"Finding God in All Things"

June 2, 2021

Bonnie Johnson Shurman

Jan. 20, 1944-June 2, 2011

Today is the 10th anniversary of Bonnie's death. I am among the many people who loved her and miss her kind and warm presence. She was an extremely generous woman and expressed her love as wife and mother,  daughter, grandmother and friend, in a way you could count on. 

More than a decade ago, when she was first diagnosed with leukemia, her husband Daniel Shurman told me that she was interested in doing the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and asked if I could suggest a book that she could use. She did the Exercises and I was blessed to be her guide. But it was her enormous spiritual gift that allowed her truly embody the Teaching of Jesus, and then to share it with others, just as the Lord asks us.

During the years that her cancer remained in remission, she continued to explore the path that her Lord, through Ignatius, opened. She continued to live her life in prayer, exploring and digging further, following her own inspiration and gifts. This mystical bent was always balanced by the consummate professional, a scholar with common sense. 

She found a link between Ignatius and Julian of Norwich via an informal association of seekers who called themselves “the Friends of God.” She wrote about Julian, Ignatius and the Friends of God when she was studying at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is dated March 8, 2005. 

Thank you, Daniel for being the kind of husband who inspires, and for introducing me to Bonnie, To thank Bonnie for the gift of friendship, I am going to post the paper, “Finding God in All Things,” here.

We miss you, Bonnie. and your gentle presence. We are enormously grateful for the gifts you gave us. May you sing with the angels.

I have given this paper the same title as William Barry’s book: Finding God In All Things, A Companion To The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius (Barry 1991). I was reading the book when Julian of Norwich was assigned in class. The similarities between Julian’s writings and Ignatius’s were striking to me. Both Julian and Ignatius write of multiple sensory experiences with God occasioned by life-threatening illness. Before I understood that Julian was born 150 years before Ignatius, I considered that her visions, like mine[1], might have been delirious manifestations engendered by Ignatian-style guided meditations. When I realized that she lived long before Ignatius, I abandoned the paper I was writing on the general topic of asceticism to delve deeper into parallels, coincidences, and possible connections between these two late medieval mystics.

The theological proposition of this paper is that the writings of Julian in circa 1400 and the writings of Ignatius circa 1525 are representative of a distinct spirituality: God as Friend. God as Friend is a paradigm shift from the dominant spirituality from the 4th century: Deity of Christ; it is distinct though related to two paradigms which were soon to emerge in the reformation: Salvation by Faith Alone and Incarnational Participation. At the end of this paper I will argue that the paradigm of God as Friend is finding new relevance in our time, hence bringing a renewed interest in both Julian and Ignatius.

In my search for a “social network” connecting Julian and Ignatius, I learned about an informal group called “Friends of God” from one of the many websites devoted to Julian. The name for this “association of pious persons, both ecclesiastical and lay [also men and women], alludes no doubt to John 15:14-15[2] … Friends of God appears to have had its origin in Basle between the years 1339 and 1343, and to have thence extended down the Rhine even as far as the Netherlands” (Walsh 1909). I am skeptical that Julian herself had any direct connection with the informal network of German mystics, but there is indirect evidence at least that many of them had access to her writing. One version of Julian’s Short Text (the so-called “Amherst Manuscript”) also contains writings of Friends’ mystics Marguerite Poerete, Henry Suso, and Jan van Ruusbroec (Holloway 1997). The manuscript had been in the Brigittine Syon Abbey; it was owned by the Lowe family and through them found its way to the Low Countries and Rouen (Holloway 1996). While there is no direct evidence of who might have read it and when, there is enough indirect evidence to conclude that Julian’s ideas were circulating among German mystics following her death circa 1425. The German mystics influenced Ignatius through the Carhusian and former Dominican monk, Ludolf of Saxony (Gieraths 1986). Ignatius is known to have read and re-read a four volume Spanish translation of Ludolf’s Life of Christ and to have been profoundly influenced, even converted, by what he read there (Ignatius 2000, p. xiv; Loyola 2000, p. xiv).

