How far will people go to separate you from your money?

I went searching on Google to see what the algorithm offered up as an answer to my query about the Hoffman Process--I was actually curious to know if anyone reads what I’m writing--and discovered some statements or claims about this Process that really stretch the facts. They are also a study in how to structure ordinary language to make a lie sound plausible.

“It is the only program of its kind offering evidence-based transformational work proven to deliver lasting results.” (hoffmaninstitute.org)

First let’s examine the phrase: “evidence-based transformational work proven….”

If perchance I were an ordinary Jane or Joe with some personal troubles and an extra 5,000 USD in my pocket, and I was looking for some personal relief for my suffering, and if I came across a program that claimed to be “evidence-based,” I might be interested or at least my curiosity would be peaked. I might assume that a team of mental health professionals, after careful examination of mental disorders ranging from simple neuroses to more acute mental disturbance, formulated and tested several protocols to treat these disorders, and over time evaluated their results. The sequence is important--facts or behaviors were observed, studied, and recorded; the evidence of their harm to a person’s well-being preceded the formulation of a course of treatment based on past psychological treatment; and last, the statistical results were examined. That is how science usually works.

Instead of careful observation by trained mental health professionals, in the case of the Hoffman Process, a psychic tailor was awakened in the middle of the night by the discontented ghost of his recently deceased psychiatrist revealing a way to treat the Negative Love Syndrome from “the other side.” After several people reported some relief and perhaps even personal insight following Hoffman’s process of psychic therapy, a carefully formulated study proved that these people were “transformed.”

Now let’s examine the phrase “deliver lasting results.” The baseline for measuring the improvement is self-reporting; it is entirely subjective or measured against general baseline surveys. Feeling good or being high is not evidence of anything other than feeling good or being high. If that is what you want for your 5000 USD, go for it. But the promises are just marketing, period. The Negative Love Syndrome is not an professionally accepted psychological disorder that has been studied and evaluated. It is not science.

I described my experience in the creation and testing of two surveys of participant’s results in my post, “Science vs. Spooks.”

If you still don’t see this as just marketing copy, read the preposterous claim that heads the sentence: “It is the only program of its kind…” Caveat emptor! Please do not subject yourself to any psychological manipulation by an untrained and unlicensed purveyor of transformation.

I have talked about my own experience with Hoffman at some length. Be forewarned, it includes a description of emotional and sexual abuse: The Dirty Secrets about the beginning of the Hoffman Process.

The Dirty Secrets about the beginning of the Hoffman Process

I have just finished a long piece about the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy and my sexual abuse by Hoffman. I intend for it to be part of a larger spiritual memoir, but that will be at least a year out. I have divided it into two sections that are more web-friendly. It is a frank discussion about Hoffman’s sex abuse and my own story about being his victim. Whether or not it is relevant to the current Hoffman Process offered world wide by the Hoffman Institute International is not for me to say.

New Age Miracle or Fraud

The chapters in the first section:

Called to Jury Duty

Introduction

Bamboozled

Who I was

The Seekers After Truth meets the First Hoffman Group Process

No Better than a Ouija Board

The Long Ride Home

The chapters in the second section:

Metatron, Interlude with an Archangel

Debunking The Big Lie

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

#GayMeToo

Moving towards a Conclusion

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

Beginnings of praise for a Zen Master's book

Phil Whalen was losing his eyesight. He was legally blind and the page appeared as just a blur. We would read aloud for him every day. If it was an author or a book he knew, he would finish the sentences. Other times he would simply vanish into a world of his own thoughts. I could use the term “to fly away" because that’s what it looked like to me. At other times there might be a request for a short piece for an anthology or small literary magazine. Usually he would remember something that he’d written long ago. He would ask you to go back to the beginning and read it again, and then again, editing and rearranging the words in his mind’s eye, muttering “too many words, too many words.” Once he had me read long sections of a draft of Dick Baker’s magnum opus, a book that he’d already received a large advance for but for which Dick couldn’t seem to quite find the right words. After a few pages, Phil who was usually very deferential to his teacher, said something like “Fuck it. He just wants me to praise him, but dammit, it’s not a book. Praise, praise him. I get it, he doesn’t want to make a mistake. He hasn't. He can’t, but it’s boring.” 

