Was Muktananda just high level chicanery?

Honesty is such a lonely word
Everyone is so untrue
Honesty is hardly ever heard
And mostly what I need from you

--Billy Joel

What I remember most about the evening was the fancy BMV with the vanity plates GURU 1. It was even driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Muktananda and Werner Erhard were in the back seat. Baba’s translator, Swami Yogananda Jain sat in the front next to the driver. The venue was most likely 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, an important presentation of Siddhi Yoga. It wasn't even interesting, but what do I know? I had pretty much listened to every sermon whether about grace, shanti or shakti. I saw the westernization of an Indian sadhu, sanitized but still containing a few tastefully presented cultural artifacts that might lure western spiritual seekers. 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. Some westerners who had become disciples had purchased and begun refurbishing a large hall with a kitchen and some staff quarters in either Emeryville or West Oakland. It was sometime in 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 those first early 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 one afternoon before his public event at the ashram.

There were only 20 or so 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 then exited into a private 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 that I would skip the whole foot kissing ritual so I sat before him in a kneeling position. I 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, 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 (Da Free John)’s group and had come to extend their greetings to Baba. The conversation was suddenly doused with cold water. The drift of the questions that I could follow went something like, well, I do hope he’s well, but where is he? Oh he’s very busy but he sends as a token of his respect this box of cheap crummy chocolate balls that came from the ashram’s kitchen. 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 they were definitely confrontational. I got the impression that someone on the staff would be asked how the group made it onto the list of invited guests.

An hour in I had a sense of heightened awareness, so when Jain invited questions from other guests, I was not prepared for my response to one woman’s question. She said she was epileptic. Was there anything she could do to prevent seizures? Muktananda became rather oddly professional, and said that he’d been a doctor before becoming a sadhu. His recommendation was to drink cow urine, preferably still warm. Now that I live 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 in 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 the time had come to get ready for the chanting, talk and darshan in the public hall, and afterwards, please stay for dinner. I’m sure Hal and I stayed. Chanting the Guru Gita was very long although harmonious. Even though the poem is in praise of the eternal guru, it was obvious that the followers identified Muktananda as that guru. I thought that singing the praises of the guru in the presence of a human guru was a bit over the top, 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 really present, not just an observer. It was extremely 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 that I put on my analytical hat and ponder it for a month. It just was. When I noticed that the light had changed to green although I had no idea of how long I’d been standing there, I looked at my watch and realized that I was going to 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 to walk north though I do remember being extremely careful of crossing traffic.  

Later that afternoon I realized that I had received shaktipat, what yogis describe as the awakening of the dormant divine energy. I also realized why there is really very little written about these experiences other than 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 at least 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 really like the Hindu trappings. I should be more clear: 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 70’s. The people around Muktananda, I felt, were there to feel some kind of spiritual high or bliss, but it was extremely self-centered. I had conversations with several of the western sadhu and 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, but I wanted to experience a longer concentrated meditation period so I asked Muktananda personally at darshan if I could attend only the weekend. He quickly assented. I arrived late on 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 VIP’s. Naranjo was among them. They were headed up to the main meditation pavilion. I bowed towards them and Muktananda nodded back. I continued to struggle along the rather densely overgrown path towards my bunk when suddenly I heard a very loud cracking sound. It sounded like a giant with enormous hands snapping his fingers right over my head or very 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. 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 in the chanting. Otherwise he sat on the side in his 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 any formal meal breaks. And oh, it didn’t stop, but went on day and night. The drive back to San Francisco was about 4 hours on a very dangerous highway so I made sure that I had a few hours 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 from time to time when he was there which was less and 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, and 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 appeared. 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 that Muktananda’s guards wouldn’t let him into the private quarters. “I know he’s very lonely. So I just wanted to share some soup with him and keep him company, but they wouldn’t let me in.” 

I am now going to 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 that 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 actually did happen, other than it happened. I might have been deluded or hallucinating, or carried away by some religious fervor, or perhaps it really did occur as I am going to describe. But I am going to demand a complete level of honesty from Muktananda so I can’t avoid telling the story. 

I forget the circumstances of my invitation. I was not a regular member of Naranjo’s inner circle, but either late one 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 actually 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. But other than that I would have to pick and choose out of a list of the usual suspects. If there’d been a very close friend with whom I might have shared and even asked questions about what was going to happen, I would have remembered.

One of the first things that I remember very clearly was a Scientology E Meter casually set up on the breakfast table. I had only heard rumors of Nanranjo’s experimentation with Auditing and to see the device, which is nothing more than a galvanic skin response lie detector, there it was. 

