New Age Blues

New Age Blues On The Politics Of Consciousness

Author: Michael Rossman Publisher: Dutton Paperback Date: 1979 ISBN: 0-52547-532-X

Table of Contents Preface....................................................................................................................1 I. Portents...............................................................................................................5 The Only Thing Missing Was Sufis ..............................................................................5 A Brief Report from the Field .....................................................................................6 A Breath Before a Plunge ..........................................................................................8 II. Notes on the Public Carnival ............................................................................11 "Show Us Your Lotus Ass, Rennie!" .......................................................................... 11 The I-Scream Man Cometh ..................................................................................... 17 Ram Dass, Kali Yuga .............................................................................................. 20 But How We Talk Now Together!.............................................................................. 25 A Father for Our Time............................................................................................. 29 The Pedagogy of the Guru....................................................................................... 34 III. Courting the Strange ......................................................................................39 Looking Back at the FSM......................................................................................... 39 Poetry, Psychic Power, and Revolution...................................................................... 42 Staring Over Uri's Shoulder ..................................................................................... 44 Molly's Epiphany .................................................................................................... 51 Notes on the Tao of the Body Politic ......................................................................... 58 IV. A Phenomenon of the Seventies ......................................................................73 V. On Some Matters of Concern in Psychic Research ...........................................106 Epilogue ..............................................................................................................107

Preface One day when I was thirty I met my guru, by the side of a road in the California mountains. He was an old quack doctor, a natureopath; I had passed his faded road sign for years on the way up to the ranch where I went to recover from the crazy strain of a political life in Berkeley during the 1960s. Now it was 1971. Ever since the Kent State murders I'd been reading obituaries for the Movement, and the market for used 1960s radicals had already bottomed out. Our commune had fizzled, our work collective had exploded, only my marriage was intact, and I didn't know what to do next with myself or my life. I was searching for a sign as I knocked timidly at his door on the way back from a hike.

I was almost too late. He lay dying on a brass bed in a gloomy room, he could hardly see or hear me. As his granddaughter flirted with me, his daughter shouted at him, trying to explain what this dusty, hairy young man wanted. Whatever I said hardly made sense even to me. Finally she gave up. "He wants to learn from you!" she yelled. His huge hands floated up like phosphorescent fish in the room's dark water, played with strange life around my ears as I leaned over the crumbling rock of his body to catch his words. "Rub … your … feet … " he croaked, and fell silent, his hands collapsing. The women hustled me out. By the time I came again, he was dead. I went home and rubbed my feet, like Aladdin with his lamp, expecting nothing. A genie came forth, who opened for me the secret doors of mystery and power. I rubbed my feet some more, I rubbed my head. A second genie came forth, to my mind greater than the first, swelling quickly from a vapor to a smoke cloud to a turbulent thunder-storm. He asked not my wishes but straightway leaped upon me, locking me in mortal struggle. Ever since I have grappled with him, and the issue is still in doubt. Nor is he my private dream and nightmare only. He is loose in the world, we have all conspired to set him free and must answer to his demands. The first genie is the genie of psychic power. He represents the spirit of the awakened body and its energies, of the psyche and its powers, of transcendent experience—of all the mysterious potentials of human consciousness. Many people have been trying recently, in crowds and alone, to summon him to do their bidding, to help win them their selves, their freedom, or the world. Some call the collective result the "growth" movement, the "human potential" movement, a spiritual renaissance, a massive mutation of human consciousness, the New Age. Others call it a disaster, a blind and self-indulgent retreat from the agonies of the spirit and a society in crisis, a prelude to fascism and worse. Myself, I have no simple name for this complex motion of our lives, nor any simple judgment upon it. I am of two minds and more about it, and explore some of their tensions and contradictions in the essays which follow, inspired by my encounter with the second genie. He is the genie of consequence, who follows always the genie of power. To me he appears as a storm of questions about choice and responsibility and freedom, about human values and human meaning itself. The questions' variety is endless and their detail is essential; but broadly phrased, they ask:

How do we use our power to control and change our consciousness; what instructs us, what do we learn? What are the consequences, for the deep reaches of the self and the complex tissues of the social body, of doing what we're doing the way we're doing it? What choices are we making about the people we are becoming and the society we create together, about the human culture and meaning we extend; and what values can guide us in making them? To whom or what can we be responsible, and how?

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Such questions moved me, early in the 1970s, to begin to write about the politics of consciousness, or rather of those modes of "consciousness expansion" which came increasingly to mark the character of the decade. The questions were not new to me. I had struggled with them first as a political activist, an organizer in the New Left. As my concern for what we learn deepened to focus on how we learn I became an educator, working and writing in the late-1960s higher-education reform movement, and since then more generally. The questions and my politics came with me; I engaged them on the ground of learning itself, perhaps deepening them there. In turn both they and the educational perspectives I gathered came to inform my subsequent engagement with the spirit of wonder and power that woke within me as I rubbed my feet. This brief résumé may account for the particular motives, ideas, and feelings which dominate the following essays—if not for their enthusiasms of metaphor, which lead me to present myself as a middle-aged child of the New Left singing the New Age blues.

Despite its subtitle, this book is modest in ambition and narrow in scope. It raises more questions than it begins to try to answer. Though its stance is personal, it deals, on the whole, very little with my own experience; though its spirit is pedagogic and political, it barely mentions the possibility of a synthesis and praxis transcending the onedimensionality of what it criticizes. In form it is largely an historical commentary, a running report and reflection on the social theater of a decade somewhat crazier, and more depressed, than the 1960s had been.

Indeed, the 1970s have been a schizophrenic decade, or rather a schizmogenic one. The intense questioning and disruption of social reality, and the wave of experiments in reconstituting its processes and institutions that marked the 1960s, had prepared and in fair degree demanded a complementary mass questioning and re-exploration of private being and consciousness—for when the fabric of society is torn and reconfigured, so is that of the self, the two being so nearly one. Yet as this "private consciousness" movement spread and deepened in society, the many-branched social and political movement so intimate to its genesis went into eclipse in the public mind. Or rather, it was forced there by a combination of failures (some its own, some from its outright repression, most from the natural difficulties of the changes sought) and deceits—the key one being perhaps the quick change of media mythology following Kent State, announcing the death of the Movement. Few even of the Movement's own people were able to deny this, since it was not an organization with membership cards and most people depended on media to help them believe it existed in the first place. And surely the new decade's mood was different. As crises continued to multiply and the domestic consensus continued to dissolve, reaction and retrenchment seemed to rule the day. Yet within this appearance, however it could be measured—by the numbers, ages and kinds of people involved; by the places and ways in which they worked for change; by the persistence, realism and slow sophistication of their efforts—more people were engaged in serious work to realize the themes of freedom, democracy, and justice that gave the Movement its character than ever the 1960s had known (though their mutual isolation and the memory of the media-magnified hordes of yore left them, too, confused about the sum and meaning of their efforts).

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Meanwhile the personal-growth-and-consciousness movement developed largely in isolation from this continuing social movement and its influences—but not in isolation from the reaction to these. Indeed, the consciousness movement seemed to evolve more in response to the conclusion that the social movement had failed, and to the social forces inclining it to failure, than in response to the more progressive forces and potentials at hand. The idea that each movement might evolve to deepen and complete itself through the other received scant attention, and few people found ways to pursue it actively (other than in nearisolation). Nor did a shared language form in which it was even possible to speak of this integral potential. Instead, as the 1970s wore on, the ideas, languages, practices, and meanings of these two broad movements continued to diverge, more to contradict than to complement each other; and many people, if still a distinct minority in each movement, were agonized by the contradiction.

Thus the context; thus my divided seat in the social theater, with a foot in each box, as I review below some performances mounted on an extreme stage of this decade's play, which show—as extreme cases so often do—some things quite clearly about the general case, the spirit of the time (and its observer), and show others not at all. I wish this were only an historical review, but it is not. The issues discussed here are all more pertinent as the decade closes than they were when it opened—not least because the growth/human potential/New Age movement continues to develop and seems likely, with its ideas and forces, to become a major influence in our politics, from personal to national, during the 1980s. In this light this book is a reflection on certain themes now entering further play. It begins with some brief previews (Portents) of the decade's acts and of my axe to grind. In Notes on the Public Carnival, six shorter essays discuss public performances by gurus of one sort and another, marvel at the way we recreate authoritarian processes and forms in our experiences of deep change, and imagine that we have alternatives to this. Courting the Strange explores these themes further, its first two essays extending them more explicitly to social events and theater, the last three reviewing some individual ways of dealing with issues raised earlier. Of these the last is my own, and at best a preliminary report of a few tentative steps toward integrating the "contradictory" poles of personal and social change.

The last two essays stand by themselves. "A Phenomenon of the Seventies" studies the one enterprise of the many in the consciousness-development industry that seemed and still seems to many, as to me, to embody the authoritarian contradiction most fully and most mystifyingly, and to suggest the potential for its further development in society. As for "On Some Matters of Concern in Psychic Research," which takes up the last third of this book, it is necessarily more narrow and formal than the other essays, and no longer than seemed necessary to take an uncharted area seriously and be taken seriously in turn. In fair part it concerns the military development of "psychic" technologies of warfare and control, as this is now proceeding in the Soviet Union and the United States. This matter is of the moment as well as of sharp concern; yet, as this goes to press, to my knowledge there is available to the public not even so sketchy a survey of the situation as is attempted here. Though my ultimate interests are synthetic, this book is still largely concerned with critique. Even so, its essays barely begin to explore the social mind, the social teachings and textures and implications, of the human potential/New Age movement as it is now developing. Beyond this exploration lies the question it prepares. How can we bring together the practices of personal and social change, the divided realms of public/private, spiritual/political, and all the rest, into some integral understanding and practice of selfdetermination, as singular and collective within the person as in society? An essay meant originally for this book, to explore this question further, may yet become a book in itself.

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In my last book I was proud to claim that the thought I recorded about education and its reform were in fair part the product of many minds and people at work with me on the same front of change. I wish I could say the same here. More than it usually is, writing these essays has been lonely—for this decade has left me, like many others, more alone than I would like to be to shape my understandings from its conflicting evidences. I do know that the issues which concern me concern many others, and I am often reminded of their appreciation for almost any effort to discuss them. Yet on the whole, despite the media attention these issues began to receive in the late 1970s, I heard remarkably little serious discussion of them (considering how deeply they affect people) either in public or among my friends. It was not that we were all so unwilling, perhaps—although the contradictions were as difficult to face squarely outside the consciousness movement as within it—as that we were unable. Something had made it hard for us even to begin to express articulately our discomforts and forebodings, let alone to speak of dangerous and promising potentials in the same breath and language. Whether it were only the unquestioning ultrapositivism that this movement encouraged—and the polarized reaction to it—that so inhibited and confused us I do not know; but there was not a great deal of active and articulate thought around me on these matters to crib from as I wrote this book, and I felt its absence keenly.

Nonetheless, for sharing somewhat in these ideas and their development I am honored to thank Lee Sanella, Michael Symonds, Stanley Krippner, John White, and Carl Oglesby; Shana, Gary, Ronnie, Russell, Barbara, and James of the Body Croup and the whole small collective of Berkeley psychics known as FOG, in whose democratic companies I have found homes for serious talk about the issues of our lives (and the Association for Humanistic Psychology, which has invited me among others for such talk); and Ira Einhorn, Peter Marin, and James Hurd Nixon. Of these the last three, and more distantly John R. Seeley, have had particular influence on my thought. The encouragement of all, and others unnamed here, has been invaluable. This book is dedicated to its editor. Bill Whitehead—both for the broad personal responsibility he has taken for promoting serious writing about the psychic (and affiliated) domains, and for his continuing support and openness as this book developed. One can have an editor "on one's side" for many reasons; but to have him there because he grasps the cogent issues and shares one's particular concerns as an ally is to be befriended indeed. MICHAEL ROSSMAN Berkeley, California July 1978

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I. Portents The Only Thing Missing Was Sufis I went down to a Conference on Consciousness put on by a student group in Philadelphia. It seemed like an early warning of the 1970s carnival. There were gurus to the right of us and gurus to the left; the discourse was very lofty. The disciples of the fourteen-year-old gum handed me leaflets announcing his arrival in town; the disciples of the 140-year-old guru invited me uptown to his parlor. Above us were the people who want to plant a permanent colony on the moon, believing that from this act fulfilling Man's Destiny in the Universe will cascade both the new technology to solve our problems of starvation and city, and the social and psychological unity necessary to overcome our divisions and put the technology to work.

For background we had an illustrious panel of former associates of Tim Leary, including Humphry Osmond, who coined the word "psychedelic," and Ralph Metzner, the New Maps of Consciousness man, who gave us a workshop in fire/light yoga at five bucks a head. Even the ghost of Richard Alpert, busy being reborn as Ram Dass, sat with them as they talked about charismatic leadership, where it gets and what it costs, and what the market for it looks like now. We heard also from Saul Alinsky, an excellent hypnotist, my feminist friend from Boston, and so on. All we were missing were the Sufis. And just as well: not because of them, but because of the aura that surrounds them. The Sufis are the cocaine of the consciousness movement for 1972. I don't know what they'll do for your nose, but people wear the badge of association with them as they display coke spoons, with the same snobbish enthusiasm, innocent and corrupt, and it puts me off. No wonder my head was spinning as I rode home on the plane, reading John Lilly's Center of the Cyclone, just after my uptown visit to the 140-year-old guru. He didn't look 140, but then he might not if he were, right? The room grew crowded with disciples radiant in his presence; he waxed eloquent on Hindu metaphysics and the morality of higher consciousness. I dropped my guard and asked him what to do about the strange fire burning in my fingers, asked him where it might lead me. He pounced on me for pedagogic example like a terrier grabs a rat, cackling as he admonished me that it was all monkey play, veils of Maya, ha ha. Well, I've known that line since I read the Bhagavad-Gita at sixteen, and known its truth since my early acid trips. But I know what else the Cita says, about how you work it out here in the flesh of these lives. Afterward the guru told my friend about me: "Too much ganja [marijuana]." I imagine he can read my aura. I can't remember whether it was four cigarettes or five I saw him smoke, sitting there in an easy lotus, cocky as any macho teacher in a classroom. My buddy says he doesn't eat, but he sure has a taste for Life Savers—did in a whole roll between cackles.

Drugs, drugs, it is all about drugs. They were our first mass consciousness trip and that patterning persists. Ira Einhorn, who convened this conference, talks about heroin, the key drug of the early 1970s: "For people assailed by stress in body and mind, it reduces wild discord into a simple pattern, organizing all the acts and consciousness and stress of life around relating to the drug." But we are all besieged by incoherence now, our culture is tearing apart with glacial slowness, and everyone in it feels the chaos as new orders struggle to emerge within an old order dying. In everyone now there is a hunger for the simple solution, the one Way that organizes everything else around itself, makes sense out of the chaos—not by embracing it all in some new higher synthesis, but by choosing only a certain part of it to deal with.

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And so we see the Jesus communes, the Lyman family, the Gaskin tribe; gurus appearing everywhere, like magnets picking up loose filings; missionary bands advancing yoga, encounter groups, alpha training, bioenergetics and Rolfing, Krishna chanting, transcendental meditation, new hybrid syntheses emerging daily. The garden is rich in this strange season after a decade of war, and many of its fruits are interesting and valuable, if you're looking for raw material to build on for growth and learning. But so far people seem mostly to be consuming it somewhat like smack, to cut down all the complexity to safe and narrow limits. Forecast for the next five years: Consciousness will be the country's quickest-flourishing growth industry. A kaleidoscope of mutant flowers will appear on every block. Too many people will take to the easy lotus, giving up the task of integrating what we have begun. April 1972

A Brief Report from the Field This is a little tale about power and responsibility and how we fool ourselves. It happened at a healers' retreat off in the woods. There were too many people, it was raining, we huddled indoors in crowded workshops. It was all a bit confused, but things seemed pretty mellow when I went to the workshop on aura reading. A hundred of us sat on the floor in the big darkened room while the Leader had volunteers stand silhouetted against the rainy light for us to read their auras. The Leader was young, she projected confidence and calm as she explained gracefully how each person's way and vocabulary of reading was unique and his or her own to discover. I fancy myself a good critic of teaching; I felt she led us pretty well.

The volunteers stood up, sat down, in turn; she asked what we saw. Most of us saw nothing, but enough saw something, and the group's air was lively with hesitant assertion. The Leader was scrupulous about validating people's perceptions (though she herself was not clairvoyant but clairsentient, getting her information through audio cues). Soon the air in the room felt safe and swelled with energy, as more people trusted to offer what they thought they saw, hoping someone would agree.

With each volunteer the Leader—in total control of the situation, with everyone in the dumb trance of obedience to authority—started us out by having us focus between the eyebrows on the person's sixth chakra, then took us to the aura above the head, and then down the body. Soon after the second subject stood up someone said, "He's sitting above his body, watching it." After the Leader confirmed this other people said they saw him too; then talk shifted to the cross some thought they saw on his chest, and to his many past Christian lives. He stood down. A third volunteer moved to take his place, stripping off her shirt as she stepped up, in a gesture of trust—"as if," she said later, "I were offering myself up for the sake of science (but to my friends)."

We focused on her pineal eye; the room hummed with energy. Quickly she was "out of her body"—there was a concerted gasp, and people cried out how they saw her rise and where her bright energy was hanging. The Leader let our surprise run down, then took us down her fine strong torso to comment on how solidly her aura was grounded, and on certain other virtues evident in her aura.

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Then or later, I came to see the Volunteer as powerful but untrained. Perhaps the Leader did too, for she asked, "Where do you work?" The Volunteer's silhouette was still for a moment longer, arms open; then gave a slight puzzled shrug. The Leader asked again. "Where I am, I guess," the Volunteer said uncertainly. "No, I mean with whom?" "Oh, no one now." The Leader fielded a question or two, the Volunteer stood down, we went through a few more people and the workshop broke up. Afterward I saw the Volunteer 'hovering near the knot of people around the Leader, until finally she dared a question. The Leader didn't understand but answered as best she could, and then asked, "Is that what you wanted?" "No," said the Volunteer, moving away as other people pressed to ply their questions, "but I'll think about it." As she passed me I asked her if she was okay, but she didn't respond. Some hours later in another workshop she passed me a note, asking why I had asked her that, apologizing because she had been "a little spaced." I wrote back that it was just a hunch. Then someone else claimed my attention, while the workshop broke up and she disappeared. Finally at dinner I found her and we sat aside, and she told me what had happened. She had only been herself again more or less solidly for the last half hour. When the raw impact of our massed energy punched her in her higher ("third") eye, it squirted her like a watermelon seed out of her bodily husk, or at least into some terrifyingly altered state, for five uncontrollable hours. While her shoulders gave their little bewildered shrug she felt herself snapping rapidly and violently in and out; while her body stood firmly planted, arms akimbo in graceful surrender, she experienced herself hanging somewhere above it screaming as she watched herself roll on the floor in agonized convulsions. She came back to herself while the Leader questioned her and when she approached her afterward, but she had kept snapping out again until just a while ago. It was the first time she'd been "out of body" awake. She apologized for her poor appetite. "Eat something," I said, "it'll make you feel realer " A little earlier a woman had come to her crying, to confess how shaken she had been at witnessing all this; otherwise I was the only person she'd talked to about the experience, going through it for hours in the crowded rooms. She had sought out the Leader yet again, tried again to tell her what happened. The Leader's response was brusque and defensive. "All she said was that I really needed to go through a lot of therapy before I tried to do any astral traveling again." I listened and responded and rubbed her, tried to comfort her for a time; I'd like to say as well as I could, but not even that, and far from enough.

For I was somewhat stunned myself, the day's mellow mood completely blasted. I sat there kicking my own ass and everyone else's too, and this is what I thought: Just what was going on in that workshop that I lulled myself into feeling was so groovy? Didn't we serious students of the occult just pick up a big chunk of power and sling it with elemental stupidity at someone's vulnerable spot? Didn't our sister hang somewhere in terror while a hundred sensitive souls were straining to see color in her afterimage? Didn't anyone see her or feel her, except maybe one woman among all these would-be empaths?

Or was it a subtler fraud? Maybe this group atmosphere—which under the Leader's able direction seemed so tolerant and supportive, where one could venture any freaky perception—maybe it wasn't free at all, maybe there was license only for a very narrow band of perceptions out of the ordinary to be spoken aloud, like "I see red" and "there she goes," and no room at all for someone to say something that would disturb the groovy vibes of harmony, like "I feel someone's in trouble."

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Yeah, I talked to her afterward, but the hunch was blind; I had no notion of what she was feeling. Five hours later, when I really looked at her, the mask of trauma was still alive in her features. What did the Leader see? What should she have been able to see (or hear)? What responsibility did she take in directing the group's energies? Was everyone as dumb as I, or did people feel the Volunteer's confusion and pain and just sit there? And why did they sit there?

I recognized again too late that we had all been in that certain numb trance in which we are schooled all our lives, and which makes us blind and dangerous. Hip enough to distrust Nixon's credentials, we are suckers for the ones we proclaim to ourselves, so far mostly in dim imitation and worship of Expertise; and we will do what the leaders we look for tell us to do almost as surely as men in the army. I don't think the answer is better training and quality control for leaders. December 1973

A Breath Before a Plunge (For Carl Oglesby)

I'm sitting out at this edge of the land watching the continents drift, toying with scraps of mystery; despite some occasional companionship, very much alone and afraid. It's like walking into the fringes of a strange force field, or the early flickers of acid: my consciousness, my world view, start to waver, spawn mirages, fall apart and re-form, still continuous with the past but pregnant with radical weird.

I sort over my disconnected scraps of experience: the telepathic realities I've shared with Karen, my precognitive mindlock with Linda, diagnosing a tumor at a distance, our experiments in sending images and energy signals to each other in Body Group, my first faint glimpse of an aura, feeling the ch‘i flow precisely in my body, glimpsing the energy configurations of my car, lifting out of my body in meditation and dropping back scared, opening to broad-band telepathy in the heat of politics, my response to the moon's phases, the instants when I've acted with my energy body alone, the million faces that spin by when my eyes meet another's, the times of merging my being with another's, or with others'. So fragmentary, so pregnant. The psychics tell me things about my "past lives" that make discomforting sense. I am wary, with the paranoia of the Jewish radical. Karen sees me as operating in a sloppy credulity: I see myself creeping along in suspicion's shadows, entertaining others' interpretations of phenomena I can no longer disbelieve, but struggling at each instance to understand the web of culture that brings forth and insists on these interpretations—struggling to keep in touch with the knowledge that all these maps are only maps and limited, and that I must make my own in consciousness that they but represent the Inchoate. It is paralyzingly slow, perhaps because the fraternity of those so engaged is thin and secretive. Is it also because I am afraid to jump into another frame? Or is it that this time, in fuller consciousness than last decade, I want to create the frame I leap to afresh from the materials of our time and being?

I sit here, once and still a man of the Movement (the more so for being, before, through, and beyond it, my own man), trying to bring what I've learned through it about being an animal man in a society in history, to bear on this new front. How to honor what I have come to understand about my nature and social justice, in unlocking the psychic and spiritual domains? Meanwhile, I ponder their implications for reevaluation of the research and treatment methodologies of the human sciences, all now even more radically suspect than they seemed through simply political eyes; observe the assimilation of psychic industry into the capitalist domain; and struggle invisible and with slow success to dare a step further in my own life.

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There are hundreds of thousands of people in America now with some degree of conscious control over significant psychic ("paranormal") powers. They are fortune tellers, dowsers, adherents of the old spiritualist traditions; they are country communes meeting in peyote ritual, meditators of a hundred practices, biofeedback pioneers, a spectrum of healers; they are multiplying. Among their thousands of small groups only a few are also working in disciplined ways to affect some social circumstance. But the impulse to meddle in society will grow as this wave of psychic exploration continues, and as its Babel begins to generate a common tongue. How can we anticipate the potential secular impact? What would a collective of revolutionary psychics do if they got it together?

It is another of those watershed times, a continuation of the last decade's changes through an odd but natural pivot of consciousness: a time in which the edge of a course into the unknown, personal and social, confronts a great many of us intimately. And besides being a naked soul I find myself an American again, dependent upon a climate of free thought and free action, of liberty, precious and self-reflective. What we are confronting is blessed and fearful and beyond our comprehension, much within us and around us cries out to close it out with violence. It is crucial that there be the space for people to dare the mysteries, and support for their engagement; it is crucial that they also be free within their own ranks to question what they are doing, for they represent us all. And we shall have to struggle to realize any of these freedoms. Great streams of thought and action are intersecting, and their full synergy can develop only in a climate which permits the adventurous and responsible hybridization of frames. Nor is this the climate of embattlement, of ideological besiegement in isolated rigid camps, that runs like a plague through the secular Left—and is already manifest in this turn to the higher domains. Indeed I pursue my timid researches in an air of dark premonition. It seems to me that the energies and values we are unleashing or yielding to are potentially even more directly and totally threatening to the old order, in all its ponderable corrupt vitality, than anything we have yet bodied forth; and I wince already with the impact of a dreadful retaliation, without any idea of the form it will take. I see also, already almost full-blown, the growth of a monstrous facade, that will hypnotize our awakening with illusions of light: not only to preserve the old forms in new face, but to preempt and inhibit that genuine transcendence whose potential winks unmistakably at the edge where our world is being torn apart. The truth is simple: we create the reality we experience, though not alone, and can change it as we will; but it is hard to keep sight of, the clouds of illusion re-forming as they do. Where will we get the energy, the solitary courage? April 1973

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II. Notes on the Public Carnival "Show Us Your Lotus Ass, Rennie!" (Bliss and Fear in Berkeley) I.

have a recurrent nightmare. I'm in a great hall filled with people and turbulent energy, everyone's shouting and waving signs. Some cry FOR?, the rest cry AGAINST! I'm kneeling on the floor with a broken pencil and a small scrap of paper, my finger is bleeding, I'm still trying to write "No two of us know the same reality," but the blood gets in the way. I look up. Everyone is staring at me. A dreadful silence settles, and the signs begin to fall … .

I had it again the night after Rennie Davis came to town, bearing the message of his new Perfect Master, the fifteen-year-old guru Maharaj Ji, known to his detractors as "that fat kid." The story of Rennie's sudden conversion was already a legend of our time: en route to Paris to meet with Madame Binh to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War, a series of "coincidences" diverted Rennie to India, to receive illumination while watching the Perfect Master do perfect wheelies on a motorcycle, spattering mud in the faces of his disciples. Barely two months later, the gossipways of what still could be called the Left in America were buzzing with the news, and would have been even if Rennie were not an old hand at playing the media and doing it again for all he was worth. Who could resist it? Venerable Movement organizer, one of the Chicago Eight, pillar and celebrity of antiwar activism, embraces Bliss Consciousness! What could it mean? Quickly Rennie hit the road to tell us: I saw him at his third stop in a tour of twenty cities, in between interviews.

Berkeley, for a decade the Mecca of the Movement. By 1973 it was as disoriented as anywhere else, a carnival of swirling currents. A thousand people jammed into Pauley Ballroom to see Ronnie in the flesh. The Perfect Master's local followers—vigorous, blissful— bore Easter lilies to surround the white-draped throne on which they placed His image while the Jesus freaks scowled; then they sang and danced in His praise. It felt like a revival meeting, high energy and good cheer; but when the singing stopped there was scant applause, and the tension stood revealed. I don't know how many there had risked their skulls in street action in the 1960s and hated Nixon still. But as I sorted out the anonymous hair and jeans, I recognized comrades from ancient strata of conflict, along with current campus activists, all slightly hysterical—a decade of Movement history come out of hiding, and come to judge.

Rennie stepped to the mike, natty in new threads, close-cropped, smiling, smiling; alluded modestly to his revolutionary credentials; began to tell his tale, or tried to. The brief silence would not have been so electric, nor the crowd so large, had he come only as a deserter, simply to testify for transcendental bliss. But Rennie was here as a heretic. The story of the funny thing that happened to him on the way to meet Madame Binh is in fact marvelously entertaining, but as he tried to embroider its wonder a sullen impatience began to break into heckling shouts. "C'mon, Rennie don't lay a rap on us," someone yelled, "we fought the pigs to keep your ass out of jail!" Smiling, lie asked again and again for time to come to the point, finally blurted it out, still smiling, his hands shaking as they clutched the microphone amid cries of disbelief.

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The Perfect Master teaches perfection, and will bring, perfection on Earth—not after the Millennium, but right now, in three years. A revolutionary perfection, realizing all our ideals of peace and justice, brought about not by struggle and conflict but by the perfect working of a perfect organization. Nothing in his Movement experience had prepared Rennie to imagine such an organization, but here it was, working in perfect harmony, already building a Utopia in India, embracing millions of people in dozens of countries he has jetted around to visit himself, reaching out to him, to you, to me, to everyone in America this year, to China in 1975, then quickly to bring the entire world into consciousness of bliss and into secular harmony. Chairman Mao himself may already have received Knowledge at the hands of the guru Mahara Ji. You can't understand this by hearing about it, you can only understand by experiencing His illumination, you owe it to yourself to check it out And you will get your chance, soon. I hadn't been in such an angry room since the night after Nixon mined Haiphong harbor, when 3,000 people heard an open meeting of the Berkeley City Council vote down a proHanoi measure, and then stormed the stage while the council fled. This time there were tomatoes with the catcalls, but the crowd was not of one mind: around me the guru's devotees squirmed in indignation and fear for Rennie's safety. I thought him in little danger; we don't beat pacifists in public in Berkeley. But heretics may be different, and the previous three years of bitter impotence while watching greed and death march on had left their mark. As the anger took on an ugly edge, the devotees hastily doused the lights and applied a media cooler. For half an hour we watched The Story of the Perfect Master, from infancy to adolescence, projected ten times life size in dazzling color, as slick as you could wish and with a real rock score. "The Organization has 150 centers in America already," Rennie had said, "they're all linked together by Telex systems and WATS lines. In the City we're building there's a full recording studio, full facilities for radio and TV production, printing presses … The guru is God on Earth." When the lights came on the anger was still there, though somewhat dazed, and Rennie came back to face it, still wearing the smile. Questions, accusations. When he got the chance to answer them, he kept falling back on what he had said before, as if there were nothing else to say, imploring us to check it out. But in some way the focus had passed beyond him and into one of those surreal theaters of debate that erupt from time to time here when reality is coming apart at the seams. Some attic scholar analyzed Rennie's retrogression from Marxian to Hegelian dialectic, and the core inadequacy of the latter. A woman from my Tai Chi class testified about what it had meant to her to come out as a lesbian, and the warmth of her reception in seeking circles. The man near the mike who witnessed for Jesus could bear it no longer, denounced all parties and spoke of the antichrist. But the most acclaim was stirred by the old street bum or prophet, no one knew which, who rose again and again in grizzled beard to entertain us with irreverent koans. By the third time, when he came to the punch line that promised us the secret of the world, he had us all in silence. "Know thyself," he bawled, "and go to bed!" An hour more passed, I got a chance to ask Rennie the questions about his state I thought were useful. The theater was still going strong, but downhill; I rejoined my buddies and we split. Outside the air was spring-night cool; we walked down Telegraph Avenue and decided to get ice-cream cones. An old ex-Red who did acid; a G.I.-coffeeshop radical who got Rolfed; a free-university organizer who saw Maharaj Ji's aura, felt the Perfect Master trying to suck his mind; and me, getting ready for a nightmare. In the ice-cream shop we joked around a bit, then clung to each other, shaking. II.

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As for Rennie, I didn't doubt that his inner reality was intense and mysteriously luminous to him, indeed genuinely (if perhaps not superlatively) transcendent; but I saw it from a different angle. Just then Rennie was the Ancient Mariner, who "stoppeth one of three" to unload his Story, obsessive with significance. It was early yet to tell how he would adapt to discipleship; so far as I could judge, he was still caught in the first moment of his conversion, amazed at the event, flying around to tell the story to everyone he could get to listen, living it over and over. He could not explain it to himself, but it was; and he was brave enough, or needful enough of transferring his reality to the world, to explain it to those who didn't yet share it. (He spoke as if Berkeley were his first hostile reception; but I didn't think that would daunt a man so experienced in facing unbelievers.)

More important, I thought, was the fact that Rennie was innocent of transcendental experience until he met the guru. The rigidity that had kept him at odds with the acid mania of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman at the '68 Democratic Convention had softened; he had taken to health foods and yoga while the antiwar movement languished, but that still wasn't much preparation for coming up alongside such high voltage. When Rennie met the guru I imagine he received two sorts of knowledge. He got zapped into heavy transcendental experience: not your usual trivial "mescalin" trip, but ongoing consciousness of the Light that floods, the Sound that builds the universe. The experience broke wide open the frames in which he understood reality.

To replace them, against the terror of the naked void, I imagine he took at a gulp the other knowledge offered by the Master and the society of his devotees: a new frame by which to interpret all, both this experience and the realities and contradictions of his past secular life and of human society, dovetailing neatly if weirdly with his allegiance to some revolutionary values. In Berkeley he was clutching this new frame rigidly, accepting it absolutely, to the point of proclaiming its Three Year Plan for human salvation.

To those who could not pardon him, this much at least should have been understandable. And to write Rennie off as petrified, as many did, was simply foolish: a strong and questing consciousness recovers from its shocks in time. Rennie's past record of devotion to cause, and the way he was using himself and being used in high-level service to spread the gospel, suggested it would be a while before we heard a new line from him, spiritual or political— though we might be aware of increasing radiance, from the cultivation of inner illumination he accomplished between appointments. But I preferred to believe in his untapped reserves of flexibility, and to bet that he will move beyond this experience, integrating it rather than repressing it (perhaps after a period of painful break and reassessment if his motion carries him at odds with devotion, though there is no assurance that it will).

All this was my interpretation of basic facts that Rennie reluctantly admitted: his prior transcendental virginity, the compulsive repetition of the first understanding he grasped to pull his mind back together. But Rennie was irritated by the implications that I thought were there to be drawn by comparison with other people's experiences. "It's not like some hippie acid trip," he insisted (as if this were the only competitive illumination abroad). He preferred to discuss inner radiance and imminent earthly harmony, convinced that his experience was superior and definitive. And who could know that it was not, save those who had shared it? We are past the time when we could afford to dismiss such claims lightly. Still I think it fair to report what I recognized later that night, helping interview Rennie for KPFA.

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His outward aspect seemed much as it had five years earlier when I met him in Chicago, organizing with a still-tiny band for an apocalyptic convention. He was rushing, all business, taut with the energy of being at the center of things, consumed with strategic designs. Then as now he seemed unable to laugh at himself, caught in the role of elite spokesman, projecting a vision of great demonstrations unfolding in every part of the metropolis, in clockwork harmony. I thought this unlikely (and the vision irresponsible), and suggested that reality held surprises beyond the expectations of his frames; he took me for a spacedout Berkeley freak in Chicago and no doubt did again this time. To observe that he was leading a similar outer life so far this time raised some question about the completeness of Rennie's transformation. Yet to dismiss him this way was too cheap. As Carl Oglesby remarked, Rennie had always had an instinct for locating the center of the radical thrust by which we transform our lives; and however different Chicago was from his expectations, it turned out significant enough. III.

But I was less interested in Rennie than in us. Behind the facade of anger, the dominant emotion I sensed in Pauley Ballroom was fear—fear multiple and confusing, welling from the irrational, fear so deep that no one would confess it. I think few were prepared even to recognize it in themselves or in their friends. "But what was there to be afraid of?" To discuss such fear logically misses some of its point and most of its substance; as with Rennie's illumination, you have to experience it to understand it. But I'll try to sort out some of its appearances, from the perspective of the (somewhat tattered) Movement. The cleanest aspect was our fear of subversion. In the early days of psychedelics, many radicals saw grass and acid as leading their users into some nirvana of hippiedom, whence no man returneth to lay his body on the line against injustice. I think history disproved this, though some do not. But by the time of Kent State, whatever organizational focus the Movement once had had fallen apart, and the loose common myth that guided the investment of our energies in political change was dissolving. During the early 1970s, years of confusion and repression, our paranoia about subversion spread, with more grounding. Yoga, encounter groups, life in the country, Dianetics, free schools, McGovernism, Jesus—a multitude of devotional ideologies appeared to sap the energies of political expression, lulling weary activists and hypnotizing the young with blissful panaceas, away from dealing with an increasingly problematic social reality.

In this light, and to people who formed their very identities as part of a movement for social change and justice, Rennie's appearance in Berkeley—blissfully charismatic, claiming 50,000 American followers of the Perfect Master and promising millions more within the year—was frightening enough. It hardly mattered that he came the day after the town's lackadaisical radical coalition got out-coalitioned by the right and middle in the elections, and blew the chance to take control of the City Council. Meanwhile, Paul Krassner's vague allegations about the ClA's links with Rennie and his master (and with Maharishi "TM" Mahesh Yogi), were entertaining, if somewhat irresponsible, and were reprinted widely—along with more accurate articles linking the Korean CIA to Maharaj Ji's competition, the Rev. Sun Moon's Crusade—as a logical extension of our paranoia. No one would have been surprised to identify our ClA's hand in a new plot; and this one was diabolical and devious enough to fit the ClA's image and appeal to conspiracy buffs (who were multiplying with good reason). Yet aside from my feelings about the growth of our own brand of witch-hunting, I found such a notion curiously stale, as if our capacity for creative disbelief had gone to pot. It reduced the problem, and our fear, to familiar dimensions; but I was sure there was more to both than this.

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For Rennie's presentation raised another specter to haunt us: the image of spiritual fascism, monolithic as of old but riding on wings of new technology. The woods grow increasingly full of bands of believers, their spirits agonized by present social contradictions, seeking an Answer that will make sense of all the confusion and distress and potential we all feel, and tell them what to do—not simply a personal Answer, but a total Answer, triumphant and unifying, that will extend its dominion over everyone, inexorable and just. So far their factions are many, their influence small. But hasn't everyone had the intimation that our age is growing ripe for the advent of the Leader, someone of the charismatic stature of Hitler or Jesus, whose presence will catalyze all this gathering need in a surge of belief that will sweep through our culture and our lives, transforming them violently? And isn't the intimation growing? We are past the time of a mere spiritual reformation, with business as usual; if the crusade erupts, its target will be secular life as well, and its vehicle will be the Organization. Sophisticated as Synanon, slick as the Maharishi, as adept at politics as at electronics, its aspect will be, as we fear, totalitarian. At present there are no major contenders, political or spiritual, for the lead role in this drama; but the script may be accumulating in the post-Vietnam War craziness, with corruption in the highest offices and the economy out of hand. Whatever other images Rennie wanted to awaken in us, he awoke this one as well. There was a more personal aspect to our fears about the Movement's subversion and transcendental imperialism, a root of private terror that I think found soil in many people there. If Rennie, why not me? It was soothing to speculate about what idiosyncrasies of character might have predisposed Rennie to put his consciousness under another's dominion, as many took him to have done in proclaiming the absolute Millennium. But it was threatening to recall that for years Rennie was an exemplary figure of the New Left, his strengths the Movement's strengths and ours: independent, breaking free of mystifications, improvising understanding and praxis from the raw materials of our time and experience. Perhaps so much overtime duty on the high-stakes line, without a certain broader spiritual replenishment, wore through something vital in him? Perhaps media burn and idolatry left him not knowing who he was, as has happened to others? Perhaps after those dogged years struggling for peace, the end of the war left him bewildered, without a mission, vulnerable to this new enlistment? But to dismiss Rennie as a special case did not account for the guru's other eager followers, nor for all the Movement's rank-and-file, people like ourselves, who had turned to embrace this and fifty other Answers.

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If Rennie was a heretic, his heresy was not one of ends, but of means; and it struck us where our faith is weakest. We have all been struggling for personal fulfillment and the social good in the same brutal climate. Few now can escape the inadequacy of the political metaphor to inspire and guide even our political actions, let alone to fulfill them. It is not just a matter of the correct line; the problem is with process. All is accomplished by organizing. But was there an activist present who had not felt despair, simple and terrifying, at the frustrations and impossibilities of working in the organizations we form: their outer impotence, their inner conflicts and ego games and wasted energy, the impoverishments of spirit which lead us to drop out of them again and again? Here Rennie was, proclaiming the perfect means to our various ends, the ideal, impossible Organization, working in perfect inner harmony and outer accomplishment. Lay down your arms, your suffering, and the Master will give you bliss. And yet to work in the Left, to be of the Left, has meant to bear these arms, this suffering; we have known no other way. Who would I be if I let them go? And what would I betray? Rennie's enthusiasm touched the deepest longings, evoked the dream of a fulfilling and effective comradeship of work that we called participatory democracy in the early days of the New Left. We failed to accomplish it in practice; it flowered again in the move to collectives, which many felt failed; now it beckoned again— but somewhat diminished, for all its new glory, promised to us in a frame in which the goals and means and meaning were already seemingly determined, our only choice being to choose them. Who would I be, and what would I betray? Rennie struck us where we are vulnerable—for was it not our capacity for belief that moved us to commitment and action, as much as our skepticism? And is this not still alive in each of us, despite the weariness of years, and still unfulfilled? We each believe that a different order of society and realized human potential is possible, even for ourselves, in some way right around a certain corner of consciousness that we do not know how to turn, that we think involves long arduous struggle—but we are not sure, and the prospect that it does not is tantalizing and terrifying.

For beneath all these fears rooted in our political identities lurks the fundamental terror that confronts us when our systems of belief are breaking down, and we encounter the naked void. In Rennie each person faced his own private predicament. Not only the political metaphor, but reality itself (or our collective interpretation of it) is coming unglued—less dramatically and rapidly than for Rennie, perhaps, but as surely. For a decade now, the surface of appearances has been falling apart around us. Nothing is what it had seemed: the stability of the American economy, our concepts of maleness and femaleness, the limits of consciousness, the nature of man. The plants, the whales, the stars, institutions, sanity: all call on us to discard our old impressions of them. Our friends make strange transits; an awesome chasm of possibilities and impossibilities gapes wide; black signals of death hang in the sky. A world is ending; intimations of the event penetrate our private being, and few can confess the extent to which they feel lost within it. To be able to go on we pull the appearances back together around us, even as we are trying to disassemble them and reassemble something truer; we shut out what we cannot explain or account for, even as we try to grasp what lies beyond it. To not know who we are, to not know what is, is totally terrifying; and Rennie reminded us of this. Yet it is also magnificent and vital and infinite, and so Rennie terrified us also in reminding us how this state is lost in certainty. IV.

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So much for my view of the fear people felt, facing a brother who proclaimed an illumination they did not understand, or understood too simply. There were other emotions in the room, obscured by the focus on elite charisma. Without question, many of the guru's devotees had access to a certain radiant high, could pool its energies together and project them out to others, meaningfully to many. Surely Rennie showed a courage vital to us, in leaping through the domain of chaos—though I think the courage to survive within it and accept it is even more essential for us now. As for the guru, my friend's impression of his aura was that it was unspeakably evil; but I had no doubt that the megawatt power Rennie described was real and tangible and uncomprehended, though perhaps not unique; and hence as awesome in its potential as it was terrifying to some even in its dim reflection through Rennie. I've passed over such positive matters for the sake of focusing on more awkward ones, but they cannot be ignored.

For reality has chambers more extensive and complex than this one we call home, yet interpenetrate and integral with it, affecting each sparrow's fall; and our consciousness is realizing this connection. The social truth or falsehood of Rennie’s claims for his master is no cut-and-dried affair, but will work out; and I think we will find ourselves testing hypotheses that stretch our minds even further, if in different styles. If I'm sitting here now cussing both sides, it's because all the frames they offer me to know by, mundane or heavenly, diminish what I understand of wonder and mystery and terror and knowing itself, diminish who I am, knowing myself as a fragment of the great hologram that some call God and others call I Am. Which brings me back to my nightmare. Long ago the Semitic peoples divided into two persuasions: those who held that connection with God could only be accomplished through the mediation of someone more firmly in touch, for which purpose they built temples that one must come to town to attend; and those who believed the God of their heart to be perfectly accessible. His worship and communion immanent everywhere—in a tent, traveling through the wilderness, even without a tent in the naked elements. I put the matter this way for the sake of clarity, though my bent of mind is no more spiritual now than it ever or always was; the metaphor will serve for political man as well. My persuasion should be clear, for it is strong. Watching Rennie & Co. organize for Bliss, I felt much the same as I had watching Rennie & Co. organizing for Chicago, and very much alone despite my friends. In the nightmare I too am the prisoner of my frames. April 1973

The I-Scream Man Cometh One December night Dr. Arthur Janov, entrepreneur of the Primal Scream, gave a talk in Berkeley, at seven dollars a head, and our friend James came by at midnight to review the performance for us. We often enjoy his capacity for amazement at discovering the mundane in the exotic, and wondered what he would make of Janov, who has always seemed to us to be the Liberace of the consciousness movement.

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Well, James found Janov to be utterly charming, candid, and delightful—"pure Beverly Hills"—and radiant with the cheerfulness of a man who has found his life's work. He did display a kind of smooth continual twitch, like someone needing to itch; but James thought it might just have been his enthusiasm for his subject and for the audience, which Janov said was the best he'd ever faced. Often his audiences scream at him and interrupt the speeches which he no longer likes to give; so this night he had written a paper which his research assistant would read. After these brief remarks his research assistant read the paper. It concerned the physiological concomitants of Primal Therapy, and was quite long. No one interrupted. But it was the movie which followed immediately that set James to chuckling, not at all disrespectfully. It featured the Therapist, the Screamer, and the Researcher.

"It was a bit odd from the start," James reported. "The Screamer is lying there with a mask on, and asks the Therapist should he start, and she says no, wait 'til the Researcher finishes wiring him up; and then he does and she says go, and the fellow just starts screaming, working himself into an awful state. Later we find out that he's really their champion screamer, he's been in Primal Therapy for four years, twice a week, he goes and pays them a lot of money and screams. And he's really good, he can do it just like that, at a signal, they don't even have to waste time warming him up, and by now he's a pro at being wired up too.

"So he's working up momentum, we see his facial contortions, the fat all over him quivering in time with the music. Meanwhile the camera keeps cutting to shots of the Researcher, bending over the dials of the electrocardiograph and the sphygmomanometer, their needles also quivering in time, as he announces their readings. Passion and passion. And then suddenly they cut the movie, censor the middle part because, as they tell us, they don't think we can take it. I think they didn't want to show us the orgasm, but anyway Janov now comes on to answer questions. Someone asks him where his papers have been published. Only in the journal of his own institute, he says, because the scientific establishment is dead set against any disruption of its orthodoxies. Which is pretty much true.

"Someone else asks him to compare primal with other therapies. Comparison is difficult, says Janov, because 'other therapies teach people to cope, but ours doesn't, ours is the only one that teaches them to feel their pain.' It's essential—the pain, not the screaming, which is only a by-product—and he says it's horrible. Someone asks about the Screamer, how well he can cope with life now. Janov says cheerfully that he's a mess and can't cope at all now; but that the pain is there in any case, 'and is it better not to feel it?' "Janov's people call it 'primaling' and get huffy if you call it screaming. And they do have a point there—it's not your everyday urban shriek; they try to get it to come from the core. The Screamer's physiological response was really remarkable—his pulse went up to 220. Janov says if your average man in the street screamed like this he'd drop dead, but that the Screamer has really trained well and can take it. It really is a kind of athletics; I had a vision of the Guinness Book of Records and international competitions. "Meanwhile the Screamer is still writhing and screaming, while Janov is talking, and they turn on the projector's light to show us the end. We find out what he's screaming about: his mother gave him a present for Father's Day when he was nine, and if he hadn't repressed the pain of it he'd have gone crazy or died. He got down to the incident in his very first .session, and has been screaming about it for four years. I think he's learned to do it very well; it shows what practice will do for you. And it's a mistake to dismiss him as just a pain junkie, because he's clearly enjoying himself and proud of his accomplishment.

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"There's a very touching scene near the end, where he's explaining how the Father's Day trauma keeps on making it impossible for him to relate to women who are weak, because they demand him to be strong, which he resists; and to women who are strong, because they demand his weakness, which he also resists. And the camera pans back slowly, revealing him in his blindfold, the tangle of wires, the machinery, the Researcher, as he says to the Therapist, 'What I want is to have the same kind of a relation with a woman as I have with you,' and reaches out and touches her foot. Really, it's exquisite, you should see it. "At the film's end the Screamer is asked whether he thinks the therapy is successful. Of course it is, he says, he wouldn't do it if it weren't—which seems reasonable. And he should know, he's the champ. Then Janov comes back to answer some more questions. He's very impatient with theoretical structures, he has a simple criterion of success: does it get to the pain? No other therapies do, he says, so they're irrelevant. He himself has never been through a full primal, because it wasn't available when he invented it, but he did spend a week last year screaming with a therapist he trained. He says it was just horrible. The therapist, who is there, says that getting to the pain is what's hard, and that after that he personally loves it; and says 'you loved it too, Art.' Art thinks, and agrees that he loved it too. "But it's very dangerous, he says, to start Primal Therapy and open up the pain, and then discontinue therapy before you've learned to handle the pain. About 700 people have gone through authentic Janov screaming, though there are inferior imitations abroad now; most of them are still going through it. Most of the graduates have become primal therapists themselves, though a few flunked. It's a pretty straightforward kind of school: you learn to do something well, then you teach others to do it. Someone asks Janov what his graduates are interested in, besides screaming. 'They're interested in living,' he says, 'but they have come to believe that society is essentially hopeless.' They work three weeks on and one off, and go skiing a lot. "Then Janov tells us how he came to invent Primal Therapy. He went off in his garage with his dog, and screamed. Pragmatic science. I think it's wonderful, no funded lab would undertake the kind of physiological research he's doing. Janov's wife thought he was off the walls, but the dog didn't mind. He sees the dog as the model therapist: it licked his hand while he screamed, and never said much. The full introductory version, before they put you on maintenance, involves being in his clinic for three weeks, around the clock. No drinking or smoking; you go through a fast and a dietary regimen, and a long buildup 'til you get to make your first scream. The elements are all pretty traditional: isolation, deprivation, anticipation, and suggestion. You can teach people a lot of different things that way. Brainwashing and the vision-quest both use it. "Myself, I think there's a lot of truth in Janov's basic message, that everyone in this society is in a lot of pain and neurotically out of touch with it. Of course he says his way is the only way to get in touch. But why hold it against him; everyone says that. Someone asks him, well, what happens after you do get in touch with the pain, where do you go from there? Janov says it's a sticky question, he doesn't really know. What he did was to start a school, to teach therapists how to teach other people to reach the pain. He hasn't found a way to measure it yet, but his researcher is trying; and when they do I imagine they'll give prizes. But it does sort of avoid the question of what to do for an encore.

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"Janov is really a perfect model of what's going around now, better even than the Maharishi, a guru teaching one obsessive yoga, surrounded by dependent devotees. That business of starting a school in his image, it's the custom with all the new therapies—I guess he picked it up by being a trained Freudian, before he went maverick—and in spiritual circles in general. Everyone who thinks he's made a breakthrough freezes up when he tries to market it as the answer, and it freezes the people who need to buy it. "I still do believe that I'd be a better person if I could scream like the guy in the film, though; it was really impressive. But the pain I feel has a lot to do with the whole society that Janov feels is hopeless, and with the way everything is so sane and so insane at the same time, and I'm not sure what screaming will do for that. But I'm willing to give it a try, from time to time." January 1976

Ram Dass, Kali Yuga Ram Dass returns to Berkeley, fills Pauley Ballroom! 1,300 young spiritual devotees flock to his presence! There is chanting and singing, Ram Dass discourses eloquently on the yogic path of enlightenment, leads us in meditation, gives mantra. Three years ago, riding the crest of success with his book Be Here Now, he spoke here as a humble beginner on the path, as a dutiful projection from his guru's portrait, which hung suspended in midair behind him. Since then he has studied with Muktananda and moved on to other gurus after Werner Erhard replaced him as Muktananda's American road manager. Now he stands forth as teacher on his own; if we hear him echo some of Muktananda's phrasings, there is still a greater power now to his presence, which is perhaps his own. After four hours people are loathe to leave. Hundreds linger until, in a stroke of inspiration, he throws them the flowers from the stage, one by one, in a sweet slow blessing. Begin again; there are many levels to reality. Fourteen years ago an academic psychologist with an experiential interest in his subject flew back from his visiting professorship at Berkeley to Harvard to join Timothy Leary in intensive investigation of altered states of consciousness. One hundred psilocybin trips changed his mind. Purged from the Harvard faculty for pursuing controversial research, he continued. Five years and 500 acid trips later he had learned, among many facts of major importance to human science, that you can get up that way but you keep having to come down again. Despondent, he went to India to find a better way to stay high. He met his guru and became a student of his guru in turn, getting higher. Begun on the path of Raja Yoga, he returned to America to work on his karma by sharing what he had learned. More gurus, a succession of transcendent experiences, each more encompassing and significant and transforming than what had come before, dwarfing the experiences of psychedelics as they had dwarfed his experience of academic consciousness as a simple, rational, neurotic Ph.D. You'd think it would be the ruin of a professor, right? But can the monkey change his skin? Popular professor lectures to mass undergraduate class! We file in, the hall is stuffy, he wants the windows closed because bongos are playing outside in the plaza. His teaching assistant leads us in an exercise. He takes over; his attire is odd but his style is superb. Engagingly authoritative, a master of wry humor, of cool clarification and varied repetition, he enlivens his material, holds us attentive, gauging our mood with the skill of a tenured pedagogic entertainer. The funny Jewish professor who studies yoga does say, at the beginning, that it's really impossible to talk about his subject; but we forgive him three hours of academic paradox because he does his job well.

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His lecture begins with a clear exposition of the basic karmic cycle: the tall from Oneness into separateness and attachment, the self's realization of its impotence in an illusory reality, the shedding of attachment through many lives to rise to Union once again. Then he discusses one particular aspect, the way of engagement with Kali, the dark mother of bitter strife. By now we are restless with words, so he leads us for ten minutes in an actual experience from the tradition he discusses, and then has us take a break. He compliments the students who stay on to ask questions after the break, saying they are undoubtedly more serious and advanced. He figures, however, that he already knows most of the questions we'd ask, so he asks and answers four or five himself—what about acid now? what about sex?—rather perfunctorily, and it's time to go. Lots of people hang around to tell him it was a swell performance, he's a credit to his profession. Indeed he is. A methodical and competent researcher, he has studied his sources well, through the literature and by interview, on-site and experientially; and he presents us with a faithful summary of the traditional discipline he professes. As for interdisciplinary syntheses, methodological innovation, pregnant speculation—well, students avid for controversy should go elsewhere; his job is to transmit an established canon correctly. Harvard should love him, and Berkeley too.

Begin again, another truth. The person once known as Richard Alpert, coauthor of a book on death and rebirth,* stands before us, beneath his social role of guru professor, as a man in a phase of death and rebirth; a curious blend of coherence and chaos, a most human mix of contradictions, tensions, and slow dynamics. Psychedelic experience blew his mind, exposing gaping holes in his—and in Western—structures of cognition. For years he struggled to recohere a new cognitive frame, following Leary's advice: "We don't know what this is about yet … it would be best not to impose a model too soon, because the Western model for these states is pathological and the model of [other] cultures is mystical and religious, and it's better we keep wide open … ." He tried, but the gap between being godhead and garbage-man remained, straining him with incoherence. Turning East for aid, he apprenticed himself again, as he had in the university, in the carpentry of consciousness. At first the framing he was taught seemed complete; he wrote a book proclaiming its revelation, more modestly but no less dogmatically than he had proclaimed the initial revelation of psychedelics. A journeyman now, he seems secure in his craft as he sketches the karmic wheel and then, after speaking of Kali, leads us in a meditation of considerable power to share two ways of getting off the wheel: first expanding our consciousness to embrace the universe and beyond, then condensing the universe to a point within our being. But if he does not lead us in meditation to engage with Kali, even after exhorting us at length to do so, it is perhaps an index of his inner state. His talk about Kali is not like his exegesis of the wheel, polished and funny; it is more enthusiastic, urgent, disordered—a report from the current edge of his learning, where he is not yet able to guide us in useful experience, and indeed is in genuine struggle himself. The pattern of the psychedelics is repeating: five years ago, he tells us, his concern was only with what got him high (like our meditation); now he is learning to turn his attention to what brings him down. Only once does he speak of this so personally; yet though he phrases his exhortation to engage with Kali as a general declaration, it seems his own tale.

Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, and Ralph Metzger, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Secaucus, N.).: Citadel Press, 1976). *

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But what does it mean to "eat the Mother," to engage the dark domain of human suffering and strife? The closed system of cognition he has settled into, against Leary's original advice, gives him certainty and purpose; but it also binds and blinds him, confuses this question. He inhabits the Hindu vision of spirit set against world, with its contempt for the material plane, without caritas for the flesh of life. We should raise our energy above the nasty lower chakras of survival, sexuality, and power, he says, to engage the lotus of Oneness. In his lone tangible reference to suffering, he says of the starving, syphilitic babies of poorest Africa only that one might well choose to be born among them to work out karma. "If you really want to remedy suffering, the first thing to do is to rise above the realm of suffering and the illusion of the self as helper." It is all an orthodox teaching he parrots, as befits a recent convert, without fear for its buried contradictions. But what is really involved in the engagement with Kali which he also urges? Perhaps one rises above suffering only by rising in engagement with it, and detachment comes through truly following attachment rather than rejecting it in scorn. What then of how to tend his life and ours? It is on his mind; he tells us to take care of the boats we ride across the river, these incarnated selves, before leaving them. But how?

Economic reform is not sufficient, political and social activity is not enough, he says, as he introduces the karmic wheel, leaving implicit the yogic syllogism that pure spirit is the answer. But there is a more symmetrical deduction: that this spiritual transformation also is not sufficient to make us whole. What Way will integrate all the fragments, all the domains, of who we are—or is there some essential core and grace of mystery and chaos in our being? The orthodoxy he professes does not encourage him to recognize or declare the need to transcend its terms. Yet perhaps he is already making the deduction in the process of his own life, as he turns back to dealing with "what brings him down," with the darker reaches of earth, of Kali's dominion, that arc half the godhead. It is easy to mock him for spiritual chic, for the terms of his struggle which he describes to us: instead of the comforts his affluence could afford him in exotic or peaceful ashrams, he is now living in Manhattan and commuting by car to Brooklyn every day, to see his guru, a woman who, he proudly says, wears false eyelashes and talks Bronx. But I see him instead as a pioneer paying a price for the learning he has ventured out to bring us; as a man struggling with inadequate tools to answer true needs, constricted by a tradition which keeps him from integrating the strengths and potentials of most of his own cultural heritage, and which furnishes him in exchange few tools or plans for working on the self as a social being, for working in the world.

I see him as a man dispossessed, clinging to a simple frame, as if venturing too far too fast in the chaotic waters of self and consciousness had left him the need to grab a secure raft, at least for a time. I see him as a man growing pregnant with contradiction, perhaps preparing to feel the raft's flimsiness and to honor the deeper rhythms by again striking out alone into the uncharted waters of the whole of who we are. Perhaps his dance with Kali will be the means of his transformation; perhaps his state is like many other people's these days.

Begin again. In Berkeley, shortly after Patty Hearst is captured and many people of political sensibility go numb and crazy somewhere beneath their apparent indifference or rational responses, a large crowd of people gathers to hear a man talk about what to do with their lives, their energy, their spirit. I look around. Many arc not so young. Most have in common a curious look and feel, a kind of placidness—rarely cither radiant or stuporous, perhaps determined. There is chanting and singing, all join; but it is not what it was three years ago, enlivened by the excitement and energy of new conversions. Most of the people here seem to be devotees of one or another spiritual path, several years along in their practice and settled into it, or trying to keep settled.

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The man preaches to an ecumenical congress, whose general views are much like his. If there are controversies or issues of value implicit in his preaching, one would not know it; here in Berkeley no one heckles him or asks a challenging question. Many in the crowd have grown used to listening in some school or other; the audience is wholly respectful and receptive, as they listen with critical approval to his version of a tale by now familiar. It's not that he brings them news; what function is being served by this ritual? It is a collective reaffirmation, a reassurance of people who are not presently struggling to decide what to do with their lives, but who are trying to keep carrying out a decision. It is an island of calm order; everyone preserves its insulation from any conflictful reference to the turbulent sea of present life: the American economic order in slow murderous spasm, the CIA at the mails and the whales dying, sexuality redefined and everybody's marriage breaking up. What to do with your life indeed, in service of the highest ends and means? It would be well to have a simple answer. The answer the man tells them sounds reassuringly simple at first, as he recites the catechism of the wheel; everyone glows with appreciation. But then he goes on to talk about Kali; and the crowd's mood changes, it leans forward a bit, listens differently, uncertainly, as he approaches his true human testament, speaking ever so indirectly from the place where he is confused and tentative, groping for some handle on the domain of problems shared by all. Of the people I know here, one is aged yet earnest and vigorous, trying to live a self-respecting and socially useful life; another has just walked out on his family, fleeing his wife's demands; another manages a countercultural supply service. They are all conscious actors in heavy human dramas; they all have feelings about the redwoods, grand juries, and nuclear reactors; they are complex beings, with parts which do not fit under the scanty umbrellas of theology that cover current spiritual paths. Well or badly, they are dealing with the problems and challenges of life-in-the-world that accumulate as time goes on inside the realm of the timeless; they are looking for wholer ways to conceive and go about it; this is why they are here. How do they hear him as he speaks of Kali, of embracing the dark energies beneath larger umbrellas, of tending the boat that carries us each and all? The year is 1975, the message in the air of our society is twofold: "deal with what has been neglected" and "what, me worry?" The waters on earth are rising; there's not enough food and everyone's lifeboat needs attention. After the meditation many in the crowd hang around, sing together again, receive flowers in mutual theater. There are few political activists in the crowd and scarcely a black face; there are no public questions. Perhaps it is because they are not really dealing with Kali yet; perhaps it is because they are absorbed in a slow process of advice from many quarters, and brooding.

Begin again, there are many levels to reality—but here just one more, the one where all the little things that chill me fit, in no particular order but perhaps together. When Ram Dass takes over he orders the windows closed, to protect us from the bongos. For the only time in the whole afternoon a voice questions dissentingly from the crowd, remarking on how stuffy it is already. "Stop breathing and go into samadhi," advises Ram Dass, with a smile. Then his young friend Krishna Dass leads us in a song about the lighthouse shining. "We're going to keep doing it until everyone gets into it," he says, smiling, "so you'd better get into it right away."

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It is all very innocent and jovial, and so is Ram Dass's style as he talks of the wheel. But underneath there is an edge of arrogance and condescension. For rather than simply share his personal testament for us to learn from, he phrases it as the "objective" Truth for us; and in almost every sentence he assumes without question the nature of the reality his audience perceives, or insists on characterizing our experience for us, as if we could not manage by ourselves. "Is that too heavy for you to understand?" he asks, speaking with hearty assurance and certainty even when talking of Kali, denying by his manner and narrow words the reality of the complex human being we can see protruding beyond the manifesto he pushes. I have seen that sort of leadership before.

Even the intermission is semiorganized; Krishna Dass insists through the microphone in leading us in another song. It has pleasant, uplifting words, about light and god. Its tune is a haunting melody from 1970, whose original refrain ran: Helpless, helpless, helpless … .

I wonder how many recall the words, feel them, feel the irony of their replacement.

Before the questions Ram Dass announces the creation of the Hanuman Foundation, to support his spiritual teachings, and plugs two of the foundation's projects. One is simple and admirable; to teach the dying about dying. The other is a stunner: prison reform. Ram Dass calls for volunteers; a great many people are locked up, they could be doing something useful with their time, cells are much like monasteries. I marvel at the sheer audacity of it: here in Berkeley in 1975, after Attica, Soledad, George Jackson, with resistance and strikes in the prisons rising and a thousand pleas and meetings for outside support, Ram Dass comes to organize for prison reform! "The guards may think it's a prison, but for the prisoner it can be an ashram," he says. And perhaps he has gauged the day, or at least his crowd—for if anyone has any questions about the politics or human meaning of his solution, they arc unvoiced.

The final "question period" is a strange farce. Ram Dass invents the questions himself and answers them; no one objects to this curious procedure. Is it that we arc incapable of surprising him? Or has he other reasons for avoiding a live engagement? He knows he is in Berkeley; he has complimented it as a home for seekers of freedom, before saving that politics is not sufficient. But no one yet has challenged his perspective on the starving children of Africa, or asked him rudely what he thinks about his old pal Leary singing to the grand jury about the Weatherpeople. Whatever drama is being played out here, the crowd is fully complicit in it. Ram Dass hurries through his standard questions: first drugs, then sex, then … why, politics, of course. But he docs not phrase the political question; instead he answers something minor, and something else, and something else. Now it is time to go. "I want to teach you a song to take with you," he says, and sings us the first line.

And then stops, and says: "By the way, there's something I've got to say to you. I know there's a lot of oppression and injustice in this country. But we must remember to be grateful for the most important thing, that a meeting like this is allowed to go on here." And then he goes on with the song, about god's protecting us, I think—I can't quite remember, as I wonder what function and whom this meeting serves, and feel a chill wind rising in this closed room of the spirit. December 1975

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But How We Talk Now Together! November; sun still shining brightly though the year is dying. St. Aquinas, a founding father of humanistic psychology, has moved here from the East, to the hotbed of the human potential movement, to enjoy the leisurely fruits of a long working life. We've had a few intense conversations, we like each other, we're looking for excuses to explore our mutual perceptions of what's going on. He calls to invite me and Karen to his house for a social evening, to meet a few people and talk. Genghis Khan will be there too; we'll hear about his recent trip to China. I've known Genghis for a long time, though not closely. We were both, crudely speaking, leaders in major New Left political actions in the mid-1960s. I went on to work obscurely in education; he went on to national organizing, government indictment, and media stardom. My books sold limpingly, his made a mint. Perhaps my experience of the evening is only sour grapes.

If so, I still don't expect it as we drive over the bridge toward Aquinas's. I'm looking forward to seeing Genghis again, among others. I've just read an interview in which he'd said very nicely some of the things about politics and consciousness that I'm trying to figure out, and I remember again that I used to admire his perception of some core issues in the generational clash (though not, at times, his ways of putting them). Since Kent State, Genghis has pursued the picaresque odyssey of our generation, and has gotten heavily involved in old and new therapies of mind and body, and with perspectives on inner revolution. More than most of our contemporaries, he has tried to keep the domains of personal and social transformation related to each other, and I wonder what he will make of China. Well, the evening is interesting and appalling. Soon Aquinas gathers us from our hellos and asks Genghis to tell us a bit about his travels. Genghis wonders aloud whether there's anything special we might like to know, but doesn't actually bother to ask before he launches into what is clearly his standard travelogue, minus only the slides. He does it well: the tour guides, the cities, factories, provinces. He is enthusiastic, humorous, and serious, and quite entertaining. But also I am somewhat bored, for almost everything he says is already familiar from casual reading of newspapers and magazines. The distinction between intellectual and manual labor is being dissolved; the Cultural Revolution was real; an intensive anti-Confucianism campaign is in progress; people are motivated by serving the people rather than by private interest; even the schizophrenics in the mental institution he visited are getting well by reading Mao. It is all tremendously important stuff, reports from the greatest human experiment of our time; I want to hear more, for we've scarcely begun to understand its relevance to our own predicament. But all I'm learning that's new is the fact that Genghis himself has been there, has been told these things and is excited about them; and that he sounds like any other tourist who has been for the whirlwind three-week tour with official guides.

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In fact what appalls me, as he rushes from one topic to another, is the quality of mind in his report. It's not just that the things he says are familiar; it's the way he says them that makes them seem already clichés, as if he had absorbed what he saw and heard uncritically, shallowly, and was passing it on with no attempt to look beneath its surface, reduced almost to a series of cheery slogans. I remember his first book, it was like this. Yet we are older now, have been through many kinds of experience, should have complex perceptions. I listen for them, in vain. Of the campaign against Confucianism, Genghis tells us only that it is part of the effort to combat dependence on traditional bourgeois authority. Yet he himself was a leader of the countercultural antiauthoritarianism of the 1960s in America. Has he thought to compare the contradiction of his own role with the paradoxical way the Chinese are using dependence on Mao's word to free themselves from dependence on role-defined authority? He doesn't say Nor can we ask, since he is going too fast; but we try to stop him when he gets to sex, for there are therapists in the audience. The Chinese all get married at twenty-six, says Genghis; there are no divorces. Marital problems? They work these out with Mao's help; people are not self-serving, but work to please others. But in some ways that's a recipe for sexual dysfunction—what about that? He doesn't know. Presumably they're virgins when they marry; he knows they don't masturbate because he asked and even had to explain the question. So who teaches them not to? No one, he thinks. But surely the young children must touch themselves? Genghis doesn't wonder about that, but goes on instead to talk about industrial decentralization and how the Chinese have a true "higher consciousness." I'm going quietly crazy: how can he use that term so casually, as if we all agreed on what it meant, after he has passed with the rest of us through the consciousness expansion of the psychedelics, the consciousness raising of antiwar work and women's and men's groups, the heightened awareness of Gestalt and bioenergetics, the spiritual striving of the guru supermarket?

Higher consciousness indeed! What I'm hearing is the rudimentary consciousness of sloganizing; it's so one-dimensional that it alienates me completely. I hear a mind without taste for irony or pleasure in the complexity of the real, unwilling to recognize contradictions or tolerate the tension of struggling with them, relentlessly making perceptions simple and safe, and offering us no way to chew on the complex human meanings of what it reports. And I wonder, were we really as brash and superficial as our critics insisted during the 1960s? Granted, Genghis is on stage, or chooses to be so; no place for subtlety. Granted also we have different styles; I like to see several sides of a matter at once and find paradox fruitful. But where then is the time and place to look beneath the surface of things? Not here, surely. And what bothers me most, as Genghis goes on, is the tone I recognize beneath his reportage. For he's done it again, he's found another Answer, flat and absolute, to the human problems of the day, and he's urging it on us with all his old enthusiasm. First the antiwar effort, then the youth revolt, then the inner quest, now it's China: the problems, the meaning of what we're doing, everything is to be evaluated in light of the Chinese experiment, not as if it were something more to richen the mix, but as if it were all that mattered. I already have my own reasons for learning from China; what bothers me is how Genghis shares his revelation. All right, it sounds like a P.R. flack, I'm used to that; but isn't he a bit old to be delivering the same speech with new names in the blanks? And what does it mean about his vision, that it wears a new costume with each popular season? A person should come to a revolution in his or her vision once, perhaps twice, in a lire; if he or she keeps going this way and that way, where is the continuity, the development?

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Genghis’ travelogue makes no space for such reflections; it rolls on undaunted until Aquinas takes advantage of a pause to say, "Well, that's all very interesting, Genghis," and proceeds to give his own response to the story, opening the space for general conversation.

