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American Gurus

American
GURUS
From American Transcendentalism to
New Age Religion
z
Arthur Versluis

1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Versluis, Arthur, 1959-
American gurus : from American transcendentalism to new age religion / Arthur Versluis.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–19–936813–6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–936814–3
(ebook)  1.  United states—Religion—History.  2.  Religious leaders—United
States.  I. Title.
BL2525.V465 2014
206’.10973—dc23
2013033755

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
[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

Americans want the fruit of religion, but not its


obligations.
—George Gallup, Jr.
Contents

1. Introduction 1

PART ONE: Nineteenth-Century Enlightenments

2. Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle 17


3. The Sage of Concord 26
4. Emerson and Platonism 35
5. The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 52
6. Walt Whitman’s Cosmic Consciousness 71

PART TWO: Enlightened Literature

7. American (Literary) Spiritual Teachers 81


8. Beat Religion and the Choice 92
9. Enter Psychedelics 109
10. Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual Anarchism 122
11. Oh, Ho, Ho, It’s Magic. . .  130
12. Spiritual Anarchy, Tantra, and Islamic Heterodoxy 139
13. On the Counterculture 147
viii Contents

PART THREE: American Gurus

14. From Europe to America 159


15. Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 175
16. The Sage on the Stage 188
17. The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 202
18. The Immediatist Wave 227
19. Conclusions 237

Notes 251
Index 293
1

Introduction

By the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon that once was inconceiv-


able had become nearly commonplace in American society. Symbolizing
this development was the appearance of Eckhart Tolle on The Oprah Winfrey
Show, as well as the selection of his work for Oprah’s Book Club. Tolle is a
German-born mystic whose books, including The Power of Now and A New
Earth, represent no particular religious tradition, though his work owes
more than a little to the long-standing current of Christian mysticism
that can be traced back not only to Tolle’s namesake, Meister Eckhart, the
great medieval Christian mystic, but also back to early Christianity.1 And
his work also owes something to Buddhist meditation practices. Tolle, a
diminutive bearded figure, was catapulted to “bestseller-dom” by the phe-
nomenally popular daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiastic
endorsement of his work. It might seem that a figure like Tolle comes
more or less from nowhere, and in fact his works to some extent support
this impression. At the same time, Tolle also represents a much larger
phenomenon, which I  am terming the “contemporary North American
guru.”2
After all, Tolle is not the only such North American public spiritual
teacher who does not belong to, or at least is not authorized by, a major
religious tradition. In fact, there are so many such independent spiritual
teachers that already before the end of the twentieth century, Andrew
Rawlinson had published a still invaluable encyclopedia titled The Book
of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Asian Traditions.3 Some of the
most famous other American guru-figures include Ram Dass, Andrew
Cohen, Franklin Jones [Adi Da], and numerous others, some of whom
claim to be enlightened, while others do not. Many of these figures have
in common a Hindu background—often a meeting with a charismatic
guru—though that is by no means always the case.
2 America n  G urus

What are the origins of this phenomenon of independent American


spiritual teachers, and in particular, of American spiritual teachers act-
ing as gurus and in some cases, claiming enlightenment? Is there any
Western precedent for this? Is there a broader literary and religious con-
text in which we can more clearly understand how this phenomenon
developed, and what it means? It is certainly the case that this phenom-
enon would not have come about without the advent of Asian religions in
the West—of that there’s no doubt. At the same time, as we will see, we
can trace other predecessors as well for the more widespread emergence
of American independent spiritual teachers in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
Characteristic of this phenomenon is what I  term “immediatism.”4
Immediatism refers to a religious assertion of spontaneous, direct, unme-
diated spiritual insight into reality (typically with little or no prior training),
which some term “enlightenment.” Strictly speaking, immediatism refers
to a claim of a “pathless path” to religious enlightenment—the immediatist
says “away with all ritual and practices!” and claims that direct spiritual
awakening or enlightenment is possible at once. Immediatism is, in other
words, a claim that one can achieve enlightenment or spiritual illumina-
tion spontaneously, without any particular means, often without medita-
tion or years of guided praxis. As we will see, a immediatist approach to
enlightenment is deeply embedded in contemporary American religious
literature.
My argument in this book is that although immediatism has a signifi-
cant history in the West—behind it as a predecessor is the ur-philosophy of
the West, reflected in terms like prisca theologia and philosophia perennis—
kin to immediatism are particularly visible in Anglo-European American
literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries right up to the
present. From Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson to William
James, from H.  D.  to Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, from Franklin
Merrell-Wolff to Bernadette Roberts, Franklin Jones, and Andrew Cohen,
there is a more or less consistent American literary, philosophical, and
religious tradition whose characteristics are best described by the term
“immediatism.”
If contemporary American immediatism has a single ancestor to whom
it owes the most, that figure would be Ralph Waldo Emerson. Literary
critic Harold Bloom was right when he said that in American literature,
the titanic figure is Emerson, and one can measure American literature as
being before and after Emerson. But our Emerson is different from the one
Introduction 3

Bloom emphasizes. Bloom has argued that the characteristic American


religion is Gnostic, and here too we are sort of in agreement with him.5
But the term “gnostic” for our purposes also has a somewhat different
meaning from that suggested by Bloom. Bloom wants to cordon the term
“gnostic” off to refer to the world-rejecting perspective attributed to it by
Hans Jonas and those who follow his existentialist, early twentieth-century
interpretation of “Gnosticism” in late antiquity, an interpretation that is
significantly belied by more recent scholarship.6 However, in our usage,
“gnosis” and “gnostic” have only their generic implications of one who
claims direct spiritual insight, a “gnostic” being someone who experiences
gnosis, or illumination. Emerson is the archetypal American figure in this
regard.
From his earliest to his mature essays and poems, Emerson empha-
sized the possibility of immediate, direct spiritual knowledge and power.
In Nature, he remarked that whereas most of human activity consists in
incremental and instrumental kinds of technical progress, rather like a
king buying his kingdom inch by inch, in fact it is possible for man to
vault “at once into his throne.” We can, he says, grasp the “sceptre”; we
have access to a “power which exists not in time or space, but an instanta-
neous in-streaming causing power.”7 Later in the same little book, he con-
cludes with a kind of Orphic revery inspired by Bronson Alcott, in which
he asserts that “a man is a god in ruins,” and that in every man is spirit,
whose foundation or element is in eternity.
Emerson’s friend Bronson Alcott also emphasized direct spiri-
tual experience, and in fact underwent an illumination that he termed
his “apotheosis” in 1849, out of which came not only an enigmatic and
lengthy manuscript (described in some detail in this book), but also much
of his subsequent thought. Emerson and Alcott together represent semi-
nal figures in the American immediatist tradition that this book traces
and describes, but they are by no means the only such exemplars. In fact,
we will trace this religious current from its origins in Platonism, through
to the remarkable phenomenon of contemporary Western immediatist
gurus. But Emerson and Alcott have an important place in its American
history.
It was Aldous Huxley who made the term “perennial philosophy”
familiar, but “perennialism” is only one among a number of related
terms and ideas. “Universalism,” “Traditionalism,” even prisca theologia
or prisca philosophia, describe not a comparison or union of different tradi-
tions, but rather a religious center or experiential essence. This center or
4 America n  G urus

essence might be described as mystical or as esoteric, because it is typi-


cally regarded as accessible only to a few, whether they are said to be initi-
ates in a particular tradition, or whether through contemplative practice or
unbidden experience they are said to come to perceive it. Although some
identify this idea with the modern era, if not with Huxley’s bricolage of
quotations, in fact perennialism has a long history in the West. This his-
tory begins, not in North America, but in ancient Greece, with the enig-
matic figures of Pythagoras and Plato.
But this book also introduces an entirely new conceptual framework
for understanding a religious and philosophical perspective that, often
in hidden ways, has shaped American and global contemporary thought.
Immediatism is not the same as perennialism, universalism, or tradition-
alism—it refers to a perspective emphasizing direct and immediate access
to spiritual insight, and does not carry along with it ancillary doctrines that
valorize ancient religions and cultures or for that matter, contemporary
world religious traditions. Immediatism emphasizes immediate, sponta-
neous access to transcendent understanding or knowledge, and the term
aptly describes not only variants or offshoots of well-known and influential
religious traditions like Zen Buddhism, but also an array of approaches to
literature and culture, and important authors of the nineteenth, twenti-
eth, and early twenty-first centuries. Understanding immediatism means
understanding well-known figures of American literary, philosophical,
and scientific history in new and sometimes startling ways.8
In our investigation, I take care neither to defend nor to attack immedi-
atism—rather, this book explores an important theme in Western and spe-
cifically in American literature and culture. As an exploration, it will move
over a broad array of sources and figures with the aim of understanding
connections and differences between them, but without condemnation or
apologetics. It is important to make this clear at the beginning, because
much of what little has been written about the most controversial figures
in this book falls into one or the other of these categories, whereas very
few authors seem to aim for even-handed analysis. I will save some of my
larger conclusions for the final chapter, where we address the major issues
raised by our survey of these figures and literature.
Relatively little has been published on the subjects in this book.
Among the handful of books I would include Philip Goldberg’s American
Veda, which focuses on the impact of Hindu gurus on American popular
religion, Thomas Forsthoefel’s and Cynthia Humes’s collection Gurus in
America, Lola Williamson’s Transcendent in America, and Leigh Schmidt’s
Introduction 5

Restless in America.9 An important book about the transition from the


nineteenth to the twentieth centuries in American religion is Catherine
Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit, and with regard to late twentieth-
and early twenty-first-century scholarship in this area, I would also refer
the reader to the work of Jeffrey Kripal, in particular his extensive history
of the Esalen community in California, but also his methodological reflec-
tions on the study of Hinduism and American esoteric religion. Kripal’s
argument about the American “religion of no religion” in his book Esalen
directly confirms the thesis of this book.
But this book covers new territory. In order to write it, I had to purchase
many primary sources because the titles could not be found via interlibrary
loan, and so I now have a small library of original sources for the history
of the 1960s counterculture and the emergence of American gurus and
spiritual teachers. Discussed in American Gurus are numerous figures and
groups brought together for the first time in contemporary scholarship,
linked by the overarching thesis that we can discern, at the juncture of
American religion and American literature, a distinct American religious
phenomenon that I  am terming “immediatism.” We see this phenom-
enon recurring in numerous, disparate, often colorful figures, especially
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is visible in the
works of Alan Watts, in Timothy Leary and the psychedelic movement of
the 1960s, in the New Age movement that followed, but most clearly in
subsequent gurus and popular spiritual teachers like Franklin Jones (Adi
Da), Andrew Cohen, and Eckhart Tolle.
Historically, although immediatism as it develops in the latter half of the
twentieth century has deep roots in the West, most notably in Platonism,
but also in Christian mysticism, from the nineteenth century onward,
American immediatism would not have developed as it has without the
emergence of Asian religions in the West. In American Transcendentalism
and Asian Religions (1993), I surveyed how Asian religions helped to shape
the entire Transcendentalist intellectual movement, and in The Esoteric
Origins of the American Renaissance (2001), I showed how Western esoteric
traditions contributed much to mid-nineteenth-century American litera-
ture and literary religion. In this book, I continue and complete the trilogy
by showing how the confluence of Asian religions and Western mysti-
cism come together to produce the continuing and fascinating saga of
American immediatism.
Clearly, we are still in the midst of a historical transition as Asian reli-
gions become more deeply rooted in the West and as Western teachers
6 America n  G urus

of Asian religions continue to emerge. In this transition, the figures fea-


tured in the narrative of this book present us with a broader and deeper
understanding of these transcultural religious phenomena than hitherto
has been available. In what follows we focus, of course, on the theme of
immediatism, but there are many other aspects to this transition that
also call out for exploration. For instance, what are the long-term implica-
tions in the West for Madhyamika and other sophisticated forms of Asian
religious philosophy? What new hybrid forms of East-West synthesis
are developing today? How will Asian forms of religion change as they
become acclimated in and to the West?
For now, what we are looking at in this book remains “outlaw religion”
in many respects, in society at large as well as in academia. Its representa-
tives assert the reality and the value of direct spiritual cognition in ways that
made or make their contemporaries uncomfortable, and that may in fact
be in some ways misguided, but that nonetheless must be recognized as
a persistent, influential, and significant cultural force not only in the nine-
teenth century, but even more in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Academics may tend to privilege discursive rationality, but these renegade
religious figures forge ahead regardless, insisting that direct, immediate
spiritual illumination is not only possible, but essential, whether we like it or
not. Of course, one question we will seek to answer is whether the kinds of
consciousness they champion are the same. Without giving away too much,
I think it is safe to say that I do not think either these various figures, or the
kinds of consciousness they champion, are by any means all the same.
It is particularly important to understand the immediatist theme in
recent and contemporary religious literature, not only because of its his-
torical significances, because it is today both influential and popular. The
first step in understanding it is to recognize that it is there, and this book
is the first to accomplish this task. Once we understand the phenomenon,
we then can turn our attention to its implications and its broader contexts
and significances. As we will see, immediatism is visible at least in vitro
for quite a long period before it develops into the much more widespread
and extensive phenomenon we see in the late twentieth century, particu-
larly in America. The intellectual history of American gurus is a fascinat-
ing and provocative saga, and I trust you will enjoy as much as I have the
journey of coming to understand it more fully and clearly. And we must
begin with the concept of “enlightenment.”
When we look for the historical origins of enlightenment in the West,
we might begin not with Plato, but with the Mystery traditions. At least
Introduction 7

some of the ancient pagan Mysteries, as initiatory traditions, centered on


individual illumination, the precise nature of which is still not entirely
clear to us. Apuleius, in his wonderful novel of late antiquity, The Golden
Ass, one of the few accounts purporting to reveal at least something of an
initiation into a Mystery tradition, alluded to his salvific experience of Isis
as experiencing “the sun at midnight.” But adherents to the Mysteries
were sworn to secrecy, and even Apuleius’s account gives us only coy allu-
sions and metaphors. Nonetheless, the Mystery traditions were said to
represent direct illuminative experience of a deity. Such initiatory experi-
ences could well be described as “primordial,” meaning that via ritual, one
participated in the timelessness that is the atmosphere, if one can so put
it, of the god.
Underlying the Mystery traditions of antiquity was the idea that
through ritual, one participated directly in eternity. Ritual celebration (a
“horizontal” or temporal event) in this context means that the participant
is primordially (vertically, eternally) present with the divine on earth; one
was prepared for death via direct illuminative experience in life in, for
instance, the telesterion of Eleusis. The very word telesterion derives from
the Greek word τελεϊνή, telein, meaning to complete or to fulfill, to be
initiated; it was where the human being was held to be completed, made
familiar with the otherwise apparently far-off (tele) divine, that is, with the
“vertical” or illuminative experience of eternity.
Something like this may be the case also with, for instance, the
Christian Mass; and one could argue that the same is true of many reli-
gious rituals in various traditions, non-monotheistic and monotheistic
alike. That would be a simple form of prisca theologia, or “ancient theol-
ogy,” closer to contemporary notions of “perennial philosophy,” implying
that all religions have a common center. But in fact the early Christian
Church Fathers inveighed fiercely against the Mystery traditions of antiq-
uity, scorning them and underscoring the differences between monothe-
istic faith and the earlier initiatory pagan traditions represented in the
Mysteries. And this bitter opposition would suggest that, in the view of
such authors as Tertullian, the Mysteries represented something funda-
mentally different from the comparatively new monotheistic faith.
In The Price of Monotheism [Die Mosaische Unterscheidung], Jan
Assmann suggests a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” reli-
gions, “primary” religions being those like Greek and Roman religions
that continue over millennia, and “secondary” religions being those that
define themselves “against” an existing tradition.10 Ancient Judaism, he
8 America n  G urus

argues, represents a classical example of a secondary or “counterreli-


gion,” as does early Christianity, because both define themselves primar-
ily against another religious tradition or traditions. And indeed, as we
explored in The New Inquisitions, what became known as “orthodox” early
Christianity established itself polemically by doing just what Assmann
points out: rejecting and demonizing others.11
But there is another way of distinguishing “primary” and “secondary”
religion that is also directly relevant to our theme here. One could see as
“primary” religions that emphasize direct individual spiritual initiation,
awakening, or illumination, and as “secondary” religions that emphasize
faith and belief in related doctrinal constructions. This latter distinction
does reflect the polemical opposition of many of the early Church Fathers
to Gnosticism as well as to the ancient Mystery traditions. It also reflects
the Christian opposition to theurgic Platonism and the ultimate closure
of the Platonic Academy by the Christian emperor Justinian in 529 a.d.
After all, the ancient Mysteries, Gnosticism, and Platonism, despite their
differences, did share an emphasis on direct individual illumination; and
what became orthodox or conventional Christianity did emphasize faith or
belief in a historical Jesus and a set of affiliated doctrines.
This distinction is important because it has shaped, sometimes in hid-
den ways, modes of thought that continue into the present day. Inherent in
this distinction is the exclusion or rejection of mysticism, which, however
vague, nonetheless is as good a term as any to describe a religious path
emphasizing direct individual spiritual illuminative experience. Orthodox
or conventional Christianity in late antiquity did include forms of mysti-
cism, including notions of orthodox gnosis in the works of Clement of
Alexandria and Origen. By and large, a term like “gnosis,” along with what
it implied, was frowned upon by the prevailing Church Fathers such as
Irenaeus and Tertullian. And by the modern period, mysticism or gnosis
were often identified as synonymous with “irrationalism;” in point of fact,
one has trouble finding very many modern examplars of classical mysti-
cism or gnosis.
But when we go back to late antiquity, it is another matter. The Mystery
traditions, Platonism, Gnosticism, and Hermetism all emphasize not
faith in doctrinal belief systems, and also not reason alone, but rather the
triad, as Gilles Quispel put it, of faith, reason, and gnosis together.12 Here,
the term “gnosis” refers to nondiscursive illuminative knowledge that
transcends subject-object distinctions. The literature of late antiquity is
replete with examples. Obviously, there were differences in approach and
Introduction 9

emphasis even within particular schools like Platonism, let alone between


broader currents like Gnosticism, Hermetism, and Platonism. Yet none-
theless, in the broad Platonic tradition, in the Corpus Hermeticum, and in
the Nag Hammadi Library, we do in fact typically find an insistence on the
importance of salvific inner nondiscursive, nondualistic illumination or
gnosis.
Consider, for instance, this sequence from the Gospel of Thomas in
the Nag Hammadi Library:

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.’ ”

Or in selection 77, Jesus asserts: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up


the stone, and you will find me there.”
These sayings, attributed to Jesus, are typically gnomic, and are akin to
the parables that we find also in the New Testament. They often empha-
size direct, immediate perception; they are in some respects akin also to
Platonism. When Jesus says to tell people “we have come from the light,”
and that “you will return there again,” his admonitions resonate well in a
Platonic/Greek context.
In The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, an initiatory Hermetic trea-
tise included in the Nag Hammadi Library, we are offered a glimpse into a
shared illuminative experience of a spiritual father and his spiritual son.
It begins “My father, yesterday you promised me that you would bring
my mind into the eighth and afterwards you would bring me into the
ninth. You said that this is the order of the tradition.” Here the illumina-
tion arises from the participation of the son in the illuminative experience
of the father—one is introduced to the experience of illumination mind
to mind, so to speak. “I see indescribable depths,” he exclaims—“I am
Mind, and I  see another Mind, the one that moves the soul!” Although
10 America n  G urus

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

Wait quietly till it appears, preparing oneself to contemplate it, as


the eye awaits the rising of the sun; and the sun rising over the
horizon (“from Ocean,” the poets say) gives itself to the eyes to see.
But from where will he of whom the sun is an image rise? What is
the horizon above which he will mount when he appears? He will
be above Intellect itself, which contemplates him.14

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

There is, in fact, no boundary to transcend and there is no negotia-


tion between the cosmos and its ultimate source. There does not
have to be. All things remain in their cause. In an infinite, eternal
universe all things are simultaneous:  remaining and proceeding,
discursion and excursion and reversion, all are the same from the
perspective of the gods. When it comes to the mundane individual
Introduction 11

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

One could hardly imagine a more perfect metaphysical description of


mysticism in the Platonic tradition than this, culminating in the last
sentence of the quotation. Here we see outlined very clearly the nondual
metaphysical foundation of Platonism that in turn forms the historical
foundation for modern immediatism, beginning with that great reader of
Platonism and of Proclus, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But we will return to the
metaphysical implications of immediatism again at the end of our histori-
cal journey in this book.
In his magnum opus on Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles,
the last head of the Platonic Academy in late antiquity, Damascius, also
explores the relationship between intellect, knowledge, and transcendence.
In Neoplatonic parlance, he describes “reversion,” that is, the return of
the intellect to its transcendent origin. He concludes that “we do not con-
nect to the Ineffable by means of knowledge but by means of Being; and
that connects to the Ineffable through complete unity, so that through this
intermediary, all other things also connect [to the Ineffable].”17 In other
words, there is an underlying, fundamental unity that links us primordi-
ally with the Ineffable via the nature of our being. Damascius emphasizes
the ineffability of transcendence, the limits of discourse in describing it,
and yet at the same time is exceptionally detailed in his rational explication
of it. But something critical remains unclear: what is our means of access
to this understanding? How do we come to experience the cognitive ascent
and reunion that he terms “reversion”? Through what praxis? That is by
no means clear.
12 America n  G urus

Hence, before we delve into the modern history of enlightenment in


an American context, we need to address a fundamental problem that con-
tinues to elude solution. This problem is the more galling the more one
studies the history of Western mysticism. And that is: What practices did
this or that figure undertake in order to realize transcendental or nondual
consciousness? We almost never know. This is true of almost the entire
history of Western mysticism. When we look at a figure like Plotinus,
whose Enneads represent an extraordinarily comprehensive metaphys-
ics, and about whom there are apocryphal reports that he had what we
may call “realization experiences,” nonetheless, we simply do not know
what contemplative practices Plotinus engaged in. He left no meditation
instructions, no indication of whether he sat in lotus posture or stood like
a pillar, no details of how he came to those realizations. This is the funda-
mental problem we find in so much of the history of Western mysticism.
The same is true of the texts in the Nag Hammadi Library, though there
are a few clues. For instance, there are strings of vowels that could suggest
chanting or singing/intonation. But when we look at the full array of texts
more or less associated with Gnosticism, we find that it is not exactly clear
how one ascends “from the eighth to the ninth,” or what one actually does
in order to realize the transcendence of subject and object characterized
by Basilides in the fragments we possess in Hippolytus’s attack on his
work.18 Scholars surmise that there was a Valentinian ritual of the bridal
chamber, but even here, we do not really know by what means, at the
conclusion of the Gospel of Philip, one “receives the holy light” and enters
into the truth. Is it through some kind of practices or discipline? Or is it
simply a gift of illuminative grace? The Gospel of Thomas is similar:  it
offers gnomic remarks about transcendence. In it, Jesus says, for instance,
“split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find
me there.” These are koan-like, to be sure, but they are not accompanied
by contextual meditative instructions or advice, as koans are.
This problem has engaged me since I first began to research the his-
tory of Western mysticism. In Theosophia, I proposed the term “ahistorical
continuity” to describe the phenomenon, in the West, of initiatory lineages
that appear to renew themselves without the kind of master-disciple conti-
nuity that can be traced back historically, as in Sufi or Buddhist lineages.19
In Restoring Paradise, I  sought to explain this characteristic of Western
mysticism by exploring the possibility that, in the West, texts and images
serve as primary means of initiatory transmission. Thus, the works of
Introduction 13

Dionysius the Areopagite preserve and make possible the reconstitution


of via negativa mysticism in the West, whenever they are rediscovered.
But these hypotheses do not, in themselves, really explain the phenom-
enon in question. That is, even if there is an ahistorical continuity perpet-
ually renewing itself via texts and images that serve as primary initiatory
means (instead of a master-disciple continuity in the form of historical
lineages), this does not explain what the particular practices are that lead
to the realization of the via negativa. After all, when we look at the work of
Meister Eckhart, or Johannes Tauler, to give two examples, or Marguerite
of Porete, to give a third, they write from a perspective of having realized a
nondual kind of consciousness, but they do not instruct the reader/hearer
on how to achieve it. This is also true, for that matter, of Jacob Boehme,
the illuminated cobbler. How was he illumined? A flash of light from a
pewter dish, a glimpse of the lumen naturae... .
It is possible that something like immediatism is characteristic of
much of Western mysticism. At the very least, one certainly can say that
immediatism as a modern phenomenon has ancient roots, and, further,
that it does help to describe what we see in the West from antiquity to the
present. Platonism certainly provides some intellectual framework and
historical precedent for what we are here calling immediatism. That is, in
Platonism, Gnosticism, and Hermetism, and in mysticism through medi-
eval and into modern times, the classical mode in the West has been not to
include meditation instructions or particular practices. Even those kinds
of spiritual advice one does find—like those in the Cloud of Unknowing
and associated texts—does not extend to exactly what and how one ought
to proceed in the more specific manner of Buddhist or Hindu meditation
or practice instructions.
Hence, the solution to this fundamental problem might have been
staring us in the face all along, if one may so put it. If so, then the reason
that one does not find specific practice instructions in the West is that,
broadly speaking, the tradition of the West is primordialism, the idea that
we can have direct access to nondual forms of consciousness as a part of
our primordial inheritance, or capacity. Of course, one also could specu-
late that because of the long-standing emphasis on discursive reason and
faith, as well as hostility to gnosis in the West, access to nondual kinds of
consciousness was intermittent and spontaneous rather than culturally or
institutionally sanctioned. And so immediatism is a way of describing a
kind of ad hoc transcendence that, as a basic human capacity or possibility,
14 America n  G urus

might be glimpsed even without particular disciplines and traditions that


point toward and encourage realization of it.
One has to at least allude here to the development of the Inquisitions
as a phenomenon in the West. In The New Inquisitions, I explored the his-
tory and significances of inquisitionalism in the intellectual history of the
West and for the development of modernity.20 Here, we might note that,
aside from its other aspects, inquisitionalism in the West could be read
in part as a formalization of the insistence on the hegemony of discursive
reason and faith over gnosis. Certainly it is telling that even so remarkable
a figure as Eckhart was in some danger from an Inquisition. Seen in the
light of our broader subject, here, the existence of Inquisitions represents,
at least in part, the hard or rigid opposite of and opposition to nondual
kinds of consciousness.
But with the advent of secular modernity, these kinds of restraints
no longer held. The earlier traditions could be accessed and invoked
without too much fear of repercussion. Platonism and even Hermetism
were rediscovered, and later Gnosticism, while Asian religions began to
make inroads into the West. It is true, of course, that mysticism remained
obscure and with few exemplars in the modern period. Nonetheless,
in modernity, meditation centers and Buddhist and Hindu teachers
flourished across the West. In this context of rediscovery, immediatism
emerged as a modern phenomenon. And the pater familias is Ralph
Waldo Emerson. But before we turn to Transcendentalism and its cen-
tral figure, we must step back and take a look at the different intellectual
currents that fed into it.
PART ONE

Nineteenth-Century
Enlightenments
2

Revivalism, Romanticism, and the


Protestant Principle

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

the second group; they inaugurated an American trend of assimilating


Asian religions that continues to the present day. But there were Western
precedents as well for American Transcendentalism.
There are several movements in the nineteenth century that contrib-
uted to and shed light on the emergence, in mid-century, of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and American Transcendentalism. Although Emerson may be
regarded in many ways as a defining figure of American literature, that
does not mean that Emerson himself had no predecessors and influences.
In fact, quite the opposite: the more closely one looks at Emerson’s work,
the more one realizes that it effortlessly blends many sources and intel-
lectual currents—to such an extent that one finds it hard to tease them
apart. Emerson blends together Platonism and Asian religions with
Romanticism and a whole array of other influences, but in such a way that
they are sublimated into his own authoritative voice. Here, we will empha-
size several intellectual precedents for later American forms or claims of
enlightenment.
The first of these predecessors, essential for Emerson’s develop-
ment, is, of course, Protestantism, and in particular the Protestant prin-
ciple as manifested in America. The “Protestant principle,” put simply,
is to emphasize the importance of the individual over the corporatism
of Roman Catholicism. We see this principle at work in the Protestant
emphasis on the individual reading and interpretation of scripture, in
the individual emphases of revivalism, and in the general belief, across a
range of Protestant sects, that one is called to an individual relationship
or covenant with Jesus Christ and with God. The Protestant principle was
broadly very influential in the early period of the American republic—
Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur suggested, in a sequel to his Letters from
an American Farmer, that Americans were so given to sectarianism and
religious individualism that the end result might be to every man his own
denomination. At one point he tells the amusing story of an American
who boasts that he was a “member of a church which was composed of no
one but himself.”1
But of course, that is almost exactly the assessment of Amos Bronson
Alcott about his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson: Alcott, after a lecture, con-
cluded that Emerson also belonged to a church of one. And Thoreau, in
Walden, went one step further by remarking that he would resign from
any organization that would have him. In fact, the individualism that the
Transcendentalists shared was a development out of Protestantism—
it was, as the prolix Orestes Brownson recognized, a kind of final
Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle 19

logical result of Protestantism.2 Separation from Catholicism, then dis-


sent from the resulting organization, in a process of sectarian division,
would result, finally, in a church of one. And that, the criticism goes, is
Transcendentalism.
Historian Sydney Ahlstrom describes the development of American
Protestantism through Unitarianism into Transcendentalism as An
American Reformation. This American reformation, he argues, derives
from two primary sources:  Hellenism (in particular, Platonism) and
Scottish realism, derived from Aristotelianism. Ahlstrom locates the
tradition of Plato and Plotinus as vital for the later development not
only of Unitarianism, but also of Transcendentalism, because Plotinus
in particular represents “a rational mysticism.” “With Plotinus,”
he continues, “the Platonic identification of intellect and the divine
became the foundation for defining a process of reflexive introspec-
tion whereby one confronted the immanent God in one’s own soul.”3
This precedent Ahlstrom sees as “integrally” related to the American
reformation that culminates in Transcendentalism. It is interesting
that Ahlstrom saw Plotinus as so important for the development of
Transcendentalism, because when we look closely at Emerson’s work,
we do in fact find that Plotinus is much more important than one
might have thought. But we will explore the significance of Plotinus’s
importance for Emerson shortly.
First, however, we should remark on the other predecessor to
Transcendentalism in American religion, and that is the tradition of
Protestant mysticism. Of course, more than once I have heard the rejoin-
der that “Protestant mysticism” is an oxymoron, and in some contexts, of
course, it is. Nonetheless, just because many historians tend to emphasize
Protestant evangelicalism and fundamentalism does not mean that there
is no robust tradition of Protestant mysticism as well. There is, and it
derives in part, naturally enough, from the Protestant principle of indi-
vidualism, but also from the influence of Cambridge Platonism. The lin-
eage is primarily via the influence of Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), who
along with Henry More (1614–1687) served as a conduit of Platonism to
American Protestantism. Jonathan Edwards was significantly influenced
by Cudworth, and in fact wrote a series of notes on Cudworth’s The True
Intellectual System of the Universe (1678).4
But Edwards’s Platonic mysticism was not only one of his intellectual
interests; it was rather, as George Marsden pointed out, an intrinsic part
of who he was. In 1723, he wrote one of the more famous love passages in
20 America n  G urus

American history, to Sarah Pierrepont [Pierpont], who later was to become


his wife. Here is the passage:

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

This was, Marsden wrote, “quintessential Jonathan.” “Indeed,” he contin-


ued, “Edwards lived in a world of spiritual realities that was closer to the
medieval Dante’s than to our own.. . . [and] the last sentence—of convers-
ing with God in the fields—is strikingly a mirror image of himself.”6
Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” confirms that he was a kind of natural
mystic from early in his life. Edwards wrote that even as a child he and
some schoolmates built a “booth” in a secret place in a swamp in order to
be able to pray in reclusion, and later in life, as an adolescent, he also had
illumination experiences. Afterward, he wrote,

my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more


and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The
Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle 21

appearance of everything was altered:  there seemed to be, as it


were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost
everything.
God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to
appear in everything; in the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and
blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature;
which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the
moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time
in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in
these things.7

I  quote these parts of Edwards’s narrative, not because they represent


the whole of his work—they do not, of course—but because they dem-
onstrate Edwards’s proclivity toward what we may term a natural mysti-
cism, an inclination toward prayer and reclusion from childhood, as well
as the extent to which he and his Platonic idealism correspond to what we
may term, at this early juncture of the mid-eighteenth century, a nascent
American immediatism.
It is interesting to think about Edwards’s natural Platonic mysticism
in relation to English and Continental Romanticism. The Romantics—
in particular, I would mention William Blake, William Wordsworth, and
Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)—are very close to the perspective
Edwards reveals both in his “Personal Narrative” and in his “On Sarah
Pierpont.” That is, one finds in the works of all of these authors a mysti-
cism that most manifests itself in close proximity to nature. This is espe-
cially so of Wordsworth and Novalis, both of whom Emerson and some of
the other Transcendentalists were familiar with. There is, in Wordsworth’s
poetry and in Novalis’s poetry and prose, a Platonic sense that in nature we
can glimpse that which transcends nature, its archetypal and enduringly
beautiful source. In the poetry, prose, and fiction of the Romantics, one
does not see a rationalistic subject-object division in which God is “out
there,” divorced from nature and from man. Rather, in Romanticism, man
in nature can experience the divine unity of man and nature—fundamen-
tally a Platonic vision.
It is particularly interesting to juxtapose with Edwards’s personal rec-
ollections of spiritual experience Wordsworth’s Ode on “Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The poem is deeply
imbued with a kind of natural Platonism. The poem begins with the
famous lines
22 America n  G urus

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,


    The earth, and every common sight,
                           To me did seem
                   Apparelled in celestial light,
            The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Shortly thereafter, we read:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
                      Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                           And cometh from afar:
                   Not in entire forgetfulness,
                   And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

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

Indeed, along with his colleagues at the University of Vermont, Marsh


purchased a library of classic Greek and Lain works, and mastered all
of it.11
24 America n  G urus

One of Marsh’s greatest contributions to American letters, however,


was his edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. Marsh’s
edition of this work was conceived and received as a direct assault on the
growing empiricism or materialism of the day. In this assault he mar-
shaled a wide range of sources in his notes to this work, significant among
whom were the Cambridge Platonists.
After citing Henry More at some length, Marsh goes on to write that

[t]‌hese extracts from a writer of such eminence as Henry More, will do


something, I trust, if either acknowledged authority or rational argu-
ment can do anything, to counteract some of the prejudices against
the author of this work [Coleridge] and the language he employs. They
will show that neither his language nor his philosophy are wholly
unauthorized even among English writers of great reputation.12

So much was Marsh attracted to More and the Cambridge Platonists as a


means of interpreting Coleridge that

I have been strongly tempted to insert, here, another Essay from


the Friend, the 9th of volume 3, as exhibiting more distinctly the
author’s views of the relation of reason, as the power of spiritual
intuition in man, to the Supreme Reason, and showing their resem-
blance to those of H. More.13

In his philosophical theology, Marsh combines his Platonism and


Romanticism with his Christian convictions. Marsh holds, like the more
radical Transcendentalists, that conscience is our “authoritative law” in
which “we have the essential and immutable law of our own spiritual
being, and that which prescribes its true and ultimate ends.”14 But Marsh
is no subjectivist: one’s conscience reflects transcendent truth and immu-
table cosmic law. He writes that

[t]‌he consciousness of a holy and perfect law in proportion as it


is reflected upon becomes practically efficient in our minds, fills
them at the same time with apprehensions of God, and an inalien-
able conviction of his existence, as a just, a righteous and a holy
God. It opens as it were, the eyes of the soul to behold the light of
the spiritual world, and directs it to the contemplation of God as
the sun of that world, the eternal center and source of its light.15
Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle 25

Platonism and Romanticism offer different aspects of what we may call


a nascent immediatism, here—the foundation of both is that the indi-
vidual’s “eyes of the soul” are opened “to behold the light of the spiritual
world,” just as Marsh has it. Transcendentalism as an American move-
ment was only being born at the time, but Marsh demonstrates the ambi-
ence out of which Transcendentalism emerged. The fact that Marsh was
the young president of a state university suggests, too, that what we are
describing here is not a marginalized perspective, but one consonant with
the broader American intellectual context.
Each of these three movements or loose groups (Platonism,
Romanticism, and Transcendentalism) can be better understood with ref-
erence to the others, and the last of these—American Transcendentalism
in the figures of Emerson and Alcott—simply cannot be understood
fully without reference to Thomas Taylor’s Platonic translations,
Cambridge Platonism, and Romanticism. Of course, there are other
predecessors to and influences on American Transcendentalism—I am
far from denying that, having published several works detailing some
of those influences. But accounts that overemphasize Kant, Schelling,
and other similar authors, while almost completely ignoring the central
role of Platonism, are altogether misleading. As we will see, American
Transcendentalism is indeed, as Orestes Brownson said it was, an
extension of [and the logical conclusion of ] the Protestant principle. It
certainly exists in that individualistic context. But to fully understand it,
we must understand its Platonic heart. And to do that, we have to begin
with “the sage of Concord” and “Emerson’s Master,” Amos Bronson
Alcott.
3