The references to Julian’s writing in this paper come from a “Long Text” version translated from the manuscript found in the British Museum. As I read Revelations of Divine Love (Julian 2002), I noted about sixty passages expressing ideas similar to those found the Spiritual Exercises, far too many passages to discuss here.[3] I am concentrating on five concepts that point parallel notions of God as friend; in particular, I am limiting myself to the best examples that reveal similarities in their views of how people carry on friendship with God various media/modes. I use quotations from the work of each to document my argument that friendship with God is created and maintained through intimate communications which take at least five different forms: imagery, senses, colloquy, consolation/ desolation, and prayer. In the conclusion of the paper, I also point similarities in how they describe the nature of this friendship in their discussions of sin, love, goodness, choice, and the indwelling of God in our nature.

Communication is the sine qua non of any friendship. To have a concept of friendship with God, therefore requires that there be some form of media which constitutes that communication. For both Julian and Ignatius, imagery is the most important media and the Passion is the most important topic of that imagery. In examining Julian and Ignatius’s imagery of Jesus’ Passion, such in the illustrative passages below, it is easy to dismiss their perspective on friendship. After all “Body of Christ” imagery was a common theme of medieval piety yet friendship with God was not. I have little knowledge of other writers in the “Body of Christ” genre, so I cannot say that the friendship imagery of Julian and Ignatius is unique. What I observe in their imagery, however, is its intimacy. Both show intimacy with Jesus’ body; this use of imagery signals closeness, friendship.

… All the precious blood was bled out of the sweet body that might pass therefore, yet there dwelled a moisture in the sweet flesh of Christ as it was shewed (Julian 2002, p.). 

… Blood of Christ, inebriate me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, strengthen me. O good Jesus hear me. Within Thy wounds hid me (Ignatius 2000, p. xlv).

Simply imagining another in a prayerful way can also create a close relationship with the one imagined with the need for conversation as we typically understand that term. A few months ago my husband and I were contacted by a friend to provide direction to on-line medical information for a friend of his with a rare bone marrow disease. We started to email with both Jim and his wife about Jim’s illness and potential resources in Palo Alto. Mostly we prayed intensely for Jim and also for his wife; we never spoke with them even by phone. When Jim died unexpectedly from a heart attack, both Daniel and I were devastated; we still cry at the thought of Jim. We had lost a dear friend, one whom we knew only through imagery, email, and prayer. It was a dramatic Julian-Ignatian lesson for me: I felt so close to this person and that closeness was entirely the product of my imagining his circumstances and my daily prayers for him. Knowing Jim in this way helped me to experience God in a fresh way; I learned how I can know God without human encounters just as I had known Jim without these encounters.

Imagery in Julian and Ignatius is not only visual, it is also multi-sensory.

I HAD, in part, touching, sight, and feeling in three properties of God, in which the strength and effect of all the Revelation standeth (Julian 2002, p. 197). And then shall we, with His sweet grace, in our own meek continuant prayer come unto Him now in this life by many privy touchings of sweet spiritual sights and feeling, measured to us as our simpleness may bear it (Julian 2002, p. 90). 

The Fifth contemplation will consist in applying the five senses to the matter. … seeing in imagination the persons, in contemplating and mediating in detail the circumstances in which they are… hear what they are saying… smell the infinite fragrance and taste the infinite sweetness of the divinity … touch, for example by embracing and kissing the place where the persons stand (Ignatius 2000, p. 45).

Communicating with one’s Godfriend goes beyond merely experiencing God through ones imagination and senses; both Julian and Ignatius converse directly with God. Throughout the Julian text, she is posing questions to God, and God is answering her, for example: “AND thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well…”(Julian 2002, p. 61); the result of this is conversational. Ignatius uses the term “colloquy” to refer to conversations with God (and also with Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit on occasions): “The colloquy is made by speaking exactly as one friend speaks to another” (Ignatius 2000, p. 24). These two examples exemplify a pattern of “shewing” vs “exercise” that I find over and over as a distinction between these two books: Julian shows her communication with God; Ignatius instructs the maker of the exercises to perform these same kinds of communications. Thus, “revelation” in Julian becomes “exercise” in Ignatius.

God has special kinds of communication with Julian that I would call, following Ignatius, “consolations” and “desolations.” In Ignatian spirituality, consolidations and desolations are the movements of the spirit—“internal movements” by which we can discern God’s will in our lives. Those making the exercises are taught how to listen or feel for these movements and thereby to guide their lives in accord with God’s will. Again, we see that Julian experiences these interior movements but makes no methodical use of them. Ignatius’s biography describes how he initially experienced them much as Julian did and then learned to put them to use in his own communications with God.

