This is dangerous territory. I could be vague and write about the people I want to talk about as if they were hypothetical and their stories anecdotal, but the damage was real and needs to be discussed. I use only Initials when I do not have solid evidence and the men or women are still alive. Believe whatever you want. You get to decide if you will remain in a world of denial and protect whatever you feel needs protecting. Guru types acting badly are precisely that. Even if I’ve made an error and the few I allude to are as clean as the morning dew, there is a long line of those who fill the bill and then some.
Yesterday, I uncovered some slight nostalgia for the New Age California of the last half of the last century, the last of the last. After all, we all learned so much, didn’t we? I’ve talked at length about Bob Hoffman’s sexual and emotional abuse and its lingering effects. I woke up trying to tell myself that perhaps it wasn’t that bad. After all, I knew at least two other young men who were the object of his aggressive, entitled, and uninvited sexual advances. Why should I think I’m special? Besides, I had a life-changing personal breakthrough, so perhaps I ought to change my tune and be grateful.
Then, a rush of other sexual misconduct started like a tidal wave: Everybody was fucking somebody.
It was common knowledge that Claudio Naranjo was fucking KS, but also RS and a few other young women in the groups. He loved the Enneagram, sex, and drugs in no particular order. One woman who lived in his harem had a psychotic break and died in a car crash, but that didn’t stop his behavior. He didn’t even introduce a word of caution. According to this wild, wide-eyed version of the “Work,” there was something to be learned from all our interactions.
Several priests were involved, and they were not celibate--at least for some period of time. They were middle-aged men acting like teenagers. One exclaimed that the vow of chastity was like closing off Soldier's Field. The gay priest came after me, but I wasn’t having it. I’d taken a leave of absence and was having sex, but not with men who’d pledged religious vows.
Joe Scerbo and another friend, an older woman I loved very much but who has cut off communication because of my insistence on talking about things she thinks should be secret, organized a weekend of tantric massage. There was only a hair’s breadth between what transpired and a full-on orgy. It had almost nothing to do with meditation and everything to do with getting naked in a large group with lots of scented oil. A cute guy there from Ichazo’s Arica Training confirmed that those groups, too, were sexually permissive. It was, in his view, part and parcel of being sexually liberated and doing esoteric work.
KS tried to establish an independent “Work” group but lost her license to practice psychotherapy in California when she recommended the services of David (pronounced Da’vid), a Chilean seer who read either your palm or your skull. I forget the particulars, but his blowjobs were legendary. One man who followed KS out of California, I will not use any initials because his crime was so heinous, molested his teenage daughter. Yeah, “everybody was fucking somebody,” but then there are sexual crimes that scream to high heaven.
In these circles, Mr. G. was a mythological figure. You said his name in a hushed voice and bowed your head. We were told he was a trickster whose sexuality was part of his repertoire of teaching tools. Of course, there is only anecdotal information, but that was enough to create a kind of blanket permission for anyone taking up the “trickster” methodology to fuck whomever they wanted, and I say that’s what they wanted, not Liberation. Of course, I, too, only have anecdotal evidence, but I’m not fucking students.
Swami Muktananda, the guru’s guru, had multiple sexual relations with young, underage women, even girls (I didn’t say dozens because even he probably lost count). No one disputes that, but the other gurus defended him! Naranjo said Muktananda was not a lecher, but he could not break the public perception of the Brahmacharya, so he had to keep his sex life secret. No, Claudio, he was a lecher. Luckily, he preferred caucasian to Indian women and avoided a raft of other cultural taboos. The only question I have is what kind of legal mechanism his successor’s lawyers set up to avoid legal claims bankrupting Yoga Siddi Dam.
One teacher in the broad Hoffman group was credibly accused of sexual misconduct with an employee’s teenage daughter. A teacher from the UK described it as “getting his jollies.” The very Brit description confirms that his conduct was known, not taken seriously, and the subsequent shuffling of responsibilities was seen as shielding the Institute from liability. Why didn’t someone call it out, have him removed, or shut down the operation? One word: power. Money and greed played a role, but the winner was pre-ordained.
I know that HK was fucking at least one woman in our work group. I stood beside him when he invited her to his bed after the meeting ended. Although it was the woman who approached him for sex, he was still her teacher, and, following even loose interpretations of the ethics of student-teacher sexual relations, this was way out of bounds. I could barely believe my ears. HK went so far as to suggest that so and so in the group sleep with so and so but stop sleeping with so and so. He tried to set me up to sleep with one of several women in the group, but at that point, I decided that I’d had enough.
