[Buddha-l] Religious, But Not Spiritual

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 26 September 2007 20:00, curt wrote:

> America is probably the only place on earth where someone like Wilbur
> could be taken seriously as an intellectual.

I should think that wherever Ken Wilber happened to be, he would be taken 
seriously as an intellectual by one person, namely, Mr Wilber himself. 

Some time ago I tried to read Grit and Grace, which I expected to be a moving 
story about a woman's struggle with what proved to be fatal breast cancer.
To some extent it was that, but it was also a testimonial to how much this 
extraordinarily intelligent and thoughtful woman loved and admired her 
husband, who she thought to be the greatest genius alive. She faced death 
with courage, we are told, but lamented being separated from this incredible 
paragon of insight wisdom. All this is told, of course, by the genius 
himself, who manages to overcome all temptations to succumb to false 
humility. (Such is the man's vanity that I have a hunch he might have a 
marginal preference for those who had learned to spell his last name as he 
spells it.)

A couple of years ago I had a student who was quite convinced that Wilber had 
managed to put all of science and all of depth psychology and all the best of 
religion together into a single comprehensive system of of such towering 
genius that the only thing left for universities to do was to close their 
libraries and just study Wilber's "Theory of Everything." The class was on 
Zen Buddhism, and said student couldn't figure out whey I was having people 
read Huineng, Linji, Dongshan, Dogen, Eisai and Chinul when we could have 
been reading the one writer who had mastered Zen and put it all into clear 
English. Being the testy sort of old fart that I am, I let all this 
enthusiasm for Wilber try my patience, but when the class was over, the 
student did give me a T-shirt that said University of New Mexico in Chinese 
characters. I still wear it. He also gave me a CD of some lectures given by 
Wilber. I've never listened to more than the opening couple of minutes of the 
first selection.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes