Notes on an Encounter with a Cult

Posted on July 21, 2004 in Encounters Myths & Mysticism Thinking

Spent the evening talking to the single other attender of the poetry meetup in Orange, California. Received a long lecture on the wisdom of Ken Wilber, New Age master of the proverbial cutting edge. Found the alarm bells going off in the back of my head — cult! cult! cult! — and finally said so when I could get half a word in edgewise. Received the usual denial — that cults are for stupid people. I disagreed. I’ve known plenty of very smart cultists.

The main trigger was the insistance that this man had found the unifying theme which explained everything. You could use it to change lives. So how about George W. Bush? Don Beck had sent him a letter came the answer. Bush hadn’t read it or wasn’t in a place to understand the message. Couldn’t even get it past his gatekeeper? What was the utility of the perspective? I asked. Well, no one can be reached all the time. A lot of talk about how this was like Piaget — just not understood as science yet — a common ploy of the New Age to get you to stop objections. Pointed this out. Could not say much because every point was interrupted before I could explicate. More cultist behavior.

An old problem, I thought. New Agers are dying to gain control of the world, tell the rest of us that they are the higher consciousness that should guide all others. Anyone who doesn’t go along just “isn’t there yet”. Bush could be a useful tool even if he isn’t “there”. The speaker insisted that he himself was. I suppose I am not because I questioned the theory and suggested that even smart people could be cultists. “Well, then Fundamentalism is a kind of cult.” Yes, it is.

What is wrong with being comfortable with uncertainty and a limited ability to perceive the universe? We know a great deal about the effects of gravity and for nearly 400 years have been able to make predictions based on it, but who knows what gravity is? No reputable scientist will call it anything but “a force” and most will admit that that is just a fudge — a name given to a mystery. Yet we do just fine not knowing what it is. By making the claim that they can account for everything these New Agers are trying to set up an authority over us. Perhaps a dangerous one.

Talked a lot about the Buddha but missed the central message which is compassion for life. All life is suffering. Lot of talk about some kind of intelligent “spirit ” that moves the universe and affectations of contempt for mythologizing the findings of science. All this talk of spirit was, in my opinion, classic projection: mythologizing a kind of unified field. I smiled and told the fellow that next month we’re going to talk poetry. We shook hands. I went out to deal with the issues of human dignity without power, living as a small organism on a small planet in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy.

I’m perfectly happy living fuzzy.

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• Ken Wilber’s Ignorance of Science
  
• Review of A Theory of Everything