A high-level Scientology auditor didn't even pause before she stuck her tongue down my throat after attending a Dianetics lecture in Palo Alto. When I told her her advances were unwelcome, she told me that being gay could be handled in a few auditing sessions and offered me a cut-rate. The ride back to San Francisco was icy. I’ve never been good at small talk after rejecting a sexual advance. Looking back, “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” might have been appropriate.
Two of the Zen groups I sat with had teachers who slept with students. I told myself that these were adults making decisions about their own lives. I sat meditation with two of the men (they were all men) whose behavior became controversial. In both cases, I learned an enormous amount. In one case, it became challenging. This teacher practiced a kind of serial monogamy, and I wanted to maintain relationships with his former wives or girlfriends.
The case of Richard Baker is more complex. He was not the teacher. Suzuki Roshi was. Baker Roshi and his wife in the 60s could be best described as swingers. I’m sure that Baker and Suzuki Roshi talked about this aspect of his life, and you can also be sure that I have absolutely no idea about the content of those discussions. It was after Suzuki’s death that the accusations mounted, forcing him to resign, but at that point, it all seems to me to be an internal power struggle for control of Zen Center’s assets and not the conversation “Omnibus est stupri aliquem” I’m talking about.
Did we have a part in it? Of course. At 80 years old, what amazes me is that we were so reckless with our emotional lives, and some of our teachers threw any reasonable guidelines in the gutter. Not every case was rape, but hormones ruled the day. In Zen, the Path of Liberation is sometimes called the Path of Intimacy, and sexuality is key. Its fabric is complex and sacred, but in the last half of the half, most of us, students and teachers, treated it with little care and even less self-awareness.
Our greed caused great damage. We didn’t want to leave the Summer of Love behind and feel left out. You didn’t have to be a hippie to flaunt the sexual mores of our parents' generation and many more preceding theirs. We thought that we had opened the secret gate to the mystery of sex! There were soft angelic voices in the air as one SAT member wandered across Cuernavaca searching for her lost diaphragm so that the Aztec god of love might descend. Oh, the fucking arrogance is astounding. Like those priests magically or mystically released from their vows, we’d regressed to pubescent insanity.
Later, out of the wreckage, carefully worded policy statements about sexual conduct have been crafted by a cadre of experts called into service; there are policies and procedures for dealing with accusations of sexual harassment. Sister Mary Ignatius could not have engineered a safer place to do the difficult work of deep introspection, but it is a bloodless hellhole of denial and repression. We constructed in less than a generation what occupied the Catholic Church for millennia.
At least part of the fault here, and I do consider it a fault, is the model of “enlightenment” or awakening or finding the way--it requires submission, but the who, what, and where are left to “one who knows” to use a phrase popular with the followers of Mr. G. And for most people that still means someone wearing a funny hat spouting nonsense and then inviting you to his bed.
Is there another way? I certainly hope so, but it will take time, care, and respect to emerge. Until then, to paraphrase another biblical maxim, “By their sins, you shall know them.”
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
The New Marie Antoinette
Let’s go live in France, in a Château!
True Confessions. Yes, I have a few bad habits, and some of my friends might say, “Really darling, I would never have guessed.” I hold to the principle that I’m no better than anyone, and no one is better than me. Sometimes, I slip in that arena, too.
I also watch YouTube. I have discovered a niche of (mostly) foreigners renovating Châteaux in France. I am a francophile and still speak and understand the language with less proficiency than I imagine after not living in France for more than 50 years. I once had all of Julia Child’s cookbooks along with the overlooked but, in some ways, more interesting Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, and I used them. I follow the reconstruction of Notre Dame.
Stephanie Jarvis bought the run-down Château de la Lande over twenty years ago. It is in Crozon-sur-Vauvre, south of Paris in central France, in the middle of nowhere. The nearest major city is Poitiers. Starting with little money, she and her friend Michel began ripping Lalande apart and undertaking an extensive DIY project. She was among the first Château YouTubers and has amassed 257K subscribers. She does segments for UK TV plus her Château Diaries. It was a lucky choice she made more than two decades ago.
