Zen Porn

Zen Koans are wonderful, and no, I hate to disappoint, they are not porn. Can they be used as porn? That’s a personal decision.

I was responding to an email from one of my favorite Zen teachers in the world, a wonderful woman with whom I share a deep love for music, flashes of koan insight, and many friends. After briefly exchanging personal updates, I mentioned that a mutual Zen friend and I had lost contact since the Ice Age. I made a mental note that it was at least three girlfriends ago, but he had not faded from my world. How could he? He’d had an enormous effect on my practice.

I’d recently posted a short piece, “How do they think they can get away with it?” The teacher accused of misconduct was a friend of our mutual friend and teacher. In my post, I repeated the wording of the complaint of some female students: [he suggested that} “meditating while naked in his lap (based on the yab-yum image) would help their spiritual practice,” a bit of secret oral tradition that should probably best be kept secret,

Then I was hit by the whack of insight, seeing exactly what was in front of my eyes--let’s just call this discussion by its real name--porn. Webster’s third definition is “The depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick, intense emotional reaction.”

I started to laugh. I realized how many thousands of words I’d written to describe and analyze the sexual misconduct of teachers, as well as Catholic priests, over the course of my blogging. I decided to review some of that writing to see if it contained any of the hallmarks of pron: compulsion, obsession, titillation, mindlessly habitual storytelling, and being ultimately unsatisfying. Was I giving porn a bad name? I chose nine posts of over 16,000 words to review. That’s roughly 25% of a standard non-fiction book. 

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“Sex, gossip, religion? Can we talk?” The subject makes many people uncomfortable. After reading one piece, a very dear woman friend I’ve known since my days with Claudio Naranjo decided to cut all ties. She complained I was opening the door to rumor and innuendo (and maligning our mentor). She had become very protective of Naranjo as she grew older for reasons I do not fully understand. Her words were that I “verged on gossip.” After being very upset and not knowing what to say or how to address the situation, I decided to write about it.

Honestly, her assessment had a ring of truth. I am open to listening to accusations from sources who feel they must remain anonymous because they fear for their reputations and personal safety or have obligations to their own sources. There are legitimate reasons. But the fact that these people will not, or cannot, publicly verify what they’ve heard or witnessed means that the information will always be hearsay.

I wanted to defend myself from attacking a person’s character without any factual basis. Were there legitimate reasons to rely on innuendo, rumor, or even whispers and use them to make a judgment and take action? This led me to examine a whole category of complaints I called “privileged:” class, gender, race, religious tradition, or even taboo placed them outside criticism or even discussion. 

One of my examples, a case study, was the defrocking of *Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2019. There had been, of course, rumors and speculation about his conduct for years. For the community of disaffected gay Catholic men looking for proof of the hypocrisy that had caused so much pain, we found secretly recorded conversations at McCarrick’s New Jersey beach house that left no doubt that they were gay sex parties. This evidence was circulated on the internet in the early 2000s. “Uncle Teddy’s” canonical trial would be in 2019. 

Would the world be a better place if Cardinal McCarrick’s hypocrisy had been exposed during his influential tenure as Archbishop of Washington? How many young men and priests might have been spared sexual and emotional abuse? We cannot say, but I will say truth is always the best choice. I argue that sometimes, the only way to get to the truth is through examination of gossip, rumor, and hearsay. Not only was this evidence admissible, it was necessary. I used Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in my closing argument about the legitimacy of gossip in the search for who done it. She set the Aristotelian methodology of English mystery writing on its ear.

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However, the Catholic Church does not provide a clear view of what’s happening in real-time, even if you have a front-row seat. The internal mechanisms for deceit and subterfuge have been honed for centuries. If you are a member of a subgroup at risk, either as a victim or perpetrator, demanding transparency can also be dangerous. 

In 1964, United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described his threshold test for obscenity: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced... [b]ut I know it when I see it ..." When I saw “Spotlight.” in 2015, I had to ask myself why I didn’t see it when it was going on? 

