The Spiritual Exercises and the Examen

I have combined three posts about Ignatian prayer, and what he calls ‘the Particular Examen.’ I had intended to rewrite them as one piece, but I think that simply dating them while leaving them pretty much as I originally wrote them serves my purpose. I read them as a series of connected reflections.

The woman who inspired the last entry, "This May be Heresy," Annemarie Marino, died on May 20. I will always remember her quick mind and generous heart. We had wonderful conversations. Please add your prayers to mine that she finds peace and her heart's desire.

I invite anyone who reads this and wants to comment or share something about their experience using the Ignatian examen to contact me at kireland8@gmail.com.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2006

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius

I have been a practitioner of Buddhist meditation for more than 30 years. But this is not my first experience with intensive meditation practice.

I entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, on August 15th 1966. After a few months to acclimate to the schedule of getting up at 5:25 and bed at 9:30, we first year novices “did” the 30-day retreat. For a full month, the whole community was totally focused on the discipline of the Exercises in its strictest form, as strict as the discipline in any zen hall: total silence, 7 hours of contemplation very day, an unwavering order of meditation, invocations and most importantly, in retrospect, the examen.

The bell that alerted us to prayer, or mass, or spiritual reading, or the daily conferences with the Master of novices, was not a beautiful, clear temple bell. Rather it had the urgency of the alarm that gets firemen out of bed in the middle of the night. We were not to be monks dedicated to a life of prayer within exclusionary monastic walls. We were being trained to pray hard and work hard for the Kingdom of God.

After we took religious vows, every year we dedicated 8 days to the exercises. These were the heady days that followed Vatican II, so the strict retreat format, the fire and brimstone of the 1st week, for example, had fallen into disfavor.

Now 40 years later it is hard to believe that the Exercises had such a visceral effect, creating a feeling for the Transcendent in the way that they did. I remember reading Joyce’s description of the preacher sermon on Hell in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was a teenager, but Joyce was right on the mark. Fr. T. J. C. O’Callaghan may have lacked the dramatic flare of Joyce’s retreat master, but he posed the fiery world of the unforgivable, using the same script that, combined with a retreat environment created by the 80 men who shared the life of the novitiate, the silence, the liturgies, the homilies, the food, and the penances, geared to the meditations of 4 weeks of the Exercises.

I remained in the Society until 1976. But 5 years before I left, I began to realize that rigidity of religious life, in the traditional form, was not going to be a happy fit with my personality. Leaving religious life was a difficult choice; I had been very happy studying theology and exploring the religious practice of the Jesuits. I wanted to show the same respect for my choice to abandon the Society as my choice to make religious vows. And so I undertook the Exercises again in a form called the 19th annotation. In place of 30 days of seclusion and intense prayer, I dedicated an hour every day for almost a year and, with a director, followed the order of prayer and meditation that Ignatius set within the four ‘weeks’. I was already practicing both zazen and vipassana meditation by then, and though I didn’t consciously try to blend the two practices, that is in fact exactly what I was doing.

I cannot cut myself off from the life giving roots in the Exercises. For most successful Jesuits, the Exercises have been grafted into their bones. I was not immune—it can even happen in 10 years. I have begun some reflections and writing about the real links between meditation practice and Ignatian discipline. Yes, it has to be called a discipline.


THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2006

The Examen

Recently I have been focusing my inner exploration on the Examen as presented in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. In the early 16th century, the Examen was a real breakthrough in the pedagogy of prayer. Human beings were most certainly capable of self-examination before Ignatius, and, through the ritual of confession and expiation, and Christians found inner peace and clarity in their lives. But as a method of prayer, Ignatius recommended three short periods a day to examine your inner landscape in a focused way, and then refocus according to an intention that you had set for yourself. Some commentators have even credited him with starting the development of what we in West now call the “self”–that particular set of inner motivations and proclivities that govern our lives.

Most people I speak with assume that “talking with God” is the most natural of any communication. I don’t believe this assumption is even close to the truth. For Christians it would mean that the results of Original Sin magically disappear with baptism or conversion. This is not supported by most of the evidence that we can gather from the experience of most Christian mystics, saints. It certainly flies in the face of most Eastern teachings regarding humankind’s sleeping, inattentive, deluded state.

I recently saw some clips from a TV documentary called “Camp Jesus” which focused on a fundamentalist summer camp for children. After an adult woman who was leading a prayer group made the rather startling accusation that Harry Potter should be in Hell, there was an interview with a young boy who preached and said that he regularly talked with God about his future. When the camera switched to his father's encouraging words, and I began to listen to him, an evangelical preacher, I felt that a strong, irrefutable case could be made that these “godly” conversations were nothing more than interiorization of subtle and overt parental messages, prejudices, on the same level as the ridiculous damnation of Harry Potter. The kid was destined, sadly, to be just like his dad.

Or in the words of one Jesuit master: “Our capacity to deceive ourselves is infinite!”

How do we know that our own channels are not jammed with well-intentioned instruction (at best), prejudice, obfuscation? Does God actually speak to us at all? If this is a real possibility, then perhaps practicing and working with the Examen and what Ignatius called the “Discernment of the Spirits” does point to a breakthrough in prayer.

Of course prayer has to be learned and taught, and how it is taught changes. We learn about love as we live out our lives; we share and try to teach our children from our experience. This learning cannot happen in a vacuum: my friend Daniel Shurman refers back to this phrase from Episcopalian liturgy: what is the Spirit saying to the Church? We are always listening and learning, both from the Source of All That Is and from one another.

Sometime in 1997 I met a priest in the Episcopal diocese of northern California who was promoting a form of weekly prayer group for business people based, she said, on the Ignatian ‘Examen.’ At the time I was exploring the possibility of doing a small meditation group downtown after work. I contacted her and she invited me to attend one of her groups. Besides her wonderful head of red hair, I found several points for wonder and refection: her commitment to bring prayer and reflection to the business world, and my initial impression that this form of Examen was both different from what I had learned and practiced in the Society and still had a strong Ignatian flavor.

I will examine my inner record as carefully as I can, and describe how we prayed together. We began with a short reading from scripture, and then after a few moments of silence and an invitation for anyone to share their private concerns and intentions, the conversation quickly shifted to the events of the day and personal reflections about what would be a “faithful” response. One participant, the most senior in age and status, redirected the conversation if it strayed from the core message announced in the gospel, as if there were an agenda for the business at hand. With sandwiches and the time to walk back to their respected offices subtracted, perhaps 30 minutes remained for conversation and reflection.

I feel that there was something that had the genuine feel of Ignatius, the discerning of God in the world, the immediacy of the inquiry, and the imperative to be in action. But there was little or no self-examination. There was, as I recall, not even an invitation to begin any introspection. The reflections seemed quite analytical. But the major break with the Ignatian Examen was that this only tangentially touched on an individual confronting him or herself.

In the next post, I will talk about the Examen, the role of the intention and examining one’s inner motivations, plus the crossover to the practice of vispassana meditation and thinking with all of you, your whole body, including your memories, dreams and emotions.


WEDNESDAY, MAY 30, 2007

This may be heresy, but does it work?

Rather than beginning with any predetermined notion of how an individual works in harmony with him or herself, their communities and the universe—following a set of rules or conventions about behavior and love and faith—I wonder where the Ignatius' Examination of Conscience (the examen) might lead if just regarded as a rigorous way to focus an inner search.

I hesitate to edit Ignatius, and only do so as an experiment. I do not wish to make him into an atheist or a secret non-theistic Buddhist master. But, in my view, his Exercises sprang from inner experience in prayer and meditation, and, I want to test if they can stand apart from any particular theological doctrine, or what becomes of them when they are allowed to stand in a more neutral context.

I have followed a few of the current trends (some might say “fashions”) among directors of the Exercises. Among some Jesuits, the examen is now called “the examination of consciousness.” I have to admit that when I first started to practice vispassana meditation in the early 70’s, I wrote to my superior saying something to the effect, “if this in not what Ignatius had in mind, it is what he should have meant, whether or not he did.” Today I take seriously that Ignatius, in every iteration of the Exercises, used the word “conscience.”

Conscience, I think, is closer to the ordinary English usage “compunction” than it is to “consciousness” which, after Be Here Now, has nuances closer to the experience of the expansive vastness sometimes experienced in Buddhist meditation. Compunction has more the twinge of regret or conscience—those places where we notice something’s off. If you are not judgmental or harshly critical of yourself, the mind more easily focuses and ventures where it would rather not go, but does not equal “consciousness.” I think that Ignatius would be happier if we save feelings vastness for the Contemplatio of the 4th week.

In response to the request of a woman who visits me for conversations about meditation, I made some simple edits to Ignatius’s instructions for the Particular Examen, a exercise that he recommends, to begin, three times a day while doing spiritual exercises, and then for the rest of life! I just removed any reference to a deity, or to any external guidance. In some places I have left the words “faith,” “love,” “grace,” “presence,” “guidance,” and “goodness,” not as absolutes but rather focus points for an inner exploration. Look for faith and presence in our own lived experience, for example, instead of returning to old sermons about how we should behave and what we must do to be good. I also presume that the practitioner has some direction and is examining him or herself for what Ignatius might call our “chief characteristic,” our greatest obstacle to living in freedom and love.

If you want to undertake this exercise, Ignatius recommends three distinct periods a day, upon rising, before the mid-day meal, and upon retiring. In the morning, as your day is not yet filled with conscious and unconscious actions, you set your mind aright to reflect, remembering what you are going to look for if you have identified a ‘chief characteristic.’


Steps in Making the Ignatian Examen

1. We begin by quieting ourselves. Become aware the simple goodness of the universe, the gifts of life and love. Be thankful. Recall that without faith, the eye of love, the human world seems too evil for good to exist.

2. Look deep within to see clearly, to understand accurately, and to respond generously to what is occurring in our daily history.

3. Review in memory the history of the day (week, month, etc.) in order to be shown concrete instances of our ‘chief characteristic,’ as well as instances of presence and guidance and, perhaps, of the activity and influence of the chief characteristic. These can be detected by paying attention to strong feelings we experienced that may have accompanied or arisen from situations and encounters.

4. Evaluate these instances in which we have either collaborated with deep inner guidance or yielded to the influence of evil in some way. Express gratitude and regret.

5. Plan and decide how to collaborate more effectively with your own inner guidance and how to avoid or overcome the negative influence of the chief characteristic in the future.



I would like to hear from you if you want to share anything you have discovered using the examen.

Further notes on Jesuit Zen adepts

Not including the name of Fr. William Johnston in my article “Buddha, S.J.” was a major oversight on my part that will be corrected. Morgan and I have yet to approve the final galley proof for Meanderings, and besides, at least with regard to Zen study, nothing is ever really final.

Thank you, compañeros and compañeras, and special thanks to Paul Kelly. I was very moved by these few sentences from his email which was forwarded to me: ¨Twenty years later, I was led to Zen practice by his best book, to me, at least: The Still Point. We corresponded by long distance airmail -- it was 1974 -- and he helped me begin Zen practice by simple, yet detailed instructions, and his own prayers on my behalf. All by mail. As each one of his books came out, I bought it, read it, kept it in a special place on my little library shelves. I owe him much.” This reminds me of many stories that I heard about Bob Aitken over the years. Students would write to all the Zen Centers in the US asking for guidance and, time after time, student after student, Bob was the only head of a practice center who responded, and usually with a personal letter, not a mimeographed application for a practice period. The encounter with Zen, though it may begin with reading, at least from my point of view, takes place outside books, in real human contact.

