Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process.

Hoffman the sexual predator grooms me. 

The public narrative about the creation of the Hoffman Process is that Claudio Naranjo’s strong, professional psychotherapeutic experience guided Bob Hoffman. I will make a case that there is little substance to this claim; that it is a myth and a marketing ploy. Naranjo says in his Introduction to “No One is to Blame” that he played the role of John the Baptist. Did he forget that that relationship did not turn out well? But both were Jews so perhaps the subtlety escaped them. (For a serious examination of Claudio’s, and others’, contributions, see “The Ontological Odd Couple”).

By Thanksgiving, the conflict between Hoffman and Naranjo in the direction of the SAT Process was becoming apparent. Claudio’s directions insisted that our exploration be self-directed. The time honored and well tested practice of psychotherapy require that discovery come from the patient him or herself, not the dictates or evaluation of the therapist. Hoffman had no patience and thought it was nonsense. 

Hoffman and Claudio might have talked about the purpose or therapeutic purpose of each exercise, but I cannot remember one evening that Claudio stayed after Hoffman began his presentation. Claudio maintained control over the direction of the work that we SAT members did through Rosalyn—3 hour group meetings once week with several small cohort meetings in between. For Hoffman that was far too long, more than a month doing what he did in two hour-long sessions with the people who came for psychic readings in the basement of his tailor shop in Oakland.

After our second or third week of the “Bitch Session” against Mother, not even halfway through the Process, Hoffman announced that he and Claudio had agreed that “The Defense of Mother'' would be an OK place to end their collaboration, as if it were an amicable divorce. Actually he’d had enough, and discovered the Wiffle Bat as a way to get to the core of emotional anger. He said that he and Claudio had agreed to finish their work together and that be doing his own version of group therapy. 

Hoffman took me aside and strongly suggested that I join the group of people he’d “selected” to do the first 13 week Process in Tolman Hall. He would later tell me that he saw me sitting there in Claudio’s SAT, he knew I was “terribly unhappy.” What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t been “selected,” rather that he’d singled me out to be a sex partner. It was not romantic. With Hoffman it was transactional. I was being groomed for Hoffman’s self-gratification.

 

Hoffman made it seem like a huge honor that he’d been invited to use the prestigious Tolman Hall, the UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology’s classroom and office building, as the venue for his presentation. In reality all it meant was that someone, Hoffman, even his secretary, or perhaps even a psychologist who supported Hoffman, called the campus rental Office, made a reservation, and paid a deposit on a room for an evening class. It was not a fancy lecture hall, actually just a drab narrow classroom with no windows and awkward plastic chairs, but Hoffman could always label his first group “Tolman Hall.”

 

50 or so people gathered on a January night for Hoffman’s first Process. 

 

Class, or session was Monday night at 7 PM. The 13 week Process quickly became a forced march. Each session had specific exercises with a clear objective, and we had to keep up. He warned us that stragglers wouldn’t make it, that we would resist but we could just take it as an opportunity to learn about our defenses.  We had till Wednesday at 5 to deliver the week’s assignment to Hoffman’s Office on 14th Street in downtown Oakland in an office building close to his former tailor shop. We listened to his taped feedback the following Monday before the session began.

 

Hoffman presented the week's objective in a rambling style. It actually felt more like he was caught up in a mental tangent, just let it rip, stream of consciousness. He claimed that he was channeling Dr. Fisher. The spirits on the other-side are apparently as disjointed and unorganized as they were in human life when they inhabited bodies, or more so—Hoffman was channeling a German professor of psychotherapy not known for flights of fancy. (It was recorded and I found out later that Mariam Brandstatter received the recordings in Tel Aviv and helped put some order and rationale into the presentation).

 

Usually Hoffman picked out one person for the demonstration of the purpose of each exercise. Often he’d just ask “who doesn’t understand, or who objects?” And the first person whose hand went up would be asked to come forward. There were compelling moments even if in retrospect they were needlessly brutal. I remember the demonstration of Negative Love in the first or second session. We had each brought a list of our mother’s negative traits to either the first or second session. One woman, she was a professional psychologist I think, a well dressed large woman—I have no idea why her image remains with me—volunteered to “work” with Hoffman.

Hoffman took the list she’d prepared of her mother’s negative traits and admonitions and started at the top. “Your mother complained about your father in an uncompromising fashion. Ok, How often do you complain about your husband?” “Never.” “Really? Be honest. Never? The thought never enters your mind? You’re always positive and loving? Don’t play your games. You never have to stop yourself from complaining just like your mother did?” And eventually the woman admitted that she had to fight with herself not to behave in exactly the same way that her mother treated her father. Onto the next trait on the list. Same interrogation. Same result: imitation to get love, or rebellion to the trait and experience conflict. Every thought, every action, every impulse was a conditioned response. There were no redeeming qualities, and no other possibilities. One thing was clear: we were nothing but the sum total of what we’d learned from our parents. Negative love was negative.

The woman was devastated. There was zero therapeutic, compassionate presence when Hoffman dealt with a person and their “games.” It was a frontal, take-no-prisoners assault, and he relished the fight. He ended the attack with a scripted, fake, all knowing, condescending smile coupled with the assurance that if we honestly stepped into his Process, and submitted to him, we’d come to realize deeply that everyone was guilty and no one to blame, and finally be free from the chains of Negative Love.

Contrast Claudio’s careful, respectful, even compassionate invitation to look into one’s self with Hoffman’s brutality and the reason why they separated couldn’t be more clear.

I also have to admit that I had never seen my own personality as some reflection of my mother’s in such stark relief before. It was enough to allow me to follow along. 

 

Hoffman the Predator Groomed Me! 

 

In the sixth or seventh week I had a very uncomfortable experience. The beginning of Hoffman’s sexual abuse started in a setting that was allegedly therapy!

 

Late one Wednesday afternoon I hand delivered my emotional “autobiography with father” to Hoffman on 15th Street. It was past 5, and the receptionist had left. Hoffman was sitting at his desk in a cramped office, with his feet on the desk. I stood in the open door. 

 

He told me to hand him my work, and he began to read it right on the spot. He would read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then try to make some connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and what he called the negative emotional patterns and character traits that I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for his love.

 

Hoffman read through to an incident I wrote about my father resetting the stone wall at the back of our lot. As Dad was lifting stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she was ferociously defending her cubs, my father killed her and her cubs with his shovel. As I remembered it, he began to beat her viciously. Her screams were chilling. 

 

Hoffman began by complimenting the emotional tone of my writing. But then he began to raise his voice. He said that obviously my Dad was a homosexual, and then, “You’re also gay too, aren’t you?” I countered with a question about how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on his bludgeoning a woodchuck? He just repeated “You’re gay.” His voice became louder and louder. Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he repeated his question: “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I admitted that of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. By now he was shouting loudly: “Don’t play games with me.” I had heard that Hoffman often often attacked clients—he claimed that he was breaking us down in order to build us up—but I could barely believe it. 

 

I was in nearly complete denial about my homosexuality, but my Dad was not gay. I actually think that the idea of same sex relationship never once crossed his mind in his entire life. I am also certain that Hoffman’s deductions from what I related in my writing were entirely projections and his own pathology. Other things that he said or implied were entirely off base and not even worthy of the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis, the whole thing became plausible, and I lost any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman. I also remember that the 13 week process cost $300. The real cost was devastating.

This part of my therapy with Hoffman happened in March. He began stalking me in September. He raped me in late October or early November.

 

When I described this incident to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did. 

 

 

Why can I find nothing online about Bob Hoffman?

An examination of the praise for Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Process, formerly known as The Quadrinity Process or Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.

I was recently interviewed for a book about personal transformation, specifically with regard to my experience with the Hoffman Process and the Landmark Forum. The writer asked me, “Why can’t I find anything online about Bob Hoffman except pro forma praise or what look like infomercials?” So I Googled him.

I found the ghost-written and dated No One Is to Blame: Getting a Loving Divorce Form(sic) Mom and Dad, the Discoveries of the Quadrinity Process which is so worthless that I can find no recommendation by the Hoffman Institute. I love the professionalism of the typo. We all make mistakes, but really, it's been 50 years, and you can't get the title of Hoffman's only book spelled correctly? 

Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute posted a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON which is so awash with factual inaccuracies (check out my blog post Why do cults need to rewrite history?) that I wonder if Mr. Kohrn actually met Hoffman. He certainly didn’t do much research about Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s contribution to the development of the Process.

You can buy You Can Change Your Life: With the Hoffman Process by Tim Laurence. Tim is the owner of the UK Hoffman Process and not an entirely objective observer. He “... came to the United States and ‘studied’ with Bob Hoffman, the gifted ‘intuitive' who founded the ‘world famous’ Hoffman Process.” I have a few admittedly snarky comments about Tim’s bio blurb.

