Science vs. Spooks

Skepticism, scientific research and the Nostradamus effect

Originally posted 2nd August 2007

In this odd corner of the world called California, many “spiritual” people are interested in the changing nature of mind, the related emotions, or what we in the West call personality. In some quarters it is believed that our unique contribution to the endeavor of self-investigation will be the application of the scientific method. This purports to be a new chapter of the old science vs. religion debate, perhaps even a new path to understanding. I have a slightly different take on a related question concerning the bias of those who sponsor the research, or more precisely: who's buying, what is the motivation behind the research and how this affects the methodology of the science. “Science vs. Spooks” reveals a personal judgement which I hope to substantiate. 

The Institute of Noetic Sciences was born in an odd mixture of New Age personal growth techniques and a deeply powerful personal, transforming experience. The astronaut Edgar Mitchell—I have heard several versions, all second hand—on his voyage to Moon, had a deep, profound enlightenment experience, a kensho,in the most unique of circumstances. He was doing a spacewalk to check things out before the capsule fired off on its return to earth. He was, and perhaps still is, a very technical kind of guy, a total professional, running down the checklist transmitted to him from NASA command. There was a momentary lapse in the transmission just as the capsule completed its orbit behind the dark side of the moon. With nothing to do for 30 seconds or so, but his concentration still entirely focused, Edgar looked up as the earth rose over the horizon of the moon, and the whole universe opened up for him. POW. Yeah I wish I'd been there.

Mitchell returns to earth a changed man, and starts off on a personal quest. I have never talked to him nor can I read his mind, but perhaps he wanted to try to figure what that experience was all about, and also, perhaps, ways for others to have that experience which might drastically alter the way we live on earth.

Enter Michael Murphy and Esalen. Located in one of the most beautiful settings California has to offer, Esalen was a kind of supermarket of altered-state spiritual experiences and meditation. Some of the best minds, highly trained professionals who were also seekers, used it as their laboratory. It was an exciting time and place. I was among the second generation of seekers to sample the feast—mostly through Claudio Naranjo’s SAT that was born during the first Arica training with Oscar Ischazo that 40 or so Esalen 'members' attended (that is a loose term, they were mostly just regular participants in Esalen workshops and seminars plus a few luminaries).

Sometime around the mid to late 70's, at least this is how I see it, three things began to happen: first there was a straightforward attempt to use standard tests, psychological and medical, to measure the effects of meditation. The work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences was a leader in this area. And the second objective is quite close to the first—standard psychological instruments began to be used to determine any measurable changes in persons who did the various workshops and training: if people reported beneficial results, were they real change that lasted, or just a kind of workshop high.

And the third thing, and here I have to be very careful because, though based on real experience, what I have to say is just my judgment, the producers of the various trainings and workshops wanted to show positive scientific results as part of their marketing. A simple look at the associates of the Institute of Noetic Sciences shows an odd assortment of scientists, practitioners, luminaries and aspiring luminaries. Most were connected to the world of psychology, some professionals and some who had transformative experiences and wanted to present them to a larger audience. Of course, money was required to support these projects.

I worked on staff at two Easlen type human potential companies, and observed scientific studies undertaken in both companies. In a small way, I participated in the creation and execution of one.

Here's the scenario: The company finds the money to finance the study, just as drug companies do when they are testing their products. Then someone, in the case I know best it was a PhD psychologist on staff, shops around university graduate psychology departments for some professors willing to design and execute a study. Of course there are requirements to insure that the results are completely impartial and not stacked, both what is to be measured and what instruments will be designed for measurement and assessment of results are negotiated and agreed on. The size of the sample and a timetable are set. A fee is paid. There is also a promise to have the results, published in a professional peer reviewed journal.

However, there are three areas where there was participation (and revision) the 'objective science behind the 'result.' I was one of several people who pre-tested the instrument that was designed. The researchers were looking for the positive psychological results and determine if they were lasting. As a 'graduate' of the course, I was given a questionnaire that the researchers had designed to measure certain psychological results. But then, through the in-house psychologist, there were 'adjustments' of the effects measured with an eye to using the results for marketing. 

Then testing began. At some point, perhaps three months into the process, company staff people called participants to make sure that they completed their questionnaires. (I actually overheard some phone calls though I was not asked to make any). However, the same staff also made 'support' calls to graduates at specific intervals. Though this may not completely unethical within the agreed upon conditions of impartiality, and I did not hear any coercion in the phone calls, it seems to me that if I got a support call, reinforcing my experience just before I filled out a questionnaire for the study, it would effect my response. And if I did not feel strongly enough to send my report back to the psychologists, but received a phone call from the same support staff support person asking if I’d returned my questionnaire, I would of course be more likely to mail it which that would affect the statistical results and the impartiality of the science behind them.

