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Sam Keen: Telling Your Life Story

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

Fire in the Belly

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.

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Robert Thurman: Travels through Tibet

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Robert Thurman journeys to the sacred mountain

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.

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Robert Bly: On Being a Wild Man

Sunday, September 18th, 2011

Modern Life as a Fairy Tale

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.

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Sogyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

A Tibetan master translates ancient wisdom into modern words

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.

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Ray Kurzweil: The Age of Artificial Intelligence

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

More Perfect than Man

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.

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Ram Dass: Still Here

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

Conscious Aging

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.

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Michael Murphy: The Zen of Golf

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

Is Life a Metaphor for Golf?

Michael Murphy discusses his sequel to Golf in the Kingdom

for Common Ground Winter 1998

by Virginia Lee

Michael Murphy is one of those unique human beings who has managed to excel in life at whatever he has chosen to do. Whether it was playing golf as a teenager, being accepted to Stanford University, then dropping out to meditate with the renowned Indian philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, during the ’50s, it seemed that Murphy always had a sort of spiritual Midas touch.

Then came Esalen Insitute of Big Sur, which Michael Murphy created in 1962 with his friend and kindred spirit, Richard Price, out of a vision to share the pursuit of enlightment in a society whose consciousness was ready to awaken. Murphy established a forum through which the New Age could begin to realize that it even existed.

As if that weren’t enough to accomplish in one lifetime, Murphy then tried his hand at writing. His first effort produced a novel in 1972, Golf in the Kingdom, a book which still reigns as a superlative example of golf fiction, and continues to be a bestseller 25 years later. Although he has written six other books in the interim, Murphy has finally completed the long-awaited sequel to Golf in the Kingdom in the form of his new novel, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons.

In the following interview, discover the mysterious world Shivas Irons, Michael Murphy and all of heaven and earth that exists in-between.

CG:  In spite of all your success in creating Esalen Institute in Big Sur, which is regarded by many as a paradigm for the New Age lifestyle, it seems that golf is your greatest passion in life and your real spiritual path. Would you agree with this perception?

MM:  No. Golf is not my greatest passion in life, nor is it my primary discipline. The extraordinary success of Golf in the Kingdom (as the best-selling book of golf fiction ever written) has simply opened up a window to the mystical aspects of sport — and to the mysticism of everyday life. Although it has contributed to my understanding of the world and to my life’s work in general, I only play golf a couple of times a year.

CG:  Have you played golf all your life?

MM:  I played in high school, having taken the game up when I was about 14. Within three years I was playing to a “four” handicap against Kenny Venturi in the Northern California Championships.

By age 20, I became interested in Eastern philosophy and the work of Sri Aurobindo while I was a student at Stanford — so I gave up golf. But I returned to the game when I sat down to write Golf in the Kingdom in 1970. At that point, I was 39 years old.

CG:  How has the enduring success of Golf in the Kingdom been a foundation for your new book, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons?

MM:  Golf in the Kingdom was a phenomenon unto itself. .Not only was it the first book I ever wrote, it was the first book I had even tried to write. And it has been my most successful one. In fact, it’s even selling more now than when it was published 25 years ago.

But the amazing thing is that as people read Golf in the Kingdom, they began to tell me about their own extraordinary experiences on golf courses. I began to feel like Father Murphy taking confession. Many of those experiences are described in The Kingdom of Shivas Irons. That part of the book is absolutely true. In many ways, the new book is a roman à clef; it’s based on real events. It’s a collection of things that actually happened to many people, but it is basically a work of fiction.

CG:  Is Shivas Irons based on a real person?

MM:  No, he’s purely fictitious. The character of Shivas Irons grew out of someone I knew but then he took on a life of his own. And now he speaks to me all the time; he’s become a living presence. Even though he’s fictitious, if you’ve lived with a character for a quarter of a century like I have, he becomes real.

CG:  Does a person have to play golf to understand your books?

MM:  Not really. It’s unfortunate that reviewers tend to pigeon-hole books. You don’t have to be a murderer in order to read a murder mystery. Nor do you have to be a spy to read John Le Carré. So, you don’t necessarily have to play golf to read these books.

CG:  Can someone understand your new book, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, without first reading Golf in the Kingdom?

MM:  Yes, that was a requirement of the publisher. It actually makes reading Golf in the Kingdom more interesting.

CG:  Is golf a metaphor for life or is life a metaphor for golf?

MM:  It can be either way. Some people even wonder: Is there life after golf? Golf has the power to evoke many basic archetypes and metaphors about life. There’s no doubt about it. It’s mysterious and wonderful and a still evolving game.

CG:  Would you comment on Tiger Woods’ performance in this year’s Masters Tournament and how he might be a character in one of your books?

MM:  The Masters course suits Tiger very well. There’s no rough, it’s wide and long. A big hitter has a huge advantage there. Tiger is the most exciting new champion by far who’s emerged in the last few years. For him, the mental side of the game is crucial. He has the magic of a great champion—and we love champions. We need champions because they represent parts of what we could be. So Tiger symbolizes all of this extra-dimensionality, if you will, that exists in the game of golf. Every now and then, someone incarnates that magic.

CG:  Do you think he was in an altered state when he won the Masters? It was a remarkable feat.

MM:  He definitely was in what athletes call “the Zone”. To win by 12 strokes with the lowest score on record—and being the youngest player ever to win the Masters—was truly extraordinary. I write about this type of experience in my book, In the Zone, which traces the many varieties of this transcendental experience while doing things like climbing Mount Everest, sailing around the world—that type of thing.

CG:  How does your relationship with golf relate to the bigger picture of global healing?

MM:  I don’t know exactly how this seed of an idea about Golf in the Kingdom got into my mind, but it was there since I was 30. At the time I was caught up in building Esalen Institute so I didn’t get around to writing the book until I was almost 40. It happened almost by the grace of God. Norman Mailer says that God gives every writer one free one.

The response to Golf in the Kingdom  has been so consistently rich and wonderful that I’ve written the sequel, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons 25 years later—but remember that there were six books inbetween. The Future of the Body, which I spent seven years on, is the fullest statement of my research; and The Life We Are Given (written with George Leonard) is the clearest statement of the kind of practices I believe we need to actualize these potentials.

CG:  What inspired you create Esalen Institute in 1962?

MM:  By the time I was 20, I had dropped out of pre-med studies and my fraternity at Stanford in order to pursue an interest in human potential—which has been my life work ever since. This was inspired by a teacher at Stanford named Frederick Spiegelberg and the Indian philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, whose vision of the universe evolving to higher and higher forms of embodied consciousness seized my imagination and transformed my life.

At age 20, I went to India and spent a year and a half at the Aurobindo ashram, deep in the study of meditation. Finally at the age of 30, I felt this tremendous drive to bring these ideas out into the world. There just so happened to be a piece of old family property in Big Sur, which through a series of serendipitous events gave co-founder Richard Price and I a place to establish Esalen.

In 1962, our intention was to create a place where we could collectively explore these passions and interests which we shared. We thought the world was ready for a place that could hold an ongoing conversation through seminars and conferences around the central issues involved in this vision. So, we started inviting the authors whose works we’d read, people like Fritz Perls, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Gerald Hurd, Paul Tillich, Arnold Toynbee — and all of them came!

CG:  Would you say this ushered in the New Age?

MM:  The New Age is a label we have for all this, since we don’t yet have an adequate social history of this whole cultural opening. We were really just exploring beyond the strictly traditional responses to the eternal questions like: Who are we? What’s really going on? Where are we headed as a human race?

Esalen was conceived as a meeting place to discuss these central questions. We wanted to explore these answers not only through intellectual thought, but also through direct experience. As well as lectures, we had sessions on Gestalt Therapy and other experimental forms of psychotherapy, sensory awareness, body work (like Rolfing and Feldenkrais) as well as forms of spiritual practice.

At that time there was no other place like this, and it was quickly imitated because the world was ready to open up to these new approaches. From the beginning, we wanted to have an open forum—not a dogma, not a cult, not a single guru and not a single teaching. Our model was a cross between a western college and an eastern ashram.

CG:  In your book you refer to a “visitation.” Would you define that term for those who don’t know what it means?

MM:  There are several kinds of visitations. Basically, it refers to the breaking through of some conscious entity or spirit from beyond our ordinary range of experience that brings in a higher energy or knowing. People have been telling me about such visitations for a quarter of a century.

In The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, I really explore that sort of thing. And not unlike other writers of Celtic origin (I am Scotch-Irish on my father’s side), Celtic literature is full of this stuff—leprechauns, banshees, witches and wizards. In general, the Irish and the Scots are very open to the mystical side of reality; they already exist on the margins of Western civilization.

In many ways, this book is not only a travelogue to the Scottish highlands, but it also transports the reader into the realm of “second sight.” The Irish call second sight the ability to see through the sensory world into its deeper colors, textures and contours—and into the spirit realm itself. For me, the golf courses in Scotland become fields of second sight, where I can describe both the inner and outer scenery.

There are two levels of this second sight: The first level involves seeing the subtle realms of auras and being aware of the extra-dimensionality of energy, which is what the Orientals call “chi” and the Hindus call “prana.” Going deeper than that is what the Jewish mystics call the “zohar” or the splendor of God, what the Sufis call the “light of the soul,” what Christian mystics call “the presence of God.” There is a dimension that is accessible to us all, that mystics have talked about in every religion, that seems to break through for people on golf courses. I’ve been getting letters about it for decades.

CG:  Are the mystical experiences you describe in your book unique to the geography of ancient Britain?

MM:  They can happen anywhere and they do happen in all walks of life. But certain places have a special power to evoke them. Places like the Scottish highlands with its magnificent golf courses and the west coast of Ireland have that power. Right here in California, spots in Big Sur and the golf course at Pebble Beach have that power too.

CG:  In your book, you refer to golf as a mystery school for Republicans. Does this reference have anything to do with the freemasons?

MM:  Perhaps golf is the successor to the old esoteric masons. I’m joking.

CG:  How old is the game of golf?

MM:  It was certainly going strong in the 15th century. It is recorded that when James IV of Scotland married Mary Tudor (the daughter of Henry VIII of England), he went out to play golf the day after the wedding. I mentioned this in Golf in the Kingdom.

You know of course that the game of golf originated in Scotland. They used to play it with their shepherd’s crooks and sticks, probably whacking stones into gopher holes. The first balls were “featheries,” made of goose down wrapped in cowhide, then soaked in brine. The Shivas Irons Society passes them out upon occasion. There are members in all 50 states, and in 20 nations worldwide.

