Thursday, August 29, 2019

Science vs. Spooks

Skepticism, scientific research and the Nostradamus effect
Originally posted 2nd August 2007

In this odd corner of the world called California, many “spiritual” people are interested in the changing nature of mind, the related emotions, or what we in the West call personality. In some quarters it is believed that our unique contribution to the endeavor of self-investigation will be the application of the scientific method. This purports to be a new chapter of the old science vs. religion debate, perhaps even a new path to understanding. I have a slightly different take on a related question concerning the bias of those who sponsor the research, or more precisely: who's buying, what is the motivation behind the research and how this affects the methodology of the science. “Science vs. Spooks” reveals a personal judgement which I hope to substantiate. 

The Institute of Noetic Sciences was born in an odd mixture of New Age personal growth techniques and a deeply powerful personal, transforming experience. The astronaut Edgar Mitchell—I have heard several versions, all second hand—on his voyage to Moon, had a deep, profound enlightenment experience, a
kensho,in the most unique of circumstances. He was doing a spacewalk 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 checklist transmitted to him from NASA command. There was a momentary lapse in the transmission just as the capsule completed its orbit behind 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 over the horizon of the moon, and the whole universe opened up for him. POW. Yeah I 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 nor can I 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. Located in one of the most beautiful settings California has to offer, Esalen was a kind of supermarket of altered-state spiritual experiences and meditation. Some of the best minds, highly trained professionals who were also seekers, 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 that 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 straightforward attempt to use standard tests, psychological and medical, to measure the effects of meditation. The work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences was a leader in this area. And the second objective is quite close to the first—standard psychological instruments began to be used to determine any measurable changes in persons who did the various workshops and training: if people reported beneficial results, were they real change that lasted, or just a kind of workshop high.

And the third thing, and here I have to be very careful because, though based on real experience, what I have to say is just my judgment, the producers of the various trainings and workshops wanted to show positive scientific results as part of their marketing. A simple look at the associates of the Institute of Noetic Sciences shows an odd assortment of scientists, practitioners, luminaries and aspiring luminaries. 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.

I worked on staff at two Easlen type human potential companies, and observed scientific studies 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. Of course there are 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 timetable are set. A fee is paid. There is also a promise to have the results, published in a professional peer reviewed journal.

However, there are three areas where there was participation (and revision) 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 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' of the effects measured with an eye to using the results for marketing. 

Then testing began. At some point, perhaps three months into the process, company staff people called participants to make sure that they completed their questionnaires. (I actually overheard some phone calls though I was not asked to make any). However, the same staff also made 'support' calls to graduates at specific intervals. Though this may not completely unethical within the agreed upon conditions of impartiality, and I did not hear any coercion in the phone calls, it seems to me that if I got a support call, reinforcing my experience just before I filled out a questionnaire for the study, it would effect my response. And if I did not feel strongly enough to send my report back to the psychologists, but received a phone call from the same support staff support person asking if I’d returned my questionnaire, I would of course be more likely to mail it which that would affect the statistical results and the impartiality of the science behind them.

And the final area of manipulation of the results was their publication. Although the researchers themselves wrote up their study and submitted it to professional journals, perhaps even a presentation at some conference (I left the company before it was complete), the interim report written by the in-house psychologist and given to the president had phrases such as, "After six months, a majority of participants report more confident and loving conversations with their spouses and children." The president claimed that this was just too much scientific jargon. 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 think ‘Six months after the Process, participants were stronger and more confident in interactions with their spouses and family,’ says the same thing, doesn't it?" When I asked the psychologist himself about the revisions, he was non-committal, "I suppose that could be said," 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 science in the real world. What has this to do with our old friend Nostradamus? Did that phrase about the two giants collapsing (“In the City of God there will be a great thunder,/Two brothers torn apart by Chaos”)'foretell' the attack on the World Trade Center towers? Yes, I am sure that we could find some paranormal enthusiasts who would design and fund a study that ‘proves’ 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. 