I have been trying to figure out how Johnston escaped my notice. First of all, I began formal practice about 20 years ago, not as a Jesuit or even a believer—in fact quite the opposite. Once inside the zendo, I began asking questions, both about the practice and its history. To my astonishment, the most recommended, and by far the most complete, thorough, sympathetic, accessible and scholarly work was the three-volume history of Zen Buddhism by Fr. Heinrich Dumoulin, another Jesuit from Sophia. (Phil Whalen called him Douggie DeMoulin, as if he were an old friend. Even as Phil was going blind, when I asked him a question, he would often point in the direction of a shelf in his extensive library and say, Douggie has something to say about that, go look in the second volume -- on the second shelf of the third cabinet, Chapter 5, page 279, that will be the right hand page, the third paragraph from the bottom. And dammed if he wasn’t right on most of the time).

All this to say, my discovery of the Jesuit-Zen connection came from my narrow Zen point of view, and I studied, read priest practitioners who had connections to the Zen teachers I worked with. I tended to stay away from those who set out to make connections between Zen meditation and Christian prayer. There was a definite anti-Christian stance in some American Zen circles, a reaction against the Church of our fathers, and to some degree this prejudice is still in place. The first book that I read that made that connection for me, and one in which I felt the power of Zen, was Fr. Kadowaki’s Zen and the Bible. Kadowaki linked his realizations working with certain koans to stories from the Gospel of Jesus, especially stories and sayings that he connected with the themes from the 4 weeks of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius: the Kingdom, the Three Classes of Men, and the Three Degrees of Humility. He opened my inquiry into what was happening among Christians who practiced Zen.

There are at least two other Jesuits I neglected, besides Johnston, whose work I am unfamiliar with. Fr. deMello has been mentioned many times by some Compañeros. I have at least 2 of his books in my library that I have only skimmed. And then there is Dan O’Hanlon whom I met when I was a JSTB. It was only after his tragic death that I discovered how respected he was in Zen circles. I was talking with a woman who is a dharma heir of Kobin Chino Roshi, and she spoke about Dan with such love and respect that I regretted not having gotten to know him better when I was up on the hill (the holy hill of the GTU).

And finally, I feel now that the Zen-Jesuit connection is not just a one-way street—that it is not just what Zen can contribute to the prayer life of Christians. Christian practice has something tangible to offer a Zen student. I want to tell a story about what may have been the first Mass said in a zendo. I have heard that Fr. Kennedy said Mass at ZCLA, but before that, in 1991, my friend, Fr. Joe Devlin, S.J., of the New England Province said Mass in the zendo at the Hartford Street Center.

I had asked Joe to come by and say mass for the Catholic men in the AIDS Hospice. It was a Saturday evening. He was due to arrive at 5 or so, and I was scrambling, assembling a few basics, bread and wine, a tablecloth for the dining room table. Issan, who was at the time in the final stages of HIV disease came downstairs in his bathrobe, to ask when Joe was due to arrive and see what I was doing. After I explained, he said, “Mass will be in the zendo,” and took over directing me in all the preparations with the same care that he would have given to a full-blown Zen ritual. He went back upstairs and came down dressed in his Zen robes, and greeted Joe at the door with a hug and kiss, thanking him for coming and telling him that Mass would be in our chapel, the zendo, and I would get him anything he needed.

Issan and 5 or 6 of us sat in meditation posture on cushions while Joe improvised the Liturgy, beginning with the rite of confession and forgiveness. When it came time to read from the New Testament, Joe took a small white, well-worn Bible out of a pocket in his jacket, and told us that his mother had told him that the following story contained all the essentials for a Christian life. Then he read Luke 11, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Issan sat giving his entire attention to Joe and the Mass, but I couldn’t get a read on how he was reacting. The next day, I found out that he had fallen in love with Luke's parable, and Joe.

Sunday mornings were the usual community gathering of the Hartford Street community, and Issan began to talk about Fr. Joe and the liturgy. He turned to me and asked, “What was the little white book that he read from?” Startled, I said that was the New Testament. “Oh,” said Issan, “it must have been in Latin when I heard it as an altar boy—or something, but it was exactly how we should lead our lives as Buddhists.” He then said that during the Mass he had the experience of really being forgiven and that the experience had allowed him to feel such peace with his early religious training. Joe and I had dinner the night before he flew back to Boston. I told him about Issan had said. A few days later, the small New Testament that had been in jacket for years arrived in an envelope addressed to Issan. He would die 6 months later, and, during one of out last meetings, asked me to thank Joe again for the zendo mass after he was gone. I did. And that New Testament which passed from the pocket of Joe’s jacket to Issan’s room at Hartford Street is now on my altar.


Here are additional books that are be included in the Zen bibliography in Meanderings:

Kadowaki, J.K. (1980) Zen and the Bible. NY: Routledge & Kegan.
Dumoulin, Heinrich. (1974) Christianity Meets Buddhism. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Habito, Ruben L.F. (2004) Living Zen, Loving God. Wisdom Publications.
Johnson, William. (1970) The Still Point, Reflections on Zen and Christian Mysticism. NY: Fordham University Press.
Johnson, William. (1981) Christian Zen: A Way of Meditation. NY: Harper Row.
de Mello, Anthony. (1978) Sadhana: A Way to God. St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources.
O'Hanlon, Daniel. (1978) "Zen and the Spiritual Exercises: A Dialogue Between Faiths" in Theological Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4, Dec. 1978.

Buddha, S.J.

[This is a chapter from the book, Intimate Meanderings, which I put together with another ex-Jesuit Buddhist, Morgan Zo-Callahan, and many collaborators. I didn't realize what a long process editing would be. This last chapter was lots of fun to write, once I got to it.]

Dedication:

Bro. Tom Marshall, S.J. is one of my cherished teachers, a koan student par excellence, a wily fox, an ordained priest in a Rinzai Zen lineage, a brother in the Society of Jesus and a true son of St. Francis Xavier. Tom directed me to Schurhammer after we spoke about Faure’s book, Chan Insights and Oversights, and then held my hand, or laughed, as I worked my way through the account of Xavier’s travels in Japan. Any merit in worlds yet to be discovered that I have generated through my work on this short essay is for you, Tom sensei.

I want to extend my gratitude to Bonnie Johnson and her husband Daniel Shurman, who, though they might seem to be unlikely members of Ignatius’s extended family, brought the Exercises back into my life after I had left them dormant for more than 30 years. May you both experience continued well-being and joy. I know that you are already blessed. So do you.

I also have to thank Morgan for giving me the time and space to complete “Buddha, SJ.” It is a tribute to those Jesuits who have traveled both the paths pioneered by Ignatius and the Buddha. Morgan, I don’t know yet whether it is a mark of completion or beginning for us—perhaps both.

There are conversations you overhear or read in books that are so familiar you feel as if you were a fly on the wall, listening to words you’ve heard before. The sentences ring with so much immediacy that you have to restrain yourself from finishing them. The tones are as so familiar you think that you are remembering them, not hearing them for the first time.

The conversations that I am going to write about are from the distant past—the case that I am going to discuss was written down in Latin by Francis Xavier more than 450 years ago, sent on an uncertain journey from Japan to Lisbon aboard a Portuguese caravel, then carried onto Rome, and delivered into the hands of Ignatius Loyola. They are the first recorded encounters between Christians and Zen Buddhists, a Jesuit saint and a roshi.

As I read from Xavier’s letters in Bernard Faure’s Chan Insights and Oversights, there were several moments when the hair on the back of my neck stood up—the words, the phrasing, even the jokes seemed to be right out of conversations that I have had with my own Zen teachers. Despite my post hippie attempts to free myself from all past influences, when I read Xavier’s comments, I could hear echoes from my Jesuit training in my responses to my Zen teachers; carefully formulated points of doctrine intended to stem the tide of the Protestant Reformation were still the core of the Jesuit curriculum when I entered the Society of Jesus 40 years ago. Among the first seven Jesuits, Xavier was the master of debate, but when he shifts the conversation with the Zen master towards a polemical argument, I was almost embarrassed, realizing how much I had missed when I set out to become a Zen student.

Xavier writes to Ignatius about his conversations with “Ninxit,” Ninjitsu who was the abbot of the Zen Temple, Kinryu-zan Fukushoji. “I spoke many times with some of the most learned of these [Zen monks], especially one to whom all in these parts are greatly attached, both because of his learning, life and the dignity which he has, and because of his great age, since he is nearly eighty years old; and he is called Ninxit, which means ‘Heart of Truth’ in the language of Japan. He is like a bishop among them, and if he were conformed to his name, he would be blessed. In the many conversations which we had, I found him doubtful and unable to decide whether our soul is immortal or whether it dies together with the body; sometimes he agreed with me, and at other times he did not. I am afraid that the other scholars are of the same mind. This Ninxit is such a good friend of mine that it is amazing“ (Schurhammer 1982, p. 85).

There is more than enough in the letters to show that what happened over an extended period in 1549 on Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan, was a real conversation between friends about what mattered in life. Xavier might have been seeking common ground with Ninjitsu, or, judging by his subsequent actions and recommendations for the missionary effort in Japan, he was looking for the weak points in Buddhist doctrine, the dharma, so he could prove Christianity’s superiority. He read the answer “I don’t know” as doctrinal blindness and the work of the Devil, but it could also indicate Ninjitsu keeping his mind open in an inquiry.

The historian of religion might see this confrontation simply as the opening salvo of religious infighting that accompanied the civil upheaval in feudal Japan that was to last well into the solidification of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Jesuits did become embroiled, taking sides between the warring daimyos, tying their missionary success to military victories of lords who converted to Christianity. Daimyo Omura Sumitada and Koteda Saemon used their new religion to undermine the power of the Buddhist establishment, even burning Buddhist temples, images, and statues. These incidents, unfortunately for the Jesuits, were long remembered and bitterly resented (Boxer, p. 47).

In a later letter, Xavier writes, “Among the nine sects, there is one which maintains that the souls of men are mortal like that of beasts…. The followers of this sect are evil. They were impatient when they heard that there is a hell” (Schurhammer 1982, p. 283). Apparently Xavier informed Ninjitsu that he or some of his monks were condemned to hell because they did not hold to the immortality of the soul. Later Xavier began to regard zazen as a way of repressing the remorse he believed Zen monks must have felt for immoral behavior. Xavier was particularly offended by the sexual license of some monks and same sex liaisons with the acolytes in the temple.

To place Xavier’s arrival in the context of the religious history of medieval Japan, it was only 49 years later in 1597, as the Tokugawa shoguns continued to consolidate their rule, that 26 Christians, including three Jesuits, two of them Japanese converts, and three young boys, were crucified in Nagasaki. That horrifying event marked the beginning of the savagery of the anti-Catholic campaign that continued until the expulsion of all foreigners in the 1630’s, and closed Japan to all but a few trading ships from China and the Netherlands until 1854.

As difficult as it is to recount these events, and as deeply as it touches the central operating myth of Christianity, a term I use with no intended disrespect, that death freely chosen opens the way to salvation, this reading of history is a search for causal events, not a quest for meaning. These few facts connected with some of the actual written reports from the first Jesuit missionaries have located them in the circumstances of 16th century Japan, and I felt that it was important to lay out the context as carefully as I could. Zen is always contained in a specific time and circumstance. But, there is another dimension to these moments that lies in realm of zazen, or what Christians call meditation or contemplation.

Now, as much as possible, let’s take this unique encounter between Xavier and Ninjitsu out of time and space, and look at it through another lens, or really a pair of lenses, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius and the tradition of the Zen koan, old stories of encounters between teacher and student, mostly of Chinese origin, that are used along with meditation, or zazen, to focus and illuminate the mind.

For a moment allow me to use a meditation technique of Saint Ignatius, the application of the senses, to recreate this meeting. Allow yourself as much latitude as your imagination requires and enter into this world of long ago.

