The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult

The old Tolman Hall UC Berkeley

I received an email from a Hoffman Process teacher about my last post, “Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter.” After noting that we hadn't spoken in perhaps 20 years, and acknowledging that indeed Bob Hoffman was a difficult guy and, by the way, sorry for the way he treated you, he then asked why I didn’t acknowledge that there are different people teaching the Process now? Why didn't I mention the “defense” of the parent? And why now did I write this “hit piece”?

I will answer this teacher’s questions in reverse order: why now did I write this “hit piece”? I have been writing about the Process for nearly 17 years. When the current owners of Hoffman’s “intellectual property” began to fashion a narrative about the Process that I felt conflated, confused and distorted some of the history, I meticulously researched and chronicled the early development of the Process in The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy which was published on July 31, 2004 and revised September 16, 2006. 12 other pieces followed, several critical of the Process, others talking about my experience of Hoffman and the Process, as well as my sexual abuse at the hands of Hoffman within 6 months after I finished the first 13 week Process, clearly a criminal offense. Nothing I wrote was a “hit piece.” I have been as honest and accurate as I can be about the facts and dates. I have carefully described the personal interactions as such and when I’ve stated an opinion, I’ve labeled it. If any of this does not match some other narrative, please present evidence to support the counter claim. Just labeling what I write “a hit piece” is not good enough. Ad hominem arguments are the bottom of the barrel.

Now to the “defense” of parents. I ended “The First Encounter” with a description of Hoffman’s unprofessional behavior with his students, patients--the people who signed up for the Process. I said that it was my opinion that it was borderline unethical and abusive. Hoffman claimed that he was “breaking down to build up.” I say he was acting out as a bully for whatever reason his own psychosis demanded, and it went unchallenged. I know I didn’t call him out and over 25 years I didn’t hear anyone really confront him despite an enormous amount of complaining behind his back. If you contradicted Hoffman, you would be considered unsuitable as a teacher or Process owner and that would cost you a career and money. I know several people who did try to confront him and were fired. He was a dictator who was also very interested in money. I stand by my assessment.

Our SAT group was the first and only Process that Hoffman did under the auspices of Claudio Naranjo, and, as I will show, it was incomplete. A lot has been said and written about Claudio’s assistance, most of that cast as approbation plus stamping it with the seal of legitimate psychotherapeutic practice. I cannot deny that Claudio did remain one of Hoffman’s supporters, and that he continued to see Hoffman as a kind of shamanistic healer through Hoffman’s death. I helped take care of Hoffman at the end of his life and remember Claudio’s visits well, but I want to review and question other claims.

I went back to what Claudio had written about the Hoffman Quadrinity Process in “The End of Patriarchy” to review his actual comments. I was an actor and participant in this history so it heightened my interest though it also colored it. Claudio describes his position as that of an ambassador between the intuitive world that gave birth to the Fisher-Hoffman Process and the world of scientific psychology, a role akin to that of John the Baptist. Leaving aside the preposterous messianic claims, he goes on to describe his involvement in the formation of Hoffman’s group process: “Reza Leah Landman led a group of about fifty people (with Bob present as silent witness) using the format of written guidelines. (I produced these guidelines at a time of rare inspiration, and when I visited Bob shortly afterwards, he interestingly commented, quite spontaneously, that Dr. Fischer had been with me.)”

This description is simply not accurate. I was in that group. Claudio was never present (perhaps briefly at the first session to introduce Hoffman. I can’t be certain, but he was definitely never present at any of the other sessions that followed). Bob Hoffman was not in any sense a silent witness. I have described the attitude of Hoffman in the group--after a few minutes of Reza Leah’s low key instructions, she invited Bob to take the floor and he did. I will also add that I am certain he hated the group process whether or not he told Claudio that Fisher had inspired the written guidelines. The pace was far too slow, and he had no patience for interpersonal work. The evidence I offer that it displeased Hoffman is that he ended the experiment before it was finished. After about three weeks into the prosecution of Mother, he announced that he and Claudio had agreed to end their work together, and that he would “take us through the defense of Mother” which would be an “OK” place to stop.

That occurred just after Thanksgiving. He also announced that he would be leading his own 13 week process beginning at the end of January in Tolman Hall, the facility of the UC Berkeley Psychology Department. He came up to me privately and suggested that I strongly consider taking part in that process. I remember our brief conversation very well. In my later therapy I recognized that this was the beginning of his predatory grooming.

