American
GURUS
From American Transcendentalism to
New Age Religion
z
Arthur Versluis
1
3
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[Ours] is such a resumption of power, as if a ban-
ished king should buy his territories inch by inch,
instead of vaulting at once into his throne.. . . [For
we can experience] Reason’s momentary grasp
of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which
exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous
in-streaming causing power.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. Introduction 1
Notes 251
Index 293
1
Introduction
49. Jesus said, “Congratulations to those who are alone and chosen,
for you will find the kingdom. For you have come from it, and you
will return there again.”
50. Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’
say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where
the light came into being by itself, established [itself ], and appeared
in their image.’
If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are
the chosen of the living Father.’
If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your Father in you?’ say
to them, ‘It is motion and rest.’ ”
there is no ritual praxis implied other than the writing of the illumina-
tion on a turquoise stele, and the inscription of a series of vowels (aaaaa,
oooooo, and so forth), there is here an initiatory participation analogous
to initiatory traditions in Sufism and in Buddhism.13 But this account is
virtually unique, even in the Nag Hammadi Library, and represents in any
case something that does not seem to have continued subsequently in a
Western context.
We also find hints of contemplative praxis in Plotinus, who in Ennead
V writes that one should not chase after illumination, but rather
Here, and occasionally elsewhere in Plotinus’s Enneads, one has the clear
sense that Plotinus is describing directly his own contemplative experi-
ence: his detailed analysis of how the Intellect is absorbed into and real-
izes the placeless, formless One is really also advice to someone who
also wishes to experience it. Hence one is advised to “wait quietly till it
appears,” and one is advised not to think that illumination or transcen-
dence is in a given place; it is, rather, the transcendence of temporal and
spatial location. This too is advice about how we might realize it for our-
selves without going astray.
Proclus, in his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, also lays emphasis on
the transcendence of space and time.15 But in The Ten Gifts of the Demiurge,
Emilie Kutash clarifies the nondual nature of this transcendence, making
clear and unequivocal what Proclus means by referring to an “infinite, eter-
nal universe.” He doesn’t mean that eternity is somewhere else, but rather
is asserting that this world is simultaneous with its own transcendence, for
soul in its singularity, theurgy and the telestic arts are the means,
not to an impossible union of finite with infinite, but to invoking
living gods that can lead and raise the soul so that its light can be
joined to its source. The soul can transcend its own material nature
in a spiritual lifting. How is this possible? Simply, there was never
a separation in the first place. By the grace of the gods, the soul
regains its continuity with the all-powerful source of unity. It was
only separated from that source by division and material obstacles.
“All things are in all things”: light penetrates even to the last of cre-
ation. The spiritual initiate need only to place himself or herself in
the best possible position to re-engage with the unity that is always
there, was always there from the beginning, and will always be
there. All of time’s dimensions are co-present after all. Unification
is not an achievement, it is a preëxisting condition.16
Nineteenth-Century
Enlightenments
2
There are, of course, at least two widely accepted, but very differ-
ent contemporary meanings of the word “enlightenment.” One is the
“Enlightenment” of the philosophes of eighteenth-century France, which is
characterized by a rejection of the superstitions of medieval Catholicism
and a new emphasis on discursive reason, scientific investigation, and
a belief in progress within the context of a secular society. The “Age of
Enlightenment” was not limited to France, of course; it represents the
emergence of modernity in Europe more broadly. Its many exemplars dif-
fer significantly, but share a rationalist skepticism toward religions and
an emphasis on empirical investigation (empirical meaning investigation
based primarily on discursive reason). It was not until the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries that a second meaning of the word “enlightenment”
entered into common discourse in the West, through the introduction of
Buddhist and Hindu concepts like nirvana (literally, “blown out” like a
candle), or moksha (liberation), which are often translated into English as
“awakening.”
Frequently, these two very different meanings have been associated
respectively with “Western” and “Eastern” religious philosophy, encour-
aging a binary division between Asian religions, on the one hand, and
Western modernity on the other. The most extreme versions of this
dichotomy have the West as “rational,” and the East as “irrational,” or
some variation thereof. Such a projected dichotomy obscures the fact that
Europe also has a tradition of “enlightenment” in the second meaning,
sometimes affiliated with the word “illumination,” but in any case repre-
senting individual spiritual liberation. Alcott and Emerson, as I showed
in American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, belonged primarily to
18 America n G urus
They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that
almighty Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are
certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other
invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet
delight, and that she hardly cares for anything, except to meditate
on him—that she expects after a while to be received up where he
is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being
assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance
from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished
with his love and delight forever. Therefore, if you present all the
world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it
and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She
has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her
affections; is most just and conscientious in all her actions; and you
could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would
give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being. She
is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence
of mind; especially after those seasons in which this great God has
manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from
place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always of joy and
pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, and
to wander in the fields and on the mountains, and seems to have
someone invisible always conversing with her.5
The primary ideas here, so beautifully evoked, come from Plato, and
although the speaker is chagrined about the loss of the “visionary gleam”
available in childhood and in nature, where he is naturally “Nature’s
Priest,” he also recognizes that nonetheless these riches remain acces-
sible. The child is a “best Philosopher.. . . Haunted for ever by the eternal
mind—.” And, Wordsworth writes, even though the weight of years bears
down on us, to each of us is given “primal sympathy” and the consolations
of “the philosophic mind.”
This poem and, indeed, much of Wordsworth’s poetry, like the poetry
and prose of Novalis, are infused with a deeply Platonic worldview, sig-
naled by the references near the beginning and the end, to the philoso-
pher and to the philosophic mind. Wordsworth, of course, to the extent
that a poetic inclination can be traced, got his Plato and Platonism where
Emerson and Alcott got theirs, chiefly from the translations and publica-
tions of Thomas Taylor (1758–1835).8 What the British poet Kathleen Raine
recognized of Taylor’s work in relation to the English Romantics is true
also of Emerson and Alcott, of course: that all of them conceived them-
selves as going back, through the vehicle of Platonic re-cognition, to “first
principles” and to the original and perpetually renewed illumination occa-
sioned by Platonic teachings when the seed, so to speak, falls on fertile
ground. That fertile ground was present with the English Romantics and
again with the American Transcendentalists. “I have come to believe that
every flowering of poetry and the other arts originates in a ‘revival of learn-
ing,’ not in ‘originality’ in the modern sense, but in a return to the origins,
to first principles,” Raine wrote.9
Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle 23
Kathleen Raine’s point here is a vital one, and entirely germane to the
larger argument in this book: that is, Platonism, as reflected in the work
of these poets and creators of culture, is not a set of specific doctrines,
though it might include those. It is, rather, at heart, a set of approaches to
knowing that include an emphasis on direct intuitive individual knowl-
edge of transcendence; on dialogue as an expression of and means to
such knowledge; on nature as divine expression and as conducive to real-
izing transcendent knowledge; and on a metaphysics that emphasizes
the originally unfallen or divine nature of man, as well as the possibility
of recovering that original state. This is not meant as an exhaustive, so
much as an indicative list; it conveys a sense of Platonism in practice. But
the particular times and venues for Platonic praxis differ, as we can see
by comparing Ficino’s Italian Renaissance with Cambridge Platonism,
then with the Romantics, and finally with American Transcendentalism.
One sees the intersection of these beginning before Transcendentalism
in the person of James Marsh, president of the University of Vermont.
A prominent forerunner of Transcendentalism, the work of James
Marsh—professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont—reflects
the ways that Platonism refracted into American thought before and at
the time of Emerson. Marsh, born in Hartford, Vermont, in 1794, went
to Dartmouth College and then to Andover Seminary for his theological
training. But rather than entering the ministry, he became a professor of
Oriental languages at Hampton-Sidney College in Virginia, and in 1824
became an ordained Congregationalist minister. In 1826, he was named
president of the University of Vermont—having married Lucia Wheelock,
niece of the president of Dartmouth two years before—but in 1833 he
resigned that position to take one as professor of philosophy, which he
held until his death in 1842.
According to his biographer, Joseph Torrey, Marsh read Greek phi-
losophy insatiably from his college days on, and Torrey goes so far as to
assert that
[ f ]ew persons... ever studied the two master spirits of the Grecian
philosophy with a deeper insight into their meaning, or a keener
perception and relish of their respective excellencies. Plato was his
favorite author, whom he always kept near him.10
about his life’s work as a whole and his consistent emphasis on dialogue
from early to late in life, we have to acknowledge its Platonic dimensions.
It is arguably the case—and more than one scholar has suggested—that
the entire Transcendentalist movement, and Emerson in particular, owed a
greater unacknowledged debt to Alcott than to anyone else. In turn, Alcott
owed a greater debt to Plato and Platonism than to anywhere else.
It is true that Alcott had a bust of Plato above a bust of Jesus in Temple
School—Plato had the place of honor there. But it is in Alcott’s writing
and in the records of his public conversations that we see the clearest
evidence of whence he drew inspiration for his work. I have already men-
tioned his Conversations with Children on the Gospel, but he also published
or in one case was instrumental in publishing such works as Record of
a School, Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction,
On the Nature and Means of Early Intellectual Education, and Doctrine and
Discipline of Human Culture. It is obvious from these titles and from sec-
tions of his other books that Alcott had a lifelong drive to change and
to perfect education. His methods of education derive, chiefly, from
Platonism, in particular from the Platonic dialogue.
In 1842, Alcott visited England, partly in order to meet the English
theosopher James Pierrepont Greaves. Alcott had been corresponding
with Greaves and others in England since the late 1830s, because Greaves
(who had studied educational method and theory with Pestalozzi) shared
Alcott’s views about the intrinsic wisdom of children and the spiritual
possibilities of proper education of them. In fact, Greaves’s circle estab-
lished a school called Alcott House, in Ham, Surrey, to embody his educa-
tional views, and here Greaves died in 1842, before he could meet Alcott
in person.
In The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance, I discussed Greaves
and Alcott and their indebtedness to Christian theosophy, so there is lit-
tle point in revisiting that territory in detail. Here, our focus is different.
Here, our focus is on Alcott’s and Greaves’s shared emphasis on the pos-
sibility of spiritual illumination. In 1838, Alcott wrote on this theme:
I have had light, heat, sight, for brief and fitful moments: and mem-
ory yet reverts to these living hours wherein I rose from the sepul-
chres of sense, and was in God. Alas! how few and transcient, these
quickenings of the divine life, in the soul! How <much of the time>
[often] I have been buried, and dead to the true, living, eternal, facts,
28 America n G urus
that are the joy, the beatitude, the knowledge, the apotheosis, of
the soul.
He exhorts himself to:
Live in thy love. Come back to thyself. Retreat into life... Exist in all
thy faculties. Put on the Perfect. Become the Ideal... conform thine
Actual to the Ideal Beauty, that <shall> [would] make thee one with
the Perfect and fair Godhead. . . within thy faculties. . . whose Image is
God; transcending, Times and Spaces; without beginning or end;
Chronicle, or History.—
For Greaves, as for Alcott and Emerson, the true purpose of education is
Platonic:
To unfold our being into the same divine likeness, and reproduce
Perfect Men. It is to mould anew our Institutions, our Manners,
our Men; to restore Nature to its rightful use; purify Life; hallow
the functions of the Human Body, and regenerate Philosophy,
Literature, Art, Society.6
Tablets, the 1868 published work, moves from outward to inward, that
is, from exoteric to esoteric, from nature and gardening through fellow-
ship, friendship, culture, and finally to speculative philosophy, conscious-
ness, and, in the very last section, “immortality.” These various sections
are prefaced by epigraphs from appropriate authors—in the early sections,
poets including Henry Vaughan, Goethe, and Wordsworth; and in the
later sections, selections from Pythagoras, Jacob Boehme, and the Corpus
Hermeticum. The final, “speculative” section is a hybrid of Neoplatonism,
with a dash of Boehmean theosophy. In it, Alcott alludes to, though he
does not explicate, his system of “Genesis.”
“Genesis,” for Alcott, was code for a theory of celestial anthropology
that he developed over decades, drawn from primarily Platonism, second-
arily Boehmean theosophy. When he referred to it during public conversa-
tions, the references often baffled his audience, with good reason. Alcott
did refer to “Boehme, the subtilest [sic] thinker on Genesis since Moses,”
but immediately dismissed the notion that nature or man fell because of
Lucifer. Alcott writes that “We think it [the fall] needs no Lucifer other than
mankind,” and adds that man is in fact “nature’s ancestor,” nature being
“man’s ruins,” since in his theory man, “eldest of creatures,” precedes
and is the progenitor of all nature. Animals and plants are the residue or
outward forms and signs of man’s fall into matter.23 Hence, even though
Alcott was clearly drawing on Boehme for some aspects of his emanation-
ist cosmology, in fact he rejected one of Boehme’s central themes, the role
of Satan in the fall of man and nature.
Rejecting such a notion, which was central for Boehme, underscores
Alcott’s core Platonism. Alcott, like Emerson, did not accept that evil
had an existence in itself, but rather that it was purely secondary, akin to
what Emerson called a “beautiful necessity.” This is fundamentally dif-
ferent from Boehme, for whom the battle between divine love and wrath
was almost analogous to ancient Persian dualism. Certainly Lucifer and
evil both existed as principles for Boehme in a way that they did not for
Alcott—and the reason is Alcott’s core Platonism. Although Platonism is
often accused of being dualistic, in reality Platonism is a monistic world-
view that does not accept the dualistic notion of evil as a principle in itself,
or as an anthropomorphized being. There is no Platonic Satan. What’s
more, Alcott’s emanationism is certainly more Platonic than Boehmean.
For Alcott, Mind is primary; it is man’s natural home, his “cloudland,”
and “nature is thought in solution.” “Nothing abides,” Alcott writes, and
“all is image and expression out of our thought.”24 “The world,” he adds,
32 America n G urus
“is but a symbol of mind.” “Thought makes the world and sustains it,”
and as such it belongs only to “the few fitted by genius and culture for
discriminating truth from adhering falsehood, and of setting it forth
in its simplicity and truth to the understandings of the less favored.”25
Alcott’s is a straightforwardly Neoplatonic and theurgic vision in which
“the gods descend in the likeness of men, and ascending transfigure the
man into their Personal likeness.”26 Above is divine transcendence, which
the human being can realize; but by descending one can “debase” and
“disfigure” this image, so man by choice ascends or descends. And every-
thing in the cosmos is an emanation or outward reflection of these inner
possibilities. In this descent, “all drink of oblivion—some more, some
less. . . . those discerning most vividly who have drank least of oblivion,
they more easily recalling the memory of their past existence.” But at the
same time, “everything aspires to its own perfection, and is restless till it
attain it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north.”27
When we turn to Alcott’s Concord Days (1872), we do not find the same
kind of systematic ascent as the underlying organizing principle for the
book. Rather, it is more like a desultory stroll, month by month, through
various topics that occurred to Alcott along the way. It includes reflections
on various figures and themes, including Emerson and Margaret Fuller,
Goethe and Carlyle, arranged in months from April to September. Topics
do include “rural affairs” and “childhood,” as well as “woman.” But here,
too, there is a hidden theme at the center, literally, of the book. That center
is, of course, Platonism.
The presence of Platonism in the book is not immediately apparent,
but “May” includes an essay on Pythagoras, “June” one on Plotinus, and
“August” articles on Plato’s letters, Plato himself and his method, as well
as Socrates for good measure. And in the very center of the book is a series
of references to the Cambridge Platonists, demonstrating conclusively that
Alcott knew quite a bit about them, too, and that he was familiar even with
the more obscure ones. He even cites Coleridge’s insightful remark that
the Cambridge Platonists might better have been labeled the Cambridge
“Plotinists,” since that would be more accurate.28 What’s more, there is
a section on Boehme and another on the nineteenth-century Boehmean
Christopher Walton, and although these are purportedly on Boehme, in
fact, just like in Tablets, in Concord Days Boehme and Walton are presented
through a Platonic lens, with Platonic reference points.
Whereas for Boehme himself, Christianity is the definitive religious
revelation and sine qua non for salvation, Alcott writes that “mysticism
The Sage of Concord 33
is the sacred spark that has lighted the piety and illuminated the philoso-
phy of all places and times.”29 He likens Boehme to Plotinus, and quotes
William Law as remarking that “whatsoever the great Hermes delivered in
oracles, or Pythagoras spoke by authority, or Socrates or Aristotle affirmed,
whatever divine Plato prophesied, or Plotinus proved,—this and all this,
or a far higher and profounder philosophy, is contained in Boehme’s writ-
ings.”30 Alcott quotes from a letter from Christopher Walton, a committed
theosopher in London, who writes:
I assert that for theosophy to have its true efficiency in the world,
there must not only be an intellectual acquaintance with all nature,
magical, mental, and physical. . . but there must be the actual real-
ization of the translocated principles of man’s threefold being into
their original co-relative positions, and this in high confirmed real-
ity; which is only another expression for the theological and alchy-
mical term, “regeneration.”31
It is a strange fact that very little has been published on Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Platonism. One does find references here and there, some-
times even a few pages devoted to the subject. Already in Octavius Brooks
Frothingham’s lengthy Transcendentalism in New England (1876), Platonism
is mentioned as the essence of transcendental philosophy (in the generic
sense).1 By 1908, Harold Clarke Goddard published Studies in New England
Transcendentalism in which he sketched the Platonic sources of Alcott and
Emerson, taking note of Plotinus’s importance for them both. Briefly put,
for more than a century, there has been awareness among some schol-
ars of Platonism’s centrality to American Transcendentalism. But for
the most part, Platonism’s influence on American Transcendentalism is
downplayed or ignored.
And we continue to see the tendency to mostly ignore the impor-
tance of Platonism for Emerson and Alcott. Here is a recent example: in
American Transcendentalism (2007), Philip Gura offers an intellectual his-
tory of the movement. When discussing Bronson Alcott, he mentions
that in Temple School, Alcott had a bust of Plato prominently displayed
above a bookcase, in fact placed directly above a bust of Christ. What’s
more, Alcott’s famously unusual pedagogy was clearly modeled on Plato’s
dialogues. Likewise, Gura mentions that Emerson’s philosophy origi-
nated from “a long-term interest in Plato and Neoplatonism.” Yet in the
hundreds of pages of this survey of intellectual influences on American
Transcendentalism, neither Plato nor Neoplatonism is mentioned again.2
Of course, one finds the occasional book or article that recognizes
the importance of this subject. Noteworthy in this regard is Robert
Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), which discusses Emerson’s
reading and his journals in detail. Naturally, this survey of Emerson’s
36 America n G urus
live more fully than we ordinarily do, simply by fully living in nature and
by seeing more deeply into the nature of existence.
There is an esoteric dimension to Emerson’s mysticism, even here in
this early text of Nature. He asserts, for instance, that Nature here “refers
to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.” The
term “essences,” here, is reminiscent of Plato’s Forms or Ideas; and
indeed Plato is visible throughout the work as a recurrent subtext. But the
more explicitly esoteric aspect of Nature is the famous passage in which
Emerson alludes to his “standing on bare ground. . . uplifted into infinite
space,” become a “transparent eyeball,” in which “I am nothing. I see all.
The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
particle of God.”5 Although it is rarely remarked upon, this passage is fol-
lowed by Emerson’s “greatest delight” in the next paragraph: “an occult
relation between man and the vegetable.” For, he continues, “they nod to
me and I to them.” And in the third paragraph, he remarks, “the power
to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a har-
mony of both.”6
We need to unpack what Emerson is referring to here, because it so
succinctly sums up his mysticism. This is an archetypal such experience.
That is, Emerson is alone in the woods, and there he feels himself in “infi-
nite space.” In this experience “all mean egotism vanishes.” And in its
wake, he feels a deep underlying kinship with the plants and trees around
him. He has had a glimpse of mystical experience; in its wake, duality
still is largely absent; and as a result, he continues to experience a sense
of unity with “the waving of the boughs,” which are mysteriously linked
to his experience of consciousness. We too can experience this profound
unity, and indeed we experience it daily in the magnificence of a dawning
day, in the magnificent, exquisite beauty of nature all around us.7
Why do I describe Emerson’s experiences here as esoteric? Certainly
they are mystical; a German colleague, Herwig Friedl, once remarked that
we know more about Emerson’s personal mystical experiences than we
do about the most famous mystics in history, like Meister Eckhart, who
never refer to their own personal experience. But Emerson’s experiences
are esoteric in that only some are open to them or are capable of grasping
what he is referring to. Beauty and an experience of unity both depend
upon “the presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element.”8 Beauty
in nature, Emerson concludes, is not the ultimate, not an end in itself,
but “the herald of inward and eternal beauty.”9 Not everyone recognizes
38 America n G urus
this beauty, let alone its inner significance. In this fundamental sense,
Emerson’s insights are esoteric.
The final three sections of Nature are devoted to describing in different
ways how we may gain access to primordial spiritual reality. The chapter
“Idealism” outlines how “nature is made to conspire with spirit to eman-
cipate us.”10 He describe how, in ordinary life, we can see things anew
simply by changing how we see them, for instance, riding in a carriage
rather than walking, or with our head upside down between our legs. The
example is a bit ridiculous, but the point is not: the point is that a different
way of seeing is available to us right now. Only a change in perspective is
necessary. The soul, Emerson remarks, is a watcher, not a doer—and what
he is encouraging us to awaken is our primordial capacity to watch, to see
anew.11
In “Spirit,” Emerson emphasizes the immediacy of transcendence. We
can realize that
the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal
essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all
in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that
by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, through
nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that
spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time,
but spiritually, or through ourselves. Therefore, that spirit, that is,
the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it
forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and
leaves through the pores of the old.12
Emerson, he tells us, is pointing toward
The golden key
Which opes the palace of eternity.13
Orphic poet who, after the tradition of Plato, offers insight greater than
anything science can provide.15
Emerson urges us, through the voice of his Orphic poet, to awaken
our higher reason, in one leap, as a banished king who vaults at once into
his throne.16 Hence he also refers to “Reason’s momentary grasp of the
sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an
instantaneous in-streaming causing power.” Reason is not rationality, but
the faculty that perceives transcendence; it is the “king” that vaults at once
into the throne of unity. “So,” Emerson concludes, “shall we come to look
at the world with new eyes.” And a “correspondent revolution in things
will attend the influx of the spirit.” Evil will vanish, and this realization will
draw around it “beautiful faces, and warm hearts, and wise discourse, and
heroic acts.”17 With this realization, he enters a dominion “such as now is
beyond his dream of God,” and with the wonder of a “blind man” who is
gradually restored to “perfect sight.”
In the larger context of our argument here, the significance of
Emerson’s inaugural little book could not be clearer. Nature really is a
mystical manifesto. Emerson had had a mystical experience, and its force
reverberates through and clearly shapes his first book. Its force continues
forward through Emerson’s later works, reverberating beneath the surface
and shaping the esoteric dimensions of his work. To be sure, none of his
later work has the urgency and immediacy of Nature, but the same themes
do recur, even if the amplitude is reduced somewhat thereafter.
If Nature represents Emerson’s debut performance, nonetheless, he
became more widely known after the remarkable collection of essays that
followed this first gnomic work. These were the essays that made his
career and that marked him as America’s answer to Goethe and Carlyle.
With themes like “Self-Reliance,” “Love,” “Friendship,” and “Intellect,”
Emerson established himself as America’s philosopher on subjects of uni-
versal appeal and importance. But we also see, in the organization of the
series of essays, that the force of his original vision became attenuated. It
is still intermittently present in the first series, but by the second series,
it had waned.
In the first series of essays, we encounter Emerson’s mysticism first,
not surprisingly, in “Self-Reliance.” In this essay, he begins by empha-
sizing the Platonic idea of genius, in particular the recognition that “to
believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius.”18 A great work of art
teaches us to “abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored
40 America n G urus
inflexibility” even when “the whole cry of voices is on the other side.” But
Emerson soon gets to the theme of transcendence, and to “the ultimate
fact which we so quickly reach on this as on every topic, the resolution of
all into the ever blessed ONE.”19 The “One” here is Plotinean, to be sure,
but it also invokes Emerson’s experience of unity in Nature. He harks back
to this earlier, urgent realization when he urges “Let us stun and astonish
the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple decla-
ration of the divine fact.”20 The intruders should remove their shoes, “for
God is here within.”
Although there are elements of Emerson’s mysticism here, they
amount to traces that show up here and there, not to the kind of
extraordinary cumulative power and effect that we saw in Nature. But
“Self-Reliance” is not the first essay, which is in fact “History,” and it is fol-
lowed by “Compensation.” Still, in the midst of the fourth essay, “Spiritual
Laws,” we find Emerson advising: “Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you
are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.”21
“Do not choose,” he tells us, but rather inwardly aspire to “the state or
circumstance desirable” to one’s constitution.22 And again, the last sen-
tence of “Spiritual Laws” is “We know the authentic effects of the true fire
through every one of its million disguises.”23 Here we see the immediatist
Emerson again, in his calm insistence that transcendence is present to us
as our natural state, if we are open to it.
If essays like “History” could be construed as Emerson having left eter-
nity for time, though, he is entirely back in eternity with “The Over-Soul,”
which features an epigraph by Henry More. In Essays: First Series, the
mysticism we saw in Nature comes back full force in “The Over-Soul.” In
fact, “The Over-Soul” is the most complete metaphysics of transcendence
that Emerson ever wrote. It is the primary complement, in his Essays, to
Nature. “The Over-Soul” is about the relationship between the human
individual and eternity, how the two intersect, how although we live in
time, in moments, “within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence;
the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the
eternal ONE.” What is more, the soul is “not a faculty, but a light,” and
“from within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”24 The language
here is more than a little reminiscent of that in the illumination passage
in Nature: we are as egos nothing, and yet we have a natural identity with
all, with the Plotinian One.
Emerson and Platonism 41
who speak with one another across the ages, “without a moment’s heed
of the universal astonishment of the human race below.” The angels, he
concludes, pay no attention to the language of men “but speak their own,
whether there be any who understand it or not.”32
What Emerson is describing here is esoteric in the classical sense of
the word.33 There are those who participate in this enduring conversation
that is not constrained by time or place, and there are those to whom it is
closed and incomprehensible. But even so, it is open to all who are capable
of hearing and understanding it. Essays: First Series presents Emerson’s
mysticism with different emphases, but the fundamental idea remains
the same: the mind can enter into a state of nondual consciousness or
transcendence, and that is the ultimate origin of philosophy, art, literature,
and religion—of culture.