An old friend who is a seasoned Zen priest asked me what happened during those years covered by Tom McCarthy’s 2015 film “Spotlight” when well over 225 priests and religious were credibly accused of sexual abuse. I was very active and reasonably well-connected in the Boston Archdiocese in the late 60s, but I had to confess that I was in the dark. The very secretive church machinery kept it hidden. I went back to my experience as a young Jesuit and discovered that the evil of sexual abuse of minors had disastrous effects. I worked for a very dedicated young gay priest who was in no way involved in abuse but whose ministry was nonetheless curtailed simply because he joined the movement to oust Cardinal Law, who orchestrated the cover-up. His name was Monsignor Michael Groden. I recounted our friendship and told his story in “Pedophile Priests Ruined Many Lives.”

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And now we come to Zen teachers who have acted badly or have been accused of misbehaving and the consequences of this misuse of sexuality for our young, newly formed communities. Given the small size of these communities, the different nature of the teaching and practice, and the different tone with regard to sexuality, I was surprised that the list of teachers is so long and continues to grow.

The next two blogs that I chose, “Sex, Death, and Food,” and “Was Muktananda High-level Chicanery?” register as high-level disappointment. The conduct of both men, Katagiri Roshi and Swami Muktananda, were similar only in that they were discovered and made public when both men were dead. In Katagiri’s case, he had the reputation of a gifted teacher beyond reproach who had helped many people, including several friends, in the aftermath of Richard Baker Roshi’s departure from the San Francisco Zen Center. Katagiri assumed the public face of an ordinary immigrant mid-Westener who was also a Zen Master. I heard story after story of something he said or did to help a student during challenging times. I talk about one interaction he had with Issan, who used what he learned till the day he died. Many others held up similar stories. After his extramarital affairs became public knowledge, however, a kind of convulsive reevaluation shook the entire community with roots at Page Street and Tassajara. With few exceptions, the reckoning was that the man’s insight outweighed any human failings. I did not have direct experience, and I felt that there were valid reasons to suspect the judgment of others. Besides, I wasn’t losing anything. I had no pony in the race.

In the case of Baba Muktananda, his secret sexual activity involved a steady stream of young women, many underage. It was criminal and required the active participation of his inner circle to coordinate and hide the violation of his yogic vows from his vast following in India and the West. The aftermath was denial, and the focus shifted to one of his successors, the one who did not also use the power of his position for sexual gratification. The attempted justification from ardent supporters ran something like Satguru was not a lecher. He was trying to recast Brahmacharya for the West; cultural circumstances limited his freedom to act. That argument is self-serving and frankly stupid, but go ahead and sell your Siddha Yoga hogwash. I’m no longer in the market. 

When I began to examine my feelings regarding both men, it was clear that some part of me felt some relief, justification, and even redress when I told the stories, especially about Muktananda. It feels good to yell at spiritual frauds. But beyond that, is there anything of value? Both men are dead, and their followers and disciples have made whatever choices they have and continued their lives. My reaction is my reaction or perhaps mirrors some other Zen idealist howling into the wind. It is only noise. Only complain about what can be redressed—only direct requests for a change of course to those who can act. And in the Zen world, that comes down to me.

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However, there will always be a segment of followers, enthusiasts, or disciples that will hang on despite any evidence. My revelation was that I could not change that. I can only deal with myself. These people fall into the closed set that Eric Hoffer called “The True Believer.” They share characteristics, including contempt for those without a holy cause themselves and respect for fellow fanatics. I recounted my experience attending the elaborate Shambhala funeral ceremony for Ösel Tendzin in San Francisco above the Jack in the Box on Mission Street. Our choice was to get up and walk out rather than join in the adulation of a sexual predator who had infected people with a deadly virus. 

This short post generated a lot of negative feedback: it’s ancient history; Chögyam Trungpa was a brilliant teacher, and we all got a lot out of “Spiritual Materialism.” Trungpa and Ösel marked an important, “auspicious” event for the birth of Buddhism in the West. My response: Avoid Zen Porn. Calm down and chill out. There will be others whose work will surpass Shambhala. There will be teachers who can do it sober without appeals to crazy wisdom. Throw your lot with kindness and compassion.