I find Aquinas's response very interesting too; in fact I find it stunning, and say so. For what our talks together have been about is the quality of people's belief in systems of Answer: the unquestioning submission, the insulation of the self from contradiction, the giving up of the struggle to achieve a unique perspective and practice in favor of the ready-made. Aquinas has grown troubled by the way the movement he helped to father has come to encourage these tendencies; when I saw him last he was furious at the workings of an organization (EST) which was, oddly enough, the focus of Genghis’ enthusiasm before he went to China. The Answer it taught set people up to pursue their private interests exclusively, and to reject responsibility toward others as illusory. Now Genghis comes back from China with that Answer turned inside out, still as absolute and unbalanced; and Aquinas hears him as a harbinger of hope, perhaps pointing a way out of this dreadful stew of American selfishness that so many of our efforts to improve seem to make worse. I know how Aquinas feels. But I hear him praising, in Genghis’ account, precisely the same style of approach and qualities of belief that infuriate him on the domestic front. I tell him so, pouncing sharply on the observation as one who has been brooding. Taken aback, he reiterates some of what Genghis has said before addressing the question of whether the style is indeed the same. It might be the start of a real conversation. But before it can go on Genghis says, "Well, getting back to China … " and someone who is content with the previous quality of entertainment says pointedly, "Let's do," and he does. And I am left with a pregnant confusion in my head, feeling silly and boorish.

Genghis goes on, and on and on. The first people leave. He is aware of what he is doing, jokes quickly, "They're not bored, they just have to catch a plane," goes on. There are people here I'd like to talk with: Aquinas himself, the editor or a new journal on consciousness, another one whose writings interest me; I imagine they all have interest in each other; at last I accept that there will be no real interaction among the people present. Karen's ready to go too. The travelogue affords us no graceful exit; finally we rise awkwardly to leave, and Genghis tells us to stay as he hurries to switch on the tape recorder he's brought in lieu of slides. As we go out we hear the tinny voice: it's just as Genghis said, the translator is quoting a factory worker quoting Mao about a problem. So what?

Outside the air is clean, rich with stars, dark mystery. For a moment I forget how violated I feel—until we look back, and through the lit windows we see the others putting on their coats. Clearly our departure made the excuse for all, a stock bit of suburban social drama. Were the others as bored or frustrated as I? No one was impolite enough to say so, or to ask. Yet they are intelligent people, they struggle with many of the same questions and complexities of vision as I do; surely they had thoughts about what was going on.

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But what was going on, anyway? Let me look at it again, change perspective, get off Genghis’ back—for this piece is not about him but about us, how we see, how we say, what we do. I sat in a room with a group of people from the human potential movement, sophisticated students of group interaction and transformational psychology. Someone talked at us all evening about group interaction and transformation. There was scarcely a probing question even about that intellectual topic; and no one did a thing to recognize or to transform a stultifying social process which made of us all together much less than we deserve to be—wasted our potential, so to speak. Was everyone else's experience so unlike mine, or did everyone just watch the situation flow by? What does it mean, to know about group process and not to change the processes of groups, to have studied authentic feeling and not to say when one>is bored, nor move to do something else? And wasn't there yet another irony in our paralysis there, perhaps a particular cause for us to hold our tongues? For I was not the only one to face his own ghost in the caricature Genghis offered us. The qualities of mind, of temper, of imagination which he now attaches to China—the uncritical enthusiasm, absolute, programmatic, superpositive, onedimensional, un-self-reflective, ephemeral, unrooted—rule the day now, attached by the hungry to every item on the New Age table. Change only the names in the blanks; the speech remains the same, and its deeper meanings too. And aren't we in part responsible for this? Weren't half the people in that room at work full-time to generate and distribute the experience and ideas which wind up treated so?

Of course we ourselves are more complex and balanced in our works and our attitudes (as Genghis may be in private). We ourselves don't come on like cheerleaders or follow like sheep; we often speak our reservations in public, sometimes write a few articles questioning the trends, sometimes publish a few. We are trying to be responsible. Yet does not each of us—from theorist to practitioner to publisher—depend in some vital way upon the consciousness which we helped Genghis model for us there? Isn't the present boom market for our ideas and services based largely on the spread of this consciousness? Don't we owe to it in the end most of our incomes, our local or national prestige, our influence, these crude powers? I have lived this before. A decade ago I too, in my lesser way, rode my career in part upon those energies of unquestioning hungry fad which Genghis was so deft at arousing and feeding with slogans, and which sapped the vitality of our most serious concerns even while it appeared to amplify their force. And I too fed those energies, that desperate devitalizing consciousness, each time I spoke eloquently of a partial truth as if it were enough, each time I held my tongue to let a half-truth pass unquestioned at home or stand for me in public.

And don't we all now speak half-truths? Aren't we all now mostly heard as Genghis seems to hear, heeded as Genghis clearly still expects to be heeded—despite our deeper desires, or in part because of them? And what is there to do about it? On the drive home I am filled with thoughts like these, too confused, or perhaps too despairing, to untangle here. 1975, 1978

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A Father for Our Time I read in the New York Times of the fate of yet another fragment of the radical Left, the National Caucus of Labor Committees. Born from the breakup of SDS in 1968, conceived as an alternative to the violence of the Weathermen and the passivity of drug communes, the NCLC was committed to rational Marxist organizing among the workers, toward a world revolution. I don't know the details of what happened during five years of violence, government repression, and national demoralization, or how its members came increasingly to submit themselves to the "guidance" of its fifty-one-year-old charismatic Leader. But today, from the Times's account, the NCLC seems to have become a small totalitarian state. Its members are expected to be totally committed, honoring no other bond; the Leader's word is Law. He has come to believe that the fate of the world depends upon him, and that a vast conspiracy is out to get him and his group, stealing their minds. And so his followers believe this too; they resort to "preventive detention" and direct brainwashing of their erring comrades, and literally submit their thoughts to the Leader to check if they're okay to think. Their proudest political product is violence, having sent forty of their ideological opponents to the hospital this past summer. All this makes me extra sad because I am of the Left, but it's nothing new these days. The Children of Cod and lesser-known Jesus cults work the same way, change only the vocabulary and perhaps the beatings; and so do Scientology, the Divine Light Mission, the Lyman Family, and, in essence, hundreds of other spiritual and therapeutic and political and agricultural communities now growing in America, involving hundreds of thousands of people. The dominant organizing form of this decade seems to be the sheep herd. In every valley I hear the tinkling bells of the leaders, see those patriarchal rams butting heads, watch them leading their followers toward the glorious pastures. I sit watching, a middle-aged radical, chewing my solitary cud, that old dream of participatory democracy, and try to remember when and how my peers started turning into sheep. I think back to 1964, to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the very first campus revolt, which at this distance seems still more an amazing watershed. During months of struggle there was born among us a new vision of community and of culture, to make whole the vision of social justice that had moved us to action in the New Left. During the rest of that decade, in the Movement and the counterculture, we saw millions of young people moved by their versions of these visions, which even today, in curiously altered forms, guide the herds through the meadows.

At the time I was rapt in the existential wonder of it all, but something gave me the creeps. Distorted in the mirror of the media, the FSM was a caricature of the movement I knew. Around me thousands of people, self-organized into a hundred spontaneous groups, were coordinating an intense web of learning and action; I saw my sisters and brothers turning all their intelligence and energy to something they cared for, for the first time in their lives. But to read it in the papers, the FSM was simply a campus mob organized by a disciplined cadre of radicals and inflamed by a brilliant young charismatic leader. Mario Savio's angular figure grew familiar on prime-time TV; the publicity made him a national celebrity. It was relentless: ten years later reporters were still at me, asking how they could get Mario's reaction to this and that. Eventually the pressure of being seen as what he was not proved ruinous to his life.

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This made me bitter slowly. But I hated immediately, on my own account, the way the media reduced us to how people wanted to see us, as simple and familiar. For when I left my former life and committed myself to a political existence, I wasn't playing follow-theLeader. It's true that Mario had a moral eloquence that gave him a special place in our hearts and made him a natural media target. Before him and since, I have known men who put into words the feelings that I could only mumble, exciting my love and trust by speaking for me. But my voice is only one part of me; I have ears and hands and a stomach. Who now remembers how Lee Felsenstein tended our electronics, how Lynn Hollander organized our research, how Steve Weissman devised strategy, how sisters I never knew invented the logistics of sit-in support? But to speak of us as simply the sum of our talents is still a lie. Listen, this is how it was, something we didn't know how to talk about even among ourselves, let alone to reporters. Emboldened to risk and dare only by each other's presence, we were out there on the existential edge, where what we knew dropped off into the unknown, toward a vision of a different reality. Everything was torn loose for a time: our careers cast off, our lives at times in jeopardy, our very conceptions of who we were and how to be a person among persons were shaken and revised as profoundly, though differently, as in any current transcendental conversion. In this chaos and mystery, alone together and equal facing the unknown, no one led or followed. We were cast into a desperate spontaneous democracy, which was our ultimate and only magic.

I knew many who felt this way. I wanted to believe that all my comrades did, and that only the media and those who feared us were responsible for the heresy that we were sheep. But well before the FSM's climax I witnessed the sweet flesh of our imaginations turning rank. Though we scoffed at the media portrait of the FSM as a disciplined, efficient organization, with Mario as its Leader, we subtly came to adopt a kindred view. Rather than take responsibility for the simple complex of our action—and the terrifying freedom we briefly felt, in which everything depended on each individual and his or her will to bring a different reality into being—each of us chose in some way to say, "It wasn't me who did this, it was the FSM." Though our spontaneous cooperation reached its tactical perfection in the first campus sit-in and strike, already we were falling back toward a state of mind in which almost everyone depended upon "the FSM" and its leadership structure as reflected by various media, rather than upon his or her own cooperative initiative, to define and undertake what needed to be done. Rebelling against the deathly authority of the university and the State, we found ourselves recreating the same forms of authority—in part because we had no language or training to support the different forms we had briefly materialized in our freedom, in part because we were afraid to. Events moved so rapidly that this retrogression was more latent than realized; the FSM may well have been the most intensely participant-democratic political event of its decade. But the many later movements of the New Left were less fortunate Save perhaps in the women's movement, political organization grew increasingly hierarchical, bureaucratized, and authoritarian. Even the Yippies, ostensibly clowns, had cloven hooves, being the first Left group to define itself purely by the media projections of charismatic leaders. By the end of the 1960s, the political Left had once again largely degenerated into a squabble of ideological splinters, lines of dwindling perspective for sheep to follow. We blamed the cold climate, government murder and repression, weariness; no one had the heart to speak of the failure of our will.

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The same retreat from democratic collectivity was also happening in the cultural Left. More than I wanted to believe, the groups and communities that formed from the initial chaotic freedom of rural communes and urban hippie ghettoes were organized around one charismatic man, re-creating the power structure of the patriarchal family, which corporations also enjoy. Still the "hippies," romantically apolitical, proved more able to sustain the democratic impulse and create new power forms than did the political Left, which studied power explicitly.

That the New Left turned toward authoritarianism is deeply ironic, for our political action set the public tone of our culture for a decade. Before the FSM and after, we were putting ourselves on the line to challenge the illegitimate practices of social authority. The antiauthoritarian impulse spread through the entire educational system, and into the domains of sex, psychiatry, consumerism, child rearing, medicine, drug use, journalism. In some fashion not only the dictates but the very workings of established authority came to be questioned in every aspect of our lives. The feeling that everything was coming unglued spread, reverberating with violence, and underlain by the fact that, indeed, many things are coming unglued. And America convulsed, killing its children, who had lost all respect, in the streets; trying to tighten the old lines of control; trying to pretend that the 1950s were back again, stable and familiar, with everyone in his or her place. The campuses have been quiet for four years now; on and beyond them the sheep herds multiply. Watching are many survivors of the New Left, still engaged in low-profile struggle to bring into being what they dreamed, who wonder what all their efforts of a decade wrought in our society. Some are sourly cheered by the prospect of Nixon's downfall, and the revelation that all our paranoias were absolutely accurate; and it is choice to see him meet his Watergate directly as a result of his own paranoid reaction to us. But I find in the matter a deeper meat. For when a majority of citizens come to recognize that the president is a self-serving crook running a gang of thugs, the highest symbol of secular authority in our culture is challenged as illegitimate. As much as the Kent State killings, this event is part of the mythic climax to the Movement of the 1960s.

Linked in electronic simultaneity, we watch the archetypal drama unfold at a grave and appropriate pace. Cowboys saddling up, cops and robbers: for six months, every day on the radio, the TV, the papers, this gang of guys has been out to get the president. Nobody knows whether they will or won't; but I think the damage has been done already. For our lives are ordered by myth and symbol, and such events of public theater move within us more deeply than we are aware. This drama brings a further erosion of confidence in the structures we have created to deal with reality, which will bring in turn a more desperate grasping for an authority which is clean and sure. If Nixon finds Christ as his Savior during this last crisis I won't be surprised, for I'm sure that the disintegration of secular authority will lead many others to do so. In this light the herds of Jesus freaks, and all the other herds, are as much a product of New Left action as is anything else we set out deliberately to inspire. I recall, during the FSM, the hysterical warnings by S. M. Lipset and other reactionary liberal academics that our direct challenge of the State's authority would work toward a fascist America. Children picking at a pimple, intent on exposing the implicit fascism that already ruled our lives, we would not listen to those who saw us as the mindless shock-troops of an authoritarianism they could recognize only in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. However blind they were to the reality of democracy among us, and the quiet ways in which it has since developed outside the sheep paths, their prediction was as accurate as our perception. For surely we have unleashed, or brought into the open, something we arc ill-prepared to deal with.

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But I believe that we had no other choice, and that we moved as best we could in harmony with the true temper of our civilization's age. For all the confines of our reality are now shifting and breaking. Our institutions of city, economy, education, and marriage are failing; our concepts of work, sexuality, and sanity are opening bewilderingly; the plants, the whales, and the stars call on us to discard our old egocentric impressions of them; as the domestic political consensus comes unglued so does our perception of the nature and limits of consciousness itself. All these influences bear on every citizen, be he or she ostrich or sheep. Less directly but more thoroughly, and increasingly, each is being moved toward the existential state we glimpsed in miniature during the FSM, in which what it is to be human among humans becomes once more unknown and re-formable, as we gape with wonder and terror at a world different from all our conceptions. The crisis may be drawn out, but it cannot be averted. To survive we must break the hold of old conceptions on our minds and lives; and when we tried to do this in public space, in the FSM and the Movement, we were not sheep but fish swimming with the natural current, or perhaps the social poets of our time. And we paid a natural price. If many in the New Left turned, in the 1970s, to narrow ideological disciplines or spiritual gurus, to isolated farms or tight therapeutic enclaves, this was due to nothing so simple as a common personality disorder that made us suckers for seeking the Answer. Rather, our daring had made us vulnerable. More intensely than any other class of citizens, those who moved in social protest—washed in apocalyptic culture and risking themselves—became aware of the true depth and completeness of the impending breakdown of our culture's cognitive and social frames. Those who stand at the edge of chaos are most exposed to dizziness. It is no wonder that each of us grabbed in some way for a small piece of solid ground to ride a ways in the general fall. Brave enough to go before the guns unarmed, we knew a deeper fear, in which we were united with those who saw, in our drugs and protests, the very symptoms of things coming apart. For this fear acts on all now, moving most to look for some Leader to take control and make things right. All the King's horses and men won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but that doesn't stop people from wishing; and in America's most important regularly scheduled symbolic theater—the presidential elections—this wish has been clearly reflected. After the Kennedy murders, the electoral passions of the young turned to McCarthy and McGovern, or rather to those media images of decent, calm Daddies who would make it all better, if only … . I forget which one's slogan was "to bring the children home again," as if that were possible. But what a cruel hoax! In cold calculation their political advisers fed them platitudes, tied the bells around their necks, and sent them out to lead the flocks. Ah, but the flocks were willing, though the images were shoddy; they wanted so to believe. Not Dad Himself, nor even great Pan, could have fulfilled the expectations thrust upon those two men of orthodox politics. Instead the lesser expectation of law and order, of stasis, was voted in. It was unfortunate that Nixon, the stern Daddy of an older frightened generation, triumphed. For his regime has proved corrupt too cheaply; there is still room for a virtuous fascism under its banner. And even Nixon's downfall will leave those who were young in the 1960s, and many others, wide open to belief in yet another benign Leader who will solve it all. In this time of urban crime, industrial chaos, environmental crisis, economic misery, and educational disaster, the citizens look to Authority to save them, rather than to the reconstruction of their own lives. And as in public society, so within the individual who has nothing at his center. Those who have a hole inside look for something or someone else to fill it; it resonates to any tinkling sheep bell.

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I too have a hole inside. I like to think it a bit smaller than the norm, but it may not be, for I have stared into it enough to know its terrors more clearly than most do. But my center survives it, and I am not moved to flock in a herd. For everyone I see has a hole somewhat like mine, and I don't expect to find anyone to magically fill it. I think the hole is there because my culture is falling apart, and as a creature partly of my culture I too am dissolving inside I stand as close to my hole as I dare, seeing in it not emptiness but the vortex of transformation, the chaos from which new wonder may be born, without as within. I know I am a mystery; I know no simple program of politics or spirituality can deal with all that has opened and all that threatens; I know the hole will be here changing all my life. All I hope for is to find others with whom to share the struggle to make a wholeness which includes the hole and honors it. I am fortunate enough to have a few comrades who share my feelings. I imagine many others do—not a herd, but perhaps a quiet scattered commonweal. Which brings me to my father, a short man who stood tall because he was proud of his competence, but who never thought himself much, not even as much as he was. It took my leaving home for me to see this, for during my boyhood he had perhaps more than his share of the routine authoritarian character that is the macho heritage of our culture. Even today I wince at his tone of tight righteousness about the right way to nail a nail or run an election, and despair at how much of that voice I hear in mine. Sometimes I wonder what saved me, after I found that he did not always know what to do, from seeking a father figure who did, or from becoming one myself.

But I came back, a man, to be his friend, and for half my life now have watched him in his changes. A Communist, he survived the destruction of the Left in the witch hunts of the 1950s with his humanity intact; but his faith in the nth International was failing well before Hungary finished it off. He remained his own man, continued his craft of journalism, chronicling the affairs of his unions through the years while the progressive flames of union spirit faded and organized labor finished becoming a bulwark of the reactionary status quo. His children grew up, committing themselves to their time's causes and strange experiences. He recognized in them the flames transformed, and listened while he sought to renew the struggle of becoming who he was. At sixty he left his marriage, unwilling to endure its dying frame. Another speck of flotsam on a sea of crumbling institutions, he moved through the world of singles, exploring open liaisons and diverse quests, learning painfully to open himself in encounter. He stuck to meditation; it steadied him while he learned how to publish a new paper and became involved in a mild union insurgency. On a clear winter day in the Sierras he ventured with acid up to the Light, knew the naked Tao that builds this universe, and came down through the fire place, coining to terms with the death of his flesh as he watched one log burn to embers, while I fell asleep wondering when his will for justice would turn him actively to the politics of age, and how.

And so not long ago he sat before me crying, while my son played off somewhere in the debris of the old house we are making new. "I always thought I'd be wise when I got old," he said, the sunlight catching in his tears as they trickled through his goatee and dropped in his forgotten tea. "And here I am old, and I don't know anything." And I was crying too, but all I could say was "Thank you, thank you." I couldn't tell him it was for promising me the soft strength to be forever putting it all together from scratch.

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Now I am writing this, and he drops by. I tease him: "It's a letter to you. A love letter, in fact, though it's kind of contorted because of the age. But you can't see it 'til it's done." So show it to me then, he says, and launches into the anecdotes of his painful human comedy, tells me of his wonder at the hints of his capacity to maintain a new kind of relationship with my mother, one he cannot name but must explore day to day in the swirl. Our talk shifts to the guru trade; he smiles ruefully above his tea. "Here I am, getting old and paunchy, and nobody's gonna sit at my feet, because I'm moving too fast." Oh Daddy, dear Dad, you're the only Dad for me! May I do as well by my kid and my friends. February 1974

The Pedagogy of the Guru These days, when I watch how so many people are learning wonderful things about body, mind, and spirit, I sometimes feel like a sour old man afflicted with the dry grumbles. In my youth, back in the misty 1960s, I didn't have much leisure for such wholesome pursuits; I was too busy dodging tear gas and clubs in the streets, or stirring up trouble on campuses. I got so involved in trying to change the conduct of an unjust war and a stifling educational system that I picked up the awkward habit of questioning how people relate to systems of authority. Later I had time to study Tai Chi, psychic healing, and sex therapy, and help found a new religious order. But nothing helped; the habit stuck with me, like the relic of a trauma I just wasn't ready to let go. As obsessives do, I rationalized it. Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly arrogant and insufferable, I think of it as a form of higher consciousness.

All this is to excuse the dry caricature which follows, as I meditate—as one concerned with the politics of learning—on the educational transaction between the Guru and his Organization, and the person who submits himself or herself to their method. I mean, it must be a caricature, because it doesn't fit anyone I know. Everybody says "My teacher isn't like that" and "That's not how I relate to the group and what I'm learning there," and I do have good reason to believe each person. So perhaps I'm only making a straw man to poke pins into.

If so, it is indeed a kind of exorcism that I pursue, of a spirit which is not simply my private neurotic ghost, but widespread in our lives. And caricature may serve at least to suggest the nature of a different spirit, in which I still believe we might learn to live. Typically, the student enrolls in what appears to be an innovative school which teaches new or ultimate truths about what is it to be human or how to handle the project—knowledge of a sort that must be experienced rather than described. But the process of learning these truths is an experience in itself, with perhaps more dimensions than are intended or acknowledged. For the student learns not only the curriculum of the Guru's truth, but a higher curriculum, a "metacurriculum" whose subject is learning itself.

What the student learns about learning has both a social and a persona] face. He or she learns about the processes of social relation in which individual learning is configured, i.e., about education as institution; and he or she learns about the private processes of his or her own learning. Together these are the student's "metalearning," or would be if they were ever discussed as such. More usually they are just the student's unconscious conditioning to seek more of the same kind of school and personal style for future learning; and to think of these as natural and proper, normative. Or rather, to go on thinking of them this way—for in general what the student learns about learning, through engagement with the Guru and his Organization, is no new lesson at all, but a reinforcement of the metalessons taught by the usual workings of society.

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The personal and social lessons are intertwined. The student learns that to learn involves being treated as an object—however nicely; to be seen and to offer himself or herself as a raw material which can receive a universal and impersonal imprint. How else to judge the matter, if one believes, with Buber, that our relationships are either I/Thou or I/It, with no middle ground? I/Thou is generally impossible in the guru clime: for to be involved with the organization characteristically demands that one deny one's existential peership with the Guru, and this relation is a model for all the others.

The student learns that to learn he or she must sacrifice autonomy—not simply by joining in something collective, but by letting another define what is of value and how to learn it. The more admirable, complete, and thorough the Guru's Method is, the more it helps the student learn this lesson, and the more he or she unlearns how to take his or her own responsibility for the process of learning. This is the schooling of dependent learners, who cannot create their own courses without authoritative direction. It is crudest and most mystifying when the student is being done to, in the name of teaching him or her what to do to be free. And no matter what or how valuable the nominal curriculum is, this schooling is disastrous for citizens of an age of social and personal chaos and crisis; for in the growing absence of reliable authoritative answers, we must depend increasingly on self-directed and genuinely cooperative skills of learning to determine our futures, or even to survive.

The student learns the habits of totalitarian systems. He or she learns not to question or to interfere with the Guru's purposes and judgments, but instead to accept the centralization of power—of informational, organizational, and decision-making power—and its disposition in hierarchies of status, as fundamental institutional principles. The student learns not to question the social structure and processes of the Organization, but instead to accept his or her place within them, transforming himself or herself rather than the Organization if there is a misfit. He or she learns to achieve status and rewards not through the process of his or her own unique growth and individuation, with the inescapable deviance and tensions these generate in relations with any group, nor through self-governed work as citizen in a democratic ensemble; but instead by accepting the Organization's terms and working within them to further them. In so doing, the student serves the interests of the Guru and the Organization, substantively and spiritually, by reinforcing their terms by re-creating them within himself or herself. He or she does not actively betray his or her own interests; rather, he or she learns to serve then; by serving the organization's, identifying himself or herself by and with it. In all of this, the student learns both functionally and psychologically to accept the operation of authoritarian social forms, and to integrate himself or herself in their operation. Every school is a school of citizenship in the commonweal; whatever else it teaches, it teaches shapes in which to create society and one's own participation in society. What teaching, then—what social forms for learning, what training in learning styles—are appropriate for the dream of a democratic society in an age in which, in deepest privacy and all our collectivities, we struggle with the urge to reassert rigid, secure control over what often seems an ungovernable chaos of change? This struggle is inner, spiritual; it is external, political. In both respects it is crucial. And I think we are badly served in it by the implicitly authoritarian lessons of the Guru and the Organization—which are the same lessons that the established institutions of education teach American citizens, as can be seen by rereading these remarks with Teacher and School in place of Guru and Organization.

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There is a deeper aspect to the metalearning of the Guru's Method, which I can express only in a metaphor which suggests an essential violence, however more subtly it may actually happen in practice. The student comes with a world view, a framework of understanding about his or her nature, place, and purpose in the universal and human cosmos he or she inhabits. The framework may be cramped, or, in these discordant times, gaping oddly open. The Guru's Method blows his or her mind, dynamites the structure or what remains; and even before the dust settles, the student is given a full prefab structure to put in its place, to inhabit (at best) in his or her own way. It isn't so simple, of course. Few who are taken as Guru intend this to happen this way. The dynamite is not to be found in the Guru, the Method, or the Organization alone; it is mainly in the learner, whose needs and perspectives prepare the impact of the encounter. But often enough it comes out this way. This educational process is no great trick to pull off, and it is quite the most efficient way for many purposes. But it cripples the development of crucial skills of learning: in particular, the ability to create for oneself new frames to inhabit from the materials available, one's own individual frames.

Privately, in our associations, in society as a whole, we live in a rich chaos of input, fragmentary information, ill-understood tools, mixed energies, partial understandings, uncoordinated parts and promises of ourselves. We are caddis worms, we are moundbuilding ants, accreting the skins of our personas and our collective home from this mix. We need to learn more skill at the eternal task, rather than to have skill atrophy from disuse. To accept from the Guru the magic touch which opens one to mysterious realms of experience is one thing; to accept from him simultaneously a prefabricated frame, however glorious, in which to understand the experience, is quite another. It is a cheap style of selfactualization, in which the self is diminished even as it grows—or so it seems, if we judge self-actualization not by how far one gets but by the quality of the process itself. And likewise in the social sphere: even if the Organization's Answer to the problem of social harmony is workable, something godly about us and some true fulfillment are sacrificed in the process of buying it ready-made, rather than forging it in a process of collective struggle and invention. What the student does not learn from the Guru and Organization is how to create the self, society, and meaning anew, autonomously, in mutual responsibility, as the continuous act of being human. Behind all this sour appraisal is a proposition: that there is another kind of education possible, necessary and appropriate to making our potentials real, both in persons and society. I think of it as democratic, for it depends on and develops the powers of selfgovernance and mutual governance. In its purest form it proceeds as people, alone and together, define their problems and tasks for themselves, decide on approaches, try them out, evaluate for themselves the results, and continue the cycle, all the while recognizing and using the resources in and between themselves, drawing on each other's knowledge and direction as autonomous peers. In the process they configure a society of learning in which authority and power are not fixed, centralized, and hierarchical, nor demolished entirely, but rather are mutable, transient, and shared; in which people recognize and bring into being each other's unique authorities and powers, not only in the transcendent realm but in the world. There is a place in this society for the Guru's specialized expertise, but its style of employment is different.

To unfold this image further, to speak of it in realistic rather than Utopian terms, is to engage with the living tradition, the literature and work, of "alternative" education, which seeks more humane and fulfilling processes of learning, and institutions to match them. The school of the Guru and the Organization is an old one, showing little trace of the educational explorations that have been going on elsewhere in our society, whatever its other daring may be. This is not the place to discuss the detail of an alternative, but one thing about method bears mention here.

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Confronted with chaos, cognitive dissonance, unresolved ambiguity, and tension, the primal impulse both within the self and in society is to close these out, simplify things, make secure our frames of understanding once again, by whatever means. Yet if there is one prime educational need for us as citizens of our time, it is to learn how to endure chaos, to appreciate it, survive in it, build in and from it our structures of meaning anew, accepting their dissolution and re-creation as the process of life. For the self and for the group, the full potentials of development are foreclosed whenever a frame is too quickly decided upon or adopted to govern a world seen anew. As in any rich solution, it is a slow process of crystallization, rather than a hasty gelling, that produces the rich forms of which our substance is capable. The implications of this for learning, whether of the self or of society, are many, and are mostly refused by the process of the Guru's school. 1976

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III. Courting the Strange Looking Back at the FSM I return again to the Free Speech Movement, that mysterious watershed. For nine years I read its significance mainly in social terms, seeing it as the first major revolt of the young against their parent institutions, in which simultaneously was born(e) in action an early image of a more just and fulfilling society. The years since have revealed the spotty progress of our efforts to translate these themes into the everyday reality of America. They have also hidden our retreat from another, more fundamental, aspect of the FSM experience.

What can I call it: the existential amazement of being at the Edge, where reality breaks open into the true Chaos before it is reformed? I always felt awkward and frightened when I tried to speak of it to others, and soon stopped trying. I felt like a crazy man alone with an unverifiable reality. I knew people shared my political passions; we retreated to this safe mutual ground, constructing the interpretations of our lives. I could even talk quite sanely and clearly about the experience of transcending ego and becoming the Light, confident that some others shared it. But I never found words to describe what is still my most vivid feeling from the FSM, beyond even the intense surprises of fraternity, community, and power over my citizen life—the sense that the surface of reality had somehow fallen away altogether. Nothing was any longer what it had seemed. Objects, encounters, events, all became mysterious, pregnant with unnameable implications, capable of astounding metamorphosis. I looked at the wall: yes, it was a wall, but I would not have been surprised to see it revealed in the next instant as a sheet of white ants cascading to the floor. The night throbbed with power, strange flows of energy; during the days and weeks, as we imagined an unprecedented movement into being, I felt us carried along by those flows, as if each tactical decision or chance dramatic incident were preordained, the precise inevitable consequence of a play of forces vast beyond our comprehension, which used us even as we acted in radically awakened will. There was no avoiding that sense. I know it gave many people the creeps: we hardly ever mentioned it and no one understood it, but we felt like audience and actors in a classic Greek drama, playing our free parts in an inexorable script we already knew by heart.

We had no words for that mind-wrenching simultaneity of free will and destiny; we tried to thrust it out of awareness. Yet I could not escape the strangeness of consciousness that remained. All quarter long I felt like I was on a low dose of acid, the only experience in my past I could compare at all, watching the reality game. For two months, while events unrolled by the calendar, beneath them time seemed to stop; some ordinary progress felt suspended even while its appearances continued, and we entered a space whose properties were expanded, where chance and simultaneity and causation were one and eternal in a moment. Yet all we could see that had stopped was the university, and all we could say was that crisis politics had suspended the normal course of our lives.

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I saw us all doing something then that I wrote about later in Ramparts (January 1966) and understand more clearly now. What appeared to be our action supporting was also our reaction against what had opened through us in those transcendent hours around the police car which crystallized a new consciousness among us. In the following weeks we built a movement, an organized form to carry out the small fraction of our shared aim that we could name. Certainly this was a practical political necessity. But we were accomplishing something else by this also: we were creating an entity, a thing distinct from our selves, "the FSM," to relieve ourselves of some terrible and naked responsibility—as if to say, "it's not me doing this, it's the FSM." It was not the responsibility for making something happen in society that we refused, but the responsibility for facing, alone and then together, an unsought and terrifyingly wild field of choice of actions and ways of being, in a universe in which somehow anything had become possible. To create the limited and external vehicle of the FSM was all we knew to do; but as much as affirm our collectivity, to name it so diminished it invisibly, rendered it safe to venture.

We became understandable to ourselves, in terms almost familiar. Whatever sense of reduced authenticity we might have felt was lost in our solidarity before a hostile world that still found us incomprehensible. There was comfort in defining ourselves as passionate political actors, with an unexpected edge of joy and humor. And not even this eccentricity is preserved now, save in a few memories. All that has been recorded as history of "the FSM" are various descriptions of external political events and organizational meetings; our motivations as seen by sociologists, educators, etc.; and some longitudinal psychological profiles. Our own few writings about it are mostly of the same caste, as we came from the Academy. Beyond my cryptic note in Ramparts and one of Ralph Gleason's columns, not one public word about that inexplicable strangeness exists. Years later I see that in some partial way—yet a way broader and perhaps deeper, humanly speaking—we succeeded together for more than a moment in what Castaneda's don Juan calls "stopping the world"; and that the strange second consciousness which haunted me was at least akin to what he calls "seeing." The key was not so much our action ("the FSM") as the awareness it evoked. In confronting social authority as directly and totally as we did, saying NO and YES in an integral act, we broke suddenly beyond the frames that bound our perceptions and our definitions of our identity, into a primal inchoate space. Here the frames were overtly psychosocial (as all cultural frames are in essence): our mystifications about power, our cultivated competitive isolation, our sense of moral decorum and civic impotence, all cracked open. The reality we saw, the possibilities, who we were—we could scarcely avoid phrasing these in political terms. Yet even as we comforted ourselves with the busyness of organizing a brief amazing democratic cooperation, I think we were staring into the same space that opened for an instant to Castaneda when don Genaro stood on his head—the space that opens whenever we let go deep frames or have them jolted from us, in which we are in the presence of reality before interpretation. Even less prepared than Castaneda to endure it, and as terrified at heart, we shut it out before realizing it, turning our energies familiar.

No sorcerer tended or prepared us or brought us to that place; we came alone and together, amazed at what burst through us. I think sheer simultaneous commitment (multiplied by the felt imminence of death) was the force that briefly broke our collective frames, on this level as on the political plane, and led us to a collective exaltation of consciousness which, however partial and quickly suppressed, we could not have achieved as untutored individuals. All the literature and lore known to me concerning such states of awareness speak of them as being achieved in solitude or as a careful pupil, in small groups under long disciplined practice in some evolved spiritual tradition. Nothing prepares me even to recognize, let alone to understand, the phenomenon when it appears as a natural product of secular action on a mass scale.

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Yet when I turn to history I find our odd experience echoed in accounts of the Paris Commune of 1871, in legends from the syndicalist towns of the Spanish Civil War, from the early days of the French and Russian revolutions. I imagine careful search through memoirs of revolutionary incandescence would uncover many more examples (and versions) of this strange consciousness engendered and masked in the crucibles of anarchy, where in heat and under pressure people take direct responsibility for the production of their world, its social forms, their selves. Mostly I think of all this as my imagination, or my solitary experience. For surely I was unusually prepared to recognize weirdness in our venture, since I had had my world jolted out of familiar aspect by seminal political events before, was fresh from my first framebreaking experiences with acid, and had a crazy pantheistic mind to begin with. But equally I can argue that many shared similar backgrounds, which served as a diffuse collective training. If I suppose that many others also felt those mysterious intimations of vision and power, but were even less able to speak them than I—a poet and the FSM's chief mystical propagandist, who could not speak them at all—if I suppose my reality shared, then awesome questions open.

