Thoughts on an article from Integral World, "Tangled Phone Lines: Why Richard Dawkins Hung up on Ken Wilber"

[shaman sun]

original article

I sometimes browse through Integral World, reading interesting critiques and sometimes just plain nasty ones. This article started out interesting, "I don't necessarily think that mystics and skeptics should depart company and go on their respective ways..." the author writes in the beginning. The relationship between science and mysticism is fascinating to me, so the article caught my attention.

But the author seems to focus on one aspect: that is, mystics that must abandon some assumptions due to their unscientific grounding. He cites a particular guru who did this, Baba Faqir Chand. This man rejected he had anything to do with miracles or visions people associated him with, attributing them to "either the devotee's previous karma or intense faith."

This reminded me of Krishnamurti, and I was relatively agreeing with the author's point up to here. If the self is illusory, if there is no ultimate "I" - that's fine. In fact, the teachings I enjoy the most are the ones that allow the "self" to dissolve gently into light, love, simply being.

A number of other thinkers, scientists are cited: that perhaps our being is grounded in the physical, too, that there is no soul, and that a very material-based reality may be ultimately true. I can't help but question, do we really understand what is "physical," especially with new implications of quantum physics, and a holographic universe? Let alone, we barely understand what the observer is...

Appropriately he quotes someone asking, "Why should I meditate for 3 hours a day if what I am experiencing isn't God but sophisticated neural fireworks?"

I don't know how to wrap up the next part, so I'll let the author speak for himself:

"In other words, isn’t at least a good part of the mystic quest predicated upon a false idea to start with? We aren’t looking for just stuff, as Patricia Churchland once put it; we are looking for some divine meaning.

I think there is a reason Ken Wilber and Richard Dawkins don’t talk. Or, if they do, why Richard Dawkins would have hung up on Wilber. Ken Wilber still wants to believe in mystic “goo.” He wants a cosmic feel good story, even if his flowery description of the same doesn’t have even an ounce of scientific credibility. How do you think Dawkins would respond to this from Wilber [in "On the Nature of Involutionary Givens"]:"

This seems very assuming to me. First, the mystic quest is the yearning to understand who and what we are, to explore this "spiritual" inclination, this sense of presence, other, and ultimately discover that spiritual "other" is you. Is that a false idea? I'm not so sure. Also secondly, Wilber may be prone to exploring the "goo," but I don't think it's as void of meaning or even content as the author seems to make out to be. This "goo" is a cosmic creation story: Ultimately consciousness, God, Brahman, etc. forgetting itself, birthing the world, and remembering again. Involution and evolution. He cites this as "Wilber's fantasy," and mentions that Dawkin's might say: "I have just been slimed by a huge ball of New Age goo."

"Wilber wants us to still believe in fairy tales, even if dressed up in pseudo-scientific jargon.

Dawkins on the other hand wants us to finally grow up and admit what we have secretly thought for a long time. We were wrong about the gods and we were wrong about ourselves."

Though brief statements- the misunderstanding would take an equally long essay to dispel them. I think I'll keep it short and open it for discussion. To me, the author makes serious flaws: 1) Isn't he confusing these descriptions as being literal and mythic, while they are not meant to be taken like that? Isn't there a difference between esoteric and exoteric teachings? He hasn't distinguished the two at all. 2) Is what Dawkin's doing really that mature? To me it seems like he's failing to understand mythic perspectives, telling them to grow up, snap out of it, but in the end only strengthening their world views. If you divide yourself from another, simply based on different beliefs, you only strengthen the gap between the two. We are all one, after all.

To bring some light back into the discussion, I think I'll end with a paraphrase of Thich Nhat Hanh:

"Nirvana can be seen as the absence of views, which are ideas and opinions. Without views, we have wisdom, which is the direct perceiving of reality."

[Steven Nickeson]

Shaman Sun,
That was well said. Thanks.
Steven

[shaman sun]

Thanks Steven,

To follow up on these thoughts... What do you think will have to be done in order to cultivate a more multi-dimensional way to navigate the world? If AQAL is too boxy, 2D - like a simple GPS that can help you get around but ultimately miss the dynamics of the area, what can we do as an alternative? I've mentioned reading Delueze and Delanda - they're great attempts to navigate without getting too boxy (DeLanda's theory of assemblages, for instance). I sort of have the feeling that applying this non-linear, multi-dimensional attitude to the social sciences, and eventually to the hard sciences, will become more prevalent as we dive deeper into the 21st century. In that sense, we may naturally find more thinkers, scientists acknowledging performance. Perhaps that's the real answer - that it will start to become part of the way we think, and how we think. And it won't be in any one "theory" labeled integral, but part of a complicated, living mentality trying to understand the world a bit better.

On a technological note, perhaps new computers in this century will be able to tackle what DeLanda mentions, multiplicative variables instead of summative. Non-linear, messy mathematics get complicated, but perhaps hard sciences will begin to work with them when we get the "big guns", AKA thinking computers, to help us. We're in for an interesting century...

[Steven Nickeson]

S.S.

Until you mentioned him (above) I was not familiar with Delanda, but I just read several of his essays and I like what he says about assemblages and meshworks...if I were kynical I would say that Delanda and his meshworks are for the courageous what Wilber and AQAL are for the timid, but I'm trying not to be kynical these days so I will not be saying that.

Notes on your question: "What do you think will have to be done...?" (These are preface to something longer that will follow.)

1) Delanda wrote War in the Age of Intelligent Machines which was published in '91...time of the First Gulf War. Colin Powell was big in the First Gulf War. At some point in his life Colin Powell has been quoted as saying "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Now that is astute.

Theories are more or less the same as battle plans.

2) Around 1971, I spent time with and carried on a correspondence with a "futurist" named Robert Theobald who at that time was predicting a world-wide cultural revolution in a meshwork of electronically linked personal-sized computers. Everyone else thought it was SiFi. One night at Vanderbilt University Theobald told about 2,500 people that one could not predict anything of the future by extrapolating from the past.
Almost all theories are more or less extrapolations of the past.

3) I have forgotten who wrote it, but whoever it was wrote, "The conditions of all contracts are invalid the moment after they are signed." (This follows from #'s 1 and 2 above.)

Theories are more or less the same as contracts.

4) Years ago, god knows where, I wrote: "All laws are invalid because all law is a feckless attempt to regulate the future by attempting to regulate the past. The present is always lawless. " (This follows from #s 1 and 2 and 3 above.)

Theories are more or less the same as law.

(Right now I am up against a design deadline and have little time, but I wanted to put up a partial post and have, at least, a couple of loose end here that to which I'll be sure to come back.)

[Steven Nickeson]

S.S.,
I'm back and maybe the preface will be longer than the body of the reply.

The point of the preface is that there is nothing out there, coming from you, coming from me, coming from all the words of the Integral Province that is going help navigate the world any better than one's own unschooled instincts--trust them all and then get out there on the first street you think you'll survive because...if you keep open and easy...that street will teach you in a week how to navigate better than all words you will read in a year. If you get stuck take the advice of playwright Christopher Frye, "...make wherever you are lost look as much like home as possible." (The Lady's Not for Burning," as an impeccable piece of writing as anything since Moliere.)

I occasionally write my own paraphrase of the famous line from B. Traven, "To God-damned hell with maps..." or the John Houston adaptation, "Maps? We don't need no stinking maps!" ( For those readers who wish to learn more along these lines I would like to direct them to my relevant blog entries here and here.)

I suggest that, and above all, never believe...anything...one little excerpt again from my blog.

"Sitting here close to the top of that part of the Andes called a coastal range, shards of alto cumulus string out to the south and east. E. Harris sings “Hickory Wind,” I sample some beets pureed with coriander and sip a little ouzo, Lebanese ouzo called Arak, Sunday afternoon western Sud Americana time.

"We wait for the chicken to finish roasting and wonder why in hell anyone would ever…ever…want to believe in a single god damned thing.

"Time idles past like a sweet old Kenworth. The sounds, sights and the feel of the joyous power at hand are the ease-gotten gains. (There are thunderheads two miles deep down the range and thunder over the house.)

"So why buy options in profitless stock? Why the belief, the faith?

"Why put in for the insurance plan, the well-thought reasons for the moral, the approval of soc. and self? We’ve watched those markets for years and know them to pay no one but the brokers, and too little, too, at their best.

"Did you come around here for the peace of it all? The certainty, perhaps? The deftly structured system to which you can pledge subordination? Needy for limits…this but not that? The four walls of sound profession? The constipation of philosophy? The assurance of Mission Control? The anchored soul with mortgage? A bathtub in which to float?

"We were floating the Rio Grande through the Taos Box in a battered old raft called “The Charlie Allnut”: Michael the disillusioned lawyer, his lady Mahaba, my river-runner-groupie neighbor Marie, her sidekick, Sid the Shrink, from the Pen who was also the skinniest man in Santa Fe, and me. I was at the oars. We were kicking back through the placid middle stretches in the heat of late morning. Someone might have mentioned Alan Watts’s notion of the Tao as the “watercourse way”. In the light of this I mentioned how as I child, maybe three, could have been four, I learned that of the Tao from Scuffy the Tugboat, a Little Golden Book about a toy boat, tired of the confines of the bathtub, who makes his break for liberty when his little boy owner takes him for a field trip in the nearby brook. At large and alone Scuffy runs the brook that becomes a creek, that becomes a stream, that becomes a river; its breadth grows wide and its banks steep. Days and nights float past. Creek-side villages turn into towns, towns become cities. The fish that bump and splash at the brave little tug are growing pretty big, row boats give way to barges. Scuffy, though, pushes on through all that is a river’s evolution. He’s there to illustrate the principles of geography, but does he know his deeper teachings? Scuffy soon enough reaches the bay and heads to sea. And just as he passes the last pier he is scooped up by the father of the little boy who owned him way back at the headwaters. The two have been chasing after him all this way. They think they have saved him so it is home to the bathtub for Scuffy. We little ones were assured he was happy to be back.

"The hearty crew of “The Charlie Allnut” was pleased with the story. I told them that Scuffy had been my favorite book for the longest time. But, there is that but…

“I never liked the ending,” I told them, “even when I was a little kid I knew it was a fucked up, sell-out, formula ending.”

“What..? No!”

“You wanted him to go to sea? You crazy?”

“He wouldn’t have lasted an hour.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but think of the glory.”

"Sid turned to the rest of the crew and asked, “Is this the man we want driving our boat?”

"Now Nelson and Jennings duet on “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. This wise woman and I are still wondering why anyone would ever hem around themselves with the slightest thread of a belief; risk any possibility for the hopeful illusion of the order of things.

"She says something like, “When you are going out there, like standing right on the event horizon or even on the other side where you can’t see and there is nothing else…it gets pretty scary. That’s when things start to fall apart inside, all the structures.”

“I think one thing stays,” I say, “that knowing you can handle it.”

“Maybe,” she says, “but for me, all I know is that it’s so right.”

"This wise woman…."