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However, the question of how to best respond remains open. Let down by the promise of quick bliss in the world of Zen porn, I find myself still waiting, alone, lonely at times, but as long as I stay engaged, I have not lost hope. Intimacy seems still within reach. And to pass the time, I happened to pick up Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir in French. This is where this former celibate Jesuit sought refuge. I began to turn my attention to the conversations about sexual misconduct rather than focusing on the blatant or alleged misdeeds. As Socrates said: “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” We have to be clear about what we are talking about, or we risk serious errors. 

 

In the first nine pages, Foucault lays out his thesis and methodology. He says that despite the modern liberal claim that sex has been repressed, forced into silence, or even neglected, the truth is that the level, frequency, and specificity of our conversations about sex have increased. When I moved to Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco, I jumped into a controversy with definite camps. I also noticed that, as Foucault notes, the conversations, even though ancient history from my point of view, went on and on. Some people wouldn't or couldn't shut up.

If I followed Foucault’s argument, this was to be expected. Talking about sex does not create a problem; the way we’ve been trained to talk about sex, specifically in the West since the 17th century, has created a conversation that didn’t exist before and, I would add, certainly one that didn’t exist in the Lord Buddha’s day. 

Some of the comments on the post accused me of trying to create some kind of off-ramp for leaders who had not faced up to the full impact of their actions. I was not aware of doing that. Instead, I was looking for my off-ramp in a conversation where I knew I had to take action to save myself.

There were practical reasons for wanting to avoid the blame game. As Executive Director of Maitri Hospice, I had to work with the Zen Center Hospice Volunteer Program. When Issan, Philip Whalen, and Steve Allen returned from Santa Fe, they managed to maintain some level of civility with the senior priests who assumed leadership roles at Zen Center after Baker’s resignation. In Heels Outside the Door, I suggest that there was deliberate compartmentalization. The term usually refers to the defense mechanism of separating conflicting thoughts and emotions to avoid anxiety and discomfort, but at least in Issan’s case, there was no hesitancy to deal with consequences.

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But I also had a pony in the race. More than 20 years before I moved into Hartford Street, I was sexually abused by a New Age guru. Some of the effects still felt fresh, and as I began to learn and practice zazen, they even intensified. They existed like #metoo porn, sensational flashes of emotional memory that produced a quick, intense reaction. I knew that I would have to deal with it and that it would have to wait until I was relieved of some of the pressure of dealing with the pandemic. 

I’ve finally managed to close the chapter of my personal abuse, but it was not a simple forgive-and-forget. It is not perhaps as clean as purists might like it, and there was no magic formula. I don’t think there is. You can read about my struggle. A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

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Here is a portion of the koan I was working on when I started to laugh at my porn!

Blue Cliff Record, Case 75: Wujiu’s Blind Stick 

Wujiu said, “Here is a good fellow to beat today,” and gave him three blows. The monk went out. Wujiu called after him and said, “I used a blind stick, as there is a fellow who deserved it.” 

The monk turned and said, “It can’t be helped, as the stick is in your hand.” 

Wujiu said, “If you need this stick, I will let you have it.” The monk came nearer, snatched the stick from Wujiu’s hand, and gave him three blows. 

Wujiu said, “Blind stick, blind stick.” 

The monk said, “There is a fellow who deserved it.” 

Wujiu said, “It is a sham to wantonly beat a fellow.” 

The monk promptly bowed to him. 

Wujiu said, “You made a bow—it is right for you?” 

The monk laughed loudly and went out. 

Wujiu said, “Right, right!”

The blog posts on Buddha S.J.

How do they think they can get away with it? 

Sex, gossip, religion? Can we talk? 

Pedophile Priests Ruined Many Lives 

Sex, Death, and Food.

Was Muktananda high-level chicanery? 

