Buddhist Heaven

 Three Cheers for Grandmother Zen!

“It is much more difficult to control one's mind than to control the weather.” --Yeshe Dorje

A lonely sheet of paper lies on the top of my desk with some scribbled notes. I picked them up to see if I could get back to the moment when it felt important to jot them down. Now they just look random but I tell myself there is some rhyme and reason. There has to be, or does there?

There seems to be some notion floating around that if it’s not hard-nosed, tough, no-nonsense practice, it’s not Zen. It certainly can’t be compassionate—or something.

To any macho Zen priest out there having a hard time adjusting to becoming a hospice monk, too bad, or as they say, suck it up. If you saw Issan in the kitchen trying to get his recipe for chocolate chip cookies right, with a temperature over a hundred and sweat on his shaved head, you might change your mind. You might even call it courageous Grandmother Zen.

______________

One of my dearest friends, Michael, was suffering a long, painful, and slow death from AIDS. His partner was an older, very proper, even stuffy, English queen. When I suggested they might visit Maitri to see if it might be a good place for Michael’s final days, the partner was emphatic. He said “Never.” He called it “The House of Death.” I was shocked.

Great pain and denial go hand in hand.

I vacillated between those two views many times every day. Before moving into Hartford Street I imagined I would be doing some modern version of the ancient Tibetan practice of living in the cremation grounds. The reality was somewhere between cooking mashed potatoes to suit a resident’s particular taste and making sure the cable bill was paid.

The Tibetan Yogi Lama Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s rainmaker, visited Maitri. Issan welcomed him with a big hug and a kiss, to which the startled Tibetan sage responded with a huge grin. I’m told there was immediate chemistry. Issan took him from room to room, probably pointing with his light but careful attention to their detail, the convenience of the bathrooms, light filling the bedrooms in the early morning hours, things that made Hartford Street feel like home, really more like your grandmother’s house. Yeshe-la was so impressed that he blurted out that Issan had created Buddhist heaven.

Stories of the rainmakers' visit were repeated so often they assumed the status of legend. I asked Issan if Yeshe Dorje had even talked about Buddhist heaven. Issan said, “Yes,” he remembered their conversation very well. “He was a lovely guy,” but added, “he didn’t pay the electricity bill.”

Whether or not Yeshe Dorje was capable of confounding the clouds, he certainly had experience trying to push out the bounds of the order of things. Beyond incantations and spells, a rainmaker needs to be able to read tell-tale signs in the sky that escape ordinary sky-gazing, not so much to control as to see which way the wind is blowing. When a storm is brewing, seek safe shelter.

In the various cultures that have invited Buddhist teachings to stay a while, even as a guest, we find at least several, if not many versions of heaven. Currently, the most prevalent myth about this transition between life and death in the West is a kind of instantaneous shift, an escape, shaking off the bonds of our earthly body. New Age Spirituality has us as spirits temporarily inhabiting a corporeal form. At this stage of my life, I find this notion very odd and very much at odds with the Buddhist idea that the gift of the human body results from eons of conscious efforts to wake to the path of liberation.

This popping out of the bottle storyline is a hangover from our 19th century bout with American and European Spiritualism. More ancient Western myths are deeper and more nuanced. The narratives and anecdotes of the gospel of Jesus have defied easy classification; Ovid persisted into the Medieval world, and of course, Dante was no shape-shifter. We can trace these stories of the transition back to Homer and the wealth of half-remembered lore that animated the ancient world. Most of them are more in line with a consistent thread throughout Buddhist teaching--that the path from this life to the next is determined by our choices, however limited and difficult they may be, and the depth of our practice.

The New Age holds accounts of near-death experiences in awe, and, perhaps I am being harsh, imagines death as a kind of “This is Your Life” TV rerun. There may be some truth in the analogy, but it also is colored, fatally in my view, with easy admonitions about loving beyond petty grudges, good over evil, and idealized heroic virtue. I admit that “This is Your Life” captivated my childhood imagination, but I think that was more due to the genius of its writers and their sentimentality rather than a glimpse into Perennial Philosophy.

Still, some stories connect us with who we are, and there are ordinary places where we can recognize who we really are.

______________

I remember a rather handsome younger man who often visited his friend in Maitri, a sweet man who had the small room at the top of the stairs on the second floor, facing the street. Like so many of us in the early 1990s, this young man spent an enormous amount of time visiting friends in several of the places where they were dying, Coming Home Hospice, the Missionaries of Charity’s Arc of Love, Garden Sullivan, Wards 86 and 5B of San Francisco General Hospital. When the time came, he attended their memorial services as most of us did--we all struggled to honor the deep connections that linked us with so many friends who were dying way too young. He was so grateful to Maitri for his friend's care that he wanted to give something back. He came to me and asked how he could help.

The room needed a quick paint job if we could get it done before the bed was filled again. I said if he could help me paint it we could do it in a few hours. As we worked together, he told me that he sensed something different at Maitri. He said he always felt like he was visiting his grandmother. I knew he wasn't talking about the “This is Your Life” version of grandmother.

Yeshe Dorje was right. Issan created Buddhist Heaven. 

Three Cheers for Grandmother Zen.

Come home to the empty house

Longing for the warmth of a fire

Or chocolate chip cookies

You notice your picture hanging on her wall

Right where she left it

Her uncompromising love that seeks only your happiness

It is a blessing

To touch this heart of grief and create a miracle

Fill that house once again

This is the great way.

Was Muktananda just high level chicanery?

Muktananda

What I remember most about the evening was the fancy BMV with the vanity plates GURU 1, driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Muktananda and Werner Erhard were in the back seat. Baba’s translator, Swami Yogananda Jain, sat in front with the driver. The venue was the Masonic Auditorium atop Nob Hill. It had the impeccably smooth and professional rollout of an est event, but it was not, at least in my opinion, the important presentation of Siddhi Yoga it pretended to be. I would have to dig deep for anything that piqued my curiosity. I had listened to far too many sermons about grace, shanti, or shakti. What I saw was the Westernization of an Indian sadhu, sanitized but still containing a few tastefully presented cultural artifacts that might be interesting to the spiritual seekers of New Age California. We might have been dusted with a peacock feather as we left, but, as you might have suspected, I was definitely not impressed. 

This was the second of Muktananda’s world tours. A few Westerners had become disciples. They’d purchased and begun refurbishing a large hall with a kitchen and some staff quarters in Emeryville. It was either ‘74 or ‘75 because I had taken my exclaustration, and was living on the Oakland-Berkeley border with my fellow SAT member Hal Slate. It was also close to the end of the first SAT groups, but all the group members were still in active communication. One day either Hal or I got a call that someone had arranged a private Darshan with Muktananda to be held late one afternoon before his public event at the ashram.

There were no more than 20 people in the room. I recognized Helen Palmer. As soon as Baba Muktananda entered and took his seat, he gestured towards Helen who got up, bowed, and went into the adjoining meditation room. She later told me that she was there because Muktananda was the best “hit” in town. Following a few remarks by Jain, Muktananda gestured towards me and Jain asked me to come forward. I’d tried to find an appropriate gift. We were told that he liked hats. I had an old white Panama Hat from college that I’d trimmed with an orange ribbon and the end of a peacock feather. I’d wrapped it in plain white paper. I had already decided to skip the whole foot-kissing ritual so I sat before him in a kneeling position. I said hello and handed him my gift. After Jain or another assistant unwrapped it, he laughed uproariously, took off his hat, and put on the Panama. Then he handed me his orange skull cap and said in English, “Hat for a hat!” Then Jain translated a few questions about who I was, what I did, and something about a Prince that I missed entirely, but others in the group were impressed. I returned to my seat.

Then Muktananda pointed to someone behind me and asked who he was. The young man said he was from Franklin Jones's (Da Free John) group and had come to extend their greetings to Baba. The conversation was suddenly doused with cold water. The drift of the questions I could follow went something like, well, I do hope he’s well, but where is he? He’s swamped, but he sends this box of cheap crummy chocolate balls from the ashram’s kitchen as a token of his respect. I had tried to be respectful within what I felt were my limits. Da Free John’s people didn’t swear or make foul gestures but seemed deliberately confrontational. I thought someone on the staff would be asked how the group made it onto the list of guests.

An hour in, I had a sense of heightened awareness, so when Jain invited questions from other guests, I was unprepared to respond to one woman’s question. She said she was epileptic. Was there anything she could do to prevent seizures? Muktananda became oddly professional and said he’d been a doctor before becoming a sadhu. He recommended drinking cow urine, preferably still warm, fresh from the cow. Now that I’ve lived in India and have some experience of village Ayurveda medicine, I realize that cow piss is a bit like aspirin. It is applied widely with little discrimination. But at that moment, I was facing total culture shock. Here I was in a guru’s ashram wearing his orange skull cap, getting carried away with lots of high energy, watching him dress down a fallen-away follower’s disciples, and listening to medical advice about the benefits of cow piss.

At that point, Jain said that we had to wrap things up, the time had come to get ready for the chanting, talk, and Darshan in the public hall, and afterward, please stay for dinner. I’m sure Hal and I stayed. Chanting the Guru Gita was very long, although harmonious. Though the poem praises the eternal guru, it is evident that the followers identified Muktananda as that guru. I thought that singing the praises of the guru in the presence of a human guru was a bit over the top, but I was also doing my best to dispel my preconceived ideas and prejudices.

The next day I had a meeting at the Jesuit School. After meditation, I walked down Telegraph Avenue towards the campus. There was a bank just past Ashby and I stopped to get 20 bucks from the ATM. I made my way back to the sidewalk, turned left, and stopped on the corner of Russell waiting for the light. Before the signal turned green, my entire world was transformed. The experience is extremely difficult, if not impossible to describe. It lit up. I’d been plugged in. First were colors I had never imagined. If I said I was floating in a whirlwind of electric particles, that wouldn’t do it justice. I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing but the world was buzzing. It was somewhat akin to the few drug experiences I had had, but far more vibrant and I was present, not just an observer. It was wildly expansive, but the center held. I cannot say how long it lasted. It disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived. Part of me was stunned, but it was not the kind of experience that required me to put on my analytical hat and ponder it for a month. It just was. When I noticed that the light had changed to green although I had no idea how long I’d been standing there, I looked at my watch and realized that I would be late for lunch at the Jesuit School if I lingered. The universe returned to what it had been a few minutes, seconds, or nanoseconds before, and I continued walking north though I remember being extremely careful of crossing traffic.  

Later that afternoon, I realized I had received shaktipat, which yogis describe as the awakening of the dormant divine energy. I also realized why very little is written about these experiences other than that they happen. It was a wild experience. Maybe I could blame it on the orange skull cap.

I would have been a fool not to follow up on my experience to see if it led anywhere. I returned to the Oakland ashram but did not become a regular by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t much like the Hindu trappings. I should be more precise: I didn’t particularly dislike them either but I wasn't falling in love. The singing started to feel like uninspired Catholic guitar masses of the 70’s. I felt that the people around Muktananda were there to feel some kind of spiritual high or bliss, but it was extremely self-centered. I had conversations with several of the Western sadhu again but was not inspired. I could not shake off their guru worship.

The staff announced a retreat, a long period of meditation at a center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was to last a week which I could not manage. Still, I wanted to experience a longer concentrated meditation period, so I asked Muktananda personally at Darshan if I could attend only on the weekend. He quickly assented. I arrived late Friday afternoon after the long rush hour drive from San Francisco. I signed in and was directed to the shared cabin I’d been assigned. I set off into the woods. On the path, I passed Muktananda with his perpetual entourage of VIPs; Naranjo was among them. They were headed up to the main meditation pavilion. I bowed towards them and Muktananda nodded back. I continued to struggle along the densely overgrown path toward my bunk when suddenly I heard a deafening cracking sound. It sounded like a giant with enormous hands snapping his fingers right over my head or close to my ear. Then again. I found my cabin, threw down my sleeping bag, and made my way to the meditation hall. I wouldn’t return to bed for 36 hours. 

An elaborate Krishna shrine had been set up in the middle of the room. Men would circumambulate for an hour, and then the women would take up the dance. It was not like the ecstatic airport Hari Krishna chanters but that was the song, and it was not quiet. There were as I recall live musicians as well as spontaneous twirling and jumping. The chanting was modulated with slow and faster sections. When I did circumambulate, I was extremely restrained but didn’t feel out of place or forced into a fake religious fervor. We sat in what zen monks would consider a very loose meditation posture, men on one side of the room and women on the other. A guy in front of me was bouncing off the floor with what I was told were some kind of kriyas or loosening of the kundalini energy. Once Muktananda came into the room and led the procession of men in the chanting. Otherwise he sat on the side in his elevated chair. There must have been a few breaks when Muktananda talked or answered questions. I remember the guy in front of me thanking Muktananda for his experience. Food was available during certain periods, but I don’t recall formal meal breaks. And oh, it didn’t stop but went on day and night. The drive back to San Francisco was about 4 hours on a hazardous highway so I made sure that I had a few hours of sleep before leaving, but other than that I was in the meditation hall.

