A Narrative on Guruji (by Ken Wilber)

I just recently listened to a teleseminar where a power point presentation of this amazing research was presented before Guruji spoke. The research yields more than 5000 studies of his ability to consistently, through energy transmissions, or as he simply refers to them as blessings, that have an ability to increase or decrease the size of atoms. Through this gift, as he states, a very powerful Universal Energy transmits making these incredible alterations at the very level of the DNA.....Viewing these photos it is at once evidenced something extraordinary is happening.

Mahendra Kumar Trivedi told his story and listening to him I was moved deeply by his own reverence to his gift. He feels strongly that we need to give scientific verification to this power. He is also quick to state this is humanity's potential, and his  actualization of this powerful Universal Energy, is to open the door into the light and arena of Science. This is not some New Age hype. He deeply feels this level of powerful energy could change the face of the planet for future generations.

Now for those who feel Ken is backtracking lets look at this for just a moment from the perspective that everything is energy......from gross to subtle to causal to non-dual and absolute.....Ken has many many times stated that higher states of consciousness, which are impermanent, can over time become stablized into more permanent stages or structures of consciousness....thru the on going practice of contemplation, meditation, and nonordinary states. It takes about five years for one to move these higher energy states into a more permanent actualized structure. What are these higher states? I do believe they are a more highly refined energy. Most of the great Masters, Jesus being one of them, used these higher powerful energies for healing. Changing the very molecular structure of the person healed.....And, many of us have read of  these great masters who understood these higher energies but very rarely shared them with the less realized. Until the student was ready to be shown these gifts; demonstrating their advanced development in the higher structures because these great teachers understood these powers could be abused......And this is exactly what Guruji says. This energy is so powerful that it can transform bacteria into a different species.....

This power has the ability to unify the brain structure. And, most of humanity's struggle to transform is due to the lower sub-conscious brain.....So this is really exciting research and why I see not only Ken, but many others, wanting to better understand these higher energies and how we might just learn to change the course of our planet through them.....Ken is excited about the research he has seen already yielded from this tranmission of energy or blessings. We should all be so excited. To understand the Core Theory and have the map to go into the territory is the first step of our journey. Now we are seeing some results of this experience throught the refined energies starting to change our very molecular structure, moving us into higher levels of our humanity. This is how we begin to unify, I believe. This is why I'm so excited about this research. 

Much love to you all,

Mary Linda

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Please keep in mind that Ken states very clearly at the beginning of his article that his endorsement of Guruji is based solely upon and limited to the scope of the results of specific empirical scientific studies that he deems credible.  What's wrong with optimistic speculation?

My opinion of Ken’s credibility wouldn’t suffer the lest bit even if Guruji turned out to be some kind of anti-christ. 

KISS :)

The following is a response to a fellow poster, since I have taken an hour to write it, I thought it would be better to post it in a more visible place. I am currently investigating the sources of the Guruji phenomenon, and have yet to conclude its scientific validity. However, I confess to be a contemplative secularist and I am increasingly alarmed by the deviation of the post-metaphysical project of the integral community. (I understand from a business point of view to attract membership) The article above mentions altering of atoms. The question I have is, how do they know that? Is atom in the evidence shaped like a ball? But that is "ball-shaped atoms and molecules" you see in chemistry rooms are simply models and not actual atoms. Or are they more like Electronic clouds as Quantum mechanics would tell us? Where the most of the atom is empty, and distance between electron and the nucleus would be like the distance between Earth and our Sun. How in the world is the atom altered? Enlighten me. Did the research involve extra-powerful electronic microscope? Did they know the altering through indirect experiments? What's the science?