The funeral of Ösel Tendzin. Deliver us from cults.

La Volonté de Savoir, Foucault on Sexuality

Heels Outside the Door

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman? 

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*“Theodore Edgar McCarrick is a laicized American Catholic bishop, former cardinal, and former priest who served as Archbishop of Newark from 1986 to 2000 and as Archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006. In 2019, McCarrick was defrocked after having been convicted of sexual misconduct in a canonical trial.” 

Why cults rewrite history: the backstory of the Hoffman Process.

Originally posted January 22, 2020

If I were Deep Throat, I’d tell you to follow the money. If you were asking whether to register for the Hoffman Process, I'd say caveat emptor.

The core premise of spiritual work is to be honest with ourselves, our faults, and idiosyncratic distortions of truth. This applies equally to the healer. Psychological treatment helps you uncover parts of yourself that you’ve been hiding from and have cast their shadow over the rest of your life. You assume that your therapist has dealt with most of that material themselves and can provide a reasonably unbiased mirror. That trust is essential.

Cults rewrite history. A fictitious backstory portrays the guru as having access to privileged knowledge. It’s just a marketing plan. The online biographies of Bob Hoffman, the founder of the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, the Hoffman Process, or the Quadrinity Process, are awash in lies, inaccuracies, fabrications, or, in the best case, distortions. How could it be possible that any of these people actually met or worked with Hoffman? If they were honest, they could not demonstrate that Hoffman had the clarity to establish the trust required to do deep personal work. 

Hoffman was not a kindly, grandfatherly, “intuitive” who had everybody’s best interest at heart. He was a bully and a psychopath. He ran roughshod over everyone. If forced to testify under oath, almost all of Hoffman’s early associates would have to admit that he was neither gentle nor sympathetic. They might duck the issue, saying his methods were unorthodox, pig-headed, and unprofessional. He was a malignant narcissist.

His apologists will not agree he was the bully and liar I experienced, but I knew Bob Hoffman for over 25 years. I uncovered some of the lies he insisted he had to tell the world in order to promote his “very important” work. Most significantly, he lied about his relationship with Sigfried Fisher. He was Hoffman’s therapist for many years, but Hoffman created the fiction of a family friend with whom he shared convivial dinners. Hoffman also led a very closeted gay life. He was what I'd call a homophobe, but that is probably too much of a leap as I had to deal with his sexual and emotional abuse.

The Process claims it is not psychotherapy, but it does explicitly and purposefully dig into the roots of emotional conditioning. The first version, The Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, was billed as an alternative to traditional therapy. The current version of the Hoffman Process is a choreographed emotional rollercoaster that promises an experience of unconditional love in a few days. It costs a great deal of money. It’s a hard sell that needs professional endorsement. In my view, it does not pass the conditions of ethical practice. One glance at the waivers you sign shows you’re in dangerous territory.

Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute Internation published a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON. The claims that he, Volker, or his copywriter use to describe the endorsement of Claudio Naranjo are not accurate. They are presented as if Naranjo had a strong hand in developing the Process, giving it a psychotherapeutic imprimatur. He did not.

Here are the claims:

• The renowned Enneagram teacher Claudio Naranjo did help Hoffman formulate his “world famous” process, but not in the ways described. Their relationship was far more complex and conflicted than either admitted. I have described my first-hand experiences in Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud.

• Naranjo’s medical education was at the University of Chile. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Harvard for a year, a high honor worthy of note, but it does not include matriculation and graduation from the University. You could stretch it and say, “Harvard educated," but even that's inaccurate. It just sounds assuring to your affluent Western audience.

• Naranjo did not coin “Quadrinity” to point to four aspects of human nature, emphasizing the oft-neglected emotional and spiritual sides. The incredibly talented polymath Julius Brandstatter came up with the term. That’s a fact. But of course, if you were looking for a sign of genuine collaboration, why not falsely claim that Naranjo gets naming rights? Who, after all, is Julius Brandstatter?