Whatever became of it? Let me google and see if it was ever published.

https://www.dharmasangha.org/news/original-mind

Ok from this short bit it’s pretty good. Heartfelt and still quirky. 2007. I read the first drafts that Phil complained about in his very circumspect, curmudgeonly voice. That was probably 1992 or 3. Phil died in 2003 so there’s five years that Dick might have contemplated Phil’s critique. But I doubt it. Dick probably certainly found other ways to hold off his publisher. He could string him along for a couple of decades for sure. Maybe not with the written word but the spoken word, Dick has a gift. (And I proved this to myself again by reading a 1994 Tricycle article, an interview Dick did with Sugata Schneider, The Long Learning Curve An Interview with Richard Baker Roshi.)

LOL the reviews on Amazon are hilarious! Pretty much mirror the scuttlebutt that I’d heard way back when! https://www.amazon.com/Original-Mind-Practice-Zen-West/dp/1573221104/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1676539755&refinements=p_27%3ARichard+Baker-roshi&s=books&sr=1-3

But my question is what makes a Zen book good, or even worth reading? I can separate out a few types of writing. 

One is the practice manual. A lot of Bob Aitken’s work falls into this category. He worked with students and was very conscious of both his limitations as well as his responsibility. He wrote about sitting, the precepts, the koans. I liked his books more than his talks which were for the most part duller than dull. He had a hard time taking off his professorial lecture hat, but he was wonderful when doing personal practice discussions, truly intimate. I experienced both so when I read his books I carry the voices I remember into what I hear. I also hear what I am sure were gentle suggestions of his wife Anne, and in some places the literary panache of his student John Tarrant.

And Bob was a real master. He often said to me that his only useful job description was encouragement. This is exactly what he set out to do, and with all his limitations, he did it.

One of the pitfalls of this kind of writing is the reputation that either follows or precedes the author or teacher. And this is the problem with Dick Baker’s writing. There’s a lot of history and hours of dharma lectures from a brilliant teacher who got into some very hot water. He also had to write a book that wouldn’t just be a hollow echo of his own teacher’s famous Zen Mind. (He could have started with a different title! Ordinary Mind sounds like a thesaurus translation of Beginner’s Mind). I suppose if you want to light a fire under your practice, start some trouble and try to get out of it. If something begins, even if it’s outside your control, circumstances pile up a barrier that’s a lot to cut through. I would personally prefer smaller fires, but I also know that things happen and that a fire has its own mind.

Then there’s the commentary type of writing. That’s very tough. You have to have chops before you pick up the pen or open the computer. They seem to fall into two groups. One is for the teacher’s students or others in the lineage who can’t sit and do dokusan. They are usually in modern times transcriptions of lectures by a brilliant busy teacher, edited and reworked for a larger audience. For the heavy lifting in the premier example of this work, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, we have to thank a woman named Trudy Dixon who was apparently dying of cancer during the editing process. In the olden revered times, we are told that these commentaries were taken from the crib notes of monks in the lecture hall. A nice mirror image.

Then there’s a respected teacher bringing their understanding to a topic that is of more general interest. My favorite writer in this genre is Susan Murphy Roshi. She is an accomplished writer, so the territory is not something that she started when she began her practice. I loved her book on sexuality in zen practice, red thread zen. These are unapologetically descriptions of how she’s used the practice in her life, even in extraordinary times and circumstances. Her latest title is Minding the Earth, Mending the World: The Offer We Can No Longer Refuse. I admit to a strong personal bias with regard to Susan. She is a teacher who has deeply touched my life.

One of Susan’s teachers, Ross Bolleter wrote another kind of commentary, based on an important root text in the practice: Dongshan’s Five Ranks. It is much more difficult and probably for students with some meditation experiences. He says “Zen language is not independent of Zen itself.” This is tricky ground. We enter a world that is usually called technical language, but it is not meters, the speed of light or symbolic logic. Rather it is a world in which ordinary descriptors themselves point to something beyond ordinary language.

And the last type of zen writing that I want to talk about is really an adaptation of a particular western type of religious confessional: the apologia. It usually is a highly personal story of how an encounter with the transcendent was transformative. In some ways, even though most zen authors would consciously avoid the grandiose path of Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, there are usually echoes of the peach tree, transgression, compunction, and transformation. What makes this kind of Buddhist writing so difficult to both read and write is that the focus on the self is ultimately about moving beyond the self. That points to a level of mastery of Buddhist practice which is key to making the book useful or even readable.

It’s why I don’t begrudge Richard Baker the years between reading the first drafts of his book to Phil and it's finally making it to words on a page. Like the title of the interview 30 years ago, it can be a long learning curve. 