Suppose the frameworks of individual perception can be broken so deeply by willfully and collectively changing social reality. Can this be accomplished in many different contexts and ways? What preparations of consciousness are necessary for people collectively to "stop the world," and how can they be prepared to endure what Castaneda calls "seeing" and use the powers it opens? If "stopping the world" is at times a natural concomitant of group action in society, what is its place in the scheme of things, in the social economy; what are its potentials for our conscious evolution? I have written elsewhere about the cascade of personal changes that followed the FSM in the lives of its participants. Now I understand those individual empowerments or choice in a deeper light, and imagine that they were our isolated, ignorant, attenuated realizations of the sight thrust upon us and the transformative power that Opened within us. What would be possible in fuller consciousness, alone and together? Could we change our very way of constructing and maintaining social reality—not for historical instants but continuously, entering a higher order of culture? Only in the past decade has a metarevolutionary vision begun to form. Now we speak of revolution in the revolution, of Mao's attempt to renew the "permanent revolution"; we grasp at the concept of education as a continuous unmetered process of growing beyond old frames and integrating new ones, and try to imagine an institutional vessel for this universal solvent. We fumble to express our intimation that there is a different order of transacting change in society possible to us, an integral Way transcending the praxis we now understand, mysteriously and radiantly life-giving. Dimly we are aware that to live in the permanent revolution is to live as different beings, in a different consciousness; but I think that even in the developments in Cuba and China we have not begun to grasp the true strangeness of that consciousness. Is all this merely my arcane fantasy, or has it some practical relevance? It is easy to write off the FSM as a chance, unique event, and its precise historical circumstance is indeed unrepeatable. But do I only imagine I have felt those distinctive energies open in the early Fillmore, the Haight, People's Park, my wedding, a dozen other gatherings of encounter and conflict? It may indeed be that we verge on breaking through into another plane of reality each time we act together to make the world strange and new, however modestly. And the occasions of our consciousness of this may be multiplying, and that consciousness itself evolving.

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For at play in our culture now on a mass scale are many influences that may prepare us, diffusely but collectively, for the consciousness of "stopping the world." Encounter, Gestalt, existential psychologies, meditative disciplines, body awareness—all lead people to live in present time, let go some frames, grow used to the process of breaking frame. Mass psychedelic use conditions us similarly (though it seems to be waning). Cybernetics, linguistic philosophy, kinesics, physics, all the edge cognitive disciplines now lead us to recognize the world as a process of interpretation. Art and literature too move us in these ways; lord knows what the electronic media do.

We do not even recognize mass vergings on transcendental consciousness as historical phenomena, as constructive social force; how then can we predict their preconditions? Could it be that the collective basis of our customary interpretation of reality is being undermined far more widely and dramatically than we can yet appreciate; and that it will begin to collapse in patches here and there, under less explosive impetus than the FSM, eventually almost at will, opening the door of many realities, on Earth as beyond it? We are aware that blind and deathly currents of repression gather in our culture and in us; we strive to make some integral sense of them. Can we understand them as reaction against a coming transformation of consciousness, not to this definite form or that one, but to the solvent state I cannot name?

In this year of our lord 1973, with Nixon in power and Watergate reassuring us that the world is in cold order, all this may seem absurd. Yet already it is clear that the attempt to turn the clock back to the 1950s, before the advent of the threateningly strange, has failed. All the forces opened in the past decade continue to tear the fabric of our consciousness, in a time of reevaluation of America's international position and the nature of man. Do I only imagine that an impulse ten years ago confined to small and mostly political vanguards continues to diffuse through our culture, and that more people than before, albeit in less public ways, are making sharp breaks of frame? And that almost all are quickly clothing the naked Edge they encounter in some limited and static interpretive orthodoxy?

It is this tendency most of all that concerns me—or frightens me, if you will, in some ways even more than the naked Void. During the FSM we were graced by the sympathetic ministry of a young Protestant theologian, T. Walter Herbert—a man unmentioned in its histories, but important to some of us who, even then, were struggling in ostensibly political ways against this urge to tie reality down in authoritative and limited form. Walt saw this as the working in the world of Original Sin. His frame was foreign to me then, and still is largely so. But I know no sharper way to describe this binding, and what we close ourselves from by it, than as our refusal of our godhood. Secular, spiritual, the struggle is the same as it always was: against deathly static orthodoxies that threaten to devour our consciousness, hold our being incomplete. April 1973

Poetry, Psychic Power, and Revolution Sometimes when we are reunited with our godhood in transcendent experience, we again become aware of all this—this paper, my typewriter, your hands, the play of multitudinous forms which we inhabit—as an artifact of consciousness, of the will. At levels beyond our normal awareness we have conspired to create this reality, and maintain it by our belief in its terms. Though it has internal consistencies, it is a somewhat arbitrary Form which we have sketched on the ground of a deeper Reality. Collectively we have the power to erase it, and to will into being quite different realities, beyond even the "absolutes" of space, time, and matter.

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Our social reality is a construct also, a coherent but arbitrary web of relations which could well be other than it is. To see this requires no mystic insight, simply a look at other cultures in which such "basic human functions" as economics, love, and governance are served quite differently. We can imagine yet other arrangements. At certain transcendent moments of history, political or spiritual, we become aware of the power we have to change the rules we play by—not piecemeal but throughout all the dimensions of life, creating a changed and integral conspiracy of social reality.

Marxism gave us a model for how change in one major aspect of our conspiracy—productive relationships—might resonate throughout society, inducing change in all relationships. In Cuba this abstraction was given flesh as workers found themselves bringing home to their families and love lives the attitudes of candor, self-criticism, and collective commitment, newly learned to run the factories in socialist consciousness. Religious movements give us similar models. The authoritarian bureaucratization to which political revolutions and spiritual reformations alike succumb testifies to how deeply the past and its forms are rooted in us. But it does not deny the essential insight of revolution: that radical transformation of the whole complex of social reality is possible. It denies only the false hope that such transformation can occur through a single main lever.

For the dynamic by which we sustain the social conspiracy operates on many levels. I go to cash a check at the bank, chat with the teller. The building and its parts are a tool, constantly reminding us of who we are, how to feel, and what to do. We agree again that these pieces of paper represent things; I do not eat one. Rather I am aware that the entire wheel of the economy turns by my tiny transaction; and I choose to turn it, with a little boy's pride in playing my role, like her pride as she performs for me the stylized professional gestures of her pen. Meanwhile each of us through all our senses absorbs the rapid and total body language of the other, saying, as by the way we remember with each breath to hold our chests just so, "I am a man, I am a woman, we agree to choose among a limited set of behaviors in response to these facts." I move forward, she moves back, it is a dance. Our language mirrors and reasserts the reality we accept as mutual: its syntax reflects the causal attitudes of technological domination; each word embodies a definition of what is real, what not, and how real things are related. That is to say: this social reality is born anew from us in each instant, through our agreements, as surely as this universe is created anew in each breath.

In each breath we create also the most private universe of our perceptions, though here too we engage in conspiracy. As best I know, we all have the power to see into and help heal each other's bodies, to read each other's feelings and communicate over distances, etc. In our culture we agree, by and large, to deny this. By acknowledging some kinds of messages and ignoring others, we teach our children which to regard as "real." As they grow up, the mechanisms they develop to shut out the constant flow of sensory, telepathic, and intuitive data pass from awareness, leaving them free to repeat the lesson. Yet just as I am subconsciously aware, shaking my finger at the teller, of the function of this dominance gesture in the sexual economy between us, so a deeper level of the self remains aware each time we choose not to react to an "unreal" telepathic message for the sake of maintaining a certain fiction of our human limits and certainties. The commitment to this fiction is surprisingly thin; many people find a few hours of certain low-keyed experience sufficient to change their definition of the personal rules to include, for example, telepathy. What maintains the fiction, on the whole, is less negative sanction than the active absence of any language or custom to reflect these realities. Instead, we conspire a language of silence about them.

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Every conspiracy as to what constitutes a perceptual, emotional, social, or material reality defines and is defined by a unique language. Lovers' talk, therapeutic jargon, the Newspeak of the government, all serve this function. In its broadest sense our language is isomorphic with our reality; we cannot change our conspiracies without changing the ways we conceive and express them. We make the events of our realities into words. And even isolated words have great power. When Uri Geller bent forks with psychic energy on prime-time telly, a score of English children learned spontaneously to follow his example. After the word that the seven-foot highjump was possible entered our athletic language, raw teenagers no stronger, no better trained than before, bettered that height by old styles and new. We agree about what is possible; but we can change our minds, given the word. Giving the word anew is the function of poetry. "And new metaphor," testifies Garcia Lorca, "is the core and mainstay of poetry." The mystifications which limit our perception and expression of what "is" are broken in metaphor, where the categories of our language are welded and transfigured. And so the psychic speaks of a cold red, in describing the sullenness reflected in an aura; the Chinese speak of barefoot doctors, peasants transcending bourgeois professionalism to bring medical skills to their villages. In the light of the new social metaphor, the new icon of humanness, all our old words take on new meanings or display their essences anew, like worn pebbles shining in a stream.

Poetry is what makes our language live; and when it is live, the expression of people casting fresh experience into new form, it is poetry, no matter what the textbooks say. In the power of metaphor is rooted the power to change the conspiracy of social reality, the conspiracy of the self. This power is the people's. Every person is a poet born, though mystification and repression lead people to forget it, as they lead people to forget their political and psychic powers, and to believe that all these belong only to a privileged few at privileged times. Every metaphor stales or is outworn in time; every social system, every image of human being is outgrown or must be abandoned; these three ideas are one. To paralyze the people's tongue is the same crime as denying social change or the mystery of our selves: it strips us of our godhood, our capacity to engender new reality. For every conspiracy awaits the Word to begin again, the poet's inspiration that transforms the universes. March 1974

Staring Over Uri's Shoulder During the early 1970s, through a well-managed, international media campaign, Uri Geller became the best-known psychic in the world. Besides several kinds of crass opportunism, the campaign also represented a serious effort to mobilize public opinion, to compel more serious scientific research into parapsychological phenomena.

The campaign was relatively successful. While Geller "caused" watches to stutter and forks to writhe on national television in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan, his backers were at work in the communities of theoretical physics and experimental bioelectronics, arranging, with the most reputable and inquiring minds they could meet, the series of experiments and observations whose subsequent publication* made Geller also perhaps the most intensely studied psychic ever, at least from this perspective.

*

Charles Panah; The Geller Papers (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin & Co., 1977).

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If history remembers Geller, it will not be for his parlor flash, occasionally unmasked as fraud, but for his service as a focus for these studies. For they achieved their modest goal, which was simply to demonstrate, as rigorously as possible, the bare existence of phenomena that could not be comprehended within the present frameworks and interpretations of physical science.

That such had been demonstrated here and there before was moot, for the Geller studies were less a scientific advance than a social event. Never before had so wide and highranking a group of physical scientists formulated such experiments as measured the nature of the crystal dislocations involved when Geller fractured keys; and the publication of their sober observations in prestigious journals of research may indeed have constituted, finally, the formal announcement of mysteries no longer to be ignored.

In the wake of this event, new currents stir in the literature of physical research. Looking into the hearts of stars and subatomic particles, the intimate space between one neuron and the next; troubling the fundamental paradoxes of general relativity and quantum electrodynamics, which have remained mysterious half a century since their formulation; or striking off in new directions altogether—a new wave of researchers, of mind, thrusts at the understanding of the world that we have so far managed, seeking to stretch or open it to embrace these phenomena, in a disciplined fertility of the imagination. If history records Geller's symbolism so, it may also record a bizarre footnote involving an imaginative fertility of quite a different kind: the story of what happened to the scientist who looked most intimately over Uri's shoulder as he did his magics. Andrija Puharich was a key figure in the Geller Event—indeed, he conceived and orchestrated the whole campaign, and shepherded Uri through his public and private performances. For this, and for the social milestone thus achieved, he deserves a modest place in the annals, a grave scientific credit—which he might have had unchallenged had he not discredited himself by acting crazy, casting doubt upon the whole affair just when his long sober labors were coming to their fruition. I heard the story first in bits and snatches, through friends in the networks of psychic research. The tales they bore were even more bizarre than those Puharich chose to put forth publicly in Uri (Doubleday, 1974), his chronicle of the inside workings of the Geller affair. Yet these were enough for most people to write him off as a fool (or worse), who had finally flipped; and to dismiss his account as an idiosyncratic, irrelevant rave.

Staring over Puharich's shoulder as he stared over Geller's into wonder, chaos, and fear, I found his story instead to illustrate—as such extreme examples so often do, in vivid human detail—central issues in the quest of our consciousness to comprehend itself. For the story I read in his book is not, perhaps, the one Puharich meant to write. True, he warns us at the start that Uri is less about Geller than about The Nine, a group of approximately omnipotent entities from another dimension or plane, whose guidance he and Geller have come to accept and serve. But I read the book instead as a drama, candid and historical, about the states of mind of men confronting the unknown; and find in it primordial themes that we seem in various ways to reenact each time we approach the Mystery—themes which so far are unacknowledged, indeed repressed, in the reflections of the scientific literature upon itself; and which reflect and help maintain our social realities.

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In Beyond Telepathy (Doubleday, 1962), Puharich presented himself as a competent imaginative researcher of psychic phenomena, grounded in contemporary physics and biochemistry, and dedicated to scientific method. And so he appears at the start of Uri, nine years older and now also a bit obsessed, when, at the bidding of Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who had returned from orbit to hunt the moons of inner space, he meets the Israeli youngster whom he sees as the perfect tool with which to score a radical breakthrough in the scientific community, fulfilling half a life's self-chosen mission. He does give some account of his first ominous communication "from above," whose significance he would not realize for two decades. But the note of mystery is clean and isolated, and Puharich appears to be his own man.

The book's first half tells the story of Uri: how he learned to do little tricks as a child, didn't quite lose the knack, had it blossom unexpectedly during the 1967 war, and left the army to become a successful two-bit psychic entertainer. Then he met Puharich, who promised him bigger things if he would consent to research; and together they began investigating the marvels Uri could produce, multiplied them, and strove for high-level attention and verification. So far, the story is still almost ordinary. Geller's biography is like that of many another talented psychic; and Puharich's efforts to place him in the eye of science are straightforward. But then the character of Uri changes, so gradually that I was almost to its end before I could identify quite how.

In the drama's second half, Puharich and Geller, seeking more deeply into the source of Geller's powers, begin to be contacted more definitively, and directed, by The Nine, known also as the Hoovans. The Hoovans represent themselves as being from beyond our locale of space, time, and matter, using computerized spacecraft as an intermediate tool to work material consequences here. These include the contact and training of humans; and Puharich describes the strange ways by which the Hoovans assign him and Geller tasks to carry out, testing their faith and abilities. The two are given a central role, apparently successful, in preventing a full-scale world war; and in general are enrolled as underlings in some grand program for Earth, of whose nature they get few hints. The Hoovans are candid about their program's being primarily for their own needs and benefit, though they suggest it will be just about the greatest thing ever for humankind. We learn, with Puharich, that they have directed his career for decades, and Uri's too; that their spacecraft are responsible for most of Uri's odd powers; and that the way society responds to Uri, or rather to the actions the Hoovans perform through him, may determine whether their program will continue, and how, as well as our general fate.

The content of this tale does not perturb me, but not because I am so humanly solipsistic, so much the human chauvinist, as to dismiss it out of hand. On the contrary, like many more sober investigators I have come to take seriously the notion that there arc discrete intelligences at hand other than those housed in fleshly bodies, and that they interact with us in quite complex ways. The Puharich/Geller story is kin to a number of other fairly independent accounts that represent a sudden apocalyptic edge to this spreading belief; and though they arise in the context of a society that is slowly tearing apart, their flamboyance can't be dismissed simply on this account. We are in for an age of increasingly strange social phenomena (and scientific ones as well); and our beliefs about what is are already in the process of being shattered. Weird things are abrew, perhaps as odd as Puharich's intimations, if not quite the same; and I think it is much the better part of intellectual humility to recognize what we have no way of knowing, and to confess our guesses as projections of our wishes.

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I have more or less accepted this. What grips me in Uri is not the content of the story, but the drama of what happens to Puharich while telling it, while living it. At first there is a clarity and singleness of purpose evident, both in the biography of Geller and the talc of his early research upon the lad, and also in the character of Puharich as he writes of these. Then, slowly and invisibly, as their contact with the Hoovans extends, this clarity simply disintegrates into chaos.

The disintegration is most striking and painful around the question of free will, which Puharich avoids completely, at least as he portrays himself as a character in a book no longer about humans but about Them. By its end Puharich is saying things like these: The Hoovans are divine and at ease; there is a great conflict "above" and we are pawns contested by two sides. The Hoovans have it all planned out and are in control; they make mistakes and keep changing their plans. They are candid with us; they tell us almost nothing and sometimes lie. They respect our free will; they compel us to do things we don't understand.

Unless I read it wrongly, it makes no sense: Puharich contradicts himself left and right. Yet the pathos lies within, in how calmly and cheerfully this happens. At the end he is still using the same tone of voice he used in the beginning—the impassioned, stubborn, cantankerous scientist, recounting the experimental data of life. He never gets hysterical; oblivious to the contradictions, he keeps on talking as if what he is saying were still making the same kind of sense, dramatic yet clear and logical. Near the end, recounting the various ways the Hoovans have used, tricked, and confused him, he states his conviction of their benevolence as if it were clear from what he had said. But all that is clear, by the end, is that Puharich himself does not know whether he is his own man or theirs now; and that he does not seem to notice this, nor to care. If one does not simply dismiss Puharich as a crackpot for this account of the Hoovans, but instead reads Uri seriously as the drama of the muddling of its writer's mind and will, one must ask why his pot cracked in this particular way. The question is not minor, for in nosing around circles of psychic research I have met a number of others whose minds have been muddled (if muddle this be) in a strikingly similar fashion. Perhaps their patterns of reaction give better clues to what they are reacting to, than do their researches themselves. And surely Puharich is a prime case to study, given the precise way in which he blew his scientific cover on the eve of a long-pursued triumph.

The key image for me is Puharich staring at his watch, after twenty years of studying psychics in action. It is 1972; the Israeli Arab war is in progress. The globe is tense, the fate of the world hinges on how he performs certain minor actions whose consequences are a mystery to him. The Hoovans stop and start his watch to tell him when. He stares at his watch for weeks; for umpteen pages of Uri he records for us the precise times of its stopping and starting, an obsessive litany, clinging to this incongruous reed of objective data like a man drowning, the scientist stripped back to his most primitive reflex: measure something, something outside the self. The chaos he faces is real before his eyes; but it is also within him. It is the chaos that opens when one frame of understanding has broken down and a new one has not yet formed, and it reaches to the core.

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If Puharich is confused about his own will, it may be because he no longer has a coherent concept of himself, or indeed a coherent identity. This state of transition is common and usually temporary; we tend to reconstruct our frameworks as quickly as we can. Within weeks after antiwar activist Rennie Davis experienced Bliss Consciousness, he was out preaching the Maharaj Ji's explanations and purposes as gospel. Puharich has done much the same with the Hoovan line, at the cost, apparently, of giving up a critical part of his own mind and spirit. For whether the Hoovans are real or a figment, Puharich has begun to surrender his sense of his own responsibility for what he does, and for how he forms his interpretations of his experience. The surrender is most striking, and most ironic, as it affects his scientific self. For there are other ways to understand what happened to Puharich as he stared too long, too deeply, or too incautiously into the well of mystery. One line of logical hypothesis, based in the lore of psychic circles, runs like this: Puharich became prominent as a researcher because he got provocative results while working with quite a variety of psychics. This may in part have been because he inspired their performances invisibly, having himself strong latent psychic powers which reinforced theirs. It is well known that such powers develop further in the presence of others exercising them. Puharich had had much intimate exposure by the time he met Uri, and soon got more. In the wake of their travels have come many authenticated reports of fork-bending and watch-stopping by children quickened by their example. It would not be surprising if Puharich had picked up one of Uri's standard tricks and were himself responsible for the antics of his watch. That people sometimes serve as open psychic channels to others is also well known, so Uri himself may have been using Puharich to toy with the watch that hypnotized him.

Such hypotheses should be obvious to a researcher of Puharich's stature; yet he does not mention them even to deny them. In person as on paper, or so I hear, he remains doggedly uninterested in his own contributions to the phenomena he observes and tries to understand. Given his historical role, and the nature of the subject, this is a stunning blind spot, whose ultimate root, I imagine, is this: that to see fully in himself the mysteries he's investigating, and to see himself as directly responsible for them, is just too much, threatens him too directly with the abyss of not knowing who or what he is. Instead he is moved to place the responsibility out there, on a Them, using this construct of order to reduce his own incoherence to barely tolerable levels. In this light, if we understand his Hoovan talc as his attempt to interpret a perturbing accumulation of such experiences (and as a factor in inducing and shaping them), its meaning is quite inverted; and we are left to ask why he chose this particular interpretation, and whether it is quite so idiosyncratic as it at first appears. Whoever moves the Hoovans, Puharich gives no reason but their say-so to credit them for the antics of his watch, let alone the world's fate. Yet occult lore is rich with tales of how tricky the depraved lower spirits can be; how they lie that they're mighty and move one by suggestion. Puharich knows the literature; what happened to his logic? Why docs he avoid the possibility of his own responsibility for the power, or Uri's, under less-than-sacred guidance? What moves him to lose his balance, to abandon the self-critical perception that should be the trademark of his trade, and to forfeit his sense of autonomy in a marvelously and terrifyingly complex universe?

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Or in plainer terms: what makes a man, well known (though not always kindly) for his selfdetermined and stubborn will, what makes him turn belly-up to off-brand voices in the sky? It is tempting to imagine that he was flawed and finally cracked; even so, the question remains: what cracked him? Standing back from the caricature of a mind-blown scientist that he presents in Uri, looking through it to what he beheld, seeking the sense of his interpretation within its blow-by-blow color, only this much is clear: striving to penetrate the psyche's mystery, Puharich found himself at last in the presence of power, of intelligence, vast, awesome, and incomprehensible.

On this score his story is quite clear, and makes perfect sense. In its essence, as in the metaphor by which lie phrases it, it is of a kind with a millennial wealth of such reports (which have themselves preconditioned the terms in which they are expressed). Such reports are a legacy and foundation of one branch of human science long pursued. In this light Puharich's story was by no means the irrelevant, bizarre embarrassment to the careful "legitimate" studies of Geller which it seemed to be, but was rather their vital and essential complement—announcing quite as precisely, in complementary terms, the same conclusion, the solid and forceful shape of a mystery beyond our present understanding (and one, moreover, which affects the tools used to explore it). If indeed the whole Geller affair has marked a major cusp and phase shift in the interaction of our physical science with the psychic, then the drama of Puharich's complementary announcement in Uri seems appropriate; and has perhaps deeper significance, in itself and for the consequence of the physicists' attempt to come to terms with psi, than we are yet prepared to grasp.

In any case, that Puharich understands his experience of incomprehensible power as he does, through the metaphor of the Hoovans, is a critical matter; and so is his reaction, for whether the Hoovans are real or a figment, in the face of the infinite power and will he assigns them his own power and will shrink to nothing, in a deep self-abasement. One can, of course, write off his account as a weak soul's and "merely" personal, just as one can say that "certain sorts" are attracted to the study of the psychic, and write them all off that way. But if we take Puharich, and the others who have imagined and reacted similarly, in their own lights, as serious, competent and brave investigators of genuine mystery, then we must elevate our view from the failure of their credentials or personalities to ask why the phenomena they explore inspire such visions and reactions. These form one extreme of two camps, with little middle ground. On one side are those who use the blinders of scientific orthodoxy to debunk and avoid the psychic, or who at most seek to establish its reality and technologizable character by the narrowest of statistical and instrumental methods, insulating themselves as best they can from its disruptive resonances in their consciousness (just as their nuclear counterparts gird themselves with lead to approach plutonium's glow). On the other side arc those swept into proclaiming extravagant claims and systems, at basic odds with the present frames of scientific knowledge and inquiry. Staring at his watch as the fate of the world rides upon him, Puharich is stretched across the chasm between, caught in an intimate snapshot of history, one foot still in the camp he is leaving, riven to the core.

Our reality is the surface of a sea, and we are fishermen. There is something out there or inside us, too large or too strangely shaped for our normal nets to encompass; and when someone does catch hold of it he comes to shore with it gone and his net torn and twisted in strange designs. Whatever it is is like the Loch Ness monster: most who look for it find nothing to see, and even the reports of those who think they have seen it are curiously stale and conventional, as if it were nothing truly unusual, but only another sort of fish or eel, built along familiar lines but ten times as long.

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For when we look beneath the exotic surface of Puharich's account of the Hoovans, it reads like many another ancient tale. We recognize the overlords who dispose and rule; the simple traditional postures of relation one assumes as subject to their mighty power, howsoever metaphysically expressed; and the sense of reality being governed and organized by motives and purposes which are felt to be incomprehensible, but whose style appears to be distinctly humanoid, paternal, and generally authoritarian.

So the story goes which Puharich retells, constant in its style through the ages, and simple enough to appeal to every young child whose parents do mysterious things—infecting the imagination with this understanding of the world, and thus providing for its own retelling. It is a regressive story, for it springs from within the self or is adopted in certain states of crisis, when people's abilities to cope responsibly are sharply undermined as they experience again the incomprehension and impotence of infancy. When the shocks involved are cognitive, as in psychic exploration, even more do people welcome the images that will bring even this much familiarity to their condition.

Does the authoritarian metaphor this story involves arise from the archetypal depths of the riven self; from early experience in the family; from the entire weight of cultural tradition; or from all three and more? Whatever, this metaphor grasped by the vulnerable self governs (more than any other) our deepest senses of who we are and where we stand in the order of things, at least as these have been expressed in Western religions and some Eastern ones as well; and through this in turn helps govern our social relations, guiding us to experience and recreate in our social forms the same regressive postures of relation to power—hierarchical, paternal-authoritarian, mystified—that we read in the story. If Puharich seems so much of the time in Uri to be running around like a low-level clerk in an outpost of a ponderous interstellar bureaucracy, this is tribute less to his own lack of imagination than to the integral closure of our system of thought. So the story goes, be it the Hoovans or Jehovah or Kali. And so the truth may be. Who am I, who in more modest explorations have felt at least once the presence of the Christ spirit, unmistakable, though not to me the most profound of those I met—who am I to know? The ancient tradition may be correct.

But it may not. It may represent instead a dull reiteration of the failure of human imagination to grasp what is truly strange—for example, a consciousness that is more than a projection of our own current social perceptions and relations. I confess, I do shiver in delicious and genuine terror, like a kid hearing ghost stories, when I am told by other bright-eyed researchers of pyramids of light again over Jerusalem, and of the plans of higher intelligence to save a few of us in the chaos I feel in my bones is coming. Yet somehow I distrust all accounts, from the Bible down to Uri: they seem to me like meeting the creature from Arcturus and finding that its native tongue is English, though with a slight accent due to the sounds' being produced by mandibles. A bit unlikely, and more, a bit disappointing. I would hope that our imagination and comprehension are capable of more, though it may well be that by their nature they are not.

Our Western vision gives us precious little clue to the shape or nature of the unknown. On the whole our patterns of inquiry, as represented by organized science, grasp only at the tail of the beast, so to speak, measuring a few scales in the familiar terms of material reality. (When the Eastern vision grasps at the shape of the Mystery, rather than describing how we live with it, it fares no better.) Those who jump off the pier of social normalcy to sec the beast head-on report only their own reflection in its eyes, in the most primitive terms, as if what they saw were so strange that they had to grasp at some fundamental image close at hand to return.

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Perhaps it is the very need to understand, as we experience it in this culture, which gives rise to our inadequate and self-parodying explanations, and indeed demands them. Perhaps our brand of cognitive understanding is inadequate to the fuller cosmos, as Zen and a minority of other human traditions teach. We cannot endure our map of the world to have blank spaces; we explore them seemingly for their wonders, but really to chart them in. Truly to be in contact with what passeth understanding is to have a consciousness occupied in large part by a formless void. We are not accustomed to thinking of ourselves this way; we find it, in fact, unbearable. 1974, 1978

Molly's Epiphany I think of my dear friend Molly, a modest therapist, who found herself a witch, the vehicle of strange power, one afternoon on a platform in Illinois. Professor L., the popular and unorthodox teacher who helped arrange the training workshop that brought her to campus, had asked her to address his class. Hundreds of students packed the room, the air was electric—not only because her topic was sex therapy, but because during that very hour the Academic Senate was meeting to decide L.'s fate, after weeks of a vigorous student campaign to save him from summary dismissal, and half the activists on campus were there to wait with him for the news.

But where was the professor? As the tension grew an aide brought Molly the word: stricken with gallstones, L. had been rushed to the hospital, and was being prepared for surgery. Stunned, Molly told the class simply that L. could not be there; and then spoke her piece about sexual dysfunction, gave her trouper's round of advice about why and what to do, and invited questions, which followed aplenty despite the distractions. With ten minutes left in the hour she stopped them. Invested by this prelude with the keys of matriarchal mystery, she told everyone what was happening to L., and asked them to spend a short time in silence with her, trying to share some good energy with him, in whatever way had meaning for them. Molly closed her eyes in a daze, in live certainty, and sought to open herself to images of L.'s condition. Pictures of cells, of tubules, precise diagrams of blockage flooded her mind; she could not stop to wonder whether they were remembered or imagined or yet something else. A silent tension gathered in the room, luminous and palpable in its intensity; she felt her body grow electric, then numb, as she spoke a simple incantation, leading them all to focus on their own images of constriction and unblocking, much as she had led clients' reveries before in smaller, more orthodox therapy groups. The constriction shook but did not open. Molly felt it locked within L.'s body; felt the pressure grow in the room as the energy they were conjuring pressed against some vast block; felt her vision waver; cried out softly to them please to keep holding their focus. There was a snap, a rush, a tumbling flood of images of release, boulders swept before the current; and the strange energy ebbed from the room so swiftly that they all found themselves stranded on the customary beach, drained and wondering what had happened. Molly summoned her wits to thank them, and escaped; for hours afterward, small knots of people were still drifting around, stunned or chattering wildly.

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At the precise moment of that snap—as nearly as could be determined by comparing notes afterward—Professor L. felt an astounding flash of pain, and then its abrupt cessation; stopped screaming; felt himself gingerly, swung himself off the table, and insisted that another x ray be taken before he was given the anesthetic. The two-inch bone-dense sphere in his midriff, revealed by the first x ray, was gone; a few small fragments were coursing down the drain. He got back to campus in time to greet his friends and learn that he had won a brief academic reprieve.* As for Molly, she has not led another such séance in the five years since—except for the time her dog was poisoned, when twenty people around town sent him energy as he struggled in convulsions twice as long as the vet had ever seen a dog manage before, and actually pulled through. Yet even this case was not quite the same. For while the dog was loved as widely and well in Berkeley as L. was in Illinois, Molly didn't really direct the process. Many of the friends she called had already lost their disbelief through their own experiences, and knew what to do on their own. Mostly they just called her to ask whether the images they were getting corresponded to what was actually happening at the vet’s, which they generally did.

From such inquiries as I have made, I would guess that an actual majority of people have experienced, however less dramatically than Molly, such sudden openings of strange power, camouflaged as instants of insight, peak experiences of sex and sport, knowing where or when or what not by accident, but in complete transcendent control. Most, like Molly, seemingly do little with whatever form of power they glimpse. Many—as one finds when one arranges a circumstance to support their remembering—go further, and quite deliberately forget having glimpsed it. Molly's experience is more interesting than the general run because it illustrates more fully the social character of such experiences, and the full stakes involved—as well, perhaps, as why we find it hard to move on them in ways less limited than we do. It is also more interesting, although less readily reproducible, than the usual healing phenomena studied in parapsychological research. For to observe that some high-powered healers working solo can do similar tricks misses the point. L.'s healing and Molly's role were not simply their private experiences and transaction. They were configured as the focus and product of a fully public ritual, in which a political community, joined by common concern and aching for potency in the face of institutional disenfranchisement, worked together to bless and heal a key figure, their friend, themselves.

To treat such phenomena as technologies, as techniques of consciousness which can be wired up in the lab and measured, is a wonderfully useful game. But it's not enough, for no microelectronics can gauge the intensity of the healing field of culture generated by the participants in the field. Welded for seven minutes, two hundred altogether, into an experience too public to deny—which most would promptly encapsule in their consciousness, place on the growing shelf of anomalies remembered with awe—they were at a sudden point of fusion, of re-creation in and as the whole.

Purists will note that this story might also be explained as "spontaneous remission" plus "mass hallucination or hypnosis"; or as a passive collective reception of what was happening in L 's body, rather than a collective influence on it. Since such reductionisrn is, as I argue elsewhere, not always possible, it quite misses the point of this story. their own. Mostly they just called her to ask whether the images they were getting corresponded to what was actually happening at the vet's, which they generally did. *

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This making-whole, this healing, was present not only in the literal union of their energy fields which they experienced, but also on a different plane, in the way the bodily healing was set integrally in its social and political circumstance. This last bears description beyond the dry summary above, for the consonances of the healing act were subtle and deep. Molly found herself an agent of the gathered power of a particular community, brought together specifically in pursuit of free inquiry, action-oriented, by an appropriate leader, a teacher exemplifying the same. From this angle her crazy experience was not at all the anomaly it seemed, but rather a quite natural (albeit dramatic) continuation of their chosen curriculum, improvised in the moment: a piece of free inquiry, action-oriented, in a charged moment of shared suspension of disbelief. (Such experiences are most likely to happen, or to happen in their full power, when political or other stresses loosen the customary constraints of institutional behavior. Whenever they happen, they seem more to find or create their agents than to be created by them. Though Molly, typically, had her own story of why she came to play her role as she did, someone else in that fairly new-culture crowd might well have led some equivalent process had she simply passed on the bad news; and her sense of having been seized by the energy is not to be dismissed as "merely subjective.")

Thus a higher spirit of education was incarnated in their act together, as well as a spirit of healing, and a political spirit harder to name but having to do with self-determination. These spirits guided them in the subtlest task, the deepest one on the agenda today: to recreate not simply community but culture itself, the intimate glue binding together our perceptions, our actions. In the literal and intimate extension of themselves for a public good, in the coherence of the various dimensions of flesh, metaphysics, learning, myth, etc. involved in the act, knowing what they were doing, some deep fragmentation and alienation—so endemic to our condition as to have been the sour talk of the town since Kierkegaard—were for an instant quite thoroughly undone, with a force that, as usual, proved impossible to sustain.

I speak here of spirits in an attempt to be precise about matters for which I have no language. Overwhelmingly the metaphysical religions speak with caution or contempt of the siddhis, the domain of mundane psychic powers, teaching one to go beyond them, as beyond other such matters of earthly consequence, in the course of striving for the Spirit. But I find a deeper purpose in our fleshly play. Precisely because it encompasses and manifests in all, I see the Spirit as incarnate here, presented in these various forms ("the healing spirit," etc.) by which the human generations have named its play. From this humble angle the question of "psychic powers" cannot be set clearly apart from the spiritual quest, just as it cannot be enclosed by technological inquiry. Instead, as Molly's experience illustrates quite compactly, the exercise of psychic powers is inseparably involved with every particular way we make Spirit manifest in our lives.

As for Molly herself, one well might ask why she is still just another late-blooming therapist in Berkeley, taking workshops and studying for the licensing exam, learning to practice a modest no-nonsense blend of insight and behavioral therapies—leaning upon her intuition at times, but little more surely than you or I. Why isn't she out shining it on with the masses in charismatic healing, like Katherine Kuhlman; why isn't she organizing a quiet local network of healers, to help keep the neighborhood healthy?

