“Don't Give Up!”

Comments on Joshua Rothman's article in the New Yorker: "Should You Just Give Up?"

Sisyphus couldn’t stop pushing his boulder—but you can.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-just-give-up

Far be it from me to enter into a debate with an astounding self-help writer. He writes for the New Yorker, so God help me, but I will call him out. Joshua Rothman seems to indicate in his latest article, “Should You Just Give Up?” that sometimes—actually, as a general rule—we should scale back our dreams to land them within the parameters of reasonable or “doable” and thus escape being disappointed or disillusioned. We’d be happier campers. 

Who am I to argue with a man with such august credentials? I am an 80-year-old failure who has faced at least an equal share of unhappiness as most living, breathing humans, but since I entered religious life as a Jesuit when I was 23 after an Ivy League education with its promise of a cushy life with lots of cash and prizes, I have never given up on my dreams. They have, of course, changed and morphed, but they are still as strong a motivating factor as they were on August 15th, 1966. What is most important, however, is that at 80, I am still living my dreams. Life is challenging, exciting, and new if I’m not careful, although when I get up from more frequent naps, I find myself remembering people and events decades old with clarity and sometimes even wonder. But the most frequent emotion is a deep feeling of gratitude. 

However, when Rothman dug up some anecdotal evidence from Kennet Roshi, I dug in my heels. He cites another self-help writer, Oliver Burkeman, who advocates “imperfectionism.”  Burkeman invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.” Once her charges saw their situations as “totally irredeemable,” they gave themselves “permission to stop struggling.” Burkeman counsels: “Instead of setting out to become a master meditator—and buying the requisite books, candles, cushion, and app—you should simply try meditating for five minutes today, and see what happens.”

I am at least 25,000 hours beyond the meditation time I might have logged using his five-minute rule. I also know the first person in the US that Kennet authorized to teach. We talk at least twice a week. Just standing in those qualifications, I want to ask Mr. Burkeman who the fuck he thinks he is to be telling people to give up on the dream of becoming Zen Masters so that they can settle into some kind of semi-pleasurable mediocrity? We need more Zen masters. You have examined the state of our world and, noticing that innumerable unhappy people have given up their dreams, your best advice is just to wake up and do a fact-driven pro and con list to settle on some achievable goals. Then you cite all the pop psychologists you’ve delved into in your 20-year writing career and find evidence that people have been pie in the sky and perhaps just getting real and seeing what they can reasonably do is the best way out. Jung told us just to do what’s at hand. 

I’m not giving blanket advice that talking to someone with perspective isn't valuable or that, when pursuing a quixotic project, talking to a lawyer or accountant is a bad idea; far from it. Perhaps Burkeman is drawing the wrong conclusions from his Kennet anecdote. Maybe it was not to give up at all, but rather to see the situation for what it was, head-on, with no illusions, and then change your approach and give up a strategy that is not working. Yes, of course, stop struggling, but that is not advice to give up. It just means to stop struggling and perhaps stop daydreaming. Go deeper into your dream and discover what it tells you. I am also sure Kennet said to wake up, but certainly, she did not counsel anyone to shut down their dreams.

Picking up the priest from Sacred Heart

Book of Serenity, Case 8: Baizhang’s Fox (Gateless Gate, Case 2)

Once, when Baizhang gave a series of talks, a certain old man was always there listening together with the monks. When they left, he would leave too. One day, however, he remained behind. Baizhang asked him, “Who are you, standing here before me?”

The old man replied, “I am not a human being. In the far distant past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I was head priest at this mountain. One day, a monk asked me, ‘Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?’ I replied, ‘Such a person does not fall under the law of cause and effect.’ With this, I was reborn five hundred times as a fox. Please say a turning word for me and release me from the body of a fox.”

He then asked Baizhang, “Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?”

Baizhang said, “Such a person does not evade the law of cause and effect.” Hearing this, the old man was immediately enlightened.

I don’t know exactly why, but after meditating a few mornings ago, my mind was engulfed by the memory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I was driving my Veterans cab. Late, very late one evening, I received a call from the dispatcher to pick up the priest at Sacred Heart Church on Fillmore and Fell Streets. It was a ghetto parish, not a Jesuit Church, though the devotion to the Sacred Heart was inspired by the visions of the seventeenth-century French mystic Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, who had been guided by her Jesuit spiritual director and confessor, Claude de la Colombière. They are now both saints. I was never much drawn to the devotion, as it felt too saccharine, but I did admire Blessed Claude.

It had to be about 1990. The Church was abandoned in 2004. It had been home to San Francisco’s largest African American Catholic congregation. The San Francisco Black Panthers served breakfast there, and it had been one of the centers for the Catholic anti-war movement, which I’d been part of in the late 60’s. My kind of church.

Originally, we were told the Church was being shuttered because of the huge cost of a seismic retrofit and condemned as too dangerous for public worship. But then it was repurposed as a roller-skating rink called “The Church of 8 Wheels.” Apparently, we don’t care if wild, wacky skaters lived or died. The Convent across Fell Street had already been taken over by a very small Tibetan monastery that’s now gone. 

But that night, I had been called to assist at one of the holy sacraments, a mission of mercy, anointing the dying.

The priest was waiting for me on the church steps rather than the next-door rectory. He was wearing his soutane, with a narrow purple stole beneath a cheap parka. He probably greeted me, but I just remember that he said, “Saint Mary’s Hospital.” Nothing more. At first, I took him for distracted, but I realized that he was carrying the Blessed Eucharist. “Recollected” would be a better word.  

The hospital was about 20 blocks away, across the Pan Handle, very close to Saint Ignatius, the Jesuit church. Under 10 minutes at that time of night. I am almost certain that I blessed myself; I may have even said, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I was now part of a holy rite. The immediacy forced all the Jesuitical arguments about the Real Presence into the background. In that moment, the Lord was real, even his Heart of Compassion. 