Imagine that you are a Zen monk with many years of meditation training, living in a fairly remote monastery high above a harbor where you usually see only fishing boats and perhaps, very occasionally, a Chinese junk. You have heard from your followers when they bring you food from the village that there is a dark haired foreigner making inquiries about the local priests. Perhaps you have heard about these barbarians before—Spaniards and Portuguese have been sighted in recent years and have made contact with some people living along the coast. But up to this point, these strangers have been merchants or heavily armed soldiers. The only foreigners you have met hail from Korea and China. You have never met a European.

Perhaps as the abbot of a Zen Temple, you have also heard that this man who wears a simple black robe as unadorned as your own and his Japanese companion have been telling a story about the creation of the world, a great flood, a people who tried to follow a special law given by a god, and a man called Jesus who died and then was returned to life. We know from Xavier’s letters that he did craft an oral version of the life and death of Jesus, connected it with some of the stories from the Hebrew bible, had it translated into Japanese, and memorized it syllabically. Why did he come to stand in the middle of the town square and recite in nearly unintelligible Japanese what was, for most Japanese, a bizarre account of the creation and salvation of the world?

In your training you had worked with Jōshū's answer to a monk who asked him, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”—his answer: “the cypress tree in the courtyard,” the Chinese answer, “庭前柏樹子,” attesting to the origin of the story in the early period of Zen, or Ch’an, (Mumonkan, case 37). Bodhidharma is the mythic remake of an actual monk, or perhaps a group of monks, who traveled to China from India in about the 4th century to plant Buddhism in Chinese culture. He is revered as the 1st Patriarch of Zen. And now, another bearded barbarian was standing at your Temple Gate with a question about life after death.

At this point in Ignatius’s meditation, when you have stepped into your imagination’s recreation of the event, Ignatius introduces another dimension into your meditation, the discernment. Simply allow whatever emotions are present to surface, and then examine them. Do they attract you? Do they produce joy and a sense of well being? Or perhaps your gut tells you to stay clear. Examine the meeting between Xavier and the Roshi on an emotional level: what was it that drew them to become the best of friends? Perhaps it was simply intellectual interest. Some (Faure, 1982, p. 18) suggest a certain level of interior inquiry that established a common ground. It might also have been the mutual recognition of a person who meditates, a friend, in the deepest Buddhist sense of the word, a bodhisattva, a Bodhidharma.

I think I can understand from my own Zen training why the Roshi took Xavier seriously. The strange man who stood before him came from the other side of the world, spoke a strange sounding language, wore clothing that seemed somewhat monkish, and asked a question that demanded an answer, not a rote answer, not just a yes or a no, but an answer that revealed a clear grasp of its full dimension coming from his experience in meditation. Many western people today still regard belief in a human immortality as the litmus test for religious faith. From Xavier’s reports, I don’t think it possible to determine what Ninjitsu actually held about the existence of the soul, but I do know that he considered it important—Xavier asking it made it important.

At the very beginning of a Chinese or Japanese Zen koan, there is usually a terse report of an actual encounter, usually a question and an answer, between teacher and student. Xavier asked Ninjitsu, “Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”

When I first read the fragments of their conversations that Xavier reported in his letters, I experienced a torrent of thoughts, memories, and explanations, everything incomplete and all lying somewhere in my past, just as what I could either reconstruct or imagine of their encounter also lay in the past, 449 years ago, not as old as the stories of the koan training or the gospel of Jesus, but belonging to a very different world than 21st century America.

Their conversation grabbed my imagination in a way that I could not explain to myself, and I found myself wrestling for many months with both the question and my own possible answers. I remembered my last visit with my spiritual director from my Jesuit theology days. He said to me: “I hear that Buddhists don’t believe in God.” Of course he knew the answer—most Buddhism is non-theistic; it does not entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity—he is a renowned theologian and high level consultant at the Vatican. He is, like Ninjitsu, “like a bishop among them,” and at the time more than 80 years old. But despite our friendship, I still felt as though he was trying to pry an answer out of me that would undermine what he understands of Buddhist beliefs. I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening for spiritual discovery, and I didn’t know how my friend would take my “turning word,” perhaps almost as blasphemy, not that much different than Xavier’s response to Ninjitsu?

Despite any difficulties with the translation, I think that Ninjitsu understood perfectly what Xavier meant, and that he might have provided some answer that might have satisfied him given the extensive hells that are available in Buddhist cosmology. But then it occurred to me that Ninjitsu might have been more interested in allowing this man who had arrived improbably at his temple to figure out an answer for himself. Any question in the right hands can serve as a koan, and if a question lies close to a man or woman’s heart, summing up the purpose they have given to their lives, it can cut to the quick like a sharp knife. Ninjitsu certainly knew that Xavier didn’t risk life and limb to sail into Asia to find out if Buddhists believed in heaven and hell.

We do not know if Xavier attempted to introduce Ninjitsu to the Spiritual Exercises, which might have been a good place to start, but we know for certain that Ninjitsu gave Xavier a critical piece of zazen instruction (Ninjitsu to Xavier, quoted in Faure, p. 17). “[W]hen asked what the monks sitting in zazen were doing, he ironically replied: ‘Some of them are counting up how much they received during the past months from their faithful; others are thinking about their recreations and amusements; in short none of them are thinking about anything that has any meaning at all.’” (Schurhammer 1982, p. 74).*

Xavier had been trained in spiritual practice, you might even say “converted,” when he did the Spiritual Exercises with Ignatius with its rigorous, defined and orderly Four Weeks, the application of the senses, the invocations, colloquies and formal prayer. These are definitely things to do—so many that the mind has little time or space to move undirected. The closest one gets to listing recreations and amusements might be in the first week, which is a prolonged examination of conscience in the light of one’s purpose on earth. But it has no random or haphazard quality to it—it is directed. Ninjitsu’s comment about what filled the head while meditating had some irony that Xavier didn’t find amusing.

Ignatius also included in his Exercises instructions on methods of prayer. I have already used the application of the senses to recreate the meeting between Xavier and Ninjitsu; Ignatius also recommends invocations and colloquies, which, at least in my experience, are more akin to the prayer of formal ritual. The exercise that comes closest to the practice of zazen though is what Ignatius calls the third method of prayer or the prayer of quiet. The instructions are quite simple, that one chooses a prayer that is so familiar that it floats in the consciousness with no effort: “Our Father who art in Heaven,” and then allow one word to rest on each breath. With the guidance of our spiritual director, over time, perhaps that prayer becomes just a word on a breath until the bell rings to signify the end of meditation.

Here is the exact text from the Spiritual Exercises: Third Method of Prayer. The Third Method of Prayer is that with each breath in or out, one has to pray mentally, saying one word of the Our Father, or of another prayer which is being recited: so that only one word be said between one breath and another, and while the time from one breath to another lasts, let attention be given chiefly to the meaning of such word, or to the person to whom he recites it, or to his own baseness, or to the difference from such great height to his own so great lowness. … Perhaps Ninjitsu had a similar experience when, as a young monk, he was given zazen instruction. I have every reason to believe that his instruction was not much different than the first time I sat in a Zen hall: simply count your breaths from 1 to 10, and when you lose track, simply redirect your mind back to 1 and begin again.

Although I had been practicing zazen on my own for years, when I officially joined a Zen temple, I asked for meditation instruction. I still recall that meeting vividly. One evening at dusk, after the six o’clock sitting, Zenshin Philip Whalen sat down next to me on the wooden bench overlooking the backyard behind the zendo on Hartford Street. He started by saying that I seemed to sit rather well which he thought indicated that I had done some work—I didn’t “wiggle around a lot”—and then he asked me about my meditation. I listed my experience, almost like a spiritual curriculum vitae, zazen, vipassana, Tibetan initiations and, of course, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. Philip listened quietly and then said that it would be best to put all that aside and to try to begin freshly, but as that in itself was impossible, just the intention to have “beginner’s mind” would probably be enough. It was all that most people could do. So I asked, “Well what should I do with my thoughts?” Phil said, “Anything you like. You can’t stop your mind. Don’t even try.”

Over and over in my early meditation interviews with Phil and Issan Dorsey Roshi, the instruction was clear: leave my mind alone. After perhaps a year or so, I was able to be present to my mind just running on, and I began to notice that the flips and loops of repeated inner conversations seemed linked in a way somewhat akin to the kind of insights that I had had in psychotherapy. Again Phil cautioned me that zazen was not psychotherapy; that I shouldn’t be satisfied with that insight but continue to sit with an open mind, trying to be in beginner's mind as much as I could.

Learning the meaning of Eternal Life

From what I can map from the chronology of the letters, Ninjitsu and Xavier met many times over an extended period, at least three but perhaps as long as nine months. It was unlike today’s high-level ecumenical gathering, a tightly scripted formal conference negotiated in advance to trumpet straightening out the thread of an old argument—where the parties separated, where they might converge, or where they agree to disagree.

Despite Xavier’s dogmatic tone, there are clues that the conversation had elements of spontaneity and laughter. It was also a time to become friends, to learn to deal with the language differences that separated them, and to consider life from a religious or spiritual perspective. Ninjitsu could have answered Xavier’s question with the famous, oft quoted response to the question about what happens after death, given by an old Zen Master; “Don’t ask me, I’m not dead yet.” It has everything that Westerners expect in a Zen answer, trusting the immediacy of experience, the attitude of not presuming to know the answer, and certainly not relying on any doctrine to settle the case. I like it because it makes me laugh, but I remember that Xavier showed very little tolerance for humor when the Roshi talked about what might be passing through his monks’ minds as they sat in meditation focused on collection plates and dalliances.

Xavier will eventually find reason enough to condemn the entire Zen sect as the work of the Devil. He was so much the product of his culture and the frayed religious culture that the Reformation left in its wake, he set a confrontational tone for the entire mission of the Jesuits in Japan. Even though a saint, he seemed to love the role of hurtling condemnations like an Old Testament Prophet. That is what spiritual life had come to in Europe and what he expected to find in Asia. I don’t know if Ninjitsu would have passed Xavier on his koan work—probably not, but Xavier did come to appreciate the depth and subtlety of the Zen mind, so much so that his recommendations for the Jesuit mission included, besides training in the Japanese language, as complete an understanding as possible of the religious traditions practiced in the kingdom.

For Ninjitsu, I would like to believe that Xavier’s question opened a window into his own soul, like a koan. Xavier writes: “I found him [Ninjitsu] doubtful and unable to decide whether our soul is immortal or whether it dies together with the body; sometimes he agreed with me, and at other times he did not” (Schurhammer 1982, 85). What Xavier takes to be wavering and indecision could also indicate Ninjitsu’s working with the koan. I can feel some kinship with an attitude that Ninjitsu’s answers might have betrayed. I have looked into the eyes of the teacher that I was working with on a koan, and not known what to say, or how to respond, feeling one thing in one moment and something entirely different a split second later. If Xavier’s question did not open a new way of viewing the world for the Roshi, it did for me.

If you are inclined, you can find your own answer to Xavier’s question. I recommend that you include the practice of zazen when you choose some tools to help your search and study. Over time, you can expect that your meditation will reset the language you, and your community, use to describe religious experience. Each time you say “life” on a new breath it will bring that word into the present moment. Each present moment wipes away more traces of the inherited meaning we give to words, the misunderstandings, the exaggerations, the lies and adjustments that we humans make for our precious beliefs, the fairy tales that we were told and believed as children. I won’t say that your language will reset to reveal the Truth, but you will certainly be more in touch with your own experience.

Xavier left Japan early in 1551. He died a just over a year later on Sancian, a small island off south China, while waiting for a boat to carry him into the celestial empire. “Nixnit” died in 1565. 1549 or 1550 marked the end of their encounter. It seems from the record that the groundwork for further conversation about religious beliefs between Zen Buddhists and Christians was not very firm. The virtues of friendship, however, cannot be underestimated.

