La Volonté de Savoir, Foucault on Sexuality

McLeod Ganj, Vesak
Revised Dewali, 2022

After all the bad press, after the astronomical settlements of lawsuits, after the decimation of congregations, Zen masters, priests and politicians continue to behave badly--still. Recently a gifted young teacher, Josh Bartok, resigned from the vibrant Greater Boston Zen Center amid a swirl of accusations of sexual impropriety. As he was trained by James Ismael Ford, my teacher’s teacher, I took note. Bartok joins a list that keeps growing.

Some blame it on losing sight of the true teaching of the Buddha, or Jesus. Others blame it on human frailty, or sin, or disregarding the grave precepts. or teachers and priests getting power-hungry when elevated to a position of authority and taking advantage of people in their care.

But taking a position of blame and passing judgment is not ultimately very useful in my view. It is also distinct from creating policies and procedures for establishing protections against abuse within our communities and hearing grievances. Blanket condemnation is not, to use a Buddhist phrase, skillful means. It creates a dead end.

I would like to take a step back and try to carefully examine the situation through a different set of lenses.

When I showed the first draft of this article to various people, some of whom I did not know but who’d been involved in communities where significant damage had occurred, they thought that I was simply doing revisionist history, letting certain people off the hook, or creating loopholes for abusive behavior. These people felt that after all the bad blood, there had not really ever been a proper settling of accounts. I want to be clear: I do not want to change the record, or excuse anyone whose behavior has caused harm. That is the arena for those who’ve experienced the damage or insult and the perpetrators, but we all take sides. And in a real sense the whole community has been harmed. But it is also true that the arena of taking a position, leveling blame, feeling some degree of personal fear and exposure is fertile ground for a Zen student to practice introspection.

The list is long, and includes many of the most important of the first generation of Zen teachers in the West. I have to ask myself as a practitioner, and a person who’s had important interactions with several teachers whose behavior has fallen under a dark cloud, how can I understand my own feelings in a way that might shed light rather than simply confirm a long standing belief system. Along the way, I also want to do some excavation of persistent, compelling but useless assumptions.

Is it about sex?

In Jesuit school, we teenage boys lined up in chapel on First Friday mornings to receive absolution for the sins of the flesh, or what was euphemistically called “self-abuse.” Maybe there was an occasional confession of cheating on the Latin vocabulary quiz, but we all masterbated.

The line for Father Halloran’s confessional was long because he was understanding of adolescent sex, or at least he seemed more tolerant than immigrant Father Murphy who was Puritanical, angrily demanding manly resolve that you would never to play with your penis again. Halloran might have simply been bored, or realistic, or perhaps he’d just given up, but he still demanded a sufficient level of shame before he dispensed the penance of 5 “Our Father’s” and 10 “Hail Mary’s.”

When the inner compulsion for shaming became intolerable, or you’d made the pious decision to try to live like a saint, you quickly ducked into Father Murphy’s booth where all hell broke loose. I made the mistake of asking for his absolution once and never went back. I also didn’t want to be seen in that line by Saint Aloysius’s shrine because the boys who masterbated together feared that you named names when Murphy asked the prescribed question from the confession manual “with yourself or others?” Dealing with ostracization as well as shame. Social ramifications have always part and parcel of sexual training.

Sex, shame, purification, reslove, failure to meet the standard demanded by the Irish Catholic cult, sex, shame, repeat. Perhaps this was just the way things have always worked, La Comédie humaine. We know without a doubt that some Zen teachers, priests or politicians will continue to abuse just as surely as the same faces will be back at the understanding, tired or just fed-up Father Halloran’s confessional the Friday before they are next obliged to perform the Sunday ritual of Holy Communion with their parents, free of mortal sin.

Shifting Zip codes

Then some of us became Buddhists. Perhaps part of the motivation for our seeking was to find a more tolerant setting for our sexual personna or nonconforming proclivities, or at least an escape from the charade. This was certainly part of my story. I joined a truly ecumenical movement. Irish Catholics may have a particular flavor as opposed to the Jews, but basically the same tales, the same quilt run through the whole sangha, and this includes the immigrant communities, the only possible difference being the level of toleration.

However, we soon discovered that our sexual training, repression and cultural taboos had simply shifted zip codes. They were persistent and stubborn. The public uproar at the San Francisco Zen Center around Richard Baker’s alleged misconduct has subsided. Or has it, really? The list of other Zen teachers who have confessed to abusing their students is long and continues to grow. Perhaps we’ve weeded out some bad actors, or maybe they have become more cautious. Some might even have developed an awareness of normative ethics, but still, when we survey the landscape rigorously, we see wreckage; friends who fled practice, or stayed but never seemed to make much progress; teaching careers shortcuited or ruined; persistent rumor and recrimination that harm the sangha. The evidence of unresolved trauma and hurt is vast.

To our credit, we've made our practice spaces more safe; to varying degrees people feel free enough to open up without subjecting themselves to exploitation; there are ethical guidelines in place in most centers; we have even asked professional therapists to help us craft the norms. But honesty, if pressed, I do not think that most people feel that the issues surrounding sex and practice have been resolved. Some feel that we’ve just added another layer of admonition and prohibition to our norms for sexual behavior. Some say it will take a generation to heal the wounds. Others say what we need is a return to that old time religion.

Let me be clear. As I stated at the very beginning, I am not setting out to create excuses. I do not intend to rewrite history. I will not whitewash what is clearly harmful behavior, nor will I play the game of weighting a teacher’s charisma to offset egregious failings. I won’t reduce our practice to the level of a cult. We cannot suppress genuine feelings of hurt that arise from past experience because, as the saying goes, time heals all wounds. It does not. I was a victim of sexual abuse myself. Bob Hoffman raped me within a few months of completing his Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. This story remains almost entirely in the shadows. When I’ve attempted to bring it to light, I’ve been ignored or gaslighted. A senior teacher of the Process told me, “It was 50 years ago so get over it.” But this New Age “Love and Light” process is a cult, and it costs a lot of money, so the behavior is pretty much expected.

The history of sexual abuse in our Buddhist communities has been tumultous. There has not been a full accounting of the alleged misconduct because, for the most part, sexual conversations are secret; even when we talk about them, there are some areas that remain hidden; the secrecy adds to their power making it more difficult to dislodge. There has never been a full recognition of the depth of the abuse because it touches the deepest core of human intimacy; people, mostly women, say that they are still hurting; we should believe them. I do. The abusers have not taken full responsibility; people are still speaking up despite calls to move on. There should be more compassion for both victim and abuser. We are a Buddhist community; understanding and compassion are at the heart of our practice. There’s always room for improvement.

