Buddhist Heaven

 Three Cheers for Grandmother Zen!

“It is much more difficult to control one's mind than to control the weather.” --Yeshe Dorje

A lonely sheet of paper lies on the top of my desk with some scribbled notes. I picked them up to see if I could get back to the moment when it felt important to jot them down. Now they just look random but I tell myself there is some rhyme and reason. There has to be, or does there?

There seems to be some notion floating around that if it’s not hard-nosed, tough, no-nonsense practice, it’s not Zen. It certainly can’t be compassionate—or something.

To any macho Zen priest out there having a hard time adjusting to becoming a hospice monk, too bad, or as they say, suck it up. If you saw Issan in the kitchen trying to get his recipe for chocolate chip cookies right, with a temperature over a hundred and sweat on his shaved head, you might change your mind. You might even call it courageous Grandmother Zen.

______________

One of my dearest friends, Michael, was suffering a long, painful, and slow death from AIDS. His partner was an older, very proper, even stuffy, English queen. When I suggested they might visit Maitri to see if it might be a good place for Michael’s final days, the partner was emphatic. He said “Never.” He called it “The House of Death.” I was shocked.

Great pain and denial go hand in hand.

I vacillated between those two views many times every day. Before moving into Hartford Street I imagined I would be doing some modern version of the ancient Tibetan practice of living in the cremation grounds. The reality was somewhere between cooking mashed potatoes to suit a resident’s particular taste and making sure the cable bill was paid.

The Tibetan Yogi Lama Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s rainmaker, visited Maitri. Issan welcomed him with a big hug and a kiss, to which the startled Tibetan sage responded with a huge grin. I’m told there was immediate chemistry. Issan took him from room to room, probably pointing with his light but careful attention to their detail, the convenience of the bathrooms, light filling the bedrooms in the early morning hours, things that made Hartford Street feel like home, really more like your grandmother’s house. Yeshe-la was so impressed that he blurted out that Issan had created Buddhist heaven.

Stories of the rainmakers' visit were repeated so often they assumed the status of legend. I asked Issan if Yeshe Dorje had even talked about Buddhist heaven. Issan said, “Yes,” he remembered their conversation very well. “He was a lovely guy,” but added, “he didn’t pay the electricity bill.”

Whether or not Yeshe Dorje was capable of confounding the clouds, he certainly had experience trying to push out the bounds of the order of things. Beyond incantations and spells, a rainmaker needs to be able to read tell-tale signs in the sky that escape ordinary sky-gazing, not so much to control as to see which way the wind is blowing. When a storm is brewing, seek safe shelter.

In the various cultures that have invited Buddhist teachings to stay a while, even as a guest, we find at least several, if not many versions of heaven. Currently, the most prevalent myth about this transition between life and death in the West is a kind of instantaneous shift, an escape, shaking off the bonds of our earthly body. New Age Spirituality has us as spirits temporarily inhabiting a corporeal form. At this stage of my life, I find this notion very odd and very much at odds with the Buddhist idea that the gift of the human body results from eons of conscious efforts to wake to the path of liberation.

This popping out of the bottle storyline is a hangover from our 19th century bout with American and European Spiritualism. More ancient Western myths are deeper and more nuanced. The narratives and anecdotes of the gospel of Jesus have defied easy classification; Ovid persisted into the Medieval world, and of course, Dante was no shape-shifter. We can trace these stories of the transition back to Homer and the wealth of half-remembered lore that animated the ancient world. Most of them are more in line with a consistent thread throughout Buddhist teaching--that the path from this life to the next is determined by our choices, however limited and difficult they may be, and the depth of our practice.

The New Age holds accounts of near-death experiences in awe, and, perhaps I am being harsh, imagines death as a kind of “This is Your Life” TV rerun. There may be some truth in the analogy, but it also is colored, fatally in my view, with easy admonitions about loving beyond petty grudges, good over evil, and idealized heroic virtue. I admit that “This is Your Life” captivated my childhood imagination, but I think that was more due to the genius of its writers and their sentimentality rather than a glimpse into Perennial Philosophy.

Still, some stories connect us with who we are, and there are ordinary places where we can recognize who we really are.

______________

I remember a rather handsome younger man who often visited his friend in Maitri, a sweet man who had the small room at the top of the stairs on the second floor, facing the street. Like so many of us in the early 1990s, this young man spent an enormous amount of time visiting friends in several of the places where they were dying, Coming Home Hospice, the Missionaries of Charity’s Arc of Love, Garden Sullivan, Wards 86 and 5B of San Francisco General Hospital. When the time came, he attended their memorial services as most of us did--we all struggled to honor the deep connections that linked us with so many friends who were dying way too young. He was so grateful to Maitri for his friend's care that he wanted to give something back. He came to me and asked how he could help.

The room needed a quick paint job if we could get it done before the bed was filled again. I said if he could help me paint it we could do it in a few hours. As we worked together, he told me that he sensed something different at Maitri. He said he always felt like he was visiting his grandmother. I knew he wasn't talking about the “This is Your Life” version of grandmother.

Yeshe Dorje was right. Issan created Buddhist Heaven. 

Three Cheers for Grandmother Zen.

Come home to the empty house

Longing for the warmth of a fire

Or chocolate chip cookies

You notice your picture hanging on her wall

Right where she left it

Her uncompromising love that seeks only your happiness

It is a blessing

To touch this heart of grief and create a miracle

Fill that house once again

This is the great way.

Was Muktananda just high level chicanery?

Muktananda

What I remember most about the evening was the fancy BMV with the vanity plates GURU 1, driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Muktananda and Werner Erhard were in the back seat. Baba’s translator, Swami Yogananda Jain, sat in front with the driver. The venue was the Masonic Auditorium atop Nob Hill. It had the impeccably smooth and professional rollout of an est event, but it was not, at least in my opinion, the important presentation of Siddhi Yoga it pretended to be. I would have to dig deep for anything that piqued my curiosity. I had listened to far too many sermons about grace, shanti, or shakti. What I saw was the Westernization of an Indian sadhu, sanitized but still containing a few tastefully presented cultural artifacts that might be interesting to the spiritual seekers of New Age California. We might have been dusted with a peacock feather as we left, but, as you might have suspected, I was definitely not impressed. 

This was the second of Muktananda’s world tours. A few Westerners had become disciples. They’d purchased and begun refurbishing a large hall with a kitchen and some staff quarters in Emeryville. It was either ‘74 or ‘75 because I had taken my exclaustration, and was living on the Oakland-Berkeley border with my fellow SAT member Hal Slate. It was also close to the end of the first SAT groups, but all the group members were still in active communication. One day either Hal or I got a call that someone had arranged a private Darshan with Muktananda to be held late one afternoon before his public event at the ashram.

There were no more than 20 people in the room. I recognized Helen Palmer. As soon as Baba Muktananda entered and took his seat, he gestured towards Helen who got up, bowed, and went into the adjoining meditation room. She later told me that she was there because Muktananda was the best “hit” in town. Following a few remarks by Jain, Muktananda gestured towards me and Jain asked me to come forward. I’d tried to find an appropriate gift. We were told that he liked hats. I had an old white Panama Hat from college that I’d trimmed with an orange ribbon and the end of a peacock feather. I’d wrapped it in plain white paper. I had already decided to skip the whole foot-kissing ritual so I sat before him in a kneeling position. I said hello and handed him my gift. After Jain or another assistant unwrapped it, he laughed uproariously, took off his hat, and put on the Panama. Then he handed me his orange skull cap and said in English, “Hat for a hat!” Then Jain translated a few questions about who I was, what I did, and something about a Prince that I missed entirely, but others in the group were impressed. I returned to my seat.