Some of her projects are extremely interesting. She undertook the renovation of the 19th-century chapel with a very creative online fundraising scheme. Though not a listed building, she has spent nearly a million euros to have specialists do the work. The painting is as intricate and beautiful as some of the side chapels in Notre Dame, and those video segments have been fantastic TV. Recently, some sagging beams above the grand salon required extensive work in the bedrooms and washrooms on the first floor and renovations of the ancient fireplaces. The carpenter, her cousin, is a master. Top drawer.
Less interesting is Stephanie’s fretting over wallpaper choices, sorting hundreds of unread books, rummaging through every brocante between Lalande and the Mediterranean, and spending hours moving precious junk from one attic room to another. I usually fast-forward but can be slightly amused.
It is also not lost on me that YouTube has provided a handsome income for Stephanie, her boyfriend, her mother, and other friends, who regularly rush off to Paris, Vienna, Venice, Geneva, the Riviera, or Marrakech for fantastic food. She leads an incredibly privileged life. (They even popped off to Venice and returned with the bed that King Charles and Camilla slept in, which became available before a major renovation in a hotel on the Grande Canal! How many people can point to a bedroom in their Château and say King Charles slept in that bed?)
Now we get to the fun part, the over-the-top mother of all disasters, the devastation of devastations! There was a leak in the ceiling of the kitchen. She had to rush back from dinner in Geneva, driving through the night to view a situation well in hand; two skilled carpenters already had the false ceiling down; the floor was mopped up, a plumber on the way; the dishes removed to a safe place, not one broken, no poo from the faulty sewage pipe on the floor, the kitchen relocated to another full-service kitchen in another part of the house, but Stephanie was inconsolable.
20 years of shattered dreams. Her well-oiled team of codependents gather around to soothe her. Oh no, she cries. How can I go on? The kitchen was the first room we repaired. It fell apart. This is the worst tragedy ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVShsNmf1sM
Get a grip, girl. Do you think you’re Marie Antoinette? The histrionics point to a life far too privileged and perhaps overpaid. I began: “Stephanie, darling, can I make a suggestion? I don’t mean it in a nasty way. Tone down the disaster and devastation talk.” I got jumped by one of her cohort of codependent supporters, telling me that she was just grieving and that I should get over it. She’s got you hooked into her game: “Poor me. A struggling minor English actress in France. Fate handed me the burden of having to spend money I have to fix a kitchen that needed to be fixed before I move on to repairing the damage caused by rotting 400-year-old beams before I restore boiserie that I picked up for a nickel out of a Parisian Hotel Particulier.
I’ll stop trying to be nice. I mean this in the nastiest possible way. Just shut up. Stop it. People who can’t afford to redo their kitchens and grand salons might find this as offensive as I do. Your team is far more interesting and pleasant.
Here is a list of my favorite YouTube Châteaux videos:
The Château Diaries; https://www.youtube.com/@TheChâteauDiaries.
Escape to Rural France; https://www.youtube.com/@escapetoruralfrance.
Les Jeromes; https://www.youtube.com/@LesJeromes.
Bordeaux Life; https://www.youtube.com/@BordeauxLife.
The Petherics; https://www.youtube.com/@ThePethericks.
Château du Theil; https://www.youtube.com/@Châteaudutheil.
Château de Purnon; https://www.youtube.com/c/Ch%C3%A2teaudePurnon.
Au Petit Château 1780; https://www.youtube.com/@AuPetitChâteau1780.
How To Renovate A Château; https://www.youtube.com/@HowToRenovateAChâteau.'
Escape To The Dream; https://www.youtube.com/@chateaudelalacelle.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Ordo Amoris
This is not the first time I’ve been disappointed in our roman catholic shadow government. I’m starting to feel the ghosts of Pius 12 playing footsie with Mussolini and Hitler, but perhaps my paranoia is winning the day. It is still unnerving to watch this unfold.
JD Vance told us to Google it. I share this much with our Catholic VP—I often use Google while constructing theological arguments. What shows up in my search for “Ordo Amoris” does not go back to the sayings of Jesus but originates with Augustine, another convert from some weird Gnosticism almost 400 years after the life and death of Lord Jesus and, I might add, a favorite of Opus Dei.
So, let’s take care of the biblical sources right away. JD’s “family and friends first” is on shaky ground. I’m not saying the scripture has nothing to say about your mother, but you should not elevate those conversations to prayers to the Blessed Virgin. Three passages will cover my argument.