Taboo or precept?
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell

I ask myself how as a practitioner I might address the situation. A Zen priest friend whom I admire and trust warned me against “starting off from [a] wrong assumption... and end up justifying a forgone conclusion.” I’ll frame my question to address my friend’s fear, and I will do so directly: what are the assumptions that seem to drive everyone to a foregone conclusion? Let me frame the inquiry in another way. If the same question is asked over and over, and the answer that’s repeated continues to be totally unsatisfactory, is it a bad question, a good question asked in the wrong way, or simply a question not designed to reveal useful information?

My intention is to ask honest questions in a way that sheds light on our dilemma. My methodology: I will do my best to recreate the set of assumptions that are the underpinning of the conversation, and I would add, provide what’s been taken as demonstrable ammunition for presumptive guilt. Then, hopefully, I can challenge these assumptions to see what remains.

They first assumption is that the perp’s, even a Zen prep’s action takes place in a vacuum, against the stark moral backdrop of right and wrong. False. The further assumption is that by simply labeling it and calling it out, we can tame the beast. False.

We haven’t eliminated sexual abuse from our practice because we can’t. The way sex manifests in each individual will be unique, but just because one enters the zendo and sits without moving does not guarantee that the sexual impluse sits quietly. It’s more likely that we notice how active it is. It’s the nature of self-investigation. Sex cannot escape our investigation, but it does not deserve a special place. Nor can we eliminate risk when we venture into uncomfortable or forbidden territory. Those may seem like extremes, but my non-professional survey points to both the exclusion of sex and evading dangerous territory are common in most practice centers. How often is sex directly discussed in dharma talks? My experience is that this happens rarely and then usually as a footnote. How often is it the subject of scuttlebutt and rumor? If the walls had ears. What’s the first response when people ask about what’s been done since Roshi’s picadillos were uncovered? We’ve put a code of ethics in place. Don’t you worry your pretty little head.


The Will to Know.

The second part of my methodology will be to analyze the conversation itself. Is it simply a straightforward case involving sex outside of marriage or the accepted boundaries of intimate relationships. The fact that I am going to cite the work of Michel Foucault will alert you that I think there’s a lot more going on.

I have been studying the French philosopher’s first volume of The History of Sexuality, La Volonté de Savoir. It’s been a real eye-opener. His contention is that the discourse about sexual behavior in the West since over the last few centuries has been incorporated or subsumed into a larger conversation about power and control. I would prefer the word hijacked, but it carries too many pejorative connotations to allow for anything close to objective analysis.

Foucault says that despite the modern liberal claim that sex has been repressed, forced into silence, or even neglected, the truth is that the level, frequency and specificity of our conversations about sex have actually increased. These conversations are varied, complex, and sometimes thinly disguised. Talking about sex does not create a problem; the way we’ve been trained to talk about sex, specifically in the West since the 17th century, has created a conversation that didn’t exist before, and, I would add, certainly one that didn’t exist in the Lord Buddha’s day. You don’t need a hefty dose of Irish Catholicism in parochial school to take part. It’s pervasive. The Irish have merely repeated the conversation with our particular brogue as have Jews and Latinas and Italians and Asians, each with their own inflection.

Foucault fills three volumes with his analysis. I will focus on the first few pages of the fist volume where he defines the scope of his inquiry and spells out his methodology. I will be talking mainly about the situation at the San Francisco Zen Center when Richard Baker Roshi stepped down from his leadership role because it is the one that I am most familiar with. There were equally disruptive scenarios occurring in other Buddhist communities in the early history of Buddhism in the West--Robert Aitken Roshi’s interactions with Eido Tai Shimano in Honolulu and subsequently with his organization in New York are now part of the public record as Aitken’s letters have been released by the University of Hawaii. They reveal the conundrum of trying to shield a growing community from scandal. Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi ’s dalliances have also become part of the public record as well as Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi Roshi and the more flamboyant history of Chögyam Trungpa and Ösel Tendzin.

The sequence of events Foucault outlines seems to fit with what occurred at Zen Center. When the scandal of Richard Baker’s romance with a married woman began to tear the San Francisco Zen Center apart, they called in a triage team. People were counseled by therapists and senior practice leaders that they had to talk about it. And that they did. I was not present, but I know many people who were. A lot never stopped talking about it. They are Buddhists so, at least on the surface, the intent to gossip, blame, or take sides, was absent. Also Baker removed himself, so there was no lightning rod, but among most of the people I know from Zen Center, they were definitely taking sides. I was trained by two men who followed Baker to Santa Fe where he started over. When they returned to San Francisco’s Hartford Street Zen Center, both Issan and Phil Whalen established a congenial working relationship with senior people who had taken over running the San Francisco Center, but, well, let’s just say that they didn’t talk about Baker’s sexual exploits, real or imagined, in polite conversation. I will make my mother happy and not join that conversation either, though I will allow myself a few general statements about the nature of the conversation.


The Zen Speakeasy
Or a general economy of discourses on sex, or the way in which sex is “put into discourse.’”

I will try to follow Foucault as closely as I can. “The central issue . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one assets its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.” [Page 9]

He says further that his main interest is locating “the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior…” I will try to use these questions as prompts for my own self-investigation. When I was coming into my sexual maturity in the Jesuit school, I learned that even the solitary pleasure of masterbation has a structure in the public conversation. All the boys at my prep school knew that Father Halloran would be less judgmental about adolescent sex just by the length of the line that formed by his confessional. Foucault does not claim that this examination will yield some correct position or reveal the truth about sex and power, but rather bring forth “the will to knowledge,” la volonté de savoir, which serves our inquiry.

My questions are from the point of view of being on the meditation cushion and not as a leader among the poobah of a practice center. Different sets of concerns yield different answers. Though my concern is shaped by the institutional response, it’s not my job to formulate a more polished defense or rebuttal in the debate, or more clear language to designate it.Historically what do we know about the history of the sexual ethos in the early days of Zen in the West, specifically among the first generation of Westerner students and their interactions with their Asian teachers?

From the very beginning, there was a lot of sex going on at San Francisco Zen Center, at least among some groups. It was an open secret. This was equally true when Suzuki Roshi was alive as when Baker Roshi assumed the helm. I assume that Suzuki Roshi knew about his students’ trysting, but to my knowledge he said nothing publicly. He surely did talk about it in private practice conversations, but we only have anecdotal evidence and no way of knowing what he really said. He was also steeped in Japanese temple culture which colored his attitude in ways that we will never fully understand.

What’s also true is that there was a lot of negative judgment about sexal behavior at Zen Center. We can all trace the outline of the public conversation. I can recognize the “orthodox,” public judgments simply by listening to the conversations that persist. But there is also evidence of personal struggle, admonitions, conflict about sex that people struggle with. Issan once said to me, “People call all the time. They need to talk.” One of the reasons why Issan was such a popular teacher was that you could talk about sex openly with him. He really did understand. Not being judgmental gave him the ability to listen. When sex presented a problem in our adloscent lives, we lined up at the Father Halloran’s confessional, the priest who at least pretended that he understood your plight. How much better a priest who really understood and could be compassionate.