This is one way to defend against the terror of the unpredictable, but I choose to remain skeptical.




Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

April 9, 2007

It’s a cold Monday night in San Francisco and I am in tears. I just watched a documentary on Jim Jones, and the People's Temple cult. Some call it mass suicide of  some 900 people in Guyana, but no, that's not right at all—Jim Jones murdered them. Some, like Representative Leo Ryan, literally died in the cross-fire, but the majority were victims of the group insanity instigated by Jones.


The documentary forced me to remember that event as if it had happened yesterday. When I ride 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 campaign to elect George Moscone mayor 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 Moscone. And in fact, home-grown spiritual leaders were not uncommon so Jim Jones presented no obvious warning signs.

The spiritual landscape of those heady days allowed us to imagine California as a new Buddha field, while only giving lip service to, much less serious study of the rich meditative practices that spanned more than 2,000 years. And we because, or perhaps in spite of the fact that there were so many people engaging a spiritual exploration, we had plenty of anecdotal experience to bolster our claim. 

The Hoffman Process itself has some of the hallmarks of a cult, and when I started to lead my own groups with Nancy Dannenberg, we tried to reduce the trappings psychic spirituality that Hoffman espoused, and of course to the best of our abilities to not engage in the bullying and manipulation that Hoffman favored. But any attempt to delve into a person’s family history, to unearth past events and relationships that color present day events, is not risk free. Some of the water will be muddied by transference. 

In a previous post, I wrote about my experience with one man, a young African-American activist and a follower of Jones, who did the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. 

". . . Early on, during the part of the Process called “the prosecution of Father,” the name Jim Jones kept coming up in our conversations—my client said that Jones was a remarkable psychic, a healer, a prophet, a seer. 

‘I had never heard of Jones before even though the People’s Temple was only a few blocks from where I lived in San Francisco. 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.”

There is value and freedom available in working through the transfences that present themselves in our everyday lives. In this case, it might have been literally life saving.


Here are the pieces that I've written about Hoffman. Although I have tried to be objective, it is impossible to take a disinterested position with regard to the Process. Hoffman sexually abused me about 6 months after I finished my first process.

 

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

#GayMeToo

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

This Victim Refuses Silence 

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.

"Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." 

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

Science vs. Spooks

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults



New Age Miracle or Fraud?

June 6th, 2008

[Google analytics tells me that many people have been reading my posts and longer articles about the Hoffman Process, The Ontological Odd Couple, Science vs. Spooks, Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults as well as the very personal #GayMeToo. 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, A 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 what’s what?

A quicker Path is so appealing to the American psyche—no mumbo jumbo, precise technical language, measurable results. Promises were made, you expected to create results that would appear in your life. One teacher claimed that everyone who worked with him doubled their real income. Another promised harmonious and satisfying relationships. I actually present when the president of the Hoffman Institute tried to hustle a gay man with AIDS, by 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. Though there might be something of value in the experience created during the Process, it is so overlaid with garbage science and unsubstantiated trappings from 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 without 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 was only 8 miles from the nearest village, an easy trek for a steady stream 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 techniques of psychotherapy is entirely the work of Naranjo as well as Ernie Pecci and other professionals who worked with Hoffman.

My case study traces the development and creation of the Quadrinity Process, between 1968 and 1974, when it was known as the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. I examine Hoffman’s version of his other worldly experience with Dr. Siegfried Fisher, and attempt to 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 SAT group until he took a sabbatical from teaching in 1976. I also had a complicated and abusive relationship with Hoffman himself, and offered a version of the Process for almost three years in the late 70’s.

I began my paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” 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.