AND after this He shewed a sovereign ghostly pleasance in my soul. I was fulfilled with the everlasting sureness, mightily sustained without any painful dread. This feeling was so glad and so ghostly that I was in all peace and in rest, that there was nothing in earth that should have grieved me. …This lasted but a while, and I was turned and left to myself in heaviness, and weariness of my life that scarcely I could have patience to live. This Vision was shewed me, according to mine understanding, sometime to be in comfort, and sometime to fail and to be left to themselves. God willeth that we know that He keepeth us even alike secure in woe and in weal. And for profit of man’s soul, a man is sometime left to himself (Julian 2002). 

God alone can give consolation to the soul without any previous cause. It belongs solely to the Creator to come into a soul, to leave it, to act upon it, to draw it wholly to the love of His Divine Majesty (Ignatius 2000, p. 119 section 330). ...When one is in desolation, he should be mindful that God has left him to his natural powers to resist the different agitations and temptations of the enemy in order to try him. For though God has taken from him the abundance of fervor and overflowing love and the intensity of His favors, nevertheless, he has sufficient grace for eternal salvation (Ignatius 2000, p. 116, section 320).

On the topic of prayer, Julian and Ignatius could not be more similar. Yet, it is not as simple to point to parallel passages as with the preceding topics. For them, prayer is not just a “doing” – not just a message we send to God, in the form of a petition, for example. Rather, prayer is a way of being in which ones very foundation, ones “ground” is God and therefore prayer is fitting ourselves to that Ground of our being. Julian puts it this way:

OUR Lord God willeth that we have true understanding, and specially in three things that belong to our prayer. The first is: by whom and how that our prayer springeth. By whom, He sheweth when He saith: I am [the] Ground; and how, by His Goodness: for He saith first: It is my will. The second is: in what manner and how we should use our prayer; and that is that our will be turned unto the will of our Lord, enjoying: and so meaneth He when He saith: I make thee to will it. The third is that we should know the fruit and the end of our prayers: that is, that we be oned and like to our Lord in all things; and to this intent and for this end was all this lovely lesson shewed. And He will help us, and we shall make it so as He saith Himself; Blessed may He be! For this is our Lord’s will, that our prayer and our trust be both alike large. For if we trust not as much as we pray, we do not full worship to our Lord in our prayer, and also we tarry and pain our self (Julian 2002).

“Grounded in God” has several implications. First, that prayer is about the will of God and our place in that will. From this the next implication, only implicit in the statement above, that God is eternally present and has already “answered” our prayers in our very existence, our salvation, and in all that we enjoy: “The first is our noble and excellent making; the second, our precious and dearworthy again-buying; the third, all-thing that He hath made beneath us, [He hath made] to serve us, and for our love keepeth it. Then signifieth He thus, as if He said: Behold and see that I have done all this before thy prayers; and now thou art, and prayest me” (Julian 2002). Julian cautions us not to go looking for this or that way that God might have answered our small petitions, but to understand that God is answering even the prayers we have not yet asked. So how then should we pray? We should pray that “our will be turned unto the will of our Lord.” The true end of our petitions is that we become like God, indeed that we are at one with God.

William Barry describes the same understanding in Ignatius in his chapter entitled, “Grounded in God: The Principle and Foundation” (Ignatius 2000, pp. 33ff.). God is up to one action; we can experience the creative action of God which is always at work (Barry 1991, p. 39); Ignatius draws out the implications of our place in God’s one action in the Principle and Foundation: “We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things… Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a short life. … Our one desire and choice should be what is conductive to the end for which we are created (Ignatius 2000, p. 12, section 23). In other words, it is about God’s will; our prayer is our participation in that will. We are engaged in the world of God’s creating and God is already answering the prayers we have not yet made.

We have seen in both of these late medieval mystics a central concern with our relationship with God and how that relationship is continuously created through various media. The relationship is one of love. While both mystics write extensively on sin, theirs is not the sin of the medieval church or of Jonathan Edwards. Indeed, Julian comes as close as one might in her day to saying that her Church is misguided in its notion of sin and salvation (Julian 2002, p. 104). Ignatius’ first week of the Exercises is devoted to examining one’s sin, but the point is not to berate or belittle the maker of the Exercises. Rather, the grace of the first week is the experience of love. “Ignatius expects that God will reveal our sins in such a way that we will actually be consoled. We are to have an increase of faith, hope, and love, be moved to tears of sorrow for our sin, but also to tears of love for a God who has been so good to us” (Barry 1991, p. 51). The heart of the message from both Julian and Ignatius is the goodness of God, the love of God, and the freedom which God gives us in the hope that we will choose to put God at the center of our lives, and participate in God’s mission.