Here’s what one student told me when I asked him about the sexual culture of Zen Center. “There was definitely a Puritanical aura about the place, ‘a disciple of the Buddha does not misuse the senses.’ . . . It was like being Catholic again, though in a small community full of the smart, good children in the front row of the class, who love to click their tongues at others and rat them out in senior student meetings. It was kind of an unwritten rule that you had to be in a committed relationship to have sex, but sex was never really mentioned.” Apparently this student found his way to Father Murphy’s confessional box by the Saint Aloysius shrine.


Deconstruct!
The Case: Phil blurted out, “the Presbyterians got the upper hand.”

Foucault says that it is legitimate to ask why sex was associated with sin for such a long time and question how this pervasive attitude was formed and why it persists. Of course partial blame goes to the scriptures and the taboos of our Abrahamic religious past, but close examination will show that the Sabbath celebration has roots is the celebration of sex, and most taboos single out specific sex acts. Foucault notes that the association with sin comes part and parcel with the religious power structure; they define the taboos. Phil exploded, slurring a notoriously staid religious sect while in the same breath berating a particular group of senior students. The ascetic discipline is “especially careful in repressing useless energies, the intensity of pleasures, and irregular modes of behavior.”[Page 9] If I didn’t know better I might label John Calvin a hidden Zen master (or an extremely strict, Western, image of one). The confusion might have its roots in history but it continues to exist in the heads of some zennies. And, in answer to Phil, the Presbyterians had no need to stage a coup d’etat when the war was going on in peoples’ heads..

In Buddhist ethics, the precept that is cited is the Misuse of Sex, whereas Foucault’s analysis is to observe and trace the use of power. It’s a tricky distinction. We’ve enlisted sex in the service of domination, or that is the assumption. Let me cite an example. If a person wanted to assert his or her position in the hierarchy, why does an expensive dinner at Green’s pass under the radar, while sex is a red flag? What if, perhaps, what we took as a sexual violation was a consensual sexual encounter which we couldn’t recognize, and I underline, “we couldn’t recognize.”

Foucault also notes that “[t]oday it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form--so familiar and important in the West--of preaching.” [Page 7] I would note that we are not talking about a sermon about the Joy of Sex, popular in the hey day of the California New Age, but sin, hell and damnation. (Foucault also notes the “solemnity” that pervades most public conversations about sex. [Page6] This rings true. How often have have we heard a sexual joke in dharma talk?)

It is just not possible to remain unaffected by this discourse. Most of the automatic response in the west, across the board, would be for the sin and damnation side, or, if we are in a rebellious mood, a swing towards the Joy of Sex’s happy sermon. Both positions are simply reactions within a set of cultural sexual norms.

If we define the relationship between sex and power as repression, Foucault points to that he calls the speaker’s benefit. “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets the established law; he anticipates the coming freedom.” [Page 6] He goes on to an analysis of the way that early psychiatrists or the 19th century felt compelled to make excuses when they broached the topic of sex.Taking a position is getting your feet wet even if the position is against what appears to be repression. I noticed the same pattern of apology in the initial unmasking of a Zen teacher’s sexual transgressions, and I notice in myself a kind of self-approval when I side with the accusers. But then these speakers quickly pivot to a broader condemnation, including for example teaching style, politics,spending habits, and other things they might find objectionable. Taking the high seat, it is a short leap from sex outside of marriage to fast cars and expensive suits even though there is zero logical connection. This is also the speaker’s benefit and a tough one to catch because it is shielded by the righteousness of “correct” sexual behavior.

I would venture this extends to the tone, and even the content of practice instruction. I noticed that when I was talking to a teacher, and stumbled on some strong inner objection to what was being said, I dismissed it with an inner notation that he or she is a hot mess so why pay attention? When teachers can’t be saints, and control their penises, nothing they say has any value.


Blurring the question

“Only in those places (the brothel and the mental hospital) would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely isularized) forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence.” [Page 5]

What happens when I realize that I’m just following, or reacting to a set script; that there is a conversation that has shaped what I hold to be true? It is a cultural creation, perhaps not entirely specific to the west, but in many other ways, entirely a creation of western culture.

Reading and studying Foucault, even when I didn’t fully understand the analysis (one could have hoped that he was easier to understand, but he was a French academic), I realized that there is a script. It exists outside our zen communities, and does not have its roots in Buddhist precepts. Foucault has shown that this is a creation, a “mental reaction” in a particular time and place, so it might be possible to break free.

Can I use this analysis to discover a hidden treasure? I am obliged to thread the needle carefully. I can see that I am part of a particular conversation, and, necessarily, I will remain part of that conversation. But perhaps if I can follow it carefully, I will become less enmeshed in it. There may be echoes in psychotherapy, but it seems a bit broader. It is not just my sexual proclivities and an analysis of their root cause in my unconscious, but the context where I first learned about sex.

I used to say about several of the men I know whose careers have been the subject of accusation and lots of scuttlebut: they and their partners were consenting adults. End of conversation. But this is using the “Get Out of Jail Free” card. If I am going to be rigorous, I have to also examine this statement. I began this discussion by mentioning Roshi Bartok and then never said another word. I don’t know Josh, and I can’t comment. However I will bet that the conversation in the Greater Boston Zen Center contains many of the elements that Foucault describes. Does that excuse anyone? No, but it might provide some insight for the people who struggle with what occurred.

Were there repercussions of those First Friday line ups of shame and guilt, barriers to experience sexual pleasure? Of course. Has the barrier between me and the pleasure of sex vanished? Not entirely, but I am a lot happier than I was when I was obliged to stand in line for Father Halloran’s absolution.

SAT, Naranjo, the Enneagram, the beginnings, and “the Work”

 Originally published in "The Enneagram Monthly"

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 – 12 July 2019) is gone. Óscar Ichazo (24 July, 1931 – 26 March, 2020) died less than a year later. The meditation teacher Ajahn Dhiravamsa (5 November, 1934 - 28 July, 2021) passed away more recently. Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us though I can find no obituary. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Kathy Speeth who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child and the Nyingmapa teacher Tarthang Tulku who had an enormous influence on Naranjo. At 86 Tarthang is still teaching though no longer traveling internationally. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West.