I knew Hoffman, and I know a good number of Process teachers, including Tim. No one “studied” with Hoffman. If you “worked” with him it usually meant that you were angling for an international license to sell the Process or a teaching credential. But it also meant that you put up with being verbally attacked, yelled at, humiliated and belittled, yet always justified by Hoffman’s claim that he was doing it all for your own good, that he was “breaking down to build up.” I know this from personal experience as well as countless conversations and complaints by Hoffman’s early followers. If you were a psychologist or really any professional, you were singled out for Hoffman’s particularly abusive brand of attention. This “study” was more akin to a secret, brutal fraternity initiation than anything remotely resembling an education or a course of psychotherapy.

But in truth, there was nothing subtle to learn. Although Hoffman had an opinion about any subject from OJ Simpson to Henry Kissinger, I'd be hard pressed to distinguish much difference. I mention these two cases because I distinctly remember conversations with Hoffman about both. Kissinger “ran all over the globe” trying to please a father who never approved of him, but he did some good. OJ killed his wife because he never got unconditional love from his parents. Kissinger, as well as Madeleine Albright, were both Jews who succeeded, a Hoffman obsession, and he couldn’t tear himself away from Simpson’s TV trial, an obsession that he felt guilty about but could not control.

I recently wrote in a post “Bamboozled” that the use of “intuitive'' is a ploy to cover Hoffman’s roots in the Spiritualist Church—not the elite, hip Science of Mind organization, but the one with spirit visitations and ouija boards. A “gifted, compassionate Intuitive'' is an innocuous and deceptive moniker to present an unqualified and untrained person who claims special knowledge that mysteriously surpasses the hard earned therapeutic work of professional psychology. Nothing could be farther from reality. 

An apparently sanctioned description by Dylan Jones appeared in the 24 September 2017 edition of GQ Britain: "Founded in 1967 by Bob Hoffman, a former tailor from Oakland, California, with no formal training in psychology, psychiatry or psychotherapy, the Process is designed to help the unmoored identify negative behaviours, moods and ways of thinking that developed unconsciously and were conditioned in childhood." At least Hoffman’s CV is accurate. I like the lyricism of "the unmoored." Really, let the precision of this precise psychological descriptor "unmoored" sink in before you plunk your money down.

Aside from the articles and reviews in either slick magazines or paid online infomercials, I know of at least one attempt to see if there were long term positive benefits from doing the Hoffman Process. A group of professional mental health researchers at a California University conducted a peer-reviewed long-term study. It was funded by a donation arranged by the Hoffman Institute. I wrote about it in Science vs. Spooks, Skepticism, scientific research and the Nostradamus effect. "You get what you pay for," or "Follow the money." Either works.

Why am I so harsh on an enterprise that has allegedly helped many people achieve some measure of inner peace and resolve unfinished business in their relationships with their parents? In my case Hoffman’s sexual abuse was severely damaging, and it took a very long time and a lot of money to resolve. The Hoffman Process is not psychotherapy but poses as an alternative. It’s a free world and anyone can subject themselves to anything they choose, but I feel that honesty obliges me to present another, less popular view so that people can make an informed choice.

Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021

James Ishmael Ford’s Monkey Mind, "Mind-monkey," 心猿

Let me begin my tribute and thanks to James Ford for his blog “Monkey Mind” with a guess that he’s never experienced living with monkeys. Among Western Buddhists, he would not be alone. I’ve been around long enough to understand the shorthand we use to describe this experience of the mind’s vagaries, and I know the honored etymology of Monkey Mind, originally from the Chinese, "Mind-monkey" 心猿. We’ve all had some experience in meditation of the tenuous connections between jumping thoughts, feelings popping up, sometimes with inexplicable twitching's, swinging from branch to branch, hanging on by our fingernails. This was a metaphor, a vivid linguistic picture, until I moved to India. Here it's been filled out with a more complete experience.


Monkey Mind and Money Matters in an Indian “spiritual” context.