The Sage of Concord

Of all the American Transcendentalists, major and minor, the most


underrated and even abused has been Amos Bronson Alcott. When
Alcott’s Conversations with Students on the Gospels was published in 1837,
he was pilloried in the press and attacked by Andrews Norton—a prom-
inent Unitarian spokesman known to some as “the Unitarian Pope”—
as having written a book “one third absurd, one third blasphemous,
and one third obscene.”1 A wag at the Boston Post remarked of Alcott’s
“Orphic Sayings” in The Dial that they were like a train of fifteen cars
carrying only one passenger, and another parodied them as “Gastric
Sayings.” Later in life, when Alcott was invited to speak in St. Louis to
a philosophical group, one of its leading members referred disparag-
ingly and rudely to Alcottian “oracles” as Alcott spoke to the group, and
another sneered “only an Alcott can interpret an Alcott.”2 And yet—the
severity of some reactions to Alcott can be counterposed to far more
favorable ones, to the admiration of his friends, and to the references
to him, in the press late in life, as “the mystic,” as “Emerson’s Master,”
and as the “Sage of Concord.”3 How do we account for this dispar-
ity? Where, after all, was Alcott coming from to elicit such strong and
opposite reactions?
To understand the reactions to Alcott, one has to consider what sources
are most vital for his work and thought, what and who inspired him, as
well as the nature of his life’s work. At minimum, we might think about
his Temple School, where he engaged children in Platonic dialogue;
about his sometimes gnomic and oracular prose style; about the public
“Conversations” that engaged him all his life, and took him across a swath
of the United States; and about the Concord School of Philosophy and other
philosophical groups that he inspired around the country. When we think
The Sage of Concord 27

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.—

Likewise, in one of his books of advice on education, Greaves admonishes


parents: “Let not the child study your doings but study the child’s doings
with respect to the inner mover.”4
Like Alcott, Greaves wants education to be founded on the princi-
ple of listening to one’s “inner mover.” This is, of course, fundamen-
tally a Platonic view of education, centered not in the idea of filling
students’ heads with information, but rather in awakening their inner
understanding. Greaves sees education as the art of awakening human
possibility:

Human Culture reveals to a man the true Idea of his being—his


endowments—his possessions—and fits him to use these for
the growth, renewal, and perfection of his Spirit. It is the art of
completing man.5

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

In his New Theosophic Revelations, for instance, extracts from Greaves’s


voluminous journals published in London in 1847, the editor forewarns us
that “The ideas and language in this volume are of an extraordinary esoteric
The Sage of Concord 29

character, and, therefore, may not be easily apprehended nor appreciated


by many in their exoteric States of Being.”7 There is no doubt that the editor
is right: the book’s epigraph is “The soul has a preparatory process to go
through in an outward dispensation before it is in an efficient state to bear
the Divine Essence, or Love’s powerful Incarnation.”
In 1849, Alcott had a spiritual experience during the summer, which
he termed an “apotheosis,” or a “self-introversion.”8 During this illumi-
nation, his experience was sometimes so powerful that he nearly had
a breakdown, at one point running from the house, after which period
he had to recuperate in Concord. He was convinced that if one only
could “Emancipate the Soul from Things,” then “lo! a new Heaven and
Earth springs into vision.”9 Out of this experience, he developed further
his theory that “Nature, and man, his mind and being, are but means
to a higher and final end, above and beyond, themselves.”10 Unlike his
immediatist successors in the late twentieth century, Alcott did suggest
that there were means to this end, including fasting, continence, prayer,
and work.11 But in the end, he thought, revelation was to be found in
“an instant solution, in the immediate action of Spirit through Nature
in man.” Ultimately, “mind and matter are one, indivisible and the
same.”12
In Tablets in Colours:  Disposed on Twelve Tables (1849)—a work that
remained in manuscript and that, thankfully, was not destroyed by Louisa
May Alcott, as so much else was in order to “protect” herself or her family
or her father’s “reputation”—he outlined in nearly eight hundred pages an
intellectual model or synthesis he began to work out from the Platonic illu-
mination experience he had, his “apotheosis.”13 This is not the same work
as his collection of essays also entitled Tablets (1868), which also bears a
Platonic stamp. Alcott’s Tablets. . . on Twelve Tables (1849), is a bound vol-
ume of handwritten notes, combined with various tables and marked with
hand-pasted images from the Zodiac to mark the beginning of sections
or chapters. It combines Alcott’s meditations on philosophy, religion, and
science in observations like “Man is a conductor of heavenly forces, and a
wondrous instrument, a cerebral magnet, and electric battery, telegraph,
glass, crucible, molten fluids traversing his frame.”14 One surmises that
in remarks like these, Alcott is seeking to explain through scientific and
technological metaphors, inner experiences he had during that period of
his life. Other remarks are more explicitly mystical, as when he writes that
“Mind omnipresent is... / In Love and Ecstasy. . . / With Light, the Intellect
is fraught.”15
30 America n  G urus

In Tablets (1849), light plays a major role—much of the book refers to


light and illumination, sometimes in more scientific, sometimes in more
religious ways. Effectively, Alcott is seeking to conjoin science and religion
to express his overarching spiritual vision, but it comes out in fragments
rather than as a coherent whole. Hence he writes “Matter. . . organic or
inorganic, are forms and modes of light and intermediate between light
and dark are minerals, gases, earths. . . animals are Light in manifold form
and mode.” Out of the “Light of Lights” emerge the “inferior laws of light,
seen in magnetism, electricity, galvanization.”16 In “Resurrection,” Alcott
writes that “We may be said to become more vitally alive at death than
before; inasmuch as we then awake,” for “we have been drugged by this
living death,” lived “bestially” a “mundane life, “ from which we awaken
“into the light and visibility of the day.”17
There are mystical and even sexual and erotic aspects to Tablets
(1849), really a kind of commonplace book that includes some things
Alcott might not have been inclined to make public. In “Clairvoyance,”
he includes remarks on how “blissful” are experiences of “the Godhead,”
full of “grace” and “beatific.”18 And he also includes one of his principal
ideas, that “Spirit is imaged in matter.”19 He speculates on how the tes-
ticles are brainlike in shape, and how for its part the “brain is the Egg of
the future state.”20 And he reflects on what a delight it is to see a “beautiful
body flourishing and fruitful,” on the beauty of married life, as a reflec-
tion of eternity, and on how “the soul delights in the Beauty of the Body.”21
By and large, the book is a meditation on how “Mind and body are [an]
Instrument of Nature and Spirit.”22
On the whole, one has to wonder what specific experiences are reflected
in the unusual nature and length of this manuscript. What we see here
are shards, showing some of what Alcott was reading (Plato, the Chaldean
Oracles, for instance) and some of his developing philosophical-religious
synthesis, as if he were assembling the parts for a much greater work that
never appeared and perhaps could not appear in his time and place. It is
not clear, from the traces that remain, exactly what kind of mystical expe-
riences Alcott had during this period of his life, but it seems self-evident
that they involved illumination, light, bliss, the movement of energies in
the body, and a renewed appreciation of the body and nature as reflections
of spirit. These are the themes in this book. But after the ridicule of his
“Orphic Sayings,” it is little wonder that he preferred to keep his mystical
experiences to himself, and in any case, ever the Platonist, he preferred
spoken dialogue to writing.
The Sage of Concord 31

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

Alcott’s interest in mysticism, in what Walton calls the “science of the


Mind,” is what drew him to Walton, but Alcott himself is not so much a
theosopher as a philosopher and Platonic mystic.
Alcott’s Platonic mysticism is in fact the key to his life and thought. He
clearly participates in and contributes to what I am terming the American
immediatist current—and indeed, Alcott is far more responsible for the
Transcendentalist movement and its characteristic thought than is usually
recognized. Odell Shepard, who edited Alcott’s journals, surmised this
too, when he remarked that “whatever the man himself may have been,
his influence was certainly wide and deep.” Alcott was, Shepard wrote, “the
one complete representative of American Transcendentalism,” to whom
the entire movement was indebted,32 confirming Emerson’s remark that
Alcott was “the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of the
time.”33 Shepard goes so far as to observe that “of the two minds, [Alcott’s]
was the more dynamic, seminal, and male. He strode up and down in
Emerson’s thought, scattering seed, and naturally it was Emerson who
bore the harvest.” In fact, “the mind and heart of Bronson Alcott enriched
the coloring of many an essay that does not bear his name,” for he “made
one realize that the world of Platonic Ideas was no mere cloudland but was
‘as solid as Massachusetts.’ ”34
Although other sources are significant for Alcott, too, their signifi-
cance for him rests primarily in the degree to which they corroborate
34 America n  G urus

his fundamentally Platonic perspective. Hence he is drawn to the mysti-


cism of Jacob Boehme, but he places Boehme in a broadly Platonic con-
text of an emphasis on the possibility of direct spiritual illumination. If
one is looking for the primary source for all of Alcott’s endeavors and
approaches, the template is in Platonism. His Conversations are mod-
ern forms of Plato’s dialogues; his educational methods with children,
even on the Gospels, were Socratic; and his writings, including his
“Genesis” theory, are comprehensible when one has the Platonic, ema-
nationist key to them. Even his Fruitlands effort at utopia is Platonic—it
reflects, among other examples, the Platonopolis that was reportedly
inspired by Plotinus’s lectures.
One wonders, looking at the whole of Alcott’s life and work, whether
in some respects he was a man born more than a hundred years too soon.
How at ease he would have been in the era of the 1960s counterculture,
and how much he would have enjoyed the arrival of Asian religions, teach-
ers, and teachings! He forecast, too, later efforts at the synthesis of science
and religion into a grand unity, just as his Fruitlands can be seen as pre-
decessor to subsequent spiritual and communal experiments of the hip-
pie era. But in his day, he never really found a place, though the Concord
School of Philosophy, late in life, came close. Nor did he find his audience;
and he was never able to chronicle his inner life the way some of his suc-
cessors in the twentieth century did. Alcott was, it seems, truly a man
before his time. Alcott wasn’t a guru-figure, but what he taught in some
ways presaged themes that recur with the later emergence of neo-Advaitin
American gurus.
4

Emerson and Platonism

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

sources means that Richardson devotes at least a bit of the book to


Emerson’s being inspired by such figures as Plato, Proclus, Iamblichus,
and Plotinus. However, the bulk of contemporary scholarship, before and
after Richardson’s valuable book, has continued to overlook the impor-
tance of Platonism and to emphasize Transcendentalism’s Germanic phil-
osophical influences instead.
There is some reason for this misleading emphasis, because of the way
that Emerson wrote. As I pointed out in American Transcendentalism and
Asian Religions, Emerson tended to absorb his sources and incorporate
them into his own words, so that allusions are woven into his thought in
ways that make it difficult to disentangle the different strands of the tap-
estry. Of course, Emerson’s rhetorical strategy is certainly not the only rea-
son that so many scholars have tended to ignore or diminish the influence
of Platonism on Emerson. That Platonism itself has been somewhat out
of favor in academia also has had some bearing on what gets emphasized
in the history of religion, philosophy, and literature.
Here, of course, we do not have space to survey all of Emerson’s volu-
minous works with an eye to Platonism’s influence. Instead, we will focus
on three particularly important groups of works:  Nature (1836); Essays,
First Series (1841) and Second Series (1844); and Emerson’s mature philo-
sophical collection, The Conduct of Life (1860).
Despite all the critical literature and apparatus devoted to Emerson’s
clarion first publication, Nature, it is nonetheless possible to see this
“azure little book,” as Carlyle termed it, as if for the first time. In fact,
from the beginning of the work, Emerson calls for us to recognize our
own “original relation to the universe.” Why, he asks, “should not we have
a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, and a religion
by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”3 What allows us to see
Nature anew is, of course, our theme of immediatism, for Nature is first of
all and fundamentally a manifesto of immediatism.
The force of Nature lies in the urgency of its insistence that we live in
nature now, that we see ourselves in relation to nature and to the divine,
now, and for ourselves, and that we not merely grope through the “dry
bones of the past.” He urges us to see nature anew, to see the sun as it
truly is. The “lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are
still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy
even into the era of manhood,” he tells us, and in the presence of nature,
“a wild delight runs through the man, in spirit of real sorrows.”4 We can
Emerson and Platonism 37

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

This key is the “view” toward which he is pointing.


In the final chapter, “Prospects,” Emerson recapitulates his Platonic
manifesto. He remarks that “the highest reason is always the truest,” and
that the most refined truth may seem dim only because it resides deep-
est in the mind “among the eternal verities.” Empirical science in fact
can “cloud the sight” because the categorizing, rationalistic faculty actually
blocks out the “metaphysics” of nature, and “a certain occult recognition
and sympathy.”14 The “end is lost sight of in attention to the means,” but
he wishes to call us back toward a higher end, and to do so, he invokes an
Emerson and Platonism 39

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

There is so much to remark on in “The Over-Soul” with regard to


our primary theme of mysticism, it is difficult to decide what we should
include. The entire essay, from beginning to end, seems to have come, as
Emerson suggests it did early on, in a “flowing river. . . out of regions I see
not,” so that “from some alien energy the visions come.”25 Once again,
we are back with Nature’s theme of immediate translation from one state
to another: “The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line; but rather by ascension of
state.. . . The growths of genius are of a certain total character.”26 In fact,
“with each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and
finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air.” For
“Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call genius.”27
“Genius,” he writes, is not merely talent or intellectual gifts, “genius is
religious.”
In effect, “The Over-Soul” is a treatise about how one lives in time
and in eternity at once; it is Emerson expressing a flow of thoughts not
about the experience of transcendence as such, which he did in Nature,
but rather about the metaphysics and the implications of that experience
for society and for the individual. He outlines the nature of the shift in
consciousness from time to eternity, and the relationship between tran-
scendent higher consciousness and the individual soul, emphasizing that
the individual soul or psyche is not a faculty but, ultimately, inseparable
from and illuminated by the transcendent light that shines through it. His
terms are nondual. As a treatise, although it is one step removed from the
original personal experience as described in Nature, it is still fairly close
to that experiential dimension—he is describing how “the mind rends the
thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity.”
In “Intellect,” he returns to this theme from a slightly different angle.
Here, his theme is not so much the movement of the mind into tran-
scendence, but rather the mind or intellect itself as the point of contact
or illumination. Even though the mind can be pulled down into dualities,
into “time and place,” “you and me,” “profit and hurt,” intellect remains
beyond these dualities.28 The intellect is what allows us to behold truth “as
a god upraised above care and fear.”29 But our path to this truth is indi-
vidual: “each mind has its own method.”30 The mind has many teachers,
Emerson says, each one seeming the best at that time, only to be super-
seded by another.31 And he concludes by referring to the Trismegisti, the
“expounders of the principles of thought from age to age,” among whom
are Hermes, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiadorus, Proclus, and Synesius, those
42 America n  G urus

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

Hence later, in the essay “Nature,” Emerson returns to the hidden


unity of mind and nature, remarking that “Nature is the incarnation
of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and
gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever
escaping again into the state of free thought.”39 In fact, he continues in
a stunning metaphor, “wisdom is infused into every form. It has been
poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as plea-
sure; it enveloped us in dully, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful
labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.”40 What a
remarkable conclusion to this second “Nature,” an interesting compan-
ion to the first!
And finally, in “New England Reformers,” Emerson discusses the
emergence of communal associations during his time, but here, too, his
mind turns to the fundamental question of deep unity, of the profound
unity that brings together man and nature, but also humanity. Emerson
writes that “[t]‌he world is awaking to the idea of unity, and these experi-
ments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic.”41 Usually
Emerson is portrayed as a skeptic about communal experiments, and that
is so, but he is a very peculiar kind of skeptic, because in fact he is taking
communes as a perhaps distorted outward reflection of an inward process
of mystical illumination like that we have been tracing throughout his
work. Magic can happen not by outward association, he writes, but by
outward separation and inward union. “Men will live and communicate,
and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once
they are united”—“but,” he continues, “by the reverse of the methods they
[the utopian societies] use.” For the real union is “a union of friends who
live in different streets or towns.” One must be left alone, and leave others
alone, and “government will be adamantine without any governor.”42 Here
Emerson’s vision of the utopian society is rather close to that of Taoism,
though in fact the great Taoist works expressing such a perspective were
not available at the time he wrote.
But Emerson makes it clear that he is not deriving this perspective
from elsewhere—it is part of his own direct experience. He writes that
“[t]‌his open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, so sub-
tle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I  have never expressed the
truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from any other,
I know that the whole truth is here for me.”43 What he is alluding to here—
this direct and certain inner knowledge—is intuited, direct, recognized by
and for oneself.
44 America n  G urus

This intuitive mysticism is the esoteric center of Emerson’s work,


hidden in plain sight. This theme has always been there in Emerson’s
work, but for the most part it simply isn’t recognized for what it is, or is
glossed over in favor of more political, social, or literary themes. And in
fact, Emerson’s essays refer to many other subjects. I have ignored these
in order to demonstrate the larger thesis here. By this point, I think we
have accumulated enough examples to make it clear that direct mystical
insight is woven throughout Emerson’s early work; in what follows, I will
show how it also is woven into an important late work, The Conduct of
Life (1870).
The Conduct of Life is, Emerson tells us early on, a work of practical
philosophy; its theme is the question of how we ought to live. Like so
much of Emerson’s work, it is aphoristic, full of memorable observa-
tions that are piled one upon the next. Its primary theme is the junc-
ture of religion and philosophy, that is, the terrain occupied by the
Platonic tradition itself. In his introduction to a recent edition of the
work, H. G. Callaway argues that The Conduct of Life is essentially reli-
gious in impulse, and there certainly is truth in that observation.44 In
it, he returns to the mysticism that launched his career, at least to some
degree, via his lifelong attraction to Platonism.
Of course, a cursory reading would suggest that The Conduct of Life is
not especially Platonic. After all, Emerson does not foreground Plotinus,
or even Plato. Plato is mentioned in the book occasionally, but mostly in
lists that include other names. Emerson does quote from some Platonists,
notably Porphyry and Plotinus, but these quotations are not prominent;
they are mostly buried in the middle of passages, and sometimes they
appear only at the end of a chapter. All of these details seem to suggest
that Platonism was not central for Emerson. But appearances can be
misleading.
Early in The Conduct of Life, Emerson discusses what he terms the
“double consciousness,” by which he refers to public and private natures.
Here he alludes to what later becomes explicit: for another way to express
the double consciousness is exoteric and esoteric. In fact, Emerson him-
self makes this distinction in the second chapter, when he remarks on
the “esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make
muscle.”45 Public and private are not identical with exoteric and esoteric,
but Emerson discusses these dualities together in his first and second
chapters, which implies that these categories may be useful for under-
standing what Emerson is up to here. Are there esoteric dimensions to
Emerson and Platonism 45

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

In this final paragraph, Emerson offers a condensed version, a kind of


foreshadowing, of the book’s culmination in the final paragraph of the
next and final chapter, “Illusions,” the most Platonic chapter of all.
Emerson begins “Illusions” by recalling his visit to Mammoth Cave in
Kentucky. He never makes the connection explicit, but Mammoth Cave
is an American version of Plato’s cave, in which one sees above a fac-
simile of stars, not the real thing. Emerson urges us to look past illusions
and search out what is real, that is, sincere and honest. “Illusions” is a
short chapter, and its most important section comes in the final three
paragraphs, which bring together all of Emerson’s most important hidden
religious influences.
48 America n  G urus

In the third to the last paragraph, he refers us to Hindu scripture, in


particular, to a verse that reads “The notions, ‘I am,’ and ‘This is mine,’
which influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world.”
And he concludes with this sentence:  “And the beautitude of man they
hold to lie in being freed from fascination.”61 This is true—that is, one
does find the theme of freedom from fascination in Vedanta, and in
Buddhism, for that matter—but there is another, Western source for this
idea: Plotinus. It is Plotinus who emphasizes the importance of freedom
from fascination. We will shortly see why this is important.
The second to the last paragraph refers to the “unities of Truth and of
Right” that are not broken by being disguised, and cites a verse of Persian
poetry. Hence, once again, Emerson reminds us of the essential unity of
all things, and the secret that he has alluded to throughout the collection
of essays, that even evil works ultimately toward the good. But the culmi-
nation, not only of this chapter, but of the book as a whole, is in the final
paragraph, which begins, “There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the uni-
verse. All is system and gradation.”
Allow me now to quote the final paragraph in its entirety:

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system


and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young
mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them
alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckon-
ing him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall
snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which
sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must
obey:  he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad
crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this
thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their
will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and
new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when,
by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little,
there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,—they
alone with him alone.62

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

Now this Transcendentalist move back to Platonic mysticism or intu-


itionism was precisely what incensed Emerson’s bitterest critics. Andrews
Norton’s angry attack on Emerson after his “Divinity School Address”
is revealing. In “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” Norton said “I know of
no absolute certainty beyond the limit of momentary consciousness; a
certainty that vanishes the instant it exists, and is lost in the region of
metaphysical doubt.” In other words, Norton claimed, only an ordinary
dualistic state of consciousness exists, and “there can be no intuition, no
direct perception of the truth of Christianity, no metaphysical certainty.”
And another critic insisted censoriously, “the doctrine that the mind pos-
sesses a faculty of intuitively discovering the truths of religion, is. . . utterly
untenable.”67 For “consciousness or intuition can inform us of nothing but
what exists in our own minds.”68 These kinds of remarks, George Ripley
observed in a reply, were “revolting,” and “the principle that the soul has
no faculty to perceive spiritual truth, is contradicted by the universal con-
sciousness of man.”69
Here we have come down to the root of the matter. On the one side is
the broadly Platonic view that direct intuition of spiritual reality is possi-
ble; and on the other side are those who vehemently deny and ridicule this
perspective. It might be worth asking as well why the latter are so bitter
in denouncing the Platonists, because this vehemence has by no means
disappeared. What is it about Platonism that, from the very beginning,
seemed threatening to the self-appointed guardians of “the norm”? We
recall here the fate of Socrates. American Transcendentalism represents
a particularly clear and assertive form of Platonism, hence its enemies,
then and subsequently, are also anti-intuitionist, and anti-Platonic. We are
looking at a particular kind of intransigent dualistic consciousness that,
for whatever reason, cannot abide the assertions about transcendence of
an Alcott or of an Emerson.70
But as we shall see, despite its critics, gnosis has a way of coming back
in one form or another. Transcendentalism is the archetypal American
form of Platonic intutionism, but it is certainly not the only one. Rather,
it represents the most explicit incarnation of a perspective that continues
to recur subsequently, certainly not only in America, but just as certainly
concentrated there. For a variety of reasons, not the least of them the cur-
rents we have looked at so far, immediatist mysticism by the late twenti-
eth century became a kind of default American esoteric perspective. I do
not want to rest too much of what follows upon the Transcendentalists’
shoulders, not least because they (in particular, Emerson) in turn drew
Emerson and Platonism 51

heavily on prior sources in the West. Furthermore, there is no evidence


among the Transcendentalists of the kind of antinomianism that we see
in the New Age gurus of the late twentieth century; there is a real and
major distinction between Transcendentalist intuitionism and New Age
immediatist religion. But in the American tradition (and we can indeed
speak of an American tradition) the Transcendentalists’ importance can
hardly be overestimated. Without doubt, American Transcendentalism
provides at least some historical precedent for the later phenomenon of
neo-Advaitin American gurus, and their embrace of what I call “immedi-
atist” mysticism.
5

The Concord School of Philosophy


and American Platonism

The bulk of scholarship on American Transcendentalism has paid rela-


tively little attention to the last creation of its first cycle, the Concord School
of Philosophy, held from 1879 to 1883, and chronicled in national publica-
tions including Harper’s Weekly and in a series of books that recounted
the subjects and details of the various lectures. The proceedings of the
Concord School are interesting, not only because they included presenta-
tions by university presidents of institutions like Princeton and Michigan,
and because they had a significant effect on the larger society, but also
because of what they reveal about Transcendentalism at its center.
Most scholars of Transcendentalism emphasize the German and French
influences on the movement and largely ignore the role of Platonism and
mysticism. But in fact when we look closely at the Concord School’s pro-
gram, it becomes clear that Platonism and mysticism are consistently and
centrally featured there. Alcott begins the first- and second-year programs
with talks on his “descending” and “ascending” scales of the person, that is,
with a Platonic anthropology, and with talks on mysticism, in particular on
Plotinus, Tauler, Eckhart, and Boehme among others.1 These talks, in 1879
and 1880 respectively, were followed each time by extensive lectures by
Hiram K. Jones on Platonic philosophy and psychology, as well as William
Channing on “Oriental and mystical philosophy.” In fact, every single year
featured extensive presentations on Platonism as well as related subjects
like Gnosticism.
But there is more. In 1882, Emerson died, and a number of presenta-
tions represented encomia for him. Among these was Alexander Wilder’s
“Emerson as a Philosopher,” in which he forthrightly described Emerson,
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 53

whom he didn’t know personally, as the “Plato of America.” But remark-


able as that appellation is, the metaphysics Wilder poses are even more
interesting. He writes that Emerson did not die, but rather when he was
born, never wholly left the Infinite, and when he died, “that great transcen-
dent spirit reached out—extended: was even back beyond genesis and the
changeable, among the fire-breathing, eternal stars.” Emerson, in other
words, didn’t go anywhere when he came to earth, and after his physical
death, is still “present and abiding here, a spirit mingled with us.”2
And Wilder goes yet further. He observes that Plato absorbed into
himself the “wisdom of the world,” and the “divinest inspirations of the
Farthest East,” rendering them into European language. The true Platonist,
he continues, “reads between the lines and takes cognition of the arcane
sense which is often purposely hidden from the sciolist and profane.”
This, Wilder adds, is exactly what Emerson did. In this relatively short
meditation on Emerson, Wilder—himself an ardent Platonist—captures
the essential aspects of Emerson’s mysticism. Emerson “reads between
the lines” of Plato, Plotinus, and the other Platonic authors, recognizes
the insights that their works transmit, and in turn translates his realiza-
tion into the American vernacular. That, Wilder argues, is the essential
achievement of Emerson, whose works also have arcane or esoteric mean-
ings hidden in them. These works transmit primordial insight—and that,
Wilder remarks, is what makes them so original.
Alcott’s own contributions to the Concord School represented his
mature Neoplatonic philosophy, which he clarified in various lectures. In
1882, for instance, he lectured on “Immortality,” distinguishing here, as
elsewhere, the difference between “personality” and “individuality.” For
Alcott, “personality” represents the human “likeness to God,” or more
specifically to the “Godhead,” whereas individuality or ego is what divides
us from God. Our personhood is ultimately transcendent; after his talk,
Alcott clarified a point for a questioner by remarking that the immortality
of the soul comes from the fact that it never really leaves eternity. “Souls
never came into time,” he said, “but the soul manifests itself to objects
which are in time.” “Ex-istence” refers to souls “coming out from God,” in
whom they have their enduring “sub-sistence.”3
Another interesting participant in the Concord School was Franklin
Benjamin Sanborn, who spoke throughout the period of the school’s exis-
tence. Not all his presentations are of interest to us, but several demonstrate
his Platonic interests. Sanborn spoke a number of times on Emerson, as
well as on Emerson and Alcott, and on Plato. But his most striking talks
54 America n  G urus

were on oracles. On July 22, 1882, Sanborn spoke on “Hebrew, Greek,


Persian, and Christian Oracles,” followed on August 3, 1882, by his address
on “The Oracles of New England.”4 Effectively, Sanborn argued in both talks,
Emerson represented an ideal poet, an oracular figure who translated from
above to below. Emerson was, he argued, an “Oriental” poet, a “Persian” by
nature whose poetry melded transcendence and immanence. Emerson, who
could read and write the “secret language of nature,” the “super-Cadmean
alphabet,” was a contemporary version of the ancient oracles.5
And it is worth noting some remarks from the encomia at the Concord
School upon Alcott’s death, because they underscore the larger point here.
On June 18, 1888, speakers assembled to remember Alcott, and William
T.  Harris said that Alcott’s originality came not from erudition, but
from “immediate insight” inspired by “Boehme and Plotinus.”6 “Alcott’s
mind,” he continued, “moved in the region of the transcendental.” Alcott
was “gnostic,” and maintained consistent views from the beginning to
the end of his life. Emerson, they recalled, had said of Alcott, “I would call
him a Platonist, were it not injustice to his salient and original mind.”7
The Concord School of Philosophy was deliberately modeled on Plato’s
Academy, and continued until Alcott’s death in 1888. Its presenters were
seeking to promote a kind of third way between scientific rationalism, on
one hand, and fideistic Christianity on the other. This third way was drawn
chiefly from Neoplatonism, of the kind visible in Alcott’s own lectures. It
emphasizes the possibility of human ascent from lower to higher levels of
consciousness, and in keeping with Platonic tradition, does not recognize
evil as having any enduring or essential presence, only an accidental one.
It does not accept the Christian doctrine of the Fall, but rather puts forward
what Emerson called the “beautiful necessity,” the view that nature, human-
ity, and the divine represent an organic whole or unity. The Concord School
as a whole, even though lecturers presented on a wide range of philosophi-
cal and literary topics, can be best seen as presenting various aspects of the
possibility of human transcendence via philosophy, literature, and religion.
While the Concord School had no official metaphysics, its primary
mover, Alcott, nonetheless had developed a metaphysics perhaps best
expressible as the relationship between eternity and time. What we saw
during the late nineteenth century was the ascendance of materialism
and rationalism, and the Concord School represented a clear counter
to those tendencies. In Harper’s Weekly, the School was said to be about
“what is the value of our civilization” via seeking “the one central principle
on which the world, the universe, rests.”8 The purpose of the Concord
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 55

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:

The controversy about Darwin’s book has been carried on with


great activity and animation among our men of science. The best
56 America n  G urus

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

Evolutionism offered materialists an explanation, if not for the origin of


the cosmos, then for how one could account for the apparent order and
development of the cosmos without a Divine source or Divine guidance.
Darwinian evolutionism gave to those who were predisposed to view
the cosmos as the product of blind material forces a theory on which to
base their materialism. Church leaders recognized this direct opposition
between evolutionist materialists and traditional Christianity, and sent
forth blast after blast against the new theory. Charles Hodge, a Princeton
theologian, wrote in What is Darwinism? (1874):  “The conclusion of the
whole matter is that the denial of design in nature is virtually the denial
of God. Mr. Darwin’s theory does deny all design in nature; therefore, his
theory is virtually atheistical.”14
In America, however, the chief spokesmen for the evolutionist
camp—basing themselves on Spencer—sought to mediate between lib-
eral Christianity and evolutionism. John Fiske, the most prominent
American popularizer of evolutionism, held that evolutionism dispelled
the “medieval darkness” of earlier Christian theology by replacing it with
a Darwinian brand. According to Fiske,

Darwinian theory, properly understood, replaces as much theol-


ogy as it destroys. From the first dawning of life we see all things
working together toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most
exalted spiritual qualities which characterize Humanity.15

Fiske here reflects the Transcendentalism with which he was affiliated


from the beginning of his career as a writer: like Samuel Johnson, author
of the massive three-volume series Oriental Religions, Fiske holds as a
given that mankind is “evolving” spiritually toward the fruition of its “one
mighty goal,” which Johnson called “universal religion.”16
Fiske, in many ways a bridge between Transcendentalism and evo-
lutionism, could not understand how Emerson remained more in the
Platonist than the evolutionist camp. In The Life and Letters of John Fiske,
John Spencer Clark relates an unintentionally amusing conversation in
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 57

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

than just Plato, Alcott was deeply attracted to Pythagorean, Neoplatonic,


Hermetic, and Boehmean thought as well. Indeed, the anti-evolutionist
theory of Genesis that Alcott propounded in later life was taken directly
from Boehme’s enormous Mysterium Magnum, Boehme’s extended eso-
teric commentary on Genesis.23
Hence, although Alcott’s opposition to evolutionary theory was
rooted in the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition, he was deeply influ-
enced by the esoteric Christian tradition as well. Indeed, one is not sur-
prised to find that Alcott opposed the “free religionist” tendencies of
later Transcendentalist writers like John Weiss, Francis Abbott, and O. B.
Frothingham, and regarded them as having been tainted by the material-
ism of Huxley, Darwin, and Spencer. In one Western tour (1869–1870),
Alcott found himself the most “orthodox” of anyone there, and in later
years he began to stress the importance of faith in opposition to Darwin,
Spencer, and Fiske’s evolutionist “school of knownothingarianism.”24 In
the battle between erstwhile Transcendentalists who embraced science
on the one hand, and those who affirmed traditional Christianity on the
other, Alcott was with the latter, for he was horrified at his contemporaries’
embrace of “progress,” belief in technology, and denial of religious truth.25
If there is one episode that best exemplifies the depth of Alcott’s assim-
ilation of Platonism and Boehmean esotericism while revealing why he
has to the present day been regarded as quirky and bizarre, it is one related
by Moncure Conway, who visited with Emerson, Alcott, and Louis Agassiz.
Conway writes:

After delighting Agassiz by repudiating the theory of the develop-


ment of man from animals, he [Alcott] filled the professor with
dismay by equally decrying the notion that God could ever have
created ferocious and poisonous beasts. When Agassiz asked who
could have created them, Alcott said they were the various forms of
human sin. Man was the first being created. And the horrible crea-
tures were originated by his lusts and animalisms. When Agassiz,
bewildered, urged that geology proved that the animals existed
before man, Alcott suggested that man might have originated them
before his appearance in his present form. Agassiz having given a
signal of distress, Emerson came to the rescue with some reconcil-
ing discourse on the development of life and thought, with which
the professor had to be content, although there was a soupçon of
evolution in every word our host uttered.26
60 America n  G urus

One can well imagine the methodical Agassiz nonplussed by Alcott’s


version of Boehmean cosmology, particularly since Alcott seemed to
have an answer for every objection. But Alcott had only warped Boehme
somewhat: in the preface to Six Theosophic Points, for example, Boehme
wrote that “We have written this work, not for the irrational animals
who, in their exterior, have the form of man, but in their image, in
spirit, are evil and wild beasts. . . but for the image of man.”27 Boehme
spoke in this symbolic language constantly; Alcott sought to be a new
American Boehme. One could say that Alcott opposed an extreme mys-
ticism to the extremity of evolutionist materialism with which he was
constantly faced.
And Alcott did see himself as in battle against evolutionist materialism,
particularly as evolutionism took greater and great hold in America. In
his Western tours to cities like Syracuse, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Fort
Dodge, and Iowa City, Alcott found himself in constant struggle against
various kinds of Darwinists. In all cases, he reiterated his fundamental
beliefs. Darwin, he said, was useful insofar as he wrote on natural phi-
losophy. But Darwin, Alcott argued, ignored the spiritual origins of life.
Earthly creatures did not ascend from protoplasm, but descended from a
Universal spirit, in which they pre-existed as souls or spirits. Darwinism,
he argued time and again, was a facsimile, a parody of religion that left its
adherents spiritually empty: “Any faith declaring a divorce from the super-
natural, and seeking to prop itself upon Nature alone,” Alcott wrote, “falls
short of satisfying the deepest needs of humanity.”28
Needless to say, Alcott found conflict over evolutionary theory and
his Neoplatonic alternative nearly everywhere he went, even among the
Transcendentalists and American Hegelians he visited. In 1866, Alcott
took a train across America to St. Louis, the heart of the American
Hegelian movement begun by that titanic intellectual force, Henry Conrad
Brokmeyer. Brokmeyer—who single-handedly translated Hegel’s Logic
for the perusal of his Hegelian students, who had been a newly landed
German immigrant, a bootblack, a bootmaker, a foundry-worker, a suc-
cessful businessman, an investor, a hermit, a student at Brown University,
a hunter, a lawyer, a politician, an officer in the Union Army, mayor of St.
Louis, lieutenant governor and governor of Missouri—was a force to be
reckoned with, and his reaction to Alcottian anti-evolutionism is revealing.
In describing Brokmeyer, Alcott calls him a man who “comes from his
solitudes to interpret the Kantian philosophy to this little Yankee Club.”29
Brokmeyer was no Kantian, and though W. T. Harris would one day go to
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 61

live in Concord, these were not the Yankees Alcott was among. Alcott said
of Brokmeyer:

A rough sample of intelligence and fire; yet affectionate, very enter-


taining, and with a jealous sensitiveness to freedom and the rights
of genius that might sometimes pass for audacity and impudence,
regardless of consequences and the due respect proper to well-bred
companions. He stays late, talking all the time with an abandon-
ment very rare to see.30

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

What an intellectual experience it must have been to be around a mind


of the force of Brokmeyer’s! But unfortunately, Brokmeyer’s genius could
62 America n  G urus

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

Brokmeyer was correct to place Alcott as a neo-Plotinian, and his ridicule


derived from his adherence to Hegelianism.
But what follows reveals Brokmeyer rejecting both Platonism and evo-
lutionism. Brokmeyer identifies Alcott as the chief of the Transcendentalist
Platonists, and gives a reasonably good summary of Neoplatonic emana-
tionist cosmology:

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

proceed, however, to describe, and every description ends with “but


he is more than this.” From this unsayable, unknowable, they pred-
icate, conceptively of course, that is by figures of speech or imagina-
tion, as the very term “emanate” shows—a resultant, an effect. . . as
you heard to-night. From this second, a third is derived in the same
way, and of the same character. . . and so down, from God-head to
atom.33

This theory, says Brokmeyer, amounts to “nothing;” it is not American,


but merely borrowed and foreign. Then Brokmeyer attacks evolutionism:

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

According to Brokmeyer, evolutionary theory, too, is “nothing,” for it


“begets something from nothing.” Like Platonic emanationism inverted,
evolutionism begins with matter, and ends with mind. But this also is
merely “accounting for a circle with a straight line.” For both theories
depend on graduated differences amounting ultimately to differences in
types, all the difference ultimately between man and mud. These differ-
ences are too much to swallow, says Brokmeyer: nothing does not beget
everything.
Brokmeyer’s inaccurate understanding of Platonist emanationism
mars his analysis, however. In his zeal to denounce both Platonism and
evolutionism together, Brokmeyer ignores the fundamental difference
between Platonic typology and evolutionism so essential to understanding
this conflict. According to Platonic emanationism, the entire cosmos is in
essence in the One; everything in existence is a reflection of its typologi-
cal origin. A table, in Plato’s famous and sardonic illustration, reflects the
Form of a table. There is a vertical relationship between the celestial Form
and its physical manifestations. By contrast, in evolutionist theory, there
is no vertical emanatory connection between Divine origin and physical
manifestation; rather, there is only a horizontal or temporal connection
between one type and another. Evolution occurs only in time; Platonic
emanationism is the “bridge” between timelessness and time.
64 America n  G urus

But Brokmeyer was not interested in this fundamental conflict


between the Platonists and the evolutionists; he was interested in attack-
ing them both. One immediately wonders, of course, what alternative he
proposed—but his alternative is, unfortunately, unclear. There is no doubt
that Brokmeyer’s enthusiasm for his Hegelian focus on self-determinative
or self-knowing consciousness was contagious. In fact, more than anyone
else, Brokmeyer was the motivating force behind the St. Louis Hegelian
movement, so much so that Denton Snider spoke of him repeatedly as a
“Titanic” intellectual force. The relentless, daemonic flow of his prose at
the end of A Mechanic’s Diary carries us along, and imparts to us some-
thing of the inspiring force Brokmeyer must have been, but from it we
finally have only glimpses of the “true solution of the riddle of the uni-
verse” toward which Brokmeyer aimed.35
Even in 1866, when this meeting of the minds in St. Louis took
place, Brokmeyer, Harris, and the other St. Louis Hegelians had rejected
Platonism as a viable American alternative to evolutionism. Despite
Alcott’s repeated defense of Platonism, despite the work of Hiram
K.  Jones’s Platonic American Akademe in Jacksonville, Illinois, which
carried the standard for Platonism the longest in Midwestern America,
despite even Thomas Johnson’s spirited journal The Platonist, succeeded
by Bibliotheca Platonica—despite all these concerted Midwestern efforts
to continue the Platonism that Alcott to some extent represented—evo-
lutionism carried the day in America. But throughout the century, there
were thoughtful people who opposed the application of evolutionary the-
ory willy-nilly. Among them was the great Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz.
When in 1874, the renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz published his
attack on Darwinian evolutionism in The Atlantic Monthly, he was no doubt
fighting a lost cause. It is true that in 1873 the president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science characterized Darwin as “one
of those philosophers whose great knowledge of animal and vegetable life
is only transcended by his imagination.” By 1876, however, A. S. Packard
termed the era after 1859  “the epoch of evolution.” And in 1888 E.  S.
Morse said, as president of the same association, “American biological sci-
ence stands as a unit for evolution.”36 Agassiz was fighting a lost cause in
opposing evolutionary theory, but in “Evolution and Permanence of Type,”
he makes a case against extrapolations of the Darwinian hypotheses still
noteworthy today.
Writing with great authority and clarity in his last great article, Agassiz
exposed the fallacies of an erroneously extrapolated Darwinianism. That
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 65

there is evolution, in a sense, Agassiz agreed—the evolution of an embryo


into an adult. Insofar as the successive stages of growth constitute evolu-
tion, “all naturalists may be said to be evolutionists.” But then Agassiz
strikes his fundamental blow:

The law of evolution, however, so far as its working is understood, is


a law controlling development and keeping types within appointed
cycles of growth, which revolve forever upon themselves, return-
ing at appointed intervals to the same starting-point, and repeating
through a succession of phases the same course. These cycles have
never been known to oscillate or to pass into each other; indeed, the
only structural differences known between individuals of the same
stock are monstrosities or peculiarities pertaining to sex, and the
latter as abiding and permanent as type itself.37

Evolutionists, Agassiz points out, ignore the higher aspects of creation,


and focus on the lower:

The most trifling and fantastic tricks of inheritance are quoted in


support of the transmutation theory; but little is said of the sudden
apparition of powerful original qualities which almost always rise
like pure creations and are gone with their day and generation. The
noblest gifts are exceptional, and are rarely inherited; this very fact
seems to me as evidence of something more and higher than mere
evolution and transmission concerned with the problem of life.