As we turned up Stanyan Street, past the ER, the priest said, “main entrance.” I knew the pedestrian door closer to Shrader. He was visiting one of his parishioners, perhaps an old friend, not a gang stabbing victim. One of the Jesuits would have been called for an emergency. I knew for certain that I was present for an intimate moment, the passing between our world and the universe of the Unseen. 

He tried to press a five-dollar bill into my hand. I refused. I watched him quickly climb the steps and ring the nightbell. I waited until the door opened and he disappeared. 

I may have paused for a few minutes to reflect, but not long. I had to pay more than $60 in “gate” fees for my cab before I actually put money in my pocket. There were many nights that I barely paid for dinner. I had to stay alert for my next fare. 

The Great Star Theater and the Monkey King

For about a half dozen years, several decades ago, I dated LC, who was born and raised in Canton; he loved Chinese opera, the Cantonese version. We never missed a performance by any troupe touring from Hong Kong. They usually played at the Great Star Theater on Jackson near Portsmouth Square in San Francisco, though I remember one more elaborate production at the new theater in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens.

I started going because I was invited and I was curious, especially after seeing the film “Farewell My Concubine” in Honolulu when I was at Kokuan studying with Robert Aitken. But after my third or fourth opera, I came to appreciate the artistry and stagecraft. The singing took some getting used to. Most times, I was the only caucasian in the crowd, mostly aunties and uncles from Chinatown, plus a few immigrant families with bewildered children.

At the Great Star, we always sat as close to the stage as possible. Loren thought he was getting his money's worth when he could see the faces of the protagonists up close, even their spit. One denouement involved the unraveling of a puzzling intrigue: the eight immortals, aided by Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, escaped a terrible situation. Several players and singers were swinging above the stage on harnesses. It was very dramatic. The stage engineering was pretty basic. One of the stage lights crashed down and almost landed on me. There was only a slight pause while the stage crew swept up broken glass, and the performers picked up where they’d been interrupted. The audience wanted the climax. On the way out, I was told that I was going to experience good fortune, having narrowly escaped serious injury.

The blinders of religious doctrine and superstition.

Recently, a person who uses the name “Zapp” commented on my post, “The funeral of Ösel Tendzin. Deliver us from cults.”

Originally published Saturday, July 24, 2021, in my other blog “Koan Conversations.” https://www.koansconversations.com/2021/05/the-funeral-of-osel-tendzin-deliver-us.html

Zapp says, “The AIDS epidemic of the mid-eighties was an unprecedented catastrophe, a deadly mystery that blindsided the world. In that climate of sheer ignorance and terror, no one possessed a cure or truly understood the virus. To condemn a spiritual leader for attempting to combat the unknown with the only tools he had—faith and practice—is to project modern understanding onto a time of global panic. Hindsight is 20/20. The Vajra Regent did not kill anyone; the AIDS pandemic did. To claim otherwise is a wrongheaded and infantile simplification of a devastating historical reality.”

Zapp, I would like to defend myself from the accusation of being “wrongheaded and infantile.” Let me refresh your memory with a few facts. 

Regarding the known, published scientific knowledge about HIV, your statement “no one possessed a cure or truly understood the virus” is inaccurate. The medical community recognized AIDS as sexually transmitted in late 1982/early 1983. The CDC reported clues in March 1983 that AIDS could spread through sexual contact, and issued guidelines noting transmission via sexual contact and blood, solidifying the understanding of sexual transmission alongside other routes like contaminated blood. They confirmed their findings in 1984.  I was actually in conversation with the research team at Moffitt Hospital, UCSF, which developed and publicized the safer sex guidelines at about the same time. I was dating one of the doctors. They didn’t waste time. So respectfully, you’re wrong. 

With respect to the Vajra Regent, by his own admission, he knew he was infected with HIV and did not take measures to protect his partners.

“. . . [I]n December 1988, the most harmful crisis ever to strike an American Buddhist community unfolded when Vajradhatu administrators told their members that the Regent had been infected with the AIDS virus for nearly three years. Members of the Vajradhatu board of directors conceded that, except for some months of celibacy, he had neither protected his many sexual partners nor told them the truth. One of the Regent’s sexual partners, the son of long-term students, was infected, as was a young woman who had later made love to the young man.

“Two members of the Vajradhatu board of directors had known of his infection for more than two years, and chose to do nothing. Trungpa Rinpoche had also known about it before his death. Board members had reluctantly informed the sangha (community) only after trying for three months to persuade the Regent to act on his own.

“‘Thinking I had some extraordinary means of protection, I went ahead with my business as if something would take care of it for me,’ Tendzin reportedly told a stunned community meeting organized in Berkeley in mid-December.” (Katy Butler, Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America, Common Boundary Magazine, 1990 May/June) 

So, Zapp, I hate to break it to you, but Thomas Rich was responsible for the death of at least one person who had put their trust in him as a Buddhist teacher. Given that he was known to be sexually promiscuous, this is a low estimate. I took care of one man who died of HIV/AIDS complications, who’d spent a lot of time at RMDC, and the Regent’s sexual activities were well known. I have compassion for the man.

For me, there is a deeper question and concern: what do we do about it? I have been practicing for almost 50 years. How do I serve the community and friends I love? I have to be honest. I try to be very careful when I speak about abuse, as well as observing the precepts as faithfully as I can. I take no joy in reporting the massive failures of those who have willingly assumed the burden of leadership in our communities. 

However, sexual abuse and exploitation of students haven’t stopped. A young woman I know well was raped last year by a Nagpo Lama in Dharamsala, India, where I have been living and practicing for more than a decade. She was in great pain, and her practice was harmed. She filed charges, and the lama wound up in jail until some rich students bailed him out. His students are also aware of the rinpoche’s sexual habits, but choose to remain silent and enable him. 