Then Muktananda pointed to someone behind me and asked who he was. The young man said he was from Franklin Jones's (Da Free John) group and had come to extend their greetings to Baba. The conversation was suddenly doused with cold water. The drift of the questions I could follow went something like, well, I do hope he’s well, but where is he? He’s swamped, but he sends this box of cheap crummy chocolate balls from the ashram’s kitchen as a token of his respect. I had tried to be respectful within what I felt were my limits. Da Free John’s people didn’t swear or make foul gestures but seemed deliberately confrontational. I thought someone on the staff would be asked how the group made it onto the list of guests.

An hour in, I had a sense of heightened awareness, so when Jain invited questions from other guests, I was unprepared to respond to one woman’s question. She said she was epileptic. Was there anything she could do to prevent seizures? Muktananda became oddly professional and said he’d been a doctor before becoming a sadhu. He recommended drinking cow urine, preferably still warm, fresh from the cow. Now that I’ve lived in India and have some experience of village Ayurveda medicine, I realize that cow piss is a bit like aspirin. It is applied widely with little discrimination. But at that moment, I was facing total culture shock. Here I was in a guru’s ashram wearing his orange skull cap, getting carried away with lots of high energy, watching him dress down a fallen-away follower’s disciples, and listening to medical advice about the benefits of cow piss.

At that point, Jain said that we had to wrap things up, the time had come to get ready for the chanting, talk, and Darshan in the public hall, and afterward, please stay for dinner. I’m sure Hal and I stayed. Chanting the Guru Gita was very long, although harmonious. Though the poem praises the eternal guru, it is evident that the followers identified Muktananda as that guru. I thought that singing the praises of the guru in the presence of a human guru was a bit over the top, but I was also doing my best to dispel my preconceived ideas and prejudices.

The next day I had a meeting at the Jesuit School. After meditation, I walked down Telegraph Avenue towards the campus. There was a bank just past Ashby and I stopped to get 20 bucks from the ATM. I made my way back to the sidewalk, turned left, and stopped on the corner of Russell waiting for the light. Before the signal turned green, my entire world was transformed. The experience is extremely difficult, if not impossible to describe. It lit up. I’d been plugged in. First were colors I had never imagined. If I said I was floating in a whirlwind of electric particles, that wouldn’t do it justice. I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing but the world was buzzing. It was somewhat akin to the few drug experiences I had had, but far more vibrant and I was present, not just an observer. It was wildly expansive, but the center held. I cannot say how long it lasted. It disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived. Part of me was stunned, but it was not the kind of experience that required me to put on my analytical hat and ponder it for a month. It just was. When I noticed that the light had changed to green although I had no idea how long I’d been standing there, I looked at my watch and realized that I would be late for lunch at the Jesuit School if I lingered. The universe returned to what it had been a few minutes, seconds, or nanoseconds before, and I continued walking north though I remember being extremely careful of crossing traffic.  

Later that afternoon, I realized I had received shaktipat, which yogis describe as the awakening of the dormant divine energy. I also realized why very little is written about these experiences other than that they happen. It was a wild experience. Maybe I could blame it on the orange skull cap.

I would have been a fool not to follow up on my experience to see if it led anywhere. I returned to the Oakland ashram but did not become a regular by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t much like the Hindu trappings. I should be more precise: I didn’t particularly dislike them either but I wasn't falling in love. The singing started to feel like uninspired Catholic guitar masses of the 70’s. I felt that the people around Muktananda were there to feel some kind of spiritual high or bliss, but it was extremely self-centered. I had conversations with several of the Western sadhu again but was not inspired. I could not shake off their guru worship.

The staff announced a retreat, a long period of meditation at a center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was to last a week which I could not manage. Still, I wanted to experience a longer concentrated meditation period, so I asked Muktananda personally at Darshan if I could attend only on the weekend. He quickly assented. I arrived late Friday afternoon after the long rush hour drive from San Francisco. I signed in and was directed to the shared cabin I’d been assigned. I set off into the woods. On the path, I passed Muktananda with his perpetual entourage of VIPs; Naranjo was among them. They were headed up to the main meditation pavilion. I bowed towards them and Muktananda nodded back. I continued to struggle along the densely overgrown path toward my bunk when suddenly I heard a deafening cracking sound. It sounded like a giant with enormous hands snapping his fingers right over my head or close to my ear. Then again. I found my cabin, threw down my sleeping bag, and made my way to the meditation hall. I wouldn’t return to bed for 36 hours. 

An elaborate Krishna shrine had been set up in the middle of the room. Men would circumambulate for an hour, and then the women would take up the dance. It was not like the ecstatic airport Hari Krishna chanters but that was the song, and it was not quiet. There were as I recall live musicians as well as spontaneous twirling and jumping. The chanting was modulated with slow and faster sections. When I did circumambulate, I was extremely restrained but didn’t feel out of place or forced into a fake religious fervor. We sat in what zen monks would consider a very loose meditation posture, men on one side of the room and women on the other. A guy in front of me was bouncing off the floor with what I was told were some kind of kriyas or loosening of the kundalini energy. Once Muktananda came into the room and led the procession of men in the chanting. Otherwise he sat on the side in his elevated chair. There must have been a few breaks when Muktananda talked or answered questions. I remember the guy in front of me thanking Muktananda for his experience. Food was available during certain periods, but I don’t recall formal meal breaks. And oh, it didn’t stop but went on day and night. The drive back to San Francisco was about 4 hours on a hazardous highway so I made sure that I had a few hours of sleep before leaving, but other than that I was in the meditation hall.

Once was enough. Despite these intense meditation experiences, I began to feel more and more disconnected from Muktananda. I continued to visit the Oakland ashram occasionally when he was there, which was less frequent. He had engagements in New York and southern California. There were now a huge number of people gathering around him. It had a cultish feel. There was also an extraordinary amount of money flowing into the organization. 

One time we were told through the SAT grapevine that Hoffman would visit. Knowing that Hoffman only went to make a public display of himself as Muktananda’s equal, or to find some way to denigrate Muktananda, I was not going to miss it. After Hoffman’s private meeting, I wasn’t present so I don’t know about the encounter, I was standing at the edge of the dining hall with others when Hoffman appeared. Suddenly he disappeared, and then, after a few minutes, he came into the room sheepishly carrying a plate of food or a bowl of soup, complaining loudly that Muktananda’s guards wouldn’t let him into the private quarters. “I know he’s very lonely. So I just wanted to share some soup with him and keep him company, but they wouldn’t let me in.” 

I will now try to describe an experience that I have never written about or even talked about other than on one or two occasions and then privately. I think I’ve been afraid of either being called a madman or a failed sannyasin, neither of which is personally appealing. I can’t say with certainty what did happen, other than it happened. I might have been deluded or hallucinating, or carried away by some religious fervor, or perhaps it did occur as I am going to describe. But I demand complete honesty from Muktananda so I can’t avoid telling the story. 

I forget the circumstances of my invitation. I was not a regular member of Naranjo’s inner circle, but either late afternoon or early evening, I went to Kathy and Claudio’s house in North Berkeley above the Arlington circle. When I arrived there were only a few people. I only specifically remember my friend Danny Ross being there. Cheryl Dembe, who later became Sundari, might have also been present, as well as Luc Brebion. But other than that I would have to pick and choose out of a list of the usual suspects. I would have remembered if there’d been a very close friend with whom I might have shared and even asked questions about what seemed to happen.