CG:  What is the significance of the number 18 in golf?

MM:  It’s a mystical number. Steve Cohen of Carmel pointed out that the 18th letter of the Hebrew alphabet refers to goodness and the holiness of life. At your bar mitzvah, you get $18 as a gift.

The reason that golf courses all over the world have 18 holes is that St. Andrew’s golf course in Scotland, which is the Keeper of the Rules, happens to have 18 holes. Everybody imitated St. Andrew’s.

CG:  Is golf the only sport that invites mystical experience or is this state possible in any athletic pursuit?

MM:  In my book In the Zone, I describe mystical states attained through other sports like mountain climbing and in long ocean voyages (particularly solo circumnavigations). There are instances of this kind of experience in every sport, but some sports give rise to it more easily than others. It’s the spirit of concentrated play.

Golf is right at the top along with mountain climbing, single-handed sailing and flying airplanes. These are sports that require tremendous vigilance and open you up to the elements. And they go on for hours and hours. The depth of experience is proportional to the amount of time you spend in this altered state. It becomes a journey of surrender. If you do something only for a few minutes, you don’t have to time to experience these larger states of being. As Nietszche said, “There’s nothing more serious than a child at play.”

CG:  Is there a difference between the fictional Murphy and the real one?

MM:  Although I did actually play at St. Andrew’s in Scotland on my way to India, the fictional Murphy had a very different life than I.  The whole parable of Golf in the Kingdom was ironic. Poor Murphy, he was given everything on a golf course, but he thought he could only get it at an Indian ashram. Instead, Murphy found safety in India against the threatening consequences of the terrible beauty of living with Shivas Irons. Only later did he realize that he had been offered everything by Shivas Irons — and the new book is all about Murphy’s search to find him again.

Right now, the human race prefers comfort to adventure. The irony is that we have all have been offered everything again and again and again—and we keep turning away. It’s all right in front of us right this very instant. We just need a vision of it and a practice through which we can go into it. It’s ironic how some people will go around the world to marry the girl next door.

CG:  In many ways, your life has been as magical as that of Shivas Irons. Is there a part of him in you?

MM: Certainly the drive to join heaven and earth, the simultaneous transformation of mind and flesh, the union of the above and the below, the within and the without—all that I was oriented to by Sri Aurobindo is what I share most deeply with Shivas Irons.

I am not the golfer he is. I’m not as tall. I look differently. I have been involved with family and I have a child. I started an institute. He was a lone Celtic shaman on the edges of civilization, who could hit the ball like a wizard into hyper space. He was a shape shifter who could appear and disappear at will.

Now remember, all humans are shape shifters. All of us aspire to what I call hyper-dimensional, luminous embodiment. Secretly, we all know in certain moments that we are more than this frail, human flesh. We are more than what our parents, our teachers, our priests and rabbis told us we were. And the world is much more than they told us it was. I share the perception with Shivas Irons that we are only just getting started.

CG:  Is this the essence of the human potential movement?

MM:  Yes, in a nutshell. This is what my whole life has been about.

CG:  Are you writing any more books?

MM:  I’m working on a third book which will make it a trilogy. I guess you’d call it a “prequel.” In this one, I’m finally going to remove Murphy. (I’m finding him to be a terrible impediment.) This third book goes back to the original relationship between Shivas Irons and his teacher, Seamus MacDuff. It takes place before Golf in the Kingdom. I can’t help it, the book’s just writing itself.

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 is a regular interviewer for  Common Ground, 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.

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Marlo Morgan: Encounter with the Aborigines

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

The Legacy of an Ancient Race

Marlo Morgan brings a divine message from the endangered Aborigines of Australia

for Common Ground Winter 1994-95

by Virginia Lee

Once in a lifetime—if you’re lucky—a truly extraordinary experience occurs. Such was the case for Marlo Morgan, an otherwise typical midwestern American woman in her mid-fifties, who was virtually kidnapped by a dying Aborigine tribe in Australia so that they could communicate their legacy of cultural wisdom to the rest of the human race. Descended from a race that’s nearly 50,000 years old, the Real People reflect a living human history we are about to lose.

Marlo Morgan surrendered to the experience she was destined to have and spent four months in the searing Australian outback on a “walkabout” learning the ways of this ancient Aborigine tribe. As a reuslt of her profound transformation—which included losing 45 pounds while surviving on a diet of worms, bugs, snakes and lizards, and walking thousands of miles barefoot through the burning desert—Marlo Morgan wrote Mutant Message—Down Under upon her return to civilization.

Mutant Message, which intitally sold over 370,000 as a self-published first edition and has recently been reprinted by HarperCollins, chronicles the details of her inner and outer journey with wisdom, compassion and humor.

CG:  Anthropologists say that the Aborigine culture is approximately 50,000 years old. Do you believe that they were the original humans? What can we learn about our own history?        

MM:  This is a point of conflict with many of the audiences that I address who absolutely believe that they have no connection whatsoever with anyone who has dark skin. They certainly are not interested in hearing anything I might have to say implying that the Aborigines represent our heritage. For those people, this is a very upsetting topic.

But those of us who are more open-minded, and have gotten over the hangups of what causes pigmentation of the skin, can begin to appreciate what the Aborigine race has to offer.

In the beginning, the man who was my interpreter, Ooota, referred to his tribe as the Real People. He was raised in an Australian city, was well-educated, and when he was 15  ran away into the Outback to find the desert people. He finally connected with them, and has been going back and forth between the two worlds ever since. Ooota was the only one I could relate to when it came to counting, because the rest of them don’t count the way we do.

According to Aborigine songs and dances, which is how they chronicle history, their race goes back for eons into what they call the Dreamtime. If there’s anything at all to what they say, then one would come to the logical conclusion that they represent the same value system that existed among very ancient people. For me, it was wonderful to find that there are people on earth who don’t just talk about relating to each other spiritually. They actually do it.

CG:  What can we learn from the Real People?

MM:  Obviously, from living outdoors their stamina and immune system are in peak condition compared to what we experience by living in confined, artificial environments. And they have very few possessions. When you don’t have possessions, you don’t constantly live to acquire and protect them. They also don’t have a written language and they don’t use their voice for speaking. Rather, they communicate telepathically.

We’re really not so far off from it right now. I have no problem going back and forth between the two worlds. I have been back to visit them since I wrote this book. It’s not terribly difficult. We all have these latent abilities that can be reawakened at any time.

CG:  What does the title of your book really mean?

MM:  The name of their tribe can be translated into a number of our words: first, original, unchanged, thinks-in-oneness, and real. That’s how they introduced themselves to me. It all means the same thing to them.

They said, “You are no longer like the first people. You think in separateness. You have changed; you have mutated.” That was the word Ooota actually used to describe me. He thought I would understand that. And that’s where the title came from.

This is their message to the mutants. It’s any way you want to take it. I had a pile of words sitting on the kitchen table and the wind came through the window, blowing all the pages onto the floor. When I picked them up, the words that came up were “Mutant Message.” The next page I picked up was upside down, and it said “Down Under.” When I went to the printer, that’s how I presented the manuscript. He tried to fix it, but I told him that’s how it came off the kitchen floor.

CG:  Does this book have an urgent message for us?

MM:  There’s no real urgency to this message. The Real People are very positive people: They believe that we are closer to Paradise than ever before. We really have the ability to feed everybody on earth, if we decide to do that.

But the Real People are no longer going to be here. And they believe that they have been keeping the spiritual fabric of the world intact. Imagine that you had a job you have been doing for years and could no longer continue doing, it is only logical to tell someone else how to do it. If the person you’ve told wants to do something about it, that’s their choice. But they don’t have to, because we all have free will. Still, you would not just walk away and leave this important task unattended. As a responsible person, you would feel an obligation to leave your legacy.

CG:  Why have the Real People decided to leave the earth?

MM:  Environmental circumstances—like the deterioration of the ozone layer, the increase in radiation levels and acid rain, the pollution of the seas—have caused these people catastrophic problems. This doesn’t just apply to the Aborigines, but to all civilized, white Australians. The government has even passed a law that children must wear hats when they go outside to play at recess. The skin cancer rate has gone up tremendously in 1993 and 1994.

Living in the open, as the tribal people do, you actually see that the lizards are shrinking in size; they can no longer grow to maturity. You can actually see what happens when rain with an acid Ph level hits the plants. The radiation is making the desert hotter than it’s ever been before so that the snakes can no longer live there. And this is their world.

Because the Real People conceive children consciously, they literally have made the decision that it would be unfair to bring souls into a world where it is impossible to survive. They would either die of starvation or go into the city where they are abused and discriminated against. So the Real People have decided to stop having children.

CG:  How were you chosen to write this story?

MM:  I was chosen to go with them, but it could have been practically anybody. It was just a matter of circumstance. As far as they were concerned, it was  a matter of finding someone whose intent was in the right place, someone who cared about fellow man. I just didn’t understand man’s relationship to man, and man’s relationship to the earth.

And I never would have if I had stayed in my city life. I would never have discovered something like this on my own. They believe that our society is a non-support system because people think in separateness. When you’re raised by people who live in a society based on separateness, how can you possibly learn about oneness?

CG:  Do you feel it was your destiny to write this book?

MM:  I do now. It was my destiny to experience being with these people. The decision to write the book grew out of that. For a long time I didn’t really believe in destiny. But now that’s a very comforting thing for me to believe in.

CG:  Do you believe that you represent the typical American, and that is perhaps why your book has been so widely received in the mainstream?

MM:  I’m about as average American as you an get—right from the middle of the Midwest. I think that just about anybody can put themselves in my position—man or woman. The thing most people can’t understand is that I seemed so calm, cool and collected throughout this whole thing.

What I try and explain to people is that I would have been scared to death too if I had been 20. At 35, I would have been smarter but would still have been pretty irate about someone burning up my gold and diamond watch. That would have really bothered me at age 35. But by the time you get past 50, a wonderful thing happens. You have some maturity about you, some flexibility that you have acquired just simply by being here so long. So when you’re in a foreign country and can’t understand what’s going on, you just go with the flow.

I’ve been in the health care profession all my life and I don’t know how many times I’ve counseled people. Hundreds of times I’ve said, “There isn’t anything you can do about this. This has already happened. There’ no point in elevating your blood pressure over something you can’t change. Let’s just see where you can go from here.” Finding myself stranded in the Outback was simply a test of that philosophy.