Essays: Second Series less clearly reflects Emerson’s theme of transcen-
dental consciousness, but this and related topics do recur in this later col-
lection. Rather than being foregrounded, though, they now are woven into
the essays as subcurrents. Hence “The Poet” begins by pointing out that
most contemporary notions of beauty are debased and have no Platonic
“doctrine of forms,” but in fact, Emerson writes, “we are children of the
fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted.”34 This underlying
theme of unity reappears in the essay in various forms, in the idea that
“soul is form and doth the body make,” that here is “the secret of the world,
there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” In fact,
not only the body but “the Universe is the externization of the soul.”35 This
concept of the unity of cosmos and transcendence Emerson shared with
Alcott, who later in life built his Platonic system of “Genesis” on it.
The poet is, Emerson writes, someone who unites himself with the
“divine aura which breathes through forms.”36 In fact, Emerson writes, the
poet knows the secret of the intellect “doubled on itself,” that is, an inner
“abandonment” in which one can unlock one’s “human doors” and allow
“the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through oneself, caught up into the
lift of the Universe.”37 Such a man’s “speech is thunder, his thought is law,
and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.” Such
a one speaks with “the flower of the mind” (a term from the Chaldean
Oracles), that is, not with the rational mind, but rather becomes a “liber-
ating god.”38 Here we are again with Emerson’s illumination expressed
first in Nature, and then revealed in different ways throughout subsequent
works. The key is that it is possible to enter into a state of nondual tran-
scendent consciousness that is the origin-point of all that exists.
Emerson and Platonism 43
Emerson’s The Conduct of Life? There are, and they are deeply entwined
with Platonism.
Let us look more closely at the book’s structure and subject matter. The
first chapter of The Conduct of Life, “Fate,” focuses on a theme important
in Plato’s work, and in particular, to the Myth of Er in the Republic and
to Timaeus. But Emerson does not cite these. Rather, “Fate” is a medita-
tion on the degree to which our circumstances of birth shape us, as well
as to what extent we shape our circumstances thereafter, and it culmi-
nates in a paean to the “Beautiful Unity” and the “Beautiful Necessity.”
Interestingly, in Calloway’s new edition of The Conduct of Life, which is
subtitled A Philosophical Reading, he footnotes these terms, but then does
not show their philosophical origins at all. Their origins, as Carl Strauch
pointed out already in 1958, are in Proclus.46
The conclusion of “Fate” extols the beautiful unity that reconciles the
opposites, the polarities that he discusses earlier in the chapter. Nature
contains “the cunning co-presence of two elements,” so that “whatever
lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to
repay.” Thus “every atom” is compelled to “serve a universal end.”47 Let us,
Emerson exhorts, “build altars to the Beautiful Necessity,” which secures
that “plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food
and eater, are of one kind.”48 And what Law rules existence? “A Law which
is not intelligent but intelligence;—not personal nor impersonal,—it
disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivi-
fies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omipotence.”49
Outwardly, these passages seem to be original to Emerson, but a closer
look reveals their Neoplatonic origins and significances.
The “Beautiful Unity” clearly underlies the “Beautiful Necessity,” and
both are Neoplatonic terms drawn from Plotinus and Proclus. The “Law”
to which Emerson refers is no law in a public or exoteric sense; it is, rather,
esoteric. It refers to an esoteric unity that is perceptible as pure intelli-
gence, as dissolving personalism, and as calling us into its transcendence
of polarities. One recognizes not only the terminology here as Neoplatonic,
but also and more important, the metaphysics are Neoplatonic. This is an
interesting conclusion to a chapter on Fate, because what it implies with
such an ending is that it is possible, by drawing on the “law” of transcen-
dence, to transcend fate.
As we move through the subsequent chapters on “Power,” “Wealth,”
and “Culture,” we can see a similar pattern of thought emerging. There
are layers to Emerson’s work here: the outermost refers to contemporary
46 America n G urus
and recent American social and political phenomena; the next refers to a
Platonic or Neoplatonic metaphysics of ascent; and the innermost refers
to the esoteric secret of the transcendence of opposites. These layers are
often visible as well in individual chapters. Thus, “Wealth” begins with a
lengthy discussion of “men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and sur-
vey,” of political economy, of how “a dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar
in Massachusetts.”50 Eventually, though, Emerson comes to his emphasis
on genius, on how “as long as your genius buys, the investment is safe,
though you spend like a monarch.”51 Follow your genius, Emerson says,
and be aware that “all things ascend, and the royal rule of economy is,
that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must always have a higher
aim.”52 Ultimately, he concludes, man is truly enriched only through “new
powers and ascending pleasures,” knowing “himself by the actual experi-
ence of higher good,” that is he “already on the way to the highest.”53
Now I do not mean to suggest that this triune structure is one imposed
uniformly by Emerson, for although we can see it reiterated in many
aspects of The Conduct of Life, we also can see an even more fundamental
dualism. Emerson is not inclined toward systematizing; even a cursory
acquaintance with his work shows that. All the same, his work is not flung
together higgledy-piggledy, but does have an inner structure, and even
what we might term esoteric dimensions. These esoteric dimensions are
Platonic, and a close examination of the book reveals an essential thematic
distinction between outer and inner, between exoteric and esoteric, which
I believe holds a key to understanding Emerson as a Platonist.
We can see this exoteric-esoteric duality clearly in the central chap-
ter entitled “Considerations by the Way.” The entire chapter turns
around Emerson’s distinction between the masses and the cultured indi-
vidual. The masses, he writes, are “rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in
their demands and influence”; they “need not to be flattered but to be
schooled.”54 “Masses! The calamity is the masses,” he exclaims. What mat-
ters is the individual whom one can draw out of the masses, who can be
cultured, who can develop a higher sensibility, who can come to know the
secret.
What secret? One secret is that what appears to be bad, or even evil,
is in the larger scheme of things a good. “The first lesson of history,”
Emerson writes, “is the good of evil.”55 “There is a tendency in things
to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shat-
ters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order,” he
elaborates.56 Beyond this Platonic unity of all to the greater good, Emerson
Emerson and Platonism 47
continues, “the secret of culture is to learn that a few great points steadily
reappear”: “the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and
love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation.”
All of these—along with the wish to serve others—add to the well-being of
men. But beyond these is the secret of the beautiful unity, that is, the unity
that includes and transcends both good and evil.
Secrecy is never far from Emerson’s thoughts during The Conduct of
Life, and that is certainly the case in the chapter “Beauty.” There is even
a secret to physical beauty: “A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was
thought to betray by this sign the secret favor of the immortal gods.”57
Beauty in nature, beauty in human creations—these take us away from
the surface and get us “thinking of the foundation of things.” Emerson
quotes Goethe: “The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of
Nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from
us.”58 All of Emerson’s observations on beauty are Platonic, as when he
observes “the ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession
at birth of each mortal.”59 But for the most part, Emerson’s Platonism is
still hidden, and only emerges explicitly at the chapter’s very end, when
he draws everything together. There is, he writes, a “climbing scale of
culture,” and
[w]herever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy
of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the
globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger
tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude
and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity,—the first stair on
the scale to the Temple of the Mind.60
Now I quote this paragraph in its entirety because in this way one can see
how Emerson draws from Platonism his concluding, beautiful peroration.
The unity of the Platonic system may be Proclus, the gods on their thrones
may be Iamblichus; but the greater unity that infuses this paragraph is
Emerson and Platonism 49
made absolutely clear by the final sentence, which reflects, of course, the
final sentence of Plotinus’s Enneads. The entire paragraph is Plotinean,
in its notion of inner ascent, in its profound idea of the gods on their
thrones, and in the concluding ascent that leaves us alone with the Alone.
Alexander Wilder was on to something when he termed Emerson
“the Plato of America.”63 But just as easily one could term Emerson the
“Plotinus of America,” or “the Proclus or Iamblichus of America”—
because in some sense, he is all of these. I have not had space here to
gloss every Platonic allusion, or to show their sources in the translations
of Thomas Taylor. Instead, I have sought to outline the primary Platonic
themes that are woven into Emerson’s work all the way from Nature to The
Conduct of Life.
A close study of these Platonic themes in Emerson shows that they are
deeply entwined with the concepts of the secret and the esoteric, words
that recur throughout the collection. I do not think it is mere accident
or oversight that the Platonism in Emerson’s works, while obvious to a
thoughtful and careful reader, is largely (and, I think, deliberately) hid-
den by Emerson himself. One has to know one’s Platonists in order to
recognize what Emerson is up to in these beautiful and dense essays. In
fact, Platonism, I am now convinced, is key to understanding the esoteric
Emerson. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that so many scholars have
overlooked the Platonic dimensions of Emerson’s work. Perhaps it wasn’t
written for them—perhaps it was written for those who have the (Platonic)
eyes to see, and they will, as Emerson himself points out, never be many.
After all, in the end, it is the individual alone with the gods, is it not?
It is no accident that when Octavius Brooks Frothingham published
his Transcendentalism in New England: A History in 1876 (while both Alcott
and Emerson were still alive), he emphasized the centrality of Platonism
not only for them, but also for the whole of the Transcendentalist group
and philosophy. Brooks begins by remarking that the “religion of New
England was Protestant and of the most intellectual type.” Yet “its root ran
back to Platonism, and its flower was a mysticism which, on the intellec-
tual side, bordered closely on Transcendentalism.”64 Interestingly, Brooks
goes on to observe that Christianity more broadly, with its Trinitarianism,
was actually Platonic and not Jewish in origin, “a confession that it was
born of the noblest idealism of the race.”65 Transcendentalism goes back to
these Platonic roots, as it requires neither Trinity nor descent of the Holy
Spirit because for its exponents, the “Inner Light” is “a natural endow-
ment of the mind.”66
50 America n G urus
School, the article went on, was to assert, against prevailing materialism,
“the supremacy of Mind.”
Broadly speaking, there were two primary streams of thought that
emerged from American Transcendentalism and, in particular, from
Emerson and Alcott. One was the development of distinctively American
forms of Platonism, fostered by the Concord School and its consistent
inclusion of Platonic subjects. The other was what became known as
“New Thought,” later becoming the New Age, which Catherine Albanese
termed “American metaphysical religion.” The New Age will be part of the
context for our final chapters in this book, whereas we must turn now to
consider a very different creature, American Platonism as it engaged in
battle with materialism and evolutionism.
Though not well-known today, there was a strong Midwestern
American Platonist movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, and this movement—as one of its chief spokesmen, Thomas
Johnson, said—was explicitly opposed to “this degenerated age, when
the senses are apotheosized, materialism [is] absurdly considered phi-
losophy, [and] folly and ignorance [is] popularized.”9 Among its lead-
ers were Thomas Johnson, publisher of The Platonist and its successor,
Bibliotheca Platonica, from Osceola, Missouri; Hiram K. Jones, founder
of the American Akademe and of the Journal of the American Akademe,
in Jacksonville, Illinois; and Amos Bronson Alcott, author of “Orphic
Sayings” and connection between the New England Transcendentalists
and the Midwestern Platonists. All of these writers stood firmly against
materialism and its ally, evolutionism.10
From the beginning, the Platonists were opposed to a formidable
enemy. Certainly Darwin and his propagandists received a warmer recep-
tion in America than in Britain; by 1880 The Origin of Species had gone
through ten American editions, The Descent of Man had gone through nine
editions here, and there were fourteen American editions of Spencer’s
First Principles. Emerson observed that Tyndall had more readers in
America than in England,11 and Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer drew more
readers still with their lecture tours in America. Indeed, evolution quickly
was adapted by the “liberals” and “free-thinkers” of the day as a kind of
acid test for the cultured and “advanced thinkers,” itself a term reflecting
evolutionism.12 Charles Eliot Norton in 1860 wrote:
among them seem to be ready to admit that his theory though not
proved, and not likely to be proved and accepted in all its parts,
is one of those theories which help science by weakening some
long-established false notions, and by suggestions leading toward
truth if not actually embracing it.13
which Fiske asserted that Emerson, despite himself, was really affirm-
ing Spencer’s belief in the “Unknowable” and Fiske’s own notion of a
quasi-theistic evolutionism.17 Clark’s account is worth quoting:
I then enquired how Fiske accounted for the fact that Emerson, with
his idea of Deity and his evolutionary insight, was so insensible to
the doctrine of Evolution when it was brought forward with such
supporting evidence in 1860 by Spencer and Darwin? I remarked
that the concluding chapter in Darwin’s “Origin of Species” alone
ought to have brought joy to Emerson’s heart: yet it does not appear
that he ever read it.
In reply, Fiske said that Emerson’s mind, with all its fine ennobling char-
acteristics, was in many respects individual and illogical, and we must
take it as we find it.18
Clark concludes that Fiske’s “line of philosophico-religious
thought. . . consists of a happy blending of the poetic philosophico-
religious insights of Emerson with the profound scientific cosmic
truths established by Spencer and by Darwin.”19 Fiske’s, then, is the
evolutionary culmination of Emerson’s more limited thought—intellec-
tual evolution at work! Clark’s puzzling over why Emerson didn’t feel
joy in his heart at reading Darwin reveals at least the quasi-religious
element of Fiskean evolutionism, or as Fiske called it, “cosmic theism.”
The enormous success of Fiske’s evolutionist popularizing—like that of
Darwinian apologists like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan in the late
twentieth century—displays again the American quasi-religious attach-
ment to evolutionary theory.
But America has always had an affinity for Platonism, too. From
Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley and James Marsh, from
Emerson, Agassiz, Alcott, and Thoreau to America’s purest Platonists,
Thomas Johnson and Hiram K. Jones, American literary, philosophi-
cal, and religious authors have often been deeply influenced by that
“Platonick stream” which in Europe produced in Ficino and Pico della
Mirandola, and which in Britain not only sparked the Cambridge
Platonists, but deeply influenced Romanticism as well. Indeed, it may
be argued that this Platonic or Neoplatonic current of thought—espe-
cially as channeled through the work of Thomas Taylor—was in many
fundamental ways responsible for the various forms of American
Transcendentalism.20
58 America n G urus
All this has been well documented. But however one might seek to
dispute or ignore the connections of Emerson, say, with Platonism, the
point remains: on the whole, American philosophical-religious writing of
the nineteenth century bears a very large debt to Plato and the Neoplatonic
writers. Platonism, with its anti-institutional, hermetic nature, seems to
fit well with American Protestant individualist tradition. The Platonist
stands among the world’s religious and philosophical traditions, picks
and chooses among them, pointing out their fundamental similarities,
the eternal verities, the Forms of which reality is a reflection. This is pre-
cisely what most of the Transcendentalists sought to do, as I have shown
elsewhere;21 and it is what Platonists have always tended to do.
By definition, after all, Platonism stands on the boundary between
religion and philosophy. As Thomas Johnson proclaimed on the cover
of his journal The Platonist—without doubt one of the most remarkable
American journals ever published—the journal one dedicated to the
essential unity of all traditions, philosophical and religious.22 Plato’s dia-
logues, along with the Hermetic tradition more generally, have always
contained a revelatory religious center, whether it be couched in terms of
the Mysteries, poetic inspiration, a vision of the afterlife in the myth of Er,
or the cosmology of the Poimandres. Nominally philosophy, Platonism
has in its manifestations always had a religious element.
But this religious element within Platonism has always been
non-institutional, independent—and it is precisely this individualism
that makes Platonism congenial to intellectual Americans who seek reli-
gious truth, but who put little stock in institutions. During the nineteenth
century, Americans saw revealed religions under continuous attack from
many fronts. The new science, intensifying materialism, Germanic bibli-
cal criticism, and comparative religion all combined to erode American
confidence in the veracity of Christian religious traditions. For an intel-
lectual with a religious inclination, it was and remains relatively difficult
to defend one’s convictions either in conversation or in writing under the
combined assault of modern skeptics. To those in this dilemma, Platonism
offers many answers, and hence it is not surprising that Platonism should
take a submerged form in American Transcendentalism, and an overt
form in later Midwest Platonism.
In many respects, overt American Platonism was a direct counter-
balance to the enormous popularity of materialist Darwinian evolu-
tionism in the United States. And Platonism’s first spokesman in the
Transcendentalist camp was Amos Bronson Alcott. Influenced by far more
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 59
live in Concord, these were not the Yankees Alcott was among. Alcott said
of Brokmeyer:
What was the topic of discussion among the members of the Philosophy
Club Brokmeyer had founded in St. Louis, and to which Alcott was visitor?
Evolution, of course.
Of this meeting Denton Snider, later a prolific author, wrote in his
autobiographical A Writer of Books:
Mr. Alcott set forth his philosophic message, his esoteric world-
view. . . . He gave quite a full exposition of his doctrine of the lapse of
the soul, from the Primal One, dropping in its descent the various
orders of creation down to matter. It was the Alcottian redaction of
the Neo-Platonic theory of the universe.
Brokmeyer was present, and in his highest vein.. . . He was cour-
teous and appreciative, but he showed the Alcottian lapse to be
hardly more than a relapse to Oriental emanation, which had been
long since transcended, while he put stress upon the opposite move-
ment of philosophy, namely, Occidental evlution, with its principle
of freedom. Mr. Alcott must have felt that he was in the hands of a
giant, certainly the rest of us did.. . . Mr. Brokmeyer seemed impreg-
nated with thought.. . . He was all aglow with enthusiasm. He had
a fit of ecstacy if there ever was one. When he spoke it was a pure
stream of the brightest thought. His enthusiasm overflowed him
like a torrent, overpowered him, carried him away.. . . When I went
home that evening, I was dimly aware of having had in my life an
epoch-making experience.
Gradually the conviction kept closing round upon me that
I must in some way go to school to Brokmeyer.31
not be squeezed out through the end of his ink pen, and in his quasi-
autobiographical A Mechanic’s Diary, Brokmeyer gives us the only real
indication of his place in this battle between Platonists and evolutionists.
Brokmeyer began by attacking Alcott:
Lost all the evening listening to Mr. Alcott. No, it was not a clear
loss, for the man is clean—in the sense that he avoids the mud.
“A remarkable case of reversion,” said I, on the way to my room,
to the eager questions of Mr. H—. [W. T. Harris]
“What do you mean, is he not original?”
“Yes, if the re-appearance of Ammonius Saccas, that is,
Ammonius the sack carrier, the peddler, as we would say now, can
be called original.”
“But who is Ammonius Saccas?”
“An Egyptian, founder of the Neoplatonic philosophy, who lived
in the second and third century of our era.. . . He loafed around
Alexandria, like the great Grecian assumption hunter, Socrates, had
loafed about Athens, some five or six hundred years before, and
talked with other people that had nothing else to do but gas and lis-
ten to others gassing.. . . It is appropriate that Mr. A— should revive,
or attempt to revive, this infantile method, because of the matter
he has to communicate! This itself is as old as the method, and as
capable of meeting the wants of the day.”
“And you mean to say that Mr. Alcott is not original, in both
thought and action?” Mr. H— asked, as we entered my room.
“He is simply odd in both, and original in neither. Egyptian
mummy wrappage is not a new invention, and the walking of the
streets of Boston or Concord, habited in such toggery, may attract
attention, but is hardly calculated to set a new fashion.”32
The emanationists commence with the One, which they call God,
but wholly inscrutable, wholly unknown and unknowable. They
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 63
the opposite theory, or what takes itself for such, also starts with
unity, and evolves thence the multiplicity. They call it matter,
however, and are quite certain that their first is the very opposite
of the first of the emanationists. With them the wholly formless
eventuates in a cell, the cell in a bunch of cells, and so on up
to man.34
Pointing out that the whole history of geological succession shows us that
the lowest in structure is by no means the earliest in time—for instance,
Selachians (sharks and their like) preceded Myzonts, fishes structurally
inferior to all others—Agassiz notes that it may therefore “truly be said
that a great diversity of types has existed from the beginning.”39
The relation of this argument to Platonism is implicit, but clear. Plato’s
Forms, or Ideas, and Agassiz’s types are the same thing, and this Agassiz
makes even plainer in his conclusion to the article, in which he writes:
Indeed, so clear and apropos is the rest of the article that I cannot resist
quoting a bit more. Agassiz continues:
The more I look at the great complex of the animal world, the more
sure do I feel that we have not yet reached its hidden meaning, and
the more do I regret that the young and ardent spirits of our day
given themselves to speculation rather than to close and accurate
investigation.. . . [For] there is no evidence of a direct descent of later
from earlier species in the geological succession of animals.40
Despite the more than a century that has passed since Agassiz published
these words, one wonders if contemporary believers in evolutionism are
any more capable than those whom Agassiz faced of understanding and
assimilating his subtly written Platonic challenge. Those words reverberate
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 67
still in the mind, more than a century later: “What of it, if it were true?” To
acknowledge that everything in the cosmos corresponds to types or eternal
Forms, just as human creations correspond to the thoughts that inform
them—is that so wholly antithetical to the evolutionist mindset? Why?
Why do we still react with such emotion when the theory of evolution is
brought into question?
By the 1880s, even the sanctum sanctorum of American Platonism,
the meetings of the American Akademe in Jacksonville, had been pen-
etrated by the evolutionists. On May 20, 1884, Elizur Wolcott presented
“The Theory of Evolution” to the Akademe, terming it the greatest idea
that the nineteenth century had produced, and rhetorically embracing the
writings of Spencer and Fiske. Science, he said, had won. One wonders
if the scientific world then or now would similarly entertain a Platonic
argument in the midst of a group of evolutionists. On September 15, 1885,
Hiram K. Jones responded with his “Physical Evolution and the World We
Live In.”41 In this paper, Jones attacked Wolcott’s evolutionism, presenting
the evolutionism of Spencer and Fiske as mere materialism extrapolated
to a grand theory, and affirming instead the Platonic insistence that the
physical world is informed by transcendent Intelligible reality.
But by 1887, the Platonic Akademe had largely given way to evolution-
ism. On February 15, 1887, the Reverend A. B. Morey read a paper entitled
“Christianity and Evolution” in which he defended a theistic evolutionism
not far from that of Fiske himself. And on September 15, 1887, Alexander
Wilder—a confirmed Platonist and an important contributor to Johnson’s
The Platonist—read “Creation and Evolution,” in which he insisted upon
an Absolute as the source of creation, but acquiesced to many of the doc-
trines of evolutionism.42 By February 1892, Charles Caverno was arguing
before the Akademe “The Intellectual Element in Matter,” opposing the
Akademe’s Platonic anti-materialism. Implicit in Caverno’s “rehabilita-
tion of matter” is a defense of evolutionism, signaling the decline of that
particular wave of Platonism as a vital force in American life. It is not sur-
prising that the Akademe ceased to be in June 1892, as did the Journal of
the American Akademe, although the Plato Club of Jacksonville continued
meeting until 1897.43
Platonism had its renaissance in America during the mid- and late
nineteenth century—as it did during the twentieth century44—because
there were a few people who saw in Platonism an intellectual alternative
to both traditional religion on the one hand, and evolutionist materialism
on the other. Platonism affirms transcendent reality without demanding
68 America n G urus
herald.” For “toward that higher social and moral level the race was
inevitably tending,” but “this book. . . will be of incalculable assistance
in the ascent.”1 Leaves of Grass, Bucke continues, manifests “the ascend-
ing sap which vitalizes all the fruit of human life,” it is “creator of a
new era.” As the Vedas, or the Torah, or the Gospels, or the Quran were
to past civilizations, Leaves of Grass will be “to the future of American
civilization.”2 For “no one, except those who have felt it, can realize
what Leaves of Grass is to the first men and women who experience its
power.”3 And its power is a kind of imbibing: “As pure air, wholesome
food, clear water, sunshine, pass into and become the life of the body,
so do these Leaves interpenetrate and nourish the soul that is fitted to
receive them.”4 We can see in this rhetoric that Whitman, for Bucke,
represents an evolutionary advance toward individual and collective
enlightenment. Whitman inaugurates what will become a familiar
theme in the late twentieth century: that of religious evolution.
A signal characteristic of this new literary religion was openness toward
sexuality. In “The Good Gray Poet,” William Douglas O’Connor defends
Whitman at length from accusations of indecency. O’Connor writes, “It is
not purity, it is impurity, which calls clothes more decent than the naked
body.. . . It is not innocent but guilty thought which attaches shame, secrecy,
baseness, and horror to great and august parts and functions of human-
ity.”5 Such represents “a morbid state of mind,” whereas Whitman intro-
duces “the conception of the individual as a divine democracy of essences,
powers, attributes, functions, organs—all equal, all sacred, all consecrate
to noble use, the sexual part the same as the rest, no more a subject for
mystery, or shame, or secrecy.” “This,” O’Connor insists, “is his lesson.”6
In Walt Whitman, Bucke includes various contemporary accounts of
Whitman, and they underscore the idea that Whitman was a literary reli-
gious figure. Whitman, in these reports of him, is charismatic, magnetic,
possesses a magnetic and wonderful voice, is humble, serene, taciturn,
joyous, wise, the very picture of the bearded American sage—indeed,
a secular saint. He never raised his voice, never seemed angry, cared
for the wounded and poor and weak among us, showed not a trace of
self-consciousness, was—in these accounts of him—very much depicted
not only as a creator of literary religion, but also as an authentic incarna-
tion of it.7
But it is Bucke’s depiction of Whitman in Cosmic Consciousness that
is most revealing. He recounts that in 1877, “a person well known to the
present writer” called on Whitman, and
Walt Whitman’s Cosmic Consciousness 73
For this future “fitly born and bred race,” it will be “enough to merely live”
for “Being” to be “suffused night and day by wholesome ecstasy,” by the
very fact of living a primordial outdoor life.13
To some extent, Bucke is depicting Whitman through his own lens
of “cosmic consciousness,” it is true, but at the same time, Whitman
really is calling for a nondual American “new metaphysics” free of
the dualistic baggage of puritanical monotheism. In this set of ideas,
Whitman also really is the ancestor of late twentieth-century modes
Walt Whitman’s Cosmic Consciousness 75
of thought that we will see not only in the poetry and prose of Allen
Ginsberg and the Beats, as well as in the counterculture, but also in
the phenomenon of Western gurus. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman really
does claim to “inaugurate a religion”; he wants to “drop in the earth the
germs of a greater religion,” one characterized in a bird’s song, “subtle,
clandestine, away beyond,” “A charge transmitted and gift occult for
those being born.”14
In Leaves of Grass, Whitman often seems strikingly close to Hinduism,
but his poetry invokes and emerges from an exhilarated state of con-
sciousness; it is written consistently from the first person. In it, the “I”
becomes a transcendent I, one that “contain[s]multitudes.”15 He remarks
that “[n]o doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before,” which
could be read as an allusion to reincarnation, but in fact also could be
read as Whitman’s grand poetic ego that is “large,” vast, containing the
entire cosmos. And Whitman wants to initiate his readers or hearers
into his poetic vision that is also an exalted kind of consciousness:
I quote him at length here because he makes clear in this passage some
themes that also converge again in later twentieth-century Western imme-
diatism. Among these is the convergence of nature, sexuality, and spiritual
illumination. Here, “the efflux of the soul” is “happiness,” and it is present
always, “waiting,” charging us like a current, but self-refreshed, emerging
“fresh and sweet continually out of itself.” One could hardly find a more
apt poetic description of immediatist themes.