I've read the forewards of Ken Wilber lavishly praising Adi Da, whom he later had reservations, and described the Adi Da case as a Line/Level fallacy. In this article above, I am seeing the same lavish praise. Rightly so, any individual should who read both pieces should be at first, a skeptic

The first part of the response deals with a poster's question whether framing is only done by conservatives, and 2nd deals with my general concern about the direction of Integral as prompted by Wilber's support of Guruji's claim. I have seen forum threads in Integral Life supporting  2012 doomsday prediction. Now I am having a cognitive dissonance. I have always identified myself as integral. Proud of my knowledge of such cutting-edge ideas. But if a believer in 2012 describes himself as integral, and I do not believe in 2012, then what exactly does it mean to be integral these days? With that I invite you all to reflect. And in the meanwhile seriously research the Guruji claim. In time it should be subject to the verification by the most close-minded skeptics, such as James Randi, Michael Shermer(editor of skeptic magazine). 

Again, I hope my concern is not dismissed as a case of scientism. As I described above in the previous post, I experience conscious Kundalini (except I cannot penetrate kundalini to the arms). I invite you all to post more links to prove me wrong. In fact, I want to be wrong about my belief regarding extraordinary effects of kundalini. 

Question from poster: 

Is framing only done by conservatives?

It's done by conservatives and liberals alike. It was simply the example that came to my mind. Liberal framing can include the switch of "global warming" to "climate change." As global warming was seen as a Leftist issue, repetition of the word "global warming" was not helping the cause. (since when it's winter, it sure ain't getting hot. )

Other conservative framing include: (I will simply paste here:)

"In one recent memo, titled ''The 14 Words Never to Use,'' Luntz urged conservatives to restrict themselves to phrases from what he calls, grandly, the ''New American Lexicon.'' Thus, a smart Republican, in Luntz's view, never advocates ''drilling for oil''; he prefers ''exploring for energy.'' He should never criticize the ''government,'' which cleans our streets and pays our firemen; he should attack ''Washington,'' with its ceaseless thirst for taxes and regulations. ''We should never use the word outsourcing,'' Luntz wrote, ''because we will then be asked to defend or end the practice of allowing companies to ship American jobs overseas.'' (source: http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/dont_think_of_an_elephant:paperback/new_york_times_article)

Other progressive framing was a term introduced by Lakoff regarding how conservative members in California state legislatures were able to thwart some progressive measures. Lakoff wanted to frame this political phenomenon as "minority rules." The logic of the framing would fall along the lines of--What determines legislature in a democracy is majority rules. However due to the supermajority, or 66%, requirement to pass some bills in California, it allows the minority party to hold the gate. In summary,  supermajority, which is often acceptable to most people when it comes to important measures, is framed as "minority rules", or anti-democratic, which is not acceptable to most people.

This phenomenon is well-known to the Nobel Prize winner Kahneman. Kahneman was a psychologist who won the Economics prize. He demonstrated irrational behavior in economic decision making, and hence challenges the dominant position of the Dismal Science--That when it comes to an economic decision, most human beings are rational, and have an enlightened self-interest. And because most human beings are rational, even though there can be special cases of irrationality, the market, through the invisible hand, will be rational price-setters for goods. 

Kahneman demonstrated, through numerous experiments, why people are not rational, and as Lakoff would add, often not even conscious. 98% of the waking life is not conscious(in the self-reflective sense.).(and my own subjective experience seems to confirm the claim. )  Experiments were done where a control and experiment group were asked to rate the price of an ordinary coffee mug. In the control, before the price evaluation, the subject is shown an ordinary, relatively neutral movie clip. Where as in the experiment group, the subjects are shown with a sad, sentimental video. What we find is that the experiment group tended to appraise the coffee mug(and other items) at a higher price range than the control group! When the subjects are asked whether the movie affected their decision making, the typical answer is "NO." There are many poignant experiments, due to time and energy constraint (I am getting a little tired from typing) I will not mention here, I will give you a few links for some readings. 