The part he did feel had been “inspired” by Fisher was the physical, emotional, verbal, and I would add, necessarily violent expression of anger. It opened the possibility of a deep emotional catharsis after which the artificial process of understanding and forgiveness would foster a deep understanding that “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” If our pain had been as great as we’d experienced in the Prosecution of Mother, her own pain had to be equally deep and debilitating.

The Defense Process entails envisioning your mother as a pre-adolescent child, telling her story. It is conducted in your sanctuary with your spirit guide as the interlocutor. Hoffman called these imagined scenarios “mind trips” and insisted that they were the channel for real information. You are instructed to ask questions about the origins of the Negative love traits and admonitions that you unwittingly inherited, one by one, leaving no stone unturned.

Of course in the real world, this is all “Best Guess,” or assumption, or hearsay, or fantasy or hallucination. If I were to be generous, it might be a “good enough” narrative to allow you to see that your parents suffered the same kind of programming that they passed on. The origins of the exercise were the psychic readings in the tailor shop on 15th street when Hoffman looked into your past and saw the incidents that excused your parents.

But I do not choose to be so generous. In my own case the narrative I created was so far fetched that it destroyed relationships with both my parents. I was actually led to believe that somehow I could get the root of my struggles with them. After I completed the Process, and the quirky working out of the loving divorce that Hoffman promised, I had so alienated my parents that they cut me off for nearly 20 years.

Of course this is not good psychological practice. That's a fact. It’s seeing a witch doctor. That's an opinion.

Claudio faults psychoanalyst Mauricio Knoble who observed in connection with No One is to Blame, “The traditional historical background was missing, as well as the scientific background, the theoretical foundation, the experimental data, the statistical validation, and the bibliography.” It’s a fair question to ask what he replaces it with. Claudio says [I] “hope that I may show that, while the ‘traditional historical background’ has not been known to Hoffman, his work is most congruent with it, as well as with the background of current psychological discourse.” My experience points to a less optimistic view of Hoffman’s methodology, one that skirts the necessary professionalism of psychological work.

The request that I take into consideration that a new cohort of Process teachers followed Hoffman and did not share his unorthodox, borderline practices leads into more New Age mire. The majority were people who came from the same mix who took the Process, members of the SAT groups, refugees from est and the work of Werner Erhard, sannyasins who had followed Osho in Antelope and Pune, and a few licensed mental health professionals. I will have more to say about this phenomena after I describe my experience of the first 13 week Process in Tolman Hall and the story of Hoffman’s stalking and abusing me, which by the way was a criminal action.

Here is a link to the description of "Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process. Hoffman the sexual predator grooms me."

Here is another link to my other writing about the Process.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021

Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter

I was an idiot, slow to learn. I was duped, seduced by the promise of an easy path. I also know that countless other people have jumped at what appeared to be the safety of a lifeboat when they were floundering and in pain. And if they’d managed to save a few bucks, there are always charlatans with a life jacket for sale.

Rocky times are a normal place to begin a spiritual journey, and a good place to begin to write about that search. It is not easy to look back and feel no regret when I realize that I let a pearl slip through my fingers. At 77 I no longer have the prospect of a long leisurely life, no time to indulge in speculation or convoluted arguments. In Zen retreats they beat a big drum at the end of the day, and caution us to be alert and not let the moment slip away in delusion. I know how little time there is to waste.

It was not entirely my bad luck that I met Bob Hoffman. What was seriously damaging is that I didn’t realize that I’d fallen hook line and sinker, and did not take steps to repair the damage caused by my own unresolved transference. Hoffman was a criminal. Period. He sexually abused me less than half a year after I completed the first group Psychic Therapy. He told me it was love. Sexual predators lie.

Something totally unexpected and liberating happened to me during those first few months in Berkeley, working with Claudio Naranjo, and his expertise with Fritz-Perls’ Gestalt therapy. I didn’t fully grasp the experience, and I tried to hold onto the power of that gift. The context of Claudio’s working with Bob Hoffman to create a group process set the stage for my transference.

When nearly 50 years later I began to recognize the truth about my relationship with Hoffman, something equally liberating took place.

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense?

I used to think that you could separate the person who originates an exploration or course of therapy from the technique itself, something like the paradox of a wounded healer. But that's far too mysterious. Transference is a very real and sufficient answer.