Agassiz was not one to mince words:

One thing only we know absolutely, and in this treacherous, marshy


ground of hypothesis and assumption, it is pleasant to plant one’s
foot occasionally upon a solid fact here and there. Whatever be the
means of preserving and transmitting properties, the primitive types
have remained permanent and unchanged—in the long sucession
of ages amid all the appearance and disappearance of kinds, the
fading away of one species and the coming in of another—from
the earliest geological periods to the present day. How these types
were first introduced, how the species which have successively rep-
resented them have replaced one another,—these are the vital ques-
tions to which no answer has been given. We are as far from any
66 America n  G urus

satisfactory solution of this problem as if development theories had


never been discussed.38

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:

The most advanced Darwinians seem reluctant to acknowledge the


intervention of an intellectual power in the diversity which obtains
in nature, under the plea that such an admission implies distinct
creative acts for every species. What of it, if it were true? Have those
who object to repeated acts of creation ever considered that no prog-
ress can be made in knowledge without repeated acts of thinking?
And what are thoughts but specific acts of the mind? Why should
it then be unscientific to infer that the facts of nature are the result
of a similar process, since there is no evidence of any other cause?
The world has arisen in some way or other. How it originated is the
great question, and Darwin’s theory, like all other attempt to explain
the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural.

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

worship or religious practice; it establishes no institutions, but requires


intellectual sophistication and affirms eternal verities—for those few
capable of comprehending it. Platonism can only point toward the tran-
scendent; a spark that can illuminate the mind, it cannot offer religious
salvation, and remains an intellectual endeavor unless it is incorporated
into a religious tradition, as has happened historically both in Islamic and
in Christian esoterism. Only then can it offer a complete alternative to the
materialism that is part and parcel of evolutionism.
Consequently, Platonism in the Western world generally flourishes
and disappears in movements like that in Ficino’s Florence, or that in
nineteenth-century Midwestern America.45 One cannot expect a Platonist
movement, divorced from the wider metaphysical significance of a full
religious tradition, to continue indefinitely. Rather, a few spirits are set
aflame by that intellectual spark it offers, in many cases devote their
lives to it, and then they are gone, until their writings in turn set a few
minds aflame again. One thinks of the translator Thomas Taylor, endur-
ing slander and poverty in London, of Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie in America
laboriously producing his Pythagorean and Platonic books, of Stephen
MacKenna devoting his life to translating Plotinus. In this tradition, the
devotion of writers like Johnson and Jones to their Platonist work is by no
means exceptional.
But in America such work remains outside the mainstream. The
Platonist arguments of an Alcott or a Jones against evolutionism are
doomed to obscurity, not because they are wrong, but because, unlike
social Darwinist evolutionism, they do not justify the worldview that pro-
duces machines and that demands “development,” the worldview which
holds that we are engaged in “progress” and that the world is “evolving.”
Divorced from any larger religious tradition and set adrift in evolution-
ist, mercantilist, increasingly positivist America, the Platonist voice must
remain an isolated one, be it that of an Alcott, an Agassiz, or a Jones. But
isolation is not failure.
The reassertion of Platonism in nineteenth-century America exists,
after all, in a larger context. That context is not only the American
Renaissance, although the term is particularly appropriate, given how
important a role Platonism had in American Transcendentalism. For even
the American Renaissance itself must be seen as part of a still larger nar-
rative of battles, not between fideistic monotheism and science, as usually
envisioned, but between those who champion metaphysics in the classi-
cal sense of the word, and those who reject metaphysics and champion
The Concord School of Philosophy and American Platonism 69

rationalism/materialism. The nineteenth-century ascent of Darwinist evo-


lutionism, after all, was an early phase of rationalism and materialism that
continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The term “metaphysics” here harks back to the original meaning of the
Greek, τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ, ta meta ta physika, from meta- (beyond) and phu-
sis (the physical/cosmological realm). Often in contemporary philosophical
discourse the implications of transcendence in a term like “metaphysics”
are rigorously ignored or refused, as one sees, for instance, in a handbook
of academic philosophy that has literally no place whatever for transcendent
states of consciousness or mysticism, and for which Platonism is reduced
to a system of thought based on abstractions.46 Even the term “metaphys-
ics” has, in this early twenty-first century academic usage, been designed to
exclude Platonism as we have been considering it historically.
We will return to this fundamental difference in perspective later,
but for now, it is sufficient to recognize that the opposition of Platonism
and evolutionism in the nineteenth century was not an opposition to
science as such—since even a famous scientist like Agassiz was closer
to Platonism, and many, perhaps all, of the Platonists were open to sci-
ence, not opponents of it—but rather an opposition between those who
affirmed what we could describe as an “upper register” of consciousness
beyond subject-object dualism and those who emphasize materialistic
evolutionism in which consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain,
and in which there is little or no place for even words like “mysticism” or
“transcendence,” let alone for what those words signify.
The Concord School of Philosophy represented a shift in the United
States from philosophy as lived metaphysical experience, open to mysti-
cism, as represented in the works (published and unpublished) of Alcott
and Emerson, to philosophy as an academic field in which mysticism was
excluded. Over the course of the twentieth century, the upper register
of possible human experience was more or less systematically excluded
from academic philosophy, whose exponents and gatekeepers insisted
on the absolute primacy of discursive reason coupled with an implicit
subject-object dualism. But this shift by no means was complete or with-
out dissenters. In fact, quite the opposite. We could invoke the metaphor
of a clamp, pressing down on academic philosophy—which meant that
the kind of thought we are charting here emerged not from inside aca-
demia but from outside it.
To put it another way, mysticism would seem to be irrepressible.
What is more, in the twentieth century, we find mysticism recurring
70 America n  G urus

where cultural creativity is most active—immediatist modes of thought


do not disappear with the waning of Platonism either in New England
or in the Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather, mysticism
reappears in new figures again in the twentieth century, but by the late
twentieth century, it no longer carried a Platonist banner. Platonism,
it seemed, had been vanquished by evolutionism, and the late twenti-
eth century immediatists often, if by no means always, imagined that
humanity was evolving toward a new age of enlightenment. And so we
now turn to the evolution of those new religious and literary figures
and their works. We end this section, as we begin the next, with Walt
Whitman.
6

Walt Whitman’s Cosmic Consciousness

Walt Whitman is as much a central predecessor for twentieth-century


immediatist literature and religion as Emerson and Alcott, arguably more
so. But to understand Whitman’s significance, we have to begin by look-
ing at a particular interpretation of Whitman, one with considerable sup-
port in Whitman’s expansive poetry as well as in some of his prose. This
interpretation of Whitman centers on him not as a literary figure alone,
although he certainly is that, but rather on him as a creator of literary reli-
gion. From this perspective, Whitman represents the emergence in the
nineteenth century of variants of literary religion that we will see develop
much more completely in the twentieth century, characterizable as cosmic
consciousness, immediatism, and a kind of paradoxical mystical expan-
sionism that might well be mistaken for narcissism.
To understand Whitman as mystic, we need to begin with the unusual
figure of Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902). Born in England, but a
nearly lifelong Canadian, Bucke led an adventurous life early on, trav-
eling across the United States during the mid-1800s; in later life he
became established as a physician and psychiatrist in charge of asylums
in Ontario. In England in 1872, he had a mystical experience, and later
became friends with Whitman, about whom he published a laudatory
book, Walt Whitman, in 1883. But Bucke is best known for his subsequent
book, Cosmic Consciousness (1901), which features a chapter on Whitman
and the argument that Whitman’s poetry is best understood as reflecting
Whitman’s spontaneous mysticism.
Before we look to Cosmic Consciousness, though, it is worth remark-
ing on Bucke’s earlier book on Whitman. In it, Bucke writes paeans to
the religious significances of Whitman’s poetry, extolling it as belong-
ing “to a religious era not yet reached, of which it is the revealer and
72 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

He said that Walt Whitman only spoke to him about a hundred


words altogether, and these quite ordinary and commonplace; that
he did not realize anything peculiar while with him, but shortly
after leaving a state of mental exaltation set in, which he could only
describe by comparing to slight intoxication by champagne, or to
falling in love, and this exaltation, he said, lasted at least six weeks
in a clearly marked degree, so that, for at least that length of time,
he was plainly different from his ordinary self. Neither, he said, did
it then or since pass away, though it ceased to be felt as something
new and strange, but became a permanent element in his life, a
strong and living force (as he described it), making for purity and
happiness. I may add that this person’s whole life has been changed
by that contact—his temper, character, entire spiritual being, outer
life, conversation, etc., elevated and purified in an extraordinary
degree.8

I quoted the description here at such length because it depicts Whitman


as a kind of guru-figure, who offers a kind of spiritual intoxication and
enduring change in one’s personality simply by being in his presence.
Very similar kinds of phenomena were/are claimed of some Hindu and
American gurus, and we will recount some of those later in this book.
Bucke himself, however, writes with certainty about the nature of
immediate spiritual awakening. He writes that it is an instantaneous illu-
mination, like a “dazzling flash of lightning in a dark night,” and offers
“not an intellectual conviction,” but something simpler, and with it the
“fear of death. . . simply vanishes.” What is more, so does “the sense of
sin. It is not that the person escapes from sin; but he no longer sees
that there is any sin in the world from which to escape.”9 This is what
Bucke sometimes terms “the Cosmic Sense,” meaning a transcendence
of self-consciousness that he interprets as the evolutionary path of human
beings in the future—Bucke’s work, as its subtitle A Study in the Evolution
of the Human Mind would suggest, is an important forerunner of late
twentieth-century evolutionary spirituality. At its center are ideas that are
characteristic of later immediatist works:  that “cosmic consciousness”
comes spontaneously, which we can term “immediatism”; and that it
bestows an antinomian sense that one has transcended sin.
Bucke sees Whitman as exemplary, and extols him as nothing less than
the best, most perfect, example the world has so far had of the Cosmic
Sense, first because he is the man in whom the new faculty has been,
74 America n  G urus

probably, most perfectly developed, and especially because he is, par


excellence, the man who in modern times has written distinctly and at
large from the point of view of Cosmic Consciousness, and who also has
referred to its facts and phenomena more plainly and fully than any other
writer either ancient or modern.10
Bucke holds that Whitman experienced cosmic consciousness in “1853
or 1854” and that he mentions it directly in the 1855 edition of Leaves of
Grass, when he refers to a descent of divine grace into his body, “athwart
my hips,” during which God “plunged your tongue to my bare-stript
heart,” and “Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and
knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth.”11
In Bucke’s interpretation, Whitman has taken the notions of evolu-
tion and progress and applied them to spirituality, envisioning a future
humanity for whom transcendence is ordinary, so to speak. Bucke’s inter-
pretation of Whitman hence prefigures the evolutionary Hinduism of
Aurobindo, as well as the evolutionary basis of New Age spirituality in
the late twentieth century. For Whitman, the conflict between evolution-
ism and Platonism that so vexed the late nineteenth century could not
have existed; he already sided with an evolutionary spirituality. Bucke cites
Whitman’s anticipation in a prose work of

A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right conditions of out-


door as much as indoor harmony, activity and development, would
probably, from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to
live—and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, etc.,
and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of life itself,
discover and achieve happiness—with Being suffused night and
day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth,
amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of
art, can give.12

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:

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?


It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is
eternal life—
it is Happiness.16

Whitman’s transcendent “I” that contains multitudes is also bliss-con-


sciousness—it is remarkable how his poetry prefigures the kinds of
claims made by Hinduism-influenced Western gurus of the late twentieth
century.
Later, in “Song of the Open Road,” Whitman mulls over this “efflux
of the soul,” and where it comes from. It comes, says Whitman, from the
“open air”:

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,


I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness
of man and woman,
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every
day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and
sweet continually out of itself.)17
76 America n  G urus

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

mysticism is sexuality, which we certainly see in Lawrence, and which will


recur in the hippie counterculture and thereafter. This tradition was also
alluded to in Whitman: The Mystic Poets (2004), a brief work on Whitman
as a mystic with selections, and occasionally in other works on Whitman.23
But Miller provides a close reading and analysis of Whitman as literary
mystic that has not been equaled since.
There is also a small body of critical literature on Whitman and Vedanta,
even though there is actually not much evidence that Whitman read or
cared much about Hinduism in general, let alone was familiar with the
abstruse philosophical-religious tradition of Vedanta. Books on Whitman
and Indian philosophy tend to proceed by demonstrating parallelisms
between the two, and in fact there are a great many parallels.24 Whitman
is arguably the one figure in American literature that really presages the
influx of Hinduism-as-a-philosophico-religious-export in the late twenti-
eth century. His poetry anticipates virtually every one of the themes that
we see recur in late twentieth-century immediatist religious literature, and
his overall philosophical-religious perspective really is strikingly similar
to what we see develop in the twentieth century, especially in American
literature and religion.
Of course, just as there was Protestant precedent for the Platonism
of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, so too there was a Protestant
tradition that also influenced Whitman, but in Whitman’s case, it was
Quakerism. In “Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox,” Mitchell Gould sums
up the case for Quaker inspirationism—and in particular the controver-
sial figure of Elias Hicks—as highly influential for Whitman’s literary reli-
gion.25 As Lawrence Templin puts it, “Whitman was at core a religious
man, and at the core of his religion was his belief in what the Quakers
called the Inner Light.”26
What we saw earlier in Edwards, or Emerson, or Alcott, are variants of
a characteristically American mysticism, but Whitman, more than anyone
else, is the prophetic founder of American literary mysticism as we see it
unfold in the twentieth century. Nearly all of the figures who pose a claim
to this theme of immediatist enlightenment in American literature and
religion owe a debt to Whitman and to his brand of breezy immediatism,
his celebration of sexuality, and his fervent belief that our consciousness
can be united with the cosmos in a kind of grand, fluidic, sexual union
right now, requiring only that we recognize what is here before us. And
this higher consciousness, he also believed, would one day belong to
humanity as a whole. What’s more, as we saw earlier—if the account of
78 America n  G urus

Bucke’s contemporary is to be believed—Whitman even was able to func-


tion as a kind of spontaneous guru-figure, awakening higher conscious-
ness just by being in his presence!
Perhaps most important of all, however, is Whitman’s cosmic con-
sciousness as grand ego or super-self. Whereas Emerson’s mystical
experience was closer to Buddhism in that in his experience in Nature
his sense of self disappeared, Whitman’s poetry is closer to the Hindu
perspective of atman is brahman, that is, the “self” is in reality the
transcendent Self. With Whitman’s poetry we see the inception of the
American religious tradition of inclusive mysticism, of the expanded
ego as including the cosmos, and of evolutionary spirituality, which we
see recurring in the works of many late twentieth-century American
mystics, authors, and gurus. There can be little doubt that in all these
themes, Whitman is the prophet for the immediatist religion to come.
And with him in mind, we turn to a few examples of those who served
as philosophical-religious and literary bridges between the nineteenth
century and the late twentieth century.
PART TWO

Enlightened Literature
7

American (Literary) Spiritual


Teachers

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

An example of what I  mean here is Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986).


The story of Krishnamurti is relatively well-known, and so I will not go into
too much detail. Suffice it to say here that Krishnamurti was found in Adyar,
India, as a youth by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, leaders in the
Theosophical Society (founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875), by this
time (early in the twentieth century) a worldwide organization. Eventually
Besant and Leadbeater, said to be impressed by the young man’s spiritual
aura, managed to obtain legal guardianship of Jiddu and his brother and
raised him to be a coming “World Teacher” figure under the tutelage of the
Theosophical Society. In fact, Besant and Leadbeater established an “Order
of the Star of the East” with Krishnamurti as its titular head. But in 1922,
while staying at a residence in Ojai, California, Krishnamurti underwent
what he termed “the process,” an unexpected spiritual breakthrough accom-
panied by difficult physical phenomena and then profound serenity.
By 1929, Krishnamurti had reached a decisive break with the “world
mission” he had been given with the Order of the Star, and on August 3,
1929, in front of several thousand members, he dissolved the Order, say-
ing that “Truth is a pathless land,” and that “you cannot approach it by any
path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.” What is more, he contin-
ued, Truth, “being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path
whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed
to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.” From this point on,
for the rest of his life, based primarily in Ojai, California, Krishnamurti
urged hearers and readers toward primordial freedom, free from any ide-
ology, dogma, or sectarianism: “As I have said, I have only one purpose: to
make man free, to urge him towards freedom, to help him to break away
from all limitations.”1
Krishnamurti is certainly an exemplar of immediatism, and his many
works and countless lectures around the world did a great deal to dis-
seminate immediatism around the globe, as well as to encourage it in
an American context. Although Krishnamurti is today not as well-known
as during his lifetime, he remains an influential figure; his emphasis on
non-sectarianism, on the simple observation of one’s own conscious-
ness that he called “choiceless awareness,” on the recognition of self-
lessness and of thought without a thinker, and finally on not accepting
guru-figures—in all of these ways, Krishnamurti’s approach resonated in
deep ways with archetypal American tendencies that go back well before
Emerson and Alcott. Interestingly, Krishnamurti’s immediatism led him
to renounce the role of guru, at least publicly.
American (Literary) Spiritual Teachers 83

Of course there are other relevant twentieth-century mystics, some


of whom, or whose works, are relatively little known. I  would mention
here the poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published as H. D. In a
very unusual little book, written in the Scilly Islands in July 1919, Notes
on Thought and Vision offers us the now familiar Emersonian idea of an
“overmind” as a model of higher consciousness. In Notes, she writes:

If I  could visualise or describe that overmind in my own case,


I should say this: it seems to me that a cap is over my head, a cap
of consciousness over my head, my forehead, affecting a little my
eyes.. . . That overmind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet
with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed
sea-plant, jelly-fish, or anemone. Into that over-mind, thoughts pass
and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.. . . I first real-
ized this state of consciousness in my head. I  visualise it just as
well, now, centered in the love-region of the body or placed like a
foetus in the body.2

H. D. wonders if it is easier for a woman than a man to attain conscious-


ness of the overmind, since she experienced it along with the birth of
her child. And like many others in the immediatist current, she writes
that “[t]‌here is no way of arriving at the overmind, except through the
intellect.”3
H.D.’s work is initiatory, and has a sexual dimension. She believes that
“a lover must choose one of the same type of mind as himself, a musician,
a musician.” The minds of the lovers unite, and when love-vision and
intellectual vision join, they “bring the world of vision into consciousness.
The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture.”4 This
initiatic process is similar to that of the Eleusinian mysteries, H. D. con-
tinues: first is the life of the body and sexuality; second is the life of the
intellect; and third is the awakening into the overmind, which is possible
for all, even if most prefer to stay entombed in dualistic consciousness.
I mention H. D. here because she so clearly demonstrates once again
the profound connection between nondualistic consciousness and cul-
tural creativity that we saw before in Transcendentalism and will see again
in many other figures and movements. Her oceanic sense of unity of
subject and object she naturally links with sexual union and with male/
female partnership, as well as a sense that in the future, others will also
experience this and will work to create new cultures from it. But H. D. was
84 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

Merrell-Wolff’s publications and thought represent a life’s work cen-


tered on his spiritual realizations—it is a consistent and extensive body
of work with a unique vocabulary and set of concepts. It is also unusual
because, although it was certainly possible for Merrell-Wolff to have cre-
ated a religion, or a religious tradition to come after him, he consciously
refrained from doing or encouraging this. Rather, he simply detailed the
nature of his mystical realizations and their implications, as well as the
ways that they corresponded to Vedanta, Buddhism, and other religious
and philosophical traditions. Ron Leonard—who wrote his doctoral dis-
sertation and a subsequent monograph on this subject—unambiguously
remarks, “Wolff’s philosophy owes nothing essential to any external
authority.”7
But if Merrell-Wolff’s philosophy owes nothing essential to any exter-
nal source, one has to ask: What then is the path by which he developed
it? What were his means, his practices? Clearly he left the Methodism of
his pastor father behind relatively early, and he was influenced by reading
a translation of Shankaracarya’s work as well as by broader readings in
Vedantic philosophy. And as a trained mathematician, he was accustomed
to abstract mathematical thinking—all of this is helpful to know, as far as
it goes. Yet it does not answer the question. Here we have a lifelong body
of work devoted to explication of an author’s mystical experiences, and
yet it is not entirely clear how he got to those experiences. He invents the
term “introception” to describe the inward focus of consciousness upon
its own nature, but again, does not present meditative practices or steps
that would induce introception.
Of course, we are familiar with this line of questioning, which is
typically prompted by Western mysticism more generally. In fact, seen
in light of our broader narrative here, Merrell-Wolff could be seen, like
Krishnamurti, as an early exemplar of immediatism. He writes, in his
preface to Pathways Through to Space, that “some years now have passed
since the precipitation of the inner events that led to the writing of this
book.” What is essential, he continues, are the “insight and resources”
derived from “Fundamental Realization.”8 Pathways Through to Space
begins with a gripping description of his mystical experiences in the sum-
mer of 1936, which he calls the beginning of his “ineffable transition.”
He does write that he had met someone he regarded as a sage, though
not as his own guru, and that he had been practicing meditation with his
wife.9 But what he calls his “Fundamental Realization” does not appear
86 America n  G urus

to have been occasioned by meditation practice as often understood—


rather, it took place in a context of sustained reflective observation and
deep thought.
He found himself—living up in the California mountains, after a stay
in gold mining country—in a state of euphoric transcendent conscious-
ness that he called the “Current of Ambrosia.” He felt himself to be “above
space, time, and causality,” without any interest whatever in worldly pur-
suits, in a state of bliss, with only one interest: “the desire that other souls
should also realize this that I had realized, for in it lay the one effective
key for the solving of their problems.”10 Others in his presence, including
his wife, he wrote, experienced the Current, and he found he also could
induce it in or conduct it to others if they were capable of recognizing it.
He could induce it in himself simply by turning his attention to it. What he
called his “Fundamental Realization” led to a state of “High Indifference,”
that is, of transcendent consciousness without an object. The entire body
of his philosophical work is an elaboration of the significances of these
mystical experiences.
Earlier, we saw how we could trace the reverberations of Emerson’s
experience of subject-object transcendence—described in his first book,
Nature—through his most well-known essays, all the way to his late mas-
terpiece The Conduct of Life. That said, we also can observe that, over the
course of Emerson’s life, the immediacy of that initial transcendent experi-
ence receded, and hence his last major work clearly refers to subject-object
transcendence in the Platonic/Plotinian tradition, alluding specifically to
important passages in Plotinus’s Enneads, but not for all that clearly focus-
ing on the nature of transcendent consciousness. Seen from this perspec-
tive, in other words, Emerson is an important but unsystematic author,
whose work meanders, yet still bears the imprint of his transcendental
experience(s) as a recurrent theme.
By contrast, Merrell-Wolff’s work centers on his transcendental experi-
ences from beginning to end, and in fact can be seen as a kind of mon-
ument to or of them. At the explicit center of these experiences is the
realization of “Primordial Consciousness,” which “transcended both
subject and object, but was, in itself, entirely unaffected by the pres-
ence or absence of either.” “It is this Primordial Consciousness that is
the common ontological ground of all forms of consciousness, regardless
of content,” which Merrell-Wolff also terms “consciousness without an
object or subject,” as well as “Great Space” and “Light.”11 Merrell-Wolff
explains: “Primordial Consciousness cannot be described as conceptual,
American (Literary) Spiritual Teachers 87

affective, or perceptual.” “It is a deep, substantial, and vital sort of con-


sciousness,” he continues, one that does not belong to a field of relation-
ships, and that is ontologically prior to the existence or absence of objects
or subjects; it is more akin to a meta-ontological or meontic universal sub-
stratum or continuum, and can only be recognized through conscious-
ness becoming aware of itself.12
There is much more to Merrell-Wolff’s work than we can discuss
here—his mathematical extrapolations of his mystical philosophy, his
mystical aphorisms, his placing of himself in the Pythagorean-Platonic
tradition—and all deserve careful attention. But here, they will take us
away from what I  want to highlight:  Merrell-Wolff as an exemplary fig-
ure of immediatism. As we will see, there are many other authors who
also represent different variants of immediatism. But I  know of few if
any who more clearly exemplify this characteristic Western tradition in
an American context. Merrell-Wolff also represents a forerunner of and a
transition to what becomes much more widespread later in the twentieth
century, as cultural creators increasingly are those who leave monothe-
isms behind.
In many respects, he is an archetypal figure whose significance has not
been widely recognized. Perhaps closest to Plotinus in the philosophical
tradition, he represents someone who makes what is known in academic
philosophy as “truth claims.” But this is a dismissive term, of course, and
there is nothing so tentative about Merrell-Wolff or about the entire imme-
diatist tradition. For its representatives insist that what they have found
is not constructed, not hypothetical, but verifiably true in an absolute,
primordial sense. That is the real reason that Merrell-Wolff is obscure: if
we accept his premises, then many contemporary rationalist-materialist
dogmas must be rejected, most of all the widespread academic fear of
bogeymen like “essentialism.” His work’s implications compel social and
cultural reevaluation and renewal.
If Franklin Merrell-Wolff represents one end of a spectrum—a life
spent in reclusion and inward focus—Alan Watts is much closer to the
other end. Merrell-Wolff, though he had some public presence, had very
little if any popular influence, spending much of his time in retreat in
the mountains of California. By contrast, Alan Watts was said to be, more
than anyone else, the “guru of the counterculture,” a best-selling author,
“America’s foremost popularizer of Zen,” and one of the first American
celebrity spiritual advisors.13 Much has been said and written about Watts,
and there is no need to recapitulate it all here. But I  do think that we
88 America n  G urus

can better understand Watts’s work if we consider it in light of our larger


argument here.
Although Alan Watts is known for his influence on the 1960s and
1970s American counterculture, and in particular as a Californian, he was
British by birth, and a prodigy whose first book on Zen, The Spirit of Zen,
was published in 1936, when he was only twenty-one. He was attracted
to Asian religions when in his adolescence, and left behind his Christian
upbringing during this period, having joined the London Buddhist Lodge
and begun to practice meditation by the age of sixteen. He continued to
publish books on spirituality even as he came to the United States for
seminary, becoming an Episcopalian priest. By 1951, Watts had come to
California at the invitation of Frederic Spiegelberg to teach at the American
Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, eventually serving as head of
the academy before he left in the mid-1950s to be a freelance author and
lecturer. From then until his death in 1973, Watts’s popularity as a lecturer
and author grew, bolstered by his radio talks and campus presentations,
mostly on Asian religions in a Western context.
Assessments of Watts’s work tend to fall into one of several catego-
ries. For some, Watts was merely a popularizer or vulgarizer of Asian reli-
gious traditions, at best presenting them to a Western audience shorn of
their cultural and religious contexts, the “Norman Vincent Peale of Zen.”14
For others, Watts, whatever his shortcomings, nonetheless represented
a broad cultural influence that needs to be recognized.15 For still others,
Watts was a philosopher in his own right, someone whose work ought to
be acknowledged for its own merits.16 For yet others, Watts is a “deviant”
mystic or an “antimystic.”17 And for still others, Watts was a philanderer
and alcoholic whose writing on spiritual topics rings a bit hollow. There is
no doubt some truth in all of these competing interpretations.
But one of the most telling criticisms of Watts comes from the first
generation of Westerners to be formally recognized as teachers of Zen
practice. It is true that Watts did practice meditation, at least at some
points in his life. However, it is also true that he neither undertook formal
Zen training for any extended period, nor emphasized in his work the
importance of zazen, or formal meditation. As early as 1965, in his book
The Three Pillars of Zen, Philip Kapleau (who had studied Zen Buddhism
formally in Japan under Yasutani Roshi), criticized Watts’s claim that for-
mal sitting meditation is not necessarily central to the practice of Zen.18 In
The Way of Zen, Watts had written, for instance, that he could not find evi-
dence of traditional Zen sitting meditation praxis in earlier texts; Kapleau,
American (Literary) Spiritual Teachers 89

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

that there is no “you” as the hard-core thinker of thoughts, feeler of


feelings, and sensor of sensations, and that because your body is
something in the physical world, that world is not “external” to you.
Thus when you listen, you do not hear anyone listening. This has
nothing to do with making an effort or not making an effort; it is
simply a matter of intelligence.22

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

Note the last phrase: “from no clearly understood cause.”