I hesitate to call you out, but I cannot allow the blinders of religious doctrine and superstition to let you either lie or remain ignorant. We have to be honest. Let’s try to continue our practice as best we can. 

What Compels Belief?

Originally posted Wednesday, May 1, 2024

When I wrote that I was having trouble with “the God question.” I was stuck, logically, perhaps linguistically, even structurally, with a long essay that I’d been working on for months, “A Buddhist looks at the proofs for the existence of God.” How might we consider the nontheistic stance of most Buddhist philosophers as they examine scholastic philosophy?  My starting point was Thomas Aquinas’s “Unmoved Mover,” then moving through the other “rational” arguments for the existence of God, including Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument. I examined each argument objectively to determine how or if I was moved to belief. I am happy to say that I am still an agnostic until you lock me up in the shrine room or hand me a personal crisis I need help with.

But I find something lacking in a strictly intellectual discourse. There’s no emotional juice. I think the materialists bypass or even eliminate emotions because they make things messy. 

A friend suggested that I try the Gaia or Goddess model, and my personal reaction was: Is there something intellectual, spiritual, or material lacking in my life that 'believing’ in the goddess would remedy? Suddenly, I was thrown out of my ordinary world. Of course, all beliefs have consequences. Even a cursory self-examination reveals that many beliefs, assumptions about reality, and even prejudices influence me, even when I am not entirely aware of their existence, much less of their influence or inner workings. Do I believe simply because it makes me feel good, or do I believe because I am persuaded by a convincing rational argument? When I Google the scientific effects of serotonin levels in people of faith, it will show that in the long run, I will be happier if I surrender some of my mad, neurotic desire to seize control and hand it over to a Higher Power. If I believe that the early bird catches the worm, I get up earlier, catch people when they are more alert, make more money, and thus am happier. Or maybe not. Using Pascal’s bet: my chances of happiness remain high as long as you don’t require that I bet the farm.

My mother changed doctors when she found out that her specialist didn’t believe in God. She told me that confidence in a physician was based on a belief that decisions about her health were guided by God’s invisible hand. When faced with major surgery in the last years of her life, she turned to a team of Indian doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital. I didn’t ask her whether she had checked their religious credentials, but I suspect it fell into the “They believe in something” category—Krishna, Jesus, deities tend to blend into one as we age. Yes, among my beliefs is that Indian doctors make a much better living in New Haven than in New Delhi. Perhaps a motivational belief for Indian medical students when applying for residency in the US turns out to be true: an Indian doctor in the US earns between 125,000 and 180,000 USD, whereas in India, he or she would only earn about 50,000 USD.

I have argued that “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a junk statement, but it persists. “Something is better than nothing” is not a strictly philosophical or faith statement. Let me examine it more closely. What kind of belief statements does it encompass, and how are these statements changed, strengthened, or made true by a personal assertion that they are true always and everywhere, despite any evidence to the contrary? Let’s look at a few examples.

In Germany in the 1930s, the belief that the Aryan race was superior to the rest of humankind was gaining traction. It had such dire consequences that it would probably be best left on the junk heap of intellectual, spiritual, and moral history. But enough people assented, and it devolved into a horrific war, as well as the attempted extermination of the Jewish race.

In the West, or at least among intellectual elites, people adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But before the end of the Second World War, the statement or definition was not “a given.” Most of the male governing class agreed that any statement would include civil and political rights, until Eleanor Roosevelt convinced the United Nations to include social, economic, and cultural rights. Her belief has changed how we think about and argue about the structure of human society on Earth. 

Some have argued that, in his comments on Genesis 1, Augustine's claim that the Lord gave humanity dominion over the earth and its creatures set the stage for the exploitation of the earth that has led to the climate crisis. The burnt earth thesis probably extends further into the early Fathers, and it is even harder to prove that, as a belief, it was partially responsible. Adopting some notion of Gaia, or goddess consciousness, might be an antidote to this kind of thinking and nudge us to treat the material world with more respect and even reverence. Thank you Gerta Thunburg for capturing our imagination. You show us that belief takes more than just intellectual assent. Imagination and dreams carry some weight.

Does assenting to a personal belief in a God being, he/she/it, god or goddess, have any value? I could argue that it might have the opposite effect: it muddies the waters and makes us “deluded,” to borrow a Buddhist term. It might be time to go back to Saint Thomas and Anslem to disentangle the mess I got myself into.

The Test of Suffering

“If you can’t make your argument briefly, you probably don’t have an argument.” John Meacham

After he read my last post, my friend James Ismael Ford asked, ”What are the consequences of so much of Buddhism in the West's proximity to the self-help industry? I look forward to your analysis.”

The short answer is suffering, but the question is not easy. There are different kinds of suffering, and some medicines are better than others for the kind of disease you're suffering from.

Who am I to be splitting hairs in what appears to be a somewhat technical Buddhist dispute about suffering and the causes of suffering? Suffering, real or imagined, is the reason why our Western version of Buddhism gets entangled with the Self-Help Industry. It’s hard for me to be objective. I’ve got a pony in this race. It was a very personal experience of suffering, both real and imagined, that led me to a cushion in a zendo. That’s factual, and I am not alone. This personal experience has helped me with what I call “a working position” for my own life—if it helps relieve suffering, it is worthwhile. 

Without trying to be all super-Zen and theological, it is a bit like the contrast between gradualist and sudden enlightenment in the Platform Sutra. The Fifth Patriarch issued a challenge. The head monk wrote for the gradualist position, “Little by little, one small speck of suffering at a time, wipe the mirror clean and do your best to keep your house in order,” while our disruptive hero, Hui Neng, blasted the Big Bang Zen position, “The mind is not a mirror. It’s all Suffering and it’s not. Open your eyes to Emptiness. That’s always here.” Little by little, then all at once.

