New Age Scum

I spent over a decade as a Jesuit with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. I’ve known and talked with hundreds of priests and seminarians, members of religious orders, and parish priests. They are scholars, missionaries, mystics, teachers and preachers, gay and straight, celibate and non-observant. The vast majority are dedicated men and women who follow the way of Jesus and give of themselves to help others. I knew only three men who were in any way implicated in the sex abuse scandals that rocked the foundations of the church, and only one had inappropriate contact with adolescent boys. Two spent time in prison. All paid dearly for their behavior, careers and lives in shatters. 

Of course, we are dealing with human nature, and human nature being what it is, we can be sure that the problem still exists. The best we can do is set some ethical standards, try to enforce them, and ensure some consequences are in place to act as a deterrent.

However, don’t imagine that sexual abuse is confined to Roman Catholic priests and religious. People like me who think that leaving the church of your mothers and fathers opened up vast fields of honey and bliss will find that some issues do not disappear by substituting one religious pantheon for another. 

What is it with these guys?

And they are always guys. I am going to talk about two cases of men in New Age groups who had to know that their sexual acting out was immoral but did it anyway. When it threatened to become public knowledge, they were swift to duck for cover. Words no longer had any meaning; it’s all circumlocution. This is, for me, key for discerning the pathology. Cardinal Edward Egan was caught in a nasty argument about condemning gay priests for the cost of paying retribution to abuse victims. His response was classic: "I would just say this. The most important thing is to clean up the truth. And the truth is I have never said anything." Of course, the truth is, Your Eminence, that you said many things. Just because your statements were lies and double talk does not cancel them out or make us deaf. They just require cleaning up. (Hint: the truth doesn’t need a thorough cleaning. It’s us, Eminence).

But before I discuss the cases of two men I know personally, I want to talk a bit about the public discussion of sex abuse. It seems there are two paths, and both have severe limitations. One is complete denial and silence; the other involves talking too much. 

Swami Muktananada hid behind the religious persona of a holy man and never admitted to having sex with underage girls. It came to light after he died. The religious sect he established continues to say nothing. The irony is that everyone knows about his sexual behavior. If followers believe in Sidda Yoga and his successor, Gurumayi, they are asked to participate in the public lie, and Muktananda gets away with his sins in the name of a higher good. The brother of his anointed successor was expelled from the group for sexual misconduct, and his name was expunged like a scapegoat. The income stream was protected.

The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was also a serial abuser, but he never pretended to be a celibate holy man. In Osho’s case, drugs clouded the picture. In my view, neither were models for living a spiritual life. It is stupid to rely on Muktananda, Gurumayi, or Rajneesh as role models to guide a life of integrity.

My example of talking too much is a man I knew who wrote a book hoping to become the poster boy of registered sex offenders. Jake Goldenflame was convicted for molesting his daughter, served a jail sentence, and then worked hard to get on Opray to talk about it. He wrote Overcoming Sexual Terrorism: 40 ways to protect your children from sexual predators (2004). I spoke with him weekly when he began his project. He eventually hired a ghostwriter with a track record and produced his book. His goal was to become the expert on protecting children against the likes of himself. In the end, to quote one of his critics, Kathleen Parker (April 2, 2005, The Spokesman-Review): “His self-outing is a form of therapeutic confession that purges his own demons while imposing them on the rest of us. He feels better, and we need a bath. Our passive complicity constitutes, if not tacit approval, at least a level of involuntary involvement that is both voyeuristic and prurient.” I should not have tried to help him. He defended his pathology by refusing to deal with it. He set a trap, and I fell for it, I suspect, out of some impulse to be fair-minded and even-handed. I didn’t recognize the pathology, and the pathology remained unchallenged.

_____________

I write with a heavy heart. On June 28th, my great friend Stan Stefancic died; We communicated briefly after he was diagnosed with cancer, and I tried to express how much I appreciated our friendship over the years. I remembered our conversations. We could talk to each other in a no-holds-barred way, even when we disagreed. Our worldviews overlapped, and we generally held similar opinions and assessments. The bone of contention was what actions were appropriate. Stan was far more conservative, supporting the status quo. Me, I am no company man.

There was one situation where the obligation of friendship prevented me from talking openly about a case of sexual exploitation by a man we both knew. Now I can talk about it. Before, the consideration that he and this man were also friends held me back. Stan used his considerable skills to try to craft a settlement to address the young girl’s needs. He failed. I remained hesitant to write, endlessly weighing the pros and cons. However, I am no longer obligated to be silent, or perhaps it has become the obligation of friendship to speak up, and I have been freed to speak. What I wish to discuss goes far beyond friendship.

The other case is a man who abused his daughter. I’ve known him for many years. We were in Claudio Naranjo’s SAT Group. I heard about his abuse from his wife whom I’ve known for decades. The mothers of both girls are dear friends, and I trust them to talk with their daughters and speak the truth. These mothers also tell me they do not talk a lot about the incidents because it restimulates the abuse. 

I cannot name names. Both the men I’ve talked about are still alive. In neither case was there a formal accusation or trial. The man from the SAT Group disappeared into obscurity in a small town on the East Coast, and the other still has a position in the Hoffman Institute. I do not have the resources to undertake an investigation, nor would it be appropriate. I am not a party to the injury. Their mothers have not taken legal action. They need to create a safe space so that their daughters have a chance to heal—another reason why abuse remains in the dark. 

However, in a broader sense, we were all injured by both men’s abuse. This is what I want to talk about. It is a difficult conversation for all of us in the spiritual community because it reflects poorly on the work of personal self-observation I value. Like the priests of my youth or Swami Muktananda, who provided comfort and reconciliation and then destroyed it, these men's actions have obstructed the path of introspection for other people. 

But we must find ways to talk about sex abuse. One of the mothers wrote, “It’s difficult to even think about. And when this happened in your own family, it’s really hard to believe it. Yet they can’t remain hidden since they’re incredibly toxic if they do.” The first step seems to be to admit that there is abuse. 

However, just holding abusers accountable does not seem to be enough. Looking at the history of a few very high-profile cases in the Zen community leaves me with the impression that permission to blame tends to restrict the conversation to blame. Communities write up what they consider to be clear ethical statements for their members and teachers or others in positions of trust and then imagine that they have fulfilled their responsibility. But the cycle of blame does not end. Sometimes, removal and discipline of the offender bring back some semblance of normalcy, but in almost all the cases I am familiar with, there is a stubborn layer of rehashing the argument that persists. Why?

Is it because the insult to our sexuality is so intimate that it touches a deep level of personal trauma--a trauma that remains unresolved and ever ready to raise its nasty interior argument? Was it that the trauma was never really addressed? Denial has thousands of dark paths. That was my situation when Bob Hoffman’s sexual abuse surfaced many years later. 

Is it because, in our attempts to be OK with co-workers of sangha members, we gloss over the subtle, covert, and offensive sexual messages that come from a staff member who had been deeply involved in a sex cult before he or she sought therapy? We’ve simply failed to identify the depth of the pathology. This was the situation with Jake Goldenflame.

Is it because after the sexual revolution of the Summer of Love, the new normal has become so muddied the water that personal boundaries are weak and ineffective? There is a thin line between setting boundaries and not judging individual choices. In cases of pedophilia, the harm is so clear that it should not be hard to keep boundaries, but in many cases, the boundaries vanish. That was undoubtedly the case of many Roman Catholic bishops and religious superiors who chose saving face over weeding out and exposing the relatively few priests and religious who abused young men and women and nearly destroyed an institution that has guided and comforted men and women for thousands of years,

Was it that in these cases, the sexual nature of the abuse forces it underground, and when it surfaces, the sudden reaction is uncontrollable? Or is it instead that we, despite our practice, have not been able to move past “the blame game?” 

It is our obligation. The practice points to the only way we can heal: deal with our reactions, settle what was hiding, and examine ourselves before and after we lay blame. Of course, it will be different for each of us. Because I cannot recommend a general fix-all, it does not free us from the obligation of dealing with ourselves.

None of the above discussion, however, removes any consequences for an abuser’s actions. I will tell anyone connected to the Hoffman Institute, directly and without hesitation--you are complicit. You can ask some hard questions if you are considering one of their programs. The organizers allowed this man to escape with no consequences, personal or financial. He is still in good standing within the organization and in the financial stream. And they have failed in their first duty as a therapist, “to do no harm.” They’ve poisoned the well. 

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.

Sex, gossip, religion? Can we talk?

Originally published Thursday, November 18, 2021

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.--Carl Jung

 

I feel like I just stepped onto the set of The View and have been put on the spot for talking about priests, gurus, illicit sex, and sexual molestation. These words, coupled with the name of God, fling open the doors to intrigue, power, domination, manipulation, and forbidden pleasures. Has calling forth these dark forces stymied any ethical guidance?