The same idea—of spontaneous spiritual illumination—recurs
throughout Watts’s writing, and seems to have origins as far back as his
childhood:

I carry over from childhood the vague but persistent impression


of being exposed to hints of an archaic and underground culture
whose values were lost to the Protestant religion and the industrial
bourgeoisie, indeed to the modern West in general. This may be
nothing but fantasy, but I seem to have been in touch with linger-
ing links to a world both magical and mystical that was still under-
stood among birds, trees, and flowers.. . . Or was it just I who carried
American (Literary) Spiritual Teachers 91

in my genes or in my “collective unconscious” the apprehension


of whole worlds of experience which official culture repressed or
ignored? The disciplinum arcanum of this culture, so easily mis-
taken in the child for idle reverie, was that intense contemplative
watching of the eternal now, which is sometimes revived by the
use of psychedelic drugs, but which came to me through flowers,
jewels, reflected light in glass, and expanses of clear sky. I get it also
from the music of India which I loved at first hearing and which
continues, like a lost name on the tip of the tongue, to put me in
mind of a long-forgotten afternoon in a sunlit room where magi-
cians were playing on the heartstrings of the universe.25

Books by Watts that illustrate different aspects of his fundamentally


Western mysticism include not only Theologia Mystica and his autobio-
graphical recollections, but also Behold the Spirit (1948), The Supreme
Identity (1950), Nature, Man, and Woman (1958), This Is It (1960), The Two
Hands of God (1963), Beyond Theology—The Art of Godmanship (1964), The
Book—On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), and various
posthumous publications, including The Modern Mystic (1990).
Typically, writing about Watts tends toward the binary: either denun-
ciation or defense. But here I am suggesting something different. Not that
Watts was “deviant” or an “antimystic” or, as he charmingly called him-
self, a “genuine fake,” only that he clearly belongs to the large current of
immediatism. When we see him in this context, one can understand his
work and its significance in new ways. On the one hand, one understands
where his work comes from—the broader Western mystical traditions—
but one also understands why his work is so broadly popular in the United
States in particular, because it taps into a current of thought that long
preexists Watts. At the same time, his work also added to a much broader
current of immediatism that could be described as core for much of what
we now term “the counterculture,” which can be traced from the 1950s to
the early twenty-first century. And again, I would describe Watts as a kind
of immediatist proto-guru—not someone who took on the name “guru,”
of course, but who nonetheless acted as a kind of immediatist spiritual
teacher through his writings and public talks.
Far from being a “deviant,” in this context Watts is very much in the
mainstream. But to see what I  mean, we need to look at a group con-
temporary with Watts that can be understood best by reference back to
Transcendentalism. I refer, of course, to the Beats.
8

Beat Religion and the Choice

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

of what he named a “counter culture.” He discussed some, though by no


means all or even the most important, of the Beat authors, recognizing
that there is at least some continuity between Beat and hippie religious
inclinations. Roszak on Watts and on Beat Zen is especially interesting,
because he saw, from a later historical perspective to be sure, that although
the Beat attraction to Zen was effectively its “adolescentization” into mere
rebellious whim and moodiness, nonetheless “the new orientalism” was
eroticized, close to and in some respects even influenced by Hindu if not
Buddhist Tantra.5
What Watts had intuited already in 1958, ten years later Roszak saw
even more clearly:  that a primary religious impulse behind countercul-
turalism was to leave behind not only organizational or confessional
forms of monotheism, but monotheism more broadly understood. In the
proliferating underground publications of the time, with their entertain-
ing typographical experimentation, one found “Zen, Sufism, Hinduism,
primitive shamanism, [T]‌heosophy, the Left-Handed Tantra,. . . Satanists
and Neo-Gnostics, dervishes and self-proclaimed swamis. . . their number
grows and the counter culture makes generous place for them,” Roszak
wrote.6 “Indeed,” Roszak concluded, “we are a post-Christian era,” one
that is not secularized, “dismal and spiritless,” but rather “a new eclectic
religious revival. . . beyond the wasteland.”7
In The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Hugh McLeod analyzes this era,
concluding that the religious ferment of the 1960s could be described
as “the end of Christendom,” meaning the end of shared monotheistic
religious cultural languages.8 Although this is a dramatic phrase, it does
describe the larger shift represented not only by the countercultural move-
ments of the 1950s and 1960s, but also by the subsequent religious history
of the West during the last half of the twentieth and the early decades of
the twenty-first centuries. It is not that organized Christianity disappears,
of course—far from it—but rather that social cohesion under the broad
rubric of “Christendom” no longer holds in the same ways during and
after the 1960s. What we are charting here is what emerges when mono-
theism begins to recede. Fundamentally, what emerges broadly can be
described as immediatism.
Early on, even as soon as the 1940s and early 1950s, these changes, as
well as the emergence of immediatism, were signaled and also to some
extent furthered by Beat religion. As Watts recognized already before
the 1960s, a Beat approach to religion was individualistic and antino-
mian—in some cases, at least, self-indulgence in quasi-religious guise.
94 America n  G urus

Nonetheless, it is not enough to attempt to dismiss Beat religion as entirely


self-indulgent or narcissistic, even if Jack Kerouac, for instance, could well
be described in those terms. What we are describing as Beat religion had
multiple sources and took several forms, all of which were determinative
for the later counterculture.
It is true, of course, that Asian religions more broadly, and Zen
Buddhism in particular, were important for the later Beat movement,
but it was fundamentally a literary movement with Western antecedents.
We have already looked at the emergence of American immediatism in
the Transcendentalist movement, but here another figure from the same
era is even more important: Walt Whitman. Whitman’s sprawling, cata-
logical poetic style and celebratory sensibility appealed not only to Allen
Ginsberg, whose later poetry is so explicitly Whitmanesque, but also
to Jack Kerouac, whose fiction reflected an analogous “loose” style and
themes. Kerouac and Ginsberg most clearly represent the Whitmanesque
style and ethos, which we might best describe as proto-tantric, that is, rep-
resenting that current of American literature that seeks to break free from
American puritanism and to incorporate everything into its celebratory
ethos—sexuality, but also all other aspects of life, not rejecting but affirm-
ing, and in this affirmation, seeking a renewal, a new way of being in the
world. This R. W. B. Lewis famously termed the American Adamic theme
of renewal, in which Whitman serves as the archetypal American Adam in
a new or renewed American Eden.9 That is the spirit we see represented by
Ginsberg, but also by Kerouac in at least some ways.
In the early 1950s, by the time he moved to San Francisco, Ginsberg
had formulated his vision of the poet as priest of a “new vision,” a “poetic
world not depending on gods,” “satisfying Whitman, concerned / with
a few Traditions, / metrical, mystical, manly.”10 Whitman is, of course,
everywhere in Ginsberg’s poetry and correspondence, in titles, in the
poems themselves, almost omnipresent. And Ginsberg’s religious vision
corresponds with that articulated by Whitman in the preface to Leaves of
Grass (1872):

when I  commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my


poems. . . one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain
it and its execution ever since—and that has been the religious pur-
pose. . . not of course to exhibit itself in the old ways, as in writing
hymns or psalms with an eye to the church-pew. . . but in new ways,
and aiming at the widest sub-bases and inclusions of humanity.11
Beat Religion and the Choice 95

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

metaphysical CIA. In an open universe, nothing is closed in, no judgment


of beliefs, just infinite possibilities of roles to role-play.”
By this time (1992), Ginsberg had long been associated with Naropa
and the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,” but also had
been engaged in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism with the charismatic
and controversial Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, and then with Gelek
Rinpoche. Ginsberg’s final remarks in the conversation with David Brown
concern how one teaches poetic inspiration, and it is clear that what he is
advocating draws on the Buddhist meditation practice of attentively fol-
lowing the breath, and on a particular kind of “panoramic” awareness that
results from meditation practice. In other words, Ginsberg’s rejection of
monotheism is linked to his adoption of Buddhist meditative praxis that
he also brings into his poetic teaching and practice.17
Jack Kerouac also went in the direction of Buddhism, although he drew
his Buddhism from available texts of the period, like Dwight Goddard’s
A Buddhist Bible (1932) and D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism series
(1927/1933/1934), or The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind (1949). Kerouac’s inter-
est in Buddhism can be traced through his prodigious fictional and epis-
tolary output, becoming quite important for him beginning in 1953, when
he began writing Some of the Dharma, which began as reading notes, and
when he began meditating. During this same period, in the mid-1950s,
Kerouac’s friendship with Gary Snyder flourished, and in 1955, Kerouac
worked on The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, a collection of poems
expressing his Buddhist-influenced philosophy, with his friend Snyder. In
the summer of 1956, Kerouac served as a fire scout alone in the Cascades
of Washington, and in 1957, he wrote out The Dharma Bums on one of the
long rolls of paper that he used in place of sheets of typing paper. Snyder
and Buddhism are woven throughout the novel.
The main characters of The Dharma Bums are Ray Smith, a narra-
tor based more or less on Kerouac, Japhy Ryder, based on Gary Snyder,
Cody Pomeray, based on Neal Cassady, Alvah Goldbook, based on Allen
Ginsberg, Arthur Whane, based on Alan Watts, and Rheinhold Cacoethes,
based on Kenneth Rexroth. So the book is more or less a “who’s who” of
males in the nascent West Coast counterculture. The book is in Kerouac’s
typical stream-of-consciousness style, and demonstrates his complicated
relationship with Snyder who, by the end of the book, is off in Japan
practicing Zen Buddhism in a monastery. Kerouac, on the other hand,
remains doubtful of Zen praxis and discipline, preferring as one might
expect the looseness and spontaneity of his own whims. Snyder, in fact,
Beat Religion and the Choice 97

described Kerouac as having “Zen flesh,” but no “Zen bones,” a succinct


enough way of describing Kerouac’s self-indulgent near-nihilistic version
of Buddhism.
Kerouac had been reading Thoreau’s Walden, whose references to Asian
religions drew him toward Buddhism, and he read Dwight Goddard’s
Buddhist Bible carefully, observing that “the Western ‘work’ idea is essen-
tial Faustian and it is Faustian Totalitarianism,” whereas he was seeking
“self-realization or highest perfect wisdom, ecstasy of transcendental
insight.”18 This language mingles that of Mahayana Buddhism (“high-
est perfect wisdom”) with a dash of Hinduism (“self-realization”) and a
hint of Transcendentalist ecstasy, while behind his Buddhism remains the
Catholicism in which Kerouac had been raised.
Kerouac’s well-known 1958 conversation with Mike Wallace began with
Wallace’s observation that “in twentieth century America, a new kind of
mystic has appeared.” Kerouac, early in this interview, asserts that “to be
Beat” is “a hipness.” “What kind of life are they hip to?” Wallace asks. “To
religion,” Kerouac replies. “You mean Beat people are mystics?” Wallace
continues. “Yeah,” Kerouac says. “It’s a revival prophesied by Spengler. He
said that in the late moments of Western civilization there would be a great
revival of religious mysticism. It’s happening.” Wallace presses Kerouac
further: “What sort of mysticism is it? What do Beat mystics believe in?”
Kerouac replies: “Oh, they believe in love. They love children. . . they love
women, they love animals, they love everything.”19
What is remarkable about Kerouac’s conversation with Wallace is how
much it centers on mysticism and self-transcendence. Later in the conver-
sation, Wallace asks about drugs, and Kerouac obligingly and laconically
mentions that he’s taken “lots” of drugs, and has had religious experiences.
But beyond the drugs, to which he claims to be allergic, Kerouac observes,
startlingly, “You’re not sitting here. That’s what you think. Actually, we
are great empty space. I could walk right through you.. . . You know what
I mean, we’re made out of atoms, electrons. We’re actually empty. We’re
an empty vision. . . in one mind.” “We are empty phantoms,” he continues,
“sitting here thinking we are human beings and worrying about civiliza-
tion.” Kerouac concludes the conversation by remarking that “we’re all
in Heaven now, really,” and yet he wishes he were dead, safe in Heaven,
because of the burden of life. “You don’t sound happy,” Wallace observes.
“If only I could hold on to what I know,” Kerouac says disconsolately.20
Kerouac’s remarks in the conversation with Mike Wallace reflect his
reading of Mahayana Buddhist sutras that focused on shunyata, sometimes
98 America n  G urus

translated as “emptiness.” Kerouac’s phrasing in the interview reflected


his somewhat peculiar admixture of Mahayana Buddhism, a latent nihilis-
tic absurdism, and Catholicism—he feels himself and Wallace to be empty
phantoms, and he longs for Heaven and refers also to God, or whatever
name one wants to give ultimate reality (during the interview he suggests
“tangerine” might do in place of “God”). His perspective expresses some-
thing akin to Buddhism, at least.
Kerouac in some respects occupies a middle or liminal place between the
more or less Whitmanesque optimism of Ginsberg and the sinister pessi-
mism—if “pessimism” is strong enough a word—of William S. Burroughs.
There is an insouciant optimism in Kerouac’s itinerant heroes, a sense, as
he put it even before completing On the Road, that he wanted to “work in
revelations,” that he wanted to “fish as deep as possible into my own sub-
conscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand
because they are the same that far down.” He looked toward creating “a
great world religion based on the hopes and images of childhood.”21 Such
a religion could be picked up like a short-wave radio signal: “It’s all in the
air, and is still there for me to grasp another day, and I hope to, I want to,
I know I will.”22 But what he sought to pick up—these hidden signals “in
the air,” could go either way, could be either positive or negative. Kerouac’s
work depicts both sides: on the one hand, the decadence of a life of alcohol-
ism, vagabondery, and licentiousness, on the other, a longing for religious
illumination—on the one hand, dissolution, on the other, a striving upward,
symbolized in The Dharma Bums by climbing a mountain.
Of course, these contradictory impulses are present in all of the Beats—
no doubt about that—but their contradictory opposition is perhaps most
acute in Kerouac. It is almost as if his life were a war of competing and
even diametrically opposed impulses, played out to be sure in the sprawl-
ing, often frustratingly undisciplined scrolls of loosely conceived fiction,
but also in his actual life. In Kerouac we can see that his American imme-
diatist inclination can go either way, or in fact both ways at once, simul-
taneously affirming a new religion whose spontaneity and immediacy is
like that of a child, while at the same time chronicling a dissolute life of
alcoholism, promiscuity, and irresponsibility. And the two are, for better
and for worse, inseparably bound up with one another—giving Kerouac’s
work a peculiarly and inherently tragic dimension. Kerouac is a perpetu-
ally mercurial doomed adolescent.
John Lardas observes in The Bop Apocalypse that the goal of the Beats
was to “reveal sacred realities,” to depict “exactly what is,” and that in their
Beat Religion and the Choice 99

work “the politics of writing was elevated to the metaphysical plane.” He


continues:  “To penetrate the interiority of a reader was a logical exten-
sion of the mystical desire to transcend distinctions between subject and
object.”23 A poem or a novel can, they thought, open up glimpses of eter-
nity, or to put it another way, a poem or a work of fiction can become ini-
tiatory, bringing the reader into a state of transcendent consciousness.24
Certainly one important aspect of the Beat literary movement is this drive
among many of its primary authors toward primordial nondual conscious-
ness or transcendence, a theme that recurs in nearly all of their works in
one form or another, often explicitly, as we have seen. The Beats were not
exactly gurus or spiritual teachers, and yet Ginsberg and Kerouac do rep-
resent a Whitmanesque American literary religion.
If the Beats, particularly Kerouac, represent an outlaw and individu-
alist religion, then one of them represents more than any other the cel-
ebration of the outlaw and the criminal, and that, of course, is William
S. Burroughs.
There is, it would seem, a choice somewhere along the way toward
transcendence. This choice is symbolized, not by the conflicted figure of
Kerouac, but by the sinister figure of William S. Burroughs. The relation-
ships between the various Beat authors are often complex and ambiva-
lent, but what we see in Burroughs is quite different from Whitman and
Kerouac. It is no accident that many of the Beats moved toward Buddhism,
whereas Burroughs did not. In fact, already in 1954, Burroughs was highly
critical of the direction taken by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Snyder, writing
Kerouac in a letter that it would be good for Kerouac to “look into” Tibetan
Buddhism and Zen, but that “my present orientation is diametrically
opposed [to], therefore perhaps progression from, Buddhism. I say we are
here in human form to learn from the human hieroglyphs.” In a subsequent
letter to Ginsberg, Burroughs wrote again that he had practiced yoga, but
that it is “no solution for a Westerner and I disapprove of all practice of
Neo-Buhudsim. (Spell it different every time and maybe it will spell itself
right.)”25 Burroughs then wrote Kerouac sternly that “Buddhism is only
for the West to study as history,” and often amounts to “a form of psychic
junk.”26
The last phrase is particularly revealing, because of course it is in fact
Burroughs who focuses on both psychic experiences and “junk,” that is, in
multiple senses of the word, meaning not only drugs, specifically heroin,
but also the detritus of a declining, entropic Western/modern civilization.
Yet if Burroughs is “diametrically opposed” to Buddhism, what path does
100 America n  G urus

he pursue? That is a more complicated question than it might seem to be


at first, with multiple possible answers. The Burroughs in the letters of
the 1950s is not quite the same as the Burroughs of Naked Lunch and of
Junky, who in turn is not quite the Burroughs of his late trilogy of books,
The Place of Dead Roads, Cities of the Red Night, and The Western Lands. But
I will offer a shot at an answer.
In The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance, I  pointed out
the opposition between Ralph Waldo Emerson as a Neoplatonist and
Herman Melville as an existentialist Gnostic. Melville was well aware of
this distinction, and in fact included a parody of Emersonian/Plotinian
Transcendentalism in his novel The Confidence Man. The Confidence Man
is without doubt an important novel for its depiction of virtually every
American endeavor as one form or another of a confidence scheme, a delib-
erate or inadvertent fraud—business, religion, philosophy, all are variant
forms of the omnipresent American confidence game, in which everyone
is either a shyster or a mark. And Burroughs is the late twentieth-century
inheritor of Melville’s bleak existentialism and near-nihilism, but with a
new aspect added, which I would term “occultism.”
“Occultism” is different from “esoteric.” The term “esoteric” refers to
inner gnosis or illumination as opposed to outer (exoteric) forms of reli-
gion or religious praxis. In Magic and Mysticism, I differentiate between two
kinds of gnosis: cosmological (magical, aiming for effects in the cosmos)
and metaphysical (mystical, aiming for transcendence of the cosmos and
of subject-object distinctions). Burroughs clearly belongs to the former,
that is, to a cosmological/magical inclination of a type best described as
“occultism,” referring in this case to a particular kind of magic emphasiz-
ing a hard subject-object division and a corresponding desire for individ-
ual immortality. The word “occultism,” with its implications of “hidden,”
in Burroughs’s case refers primarily to sorcery.
Typically, the Beats are regarded as more or less a single group or
movement, and most literary criticism treats them this way. What’s more,
there are good reasons to do so: after all, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac,
and Snyder (to take only four of them) did know one another very well,
and indeed, the first three did share a Spenglerian interpretation of the
decline of the West and in particular of America, which in turn clarifies
how they saw themselves in different versions of prophetic roles. To look
at them together is illuminating. But at the same time, literary critics or
theorists typically do not seem to recognize that Burroughs is a very differ-
ent creature from the others.
Beat Religion and the Choice 101

And in fact, Burroughs makes this clear in an interview published in The


Job. The interviewer asks Burroughs point blank: “What is your relation to
the Beat movement, with which you associate yourself? What is the literary
importance of this movement?” Burroughs replies: “I don’t associate myself
with it at all, and never have, either with their objectives or their literary
style. I have some close personal friends among the Beat movement: Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso are all close personal
friends of many years standing, but were not doing at all the same thing,
either in writing or in outlook.”27 He adds that the Beat movement has had
a worldwide effect through self-replication: everyone has become a Beatnik.
The interviewer later asks this: “The Beat/Hip axis, notably in such figures
as Ginsberg, want to transform the world by love and nonviolence. Do you
share this interest?” Burroughs replies: “Most emphatically, no.”28
What separates Burroughs from his friends, many of whom went in
the direction of Buddhist practice, is largely ignored by literary critics, and
often does not even appear in the indexes of books on Burroughs. Here,
of course, I am referring to his occult or magical preoccupations, which
are quite important to understanding his work, yet remain largely undis-
cussed.29 Why? Topics like “magic” or “sorcery” or “occultism” or “telepa-
thy” are disreputable to begin with. What is more, as one might expect
if one is familiar with his work, the direction of Burroughs’s interests in
these areas is markedly sinister or “left-hand.” He violates taboos as a mat-
ter of course in his work, but looking at these themes illustrates just how
far he goes in this direction, and helps to give a much larger sense of what
Burroughs is up to in his work as a whole.
Throughout his work, Burroughs is uncompromising in his
anti-monotheism. On October 13, 1956, Burroughs wrote a particularly
acidic passage attacking Christ as a “cheap mountebank” and Mohammad
the Prophet as “someone dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of
Commerce.”30 This viciously parodic attack on religious figures was then
modified and included in Naked Lunch in the “Market” passage.31 In his
last major work, The Western Lands, he inveighs against the “One God
Universe” [OGU] and at another point writes:

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

Burroughs was, if possible, even more in reaction against monotheism


than Ginsberg. But Burroughs proposed an alternative model:  what he
calls “the Magical Universe, MU,” “a universe of many gods often in con-
flict.”33 His magical universe is harsh, unforgiving, demonic, characterized
by betrayal and paranoia; in it, everyone is out for his own good in a kind
of cosmic confidence game; and as Burroughs himself puts it, “my uni-
verse is less stable than Don Juan’s.”34 The reference to a primary sorcerer
character in Castenada’s novels is not a coincidence here, for Burroughs’s
fictional world, like Castenada’s, is characterized not only by instability,
but also by implacable hostility and a sense of constant combat. In fact, in
Burroughs’s fictional world the combat is not only magical and between
sorcerers, but literal in the form of gunfights, whippings, and all manner
of physical violence. It is not really an exaggeration to term Burroughs’s
fictional world infernal or hellish.
But this alone does not make Burroughs’s fiction occult. The occult
aspects are both overt and covert. He refers explicitly to “black magic” and
“casual curses,” to “psychic attacks” and psychic vampirism, to drawing
life energy or ki from other creatures, to non-physical spirits, some in
animal form, to demons, to “magical visions,” and so forth.35 He asserts
that “we can make our own Western Lands,” that is, our own places for
immortality in the realm of dreams.36 In other words, Burroughs draws
quite explicitly on what can best be described as a sophisticated occult
vocabulary as an integral part of his fictional worldview.
Burroughs’s occult vocabulary and perspective have explanatory power
for his work as a whole. It is true that one could regard Burroughs’s ref-
erences to various aspects of a magical worldview to be more or less for
purposes of decoration or illustration—merely symbolic, as it were—and
given that most literary critics entirely ignore those aspects of his work, one
would guess that if pressed, that would be the direction of their thought in
most cases. However, there is evidence that magic was an integral part of
Burroughs’s own worldview. In fact, in “Playback: A Personal Experience
of Chaos Magic with William S.  Burroughs, Sr.,” a former student of
Burroughs at Naropa, Cabell McLean, tells of how Burroughs used a tape
recorder for black magic in a restaurant, generating discord and chaos
by, in Burroughs’s words, “recording the target’s own base shittiness, and
then playing it back to him at subliminal levels.”37 Burroughs also was said
to have formally joined a chaos magic group, the Illuminates of the Pact of
Thanateros, and to have practiced ritual magic with them.38 The point here
Beat Religion and the Choice 103

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):

My personal experiments and experiences have convinced me that


telepathy and precognition are solid demonstrable facts; facts that
can be verified by anyone who will perform certain definite experi-
ments. These facts point to the possibility of consciousness without
a body or life after death, and before birth. Telepathy is independent
of space-time.. . . Mysticism is just a word. I am concerned with facts
on all levels of experience.40
104 America n  G urus

But here again, telepathy, precognition, and psychic experiences of various


sorts are in a context of “consciousness without a body. . . independent of
space-time,” whereas “[m]‌ysticism is just a word.” So again, even though
it might appear that we are looking at a subject-object union, in fact mysti-
cism here is rejected, and what we are looking at are “experiments” in a
magical/sorceric cosmos.
Burroughs’s work is consistently opposed to totalitarianism, to forms
of control, to bureaucracy, to all of which he opposes anarchy—not just
anarchy as a utopian ideal, but anarchy in an absolute sense, if we can
so put it. In a subsequent paragraph in the same May 1, 1950, letter to
Ginsberg, Burroughs adds that “increased government control leads to a
totalitarian State. Bureaucracy is the worst possible way of doing anything,
because it is the most inflexible and therefore the deadest of all politi-
cal instruments. As I see it the only possible solution is the cooperative
system.”41 But increasingly in Burroughs’s work, there is less cooperative
system, and more along the lines of what we might term magical combat
in a fundamentally hostile cosmos filled with hostile and infernal beings
or images.
Burroughs’s opposition between a “One-God Universe” and a “Magical
Universe” is respectively analogous to the totalitarian political state he
opposes, and to the anarchy that he favors. But here we are looking at a
spiritual anarchy that is sometimes termed “left-hand path” and is often
associated with Hindu Tantra. About the latter and its reception in the
West, Jeffrey Kripal writes that the 1960s counterculture “enthusiastically
embraced Asian religious practices and doctrines in an effort to decon-
struct and move beyond conservative forms of Western religious and
political culture, which these same countercultural actors found stale,
unbelievable, materialistic, militaristic and sexually repressive.”42 Now
much of this description is also true of Burroughs—he was nothing if not
critical of monotheism and also of what he saw as totalitarian governmen-
tal control and militarism—but he did not turn to Asian religions. Rather,
he turned to a type of magical spiritual anarchy that includes elements of
sorcery.
Allow me to offer an example from relatively early in Burroughs’s
career (1961). In The Soft Machine, Burroughs describes what might be
interpreted as privileging unity over duality: a “transfer” operation uniting
as “two halves” a man [the narrator] with a Mayan boy, as well as telepathic
communication.43 But in fact these both represent a kind of extreme dual-
ism, because the “transfer operation” entailed the narrator being “moved
Beat Religion and the Choice 105

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

the sorceror’s quest for immortality of the ego through consciousness


transference into children or adolescents.49 In The Place of Dead Roads,
Kim Carson is in Earl’s Court, England, and there

Learned to use the shield of constant alertness, to see everybody on


the street before they saw him. He learned to render himself invis-
ible by giving no one any reason to look at him, to wrap himself in a
cloak of darkness or a spinning cylinder of light. Devoid of physical
weapons, he turned to the weapons of magic and here he scored
some satisfying hits.
He produced a blackout with a tape recorder that plunged the
whole Earl’s Court area into darkness. . . SPUT.
He conjured up a wind that tore the shutters off the market
stalls along World’s End and went on to kill three hundred people
in Bremen or someplace.50

Shortly thereafter, Kim is “interested in devices for concentrating and


directing magical intent.”51 And as we already saw, The Western Lands,
Burroughs’s final novel, is replete with references to magical visions, spir-
its or demons, action at a distance, and black magic—in short, it is replete
with sorcery.52
Now it is true that Ginsberg offered a blurb for the front cover of The
Place of Dead Roads: “It’s a comedy and a nightmare of Bosch-like visions,
extraordinarily precise vivid visualizations, outrageous ideas like mind
bombs.” Ginsberg encouraged Burroughs and steered Burroughs’s career
forward as much as he could, so the blurb is not a surprise. But its impli-
cations are interesting. What are we to make of it, of the relationship not
only between Burroughs and Ginsberg, but between the sinister course
of Burroughs’s work, and its apparent opposite, the direction pursued by
so many others, including Watts, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Snyder, right
through the hippie era and into the twenty-first century?
In The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak argued for the
importance of the shamanic aspect to the counterculture, which he associ-
ated with magic as “communing with the forces of nature as if they were
mindful,” and which he links to Native American cultures and beliefs. He
writes of this new shamanism of as “communion with transcendent pow-
ers,” with entering “wholly into the grand symbiotic system of nature.”53
But this rosy image of the shaman is far from what we see in Burroughs
or, for that matter, in the work of Carlos Castaneda beginning with The
Beat Religion and the Choice 107

Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1968. What characterizes Castaneda’s


novels is the paranoia of living in a hostile cosmos, one in which nonphys-
ical beings and other sorcerers represent very real threats to one’s sanity
and survival. And the key that opens this hostile vista is hallucinogenic.
My point here is that Roszak’s rosy-colored view of shamanism in
relation to the counterculture, which he suggests is comparable to the
nature-romanticism of a Wordsworth, does not at all express the vital
differences between the extremes of transcendent unity/ via negativa
mysticism at one end of the spectrum, and dualism / sorceric combat /
black magic at the other end of the spectrum. That is the division that
we see playing out in the division between Burroughs and many of his
fellow Beats; that is why Burroughs himself says that he is not a Beat.
And this distinction is important because of its broader explanatory
power when we look at various other authors during this period and
thereafter.
To return to the theme with which we began our look at Burroughs,
there really does seem to be an archetypal division in Western literature,
evidently a temperamental one as well, represented not only by the differ-
ences between the Beats and Burroughs, but also by the earlier division
between Melville and Emerson. This split in turn harks back to the divi-
sion between Plotinus and those whom he saw as regarding the cosmos as
hostile, who are often interpreted as Gnostics, but might in fact be confes-
sional Christians who saw the world as the province of the devil. In any
case, there is here an existential division between those whose worldview
is predicated on transcendent unity (e.g., the Platonists) and those whose
worldview is predicated on implacable opposites in a hostile “war uni-
verse” where paranoia is just part of the territory.54
What I am suggesting here is that, beginning from similar territory,
these authors end up in very different realms, a distinction that would sug-
gest that there is a kind of existential choice that presents itself. From early
on, Burroughs, even more than Melville before him, rejected a Platonic
hierarchic cosmos in which one could ascend from nature through purer
and purer degrees of consciousness to the transcendent experience of the
One. Melville was tired of the American world and its confidence games,
but Burroughs became its fierce and implacable foe, a kind of luciferian
figure rebelling, if one may so put it, against what is, and asserting instead
his occult dreams of ego survival and power.
Hence Burroughs, in the end, does not belong to the immediatist
current of the kind we are looking at throughout this book. He is the
108 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

Certainly psychedelics have dramatic, potentially even revolutionary


effects for human consciousness and society. Just what kinds of effects
became clear in the West during the 1950s and 1960s, when very pow-
erful synthetic hallucinogens became available, first to limited but elite
circles, later much more widely. It is perhaps a bit difficult, from today’s
vantage point looking back, to realize just how revolutionary psychedelics
seemed to be during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. With a tiny dose of
a synthetic chemical, one’s entire consciousness changed—one could, or
seemed to, experience religious transcendence, enter illuminated states,
see nature as paradisiacal, experience one’s own reincarnation, in short,
be thrown into mystical and magical awakening. Take this, and you will
experience what mystics experience—that is what exponents could say. In
the context of our larger argument in this book, psychedelics would seem
to fit perfectly: they represent immediatism in a pill.
We already have seen that there was a deep well of immediatism in
the Western European traditions going back to Platonism, visible also in
the various mystics of Catholicism and Protestantism, and in American
Transcendentalism. Immediatism is central to understanding the back-
ground of the counterculture. Eastern religions, and in particular Zen and
Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Bhakti and Vedantic and Tantric forms of
Hinduism, all were becoming known and even to some extent practiced in
the West, sometimes by Westerners who, like Gary Snyder, Robert Aitken,
Richard Alpert, or Philip Kapleau, made the trek to Asia and came back
to the West to practice and, often, to teach and even found a new lin-
eage in the West. Zen in particular, especially via Daisetz T. Suzuki and
Shunryu Suzuki, was attractive to Westerners because it seemed to rep-
resent, or was often depicted as representing, immediate illumination.
110 America n  G urus

Alan Watts’s writings, as we already saw, contributed much to a current


we might call “instant zen” in the West, but he certainly did not create it
single-handedly—rather, he tapped into the much larger current that I am
terming “immediatism.”
There is much more to say about this, but here we will begin by looking
particularly at what some term “entheogens” (from en [inward] theos [god]
gen [generation], meaning “substances that generate god within”) and
how they seemed to fit perfectly into the pre-existing Western tradition of
immediatism, and yet, do not entirely fit. For it was not quite so simple
as the notion, popularized by Timothy Leary and others, that psychedelics
offered religious illumination in a pill and that is all one needs: merely to
“turn on” with a pill or bit of powder. For what happened sometimes was
not heavenly, but infernal. Instead of primordial illumination, some expe-
rienced the horror of deep alienation and paranoia, not self-other tran-
scendence, but the most extreme forms of self-other division or alienation.
In fact, we saw one aspect of this very pattern already in the work of
William S.  Burroughs. Burroughs’s fictional worlds reflect the extreme
self-other dualism of paranoia, fear of the oppressive totalitarian state,
and related themes that perhaps can be best understood in the context of
his frequent use of a range of drugs including heroin and various other
opiates, yagé and various Latin American hallucinogens, well prior to the
development of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. Already in the
1950s, Burroughs had been in Mexico and South America, remarking on
his psychic experiences from various hallucinogens.1 He said he experi-
enced telepathy, for instance. But much of the latent paranoia and violence
in his work should be understood in the context of the criminalization of
drugs and drug usage—the user is paranoid about being caught for good
reason, after all.
The bifurcation that we observed among the Beats, in other words,
between those who imagined a transcendental future and those who
focused on the rottenness of contemporary American society, is visible
also in a slightly different way in the history of psychedelics. In terms of
ingestion, one sees “good” and “bad” trips, heavenly and infernal ones; and
in social terms, one sees psychedelics offered as a revolutionary panacea
to transform all of society, as well as psychedelics perceived as dangerous
and to be suppressed by a military-industrial-espionage complex about
which the revolutionaries have good reason to be paranoid. The point is
that, for a variety of reasons, psychedelics represent spiritual, psychologi-
cal, and social extremes—they are, in multiple ways, polarizing.
Enter Psychedelics 111

We see this from the very beginning of the psychedelic movement in


the West, beginning with the synthesis of LSD (lysergic acid diethylam-
ide) by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938, and his “trip” on April
19, 1943, while bicycling home from the laboratory. In this pathbreak-
ing “trip,” Hofmann experienced “feelings of anxiety,” saw threatening
forms, and when a neighbor brought him milk, he saw her as a malevo-
lent witch wearing a “lurid mask.” Yet he also came to believe that, despite
its dangers, even the possibility of generating psychosis, LSD also had the
potential to offer a counter to Western materialism, and a new religious
foundation for alienated modern man.2 Hofmann himself exemplified the
Janus faces of his discoveries.
And, of course, there are other ways we see this Janus face of psychedel-
ics. For in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the US government sponsored
clandestine research into LSD to understand its (and other hallucinogens’)
possibilities for covert warfare, interrogation, and psychological manipula-
tion. Two such researchers were Max Rinkel and Robert Hyde, who tested
LSD on student volunteers via a CIA-funded program. Many of the volun-
teers became temporarily psychotic, but some of those involved in the test-
ing, like Hofmann, came to think that LSD also opened a door into “reality,”
that is, the transcendent “perennial” reality behind the illusions of the social
world of industrial production and consumption.3 So on the one hand, LSD
already on the cusp of the 1950s was at once embedded in the bureaucratic,
military-industrial complex and, on the other hand, was recognized by some
of the researchers as a potential force for social revolutionary.
That mysticism can have political consequences, at least in the eyes
of some, began to dawn on me when, in London—after I gave a public
lecture on the mysticism of John Pordage (d. 1681) and his small, reclu-
sive circle of mystics—a clean-cut American man came up immediately to
declare that “mystics are the most extreme form of political radicals, aren’t
they?” I was quite taken aback, and in fact wondered if he worked for an
American intelligence agency that was checking up on my “radicalism,”
since at the time I was editing an academic journal for the study of radi-
calism. Only after studying the history of psychedelics in the 1960s did
I begin to understand the deeper background that produced what seemed
to me a totally incongruous series of questions about the political radical-
ism of mystics.
But questions and fears like these exist in a context shaped by this
period more than fifty years earlier, when the genie of LSD was released
from the Sandoz laboratory into American society, first to researchers and
112 America n  G urus

psychiatrists, then later, illicitly, to an ever larger public. In hindsight,


it is not hard to see why the American government would have been so
concerned about widespread use of hallucinogens. Even the writings of
the earliest researchers reveal some hints of what they recognized as its
possible revolutionary potential, but it was only after the publications of
figures like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Timothy Leary, extolling the
benefits of psychedelics, that their social consequences across the spec-
trum became broadly obvious.
Aldous Huxley recognized the dramatic potential of psychedelics early,
and already in 1954 published The Doors of Perception, followed by Heaven
and Hell in 1956. Excerpts from these and many other of Huxley’s writ-
ings, mostly on psychedelics, were published in a posthumous collection
titled Moksha. It is a startling collection in that it begins with his writings
on drugs and soma in 1931, even though the primary works on psychedel-
ics as such begin in the 1950s and last all the way up to his death in 1963,
on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It is almost as
though Huxley’s life were destined to lead up to his experiences of and
his writings on the religious significances of psychedelics. But it is not
insignificant that he is also best known for his collection The Perennial
Philosophy. These subjects—psychedelics and perennialism—have more
than a little in common, as we shall see.4
But although Huxley certainly did his part in popularizing psychedel-
ics, it was Timothy Leary, more than anyone else, who really had a broad
public impact in this respect. Leary was regarded by many of his fellow
researchers in this new field as having almost single-handedly—and out
of his boundless egotism—simultaneously popularized and destroyed
research in the area of psychopharmaceuticals not only for his generation,
but also for subsequent ones. Two aspects of Leary’s motivations are rele-
vant to our inquiry here. First, he opposed hegemonic monotheism. As to
monotheism, Leary wrote explicitly that “there was not much chance that
the bureaucrats of Christian America were going to accept our research
results, no matter how objective” for, he continued,

we had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God,


one religion, one reality that has cursed Europe for centuries, and
America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to mul-
tiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe.
We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intel-
ligent good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.5
Enter Psychedelics 113

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

psychedelic experience is highly individual, and further, that “both the


sexual and psychedelic experiences are fiercely attacked and controlled by
those who do not like it themselves and do not want others to have it.” The
same psychological mechanisms are at work in both: “fear, hysteria, ratio-
nalizations about protection of the young, repression, rumor, puritanical
control.”12 Leary would soon live out the consequences of generating fear
and hysteria by becoming the polarizing figure that this article signaled.
But already at this relatively early time (1964), Leary had moved toward
Buddhism, like so many of his fellow voyagers, and in fact in the same
year he published, with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, a psyche-
delic manual based on the Tibetan Buddhist Bardo Thodol, or Book of the
Dead, which had been published in its first translation in English by W. Y.
Evans-Wentz in 1927.13 The manual, dedicated to Huxley, includes the fol-
lowing instructions:

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

After the Mexico experiment in psychedelic communalism, Leary came


back to the United States and by the fall of 1963, having been fired from
Harvard, he and his friends set up a new psychedelic communal home at
Millbrook, New  York, a 2,500-acre estate and sprawling sixty-four-room
mansion donated by the Hitchcock siblings, Peggy, Billy, and Tommy,
heirs to a family fortune. There, Leary and Alpert established the Castalia
Foundation, based on the novel The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse,
which featured a remotely located semi-secret group devoted to developing
the arts and the inner life. The Castalia Foundation was only one of a num-
ber of unusual organizations to emerge from this period, others being the
League for Spiritual Discovery and Arthur Kleps’s Neo-American Church.
Millbrook, as one might expect, was something of an open-door zoo,
with all manner of people and drugs and sexual escapades. One gets a
flavor of the time from Arthur Kleps’s Millbrook, which chronicles, in an
often fragmented and stream-of-consciousness way, what it was like to be
in Leary’s circle and a psychedelic revolutionary in this heady era. Leary
was not just charismatic, Kleps said, his voice was downright hypnotic; he
was profoundly seductive. And soon Leary took on a guru-like role, almost
a messianic role. When Kleps was called to Congress to testify about psy-
chedelics and religion, he said that Leary was to their Neo-American psy-
chedelic religion a founding figure, and regarded “with the same special
love and respect as was reserved by the early Christians for Jesus, by the
Moslems for Mohammed, or the Buddhists for Gotama. I am merely the
head of one of several psychedelic churches.” “The psychedelic churches,”
he continued, “exist to promote and defend the psychedelic religion, a reli-
gion which sees in the transcendental experience produced by the sacred
substances the key to understanding life and improving the condition of
man on earth.”19
Kleps’s testimony emphasized the religious and transcendental dimen-
sions of psychedelic experiences, focusing in particular on the transcen-
dence of words and discursive consciousness, but there were other, more
sinister aspects to Millbrook as well. In Neuropolitique, Leary reflected
back on this period, and on Charles Manson as well as on the “spiritual
Wild West” of America in the 1960s and 1970s, “with San Francisco as its
Dodge City,” where “religious gang leaders and ethical gunslingers com-
peted for control.”20 To Millbrook, he reflected, between 1963 and 1968,
came thousands of “self-appointed messiahs, occultists, and adepts.”
While there were never physical threats at Millbrook, Leary wrote, resi-
dents were inevitably compelled to consider “black magic,. . . which at
118 America n  G urus