In 2011 on our first trip to India, Ashish and I visited Shimla where east of the city on Jakhu Hill a 108 foot statue of the Monkey God had been unveiled just the year before. But for hundreds of years before that at Shri Hanuman Mandir, monkeys had been venerated and pampered, producing some pretty outrageous ingrained behavior. One jumped me and stole my glasses, my spec’s, and refused to return them without forfeiting a ransom. The animal wanted candy which, along with small versions of its supernatural idol, is readily available from the concessioners set up in the Temple precincts testifying to the long, universal symbiosis between religious observance and extortion. These annoying, religiously-conditioned primates have been crawling over the shrines of northern India for generations. On the 12 km trek up Vaishno Devi in Katra, near Jammu, they steal your overpriced Pepsi’s in a kind of comedy routine, and of course do not pay any delivery cost to the way station at almost 12,000 ft above sea level. And we’re not talking about satisfying basic needs—for monkeys Pepsi is an acquired taste.

OK, perhaps filling out the picture of monkey mind and money is no antidote for the pain of paying the cost of spiritual pursuits, but the experience of real monkeys is closer to the bone. For me at least, seeing the image of god as a creature with such distasteful behavior was a shock. My cynic wants to highlight the cunning of extracting a price without getting anything in return. And theologically we are worlds apart from Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he taught Donald Trump and his father: think the right positive thoughts, and cash will pour into the coffers. Here nasty monkeys’ stealing and conniving is seen as just that and not a holy virtue worthy of the celestial realm. It’s as real as the writing in Monkey Mind. In this regard James is not easily distracted.


Monkeys as Kings and Gods in Buddhism

The Hindu pantheon is not unique in elevating the monkey to a revered status. In some Buddhist lore, monkeys are both kings and scoundrels at the same time, in the same body, in the same world, in all worlds. I can still almost hear Zenshin Phil Whalen’s guffaws as Lou Hartman read aloud Arthur Waley's abridged translation of the Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì), Adventures of the Monkey God, two old monks delighting in the ingenuity of Wú Chéng'ēn’s story telling. Also known as Ruzhong (c. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), he weaves a long tale about the risky transplanting of the Buddhist Teachings they both loved from India to China. It’s based on a true story of another famous monk, Xuan Zang, of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (602-664) who journeyed to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, to retrieve the “true” Buddhist holy books, and when he returned, translated the Sutras into Chinese.

Ruzhong weaves in all kinds of folklore and fantastic tales into a complicated and convoluted plot with a large unlikely cast of fantastic animals, humans, and celestial beings. Over 100 chapters, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, gains power, rebels against heaven, wins battles, is condemned to death by the Eastern deities, but the Buddha intervenes and traps him under a mountain for 500 years, preparing him to guard Xuan Zang and the Dharma. I’ll skip the Buddhist pig and dragons given the space limitations of a blog post.

It’s late Spring now in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the brown rhesus monkeys have just come down from the mountains—or maybe they’ve come up from the plains. I have no idea why these nasty monkeys seem to appear now in the village, but they’re here. To be fair to the species, their behavior is totally different from their grey langur cousins who live in the higher elevations, but they do not conform to the fanciful literary portrait except perhaps in this way: just as the Monkey King survives the celestial plot to execute him, they won’t disappear. They can’t be silenced, squelched, or eradicated. And this might have been the very quality that the Buddha singled out as important for guarding the Sacred Teachings as they made their way across continents, oceans, languages and cultures.

Everyone hates the brown monkeys. Besides being scavengers, they have ugly orange asses; they scream and fight; they steal my tomatoes just when they’re ripe; they shit all over my balcony, and are not easily scared off. They even throw their shit if confronted. These days, almost as if to highlight our suffering during the epidemic, they crowd the road that runs along the river where cremation gnats receive the bodies of people who’ve died from Covid. Food offerings provide an easy meal.

There are no wild monkeys in San Francisco, and I am a thoroughgoing Westerner. The way that local people deal with “the monkey problem” is for me as new and intriguing as living with monkeys. They simply make lots of space, and live their lives around them.

I’ll contrast it to the way a San Franciscan, for example, might deal with homelessness and poverty. Here there are people who live outdoors, and there are beggars everywhere, but there are no governmental attempts to house, feed or educate the homeless. The liability of drug addiction, here as in San Francisco, seems to be part and parcel of the homeless condition, but it is handled very differently. If an addict is lucky enough to have some family, he or she might get involuntarily locked up in the 30 day detox, the “de-addiction center,” but with no medical follow-up, they are basically left on their own to fight their demons.