My friend Dan Kaplan forwarded an email promotion for a course by some proponents of the Enneagram that promises to unlock its radical teaching by returning to the “original intent.” Please forgive me if I'm skeptical. Are these third generation experts going back to Naranjo’s characterization of the 9 types, or Ichazo’s prototyping which is notably different, or the myth of an esoteric Sufi circle, or the inconclusive evidence that it lay hidden in Gurdjieff’s teaching, or William Patterson’s tracing the system back to ancient Egypt. I try to give the devil his due, but “original intent” is just hype to separate you from your money. I challenge any of these teachers to reveal the original intent in a rigorous way. If they’re just trying to distinguish themselves from Enneagram parlor games, I might be more generous.

Perhaps it is time to look at some of the threads that tie the Enneagram’s popularization in the West to the burgeoning of the psycho-spiritual integration that took California by like a New Awakening in the last part of the last century. I only know the SAT experience so that will be my focus.

Dr. Aubrey Lindgren, who was in Naranjo’s first SAT group, talked about Naranjo’s early teaching in the October 2021 edition of “The Enneagram Monthly.” Lindgren’s account tries to unwrap the Enneagram, particularly the Enneagram of Fixations, for a Western audience steeped in the language of psychotherapy. She asks why so little has been written about those early days? Her answer is “To realize the full impact of the teachings, we have to hold the container in silence. A silence that is both inside our own minds, as in not forming concepts about transformation, and outside, as in not discussing the material presented. It is a disservice to the public to hear about a theory without the full understanding and guidance as to how to effectively apply these ideas to your life.”

A gnostic response wants to keep secrets secret, or is trying to hide something, or hinting at some secret knowledge that will cost money. While I appreciate whatever caution is there about doing inner work, Lindgren's answer hides too much. As far as the Enneagram is concerned, the cat’s out of the bag. If the Enneagram ever was an esoteric teaching, it has crossed over into popular culture, at worst mimicking astrology or at best being an adjunct to the techniques of psychotherapy. The careful inner work of introspection seems too difficult for a mass audience.

I was in Naranjo’s SAT 2 which began in the Fall of 1972. By the end of the second year, the group had expanded to perhaps 60-80 people. The first group that Lindgren describes was distinct and interacted with Naranjo in a different way, often delivering his “indications” to newer students. I talked with my longtime friend Daniel Shurman who was in Group 1; together we combed our memories and remembered many people who were and remain friends. I was particularly close to my fellow Jesuit Bob Ochs and the Franciscan priest Joe Scerbo among others. We also remembered friends who lived communally out on Broadway and another group around Indian Rock in North Berkeley, and the women who lived with Naranjo on Allston Way. The membership included the well-known second generation Enneagram teacher, Hameed Ali, as well as the transpersonal scholar Charlie Tart.

The influence of Oscar Ichazo on the modern Enneagram is well known, even litigated. As I pointed out in my article “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram,” as well as “Muddied Roots, Psychobabble, and Inoculation.” I was aware that Naranjo was unpacking a powerful experience he’d had in Arica, and his presentation and understanding were different from Ichazo. Actually a lot of time was spent sorting out the distinctions. I am not an Enneagram teacher so I am not going to indulge in any of the arguments about theories, typing or tests. Have at it.

I will second what Lindgren says about the inspiration of Naranjo’s personal gifts, his intelligence and his creativity. There was also the influence of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt, echoes of Sufi school or what we were told was the teaching of the Brotherhood, the ego reduction in our personal and group work, some dabbling in Buddhist meditation and, of course, what is called “The Work.” Naranjo felt that the Enneagram as it came through Ichazo was a kind of fleshing out of the esoteric work that Mr. Gurdjieff undertook at the beginning of the last century. He never claimed to be an authorized Fourth Way teacher, but he loved the “trickster” myth around Gurdjieff’s teaching, and was always on the lookout for some connections, real or imagined, with Gurdjieff.

We were a group of bright, mostly young, educated westerners ready, willing, even eager for what we imagined to be the shock of eastern spiritual practice. We were also terribly naive. At times our work together became a circus. There were many dark sides. They do not discount the value of the work that we managed to accomplish--in a way some of the more thorny issues were part of that training. However they persist. In my view we cannot allow them to stay in the shadows, or sweep them under the rug. If we purge them from our telling the history of this period, we are just not being honest.

I will examine one aspect of the early SAT story, its connection with the unofficial Gurdjieff work, and my personal experience of sexual abuse and trauma after undergoing the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy.

The Work

When G.I. Gurdjieff died in Paris in 1949, beside his recondite writings, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and All and Everything, he left a large body of oral teaching that spanned nearly four decades. He had many devoted students, and though he did charge certain senior students to work with other interested people across the globe, he died with no clear transmission of a spiritual lineage. As with many powerful systems, it attracted a lot of interest, some from sane people who were intent on realizing the goals of liberation through self awareness and observation that Gurdjieff advocated. In other cases people seem to have been attracted by his unorthodox teaching methods. Several hung out a shingle with “The Work” predominantly displayed, and felt it gave them license to behave badly.

I don’t doubt that Kathy Speeth sat in Mr. Gurdjieff’s lap. But it is extremely unlikely, as Lindgren recounts, that it happened during the summers that her parents spent in Paris studying with Gurdjieff at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard in the 17th arrondissement. Her parents were prominent New Yorkers who had been students of A.R. Orage, perhaps continuing to work with Jane Heap or Willem Nyland after Orage’s early death. Kathy was born in 1937 and the Second World War began in September of 1939. Her meeting with Mr. Gurdjieff was probably on one of his trips to the United States, and he did make one trip to the United States after the surrender of Germany so the timing sounds likely.

Why am I making such a big deal about the exact time that Kathy sat in Gurdjieff’s lap and where it took place? It is probably one of two verifiable connections with “the Work” in the early SAT. Kathy and Pamela Travers were the only people he introduced to the group who had actually met Mr. Gurdjieff. I want to avoid the sloppy thinking that comes from blurring facts with fanciful stories.

When Naranjo began to teach, there were several legitimate, respected Fourth Way teachers in the Bay Area, Lord John Pentland in San Francisco, Mr. Willem A. Nyland on “The Land” up near Cazadero and Mr. Robert S. de Ropp. I know that Pentland and Nyland stayed away from Naranjo’s Enneagram work although each one knew about it. Instead we were introduced to Alex Horn (by proxy--he never visited the group), EJ Gold aka “The Beast,” and Henry Korman as Fourth Way connections. Carlos Castenada, who never claimed to have any connection with the Work but was a Hollywood example of crazy wisdom, appeared at some point to entertain us. None of these teachers had any interest in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it, but Naranjo was interested in their teaching methods.

Lindgren describes working with Alex Horn during one of his late night early morning marathon sessions on a secluded ranch north of San Francisco as a revelatory experience. It could have simply been the result of sleep deprivation and hypnosis. My only experience with Horn was at his Everyman Theater on 24th Street and Mission in San Francisco where I watched a preposterous production about the assassination of JFK staged by Horn and his then wife, Sharon. Horn prowled the audience before, after and during the intermission. That was enough for me.