Millbook was defined as the use of neurological techniques to obtain


power over others.”21
Leary wrote that at Millbrook, he belatedly discovered, he was being
“hexed, vexed, perplexed, painted into pentagons, exposed to Kali
death-goddess mantras and flashed by charms and jujus,” so that finally
he felt compelled to develop white magic to neutralize “occult power
moves,” and “black-magic reality take-overs.”22 It was in this context that
he described his meeting with Charles Manson in Folsom Prison. Manson,
he said, began by “imposing a reality in which he came on as a Biblical
prophet.” Leary responded that everyone has responsibility for his own
reality, because “it’s the end of the monotheistic trip, remember.” “That
was your mistake,” Manson replies in a ghostly whisper. “They want to be
told what to do, what to believe, what’s really true and really real.” “And
you’ve got the answers for them?” asked Leary. “It’s all in the Bible, man.”
“Do you know why everything went wrong?” “Why?” Leary responded. “It
was the women,” said Manson. “They got scared and forced all these laws
and morals on the men. It’s all in the Bible, man. What does the Bible say
about women? That they’re the cause of evil.. . . Evil has to be killed. Only
a few are to be saved. I’m the only one who really takes the Bible seriously
and that’s why I’m here.”23
Leary’s clear implication is that Manson’s neurological control or black
magic directly reflects monotheistic control, in particular its repression of
sexuality and of women. Leary’s rejection of monotheism is a recurrent
theme throughout his adult life. He mocked Christianity, appearing in a
photograph under a marquee in New  York announcing that he was the
return of Jesus Christ. A few years before his death, when he was asked
about the state of scientific progress, he took even such a question as an
opportunity to reject monotheism again. He replied “there are no laws of
the universe. That’s such a typical Victorian British Empire piece of shit,
because the Judeo God is up there—he’s the judge, and he’s emitting laws
and commandments, of all things.”24 In reality, the universe develops by
algorithms, he goes on, a series of “if, then” propositions—not monothe-
istic “laws.”
Leary’s encounter with Manson prompts us toward reflecting on and
developing a hypothesis about the spectrum of possibilities coming out
of a psychedelic experience. Just as a trip itself can go “either way,” that
is, toward heaven or toward hell, so too, we could posit, coming out of
an experience of “the void,” to which Leary and Manson both referred
in their reported/fictionalized conversation, one could go in a number of
Enter Psychedelics 119

different directions aligned along an axis from selfless compassion to self-


ish drive for power (accompanied by the desire to extirpate “evil”), with
various other points in between. In other words, one could posit that the
psychedelic may offer one a glimpse of transcendent experience, but what
one does with that experience, or where one goes afterward, is an indi-
vidual matter.
In the heady days of the late 1960s, when Leary had taken on (and
had projected upon him) the role of psychedelic guru-figure, his public
remarks tended very much toward the millenarian. At the University of
California, Berkeley, in 1969, Leary’s addresses referred directly to “the
Aquarian Age” inspired by “the chemicals which change consciousness,”
that is, “dope.” He claimed that “dope has always been the carefully
guarded Sufi, Pythagorean Atlantean secret,” that “Atlantis fell because
they misused dope,” and that “the key to the present revolution—which is
the hedonic revolution, which is the revolution of individual freedom and
pleasure—the key to it is dope.”25 He extols “psychedelic yoga” of weekly
“death-rebirth” as key to personal and social transformation, and claims
that “the only revolutionary act is, of course, just to keep getting high, and
staying high, and getting higher.”26
It seems self-evident that Leary’s millenarianism here—which is
closely intertwined with his rhetoric of sexual “hedonic” revolution and
“psychedelic marriage”27  —ignores what he certainly also knew about
psychedelics from long before, and what is clear in his writing about his
encounter with Manson: that psychedelics do also have a potential dark
side. In the Berkeley lectures, he does mention the notion of “levels,” a
“level six” being contact with law enforcement or the outside world, and
a “level one” being a highly protected zone conducive to positive “trips.”28
He doesn’t seriously or openly acknowledge bad trips, breakdowns, para-
noia, or psychosis, or for that matter, sexually transmitted diseases, psy-
chological issues related to promiscuity, the breakdown of marriages and
partnerships, or the like.29
Leary continued his rosy rhetoric in his later years. In his 1988 book
Neuropolitique, he still insisted that a philosophical revolution was com-
ing that would “be based on the expansion of consciousness,. . . stress[ing]
individualism” and “open sexual expression,” whose “religious symbol
will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair uniting in higher love
communion.”30 But in an interesting turn, he claimed that in his earlier
incarnation “I advocated, not drugs (no one had to do that), but a rational,
philosophic, scientific understanding of drugs.”31 This, of course, as we
120 America n  G urus

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

a related movement has to be understood. That related movement is a


bastard child of marijuana, psychedelics, satirical anti-religion, and the
mingling of countless religions in a parodic stew. It is characterizable as
“instant zen,” is certainly is a form of outlaw religion, and perhaps its
most visible and flamboyantly iconoclastic form is Discordianism.
10

Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual


Anarchism

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

spiritual anarchism as what might happen if a marijuana-induced laugh-


ing fit were to be conveyed in extended form in print.
The roots of American spiritual anarchism are to be found in the
1950s, and take us back to some of the same figures we have met already
in our introduction to the Beat movement. One of the main spiritual
anarchist authors was Robert Anton Wilson, who said that his interest in
“consciousness enhancement” began in 1957, when he had been reading
Korzybski’s book Science and Sanity, which discussed “getting back to the
non-verbal level” of consciousness. Wilson said he was given marijuana,
and shortly thereafter heard a lecture by Alan Watts. Wilson decided that
“Zen, marijuana, and Kozybski were all relating the same transformations
of consciousness. That was the beginning.”1
This beginning was not with psychedelics, but rather with the possibil-
ity of immediate “transformations of consciousness” through nonverbal,
childlike awareness. In the interview, Wilson goes on to describe the

Discordian Society, which is based on the worship of Eris, the


Goddess of Chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and interna-
tional relations. They have no dogmas, but one catma. The catma
is that everything in the universe relates to the number 5, one way or
another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter.
I found the Discordian Society to be the most satisfactory religion
I had ever encountered up until that point, so I became a Discordian
Pope. This is done by excommunicating all the Discordian Popes
you can find and setting up your own Discordian Church. This
is based on Greg [Hill]’s teaching that we Discordians must stick
apart.2

The term “spiritual anarchism” fits well what Wilson is describing—it is


a much more extreme form of what we saw more than a century earlier
in Transcendentalism, itself an individualistic sport from Protestantism.
Here, religious individualism is taken perhaps as far as one could take it.
The sacred text (or “sacred text”) of Discordianism is the Principia
Discordia, the “magnum opiate” of Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill)
and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (Kerry Thornley) that is said to have
begun with a holy vision in a bowling alley in 1957 or 1958.3 Early in the
Principia—which has more than one origin-story embedded in it—we
read about “two young Californians,. . . indulging in their habit of sip-
ping coffee at an allnight bowling alley and generally solving the world’s
124 America n  G urus

problems,” who are said to experience a “great stillness” and a “blinding


flash of intense light,” followed by time stopping, and the presentation of
a scroll to them by a chimpanzee. They then, on the fifth night thereafter,
dreamed a revelation by Eris, goddess of discord.4 The first publication of
Principia Discordia was said to be from a mimeograph in Jim Garrison’s
office in New Orleans in 1964, according to Thornley himself, and there
were said to be five copies.5 Later references have it that the first publica-
tion was in 1965, and the latter number would seem to fit better with the
Erisian “law of fives,” that is, that everything sooner or later can be linked
to the number five.6 Legend has it that the first edition had the somewhat
Spenglerian subtitle “How the West Was Lost,” but later (or “later”) edi-
tions have the subtitle “How I  Found Goddess and What I  Did to Her
When I Found Her.”
It is more difficult than in most cases either to do justice to the hilarity
of the Principia Discordia, or to give a standard historical account either of
the text or of the people associated with it. Discordianism ridicules and
shatters conventional beliefs, and in doing so as an extended joke has
accreted many more subsequent jokes in which it is nested, until disen-
tangling the whole becomes virtually impossible. What’s more, many of
the principal figures have died, and others in a position to know what his-
torical details might have some conventional validity also have died, while
the written record itself is actually a satire, really, a detonation of monothe-
ism in general, as well as of religions based on revealed texts.
But the underlying point of the book remains quite clear. Principia
includes a letter of termination to Jehovah or Yahweh, and it includes an
amusing parody of the founding of Mormonism, with a main character
digging for five days for revealed scripture, finally sleeping, exhausted,
using as a pillow a golden chest that he had found the first day. It becomes
clear over the course of this strange little book that one of its purposes is
to undermine monotheistic religion based on faith, because “it is my firm
belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.”7 And it would be a serious
error to dismiss this peculiar and complex text because of its near-total
iconoclasm, as it (and other works by authors belonging to this tradition
of spiritual anarchism that began in the 1960s) has a remarkable range of
sources and references.
Some of those references we have already seen emerging elsewhere,
but others are new to us. Hassan i Sabbah, the head of the assassins and
the “old man of the mountain,” whom we saw earlier in Burroughs’s
work, makes his appearance in the Principia, and so too do Adam
Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual Anarchism 125

Weishaupt and “the Bavarian illuminati,” about whom more shortly.8


And there is a link to the worldview epitomized by the motto that
appears in Burroughs’s late work, “Nothing is true. Everything is per-
mitted,” which in Principia is expressed as “Nothing is true. Everything
is permissible.”9
But in Discordian literature, and more broadly in the tradition of spiri-
tual anarchism, a spirit of high mirth is relentless, seemingly unending,
and all-consuming, almost as if there were no dark side. And of course,
one of the main serious points of the Principia, if we can put it that way, is
the rejection of dualism. There are several sections that refer to “the curse
of Greyface,” which is to say, of opposition between order and disorder,
and one such section concludes: “Seek the Sacred Chao—therein you will
find the foolishness of all ORDER/DISORDER. They are the same!”10 The
subsequent section refers to an “Erisian Magic Ritual” called “The Turkey
Curse,” in which one is instructed to engage one’s fists in the manner
of John L. Sullivan, and wave them about while saying “Gobble, Gobble,
Gobble,” the results of which, it advises, will be apparent.
One can understand why some scholars are inclined to classify
Discordianism as a magical tradition, and in particular, as a subset of
Chaos magic.11 There are problems with this classification, however,
because the Principia Discordia predates Chaos magic, and because
Discordianism goes well beyond magic in any strict definition. As we have
seen, Discordianism has a whole array of satirical targets, chiefly relating
to but not limited to monotheisms, and it also has an affirmative meta-
physics opposed to dualism, while invoking a “real” goddess, Eris. It is
not only that Discordianism predates Chaos magic by decades; it is that
Discordianism and spiritual anarchism more generally represent a fun-
damentally different current of thought with some similarities to Chaos
magic.12
It is true, of course, that there are numerous magical references and
links not only to Discordianism, but also to other figures in and branches
of spiritual anarchism. And in fact, we will trace a number of these con-
nections. However, it is important to recognize that these connections
are not themselves the point of spiritual anarchism, which although it
often includes magic, is not itself primarily magical in the sense that, for
instance, the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO),
or the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), are. Rather, the overarching point
of Discordianism and many of its siblings, including the work of Peter
Lamborn Wilson, is to deconstruct religious, political, social, and cultural
126 America n  G urus

conventions and to replace them with individualism or individual liberty


in all spheres of life.
However, despite the spirit of continuous hilarity that pervades the
Principia and all Discordian texts, there is a dark side to Discordianism.
There is comparatively little academic work on Discordianism, but there
are several works in which the authors seek to penetrate through the fog
of countless pseudonyms and the farrago of claims and counterclaims,
the broadsheets and renegade publications, and the conflicting dates and
the conspiratorial assertions, with at least some success. Discordianism
was invented by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley primarily, but there was
a cast of characters who contributed to their circle, notably Camden
Benares and Robert Anton Wilson. Later in life, Hill (who worked at Bank
of America for twenty-three years) suffered from depression and alcohol-
ism, Thornley became increasingly paranoid and convinced of conspira-
cies against him (regarding Robert Anton Wilson as a CIA “minder,”
for instance), and Camden Benares, an early Discordian and author of
Zen Without Zen Masters, was institutionalized for five months in the
1980s.13 Psychologically, the manic spirit of hilarity was the public side of
Discordianism, but depression or paranoia was the private or other side.
Our purpose here isn’t psychological explanation, however, so much as
religious explication. And whatever its psychological dimensions, the fact
is that Discordianism is archetypally immediatist religion. Although the
Discordians published books with the word “Zen” in the title, the “Zen”
in question is really a variant of the American-style immediatism that we
have seen already in the works of Alan Watts, but in a more extreme form.
Watts was a immediatist, but he still made an effort to reflect Buddhist tra-
ditional teachings to some extent. However, works like Camden Benares’s
Zen Without Zen Masters (1977)—a bit of which was incorporated into the
Principia—and Kerry Thornley’s Zenarchy (1991) represent a new genre.14
While including allusions to traditional Zen Buddhist figures and koans,
they are quite different from the kind of Zen Buddhism that Gary Snyder
and Robert Aitken studied in Japan, practicing with a Roshi, or traditional
teacher.
Although Benares’s and Thornley’s versions of American “Zen” do
include versions of traditional Zen Buddhist koans as well as humorous
ones of their own invention, the nature and interpretations of those
koans is not Buddhist. To give an example, Thornley refers at the begin-
ning of Zenarchy to the Zen Buddhist expression “your face before
you were born.” But he fundamentally changes the interpretation to
Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual Anarchism 127

this: “Very early in the Zen tradition in China, a seeker was instructed


to return to his face before he was born. In other words, be yourself.
Don’t put on a face for the outside world. Let your attitude be as uncon-
ditioned as before you emerged from the womb.”15 One’s face before
one was born is an obliquely symbolic way of referring to sunyata, or
emptiness, central to Mahayana Buddhism and to the Prajnaparamita
Sutra. But here the central Buddhist teaching is lost, and it has been
replaced by the rather more conventional hippie message to be “one-
self.” Of course, a foundational concept in Buddhism is anatman, or the
fundamental nonexistence of any enduring self.
Benares’s version of “Zen,” like Thornley’s, incorporates aspects from
Zen koans, but they lose their Buddhist meaning in the process and
become often rather crude jokes. In Principia, we find “A Zen Story” attrib-
uted to Camden Benares, a.k.a. “The Count of Five,” in which a young
mid-twentieth-century American man is told by a “self-ordained Zen mas-
ter” to go sit in a “dilapidated mansion.” The young man does so, ordure
falls on his head from the upstairs plumbing, and passersby remark that
they are not sure whether he is a “holy man” or a “shithead.” And with
that, he is “enlightened.”16 But of course, what is entirely missing from
the story is the entire Zen Buddhist tradition that produced koans: there
are no Buddhist teachings about emptiness and bodhicitta, or compassion,
no meditation practices that lead up to the koan tradition. Here, “Zen” is
without either its cultural or religious purpose—only a punchline is left.
And the punchline, on its own, whatever its humorous merits, is in itself
really neither Zen nor Buddhist.
Thornley’s Zenarchy, for his part, is fundamentally a defense of
California hippiedom. He begins by recalling fondly 1967 discussions of
“mysticism and authority” that grew into the “first American Zen story”
by Benares, the Gathering of the Tribes, Human Be-ins, as well as Jack
Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Gary Snyder’s term “Zen Anarchy.” He
recalls the Los Angeles Oracle and its featuring a conversation between
Ginsberg, Leary, Snyder, and Watts. What we see, in other words, is
that “Zenarchy” is really another name for the counterculture, broadly
speaking. Thornley distinguishes countercultural “enlightenment” from
Buddhist enlightenment—stoned on marijuana, he recalls that one morn-
ing “wooden blocks seemed to tumble and clatter away from my mind
in all directions. [But h]ad it been satori (enlightenment), I wouldn’t have
been so annoyed since then by the trials and tribulations of living.”17 Later,
Thornley advises his readers to see everyone as the readers’ own children,
128 America n  G urus

or as Buddhist teachers, albeit, one imagines, preferably in a stoned hippie


reverie rather than in more formal meditation.18
Benares’s and Thornley’s “Zen” or “Zenarchy” represent clear examples
of spiritual anarchism. It is true that in the book’s preface, “Zenarchy” is
described as “the social order which springs from meditation,” but some-
what more accurately also defines it as “a way of Zen applied to social
life.”19 These books represent, like Principia and the works of Robert Anton
Wilson, an emphasis on individual freedom but also tribalism, and the
notion that people are illuminated, not through lengthy meditation prac-
tices, but by smoking a joint, dropping a tab of acid, dancing in the park,
getting naked at tribalesque gatherings, and simply by dropping social
roles and pretense, giving up social rigidity, becoming oneself. There is
something attractive about this libertarian view, as we certainly see made
clear in the late 1960s hippie movement. But there is more than a little of
what Christopher Lasch later described as a “culture of narcissism,” too.20
Spiritual anarchism, as we will see in other instances as well, is funda-
mentally different from political anarchism, let alone Marxist or other mil-
lenarian currents. Typically, spiritual anarchism emphasizes the moment,
and a limited space and time within which liberty can be realized. In
Zenarchy, Thornley extols the virtues of “simply knowing that freedom
is everywhere for those who dance through life, rather than crawl, walk,
or run.” For “what Zen has most to offer Anarchism is freedom here
and now.” He rejects dreams “of a utopian millennium” in the future,
emphasizing instead the present moment, charmingly claiming that the
“Zen” anarchist can “prance boldly into the collage of events,. . . with no
fears,. . . turned on, tuned in, and made One.”21 Thornley, like his fellow
Discordians, often was all too willing to “prance boldly” into the “collage
of events.”
When Thornley pranced into the collage of events, he occasionally
came into conflict with Marxists or other true believers. For instance,
Thornley’s Zenarchy originally was published as intermittent articles
in alternative papers in California or The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta,
Georgia, during the height of the Vietnam War protests. During this
period, he and Benares shared a character that Thornley says he cre-
ated, Ho Chi Zen, a play, of course, on the name of the leader of
Vietnamese communist revolutionaries, Ho Chi Minh. It is amusing
to read Thornley’s account of seeking to publish, under the name “Ho
Chi Zen,” an anarchist incitement to burn all flags, including US, peace
flags, and even Viet Cong flags, which for some California Marxists was
Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual Anarchism 129

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

Oh, Ho, Ho, It’s Magic . . .

As Hugh Urban points out in Magia Sexualis, Discordianism has magi-


cal elements in it, and a subsequent author, Carole Cusack, even claims
that Discordianism should be seen as an early development of what
later became Chaos magic.1 The problem with that implication is that
Discordianism, as we have already seen, belongs primarily to spiritual
anarchism, and its magical elements, which are pretty minimal to begin
with, are clearly subordinate to its larger religious and political aims. None
of the Discordian works proper are primarily or explicitly magical, after
all. And just because they refer to the goddess Eris and to Chaos doesn’t
put them in the category of this later movement.2 At the same time, magic
is in the penumbra of Discordianism, not so much in Discordiana proper,
as in the prolific works of Robert Anton Wilson. While Wilson wasn’t
always credited, he represents a major influence on, as well as the most
effective disseminator of, the Discordian circle, and it is with Wilson that
Discordianism and magic really meet.
In 2003, Robert Anton Wilson acknowledged that he very much helped
to create Discordianism, and wrote then, not long before his death, “Many
people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new
religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated
joke.” He continued, “Others consider Discordianism an American form
of Zen Buddhism. I think Kerry held that view most of the time.”3 What
Wilson doesn’t mention is the role of magic or magical traditions, because
magical references appear not so much in Discordianism, but rather in
Wilson’s own work.
It is not all that easy to describe Wilson’s voluminous and idiosyncratic
works. A  broader public read Wilson’s allusions to Discordianism and
related ideas in Wilson’s and Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), and in
Oh, Ho, Ho, It’s Magic. . . 131

later works he also referred to them, for instance, in Everything Is Under


Control (1998), where he included entries on Discordianism and Discordian
notions. But Discordianism itself was only one aspect of Wilson’s exten-
sive, complex, and peculiar cluster of books. We find numerous references
to Aleister Crowley, the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the Order of the
Golden Dawn, sexual mysticism, sex magic, Thelema, Rosicrucianism,
and much else—enough so that it soon becomes clear that Wilson’s work
is replete with references to Western esotericism.
In an interview, Wilson reflected on the magical groups and figures
that most influenced him. He described Aleister Crowley in some detail,
claiming him as “the leader of the Illuminati” [?]‌, the Argentum Astrum,
and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO)” and as “continuing the project of
overthrowing Christianity” and “reviving Paganism.”4 Of the many differ-
ent Crowley personae, Wilson prefers “Crowley the scientist,” and of the
various modern magical groups, he prefers the Order of the Golden Dawn
“of which Christopher Hyatt is the Outer Head.” To Wilson, the Golden
Dawn’s goal is “unleashing the full positive potential of human beings,”
and he respects Hyatt because he is a trained psychologist who “knows
what he’s doing,” and has “his head on right.”5 It is clear from his com-
ments that Wilson is quite familiar with the history and major contempo-
rary figures of modern magic.
But when we turn to Wilson’s most well-known series of books, The
Illuminatus! Trilogy, we find them to be a convergence of nearly all the
themes and figures we have looked at so far. Discordianism and Discordian
jokes are woven throughout the books, and so is Timothy Leary, Hassan i
Sabbah and the Assassins, the motto “Nothing is true. Everything is per-
missible,” sexual libertinism, the notion of transcending time and space,
the I Ching and various hexagrams (which played a major role, we will
recall, in the organization of Leary’s book High Priest)—in short, Wilson’s
work is like a compendium of countercultural themes, with one innova-
tion: Wilson introduces as central the theme of the “Bavarian Illuminati.”
One could interpret Wilson’s inventive use of the “Illuminati” as a kind
of gentle, literary version of the paranoia that sometimes gripped people
on an LSD trip, or after smoking or ingesting marijuana, or that possessed
Kerry Thornley in the latter part of his life. We will recall that Thornley
believed that he had been experimented on by the US government in its
MK-ULTRA project, and that he was under surveillance—and that Robert
Anton Wilson was his CIA minder. Wilson, in other words, was personally
familiar with paranoia and conspiracism in his friend Thornley. Wilson’s
132 America n  G urus

Illuminatus! trilogy, constructed as a tongue-in-cheek detective story, both


exploits and pokes fun at this conspiracism.
Much later, when he was asked about his choice of the term
“Illuminati,” Wilson explained the history of the term in his circle and later
in his books. He said that once Thornley was implicated in the Kennedy
assassination by Jim Garrison (and Thornley did serve with Lee Harvey
Oswald in the military), Thornley responded by “sending out all sorts of
announcements that he was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati.” This
got Wilson interested in the subject, and so he proposed the “Illuminati”
as the agents of totalitarianism, in opposition to the Discordians as the
agents of chaos. Eventually, Wilson said, “I appointed myself the head of
the Illuminati, which led to a lot of interesting correspondences with other
heads of the Illuminati in various parts of the world.” Effectively, he said,
“the Illuminati that is believed in by right-wing paranoids is a hypothesis
that leading intellectuals of the eighteenth century were all members of
the Bavarian Illuminati which was working to overthrow Christianity.” In
fact, he continued, they were in favor of democratic republicanism and
scientific inquiry.6
It is amusing that Wilson’s ginning up of fear about a cabal of
“Illuminati” in fact fed into, and perhaps even generated a host of liter-
ature, largely by evangelical Christians, about the dangers of the same
group. From Wilson’s point of view, the “Illuminati” are basically the same
as the Discordian Society:  invented, but describing a phenomenon or a
cluster of tendencies that do exist in society. Nonetheless, we find hys-
terical books about the “Illuminati” selling hundreds of thousands of cop-
ies during the 1990s and early 2000s, among them Larry Burkett’s The
Illuminati (1991), boasting “over 250,000 sold,” and Pat Robertson’s The
New World Order (1991; “over 500,000 sold”), which is full from beginning
to end with alarmed and knowing references to the Illuminati, a secret
anti-Christian cabal that really rules the world. Other authors, for instance,
Texe Marrs, continued the paranoia with books like Circle of Intrigue: The
Hidden Inner Circle of the Global Illuminati Conspiracy (2000).
One has to ask what Wilson was up to by encouraging conspiracy theo-
ries about the “Illuminati” among some evangelical Christians, as well as
others suspicious of ruling cabals in finance and government. There’s no
doubt he knew that he was generating and feeding an influential meme,
after all; he’s forthright about that in interviews. Of course, it was amusing
to him, so there is the practical joke aspect of it. But the “Illuminati” also in
some respects serve as a kind of rationalization for the extreme anarchism
Oh, Ho, Ho, It’s Magic. . . 133

of Discordianism—the totalitarianism represented by secret institutional


power serves to justify or “justify” the libertarian or Rabelaisean excesses
of “nothing is true” and “everything is permitted.”7
The final part of The Illuminatus! Trilogy is thoroughly Discordian, full
of quotations from Discordian texts, allusions to Discordian lore, and gen-
erally calling into question all received institutional truths, either religious
or secular. Not surprisingly, this final section of appendices includes copi-
ous references to magic and “psi power,” not to mention Rosicrucianism,
game theory, and anarchism. In this context, Wilson and Shea outline
“Operation Mindfuck,” a notion originally of Thornley’s, and here also
termed OM.8 Rosicrucianism (the Brotherhood of the Rose + Cross) is
generally regarded as having originated as a hoax, but did generate real or
“real” orders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and something
of the same thing is happening in Wilson’s work. Operation Mindfuck is
effectively what Shea and Wilson’s entire trilogy is doing:  upending all
received notions derived from a principle of authority and instead positing
a principle of liberty.
But there is a theme in Wilson’s work, and in particular in The
Illuminatus! Trilogy that also deserves some scrutiny here, and that is
the role of marijuana and its close cousin, hashish. Although LSD and
Timothy Leary as psychedelic guru—as well as various other psychedel-
ics—do appear in Wilson’s work, marijuana also has a significant role. In a
late section of the book, “Appendix Daleth: Hassan i Sabbah and Alamout
Black,” Shea and Wilson discourse on the possible role(s) of hashish in
Hassan i Sabbah’s Ismaili order of hashishin, or assassins housed in his
fortress, Alamout. In addition to the use of hashish, they write, he taught
“a doctrine. . . taught by all the mystics of East and West—Buddhists,
Taoists, Vedantists, Rosicrucians, etc.” that “even the personal mystical
experience of the seeker (his own encounter with the Absolute, or the
Void, or the Hodge-Podge, or God, or Goddess, or whatever one chooses
to call it) should be subject to the most merciless analysis and criticism.”9
Shea and Wilson are espousing a variant form of immediatism here,
one in which the use of marijuana or hashish and the feared founder of
the order of the assassins are conflated with mysticism “East and West,” as
well as with the individual experience of the Void or whatever one calls it.
The extreme perennialist assumption is that all of these—from Buddhism
to Rosicrucianism—are basically the same thing as what Hassan i Sabbah
was up to. But of course there is a problem with that, one which is not
addressed in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, yet which remains obvious:  the
134 America n  G urus

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

and author Aleister Crowley (who he claims introduced Aldous Huxley to


peyote in 1929), Alan Watts (who he says was initiated into “Crowley-style
sex-yoga. . . way back in the 1930s”), and Wilson himself. 14 Linking all these
connections, for Wilson, is the term “Illuminati,” which he associates here
with “the European branch of the Sufis” and with Aleister Crowley’s magi-
cal order, the Argentum Astrum. In other words, “Illuminati” here refers,
not to a secret international group promoting totalitarianism, but rather to
a loose network of magical “adepts.” He goes on to entertain a theory that
“the Illuminati are preparing Earth, in an occult manner, for extraterrestrial
contact” with “Higher Intelligence,” likely from or related to the star Sirius.15
In The Illuminati Papers (1980), a hodge-podge of materials, Wilson
included an interview with Conspiracy Digest. In the interview, we find ref-
erences to one of his sources regarding Hassan i Sabbah, the Assassins,
the Illuminati, and related topics:  Nesta Webster’s book Secret Societies
and Subversive Movements (1924), in which “the inner doctrine of the
Illuminati was (is?) antiauthoritarian anarchism.”16 In the same interview,
Wilson remarks that “the more centralization,” the more “hierarchy and
authoritarianism,” “the more the SNAFU [Situation Normal, All Fucked
Up] principle will fuck up its reality map. Far from being the superintel-
lectual Machiavellians you imagine them as, the big bankers are probably
(if my analysis is correct) the biggest dumb-dumbs on the planet. Every
conspiratorial group becomes steadily stupider the longer it lasts.”17 Like
Webster, Wilson sees the “Illuminati” as “antiauthoritarian anarchists,”
for Wilson, very much individualists like Crowley, the witch coven with
which he practices, Christopher Hyatt, Timothy Leary, and others.18
In Masks of the Illuminati (1981), Wilson continued the kind of fic-
tional romp he began with The Illuminatus! Trilogy, here featuring as
characters James Joyce and Albert Einstein, as well as Aleister Crowley,
who tells another character, Sir John Babcock, “You came to us seeking
Illumination.” “You are still receiving it.” “Were you not aware from the
beginning that you would be required to face everything you fear?”19 And
here, at the climax of the novel, Crowley, as “sixfold star initiator,” initiates
Joyce, Einstein, and Babcock into climactic higher knowledge, at which
point Joyce says “That was queer.. . . For a moment it was as if I understood
Plato. As if the moving image in time stopped and I saw the worldline in
four dimensions, eternally there. Damned odd.”20 It is fairly difficult to
summarize the Joycean, occultist, magical, and semi-scientific, esoteric,
and ecstatic end to this novel, but it is appropriate to term it a kind of
illumination.
136 America n  G urus

Reading Wilson’s books sequentially is a peculiar experience, because


it soon becomes clear that to read them is to engage in semantic disori-
entation or dissociation. First “Illuminati” seems to mean one thing, then
later it means its opposite. First it appears that Wilson is endorsing or
encouraging a rationalist and materialist approach, and later he recounts
the most preposterous of ideas and connections with such aplomb that at
a certain point, one begins to think there may be a grain of truth to them.
He is open to almost anything, and yet he refuses to be implicated or
trapped by any theory or notion to the point of becoming a true believer.
He is a slippery and entertaining character, analogous to a sleight-of-hand
magician skilled at distracting patter.
Where does he fit in our narrative? Without doubt, he is a spiritual
anarchist, and a collection edited by his friend Christopher Hyatt, Rebels
and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation (1996), makes this (and his rela-
tionship to fellow spiritual anarchists) much clearer.21 This book features
grainy black and white photographs of William S. Burroughs as an elderly
man in a light jacket as a frontispiece and as an endpiece, so that the
book itself is enclosed, so to speak, in the context of Burroughs. The book
is also dedicated to Burroughs, contains selections from him, and refers
to him as the “mage of the era” in the acknowledgements. We have seen
Burroughs’s perspective in some detail, so we already have some sense of
the significance of this emphasis. But there are many other connections
as well that this book clarifies for us.
Robert Anton Wilson’s own contribution to this volume, on how the
“brain’s software” programs or reprograms the “brain’s hardware,” is
not as significant as the volume as a whole and the context in which his
essay appears. Rebels and Devils is quite revealing in this regard. In his
introduction to the volume, S. Jason Black extols the value for him of the
Marquis de Sade, whose work he discovered in adolescence, and to which
he credits his later extreme individualism as expressed in magic. The edi-
tor of the volume as a whole, Hyatt, also expresses an extreme individ-
ualism, denigrating not only monotheism but also Buddhism, terming
Christianity (after Nietzsche) “the religion of the weak and pathetic,” and
affirming instead “your priorities,” “your primary goals,” your “true will
and desires,” which “have been contaminated or replaced by the will and
desires of others.”22
The collection as a whole exemplifies this extreme individualism,
expressed in different ways. Throughout it is a hostility toward not
only monotheisms, but also non-monotheistic religions emphasizing
Oh, Ho, Ho, It’s Magic. . . 137

selflessness, particularly Buddhism; extolled in their place is the individ-


ual expressed as a star, as an enduring entity with a “true will” that is sup-
pressed or polluted by society, but that can be liberated by a “rebel” path.23
In a Christian context, of course, the chief “rebel” is Satan or Lucifer,
hence the title. And Lon Milo DuQuette in fact writes that on the journey
from a world where “all that is best in the human spirit is condemned and
repressed,. . . a seeker of enlightenment” has as companions “outlaws and
rebels.” In this journey, “sacredness breeds in blaspheme, truth falls from
the lips of false prophets,” heaven is sought in hell, and God is the Devil
himself.”24 Another author forthrightly puts it this way:  “We are Black
Magicians.”25 Also represented in the collection are such well-known fig-
ures and authors of primary works in contemporary magic as Phil Hine,
Peter Carroll, and, needless to say, Aleister Crowley.
Whereas the immediatist mysticism we have been exploring empha-
sizes transcendence of self-other dualism, the magical individualism here
emphasizes the primacy of the individual in opposition to the other (“we are
Black Magicians”). Hence, the “sign of Sade” is important. In The Culture
of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch also emphasized the importance of Sade.
He wrote that modern American society, absent a sense of historical con-
tinuity and ruled by a “cult of consumption with its immediate gratifica-
tions,” means that the pursuit of self-interest has risen to a new extreme,
characterized by “a search for pleasure and psychic survival.” The “most
disturbing of the prophets of revolutionary individualism, Sade defended
unlimited self-indulgence” as the “only way to attain revolutionary broth-
erhood in its purest form,” a “sexual utopia” that reduces individuals to
“interchangeable objects.” In this revolutionary individualism, there are
no limits on the pursuit of pleasure, on the gratification of “every desire no
matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral.”26
This extreme individualism also expresses itself in the notion of
personal immortality, expressed not only in Crowley’s metaphor of the
individual as a star, but also in Timothy Leary’s fascination, toward the
end of his life, with cryogenics, with preserving his own head or brain
cryogenically, with technological extensions of longevity of the ego and
the like, in fact the focus of his contribution to Rebels and Devils.27 An
analogous emphasis on an enduring self is found in the well-known
Italian author on magic and sexuality, Julius Evola, whose expositions of
Hermeticism and even of Buddhism convert these religio-philosophical
traditions of self-transcendence into extensions of “adamantine” enduring
138 America n  G urus

or “permanent” self. The fact that Evola is often classed as a Traditionalist


does not affect our assessment of his work based on this broader
categorization.
The point here is that what we are looking at is a much broader phe-
nomenon of what I  term “proto-gurus,” not simply what we see in the
works of a particular author. And part of that phenomenon is quite nega-
tive—some of these proto-guru figures have a decidedly dark or selfish
side to them. We have one more author, though, whose work we need to
consider here, to conclude this part of our case, and that is Peter Lamborn
Wilson.
12

Spiritual Anarchy, Tantra,


and Islamic Heterodoxy

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

Traditionalism is an antimodern form of esoteric religion and philosophy,


itself closely allied with heterodox Islam, but more on that in a subsequent
chapter.
Here, we will concentrate on those works of Wilson’s that most clearly
demonstrate the development of his spiritual anarchism, beginning with
esoteric Islam, and moving toward his later explicitly antinomian indi-
vidualism. Of course, as Wilson himself points out in an interview, he
did not leave behind his Traditionalism, or his Islamic mysticism. Rather,
these are woven into the subtext of his later, synthetic perspective. In
Scandal:  Essays in Islamic Heresy (1988), he draws together essays from
his time in Iran and after, in particular developing a theme that we have
encountered already a number of times before: that of Hassan i Sabbah
and the Assassins. On the back cover, we read “Fascinating material on
the Ismaili sect and on Hassan i Sabbah. . . the only spiritual leader who
has anything significant to say in the Space Age,” a blurb from William
S. Burroughs, along with the epigraph, “The Chains of the Law have been
broken!”
And that is pretty much exactly it. That is, Scandal is essentially an
extended meditation on various aspects of antinomianism, the notion that
“the chains of the law have been broken” by mystical realization, and that
heresy, or “heresy,” represents the revolutionary nature of radical spiritual
illumination perpetually breaking through or overturning the solidifica-
tions of monotheistic doctrinalism and orthodoxy. Wilson, in the final
chapter, “A Note on the Use of Wine, Hemp, and Opium,” alludes to his
meeting with hundreds of Sufi mystics, gurus, dervishes, Tantric practi-
tioners, and heterodox individuals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India,
and Nepal between 1968 and 1978.3 He recounts his meetings with those
who used marijuana or opium for spiritual purposes. Although the use
of intoxicants is technically a violation of shariah, or Islamic law/custom,
in fact he knew a number of Sufis who did use them, and some of them,
he thought, were spiritually illuminated. Marijuana and opium may be
against shariah, but nonetheless can help break one “out of the shell of
our stale illusions,” even offer divine intoxication—a heterodox and anti-
nomian mysticism, but a mysticism nonetheless.4
Scandal offers us a clearer understanding of how Wilson moved from
Middle Eastern and Central/South Asian heterodox Islam to his later
spiritual anarchism. In particular, the second chapter of Scandal is about
“Secrets of the Assassins,” that is, about the Islamic heterodox theology of
various Sufi renegade groups, and in particular, about those who “break
Spiritual Anarchy, Tantra, and Islamic Heterodoxy 141

the chains of the Law” (shariah) in favor of divine intoxication or annihila-


tion (fana).5 “Is there no such thing as an esoteric morality?” Wilson asks.
“The answer must be no,” he replies, endorsing instead an “antinomian
morality,” an “autonomianism or even anarchism,” a “praxis which takes
the place of morality in any exoteric sense. Action flows from the still cen-
ter.”6 This is the “dangerous teaching of the abrogation or interiorization
of the Law” that results in the dictum that “no thing is true” and “every
thing is permitted.”7
The Alamut doctrine of Qiyamat or resurrection “sets aside all vexed
and vexing problems of metaphysics” by declaring that “metaphysics and
physics are indistinguishable: this body, this soul, here and now, is free.
The idea of reward and punishment after death is meaningless in this con-
text except as a symbol for immediate psychological reality. One is ‘reborn’
into the present, into presence.”8 This is, of course, pure immediatism
that Wilson is putting forward here. He asks: “If all that exists is no-thing
(or mu in the Taoist/Zen tradition)—and if all that exists is God, how could
anything be other than permissible (halal)?” “This,” he continues, “is the
realization behind Hasan II’s saying that ‘The chains of the Law have been
broken,’ ” for his tradition is “quite openly antinomian” and “scandalous”
from the point of view of “outward Islam.”9 Man is not subject to the Law;
he is already free and merely has forgotten this fact, Wilson concludes.
In the middle of Scandal, Wilson explores further an aspect of this
antinomianism, one that does exist as a part of Persian and Arab Islamic
traditions: pederasty or pedophilia. Here, too, Wilson’s exploration of the
theme is erudite and complicated. He begins by discussing “imaginal
yoga” in “the School of Love,” focusing in particular on the practice of
contemplating the “unbearded” youth as God “shining through” human
form.10 Such Sufis were regarded as lawless (bisharh), but in fact Sufism
“has frequently served as a pose for marginal and even criminal elements
within traditional Islamic society.”11 But “even handbooks on manners for
princes could discuss casually the relative merits of women and boys,” for
“in societies where women wear sacks over their heads, men tend to give
overt expression to natural bisexual leanings.”12
But it is important to recognize the immediatist center of what Wilson
is arguing here. For him, “metaphysical Truth is scandalous; that is, it
violates all the accepted modes of perception, all the ordinary, epistemo-
logically neutral expectations of the sleeping soul. It tears open a curtain
and reveals the occult; it unveils a beauty that is ‘forbidden’ only because
we ignore it in our stupor.”13 Among the Sufis, he continues, one attains
142 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

“envy & vendetta,” but “the systematic cultivation of enhanced conscious-


ness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds &
objects to bring about desired results.” “No, not spoon-bending or horos-
copy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projec-
tion, or the Satanic Mass,” but rather “Imaginal Yoga,. . . the spontaneity
of natura naturans, the tao,. . . the seizure of presence.”18 Later, though, he
includes in a “Special Halloween Communique” instructions on “Black
Magic as Revolutionary Action,” which includes a spell binding djinn to
do the sorceror’s will, complete with hand-drawn magical sigil and the
avuncular advice that one might direct this actual spell at “an Xtian tel-
evangelist show,” or other institutional targets.19
T.A.Z. is written in a collective voice with a royal “we,” and it clearly
identifies the current to which its perspective belongs. Who are “we”?
Prepare yourself.

