I received a complaint disguised as a question from a senior Hoffman Teacher—why was I writing now about Hoffman’s unethical behavior? A.M., who choses to be anonymous, responded to my Facebook post about Hoffman’s sexual abuse by trying to shame me. He deleted his remarks after many people objected to what he said. I didn’t get a screenshot so I can’t quote him directly. However, this was the essence: “It’s been 50 years since Hoffman raped you, and he’s been dead 20 years. It’s too bad you still are playing the victim.” And in a second response he said: “I’m sorry that you can’t let go of it.”
It demands a response. Here is what I said:
“So the complaint continues. Is this a plea to “let it go” as if I am a bad person for calling attention to harm caused by Bob Hoffman, who presented himself as a healer, a spiritual counselor, and a trustworthy public figure? Let me be entirely clear. He got me drunk and raped me 5 months after finishing his Process of Psychic Therapy. It was not consensual. It was illegal, unethical, and under normal circumstances there would be consequences. His ineptitude destroyed my relationship with my father for 30 years. The damage was real. I should keep my mouth shut? Be a man and deal with it? This is just another form of bullying and if it’s the mind set that comes from doing the Process, we have a problem. My response is clear: a victim never has to apologize. Period.”
I have been writing about Hoffman for almost 20 years. It has been part of my therapy to deal with Hoffman’s sexual abuse. Here’s a list of all my published posts about Hoffman with their timestamps. I think that after revision and rewriting (I do repeat myself), there might be enough for an eBook.
Hoffman Process, Bob Hoffman Bibliography
31/07/04, The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. A lengthy examination of the people who contributed to the creation of The Hoffman Process. Revised September 16, 2006
09/04/07, Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults. Remembering one FHPT client who did not die in the murder/suicide at the Peoples’ Temple.
02/08/07, Science vs. Spooks, skepticism, scientific research and the Nostradamus effect. Is a peer-reviewed study of spirituality even possible? Revised August 11, 2011.
05/06/08, New Age Miracle or Fraud. An introduction to my thoughts and experience with Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, now known as the Hoffman Process.
21/11/19, #GayMeToo—Bob Hoffman. The traumatic sexual episode in my relationship with Hoffman.
23/12/19, "Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." A respected Zen teacher reacted to #GayMeToo.
19/08/20, Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.
07/09/20, A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman? In short, if I can forgive myself.
21/11/20, This Victim Refuses Silence It was difficult to write about Hoffman’s sexual abuse, and it might be difficult to read—but I had to be honest with myself.
22/01/21, Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History? The institutional narrative about the creation of the Hoffman Process is awash in lies, distortions and fabrications.
13/02/21, The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman. My experience with Hoffman at the end of his life.
18/02/21, Called to Jury Duty. The real story of waking up to my sexual abuse.
13/04/21, Sex in the Bushes: the real story. Hoffman ends it with his boyfriend. Yes the name says it all!
22/04/21, Bob Hoffman, the First Encounter. Why do intelligent people believe nonsense? My personal experience of the first Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy group with Claudio Naranjo’s SAT in Berkeley.
12/05/21, The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. The inter-relationship of Hoffman, Claudio Naranjo and the SAT group process.
16/05/21, The Hoffman Process was birthed by TV sitcom “Bewitched,” Some wicked, nasty fun about the psychic origins of the Hoffman Process.
09/06/21, Bamboozled. “Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan.
17/06/21, Why can I find nothing online about Bob Hoffman? An examination of the praise for Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Process.
21/06/21, Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process, Hoffman and Naranjo end their collaboration. The predator begins to groom me for sex.
19/10/21. The Truth about Bob Hoffman
Monday, June 21, 2021
Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process.
Hoffman the sexual predator grooms me.
The public narrative about the creation of the Hoffman Process is that Claudio Naranjo’s strong, professional psychotherapeutic experience guided Bob Hoffman. I will make a case that there is little substance to this claim; that it is a myth and a marketing ploy. Naranjo says in his Introduction to “No One is to Blame” that he played the role of John the Baptist. Did he forget that that relationship did not turn out well? But both were Jews so perhaps the subtlety escaped them. (For a serious examination of Claudio’s, and others’, contributions, see “The Ontological Odd Couple”).
By Thanksgiving, the conflict between Hoffman and Naranjo in the direction of the SAT Process was becoming apparent. Claudio’s directions insisted that our exploration be self-directed. The time honored and well tested practice of psychotherapy require that discovery come from the patient him or herself, not the dictates or evaluation of the therapist. Hoffman had no patience and thought it was nonsense.
Hoffman and Claudio might have talked about the purpose or therapeutic purpose of each exercise, but I cannot remember one evening that Claudio stayed after Hoffman began his presentation. Claudio maintained control over the direction of the work that we SAT members did through Rosalyn—3 hour group meetings once week with several small cohort meetings in between. For Hoffman that was far too long, more than a month doing what he did in two hour-long sessions with the people who came for psychic readings in the basement of his tailor shop in Oakland.
After our second or third week of the “Bitch Session” against Mother, not even halfway through the Process, Hoffman announced that he and Claudio had agreed that “The Defense of Mother'' would be an OK place to end their collaboration, as if it were an amicable divorce. Actually he’d had enough, and discovered the Wiffle Bat as a way to get to the core of emotional anger. He said that he and Claudio had agreed to finish their work together and that be doing his own version of group therapy.
Hoffman took me aside and strongly suggested that I join the group of people he’d “selected” to do the first 13 week Process in Tolman Hall. He would later tell me that he saw me sitting there in Claudio’s SAT, he knew I was “terribly unhappy.” What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t been “selected,” rather that he’d singled me out to be a sex partner. It was not romantic. With Hoffman it was transactional. I was being groomed for Hoffman’s self-gratification.