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Part of the answer is that she got scared. In this case it was not simply the usual existential fright, of seeing herself suddenly in ways which challenged deep beliefs and faced her with the absolute abyss of the unknown. Indeed, this fright was somewhat undercut, as she had had a good share of strange experiences before and, rather gingerly, welcomed them. Moreover, this one happened in plenty of company, reinforcing the net of consensual alternative belief. So I imagine that Molly's fright came also at accepting, rather than refusing, the experience's full and positive implications and demands. For what, after all, does a relatively ordinary person do with such an experience, if she is not so precariously fixed in the orbits of her life as to be blown away by it? Molly had no need to run to a guru to interpret the matter. She had a reasonable framework already, grown familiar during the decade since her first acid trips had taught her to recognize the occasional telepathic experiences that many of her friends also shared. We are energy, the universe is energy, at some meaningful times our energies flow together. Her phrasing of the matter was not, perhaps, precise enough to satisfy the theoretical physicists, whose dimly grasped pronouncements seemed comfortingly similar to her; but common folk are less troubled by quantum paradox, and Molly had been well prepared to accept with delighted awe the night when her breasts started Bowing wildly ten minutes before her husband, off at the drive-in movies with their weaning son, phoned to say he'd forgotten the bottle and the kid wouldn't stop wailing. Nor do ordinary believers in such experiences strive to distinguish between their subtler varieties. If breasts, why not gallstones? If professors, why not dogs? And wasn't everyone's energy up for the occasions? The whole Illinois episode was perfectly credible to Molly; the only immediate question was not of belief, but why me? And she knew why: because she had chosen to do her part in the whole.

Nor was Molly in any danger of making the usual basic mistakes: to think that the power is simply one's own, or that access to it depends on some special person or group or brandname perspective. Instead, because she had wit enough not to take herself as special, the contrary lessons were clear: the power was at hand and in heart, lurking under the surface of ordinary life; it was fully hers, as she had committed herself to evoke it, yet was fully shared, in social circumstances that made perfect sense.

Had Molly known such power simply in private ecstasy or at some guru's touch, she might have been more tempted to the sort of solitary or guided disciplines that traditionally develop one as a spiritual healer. But she experienced instead quite a greater power than any such discipline claimed to develop, besides the bare power of union with the underlying Spirit of All, which she had long since known directly as the basic state of being, however dim her awareness of it on usual days. For even if one chose to imagine this power lost and to be regained, there is still the human question, spirit incarnate, of how we live during its pursuit. And the answer, the power known to Molly during that instant, was as integral as the spirit it embodied. It was the power to create the human whole—not an isolated "psychic healing," but a state of collective being extending from the roots of the private self through idea, community, society, culture, and employed in the instants, the continuum, of human history.

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All this was modestly predicated in Molly's experience: not as some specially sought transcendental glory, but as natural action, the transsubstantiating bread of life, baked in the oven of ordinary days. The experience was all the more organic and whole-grain because it was even less isolated in her own life than the anecdote's drama makes it seem— not only in terms of her prior "private" psychic experience, but because of her place and stake in the community and history it extended. For Molly had been to that campus before, playing a bit part in the ferment of educational reform during the wild late 1960s, just as she had helped host L.'s friends in turn when they came to Berkeley on their own quests of work and maturation. She was linked with L. in delicate webs of community, continuity, and commitment—spanning a continent and a decade—which had formed during the years of the New Left and the Movement, when they sought in political terms the same holy power to determine their lives, to create the human whole from the depth of the self and spirit to the dynamic of history; which had given them such support as they'd had while they sought into the mysteries first opened to them in drug experience; and which had survived the Movement's apparent death, to form the unnamed textures of their lives as they and their friends struggled on with the inner and outer agendas begun in those years. In this context L.'s fight for tenure was just another minor episode in the slow struggle for institutional reform, just as Molly's leading the class in séance was just another little try at making the mystery meaningful, just another brief time when she was privileged to lend what she could to the common good. In this sense what Molly experienced was a moment of Heaven on Earth, full-fledged even in its transience, the integral fruit of her dreams in life. What then could Scientology, the Berkeley Psychic Institute, Muktananda, or the Bible offer her but a weaker vision, more specialized and rhetorical and distant, of what she had known; and its pursuit within a narrower community with narrower purposes? What Molly herself could imagine might be made of life, extending that moment of private and public grace and power, was grander than anything promised.

And that was precisely the problem, the positive root of her fear, which was of nothing mysterious but clean and realistic. For what do you do when you can't deny your own vision, when you can't give it away, when you'd sure like to believe that someone else knows what to do with the whole ball of wax but you can't, and you're left to face the logics of your own small understandings? Molly knew quite well how to get from here to there, or at least how to proceed until a shortcut appears: continue. Continue to explore the processes of meditation, therapy, politics, culture, the purposes of care and of community, the needs of survival, which had led to that moment of power and her part in it, and which led beyond, toward its fuller and enduring realization.

And she knew quite well how long this would take and how far she might get. Ten years had flown by while she watched, around and within her, the slow accumulation of experiences, the slow contagions and transformations of attitudes, which now moved a few students at times to act as if they should and could control their education, which now moved her at times to act in public as if what she sensed were real, which enabled them together to achieve for this one moment the integral fusion—of the "irrational" with the rationalacademic, of the spiritual with the political, and so much more—that this moment represented and illuminated. Nothing was mysterious in this process of change, least of all why it had been so slow and partial, or why it would continue to be so. In this light Molly's fear was simple and clear. It was the fear that comes when you know what is to be done and how important it is, know that you are fully responsible, and realize that you will never be able to do more than begin. As she Hew home from that instant of absolute power in Illinois, numbly writing postcards, the feeling of absolute helplessness swept her; and she laid the cards aside and wept in her impotence, for her fear was equally grief.

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For the next week Molly was confused and at times depressed, much as she had been after her first transcendental acid trips, and for much the same reasons. What she had experienced was, despite her partial preparation for it, totally extraordinary; and yet it was simultaneously so ordinary, the casual stuff of natural life. How could one reconcile the contradiction, how could one act responsibly in the experience's light? To grasp at least one fragment of the whole, Molly thought of seeking training as a psychic healer, though her professional psychic friends soon confirmed her suspicion that no one knew how to teach much more about the basic action of healing than she had experienced already, however interesting the frameworks that were offered to explain it.

The local psychic schools offered courses to teach her to call on discarnate "healing guides"; the Tibetan Buddhist academy provided a much richer curriculum of practices and belief; the nameless healing group her lover was in, which just got together and did it, had invited her to join its weekly sessions long before, knowing her for a natural. Each promised her, within its fellowship of support, an initial entry point into some process of focused discipline, ultimately only her own, which she might develop through the patient years while she learned to manage herself and to conjure the connections and life circumstances which could provide her with people to heal and people to share the task.

Such were the obvious paths open to Molly. Had she been still twenty-one, or been someone still seeking a form to her seeking, she might well have taken her Illinois triumph seriously as a pivot in her life's course, and chosen one path in a radical turn to engage the mysteries. But she was thirty-three, and pleasantly invested in her life's momenturns, which scarcely left her even a free evening once a week to engage such intense new complications. Instead, she settled back into the vital routines of her therapy work and learning, her family, their community; and as their demands postponed from week to week her conflicted impulse to undertake psychic training, she felt it ebb and pass, as if something torn were healing, and wondered why she felt no regret. Perhaps Molly's choice was dictated by rear after all, of the ordinary sort; for most people do find these matters too terrifying at heart to take seriously. Perhaps it represented some more complex failure of her will; perhaps the peace she came to feel about it was only the numbness of repression. But I think something more was involved, as Molly in time came to agree, though she still has not words to phrase the whole of it. For what was the work which had brought her to Illinois and back about, but the same whole from a different angle? Though she did not write her own book about it for some years, she was herself involved in developing a psychic technology of considerable subtle power—and one, moreover, more directly connected with its social employment, which too she was helping to invent. Half the women in the training workshop she conducted on that campus were activists in the local women's movement, and no wonder. For while feminists had taken little notice of sex therapy in the couple-oriented form which Masters and Johnson developed, the women's "preorgasmic" groups which Molly helped pioneer had much in common with the more familiar "consciousness-raising groups" of the women's movement, as well as with the professor's ad hoc psychic healing.

Even the transcendent serpent of Kundalini, which links the self with the cosmos in the peak energies of orgasm, was involved in their nominal quest. Each teaching that the women brought home from the group to explore between sessions—the attention to sensation; the permission to give oneself pleasure, to receive it openly, without expectation, following wherever the path led; the very giving of positive strokes to the body; the strategies against frustration—was in itself a healing meditation, as surely as was the one Molly led in the classroom; nor was it accidental that each had its parallel in that grand event.

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In the groups themselves, ten times in two intense months, the women met who had never known orgasm, five or six in a group with two Mollies to help them share their learning and to lead them through its phases. As they shared for the first time their fears, frustrations, and discoveries, a complex spirit was conjured among them—again, at once intensely private and social—in candid joy. It was a spirit of power: of power within the self, climactic; of power shared, healing themselves together; in both ways reflecting the time's currents of self-determination. The power was also ancient, matriarchal, of a sisterhood grounding itself in the female mysteries. And the spirit of these powers can again be recognized, like the spirit conjured in L.'s class, as a spirit of healing, of learning, of culture's regeneration; each working on many levels, and all so compactly and naturally pregnant in the experience of the groups as hardly to bear description. Best of all, the groups worked, like a charm. Fully five-sixths of the women learned how to climax, not by magic but by dependable processes which many people could learn to lead. By the time Molly tired of running the kind of training workshop that had brought her to Illinois, she and her friends had trained so many group leaders near home that their share of the basic business dropped dramatically. It was just as well, for her own interests in therapy had grown broader and deeper, leading her into the intricate mysteries of family relationships and of the generation and regeneration of the self, and to new teachers, colleagues, and clients to explore these with.

Something certainly was going on in those altered states or consciousness which Molly slowly came to identify at the heart of therapeutic transaction, for client and practitioner alike, in the quiet rooms where she practiced. As with psychic healing, no one seemed to understand fully what it was, beyond some ideas about mild hypnogogia, cognitive paradox, and other hypotheses, which though quite useful in practice were also quite inadequate to encompass the full human energies involved. Yet the books and workshops she sought out and the people who practiced in her clinic's collective were rich with interesting ideas about what therapy was and how to do it better. To take the craft seriously meant indeed to become a journeywoman, and she was set out on this journey of her journey, through the degree and licensing exam that would cover her practice—in time perhaps to lead others into the archetypal wells of dream, into the psychic core, as her Jungian teacher had led her toward healing so long ago. So now Molly continues to practice in Berkeley—nothing fancy, just the bread-and-butter of human pain, twenty-five caseload hours a week, plus staff conference and whatnot, patching up the casualties of industrial civilization while its social mechanisms keep grinding them out, and wondering what to do about it all. Her diagnostic intuitions and her sense or therapeutic timing are growing sharper and more reliable; she does not quite know whence they arise within her or how, but she takes as much care to open herself to them and honor them as she does to learn the ideas that will both rationalize and guide them, shaping her own way from this interplay.

Sometimes she thinks of that afternoon in L.'s class. She herself has not led a psychichealing session since her dog was poisoned. But every now and then someone in her broader family is in trouble, and the word comes round to send some good energy at the time of an operation or whatever; and Molly frees up fifteen minutes between clients, settles down in her pretty office, gets centered, and tries to open herself to the flow. It does feel so good, so clear, when you connect! Perhaps she should have taken that Illinois experience more seriously after all, instead of just accepting it among life's marvels? At times she wonders what became of it, besides compost for her soul, and whether she should have sought training in that power; at times she knows, and knows she did. 1978

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Notes on the Tao of the Body Politic Of Therapy and the Therapist I speak of therapy and as a therapist here in part because a friend asked me to contribute to his book,* concerning the way new perspectives on therapy arise from our lives and pass into practice. This language is convenient, and I'm glad for the chance to reflect on some issues of my life and work and their connection. I might equally have spoken as an educator, healer, or political organizer in considering them, and sometimes do. Yet therapy is not entirely a masquerade in this essay. For overall these reflections are themselves casenotes on an integral process of becoming whole, connected, potent, for which I know no better name than "therapy," though again the others might serve as well. When I think of "therapy," I think of human pain and its relief; or, more generally, of dysfunction (in terms of some notion about what it means to be human, healthy, whole) and its remedy. When I started practice in the late 1950s, the dimension of therapy I chose was social, and its mode was political action. Yet I saw little reason then, and see less now, for making arbitrary boundaries between the practices of social therapy, personal psychological therapy, and bodily therapy. Each dimension of therapy opens into every other, and as my work evolved it came to include elements of all. For every ill has a private and a public root, a material and a psychic expression. I now sec no purpose in continuing to think of these dimensions as separate or independent. We must face their conjugacy. Indeed, the key task of therapy today may be to arrive at understandings, and create practices, which treat the human spirit embodied in society as an integral organism.

In these terms I try to be a therapist. But at a deeper level, though I often violate it I am pledged to the view that "therapist" is a dysfunctionalizing category which deepens some of the problems with which it deals. I want to melt down all the concepts and practices that perpetuate the specialist culture of our bureaucratic industrial age, for they guarantee our general disenfranchisement from power over and within our daily lives. Therapy may remain as a perspective, and skill surely will. But we must learn to be responsible for the fact that we are all therapists and that our every action has a therapeutic face; and we must make a language of some sort which reflects this, and a way of life too. I feel this as strongly about the therapeutic function of citizenship as I do about tinkering with individual psyches. Two things strike me about therapy. One is how complex and intimate the interplay of social and personal factors is, not only in the origin of distress but in the act of its remedy, and in the life of the therapist. The other is how the practice of therapy, social or personal, changes the therapist, leads him or her (if he or she will go) through personal transformations which in turn transform practice, in a slow and integral cycling. These two themes unify the series of snapshots which follow, in which I try to see myself as a therapist in the process of a particular transformation of work at a particular time of history. Ever since the late 1960s, a growing number of political activists, veterans of the New Left and the Movement, have been turning to disciplines of the, body/mind/spirit for various reasons—some say to retreat from politics, some say to transcend it. I'm not sure how representative I am on tin's score, since I see my present turn of work simply as continuing my past. I think my experience as a member of this class may be more interesting for the way it illustrates the interplay of the social and the personal, which may be recognized in more conventional therapeutic life. So I will focus here on this aspect, rather than on more technical or intimate details of practice and life.

*

Dennis Jaffe, ed., In Search of a Therapy (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

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How I Got Back into My Body, in Good Company So how did this former sit-in leader come to find himself in a yoga posture? Human pain led me to politics young; I grew up in the New Left before it was named, and worked in the Movement all through my twenties. My experiences as an activist led me to focus on education as a crucible of political citizenship, and since 1964 most of my work has been in this domain. Attempts to remake educational institutions led me, with my friends, to concentrate on the processes of institutional education, which so determine the fate of our therapeutic efforts and our own skills as learners. This concern with process led us on to develop new learning forms and processes, which involved us in acting out our cognitive investigations by means of theater, through our bodies. This work led us to recognize the importance of the proposition that it's not simply the "whole person" who learns, but that learning is done in and with the whole body. This has led me in turn into empirical research on what it's like to live in and learn in and tend a body.

Thus runs the dry pedigree of my professional interest in the body as a ground of political learning, summarizing the five years before I got hooked. The fuller tale—of how I once was in possession of my senses gross and fine; lost touch with my body in the process of learning to be a man and an ordinary numb citizen; and then set out slowly to find myself again, at first alone—runs parallel, a story in itself, of a sort many people are telling eloquently these days. But I skip over both stories here to begin where my personal and social interests in the body fused into one pursuit. In 1969 nine of us formed the Troupe. We had come to know and learn, we came together to integrate and extend our work in education and to grow toward family. But the Troupe lasted less than a year. Perhaps we weren't committed enough to handle all the energy we conjured together. Certainly all our professional smarts about how to help healthy groups grow proved inadequate in the end, as we could not help ourselves—or chose not to. I omit the complex and painful details; but after this venture's failure I entered a paralyzed depression which lasted two years. Many people were going through similar depressions around that time, perhaps as much from having tried to do too much too soon as in response to the grim theater of Kent State.

The memory of that mixed time with people I love is still precious; and in one way the Troupe was a pure and lasting success. For the vehicle we chose for our work together was theater, and its medium was our bodies. We made ourselves a training program in which we worked with Jerzy Grotowski's exercises and our own, and with Anna Halprin, a fine movement teacher. We each had messed a bit with yoga and whatall before on our own. But working together for nine months was different; it broke us each through into some new space, some different kind of connection with our bodies. And a new line of cooperative work Opened. Doing improvisation postures, we observed that we had idiosyncratic forms. We speculated about them, tried to adjust their imbalances by motions, asked each other to lend a hand, finally got around to touching each other with our own hands in deep exploration. By the time the Troupe blew up we had developed the rudiments of a praxis of body therapy.

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I worked at it alone thereafter, in odd hours stolen from my other life as an intellectual, using improvised yogas, anatomical and medical texts, and psychedelics to feel out a slow program of undoing the warps and blockages I could recognize in my flesh. The details arc humble and not for this report, except to say that as my body changed, how I am who I am changed; and that I found some connections between these changes, during the years it took me to begin unraveling the defensive hunching of my shoulders and the supermanly tightness of my diaphragm and belly. Since lazy childhood mornings with my mother I had always been into back rubs; now I gave them with a new and increasingly clinical eye, applying what I'd learned from working on myself and from the workshops I sought out to extend this. All this body work turned out to be an intense form of meditation, though I did not seek it as such. It affected me slowly beyond my awareness, and drifted me into a subtler consciousness of the body and its processes than I knew how to speak.

Meanwhile life went on. I finished two books; my kid learned to argue; my erstwhile comrades went through their own cycles. Some also had found themselves committed to major programs of body reinhabitation, and to plumbing "the mysteries of the organism." Two years after the Troupe exploded, three of us trickled back together to form a nucleus for the Body Croup, to carry on together this work that had become important in our lives. As I write, the six of us in Body Group have been meeting for eighteen months. We have completed one cycle of exploration, in which we came to know each other's bodies and used them as a laboratory to develop and test out a common practice of body therapy. Now we begin another cycle, more public, finding ways to share our learning with others.

From one angle we are just a group of friends who hang out together once a week, poking at each other's bodies with lazy laughter, a bit stoned, discovering amazing things. From another, we are a political cadre. For the repression of bodily energies is a key element in the functioning of authoritarian social systems, and the freeing and rebalancing of our bodily vitality is perhaps essential to the struggle against them, as well as for the re-creation of a freer order. And we are a political cadre in another, more immediate sense: for the very processes by which therapies of any sort are developed and learned and transmitted are political, and we are trying to change them. In our innocent research we find ourselves in the milieu of "your wallet or your soul." Abroad now are dozens of therapeutic disciplines, from structural integration to Arica, bioenergetics to Silva mind control, which deal with the mind-body-energy interface. We study in a welter of partial bodies of practical knowledge, each in a ferment of development, on a wide front of breakthrough whose connection with the broader culture and meaning within it have barely begun to be articulated. It's a rich new terrain to explore, but the entrance lies through old portals. To connect with the action more seriously than buying a piece of experience at a workshop or as a client permits, you must seek "training" from a proprietary source; for the action is guarded as jealously as any magic spell or key patent might be, and is parceled out through this apprenticing relation. And to get training, you have to pay, either a price that only the affluently alienated upper middle class can afford, or—what may come to the same thing— by turning the better part of your life to service in someone's brand-name enterprise, becoming an "inner groupie."

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I resent both these options bitterly, not simply because I am poor and independent but because their effect is to reproduce the worst aspects of therapy—psychological, physical, political, spiritual—in our society, by which therapeutic skills and goals become, as commodities, the private property of specialist, upper-middle-class elites; the people's capacity for exercising therapeutic power in their own lives, private and shared, withers undeveloped; and therapy itself, as an occasional commodity received by those with no means or roles to integrate its continual practice in their everyday lives, becomes an expensive entertainment, an alleviant to the general distress rather than a root remedy of reempowerment.

With the sorts of training now available comes also a subtler cost, which reinforces the same effects. However new their subjects, most involve equally a retraining in the old lessons of relation between teacher and learner, therapist and client. These lessons define again the authority of expertise; teach trainees the justice of selling it for the most the market will bear, fiscally and psychologically; and ensure that the new knowledge will continue to be created, transmitted and used in contexts of dependency. Of course one can try to separate out these lessons and to imagine better ones, but that is the point. This is how we are choosing to structure these matters in society. There is no freer court of inquiry and creation, accessible to the public and not organized around a royalty, in which this basic wealth of human discovery is shared in and shared out—nor indeed is it easy to imagine its transactions, so bound are we to the narrow notions of clienthood and traineeship. Against this grain, our small group has fumbled on, exploring other ways of learning and sharing power. As a learning collective (a name we have never formally spoken) we have learned how to move collectively and democratically on a complex frontier—together enough for mutual support, loosely bound enough for each to pursue his or her idiosyncratic exploration and development. To this home base we bring back the fragments of learning that we discover in privacy, swap with other friends, or buy on the expensive market. With no leader, but each in turn teaching when ready or directing our processes as appropriate, we share them, compare them, take them apart, puzzle them into new combinations, apply them to our cases.

We find that many pressure points of polarity therapy can be understood in terms of the acupuncture meridian net and used to deepen the effect of bioenergetic release exercises, and we begin to learn how to work with the emotions released. We are cautious, for there is more power open here than we yet know how to use, and no expert at hand even in one subject, let alone the blend, to tell us what is safe or how we put ourselves at risk, but only our trust in each other, our respect for each other's capacities and sensitivities, to guide us. We try to package the theory we achieve, design simple dance forms that two people can help each other through, whose habitual practice will open and harmonize their energy flows, work into the knotting at their shoulders and thighs. Beyond our modest particular knowledges, we have learned new processes, as much social as technical, of learning how to take care of one's body and how to learn collectively; and now we each in various ways move on to teach them to others. We begin to share our developing praxis with our children; we take first steps with friends and peers to pass on what we have learned free or for trade, and encourage them to explore together; we work to free the learning processes of the workshops we attend. Very low-key proselytizers, still we think in terms of power to the people. So much for the political sermon; we do what we do more naturally than it may suggest. Meanwhile, most of all, it is good to be among friends, engaged. The group has been the best ongoing cooperation I've had in many years, warm and intimate without being mushy, strengthening us each and all as we move slowly into the unknown waters of our being.

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A Bit of Strange It is 1970, Cambodia time; the Troupe is coming apart at the seams, my child is about to be born, the streets are full of tear gas, and four are dead at Kent State. In this instant I sit writing, bawling like a kid, about all this and a decade of the Movement, and about the holy language of Energy we are investigating, which manifests in saints and social fire. I write of how the currents of transformation flow strongly through Berkeley and out across America, and how, if you stay open to them, "you are transformed into an active conduit for the common sea of our Energy, lines of its organizing come to flow through you. I think I am learning to feel them in my body. It is frightening not to have a language in which to wrap the nakedness of your experience … ." The odd thing is that what I wrote then wasn't true—at least not yet. In retrospect it seems clear that the years I spent as a political therapist, opening myself to intense flows of social energy in crisis and in intimacy, did indeed have much to do with what I came to experience in my body. But at the time I thought I was only making a metaphor; I couldn't begin actually to feel those lines of energy, and had no intention of trying to, nor real consciousness of what it would be like: all this started to emerge only a year and a half later. Who was writing through me in that torn-open instant, and what did he know? This uncanniness continued, through my hands. The next year, teaching at a new school in the desert of Los Angeles, I lived through again, in weary, vicious five-month miniature, the whole cycle of founding an institution and seeing its progressive essence destroyed by inability and repression. Too much! Twelve years of organizing experience were useless, I could do nothing but suffer; we were all too weary or innocent, and there was no real base of mutually grown purpose to withstand the purge. I had come to teach the politics of institution-building; but in the context of the Disney millions all I could do that was useful, besides be a friend and analyze the fall, was give people back rubs to ease the pain. I found myself doing this a lot, before I realized what was happening. When I did, what surprised me wasn't the completeness of my political impotence there, but this weird pursuit of touch. For I became aware that my hands had acquired a life of their own, or at least a sense. Like blind snakes seeking warmth they nuzzled unerringly to the stagnant clots of energy in whosever frame I touched. Since then it has grown somewhat embarrassing: I touch a friend casually in conversation or greeting, or am deep in sexual interplay, when suddenly I realize that my hands are actively poking into secret pain buried in the other's body, intent on knowing and easing it. The habit has grown less obtrusive but more vivid as my awareness and action have begun moving from naive material poking toward pure energy manipulation.

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One cusp in this unfolding came two years after I started serious work in my body, and shortly before I helped organize Body Group for the comfort of company in the Mysteries. On a night of full moon and transcendent community, I broke through to feeling the energy centers within someone's feet instead of imagining them. It was actually a relearning, for in passing on the knowledge later I remembered the precise incident in my ninth year when I forgot the feeling or repressed it through having no language and no sanction to express it. This time, through a little diligent work, the feeling quickly grew into a sense of having eyes in my fingers and toes, and certain unfamiliar modalities of sensing apparently centered in my head. I learned to feel the ch‘i flow in the acupuncture meridians, in others' bodies and my own, and am learning to direct energy flow into and along the meridian system, through bodily force or by mind alone. All this sounds much more grandiose than is the case. Though amazing enough to me, the experiences are almost too simple to bear description; and as their Hash recedes I learn how widely shared they are and how primitive my own grasp of them is. With regard to these senses I reel like the first organism to develop a rudimentary light-spot, barely able to differentiate between day and night, yet trying for dusk. There are many such organisms in our sea now; as for myself, I doubt that these senses will ever have the clarity that born clairvoyants display, even if I did not cultivate them indifferently at best. And now I teeter on a thin edge. If I have been away from the public front lines of political action for the past few years, after a decade there, it's not only from broader social circumstances but because much of my energy of daring is committed internally. For I ask myself, what manner of creature am I? I have had experiences, now sufficiently reinforced and verified by others', which cut totally across my Western concept of being human and being in a body. I start to feel like some astral starfish, a creature of vivid filmy lines, luminescent in the dark waters, flowing through this meat and able to leave it. Meanwhile I wash the dirty dishes and drive carefully, having learned from acid a decade ago how to endure the dissonance between the transcendent and the mundane. If I allow myself to feel mainly the wonder and not the terror of this opening of my frames, it ain't because I'm not scared. Indeed I sense a thin layer of terror beneath all my consciousness these days on this account, and an increasing one. Lord knows my progress seems so tentative and slow, reluctantly trying to move on through chest-deep mud and constantly lapsing. But it is the quality of this motion that is surprising, to a political man accustomed to being a conscious swimmer in history, making my own choices about direction, if not destination. I mean, it's hard to evoke this sense of my hands having a life of their own. It's not as if they were detached from me, alienated; but as if I were a part of them, perhaps their ass, facing backward to what was. If I judge the displacement accurately, it seems that my hands are leading me into experiences that become comprehensible to my conscious mind only a year or so later. It's like working for a big corporation that moves slowly, so that decisions at the top filter down to the lower echelons only a long time later. Weird! Sometimes it seems that this whole body excursion is like the hands part, leading me on in a fashion not independent of my will, but anticipating it. The Politics of the Body Much fell away as the 1960s turned 1970s, many illusions and some hopes. Emblems of death had been in the air since the Chicago convention; the ideological chaos and disorganization of the Movement was mirrored in people's lives and minds. If we in the Troupe turned to body to go on, it was in part an attempt to ground ourselves in something essential and inalienable. I really felt it this way, that I had chosen to cast myself back on the original solid ground of being. A retreat, perhaps, from the inclement clime? But it came at a high point of venture, and was more an entrance into Mystery.

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For we had come to a curious place together, all of us. As politics grew cultural we realized that deeper forces were involved than had yet been named, or attended to deliberately. We were adrift in questions and potentials: the organizational disintegration of the Movement as a political body was an outer emblem of conceptual incoherence, the inability to synthesize an adequate frame of understanding (and program) to embody all that we had come to realize was essential for the transformation we sought, and for its harmony. This chaos left us free to roll our own, from the materials available. So I turned to body not only for solace and diversion, but also as a political man seeking essential tools and programs. We are a long way yet from making actual the fancy potentials of this perspective. But I approach the body now recognizing, in the tangible dear flesh of my friends, the imprint of "anti-faggot" conditioning that leaves us men tightpelvised and stiff-wristed; the constricted breath that goes with emotional repression and is taught for the sake of industrial homeostasis; the numbness that permits us to ignore what our bodies are telling us about the environments and ways in which we live and our reactions to the orders we obey; and so much more that follows from the simple thesis that our social condition is reflected in our bodies, arid can be approached through them as well. More broadly, I think the politics of repression which maintain our culture's inequities have dictated that we cut ourselves off from awareness of the many ways in which we so intimately intermesh with each other. The barriers seem thick, yet we can see through them: as we find through such primitive disciplines as "mind control" training, as little as twenty hours of gentle deconditioning, via practice in letting images form while in light trance ("alpha") states, is sufficient to enable many people to sense in some beginning detail the inner condition of another person's organs and moods, and perhaps to influence them as well, help him or her move toward health. It is impossible not to recognize what this means about the intimacy with which we do cohabit the universe, and the social space we share.

So when I come this year to ask certain old questions—How do authoritarian structures work, and at what levels of the psyche do they breed and persist? How does the middle class manage to remain insensitive to the suffering of others which secures its privileges? How can people be led to that opening of self-awareness in which any real politics involving them must be grounded? How can we construct participant-democratic groups and organizations in which information and decision making are truly and deeply shared? How can we devise a "political" process that pays harmonious attention to the inner and the outer aspects of being and change?—when I come to ask these again, I have some "new" material to put into the search for experimentally verifiable answers. For if telepathy/telempathy, for example, is as basic a human power as I'm coming to understand it to be, its repression or deliberate cultivation is a political matter, bearing importantly on all such questions.

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I speak of bodily and psychic matters together, for one leads to the other if you don't stop short. In this day of Wilhelm Reich's belated popularity, it may be faintly credible that living in touch with our vitality in reawakened bodies is integral to the pursuit of the revolution we dream is necessary. Yet no one I know in the political branch of the Movement has gone beyond to argue that we must take the matter of the "vibes" between people more seriously, to the point of realizing ourselves in strange dimensions of being in this pursuit. Yet such might be the case. Sometimes when I see all the Nixonian ugliness perpetrated in my name I feel impotent and guilty, and long again, despite the guns, at least to be throwing tangible wrenches into the machinery, to cry it stop. But confronted with an imagined legion of Movement brethren who accuse me of pursuing an idle bourgeois indulgence in experience and entertainment while the Empire triumphs and crumbles, I reply that no such stupendous change in our conception of humanity and reality can come about without the most profound social and political ramifications. Though for the moment these appear confined to the rise of Uri Geller and the Growth industry, deeper images and consequences are brewing.

Meanwhile we pursue a modestly social aim, banding together in Body Group to make a nonexploitative model of sharing the knowledge of healing. For here is the political core of therapy: is fixing body-minds, like fixing cars, to continue to be a specialist matter, or is power to pass to the people? "As long as there are doctors," said Lao-tse "the people will be sick." The truth of this is measured by how unable we arc to maintain our own health. And so beyond Body Group's humble backyard molehill of mutual learning looms a mountainous sector of the capitalist economy, the $140-billion-a-year medical industry. Liberation here means first, for all people, power over our own lives: if not yet a noncarcinogcnic environment, or a government (unbought by industry) to get us this, then at least good nutrition and new access to the objective knowledge and internal powers we need to maintain our own and our loved ones' bodies in health. For me, even the modest goal of taking adequate care of my family seems many years off; but already I feel the broad power behind an integral praxis of health that can be learned and passed on by its users. With a clarity of potential I see in few other fantasies, I can see changing our culture's consciousness, person by person, and just wiping out one indelibly exploitative way of handling precious health. And I see that to do true transformation of medicine as a power institution, rather than just to reengineer its techniques and redistribute its fruits more equitably, will require measures of no less depth and magnitude.

Life is slower than dreams. At present, friends are starting now and then to come to me for relief from some minor distress; and I try, as in organizing, to learn to teach what healing I can catalyze. In precious irreversible experiment, which I handle casually for fear I botch it, I pass colored flows of energy back and forth with my young son as we lie in long wordlessness on the summer bed. I fumble for a way to help him find validation and language and exercise for realities and skills he has not yet learned to disbelieve; and wonder how much I'll be able to help him avoid the long blindness and minuscule rediscovery that has been my experience. I already see some minor but real integration of these mysteries in my everyday urban experience, and wonder what kind of cognitive climate that will create for him, what sorts of political and therapeutic sensibilities might grow up in such soil.

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The Cycling of Personal and Social Change The Movement gave me much occasion to see how healthier social conditions, often no more than a mist around our collective action (or .a perspiration generated by it), freed people's energy for therapeutic personal change, often in directions outlined by collective analysis but still inalienably private; which in turn freed energy and pointed directions for action to make the society healthier. As I grew from a brash kid of seventeen in the New Left through a struggle that kept evolving to a weary warrior of thirty-four in some confusion, I lived through enough of these cycles of private and public therapy, and saw them enough in the lives of my friends, to recognize them as such, to chart their periods and grow familiar with their rhythms—and with what happened to individuals and to movements when these rhythms, and the needs beneath them, were not honored. I came to believe that we must know these cycles, go with them, tend them; and that tins in itself is as important as the pursuit of cither of the two great conjugate streams of therapy which arc the cycles' ground. Much effort is spent these years on finding ways to make our society healthier; much effort explores ways for people to realize their wholeness individually. We are coining slowly to realize that these processes are vitally interwoven; but our consciousness of how is pretty dim and rhetorical, and we nourish the cycles mostly by happenstance. Both ideologically and practically, it seems to me more important now to construct the connections between personal therapy (learning) and social therapy (change) than to seek to extend either as such; for attention to their cycling will itself give rise to their extension.

Under their grand face these abstractions reduce for me to the rhythms of my life, as I go on striving to be a healthy person in a healthy society. Fourteen years, an adulthood, in the Movement kept alive a part of my soul, gave me a program for personal reconstruction that I shall not accomplish in this life, even with the thin, dear help of my friends: to be open in my emotions and present in my experiences, accepting of my spectral sexuality and nonoppressive in all my relations, capable of deep commitment and ultimate flexibility, empathetic with human and plant alike and connected to the Infinite. All this and more was outlined by the thrust of the various streams of our collective movement for liberation and justice. And I am somewhere following this program, more alone than I would like to be, struggling and indifferently successful.

It is the summer of a fallow year; rain will reveal how much the soil has been nourished. My last tour of active duty, running around America trying to organize change, lasted six years. By the time I understood the cycle it was clear that I was running too long and would pay in down time; but work has its own momentums, and it took two years more to disengage. I was off-rhythmed by the general contagions of energy in the late 1960s: so much was opening, so much needed to be done. When I turned inward, literally, it was partly because I needed a change of pace, a time and way to integrate the inner implications of what was going down in public. (I may be wrong in assuming that only in our time have social therapists begun broadly to be aware of such needs; but it seems clear that personal therapists rarely face their complementary need to investigate periodically the outer implications of their work in the world which surrounds it.)