To reintroduce the Self-Help Industry: there are as many valid reasons to put some money down and sit in a hotel meeting room for several days listening to Werner Erhard as there are to shy away and continue a boring day-to-day routine. (For the record, I have spent far more than several days with Werner’s programs, and my dollars were well spent.) Weighing the positives and negatives of taking action is a human trait. I can list my personal reasons to distrust Buddhism, to avoid the teaching, or to dive into the Tao. It’s a choice.

As I said, I am no expert. Here in Thailand, I live alone and spend much of my time by myself. Of course, I am not a recluse in a cave in the remote hinterlands of China; I have cable and wifi. I meet and talk with other people, family and friends, though by choice in small doses, but most importantly, I have time to meditate, read, reflect, and write; I feel an obligation to use this gift wisely. I haven’t answered my own question, but I am inching closer to what I have at stake in any answer, and as I do, I feel a great deal of gratitude that I have been given enough freedom to explore the question.

I try to sit for at least two periods a day. It is something I usually look forward to; now that I am past 80, I have given myself permission to sit in a chair. Recently, I started to end with a private ceremony. I wanted to put an end to my formal meditation and boot up the computer with some equanimity. One of the English versions of the Heart Sutra allows me to acknowledge that all there is is the moment right here in front of me. I feel some confirmation that I am Buddhist, at least in the sense that I want to see an end to suffering, mine as well as other people’s, and most importantly, that I am willing to dedicate myself toward that goal. 

Suffering is not fun. But I have observed that there isn’t just one kind of suffering as if it had a unique DNA marker. I have explored the kind of suffering that comes from an indulgent interpretation of past events, or from being deprived of an imagined right to exercise my power and grab what I think I need. Then I stand back and see how different that is from the unimaginable suffering of innocent settlers in the kibbutzim on the borders of Gaza and the equally horrific suffering of Palestinian mothers and children caught in crossfire with nowhere to turn, I know that my petty suffering is just that, petty and self-serving, and there is almost unendurable suffering. There is no way to take back the actions that have caused it.

The Self-Help Industry through the Test of Suffering. Transference and Projection*.

When I was on staff at Landmark Education, a few other Zen students showed up. There were rumors of another former Jesuit who became one of Werner’s Forum leaders, but I never met him. During the time I coached the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, six women students of Cheri Huber drove from the Sierra foothills to San Francisco for group work. Their SELP projects were wonderful and had a very Zen feel to them, something that my teacher Issan would have been proud of, reaching out to marginalized and homeless vets in the area. Then out of the blue, another friend, my Jesuit brother, Tom Marshal, told me that Gempo Roshi’s students in Salt Lake often did the Landmark Forum “in order to discern the Spirits,” an odd but refreshing mash-up of spiritual technologies. But all that is just anecdotal evidence of a connection. I only mention it to note that often the proximity can be very real, real Zen practitioners. 

But rather than consider a few outliers, I am going to turn to the language we use in practice to examine the connection. Monks from the Golden Age of Zen, more than a thousand years ago, never heard the words “Projection” or “Transference,” but they are part of most modern Western Zen students' working vocabulary. We learn them as quickly as we use gassho and kensho in our practice conversations. However, both words have a whole set of nuances that are hidden, assumed, or poorly understood. A woman priest whom I respect said, “It's about realization and recognition and withdrawing unconscious projections.” 

The advent of the new psychological gurus depends, in my view, on the emergence of two strains of teaching. First is undoubtedly G.I. Gurdjieff, but no less important is Freud. More on that later. 

“If you want someone perfect, write a novel.” I might add the caution: “If you want someone perfect, don’t look for a guru."

__________________

*Psychological projection is a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with difficult feelings or emotions. Psychological projection involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with them.

*Carotenuto, A. (1991). Kant's dove: The history of transference in psychoanalysis. (J. Tambureno, Trans.). Chiron Publications.

Mr. Gurdjieff was a misogynist. Period. I brought receipts.

Is someone trying to edit him? Compare the meeting notes of Thursday, July 22nd, appearing in “Transcripts Of Gurdjieff's Wartime Meetings 1941-1946” (Book Studio, p.19) with the meeting of the same date recorded in “G.I. Gurdjieff Paris Meetings 1943” (Dolmen Meadow Editions, p.87).

There is a substantial missing passage in the Dolmen Meadow version. The excised passage in full reads:

[A long silence.]

P: May I ask a question, sir? There is one thing which has preoccupied me for a long time. How should a man act towards a woman so as to be her master and make her happy? To be really master of the situation.

Gurdjieff: Your question is, what is it necessary to do. First of all you must be a man inside yourself. Every woman should feel herself a man’s slave. This is the property of women, they are made that way. For that there is a law. You ought to represent the boss, the master. You should consider all things as the master. If you are like that, she, without manipulation, without anything, (it always happens) becomes your slave. Without explanations or anything, it only depends on you. If I am a man I will have a woman. This depends on what I am, what you are. If I ought to have seven wives all seven will be my slaves, perhaps because I am a man. Not only will all seven be unable to deceive me but they will tremble at the mere idea of deceiving me; they feel that they have a master. These seven women always and everywhere are my slaves. This, firstly, is what is necessary. Now secondly many other things are still necessary. What I have just said is the main thing. Now I say secondly: You are man, she is woman. Nature has given you more possibilities than to woman. You have more physical strength; everything you have more than her. Amongst all these things you have more logical thought than the woman. You should first prepare her, calm her, put her into a certain state and then logically explain to her what can happen for the future. Show her life not for today but life in a month, in a year, in five years time. As it is established on earth that if husband and wife live well together they will live a long time together, and as life is long it is necessary to explain to her what things she must not do and what she must do. If you explain to her as I have told you, she will do it.

P: One must not be angry, never negative?