The expression “eternal moment” is more than poetry, but something that can be really experienced in meditation. Lovers, and sometimes friends, can also share this experience. It might also be a lens to open up all of life in every dimension of time and space.

Jesuits enter the Zen hall to sit

Father Enomiya-LaSalle, S.J. is buried in Hiroshima where he was walking on August 6, 1945, only eight miles from the epicenter of atomic explosion that destroyed the city. He survived. He also was a Zen student for the remaining 45 years of his life, attaining fluency with the practice of zazen and a mastery of the koans that was fully recognized by his teachers. He wrote about his long work with the practice, but that is the subject of another article. LaSalle led many fellow Jesuits into the sphere of zazen, including Pedro Arrupe who was his superior in Japan, and Ignatius’s successor as the General of the Society during the time that I was a Jesuit. Arrupe carried his meditation cushion, or zafu, from Japan to the Jesuit Curia in Rome. LaSalle’s example and teaching influenced most of the men I mention below who became fully authorized Zen teachers in their own right.

The teaching never ends. The wheel of the dharma, as the Buddhist metaphor is clearly trying to tell us, never stops. I have no evidence that Xavier ever really taught Ninjitsu anything about the Christian way of life, but I have anecdotal evidence that it just might have happened as I imagined it. My friend and teacher, David Weinstein Roshi, was a student of Yamada Koun Roshi during the last years of Father LaSalle’s life, and often saw him coming and going at the zendo in Kamakura. He worked with his teacher almost until the day he died. David told me this story. One morning after zazen, after Yamada had finished seeing students who were working on a koan, he was standing next to Yamada as LaSalle was leaving. Yamada turned to David and said, “He is the man who taught me how to apply the koans in my life.”

There seems to be a way that koans enter into our consciousness, and change our viewpoint. They can even change a society. After the letters that Xavier sent to Ignatius describing his encounter with the Zen Master Ninjitsu, to my mind, it seemed inevitable that some Jesuits would eventually enter a Zen hall, and, that with the discipline learned from their training under the Spiritual Exercises, some would complete their koan training and teach Zen. Here are the names of the Jesuits who have followed Xavier and Ninjitsu into that deep meditation. It may be incomplete. I have only used the title “Roshi” for the Jesuits who have publicly received “inka” which is both recognition of their intimate understanding of the Dharma and a sign of their authority, their seal, as a Zen teacher.

I begin my list with Fr. LaSalle who is the first in this lineage of Jesuit Zen masters. I cannot even guess where their Zen practice will lead; I hope that the work of these men will open and enrich the spiritual lives of many people.

Jesuit roshis:

Fr. Hugo Enomiya-LaSalle, S.J. (dec. 1990)

Fr. William Thomas Hand, S.J. (dec. 2005)

Fr. Niklaus Brantschen, S.J., Roshi

Ruben Habito, Roshi (a former Jesuit)

Fr. Bill Johnston, S.J.

Fr. Kakichi Kadowaki, S.J.

Fr. Robert Jinsen Kennedy, S.J., Roshi

Bro. Tom Marshall, S.J.

Fr. Ama Samy, S.J., Roshi

The Verse

In the traditional collections, a commentary on a koan usually ends with a poem, language that points beyond itself. Here are a few lines from Rumi translated by Coleman Barks that I have chosen to close the question of “the immortality of the soul.” The words only point to a possible answer, or a way for you to look for your own answer.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?

Who comes to a spring thirsty

and sees the moon reflected in it?

Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,

smells the shirt of his son and can see again?

Who lets a bucket down

and brings up a flowing prophet?

Or like Moses goes for fire

and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,

and opens a door to the other world.

Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.

Omar storms in to kill the prophet

and leaves with blessings.

Chase a deer and end up everywhere!

An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.

Now there's a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins

Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories,

how things have gone with others.

Unfold your own myth,

without complicated explanation,

so everyone will understand the passage,

We have opened you.

Notes:

*Fukushoji has been alternatively designated as a Soto Temple (Faure), a Rinzai Temple (Kagoshima records), a Sendai Temple (Xavier Memorial Association). Although this encounter was before the 17th century Rinzai revival of Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768), the instruction has the distinct feel of shikantaza,“just sitting,” favored by the Soto school, founded by Dōgen Zenji, (1200-1253).

References:

Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, Vol. 4: Japan and China, 1549-1552, Georg Schurhammer, Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973.

Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, Bernard Faure, Princeton University Press, 1993.

Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkai Shibayama, Shambhala, 2000.

A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542-1742, Andrew C. Ross; Edinburgh University Press, 1994.

Papers on Portuguese, Dutch and Jesuit Influences in 16th and 17th Century Japan, Boxer, C.R., complied by Michael Moscato. Washington D.C.: University of America, Inc., 1979.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Ignatius Loyola and Father Elder Mullan, Cosimo Classics, 2007.

The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks, translator, Harpercollins, 1995.

In honor of Mahatma Gandhi — 8.15.08

[I wrote this essay for Meanderings as part of an exploration of Hindu meditation in conversations between Dilip Trasi, Nitin Trasi and Morgan Zo-Callahan. I focus primarily on the unique contribution to Mohandas Gandhi, or Mahatma Gandhi. Tomorrow, August 15th is Indian Independence Day, and I publish this essay here in “Buddha S.J." as a tribute to a man who contributed so much to the spiritual practice of all humans everywhere on our planet.]


Taking the Next Step, A Note on Activism as a Spiritual Practice

The Blessed Lord said: "Time I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people. With the exception of you, all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain.’’ Bhagavad-gita 11:32

Dilip Trasi and Nitin Trasi are committed and skilled practitioners who speak out of their own experience of meditation. Both have a deep understanding of the Hindu meditation tradition and both have worked with authentic teachers. They are also both laymen, not Brahmins, gurus or clergy, who set themselves apart by claiming special knowledge and this, in my view, allows for a freer exchange of ideas as well as a search for a common language in which we can share our experience. However, when questioned about activism and practice, we entered a territory where they felt that they had to offer cautions and reservations. Not that their reservations might not valid in some cases, but I hope to show if the heart of the spiritual activists’ motivation and practice is of the simple “do-gooder” variety, it does not work as a spiritual practice much less effective community organizing.

One argument against activism runs like this: when faced with a choice between several courses of action, or taking no action whatsoever, we cannot say with certainty which one is the better, and, even if we practice some form of meditation, given that maturity in practice seems to sharpen our ability to discern the shades of gray, we cannot favor one position over another. This caution halts us in out tracks. The idea is not exclusively Eastern. Albert Camus said; “The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” (The Plague)

However, in all cases, no matter what our motivation or position, in any situation, in any relationship, in any community, country, tradition, or time, all actions produce results. Religious precepts, as they are called in Buddhism, recognize that living our lives leaves a trail of consequences. The possibility of making a mistake does not relieve the obligation to try to act responsibly; rather it imposes a further, perhaps more difficult obligation to remain open and test your experience, examine the results, and then change course if you find yourself embarked on an unproductive or negative course of action.

There is a second argument: that the desire to relieve universal suffering really stems from a desire to relieve one’s own suffering, that it is a myth to believe that we actually help others. From a Buddhist point of view, we are all intimately interconnected in a world that is always in flux. Most practitioners recognize that the source of suffering is not outside ourselves, that we are ultimately responsible for the conditions that cause suffering. That is in fact one of the reasons why we act. Activism is not reserved for enlightened beings. Submitting to moral obligation is for both ordinary and “enlightened” people. Besides, the conservative position—don’t act unless you are certain that your actions will have no harmful consequences—presupposes that omniscience, being able to foresee all the consequences of our actions, is available to humans. I have seen no evidence that such awareness is possible, even in supposedly enlightened beings.

And finally, what I would like to call the “conservative position” asserts that the strain on the social order caused by righting a wrong, causes far more pain, confusion and upset than any possible benefit of the actions. I do not buy into the argument that activists are wrong headed, self-indulgent and create harm because they upset the status quo.

The only part of that analysis that I can support is that some consequences of our actions will be unforeseen. But what is wrong with that? It will not stop me from trying to prevent women and children from being sold into sexual slavery or help innocents caught in the crossfire of the civil strife in Iraq. I will say more about any strain on the social fabric when I touch on the practice of non-violence.

Take ending of the enslavement of Africans in America or stopping the holocaust of the Jewish people that came with the allied victory over Germany in 1945. These were patent evils engrained in the fabric of a society, or the programs of a powerful single party fascist regime. They had to be eradicated by whatever force necessary though we may have to sort out the consequences of both the American Civil War and World War II for several more generations.

Morgan, who is deeply involved in the activist world, said that he too regretted that some activists, though relatively very few, get carried away by their own self-importance. When I questioned Morgan, his objection was that “full fledged” activists who had a lot of unexamined personal motivations made organizing difficult, not that they were prone to mistakes that would cause harm in the outcome. But even this is not my experience. Perhaps my position is biased because my sample of activists comes largely from a group that creates effective actions in support of a cause as spiritual practice, not an add-on, or something to do during the rainy season when you don’t feel like meditating. Practice does more than keep an activist focused. It is the source of their action.

Nitin Trasi used this definition of activism in his analysis: A doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue (Webster). I want to suggest that this definition is not broad enough to include cases in which spiritual practice is the real operative factor.

The greatest modern proponent of the spiritual practice of activism was Mahatma Gandhi, and the traditions from which he derived Satyagraha, Sanskrit for “truth force,” were mostly Indian—Hindu, Buddhist and Jain. He also read the gospels of Jesus and was undoubtedly influenced by the saying: “whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do also to me.” In the Western monotheistic traditions, taking care of the world, tikkun in Hebrew, caring for the least fortunate of society, charitas in Latin, has always been part of religious practice, much more so than in Hinduism. When we talk or write about the practice of non-violence as Gandhi developed and practiced it, we are translating the Sanskrit, Ahimsa, which means literally “the avoidance of violence,” but it is impossible not to see the influence of his western education.

Gandhi himself, Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, as well as the Dalai Lama in his efforts to free Tibet from the oppression of Han Chinese overlords, have all undertaken practice to quell selfish motivation and focus on the goals of clearing a path to justice and equality. Many of Jesuits and ex-Jesuits represented here in Meanderings use the discernment of spirits outlined in the “Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius” to weigh their activism. The American abolitionists of the 19th century were for the most part inspired by their religious convictions, transcendentalism or Quakerism, worldviews that hold all the created, visible world to be intricately connected and their practice had the flavor of the Great Awakening, with all its limitations—preaching and conversion.

Without humans, aggression, hatred, anger are not a perpetual motion machine. They need our energy to keep the pendulum swinging. A problem arises when, by applying a force strong enough to counteract the prevailing intransigence of a social order which supports evil, inequality and social injustice, we perpetuate the underlying mechanism that holds those structures in place. Halting that engine also has side effects—what will fill the void?

There are always far-reaching effects accompanying any action, violent or non-violent. For example, World War II, which was to be the war that ended war, has not marked the end of aggression and killing. It was not enough to defeat Hitler just as winning the US Civil War was not sufficient to cause the complete freedom of African slaves. (Though there is some evidence that the amount of armed conflict has been reduced since the defeat of Germany and Japan). In the ending of the British rule over India, the Mahatma struggled with the immediate consequences of partition and the bloodshed between Hindu and Muslim. The fast he undertook in an attempt to halt the violence nearly cost his life. He says in The Story of My Experiments with Truth, "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall—think of it, always." It’s just simplistic to think that any one action can end injustice or suffering. It is more a continuing struggle in which humans must engage. The birth of modern India, the largest functioning democracy on earth, has increased wealth and opportunities for Indians of all social strata. This is neither a myth nor inconsequential.