And of course I am not the first to recognize these aspects of Whitman’s
works—in fact, there is a significant body of literary criticism based on
interpretations of Whitman as a mystic.. We already have seen Bucke’s
interpretation of Whitman as an exemplar of “cosmic consciousness,” but
in 1957, James E. Miller published A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass, a
careful, often ingenious close reading of Whitman’s major work of poetry,
and Miller’s primary interpretive frame is Whitman as an “inverted mys-
tic.”18 Miller argues that “ ‘Song of Myself’ is the dramatic representation
of a mystical experience,” by which he means that “the poem is not neces-
sarily a transcript of an actual mystical experience but rather a work of art
in which such an experience. . . is represented dramatically.”19
Miller’s argument is quite detailed and extensive. In his view, “Song of
Myself” breaks down quite naturally into phases that are reflected in the
sections of the poem, sections 1–5 showing the poet’s entry into a state of
mystical consciousness, 6–16 showing the poet’s awakening of self, 17–32
showing the purification of the poetic self, 33–37 revealing the poet’s illu-
mination, 38–49 showing the poet in a state of union, and 50–52 marking
the poet’s leaving the mystical state.20 This sequence Miller draws from
Evelyn Underhill’s well-known sequence of “the mystical life” in her book
Mysticism (1911). Some of Miller’s interpretations do seem a little forced,
but it is true that section 33 of “Song of Myself” shows the poet claim-
ing new “knowledge of Reality,” the poet illuminated and “afoot with my
vision,” for “now I see it is true, what I guess’d at.”21
Miller’s lengthy analysis of Whitman’s poetry, his close reading
extended for several hundred pages, is the kind of classic single-author
work of literary criticism that now seems to belong to the past, and is
certainly an achievement. Miller also coauthored a collection of articles
on Whitman, Start with the Sun (1960), which includes arguments for
Whitman as a mystic or exponent of cosmic consciousness.22 The argu-
ment of the volume’s authors is that Whitman inaugurated a Whitmanian
mystical-literary tradition that is reflected in the works of subsequent
authors, especially D. H. Lawrence. At the center of this Whitmanian
Walt Whitman’s Cosmic Consciousness 77
Enlightened Literature
7
The period between the mid-nineteenth century and the latter half of the
twentieth century is often given short shrift insofar as the history of mys-
ticism is concerned. On the one hand, we have the Transcendentalists,
and on the other, the Beat and Hippie movements. But bracketed between
these two eras—which are important, and in fact strikingly similar in
some respects—we also find some major figures representative of the
immediatist current, as well as some who evinced more than a little schol-
arly interest in it. We must mention here William James (1842–1910),
of course, who in several works, most notably in Varieties of Religious
Experience, not only referred to, but also took seriously the possibility of
subject-object transcendence and its significances. James was a scholar,
though, and there are other figures who more directly provide precedent
for and in some cases influence the later emergence of American gurus.
By its very nature, of course, immediatism as a phenomenon tran-
scends national or continental boundaries, especially in an era of global
communication and travel. We see this globalism already in American
Transcendentalism, which drew on so many different world religious, lit-
erary, and philosophical sources, and whose influence went well beyond
the boundaries of the contiguous United States. But in the twentieth cen-
tury, it becomes even more challenging to focus on specifically American
forms or manifestations, even if the American milieu is always produc-
tive of and receptive to immediatist thought. There is a deep connection
between American thought and immediatism, even if immediatism as
such is not and cannot be specifically American.
82 America n G urus
not a philosopher; she was a poet, and far from systematic. She went on
to write dense, allusive, esoteric poetry, and still is insufficiently recog-
nized today for her achievements. While figures like H. D. are important,
we must turn now to a much more systematic thinker and mystic, who
indeed devoted his life to explicating his mystical experiences—Franklin
Merrell-Wolff. Merrell-Wolff, if not a guru, can be described at the very
least as a proto-guru.
We might begin by remarking on a pattern, for it was California that
Krishnamurti chose to make his home, and it was in California that a
number of other major immediatist authors also lived or live. One of
these, Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887–1985) is a remarkable and rela-
tively little-known author of a large and fascinating body of work cen-
tered on what he termed his “Realization,” a series of illuminations
followed an enduring change in consciousness that he termed “without
an object.”5 Merrell-Wolff’s works detail the implications of his meta-
physical realizations, for which he developed a vocabulary of explanatory
terms and concepts. Trained as a mathematician, and very much in the
Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, he sought to demonstrate that there is a
continuity and complementarity between discursive reason and its tran-
scendence. If he is acknowledged at all, Merrell-Wolff is often seen in the
context of his interests in Vedanta and Buddhism, that is, in Asian reli-
gions, but as closer study will demonstrate, he is best understood as an
exemplary figure of American immediatism.
Franklin Fowler Wolff, so christened in Pasadena, California, in 1887,
was raised as a Methodist, but in adolescence left Christianity behind.
He went to Stanford, where he studied mathematics and philosophy, and
later studied at Harvard. In 1914, he returned to Stanford, where he taught
mathematics, but in 1915, he left academia. He lived in the San Fernando
Valley; in 1920, he married Sarah Merrell Briggs, and they chose to take
one another’s names—hence he became Franklin Merrell-Wolff. He and
his wife, later named Sherifa Merrell-Wolff, founded an esoteric group
called the Assembly of Man in 1928, and built an ashram in the Sierra
Nevada mountains near Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contigu-
ous United States.6 Sherifa died in 1959, and Merrell-Wolff remarried, liv-
ing in a house in the mountains until his death at the age of ninety-eight
in 1985. He had a number of students and followers, and he published
various books on his mystical experiences and philosophy, also leaving
behind a large library of audio recordings of his thought.
American (Literary) Spiritual Teachers 85
like most subsequent Zen Buddhist teachers in the West, took issue with
these kinds of claims. Based on his own training in Japan, Kapleau writes,
“Without zazen, whether it be the stationary or the mobile variety, we can-
not speak of Zen training or discipline or practice.”19 And indeed, medita-
tion is central to Zen Buddhist training and practice.
Nonetheless, to this day, readers continue to review appreciatively vari-
ous posthumously released new titles drawn from Watts’s taped lectures,
like Buddhism: The Religion of No Religion, that continue to convey the
same message of immediate illumination.20 In fact, one could argue that
a message of “religion of no religion” may be part of why Watts’s books
still retain an audience decades after his death. His emphasis on imme-
diate illumination and on the importance of mystical insight resonated
well with his 1950s and 1960s audiences, and his books still were broadly
in print and being read in the early twenty-first century. But from where
did Watts draw his emphasis on transcendence or insight without specific
meditative practices?
In order to understand Watts’s tendency to interpret Buddhism,
Taoism, and Vedanta without much reference to meditative disciplines
or practices, we might consider those parts of his background and work
that often are overlooked. We might begin by remarking that Watts was,
at heart, a Westerner speaking from the Western religious tradition. He
was trained as an Episcopal priest, and in fact published quite a few books
on Western mysticism, including an edition of the via negativa mystical
treatise of Dionysius the Areopagite.21 We will recall that Dionysius’s work
was highly Platonic, and that the Dionysian treatise on mystical theology
is in many respects the ur-source for apophatic mysticism in Christianity.
And we might remember that although the Dionysian treatises offer won-
derful descriptions of the celestial hierarchies and of apophatic illumina-
tion, what they do not offer is a set of practices leading to that kind of
illumination. Strikingly close to the Prajnaparamita Sutra in its negations,
Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology is paradigmatic for under-
standing Watts’s work.
Throughout his works, one finds Watts referring to immediate spiri-
tual illumination. In his autobiography, he confides that
I was always being accused of being a lazy fellow who had the absurd
idea that transcendence of egocentricity could be achieved without
long years of effort and discipline. You would immediately feel one
with all nature, and with the universe itself, if you could understand
90 America n G urus
Earlier, in Behold the Spirit, Watts wrote at length about what he had
termed a “mysticism without means,” a notion that he drew, naturally
enough, from the fact that, in the history of Western Christian mysticism,
there are so few manuals of praxis or directions, or even autobiographi-
cal accounts to guide a prospective practitioner.23 Watts emphasized this
notion elsewhere too, writing that
[t]
he most impressive fact in man’s spiritual, intellectual, and
poetic experience has always been, for me, the universal prevalence
of those astonishing moments of insight which Richard Bucke
called “cosmic consciousness.” There is really no satisfactory name
for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with
visions of another world, or of gods and angels. To call it spiritual
or metaphysical is to suggest that it is not also extremely concrete
and physical, while the term “cosmic consciousness” itself has the
unpoetic flavor of occultist jargon. But from all historical times
and cultures we have reports of this same unmistakable sensation
emerging, as a rule, quite suddenly and unexpectedly and from no
clearly understood cause.24
In an article titled “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” published in 1958,
and again in 1959/1960 alone and as part of a collection called This Is It!,
Alan Watts distinguished between the three categories indicated in the
eponymous title. Perceptively, Watts recognizes that the growing Western
fascination with Zen Buddhism requires one to “come to terms” with
monotheism and the “Hebrew-Christian conscience” so that one can “take
it or leave it without fear.”1 He suggests that neither Beat rebelliousness
nor “square” respectability reflect Zen as he thinks it really is, a “libera-
tion of the mind from conventional thought.”2 Beat Zen, as Watts sees
it in Ginsberg, Snyder, and Kerouac, is “too subjective, and too strident”
to have the flavor of real Zen because it is really a form of “protestant
lawlessness.”3 Watts understood that the Beat movement represented an
effort at going beyond monotheism that was nonetheless conditioned by
monotheistic precedents and categories. The Beat movement, in other
words, was—as Watts recognized—a much more complex religious phe-
nomenon than it might at first seem to be.
Not enough has been published on the religious dimensions of the
Beat movement. There are some books, including several useful antholo-
gies, but we still await a more definitive and extensive survey and analysis.4
In what follows, we will present support for our particular argument, but
it is worth recognizing here that fuller consideration both of the Beat and
the Hippie movements, taking them as significant religious phenomena
in themselves, for the most part has not yet been seriously undertaken.
But there is one insightful work worth returning to, and that is the
seminal The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak, first pub-
lished in 1969. Roszak’s study of both the Beat and the Hippie move-
ments remains today the most comprehensive and perceptive assessment
Beat Religion and the Choice 93
But Ginsberg was even more explicit than Whitman about his mysti-
cism. Whereas Whitman wrote about his “religious purpose,” Ginsberg
wrote that Howl is “an affirmation of individual experience of God, sex,
drugs, absurdity, etc.” He continued that the poem’s “force comes from
positive ‘religious’ belief and experience. It offers no ‘constructive’ pro-
gram in sociological terms—no poem could. It does offer a constructive
human value—basically the experience—of the enlightenment of mys-
tical experience—without which no society can long exist.”12 Mystical
experience has primacy, here, obviously, but it is worth noting that this
individual mystical experience is linked to “God, sex, drugs, absurdity.”
This series of terms is far from random, as we shall see—what Ginsberg
alludes to here, later becomes the leitmotif of a series of disparate fig-
ures and movements during the long 1960s, some specializing more in
one than the others.
A few years before his death in 1997, Ginsberg reflected on his friend-
ship with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and on the signifi-
cances of their lives and work for the broader movements of the 1960s
and thereafter. Asked specifically about the relationship between the Beats
of the 1950s and the Hippies of the 1960s, Ginsberg replied that “the cen-
tral theme was a transformation of consciousness, and as time unrolled,
experiences that Kerouac, Burroughs and I had, related to this notion—at
least to widening the arena of consciousness.”13 Exploring consciousness,
Ginsberg continued, took a variety of shapes: “Burroughs through his
exploration of the criminal world, or Kerouac through his exploration of
Buddhism, or Gary Snyder’s meditation practices, or myself, who worked
with the Naropa Institute under Tibetan Buddhist auspices. Spiritual lib-
eration is the center.”14
And Ginsberg made it clear that the broader movement toward spiri-
tual liberation that impelled them all in different ways was also a rejection
of monotheism, of what he termed the “monotheistic hallucinations” of
the “whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind-trap.”15 Asked more specifically
about his “personal understanding of God,” Ginsberg replied forthrightly
that “there is no God.” “There’s no question about it?” David Brown asked.
Ginsberg answered: “No. It’s a big mistake. It means six thousand years
of darkness. It means a Judeo-Christian-Islamic control system. It means
war and centralization.”16 Brown then tried to introduce the notion of
God as a “state of consciousness,” but Ginsberg will have none of that,
either: “Why do you have to add ‘God’ onto [a state of consciousness]?
It’s sneaking in a centralized state of consciousness, it’s sneaking in a
96 America n G urus
I spit on the Christian God. When the White God arrived with the
Spaniards, the Indians brought down fruit and corncakes and choc-
olate. The White Christian God proceeded to cut their hands off. He
was not responsible for the Christian conquistadors? Yes, he was.
Any God is responsible for his worshippers.32
102 America n G urus
is that there is significant evidence that Burroughs engaged in, or lived in,
the sorceric world represented in his fiction.
In Magic and Mysticism, I suggested that these two broad types (mys-
ticism and magic) exist on a spectrum: at one end, via negativa mysti-
cism of pure self-other transcendence; in the middle, mystico-magic or
magico-mysticism; at the other end, a very strong self-other magical divi-
sion, meaning a desire on the part of the self to control or to will changes
in the other or in the environment. An extreme form of self/other distinc-
tion would be sorceric combat or battle, or for that matter, infernal or hell-
ish worlds like those Burroughs depicted. This distinction has relevance
here because in these regards, Burroughs and his fiction represent some-
thing fundamentally different from what we see in Kerouac, Snyder, and
Ginsberg, let alone from Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau.
Does someone like Burroughs belong to what we are terming the
immediatist current? Or does he represent something distinctly different,
as he himself said he did in separating himself from the Beat movement?
It would seem fairly clear that Burroughs’s fiction belongs to a different
group from these others, even though it (and his life) has some elements
in common with some, though not all, of the Beats. It is true that a case
can be made for Burroughs as a kind of existentialist gnostic as projected
in mid-twentieth century works like those of Hans Jonas or, in popular
form, Jacques LaCarrière. “Burroughsian Gnosticism,” as one author calls
it, does depict the world as hostile, and escape from a time-space trap as
the goal.39 But the kind of gnosis or “gnosis” he seeks appears also to be
immortality, that is, ego continuity, which is rather the opposite of the
transcendence of subject-object that we saw in Alcottian and Emersonian
Transcendentalism.
Burroughs does refer to some forms of subject-object connection that,
in his view, happens beyond space and time. In his 1950s correspondence,
chiefly with Allen Ginsberg, he writes (May 1, 1950):
into the body of this young Mayan” through manipulation and compul-
sion, and the telepathic communication manifests itself as “the crushing
weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prear-
ranged molds, squeezing my spirit in a soft invisible vice.”44 The narrator,
who seeks to avoid the “Time Police,” in his new environment “immedi-
ately felt stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation,” but avoided them
by turning on “the thoughts of a half-witted young Indian.”45 The narrator
then exists in an infernal world of Mayan bureaucratic “control”—in other
words, in an extremely hostile world in which his time travel does not
offer liberation, only a new kind of bureaucratic oppression, by definition
the opposite of either inner union or freedom.
We see the same type of relentless dualism in Burroughs’s inter-
views during roughly the same period (the 1960s). In The Job, Burroughs
appears to be reflecting the unity rhetoric favored by his correspon-
dent Ginsberg: “as soon as you get two you get trouble. Dualism is the
whole basis of the planet.” But the interviewer asks: “Is love a solution?”
Burroughs replies: “I don’t think so at all. I think love is a virus. I think
love is a con put down by the female sex. I don’t think it’s a solution to any-
thing.”46 And likewise, in The Job, the editor Odier includes Burroughs in
his method of tape recording and “cut ups,” in particular, observing already
then (long before the magical episode some time before Burroughs’s
death, described by Cabell McLean, “anyone with a tape recorder con-
trolling the sound track can influence and create events,. . . learn to plant
events and concepts,. . . make you more efficient in reaching your objec-
tives.”47 Burroughs’s alternatives to the “nightmare” of modern America
are sinister reflections of it: in place of advertising propaganda here, he
offers the tape recorder as a kind of black magic, just as in place of the
American bureaucratic state, he offers the Mayan “control” apparatus. But
in any case, his narrator(s) and characters exist in a hostile magical cos-
mos, even more so if possible in his late trilogy of novels, The Place of Dead
Roads, Cities of the Red Night, and The Western Lands.
Here I will point out only a few examples of explicit references to sor-
cery. In Cities of the Red Night, which after all is dedicated to “the Ancient
Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of
entrails,” to “Pan the God of Panic,”to “the nameless gods of dispersal
and emptiness,” to “Hassan I Sabbah, Master of the Assassins,” “to all the
scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits
have been manifested.”48 Under the motto “Nothing is true. Everything is
permitted,” Burroughs returns again to his infernal visions that include
106 America n G urus
exception that tests and demonstrates the rule. He and his brethren rep-
resent an antitype, a thorough-going rejection of immediatism and of all
its implications, and an assertion in its place of an imagined permanent
self-other dualism, genuinely a hellish realm of implacable division in
which “I” seek to maintain and augment “myself” against my many ene-
mies in “control,” be it the Mayan city-state, or the American empire as
represented by the CIA. Burroughs’s really is an infernal world in which
even apparent possibilities of union like telepathy turn out to be intru-
sive control mechanisms, and in which monstrous demonic creatures and
actions exist in sordid chaos. Burroughs represents, not a proto-guru in a
literary religion, but rather a literary sorcerer.
We need to understand this division as we move forward through the
era of psychedelics and of hippies—for as we shall see, this division has
considerable explanatory power.
9
Enter Psychedelics
Like the Beats before him, and like the Transcendentalists before them,
Leary saw himself very much as part of an emerging new religion, a kind
of post-monotheistic paganism that represented freedom after centuries
of intellectual confinement.
And second, in establishing this new religion, Leary frequently cited as
precedent Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists,
because he consciously placed himself as their successor. At his 1983
Harvard reunion, Leary said that the Transcendentalists were also saying
“turn on, tune in, go within. Become self-reliant.” In an unusual interpre-
tation of history, Leary claimed that Emerson was hanging out in England
with notorious “druggies” Coleridge and Wordsworth, who were “expand-
ing their minds with hashish and opium and reading the Bhagavad Gita.”
Then, he said, Emerson came back to America and said “find God within
yourself. Drop out. Become self-reliant.”6 We could charitably call this an
interesting angle on Emerson’s life and thought, but certainly feel com-
pelled to remark that Emerson, for one, would have been horrified at the
claims. Yet it is in fact the case that Leary was at least to some extent fol-
lowing in the steps of Emerson and, even more, of William James.
As is well known, William James wrote about mysticism in his Varieties
of Religious Experience, remarking that as a result of his experiments with
nitrous oxide, “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness
as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of con-
sciousness entirely different.” “No account of the universe in its totality
can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disre-
garded,” he continued.7 In transcendence of dualism, the nobler dimen-
sions of human experience absorb everything, including their opposites,
he writes. But even more than that, he observes, there seems to be a dou-
ble aspect to mysticism: on the one side a seraph, on the other a snake, on
the one hand transcendence, on the other hand a “diabolical mysticism,”
in which instead of “consolations we have desolations; the meanings are
dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life.”8 There is, James thinks, a
common origin to both.
The difference between the class of drugs to which James referred
and the psychedelics of Leary’s generation, however, is rather like the dif-
ference between a horse-drawn wagon and a jet airplane; nonetheless,
James’s observations remain surprisingly germane. For LSD offered both
beatific and diabolic experiences, both delightful unity and terrifying para-
noia and fear, while DMT (dimethyltryptamine) seemed to offer largely
114 America n G urus
the latter—but all three primary psychedelics, LSD, DMT, and psilocybin,
Leary and his colleagues concluded in the early 1960s, opened the doors
to religious illumination.
One can only imagine what it must have been like for Leary and his
colleagues during that heady early period when it seemed that with a
few milligrams, one could experience religious awakening, that any-
thing was possible, and further, that all of humanity was moving forward
into a new era of an evolutionary leap forward in consciousness. We
see some of this excitement in the academic work that Timothy Leary,
Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner published during the early 1960s. In
an article on the “Psychedelic Training Center at Zihuatanejo,” a 1962–
1963 Harvard research project drawing on the resources, faculty, and
students from three Boston colleges and universities, Leary, Alpert, and
Metzner described how experimental subjects were able to go immedi-
ately “beyond the limits of the learned cultural programs,” beyond “spa
ce-time-verbalization-identity,” through “the science of ecstatics.”9
During this early period in psychedelic research, there was a funda-
mental disagreement between those who wanted to keep the research
strictly medical, psychological, and scientific—in effect, Leary wrote later,
insisting on working “within the system”—and those whom he termed
“religious philosophers,” but who also might be termed exponents of out-
law religion.10 Leary, as is well known, began “in the system” as a Harvard
professor, but he soon became an advocate of what I have come to term
“outlaw religion.” Outlaw religion is a distinctly American term that cap-
tures much of what Leary and some other exponents of psychedelics
became: advocates for a new antinomianism in which freedom—of ways
of life, of drug experimentation, and of sexuality—became leitmotifs.
But psychedelics were at the heart of this new outlaw religion, of which
Leary was in fact at the epicenter. His memoirs, correspondence, and books
show Leary’s life during the early 1960s as a kind of family or tribal gather-
ing of the figures we have already looked at in the Beat movement, with
many others besides. In Leary’s circle were Aldous and Laura Huxley, Alan
Watts, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs—and of course
Allen Ginsberg, whom Leary fondly described as “secretary general of the
world’s poets, beatniks, anarchists, socialists, free-sex/love cultists.”11
Leary and his coauthors of the report on their Mexican psychedelic
experiment write that their continuing program was not, in the end, scien-
tific or medical, but “aesthetic-educational-religious,” because psychedelic
experience is “like sex.” By this, Leary (the primary author) meant that
Enter Psychedelics 115
O (name of voyager)
The time has come for you to seek new levels of reality.
Your ego and the (name) game are about to cease.
You are about to be set face to face with the Clear Light.
You are about to experience it in its reality.
In the ego-free state, wherein all things are like the void and
cloudless sky,
And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum;
At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.14
A selection like this makes it quite clear that Leary had chosen the same
course that most of the Beats did: toward a fundamentally Buddhist-
inflected immediatism.
We also see during the early 1960s that Burroughs and Leary went
in different directions, Burroughs rejecting not only Leary’s interpreta-
tion of “the Buddha nature of drugs,” but also Leary’s offer in Mexico of
LSD.15 Leary describes a number of his friends in High Priest, his highly
edited and shaped journals from 1960–1962, devoting chapters to each of
them. Leary’s book is a remarkable and layered text, with many layers, and
each chapter is arranged around a hexagram of the I Ching. One of these,
“Trip 11,” is devoted to William S. Burroughs, under the vertical heading
“Bill Burroughs Drops Out of Our Clan,” with the hexagram “Work on
What Has Been Spoiled (Decay).” What has been spoiled, it turns out, is
Burroughs.
116 America n G urus
Leary, of course, was eager to bring Burroughs into his circle, since
Burroughs’s reputation was as the “world’s most experienced experi-
menter,” the “black priest” of drugs; and in “Trip 11,” Leary tells the
fragmented story of how he met Burroughs in Tangier in the summer
of 1961. Years before, Burroughs had traveled Latin America seeking
Yagé, or Ayahuasca, and in 1961, he had had a hellish experience with
the recently invented DMT, after which he had sent an urgent warning
to Leary about it. But when ensconced at Newton House in Cambridge,
Burroughs remained “suspicious and cynical of psychedelic drugs and
their use,” silently disappeared, and later wrote a critique of Leary and
his Harvard group: “Stay out of Timothy Leary’s Garden of Delights.”16
Leary remained baffled and disappointed in his own insufficient hospital-
ity toward Burroughs, even going so far as to write parts of the chapter in
Burroughsian style—as if, in the end, the fault was Leary’s own. I am not
so sure it was.
For Burroughs belonged to a different clan, all right—his was the clan
of Hassan i Sabbah, the shadowy head of the hashashin, or assassins, the
world of criminality and black magic and addiction, not of Leary’s cheery,
Buddhist-influenced mysticism. In the margins of his text, Leary includes
letters and other documents from or about the main figures, and in the
margins of High Priest we read “Gray writing of Hassan i Sabbah switch
tower orders reverse fire back creatures of the oven stored in pain beaks
from the torture chambers of time,” and “souls torn into insect fragments,”
or again, “blockage this planet under alien insect enemy” via “Dim-N,” or
DMT.17 For whatever reasons, Burroughs in the end resonated more with
the nightmarish, Boschian landscapes of alien insect invasions and infer-
nos than with Leary’s envisioned future of shared human mysticism.
What is more, Burroughs invoked “Hassan i Sabbah,” “the old man
of the mountain of the assassins,” “master of the jinn,” “assassin of ugly
spirits,” that is, magic and the coldness of a rejection of love and of what
he contemptuously termed the “Venusian” spirit of femininity. One can
understand why Leary, with his love of women and emphasis on love,
would have repelled Burroughs, who thought (and wrote) “cosmic con-
sciousness and love is second-run grade B shit.”18 Burroughs represents
a sorceric inclination also visible in a variety of other figures during this
period and later—the counterculture certainly included an occult/magi-
cal side, and Leary himself, though he did belong primarily to the side
of “Aquarian revolution,” or “cosmic consciousness and love,” also had a
magical side.
Enter Psychedelics 117
have already seen in Leary’s Berkeley talks, is simply not true. Yet it is
interesting that the revisionist Leary, no longer acknowledging his earlier
role as psychedelic guru, still for the most part does not publicly admit the
darker aspects of psychedelics.
