Showing posts with label Bob Hoffman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bob Hoffman. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Why cults rewrite history: the backstory of the Hoffman Process.

Originally posted January 22, 2020

If I were Deep Throat, I’d tell you to follow the money. If you were asking whether to register for the Hoffman Process, I'd say caveat emptor.

The core premise of spiritual work is to be honest with ourselves, our faults, and idiosyncratic distortions of truth. This applies equally to the healer. Psychological treatment helps you uncover parts of yourself that you’ve been hiding from and have cast their shadow over the rest of your life. You assume that your therapist has dealt with most of that material themselves and can provide a reasonably unbiased mirror. That trust is essential.


Cults rewrite history. A fictitious backstory portrays the guru as having access to privileged knowledge. It’s just a marketing plan. The online biographies of Bob Hoffman, the founder of the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, the Hoffman Process, or the Quadrinity Process, are awash in lies, inaccuracies, fabrications, or, in the best case, distortions. How could it be possible that any of these people actually met or worked with Hoffman? If they were honest, they could not demonstrate that Hoffman had the clarity to establish the trust required to do deep personal work. 


Hoffman was not a kindly, grandfatherly, “intuitive” who had everybody’s best interest at heart. He was a bully and a psychopath. He ran roughshod over everyone. If forced to testify under oath, almost all of Hoffman’s early associates would have to admit that he was neither gentle nor sympathetic. They might duck the issue, saying his methods were unorthodox, pig-headed, and unprofessional. He was a malignant narcissist.


His apologists will not agree he was the bully and liar I experienced, but I knew Bob Hoffman for over 25 years. I uncovered some of the lies he insisted he had to tell the world in order to promote his “very important” work. Most significantly, he lied about his relationship with Sigfried Fisher. He was Hoffman’s therapist for many years, but Hoffman created the fiction of a family friend with whom he shared convivial dinners. Hoffman also led a very closeted gay life. He was what I'd call a homophobe, but that is probably too much of a leap as I had to deal with his sexual and emotional abuse.


The Process claims it is not psychotherapy, but it does explicitly and purposefully dig into the roots of emotional conditioning. The first version, The Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, was billed as an alternative to traditional therapy. The current version of the Hoffman Process is a choreographed emotional rollercoaster that promises an experience of unconditional love in a few days. It costs a great deal of money. It’s a hard sell that needs professional endorsement. In my view, it does not pass the conditions of ethical practice. One glance at the waivers you sign shows you’re in dangerous territory.


Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute Internation published a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON. The claims that he, Volker, or his copywriter use to describe the endorsement of Claudio Naranjo are not accurate. They are presented as if Naranjo had a strong hand in developing the Process, giving it a psychotherapeutic imprimatur. He did not.


Here are the claims:

  • The renowned Enneagram teacher Claudio Naranjo did help Hoffman formulate his “world famous” process, but not in the ways described. Their relationship was far more complex and conflicted than either admitted. I have described my first-hand experiences in Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud.

  • Naranjo’s medical education was at the University of Chile. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Harvard for a year, a high honor worthy of note, but it does not include matriculation and graduation from the University. You could stretch it and say, “Harvard educated," but even that's inaccurate. It just sounds assuring to your affluent Western audience.

  • Naranjo did not coin “Quadrinity” to point to four aspects of human nature, emphasizing the oft-neglected emotional and spiritual sides. The incredibly talented polymath Julius Brandstatter came up with the term. That’s a fact. But of course, if you were looking for a sign of genuine collaboration, why not falsely claim that Naranjo gets naming rights? Who, after all, is Julius Brandstatter?

  • The writer claims that Naranjo helped Hoffman formulate the 8-day Process. Wrong. When Naranjo independently crafted a 3-day version of the Process for his SAT groups, Hoffman realized that a shorter process would be more marketable. Naranjo had no hand in formulating what is now known as the Process. Again, Julius Brandstatter and his lovely, professionally trained wife, Miriam, were Hoffman’s principal consultants. How do I know this? Hoffman told me. Miriam herself recounted the experience in great detail when I visited her at her home during the last years of her life. I stand by my presentation of the history of the Process. When researching my paper, The Ontological Odd Couple, I had detailed conversations with almost everyone who contributed to Hoffman’s Process. 


