Spotting Blindspots of a Blindspots Spotter. My response to Jørgen Rasmussen’s video on Ken Wilber’s Alleged Mistakes
Jørgen Rasmussen, a Norwegian hypnotherapist, posted a YouTube video (on August 18, 2026) that attempts to provide some criticism of Ken Wilber’s work on Integral Psychology.
Since I saw a lot of confusion and misrepresentation in Rasmussen’s presentation, I wrote the following comment (it can also be found in the comments section of the YouTube video).
Eugene Pustoshkin’s response to Jørgen Rasmussen regarding his Ken Wilber video
First of all, thank you for your attempt to provide a critical overview of Ken Wilber’s works. As you invited me to provide you with my feedback, so I will now. (The following is a fully AI-free manually written text.)
I’d say your reading of Ken Wilber (from now on: KW) is surprisingly superficial given what you say about your two decades of experience with his Integral Framework. I’ve also been involved with Integral for two decades, and I’ve translated a dozen books by Wilber to my native language.
It is strange that you start your criticism of KW’s views based on his most popular recent book Finding Radical Wholeness. This book is clearly a simplified popularization, and you’d need to at least address KW’s views in such books as The Religion of Tomorrow, Integral Spirituality, Integral Psychology, and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, not to mention his other works in order to at least start to outline his authentic Integral view.
You provide a useful commentary about “functional projection” but your lament that KW doesn’t include this notion in his recent work is not appropriate. KW is clearly in the latest part of this present lifetime, having experienced serious health-related issues, and while he might still provide us with new discoveries, it is also reasonable not to expect that he would make many additions to his system. It is up to us to include into our versions of Integral Psychology & Integral Psychotherapy any novelties and new notions that seem reasonable to us. Claiming KW should’ve included any specific construct in his works is simply a claim that can be easily deconstructed (as I think I pointed out).
You speak a lot about repression giving an impression that this notion is somehow irrelevant to contemporary psychotherapy. This is clearly not true, repression is still a term that is widely used by psychodynamically-inclined (both academically recognized and independent) clinicians, and it is as fresh as ever. Repression is to this day a valid mechanism recognized and dealt with in psychodynamic approaches (see works of contemporary clinical scholars and practitioners such as Nancy McWilliams and her team’s Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual).
When you speak about repression you make a false equivalence between repression per se and the notion of repressed memories. First of all, repressed memories clearly exist, even though there could be implanted memories as well. It is nonsensical to deny the existence of that phenomenon. Second, however it is, the repressed memories situation you discuss is only an exotic subset of the implications related to the basic and undeniable discovery of repression by Freud and whole generations of psychanalysts and other therapists ever since 1900 (and before).
The evidence of your reading’s being shallow and partial (and full of false interpretation) can be found in that you assert that Wilber never touches the issue of that repressed memories case. However, KW directly writes about it in his book A Brief History of Everything in the section where he speaks of the Satanic Ritual Child Abuse and UFO cases. Can it be that your own psyche repressed the memory of your reading Wilber’s writing about this (if, of course, you read A Brief History, which I assume you did)?
Then you make the claim that the idea of body memories or repression not being “scientifically proven.” That’s clearly an overstatement. In clinical practice when you work with the dimension of embodied felt sense it is clear that phenomenologically body does keep the score (as the famous book by Bessel van der Kolk quipped). There are also neuroscientific studies of how the organism system (such as the brain) keeps the score in terms of inhibitions and disinhibitions of various brain systems. There are works on the vagus nerve’s role in traumatic processes which is invaluable to practitioners.
In my experience, the only people who deny that body and our felt-sense embodiment contain memories are either people who do not work with real human beings or people who avoid somatic-based psychotherapeutic interventions (and are often grounded in a reductionistic cerebrally-based and very narrowed activities masquerading as science). It is clear to anyone who includes aspects of somatic awareness in their psychotherapeutic work that memories are contained within our bodies as body armor, access points, acupuncture-like locations, etc.
In fact, when you do refer to some scientific foundations, most often you refer to reductionistic sciences which are limited to the Orange-stage structure or even the earlier Expert-stage structure. KW and other postconventional thinkers have spent literally decades criticizing narrow sciences as opposed to a broader and more holistic view of sciences. Limiting the entire Science only to structure-specific views and enactments of science is wrong, according to an Integral perspective.
You correctly say that memories can be implanted by suggestion. But you do not mention MK Ultra and brainwashing in that regard. In fact, various mind-control experiments, as some scholars of that topic suggest (such as Daniel P. Brown, by the way, as in his study of the Sirhan Sirhan case) are based on artificial induction of dissociative states which operate via the mechanisms of dissociated memories (i.e. memory repression). KW doesn’t speak about that either, but this sort of theme has never been in his focus of interests.