• The writer claims that Naranjo helped Hoffman formulate the 8-day Process. Wrong. When Naranjo independently crafted a 3-day version of the Process for his SAT groups, Hoffman realized that a shorter process would be more marketable. Naranjo had no hand in formulating what is now known as the Process. Again, Julius Brandstatter and his lovely, professionally trained wife, Miriam, were Hoffman’s principal consultants. How do I know this? Hoffman told me. Miriam herself recounted the experience in great detail when I visited her at her home during the last years of her life. I stand by my presentation of the history of the Process. When researching my paper, The Ontological Odd Couple, I had detailed conversations with almost everyone who contributed to Hoffman’s Process. 

The Hoffman Institute International’s copywriter is batting four for four. I might be less critical of the Process if the current practitioners did their homework, but I beg the question.

Be highly cautious of psychological work channeled through a dead psychiatrist to a bespoke tailor with absolutely no professional training. Hoffman and The Hoffman Institute need Naranjo’s endorsement. To lend credibility to their product, they’ve invented a dubious backstory. Buyer beware. Undertaking this exploration outside the guidelines of professional therapy is risky. It certainly was in my case. 

Cults rewrite history as advertising copy.

How do they think they can get away with it?

As soon as I read the self-congratulatory promo that Lama/Guru/Rinpoche is “one of the most highly trained American-born lamas in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition & author of many books….” I smell sexual scandal. It seems inevitable. Of course, the charming Surya Das is statistically a minority among all the practitioners who just do their work and practice, but my god, the sexually misbehaved fringe sucks up so much energy. 

His sangha included “five women [who] brought allegations of sexual misconduct by Surya Das to Dzogchen Foundation's board of directors in 2019. Three of them said Surya Das suggested that meditating while naked in his lap (based on the yab-yum image) would help their spiritual practice.” 

This guy is still doing his esoteric chant master gig. Really? Well, in the world of Trump, sexual misconduct is a requirement for higher office. Goddamn, what do I know? It may all come down to a kundalini lap dance, and I’m just another deluded jerk.

Ashutosh Jogalekar’s blog, koans, and a story about Heisenberg and Dirac

I have been single-mindedly focused on koan study for the past three years. For over thirty years, I’ve been “a serious koan student,” but there were gaps and less-than-assiduous application for one reason or another—none of which I’d recommend. The COVID lockdown had some fortuitous consequences—koans morning, noon, and night.

I was just working on a koan that pushed the boundaries. In addition to zazen and working with my teacher, I started doing a jig in front of the refrigerator (I live alone) and singing an off-tune (and sometimes off-color), made-up chant, something about how cold left-over pizza was perfect bodhisattva fare. Although a lot of humor in koan work gets squashed, I began to wonder if I was starting to abuse the glimpses of freedom that appear now and then. Following the rhythm of my dance and the odd taste of cold pepperoni, I asked myself what ways of working with koans might take me outside the ballpark. Experience says that some methods are more productive, but that differs from my question's direction. For example, I wouldn’t recommend starting work on the miscellaneous koan: “Count the stars” by lying on your back at midnight and mumbling “A fuck of a lot.”

An online koan enthusiast asked for documentation about the well-known and oft-repeated zen saying from the Jewel Mirror Samadi: “When the wooden man begins to sing, the stone woman gets up dancing.” I thought about how I would handle it as a koan.

And then I got a hint from a curious, not very Zen source. I found this anecdote about Heisenberg and Dirac in a blog (The Curious Wavefunction) by Ashutosh Jogalekar: “. . . The two were on a trip to Japan for a conference. The social Heisenberg used to dance with the young girls on the ship before dinners while Dirac used to sit watching. Once Dirac asked him, ‘Heisenberg, why do you dance?’ Heisenberg replied that when there were nice girls he felt like dancing with them. Dirac fell into deep thought and after about fifteen minutes, asked Heisenberg again, ‘Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?’.

Either way, Heisenberg’s dancing or Dirac’s questioning might provide an entrance. But if I had to choose, I’d vote for dancing, but I’m not everybody.