One of the first things that I remember very clearly was a Scientology E Meter casually set up on the breakfast table. Up until that point, I had only heard rumors of Nanranjo’s experimentation with Auditing, but seeing the device, which is nothing more than a galvanic skin response lie detector, the rumor was no more. 

There was undoubtedly the usual friendly chit-chat. As it was beginning to get dark, Speeth and several others arrived. They came in through the front door. She was carrying a plain square cardboard box, slightly smaller than a bank box. In it were copies of a thin book, talks by Muktananda* that she and Donovan Bess had edited and published. She said that they were hot off the press and the reason she was late was that she’d been at the airport saying goodbye to Muktananda before he and his entourage flew back to India, and she had wanted to share the new publication with him before he left. She gave us each a copy. We were sitting on the floor near the breakfast nook and some casual seating. I still had a clear view of the front door. The group was politely enthusiastic about Speeth and Bess’s work, thumbing through, reading bits and pieces here and there, smiling, laughing.

Then I looked up and noticed a very bright light that seemed to be coming through the front door. It was a long oval shape and fit the door frame. It increased in intensity, the edges becoming more bright while the inside seemed reddish or orange. Suddenly the actual shape of Muktananda’s body became clear. It was dressed as we had always seen him in darshan, but the clothing was diaphanous and brightly lit. His distinct facial features were clearly visible. He was walking at a very deliberate pace though the legs may not have been moving at all. He had the appearance and movement of a real human body although it did not seem solid. I could still make out the door and the walls through him. It was eerily real.

I do not know if I was the only person who saw this. There was no discussion, no questions, or expressions of shock and awe. The only thing that did happen was that someone in the group began to sing Om Namah Shivaya very softly. The figure began at the edge of the circle opposite me. It stood behind each person. I cannot remember if they were gestures, but the person became very quiet. The figure moved clockwise until I could sense it standing behind me. That was the last thing I recall until we began to gather our things together to return home.

I am surprised that after an extraordinary experience, and I presume that others had some experience, we just returned to our everyday lives. I have hesitated to speak about it openly for almost 50 years. Many possible reactions exist to a clear, even violent breaking of ordinary perception. One is silence. Almost all modern writers talking about their drug experiences have expressed frustration. Most writings by the mystics are rarely clear or self-explanatory. When you can’t say anything, nothing may be the best option. I have not used any language designed for extraordinary mystical experiences, Muktananda was not projecting an astral body. I am not calling it an apparition. I wonder if close disciples of devotees simply have these kinds of encounters and accept them as the “new normal,” but what I experienced was not ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. 

What I can say honestly is that a revered Indian guru who was on a scheduled international flight from San Francisco to Mumbai appeared in an ordinary Berkeley house in the early evening. He was a real person or appeared incredibly life-like although his body was diaphanous and bright. He was alive, not dead or resurrected, as in the Jesus narrative, but afterward, I could see Thomas’s meeting Jesus differently. And if the story of Thomas putting his hands in Jesus’s open wounds actually happened, I could also understand that the conversations recorded in the 20th Chapter of John took a few years to emerge. 

Baba-ji is lecher

The number of followers around Muktananda became overwhelming. Darshan was a circus. I can’t recall one talk that I thought was memorable. No one seemed interested in psychological investigation. I stopped going. Siddha Yoga is a practice of energy transfer and a connection between the guru and his or her student. That wasn’t happening.

What was also clear was that in a larger group, there were those who were close devotees or considered themselves close and those aspiring or even jealous. There was also an enormous amount of money now available. This is ripe terrain for abuse, distrust, even warfare. It never reached the outrageous heights of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, but cults are cults. The disintegration in trust was the beginning of the leaking of salacious details about Muktananda’s sexual life.

Hoffman had been wrong, or perhaps very right. Muktananda was not lacking in company, and he may have been very lonely. I will not delve into his motivations, but soon there were credible rumors that the guards who had blocked Hoffman from the private apartments invited many younger women, some even underaged, to join Muktananda. He was not a celibate sadhu. 

I have read through many of the accounts from insiders malcontents and disenchanted followers. Muktananda at some point gave up the celibate life, but he couldn’t just trade satguru for the role of a conventional married man. Krishna Murti’s long involvement with an older married woman might be a good example that I can understand and even sympathize with. What I think I can say with some understanding of the cultural divide between traditional Indian culture and Westernized ones, especially New Age California: Muktananda could not prey on younger Indian women--the taboos are too strong--but with so many younger American women with liberated attitudes available, the doors opened. From most reports, the doors opened frequently, and it was not about nurturing human relationships. It was sex.

People try to defend him. I will only point to one of Muktananda’s most ardent supporters, Claudio Naranjo’s explanation: “I think Muktananda’s case is very complex. My own interpretation of him is that he was playing the role of a saint according to Western ideals, or to cultural ideals in general. I think he was a saint in the real sense, which has nothing to do with that. For instance, it's the popular idea that a saint has no sexual life, and he was playing the role of a Brahmacharya, which I think was part of a cultural mission he was on, to be an educator on a large scale. It was fitting that he did that role, and my own evaluation of him is that he was clean, because he was not a lecher.” 

Claudio, let me be clear--your analysis is wrong, He was a lecher. His behavior was unethical and exploitative. If he were a Catholic priest he would be defrocked, or even in jail. He does not get a pass for trying to play the role of a Brahmacharya in some huge cultural shift.

Baba-Ji, you lied to us. You were not who you claimed to be. You were a lecher.

I’m unsure where I can begin to separate the man from the yogic powers, or even if I have to. But I know where to place my allegiance and when to withdraw it.

Honesty is such a lonely word

Everyone is so untrue

Honesty is hardly ever heard

And mostly what I need from you

--Billy Joel

*The publication date of “Swami Muktananda,” edited by Kathleen Speeth & Donovan Bess is 1974 so my mental calculation is slightly off.

The Death of the Public Intellectual

The Death of the Public Intellectual does not signal that we are all brain-dead

Ideas have power. Ideas can change minds or reinforce tightly held beliefs and prejudices. Ideas can capture the public’s imagination. I’m not talking about sound bites or the flagrant manipulation of sentiment by appealing to racism, fear, or hysteria of one brand or another. At the risk of sounding overblown or pretentious, I will put forward a few ideas that might have legs: democracy and fascism, climate responsibility, the ethical life, the role of imagination, and spirituality. These topics interest me, and I would hope that joining in an intellectual conversation, sharing and discussing our ideas in a civil way, might help us find a way forward.

Sadly, this kind of conversation is on life support in today's information environment. We are treated to speculation about the size of Trump's sexual organ, the length of his time in the saddle, Melania's absence, and his devastation that there are no crowds protesting his trial in lower Manhattan. I never thought that I would be cheering David Pecker for his ability to string together a few coherent, believable sentences. Instead of a real conversation, we are reduced to sloganeering and “bothsidesism” that includes vile insults as well as calls for execution. Will it be by firing squad, or maybe just shot with an AK 47 and unrecognizably mutilated?

Someone posted on my Twitter account a clip of an animated Marjorie Taylor Green ranting incoherently about fake meat Bill Gates grew in a "peach tree dish." Surely, it is a delicacy that will add to the wonders of Georgia. The woman is totally unhinged, yet she gets lots of coverage, and this is exactly what she wants, what the Right wants, and what her donors demand. This is the script: monopolize our attention, clog the airtime, and then move ahead with the other agenda, and we're not talking QAnon or some other nonsense. It doesn't matter whether MTG is an idiot or an Oxonian. She's just a pawn. Their Queen is about to checkmate our democracy.