The current proponents of the Hoffman Process cast Hoffman as a kindly grandfatherly “intuitive” to market their Process, a kind of Jewish Cosmo Topper or a psychological Colonel Sanders. When I stopped laughing at that ridiculous folly and recognized my own story, I began to experience some relief.

Hoffman was a crafty fraud. Is it possible to watch a Woody Allen movie with a clear eye after the revelation of substantial accusations of sexual relationships with very young girls? It’s certainly difficult. I asked myself why I cannot put Hoffman's abuse in the past and even honor the work that has been beneficial to many people. That answer is simple. Because it would be a lie.

In 1973 I was a 28 year old highly educated and bright Jesuit who’d completed almost 8 years of rigorous religious training on top of an Ivy league education. I had invested a lot in getting to that point in my life, both in terms of building a tough defense system as well as constructing what I thought was a pretty well reasoned personal sense of my world and purpose. But I was also miserably unhappy, and desperately looking for a way out.

I wrote about the early days of the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy in The Ontological Odd Couple. I tried to be objective and state facts: the actual words spoken in a particular time, to a specific group of individuals, with a defined purpose; to identify as clearly and honestly as possible the real people, actual living humans, who were involved, with their own prejudices, training, and background. Specific circumstances help us set aside personal reactions that prejudice our interpretation, but also help someone else who might be trying to sort through their own experience.

That’s the high road, clear-headed and noble. Everyone has their say. It lends authority and even a hint of blessing to the enterprise. Plus in matters of the soul and the inner workings of the psyche, it’s better to err on the side of righteousness rather than condemnation.

But my early attempt to write about the origins of the Process was just window dressing, softening the blow. It was as bad as I'm going to describe or probably worse. What I had to ask myself is why I was such an idiot, or to soften the harshness of that question, I’ll pose it in a different way: why do intelligent people believe nonsense?

Meeting Hoffman for the first time

About 8:30 on a cold Tuesday night in the early fall of 1973, I sat on the floor of a ramshackle old fraternity house near the UC Berkeley campus. Rosalyn Schaffer, acting as Claudio Naranjo’s representative, introduced Hoffman as a person who had a unique insight into our parental conditioning. Claudio had 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.

To this day I remember most of the details of the bizarre introduction clearly. He wore an expensive sport coat and garish tie while we were mostly in jeans and tee shirts. He appeared extremely uncomfortable standing behind Rosalyn, but when he began to speak, his voice was angry; his presentation was gruff and aggressive. It was obvious that he was not educated in any psychological discipline, but he dominated the room, alternately talking then yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon.

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 as an uneducated tailor from Oakland told the 20-25 eager, inquisitive, mostly young 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 perverse relationships with our parents who didn’t know the first thing about love.

The definition of Negative Love was “It is illogical logic, nonsensical sense, and insane sanity, yet masochistically true or we wouldn’t behave in such a fashion.” 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. If we thought he was dressed in bad taste, we were mired in self-hatred. I thought he was overdressed for the Trifecta so my transference had already begun.

There was zero invitation to observe our reactions. Hoffman's teaching method was to set himself up for the transference for all the negative emotions we’d inherited from our parents, and were the main reason that we were miserable. No one knew anything—nobody except him. He had received a saving, other-worldly message, in a revelatory middle-of-the-night visitation when Dr. Siegfried Fisher, who had recently died, appeared and cured Hoffman of negative love, then enlisted Hoffman’s help to allow him to “move on” by teaching us how to love ourselves and get a loving divorce from mom and dad.

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

When my guide appeared to be my great aunt Mary, my grandfather’s younger sister, the first female graduate of Harvard College, and an extraordinary woman, he dismissed the authenticity of my vision because in my "mind-trip" she wore her signature tailored navy blue suit. Any real spirit guide had to be dressed in white, like Fisher in his Langley Porter uniform although the truth about Aunt Mary was more real than Hoffman’s story about Dr. Fisher. Colors and white light played an outsized role in the otherworld.

Once we were “psychically open”—and vulnerable—Hoffman asked us to imagine that we held a lovely tasty fruit, an orange I think, 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 he told us that of course there was no succulent fruit in our hands, that we’d created the whole thing in our minds, but didn’t it feel real? He asserted categorically that our emotions were just like this, both negative or positive, simply the projection of our mind that dictated the way we behaved, acted, felt and most importantly, how we learned to love.

As the evening session was drawing to a close, 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 of a negative trait, and 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 all the negative characteristics of our mother, and bring it to the next session.

