The cult of Ken Wilber - What has gone wrong with Ken Wilber? - (from a longer article, an excerpt addressing Wilber and Adi Da Samraj aka Da Free John)

Excerpt from an article by Michel Bauwens

I used to be a great fan of Ken Wilber and his Integral Theory. As I was searching for a more integrated and inclusive understanding of personal and world processes in my twenties, and confused by all the different competing theories and techniques, the first book I read by Ken, Spectrum of Consciousness, was truly illuminating to me. What if all these western psychologists, with their various theories on the ego and how to care for it, where in fact complementary to each other? And in addition, what if the eastern theorists of paths beyond the ego, where themselves complementary to each other and to the Western points of view? What was needed was to find to right context in which to recognize the relative truth of each perspective, and to pursue truth as a combination of such partial perspectives. Thus, I've found Wilber's developmental structuralism to be very convincing, and not only that, emancipatory, since it not only offered a path for personal development, but based on his hypothesis that psychogeny equals sociogeny (the development of individuals is reflected in the development of society and vice-versa), it held out great hope for future developments. As a consequence, I read pretty much all he published over the years, at least 90% if not 100% of the thousands of pages that comprise his eight volumes of Collected Works.

But then, I'm not sure at which exact moment, I started to feel uneasy. First, it was the Da Free John case. Da Free John aka Franklin Jones was a very literate spiritual master, whom Wilber claimed to be the avatar for our age, someone who incarnate his own theories in the practice of a realized and enlightened Being, adapted to our own age. And I must admit that I found Da Free John's early books amazing.

This being said, I had developed my own spiritual discernment by then, by having followed and tried a variety of eastern and western paths, but especially also a criminalized 'scumbag guru' (a term I found on the web), in my case Rajneesh, which is of course an intense learning experience, as one usually learns more from painful mistakes. So when I approached Da Free John I immediately realized it had already taken on the workings of an exploitative cult, a fact that was confirmed by many former devotees and their exposes and tales of sexual exploitation, financial greed, and deceit. But as the madness of Da Free John started to gather huge proportions, Wilber could not and would not bring himself to any clear denunciation, he wrote what were in my opinion convoluted letters and only in a third letter did he acknowledged clearly that it was better to stay away from the commune. The letter however still implies that Da Free John is a "realized being", but that it somehow co-exists with features that are not so healthy for his devotees. Wilber is of course entitled to such opinion, but what disturbed me is the whole tone of defensiveness about it, this huge difficulty of saying, "I misjudged". It is mostly that which set made me worry.

This is puzzling, not only what concerns Da Free John, but more importantly Wilber. If you praise someone as the purest expression of your own theoretical system, and that experience then fails, and you fail to clearly analyse this or even recognize it, then somehow to me, Wilber's theories started to look more like a ideological construct. Just as a Marxist had to take stock, but not necessarily abandon all his premises after the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment, you would expect that Wilberism would have to take stock after such an event, but it did not happen. Wilber does change and evolve, as he himself now recognizes five phases but it only in a expansionary form of an ever greater Edifice of thought…. (article continues)