Of course, Leary’s psychedelic millenarianism in many respects gen-
erated its own bureaucratic suppression. His oft-described “messianic”
energy and enthusiasm and charisma, and his public exhortations that
“dope” was the “key” to a global revolution in consciousness, all generated
considerable fear in the highest levels of the American federal government
that Leary might in fact be right, that a revolution really was coming, with
him as its prophet. And Leary did directly reject industrial-consumerist
society while exhorting listeners to buy land and create communes, “turn
on” and “drop out,” as his well-known catchphrase had it (reportedly first
said by Marshall McLuhan to Leary). One can certainly see why Nixon
reportedly labeled Leary the “most dangerous man in America.” In many
respects, from a status quo perspective, he was.
Central to understanding the appeal of Leary and the psychedelic revo-
lution is how it fits into the longer arc of American immediatist religion.
What is more immediate than profound religious revelation attained by
taking a little pill? Of course, the question remains as to what the nature
of such a revelation might be. How is a psychedelic enlightenment experi-
ence related to other kinds of mystical experience? But from our perspec-
tive, answers to questions like these would not change how Leary and LSD
fit as a chapter within the history of American immediatism: for a time,
Leary clearly was a prophet of psychedelic immediatist religion.
Many of Leary’s early colleagues and students later came to see him
as more or less responsible for the subsequent criminalization of psyche-
delics and for the termination of institutionally legitimized scientific and
medical research into psychedelics and consciousness. Harvey Cox, for
instance, said he thought LSD “had great promise. . . if it had been used
in a controlled and careful way. But Leary was such an egotistical guy.”
Instead of being a researcher, Cox said, he made himself “the messiah for
spiritual discovery.”32
Nonetheless, the impact of psychedelics on the art, the music, the
culture, and above all, the religion(s) of the 1960s and 1970s can hardly
be exaggerated. And that impact goes hand in hand with governmental
reaction (federal, state, and often local) against psychedelics and against
the counterculture more broadly. Leary certainly was important for both.
It is in this double context—revolution and the fear of revolution—that
Enter Psychedelics 121
Here we enter into one of the stranger regions of our journey. This region
is one of perpetual hilarity, of jokes told deadpan; it is a region that came
into being alongside the psychedelic religion of the 1960s championed by
Leary, but that has its own unique configuration. Of course, a major prob-
lem in explaining the history or even the outlines of this kind of satirical
religion is that virtually every aspect of it is itself a joke, in turn nested
inside other jokes. Who was really involved with this or that publication?
When was it really first published? These kinds of questions ordinarily can
be answered by conventional historians, but when it comes to the mass of
confusion and japery exemplified by a phenomenon like Discordianism,
it is not quite so easy to find conventionally reliable answers. Fortunately,
here what matters is primarily what confirms our argument about imme-
diatism. And Discordianism and its brethren really do represent a unique
form of American immediatism that could only have come into being dur-
ing the heady stew of the 1960s.
Because what we are describing here is not only Discordianism, I feel
compelled to come up with a more comprehensive term, and so I choose
“spiritual anarchism.” Spiritual anarchism developed alongside the psy-
chedelic revolution, but took the form of extended parodies of conventional
forms of social order of all types, especially religious order. Marijuana,
LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT had a real philosophical impact
with relatively little historical precedent. Suddenly previous social and reli-
gious conventions seemed ridiculous, and a new ludic spirit filled some,
at least, with a sense of hilarity about what conventionally many people
regarded with great seriousness. In some respects, one could describe
Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual Anarchism 123
the last straw. They were fine with burning every kind of flag except the
sacred flag of Vietnamese communists! This, Thornley says, prompted
Robert Anton Wilson to write him and assert that the Marxists were
right, for “while the flags of most nations are made only of cloth and
hence are simply rags, the flags of the socialist nations are made
one-hundred-percent of gossamer and angel feathers.”22
What are we to make of Discordian “Zen”? On the one hand, we could
regard it as a collection of jokes nested within larger jokes in the con-
text of even larger jokes—none of it really reflecting Buddhism or Zen
Buddhism or Taoism, even though it cites figures like Dogen, the great
Japanese Zen master, or Chuang Tsu, the legendary Taoist sage. Typically,
these figures are transposed into a contemporary American hippie context
without much relationship to Buddhist or Taoist meditation or other ritual
practices or traditions. And this is true: Discordian “Zen” is superficial
and sophomoric, no doubt about it. But on the other hand, Thornley terms
it a “Bastard Zen of America,” and there is arguably something to this. He
and Benares are espousing under the rubric of “Zen” an anarchic indi-
vidualism expressed in decontextualized but still religious terms—a form,
in other words, of spiritual anarchy.
It would be a mistake to entirely dismiss this “Bastard Zen of
America” as an extended practical joke, because it is clear from the
copious Discordiana that although it is humorous, it is also in some
respects serious in its larger points. What’s more, the sad history of
many of its exponents doesn’t change its historical significance not
only as a representative of, but also to some extent as an influence on
the broader American and global counterculture. Discordian “Zen” is a
form of spiritual anarchism that both shaped and reflects the counter-
culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It may have emerged as a pipe dream
in a haze of pot smoke, but it is nonetheless neither parodic nor satiri-
cal. It makes highly individualized, anarchic claims in a recognizable
if secularized religious context. We will return to the significances of
spiritual anarchism, but first we must make a foray into the related, but
slightly different terrain of magic.
11
assassins were known for murdering people. We already have seen Hassan
i Sabbah, who was introduced in the work of Burroughs, appear again in
Leary’s writing, and he now appears again in Robert Anton Wilson’s volu-
minous body of work. And we will see this shadowy figure appear again,
shortly.
It is worth noting that some links between marijuana or hashish and
paranormal phenomena of the kinds discussed by Wilson—telepathy,
clairvoyance, telekinesis—as well as mystical experiences can be found
in at least some social science literature of the early 1970s. In On Being
Stoned, for instance, Charles Tart describes research results from survey-
ing users of marijuana. His results suggest that, as he put it, “either mari-
juana affects judgment such that a large number of ordinary experiences
are judged to be paranormal, or there is a very high incidence of para-
normal phenomena associated with marijuana use, or both.”10 In particu-
lar, his subjects described floating in limitless space, feeling possessed
by a hostile force, feeling they could perform magical operations, believ-
ing they had precognitive powers, seeing auras, and feeling energy going
up the spine or in energy centers (chakras).11 His subjects also described
enhanced sexual experiences, including the sense of merging and union
with a partner.12 Interestingly, substantially more subjects reported spir-
itual experiences (experience of unity, contact with divine beings, deep
peace and joy, and stimulation of long-term interest in religion) on mari-
juana than on LSD by ratios of 2:1 or 3:1.13 The relevance of these results to
Wilson’s work seem fairly self-evident: the results of Tart’s surveys closely
correspond to themes we have seen in The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
At this point, it is useful to give an overview of Wilson’s subsequent
books, many of which were published by Falcon Press or New Falcon
Press, a publishing house that, in addition to Wilson’s works, also pub-
lished various books by Timothy Leary (Neuropolitique, Info-Psychology),
books by both Leary and Wilson (The Game of Life), as well as titles by
various authors (Christopher Hyatt, Antero Ali, Aleister Crowley, Israel
Regardie, and others on magic, including “Western Tantra,” “sex magick,”
and related topics. Their catalogue also includes Camden Benares,
Austin Osman Spare, and others whose names indicate links between
Discordianism, Leary, Wilson, and left-hand path magic.
When we look at Wilson’s subsequent “Illuminati” books, we find that
ritual magic plays a major role, and we also see the term “Illuminati” used
in a new way. In Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), Wilson
describes a complex set of connections between the notorious magician
Oh, Ho, Ho, It’s Magic. . . 135
Peter Lamborn Wilson, whose work also appears under the nom de
plume Hakim Bey, is author of an array of works that include essays on
the heretical margins of Islam, various collections of poetry, and one of
the most influential anarchist treatises of the twentieth century. Wilson,
born in 1945 in Baltimore, Maryland, grew up living a fairly middle-class
life and studied at Columbia University. Later, he traveled in the Middle
East and Asia, in particular India and Nepal. He studied Sufism, and in
the mid-1970s, became associated with the Imperial Iranian Academy
of Philosophy in Tehran, headed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr; as director
of English language publications, he worked with Nasr, Henry Corbin,
Toshihiko Izutsu, William Chittick, and other Traditionalists associated
with the Academy, which was sponsored by the Shah of Iran. He also
edited the journal Sophia Perennis and published a scholarly history of the
Ni’matullahi Sufi Order in Iran. However, Wilson, an erudite and contro-
versial figure, began to publish works of a different type in the 1980s.
Wilson is an unusual combination of hippie and Traditionalist. Wilson
recalled that “I was just the right age to be, as I like to say, a buck private in
Generalissimo Leary’s army of premature entheogenists. That was the six-
ties, and then I spent ten years in India and Iran. That’s it in a nutshell.”
But of course there was more to it. He spent years among major figures in
Traditionalism, and although it might appear that he left Traditionalism
behind, as he put it, “I’m a very palimpsestic thinker, so I never throw
anything away.”1 He left behind “rigid” Traditionalism, but retained the
critique of modernity that it provided. This is an important point, but
totally elided by those scholars who have written about Wilson’s work.2
140 America n G urus
purity not through ritual, faith, worship, deed, or merit, but “by direct
knowledge, experience, certainty, the drunkenness of ecstatic realization.
Only this intoxication truly purifies the soul,” as one loses “separative
delusions” and “attains the One.” Such an individual is to “wander nude
in the bazaar, like a naked Qalandar. But if the bazaar is shocked, then
scandal belongs to the bazaar, not the dervish.”14 Platonism offers eros
(directed bisexually) as a means of ascent, but Sufism, he argues, offers
immediate unity of above and below.
It is in this spiritual anarchist context that we can understand
Wilson’s later and most influential work, the remarkable T.A.Z.: The
Temporary Autonomous Zone (1985/1991/2003). The back cover of a later
edition includes very positive comments from many by now familiar
names: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Robert
Anton Wilson, and the cantankerous anarchist Bob Black. Furthermore,
the book itself consists in “communiqués and flyers” attributed to “The
Association for Ontological Anarchy,” as well as “Chaos: The Broadsheets
of Ontological Anarchism,” both of which place the book very much in the
tradition of Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius, that is, of
serious spoofs or invented religions and associations. And it also explicitly
invokes the figure of Chaos, which we saw earlier in Discordianism, and
which by this time in the 1980s had begun to emerge as well in the phe-
nomenon of Chaos magic. In other words, T.A.Z. exists in a larger current
of antinomian spiritual anarchism with clear ties to Chaos magic and to
other movements and groups both before and after.
T.A.Z. begins with declarative prose poetry in the style of Whitman and
Ginsberg, and what it declares right off the bat is immediatism. “Chaos
never died,” it begins, “the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still
radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins.”15 “Not only have the
chains of the Law been broken, they never existed,” it continues. “No, lis-
ten, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good &
evil, gave you distrust of your body,” but in fact “there is no becoming,
no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your
own skin—your inviolate freedom waits to be completed only by the love
of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.”16 It
urges us to “shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history” and prof-
fers instead “shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police,”
“poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.”17
T.A.Z. is a forthright declaration of magical anarchist independence.
Sorcery is a word describing that independence, not the “black magic” of
Spiritual Anarchy, Tantra, and Islamic Heterodoxy 143
presumably would have little positive resonance either. But none of this
in Wilson’s work is intended for that hypothetical individual: it is esoteric,
intended for a kind of anarchist elite, for those who are willing to go out-
side the norm, indeed, even to accept a reversal or inversion of norms as
part of an antinomian spirituality.
Wilson’s work is at heart immediatist. Beyond those examples we’ve
already seen, we can turn to his “Shower of Stars” Dream and Book: The
Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism (1996), which further exemplifies
Wilson’s immediatism. In it, he defines his work as “esoteric,” meaning “all
modalities of the study and deployment of ‘non-ordinary states of conscious-
ness,’ or of spiritual experience, which are sufficiently radical to escape the
totalitarian discourse of religious or mystical authority.” He means “some-
thing like a tradition of the ‘Free Spirit,’ ” that is, an entrance into transcen-
dence not controlled by an institutional authority. Dreams, he continues, are
the natural venue for initiation into transcendence, a relationship between
the initiator and initiated that is not mediated by institutional or bureau-
cratic power relations.24 The problem, Wilson muses, is not so much “true”
and “false” gurus or Sufi teachers, but rather “one of authority itself.” He
prefers “various anti-authoritarian positions within Sufism,” and in particu-
lar, “a radical version, tending toward ‘spiritual anarchy’ and heresy.”25 He
quotes Wendy Doniger: “To this day, many Indian sects hold that anyone
who dreams that he is initiated has in fact been initiated.”26 And he offers
a discourse on the practice of incubation (sleeping in a temple/seeking an
initiatic dream) in the ancient Western world and more recently.27
In Sacred Drift (1993), Wilson writes directly about the intellectual ori-
gins of his thought, and it is worthwhile sketching here what he says,
because much of this will reappear again in subsequent sources. It is true
that he draws on the work of Henry Corbin, himself a scholar of heterodox
Ismaili Islam who emphasized direct inner individual visionary revela-
tion via the “imaginal.” After all, Wilson knew and worked with Corbin
when he lived in Iran. But it is not in Shiite Islam, nor even in heterodox
American forms of Islam that we find Wilson’s most significant anteced-
ents. For he also refers not only to antinomian medieval Christian sects
like the Adamites and the Families of Love, but also to various radical
Protestant sects.28 And I would argue that Wilson’s heterodox interpreta-
tion of Islam in fact owes quite a bit to Protestantism and its progeny, in
particular American Transcendentalism.
The significance of all this should be self-evident. Wilson’s empha-
sis is on initiation not into an external hierarchy or lineage but as inner
146 America n G urus
On the Counterculture
Interpretations of the 1960s have tended to fall into two general camps.
One group consists in those who trace perceived social ills back to that
period, like a colleague who, morosely contemplating the failures of aca-
deme, said that one couldn’t begin to rebuild the humanities and social
sciences until the generation forged in that era had retired. Probably he
is right, though one shouldn’t be too optimistic. Another group consists
in those for whom the 1960s represent the birth of a still incompleted
social revolution, and for them, the era is comprehensible chiefly through
Marxist interpretive lenses. The former is a pessimistic narrative of social
decline and fragmentation; the latter is an optimistic narrative of partially
thwarted social progress that nonetheless could be completed one day
in the future. What I offer here is a very different interpretation of that
era, and in particular, of the emergence of what came to be known as the
“counterculture.”
But we need to consider what is meant by the term “modernity.”
Essentially, modernity is a historical category—it begins with “early
modernity,” a nebulous term denoting perhaps what follows the “medi-
eval era,” and proceeds through “the modern age” to the present moment,
which is, of course, what “modern” actually means: “present, now, this
historical moment.” That is why, when Fredric Jameson wrote in A
Singular Modernity (2002) that “the modern” should be thought of as a
“one-dimensional concept (or pseudo-concept) [that] has nothing of his-
toricity or futurity about it,” one has to see this as something of a joke,
followed by the punchline that the “postmodern. . . does not designate a
future.”1 Needless to say, it doesn’t.
But in truth, “modernity’s” characteristics—secularity, for instance—we
can discern only after distinguishing its historical boundaries that, inevitably,
148 America n G urus
end with our own present moment. We can “place” modernity’s beginning
earlier or later, as we wish, but we are compelled to see the present as a part
of it. Jameson claims to want to remove “modernity” from its historical situ-
ation so as to make room for various speculations, but my point is that it
cannot be so removed, and for that matter, neither can the fictive “postmod-
ern” remove the weight of historicity. In fact, quite the opposite: “modern,”
“postmodern” or “aftermodern,” whatever—all are inescapably temporal.
There is no way around this fact, no matter how inscrutable one’s stupify-
ing cloud of rhetorical ink. “Modernity” is an historical term that includes
the present, and that is thus practically speaking inseparable from a global
technological-industrial-financial social superstructure.
The word “culture” also is used blithely, as in “popular culture,” or
“Hollywood culture” or “corporate culture,” the notion apparently being
that culture is more or less synonymous with “society,” and signifies lit-
tle more than one or another group ethos. However, this colloquial and
modern use of the word ignores its much older and deeper meanings.
Culture, after all, is etymologically linked to cultus, that is, to the invisibil-
ity of labor and worship, a relationship visible in a ritual image or instru-
ment whose cultural significance is imbued by the cult that brought it into
being. But secular modernity consists in the detachment of culture from
cultus, something inconceivable in a traditional culture where everything,
all implements and clothing, bears the imprint of the sacred. In the same
way, a traditional culture’s worldview is inconceivable in secular moder-
nity, whose foundational perspective is dualistic, objectifying, commodify-
ing—hence the corrosive effect that secular modernism inexorably has on
traditional cultures around the world.
Here I do not have space to discuss in detail how and where secu-
lar modernity emerged, but I do have to admit the role that anti-iconic
Protestantism played, the Cromwellian antipathy not just to the sacred
images that bore the stamp of the venerable and sacred, but also to their
settings, to monasteries, statuary, and sacred sites—in short, to the indig-
enous cultures of the West. A similar antipathy was borne along with
English and European settlers in the New World, an inherent and inex-
tinguishable dualism of humanity and god, humanity and nature, us and
them, and thus also a wake of destroyed indigenous cultures. Secular
modernity, especially in North America, certainly derives from the dual-
ism built into exoteric Judaism and Christianity.
Both communism and capitalism inherit this dualism, secularized
into narratives of historical progress dependent upon the objectification
On the Counterculture 149
of nature and of other people, which is, as Lynn White pointed out in his
famous essay of 1967, in turn derived from the Jewish and Christian rejec-
tion of spirits and gods in the natural world.2 The 1950s in many respects
represent the zenith of American industrialism, and also arguably the
zenith of communism—both of which are being rejected in the 1962 Port
Huron Statement that called not only for a new polis, but also for a new
culture. In the 1960s, something new but also ancient was being born.
Historical interpretations of the 1960s tend primarily, I would suggest,
toward narratives of progress, aided by the successes of the civil rights
movement in the United States during this period. In other words, the era
is often interpreted as moving in a direction of social progress through
history, marked and to some extent driven by social protest and conflict—
by the marches against segregation and the protests against the Vietnam
War, by students closing down universities or parts of them, and so forth.
Such a narrative commandeers a disparate collection of events and herds
them along in service to a more or less Marxist-tinged narrative of awak-
ening socioeconomic consciousness.3 An apparently opposed narrative,
obviously, is one of decline and fragmentation: from this perspective, the
1960s represent social disintegration, riots, violence, narcissistic individu-
alism, the twilight of authority, and cultural deterioration.
But I have come to wonder about the extent to which these familiar
narratives obscure our understanding of what was afoot during that era.
Does a pessimistic or an optimistic narrative really help to explain what
the counterculture was? The term “counterculture,” attributed to Theodore
Roszak, is very much akin to the word “antinomian,” or against the nomos
(community, culture). Antinomianism was a common accusation against
Christian “heretics,” who were said to believe themselves beyond the law,
beyond conventional morality, in Nietzsche’s terms, beyond good and evil.
Is it possible that the counterculture of the 1960s also represented a resur-
gence of archaic Western perspectives sometimes deemed “heretical”?
The late 1960s counterculture was fairly explicitly antinomian—
often, it represented a conscious break with conventional forms of
Western Christianity, and indeed, with “modernity” conceived as
industrial-commercial society, and along with that, a rejection of conven-
tional morality. Take, for instance, this excerpt from Jeff Nuttal’s essay
“Applications of Extasy” in the avant-garde collection Counter Culture
(1969): “It is not very thoroughly realized in these days how completely
the adherents of international culture, the culture whose surest mark
is the long romantic haircut and the elaborate ornate disarray of dress,
150 America n G urus
whose style is one in which the old patterns of Bohemian Europe merge
with the adopted patterns of the Hindu East and the Prairie Indian, have
stepped outside the morality [that] has governed civilization since the
Middle Ages.”4 Strictly speaking, this is antinomianism.
I have come to think that the counterculture of the late 1960s rep-
resented a complex resurgence of what we could term the suppressed
archaic, not only antinomianism, but a whole constellation of archaisms,
and a conscious rejection of the conventional historical narratives of the
West, both “optimistic” and “pessimistic.” It also was, in a more profound
sense than usually acknowledged, a rejection of secular modernity. The
long hair, the fringed clothing, the communal ethos of groups like the
Diggers, the widespread emergence during this period of communes, the
turn toward a life lived closer to the land and to nature, all of this in ret-
rospect may seem cliché, but taken along with intellectual statements of
the period, leads me to believe that something much deeper was going on
than generally is recognized.
In a 1967 statement entitled “Consciousness and Practical Action,”
Allen Ginsberg urged his audience “if we’re going to go back to tribal
wisdom, let’s get back to tribal wisdom.”5 Central to Ginsberg’s remarks—
delivered at the Dialectics of Liberation conference convened in London
by Ronald Laing, David Cooper, and Joseph Berke—is the “religious expe-
rience, the peak experience, the mystical experience, the art experience,
identity experience, unitive experience of One, of all of us being one—not
only ourselves [but] also one with the flowers, the very trees and plants.”
“Everybody’s known that,” Ginsberg continues, “everybody’s glimpsed
that and has had that natural experience.”6 He rejects “all strange forms of
being,” so that one treats a person as a person, not as a cop, a capitalist, a
communist, a Maoist, or Allen Ginsberg, not as “self,” but in a “recognition
of that one which extends outward, outward, to everybody, everywhere,” in
short, one should embody “interpersonal Bodhisattva conduct.”7 Tibetan
Buddhism plays an obvious and central role in Ginsberg’s thought already
at this time—he mentions Dudjom Rinpoche, a very well-known Tibetan
lama living in Nepal, and indeed, Ginsberg’s whole statement is an effort
to, as he put it, convert San Francisco into an “electric Tibet.”8
What makes these kinds of remarks—examples of which I can mul-
tiply at some length from other sources—important here is this: they all
emphasize, in different ways, a break with the conventional narratives of
Jewish and Christian historicity and dualism. We can see the break with
the conventional Marxist/Communist historical narrative a few years
On the Counterculture 151
earlier, in the Port Huron Statement, which famously calls for a New Left.
It is quite clear that the authors were aware of the disastrous results of
communism in the Soviet Union, and they were calling for a “New Left”
for just that reason—they could not believe in the historical narrative that
Marxism supplied. And they did not believe in the conventional narrative
of “modernity” in America that had been supplied to them from elemen-
tary school. A new vision was necessary.
In fact, a new vision is exactly what the Port Huron Statement called
for. Its authors wrote, with a sense of urgency, and in words that have a
particular resonance in hindsight, with our themes in mind, that “Our
work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the
experiment with living.” They wrote against the “human potentiality
for violence, unreason, and submission to authority,” and in favor of
“self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” Their
statement endorsed independence, not egotism or narcissism, but “a
democracy of individual participation.” They see America “without com-
munity impulse,” and by implication, they seek to restore a sense of
common purpose and community, but not through some grand utopian
project, let alone by force. They were calling for something new.
By 1968, something new clearly had emerged, and it was not strictly
or even primarily political—it was religious and cultural. That is what
we see in remarks like those of Ginsberg or Nuttal or Stephen Gaskin,
a charismatic figure a bit later in San Francisco. The influx of Asian reli-
gions, specifically Hinduism and Buddhism, and the rediscovery of some
aspects of the West, for instance, the poetry of William Blake and through
it some aspects of Western esotericism, all represented an infusion into
“modernity” of elements that were not very easily commodifiable, that in
fact represented the explicit rejection of the commodifiable, the packaged,
the “modern.” More than that, they represented the infusion of the vertical
into the horizontal, that is, the invocation of timelessness, the assertion of
the millennial present, not held off as some imagined future event as in
Marxism or, for that matter, in Judaism or Christianity, but as present and
immediately available.
I believe that the term “counterculture” is misleading, because it
implies that there is a prevailing culture in secular modernity, and I do
not think this is so.9 Modern industrial-technical society has no culture.
In fact, the absence of a prevailing culture is precisely what makes secular
modernity so seductive—after all, industrial-technical society represents
freedom from the ties of culture and, indeed, of notions of sacred lands or
152 America n G urus
the secular millennialism that impelled the Left through much of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Weatherman phenomenon was
an almost inevitable outgrowth of the secular millennialism implicit in
the SDS—the Weatherman group sought to speed the coming of the mil-
lennium through violence, but both groups aimed in the same general
direction, and both vaguely imagined a grandly transformed society that
was, nonetheless, still only a society, not a culture.12
What makes the communal movement born in the late 1960s so
remarkable is that it rejects secular millennialist aims for society as a
whole, and turns instead back toward archaic wellsprings of culture that it
seeks to incarnate immediately and on a federalist, or subsidiarist, model.
One sees cooperation among different groups on occasion, and broader
coalitions, but the center of gravity was local and immediate—the com-
munes in many respects represented efforts to create new traditional cul-
tures.13 When we step back from this period and think about it in a much
larger historical context, it is clear that the late 1960s represent at least in
part the rebirth of the archaic in the guise of the new.
Furthermore, the underlying impetus for the “counterculture” was not
against, but rather aligned with some of the most characteristic traditions
of the pre-Christian, in particular, Celtic West. These traditions were tribal
and family-centered, dispersed, and organized heterarchically rather than
bureaucratically/hierarchically. A heterarchy has multiple lines of author-
ity, depending on the sphere under consideration; it is flexible, and tends
more toward adventitious coalitions or confederations than toward an
enduring and far-flung imperial structure like, for instance, that of Rome.
In fact, we will recall the antagonism between the Celts and the Romans,
as the Romans expanded their empire westward.
In many respects, the “counterculture” was truly pagan, pagan in the
sense that it harked back not only to the confederated tribalism of the
Celts and Northern Europeans, but also in its adherents’ desire to return
to the land, to identify with nature in more ancient ways, and to experi-
ence what we might term variants of gnosis, that is, of direct individual
spiritual insight. One sees this in the attraction to Hindu and Buddhist
gurus, but also in the significant role played by psychedelics during this
era. All of these, like tribal music, are at least in part informed by a desire
to go beyond the self-other division, to break beyond the objectification
and self-other dualism that is the hallmark of modernity.
We see exactly these emphases in Theodore Roszak’s seminal The
Making of a Counter Culture (1969), the subtitle of which is Reflections
154 America n G urus
American Gurus
14
among the cults such as sexual license, the flouting of local authorities and
political customs, and the actual transgression of the laws.”1 McNamara’s
historical generalizations are no doubt overbroad, here, but as we will see,
his remarks do apply to some parts of the contemporary American reli-
gious landscape.