Once was enough. Despite these intense meditation experiences, I began to feel more and more disconnected from Muktananda. I continued to visit the Oakland ashram occasionally when he was there, which was less frequent. He had engagements in New York and southern California. There were now a huge number of people gathering around him. It had a cultish feel. There was also an extraordinary amount of money flowing into the organization. 

One time we were told through the SAT grapevine that Hoffman would visit. Knowing that Hoffman only went to make a public display of himself as Muktananda’s equal, or to find some way to denigrate Muktananda, I was not going to miss it. After Hoffman’s private meeting, I wasn’t present so I don’t know about the encounter, I was standing at the edge of the dining hall with others when Hoffman appeared. Suddenly he disappeared, and then, after a few minutes, he came into the room sheepishly carrying a plate of food or a bowl of soup, complaining loudly that Muktananda’s guards wouldn’t let him into the private quarters. “I know he’s very lonely. So I just wanted to share some soup with him and keep him company, but they wouldn’t let me in.” 

I will now try to describe an experience that I have never written about or even talked about other than on one or two occasions and then privately. I think I’ve been afraid of either being called a madman or a failed sannyasin, neither of which is personally appealing. I can’t say with certainty what did happen, other than it happened. I might have been deluded or hallucinating, or carried away by some religious fervor, or perhaps it did occur as I am going to describe. But I demand complete honesty from Muktananda so I can’t avoid telling the story. 

I forget the circumstances of my invitation. I was not a regular member of Naranjo’s inner circle, but either late afternoon or early evening, I went to Kathy and Claudio’s house in North Berkeley above the Arlington circle. When I arrived there were only a few people. I only specifically remember my friend Danny Ross being there. Cheryl Dembe, who later became Sundari, might have also been present, as well as Luc Brebion. But other than that I would have to pick and choose out of a list of the usual suspects. I would have remembered if there’d been a very close friend with whom I might have shared and even asked questions about what seemed to happen.

One of the first things that I remember very clearly was a Scientology E Meter casually set up on the breakfast table. Up until that point, I had only heard rumors of Nanranjo’s experimentation with Auditing, but seeing the device, which is nothing more than a galvanic skin response lie detector, the rumor was no more. 

There was undoubtedly the usual friendly chit-chat. As it was beginning to get dark, Speeth and several others arrived. They came in through the front door. She was carrying a plain square cardboard box, slightly smaller than a bank box. In it were copies of a thin book, talks by Muktananda* that she and Donovan Bess had edited and published. She said that they were hot off the press and the reason she was late was that she’d been at the airport saying goodbye to Muktananda before he and his entourage flew back to India, and she had wanted to share the new publication with him before he left. She gave us each a copy. We were sitting on the floor near the breakfast nook and some casual seating. I still had a clear view of the front door. The group was politely enthusiastic about Speeth and Bess’s work, thumbing through, reading bits and pieces here and there, smiling, laughing.

Then I looked up and noticed a very bright light that seemed to be coming through the front door. It was a long oval shape and fit the door frame. It increased in intensity, the edges becoming more bright while the inside seemed reddish or orange. Suddenly the actual shape of Muktananda’s body became clear. It was dressed as we had always seen him in darshan, but the clothing was diaphanous and brightly lit. His distinct facial features were clearly visible. He was walking at a very deliberate pace though the legs may not have been moving at all. He had the appearance and movement of a real human body although it did not seem solid. I could still make out the door and the walls through him. It was eerily real.

I do not know if I was the only person who saw this. There was no discussion, no questions, or expressions of shock and awe. The only thing that did happen was that someone in the group began to sing Om Namah Shivaya very softly. The figure began at the edge of the circle opposite me. It stood behind each person. I cannot remember if they were gestures, but the person became very quiet. The figure moved clockwise until I could sense it standing behind me. That was the last thing I recall until we began to gather our things together to return home.

I am surprised that after an extraordinary experience, and I presume that others had some experience, we just returned to our everyday lives. I have hesitated to speak about it openly for almost 50 years. Many possible reactions exist to a clear, even violent breaking of ordinary perception. One is silence. Almost all modern writers talking about their drug experiences have expressed frustration. Most writings by the mystics are rarely clear or self-explanatory. When you can’t say anything, nothing may be the best option. I have not used any language designed for extraordinary mystical experiences, Muktananda was not projecting an astral body. I am not calling it an apparition. I wonder if close disciples of devotees simply have these kinds of encounters and accept them as the “new normal,” but what I experienced was not ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. 

What I can say honestly is that a revered Indian guru who was on a scheduled international flight from San Francisco to Mumbai appeared in an ordinary Berkeley house in the early evening. He was a real person or appeared incredibly life-like although his body was diaphanous and bright. He was alive, not dead or resurrected, as in the Jesus narrative, but afterward, I could see Thomas’s meeting Jesus differently. And if the story of Thomas putting his hands in Jesus’s open wounds actually happened, I could also understand that the conversations recorded in the 20th Chapter of John took a few years to emerge. 

Baba-ji is lecher

The number of followers around Muktananda became overwhelming. Darshan was a circus. I can’t recall one talk that I thought was memorable. No one seemed interested in psychological investigation. I stopped going. Siddha Yoga is a practice of energy transfer and a connection between the guru and his or her student. That wasn’t happening.

What was also clear was that in a larger group, there were those who were close devotees or considered themselves close and those aspiring or even jealous. There was also an enormous amount of money now available. This is ripe terrain for abuse, distrust, even warfare. It never reached the outrageous heights of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, but cults are cults. The disintegration in trust was the beginning of the leaking of salacious details about Muktananda’s sexual life.

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

I have read through many of the accounts from insiders malcontents and disenchanted followers. Muktananda at some point gave up the celibate life, but he couldn’t just trade satguru for the role of a conventional married man. Krishna Murti’s long involvement with an older married woman might be a good example that I can understand and even sympathize with. What I think I can say with some understanding of the cultural divide between traditional Indian culture and Westernized ones, especially New Age California: Muktananda could not prey on younger Indian women--the taboos are too strong--but with so many younger American women with liberated attitudes available, the doors opened. From most reports, the doors opened frequently, and it was not about nurturing human relationships. It was sex.