Whether or not one holds to some vague concept “progress” or the endless repetition of karma due to the consequences of our actions, it seems that the world has changed and continues to change. That all life is impermanent, always being born and passing out of existence seems almost self-evident. Though I have never studied all the ways that the Hindu point of view differs from the Buddhist view, in Buddhism lived experience opens the door to religious practice.

Those who have some taste for practice seem to have chosen the path that was begun by Mohandas Gandhi. As with any discipline, Ahimsa takes practice. It is not a theory. Though solidly based on the most ancient understanding of man’s place in the universe, it launches us into the unknown territory of caring for all of humanity, the entire earth in a new way. It requires the most courageous action and deep meditation. It requires that our spiritual practice take on a wider goal than our own salvation or enlightenment.

We are in the middle of such a revolution. The aims of the revolution seem to be clear: clean the environment, curtail the destructive power of our weapons, find new ways of resolving conflict, create universal recognition of human rights. They also include what Jesus taught as ‘charity’—to feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners. What is not clear is the path we chose to follow to achieve those goals. The old institutions have failed or are crumbling. What will emerge? Where do we place our bets and focus time and resources? Those who are in the middle of a revolution are least likely to recognize it. They are certainly among the last to appreciate it—they are way too busy tending to immediate concerns of Right Now! We don’t even know if we will succeed.

It will also demand new myths, and I mean myth in the most powerful sense, not fantasy, but images that capture the imagination in a powerful way. And it seems that one of those myths will be the story of the Bhagavad-gita, which has inspired Hindus and fascinated Westerners. In Philip Glass's Satyagraha, An Opera in Three Acts (2001), huge chariots for Arjuna and Krishna with larger than life puppet figures are drawn up on the stage; the prologue is verses from the Gita sung, chanted in Sanskrit. On the Kuru Field of Justice, Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna to put aside pain and pleasure, that action is his moral duty: “Be unconcerned with consequences, with victory or defeat, but act with the world's welfare as your intention” (LA Times, April 2008). Then when the figure of Gandhi walks onto the stage, small and clothed simply in a loincloth as he appears in later pictures; it is a powerful statement of “Truth Force.” But the performance is not left in some reverential version of Indian history—in the third act, Martin Luther King appears behind Gandhi, superimposed in a TV clip of his famous “I have a Dream” speech which electrified a generation of civil rights activists.

I would like to quote what J. Robert Oppenheimer said about his experience at the first test explosion of the atomic bomb, July 16, 1945. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” There may be some exaggeration in his statement. By the time he said it on TV in the 50’s, Oppenheimer had already become an activist working to stop the “Arms Race” and curtail the use of both nuclear fission and fusion in the manufacture of weapons.

Man now has developed a technology powerful enough to destroy himself, certainly to visit unfathomable pain and destruction on his fellow beings. The usual political balance for checking power, aggression and greed do not seem to be adequate to the task. It is not surprising to see that creativity, coupled with the spiritual dimension of reverence for all life, have shown up as potential sources for finding a way, not just to remedy injustice and relieve suffering, but to ensure human survival.

Because Dilip or Nitin didn’t have the opportunity to read and respond to my argument, I will give Dilip the (almost) last word on the subject.

“Let me investigate the useful side of [activism]. Activism in a beneficent sense can be defined as aggressive action towards a specific goal. We always find that in nature there exist thresholds. Right from the atom onwards, we find that a minimum energy barrier has to be crossed to overcome the forces of nature, which is called the threshold force. For example to get free of the force of gravity of the earth, a minimum velocity called escape velocity has to be exceeded (approximately 7 miles per second).

“Applying activism to inventiveness, we find that many of the great inventers were intoxicated with only thoughts concerning their invention. Scientists were considered as absent-minded people. But this is the kind of aggressiveness and activism that is necessary to break the thought barrier.

“Finally, applying activism to spirituality, we find that a paradigm change in understanding is necessary, like the quantum jump of an electron, freeing from the influence of the nucleus. Maya is like the intra-atomic force that binds the electron to the nucleus. To overcome the influence of Maya or ignorance, one has to be intoxicated with Atma-consciousness or God-consciousness. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Ramana Maharshi were typical examples of such persons.”

In the last analysis, any call to action for the spiritually centered person is an act of faith, in the deepest sense—that he or she is called to participate in the action of God loving, caring for our world, that the easing of suffering is part of the dynamic of God’s love. To close, I am not going to quote scripture or give a sermon, but rather quote one of my heroes, the visionary architect, Bucky Fuller (from NO MORE SECONDHAND GOD by R. Buckminster Fuller):

Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.
Naught is lost.
Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.

New Age Miracle or Fraud?

[Google analytics tells me that very many people have been reading my posts and longer articles about the work of Bob Hoffman, "The Ontological Odd Couple," "Science vs. Spooks," and Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults. To make the search easier, I am going to assemble them together, here on Buddha, S.J. This piece, "New Age Miracle or Fraud," was intended as an introduction.]

In the 70’s California seemed awash in spiritual awakening. We imported Indian gurus, Tibetan tulku’s, zen masters from Japan and Korea, plus there were a slew of home grown American hybrids, Werner Erhard’s est, Scientology, psychic readers, Seth speaks, the Course in Miracles - the list goes on. The sea changes of the 60’s had left my generation with a yearning for religious experience that the faiths of our fathers, and mothers, did not satisfy.

Now more than 30 years later, I am trying to step back and assess the current state of our spiritual life. The pews of most mainline churches are, at best, sparsely filled. Here in California only the elderly and immigrants attend with any regularity. Whatever became of the New Age born-again’s? Perhaps they just faded into the culture supplying raw spiritual perspective, devoid of religious garb.

The most interesting innovation in that awakening, to my eyes, was the proposed marriage of spiritual practice and psychological work. If the workings of the mind could be assessed and treated in a scientific way, paying attention to the spiritual dimension, then, perhaps, years of spiritual training could be compressed. However, along with this promise came the drawback of distinguishing spiritual practice from psychological work. Are they really the same reality hiding under different masks? Meditation practitioners were suddenly getting professional degrees as therapists and old line therapists began a meditation practice, but do they know what’s what?

A quicker Path is so appealing to the American psyche—no mumbo jumbo, precise/technical language, measurable results. There were promises made, results that you expected to create, or would appear, in your life. One teacher said that everyone who worked with him doubled their real income. Another promised harmonious and satisfying relationships. I actually heard the president of one human potential enterprise hustle a gay man with AIDS, promising that his fear of death would disappear after 6 days of working with him at the cost of several thousand dollars. ‘Enlightenment,’ though lacking a clear definition, is certainly a column on the spreadsheet.

Any exaggerated claim to entice you to put your money down is fraud, pure and simple, and as the price goes up, the insult becomes more egregious. When I paid somewhere around $300 to hear Werner Erhard say to me after two weekends of marathon sessions, “that’s it, there’s nothing to get, get it?” I didn’t feel ripped off. I actually got it. If it had cost thousands, I might have been so resentful that I never would have been able to hear a thing.

Most of these short experiential workshops were not based on good science or professional practice, and, as a result, any scientific test for lasting effects is extremely difficult, if not impossible. What I have proposed for myself is a case study is the development and creation of the Quadrinity Process, then known as Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, created by Bob Hoffman between 1968 and 1974. I do think that there is something of real value available in the experience that is created during the Process, but it is so overlaid with garbage science and the unsubstantiated trappings of the Spiritualist Church, that its value is at best obscured.

A quick anecdote about a scientific hoax might demonstrate part of my thesis. In 1972, when I was working with Hoffman in the first group he “took through” the 13 week Process, National Geographic published an article about the “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines called the “Tasady.” Hoffman, with the enthusiasm of a latter day Jean Jacques Rousseau, was convinced that he had found the noble savage who proved that the natural condition of humankind was uninhibited love, the free exchange of emotional feelings, with no blockage from parental conditioning.

In Hoffman’s defense, he was not the only person duped by this elaborate hoax created at the end of the Marcos regime. Roderic Gorney, M.D., Ph.D., writing about the Tasady in the Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis (1981), postulated “(1) that during the last ten thousand years the psychosocial identity and self-esteem of the human species have increasingly grown out of conditions of competition and low social synergy, leading to the conflict, terrorism, and war that now jeopardize us, and (2) that there is on the human agenda a current shift toward greater cooperation and high social synergy…” There is not one shred of evidence that this group was really “pre-clothing, pre-fire-making, pre-anything cave-dwelling family unchanged since prehistoric times, who had no words for War or Anger, never fought among themselves & burst into tears if you brought up the subject of death.” Their cave (pictured above) was only 8 miles from the nearest village, an easy trek for a steady steam of celebrities eager to connect with their pristine roots.

Bad science and the complete disrespect for professional practice went hand in hand with the naive conjecture that was the origin of the “Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.” That it was eventually rooted in the scientifically tested techniques of psychotherapy is entirely the work of Naranjo and other mental health professionals who worked with Hoffman.

My case study traces the development and creation of the Quadrinity Process, between 1968 and 1974, when it was know as the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. After I examine Hoffman’s version of his other worldly experience with Dr. Siegfried Fisher, I deconstruct the psychic therapy that Hoffman practiced in his Oakland tailor shop to sort out the borrowings from the Spiritualist Church. Then I detail Claudio Naranjo’s major contribution, adding professional psychotherapy to the mix, but I also touch on the contributions of Miriam and Julius Brandstatter, Ernie Pecci, and Ron Kayne.

I freely admit to having a horse in this race. I began a meditation practice in the early 70’s that continues to this day. I also explored every new offering that I found interesting. I began this exploration with Claudio Naranjo in 1972 and worked in his group until he took a sabbatical from teaching in 1976. I also knew Hoffman and offered a version of the Process for almost three years in the late 70’s with mixed results.

I began my paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple,” when the current owners of the intellectual property developed by Hoffman began to rewrite their copy, recasting Hoffman and his Process, and editing out the contributions of many people who worked hard and selflessly to create an effective tool for insight and growth.

The Ontological Odd Couple

and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

July 31, 2004
Revised September 16, 2006

Introduction

Success has many fathers and mothers.

When creating an historical account, you have to start at the beginning and get it right. Some facts, times, and dates can be accurately reconstructed from documents, letters, transcripts and personal calendars, if you are lucky enough to have them, but the messy parts of bringing something new into the world are, for the most part, buried and lost.

The original Process, the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT), was created by Bob Hoffman and the people he gathered around him between 1968 and 1973, most notably Claudio Naranjo.* It had to fight for a marginal existence, competing with other offerings in the world of human potential that were then beginning to appear in California. Though the firm hand of Hoffman was always present during this period, he sought input from many sources (who sometimes did not even know that Hoffman was talking to others about the same issue). But he attributed final changes to his spirit guide, Dr. Fisher, which, I will argue, was part of the story he created to make a plausible claim that a tailor from Oakland could be the source of a complete psychological treatment.

It is ironic that the marketing efforts required to breathe life and cash into a new offering also distort the original vision. Reshaping history creates the impression that the Process came full blown from a pure source, and the people who do the difficult work of bringing something new into a world are elevated far beyond who they really are. Unrealistic expectations become a false standard to evaluate personal experience and it becomes more difficult to use one’s own inspiration to gain self-knowledge and liberation.

No course of psychotherapy can produce real changes in people if it remains only theory. It changes. It reaches into areas that its creators cannot predict. If promises and expectations cannot be fulfilled, they have to be modified or eliminated. However, this evolution is distinct from marketing. Sadly, in our culture, promoting a brand name, writing persuasive copy, will prevail and in the process the contributions of many talented people are cut and lost. When these contributions are marginalized and their value neglected (or, in the worst scenario, attributed to others), the world itself loses something of its humanity and love.