 

Recently, I was stung by criticism from a trusted friend. She felt that some of my writing about the sexual behavior of both teachers and students whom I know and have had some relationship with, Buddhists, Enneagram enthusiasts, meditators, “verged on ‘gossip”--her words. Further, it gave fodder for some within our loose-knit community to lob attacks and discredit opposing positions. She felt that just talking about it might discourage people from undertaking the hard work of introspection, self-analysis, and meditation we’d like to encourage. And I also suspect that my friend feels the criticism is unfair on some level. This is the way of the world.

 

For me, for the Jesuit in me, this poses some thorny ethical questions. I know that I have to discuss these issues openly, including my personal experience, but I want to avoid gossip and honor the confidence of friends and other people I’ve known and worked with. I reject any underlying assumption that this situation is “the way of the world” and that we should be mute because of some larger, more important matters at stake.

 

In this essay, I will look at some of the implications of accusations of sexual misconduct, gossip, and spiritual practice. But first, I have to look at the conversations themselves and try to distinguish between gossip and real situations open to analysis and criticism.

 

Gossip is the “casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.”

 

In our current culture, it’s very politically, morally, and even spiritually “correct” to talk about the consequences of sexual conduct, especially if it’s misconduct. These conversations have their own cachet with their own rules. But this is nothing new, is it? Every religion on the face of the earth spends a considerable part of its capital trying to corral the impulses of the lower centers, legislate sexual behavior, and devise punishments for those who stray.

 

One of the main reasons for the #metoo movement, including digging into the egregious behavior of many in the formal institutions of religion, is that for generations, negotiating these tricky moral areas was secret; it was never talked about in polite conversations. No matter the consequences, even challenging the wisdom of saints, there is widespread public support for this type of investigation. When people began to realize that even the Sainted John Paul turned a blind eye to the sins of some men in his workforce, the lid blew off.

 

John-Paul was a saint, and he allowed priests who molested boys and young men to remain in positions where they could continue to abuse. The church admits no error when it comes to declaring saints, but there are other consequences when this kind of conversation breaks loose and creates its own weather system. Humans love a good stoning when the clouds begin to threaten our comfortable sunny afternoon--especially if the miscreants appear to be having their cake [bought for them] and eating it, too. And we’re mainly talking about a modern tabloid version of the Salem witch trials with an emphasis on sleaze. 

 

These are factual cases of unethical behavior and, as in the case of my own abuse, criminal behavior. There’s a lot of blame, from the butcher, the baker, to the candlestick maker. Michel Foucault argues that surveillance and punishment are part of a technology that poisons institutions from the top down. I will leave that analysis for a later discussion. For now, it is enough to note that the sins of pedophile priests are at least partially shifted to the institutional mechanisms that allow them to function and, more importantly, continue in positions of authority after they’ve been discovered. 

 

Any subsequent slowing of monetary support might force hard questions about how a religious institution spends its political capital. If there is erosion of public support, i.e., donations, is any revision or qualification possible? Of course, there’s a tendency for an institution, an organization, or a church to sweep this kind of behavior under the rug, particularly if any exposure endangers a stream of income.

 

I have encountered this criticism: you were raped, but it happened 40 years ago. Get over it. The pain caused by the trauma is as much a result of my inability to move on and deal with my issues as it was Bob Hoffman’s fault for abusing one of his clients in Psychic Therapy. When a senior teacher of the Hoffman Process told me that I should move on, that it was only the result of my “patterns,” he was gaslighting me. The definition of gaslighting is to “manipulate (someone) by psychological means into doubting their sanity.” He wanted me to shut up, which is the response worthy of a cult follower with no integrity.

 

There are several other characteristics of the conversation about sexual abuse in spiritual groups that I’d like to highlight.

 

This conversation about clergy sexual abuse is, for the most part, taking place in rich, privileged parts of the world. But it is also privileged in other ways. Privileged describes a person as having special or unique advantages and opportunities. When used to describe a position in a conversation, analysis, or controversy, it points to what we call an unfair advantage, insisting on a position because of the status of the speaker rather than the merit of their cause.

 

It is a conversation of privilege in that the main actors are men and in terms of “privileging” the conversation, the conversation deals with men in power. In a study, “Female Sexual Assault Perpetrators,” we see that only recently has any attention been paid to female offenders. They exist, of course, but the conversations we are dealing with only involve male perpetrators.