The Hoffman Institute International’s copywriter is batting four for four. I might be less critical of the Process if the current practitioners did their homework, but I beg the question.


Be highly cautious of psychological work channeled through a dead psychiatrist to a bespoke tailor with absolutely no professional training. Hoffman and The Hoffman Institute need Naranjo’s endorsement. To lend credibility to their product, they’ve invented a dubious backstory. Buyer beware. Undertaking this exploration outside the guidelines of professional therapy is risky. It certainly was in my case. 


Cults rewrite history as advertising copy.


Sunday, December 1, 2024

Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud.

I’ve reached the end of the road with Hoffman and the Quadrinity Process.

This Fall, I began working with several professionals to isolate the transformational insight of the Hoffman Process. Hoffman’s ideas are not unique, and given the heavy dose of the Spiritualist Church, his Process is hardly worth stealing. However, we aimed to create an accessible format and shortcut the outrageously expensive series of staged emotional exercises now available. Undertaking an updated version of the “Process” also allowed me to review my long relationship with Hoffman, including his collaboration with Claudio Naranjo.

So, one last word: Bob Hoffman was a lunatic, a liar, a criminal, a fraud, and, in the end, a very ordinary and unhappy human being. His proponents and enthusiasts try to cast him as a kindly Jewish “intuitive,” which, I think, is a spiritually correct term for someone who stares into the void, hears voices, and then comes back to tell you the truth. It’s a step above an Ouija board, and as a total supporter of freedom of religion, if you want to believe that nonsense, put your money down and stake your life on it. Be my guest.

Hoffman, the Lunatic, was for many years a patient of the highly respected German psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, who fled Nazi Germany and ended up at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital. At the same time, Hoffman was poking around in the Spiritualist Church under the direction of Reverend Rose Strongin, a relatively unknown psychic minister. I googled the lovely lady and found one reference to her in a 1963 copy of “Chimes, Largest Psychic Monthly,” which was the outlet for this form of communication. The summer issue included an article called “Visiting with Grandma” and the more esoteric “Begin Orbiting at Higher Mental Altitude” by Clara Mills Ward. It cost 30 cents.

Fischer died suddenly before Hoffman completed treatment and became Hoffman’s Spirit Guide. In 1968, as Hoffman told the story, Doctor Fischer’s disgruntled ghost appeared at the foot of Hoffman’s bed and supplied the missing piece that had eluded the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry, “Negative Love.” But there was a way out revealed that night. Hoffman became the first embodied human to undergo a loving divorce from Mommy and Daddy. You, too (the angels cheer), can hear the story and help reduce Dr. Fischer’s negative karma. Hoffman will hand you the keys to the freedom to orbit at a higher mental altitude. Unlocking the door to that world, believe it or not, begins with an imaginary visit to Grandma, but it will cost a good deal more than 30 cents.

And now Hoffman, the Liar, begins to emerge. The man who became the channel for “Negative Love” could not be a malignant narcissist who’d undergone prolonged treatment at a psychiatric hospital--he had a psychiatrist friend through his wife’s family with whom he argued about the unseen world. Fischer’s son told me the argument is the only fact in his cover story, but I could have supplied that information independently.

The treatment, the divorce from mommy and daddy, was the cure for everything you wrongly believed about love; it was wrong and negative because you learned it from deluded parents who couldn’t tell the difference between a kick in the face and a kiss. When Hoffman psychically “read” your grandma’s emotionally stunted childhood, you learned that “everyone is guilty, and no one to blame.” I never heard of one case where Hoffman supplied hard, verifiable information about Grandma’s emotional life as a child. Your parents learned how to love from their parents, whose parents taught them what they learned, and so on, from generation to generation, all the way back to when everyone hung out in caves. People have some insight during the Fischer-Hoffman Process, I will grant that, and perhaps this hypothesis is the inflection point where a taste of freedom becomes available.