Friday, August 23, 2019

The Tantric Shamanism of Claudio Naranjo

  1. From Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, by Jeffrey J. Kripal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pages 173- 80).
    Along with Dick Price, Perls considered Claudio Naranjo to be one of the most gifted successors. Naranjo is a Chilean-born psychiatrist who made his first trip to the States in the early 1960s for family medical reasons (his mother needed an eye doctor). While in Boston, he met the psychologist Frank Barron at Harvard. When Naranjo later won a Guggenheim fellowship, Barron invited him to Berkeley, where he was introduced to the anthropologist Michael Harner. Harner was working on the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon basin and their use of the yage vine as a psychotropic ritual substance. Harner in turn introduced Naranjo to a young graduate student at UCLA named Carlos Castaneda, who was working on similar subjects in Mexico, allegedly with a native shaman named Don Juan. Naranjo and Castaneda would become close friends. Castaneda even claimed that Don Juan had “smoked” Naranjo, that is, seen him in a vision.
    One of Naranjo’s first visits to Esalen involved a local television station (KRON), which had decided to film Murphy, Perls, Naranjo, Harner, and Castaneda discussing the subject of shamanism just after a seminar with a female Pomo Indian healer. Naranjo remembers arriving at Esalen and finally encountering of one his idols standing in the front door of the Big House, Fritz Perls. Having read Gestalt Therapy, Naranjo was somehow expecting a young man. Instead he met what he calls “an old sea world.” This old sea wolf, moreover, was not just old. He was old and feisty. Specifically, he objected strenuously to the “occult mud” that he felt Harner and Castaneda were dishing out to a gullible audience. Indeed, when at one point Castaneda asked something like, “How do I know that consensual [socially constructed] reality is real?” Fritz reached over and slapped him, not out of anger, but as if to demonstrate how reality is not that consensual. Reports differ, but most say Castaneda responded with some version of “Fuck you, old man!”
    Old man or not, slap or not, fuck or not, Perls made a profound impression on Naranjo. In one conversation that Naranjo remembers especially well, Perls pointed out to him that he could do all the things the female Pomo Indian healer could do: if she was a shaman, well, then so was he. Observing first-hand Perls’s uncanny psychological powers, Naranjo could only agree with him: “I came away feeling that he really was a genius, a shaman in another culture.” Indeed, he agreed so much with Perls’s personal assessment of his own shamanic powers that he left his original psychoanalytic orientation and became a Gestalt therapist. By 1969, Claudio Naranjo was one of the second-generation gestaltists, along with Dick price, Julian Silverman, Jack Downing, Bob Hall, and Jim Simkin. Esalen was quickly turning into a kind of gestalt mecca.
    Certainly Esalen embraced Naranjo. Perls gave him a “free scholarship” to any of his gestalt sessions, and Price offered him a space on the floor anytime he wanted to come with a sleeping bag to Big Sur. Naranjo had effectively won a permanent invitation to Esalen. He was part of the inner circle. Naranjo remembers well what a tremendous impact the place’s spirit of experimentation and sexual liberation had on him in turn. Born Jewish and having grown up in a sexually repressive Latin American Catholic environment in which “the flesh” was more or less a synonym for “sin,” Naranjo found Esalen’s metaphysical synthesis of sensuality and spirit especially powerful.
    Like Price but in a somewhat different key, what Claudio Naranjo became know for was a creative synthesis of Asian meditation (again, with a pronounced Buddhist accent) and western psychotherapy. Alan Watts, of course, had written and talked about this a great deal, but it was Naranjo who perhaps did more than anyone to act on these remarkable resonances and come up with models and exercises to realize them.1 He left Esalen in the early 1970s to found his own psychospiritual school along these same lines (SAT Institute, located first in Berkeley and now moved to Spain). Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the fact that Naranjo’s path through Esalen toward his own psychospiritual community displays in some frankly astonishing ways many of the central themes I am tracing here, from the esoteric roots of western psychotherapy, to the felt energetic states of a distinct Tantric transmission. The later Naranjo understands such a transmission not as some ethnocentric Asian privilege, but as an always available gnostic contagion, a universal human potential rooted in the physiology of the human body and its enlightenment.