Matthew 12:47-50: “47 Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’ 48 He replied to him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ 49 Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’”
John 15:12–13: “12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
And then, of course, Luke 25-37, the story of the Good Samaritan. I’ll only quote Luke’s rhetorical question: 36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” 37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Obviously, Jesus was not as narrow-minded as JD. Or perhaps I should say, “properly ordered.” Loving your parents, especially your mother, is high on the list of virtues to be emulated. Even the Dalai Lama tells his followers to love the world like your mother. But add a Latin formulation from Agustine to Aquinas, and ordo amoris has the ring of natural theology if not the Revealed Word of God.
But I have trouble with it. It is called natural theology because it states that the order of the world as we find it should be respected because it provides a broad outline of what God intended for the world. But Natural Theology, at least as far I recall, was a relatively confined discipline, covering the “Just War Theology” and a list of sexual disorders that included contraception, sexual attraction, and the proper positions for sexual intercourse. Of course, there were other applications, but this is where the rubber met the road in my Jesuit theology: justification of the war in Vietnam, condemning the sexual revolution, and the “gay Kabal.”
But here is where I can legitimately put on both what remains of my Ratio Studiorum (should I tell JD to Google it?) and my Buddhist robes: Compassion is not a zero-sum game. Vance wants to use lofty-sounding Latin to justify draconian budget cuts that mostly affect poor immigrants and people of color because he can then say that Catholic teaching justifies budget cuts. The order of the universe tells us to take care of our own first. I will not comment on the finite limits of the possible US debt obligation, but this is not a conversation about compassion or the proper order of love. It is bookkeeping, and paying the bill is included. Luke’s tale is explicit. After the Samaritan cared for the man: “35 The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
Father Ignatius also teaches us that Love is expressed in actions, not words. Compassion is the supreme virtue in most Buddhist sects, and I suspect in most interpretations of the teaching of the Lord, though the language is slightly different. I usually try not to give spiritual advice online, but this is a no-brainer: JD, talk to your priest or spiritual director. You are doing something wrong if your compassion is not growing and expanding, including more while excluding none. Change your life, and don’t take the advice of your bookkeeper or the tax collector as the word of God.
I found this article by Frederick Bauerschmidt and Maureen Sweeney in The Church Life Journal helpful. They are a couple. Maureen is an immigration attorney, and Frederick is a theologian.
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/ordo-amoris-wisely-extending-love/
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Words Shape Our World: Why It's Time to Rethink the Language of Partnership
Most people don’t think twice about the words they use, but the truth is, words shape our world. They're not just descriptors. They’re creators. When someone says, “You’re hired” or “You’re fired,” they’re not just describing a situation—they’re creating a new reality. The phrase “I now pronounce you husband and wife” doesn’t reflect a relationship—it forms one. That’s how powerful language is. Even in the Bible, it says, "In the beginning was the Word." The very foundation of creation starts with language. Words are that powerful.
Philosophers like John Searle and Fernando Flores got it. They understood that words aren’t just passive tools we use to describe the world—they actively create the world. When we speak, we’re doing more than talking. We’re building the future with every sentence.
Now, think about the language we use at work. Specifically, in recruitment and professional services—a world I know well. Words like “human resources” are a relic of an industrial past, where people were seen as cogs in a machine. “Head-hunting”? Even worse. That language reflects a transactional, outdated way of thinking about talent. It doesn’t just describe how we treat people; it informs how we treat them.
What if we changed that? What if the words we used matched the future we want to build? We don’t need "resources." We need talent, creativity, and energy. We don’t "hunt heads." We build teams. This isn’t just semantics—it’s how we shift the narrative, the culture, the work we do.
And speaking of shifting narratives, it’s time to rethink how professional services and managed service providers are viewed. “Suppliers.” Really? That word reduces us to a one-sided transaction, where companies receive and service providers deliver. But the best partnerships aren’t built on transactions—they’re built on collaboration. Service companies should be seen as partners—invested in your success, not just delivering a service. It’s a relationship that goes both ways, where both parties grow together.
But here’s the kicker—changing our language isn’t hard. It’s a choice. It’s about being intentional. When we start using words that reflect respect, possibility, and collaboration, we stop thinking about people as resources and start thinking about them as partners. It shifts the conversation from what we can get to what we can create together. And that small change in language? It leads to a big change in culture.
So, what does this mean for you? It means you can start today. Pay attention to the words you’re using. Are they shaping the future you want, or are they holding you back in an outdated mindset? The power to change the way your organization thinks, hires, and grows is already in your hands—or rather, in your words. And once you start using them with intention, the impact will be impossible to ignore.
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