While cognitive science and neurobiology do shed some light on
aspects of American immediatism, some of the most penetrating remarks
come from an earlier figure, Carl Jung (1875–1961). In Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology (1943/1945), after describing his theory of how men
need to integrate their female aspect (anima) and how women need to
integrate their male aspect (animus), he then outlines what he terms
“the mana-personality.” Jung is, of course, drawing on a term that has
an interesting history of its own in the study of religion.2 The word mana
in Polynesian or Melanesian religion refers to supernatural power that
resides in or is generated from an individual creature or object. Jung
uses the term to describe a personality that has become conscious of its
“unconscious complexes” and that becomes “complex-free,” so that “noth-
ing more should happen that is not sanctioned by the ego,” and such an
individual has the “steadfastness of a superman or the sublimity of a per-
fect sage.”3 “Historically,” Jung continues, “the mana-personality evolves
into the hero and the godlike being, whose early form is the priest.” The
mana-personality’s power, Jung thinks, comes from the extent to which it
draws “to itself the power belonging to the anima.”4
What Jung describes here almost uncannily captures aspects of some
(though by no means all) of these guru-figures. As for the individual who
becomes so identified, “one can scarcely help admiring oneself a little for
having seen more deeply into things than others,” just as “the others have
such an urge to find a tangible hero somewhere, or a superior wise man,
a leader and father, some undisputed authority.” So the mana-personality
fills needs on both sides, Jung asserts, and in fact it is “hard to see how
one can escape the sovereign power of the primordial images.”5 The
mana-personality “is always in possession of the secret name, or of some
esoteric knowledge, or has the prerogative of a special way of acting—quod
licet Jovi, no licet bovi [what is licit for Jove is not licit for cattle].” And actually
there is still more in Jung’s discussion. For beyond the mana-personality
is “something” [Jung’s quotation marks] that is “strange to us and yet so
near, wholly ourselves and yet unknowable, a virtual center of so mysteri-
ous a constitution that it can claim anything—kinship with beasts and
gods, with crystals and with stars—without moving us to wonder, without
From Europe to America 161
religious traditions. In what follows, although I will survey a few of the early
and later “Traditionalists,” we will focus on one primary theme: the central
role of immediatism in this movement. The truth is that “Traditionalism”
can be understood as having at least some characteristics in common
with, and in influencing, the later development of immediatism.
“Traditionalism” as a modern intellectual current began with
French author René Guénon (1886–1951) and Ceylonese author Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), both of whom published prodigiously.
Guénon and Coomaraswamy both offered highly intellectual and abstract
works on Eastern and Western religious traditions. Coomaraswamy’s
works were highly critical of industrial modernity, and, influenced by
authors like John Ruskin and William Morris, he defended traditional arts
and crafts. Coomaraswamy’s writings on religious subjects tended to be
very dense, more so in the later works, with detailed and discursive foot-
notes referring to both Eastern and Western classical works. Guénon, on
the other hand, wrote in a more ex cathedra style, and it is Guénon whose
works most clearly demonstrate the universalist style that has come to
characterize this movement.
Early in the 1900s, Guénon joined a number of different Western eso-
teric groups, including the Martinist Order, Freemasonry, and the Gnostic
Church, and in 1912, was brought into Sufism by a painter, Ivan Agueli
(1869–1917). He continued to live in Paris until 1930, and during this time,
he published a series of books that exemplified his approach to world
religions. His first book was originally his doctoral thesis, Introduction
general à l’études des doctrines Hindoues [Introduction to the Study of Hindu
Doctrines], rejected by Sylvain Levi of the Sorbonne as not strictly aca-
demic. Early in his writing career, Guénon attacked the spiritualist move-
ment as well as Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society in L’erreur
Spirite and Théosophisme: Histoire d’une pseudo-religion. Subsequent books
included L’homme et son devenir selon le Vedanta [Man and His Becoming
According to the Vedanta], as well as the seminal La crise du monde moderne
[The Crisis of the Modern World].16
Guénon’s works reveal a universal perspective from which he surveys
the world’s religions regarding their esoteric center—a perch from which
he also mercilessly critiques modernity and the many anti-traditional or
counter-traditional figures and groups that inhabit it. Guénon’s writing
is striking in its universal authority—its vantage point is not from any
particular religious tradition, but from that of a universal esoterism that
allows him to develop an overview of modernity startlingly different from
From Europe to America 165
Islamic or even Sufi. The role that Hinduism played in his work is evident
even from the titles of his books and from our previous brief discussion of
modernity belonging to the Kali Yuga, or latter time-cycle of dissolution.
In particular, Advaita Vedanta provides the basis for Guénon’s metaphys-
ics, similar in many respects to Neoplatonism. But whereas Neoplatonism
was largely ignored, particularly in the modern period, Vedanta and
Vedantic metaphysics provide a similar metaphysics that emphasizes an
ultimate nonduality. And this nondual metaphysics does not belong solely
to one or another tradition; it is an expression of primordial truth to which
we have intellectual access. The word “intellectual” in Guénon’s usage
includes but also transcends what usually is meant by the term: intellec-
tion is direct intellectual perception of truth, liberation through identity of
atma with Brahma, the nondual principle of existence.19
Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (1945), argu-
ably his most influential and signature work, focuses on the indications
that ours is an era not of progress but of inexorable decline. Our own
era is characterized by the “acceleration of time,” the occlusion of ancient
truths, and ever more materialism, not to mention the encroachment of
downright malevolent or evil forces. It is measured against the timeless-
ness of paradise, the “center of the world,” representing “the primordial
state” of humanity, with which the temporal cycles begin, and in which
it ends.20 The “end of time” is what the book as a whole is about, and in
particular, about when “time is changed into space,” that is, when the cur-
rent time-cycle of decline ends in a “primordial state” that is the inception
of a new golden age and time-cycle. The primordial state is the “seat of
immortality” and timelessness seen by the “third eye” that sees eternity,
not time.21 The entire book, seen in this light, is on the one hand a pro-
vocative analysis of how ours is an age of decline, but on the other hand an
affirmation of primordial timelessness, eternity, and truth.
The relevance of Guénon’s work to our theme of immediatism, in other
words, is obvious. Seen in the intellectual context of immediatism even as
we have sketched it so far, Guénon’s work takes on a particular importance
because it inaugurates what, by the end of the twentieth century, would
become a panoply of figures and works exemplifying similar sources and
inclinations. He drew on Hinduism and from it developed a universal-
ist interpretation of religion. Guénon himself undoubtedly would have
condemned many modern immediatist figures as examples of counter-
feit spirituality or of infernal “counter-traditions,” but in some respects,
Guénon’s universalist perspective sets a precedent for the immediatist
From Europe to America 167
gurus of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But before we
get to those figures, we need to turn to one more major figure in this
movement, the successor to Guénon in many respects, Frithjof Schuon.
Frithjof Schuon was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1907, his father a
musician who also taught at Basel Conservatory, and Schuon’s early years
included reading or having read to him such books as the Bhagavad Gita,
the Vedas, the Koran, and Goethe, as well as Emerson. Already as an
adolescent, Schuon encountered the early books of René Guénon, with
which he immediately felt an affinity.22 Although he had been educated in
a Lutheran ambience, after his father’s premature death, he and the rest
of the family returned to their ancestral Catholicism. And during this time
he also wrote, presaging his future life, that “the nature of the higher ego,
in which the noble man must be consumed, is feminine: he must be con-
sumed in the Eternal Feminine, just as woman must be consumed in the
Eternal Masculine.”23 He served in the military, and then in 1929, moved
to Paris where he worked as a textile designer. During this period (the
early 1930s) he moved back to Switzerland and completed what became
his first book, Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung, published in 1935.24 He had
already begun this work at age twenty, at that time thinking it would have
the title The Doctrine of Deliverance.
Schuon’s first book has been published in an English translation by
Gillian Harris and Angela Schwartz as Primordial Meditation: Contemplating
the Real, although William Stoddart suggested that an alternative transla-
tion of the original title might be “Themes to Aid Primordial Meditation.”25
But either way, in this first book one does clearly see many of the major
themes that were later to be much more fully expressed not only in
Schuon’s work, but also in his life. Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick
Laude describe Schuon as an exponent of “the universality and primordi-
ality of fundamental metaphysical principles,” which “occupies the most
central position in Schuon’s thought,” and Renaud Fabbri in fact explicitly
characterizes Schuon and his work as “primordialist,” in contrast to those
approaches to Schuon’s work that emphasize its Islamic aspects.26 Fabbri
writes that “the ‘primordialist’ approach, while recognizing Schuon’s
essential connection with Sufism and his function as Shaykh, will insist
more strongly on his reference to the Religio Perennis, the ‘timeless eso-
teric truth.’ ” For primordialists, Fabbri continues, “Islam represents only
a sacramental and symbolic support for gnosis,” and much misunder-
standing about Schuon “originated in the erroneous presupposition that
he should be interpreted primarily as a Muslim figure.”27
168 America n G urus
even a Sufi order—while at the same time in some respects also shocking
those who want to emphasize outward or exoteric formalities.
In fact, one could argue that Schuon’s primordialism entails both
homage to and antinomian “breaking” of an entire array of traditional
religious forms. It may have seemed outlandish to some Muslim observ-
ers, for instance, when photos were published of Schuon in American
Indian garb in front of a teepee, or in Indiana, just as the images of a kind
of bare-breasted or nude Native American Virgin Mary with Christ child
may have seemed blasphemous to devout Catholics.49 And there is prec-
edent for some of the American Indian themes in the photos of Schuon
as a young boy, playing and dressed as an Indian, I suppose.50 But in fact
in our larger historical context, the universalist religion that Schuon cre-
ated makes sense as a reflection of the (mildly antinomian) transcendence
of particular religious forms—a kind of mingling and “breaking” of exo-
teric forms, while at the same time asserting their primordial origin and
supersession.51
It also seems to be the case that Schuon’s “primordial gatherings” were
intended, like the tariqah itself, to presage or invoke a future golden age,
and its primordial culture at the dawn of a new cycle. He represented, one
of his wives and disciples wrote, “an Avataric phenomenon,” “a prophetic
figure,” a “spiritual manifestation,” and an incarnation of the “Logos,” the
“Center which unites every spoke.”52 Schuon represented “a new category
that has never existed before,” because he represents “pure metaphysics,
the primordial religion.”53 And the ritual nudity of the group’s “primordial
dance” corresponds to “bodily Invocation,” representing a state of nude
primordiality and a new, paradisiacal golden age, even if the contemporary
cycle is one of decline.54
Schuon’s “primordial gatherings” do directly reflect themes that pre-
occupied him for his entire life, which can be seen throughout his work.
In fact, when we look back at Schuon’s written and visual works, we find
much in them that correspond to the themes of the divine feminine, of
beauty and eros, of the transcendence of forms. Even in scholarly works
by his followers, we find remarks suggesting the continuity between
Schuon’s life and works, including the controversial or shocking elements.
Patrick Laude writes, for instance, a bit elliptically of how “through dance”
and “the connection to the cosmic and celestial quality of power, or else
by contact with. . . aesthetic and erotic vibrations,” a kind of “alchemical”
and healing shamanism or “white magic” could restore “psychophysical
balance” through “the barakah of Amerindian Shamanism.”55 This would
From Europe to America 173
Although Rawlinson could not include everyone who fit the definition
of “Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions,” his book unquestionably
serves as a valuable compendium for researchers of this phenomenon.
Here, of course, it is impossible for reasons of space to survey all of the
relevant figures and the groups or traditions that they founded. In fact,
to do so would undoubtedly take us down numerous byways, some of
them rather far afield. But as Andrew Rawlinson remarks, in this par-
ticular area, “there are no real culs de sac,” and I think that is essentially
correct.58 That is, a considerable part of the Western-guru phenomenon
that Rawlinson outlines, for all of its bewildering diversity, is at heart
immediatist. The Western guru-figure represents a natural culmination
or answer to the historical problem of immediatism in the West. In this
respect, the phenomenon of Western immediatist gurus perhaps was
inevitable.
Before we turn to more of these figures, though, it is important to
differentiate between those who belong more or less to the West as
such, and to those who, although they are Westerners by birth, derive
their teachings or their lineage (or “certification”) from Asian religions.
In what follows, we will begin with a handful of those who belong, at
least nominally, to the West, and then turn to those gurus who, often
flamboyantly, represent variant forms of a immediatism drawn fre-
quently from Hinduism or Buddhism. As we will see, there is much
explanatory strength in our hypothesis of an underlying immediatism
that links many disparate figures, works, and religious phenomena. But
we begin with mysticism.
15
In Magic and mysticism, I remarked on how few are the Western apo-
phatic mystics of the twentieth century.1 Strictly speaking, this is the
case: so far as publicly known exemplars, one can name them using the
fingers of one hand. But there are a few exemplary figures, and it will serve
us well to take a look at their works.2 Western mysticism is, of course, a dif-
ferent category than that represented by Schuon, even though he certainly
developed his early writing in the broad context of Christian mysticism.
And in fact it is relatively difficult to clearly differentiate even the figures
we will look at here as strictly Western, because even the most strongly
Christian of them clearly had direct access to Buddhist practitioners, prac-
tices, and teachings. But it is important to recognize, all the same, that
there are examples of Western immediatist mysticism who do not seem
to owe very much to Asian religions. Among these figures are Bernadette
Roberts, Eckhart Tolle, Peter Kingsley, and John de Ruiter.
Bernadette Roberts (1931–) is a California Christian contemplative
whose closest predecessors are Meister Eckhart and the author of the
Cloud of Unknowing. She sees herself as “outside the traditional frame of
reference—or the beaten path of mystical theology so well travelled by
Christian contemplatives.”3 Because she depicts herself in this way, one
has to ask what relationship her work bears to Asian religions, in particu-
lar, the nondual traditions like Advaita Vedanta, as well as Buddhism. After
all, she tells us herself that she spent at least a week with Zen Buddhist
contemplatives.4 In a late extended essay, she took care to distinguish her
work from Advaita Vedanta, writing against interpretations of her work by
founders of new religions like A. H. Almaas,
176 America n G urus
Roberts thinks that Advaita allows those in the West to avoid or bypass
monotheism and its implications, including those of the soul [not simply
the “self”], of “the Transcendent,” or of the “supernatural.” Effectively, she
thinks, Advaita ultimately is “a focus on self alone.”
By contrast, Roberts’s work, both published and unpublished, out-
lines her deeply Christian journey toward realizing “no-self,” which she
detailed in her book The Experience of No-Self (1982) and its culmination in
her subsequent book, The Path to No-Self (1985/rpt. 1991). She does claim
that “[i]n the Christian tradition, the falling away of self (not the ego) has
never been addressed!”6 Nonetheless, in the latter part of her book The
Experience of No-Self, Roberts acknowledges her deep affinity with Eckhart
as “one who has made the journey [to no-self ] and crossed over,” and if she
belongs to any Christian predecessor tradition, it is his.7
The Experience of No-Self is, Roberts writes, “the personal account of
a two-year journey in which I experienced the falling away of everything
I can call a self. It was a journey through an unknown passageway that
led to a life so new and different that, despite nearly forty years of var-
ied contemplative experiences, I never suspected its existence.”8 Roberts’s
spiritual journey begins when she gazes into her empty self and discovers
that she can find no self, whereupon she experiences a sensation like an
elevator falling hundreds of floors. After this stunning experience, she
realizes that “[w]hen there is no personal self, there is no personal God.”
She saw clearly that these two go together—“and where they went, I have
never found out.”9
All of this would suggest that Roberts’s work, for all its parallels with
Advaita Vedanta and with Buddhism, is in her view to be firmly distin-
guished from them. In What Is Self? Roberts analyzes her experience and
understanding of “no-self” with Hinduism and Buddhism. She thinks that
Hinduism represents an earlier phase of understanding, a necessary one,
Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 177
[I]n all our religions we are presented with a great Truth or Truths
that we eventually take for granted as a kind of foregone conclusion.
Thus we hear and read about Truth and go on our way, without,
however, actually realizing the enormity of its revelation. Perhaps
the ultimate paradox is that our great religious Truths can only be
revealed when everything we know and experience as these Truths
has fallen away. Truth, after all, is “that” which can never fall away.11
lie hidden in the souls and minds of men and women today—and
which urgently need to be brought to light in a world groping in so
much spiritual and intellectual darkness. It seeks nothing less than
to reveal the original nature of Western philosophy in its true, but
long forgotten, sense.
Jacob Needleman writes that Reality demands that we “open our eyes to
the unseen realities nourishing the ancient roots of our civilization. Of
even more importance, it invites us to the great work of opening ourselves
to the mystical reality that is calling from within to each and every one
of us.”32
All of these encomia share an emphasis on how Kingsley’s work leads
us back to the beginning of Western civilization to see it in a new light,
and at the same time, introduces us to inward mystical reality. All of these
authors represent different strands or currents of immediatism, so it is
not surprising that Reality resonates well with them. In some respects, it
fills a need: an affirmation of the primordial wisdom of the West. And that
is what Kingsley seeks to introduce us to. These cover remarks express
accurately the twin emphases of this large book, which claims that not
only has the entire history of the West been a kind of colossal mistake that
this book is meant to rectify, but also that at the root of the Greek West
is the recognition of our primordial unity with all things: “nothing exists
apart from you. There is nothing outside you any more: nothing out there
at all. You are everybody, everywhere.”33
Reality is far different in style from Roberts’s or Tolle’s books.
Roberts’s and Tolle’s works are fundamentally autobiographical, and
turn on their author’s narratives. This is even true of Roberts’s less auto-
biographical works, which still are based on her comparison of her own
mystical experiences with the accounts or perspectives of others, for
instance, Jung. By comparison, Kingsley’s work is much more gnomic
Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 183
was carried from Asian to North America: from the Mongols through
to the Iroquois.”48 From the Iroquois Confederacy, this symbolism was
adopted by the Founding Fathers and “its imagery went straight into creat-
ing the Great Seal of the United States.”49 In other words, Kingsley is link-
ing the emergence of Western culture in Greece with the later emergence
of Western culture in North America, in both cases, with a Mongolian or
“Mongolian” primordial source. But the final section is also, more broadly,
about how “civilizations. . . are brought into existence quite consciously,
with unbelievable compassion and determination, from another world.”
It is about how “every single civilization, including this western world,
was brought into being from a sacred place to serve a sacred purpose.”50
Eventually, though, cultures die, and then it is time for a “new seeding.”51
And there is a theme introduced here that recurs not only in Tolle’s
works, but also in that of other immediatist authors—the theme of cul-
tural emergence. Tolle suggests, in A New Earth, that the purpose of those
who have spiritually awakened is to nurture an emerging, spiritually illu-
minated culture. So, too, Kingsley’s work here has a prophetic dimen-
sion: the perspective he offers is epic, spanning the birth and death of
civilizations. He distinguishes between those who live in time, “for today
or for tomorrow,” and those who “know how to work in perfect stillness,
imperceptibly bringing the future into being.”52 Part of bringing the
future into being is destroying what is not useful any more, and he saw
this as a role of the Mongolian barbarians under the Khan. That line of
thought does naturally lead to questions about why the Mongolian hordes
and their violence could be interpreted as good, while that attributed to
Tibetan Buddhist leaders is depicted as bad, but the point remains that
Kingsley is offering a kind of prophetic metatheory of cultural decline and
cultural emergence. And his copious endnotes, about half the book, show
Kingsley also to be a kind of outlaw scholar, strongly differentiating his
interpretations from those of the academic mainstream.
We have to note, just as some reviewers have, that for all these many
hundreds of pages, it is not quite clear what is the praxis that leads from
our benighted state to that of illumination. One reader, author Caitlín
Matthews, pointed this out in a brief review of A Story. Does Kingsley
himself practice shamanism? “Is there any praxis behind the theory?”
she asks. Or, she adds, “if this is a private poker game, then please at
least put up a notice so that we can all tiptoe away and go and play with
each other the great game of spiritual sharing from experience.”53 But of
course by now we are familiar with this phenomenon—for the tradition
Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 187
Night Class (1970) and the subsequent publication of The Caravan (1972),
a record of similar talks and dialogues from around the United States,
made Stephen a national phenomenon.
A close reading of these books shows just how unusual Gaskin was.
Photographs from the time show a lanky man with long hair and a man-
darin beard, seated cross-legged on a rolled-up sleeping bag on a stage,
sitting among friends cross-legged outside in a park, or standing, address-
ing a huge crowd of colorfully dressed, often similarly long-haired fel-
low hippies. But what distinguishes Gaskin is what he said. And what he
said ranged across Western esoteric traditions, Asian religions, Russian,
British, and American parapsychological experiments, philosophy, occult-
ism, magic, Tantra—a dizzying gamut of esoteric subjects addressed in a
folksy, appealing, very straightforward way. It is difficult to offer here a full
sense of these extraordinary conversations.
Gaskin begins the recorded text of Monday Night Class in 1969, when
the class was held in the Family Dog Ballroom in San Francisco, and there
were around a thousand people attending. From the very beginning, Gaskin
consciously evokes a group consciousness, which he compares to “when a
man and woman are making love” because “it takes about twenty minutes
for their fields to fully merge.” “It’ll be that way,” he continues, “here with
us.”7 He begins with this idea of collective shared consciousness because
that is essentially what Gaskin spoke from and taught—energy exchange
and telepathic sharing. Gaskin summarizes this point: “If you admit to
making one telepathic communication, if you say one signal goes between
two human [beings], from that one signal, even if it’s only a feeling, you
can derive the entire rest of religion and metaphysics.”8 Effectively, by tap-
ping into this collective “electromagnetic field,” “we also have the book of
directions on the manipulation, receiving, and transmission of that elec-
trical field by the use of your own body and mind.” This, he said, is effec-
tively what was taught by Hermes Trismegistus in antiquity, as seen in the
Emerald Tablet and the doctrine of magical correspondences.9
The Monday Night Class included many references to magic. In a
series of questions and answers, Gaskin spoke at length about magic,
referring to ceremonial magic and medieval magical texts, but said that
it’s actually much simpler. “It takes a great deal of mental to make a little
something happen in the astral,” he said, and “then it takes a great deal of
astral to make a little something happen in the physical.” “The way you do
magic on that level is you decide that you know what you want and then
just sock it to it with everything you have, that you know what you want
The Sage on the Stage 191
and then let it happen.”10 “Magic,” he continues, “is working with vibes.
That we work all together for the vibes for the good of us all is the real
thing. A magician is just someone who moves the vibes around.”11 In a
subsequent commentary from 2005, Gaskin added the coda, “It needs to
be understood that this chapter is very much about Acid reality.”12
One might ask what the origins of Gaskin’s teachings were, beyond
wide reading in religion and literature.13 What he said was certainly
informed by his psychedelic experiences, although he was by no means a
psychedelic evangelist in the way that Leary was. It’s obvious he took acid,
and sometimes was given it unbeknownst to him, which in such cases
sometimes made his public discourse a bit chaotic.14 Beyond the obvious
use of marijuana and LSD—and peyote—Gaskin said his teachings were
drawn from the different world religions, but in particular from the eso-
teric and practical traditions of Hinduism (Vedanta and Yoga), Sufism,
Kabbalah, and most of all, Zen Buddhism. He said he had visited Indian
gurus, practiced formal Zen meditation, and was deeply indebted to Suzuki
Roshi.15 But Gaskin’s religion was a practical amalgam of Western occult-
ism, Zen Buddhism, and Vedanta, salted with his down-home American
commonsense style.
And Gaskin’s definitions are certainly his own. For Gaskin, human
communion is essential. Asked “Is satori to the mind what orgasm is
to the body?” Gaskin replied “Not necessarily, although you can achieve
satori through orgasm. Satori is specifically the clean, wide-open and hon-
est telepathic communication between two open minds.”16 “Samadhi,” he
continues, “is the superconscious, and it’s always telepathic in the super-
conscious.. . . Samadhi can be the kind you first get when you’re sitting
cross-legged, and you’ve been meditating for twenty years, or when you
get stoned, it goes ram-bam, and does that thing to you.”17 Needless to say,
none of this corresponds very closely to Buddhist or Hindu uses of these
terms. “White light,” he continues, is when you’re “over-amped” on LSD
and blown your circuits—it’s when you’ve “expanded your consciousness”
and “blown your mind.”18
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a garbling of various Asian reli-
gious traditions with some LSD thrown in, and in fact that dismissal is
arguably what has happened, historically, since very little scholarship has
taken seriously the phenomenon represented by Stephen. But there is
something very real here: this was a dramatic public phenomenon, and
Gaskin was its leading figure. By 1970, he had an audience in San Francisco
of 1,500 people, and some of them decided that it would be a good idea to
192 America n G urus
go out on the open road. They got together more than two hundred people
and a caravan of buses, and took to the highways, going up to Oregon, and
across the United States and back. It is a remarkable phenomenon, this
hippie caravan that would stop in different places along the route, with
Gaskin leading public discourses, a kind of traveling Monday Night Class.
Gaskin’s talks during this period are recorded in The Caravan (1972),
an unpaginated book of talks and photographs, which was distributed by
Random House. The caravan of buses, the talks, and the publications gave
Gaskin national attention. We might observe that the origin of The Caravan
also was a meeting in San Francisco of the American Academy of Religion
and the Society for the Study of Biblical Literature. Some attendees of that
conference met with Gaskin, who acted as a spokesman for the hippies,
and subsequently many of them “set me [Gaskin] up on a speaking tour in
all of their churches.”19 As a result, The Caravan is quite similar to Monday
Night Class in structure: there are questions or comments from the audi-
ence, and Gaskin’s improvisational riffs on spirituality in response.
Early in The Caravan, Gaskin was asked about death and the afterlife,
and his reply was quite revealing, not only for his own perspective, but
also for the larger view of immediatism as a phenomenon. Gaskin said, “If
you’ve led a bad life you might not die well, because it takes great strength
of character to die well.” But then he went on: “You see, I belong to the
sudden school, and I believe that once you realize the unsulliable nature
of the intellect that it’s no longer necessary to seek absolution for past sins,
and that doctrine is so potent that anyone who hears it and understands
it has their past sins absolved.”20 At the same time, he does not endorse
radical antinomianism, and in fact, shortly thereafter, when asked “What
is spiritual enlightenment?” replies: “The first hallmark is being compas-
sionate.. . . The only thing I recognize as being cool is being compassionate
and doing your best to help out.”21
Gaskin’s emphasis on “the unsulliable nature of the intellect” and on
sudden enlightenment is quite important. It underscores what we see more
broadly in American immediatism as it emerges in the 1960s and 1970s.