Horn claimed that he was in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff, but there is zero evidence of a real connection. I assert that Horn was attracted to the power he could reap from Gurdjieff’s unorthodox teaching methods. Period. Naranjo never encouraged me to work with Horn although several members of the early SAT groups did. I know several people who were not Naranjo’s students but had been in Horn’s group. They report sexual exploitation, coercion and even physical violence. For example, Horn would instigate a dispute between several of the men in the group and then instruct them to have a wrestling match, or even fist fight without gloves. Horn was also a known sexual predator with a voracious appetite for young women. His Bible was not anything that Gurdjieff or Ouspensky wrote but Atlas Shrugged.

E.J. Gold claimed to have been authorized to teach as “The Beast” by an esoteric Sufi School. As far as I can ascertain, he fabricated his connection with Mr. Gurdjieff. He was also the author of a cult book called The American Book of the Dead. When I met him, I could not shake the feeling that he was devoid of compassion. He invited anyone of the SAT group to come to Southern California and do an “intensive training.” By the time my friend Hal Slate arrived at a secluded bunker somewhere up on the Grapevine, the title and authority of “The Beast” had been given to one of Gold’s very young disciples who had learned everything he needed to know by performing for three days straight with a garage rock band made up of people who had no musical training. Ripping a page from the script of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, “The Exterminating Angel,” Gold seized on an unexpected change in the weather to concoct a scenario that it was the end of the world and all his trapped guests had to make some serious ontological choices. Hal escaped, walking out of the canyon on foot during the freak Southern California blizzard. As the saying goes, “Never miss the opportunity provided by a catastrophe.” I would add, “real or imagined, there are always several choices available.”

Of all the Gurdjieff students and teachers who visited our groups, meeting Pamela Travers was remarkable. The real Mary Poppins had actually been Gurdjieff’s student. Because I’d actually read some of her books, despite all the technicolor dancing and singing I knew that Poppins would be very English prim and proper with a mystical bent. And here was a middle aged woman, not at all glamorous, as much the portrait of an English nanny as my imagination allowed, who was also very present. She talked and answered our questions in a completely no nonsense way but with a lilt in her voice; she mentioned that she still met with a group and she named one of Mr. Gurdjieff’s senior students as her teacher.

By 1975 Naranjo began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram. Others with more personal knowledge can comment or speculate on his motivation. My sense is that the initial work had been exhausting and the inspired impulse of his Arica experience had petered out and drained him personally. Some of the second generation Enneagram teachers have speculated that his drug experimentation had taken a toll which from my observation was a strong possibility. One member of the first group told me that much of his distress stemmed from the end of his intimate relationship with Kathy Speeth. All these are possible scenarios. There was also the concern that he felt after that the Enneagram materials had also been released to a wider audience. I do know from my conversations with him that he was apprehensive about the possible distortion of the Enneagram. He also told me that popularizers had watered it down. The SAT experiment would go dark at least temporarily.

He introduced Henry Korman as a person who would possibly inherit his SAT groups. Korman was leading a group in New York but had agreed to come and work with anyone who wished to continue to do what we imagined was Gurdjieff’s Work.

I worked with Korman for almost 3 years, group meetings twice a week and every Sunday. We began with an exercise called “Sensing, Looking and Listening,” then observations and questions from the group under Korman’s heavy-handed direction. Korman also organized elaborate dinners with exacting preparation, like the ones we read about in former Gurdjieff students’ memoirs. Sundays were dedicated to a Work exercise, and once a month we would begin on Saturday and extend it throughout the whole night. This pattern of group meetings, intensive concentration and work coupled with sleep deprivation seemed to be something imitated from the way Gurdjieff is said to have worked with his students. Alex Horn and E.J. Gold also made ample, and often manipulative, use of forcibly breaking up normal cycles.

While there was none of the physical violence that was reported in Horn’s groups, my experience of Korman was that he was a bully. He had no qualms about interfering in the sexual relationships of couples in the group or openly sleeping with students. He tried to arrange for a woman in the group to introduce me to heterosexual experience. Thank god she had the presence of mind to say no. He “strongly” suggested that I join with two other group members and start a construction company which he named “Double Action Builders.” This is the one real regret of getting involved in his group. It set me up to follow a dead end career for way too long.

After I had left Henry’s group, I was living in San Francisco, and trying to piece together some of that frayed experience. A Jesuit whom I knew and worked with was a member of the San Francisco Gurdjieff Group. He arranged for me to meet Lord John Pentland. I arrived at the upper middle class home in Saint Francis Woods at the appointed time for a congenial conversation with Pentland. He asked about my intentions, my experience, and talked about our mutual friend whom he knew well and respected. Pentland suggested that one of his longtime students, the woman who owned Fields Book Store on Polk, would meet and talk with me while we decided if I should join the group. When he asked me if I had any questions, I asked if he knew Korman and about the exercise of “Sensing, Looking and Listening.” Pentland said that yes, he had heard of Korman. Then he asked me to describe the exercise completely and fully which I did. He then asked about some specific details, particularly the attention to breath, or really the absence of any instruction about the breath. He paused, then looked at me directly and said that the exercise had absolutely no relationship to anything Mr. Gurdjieff taught. He would not comment about its possible usefulness.

I’m not going to say that my time with Korman was completely wasted, but I cannot pretend that I was in any way participating in “The Work.” Just a quick footnote--Korman met Mr. William Patrick Patterson, and began to work with him. He stopped teaching, admitted to a “grave” mistake, and wrote a letter of apology to his former students. He did not include me. I had to read a copy of the letter sent to a friend. He was in many ways brilliant, and I hesitate to put him into the category of an arrogant, destructive prick. Sadly he belongs in that bin.


Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

Both Lindgren and Ernest Lowe talk about the psychic Bob Hoffman. They both used Hoffman’s Process working with clients as did I. Naranjo introduced this tailor who had zero psychological training to SAT. Hoffman claimed to have had a midnight vision of Dr. Siegfried Fisher, a well known and respected psychiatrist and also a family friend, who revealed the secret of what Hoffman called Negative Love and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy that allowed us to undo the negative consequences of our childhood programming.

Most of my first year in SAT was spent doing the Fisher-Hoffman Process. Hoffman became infatuated with me, and within 6 months after I finished working with him, Hoffman began stalking me at Berkeley’s gay bar. After a few more months invited me to dinner and raped me. He was a psychotic and a criminal.

Naranjo did not condone or in any way encourage aggression, violence or sexual exploitation between students and teachers or among SAT members, but I do fault him for not doing appropriate due diligence before allowing Hoffman to work with SAT members. Hoffman was a “psychic.” Hoffman allegedly told Naranjo several things about his childhood which he could not have known. The normal training for a mental health professional was superseded or abrogated.