    Naranjo understands perfectly well that the original impulse for psychotherapy came from the altered states of Mesmer’s magnetism and Freud’s interest in hypnosis.2
    Accordingly, he insists that, “psychotherapy is always more than what it purports to be.”3This is also no doubt why his mature teachings on psychotherapy—as a kind of “assisted liberation from the barriers of ego” through a yielding to the body’s “organismic” spontaneity4—draws deeply, not only on Reich and Perls (the “organismic” part) but also on his own mystical experiences of Hindu Tantra and kundalini yoga, which he intuitively (and correctly) understands to be related to Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Taoism.5 It is hardly an accident, then, that the very first workshop Naranjo led at Esalen carried an explicitly Tantric title: Sadhana for the West. In short, he has received the Esalen gnosis. Naranjo knows.
    How he came to know through what he himself calls his “tantric journey” is a story very much wroth telling here.6 It involves Naranjo’s kundalini awakening, which he likens both to being possessed by a serpent and to an alchemical process that transfigured his flesh and bones, a kind of “‘kundalinization’ of the body from head to feet,” as it puts it.7 Interestingly, such an awakening was transmitted to him not by the touch of a Hindu guru in the Himalayas, but in a gestalt session with Jim Simkin at Esalen. Simkin told Naranjo that he needed to work on his breath, to pay attention to his breathing. This led Naranjo to hyperventilate, then to a new awareness of his ongoing experience, and finally to “a satori lasting some two hours as I drove back to Berkeley from Esalen.” Naranjo felt he had received a kind of “wordless contagion” that allowed him to surrender to the spontaneous movements of his own body. This, he speculates, can happen through a formal initiation with a guru, spontaneously, or in groups conducted by a spiritual teacher who can inspire real surrender.
    He is fairly certain such awakenings are not actual flowings of “subtle energies.” In a fascinating move, Naranjo suggests instead that, “blasphemous as it may sound,” the felt experiences of energy movements so common in so many types of psychospiritual experience (from Reichian therapy to the shakti-pat initiations of gurus) are in fact “an ever-shifting tonus dance that takes place in our muscle system in the situation of ego- dissolution.” One might feel that there is a literal flow, but “the anatomical fact is one of coordinated volleys of nerve impulses that follow pre-established patterns (according to the organization of our nervous and muscle systems).” But the key is not the metaphysical status of the subtle energies. It is the very real spiritual state of which all of
    this is a bodily response, that is, the spiritual state of surrender and ego-dissolution.8 In the end, then, there is no literal Tantric transmission. There is the enlightenment of the universal body through the surrender of the social self.
    Having noted Naranjo’s elaborate analysis of his own kundalini awakening, it would be a serious mistake to lock Naranjo’s teaching into any single historical tradition, including Indian Tantra. Hence Naranjo actively resists any use of Hindu scripture or mention of the yogic chakras to explain what happened to him, and he does not hesitate to turn to Taoist dragon or Mexican eagle and snake symbolism to explain his more mature shamanic experiences of his scapular bones as felt “wings” and his nasal region as a kind of experienced “beak” (and indeed, in his own mind, it is finally a nontraditional shamanism, not Asian Tantra, that best describes his mature spiritual life).9 Twenty-seven years of meditation, psychotherapy, and altered states cannot be pigeon-holed into any “Hindu” frame for Naranjo. How could they be? The “inner serpent” of kundalini yoga is simply a South Asian construction of a universal neurobiology; it is “no other than our more archaic (reptilian) brain-mind.” The serpent power “is ‘us’—i.e., the integrity of our central nervous system when cleansed of karmic interference,” the human body-mind restored to its own native spontaneity.