 

Either by rank, authority of position, or what I will call “privileged knowledge,” there is a dominant voice in the conversation. People apply different moral indicators when dealing with clergy members, gurus, or spiritual teachers. Time-honored demarcations of power and authority that accompany sexual restrictions and practices are normally unquestioned. This complicates the discussion.

 

The issue of misogyny: the conversations in the Catholic Church have been focused on male clergy because the actors are male and clergy. The conversation is skewed by a strong undercurrent of misogyny also present. Some indicators would be the differences in the level of condemnation between men and women (listeners); the conversation is also prejudiced by the high level of homophobia among the listeners.

 

Let's look at some other characteristics of these conversations.

 

The conversation can quickly be shut down as gossip because it involves private behavior. For example, what happens in secret, in the bedroom, automatically becomes hearsay. When some secretly recorded tapes were circulated of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, "Uncle Teddy,” seducing seminarians at his private beach house, I posted them to a group of primarily heterosexual former Jesuits. The response was “just crickets.” Actually, they were so explicit and damning that most of the group just didn’t believe that they could be true. After a two-year Vatican investigation, McCarrick was defrocked. The crickets were speaking loudly, but for my listeners, they spoke a coded language.

 

Another indicator that the private nature of most behaviors prejudices the conversation is the evidence of widespread victim blaming. When a few victims of molestation by priests began to come forward, one of the most complex obstacles to highlighting the severity of the problem was the reluctance of other victims to speak openly, given that the abuse was sexual and, for the most part, homosexual.

 

There are many divergent views of what is acceptable sexual behavior. The social norms, for example, in the gay community, and what is expected of a parish priest, a monk, or the leader of a New Age Spiritual Community are quite different. Gender, marital status, age, race, level of education, income level, and sexual orientation all play a role in how severely or leniently we judge sexual misconduct.

 

In some cases, sexual conduct outside the norm is excused because it is outside the norm. In an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Claudio Naranjo gave Swami Muktananda a free pass for breaking his religious vows: “My own interpretation of him is that he was playing the role of a saint according to Western ideals, or to cultural ideals in general. I think he was a saint in the real sense, which has nothing to do with that. For instance, it's the popular idea that a saint has no sexual life, and he was playing the role of a Brahmacharya, which I think was part of a cultural mission he was on, to be an educator on a large scale. It was fitting that he did that role, and my own evaluation of him is that he was clean because he was not a lecher. He had a healthy sexual life. . . . “ In this regard, Claudio was far too optimistic. Although Muktananda retained some following, both in India and internationally, his sex life did not help his “cultural mission to be an educator on a large scale.” He proved unworthy of the kind of trust that is required for a spiritual teacher to function. But given Claudio’s logic, again it is the fault of those of us who are uneducated rather than "the one who knows," who is enlightened or has some special knowledge.

 

Naranjo also had, in my view, an outsized evaluation of the role of trickster in a spiritual teacher--the devious nature of our egos can only highlighted when we are tricked, or forced, into seeing our personality types, our behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets, and their consequences by unorthodox methods. This led him to place undue confidence in psychics, e.g., Bob Hoffman, Ann Armstrong, or Helen Palmer, and 4th way teachers such as E.J. Gold and Henry Korman, who were bullies. This prejudice also tended to blur or excuse any sexual misconduct on the part of the male psychics or teachers.

 

People also tend to compartmentalize and separate the offense from other qualities, events, and teachings that they value. This includes both those who are not directly affected by the abuse as well as the victims. A Zen priest told me that he felt Katagiri Roshi “got a bad rap” because Katagiri had been an important influence during a particularly difficult period of the priest’s training. Katagiri, a married man, and Zen teacher, had sex with students, but in the subjective evaluation of my friend, the Roshi had other qualities that outweighed sexual misconduct. In my own case, I refused to acknowledge the damage that Hoffman caused because he was part of a radical change in my life.

 

False equivalences ignore and/or exaggerate both similarities and differences. The distortion is particularly confusing and pernicious when it suggests that there is a moral equivalence between two or more things that are being equated--in the Katagiri case individual sexual misconduct and teaching meditation, or in the case of Hoffman Process, the pervasive influence of parental conditioning and my personal transference to Hoffman who was my therapist and counselor.

 

In summary, these conversations about sexual abuse are not gossip. They are not casual or unconstrained nor are they easily categorized. However, no matter the particular case, Catholic, New Age, or Buddhist, they all seem to contain several of these characteristics:

• They take place in rich, privileged parts of the world, but they are also privileged because the main actors are men.

• These are factual cases. For generations, they were kept secret, but now open discussion has widespread public support.