Although I don’t think he would have approved of Hoffman’s sexual conduct, Naranjo did sleep with students. To my knowledge he did not coerce or manipulate anyone, but inevitably it had negative consequences.


The Soup of the Soup

Looking back, I find it odd that none of the teachers that Naranjo introduced to the group were conversant or really even interested in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it. They were generally teachers, monks, therapists devoted to the Path of Liberation, but mixed in were some who lied about being in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff and fraudsters who made preposterous claims but really were just out for power, money or sex. It was the soup we swam in, and, like the air we breathe, no matter how careful we try to be, we cannot be certain that we’re not getting a whiff of poison.

Naranjo loved a Sufi story, attributed to Mulla Nasruddin, called the Soup of the Soup. A generous neighbor gave the Mulla a fat duck which his wife dressed and made into a fine dinner. Everyone was happy. The next day, a guest knocked on the door, “I heard that Mustafa gave you a big duck, do you have any left?” Of course observing the obligation of hospitality, the Mulla invited the guest in for some hearty soup made from the leftovers. The next day, a friend of Mustafa's friend smelled the still rich soup bubbling in the kitchen, knocked on the Mulla’s door, and asked to taste the savory dish. The Mulla invited him in. This goes on for several more days and several more friends of the friends of Mustafa. (In the West we’d call this a shaggy dog story). About the 10th day, after the now familiar knock on the door, the Mulla invited another friend of the friend of the friend of Mustafa's friend in for the remainder of the soup, but when the guest sat and tasted nothing more than hot water, he asked, “Where’s the duck?” The Mulla answered, “I’m sorry but all I have to offer you is the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck that Mustafa gave me.”

That is my impression of the end of our work with SAT. We were just going through the motions of the Work of the Work, but we’d lost the taste of that fine fat duck that we were given for our feast. However we'd also tasted real Duck Soup that Naranjo had served, and, with persistence and a bit of luck, we could buy a fat bird and recreate the recipe ourselves. We can, in the words of Lord John Pentland, create what Mr. Gurdjieff called self-remembering, “. . . a state of attention . . . a state of vibrant attentiveness, of inner alignment and attunement, which, when we are sufficiently still inside, possesses a potency reminding us that the real inner work is a response to a higher and deeper calling.”

Krishnamurti Redux

How much can we really know, especially when it comes to the difficult task of knowing ourselves?

A proposition: The world is not as it appears to be.

In most spiritual practice there is a notion that the world we see and experience is an illusion. It is called māyā in both Hindu and Buddhist world views, a blindness that prevents humans from having a complete experience of life. The word māyā in Sanskrit points to a mental condition of pretense or deceit that’s a hindrance on the path to realization. Its Hindu roots also carry some notion of magic that the gods use to create illusion unless they are appeased. In Buddhist and Hindu theology, samsara indicates the perpetual cycle of enslavement to birth and death and the pain of being caught up in the grip of illusion. Samsara simply means “world” in Sanskrit, but has been extrapolated out to include an endless cycle of birth and rebirth, spelling out continuous suffering.

The monotheistic religious traditions attribute our alienation from God and ourselves as the result of sin. In Christianity, particularly after Augustine, Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden, and Adam’s complicity, cursed all mankind to Original Sin until the sacrifice of Jesus. While any broad statement is of course misleading, it is enough here to point to the role of sin and alienation from God that traps us in misfortune’s clutches.

Religious and spiritual teachings have proposed various ways of digging ourselves out of this hole. Christianity and other monotheistic traditions advocate “conversion,” repentance, prayer and good works; Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism veer towards the meditation/introspection end of the spectrum, coupled with an analysis of the condition itself. 

Gurdjieff (I mention him because he is the subject of other posts on Buddha, S.J.) as well as various disciplines that have emerged more recently attempt this analysis in the more neutral terms of being asleep. Gurdjieff said, "Man is immersed in dreams... He lives in sleep… He is a machine. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention... He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination." 

These characterizations are simplistic at best and miss a lot of nuance, a fault for which I will be criticized, but my purpose is to simply point to the predicament, not necessarily to argue the merits of any particular solution. 

A conundrum

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell

I know that I cannot know the entire universe as it is. If I need proof I just need to log onto the cameras of the Webb Space Telescope. I am in awe of the universe’s vast expanse, and in 14 days, 8 hrs, 11 mins, and 3 secs, I will be able to see the first images Webb transmits from the deep reaches of space, but I need a 10 billion dollar delicate instrument rotating at 1.5 million miles from earth. I don't even know my immediate world as it is. I am limited, for example, by the range of my hearing. I am sitting in the same room with a friend when he or she begins talking about a car coming up on the road, but I haven’t even heard the rumble of tires on the stony path. I cannot even fully know myself. If I were completely aware, I would not have been stunned by an “ah ha” moment that shed light on some personal behaviors that were troubling for years on end.

When I see and admit that this is so, including the extent of my blindness, I’m presented with a conundrum. Whether I simply observe that I feel frustrated or unfulfilled in some existential sense, or undertake the practice of observing myself, let me explore some of the ramifications of the philosophical argument behind my dilemma to see what, if anything, holds water and where there are holes in the bucket.

 

The first part of this argument I would like to examine is that, as humans, our perception of the universe is limited, but we believe that the information at our disposal portrays a complete representation of the world as it is. Even if we admit that the world is not as it appears, we imagine that with some investigation, we can discern more accurate information and, like a sleuth, uncover the culprit and save ourselves. This is of course simply hubris.

Self-observation is at least partially what the language points to: we investigate ourselves. But there are limits to our claims about the reliability of our human experience. What part of the “self” comes into play is not altogether clear, but this is true: it is “subjective.” How do we examine the data? Is it real, can it be verified? Is it useful for understanding the events of past personal history as well as predicting the results of present and future actions?

Common sense demands--correctly I think--that I can only believe that what’s in front of my nose is in fact what’s in front of my nose if and only if I limit what I assert about the way I see my world to what’s actually under my nose. I only know the immediate world I can directly perceive. Unless I can verify it, all the rest is assumption. If I allow my mind to stray into the world of made-up stories, half-remembered or repressed memories, heavenly illusions or sexual fantasy, I can no longer legitimately assert that I am seeing the world as it is. I want to believe that I can be as stone cold sober as a hanging judge whether or not I really can wield judgments best left to God. I will convince myself that I won’t stray into the forbidden territory of false opinions or prejudice by taking the moral high ground, but in fact I am deluded into believing that the world I see is objectively real when in fact it is almost entirely subjective, buttressed with the few agreements that I’ve managed to wrestle into my corner from family and lovers, political allies or friends from church. 

