28.08.08
From Kant’s Challenge: Visions Of A Ghostseer
The blog Kant’s Challenge has a short essay on the issues of metaphysics here: Visions Of A Ghostseer, from the Introduction to World History And The Eonic Effect
Spiritual psychologies…and a little Schopenhauer?
It is interesting to read through Calder’s essays and watch his attempts to formulate a New Age, or post New Age philosophy/psychology. He manages to zigzag between clarity and excessive skepticism. His views offer a practical survival kit, at least for him, and are refreshingly past the usual spiritual cliches, but still none of it quite adds up.
What I find remarkable is that after a generation of gurus, we still don’t have anything like a practical spiritual psychology that anyone can use to orient themselves in terms of meditation, a spiritual path or who they are.
Calder is entangled at the end with the evolutionary psychology he finds in The God Part Of The Brain, and it is poison, although superficially reasonable on one level.
We have to face it, scientists simply can’t resolve any of these confusions.
And apparently gurus can’t either.
That leaves Ken ‘Zen’ Wilbur.
It’s a problem.
I might inject some material from Kant and especially Schopenhauer along the way here.
They might give you a clue as to why every attempt to produce a spiritual psychology goes haywire.
These two are brutal, in one way, but they can help to see the metaphysical dilemma that works both ways, against strict empiricists, and metaphysical spiritualists.
27.08.08
Cohen is the sneaky one
I don’t mean to let Wilbur off the hook, and any critiques are welcome, but the really sneaky one is Andrew Cohen.
Wilbur has no occult connection. So the harm comes from a book, it seems.
Maybe some of his ideas are of value, ….
After Da Free John, Rajneesh, et al. a new breed of gurus is going to come along without the exterior fuckup syndrome that has been so frequent in the past generation.
They won’t make those mistakes, and their stealth action can be devastating. Be forewarned. Andrew Cohen is all smiles, and bliss, but he aims to destroy people’s autonomy before they realize it.
Beware of them.
There is a book, Enlightenment Blues….
Rajneesh and the fascist connection
It’s funny, I encountered this phenomenon, also in 1988, but in New York’s East Village, at a time when hundreds of sannyasins lived there.
From Calder’s essy on Osho
The last time I visited the Rajneesh ashram in Poona, India, was in 1988. The ashram was literally like a loud convention of German Brownshirts (storm troopers) by that point. Rajneesh, alias “Osho,” was still very popular in Germany, due in part to his comments in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which were widely interpreted as being pro-Hitler. Many young Germans, who were looking for a strong and charismatic leader, were thrilled by his words. Those who lost loved ones during World War II were justifiably shocked.
Even in the early 1970s in Bombay, Rajneesh made careless statements which could easily be interpreted as being pro-Hitler and pro-fascist. In one lecture on “esoteric groups” he claimed that Adolf Hitler had been telepathically propped up by an occult Buddhist group that Rajneesh himself was in contact with. During World War II it is well known that a number of Brahmin Indian yogis and Japanese “Zen masters” had supported the Axis cause and the extermination of the “inferior races,” so Rajneesh’s claim was not entirely surprising, if not totally believable.
In Poona, Rajneesh gave an infamous lecture in which he stated that Jews had given Hitler “no choice” but to exterminate them. In his last years Rajneesh declared that “I have fallen in love with this man (Adolf Hitler). He was crazy, but I am crazier still.” Rajneesh said that he wanted his sannyasins “to take over the world” and that he had studied Hitler to gain insight into how to accomplish the task. For a man who portrayed himself as the world’s smartest, highest, and greatest soul, such remarks were proof to me that his drug use had destroyed the quality of his mind.
Rajneesh’s comments about Hitler could be discounted as obnoxious but largely harmless hot air if it were not for the fact that he put many of Hitler’s techniques into practice. Rajneesh used Hitler’s “big lie” method of mind control very effectively, and he demanded total surrender from his troops (disciples). Rajneesh condoned illegal spying on his own followers and used informants to weed out the disloyal. Ma Anand Sheela, his personal secretary, turned the tables on Rajneesh by bugging Rajneesh’s trademark high-backed chair, a betrayal his “third eye” never detected. The Oregon police later found Rajneesh’s illegally taped conversations, but due to rules of evidence they could not be used against him in a court of law. The tapes were reported to be highly damning as to Rajneesh’s culpability in much of the commune’s day to day illegal activities.