Hoffman made it seem like a huge honor that he’d been invited to use the prestigious Tolman Hall, the UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology’s classroom and office building, as the venue for his presentation. In reality all it meant was that someone, Hoffman, even his secretary, or perhaps even a psychologist who supported Hoffman, called the campus rental Office, made a reservation, and paid a deposit on a room for an evening class. It was not a fancy lecture hall, actually just a drab narrow classroom with no windows and awkward plastic chairs, but Hoffman could always label his first group “Tolman Hall.”
50 or so people gathered on a January night for Hoffman’s first Process.
Class, or session was Monday night at 7 PM. The 13 week Process quickly became a forced march. Each session had specific exercises with a clear objective, and we had to keep up. He warned us that stragglers wouldn’t make it, that we would resist but we could just take it as an opportunity to learn about our defenses. We had till Wednesday at 5 to deliver the week’s assignment to Hoffman’s Office on 14th Street in downtown Oakland in an office building close to his former tailor shop. We listened to his taped feedback the following Monday before the session began.
Hoffman presented the week's objective in a rambling style. It actually felt more like he was caught up in a mental tangent, just let it rip, stream of consciousness. He claimed that he was channeling Dr. Fisher. The spirits on the other-side are apparently as disjointed and unorganized as they were in human life when they inhabited bodies, or more so—Hoffman was channeling a German professor of psychotherapy not known for flights of fancy. (It was recorded and I found out later that Mariam Brandstatter received the recordings in Tel Aviv and helped put some order and rationale into the presentation).
Usually Hoffman picked out one person for the demonstration of the purpose of each exercise. Often he’d just ask “who doesn’t understand, or who objects?” And the first person whose hand went up would be asked to come forward. There were compelling moments even if in retrospect they were needlessly brutal. I remember the demonstration of Negative Love in the first or second session. We had each brought a list of our mother’s negative traits to either the first or second session. One woman, she was a professional psychologist I think, a well dressed large woman—I have no idea why her image remains with me—volunteered to “work” with Hoffman.
Hoffman took the list she’d prepared of her mother’s negative traits and admonitions and started at the top. “Your mother complained about your father in an uncompromising fashion. Ok, How often do you complain about your husband?” “Never.” “Really? Be honest. Never? The thought never enters your mind? You’re always positive and loving? Don’t play your games. You never have to stop yourself from complaining just like your mother did?” And eventually the woman admitted that she had to fight with herself not to behave in exactly the same way that her mother treated her father. Onto the next trait on the list. Same interrogation. Same result: imitation to get love, or rebellion to the trait and experience conflict. Every thought, every action, every impulse was a conditioned response. There were no redeeming qualities, and no other possibilities. One thing was clear: we were nothing but the sum total of what we’d learned from our parents. Negative love was negative.
The woman was devastated. There was zero therapeutic, compassionate presence when Hoffman dealt with a person and their “games.” It was a frontal, take-no-prisoners assault, and he relished the fight. He ended the attack with a scripted, fake, all knowing, condescending smile coupled with the assurance that if we honestly stepped into his Process, and submitted to him, we’d come to realize deeply that everyone was guilty and no one to blame, and finally be free from the chains of Negative Love.
Contrast Claudio’s careful, respectful, even compassionate invitation to look into one’s self with Hoffman’s brutality and the reason why they separated couldn’t be more clear.
I also have to admit that I had never seen my own personality as some reflection of my mother’s in such stark relief before. It was enough to allow me to follow along.
Hoffman the Predator Groomed Me!
In the sixth or seventh week I had a very uncomfortable experience. The beginning of Hoffman’s sexual abuse started in a setting that was allegedly therapy!
Late one Wednesday afternoon I hand delivered my emotional “autobiography with father” to Hoffman on 15th Street. It was past 5, and the receptionist had left. Hoffman was sitting at his desk in a cramped office, with his feet on the desk. I stood in the open door.
He told me to hand him my work, and he began to read it right on the spot. He would read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then try to make some connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and what he called the negative emotional patterns and character traits that I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for his love.
Hoffman read through to an incident I wrote about my father resetting the stone wall at the back of our lot. As Dad was lifting stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she was ferociously defending her cubs, my father killed her and her cubs with his shovel. As I remembered it, he began to beat her viciously. Her screams were chilling.
Hoffman began by complimenting the emotional tone of my writing. But then he began to raise his voice. He said that obviously my Dad was a homosexual, and then, “You’re also gay too, aren’t you?” I countered with a question about how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on his bludgeoning a woodchuck? He just repeated “You’re gay.” His voice became louder and louder. Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he repeated his question: “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I admitted that of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. By now he was shouting loudly: “Don’t play games with me.” I had heard that Hoffman often often attacked clients—he claimed that he was breaking us down in order to build us up—but I could barely believe it.
I was in nearly complete denial about my homosexuality, but my Dad was not gay. I actually think that the idea of same sex relationship never once crossed his mind in his entire life. I am also certain that Hoffman’s deductions from what I related in my writing were entirely projections and his own pathology. Other things that he said or implied were entirely off base and not even worthy of the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis, the whole thing became plausible, and I lost any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman. I also remember that the 13 week process cost $300. The real cost was devastating.
This part of my therapy with Hoffman happened in March. He began stalking me in September. He raped me in late October or early November.
When I described this incident to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Why can I find nothing online about Bob Hoffman?
