Nuggets

Ken Wilber, in Always Already: The Brilliant Clarity of Ever-Present Awareness:

Many people have stern objections to “mysticism” or “transcendentalism” of any sort, because they think it somehow denies this world, or hates this earth, or despises the body and the senses and its vital life, and so on. While that may be true of certain dissociated (or merely Ascending) approaches, it is certainly not the core understanding of the great Nondual mystics, from Plotinus and Eckhart in the West to Nagarjuna and Lady Tsogyal in the East.

on Boomeritis Buddhism:

But as authentic as those states truly are—and nobody is denying that!—they are immediately snapped up and interpreted by the green meme [postmodernism/pluralism].  Consequently, the person then interprets Buddhism—or simply his or her own spiritual experiences—to mean that authentic spirituality must be anti-hierarchical, relativistic, primarily a matter of participatory sharing, focused on caring dialogue, a democratic jettisoning of any ranking between teacher and student (‘the sangha is the buddha’), denying any grading and judging, encouraging a multiplicity and diversity of equally valid truths, asserting a plurality of spiritual ultimates, de-emphasizing enlightenment since any ‘higher’ states might marginalize somebody, seeing the spiritual teacher as merely an egalitarian friend with whom we walk the nonhierarchical spiritual path, hand in hand as equals, dispensing with intense discipline and denying that awakening is anything other than doing the laundry with some sort of awareness….”