• They have developed their own cachet with their own particular rules.

• They erode public support for institutions; they undermine the authority of teachers.

• The conversations themselves are privileged because the speaker's status is used to support a position or the perpetrator.

• Some conversations are not easily understood because they are spoken in a coded language. They are prejudiced by misogyny as well as a high level of homophobia. There is also evidence of widespread victim blaming.

• There are many divergent views of what is acceptable sexual behavior. People apply different moral indicators when dealing with clergy members, gurus, and spiritual teachers.

• People tend to compartmentalize. Their arguments contain many false equivalences that ignore and/or exaggerate similarities and differences when discussing cases.

Agatha Christie, through her gossip detective Miss Marple, makes a strong case for collecting useful information by paying attention to the whispers and tell-tale signs of bad behavior. Marple entered the exclusively male realm of English detective fiction as a female outsider whose methodology veered from the careful Aristotelian observation of, for example, Sherlock Holmes. I might argue along with Christie that what is commonly called rumor or innuendo is sometimes the only reliable source for gathering key information about bad behavior and holding people to account. Some would even argue that dominant male actors created the blanket prohibition against gossip and gossiping to protect themselves.

 

In the next part of my exploration, I will ask: What next? Is there a way to step out of a black-and-white set of responses and look at the situation differently? Maybe we already have. We’ve been forced to--a fact not yet recognized, accepted, or fully understood. 

The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

APPROACHES TO GROWTH: EAST AND WEST with CLAUDIO NARANJO, M.D. 

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is a look at techniques for human growth, a comparison of Eastern and Western approaches. My guest, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, is a seminal figure in the human potential movement, the author of several books including The Healing Journey, coauthor of On The Psychology of Meditation with Robert Ornstein, and also the author of The One Quest. Welcome, Claudio.

CLAUDIO NARANJO, M.D.: Thank you.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. One of the things for which you will be remembered in the history of the consciousness movement was your role in bringing the Arica school to the United States from Chile. Maybe that's a good place to start, since Arica introduced many, many different techniques, and attempted, I think, to synthesize Eastern and Western approaches. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved in Arica?

NARANJO: Well, I worked in Chile before coming to California.

MISHLOVE: You were a psychiatrist there.

NARANJO: Just before migrating I left many people hanging. I had a group that had become a therapeutic community, where I had partly applied the inspiration of Esalen, where I saw many approaches under the same roof that were normally not found under the same roof in other places. I undertook to do something of that sort, but just with my resources, so I created a program with meditation and Gestalt therapy and readings from mystical literature, fencing, and so forth — a collage of approaches, which I thought were converging. Naturally people were a bit desolate when I left. It's said that when there is a need a teacher appears, and probably there's some truth in that, in that this group contacted Oscar Ichazo, or Ichazo somehow appeared in their midst soon after I came to the States.

MISHLOVE: In other words, he filled in the vacuum that you left at that time.

NARANJO: Yes. People in that group wrote me and said, look, there's a very interesting Sufi here that you might want to meet one day. When you come to Chile next time, make a point of knowing this man. I was then traveling every year to spend vacations with my son, after a divorce. So when I did come to Chile I did make a point of meeting Ichazo. A good friend of mine, who at that time was head of the Chilean Psychological Association, had invited Ichazo to give a series of lectures in Santiago. In addition to the two months of lectures — I don't remember how many times a week — I was invited by him to spend hours every day with him. He said, "I want to give you this attention because I feel you will bring other people to me." I said, "I don't see myself in a role of propagandizing for anything. If I want to work with you, that's what I'll do." He insisted, "Other people will follow, whatever you do." And that's how it happened. I was very ambivalent about the experience of those months. I came back to California, and particularly to Esalen, where I was considered an associate in residence and held workshops. I came back feeling that I had had remarkable spiritual experiences by meditating in his presence or by following directions, and at the same time I felt great distrust for the man. I felt he lied a lot, and I told him to his face just before departure. I told him, "What should I do about this? I perceive you as a liar and as a manipulator, and I don't know whether I can work with you under these circumstances."

MISHLOVE: It was very forthright of you to say that.

NARANJO: I came from the Gestalt tradition; I rather believed in that approach. He said to me, "In this manner of working, we don't need sanctimonious reverence. All that is necessary is that you work and you let me work. Honor your distrust; you have been deceived in the past. And allow yourself the time to know, because you cannot judge now; you can only judge by the fruit. So if you work with me you will come to Arica" — and this is the part of the story I've never told publicly before; I think at this point I can — he said, "You will know very soon, because what I will do with you is take you through a process involving only several weeks of retreat in the desert, a very powerful process after which you will know for sure." He made a great emphasis on that being secret at the time. Now what happened later was — well, to say it succinctly — a new birth. I experienced a new beginning.

