for Common Ground Summer 2002

by Virginia Lee

Julia Butterfly Hill is one of those naturally charismatic people who life just happens to. A woman who is dedicated to living every moment of every day to its utmost fullest, she exudes a powerful energy, a passion for the truth that defied the Pacific Lumber Company until they recognized the error of their ways. Through her heroic efforts of living in a 200-foot redwood tree named Luna for 738 days, this majestic old-growth redwood and the forest around it was saved.

Her story is one reminiscent of David and Goliath out of the Bible, and well documented in her mesmerizing autobiography The Legacy of Luna (2000, Harper San Francisco). On the heels of this national bestseller, Julia has written a new book One Makes the Difference, which was just released by Harper in Spring 2002. In these pages, she  steps beyond her personal story, reminding us that we are all capable of greatness, we are all capable of acts of heroism for the love of the Earth. We are all players on the same team, and the prize is survival itself.

Refreshingly honest, straightforward and articulate, a conversation with Julia is as engaging—and challenging—as her life in a tree must have been. Whether speaking by call phone from a platform 180 feet above the ground in Luna or on her way to catch a plane at Dulles airport, the message is the same: Love the Earth, Live in the Moment, Have the Courage to be Your Higher Self. She makes it seems so simple. And it is. And at 28, her journey has just begun.

CG: Although you have probably told this story hundreds of times, would you tell our readers what inspired you to do the tree-sit in Luna?

JBH:  It began with a car wreck I had in August 1996 that made me re-examine my value system. I began a search to find out why I am here on this planet, separate from what my parents had taught me and separate from what society was teaching me. While traveling around the country with some friends, I ended up  in the redwoods of northern California and had a very profound and magical experience.

When I found out two weeks later that 97 percent of those trees are already gone, that lumber companies were still cutting them down at that very moment, and spraying massive amounts of toxic fuels, herbicides and insecticides on the logging sites, I thought, “I have to do something.” When I saw the devastation, I got an answer through my prayers. It was: “Julia, if you walk away from an injustice in the world, your inaction is just as much a part of that injustice as the actions of others.” I knew if I walked away, it would mean the same thing as cutting down another tree.

Before this moment in my life, I had never done any kind of direct environmental action. I didn’t have any experience other than the fact that I grew up with two brothers and no sisters, so I had climbed a lot of trees. When I heard that someone was needed to tree-sit in Luna, I volunteered. It wasn’t something I ever intended to do. It just sort of happened.

CG: Was that the breakthrough you had been seeking to understand  your higher purpose in life?

JBH: For me, it was. But in every moment of every day, the universe is calling us to rise to our higher selves. It’s just a matter of listening. So many of us just walk (or run) right on by without even noticing, because we are living in this society that is oriented to what I call “bigger, better, faster, now.” As a result, we miss numerous opportunities of creating really beautiful things in life. Sure, I did a really intense action, but it was only because I was in a place in my life where I could do that.

Every moment of every day, there is a chance for us to make a difference in the world, to live our lives for a higher purpose. I am sad that most of the time we miss it, because we are rushing by. One of the most valuable things that Luna taught me was taking the time to be still, to pray, to be willing to listen to what I receive. That’s important for all of us.

CG: Is that why you’ve written your new book, One Makes the Difference?

JBH: Absolutely. It’s my response to all the kind words people have said to me, like “Thank you, Julia, for showing us how one person can make a difference,” with the emphasis on CAN. My response is that every single choice we make in every moment of every day affects the world whether we see it or not. So make that choice consciously and make it count.

It’s not a question of whether we CAN make a difference, because we DO make a difference. The question we have to ask ourselves is: What kind of a difference are we going to make? Every day, we have the opportunity to be the hero and the healer —or be part of the pain and  suffering and destruction. That’s every single moment of every day. I really wanted to bring that consciousness that I gained in the tree down into the everyday hustle of our lives.

Any one of us is capable of greatness. Every moment offers the potential for greatness. I often talk to people about how we worship the celebrities in our society. What I call “celebrititis” is a disease where certain people are considered more special than everybody else. I tell people that I don’t want to live in a world with leaders and followers. I just want to live in a world with leaders. Every moment is a chance for greatness and it doesn’t matter if you’re the person sitting at a desk answering the phone or you’re the one (like me) with a microphone in your face.

CG: Julia, how did you get the name “Butterfly”?

JBH: When I was about seven or eight years old, I was hiking in the mountains of Pennsylvania and a butterfly landed on me and stayed for hours. It has been a part of my name ever since. I started calling myself Butterfly that day, because it stayed on me all the way home.

Later when I was in my teens, my friends started calling me Butterfly without even knowing about the experiences I’d had. There was another beautiful, crazy moment when I had been up in the tree for 100 days and there was a big rally, someone brought me a picture of a big beautiful orange butterfly, the species of which is actually named “Julia Butterfly.” Biologically, it’s the only genus of its kind, whose habitat is native to Texas, Florida and Central America.

CG: Would you say that the transformational quality of the butterfly is a metaphor for what has happened in your life?

JBH: Absolutely, we all have totem animals. Some of us see them and some of us don’t. I had a very difficult childhood, so the butterfly came at a very important time in my life and has continued to come at different times to help and guide me. It has been a very powerful totem and I am very thankful for it.

CG: Why do environmentalists sit in trees?

JBH: Direct action in all of its forms, whether it’s a person sitting in a tree or locked to a bulldozer, means that people are putting their bodies on the front line.  First and foremost, you must realize that direct action is a sign that every other system is failing. But it doesn’t mean that those systems cannot be healed.

Direct action is all about shifting consciousness in order to change systematic problems. When you see people putting their bodies where their beliefs are, because corporations are failing and governments are failing and consumers are failing, it brings a spotlight to that problem. Often that action will shift consumer awareness, for example into realizing that a forest is not a product. Often direct action will delay things long enough to give people working within the legal system enough time to get laws passed and policy changed.

Direct action is usually a last resort and it’s dangerous. But it’s the front line of consciousness. You don’t do it unless nothing else is working, when eco-systems are disappearing and communities are disappearing. We’ve seen throughout history that the greatest changes have happened when people were willing to put their bodies—and their beliefs— on the line. If their lives are being destroyed anyway, it’s a way of making a statement. And it’s a moral responsibility as a human of conscience.

CG: What do you think of the eco-terrorist movement as popularized by books like The Monkey Wrench Gang?

JBH: Eco-terrorism is not The Monkey Wrench Gang. Eco-terrorism is Maxxam Corporation destroying what little is left of our old-growth redwoods, spraying herbicides and pesticides over the forest floor. Eco-terrorism is Monsanto genetically engineering our food and our future. Eco-terrorism is a government that’s trying to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic Wildlife Refuge. And we have to hold them accountable for what they do.

CG: How did you break through the stereotype of prejudice that usually pits loggers against environmentalists?

JBH: That’s the crucial part. Psychologically, the stereotypes and labels are what make us create an “other.” Whenever we create an “other”, we can destroy it. The reality is that whether we like it or not, we all share the same planet together. We have to figure out how to get human with each other. For me, it was a matter of trying to relate to the loggers as human beings. I stopped talking to them about the issues and just began asking about their lives, things like “Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you have babies? Seen any good movies lately?”

Being human together is critical to creating change. It was Gandhi who said, “Although I have to learn to love my neighbor, I don’t have to like him.” We have to find that place where we can love all beings.

CG: It seems that you had as many issues with Earth First! as you did with Pacific Lumber. In retrospect, how did you reconcile them both?

JBH: As human beings, we’re always going to be diverse. It’s not about Earth First! or Pacific Lumber; it’s about being very diverse people in an very diverse world living on a very diverse planet. No matter what group or organization you deal with, there’s always going to be a wide spectrum of personality. How we deal with the conflicts that come up is what really matters.

Earth First! is an anomaly. Everywhere you go, it means something different. Some Earth First! activists are my best friends and there are other Earth First! activists who hate me to this day. Earth First! is not a movement of everybody who thinks the same way. The only way I can continue to work with different groups is by being honest and trying to respect diversity—even with people who don’t respect the diversity in me.  I have found that is what works the best. It doesn’t make everyone like me, but I am going to love people whether they like me or not. I often point out to people in the movement how ironic it is that we are working so hard to protect diversity in the natural world, yet we don’t tolerate it in each other. I don’t want a monoculture of a movement any more than I want a monoculture in the world.

CG: Do some people in Earth First! approach the movement as others approach a religion?

JBH: I try and look at it from the viewpoint of passion. Passion is very important, but it can sometimes keep us from seeing the truth. How often do we get into an argument with our loved ones, people we’re close to— maybe even married to, but the passion gets so intense that it’s like blinders on a horse. We can see straight ahead but we can’t see the larger context we’re in. The same thing can happen whether it’s in the logging community, in the direct action community or just in our everyday lives. That’s a challenge for all of us, no matter who we are.

CG: What is the greatest lesson you learned from Luna?

JBH: It’s hard to pick one thing because the whole experience taught me so much. It’s like asking me if I prefer my hands or my feet. My two years of living in Luna is so integral to who I am today.  If I had to choose one thing that encompasses everything I learned, it would be the understanding that love is a verb.

CG: How did you decide when it was finally time to come down?

JBH: When I was up there, it was an every day, every moment challenge. Every day I would ask myself, “Am I meant to be here still? Am I still being effective? Or would I be more effective on the ground?” All these questions would race through my mind.

But I had given my word that I wouldn’t come down until I had done everything I could to accomplish two goals:

1) Make people aware of what was going on.

2) Try to get the forest area I was in protected forever.

I couldn’t control other people, but I could control my own will. I knew it was going to take a lot more than just me sitting in a tree to protect Luna. It took 738 days to build the critical mass of consciousness necessary to save that tree. In the beginning when no one knew about it, it seemed like Pacific Lumber was trying to kill me. They hovered a twin propeller helicopter above my head that nearly blew me out of the tree. They cut trees directly around Luna, two of which crashed into her. They tried starving me out and shone spotlights on the tree 24 hours a day so I couldn’t sleep. They say they weren’t trying to kill me, but they knowingly took actions that could very easily have taken my life. They knew they were risking my life.

CG: Psychologically, what did it take to survive in a tree for two years?

JBH: Courage. When people say, “I couldn’t have done that.” I say, “I couldn’t  have done it either.” The origin of the word courage is “coeur,” which is French for heart. And that’s where our true strength comes from.

The stories of heroism that came out of September 11th, as tragic as that day was, speak the same truth. People did not run back into burning buildings to grab their stock portfolios. They risked their lives to save the lives of others. And that’s the courage that comes form the heart. Any of us are capable of greatness when the circumstances demand it.

CG: Did you feel any divine guidance throughout those two years?

JBH: I think divine guidance is always there. It’s just whether or not we’re awake to it. I’ve found in every moment in every day, ever since coming down, phenomenal teachers and guides in my life. The tree taught me how to awaken to that reality. We have divine help, inspiration and guidance available to us all the time.

CG: What has happened to Luna since you left?

JBH: The tree was attacked by a person with a chainsaw about a year after I came down. Luna had become a powerful symbol. And as is often the case when something becomes a symbol, it is vulnerable to attack.

CG: Do you have any idea who did it?

JBH: Yes I do, but the kind of evidence that would bring about a conviction is very controversial. Some people are just too afraid to come forward to testify. If I had been able to bring those people to justice, the thing I would have asked for from the court is not to send them to jail, because I don’t believe jail helps anybody. Instead, a better form of rehabilitation would be a few months of what I call peaceful activism and conflict resolution training. Then maybe add a few years of restoration work out in the forest, where they would have to help heal a forest that’s been injured. To me, that’s the kind of justice that fits the crime. I don’t really believe in punishment. I believe in solutions, I believe in redwoods and I believe in healing.

CG: Do you still see Luna?

JBH: I do go visit her regularly and she’s doing incredibly well. It will take longer than you and I are alive for her to grow back, but she’s alive. When a tree is over 1,000 years old, they don’t grow back very fast.

CG: What has it been like to return to life on the ground?

JBH: It’s just a new way of practicing the lessons I’ve learned. Some of it is easier than living in a tree and some parts are more difficult. Life is a blessing no matter where you are, every moment of every day. And I actually thrive on the challenges. A lot of people thought I was living some kind of fairy tale existence up in the tree, but it was anything but peaceful with active logging going on around me.

CG: Are you enjoying a more comfortable life?

JBH: I don’t think I know what a comfortable life is. But I have a glorious, joyful life that I am very thankful for. Things like walking down the street and seeing a tree root pushing up through the concrete is what makes me happy. I usually take the time to stop and cheer that tree on.

CG: If you were to have children, would you build them a tree house in the back yard?

JBH: First of all, I’m not going to have children because I know that every choice comes with a responsibility. I understand the magic of wanting to have your own child, but I also understand that we’re not doing a good enough job of taking care of the earth that we’re bringing those children into. On top of that, there are a lot of babies already here who need love. Personally for me, I tell people that if they want to have the experience of a child, have that experience with one. I honor that desire to be a part of the magic of creation. And then extend your love beyond that child and adopt those children who are already here.

For me, I experience the magic of creation every day so I don’t have to bring a child into this world as a validation of who I am. When my life settles down and I have some kind of a space that allows me to nurture, then I will adopt children. And I will probably adopt children who are at an age when no one wants them anymore. And about the tree house—if they wanted one, we would probably build it together.

CG: Would you talk about your love/hate relationship with the media?

JBH: First of all, it’s important to know the difference between the mainstream corporate media and what we call the alternative press. Mainstream media is funded by corporations who have a vested interest in people NOT becoming proactive. So, it’s very difficult for writers who have a lot of passion for the story, because their mandate is to print an article that is not too controversial. For me, it’s been difficult to spend two hours with a writer, and then see what comes out on the other side.

I tell people that I don’t expect them to either believe or not believe in what I’m doing. That’s not what I’m asking for. But some writers are so concerned about being unbiased that they don’t tell the whole truth. They’ll skirt around facts that would hold people accountable because they want to seem unbiased. To them I say, why even tell the story?

The biggest function of the mainstream corporate media today is to feed our society’s addiction to entertainment. We’ve created this dynamic where the media entertains people rather than informs them, so we spend more time covering stories about what Hollywood celebrities are wearing than about which corporation is polluting our children’s lives. The truth is that we are products of our environment. From the moment we are born, we are conditioned to want entertainment. We are like sponges who absorb the advertising that is fed to us, especially to our young people. The media defines our values, from what we eat and drink, what we drive to what kind of clothes we wear.

That’s why an important part of shifting consciousness is to encourage people to change how they view the world. That’s why all of us becoming a voice in the media is crucial, and not just accepting what the mainstream feeds us.

CG: As a naturally private person, what has it been like for you to be the focus of so much public attention?

JBH: That’s been one of the biggest gifts of myself I’ve had to give to the world, being willing to put myself in the spotlight and stay there. It is really brutal. People only know me in the context of what the media portrays, so they don’t stop to think that you don’t climb into a tree to get attention. Even as a little kid, you climb into a tree to seek solace and solitude. Originally, I went into the tree to be alone. Being in the spotlight all of a sudden was a real shift for me. I was never the kind of kid who dreamed about being a star. It’s not in my personality.

The celebrity aspect of all this makes it difficult, but I also see it as a blessing. Being in the spotlight can warp people really easily. But because I don’t particularly like it, it helps keep me grounded. It helps to keep me human and it helps me stay real.

CG: How do you see yourself?

JBH: I see myself as a person deciding to offer my life in joyous, loving service to the world.

CG: Would you call this a spiritual path?

JBH: Spirituality is not a way of life. It is my life. The path is me, it’s the sun shining down on the path, it is everything. It is not even just a path. It is the whole experience of being who I am.

I tell people that my religion (which to me is the way I practice my spirituality) is love. And to me love is a verb. I think that all the “isms” have served their purpose in our world, but that now they are becoming detrimental. They are creating labels and boxes that separate us, instead of bringing us together. When they were first created, it was a way of defining things and connecting with them more. But I think we’ve already gotten to that point and now we’ve gone too far.

If you like to breathe, you’re an environmentalist, like it or not.

CG: Did living with Luna make you an environmentalist or have you always been one?

JBH: My family was a group of accidental ecologists, because we were very poor. As a family of five, we only had one plastic grocery bag full of trash at the end of the month. It wasn’t because we were environmentally conscious, it was because we were poor. It was a part of my consciousness without realizing it was a part of my consciousness.

I didn’t know anything about the world because my father was an itinerant preacher. All I knew about was religion. I didn’t know that I needed to be awake and be active in the world. Because I didn’t know to even question it, until I found out what was happening in the old-growth redwoods. Through finding that out, I began to learn about what is really going on in the world. I tell people that this isn’t our Earth, it’s us Earth. We are the planet, and it’s up to use to make it a healthy place.

Activism is about all of us; we’re all activists. Every moment of every day we’re changing the world. Are we going to choose to be positive conscious activists or destructive unconscious ones? No one is perfect, but it’s better to be part of the solution than part of the problem.

CG: Have you ever considered taking on the protection of the Amazon rain forest?

JBH: Sure, I’ve thought about taking it all on, but I’m just one person. On a slow week right now, I get 25 requests for my help from commentates around the world. And sometimes it goes up to 150. I can’t do it all.

But I may be going down to Chile, Argentina and Ecuador. I know some people sitting in trees in Ecuador right now. I’m would like to try to go down and get some support for them and hte forest.

CG: Have you ever considered a career in politics?

JBH: I’ve definitely considered it. I consider everything that comes to mind. You know, stranger things have happened.

CG: In your mind, what is the greatest threat of globalization?

JBH: I think we need to be careful about what words we use to define globalization. The reality of globalization is the Big Bang, Creation, and whatever way you relate to the beginning of Life. Since the moment of inception, we’ve been globalizing. Micro-organisms have been spreading across the face of the planet for millions of years.

But corporate globalization is a phenomenon unto itself. Corporations are not people, even though they have given themselves identities. They are machines which have been given a specific purpose to fulfill, and that is to make a profit. And unfortunately, because they are not human beings, they don’t come with a heart or a spirit. There’s no value for compassion, respect or care for the common good. And as such, corporate globalization is massively exploiting the people and cultures of the planet, in order to fulfill its mission.

That’s why we have to look for solutions in our own lives, by supporting local businesses, buying locally grown food, using local services and resources. Every penny we spend is vote on the future of the planet.

CG: Who is the intended audience for your new book, One  Makes the Difference?

JBH: The intended audience is anyone from any walk of life who can pick this book up and learn some new things, as well as be reminded of some things they may have forgotten in the bustle of everyday living. More than anything, I want whoever reads this book to be inspired to be a agent of positive change in the world. There’s something in here for kids, for adults, for hard-core environmentalists—and maybe even something for CEOs who want to change the way they operate their business. It’s possible to make a profit and protect the interests of the planet. I believe that there’s something in this book for everyone.

CG: If you had one minute to speak to the whole world over television or radio, what would you say?

JBH: I would say to think of love as a verb. I would tell people that ecology and economy both come from the same root word oikos, which in Greek means “house” or “home.” The only way our true economy is ever going to work is if we put our love into action by protecting our shared home for everyone.

I would list a couple of examples of places where they have held up economics as an excuse for exploitation and then show the reality of what happened as a result—places like the Pacific Northwest, the Amazonian rain forest and Papua/New Guinea. I would show examples where ecology has not been respected in the name of economics, and how that has destroyed people’s lives.

Then I would try to grab as many people as I could and bring them into the camera, and say, “By the way, these are all people putting love into action.”

CG: What do you think it would take for the principles of economy to work in harmony with the principles of ecology?

JBH: For people to take their money back. As long as corporations continue to make a killing financially, they’re going to keep on doing it. As long as they have incentive to exploit, they’ll continue to do it.

I tell people that the world is going to change one of two ways: It’s as if we’re building this big beautiful house with all the things we could never possibly need. But if you take a closer look, you’ll realize that we are using the foundation to build the house. And the foundation can’t support it. Either enough of us will become conscious and restore the foundation or the house is going to collapse. Either way it’s going to change. Those of us who are choosing to live joyous, conscious lives of loving service right now are putting pieces of that foundation back into place. we’re building a new kind of home. And if the big house crumbles, our humbler, smaller one will make it through. But then again, the big house might not crumble. To quote a Turkish proverb from One Makes the Difference: “No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn around.”

CG: What do you plan to do next?

JBH: Anything is possible. I climbed into the tree on December 10, 1997. If you had asked me in August what I would be doing at Christmas,  I wouldn’t have seen what was coming. I do believe in strategy, I do believe in analysis. I majored in business in college and I enjoy using the logical side of my mind, but I also have a very strong belief in magic. We can’t see everything. And if we try and plan things too much, we’ll plan ourselves right out of the possibility of something incredibly beautiful happening in our lives.

But to answer your question, I’m working on promoting youth activism right now. The young people today are the leaders of tomorrow.

CG: What kind of world will we be living in 20 years from now?

JBH: That depends on who reads your article, and who doesn’t. And what choices they make from this moment forward.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since. She was a regular interviewer for Common Ground from 1992-2004. She has also written two books: The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993. She currently lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA.

for Common Ground Spring 2003

by Virginia Lee

Wavy Gravy has been many things to many people. To some, he’s one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, made legendary in Tom Wolfe’s classic ’60s novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. To some, he’s the guy who kept the vibes together at the Woodstock music festival in August 1969. Yet to others, he is the founding visionary of the Hog Farm, which survives as an urban commune in Berkeley to this day as well as on a 900-acre ranch outside Laytonville, CA.

To a whole different group, he’s a guiding light, having helped save millions of people from blindness through his work with the SEVA Foundation. For terminally sick kids in a hospital, he’s a clown who makes them laugh when they are in pain. On the political scene, h works diligently for Nobody for President, for whom peace never goes out of style.

And to the likes of Bob Dylan, Ram Dass, Robin Williams, Patch Adams, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, and a list of countless others who are all legends (both famous and infamous) in their own right, he’s just an old friend. And to his wife, Jahanara, he has been a loving and loyal husband for almost 40 years. To his son, Jordan, he is a father like no other. And to the kids who go to Camp Winnarainbow every summer. . .well, it just wouldn’t be the same without him.

Oh yes, and he’s also been a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor.

In deciding who to feature for Common Ground‘s issue on Play, Wavy Gray is the obvious flavor of the month. It was a real privilege to interview him at his home in Berkeley, just days after the peace rally in San Francisco in January 2003. In the privacy of his bedroom, surrounded by decades of hippie memorabilia and Woodstock posters, we were transported back to a time that left an indelible imprint on those who lived through it, and left the rest of the world wondering what happened.

A marvelous raconteur and storyteller, Wavy Gravy will take you on a magic carpet ride, all the way from those nostalgic times to the present. Be spontaneous and spend a few moments with a living legend. You’re either on the bus or off the bus.      

CG: How did you get the name Wavy Gravy?

WG: That name came to me in fall of ’69, after the Woodstock music festival. We were invited to Texas, after having returned to our little 12-acre ranch in Llano, New Mexico only to discover that half the hippies in the free world had moved to our place to live with us forever. Fortunately, we had this offer to go to Texas where they were having a rodeo and a rock festival at the same time, and there was a little friction. In fact, I understand that cowboys were driving through the rock n’ roll campground dragging these big metal hooks attached to ropes, intending to snare freaks in their sleeping bags. Since we had the reputation of running the Please Force at the Woodstock music festival, they had sent a convoy of buses for us. When we got to Lewisville, Texas just outside Dallas, we drove immediately to the rodeo grounds where I got to share some herb with the rodeo clowns and recruited them to our side.

We went back to the rock n’ roll staging area where the police weren’t letting anyone in unless they had long hair. We chased the police away, took over and let all the cowboys drive in and set up camp on the tops of their cars. I remember getting onstage at the concert and complimenting the chemists of Texas, who came to the drug-free tent to sniff the incense and giggle.

I had fallen asleep, and suddenly I was being prodded by the mayor and the police chief to get up because their daughters had gone skinny dipping in Lake Dallas and they just couldn’t deal with it. All these kids in Texas had seen skinny dipping at Woodstock and they wanted to do it too. The mayor was saying to me, “You showed the world at Woodstock that you could police yourself . . . ” and I could just feel it coming.