CG:  What were you like before this experience?

MM:  I was a nice person. I was involved in a lot of civic things like Community Chest and United Way. I was always the one who was concerned for the underdog. I was happily married for 25 years. Then my husband fell in love with a younger nymph-like creature who would take care of him. It was wonderful since it gave me the opportunity to move to Australia, which is something I would never have done if I were still married. Our divorce was very congenial. I came from the era when you married forever, so I was suddenly free to go and do my thing.

CG:  If someone had predicted the experience you were going to have, how would you have reacted?

MM:  If I had had a vote, I would have said no.

CG:  How has the experience changed you?

MM:  Pretty much in everything I do. The first thing I did when I moved into my rental house was to have the locks taken off all the doors. I cannot put energy into locking up my things. If someone steals them, they’re the thief. I’m not. I used to be into jewelry, too. Now I don’t buy those things anymore.

My background is in bio-chemistry, so I’ve always been very concerned with nutrition and the human metabolism. I used to counsel people about staying healthy and avoiding diabetes if it ran in the family. Now, my diet is very different. I rarely get to choose what I eat since I spend so much time in hotels and airplanes.

What I do now is bless my food. I do the Aboriginal rite of thanking Divine Oneness. Every morning when I wake up, I give thanks for another day and say that I will devote my day to walking my path on earth, to honor whatever is out there and its purpose for being. If it’s in my highest good, then I welcome the experience of eating again today. Whatever food shows up is the right food for me to eat.

CG:  Do you have any dietary restrictions?

MM:  No. If I am given an opportunity to choose my own food, I will choose fruits and vegetables because I know that they are better for you than processed foods. But that’s not a big thing for me anymore. There was a time when I would have not eaten anything if I didn’t like what was presented to me. I would have driven clear across town for a salad.

CG:  Were their methods of healing a revelation to you?

MM:  I’ve been in the alternative health care profession practicing as an acupuncturist since the 1970s. So when I saw them massaging each other, using acupressure points and clearing energy with their hands, I had some idea of what was going on.

CG:  What was your name in the tribe?

MM:  These people name themselves constantly according to what they do. So I called myself Dung Collector, since that was my way of being useful to the tribe. Although it doesn’t sound too complimentary, that was my job. Dung was a primary source of fuel and was often the only way to make a fire.

Later they suggested the name Two Hearts, and that was very complimentary. They saw me as someone who was totally loyal to my society and validated my people’s ways. At the same time, I was totally loyal to them and understood their ways, too. They thought that was absolutely amazing since the two cultures are so diametrically opposed. But now my name is Traveling Tongue. It’s who I am and what I am doing.

CG:  Was it difficult to readjust to American society ?

MM:  No. It was wonderful. I love toilet paper, running water and sleeping on something other than sand. But I did find that I came out of the desert with an incredible sense of humor that I did not have when I went in. Before, I was a very serious person. I would have carried a picket sign on certain issues. Things that used to be really important now seem hilariously funny to me.

The Aborigines make sure to laugh hard every day. If you go to bed at night and think about your day and you haven’t laughed very much, then you must jump out of bed and go do something fun. They believe that if you’ve gone a whole day without laughter it’s very bad for you physically, emotionally and spiritually. I’ve learned from them that forever is a long, long time. When you think of things in terms of forever, most of it is quite hilarious. It’s changed how I view everything.

CG:  Can we do anything to influence our future?

MM:  Not only can we, but once we understand stewardship and responsibility, not to do so would be a step backward on our own spiritual path. There’s a fine line, because these people truly believe in free will. They don’t believe that anyone should be forced to do something they don’t want to. They are into observing, not judging. They believe in being a steward of your own energy.

For example, take the issue of gun control. They see people carrying signs about gun control—pro or con—as the same thing. It’s just putting energy into gun control. Instead, they would do a 180° turn and put their energy into young people to support their dignity and self-worth, and encourage them to express themselves positively. If you do that, then the whole gun issue resolves itself.

CG:  Do they think that our society lacks rituals to help young people become adults?

MM:  No, just the opposite. They think we have all kinds of rituals. They think that’s what birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, confirmations and graduations are all about. To them, all those things are celebrating a circumstance. You treat a kid one way on Tuesday, then you have  a party on Wednesday, and go back and treating him the same old way on Thursday. They don’t think our celebrations and rituals have anything to do with the person.

What they do is just the opposite of that. If you give children attention every day, listen to them, hug them, support them and nurture them, the transition into adulthood happens on a daily basis.

CG:  Is a “walkabout” considered a rite of passage?

MM:  Not really. Their walkabout is what they do everyday. They’ve always been nomadic people; they’ve never had houses. When they had the continent to themselves, they followed the seasons. That’s how they ate. All the animals used to walk with them—the emus, the kangaroos, the turtles. They all ate the berries, nuts and seeds.

It’s not their custom to undergo riutals of suffering. And they’re not into any kind of hallucinogenic drugs to get into another state of consciouseness. They are thoroughly convinced that they understand alcoholism in our society. They think that someone who has recovered from alcoholism—or any other kind of addiction—is further along the spiritual path than the self-righteous person in a box that won’t get out.  The only reason you get involved with a mind-altering substance is to take a trip to understand a different level of consciousness. Even a bad trip is better than no trip at all.

CG:  It sounds as if yours is a true story, yet it is classified as fiction. Can you explain this contradiction?

MM:  It is a true story. But it has to be sold as fiction. A book has to be either fact or fiction, and if you call it fact, you have to be willing to say where you went and what you did, with the exact longitude and latitude. If it’s fiction, you can leave all those details out. And those details have to be left out to preserve the sacred area of the tribe.

When I wrote the book in 1991, there were two of these sacred areas. In November 1992, one of them was totally dynamited, because it was on land owned by the federal government and leased to a mining company. They just want the opal rights. The government is not interested in preserving sacred Aboriginal sites. I don’t want to say anything negative  because I have many wonderful friends in Australia with many colors of skin. They just don’t fraternize with one another.

CG:  Other writers of visionary autobiography—like Lynn Andrews and Carlos Castañeda—have been criticized for exploiting indigenous people. Some have even accused them of making it all up. Have you encountered this?

MM:  Definitely, I’ve encountered the same thing. The people who accuse me of making it up don’t bother me at all. It’s the ones who threaten to kill me that cause a little bit more concern. The people who hate me the most are religious people in a box. They believe that I’m doing the work of the Devil since I’m talking about folks who don’t go to church on Sunday. I’m saying that they are nice folks and they might have a front row seat in heaven. So they tell me that God wants them to kill me. That happens quite frequently.

There are other people who hate me over racial issues. Since the Aborigines have dark skin and I have light skin, they call me the worst kind of “nigger” there is. They also feel it’s their obligation to silence me. The latest threat is car bombs. These people  show up armed with guns and knives at lectures and booksignings, in airports and hotels—all kinds of interesting places. And I’m still here.

CG:  How do you deal with this?

MM:  I left my fear in the desert. These tribal people have never killed anybody in their history. And the reason they haven’t is because they understand that it can’t be done; it’s an impossibility. You cannot kill what you didn’t create. A person is forever.

I realize that these people can’t kill me because I am forever. Other than the ones the police have hauled off, I welcome people who want to talk to me and try to understand my position. When I have an opportunity to explain what’s going on, we are usually able to resolve our differences. Interestingly, many times they cry. Many times the people who come to kill me end up with tears in their eyes.

And then a lot of people think I made it all up, even though I can prove that I started at one point and ended up at another thousands of miles away, disappeared for four months and lost 45 pounds. Not to mention my permanently fried feet and skin cancer. I can’t really prove what happened in the desert and I can’t argue with people who don’t believe me. It really doesn’t make any difference to me.

But the tribal people think it’s miraculous. At the end of the book there is a written letter with their full endorsement. I now have an Aborigine woman who is helping me set up a trust fund for the proceeds of the book, which will go to various Aborigine nations living in poverty. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

CG:  Can you describe how the Aborigines relate to music?

MM:  They believe that the human voice us made for singing—not for talking. When you use your voice for talking, you talk about very small things that have nothing to do with your foreverness. When you sing, you sing about very important things: celebration, and healing. They believe that everyone is a musician. If you don’t think you can sing, it still does not diminish the singer within you. The music is in you, not the instruments.

They also keep their history through music, song and dance. They have no written language. It takes about a year for them to sing the entire history of their culture. And they continue to do that to keep it alive.  They also do all their measuring in song. If you wanted to tell someone how to get from Dallas to Chicago, you would sing them that song. It might be very, very long, but you can’t forget part of it. And you can’t ad lib either, because the person would end up in Little Rock. It requires an incredible memory.

To them, everyone is multi-talented and life is supposed to be fun. So if you’re not having fun, look around and do something else that is fun. They don’t have a word for “work.” When I explained to them what work was, they didn’t think it sounded like fun.

CG:  What about language?

MM:  They have their own language but they really don’t use it all that much. Their words are very difficult to say and almost impossible to spell. We talked more with non-verbal communication. It has more to do with intent than language. You know what you intend another person to know, and they know it in their own way.

I only think in English because it’s all I know. But I can still communicate with them. To begin with, Ooota was my translator. Eventually, I learned how to communicate with them non-verbally, and I still do it every day. I have to do it when I’m quiet, kind of like meditating. You have to shut down your system so that you can filter out extraneous noises. It has nothing to do with the five senses; it’s another system.

CG:  How do they relate to time?

MM:  Well, they burned my watch. They thought that was very necesssary. They kept asking over and over if I knew how long forever is. They can’t understand how anyone with time strapped on their arm understands how long forever is.

They do not believe that time is linear. They think that we are addicted to many things, and one of our addictions is to form, that we cannot comprehend time that doesn’t have a start and a stop. Time for them is circular. They are forever. They came from forever and will go back to forever. Time is forever, with no beginning or ending. So, everything they do in their lifetime is related to forever. We can do whatever we want in this moment, but we are connected forever. We can honor each other or make each other miserable.

That’s what they find so amazing about our society, that there are so many relationships with frayed edges. If something negative happens, we drag it with us for 30 years. Sometimes we even die with these ill feelings. And that to them is quite humorous.