There was certainly 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 is that she’s 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 all now sitting on the floor near the breakfast nook near 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 continued to increase in intensity, the edges becoming more white 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 clearly visible. He was walking at a very deliberate pace though the legs may not have been really moving at all. He had the appearance and movement of a real human body although it was not solid. I could still make out the door and the walls through him. It was eerily real.

I do not know if I was the only person who saw this. There was no discussion, no questions, or 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 began at the edge of the circle opposite me. It stood behind each person. I cannot remember if they were gestures, but the person became very quiet. The figure moved in a clockwise fashion 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 went back to our normal lives. I have hesitated to speak about it openly for almost 50 years. There are many possible reactions to a clear, even violent breaking of normal perception. One is silence. Almost all modern writers talking about their drug experiences have expressed frustration. Most writings by the mystics are rarely clear or 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 or devotees simply have these kinds of 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 an 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 extremely life-like although his body was diaphanous and bright. He was alive, not dead or resurrected as in the Jesus narrative, but afterwards I could see the story of 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. 

Things fall apart

The number of followers around Muktananda became overwhelming. Darshan was a circus. I can’t recall one talk that I thought 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.

What was also clear that in a larger group, there were those who were close devotees, or considered themselves close, those aspiring or even jealous. There was also an enormous amount of money now available. This is ripe terrain for abuse, distrust, even warfare. I don’t think that it ever 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 sexual life.

Hoffman had been wrong, or perhaps very right. Muktananda was not lacking in company, and he may have been very lonely. I am not going to delve into his motivations, but soon there were many credible rumors that the guards who had blocked Hoffman from the private apartments invited many younger women, some even underaged, to join Muktananda. He was not a celibate sadhu. 

I have read through many of the accounts from insiders and malcontents and disenchanted followers. Muktananda at some point gave up the celibate life, but he couldn’t just trade satguru for the role of a conventional married man. I think that Krishna Murti’s long involvement with an older married woman might be a good example, one that 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 so many younger American women with liberated attitudes available, the doors opened. From most reports, 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 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.” 

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 be defrocked, or even in jail. He does not get a pass for trying to play the role of a Brahmacharya in some large cultural shift.

Baba-Ji, you lied to us. You were not who you claimed to be.

I’m not quite sure where I can begin to separate the man from the yogic powers, or even if I have to. But I do 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?

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, 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 that we’d like to encourage. And I also suspect that on some level, my friend feels that the criticism is unfair. 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 both avoid gossip and honor the confidence of friends as well as other people whom I’ve known and worked with. I totally 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 that are open to both analysis and criticism.

 

Gossip is defined as 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, 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 huge part of its capital in 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 huge #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 done in 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 work force, 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 talking, for the most part, 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 to go around, 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’d been discovered. 

 

Any subsequent slowing of monetary support might force some 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, 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 actually 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 own sanity.” Obviously he wanted me to shut up, which in my view 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 with regard to 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 advantages and opportunities. When used to describe a position in a conversation, analysis or controversy, it points to what we might 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 a different set of moral indicators when dealing with members of the clergy, gurus, or spiritual teachers. Time-honored demarcations of power and authority which 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 easily be shut down as gossip because it involves private behavior. What happens in secret, in the bedroom for example, 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 mostly 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 possibly 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 the behaviors prejudice the conversation is the evidence of widespread victim blaming. When a few victims of molestation by priests began to come forward, one of the hardest 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, 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 were tricked, or forced, into seeing our personality types, our behaviors, attitudes and mindsets, and their consequences by unorthodox methods. In my view 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, the only word that comes to mind, 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, teachings, which 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, did have sex with his 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 much larger radical change in my personal 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 seuxal 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 its own particular rules.

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

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

• Some of the 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 a different set of moral indicators when dealing with members of the clergy, gurus, spiritual teachers.

• People tend to compartmentalize. Their arguments contain many false equivalences that ignore and/or exaggerate both similarities and differences in discussing actual 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 until then exclusively male realm of English detective fiction as a female outsider whose methodology veered from the careful Aristotelian observation of, for example, Sherlock Holmes. In fact, 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 the blanket prohibition against gossip and gossiping was created by dominant male actors to protect themselves.

 

In the next part of my exploration I’m going to ask the questions: What next? Is there a way out of this? Can we perhaps step out of a black and white set of responses and look at the situation in a different way? I actually think that 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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