    Put a bit differently, Naranjo’s “one quest” is a religion of no religion that has come to realize how “instinct” is really a kind of “organismic wisdom” and how libido is more deeply understood as a kind of divine Eros that can progressively mutate both spirit and flesh once it is truly freed from the ego.11 This, of course, is yet another version of what we have learned to call the Freudian Left, an enlightenment of the body that has passed through both a Western psychotherapy (that is always somehow more) and an Asian meditative discipline (that is more often than not Tantric). Such was the Tantric journey of Claudio Naranjo to and through Esalen.
    Oscar Ichazo and Arica
    Naranjo’s last major impact on Esalen was an indirect one. Oscar Ichazo was a charismatic teacher from the Chilean seaport city of Arica (pronounced a-ree-ka).12 He claimed to be initiated into a legendary Sufi lineage called the Sarmouni or the School of the Bees. Naranjo helped Ichazo establish a community in Santiago, mostly by supplying him with many of his earliest disciples, who had earlier gathered around Naranjo himself. Subsequently, Naranjo returned to Esalen and brought back to Santiago many of the place’s central players (around fifteen, according to Naranjo) to apprentice with Ichazo. There was psychologist and human-dolphin interaction research John Lilly, who, among many other remarkable things, gave dolphins LSD and told the almost unbelievable story of a dolphin named Dolly who seduced a man into making love with her in a holding tank.13 There was also encounter-group leader Seve Stroud. All came with Naranjo back to Chile to study with Ichazo, whose influence on Esalen is now legendary. Heider’s journals, for example, record that Steve Stroud sold his house for $5, quit his Esalen job, and “gave away all his stuff” to travel down to South America.14 As for Heider himself, he didn’t go. He felt that those who did go were “copping out” to an external authority. Cop-out or no, “Arica cleared our bench,” as Price put it.15
    It also enriched their catalog. The winter Esalen catalog of 1972 included its own section called Arica Training, a series of workshops with titles like Arica Awareness Training and The Human Biocomputer taught by Esalen regulars who had traveled to Chile to study with the new master.
    This event would go both well and not so well for Naranjo. Ichazo, like so many other guru figures, turned out to be a highly authoritarian teacher. He also had a way of turning the tables on his original generous host. After secretly sending Naranjo out to the desert for a special forty-day retreat designed to rapidly spiritualize Naranjo’s life, Ichazo gave the community the impression that Claudio was a megalomaniac who had disdained the community and was on a kind of Jesus trip. In actual fact, Ichazo had sent him out and Naranjo had experienced the desert retreat as “a kind of rebirth, a true beginning of a spiritual life.” It would be the first of many lessons for Naranjo in the spiritual potentials, ethical dangers, and psychological limitations of charismatic teachers.
    Even Dick Price would come to study with Ichazo, this time in New York, only to learn similar lessons. One day in the early months of 1971, Price came up to Silverman and said, “It’s yours. Take it.” And then he walked away and left for New York City to take part in a three-month-long Arica training session. Price’s Esalen ethic of never coercing a student or seminarian were violated again and again during his own retreat. The final straw was an exercise in which the group members were asked to perform a mudra (a Tantric yogic term for a hand posture symbolizing a particular state of consciousness) that happened to be identical to the Nazi Heil Hitler! salute. There is no such mudra in Hindu or Buddhist yoga. Price, having grown up in postwar America in a Jewish family fearfully pretending not to be, was not impressed with such an exercise. He had enough and left eight days before the retreat was scheduled to end. Other Esalen figures, however, would stay, and still others would take up Arica in various ways over the next four decades, indeed until this very day.
    Ed Maupin, for example, speaks warmly of how his own Arica training from 1972 to 1973 in New York began his “karma cleansing about sexuality.” He believes that Arica’s turn to such a focus was “a fundamentally new departure in alternative spirituality and in the human potential movement” and “had effects far beyond the borders of Arica.” More personally, it helped him come to positive terms with his homosexuality. Such feelings could be adequately processed now. He thus ended an affectionate but somewhat troubled marriage and, in 1974, met his partner, with whom he has lived happily for the last thirty-three years.