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Part of growing up is coming to see the cycles in longer perspective. Turning thirty, I grew able to see them in years instead of months, and to plan for them somewhat. When I finished the two books which brought to closure a phase of my work in the Movement, I knew I should need some long-term R-and-R before I could engage so actively again. I kept a professional toe in education, but mostly drew back to savor my son's first years, tend my love for my lady, and write privately in my journal about being a father and a son, about death, about the body. This time of tending private gardens has stretched four years and is not near ending, as my son's life leads me into deeper perspectives on education and my hands lead me on at their own pace. At times I think of my excursion into the body and psychic domains in this light: that six years of heavy-duty service on the social-change line, with only partial rhythms of rest and recuperation, built up in me a change, a potential for personal change, which, when I let up, might have spun me in any of a number of intense directions, but which spun me in this one (for reasons dynamic in my work, in the time, and in who I was) and perhaps toward an intimate breaking and re-creation that is quite as radical as anything I proposed for society. I use this perspective to counsel myself when it seems, as it often does, that I have abandoned a struggle faint-heartedly, lapsed into a safe (if not entirely comfy) privacy whose social relevance I only rationalize. The daily and chronic atrocities of the System confront me, call to be dealt with, while I consider how memory is cramped in muscle. I observe how minimal my progress is, seemingly with a tenth of my will, and energy sapped from the days to I don't know where. I know now how slow something new grows, while old projects uncompleted beg me to attend them. Still the matter of values seems constant to me: even in the context of occult and spiritual knowledge, it seems right, it is just, to use power to better the material lives with which my own is intertwined, as well as their other aspects. Yet doing massage is not by itself enough to satisfy my need for political engagement and my sense of social purpose.

The line that distinguishes radical politics from vague goodwill is drawn, I think, by the deliberate choice to work to reconstruct the collective structures of power which determine our lives. I mourn somewhat for my father's day, when it was still possible to believe that an informed electorate and workers' control of General Motors were a sufficient program. Now a sufficient politics must root itself more deeply, in educational process and in the body, among other places. It wasn't hard for me to see and justify the consequences for social action of educational reconstruction. But the body is a stranger ground; and though I already see in its lessons applications to the process of social action and the re-creation of the medical industry, I imagine that the full integration of its mysteries with politics will take a long time, and unfold in ways for which we have as yet no adequate language. Meanwhile I slog along, in the early stages of a progress that leaves me somewhat necessarily blind to where its energies are bearing me, and to how they will mature in social application. When I am not chiding myself for failing to press for a strategic position in the guild of healers now forming in Berkeley, I counsel myself against an impatience born of all my past active engagement, and tell myself not to anticipate too early the form reengagement will take.

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An Anecdote About the Interplay of Personal/Social Therapy When I finished my second book, On Learning and Social Change, a chapter of theory about decentralized educational institutions was missing. The book implied it, and I knew its demonstration was already present in the "counterculture's" learning experience; but strain as I would I couldn't get my mind around its concepts. For a year more they brooded in me, while around me grew the funky subinstitutional structure which embodied them, and while I worked on body. Shortly after I first felt clearly the ch‘i flow in someone's meridians, I went on business to New York. For nights before my trip I was inhabited by vivid dreams. I saw my body as a space of fiery points, dark and vast as a galaxy; and among them tendrils and webs of energy arching, glowing through strange colors, constantly changing, as if the aurora borealis were strung on the stars and gone wild, I think now. At the time it seemed like the mysteriously ordered flickering of lights on the face of a vast computer, but with sensate shimmers and washes of color, like the skin of an octopus flushing with emotion. When I got home, with a dozen things on my mind to write about, I sat down at the typewriter. What came out was unplanned: an essay sketching the structure and process of a decentralized institution of alternative education (or therapy, if you will);* involving ten thousand working nodes, small groups alive with energy and interlinked in mutating connection, a network of seasonal flushes, fields of radiance. And I was illuminated with more than the pleasure of having got my mind at last around these few simple concepts which extended an old line of thought. For pretty clearly, it was my body experience which fed through my dreams and set my mind free to conceive. I suppose the process ran something like this: we see the world outside ourselves as our extension (though not only this), imagine it shaped in our image, imagine ourselves in the image it reflects back to us. In particular, we see the social body as we see our own, with sharply differentiated heads, stomachs, nerves, muscles, etc; and so our images of change in it are cast in terms of bodily mechanics and metabolisms. In coming, simply but profoundly, to see my own body differently, in terms of different governing metaphors (not replacing but extending my culture's set), I was establishing a ground from which to begin to re-envision and revise those matters for which we use body as metaphor, in particular the structure, metabolism, energetics, and health of the social body.

I have no idea how deep this revisioning will go, or how slowly. What made it visible as a process was the fortunate coincidence of a problem on my mind, which let a radical shift of internal perception be reflected directly in analysis of external forms. Here personal therapy and social therapy feed back and forth through one person, a Movement writer in a body; for equally it was my experience of years of trying to organize decentralized learning forms which opened my mind to accept the reflection of metaphor and see myself vividly as a decentralized learning form. If I had not had around me, and helped to make, a deviant social environment which was, at an archetypal level, already somewhat harmonious with the image of self dawning in me, would I have had so readily, or at all, the experiences which prompted me to accept this new image and explore its promises and considerable fears?

*

"How We Learn Today in America," Saturday Review, August 19, 1972.

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A Broader Perspective of Therapy I started out oppressed by social wrongs, and tried to oppose them. I learned that we had to clean up the operations of social power, and tried to do so. I learned that for this we had to re-form the structures of power, and tried to do this. I learned that for this we had to reform the processes of power among ourselves, as radical political actors and as citizens, which meant to re-form ourselves as human beings—not independently of the other projects, but in and by their processes, and as their ground. In this sequence I shared what I see as a key development of Movement consciousness in the white middle class: from action on behalf of unknown others who were wronged, to seeing myself as among their oppressors, to action on my own behalf, as well and first, through coming to recognize myself as victimized and oppressed in ways which ultimately were key to the oppression of those others. A parallel development in the psychology of radical political process took place during this time (1958 to 1970). The belief that the cutting edge of radical action was change in political and economic institutions was faced with competition from the belief that the vanguard action was to lead personal lives which as far as possible embodied the conditions of society we wished to bring about.

The potentials for active harmony between these thrusts "were rarely sought, or, I believe, understood. Instead a conflict ensued, for sufficient reasons; and the streams of our action divided all too much between the pursuit of traditional political goals by traditional means, and the attempt to live differently. I found myself often isolated and lonely on the tangled ground between these streams. My late 1960s were marked by fruitless visits to the SDS national office trying to convince people that educational process was important, that the way we learn together affects how we are able to function in political action; and by equally fruitless attempts to talk usefully, in country communes, about the relevance of the war and racism. Often enough I felt like a freak, unable to be at home in cither stream of action save by denying half of who I was. If therapy is to heal, make whole, what therapy was there possible for me but to try to remake my surroundings? You are the tool you make yourself, as well as more. If I had pursued radical politics in an era when its strategies seemed clearly determined and its tactics engaged fewer dimensions of life, I might have grown into an adulthood and professionalism as stable, in their way, as those of any ordinary bourgeois. But I pursued politics (therapy) in a time when its nature was changing radically. What is wrong, what needs to be reformed, what constitutes political (therapeutic) action—all these questions have opened up drastically in my mind and many others'. In trying to keep on dealing with them, the law that "making change changes the changer" has led me through evolutions of work and, more slowly, of personality, which might well have been less variegated and more secure in a stabler clime. Once it had been established in many minds—I believe for the first time in history—that members of the "privileged" classes could relate genuinely to revolution as a response to the pain in their own lives, rather than only the pain that others felt; and once the American mystification which restricted the adjective political to describing the electoral process had broken for many, admitting even sex and the biochemistry of madness to its domain … well then, a great wilderness opened to us, and we are not even recovered from the shock, let alone finding our way.

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In politics is reflected our culture's general state of shock. Here it can be seen that the visionary task is no longer "simply" to redistribute equitably the material privilege and power of the few among all, itself a task in which we are losing ground; but to re-form even those conditions of life which recently we offered to the world as model, in view of the stifling of life and freedom we now can recognize in them. The Soviet bureaucratic state tells us about revolution too narrowly conceived; China tells us each culture must find its own way. And we are here, with all the colors and genders and ages and occupations learning to demand the basic rights: just at a time when technology forces us to recognize the gestalt organism we have become through it and the many varieties of general death we have set ourselves up for; just when our concept of human nature is breaking open radically; just when the handwriting on the sky says that we must change our middleclassamerican way of life, change it more deeply and abruptly than any civilization has been called upon before to do. In this circumstance I think it no wonder that the positive function of ideology has disintegrated, leaving adrift citizenry and radicals alike. No one, no group, has been able to grasp all the needs and implications which have opened and offer us a formulation of goal and strategy which embodies them fully enough to deserve allegiance. We are left to formulate from the morass, each alone, some sense to apply to the tiny patch of turf on which each of us labors. We are in a chaos. It has some healthy aspects, for from the rich bewildering drift of old and new input many different patterns of dealing with reality are emerging. But too many are adrift and paralyzed by the overall lack of sense; and the rest cling overtight against this to what they think they understand. Fadeout on Therapy In this chaos I experience the stripping away or radical transformation of my definition of myself as political actor. At first I saw as political only my actions of social protest and electoral citizenship. Fifteen years later I see as political every use and limitation of my consciousness, how and where I shit and touch my lover and repair my car. Do I retreat from my Marxist forebears or go beyond them, in seeing not a single prime determinant of our condition, as they did in productive relationships, but a total web of factors which will not permit the mechanisms of homeostasis and change to be single-mindedly approached or explained in terms of linear causality? Talking with the other parents about playgroup sexuality seems as profound politically as piling another brick on Watergate, planting a garden and hugging people as essential as wildcat strikes. After ten years of mulling them, the connections among all these matters have become familiar, I can hardly recall what it was like not to see them.

This collapse of traditional categories—for that's what I'm talking about—didn't just happen to me while I was standing in the crumbling mind of the time. I sought it actively, as a consequence both of my own psychological proclivities and of the understandings I was reaching through my work about education, authority, specialization, and the very process of Western thought; in general about what was dawning in our culture and what was to be desired. And having in my mind smashed some of the barriers that divided an integral society and self into fragmentary processes, I find myself in the odd experience of seeing everything with almost equal vividness through the lens of ultimate politics. On one extreme this invokes in me a deep terror: not being able to define political actions as those which are so primarily in themselves leaves me unable to continue defining myself as political man in any familiar way, and my sense of who I am falls apart in an area quite important to me. On the other extreme there is a modest but transcendent bliss involved in coming to experience myself no longer in fragments, but with my political man and my learner and my lover and my parent and my technical man and all those folks somewhat inescapably one.

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"Political" is still a useful term for me, though beyond a small circle I feel like a relativist among Newtonians, making sense only in limiting cases. When I look through the political lens now, I see that all that I do is an essential test of holiness, politically speaking. And I begin to think of myself as political man now as I did of the Taoists who, I used to imagine, finally pursued the Way intensely enough to disappear from what they were doing, and came back later to résumé those same lives, outwardly indistinguishable but transfigured and transforming. 1973, 1978

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IV. A Phenomenon of the Seventies Preface: A Cold Night, a Quick Shuffle I first became aware of something called EST—an organization, a process—through enthusiastic rumors, which called it unique, as rumor did every enterprise of consciousness transformation that sprang up during the decade. Few, however, had the taste to name themselves explicitly after the charismatic leader/organizer at their core, as Erhard Seminar Training did when Werner Erhard began it in 1971. Soon enough EST touched my life more directly, at first through coy messages in my newspaper (EST's only purchased publicity) to announce that its latest mass "guest seminar" was sold out well in advance—which it regularly was—announcing also a unique sophistication at least of advertising style.* Then our connection grew more intimate, as a friend came back transformed from the basic EST immersion process.

Jason had been a somewhat troubled man before, like so many of us. His change seemed sudden and remarkable. He became unfailingly cheery and optimistic, stopped snapping at his kids and the wife he finally left, abandoned various crutches. Radiant and intense, he had taken himself and his life in hand as his own responsibility, and seemed altogether improved. And he gave me the creeps, or, as he would say, I chose to feel them—as I did, rather than wish them away. It wasn't because he spoke with the smugness of one who has just discovered Jesus but is too polite to proselytize; nor because his eyes shone, since everyone's do when they're on fire, whatever the spark. There was instead some rigid and mechanical quality to his way of conceiving and dealing with everything—ideas, others, himself, it made no difference—always there seemed something cold, desperate, tightly controlled within the appearance of warm ease and calm which he wore so pleasantly and used to such genuine good effect. Moreover there was the matter of anger. It was no business of mine if Jason had suddenly, against former inclination, ceased to get angry about anything whatsoever for any reason, as one presumes adults are responsible for experimenting with themselves (though as a friend I could not help but cock an eyebrow). But when the kids in the play group Jason helped run—a normal, squabbling pack of late two-year-olds—started telling each other in childish mouthing of the adult formulas that they shouldn't ever get angry, and that whatever pissed anyone off was his or her own fault in the first place, I grew uneasy.

All in all, the dissonance was extreme, and put me on edge every time. Whatever Jason had been through was potent and complex. Wanting to know more about its spirit than he could tell me by describing its process, I went as his guest to an early mass EST seminar—like any, an evening with Werner.

The coyness was consistent: to advertise its modesty EST insisted on the lower-case "est" as its name, a convention ignored here—though I dwell below on EST's general dependence on paradoxical intention. *

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All I remember is the totalitarian chill I felt as I sat in Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, watching 3,000 people lap up Erhard as he rapped it all down to them, and wondering why I felt more terrified there than in any violent demonstration of the 1960s. Erhard's overt message was that reality is not what we take it to be; and everything he said, from his use of quantum physics’ metaphors to his peppy recaps of what all the high teachings teach, seemed to me true enough, if hardly news, and even rather well put. But this truth and clarity were beside the point, for the medium was the active message: a theater of degradation, lit harshly by the condescension and scorn of Erhard's attitude and words. It wasn't just that he told us repeatedly what stupid fools we were for thinking and handling our lives as we did, for even such language may serve a didactic purpose. His scorn for our stupidity was more than didactic: it seemed real, sincere, superior, complete. Look at me, he was saying in essence, prancing on the stage, I'm the model of how you should be, I'm with It and a winner, and you 're jerks and losers because you're not like me. And 3,000 heads nodded yes, and 6,000 hands clapped at his bons mots of general cruelty, convinced that they were grace. What chilled me was not simply the glad subscription to insult, but the spectacle within it of relatively intelligent people handing over their minds en masse, if only for this while, for someone to tell them what was and who they were. It seemed a deep debasement. Yet Erhard clearly had a terrific sales pitch; the rafters rang each time he paused for effect. Whatever was being sold there was more precise and powerful emotionally than intellectually, and people were hungry to buy it: the waiting lists for the EST "experience" were stacked up months in advance.

Given that our evening's tone was a foretaste of the experience itself, I could see why Jason and the other EST "graduates" I knew by then so often sounded as if they had been miserable, wrong, lost, and now were saved, healed, redeemed, right. And I could see why even people who hated Erhard for his arrogance of judgment, but paid their money anyway because some friend had genuinely benefited from the experience, so often came out adoring him. For how, if you learned something positive that was indeed of the nature he claimed, could you not at some deep level be grateful to, and internalize the broader judgment of, the man who did it to you so intimately and against your former will? Especially if he taught you that you did it to yourself? As the 1970s advanced, EST and Erhard prospered, becoming for several years the hottest, or at least the most-discussed, operation in the new consciousness industry. By 1975 their reknown had spread from its San Francisco hotbed origin; journalists in national magazines were variously pumping Erhard up as the most remarkable man on earth, or singling EST out as a prime example of the psychic boot camps of the day, and a prime purveyor of the narcissistic ideas and attitudes that led Tom Wolfe and others to call this "the Me decade." Lord knows, the attention was justified, both for the weight of the issues involved, and because the EST/Erhard operation was indeed, in every aspect of its working, such a paradigm. Some of these aspects seem to me still to be worth discussing, less as reportage on EST itself than because they suggest how an organization more overt in its social goals than EST, and more effective at mobilizing broadly the energies I witnessed in that auditorium, might proceed in times to come.

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Technique: The Totalitarian Classroom Game The EST "experience" itself received much attention as a paragon of aggressive pedagogy. Two hundred people were herded together through two weekends of marathon sessions, endured hours of superamplified harangue, were kept from eating, peeing, moving, sleeping; sometimes the doors were locked to keep them in. It was a process of deprivation, discomfort, assault from above and from peers; of isolation, fatigue, and depersonalization—except for the many hours of guided meditations and visualizations, per the leader's instructions, in a state of light hypnogogic trance deepened by all these factors. These features of the process seemed adequately to account for its impact, and few critics questioned it further. You can teach almost anyone almost anything by such methods, and many people were disturbed by their sheer macho character and seemingly fascistic tone. Yet the righteous indignation of outsiders was betrayed by the righteous fact that EST enthusiasts appeared to know quite well what they were getting into, voluntarily; and on the whole to be quite happy with what they learned, which in its application to their lives seemed more often than not benign and powerful, at least in immediate consequence. Given this, critics were mostly reduced to carping about the pernicious social ideas which people seemed to absorb in their EST training (which I shall describe below). And all that most could say, in response to EST supporters who claimed that the process was unique and that it was impossible to judge it (and EST) without going through it, was "I think I know what you mean, and no thanks, no way." The less polite said, "The smell is enough, I don't have to step in it to know what it is"; but I think they were mistaken. For there was indeed something more special about the EST process, some precise trick intimately connected with the experiential knowledge which EST claimed to teach, which neither friend nor foe ever discussed in public so far as I could tell. By an unlikely accident, I had a modestly unique perspective on what it was—or so I think still, as I myself had run a consciousness game somewhat like EST for several years, in quite a different context, and had already described in print some of its remarkable character. We called it the Totalitarian Classroom Game.* It was developed by a young professor, Neil Kleinman, who was deeply involved both in the study of reflexive theater and in developing a brilliant analysis of the social-iconographic processes, the manipulations of aesthetic reality, which underlay the rise of fascism in Hitler's Germany. Moved by the spirit of educational reform then blooming on the campuses (1968), Neil brought these themes together into a game which he played with the English class he taught, to try to decondition the students from their accustomed roles of learning; and I developed the game a bit further as I took it out from Neil's campus into the broader network of educational reform, where it spread and perhaps is still played here and there.

'Cherishers of irony will note that these details are genuine. A brief account of the TCC appears in Change, January 1970, reprinted in Inside Academe: Culture in Crisis, by the editors of Change Magazine Change Magazine Press, 1972; fuller accounts appear in Glamour, August 1970, and as the first chapter of my On Learning, and Social Change, Random House, 1972. See also Neil Kleinman and Bill Kinser. The Dream That Was No More a Dream: A Search for Aesthetic Reality in Germany; 1890-1945, Schenkmian Publishing, 1969. *

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The TCG's gimmick, its key technique, is simple and profound. It begins as a general discussion, led by the teacher, of how people conduct themselves as "good learners" in the social space of the classroom and alone. Then it turns reflexive (i.e., self-descriptive) as the teacher begins to point out the ways in which each person is playing out the detailed social roles of "good learner" that he or she has been conditioned (and has conditioned him- or herself) to play, even in the very act of describing his or her own conditioning. The game becomes excruciating as the teacher—by now aided by a wolf pack of willing critics who have got the (first) idea, good students all—rubs everyone's face in the fact that they still can't stop playing their conditioned roles, even knowing what they're doing. The dissonance, pain, and confusion mount, sometimes to incredible heights; the players' senses of reality and self begin to come apart; and then there is a snap, a leap of consciousness, as first one in detached amazement or angry rebellion and then many realize that not only their own acts but the entire social situation which these support, this present theater of authoritarian pedagogy, are only voluntary constructs, limited and limiting, which they may then begin to recreate, both alone and together. Like the TCG, the EST process depended upon such a cognitive and psychic jujitsu, working consciousness against itself to "raise" it to a "higher" level. Using the literal metaphor of its participants' discomfort, subjugation, etc., EST drove them to realize that their general senses of frustration, impotence, oppression, etc., and the ways they went about acting these out in the world, were vitally ("totally") of their own creation—old programs, so to speak, which, once recognized, could be discarded and replaced with new programs.

EST made a big deal of the process, as if it were a trade secret; Erhard's coy formula was that the idea of EST was to get "It," but that there was no It to get, only the truth that "what Is, Is"; and sure enough, EST graduates agreed. But this is surely true, and every high teaching that has taught it exponentially has depended on leading its students by some version of this key process, this jujitsu, to encounter and transcend their own habits of shaping their consciousness—though most teachings, through their own uses of koans, meditations, etc., have chosen gentler and often less authoritarian ways of preparing this encounter. The thrust of such traditional practices is spiritual; but Erhard and EST turned this psychic technology to secular use, to inspire people to recreate their personal lives as they experienced them in the world. As for Neil and I and our friends, we were not so spiritually hip in those earlier days. But we were secular with a vengeance, as the TCG was created just before we went to the '68 Democratic convention, in that ambiance of commitments. And though we never "processed" more than a handful of people compared to EST's hundreds of thousands, and affected quite more modestly the lives of those we touched, the differences between our uses of this potent technology and Erhard's (and tradition's generally) are worth remarking.

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The key difference was that in our games the roles examined and the consciousness transcended were both personal and social, simultaneously and inseparably; and our goal likewise was both personal and social, to recreate not only our private learning styles, but the modes of learning we pursued together, and ultimately the institutions of learning through which we pursued them. In this "holistic" operation, the leader of our game was not insulated from cither its cognitive or its social processes of transformation. Instead, he or she was on stage and vulnerable as an agent and player of the game himself or herself; and was led by self and others to confront his or her own construction of self, his or her own tricks and reasons for playing the classroom tyrant (the "good teacher") so harshly or so softly but always so well. And after the agony had broken and been discussed, all its players, the leader included, were left as peers in an existential democracy of consciousness, faced with the. challenge of constructing a new way of being in learning, alone and together—with little in pedagogical or cultural tradition to guide them, beyond their choice not to recreate the selves and processes of the traditional authoritarian learning-game that they had just experienced driven to a special extreme.

By contrast, EST's emphasis was purely personal and privatizing. Not simply its brutal process, but the way its thoughts were phrased, the particular ideas that were hammered home incessantly while people were vulnerable to them, led people not only to a transcendent leap of consciousness recognizing their own part in constructing and interpreting their reality, but simultaneously to the absolute denial of anyone else's responsibility—parents, mate, boss, politicians, the CIA, whoever—for affecting their "ultimate" reality or their comprehension of it. Of course even their most private interpretations and responsibilities remained also intrinsically mutual, if only because the very terms of private understanding were even there being mutually forged and validated. But given EST's one-sided, subtle mystification, and the incautious solipsism it encouraged, there was no ground for EST recruits to grasp even their own roles there, let alone Erhard's and his lieutenants', as being social, mutually self-creating; and as being in this regard quite as arbitrary, as unnecessarily limited and limiting, and as reformable, as their "simply personal" ways and games appeared to be. In sum, many people seemed to emerge from the EST experience with their "private ' mystifications about self-construction somewhat broken, and thus freed; yet with the social mystification, and the social processes of self-construction, perfectly intact and indeed placed beyond question—and moreover with the dazed conviction, guaranteed by the punch of the process whenever it took, that they had the whole answer in what they had been led to understand. As EST graduates unscrambled their brains afterward and set about vigorously applying their lessons to life, it occurred to few that after realizing that they could reprogram themselves through solipsistic will alone, they had nonetheless set about this by using the ideas, the jargons, the programs for self-programming which told just how to do it and what it meant—which EST had so conveniently developed, and provided not only as part of the basic experience but in an endless chain of subsequent EST seminars, which offered guidance in their application to every major realm of private life (sex, family, health, money, etc.) to the 80 percent of EST graduates who pursued them; and which were offered (get this) for free, or at a cost so nominal it hardly mattered.

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All in all, it was a tremendous coup, pedagogically speaking, at least if social schizophrenia were the object, a dazzlingly effective operation. I met no one who'd been through EST, read no one's analysis, with a language sufficiently subtle and precise to describe the mystifying meta-game which EST depended upon and comprised. Instead I witnessed the spectacle of many interpretations of reality and self being reduced to one, to a stock set of formulas, with no one involved seeming to wonder at this, or indeed quite able to; and no one outside quite naming the powerful magic by which it happened. As for Erhard, I don't know what he felt; but as efficiently as if the outcome were so designed, he, and beneath him his entourage, were left in overall control, mapping out a set of processes and meanings for others to learn And I imagined Erhard in the center, lord of the enterprise, beaming each time an EST recruit said with conviction that he or she made his or her own reality, was totally responsible for himself or herself.

This account of EST's key psychic technique and mystification is awkward and dry, too technical yet too vague and sketchy. But some such accounting needs be made, for it was no accident that EST was, overall, the most potent short-term mass consciousness-changing technology to go public during the 1970s. This represented a specific art and science at work; and there is no assurance that a future EST and Erhard will not be able to use such tools, manipulating not simply personal but social consciousness, to more powerful and massive effect, moving for social power in the style of EST and Erhard (which I shall come to presently) but more efficiently. For indeed, as ancient lore tells, such tools open the doors of many powers, and not only the highest; and we should not underestimate the raw forces of will and consciousness involved, nor the social convolutions their development may entail. In particular, I remember what it felt like to run the Totalitarian Classroom Game. It was like driving an all-powerful machine; it was like standing on a hill and kicking people down each time they tried to climb it, and throwing rocks at those who would not try. I didn't have to call the students jerks or bark at them through microphones or starve them. It was enough to point out sweetly, in terms which they themselves had supplied, what conditioned jerks they were each time they spoke, or to get someone else to do this for me to win my approval; and I could screw the pain and dissonance up to quite remarkable heights before someone would finally move to comfort another person in tears, and refuse to be chopped apart for doing so. In all this I had to face my own pleasure in power and in putting people through pain for (of course!) their own good. By the time I had played the game twenty times or so, it took me a long way inwardly, and (with other influences, notably from women) through some reconstruction of my male self But that is another story. In the groups themselves, I and the other leaders expiated our tyrannical excess not only by a full confession of our own experiences following the revolt, but by explicitly discussing the means we had used to drive people to it, the peculiar reflexive game we had exploited—opening our tools and selves to the "students," now our peers; sharing the power, to confront fully together the mystery of our regeneration

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By contrast, the EST process, by emphasizing the leader's solipsistic right to be/do as he was (and that it influenced no one), precluded any questioning or change of his role; nor did he move to share its workings or his feelings, beyond those of utter purpose and triumph. Erhard's way and his lieutenants' ways were simply Right, and many chose freely to model their own upon these, leaving the question of peership or significant reciprocity quite out of bounds. Nor was the trick—the psychic technique they used—ever fully revealed; its power was never shared as a tool for general purpose. Instead, the impression was preserved that it took two years to train an EST trainer, through a process so exacting that Erhard himself had to conduct it personally, and so stiff in its various requirements that he could train in five years only the handful of genuine, industrious EST trainers who took 160,000 people through the process. Myself, I thought this bottleneck was due less to the art involved—for we had taught people to work the TCG's basic deconditioning magic in a session or two— than to the demands of indoctrinating trainers deeply in the world view they were to impart along with their magic, and to the necessity of ensuring their fidelity by complex personal and social means (in which even Erhard could not succeed completely, as in time a couple of trusted aides broke away and set up competing operations). But most of all I wondered what Erhard felt each time he ran the game not to the completion and sharing I had known, but incompletely, to produce a completely atomized social mass through whose subsequent reassembly Erhard's own stature and power were quite mysteriously and quite rapidly enhanced. When I heard the talc of how my old New Left friend M. leaped up at the special seminar to which he was invited and challenged Erhard about the totalitarian process he was running, and got shown up for several kinds of stupid fool, enough to himself to collapse in cowed confusion, I winced as I remembered what it was like to kick people in the face from a higher rung in the consciousness ladder; wondered whether Erhard winced too as he felt his boot connect and heard the general applause, or whether he just took it as the day's work; and vowed some day to tell M. what I could of how he had been had. In sum it was no wonder that people came out dazed, and promptly started hustling their friends to taste EST's magic at two hundred bucks a shot. For most, the complex tides of ordinary life in time dissolved the magic spell, and they came to see both Erhard and the patented ways they had adopted in more perspective, as not being quite the answer to all; but enough were properly in love with Erhard and awed by the whole enterprise to commit great chunks of their energies and time, and even their entire selves, to staffing and implementing Erhard's ambitious organization and plans.

Myself, I had still enough machismo left—it was more than just scientific curiosity, though this was quite precise and strong—to want to take Erhard on at his own game. The context and two hundred credulous subjects might give him overwhelming dominance; yet still I wondered whether it were possible to confront him on the metalevel during the EST process, armed with the same tools as he, and engage him in a genuine dialogue of peers, with his own role as agent and subject of social conditioning and responsibility made manifest and up for grabs. Indeed, I would have jumped at the chance to try, had Erhard seen fit to offer, as he and EST did to those they were courting. But I was damned if I was going to pay half a month's income for the privilege of checking it out, as I explained again and again to the cheery women who called me from EST headquarters to invite me to follow up on my guest seminar, until I finally thanked them for their courtesy, and asked them to knock it off.

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Political Efficiency Liberals tended to admire EST, because (in contrast to much of their own work) it was slick, purposeful, and efficient. To remind them that their ilk in Germany had applauded the rise of Hitler's National Socialism for the same reason was a cheap shot, if not entirely unfair. Innocent of political nuance or foreboding, their reverence was All-American, of the sort we accord to the prime team on the field, or to corporate enterprise in high gear. And indeed this last comparison was irresistible; for the purpose and efficiency of EST marked not only its inner "experience" but its organization. EST kept in touch with potential customers and its graduates more persistently even than Scientology did, with the ample aid of volunteers, not satisfied to spread the gospel among their friends, who put in long hours at the central offices. The style of their calls was firstrate: personal, but not chummy. Unlike Scientology's crude hustle, the EST tone was dignified, as if they were doing you a service by notifying you of unusual opportunities available; they were quick to cease calling at the slightest demurrer.

The same sense of with-it efficiency marked their offices when I visited, from the modern furniture and arrangement on up, though EST had not yet gotten a Telex network linking centers in a hundred cities, as the Divine Light Mission claimed to have. It was no place for idle hangers-on to hang-out; for unlike some other consciousness enterprises, EST recruiting was strictly a field operation The phoners, busy with their files, ignored the casual visitor, who was quickly screened by higher functionaries and dispatched to the appropriate appointment, or simply dispatched. All in all, EST's public face was skillful and appropriate, just what one would expect from an entrepreneurial operation which had discovered a hot proprietary process, built an organization to produce it, and set out to market it in earnest. By 1976 EST was grossing over $6 million annually, not bad for a four-year start from scratch and a tiny clique of trainers. It was still dwarfed by Scientology and Transcendental Meditation, but was a more together operation (at least until this year, when EST seems to have run into the capitalization problems so common to rapidly expanding industries and businesses).

Nor was EST's business efficiency simply a superficial front. Instead it extended intimately to the organization's management of itself. EST staff and volunteers, all adepts of the EST experience, applied their learning to transform themselves as workers, focusing their refurbished responsibilities and psychic powers upon the tasks to be done with no uncertainty of motive or useless waste of energy in the frustration game, engaging each other in diligent conversations about making and keeping their agreements and realizing their own responsibilities. Though their jargon was easy to mock, what they were doing in all this was precise and admirable. As in the "bootstrapping" of computer programs, or the heavy capitalization of basic machine-tool production, they were applying a technology to its own generation, using it to transform its own productive base—a move of great potential power, which may concern us more vitally in the future development of enterprises exploiting basic mysteries of consciousness.

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Still, as I saw it, EST and Erhard were most slickly efficient in the sphere of political operation, where—somewhat the bumbling liberal myself—I did admire their work, however little they advertised it as such. While the fad for Indian gurus was still growing, Erhard imported one generally acknowledged to be absolutely top-notch; and himself served as road-manager for Muktananda's first American tour, impeccably deferential, noblesse oblige. Of the many new physical therapies in the field, the one best-reputed and most in vogue received EST's blessing, as Ida Rolf's institute found itself with a twenty-grand grant for research, no strings attached. The leading maverick among the new crop of theoretical physicists probing the mysteries of psychic phenomena, Jack Sarfatti, was similarly blessed. EST sponsored a Western comeback tour for Bucky Fuller, his cachet a bit stale but still definitely a class act; and Erhard got the Karmapa himself to give a private tip of the transcendental hat for an all-EST audience. Not all such ventures prospered: the International Movement Center, launched in part with an EST grant as the fitness and martial-arts wave was cresting, was promising but ill-fated. But the broader relation Erhard cultivated with its Esalen founders survived this, establishing EST in a friendly and active alliance with this center of influence in the human potential movement throughout the later 1970s.

Such are the examples I recall; there were many more. Few if any involved crude hustling; as I heard it, more often the mountains came to Mohammed, at least within the growth movement/New Age ambit. Farther afield, in the more social sphere, Erhard had necessarily to reach out—with spottier success. By the time he came actively to court the Association for Humanistic Psychology—the large collection of human-services professionals most influenced by Growth culture—that organization had begun to ask itself questions about the social meanings of such teachings as EST's. Opinions were as sharply divided about Erhard's public presentations as about his private, and EST never did make a firm AHP connection— though the AHP retained devoted ESTians in strong positions, as what ecumenical and democratic group would not? By then the first effort to organize a political movement extending the principles of the human potential/growth movement to society's management, and organized among the latter movement's followers, was getting under way, in the form of Self-Determination, a networking effort inspired by California assemblyman John Vasconcellos. Erhard courted alliance, as Self-Determination sure did seem a comer at first and the stakes were clearly major; but he met with even less favor here than at the AHP. Later, when I learned that EST monies had gone to fund Groundswell, a venture somewhat akin to Self-Determination, I recalled how Groundswell's organizers had dodged the question of where their money came from, at the early meeting I attended; and wondered whether the grant would have been made if Self-Determination had proved more receptive, and whether the semisecrecy were due only to embarrassment at how mediocre the funded organizers were (or so they seemed, from my brief take).

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Nor were the moves of Erhard and EST to establish their influence limited to such efforts to ally with particular organizations and noted persons. While their star was rising they were handing out freebies right and left, and arranging special inductions in the EST experience for special groups of people. One concentrated on adventurous practitioners drawn from the excitement of new psychotherapies flourishing in the Bay area. In another, pitched to media types in New York, EST transformed the consciousness of much of the staff of the New Age Journal, arguably the most influential in the New Age community. The journal promptly declared its allegiance in print and dedicated an issue to EST, presenting for a few issues a remarkable political spectacle before the spell wore down. Other special inductions were rich with invitees from the old New Left and with current (nice) community activists, curious to encounter what they'd damned from afar; with mainline psychiatrists; with doctors and with alternative health people, though not necessarily together; with Esalen and AHP staffers; and so on. Erhard ventured increasingly afield to present his ideas and charisma to general and specialized audiences; EST organized special colloquia and presentations for businessmen, sexuality counselors, hip clergypersons, whatnot. Had the EST experience been as centrally biophysical as Transcendental Meditation's, EST no doubt would have outdone TM's aggressive enterprise in establishing scientific foundation for its technique's many lesser claims of health. As it was, the EST Foundation sponsored long-term psychiatric research on the outcome of EST training, through a clinic of high repute. This whole pattern of funding, sponsorship, courtship, alliance, special event, media reknown—or rather this enterprise, for it was continuous, energy-intensive and systematic— was in itself neither ominous nor reassuring. It seemed natural, organic, at each step appropriate to an enterprise aggressively advancing its broad claims broadly in the field, beginning near home base, winning a reputation not only for polish but for the ecumenical support of worthy ventures, in the fine tradition of Carnegie and Rockefeller. Yet were commerce and conversion only the intent, a far simpler and more strictly "domestic" EST engine might have done just as well—indeed, perhaps better, had Erhard put his magical time into training more trainers instead of into foreign diplomacy, given that EST's best salesperson continued to be its satisfied and energized customer. Whatever its intent and conscious strategy, this enterprise was remarkable, and quite without peer among the competition, the foreign relations of TM and Scientology being not half so thorough nor a tenth so broad. From the face of things, at least as seen from outside, Erhard and EST seemed embarked on an ambitious, systematic program whose effect was to outflank and out-ally potential competition; to co-opt potential critics and neutralize potential salients of critique, professional and political; to extend organizational alliance to groups that might in turn give EST and Erhard further leverage and influence in society; and •more, to establish base camps of ideological operation within these groups, bringing light to their persons and policies (though never pushily, of course, as how nonESTniks received them was their own responsibility).