MISHLOVE: You went to the desert.

NARANJO: I went to the desert, and I could validate that indeed it had been a good idea to accept his offer. At the same time he played like a typical Sufi trickster. At the end he told people that I had gone to the desert on a Jesus Christ trip, disobeying his orders instead of staying with the rest of the group in Arica. Because indeed many people had followed my footsteps. First it was five; Ram Dass wanted to come, and Stanley Keleman and John Lilly, very well known people. Ram Dass ended up not coming, and Stanley Keleman didn't come.

MISHLOVE: But John Lilly did.

NARANJO: But they attracted many people, because knowing we were coming, others wanted to. And then Oscar asked me and John Liebtraub, who is still with him, to select no more than fifteen. Then it was no more than twenty, then no more than thirty, and the group kept increasing. The maximum was thirty, but forty came.

MISHLOVE: For a training in Chile.

NARANJO: For a training in the city of Arica, which is the northernmost town.

MISHLOVE: For which the movement was named.

NARANJO: After which the movement was named, after everybody left Arica and came back to the States. But at this point we went different directions. I became the black sheep of that group, because I didn't abide by the group's decisions after a while; it was a choice we all had to make. I chose to be my own person — a little bit like Gestalt tradition again. And so I came up a bit earlier, and started teaching in Berkeley in my own way, which was integrating the Arica experience with my earlier Gurdjieff background, with Gestalt, and increasingly with Buddhist meditation.

MISHLOVE: I suppose it's worth mentioning that within a few years, two or three years, of your experience there with Oscar Ichazo, the movement spread in the United States, and must have encompassed thousands of people.

NARANJO: Many thousands.

MISHLOVE: And has shrunk down now.

NARANJO: Yes. I think his purpose in doing that was very different than the Arica experience. The experience of the few of us who were down there was, I think, deeper and of a different nature, in which he was improvising. Then he created a kind of spiritual supermarket designed, I think, to turn people on to the quest in great numbers, since he was convinced that it would make a difference politically one day — or in even a wider sense, that the future of our species, according to the old prophecies, would depend on the degree of spiritual orientation.

MISHLOVE: Well, we are faced today with this supermarket situation, and I suppose it's fair to say that you in your own work have combined a variety of Eastern disciplines with a Western psychotherapeutic practice.

NARANJO: Yes. Not only have I combined them, but I have also espoused the attitude of creating exercises that people can take home. I think we are in the midst of a democratization of psychotherapy. First psychotherapy was part of medicine. Then it became wider; it broke the professionalism and went into psychology social work. And then I think a new shamanism has emerged — a phenomenon of contagion that goes much beyond professionalism, a phenomenon of vocation.

MISHLOVE: I think you'd have to say that here in California, where there must be thousands and thousands of people practicing psychotherapeutic disciplines outside of the recognized professions.

NARANJO: Yes, and I think there is a hope in that. At the time when psychotherapy started with psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis has a very imperialistic attitude, a monopoly which discouraged self analysis. I think today it is more suitable to encourage the potential everybody has to work on himself and to assist in the work of others. So I'm all for support groups and self-help procedures, only I think there are particular tools that need to be generated and training that needs to be given, so professionals might now turn their attention to a different function in the community.

MISHLOVE: One of the parallels that I suppose one might draw between the Eastern and Western approaches is that of the guru, the Eastern teacher who is often very authoritarian, and the therapist, who in his own way can also be quite authoritarian. You yourself seem to have run into some difficulties with this. How does one, especially a Westerner, deal with the authoritarian aspects of it?

NARANJO: It's a very interesting question. I have lived it very personally, since as I have mentioned my first powerful influence after psychoanalysis was Fritz Perls. I believed in the democratic, all-American attitude — personal transparency. And even though Perls had a masterful use of authority, it was different from the guru's authority. It was not supported in holy books or anything beyond himself; it was only supported in his wishes and in his impulse. And then, after working with Oscar, I came to believe in the possibilities of being a group manipulator in Eastern ways too, and I adopted that for a while.

MISHLOVE: What do you mean by that, in Eastern ways?

NARANJO: I was very charismatic during that time. I attracted lots of people. Little by little I started to accept the position of a taskmaster.