Some would argue more strongly that common sense doesn't just advise, as in “take aspirin if you’re feeling a bit woozy.” Normative logic prescribes limits for my world, as in drawing boundaries for the experience I can assert as true and reasonably trust. The process of expanding my world requires another level of investigation. I am obliged to account for the way I want to see the world. This demands that I undertake a careful, critical examination of subjective factors, from yearning and dissatisfaction to remembering with Proust the smell of my mother’s cookies, the elation of catching my first fly ball, or the humiliation of being punched in the nose by the class bully. 

This simple observation may point us in the right direction. We begin to see and understand the mechanisms of the apparatus of our perceptions, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, visual perceptions and the registration of this experience in our memories. Our worldview is very limited unless we are willing to admit other factors, including, for example, our conversations with other people, our reading of history, and, importantly, empirical scientific evidence which, along with an understanding of the instruments of observation (including both physical sciences and psychology), allows us to test and verify our assumptions. This is also common sense.

I don’t want to let my argument devolve into complete solipsism. Surmising that what’s in front of my nose is also what’s in front of my friend’s nose is possible only if I have an agreement with my friend that he describes what’s in front of his nose with similar identifiable characteristics, mass, color, along with the collection of data from my other sensations, at least within a range of probable predictors. This will include an agreement to use a common descriptive language. Digging through this complex web of linguistic and psychological machinations tests the limits of human intelligence, but it does seem to be a worthwhile project. It can lead to freedom, but it can also verge on the preposterous.

I have drawn this picture as extensively as I could in order to describe a gap in our understanding. What we know empirically we neglect both in the way we conduct our lives and what we allow ourselves to believe. However, we would like to believe that our understanding can get us out of trouble, and when it doesn’t, we look elsewhere to fill in the gap.

The Lacunae. The Unknown is simply unknown. The rest is just shit we make up. Enter the Guru!

There’s a natural lacunae in our experience where we just don’t have any reliable information. In my view it is unknown because it is unknowable. We as humans do not have the access to the data required or our physical bodies and minds simply do not have the capacity to experience or know what remains hidden. There is no ontological reason; there are no secrets. 

It’s a normal human instinct to seek certainty. We all want peace of mind, but because we are afraid, or lazy, or greedy, or insecure or arrogant, this creates an opening for the guru’s stealthy entrance. This ignorance becomes the playground for superstition, magic, wizards (sorry Harry Potter), myth, and deception. Any appeal to a supernatural or unseen world that uses our inability to know creates a loophole, and opens a vast playground for all kinds of mischief, from the taboo against walking under a ladder to believing your daily horoscope supplied of course for a fee.

Even after we’ve observed and accepted that we as human beings have a limited range of perception due to physiological constraints, the limited capacity of our sense organs, as well as the physiology of our brains, our mind plays a trick; we tend to forget and set this aside. We still experience dissatisfaction with not getting all the things we think we want or imagine we need. Plus there are psychological consequences that come from the firing and misfiring of synapses that distribute endorphins to our pleasure centers. It makes no difference whether or not these actions and reactions are random or follow some predictable pattern; we experience an imbalance coupled with limited data to account for it. Voilá, from chemistry set to ontological predicament!

As a matter of fact, our suffering always seems to get the upper hand. When our unhappiness or dissatisfaction reaches a tipping point, we reach out for an answer even if it means grasping for straws. Enter the person, or book, practice, or belief system with an answer.

It doesn't even have to be a good answer. But keep in mind that at least some of the grasping answers to an existential question require suspension of belief; perhaps the answer imposes an alternative set of beliefs, and demands submission to its authority. In some sense it operates quite a bit like a narcotic or psychological addiction--the high it produces needs to be repeated in order for it to be effective. 

Over many centuries, our answers have taken the form of the tribal ritual the Nepali woman I know used when she called on a village priest to solve a problem. I saw with my own eyes the bloody sacrifice of a young goat to create favorable circumstances for increased guest house revenue--and sanitary plumbing. In my view the solution should have been to hire a competent plumber, but the magic formula for gaining wealth was left to a witch doctor.

The other end of the spectrum of tapping into the unknown is Bob Hoffman sitting in a Berkeley coffee bar, glancing off into space and delivering a prediction about a life choice or personal problem, allegedly from his spiritual guide, Dr. Fisher. I can hear the certainty in the psychic’s tone of voice when he or she divines the root of your predicament, and says “Doors will open.” The door actually remains shut until we see for ourselves what is posing as an answer. Snake oil doesn’t even loosen the hinges.

Let’s take a trip to Ojai California

There was a famous Indian teacher who lived in Ojai for the greater part of his long life. Jiddu Krishnamurti was born into an upper caste but struggling family in Southern India. When his dad took a job at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Madras, he was discovered by the occultist Charles Webster Leadbeater. In 1909, Leadbeater, who had just emerged from a scandal where he recommended masturbation to his young students, much to the dismay of his Anglican superiors, spotted Krishna on the Theosophical Society’s beach. Pictures show a very handsome young man, whom his tutors called dimwitted.  Leadbeater claimed extrasensory, clairvoyant abilities, and said Krishna had an extraordinary aura. I can legitimately entertain other inspirations for the homosexual Leadbeater’s psychic insight, and really it cannot go unsaid. 

This unleashed a series of events that would transform Krishnamurti’s life--Annie Besant and Leadbeater claimed that they had discovered the heralded World Teacher; they took the young man under their wing, even legally adopting him, and carefully indoctrinated him in the doctrines of Theosophy. Eventually Krishna would rebel against The Order of the Star in the East, the organization that had created and encouraged the myths surrounding his role in the Enlightenment of Man and Womankind. Rejecting the role of spiritual teacher, he set out for the rest of his life to lecture about the ruse of surrendering to the guru. 

Since I first learned about him in the 70’s and 80’s, Krishnamurti always left an odd, unbalanced taste in my mouth. It was not his argument or his eloquence. On the surface I could find no fault in that. It was the way people used him. Most of these followers, if pressed, could thread their way to the end of an argument, but It was just too easy to say, in a slightly superior tone, “Read Krishnamurti. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and walk away. They weren’t blatantly stupid and arrogant. For the most part, they just wanted to have sex with whomever they wanted or eat whatever their tastes dictated, except for the strict vegetarian who ruined his marriage to a lovely Italian woman who couldn’t give up sausages. She told me she tried, but her husband wouldn’t tolerate a mixed-cuisine marriage. (By the time of their divorce she also had a Green Card.)

It was impossible to convince this anti-authoritarian faction that the statement, “The guru says that you can’t trust the guru” is an argument from authority that should be rigorously applied equally across all the guru’s statements. When you rely on the guru to tell you that you can’t trust the guru, your decision not to trust the guru still relies on basic trust. The skepticism may have real teeth (and I think it does), but I will insist on other avenues of verification which of course merits me the label of materialist. 