So I said, “Well, you’ve got to let me use your boat and maybe give me a truckload of watermelons for the free kitchen.” Immediately he threw me the keys to his boat and I grabbed a Hog Farmer who was an old salt, put on my Mae West persona, got a loudspeaker and took to the surf.  I jumped into the water next to the first nudo and yelled, “Ahoy, nudo. If you want to stay high, you’ve got to put your pants on.” He says, “OK,” then I told him to swim over and tell all the others. So I was going all around the lake doing this, until the sun was setting a lazy peach and there isn’t a bare ass in sight. Even though my throat felt like raw hamburger, I say to our driver, “Well it looks like we’ve done it.” I am smug. Then right at that moment, out of nowhere came a naked water skier with a hard-on and I yelled, “Follow that sonuvabitch!” We just chased him round and round the lake until we ran out of gas, and laughed and laughed.

Then we made our way back to the free stage where there were about 96 conga drummers onstage. I just took the mike and said, “Hi, this is Wavy Gravy.” I don’t know where it came from, but a bunch of people started dancing around me. At that point I saw one of the rodeo clowns being sold a joint for $6, so I continued, “This is Wavy Gravy, and I see this clown being ripped off who was really helpful to me. Can we have all the pot in the stage please?” Then the conga drummers started chanting, “All the pot on the stage, all the pot on the stage.” The next thing I knew we had this big pile of weed. So these guys jumped up onstage, stripped to the waist, started rolling joints and kept throwing them out to the audience.

This cloud of smoke went up and just then the announcer says, “B.B. King is here with his bus. He’s gonna play for free. Can we clear the stage?” It was before one of my multitude of back surgeries, so I got up slow, felt this hand on my shoulder and looked up. There was B.B. King. He looked at me and in his deep baritone voice and says, “You, Wavy Gravy?” I thought for a moment and say, “Yes, sir.” He says, “Well, Wavy Gravy, I can work around you.” He leaned me up against his amplifier and whipped out Lucille. Then Johnny Winter came out from the other side and they just played until sunrise. It all turned into celestial jelly, the Lord’s jam and a tiny tip of Texas went to heaven.

When we came back to California, I had a grant teaching improvisation to neurologically handicapped kids. When I went to meet this new bunch of kids and introduced myself as Wavy Gravy, all the professors came running in and said, ” Keep that name! You just saved us a week’s orientation.”

But I have to watch it when I make phone calls, because if I say Wavy Gravy, the operators can get nervous. But if I say, W. Gravy, then they sometimes ask, “Are you him?” Then they help me make extra calls.

CG: What’s it like being an ice cream flavor?

WG: Ever since I became an ice cream flavor, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal stopped calling me Mr. Gravy. They call Meatloaf “Mr. Loaf” and Sid Vicious “Mr. Vicious.” But they call me Wavy Gravy since I was a food product.

But now I’ve been retired as a flavor of Ben & Jerry’s since I wasn’t cost-effective. It was the most expensive, complicated ice cream flavor ever known to humankind, but the public response has been such that they’ve had to create an e-mail address (wavygravycomments@benjerry.com) for all the requests to bring it back. All the royalties went to a fund to send homeless kids to camp.

CG: What was it like being with Ken Kesey?

WG: Oh goodness. When Ken Kesey passed away, there were all these calls early in the morning and the TV reporters were circling the block. It made me wonder, “Who is it this time?”

Ken gave me my family values, which really surprised a lot of people. In The Last Supplement to The Whole Earth Catalog, he wrote this whole thing about honoring your father and your mother. So I immediately called up my parents and had a really great talk with them. When they both passed away shortly afterwards, I called Ken and really thanked him for that. And he said, “It’s all the simple, obvious stuff that a lot of people miss.”

When he died, I wrote a haiku poem:

                  They say Kesey’s dead,

                  But never trust a pranskter—

                  Even underground.

When they published that in Rolling Stone, they left the “but” out. So I had to send them a letter asking if they had seen my but. Then it got published again in its entirety, because if you take a syllable out, it’s not haiku anymore.

CG: How did you become one of the Merry Pranksters?

WG: I’m trying to remember. I was with an improvisational theater group in San Francisco called The Committee, and we began to do little acid tests out at Muir Beach. I may have run into Kesey before that though, when I was living in LA with Tim Hardin. Once he kidnapped me and took me to Babbs’ spread in Soquel (somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains) and made me watch 50 hours of bus nonsense about the first cross-country trip they made. I had to put toothpicks in my eyelids to stay awake. It was mostly endless hours of Mike Hagan’s shoes since he was too stoned to point the camera properly.

That was the odyssey that Tom Wolfe wrote the book about.

CG: What do you think of Tom Wolfe’s book, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

WG: The book is a classic. But in that book, I get credit for putting the acid in the Kool-Aid in Watts when 28 people committed themselves. For the record, I never put any acid in any of the Kool-Aid. In fact, that was something that Kesey and I disagreed about, and what eventually caused a separation between the Pranksters and the Hog Farmers at one point. I believe that no one should ever receive psychotropics without their knowledge.

CG: For those who don’t know, what was the “electric Kool-Aid acid test”?

WG: The electric Kool-Aid acid test in Watts was held on the eve before psychedelics became illegal in the USA. We had these two large galvanized garbage cans full of Kool-Aid and I said, “OK, let’s get this straight. The Kool-Aid on the right is for the kids. And the Kool-Aid on the left is the “eee-lectric” Kool-Aid. Now let’s go over that again. The Kool-Aid on the right is for the children.” But people were dancing for six hours straight to The Grateful Dead and got so thirsty that they didn’t pay attention to what they were drinking. They just grabbed something wet and things eventually started to melt down.

At one point this young woman started absolutely freaking out. She started wailing, “Who cares? Who caaaaaares?” Ken Babbs took the best microphone there and shoved it down her throat and into everybody’s DNA goes, “Who cares?” I remember crawling to a microphone and saying, “Some sister is unglued, and perhaps we might want to help glue her together again. I’m going to go looking for her, so meet me where she is.”

I took off and found her 20 minutes later in a little side room. She was still wailing “Who caaaares?” I knew a few people there and others I didn’t.  Suddenly we just all joined hands. She dropped her mike and she turned into jewels and light, and then we turned into jewels and light. And that’s when I passed the acid test.

CG: How do you define an acid test?

WG: It’s a palette for human consciousness, where you can revolve, evolve and dissolve. When you get to the very bottom of the human soul, where the nit is slamming into the grit, and you’re sinking, but you reach down to help somebody who’s sinking worse than you are, then everybody gets high. And you don’t even need acid to figure that one out.

Let me tell you another story. My wife and I were living on Lemon Grove Street in Hollywood. Tiny Tim was in the back room and we were working on an evening show called “The Phantom Cabaret.” There were a lot of other amazing people there too. We were doing our first public event in southern California which was called the Lord Buckley Memorial sunset. We had sent these great little invitations out with a Lord Buckley quote on it:

“The flowers, yes the flowers.

                  But the people are the true flowers.

                  And it has been a pleasure to have momentarily

                  strolled in your garden.”

There was a little map with directions how to get to this beautiful mountain top above Topanga Canyon. It was a lot like Sugarloaf in Rio de Janeiro. The land was owned by Lewis B. Marvin III, one of the heirs to S&H green stamps, and he had given me his mountain top for this free celebration.

But the day before the event, it was pouring rain. The phone kept ringing and people were asking, “What about the sunset?” I said, “Let’s see what it’s like in the morning.” So, I go downstairs in the morning to see 50 or 60 people in day-go clothes in the kitchen cooking eggs. The Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters had arrived to do this acid test show and Tiny Tim was beside himself. In his British accent, he sputtered, “Mr. Neal Cassady knocked on my door, saying he wanted some grass. But he was standing on a whole lawn full!”

It kept raining and raining all day long. So finally I said, “Let’s call off the sunset go to the acid test thing.” But as it got more towards dusk, Ken Babbs (who was Kesey’s lieutenant) said, “Look, if you really want to go to that mountain top, let’s go.” So a bunch of us drove up there, in the rain, up this winding dirt road until we got to a metal sign that read: Police Dog Training Course (not many people go beyond that sign). When we walked, there was this beautiful house that he had built by hand, with a piano in the ceiling that would come down on a hydraulic arm. There were even birds living in the piano. The minute we got to the summit, the rain stopped, and there was the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen in my life.

Ever since then, through rain, snow, hail, sleet, earthquakes, fires, whatever, if our name is on a flyer saying we’re going to do something, we do it no matter what—if five people are there or 500 or 5,000 or 500,000. In hindsight, we were always so much richer for the experience. So I encourage people to do what they say they’re going to do, no matter what else happens. Sticking with it is part of the acid test.

CG: How did the Hog Farm get started?

WG: We had moved to this little cabin in Sunland, California and we got a call from the Pranksters. (Kesey was on the lam in Mexico, hiding out after a marijuana bust.) The Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead wanted to come over and pose with us for the cover of Life magazine, which was doing a story about psychedelia. While the photographer was shooting the pictures, Ken Babbs stole the bus and took off to join Kesey in Mexico. So suddenly, my wife and I in our one-bedroom cabin, had 40 house guests. And the landlord came by and went totally nuts. So, we were evicted.

But in the land of kitchen synchronicity, a neighbor came by an hour later and said, “Old Saul up on that mountain had a stroke, and needs somebody to slop them hogs!” So we were given a mountain top, rent-free, if we would take care of 50 hogs. And they were huge animals, about the size of this bed. We drove up to the top of the mountain in the dark and I stood out on this knoll looking at the lights of Burbank. And then the knoll suddenly stood up and started walking. I was standing on the back of a big, black sow! So that was the birth of the Hog Farm.

On Saturday nights we would all work the Shrine auditorium in LA where all the big rock shows were happening and all the great rock n’ roll bands of the ’60s would perform. We had a late show called The Single-Wing Turquoise Bird, when we would do energy games with the audience. Every Sunday we would have a free celebration at the ranch called Hog Sunday. It was always a different theme, and people would call from all over southern California to ask what the theme was. One Sunday it would be kites (even if there was no wind), another Sunday it was the Hog Farm country fair with holding-your-breath-underwater contests, kissing booths and that kind of stuff. Another Sunday, Tiny Tim came and 100 people built a theater for him out of nothing in about two hours. On Mud Sunday it just rained and we had sliding contests in the mud. One Sunday we had a hog rodeo, when we painted up the hogs and rode ‘em. And one day we had this great Buddhist priest come by who taught us a prayer to spread love throughout the valley. That worked pretty good.

We shared all our money too. One guy was a computer analyst, my wife was an actress in Hollywood and I was teaching improvisation at Columbia pictures and to brain-damaged kids at Cal State. At Christmas, the mechanics bought us a bus and we painted it up. We got some more buses and then were extras in a movie made by Otto Preminger called Skidoo, with Jackie Gleason and Groucho Marx as God. You could call it Otto Preminger’s acid movie.

Then we got all the buses on the road and began this adventure called the Hog Farm & Friends in Open Celebration. It was very similar to the acid tests, except that people would provide their own high. We didn’t supply any psychedelics, but what we did supply was a palette for human consciousness. We would visit college campuses and would be simultaneously sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Inter-Fraternity Council. It’s the only thing they agreed on all year.

We would park the seven or eight buses in our caravan on a football field and the kids would be knocking on the buses in the morning asking when things were going to start. We’d say “Well, grab a wrench.” We would eventually set up these enormous geodesic domes with overhead projectors and microphones, and we would get 500 people working on one painting. It was a whole event to show that the audience was the star.

Then we got asked if we wanted to help do this big music festival in New York State. And that would be Woodstock. I said we were going to be in New Mexico, and the guy said, “That’s alright, we’ll fly you all in a astrojet.” A month and a half later we were in Aspen Meadow above Santa Fe celebrating the summer solstice when this guy shows up with aluminum briefcase full of plane tickets. So 85 of us and 15 Indians were soon on a jet to Woodstock.

When we spilled off the plane at JFK airport in New York, the world press was there with all their cameras flashing. One reporter says to me, “Oh it’s the Hog Farm. You guys are here to do security.” I thought, “My God, they’ve made us the cops.”  And then I asked him, “Well, do you feel secure?” When he says yes, I say, “You see, it’s working.” When he asked me what we were going to use for crowd control, I said, “Cream pies and seltzer bottles.” And they all wrote it down!

I remember that the promoters wanted to know how many armbands we would need for security, and Babbs asked, “How many are you expecting?” They said, “It could be hundreds of thousands.” He said, “That’ll be sufficient,” and they all went nuts. We finally agreed on 300. But then we kept printing them up on our own with a potato. The logo was a flying pig printed on a red arm band. Whenever we would go out in the big crowd, we would have about 20 of them in our pockets. If we saw someone acting responsible, we’d give them three or four. So by the time Woodstock was over, a lot of them had been drafted into the Please Force.

CG: In your opinion, what was the Woodstock era all about?

WG: At Woodstock, everybody realized that they weren’t alone. They were all coming from little towns somewhere. Then Janis Joplin got on the mike and said, “If you have any food, share it with your brother and sister—and that’s the person on your right and the person on your left.” People got a deep print about what sharing stuff was all about. Even today, whether they are a stock broker or a street person, they still have that print. In a lot ways, it was the birth of Woodstock nation, a group of people who all experienced life the same way. And Bill Graham realized that rock ‘n roll was big business.

CG: Does that consciousness still exist?

WG: I don’t know, in some ways we’re just talking about the good old days. I like Kurt Vonnegut’s definition that history is a list of surprises. But there was an awful lot of peace and love at the anti-war rally I just went to in San Francisco this weekend—and a lot of creativity. The heartening thing that there was a pretty diverse population of old folks, middle-aged folks and youth. This gives me nostalgia for the future.

CG: Does the Hog Farm still exist?

WG: We’re sitting in the Hog Farm right now, at our hippie Hyannisport right here in Berkeley. We’ve been here 15 years or so. We also have a 900-acre ranch up in northern California near Laytonville, which is where we run Camp Winnarainbow. I’ve been doing Camp Winnarainbow for 30 years, where I do two four-week sessions every summer for kids—at 150 each. The kids are from 7-14, and 25% of the kids—even now without the Ben & Jerry money— are there on some form of scholarship. That’s an awful lot of young people who are going through our gestalt—a circus and performing arts camp where they get a chance to learn about timing and balance. I call it survival in the 21st century or how to duck with a sense of humor—and a little compassion.

CG: What is the philosophy behind your Camp Winnarainbow?

WG: We actually didn’t write down the philosophy until long after the camp was developed. Years ago, it started out as daycare for Sufi kids in the Mendocino woodlands. My wife studies Sufism and I felt bad that a lot of the Sufis who had kids couldn’t go to the meditations and workshops. So I said, “Give me the kids.” I had this wonderful friend, Surya Singer, who was a juggler, tightrope walker and theatrical director and we slowly started creating Camp Winnarainbow. We moved it one camp away in the Woodlands because I discovered that the parents did better without the kids and the kids did better without the parents. Then it began to snowball year after year.

It’s basically a circus and performing arts camp where kids learn juggling, tightrope and trapeze, unicycling, tall stilts, and improv everything from Shakespeare to dance—which ranges from hip-hop to swing and Afro-Haitian. What we’re trying to do is not so much to develop little star performers—although it does happen—but rather universal human beings who can deal with anything that comes their way with style, panache and compassion. And I think we’ve been pretty darn successful about that.

Over the years, parents have said, “When are you going to do something for us?” And so, about a decade or so ago, we started doing Winnarainbow for adults, with the motto that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. It’s just like kids’ camp, except that you don’t have to brush your teeth, you can stay up late and you can procreate (if you’re not too noisy). We set it up in a circle of 16 teepees, but if you want more privacy, there are campsites where you can bring your own tent.

Adult camp is held during the summer solstice and we have a beautiful unicursal Cretan labyrinth that has evolved over the years. It was first created by myself, some campers and counselors for a cosmic event perpetrated by Jose Arguelles, the one who instituted the Harmonic Convergence in the late ’80s. We created the labyrinth for that event and we work on it every year. We bring more rocks and line it with beautiful white river sand, with crystals and flowers growing in the center. If kids do well at camp and their good deeds are mentioned during the evening circle seven times in a two-week period, then they get to walk into the labyrinth and get a crystal to take home.

Since the beginning of camp, the policy has been that if you got in trouble, you’d get a strike. And if you got three strikes, you were out. But you could work off strikes too. It has to be a safe space for everyone.

To quote the Camp Winnarainbow philosophy:

“We work to create a living environment of love, safety and harmony. Camp life teaches responsibility for one’s own behavior and develops confidence, inner security and appropriate self-expression. We encourage respect for oneself, other beings and the environment. We value the uniqueness of each individual, within the diversity of racial, cultural, economic and religious backgrounds that comprise our camp community. Camp Winnarainbow provides a training ground to nurture leaders for a peaceful, harmonious and sustainable culture.”

During the adult camp, we have a rock concert, a kick-the-Cannes film festival—these are all things that have evolved out of nothing. We have this enormous tent filled with costumes, so for kick-the-Cannes, people figure out a celebrity they want to be and they all get interviewed on the way in. And of course we have film critics who watch all the films, too. We also have a 350-foot waterslide that we got from Marine World/Africa USA when they moved from Redwood City to Vallejo. And we have Beach Blanket Bingo at the lake, which is called Lake Veronica; the raft’s name is George.

CG: How do you raise the money for all this?

WG: I do a lot of fund-raising every year, for both Camp Winnrainbow scholarships and for SEVA. I’ll do anything for a good cause.

CG: What is SEVA?

WG: It’s s non-profit organization dedicated to preventing blindness all over the world. It’s what we’ve put on many benefit rock concerts to raise money for. In 25 years we’ve helped sponsor over 2 million eye operations and includes a diabetes project and buffalo restoration project with Native Americans. We work in Chiapas and Guatemala bringing by developing agriculture and bringing in potable water, also in Cambodia and Tibet, with the blessing of the Dalai Lama. Ram Dass is one of the founders of SEVA and he is on our advisory board.

CG: Do you still see Ram Dass?

WG: He’s doing better now since his stroke. He’s still in a wheelchair, but I got to see the Rolling Stones with him and the World Series. He’s doing all right. He’s even doing his Ram Dass tour again, without so many pregnant pauses.

CG: What is the role of play in your life?

WG: Play is just a matter of passing time creatively when you don’t have to do anything. And to turn work into play, you take a task and then approach it creatively. But there are a few guiding principles:

         Whatever you do is right.

         Your first original thought is your best thought.

         Make stuff up as you go along.

         Support each other.

         When you let the wind of creation blow through your heart,

         Good stuff will happen.

CG: What does it take to be a clown?

WG: The job of the intuitive clown is to go into the really hard spaces, to take really negative stuff and turn it into fun. So, I’ve spent years in the children’s hospitals. I became a clown when I was asked by a bunch of doctors to show up at the Oakland Children’s Hospital and cheer kids up. I had a multitude of back surgeries, all of which I tried to deal with as much play as possible. They used to put me in these big body casts, and the first one we painted blue with stars all over it, and we called it the all-star cast. Then we covered another one with money from all over the world, and that was the cast of thousands.

When I went to the children’s hospital, I was still in a fair amount of pain. Somebody on the way out the door handed me a red rubber nose. After awhile, I met this clown who was retiring from Ringling Brothers and he gave me his big giant shoes. Eventually I began to acquire the patina of a clown. Then one day I had to go to People’s Park for a political demonstration and didn’t have time to take off my makeup. That’s when I discovered that the police didn’t want to hit me anymore, because clowns are safe. They don’t feel threatened by clowns. At the Republican convention in Kansas, I bought out every red nose in Kansas and Missouri and helped the under-the-counter-culture surround it with clown noses on. The police were dumbfounded.

CG: Do you see yourself as a kind of Patch Adams?

WG: No, Patch Adams is Patch Adams. He teaches at Camp Winnarainbow. His son has been going to camp there for many years. He’s another kind of clown.

I used to open for a piano player in Greenwich Village named Thelonius Monk, doing standup comedy back when I was a teenage beatnik. And Monk used to tell me, “Everyone is a genius just being themselves.” So it’s my job just being the best Wavy Gravy that I can be.

CG: Do we all have an inner clown?

WG: I think it’s possible. It’s matter of discovering the inner clown and bringing it out into the world. It takes a little nudging and giving yourself permission to come out. But my own proboscis works pretty well most of the time. I noticed that I wasn’t wearing any makeup at all and hardly put on a nose at the peace rally over the weekend, but I wore a peace sign on my front and had a flower in my hat and was walking a fish on a leash.

CG: Speaking of the peace rally in San Francisco, how can we use the principle of play to prevent war?

WG: I keep trying to put more play into the peace movement. I got to do a really nice evening conversation in New York City with the young people who organized the first “Not in Our Name” demonstrations in Central Park. We talked about using more creative imagination in peace rallies, rather than having just a bunch of people talking at you. Pure play is just spirit blown through your heart. I think you can raise everybody’s consciousness that way. I always say, “Dare to struggle, dare to grin.”

In every available circumstance, you’ve got to put yourself on the line for what you believe and ask, “How can I approach this creatively?” It began with the young kid during the Viet Nam era who took a flower and stuck it in a gun barrel. That was a powerful and magical statement.

Once when I was at a Lawrence Livermore Lab demonstration, I decided to go at them with a phalanx of Santa Clauses. I was busted at Diablo Canyon as Santa Claus. And also as the Easter Bunny. When the police finally dove on me, I pulled out a “Get Out of Jail Free” card and it cracked them up. I knew the police didn’t want to be photographed arresting an Easter Bunny. And I almost got into the weapons lab because of that.

You have to take every situation as different, because it always is different. Just let the wind of imagination blow through your heart and something will appear. Your first instinct is always right.

CG: Shakespeare often used the role of the fool as a voice of wisdom in his plays. Do you see yourself in a similar way?

WG: I was a fool. And I’m still nobody’s fool, especially in my Nobody for President campaign. That’s the role I’ve assumed.

CG: You manage to effectively use humor in politics. How did you come up with the “Nobody for President” campaign?

WG:  In 1968, we ran the Pig for President. She was the first female black-and-white candidate. She even had her picture in Time and Newsweek. In 1972 we actually ran a rock for president and a roll for vice-president. At different rallies we would cook up jelly rolls or cinnamon rolls and pass them out. So you could always eat the vice-president. That was the plan. Because the roll kept changing. Then one day I spaced out the rock in a taxicab in New York City (it was a great rock from Mount Ararat). We ran ads on the radio and in the Village Voice asking “Have you seen the Rock?” And that’s when the Nobody for President idea came up my spinal telegraph.

Nobody’s perfect. Nobody keeps his campaign promises. Nobody bakes apple pie better than Mom. Nobody should have that much power. Nobody abolished the draft. If Nobody wins, nobody loses. During the Nobody for President campaign, Nobody drives up in the back of an open convertible, then Nobody gives election speeches. We’ve done it for every election since 1976. In the last one in 2000, Nobody was actually president for awhile.

CG: Will Nobody run again in 2004?

WG: Absolutely. Nobody’s still perfect.

CG: Do you believe in campaign fund-raising?

WG: Well, Nobody works for nothing, but we do sell buttons. When Ram Dass became Nobody’s guru, he asked what he could do. And I said, “Sit here. The bumper stickers are $1 and the buttons are 50 cents.”

CG: Do you ever get depressed after hearing the morning news?

WG: Sure. Thich Nhat Hahn is one of my teachers and after my last major surgery, I asked my son to paint something on the ceiling over my bed. So I wake up every morning, open my eyes and there’s the word “SMILE” in gold letters. It’s the first thing I see. So if I’m really feeling bad, it just cracks me up.

CG: How do you look at the downhill side of life?

WG: One of the great tasks as I journey into geezerhood and watch as many of my contemporaries enter into the sleep that rots (or what we refer to as Patrick Henry’s second choice) is to approach the ceremony of demise as sacred play.

I have a few lines for that. One is an ad in the paper that said: “Used tombstone for sale. Splendid opportunity for family named Ginsberg.” Or how about, “Fate is like a kick from a blind camel. If it’s a hit you’re dead. And if it’s a miss, you live until you’re senile.”

Suffering sucks, but death is like a Get Out of Jail Free card. It has really bad press, but if it didn’t, more people would want to try it out. So, I think you’ve got to do your full term. Tim Leary called death changing your address.

CG: How do you want people to remember you?

WG: Activist, clown and frozen dessert and a temple of accumulated error.

I’m an old guy who just stuck with it.

CG: What one thing are you the most proud of in your life?

WG: Probably for Camp Winnarainbow and the way it has evolved. There’s a whole legion of young people who have come in and figured out how to run things. My job is to just be there to play and find new things to light them up.