Your claim that KW never mentions hypnosis is also wrong. I looked through a few of his Collected Works volumes, and there are passing mentions and references to hypnosis and hypnotic states. Even in his very first book The Spectrum of Consciuosness there’s a brief mention of hypnosis.
KW doesn’t provide (as far as I remember) a comprehensive outline of the theory of hypnosis, but then why would or should he? He is not an Integral psychotherapist. What he writes can be characterized as an Integral Philosophy of Psychology or Integral Psychology. Integral Psychology is so vast, and hypnosis, while relevant to clinical psychotherapy, is one of numerous aspects which can be included in General Integral Psychology.
In fact, KW does more than anyone else (or at least as much as the most qualified transpersonal theories) when he speaks about altered states of consciousness (ASC) and states of consciousness in general. Hypnotic states are included in that category. But asserting that he should have written on hypnosis is inappropriate, because he has never claimed to be a clinical specialist or psychotherapist. It is up to specific practitioners and theorists who apply KW’s Integral Framework (also known as AQAL) to their fields to fill in all the details. It is fairly easy to incorporate hypnosis into an Integral Psychotherapy framework—the entire AQAL system provides a lot of space and context for that. Perhaps, you could do that yourself, if not already.
You mention Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind Big Heart approach and offer an opinion that the voices that are evoked in that framework are not discovered but suggested, citing the hypnosis-based therapy discourse in that regard. But that is just an opinion, which attempts to limit all the variation to your preferred discourse of hypnotic suggestion.
Of course, some voices might be induced via hypnosis, but the overall gist of the Integral worldview as proposed by KW and others is that there are also universal structures which are not situationally or culturally constructed. In fact, the Big Mind approach is a Zen-based spin-off of the Voice Dialogue approach which in itself is a continuation of the lineage of understanding psyche as composed of subpersonalities, stemming directly from Janet’s and Freud’s works.
Thus, I’d say that not all voices are constructed in the moment, as, e.g., Freud showed with id, ego, and superego, and Carl Jung (and such scholar-practitioners as Stan Grof) showed with archetypal identifications (which are transculturally inherited and are universal to our species). And the thing with transpersonal voices in the Big Mind approach (as well as other similar approaches) that they might as well be not induced but evoked as universal transpersonal archetypes—which is basically the gist of many transpersonal approaches such as the Big Mind.
In fact, there is not much description of what a specific voice is in the Big Mind process, and results of inviting transpersonal voices even to the audiences which have no prior acquaintance with the transpersonal discourse are always surprising vivid if not astonishing.
But KW’s authentic view of that matter is not that the voices are discovered as static givens or things. His authentic view which you consistently failed to mention in your presentation is actually that of Integral Postmetaphysics and multilayered tetra-construction combined with the recognition of universal transpersonal dimensions seeded not in evolution but in involution. So his authentic view would be that the voices are partially tetra-constructed but partially evoked from the morphic fields which are in themselves a result of evolutionary construction combined with an involutionary outflux. You haven’t addressed that at all. To summarize that point, KW doesn’t adhere to the “discovery view”; he adheres to a universal-evolutionary postmetaphysical (tetra)constructionist view.
You make a strange claim that Multiple Personality is somehow discredited. But Dissociative Identity Disorder is an internationally and officially recognized diagnosis (it is not recognized in some countries such as Russia, which is conservative and still very reductionistic in its psychiatry medicine, but in overall in the West it is a mainstream notion). While therapy and therapists’ activities might contribute to dissociation (especially if there are hypnotic states involved or some foul play or mishandling of the patient), it is absurd to claim that all alters/subs/subpersonalities/voices are suggested or induced. As I said, some ego states are not suggested or induced, at least not in the way you attempted to suggest or induce (pun intended).
In your statements I sense an unrealistic overstatement of what hypnosis can do—this is not to deny that it could do a lot of good and a lot of harm. It’s an important therapeutic technique which needs to be used skillfully and within a rigorous ethical context.
I liked parts of your social criticism of today’s situation. But your claims regarding KW’s developmental views are inadequate. You misrepresent his actual authentic view present in his written works and oral presentations. He doesn’t make those mistakes regarding understanding development that you ascribe to him, and you and anyone should read his hardcore technical works on that topic (such as The Atman Project; Up from Eden; Transformations of Consciousness; Eye to Eye; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; The Eye of Spirit; A Brief History of Everything; Integral Psychology; Integral Spirituality; and The Religion of Tomorrow) in order to adequately represent the fullness of KW’s authentic view of development.
For instance, KW makes a clear distinction between enduring structures and transient structure-stages; he differentiates between basic structures of consciousness and self-related structure-stages, etc. These differentiations as well as the formulation of the multiple developmental lines/streams idea actually addresses if not all then most of the critiques you raised against his developmentalism.