We are Nizari-Ismaili Esotericists; that is, Shiite heretics & fanatics


who trace our spiritual line to Hassan-i Sabbah through Aladdin
Mohammad III, “the Madman,” seventh & last Pir of Alamut (& not
through the line of the Aga Khans). We espouse radical monism &
pure antinomianism, & oppose all forms of law & authority, in the
name of Chaos.
At present, for tactical reasons, we do not advocate violence or
sorcery against individuals. We call for actions against institutions
and ideas—art-sabotage & clandestine propaganda (including cer-
emonial magic & “tantrik pornography”)—and especially against
the poisonous media of the Empire of Lies.20

The self-identification here makes quite inescapable the origins of


Wilson’s spiritual anarchism chiefly, though by no means exclusively, in
heterodox Islam, so it is interesting that many scholars writing on Wilson/
Bey seem to overlook it. Probably this, like so much of T.A.Z., is just plain
inconvenient.
The argument of T.A.Z., if we can speak of only one, is that it is pos-
sible to create or declare a utopian zone in a particular time and place,
just for the duration—an anarchist domain for the time being, if you will.
Such a domain has deeper roots than one might at first think. Wilson/
Bey recalls his Tantric initiation in India, and describes it as his entry into
awareness of the meaning of the Kali Yuga, or era of the goddess Kali of
destruction, in particular that we are called in such an age to “ride it like
144 America n  G urus

a tiger, to embrace it (even sexually).” “Creative nihilism,” he continues,


for “those who worship her as ishta-devata, or divine self, taste her Age
of Iron as if it were gold, knowing the alchemy of her presence.”21 Here
Wilson/Bey goes beyond Traditionalism, explicitly rejecting Guénonian
Traditionalist pessimism, and instead affirms a Tantric alchemy that turns
the Iron Age into a Golden Age in one’s own domain, through a transmu-
tation of consciousness.
Here, as again in a book devoted to the subject, Wilson/Bey affirms
what he terms “pirate utopias.”22 His fascination with the notion of pirate
utopias makes sense, of course: these were the areas where pirates went
between sallies looking for plunder, where, he speculates, they must have
created their own autonomous zones. Wilson is particularly fascinated by
the points of cultural juncture, where Christian and Islamic “heresies”
meet, where cultural transfer happens, and where, he imagines, there
must have been an antinomian independent zone free of institutions and
laws. We will recall that he elsewhere refers to the “concept of law” as a
“philosophical shithouse.”23 We might also point out that the pirate utopia
is one that presumably allows not only homosexuality, but also the “love
of boys” to which he refers on occasion in his books. The point is that
pirates and their clandestine island hideaways would seem to be an ideal
metaphor for Wilson’s particular kind of antinomianism.
It is true, of course, that Wilson has come in for some severe criti-
cism because of his frankness about his sexual proclivities, one of which
is anathematized in modern American society. It is worth recognizing
that cultural norms do differ regarding what Wilson refers to as “love of
boys,” and that in North Africa, for example, where some of the Beats trav-
eled (and where some, notably Paul Bowles, made their home), there is a
history of the society more or less clandestinely accepting non-normative
(homo)sexual behavior. It is also worth noting that Wilson does mention
Burroughs in his discussion of these themes—and that Burroughs him-
self published Wild Boys, arguably his own version of antinomian utopia
or dystopia, as the case may be.
Some may see this subject demonstrating just how far out of main-
stream American society (if there is such a thing) the spiritual anarchist
current may be. But perhaps that is part of the point. After all, Tantric
initiations, heretical Ismaili sects, antinomian Sufi orders, and assertions
that the “chains of the Law have been broken” all represent unfamiliar ter-
ritory for a hypothetical obese ordinary American pushing a shopping cart
down the aisles of a Wal-Mart, to whom a phrase like “poetic terrorism”
Spiritual Anarchy, Tantra, and Islamic Heterodoxy 145

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

and symbolic individual immediate experience. He has magical aspects


of his work—as Hakim Bey, he includes, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, ritual
instructions for Malay black magic against institutions—but this kind of
thing is clearly subordinated to his mysticism. And his mysticism, for all
his references to heterodox Sufism, finally belongs also to the Western
hermetic tradition.29 On the spectrum I  outline in Magic and Mysticism
(2007), his work belongs in the category of magico-mystical, that is, his
primary mode is that of union with the divine, and the magical aspects
of his work are subordinated to it. He brings together, more than any
other figure, the many and varied aspects of spiritual anarchism, embody-
ing them as no one else does. In many respects, he too exemplifies the
proto-guru, one who incorporates both tendencies, one toward mysticism,
and the other toward sorcery.
While there is more one could say about him, it is time now for us to
consider the counterculture more broadly.
13

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

ancestral landscapes, of the ancient gods or spirits, of ancestors and tra-


ditions, of magic and mysticism.10 In modernity, places become homog-
enous, eventually interchangeable. Coming from an indigenous culture
into secular modernity, suddenly one is bound not by the invisible, but
only by what is visible and quantifiable. Hence the late 1960s “counter-
culture” wasn’t a counterculture at all—since from this perspective there
was no culture there to begin with—but rather was the most widespread
effort since the advent of secular modernity to begin to establish culture
within modernity, that is, culture in the traditional sense as reflecting and
manifesting cultus.
It has become a commonplace to suggest that the late 1960s only could
have taken place because of the extraordinary prosperity generated by
mid-twentieth-century industrialism, and that is no doubt true. But what
we also see quite clearly is a widespread rejection of military-industrial
society, of what Lewis Mumford termed the “megamachine,” and a cor-
responding effort to create, immediately, and not as an imagined utopia
in the distant future, a living culture. One can object, of course, that the
new “drop-out” culture of communes was not really a culture in the sense
that it did not have a cultural center or cultural unity in the way that a
traditional culture does, but rather was a pastiche of elements drawn from
Hinduism, Buddhism, American Indian, and so forth. Such objections
have real merit.
And yet for all that, one cannot deny that something remarkable was
happening during this period, something that cannot be relegated to the
negative or reactionary, that is, to simply a rejection of the military-industrial
“megamachine.” The 1960s and early 1970s without question generated
the most widespread and affiliated communal experiments in modern
history, not only in the United States, which has a history of such experi-
ments, but also in England, Europe, indeed, around the globe. “Dropping
out” referred not only to abandoning military-industrial society, but also
the prevailing historicizing narratives of Judaism and Christianity, and of
capitalism and communism, indeed of secular modernity, and the imme-
diate, not indefinitely postponed creation of a new culture—not for society
as a whole, but for oneself and one’s family and friends.
By contrast, prevailing narratives of progress that emphasize the emer-
gence of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) generally accept,
as Jameson does, the notion that all of American society, or later, global
modernity, must be transformed, by force if necessary, into a Marxist or
quasi-Marxist ideal polis.11 In other words, these narratives tend to accept
On the Counterculture 153

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

on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Deeply influenced


by Jacques Ellul’s pessimistic attacks on technocracy, Herbert Marcuse’s
One-Dimensional Man (1964), and Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the
Machine (1967), Roszak’s book emphasizes the role of Asian religions,
poetry, magic, and mysticism in recovering aspects of humanity that are
threatened by technicalization of society.14 Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts
are featured in the book’s center. But the final chapter underscores the
atavism of the era, and is particularly interesting in our context—it is a
chapter on shamanism.
One might be surprised at the importance given to shamanism, given
that the neoshamanic movement in the West was still many years ahead.
But this final chapter forecasts and calls for neoshamanism; it opposes to
the “certification authority of state, corporation, university, or party,” the
“immediacy of personal vision” that like the “old magic” that “could illu-
minate the sacramental presence in a tree, a pond, a rock, a totem.”15 The
“instinctive fascination” of the counterculture with magic, mysticism, and
tribal lore represents a widespread effort to go to the root of the malaise
afflicting contemporary society, to reconnect with the “ultimate ground of
our existence,” and to realize the autonomy of direct inner experience.16
Thus Roszak confirms the argument I am making here. The counter-
culture represented the return of the archaic, which is also to say, the first
sustained and widespread effort not to oppose modernity, but to invoke
and realize in new ways previous suppressed, archaic ways of knowing
and living that consist in the transcendence of the subject-object dual-
ism inherent in modernity. Magic and mysticism are terms for efforts at
exactly such transcendence, in the first instance of the objectified other,
in the second of the isolated self. This argument is not that the counter-
culture was necessarily successful in efforts to create a new culture, but
rather that the effort to create a new culture would have to proceed along
just these kinds of lines—that is, it would entail not merely changes in cir-
cumstances, but a fundamental reorientation of being, calling on ways of
knowledge at once archaic and new. Such a reorientation is not antimod-
ern, but rather represents something fundamentally new, or renewed.
One could object that the counterculture represented just another face
of modernity, perhaps reactionary, but still in the end commodified and
sold back as a simulacrum of itself. A  case like this presumably would
emphasize commercialism, the packaging of rock music, say, and would
ignore as much as possible those countercultural aspects that I  have
emphasized. Such an argument is more or less the line pursued by
On the Counterculture 155

Jameson and certainly by Baudrillard: it makes secular modernity a kind


of möbius strip from which there is no escape, to which there is in the end
no real alternative, similar to the amusing “neoconservative” hypothesis
that secular modernity represents the “end of history.” However, to believe
that modernity is a hermetically sealed end-state requires a willfully sus-
tained historical naïveté.
The argument here—that the counterculture represented a break with
the prevailing religious and secular historical narratives of the West—can
be described in another way. The counterculture represented the emer-
gence into broader society of an essentially gnostic perspective, that is,
a perspective that emphasizes above all not faith in a historical narrative
promising a religious or secular millennium somewhere ahead, but direct
individual spiritual insight here and now, exactly as Roszak insists. There
is, of course, an American precedent for this, in the path marked out by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in his first book, Nature, wrote that man as
an individual need not resume his kingship by degrees, but should leap at
once into the throne.17 Emerson here, as often in his work, was asserting
an American gnosis, that is, an assertion that spiritual insight is avail-
able to us now, not vicariously, but individually, directly, and immediately.
What we see in the counterculture—particularly where it is drawing on
Buddhism and Hinduism, just as Emerson himself was—is very much
this kind of emphasis on gnosis.18
There is, of course, a long-standing allergy in the West even to terms
like “gnosis” or “gnostic,” thanks to the heresiophobic rhetoric of early
Christian authors such as Irenaeus and Tertullian. As I have already shown
elsewhere, this heresiophobic rhetoric has been regurgitated into a variety
of new settings, but here we might note only two:  the anti-Gnosticism
of Eric Voegelin and of Hans Blumenberg. Voegelin I  have already dis-
cussed at length in Telos, so here I will mention Blumenberg, who sought
to “legitimate” secular modernity by claiming that modernity consisted
in a “second overcoming of Gnosticism, at the end of the Middle Ages.”19
Both Voegelin and Blumenberg exaggerate “Gnostic dualism” so as to
make it into a bugaboo, thus masking the dualism inherent in Judaism,
Christianity, and the dominant currents within secular modernity. If
“Gnostics” are dualistic, well then, “we” must not be, hence “our” “legiti-
macy.” There is a profound underlying anxiety built into these anti-Gnostic
arguments, and rightly so.
But in fact, what we see in the late 1960s counterculture—informed
by Zen Buddhism, Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, and other non-dualist
156 America n  G urus

religious traditions—is an explicit emphasis on “the mystical experience,


the art experience, identity experience, unitive experience,” that is, on
nonduality, exactly as we saw in these remarks of Allen Ginsberg in 1967.
That is what I am terming “gnosis,” which does not imply an end-state of
illumination, but rather an inclination away from subject-object dualism
and toward subject-object unity. This gnostic tendency is what informs
much of the counterculture during this period. Such an observation
should not be taken as a blanket valorization of the era or of its individual
tendencies or charismatic figures, any more than it should be seen as a
condemnation (which terms like “gnosis” usually are!). Rather, what I am
suggesting here is meant as an initial foray into a broader understand-
ing, not just of the counterculture, but even more, of the central role that
gnosis and its rejection continue to play in Western history and now in
secular modern society. What we will turn to now are those who saw or see
themselves as revealing and even as embodying gnosis. And so we turn
from proto-gurus to those who present themselves, at least, as the real
thing—American gurus.
PART THREE

American Gurus
14

From Europe to America

We have seen an array of immediatist authors, many of whom were, at one


point or another, regarded as guru-figures, and some of whom were seen as
gurus. Examples include Franklin Merrell-Wolff and Jiddu Krishnamurti,
the latter of whom explicitly rejected the idea of guruism and a messianic
or avataric view of himself. Indeed, Krishnamurti’s famous rejection of
guruism is what launched the rest of his public life. A guru-figure, he was
at the same time also an anti-guru figure, and as such, he exemplified
immediatism. Modern Western immediatism is certainly influenced by
Protestant individualism and anti-institutionalism; these are among its
primary characteristics, as we have already seen. But neither Merrell-Wolff
nor Krishnamurti put themselves forward publicly as gurus in the way
that more recent figures have. Neither, for that matter, did Timothy Leary
(sometimes regarded as a “guru” of psychedelics during the heyday of
that era). Nor did Thornley or Benares or the Discordians, nor did Robert
Anton Wilson or Peter Lamborn Wilson take on the role of guru. The age
of immediatist gurus was still to come.
What we see, when we survey American immediatism, is a persistent
strain of antinomianism. We saw this aspect latent in Transcendentalism,
where it frightened Alcott when he recognized it in himself, and certainly
in the Beat poets, but it was really with the advent of immediatist gurus
that antinomianism becomes more visible. In a recent work on religion
from a cognitive science perspective, Patrick McNamara develops a theory
about the importance of the king, priest, or authority figure in society.
When that authority wanes, “ecstatic cults” tend to appear, McNamara
argues, adherents become possessed, and “invariably claim that they had
been deified in one sense or another and that therefore they were no lon-
ger bound by the laws. This ‘antinomian’ train tended to create excesses
160 America n  G urus

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

even exciting our disapprobation.” This, he continues, is the “God within


us,” the goal of all our “highest and ultimate purposes,” accessible only to
a few. The many remain in a state of childhood; “the vast majority needs
authority, guidance, law.” “The Pauline overcoming of the law falls only to
the man who knows how to put his soul in the place of conscience,” and
“very few are capable of this.”6
At the end of this disquisition on mana-personality, Jung remarks
on the esoteric nature of his subject, and his awareness that many will
not understand or understand properly what he is writing about here.
Although “I have done my utmost to smooth the path of understanding,”
he continues, “there is one great difficulty which I could not eliminate,
namely the fact that the experiences which form the basis of my discus-
sion are unknown to most people and are bound to seem strange.”7 Jung is
almost certainly referring to his own experiences as a kind of guru-figure.8
And one might surmise that, precisely because of his own experiences
in this regard, Jung was able to describe very well the phenomenon he
termed “mana-personality.” The notion of the mana-personality does shed
light on the emergence of Western guru-figures in the latter half of the
twentieth century.
Western immediatist guru-figures are, after all, a relatively new phe-
nomenon, one that derives in part from the influx of Asian religions into
the West, in particular Advaita Vedanta and Hinduism, but also from exist-
ing Western archetypes and currents, including what I have termed the
ahistorical continuity of Western esoteric currents. Western esoteric magi-
cal and mystical traditions were transmitted primarily via written texts
and images rather than by initiatory lineages, as in Sufism or Buddhism.9
This latter point is important:  many of the immediatist guru-figures of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were Westerners, and
at least in some respects inherited the Western esoteric tendency toward
spontaneous individual illumination rather than historical transmission.
But this tendency would not have developed into the full-fledged phenom-
enon of Western gurus with devoted followings without the influx and
Westernization or adoption of Asian, specifically Hindu and Buddhist reli-
gious practices.
We need to recognize, here, that the phenomenon of Western gurus
developed alongside (if not as a part of) the New Age movement. Catherine
Albanese exhaustively traces the predecessors to the late twentieth-century
New Age movement, locating the movement as part of a sweepingly larger
history of what she terms “American metaphysical religion.” Included in
162 America n  G urus

her survey are witchcraft, Christian enthusiasm, new religions begin-


ning with Mormonism, spiritualism, New Thought, and the Theosophical
Society, to name only a handful of examples. But she suggests that the
Theosophical Society and its various exponents, including Alice Bailey,
represent a “parent” for many New Age “children,” especially via the
notion of “ascended masters” bringing about a coming “age of light.”10
In her survey of “American metaphysical religion,” Albanese comes
to the conclusion that its primary characteristic is “combinative prac-
tices,” that is, joining together heterogenous religious ideas and practices.
“Americans,” she concludes, were not “simply tolerating one another nor
contesting one another,. . . as the standard interpretive tropes. . . suggest.
Rather, from a religious perspective, they were begging, borrowing, and
stealing from one another, and they were doing it in broad historiographi-
cal daylight with little or no apology.”11 And “combinative practices” are
precisely what we see when we turn to the phenomenon of modern imme-
diatism. All of the mystics or gurus we will look at bear the impress of
Western contact with Asian religions, sometimes in less obvious ways,
but mostly quite obviously. It is not necessarily that they are themselves
results of the New Age movement, but they are the result of the same
combinative tendency.
There is another aspect of the New Age that is relevant here—its inher-
ent evolutionism. In the nineteenth century, a battle played out between
those who represented a Platonic model, and those who rejected Platonism
and fully embraced evolutionism and the notion of progress. By the latter
half of the twentieth century, that battle was long past, Platonism seemingly
vanquished and forgotten, and evolutionism woven into the very fabric of
New Age thought. This came about, Wouter Hanegraaff demonstrates,
through Helena Blavatsky’s pioneering insistence that “progressive evo-
lution functions as the great Law of Nature,” her faith that “Nature must
always progress, and each fresh attempt is more successful than the pre-
vious one.”12 This notion of spiritual evolutionism subsequently became
deeply embedded in New Age discourse, indeed (along with notions of
holism) pervasive.13 New Age evolutionism leads “into a world of inevi-
table progress toward a superconsciousness of cosmic dimensions.”14
Implicit in the various notions of New Age evolutionism is a kind of
passivity—that is, the New Age is often portrayed as a process or a series
of events that happen to us (the human collective). Indicative of this ten-
dency is the very name (the “New Age” dawns upon us), visible also in
occasional prophetic flurries like that preceding the “end of the Mayan
From Europe to America 163

calendar” in 2012. We are called in New Age literature to adjust to cosmic


climate changes. Immediatism encourages a similar kind of passivity—as
we will see, the immediatist mystic or guru rarely, if ever, offers a disci-
plinary path. Rather, spiritual transformation is held to take place as a
function of being in the “force-field” of the guru, or as a result of divine
grace—it happens to one.
I am not suggesting that immediatism is a particularly New Age phe-
nomenon in itself, necessarily, although it certainly can be, and we do see
much evidence of that in the networks of Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen,
for instance. Rather, immediatism is a distinct religious phenomenon, not
to be confused with spiritualism or its successor, channeling, nor with
the marketing category of New Age more broadly. But it is important to
recognize that contemporary immediatism came into being at the same
time that the New Age emerged, in the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of
the counterculture. Although immediatism and the New Age movement
are separate phenomena, they emerge in a shared context and they often
share characteristics.
What is more, sometimes immediatism emerges as part of a reaction
against New Age thought or tendencies, even if it nonetheless continues
to exemplify some of the very same aspects. Such is the case with what is
known in the Anglophone world as “Traditionalism,” a religious move-
ment that, instead of notions of progress, offers a historical theory of
decline based on traditional Western and Eastern religious and cultural
texts. Yet for all that, its exponents share what Albanese marked as the
primary characteristic of American metaphysical religion, its “combina-
tive practices.” In order to show the range of contexts and types of imme-
diatism, then, we begin with one that might at first seem not to fit such a
category—we begin with “Traditionalism.”
One of the most intellectually vigorous antimodern movements of
the twentieth century is usually labeled “Traditionalism” in both popular
and scholarly discourse, even though Guénon himself, the movement’s
foundational figure, was critical of this term.15 Authors now typically
labeled “Traditionalist” in Anglophone literature tend to be highly criti-
cal of modernity in general, and suspicious of those religious figures and
movements that fall outside the world’s mainstream religious traditions,
that is, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and the others. And in fact
“Traditionalist” writings do draw on primary religious texts, often empha-
sizing the historical decline from a golden to an iron age (or the equiva-
lents in Hinduism) that is in fact visible in classical Western and Indian
164 America n  G urus

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

modern ideologies of progress. In Crisis of the Modern World, successor


to East and West and predecessor to The Reign of Quantity and the Signs
of the Times, he offers a stern critique of modernity that is in fact based
on Hindu as well as Greek and Roman traditions regarding history as a
decline into an Iron Age. Guénon’s uncompromising critiques of moder-
nity are prophetic both in that they represent an analysis and warning of
decline, and in that they predict the characteristics and outcomes of that
decline.
Some quotations will give a sense of this perspective. In The Crisis of
the Modern World, Guénon writes that “the modern period must neces-
sarily correspond with the development of certain of the [inferior] pos-
sibilities which were included in the potentiality of the present cycle from
the beginning.” Modern people are engaged in pursuit of “lower forms of
knowledge,” “at the opposite pole to primordial spirituality,” exploiting the
material world and “thereby dooming themselves to an ever-increasing
agitation, unregulated and aimless, a dispersion in pure multiplicity tend-
ing toward final dissolution.”17 “Such,” he adds, “is the true explanation
of the modern world.” There is still an intellectual élite in “the Eastern
civilizations,” but none in the West, and while it is possible a Western élite
could emerge from the “primordial tradition,” in the end what matters is
truth itself, which will always be victorious in any case.18
Rhetorically, Guénon’s style is magnetic in that it gives us the key
to world religions, entry into an esoteric perspective separate from the
world’s religions (“subordinate traditions”) because it asserts a right of
priority: what he offers is rhetorical access to the “primordial tradition.”
But how did he gain this access? And how do we in turn gain it? Simply by
vaulting at once into the throne, to paraphrase Emerson. That is, Guénon
has access to primordial truth, and through the indications or hints in his
works, we too can have access to it. Such a style is magnetic—it pulls the
reader in or repulses him, as the case may be. Guénon’s work is initiatic
in that the act of reading brings the willing reader into a realm of esoteric
or hidden knowledge that gives us the secret keys to the nature of our era
and to world religions, as well as to eternal principles transcending any
particular time. These aspects of his work are the primary reason that
Guénon’s work has remained continuously in print, and why his influ-
ence continues to be felt.
Although Guénon moved to Egypt, converted to Islam, took the Arabic
name Shaykh Abdel-Wåhid Yahya, and died in Egypt an Egyptian citizen,
married to an Egyptian wife, the center of his work is not necessarily
166 America n  G urus

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

As we will see, the interpretation of Aymard, Laude, and Fabbri is


well founded: from the beginning to the end of his work, Schuon was
a primordialist, and this is a key that unlocks many otherwise seem-
ingly inexplicable aspects of his multifaceted work. In fact, Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, who might be expected to emphasize the Islamic aspects
of Schuon’s life, nonetheless also describes Schuon primarily as “the
premier authority on perennial and primordial wisdom during the
second half of the twentieth century.”28 And it is not only those who
belonged to Schuon’s immediate circle, like those mentioned above,
but also Schuon himself who characterizes his work as primordialist,
from his very first book on “primordial meditation” to his late book of
paintings, Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty.29 This terminology is
not accidental or tangential, but is central to understanding the arc of
Schuon’s life and work.
Schuon’s first book, Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung, (posthumously pub-
lished in English as Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real), is effec-
tively an extended and profound meditation on primordiality. Aphoristic,
abstract, even lapidary, many of the themes in Schuon’s later books can
be found in it. What is more, the book sheds light on the origin-point
or center of Schuon’s subsequent life’s work. He distinguishes between
prayer, which is “an individually limited meeting with the Divine,” and
“primordial meditation,” which “proceeds from the core of our being in
which we ourselves are divine, so that actually the Divine speaks and rea-
son only perceives.”30 Primordial meditation puts one in direct contact
with “primordial doctrine” that directly reflects Truth, and the particular
religious forms or traditions reflect a “shattered” diversity, effectively, a
kind of Fall.31 “Truth suffices unto itself and has no need of any external
reference point,” he writes.32
What we see in this very early book by Schuon is central to understand-
ing his subsequent writings and the larger arc of his work and life. There
are several Western classical sources for Schuon’s primordialism, among
them Plato and Neoplatonism, but also high German mysticism, in par-
ticular that of Meister Eckhart. What these sources share is an emphasis
on the possibility of direct inner experience of the Divine, or of Truth. Nasr
remarks, in his introduction to The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon,
that Schuon re-evaluated “Platonism and especially Neoplatonism as an
authentic metaphysical doctrine of an ultimately Divine Origin.”33 Aymard
and Laude write that Schuon was “above all a metaphysician, or ‘philoso-
pher’ in the Platonic sense of the term.”34
From Europe to America 169

The importance of Platonism/Neoplatonism in Schuon’s work is obvi-


ous. Platonism, especially middle and later Platonism, provides a model
in the West for the philosopher’s direct inner access to truth via noesis or
intellection. It also provides a philosophical/metaphysical model analo-
gous to Vedanta for ascent from duality to nondual transcendent knowl-
edge. In fact, most of the themes of Schuon’s work, in particular the role
of beauty and art, also can be found in Platonism/Neoplatonism. I  do
not mean to overemphasize this, only to point out that just as Emerson
found Platonism congenial as a reference in explaining his insights, so too
did Schuon. Platonism represents a metaphysics that, although it corre-
sponded to late antique paganism, is not necessarily tied to any particular
religious tradition and can be imported into Christianity, Islam, or other
traditions. The relevance of this is self-evident, as we shall see.
In Logic and Transcendence, Schuon considers the nature of spiritual
masters, and whether one can transcend the bounds of particular religious
traditions. He writes that while it can happen, it requires “a high degree
of spirituality” on “the part of the master,” and in fact someone like that
has to “act as the vehicle of an ‘extraneous’ barakah, and this presupposes
a spirituality which has effectively transcended the world of forms.”35 At
the time this was published, it was not widely known that Schuon had
founded a Sufi order, or tariqah, but it is clear from quotations like these,
and in fact from the whole of his publicly available writings that, as Fabbri
put it, “Schuon’s perspective, both doctrinally and methodically, is better
described as an autonomous path of knowledge (gnosis or jnana). . . inde-
pendent of any particular school.”36 But there is more that needs to be said
about this transcendence of religious forms.
In his later years, Schuon took a strong interest in American Indian
religions. He had met Thomas Yellowtail, a Crow medicine man, in 1953
in Europe, and in 1959 traveled to the Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, as
well as to visit Yellowtail. Again he and his wife returned to South Dakota
to attend a Sun Dance. About this period Schuon wrote, “The Indian world
means first and foremost the reading of primordial doctrine in the phe-
nomena of nature. . . and then the perception of nature as a sacred and pri-
mordial home manifesting everywhere the Great Spirit.”37 Schuon moved
from Lausanne, Switzerland, to Bloomington, Indiana, in 1980, where he
and his wife took up residence near a wooded area in a gated community.
In 1982, he wrote that “destiny has translated me to the primordial world
of the American Indians, and it is good thus.”38 The theme here—the con-
sistent emphasis on primordiality—is obvious.
170 America n  G urus

Schuon’s connections to American Indian religions became appar-


ent in several of his later books, the first, with Thomas Yellowtail, The
Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy (1990), and the second,
edited by Michael Pollack, Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty (1992).39
In the latter, even the cover image demonstrates one of the themes that
is traceable through his life: that the divine is revealed through the nude
female form, in this case, nude American Indian women. Although there
are numerous sketches and paintings of men, in both American Indian
and Islamic contexts, particularly from earlier periods, there are a great
many paintings of nude women in very revealing American Indian dress,
and as naked yoginis.40 Sometimes the nude woman has a halo, some-
times has a kind of Christ child before her, and many of the images show
the figure’s legs spread open toward the reader, indicating that there is no
shame in nudity.
Several scholars have already outlined how the Schuon community at
Inverness Farms in Bloomington came to ritualize primordialism, hold-
ing not only “Indian Days,” featuring drumming, with Schuon dressed
as an Indian chief, sometimes attended by Thomas Yellowtail—but also
what were said to be called esoteric “primordial gatherings.”41 These gath-
erings also are alluded to in Aymard’s and Laude’s more or less official
biography of Schuon.42 Because (not at all surprisingly, given the nature
of Schuon’s published paintings) some of these gatherings featured ritual
nudity, it is also not entirely surprising that there was a scandal when this
became public knowledge via a prosecutor’s zeal, although charges were
later dropped because of insufficient evidence.43
But in fact Schuon’s work provides copious documentation, both in
writing and in paintings, of the religious significance of the nude male
and female forms, which he terms “theomorphic.” In unpublished work,
Schuon remarks that whereas it may have degenerate forms in moder-
nity, esoterically and in principle, “nudity means inwardness, essen-
tiality, primordiality, and thus universality.”44 But one does not need
unpublished work to demonstrate that, in Schuon’s view, “the beauty
of woman appears to man as the revelation of the bliss of the Essence
of which he is himself as it were a crystallization.”45 Fundamentally,
Schuon writes, “existence was beatitude” in Eden, but fallen man is
drawn into what is delusional and transitory—yet “reposing in the
immutable purity of Existence,” the “snow-like purity” of the Blessed
Virgin is still possible for us, indeed, is all that ultimately does exist.46
In fact, he defines homo sapiens as (at least in potential) as “deiform,” as
From Europe to America 171

a “theophany.”47 And in another context, he writes that faith and gnosis


“meet in Beauty, which is the ‘Splendor of the True,’ ” and which “rec-
onciles—beneath the mantle of the Holy Virgin—all the antagonisms
that the spiritual aspirations of man can assume.”48
My point here is that there is more than enough in Schuon’s publicly
available texts and artwork, and in the perspective he outlines, to demon-
strate that ritualized or sacramental nudity (however scandalous it might
be for someone belonging to what Schuon terms “exoteric” religion) in
fact reflects what is visible throughout his work. He consisistently empha-
sizes “esoteric” and “primordial” religion, and nudity corresponds to and
symbolizes both of these terms for him. Nudity is private, individualized,
or belonging to a small group—it is at once personal and yet reveals the
human form in an archetypal way, particularly when combined with a
ritual iconography, which is what we see in his paintings.
Combining iconographic symbolism from multiple religious tradi-
tions with nudity, what we see in the paintings—and what evidently also
sometimes was enacted in “primordial gatherings”—is scandalous in a
variety of different contexts, not only that Schuon had the role of founding
Shaykh of a Sufi order, but also that he resided in a Midwestern American
suburb in the late twentieth century. On the other hand, on the spectrum
that we are exploring in this book, Schuon actually represents a rather
gentle manifestation of antinomianism. An antinomianism whose great-
est affront is nudity in a sacred context—which is what we see in his
published paintings, and that is in concord with what he expresses in his
theological writings—is a pretty mild antinomianism, as we will see when
we look at some other figures from the same era who were imputed or
who claimed a kind of sage, guru, or avataric status.
What antinomianism do we see in Schuon’s paintings, and in his
work more broadly? It would be easy to claim that what we are seeing is a
form of colonialism, that is, an appropriation of these different religious
traditions. But such an assertion would risk ignoring the fact that there
is a broad continuity between Schuon’s written works, his artwork, and
“Indian Days” or “primordial gatherings”—there are larger metaphysical
assertions here that also would have to be confronted. At the center of
those assertions is the concept of primordiality, which has such a central
role in Schuon’s life and work. In a context of primordialism, one could
argue that Schuon’s work represents an esoteric antinomianism that
on the one hand accepts the outward forms of particular religious tradi-
tions—the Virgin Mary of Catholicism, American Indian garb or symbols,
172 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

seem to be an abstract, elliptical allusion to, as well as justification for, the


ritual practice of “primordial gatherings.”
Beyond what I have written here so far, there are several more things
to point out. The first is that Schuon exists in a historical context. He
certainly is most self-consciously aware of his place in relation to both
East and West, especially of the West. It is no accident that he begins his
writing career with a book that owes much to Platonism/Neoplatonism
and apophatic Christian mysticism. And it is no accident he draws on
Advaita Vedanta for his metaphysics. He represents the extension and
combination of all these with a dizzying array of world religious traditions
that could only have taken place for the first time in the twentieth cen-
tury. What’s more, Schuon’s move to the United States also makes sense,
if one thinks, as I do, that outlaw religion is particularly pronounced in
American literary and religious history—it is a kind of American leitmotif.
Of course, “Traditionalism” as a movement encourages adherents
to belong to and practice one of the world religious traditions, typically
that into which one is born, and exponents have been highly critical of
“counter-traditional” deviations like “instant mysticism.”56 Numerous
figures within the “Traditionalist” movement have expressed strong criti-
cisms not only of “instant mysticism,” psychedelic-inspired or not, but
also of contemporary religious narcissism more broadly. Among such
critiques are those of Jacob Needleman, Whitall Perry, and Kenneth
Oldmeadow, and such critiques certainly can be inferred from the work of
Guénon and Schuon themselves. Kenneth Oldmeadow, in Traditionalism,
is specifically critical of Aldous Huxley’s version of the philosophia perennis
and its related “Neo-Vedanta,” calling a narcissistic immediatist perspec-
tive “quite repellent to anyone evincing the traditionalist outlook.”57
Nonetheless, by the early twenty-first century, there are numerous fig-
ures, some clearly Western, other inspired by Asian religions, who clearly
represent variant forms of immediatism. Sometimes, it is not that easy to
discern whether the Western or the Eastern aspect of these guru-figures
predominates, though the phenomenon of Western gurus would not have
come into being without the influx of Asian religious traditions, in partic-
ular Hinduism, as well as, to a perhaps lesser extent, Buddhism. Andrew
Rawlinson provided sketches of many such Western guru-figures in his
encyclopedic The Book of Enlightened Masters. And even Rawlinson’s book,
650 pages long, covers only some of these many figures—he found that
he had to edit it severely just to get the collection of biographical sketches
into a single volume.
174 America n  G urus

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

Varieties of Modern American


Mysticism

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

Sooner or later people seeking a spiritual life will come across


authors whose psychological paradigm culminates in Hinduism’s
Advaitic realization. There is no underestimating the wide-spread
influence of this new spirituality[;]‌its influence is such you can
hardly talk to anyone about the spiritual journey who has not
already bought into this popular way of thinking. Converts have not
only bought into this particular view of the spiritual life, but bought
into its same belief system. This is what accounts for much of the
West’s present Advaitic understanding of man’s spiritual journey.5

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

in which atman or “self” is Brahman, or the divine, and that there is no


evidence of the “no-self” experience in Hinduism. There is such evidence,
however, in Buddhism, and so it is perhaps not surprising that Roberts
finds Buddhism much more congenial than Hinduism. “Without ques-
tion,” she writes, “Buddhism has hold of a profound and difficult Truth.”10
And although she differentiates carefully between Hinduism,
Buddhism, and her own perspective, she nonetheless concludes that
Truth by its nature has to be one.

