“There is nothing of value apart from the truth.”
Half a century ago, I joined a cult. I talk about it, sometimes very publicly and too much, but I never call it a cult. I struggle to admit that’s what it was. I am too proud and too embarrassed to admit that I was part of a closed group that controls what you think, how you interact with the world, and how you spend your money, all with vague promises of being enlightened, or perhaps just living consciously, provided we were deferential to mentors who even dictated whom you slept with; there were no limits or boundaries to what was fair game. That pretty much checks all the boxes under “cult.”
Me? I’m an intelligent Ivy League-educated man who’d undergone almost ten years of rigorous training as a Jesuit. How could I possibly abandon all my basic critical skills? Perhaps 'abandon' is too mild — I slavishly devoted them to the leader's system of self-investigation, which he learned from a Bolivian occultist who was protected by a Sufi entity known as the Green Qutb and guided by the Archangel Metatron who speaks directly to God. The Source of this school was rumored to be a Sufi sect half a world away, and allegedly the training ground for the esoteric teaching of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Sufis guard their secrets ferociously, thus all the guessing and obscurity.
Metatron’s alleged seal of approval should have been a red flag, pointing to arrogance rather than wisdom. The occultist was Oscar Ichazo, and although I never met him, from reports I’ve heard and read, he was brilliant, odd, and arrogant. He claimed, “Our work is exceptional in that I am trained and entitled to do much work for others.” His main student, at least in that student’s spiritual narrative, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, describes several profound, self-confirming experiences that led him to believe he had been initiated into the Sufi school that was the source of Gurdjieff’s teaching. My direct connection was with a bright, personable, and well-trained Jesuit, Father Bob Ochs, whom Naranjo had authorized to teach the basics of the Enneagram, also known as the Enneagon, the key to Ichazo’s system of “self-remembering.” Ochs mentioned, almost off handedly, that the esoteric school where the Enneagram had been hiding was the same school that trained Jesus before his ministry.
Naranjo, at least as far as I can determine from his public CV, was not an occultist before meeting Ichazo. He was a highly trained and well-regarded medical doctor and psychotherapist who worked primarily in his native Chile. He certainly had more than a passing interest in entactogens and psychedelic drugs, which were not illegal in his native country, or certainly they were far less regulated than in the US. In 1962, he was invited to Harvard for one academic year as a Fulbright scholar. There, he worked in the Center for the Study of Personality under the direction of David McClelland. He then came to Berkeley, California, and became a regular at the Esalen Center in Big Sur. It was at Esalen that he recruited between 54 and 70 people, reports vary, to accompany him in April 1970 to Arica, a beach town bordering the Atacama Desert at the northernmost point of Chile, to study with Ichazo. They became the first students to participate in what would become the Arica Training. When Naranjo returned to Berkeley, he began gathering 50 or so students to study the Enneagram/Enneagon. I was in the second wave of that group.
Naranjo billed his Seekers After Truth (SAT) group as sampling from the smorgasbord of psychological and spiritual offerings fortuitously appearing in California. We had a Tai Chi Master from Taiwan, a Buddhist Yogi from Tibet, a Thai Vipassana meditation teacher, plus the Gestalt work of Fritz Perls, who was one of Naranjo’s mentors. But other teachers had far less conventional -- and far more troublesome backgrounds. He delegated the psychological exploration of early childhood to a bespoke tailor in Oakland, Bob Hoffman, who didn’t finish high school but was guided by his former therapist, a disembodied (deceased in real language) German-Jewish Freudian psychiatrist who fled the rise of Hitler and landed at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital in San Francisco.
The birth of the “School for this Age” was marked by very mundane coincidences that defied common sense. Naranjo’s narrative included checking into the same cheap Miami hotel as Oscar, and by chance, picking up the phone at the exact moment that the person he was destined to meet dialed him. Sufi lore suggests that these coincidences put you on a new path to unraveling the mystery of the Universe. He missed the appointment because he took a nap and overslept. Given his infatuation with drugs, he might have been either high or coming down, but no matter.
This “School” had three legs: the Enneagram, sex, and drugs. All three were always present to varying degrees depending on Naranjo’s whim. Most of Naranjo’s students spent (in my view) far too many weekends experimenting with drugs. LSD, harmaline, MDA, MDMA, ibogaine, phenylisopropylamine, and Ayahuasca, a South American shamanic brew. Naranjo claimed to have studied its application to psychotherapy.
It was illegal for a medical professional to advocate any of these mind-altering substances. Because Naranjo did not want to lose his license, he could not recommend any hallucinogens. But to qualify as a real experiment, either experimentally or therapeutically, there needed to be at least one objective, sober observer. No one assumed that role. Naranjo certainly did not. He was the first to swallow the pill. Looking back, it was probably the drugs that led to what he calls his Dark Night of the Soul.
After talking with Ochs, I decided not to participate in the drug experimentation, and did not, aside from occasional marijuana use. There may have been some group work or conversations after the experiments, but I was never asked to participate. I was far too afraid. Afraid is too mild; I was petrified, witnessing the side effects. At least one student’s death might have been avoided.
As far as the sex part of cult exploitation, it was just post the Haight Ashbury Summer of Love, and no one wanted to sit on the sidelines for that party. People seemed to assume they had permission to do whatever the hell they wanted, but that does not, in my view, absolve anyone. Indeed, “no” was a word rarely spoken and rarely heeded when it was. We called Naranjo’s house on Allston Way “the harem,” and I will leave it there. I was raped by Hoffman, a man whom Naranjo recommended, even championed. Entities that spoke “from the other side” encouraged Hoffman to flout the norms of professional conduct. He was a maniac who felt above the law. He defined freedom and grabbed as much power and permission from the invisible world as we were willing to hand over. Part of the game was surrender: if you were unwilling, you’d never get whatever it was your heart desired.
We were all guinea pigs in the experiment. I could not avoid harm. None of us could. The level of denial matched the depth of our participation. Naranjo, other teachers, and mentors in SAT had an obligation to protect us against the dangers of “ego reduction.” They failed. If drugs were to be tolerated, even encouraged, there was the obligation of full disclosure. Instead, there was a wall of silence and denial. I had the right not to be sexually exploited. I was. When I joined Naranjo’s SAT, I was a full-time student at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Four years later, I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco, and drove a cab.
Better to admit you walked through the wrong door than to spend your life in the wrong room. The fact that I opened the door and walked through, however, remains.
The next series of posts will detail how I came to this realization and what I’ve done about it.