We are in a closed system. For example, there is no new water. The water we are drinking now is the same water the dinosaurs drank. The more toxins and pollutants we put into it, the more recycling is necessary. But one of our strong qualities is that we can mutate. It’s amazing that we can breathe smog and that our lungs will actually change so that we can breathe more shallowly. They believe it’s wonderful that we can adapt as we change the environment. They are very positive people.

CG:  What about navigation?

MM:  They would say to beware of navigation, to think about it twice. You can make up your mind where you want to go and you can go there. But keep in mind, where does Oneness want you to be? If you are here for a spiritual experience, then you must be open to what the world has in store for you. It may or may not be where you think you want to be.

So they would say that they really aren’t navigators. They wake up and say, “Thank you for this day and I walk to honor whatever is out there.” Whoever and whatever shows up is what is meant to be. If you do this in your everyday life, then you don’t have to navigate anything. The world has wonderful things in store for you, probably much more than you would have in store for yourself.

CG:  How do they relate to memory?

MM:  They saw me as this person with such tremendous enthusiam and zeal that I would carry a sign trying to convince everybody that reading is important. Again they asked me, do you understand how long forever is? It’s a long time. And then they told me that when you go back to forever, there is no written test. You don’t have to read anything. You can get all the way through the human experience—and be a wonderful person—and never read anything.

They said, “We do not read, and do not want to read. And you don’t have the right to tell us we have to do this. There’s a price you pay—an obvious one. When you believe in reading, then you believe in writing things down. And you don’t have to remember them. That’s why your society has such tremendous memory problems. When we are 100 years old, we are twice as wise as when we were 50 because we remember everything.”

CG:  How do they relate to dreams?

MM:  They don’t dream at night. When they sleep at night, they shut down their systems to give their bodies a chance to recover and recuperate. That’s when healing takes place. If you dream at night, you split your energy.

They believe that we dream at night simply because we’re not allowed to dream during the day. Daydreaming is frowned upon. They believe that dreaming is part of the world created by an expansion of consciousness in the Dreamtime—and they believe the Dreamtime is still going on. They can be in altered states of consciousness when they are walking; they can be dreaming and be awake at the same time.

They interpret their dreams by feelings—not symbols. For example, fire means something different to you than it does to me. But human emotions are universal. They would ask how the fire made you feel—warm and safe, or terrified and threatened?

CG:  How do the Aborigines relate to sex?

MM:  They are very physical people. They touch each other all time, massage each other, hug each other and rock each other. It has nothing to do with what gender they are. Obviously they make love in order to create children. But they also use an herbal product that both the men and the women eat if they don’t want a pregnancy.

They marry, they are monogamous, and they plan a child when the two people are ready for the responsibility of caring for the spirit coming in. The children are raised by the whole group because they all live together. They don’t think that you can love a child too much. But they do think that we are confused because we give our children things in order to make them happy. But unfortunately, when the thing breaks it makes them unhappy—until you get a new thing. They believe that creating your own happiness is the essence of the spiritual experience.

They don’t believe in familial roles. They believe that the father needs to be just as nurturing as the mother and that the mother needs to be just as much of a provider as the father. It’s just a matter of whatever you want to do.

CG:  How do they relate to death?

MM:  They don’t look upon death as a bad thing, so it’s not sad. Since they are incredibly healthy, they don’t die of disease. They believe that because you chose to come here, you should be allowed to choose when you want to go.  When you decide that it’s time to die, they have a party. Like a graduation, it’s a time for celebration.

When you’re born, the first thing you’re told is, “We love you and we support you on your journey.” And on the other end of the human experience—when you are over 100 and have experienced being leader, healer, storyteller, cook, and changed your name many times and finally feel you have accomplished what you came to do—you ask if it is in the highest good for all of life everywhere for you to return to forever.

If you are told innately that it is time, then they have a party to celebrate your life. Everyone hugs you and says the same sentence to you that you heard when you were born: “We love you and support you on your journey.” That’s the last thing that you hear. Then they walk away and you sit down in the sand. You change your body temperature, shut down the oxygen flow, change your circulation and shut off the power centers. Within two minutes, you’re dead.

I learned to control my body functions like that. Anyone can. But if I told you how to do it, it would be a criminal act. So many of the wonderful things that these people do are considered criminal by our society. To them, there’s really no such thing as accidental death.

CG:  In the book you describe having a dream. Has your dream come true?

MM:  Yes. It told me that a lot of things I had put energy into in the past would no longer apply. My life is very different. I’m just doing what I think I am supposed to do. The thing I really learned from this experience was not to get attached to the end result. I don’t pull my own strings anymore. I am no longer a goal setter. The stress is gone. I don’t deliberately go someplace to touch somebody’s life—or have a bestseller.

With every word that I say and every thing that I do, I am doing the best I can do with the highest degree of integrity that I have—on a daily basis. I don’t leave things left undone; I tell people I love them when I see them. If I don’t make it through the day, then today is as good as any day to go back to forever.  

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 is a regular feature writer for  Common Ground, 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. She also worked as Features Editor for Good Times in Santa Cruz.

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Marianne Williamson: Healing America

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

The Inner Revolution

An Interview with Marianne Williamson on The Healing of America

for Common Ground Fall 1997

by Virginia Lee

An articulate and insightful speaker on metaphysics matters and the power of prayer, Marianne Williamson brings the realm of spirit into her unique perspective on American politics. In The Healing of America (published Fall 1997 by Simon and Schuster), the author outlines the political, economic, environmental and moral crisis we are facing in the 21st century against the background of the constitutional ideals of our founding fathers. Williamson calls for nothing less than reclaiming our democratic destiny through an inner revolution before we are collectively swept away by the tides of apathy and self-interest.

Although The Healing of America is departure from her former emphasis on The Course of Miracles, the same guiding principles are still evident in her newest work. Many know of Marianne Williamson through her first book, A Return to Love, which has sold over 1 million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 35 weeks in 1992. Her subsequent writings, A Woman’s Worth (1994) and Illuminata (1994), have both met with their own measure of success.

CG:  Many people know you from your first book, A Return to Love, which is a collection of insights and reflections on The Course of Miracles. How did you first discover this path?

MW:  I’m not sure any of us can point to the particular moment or even book that started us on our mystical path. After all, it’s an innate yearning. I took my first philosophy class when I was 14 and by the time I started reading The Course of Miracles at age 27, I was a full-blown seeker.

CG:  Do those same principles continue to guide your life?

MW:  Absolutely.

CG:  What is a miracle? How would you describe The Course of Miracles to those who aren’t familiar with it?

MW:  A miracle is the breakthrough that occurs when we shift our perception of a situation. The Course of Miracles is a self-study system of spiritual psychotherapy that helps us to dismantle a thought system based on fear — and to embrace one based on love. Essentially, it removes the obstacles to the awareness of love’s presence.

CG:  Do you consider your spiritual beliefs to be akin to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism or shamanism? Are all the world’s religions embraced by The Course of Miracles?

MW:  The Course deals with universal spiritual themes that are at the heart of all the great religious teachings.

CG:  In your new book, The Healing of America, you say that “the level of consciousness that is the salvation of the human race is not something new, so much as very old but forgotten.” Is this what the New Age is all about?

MW:  The phrase “New Age” has become so bastardized that it’s difficult to talk about what it means anymore. But the fundamental shift in consciousness now occurring on the Earth is clearly something which simultaneously goes backwards and forwards.

As Jesus said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” And T.S. Eliot wrote that we’re always seeking to go back home. The root of the word “religion” is religio , which means to “bind back.” I think the realm of consciousness we most hunger for is a return to something basic and fundamental within us.

Because the Western mind thinks in linear terms, we are tempted to ask ourselves whether this means past or future. For people such as the ancient Egyptians, time was thought of in concentric circles. To this kind of mind, time has a more cyclical meaning. You can look at many cultures throughout history and see these same themes repeated. The Jews say that the Messiah is coming, while the Christians say that the Messiah already came. But Einstein said, “There is no time.”

Eternity exists outside time. And The Course of Miracles says that the only place where eternity intersects time is in the present moment.

CG:  What was the role of the freemasons in American history and how is their philosophy relevant today?

MW:  There are a lot of differing views on the role of the freemasons in the founding of our country. Because the freemasons were a secret organization, it is hard for anyone to speak definitively about membership. There are those who argue that some of our founding fathers were freemasons and there are those who argue with equal passion that they were not.

We do know, however, that the Great Seal of the United States, which was designed by Adams, Washington and Jefferson and appears today on our dollar bill, is clearly a Masonic symbol. On it there is a picture of the Great Pyramid at Giza, with the now-lost capstone returned to its top. In the center of the capstone, illumined in the Great Seal, is the eye of Horus. The return of the capstone and the eye signifies the return of the Higher Mind. Underneath the picture is written Novus Ordo Seclorum, which means “New Order of the Ages.” So, regardless of who actually studied what (and we do know that Ben Franklin was a Rosicrucian), the Great Seal is what it is.

CG:  On an evolutionary scale, would you say our form of government is distilled from the wisdom of the ages?

MW:  I would say that the founding principles of American democracy are as close a reflection of higher law as any governmental system throughout history has ever been.

Religious pluralism is the cornerstone of American liberty, the notion that people can worship or not worship, however they see fit. Thomas Jefferson said “I care not whether my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both emphasized that tolerance is not enough. To merely tolerate another’s religious beliefs is to undermine true liberty, because judgment is still implied. They believed we must seek to move beyond tolerance and embrace genuine respect for the religious beliefs of others.

CG:  What do you mean by our inalienable right to the American Dream?

MW:  Our Declaration of Independence says that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To me, the American Dream is that we have the right to dream. Ours is the first country in modern history that was founded on the notion that there should at least come a time (even if this ideal had not fully manifested at the time) when this model for human society might actually become a reality. The American ideal is that people’s dreams, talents and hard work (rather than the imposed limits of a class structure or the prejudices of others) would determine the unfolding circumstances of their life. Now that is radical.

And it is the responsibility of every generation of Americans to further expand the manifestation of that ideal. Our founders were aware that what they bequeathed to us was the ideal itself, not its full manifestation. Those of us who are metaphysical students understand the notion that there is gap between the conditions of the world and the transcendent archetypes which hover above it. It is the purpose of human existence to close the gap.

In American society, our founding principles are equality, unity in diversity, security of the common good while protecting human liberty and religious pluralism. None of those founding principles has ever been universally manifested among all Americans. But what politics should  be is the effort made by each of us in our own way to further the process of closing the gap between the ideal and the real.

