INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 576 Amsterdam, July 3rd, 2015 QUESTIONING THE ENTIRE EDIFICE - The Integral World Contributions of David Lane - FRANK VISSER Around 1999 Ken Wilber asked me around for the role of Devil's Advocate of the newly formed Integral Institute, with the specific assignment to collect all existing online criticism of integral theory. The Internet was just getting on the horizon and Wilber being a late adopter and I was working in the Internet industry for Intel, I thoroughly started an online search. Not much of substance could be found at that time though. One exception was a series of brief critical essays written by a professor of religion called David Christopher Lane. Professor Lane had been a big fan of Wilber for many years, and appears on the back cover of A Sociable God (1983) as saying: "Wilber may singlehandedly alter the course of future research in consciousness." Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/visser87.html RICHARD FEYNMAN'S CLOCKS VS. KEN WILBER'S WINDS - Ken Wilber's Achilles' Heel, Part IV - DAVID LANE Richard Feynman reveals a very intriguing story about how a clock that he had given his wife stopped at the moment of her death. On the surface of it, the story has a twilight zone feeling. What an odd coincidence it was. A young woman dies and the clock "mysteriously" stops. Now for some people this event would provide a point of meaning in which they would impute a certain type of significance (maybe this was a sign to us, maybe a confirmation, maybe a prophecy). But for Richard Feynman, the soon to be world famous Nobel Prize winner in Physics for his work on Q.E.D. [quantumelectrodynamics] he saw nothing of the sort. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/lane99.html THE SOUND OF THREE BOOKS CLAPPING - Ken Wilber's Under-Reading of Shabd Yoga - Ken Wilber's Achilles' Heel, Part IV - DAVID LANE I have read over one thousand books directly on the subject myself, been to India 8 times, and completed an M.A. and Ph.D. on the subject, but I really don't know who is the "unsurpassed" master of shabd yoga. I may believe many things and say many things (by the way, I am also guilty like Wilber of inflationary hype at times—just read some of my more "puffy" pieces on gurus in the 1980s), but even in my own little field of expertise which I have concentrated on does not, indeed cannot, lead to me to say unequivocally that so and so is the "Best" or the "Greatest." All I could say is that I have read such and such books and this one I think is best, or I have met such and such guru and I think this guy is tops. That's it. Yet, Wilber who is not an expert on shabd yoga pontificates in a rhetorical fashion as if he "really" knew. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/lane100.html