Gurdjieff: You must be the opposite. Science says a woman is hysterical, she has five Fridays in one week. Man, a real man, has one Friday. Science of all epochs explains this. If you are not master of your state you do not know which Friday she has today. What you have decided, put that into her. You tell her. Even if she is at Friday number three, do the same number four or number five—do the same. If you continue a hundred times, a thousand times, she will transform herself and will receive that which you wish. You are obliged to be a man; she is obliged to fulfil her obligations as a woman. You cannot be egoist. You are a man. You ought to demand of her that she be woman. If the man is an egoist, he is merde. He wants to do everything (as it pleases him, by chance) and he expects his wife to be a woman? Little by little it can happen that she may reach the same state as him; either nature does it or it becomes established by force of law. Begin at the beginning. If she has five Fridays a week and if you, not being a man, have two or even three Fridays in a week, first of all, try, like any normal person to have only one Friday each week. When you succeed in having only one Friday, she too will have only one Saturday. Logical thought even automatically makes understandable the present, past, future and the rest. The man must be a man. Your question is very original and characteristic for everybody. A man can demand everything of his wife but he can only demand if he is, in truth, a man. If he is a man of the middle sex it is impossible. This, by the way, exists in all languages; there are two kinds of prostitutes, prostitutes in skirts and prostitutes in trousers. In trousers it is neither man nor woman—middle sex. He who always in his waking state is a man can never belong to the middle sex. Whether it be his mother, his sister or his wife, she will act as she is told to. Woman does not depend upon herself. If you are not a man then you are a prostitute and you suggest to her that which she is. You are half a man.

[All fall silent.]    

(@Dan Chirica)

The Stray Dog, Wandering with Gurdjieff

Real Wars kill people. Mythological Wars create cults

23rd April 2022, the Feast of Saint George

I'm going to write about Mr. Gurdjieff against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I cannot hide from real human suffering. If I really acknowledge how little I can do to change this situation, I know I'm powerless. Nonetheless, I constantly check online for the latest updates. I count the children evacuated from Mariupol. I wonder how many fighters remain in the labyrinth of bunkers and tunnels built to withstand a nuclear attack.

I know which side I should root for, or more accurately, I know which side I want to win, although I'm not aware of all the factors that govern my impulses. It seems clear that there are good guys and bad guys. I don’t know if Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hiding secret sins, but I can see Vladimir Putin in Russian TV news clips, keeping his distance at the end of a long white table with arcane golden imperial symbols planting its legs on the floor. His generals sit far away. Does anyone give him accurate information about the progress of his narcissistic war? It's a world of lies and manipulation. I have no reason to believe otherwise, though if I were in Russia, I would hear an entirely different story, and I know I would feel differently. What is accurate information, what is propaganda, and how can I tell the difference? Using filtered information is always tricky. I find sympathy impossible.

I am uneasy. My perceptions are almost archetypal, like watching Arjuna and Lord Krishna surveying the battlefield, going on and on about the “big picture.” I should direct my reflection back to the Bhagavad Gita when things are less heated, the actual winners and losers have been sorted out, and the bodies buried. All wars have consequences, but I am not in the horrific underground labyrinth of Mariupol. It is a theoretical conversation. I cannot know how or where we have been injured, even when I try to get personal about the cost.

However, this mythic, fable-like perspective is perfect for examining the story of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

The Stray Dog*

More than 100 years ago, during the Bolshevik Revolution, very close to this same battlefield, Gurdjieff started his wandering that would eventually take him and his followers to France. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to establish his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Tbilisi, then soon after in Essentuki. By 1920, he and his followers left Georgia for Constantinople. He'd become a stray dog, forced into roaming by the progenitors of the army currently bombing, slaughtering, and raping.

This small group of men and women was drawn from the Russian elite. Eventually, they found their way to Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon. This French chateau, the residence of Louis XIV's secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, was abandoned after a previous revolution impoverished its aristocratic owner. Then the first major global conflict created a mammoth fixer-upper where these homeless exiles set up an esoteric school.

They remained an elite group for the next 29 years he taught. Some prominent figures came to study with Gurdjieff, but he authorized very few senior students as teachers and left us scant, for the most part, very difficult, poorly written materials. Yet he has an outsized impact on modern spirituality. Many proponents of the Western Enneagram cite Gurdjieff as the source of their psychological/spiritual tool, though their claims are far from certain.

Gurdjieff was vague about his teachers. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, and in several other places, he makes them the stuff of legend, idealized characters, almost caricatures in a mythic story of discovery and intrigue. They imparted a special, hidden teaching. They are never clearly identified. This is the very nature of esotericism—obscure and only understood by a small number of people with special (and perhaps secret) knowledge. Understanding these teachings requires an initiation.

I meet “The Work.”

I moved to Berkeley in 1973 and began work in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth, a name he borrowed from Gurdjieff. Our group of 50 to 60 people came from all walks of life. There were psychologists and professors, a Jesuit priest and a Franciscan Friar, two seminarians, one former nun, a devotee of Swami Rudrananda, a rabbi’s wife, and one woman who’d been associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation; several Ph.D.’s, two medical doctors, school teachers, at least one lawyer, more than a handful of psychology graduate students, body workers, therapists, a film-maker, a martial artist, a C-level New York fashion executive, Ravi Shankar’s mother-in-law, one professional journalist and a film distributor; but there were also carpenters, house painters and a French hippie. We were mostly white, straight (only 2 or 3 gay people), a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim, and a few Asians.

We explored the Enneagram of Fixations, and, by extension, told ourselves we were engaging in “The Work.” The figure of G.I. Gurdjieff, always referred to as “Mr. Gurdjieff,” or "Mr. G.," his pronouncements, statements about the nature of the universe, humankind’s ultimate purpose, and his methods for spiritual work were treated as sacrosanct.  Beelzebub's Tales was spoken of in hushed tones, but rarely read. If you read it but didn’t understand his jibberish or the insidious properties of the mysterious organ Kundabuffer, you were advised to re-board the spaceship Karnak and delve more deeply into the mysteries that eluded you. This language purported to have roots in several esoteric Eastern spiritual disciplines. Using it, wrestling with the complexity of the inner states it purported to describe, was part of the process of introspection, which Gurdjieff described as “Self-Remembering.”