People try to defend him. I will only point to one of Muktananda’s most ardent supporters, Claudio Naranjo’s explanation: “I think Muktananda’s case is very complex. My own interpretation of him is that he was playing the role of a saint according to Western ideals, or to cultural ideals in general. I think he was a saint in the real sense, which has nothing to do with that. For instance, it's the popular idea that a saint has no sexual life, and he was playing the role of a Brahmacharya, which I think was part of a cultural mission he was on, to be an educator on a large scale. It was fitting that he did that role, and my own evaluation of him is that he was clean, because he was not a lecher.” 

Claudio, let me be clear--your analysis is wrong, He was a lecher. His behavior was unethical and exploitative. If he were a Catholic priest he would be defrocked, or even in jail. He does not get a pass for trying to play the role of a Brahmacharya in some huge cultural shift.

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

I’m unsure where I can begin to separate the man from the yogic powers, or even if I have to. But I know where to place my allegiance and when to withdraw it.

Honesty is such a lonely word

Everyone is so untrue

Honesty is hardly ever heard

And mostly what I need from you

--Billy Joel

*The publication date of “Swami Muktananda,” edited by Kathleen Speeth & Donovan Bess is 1974 so my mental calculation is slightly off.

Bob Hoffman's Dirty Secrets

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Bob Hoffman and his famous Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, Hoffman Quadrinity Process, Quadrinity Process

By Kenneth Ireland

Part 1

Contents

Bamboozled

The Seekers After Truth meets the Hoffman Process

No Better than an Ouija Board

A Second of Authentic Experience

The Long Ride Home

© Kenneth Ireland

12/8/2022

Mcleod Ganj 

Himachal Pradesh, India

Bamboozled

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you rarely get it back.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

I heard Bob Hoffman tell his otherworldly story many times.

In the middle of the night in 1968 in Oakland, California, Hoffman was awakened from a deep sleep by the discontented ghost of a family friend, the renowned German psychiatrist Siegfried Fischer, who had recently died. Dr. Fischer, as Hoffman always called him, stood at the end of his bed and revealed an essential piece of psychological insight that had eluded his mentor, Sigmund Freud, and the entire Viennese School: we human beings are blindly tied to repeating the mistakes and negative behaviors of our parents because we are starved for authentic love. “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” Thus, the concept of Negative Love and the "world famous" Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy was born; both have the dubious markings of revealed Truth and Hoffman, an awakened Teacher.

Fischer then took Hoffman through a process of freeing him from his parents' negative conditioning and erasing the karmic link. Fischer disappeared with the promise to return and assist Hoffman in completing some of his unfinished karma and that Hoffman could help him “move on.” Hoffman said he heard the phrase “doors will open” when he asked Fischer how he, a tailor, would enter the world of professional psychotherapy and present this insight as the missing piece, an antidote to the endless analysis cycle.

The tale is as absurd as it was unlikely. Over time, cracks inevitably appear in Hoffman’s narrative. The first crack was the obvious lie that Hoffman and Fischer had been friends or acquaintances introduced at synagogue by his wife’s family.

Hoffman presented a scenario of convivial after-dinner conversations with Fischer. They chatted and argued about the existence of the psychic realm, life after death, and questions about the efficacy of psychotherapy versus the Spiritualist Church’s doctrine: “truth” spoken by disembodied spirits to spirits inhabiting human bodies, satisfying karmic obligations. Fischer was a scientific materialist and would have had none of it. Hoffman’s telling felt like an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, psychotherapy vs. a psychic tailor, and ultimately, the psychic declaring victory after death.

After hearing this part of Hoffman’s story, with slight variations, innumerable times, I also began to feel that Hoffman had an ax to grind with the enterprise of psychoanalysis and that he had probably had a failed experience in therapy. I asked Hoffman if he had been Fischer’s patient, and, finally, after many years, he admitted that he had been, although he claimed that he and his wife had seen Fischer for family therapy with their son Michael. I have confirmed through reliable sources that the story was another lie. Hoffman himself had been Fischer’s long-term patient. I began to suspect that he had quit while still in transference.

Who was Siegfried Fischer? Hoffman claimed that Fischer was an acquaintance, a friend of his wife’s family, and a German psychiatrist who escaped the country in 1936, making his way to San Francisco. I confirmed from the public record that Siegfried Fischer did emigrate in the 40s and practiced psychotherapy at Langley Porter. Fischer’s son David contacted me after reading some of my online writing. He maintained that his father was never a close personal friend of either Hoffman or Hoffman’s wife. David filed a lawsuit against Hoffman to cease using his father’s name, “Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.” Hoffman did not contest David’s claim and changed the name of the FHPT to the Quadrinity Process. However, Hoffman still claimed, in private conversation and group presentations, a personal friendship with Fischer and that Fischer was his spirit guide.

To complicate the investigation, as if it were not already cloudy enough, Hoffman was a sexual predator. I had first-hand experience, and the effects of his abuse lingered for decades. At 78, I thought that I had to be resigned and that the trauma caused by his selfish and unethical behavior would last for the rest of my life. It was not satisfactory if the criteria for resolution were that I could forgive and forget. It made no difference that he was a closeted homophobic queer and that it had been a severe impediment to his happiness. Yes, everyone is guilty, but I continue to blame him. I also gave up trying to see some “wounded healer” motivation as a factor in his psychic therapy. What’s the word? Bunk, as in complete nonsense.

I am amazed that no one, not one single person other than me, actually undertook a real investigation of Hoffman’s claims. Everyone, teachers, licensees, therapists, and clients, simply believed Hoffman’s disembodied spirit at the foot of the bed story. Still, facts in my face, I fell under his thrall.

So, how was I bamboozled? In October 1973, after several months of psychological investigation in Naranjo’s group, I had an awakening. I saw that I was responsible for my life precisely as it was. The insight would completely change my life, and I am grateful to Naranjo for providing the platform for the experience. It was my bad luck that Hoffman was also in the room. That was 50 years ago. I gave a charlatan power over me.