[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

This Truth is experiential: it is the Truth of “no-self.” And the “shocking


revelation of the no-self experience” is that “the self’s deepest experience is
the experience of the divine.” But the divine is “beyond the boundaries of
human existence, having existed before man or consciousness came into
being. Consciousness comes from the divine and returns to the divine,
and in between is our human passage.”12 Fundamentally, there is no ego,
no self, no experiencer, and nothing experienced—very much like what we
find in the classical descriptions of transcendence of Basilides, Dionysius
the Areopagite, and the Prajnaparamita Sutra.13 “No-self means: no true-
self, no divine-self, no phenomenal self, no knowing-self, no feeling-
self. . . no unconscious, no conscious, no psyche,” she summarizes.14
But how does the experience of “no-self” arise? What is the path to it?
In Buddhism, we know: it is a path of meditation practice, with detailed
philosophical and practice instructions. But in Roberts’s work, we don’t
know. She does not offer us specific directions, but rather presents her
journal accounts of what she experienced—a series of revelations as con-
cepts of self fell away, and as her awareness went through changes that
she labels with terms like “the Great Passageway.” She offers us some
of the most remarkably personal accounts of mystical experience in the
whole of Western literature; her accounts are strikingly psychological, and
very acute. Because she is so psychologically revealing, one should not
be surprised that some have speculated that Roberts may be recording
178 America n  G urus

her experience of “depersonalization disorder,” or DPD.15 Whether one


wants to indulge in speculative labeling or not, it is the case that Roberts’s
accounts of “no-self” experiences are intensely psychological: she is in a
process that in some sense happens to and around her. Roberts undergoes
changes, but she is not their agent.
It is possible that the process Roberts describes—some of which she
experienced as terrifying—is more widely undergone than is commonly
acknowledged, and that what is different is the acuity and detailed atten-
tion that she affords it. Rather than seeing it as pathological, she expe-
riences it in the context of her Catholic and theological upbringing, as
mysticism.16 But others to whom these kinds of experiences come may
not have a context for them, and may therefore experience them as psy-
chological dysfunction or collapse rather than as mystical breakthrough.
Or we may be looking at two fundamentally different sets of experiences.
Still, it may be that both the processes she outlines and the experience of
“no-self” can be experienced more or less spontaneously, and everything
depends on how one then interprets them.
Regardless, Roberts’s life and work can be understood as immediatist
in a latent rather than an overt way. She does not describe herself as a
immediatist, but when we look at her work as a whole, it becomes clear
that she shares with many of our authors an insistence that the Truth
(which she also describes as no-self) is directly available to us not as a
result of a particular discipline or set of practices, although she does not
discount those, but rather as divine grace revealing an intrinsic truth
of what it means to be human. Truth is prior to particular religions or
practices, prior to concepts themselves, prior to subject-object divisions,
and it is possible, Roberts asserts, to realize it, even though it cannot be
described or captured conceptually. She is thus very much in the classical
Western apophatic mystical tradition represented by Meister Eckhart, who
also offers no specific instructions, and indeed, far less than Roberts in the
way of psychological description of the process of realization.
Another author in the immediatist tradition is Eckhart Tolle (1948–),
born Ulrich Leonard Tolle in Lünen, Germany. Tolle said that he under-
went a transformative spiritual awakening at the age of 29, after a period
of depression, and that he lived in a state of bliss for some time after-
ward. Tolle took the first name “Eckhart,” the significance of which is
self-evident. He moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. His first book was
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997), which was rec-
ommended by television talk show host and magazine publisher Oprah
Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 179

Winfrey, and then became an international bestseller. Subsequent books


include Stillness Speaks (2003), and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s
Purpose (2005). Tolle, in tandem with his partner Kim Eng, offers medita-
tion retreats and talks via an Internet video service provided by Eckhart
TV, and developed a corporation, Eckhart Teachings, to make his perspec-
tive widely available.
In the early twenty-first century, Tolle was frequently listed as the num-
ber one spiritual author in the United States, and his books The Power of
Now and A New Earth, powered by the recommendations of Oprah Winfrey,
sold millions of copies apiece.17 Certainly his work fits the characteristics
of New Age writing, as outlined by Wouter Hanegraaff: (1) this-worldlines
s; (2) holism; (3) evolutionism; (4) psychologization of religion and sacral-
ization of psychology; and (5) expectations of a coming New Age.18 All of
these elements can be found in Tolle’s books, no doubt of that. But to say
this does not do justice to Tolle’s work; it only serves to point out that his
writing does fit into the larger category of New Age much more than that
of Roberts or nearly all of the other authors we are considering here.
Tolle’s early work is elusively abstract and general, but represents
a synthesis drawn from Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, Buddhism, and
Christianity, packed into what his first publisher, Constance Kellough,
called “a clean contemporary bottle.”19 His first book, The Power of Now,
consists in admonitions and instructions to the reader, which some dis-
miss as pabulum, but which others find helpful as an orientation toward
a generic spiritual path. He advises the reader not to “read with the mind
only,” and asserts “all I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.
Living knowledge, ancient and yet ever new, is then activated and released
from within every cell in your body.”20 In essence, he continues, “there
is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in
many forms.” Now all of this is perennialism, to be sure, but it is also
immediatist: what Tolle claims is that he is presenting what precedes and
informs the spiritual traditions of the world, and what precedes and is
beyond discrete human consciousness.
Some of the more specific aspects of Tolle’s work derive from
Buddhism, and in fact directly refer to Buddhist teachings regarding suf-
fering and enlightenment.21 Tolle does develop his own individual con-
cepts, like the notion of a “pain body” that we carry about with us, at once
symbolically and literally. Nonetheless, much of what he presents, like the
idea of present-consciousness or awareness, the importance of compas-
sion, the need to let go of our attachments, including the attachment to
180 America n  G urus

our own pain or suffering—all of these are fundamentally Buddhist, but


conveyed in a generic, spiritual rather than religious context of individual-
ized spiritual practices.
In Stillness Speaks, Tolle’s immediatism becomes more explicit.
Although his work is close to and arguably is drawn from Buddhism,
what he presents in this book is not meditation instruction, but rather
more abstracted and generalized. He instructs the reader to “pay atten-
tion to the gap—the gap between two thoughts, the brief silent space
between words in a conversation. . . [because] when you pay attention to
those gaps. . . the formless dimension of pure consciousness arises from
within you and replaces identification with form.”22 “Wisdom,” he contin-
ues, “comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more
is needed.. . . A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with
you in essence takes over.”23 What Tolle urges the reader toward is tran-
scendental consciousness very much akin to what we saw in Emerson’s
early passage in Nature, a unified and exalted state prior to subject-object
differentiation.
Tolle’s most comprehensive and detailed book is A New Earth: Awakening
to Your Life’s Purpose (2005). It includes many of the themes already men-
tioned, and is written in the same light style, but does add a few new ideas.
Tolle differentiates between religion that serves the ego by buttressing it
with ideological rectitude, and religious teachings that “represent sign-
posts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual
awakening.” Once again, he continues, “there is only one absolute Truth,
and all other truths emanate from it. When you find that Truth, your
actions will be in alignment with it.”24 Being in touch with this dimension
“is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement.”25 He describes
in much greater detail the “pain-body,” which is “a semiautonomous
energy-form that lives within most human beings, an entity made up of
emotion.”26 What is new, beyond these additional and sometimes arrest-
ing details, comes nearer the book’s end.
Tolle’s immediatism becomes explicit later in the book. On a section
about awakening, he defines spiritual awakening as developing an aware-
ness or Presence beyond thinking, and he remarks that “the initiation of
the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor
can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn’t
a tidy sequence of logical steps that lead toward it.”27 In short, “there is
nothing you can do about awakening.”28 After you awaken, he continues,
your task becomes “bringing its light into this world.”29 And this theme
Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 181

is the titular one: contemplatives, by “just being,” perform the vital role


of anchoring “the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet.”
They help create a “new earth.”30 And he concludes that “a new species is
arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!”31 A New Earth is
more explicitly immediatist in its exhortations than any of Tolle’s previous
books, and in this it also moves away from most forms of Buddhism. In
fact, its primary citations are (in addition to a reference to Emerson) by
and large from the New Testament. I do not think this is coincidental.
Although Tolle drew on various religious traditions, notably Buddhism,
and though one can reconcile some of what he says with Buddhism, in the
end what he is proposing is actually New Age immediatism. That is, we
are pointed toward direct and immediate spiritual illumination, toward
“enthusiasm,” which comes through “grace,” that is, even more suddenly
and inexplicably than what we see in Bernadette Roberts’s narrative. In
pointing this out, I  am not criticizing it, nor am I  advocating it:  this is
simply what we are looking at in Tolle’s work, and I think it accounts for a
great deal of his popularity. He is a gifted popular writer, and much of that
popularity comes from the deep resonance of his work with this contem-
porary pattern in the West that I am terming immediatism.
And there is another immediatist author who brings together many of
the authors and themes discussed up to this point. I refer to Peter Kingsley
(1953–), by training a British classical scholar who in 2004 “came out,” if
one may so put it, as a spiritual teacher in an ancient Western pre-Socratic
wisdom tradition—in the context of our narrative, in other words, as a
immediatist. In 2003, he published Reality, a 591-page book that differed
dramatically in style and structure from his earlier academic titles, Ancient
Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic (1995), and to a lesser extent, In the Dark
Places of Wisdom (1999). Looking at the cover remarks for Reality gives one
a sense of some connections to and context for the book.
These are unusual “blurbs” because of who offers them as well as
what they say. Eckhart Tolle remarks that “[t]‌his book is a journey back
to the source—not only of western civilization but, more importantly, to
the source within you. Read it! To understand it is to be transformed.”
The head of the Krishnamurti Foundation ranks the book as equal to one
of Krishnamurti’s. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was closely connected to
Schuon, writes that

This epochal work is not only a seminal study of the origins of


Western thought. It also is a guide for the rediscovery of truths which
182 America n  G urus

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.

Huston Smith, perhaps the most well-known perennialist scholar of


religion, writes:

Stunningly original, Reality is momentous in its implications. This


book is aimed at one of the highest ends I can imagine—to restore
to us the understanding that the original purpose of Greek philos-
ophy was to launch the Western mind on a profoundly spiritual
course.

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

or enigmatic in style; it is elusive, and although Reality has chapters


and does follow a kind of sequence, it also has an elliptical quality that
frustrates one’s expectations for logical continuity. Readers refer to the
book as representing an “esoteric transmission,” or as a kind of “initia-
tion,” and these kinds of terms do indicate something of how unusual
the book is.34
The two main figures Kingsley emphasizes in Reality are Parmenides
and Empedocles, whom he regards and depicts as esoteric teachers. But
it may be helpful to give a sense of how he depicts them. Empedocles,
Kingsley writes, “is a model of undeceptiveness. And yet he deceives
everyone. He is the most accomplished of tricksters who does all the cor-
rect and decent things but still manages to fool everybody without excep-
tion.”35 Empedocles plays a role as an “initiator into esoteric mysteries,”
but “his teaching is pure treachery because the whole world we live in is
treachery.” Empedocles offers us a model of the universe as “something
to keep our minds busy and occupied,” but for those who “manage to see
what he is doing,” who “realize how completely we have been fooled not
just by him but by everything, then he will have given us the most precious
gift of all—ourselves.”36 For “what we consider reality is a total illusion.”37
Reality is a classically immediatist text, even more than those of
Roberts or Tolle. Empedocles, Kingsley tells us, reveals that “all of a sud-
den everything visible has become quite transparent, a pointer to the
invisible. Whatever we are able to see in whichever direction we look is
a token, a pledge, from the unseen.”38 “And here,” Kingsley continues,
“you have come to the point of no return. Either you can break trust by
going back again into the human world you are used to,. . . or you can let
it be transformed in front of your eyes into what it was always meant to
be: eternity.”39 It is not only that the book is about recovering what came
before the history of Western civilization from late antiquity to the pres-
ent—but also that the book presents not a path but rather an immediate
transformation or illumination.
The very things that make Reality a frustrating text for some—its allu-
siveness, its elliptical nature, its “trickery,” its elusiveness—make it also a
fascinating text for others. It does not present advice to the reader about
how to meditate, or even about some sequence of experiences that one
must undergo. Rather, it presents the reader with an existential choice, an
assertion that “everything is inside you now, rooted deep into your being.
And with the entire universe inside of you, where in reality it has always
been, you can sense for the first time how much power you hold in the
184 America n  G urus

palm of your hand.”40 “For the whole world—whatever you experience or


perceive—is just buds on the tree that you are.”
And that tree is rooted in “Tartarus,” that is, in “the power of sheer
nothingness beyond this world of the senses that makes everything pos-
sible but in which only nothing can survive.”41 Our human roots in this
“nothingness” means that “however huge any scientists choose to make
the age of the cosmos, you are more ancient.” “And you are fresher
than time.”42 In other words—and this is the culmination of the book—
Parmenides and Empedocles are pointing toward a direct experience of
transcendence “far vaster than space” that is immediately accessible to us
if we are able to see it. It is always present; it is only that we do not recog-
nize it. If we do, then we have become companions of spiritual guides like
these pre-Socratic philosopher-initiators.
After the publication of Reality, Peter Kingsley began to offer retreats
and teachings, some of which are available online as videos. It is worth
recalling the remarks of Eckhart Tolle, which appear on the back of
Kingsley’s next book, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: “Peter Kingsley’s teach-
ing is a journey back to the source—not only of western civilization but,
more importantly, to the source within you. To understand him is to be
transformed.”43 To understand him is to be transformed—the understand-
ing itself is the transformation. Tolle does capture an important aspect of
Kingsley’s work. Even though he does lead retreats and workshops and
gives lectures, Kingsley is not offering a sequential path, but an immedi-
ate, primordial illumination.
Kingsley’s A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet, and the Destiny
of the Western World (2010) is in some respects analogous to Roberts’s work
distinguishing her own teachings from Hinduism and, to a lesser extent,
from Buddhism. In A Story, a much more succinct book than Reality,
Kingsley reinterprets the story of how Abaris, the Hyperborean, came to
Greece with an arrow in his hand to meet Pythagoras. In Kingsley’s inter-
pretation, Abaris represents shamanic “barbarian” wisdom being trans-
mitted from Mongolia/Tibet to ancient Greece, as the seed of Western
culture. And Kingsley distinguishes Abaris’s shamanic tradition, which he
associates with the Bön tradition of ancient Tibet, from Tibetan Buddhism.
Hence the wisdom of Pythagoras, founder of Western/Greek culture, is
primordial, shamanic, and to be distinguished from the later overlays rep-
resented by Tibetan Buddhism.
One could read this as a way of recovering the primordial West
“against” the influx of Asian religious traditions, because there is a
Varieties of Modern American Mysticism 185

critique of Tibetan Buddhism woven into A Story. Kingsley, who identifies


Abaris with Mongolian shamanism, writes that the Dalai Lama exhorted
the Mongolian Khan to “wipe out every single trace of shamanism among
his Mongol people, smash and burn their sacred instruments, extermi-
nate their practices, silence their songs, and annihilate any shaman stupid
enough to resist.”44 Kingsley develops this theme in copious endnotes,
which amount to bibliographical essays of their own. There, he makes
the case that the Tibetan tradition of tulkus, or reincarnations of spiritual
teachers, has Mongolian and shamanic origins and implications, and that
the Gelukpa sect came to rule Tibet and quash both Bön shamanic tradi-
tions and rival lineages.45
And there are other connections to our earlier themes in this sec-
tion that emerge in Kingsley’s A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Kingsley’s
work presents some interesting links not only to Tolle, but also to Schuon
and Traditionalism. To begin, A Story was very favorably reviewed in a
Traditionalist context. In a review in Sacred Web, which privileges the work
of Schuon and his school, Nicolas Ruiz wrote a strongly positive overview
and assessment of Kingsley’s book, observing that “Traditionalists will
find an extremely elegant and down-to-earth confirmation of their world-
view in Kingsley’s demonstration of the common spiritual heritage that
unites East and West both on the level of concrete history and on the level
of esoteric essence as well.”46
Interestingly, A Story begins with a foreword by Joseph Raul (Beautiful
Painted Arrow), who identifies himself as a Pueblo Indian from New
Mexico, and who contextualizes Kingsley’s book as being “what the native
people of the Americas have been trying to say, but were never permit-
ted to. This song is the song of wisdom that we native people have not
been allowed to sing.”47 Raul writes that Kingsley is “an interpreter of
mysteries,” and “one of the most courageous people on the planet at this
moment.” This context is particularly interesting because we saw earlier
the links between Schuon and American Indian, particularly Great Plains
Indian, religion as a kind of “seal” of his primordialism, demonstrated in
Schuon’s case by the periodic journey of Thomas Yellowtail, a Crow medi-
cine man, to Bloomington, Indiana, to visit Schuon for “Indian Days.”
Here, in the case of A Story, Raul has an analogous role—he certifies or
seals a link to American Indians, and thereby also to primordial truth.
Why is such a link to American Indians important? There are two rea-
sons for this, one specific, one more general. The final section of A Story is
about how the tradition of the Mongolian “sacred symbolism of the arrow
186 America n  G urus

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

of immediatism is precisely that it does not offer a specific, sequential


path or praxis. Rather, it offers us or asserts immediate, direct, transfor-
mative illumination. What marks Kingsley’s immediatism, even more
than that of Roberts and Tolle, is that it derives from and asserts its
Western origin even as, in A Story, it steps beyond a Western narrative
into a global one.
Part of Kingsley’s global connections, beyond those noted, is with
Sufism, in particular the Russian-born Nakshbandi Sufi teacher Irina
Tweedie (1907–1999), whom he knew in London. In a talk he gave at
one of the Western Sufi conferences in 2008, he described a visit to
her home and there, he said, many people were lying on the floor on
their backs, engaged in a Sufi practice that is analogous to the ancient
“incubation” practice in which Kingsley guides participants, and which
he discusses in Reality. 54 In fact, Kingsley remarks, at this conference
he represents a “black hole,” that is, an introduction to “primordial
Sufism,” which is very ancient, and which emerges out of “nothing-
ness.” His talk begins, he says, and ends in “nothingness.” And his par-
ticular teaching, he reiterates, is “primordial Sufism.” One might also
remark that the publisher of Reality and A Story Waiting to Pierce You is
Golden Sufi Publications in California, underscoring the link between
Kingsley’s teachings and Sufism.
Nonetheless, Kingsley’s work is unusual for the extent to which
it asserts and affirms an originating wisdom in Western, specifically
ancient Greek culture. Even his Sufism is “primordial” and ancient
Western. As we have seen, however, a global cultural context is also vis-
ible in his later work, which in A Story is also coming to terms with and
in some sense differentiating the Western or Greek gnosis from Asian
religions, specifically Tibetan Buddhism. By citing and drawing on sha-
manic and American Indian cultural sources, effectively he is assert-
ing priority, placing what he offers as more primordial than Tibetan
Buddhism. It is a familiar theme in American literature and art, too,
that of the American Adam, or the American Eden. These tropes, or
metaphors, aptly describe also immediatism as it appears in the phe-
nomenon of Western gurus. And as we will see, some of these Western
gurus are the archetypal exemplars of outlaw religion, bringing together
every theme we have seen thus far.
16

The Sage on the Stage

The phenomenon of Western gurus is relatively recent, but quite sig-


nificant, and at some point will constitute a small field of study in itself.
We are not going to survey the entire history of this religious phenom-
enon, but rather here will concentrate on those Western gurus whose
work best exemplifies variants of immediatism. Nonetheless, we will need
to acknowledge some of the major precedents for the efflorescence of
Western guru-figures in the last half of the twentieth century, especially
in the wake of the 1960s. Although arguably Buddhism has taken root
more deeply in the West and in North America in particular, with numer-
ous practice centers, monasteries, and teachers, it is in Hinduism that the
phenomenon of Western immediatist gurus has its primary antecedents.
And there are, of course, predecessors to the figures we will focus on
in this narrative. I have already introduced Franklin Merrell-Wolff, whose
works—like The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object—did bring
him followers during his long life in the mountains of California. And
another such figure was Paul Brunton (1898–1981) who, like Merrell-Wolff,
did have followers, but who, although he did act as a spiritual teacher,
did not take on the role of guru in the kind of public way that our later
figures did. Brunton did publish a whole series of relatively popular eso-
teric books with titles like A Search in Secret India (1934), The Quest of the
Overself (1937), The Wisdom of the Overself (1943), and The Spiritual Crisis
of Man (1952). After a series of mystical experiences in England, Brunton
traveled to India and met with some of the major Hindu sages of the twen-
tieth century, including Ramana Maharshi. As a figure who combined
Western esotericism with Advaita Vedanta, Brunton has a enduring audi-
ence of readers—in fact, a sixteen-volume collection of his writings was
edited and published posthumously (1984–1989), and Anthony Damiani
The Sage on the Stage 189

(1922–1984) developed an affiliated center and tradition with the “Center


for Philosophic Studies,” “Wisdom’s Goldenrod” in upper New York State.1
What we see in all these figures is interesting and worth further study—it
is arguably the development of a new and living Western philosophical
lineage inspired by pollination from Asian religions.2
Other precursors of late twentieth-century American immediatism
can be found in the proto-countercultural Ascona community in south-
ern Switzerland in the early twentieth century, as well as in the German
Wandervogel and Lebensreform movements during roughly the same
period.3 In this constellation of movements that encouraged European
paganism, nudism, long hair, vegetarianism, organic food, sexual free-
dom, and wandering in wild nature, as well as striking experimentation
in art and literature, we do find predecessors to the 1960s counterculture.
These antecedents have been somewhat elided in scholarship for a vari-
ety of reasons, but there can be little doubt that Ascona and these other
European and specifically German movements represent antecedents to
the long-haired hippies of California.4
But our narrative begins in the 1960s, because this is the period in
which American immediatism really began to flourish as a public and
even mass phenomenon. The exemplary figure of this period is Stephen
Gaskin (1935–), who for a time was known only by his first name, and
who became a kind of pied piper of the Hippie counterculture. Gaskin
had served in the American infantry during the Korean War, and later
received an M.A. in literature in 1964, from San Francisco State College,
where he taught creative writing from 1964 to 1966. Gaskin then drove
a Volkswagen bus through the Yucatan to Belize (British Honduras),
and when he returned to San Francisco in 1967, he was a long-haired,
bead-wearing hippie. Although he cut his hair and tried to return to col-
lege teaching, his countercultural perspective was too obvious, and instead
he soon began what became known as the “Monday Night Class.”5
Gaskin began his Monday Night Class in the San Francisco State
College’s Gallery Lounge, with a dozen people, as a kind of open con-
versational discourse meant to “compare notes with other trippers about
tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world.”6 It began, in other
words, more or less where Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and others had
begun, with psychedelics—and, of course, marijuana. But there were other
aspects to what Gaskin offered, and soon the remarkable monologues and
question-and-answer sessions, which grew to have an audience of fifteen
hundred, were recorded and transcribed. Their publication as Monday
190 America n  G urus

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

Declaration of Independence said, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident.’


The ‘All’ may not be apprehended through Aristotelian logic.” Directly
asked “How do you know?” Gaskin replied, “by direct revelation, by direct
knowledge. It is not given to us to figure it out, because that would make
us able to comprehend the All [Gaskin’s redefinition of the word ‘God’].
Well, comprehending the All would make you bigger than the All. Can’t
do it because the All is everything.. . . But you can experience oneness with
it and be everything. And you can know it by direct cognition.”23
Gaskin was and no doubt still is regarded as a quixotic if archetypal
hippie-guru figure, but little attention has been paid to how he is also
archetypally American in many respects, and even conservatively so. We
will recall that he was a veteran of the Korean War, and that, as he put it
near the end of The Caravan, when the Caravan was in Oklahoma, “my
great-grandfather was a U.S. Marshal in the Oklahoma Indian Territory,
and I  have an aunt living now who was born in the Oklahoma Indian
Territory when it was still Territory, so I  don’t feel alienated down here
a bit.”24 He frequently said that in the Caravan, if you’re making love,
you’re engaged, and if you’re pregnant, you’re married.25 And at the end
of the book, in San Francisco in 1971, Gaskin said of their intention to go
to Tennessee to start a commune: “I need more trees, more grass, more
wheat, more soybeans, more healthy babies, more good-looking sane peo-
ple, people that can work.”26 All of these aspects of Gaskin and his ideals
are actually more traditionally conservative than radical. In fact, there were
public conflicts between members of the Caravan and of the Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS)—because, for all their long hair and ethos of
telepathic communion, the Caravan represented also a movement toward
archetypal American values of self-sufficiency, spiritual independence,
and political-social localist community, not abstract Marxist national polit-
ical revolution.
We see this archetypally American dimension of Gaskin and his com-
munity in The Farm, near Summertown, Tennessee, where the hippie
community finally settled, and where some of the school buses from
the Caravan still rest. Tennessee, the “volunteer state,” is not known as
a hotbed of communal and social experimentation, so that choice (rather
than, say, Northern California) may seem an odd one for Gaskin and the
Caravan. But in fact, when one visits The Farm and talks with Stephen
and other folks, both inside and outside The Farm, one begins to recog-
nize that there is something deeply, one might even say, profoundly and
fiercely American and independent about them. It is true that Gaskin
194 America n  G urus

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

practice; nonetheless, it remains a remarkable and enduring example of


what became a common theme in immediatist literature:  the dream of
enacting a new, spiritually renewed culture.
In Cannabis Spirituality (1996), Gaskin mused again about spiritu-
ality and religion, writing that “religion is like water. . . [if it] quenches
your thirst, then it’s water. If religion is compassionate and if it excludes
nobody and if it doesn’t cost money and if it really helps you out in the
here and now, then it’s real religion.”31 He continues his leitmotif from
the 1960s that “we are all one, and we can share one soul, and we can
communicate telepathically and vibrationally.”32 And if someone becomes
angry, or makes a Farm member angry, “we go off and do the thing that we
do to get cool: meditate, smoke cannabis, go for a walk in the woods, and
get our peace back. That way we take anger out of the system, and no one
has to suffer from it again.”33 The primary theme in Cannabis Spirituality,
as in his earlier books, is an affirmation of immediate, natural spiritual
communion. Cannabis can be sacramental, and so can psychedelics, but
ultimately, what matters is one’s compassion for and unity with others.34
This kind of religion isn’t formal, but it has existed for “millions of years,”
and “primordial” describes it as well as anything.35
The Farm remains one of the longest-enduring of all the communal
countercultural experiments in the wake of the 1960s, which suggests
something interesting about the independent American immediatism
that Stephen Gaskin represented in his spiritual teachings.36 Without
a religious tradition and specific praxis, one might think that, in itself,
immediatism may not be able to provide a basis for an enduring spiri-
tual community, even if the physical community remains in one form or
another. But, in fact, the Farm continued. Stephen certainly represented a
classic charismatic leader, and just as he said, he really was an American
spiritual teacher in the tradition of Emerson and Alcott, combining
Emerson’s Platonic Orientalism with Alcott’s love of dialogue or conversa-
tion. Stephen plays a significant role as exemplar of the recent American
immediatist tradition. And like its utopian predecessors in the nineteenth
century, Brook Farm and Fruitlands, The Farm’s greatest significance may
have been in what it represented.
The Farm clearly forecasts a dream that we will see again in the his-
tory of American immediatism: an illuminated spiritual teacher who then
seeks to enact that illumination in a living community. The Farm repre-
sents one of the most enduring of these experiments, but it is far from the
only one. And for that matter, Stephen Gaskin is by no means the only
196 America n  G urus

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

Western gurus, Alpert/Ram Dass’s text is also perennialist, but in a par-


ticular way. At heart, it is Vedantic, and its Vedantic philosophy takes other
religious traditions—Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, and so forth—into
itself as examples of itself. This is a modus operandi that we will see again
in other figures’ works; one could almost call this a basic characteristic of
much of American immediatism.
It is true that Ram Dass returned to America and began to take on
the role of a spiritual guide or guru himself. Hundreds of students gath-
ered at his family home in New Hampshire, and he became a well-known
public representative of Asian religion in the West. In 1970 and 1972, he
gave talks on a range of religious topics at the Menninger Foundation in
Kansas, and at Spring Grove Hospital in Maryland, which were subse-
quently transcribed and published in paperback as The Only Dance There
Is (1974). It begins with an epigraph from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and
another from Emerson. Reading this book is like listening to the mono-
logue in his head at the time—it is a stream-of-consciousness series of
ruminations on a whole array of topics, from when one needs a guru, to
how Freud could be understood in relation to kundalini and sexual energy,
from how Be Here Now came about, to how he conceives of the spiritual
path at that time.
Near the end of The Only Dance There Is, Alpert/Ram Dass says that
“the desire to become enlightened is still you desiring something,” and
that “eventually you have to give up that desire.” So now, he continues, “life
is happening to me—rather than I’m trying to make it happen.” Hence
you move “beyond dualism,” and “when an experience comes along, you
just note it and just let go.”47 “In that place beyond dualism,” he continues,
“you’re nobody—and there’s nothing.” “Then you leave it in the hands of
God whether or not you are going to live or die, or serve or not serve, and
you don’t decide for yourself what’s best.”48 With this remark (a reference
to a monotheistic God), he concludes the book.
In a slightly later book, Grist for the Mill (1976), Ram Dass reflects back
on this period (only a couple of years before), and on what was happening
in his life during this time. For instance, after teaching at Naropa with
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, when traveling in New York, he was brought
to the home of a Jewish woman in Brooklyn named Joya, who was sit-
ting in a state of trance or suspended animation, came to, and charmingly
asked Ram Dass, “What the fuck do you want?”49 He became her stu-
dent for fifteen months, and to his later regret, said publicly that she was
enlightened.50 She acted as a medium or channel, conveying messages
The Sage on the Stage 199

from various holy figures of different religious traditions, as well as from


his deceased guru, Baba. She also “represented herself as an actual form of
Kali and a number of other cosmic identities as well, including Athena, Sri
Mata Brahma the Mother of the Universe, and Tara the Tibetan Goddess
of Tantra.” It was, he said, “a hard act to follow.”51 He later realized, to his
chagrin, “I had been had.”52
Ram Dass also described his experiences in meditation practice during
the early 1970s. For instance, he joined a Zen Buddhist sesshin, a nine-day
retreat, which he found quite arduous, until suddenly he went into “this
other state. It was like I had been released from this incredible sickness
and tension and I went in and I was having a satori experience. And he
kept asking me koan after koan and the answers kept coming right out.”53
“From then on,” he continued, “the rest of the nine days was ecstasy.”
But his primary experiences were with Baba/Maharaj-ji, for “when I  sit
with Maharaji-ji, my heart flows.” “As I open more and more through my
heart,” he continues, “I start to rise. It’s as if it’s a fuel. And I rise into
states of consciousness which are known as j[n]‌anic states or samadhi
states.”54 “The game,” he concludes, “is not to know God; the game is to be
God. To be God is to be nobody; and yet there is nothing that we are not.”55
Just two years later, he published Journey of Awakening: A Meditator’s
Guidebook (1978), a mass-market paperback designed as a manual and
as a collection of resources.56 It is a determinedly eclectic volume, with
copious quotations from Jewish, Christian, Sufi, Hindu, and Buddhist
sources, as well as from popular American authors on spirituality. And it
includes much advice on how to find a spiritual path, on how and where
and when to meditate, on typical issues one might encounter on one’s
spiritual journey. The book concludes with nearly half its pages devoted
to state-by-state lists of practice centers, some Hindu, some Buddhist,
some more or less New Age. Journey of Awakening presents an avuncular
neo-Vedantic-perennialist approach to spiritual practice.
Subsequent books and activities centered on compassion and ser-
vice. Among his books are How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on
Service (1985), Compassion in Action:  Setting Out on the Path of Service
(1991), and Still Here:  Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying (2000).
Ram Dass helped found and raised support for several charities, includ-
ing the Hanuman Foundation, devoted primarily to educational and
community service projects and founded in 1974, the Seva Foundation,
founded with hippie activist Wavy Gravy in 1978, dedicated to health
and service, and the Love Serve Remember Foundation, begun in 2009,
200 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

he seems to have remained grounded in the midst of a remarkable


life that led from Harvard and LSD with Leary to his role as America’s
celebrity guru.
Key to both roles is the immediacy of transformation. Taking LSD obvi-
ously has sudden effects, but so too does darshan with the guru. One is
transformed by the presence of the guru, and that is exactly what one sees
emphasized in Be Love Now. Ram Dass does not offer the most extreme
form of immediatism—that is, the assertion that nothing external is nec-
essary, no practices, no rituals, no anything—because something is neces-
sary for him, and that something is the conduit of the guru. But he also
includes meditation practice both in his accounts of his own history and
in his advice to spiritual seekers.
Ram Dass represents a kind of middle way among the immediatists,
one that draws on many different traditions, one that emphasizes the
sudden path of the guru’s presence, but that nonetheless encourages
nonsectarian meditation, one that emphasizes being here now, but that
also advocates an ethics of compassion and love for others now. Some
scholars argue that spiritual experience or understanding is or ought
to be entirely separate from ethics, but Ram Dass represents a Western
guru who by all accounts combines the two.60 Perhaps this is in part a
result of his particular combination of Hinduism and Buddhism, but
it could also be the case that when mysticism and ethics are separated,
harm to others may all too often begin. Gaskin and Ram Dass—what-
ever critics may say about them—certainly come across as having ethi-
cal constraints and a certain innate modesty. Not every immediatist
spiritual teacher, however, appears to agree that spiritual insight and
ethics should go together.
17

The American Guru Enters,


Stage Left

We have a number of American gurus to consider here, and all of them


share more than a few characteristics with one another. But the earliest
of these is also the most extreme in his claims, and it is with him, and
in the same period as Gaskin’s Monday Night Class in San Francisco,
that we begin. In many respects, this Western guru also comes out of the
heady brew of Western esotericism, Asian religions, and occultism that
we saw in Gaskin’s work. If anything, he mingles together even more of
these, more clearly, than Gaskin did. But this individual went, from some-
what analogous roots, in a much more dramatic, one might say, theatrical
direction than Gaskin ever did. This guru took a bewildering variety of
names: Bubba Free John, Da Free John, Adi Da, and a number of others.
But this most flamboyant and antinomian guru-to-be began life in 1939
as Franklin Jones, born to a middle-class Lutheran family on Long Island,
New York. As a boy, he served as an acolyte in the church, and he observed
in his autobiography, The Knee of Listening, that he had an uneventful and
happy childhood and adolescence. But he also claimed that he had been
enlightened from the beginning, and in the revised version of his autobi-
ography, makes many other claims as well about himself and his unique
importance in the world. Much was alleged against him, as well. While
we will touch on all of these aspects, and will meet some familiar names
and themes on the way, we will focus on one element above all, which is
Jones’s radical immediatism.
Jones’s life and work is even more well documented than that of
Gaskin: “the most autobiographical” of all the Western gurus, as Andrew
Rawlinson put it, by the time he died on his island retreat in Fiji in 2008,
Jones left behind a vast body of documentary photographs, films, videos,
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 203