Rajneesh turned many of his disciples into the equivalent of armed Brownshirts. I have received letters from several of Rajneesh’s former security guards who admitted they had fallen under the spell of fascism and now regretted their behavior and attitudes. One wrote that he did not even know how to meditate, and that the thrill of power was what kept him loyal to his great leader. In Poona, Rajneesh guards beat up an annoying local resident, his hands held behind his back as the guards pummeled him. In Oregon, Rajneesh guards were armed to the teeth with handguns and military style semiautomatic assault rifles. Rajneesh was never an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian pacifist, but he did have a unhealthy fascination with Adolf Hitler, as well as the United States Army General, George Patton. According to Hugh Milne (Shivamurti), Rajneesh watched the movie Patton over and over again on his big screen projection television at his ranch house in Oregon.
26.08.08
The premise of ‘The God Part’ and math abstractions
The author of The God Part states his premise and begins with:
The Premise
For every physical characteristic that is universal to a species, there must exist some gene or set of genes responsible for the emergence of that particular trait. For example, the fact that all cats possess whiskers means that somewhere within a cat’s chromosomes there must exist “whisker” genes. Of our own species, that all humans possess a nose in the middle of our face means that somewhere within our chromosomes there must exist “nose” genes that instruct our emerging bodies to develop one in that very place. It’s not, for instance, as if a nose can develop anywhere on one’s body, only by mere coincidence, it always ends up on our face. Apparently, humans are genetically “hard-wired” to develop in a very specific and particular way.
I am as much a fan as anyone of science, but ‘scientism’ is something else.
Is this quoted statement really true?
Consider a mathematician contemplating an isoceles triangle, any mathematical construct (some of which are ultra complex). There is a genetic component to the brain producing software that can think of such things, and a genetic match at the moment of such contemplation, but the genetics is irrelevant at this point. In the same way you can use software to write a text, but the claim that the hardware explains away that text is invalid. There are different levels at work.
There is no genetics of isoceles triangles. So what is the nature of their existence (a very vexed and ancient question)? We can’t really answer, but the standard explanation of scientists doesn’t really add up much better than the considerations of idealist philosophers.
I can’t answer the question, but the obsessive attempt to reduce mysticism to genetics (which is sure in the right hands to be a fruitful enquiry) misses the point completely.
In the same way it is open to question that ‘enlightenment’ is a physical brain state. It must be, and yet it is something different, a connection to something analogous to the ‘isoceles triangle’ which is not genetically preprogrammed into the brain as knowledge.
Rajneesh, ‘godpart of the brain’, and U.G.Krishnamurti
Calder, the author of the previously cited material on Rajnessh, struggles with the implications of the Rajneesh phenomenon, slipping in and out of confusion. He is more sensitive than most critics, and deserves reading, but I think he has become entangled in the briar patch between ‘science’ and ‘mysticism’, which noone can easily tread.
Then he connects with a misleading book from the reductionist scientists, complete with quote from E.O. Wilson:The God Part Of The Brain
This viewpoint, which comes in many forms in the evolutionary psychologists, is creating still more confusion in people with its essentially one-dimensional view of both man and his evolution.
I see no problem with pursuing the genetics of mysticism, but the question simply doesn’t resolve in anyone’s formulation as yet. The Darwinian view of religion is so cockeyed that it is essentially a non-player in this issue of gurus.
Calder has understandably, but incorrectly, rejected the lore of Hinduistic/Buddhistic ideas of soul and reincarantion, a quagmire of confusion difficult to navigate.
And yet Calder acknowledges the ‘enlightenment’ phenomenon, amidst the difficulty of assessing this given the nosedives of so many current gurus.
In any case, these Darwinists simply haven’t gotten anything right.
Then there is U.G.Krishnamurti whose problem is that he denounced ‘enlightenment’ so many times he couldn’t back down when he reached ‘it’, and made an amusing fool of himself in his ‘plausible denials’.
Rajneesh at darwiniana.com
There are a lot of posts at Darwiniana on Rajneesh (Osho):
Rajneesh links at Darwiniana
Scroll down for the best, or go to beginning by going to bottom of page and clicking on ‘previous page’ until you reach the start.