    When Price left Esalen for New York, Silverman became, instantly, the new director of Esalen. He quickly learned that he would now have to deal with Will Schutz, the emperor of Esalen, not to mention a whole bunch of hippies who had camped out on the famous grounds and were tripping on God-only-knows-what. Everyone may have been “tuning in,” as Timothy Leary would have put it, but they were also driving poor Julian crazy. Silverman called a community meeting to try to take some control of things. He began by telling people what they were going to do. Richard Tarnas raised his hand and asked in his typically gentle fashion, “But isn’t this a democracy?” Silverman erupted, “This is not a democracy! This is a damn business!”
    Schutz’s response to Silverman’s business meeting was to organize “an experiment in democracy” with the kitchen staff. Essentially, this was an implicit form of mutiny (or, as some have it, a desperate attempt to improve the quality and diversity of the menu). Silverman went along with it anyway, to a point, and then declared the experiment over. In Silverman’s words, the two men then “went at it” but ultimately survived each other. As did Esalen. In the end, though, it was Gestalt psychology, not open encounter, that would come to dominate the Esalen catalogs well into the 1970s and beyond.
    As for Julian, he stayed on for a full and fruitful seven years. Silverman finally stepped down as director in January of 1978,but only after he had penned with Wendy Ovaitt a manual on how to manage Esalen: Notes from an Esalen Director’s Handbook.16 This document, which was typeset and even illustrated but never professionally published, provides a clear window into the kinds of institutional changes Esalen underwent between 1971 and 1978, complete with salaries and budgets (Silverman’s director’s salary was $1,100 per month in December of 1977). In 1971, Silverman points out, the place was staffed by “transient hippies,” “male chauvinism” was the norm of the day, and Perls’s dictum “lost your mind and come to your senses” had been translated into a dysfunctional and rampant “emotionalism.” Not surprisingly, the institute was also a quarter of a million dollars in debt: “In all but legal declaration,” Silverman sighs in his introductory remarks, “we were bankrupt.” By 1978, however, the place was in excellent financial shape and the key managerial terms were not self-responsibility, co-operative processing, and nonhierarchical decision making. Things had changed quite a bit. Schutz was gone and Silverman was leaving too. But Esalen would go on, and it would continue to change.
    _______________________________________________________________________
    1. Hence his first book, published in Esalen’s Viking Series: Claudio Naranjo and
      Robert Ornstein, Psychology and Meditation (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
    2. Claudio Naranjo, The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure: On Meditation and
      Psychotherapy (Nevada City: Blue Dolphin, 2006), 73.
    3. Ibid., 69.
    4. Ibid., 73.
    5. Ibid., 38. Actually, Naranjo takes this pan-Asian Tantra even further, to ancient
      Greece, by noting that there is some reason to believe that the Greek Dionysus and the Indian Shiva are cultural manifestations of the same underlying Indo-European mythology (ibid., 40). In this context, then, even Naranjo’s Apollonian/Dionysian typology of early Esalen possesses a rather clear Tantric subtext or secret: Dionysian Esalen is Tantric Esalen.
    1. Ibid., 60.
    2. Ibid., 43.
    3. Ibid., 57-58.
    4. Naranjo’s Esalen-related “tantric journey” to a nontraditional shamanism strongly
      echoes that of Terence McKenna, discussed below, in ch. 17.
    5. Ibid., 51.
    6. Claudio Naranjo, The One Quest (New York: Viking Press, 1972), published in Esalen’s Viking Press series. According to Seymour Carter, this was an especially important book for the Esalen community, as it gave the community an early “map” or frame through which to understand itself (52-53).
    7. For further discussion of Arica and its pass through Esalen, see Walter Truett Anderson, The Upstart Spring (2004 edition), 223-29, 241-43, 262.
    8. For Lilly’s personal reflections on life, including his experiences with LSD, sensory deprivation tanks, Arica and Esalen, see John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (New York: Julian Press, 1972).
    9. Heider Journals (private Esalen journals of John Heider), 74.
    10. Anderson, The Upstart Spring, 227.

    11. My sincere thanks to Steve Harper for sharing a copy of this document with me.
      There are no pages and no publisher listed, only a copyright date: 1978.