When I read Henry Miller’s account of his experience just looking at a photograph of Madame Blavatsky, I understood him completely. Miller writes: “Now I don’t know if that had anything to do with what happened next, but I had a flash, I came to the realization that I was responsible for my whole life, whatever had happened. I used to blame my family, society, my wife... and that day I saw so clearly that I had nobody to blame but myself. I put everything on my own shoulders, and I felt so relieved: Now I’m free, and no one else is responsible. And that was a kind of awakening, in a way.” (The Mysterious Madame B., Tricycle, The Buddhist Review)

The Seekers After Truth meet the Hoffman Process  

Seduced by the promise of an easy path, countless others have jumped for what appeared to be a lifeboat when they were floundering and in pain. And if we’ve managed to save a few bucks, there are always scoundrels with a life jacket for sale. I ask myself why I was such an idiot, but to soften the harshness, I pose the question differently: why do intelligent people believe nonsense? My friend Stan Stefancic tried to guide me, “Remember that there's a lot of Naranjo in the Process,” I thought long and hard to determine if Naranjo’s input was enough of a justification to accept Hoffman’s preposterous story. I tried to understand why Naranjo took Hoffman to be some kind of modern-day shaman and supported his work.

Naranjo supported Hoffman and tried to implement some professional practices in the process. Still, I couldn't find a good answer nor in any way understand Naranjo's infatuation with Hoffman. Naranjo was a psychotherapist of ability and insight. After his experience in Arica, he was always on the lookout for tools that might enhance his work, and Hoffman needed Naranjo’s imprimatur. It was a relationship fraught with jealousy on Hoffman’s part and a good deal of passive-aggressive behavior.

Naranjo had met Hoffman and did his rudimentary Process of Psychic Therapy in the basement of Hoffman’s tailor shop on 15th Street in Oakland. It was emotional and exotic enough to capture Naranjo’s interest. And it allegedly came from an “otherworldly” source, which always caught his attention. He says that after the experience, he felt he should help Hoffman shape a group process and become his John the Baptist. Yes, Naranjo really did use this messianic analogy. Both men painted their collaboration as destined by heaven. I do not claim to have any secret knowledge about their relationship, but I do know that it was as codependent as the analogy is preposterous. Members of Naranjo’s SAT were the guinea pigs in their initial experiment.

In Naranjo’s book, End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society, there is a chapter about this first group; Naranjo claims that he, Naranjo, directed and that Rosalyn Schaffer delivered his indications with Hoffman, a silent witness. This is simply not true. Hoffman was far from silent. It was a rocky road. Naranjo’s collaboration ended before the FHPT was complete. Although both men tried to paint their rupture in the best possible light, it did not end well. I will try to be as honest as I can about what I observed. I was present at every session until Hoffman and Naranjo ended their experiment. I will alert you when I speculate and say something not substantiated by the record.

___________

At about 7:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus with the new students in Naranjo’s SAT 2. Naranjo Introduced Bob Hoffman as someone with a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Naranjo said that he’d offered to help Hoffman shape the work he’d been doing with individuals into a group process. We were to be the avant-garde of psychic therapy. Then, after these few short words, he turned the meeting over to the mild-mannered and soft-spoken Schaffer and left the room. She delivered a few “indications” about how the process would proceed and yielded the floor to Hoffman. He was hardly silent.

To this day, I remember many details of that bizarre evening. Hoffman wore an expensive sports coat and garish tie while we were mostly in jeans and tee shirts. He appeared highly uncomfortable standing behind Schaffer, and when he began to speak, it was evident that he was not educated in any psychological discipline. His presentation was gruff and aggressive. He dominated the room, alternately talking and yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon, the teaching style that would later be recognized as a trademark.

A tailor with no psychological training told 30-35 eager, curious, primarily young, highly educated people present that no one in the room really loved themselves, that like actors in a bad play with an unhappy ending, we only gave love to get love, that we’d learned everything we knew and understood about love from our negative, almost perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love.

Hoffman defined Negative Love as “illogical logic and nonsensical sense but masochistically true or why would we do it.” No questions. If we didn’t understand, we were just playing the game of playing dumb; if we thought he thought he was dumb, it was negative transference and proof that we didn’t love ourselves. We were mired in self-hatred if we thought he was dressed in bad taste. I thought he was overdressed for the Trifecta, so my transference had already begun. Hoffman set himself up to be the point of transference for all the negative emotions we’d inherited from our parents. They were the main reason that we were miserable. There was no invitation to observe our reactions. No one knew anything—nobody except him. He had received an other-worldly message in a revelatory middle-of-the-night visitation when his spirit guide, Dr. Siegfried Fischer, taught us how to get a loving divorce from mommy and daddy.

We were then told to close our eyes and imagine many steps that were detailed as we built a psychically sealed vault, our Sanctuary, where we could work and be worked on in safety. Once settled into that space, Hoffman instructed us to look for a human figure, no angels, who would appear and become our spirit guide. He told us to pay attention and listen to messages, that he’d “opened us psychically,” and we would receive solutions to our problems from our spirit guide. These were real spirits and genuine messages, not some imaginary construct, and if we didn’t believe him, it was negative transference.

Once we were “psychically open,” Hoffman asked us to imagine holding a lovely fruit, an orange, but it might have been a strawberry. Then he told us to taste it, savor it, feel it drip down our throat. When we opened our eyes, of course, there was no succulent fruit in our hands; we’d created the whole thing in our minds, but didn’t it feel natural? He asserted categorically that our emotions were just like this, both negative or positive, simply the projection of our mind that dictated how we behaved, acted, felt, and most importantly, how we learned to love.

Hoffman assured us that whatever we created could be uncreated or replaced by placing our attention on our inattention, and what it could be replaced with would be shown to us by our spirit guides through "mind trips." We were instructed to pinpoint a negative trait. Then, after we’d imagined it written out in words, our guide incinerated it with beams of light shooting out of his or her hands and threw the ashes on the ground of our sanctuary, where they became seeds for flowers that grew and spelled out a word that would be the positive side of the negativity that we’d pictured. Then, we were instructed to make a list of our mother's negative characteristics and bring it to the next session.

He ended the evening with a smile, very pleased with himself. We'd also been hypnotized. I just had a few hours of spirit visitation and an Ouija board session. I knew it was ridiculous, but I felt trapped. I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn. I looked down and took notes, resolved to stay and do the work.

___________

Naranjo told us that even just a second of authentic experience could change our world.

We launched into what Hoffman called “The Prosecution of Mother.” I calculate that the exercise lasted more than a month. For Hoffman, lists of negative traits and admonitions were crucial for the Prosecution of Mother, but there didn’t seem to be any actual logic, purpose, or order in the lists or making the lists. It was just anything that we found unsetting or anything Hoffman saw that he judged to be negative. The one criterion for the lists was length. A short list was proof of denial. Then there was what he called the emotional autobiography with mother. Again, there was no fundamental analysis. It just had to be emotional.