And the final area of manipulation of the results was their publication. Although the researchers themselves wrote up their study and submitted it to professional journals, perhaps even a presentation at some conference (I left the company before it was complete), the interim report written by the in-house psychologist and given to the president had phrases such as, "After six months, a majority of participants report more confident and loving conversations with their spouses and children." The president claimed that this was just too much scientific jargon. I actually stood by his desk as he reworked every sentence, every word or phrase that seemed too guarded, and changed them, asking us as witnesses, "I think ‘Six months after the Process, participants were stronger and more confident in interactions with their spouses and family,’ says the same thing, doesn't it?" When I asked the psychologist himself about the revisions, he was non-committal, "I suppose that could be said," and turned the conversation to his new home in the foothills.

There is nothing criminal or terribly important in this manipulation of scientific inquiry—the drug companies do it all the time and we pay for it—but it shows, I think, the limitations of science in the real world. What has this to do with our old friend Nostradamus? Did that phrase about the two giants collapsing (“In the City of God there will be a great thunder,/Two brothers torn apart by Chaos”)'foretell' the attack on the World Trade Center towers? Yes, I am sure that we could find some paranormal enthusiasts who would design and fund a study that ‘proves’ that a certain percentage of the American public, after hearing those sentences read to them in a scripted phone survey, will agree that Nostradamus did really predict 9/11. 

This is one way to defend against the terror of the unpredictable, but I choose to remain skeptical.

Here are the pieces that I've written about Hoffman. Although I have tried to be objective, it is impossible to take a disinterested position with regard to the Process. Hoffman sexually abused me about 6 months after I finished my first process.

 

The Dirty Secrets about the Beginning of the Hoffman Process, parts 1 and 2

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

#GayMeToo

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

This Victim Refuses Silence 

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.

"Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." 

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

Science vs. Spooks

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

April 9, 2007

It’s a cold Monday night in San Francisco and I am in tears. I just watched a documentary on Jim Jones, and the People's Temple cult. Some call it mass suicide of  some 900 people in Guyana, but no, that's not right at all—Jim Jones murdered them. Some, like Representative Leo Ryan, literally died in the cross-fire, but the majority were victims of the group insanity instigated by Jones.

The documentary forced me to remember that event as if it had happened yesterday. When I ride out Geary, I see the gap between buildings where the Peoples' Temple used to be. I see faces of people I knew and worked with in politics. I cannot remember their names. I had been very involved in the campaign to elect George Moscone mayor which put the People's Temple in the public eye. I had defended the Peoples' Temple in conversations with friends just because Jones's followers had worked for Moscone. And in fact, home-grown spiritual leaders were not uncommon so Jim Jones presented no obvious warning signs.

The spiritual landscape of those heady days allowed us to imagine California as a new Buddha field, while only giving lip service to, much less serious study of the rich meditative practices that spanned more than 2,000 years. And we because, or perhaps in spite of the fact that there were so many people engaging a spiritual exploration, we had plenty of anecdotal experience to bolster our claim. 

The Hoffman Process itself has some of the hallmarks of a cult, and when I started to lead my own groups with Nancy Dannenberg, we tried to reduce the trappings psychic spirituality that Hoffman espoused, and of course to the best of our abilities to not engage in the bullying and manipulation that Hoffman favored. But any attempt to delve into a person’s family history, to unearth past events and relationships that color present day events, is not risk free. Some of the water will be muddied by transference. 

In a previous post, I wrote about my experience with one man, a young African-American activist and a follower of Jones, who did the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. 

". . . Early on, during the part of the Process called “the prosecution of Father,” the name Jim Jones kept coming up in our conversations—my client said that Jones was a remarkable psychic, a healer, a prophet, a seer. 

‘I had never heard of Jones before even though the People’s Temple was only a few blocks from where I lived in San Francisco. I just kept encouraging my client to examine any transference he might have to Jones. After a few more weeks and the “prosecution of father,” I noticed that Jones’s name was not coming up. I asked how he was feeling towards Jones. He replied that Jones was just another fraud preying on the black community. He left the Peoples’ Temple before the exodus to Guyana and escaped the horrific aftermath.”

There is value and freedom available in working through the transfences that present themselves in our everyday lives. In this case, it might have been literally life saving.

Here are the pieces that I've written about Hoffman. Although I have tried to be objective, it is impossible to take a disinterested position with regard to the Process. Hoffman sexually abused me about 6 months after I finished my first process.

 

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

#GayMeToo

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

This Victim Refuses Silence 

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.

"Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." 

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

Science vs. Spooks

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

New Age Miracle or Fraud?

June 6th, 2008

[Google analytics tells me that many people have been reading my posts and longer articles about the Hoffman Process, The Ontological Odd Couple, Science vs. Spooks, Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults as well as the very personal #GayMeToo. To make the search easier, I am going to assemble them together, here on Buddha, S.J. This piece, "New Age Miracle or Fraud," was intended as an introduction.]

In the 70’s California seemed awash in spiritual awakening. We imported Indian gurus, Tibetan tulku’s, Zen masters from Japan and Korea, plus there were a slew of home grown American hybrids, Werner Erhard’s est, Scientology, psychic readers, Seth speaks, A Course in Miracles—the list goes on. The sea changes of the 60’s had left my generation with a yearning for religious experience that the faiths of our fathers, and mothers, did not satisfy.