KW doesn’t make the conflation regarding Green that you ascribe to him. He writes about the cultural issues in his books such as Boomeritis and A Post-Truth World, and in other treatises—and his full authentic view is that of the full AQAL matrix. Wilber’s authentic understanding of the structures of consciousness notion has everything you say it lacks and even more. Your critique can be adequately related only to KW’s most simplified presentations of his views (and in some places he does indicate it is a popularization)—and this should have been indicated by you from the get-go (if you are aware of that, of course).
You make a good point that someone could have a political ideology (say, libertarianism, communism, liberal capitalism, etc.) while being at any stage of consciousness. In this sense an ideology is a kind of a type within a political spectrum.
But when you speak about Islam and the radical tendencies within Islam you seem to be coming from an Islamophobic perspective. You fail to mention that it is the USA (or, rather, the forces which govern its deep state) and some of its satellite allies (or rather the comprador elites manipulated by those forces) have consistently been sponsoring “jihadi terrorists” around the world in order to destabilize various societies (both in the West and the East, in the North and the South) and achieve various political and geopolitical gains. Wilber doesn’t mention it too, to be just.
In many if not most Islamic countries there is no terrorism and actually quite a lot of tolerance to various religious identities, and societies function normally. In my own country, Islam is fully integrated, is practiced by millions of people, and has a lot of even secularized and postconventional layers. People of different religious identities co-exist peacefully, in a mutually respecting manner, while terroristic activities are often induced and artificially constructed by the forces who themselves often have no relation to any particular religion. And here, once again, Wilber’s view seems to provide a more correct view of the roles of the Red Opportunistic stage and the Amber [Blue] Conformist/Diplomat stages, at least as a general blueprint, than what you suggested.
Islamophobia is a construct used to divide and conquer and artificially induce crises in societies in order to exploit them via their weaknesses and “controllable chaos.” If you imported preconventional clans to your country without any discriminative wisdom, you’d have raise in crime and rape rates etc. It has nothing to do with Islam per se or any specific religion per so, but has everything to do with Opportunistic and Conformist stages’ dynamics combined with mass manipulation activities intentionally enacted by specific powerstructures. (There’s a lot of critical literature on that matter, even if it is not developmentally or integrally informed.)
So, KW is correct in that sense. Just read the Old-Testament Psalms and see the same blood-thirsty rhetoric which you may encounter anywhere.
You mention that people at Red can be honorable people while KW tends to describe Red as a dark-triad phenomenon. Well, while this critique highlights something important, to be just we need to say that even a Narcissistic or Psychopathic Personality or Antisocial person can often exhibit themselves as being “an honorable person.” See The Godfather Trilogy for an example. But you are correct that there can be some variation, especially when it comes to youth raised in poverty.
As for female examples of Red, those can be found in Susanne Cook-Greuter’s description of the Self-Protective type of the Opportunistic stage. The example you provided is a classical example of that Self-Protective variation. (I’ve also completed Susanne’s programs and respect her work a lot.)
In your criticism of KW’s approach to Postmodernism you mention Michel Foucault and claim that he must be earlier than Green because of what, as you say, his support of Marxism, Communism, and the Islamic movement. But, in fact, if you’re objective enough in studying Foucault, you would see that he might as well have been Construct-Aware (which is much later than Green). By the way, KW read everything by Foucault that was available in English during the time he studied him.
To understand and embody Postmodernism you definitely have to be at the Green altitude, but not necessarily in the values or ego-stage line. (As I already said, you failed to mention KW’s notion of multiple developmental lines in your presentation.) It is a highly pluralizing and deconstructive way of thinking which operates based on early-to-mid vision-logic. But of course Green stage’s artifacts, as you too mentioned, can be downwardly translated into more conventional stages and contexts (which is also present in KW’s Integral Metatheory—the very term downward translation is actually the term he introduced).
You mentioned Marxism and Communism and Karl Marx as something which allegedly indicates not later than Orange. But you yourself mention that a specific political ideology can be exhibited at any stage of development. As for Marx and authentic Marxism, while some parts of it might have been at Orange (say in some values), Marx’s thinking was, as widely recognized, dialectical, which means (in KW’s terms) vision-logic, which puts Marx into the category of second-tier Integral thinkers (which doesn’t mean he wasn’t true but partial). So, no wonder various postconventional thinkers studied Marx and Marxism and found and still find it useful. In fact, if you’d read Marx yourself today, you’d probably be surprised how convincing his discourse is.