CG:  In what way has the American Dream become the American Nightmare?

MW:  The over-arching drama of American life has always been the tension and contest between our most noble selves and our most selfish selves. The yearning for the full manifestation of the ideals upon which we were founded and the pull towards materialism is the conflict which still lurks in all of us.

We have chosen our most noble self when we abolished slavery, when we gave women the right to vote, when we passed child labor laws and when we passed civil rights legislation. Obviously, there have been other times in our history — and continue to be — forces which would constrict rather than expand the Dream. Today, our dedication to unbridled market values, to what I think of as the shadow side of capitalism, is so rampant that the search for social justice and societal ethics have all but disappeared as a dominant political value.

Since the death of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys—particularly Bobby Kennedy—there has been no serious social force field to hold the call for true social justice, which is the core of the American ideal.

CG:  Is this the reawakening that you are striving for in your new book?

MW:  I don’t think that I am personally striving for a reawakening though my book. But I feel a hunger, as I know many people do, to resurrect the idea that conscience must have a place, not only in our personal dealings, but in our politics, our economics, our global presence.

CG:  In your new book, you make a prediction that during the next ten years, we will have either a renaissance or a catastrophe. Would you explain what you mean?

MW:  What goes around comes around. The universe is based on a law of cause and effect. And this is true not only for an individual, but for groups of individuals. If God is watching any of us, he’s watching all of us.

There is just so far any of us can go in the direction of violating spiritual principles. We either fall to our knees—or fall apart. It is absurd to think that lesson, which is reflected clearly in the dramas of history, somehow does not apply to the United States. There has never been a nation that has been able to sustain the kind of income gap we now have between the rich and the poor. There has not been such a sizable gap since 1926, which was followed by the Great Depression. No society has ever been able to sustain this kind of disparity.

We will either radically awaken as people to this fact—and exert a national will to change—or it is only reasonable to assume that we will suffer the consequences.

CG:  In what way is our old thinking our greatest enemy? And how do we cultivate new thinking in ourselves and in our children?

MW:  Old thinking posits a separation of needs. New paradigm thinking posits that we are all, as Martin Luther King said, “woven from a single garment of destiny.”

If you were on a boat with someone, then a hole forming underneath their seat is ultimately as dangerous to you as a hole forming under yours.

New thinking as applied to politics means a shift from an exclusive to an inclusive sense of family. Loving our children is not an expanded enough concept of love to save the world. The love that most matters now is love for the children on the other side of town. That kind of fundamental shift from “me” to “we” is necessary across the board in order to turn the country toward the direction of fundamental healing.

CG:  In other words, the idea that it’s the welfare mother’s fault that she’s poor is what needs to change?

MW:  Absolutely. It’s what you call a big lie. It’s a tool of demagoguery to scapegoat a group of people and then repeat it so many times that it has a veneer of truth.

It’s really a flaunting of privilege, yet we pride ourselves on being a classless society. If we take a closer look, corporate America has become the new aristocracy while the rest of us are practically reduced to serfdom. When you look at the money being taken away from welfare mothers, it’s minuscule in comparison to the money being given to corporate welfare.

CG:  How can people turn their lives around if they’re in a situation where there’s no hope of ever making more than $10 an hour? How can people have hope and vision under those kinds of circumstances?

MW:  Supposedly in America there’s no such thing as a job that you’re never going to improve upon. Once again, American democracy was founded on the notion that an individual can and will do whatever the individual chooses to do. If we exercise our rights and powers spiritually as well as politically, that is still true. A few selfish people didn’t decide to steal America, so much as we gave her away. It’s only a democracy if we exercise it, if we participate in it.

What has happened is that the American mind, especially during the last 30 years, has gone to sleep. Between a public education system which often taught what to think rather than how to think (which ultimately taught us not to think) and television programming which has practically destroyed the linear thought processes of a generation, and an unbelievable emphasis on consumerism as the basis of self-esteem, and a near-epidemic use of anti-depressants to dull the pain—we are in serious danger of allowing our freedom to become completely unraveled. I think that we are much closer to that point than most people seem to realize. I think that there are about six minutes left in this game. I also know that many games have been won in less than six minutes. But somebody had to wake up to the fact that it was that close to the bell—and rally to win the game.

CG:  Perhaps ten years ago, New Age magazine ran a story comparing the denial and dysfunction of the American government to an alcoholic family. Can you comment on this?

MW:  I already have. It’s in my new book in a section called “Corporate Soul”: “The forces that drive the U.S. economy are drunk on power. They swagger, they deny, they justify, they intimidate. That’s what drunks do. The American people must stop wimping out; we must awaken from our co-dependent stupor. We must not allow the American political system to become little more than the servant of dominant economic interests. We must perform the equivalent of an intervention.”

CG:  Several years ago, the media reported a meeting between you, First Lady Hillary Clinton and Jean Houston in a rather condescending manner. They referred to you and Jean as “occultists.” Please discuss the role of media in our culture.

MW:  I have come to regard the mainstream media, as most of us have, as guardians of the status quo. Being angry about that doesn’t help the situation. We must realize that the mainstream press, far from being the watchdog that they were intended to be, has become more than anything else the guard dog for the Old Order. They are the first to mock and revile any effort to bring depth, psychology or higher consciousness into the mainstream. At this point, it’s to be expected. And it isn’t the first time that it’s happened. It also behooves us to cry foul when it happens, because trivializing the consciousness revolution that’s now occurring goes a long way toward obstructing it.

CG:  How can the power of the media be harnessed to facilitate the transformation of America?

MW:  There’s no monolithic structure called “the power of the media.” Institutions are made up of individuals. And as individuals think more deeply and dedicate themselves to conscience as a primary principle in their lives, as individuals seek to shift their primary value from economic to humanitarian, the kinds of changes that we most need begin to emerge. That kind of change works from the bottom up more than from the top down.

We need to radically shift our thinking from “What can I do for me today?” to “How can I serve?” If the majority of Americans can dedicate themselves to what is good, true and beautiful, then America will heal.

CG:  In the 21st century, how do you think history will look back on us?

MW:  The jury is still out on that. Either they will look back on us with sadness, perhaps even contempt, because we were so narcissistic and selfish that we weren’t looking at what was going down. One thing for sure is that we will be noticed; we will not be forgotten.

CG:  In your life, how have the ideals of the ’60s matured into a driving force for the ’90s? As a generation, have the idealists of the ’60s failed?

MW:  When our heroes were killed, practically in front of our eyes, I think we froze. The bullets that shot the Kennedys and Dr. King psychically shot all of us. As a generation, we were not aware enough of the cycles of history, the myth of the eternal return, to recognize that this loss did not have to be a loss for all time. We thought that our dreams had died with those who had articulated them, when in truth the dreams themselves can’t be killed, can’t be destroyed by bullets.

I think that it’s time for us to resurrect the ideals, the principles, the dreams of Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy and others. Although we loved those dreams, at the time we were not as personally mature as we needed to be in order to materialize them. Our own rampant drug use and the fact of our youth (in addition to the loss of our leaders) was enough to stop us in our tracks — but hopefully not forever.

According to the mystical principle of threes, it has been three decades since the ’60s. Historian Arthur Schlesinger says that Americans get interested in politics every 30 years. I think that there is a force struggling to emerge from the bottom of things — a social revolution akin to the ’60s, and led by those of us who were young in the ’60s.

CG:  Would you say that perhaps the Flower Children of the ’60s might become the Elders of the ’90s?

MW: Absolutely. It’s trying to happen.

CG:  Is it really possible to practice spiritual politics? Is it naive to believe that we could recreate a moral government in our lifetime?

MW:  Any great historical unfoldment, from the beginning of the Christian church to the scientific revolution, was begun by people whose ideas were considered radical to the guardians of the status quo. The founders of this country were considered naive and ridiculous by King George III. Any search for higher truth is by definition outrageous and radical.

CG:  Please describe your vision of a 21st century revolution and what role each of us would play. Would it involve a kind of “spiritual Internet?”

MW:  Dr. Martin Luther King said that with our brilliance in technology we have made the world a neighborhood. And now with our spiritual genius, we must make it a brotherhood. We have hooked up our machinery, and now we must hook up our hearts.

President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. We don’t have long,  however, to make the choice which it will be.

CG:  Are you really talking about an inner revolution?

MW:  I asked the Dalai Lama: “If enough of us mediate, will that heal the world?” He said, “I would answer you in reverse. We must have a plan. But if we don’t meditate, then no plan will work.”

When we think of politics today, we usually think of governmental action. We have become a government-dominated political system, when I think we need to become a citizen-based political culture. The Greek root of the word “politics” does not mean “of the government” but rather than “of the citizen.” That means we have more to bring to the political table than just ideas for legislative action.

In medicine, we have moved into a holistic model. We don’t just treat the symptoms of the body, but look equally to the resources of mind and spirit as well. We understand that body, mind and spirit must be treated as a whole in order to truly heal someone. We now need a holistic politics. Legislation can be like Western medicine. We need a medi-political orientation, where we recognize the depth of our thinking,  our feeling, spiritual atonement and prayer itself as serious political tools. We have now proven scientifically that prayer helps heal the human body. Ideas like that can be applied to the larger political realm.

The intersection of spiritual and political principles is nothing new. It is a traditional and philosophical continuum, which has been present in American culture from the beginning. Start with the Quakers in Pennsylvania, who had a profound effect on the Transcendentalists and especially Thoreau, who suggested that we should seek conscience as a higher law than that of government. Thoreau, in turn, was a great influence on Gandhi, who then inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Between Gandhi and King, and their evolving 20th century philosophy of non-violence, we have a great example of mankind’s capacity to choose soul force over brute force.

CG:  Do you think it’s important to keep Church and State separate? Or return to the ancient tradition where the King was the High Priest as well?

MW:  Making your religious leader the same as your political leader is potentially a very bad thing. I think that the separation of Church and State is an enlightened concept. However, the separation of Church and State was never intended by our founding fathers to mean that we were to separate the political conversation from conversations of higher spiritual principles.

CG:  What are the dangers of fanaticism—both spiritual and political? How can we make sure that neither of them threatens our democratic way of life?

MW:  The American system of government was set up with a very delicate system of checks and balances, which exist to make sure that no one viewpoint, no one set of attitudes gets to run the whole show — ever. It is assumed that no one segment of the population has all the answers.

CG:  What do you mean by “true democracy”?