If you did a survey—now at this moment, not yesterday before the Peach Tree idiocy—you’d find that more respondents believe Bill Gates is experimenting with synthetic meat and that it's finding its way to your neighborhood butcher without proper labeling. I’ll put money on it.

In the process, MTG has also heaped more distrust on the FDA and the entire expert class of technocrats who are ruining America. She’s also created an atmosphere where people who have done good work, gone to college, and gained some standing in their communities for careful thought, attention to science, and language are pilloried. Of course, you don’t have to know a damn thing about scientific experiments to know that we’re being poisoned by fake meat. Actually the less you know, the more credible you are. There's not much of an audience for a man or woman who actually knows something about the real poisons that can infect the food chain. They’re just boring.

Who qualifies as a public intellectual and what is their role? Narrowly defined, they would be an academic, philosopher, economist, or scientist who devotes some of their time to commenting on public issues and, I would venture, subjects that a large number of people find interesting. In science, both Neil deGrasse and Steven Hawkins fit the bill. For all his faults, the late Milton Friedman would have to be included as testimony that his or her opinions don’t have to be as solid as Euclidean geometry.

Who are the current crop of public intellectuals? Dan Rather comes to mind. With less reverence for academia in America, there are no philosophers such as Albert Camus or Bertrand Russell. Rachel Maddow gets high marks; she’s an Oxonian, yet Google calls her a television presenter. John Oliver and Steve Colbert are very bright and provide sharp commentary in their quirky way. Charlie Rose was in the running until he demonstrated that he'd disconnected his head from his penis. Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal are no longer with us. Thomas Friedman tries. No one today commands the respect of an Edward R. Murrow, but there must be people who could assume that role, yet as I survey the Op-Ed page across America, brilliant voices do not speak out clearly and strongly for fear of getting mowed down.

We've always had crazies, even in mighty positions. Sometimes, the powerful maniacs have kept a low profile, or maybe they just didn’t stop taking their meds. But now after Trump in this era of Fox News, the Marjorie Green’s of the airwaves flaunt their stupidity because the media will lap it up, and that’s key.

When I lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, an older woman installed herself daily on one of the benches set on Broadway's median divide and screamed at the traffic. None of it made much sense, a 70’s version of Fake Meat and Peach Tree Dishes. But, my point—no one paid her any attention. If MTG were shouting her nonsense from the same bench, they'd have to close Broadway to make room for the TV crews.

The woman I used to see at 102nd Street has now been replaced by a silent public monument. She didn’t make the cut. Dan Rather has 2.5 million followers on Twitter, and MTG has almost 900,000. She's still behind, but her brand of insanity is getting exposure. Lauren Boebert has 1.3 million! Watch out, Dan. They’re coming after you.

If you can't shut her up, stop paying attention to her or giving her undue attention—just stop it.

*Daniel Drezne made these nominations:

1) Ta-Nehisi Coates: Any book or long-form essay of his becomes the topic of conversation among elites. That’s influence.

2) Masha Gessen: I have found her thoughts about the Age of Trump and the Age of Hysteria surrounding Trump to be invaluable. She might even be right about Trump acting more like a teenager than a toddler.

3) Francis Fukuyama: Many people would have a hard time repeating something like “The End of History,” which holds up better than you think. However, Fukuyama’s latest work on political decay has proven to be both prescient and vital.

4) Ron Chernow: I suspect some might not think of Chernow as an intellectual, to which I would respond by noting that Chernow’s biographies lead to reinterpretations of American history. If nothing else, reading Grant will cause multiple generations to rethink what we were taught about Grant — and Robert E. Lee — when we were kids. Since the Civil War still plays a role in current political life, that is no mean achievement.

5) David Autor: The hardest-working labor economist in the profession and probably the least well-known name on this list, Autor's research into the effects of technological change and globalization on the American worker guides much of the current conversation on these topics.

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets, Part 2

The Dirty Secrets of the Hoffman Process, Part 2
New Age Miracle or Fraud

eBook about Bob Hoffman and his famous Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, Hoffman Quadrinity Process.

By Kenneth Ireland

Contents

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel
Debunking The Big Lie
The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman
The Final Act
#GayMeToo
Moving towards a Conclusion
Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

© Kenneth Ireland
12/8/2022
Mcleod Ganj
Himachal Pradesh, India

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel 

A friend who is a cult expert working in Australia says that most people who get involved in cults have a significant spiritual opening that cements their allegiance. That was certainly true in my case, but I also needed some buttressing and emotional support. I am not alone. The initial experience fades, or its unfolding takes more time than expected. The whole process requires a difficult-to-maintain level of self-care.

When I took my leave of absence from the Jesuits, I was broke. The question became how do I make a living? In this regard, Hoffman was true to his word and recommended me to Dr. Ernie Pecci, who was taking over Hoffman’s work. I began training at Pecci’s Center for Psycho-Spiritual Integration. I was to be a leader for the gay group and take individuals through the Process under Ernie’s supervision. The pay was $1000 a month. I needed an income, and in the 1970s, PSI paid a good middle-class salary for what, in the real world, might be described as an internship, though it lacked any professional training that normally proceeded with it.

Our professional training amounted to little more than going through the process of psychic therapy and experiencing some change, though it was impossible to measure. Working under professional supervision would be further training. Ernie was a fully trained and licensed psychotherapist with an M.D. after his name, but he had to classify us as spiritual teachers or guides. Our official titles skirted his legal liability for offering psychological treatment with our ragtag group of untrained psychic therapists.

Pecci tried to establish a professional environment. We worked a week of training, client meetings, group sessions, and meetings with Pecci to review our client’s progress. Most of our training was designed to hone our presentations to create the emotional response necessary to achieve a “loving divorce.” We were presenting Hoffman’s Process. 

Under Pecci’s supervision, there were some extremely dangerous incidents among the people I worked with. Irving was a high-level, successful financial advisor from Marin. I would characterize his engagement in the process as slightly more than he would give to a spreadsheet. Pecci encouraged me to push him a bit during the Mother bitch session with its high level of physical, verbal, and emotional expression. I called him the following day. He did not pick up the phone. The next day, or it might have been a few days later, I finally got through to either his wife or one of his children. Irving had had a near-fateful heart attack the day after the “Bitch session.” I visited him in the hospital. He recovered but never finished the Process. However, he thanked me for pushing him. He’d never even suspected that he had a heart condition. Within six months, he divorced his wife and moved his girlfriend into this beach cottage. We kept in touch for several years. He did finally die of another heart attack during a movie. I attended his funeral in Stinson Beach. Irving was the immediate cause of the liability waiver, which all Process students must now sign.

Another of my clients, J, a highly bright gay man, was trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse. He just didn’t show up for one session. He had been hospitalized for a psychiatric breakdown. J never finished the Process and remained extremely angry that he’d been pushed over the edge and that we’d allowed this event to occur. With J, I realized that I might be in over my head, that the Process did dig deeply into a person’s psychological makeup, and that I was not adequately equipped to handle what might come up.

Pecci asked me to work with one of his longtime psychiatric patients, Antonio, a gay man from Mexico who, in Pecci’s evaluation, was a borderline schizophrenic. Antonio was on a maintenance level of medication to help him cope with hallucinations. Of course, it would have been impossible for Antonio to do any group work. Still, Pecci thought that I could take Antonio through the steps of the Process one-on-one, with particular emphasis on the ritual and visualization aspects, and see if he could begin to function without antipsychotic drugs. I should note that this was entirely counter to then-accepted psychiatric guidelines, but in the psycho-spiritual world, miracles were not a matter of scientific evidence or evaluation. They were the expected norm.