The case of Rajneesh
Update: the author gives permission to use this page, so I have put the whole thing up.
While we are at it, we may as well consider the case of Rajneesh: an interesting take by an ex-disciple. Such figures are doubly tricky because we can’t say they weren’t enlightened, what then of their deviant behavior. This issue is often lost on conventional ‘deprogrammer’ commentary.
Osho, Bhagwan Rajneesh, and the Lost Truth
Osho, Bhagwan Rajneesh, and the Lost Truth
“Meditation must not be made into a business.” – Acharya Rajneesh 1971
Acharya Rajneesh was 39 years old when I first met him at his Bombay apartment in December of 1970. With long beard and large dark eyes, he looked like a painting of Lao-Tse come to life. Before meeting Rajneesh, I had spent time with a number of Eastern gurus (see pictures) without being satisfied with the quality of their teachings. I wanted an enlightened guide who could bridge the gap between East and West, and reveal the true esoteric secrets without the excess baggage of Indian, Tibetan, or Japanese culture. Rajneesh was the answer to my quest for those deeper meanings. He described for me in vivid detail everything I wanted to know about the inner worlds, and he had the power of immense being to back up his words. At 21 years old, I was naive about life and the nature of man and I assumed that everything he told me must be true. [see picture of Rajneesh at his best]
Read the rest of this entry »
25.08.08
More on Bennett
I have been a little slow on posting, among other reasons because I am setting up some other blogs: see the blogroll. I will get more momentum soon.
Also, I am (re)reading Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe, a work that can be a kind of private universe, since few have read it, or the means to cope with Bennett’s flood of philosophy/science that he uses in the text.
This is a book I have critiqued (reviewed at Amazon, can’t find the review), and, indeed, repudiated, but once one’s responsibility is absolved in that direction, it is possible to throw the book into a melting pot for some reconsideration.
It raises some questions about human evolution that might give both the Intelligent Design people and the Darwinists both a run for their money. As the blog owner of Darwiniana I am looking for a way to use this book as a stick to beat both parties over the head. (I am not a designist, nor a Darwinian.)
The ID group: if you won’t specify your ‘intelligent designer’, you might confront some pretty breathtaking candidates produced in the New Age world. Of them all Bennett’s is the most exotic, and frightening: the demiurgic powers, beings far far short of ‘divinity’ (if you believe or not in such) in disembodied form existing in the time-frame of life on earth (Gurdjieff’s immortals in the frame of the solar system) managing each stage of life’s emergence, and especially man’s emergent evolution, as man passes from the stage of animal sensitivity (what we usually mean by ‘consciousness’) to ‘consciousness’ (which in Bennett’s scheme is not a natural but a cosmic energy, and not controlled by the human will) and ‘creativity’, the energy beyond ‘consciousness’.
Bennett points to a lot of discrepancies in our knowledge, however outlandish his imaginary speculations, e.g. the stages of mind-formation, soul-formation, etc…
All this is based on the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky version of Samkhya where everything is ‘material’ in the Samkhya sense, so all of this is not, at least in principle, some kind of exercise in anti-materialism. Soulstuff and mindstuff are all material (and the sausage machines run by these demiurgic powers don’t exactly correspond to standard religious fantasies of going to heave at death, etc….)
The Darwin group: the current Darwinian view of man’s emergence is so hopelessly inadequate that even New Agers seem better informed. Idiots!
I am going to pursue this here as a sideline, if anyone is interested, in part to liberate people in the ‘work’ from any authoritarian abuse of this system (not likely since the book is too hard to be pop New Age spiritualism), and also as a device to muse on the mysteries of human evolution, about which we know so little. Certainly the current (and past) field of gurus don’t grasp the issues, and an ironic side effect of reading Bennett is to realize that ‘evolutionary’ guruism is pretty small potatoes compared to the real potential of human future evolution.
The ridiculous idea purloined from Nietzsche then backdated to the ‘tradition’ of these characters being some kind of ubermensch gang is, or was, a funny joke.
Bennett was a very smart fellow but his systematics has a few weak spots, and I fear I will have to show those wishing to make this stuff seem like science how easy it is to pull the plug on it. Not that that is hard: he made the whole thing up!