Both mystics are saying that we must look in the world and in ourselves to find God. Their piety is finding God in all things, starting with finding ourselves IN God. “For our Soul is so deep-grounded in God, and so endlessly treasured, that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God, which is the Maker, to whom it is oned” (Julian 2002, p. 133). This is such a contemporary message; it is not surprising that both mystics are being read more in our time than in any time of the past, including their own.

I have argued here that both Julian and Ignatius provide us with kataphatic paths to relationship with God as friend, one in which we are constantly called to God’s mission, but never coerced or threatened. We are called to examine our own sins, not the sins of others; we communicate with God who already God loves us and forgives us already. This is a contemporary theme. These are mystics for our time.

Notes:

1 Since this is not a “personal reflection paper,” I will not discuss further my own experiences. Suffice to say that the parallels I find in Julian’s writings to my own experiences were the motivation for my choosing this topic.

2 “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my father.”

3 References to “Pages” in Julian are to the original manuscript pages; references to Ignatius are to pages in the Vintage-Random House version with section numbers referring to Ignatius original sections.

References

Barry, W. A. (1991). Finding God In All Things A Companion To The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius. Notre Dame, IL, Ave Maria Press.

Gieraths, G. M. (1986). "Life in Abundance: Meister Eckhart and the German Dominican Mystics of the 14th Century." Spirituality Today 38 (August): Supplementary Book.

Holloway, J. B. (1996) The Westminster Cathedral/Abbey Manuscript of Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love. http://www.umilta.net/westmins.html.

Holloway, J. B. (1997) Godfriends: The Continental Medieval Mystics. http://www.umilta.net/godfrien.html.

Ignatius (2000). The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. New York, Random House.

Julian (2002). Revelations of Divine Love. Grand Rapids, MI, Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Walsh, R. (1909). Friends of God. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Online Edition, K. Knight. 6.

Issan Dorsey and Some Undisclosed Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic

What follows is an interview I did with Marlin Marynick for his book, Undisclosed: Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic.

1/27/2012

I'm a gay man in San Francisco. I've been living here since 1974. I'm a former Jesuit—I’d been in Berkeley studying theology—and when I came out, I stayed. I did all the crazy kind of things that people do when they first come out—particularly the men of my generation who were just beginning to do the things we were really capable of in spite of all the discrimination against us. I drove a cab for a number of years, and I started a wood shop, perfect for a guy with a degree in theology, but I didn't really feel much like practicing any religion. When I met Harvey Milk, I joined the fight for gay rights. I had a partner, and we tried to build a life here in gay Mecca.

Then, all of a sudden in the mid-80’s, our friends began dying, huge numbers. . .first it was called gay cancer, then it was called GRID. . .nobody really knew what it was, but it was terrifying. Towards 1987-88 I felt that I had to do something, although this was also a process of me overcoming my own fears, of dealing with them. I had many friends that were diagnosed, and everybody was dealing with the fear, the loss and the not-knowing what we were really dealing with.

In 1988 I met a gay Buddhist priest, Issan Dorsey. Friends had told me that he was remarkable guy, but my first impressions were that he was actually rather ordinary, far more effeminate than any of my gay friends, and not in any way “spiritual” as I understood the word.

Issan, “Tommy” Dorsey, did have an unusual path to a Zen. He had been a professional drag queen, and a heavy drug abuser, which was not terribly out of the ordinary for gay San Franciscans 40 years ago. He was also a very bright, funny, human being, and he had just started an AIDS hospice. (He himself died at the Hospice of the disease on September 6, 1990—he’d contracted HIV from his partner, James). I was blessed to be able to be with him during the last few years of his life, and helped him create Maitri Home and Hospice for People with HIV.