I need to say your USSR history is a bit rusty and partial and it needs a serious upgrade beyond usual propagandistic and caricaturized tropes. Also, Jordan Peterson’s translation of Marxism and Communism is highly subjective and very weak (you mentioned Peterson a number of times). You should study the Soviet History in 1920s. If you do, you would actually see that there was an entire Left-to-Right spectrum among the Communists and their allies. Then, years later, all of that multiplicity and pluralism was centralized and reduced more to the Center-Right stance under Stalin’s consolidating/purges activities—legitimizing only the strictly conventional layer in mass society.
You also make a very dubious statement that allegedly Capitalism rescued many people from poverty. Take a look at the World-Systems Analysis as proposed by Immanual Wallerstein and the students of his work. They conceptualize an important notion of the intentional development of underdevelopment in the peripheral and semi-peripheral (in relation to the exploitative center or core of the Capitalist World-System) countries. Over the course of the rise and unfoldment of the Capitalist World-System entire cultures and societies were intentionally put into poverty and misery by capitalist globalist imperialists in their struggle for the world hegemony.
As a matter of fact, in Communist and Socialist countries that were able to establish their sovereignty, hundreds millions of people started to have access to free (government-funded) middle and higher education, medicine, paid vacations, paid maternal leave, etc. Women were emancipated and elevated to equal positions of administration as men (although it is true that there were many problems around gender stereotypes and sexism just as in other parts of the world, including the West—to this day, sexism is quite widespread in the West, as many women validly testify). Western elites made sure to exert artificial pressures, invent sanctions, instigate coups and terrorism and various other subversion activities in order to undermine their opponents in what they tend to see as a zero-sum game competition for world hegemony.
You also claim that KW doesn’t discuss narcissism in its complexity or reduces narcissism to the Opportunistic (Red) stage only. This is not true. In fact, KW writes about narcissism and narcissistic disorders through the lens of psychopathology in Transformations of Consciousness; and he extensively discusses the problem of cultural narcissism in Boomeritis. He has never suggested that, say, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) belongs solely to the Red Center of Gravity. He has always (at least starting with wilber-2) pointed out that a dysfunction may emerge at a certain level, but then it may persist even as the individual continues his or her development to later stages of maturity.
You assert that KW never considers that narcissism can be a part of later “second-tier” stages (such as Teal and Turquoise), but this is also untrue. First, his understanding of narcissism as an early pathology implies that this dysfunction may still be present even when a person’s developmental Center of Gravity is much higher / later. Second, he suggests that Green has been infected with narcissism (the condition that he calls Boomeritis or Pluralitis). If that is possible, then it is also theoretically possible, in the logic of his framework, to have later stages also infected by narcissism. Third, KW directly spoke about the Darth Vader move being possible at the second-tier “integral” stages of development.
Towards the end of your presentation, you say that the so-called scientific perspective doesn’t favor KW’s views as much as the views expressed by the scientific community. However, you don’t seem to understand that the consensus you refer to is actually a structure-specific consensus of what is rather a reductionistic and flatland version of science (limited mostly to the Expert Amber-to-Orange and early Achiever Orange stages). Of course, reductionistic scientists would favor reductionistic ways of conducting science and dismiss less reductionistic and more holistic forms of scientific endeavors.
But you also provide here an unfair representation of the grounds upon which KW builds his views. Ken Wilber builds his views upon prominent scientific and scholarly views well-established in literature of specific disciplines. In the case of narcissism and understanding of psychopathology (including developmental dysfunctions) Wilber grounds his views in such well-respected disciplines as attachment theory, object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, existential and humanistic psychologies, as well as transpersonal psychology. All of these exist verifiably in the scientific literature of the specific disciplines that KW highlights in his numerous works.
Sorry, but given that you say you have spent almost two decades studying Ken Wilber (or at least that you got involved in studying him almost two decades ago) I can assert that your reading of KW’s work and your understanding of his full and nuanced position that you’ve exhibited in this video is very weak. It inadequately represents—or, rather, misrepresents—KW’s authentic views.
In the very end of the video you make a false statement that Ken Wilber hasn’t engaged his critics in dialogue. But there’s even the book called Ken Wilber in Dialogue (with his critics)—not a good book, but still. And in each book that Ken Wilber sequentially wrote, one after another—at least up to Integral Spirituality (and I’d argue even including his more recent books)—he has consistently addressed various criticisms. In fact, objectively, in his books he spends literally dozens if not hundreds of pages (e.g. in various footnotes) arguing with his critics or updating his views based on previously received criticisms. KW himself asserted that his evolution from wilber-1 to wilber-5 is a result of such accommodation of various criticisms of the views he used to hold. You’ve never mentioned that even in passing.
Short summary: In this video you give a highly selective reading of a surface-level understanding of KW, while making many misrepresentations of his actual authentic views.
