Note: This is an abridged version of the original essay posted on another website. If you want to read the original essay, click here. This abridged version is more to the point and focused, not just because it is shorter, abridged, but because it does not include the distracting spectacle of Wilber hoisting himself by his own petard.

The life and career of Ken Wilber is nothing if not interesting. A google search will reveal that episodes and chapters of recent years involve Wilber losing former fans, readers, followers, and promoters. Why? Ken Wilber is a scholar, critic, teacher, observer, and prolific writer who has written extensively and critically about science, psychology, religion, and philosophy—eastern as well as western. But he is not himself a peer of those whose writings and work he reports and critiques. Not that you have to be an expert, on the cutting edge of a given line of research, to write about that field, but Wilber makes claims and gives critiques that really only experts working in a given field can effectively make.

Wilber’s pretensions to “expertise” mislead those new to his writings into attributing more importance and legitimacy to his models and ideas than they can sustain. Once a reader realizes—often after years of study—that Wilber’s work has not been nor is it ever likely to be rigorously tried and tested through experiment and the peer-review publication process, that reader will likely join the growing number of former fans and followers.

Wilber’s defacto role has been to introduce and popularize various important areas of thought and research in psychology, philosophy, the history of science, and comparative religion. There is a place and a need for someone who can do for philosophy, evolutionary biology, comparative religion, brain research, and consciousness studies what Isaac Asimov did for the subjects he took up. Instead of the Einstein of consciousness—as he has been occasionally called—Ken Wilber might do well to emulate Isaac Asimov, the esteemed writer, teacher, and author of classic works of science fiction—including the short philosophical science fiction masterpiece, “The Last Question.”

If Wilber acts quickly (he is now in his late 50s) there might still be enough time for him to successfully emulate Asimov’s example and become widely known and revered as Ken Wilber, the Isaac Asimov of Consciousness.

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