Another side of Hoffman the Liar appears with the creation of the public face for his “important work”: Hoffman was queer. Not in the liberated sense of my post-Stonewall generation but in the closeted, campy, hidden lives of American middle-class gay men who thought they had to blend in to be happy. Hoffman was homophobic and not at peace. Though a few friends knew that he was a homosexual--he claimed that was enough to land above board in honesty--he was conflicted, constantly bickering with lovers, demanding and frustrated. He also believed the universe owed him “true” love; he was always on the prowl. The guy was a total mess.

Now we get to Hoffman, the Criminal. Within a few months of finishing my Process of Psychic Therapy, Hoffman began stalking me. This was right out of the predator's handbook. I had zero sexual attraction to the man; I was 28, and he was about 50. I had a professional relationship with him as (I suppose) a spiritual mentor, and no matter how anyone tries to analyze the dynamics of the relationship, whether it was rape or a twisted consensual sexual encounter, California Law prohibits dating and certainly having sex with a patient or parishioner for a full two years after the professional relationship ends. He raped me 13 months after I met him and began psychic therapy. However, Hoffman’s psychosis placed him outside the law that governs ordinary people’s lives. He should have been heavily fined, restricted from his role as a spiritual teacher, or in jail. Instead, he continued to do precisely as he’d done in the past. I know at least three other younger men who found themselves in the same predicament. A cute guy Hoffman hired as an assistant hadn’t completed the Process. He claimed harassment and filed charges. They settled after Hoffman, kicking and screaming, listened to the advice of his lawyers. It included a non-disclosure clause.

Now, to the enterprise itself, Hoffman the Fraud. Sadly, I have to include Claudio Naranjo. Webster defines fraud as “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.” Hoffman needed Naranjo’s imprimatur to cover his idiosyncratic work as psychotherapy, which it was not, and Naranjo felt that he had to play the role of John the Baptist. Hoffman wanted to rival Werner Erhart’s income, and I will never understand Naranjo’s trust in messages from “the otherside.”

In order to create this deception, they both needed to document Naranjo’s collaboration in the development of the Process. I refer to Naranjo’s description of his role in his book “The End of Patriarchy.”* It is not even vaguely close to what happened. I was present from the first moment Naranjo introduced Hoffman to SAT until he delivered his “Closure” mind trip of his first group process. I didn’t miss a session. I was never late for a session. I paid close attention, took detailed notes, and did every assignment. I tried to “make the Process work” because I’d had a life-altering experience. Naranjo’s description is a complete fraud.

I can forgive Naranjo for inflating the number of people who undertook their collaborative endeavor. Naranjo says 50, and it was 37 (+/-1). He says Hoffman was a silent witness and that Reza Leah Landman delivered the Process using written guidelines. After you left the room, Claudio, Hoffman wouldn’t shut up.

But far more egregious is the claim that the SAT Gourp experienced the entire Process. After Hoffman got the emotional release in “the bitch session,” he withdrew from any further collaboration. In November, he announced that the “Defense of Mother” would be an appropriate place to finish his work with SAT and announced that his rival group would begin in January. The Naranjo/Hoffman collaboration barely included a third of the Process. (For a thoroughly researched paper on all the sources and contributions, see The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process).