There is also an email group on Bennett, deeper_d, at Yahoo, run by A.G.E. Blake, a venerable fellow. I was banned from posting, but may stalk their archives anonymously for any leads. Be forewarned.
More on Wilbur
From Disciples vs nine to fivers, 2008/08/25 at 8:25 AM
mybrainisafleamarket:
must mention I get very fed up with mentioning Buddhism in online discussions. All too often someone jumps in quoting Wilber and especially Wilber’s obsession with Boomeritis.
When URLs are provided listing KW”s ongoing ties with abusive gurus, these folks usually vanish. Wilber dislikes accountability in all forms, loves to make pronouncements about psychological development and narcissism, but he has never been licensed to practice as a mental health professional, and is under no legal obligation to carry malpractice insurance or do mandatory continuing education courses. He loves to accuse people who misunderstand him or critique him, of having ’shadow issues’ but as a powerholder Wilber has failed to understand that he’s vulnerable to what has been termed ‘countertransferance’–the set up where a powerholder has unconscious hang ups and projects them or acts them out at the expense of underlings.
One way to identify hazardous self educated folk who try to behave as self appointed therapists is that they know about transferance and accuse their opponents of engaging in shadow projection, but these folk are unaware they are vulnerable to the same thing via counter transferance–the powerholder/authority figure unconsciously projecting his or her shadow material onto those who are socially or psychologically at a disadvantage.
By contrast a friend of mine who is a therapist (and is merely a humble social worker) spent about 2 months this past summer taking a tough continuing education course on counter transferance issues. She’d already covered this subject in school, but as a conscientous practitioner, was determined to stay up to date with new findings in this field–and she had to pay to do that course–a course on the unlovely subject of how people in her profession can behave unconsciously and risk harming thier clients–and how to prevent this.
Wilber and other self appointed gurus are under no legal obligation to do this kind of continuing education. They have the luxury of surrounding themselves with people who agree with them and excuse everything they do. Ish.
From Disciples vs nine to fivers, 2008/08/25 at 8:25 AM
24.08.08
Evo-psych vs evolution in Bennett’s DU
This link from MBFM’s post, http://members.tripod.com/~dlane5/shabdwilber.html, leads to a lot of interesting material, but I note that behind the critique lies a defense of (and a book about) evolutionary psychology. I am critical of gurus, but, as anyone who follows the blog Darwiniana would know, I am critical of the standard Darwinian view of evolution, which can’t explain the evolution of consciousness (most New Age texts can’t either, but at least they have a sense of what has to be explained).
I cited Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe: at the opposite extreme lies a truly exotic thesis on evolution armed with the idea of the ‘demiurgic powers’ that animate his text, in what is plain science fiction, but which does expose some of the flaws of the Darwinian thinking.
It might be useful to constrast the two approaches.
23.08.08
Dracula gurus
Years ago, living in Sacramento, I ran into a down and out psychically sensitive ‘disciple wannabe’ of Da Free John, who couldn’t manage to ‘reach the ashram’ (they wouldn’t let him near the place, they are quite hoitytoidy it seems), content to read one of his books, staring at the photos of the ‘master’ in rapt devotion. At some point he had got into a compulsion to sell plasma, that racket for the financially desperate.
I didn’t connect at the time, but years later I read that Da Free John was setting his own disciples to sell plasma for the ashram, incomprehensible behavior until you get his ‘vampire/dracula’ fixation (which is in one of his books).
That’s an example of the dangers sensitive people can suffer around gurus (an extreme case, perhaps) in these ‘energy fields’. The problems can never be resolved in public.
Go to Darwiniana, find the search box, and type in ‘da free john’, ‘vampire’, and ‘plasma’ and you should find the previous discussions of all that there.
Some of these ‘fuck ups’ are draculas, then, and incarnate to suck the blood out of a fresh group of disciples, if you get my drift.
Somebody drive a stake through his heart.
Da Free John
From Disciples vs nine to fivers, 2008/08/23 at 10:21 AM
mybrainisafleamarket:
The interesting thing is that the author of the Rude Boy manifesto has never himself lived under the authority of any of the Rude Boy gurus he has sucessively associated with/endorsed over the years.
Adi Da/Da Free John, Andrew Cohen, Rabbi Marc Gafni.