I had first moved into the Zen center on Hartford Street to practice meditation, to get away from a relationship that was ending, and to put some perspective around all that. Very quickly after I packed my bags, my partner and I closed our business, we made and sold furniture, and ended our relationship. So there I was living in this Zen center-hospice, and I started doing some general carpentry work, fixing bathrooms, getting rooms ready for the men who would live with us. It just was the next thing to do, right in front of me. This quickly lead to finding money to pay for the building materials; then more organizational stuff; and by 1990, I followed Steve Allen as executive director of the hospice. Looking back, it was something that my Jesuit training, and everything, prepared me for though I didn't have much experience with non-profits and no experience in health care.

Back then people with HIV-AIDS died quickly after being diagnosed. . . 3 weeks, 6 weeks, a few months, perhaps a little bit longer in rare cases. It felt like we were picking up bodies off the street. Some months 100 men died in our neighborhood, the Castro. You'd walk down the street, pass someone you knew who looked pretty healthy. Then you'd see him 2 weeks later and he’d aged 40 years. Within a year or two I said to myself "Oh my god, where did my friends go." No one knew what to do, or how to behave around those infected—these were friends. Of course a lot of us were afraid of catching the disease, because no one knew how it was transmitted, although we had our suspicions, no one really knew. No one knew if it was poppers, or kissing, or if it really was sex and drugs and rock and roll. That didn't appear on the horizon for a while because no one wanted to give those things up. Sexual freedom was part of our emancipation, or that’s what we though. Denial was a big part of the epidemic’s horrifying spread through the community.

Issan said that the only real thing that we could do was to take care of what was in front of us, take care of life as it presented itself. He said HIV was like a guest who’d come and knocked at the door, and couldn’t be turned away. When one member of the small meditation community, JD, became so sick that his partner Pierre could no longer care for him, despite the misgivings of some in the community—Issan could be very firm, even stubborn, when he was sure of the next thing he had to do—he moved JD into the bedroom next to his. And he began looking after his immediate needs, which included martinis after evening meditation, spicy hot dogs, and cable TV. It was a very simple concept—just take care of people in the most basic way and sustain a normal life for as long as possible. And be as happy as you could—no matter what.

And then something unexpected happened, JD did not die quickly. The symptoms of the disease worsened, he could no longer walk, was bed-ridden, but when a supporter gave Maitri a motorized wheelchair, JD became a teenager with a hot rod, missing meals, staying out past curfew. He found a new boyfriend who was also disabled, and they began to spend the night together. We moved him from the second floor to the street level front room of the second building where he held court. Four or five other men would be in his room watching campy movies on VCR at all hours. He stocked his small refrigerator intended for medications with soda and beer, and in the front window a hydroponic wheatgrass farm, for health, of course. All this really tested some zennish sensibilities, and the CNA staff. But despite complaints, Issan remained firm in his support for JD. When JD returned one day from Oakland—he’d taken BART across the Bay—with an iguana, no one believed that he would actually take care of it himself. He did. In fact he smuggled his pet onto a plane when he went back to Florida to spend his last days with his mother. The story of the lizard squirming around under his shirt while JD locked himself in toilet at 30,000 feet became the stuff of legend. I think that JD’s story is also a real example of what kind of life is possible when your guests are not bound by some rigid rules for how you expect guests to behave.

Even if people couldn’t see the compassion in what Issan was doing, most everyone trusted him enough to give money. Another friend of his bought the building next to our small Victorian house, and we bought back the lease. That gave us rooms for another 5 people. Within a year we had 8 beds for people with HIV-AIDS plus 6 people to take care of them, Issan, Phil Whalen, a zen priest, as was Steve Allen, and his wife, Angelique, Michael Jamvold, myself, and David Bullock. We shared a life together—we meditated, had fun. We worked hard and cried.

Maitri was a ragtag operation. We learned, and we would create a Buddhist hospice piece by piece. I began to spend time helping people get their paperwork arranged for the end of their life, getting everything straightened out with their partners, and their families, taking care of the kinds of things that come up towards the end of life. I asked social workers and lawyers to help and everyone I asked stepped forward.