He ended the evening with a smile on his face, very pleased with himself. We'd also been hypnotized. I just had a spirit visitation along with a ouija board session served up in a few long hours. Yes, it was really that bad.

Hoffman’s Primitive Understanding of Psychology

The Prosecution of Mother and the creation of the “Bitch Session."

As the weeks progressed our course of Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy got worse. We launched into what Hoffman called “The Prosecution of Mother.” I calculate that the exercise lasted at least five weeks.

The differences between Claudio and Hoffman were also becoming apparent, and the strain between the men started to show. Claudio was interested in exploring some of the possibilities of professional therapy and applying it to the Process. Bob was not interested in this endeavor at all. Claudio was interested in using the techniques of Perls to explore our anger, but Hoffman was only interested in its emotional expression. In Hoffman’s individual work, lists of negative traits and admonitions were the key to the Prosecution of Mother. There didn’t seem to be any real logic or purpose or order in the lists or making the lists. It was just anything that we found unsetting, or anything he saw that he judged to be negative. The one criteria for the lists was length. A short list was proof of denial.

If Hoffman’s psychic understanding of our emotional life was primitive, his behavior in the group setting was also becoming problematic. He claimed he had to break us down so that we could build ourselves up, but he was just giving himself blanket permission to be a confrontational bully, at times verging on the psychotic. List of Mother’s Negative Traits and emotional autobiography in hand, playing the tough-love, or alternatively the bad cop role, 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, 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.

Because Hoffman’s behaviors went unchallenged and were tolerated, they became his go-to teaching technique throughout his career. It was 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 even see that we were just negative children. His job was to point out all the ways we acted out of negative love and that our resistance and denial were so strong it required a very strong hand. He used the “iron fist covered in the velvet glove of love.” And he let us know in no uncertain terms his job was thankless with very little reward. (My Lord, he reflected almost mirror sentiments as my Mother). Most independent observers would see these behaviors as pointing to some very deep level of psychosis.

Not only was his practice outrageous, his arrogance in the face of sound psychotherapy was astounding. There was no understanding of basic genetic ordering and impulses, no grasp of a complex set of emotional responses conditioned over time. There was only the economy of “buying love.” Every human action was only a calculated transaction to obtain the genuine affection, love and acceptance that you craved from infancy but were denied. That was it. He’d point to any behavior he thought was negative, self-defeating, counterproductive and echo in a whiny voice, “See mommy, now will you love me?”

It was long before the wounded child syndrome hit therapeutic TV, but Hoffman’s concept wasn’t even that sophisticated. He envisioned a pristine emotional harmony that had somehow been usurped by the vagaries of our parental conditioning perpetuated through generations. Hoffman repeated over and over, “everyone is guilty and no one to blame.” We were just the sum of 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.

A quick anecdote about a scientific hoax demonstrates part of my thesis that Hoffman’s psychology was pure quackery. In 1972, National Geographic published an article about the “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines called the “Tasaday.” Hoffman, with the enthusiasm of a latter day Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was convinced that he had found the noble savage, and demonstrated the truth of Negative Love, that humankind’s natural state was the free exchange of emotional feelings without the blockage of parental conditioning.

There was, however, not one shred of evidence that this group was “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.” It was an elaborate hoax created at the end of the Marcos regime. 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, and a quick trip home for tele-melodramas after a hard day’s work sitting around naked and speaking gibberish.

Of course the supporters of the Process will point out that Hoffman was not alone in falling for Marco’s wild fabrication. But I think it is extremely revealing of his naive psychological understanding, falling for the myth of a primitive people with no word for war, as if all psychological exploration of anger was misplaced.

Hoffman painted all negative behaviors passed from parent to child with this crude, broad brush. Sloganeering is a blunt instrument for self-analysis or understanding. In his crude psychological model, Negative Love refers to what might be understood as intergenerational guilt, and Hoffman grabbed anything to support his simple thesis: Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China to lay the groundwork for the Nixon visit and beginning of the end of détente was running all over the world to get approval from his father he’d never had in real life, but that something good might come from it. The absurdity of this reductionist analysis points to the messianic overlay of Hoffman’s thinking: if the world just got some understanding of negative love, if it were taught in the schools, if there were departments of psychology in major universities devoted to its study. . . .

