A threat to the credibility of Integral Theory?

Academy
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Here is a speedbump. Waking up seekers and communities of practice tend to resist academic rigor. The “gift from god” theory of waking up would say it is impossible to study academically because it is the “grace of God” while the practiotioner approach is often guarded by secrecy and gatekeepers. Others are outright illegal such as Ayahuasca, mushrooms and other psychedelics. A side issue is cultural appropriation, which can bring strong protests and even threats of violence such as in Native American sweat lodge or Peyote appropriation.

While It is possible to conduct a comparatuve study of Golden Dawn vs Birkham Yoga vs Church of our Savior of the Third Pentacost - or whatever, then deconstruct the waking up experience and establish “best practices” backed by graphs displaying effort vs measurable physical, psychological and sociological results. I expect such a study would be difficult to carry out, though. But not impossible.

Perhaps it would be easist to begin be comparing those who have already submitted to scientific rigor and claim some degree of scientific basis and repeatable results in their practice such as Wim Hoff, Holosync, Sadhguru, etc. Another one even already involved in Integral
and probably very approachable is Doshi of “Integral Zen”

“Cleaning Up” has a different problem in that the Departments of Psychology have exclusive control over “Therapy” and in most places it is illegal to help others “clean up” uless you can say it is exclusively for “vocational and general self improvement purposes” and not " deep work". For example, if “coaching” a person through hypnotism, shadow work, or other processes, as soon as you come across any “symptom” that may indicate a condition described in the DSM-5, you are treading in dangerous legal waters.
The summary being that any study on Cleaning Up has to either be controlled through the APA and departments of psychology, or explain why it isnt the domain of psychology. At this point enter the pharmaceutical industry and a vested interest against “cleaning up” their customers

1 Like
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On a more upbeat note - it is possible now (since around 2004) more than ever before to find methodologies to wake up and clean up. They are out there at low cost waiting for evaluation.
The benefits of most of these practices are clear and possible to measure with data in double blind studies.

Its just that they are not as deeply enmeshed with Integral Theory as “Growing Up” is

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In this post I will attempt to wrap up my part in this discussion of a potential threat to the validity of Wilber’s Integral philosophy.

First, my thanks to all of you who have taken the time to respond to my post. For the most part, the responses indicate that my post is not particularly worrisome to this integral forum. Wilber is excused from engaging with his philosophy peers more seriously because he is simply interested in other pursuits. A few suggest that the academic community is not at a sufficiently enlightened stage of development to truly appreciate or understand Wilber. There is some concern that the academic community may be resistant to Wilber’s theoretical elaborations because he allows for metaphysics and is interested in spirit. And there is even some encouragement to look beyond Wilber.

Second, in my first post I searched two reputable philosophy journals, one from the UK and one from the USA, for any engagement with Wilber and his Integral Model. Crickets. Undeterred I searched an additional 18, top-tier, highly reputable, academic journals in philosophy from academic institutions in Europe and North America. Again, crickets. The following are the philosophy journals that I searched for signs of Wilber: The Philosophical Review, The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research (PPR), Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Analysis, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Philosophy Today, Continental Philosophy Review, Dialectica, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Diogenes, Philosophy.

I do wish to give honourable mention to a book, “Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers (Quest Books, 1998). As indicated in the title, this is a book in which Wilber engages with thinkers about Transpersonal theory. I especially note the engagement of McDermott, Walsh, Murphy, and Zimmerman. But this book does not represent a serious engagement with the academic discipline of philosophy.

I conclude that Wilber’s ideas have not been seriously vetted by his academic philosopher peers. I find this shocking. It’s like a physicist who believes that she has found a way of reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity and can thus make the way possible for a Theory of Everything in physics. What does she do now? She might well want to write books. She might wish to disseminate her ideas to a community of interested followers from the general public. She may start her own podcast and be interviewed by others. However, I would have thought that she would quickly want to share her ideas with other physicists, especially those who are senior to her in the field, in order to get critical feedback; that is, she would seek to have her ideas vetted by a jury of her peers in physics. Not doing so would not necessarily invalidate her ideas, but it would mean that her ideas were not evaluated, affirmed/rejected, or enriched by those whose careers are devoted to the serious academic study of physics. Similarly, Wilber has made some serious truth claims and presented a meta-theory of knowledge. He has done so outside the academic community. However, he has not published or seriously engaged his peers in philosophy, to the loss of both, in my opinion.

I consider this problem a serious potential threat to the validity of Wilber’s Integral Theory.

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Not intended flippantly, but here’s to cricket opinions, so often ignored, dismissed …

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What is the saying?
After considering all of various possibilities and without verifiable facts to support any one in particular to the exclusion of others, the simplest explanations tend to be the most accurate. Usually this simple explanation is something like the cost / benefit not being “worth it”. From there it tends to follow the proverb of five blind men describing an elephant. Nobody has ESP or all the data or those who do are not speaking.

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Because academic publishing, as we know it, is severely flawed and corrupt.
Here are 2 examples of the 12 Dr. Bartlett mentions in his FREE E Book

Let us see in psychological terms how abuses in publishing result. Peer review and editorial bias can become abusive in a number of ways:

*4. Emotional gratifications of the familiar. *
It is well established that people find emotional security in the familiar and are threatened by the unfamiliar. There is a gratifying sense of safety in which members of the respective disciplines feel “at home” with colleagues who share their disciplinary perspective; who use the same familiar approaches, concepts, and terminology; who are drawn to the same research problems; and who share many of the same beliefs. Peer reviewers and editors are no different in this respect: it is understandable and to be expected that the psychologically normal peer reviewer and editor is emotionally rewarded by his or her decisions that preserve the familiar and that serve professional self- and group interests which have become comfortable and habitual. The emotional gratification fication experienced in a research environment made comfortable through habituation feeds back into the psychologically normal predisposition disposition to mimic and conform to the preferences, values, expectations, tations, and behavior of others. Researchers whose work does not conform are less likely to be rewarded, as Dyson observed in the opening quotation.

5. Resistance, recalcitrance, repugnance, and retaliation.

  • These are the “4 Rs” of peer and editorial review. They describe a peer reviewer’s or editor’s range of negative response to manuscripts whose content trespasses beyond the boundaries of acceptable belief. Resistance, recalcitrance, repugnance, and retaliation have both intellectual and emotional components. When some peer reviewers and editors are confronted by opinions, ideas, beliefs, values, approaches, results, and so forth that they do not like or that they do not believe satisfy criteria of the conventionally acceptable, their response may be one of intellectual and emotional resistance, in which the submitted manuscript is passively blocked: a form-letter variety of rejection is then sent to the author. Should the negative response be more strongly felt, the peer reviewer’s or editor’s reaction becomes recalcitrant: trant: he or she is repulsed by the views advocated in the offending manuscript, and then derogating behaviors of the sort mentioned in item 1 can ensue. The same is true with the last two degrees of response, repugnance and retaliation, which are more blatantly hostile and aggressive, the last expressing a militant judgment against the offending author, with punitive criticism against the author that can spill over and be re-expressed in the peer reviewer’s or editor’s own publications and communications with colleagues. It is important tant to recognize that all 4 Rs give a peer reviewer or editor an opportunity, tunity, which he or she believes is professionally sanctioned, to gratify defensive needs and at times aggressive behavior as well.*

There is much more of this in Steven James Bartlett’s FREE E-Book Normality Does not Equal Mental Health

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You might find some references to Wilber’s work in the books of philosopher Andrew M. Davis. He is in the field of Process Philosophy, which shares a few things with Wilber’s IT: holism, interconnectedness, developmental stages.