Gaskin makes it clear that he belongs to no particular religion, though he
is certainly deferential to them in some ways, even using monotheistic
language (albeit in heterodox ways). He is explicitly “a spiritual teacher,”
but the origin of his teaching is direct, immediate cognition that is acces-
sible to everyone.22 Challenged at the University of Missouri in 1971 by an
audience member who demanded a “pre-enlightened rational argument
that demonstrates this,” Gaskin replied, “As the fellows who wrote the
The Sage on the Stage 193
spent time in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in 1974 for marijuana pos-
session, but that too in his view represents his fierce independence and
libertarian refusal to submit to the dictates of an overbearing centralized
government.
In fact, in his subsequent political works—which are not nearly as
entertaining reading as his earlier spiritual teachings and conversations—
Gaskin emphasizes the importance of the Constitution in ensuring the
liberty of individuals and communities, and he also emphasizes his own
status as an outlaw figure. His genuine concern for the protection of
individual and community rights under the Constitution is certainly the
leitmotif of Rendered Infamous: A Book of Political Reality (1981), and his
outlaw identification is visible also in his declaration of his run for presi-
dent in 2000, under the rubric of the “Outlaw Party.”27 It’s visible, too, in
the title of his guide for political activists, An Outlaw in My Heart (2000).
Gaskin concludes, “That is why we protest: not to break the law, but to ful-
fill it. We assume that the law represents the people; and if the law doesn’t
represent the people, it should be amended. If this is not the assumption
under which we are all doing this, then no one owes any allegiance to this
government or to any other.”28 Gaskin’s declaration of his candidacy for
president began “I want to be President because the country that I’ve lived
in for 65 years is not as free as it was when I was born, and it’s gotten less
free all my life. I still believe in the Constitution that I learned about in the
third grade, and I would like to see that be what we live under, and not this
patched-together thing that the corporations have bought.”29
In many respects, The Farm represents the declaration of a zone for a
new culture and a new way of being in the world, under the rubric of the
US Constitution as a protection for individual freedom. Originally, those
who came to The Farm took Stephen as their spiritual teacher, but in what
surely has to be an unusual turn of events, if not unique, there was a coup
d’etat, and Gaskin was subsequently a guiding member of the commu-
nity, but not its guru. This is quite interesting, too, because it represents
something quite rare: a guru-figure who remains in the community, but
who no longer holds on to the role of guru. In 1976, Gaskin published This
Season’s People: A Book of Spiritual Teachings, which continued in aphoristic
form the teachings that he had been presenting during the Caravan, when
he had declared himself an “American spiritual teacher.”30 But by 1981,
his writing had taken on a different tone, expressed in the subtitle A Book
of Political Reality. The Farm went through many changes over the years,
and it did not, by the early twenty-first century, have any visible religious
The Sage on the Stage 195
figure that took on the role of “American spiritual teacher.” In 1971, he rue-
fully said there weren’t very many of those. But evidently times change.
Stephen, in any case, was true to his commonsense American roots: his
outlaw religion was archetypal in many respects, and yet he was a home-
grown American guru-figure who more or less gracefully relinquished his
guru status. But some of the subsequent gurus were (to put it mildly) not
quite so inclined.
One such figure, among the more well-known of our authors, was
Richard Alpert (1931–), later known as Ram Dass. We will recall meeting
Alpert earlier, in the section on LSD and Timothy Leary, for Alpert was
Leary’s main academic partner at Harvard in the early 1960s. Alpert was
born to a relatively wealthy and prominent Jewish family in Massachusetts;
his father was instrumental in the founding of Brandeis University. Leary
and Alpert were kicked out of Harvard in 1963, after Andrew Weil wrote
an exposé of their use of LSD with students. Partly behind the exposé, and
behind the split between Leary and Alpert, was Alpert’s continuing infatu-
ations with various young men.37 Whereas Leary went on, as we saw, to
become more or less the pied piper of LSD, Alpert parted ways with Leary
and traveled to India, where in 1967 he met Neem Karoli Baba (d. 1973),
who became his guru. Alpert/Ram Dass was to be among the first in what
became a phenomenon: going to India, staying for a relatively brief period
with a guru there, and returning to the United States as a guru oneself.
Alpert tells the story of meeting with Baba in Be Here Now, a 1971 book
that embodies many aspects of countercultural production characteristic
of the time—a quasi-psychedelic-mandala cover, copious hand illustra-
tions, exotic large, small, and wavy typography, the occasional sexually
explicit image, brown paper. In the center of the cover’s mandala is a
chair, indicating a Western form of “sitting” meditation. In each of the
four directions of the cover is the word “Remember,” recalling the Platonic
idea of anamnesis, of realizing truth as a matter of ceasing to forget. The
cover’s title goes in a sequence, which can be read not only “be here now,”
but also “now be here” and “here now be,” and so forth. The title and the
cover’s symbolism, in other words, indicates a immediatist inclination,
“being here now” being all that’s necessary.
The title, “Be Here Now,” comes primarily from a young American
in traditional Indian dress whom Alpert met in 1967 in India, who went
by the name “Bhagawan Das[s],” but who also had the Buddhist name
“Dharma Sara.” Whenever Alpert brought up his personal dramas, Das
would repeat “just be here now.”38 It was Das who introduced Alpert to
The Sage on the Stage 197
Baba. Baba told Alpert that the night before he had been thinking of his
mother, who had died from a problem with her spleen—which was correct,
and which led Alpert to break down and cry, and to say “it felt like I was
home. Like the journey was over. Like I had finished.”39 But endearingly,
Alpert also writes subsequently that despite his various experiences with
gurus in India, “I am a beginner on the path,” one who has “returned to
the West for a time to work out karma,” and “to share what I have learned
with those of you who are on a similar journey.”40
What we find in the chaotic pages of Be Here Now is not for the most
part, despite the title, on the extreme end of the immediatist spectrum.
It does include oracular statements like “I am without form / without
limit / beyond space beyond time / I am in everything / everything is me
/ am the bliss of the universe, / everything am I.”41 At the same time, we
also read that “When you have quieted your mind / enough / and tran-
scended your ego / enough / You can see how it really is.”42 The former
remark is closer to immediatism, but the latter is closer to a gradual
approach through meditation. In general, the approach in Be Here Now
is not to give specific meditation instructions and advice on stages of a
path, but rather points us toward direct experience of the inner guru,
and of “the way bhakti works / you just love / until / you /and the /
beloved / become one.”43
Be Here Now reportedly sold about a million copies as of its forty-third
print run, after which there have evidently been another ten or fifteen
printings at least, so one can say that over a million copies would be a
conservative estimate. What made the book so popular? It is visually
engrossing, and it intersperses oracular statements of various kinds of
Hindu teachings with ideas drawn not only from Hinduism, but also from
Buddhism, and it even includes references to Gurdjieff, an occult teacher
in Paris early in the twentieth century. But as entertaining as its form is,
its immediatism certainly has much to do with its popularity.
That this is an immediatist text is very clear. For instance, Be Here Now
asserts that “You are the breath / you are the river / you are the void / you
are the desire to be enlightened / you are enlightened.”44 You already are
enlightened, the text tells us confidently; you are the atman, the “divine
self,” you are in “the place of pure being / [and in] that inner place where
you dwell / you just be. There is nothing to be done in that place. From
that place / then, it all happens, it manifests in / perfect harmony with the
universe.”45 “This is the place!” the text repeats, and now is the moment
of “Buddha consciousness” or “Christ consciousness.”46 Like many of our
198 America n G urus
that serves as the basis for Ram Dass’s activities in Maui, Hawaii, where
he lives, and sponsors his outreach activities that include face-to-face
individual online meetings with his students, online broadcasts of
teachings (Bhaktitube), and meditation retreats that include meeting
with him.
In 2010, almost four decades after Be Here Now, Ram Dass published
Be Love Now, a compendium of reminiscences and teachings, prefaced
by Rameshwar Das’s history of Ram Dass’s life from the late 1960s to the
early twenty-first century. Rameshwar Das first met him in 1967 at a talk
Alpert/Ram Dass gave at Wesleyan University from 7:30 p.m. until 3:30
a.m., during which Das experienced a deep sense of love and transcen-
dence.57 Soon thereafter, a spontaneous “yogi camp” developed at Alpert’s
family’s summer home in Franklin, New Hampshire, eventually attract-
ing hundreds of students.58 Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, Ram Dass lived
mainly in Northern California, still giving talks, traveling, and working on
book and other projects. In 1997, he suffered a severe stroke, which led
to his book Still Here (2000), on dying, and the documentary film about
him, Fierce Grace (2001). In the mid-2000s, he moved to Maui, where a
home and retreat facilities were given him by supporters. Be Love Now
(2010) marked the publication of a book on which Ram Dass had worked
years before.
Be Love Now is in many respects Ram Dass’s most intimate spiritual
autobiography, and it is also his most mature work, a kind of summa of his
spiritual life. Primarily, it is a series of reminiscences of his guru, Neem
Karoli Baba, and includes also Dass’s reflections on the nature of gurus
and disciples, as well as on other major gurus of the twentieth century,
including both well-known and little-known figures. It is a warm, devo-
tional book, in which he encourages readers to “learn unconditional love
from those who live in it, the saints and siddhas, from their darshan, their
presence, their satsang.” To feel it, he continues, “we have to let go of our
analytical minds and open ourselves to the moment and to those who have
gone before.”59
One of the most charming aspects of Alpert/Ram Dass’s personality
is the sense that he is confiding in the reader, that he is openly admit-
ting his own faults and errors. In this respect especially, he differs from
some of the other Western gurus, who present (especially later on), a
persona of infallibility and sometimes even of grandiosity. One does not
see that in Ram Dass, especially in the Ram Dass of Be Love Now. In it,
and in the various films or videos of him, one senses his genuineness;
The Sage on the Stage 201
and audios, devotees and estranged followers as well as critics and sup-
porters, and of course, a huge corpus of books, some thousands of pages,
many drawn (like most of Gaskin’s from the late 1960s and early 1970s)
from transcriptions based on talks or conversations with an audience.1
What makes Jones particularly remarkable is how dramatic his claims
about himself became. He, and the nature of his teachings, became
influential and even determinative for a number of other, subsequent
Western gurus.
Jones studied philosophy at Columbia University, beginning in 1957,
and in 1962, went on to apply for a master’s degree in creative writing in
a program at Stanford University, directed by Wallace Stegner.2 During
this time, he read, in addition to figures like Wittegenstein, Freud, and
Jung, Beat literature.3 But Stegner was not impressed by Jones’s produc-
tion of hundreds of pages of “subjective” writing, and so Jones left, even-
tually living near Palo Alto, California, where he took part in a series
of experiments with hallucinogens, in particular, mescaline, LSD, and
psiloscybin, at the Veterans Hospital there.4 It was there, he said, under
LSD, he experienced the emergence of Shakti energy in himself, which
he characterized as an event “shaped like a seahorse.”5 This is evidently
the beginning of what became a primary theme in his life and work, that
of the “dawn horse.”
After more drug experimentation and reading in occult or esoteric lit-
erature, Jones traveled to New York City with his girlfriend, Nina, and
met a spiritual teacher, Albert Rudolph, who ran an art gallery there,
and whom he refers to as “Rudi.” Rudi belonged in part to the lineage of
Gurdjieff (himself a controversial spiritual teacher of ambiguous religious
background), but also was affiliated with Swami Muktananda, who liv-
ing in India. Jones tells the story of his spiritual apprenticeship to Rudi,
where he learned about “the Force,” his return to California and his entry
into Scientology, which was developing at the time, and then finally of his
trips to India to meet Muktananda.6 When he was in India, Jones expe-
rienced a visitation of the Virgin Mary as “Shakti energy,” an experience
that reminds us of Schuon and his visions and sometimes sexually explicit
paintings of the Virgin Mary or of figures reminiscent of her.7
When Jones returned from India, he brought with him a letter
from Muktananda as an imprimatur authorizing him to teach medi-
tation, but that was not where his subsequent teachings originated.
In 1970, Jones was living in Los Angeles, and he visited the Vedanta
Temple in Hollywood, where, he wrote, he experienced “the Divine
204 America n G urus
what he [Jones] says, and says very well, is something that I have
been trying to express for thirty-five years, but which most people
seem quite reluctant to understand, as if it were too good to be true.
The point, with which Krishnamurti and the ancient Chinese Zen
masters also agree, is that there is no progressive method by which
the liberated and awakened state (moksha) can be attained.
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 205
One of those two disciples whom Marie mentions, Sal, wrote that earlier
he had gone into a kind of “anaesthesia” experience in which he “was fully
conscious,” during which he passed with Bubba into “what Bubba calls
‘smithereens.’ There is no experience in ‘smithereens.’ There is noth-
ing.”17 Near the book’s end, Jones/Bubba Free John repudiates an empha-
sis on experiences of “the Force” [kundalini], because ultimately, although
he can generate them, “it is not useful to do it.”18
His later work emphasizes even more the centrality of Jones him-
self, particularly the very late and posthumous texts published under the
byline “the Avataric Great Sage Adi Da Samraj.” In My Final Work of Divine
Indifference (2007), which is part of a much vaster work called The Aletheon,
in a section titled “My Final Work is Me—Alone,” he writes “the only-by-
Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam becomes Perfect devotion
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 207
David Lane, co-author with Lowe of a book on Jones, does not dismiss
Jones’s claims of being enlightened, but rather wonders whether someone
who is enlightened is necessarily kind, or even benign. Of course, that
depends on what one means by “enlightenment,” because in Buddhism,
wisdom and compassion are aspects of one another. For his part, another
scholar of religion who had been quite active in the Dawn Horse com-
munity, Georg Feuerstein, later left it and observed in an interview with
Edward Brennan that “I believe that he [Jones] is an adept with consider-
able powers, but I also sense an absence of compassion in his writings and
his interaction with disciples.”27 We will return to this subject of enlighten-
ment and compassion in the conclusion.
Jones/Adi Da eventually (in 1983) took up residence on a Fijian island,
on an estate once owned by actor Raymond Burr. He named it first
“Translation Island,” then “Love-Anandashram,” then, “Purnashram,”
and said that he chose it because it was “untouched since the beginning of
time.”28 It was, in other words, primordial. Certainly it provided sufficient
distance between him and modernity; it provided an island refuge that
also served as a base for the new primordial spiritual community symbol-
ized also in the name “Dawn Horse.” It was, critics alleged, also a place
where he could be sole lord and master in a way that would not have been
possible in, say, the United States.29 There were allegations of sexual and
other kinds of license.30 Sal Lacania, a friend of Jones’s, was quoted as say-
ing during this period, “At this point, I think he really thinks he is God. If
you had every whim indulged for 13 years, how would you think of your-
self?”31 The island became the site for an experimental and antinomian
new community.
Although his main residence was in Fiji, Jones/Adi Da, in his volumi-
nous later works, emphasized Western terms and references. He spoke
at length about what he termed “Radical Transcendentalism,” a term that
obviously harks back to nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism,
but here refers to “the single transcendental truth taught by the great sages
and the revelation of reality itself.”32 In fact, one late book is “Radical”
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 209
at work in the popularity of another guru of the period who offered “an
antinomian philosophy and moral anarchism” in a “ ‘religionless’ reli-
gion:” Rajneesh, later known as Osho.42 Wilber might have been attracted
to Jones/Adi Da precisely because he was an ardent Western exponent
of immediatism, which is what Wilber continues to espouse after having
attempted to publicly separate himself from Jones/Adi Da.43
In 1999, Wilber published One Taste, an edited selection from his
journals, “a record of further attempts to convey the perennial philoso-
phy,” and there are two aspects of the collection relevant for us here.44
First is the title’s implication: the term “one taste” refers in Wilber’s
usage to “post-nirvanic and post-enlightenment stages of development,”
that is, to “plateau” and ultimately “permanent” nondual/enlightened
consciousness.45 The clear implication of the journals is that Wilber has
“constant access to One Taste.”46 The second aspect of the collection is
Wilber’s phrasing: “pointing-out instructions” are reminders that “this
simple, clear, ever-present awareness is primordial Purity just as it is.”47
Another description he offers is “your primordial self,” and again, “the
primordial Self that embraces the All in radical One Taste.”48 “One taste”
is a Vajrayana Buddhist term, to be sure, but “primordial Self” does not
describe that form of practice—the term is here adapted to an Advaita
Vedanta usage reflecting language more akin to that of Jones/Adi Da. And
it is immediatist language.
In One Taste, Wilber also makes clear what already was fairly evi-
dent, that he felt particularly indebted to Aldous Huxley and his notion
of perennial philosophy, as well as to Krishnamurti, who was influential
for Huxley, but even more so for Wilber in his early intellectual life.49
“Krishnamurti was a supreme liberator, at least on occasion, and in books
such as Freedom from the Known, this extraordinary sage pointed to the
power of nondual choiceless awareness to liberate one from the binding
tortures of space, time, death, and duality,” Wilber writes. In remarks like
these, we are reminded that Wilber is very much in the immediatist cur-
rent we have been tracing.
Early in the twenty-first century, Wilber’s work began to center on
“integral spirituality,” which he sought to make into a spiritual path, a “life
practice,” effectively, into a new religion. This new religion reminds us of
Stephen Gaskin, who said that “it’s not that I was into yoga or meditation
so much. It’s that I was ransacking religions looking for goodies. I went
through what I thought was the secret stash of each one. That seemed to
me to mostly be in the neighborhood of meditation and enlightenment.”50
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 213
Wyatt has got to go back to work now, protecting the true and the
good and the beautiful, while slaying partial-ass pervs, ripping their
eyes out and pissing in their eye-sockets, using his Zen sword of
prajna to cut off the heads of critics so staggeringly little that he has
to slow down about 10-fold just to see them. . . and then rip their
eyes out and piss in their eye-sockets, and slay the. . . [sentence ends
here in ellipses in original]63
are still there, visible not only in the language of Wilber’s “Wild West”
responses to critics, but also in the slightly racy, semi-tantric imagery of
some of Wilber’s websites and projects, like “Integral Naked,” as well as in
his guests, their subjects, and the network that he has developed.
Wilber’s predilection toward immediatism to a considerable extent ties
together the network that we see represented in the Integral Institute, an
organization created by Wilber in the late 1990s to promote an integral
spiritual approach that seeks to conjoin many disparate fields of knowl-
edge. Associated with the Integral Institute are a number of people who
function as Western gurus, and most are immediatists. Among them are
David Deida [David Greenberg], author of The Way of the Superior Man
(1997), and Finding God Through Sex (2002), a guide to spiritual sexuality,
and a former student of Adi Da’s whose chosen name is a combination of
“dei” and “da,” as well as Michael Murphy (the founder of Esalen), Robert
Forman, and Saniel Bonder, who was a member of the Jones/Da com-
munity, indeed, the author of the “official” biography of Jones/Adi Da,
before breaking with it to develop such teaching programs as Awakened
HEART-Shamanism™, The WholeHEART Way™, and Tantra of Trust™.
A contributor to their “Waking Down” program is Ken Wilber. Also associ-
ated with Integral Institute is Marc [Mordechai] Gafni, a Jewish spiritual
teacher who has written about his “post-conventional” sexuality, and to
a limited extent in favor of spiritual teacher/student sexual relations.65
All of these figures in different ways arguably teach various kinds of
immediatism.
But the primary Western guru we will look at next frequently appears
with or collaborates with Wilber, and is closely associated with the Integral
Institute. And he has made immediate enlightenment his primary mes-
sage—in fact, nearly everything he has published and spoken about pub-
licly concerns this theme of immediate enlightenment. Born to a Jewish
family in New York City, and after undertaking a series of spiritual prac-
tices, including Zen Buddhist meditation, Andrew Cohen (1955-) began
teaching after a few weeks in India with his guru, H. W. L. Poonja, in
1986. But they were a remarkable few weeks. In My Master Is My Self
(1989), Andrew Cohen tells the story of those weeks, and of how he came
to be an independent American spiritual teacher.
The Indian spiritual teacher whom Cohen met was a seventy-five-year-old
Advaita Vedantin known as Poonjaji [H. W. L. Poonja] who told Cohen
at their first meeting in late March 1989 that “you don’t have to make
any effort to be free.” Cohen said he felt radiance, and that he had had
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 217
an illumination, which Poonja later told him was quite rare.66 In ensu-
ing days, they discussed “how ‘doing anything’ just creates more bond-
age,” and how enlightenment is timelessness and the realization that one
“never existed.”67 Cohen experienced great bliss, and “No limitation. No
Ego. Emptiness and Completeness, endless BEING and JOY.”68 If he tried
to meditate, he said, “the flow stopped,” and he subsequently “proclaimed
with tremendous conviction: ‘Anyone who tells you to do ANYTHING at
all to attain Liberation is a liar and a cheater!’ ”69
During this period in India, Cohen was very close to Poonja—his
published journals and the letters he exchanged with Poonja demon-
strate what Cohen called a spiritual “love affair” between them.70 By early
May 1989—Cohen wrote—several of Poonja’s “Indian devotees asked
me questions about my ‘Enlightenment,’ ” because “Poonjaji has appar-
ently been praising [Cohen] very highly and telling them that [Cohen is]
Enlightened.”71 Poonja is quoted in the book as saying “once in a rare time
for the good of mankind someone comes along who can Enlighten others,
and you are such a one.”72 Two women go into ecstasy in Cohen’s pres-
ence, and in a friend the “Process” begins spontaneously, Cohen writes in
a letter to Poonja.73 After they separate and Cohen goes to Devon, England,
to teach, Cohen’s letters to Poonja are filled with ecstatic exclamations like
“MASTER I LOVE YOU SO! My each breath is only YOU and YOU and
YOU!”74
One can see how Cohen attracted students during this early period.
Like Jones/Adi Da, there were said to be spontaneous spiritual phenom-
ena in his presence. Cohen wrote that “something has been coming out
of me that I have no power over. It is me and it has possessed me.” After
his initial meeting with Poonja, he said, “there was a ‘presence’ in the
room with me,” which “was haunting me and it was loving me.”75 From
that time forward, “many of those whom I came into contact with eas-
ily and often instantly began to have profound realizations, insights into
their true nature and powerful feelings of love, joy and bliss.”76 During
this time he gathered students in England, Europe, and Israel, and part of
the attraction must have been the immediatism: just to be in his presence
was, Cohen said, sufficient for awakening, and others, including his own
teacher Poonja, became increasingly jealous of him.
In Autobiography of an Awakening (1992), Cohen tells the story of how
he came to break with Poonja as well as his own mother, and to become
critical of many contemporary gurus. His mother, Luna Tarlo, had initially
been among his disciples, but she grew increasingly doubtful about his
218 America n G urus
power over his followers. Cohen’s response was that traditionally it is said
“the family of the one who has Awakened is unable to recognize [his or her]
transformation, nor perceive its significance. This also has been my experi-
ence.”77 At around the same time, Cohen’s guru, Poonja, began to be critical
of Cohen, then to be directly “disrespectful and ungracious” to Cohen and
his students, until Cohen said he realized that “I had a completely different
‘view’ of Enlightenment.” In fact, “what I [Cohen] was teaching and what
my Master was teaching were diametrically opposed to one another.”78 In
short, “I had obviously surpassed my own Teacher,” because he had autho-
rized someone with extreme antinomian views to teach.79
Cohen condemned antinomianism, the belief that “being Enlightened
they will be free from the consequences of their own actions!”80 Hence
he was also openly critical not only of Poonja, but also of Rajneesh,
Krishnamurti, Muktananda, and Jones/Adi Dam, who all “failed,” left peo-
ple “in confusion,” and in the case of Jones, were subject to “megalomani-
acal rantings.”81 At the end of his autobiography and in a subsequent book,
In Defense of the Guru Principle (1999), Cohen muses on why so many
modern gurus could “betray” their own illumination.82 “Not all spiritual
teachers are teachers of Enlightenment,” Cohen writes. Only those “in
whom the Guru principle has been awakened” and who represent “integ-
rity and pure-hearted motivation” pass muster.83
But Cohen himself has generated quite a bit of critical literature, mostly
and perhaps almost entirely from former followers. Cohen’s own mother,
Luna Tarlo—a doting mother who initially took her son as a guru—later
published a book about what she regarded as her son’s authoritarian
abuse of power. In The Mother of God (1997), her memoir of her relation-
ship with her son as a guru, Tarlo speculated on why Poonja had turned
against Cohen, and surmised “it probably started when some of Andrew’s
disciples came to Poonja with loud complaints about Andrew’s arrogance
and cruelty, and he chose to believe them.”84 Tarlo tells of how Cohen told
her to burn her life’s work of writings, which she did; she tells of how he
told a follower to have his expensive Saab automobile crushed, which he
did; she cites various other examples of what she regards as his peremp-
tory abusiveness.85
And there are other books by former devotees, including Andre van der
Braak’s Enlightenment Blues: My Years with an American Guru (2003) and
William Yenner’s American Guru: A Story of Love, Betrayal, and Healing—
Former Students of Andrew Cohen Speak Out (2009). Van der Braak was
one of Cohen’s first followers, beginning in 1987, and he describes the
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 219
those individuals who are ahead of their time, living on the leading
edge, who participate in the creation of these new structures or hab-
its in consciousness. Eventually, when others progress through the
already established stages of cultural development, they’re going
to follow in the footsteps of those evolutionary pioneers who went
before them.101
The Immediatist Wave
Our problem here is how to keep our discussion of them in this chap-
ter to a manageable length. They represent a confluence of many of the
currents we have already seen, including the instant religious experiences
provided by psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, the New Age movement
with its notion of “evolutionary spirituality” that is imagined to come about
as a global transformation of humanity rather than as a result of individ-
ual spiritual practice, the influx of Hinduism-derived spiritual teachers
like Krishnamurti, who emphasize immediate spontaneous spiritual illu-
mination, and the emergence of American guru-figures, notably Adi Da
(Franklin Jones) and Andrew Cohen. Other influences include Rajneesh/
Osho, and Ramana Maharshi.3 All of these are important, but should be
distinguished from immediatist spirituality, which is a phenomenon in
its own right.
The older man sitting in a chair confronting his audience is one of
the most influential of the immediatist spiritual teachers, Tony Parsons.
Countless other immediatist spiritual teachers list him as a major influ-
ence on them, not only because he was an early exponent of these teach-
ings, but also because he is among the more extreme of the immediatists,
insisting that there is no path to enlightenment, that no practices are nec-
essary, and further, that “all concepts of bad or good, original sin, karma or
debt of any kind, are the products of an unawakened mind that is locked
into time and the maintenance and reinforcement of a sense of father,
mother, and self.”4 In other words, Parsons’s message is one that we may
call absolutist immediatism, in that he emphasizes sheer transcendence
and ignores the relative; and as a result, he could be seen as antinomian.