Here is another story of living close to the wild, unpredictable, and very dangerous side of nature. Late this Spring near a local water tank, seven people were mauled by a black bear who came down from the high forest. Two died. The tank is located perhaps 500 meters below the Dalai Lama’s residence but still in the dense forest before the large Central Tibetan Authority complex, Gangchen Kyishong, commonly known as the “Library” because it holds perhaps the largest repository of Tibetan Buddhist texts in the world, after the Chinese occupation and wholesale destruction of Tibet’s monasteries. That’s also very close to me so I hear reports, stories of those injured and killed as well as most of the rumors.

My dear friend Bablu left my flat before sundown to return to his village which is adjacent to the Library, and we joke—carry big dunda to frighten off an angry bhaaloo. He knows one of the women who was injured. She tried to fight off the bear without any stick. She escaped alive, but was badly injured. People commended her for a brave fight, but they didn't arm a vigilante posse to stalk the bear and her cubs. That might be a course of action I’d expect if it happened in an American town.

But the presence of the bear and her cubs have made people hyper-vigilant. The furious barking of dogs and loud monkey squalling (I can’t think of a word that describes the sound) served as a warning that the bear was in Bablu’s village next to the Library. And this is as close as I can get to the monkey behavior guarding the Dharma—brown monkeys making a ruckus near a repository of precious texts, warning my friends to keep their dogs inside and watch over their children.

The real lives of people and monkeys is something that has thus far eluded the attention of religious scholars examining the exegesis of Monkey Lore. If anyone can do it, it is James Ford, but alas he might have to sojourn in India for a spell to deepen his understanding. As for me, I will just not plant tomatoes in my garden, and be grateful that monkey screams helped protect the precious children of my dear friends. If he visits, James will not be imprisoned under a rock for 500 lifetimes until he solves some tricky dharma questions, or at least I hope not. (I’ve already mixed monkeys in with bears so I’ll leave the Zen foxes for another time).

Taking the Next Step: A Note on Activism as a Spiritual Practice

This is a chapter from Intimate Meanderings: Conversations Close to Our Hearts, a book that Morgan Zo-Callahan and I put together with several other Jesuits, former Jesuits and their friends.

The Blessed Lord said: Time I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people. With the exception of you, all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain.’’ Bhagavad-Gita 11:32

Dilip Trasi and Nitin Trasi are committed and skilled practitioners who speak out of their own experience of meditation. Both have a deep understanding of the Hindu meditation tradition and both have worked with authentic teachers. They are also both laymen, not Brahmins, gurus or clergy, who set themselves apart by claiming special knowledge and this, in my view, allows for a freer exchange of ideas as well as a search for a common language in which we can share our experience. However, when questioned about activism and practice, we entered a territory where they felt that they had to offer cautions and reservations. Not that their reservations might not be valid in some cases, but I hope to show if the heart of the spiritual activists’ motivation and practice is of the simple “do-gooder” variety, it does not work as a spiritual practice much less effective community organizing.

One argument against activism runs like this: when faced with a choice between several courses of action, or taking no action whatsoever, we cannot say with certainty which one is the better, and, even if we practice some form of meditation, given that maturity in practice seems to sharpen our ability to discern the shades of grey, we cannot favor one position over another. This caution halts us in our tracks. The idea is not exclusively Eastern. Albert Camus said; “The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” (The Plague)

However, in all cases, no matter what our motivation or position, in any situation, in any relationship, in any community, country, tradition, or time, all actions produce results. Religious precepts, as they are called in Buddhism, recognize that living our lives leaves a trail of consequences. The possibility of making a mistake does not relieve the obligation to try to act responsibly; rather it imposes a further, perhaps more difficult obligation to remain open and test your experience, examine the results, and then change course if you find yourself embarked on an unproductive or negative course of action.

There is a second argument: that the desire to relieve universal suffering really stems from a desire to relieve one’s own suffering, that it is a myth to believe that we actually help others. From a Buddhist point of view, we are all intimately interconnected in a world that is always in flux. Most practitioners recognize that the source of suffering is not outside ourselves, that we are ultimately responsible for the conditions that cause suffering. That is in fact one of the reasons why we act. Activism is not reserved for enlightened beings. Submitting to moral obligation is for both ordinary and “enlightened” people. Besides, the conservative position—don’t act unless you are certain that your actions will have no harmful consequences—presupposes that omniscience, being able to foresee all the consequences of our actions, is available to humans. I have seen no evidence that such awareness is possible, even in supposedly enlightened beings.