Years ago David Lane summed this up:
(small exerpt from a longer essay)
“In part one we saw how Wilber grossly over-estimated the power and
status of Da Free John (oops, Franklin Jones, now Adi Da). Just
recently, after about 10 years of keeping relatively silent on the
subject, Wilber has gone public on the World Wide Web and attempted
to soften his endorsement of the Big Boy from Fiji. It is a rather
lame retraction at that, since Wilber does not acknowledge or admit
the extent to which Da is a real “fuck-up” (Wilber’s words, not
mine). Indeed, Wilber just doesn’t seem to “get it” about why so
many of his readers are turned off by his praise of the
one-time California guru from New York.When it comes to guru appraisements, Wilber is just plain naive. He
is as gullible as the rest of us and given his track record with Da
perhaps more so.What is perhaps so worrisome about all of this, of course, is that
Wilber does not show the kind of level-headed discrimination that is
necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. It would be one
thing to admit to a bit of “greenness” (e.g., “Hey, I am a sucker
when it comes to Perfect Masters”), but it is quite another to pose
like you are a seasoned veteran of the guru wars.”http://members.tripod.com/~dlane5/shabdwilber.html
and Lane points out that Wilber far from being a ’seasoned veteran of the guru wars” was never even a disciple of Adi Da…!
“As I mentioned to Wilber in print and in person (I first wrote the
Paradox of Da Free John back in 1985 as a direct response to
Wilber’s hype) just because one writes well does not mean by
extension that he is an embodiment of the highest truth or
realization. He could be quite the opposite. Wilber repeatedly
confuses the message with the medium, believing that if someone
writes well or beautifully or transcendentally that he/she is a
Master by virtue of it. Well, given that modus operandi, then Alan
Watts was an enlightened being (just tell that to his ex-wives and
his drinking buddies in Marin County). No, Alan was a good
writer…. Just like Wilber is a good writer. But that does not make
Wilber enlightened.Simple mistake, no doubt, but a devastating one as well.
4. Wilber expresses wonder at how his numerous fans balk at his
praises of Da Free John. I am not surprised. I don’t even think
Wilber is surprised. If Wilber really believes that Da is the
greatest spiritual master of all time, then why did he refuse to do
Da’s official biography? A job which would have allowed Wilber
direct access to Da for a long period of time. In private
correspondence with me (and in person), Wilber has admitted that
“Da is a fuck-up” (his words, not mine).Do I see any indication of that in Wilber’s overly-enthusiastic
gushes? Yea, there it is, Da is the Supreme Avatar of all time,
but he is also a major fuck-up…… Talk about Paradox!In more simple terms, if Wilber really believed what he was saying,
then I would venture that he would want to “hang” with the Supreme
one. But guess what? He has only occasionally seen the Big Boy.I mean if you are going to read this guy’s books, you are going to
express your absolute awe at his being, then take the next logical
step and become his disciple (Wilber told me he was a “friend” of
the group–a non-committed involvement).Now I am sure Wilber has lots of reasons, but I would suggest that
those reasons should be broadcast load and clear. Could it be, as
Wilber has told me in conversation, that Da surrounds himself with a
bunch of sycophants? Could it be that Wilber does not condone Da’s
continual sexual interplay with numerous female disciples (The great
Da is reported to have had a least 100 sexual encounters since the
1970s with his female devotees; my source on this, lest I be accused
of inflating figures is from a soon to be published essay by a
former follower of Da. I have cut his figures in half, just to be
conservative.) ”
http://vclass.mtsac.edu:940/dlane/wilb1.htm
So, dont trust a restaurant reviewer who raves about a restaurant–yet turns out never to have had a sit down meal at the place.When then would we trust someone’s endorsements of gurus when this same publicist has never lived under authority of said gurus?
Technical note
I just approved MBFM’s recent comment, which shouldn’t have been necessary: once you get one comment approved it’s automatic thereon. But he used a flagged ‘spam’ term BDSM in the comments and the software flagged the comment, and withdrew permissions (I think this is what happened).
I have no problem with such references, but the software does. In general don’t use any four letter words or anything in the porno realm or your comment might get flagged. (Since it was a valid reference, I don’t know what to suggest, use some different jargon).
Or else just wait to get the comment approved, if it appears at all in the queue.