Gurdjieff’s teaching has been passed down to us in several distinct categories. The carefully written unreadable book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man; Meetings with Remarkable Men, apparently combines his own autobiographical work with a draft by his student, A.R. Orage, and finally Life is Real Only Then, When “I Am,” are fragments of talks edited by one of his principle students, Jeanne de Salzmann. The writing of students that Gurdjieff authorized, most notably P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, also received his imprimatur.

There are anecdotal memoirs of students, plus extensive transcripts of his talks. The writings of men and women (both genders are represented, but men far outnumber women) who stand in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers who purport to transmit Gurdjieff’s teaching and to claim authority to teach. Finally, there are extensive writings by people who describe their own experiences and interpretations of his teachings. These vary widely from memoir to metaphysical speculation to hagiography.

I use the word “myth” to denote stories told about Gurdjieff’s understanding of the complexity of our human nature, driven by some overriding knowledge of the ultimate purpose of our human predicament. They include the repetition of phrases or instructions to people who sought his direction as they undertook their own inner search. Though Gurdjieff was a real person who had real contacts with humans that were, from their reports, immensely transformative, the myths that I am talking about are, for the most part, second-generation, embellished stories that share more with Aeneas’s journey from Troy than, and (I chose my example carefully) Krishnamurti’s talks at Ojai. Though I love Virgil’s poetry, I prize Jiddu Krishnamurti’s analysis.

I was born five years before Gurdjieff died in Paris, 29 October 1949. I met and had several conversations with one person, Lord John Pentland, who knew Gurdjieff over a long period and had been his student as well as a person he authorized to teach. I also knew several of Pentland’s students, most intimately a fellow Jesuit and gay man, Father Tom Charbeneau. I met the writer, Pamela Travers, who was Gurdjieff’s student, and I had a long association with Kathy Speeth, who sat on Gurdjieff’s knee when she was a toddler. I worked intensively for several years with Henry Korman, who claimed to be in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers, but later confessed to being a fraud. Others, most importantly Claudio Naranjo, used selected phrases and stories about Gurdjieff in their own teaching. Although I have combined this experience with my wide reading, I state at the outset that I am not a student of the Fourth Way, nor do I claim to have conducted a comprehensive study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching.

Gurdjieff’s public portrait is complex and tightly edited by his followers. On top of that, each one does his or her own editing. I have tried to report as accurately as possible what I can surmise from my own reading and research, as well as what I’ve been able to glean from second-hand accounts. For the purposes of argument, I've set my narrative against an idealized version of the man I’ve pieced together. Naranjo did not present himself as an heir to Gurdjieff’s teaching, but he was certainly conversant with it and frequently cited Gurdjieff as a prototypical teacher of the inner work he favored. He labeled him a “trickster,” standing in a venerable line of teachers who use unorthodox, even unethical means to compel a student to learn something they can’t see for themselves. Naranjo talked about “The School,” an interrelated set of teachings and teachers whose work could be traced, using some psychic map, to the same Source.

This unfettered style often veers outside normal ethical norms and opens the possibility for abuse. The end justifies the means. Our newfound sexual freedom encouraged an attitude of laissez-faire, which inevitably led to exploitation. Naranjo was very interested in psychedelics—he encouraged experimentation with drugs, notably LSD and Ayahuasca; he and his leaders allowed interactions that were outside professional guidelines; teachers’ credentials went unchecked or were inflated. In post-hippie, Beatnik California, Naranjo was not alone, encouraging some of these behaviors, engaging in some, and turning a blind eye to others. Many New Age teachers shared this sin. It comes part and parcel with the top-down authority structure that framed the conversation.

Trying to be as transparent as I can be in this conversation, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my adult life exploring New Age esoteric and occult, a highly suspect endeavor, populated with the likes of Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Charles Webster Leadbeater, or Aleister Crowley. They all purported to be authentic or enlightened teachers with a clear channel to “All that Is.” This is rocky terrain, rife with snake oil salesmen and outright frauds. Some of these people were more convincing than others, basically because they spun better yarns, but the frauds all seem to have this in common—their stock in trade was taking advantage of vulnerable people. In my case, it was a severe personal crisis that I didn’t even recognize. I was looking for a way out. By directing my attention to my plight, seeming to dismantle it and returning life to some level of normalcy, acceptance, and happiness, roped me into its intrigue.

Several friends have discouraged my investigation. One asserts that Naranjo is not as important as he was when we were part of SAT, that his influence is waning. Another warns that negative comments deter people from undertaking the difficult work of introspection. These cautions do not deter me. The influence of Gurdjieff in modern, non-religious practice is far wider than might appear at first glance. It warrants examination. It extends from the presentation of the Enneagram in a Catholic setting to several “Human Potential Trainings/Processes,” notably the processes directly connected to the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, which Naranjo promoted and introduced to SAT. 

Most importantly, “The Work '' struck a chord with me, opening up a world that I had to explore. I got caught in the trap of not being able to see my own plight clearly. When I could open my eyes, I was forced to admit that I’d been the fool. It was a very uncomfortable predicament. The amount of personal capital that I’d already invested obscured the situation. What makes this gnostic enterprise difficult to crack is that it begins to unmask both the entrapment and the self-deception, the very thing that I’d sought to free myself from in the first place. It provided some sense of relief, but a half-right answer is still wrong. Freeing one hand provided relief, but I was still a slave.

The logical fallacy of the Argument from Authority.