What follows is just an inclusive footnote to the revised story.

*Naranjo is best known as the person who introduced and developed the Enneagram as a tool for self-analysis and spiritual development in the West.

My Purpose and Sources

I propose to outline the early development of the FHPT from the basement ‘reading’ room in Hoffman’s clothing store on 15th Street in Oakland to the SAT group process that is the foundation of today’s Quadrinity Process. I will not cover any of the subsequent additions and deletions since the creation of the seven-day format. My interest is to examine the 13-week process, the exercises and mind trips (now called ‘visualizations’) that remain the framework of the HQP, to see if this yields an insight into how a very simple insight became a course with sequential series of scripted emotional ‘events’ and a recognized 'product' in the human potential market place.

The primary source of information about the early development of the FHPT is my own experience. In 1972-73, I was in the first SAT group that Naranjo used to create a group process to accomplish “a loving divorce from mother and father” that Hoffman promised. Later in the spring of 1973, I was one of approximately 55 people Hoffman invited to be in his first 13-week group that he himself “took through” the Process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The following year I was trained as an FHPT therapist and group leader which became my primary work for several years. I lead the 13-week processes for PSI and later, I worked privately with smaller groups for another three years.

Another primary source is Hoffman himself and my conversations with him from 1972 until his death in 1997. Our friendship was at times rewarding and at other times strained and painful. While he was alive I did not talk about the personal qualities and idiosyncrasies that gave me some insight into inner workings, puzzles and deep-seated sources of the unhappiness of the complex man. Extremely concerned about his public image, he imagined that he had to present himself to world as straight, a guy who had “his act together.” Most people who were at all close to him, certainly those who worked with him closely, knew that Hoffman was gay, but he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. In this day of liberation and acceptance, however, his deception, his closeted life, cannot be overlooked. A good case could be argued that the process itself grew out of his conflict about being a man who loved men, his difficulty forming and nurturing close relationships, his creativity and sensitivity, and perhaps some of his inner doubts about the worth of his work.

I do not know all the people who contributed to the development of Hoffman’s work. They are legion. I have not included hearsay material from people with whom I did not work or with whom I didn’t have focused conversations. Many disappeared after working with Hoffman and making a significant contribution to the Process, such as Dr. Ernest Pecci, M.D., a psychiatrist who founded PSI, The Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration, to present the 13-week Process. I trained as a therapist under Pecci and worked with him for more than two years in the 70’s. Pecci’s psychotherapeutic model was heavily influenced by New Age spirituality. My last personal contact with Pecci was a phone call about 1977 when he warned me that Hoffman was going to sue everyone that he, Pecci, had trained unless we ceased to offer the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic therapy to the public. (Nearly everyone who was offering some version of the FHPT ceased under Hoffman’s threat of legal action, with the exception of one or two practitioners who had split with Hoffman before PSI, substantially altering or modifying it. He was also not successful in shutting down the Anti-Fisher Hoffman Process that was offered in the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashrams in Pune and Antelope).

Some key people are dead, among them Julius Brandstatter, the man who coined the word ‘Quadrinity’ to reflect the four aspects of being human— physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. I met Julius and his wife Miriam when they returned from Israel in the 70’s; their work with Hoffman continued through the re-casting of the Process into the current seven-and-a- half-day format. In the opinion of most observers, their contribution was never fully acknowledged by Hoffman. I had several long conversations with Miriam in 2006. It was she who created the organization and flow for Hoffman’s early sessions. Hoffman would call Miriam in Israel and tell her what he presented that week with SAT, and later in Tolman Hall. Miriam, a well-trained psychotherapist, then returned what she had presented in Israel, as an orderly, effective outline which Hoffman filed and used for the next Process.

The most important person in this story was dead before Hoffman had the powerful experience that gave birth to the Process. In the first years, Dr. Siegfried Fisher assumed the status of legend and myth in the story of the Process as Hoffman’s guide. His name was removed from the original title when his widow threatened to file suit. She claimed that there was no personal friendship between the two men and that her husband’s professional reputation was threatened by Hoffman’s claims. I will briefly examine both claims below.

Many of the people with whom I had extensive conversations became estranged from Hoffman, among them Ilene Cummings and Stanley Stefancic, who both served as Executive Director of the Institute after Hoffman’s return from Mexico. Besides long and thoughtful discussions about the origins of the Process and the contributions of various players, Stefancic showed me several documents, lists of the unique terms and phrases that were intended as teaching tools in the HQP (e.g. “negative love,” “giving to get,” “illogical logic, nonsensical sense”), as well as descriptions of several elements in the Processes, (including the bitter sweet chocolate ritual, and spirit guide and sanctuary mind trip), that Hoffman and his lawyers prepared when he was considering lawsuits against those he considered pirates. (I have used quotes around words and phrases that Hoffman habitually used to describe either his methodology or the concepts that were the underpinning of his spiritual worldview.)

Other people were constant friends and supporters from their first meeting with Hoffman until he died. Although I know these people and have had conversations with them, I have not used anything they told me in my presentation. Cynthia Merchant, personal assistant to Hoffman and a Hoffman Quadrinity Teacher, worked as the editor of the lengthy transcripts of Hoffman’s presentations that became the core of today’s Process. Ron Kayne, early supporter, by Hoffman’s admission, created the “guide and sanctuary mind trip,” as well being the ghost writer for Hoffman’s book, Getting Divorced from Mother and Dad and the first version of the Negative Love Syndrome.

When I became serious about uncovering and documenting the origins of the FHPS, I interviewed several of the members of Naranjo’s first SAT group who had worked individually with Hoffman. Ron Deziel gave me important information about the bare bones of Hoffman’s initial work heavily laced in psychic practice borrowed from the Spiritualist Church.

While some of what I will present is not easily reconciled with the proposed image of an inspired “intuitive,” or kindly and wise Jewish grandfather, I feel it vital to record another version of Hoffman’s inspiration and preserve it in a small corner of universe, and especially to note in some detail Claudio Naranjo’s contribution. It is a dangerous thing to allow a story of real creation and inspiration to become too sanitized. The contributions of this highly talented man who was present at a certain moment and responded wholeheartedly to Hoffman’s questions and requests without concern for his own personal gain and enrichment cannot be neglected.

The Inspiration

I heard Hoffman describe the inspiration for the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy many times. The rather bare outline of this otherworldly encounter never varied. In the middle of a night in 1967, the figure of a recently departed friend, the psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, appeared at the foot of his bed and revealed to him the missing link in psychoanalytic therapy: the concept of negative love, the stream of negative behaviors unconsciously passed from one generation to the next. Then Fischer’s spirit being took Hoffman through his own psychic therapy, uncovering the roots of his own inherited patterns of behavior and liberating him with a new understanding that reached into the depths of his emotional being. Hoffman said that he was able to forgive his parents for all the negativity he had experienced growing up. He knew that “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman to complete some of his own unfinished work, his karma, and that Hoffman could help “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fisher how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless cycle of analysis.

Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, a Viennese-trained psychiatrist who had escaped from Austria before Hitler’s invasion, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed the basic outline of the Fischer story from the public record. Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40’s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter; he wrote Principles of general psychopathology: an interpretation of the theoretical foundations of psychopathological concepts, (New York, Philosophical Library, 1950).

Hoffman presented a scenario of convivial after-dinner conversations with Fischer. They chatted and argued about the existence of the psychic realm, life after death, and questions about the efficacy of psychotherapy. I can’t overemphasize the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer was the scientific materialist and believed none of it. The telling had the feel of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, the psychic declaring victory after death.

After hearing this part of story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I, and several other participants, began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psycho-analysis, that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy himself. I began to suspect that he had been Fischer’s patient and quit, still in transference. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient and he said yes, that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. Nothing about any friendship. I am convinced that Hoffman created a good yarn, a myth, and lied about his personal friendship with Fisher to present himself as a reliable source.

Fischer’s widow maintained that he was never a personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. When Hoffman continued to use her husband’s name, Fischer's heirs filed a lawsuit against Hoffman. Hoffman acceded to the demands of the Fischer family, and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, he still claimed, both in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide. [He asked me if I had had any psychic contact with Fischer. His criterion for authentic contact was a vision of Fischer as a real life persona, complete with grey hair, glasses, and white coat. Hoffman told me that he was fairly certain that Naranjo had experienced Dr. Fischer as a spiritual entity, but my vision was less certain.]

Hoffman claimed that Fischer guided him as he began to work with people who started to come to him for psychic readings. From my conversations with several people who did psychic therapy with Hoffman in the “reading room” of his 15th Street shop, Hoffman’s initial work contained the following elements. After some discussion of the problems that were plaguing a person’s life (and legendary “forceful” persuasion), and making lists of his or her parents' negative traits, Hoffman instructed clients to write an emotionally-charged autobiography of their life from birth till puberty. Then he began to direct the “prosecution” of Mother and Dad for programming a defenseless child with negative emotional traits. An “anger letter” to his or her parents capped the prosecution which provided some release as well as giving Hoffman an opportunity to evaluate the depth of the client’s emotional state.

Then Hoffman “psychically read” the emotional history the client’s parents, living or dead, describing events without prior knowledge, often including times and places, that explained and cemented difficult emotional traits into their emotional make up. This was the parents’ “defense”: to see that negative love was passed from one generation to the next. This is the concept of “negative love”: that his or her parents had unwillingly “adopted” these negative traits themselves, driven by their own emotional history and therefore could not be blamed. These deep, psychically verifiable, understandings led to the experience of forgiveness and compassion for one’s parents. “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”

And finally, through the mediation of Dr. Fischer and their personal spirit guide, the client got “Closure” by cutting the psychic ties to his or her parents. In a “mind trip,” the client yanked out the umbilical cord that connected his or her emotional child to their parents and allowed them to grow up to their chronological age. As an emotional adult, the client could for the first time experience unconditional love for their parents. The tools for breaking the habit of negative behaviors, now just phantom symptoms of imagined hurt, were repetition of positive traits, a process called “recycling,” and avoidance of negative behaviors by “putting your awareness on your awareness” using rudimentary self awareness exercises. There were also tapes of sessions with Hoffman and written negative trait lists and positive alternatives for reinforcement.

The original elements of the Process, according to Ernie Pecci, were the prosecution of Mother and then the defense of Mother, the prosecution of Father and the defense of Father plus the “Closure.”

One other piece was introduced into the FHPS before Naranjo took on creating the group process with Hoffman. The imagined conversation between the client’s emotional child and the emotional child of the parent came from Transactional Analysis. Hoffman’s no longer read his patients psychically to uncover his or her own parents’ emotional history. Hoffman found facilitators trained in transactional analysis, and adapted an existing technique, a path that he was to follow many times throughout the creation of the Process. If Fischer had really communicated to Hoffman, “doors will open,” perhaps he knew that Hoffman would not hesitate to break down doors if he found them stuck.

The Development of the Group Process

When I arrived in Berkeley in 1972, I was a 28-year-old Jesuit seminarian. I also knew that I needed psychological help—my own spiritual practice had opened up as many blank spaces as it had satisfied—and I was at a loss for any real solutions. I had been in therapy but the result only put me in a huge dilemma: I knew I was gay but denied it; I wanted to experience intimacy in my life, and I wanted to have a spiritual life. My vow of celibacy presented a definite obstacle to intimacy. I had come to Berkeley to work with a Jesuit priest named Bob Ochs who was a student of Naranjo. I had heard that Naranjo was about to begin to “introduce” his group to the work of a man he considered a modern shaman, a tailor from Oakland who was psychically guided by a deceased Viennese psychiatrist, a man who was able to introduce people to the core of psychological understanding in a very swift and complete way. This was a real “Hail Mary,” but would a Jesuit lead me down a dead end?