And finally, what I would like to call the “conservative position” asserts that the strain on the social order caused by righting a wrong, causes far more pain, confusion and upset than any possible benefit of the actions. I do not buy into the argument that activists are wrong headed, self-indulgent and create harm because they upset the status quo.

The only part of that analysis that I can support is that some consequences of our actions will be unforeseen. But what is wrong with that? It will not stop me from trying to prevent women and children from being sold into sexual slavery or help innocents caught in the crossfire of the civil strife in Iraq. I will say more about any strain on the social fabric when I touch on the practice of non-violence.

Take ending of the enslavement of Africans in America or stopping the holocaust of the Jewish people that came with the Allied victory over Germany in 1945. These were patent evils engrained in the fabric of a society, or the programs of a powerful single party fascist regime. They had to be eradicated by whatever force necessary though we may have to sort out the consequences of both the American Civil War and World War II for several more generations.

Morgan, who is deeply involved in the activist world, said that he too regretted that some activists, though relatively very few, get carried away by their own self-importance. When I questioned Morgan, his objection was that “full fledged” activists who had a lot of unexamined personal motivations made organizing difficult, not that they, with few exceptions, were prone to mistakes that would cause harm in the outcome. But even this is not my experience. Perhaps my position is biased because my sample of activists comes largely from a group that creates effective actions in support of a cause as spiritual practice, not an add-on, or something to do during the rainy season when you don’t feel like meditating. Practice does more than keep an activist focused. It is the source of their action.

Nitin Trasi used this definition of activism in his analysis: A doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue (Webster). I want to suggest that this definition is not broad enough to include cases in which spiritual practice is the real operative factor.

The greatest modern proponent of the spiritual practice of activism was Mahatma Gandhi, and the traditions from which he derived Satyagraha, Sanskrit for “truth force,” were mostly Indian—Hindu, Buddhist and Jain. He also read the gospels of Jesus and was undoubtedly influenced by the saying: “whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do also to me.” In the Western monotheistic traditions, taking care of the world, tikkun in Hebrew, caring for the least fortunate of society, caritas in Latin, has always been part of religious practice, much more so than in Hinduism. When we talk or write about the practice of non-violence as Gandhi developed and practiced it, we are translating the Sanskrit, Ahimsa, which literally means “the avoidance of violence,” but it is impossible not to see the influence of his western education.

Gandhi himself, Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, as well as the Dalai Lama in his efforts to free Tibet from the oppression of Han Chinese overlords, have all undertaken practice to quell selfish motivation and focus on the goals of clearing a path to justice and equality. Many of the Jesuits and ex-Jesuits represented here in Meanderings use the discernment of spirits outlined in the “Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius” to weigh their activism. The American abolitionists of the 19th century were for the most part inspired by their religious convictions, transcendentalism or Quakerism, worldviews that hold all the created, visible world to be intricately connected and their practice had the flavor of the Great Awakening, with all its limitations—preaching and conversion.

Without humans, aggression, hatred, anger are not a perpetual motion machine. They need our energy to keep the pendulum swinging. A problem arises when, by applying a force strong enough to counteract the prevailing intransigence of a social order which supports evil, inequality and social injustice, we perpetuate the underlying mechanism that holds those structures in place. Halting that engine also has side effects—what will fill the void?

There are always far-reaching effects accompanying any action, violent or non-violent. For example, World War II, which was to be the war that ended war, has not marked the end of aggression and killing. It was not enough to defeat Hitler just as winning the US Civil War was not sufficient to cause the complete freedom of African slaves. (Though there is some evidence that the amount of armed conflict has been reduced since the defeat of Germany and Japan). In the ending of the British rule over India, the Mahatma struggled with the immediate consequences of partition and the bloodshed between Hindu and Muslim. The fast he undertook in an attempt to halt the violence nearly cost his life. He says in The Story of My Experiments with Truth, "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall—think of it, always." It’s just simplistic to think that any one action can end injustice or suffering. It is more a continuing struggle in which humans must engage. The birth of modern India, the largest functioning democracy on earth, has increased wealth and opportunities for Indians of all social strata. This is neither a myth nor inconsequential.

Whether or not one holds to some vague concept of “progress” or the endless repetition of karma due to the consequences of our actions, it seems that the world has changed and continues to change. That all life is impermanent, always being born and passing out of existence seems almost self-evident. Though I have never studied all the ways that the Hindu point of view differs from the Buddhist view, in Buddhism lived experience opens the door to religious practice.