Let's examine the logical fallacy that brings down the whole house of cards. Gurdjieff argues that man has the possibility of being awake, but to wake up, he or she must set an alarm, a conscious mechanism he or she inserts into his unconscious routine to remind him that it's a dream. But there’s a catch: once the alarm clock has been set and has worked a few times, the mechanisms of our human mind grow numb to its sound, and it doesn't work. We fall back into sleep. The human perpetual sleeping machine needs a perpetual waking machine, one that stands outside the habitual way of being. Thus, we need an awake man (sometimes a woman, but rarely), a guru who knows, vs. an ordinary asleep man just going through the rituals of survival and coping. To top off the esoteric mechanism, when you realize that you are asleep, you need to find and pay this awake person to wake you up.*

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true. This is also known as an appeal to authority. This fallacy occurs when person Y claims that person X is experienced in the topic at hand. Therefore, whatever person X believes is the truth. Alternatively, this can also occur if person Y claims to be the authority, therefore whatever person Y believes is true. This fallacy is a special case of the generic fallacy where the source is used to justify the acceptance of a conclusion.”

Who stands in the position of X at the top of the enterprise of the Western Enneagram as the person of authority? When describing the origins of the Enneagram, we find oblique references to Gurdjieff. The main candidates for any authorized source swing between the truly secret teaching of Gurdjieff or his followers, to Arica founder Oscar Ichazo and his student Naranjo, with some dubious stops in the Sarmoung or Naqshbandi brotherhood, or (this one is close to my heart) in the work of a 17th-century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher. 

I argue that all these stories are fishy—to use a technical term. Most conversations about spiritual life are crippled by weak arguments. The impulse to expand the world beyond what we can perceive and verify is not the exclusive property of Gurdjieff's metaphysical construct. The awake person knows something that you do not know, something your present condition blinds you from seeing, but something that can alter your present condition by correct analysis. I argue that this argument from authority is consistent across all revealed religions: for example, the dogmatic claim that the Pope, by virtue of his authority alone, can issue statements that are “infallibly true” despite any factual evidence. I will also point to the passion for miracles, physical occurrences that stand outside the normal laws of cause and effect. I use the word “passion'' purposefully because even if we can’t personally witness these extraordinary events, we “believe” them, assuring ourselves in the benevolence of the unseen world, guiding us when we lack clarity, and for the purposes of this argument, providing authority as we grapple with the unknown.

The proponents of what I call the Western Enneagram Teaching as a tool for self-observation point to the appearance of the nine-pointed mandala in Gurdjieff’s teaching, plus a few other references, found mostly in the works of Ouspensky and Bennett. But in Gurdjieff, the Enneagram outlines the steps for the movements, or sacred dancing, combined with a rather complex set of laws of three and octaves—certainly nothing that points to 27 categories of personality fixations, virtues, or holy work.

The first person in the Americas, and the first person to refer to an Enneagon, was the Bolivian esotericist Oscar Ichazo. In 1968, Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. It was there that Naranjo made contact with Ichazo. Later at Ichazo’s first training in Arica, Chile, Naranjo began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations.

Naranjo wove a convoluted tale of Sufi masters disguising their teaching and tricking their disciples, and wove it into his story about receiving the Enneagram from Ichazo. My skeptic tells me he was just trying to establish an authorized teaching lineage by characterizing his difficult relationship with Ichazo as a Sufi trick. To further break with the pesky facts, Naranjo describes his understanding of the Enneagram as the result of automatic writing. Appealing to an otherworldly realm for evidence, one of Ichazo’s disciples says that an esoteric volume fell from a shelf in Ichazo’s study, opened up to the Enneagon diagram, and Ichazo divined its gnostic meaning.

I want to point out that all these conversations themselves are privileged. They rely on the status of the speaker rather than hard evidence to prove the validity of the Enneagram/Enneagon. Both the claims and statements fall entirely within the argument from authority to confirm the system’s validity.

You don’t believe me? Then why are we still having this argument about the correct or authorized source? Q.E.D.

Debunking some myths around “Mr. Gurdjieff” and “The Work.”

Before I begin to debunk any mythological constructs. I will note what first attracted me to "The Work,” what I found useful, where I opened myself to abuse, and finally, how I began to become disenchanted. Throughout, I will be paying close attention to language. Zen posits that what's important to discuss is beyond words, but we have to use words; they may be an approximation, but they are the only tool available to humans. Some esoteric language points to important issues in life, while other language—I will use a less technical, but very precise, word to describe this abuse—is gibberish.

When I was 29 years old, after just a few months working with Naranjo, I had an experience that lifted a huge weight that I’d been carrying for many years. Sitting in that ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley, it struck like lightning. Its debris would take years to sweep up. I uncovered the motivation for my decision to train as a Jesuit, a dream that began in adolescence. Unpacking it, dealing with the consequences, including the abuse that played out, would be a long, slow, and costly process, but it opened a new vista for my life that I could not have imagined. I remain grateful, but in retrospect, the experience was so overwhelming that I was blinded to its limitations.

These were heady days. Naranjo told us that he was setting up a school that would be a smorgasbord of available spiritual disciplines, shorthand for “Esalen Style.” Experimentation was the norm, and, given the circumstances, the path might prove rocky, even dangerous. I knew that I needed psychological help, but I also wanted to avoid professional treatment. As a Jesuit, therapy was not out of bounds, but still carried enormous baggage if I wanted to advance in the Order. The prospect of blending spirituality with the insights of psychology provided cover. For any psychological process to work, however, it requires a level of vulnerability, but in the freewheeling world of SAT, time-tested ethical and professional principles have been suspended. There were casualties, and personally, I ran up against very difficult obstacles. Being raped by an uneducated tailor who claimed to be the psychic channel for a dead psychiatrist certainly fits in that category.