An examination of the praise for Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Process, formerly known as The Quadrinity Process or Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.
I was recently interviewed for a book about personal transformation, specifically with regard to my experience with the Hoffman Process and the Landmark Forum. The writer asked me, “Why can’t I find anything online about Bob Hoffman except pro forma praise or what look like infomercials?” So I Googled him.
I found the ghost-written and dated No One Is to Blame: Getting a Loving Divorce Form(sic) Mom and Dad, the Discoveries of the Quadrinity Process which is so worthless that I can find no recommendation by the Hoffman Institute. I love the professionalism of the typo. We all make mistakes, but really, it's been 50 years, and you can't get the title of Hoffman's only book spelled correctly?
Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute posted a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON which is so awash with factual inaccuracies (check out my blog post Why do cults need to rewrite history?) that I wonder if Mr. Kohrn actually met Hoffman. He certainly didn’t do much research about Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s contribution to the development of the Process.
You can buy You Can Change Your Life: With the Hoffman Process by Tim Laurence. Tim is the owner of the UK Hoffman Process and not an entirely objective observer. He “... came to the United States and ‘studied’ with Bob Hoffman, the gifted ‘intuitive' who founded the ‘world famous’ Hoffman Process.” I have a few admittedly snarky comments about Tim’s bio blurb.
I knew Hoffman, and I know a good number of Process teachers, including Tim. No one “studied” with Hoffman. If you “worked” with him it usually meant that you were angling for an international license to sell the Process or a teaching credential. But it also meant that you put up with being verbally attacked, yelled at, humiliated and belittled, yet always justified by Hoffman’s claim that he was doing it all for your own good, that he was “breaking down to build up.” I know this from personal experience as well as countless conversations and complaints by Hoffman’s early followers. If you were a psychologist or really any professional, you were singled out for Hoffman’s particularly abusive brand of attention. This “study” was more akin to a secret, brutal fraternity initiation than anything remotely resembling an education or a course of psychotherapy.
But in truth, there was nothing subtle to learn. Although Hoffman had an opinion about any subject from OJ Simpson to Henry Kissinger, I'd be hard pressed to distinguish much difference. I mention these two cases because I distinctly remember conversations with Hoffman about both. Kissinger “ran all over the globe” trying to please a father who never approved of him, but he did some good. OJ killed his wife because he never got unconditional love from his parents. Kissinger, as well as Madeleine Albright, were both Jews who succeeded, a Hoffman obsession, and he couldn’t tear himself away from Simpson’s TV trial, an obsession that he felt guilty about but could not control.
I recently wrote in a post “Bamboozled” that the use of “intuitive'' is a ploy to cover Hoffman’s roots in the Spiritualist Church—not the elite, hip Science of Mind organization, but the one with spirit visitations and ouija boards. A “gifted, compassionate Intuitive'' is an innocuous and deceptive moniker to present an unqualified and untrained person who claims special knowledge that mysteriously surpasses the hard earned therapeutic work of professional psychology. Nothing could be farther from reality.
An apparently sanctioned description by Dylan Jones appeared in the 24 September 2017 edition of GQ Britain: "Founded in 1967 by Bob Hoffman, a former tailor from Oakland, California, with no formal training in psychology, psychiatry or psychotherapy, the Process is designed to help the unmoored identify negative behaviours, moods and ways of thinking that developed unconsciously and were conditioned in childhood." At least Hoffman’s CV is accurate. I like the lyricism of "the unmoored." Really, let the precision of this precise psychological descriptor "unmoored" sink in before you plunk your money down.
Why am I so harsh on an enterprise that has allegedly helped many people achieve some measure of inner peace and resolve unfinished business in their relationships with their parents? In my case Hoffman’s sexual abuse was severely damaging, and it took a very long time and a lot of money to resolve. The Hoffman Process is not psychotherapy but poses as an alternative. It’s a free world and anyone can subject themselves to anything they choose, but I feel that honesty obliges me to present another, less popular view so that people can make an informed choice.
Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.
© Kenneth Ireland, 2021
Saturday, June 12, 2021
James Ishmael Ford’s Monkey Mind, "Mind-monkey," 心猿
Let me begin my tribute and thanks to James Ford for his blog “Monkey Mind” with a guess that he’s never experienced living with monkeys. Among Western Buddhists, he would not be alone. I’ve been around long enough to understand the shorthand we use to describe this experience of the mind’s vagaries, and I know the honored etymology of Monkey Mind, originally from the Chinese, "Mind-monkey" 心猿. We’ve all had some experience in meditation of the tenuous connections between jumping thoughts, feelings popping up, sometimes with inexplicable twitching's, swinging from branch to branch, hanging on by our fingernails. This was a metaphor, a vivid linguistic picture, until I moved to India. Here it's been filled out with a more complete experience.
Monkey Mind and Money Matters in an Indian “spiritual” context.
In 2011 on our first trip to India, Ashish and I visited Shimla where east of the city on Jakhu Hill a 108 foot statue of the Monkey God had been unveiled just the year before. But for hundreds of years before that at Shri Hanuman Mandir, monkeys had been venerated and pampered, producing some pretty outrageous ingrained behavior. One jumped me and stole my glasses, my spec’s, and refused to return them without forfeiting a ransom. The animal wanted candy which, along with small versions of its supernatural idol, is readily available from the concessioners set up in the Temple precincts testifying to the long, universal symbiosis between religious observance and extortion. These annoying, religiously-conditioned primates have been crawling over the shrines of northern India for generations. On the 12 km trek up Vaishno Devi in Katra, near Jammu, they steal your overpriced Pepsi’s in a kind of comedy routine, and of course do not pay any delivery cost to the way station at almost 12,000 ft above sea level. And we’re not talking about satisfying basic needs—for monkeys Pepsi is an acquired taste.