Hoffman was always in the market for miracles from the nether world. He handed the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy to Dr. Ernie Peci (Ernie was a lovely man, even if very New Age. The grandnephew of Pope Leo 13th wholly bought into Spiritualist dogma). Hoffman had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and had gone to Mexico to die or be cured. When he miraculously recovered, he returned to Oakland and wrested control of the Fischer-Hoffman Process back from Pecci, who’d just about had it anyway. Then Hoffman created an eight-day product he hoped would rival Werner Erhart and set up internationally. In the mid-1990s, he developed liver cancer. He again tried to bypass modern medicine. He went to Brazil and sought out a famous psychic surgeon named Doctor Fritz. In the non-sterile setting of a Sao Paulo kitchen, Hoffman went under the knife. Fritz nicked his liver, and Hoffman was forced to book an expensive air ambulance back to San Francisco for emergency treatment. Sadly, after an excruciating painful liver resection, the hope of miracles crashed. A psychic surgeon botched the job and helped the cancer complete its work. Dr. Fritz might as well have been a voodoo priest.

I don’t know if “Chimes, Largest Psychic Monthly” will accept my commentary on the old-time hymn “May the Circle be unbroken, Bye and Bye, Lord, Bye, and Bye,” but they’ve probably migrated online and charge your phone bill for readings from an Indian Call Center.

I can feel my critics lining up. “Why are you so hard on a Process that’s helped thousands?” By their records, hundreds of thousands. Hoffman enthusiasts even have a word to describe my attack: “Vindictive.” Yes, it is an attack. Why? Because it’s a lie based on a complete fabrication. “Gifted Intuitive” attempts to be “spiritual” and talk around the more rudimentary Spiritualist Church with real ghosts. “Kindly Jewish Grandfather” is a complete ruse if you ever met Hoffman. He was a rather dim-witted, uninteresting, bossy tailor who did not complete grade school, a psychotic who’d failed psychiatric treatment, a man with very fixed opinions who concocted an unscientific theory of personality development, and, to top it off--was a con man. Naranjo participated in this fabrication by withholding the truth and not vetting people he invited to teach his SAT students. Had he been slightly more transparent, I might have avoided the worst decision of my life.

I am telling you what Hoffman enthusiasts are hiding from you so that you can make an informed decision. A basic level of integrity is required for any personal work. Perhaps by following in the footsteps of Hoffman and Fischer, I am helping Hoffman relieve some of his karma for being a complete and total liar. I’ll hand “lunatic, criminal, and fraud” over to someone else. My pockets are not that deep. In the end, Hoffman was just a flawed, ordinary human being. But as I said, if you were willing to trust your psychological well-being to people directed “from the other side,” go for it. I strongly advise against it.

________________

*“first application was with a group of more than seventy people (culminating in Bob’s visit for the closure stage of the Process). This was a time when, in my work with people at SAT Institute, I was particularly interested in the process of turning groups into self-healing systems. There followed a second application in which Reza Leah Landman led a group of about fifty people (with Bob present as silent witness) using the format of written guidelines. (I produced these guidelines at a time of rare inspiration, and when I visited Bob shortly afterwards, he interestingly commented, quite spontaneously, that Dr. Fischer had been with me.)”

From The End of Patriarchy, by Claudio Naranjo 1994
https://www.claudionaranjo.net/pdf_files/inner_family/from_the_end_of_patriarchy_english.pdf

Sunday, November 3, 2024

The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy Process

Originally posted July 31, 2004, 1st revision 9/16/2006, 2nd revision 6/6/2011, 3rd revision 5/18/2021

© Kenneth Ireland, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2021, 2024


I began research for this paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” when the current owners of Hoffman licensed intellectual property began to rewrite their marketing copy. They recast Hoffman and his Process, editing out the contributions of many people who worked hard and selflessly to help Hoffman flesh out his rudimentary insight..


There was another purpose behind my writing. I was trying to resolve my reservations about Hoffman and his work by simply recounting facts and events. However, after trying to disentangle Hoffman's bizarre and abusive behaviors from the modality of the Process itself, I see nothing original or other-worldly about his insights or his methodology either as presented nearly 40 years ago or in their current iteration. I'd advise anyone to undertake an ordinary course of therapy with a licensed professional rather than the HQP.

 

I also have to note here that my observations are colored by a sexual and emotionally abusive relationship with Hoffman. See: Bob Hoffman was a lunatic, a liar, a criminal, & a fraud.