Freedom doesn’t mean that we all agree. By definition, it means that we don’t. It means that we are free to disagree. That’s what freedom is. American democracy is meant to be a process by which through consensus building, deliberation and constitutional reference, we find a way to govern our affairs.

True democracy is where each of us digs into the depths of our minds and hearts, and speaks from our soul what our truth is. In turn, we are to listen to the best of our ability, without judgment, to others who do not see things as we do. Ideally, out of that comes a synergistic dialogue, in which everyone’s attitudes are raised to a higher level.

Our political culture today is so psychologically and spiritually immature, so adversarial, so dominated by personal attack and insult, that it’s hard to imagine something like the Constitution ever emerging from it. I think we need to open our minds to the possibility that there can be so much more to politics than the tawdry game it has become.

True democracy is really the freedom to do what you think is right. But if you don’t exercise that freedom, it means very little.

CG:  In what way are prisons a symbol of what’s wrong with America?

MW:  Prisons are the #1 urban industry in America today. America has more of our people locked up than any other nation in the world. We deny opportunity to young children, claiming we don’t have the money to do better, and then pay far more on the other end to incarcerate them—to the tune of $30,000 a year each. Our prisons have become the University of Crime. When we send a young offender to jail, he will most likely emerge a professionally hardened criminal.

But considering the childhood in which these people grew up, it’s not surprising that their lives become criminally dysfunctional. That’s not to say that some people don’t escape these conditions. But in the richest country in the history of the world, why should childhood be an obstacle course?

CG:  How can the principles of non-violence be effective in today’s environment of political terrorism?

MW:  Fear is not an entity of its own. It’s an absence of love, just as darkness is an absence of light. Real solutions come from beyond merely suppressing the symptom, such as punishing the terrorist.

We must apply ourselves to the cultivation of genuine peace in the presence of which violence cannot exist. It’s like cutting off oxygen to a fire. As we pray, as we meditate, as we commit ourselves to policies which care for children, provide them with lives of meaning and purpose, allow them unfold their talents and creativity, we will see these psychic horrors begin to diminish.

CG:  Why are people so threatened by peace?

MW:  Peace is extremely threatening to most people because it is opposite to the state of the world. Dr. Martin Luther King said that Although we are not a nation at war, it doesn’t mean that we are a nation at peace. We have a negative peace, meaning there is no declared war. Positive peace means the presence of justice and brotherhood. Peace is a threat to the status quo.

That’s why the prophetic vision emerging in the world today is something that comes from deep within us collectively, not just based on the ideas of a few individuals. We can’t be soloists; we must be a choir. And each of us must sing our song within it.

President Roosevelt wrote something in a speech he never had chance to give before he died: “In order to eradicate war, we must eradicate the beginnings of all wars.” And we know that source exists in the realm of consciousness.

CG:  If you believe that a divine intelligence is guiding our destiny, then why is there such concern for the future?

MW:  The Course of Miracles says that God’s will has never not been done. The question is not whether or not the human race will ultimately turn to love as its guiding principle. The question is: How long will it take? How much more human suffering will there be before it happens?

I don’t believe that any spiritual principle is meant by God to be used as an excuse for turning our backs on human suffering. And there is still plenty of it, not just in the world but in this country. We’ve just moved it to the other side of town.

CG:  Is it your destiny to bring this shadow into the light?

MW:  It’s not just my destiny. It’s the destiny of our entire generation. Roosevelt said his generation had a rendezvous with destiny, and I thinks that’s equally relevant for us. But what’s not clear yet is whether or not we will sleep through the date.

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 is a regular interviewer for Common Ground, and has 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.

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Margot Anand: Sex and the Goddess

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

Sex as a Divine Experience

Margot Anand explores Tantra

for Common Ground Summer 2003

by Virginia Lee

A native of France who was born into an aristocratic family, Margot Anand first experienced tantra at the age of 18 while a student at the Sorbonne in Paris. After graduating with a degree in psychology, philosophy and art history, Margot spent the next seven years traveling the world in search of understanding the deeper meaning of her life. Finally on a meditation retreat in England, she had an experience of her own true nature that left her forever changed.

Her new path took her to the ashram of Osho, known the world over as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At his invitation, she began to teach tantra workshops and share her gift of knowledge with more than 20,000 students all over the world. Many books followed, including The Art of Sexual Magic; then her bestseller, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy; followed by her most recent book The Art of Everyday Ecstasy, many of which have been translated into foreign languages in 20 different countries. She has also been a gracious hostess for the State of the World Forum, a panel held in San Francisco in recent years with the likes of Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Dean Ornish and Jean Houston, before it transcended its boundaries into the international arena.

Spending time with Margot Anand is an exercise in truly being in the moment. It was my privilege to spend Easter Sunday with her in the intimacy of her own home, a sacred sanctuary dedicated to only positive energy. It is a comfortable and creative space, full of light, vitality and art, much like Margot herself. In the spirit of tantra, do something that gives you pleasure, call on your inner lover and enjoy an extended moment with the divine that lives in all of us.

CG:  How did you discover tantra?

MA:  The first time I made love, I discovered tantra. Although I had never heard the word “tantra” and didn’t know what tantra was, in fact what I had was a tantric experience. In other words, it was an experience of consciousness expansion beyond the body, beyond the mind and beyond time so that I connected with the truth of who I truly am, that which existed before I was born and will continue to exist after I die. I am referring to the eternal self.

I was thrown into an experience which was not even an experience anymore. It was the truth of my being. I realized the light of spirit and I knew that sexuality was going to be my path of awakening as a woman. That was my revelation the very first time I made love. That’s what put me on my path.

After I finished my studies in psychology, philosophy and history of art at the Sorbonne in Paris, I went on to research sacred sexuality around the world for seven years. I completed the masters degree and now am finishing my Ph.D. through International Studies at the University of Hawaii.

CG:  Who has been your most powerful teacher?

MA:  I probably would say Osho (aka Rajneesh), although I had many others. Looking back, the one who was the most powerful was Osho. It started when I had finished my psychology studies at the Sorbonne and was very dissatisfied with how psychology was being taught in France. It was caught up in statistical analysis of behavior and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere interesting. Then in the early ’70s, I went to an institute in England called Quaesitor (which means the “inquirer”), the first institute to bring “new age” teachers (from places like Esalen) to Europe.

Then the leader of this institute came dressed in an orange robe and told extraordinary stories about meeting a master in India (who was Osho) who said, “I was expecting you. I want you to take your students to a new level which will require a week of preparation including encounter exercises, bioenergetics, massage and breathing.” After that, we became part of a sensory deprivation experiment. Each of us stayed alone in a hotel room by the sea. Our eyes were blindfolded, our ears plugged, and we had one bottle of water a day and a pound of grapes. This lasted for seven days and seven nights, the idea being for us to go deeper into our consciousness.

During this retreat, I had just read John Lilly’s “Center of the Cyclone,” and I expected to have an experience of meeting my guides, similar to what he described. Then as I went deeper I realized that was his experience—and that my experience was different. So I went through layers and layers and layers, until I came to this emptiness, this center of my being where there was nobody. And I had darshan with myself. I heard all the wise answers come of themselves to all the questions of my life.

At that moment, a face appeared. And that face said to me: “Ecstasy is already within you. You do not have to look for it outside.” Considering the state of mind I was in, this was a huge message. I realized that I had been searching outside of myself for the teachers, the methods and the cultures, yet it was all already there. I knew that everything I was seeking was within.

The vision of this face I saw was Osho. It was the first time I had ever heard anything about him in my life. And he appeared to me that way. It took five years (including a marriage) before I ended up visiting him. When it finally happened, it was a very powerful meeting.

Shortly thereafter, he asked me to lead the tantra groups at the ashram for the first time. When he offered me the job I said, “I don’t know how to lead tantra groups,” since I had only been trained as a western therapist. Then he touched my forehead and wiped out my brain of any knowledge about methods, techniques and procedures. It all went away—a blank slate. Then he laughed and said, “You don’t have to worry. Just let me lead the tantra group through you.” And I said, “I don’t know what that means, but I’ll go for it.”

And that’s how I began teaching tantra. Now I’ve gotten to the point with my teaching that I am my own master, but he’s someone I still love. He’s around.

CG:  How do you define “tantra”?

MA:  I would say that tantra is the art of choosing with awareness what brings you joy, so that it opens the door to your spirit. That’s one definition. Another is that tantra is the art of weaving the contradictory aspects of your personality into one whole for the purpose of expanding your consciousness.   Let’s say you’re on a date. Maybe your heart says, “Yes, I want to open up. This is the one.” But your mind says, “Absolutely not, remember what happened last time.” And then your body says, “I’m turned on. I want sex.”  All the different aspects of your self are in contradiction to one another. You’re not in harmony, you’re in pain. So the tantric work I teach on the chakras harmonizes your energy and your consciousness into one entity. It’s the marriage between shakti (pure energy) and shiva (pure consciousness). When they marry, the world is born.

That’s the cosmology of tantra. The goddess Shakti, embodying the feminine, and the god Shiva, embodying the masculine are the two aspects of the divine. When they are joined as one in their fusion, the cosmos is born. From the tantric perspective, the cosmos is born out of an erotic union between the male and the female, which is a much more juicy perspective than the one that tells us to honor the prophet who was nailed on the cross to redeem our sins. That’s spirituality based on pain and punishment.

CG:  What is the greatest misconception about tantra?

MA:  There is a big misunderstanding in this country about tantra. Unfortunately, tantra has gotten a very bad reputation and is often thought of as a bastardized, semi-mystical sexual therapy. Some people seem to think if they can manage to have a one-hour orgasm, they can claim to be enlightened. Everybody who has been repressed by this puritanical culture becomes obsessed with the senses and the garden of pleasure, and all of a sudden, sexual prostitutes are called dakinis. The original meaning of the word “dakini” is the female Buddha, the enlightened woman. It saddens my heart to see how low we have gone. As one of the original teachers of tantra in this country, I see that most people don’t really know what it is all about.

In this country, it is hard to talk about sex and maintain any dignity. Sex is often perceived as something hidden, dirty and forbidden. Although that’s exactly what makes it so interesting, it’s what brings so much violence into it. It is as if you have to fight through all the cultural taboos to have a good time. That’s where I come in, to recondition people’s bodies, hearts and minds to understand that’s not the right approach. And I’m quite successful at it.

I understand tantra to be a door to enlightenment. It is a spiritual path like yoga or zen. The only thing that makes it different from other spiritual paths is that sex doesn’t have to be left out of the picture. Sex is a skillful means, among others, that we use to awaken. There is no more challenging meditation than the sexual meditation, because in the sexual meditation, everything comes up: your timidity, your self-doubt, your lack of self-esteem, your lack of trust, all your past experiences that condition you to fear love.

But it’s really no different than any other meditation. If you can approach the sexual experience with the same quality of emptiness that you approach a zazen sitting, then you have understood everything. It doesn’t matter if you’re having sex, eating food, having a conversation or taking a walk. It is the state of your consciousness that matters, your understanding of who you truly are and who is behind the person engaged in the action. If you ask this question, then you come to emptiness, because there is nobody there—just pure consciousness. And consciousness cannot be upset, changed or swayed. It just is. It is all and everything. Once you know that, you can experience anything in life.

CG:  Are all tantra teachings the same? If not, then how are they different?

MA:  All tantra teachings are not the same. People don’t know that in the ancient tantra sutras of the enlightened masters, it is said that he who is empowered to be the guru (the teacher) is someone who has received direct transmission form an enlightened master. If one has been deemed ready to pass on the work, they are part of a protected lineage. That protection allows the teacher to tread where nobody else can tread into very difficult and dangerous zones.

In tantra, working with sexual energy is not an easy path. One has to know how to confront the demons of our society in order to transform them into allies. The people who come to me come to me because they don’t know how to do it. This requires a lot of discrimination and power that doesn’t come from your ego. It’s something that comes form the master who empowered you to do that. In my case, there were three masters: Osho, Swami Satchidananda and a Sufi master named Siddhi Mohammed, the custodian of the Mosque of the Sacred Rock in Jerusalem.

CG:  What should a student of tantra look for in a teacher?

MA:  Once you have determined the source of their empowerment, the next step is to examine what they have written. Ask if their work has made a contribution within the context of the tantra culture and see if they have made a difference. Then look at the fruits of their work. Look at their students to see how they speak, how they live, how their lives have been transformed. These are the three criteria to consider when choosing a tantra teacher, especially if you are looking for the deeper, more mystical path.

Practicing tantra is like diving for pearls. If you don’t go very deep, you won’t find them. You’ll just play around on the surface.

CG:  So tantra is about more than sex?

MA:  I will tell you what it is for me. The first level is to heal your sexuality. The second level is to expand the orgasmic power of your whole body. The third is to open the flow of energy that links the chakras to one another; it moves from the root chakra in the perineum to the crown chakra in the top of the head. Then shakti can move through you and marry with shiva. Once you have done these three things, the fourth level is to transform lust into bliss.

CG:  Why do so many spiritual paths require celibacy?

MA:  They consider that when sex is practiced with unawareness, it is a distraction. But I want to remind you that of the Buddha’s five mindfulness teachings, the third one was “sexual mindfulness.” What he was talking about (and something I have incorporated into my teaching) is that the place where we are most challenged and least aware, is the arousal of our lust.

When we instinctually want someone, we forget our promises and commitments. We forget everything. This is how empires have been lost. But it is the moment when awareness is most needed. Your capacity to be the witness, as you develop it in meditation, is to be thoroughly involved in the moment yet at the same time know it is a dream. That is when sexual mindfulness is called for, and that’s where people lose it.

To put sexuality away is a shortcut as far as meditation is concerned because you don’t have to deal with all the ups and downs, the temptations and distractions. Ultimately, everyone chooses their own path. No one method is better than the other.

CG:  What is the difference between yoga and tantra?

MA:  As I understand it, yoga is a science that helps us to unite the body and mind for the purpose of knowing the divine. I have heard it said in India that the difference between tantra and yoga, is that according to traditional yoga philosophy, you had to renounce all worldly desires in order to know Brahma. In yoga, you control and purify yourself in order to realize enlightenment, but the tantric perspective says that you are already divine exactly as you are. Tantra tells you to completely let go and dive deeply into your nature as it is.

In so many ways, yoga, tantra and meditation all go hand in hand. Tantra really is the yoga of love.

CG:  Why is the spiritual element in sex so important?

MA:  Orgasm is what brings us the closest to the experience of the divine. In the moment of orgasm, there is a bonding between the right side of our brain, which is the artistic and feeling side, and the left side, which is the center of thinking and logic. When intuition and intelligence fuse into one zero point of total connection, the ego disappears, time disappears and you become one with energy and consciousness. Even the enlightened Vedic masters of 5,000 years ago, discovered meditation through exploring orgasmic states in sex. There’s a close connection between advanced meditation and a good orgasm.

CG:  What do you mean by High Sex?

MA:  High sex for me is simply a method to get high naturally. Sex is a practice that releases endorphins, that expands our brain and releases natural opiates that can relieve pain in the body. I’ve discovered that if you have one long orgasm a day, your whole life will change—your creativity, your career, your magnetism, your ability to handle crisis, your finances. Sex is the shortest and best way to access your naturally high state of being.

CG:  How is High Sex different than ordinary sex?

MA:  Most people think that sex is a natural impulse, so why interfere with it? In fact, what we bring into the bedroom is mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother and grandfather—a whole crowd is in bed with us. Everybody has a particular opinion about how it should go, whether it’s right, whether it’s safe to open up, whether it’s honorable or not, etc.

Ordinary sex is usually a matter of instinctual impulse, a reflex response. It is conditioned not only by our family values, but also by what we learned in school and by what our culture teaches us. Very often, that conditioning gets in the way of our ability to be totally natural and allow our real responses to emerge. As a result, ordinary sex is rather limited. High sex allows us to move into sex with full awareness, responding moment to moment with the rising energy, being in the present without dragging in the past or projecting on the future. I am as present in high sex as when I sit on the zen pillow.

High sex also means seeing the divine in your partner and your partner seeing the divine in you, the same consciousness of namasté in yoga. If you can approach sex in that way, miracles take place.

CG:  Is there a right way and a wrong way to make love?

MA:  Yes. Usually the wrong way happens because physiologically speaking, there is a different psychology and timing in the way the body responds in the woman compared to the man. When the man is excited or stimulated, when he sees the beauty of a certain type of woman, his penis responds automatically. It is a brain/sex reflex that he has very little control over, and it’s something that happens within a few seconds to a few minutes. Once he is inside the woman, then he can relax and that’s when he opens his heart. This may take all of ten minutes. The erect penis just wants to be in the garden.

However, the woman is very different. Where the man starts with sex and moves to the heart, the woman starts from the heart. She needs a lot more time. She needs to feel safe and protected. She needs to be touched in her heart and held as a little girl so that she can relax and trust the man. When all of that is given, then something relaxes in her, her juices flow, her sex opens and she is ready. All this takes about a half an hour at least, so he is ready way before she is.

Confusion arises if she just lets him have his way without telling him what she needs, and he ends up landing before she has time to take off. Maybe she doesn’t really have an orgasm and she’s frustrated. Maybe she doesn’t even talk about it, and expresses her feeling toward him as anger. The whole situation can escalate because there hasn’t been honest communication about what each partner needs.

That’s why I say in my workshops that truth is erotic. When you tell the truth you take a risk, but at least you put yourself on the same page. If love is there and you’re willing to grow together, you can explore beyond your limits.

So the wrong way is to have sex is without awareness and communication. The right way is to have sex the tantra way in a sacred space, which is explained thoroughly in my first book, “The Art of Sexual Ecstasy.”

CG:  What is the role of seduction in High Sex?

MA:  Seduction is very misunderstood in this country. People think of seduction as manipulation. Actually, I believe that seduction begins the moment you close your eyes and go deep within to get in touch with yourself. It’s what happens when you awaken your inner lover and fall in love with yourself. In a sense, you are seduced by the beauty of your own essence. At that moment, there is such joy to feel the divine dancing through you. It’s natural to want to share this loving energy with your partner and the world around you. You become seductive when you radiate this divine beauty and love for yourself.

CG:  What is the role of surrender in High Sex?

MA:  The root of the word is sur-render, which means to melt into that which is the highest. In terms of tantra, surrender means seeing and feeling the highest potential of the divine in your partner and melt into that energy, trusting that it is the same energy you have discovered within yourself. When you open to that reality, there is no longer a difference between you. You are both divine.

CG:  How can sex induce healing?

MA:  You cannot have good sex unless you drop the past and the future—and become totally present. That’s why so often when lovers get excited, they have to have a quarrel first, because they are about to drop their defenses. When those defenses drop, all the little demons of frustration and resentment that haven’t been dealt with suddenly emerge and there’s a fight. Actually, the fight is a catharsis to release all the charged energy that has accumulated. When the lovers are able to navigate through this negative energy, forgive and focus on the real goal of having an orgasm together, then they arrive at a place where the energy can be healed and transformed.

CG:  Can you help those who want to heal from sexual trauma and abuse?

MA:  Those people come to us all the time. We teach the Love and Ecstasy training on five-day retreats with different topics. In The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, there is a chapter on “Healing the Yoni” in which I explain what trauma does. Trauma, especially sexual trauma, leaves such a violent impact on the tissues of the body that it goes numb and consciousness leaves the body. The place that was violated becomes numb to protect the person’s psyche. It is as if the body is saying, “I will help you not to feel there anymore, so it won’t be so painful.” So, people wonder why they don’t feel anything in their genitals and don’t have orgasms. It’s because they need to release sensation back into that place. To feel sensation again, they need to be touched and massaged the way that I explain in the book, so that the memory of that trauma can come back and be healed as an adult in a safe situation with a loving partner.

Osho once said, “You can’t be orgasmic in love if you can’t be orgasmic in anger.” In many ways, anger holds the key to our vital power and life force.

CG:  Is traditional psychological therapy and counseling effective?

MA:  I mostly know what I hear from those who come to my trainings, which last two to three weeks over the course of a year with practices in between. Almost every one of them says to me, “This is worth 15 years of therapy,” probably because my training deals with the whole person. All it takes is a skilled teacher and a willing student. Individual therapy can heal the mind and feelings, but often does not deal with the body too.

CG:  Does tantra liberate both men and women from gender stereotypes?

MA:  Tantra philosophy teaches that we all have aspects of the masculine and feminine within us. Jung called it the animus and the anima. We were born with the hormones of both, which allows us to experience both polarities. It is culture that separates the male and female roles.