I worked with Antonio for about six months, talking with him four to six hours every week. I found him a part-time job as a janitor in a gay bar near his apartment. When he began to live without medication, he felt so energized and was so much more present that we were encouraged. We continued to do the steps and exercises of the Process slowly. Then he began to report hearing voices, and most disturbing that there were evil and demonic people on the other side of the mirrors in the bar spying on him while he worked. He was headed towards a significant psychotic episode. Still, I was counseled to continue talking with Antonio, even sitting with him in the bar and talking with him about the figures' personalities behind the mirrors. Eventually, the owners of the bar had to fire Antonio. He had a significant breakdown, was hospitalized, and involuntarily returned to Mexico. 

Aside from these cases of medical emergencies and psychotic breakdowns, the majority of people who did Hoffman’s Process did experience some degree of personal freedom. There was relief from what Hoffman called Negative Love or “patterns,” which became shorthand for any debilitating behavior that caused personal or interpersonal problems. However, I began to feel that there were no lasting results, or perhaps, in the best-case scenario, the immediate results took longer to solidify.

There are only anecdotal stories--people dazzled by what, in retrospect, was an induced emotional experience. It usually occurs without drugs, but not in all cases. But by and large, people quickly returned to familiar behaviors, or worse, more entrenched and justified patterns. This encouraged cult-like recriminations and accusations of not measuring up and falling away. But there was at least that memory of freedom and a desire to regain and maintain it

The popular culture of the ’70s considered psychiatry establishment and rebellion was hip; we adopted the mantra “Fake it Till you Make It,” which was adopted by the self-help movement after a con man, Glenn W. Turner, used it to popularize his get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme in the ’70s. Reinforced by the like-minded Napoleon Hill, our “fake it” belief system remained intact even after Turner was arrested in 1972 on 86 counts of securities fraud. If Hoffman’s New Age miracle results weren’t immediately available,” just hang in there.” The fact that a man was a criminal didn’t negate the validity of insight, or that is what I wanted to believe.

I’d fallen for it. A significant problem was the Spiritualist Church and its reliance on messages from the other side. After a year and a half, I thought I could do it better or imagined I could. Together with Nancy “Janabai” Dannenberg and Glen Lewis, we set out to present the Process in San Francisco. We called our company Metatron Associates after the archangel whom Oscar Ichazo claimed was his spiritual guide. Glen had been among the 25 or so people from Esalen who, with Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly, had been in the first group that traveled to Arica, Chile, to work with Ichazo.

The trappings of the spiritualist church repulsed me, and I imagined I could rescue the insight out of that swamp. When Nancy, Glenn, and I prepared the script for our 13-week sessions, I advocated cutting as much as we could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. If not fraudulent, they were, at best, embarrassing and useless. We dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was the only therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. We toned down Hoffman’s fire and brimstone tale of emotional abuse and introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early programming influenced their lives here and now. But it was not enough, and even, to some degree, my experience was that the Process didn’t work without these quasi-magical elements.

As I look back on how I intended to separate myself from the specter of Dr. Fischer by substituting the archangel who guided a Bolivian cult leader, it’s quite beyond me. The Kabbalah tells us that God permitted Metatron to view His countenance, an honor not granted to most heavenly hosts. Metatron also acted as the scribe who recorded the choices and decisions made by humans and the divine in the Book of Life. As a result, he knew and guarded all those secrets. Slightly inflated, but in the spiritual culture of those heady days, Werner Erhard had sold used cars; L. Ron Hubbard had written science fiction; Bob Hoffman was a tailor; Henry Korman was an architect; Oscar Ishzo had reportedly immersed himself in esoterica; Hameed Ali had been working towards an advanced degree at a prestigious university. Naranjo had at least been well-trained in psychiatry. Of course, there was room for three slightly lost post-hippies from Berkeley to join the surge and invoke Metatron.

The people I mentioned were not devoid of spiritual insight—quite the contrary. There had to be some insight or experience, but coupled with the need to make money, they devised a Ponzi scheme. Peer counselors with minimal training were tapping into their clients' psyches with virtually no psychological training, no accountability, and no professional supervision. After their clients had some experience of freedom, real or imagined, they were encouraged to go out and recruit their friends and family to undertake the Process. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There were Hoffman teachers with backgrounds in professional gambling, art history, music, disc jockeys, former sannyasins of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and the Unitarian ministry. To their credit, some of these teachers, including my former partner Nancy Dannenberg, have earned professional degrees in counseling or therapy. However, their roots are still in Hoffman’s otherworldly revelation.

Listening deeply to 40 individuals a year took a personal toll. I didn’t have the skill set to cope. When Pecci called and told me that Hoffman had withdrawn Pecci’s license to present psychic therapy and threatened a lawsuit against anyone doing his 13-week course, we closed Metatron. Our interlude with the archangel had ended. I certainly had no stomach or money to face off in court over what Hoffman called his intellectual property.

We usually think of arrogance as a sin or a volitional character defect. The perpetrator exerts his will over another human to gain power and control. I think it can just as easily fall under the rubric of “group think.” I tell myself that my good intentions excuse me and that I never would have knowingly taken steps to destroy the life of another human being, but I did. My actions profoundly sadden me.

Before I started to work with him, Antonio had a reasonably happy life; he was a gay Latino whom his conservative birth family had ostracized, but he’d carved out a life for himself; he lived in a modest subsidized apartment overlooking Castro Street; he had a circle of friends; he could laugh; he had competent social services to make sure that he had proper medication for his schizophrenia; he was able to take care of himself. After working with me, even under the direction of a licensed psychotherapist, social services returned him to Mexico City. Pecci told me that his family had subjected him to electroshock therapy, which left him more debilitated, almost from what we could learn in a kind of vegetative state. Then I lost track. I couldn’t bear to face the consequences of my actions.

I was arrogant, stupidly, blindly arrogant, but still culpable. Antonio, I am so very sorry. I know that you would like to forgive me. You wanted me, even loved me. You trusted me, and I betrayed you. I know that I caused you to suffer much more than you needed to. I will carry this burden for the rest of my life. The only way I can make amends for you is to be honest and tell your story, including my part.

Debunking The Big Lie

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. —Arthur Conan Doyle

For anyone with a taste for otherworldly drama, the tale of the revelation of Psychic Therapy has everything that Hollywood or Mme Blavatsky could provide—the late-night visitation of a disembodied spirit unlocking a thorny problem in the human psyche; it included a simple, down-to-earth maxim that a vulnerable person in pain could understand; it also came with the validation of a highly qualified psychiatrist, bona fides traced all the way to Vienna.

However, there was a lie at the center of the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. Perhaps the psychic world requires suspension of rational thinking, but Hoffman’s relationship with Fischer contains a provable lie. I remain amazed that even when I uncovered the duplicity of his cover story, I still found ways to excuse it and absorb it into my flawed relationship with him.

A friend from SAT also heard Hoffman’s tale of the birth of the Process in the 1970s—his awakening in the middle of the night to a vision of Dr. Fischer. She always assumed that Hoffman’s spirit guide was a “Source” like “Seth” or “Lazarus” and channeled psychic wisdom. When I told her that Seigfried Fischer had been a natural person, a Jewish psychiatrist who’d fled Hitler’s Germany and whose son contacted me after he’d read one of my blog posts online, she was shocked. 

Fischer’s son and I had several long conversations. He wanted to correct some of what I’d said about his father. First, miscellaneous information: his father was German and not Viennese. He, his father’s son, not his wife, sued Hoffman to stop him from using his father’s name. 