Introduction


When creating a historical account, you have to start at the beginning to get it right. If you’re lucky, some facts, times, and dates can be accurately reconstructed and pinpointed in documents, letters, transcripts, and personal calendars. Some of the messy parts of bringing something new into the world will inevitably be buried and lost. The current owners of the Hoffman Process have recast, revised, and distorted the history. They need to create a compelling narrative to sell the Process. I do not rely on the process for my livelihood, which lifts some of the constraints on telling the truth.


I will argue that they are following Hoffman’s own steps in creating the narrative of a distinguished psychotherapist appearing in a psychic event to resolve his botched karma and making a plausible claim that a tailor from Oakland could be the source of complete psychological treatment.


Bob Hoffman created the original Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy (FHPT) between 1968 and 1973. Claudio Naranjo, the Chilean psychiatrist who introduced the “Enneagram” into Western psycho-spiritual conversation, is the best-known of the professionals who contributed to Hoffman’s Process, but there were many others. Hoffman sought input from many sources (who sometimes did not even know that he was talking to others about the same issue). But he always attributed the final product to his spirit guide, Dr. Fischer.


The myth that the Process came full-blown from a pure source and neglected people who did the difficult work of bringing something new into the world is false. In addition, fostering outrageous expectations creates false standards for evaluating personal experience and makes it more difficult to use one’s own inspiration to gain self-knowledge and liberation. In other words, it undermines what it sets out to do.


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


If nothing else, what follows can be an inclusive footnote to the revised story.

My Purpose and Sources

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


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


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


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


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


The most important person in this story is dead before Hoffman gives birth to the Process. Dr. Siegfried Fischer assumed the status of legend and myth in the story of the Process as Hoffman’s guide. His name was removed from the original title when his son filed a lawsuit. He said that Hoffman had been his father’s patient and that his professional reputation was threatened by Hoffman’s claims. I will briefly examine both claims below.


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


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


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


Most of what I will present is not easily reconciled with the image of an inspired “intuitive” or kindly and wise Jewish grandfather. However, I feel it vital to record another version of Hoffman’s inspiration and preserve it in a small corner of the universe, especially in order to note Naranjo’s contribution in some detail. Suppose we allow a story of real creation and inspiration to be sanitized. In that case, the contributions of this highly talented man who was present at a certain moment and responded wholeheartedly to Hoffman’s questions and requests without concern for his own personal gain and enrichment might be forgotten.

The Inspiration

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


Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, a German psychiatrist who managed to escape the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed the basic outline of the Fischer story from the public record. Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter; he wrote Principles of general psychopathology: an interpretation of the theoretical foundations of psychopathological concepts, (New York, Philosophical Library, 1950).


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


After hearing this part of Hoffman’s story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psychoanalysis that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy himself. I began to suspect that he had been Fischer’s patient and quit, still in transference. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient, and he said yes, that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. I have confirmed through reliable sources that Hoffman was Fischer’s patient “for years.” Still, Hoffman lied about his personal friendship with Fischer in order to present himself as a reliable source.


Fischer’s son maintained that he was never a close personal friend of Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. Hoffman continued to use “Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy,” and Fischer's son, David, filed a lawsuit against Hoffman. Hoffman did not contest David’s claim and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, Hoffman still claimed, both in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide. 


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


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


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


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


One other piece was introduced into the FHPS before Naranjo took on creating the group process with Hoffman. The imagined conversation between the client’s emotional child and the emotional child of the parent came from Transactional Analysis. Hoffman no longer psychically “reads” his patients to uncover his or her own parents’ emotional history. Hoffman found facilitators trained in transactional analysis and adapted an existing technique, a path that he was to follow many times throughout the creation of the Process.

The Development of the Group Process

I have attempted to describe the huge emotional breakthrough that I had over several weeks in that first SAT group in Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. I also talk frankly about Hoffman’s predatory behavior towards me, which included sexual abuse as well as my difficulty dealing with it. I’ve written about his clear violation of ethical and legal conduct as well as my struggle with it in several places, including "Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." But that is not the subject of this article.