Under Naranjo’s direction, we worked several times a week in small groups of three people. We were instructed to touch the core of any latent anger we harbored towards our mothers through role-play, questioning, and feedback. The aim was to understand its level and depth in the most complete way possible.

It took weeks for me to allow myself to express any anger. When I was in the hot seat, I tried to express anger, but no one in the group believed me. So I tried again. Again, they are just surface complaints about a trivial matter. This went on for more than a week. But then, one evening, something inside me opened. I could use the word snapped. My anguish and anger exploded. The pitch of my voice broke a glass sitting beside a woman friend in my support cohort.

The experience was one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if an impenetrable veil had been lifted. I had to admit that I was an angry person. I could no longer pretend that I was somehow spared the anguish of a domineering parent. And with that realization, the intricate spiritual world of a young Jesuit seeker that I’d constructed as a defense began to look like a sham, and ten years of rigorous, disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings I’d struggled to avoid all my life, ones I’d constructed to avoid feeling. At that moment, I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be an arduous, long process. The breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, using the technique he learned from Perls. It was also, and perhaps this is just my bad luck, part of Claudio’s efforts to help Hoffman create the Group Process.

My life story began unraveling. The trajectory of my life changed, and I started a long and challenging journey. I recognized on an intense level that I harbored a well of repressed anger towards my parents, my rearing, and the Jesuits. I didn't realize it at the time, but I turned my back on ten years of rigorous religious training and had to start afresh.

Hoffman contributed to this equation because he was the loudest voice in the room when my emotional defenses began to crumble. But given the vagaries of our psychological make-up, I conflated the psychological events, which only reinforced my transference towards Hoffman. Hand in hand with an immense sense of freedom came the crippling burden of decades of dealing with transference to a narcissist sexual predator. Because it was on the level of peer counseling, no one could provide the kind of professional feedback that the situation demanded. Naranjo, for all his insight and professionalism, was woefully negligent.

I was left floundering. My guide was no better than an Ouija board.

___________

At about the same time, it became clear that Hoffman was frustrated with the pace of the process and the depth of Naranjo’s exploration. The strain between the men started to show. Hoffman felt that a person just had to “open” to the emotions that he or she had either denied or repressed. Naranjo’s work with Fritz Perls and his psychological training, I think, opened the emotional world for exploration. Still, Hoffman was not interested in anything more than the psychic and emotional motivation for adopting the negative behaviors of a parent or parent surrogate. In his one-on-one process, he’d worked with people in 4 or 5 weeks.

Hoffman’s professional behavior was also problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up, which gave him blanket permission to be an aggressive bully, at times verging on psychotic. With a list of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing tough love or good cop-bad cop, Hoffman would scrutinize gestures, mannerisms, speech patterns, slips of the tongue, ways of dressing, and pick a fight. He lectured, cajoled, confronted, and intimidated. He was extremely good at reading a person’s weakness, imitating it, and exaggerating it. He would shout, insult, mock, humiliate, bully, and belittle, accusing us of playing games. He was unrelenting. And then he went in for the kill.

I was appalled. This unprofessional behavior went unchallenged. Hoffman justified it as “breaking down to build up.” He singled out every therapist in the group for harsh attention. I guess that Hoffman, the psychic tailor playing in a world of highly trained mental health professionals, needed to be a bully. He continued it throughout his career. He had a deficient level of self-esteem and needed the endorsement of a man of Naranjo’s stature. This further complicated their relationship, making honesty impossible.

Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged. They were so far outside the norms of ethical conduct for a therapist or spiritual guide that it usually left everyone speechless, but few left. Those who did were ridiculed as not having the inner strength to do real Work. Hoffman justified himself by insisting that we couldn’t see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out how we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so intense it required a firm hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” He told us in no uncertain terms that his job was thankless and with minimal reward.

Hoffman’s arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy went unchallenged. He had no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses and no grasp of complex emotional responses conditioned over time. The only economy was “buying love.” Every human action was a calculated transaction to obtain the genuine affection, love, and acceptance you craved from infancy but were denied. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, or counterproductive and taunt in a whiny voice, “See, Mommy, now will you love me?” Hoffman repeated his maxim repeatedly, “Everyone is guilty, and no one’s to blame.” We were just the sum of the sins of our fathers and mothers. The mechanism was simply learning to imitate your parents’ negative traits and internalize their negative admonitions. We acted in the exact same way to get the love we thought, no, knew we deserved, or rebelled against it.

After about a month, it was clear to me that Naranjo had lost control of the process, and Hoffman was increasingly unhappy when Naranjo tried to regain control, particularly in insisting on the pace of the work. Their much-heralded collaboration lasted nine weeks on the outside. After weeks of working on “Mother Bitch session” (now called “bashing”), Hoffman had enough of the careful exploration of repressed anger and suddenly announced that he and Naranjo had reached a friendly agreement to end their experiment, and Naranjo’s participation, after the “Defense of Mother.”

Hoffman did get something from the SAT Group that has become a hallmark of the Process. The Wiffle bat and overstuffed pillow have become synonymous with releasing repressed anger, something that he had tried unsuccessfully in his psychic readings by having his patients write “an anger letter” to their parents after they’d written an emotional autobiography. He had little use for Naranjo’s therapeutic exploration, not Fritz Perls's methodology or the Enneagram. It took too long and went to the root of anger. Hoffman only cared about tapping a deep emotional reservoir. The process of expressing anger, followed by the fabricated understanding from his psychic readings, would reappear repeatedly in the development of the current Process. Hoffman loved an emotional jolt. He was a junkie and a one-trick pony.

___________

With appropriate fanfare, Hoffman announced that he would lead his own 13-week Process beginning in January. He took me aside and strongly encouraged me to join his pilot Process at Tolman Hall. He told me that I would go on to lead groups and that I should train under Dr. Ernie Pecci, whose PSI Institute would be taking over the Process. I was one of only a handful of SAT members who did. In retrospect, Hoffman was just following the predator’s script, grooming me for sexual conquest. His unethical and criminal behavior would play out over the next year.

In late January of ‘73, 55 people gathered for Hoffman’s first 13-week group Process of Psychic therapy in a nondescript rented classroom in UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, the home of its psychology department. Hoffman believed that location could bestow a measure of legitimacy. We met every Monday night, and an assignment was due by Wednesday. It was more of a forced march than a psychological inquiry. The main elements of the current Hoffman Process were present: a rigid set of exercises, the requirement to complete the assignments with as much emotional expression as possible, and to be on time. “Keeping up” meant, in Hoffman’s estimation, that you were willing to break down your defenses and see yourself clearly.