Parsons has been parsimonious with his biography, but from accounts
of his seminars or workshops, it appears that he grew up in Britain during
World War II, and that although he claims to have had spiritual experi-
ences early on, he went on to make a living as a bus driver, as a used
car salesman, and as a builder, before in the 1990s beginning to teach
publicly his doctrine of spontaneous awakening.5 He reportedly has four
children, and has said that his wife Claire and some of his followers
can claim enlightenment, including Nathan Gill and Leo Hartung. For
Parsons, with his simple message that enlightenment is “the dropping
away of any sense that there is anyone that life is happening to,” asserts
that there is only “the divine play of being.”6 The simplicity and clarity of
Parsons’s teaching is without doubt a major reason for his influence on
other immediatists: out of the gate early, he established widely the notion
of immediatism as something one could get out in public and teach.
The Immediatist Wave 229
But Parsons was far from alone, of course. The book Conversations on
Non-Duality (2011) features twenty-six conversations with (mostly) imme-
diatist spiritual teachers; the annual Science and Non-duality conferences
(one in the United States and one in Europe) feature a long list of imme-
diatist spiritual teachers, including some figures we have already met,
like Andrew Cohen, and numerous others, some of whom we will shortly
introduce, including not only Tony Parsons, but Gangaji, Pamela Wilson,
Rupert Spira, Adyashanti, Jeff Foster, Beninho Massaro, Thomas Hüble,
Unmani, Mokshananda, and numerous others. The US satsang network-
ing site satsangteachers.com featured, as of last count, well over 100 teach-
ers and their websites, including among them those of Peter Kingsley,
Eckhart Tolle, John de Ruiter, and others whom we encountered earlier, as
well as many more, including most of those whose names appear above.
And there are quite a number of other teachers who are not included in
this particular satsang network listing—certainly the number of immedi-
atist spiritual teachers in the United States must be in the hundreds.
But of these, some are much more prominent. Here, we will look at
some representative spiritual teachers, beginning with Adyashanti. Like
a number of the immediatist gurus, Adyashanti (Steven Gray, 1962–)
says that he practiced Zen Buddhism, in his case under Arvis Joen Justi,
a student of Taizan Maezumi Roshi, as well as with, later, Jakusho Kwong
Roshi of the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. But even though he practiced
Zen Buddhist meditation in annual sesshin retreats for years, when he
began to teach, he took the Hindu name “Adyashanti,” meaning “primor-
dial peace,” and he began to hold satsang rather than Zen meditation ses-
sions. He does encourage meditation, so Adyashanti cannot be termed an
extreme immediatist like Tony Parsons. Nonetheless, he writes that “[t]rue
meditation has no direction, goals, or method. All methods aim at achiev-
ing a certain state of mind,” whereas “true meditation is abidance as pri-
mordial consciousness.”7 The only method is to “truly allow the teacher’s
presence into yourself,” and “once you let the transmission in, everything
happens spontaneously.”8 “At the moment of enlightenment everything
falls away,” Adyashanti writes, and “you are alone because you have real-
ized that there is no other; there is only THAT, and YOU ARE THAT.”9
In a series of audio interviews with him, Adyashanti tells his story of
“spontaneous awakening,” which took place in the morning, beginning
when he sat down to meditate. He is an engaging, softspoken narrator,
and tells of how he suddenly experienced the sense that he was identical
with This, and in fact he trotted around his small cottage, checking to
230 America n G urus
see if This was the stove, or the toilet, or the sleeping form of his wife,
and verified that they were the same. The story he tells is essentially what
in Japanese Zen Buddhism would be known as a kensho narrative, akin
to those one finds in Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen.10 But the
language is not Buddhist; the story he tells is one of self-inquiry along the
lines of Ramana Maharshi, as is the revelation that “I” am “This.” And in
the liner notes, he writes that
The language here is pretty clearly Hindu, based not in Buddhist shunyata
or emptiness and anatman, or absence of self, but rather in the formula-
tion tat tvam asi —“you are That,” or in the identity of atman (Self) and
Brahman (the Divine). And Adyashanti is not alone in shifting from years
of Buddhist meditation practice to this Neo-Advaitin immediatism. Others
who did the same include Gangaji, Catherine Ingram, and Steven Bodian,
to name only a few. In so doing, they continued to allude to some extent on
Buddhist terms and even texts, but as the Sanskrit names they took make
clear, they belong primarily to an American Neo-Advaitin immediatist cur-
rent that began to emerge in the 1990s. Catherine Ingram, for instance,
says that she practiced Buddhist meditation for about twenty years before,
she said, it “fell away” and she experienced a kind of “dark night of the
soul.” In 1991, she then went to meet Poonjaji, the same guru whom
Andrew Cohen visited, and “in meeting him I really saw that there was
nothing to do, nothing to seek for.” “You don’t attain it, you just relax into
it, a stream of now.”12 She then founded (after working with Ram Dass)
what she calls “Dharma Dialogues,” which are a “Buddhistish” form of
satsang or “truth audience,” and became an independent spiritual teacher.
I use the term “Buddhistish” to describe what we see to various degrees
in many of the immediatist teachers or gurus. Pretty clearly, what they
teach is not Buddhism, though they often draw on Buddhist terminology.
Signature Buddhist teachings like interdependent origination get short
shrift, or none, in immediatism; instead, emphasis is placed on immediate
The Immediatist Wave 231
India, one does wonder about the relationship of his enlightenment story
or teachings to traditional Hinduism. It is an interesting question that’s
more difficult to answer than one might think.26
Not surprisingly, even within the American Advaita Vedanta commu-
nity, immediatism has come in for significant criticism. In one such anal-
ysis, Timothy Conway critiques what he terms “pseudo-Advaita,” whose
immediatist teachers tend to have the following modus operandi: (1) chronic
one-up-manship of audience members by demanding “who is asking this
question?” to “stay on top by posturing as the Guru of Infinite Awareness
mentoring the lowly disciple”;27 (2) chronic attempts to “absolutize” every-
thing onto the “ultimate” or “final” level of truth-discourse (speaking
“absolutish,”) causing depersonalization and a zombie-like demeanor;
(3) going “numb and dumb” in exchanges with other human beings, star-
ing or going silent as a kind of one-upmanship; (4) condemning “engaged
spirituality” and world-improvement; (5) rationalizing away one’s own
misbehavior as a “dream” or “maya”; (6) prematurely claiming enlight-
enment and “ending the search” too soon; (7) denigrating devotional or
other forms of practice; (8) aversion to genuine spiritual education and
intuitive-intellectual development (anti-intellectualism shared with funda-
mentalism and some New Age devotees); (9) an “attack on the mind,” often
resulting in a “tranced-out zombie state” for followers; (10) a “stunted”
form of spiritual development based in a repetitive cycle of deconstructiv-
ist rhetoric, often combined with nihilism and narcissism masquerading
as knowledge.28 Conway also adduces some examples given by correspon-
dents of various immediatist teachers who represent these characteristics.
A longtime student of Advaita Vedanta, Dennis Waite (1948–) pub-
lished a book, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle (2008), in which
he outlined, in numbered aphorisms and paragraphs, his criticisms of
Neo-Advaitin immediatism. Waite describes Neo-Advaita as claiming
“bottom-line” conclusions “without having carried out any of the interven-
ing stages.”29 It has “no methodology, since its teachers explicitly reject
the scriptures.”30 “It does not admit of any ‘levels’ of reality and does not
recognize the existence of a seeker, teacher, Self-ignorance, spiritual path,
etc.” Hence Neo-Advaita is essentially a nihilistic belief-system without
any real foundation in method or practice.31
Waite forthrightly states “the premise of [his] book is that satsang teach-
ing alone does not bring about enlightenment.”32 Waite distinguishes
between “direct path” Advaitin teachers and Neo-Advaita, and places some
in the former and some in the latter categories; the distinction is that
234 America n G urus
what he calls “direct path” teachers more clearly recognize different levels
of reality, and Neo-Advaitins, for instance, Tony Parsons, teach what he
regards as effectively a variant of nihilism.33 Waite puts it this way: “The
traditional view is that there is an individual seeker. . . who is motivated
to seek the truth,” and the “extreme neo-advaitin position is that this is
untrue. Most other satsang teachers appear to hold intermediate posi-
tions.”34 “Being repeatedly told that there is nothing to do, that ‘this is it,’
may be comforting to the Western mindset[,]but it carries with it the very
great danger of increasing frustration and helplessness.”35 In brief, Waite
writes:
Conclusions
One of the few scholars to discuss some of the gurus in this book, Georg
Feuerstein, himself was a devotee of Jones/Adi Da for some years before
moving on to Tibetan Buddhism. In the revised edition of his book Holy
Madness: Spirituality, Crazy-Wise Teachers, and Enlightenment (2006),
Feuerstein surveys a whole series of controversial gurus of the mid to late
twentieth century, including Gurdjieff, Rajneesh, Jones/Adi Da, and Lee
Lozowick, among others. Feuerstein also reflects at length on the nature
of gurus and disciples, enlightenment, and the potential as well as the
dangers of “crazy wisdom” spiritual methods. Then, at the end of his book,
he observes that the wisest course would be
spontaneously, the means for generating such experiences, and the kind
of experiences generated, vary quite widely. Merrell-Wolff’s insights, aus-
tere and cool, would seem rather far from Gaskin’s room-temperature,
laid-back stoner philosophy of telepathic communication, for instance,
which in turn is far indeed from the grandiose claims and flamboyant
“hot” phenomena of Jones/Adi Da, with sexual license, “spontaneous
mudras,” ecstatic convulsions, and glossolalia. And in turn these oth-
ers might seem removed from the New Age enlightenment envisioned
by Andrew Cohen, or from the intellectual system-constructions of Ken
Wilber. But of course, I am not arguing in favor of a half-baked notion that
these groups are all pointing to or exhibiting the same phenomena and
experiences—it would seem obvious that they are not.
What joins them all is not so much the enlightenment they urge their
respective audiences toward (because the kinds of claimed enlighten-
ment vary)—it is how they claim that one can get there. One gets there, the
immediatist claims, not via sustained practice in a particular religious
tradition (for instance, via years, even a lifetime of meditation and other
kinds of practice under a teacher who belongs to and is recognized by a
long-standing traditional lineage and is authorized to teach by previous
teachers), but spontaneously. What differs is the means: in one case,
it is God’s grace; in another, smoking a little dope and being one with
nature and telepathically one with other people; in still another case,
it is devotion to the guru, or a connection to the guru or the guru’s
presence.
The astute reader might have noticed that, in the course of our sur-
vey, I did not include Zen or Tibetan Buddhist teachers or practitioners,
even though some forms of Vajrayana Buddhism in particular refer to
primordial wisdom, and the word “primordial” recurs quite often in some
translations of traditional Buddhist texts. The reason I did not include
Zen Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhism, except when they influenced our
Western immediatists—be they Discordians or Wilberites—is that, strictly
speaking, these Buddhist traditions are not immediatist in the way we are
defining it here. For example, although there is a “sudden school” in Zen
or Ch’an Buddhist tradition, it exists within a broad and deep religious
context that includes ritual practices and meditation; it does not exist on
its own, disconnected from these. And I did not include Mahamudra or
Dzogchen—forms of Vajrayana Buddhism where terms like “primordial
wisdom” recur—because these too are part of a fairly strictly controlled
ritual and meditative praxis and tradition.3
Conclusions 239
does—does not in itself offer, nor can it logically offer, ways to sustain and
develop enduring spiritual awakening. If there is a guru-figure, then that
figure becomes the devotional center of the revelation. But immediatism
in the strictest sense, especially when combined with an individual who
claims avataric status, in effect (this argument concludes) may be a kind
of “short circuit” of sustained meditative practice and guided training.12
We can see, then, a wide range of possible interpretations of American
enlightenments or “enlightenments” and of immediatist gurus in particu-
lar. No doubt many of these interpretations contain some truth. But there
are two contexts for immediatism that I would also like to remark on here.
The first is historical. Historically, although there certainly is at least some
precedent for immediatism in the West, particularly in Neoplatonism and
in Christian mysticism, what we are seeing now is primarily part of the
larger and continuing development of Asian religions as they come to and
become rooted in the West. This process began in earnest in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and its full arc is not yet known. Whereas
Emerson and Thoreau drew on what they knew of Asian religious tradi-
tions, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we see for the first
time Westerners teaching as traditionally recognized authorities in Asian
religions.13 It is possible that immediatism, as we have seen it here—com-
ing mostly out of the 1960s counterculture—is actually a phase, or even a
cul de sac off this larger historical development of Asian religions becom-
ing rooted in the West.
This brings us to epistemology and postmodernism. In the late twen-
tieth century in the humanities, there developed broadly in the academy a
reaction against “metanarratives” and a kind of general consensus reject-
ing “truth claims” and “essentialism.” The problem with these kinds of
critiques, which are sometimes subsumed under the heading of “post-
modernism,” is that they typically represent a kind of de facto nihilism,
at least in the sense of a belief in nothing, in no verities, and certainly in
no Truth. Immediatists represent the antithesis of “postmodernists” inas-
much as they assert that there is Truth, and that it is directly accessible by
us and in us. It is even possible that immediatism represents a different
aspect of the same historical context that produced “postmodernism”—a
context in which monotheism is to some extent breaking down.
Immediatism represents a vehement reassertion of truth, and in fact
that, I would argue, accounts for much of the attractive power of those
who claim or imply their own enlightenment. Most and perhaps all of the
figures we have looked at seem absolutely convinced of the verity of his or
242 America n G urus
her direct, gnostic understanding of truth. This is also true of those who
are in a border-territory as spiritual teachers, but not exactly gurus, like
Tolle, or Kingsley; it is certainly true of Roberts, as a Christian (Catholic)
mystic; and it is also true (in an exaggerated way) of Jones/Adi Da, who
asserts his own divine status, as well as of the various contemporary
immediatist gurus. My point here is that the certitude of immediatists
about what is true—indeed, about Truth—might be seen as parallel to the
rejection of certitude by “postmodernists,” and that both are the result
of a particular set of historic changes during the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
To give an example of this conflict, we might turn to a late
twentieth-century scholar of Neoplatonism, Algis Uždavinys, who also
was an outspoken critic of “postmodernism.” In Philosophy and Theurgy in
Late Antiquity, Uždavinys wrote that
Postmodernism is unmoored and adrift, for it does not have “the One or
any other metaphysical principle.”15 Indeed, not only postmodernism, but
also modern academic philosophy as a whole represents merely a “form of
auxiliary rational discourse” “separated from any independent soteriologi-
cal claims and spiritual practices.”16 By contrast, Uždavinys writes, authen-
tic philosophy leads one in the direction of the “better lot,” that is, “virtue,”
“supreme wisdom,” “one’s noetic identity,” and “mystical union.”17
Clearly, Uždavinys is an “outlaw” with regard to contemporary aca-
demic philosophy. But in fact this is true of almost all and perhaps all of
the immediatists as well. They all are “outsiders” with regard not only to
academia (even as subjects of study), but also to institutional religions,
and indeed even in some respects to society as a whole. Perhaps the most
exemplary of this is not Cohen, with his Foxhollow community or his
envisioned future enlightened society, but Jones/Adi Da, whose Fiji com-
munity was/is literally and certainly symbolically antinomian in being
outside the reach of US law.
Conclusions 243
I am not one of these new age, fast-fruit gurus who teach that we
are all enlightened already and therefore there is nothing to be
done: no spiritual aspiration or efforts, no karma, no discipline, no
practice, no path, no goal, no enlightenment and so forth. This is
only one side—the absolute level—of the whole truth. Merely to
246 America n G urus
another way, even though some, many, or perhaps even all of these figures
represent partial recognition or realization of some primordial truth, what
remains beyond them all is the sense that there really is something emerg-
ing with these figures in American culture, not only in the nineteenth
century with Emerson and Alcott, but throughout the twentieth century
into the twenty-first, too. And even if some of the avenues they offered,
like LSD or other psychedelics, pretty clearly do not lead to enlightenment
as it is understood in Buddhism, for instance, still perhaps in some sense
they may gesture toward it.
At the same time, one does need to differentiate between different—
sometimes radically different—concepts or even claims of enlighten-
ment. Not everyone sees enlightenment in the same way, that much is
self-evident. What is more, one also finds that Buddhist teachers tradition-
ally give disclaimers that they are not themselves enlightened, but instead
are representatives of a particular tradition; it is actually quite unusual
to find many direct claims of enlightenment within the tradition. There
really are dramatic differences in how people envision enlightenment and
what they claim, and contemporary scholars are only at the beginning of
grappling with questions of comparative religion of this kind, the most
controversial, profound, and difficult ones.
Throughout this book, for the most part I have used the term
“immediatism” because it more clearly emphasized the notion of
spontaneous direct immediate illumination, often coupled with the
assertion that particular practices or techniques do not lead to this illu-
mination. However, at this point I would like to reintroduce the word
“primordialism,” because I think the word expresses more accurately
the underlying metaphysics on which much of immediatism depends.
The astute reader will have noticed how many times the word “primor-
dial” recurs among these disparate authors, not because one has read
another’s work, but because there is an underlying metaphysics that
many of these authors share. Central to them is the idea that we as
human beings have access to blissful awareness that is not subject to
temporal or spatial restriction, that is always present to us, and that can
be described as primordial. This perspective and its significances need
to be explored in detail in another book, so for now I only wish to rein-
troduce the term and idea. I think that many of the disparate authors
discussed in this book share this perspective, and I would not want the
reader to come away thinking that I am disparaging these authors or
figures or this perspective. I am not. Rather, I have sought to show that
Conclusions 249
C h a p t er 1
C h a p t er 2
C h a p t er 3
1. See Andrews Norton, “Letter to the Editor,” Boston Daily Advertiser (November
5, 1836): 2, reprinted in Joel Myerson, ed., Transcendentalism: A Reader
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 160–162.
2. See Henry Brokmeyer, A Mechanic’s Diary (Washington, D.C.: E. C. Brokmeyer,
1920), 230–232; Henry Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis
Hegelianism (Philadelphia: Carl Shurz Memorial Foundation, 1948), 36–45;
Henry Pochman, “Plato and Hegel Contend for the West,” The American-German
Review (August 1943): 8–13; Denton Snider, A Writer of Books in His Genesis (St.
Louis: Sigma, 1910), 334–339; Frederick Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott: An
Intellectual Biography (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1982), 282.
3. See Octavius Brooks Frothingham, “The Mystic,” in Transcendentalism in New
England: A History (New York: Putnam’s, 1976), 249.
4. Frothingham, Transcendentalism, 16–17.
5. Frothingham, Transcendentalism, 79–80.
6. Frothingham, Transcendentalism, 84.
7. J. P. Greaves, New Theosophic Revelations (London: Strand, 1847), iv.
8. See Odell Shepard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat, 1938/1966 rpt.), I.208.
9. Cited in Frederick Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography
(Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 226.
10. Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott, 227.
11. Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott, 227.
12. Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott, 230.
256 Notes
13. Amos Bronson Alcott Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am
1130.10: II. Works of Amos Bronson Alcott, (11) Tablets in Colours: Disposed on
Twelve Tables. Boston, 1849. 387f. (774p.).
14. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 43–44.
15. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 57.
16. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 679.
17. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 759.
18. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 757.
19. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 665.
20. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 667.
21. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 447, 461–463, 765.
22. Alcott, Tablets Ms., 31.
23. See Amos Bronson Alcott, Tablets (Boston: Mudge, 1868), 187–192.
24. Alcott, Tablets, 174–175.
25. Alcott, Tablets, 177.
26. Alcott, Tablets, 184.
27. Alcott, Tablets, 203, 207.
28. Alcott, Concord Days (Boston: Roberts, 1872), 146–147.
29. Alcott, Concord Days, 237.
30. Alcott, Concord Days, 237–239.
31. Alcott, Concord Days, 241.
32. See Odell Shepard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat, 1938/1966 rpt.), 2 vols., I.xvii.
33. Shepard, Journals, I.xvi.
34. Shepard, Journals, I.xx–xxi.
C h a p t er 4
C h a p t er 5
9. See The Platonist, An Exponent of the Philosophical Truth, and Devoted Chiefly to
the Dissemination of the Platonic Philosophy in all its Phases, Vol. I.1, 1
10. See Paul R. Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest (New York: Temple University
Press, 1963) for the only extended discussion of this movement.
11. See Harriet C. B. Alexander, “Tyndall and Emerson,” Atlantic Monthly LXXV
(February 1889): 281.
12. See Mrs. John T. Sargent, Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club of
Chestnut Street, Boston (Boston: Osgood, 1880), 184–187, 243–250, 259–270,
indeed, virtually passim.
13. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Sara Norton and M. A. De Wolfe Howe, eds.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), I.210–211
14. Frederick Conner, Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution
by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson (Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 1949), 134.
15. See Fiske, The Destiny of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 113–114.
16. Transcendentalism had always flirted with evolutionism, and as a result some
critics have even tried to make Emerson an evolutionist retroactively. Citing
Emerson’s assertions that “Evil. . . is good in the making,” that “the first lesson
of history is the good of evil,” Conner holds that Emerson’s “Melioration is the
law,” confirms Emerson as a believer in universal progress. Unfortunately, such
arguments don’t bear up under scrutiny: Emerson did say that
The same course continues itself in the mind that we have witnessed in
Nature, namely the carrying-on and completion of the metamorphosis from
grub to worm, from worm to fly. In human thought this process is arrested
for years and ages. The history of mankind is the history of arrested growth.
But Emerson is not saying with these lines that “evolution... takes place by
comparatively sudden jumps,” as Conner contends. Rather, Emerson is saying
that the intellectual history of mankind is the history of arrested growth, nothing
more nor less. See Conner, 62–65. The Emerson quotations are from “Success,”
“Considerations by the Way,” and “The Soveignty of Ethics” respectively. Conner’s
bizarre interpretations of Emerson continue in his notes; he says, for instance,
that Emerson’s observation that society “recedes as fast on one side as it gains
on the other” really means that “the world is at once perfect and getting better.”
17. The Life and Letters of John Fiske, John Spencer Clark, ed. and author
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917) 2 vols., II.479 ff.
18. Ibid., II.481.
19. Ibid., II.482. Not only were “primitive” peoples all born too soon to be blessed
with the happy insights evolutionism can bring, even Emerson was born a bit
too soon, according to Fiske! See II.479 ff.
20. See Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper, eds., Thomas Taylor the
Platonist: Selected Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
On the Platonism of James Marsh, see Ronald Wells, ed., Three Christian
260 Notes
spirit had long since departed from the earthly plane.” This is true of Platonists
generally, and specifically of Thomas Johnson, Hiram K. Jones, and to some
extent even of Alcott, though toward the end of his life Alcott grew much more
attracted to Christian mysticism as manifested in Jacob Boehme. See Nasr,
Knowledge and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1981), 97.
46. See Robin Le Poidevin, et al., The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics
(New York: Routledge, 2009).
C h a p t er 6
C h a p t er 7
1. For the full text of Krishnamurti’s “Dissolution Speech,” see J. Krishnamurti Online,
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php. For
more on Krishnamurti’s life, see for instance Mary Luytens, Krishnamurti: His
Life and Death (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), Roland Vernon, Star in the
East: Krishnamurti—The Invention of a Messiah (New York: Palgrave, 2001), and
Sidney Field, ed., Krishnamurti, the Reluctant Messiah (St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon
House, 1989); as well as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti
(San Francisco: Harper, 1980), and Krishnamurti, Total Freedom: The Essential
Krishnamurti (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
2. HD [Hilda Doolittle], Notes on Thought and Vision, (San Francisco: City Lights,
1982)., 17–19.
3. HD, Notes., 21.
4. HD, Notes., 23
5. In his Experience and Philosophy, (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), 5, Franklin Merrell-Wolff remarks coyly on having met a “Sage,” and on a
setting he prefers not to name in which he, fourteen years earlier, had realized
“I am Atman.” One has to hypothesize a connection between Krishnamurti and
Merrell-Wolff at some point, for geographic and other reasons, but I have not
seen evidence of this as yet.
6. See Ron Leonard, The Transcendental Philosophy of Franklin Merrell-Wolff
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 15–20.
7. Leonard, Transcendental Philosophy, 19.
8. Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy, ix.
9. Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy, 9.
10. Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy, 7.
11. See Leonard, Transcendental Philosophy, 223.
264 Notes
C h a p t er 8
1. Alan Watts, “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” originally published in the
Chicago Review 12(Summer 1958), and then in This Is It, 79–110, as well as in a
City Lights pamphlet version (1959).
2. The original Chicago Review article is available online as a pdf at humanities.
uchicago.edu/orgs/review/60th/pdfs/15watts.pdf and the page numbers refer to
this version. See Watts, “Beat Zen,” 6–7.
3. Watts, “Beat Zen,” 8–9.
4. See, for instance, Carole Tomkinson, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat
Generation (New York: Riverhead, 1995), an important anthology. See also
Notes 265
29. See, for instance, Robin Lydenberg’s Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in
Wlliam S. Burroughs’ Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), or Oliver
Harris, William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2003), or John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse. One of
the few exceptions is Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, Retaking the
Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (London: Pluto Press,
2004), which includes Ron Roberts’s “The High Priest and the Great Beast at
The Place of Dead Roads,” 225–240.
30. See Burroughs, The Letters, 332–333.
31. See Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1992), 102–105.
32. William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands (New York: Penguin, 1987), 165.
33. Burroughs, The Western Lands, 113.
34. Burroughs, The Western Lands, 139.
35. Burroughs, The Western Lands, 46, 209, 241–242.
36. Burroughs, The Western Lands, 164–165.
37. See Cabell McLean, “Playback: A Personal Experience of Chaos Magic with
William S. Burroughs, Sr.,” in Sven Davisson, ed., Playback: The Magic of
William S. Burroughs (Hays Cove, Me.: Rebel Satori Press, 2009), 16–26.
38. See Douglas Grant, “Magic and Photographs,” in Playback, 27–30.
39. See Sven Davisson, “Burroughs-ian Gnosticism,” in Playback, 57–70. See
also “Burroughs-ian Gnosticism” in Ashé 4(2005)3: 469–483. See also Hans
Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1958), and Jacques LaCarrière, The
Gnostics (London: Peter Owen, 1977).
40. Burroughs, Letters, 68.
41. Burroughs, Letters, 69.
42. See Jeffrey Kripal, “Remembering Ourselves: On Some Countercultural Echoes
of Contemporary Tantric Studies,” in Religions of South Asia, 1(2007)1: 16.
43. See William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and the Wild Boys
(New York: Grove Press, 1992), 84–89.
44. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 89.
45. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 90.
46. Burroughs, The Job, 97.
47. Burroughs, The Job, 162–163.
48. William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (New York: Picador, 1981), xvii-xviii.
49. Burroughs, Cities, 154–157.
50. William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (New York: Picador, 1983), 195.
51. Burroughs, Place of Dead Roads, 231.
52. See Burroughs, The Western Lands, for instance, 46–47, 206–207, 241–243.
53. Roszak, The Making of the Counter Culture, 244–247.
54. See William S. Burroughs, “The War Universe” in Grand Street 37(1991):
92–108.
Notes 267
C h a p t er 9
1. See William S. Burroughs, The Letters, 149–186, as well as with Allen Ginsberg,
The Yagé Letters (San Francisco: City Lights, 1971).
2. See Albert Hofmann, LSD—My Problem Child (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980),
also available online at www.psychedelic-library.org/child.htm.
3. See Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (New York: HarperOne,
2010) 211–215.
4. See Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper, 1954), Heaven
and Hell, (New York: Harper, 1956), and Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Fowler,
eds., Moksha (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1977). See also The Perennial Philosophy
(New York: Harper, 1945).
5. Quoted in Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, 83–84.
6. See Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, 105.
7. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, in Writings, 1902–1910
(New York: Library of America, 1987), 349.
8. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 384.
9. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, “Rationale of the Mexican
Psychedelic Training Center,” in Richard Blum, et al., Utopiates: The Use and
Users of LSD-25 (New York: Atherton, 1964), 178–186.
10. See Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York: New American Library, 1968), 112.
11. Leary, High Priest, 112.
12. Blum, Utopiates, 182.
13. See Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic
Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: University
Books, 1964).
14. Leary, et al., The Psychedelic Experience, 115–116. Incidentally, a selection from
this manual was also included in Huxley’s posthumous collection Moksha,
267–269.
15. See Leary, High Priest, 112.
16. Leary, High Priest, 227–229.
17. Leary, High Priest, 220–222. In a telephone conversation at 8 p.m. on July 14,
2011, Peter Lamborn Wilson said that he met Burroughs in 1964, but that much
of the later Hassan i-Sabbah material in Burroughs’s work came via Brion Gysin,
who had been reading von Hammer-Purgstall. However, much later, Wilson
had sent Burroughs a package of materials for reference, and Burroughs in fact
in The Western Lands drew on the materials Wilson had sent him.
18. Leary, High Priest, 230.
19. Art Kleps, Millbrook: The True Story of the Early Years of the Psychedelic Revolution
(Oakland, Calif.: Bench Press, 1975), 129.
20. Timothy Leary, Neuropolitique, (Scottsdale, Ariz.: New Falcon, 1988), 67.
21. Leary, Neuropolitique, 71.
268 Notes
C h a p t er 1 0
12. Typically, Chaos magic is regarded as beginning in the late 1970s, with the
Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) being founded in 1978.
13. See, regarding the history of these individuals, Adam Gorightly, The Prankster
and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and
Inspired the Counterculture (New York: Paraview Press, 2003), in particular,
231–267. See also Carole M. Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction, and
Faith (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 28–51. Finally, see Camden Benares, Zen
Without Zen Masters (Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1977).
14. See Kerry Thornley, Zenarchy (Avondale Estates, Ga.: IllumiNet Press, 1991).
15. Thornley, Zenarchy, Chapter 1; see http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenar-
chy1.html.
16. Principia, 5–6.
17. Thornley, Zenarchy, Chapter 1; see http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenar-
chy1.html.
18. Thornley, Zenarchy, Chapter 8; see http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenar-
chy8.html.
19. Thornley, Zenarchy, Preface; http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenarchy.html.
20. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
21. Thornley, Zenarchy, Chapter 2; see http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenar-
chy2.html; “The Birth of Zenarchy,” Zenarchy, [letter pdf ] 20.
22. Thornley, Zenarchy, Chapter 3; see http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenar-
chy3.html.
C h a p t er 1 1
1. See Hugh Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western
Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 222–235. Urban
describes Discordianism, but does not “place” it explicitly as Chaos magic.
2. See Carole Cusack, “Discordian Magic: Paganism, the Chaos Paradigm, and
the Power of Imagination,” International Journal for the Study of New Religions,
2(2011)1: 125–145, for the opposite claim. But, for instance, in Gorightly, The
Prankster and the Conspiracy, the most extensive work on Thornley and
Discordianism to date, there is virtually no mention of magic.
3. Robert Anton Wilson, “Foreword,” in Gorightly, The Prankster and the
Conspiracy, 11.
4. “Firing the Cosmic Trigger,” in Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the
Mind, 117.
5. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 118.
6. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 112–113.
270 Notes
7. See Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
(New York: Dell, 1975/1988), 792, i.e., “human society can be structured either
according to the principle of authority or according to the principle of liberty.”
8. See Shea and Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 783–788.
9. See Shea and Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 757.
10. Charles Tart, On Being Stoned (Palo Alto, Calif.: Science and Behavior, 1971), 108.
11. Tart, On Being Stoned, 107.
12. Tart, On Being Stoned, 149.
13. Tart, On Being Stoned, 216.
14. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (Tempe,
Ariz.: New Falcon, 1977/1986), 74–75.
15. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 168–169.
16. Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924).
17. Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (Berkeley: Ronin, 1980/1997), 84–85.
18. Regarding Wilson’s magical experiences with the witch coven, see, for instance,
The Illuminati Papers, 135–136.
19. Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati (New York: Dell, 1981), 319.
20. Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati, 320.
21. Christopher Hyatt, ed., Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation (Tempe,
Ariz.: New Falcon, 1996).
22. Hyatt, Rebels and Devils, 43.
23. Hyatt, Rebels and Devils, 43.
24. Lon Milo Duquette, “Devil Be My God,” in Hyatt, Rebels and Devils, 263.
25. Adrian Omelas, “Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back to the Altar,”
in Hyatt, Rebels and Devils, 350.
26. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 69–70.
27. Timothy Leary, “Twenty-two Alternatives to Involuntary Death,” Rebels and
Devils, 293–310.
C h a p t er 1 2
4. Wilson, Scandal, 212.
5. Wilson, Scandal, 44–45.
6. Wilson, Scandal, 48.
7. Wilson, Scandal, 60.
8. Wilson, Scandal, 61.
9. Wilson, Scandal, 63.
10. Wilson, Scandal, 93–97.
11. Wilson, Scandal, 104.
12. Wilson, Scandal, 104–105.
13. Wilson, Scandal, 115.
14. Wilson, Scandal, 116.
15. Hakim Bey [Peter Lamborn Wilson], T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone,
Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 2003 ed.), 3.
16. Bey, T.A.Z., 4.
17. Bey, T.A.Z., 4.
18. Bey, “Sorcery,” T.A.Z., 22–23.
19. Bey, T.A.Z., 55–57.
20. Bey, T.A.Z., 58.
21. Bey, T.A.Z., 73–74.
22. Bey, T.A.Z., 95–97. See also Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish
Corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York: Autonomedia, 1995/2003).
23. “A Conversation with Peter Lamborn Wilson,” JSR, 147.
24. Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Shower of Stars” Dream and Book: The Initiatic Dream in
Sufism and Taoism (New York: Autonomedia, 2005), 13–14.
25. Wilson, Shower of Stars, 11.
26. Wilson, Shower of Stars, 85, from Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusions,
and Other Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 142.
27. Wilson, Shower of Stars, 33–41.
28. See Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 70, 114,
29. See Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, and Kevin Townley, Green
Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology (Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2007).
The titular chapter, “Green Hermeticism,” was written by Wilson, and in it he
mulls over some of the theory behind his Hermetic art installations several
years later in upper New York State.
C h a p t er 1 3
1. See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: [An] Essay on the Ontology of the
Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 214–215.
2. See Lynn White, “The Historical Origins of Our Environmental Crisis,” Science
156 (1967):1203–1207.
272 Notes
3. See, for instance, Frederic Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Sohnya Sayres,
et al., eds., The 60s Without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), 178–209, which concludes by discoursing on the “therapeutic”
aspects of the Chinese “cultural revolution,” implying that Mao just didn’t go
far enough, and by asserting that the “sense of freedom and possibility” of the
1960s was merely a historical illusion, while the 1980s will surely be character-
ized by the “extension of class struggle” [the only authentic reality, which is
dualistic] “into the furthest reaches of the globe “(208–209).
4. Jeff Nuttal, “Applications of Extasy,” in Joseph Berke, ed., Counter Culture
(London: Peter Owen, 1969), 208.
5. Allen Ginsberg, “Consciousness and Practical Action, in Berke, ed., Counter
Culture, 172.
6. Ginsberg, in Berke, ed., 173.
7. Ibid., 180.
8. Ibid., 176.
9. Although the term “counterculture” is fundamentally misleading, I continue to
use it here because it is still in general use and because I do not see an appropri-
ate alternative to it.
10. See Arthur Versluis, Magic and Mysticism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman, 2007), for a
discussion of these primary terms and currents within Western history.
11. This notion still impels discourse on the putative Left, and helps also to explain
the continuing attraction that Stalin or Mao holds for some. The motive impulse
behind such discourse was captured by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov,
in his figure of the Grand Inquisitor. See Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10–11, 136–137.
12. Analogously, one might expect a renegade band or bands of evangelical
Christians to attempt to “speed the coming of the millennium”—if not for the
belief that the timing of such things in the end belongs to God, not man. The
Weatherman group acknowledged no divine constraints on humanity—every-
thing is up to us, they believed.
13. Hence after the communes were established came the anthropologists, who
studied the new natives in their habitats.
14. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, John Wilkinson, trs. (New York: Knopf,
1964); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); and
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt, 1967).
15. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 263–264.
16. Roszak, 265. It is worth noting that Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don
Juan was published in 1968.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: Munroe, 1836), 90.
18. See, on Emerson and Asian traditions, Arthur Versluis, American
Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press,
Notes 273
1993). Emerson’s immediatism is one reason that his Harvard Divinity School
Address was seen as so scandalous. For an exceptionally clear example of
countercultural Emersonesque gnosticism, see Stephen [Gaskin], The Caravan
(New York: Harper, 1972).
19. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Robert Wallace,
trs. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 137. See also Arthur Versluis,
“Antignosticism and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” Telos 124(2003): 173–182,
and Versluis, The New Inquisitions, op. cit., 69–84.
C h a p t er 1 4
1. See Patrick McNamara, Spirit Possession and Exorcism: History, Psychology, and
Neurobiology, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011), I.103.
2. Mana figures in Robert Henry Codrington’s (1830–1922) work The Melanesians
(1891), as well as subsequently in the work of authors including Émile Durkheim,
Marcel Mauss, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
3. See Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York: Pantheon/Bollingen,
1953), 230.
4. Jung, Two Essays, 231.
5. Jung, Two Essays, 231–233.
6. Jung, Two Essays, 236–237.
7. Jung, Two Essays, 238.
8. See Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), and The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of
Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997). For critique of this perspective,
see Sonu Shamdasani, Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical
Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1998).
9. See Arthur Versluis, Restoring Paradise: Western Esotericism, Literature, Art, and
Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
10. Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Spirit: A Cultural History of American
Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 497–498.
11. Albanese, A Republic of Spirit, 515.
12. Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Secular Culture: Esotericism in the
Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 471.
13. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 158–168.
14. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 167.
15. See René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Baltimore,
Md.: Penguin, 1972), “Tradition and Traditionalism,” 249–257.
16. Guénon’s books during this period included Introduction générale à l’Étude
des doctrines hindoues (Paris: Éditions Trédaniel, 1921), Le Théosophisme, his-
toire d’une pseudo-religion (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles, 1921), L’Erreur spir-
ite (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles, 1923), Orient et Occident (Paris: Éditions
274 Notes
29. Frithjof Schuon, Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty: Paintings by Frithjof
Schuon (Bloomington, Ind.: Abodes, 1992).
30. Frithjof Schuon, Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real, in Sacred Web
20(2007): 86–87.
31. Schuon, Primordial Meditation, 87.
32. Schuon, Primordial Meditation, 77.
33. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon (New York: Amity
House, 1986), 34.
34. Aymard and Laude, Frithjof Schuon, 107.
35. See Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, Peter Townsend, trs. (New York: Harper
and Row, 1975), 223.
36. Fabbri, Shining Realm, 5.
37. Aymard and Laude, Frithjof Schuon, 41, quoting a letter of Schuon’s.
38. Aymard and Laude, Frithjof Schuon, 47.
39. Thomas Yellowtail, The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy
(Bloomington, Ill.: World Wisdom, 1990), and the second, edited by
Michael Pollack, Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty (Bloomington,
Ind.: Abodes, 1992).
40. See Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty, 56–150, 204–277.
41. See Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 173–177. See also Hugh Urban,
“A Dance of Masks: The Esoteric Ethics of Frithjof Schuon,” in G. William
Barnard and Jeffrey Kripal, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status
of Mysticism (New York: Seven Bridges, 2002), 406–440.
42. Aymard and Laude, 51.
43. See Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 175; see also Urban, “A Dance of
Masks.”
44. Quoted from an unknown source in Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 174.
See also Michael Fitzgerald, “Beauty and the Sense of the Sacred,” in Sacred
Web, 20(2007): 145–146.
45. Nasr, ed., The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon, 390
46. Nasr, ed., Essential Writings, 392.
47. Schuon, To Have a Center (Bloomington, Ind.: World Wisdom, 1990), 52.
48. Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism (Bloomington, Ind.: World Wisdom,
1986), 134.
49. See, for instance, Michael Fitzgerald, “A Portfolio of Photographs of Frithjof
Schuon,” Sacred Web, 20(2007): 121–124.
50. See Michael Fitzgerald, “A Portfolio of Photographs of Frithjof Schuon,” Sacred
Web, 20(2007): 121–124.
51. Cf. Patrick Laude, “Quintessential Esoterism and the Wisdom of Forms,”
Sacred Web, 20(2007): 192, to wit, Laude’s remark that Schuon’s work “bears
witness both to the liberty of the Spirit that ‘burns’ forms to reduce them to
their essence, to the Eckhartian breaking of the shell that is a requirement for
276 Notes
reaching the core, but also to a keen awareness of forms as testifying to degrees
of reality.”
52. See “Veneration of the Shaykh,” quoted in Urban, “Dance of Masks,” 416.
“Veneration of the Shaykh” is a document composed by one of Schuon’s spiri-
tual wives, corrected by him, and circulated among his disciples. It was included
in materials later made broadly available by Mark Koslow, an erstwhile member
of that group.
53. Urban, “Dance of Masks,” 416.
54. Urban, “Dance of Masks,” 419. A range of interpretations of Schuon’s life and
work already exists, of course. In Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick
describes the public disclosure of Schuonian primordialism as a “deeply con-
fusing tragedy” for many members of the Maryamiyya order, and adds that “the
most frequent explanation among thoughtful ex-Maryami. . . is that Schuon
confused. . . the transcendent unity of religions with a foolish and impossible
attempt to recreate a single unified religion on earth.” Mark Sedgwick, Against
the Modern World, 177. Sedgwick’s interpretation corresponds to those who
prefer to see Schuon in an Islamic context. But Hugh Urban recognizes that
“Schuon’s Primordial Gatherings, it would seem. . . also had much larger social,
ethical, and even eschatological implications.” Urban, “Dance of Masks,” 424.
In the end, Urban writes, Schuon’s esoteric religion represented the “embodi-
ment” of his metaphysical vision, creating not only an ideal hierarchic initi-
atic community, but also affirming “his own status as the Supreme Self or the
supraethical, radical liberated Esoteric Man who transcends all the finite moral
boundaries that limit ordinary humankind.” Urban, “Dance of Masks,” 427.
55. Laude, “Quintessential Esoterism,” 190.
56. The term “counter-traditional” comes from Guénon, and is developed in The
Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. A Traditionalist-inflected critique of
“instant mysticism” is to be found in Jacob Needleman, A Sense of the Cosmos: The
Encounter of Modern Science and Ancient Truths (New York: Doubleday, 1975),
161–164. See also Whitall N. Perry, Challenges to a Secular Society (Oakton,
Va.: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1996) 7–16.
57. See Kenneth Oldmeadow, Traditionalism (Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of
Traditional Studies, 2000), 159.
58. See Andrew Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in
Eastern Traditions (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), xiii.
C h a p t er 1 5
The fact remains that classical apophatic mysticism is not a well-populated cat-
egory in the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries.
3. See Roberts, The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey
(Boston: Shambhala, 1982), 114.
4. Roberts, Experience, 108.
5. Bernadette Roberts, Forcing-The-Fit (Santa Rosa: [spiral-bound], 2008), preface.
6. Bernadette Roberts, The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center (Albany: State
University of New York, 1991), xv.
7. Roberts, Path, 199. Roberts, in a telephone conversation in 1999, showed little
interest in discussing her predecessors, and was not familiar with Böhme or
with Christian theosophic mysticism more broadly. She is closest to the Catholic
apophatic tradition of Eckhart.
8. Roberts, The Experience of No-Self, op. cit., 9.
9. Roberts, Experience, 25.
10. Bernadette Roberts, What Is Self? (Austin, Texas: Mary Botsford Goens, 1989),
118; see 109–121.
11. Roberts, What Is Self?, 120.
12. Roberts, What Is Self?, 49.
13. See Arthur Versluis, The Mystical State: Politics, Gnosis, and Emergent Cultures
(Minneapolis: New Cultures Press, 2011), 15–23.
14. Roberts, What Is Self?, 72.
15. See Daphne Simeon, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of
the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 140–142.
16. See Bernadette Roberts, Contemplative: Autobiography of the Early Years (Santa
Rosa, Calif.: Pat Masters, 2004).
17. Jesse McKinley, “The Wisdom of the Ages, For Now Anyway,” The New York
Times (March 23, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/fashion/23tolle.
html?_r=1, and Cathy Lyn Grosman, “ ‘Life’s Purpose’ Author Eckhart Tolle is
Serene, Critics Less So,” USA Today (April 15, 2010), http://www.usatoday.com/
news/religion/2010-04-15-tolle15_CV_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip.
18. See Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998), 514.
19. McKinley, “The Wisdom of the Ages,” 1.
20. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato,
Calif.: New World, 1999), 6.
21. For instance, Tolle, The Power of Now, 25, 43, 63.
22. Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (Novato, Calif.: New World, 2003), 7.
23. Tolle, Stillness Speaks, 23.
24. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Plume,
2006), 71.
25. Tolle, A New Earth, 72.
26. Tolle, A New Earth, 144.
278 Notes
C h a p t er 1 6
fallacy, and that’s the idea that having a profound religious experience requires a
moral state. In other words, my position is that there is no necessary relationship
between a profound mystical experience and a moral state, or a set of moral or
ethical behaviors. You can have a mystical experience of divinity, of oneness with
nature, of the immortality of the soul in a situation that is entirely amoral or even
immoral.” David Lane approached a similar conclusion in David Lane and Scott
Lowe, Da: The Strange Case of Franklin Jones (Walnut, Calif.: Mount San Antonio
College Philosophy Group, 1996), 8–9, 26; see also Lowe, 78–81.
C h a p t er 1 7
It is, of course, still too soon to make a solid judgment about this, but it seems
safe to say that Barack Obama is likely moving into truly Integral waves of devel-
opment and therefore beginning to evidence truly Integral values and positions.
Combined with his already significantly developed states (which gives the very
notable Radiance and Presence to his being), this means we might very well
be seeing, certainly for the first time in this century, a truly Integrally-oriented
President of the United States.” See Ken Wilber, “Perspectives on President
Obama,” originally found at http://integrallife.com/apply/politics-civics/
perspectives-president-obama and replicated on the web at places like http://
www.throughyourbody.com/ken-wilber-on-president-obamas-integral-state/
56. Ken Wilber, Terry Patten, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli, Integral Life
Practice: A 21st Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental
Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening (Boston: Shambhala/Integral, 2008), xvi.
57. Wilber, et al., Integral Life Practice, 181. The same terminology is found in Jones/
Adi Da, The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Awakening, as well as in The
Dawn Horse Testament. See on meditation, Wilber et al., Integral Life Practice,
248. The terminology here is specifically that of Jones/Adi Da during the 1970s
and 1980s: both “avoiding” and “contracting” are found throughout Jones’s
works, but particularly during the earlier period.
58. Franklin Jones/Adi Da, The Dawn Horse Testament (San Rafael, Calif.: Dawn
Horse, 1985), 110.
59. Wilber et al., Integral Life Practice, 194.
60. Ken Wilber, “What We Are, That We See” Part I: Responses to Some Recent
Criticism in a Wild West Fashion,” June 8, 2006, http://www.kenwilber.com/
blog/show/46
61. See Frank Visser, “The Wild West Wilber Report,” http://www.integralworld.
net/visser15.html
62. Ken Wilber, “What We Are, That We See” Part I: Responses to Some Recent
Criticism in a Wild West Fashion,” June 8, 2006, http://www.kenwilber.com/
blog/show/46
63. Ken Wilber, “What We Are, That We See” Part I: Responses to Some Recent
Criticism in a Wild West Fashion,” June 8, 2006, http://www.kenwilber.com/
blog/show/46
64. Wilber et al., Integral Life Practice, 195.
65. See Marc [Mordechai] Gafni, “Privacy, Post Modernism, Sex, Teachers and
Students: On Sex, Ethics, and Injury,” September 13, 2011, http://www.marc-
gafni.com/?p=3002
66. Andrew Cohen, My Master Is My Self: The Birth of a Spiritual Teacher (Larkspur,
Calif.: Moksha, 1989), 4–5.
67. Cohen, My Master, 6–7.
68. Cohen, My Master, 22–23.
69. Cohen, My Master, 26.
Notes 285
C h a p t er 1 8
15. For a related Buddhist critique, see Jeffrey S. Brooks, “The Emperor Has No
Clothes: A Critique of Neo-Advaitinism and Adyashanti,” originally at http://
www.greatwesternvehicle.org/criticism/neoAdvaitinism.htm 7 October 2005.
16. See Gangaji, Just Like You (Mendocino, Calif.: Do, 2003), 53–54, on Kalu
Rinpoche; by contrast, there are large sections of the book on Poonjaji. There’s
virtually no trace of Buddhism in Gangaji, You Are That (Boulder, Colo.: Sounds
True, 2007).
17. Gangaji, You Are That, 2.
18. Gangaji, You Are That, 6.
19. Gangaji, You Are That, 7.
20. Gangaji, You Are That, 8.
21. From The Sedona Method, www.sedona.com, May 10, 2013.
22. See the interview with Pamela Wilson, “Loving Mystery,” in Conversations on
Nonduality, 193.
23. Interview with Pamela Wilson, “Loving Mystery,” in Conversations on
Nonduality, 192.
24. See AHAM: Sharing the Teaching–Arunachala Ramana, http://www.aham.com/
usa/sharing/a_ramana2.html, May 14, 2013.
25. See AHAM: Sharing the Teaching–Arunachala Ramana, http://www.aham.com/
usa/sharing/a_ramana2.html, May 14, 2013.
26. One commentator says that Ramana’s (Trammell’s) teachings were a combina-
tion of Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich) and Neo-Advaita. There is some
evidence for this—Trammell was a student of Hill’s. See “A. Ramana’s Passing,”
http://www.aham.com/oldsite/ARamanasPassing.pdf and see also http://www.
aham.com/oldsite/livingfree/aramana.html
27. Timothy Conway, “Neo-Advaita or Pseudo-Advaita and Real Advaita-Nonduality,”
http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/neo-advaita.html, March 1, 2008.
28. Timothy Conway, “Neo-Advaita or Pseudo-Advaita and Real Advaita-Nonduality,”
http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/neo-advaita.html, March 1, 2008.
29. Dennis Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle (Winchester, U.K.: O
Books, 2008), 47.
30. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 47.
31. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 48, 50.
32. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 58.
33. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 50, 61.
34. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 73.
35. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 83.
36. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 84.
37. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 84.
38. Waite, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, 144, 145.
39. Eleonora Gilbert, ed., Conversations on Non-Duality: Twenty-Six Awakenings
(London: Cherry Red, 2011), 140–141.
Notes 289
C h a p t er 1 9
life, my mind, and my heart. Even with the adversity and the confusion that they
brought to my existence, I have benefited from their valuable lessons.”
9. Bernadette Roberts, Essays on the Christian Contemplative Journey
(n.p.: self-published, 2007), 44, 46.
10. See for instance, Ken Wilber, “What We Are, That We See,” Part II (June 11,
2006), http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/48
11. Wouter Hanegraaff, “Everybody is Right: Frank Visser’s Analysis of Ken Wilber,”
Hervormd Nederland 1.2(January 12, 2002): 28–30, available at http://www.inte-
gralworld.net/hanegraaff.html
12. See Georg Feuerstein, Holy Madness, 445–454. Feuerstein, formerly a devotee of
Jones/Adi Da, became a Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner, and in this appendix to
Holy Madness, offers a Vajrayana analysis of what characterizes enlightenment
and enlightened behavior. See also 427–428.
13. See Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters, for entries on some examples.
Examples include Robert Aitken, Richard Baker, Philip Kapleau, Eric Pema
Kunsang, and John Daido Loori, to name only a few—there are many others.
14. Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity (San Rafael,
Calif.: Sophia Perennis, 2010), 13.
15. Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy, 13.
16. Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy, 16.
17. Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy, 9.
18. Here I am thinking, for instance, of R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence,
Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1955).
19. See Gaskin, Rendered Infamous and An Outlaw in My Heart.
20. See, for instance, the critical accounts archived at www.adidaarchive.org, and
William Yenner et al., American Guru, for instance, 62, 64, as well as Scott Lowe
and David Lane, Da: The Strange Case of Franklin Jones (Walnut, Calif.: Mount
San Antonio Philosophy Group, 1996), 10, 22, 41, 87.
21. See Ludovic Viévard, Vacuité et compassion dans le bouddhisme madhyamaka
(Paris: Collège de France, 2002), for a survey of various Buddhist texts on this
subject.
22. See Khenpo Namdrol, The Practice of Vajrakilaya (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion,
1999), 31–43.
23. See Jeffrey Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 174–175; see G. William Bernard
and Jeffrey Kripal, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of
Mysticism (New York: Seven Bridges, 2002).
24. Tony Parsons, As It Is (Carlsbad, Calif.: Inner Directions, 2000), 98–99.
25. For examples of this antinomianism, see, for instance, the accounts concerning
“Master Nome” (Jeffrey Smith, 1955–) and his brother Russell Smith at Sarlo’s
Guru Rating Service, http://www3.telus.net/public/sarlo/Yjeffruss.htm. There
Notes 291