CG: Is it possible to have too much fun?

WG: I don’t think so, but I’m working on it. I think there’s always just enough. Too much and it will spill of onto somebody else.

CG: If you could broadcast one message to the world, what would it be?

WG: Let me sing you a song called “Basic Human Needs:”

                  Wouldn’t it be neat if the people that you meet

                  Had shoes upon their feet

                  And something good to eat?

                  Wouldn’t it be fine

                  If all humankind had shelter?

                  Basic human needs, basic human deeds

                  Doing what comes naturally

                  Down in the garden where no one is apart

                  Deep down in the garden, the garden of your heart.

                  And wouldn’t it be grand if we all would lend a hand

                  So each one could stand on a free piece of land?

                  And wouldn’t it be thrilling if folks stopped their killing?

                  And started just tilling the land?

                  Basic human needs, basic human deeds

                  Doing what comes naturally

                  Down in the garden where no one is apart

                  Deep down in the garden, the garden of your heart.

                  What a great day it would be if everyone could see

                  If no one was blind unnecessarily,

                  Cause it’s hard, yes it’s hard

                  to be blind—and disabled.

                 Basic human needs, basic human deeds

                  Doing what comes naturally

                  Down in the garden where no one is apart

                  Deep down in the garden, the garden of your heart.

                  If folks started sharing, instead of comparing

                  What each other was wearing

                  And wouldn’t it be swell

                  If people didn’t sell their Mother, Earth.

                  Basic human needs, basic human deeds

                  Doing what comes naturally

                  Down in the garden where no one is apart

                  Deep down in the garden, the garden of your heart.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been published in the alternative press ever since. She was been a regular interviewer for Common Ground from 1992-2004. She has also written two books: The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993. She currently lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA.

for Common Ground Spring 1995

by Virginia Lee

CG: Do you believe in the concept of a soul mate?

SL: The concept of a soul mate gets in the way of finding your soul mate. I think that everyone’s soul is one. By asking about a soul mate, you imply that there is such a thing as “not a soul mate.” If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside anyone. And when you find your soul, it’s already mated to the soul of the other. When the clouds part, the sun shines.

CG: How did you and Ondrea meet?

SL: We met at a Conscious Dying workshop I was giving. She came there to get ready to die. She had terminal cancer. She had actually worked with dying patients longer than I had, so she knew the ways of working with others. But her own body had come to the end of its rope. That was about 16 years ago.

We’ve been together literally since the moment we met. It was all heart. We didn’t really know we were together until after we had been together all weekend. Then when the workshop came to an end, I said, “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

CG: Is everyone capable of a conscious relationship?

SL: Yes. That’s like asking, “Is everyone capable of paying attention to what’s happening as it’s happening?” Everyone also has blocks to paying attention as well. It’s what we call our personal history.

If two people have the intention of having a conscious relationship, that’s what they’ll have. Even with the purest intention to stay as conscious as possible, all the hindrances, all the confusion, all the balancing of accounts, all our mislearnings block our capacity to learn in that moment.

I don’t think that everybody wants a conscious relationship, and I wouldn’t even say it’s right for everybody. You have to evolve to a place where that’s the only thing you do want. You don’t want another unconscious relationship. And it’s not just that you don’t want to be in pain anymore; you don’t want to create more suffering for anyone else either.

Consider all these human beings that we have in our past that we have labeled “unsuccessful relationships.” Remember that those human beings too — just like us — only wanted to be happy. We’re all in this. It’s not like one person is right and the other person is wrong.

It’s a matter of finding somebody who has the same goals that you do, and wants to work in the way you want to work. Ondrea and I often say that in order for a relationship to be really successful in the widest sense of the term, you have to want God more than you want your partner. And “God” isn’t necessarily the right word for everybody. Let’s just call it the Truth. There has to be something deeper than romantic love.

CG: How do you define conscious relationship in terms of the “triangulation” you refer to in your book?

SL: Conscious relationship happens when two people come together and use their relationship to become more conscious. Triangulation happens with something that is bigger than our small desires, needs and fears. And that thing becomes the apex of the triangle.

In the beginning of a relationship, the tip of the triangle is the relationship itself — seeking and finding trust, seeking and finding heart in your beloved. Then your beloved becomes The Beloved. In traditional devotional literature, the term “mystical union” usually means “union with God and yourself” or “union with the God within.” What we are saying is that you can have a mystical union with the God in your partner.

When we are setting up that triangle, the couple forms the solid base, but the highest truth is in neither one of us. Neither of us are right and certainly neither of us are wrong. But we can explore what’s going on between us to find the Truth.

I remember a story about a person who was very ill and went to his Zen master for advice. He told him about his pain and his difficulty. The Zen master said, “Stop looking for relief. Just look for the Truth.” Similarly, when you form the triangle of a conscious relationship, you’ve stopped looking for relief; you’re looking for the Truth. Eventually, the apex of the triangle becomes the foundation. And the relationship itself becomes the basis for exploring the unknown and enters into triangluation with our deepest nature—the Divine.

CG: How is relationship the most difficult of all yogas?

SL: It’s not on your own terms. You can’t space out and fall asleep. If you’re not fully present in every moment, you’ll catch fire.

CG: What role do children play in a conscious relationship?

SL: They are right there between every breath, like a big mirror. Nothing will wake you up to what you’re holding onto like a relationship. And nothing will wake you up to your smallest holdings like a relationship with children.

CG: What if the children are from a former marriage?

SL: All children are from a former marriage. Even your own children are from a former marriage. Just think about where your head was at when your children were born and then look at where your head is at 15 years later. That was a former marriage! Especially if it’s really alive, it’s a marriage of this moment.

One of the sadnesses of being born in a materialistic culture, most of which is in the world of becoming, is that you think you are your body. That tendency is reinforced, and from that belief comes the fear of death.

But if you think you are your body, then you will think that your children’s bodies are extensions of your body. But they are a gift, just like this body is a gift. We don’t own them, nor can we control them. They confront us in the places where our heart isn’t open. And when it is, they reinforce and reward in us the joy of an open heart. There’s no pool that Narcissus likes to look into longer than the gene pool.

This stuff about children being blood and not being blood is very sad. It’s a sign of an absence of evolution. What it means is the closure of the human heart. If you do not see your stepchildren as your own, you are seeing those children as one step away. The degree to which you see your children as “stepchildren” is the degree to which you live in hell. The degree of separation is where your actions come from. It’s the depth of your depression and it’s the depth of your own self-hatred.

Helen Caldecott used to say a wonderful thing. She said that there is no such thing as American babies; there is no such thing as Russian babies; there is no such thing as Mexican babies. There are just babies. They’re not your children; they’re not my children. They are simply “the” children. When you stop seeing them as “my” children and see them as “the” children, then your capacity to work on yourself expands. You begin to see that it’s not “your” anger or “your” fear around children, but it’s “the” anger and “the” fear. Let’s eliminate all the pronouns.

CG: What is the role of sex in a conscious relationship?

SL: Whatever role it takes. Different people have different relationships to sex. There are some conscious relationships where there is very little sex at all—or none. But there’s also the kind of mystical union where a couple has become more like brother and sister than lovers.

And there may be others where sex is a constant need to unite and go beyond identification with the body. Those who have done a lot of work with meditation have already been able to reside in the realm of sensation without calling it the body, and sexuality takes on another dimension.

If sexualtiy is only in the bed, orgasm is the very least you can get out of it. Above that there is a high-energy ecstasy, a clarity that is similar to a high seratonin state—like a crystal clear night when the stars shine through. And that comes from commitment. Sexuality can be an incredible expression of commitment.

CG: Would you say that sex can be a barometer for the intimacy of a relationship?

SL: Sure. But it isn’t just a matter of where the relationship is at. It has to do with your state of mind at the moment. Two people can be totally connected but at a certain moment be working on some issue of their own. Perhaps not having sex is the most real thing you can do in a moment like that. Not forcing anything. Not creating anything, but just allowing God to be present.

CG: Can a state of mystical union exist between memebrs of the same sex?

SL: I’ve seen at least as many—if not more—states of mystical union among homosexual couples than heterosexual ones. First of all, they’ve already had to go through an enormous amount of shit in their lives. I think it has sensitized them to other people’s pain. And the commitment of these relationships is so strong—sometimes 15 or 20 years. I see people standing by their dying loved ones who are healed in their process. I can honestly say that I see more genuine love on the deathbed of gays than heterosexuals.

Ironically, when you ask people on their deathbed what are their greatest regrets about life, one of the three you hear most often is, “I should have divorced my partner.” We hear that ten times more from heterosexuals than from homosexuals. It’s sad, but it’s not a surprise. It shows that human beings just aren’t meeting each other.

CG: How can a couple change the patterns of how they practice sex?

SL: Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing roles. Whoever is normally the initiator of sex, the initiator of ideas in the relationship is usually the person who leads when they dance. We do an exercise where we switch the lead. The person who usually leads is not allowed to lead. When I give my lead to Ondrea, I have to laugh. I’m stepping all over my own feet. I have not learned, at a certain level, how to just let go and let it be—in a dyad. We laugh like crazy. It makes us see how we’re synaptically addicted to control. And it’s a very important one when we’re talking about sex.

Do an experiment in consciousness. Whoever usually initiates sex, stop. And let the other person initiate sex for a month.

CG: Do you think that monogamy is essential in order for a conscious relationship to work?

SL: Absolutely. Without exception. In fact, if that question even comes up, the notion of mystical union and conscious relationship is completely inapproriate at the time for that individual’s evolution. If someone is still wondering about that, they’re not coming from the heart. Monogamy is not something that can be superimposed. My teacher said that you can get the power of celibacy through a committed and monogamous relationship with one single person. Without that, the idea of conscious relationship is premature. Ask yourself, aren’t you in enough pain as it is?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were just two people in the love bed—not a parent, not an ex-lover, not the kids in school who beat you up? That’s monogamy, and it’s a monogamy of the senses, too. If someone tells us that they want to be in a conscious relationship and not be mongamous, we just say good luck.

CG: Do you believe that people ever outgrow each other?

SL: It’s not so much that people outgrow each other, it’s just that they grow in different directions.

CG: If one partner is inclined toward personal growth and the other one isn’t, should they stay together or separate?

SL: Well, certainly the best way to encourage your partner or your children to meditate is to meditate. Of course people grow at different rates. Even in a committed relationship where two hearts are truly one in the beloved, both have to continue their own spiritual practice. If you don’t continue to do the practice that has prepared you to enter the dyad, then it won’t work. You can’t let your personal practice go. It is the basis of the relationship.

CG: Do people ever fall out of love?

SL: Of course. All the time. Moment to moment. Part of the teaching of relationship is to open your heart in hell. Sometimes you feel like you just don’t want to do it anymore. It’s too hard. Sometimes you feel like saying, “I’ve had enough of this. I just want to screw, drink tequilla and have a taco. I want to sit in the sun.” We’ve all seen how much suffering we’ve caused ourselves and others with that attitude. It’s an unwillingness to let go of your own suffering. Then you get to a point where you’re not going to buy into the demands of Narcissus anymore. That still small voice inside becomes more and more distinct.

CG: Is there such a thing as a conscious divorce?

SL: Conscious divorce is the flip side of a conscious marriage. It has to do with ongoing forgiveness and being discreet. You don’t go bad-mouthing your partner after a divorce. If you do, you’re simply vomiting up your pain. But don’t think you’re really talking about the other person. That person is nowhere near the center of what you’re talking about. You’re really taking about your own pain—about feeling abandoned, about feeling unloved; not feeling heard and not feeling trusted; feeling wounded and unhealed.

CG: Is it possible for people to be friends after a divorce?

SL: I was divorced 20 years ago. I was the best man at my wife’s remarriage, and I am the godfather of one of their twins. It’s a sign of maturation on both our parts. She had as much to do with it as I did. She and I couldn’t have been more wrong for each other. Sometimes divorce has more heart in it than the marriage ever did.

CG: How can divorce be part of your healing?

SL: It’s the pain that finally ends the suffering.

CG: What should a person do if they are in an abusive realtionship?

SL: I must say something very clearly to anyone reading this: If you are in a relationship where someone is physically hurting you—just leave. If you can, leave. Don’t fool yourself by saying it’s never going to happen again. Believe me, it’s going to happen again. There is nothing spiritual about being letting yourself be abused.

Some people think that if they’re a good Buddhist, a good Hindu or a good Christian by turning the other cheek, that they’re a better person for it. That’s baloney. It’s not okay to let someone be abused—even if it’s you. Just get out and follow your dharma.

CG: How can a person avoid making the same mistake?

SL: The deeper your awareness, the more you’ll be able to see old patterns when they arise. If you’re in a really bad relationship that just doesn’t work, get out of it. It’s as simple as that. Then use the time between relationships to heal. Go into your own heart and sharpen your perception of what’s going on in your own body, mind and spirit.

When you come to your next relationship, you can expect those old patterns to arise. If you’re going to try and deny that they’re coming out of you by blaming them on your ex-partner, you’re going to have a rude awakening. Or maybe it will be a rude sleep. The work we do on ourselves in the interim is what our future partner is looking for.

CG: Do you believe that each relationship builds on the next?

SL: Yes, if you’re paying attention. Everything brings us to now.

You don’t even know what’s available until the voice of love replaces the voice of anger. There needs to be as much concern for another’s healing as for your own.

CG: How would you rewrite the traditional wedding vows?

SL: I would add, “You take on my suffering and I take on your suffering. We commit to swim across the reservoir of each other’s grief—and not drown in it—rather swim to the other shore.

Until death do us part is the least of it. And the part about “to love, honor and obey”? All the slavery stuff that’s in the wedding vows has got to be rewritten. In a sense, the person who commits to that kind of thinking isn’t the person you want to marry. How about, “I stand on my two feet and you stand on your two feet, and then we’ve got four feet on the ground.” Then you’re really stable.

I think that the traditional wedding vows are really ridiculous and that it’s important for people to write their own. In our vows, which are published in Embracing the Beloved, we just commit to staying as present with each other as possible. Remember, this is my third marriage—and Ondrea’s second. You learn an awful lot from where you weren’t.

CG: How has your previous work with death and dying influenced what you are doing now?

SL: It makes you pay attention to the moment. So often people haven’t lived the lives they seemed to live. Someone can appear to be Mahatma Gandhi to the world, but when you look into their lives and see the wreckage with their children, their parents and their siblings, that’s where you can see the Truth. Most people who are successful in the world are generally less successful in relationship.

CG: How do you define a successful life?

SL:  Looking back on life, so seldom are people praised for simply having had a successful relationship. It’s not encouraged in men, and it’s not encouraged in women either. Personally, I’d rather be successful in relationship than successful in the world. A successful relationship in this culture just means one that just didn’t get divorced. Some of the most unsuccessful relationships I’ve ever seen are with people who should have gotten divorced 20 years before.

A really successful relationship is one that’s so alive, you just don’t know what’s going to happen next. When stuff does come up, which it inevitably does, it lasts two minutes instead of two weeks. A good relationship doesn’t require a lot of entertainment. A good relationship is a miracle in this world.

When Ondrea and I look back at our arguments, I just start laughing out loud when I see how absurd they are. Considering the scope of what we’re up to, even in this tiny little life, to spend even a few moments out of love is really crazy.

We are really all a little crazy. What we do to ourselves causes us so much more pain than satisfaction. There’s very little satisfaction in the world, because people think that satisfaction comes from desire. The only time you experience it is in that fraction of a moment when your desire is satisfied. And why? Because for that millisecond, the desire is absent and you can see beyond the mind. What we call satisfaction is a glimpse of our true nature.

Relationship is really the greatest of all danger sports. When you think of it, people do danger sports because they make you pay attention. You jump of a cliff with an aluminum brace and a handerkerchief over your head, you call it hang gliding. You jump out of an airplane and call it sky diving, or dive off a tower with a giant rubber band around your ankle and call it bungee jumping.

Why do people do it? Because it makes them feel alive. What makes you feel so alive? You’re paying attention. That’s all. Well, relationship will make you pay attention. If you don’t, you’ll suffer.

CG: How dos a person best deal with the death of a relationship or the death of a loved one?

SL: They are two very different things. The death of a relationship can be more painful in some ways than the death of a loved one. Take a woman who’s been married 40 years. Her husband is out shoveling the walk and dies of a heart attack. We see her at the hospital, lamenting the death of her husband and she is full of love for him. Her life is shattered to pieces.

Then there’s the woman who’s been married 20 years whose husband ran off with the secretary. Both of them wake up to an empty house in the morning, but one has been rejected. If someone dies, your relationship is actually maintained. I think that the sense of loss is broader if someone leaves you than if someone dies. The level of grief and the level of distrust in life is greater. Not always, but very often.

CG: What do you mean when you say to love your pain, love your disease, love your illness?

SL: I don’t mean love it; I mean to send love into it. We know people who are doing “forgiveness meditation” on their tumors. They’re finding that by sending softness into their illness, it begins to release and open as it’s bathed in mercy and loving kindness. Instead of reacting to illness with hatred, we try and recondition people to respond to it with love. That way, healing can take place. We are teaching people to enter with mercy and awareness into those areas they have withdrawn from in fear.

CG: Is that the essence of miracle healing?

SL: One of the problems with the word “miracle” is that it sounds as if it’s out of reach to the average person. Everyone is capable of a miracle. Remember that we work in terms of “healing” more than we work in terms of “cure.” Healing is learning to bring your mind into merciful relationship with the illness in the body. That way you can live with it.

Sometimes pain and illness is not meant to removed. You can’t second-guess God. Rather than praying for it to go away, it’s often wiser to pray that you learn as much from it as you possibly can. That way, illness is not an emergency. I am not trying to save anyone. I am not wise enough to know what I would be saving them from. But I am wise enough to know that death is not a problem. Sometimes it’s better to practice the laying off of hands.

CG: What do you mean when you say that we are all wounded healers?

SL: I don’t know anyone who does not show attachment to their pain. Pain is a given; suffering is not. Suffering is the way that we don’t deal with pain. So I think everyone is in pain, everyone is wounded. I don’t think you can be a very effective healer unless you’ve been wounded first.

CG: Is the meditation you practice with Ondrea based on finding your spiritual center?

SL: There is no “center.” Everyone is going mad trying to find their center. But there is no solid center; our center is nothing but space. And that space is me and that space in you is not “our” space; it is “the” space. The more I can touch the space in me, the more I can experience your space as well. There is only the heart in space, and that is where we can really connect.

When you find one person for whom God is as much in the forefront as He is for you, you and that person create a new world. I’ve come to see that what one person can do in this world is really remarkable. What two people can do when they’re focused is ten times greater. You can amplify spiritual power by putting it through two lenses instead of just one.

by Virginia Lee

On the heels of his bestseller, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore expands his soulful perspective into the mysterious realm of human relationships in his newest book, Soul Mates. Moore’s previous works include The Planets Within, Rituals of the Imagination, Dark Eros, and A Blue Fire. Internationally recognized as an authority on archetypal psychology, mythology, and the imagination, Moore lived for 12 years as a Catholic monk before receiving his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in Religious Studies. Most sacred to Moore is a very private and quiet life with his family in western Massachusetts—an ironic contrast to the endless demands for public appearances that accompany his current success. Graciously, Moore gave an hour of his time to Common Ground for the following interview.

CG: What is the difference between “soul” and “spirit”?

TM: The words themselves aren’t that important, but it is important to know the difference. In my mind, “spirit” is a state of divine perfection that exists beyond the human plane of existence. It is something we all strive to realize in this life whether it be through religion or the highest reaches of human potential, whereas, the “soul” is what we are given to work with in our life on earth. The soul delights in the messy conditions of life’s entanglements, and relationship is the place where the soul works out its destiny. Simultaneously, religion recognizes pain and failure as important in the soul’s deepening and sophistication. That’s where soul and spirit merge.

There’s nothing new about this information. Carl Jung and James Hillman have said the same thing. There’s a kind of spirituality that tries to sublimate ordinary human experience, and remove itself from life. That’s very valuable in its own way, but is very different from the path of the soul— which stays close to human experience and thrives on relationship. Essentially, the spirit is what is divine in us, and the soul is what is human.

CG: What do you mean by “alchemy of the soul”?

TM: “Alchemy” means that certain substances go through a process of transformation, which brings out the color and flavor of the material itself. By alchemy of the soul, I mean that we transmute at the level of our emotions and our imagination what we experience through life. We actually change our feelings, our thoughts, our long-held beliefs about the way things are.

Alchemy is different from growth. The idea of growing and developing is more a project of trying to become something with a goal of perfection in mind. Whereas, alchemy is more of a natural process itself, wherein the inherent qualities of something are revealed. A person’s soul can go through some really significant changes through the alchemical process—like anyone who has gone through a serious illness. The power of the experience leaves them forever different. They still appear to be the same person, but a major shift has taken place.

CG: Would you say that every crisis in life has a hidden gift?

TM: There’s a tremendous amount to be gained through what appears to be adversity. If we don’t allow these crises, these challenges to take place, then we remain fixed in life and never really ripen or mature. It’s human nature to cling to what’s safe and familiar. The choice is between being safe and allowing these transformational processes to happen.

The life of the soul is dynamic—always moving toward a deeper, more subtle place. What I’m really saying through my work is to honor what’s happening in your life rather than trying to take the safe way.

CG: How does a person become “sensitive to the sacred” in life?

TM: Becoming sacred is supposed to be the job of religion. It teaches us how to live the sacred life in the everyday world. Hopefully, we go to church or temple to learn about ritual, to learn how to pray. But that notion exists on an ideal level and it’s  not what is really happening in society today.

CG: What has replaced the function of religion?

TM: Nothing as far as I can see. Unfortunately, what has replaced it has not been about the sacred—rather it has been about the profane. We have moved that function of ritual in our lives to drugs, sex, rock n’ roll. And some of that ritual has been pretty effective. Just look at the phenomenon of rock concerts. Fortunately, music has provided us with much of the soul work that we need to experience. There’s something sacred in that.

But I also think that we have translated a lot of the outdated religious functions into the secular realm of modern psychology. In my work, one of my implied criticisms is that we give too much power to therapy and psychology. We lose the sense of the sacred as a result.

CG: Do you think it is wrong to use the psychological method—which is logical in nature—to understand the soul which is illogical in nature?

TM: Essentially, yes. By nature, the soul is mysterious, and that’s its beauty. It’s not something to be figured out.

CG: What do you mean by the “mystery” of relationship?

TM: I use “mystery” in an older sense of the word. My degree is in the History of Religion, so to me, “mystery” is a very special word which refers to the ineffable, the unexplainable dimensions of life. Mystery is powerful, magical, and positive—and it embraces all of life and death.

Mystery is not a problem to be solved, which is how we often think of it in our modern language. We get so caught up in solving mysteries, in solving problems that all we connect with is narcissism and ego. We have this illusion that if we solve all our problems then we’re on “top” of it all. Whereas, in the sacred life the point is to be “under” it all, to be so enthralled by the mystery of life that we can surrender our control to the divine. Again it’s a matter of honoring the unexplainable and letting it just be there—it’s a matter of living with our unsolved mysteries.

This also applies to relationship. Relationship is more than just setting up a structure for people to live together. It’s more than what anthropology and sociology imply. When people come together there’s a tremendous sense of destiny. It’s a mysterious process when people describe when, how, and where they met.

And even more mysterious at times, is how they stay together. That’s what evokes the more sacred part of relationship. Many cultures have honored family life with rituals and shrines to their ancestors. There’s a great deal of respect for the mystery of what keeps a family going. It acknowledges the fact that what goes on in a family is more than just maintaining a “family unit” of four people living in the same household. Family life teaches that you are part of something greater that has an ongoing destiny unto itself.

CG: How can people keep the magic alive in their relationships?

TM: Human nature is infinitely profound, and no one of us ever really knows what is going to come up and emerge. The soul is constantly trying to find a new direction in life. Honoring that phenomenon in oneself and in another is a mutually nourishing process and is the core of relationship. What I am suggesting is to live much more radically than the way we live— to live more by the intuitive signs we see in life than to live by logic.

CG: What is the function of destiny in relationship?

TM: We’re all destined to be in each other’s lives, whether it’s someone you’re divorced from, or an old friend you never see anymore. Still there’s destiny at work and I think it’s worth considering how profoundly affected you are by this individual person—whether or not you want them in your life on the surface level. Destiny has brought them to you.

CG: Do you believe that we are the sum total of all our relationships?

TM: No, I don’t think so. Our relationship to history and nature is as important as our relationship to other people. We are not really the sum total of our relationships because there is some inexhaustible thing that emanates from a divine core. Our relationships flow in and out of that. Rather than reflections of ourselves, I’d rather think of the people we meet as reflections of human possibilities. As we get to know other people, we are enlarging our sense of what humanity is.

CG: How can we understand Jungian archetypes through our relationships?

TM: I’m not really Jungian nor am I an analyst. I just happen to be a student of human nature. But to refer to Jung’s autobiography, he says that everyone we meet is written in our destiny, so that every time we meet someone it is a remembrance. It’s a very Platonic view. Plato says that all our experiences are reminiscences of memory rather than new experiences.

CG: How would you define a “soul mate” and how do you identify one?

TM:  A person can only know a soul mate through their intuition. It’s more than a personal project you have with another person. People who make a project out of finding a soul mate are on the wrong track. Some misinterpret my book thinking I’m describing a reincarnational kind of thing. And I don’t really intend that at all.

In my book I give the following definition: “A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communicating and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace.”

CG: Is there just one soul mate that each of us is destined to be with?

TM: No, I don’t think so at all. In fact, some people tell me that their mother, or their sister or brother is their soul mate. I don’t think a soul mate necessarily has to be found within a romantic or intimate relationship. In fact, my intention is not to sentimentalize relationship. I think we should keep the notion of “soul mates” as something flexible and transparent so that we don’t become too rigid and lose what “soul” is all about in the first place. After all, “soul” is the mystery in relationship.

CG: You say that intimacy is food for the soul, yet why do you think there is such a fear of intimacy in so many relationships? What can people do to overcome this fear?

TM: Intimacy really does nourish the soul—all kinds of intimacy. Just one intimate conversation can make life worth living. If it’s so great then why would people be afraid of it? I think that a lot of us live out of anxiety with a rather tenuous hold on our own individuality and independence—and a fear of losing ourselves in another person.

In talking to groups I often talk about this dynamic between dependence and independence. When I say that I’m thinking of giving a workshop so that people can learn how to be dependent, everyone laughs. Our culture is more interested in people who are independent at the moment. But I think it’s important to be both. As a society, intimacy threatens our independence and individual identity.

CG: In your book you discuss the contrasting values of “flight” and “attachment.” Would you expand on that more?

TM: My intention was to speak positively for both of those feelings, which is what I try to do with everything I see that is divided. There are advantages and value in both “flight” and “attachment.” It’s only when they are split that we worry about which is “wrong” and which is “right.”

On the other hand, “detachment” is an approach to life that is favored by the more spiritual point of view. I want to emphasize the value of attachment—of being attached to your home, your family, where your grew up, or a car you’ve driven for years. It’s OK to hesitate to discard these things in your life because you’re attached to them. Acknowledge those attachments and live life according to them. I don’t always see the value in being spiritually “strong” and running over those attachments. One of the reasons our society is so mobile and transient is that we aren’t rooted enough.

Soul and spirit need to carry on this constant dialectic with each other, so that neither of them is wounded by the other. We live in a time when soul is constantly wounded by all our attempts at spiritual progress.

CG: How do you integrate the two?

TM: First you need to learn to appreciate them, which is why I am writing these books. Many of the people who come to my talks are used to listening to spiritual presentations of various kinds, chastising them for their attachments. I try and tell them to get back some of what their souls have lost—their homes, their family, their past—whatever they have given up.          The soul cherishes what’s real and close to home, not these things that are faraway and romanticized. Yet we need to value the soul without denigrating the spirit. The two are really meant to enhance each other, to co-exist like heaven and earth. Religions have been saying this for centuries.

CG: What is the significance of the sailboat on the cover of your new book?

TM: I have a few thoughts about that. I like the fact that the people can’t be seen too clearly. I want to look at relationships without looking too closely at the person. To focus to much on personality is a distraction I think.

The other image I like is that of the wind, which is so unpredictable in nature. It’s something you can’t control. When you go sailing, you just have to work with the forces and elements that are there, and not worry about doing it “right.”

We are so hounded by people who imply that we have to be responsible for everything that happens in a relationship. But being in a relationship is not something you learn how to do in a class. It’s about discovering how to surrender and allow spontaneity—to just let the wind blow and take you somewhere without being afraid of being swept away. And if you don’t work together as a team, you don’t make it.

The cover suggests that life is an odyssey, a journey to unknown ports of call with many unforseen delays along the way.

CG: What in your opinion makes a good marriage?

TM: I don’t like to give prescriptions or diagnosis. There isn’t any one thing I can point out. If I could back away from the question a bit, I would like to take marriage out of the personal. What the ancients knew is that the whole world needs to be married. We need to get the Republicans and the Democrats married. We need to get the Blacks and the Whites married. We need to marry the intellect to the  body. We are surrounded by differences that need to appreciate each other and want to be together. Marriage is really a state of connectedness and co-operation.

We prepare for marriage by enriching our imagination. That way we can come to marriage with rich textures to weave our lives into the fabric of family life. Marriage is not all about interpersonal dynamics, a notion which tends to get us swamped. I think we could handle our emotions better if we saw marriage as something which holds the whole of life together. In that way, marriage is truly a service to humanity.

CG: What is your opinion about the current notion of “dysfunctional” families?

TM: I really don’t have one. Some people read my work and think that there is an implied criticism of the recovery movement. I don’t like the word “dysfunction” because it is such a mechanical word. I have a hard time seeing a human being as something that “functions” like a machine. We have passions and struggles, questions and answers, but we don’t function.          Again, dysfunction seems like another problem that we are trying to solve. It’s another project to get involved in. I think that psychology tends to pathologize us; we think that we’re sick because we’re not doing things “normally.” All these connotations of dysfunction bother me a great deal. But I really don’t have any particular criticism of the recovery movement because I don’t know it. There is so much more of life to live than to be focused on these narcissistic issues.

CG: What is a healthy way to look at the ending of a relationship?

TM: I don’t know that there is a “healthy” way. There may be good, unhealthy ways of doing it too. Feeling the pain is an unavoidable part of it which you just have to go through. To me, the point is to be able to embrace the experience of ending. It’s a death experience and exists beyond what’s personal.

It touches on the mystery that life is full of endings—a mystery that nobody can explain. Life is not perfect. It’s full of death and  sickness, failed careers and failed relationships. And it’s OK to be thrown by these things. The challenge with endings is to live through them and not run away from the pain of the experience. The powerlessness, the despair does something profound to us, it changes us. It’s the alchemy of the soul at work.

CG: Do you advise people to look for the “gift” in their loss?

TM: I am very cautious about making it sound too positive. There may be a gift, but at the time it seems that there is no gift whatsoever. And if you imply to someone in the midst of this kind of pain that they should see it as a gift, they’re only going to feel angry and alienated. Just let it be what it is. Hang out with the feeling of pain and despair for awhile. You can’t cheat the experience by thinking you’re going to get something from it. The “gift” usually comes further down the road. Often the idea of finding the gift in your pain is a very sentimental one, and that’s not what my work is about.

CG: Can we ever really transform or transcend the conditioning of our past experience? If so, what does it take?

TM: I see past experiences as food for the soul, and not something to be transcended. We can dip into the past, not to solve the problems of what may have happened but to tell the stories of our personal history. It’s a form of imagination. If the memories are not used as explanations for our life, they can be used as a very rich source for reflection on the nature of life—even if they are painful. It’s the mystery of what human life is.

Consider Hamlet and the pain he lived. You can read Hamlet  over and over again, and still get more from it. Your own personal history is the same. You will remember your childhood differently at 20 than you will at 40, or even 60.

I’m not sure that psychology does that. I think psychology is constantly looking for explanations. I think that this obsession with cause and effect is what destroys imagination.

CG: How has James Hillman inspired your life?

TM: He has had a tremendous influence on me through his ideas, his writing, and his friendship. We have worked together in many venues, in many places. We will be giving  a workshop together at the Open Center in New York this Fall. I think he’s truly the great genius of psychology in this country. I haven’t met anyone who has been able to apply such a free and original imagination to the whole history of imagination. He doesn’t treat psychology just as something scientific; he is equally devoted to philosophy and the arts. There is a a very profound education behind his work, which includes a healthy orientation to Jung‚which I appreciate.

As a personality, he is very different from me. He is very fiery and strong, while I am rather quiet and retiring. He’s right in your face. In many ways, he is my mentor.

CG: What do you think is our greatest challenge as human beings?

TM: There’s an ancient riddle in eastern philosophy which says: “It’s only by losing your soul that you gain it.” If we could learn to let go of what we think is so important in life, and stop trying to fulfill all our plans, we might actually find what we are looking for.

CG: What has been the greatest challenge in your life so far?

TM: At the moment, my greatest challenge is dealing with public life. I am not someone who wanted fame and fortune, but now I have it. Having a family, and being a writer requires a lot of time for solitude. I like having a private life. Yet at the same time, I am trying to respond to the world at large, which is the greatest challenge I have had to deal with so far. Ironically, it’s been hard to find time to take care of my own soul.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since, including Harper’s Bazaar. She was a regular feature writer for Common Ground from 1992-2004, and has also written two books:  The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and more recently  Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993.

for Common Ground Summer 1994

by Virginia Lee

Sam Keen is a prolific author who has written no less than thirteen books about what it means to be human in the 20th century. An advocate of what he calls “autobiographical philosophy,” Keen believes that it’s possible to read the underlying currents of our times simply by understanding your own psyche. According to Keen, we are all living holograms, and can find answers to the deep questions of life simply by telling our own stories.

Sam Keen is so well educated, it has taken tremendous effort to “unlearn” some of the attitudes ingrained by his extensive academic training. With degrees from Harvard Divinity School, and a doctorate from Princeton University, he was a full professor by the 1960s. Through the process of defining his personal mythology, Sam Keen began to write his many books, the more well-known ones being  The Passionate Life, Inward Bound, Your Mythic Journey, Faces of the Enemy, and his recent bestseller, Fire in the Belly. This summer, Bantam will publish his latest work entitled  Hymns to an Unknown God, which promises to be a thought-provoking sequel challenging our conventional notions about spiritual life in the 1990s.

Interviewing Sam Keen was both a privilege and a challenge. On the heels of an early morning interview on Good Morning America, we met at a restaurant at 7:30 am in San Francisco. Knowing that Sam Keen had been an interviewer for Psychology Today in years past, I was in awe of someone who possiby knew the art of interviewing better than I. He put me at ease immediately with his gracious Southern charm and we were instant friends. What follows is a delightful yet provocative conversation.

CG: What is “autobiographical philosophy” and why is it something we can all use?

SK: What gives our lives dignity and meaning is  our own autobiography. But telling our own story is not something that we’re taught how to do. If we learn how to mine our own experience, we can find answers to the great questions of life.

When my own naîve faith in Chrisitianity first failed, I was thrown back on my own experience. My life was a mess. I was in psychotherapy at the time, but even that didn’t help me answer the very deep questions. So, I began to interrogate my own experience and explore my personal mythology. Out of that I began to write my books—back in the 1960s.

When we’re dealing with psychology or the life of the spirit, I have come to greatly distrust supposed experts who don’t  talk about themselves. That’s one of the phenomena you find with gurus and cults—they won’t talk about themselves. They sever ties with friends and family in an effort to erase personal history. It’s as if they’re not human. I use my life as as a kind of mirror, a hologram of the age I am living in. How do I know what the spiritual tensions and crisies of our times are if I don’t read it off my own psyche? I am very much a believer in the autobiographical method.

CG: Would you say that what we all have in common as human beings is the human condition?

SK: That’s true, but what we also have is the gift of our own uniqueness—the uniqueness of our own story. That’s what gives us the sense of inhabiting our own lives. I think that the majority of people never get inside their own lives. It’s as if someone else has already written the script for them. We’re given a legacy of stories and expectations about who we are from the time we are born—from our parents and from our culture—a tradition which may or may not fit who we really are. Most people dedicate themselves to living out those stories for an entire lifetime. And defying the myth is often interpreted as cultural rebellion or familial  betrayal. That  is the difference between living mythically and living autobiographically.

In The Passionate Life, I distinguish between the five stages of life: the child, the rebel, the adult, the outlaw, and the lover. When you’re a child, you’re living out the myths of your parents and your society. And when you begin to rebel, you rebel against them. But as you go into adulthood, you go back to that conditioning and take a responsible role. Often midway through life, especially if there is some crisis, the question arises: “What is my life all about? What do I really want?” And that’s the outlaw stage, when it’s time to begin writing your own story.

The lover stage comes when you discover that you are a part of the human condition, and you can’t separate yourself from other people. That’s when you overcome the need to do things “right” in order to justify your existence, nor do you need to make someone else wrong in order to be right. There is no more “enemy.” That attitude can apply to political and religious identities as well as individual ones. You realize that you are a part of all humankind.

CG: To what do you attribute the current renaissance in spiritual life and simultaneous wane in religious life?

SK: That’s what they asked me on “Good Morning America,” and only gave me three minutes to answer. We’re in the middle of an enormous change in the cultural mythology by which we live. It’s as significant as the change from the nomadic life of hunters and gatherers to the domestic life of agriculture, then to the consumer life of the industrial era. We are now living in the post-industrial age. We are the first culture to ever live our way through the materialistic dream. As a rule, western culture is extremely rich. We have more than anybody has ever had in world history.

One would think that the desires would cease. But not only do they not cease, they are not satisfying. It’s almost a rule that you can’t get enough of what you never wanted in the first place. Our culture has reached the end of the myth of progress. We cannot continue to double the world’s population and live with more advanced technology—without polluting ourselves out of existence. Everything is telling us that the way we looked at the world in the 19th century doesn’t work. First of all, it’s unture. Ecology is probably the best proof of that. The notion that we are separate from the rest of the world, and that there are no consequences for our actions is an illusion.

I think that American culture is very privileged. We are getting a chance to change. We have the political freedom and material abundance to consciously  look at other options. But it makes no sense to try and return to the ways of the American Indians or an isolated Tibetan Buddhist culture such as found in Bhutan. We need to find a post-industrial relationship to the natural world, not a pre-industrial one.

CG: The American psyche has always been based on glorifying the individual—with plenty of space and resources to do that. Do we need to start thinking more in terms of community? Is that what is implied by the “Aquarian Age”?

SK: That’s absolutely right. And incidentally that’s where the mainstream media totally misses the point of the spiritual movement. They think it’s all about “inner experience.” It’s not about inner experience; it’s much more about finding a community of people you belong with. There are different spiritual tasks that go with each age. Discovering individuality was a great task for humankind, but that is not the task of our age. Our task is to discover our connections with all life—human or otherwise.

Unfortunately, we are somewhat spoiled by the notion of entitlement, that we simply deserve the best life has to offer without having to work very hard for it. And that applies to spiritual life too. Americans want “enlightenment-to-go” out of some weekend workshop, or a three-minute byte on television. Ours is a fast-food culture that demands instant gratification.

CG: How can the experience of a “vision quest” enhance everyday life in the 20th century?

SK: First of all, you have to separate the pseudo-Indian trappings from what actually happens. The majority of people in the US have never been in a place without electric lights. They’ve never been quiet for a whole day. The importance of the vision quest is the age-old cultivation of solitude in a natural environment. You don’t have to act like an Indian to make it work.

I invented the Inward Bound part of the Outward Bound experience. We would take people out on “solos,” and they would have very profound experiences. If you take away all the external distractions, a person has to face things. I remember one day in Big Bend, Texas when I spent a whole day by a brook in a canyon without as much as a pad of paper. I will never forget that day. It revivified my sense of time.

So much of life in the spirit has to do with being quiet—of paying attention to and savoring life. People need to invent miracles in direct proportion to the decay of their sense of wonder. So I say, belief in angels is for people who have never really looked at a ruby-throated hummingbird. If you don’t see the miraculousness of every day, then you’re going to have to invent some kind of weird story. If you don’t see the beauty of terrestrial beings, then you’re going to invent extra-terrestrials. A vision quest is the return to a state of silence that gives you a chance to look at the smallest things. It put you back in touch with your sense of wonder.

CG: Is this essential to creativity?

SK: It’s not the same thing as creativity. It’s what has to happen before creativity can take place. I do not create the ruby-throated hummingbird. Rather it is a gift to me. What I create comes out of gratitude for that experience. The Christians call it the “eighth day of creation.”

CG: How does someone take the experience of a vision quest or any altered state and bring it into everday life?

SK: In the first place, throw out the concept of “altered state.” When you get on the subway and shut out your senses, that is an altered state. An “altered state” is a meaningless term. Consciousness is always altering. Most people who are looking for a “peak” experience haven’t taken any time to look what’s in the valley.

CG: What is the “common boundary” between spirituality and psychotherapy?

SK: I think that there is very little boundary between psychotherapy and spirituality, but you need psychotherapy to clean out the subconscious garbage first before you can make much progress on the spiritual path. Psychotherapy deals with the way your psyche has been put together, especially in ways that don’t work. These days it’s called being “dysfunctional.” The life of the spirit exists beyond all that, beyond individuality and the illusion of an egocentric universe. Life in the spirit means being connected to all other beings through a heart of compassion. Psychotherapy is a necessary first step. Look what happens when people go into the spiritual life without doing the psychological work first. Look at what happened with EST, or Rajneeshpuram, or the Zen community in San Francisco. We’ve seen these spiritual communities blow up one after another. All these disciples are people who needed authority, who wanted father figures and then of course hated them. Then there’s all the sexual intrigue between gurus and disciples. It’s all unresolved psychological stuff. Psychotherapy is very important if you want to clean out the basement.

CG: Does one evolve from psychotherapy into a life of the spirit?

SK: Yes. That is the natural path of evolution. And you don’t have to go through psychotherapy either. The work of writing your autobiography—and discovering your personal mythology—can achieve the same thing.

CG: How do you see the relationship between music and spirit?

SK: That is a complex subject. Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead  is working with the power of music and the divine. He is reviving the link between drumming and ecstatic states—inducing a trance if you will. Western religion repressed any form of trance or percussion, a phenomenon which has existed in many cultures of the world (among the Africans and native Americans to mention a few).

Sacred music in our culture almost always has words. I was brought up in the church, and the hymns still move me deeply. Hence the metaphorical title of my new book, Hymns to an Unknown God. There are many things that don’t resonate with me about Christian doctrine, but there’s a core experience with the hymns that has a profound power in my psyche—which I honor. Music enables the human spirit to fly free, beyond the conventional boundaries of daily life.

CG: What do you think of people who are mesmerized by rock concerts?

SK: It’s both good and bad. Loss of self is always part of life of the spirit, but it’s also part of the demonic life. Was Woodstock a holy experience? People have been killed at rock concerts. The greatest experience of self-loss ever was choreographed by Hitler. There are a lot of trance states that can be destructive. So, you have to ask (like Plato asked): “What’s the difference between divine madness and demonic madness?”

CG: How do you tell the difference? How do you deal with the pitfalls of spiritual path?

SK: Answer this question: “Does your experience develop a life of greater comprehension and compassion toward all living things?” William James used to say, “It’s easy to create a religious experience. But it’s very hard to create a religious life.” The real test is: “What kind of a life does it create?”

That’s the problem with drugs. They can give you a very temporary high, but then it goes away. We now know that there’s a very limited place in the life of the spirit for the use of drugs. If overused, they create a destructive form of ecstasy.

CG: Is the same true of people who are dependent on cults and gurus? And if so, whose fault is it—the disciples or the gurus?

SK: Both. Most of the gurus don’t have any real power. When I wrote for Psychology Today , I interviewed a lot of them. They talked about being free of needs and desires, but if you watched their entourage, most of them couldn’t survive without their disciples. They were like children; they didn’t have an adult life. They couldn’t even tolerate real dialogue. That’s not power. It’s co-dependence.

I deal with this in my new book, Hymns to an Unknown God , in the chapter called “Constructing a Bullshit Detector.” The first thing I look at is the personal life of the teacher: Do they handle sex, money, and power in an open and upfront manner? I don’t care how holy they are. One teacher of Tibetan Buddhism was a drunk. It wasn’t “crazy wisdom,” it was alcoholism. Call a spade a spade. Another Indian guru had sex with teenage boys and girls. It wasn’t “tantra,” it was statutory rape. Ask whether a spiritual community is producing more open individuals, or have they divorced themselves from the “real” world? A sure sign is: Does it break up marriages and families? Be suspicious of eliminating “attachments” to loved ones and “erasing personal history.”

CG: What is the best way to deal with the spiritual “dead-ends” one encounters on the path?

SK: When you’re in the shit, stay in the shit. Look at your illusions. Look at what lead you into it. I wrote a whole book about this. It was called Inward Bound . Boredom is a very important emotion. So is despair and disillusionment. When you’re in it, stay there. We want the dark night of the soul to last no more than ten minutes. Part of the spiritual path always involves the dark night of the soul.

Maybe you have to find out that what you have done with a guru is idolatry. What you have given your trust and commitment to is totally inappropriate. When you get disillusioned, you have to explore your own capacity for idolatry. You have to ask yourself, “Why was I willing to sell my soul for a sense of false security? How badly did I need it? What void am I really trying to fill?” The “dead-end” is how you find the other road. Hitting a dead-end is not an excuse for giving up. That’s just going back to an unexamined life.

If you’re on the spiritual path, you’re not going to be disillusioned  once. You’re going to be disillusioned again and again and again. It’s like rowing a boat. As long as you keep pushing your illusions behind you, you make progress. Every year, every week I discover new illusions. All the gender stuff for example—I was brought up under this illusion that I had to be an American man.Until we die, and maybe even after, we are constantly uncovering our illusions. We thrive on illusions, layers and layers of them.

CG: In what way is ecology part of the spiritual path?

SK: Ecology is a central spiritual disciple to the coming age. A spiritually aware person needs to embrace thr principles of ecology as well. If you go beyond your own ego into the life of the spirit, you see how connected everything is—and that is the basis of ecology. The myth of progress puts our species at the center of the world, and that’s not the way it is.

The science of ecology has shattered that illusion. We have more science of the spirit than we’ve ever had. We now know scientifically what for other generations was a matter of faith.

CG: In your new book you say that “the old war between science and religion is over and the romance has begun.” How can that bring about peace in our time, and encourage humans to let go of their age-old cultural enmity and racial hatred?

SK: That’s really two different questions. You can bind people together in a technological world order, and that may have very little to do with overcoming enmity. The Bosnian Serbs and Croats have pretty good communication devices, yet they’re still out slaughtering each other.

Even though the war between science and religion may be over, the battle is still raging with those who believe in the myth of progress. It’s over in theory, but many people haven’t yet realized that they can stop fighting. If the age of technology is not infused with spirit, it will become demonic. Control without compassion is a frightening thing.

Knowledge doesn’t save us from ourselves. Even though we may know scientifically about the sex life of spiders, that hasn’t make us more ecologically responsible. It’s a matter of the heart. It’s a matter of conversion to a more compassionate life. And I don’t think that happens automatically. What’s required is a curriculum for compassion.

It’s something you learn before you’re six or seven. Just as you are taught to hate all the same enemies your parents hate, you have to be taught to love. I addressed this question in a book I wrote called Faces of the Enemy.  We systematically teach people to hate. That’s what prejudice is; that’s what we call propaganda. So, that’s why we have to teach people to love. I strongly believe in a curriculum for learning empathy and imagination—love. We can’t assume that it’s something that’s going to be learned at home, because in many cases, that kind of love isn’t there.

There’s a mechanics to love and a mechanics to forgiveness. We’ve got to learn how to forgive. Someone’s got to teach us how to do it. We’ve got to learn how to feel how another person really feels—in the body, not just in the head. I think CQ (compassion quotient) is as important as IQ. I think that education should deal with moral issues and questions of the heart as much as math and science.

It should begin as early as the first grade and include things like conflict resolution and  self-defense for girls. A lot of gender problems would be cleared up right away. I’m not talking about religion either—religion is very different from educating the emotions. I would teach about geography of the emotions, just to identify the difference between sadness, boredom, anger, and resentment. It would do a lot to reduce emotional illiteracy. Moral education in schools could provide a whole new type of career.

CG: Can you discuss the role of passion in life? Would you say that passion is an essential part of spiritual life or its worst enemy?

SK: I spent an entire book trying to define the nature of passion; it’s called The Passionate Life. I think that passion is an essential part of spiritual life; it’s the desire to know God.  Augustine says, “Love God and do what you want.” Passion needs to come out of the core of you, and is something that integrates you with all life. Let’s face it, passionate people are a pleasure to be around.  When the Hindus talk about dispassion I think what they really mean is non-attachment—which teaches you to approach life without grasping for it. Perhaps “joy” or “enjoyment” are better words. Life is simply better when it’s juicy than when it’s dry.

We have to distinguish between passions and addictions, although sometimes they can look the same. Addiction has a character of desperation, while passion has the element of desire. My abiding passions are things that expand me rather than contract me, and increase my sense of possibility. My current passion is the flying trapeze—something I discovered at age 62. It waters the rest of my life, and leaks into everything else. It makes me a better father, a better lover, a better philosopher, and a better writer. If spirit is the breath or wind of life, passion is the fire. Without passion, the inner life is pretty cold and dry.

CG: Please talk about your evolution as a writer and how it parallels your personal life.

SK: They are one and the same. My writing is drawn completely from my personal life. I do not have one part of me that writes and another part that lives; there is no distinction between the two. My books are just reports of a journey in progress—my latest being Hymns to an Unknown God..

I’ve written thirteen books. The first one was called Gabriel Marcel ; the next was Apology for Wonder , then To a Dancing God , followed by Voices and Visions  (a collection of Psychology Today  interviews). The Passionate Life  came after that, then Inward Bound, which is about dealing with the geography of emotions (especially the blue ones). Your Mythic Journey  is about how to uncover your own mythology and write your own autobiography. And then there was Faces of the Enemy andFire in the Belly.

CG: What is your greatest advice to men? To women? To children?

SK: Read Fire in the Belly . Men and women really have to study each other in a way that we haven’t before, to become interested in what the other’s experience is. And then we have to drop it, simply get off the special privileges of gender. Give it up. To hell with gender. Write your own autobiography. No one should have to ask the question: “Am I manly—or womanly—enough?” Each of us should ask: “Who am I?”

And I don’t buy the notion that there are men with “feminine” traits, or women with “masculine” traits. It’s just a lot of Jungian confusion. Just because I want to hug my daughter, does that mean I’m feminine? Hell no. It means that I love my daughter. It’s just something that I do. As soon as we can stop labeling our conduct as masculine or feminine, we are free to be ourselves. Once again, when we can get rid of dumb language, then new experience can come.

CG: How can we disarm the traditional roles that gender-script the behavior of men and women?

SK: Read Fire in the Belly . As much as we need education about emotions and morals, we need education about gender. We need to clarify all the misconceptions and misinformation—everything that contributes to the crippling effect of gender. It starts before first grade; it starts in the nursery.   We’re all in the middle of it. We’re all shaped by it, and misshaped by it. Perhaps the one thing I didn’t say clearly enough in the book is that we need to stop making money off gender, to stop fanning the flames of the gender fires. There are too many people making money by keeping other people angry—both men and women. I call it the professional gender mafia.

We hear that men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, and that bullshit is from cows. I think  that psychological philosophies like that are enormous over-simplifications and completely miss the point. I deal with this issue in both Faces of the Enemy  and Fire in the Belly . It goes back to warfare: Men are trained to be violent, and women are trained not to be powerful. Sure, that training is going to do something to your mind.

Yes, there are different communication strategies, but it’s rooted in something far deeper. It’s not genetic, it’s not biological, and it can be changed. But it takes honesty on both parts: Men have not been honest about their violence toward women, and women have not been honest about riding for free—especially in regard to the war system. The payoff for the wars we fought is that we got to go to the mall and buy nice things. The war system has given us material benefits, and until we get honest about that, it won’t change. Both sexes need to mutually share in the management of violence. That’s why I support women’s self-defense and model mugging. That way women can be competent in dealing with evil in the world—right from the start—and doesn’t need to rely on a man to protect her.

CG: How do you deal with your own daughter in this way?

SK: My 14-year-old daughter is now doing flying trapeze with me. At a very young age, I wrestled with her in a game called Papa Lion and Baby Lion. I wanted to make sure that she could hold her own physically with men, and that she knew it was a very womanly thing to do. My 35-year-old daughter is a martial artist who runs her own Aikido school in Brazil. With my eldest daughter, I had to overcome my fear of touching her, especially during her adolescent years. It’s confusing when incestuous feelings arise.

CG: Would you say that Fire in the Belly   is your greatest work?

SK: No. I only have one book. It’s just been written thirteen times. My work is like a Persian rug. I’ve been working on the same vision my whole life. It’s one work that captures different aspects of the pattern.

CG: How does the revival of goddess worship fit into the spiritual picture?

SK: It’s a bad idea. Feminists taught me that to talk about God the Father was a political statement. When we use gender language in regard to God, it’s a statement intending to get power over the other gender. If the feminists want to turn it around, I don’t like it. We simply shouldn’t use gender language.

I suggest that we eliminate the use of all personal pronouns in speaking of the divine. As soon as we stop using the cheap language, we have to find some real language. We’ve got to really think about what we want to say. I also point out the fact that when God was feminine, she was kind of a bitch. She liked human sacrifice and thrived on blood. Blood was necessary for creativity in goddess worship. We had Her for a long time before we had God the Father. The Goddess had her time in early human history, and God the Father has had his time, so now I think it’s time to retire them both. We should also retire the idea of Mother Nature. There’s nothing feminine about nature either. Let’s simply retire all gender pronouns from inappropriate places. We should no longer say “mankind” when we mean humankind. Let’s not talk about the ultimate ground of our being in terms of “he” and “she.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of  Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since, including Harper’s Bazaar. She was a regular feature writer for  Common Ground from 1992-2004, and has also written two books:  The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and more recently  Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993.

for Common Ground Summer 1999

by Virginia Lee

Robert Thurman seems to be one of those people who manages to be in the right place at the right time. As a Harvard student on a self-imposed sabbatical in 1961, Thurman set out to travel the world in search of a teacher, a spiritual quest that would be popularized by the likes of Baba Ram Dass later that decade. After meeting many swamis, gurus, monks and masters, Thurman finally found his way to northern India, where he met a community of Tibetans living in Dharamsala. He felt immediately at home.

As fate would have it, the young Dalai Lama was living there at the time, and when the two twenty-somethings met, they became instant friends. The rest is history. What follows is the fascinating spiritual journey of one man’s  path in life, a path which has inspired him to write dozens of books on Tibetan Buddhism, the latest of which is Circling the Sacred Mountain, co-authored with Tad Wise and published by Bantam Books in March 1999. Earlier books include The Central Philosophy of Tibet, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and more recently, The Inner Revolution, in which he describes enlightenment as a socially transformative phenomenon.

Robert Thurman returned to Harvard and ultimately earned a B.A,, an M.A. and a Ph.D. Today, he is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University in New York City, where he and his wife, Nena, also run the Tibet House New York. In 1997, Time magazine named Robert Thurman as one of America’s most influential citizens, most likely because of his outspoken advocacy for Tibetan independence. Or perhaps it is because he’s Uma Thurman’s father.

CG: What inspired you to make the journey to Mt. Kailash? And how is it known by other religions and other cultures?

RT: I’ve been to other holy places in Tibet, but Mt. Kailash is the ultimate holy place. I’ve always wanted to go there. Mt. Kailash is the abode of Shiva and Uma for the Hindus, just like Mt. Olympus was the home of the gods for the Greeks. To the ancient Indians it was the axis mundi, literally the axis around which the world turns. Mt. Kailash (aka Mt. Meru) itself was considered to be the Earth’s connection to the greater cosmos. For the Jains, it was where Mahavira attained enlightenment, and above it is the Jain paradise where liberated souls abide. The Bön religion (which is Persian-based although very similar to a form of early Buddhism that was practiced in the Tibetan court) regards Mt. Kailash as the center of the universe.  In ancient times, the Tibetans had actually conquered what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, so it wasn’t all that far away. There were Buddhists in all these mountains, and they still speak languages similar to the Tibetans.

This has been a sacred mountain for thousands of years. Geographically, the Himalayas are a huge watershed, and most of the great rivers of Asia arise from the Tibetan plateau. Mt. Kailash is a bump in the Himalayan plateau, with rivers flowing both to the west and to the east. One myth claims that Kailash’s roots are in the ocean and that all the waters of Asia bubble up into the magic nearby Lake Manasarovar. Essentially, it is regarded as the source of life.

CG: What do you mean by the “mandala mountain”?

RT: Buddha manifested a special mandala in the sacred mountain for what he called the “super-bliss deities,” the divine in an archetypal form. In the book, I refer to this as the “mandala mountain mansion.”

The Buddha creates mandalas in other holy places too, like in the Sierras or in the Andes. There is a sacred network within nature, created from a transcendent level, called the “network of dakinis“  (Buddhist goddesses) connecting hundreds of spiritual sites all over the Earth.

CG: Is the jewel palace within Mt. Kailash a metaphor or is it really there?

RT: The mountain itself really is a jewel palace if you can see it with spiritual vision. The jewel palace is on top of the cosmic mountain, located at the top of the universe. So, if you can’t see it, it’s a metaphor. But the Tibetans believe that it’s really there.

I guess it depends whether or not you’re a Western materialist (like me). I didn’t actually see it, but I had a strong feeling for its presence. For me, I had the very graphic experience of rock actually being alive, as living energy rather than an inert object.

CG: Why do people hike around Mt. Kailash instead of climbing to the top?

RT: Going around it is a gesture of respect, and a way of receiving the blessing of the mountain. It’s a way of letting the mountain act upon you rather than trying to dominate it and conquer it. You don’t want to trample the mandala.

Similarly, when people would approach the Buddha, before asking him a question directly, they would circumambulate him three times. Then they would stand back and ask the question.

CG: In the book, you say that one of the reasons for making this pilgrimage is to wash away the sins of a lifetime. Does this happen all at once or is it a gradual process?

RT: It’s different for different people. To really get free of many lifetimes of karma, it is said you have to go around Mt. Kailash thirteen times. There’s another kora (circumambulation) that’s made up closer to the mountain near the south face that is considered to be an especially holy route.

There’s no end to purification and no end to the development of positive qualities. The more you go around the better it is, but if you make it around Mt. Kailash even once, you’ve saved yourself many lifetimes of suffering. Going over Tara Pass (at 18,600 feet) is the highest point of the journey. As you go up, you get heavier and heavier as your sins weigh down on you more and more, but then they fall away when you make it to the top.

CG: What do you mean when you refer to the “inner landscape” in your dharma talks?

RT: It’s partly self-purification and it’s partly the path of evolutionary development. It’s the spiritual journey one’s mind embarks on while taking the path from ignorance to enlightenment. When I take a group of people to Tibet, and we are looking at some holy place in the outer landscape that pilgrims go to, we have to simultaneously look at the inner landscape of the Tibetan mind.  Even if people aren’t Buddhists, it’s a way of really visiting Tibet.

CG: Does a person physically need to go to Mt. Kailash to have that kind of experience?

RT: No.  Everyone has a Mt. Kailash in the soul. It is that place where selfless love exists, but is too often imprisoned by self-centered fear and egotism.  Turning the heart inside out is the real key to any pilgrimage. It’s a lot like a “vision quest.”

CG: Does the pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash have the same effect regardless of one’s religion?

RT: I think so. All human religions do teach in some way how to overcome narcissism and self-centeredness, and how to open up to love and wisdom. The are different ways for different kinds of people.

CG: How would you compare this to Jesus Christ’s forgiveness of sin through his resurrection?             

RT: It’s very similar. The Buddhists do consider Jesus as an equally divine manifestation as Buddha. The Buddhists do however feel the misfortune for those in the Middle East who “did in” their enlightened master in such a short period of time. Although Christ gave them the whole teaching, they didn’t allow themselves much time to enjoy His presence due to their own narrow-mindedness.

CG: Do you plan to return to Mt. Kailash again?

RT: I certainly hope so, but I don’t have a particular plan right now. I’m quite devoted to helping the Tibetan people get a fair deal from the international political order, and from their neighbors, the Chinese, who are currently occupying their country. Therefore, I do speak out on their behalf which makes me rather unpopular with the Chinese border guards. It makes it hard for me to get a visa. But I hope that things will change soon, so that people who have spoken out honestly will be honored rather than feared. I believe I will be able to go back someday.

CG: What does Mt. Kailash mean to you personally and what does it mean to the world as a whole?

RT: To me it is a spiritual Mt. Everest. There’s something about how ideals connect with reality there. At least, one has the illusion that it is more realistic to try to realize your ideals by having been there. The ideal we all grow up with is to see goodness prevail in the world and the people we love being happy. We want the good guys to win.

But then there is a false realism we are taught in our industrial culture that promotes an attitude of scarcity in the world. People  end up hoarding things greedily because they don’t believe there’s enough for everyone. In this reality, the bad guys usually win.

But in truth, the good will and can win. They should win and must win. Whatever happens, we must cultivate that positive attitude.

CG: Is this a journey for everyone?

RT: Traditionally it hasn’t been. Geographically, it’s quite a difficult place to get to, and it’s very arduous physically (although nothing like climbing Mt. Everest). So, by it’s nature there’s a process of natural selection.

On the other hand, I don’t see why many more people shouldn’t go there freely. If just seeing the mountain is such a blessing, perhaps there should be an airport nearby so that more can enjoy it. As long as people respect the environment, I see nothing wrong with finding a way of making it easier to get there. The Dalai Lama actually likes tourists and spiritual pilgrims to visit Tibet because it instills in his people a greater appreciation for their own legacy.

I really do believe that politics, visas and border controls should not block devoted people access to the object of their worship. For example, I believe that Jerusalem should be a strictly religious city — and not owned by any government or political entity. The cathedral of St. Sophia in Istanbul should be open to the Greeks. The Black Hills of South Dakota should be given back to the Lakota as their sacred place. And the Hopi mesa in Arizona too. In general, political governments should stop occupying sacred sites.

CG: How has your life changed since your return?

RT: Well, who knows? I was busy before I went, and I’ve been even busier since I got back. The struggle for freedom in Tibet and in the world at large is advancing, And we’re about to greet a new century.

Unfortunately, the Milosevics of this world are still functioning too. Fortunately, there now seems to be some sort of collective will to oppose that energy.

I don’t know whether my delusions have deepened or whether I feel more energized and really am pursuing my ideals with greater clarity and peace. Although things appear to be getting worse, I think they really are getting better—and will turn the corner soon.

CG: How can Americans benefit from understanding the principles of Buddhism?

RT: Americans are just human beings like everyone else. Buddhism as a psychology is what is most beneficial to them. Much like transpersonal psychology, it can enable them to transform their souls and psyches from being so self-centered, self-defeating, dissatisfied, afraid and aggressive. As a culture, the principles of Buddhism could reinforce their deepest ideals and make Americans more civilized, compassionate, loving and happy.

But I don’t think that Americans should all become Buddhists. In fact, I think it would be a mistake and would cause a lot of religious tension. It would just antagonize fanatical Christians and Jews. Religious conflict is the last thing we need in this country.

CG: Would you say that this process needs to begin by turning off the television?

RT: No, I don’t agree with that at all. It needs to begin by circling the sacred mountain more on television. More Buddhist psychology can be taught through television. Although the airwaves belong to the people, the problem is that what’s on television has become so commercialized and dominated by corporate interests that are seeking to manipulate people into buying their products. Rather than just turning it off, it needs to be transformed into an educational tool. Television is a very powerful medium, but it’s just teaching people the wrong lessons.

CG: Do you think that by watching the news and being able to see what’s actually going on in Kosovo, we can have more compassion for the suffering going on there?

RT: Exactly.

CG: How does Milosevic use the media?

RT: Milosevic is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. One of the ways he has controlled the Serbian population is through the state-run media. He even made snuff and rape films with his paramilitary police dressed as Croatians or Bosnians killing prisoners who were made to look like Serbs. When they showed that on TV, they terrified the Serb population.

The civilian Serbs are perfectly nice people like anyone else. The participated in the Olympics. They like to go to cafés and hear music just like us. But they’ve just been manipulated by a powerful dictator who knows how to create distortion and concoct propaganda. The Serbs have no idea what’s really going on in Kosovo. They just know that NATO is bombing them and they don’t understand why.

CG: Please compare what is happening in Kosovo to what happened in Tibet.

RT: Really there is no difference at all. Politically, I’m a Wilsonian who believes in the principle of self-determination as the most fundamental of human rights. Without self-determination, the right to life, education and freedom will never happen, because you’ll always be dominated by some other power. That’s why it’s included in the UN charter.

Tibet had been a protectorate of the Manchu empire, but then became independent in 1911. When China invaded Tibet 50 years ago, the British ignored it because they didn’t want to jeopardize their economic relations with China in Hong Kong. The rest of the world followed suit. It’s a tragedy that the governments of the world have sat by silently, letting the Chinese occupation go on, pretending they didn’t know, while this beautiful, non-violent culture was being invaded and utterly destroyed. It’s taken almost 50 years for movies like Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet to be made, so that people for the first time can see the truth about what has happened in Tibet. It’s a fact that in this century, more people have been killed by their own governments than have been killed in international warfare. So-called sovereignty has been a cloak for genocide.

So, what’s happening in Kosovo is really a breakthrough. Finally NATO has decided that humanitarian concern outweighs the sovereign justification for ethnic cleansing.

CG: How accurate are movies like Kundun  and Seven Years in Tibet in portraying the Dalai Lama’s life?

RT: They are actually pretty good. Although these movies couldn’t be filmed in Tibet for obvious reasons, details about the Dalai Lama’s life and the Chinese invasion of Tibet are quite accurate. The Dalai Lama even was consulted on the script.

CG: Would you talk about your relationship with the Dalai Lama?

RT: Sure. He’s a really nice guy. He’s been my buddy since I was 23 and he was 29. We first met in Dharamsala, India in the early 1960s, when he was a refugee from Tibet and I was a refugee from Harvard. This was before Baba Ram Dass but after Allen Ginsberg. I was in search of a spiritual teacher and had met all the swamis, the yogis, the Sufis and the Greek Orthodox masters. But when I finally came across the Tibetans in India, I felt as though I was finally home.

Soon after that, I met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. We hung out and I learned Tibetan real quick. We discussed many things, but he wasn’t necessarily my spiritual teacher in that early period, except by his own example. I was actually assigned to study with his teachers, so we would have great dialogues about the things we were both learning. I was only the second westerner he had ever met who could speak Tibetan. The first was Heinrich, the German man whose story is told in the movie, Seven Years in Tibet.

So, in those early years, he was more of a friend than a teacher. But later, when I went back to India in the 1980s, he had really become immersed in his own studies and had become a major spiritual force. He is definitely my teacher today.

Although one of the things he teaches is not to be so rigid about how you define your relationships. When he’s a teacher, he’s a teacher. And when he’s a friend, he’s a friend. It’s been that way between us for almost 40 years. When he visits here, we get to hang out in the limo or walk up and down corridors together, or have tea and an occasional meal. He travels a great deal so that he can represent his people’s plight to the world. That’s a very big job.

I went back to Harvard and got a Ph.D. And now I’m a professor at Columbia University in Tibetan Studies.

CG: What is your evaluation of life in present-day Tibet? Do you think that the ancient Buddhist culture is lost?

RT: No, it is not lost for good. It still lives in the Tibetan people. A million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  There was an absolute holocaust for three decades. Religion was totally crushed. Holy carvings on faraway mountains were dynamited, and over 6,000 monasteries were dismantled. People were arrested just for having a rosary. It was the blood bath of the “Gang of Four.”

But as soon as Dung Xiao Ping took over in 1981, and decided to leave Tibet alone, there was a spiritual renaissance, rebuilding monasteries, educating new monks and nuns, etc. But since the late 1980s and 1990s, there has been a terrible crackdown again. Today, the Tibetans are very miserable. The Chinese are taking away their pictures of the Dalai Lama and suppressing their religion, denying them access to education since all the schools are taught in Chinese. Almost 85% of the Tibetan children have malnutrition. It’s a lot like apartheid.

A huge number of Chinese have moved into Tibet, and for the first time the native Tibetans are outnumbered. In the big cities, the ratio is about 10:1.  The Chinese colonists are paid triple to live there, while the Tibetans are starving. Few Tibetans can own anything, like a home or a business, and only if they inter-marry with a Chinese. It’s cultural genocide, just like in Kosovo, but more slow and subtle.

The only thing that’s held them back is the altitude. At three miles high, the Tibetan plateau has made it nearly impossible for the Chinese to develop a subsistence livelihood. As a result, colonization is very expensive for the Chinese government and why I think that someday they will just give up and go home.

It’s simply not cost-effective. The Chinese will never be able to make their people into Tibetans; they don’t even like it there. Physiologically, they don’t have the lungs to live there and they never will. There aren’t any amber waves of grain, just a million square miles of rock and a bunch of yaks munching on sparse grass. The best you can do is make yak butter and cheese. That’s it. There’s no way to plow that place. Mao’s dream of 60 million Chinese living in Tibet will never be realized.

Once the Chinese realize this truth, they will leave and the Tibetans will get their country back. And once the Tibetan culture is rekindled, then there can be an economy based on spiritual tourism. It’s ironic that a combination of spiritual tradition, practical materialism and a vast, hostile landscape may be what saves Tibet. The Wilsonian dream of a world democracy based on self-determination may happen yet, and when it does they’ll all get rich be the happier for it. The Chinese could then become financial investors in the Tibetan economy rather than the military destroyers of it. I’m sure it will all change soon.

CG: What is enlightenment?

RT: Enlightenment is defined as perfect wisdom, meaning accurate and precise knowledge of the nature of reality of the self and of the world. It’s an awareness of exactly what is there, combined with perfect compassion, which is understanding the inter-relatedness of all things. Relativity was not discovered by Einstein, but by Buddha. You feel other beings as if they were in some sense yourself.

Most people think of enlightenment as some kind of blanking out state, when you’re oblivious to everything. We’re usually so miserable and stressed out all the time, the only time we’re really happy is when we’re sound asleep. So, we think of enlightenment as some kind of unconscious, blissed-out state.

In fact, enlightenment is the opposite. It’s being totally present; it’s feeling connected with everything and feeling love toward it all as a natural state. You don’t want anyone or anything to suffer, and  know that the question can’t exist without the answer.

And the good thing is that apparently when you are like that, you are very jolly. It just feels very good—a lot better than all this business of struggling with the universe. We’re so used to struggling all the time and being dissatisfied (except for brief moments of sensory distraction), it’s almost inconceivable that one could be fully present and connected to everything—and enjoy it!

CG: Have you experienced anything that comes close to this?

RT: A taste. Enough of a taste to feel that it must be true, and that it is worth exploring further. But I’m not absolutely sure that it really is that way, and I’m not sure that what I tasted wasn’t some kind of delusion. But being at Mt. Kailash was enough to encourage me not to give up.

It’s like falling in love with someone or holding your baby, when you feel that momentary sense of fusion with something divine. It’s such a relief to be out of your own self-centered little frame of existence. So why should it be impossible to cultivate an empathetic heart that feels that way about everyone and everything? Enlightenment exists beyond the god-state. It is actually reinventing the divine state within a human being.

CG: Do yoga and Buddhism come from the same source?

RT: I think they are both very inter-connected. Both yoga and Buddhism developed in the same direction and they honor many of the same sacred sites, including Mt. Kailaish. India lost something when the Islamic conquest deprived them of their Buddhist partners. Hopefully, this will be remedied in this century. The world-wide interest in yoga and Buddhism as eastern psychology is reawakening something in India. But that’s another story.

When it comes to enlightenment, brahmahood and buddhahood are aspects of the same thing. But self-realized yoga masters tend to be more detached from the world, while Buddhist masters integrate their awareness with the world, imperfect as it is.

CG: What is compassion?

RT: Compassion is the will to relieve others of their suffering, which is only natural when you are connected to everything because their suffering is your suffering. Universal compassion is felt toward one’s enemy as well as one’s friend—toward all beings. That’s what the Buddha is—the manifestation of compassion.

CG: What is freedom?

RT: Freedom is dharma It is reality, not a fantasy. It is what you experience when you are enlightened. The true nature of reality, of the atoms, of the cellular structure of life, is bliss. And with this awareness, there is freedom from suffering. But within that total freedom is the freedom to be totally engaged. Although nirvana is the state of freedom and samsara is the state of bondage, when you achieve freedom you embrace the bondage of all beings from a place of compassion. Enlightenment will not leave anything in bondage outside the boundaries of freedom.

It’s like what NATO is finally doing for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. We can no longer allow them to suffer under Milosevic’s atrocities while we exist in a relative state of freedom. It’s very significant that we are standing up to this lunatic right now in 1999. Because we are all interconnected as human beings, we cannot tolerate this insanity and suffering. Through doing this, we are reinventing our own freedom by giving them theirs.

Someone who is suffering, dying even, can still realize that the true nature of the universe is love. And that the demonic reality of the rapists and murderers is only a delusion. The greatest victory the Kosovars could have over Milosevic is to realize that they are free not to hate him back. There was a famous man named Frankel who survived a Nazi death camp by maintaining his spiritual dignity. He was determined not to hate them they way they hated him. His inner freedom was the one area of his life that the Nazis could not violate. So when we finally capture Milosevic, we should bombard him with kindness, not bombs. We should transform him with our loving kindness, because if we simply destroy him, another monster will be reborn to take his place. The only way to really defeat him is to inspire a breakthrough in his heart.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since. She was a regular interviewer for Common Ground from 1992-2004, and has also written two books:  The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993. She currently works as a freelance writer in Santa Cruz, CA.

Robert Bly: From Iron John to The Maiden King

for Common Ground Winter 1998

by Virginia Lee

When it comes to the English language, Robert Bly has a magic touch, an ability to infuse myth and mysticism into everyday words. Whether as a prolific poet, engaging storyteller or armchair psychologist, Bly evokes contemporary meaning from age-old fairy tales. Perhaps his best-known work is Iron John, a rendering of the classic initiation story which gave tremendous impetus to the men’s movement and brought a greater awareness of male ritual and tradition into the mainstream.            

But Robert Bly has an equal commitment to the women’s movement, as evidenced in his latest work with co-author Marion Woodman, The Maiden King. Based on an old Russian folktale, this new book chronicles a man’s journey into a metaphorical world of the feminine, seeking to awaken the intuitive power and mystery every man needs in order to be whole. Bly’s courage in wrestling with the archetypes of the masculine and feminine reflect his life work, themes which are embraced in nearly every word he utters.

 Bly’s literary accomplishments are impressive, including numerous books of poetry, the most recent being “Morning Poems.” (When The Light Around the Body won the National Book Award in the late ’60s, Bly donated the prize money to the American Writers Against the Vietnam War.) As a “mystic of evolution”  and “poet of the other-world,” Robert Bly’s life itself is a literal work in progress.

CG: Much of your written work revolves around myth and metaphor. What do we have to learn from fairy tales?

RB: I would say everything. There is a vertical line in the world and there is a horizontal line. The horizontal line represents the way we pay our taxes, the way we eat, the way we talk to each other. The vertical has more to do with ascending towards the saints, towards spiritual beings, towards God—or downwards into the world of demons. You could call this the spirit world versus the material world, but I prefer to see it terms of the horizontal and the vertical.

We’re living in the flatland now, because of the overbearing significance of global capitalism. The vertical line is disappearing; many people are living their entire lives on the horizontal plane.

Fairy tales are supremely important because they never omit the vertical line. My wife is working on a story now about a young woman who sees the boy she loves in a pond. He rises from the water above his shoulders and then he goes back down. When the young woman says something more, he comes up to his waist and goes back down again. It takes her five years to coax this man all the way out of the pond. The rising out of the water and going back down is a purely vertical image.

True, they are universal and archetypal stories, but that’s not it. What’s important is that some form of incredible non-human energy is there. We don’t wrestle with these powerful spiritual entities, these themes of the human dilemma—they wrestle with us. Fairy tales are our only hope of regaining any sanity in this world.

CG: Would you agree that rock n’ roll expresses the poetry of the younger generation?

RB: No. Bob Dylan was right when he said that hasn’t been any original rock n’ roll since 1964. What we have now is a degenerate form of pop music. It’s flat. It’s no longer vertical. Music from Bob Dylan, the Beatles and a few more in the ’60s had more of the vertical element in it, which really came from the old Appalachian ballads that evolved into what we know as folk music.

You can find the original source on a CD collection called Harry Smith’s Anthology of Music before 1929: A History of American Folk Music. He gathered all these songs in the ’50s and ’60s, all made before 1929 when everyone went broke. You have to remember that this is the music that people were singing in this country before the radio. What’s amazing is the individuality of the singers, mostly black and from the South. There is an incredible amount of spiritual, vertical energy in this music. And it’s what Bob Dylan (and many of the British R&B bands of the ’60s) fed from.

Younger musicians nowadays aren’t feeding from that source anymore. They are just feeding from other pop musicians, which is shallow and two-dimensional.

CG: What was the influence of Woodstock on our culture?

RB: Woodstock had two aspects to it:. One was a statement against the corrosive and deadening effects of Protestant Puritanism, and how much goodwill between people is killed by moral self-righteousness. To that extent, Woodstock was a cultural victory. It was a celebration that took place outdoors, full of compassionate and human music. It was very beautiful.

But the dark side of Woodstock is that it gave permission for people to follow their impulses, which turned out to be disastrous. People somehow thought that they could save the world just by doing their own thing. That’s the way people on Wall Street feel too. They are doing just what they want, which is to make a lot of money by ripping off underdeveloped countries without any conscience.

This whole issue of restraining impulses is terrifically interesting in relation to what’s happening in so many American families. Children get out of control, and the parents don’t know how to rein them in. If the children don’t learn how to restrain their impulses when they are very small, it’s nearly impossible later on.

It’s very strange to think that while these people at Woodstock were participating in this phenomenon in an innocent way, a few years later the global capitalists recognized it as what would be the essence of our culture for the next 50 years. Through advertising, they taught people to never restrain any impulse whatsoever.

It’s hard to live in a culture that worships youth, and tries to seduce our adolescents into becoming slaves to credit cards. Advertising is only interested in the next generation of consumers, who will need two jobs each to pay off their debts even before they get out of college. The guys who run the credit card companies ought to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

CG: What do you mean by a “sibling society” and what role does television play in maintaining it?

RB: In Germany, my book The Sibling Society was translated as The Childish Society. And maybe that’s a better title. The reason I chose “The Sibling Society” is that often in American families, there are no parents. Everyone behaves like a sibling. The parents tend to dress like the kids, and listen to the kids’ music instead of teaching them to listen to Mozart. In essence, the parents agree to become 20 years younger than they are.

This, too, seemed like a good idea at the time. But what has really happened is a massive failure of adulthood. People are simply not growing up, which you can see very clearly in the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair. It’s not so much that Lewinsky and Clinton are acting like children, but that the entire nation has become like children obsessed with peering into their parents’ bedroom.

CG: What is the reason for our perpetual adolescence?

RB: That’s a very tough question, and I don’t even know if I answered that in the book. I would say that it’s too hard to be a grown-up. If you look at the photographs of our immigrant grandparents, you can see how hard it was to be a grown-up in let’s say, Norway, which is where my family comes from. The amount of pain and suffering in those photographs is staggering.

Since we’re technologically superior to the rest of the world, and can live in comfort if we want to, the decision was somehow made that we would stop being adults and avoid going through all that pain. We chose to roll around in all our money. Being adult means not always getting what you want—as well as accepting the consequences of your actions.

CG: Do you believe that the Internet facilitates a global community?

RB: No, I believe that the Internet facilitates biological warfare. Making bombs. People can now learn how to wage chemical warfare through information they can get for free off the Internet. Besides that, it’s a great gift to pornographers. In the long run, I think it will become one of the greatest enemies of civilization. It’s naive to be optimistic about something that inhuman.

For example, last year, Dartmouth College gave all their students computers and charged the parents $700 extra apiece. By December, none of the students were going to class. They were all sending e-mails to the teacher at 11 p.m. Also, most of the restaurants failed in the town of Dartmouth, because the kids were just staying in their rooms. If part of the function of college is to introduce people of different classes and races to each other, they are obviously failing at Dartmouth.

CG: What are the consequences of a fatherless society?

RB: I can see these consequences in the work I do with prisoners. In one of the men’s groups I lead called “Project Return,”  one of the most important aspects is the existence of a male mentor for young men. If there is no father, your either going to end up with a criminal, or there’s going to be a second father somewhere. In Louisiana, Project Return has a halfway house where they match up young prisoners with ex-cons for six months after they get out of jail. The older man teaches the younger one how not to take drugs and end up back in jail. And, they teach them things like how to use computers, how to dress and how to get a job.

As a result, Project Return has only a 7.5% relapse rate as opposed to an 80% relapse rate for those without a male mentor. In a fatherless society, 90% of the young men in prison have no father. It’s the inherent danger in being a single mother. Although, many single mothers work very hard to compensate for this (and there are many who didn’t want to be single mothers in the first place), they must realize that the psychology of a little boy is not the same as the psychology of a little girl. You’re looking at a bomb in your own house. The first thing to do is to begin to look for an older man in your neighborhood, although you have to be careful about that too.

CG: Is this because our society lacks initiation rites?           

RB: Yes, that’s true. It’s a vertical thing. The point of the initiation rites among the native Americans is for young people to be bent by something strong. So, the Indians take their adolescents out in the woods and leave them in a cave for three days without any food or water. Sometimes, a bear will come in and sit down with them—and they get a connection with the vertical world through a wild animal. Like fairy tales, they belong to that other world.

Initiation is not about getting a driver’s license or having a bar mitzvah. It’s about making a firm connection with the vertical world.

CG: Are teenagers seeking that mystical experience when they take drugs?

RB: Yes, and the drugs are a terrible disappointment. The drug promises them an other-worldly experience, and when it turns out to be fake, they believe that everything is fake. It’s like hitting the existential wall in a motorcycle going 100 m.p.h. One mistaken notion of the sibling society is the belief that you can go through life purely on the horizontal with the help of a few drugs. That’s another misconception we got from Woodstock—that drugs offer the path to enlightenment.

Once I was with Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Notre Dame and he was going on about all the wonderful effects drugs had on literature. When I asked him to name one great poem that had been written on acid, he sat there for five minutes and didn’t say a word. I admired him a lot for his honesty.

CG: What are the consequences of a motherless society?

RB: That’s a good question because that’s where we’re headed. The feminists have been fighting for a long time against the denigration of women, which was allegedly perpetrated by patriarchal men. So when the authority of fatherhood began to disintegrate, many women rejoiced. But I say to them, be careful what you wish for, because the same forces that destroyed fatherhood (which I believe is global capitalism) will destroy motherhood as well.

I believe that one of the most effective ways to prevent violence in children is a least a half-hour a day of close conversation, an intimate exchange of feelings, between parent and child. When both parents are working, that exchange is not happening. And if there are five kids, imagine how impossible it is to set aside two and a half hours a day for this kind of interaction, which used to take place in the extended family—with aunts, uncles and grandparents. If you wait until the kids grow up and go to therapy, it’s too late. Unfortunately, we’re going to go way down before we go back up. I hate to say this to you, but we’re producing a culture of savages.

A lot of women have given up the anger they had against men a few years ago, partly because they realize that they can’t really raise a child alone. They realize that the more they attack men, the farther away they will go. They really do want them to come back.

CG: How can parents of today’s adolescents effectively prepare them for the adult world?

RB: What I’m trying to say is that you don’t prepare them for the adult world, you just listen to them, talk to them. Many a million such exchanges are necessary before the child is ready. This is how the child’s brain develops, and is part of evolution’s master plan. If that doesn’t happen, you don’t have a grown-up, because you don’t have a fully developed brain.

The second thing you can do for a child is to provide a firm structure, which involves appropriate consequences for various behaviors. It’s a big and difficult job. And ironically, the discipline has to be enforced by the same person who does the listening.

CG: What is the role of the poet in modern society?

RB:  You have these big questions! First of all, I have to say that the poet doesn’t really have a job. It’s like asking what is the job of the person who sings in the shower? Writing poetry is an expression of the joy of playing with language. And as long as you’re doing it, you may as well make some sense. In many ways, the poet is a voice of the vertical in our culture. The poet is like a ladder between heaven and earth, like having your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.

CG: As a poet, what is your greatest ongoing source of inspiration?

RB: That’s another huge question, which I’m not going to answer because there’s something too abstract about it. And I don’t really want to tell you because it means a little too much to me. You realize, I’m just trying to be difficult.

CG: That’s fine, I respect your privacy. We can leave that one to the realm of mystery. May I ask what influence the Sufi poet, Rumi, has had on your work?

RB: He’s the ultimate non-Lutheran. Take something like wine. Although Sufis don’t drink wine, Rumi uses it as a metaphor all the time. He uses the vertical definition of wine instead of the horizontal (or literal) one.

Recently I was at a conference where everyone got up at 4 a.m. to recite poems to sitar and tabla music in the background. An incredible feeling of sweetness came into the room—and that is “the wine.” It’s an ecstasy that has nothing to do with drinking wine at all.

Rumi made me understand that there was a sweetness possible beyond anything I had ever known. That sweetness has nothing to do with being good, but rather with being able to fall in love. In other words, Sufis believe that God is not attracted to us because we’re good. God is only attracted to us if we know how to fall in love. And if you know how to fall in love with a human being, why not fall in love with God?

That is a completely different path from anything I had ever known. I had always felt that being good was the opposite of being in love. Instead, that was resisting love. But you can’t interpret the Sufi idea of falling in love horizontally. Falling in love with a human being is very fine, but it is not exactly the same as falling in love with the divine. This was all a huge shock to me, and I’m still trying to understand it.

CG:  Was Sufi poetry a recent discovery in your life?

RB: Perhaps 20 year ago. Ironically, the more you study Rumi, the more you become aware of the amount of selfishness we each have. I’m in the midst of translating the poetry of Ghalib, a 19th-century descendant of Khabir. Ghalib has two unforgettable lines:

“He gave me heaven and earth, and assumed I would be satisfied. Actually, I was too embarrassed to argue.”

Ghalib is not really a Sufi poet because “wine” was literal to him. There’s a marvelous poem he wrote full of all these remarkably spiritual ideas. And at the end a Sufi master says, “Your grasp of spiritual concepts is great, Ghalib. You could have been considered a saint if you didn’t drink all the time.” In another poem he boasts, “The lightning that fell on Moses should have fallen on Ghalib. You know, you always adjust the amount of liquor to the quality of the drinker.” He’s totally outrageous. It’s hard to believe that he died in 1869.

Today, he’s the most popular poet in India and Pakistan. My son-in-law, who lives in Jaipur, begged me to translate his work into English. The title is The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib and it will be published in April 1999.

CG: You are credited with bringing the men’s movement into mainstream consciousness. Please briefly explain the metaphor of Iron John in terms of our culture.

RB: Iron John is actually a series of metaphors. The fairy tale of Iron John is an initiation story. Basically, it says that the natural Wild Man inside all men (which is also true of the Wild Woman by the way) has been put into a cage in the center of the castle courtyard, which you can interpret as Christianity, capitalism, industrialism, anything you want.

In any case, the man in the iron cage has hair all over his body. And the question is, what does the young prince do when he meets this Wild Man? In the story, the young boy is playing with his golden ball (which is really his spiritual nature)  and it rolls into the cage of the Wild Man.

Naturally, the boys asks, “Can I have my ball back?” And the Wild Man replies, “Not unless you let me out of the cage.” And that is the crucial point that all boys and girls come to: Are you willing to go against this civilized contempt for nature and wildness to discover your true self? And that’s what rock n’ roll pretends to do. But rock n’ roll in now under control of the entire capitalist system. So. there’s no way that it’s capable of freeing anyone at all.

The way I tell the story, this encounter between the Wild Man and the young boy happens three times, and each time the boy refuses saying, “No, I can’t do that. I can’t let you out of the cage. I’m not supposed to.” Metaphorically this encounter can happen at age 15, 25 or 35. Usually, by the time he’s 35, he’s living in Long Island and notices how empty he feels. At that point he either lets the Wild Man out of the cage or else he goes to Wall Street.

What happens next? The Wild Man picks him up and takes him away for his initiation. Metaphorically, it means going against all the social conditioning of your upbringing, the notions about it means to stable, successful and secure. For some, it can mean divorce.

CG: What is the difference between the Wild Man and the Savage Man?

RB: I had to make a point if distinguishing between the two because most women were very angry when this book came out. It was perceived as an attack on the women’s movement, which it wasn’t in the slightest. (I’ve been a feminist most of my life, having done some earlier work on goddesses.) But many women were afraid this book would take attention away from the women’s movement.

There was a typical misconception that I wanted to turn men into savages so that they will beat women into submission. Unfortunately, it was really a failure to distinguish between the Wild Man, who is a free spirit more like William Blake or Rumi, and the Savage Man, who is a wife beater. Really, they are opposites.

But even the New York Times didn’t get it straight. The woman who reviewed my new book, The Maiden King (written with Marion Woodman) said, “A few years, Robert Bly said that men needed to develop their masculine side before they could really help women, but he undermined that by telling men to go out into the woods and beat their chests.” You see, ten years have gone by and she still has that same picture.

GG: In what way is your most recent book, The Maiden King, a point of departure from Iron John?

RB: Iron John is about being initiated into the masculine, and is necessary because we don’t have grandfathers and elders to do that anymore. In contrast, The Maiden King is about the initiation of the masculine into the feminine, which is a very different process but equally important.

In this brilliant old Russian fairy tale that Marion and I use, the young prince first encounters the feminine at age 15, about the same age an adolescent boy in the horizontal world goes to a dance and gets a crush on some beautiful girl he sees. Usually, he can’t even speak to her because he’s so incredibly stunned. What happens in story is that the feminine appears in the form of thirty ships with thirty women while he’s out fishing. He falls in love with the Maiden King at first sight and they promise each other to be together forever. As the story goes, he falls asleep. He can’t take the intensity of the feminine; it’s too much for him. Ironically, lots of girls know this about boys.

Then what happens? In horizontal life, he abandons the girl he first loved, and she is wounded by this. Usually, he goes and marries someone else, and so does she. But this Russian story brings in the vertical element and something happens which the young man is completely unprepared for by ordinary life. Predictably, the feminine can only take this neglect for so long. She finally runs out of patience and leaves a message for him saying, “Your tutor has betrayed you. And if you want to see me again, you will have to come to the country called Three Times Ten.”

So when, he wakes up and realizes this betrayal and he cuts off the tutor’s head with his sword. But that may take a young man ten years to learn that his German Lutheran minister had lied to him. But then comes the real surprise when he starts off to find her, and realizes that he has to go into the underworld. It’s not an easy process, and could literally mean that he goes into ten years of depression. Or he marries a women who has some of the Baba Yaga energy, and will give him nothing but a hard time. Because of her earlier rejection, the Maiden King isn’t necessarily going to want to get back together with him when he wakes up. He’s going to have to go through a lot of grief, disappointment and punishment to prove himself worthy of her again.

At a certain point, he emerges from the underworld having learned how to deal with the female energies that are down there, and he goes to the crone to ask where the Maiden King is. The crone answers, “Are you the one that she came to when you were 15 and you fell asleep?” “Yes,” he answers. “Well, I’ve got news for you,” continues the crone. “She doesn’t love you anymore. As a matter of fact, if she saw you now she’d tear you to pieces.” I was originally going to call the book, “The Goddess Doesn’t Love You Anymore,” but my publisher talked me out of it. It is still the most important statement in the whole book. After so many years of neglect and abuse, the Goddess might not love you any more. Young men don’t understand that they might just have to pay for that; it isn’t given back for free.

On the personal level, what does that mean? That ecstatic love they once felt is not annihilated. She simply has it stored somewhere. The man has to go through ten years of ritual and repentance to reawaken that energy. He can’t just sit back and wait for the feminine to find him. I tell men to stop whining when they complain that women aren’t good to them. I say, “Do you realize what you have to do? Work on it for ten years or so, and then we’ll talk about it.”

CG: What are the dangers of dissolving the patriarchal society?

RB: That’s a very good question. The danger of dissolving the patriarchy is that you risk dissolving the hierarchy, and unless you are careful, you will dissolve vertical line too. The hierarchy has to do with power, while the vertical line has to do with the longing of the spirit. The difficulty in dismantling the hierarchy (which we did with Lutheranism, the French Revolution and the American Revolution) is that the entire society can be thrown into spiritual chaos. Women will be lost as much as men. The Franciscans and the Buddhists manage to do it in a way that’s beyond gender.

CG: What can be gained by cultivating a matriarchal society?

RB: Women are doing very well at cultivating a matriarchal society in small groups. Half of Marion Woodman’s work is devoted to that kind of nurturing. Men’s groups are actually modeling themselves along matriarchal values, like feeling, healing and sharing one’s pain. But if the matriarchal system developed a hierarchy, it would become just as stuck as the patriarchy. Women often sense that in their own mothers. Marion Woodman says, “Some of the worst patriarchs I know are women.” It’s a complicated thing.

CG: What are the archetypes of the 21st-century man and woman?

RB: The same as in the 8th century BC. We really haven’t changed all that much. We’re just chimpanzees that have gone to college.

CG: Please describe your vision of the future.

RB: There’s a new book about chimpanzees called The Demonic Male. It describes how we are evolved from the chimpanzees (about 97.5% of our identity), and the only problem with that is that they are the only one of the great apes who are genocidal. They will kill off a neighboring group of chimpanzees. not only that, they will move into a neighboring group until the other group trusts them and then they will kill them. You can see it in Bosnia and Kosovo, you can see it in Rwanda and Algeria; you can see it everywhere.

So we’re about to learn a whole lot about our genetic background before we can change the future. I don’t have much hope until we come to terms with the Savage Man. When I was in Italy visiting my daughter and son-in-law, we went to mass in Catholic church where there were 50 people listening to the priest. At first, I went in there with my Woodstock personality intending to inform these people about what the Pope was doing to them, but I had just finished reading The Demonic Male and it completely changed my perspective. I saw 50 chimpanzees sitting there, listening to someone talk about somebody greater than them. Don’t even touch this. That finished off my Woodstock anti-Catholic bias.

CG:  If your message could reach the entire world, what would you say?

RB:  I’d go to sleep immediately. I’m afraid we have to go down a long way before people are willing to look at the vertical. Sorry about that.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of  Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since. She was a regular interviewer for  Common Ground from 1992-2004, and has also written two books:  The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and  Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993. She currently works as a freelance writer in Santa Cruz, CA.

for Common Ground Summer 1993

by Virginia Lee

When Common Ground asked me to interview the Tibetan exile and master scholar Sogyal Rinpoche about his bestseller, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I had to admit I’d never even heard of him. Within two days, a copy of the book was on my doorstep. And later that night I got a phone call from my brother saying that our father was in the hospital and had just been diagnosed with cancer—again.

Having had six months to live for eleven years, Dad has been in and out of remission three times, and has become rather adept at his dance with death. We all have. But this time was different. An undying love for his wife, nurse and companion, Jane, has kept Dad alive all these years. But we just buried Jane six weeks ago, victim to the same cancer Dad has been battling for more than a decade. Diagnosed with lung cancer last September, she was gone by late March. I always sensed that once Jane was gone, Dad would not be far behind.

My own sense of prophecy was beginning to haunt me as I gently opened the cover to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and contemplated the upcoming interview with its author, Sogyal Rinpoche.  Settling into the pages of Tibetan wisdom that lay before me, I found myself seeking the message of an ancient voice as I face the inevitable change that life presents. And once again I marvel at the synchronicity of the universe.

CG:  How does our attitude toward death in the West differ from how death is understood in the East?

SR:  In the modern world, life and death are not seen as a whole.  As such, we become very attached to life, and we deny death. As a result, death becomes the ultimate fear. Beneath the fear of death is really the fear of looking into ourselves. Because of the myopic focus in the West on just this life—without looking at life as a continuum—all we see is what is practical and material. In a sense, we lose our vision of the future. And when that happens, everyone suffers—including ourselves.

In the Tibetan teachings, two things are certain: It is certain that we are going to die, but it is uncertain when or how death will occur. So we mistakenly use this ignorance of our death as a kind of false permanence that we grasp onto, thinking that we have an umlimited lease on life. As such, we digress into triviality, and become very busy with our lives. Success is often judged by how busy we are. But if we really look into the kind of busy-ness we dovote ourselves to, by the end of the day we really haven’t achieved very much.

My master, Jamyang Khyentse, who was also one of the teachers of the current Dalai Lama, is the source of the authentic teachings I am referring to. When asked by western students what he noticed about the West, the thing that struck him most was how people in the West waste time.

“But how can that be,” they responded, “when we are all so busy?” His reply was, “Being busy is how you waste time.”

We fill our lives with so much activity that we never have to risk looking into ourselves. There are two kinds of laziness. Passive laziness is the kind so well practiced in India. Active laziness is what we practice here in the West. We don’t really look into life because we believe in this sense of false permanence.

When we are told that we are dying is when we finally wake up. Unfortunately, in the West we only look at death when we are dying, then we see life much more clearly. We realize that the kind of life we have lived and the kind of life we had wanted to live are quite different. And it’s too late.

What the teachings are trying to tell us is that if we live with the immediacy of death, then we can live fully. In that way, death is the greatest teacher. In Tibet, there is a saying: “Which will come first—tomorrow or the next life? No one can know.” Gradually we realize that the most important thing in life is to ask: Are the actions that I choose going to help me when I die? Because the truth is that we die as we have lived.

CG:  How can the Buddhist teachings really help a person understand how to prepare for death?

SR:  We only die once and the great mystery is in knowing what that is going to be like. How can we possibly prepare for it? The answer is that death exists within life. Life is just a series of changes. All the little deaths that occur within life are teaching us to let go.

Living with the immediacy of death helps us sort out our priorities. Realizing that things are impermanent teaches us that change is the living link with death. We think things are permanent—especially life— but in reality it is not. So it is futile to grasp and hold onto anything. That’s where the pain comes from. Impermanence teaches non-attachment. That way, when impermanence occurs, it doesn’t break your heart.

I learned this through the death of my country, Tibet. I was young when I lost my country, maybe 13 years old, so perhaps I could deal with change more easily. Amazingly, the great Tibetan elders reminded us of the Buddha’s teaching—that everything in life is impermanent. So, that is how we understood what was happening to us. It helped us to let go. You can find this mentioned in the first three chapters of my book, which is the basis of all Buddhist philosophy.

CG:  Would you say that underlying the fear of death is the fear of the unknown?

SR:  At the moment we only know one aspect of our being, the ordinary dimension of our mind. Through death we can experience many other levels of consciousness, which is what the bardos  are. Life and death really only exist in the nature of mind. Since we are usually preoccupied with the ordinary mind, we fear other levels of consciousness—which is the unknown. Beneath the ordinary mind—which clouds our perception—is the clear sky-like nature of mind, which can give us the confidence to face death without fear.

CG:  In your book, you say that the greatest death you have ever experienced was the death of your own country. Can you talk about how you have dealt with this loss and what future you see for Tibet.

SR:  Even when you know death is coming, and you try to prepare for it, it is still a shock when it actually happens. Even though we were trained to accept impermanence as the way things are, when we lost our country it was devastating. In my case, we were in the eastern corner of Tibet when the Chinese first invaded in 1949. They called it the Peaceful Liberation. As we saw this situation becoming more and more grave, we escaped quietly with my master by traveling as pilgrims into central Tibet. My master was well respected all over Tibet, so his presence was a silent alarm to many of the lamas that it was time to leave.

Slowly, China took over. In 1959, there was a big demonstration which the Chinese used as a pretext to ask the Dalai Lama to visit. It was a trap to capture him. Fortunately, he was wise enough not to go, and escaped. March 10, 1959  was the great uprising when the Chinese finally clamped down.

It was all very sad, because we were a peace-loving country, unaware of the complications of world politics. Perhaps it was a mistake not to be involved with the world, not to send a representative to the United Nations to plead on our behalf. Because we were independent and free, we thought that the world would leave us alone. We were not harming anyone.

I first went to Sikkim in the Himalayas of India where I lived until I came to the West for my graduate work at Cambridge University. India gave asylum to the Tibetans, and my master was very much respected in Sikkim.

When we escaped to Sikkim we were in complete disarray and many people died in the heat of India. We had always felt a cultural kinship from both India and China. That is why it was such a shock when the Chinese invaded. We always thought someone would come to the rescue, but no one came. When we became refugees we had to regather our strength, but it was still a very difficult period.The teachings gave us our inner strength. It gave us an opportunity to practice compassion for our enemy.

CG:  Did you write this book as a way of preserving the wisdom of the Tibetan culture?

SR:  Yes. As much as we have tried to transplant the teachings, it is not the same as it was in Tibet. We have lost so much. Many lamas have been murdered, many monasteries have been destroyed, and many of the sacred texts have been forever lost. A few of the young lamas—like myself—have been fortunate enough to learn English and the ways of the western world.

When I first came to Cambridge, I primarily came to translate. I assisted with the travels of the Dalai Lama when he first came to the West in 1972. And when my own masters came, I served as a translator for them as well. That’s when I realized what a deep interest and affinity exists for these teachings in the West.  I began to write my book in 1980, so that western people can understand the Tibetan view of life—and death. The answers are in the teachings, but because of cultural barriers the meanings were not being fully translated. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying   is my way of bridging the gap. It offers the spiritual education I see people so hungry for in the western world. It took ten years of reflection and three years of actual writing to prepare the manuscript.

CG:  Would you call this your life’s work?

SR:  So far. It is the synthesis of all my teachings.

CG:  Why is this topic so important today?

SR:  As we get immersed in materialism, we begin to realize that it does not bring us happiness. We are searching for the answers that these teachings offer. There is a tremendous thirst and hunger for this kind of spiritual knowledge because there is such a lack of it, especially in the realm of death and dying. Unfortunately, it is a subject that is almost completely ignored in the West. In this age of cancer and AIDS, we cannot ignore it any longer. It is a fact of life laced with a bitter truth.

People so often give up in death and that is a pity. Death is not a tragedy to be feared, but actually is an opportunity for transformation.

CG:  How would you advise someone diagnosed with a terminal illness  like cancer or AIDS— to fight for life  or surrender to death?

SR:  Ironically, we often think that these are two different things, when actually they aren’t different at all. In fact,  when some people are faced with death and there is no option but to accept and make a change in their way of being, somehow in the process they are healed. An illness of this nature can be a gift— a warning to live life more fully.

Therefore, accepting death and healing are not really contradictory. Preparing for death does not mean giving up on life; it’s actually a chance to look into life more deeply and come to terms with deeper issues. At some point we must each ask ourselves: “What have I done with my life? What have I accomplished? What love have I brought into the lives of others. What pain? What knowledge?”

Knowing that we can die at any moment helps us to live life more fully. Through my book I want people to see suffering as a natural process of purification, as a way to dissolve any resentment and bitterness about their pain, and as a way to awaken compassion.

CG:  How does a person prepare for death?

SR:  By being at home with impermanence, letting go, and relaxing into your true nature. Our mind is like a camera: If the camera is not in focus then the picture is not clear. Without meditation the mind is all confused and distracted. By calming the mind, we can explore the depth of insight through the wisdom of listening and hearing. Then we can rediscover our true nature. In many ways we have been involved in this terrible accident called  samsara  in which we have lost our mind. The teachings will help us find it again.

CG:  How can the death process become more humane?

SR:  People often die as they have lived. If we live in a more humane way, we can die in a more humane way. So often people die with more pain and suffering in hospitals. Creating an environment filled with love is the best thing you can do for someone who is dying. That’s why hospice care is one of the best things to happen in a long time. Home death is just as important home birth. If you want to die a peaceful death you have to live peacefully.

CG:  Would you explain what the bardos  are and how death presents an opportunity for enlightenment?

SR:  The original Tibetan Book of the Dead  by Evans-Wentz,  published in 1927, initially had a different title. It was called Liberation Upon Hearing in the Bardos.  In the Tibetan language, the bardos refer to the four different periods of transition in the life/death cycle: life, dying, after death, and taking on a new life. But “bardo” also has a deeper meaning: “bar” means inbetween and “do” means suspended. Literally it means “suspended inbetween two situations.” And that is what life is: We are born and then we die, and life is what happens inbetween.

Essentially, everything is a bardo. But in this process of life and death there are always gaps between each thought, each transition, in which exists the possibility of seeing the true nature of mind. The bardos give us the opportunity for this recognition. It always exists in any moment.

Even in natural life there are two different bardos: the bardo of meditation in waking life, and the bardo of dreams during sleep. By working in this life with mediation and the yoga of dreams we can come to know our mind, and prepare ourselves for entering the bardo of death. That way, we will recognize the opportunity for enlightenment when it presents itself. If we have not prepared in life, we may miss this opportunity.

The blessing of death is that as we lose the body, we also lose all the negative thoughts and emotions that went with it. Momentarily, all the confusion obscuring the Clear Light is suddenly removed. The ego of the mind dies into the essence of the divine. In this truth, enlightenment takes place. That is why death is referred to as liberation.

CG:  What about near-death experiences when people enter the bardo of death, see a tunnel of light and then come back to life?

SR:  I discuss this in Chapter 20. I think it is indicative of the kind of experience we go through after we die. I think they come to the edge of the bardo, and are looking through the window of death. Amazingly,  people who have gone through this experience, even for a few moments, emerge from it completely transformed.

CG:  Is it possible to see a continuum of lifetimes—from the past, through the present and into the future?

SR:  Yes, even now. As Buddha said, “What you are is what you have been. What you will be is what you do now.” If you want to know your past, look into your present condition. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions.

CG:  In your understanding, what effect does destiny and karma have in our lives?

SR:  Our karma dictates our destiny. What we are is what we have done in the past. But what we will be in the future is every much in our actions. Karma is not a theory of predestination. Rather it is the sum of our actions, our thoughts, and our words. And motivation—or intent—is what determines the outcome of any action.

CG:  Would you say that you discovered your life mission after you left Tibet?

SR:  Yes, when I was living in India, and then England. When I was very young, my master prophesied that I would continue the teachings. In many ways, he was a spiritual father who treated me with tremendous love and compassion. Even though I believed him, I didn’t know how it would happen. But as I began to work with the teachings more, the vision began to unfold. Even when I was in India, I felt that my work would be in the West. I was naturally drawn to the teachings and they came quite easily to me.

CG:  Is a teacher really just a mirror?

SR:  A teacher is more than a mirror. It is wisdom seeking wisdom. Even though we are all fundamentally buddhas, our true natures have been obscured by samsara (illusion). That deeper truth is always rebelling against this confusion, and is always trying to bring us back to the truth. In that way, life is really our greatest teacher.

CG:  What do you think of the incident that recently took place in Waco, Texas?

SR:  What it really shows is that people are hungry for truth. It shows how much they are seeking and how desperate people are. It also shows how lacking the true teachings are. People cannot discern the truth from illusion. In my book, I am trying to give people the discernment to be able to choose correctly, and not depend on an outer teacher. An outer teacher is only the spokesman for the inner teacher of our true nature.

You see, a mirror reflects everything without judgement or prejudice. But discernment is necessary to avoid such a great tragedy and penetrate such a high state of delusion. I feel tremendous compassion for all the souls involved, especially for the teacher. Once again, it shows how important humility is. In our tradition, it is essential to have a living teacher for guidance. And what our teachers teach is to constantly work on humbling our egos, in order to avoid the subtle delusions of the self.

CG:  To you, what is the most important issue facing humanity today?

SR:  Awareness. With awareness, people become naturally kind and naturally good. Ignorance is what makes us cruel. If we really want to change the world, we need to change from within. Then we can bring about change in our environment. Nature is teaching us that we need to change. Even though the negative aspect of environmental destruction is very frightening, it is  bringing us to the brink of inner transformation. Through awareness we will have more compassion, When the sky is cleared of the clouds of confusion, then the sun of our wisdom will shine forth.

Virginia Lee was a regular contributor to Common Ground from 1992-2004. She was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since. She is also the author of two books:  The Roots of Ras Tafari was published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and Affairs of the Heart by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993.

Ray Kurzweil believes computers will surpass human intelligence in the 21st century

for Common Ground Fall 1999

by Virginia Lee

When it comes to predicting the future, Ray Kurzweil has a remarkable track record, but it has nothing to do with reading a crystal ball. However, it has everything to do with Artificial Intelligence and teaching computers to think like human beings.  Owing to the exponential nature of  evolution, and the accelerating advances of computer technology, Kurzweil predicts that within three decades, the world of “non-biological entities” and humans will be so integrated that it will virtually impossible to distinguish them apart.

From this point in time, this may sound like science fiction, but keep in mind that Ray Kurzweil has rarely been wrong. In The Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT Press, 1988), Kurzweil predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web, the fall of the Soviet Union, an unprecedented economic expansion and the taking the world chess championship by a computer. All these events have come true. Kurzweil’s most recent book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking Press, 1999), takes the reader time traveling through the past, present and future on a scientific journey of evolution, describing a future that is staggering to the imagination.

Kurzweil’s credentials are impressive to say the least. Having graduated from M.I.T., Kurzweil has founded and sold four different companies, each on the cutting edge of their respective technological fields. Each continues today as a leader in the field it pioneered. Kurzweil’s omnifont OCR  system and the Kurzweil Reading Machine have both been a blessing to the blind. Musician Stevie Wonder recognized Ray Kurweil’s genius  and helped him create Kurzweil Music Systems, making synthesizers so realistic that even musicians can’t tell the difference. Kurzweil’s other accomplishments are too numerous to mention here, but they include significant contributions to the fields of medicine and education.

As someone who first unveiled his genius on Steve Allen’s TV show I’ve Got a Secret as a high school prodigy in the 1960s, Ray Kurzweil has come a long way. However, it seems as though he’s still got a long way yet to go.

CG:  For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with your work, how would you summarize the premise of your most recent book, The Age of Spiritual Machines?

RK:  Within three decades, computers will match and then rapidly exceed human intelligence. Once they match human intelligence in the ways that it is superior, they will necessarily soar past it.

For one thing, machines can share their knowledge. For example, if I spend 20 years learning French, I can’t download that information into your brain. You’ll have to spend years learning French in the same painstaking way I did. But computers can. Humans can, however, communicate our knowledge to each other across generations, which is something that other animals don’t seem to do. We have an accumulated knowledge, but we can’t  share it instantly the way computers do.

CG:  Would the same principle apply to the knowledge gained through human experience?

RK:  Yes. We can talk about actually scanning and recreating human brains, which would contain all my experiences, my knowledge, my skills, represented as vast patterns of neural transmitter strength. Even the memory of your first-grade teacher would be passed on.

Whether we’re talking about recreating a specific person, or whether we’re talking about machines that have human levels of capability, machines will be able to share their knowledge rapidly.

Secondly, computers are already faster than the human brain. Their electronic circuitry is 10 million times faster than our inter-neuronal circuits. And they have will have much more extensive and more accurate memories than we do. We’re hard-pressed to reliably remember a handful of phone numbers. In these ways, computers already exceed us.

However, computers today don’t have the subtlety and depth of human intelligence. They haven’t yet matched our pattern recognition capabilities. When they catch up in those areas in which humans are now superior, and combine with the ways in which machines are inherently superior already, it will be a very formidable combination.

Machines are getting more powerful at an exponential rate. They are doubling in power right now every 12 months. Whereas, human intelligence and mental capability is not expanding at any noticeable rate.

CG:  Isn’t it said that we only use about five percent of our brain?

RK:  That’s not really accurate. The human brain is organized quite differently from today’s computers. All of our brain operates simultaneously. Although today’s computers work very quickly, they basically only do one thing at a time. Whereas, we have 100 billion neurons, 1,000 connections of one neuron to another, that amounts to 100 trillion connections which are all computing simultaneously. But brains are all organized differently.

Take a musician for example, whose innate talent as well as inherent skill and training creates a brain that’s organized uniquely for performing that activity. Some brains are just better organized than others.

CG:  Can computers  be intuitive?

RK:  Let’s start with the basic premise of the book, which says that we will be able to reverse-engineer the human brain and see how it works.  It describes ways in which we will literally be able to scan the brain and see all the neurons, all the connections between the neurons, all the synapses, all the neuro-transmitter strength, a huge data base of how the brain is working. Essentially we’ll have a picture of this very complex entity.

All of the skills we associate with human beings—including our emotions, our desires, our passions, our intuitions—all of the these human qualities are the result of the activities that go on in our brain. We will ultimately understand that. We could then take that data base, download and recreate it. Today’s computers can’t handle that complexity of information, but the computers of 2030 will be able to. Hypothetically, we could literally scan my brain and see everything going on inside it. You would have a computerized entity that thinks and acts just like me. It will think it is me.

CG:  This opens up some amazing possibilities. In a sense, we would never die. Death would become obsolete. Wouldn’t this be both a blessing and a curse? What about some demonic person we could never get rid of?

RK:  That’s right. And it also introduces subtle dilemmas about what is consciousness. Instead of something abstract and philosophical, it becomes something quantifiable.

If you scanned my brain into a machine and then talked to the new Ray, he’d tell you that he grew up in Queens, New York, went to M.I.T., started a few companies and then woke up inside this computer. But meanwhile the old Ray, which is me, is still there sleeping in his old carbon cell-based brain, with no idea about this entity which is a facsimile of himself. This new Ray isn’t necessarily the same person as the old Ray.

CG:  Doesn’t that scare you a little, the idea that you could be replaced by a computer?

RK:  I guess I haven’t fully come to grips with this. I would embrace the opportunity to expand my intelligence by connecting with a machine. One way to do this would be through neural implants, but some balk at the idea of brain surgery to expand human intelligence. But there’s another way to do it, which I’m writing an article about right now. There is a non-invasive way of expanding your mind and connecting directly to machine intelligence through the use of nanobots, which are  microscopic-sized robots, which will exist by 2030. You would send billions of them into your brain through the bloodstream.

These nanobots would be able to do a number of different things. First of all, you could scan your brain from the inside. All these nanobots could swim through every capillary of your brain and take a high-resolution picture from inside.

A second way would be through virtual reality. We already have the means to hook up electronic circuitry next to a neural connection. It can both detect what’s going on in that nerve, as well as stimulate or suppress neural activity of the nerve. So you have two-way communication between these nanobots and literally every neuron in your brain. And these nanobots would all be communicating with each other through wireless communication, also a technology that exists today. They could pool their intelligence through distributive computing, like a massive network, and create new neuronal connections through this wireless communication. Some simple applications would be to repair nerve damage, such as spinal cord injuries, which would be then be trivial to reverse. You could also rewire the brain by creating new neuronal connections, and suppressing other ones.

To enter virtual reality, you would attach one of these nanobots to every nerve of each of your senses—your eyes, your ears, your tactile senses. To be in real reality, you would instruct the nanobots to sit passively and do nothing. It would be like it is now where you get information from your real eyes, your real ears, your real tactile sense. In a way, it’s like turning an on/off switch between virtual/real reality. In virtual reality the nanobots switch off the sensory input coming from your real senses, and instead provide a stream of input that would have come from your real senses had they been in the virtual environment.

CG: Wouldn’t that get confusing? Would you be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s virtual?

RK:  Even now you can enter virtual reality using helmets etc. It’s like the real world but it’s a virtual world. This scenario would actually be a virtual world where you could walk around and experience all the senses, including touch, taste and smell. You could actually meet other people in the virtual world. Instead of you and I talking on the phone, we could meet on a game preserve in Mozambique or a beach in the Caribbean. You could do anything with anyone, including physical, intimate encounters.

You could also have parts of your brain communicating with brain extenders, which would expand your pattern recognition capability and memory.

CG:  The title of your book is  fascinating, but how can a machine be spiritual? Does it have a divine connection? Does it have free will?

RK:  There are several ways to answer that. In this next century, we will meet entities that will claim to have spiritual experiences and to be conscious. In my mind, consciousness implies the spiritual condition. If you consider what it means to scan a person’s brain and essentially recreate that person’s mind in a non-biological medium, that entity will claim to be that real person. To the extent that humans claim to have spiritual experiences, so will computers.

We can debate whether or not they really are conscious, but their claims will be very convincing for the very reason that they will be as complex and subtle as humans. Human beings go to churches, synagogues, temples and mosques, and have relationships with spiritual concepts and ideas. So if computers copy people, these new entities will act in the same way. They will actually spend time pursuing spiritual ideas. They will have the same range of spiritual and emotional experiences that we have.

If we deal with it on a philosophical level and ask, “What is a spiritual experience?” it will reveal itself as a pattern of information. Patterns are very powerful. All my ideas, all my memories are embodied in very complex and vast patterns.

CG:  Doesn’t the divine exist outside of ourselves?

RK:  On the contrary, most spiritual books refer to it as something that dwells inside ourselves, in every part of our being.

CG:  Perhaps that means there is a fragment of the divine within each of us. Does that mean that even a computer could have a fragment of the divine within itself? Does a computer have a soul?

RK:  What is a human being? On a very literal level, it’s 150 pounds of matter organized in a certain way, but that’s not really accurate. We’re really just a series of complex patterns. In fact, I am not the same collection of molecular particles I was a year ago; our cellular structure turns over very quickly. We change our stomach lining every month, but our brain cells last a lot longer. So what is really continuous about Ray Kurzweil is the pattern of consciousness. It’s like the pattern that the rock makes in a stream: The pattern is the same but the molecules of water are constantly changing. And the actual pattern may change gradually over time, just like human beings do.

The same is true for these computer entities. Concepts like emotion and spirituality are not side effects of human nature; it is the cutting edge of human intelligence. To recognize humor, to get the joke, to understand sadness, these are all very subtle human capabilities. Right now it’s something that machines don’t have. People think that’s a fixed concept, but the primary message of my book says that is all going to change. When we have machines that equal human complexity, they will be talking to us realistically about sadness, loneliness, joy, love, etc.

CG:  But machines aren’t born. They don’t have mothers and fathers. They don’t grow up in a family. They don’t know what it’s like to be a teenager. They don’t know what it’s like to hold a newborn baby. How could a computer ever embrace that realm of human experience?

RK:  I’m not sure that kind of derivation is necessary to have the emotions that humans have or to be conscious. If we take a 51-year-old Ray Kurzweil and scan his brain and recreate that entity, you’ll have an entity that at least thinks it grew up in Queens, New York and had parents. In fact, it would have as much claim to have done those things as I do. Again, I am not the same particles and cells as I was when I had those experiences. I have memories, which create a continuous line between the child, Ray Kurzweil, of the 1950s and who I am today. So in a sense, the current copy of me comes with all those memories. In the future, the fact that machines will be able to copy themselves so readily will change our concepts of birth and death. That is one of the startling things about the future: All of our basic concepts will come into question.

CG:  What about the dark side of living in world where computers exceed human intelligence, can replicate themselves to a point where people don’t even need to be born or die. Is it possible that the human race might become obsolete?

RK:  That depends on what you consider human. I do agree that if you look at the down side or a dark side to all of this, there are dangers. It is disturbing because it calls into question so many of the values that we take for granted.

But in my view, this is all a continuation of evolution, which is inherently an accelerating process, which is one of the key ideas in my book. The evolution of life forms started out extremely slowly. It took billions of years for primitive cells to form. Later on in the process, things moved much more quickly, only taking hundreds of thousands of years to go from primates to Homo Sapiens.

Technology is similar in that it is an evolutionary process. It is in fact a continuation of that same evolutionary process that gave rise to the creation of species in the first place. Technology began moving much more rapidly than life form evolution, with major steps that have occurred in mere tens of thousands of years. It took us several tens of thousands of years to figure out how to sharpen the edges of a stone, how start a fire, how to make the wheel. Over the past millennium, we we’ve taken major steps in technology that only took a hundred years, like the printing press. In the 19th century, we accomplished more than the ten centuries prior to that, and in the first two decades of the 20th century, we accomplished more than  we did in the entire 19th century. We now experience major paradigm shifts in just a few years’ time. The World Wide Web barely existed even five years ago.

Technology is inherently moving faster and faster. When we get to the point where technology is intelligent enough to create its own next generation, it’s going to continue to evolve, creating more and more knowledge. I see that as a spiritual progression. What evolution does is to move towards designs and creations that are even more beautiful, more intelligent, more creative—all of the things which God has been called.

CG:  Would you say that we are fulfilling our evolutionary destiny?

RK:  Yes, I believe this is our destiny. These machines are not an alien invasion of some extra-terrestrial species. It’s emerging from within our civilization. Our human way of life today is inextricably bound to machines. If all the computers in the world stopped today, life as we know it would grind to a halt. That wasn’t true as recently as 25 years ago.

It won’t be a matter of machines on the left side of the room and humans on the right. We’re going to be putting intelligent machines right in our brains and in our bodies. There won’t be a clear distinction between who are the humans and who are the machines. You’ll have humans with an expanded intelligence from neural implants and machines that claim to be human because they are exact copies. It is our destiny and the destiny of evolution on our planet.

CG:  Would you say that we control technology or does it control us?

RK:  Right now it’s a symbiotic relationship. We’re creating it and it’s helping humanity.  There was an experiment that happened in the last seven months (even since the book came out) that examined biological neurons while they were solving a problem. They tended to oscillate wildly with their electro-chemical messages, as if they were all connected by strings. After a few seconds of so-called “thinking,” they went into a state of equilibrium. Resonance occurs and an idea is established. It is almost like a musical vibration, a form that is less chaotic than the initial state.

We’ve been able to replicate that process in electronic circuitry that are copies of these neurons. Then the question is, “Are these electronic neurons really doing the same thing as the biological neurons? Or does it just look the same to us?” Recently, scientists have been able to actually combine the electronic and biological neurons in animals and see if they would actually work together. They went through this chaotic/harmonic dance and it worked, which indicates that our electronic models are accurate.

CG:  Is this an example of “artificial intelligence”? Would you define exactly what that term means?

RK:  In my mind, artificial intelligence refers to creating intelligence in non-biological entities. Artificial intelligence emulates natural intelligence. There have been different schools of thought about exactly how to do that.

Two broad ideas include: 1) The “expert system” is where you program a very elaborate series of logical rules defining how a certain activity is conducted. Computers are then able to implement these millions of rules to define an intelligent process. 2) Another is to emulate the chaotic processes that actually go on in the biological brain. This is called “chaos theory.”

The first school became associated with artificial intelligence. Sometimes when people would talk about artificial intelligence, they were referring to this expert system school of thought. That generated a lot of criticism. In fact, that methodology in my opinion is not capable of creating the subtlety of intelligence that we have as human beings, which is really based on our ability to recognize patterns. This is where my technical background lies. In my view, artificial intelligence is really just the effort to create intelligent machines, non-biological entities that can think like we do. One of the most powerful paradigms is to learn how the natural systems do it, and then copy that.

CG:  Would you say that computers are a part of nature?

RK:  We’ve had a distinction between the natural world and the world of technology that we’ve created. And it has been feasible to distinguish between biological and non-biological entities. I think that distinction will diminish as we make our technology more like biological systems, especially when we can create skin for a non-biological system that is as supple as a person’s. That’s really the message of the book.

And it’s still not true today. Although we have computers that can do some pretty remarkable things, they are still a million times simpler than humans. That factor creates some real qualitative distinctions, but that factor of a million is shrinking exponentially. It will be gone within two or three decades.

CG:  Would you say that DNA is like a computer program?

RK:  Yes, DNA is a digital system. It’s a remarkable little computer program that nature evolved for storing the design of living creatures. At several different levels we see computing in nature. In addition to genetic coding, information processes in our brains are both digital and analog. As we learn more about that, we’ll actually be able to design more powerful computers.

There’s actually not that much information in the genome. The human genome is only about a billion bytes of raw data, but most of the information is incredibly redundant. One of its little secrets is called ALU, which is repeated several hundred thousand times, comprising three percent of our genetic code. If you eliminate these redundancies and compress it, it’s only 50-100 million bytes—about the size of Microsoft Word. And that defines the human brain as well as the rest of our body.

CG:  Einstein must have been smarter than that.

RK:  His brain was very well-organized for doing mathematics. They recently found out that the region of the brain for doing mathematics was actually larger in his case. However, the part of his brain that had to do with fashion coordination was smaller.

CG:  Will computers ever be psychic?

RK:  For one thing, machine today communicate wirelessly. And one of things associated with psychic activity is the ability of two minds to communicate at some level, at least across space. That is something that machines do now all the time.

CG:  Would you say that computers can “read energy”?

RK:  In a sense, that’s the same as seeing patterns. In my view, the essence of human intelligence is pattern recognition, in everyday ways and in ways that are more archetypal like sensing that certain events are going to happen. We probably do have patterns and access to information that we haven’t really defined yet.

When we plug into the kind of technology I’m talking about, we’ll all be plugged into the Web at all times and have these high-speed channels of communication open with every other person.

CG:  Could computers ever communicate with animals?

There is the unexplored dimension of communication with animals, of understanding their language and their feelings, translating a cat’s meow, a dog’s bark, a bird’s chirp or understanding the intelligence of the creatures in the ocean. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What’s it like to be a whale?

CG:  To what degree will the developing countries of the Third World be affected by a technologically driven future? Is there any culture on Earth or species that will be exempt?

RK:  There are pluses and minuses on that issue. The information revolution is allowing some regions of the world to skip industrialization and move right into a post-industrial information economy. We are really already arriving to a place in the economy where the ability to create intellectual property has value in itself. Suddenly, those who were starving artists a few years ago are making a killing on the Web. There’s a huge demand for Web page design. The ability to contribute to the world-wide dialogue is open to everyone and where the global economy is going. Japan is having difficulty because they don’t have the cultural paradigm to take risks.

CG:  Aren’t we going to lose something by homogenizing culture?

RK:  On the contrary, I think there will be much more diversity. We’ve gone from three network TV channels to 100 channels to nearly a million channels. Communities can develop anywhere in the world around a common interest. Today’s Web has pretty low resolution, but when we are able to meet with people as if we were in the same physical location, with very high resolution, then people of like minds will be able to find each other.

I wrote in 1988 in The Age of Intelligent Machines, how the Soviet Union with their totalitarian control was doomed. The 1991 coup against Gorbachev was crushed because of the communications network with cell phones and faxes. It was more than a matter of just taking over the radio station.

CG:  Do you envision a world government of some kind?

RK:  I think we’re seeing a trend towards global democratization. In the past, totalitarian governments have been able to control information and keep people in the dark. But that is increasingly less possible. Through democratization, the boundaries between different national governments becomes much less important. Whereas, less democratic, nationalistic governments tend to go to war against each other.

Power and wealth has also been greatly diversified in terms of corporations. A couple of college students from Stanford can start a little dorm project, and it turns into Yahoo which is worth about $50 billion. That’s not unusual. It’s happening all around the world. The Internet has be come a truly global marketplace and a democratizing force in its own right.

CG:  What about those people who don’t want to be part of a computer-driven world. Do they have any choice not to be?

RK:  It’s not a matter of just using a personal computer. Every time you make a phone call or listen to the radio, a computerized system is involved. Computer technology is so imbedded in our infra-structure, there’s no avoiding it really. And in the future, this will be even moreso—every wall, every piece of furniture, in our clothing and ultimately in our bodies. Everyone is invariably affected by computers.

It really comes down to education. Access to material resources is becoming less and less significant. In 1988, I made a prediction in The Age of Intelligent Machines that commodities would actually go down in value, which they have dramatically. Whereas intellectual resources are increasing in value. One of the reasons the American economy is doing so well is because of all this entrepreneurship. We’ve created a trillion dollars of market capitalization in the last ten years just in the Silicon Valley alone. That’s real money. In fact, that is where real wealth is being created and how it’s being created.

CG:  In reading your book, I found your analysis about the exponential nature of evolution to be brilliant, yet somehow your blueprints of this futuristic society seem like science fiction, like 2001 or Star Wars. Doesn’t it seem like we’re playing God?

RK:  Perhaps, but you can’t stop it. Hopefully, the positive aspects will outweigh the negative ones. There are dangers, but I tend to be an optimistic person so I think we’ll make it through.

Just in the realm of biological engineering, I think we’ll overcome all kinds of disease and be able to reverse aging. But there is a tremendous danger in bio-engineering. In a college engineering lab, it might be possible to create a pathogen that is much more deadly than an atomic bomb. At least an atomic bomb is relatively local in its effects. Look at all the malevolent computer viruses; I can only imagine a biological one. And nanotechnology will be even more powerful because it will have self-replicating entities that are not biological. In fact, they would be much more dangerous, like a non-biological cancer. There are actually people worrying about these things, and there are ways to deal with it involving more technology. That is the race between the constructive/destructive potentials of technology. It is a two-edged sword.

CG:  Would a nuclear holocaust annihilate  technological society?

RK:  As I said in the book, the only thing that can derail the acceleration of this process is something that wipes the process out. We’re not completely out of the woods on that one. If anything, things are less stable than they were during the Cold War.

CG:  What is your humanistic view of the future?

RK:  I think this technology is very empowering for all forms of human expression. For example, take music today versus music several decades ago. My father was a noted musician with a symphony; he was a concert pianist and a composer. In order to hear one of his compositions, he would have to raise money, hire an orchestra, rehearse and perform. And if it wasn’t right, he would have to start  over again, and rewrite all the musical scores by hand.          Now, a student in her dorm room can create a multi-instrumental orchestration and hear it on her synthesizer with very realistic sound, and then make changes as easily as you would on a word processor. In fact, musicians today have a whole new palette of sounds to work with. A $1000 synthesizer you can buy today is vastly more powerful than $1 million worth of instruments you would have to buy years ago.

As we go forward, the palette of human expression for artists of all kinds will expand greatly. There are already whole new art forms being created, and that process will continue. And the global theater for this artistic expression is the World Wide Web.

CG:  What does the Apocalypse mean to you?

RK:  I’m not sure what you mean, but I think that the 21st century will transform the human species. In one sense, it will be the end of human civilization as we have known it. Maybe the Apocalypse refers to the transformation of the human species into a more advanced, more creative form of civilization. I see it as a positive step on the evolutionary path, but it will be a profound transformation. The world will be very strange by the end of the 21st century.

CG:  Do you think we will ever have just one religion in this world?

RK:  We already have what’s close to one religion; there’s not a lot of difference among the major religions. The important questions are basically the same, although there are differences in how they are implemented on the spectrum of orthodox to liberal.

I grew up in the Unitarian church where we believed that there are many paths to the truth. Our religious education consisted of studying a particular religion for six months. During those six months, we would attend those religious services, read those books and bring in those religious leaders to our discussion groups. We would get into Buddhism for six months, then Judaism and then Hinduism. There were cultural differences  but the parallels were very profound.

CG:  What does the Millennium mean to you?

RK:  It’s an opportunity for people to think more seriously about what the next century is going to be like. When a lot of people think about the future, they don’t take it very seriously for one thing, and one key insight they usually fail to consider is the exponential nature of change. They seem to think that what took 300 years in the past will take 300 years in the future. You really can’t understand the future without realizing that it is not linear — it is exponential. It starts out very slowly and then explodes with tremendous fury. We’ll see as much change in the next 20 years as in the past century.

And most of that change we can’t even imagine from where we are. How many people could have imagined what would happen in the 20th century only 100 years ago?

CG:  Do you believe in extra-terrestrial intelligence? What role could computers play in contact with alien life?

RK:  I generally have thought there was intelligence on other planets, but I have recently come to have some serious reservations about that for the following reason: Once a species gets to a level of intelligence that humans have, and develops technology, it’s a very short period of time before the technology becomes far more intelligent than the species that created it. Again, it grows at a tremendously exponential rate. Within a few hundred years, all matter will be fused with an intelligent, non-biological entities.

So, if there were an intelligent civilization that had created a very advanced technology somewhere in our vicinity, we would have noticed them. Their superiority would be obvious. It’s not likely either that they would be just 50 years ahead of us. Even a million years isn’t very long on the cosmic scale. Then there’s the argument that they are out there, but that they are not allowed to intervene in human affairs. That they are just watching us and they are invisible.

I do point out at the end of my book that if an intelligent civilization had made a visit here, they would have already long surpassed the point where they had merged their intelligence with microscopic-sized non-biological entities. What they would send here would be a mission of microscopic entities rather than large, squishy creatures as is imagined in science fiction films. They wouldn’t really have all that much to gain from us.

All this makes me think that in our corridor of the universe, that perhaps we are in the lead. It’s odd that with all the effort we have made that we haven’t seen any indication of intelligence elsewhere. If there were out there, they would have exceeded us. The only explanation for not having noticed them is that perhaps they have decided that they don’t want to be noticed.

CG:  Is it possible to attain a state of biological perfection as a species and just stay there? For example, cats have remained virtually unchanged for 35 million years.

RK:  That’s a good question. That depends on what you think the goal of a living entity is.

CG:  Do you consider yourself an avant-garde scientist or a metaphysical visionary? Or both?

RK:  I do consider myself a scientist. Visionary is not a word I would generally use to describe myself, but I guess my book is a vision of the future. That’s for others to say.

I am a futurist. I spend a lot of time seriously thinking about the future. No one has a crystal ball, but there are methodologies one can use. Predictions I’ve made in the past have been pretty successful.

CG:  If you could time travel, where would you go?

RK:  I’d probably go into the future to see how some of these scenarios have worked themselves out. I might start with 2029. It would still be a recognizable world.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of  Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been widely published in magazines ever since. She was a regular interviewer for  Common Ground from 1992-2004, and has also written two books:  The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993. She currently works as a freelance writer in Santa Cruz, CA.

Ram Dass reflects on the sunset years

for Common Ground Fall 2003

by Virginia Lee

 As an interviewer, it has been a lifelong goal to interview Ram Dass. And as a spiritual seeker, the chance to spend a moment or two with him was one I had waited for since 1973. That moment finally came, and this interview is the result.

To those of us who were spiritual seekers in the Sixties and Seventies, Ram Dass was the American guru for our generation. As kids, we were exposed to everything from political assassinations, race riots and the Vietnam War on the evening news to a revolutionary era of rock n’ roll and the mind-expanding potential of LSD. In a world where anything was possible and the nature of reality itself was being questioned, we were trying to make sense of the phenomenal social changes happening around us and the moral dilemma before each of us: Sell out to The Establishment or choose the path with a Higher Calling? Not wanting to support what we thought was an unjust war, some of us became flower children, some became war protesters and others were draft dodgers who escaped to Canada. Some even went to war and came home disillusioned. In any case, we were in search of an identity and looking for answers obviously lacking in the society and culture we grew up in. Collectively, we were redefining consciousness itself, and without the likes of Ram Dass, many of us would not be who we are today.

Born as Richard Alpert in 1931, Ram Dass enjoyed the secure life of a Harvard psychology professor until he met Timothy Leary in the early Sixties. Everyone knows about their experiments with LSD, which led Tim Leary to say, “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” Richard Alpert did just that in 1967 when he made his legendary pilgrimage to India where he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Ever since, he has been know as Ram Dass, which translated means “servant of God.” When he returned from India, Ram Dass shared the experience of his search for enlightenment through the classic book, Be Here Now, published in 1971. I remember my own journey of awakening while reading the now-ragged pages of Be Here Now in the early Seventies, when I finally saw a clear path out of the drug culture and into the realm of yoga, meditation and spirituality. The realizations I had while reading that book remain a continuing theme in my life and have affected the choices I’ve made ever since. And I know I am not alone.

Be Here Now is in its 34th printing and has sold over a million copies. Since its publication, Ram Dass established the Hanuman Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of spiritual well-being; the Prison-Ashram Project, created to help prison inmates grow spiritually; the SEVA Foundation, designed to help eliminate curable blindness in India and Nepal (among other projects); and the Living Dying project to help the terminally ill face death. Aside from being a prolific writer and teacher, his life has been one of service and helping others.

But now, the roles have been reversed. Just as Ram Dass was seeking a conclusion to his manuscript for Still Here, he collapsed when he was stricken by a crippling stroke. Although he survived the stroke, Ram Dass is now confined to his wheelchair, and has spent recent years dealing with the cycles of depression and acceptance of his limited physical abilities. Having once been the helper, he is now the one being helped, and has had to adapt his life—and attitude—accordingly.

Characteristic of Ram Dass, he regards his post-stroke condition as “grist for the mill.” It has become an entirely new spiritual exercise of being in the moment. As you may deduce from the following interview, his words are not as abundant and flowing as they once were, but they are still powerful in their message. During the course of the following interview, Ram Dass spoke slowly, as he thoughtfully chose each word, often pausing to find just the right one. I like to think of these words as distilled spirits. So drink deep, and enjoy Ram Dass, while he’s still here   

CG:  Most people know you as the American guru who showed a whole generation the path to enlightenment through your classic book Be Here Now. You have left your mark on history and consciousness. You were so much a part of that social change, that awakening, and you’re still here. Looking back on who you were then, how have you changed? And how has your essential message evolved over the past 30 years?

RD:  I think I’ve become seasoned. I think I was very naïve, and I’m not so now. I used to think it was all happening too quickly. And now I see that it happens very slowly. By “it,” I’m referring to life, realizations, social change, things that happen more slowly than I thought they would. In those days, I just looked at the short-term effects. And now I look at the bigger picture. I was an achiever, and now I’m not.

It’s actually very liberating. Before, I was caught in my ego. And now I am a soul. That makes things different because the ego is worried about death. But the soul doesn’t worry about the death of any particular incarnation.

CG:  In your latest book, Still Here, you say that you are happier since your stroke in 1997. Why is this?

RD:  It’s a comfortable role. The wheelchair gives me a great seat every place I go. I’m dealing with the fact that my body is old. The stroke brought me to my appreciation for this place of existence. I had always been busy living in other spiritual planes and never really acknowledged my body. But the stroke said, “It’s time.”

CG:  Didn’t you have your stroke right when you had finished the first draft of your manuscript for Still Here?

RD:  That’s right. I thought my leg had collapsed underneath me just because I was thinking about what it means to be an old person. Somehow I thought my mind had created the whole experience for me. Of course I didn’t realize that the stroke had happened. I couldn’t quite distinguish which reality the collapsing leg had happened in.

CG:  Were you afraid at all?

RD:  No.

CG:  How has having a stroke altered your perception of life?

RD:  It brings the notion of illness down to size. Because I had a stroke, control of the muscles in my arm has gone. So if you look at me as a man who’s had a stroke, that’s one perception. But if you look at me as a soul, that is a completely different perception.

But I can say that the stroke has brought me closer to my guru. At first, when I came to and people told me I was a stroke victim, I thought that my guru must have gone out to lunch. Then I started talking to him about my feeling that he had abandoned me and found that those conversations increased my faith. He had been giving me faith all the time, but I wasn’t experiencing it. Ironically, the experience of faith is reliant on your faith. What occurred to me is that I didn’t have the faith to be able to handle the stroke. As I went deeper and deeper and deeper into my faith, I came out to a place where the stroke doesn’t matter.

CG:  How do you communicate with your guru? Do you have a vision of him?

RD:  Here’s how I do it. First, I note his presence in the room. Then I shift into my imagination, and I imagine the conversation while the presence is there. Some people say that I am imaging things since my guru is dead. So I just say, “Yes, that’s what it is.”

CG:  Will those who see you as a guru be able to contact you when you’re no longer here?

RD:  Maharaji helped me heart-to-heart. And I can help anybody heart-to-heart. But then, so can you. And so, if anybody loves me enough, they will get through to me when I am dead. Because the string that goes across soul-to-soul is the string of love. And it exists beyond the time/space continuum.

CG:  To you, what is the greatest challenge of the aging process?

RD:  The changes in my body. I never know when I feel a pain or something changes if I’m supposed to do something about it. The whole issue of maintaining a body is rather hit or miss. That’s the worst challenge.

The people who feel they have to be careful around me because I’m old and fragile make me feel uncomfortable. I know they mean well but it creates anxiety. But it does give people a chance to exercise their compassion. I like that part of it.

Before my stroke, I was very much into helping others. Just read my book, How Can I Help? It’s about the power of being a helper. And now I am experiencing the opposite, the powerlessness of being a dependent person. I am the one being helped. At first, I was freaked by that, and then I got used to it. I’ve found that the heart-to-heart resuscitation goes both ways. I’ve found that in the role of a dependent person, I can contact the heart space and the soul of a human being. I get to make people feel really good.

CG:  How do you like to spend your time?

RD:  I sit by the window and let my consciousness play upon the planes of existence. I go to beyond time and beyond space, and from there I witness life. For example, when my partner goes surfing, I sit in the car and watch the people go by, and the dogs, the birds, the whales and things. My consciousness goes into them.

CG:  As a teacher, what is your greatest teaching?

RD:  I wanted to work with people about planes of consciousness. But in the psychedelic realm, there are so many planes of consciousness, I decided to focus primarily on the three planes where most human beings are: the physical plane, the soul plane and the mystical plane.

I’m currently teaching this view of humans as three-planed beings at a great rate, but it’s something that has come from my mind. Since it didn’t come from my heart, I question if it’s a pure teaching. This is a predicament for me, but I believe that a metaphor is still good as long as it takes one in the right direction.

CG:  Over the years, you have dedicated a great deal of your life to understanding death and dying. What has been your greatest lesson through this work? How has it helped you prepare for your own death?

RD:  I have a number of metaphors to approach death with, including The Tibetan Book of the Dead. One of the things I’ve gained from this work is the absence of anxiety about death. That work became obvious to me though the use of psychedelics, and it was because of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Death has such great importance in this society that it affects everything. I learned from my guru that death is not the enemy, as well as from Emmanuel (a spirit who is channeled by Pat Rodegast). In a session once, I asked Emmanuel, “So many people ask me about death, so what should I tell them?”  He answered, “You can tell them it’s absolutely safe.”

CG:  Is death just another moment?

RD:  First of all, I do see it as another moment. Yet it’s the end of an incarnation and means going on to other incarnations.

CG:  Is that something you’re looking forward to?

RD:  No.

CG:  Curious?

RD:  No, I’m just being here now.

CG:  Do you believe it’s possible to get messages from the “other side”?

RD:  I have gotten postcards from the other side, mostly from my guru. My guru says that we know the moment of our death, and I don’t foresee mine for awhile.

CG:  Do you still read The Tibetan Book of the Dead?

RD:  No. I don’t really focus on my own death. I only focus on other people’s deaths because they bring them to me.

CG:  How is the attitude towards death different in India?

RD:  It’s very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls. And Americans live as if they are their egos. Egos are frightened by death because it means they are going to cease to exist. Whereas, the Indians see death as an ending of a chapter of a book they are reading. In India, a dead body goes riding through the city on a rickshaw to the place where they cremate bodies by the river with nothing more than a sheet over it. In our culture, we wrap bodies in clothes and put them in boxes so that we don’t see anything.

Spiritual practices help us move form identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally. Then for those who don’t get it, death does it for them. In old age, when people lose their memories, it can be wonderful.

CG:  Can you talk about what it means to be an elder in our society?

RD:  I’ve been having a battle about this with a dear friend who would like us to play the role of wise persons. My position is that as we delve into the well of wisdom, we become wise, and it doesn’t matter what our role is.

CG:  How do you think the role of being an elder will change as the Baby Boomers become senior citizens?

RD:  They’re going to be powerful. It’s time for them to start filling the power positions.

CG:  Are you affected by what goes on in politics?

RD:  I’ve got a new friend whose name is Dennis Kucinich. My heart is reflected in his policy.

CG:  What can we learn from how traditional cultures deal with aging?

RD:  They treat the age stage as the culmination of what a person’s life has been about. They don’t worship youth as the ultimate state of being. Like life cycles in nature, old age is about harvesting whatever your life’s work has been. It’s a well-kept secret that aging is the greatest stage in the life process.

CG:  What is the role of LSD in your life? Do you still use it?

RD:  Not since I had the stroke. I don’t want to push my brain. But I do use medical marijuana.

CG:  Do you still regard it as a door to enlightenment?

RD:  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

CG:  In many ways, you and Timothy Leary were the pioneers of consciousness for the 20th century. How do you regard that legacy today?

RD:  I think Tim was, but I don’t think I was. I took care of the children and cooked the food and stuff like that. I kept the finances together.

Being an icon is uncomfortable. People don’t treat you like a real person. They treat you like you’re a god or something. But I ‘m delighted to have played a part in the opening of human consciousness.

CG:  What do you see as your life’s work?

RD:  First, I thought my life’s work was psychology. And then I thought my life’s work was psychedelics. Then I thought my life’s work was bringing eastern philosophy to the West. And now I’m going to the Rainbow Gathering and stuff like that. Whatever I’m doing now is my life’s work, even if it’s sitting by the window.

My guru said, “Be like Gandhi.” And Gandhi had one line that said it all: “My life is my message.” That’s what I’m trying to do.

CG:  Looking back on your life, is there anything you would have done differently?

RD:  No.

CG:  What has been your greatest accomplishment?

RD:  Taking psychedelics. I wouldn’t be who I am without that experience.

CG:  How would you like to be remembered?

RD:  As a free spirit.

Virginia Lee was Associate Editor and served on the Editorial Board of Yoga Journal from 1980-85, and has been published in the alternative press ever since. She has been a regular interviewer for Common Ground since Fall 1992. She has also written two books: The Roots of Ras Tafari published by Avant Books of San Diego in 1985, and Affairs of the Heart published by Crossing Press of Freedom, CA in 1993. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, CA.