All this is to speak phenomenologically, without assuming intent. Had this whole pattern of enterprise been acted out among community groups and agencies in some city on a more usual political stage, questions of intent and personal power could scarcely have been avoided. But not even the hipper elements of the scattered Left of the 1970s, who criticized EST for its ideology, let alone the mass of ordinary growth-seekers and human-service professionals who absorbed it, were used to tracing these familiar elements of political organizing, of the development of political power, upon the unfamiliar ground of the New Age; and EST's sophistication in this (though not its consequence) passed unremarked.

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Myself, I was powerfully impressed both by the pattern and by the diligence of its pursuit by Erhard and crew. It led me to imagine that in some future, from this or another edge domain of personal and social change, some Erhard and EST of even more polish and power might begin a more purposeful and potent effort to influence society by some such scenario as sketched above. As for Werner Erhard himself, there was no sign that he had any purpose particularly pernicious or exemplary, or personally ambitious, in mind, at least until he kicked off his grand campaign to end world hunger in 1977. Indeed I fancy that the potential political power he accumulated was at most an idle fantasy when he started EST; and that he went after it almost automatically, as one would if one turned up gold in virgin country and rushed about staking claims here and there with little thought of how to spend it and little need to wonder at the time (though it is perhaps ironic to suggest that Erhard could be so programmed).

Still, his power accumulated, as fast as had he sought it willfully. The taut character and hierarchical spirit of EST's organization survived the desertion of Erhard's first trainer and then others' going independent, and provided Erhard with an increasingly prominent platform. EST's recruitment rates dropped during the Bicentennial, and Erhard himself grew both less visible and less presumptuous in public, working hard to secure professional recognitions that would offset the damage; but all in all they came through quite well, considering that Erhard and EST had served as the main target for the massive and quite nasty wave of criticism of the entire Growth syndrome that broke nationally with Peter Marin's seminal essay "The New Narcissism" (Harper's, October 1975).

By 1977, a hundred thousand people in California, EST's most advanced province, had (presumably) intimate reason to stump for Erhard as a magical candidate for almost any job within the growth movement or beyond it. Tolerated as well anywhere within it as a controversial figure can be, he had established a wide and varied network of alliance, respect, and influence, extending not only throughout his amorphous "field"—in which there was not a public figure to compare with him in terms of organizational talent, broad interests, and charisma—but into such unrelated professions as law and social welfare, and into at least the lower fringes of Democratic grassroots organization and the "hip" Jerry Brown administration of the state.

All in all, I thought Erhard was going through a phase of accumulating power which would in time cycle on to a phase of appropriate effort—for so power's potentials invoke its applications, in dialectic with our guidance. After he shrugged off the mid-decade attacks I figured it was even odds he'd wind up running for public office, if he couldn't find a way to be appointed to the right one as a first, called-to-duty, step. When he set out to rid the world of hunger, I felt as disappointed as a bettor who has followed a horse throughout his career and then blown a bundle on him in the stakes finale. Granted, the accomplishment would make Erhard irresistible presidential timber; but twenty years seemed a while to wait, and the chance of immediate progress slim.

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Style On one sunny weekend in the mid-1970s, well after this innocent political pattern had become well-established, EST invited a bunch of old New Lefties, my erstwhile comrades in the 1960s Movement, to partake of its potent experience. I suppose it was my own responsibility that I was not invited to the party, as I was too proud or too foolish to ask, and I'm sorry now that I missed such an archetypal show. Instead, I sat down to the reflections in this section and the two that follow, concerned with more subjective issues than those discussed above—trying to sort out my own impressions of EST's ideology and style, and Erhard's display of these in action, and to pin down my distrust.

Another special induction. Good lord, the man's efficient; he's covering all the bases. So why do I feel so paranoid, wondering about his intentions while he says so consistently that he's not out for personal power? And what is it about his whole style and message that so puts me off? To begin with, the style is crassly commercial, for good reason. Before he got into secularmystical frontiersmanship, Erhard was sales manager for an encyclopedia firm (Grolier’s), and also for many years a trainer in a franchise operation (Personal and Company Effectiveness, PACE) training businessmen in self-improvement to be more effective human beings, i.e., businessmen. I assume that this was his first extended work in the world; I may too easily presume the depth of its cultural imprint in the plastic material of his younger self, but Erhard is a winner and no doubt was at least quite talented in mastering the techniques, strategies, and perspectives of his former trade. This trade included not only the enterprise of developing clients' positive mental attitudes, through particular pedagogic techniques and ideologies, but also the trade of salesmanship itself, with its subdisciplines of product definition, packaging, and marketing. Moreover, the marketing process, as practiced by such entrepreneurships as PACE, was a double competition, being directed both against competitive commercial agencies (and noncommercial operations which might undermine the market itself) and against the consumer himself, to penetrate his defenses and create desire.

All this is reflected in Erhard's present operation: hot product, slick package, aggressive sell, underpricing the competition at first until the brand-name market gets established. And beyond this, given the way he's moving on the broader political front, Erhard is clearly talented on a higher plane of strategy than normal low-level commerce involves—a plane proper to major forces in core industries, which must eventually control and manipulate public policy and reality to secure an expanding empire. But this is of course appropriate, since the shaping of consciousness—through education, therapy, etc.—is now perhaps our largest industry and certainly our most core, and EST is the hottest operation in a rapidly expanding sector of this industry.

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But why be hard on Erhard? Can't people change, grow, become humanized, democratized, radicalized? Can't the attitudes and practices of capitalist commerce be usefully adapted to serve the highest ends? I don't know. I am concerned here with myth and metaphor, with archetypes; and I wince, I feel paranoid and mean-spirited, each time I think about EST's antecedents and style, because I can't helping thinking about Scientology as a model—if only because Erhard spent some time exploring and digesting Scientology (I don't know how deeply, but he's a quick study). Every report I have read or heard about Scientology's workings portrays a certain spirit resonant throughout the whole enterprise, mystified and rank with top-down power, rigidly hierarchical, programmatic and authority-centered. The authoritarianism goes hand-in-hand with an overt ideology of persona] liberation and empowerment, of autonomy through personal responsibility—a distinctive, contradictory, confusing blend, which seems to appeal to many people nowadays, perhaps because it satisfies the mind in one way and certain blind emotions in quite another. In any case, it is disturbing to recognize each of these spiritual qualities reflected again in the EST operation (which was equally apt to inherit them also from Erhard's previous commercial milieu), albeit somewhat softened—pastel instead of garish. My own impressions of Scientology derive in part from the science fiction novels which L. Ron Hubbard wrote in the late 1940s while he was pulling together the Dianetics therapy and franchising system that evolved into Scientology. Since reading such books as a lad helped predispose me to the essay on parapsychological technologies that follows, exploring the edge where science-fiction turns real, it is appropriate that in the context of that essay Scientology may be seen as the first serious civilian venture—therapeutic and religious in guise yet deeply political in character—to apply bioelectronic feedback technologies not simply to exploit altered states of consciousness and psychic powers, but to help socialize people to an authoritarian enterprise and world view.

At any rate, imaginative literature strikes deep, and I believe it comes from deep places as well. I took Hubbard's novels, with their themes of power, intrigue, domination, violent adventure and the Übermensch or superman, to reflect his ideas about self and society; and ever since, I have been predisposed to entertain certain of the rumors I keep hearing about Hubbard and Scientology. It would match his fiction if Hubbard, perhaps himself at the uneasy border where fantasy turns fact, had indeed conceived a design for domination of the whole world in the course of founding Scientology, with himself as Numero Uno; and if this gross fantasy had continued to inspire him and Scientology's inner power circle into the 1970s. That the fleet they accumulated was ever in fact the largest private navy in the world seems unlikely; and perhaps it was not even a navy in the strict military sense, as any fleet with some old military vessels and taut discipline might merit the metaphorical description. That on this fleet's flagship contingency plans were prepared for the executive seizure and administration of several countries, in the event of their governments' disruption by social turmoil, I credit as a fantasy more consistent with Hubbardian fiction than with the capabilities of his organization, as I can't believe that it has the skills and forces necessary to plan adequately—let alone to carry out such plans, unless Hubbard and crew have indeed developed powerful psychic technologies fit for such use.

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Whose fantasy it is I cannot tell. It is no more than might, in a time when governments shake and paramilitary organizations rehearse such plans within various countries, be imagined by many about any organization claiming millions of members in many countries and conducting its tightly-ordered affairs in close secret from a floating base beyond the effective reach of any government. But it is a fantasy that might just as easily originate from within such an organization if it also encourages belief, as to my best understanding Scientology does, that it has the best process of all for developing people's consciousness in ways that make them not simply better but superior beings; and that its leaders are the most highly developed, i.e., superior, people of all. Such beliefs have throughout history been a fertile breeding ground for social actions in harmony with their presumption, and with ill consequence. Nazism is the most abominable example; it bears citing in this and in any connection in which such beliefs are systematically nurtured, and such circumstances must bear special scrutiny and comparison, because we have no more resolved the vital moral conundrum Nazism posed than we have understood the psychological and social means that brought such atrocity to humankind and, in our ignorance, can again. In any case, that the "contingency plan" rumor reflected at least Hubbard's fantasy if not actual planning is not inconceivable to me, given its literary and ideological consonances. Nor am I moved to dismiss entirely the reports that some of the defectors from Scientology's inner circles who spread such rumors were subject to abduction, beating, and perhaps worse. Similar ways of dealing with defection and critical description have already been documented for such kindred enterprises as the Mel Lyman Family and the Divine Light Mission; and I have no reason to believe that my acquaintances who have borne such reports purportedly from the people in question have been making them up.

Indeed stranger things are potentially credible to me in the weird atmosphere of the mid1970s. Not only of Scientology, but of Arica, the Divine Light Mission, the Manson and Lyman crews, and other more benign spiritual enclaves, rumors and direct accounts have reported that certain deviants and dissidents have experienced themselves as subject to strange psychic pressures and controls, frightening and powerful. Given the beliefs about psychic phenomena current in such circles, I see little reason to doubt that such reports indeed reflect the subjective experiences of their originators. Whether they reflect objective "psychic technologies" at work, I simply do not know. My own psychic experiences have mostly been benign enough; but they have left me open to believing that such technologies may be possible, and that on our earthly plane they need not always work for good, nor even by mutual consent.

Indeed for a time, when Karen and I were imagining plots for science fiction stories, I wondered about the many people formerly or actively engaged with Scientology who turned out to be working in so many of the important centers of inquiry into psychic and paranormal phenomena. No doubt the coincidence was natural and benign, since Scientology's process of "clearing" can indeed sometimes open psychic and perhaps transcendent doors; and since interest in these domains has brought many to Scientology, and Scientology many to these domains, whose learning’s subsequently spun them off quite naturally toward such centers. But for the purpose of fantasy worthy of the science fiction greats of my youth, I did for a time imagine the trace of a Scientological thumb in so many research pies in a more lively way—as if Hubbard had come upon the rudiments of some psychic technology with great potential power over persons, and were exploiting it as best he could while exploring its mysteries further, both by his own devices and by having contact with other centers of research-and-development.

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All this is paranoia's play, the direct consequence of taking others (here Hubbard) seriously in terms of their own background metaphors. In this sense it is more a literary exercise than a journalistic account, an interpretation and projection upon a likely ground of certain themes pondered throughout this book. I try above to say what grounds I have for believing what. But beyond whether the shoe these rumors form fits Hubbard and Scientology perfectly—though its style, from all I hear, fits the case—my concern is with the shoe itself. The shoe is not just a random collection of nasty surmises specific to Scientology. Rather the rumors, taken together, are a collective creation, a collective work of imaginative literature born(e) in the oral tradition, encoding a coherent myth, and rephrased by a diverse chorus at each likely occasion. Were there no Scientology or EST, the myth would be retold around any other organizations whose semblances provided occasion—for it has independent standing now as part of our culture's lore. What it says, it seems to me, is roughly this. If we birth catastrophe upon ourselves from ourselves in a way predictable from the past, rather than by outdoing ourselves altogether, the way will most likely involve these elements: Hubris, a blind arrogance of spirit. The belief that some persons are innately superior to others; and a way to justify whatever happens to the inferior as their own responsibility or fault. A rigid ideology and world view, passionately and narrowly held by many people. An efficient, disciplined, hierarchical organization with greatly centralized power (and perhaps a key charismatic leader). Its access to economic and political power. Superior technology at its disposal. This is the form the bad dream of warning takes, its elements our distillation of millennial experience; we wake and seek its image in the world, as well we may. Many are now coming to recognize its elements in the entire condition of Western, rational civilization, tyrant to the life-web of Earth. Recognizing them in certain practices of communism has provided such core of sanity as there has been in the anti-Communist hysterias of our age, without saving them from reproducing this image again. Nor has the United States as a nation quite escaped this image recently. And so it goes, down the line, to such smaller occasions as Scientology or EST to spin the tale around again.

Together we are like children out at night, fearfully eager to recognize a shape of dread within each shadow, as our animal heritage from before the time humans made the night safe—except that our fear is not so delicious as theirs, as the nights we inhabit are not safe. In particular, given such early models as Scientology and EST at hand, we should not be sanguine about what further developments of technologies and processes integrating psychic and social manipulation may bring.

It is doubtless unfair to lay all this weight on Werner Erhard, or on those others who have passed through Scientology to lead such independent enterprises as Silva mind control and Abilitism; for their stories are their own. Yet I view with respect and caution the complex processes by which people pick up imprints of character and spirit (outside psychic circles as within them) and adapt others' models to their own uses. Given the many strong parallels between the internal social characters and ideologies of EST and Scientology (which direct their employments of the psychic technologies both cultivate), and given that the themes of grand power adventure, based in intensive psychic-technological development and shaping society as a whole, seem as much potentiated in EST's present flourishing as in Hubbardian fantasy, Erhard as an influence seems to me at times somewhat like Hubbard slicked up for public consumption, professional and respectable and bidding for more of both, but still one hell of a rouser.

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But why tar Erhard with Scientology's brush? Perhaps these qualities and styles just arise naturally in any organization filling EST's particular psycho-spiritual-economic niche. Perhaps there is a nicer way to view them. Even if there is not, Erhard may have subscribed to them quite innocently, in the virtuous, selfless pursuit (or pushing) of the highest good. I hope so. It might mean that he might yet make a start at undoing some of what he has done—which, at its least, is to have etched the charged iconography of the charismatic leader and the dominant social ideology of our time (as discussed below) deeper in people's imaginations.

But why do I keep talking about Erhard, anyway, reinforcing the disastrous personalismo of the whole EST affair? Lots of other people are responsible for helping to create and maintain the collective theater and belief-system of EST. I suppose I'm as responsible for this myself as is any simple singer of Erhard's praises, in the way I focus here on EST as Erhard('s) Seminar Training. Yet if the concept of personal responsibility means anything at all, it must apply to Erhard himself in his context; and we may ask what he is responsible for. Surely he has been responsible for catalyzing a social process that has put some quite useful tools of psychic self-management and perspective into many people's employ, however confused the larger frames of meaning in which their use is interpreted. But he is also responsible for his social act—for being at the center of EST in the way he has chosen to be; and for casting, as the presiding secular and spiritual leader, the decisive vote of approval, active or tacit, for every major move, strategy, policy, and element of style practiced by his organization. (EST may have found another way to run a humble company of the elect; if so, no word of this has come to my attention.) And since Erhard has also centered in himself the role of prime model for EST's product—often in the very process of denying this—he casts a long shadow. It's no accident that when EST holds a major public shindig, its form is "an evening with Werner," to hear him give the Word. If EST has developed any internal power figures of even secondary stature, they have yet to be mentioned by any article or EST graduate I've consulted. Tills doesn't mean that ESTniks leap when Erhard whistles, at least not all the time; being the main man gets exercised in much subtler ways even in ward politics, let alone in modern corporate endeavors. Yet what goes on in EST's public presentations, where style is as much a calculated artifice as in any other EST activity, is not subtle at all, and is certainly not the proud presentation by a vital community of the varied richness of its growth and persons; rather it is Spotlight on Superstar, preaching in his inimitable overamped style. The social theater of all this is too blatant to ignore. Though my interpretation of it is of course my own responsibility (or projection), this theater is also an objective reality, which Erhard has chosen to create in preference to any other.

Is this simply a wise strategy to advance the good, pitched to the cultural sensibilities or silly superstitions of the natives? Is it a subtler teaching, to lead us to recognize how much personal garbage we project upon such authority symbols? Or is there also some less selfless profit involved in Erhard's choice? EST's finances are obscure: some think its rapid growth means somebody's making a mint, though EST claims top salaries are "only" $30,000. EST says the money's all plowed back into deepening and extending the enterprise, in the best tradition of selfless spiritual endeavor, as well as of industry. I myself have heard no EST rumors like the one about the official of a competing brand-name enterprise who kept his mistress in a $1,200-a-month apartment with company funds. Anyway, this material plane, though not to be despised, is not the most important site of profit here.

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Instead, I think, the EST profit economy involves not money but ego, even in this intimate school where people learn to transcend it. I'm told that Erhard is a very nice fellow, doesn't particularly want all this semblance of power that somehow keeps accidentally accruing to him, listens very respectfully to everyone, meets you person-to-person. It all may be true, or mostly so. But the impression I have from my few direct contacts with Erhard is visceral, and leads me to imagine that he also likes the power, likes being in soft command, likes being Number One—especially when he manages it all in paradoxical fashion, denying his responsibility for the role and power as prime mover that others are responsible for granting him. So what's wrong with liking yourself and liking everyone to like you and getting them to do so? Isn't positive self-concept a positive good in itself, and doesn't it bring health to the world if you act it out, as EST and so many current positive disciplines teach? I do suppose so, actually, on the whole. But surely there are some finer discriminations to be made, since saints, tyrants, and businessmen alike can move about their typical enterprises aglow in positive self-appreciation. All I know is that when I watched Erhard prance and strut so scornfully upon the Masonic stage, I had some childhood button punched for sure, and was again on the recess ground of grade school where this dance of arrogance and all the others are first practiced, watching the kid who wanted to be seen as hot shit strut his stuff. And even as a somewhat more neutral adult, I find it hard to conceive that Erhard could have radiated such a healthy relish in his act there, unless some vital fulfillment of his private self were being accomplished through his social role and show. When I met Erhard at closer range, during our panel in the Esalen-sponsored Symposium on Therapeutic and Spiritual Tyranny in 1975, we were, beneath the humanistic facades, on an ancient stage of public performance, hustling, and competition—for so this star-studded symposium was organized, despite its healthier intents. Erhard was of course simply a human person there, responsible for no one but himself; but he was also on this stage, inescapably, as the main spokesman of an ideological-commercial-political enterprise, and he was much too much the professional to act carelessly. He was totally personable, sincere and charming; truly rather than arrogantly modest; sparing and reasonable in his comments, rather than didactic, scornful, and lengthy as of yore (before the recent questionings of social meanings in the Growth orbit, which had provoked this symposium); responsive to the context rather than taking it over; and super super careful.

All in all, it was a totally different style from his Masonic performance, and also from the one with which he tried to charm the AHP Annual Conference that summer—testifying to much practice in putting on the right show in the right context, and to a certain polished chameleonship which made it hard to trust his presentation as entirely authentic. Neither the main speaker nor the target of sharp questioning, he easily avoided any real engagement with the question of how the issues raised there applied within EST itself, and instead contented himself with a few broad remarks about the precious need for individual responsibility in our society. He came out smelling like a rose; and EST had passed one early public test, not by being put on trial but instead by being vaguely enrolled on the side of Good.

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But what got me most, I do confess, was when Erhard ate me. For so it seemed, slick and quick as a frog's flick of the tongue at a fly within reach. I had raised some moderately passioned questions about the strange current phenomenon of people seeming suddenly to drop out of sight into deep holes all around me, one by one, appearing to surrender their senses or their own wills to a number of outside agencies. Echoes of these questions still hung in the hall a while later when Erhard took care to make three separate references to me and (apparently) to some of what I had said. He was gracious and serious, and took no personal offense, the questions clearly having nothing to do with him. The persona] quality instead ran the other way round, for he was so responsible in crediting me as the source of the questions that it seemed that he had dealt with them, rather than only rephrased them and acknowledged that yes, they were real questions, without really engaging them.

Well, I've spent too long in group political contexts not to know when I've been had. In the fields of marketing strategy and intracorporate power where Erhard learned to play, such trivial maneuvers are well practiced, and Erhard handled this one automatically and as quickly as was seemly. But what made it feel like being eaten, rather than outflanked, was his particular style. In effect he constructed a charade, to say: "Watch me: I am heeding this person/issue; I am learning; see, I have learned, I have taken what was valid and made it shine more brightly in a fuller frame." As I recall, he even said something explicit to this effect the third time around, which I thought a slight lapse of polish in the act

I do wish he had digested my ideas, which were not mine alone. But to my ears Erhard's paraphrases lacked not only content but feeling. If he himself were troubled by the troubling issues in the air (let alone by the question of his role in them), one could not tell it from his voice. Instead there was a calm, rote quality to the way he ate me, which suggested less that he was struggling to integrate a new or foreign bit of thought, than that he was involved in performing an automatic and necessary routine.

Erhard seems to be quite an eater; it is by no means a bad characteristic in itself. In any public, I am told, he makes a practice of recalling and reusing every name he can of persons present, a polite and politic habit despite its overuse by salespersons. Better yet, he has made a long practice of seeking out people and groups who are doing important or worthwhile things, and learning efficiently from them. Seldom, I imagine, has his own practice been as crass as when some over-eager ESTnik, acting independently, allegedly Xeroxed some of the Arica staff manuals, and bits of undigested Arica routines appeared under changed names in EST's training programs (but then Arica was in the direct line or competition, and there may have been no reason to be polite, nor not to use the fruits of what was. in effect, industrial espionage). Yet more often one function of such eating, beyond pure nourishment, is to neutralize or make friendly the agency fed from, by incorporating some of its substance and seeming to stand somewhat in its debt or as its relative, if not precisely within its own sphere of influence. Such wide feeding on bits from many sources also offers protection against being outflanked by the competition; the marketer's dream is to have a product incorporating a plausible facsimile of every positive feature offered by any competing product.

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But this merges into an admirable objective: to make the best construct that can be made. Another way to see Erhard-the-universal-gourmet is as synthesizer. Erhard as a person, EST as a practice, bring together not simply a packrat hodgepodge of old saws and tricks, as the snippier critics suggest and have suggested of every complex consciousnesstransformation package now on the road, but a fairly coherent package and even a synthesis It is perhaps not quite the triumphant distillation of the essences of all the world's great teachings that Erhard and his more enchanted disciples claim; but surely it is synthesis enough to have great power in people's imaginations, and often in their lives, at least for a time. Erhard has drawn on great texts, traditions, people, groups, and on consciousness itself; and it is much too simple to say that he has drawn superficially as he did with me. His style of eating is undoubtedly characterological, if he still has an ego structure (as I think he does); yet even with such human limits it is a style, particular, potent, and useful. Every synergist takes what will fit; but the wonder of the world is that so many things may fit together in so many different ways. So of course Erhard and EST must be selective, and there is as much order in what they ignore or avoid as in what they accept. Their negative and positive choices together define a set of lessons—not only about private consciousness, but about society and social conduct—which constitute the EST teaching. This in turn is but a part of the general teaching of the whole human potential/growth movement. I mean to explore the social issues and potentials involved in this movement and its teachings in another book, for they are too broad and complex to illustrate through EST's example. Yet as enterprises dealing directly with consciousness and its control are so central to this movement, and as EST itself is widely acclaimed as a paragon (or, by some, a caricature) not only of such enterprises but of the whole movement's social style and teachings, some first simple thoughts about the social character of EST's simplistic ideology of "personal responsibility" are appropriate here. Ideology The rules of social behavior taught by the growth movement generally are much fuzzier than the sharply stylized versions taught by such highly ideological groups as EST, and are more open to flexible interpretation. For example, experience in encounter groups, with their emphasis on feeling what you feel and expressing it freely, might well lead a woman employed menially in a sexist organization to object both personally and formally to her superiors about the division of productive labor and reward and the modes of interaction, and to share her realized feelings actively with her coworkers, initiating some organizing process to change their social condition as a whole through collective effort. Such a reading of "personal responsibility" is neither encouraged nor discouraged by the basic, fragmentary frame of encounter. It is still inhibited by other ("outside") cultural influences; but training in encounter alone makes it perhaps more conceivable and practical for the woman and her boss alike. But EST's ideology is more explicit than encounter's, being phrased as a general answer rather than a useful process. It interprets personal responsibility more explicitly and narrowly, with a solipsistic vengeance, and works actively against such a social interpretation. An EST woman would be less likely to perturb the status quo by expressing unpleasant emotions, or indeed even to have them—since once one has grasped that oppression is an illusion, that no person other than oneself is responsible for whatever "happens to" one, one has then neither cause nor reason for anger or protest. (One might still then choose to experience one's state as "oppressed" rather than autonomous; but EST teaches also, in many ways, that it is stupid and futile to experience oneself so negatively, or indeed as subject to anything.)

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An EST woman would instead be more likely to see herself as responsible for whatever she experienced; and set out positively to prove that she personally could be trusted to do the more creative and rewarding work, and were worthy of this as well as of lesser evidences of respect. So much, so good: admirable, necessary. But it stops here. In this task she would be competing, perforce, in a male-dominated system and its terms, and, if successful, would indeed set a quiet example of nominal desexism—nominal because it involved integration into rather than transformation of the social order—but she would also be leaving her old share of the shitwork to be done by some other woman, less talented, responsible, and enlightened, for whom she of course would bear no responsibility. Nor would she bear responsibility for changing this situation, as distinct from any particular employee's state, if she rose to be among its administrators, since her very rise would testify that the situation was okay as it was. All very neat: no fuss, no furor, no action undertaken on any basis other than through private initiative and means and with private intents; no challenge to the basic scheme that divides work and workers into superior and inferior classes, nor indeed any questioning of any social arrangement that might help lead people together to be conscious of and govern their collective condition and work. Instead, the myth of society as a collection of separate atoms, preserved and reinforced by following the basic rule: get yours. Get whatever you can however you can, but get yours, and get it first.

Personal responsibility, as I hear it from EST graduates and so many others in the ideological orbit of growth, ends at arm's length. They do not often put it quite so coldly and self-centeredly, nor see themselves as buying and preaching the moral stance essential both to capitalism and to the totalitarian state. Rather than grudging, they see their attitude as benevolent: light your own lamp and the world will shine, for positive energy radiates outward to transform all; your being fulfilled will make the world better for all, and perhaps inspire others to their own fulfillment. And all this is true, so far as it goes; but as it stops here and is cut off and sold as the Answer, it is false, and more, a deep heresy to the human spirit. For the proposition that you make your own reality, being ultimately responsible for everything that you experience, is only one half of a moral syllogism whose other half is implicit and inescapable. If nothing else—neither persons nor systems of persons—is responsible for making things "happen to" you, or for influencing or constraining your choices and interpretations, then by symmetry you yourself are not responsible for anything that happens to or is experienced by anyone else, nor even for influencing any interpretation they make of their experience. Nothing you do, no action you take, no inaction you continue, cither directly and personally or indirectly through your participation in any group, can infringe in the slightest way upon any other person's own essential freedom and responsibility. You may still choose to be responsible for imagining or creating your own experience of misery, repression, oppression, or exploitation; but even then you have no responsibility for anyone else's similar experience, no matter what part you play in any system in which they choose to experience it.* That's their own responsibility, no skin off your ass; and meanwhile you are morally free to do whatever you want in the interests of being who you want to be and getting yours. If others can't manage so well, that's not even their tough luck—it's their fault, since it didn't just happen to them, let alone from causes involving you, but instead was their own free choice.

Nor have you any conceptual basis at all for responsibility to or for others, unless you choose to imagine or experience it from whole cloth anew—in which case, as it contradicts the ESTian premise of exclusively private responsibility, we engage a more subtle dialogue, postponed here. between the truths that EST includes and those it excludes. *

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Well, I don't know. Surely I've enough to be concerned about in managing my own life without taking on anyone else's problems unnecessarily. And since I do some therapy I can't help recognizing how much people project maimed, depressing images of themselves into the world and then contract with others to live up to them. Often enough I think of myself as some limping emotional cripple and wonder why I keep doing it to myself. So on the whole, I think that anything that leads people to take responsibility for what they in fact do and might do to govern their own realities is to the good. But also I believe that we must learn to recognize/.c and assume responsibilities which are equally neglected—our responsibilities for what we do (or don't do) that affects other people, and for how we go about this. I do detest the liberal guilt trip, which doesn't get much done anyway. But the truth I sec everywhere, even in the process of the EST training which denies it, is that we are not alone but inseparably intertwined, that we determine each other's realities of self and situation and interpretation as much as we do our own, and are ourselves so determined, in the most intimate intercourse of all. And any frame, like EST's, that is built to deny this perpetuates the most basic and amoral sundering.

This theme calls for eloquence; but as EST is the inspiration here all I can manage is caricature. Consider the fat man, who comes to the therapist seeking healing for his unhappiness. He is unhappy because he is not jolly (and thus is trapped in a tautology, both of logic and of behavior, of the sort which EST addresses to transcend). He is unhappy because he "cannot" be happy at being not jolly, since everyone else wants him to be jolly, reminds him of their displeasure in various ways when he is not, and helps (or at least reminds) him to feel badly about himself for not being jolly. A jolly Fatman is a dear and noble figure, honored by Shakespeare and the Sunday funnies; a fat man who scowls is not just a fat man scowling, but a Fatman out of character, who troubles our sense of the play (and his sense too, since this sense is largely collective), and should be subtly prompted to be who he should be, or socially penalized for not being a proper citizen, for the sake of his eventual improvement. Of course he is responsible for his fatness, and thus for its social consequence, because he has chosen in the first place to eat wrongly or to be born with a certain genetic condition or whatever. But suppose he has chosen this, for whatever reasons, and has chosen to scowl at what he has chosen to see of people's response. What can the therapist recommend to him? "Be yourself, love yourself, do not depend on the judgment of others, at least not overmuch." Fair advice, which EST would condone without qualification.

The fat man says, "But no woman or man will love me as I am, because they all think I'm sick since I'm not jolly." "Think of it as their loss," counsels the therapist, "and persevere, for somewhere there is someone who will love you."

"But I can't feel fully good about myself or truly good unless someone else feels good about me too." "You must bear that, until you can find someone(s) who will do this for you," says the therapist who knows that we need some things from others to be ourselves and whole, which an EST counselor might deny as a cruel illusion.

"But I think it's wrong that the public school textbooks always show fat men as being jolly Fatmen," says the fat man. "They and whoever writes and approves them have made it much harder for me to find a lover. Something should be done about this, though it's too late for me to benefit from a change."

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"Well, that's outside my province," says the therapist, having chosen his or her own condition; adding, if hip, "But if you feel you could grow by trying to change this, go to it." An EST counselor might chide him for trying to blame something outside himself, and return him to the basic proposition: "You feel as you choose to feel about what Is; you can choose to feel or to interpret It otherwise, or to get skinny." And continue to laugh at the Fatman Funnies, without a second thought. The fat man is a Black man, is a woman, is any person objectified through objective social processes which themselves are collectively willed as our collective responsibility. Why should we kick against objectification, prejudice, intolerance, oppression, exploitation, against the personal actions and social agencies that teach them, the institutions that embody and perpetuate them, and the practices that profit by them? Why should we act to undo these? Ask rather why we should not, for there is a reason, a selfish and ESTish one: it is more comfortable and less demanding and dangerous not to, to deny the breadth and depth of our own responsibilities, rather than struggle to understand and meet their implications.

And so we fall back again to the posture so many felt was sufficient response to deal with a society of institutionalized racism: "What am I doing about it? Oh, I do try to be unprejudiced in my own relations, when I get the chance: there still aren't any Negroes in my neighborhood, oddly enough, but the office just hired one to deal with Black customers, and I told Thelma straight to her face that I didn't like the joke she made behind his back." Nothing in EST, Scientology, Arica, or the rest implies any more responsibility for exertion on another's behalf than this, if this much—let alone any searching of the self to understand it neither as isolated ego nor as transpersonal infinitude, but as an organic member of society.

What then of those who in recent years struggled with the realization that in consenting to pay their taxes they were buying napalm to be dropped in their name, and nominally for the sake of their own freedom, upon children of a different skin in an unjust war; and who knew both guilt and helplessness in the knowledge that each daily action of theirs that contributed to maintaining what Is, including the inexorable machine of business-as-usual, contributed also to maintaining this war and every other systemic injustice of American society? From EST's solipsistic perspective they were quite wrong, quite mad, out of touch with "reality," irresponsible to themselves. Granted, it is bewildering to figure out how to move, once we accept all that we can recognize about how our least action reverberates in and transforms the human world. But that's no excuse for wishing the problem away, or for declaring it solved. There is much truth in the line that we choose how we interpret the realities we experience, as almost anyone can learn easily by some experimenting with the sensations called "pain." Much cultural programming can be erased, and new programs of interpretation can be created. But when the flesh is torn, the flesh is torn, whether or not one chooses to cry. There are practical limits even to our most "miraculous" abilities to heal ourselves; and there are perhaps also some limits we should choose for our reinterpretations. It seems useful to choose to experience "pain" in a way which does not incapacitate the self while one seeks, inwardly and outwardly, for help to make the flesh healthy, whole again; it seems unwise to experience it so blissfully or indifferently that one neglects to seek aid, and bleeds to death. And so for our human flesh in society: we face such choices. Too easily, perhaps, the reinterpretation of pain can amount to no more than the old helpless counsel of adjustment—but with a new mystification, that by adjusting to it, the worse is indeed transformed into the better.

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Practice There is of course a shortcut to Utopia in EST's philosophy, simple and attractive. "If everyone," it is called. If everyone took responsibility for themselves, made known their wants and moved on these with their full, released potential—why then, it would all work out, because people are basically good ("perfect," "complete") and they will make fair arrangements and validate each other. In short, if everyone were a saint, then heaven would automatically follow. It may be so; and perhaps the dreamers of socialist Utopias are only a bit more detailed in their vision of the mechanics of working it out. But meanwhile we are somewhere between here and there, and the uses people do actually make of the power they can get give me pause. These lead me to imagine a Dystopia—a Utopia in reverse— instead, which follows quite as logically from EST's premises and seems a good deal more likely, perhaps because it so much resembles the present state of society, whose lessons EST reaffirms. For what is to inspire the corporate executive, who believes that people make their own realities and that God has granted him license to succeed in business, to change his company's manufacturing and pricing policies, stop lobbying against government regulation of the poison in his product, and stop hiring the best talent he can to sell it to children via TV? The approach of humanistic politics, applied to business, says at least that the executive has the personal responsibility to listen and respond to the individuals affected by his decisions; or so I in charity read it. But the philosophy of EST brooks no "shoulds" as they apply to others.