Why is this Krishnamurti so persuasive and appealing? First of all, what is his argument? I just did a thought experiment, not entirely rigorous but still revealing. I picked up Krishna's First and Last Freedom, and began to read. After three paragraphs, enough to catch the thread of his argument in its context, I randomly turned ahead some pages, and continued to read from the top of the first paragraph that caught my eye. I was shocked. It made perfect sense. I wasn't jarred by any abrupt shift in the argument; the tone, even the sentences maintained a conversational flow. 

I might conclude that Krishna used an argument that can be succinctly stated in the three paragraphs which he repeated and riffed over and over, but that would not do justice to his rigorous self-examination or his eloquence. I went back to First and Last Freedom, and read through the chapters carefully and was moved by the intelligent, even forceful way he invites each of us into his analysis which included a thorough examination of our belief systems*, our prejudices, our sensory experience, and our past memories. 

He was exhaustively thorough and doggedly insistent. He could be compassionate as well as angry or dismissive without apology. But in my view the analysis is always kept at arm’s length, or perhaps I have not read him as carefully and thoroughly as I should. He does emphasize over and over that our immediate experience has to be seen and evaluated within the context of our relationships, with ourselves, with our past, with our environment, as well as with our family and friends. He was obviously a man who investigated the prison of his own delusion, Leadbeater and Besant grooming him for the unique role as avatar for the Coming Age, but he never gets very personal or vulnerable about his own experience. 

It is ironic that the man who preached that the guru is untrustworthy, himself became a guru. As much as Krishna might protest, the path to a normal life must have been difficult when he uncovered the sham that his karma had singled him out. I think he actually tried to be normal, but circumstances created a pampered life. To bolster my case that he was nothing more than a real human, he had a long term lover, the wife of a close associate. Of course he lied about it, claiming to be celibate--which leads me back to my initial problem with his analysis. “Trust me to tell you not to trust me” is the brick wall you hear in the conversation of an abusive lover.

I still haven’t really answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just pointed to some of the false claims. Knowing that there are limits to what we can know, doesn’t invalidate what direct experience teaches us or weaken those experiences. It simply rejects their infallibility. I can be satisfied with my own experience. In the words of Jack Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, ... then it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.” 

_____________________

 

*"Belief is the central problem in the analysis of mind. Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.”

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture. XII: Belief, p. 295

Bamboozled

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

In the middle of the night in 1968 in Oakland California, Bob Hoffman was awakened from a deep sleep by the discontented ghost of his former shrink, Siegfried Fisher. Dr. Fisher, as Hoffman always called him, stood at the end of his bed and revealed to him a key piece of psychological insight that had eluded his mentor, Sigmund Freud and the entire Viennese school: “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”

Thus was born the notorious concept of Negative Love and the "world famous" Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy; both have the dubious markings of revealed Truth, and Hoffman, the awakened Teacher—literally.

I listened to Hoffman’s psychic awakening tale many times, and although the basic outline never changed, I did manage to fill in some of the lacunae over my long association with him. For example, there is a lie embedded in the narrative—he confessed that he had been Fisher’s patient and not an old family friend or acquaintance from shul. That misinformation had been manufactured for marketing purposes, and Hoffman was a born salesman. But it never occurred to me to ask how his wife reacted to the whole affair. I think that they were still married at the time, but I don’t want to make any factual assertions without some evidence so I can’t say if they shared a bed, and I don’t want to spoil the party with more misinformation. Did she even wake up? 

So how did a Jewish tailor with barely a high school education become a healer, a channel for this occult insight coupled with powerful results of psychological investigation? Answer: the Spiritualist Church and, if you believe the proponents of the Hoffman Process enterprise, the gifts of a highly advanced, and compassionate, “intuitive,” the new moniker that has become the cover for knowledge that mysteriously surpasses the hard earned therapeutic work of professional psychology. 

I chronicled as accurately as I could the creation of the “Process” as a psychological tool in “The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Hoffman Process,” and I tried to give everyone I interviewed a fair hearing. At the time I imagined that I could resolve my long standing qualms about Hoffman and his influence in my life by simply getting to the facts, but in fact it only aggravated my personal pain. 

When my friend Stan Stefancic cautioned, “Remember that there's a lot of Claudio in the Process,” I thought long and hard to determine if Naranjo’s input was enough of a justification to accept Hoffman’s preposterous story. In a long rambling piece, Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter, I tried to understand why Naranjo took Hoffman to be some kind of modern day shaman, and supported his work—I will not deny that Claudio did support Hoffman and tried to plant some professional practices in the Process. But it was a relationship fraught with jealousy on Hoffman’s part as well as a good deal of passive aggressive behavior all the while seeking Naranjo’s imprimatur. I asked myself the question, why do intelligent people believe nonsense, but again couldn't really find a good answer nor in any way understand Claudio's infatuation with Hoffman.

 

To complicate the investigation, as if it were not already cloudy enough, Hoffman was a sexual predator. I had first hand experience, and the effects of his abuse have lingered for decades. I tried to exorcise that demon by writing what became a long series of posts on my blog, beginning with Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. If the criteria for resolution is that I can forgive and forget, it has not been satisfied. At 77 I am resigned that his selfish and unethical behavior will be a trauma that I will carry for the rest of my life. I have given up looking for some reason why it happened. It makes no difference to me that he was a closeted homophobic queer man, and that it was a severe impediment to his happiness. It was. Yes, everyone is guilty but I will continue to blame him. I have also given up trying to see some “wounded healer” motivation as a factor in his psychic therapy.  What’s the word? Bunk, as in complete nonsense.

So how was I bamboozled? When I read Henry Miller’s account of his experience just looking at a photograph of Madame Blavatsky, I understood him completely. Miller writes: “Now I don’t know if that had anything to do with what happened next, but I had a flash, I came to the realization that I was responsible for my whole life, whatever had happened. I used to blame my family, society, my wife . . . and that day I saw so clearly that I had nobody to blame but myself. I put everything on my own shoulders and I felt so relieved: Now I’m free, no one else is responsible. And that was a kind of awakening, in a way.”

In October of 1973 I had such an awakening over several weeks of psychological investigation in Claudio Naranjo’s SAT group. It changed my life, and I will be forever grateful to Claudio for providing the platform for the experience. But I had the bad luck to have had Bob Hoffman standing in the room shouting nonsense. That was almost 50 years ago. I gave the charlatan power over me, but damn it, I’ve taken it back. 

To the ghost of Bob Hoffman, if you’re still lingering around, there’s an open invitation to state your side of the story at the foot of my bed in my flat in the Himalyan foothills. It’s 12 and half hours ahead of Oakland time, but if you can’t figure that out, Google has a nifty world clock application.