Back to the framing example about supermajority vs. minority rules. Kahneman wrote about how patients, when facing a critical surgery operation, chose different things depending on how the risk of the operation is framed. If the operation is described as having 10% chance of failure, more patients will refuse the operation than if it's framed as 90% of success! Notice how both claims entail the same fact, but to the perception of the patient, IT IS NOT! There are so many examples of this, I only wish Wilber would talk about them! (stop repeating the same content ><)

A picture is worth a thousand words, a documentary is worth ten thousand, Here's a good link for you if you are interested in framing:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3707_money.html

Explore the wiki citations on Lakoff, framing, Kahneman etc. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

http://fora.tv/2009/08/03/Politics_of_Language_George_Lakoff

Idk how much you are aware of the Integral's involvement in framing. Although Integral community did not call it framing, the changing of language suited to a particular audience is essential the same idea. For example, in one of Wilber's dialogue with Hunter Lovins, Ken mentioned the changing of environmentalist language according to the audience. Because a religious audience, or a mythic-membership audience, would not resonate with the language of "Mother Nature being raped by humanity. Or humanity is like cancer conquering the womb of the Mother Goddess." This type of language is OK with a lot of students in progressive university, it is OK with some "tree-hugging"(in a positive sense) environmentalist. But "Mother Nature," to a monotheist religion, in our case, Christianity, is an immediate turn off. In fact, Mother Nature is like Santa Claus to a lot adult Christians, it's a myth, a human construct, and a heresy to His Almighty. 

So when an environmentalist wants to accomplish something, and he has to garner the support of secular/religious group alike, he can change the language of his communication without compromising his principles. He would instead, talk about "stewardship of the earth." About protecting the family through the means of environmentalism...about national security through development of alternative energy. These are language that resonate with a blue audience. And by no means is it lying, manipulation or pandering. 

I am currently studying in a university, and I am aware of all the anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-corporate atmosphere of the university. And that in my opinion, can really need some guiding wisdom from the integral community. About the distinction between ideal and the means to reach the ideal. There's so much ideal in the University, and so energetic, but so much of it is wrongly channeled to its own special kind of hatred. 

Integral community, in turn, needs to be aware of the problems with the coding of a system. I deliberately avoided using green to describe the academic culture, or "blue" to describe the religious. The world is so much more complex than that.

General Concern for the Direction of Integral

This is a little bit of excursion, but I want to take the chance to express some of my concerns for the development of integral. When I first encountered it, I was so enthusiastic that I have found my community of like-minded individuals. Then I proceeded to read all of Wilber's books, and I vowed I would contribute to the Integral community through my own authoring of books.

But as the years went by, I have gradually fallen out. Not because I have come to disagree with the basic premise of integral or its ideas, but because of the following 

1)from what seems to me a deviation from the Post-metaphysics project of Wilber-V. The frequent mentioning of the word "Spirit" with capital "S" with no context as to what it means. The catering to a less skeptic community due to the sheer demographics of audience that could be interested in "expansion and elevation of human consciousness." 

2)the lack of concrete examples in the audio dialogues. I'm sure this is a common complaint amongst people who have been familiar with Integral for a long time. There is a constant repetition of content. I understand Wilber needs to introduce ideas to new audiences, but those repetition of ideas should be bolstered with concrete examples, such as the ones I provided above regarding framing. At first the integral corpus was intellectual overwhelming--so many perspectives, so many disciplines, and so many new words! Now I am underwhelmed. Now it is often redundant, and vague with basic theories but with no real examples. It would be much more intellectually stimulating if Wilber talked about the example about organ donation, the imprinted chickling and the randomly-walking-robot...

3)integral vs. not integral, and the color-talk. Initially I thought it was fine, since it's useful as a shorthand to introduce the concepts. In order to establish itself as a genuine wave of culture, it needs to critique its previous wave, so as to distance itself--so that people would not think Integral is same as Pluralistic, but better. (just as the postmodern would always do to Modernity in their calls for a post-Enlightenment project) Since my first threading in the forums of IntegralNaked, I've seen, on the forum, individuals accusing each other of NOT-BEING-INTEGRAL. The accusations takes shape like the following: "Are you sure you have made the momentous leap into 2nd tier yet? From what you have written so far, I am sure you are a GREEN." You get the idea, I'm sure you encounter this in your own forum browsing and the monkey-mind. 