And so it would be, I imagine, for every other character on the social stage, when solipsistically enlightened and realized: no ground for anything but a greedy anarchy of selfinterest, unbound by necessary mutual considerations, a wilderness of shrewd contract. Nothing in EST addresses the issue of power as a social phenomenon, or suggests moral injunctions on its use; and these subjects aren't simply omitted from the curriculum but mystified, since the curriculum is sold as all you need to know and deal with about your own power.

This sort of thinking is deep in our tradition, and endemic these days. Currently it appears on the grossest scale in the proposal of "lifeboat ethics" for a world facing hunger pangs.* Let those who have the power to feed themselves, or to enforce the trade that feeds them, keep it however they can; let those who don't have it, do as they can by themselves, starve if they must; no blame. The status quo of social reality, with its distributions of power, is a given. There's no point in arguing whether America "should" share its political and agricultural power with the countries whose political, industrial, and agricultural developments America has stunted by the exploitations which have helped her to secure this power; nor whether within America the normal operations of food commerce "should" be disrupted to permit her poor to eat properly. Get yours if you can, keep it if you've got it; survival to the fittest or most fortunately located, the more so if they got guns.

*

This section was written well before Erland launched his project to end world hunger. Little did I know.

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It is refreshing to see such thinking put so straightforwardly by "objective" scientists. In the milieu of consciousness expansion it is put much more softly, with rarely an ugly resonance. But psychic me-firstism reduces to the same thing, a Social Darwinist ethic of survival and success. The competitive structure of reality is politely assumed, but scarcely mentioned; what matters is to make yourself strong, a winner. Thus American business and this philosophy of consciousness development go hand in hand: a commercial approach being appropriate to the education, and the graduates being appreciated in commerce for their mastery of the standard line. And what makes it all the more irresponsible, perhaps, is the stance of groups like EST in selling people not simply a few genuine tools for selfimprovement, but the line and belief that this is what "responsibility" is really all about.

Lord knows, people do seem eager to buy it. But EST and Erhard must take some responsibility for the act of selling it, and even more for their claim to be acting in fully conscious responsibility. Of course EST's philosophy gives them the perfect out: they themselves are not responsible for whatever people choose to experience through what they do offer! Since they are kind and not insensitive, however, they do occasionally give people mild warnings, like, "Don't think we're It, It's It." It is a little like setting up a candle name and then whispering to the moths as they fly by to beware lest they singe their wings. The world is One; and each of our actions is acted upon the political stage, whether we will it or are aware of it as so or not, just as it is acted simultaneously upon each other stage of consciousness. As Erhard is a teacher, there is a politics to what he teaches, and to his choice to teach it so; and his responsibility, too, has a political dimension. The State does not compel attendance at his school; he seems an independent scholar. But even the overt content of his teaching is so in line with the interests that control the (capitalist) State, that Erhard functions as a teacher in the State's broad school system. That the frustrations and sufferings of life are only personal and subjective; that change is only a private affair—these precepts underlie the isolation and powerlessness which permit institutions and the State to function as they do for whom they do. This essential ideology is preached subtly by the processes of all our institutions, but nowhere so nakedly as by certain gurus of the Inner Way. Therefore, in terms of the present politics of our society, Erhard is an exemplary servant of one particular line, however highly his teachings may be valued in the higher spiritual domain (where, to hear him, there is only one party line). That the State's tolerance of the teachers of consciousness who teach this line is political may be seen by thinking in reverse. Suppose Erhard et al. were teaching people to seek not simply private achievement for private gain, private remedy for private distress, but also private responsibility and public justice for public oppression, collective responsibility for the collective spirit and its realization, and change in the State itself, as well as in the practices of powerful persons, for the ultimate sake of human being. Would the State and the empowered so tolerate their schools, if their prospering might trouble the operations or institutions of power?

Something like this did happen in the 1960s, during the last main wave of consciousnessraising. Many raisers of political consciousness may well have had only a scanty grasp of the inner reaches of the spirit, but even those who had more were subjected to the same response by the State: surveillance, infiltration, manipulation, disruption, repression and persecution of their teachings, themselves, and their taught, and occasionally execution. Some would blame this all on the coarse manners of upstart minorities and the political Left, the unfortunate ways they went about trying to change consciousness. But I think it was also, and perhaps more, because men who control the real secular powers which we have (not always consciously) granted them perceived quite clearly the fact of threat to their possession and reacted accordingly, with all the power at their disposal, up to the highest levels, as has recently been revealed.

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I don't think the present managers of power in our society are omniscient, but I know they're paranoid and hard to pull a sneak on. For example, it has taken over two million arrests for the public authorities to begin to decide that marijuana, despite its early promise, was not a vile threat to social homeostasis but would rather, on the whole, be used by people to adapt themselves to an unchanged society; and therefore to relax the persecution of this particular way of exercising the "freedom" to change one's private consciousness. If the campaign against the stronger psychedelics remains unrelaxed, it is at heart perhaps because they can open people to seriously new consciousness directly, without mediation and without the strong frameworks of social values and interpretations which EST and other spiritual disciplines place upon such experiences. No, I think society's managers are quick to scent the possibility of subversion in new teachings and new tools, if only because their power indirectly affords them analysts to do this very job. Reformers of the spirit, of communication, of authenticity, who see their teachings as a holy rot which will infect the foundations of social enterprises and transform them invisibly, without active opposition, count perhaps too much on the blindness of those whose job and goal is to keep the superstructure intact; and too much on the efficacy which they hope their teachings retain after they are sanitized to pass inspection. The moneychangers work in the market and temple still, despite Jesus, grown grosser while they worship in his name; and those others of a new Name who chuckle at having cozened them to tolerance should ask whose secular interests they really serve. Power During the 1970s, EST was one of several new-consciousness franchise training programs whose creative spark and stylistic guidance were due to "former" salesmen. Few of the functional skills of consciousness which they taught were in fact new. Methods for training people in "positive mental attitude," visualization, "entering alpha-space," and other such aids to self-programming had been well-developed for at least half a century in the sales profession, and were advertised more publicly from era to era (as by Emile Coue, with his "every day in every way I am getting better and better" routines). These teachings in turn were to a fair extent adaptations of occult traditions. Eastern and latterly Western, or rather of techniques isolated from these. In this sense the spiritual face of EST and kindred enterprises represented a re-sacralization of a functional heritage whose secularization was never total anyway, given the continuing involvement and influence of adherents of such "mentally active" Western religions as Christian Science in sales practices and trainings. Still selling is in a sense its own religion; and it was equally proper to see the sudden flowering of self- and spiritual salesmanship in more industrial and economic terms—as if a well-established and denned industry had suddenly found a rapidly expanding market for its product, suitably recosmetized or reengineered, and were retooling and branching out to exploit the opportunity (all the more effectively because the product, salesmanship, were itself the means of its promotion).

This reading is suggested by the prevalence of such commercial biographies as Erhard's among the leaders of the new-consciousness wave. Their chief competition was foreign, a host of Indian, Tibetan, and other Oriental sages attracted by the spectacle and opportunity of America's opening to spiritual quest. Throughout the 1970s there was not a running show more comic, nor more passionate and deeply meaningful to many people, than this motley, brilliant cavalcade of entrepreneurial gurus provided as they traversed the land, performing in main tents and sideshows, vying to entice the populace to retreats and inductions, spinning off so many local franchise operations that the psychic crossroads of each significant cultural center came to appear a maze of holy Kentucky Fried Chickens, McDonald's, and Jack-in-the-Boxes.

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If the celebrated mid-decade Retreat of the Gurus in Colorado (near Boulder) turned out, as from accounts it did, not as an ecumenical council but as the sulky tangling of a dozen prima donnas, this may in part have been due to the character of their collective enterprise. For on the whole all their operations were selling not simply submission and peace but power—power over the self and through this means power in the world, to people in need or quest of both—and there was no reason to expect competing proprietors of such a product to get along. But they did learn from each other's examples in adapting to the market; and a detailed history could retrace the way spiritual enterprises of consciousness change came also to emphasize their worldly, practical benefits even as the advertisements of more secular enterprises came to assume a more spiritual cast. That the spiritual dimension of EST and others was economically convenient does not mean that Erhard and other leaders did not experience it as genuinely, and express it as sincerely, as did many of their followers. But at the least, given the commercial ambiance and background of their enterprises, there was potential for some confusion between the impulses of sales and spirit as these fused. The essential scenario of salesmanship is a contest of the will, or so the salesman sees it and so his training prepares him. He gathers all his persuasiveness, all the force of his spirit and affirmation; he projects as vivid an image as he can of the potential reality of the customer's happily using the encyclopedia or driving away in the car. He projects it in his own mind, and in other ways for the customer, inducing the belief of both parties in this reality, repeating the vision and the implied command to the subject, while screening out as much distraction as possible from the subject's consciousness. The subject may be unaware that it is a contest of will; he may feel purely helped; so much the worse for him. Dagwood may be inept, but he isn't dumb. He knows it's a contest of will. Like the others, the encyclopedia salesman is out to sell him a product (in this case, of instant enlightenment) which may well be useless to him. Dagwood knows he's lost if the man gets inside his door, for he knows the salesman knows how to get him, given half a chance. He feels the terror of the untrained, unwilling gladiator against a trained opponent. The salesman can do something strange, can hypnotize Dagwood; sometimes Dagwood resorts to loud music or to other antics to try to screen out the command. We laugh at Dagwood. It is a complex laugh, for Dagwood lives in a quaint history and salesmen rarely knock on the door anymore. Still, there are those moments when you rush out to buy the newest Gizmo, cheerfully realizing you've been had; and that feeling of being mesmerized in the supermarket, which has at last been recognized in a few psychological studies as, indeed, a trance state. The skills of consciousness in which salesmen are trained formed much of the functional product of 1970s new-consciousness enterprise, somewhat rephrased to fit the purpose of selling oneself to oneself and the world. Thus, the skills which EST and such sold were the skills used to sell them. It was exquisite: here again, as in the magical inner experience of EST, consciousness was applied reflexively to itself. In such metaplay lie our most precious and potent capacities, as well as our most unsettling; it is no wonder that the EST package was such a novelty item and so much in demand that EST did not descend to knocking on doors or buttonholing random people on the street as the Scientology and Krishna crews so obnoxiously did. Rather, people flocked to EST for curiosity or for deeper reasons. "I'm looking for a vehicle."

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"Well, my friend, I've got the one that's just right for you! Has it all over that undependable LSD-25, much more get-up-and-go than the old TM. Is that a flaw in the chrome? Naw, it's just a trick of the light. Here, take it for a spin. Hear that power hum?! Pretty snazzy, huh? Hell, I don't care if you don't buy it, the factory can't keep up with the demand. And you know the price'll be higher next year. Don't mean to insult your intelligence, but you're stupid if you pass this opportunity up."

Me, I don't know what it all means, that they use the same skills to sell us as they promise to teach us. That does seem harmonious, in a way. But it seems also, in this case, a peculiar harmony of humiliation and ennoblement—as if the ultimate proof that Dagwood should buy the encyclopedia were the very fact of the salesman's outtalking him with its aid. Convinced of the product's power, Dagwood realizes that his defeat was a blessing, and plans to use it on Mr. Dithers and Blondie, the forces ruling his life. In the middle of an encyclopedic speech to Blondie, she points out the gravy on his tie; when he thinks he has Mr. Dithers hypnotized and is dozing at his desk, the old man comes up and clouts him on the head. EST sold both a product and an ideology; each had both a visible and a hidden side. The overt product was a process of personal empowerment, i.e., personal power; and the ideology mainly concerned power's nature and purposes. This harmony was natural, as power generally comes with instructions for its use, being most dangerous (and tempting) otherwise. But as usual, the ideology had an implicit side, connected with the covert product of EST, which was a particular sort of personal impotence. The ultimate power involved was the power of will, paradoxical, self-transcendent. And one core teaching that EST shared with many other groups was that this power is not fuzzy and metaphysical but literal, a direct rather than indirect cause of event and phenomenon in the material world. For in the beginning is the Word, the image, the metaphor, through which Will works this world into being; and in teaching the simple, basic skills of making visualizations and energizing them with will (which form the functional core of so many various teachings, old and new), EST was dealing directly with the primal substrate, power indeed.

What the explicit EST ideology taught was that the power of will is raw, unmediated, and private property: that it is the power to work your own will in and on the world, however you can. ("Your reality is what you make it.") It was the philosophy of Manifest Destiny reduced to individual scale, square in the American tradition of autonomous power as a godgiven right. Nor did the ideology quite dodge the question of responsibility. We all are citizens of society; and in society, duty without power is slavery, and power without duty is license or tyranny. What then was the duty of one empowered (yea, as unto a minor god) by EST? The duty taught overwhelmingly was to oneself, one self only, the shrunken remnant of society left after ideological narcissism and solipsism ("you are totally responsible for the reality you experience") had dissolved one's connections to the world. If you want the food, take it; if he wants it too, let the more powerful will prevail. Isolated atoms in the free market; but where, where is the human bond nourished? The contradiction within this closed system, the door leading from its airy isolation to the fetid human basement, was accessible through EST's own terms. (If few EST graduates sought it through them, this was perhaps not alone due to the metaphysical delicacy of the argument which my summary somewhat brutalizes, but also to some mesmerized paralysis of will and imagination.) For the essential tenet of Erhard's teaching was that there is a reality, both material and social, "out there," a reality essentially distinct from our interpretations of it; and that we each are ultimately responsible for choosing to make the interpretations that we do make.

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Both clauses are true, so far as I understand "truth." The kicker is that this ultimate act of choice-of-interpretation, like any other choice, is ultimately of the will, i.e. (as I understand the matter) of the primal substrate of reality, the essence beyond our grasp and naming. We can never quite catch hold of this act of choice at its original root; wherever we actually grab it we arc already in the domain of interpretation, however subterranean. Likewise, though indeed pure breakthrough beyond formerly-held interpretations of reality often occurred when people "got It" in EST, whatever consciousness and knowledge they subsequently retained of their experience of these moments was again couched in interpretation.

In particular, wherever and however we catch hold of the way we create the reality we experience, we can recognize others' participation inseparably in our creation (if we choose to do so). Thus we do not know, and indeed have reason to doubt, that the ultimate root of the act is strictly private. As for the domain we can grasp, recent studies show that even the cellular structures through which we experience vision (in both senses) are shaped by the collective forms of our culture. Each word and concept we use to interpret our experience was shaped by many mouths and minds and is freighted with their power; and the new words and concepts we make for use are equally children of the old. Our responsibility for our interpretations and our choices may be inalienable; yet it is never ours alone, as both they and our very recognitions of them are shaped and limited by others' interpretations and choices. So it was, for those to whom EST taught that they alone were responsible: not one experience of their own reality did they have through the EST process without having with it EST's words and ideas and frames immediate for use. For these to determine their interpretations totally was no doubt rare, or rather impossible. But for these to determine their interpretations not at all was equally impossible, if only because our perpetual human need to share consensual reality is strongest in the presence of strange new experiences, and EST's terms for defining reality were the main ones available.

In short, the idea of total responsibility for one's experience of reality was—even in the unqualified way it was promulgated, let alone in how people interpreted it—a subtle and total contradiction. The operational and ideological corollary which many drew from it—that one has, alone, the power and license to transform one's reality at will—was simply false, as no EST graduate could transform his or her experience sufficiently to experience Erhard's refunding his or her money and welcoming him or her to co-leadership. The subtler corollary—that one can transform one's own interpretation of one's experience at will—was more nearly true, as most graduates could transform theirs enough not to care about this or any other "negative" social fact about EST. Yet even this corollary was false if taken to mean that one could do so without limits or influences from others, in pure private responsibility, as EST had it. The ultimate truth of EST seemed rather that one could choose to remain ignorant of what influenced one's choices and interpretations, and of the very fact that they were influenced.

Meanwhile, in the real social world, the idea that one determines one's own experience is contradicted, or at least faced with its own limits, as soon as one's desires and needs grow beyond one's own power to enforce or fulfill them. To cope with this reality, EST's ideology had an implicit side and argument. Given that there is a structure of (human) power outside the self which limits and otherwise determines one's own power, all that one can do is (a) "be realistic," play along with the powers that be to get what one wants; and (b) if that doesn't work, adjust, change one's desires and needs and interpretations to fit the situation. Thus the (unacknowledged) limits to private power became, from the other side, the outlines of private impotence, which EST covertly reproduced and reinforced.

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Both of these implicit propositions are much broader than my churlish phrasing makes them seem at first glance; and as broad propositions both are broadly reasonable. We have indeed some ordered place in the power structure of the universe, of reality. However much we wish to By unaided, it seems the Earth has gravitational power which functions to prevent this. Those who would fly must make alliance with other agencies of power to evade or overcome this force, bending their natural operations to favor the flyer's ends, and in return being subject to their demands and uses. So it is for gliders obeying the wind, and for jets burning the ancient benison of the plants, excreting it into the life cycle again (to trouble our breath). Those who still would fly unaided must curb their desire, or else modify it to fly with the mind alone, leaving body behind. To resent the Earth for her gravity, or any other limitation of our place in the universal power structure, is crazy, in the literal sense of being out of touch with reality. We learn, or are taught, to apply this metaphor to social reality.* We experience the structure of power as primordial, and our limited potential for empowerment in its scheme as a given. We would fly, would aspire to that sense of motion, exhilaration, pure ease, alone, in relation or community; but the weighty influence of our institutions, from industry and economics to culture itself—mostly invisible forces functioning by mostly invisible laws— holds us down. Why protest this gravity? Only a crazy man walks off a cliff to be smashed on the rocks below; a sane one limits his desire, to jump only as high as he can, given the inexorable weight; and at most seeks training, as from EST, to have stronger legs, more personal leaping power. This vision makes for peace of mind and social homeostasis; but it's too simple. For our social reality is not a fundamental given but an ephemera] and mutable construct of our will—more directly and accessibly so than the material universe, which may also be so. We choose to obey the laws we create together and to suffer the consequences we ordain for their breaking; but we can choose also to change them, to change the constant and content of social gravity, perhaps to fly. Why should love, the mutual flowering of personhood in supportive relationship, be bound down by the sex-role and gender stereotypes our institutions perpetuate? True, a couple reaching for the sky can struggle alone to unencumber themselves alone of this old baggage, and to shrug off its daily reassignment at the office, which needs them, for the sake of business, to carry it everywhere they go. But they might equally work to change the way the office runs and the definitions of being men and women which it recreates, change these to take some weight off other lovers in the office and the future: an "unselfish" act which provokes its own reciprocation, and which can only be motivated by a larger vision of the self, which knows the self as just another lover in the office, child of the past and parent of the future; and knows that every weight or levity felt by another self adds a fraction of the same to one's own, despite the illusion of the separateness of flesh.

In particular, we couch our ideas of social hierarchy in its terms, acknowledging each other as "higher" or "lower" in various ways; and this persistent couchment in turn imparts social definition and nuance to our every use of these spatial qualifiers. The very idea of "higher" consciousness seems in itself a cognitive failing, using a gravity-based (i.e., explicitly material) metaphor for what is (presumed to be) independent of the material world. It is doubly unfortunate because each time we use it we subliminally credit this consciousness with specific social as well as spatial meaning, endow its presumed possessors with social status, and reprogram ourselves to do so. *

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What EST and such ideologies taught was to mind your own business, in both a positive, literal sense, and in the usual negative sense, which permits "others' " business and the business of business itself to proceed uninfluenced, unchanged. Don't mess with the power structure and you won't get frustrated or hurt; accept the limitations and directions its gravity assigns as natural; by climbing on another's shoulders you can add his small buoyancy to your own, and rise a bit higher in our thick medium. Thus runs the traditional American line; but EST's solipsism took it further. To accept such limits as being only your own choice and responsibility is to be deeply mystified not only about their nature but about your own freedom to choose. Moreover, if no one else shares the responsibility for determining the limits of your experience, then no one else shares your power to change them; and you thus have neither ground nor motive to look to others for help in this (other than to manipulate them as you can). In sum, the personal impotence implied by EST's ideology was as comprehensive and absolute as the personal empowerment taught as its complement.

All this, I think, was implicit in EST's ideological teaching (which bore no more positive social lesson to counter or balance it). But how sadly limited it was! For what, after all, is "my own business"? If each cry of pain in the world echoes in every mind and heart (as I argue elsewhere, it quite literally does), then each source of distress is my business. Part of my most serious business upon this planet in present time is my involvement and responsibility in making this entire social reality as it is made anew each instant. My business is to create the value and meaning of social gravity, the character and shape of the forces which bind our human matter together and into one—the unity which EST denied. A busybody, everyone's daddy-mommy, a megalomaniacal meddler. Why should I not be? Like you I am god in this small heaven, full peer of four billion other crippled deities. And I bring suit against Erhard for raise advertising, in the courts of higher heaven and in the common council of humankind. For his promises implied that through his lens we might recognize the full extents of our power and responsibility; yet it was narrowly formed and was pointed in one direction only, to show us but the half of who we holy are.

I bring similar suit against Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalogue fame, though I hold personal treasures from him and believe that his vision has in many ways enriched us. For he said it out front, in his catalogue's dedication: "We are as gods, and may as well get good at it." Yet when I looked within his compendium of enablement I found listed many tools for changing material reality, and many for changing the reality of private consciousness; but none for the changing of social reality, which lies between. And no apology, worse, no mention or consciousness of this great omitted spectrum of technology and empowerment, let alone of its being integral to the others.

Who among those who invite us to realize our wholeness through their teaching, their lens, will not be named in this suit? Who will offer a chisel for fine cabinetry, a mantra to refine the mind, and a seat on the police review board, all three; and help us learn to use them all well and wisely and together? Eurobond seems to, and there are others; so pleading the more usual commercial standards will not dismiss the suit.

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No, the mutability of social power and our collective responsibility for it must be addressed; and the precept of EST to "go with the flow as given" was no more adequate a response than the "do your own thing"-ism of the hippies, which it slicked up for sale. The precept was, however, implicit not only in the ideology but in the social organizational practice of EST, which conditioned its participants to obey this injunction. For if my contact with the world of EST was any guide, within EST a powerful set of socializing norms was constantly in action, evidenced by a continual, general, upbeat attention on what was the right thing and the right way to think and speak and act. And I've never seen a context of this sort where the existential rules of participation, the laws of inner gravity, did not say this: you can try to rise higher in the power structure, perhaps displacing someone else; but don't try to change the structure itself, how it works, unless you're on top. Schooling Insofar as the EST experience taught—or more properly, conditioned—its participants to a certain view of reality, the social order, their places in it and how to act, EST was a school. In any school students learn two curricula, one of content and the other of process. The content here was EST's ideology and certain skills of self-management. The process was a process of social relation in learning, of the sort discussed more generally above in the essay "Pedagogy of the Guru," which applies word for word to this case.

Yet though EST was in no wise unique as a school, it exaggerated certain themes of style which bear further mention here. For the motto engraved on the lintel over the schoolroom door of EST, the sentiment repeated each time Erhard or his surrogate addressed new classes and prospective clients, was You dumb assholes! You can't learn unless I hit you over the head and make you learn! And in this advertising, Erhard and his school were more honest than the State, whose teachings theirs served and extended. You start learning EST (the present tense is convenient here) by making a deal with your trainer. He says he will force you to realize. You agree to be forced. He says, "You can't speak, eat, stand, shit, or sleep until I give the word." This is what he's selling; you agree to it when you buy it and again when the process begins and he repeats the rules. You have made a contract; he tells you reality is a matter of the contracts we make together (together!); it is true. Later your body feels "hungry," "tired"; you decide you want to eat, to sleep; lowered blood sugar and fatigue help mind body you to feel angry at the trainer for not announcing chowtime, naptime; attendants muscle you back when you head for the John, the door to the outside is locked; you protest. "You jerk!" says your trainer, "you can't even keep a contract you make! Wise up!" You know he's right. How can you be mad at him, when you have betrayed yourself? You adapt to the situation: perhaps cheerfully, realizing you arc not (just) the creature of your body; perhaps reluctantly, nursing your anger and still too well behaved to pee in your chair. Either way, your trainer's got you, when he says at the end, "Did you get It? You bet you did!" If you know you've experienced a profound shift in levels of consciousness, you nod in agreement; if you know he's run a trick on you and "made" you sit still for a cruelly and unnecessarily long time, he says, "Yep, you're right: that's the reality you chose to experience. You got It!" If you still don't get It, and whine, "But you cheated me, you didn't teach me anything!," he says, "You fool! You're always running to others looking for what you think you don't have yourself, and now you've done it again! Now don't say I never taught you nothing!"

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So what do you learn about learning itself, through such a process? You learn that an absolute authority is necessary to define what you should learn and how you should learn it. You learn that it's okay for Benevolent Power to put you through whatever painful experience it deems necessary for both your education and its own purposes, once you assent to its authority. You learn that you learn by agreeing to be coerced, passive, and dependent; by feeling (as a friend of mine who loved EST put it) controlled, abused, powerless, alone, fearful, wrong, stupid, and bad; and by so completely accepting these feelings and the objective circumstances which lead to them that you are no longer bothered by all this. All in all, nothing new: these are the lessons about learning and citizenship that arc conveyed in the course of fraternity initiation, and (usually less blatantly) throughout the processes of institutional education in general. In EST, pushed to extremes, people learned to be the sort of learners they had already been trained to be, through a kind of processlesson so familiar in its essence that people hardly noticed it as such, however much some noticed and objected to its exaggeration. Many people, my friends included, had regarded themselves after leaving the school system to become quite admirably self-directed learners and autonomous citizens. Nonetheless, under the intense particular stresses of the EST process—for this is how such circumstances affect us—they found themselves regressing to former and more primitive (childish) ways of being selves and learners, ways which moreover were explicitly reinforced and normative there, and mystified by being defined as progressive rather than regressive; and came out knowing that something odd had happened to them but not quite what, as the EST curriculum, though otherwise quite sophisticated, never quite got around to dealing explicitly with styles of metalearning.

All this, I think, helps to account for some of the sense of creepy contradiction that people had about EST but could never quite pin down. But from this perspective the contradiction is quite clear. EST intended overtly to teach people to be autonomous, self-responsible learners and often did so on one level; but the EST process taught them precisely the reverse on another subtler level. And the contradiction extended to the depths of the person: EST went about teaching people to be responsible for generating and managing their own view of reality, by programming them with its metaview. It was no more than they deserved, perhaps, for signing up for a process so explicitly (if mystifyingly) advertised to sock it to them; but still … . All this might have been okay, in the sense of being necessary, if Erhard had been right when he said, "You can't learn unless you let me hit you on the head." Perhaps he was right, at least for many; but I am reluctant to believe it. I think rather that what one learns most from such processes is about getting hit on the head and liking it. No blame; everyone to their liking. But as for the particular skills and tools of self-perception and self-control which EST did teach, and even the fullest leaps of consciousness it induced, there is not one, nor all together, that cannot be taught and learned in many different styles, paces, and webs of social and educational relationships and processes. Most of the psychological insights are humane, useful, and well known in gentler therapeutic contexts; the experiential states of altered consciousness can be generated and interpreted in many different ways; and the ideology can go hang.

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Erhard said up front, while his whole charade convincingly denied it, that EST had nothing new, that all of its elements were derived from other sources. All that was unique was EST's capacity to inspire at least temporary belief in and learning from their amalgam, through its extreme, intense, and skillful use of paradoxical intention and direction, and the gloss of its glib verbal gloss of the matter. I do believe that all of value that EST taught can, in particular, be learned in ways whose social process and implications are quite the reverse of EST's (though not defined so counterdependently!). I may be wrong; men and women may learn and live best, or at least more efficiently, under the psychic lash. But I choose to create another reality, agreeing with EST that this is my privilege, and ours.

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V. On Some Matters of Concern in Psychic Research [Not included.]

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Epilogue So much for the parties concerned, as a model for what may come, magnified. EST and Werner Erhard are still very much alive and on the move. Vague reports about their Hunger Project have been accumulating for a year now; and the most recent local publicity had EST volunteers showing up to staff refreshment-and-aid stations for the 3,000 runners in the Second Annual San Francisco Marathon this past weekend (July 9, 1978), wearing their "Ask Me About Hunger" buttons. I thought the symbolism was marvelous. Running-around-in-circles has become the main dance of this decade, now more popular in California than disco, having completely replaced the dance of running-naked-in-the-streets to which the young were moved when everything seemed so immediately to be falling apart at the decade's start. And for EST so to bless the grandest runaround of all (and advertise the fact, for they scored a blurb for Erhard's Hunger Project right in the middle of the San Francisco Chronicle's front-page story on the race—efficient as ever) while I was running around in typewriter circles chasing EST myself has left me, like Erhard, feeling myself part of some grand harmony.

I hope I've made my respect for the holy task of reinhabiting our bodies clear enough in "Notes on the Tao of the Body Politic," not to offend my many jogging friends when I suggest that the figure we trace in our efforts, though it serves many other uses and interpretations as genuinely, has also a political and mythic character that reflects and helps to determine the cultural conditions of our day. And similarly, in describing EST as the sort of runaround I have, with political character and implications, I must beg the pardon of my friends. For a fair number—several powerful journalists, old political cronies, a therapist, some others, and several quite dear to me—are still heavily involved with EST and Erhard, not only in crediting their influence personally but in lending energies actively to their efforts. For the most part we have never quite seen eye-to-eye on political matters, on what forms of power relations are desirable and how they are to be developed; and I see, looking back now to our dialogues in the 1960s, that the key issues and implications that divided us then have come, through EST, to divide us further, or at least perhaps more clearly.

Despite this I do not see them, in their learning from and work with EST, as simply the tools of a tyrannical design or potential. Rather—and as they are my random sample of EST's population, I take them as somewhat representative of all the other EST-influenced people whom I do not know—I know them generally as intelligent people, generous of impulse and competent and serious in their purposes, generally strong in ego and will, and concerned to work good in the world for more than selfish reasons.

And so I see them still, even when they sing EST's line and Erhard's praises as if hypnotized—for few of these qualities have changed in any of them through the sudden shallow "transformation" which EST affords. These qualities of strength and grace- of concern for the textures of society and of the human bond, continue largely to animate their ordinary conversations, actions, and commitments—and even the work they undertake for EST, being indeed its saving grace and contradiction, so far as I can tell—however much their expression may at times be inhibited or confused by the ideas and loyalties they have chosen to hold for this season. Nor have they in truth taken Erhard's closed system to replace their own, despite this sometimes seeming so. Rather they have tempered his lessons with their own, in ways doubtless more complex than they (let alone an observer) could describe; and may yet, I trust, finish sorting out what is useful and discard the rest, though the time and energy this takes might perhaps have been put to some wholer purpose.

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All I can say is, this is how we are, gloriously rich with contradiction, pursuing our purposes and being through frames of interpretation that never quite describe them and always gape somewhere wide to the mystery of higher order which we call Chaos. As for my friends, though my interpretation of the deeper meaning and broader implications of the ESTian circle they've been running around in is necessarily similarly flawed, I must leave it stand so; and ask them, for both our sakes and more, to address the issues it raises more seriously than any yet have done—for their significance in our society and time is far wider than the case of EST alone displays—lest we betray what we most desire.

As for Erhard's Hunger Project—whose title is curious in itself as an expression of intent, or rather characteristically paradoxical—so far it seems strictly from hunger as well as to. But it merits description if only for being among the more bizarrely logical social enterprises of a decade which, all in all, has turned out to be quite as much a carnival, if a more quietly agonizing one, than the 1960s were. Erhard kicked off the Hunger Project in San Francisco's Cow Palace, appropriate stockyards theater, in mid-1977. Twenty thousand EST devotees joined him for the occasion, to hear an hours-long speech which boiled down to this: Erhard declared that it was right to end hunger in the world, and that the time had come to begin; that it was possible to do the job within twenty years; and that hunger would end when enough people determined to end it. To this end, he asked the people to join him in determining this, however they would, and to fast for a day, contributing their food savings along with their admissions and Other donations to a treasury for this purpose. Many observers saw the project and its attendant hoopla as Erhard's belated move in response to the criticism, by then two years mounting, concerning EST's lack (to be polite) of positive social purpose. Some saw it also as a stalking-horse for Werner's personal political ambitions. But surely the goal was admirable in itself, appealing to every constituency and everyone's most progressive sympathies, and offending no one—except perhaps those who asked how hunger was to be ended. For Erhard had perhaps drawn his inspiration from Buckminster Fuller. A decade earlier Fuller's World Game, global calculator, had described the fact that humanity's present and readily developable resources were adequate to feed it well, if only they could be so employed; and publicity planted the idea fairly widely in a generation's imagination. The only thing was, Bucky and his game had said nothing about the social mechanisms and political processes that might actually be used to bring this employment about.

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Nor, so far, has Erhard had anything to add on this score; his contribution instead has been to define the idea itself as an effective agency and apply his talents and organization to selling it as such. By now hundreds of thousands of dollars and lord knows how many thousands of volunteer hours have gone into the project, apparently devoted principally to publicizing it and seeking subscribers for no duty more firm than subscription to it. Erhard's reception on the road has been mixed, from what I hear. Some Rotarian and Junior Chamber of Commerce conventions and some general groups are said to have greeted the project enthusiastically, if not unanimously so. But all accounts I've seen of his presentations to persons and agencies professionally concerned with hunger, or with the actual management or transformation of any social system, agree that his reception has been quite dismal and hostile, and that people have found his project and his role as Hunger-Banisher, if not also Erhard himself, to be quite unbelievable.*

And here it sits, a social phenomenon still in progress. The hell of it is that Erhard is right. We could end all hunger if we all (or enough of us) chose to; we could figure out how, just as we could change for the better every feature of our social, political, and technological practices (and would have to change a great many to end hunger). And we may yet, despite all the effective undermining of this historical potential by the metalessons and -workings of such organizations as EST. Nor is Erhard's style of going about it to be totally kissed off as ludicrous, unless one is so deeply atheistic and ignorant or discounting of human potentials as to deny totally the efficacy of prayer. Rather, the Hunger Project kickoff was done in first-class style, in accord with millennial practices of human magic. Around the shaman, invoker of the powers, the (fed) community assembled, dedicating itself by sympathetic ritual experience; intention and image were energized with will, to resonate in the causal and acausal fabric of the world. So it has long been, the old tales crediting also that those who work such ways are as oft as not surprised and betrayed in their conscious intents by the results, yet persist anew nonetheless, for the sake of goods also realizable through them.

That no positive political mechanisms are specified (and some negative ones implicitly involved) concerns me still; yet, as I argue in the next essay, even our rational Western science is now beginning to open to the proposition that the world works also in such strange ways. Nor will our accounting of political processes remain unchanged as the synthesis of these long-separated cultural frames proceeds. For this reason alone we would be foolish to consider the historical book on the Hunger Project closed in advance, however inadequate we may accurately account it in present time; and more foolish to discount the political and social potencies of such attempts in general to apply consciousness to the task of transforming itself. However Erhard's project and EST's fortunes fare, each aspect of their show still stands as a light-weight rehearsal for the first act of a heavier leader and organization who will realize such techniques and implications more profoundly. Nor in America's current social climate, moving so strangely toward 1984 and the millennium, were we wise to discount this potential, or the responsibilities incumbent upon those who recognize it. 1975, 1978

As this goes to press (11/78) disbelief grows more public, with the publication of a Mother Jones exposé alleging that the Hunger Project, legally a separate entity, is feeding EST itself—both indirectly, through a complex fiscal interlock involving offshore tax shelters, and directly, since (whatever its purpose) the main visible function of the Hunger Project seems to be to recruit its volunteers to take the EST experience. If the first is true, I'd be disappointed, having thought the Project a classy act. As for the second, it seems to me more natural than reprehensible. *

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