I am not alone in my dismay at the muddled “thought” that substitutes for the commitment to rigorous spiritual principles among the trendy spiritual gurus of mass American culture.
Deepak Chopra, Jean Houston, Marianne Williamson, and Neal Donald Walsch, and others of these media gurus have enunciated truths that contain relatively accurate insights from the perennial wisdom. I have learned much from each of them. In particular I have great fondness for Jean Houston, whose Mystery School program made such a contribution to my father. But something trips all of them up whenever they stray into real world politics. Without exception, demonstrating not the slightest absorption of the spiritual truths they present, they come across as New Age liberals without a scintilla of integral insight.
They simply haven't studied the integral model at all.
Thus their glamorizing the Occupiers and misreading of their influence is telling but not surprising to anyone who has followed their work. Not only does it spring from their ongoing falling for the pre/trans fallacy, it is also an expression of the very real confusion among Greens about the actual structure of the transpersonal realm.
As Wilber has often pointed out, Boomeritis Greens are particularly susceptible to the pre/trans fallacy because of their vehement rejection of reason. Thus they are apt to label anything nonrational as transrational, thus falling time and again for the communitarian bling of the left's rejection of individual freedom in favor of group rights. Their embrace of the Occupiers is just the latest demonstration of the problem.
As a group, these media spiritual gurus lambaste our market economy, insisting that we must put “human values” before “economic values,” as Williamson demands in her speech to the Los Angeles Occupiers. Indeed, our friends offer spiritual cover for the political demand for something they call “economic justice,” a very vague program centered on more vigorous redistributionist policies.