We were told that imaginary conversations had the same function as Hoffman using his psychic power to examine our parents' history. We would discover actual events and circumstances of their programming and could tap into the same deep unconscious emotional knowledge that contained the truth about our parents’ rearing. There’s a proper term to describe this well-established psychological principle. Nonsense. Total nonsense.

The Long Ride Home

Shortly after five on a hot Wednesday afternoon, I hand-delivered my “Emotional Autobiography with Father'' to Hoffman’s office on the second floor of a building in downtown Oakland. His secretary had already left. Hoffman was recording his feedback for another patient on a cheap cassette player. He’d thrown his feet up on the desk. I stood awkwardly in the half-open doorway. There was no chair, no invitation to engage in a conversation.

He told me to hand him my work. Right on the spot, he’d read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then make a simplistic, predictable connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and a negative pattern or character trait that he asserted I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for love.

Hoffman read through an incident 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 ferociously defended 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 complimented the emotional tone of my writing, but then he began to raise his voice. Obviously, my Dad was a homosexual, he said, and then, “You’re gay too, aren’t you?” I countered how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on bludgeoning a woodchuck. His voice became louder and louder. He just repeated, “You’re gay.” Now he was almost screaming—obviously, my father was a sadist. What? Then he yelled, “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I said, of course, I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. “Don’t play games with me,” his voice was now furious, his face red. I had watched Hoffman attack clients, but I could barely believe that I was now his victim.

My Dad was not gay. The idea of having a same-sex relationship had never crossed his mind in his entire life. Hoffman’s readings were projections and his pathology. What he asserted was so off base that it isn’t worthy of even the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in the analysis–that I was in denial about my homosexuality–the whole thing became plausible, and I destroyed any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange, I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman.

I don’t remember much about finishing the Process. It had become a kind of forced march. I remember that the price of that first group Process was about $300. The actual cost was devastating. Instead of dealing with coming out in the care of a professional, compassionate therapist, I had the bad luck of landing a closeted gay predator as my guide. When I described this incident to my therapist, his immediate response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.

___________

My parents arrived in Berkeley just after the semester ended. We planned to drive back to Connecticut and spend time together; I would attend my annual Jesuit retreat and then return to California.

There was a kind of ritual for completing your emotional divorce from your parents—after you’d gotten your parent's full attention, you just said “I love you” and kissed them. My parents thought it strange, but I always followed instructions as closely as possible. Hoffman said that no matter how awkward it felt, you had to do it. It was extremely awkward, but I dutifully followed Bob’s directions, disregarding my doubts. I even rehearsed it several times, fearing that there was some piece that I’d miss.

My parents and I drove to southern California, and I took my mother to Disneyland, which she loved. Then we drove to the Grand Canyon, which my dad loved, and continued down through the Southwest. I planned to spend one night at Brophy Prep, the Jesuit high school in Phoenix, and visit some younger Jesuits I’d met and liked very much. I met my friends and disappeared into the Jesuit residence while my parents went to their hotel.

During that whole year, I’d kept a journal detailing my dreams, my work with the Enneagram, all the Fischer-Hoffman work, including lengthy lists of what I thought were my parents’ negative traits, writing assignments about early life, with lots of emphasis on the negative memories, imaginary conversations with myself as a child and with my parents as children. It also detailed my coming out, falling in love with a guy named Danny, and my first sexual experiences. None of Hoffman’s psychic therapy made any sense out of context, and it was very personal, so much of it made no sense anyway.

When they picked me up in the morning, neither said a word. My mother was driving. She just looked straight ahead and got on the highway. She was driving very fast. Finally, after many upsets and questions, my mother announced that we were going straight home. She’d found the diary I’d kept during the past year in Berkeley and read it from beginning to end. She always felt that she had complete authority in my life, so of course, she was entitled to access my private life, though she said she thought that she’d be reading poetry.

She said that I was sick. She told me that she and my father had decided to send me to a psychiatrist for electric shock therapy, that she called my Jesuit superiors and asked for me to be thrown out. I was stunned. No matter how complete or thorough my work, I could never change my parents.

The drive across the country was almost unbearable, the interaction with my parents varying from loud anger with my mother to complete disgust with my father’s silence. We arrived at their home, and I left to see my superiors in Boston. They supported me—I was a 30-year-old man and had not hidden anything from them. But my already strained relationship with my parents entered what would become the new normal for the next 20 years—alternating icy communication interspersed with attempts to restore some civility. It would not change much until each of them approached death.

The life that I’d known for nearly a decade was beginning to fall apart.

___________

When I returned to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley that fall, my superiors and I together decided that I would reconsider ordination. I was not thrown out of the Jesuits, but I stopped any academic work at the seminary and took a leave of absence. Technically, this is called exclaustration, where a person with religious vows is allowed to live outside the cloister or have a formal religious life. Thus began a difficult period of my life. I loved being a Jesuit. If it weren’t for the obligation of celibacy, I might have been able to carve out a happy and successful career as a priest.

Another man in Naranjo’s SAT, Hal Slate, and I rented a small apartment on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It was just a short walk from the White Horse, a college-town gay bar that became the place where I was introduced to gay life.

Towards the end of September, Hoffman started to show up at the bar every night around 9 o’clock, leaning awkwardly against the elbow bar, pretending to look off into some distant corner of the universe. I said hello. He tried small talk, claiming he usually stopped by on his way home. Another lie! He later admitted that he never went to gay bars because being recognized might negatively affect his important work. In reality, he was tracking my movements and making himself known. This is stalking–precisely out of the predator’s playbook.

I recall one conversation in particular that helped me accurately date Hoffman’s obsessive pursuit; it also should have alerted me that he knew exactly what he was doing. Almost in passing, and perhaps as a way of excusing or justifying his behavior, he mentioned that although the usual period for a therapist to see a patient was six months after the professional relationship had ended, he thought that I had so thoroughly and lovingly divorced myself from my parents, perhaps the usual six months could be compressed. Misinformation, or perhaps he considered himself above the law. In California, “Therapy Never Includes Sexual Behavior. . . . Sexual contact of any kind between a therapist and a client is unethical and illegal in the State of California. Additionally, about former clients, sexual contact within two years after termination of therapy is also illegal and unethical.”* Less than four months after finishing my work with him, he nervously gave me his “private” phone number and asked if he could call me.