MISHLOVE: The mystique of the guru, perhaps.

NARANJO: I started using authority in a subtle way. I haven't spelled it out very carefully to myself either, what it consisted in. But I only know that at some point I was feeling uncomfortable about being at the same level as others. It is as if I had something at stake on being one who knows more, one who is followed. It was a long process to regain my original stance, and now I would say I have come through experience to a point where I get respect, I am heard in a way, even more than I have in the past, when I was unconsciously seducing the audience by being brilliant. But I can see in retrospect that many people today are caught up in the guru role — therapists who have found refuge in the guru role without quite being up to it. There is such a thing as being addicted to applause and not knowing the difference, which is different from the role of a true master, Oriental style, who can sometimes handle that situation — who can hold court, as Muktananda, for instance, used to do, in a masterful way, without really needing it for himself. He can sort of use the human energy polarized to him, and act the role of a hierophant, or like some of the great Tibetans, and use the paraphernalia, like the throne, as the Pope does.

MISHLOVE: It seems if you look into the writings of the followers of even some of the well recognized gurus, such as Muktananda, there's a lot of gossip that comes out, that they didn't fulfill the idea role ultimately. They had their foibles.

NARANJO: Well, I think Muktananda's case is very complex. My own interpretation of him is that he was playing the role of a saint according to Western ideals, or to cultural ideals in general. I think he was a saint in the real sense, which has nothing to do with that. For instance, it's the popular idea that a saint has no sexual life, and he was playing the role of a Brahmacharya, which I think was part of a cultural mission he was on, to be an educator on a large scale. It was fitting that he did that role, and my own evaluation of him is that he was clean, because he was not a lecher. He had a healthy sexual life, let's say, but he was like some of these Orientals that I have called tricksters. I think it's an old tradition that runs all the way from days of shamanism up to contemporary teachers, particularly in the Middle East, that have this characteristic. I think because the human ego is such a trickster, it can be very useful to have a trickster to play chess against for the ego, to be tricked beyond oneself. Some people have taken up this subject in contemporary therapy, like the followers of Erickson. It's not the core of the humanistic movement, but I think there's something to be said for that.

MISHLOVE: You mean Milton Erickson, the hypnotist, who would trick people into trance states.

NARANJO: Yes.

MISHLOVE: Very interesting. I'd like to talk a little bit about meditation, since you have authored a book on that subject. When we think of Eastern techniques, surely meditation must be the archetypal Eastern technique. It's one that seems to be the most acceptable from a therapeutic point of view, wouldn't you say?

NARANJO: It is self therapy. It is one thing anybody can do for himself, and it has much to do with psychotherapy. For instance, one aspect of meditation is paying attention to one's experience in the moment. This was the earliest form of Buddhist meditation, Vipassana, and it was rediscovered by Fritz Perls with Gestalt. It was coming with the evolution of psychoanalysis, but Perls could be called the prophet of the here and now. He made this discovery a socially accepted, socially valued idea.

MISHLOVE: Yet he wasn't conscious that he was deriving it from Buddhism.

NARANJO: He was not, he was not. He had some acquaintance with Zen. But that is not the core of Zen. The core of Zen is non-doing, dropping the intention to do anything. But the earlier Buddhism, the first five centuries of Buddhism, converged on this practice of finely recording one's experience, paying attention not only to the mind but to the experiences of the body, even experiences that we would consider psychologically trivial, such as posture and breathing. This Perls rediscovered, and the difference is that in Gestalt and in the many therapies that Gestalt influenced and that go with different names — eclectic, group therapy, existential therapy, and so forth — there, it is paying attention to oneself in a social, relational context. But it's the same basic tool, and in this way there are many aspects of meditation that are also shared by therapy, only in meditation the situation is simpler. It's done by oneself before coming into contact.

MISHLOVE: What you're talking about as you describe meditation sounds almost identical to me to a technique developed by Eugene Gendlin which he calls focusing — I believe at the University of Chicago.

NARANJO: It's a convergent thing — Perls with the continuum of awareness, and Gendlin with the focusing idea. It was one of these ideas that was ripe at the moment, and as Nietzsche says, when the fruit is ripe, it's part of the zeitgeist; anyone can just pluck it. Many people in the same generation sometimes pluck the same thought.

MISHLOVE: But in the Eastern tradition, the notion of the guru is essential for meditation, is it not?