Naranjo, much like Gurdjieff in Meetings with Remarkable Men, told tales of receiving information from other sources. Bob Hoffman told him things about his past that Hoffman could not have possibly known, or that was Naranjo’s claim,* and therefore the whole group would be subjected to the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, despite Hoffman’s obvious lack of professionalism. On the other hand, the discipline of Fritz Perls was far from unprofessional, and when Naranjo sat in that chair, he was the consummate professional. People in SAT relied on Helen Palmer’s costly psychic readings as prognosticators of behavior patterns, things to work on. Some people used their alleged connections to the other side as sources for psychological investigation. There was Anne Armstrong (who gave me unsolicited and disastrous advice about a business deal) and a specious Chilean palm reader to whom Kathy Speeth is indebted for losing her license to practice therapy in California.

I made a list and named names, far from complete, to point out the otherworldly, suspect sources of many of the psychological techniques used to probe the roots of personal psychological makeup. Key to any of this having therapeutic benefits is surrender. Suspension of judgment opens the back door to the unexpected, revelatory, hidden motivations, the dark family secret that has been lurking and putting up barriers. However, investigation shifts from analysis of counterproductive behaviors to tracing their source, as if dream analysis á la Oracle at Delphi had become a substitute for free association, and the mind-altering experience of LSD a quick route to the fruits of meditation practice.

But what if this type of inquiry does not stand the test of time or produce real results? Spiritual charlatans have a huge bag of tricks—they act like drugs—to induce experiences of ecstasy and revelation. I was told over and over to “suspend [my] judgment, enter into another state where things will be revealed.” This is an exact quote; some version of this is repeated ad nauseam to this day. To be honest, sometimes sleight of hand is useful in discovering a personal blind spot, but at some point, if the trick is not revealed for what it is, it becomes part of the illusion.

We know that some mental processes work below the surface. They are unconscious; if they remain hidden, they wield enormous influence, and we remain in their thrall. But a simple dream about having a heart attack is no predictor. Casual or surface exploration serves little purpose other than to induce fear. When a friend told me about having a dream like this, I asked if he’d seen a cardiologist. But I also knew that I suspended my judgment many times when it would have been better to allow my actually well-trained critical faculty to maintain the upper hand.

Hoffman once told me that his dreams had predicted that he would be cured of cancer because he had a higher calling, and I believed him until I took care of him when he was dying of cancer. I’d been doing professional hospice work for nearly a decade, so I was not particularly shocked by his lack of acceptance of his own death. He was in complete denial, expecting another psychic miracle and very angry when it didn’t appear. I have detailed some of the unraveling of his pretense and absurd lies behind his psychic understanding of life in other writings. Perhaps I ought to listen to my mother and not speak ill of the dead. I have to confess that I was far too close to the man to be objective. His sexual abuse was always in the background, but he never made amends—he was far too arrogant to admit any faults. But there was also something more interesting going on, the beginnings of the erosion of the framework underpinning his system and, by extension, the entire work that Naranjo undertook with his groups.

In response to a friend's request to examine particular Gurdjieff sources, I came across some talks in which he made very definitive statements about the differing roles of women and men. These were the urtexts, transcriptions of his talks to students either at Le Prieuré or in his Paris flat. It seemed all very high-tone, even provocative, but it had the confrontational tone of a bully. Part of my mind revolted, and I realized that it was simply outright misogyny, delivered in an extremely arrogant tone, quite similar to what I experienced in the men whom I’d met who claimed their authority by referencing the Armenian seer.

There was no abrupt “Ah ha” moment. In my mind, I'd constructed a protective shield for this figure who was held in utmost reverence by people I respected. He was, we were told, a man who knew himself. I told myself that the misogyny had to be a function of time, place, and circumstance; this charismatic member of an elite group who’d undertaken a heroic exploration of ancient traditions and helped find a key to some of life's mysteries, and provided a key, or what I imagined was a key, to self-understanding.

But what if Gurdjieff himself was an ordinary man ruled by circumstance? Being a man lulled to sleep by life’s circumstances was exactly what “The Work'' sets out to conquer. This sleep keeps us enslaved. What about all the rest of what Gurdjieff claimed? The house of cards began to fall. I gave up surrendering to a set of ideas that produced a modicum of results. They were based almost exclusively on the word of a man who claimed authority by his experience and hard-won understanding of man’s plight. It stood or fell on his authority, real or imagined. I could no longer stake my life on this teaching.

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true.” But what this authority figure proposed was blatantly false. What Hoffman claimed about the psychic workings of the mind was absurd. Naranjo's claim about the origin of the Enneagram of fixations was at best a hallucination. Gurdjieff was a bully, a sexist, and a misogynist. Believe them at your own peril. Q.E.D.

I do not, however, want to throw out the whole barrel as if it were filled with rotten fish that stinks to high heaven. I remembered the words of Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, whom Gurdjieff thought was a convivial partner to share a glass of vodka with at The Stray Dog, but “a weak man”. If Self-Remembering can get us here, even for an instant, it was worth all the effort.

“…that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it.”

And I emphasize this sentence: “And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards.”

After a period of time and reflection. It took a while.

____________________

Notes:

*The Stray Dog. A Saint Petersburg cafe where Gurdjieff held forth, according to G. Lachman. It is the presumed site that elicited the comment from Gurdjieff that Ouspenskyy was a personable guy to drink vodka with, but a weak man.

* When I first heard of wokeism, this is what my mind conjured up, and the term does insist on a degree of blanket “correctness,” including its underlying assumptions.

Ichazo has said that “in order to understand the originality of the perspective of the Arica Integral Teachings, it is important to remember that Buddhism is based on the epistemological and immediate discovery or knowledge of the world as being fundamentally in a state of suffering (Skt. samsara). This is the First Noble Truth. What the Arica Theory proposes is an ontological foundation with the discovery that one step behind suffering, we find the actual root of that suffering, and this step behind discovers, answers, and defines the ontological proposition that there must be a being, an Ego–entity, that supports that suffering.” The Roots of Buddhism and Arica Integralism

Bibliography

Claudio Naranjo
End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society, Paperback – 1 Jan. 1994
Cf. Chapter on the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy