Utter drivell attempting to sound profound

I bought this book hoping that Wilber would somehow manage to present a more reasonable angle on the New Agers than the likes of Deep Quack Chopra & his ilk. To me Wilber's claims aren't quite as ludicrous as Chopra's but they aren't much better. He smuggles in an awful lot of unwarranted concepts & presents buzz words that amount to nothing more than 'word salad'. An example of this is him speaking of The Four Quadrants - an extremely notional concept he came up with which cannot be tested for authenticity in any reliable manner rending his idea *entirely* subjective.

Another bad habit of Wilber's is to misrepresent science. He pretends that science denies spirituality but it doesn't. It has nothing to say about it because even so-called 'spiritual' people can't even agree on things like their god / gods. Not even Christians, where Catholics think there's a '3 in 1' "Trinity" (whatever that could mean), Unitarians think there's only one God but Mormon think there are many! - And this is before any other faith claims are examined. If religions could make up their mind maybe scientist could address such claims but without wide agreement on such matters from the God Squad how can they agree OR disagree?

He makes a claim that evolution is an example of spirit 'returning to itself' by 'falling away' & returning but anyone who knows a thing of two about evolution will see that there's no good reason to believe any spirit has guided the processes we see, There are too many ludicrous examples of 'bad design' - giraffes like ourselves have a nerve called The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve connecting their brain to their vocal cords which any intelligent designer would send from A to B - a matter of just a few inches, but is that what evolution created? No. It created a ludicrous detour all the way down it's neck & all the way back up again for no good reason making the nerve perhaps 30 or 40 times longer than it needs to be! Our eyes are also very badly 'designed' (not that there's any good reason to think that they are). Our retinas face in the wrong direction which in & of itself isn't too big a problem as they still detect light but out optic nerves have to go through a hole as a result of this which creates invisible blind spots the size of six full moons in each eye! The octopus doesn't have this design fault so why would this Great Spirit make such a stupid error as that? It wouldn't but mindless Natural Selection certainly would,

I could go on & on about how this book jumps to more & more unjustified conclusions & smuggles in unwarranted assumptions as if they were known facts but I'll stop or I'll be here all day. One thing I do acknowledge Wilber for is criticizing the Post Modernism for pretending there's no such thing as truth - which begs the question: 'Oh really but is that true?' - An ironic shortcoming he didn't miss so he does at least deserve one star in this review!

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