The trauma passed from parent to child involves a complex psychological mechanism; it’s a psychological disorder, and there are several recommended therapies for treatment. But for Hoffman, treatable psychological disorders, stage fright or anorexia, for example, were lumped together with severe depression, and the solution is always the same: after experientially touching the repressed anger through a bitch session, or “bashing” as the PR professionals now call it, the client traces the origins of the negative influence back to his or her parental figures. Then some staged catharsis facilitates an emotional release.

I stayed and did the work. I had nowhere else to go, but I also trusted Claudio Naranjo. He had vouched for Hoffman, and urged him to develop a group process. Naranjo, as well as Dr. Ernie Pecci and other psychologists tried to tie whatever value they saw in Hoffman’s Process to the professional practice of psychotherapy. The basic structure of the analysis might have been original to Hoffman, but I am skeptical—he wasn’t that bright. Everything else was an adjustment by professional psychotherapists.

Claudio may have tried to justify and rationalize the framework of Hoffman's psychological insight, but I don’t think it was a very serious attempt. What was more serious was Claudio’s attempt to use the professional tools he’d learned, especially from Fritz Perls, to allow us to explore our anger towards our parents. We worked through the “Prosecution of Mother” which for Hoffman was just the lists of negative traits, silent and overt admonitions, writing an emotional autobiography and finally writing an angry letter.

A Huge Personal Breakthrough

Claudio said that even just a second of authentic experience would change our world. Under his direction, we worked several times a week in small groups of three people, and through role play, questioning and feedback, tried to understand in the most complete way possible the level and depth of adopting our parent’s negative attitudes and behaviors.

It took weeks for me to allow myself to express my own anger, but when I finally did touch the depth of my rage at my mother, it completely altered the course of my life. With the group members observing the person on the “hot seat” and providing feedback, we were instructed to touch the core of any latent anger we harbored towards our mothers.

So I was in the hot seat, and I tried to express my anger. No one in the group believed me. So I tried again. Again just surface complaints about a trivial matter. But then something inside me opened. I could use the word snapped. And my anguish and anger exploded. The pitch of my voice broke a glass that was sitting beside Sundari, a cherished friend in my support cohort.

This experience was for me one of the major breakthroughs of my entire adult life. It was as if a huge veil had been lifted, and 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 defense began to look like a sham, and 10 years of rigorous disciplined religious life began to crumble. I recognized a range of feelings that I’d struggled to avoid all my life, that I’d actually constructed my life to avoid feeling. And in that moment I became solidly engaged in the exploration to achieve some degree of resolution and freedom. It would be a very difficult, long process.

What is important for me to note here is that the breakthrough happened under Claudio’s guidance, carefully using the technique he’s 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, and 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 who was also a sexual predator.

The “Bitch Session” was born

This is the actual story of how “bitch session” replaced the “anger letter” in Naranjo's SAT group. In the Hoffman Process it is an experiential expression of anger, directed at a parent, using explicit language, physical motion, beating pillows, and screaming. The invention of the “bitch session” was important because it was Hoffman's first experience of a person experiencing the level of emotional release that he had been unable to achieve with his “anger letter.” It also pointed to a rapid way to induce the level of feeling and emotion that is the hallmark of the current version of the Process.

When Hoffman used the Bitch Session in his 13 week Process, he stripped out the subtlety of Gestalt Therapy which he considered useless and didn't understand it anyway. All that remained were the Wiffle bats, pillows and fellow participants to egg you on. This also set the stage for the inevitable heart attacks and psychological breaks that became part of the cost of doing Process business.

But this also marked the end of Naranjo’s and Hoffman's collaboration. Hoffman announced that the “Defense of Mother” would be an “OK” place to finish, and that he would begin his own Process starting in January in Tolman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. I will take up the description of Hoffman’s first group in another post.

Hoffman came up to me privately and strongly suggested that I join his Tolman Hall Process. Looking back it was the beginning of his predatory sexual grooming. He was a very sick man.

If you want to read the sequel to this post, click on "Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process."



Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021

Sex in the bushes: the real story

In the wall-to-wall news coverage of despicable, unbelievable denials of sexual misconduct by people in high places—today Matt Gaetz, yesterday Donald Trump—I began to wonder about the prevalence of explicit sex innuendo, the circumlocution, the double talk and outright lying about sex that we’re expected to countenance. People say that the times have changed, that we can be more open about our sex lives now in a way that we couldn’t be even a few decades ago—that this openness causes the problems as well as giving us a degree of freedom that our parents didn’t have. The real problem, however, has always been the lies about sex.