OK, perhaps filling out the picture of monkey mind and money is no antidote for the pain of paying the cost of spiritual pursuits, but the experience of real monkeys is closer to the bone. For me at least, seeing the image of god as a creature with such distasteful behavior was a shock. My cynic wants to highlight the cunning of extracting a price without getting anything in return. And theologically we are worlds apart from Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he taught Donald Trump and his father: think the right positive thoughts, and cash will pour into the coffers. Here nasty monkeys’ stealing and conniving is seen as just that and not a holy virtue worthy of the celestial realm. It’s as real as the writing in Monkey Mind. In this regard James is not easily distracted.
Monkeys as Kings and Gods in Buddhism
The Hindu pantheon is not unique in elevating the monkey to a revered status. In some Buddhist lore, monkeys are both kings and scoundrels at the same time, in the same body, in the same world, in all worlds. I can still almost hear Zenshin Phil Whalen’s guffaws as Lou Hartman read aloud Arthur Waley's abridged translation of the Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì), Adventures of the Monkey God, two old monks delighting in the ingenuity of Wú Chéng'ēn’s story telling. Also known as Ruzhong (c. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), he weaves a long tale about the risky transplanting of the Buddhist Teachings they both loved from India to China. It’s based on a true story of another famous monk, Xuan Zang, of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (602-664) who journeyed to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, to retrieve the “true” Buddhist holy books, and when he returned, translated the Sutras into Chinese.
Ruzhong weaves in all kinds of folklore and fantastic tales into a complicated and convoluted plot with a large unlikely cast of fantastic animals, humans, and celestial beings. Over 100 chapters, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, gains power, rebels against heaven, wins battles, is condemned to death by the Eastern deities, but the Buddha intervenes and traps him under a mountain for 500 years, preparing him to guard Xuan Zang and the Dharma. I’ll skip the Buddhist pig and dragons given the space limitations of a blog post.
It’s late Spring now in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the brown rhesus monkeys have just come down from the mountains—or maybe they’ve come up from the plains. I have no idea why these nasty monkeys seem to appear now in the village, but they’re here. To be fair to the species, their behavior is totally different from their grey langur cousins who live in the higher elevations, but they do not conform to the fanciful literary portrait except perhaps in this way: just as the Monkey King survives the celestial plot to execute him, they won’t disappear. They can’t be silenced, squelched, or eradicated. And this might have been the very quality that the Buddha singled out as important for guarding the Sacred Teachings as they made their way across continents, oceans, languages and cultures.
Everyone hates the brown monkeys. Besides being scavengers, they have ugly orange asses; they scream and fight; they steal my tomatoes just when they’re ripe; they shit all over my balcony, and are not easily scared off. They even throw their shit if confronted. These days, almost as if to highlight our suffering during the epidemic, they crowd the road that runs along the river where cremation gnats receive the bodies of people who’ve died from Covid. Food offerings provide an easy meal.
There are no wild monkeys in San Francisco, and I am a thoroughgoing Westerner. The way that local people deal with “the monkey problem” is for me as new and intriguing as living with monkeys. They simply make lots of space, and live their lives around them.
I’ll contrast it to the way a San Franciscan, for example, might deal with homelessness and poverty. Here there are people who live outdoors, and there are beggars everywhere, but there are no governmental attempts to house, feed or educate the homeless. The liability of drug addiction, here as in San Francisco, seems to be part and parcel of the homeless condition, but it is handled very differently. If an addict is lucky enough to have some family, he or she might get involuntarily locked up in the 30 day detox, the “de-addiction center,” but with no medical follow-up, they are basically left on their own to fight their demons.
Here is another story of living close to the wild, unpredictable, and very dangerous side of nature. Late this Spring near a local water tank, seven people were mauled by a black bear who came down from the high forest. Two died. The tank is located perhaps 500 meters below the Dalai Lama’s residence but still in the dense forest before the large Central Tibetan Authority complex, Gangchen Kyishong, commonly known as the “Library” because it holds perhaps the largest repository of Tibetan Buddhist texts in the world, after the Chinese occupation and wholesale destruction of Tibet’s monasteries. That’s also very close to me so I hear reports, stories of those injured and killed as well as most of the rumors.
My dear friend Bablu left my flat before sundown to return to his village which is adjacent to the Library, and we joke—carry big dunda to frighten off an angry bhaaloo. He knows one of the women who was injured. She tried to fight off the bear without any stick. She escaped alive, but was badly injured. People commended her for a brave fight, but they didn't arm a vigilante posse to stalk the bear and her cubs. That might be a course of action I’d expect if it happened in an American town.
Monkey Mind and Money Matters in an Indian “spiritual” context.
In 2011 on our first trip to India, Ashish and I visited Shimla where east of the city on Jakhu Hill a 108 foot statue of the Monkey God had been unveiled just the year before. But for hundreds of years before that at Shri Hanuman Mandir, monkeys had been venerated and pampered, producing some pretty outrageous ingrained behavior. One jumped me and stole my glasses, my spec’s, and refused to return them without forfeiting a ransom. The animal wanted candy which, along with small versions of its supernatural idol, is readily available from the concessioners set up in the Temple precincts testifying to the long, universal symbiosis between religious observance and extortion. These annoying, religiously-conditioned primates have been crawling over the shrines of northern India for generations. On the 12 km trek up Vaishno Devi in Katra, near Jammu, they steal your overpriced Pepsi’s in a kind of comedy routine, and of course do not pay any delivery cost to the way station at almost 12,000 ft above sea level. And we’re not talking about satisfying basic needs—for monkeys Pepsi is an acquired taste.OK, perhaps filling out the picture of monkey mind and money is no antidote for the pain of paying the cost of spiritual pursuits, but the experience of real monkeys is closer to the bone. For me at least, seeing the image of god as a creature with such distasteful behavior was a shock. My cynic wants to highlight the cunning of extracting a price without getting anything in return. And theologically we are worlds apart from Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he taught Donald Trump and his father: think the right positive thoughts, and cash will pour into the coffers. Here nasty monkeys’ stealing and conniving is seen as just that and not a holy virtue worthy of the celestial realm. It’s as real as the writing in Monkey Mind. In this regard James is not easily distracted.
Monkeys as Kings and Gods in Buddhism
The Hindu pantheon is not unique in elevating the monkey to a revered status. In some Buddhist lore, monkeys are both kings and scoundrels at the same time, in the same body, in the same world, in all worlds. I can still almost hear Zenshin Phil Whalen’s guffaws as Lou Hartman read aloud Arthur Waley's abridged translation of the Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì), Adventures of the Monkey God, two old monks delighting in the ingenuity of Wú Chéng'ēn’s story telling. Also known as Ruzhong (c. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), he weaves a long tale about the risky transplanting of the Buddhist Teachings they both loved from India to China. It’s based on a true story of another famous monk, Xuan Zang, of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (602-664) who journeyed to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, to retrieve the “true” Buddhist holy books, and when he returned, translated the Sutras into Chinese. Ruzhong weaves in all kinds of folklore and fantastic tales into a complicated and convoluted plot with a large unlikely cast of fantastic animals, humans, and celestial beings. Over 100 chapters, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, gains power, rebels against heaven, wins battles, is condemned to death by the Eastern deities, but the Buddha intervenes and traps him under a mountain for 500 years, preparing him to guard Xuan Zang and the Dharma. I’ll skip the Buddhist pig and dragons given the space limitations of a blog post.
It’s late Spring now in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the brown rhesus monkeys have just come down from the mountains—or maybe they’ve come up from the plains. I have no idea why these nasty monkeys seem to appear now in the village, but they’re here. To be fair to the species, their behavior is totally different from their grey langur cousins who live in the higher elevations, but they do not conform to the fanciful literary portrait except perhaps in this way: just as the Monkey King survives the celestial plot to execute him, they won’t disappear. They can’t be silenced, squelched, or eradicated. And this might have been the very quality that the Buddha singled out as important for guarding the Sacred Teachings as they made their way across continents, oceans, languages and cultures.
Everyone hates the brown monkeys. Besides being scavengers, they have ugly orange asses; they scream and fight; they steal my tomatoes just when they’re ripe; they shit all over my balcony, and are not easily scared off. They even throw their shit if confronted. These days, almost as if to highlight our suffering during the epidemic, they crowd the road that runs along the river where cremation gnats receive the bodies of people who’ve died from Covid. Food offerings provide an easy meal.
There are no wild monkeys in San Francisco, and I am a thoroughgoing Westerner. The way that local people deal with “the monkey problem” is for me as new and intriguing as living with monkeys. They simply make lots of space, and live their lives around them.
I’ll contrast it to the way a San Franciscan, for example, might deal with homelessness and poverty. Here there are people who live outdoors, and there are beggars everywhere, but there are no governmental attempts to house, feed or educate the homeless. The liability of drug addiction, here as in San Francisco, seems to be part and parcel of the homeless condition, but it is handled very differently. If an addict is lucky enough to have some family, he or she might get involuntarily locked up in the 30 day detox, the “de-addiction center,” but with no medical follow-up, they are basically left on their own to fight their demons.
Here is another story of living close to the wild, unpredictable, and very dangerous side of nature. Late this Spring near a local water tank, seven people were mauled by a black bear who came down from the high forest. Two died. The tank is located perhaps 500 meters below the Dalai Lama’s residence but still in the dense forest before the large Central Tibetan Authority complex, Gangchen Kyishong, commonly known as the “Library” because it holds perhaps the largest repository of Tibetan Buddhist texts in the world, after the Chinese occupation and wholesale destruction of Tibet’s monasteries. That’s also very close to me so I hear reports, stories of those injured and killed as well as most of the rumors.
My dear friend Bablu left my flat before sundown to return to his village which is adjacent to the Library, and we joke—carry big dunda to frighten off an angry bhaaloo. He knows one of the women who was injured. She tried to fight off the bear without any stick. She escaped alive, but was badly injured. People commended her for a brave fight, but they didn't arm a vigilante posse to stalk the bear and her cubs. That might be a course of action I’d expect if it happened in an American town.
But the presence of the bear and her cubs have made people hyper-vigilant. The furious barking of dogs and loud monkey squalling (I can’t think of a word that describes the sound) served as a warning that the bear was in Bablu’s village next to the Library. And this is as close as I can get to the monkey behavior guarding the Dharma—brown monkeys making a ruckus near a repository of precious texts, warning my friends to keep their dogs inside and watch over their children.
The real lives of people and monkeys is something that has thus far eluded the attention of religious scholars examining the exegesis of Monkey Lore. If anyone can do it, it is James Ford, but alas he might have to sojourn in India for a spell to deepen his understanding. As for me, I will just not plant tomatoes in my garden, and be grateful that monkey screams helped protect the precious children of my dear friends. If he visits, James will not be imprisoned under a rock for 500 lifetimes until he solves some tricky dharma questions, or at least I hope not. (I’ve already mixed monkeys in with bears so I’ll leave the Zen foxes for another time).
The real lives of people and monkeys is something that has thus far eluded the attention of religious scholars examining the exegesis of Monkey Lore. If anyone can do it, it is James Ford, but alas he might have to sojourn in India for a spell to deepen his understanding. As for me, I will just not plant tomatoes in my garden, and be grateful that monkey screams helped protect the precious children of my dear friends. If he visits, James will not be imprisoned under a rock for 500 lifetimes until he solves some tricky dharma questions, or at least I hope not. (I’ve already mixed monkeys in with bears so I’ll leave the Zen foxes for another time).
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Taking the Next Step: A Note on Activism as a Spiritual Practice
This is a chapter from Intimate Meanderings: Conversations Close to Our Hearts, a book that Morgan Zo-Callahan and I put together with several other Jesuits, former Jesuits and their friends.
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 be 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 grey, we cannot favor one position over another. This caution halts us in our 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, with few exceptions, 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, caritas 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 literally means “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 the 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 of “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 practice, 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 seven miles per second).
“Applying activism to inventiveness, we find that many of the great inventors 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.
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 be 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 grey, we cannot favor one position over another. This caution halts us in our 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, with few exceptions, 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, caritas 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 literally means “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 the 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 of “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 practice, 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 seven miles per second).
“Applying activism to inventiveness, we find that many of the great inventors 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.
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
"Finding God in All Things"
June 2, 2021
Jan. 20, 1944-June 2, 2011
Today is the 10th anniversary of Bonnie's death. I am among the many people who loved her and miss her kind and warm presence. She was an extremely generous woman and expressed her love as wife and mother, daughter, grandmother and friend, in a way you could count on.
More than a decade ago, when she was first diagnosed with leukemia, her husband Daniel Shurman told me that she was interested in doing the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and asked if I could suggest a book that she could use. She did the Exercises and I was blessed to be her guide. But it was her enormous spiritual gift that allowed her truly embody the Teaching of Jesus, and then to share it with others, just as the Lord asks us.
During the years that her cancer remained in remission, she continued to explore the path that her Lord, through Ignatius, opened. She continued to live her life in prayer, exploring and digging further, following her own inspiration and gifts. This mystical bent was always balanced by the consummate professional, a scholar with common sense.
She found a link between Ignatius and Julian of Norwich via an informal association of seekers who called themselves “the Friends of God.” She wrote about Julian, Ignatius and the Friends of God when she was studying at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is dated March 8, 2005.
Thank you, Daniel for being the kind of husband who inspires, and for introducing me to Bonnie, To thank Bonnie for the gift of friendship, I am going to post the paper, “Finding God in All Things,” here.
We miss you, Bonnie. and your gentle presence. We are enormously grateful for the gifts you gave us. May you sing with the angels.
I have given this paper the same title as William Barry’s book: Finding God In All Things, A Companion To The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius (Barry 1991). I was reading the book when Julian of Norwich was assigned in class. The similarities between Julian’s writings and Ignatius’s were striking to me. Both Julian and Ignatius write of multiple sensory experiences with God occasioned by life-threatening illness. Before I understood that Julian was born 150 years before Ignatius, I considered that her visions, like mine[1], might have been delirious manifestations engendered by Ignatian-style guided meditations. When I realized that she lived long before Ignatius, I abandoned the paper I was writing on the general topic of asceticism to delve deeper into parallels, coincidences, and possible connections between these two late medieval mystics.
The theological proposition of this paper is that the writings of Julian in circa 1400 and the writings of Ignatius circa 1525 are representative of a distinct spirituality: God as Friend. God as Friend is a paradigm shift from the dominant spirituality from the 4th century: Deity of Christ; it is distinct though related to two paradigms which were soon to emerge in the reformation: Salvation by Faith Alone and Incarnational Participation. At the end of this paper I will argue that the paradigm of God as Friend is finding new relevance in our time, hence bringing a renewed interest in both Julian and Ignatius.
In my search for a “social network” connecting Julian and Ignatius, I learned about an informal group called “Friends of God” from one of the many websites devoted to Julian. The name for this “association of pious persons, both ecclesiastical and lay [also men and women], alludes no doubt to John 15:14-15[2] … Friends of God appears to have had its origin in Basle between the years 1339 and 1343, and to have thence extended down the Rhine even as far as the Netherlands” (Walsh 1909). I am skeptical that Julian herself had any direct connection with the informal network of German mystics, but there is indirect evidence at least that many of them had access to her writing. One version of Julian’s Short Text (the so-called “Amherst Manuscript”) also contains writings of Friends’ mystics Marguerite Poerete, Henry Suso, and Jan van Ruusbroec (Holloway 1997). The manuscript had been in the Brigittine Syon Abbey; it was owned by the Lowe family and through them found its way to the Low Countries and Rouen (Holloway 1996). While there is no direct evidence of who might have read it and when, there is enough indirect evidence to conclude that Julian’s ideas were circulating among German mystics following her death circa 1425. The German mystics influenced Ignatius through the Carhusian and former Dominican monk, Ludolf of Saxony (Gieraths 1986). Ignatius is known to have read and re-read a four volume Spanish translation of Ludolf’s Life of Christ and to have been profoundly influenced, even converted, by what he read there (Ignatius 2000, p. xiv; Loyola 2000, p. xiv).
The references to Julian’s writing in this paper come from a “Long Text” version translated from the manuscript found in the British Museum. As I read Revelations of Divine Love (Julian 2002), I noted about sixty passages expressing ideas similar to those found the Spiritual Exercises, far too many passages to discuss here.[3] I am concentrating on five concepts that point parallel notions of God as friend; in particular, I am limiting myself to the best examples that reveal similarities in their views of how people carry on friendship with God various media/modes. I use quotations from the work of each to document my argument that friendship with God is created and maintained through intimate communications which take at least five different forms: imagery, senses, colloquy, consolation/ desolation, and prayer. In the conclusion of the paper, I also point similarities in how they describe the nature of this friendship in their discussions of sin, love, goodness, choice, and the indwelling of God in our nature.
Communication is the sine qua non of any friendship. To have a concept of friendship with God, therefore requires that there be some form of media which constitutes that communication. For both Julian and Ignatius, imagery is the most important media and the Passion is the most important topic of that imagery. In examining Julian and Ignatius’s imagery of Jesus’ Passion, such in the illustrative passages below, it is easy to dismiss their perspective on friendship. After all “Body of Christ” imagery was a common theme of medieval piety yet friendship with God was not. I have little knowledge of other writers in the “Body of Christ” genre, so I cannot say that the friendship imagery of Julian and Ignatius is unique. What I observe in their imagery, however, is its intimacy. Both show intimacy with Jesus’ body; this use of imagery signals closeness, friendship.
… All the precious blood was bled out of the sweet body that might pass therefore, yet there dwelled a moisture in the sweet flesh of Christ as it was shewed (Julian 2002, p.).… Blood of Christ, inebriate me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, strengthen me. O good Jesus hear me. Within Thy wounds hid me (Ignatius 2000, p. xlv).
Simply imagining another in a prayerful way can also create a close relationship with the one imagined with the need for conversation as we typically understand that term. A few months ago my husband and I were contacted by a friend to provide direction to on-line medical information for a friend of his with a rare bone marrow disease. We started to email with both Jim and his wife about Jim’s illness and potential resources in Palo Alto. Mostly we prayed intensely for Jim and also for his wife; we never spoke with them even by phone. When Jim died unexpectedly from a heart attack, both Daniel and I were devastated; we still cry at the thought of Jim. We had lost a dear friend, one whom we knew only through imagery, email, and prayer. It was a dramatic Julian-Ignatian lesson for me: I felt so close to this person and that closeness was entirely the product of my imagining his circumstances and my daily prayers for him. Knowing Jim in this way helped me to experience God in a fresh way; I learned how I can know God without human encounters just as I had known Jim without these encounters.
Imagery in Julian and Ignatius is not only visual, it is also multi-sensory.
I HAD, in part, touching, sight, and feeling in three properties of God, in which the strength and effect of all the Revelation standeth (Julian 2002, p. 197). And then shall we, with His sweet grace, in our own meek continuant prayer come unto Him now in this life by many privy touchings of sweet spiritual sights and feeling, measured to us as our simpleness may bear it (Julian 2002, p. 90).
The Fifth contemplation will consist in applying the five senses to the matter. … seeing in imagination the persons, in contemplating and mediating in detail the circumstances in which they are… hear what they are saying… smell the infinite fragrance and taste the infinite sweetness of the divinity … touch, for example by embracing and kissing the place where the persons stand (Ignatius 2000, p. 45).
Communicating with one’s Godfriend goes beyond merely experiencing God through ones imagination and senses; both Julian and Ignatius converse directly with God. Throughout the Julian text, she is posing questions to God, and God is answering her, for example: “AND thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well…”(Julian 2002, p. 61); the result of this is conversational. Ignatius uses the term “colloquy” to refer to conversations with God (and also with Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit on occasions): “The colloquy is made by speaking exactly as one friend speaks to another” (Ignatius 2000, p. 24). These two examples exemplify a pattern of “shewing” vs “exercise” that I find over and over as a distinction between these two books: Julian shows her communication with God; Ignatius instructs the maker of the exercises to perform these same kinds of communications. Thus, “revelation” in Julian becomes “exercise” in Ignatius.
God has special kinds of communication with Julian that I would call, following Ignatius, “consolations” and “desolations.” In Ignatian spirituality, consolidations and desolations are the movements of the spirit—“internal movements” by which we can discern God’s will in our lives. Those making the exercises are taught how to listen or feel for these movements and thereby to guide their lives in accord with God’s will. Again, we see that Julian experiences these interior movements but makes no methodical use of them. Ignatius’s biography describes how he initially experienced them much as Julian did and then learned to put them to use in his own communications with God.
AND after this He shewed a sovereign ghostly pleasance in my soul. I was fulfilled with the everlasting sureness, mightily sustained without any painful dread. This feeling was so glad and so ghostly that I was in all peace and in rest, that there was nothing in earth that should have grieved me. …This lasted but a while, and I was turned and left to myself in heaviness, and weariness of my life that scarcely I could have patience to live. This Vision was shewed me, according to mine understanding, sometime to be in comfort, and sometime to fail and to be left to themselves. God willeth that we know that He keepeth us even alike secure in woe and in weal. And for profit of man’s soul, a man is sometime left to himself (Julian 2002).
God alone can give consolation to the soul without any previous cause. It belongs solely to the Creator to come into a soul, to leave it, to act upon it, to draw it wholly to the love of His Divine Majesty (Ignatius 2000, p. 119 section 330). ...When one is in desolation, he should be mindful that God has left him to his natural powers to resist the different agitations and temptations of the enemy in order to try him. For though God has taken from him the abundance of fervor and overflowing love and the intensity of His favors, nevertheless, he has sufficient grace for eternal salvation (Ignatius 2000, p. 116, section 320).
On the topic of prayer, Julian and Ignatius could not be more similar. Yet, it is not as simple to point to parallel passages as with the preceding topics. For them, prayer is not just a “doing” – not just a message we send to God, in the form of a petition, for example. Rather, prayer is a way of being in which ones very foundation, ones “ground” is God and therefore prayer is fitting ourselves to that Ground of our being. Julian puts it this way:
OUR Lord God willeth that we have true understanding, and specially in three things that belong to our prayer. The first is: by whom and how that our prayer springeth. By whom, He sheweth when He saith: I am [the] Ground; and how, by His Goodness: for He saith first: It is my will. The second is: in what manner and how we should use our prayer; and that is that our will be turned unto the will of our Lord, enjoying: and so meaneth He when He saith: I make thee to will it. The third is that we should know the fruit and the end of our prayers: that is, that we be oned and like to our Lord in all things; and to this intent and for this end was all this lovely lesson shewed. And He will help us, and we shall make it so as He saith Himself; Blessed may He be! For this is our Lord’s will, that our prayer and our trust be both alike large. For if we trust not as much as we pray, we do not full worship to our Lord in our prayer, and also we tarry and pain our self (Julian 2002).
“Grounded in God” has several implications. First, that prayer is about the will of God and our place in that will. From this the next implication, only implicit in the statement above, that God is eternally present and has already “answered” our prayers in our very existence, our salvation, and in all that we enjoy: “The first is our noble and excellent making; the second, our precious and dearworthy again-buying; the third, all-thing that He hath made beneath us, [He hath made] to serve us, and for our love keepeth it. Then signifieth He thus, as if He said: Behold and see that I have done all this before thy prayers; and now thou art, and prayest me” (Julian 2002). Julian cautions us not to go looking for this or that way that God might have answered our small petitions, but to understand that God is answering even the prayers we have not yet asked. So how then should we pray? We should pray that “our will be turned unto the will of our Lord.” The true end of our petitions is that we become like God, indeed that we are at one with God.
William Barry describes the same understanding in Ignatius in his chapter entitled, “Grounded in God: The Principle and Foundation” (Ignatius 2000, pp. 33ff.). God is up to one action; we can experience the creative action of God which is always at work (Barry 1991, p. 39); Ignatius draws out the implications of our place in God’s one action in the Principle and Foundation: “We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things… Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a short life. … Our one desire and choice should be what is conductive to the end for which we are created (Ignatius 2000, p. 12, section 23). In other words, it is about God’s will; our prayer is our participation in that will. We are engaged in the world of God’s creating and God is already answering the prayers we have not yet made.
We have seen in both of these late medieval mystics a central concern with our relationship with God and how that relationship is continuously created through various media. The relationship is one of love. While both mystics write extensively on sin, theirs is not the sin of the medieval church or of Jonathan Edwards. Indeed, Julian comes as close as one might in her day to saying that her Church is misguided in its notion of sin and salvation (Julian 2002, p. 104). Ignatius’ first week of the Exercises is devoted to examining one’s sin, but the point is not to berate or belittle the maker of the Exercises. Rather, the grace of the first week is the experience of love. “Ignatius expects that God will reveal our sins in such a way that we will actually be consoled. We are to have an increase of faith, hope, and love, be moved to tears of sorrow for our sin, but also to tears of love for a God who has been so good to us” (Barry 1991, p. 51). The heart of the message from both Julian and Ignatius is the goodness of God, the love of God, and the freedom which God gives us in the hope that we will choose to put God at the center of our lives, and participate in God’s mission.
Both mystics are saying that we must look in the world and in ourselves to find God. Their piety is finding God in all things, starting with finding ourselves IN God. “For our Soul is so deep-grounded in God, and so endlessly treasured, that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God, which is the Maker, to whom it is oned” (Julian 2002, p. 133). This is such a contemporary message; it is not surprising that both mystics are being read more in our time than in any time of the past, including their own.
I have argued here that both Julian and Ignatius provide us with kataphatic paths to relationship with God as friend, one in which we are constantly called to God’s mission, but never coerced or threatened. We are called to examine our own sins, not the sins of others; we communicate with God who already God loves us and forgives us already. This is a contemporary theme. These are mystics for our time.
Notes:
1 Since this is not a “personal reflection paper,” I will not discuss further my own experiences. Suffice to say that the parallels I find in Julian’s writings to my own experiences were the motivation for my choosing this topic.
2 “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my father.”
3 References to “Pages” in Julian are to the original manuscript pages; references to Ignatius are to pages in the Vintage-Random House version with section numbers referring to Ignatius original sections.
References
Barry, W. A. (1991). Finding God In All Things A Companion To The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius. Notre Dame, IL, Ave Maria Press.
Gieraths, G. M. (1986). "Life in Abundance: Meister Eckhart and the German Dominican Mystics of the 14th Century." Spirituality Today 38 (August): Supplementary Book.
Holloway, J. B. (1996) The Westminster Cathedral/Abbey Manuscript of Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love. http://www.umilta.net/westmins.html.
Holloway, J. B. (1997) Godfriends: The Continental Medieval Mystics. http://www.umilta.net/godfrien.html.
Ignatius (2000). The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. New York, Random House.
Julian (2002). Revelations of Divine Love. Grand Rapids, MI, Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Walsh, R. (1909). Friends of God. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Online Edition, K. Knight. 6.
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