Finally, I agreed to go out to dinner with him. He imagined it was a date. I thought it was dinner. I can’t in any way recreate the events or the conversation that ended with him returning to my apartment. Still, as with many sexual predators, Hoffman’s ability to read his victim, what he would describe as his “psychic powers,” lent themselves to manipulation. He’s been my therapist for almost a year, so he had a window into my psychology far more accurate than his psychic reading. After a highly awkward series of interactions, a lot of “Why don’t we try this?” and “Do you like that?” I found myself on the living room floor of my shared apartment with a man I found sexually repulsive, naked, on my stomach, being brutally raped. After Hoffman had his orgasm, my anus was bleeding.

Then the situation became surreal—I listened to apologies which were blame shifting—Hoffman told me that pain was expected when a man first had anal sex and that in time I’d learn to enjoy it—that anal sex was an essential part of spiritual development. It mirrored the mother-father god, both active and passive. I remember this statement after all these years because of the horror and lunacy of justifying rape in the name of some intrasex deity.

I didn’t throw him out as I should have. Whenever I think about this, I ask myself why I didn’t say, “This isn’t working. Why don’t you put on your clothes and leave?” But I just kept my mouth shut and endured him trying to apologize for physically hurting me. When he asked if we could have another date, I did say no. However, in true co-dependent fashion, I left the door open to further contact as friends. I realize now that I had to—I was in transference with him. We maintained a strained acquaintance until he died.

All this happened only 13 months after that cold Tuesday evening when Naranjo introduced Hoffman to our SAT group. I had hoped to avoid a painful and lewd description of the sexual encounter, but I’ve decided to write about it openly, including its repercussions. Including my missteps is the only possible path I see to free myself. If my writing leads to liberation, “the function of freedom," in the words of Toni Morrison, "is to free someone else.”

I came out as a gay man in Hoffman’s Process, but it wasn’t coming to terms with a part of myself that I’d kept hidden, festering under parental and societal disapproval. It wasn’t part of a program of careful analysis. I wasn’t led by a professional to uncover layers of self-deception. Instead, I stood uncomfortably in the doorway to Hoffman’s office while he, red in the face, screamed that I was gay, told me not to play games, and that I couldn’t love myself. I sensed the same angry, defensive stance in the way he dealt with his homosexuality, and he certainly displayed its brutality when he forced anal intercourse.

Within a year of our encounter, I’d left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco with Hal Slate, and began experiencing the burgeoning Castro gay scene of the ’70s. I became promiscuous, but at the same time, I was miserable and frustrated with sex itself. I could not achieve orgasm. I cannot claim that Hoffman’s brutal abuse was the direct cause of my sexual dysfunction, but I am sure that it played some part. But my solution to the problem became more of a problem. As in my college days, alcohol became an antiseptic for the wounds. But now pot, cocaine, and eventually methamphetamines became part of my life. I began to display the classic side effects of sexual abuse.

I met with Frederick Copleston

In 1965 I had a meeting with Frederick Copleston. I have been trying to collect my memories of our visit. It was 60 years ago and not a huge breakthrough event in my spiritual journey so parts of it are hazy and will remain so, but given that I was the only undergraduate on the schedule of a renowned Jesuit philosopher, it was an honor and as you will see, memorable. Father Bill Nolan, the Dartmouth Newman chaplain of course knew that I wanted to become a Jesuit and did everything he could to encourage me which was the explicit reason for the interview.

But the process of memory is notoriously unreliable. Recall activates a selective circuit in the brain, and we tend to recall those juicy bits that support the stories we tell ourselves. Even if the date, time and location are reasonably accurate, even if they can be verified, it still might be difficult to remember if it was a bright day or if the autumn winds were blowing. Even then the data collection system is not as if it were a selfie with the Pope. On top of that the things that we retrieve may in themselves hold some key that we are not fully aware of. There could be some mystery solving to be done, even if it’s just trying to remember the crumbs that you laid on the path to grandma’s house. 

Copleston came to Dartmouth, and stayed at the Newman Center for perhaps a week. I checked the online archives to see if I could identify some event or colloquia in the Philosophy Department. None. Perhaps he had been scheduled at BC, Harvard or Fordham, and Nolan arranged to have him lecture at the Aquinas Center which was something he often did. That is possible, even likely. But it is also likely that even if Copleston were in Hanover at the invitation of the College, he would have stayed at Aquinas House. He was a very traditional old school Jesuit; I am sure he rose at 5 AM every day, did his meditation and then said Mass. Mass would not have been very difficult if the College put him up in a hotel room.

Bill Nolan gave him the office of his assistant for the week, and Copleston had office hours. I’m sure many Dartmouth faculty were anxious to meet him. I remember that my hour was carefully scheduled. I remember what he wore. Over a simply tailored black suit and a tall white collar that I associated with Anglican clerics, he wore what I thought was a very strange robe, even for a scholar priest. It might have been a don’s gown from Heythrop. It was not the long black Jesuit habit that I knew from the Jesuits at Fairfield. There was no sash and the sleeves seemed to be broad black ribbons that dropped from the elbow. I recall that his speech was very precise and soft spoken. I would characterize it as meticulous. He didn’t rush and my memory even after 60 years was that he was a careful listener. Google tells me that he would have been just a few years older than my father, but I didn’t get any daddy vibe. 

He had just published Volume 7 of his monumental 11 volume History of Philosophy: Fichte to Nietzsche; his debates about the existence of God with Bertrand Russell which made him very famous in Catholic circles took place at least 15 years earlier, but I had no questions to ask about his writing or the debate. Perhaps Bill Nolan had told him that I wanted to enter the Jesuits or I did, but I told him about my parents' vehement opposition.

I was now 21 and could enter without their permission, and I was tempted to do that, but I promised them that I would finish college before I set off on what they considered a disastrous career choice. He asked me what I was studying, whether I liked it, and pointed out how it would certainly do no harm when I became a Jesuit. Then he asked why I wanted to be a Jesuit. I may have mumbled something about being impressed by certain scholastics and priests in prep school. Then he got personal and told me that his own parents had opposed his becoming a Catholic priest, but he persisted and continued to treat them with love and respect. He said that they eventually came to support his decision. He thought that it was a good idea that I finish my degree at Dartmouth. After some quiet time, he looked at his watch and said that he would have to begin preparing for another meeting, but that he would pray for me. 

I had an interview with the man whom I imagined could have removed any doubt about Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover argument for the existence of God, and instead received the promise of prayer to resolve a painful family situation.