As integral community expands, there are bound to be what I call "dispersal effect." Individuals taking liberties with the color-talk, and not previously informed by the "probability-wave" metaphor of the stages, not aware of the past history of labeling such as demonstrated through the Rosenhan pseudopatient experiment. Initially, in a relatively small community scattered around the globe, the ideas were used as a short-hand with the assumption that people will take them lightly, however as the ideas spread, the language becomes "reified," increasingly "literalized..." 

This dispersal effect of ideas and the consequent distortion should be a concern for the integral community. And although I still believe that Integral movement will have far more benefits than side-effects, but we should leave the integral cultural inheritance, like the metaphor Kosmic groove, as healthy as we can. 

--

To see a world in a grain of sand....

As stated in the article, Dr. Roy is not at the Univ. of Pennsylvania.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustum_Roy
Dr. Rustum Roy (born July 3, 1924) is a materials scientist who holds visiting professorships in materials science at Arizona State University and in medicine at the University of Arizona, as well as an emeritus position at Pennsylvania State University in three departments. He is a self-described science policy analyst, advocate of interdisciplinary education and alternative medicine, and science and religion.

There seems to be quite a charge regarding Ken’s post above. It seems that our reactions could be in some of the categories below:

1.     I don’t believe that Mr. Trivedi can bless beings in positive ways. I suspect that some of the people in this group do not understand how he could do this and would be against anything their rational brain could not understand even if it was real and helpful.

2.     I believe that everyone specifically including me could do what he does.

3.     I am open to the possibility that he might be able to do something that is very rare, special, and helpful.

4.     I can attest by my personal experience with him that he did not bless me.

5.     I can attest by my personal experience with him that he did bless me. 

I would especially like to hear from people who could speak from their personal experience with him.

I will have to join the ranks of the open minded skeptics on this one. How is this any different from Deeksha, the oneness blessing that is most closely associated with Sri AmmaBhagavan at Oneness University in India? www.onenessuniversity.org. There they claim that, for a price, you can learn how to do what Mr. Trivedi seems to be doing. I don't see the kind of scientific rigor that would validate the claims being made here.

Keith --

I too have trouble with some of the directions that our content goes.  I'm deeply ambivalent about some of the more New Age sounding material that we work with. On the one hand, I don't personally find a lot of credence in some of it because so much of what passes as data validity falls prey to one of many well-known statistical fallacies.  Humans are absolutely atrocious at rigorously inferring meaning from data. (A la climate change, on both sides...)

On the other hand, I feel a responsibility for allowing our audience to judge for themselves what are in most cases highly-credible guests and researchers that we feature, and this instinct is only the greater when the material causes me a second thought.  I have a built-in anti-censor as long as the guest's worldview is not itself prone to magical delusion.  (Not always an easy judgment, mind you.)

I can't speak for Ken but I know him to be extremely rigorous in his view of data and empirical methodology.  I suppose that one of the job hazards of our endeavor, which includes integral media that strives to take a post-metaphysical and methodologically-pluralistic view of phenomena, is that by examining as object some of the topics that have been badly and magically mythologized by regressive New Age tendencies is that we will get hit by some shrapnel.

What I can promise you is that we are not engaging in New Age regression ourselves.  We have a huge filter around the problems that arise from unsupportable claims and from the over-focus on the subjective quadrant.  This is in part why we actively try to present growth media and insights from every quadrant, from economics and climate change to personal practice, relationships and meditation and more.  We try to cover the full range of human experience.

What I will ask is that while you rightfully and fully engage your analytical process on any media we produce that deals with objective claims, that you also consider your own first-person account of how that is coloring your experience.  I think the trick here, as someone once noted, is to be just open-minded enough such that our brains don't fall out.

Thanks for the great feedback.