At our group’s first meeting with Bob Hoffman, he wore very expensive clothes—a race-track sport coat and tie. Standing behind Rosalyn Schaffer, Naranjo’s representative, he appeared uncomfortable. When he began to speak, it was soon obvious that he was not educated in any psychological discipline, but he dominated the room, alternatively talking then yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon filled with what became known as ”Hoffmanisms.” The paradoxical definition of “negative love was illogical logical and nonsensical sense,” and if we didn’t understand that, we were just playing dumb out of negative love; if we thought he was too well dressed, it was negative transference and an indication that we didn’t love ourselves. I was trapped, but I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn so I sat and took notes.

This was the very beginning of the creation of the group Process. It is very clear from Hoffman’s written notes in Stefancic’s possession that Hoffman credited Claudio Naranjo for transforming the FHPT into a group process. It is also clear from every interaction between them that I witnessed over more than 20 years, that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern day shaman, just as he was introduced on that September evening. Naranjo would from time to time poke fun and try to deflate Hoffman, but he also respected the kernel of Hoffman’s insight.

Not only did Naranjo shape the group process, he also gave Hoffman a measuring stick to evaluate the effect that the FHPS had on participants. Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed Naranjo’s validation, but at the same time he never trusted the techniques that Naranjo introduced to yield insight. He felt that psychotherapy was at base a misguided enterprise and any kind of self observation was, at best, far too slow and, at worst, a head game. His style was to evaluate and attack people, then point to their emotional reactions as example of negative programming, almost always violating the boundaries of professional behavior.

Naranjo was usually absent from Hoffman’s group interactions and, I suspect, just let Hoffman conduct himself in any way he chose. But Naranjo did craft the interactive exercises for most of the sessions. I will discuss two exercises in some detail, the “bitch session” and the “child/intellect confrontation.” They highlight Naranjo’s major contribution to the Process and laid the groundwork for the experiential HQP that is now produced worldwide.

Hoffman instructed us to list our parents’ negative traits. He defined a negative trait as any behavior that was “giving to get,” “buying love,” “withholding love.” This warped economy of love thwarted the free exchange of affection to satisfy our innate desire to love and be loved. (Naranjo examines Hoffman’s view in “The End of Patriarchy”). As we listed our parents’ negative traits, Hoffman insisted that we had adopted them, every one of them, even if we had rebelled against them as children and they occurred as negative reactive behavior. He insisted that this was the sum total of what we knew about love, that our emotional life was infantile, and that we gave emotional love in the vain hope of having it returned, deprived of our birthright to give and receive love freely. This simple model became the foil that Hoffman used to reflect our behavior back to us, a rudimentary self-observation: the memory of past behaviors in relation to our parents revealed how we conducted our emotional life. Our list of negative traits became his confrontational tool. In the SAT group, Claudio also used dyads and other tools of self-observation, notably the study of the enneagram, meditation, and methods adopted from Gestalt, but Hoffman again thought those techniques cumbersome and slow.

We were then instructed to take the list of negative traits and recall scenes from our childhood, before puberty, where we had experienced these traits exhibited by our parents, and write down our reactions. Our emotional autobiography was to be as emotional as possible; we were not to censor ourselves as we wrote. (The Emotional Autobiography is no longer used— Hoffman told me that it was not necessary but I suspect that it took too much time for the compressed version).

That first Fall there were at least five weeks dedicated to this prosecution of Mother. It was mid-October when we began the bitch session. I mention this because it was the first time I noticed Hoffman’s urge to move the process ahead while it appeared to me that Claudio was testing psychological methodology as applied to the FHPT. My observation was of course obscured by the fact that I was a participant with enormous transference already underway. Subsequent events confirmed my initial impression.

The bitch session, which replaced the “anger letter,” was an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. It was first conducted with the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and then providing feedback about the depth and expression of the anger. (A personal note here: this experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs in my entire adult life. It took weeks for me to really allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it altered the course of my life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted and I had to admit that I was an angry person. But more important, I recognized that I had a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I had constructed my life to avoid these feelings. At that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration of myself to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom.)

The introduction of the “bitch session” was important to Hoffman. It was his first experience of psychological work allowing a person to experience the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also, in my view, pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the HQP. Later Pecci introduced another technique for inducing very early infantile feelings, the “primal,” an adaptation of Reichian body work, borrowing its name from the then-popular Primal Scream Therapy; it also continues to exist in some form in the current HQP.

The next of Naranjo’s contributions that I would like to discuss is what is now known as the “Child/Intellect Bitch Session.” This does not follow the chronological sequence because it actually occurred after Hoffman had begun to do his own work. While I worked in the first FHPT Process, I continued my participation in the SAT group. One night I took the hot seat when Naranjo himself was doing Gestalt therapy. In the FHPT, the client visualizes his or her self as composed of four parts, the physical self, the intellectual self, the spiritual self and the emotional self. The emotional self can assume whatever age where the client or patient feels some block or experiences some incident that remains unresolved. In a dream sequence that I began to act out, alternately taking the role of a stern mother and a vulnerable child, with Naranjo’s coaching, I experienced myself at war with myself, perpetuating in a kind of stalemate, hiding from my sexual feelings and repressing them fearing my mother’s disapproval. Anger and frustration surfaced, and the solution that I had crafted, the choice of the celibate religious life, began to look like just that, a solution I had crafted and not the vocation that I was trying to follow. As a follow up, it was suggested that I try to craft another kind of truce between the emotional child and the intellectual self, represented in the session as my disapproving mother. I was among the first of several people who used the persona of the child and intellect on the hot seat. Very soon Hoffman introduced an exercise where the emotional child and the adult intellect alternately expressed anger and frustration, eventually arriving at a kind of truce. This became know as the Child/Intellect Bitch Session and continues to exist in a different form in the HQP today.

In the middle of January, Hoffman and Naranjo decided to end their group experiment with SAT. Hoffman told us that he would take us to a place where we could stop the defense of father and that he would conduct his own 13-week group process in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. (I later learned that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and was going to retire to Mexico to either heal or die; that he had made the decision to entrust his group process to Pecci; and that the training in Tolman Hall was to introduce a pool of people to the group process who might be trained as therapists, or ‘teachers’ as we were called.)

The hallmark of the 13-week process was the order and the pace. The specific assignments for each week were due three days after the session; Hoffman reviewed them and his taped comments were back in your hands at the beginning of the next session. In every session Hoffman lectured, shouted, cajoled, confronted, intimidated, humiliated, bullied, abused us. He called us ass holes and negative love buyers. This behavior perhaps forced some people to examine themselves, but it far exceeded professional boundaries appropriate for therapist/teacher, student/patient relationship. Hoffman justified his behavior by claiming that his basic message was so simple that it was hard to grasp without his unyielding confrontation: human beings deserved a satisfying emotional life but were prevented from achieving that goal by their parenting, the adoption of the negative traits of their parents.

He conducted other portions of his course through “mind trips” and I will mention two of them, the parents’ funeral and the birthday party, because together with the other exercises already mentioned, these fill out nearly every essential element (except “Vindictiveness,” “Play Day,” and “Dark Side”) of present HQP. After the prosecution and defense of both parents, we were asked to close our eyes and imagine that we were awakened in the dead of night by a phone call: our parents had been involved in a car crash and were near death. We were asked to follow the course of events from the emergency room to the graveside. Bob told me that this “came through” as he was speaking. Furthermore he said that if we experienced a full range of emotion, we could actually set aside our anger towards our parents and begin to experience unconditional love for them. There was another mind trip when we were asked to visualize the birthday party that we never had, where we were celebrated and feted for who we were and not who we had to pretend to be in order to experience our parents’ love. During the whole time I practiced the 13-week FHPT, I know that Hoffman struggled with achieving the high level of emotional experience he considered necessary to produce the emotional freedom he saw as the goal. Both remain today in the HQP as elaborately produced events, with music, props, food. When combined with suggested visual images, they can and do induce the powerful emotional states Hoffman sought. I suggest that Naranjo’s early introduction of experiential exercises into Hoffman’s basic framework made it possible for Hoffman to create the controlled emotional rollercoaster of the current HQP.


Conclusion

As the history of the process is being revised and cleaned up as a product of the human potential movement, I have tried to leave a footnote about the people who helped Hoffman in order that their important contributions are not neglected, attributed to others, or lost regardless of copyright.

I had also hoped to shed light on how an “inspired insight” makes itself known in the world, examining how a core insight into human nature could become a coherent, repeatable experience that would provide people an access to their own emotional life and deepen their awareness of their own spiritual lives. Frankly I do not know if any process is able to deliver this result in a sustainable way, but there is always the possibility that even a split second experience of unconditional love might be enough to alter centuries of abuse.

However, I am certain that I demonstrated that the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy and the subsequent Hoffman Quadrinity Process came into existence through the combined efforts of Bob Hoffman and Claudio Naranjo, that it required both men to bring it to life, that the HQP would not exist at all without the generous contribution of Claudio Naranjo. Hoffman borrowed widely and used anything that he thought might be useful. He relied on Naranjo more than anyone, but also others like Pecci, to fill out his vision and give it legitimacy.

Claudio Naranjo was constant in his friendship and support. I saw Naranjo demonstrate respect and love for Bob Hoffman from the time he provided him with a group that he could use to create the FHPT to his last meetings with Hoffman while he was dying from liver cancer in his Oakland home. Naranjo thought of Hoffman as a modern day shaman, a man who received an inspiration, an insight that broke into his life unexpectedly and that he wrestled with for the rest of his life. On the other hand, their relationship was not easy—Hoffman, untrained and impetuous, a tradesman by nature and choice, Naranjo, skilled and intellectual, a thorough professional—they were an ontological odd couple.

And finally, a personal evaluation, one that was also hard won.

In the last analysis, it is not difficult to create the circumstances for unique experiences that are extraordinary or yield real insights.

Teachers, real ones and charlatans, have been doing this for ages. Their bag of tricks include meditation and self-analysis, as well as trance and hypnotism, auto suggestion, even bullying as a way of barging through defense mechanisms. Despite his claims to the contrary, Hoffman made ample use of the more nasty tricks with complete impunity, always taking the higher ground. (He was, for example, never angry with anyone, but ‘righteously indignant.”) But when it comes to actually seeing if his results were lasting, the evidence is scarce or relies very heavily on anecdotal evidence. Many people say that the experience was powerful, but if they made real changes in their lives, if they were happier and not living under another despotism, however benevolent, the majority of those I interviewed had found a sustainable spiritual practice and devoted themselves to it.

In my own experience of directing people in the Process, I cut as much as I could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. I found them fraudulent, or at best embarrassing and useless. I dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was all the therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. I introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early emotional programming influences their lives here and now. But listening deeply to 40 individuals a year began to take too much of a personal toll for a meager income, and I stopped offering the Process when Hoffman threatened a lawsuit. I certainly had no stomach and no money to face off in court over his intellectual property.

I have not kept in touch with people that I worked with. But one person, a very articulate and bright African-American, and his Process were memorable. Early on in the prosecution of Father, the name Jim Jones kept coming up in our sessions—my client said that Jones was a remarkable psychic, a healer, a prophet, a seer. I had never heard of Jones and though the People’s Temple was only a few blocks from where I lived in San Francisco, I felt no desire to “check him out.” I just kept encouraging my client to examine any transference he might have to Jones. After a few more weeks and the “prosecution of father,” I noticed that Jones’s name was not coming up. I asked how he was feeling towards Jones. He replied that Jones was just another fraud preying on the black community. He left the Peoples’ Temple before the exodus to Guyana and escaped the horrific aftermath.