In my training, which I call SkyDancing, there’s an opportunity to look at all that. There’s one practice I call the yin/yang game (which is also described in The Art of Sexual Ecstasy) in which a couple divides a 24-hour day into different periods. They each write down what they think is “my day in fantasy” (which is usually of an erotic nature), describing all the things they have ever wanted to experience and never got a chance to. Then they take turns, one being the supporter while the other one asks for what they want and need. This is all based on an agreement of complementary interaction, where one takes on the yin role while the other gets the yang role. Yangs will be at each other’s throats because they each want it their own way. Yins wait for the other to give direction because they don’t want to take the initiative.

Changing yin/yang and male/female roles is one of the ways tantra teaches how to drop the stereotypes and come into your own power.

CG:  Why do you think so many religions have taboos about sex?

MA:  Traditionally, religion has always tried to control human sexuality, because when someone becomes ecstatic, they are free. The system that is run by the politicians and the priests want to harness people’s energy so that the citizens will make money and support the priests and politicians. People are taught to believe that a priest is necessary for them to have a relationship with the divine. They do not believe it is possible to have this experience on your own, which is what tantra teaches. So, the priests have a vested interest in controlling people, especially when it comes to having an ecstatic experience. This is where the traditional separation between the flesh and the spirit comes from. The body has been regarded as the abode of evil instincts, while the spirit is what will bring you to God. When people are convinced of their original sin and guilt, they are under control of the church and are powerless. This is what I mean when I say that we are trapped in the Anti-Ecstatic Conspiracy. The system does not want us to wake up to our natural ecstasy. The moment a person does wake up, they become a free thinker and are considered dangerous. That’s when they become a “cultural creative,” someone who demands to have meaning in their life in every moment.

CG:  What do you think about the secret life of President Bill Clinton?

MA:  Americans, in their Puritanism, think that there’s only one way to deal with people who have affairs, that if you don’t tell about your affair then you will be damned for the rest of your life. And that’s not true.

If Clifton had been president in France, we would have sent him many blessings and would have said, “Look, if you’re OK with your wife and you’re OK as president, we don’t want to hear about the rest. It’s none of our business.” In France, the art of having affairs while staying happily married is something that has been cultivated for centuries. It is still going on to this day.

My responsibility is not to tell all, but to make sure that sexual safety is respected and that I don’t put my partner at risk. When we enter into our sacred garden, our commitment to each other is honored and we are truthful with each other. Even if I am not married to that person, I honor my commitment to him and the agreements we have. But one of those agreements may be that I don’t want to hear what you are doing outside our relationship. I want to trust that when you come to me, you come clean and fully present.

How you handle it depends on every individual and every situation.

CG:  What culture in the world has the healthiest attitude about sex?

MA:  Bhutan. It is the only tantra culture left in the world. It is the only culture where women are openly allowed to have many lovers without being chastised or judged in any way. A man is happy when a woman comes to him and asks for a wonderful night of lovemaking, because they believe that an orgasmic woman is a happy woman who will serve the community better. It is his goal and duty to make her happy. It’s not the other way around like it is in our culture, where the woman is expected to serve the needs of the man.

Raising the children is taken on by the whole village, not just by an individual person. And it is a matrilineal society where property and wealth can be transferred equally to men and to women.

CG:  What do you think of people who exchange sex for money?

MA:  Not good, except in certain circumstances. I can accept the role of a mistress to a high-level leader, who is there to enjoy her life in the feminine, cultivate her beauty, be available to him when he wants and be taken care of.

On the more mundane level of masturbating someone for a few hundred dollars (especially where it’s illegal) is very dangerous. Most of the sex workers in our culture who I’ve seen are in great denial. Those who believe they are doing good healing work (which in some cases they do) are actually deadening their souls by selling themselves. After five or ten clients, they are hooked on the money. I believe that they lose the capacity to separate their personal love life from their professional life. That professional life has an immense impact on their spiritual being, which they usually deny. Sex work is a very delicate issue.

CG:  What is the source of your inspiration?

MA:  My yoni! That is the source of my inspiration. I just spent seven months doing a fast with no lovemaking, to intensively explore enlightenment, zen meditation and consciousness without sex. I was in silent retreat for weeks at a time. I just broke my fast a few weeks ago. And I find my yoni as responsive and happy as she ever was before. I was worried that she would atrophy.

There is a deep connection between my yoni and my brain, so when my yoni has an orgasm, I feel empowered to write books, give workshops and be playful in the feminine. For many years, my yoni was my teacher and whatever she was telling me, I would listen.

CG:  Please describe your work with Deepak Chopra.

MA:  It all started when Deepak and I met at a party in LA at a mutual friend’s house. We were both working on the question of magic; he was writing his book Merlin the Magician and I was working on my book The Art of Sexual Magic. After a very nice conversation we had together, he called and asked me if I would be a guest speaker at one of his seminars. We have been friends ever since.

The last thing I did with him was teaching in India at the Taj Mahal for 500 VIPs who came from all over the world. He taught in the morning and I taught in the afternoon. It was a wonderful experience. What I appreciate about Deepak’s perspective is that he grew up in a culture where the divine presence took a feminine form. As a result, he is more in touch with the goddess aspect of the divine than we are in the west. As a result, he has a very playful attitude toward life. And we both love meditation. He gave me a platform within his work to honor what I teach.

One of the greatest stories I have about Deepak was one time when I had just finished the most ridiculous interview with a redneck, idiotic radio interviewer calling me from some station in Boston about The Art of Everyday Ecstasy. And I was so depressed about his low-life intellect that I sat at my altar and called on the universe saying, “I deserve better than that! I am calling for a person who understands my work and has intelligence.”

The next morning at 9 am, the phone rang and it was Deepak Chopra.

CG:  What is the essential message of your most recent book, The Art of Everyday Ecstasy?

MA:  It is possible to take the tantric experience outside of the bedroom and bring it into our everyday life. The skills and the realizations you have in becoming a good lover are the same ones you can apply to your work and your family life. Intimacy with yourself and with whatever you do is just a matter of being present.

For example, if your first chakra is closed, you will go around feeling like you never had enough money or a good enough place to live. If your chakra is open and relaxed, you are grateful for what you have and you feel fulfilled. And it’s like that for each of the chakras. It’s like a behavioral map, so that you can read yourself, your partner and change your behavior.

CG:  How do you practice everyday ecstasy?

MA:  I follow a deep intuition that leads me into whatever explorations I need at the time. Right now I’m doing a lot with Zen meditation. I take that attitude into my lovemaking and into relating to my partner. There is a lot of silence between us. When you go to the root of your being and touch the essence, and the heart is open, something magical takes place.

So the practice that I have is to bring everything I do in my life, all that I am, and I honor the other person with the utmost respect. Above all, I give them the utmost right to be free. The commitment is to be in a relationship that expresses the truth that arises in each moment we are together. That is our meditation. And I find this practice to be eminently challenging and extremely awakening. You have to believe that truth manages itself pretty well. Then things happen the way they are supposed to.

CG:  What do you think of the drug called “Ecstasy”?

MA:  As drugs go, I believe in the ones that come from plants that grow in the earth, things that come form nature as opposed to ones that are synthetically manufactured, which seem to have a larger negative impact on the organs of the body. You have to be very discriminating about what you take.

For instance, it’s a well-known fact that Ecstasy affects the liver, that you have to take a lot of vitamins to counteract those side-effects. I went through a period where I explored every non-addictive drug under the sun, because it goes with the territory. Then I went through another period to determine whether it was possible to arrive at the same result without taking any drugs at all. I went to India and did all the spiritual practices and assessed that “Yes, you can, but it takes a lot of time. There’s no shortcut.” Now my interest is in waking up, which is not something you do with drugs. I would recommend cultivating your natural ecstasy.

CG:  What is the path of the SkyDancer?

MA:  This lineage, and the name SkyDancing, comes from Buddha Padmasambhava who was a master alive in 8th century Tibet, and his consort, Yeshe Sogyal, an enlightened female Buddha. She was called the SkyDancer. In a way, it’s a metaphor for the orgasmic state in which you feel very buoyant; you feel like you are floating—or dancing—in the sky. You are very light because you don’t have an ego to make you miserable and weigh you down. You are open to the spirit and know that your ecstatic Buddha self already exists. You don’t have to go find it somewhere.

The path of the Skydancer is the path of the dakini and her male practitioner who are dedicated to their mutual awakening.

CG:  Can ecstasy in everyday life neutralize the effects of war, media and politics, all of the negative events going on in the world?

MA:  As a matter of fact, I am giving an event called the Love and Ecstasy Day dedicated to this very thing. It will be on May 24 in Fairfax (see below).

I was a speaker at the State of the World forum, which was a prestigious international conference here in San Francisco where Colin Powell came, Gorbachev, Alan Cranston and many other well-known figures. The first year I spoke about “Sex, Power and Politics” with Marianne Williamson, the same year as the Clinton scandal. The second year I spoke about “Meditation, Power and Politics” with a panel including Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, Jean Houston and Marianne Williamson again. The third year I talked about sexual slavery of young women in the world. So, I am actively looking at how tantric teachings can change the way women think about themselves and empower them. One woman who has helped tremendously with this is Riane Eisler.

There is no separation between my body and the body of Mother Earth.

CG:  In light of world events, what is that state of the consciousness revolution?

MA:  There is a calling for us to be more active in changing the world. And at the same time there is a resignation and despair about the fact that we make so little impact on the greed of the corporate power structure. When the war on Iraq was declared, I was in France in a country at peace, where people were celebrating the anti-war position with a 92% approval rate. The vibe was so different than in America. I am both French and American, so I was enjoying being French when I was there. But I have to honor the fact that America has been incredible about doing a lot of good things in the world.

I think the powers of darkness are growing and I think we are entering a stage of reactionary chaos. There are things about our government I’d just rather not know.

The truth is that liberation and freedom is first and foremost an individual path. So the more people wake up, the more critical mass is reached. If everyone works on their own awakening, it will be a better world.

CG:  Do you believe that heaven is to be found on earth?

MA:  Yes. Heaven is within.

Margot Anand has founded eight SkyDancing Tantra Institutes worldwide and the SpiritWorks Church for Spiritual Partnership. More information about her is available at www.margotanand.com, www.spiritworkschurch.net, and through her promoters, the Institute for Ecstatic Living at www.ecstaticliving.com or (877) 982-6872. Margot Anand lives in Northern California. For info visit: www.loveandecstasy.net.

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 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 in Santa Cruz, CA.

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