Warmly,

Robb Smith

 (Smith's quote from : http://integrallife.com/member/keith-orndoff/blog/i-am-feeling-increasingly-estranged-integral-theory)

I was glad to see Robb Smith has similar worry that many of us empiricists do. The reason why some of us empiricists are in the integral camp is because we ARE aware of the scientism aspect of Science, and the many important phenomena that mainstream science/academia simply dismiss away.

Like Keith, I felt estranged from Integral more and more. What in the world is going on? Why is there so much repetition of content? Why are so many concepts literalized? 

Question to Integral-Life, I-I, IntegralNaked staff--

Is this direction toward more "New-Age" content a reflection of demographics? I understand empiricist integralism will always likely to be a minority in a topic borders around spirituality. Is there any expressed intention to urge this less-skeptical demographic to critically examine post-metaphysics and cognitive biases? In other words, will the Integral staff acknowledge this demographic reality, turn it into a kind of social experiment, a Great Conveyer belt?

Here's a blog that I created(i fleshed out the messiness of the above posts): I am hoping to rally more "vocal" concerns from critical-thinking empiricists about the direction of I-I. As noted by Google Search pointed out by an article in Integral World: search interest for Ken Wilber has dropped precipitously. It's time for exploration of ideology, engagement with academic disciplines, and meta-integral studies. 

links:

my blog post: http://integrallife.com/member/jim-lee/blog/where-integral-post-metaphysics

Ken Wilber search history according to Google: http://www.integralworld.net/visser34.html

Edward's call for more concrete integral methodology: http://www.integralworld.net/edwards27.html

--

To see a world in a grain of sand....

Most of the latest discussion has been centered around Integral Life's current state or whether this is a dip into New Age nonsense, but what about the substance of the argument here?   If we have modernity with its Industrial shift, and post-modernity with its Informational shift, surely an integral age must be accompanied by something new, something never seen before, something emergent?   It does not seem too far off that a new form of Life Energy would be just that new transformation.  

I believe that Ken does not take his brand (the official Ken Wilber output, including Integral Life) lightly, so I read this with great trust and openness.  After researching it further, I signed up for a remote blessing, something I am glad to put money towards.  How many would not buy a computer, or a factory for their product, or a plow, or a hoe, or greater hunting equipment?

After reading Ken's blog I decided to experience the "Trivedi effect" for myself.  I figured the worst that could happen is that I'd have a little less money to spend on the stuff that Bill Harris hawks.

I'm a practicing physicist, and my native perspective is highly 3rd person.  That said, it is impossible for this report to be scientific.  I don't know of a way to fully characterize gross/subtle/causal body/mind/spirit either prior to or after the blessing, nor do I know how to eliminate the effects of life living me in the intervening time.  Additionally, note Ken's point about needing to be at 5th stage before being nudged to the 6th, or in my own odd vernacular "You can't make apple pie from apple blossoms."  So, with all those disclaimers out of the way, here is my subjective experience with the remote blessing:

At the scheduled time of the blessing (June 30):  I felt a very warm sensation in and around my spine at heart level and I felt "itching" on my forehead. 

On July1, I still felt residual "tingles" in my back at heart level and "itchy tingles" in the forehead.

On July 1 and 2, I slept extraordinarly well.  Best sleep in at least a decade.

On July 4th, I had 8 hour bout of nausea and vomitting, headaches, and muscular aches.

On July 5-7, I have experienced sharp pains in the muscles around the left hip joint.  Coincident with the pain, I've noticed a small realignment in my walking gait.  (Before, when I stepped with my left leg, I led with the inside of my knee.  Now I am leading with the kneecap.  I'd guess this amounts to a 7 degree rotation in the way the leg "swings" from the hip socket while walking.)

I could find plausible explanations for the nausea and aches and pains, but cannot think of a plausible explanation for the sensations the night of the blessing or the shift in alignment in my leg.

All in all, I am somewhat excited in what is happening.  I'll wait a few weeks to see if/how the hip pain resolves.  But at this point I would be willing to try the experiment again.

Brian