Yesterday I had the honor of hosting the distinguished Tibetan Rinpoche, Khyongla Rato, along with Nicky Vreeland Rinpoche and his attendant Lama Norbu for a small lunch in my McLeod Ganj flat. My friend Alex asked if I was going to leave up some of my own art, visual puns, combining Greek pottery figures with French primitive art from the late 19th century. It’s not erotic art, so there was no question of offending a celibate monastic.

the non-offending art

On the other hand for anyone with even the slightest understanding of same sex realtionships, it would tip them off that I am gay. Of course they stayed up. I do not hide who I am, and certainly feel no need to be duplicitous, even when dealing with high lamas. I know I can trust them to accept me as I am. I am not going to complicate the relationship by lying or pretending.

For too long, actually, pretending has been at the root of the lying and duplicity that never seems to let up in the tabloid news. I've written about my relationship with Bob Hoffman, and my coming out in #GayMeToo. There was sexual abuse as well as bullying and coercion. But there was also lying and pretense. Hoffman argued that he couldn’t be honest and open about his sexuality because of the negative repercussions on his “important work.”

But the reality was that Hoffman couldn’t be honest with himself. And he tried to force me into that endless denial by accepting his self-justification. And for a while I did, but thankfully his pretense was so shoddy and full of holes that eventually I got fed up.

After Hoffman took 50 or so people through his Process of Psychic Therapy in UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, and turned the Process over to Dr. Ernie Pecci, he retired to Puerto Villarta in Mexico, and as I later learned to also deal with his first bout of cancer. At the time he was in a relationship with a man named Harold whom I met on several occasions. Hoffman eventually returned. I can’t remember if it was just to check in or if it was when he decided to curtail Pecci’s psycho-spiritual version of the Process, but I do remember that he and Harold were no longer a couple. I asked him what had happened. Well, he said, he’d discovered that Harold was being unfaithful. Oh really? Here’s the Poor Bob story.

The path into the bushes in Aquatic Park





It seems one day Hoffman needed to get out for some fresh air. He was in a back-to-nature kind of mood. He just happened to drive down to Aquatic Park in Berkeley, a notorious gay cruising place for furtive sex. He wanted me to understand that his excursion was of course entirely non-sexual, just to enjoy the scenery, but, while leisurely strolling along the lagoon looking for blue heron, who should he discover lurking, having sex in the bushes? Harold! Hoffman could now be the offended partner. They had it out, and Harold, in the face of Hoffman’s "righteous indignation," rushed back home to Piedmont and packed his bags. I was expected to believe this story. Of course I didn’t, but neither did I confront Hoffman and challenge him. I couldn’t. Still in transference, I had to allow him the saving grace of pretending to be a virtuous man instead of dealing honestly with his promiscuity and anonymous sex adventures.

Lies build on lies. Justifications pile up sky high. At some point there’s no escape. I didn't take down my innocent humorous washroom art to sanitize my life for the Rinpoche. I learned the hard way: if I lied, there would be no end, or as the Zen saying goes, it’s turtles all the way down.

Here is a link to the page with other writing about Hoffman.

© Kenneth Ireland, 2021

The Road to Rohatsu

Ryutan’s Candle and Kenosha

Mumonkan Case 28

The original Chinese Goang

Longtan Chongxin (Dragon-Lake): Because Deshan Xuanjian asked more and more and night arrived, Tan said, "The night is deep. Sir, why don’t you go to lie down?"

Shan thereupon gathered his precious baggage, hoisted the [door] blind, and then exited. He saw the outside was pitch dark, withdrew, turned around, and said, "Outside is pitch dark."

Tan then lit a paper measuring-candle and gave it to him.

Shan intended to accept it, but Tan then blew it out.

I was driving from Santa Fe to Crestone with Baker Roshi for my first Rohatsu sesshin. It was going to be just Baker and me for the four hour drive. I was assigned a lot of packing tasks; his instructions were very exacting. I remember quite clearly that I had to fit the large densho bell into the trunk of the car. There were other bells and zendo items that were needed to keep the schedule and turn the Wheel of the Dharma. 

It was probably between 4 and 5, and already getting dark when we drove out Cerro Gordo Road. We were due by 9 to formally open the sesshin; I thought that we might have been late, but Baker Roshi knew the route very well and had the trip planned to the second. I’d heard about his legendary fast driving, but felt reasonably comfortable.