What also started to become clear, we were charting new territory. We were the only Zen center in the United States to put meat, chicken and sausages on our vegetarian, Zen, table. People with HIV needed protein. There were a lot of other things that broke rules, both in Zen terms, and hospice-wise. When we had to take care of getting the drugs adjusted so that people could have a fairly comfortable life, we got help from Visiting Nurses and Hospice (Steve Allen worked out a contract with them to provide a full-time nurse and certified nursing attendants using moneys already allocated for care from the city). As I started to investigate how we could get money for hospice, I discovered that for most insurance and federal funding, people had to have a 6 month diagnosis to receive assistance and they couldn't take any drugs which would prolong life. Issan said that’s crazy because he wanted people to live and enjoy life as much as they could for as long as they could. There was a new, experimental drug called Foscarnet which prevented, or at least retarded, blindness caused by CMV retinitis. It had to be given intravenously. The nurses from hospice were not allowed to do that with hospice patients so I recruited a small group of volunteers who learned how to administer it. Then several patients wanted to sign up for drug trails of the new HIV drugs that began to appear. It would probably have been prohibited in more formal hospice settings, but somehow, I convinced VNA to not report any person at Maitri who enrolled in a drug trial.

The partner of my friend Michael who was dying called Maitiri “the house of death” when I suggested that he move Michael in. I was pretty offended. I saw what we were doing as creating a house of life. While I was trying to figure out how to keep the cable TV from being shut off, and lamb stew on the table, there were times I thought I was running “animal house.” There were lots of humorous, funny things going on all the time. Yes, people were dying, in the 2 + years I was there 82 people died in those 8 beds, and I was with almost every one of them. I won’t deny that it tested my defenses, that it was trying, and stressful work. There was always a poignancy about life at Maitri. But when death is simply part of life, it becomes easier to sustain what we think of as normal life.

Bit by bit, we did put something together, and what we created is now the longest surviving AIDS hospice, “home and hospice for people with AIDS,” in the city. The morbidity rate from HIV/AIDS has gone down enormously, thank god. Only a few people actually die in the hospice now, so the current staff deals with things like drug addiction, and adherence to medical protocol for the antiviral drugs, respite care, things that Issan would have encouraged us to do to make life as normal and happy for as long as it lasts. What we did in the early days of the epidemic and what continues to be done now is really extraordinary.

By the time he died, I realized that Issan was a truly extraordinary man. He had more than an extremely funny sense of humor. He’d worn a skirt, or as he used to say, "I still wear a skirt but I renounced the heels." His speech was always in entirely plain language. And he really was a Zen master. When this drag queen, substance abuser par excellence, started to sit in meditation with Susuki Roshi, he sat down and looked at the bottom of his feet, and said to himself, oh my god, they are dirty. . . and he started to clean up from drugs, and meditate. He also discovered what was important for his own life. In official Zen, he went as high as any man can go. For me he was an absolutely extraordinary, terrific human being.

How does the past become the past? Therapy, Jesus and Zen

My Facebook Zen friend, James Kenney, asked a wonderfully provocative question: “Is forgiveness an act of will?”

Psychologists define forgiveness as a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. 

Whether forgiveness is a will-act, whether it’s voluntary or conditional, and what happens to your state of mind, are also issues worth examining. The psychological definition says it's a choice that allows a person to forgive another for an offense or an act that was illegal or immoral. It is intentional.

When someone forgives someone, they let go of negative emotions. When a debt is forgiven, there is a release of any expectation or commitment for repayment or compensation.

Perhaps in terms of the law and psychotherapeutic practice these definitions are useful, but as a practitioner, I find they don’t go far enough. I’m going to posit forgiveness as being finished with the past in the sense that the trauma becomes a complete chapter of personal history without any holdovers in one’s present everyday life. This includes being able to handle any residual flashes of negative emotion as well as not suffering any real financial or physical consequences from the other person’s action. I’ve set the bar quite high. Forgiveness is like an act of God, but very possible for us humans too. We all make mistakes. We all need forgiveness.

In my response to James’s question on Facebook I made a simple statement that I was raped by Bob Hoffman within 6 months after I finished the Process of Psychic Therapy, and when a senior Hoffman teacher asked me why I hadn’t been able to “move on,” I said that I chose not to. It’s part of being compassionate. 

Then a no-doubt well-intentioned person told me that I just had to forgive Hoffman. I found the injunction extremely annoying, but I could not pin down why. I felt that my respondent had both missed the point and misconstrued my intention. However there was something more. I was told I had to forgive to live fully, but not condone the act. That I had to dispel the darkness, or something. Of course when I went back to copy the response so that I could digest it, the writer had taken it down.