Vatican 1 was a colossal mistake.

It’s no secret that I think that Vatican 1 was a colossal mistake that’s sucked up more spiritual oxygen than it’s worth in its rather brief history. Ex Cathedra has about as much to do with the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus as the proclamation of Charles III as king certifies the divine right of the British monarchy to rule the fate of nations. Zero, except for his bank account. What we are witnessing now is the slow, painful demise of a spiritual monarchy and the upset of curial hangers-on and courtiers who have been sucking the papal tit for money and power for a century and a half. It’s not pretty but it’s entirely predictable. The rub is that this proclamation can’t be wrong no matter how wrong it is, or the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

It was a California Jesuit, perhaps John Loubonis or Gene Bianchi, who retorted to one of my historical analyses: “remember the logical fallacy ‘post hoc, propter hoc.’” My worthy opponent was defending arguments in favor of the truth of the doctrine of papal infallibility. The fact that Pius IX surrendered the Palazzo del Quirinale to Victor Emmanuel when he lost the Papal States, his army of 15,000, his rights, privileges and income as one of the kings of what we now know as the the Republic of Italy of course has nothing to do with shoring up his spiritual authority at a time when he lost everything else on which he imagined that authority rested. Of course not. It was just a quirk of fate or a pure coincidence that allowed him to reassert a doctrine lurking in the shadows until a political upheaval allowed the truth to reveal itself.

In the cult of objective spiritual truth, it is vital to dissociate the muck of historical circumstance from the hard work of doing logical analysis. Post hoc ergo propter hoc* is what is known as “informal fallacy.” It refers to assumptions embedded in ordinary language. “I saw Johnny on the street just after the bus left the station” does not necessarily imply that Johnny took the bus from Bakersfield. If I needed to demonstrate that Johnny took that bus, of course, I could just ask Johnny to show me his bus ticket or search his pants pockets for the incriminating evidence, but then there is still the possibility that he might have picked up a ticket from a real passenger who’d dropped it on the sidewalk or had boarded the bus in Oakland and disembarked on 6th Street. Nothing is certain. But I am certain that the Roman church is pulling a fast one. They’re not showing the ticket from Bakersfield.

After all this, you might think that I am actually interested in the pope’s infallible words. I'm not. I was curious that Benedict, recently of happy memory, said he was no oracle, but he could be given the proper conditions. Even John 23 said something to the effect that “I am infallible, but you’re not going to hear it from me.” So these guys hold the authority of the oracle in their back pocket just in case. Meanwhile, it has caused immense disruption and controversy across doctrinal Christianity. This interests me. The church is standing in its own way.

Why and how? I think that the “why” is self-evident. The “how” might require some digging, but let’s dig.

Avery Dulles became very conservative in his later years. I asked him why he supported this kind of centralized authority, and he said that his argument rested on the Ignatian principle of “Thinking with the Church.” I should have countered, “Even if that thinking is wrong?” But I didn’t. I was intimidated by the obligations of friendship and his red hat, but after John Paul 2 strongly reiterated the centralized power of papal authority, any further discussion was over as far as Avery was concerned.

This was not always the case. During a symposium about the Jesuits’ connection and promise to hitch their horses to the papal cart, a strategy that proved immensely successful, I asked a simple question: why? Avery said that despite everything, any problems or contradictions, we obeyed because of “filial piety.” That was enough for him. I then asked how we could support something or someone on a premise that contradicted the person's own understanding, or how could we justify believing one thing when the person in question actually said something different about themselves? He reiterated his statement about filial piety but later privately said, “I really didn’t answer your question, did I?” He did not, and I cannot accept a pious notion to guide us. Today I would phrase my question differently, “Why do people believe nonsense?” Usually because of laziness, or fear, or tradition, none of which are good reasons.

I am quite sure that we will never hear any infallible words from Francis. The question is whether or not the absurd travestry of papal monarchy will simply die off without being addressed directly. The opposition is gathering its forces to nullify any work by the upcoming synod.

*Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: 'after this, therefore because of this') is an informal fallacy that states: "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy. A logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety, it is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc ('with this, therefore because of this'), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a logical fallacy in which one event seems to be the cause of a later event because it occurred earlier. [1]

Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because correlation sometimes appears to suggest causality. The fallacy lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors potentially responsible for the result that might rule out the connection.[2]

A simple example is "the rooster crows immediately before sunrise; therefore the rooster causes the sun to rise."[3]