We talked about Phil Whalen, Issan, the Hospice, and food. Then the conversation turned to losing normal mental ability, Alzheimers, and AIDS dementia. I was somewhat concerned about Issan’s losing his faculties during the last phase of his disease, and asked about the effect of meditation and the blurring of our normal sense of time. I spoke of one guy in the Hospice who couldn’t even remember the past of 5 minutes ago and was completely unable to foresee any future. Given that he was a dying man, it actually seemed to be a blessing.

Baker told me that I probably shouldn’t worry too much. He mentioned something one of his old friends in Japan, Nanao Sakaki, the godfather of Japanese hippies, said when his memory was fading after he crossed 80 years, “I can’t remember what I didn’t need to know anyway.” 

I asked David Chadwick if he remembered if he had any more details about Nanao's condition. David pointed me to a conversation he had with Nanao before he died. David talked about a mutual friend who had colon cancer. Nanao seemed to follow the conversation but asked the same question several times, “What did he have?” "Shiri," David repeated, patting his butt, but said that he’d already answered the question.

Nanao wasn't fazed. "Kenbosho," he said. "I have kenbosho." David asked if that meant senility or Alzheimer's. Nanao wasn't exactly sure. But he was quite cheerful about it.

"Ah, kenbosho is very good," he said. "No need to remember anything anyway. My mind is becoming more empty and free every day! This is a very good thing. I like kenbosho very much."

After crossing Four Corners, the last 40 miles north up Highway 17 from Amoroso to Crestone, the road becomes totally flat, level and straight for as far as my eye could take it to the edge of the car’s headlights. The night was very dark, no light for miles; the sky seemed to be painted a deep penetrating purple that went all the way to the moon, but I didn’t really notice. I thought that we must have been late, and Baker Roshi might have been driving even faster, but it also might have just been my fear. I think we were riding in a BMW, but it might have been a Mercedes. I am not interested in cars; however Roshi's love of fast cars is legendary and actually got him into some trouble. He turned the conversation towards how German engineers make sure that the mechanics of the automobile are tip top because driving on the autobahn was very fast and Germans demanded strict safety protocols and no speed limits. He joked, they at least needed the assurance of safety even if a ruse.

Suddenly the Roshi turned off the car’s headlights. It took a few seconds before my eyes adjusted. I was afraid. We were bolting up the highway at what seemed to be breakneck speed. After a few seconds, perhaps a minute, but certainly far too long in my judgment, Richard turned on the headlights again, and said with a little chuckle that we were lucky that no other driver had decided to turn out the headlights on their car to experience the beauty and depth of the dark night.  

I gradually regained my composure, but my perception of the night had changed. It opened up and I was so aware of the beauty of the night above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I was just part of a vast universe, beyond any explanation. 

The Diamond Sutra says, “If there is even a bit of difference, it is the distance between heaven and earth.” If Deshan (Tokusan) had been a better student, and actually understood before he went all out with his over the top melodramatic burning of the scripture, he would have saved generations of Zen students a lot of pain. But perhaps he thought that Longtan (Ryûtan) was equally dense, and the enthusiasm of a teaching moment simply overwhelmed him. It was I who needed to shed my unsentimental Jesuit training in order to catch the beauty of fire.

Within 25 minutes, we arrived on time to a waiting hall of people all sitting in good posture. I found my seat. The days rolled on; the sun came up; the stars appeared again. I heard the Temple bell ring, and I woke up.

I returned to Santa Fe with some other friends, and quickly fell into a round of gatherings and holiday parties. I called Southwest Airlines and postponed my departure several times. I was having fun. 

Then just after dinner at Robert Winson’s house, someone handed me the phone. It was Issan. He’d tracked me down. He asked how I was doing, and how my sesshin had been. I told him that I thought Sante Fe was beautiful and just amazing with all the luminaria and snow.

“Oh yes,” he said; I remember his words exactly, “all those cute little mud houses. You know that the effect of sesshin can be like a drug trip, and it’s wonderful, but we need you here. Why don’t you come home?”

I called the airport and booked the next flight to San Francisco. It was time to return to my immediate experience of day-to-day life at Maitri Hospice where the moment of living life was always in the shadow of knowing that it will end sooner than we might have dreamed..

  

Daido Loori’s verse:

Within darkness there is light;

within light there is darkness.

If you really see it,

you will go blind.

Tarrant Roshi concurs.