I hate being told what’s in my best interest. But now that I’ve owned up to my off-the-shelf response, perhaps I can examine why I resist this blanket injunction to forgive. I’ve actually written about this in some detail, “Forgive and Forget Hoffman?” where I examine one possible underlying motivations, playing the victim card, which is what I think the senior Hoffman teacher was snidely inferring with his admonition wrongly framed as a therapeutic question: isn’t it time to move on?

Thanks for advice I didn’t request, and, actually, I get to decide when, what and if to forgive. But instead of just firing off a “Fuck off,” I’ll take it the opportunity to spell out my reasons for rejecting the self-serving advice—the teacher does make money selling Hoffman’s Process, and my well-intentioned respondent reads New Age self-help books although I am unsure if he gets a percentage.

It’s not in the past because it’s not in the past. There are limits to being able to just declare something ancient history, to forgive and forget.

I was enjoined to dispel the darkness of past events that are blatantly evil and destructive. I’m going to posit that just dismissing them and their consequences under some command to “move on” is not particularly useful or helpful simply because it’s not honest.

My friend Susan Murphy, an insightful Australian Zen teacher, responding to my question as to whether or not I was playing the victim card, pointed to the story of Jesus at Capernaum when he healed a man whose friends had to lower him through the roof of a house where Jesus was with some friends--the crowd so dense that this was the only way to get Jesus’s attention. Some version of the story appears in all three synoptic gospels.

The writers of the story clearly separate two aspects of Jesus’s healing. First off Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” That’s the most important one: the man’s faith and that of his friends have caught the attention of Jesus, and he does what he was sent to do, forgive sins. But it is after all a teaching story, so there are objections: scribes and Pharisees, also present, at least rhetorically, ask, ‘How can you forgive? That power belongs only to God.’ And here are the words Jesus responded with in Mark’s gospel: "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? “ The man stands and picks up his mat, demonstrating Jesus’s power, but it also says, compared to forgiving sins, that was the easy part.

And, in the blink of an eye, the past becomes the past.

Why the deliberate separation of two events or perhaps two sides of the same event? Forgiveness is an act of grace and god, and then the disappearance of the physical impairment, the man’s disability becoming just part of his ancient history. The implication is that they may not always be a miracle as commonly understood, but, because Jesus is neither a charlatan nor soothsayer nor fake miracle worker, the act of forgiveness belongs to God alone. However depending on factors we cannot fully understand, there may or may not be the sought after physical, magical cure. But this nuance is left for the commentator or preacher at a later date.

And this is Susan’s observation: “When Jesus told the paralysed man who had been lowered through the roof for a miracle, ‘Pick up your bed and walk,’ effectively he was acting not in the name of supernatural power but in the name of the forgiveness he was asserting that [he] had a right to bestow, because ‘justice is mine’, (or was his, as the Lord). What I see here is that the true miracle, then, was not the performance of a nature-bending act, it was forgiveness. He veered away from performing miracles after that. They were cheapening his teaching. . . . Forgiveness is surely the actualising of love.”

I promised Zen! I quoted a Zen teacher’s reference to the Gospel of Jesus. Let me bring Zen to the Gospel.

A small band of Zen monks carry a paralized brother to meet Jesus in Capernaum, and get his blessing. Like many people here in India lining up for darshan, they’re seeking some relief for their sufferings, also a very Zen thing to do, but following their training, they don’t have too many expectations. They set the stage for a Buddhist encounter with Jesus. 

Their Zen training suddenly throws a lot of work into the scenario. They carry the man obviously a long way from a distant Eastern ashram. Then they find the materials and tools to fashion a ladder to get up to the roof. They certainly can’t steal one. After determining where Jesus was sitting, they carefully cut an opening in the ceiling, not hurting anyone in the room with falling debris. Each one of these actions is deliberate, requiring planning and effort. The work is performed as carefully and mindfully as possible. They’re monks after all. I didn’t mention that they might also have to learn Aramaic but there’s already enough to do without that so let’s throw in the magical appearance of a good interpreter.