NARANJO: Not so much for meditation. That's different in different traditions. For instance, in early Buddhism the meditation teacher is more a specialized instructor, not so much a guru. It is with Zen that the idea began of a personal transmission beyond instruction — the idea of the contagion of being that could happen not only through the practice of meditation, but by just being around an enlightened being.

MISHLOVE: Muktananda used the term the Shaktipat, the transmission of Shakti energy.

NARANJO: The transmission that goes from heart to heart beyond the scriptures, is the way it's put in Zen. Which are also the words Beethoven used to express his intention to express himself in music — to go from the heart to the heart. I think it's a universal phenomenon that Zen acknowledged — that there is a much richer interaction between people than the mere sharing of a technique, and particularly between a more conscious person and a beginner. This was an evolution that culminated in Tantric Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, where the guru is so important that there is a specific place for initiation. Initiation is not only a ritual situation, but also a situation where the teacher not only instructs but demonstrates a mental state by infusion, so to say — making you feel a way of being through his presence, and saying, "Well, this is it. Now you have to cultivate it."

MISHLOVE: This is common to the Sufi tradition.

NARANJO: Yes, not only the Sufi tradition, but it was in Christianity at the beginning of Christianity. The idea of baptism was originally very different from now. It was originally an adult that was baptized after immersion in a river and experiencing the risk of drowning. It was an act of insufflation by the holy spirit. The priest or the holy one, the patriarch, would blow the ineffable quality of sanctity over the novice to precisely convey this presence.

MISHLOVE: Well, as we're discussing all of this, Claudio, I get the feeling that really the differences between the Eastern and the Western approaches are minimal. And yet, somehow intuitively that doesn't quite seem right to me. One thinks East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.

NARANJO: I think the main difference is that traditionally the East has specialized in going inward, introspectively and individually; whereas what the Western contribution is is the expressive component. Psychotherapy began by being expressive, by being a talking cure, with Freud. It continued being even more expressive with Wilhelm Reich, who believed in breaking through, not only becoming aware of repression — not being aware of repression in the Freudian sense, which is making something unconscious, but also to liberate the human impulses.

MISHLOVE: In the body, literally.

NARANJO: Liberate behavior from the straitjacket of culture, an excessive constraint of the social ego, let's say. Reich and D.H. Lawrence, in literature, were champions of this. So the later movement, and particularly with the new age — and Perls was very important in this again — was a step further, was a liberation movement, like many liberation movements. More and more an expressive quality came — the use of dramatic means, and the use of letting go, of relinquishing impulse control as a way to know oneself. Traditionally the way to self knowledge was one of self observation in containment: stop yourself from acting, and then you will know yourself. If you put your hand against the water, you feel the resistance of the water.

MISHLOVE: Now you say traditionally. Do you mean in the East?

NARANJO: In the East, and in the past, implying also the Western spirituality — rather Christian spirituality, and Islamic. It was a life of virtue and contemplation and not acting out of one's impulses, whereas in modern therapy there's an invitation to catharsis of the good and the bad — expression which is in many ways — well, catharsis in the Aristotelian sense. It's something like an exorcism of the passions, or a psychological judo, you could say — a process by which letting the anger out, or letting the greed out, in the form where you become a caricature of yourself, you end up being able to take distance to a whole layer of your psyche.

MISHLOVE: I suppose in a sense that may stem from the influence of the theater itself on the Western tradition.

NARANJO: The theater was important, and Perls was trained by Max Reinhardt, had that background. But many other ingredients came; psychodrama with Morino was important. But I think it's also in the spirit of the Western culture.

MISHLOVE: That notion of catharsis isn't present so much in the Eastern traditions, is it?

NARANJO: Certainly not. Social life in the East is regulated by etiquette, by norms, whereas in the West it is an adventure of improvisation. The libretto is not written before we're born into it.

MISHLOVE: We have greater freedom.

NARANJO: It's a creative challenge, and psychotherapy is a help in exploring that creative challenge of human relationships.

MISHLOVE: Well, my sense is that for people living today in our modern world, we can draw on East and West as you have done, and it's almost incumbent upon us, I suppose, if we are serious about our own growth, to taste of the richness that is available to us.

NARANJO: Yes, I think it is not only useful for us to meditate as well as engage in psychotherapy, to absorb from both, but there's much to be said for the interface of both. I have particularly been interested in creating what I call psychospiritual exercises, where there is a psychological content, but a meditational task too at the same time.

MISHLOVE: Claudio, our time is up. It's been such a pleasure having you with me. Thank you very much.

NARANJO: You're very welcome. It's my pleasure.

END 

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