Those who have some taste for practice seem to have chosen the path that was begun by Mohandas Gandhi. As with any practice, Ahimsa takes practice. It is not a theory. Though solidly based on the most ancient understanding of man’s place in the universe, it launches us into the unknown territory of caring for all of humanity, the entire earth in a new way. It requires the most courageous action and deep meditation. It requires that our spiritual practice take on a wider goal than our own salvation or enlightenment.

We are in the middle of such a revolution. The aims of the revolution seem to be clear: clean the environment, curtail the destructive power of our weapons, find new ways of resolving conflict, create universal recognition of human rights. They also include what Jesus taught as ‘charity’—to feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners. What is not clear is the path we chose to follow to achieve those goals. The old institutions have failed or are crumbling. What will emerge? Where do we place our bets and focus time and resources? Those who are in the middle of a revolution are least likely to recognize it. They are certainly among the last to appreciate it—they are way too busy tending to immediate concerns of Right Now! We don’t even know if we will succeed.

It will also demand new myths, and I mean myth in the most powerful sense, not fantasy, but images that capture the imagination in a powerful way. And it seems that one of those myths will be the story of the Bhagavad-gita, which has inspired Hindus and fascinated Westerners. In Philip Glass's Satyagraha, An Opera in Three Acts (2001), huge chariots for Arjuna and Krishna with larger than life puppet figures are drawn up on the stage; the prologue is verses from the Gita sung, chanted in Sanskrit. On the Kuru Field of Justice, Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna to put aside pain and pleasure, that action is his moral duty: “Be unconcerned with consequences, with victory or defeat, but act with the world's welfare as your intention” (LA Times, April 2008). Then when the figure of Gandhi walks onto the stage, small and clothed simply in a loincloth as he appears in later pictures; it is a powerful statement of “Truth Force.” But the performance is not left in some reverential version of Indian history—in the third act, Martin Luther King appears behind Gandhi, superimposed in a TV clip of his famous “I have a Dream” speech which electrified a generation of civil rights activists.

I would like to quote what J. Robert Oppenheimer said about his experience at the first test explosion of the atomic bomb, July 16, 1945. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” There may be some exaggeration in his statement. By the time he said it on TV in the 50’s, Oppenheimer had already become an activist working to stop the “Arms Race” and curtail the use of both nuclear fission and fusion in the manufacture of weapons.

Man now has developed a technology powerful enough to destroy himself, certainly to visit unfathomable pain and destruction on his fellow beings. The usual political balance for checking power, aggression and greed do not seem to be adequate to the task. It is not surprising to see that creativity, coupled with the spiritual dimension of reverence for all life, have shown up as potential sources for finding a way, not just to remedy injustice and relieve suffering, but to ensure human survival.

Because Dilip or Nitin didn’t have the opportunity to read and respond to my argument, I will give Dilip the (almost) last word on the subject.

“Let me investigate the useful side of [activism]. Activism in a beneficent sense can be defined as aggressive action towards a specific goal. We always find that in nature there exist thresholds. Right from the atom onwards, we find that a minimum energy barrier has to be crossed to overcome the forces of nature, which is called the threshold force. For example to get free of the force of gravity of the earth, a minimum velocity called escape velocity has to be exceeded (approximately seven miles per second).

“Applying activism to inventiveness, we find that many of the great inventors were intoxicated with only thoughts concerning their invention. Scientists were considered as absent-minded people. But this is the kind of aggressiveness and activism that is necessary to break the thought barrier.

“Finally, applying activism to spirituality, we find that a paradigm change in understanding is necessary, like the quantum jump of an electron, freeing from the influence of the nucleus. Maya is like the intra-atomic force that binds the electron to the nucleus. To overcome the influence of Maya or ignorance, one has to be intoxicated with Atma-consciousness or God-consciousness. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Ramana Maharshi were typical examples of such persons.”

In the last analysis, any call to action for the spiritually centered person is an act of faith, in the deepest sense—that he or she is called to participate in the action of God loving, caring for our world, that the easing of suffering is part of the dynamic of God’s love. To close, I am not going to quote scripture or give a sermon, but rather quote one of my heroes, the visionary architect, Bucky Fuller (from No More Secondhand God by R. Buckminster Fuller):

Yes, God is a verb,

the most active,

connoting the vast harmonic

reordering of the universe

from unleashed chaos of energy.

And there is born unheralded

a great natural peace,

not out of exclusive

pseudo-static security

but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.

Naught is lost.

Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.