Wilber, You Procrustean Nut, Lay Off the Graphs for a Minute, Will Ya?

I’m really spiritual. I mean, really. Like I started meditating when I was seventeen, and did a whole slew of retreats by the time I graduated college. And then moved to a Zen monastery and lived there for years. And then went to India and Nepal and got blessed by some really important lamas. I have a spiritual wife. I have spiritual friends. I meditate morning, noon and night. Truth told, and I’ll tell you, I’m so spiritual sometimes I just about dissolve in the radiating bliss that we all inherently are without even a thought for my mortgage.

So why do I hate Ken Wilber?

Maybe it’s history. Wilber and I go way back to 2001, when I was a 23 year old spiritual neophyte and ready sycophant. I read Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, widely considered to be the man’s magnum opus (though his ideas have since developed), in a fit of worshipful elevation. I read it on planes, buses, and the tent I was pitching around Hawaii at the time. I underlined and highlighted the prose into oblivion, then bought a second copy and started highlighting that.

In the next years I plowed through a number of Wilber’s other tomes, mostly restatements of the ideas in SES, and earlier seeds of that work. Simultaneously I began my own textual study of but one of his many influences: Mahayana Buddhism. And, over a period of several months in 2004, while living at the above-mentioned Zen monastery, the house of cards came crashing.

In essence: If Wilber could get Nagarjuna and the Madyamaka school so utterly wrong, if he could more or less portray Nagarjuna’s philosophy of no-position as a kind of essentialist idealism equivalent in scope to Advaita Vedanta, what else could he misuse, mistake, and misappropriate?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Wilber is, at heart, a synthesizer. He is a lover of ideas, and he wants the greatest ideas the world has ever known to all fit together in a neat series of perfectly interlocking little boxes. He is the Lego master of contemporary philosophy. The problem: if you read Piaget carefully it’s hard to believe he leads to Habermas. If you read Habermas carefully it’s hard to believe he leads to Zen. Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo, in fact, have nothing to do with each other.

So, what Wilber attempts to weld together with a bunch of really impressive charts and graphs and diagrams and psychospiritual grids actually falls to pieces the moment you enter any one of the little Lego blocks. In fact, every one of those Lego blocks is its own world, a world of richly complex epistemologies, contextualized and undergirded by its time, place, and purposes.

One might think at this point: “Thank you for this incisive critique of a philosopher that no one in professional philosophy actually takes seriously, but what does any of this have to do with psychology?”

What, indeed. I wouldn’t bring up Ken Wilber at all, except that he continues to lead the cutting edge (or fringe) of Transpersonal Psychology, a field that I should like much better than I do, since it has to do with meditation and the interpretation of altered states and traits of consciousness.

In fact, despite his attempts to frame his own work outside and above the murmuring hubbub of the Transpersonal field, Wilber is still the most quoted theorist of this amorphous and conflicted attempt at a contemporary spiritual psychology. And, in fact, one of my favorite professors sketched out one of the favored Wilberian hierarchies on the chalkboard at the end of this last term, seeming to imply that words like uroboric or pleromatic might somehow apply to something relevant to our actual experience.

And maybe they do. Maybe they do. But I am here to tell you, Dear Readers, that I will have nothing to do with Ken Wilber and his weird hyper-cerebral maps, his shrill claims of superiority, his uber-masculinist hierarchies, his funny knighting of questionable spiritual figures, his culty Integral Community, his abysmal lack of proper citations, or his impressive physique.

No, instead, I will have a cup of tea, and post this blog, and try to find some decent live music on this Saturday night in my quaint little adopted home of Ashland, Oregon. So Good night. And good luck.