Now more than 30 years later, I am trying to step back and assess the current state of our spiritual life. The pews of most mainline churches are, at best, sparsely filled. Here in California only the elderly and immigrants attend with any regularity. Whatever became of the New Age born-again’s? Perhaps they just faded into the culture supplying raw spiritual perspective, devoid of religious garb.

The most interesting innovation in that awakening, to my eyes, was the proposed marriage of spiritual practice and psychological work. If the workings of the mind could be assessed and treated in a scientific way, paying attention to the spiritual dimension, then, perhaps, years of spiritual training could be compressed. However, along with this promise came the drawback of distinguishing spiritual practice from psychological work. Are they really the same reality hiding under different masks? Meditation practitioners were suddenly getting professional degrees as therapists and old line therapists began a meditation practice, but what’s what?

A quicker Path is so appealing to the American psyche—no mumbo jumbo, precise technical language, measurable results. Promises were made, you expected to create results that would appear in your life. One teacher claimed that everyone who worked with him doubled their real income. Another promised harmonious and satisfying relationships. I actually present when the president of the Hoffman Institute tried to hustle a gay man with AIDS, by promising that his fear of death would disappear after 6 days of working with him at the cost of several thousand dollars. Enlightenment, though lacking a clear definition, is certainly a column on the spreadsheet.

Any exaggerated claim to entice you to put your money down is fraud, pure and simple, and as the price goes up, the insult becomes more egregious. When I paid somewhere around $300 to hear Werner Erhard say to me after two weekends of marathon sessions, “that’s it, there’s nothing to get, get it?” I didn’t feel ripped off. I actually got it. If it had cost thousands, I might have been so resentful that I never would have been able to hear a thing.

Most of these short experiential workshops were not based on good science or professional practice, and, as a result, any scientific test for lasting effects is extremely difficult, if not impossible. What I have proposed for myself is a case study is the development and creation of the Quadrinity Process, then known as Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, created by Bob Hoffman between 1968 and 1974. Though there might be something of value in the experience created during the Process, it is so overlaid with garbage science and unsubstantiated trappings from the Spiritualist Church, that its value is at best obscured.

A quick anecdote about a scientific hoax might demonstrate part of my thesis. In 1972, when I was working with Hoffman in the first group he “took through” the 13 week Process, National Geographic published an article about the “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines called the “Tasady.” Hoffman, with the enthusiasm of a latter day Jean Jacques Rousseau, was convinced that he had found the noble savage who proved that the natural condition of humankind was uninhibited love, the free exchange of emotional feelings without blockage from parental conditioning.

In Hoffman’s defense, he was not the only person duped by this elaborate hoax created at the end of the Marcos regime. Roderic Gorney, M.D., Ph.D., writing about the Tasady in the Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis (1981), postulated “(1) that during the last ten thousand years the psychosocial identity and self-esteem of the human species have increasingly grown out of conditions of competition and low social synergy, leading to the conflict, terrorism, and war that now jeopardize us, and (2) that there is on the human agenda a current shift toward greater cooperation and high social synergy…” There is not one shred of evidence that this group was really “pre-clothing, pre-fire-making, pre-anything cave-dwelling family unchanged since prehistoric times, who had no words for War or Anger, never fought among themselves & burst into tears if you brought up the subject of death.” Their cave was only 8 miles from the nearest village, an easy trek for a steady stream of celebrities eager to connect with their pristine roots.

Bad science and the complete disrespect for professional practice went hand in hand with the naive conjecture that was the origin of the “Fischer-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.” That it was eventually rooted in techniques of psychotherapy is entirely the work of Naranjo as well as Ernie Pecci and other professionals who worked with Hoffman.

My case study traces the development and creation of the Quadrinity Process, between 1968 and 1974, when it was known as the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. I examine Hoffman’s version of his other worldly experience with Dr. Siegfried Fisher, and attempt to deconstruct the psychic therapy that Hoffman practiced in his Oakland tailor shop to sort out the borrowings from the Spiritualist Church. Then I detail Claudio Naranjo’s major contribution, adding professional psychotherapy to the mix, but I also touch on the contributions of Miriam and Julius Brandstatter, Ernie Pecci, and Ron Kayne.

I freely admit to having a horse in this race. I began a meditation practice in the early 70’s that continues to this day. I also explored every new offering that I found interesting. I began this exploration with Claudio Naranjo in 1972 and worked in his SAT group until he took a sabbatical from teaching in 1976. I also had a complicated and abusive relationship with Hoffman himself, and offered a version of the Process for almost three years in the late 70’s.

I began my paper, “The Ontological Odd Couple, the Origins of the Hoffman Process” when the current owners of the intellectual property developed by Hoffman began to rewrite their copy, recasting Hoffman and his Process, and editing out the contributions of many people who worked hard and selflessly to create an effective tool for insight and growth.