When it comes to truth and justice there is no difference between the small and great problems. Whosoever fails to take small matters seriously in a spirit of truth cannot be trusted in greater affairs.

—Albert Einstein

[W]hen intellectual dishonesty (or gross incompetence) is discovered in one part—even a marginal part—of someone’s writings, it is natural to want to examine more critically the rest of his or her work.

—Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense

Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.

—former NFL quarterback Joe Theisman

THIS BOOK GREW OUT of a chapter and an appendix in the original online version of my second book, Stripping the Gurus (STG). Following the electronic publication of that, over the first half of 2006 I posted three additional appendices concerning the flaws in the ideas and character of Ken Wilber, with the material being presented there largely in the order in which it was written.

Here, the same information, with less commentary, has been regrouped by subject—although the “Bald Narcissism” chapter and the appendix on “Wilber and Bohm” remain largely as they were originally written.

Even with that new, non-chronological presentation, however, the chapters still provide an instructive example as to how even the most well-intentioned of spiritual communities will invariably degenerate into closed, unquestioning, cult-like environments.

Some of the information in several of the sections here was sparked by emails from Jim Andrews, whose research I have freely incorporated. Specifically, that refers to Wilber’s pronouncements in the sections on animal cannibalism, the purported benefits and real dangers of meditation, the value of prayer, the “Maharishi Effect,” and the supposed efficiency of yellow versus green memes.

January 2016	Geoffrey D. Falk

P.S. For this “tenth anniversary” edition, I am in the process of updating all of the hyperlinks to point to accessible pages. In the time since the initial publication, amazon.com fatally changed the query string for calling the “search inside this book” feature, and many other sites have disappeared as well, being viewable now only via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.