Somehow they climb down into the presence of Jesus with the brother they’ve just lowered in a sling, and hear, “Your sins are forgiven.” They also hear the Pharisees' question: “Doesn’t forgiveness of sins belong to God?” "Good question," they say, and the dharma combat begins. The Pharisees are often the fall guys in the Gospel stories, but not our Zen monks: What is forgiveness of sins exactly? What is there to forgive? Are a misstep or an evil act the same? These monks live by the Law of dependent origination, Paticca-samuppada. Something in their brother’s past resulted in his paralysis. At least in that regard, on the surface, although Jesus does not talk about any cause for the man’s affliction, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it was the result of something in his past, his sins. In Zen they were taught to chant: “All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind. I now fully avow.” 

I promised therapy. Here is an examination of the mental results of past events.

I will try to frame the conclusion of this conversation with some tested therapeutic hypotheses. I remained in negative transference for years to a man, a trusted therapist, whom I turned to for counsel at a time of personal crisis when I was very vulnerable, and he abused me sexually and emotionally.

I recognize my personal event in this Jesus story, and thank Susan for providing the match up for me to work with. Of course Hoffman’s rape paralized me—I am the paralytic lowered through the roof. Hoffman’s abuse surely cut off opportunities that might have been open to me were I not in transference for so long; there were always blocks working with teachers because on some very deep level I couldn’t trust them; there was sexual dysfunction and frustration; there was alcohol and substance abuse; there were the silly issues with partners that popped up—when I managed to find someone willing to put up with my defensiveness. I certainly would have preferred to exit the dead-ended process earlier. I can imagine the possibility of having time and energy to explore other avenues, but those daydreams didn’t happen.

And yes, I regret those lost opportunities although I’ve managed to find compassion for Bob Hoffman who was himself a closeted gay man racked by self-doubt, psychosis, and loneliness. It is not difficult to be truly forgiving and compassionate when you really comprehend the pain of another person’s life. It seems to actually spring up naturally without effort or responding to a command to move on. And, in my case it happened in its own course after I was willing to do the work of unraveling the complex story of my abuse.

But I am not ready to forgive Hoffman's actions. They had real consequences. My greatest loss doing the process of psychic therapy was the destruction of an admittedly tenuous relationship with my father. I was in crisis when I undertook work with Hoffman, but my father did not abuse me. Hoffman did—he really abused me, but managed through his psychic therapy to blame my dad (and then forgive in his again fictional way). As a result I had almost zero relationship with my father, a wonderfully kind and good man, for most of my adult life. Hoffman even fed me a wildly speculative made-up story about my father being gay. My father lived to be almost 101 years old, and I was lucky that we shared a few very rich years of real friendship at the end of his life. I missed out on 40, but I am still very grateful. Yes, that past is fully past, but some gifts remain and can be nurtured.

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense? Because when we’re vulnerable and in pain, we need to experience compassion. Instead I had the bad luck to be an object to fulfill a charlatan’s need for sexual gratification. The real answer to the question about "moving on" is that the compassion and forgiveness had to be for myself, not Hoffman. And because I’ve opted for the Zen route, it was not like just falling through a hole in the roof or being lowered into a Blessed Presence. I traveled from afar with the help of companions. That was my good luck, and I remained angry enough at Hoffman’s abuse to get to the heart of the matter. At least for me that route could not be short circuited.

The hip coffee house New Age sage will tell you that not forgiving only hurts you. There’s no one to hurt but yourself so why not “Move On”? By contrast, in legendary Zen a deceptively ordinary lady at the tea stand doesn’t order you around but rather asks a simple, innocent sounding, straight forward question: “hey Mr. Paralytic, is that ‘not-walking-mind’ past, present or future?” A good answer might allow you to step into the radical present. The past is past because it’s past; the future might exist in hopes and dreams, perhaps sadly colored with regret; the only place to walk into is this moment.

If there was a tea stand in Capernaum, you can bet that there were no crowds like the ones surrounding Jesus. Zen is oftimes a lonely practice, but maybe a few stragglers found their way there after Jesus had performed enough miracles for one day. They would be lucky if they came armed with some good questions. But that might take some work, work that’s still to be done, like finding a real path to forgiveness.

In Zen forgiveness is an act of will if you choose the right path and refuse to settle for an easy way out. Then the Blessed Presence thing just happens. That cannot be willed.

And to the Hoffman teacher who told me to “Move on.” Thanks for the free advice, but “Fuck Off.”

P.S. When the Hoffman teacher asked why I waited until now to write a hit piece, I listed all the writing that I've been doing over almost two decades in my attempt to put the past in the past: My Hoffman Process Writings.

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.