Just that result is enough for me.

Science vs. Spooks

Skepticism, scientific research and the Nostradamus effect

In this odd corner of the world, California, some people are interested in the changing nature of mind, emotions, personality. In certain quarters, it is believed that the uniquely western contribution to "spiritual" efforts will be the addition of scientific investigation. Perhaps this is a new chapter of the old science vs religion debate; perhaps it is a new path to understanding. I have a slightly different take on some related questions which I'm calling, Science vs. Spooks. It has to do with the prejudice of those who sponsor the research. More precisely: who's buying and why and what does this have to do with science?

The Institute of Neotic Sciences was born from the odd mixture of new age personal growth techniques and a deeply powerful personal, transforming experience. The astronaut Edgar Mitchell on his voyage to Moon during the Apollo project, had what had to be a deep, profound kensho in the most unique of circumstances. This is the second hand version of the story I heard. He was doing a space walk to check things out before the capsule fired off on its return to earth. He was, and perhaps still is, a very technical kind of guy, a total professional, running down the check list transmitted to him from NASA command. There was a momentary lapse in the transmission just as the capsule emerged from the dark side of the moon. With nothing to do for 30 seconds or so, but his concentration still entirely focused, Edgar looked up as the earth rose above the moon's horizon, and the whole universe opened up for him. Yeah, POW. Wish I'd been there.

Mitchell returns to earth a changed man and starts off on a personal quest. I have never talked to him, and can't read his mind, but perhaps he wanted to try to figure what that experience was all about, and also, perhaps, ways for others to have that experience which might drastically alter the way we live on earth.

Enter Michael Murphy and Esalen, the new age, meditation, psycho-spiritual center. In the 70's, Esalen (which is located in one of the most beautiful settings California has to offer) was a kind of supermarket of meditation-altered-state-spiritual experience. Mitchell becomes a regular, and Esalen becomes a model for the Institute of Neotic Sciences. Some of the best minds in the West, highly trained professionals who were also seekers, along with a good dose of quacks and kooks, used it as their laboratory. It was an exciting time and place. I was among the second generation of seekers to sample the feast - mostly through Claudio Naranjo's SAT which was born during the first Arica training with Oscar Ischazo that 40 or so Esalen 'members' attended (that is a loose term, they were mostly just regular participants in Esalen workshops and seminars plus a few luminaries).

Sometime around the mid to late 70's, at least this is how I see it, three things began to happen: first there was a straight forward attempt to use standard tests, psychological and medical, to measure the effects of meditation. The work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been a leader in this area and its contribution impressive. The second objective is quite close to the first, standard psychological instruments began to be used to see if there were measurable changes in persons who did the various workshops and trainings: if people reported beneficial results, to see if they were real change that lasted, or if it was just a kind of workshop high.

And the third thing, and here I have to be very careful because what I have to say is just my judgment though based on real experience, the producers of the various trainings and workshops wanted to show positive scientific results as part of their marketing. Most were connected to the world of psychology, some professionals and some who had transformative experiences and wanted to present them to a larger audience. Of course, money was required to support these projects. If you would like to see who some of these people are, simply look at the associate faculty of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It is an odd assortment of practitioners, luminaries and aspiring luminaries.

I worked on staff at two Easlen type human potential companies, and I watched scientific studies as they were undertaken in both companies. In a small way, I participated in the creation and execution of one.

Here's the scenario: The company finds the money to finance the study, just as drug companies do when they are testing their products. Then someone, in the case I know best it was a PhD psychologist on staff, shops around university graduate psychology departments for some professors willing to design and execute a study. There are the usual requirements to insure that the results are completely impartial and not stacked. Both what is to be measured, and what instruments will be designed for measurement and assessment of results are negotiated and agreed on. The size of the sample and a time table are set. A fee is paid. There is also a promise to have the results, if they are positive, published in a professional peer reviewed journal.

However, there are three areas where there was participation (and revision) skew the 'objective science' behind the 'result.' I was one of several people who pre-tested the instrument that was designed. The researchers were looking for the positive psychological results some people reported and determine if they were lasting. As a 'graduate' of the course, I was given a questionnaire that the researchers had designed to measure certain psychological results. But then, through the in house psychologist, there were 'adjustments' in what was measured (most I suspect, with an eye to using the results for marketing). Then the testing began. At some point, perhaps three months into the process, I heard that people in the company were calling participants to make sure that they completed their questionnaires. (I actually overheard some phone calls though I was not asked to make any). Though this is probably not completely unethical within the agreed upon conditions of impartiality, it seems to me that if I did not feel strongly enough to send my report back to the psychologists, that would effect the statistical evaluation. I did not heard any coercion in the phone calls other than to complete the questionnaire. There were however, other 'support' calls to graduates at specific intervals. Now if I got a support call, reinforcing my experience, and then, a few weeks later, another making sure I completed a questionnaire for the study, well, you get the picture.
,
And the final area of manipulation of the results is their publication. And this is the most flagrant. Although the researchers themselves wrote up the results of their study and submitted it to professional journals, perhaps even a presentation at some conference (I left the company before it was complete), there were interim reports: you know, "After six months, participants report more confident and loving conversations with their spouses and children." That first report, an assessment of the initial data, was written by the in-house psychologist and given to the president. The president claimed that there was just too much scientific jargon. In reality it was not the overwhelming positive result expected. I actually stood by his desk as he reworked every sentence, every word or phrase that seemed too guarded, and changed them, asking us as witnesses, "I don't think it should say that, this (his powerful punched phrase) says the same thing, doesn't it?" When I asked the psychologist himself about the revisions, he was pretty non-committal, "I suppose that could be said about X," and turned the conversation to his new home in the foothills.

There is nothing criminal or terribly important in this manipulation of scientific inquiry - the drug companies do it all the time and we pay for it - but it shows, I think, the limitations of scientific research in the real world.

What has this to do with our old friend Nostradamus? Did that phrase about the two giants collapsing or whatever, really 'foretell' the attack on the World Trade Center towers? I bet we could find some rich paranormal enthusiasts to fund a study that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that a certain percentage of the American public, after hearing those sentences read to them in a scripted phone survey, will agree that Nostradamus did really predict 9/11. It is one way to defend against the terror of the unpredictable.

I remain skeptical.

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

April 9, 2007

It is a cold Monday night in San Francisco and I am in tears. On KQED, I just watched a documentary on Jim Jones, the People's Temple cult, and the mass suicide of over 900 people in Guyana. No, that is right at all - it was the murder of 900 people by Jim Jones.

The documentary forced me to remember that event as if it had happened yesterday. When I ride the bus out Geary, I see the gap between buildings where the Peoples' Temple used to be. I see faces of people I knew and worked with in politics. I cannot remember their names. I had been very involved in the mayoral campaign of George Moscone which put the People's Temple in the public eye. I had defended the Peoples' Temple in conversations with friends just because Jones's followers had worked for George's election.

In a previous post about the Hoffman Quadrinity Process, I wrote of my experience with one man, a follower of Jones, who did the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. The Process, which has some hallmarks of a cult in its history, turned out to be his deliverance. I will quote that last paragraph again to restore some hope in my heart.

"I have not kept in touch with people that I worked with [in the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy]. But one person, a very articulate and bright African-American, and his Process, were memorable. Early on in the prosecution of Father, the name Jim Jones kept coming up in our sessions—my client said that Jones was a remarkable psychic, a healer, a prophet, a seer. I had never heard of Jones and though the People’s Temple was only a few blocks from where I lived in San Francisco, I felt no desire to “check him out.” I just kept encouraging my client to examine any transference he might have to Jones. After a few more weeks and the “prosecution of father,” I noticed that Jones’s name was not coming up. I asked how he was feeling towards Jones. He replied that Jones was just another fraud preying on the black community. He left the Peoples’ Temple before the exodus to Guyana and escaped the horrific aftermath.

Just that result is enough for me."

Smokey the Bear Sutra

Golden Gate Gold, originally uploaded by CoastRanger.

This is how we might dream of San Francisco Bay, gazing west at the sunset through the Golden Gate. It reminds me of a painting of the central valley at sunset by the Japanese American artist Chiura Obata. When I first saw it at the de Young, it knocked me on my ass in the way that only powerful religious art can do. Gary Snyder can write a sutra and Obata can paint one.

By reciting this sutra (and matching our actions to its words), we are confident that it's merit will:

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.

Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.

Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.

Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.


To this we dedicate yourselves and our actions. And we especially dedicate the merit of our practice to all those who are cleaning up the oil spill on San Francisco and all those who are charged with protecting our natural resources.

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA

by Gary Snyder

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display--indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains--

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but Calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him...

HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:

Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam

"I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND MAY THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED"

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT

...thus we have heard...

(may be reproduced free forever)

The Meeting of the Buddha and the Goddess

The Very Short Sutra on the Meeting of the Buddha and the Goddess
by Rick Fields











I dedicate any merit that might come from reciting, posting, and spreading this sutra to Julie Childs, Jacqueline Kramer and Bonnie Johnson, goddesses all.

Thus I have made up:

Once the Buddha was walking along the forest path
In the Oak Grove at Ojai, walking without arriving anywhere
Or having any thought of arriving or not arriving
And lotuses shining with the morning dew
Miraculously appeared under every step
Soft as silk beneath the toes of the Buddha

When suddenly, out of the turquoise sky,
Dancing in front of his half shut inward looking eyes,
Shimmering like a rainbow or a spider's web
Transparent as the dew on a lotus flower,
-The Goddess appeared quivering
Like a hummingbird in the air before him

She, for she surely was a she
As the Buddha could clearly see
With his eye of discriminating awareness
Was mostly red in color
Though when the light shifted
She flashed like a rainbow.
She was naked except
For the usual flower ornaments
Goddesses wear
Her long blue hair was deep blue,
Her two eyes fathomless pits of space
And her third eye a bloodshot
Ring of fire.

The Buddha folded his hands together
And greeted the Goddess thus:
'O Goddess, why are you blocking my path.
Before I saw you I was happily going nowhere.
Now I'm not sure where to go."
"You can go around me," said the Goddess,
Twirling on her heels like a bird darting away,
But just a little way away,
"Or you can come after me.
This is my forest too,
You can't pretend I'm not here."

With that the Buddha sat
Supple as a snake
Solid as a rock
Beneath a Bo tree that sprang
Full leaved to shade him.
"Perhaps we should have a chat," he said.
"After years of arduous practice
At the time of the morning star
I penetrated reality, and now .. "
"Not so fast, Buddha.
I am reality."

The earth stood still,
The oceans paused,
The wind listened
- a thousand arhats, bodhisattvas, & dakinis
Magically appeared to hear
What would happen in the conversation.
"I know I take my life in my hand," said the Buddha
"But I am known as the Fearless One
- so here goes."

And he & the Goddess
Without further words
Exchanged glances
Light rays like sunbeams
Shot forth
So bright that even
Sariputra, the All Seeing One,
Had to turn away.

And then they exchanged mind
And there was a great silence as vast as the universe
That contains everything
And then they exchanged bodies
And clothes
And the Buddha arose
As the Goddess
And the Goddess
Arose as the Buddha
And so on back & forth
For a hundred thousand kalpas.

If you meet the Buddha
You meet the Goddess,
If you meet the Goddess
You meet the Buddha.
Not only that. This:
The Buddha is the Goddess,
The Goddess is the Buddha.
And not only that. This:
The Buddha is emptiness
The Goddess is bliss.
And that is what
And what-not you are
It's true.

So here comes the mantra of the Goddess & the Buddha,
the unsurpassed non-dual mantra.
Just to say this mantra, just to hear this mantra once, just to hear
one word of this mantra once makes everything the way it truly is: OK.