This was the very beginning of the creation of the Group Process. Hoffman’s written notes in Stefancic’s possession clearly show that Hoffman credited Naranjo with transforming the FHPT into a group process. Every interaction between them that I witnessed over more than 20 years also clearly shows that Naranjo always regarded Hoffman as a modern-day shaman. 


Lacking psychological training, Hoffman needed Naranjo’s validation, but he never trusted the techniques that Naranjo introduced to yield insight. He felt that psychotherapy was, at base, a misguided enterprise, and any kind of self-observation was, at best, far too slow and, at worst, a head game. His style was to evaluate and attack people, then point to their emotional reactions as examples of negative programming, almost always violating the boundaries of professional behavior.


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


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


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


That first Fall, at least five weeks were dedicated to this prosecution of Mother. It was mid-October when we began the bitch session. I mention this because it was the first time I noticed Hoffman’s urge to move the process ahead while it appeared to me that Naranjo was testing psychological methodology as applied to the FHPT. My observation was, of course, obscured by the fact that I was a participant with enormous transference already underway, but when Hoffman ended the SAT group process before it was even half complete, it was evidence of their tension.


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


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


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


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


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


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

Conclusion

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


In my experience directing people in the Process, I cut as much as I could of the trappings of the spiritualist church. I found them fraudulent or, at best, embarrassing and useless. I dropped Hoffman’s inflated claims that the Process was all the therapy that anyone needed, that it was Freud’s missing link. I introduced conversations that allowed clients to explore how their early emotional programming influenced their lives here and now. But listening deeply to 40 individuals a year began to take too much of a personal toll for a meager income, and I stopped offering the Process when Hoffman threatened a lawsuit. I certainly had neither the stomach nor money to face off in court over his intellectual property..

 

© Kenneth Ireland, 2024



Sunday, April 28, 2024

Was Muktananda High-Level Chicanery?


Published Sunday, April 28, 2024


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 spiritual seekers of New Age California. We might have been dusted with a peacock feather as we left, but 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 that afternoon before the 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. I sat before him in a kneeling position, 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. 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 for the chanting, talk, and Darshan in the public hall. Afterward, please stay for dinner. I’m sure Hal and I stayed. Chanting the Guru Gita was very long. The poem praises the eternal guru, and his followers identified Muktananda as that guru. Singing praises of the divine guru in the presence of a human guru was a bit over the top for me, 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, 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 70s. 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 Western sadhus 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. 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 circling the Krisha shrine, but most of the time, he sat on the side in an 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. The dancing and singing went on day and night. It didn’t stop. 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 reappeared. 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 about Muktananda’s guards. “I know he’s very lonely. So I wanted to share 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 an induced fervor, or perhaps it did occur, as I am going to describe. But I can't avoid telling the story if I demand complete honesty from Muktananda. 


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. Other than that, I would have to pick and choose from 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 I clearly remember was a Scientology E Meter casually set up on the breakfast table. Until then, I had only heard rumors of Nanranjo’s experimentation with Auditing. However, 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 brighter 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 also 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 lifelike.


I do not know if I was the only person who saw this. There was no discussion, no questions, no 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 started at the edge of the circle opposite me. It stood behind each person. I cannot remember if they were gestures, but the person became 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 an apparent, even violent breaking of ordinary perception. One is silence. Nearly all modern writers talking about their drug experiences have expressed frustration. Most writings by the mystics are rarely 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 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 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.


It was also clear 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, and 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 sex life.


Hoffman had been wrong, or perhaps very right. Muktananda did not lack 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 allegedly underage, to join Muktananda. He was not a celibate sadhu. 


I’ve read many accounts from insiders, malcontents, and disenchanted followers. At some point, Muktananda 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 of a relationship 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 many younger American women with liberated attitudes available, the doors opened. Most reports said 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 his cultural mission 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 have been 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.