Then, the son told me some facts, and Hoffman’s narrative unraveled. Hoffman had always claimed that he knew Fischer through his wife’s family, that they’d had friendly and animated arguments about the spirit world and spiritualist dogma over convivial dinners, and that after Fischer died unexpectedly, his spirit returned to confirm that Hoffman had been right.

Fischer’s son was almost sure his father had no connection to Hoffman’s wife’s family. Still, he admitted that his father didn’t maintain the strict separation between social and professional contact currently dictated by the ethics of psychoanalytic practice. Even though he was just a kid, he even remembered dinner at Hoffman’s house and Hoffman dining at their house. So this much is true: there were dinner conversations, but that’s where it ends.

I’d always suspected that Hoffman had been Fischer’s patient. At some point, perhaps over a convivial dinner, I pressed Hoffman to tell the truth; he admitted that he’d been a patient but insisted that he and his wife did family therapy when they were “having trouble with their son Michael.” I was right—Hoffman was a patient, but he still evaded truthfully describing their relationship. Fischer’s son told me that his father treated severe psychosis and that although most of his patients at the Langley Porter Institute were short-term, Hoffman had been his patient for years. Hoffman certainly couldn’t admit that he’d ever had severe psychological problems, so he deflected and blamed his son.

Lies cover up lies ad infinitum. In the shenanigans of a conman, truth is a strip tease. Fischer’s son told me that his father claimed he could cure homosexuality, so it’d be a good bet that Hoffman’s sexuality came up in therapy. But I’ll skip any speculation about those conversations. Use your own imagination.

Fischer’s son does not attribute any psychological or spiritual value to the Fischer-Hoffmann Process: “He was a tailor and not a spiritual man,” he still bears no animosity towards Hoffman. He just felt that he had to protect his father’s legacy. Our conversation loosened many knotted resentments I was still holding, and the pieces for a different possible narrative of the birth of the Hoffman Process began to fall into place. It’s based on my assumptions. I have no evidence other than reading what I learned of the factual history against Hoffman’s endless fabrication.

Who was Bob Hoffman? He was a tailor from Oakland, California, with minimal formal education and no psychological training. He was not a professional in any sense of the word. He had been the patient of a skilled and distinguished psychoanalytic professional for many years. Before finishing his course of therapy, Dr. Fischer died, and Hoffman remained in transference. He was never “cured” in any sense–the evidence is staggering if you worked with him.

During his years of psychotherapy, he learned, perhaps even experienced, one actual link in the birth of psychosis. Using as many tricks as he could glean from as many sources as he could, especially hypnosis and auto-suggestion, plus the trance state he’d learned in the spiritualist church and his teacher Rose Strongin, he pieced together a way of barging into a person’s unconscious with a blunt force that forced an opening and allowed some people a fresh view of themselves, and, if for only a second, to step out their habitual way of living and clearly distinguish parts of themselves that they’d been hiding from, neglected, or repressed.

John Tarrant Roshi once told me that creating a powerful insight, even a life-changing breakthrough experience, was relatively easy. Tried and true ways of breaking down the ego's defenses allow for an onrush of fresh stimuli. Hypnosis, sleep deprivation, forced concentration, disruption of everyday communication and human interaction, alteration of critical environmental factors related to perception, light and noise levels most obviously. Drugs, a favorite California choice, also make the list. Charlatans and cult leaders, as well as authentic teachers, have understood how to manipulate these factors from time immemorial. The Hoffman Process uses all of the above except the California favorite.

Calling this experience Negative Love, Hoffman crafted wares to take to market. Using a true huckster’s innate instincts, he had to convince us that there was something to buy. Thus, the story of his midnight visitation. I cannot say he consciously crafted the story, hallucinated, or experienced genuine insight, but it makes no difference. It allowed him to claim infallibility for the knowledge coming from an otherworldly source he could access as a gifted intuitive. We could hitch a ride, but it wasn't free. Hoffman was very interested in money.

Hoffman was in no way qualified to receive an insight that had evaded generations of highly trained psychotherapists. He had no outstanding intellectual gifts to offset his handicap, a heavy dose of strong opinions, and fixed beliefs. His primary interest, when not measuring the inseam of custom suits for the Oakland Raiders, was immersing himself in the Spiritualist teachings of a psychic named Rev. Rose Strongin.

Hoffman’s reliance on spirit guides would have been rugged terrain for any professional therapist to negotiate. Plus, voices from beyond provide a ready defense to deflect any meaningful attempts to deal with psychosis. Fischer’s son told me that his father thought that homosexuality was “curable,” which, if my own experience is any measure—Hoffman maintained that homosexuality was not a “curable condition”—became a long and costly war with a very closeted, angry homophobic gay man.

The stage was set for an epic battle, and what better way to resolve all the conflict inherent in a deep self-hatred of being gay plus transference than your therapist’s death coupled with the omniscience of seeing life “from the other side?” A dead therapist cannot defend himself. Questions are answered by the only voice we can hear. It becomes an unequal battle when one party quits or dies.

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

Bob Hoffman died in 1997 of liver cancer. 

A spiritual enthusiast chided me. She believes everything happens for a reason and claims she would never have changed a thing. She asked me if I would have made different choices knowing what I do now. My answer was, “Of course, I’m not a complete idiot.” Fifty years ago, my life was falling apart. I made choices, and I have to live with the results of my choices but to say that I always choose wisely is pure insanity. And I will tell my story in hopes that some other kid can choose a more reasonable path. 

Hoffman’s roots were in the Spiritualist Church—not the hip Science of Mind practice, but the one with trace mediums, seances, and spirit messages. Hoffman claimed that the kernel of the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, “Negative Love,” was transmitted to him during a visitation one night in 1968 by his spirit guide, Dr. Siegfried Fischer.

Despite Hoffman being a difficult man—and I am not alone in my assessment—I always tried to remain friends with him. He was a man who had influenced my life for better or worse. He was also another gay man who struggled with his sense of self-worth and purpose in an antagonistic culture. However, I never succeeded for reasons that were inevitably labeled as my personal failing or the result of a lack of understanding, empathy, love, or compassion. Whenever I made some effort to maintain or develop the relationship, and I was always the one who reached out, it would last for a period of time, and then I would have to back off. This pattern would repeat at the end of his life.

The Last Act 

I phoned Hoffman in the Fall 1995, or it might have been early in ‘96. I had returned from Hawaii, where I’d tried to do a lot of self-care after working in a Buddhist AIDS Hospice for six years. Hoffman told me that he’d just been diagnosed with liver cancer and that, of course, there had to be some reason that I’d called. In Hoffman’s narcissism, there was always some great mysterious purpose in events that only he could fathom. I thought the reason might be more mundane. I had been with many men who were dying. Perhaps I might be of some service, and I easily fell into sitting with him during his doctors’ visits, CT scans, disappointments, and grasping for life.

Before he began the very invasive medical treatment, before the disease killed him, Hoffman decided to travel to Brazil, where there was a thriving Process center. He told me that he had been treated like a guru, flowers strewn in his path, and that pleased him, but the trip ended with a nearly fatal treatment by a famous psychic surgeon.

 

I’ll never forget the circumstances of that conversation. We were in his room at the old Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where he was recovering after being flown back from Brazil in an air ambulance after a near-death experience in the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Sao Paulo. He’d seen a psychic surgeon known as Dr. Fritz, who had operated on him with a kitchen knife and nicked his liver, causing bleeding, infection, and hospitalization. Luckily, he’d just received the deposit from the new US owners for the sale of his intellectual property because the $50,000 for the air ambulance had to be paid in cash in advance. Another fortunate quirk of fate, but this act of the telenovela came at a steep price, and he was a man who was always very interested in money. 

It was surreal. A man who’d built a career around an otherworldly visit from a dead psychiatrist would, of course, be nearly killed by an unlicensed, untrained man channeling a dead surgeon performing a barbaric medical procedure in a kitchen in a Brazilian suburb. I am sure it wasn’t a sterile operating room. 

The denouement of the telenovela continued to unfold. Visits to several oncologists, encouraging promises of a cure, a liver resection coupled with a tough and painful recovery, a very brief remission, and then a steep, rapid decline. 

I did not stay till the end. I saw parts of Hoffman’s personality that were simply ordinary, which I will talk about. They are both part of the story of his Process and my story, my involvement, and my transference.

Food didn’t have to be kosher; it had to look kosher. I called a rabbi to see what I could prepare that he could eat, but he refused the sandwich because the vegetable spread looked like dairy. Then, there was the saga of finding a hospital bed that had never held a dying person. It would have jinxed his recovery.

When all hope was dashed, none were immune to his anger when death finally had to be faced as inevitable.

I tried to be his personal assistant. I set up meetings with the people who meant something to Hoffman, including people with whom he had unfinished business. I hoped that Hoffman could repair some of his messier relationships and, in terms of his idiosyncratic belief system, move on. As I waded through the wreckage with him, he received—there is no other word for it—people he’d trained as teachers, people who’d helped him, different people to whom he owed a debt, people who were vying to make some money from his notoriety, There were people who chose to remain angry and resented my calls. In all fairness, there were also many people whom he’d helped. Naranjo and Schaffer visited several times.

I was personally very distressed that he would not reconcile with his son. I didn’t see this at the time as part and parcel of my own transference, but it was. Whatever outcome between Hoffman and Michael was their affair, it was this experience that eventually led me to reconcile with my own father before he died at 101 years old.

As I said, I didn't stay until the end. But I did return to visit once a few days before Hoffman died. He was in a great deal of pain and, from what I could discern, not at peace. I have no idea if the seven stages of the dying process described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross are even close to what occurs. I hope that if they do reflect a natural passage, Hoffman was able to move beyond depression and anger to some degree of acceptance. 

#GayMeToo

There is no silver lining in the story of my abuse. Trying to write about it also presents a dilemma. I feel blocked because honesty obligates me to disclose too much about personal failures. I cannot write from the position of a life that didn’t turn out, even though opportunities and possibilities were indeed closed off to me by the repercussions of my abuse. I can say with certainty that my life is not what my parents or I envisioned for myself, but it has been my own life, and I am responsible for my choices.

My hesitancy to speak out, however, began to change when I discovered the names of several Jesuits I knew and another priest friend on lists of priests who had molested adolescents; I was filled with incredible sadness. But there were also feelings that I could not pin down immediately. It was not remorse--I never abused anyone in my care. Those unidentified stirrings were the beginnings of a personal awakening. I had been abused by a person I assumed I could trust, but I managed to ignore the damage for years.

I also knew and worked with one of the Zen teachers plus several students who became entangled in the scandals that engulfed several important Zen Centers, creating havoc and landing a severe blow to personal practice. Three decades ago, when I learned that a high Tibetan Buddhist teacher, an American, Osel Tenzin, had recklessly infected a teenage boy with HIV, I was enraged. My teacher, Issan Dorsey, used his dying and death from the same disease to teach his students about what matters in life.

The places, circumstances, and people we encounter when our highest aspirations meet our basic human instincts are supposed to be fruitful for our practice. This practice also demands the highest level of care by everyone involved. It was a heady time when Eastern practices were first introduced into the West among more than just a few idiosyncratic, curious, and restless seekers. We were creating something new, and mistakes were inevitable. Our enthusiasm left lapses in judgment and huge gaps. We were seeking experiences we’d heard about in legend, but when we read the guidebooks, we couldn’t make out the contours of the landscape or the tricky curves on the road.  One friend said, “Looking back, it seems to me that we were all guinea pigs in some often reckless  experimentation.”

I’ve watched the #metoo movement unfold, and, at least in the press, the emphasis has been on the crimes of the predators. The public now sees them for what they are. Everyone realizes that sexual abuse and manipulation can no longer be hidden in the closet. However nuanced the arguments the lawyers present in their defense, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche were terrible actors. The ongoing scandal of priests abusing their position to satisfy their sexual drives with adolescent boys is a kind of #Catholicmetoo story. And so was the man who raped me and many other men with less notoriety. Not as sensational as Roman Catholic Cardinals being held to account for their past sins, there is more than enough evidence of older gay men taking advantage of younger men in the process of coming out that I have to tell my story. There really can be no argument. These men—there are no women abusers I am aware of—used their position and power to satisfy their sexual urges. 

We applaud the women who have come forward. Sexual abuse is also widespread in the gay community, but far fewer queer and bi men have come forward. The added stigma of identifying as queer probably played a significant role. It certainly played a part in my own silence. But I think there has been far less attention and understanding of the insult to their victims. There’s still something missing in reporting the #MeTooMovement—stories of the victims.

Living a life of victimization feeds our natural tendency to blame others, avoiding responsibility. On the other hand, my own reluctance to talk openly about my own abuse reinforced my denial about the damage that Hoffman did to me, and also in the odd reversal of roles that psychologists describe as Stockholm syndrome. I continued this relationship over many decades and glossed over my resentment with a fake veneer of compassion and forgiveness.

Staying silent is not the answer to anything, and perhaps it’s even “enabling” to borrow a term from addiction therapy. I learned an enormous amount about the effects of sexual abuse because I experienced them.

This has been difficult for me because I know that living a life of victimization feeds our natural tendency to blame others and avoid taking responsibility for our own lives. On the other hand, my own reluctance to talk openly about my own abuse reinforced my denial about the damage that Hoffman did to me, and also in the odd reversal of roles that psychologists describe as Stockholm Syndrome, allowed me to continue this relationship over many decades and gloss over my resentment with a fake veneer of compassion and forgiveness.

“It’s time to take off the gloves!”.

On Monday, June 21, 2021, I received a complaint disguised as a question from a senior Hoffman Teacher—why was I writing now about Hoffman’s unethical behavior? AM, who chooses 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 exactly. However, this was the essence: “I’m sorry for what Hoffman did to you; we all know he was a difficult man, but now there are different people at the helm, so why are you writing a hit piece? It’s been 50 years since Hoffman raped you, and he’s been dead for 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.” 

These events happened almost 50 years ago. The man who abused me is long dead. I was 28 years old at the time, certainly not a choir boy under the age of consent. However, it’s not that I can’t “let go of it.” I’m not going to let him get away with it. I will not be bullied by Hoffman nor the man who currently teaches the Hoffman Process and charges a hefty fee. Money, power, being male, and the aggressor win the day. I publicly add my name to the list of people who’ve said enough is enough. It’s time to take off the gloves!

Here’s my response: “So the complaint continues. Is this a plea to “let it go” as if I am a bad person for calling attention to the harm caused by Bob Hoffman, who presented himself as a healer, a spiritual counselor, and a trustworthy public figure? Let me be clear. He got me drunk and raped me five months after finishing his Process of Psychic Therapy. It was not consensual. It was illegal and unethical, and there would be consequences under normal circumstances. 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 mindset that comes from doing the Process, we have a problem. My response is clear: a victim never has to apologize. Period.”

 

Moving Towards a Conclusion 

When my then-partner and I returned from India in April 2019, I realized that after nearly 10 years of being inseparable, something had changed in our relationship. I became restless and irritable. I tried to pretend that everything would eventually return to normal, but some line had been crossed. After several blowups, he told me it was over and left.

I was dazed. I felt betrayed. Not 10 minutes into the first session with a therapist, I found myself talking about Hoffman and being stalked by Hoffman not four months after I finished the Process. Before the therapist could even ask the question, I blurted out that he had raped me. It could not be mistaken for a consensual encounter between adults. It was an uninvited, unwelcome, and painful sexual violation by a man in whom I’d placed my trust. After describing how Hoffman yelled and screamed that I was gay as I stood awkwardly in the doorway of his office to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And when Ashish abandoned you, of course, you felt betrayed.

I met Hoffman when I was in the midst of an enormous shift in my life’s trajectory. I left the Jesuit order; I abandoned my professional aspirations to be an architect and struggled to create a fulfilling livelihood; I came out; I embraced an active role in gay liberation; I began my quest to find a nurturing relationship. I would love to acknowledge Hoffman as the impetus for this change of direction and celebrate him, or at least be grateful to him. Instead, my only feelings toward him vary between indifference and outright hostility, depending on the circumstances.

It was clear to me that at 78, I still hadn’t buried Hoffman and the memory of his abuse. The psychological trauma still lingered.

It was difficult to tell the story of Hoffman’s death. I hesitated for years. The usual language of obituaries is not particularly honest. It is about accomplishments, survivors, and legacy. Negative words are not allowed. But if the language of death allowed us to tell the truth, we might learn something profound about a man or woman by the way they died. We might be a bit more wise in how we live our lives. Secrets of the death bed share the same cover as the truth about sex. We don’t talk honestly about sex—unless you’re a pornographer and it’s the way you make your living, which is one of the reasons why there will be many people who object to my telling my story.

The alternative to honesty, however, is to enshrine lies and build cults. For Hoffman, the psychic world could deliver no lies. Circumstances might be unclear for a moment or two but not long, but eventually, whatever words were spoken were accepted as accurate. At his memorial service, no one suggested that he’d been murdered by a charlatan in Brazil. Hoffman had advanced liver cancer, so he was going to die sooner than later, but after his psychic surgery, it would be much sooner. Certainly, no one dared mention Dr. Fritz.

It almost brings me to tears to remember standing by his bed in what was the old Mt. Zion Hospital on Divisadero and hearing him tell the story. As in all of Hoffman's stories, there were so many missing links. The woman who was with him supplied a few more details, but she skirted the parts where the psychic world failed in its promise. He’d visited a psychic healer. Something went terribly wrong.

After the botched surgery with a dirty knife on a kitchen table, he would experience more pain exiting life than he was capable of handling, but he had no choice. The possibility of bargaining was past. I saw it with my own eyes—he was not brave; he was not confident. The physical pain was excruciating. He was angry and depressed; he was not accepting or forgiving. He was in denial up until the end. As the scenario unfolded, in the back of my mind, I saw that it didn’t have to be that difficult. He was just an ordinary man.

Hoffman’s death is not an example for anyone. In those last months teachers of his process lined up subserviently with a plea to buy a franchise. If you came begging forgiveness for your offenses, you might be welcomed, but a son who needed his father’s forgiveness or a father who needed to ask his son for forgiveness, that was not possible. I was the gatekeeper up until the last few weeks. This is what I saw. People couldn’t be honest or authentic. The only possible exception was Naranjo, who visited several times.

Do I forgive him? Of course. But forgiveness includes that he takes his place as a man who tried to have power over me, took advantage of me, and deeply injured me. He made intimacy impossible even though he pretended to be a channel for intimacy with the mysterious, numinous world. He was a barrier. He conjured up power that was not his and used it for his own selfish gratification. Now that time has allowed the anger and disgust to subside, my feelings are closer to pity.

A small insight in the hands of a narrow-minded man can be dangerous. In the murky cesspool of his spiritualist drivel, I ask myself: Is this where I want to end it? Instead, I will try to quiet the conflicting inner conversation and listen for a dim voice of reason: If I think I know everything, it’s hard to taste the unexpected. If the New Age meant anything, it might be to open up an experience of intimacy that was blocked off for our parents.

 

Why did I write this?

Any light at the end of the tunnel would mean that the residue of the abuse was over, and I would be able to forget Hoffman and our relationship for 50 years that did not happen. It’s not enough for me to declare, “This happened,” and move past it as I’ve been counseled by many quarters, new age therapists, love and light gurus. All that I can say for certain is that Hoffman’s selfish actions had an effect on me. Of course, they cut off some avenues and added unnecessary suffering. As I recently told a friend, every gay person I know would love to be guided by the loving, wise and resourceful example of an older queer man or woman, but by the luck of the draw, I got a narcissistic predator.

Bob Hoffman is an easy target. He was not what he claimed unless you subscribe to his otherworldly insight, which is, I suppose, a choice covered by the freedom of religion, but it is not rational. He tried to substitute being a bully clothed in the robes of a spiritualist healer for being a man of wisdom and compassion. I am convinced that he was a pathological liar and fraud, but you don’t have to agree with me.

You will not find Hoffman’s Negative Love Syndrome listed among any recognized and treatable psychological disorders. It is entirely made up. It poisoned my relationship with my parents, who did not deserve to be treated poorly and certainly were in no way healed by any psychic balm. Hoffman’s premise is that they were victims of unconsciously passing on the negative patterns of their parents in an unending chain that goes back to the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. This added story is the stuff of cults, not professional psychotherapy,

Who were my parents, and did they teach me about love? Did they make mistakes? From where I stand today, could they have done better as I tried to sort through my life’s problems? Could they have stood beside me, or could we have tried to stand closer together? After years of self-study and observation, the answer is that they were not evil and did not deserve to be cut out of my life. For years, I placed the blame entirely on them. I imagined that it was their fault that they never really accepted me. The truth is closer to this: Everyone knew I was going to grow up to be gay, which, for my parent's generation as for countless generations before them, was a painful life of secrecy and pretense, so we just pretended it wasn’t true.

From an early age, I was just too gay for them to accept me as I was. It would always be my mother’s project to do her version of conversion therapy, and it would be mine to fight and resist. My father and I were creatures from different planets. Every attempt to understand one another failed. Not knowing how to work through this, we settled on non-violent neglect.

 

Is this where I leave it?

I will adapt one of Hoffman’s famous “mind trips.” Close your eyes and dream of lemons, bitter and hard to swallow. Then imagine that you’re tasting chocolate, sweet and wonderful. This is not even close to the truth. The fantasy of a wonderfully emotional childhood might make you happy, but it’s a story of your creation. Excavating the memories of the painful and repressed part of childhood may be bitter and sore, but the work is not done by imagining a bitter taste in your mouth.

The truth about life is closer to kumquats. If you’ve ever had one, you know that the experience is neither lemon nor chocolate and if you’ve never experienced the taste, it’s not at all what you expect.

If we’re lucky, life is kumquats.

 

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

April 9, 2007 

It’s a cold Monday night in San Francisco, and I am in tears. I 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 crossfire, 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 the faces of people whom I knew and worked with in politics. I cannot remember their names. I was very involved in the campaign to elect George Moscone as 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. Home-grown spiritual leaders were not uncommon, so Jim Jones presented no obvious warning signs. I never bothered to learn more because it didn't interest me.

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

The Hoffman Process itself has the hallmarks of a cult. When I started to lead my own groups with Nancy Dannenberg, we tried to reduce the trappings of 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. However, 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.

A young African-American activist and a follower of Jones did the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy in one of my groups. 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, healer, prophet, and seer.

I’d 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 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. 

Working through the transfences that present themselves in our everyday lives offers value and freedom. In this case, it might have literally saved his life.