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

Shakti appear in Person, Pressed against my own natural body, and,


altogether, against my Infinitely Expanded, and even formless, Form.
She Embraced me, Openly and Utterly, and we Combined with One
Another in Divine. . . ‘Sexual Union.’ ”8 Subsequently, Jones said, he
“saw that Reality Itself Is Consciousness Itself, Present as no-seeking in
the heart.” “Thus,” he continues, “Real life is the only-by-me revealed
and given way of ‘radical’ understanding. . . which is the direct resort to
Reality Itself.”9 It is worth noting here that Jones describes his path as
“no-seeking” and that it is revealed “only-by-me.” Both of these aspects
of his description are characteristic of Jones’s copious subsequent
teachings.
Following these experiences, and after a return to India and an appar-
ent break with Muktananda, by 1974, Jones was teaching more publicly
as a guru in Hollywood, and had gathered a small community.10 During
this early period of teaching, Jones was antinomian, calling religious
practices and conceptions “garbage,” urging people to leave behind insti-
tutional constraints such as marriage, and conducting wild parties.11 This
period, which evidently was very turbulent, was called “Garbage and the
Goddess,” memorialized in a book by that name, and also in a documen-
tary from 1974 called A Difficult Man. The film features footage of Jones
teaching, and followers who appear to be convulsing in spontaneous
states of ecstasy. Jones and his audience seem to be in a state of more or
less continuous high hilarity, and we are told that Jones teaches a form of
“prior perfection,” meaning that the seeker does not need to undertake
ascetic or other religious practices or rituals, but rather the seeker sim-
ply has to experience what is—in the presence of Jones, that is.
At this point, we need to mention one figure whose name and thought
was instrumental in drawing followers to Jones, who at this point was
teaching and publishing under the name “Bubba Free John.” That figure
was Alan Watts. Before he died in November 1973, Watts evidently wrote
a foreword to Jones’s spiritual autobiography, The Knee of Listening, and in
it asserted

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

“Striving after this state,” he continues, “blocks the understanding that


is already present.” “Beyond words,” Watts concludes, “we are already
there.” And the back cover of Garbage and the Goddess features a blurb
dated September 14, 1973, and attributed to Watts: “It looks like we have
an Avatar here. I can’t believe it, he is really here. I’ve been waiting for
such a one all my life.” Later editions feature a different blurb from Watts,
while the one on the original edition seems to have vanished: “It is obvi-
ous, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about. . . a
rare being.”
Andrew Rawlinson remarked that he had not found the last quotation
in Watts’s published work, and indeed, neither quotation is from Watts’s
actual foreword to the original edition of The Knee of Listening—but actu-
ally, regardless of the origin of these quotations from Watts, their primary
significance, and that of the foreword, lies in the explicit link between
Watts’s and Jones’s perspectives.12 It is not just a matter of Jones capi-
talizing on Watts’s status as interpreter of Asian religions to American
hippies—it is that they really do have a commonality in the rejection of tra-
ditional practices and methods leading to enlightenment. They are both,
at heart, immediatists.
However, Jones’s version of immediatism diverges from that offered
by Watts, or for that matter, from earlier or other American spiritual
teachers of the time. For at the center of Jones’s vast corpus of writ-
ings, and at the center of Jones’s revelation, is Jones himself. Early on,
Jones had been deeply affected by the myth of Narcissus, and he often
criticized ego-identification and what he called “self-contraction.” In The
Knee of Listening and in many works, he emphasizes that what he reveals
is “only-by-me,” and that he represents the “seventh stage,” beyond, he
claims, the entirety of Tibetan Buddhism (which he thinks is only “sixth
stage.”)13 He (as Adi Da) is the “Avataric Divine Self-‘Emergence’ ” and that
is itself the means, for practices and other traditions are rendered more
or less irrelevant by his advent as “world-teacher.”14 What is necessary, he
says, is relationship to him, or rather, Him.
Reading or watching the numerous accounts or films of devotees
online, in various books, in the documentary A Difficult Man, and in
online videos, some of what one sees, particularly in the early period of the
Dawn Horse Communion, is suggested by the word “Communion” itself.
The phenomena one sees—glossolalia, ecstatic convulsions, testimoni-
als about the movement of inner energy or energies, the sense of inward
“wildness,” which scholar Georg Feuerstein attested to during his early
206 America n  G urus

time with Jones [then Bubba Free John or Da Love-Ananda]—is analogous


to Pentecostal revival atmosphere, with Jones as the anointing preacher
who is conducting energy in the manner that a leader of a Pentecostal
service might conduct the Holy Spirit. We might recall that an early name
for his community was the “Johannine Daist Communion.”15 Devotees
from the Garbage and the Goddess period also refer to their communal
spirit as being analogous to a beehive, a kind of shared hive conscious-
ness—indeed, an online source for such testimonials and source materi-
als is called the “beezone.” Jones, in this analogy, would be the Queen bee.
Particularly revealing regarding this early period are the various narra-
tives in Garbage and the Goddess, which also is illustrated with photographs
and pen and ink drawings that corroborate what we see in films like A
Difficult Man: people in the community during this time experienced what
Jones/Bubba Free John called “the Force,” and the descriptions are as dra-
matic as some of the archival images and footage from that era. Not only
Jones/Bubba Free John was a vehicle for “the Force,” but so too others
became vehicles for it. Marie Marrero writes that when she went into the
main hall to hear two main disciples talk,

I felt Bubba’s Force and Presence entering me and taking over my


being. I began to do hand mudras. My arms would reach for the
sky and move rhythmically, as if I  were dancing with my hands
and arms. Then I  was completely absorbed in and possessed by
God. I felt His Light moving through my body, taking me over com-
pletely, and it was joyous and blissful and perfect.16

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

to Me—by Means of My Transcendental Spiritual Self-Transmission of the


‘Perfect Practice’ of ‘Radical’ (or Always ‘At-the-Root’) Self-Abiding As the
egoless Self-Condition That Is not-an-‘object.’ ”19 In late or posthumous
works, Jones’s unusual capitalization and other stylistic choices make
his writing somewhat challenging to read, but nonetheless, we can see
in the quotation here that perhaps paradoxically, given the emphasis on
being “egoless,” there is considerable repetition of “Me” and “My” and
“only-by-Me.”
The emphasis also, throughout Jones’s huge body of published texts, is
on the “prior perfection” and “always already” nature of the transcendental
revelation that he embodies. Sexual practices are described as a vehicle for
this revelation. In another late book, The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual
Life, we read that masturbation [“own-body Yogic sexual practice”] “must
be engaged as an ego-surrendering, ego-forgetting, and ego-transcending
exercise of ‘radical’ devotion to Me. . . in which the principal faculties of the
body-mind-complex are aligned to Me, concentrated on Me, ‘Bonded’ to
Me, and devotionally turned to Me.”20 This bonding to the “Self-Evidently
Divine Person in the midst of humankind” is all that is necessary, because
“there simply is no basis in reality for conventional ‘religious’ presump-
tions and ideas.”21 What matters is “My Love-Bliss” “Which Is Always
Already The Case.”22
It should not be surprising, given the nature and magnitude of
Jones’s assertions, that he has been criticized as narcissistic, and as
exemplary of the authoritarian gurus that one finds deplored in such
works as Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers:  Masks of
Authoritarian Power.23 There, they write “What better profession for a
narcissist than being a guru?” “A guru is made to feel he is the center
of the universe by his disciples. It is difficult to not be ‘in love’ with that
image of oneself.”24 And “by denying that self-interest is or can be oper-
ative in a guru, there is no way to mitigate against its effects.” Hence,
they continue, “the guru role makes it extremely difficult to escape the
traps of power—the ultimate trap being that in the end, gurus lose their
humanity.”25
Public criticism of Jones broke out in earnest in the 1980s, when a
former devotee took Jones and the community to court for alleged physi-
cal and sexual abuse, fraud, and false imprisonment. A series of articles
appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and Scott Lowe, a scholar of Asian
religion who at one point had been a member of the Dawn Horse com-
munity, described them as
208 America n  G urus

disturbing and plausible. Da Free John appears to have become a


reclusive, binge-drinking misogynist, still brilliant and charismatic,
but violent and sadistic towards his most committed and depen-
dent followers. That one of the two men closest to him in 1974 was,
in 1985, contemplating a lawsuit for “seventeen years of emotional
stress” does not bode well.26

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

Transcendentalism:  The Non-“Religious,” Post-“Scientific” and No-Seeking


Reality-Way of Adidam (2007), the title speaking for itself. Several other col-
lections were published posthumously (some thousands of pages), under
the names The Aletheon (2009; 2,300 pages), The Gnosticon (2010; 1,200
pages), and The Pneumaton (2011; 1,300 pages). These latter books rein-
terpret Advaita Vedantic, Buddhist, and Christian texts and ideas, and do
represent an effort to present a perennialist, somewhat Advaita-Vedantic
interpretation of Eastern and Western religions.
What is more, as one already will have surmised, despite the contro-
versies and scandalous allegations, Jones drew quite a number of encomia
from prominent people, including scholars of Asian religions, physi-
cians, psychiatrists, and well-known authors. As we have already seen in
other cases, these blurbs, and their authors, sometimes have interesting
implications. In the case of Jones, most surprising is how extreme these
endorsements often were. Such endorsers are too numerous to list here,
but examples include the host of a PBS television show, Jeffrey Mishlove,
who says “I regard the work of Adi Da and his devotees as one of the most
penetrating spiritual and social experiments happening on the planet in
our era,” and Ken Wilber (1949–), who announced in 1979 that “without
any doubt whatsoever” Bubba Free John “is destined to be recognized as
the first Western-born Avatar.”33
The relationship between Wilber and Jones is worth considering in
more detail here, not least because Wilber is himself a prolific and influen-
tial author. In his enthusiastic 1979 article on Bubba Free John, “The One
Who Was to Come Is Always Already Here,” Wilber asserts that Jones’s
“Teaching itself is, in its scope, its eloquence, its simplicity, and its ecstatic
fund of transcendent insight, probably unparalleled in the entire field of
spiritual literature.” He summarizes Jones’s work as carrying “the grace-
ful ability to liberate and awaken simply through hearing the argument.”
That argument, he continues, is that “the search for a way out of suffer-
ing. . . is doomed because 1. The search, the activity of the search, is itself
suffering and therefore could not alleviate suffering and 2. The Truth can-
not be found tomorrow, as seeking supposes, because it is always already
the case, and there is no path to that which presently is.”34 “Bubba Free
John,” he concludes, “stands as simple Presence for all who would have
recourse to him,” and he urges us to “make use of the works and presence
of Bubba Free John to whatever degree you are capable.”
In 1985, Wilber wrote in a review of The Dawn Horse Testament, that
“[t]‌his is not merely my personal opinion; this is a perfectly obvious fact,
210 America n  G urus

available to anyone of intelligence, sensitivity, and integrity:  The Dawn


Horse Testament is the most ecstatic, most profound, most complete, most
radical, and most comprehensive single spiritual text ever to be penned
and confessed by the Human Transcendental Spirit.” He then goes on: “I
am honored (even awed) to be allowed in its Presence, to listen to and
Hear the Potent Message of the Heart-Master Da.” Wilber adds that “The
days of denial are over; this nonsense of neglect cannot continue, with
any rational reason. I  ask my friends, my students, my readers, even
my casual acquaintances, to see and recognize and—above all—confess
the Realization that Master Da is.” “It is as if my friends believe every-
thing I say except that Master Da is a genuine Adept, Free at the Heart,
Confessed in Radiance, Transcendent to it all. How has my judgment sud-
denly lapsed in regard to this Man? I am as certain of this Man as I am
of anything I have written—in fact, as certain as I am of my own hand
(which apparently claps by itself in solitude when it comes to this Great
Issue).”35
In 1996, Wilber wrote a partial retraction of his earlier endorse-
ments, seeking to separate Jones’s teachings from the person of the
guru. He still extolled The Dawn Horse Testament as “one of the very
greatest spiritual treatises,. . . comparable to any of the truly classic reli-
gious texts.” But “the teaching is one thing, the teacher, quite another,”
for it appears that “some types of spiritual development can run way
ahead of moral, social, interpersonal, and wisdom development in gen-
eral.” “Da,” he continues, “is capable of some truly exquisite insights,
but in other areas, he has fared less well, and this has increasingly
verged on the catastrophic.” “Crazy wisdom might (or might not) be
fine for a few very close and longtime devotees, but it is disastrous when
done as a large scale social experiment, which Da did, especially during
the ‘Garbage and the Goddess’ period.”36
Ken Wilber—author of a whole array of popular books, beginning
with The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), The Atman Project (1980), and
Up From Eden (1982), through Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) and A Brief
History of Everything (1996), up to The Integral Vision (2007) and Integral
Life Practice (2008)—certainly owes some debt to Jones. Wilber’s perspec-
tive and some of his terminology were clearly influenced by Jones, espe-
cially in Jones’s Bubba Free John / Da Love-Ananda periods, but also in
the later Adi Da period. To give an example, let us look more closely at
The Eye of Spirit (1997), in which Wilber entitled his final chapter “Always
Already: The Brilliant Clarity of Ever-Present Awareness.”37
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 211

“Always Already,” the chapter’s main title, is of course a phrase found


throughout Jones’s texts under the various guru-names, and in fact we
have already see it appear several times in quotations. But Wilber’s entire
chapter is immediatism. It is written in a declarative and sometimes
exhortational style, as a series of assertions about nondual consciousness.
Wilber begins by remarking that “the Great Search is the loveless contrac-
tion hidden in the heart of the separate-self sense,” and so we seek else-
where in vain, because “this simple recognition of an already present Spirit
is the task, as it were, of the great Nondual traditions.”38 This phrasing is
a concise formulation of what we also see repeated in Jones’s writings,
where we find “self” frequently defined specifically in terms of a “contrac-
tion” or “self-contraction.” Wilber asserts that this “self-contraction” is an
illusion, and that in fact what we seek “in some profound and mysterious
way. . . has been your primordial condition from time immemorial. You
have, in fact, never left this state for a second.”39 Wilber exhorts us to real-
ize “primordial emptiness,. . . this primordial recognition of One Taste.”40
The last part of this final chapter in Wilber’s The Eye of Spirit consists
primarily in his descriptive advice to the reader concerning what nondual
awareness is like. He writes that “when I rest in simple, clear, ever-present
awareness, I  am resting in intrinsic Spirit. . . I  do not become Spirit;
I  simply recognize the Spirit that I  always already am.”41 Much of this
description evidently derives from Tibetan Buddhism, in particular from
Dzogchen teachings. The only footnote to the chapter is to The Flight of the
Garuda, a book of Dzogchen teachings translated by Eric Pema Kunsang,
a well-known Danish translator of Tibetan texts who in 2010 was given
authority to teach by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche (son of the great Dzogchen
master Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche). There are pages of notes on translations
of Plotinus, on Emerson, and even on the “Diamond Approach” of A. H.
Almaas [Hameed Ali]. But there is no direct reference to Jones/Adi Da in
Wilber’s book.
Of course, there is a different way to understand Wilber’s attraction to
and use of Jones’s/Adi Da’s teachings than simply as “influence.” An alter-
native perspective is that Jones was not the inventor of immediatism—
rather, Jones tapped into a type of spirituality that pre-existed him, though
he certainly made it his own. And part of the reason that Jones in turn
was attractive to so many others, including well-known scholars of reli-
gion, was that in many respects he seemed to incarnate immediatism—
what’s more, an immediatism that was quite alluring to moderns already
inclined toward instant consumerist gratification. Something similar was
212 America n  G urus

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

In Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and


Postmodern World (2006), Wilber offers an overview of what I will term
“integralism.”
Integralism is, in some respects, like an inverted version of the
Traditionalism that we looked at earlier. Whereas Traditionalists in gen-
eral and Schuon in particular regard our era as one of decline, and remain
critical of evolutionary theory and progressivism, Integralists in general
and Wilber in particular are committed evolutionists, and look forward
to a superhuman future. Wilber goes so far as to suggest, in an elaborate
discussion of the subject, that “[a]‌person’s realization today is not Freer
than Buddha’s (Emptiness is Emptiness), but it is Fuller than Buddha’s
(and will be even Fuller down the road.”51 In other words, there is a “slid-
ing scale” of “evolutionary Enlightenment.”52 Enlightenment for someone
in a “magenta” (magic), “red,” or “amber” (mythic) era-phase would not be
as “full” as that of someone in a “green” era/phase (post-1960s), let alone
a future-defining “indigo” era/phase.53
Yet Wilber also seeks to provide a comprehensive model that, like
Traditionalism, seeks to bundle together not only all the world’s major
religions, but also contemporary psychology, neuroscience, as well as
numerous other fields of knowledge and “postmodernism,” into a single
vast system. To accomplish this, he draws on the Traditionalist model
offered by religion scholar Huston Smith, but Wilber also developed his
own “quadrant” model as an “integral map” that seeks to chart “all lev-
els,” “all states,” and “all types,” and that therefore seeks to be even more
comprehensive than Smith in his earlier project. Wilber seeks to provide
a postmodern, post-religious “Integral Operating System [IOS]” model to
understand everything about the human being with regard to the cosmos,
metaphysics, and post-metaphysics.54 It is a project interestingly similar
to that of Schuon and Traditionalism in its metaphysical and cosmological
universalism.55
Wilber continued this ambitious project with a sequel, Integral Life
Practice:  A  21st Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance,
Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening (2008), written by Wilber with
a trio of coauthors. As the title suggests, Integral Life Practice is a hand-
book for practicing Integralism as a comprehensive new and, I  would
argue, American immediatist religion. In their preface, the three coau-
thors write that “Integral Life Practice” [ILP] “contains a distilled and con-
densed series of practices that are taken from pre-modern, modern, and
postmodern approaches to growth,” including “the world’s great wisdom
214 America n  G urus

traditions and the meditation practices that drive them,” combined in a


“cross-training” that produces “faster, more effective, more efficient prac-
tices than were ever possible prior to this time.”56 One is not surprised to
see a laudatory back cover blurb from celebrity American motivational
speaker Anthony Robbins extolling Integral Life Practice as “the definitive
roadmap for your journey to an awakened life.”
Integral Life Practice belongs to the venerable American self-improvement
genre, with earnest instructions on how to do “1-minute modules” of
Integralist aerobics, weight training, Taoist inner energy circulation, sexual
intercourse, parenting, and above all, meditation. Integral Life Practice aims
to offer comprehensive advice to you, the liberated American reader, and
some of that advice owes a bit to Jones/Adi Da, including, for instance, the
advice on conscious lovemaking and on avoiding “degenerative” orgasm,
or again, in the “1-Minute Module” for meditation, when we are told that
during meditation practice “You can ask ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I Doing?’
‘Avoiding?’ or ‘Contracting?’ ”57 In The Dawn Horse Testament, for instance,
Jones/Adi Da writes that the devotee should engaged in “Enquiring Of
the self (In the Form ‘Avoiding Relationship?’), Until the self-Contraction
releases and The Transcendental Divine Self-Condition Spontaneously
Reveals Itself.”58 Thus Jones/Adi Da, the immediatist American guru, is
bundled into the subtext of Integral Life Practice.
It is not hard to find immediatism in Integral Life Practice. The text,
hundreds of pages of advice to you, tells you that

when this constant nondual consciousness becomes obvious in


your case, a new destiny will awaken in the midst of the manifest
world. You will have discovered your own Buddha-mind, your own
Godhead, your own formless, spaceless, timeless, infinite empti-
ness, your own Atman that is Brahman, your Keter, Christ con-
sciousness, radiant shekinah—in so many words, One Taste.. . . and
just that is your true identity.. . . You then will awaken as radical free-
dom, sing those songs of radiant release, beam an infinity too obvi-
ous to see, and drink an ocean of delight.59

In this advice, we can see that nondual consciousness is described in pan-


religious terms, placing the reader in a transcendent position relative to
the world’s religions:  this is a kind of American Transcendentalist reli-
gious praxis, a bundling together of “1-minute modules” and “Gold Star
Practices” from the great world’s religions to produce a good, healthy,
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 215

ethical regimen for those who wish to lead a nonsectarian path to an


enlightened life.
As one might expect—given that Wilber’s ambition is to create a com-
prehensive vision that includes all of science and the humanities, and all
the world’s great religious traditions (or at least their ransacked goodies)
in a “postmetaphysical” synthesis—he has some critics. There is evidence
that Wilber does not always gracefully suffer critics or gadflies. In a blog
entry whose title is drawn from Emerson (“What We Are, That We See”)
Wilber lashed out against some of his critics, terming some “morons,”
others “lunatics, nuts, fakes, and frauds,” or alternatively, “numb-nut
young Turks” and “no-nut old Turks.” Wilber expected that he would be
attacked, because he is “Wyatt Earp” in intellectual town, and hence, he’s
found, “every punk with a pistol comes gun-slinging for your ass.”60
There is a surprising degree of vituperation in the ensuing series of
exchanges between Wilber and his critics, in particular with Frank Visser,
author just a few years before of Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (2003), but
later a critic of Wilber.61 What is particularly interesting from our perspec-
tive here is how Wilber perceives and presents himself in these exchanges.
He is a gunslinger, calling out and insulting his opponents, suggesting
that they “suck my dick.” Wilber sees himself as someone who belongs
to the American “Wild West,” and as the imposer of law on an outlaw
region.62 But Wilber’s imposition of law is a bit crude:

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

Commentary seems unnecessary here.


Even if he sees himself sometimes as “Wyatt Earp,” Wilber is, in actu-
ality, an outlaw—his Integralism belongs to no religion, but incorporates
aspects of many; it offers transcendence beyond any human institution
or law, allowing you to recognize how you have “the moon as part of your
body” and “the sun as part of your heart.”64 His is a mild antionomianism
at best, but still it is antinomian, damping down the wild extreme of Jones/
Adi Da into more socially acceptable forms. The traces of antinomianism
216 America n  G urus

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

early period as a kind of “honeymoon,” in which they were all “profoundly


in love with Andrew.” They “stare at his picture for long stretches of time,
feel ourselves melt and become one with him.”86 But by the end of his
time with Cohen, “the spell is broken,” especially when Cohen tells van
der Braak that “you are evil!”87 Van der Braak, like Tarlo, becomes critical
of Cohen’s authoritarianism, and even of the unity experiences, regarding
them as “a particular hyperactive frame of mind” that “energizes you,” and
insulates one from negative emotions.88
By the conclusion of van der Braak’s reflective book, he is no longer
convinced that there is such a thing as “enlightenment” as “a state of con-
sciousness to be attained.” Nor is he convinced that there is a “mystical
union with some kind of transcendent Reality.” Rather, he writes of “a
mystery that is not different from our self, the stuff we’re made of.”89 What
he looks for now, after more than a decade with Cohen, is “a postreli-
gious spirituality,” one that reflects “our own western enlightenment.”90
Or “maybe there’s no need to search for enlightenment, maybe enlight-
enment is where you are.”91 Hence, although van der Braak left Cohen’s
community and Cohen as his guru, he had nonetheless to a considerable
extent internalized Cohen’s fundamentally immediatist vision—even if he
no longer looks for enlightenment or mystical union.
Even more critical of Cohen is William Yenner’s American Guru,
which includes chapters written by other former followers of Cohen, and
which focuses on Cohen’s authoritarianism. Yenner had been a mem-
ber of Cohen’s community for thirteen years, and his reflections are
soul-searching, even anguished at times. Yenner admits that “it can be
a life-altering experience to meet a powerful and charismatic guru.” But
“while one can comprehend what turns the casual follower into a devo-
tee, it is perhaps harder to understand why an intelligent, thinking adult
remains devoted once the quality of the experience with the guru has
begun to deteriorate or, as in my case, has been marred by humiliation
and abuse.”92 By the time Yenner published his book, though, he asserts
that “of 130 of Andrew Cohen’s original students, 123 have left him, and
Cohen has vilified almost all of them for doing so.”93 Yenner and others
give numerous examples of what they regard as Cohen’s abusive behavior.
Like Tarlo, Yenner and his fellow ex-students look to the
anti-authoritarianism of The Guru Papers to develop their critique of
Cohen. But the direction of Yenner’s critique is somewhat different:  he
develops the idea that Cohen is narcissistic, and that “his narcissism—his
need to be ‘The One’—prevents him from seeing his own flaws and he
220 America n  G urus

comes to believe with increasing fervor that he is morally unassailable and


beyond human reproach.”94 Yenner compares Cohen’s narcissism to that
of Rajneesh and others, including Franklin Jones/Adi Da, concluding that,
like them, “in time, as his delusional self-righteousness grows, his project
becomes toxic and dangerous.”95
Despite these publications and the development of related websites crit-
ical of him, Cohen has continued to publish, to teach, and to appear in pub-
lic settings, collaborating frequently with Ken Wilber. Cohen’s Embracing
Heaven and Earth: The Liberation Teachings of Andrew Cohen (2000) features
Ken Wilber’s blurb, “Andrew Cohen is an important voice that needs to be
heard,” and Wilber wrote the foreword to Living Enlightenment: A Call for
Evolution Beyond Ego (2002). In his foreword, Wilber in effect responded
to the criticism of Cohen as abusive, writing that Cohen is a “Rude Boy,”
not a “Nice Guy.” A “Rude Boy” is “not here to console but to shatter, not
to comfort but to demolish;” a Rude Boy will “turn on you in a second and
hold you up for ridicule,” will “make you wish you were never born,” will
“offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror.”96
It is quite interesting to read Wilber’s foreword to Cohen’s Living
Enlightenment juxtaposed with Wilber’s earlier encomia for Jones/Adi Da.
One sees the same enthusiasm and a similar kind of praise. Earlier, Wilber
urged everyone to “confess the Realization that Master Da is”; here, he
extols the “Rude Boy” Cohen, because “Rude Boys are on your case in the
worst way, they breathe fire, eat hot coals, will roast your ass in a scream-
ing second, and fry your ego before you knew what hit it.” Confronted by
a spiritual “Rude Boy,” Wilber concludes, your “self-contraction” [a term
from Jones/Adi Da] may uncoil “in the vast expanse of all space,” and
“your real Self will quietly but surely announce its Presence as it calmly
embraces the entire universe and swallows galaxies whole.”97 A  cynic
might say that Cohen has replaced Jones/Adi Da for Wilber here, but I do
not think that is entirely the case. Rather, all three of them represent mani-
festations of American immediatism.
But clearly Wilber and Cohen are collaborating, and mutual influ-
ence is the result. In Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual
Awakening (2011), which is dedicated to Wilber, Cohen develops his own
take on ideas that Wilber also has been promoting, or as Wilber puts it in
his blurb for the book, given pride of place among the blurbs,

In Evolutionary Enlightenment, Andrew Cohen has given us a com-


pellingly new, important, even profound work on the nature of
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 221

spiritual enlightenment in today’s world. Enlightenment is still


viewed as a nondual realization.. . . But in our time, the relative
domain of Form has discovered itself to be evolving, and a truly
non-dual realization is thus a not-twoness of Timeless Being and
Evolving Becoming. More than an intellectual discussion, this is
a book of practice, of actually how to realize this new Evolutionary
Enlightenment. It is truly one of the most significant books on spir-
ituality written in the postmodern world.

Hence Wilber’s blurb on Cohen’s book summarizes Wilber’s Integralism


while attributing it to Cohen, an interestingly recursive move.
Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment, as the relationship between
Wilber and Cohen would indicate, offers a vision very much akin to
Wilber’s Integralism. Both Wilber and Cohen urge the reader toward
nondual realization and transcendence of the ego, and both embed
this idea in what Cohen asserts is “changing the world from the inside
out.” “My vision,” Cohen tells the reader, “is not some vague utopian
ideal a thousand years away; it’s a new structure in consciousness that
emerges between us, in the most interior dimensions of the cosmos,
in real time, right now.”98 “As it stabilizes, that structure becomes the
ground for new and higher orders of consciousness,” he continues, “a
newly emerging intersubjective enlightenment.”99 This shared nondual
consciousness becomes “the evolving context for a new cultural emer-
gence.”100 Effectively, Cohen’s text is a more general version of what
Wilber is arguing for in his Integral Spirituality—both are urging a
model of evolutionary enlightenment.
In many respects, Cohen is expanding his vision of his community of
followers to a planetary and cosmic level, because he, his collaborators,
and his followers, become

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 language here is quite reminiscent of Wilber’s stages, except that


whereas Wilber’s are specific—red, amber, teal, and so forth—Cohen is
222 America n  G urus

urging us toward a general evolutionary vision of consciousness in which


he, his followers, and Wilber are at the forefront. It is “thrilling,” because
“God is evolving as we evolve.”102
Of course, Cohen’s vision here of evolutionary enlightenment is mil-
lenarian—or New Age. That is, it points us toward a new era of collective
consciousness and, entirely true to New Age works more generally, sug-
gests that this transformed society will come about through a “new path,”
one that does not require long meditation practice or long training under
a teacher recognized by a traditional lineage. Rather, “the empty ground-
less ground of Being” is “always already perfect, fulfilled, and complete.”103
“Before everything that was and before everything that is, I already am,”
Cohen writes, and this is the foundation of “the new evolutionary enlight-
enment.”104 What Cohen has effectively done here is fuse the “always
already” immediatism we saw earlier, and its participatory ethos of shared
consciousness through the guru, with a New Age thesis of conscious evo-
lution through the former two.
In some respects, what we are looking at in all of these figures is a kind
of charismatic and millenarian Great Awakening. Van der Braak describes
the feeling of those early days with Andrew Cohen, back in Totnes, Devon,
in England: “We were united by a deep love for and surrender to Andrew.
We saw ourselves as the latest manifestation of an age-old phenomenon,
like Christ and his disciples, stirring up the religious (in this case Buddhist)
establishment.”105 Van der Braak later remarks on Cohen’s “yearly teach-
ing trips to Israel,” and remarks that “his teachings now seem to become
more Jewish than Buddhist.” “Andrew speaks about creating heaven on
earth.”106 And indeed, that is the language of Evolutionary Enlightenment,
where “Before everything that was and before everything that is, I already
am,” and where “God is evolving as we evolve.” If one is “born again in
the spirit,” one can experience heaven on earth. Cohen is not only a char-
ismatic figure, but at times nearly messianic.
Before we conclude, though, we need to return to the theme of net-
works. We earlier introduced Wilber’s Integral Institute and its related
projects, including an Integral University and an Integral Spiritual Center.
Some names recur in these projects, chief among them Andrew Cohen,
but also a variety of others, some of whom were devotees of Jones/Adi Da,
among them Saniel Bonder. Bonder, as we saw earlier, developed a series
of practices and teachings of his own, but there is one that bears mention
here. He and his wife Linda encourage those who wish to “live a deeply
HEART-Awakened Life Without Having to Master Your Mind and Ego
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 223

First.”107 They do this by “Spontaneous, Non-formulaic Practice,” in par-


ticular, by clients gazing at a photograph of Linda and/or Saniel Bonder,
or at a video of them, being sure to make eye contact with the Bonders.108
It is, in other words, a kind of diluted form of guru-devotion—the same
general idea as the “bees” around the “queen” of Jones/Adi Da, but here
made more nonthreatening and supportive. We might note here that the
Siddha Yoga organization went in a somewhat similar direction, with the
spiritual leader, Gurumayi, giving shaktipat to awaken one’s inner energy
(kundalini) via satellite transmission and uplinks as early as 1989.109 What
connects many of these figures, in other words, is the idea that spiritual
realization is something to be transmitted or shared, rather like “anoint-
ing” in charismatic Christianity.
Another important figure to mention here is Michael Murphy (1930–),
founder of Esalen, though Murphy takes us in a slightly different but related
direction. Murphy was a founding member of Wilber’s Integral Institute,
and Murphy earlier (in the early 1990s) had created an Integralism as
well, “Integral Transformative Practice,” with George Leonard. Ken Wilber
refers to “Integral Transformative Practice” as “synergistic packages” that
“are proving to be the most effective means of human transformation yet
devised.”110 Like Wilber’s later version, the earlier Murphy and Leonard ver-
sion of Integralism produced both a book and a workbook, The Life We Are
Given: A Long-term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart,
and Soul (1995).111 The Leonard/Murphy program includes diet, exercise,
yoga, affirmations, and meditation in order to awaken one’s innate excep-
tional abilities. Like Wilber’s Integralism, Murphy’s and Leonard’s earlier
version draws on practices from various religions and cultures, but is spe-
cifically beholden to none of them.
Michael Murphy is, of course, an influential figure in the human poten-
tial movement of the last half of the twentieth century, not only because
of the role of Esalen as a venue for or a nexus linking to figures we have
encountered earlier, like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Theodore Roszak,
Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and many others. Under Murphy’s
direction, Esalen, a beautiful resort property overlooking the ocean on the
rocky edge of Big Sur, California, became a refuge for burned-out hippies
and for those in flight from various gurus or groups; it became a center
hosting many prominent authors and speakers; it became a center for
body-centered transformative practices like “Rolfing” [a kind of deep mas-
sage]; and it became a place where, in Murphy’s words, “no one captures
the flag.” By this, he meant that Esalen was to be fiercely independent
224 America n  G urus

from all organized religions—no guru or spiritual leader or group was to


become dominant.112
Murphy also has published books that reflect this ethos of spiri-
tual independence. One of these, and the book for which Murphy is
best known, is Golf in the Kingdom (1972), a tale about a kind of golf-
ing shaman-priest figure “Shivas Irons” initiating the reader into a wild
form of nonsectarian mysticism in 1956 Scotland. The sequel to Golf
was The Kingdom of Shivas Irons (1998), which continued Murphy’s fic-
tional explication of nonsectarian mysticism.113 Murphy’s most exten-
sive work of nonfiction is The Future of the Body:  Explorations into the
Future Evolution of Human Nature (1992), a synthesis drawn from a
wide variety of sources, including various branches of science as well as
numerous religious and cultural traditions, to demonstrate that human
beings have the capacity for “uncharted” supernormal powers, if only
they would develop them.
Jeffrey Kripal tells the story of Murphy and of Esalen in Esalen: America
and the Religion of No Religion (2007), a title taken from Frederic Spiegelberg
(1897–1994), author of The Religion of No-Religion (1948). Spiegelberg was
a professor of religion at Stanford who introduced the founders of Esalen,
Murphy and Dick Price, to Asian religions and to Alan Watts. In 1917,
Spiegelberg had had a spontaneous mystical experience, and this in turn
shaped the way he saw and taught religions, emphasizing the outward
forms of confessional religion as “heresy” and the inner mystical life as
“orthodoxy.”114 Speigelberg’s perspective helped shape the development
of Esalen under Price and Murphy—effectively (particularly in Kripal’s
telling) Esalen became a place where Murphy’s spiritually independent,
loosely tantric, evolutionary and New Age philosophy could be realized.
And Esalen was a kind of outlaw region, especially during the psyche-
delic era of the counterculture. Esalen, as a countercultural center, as a
kind of mecca for all kinds of people—celebrities, pioneers of conscious-
ness research, hippies, musicians, the list is rather long—and because it
encouraged consciousness research in particular, was the subject of fed-
eral investigation or observation. Murphy found, with legal consultation,
“that the law protects institutions for being legally responsible for what
goes on in the privacy of, say, a hotel room.” There was a “huge amount
of drug use on the grounds,” but Esalen was very clear about prohibiting
the sale of drugs, and so remained protected by the “innkeeper’s law.”115
Kripal describes the philosophical perspective of Murphy and, by
extension, Esalen, as “hidden radicalism.” Murphy was deeply influenced
The American Guru Enters, Stage Left 225

by the evolutionary mysticism of Sri Aurobindo (with whom Spiegelberg


had experienced darshan in 1949), a mysticism that insisted “on the
basic unity of the transcendent consciousness of brahman” and “the
ever-changing, constantly evolving shakti or occult energy of the human
body, which [Murphy] would later encode in his mystical novels and theo-
rize in his analytic works.”116 “Such a vision,” Kripal continues, “was not
simply a metaphysical union of the Supermind and the universe, of Shiva
and Shakti,” but also was “a potential cultural union of East and West.”117
Murphy insists, Kripal summarizes, that “religious truth changes, that the
divine itself evolves,” and that we human beings are all potentially “super-
heroes” in disguise.118
It is worth noting here that Kripal himself is part of this story as well.
According to Kripal, Murphy has “consistently rejected the antinomian
and sexual methods of the Tantra and of the American counterculture
(which he has often described to me as a kind of left-handed Tantra) and
has opted instead for the more stable ‘right-handed’ metaphysics of medi-
tation and Sri Aurobindo’s writings.”119 But Kripal, a scholar of religion
specializing in Hinduism, wrote the foreword to Jones/Adi Da’s The Knee
of Listening (2004 ed.) describing the author as “a contemporary religious
genius,” and his works as “the most doctrinally thorough, the most philo-
sophically sophisticated,” and “the most creatively original literature cur-
rently available in the English language.”120 In a subsequent article, Kripal
describes Jones/Adi Da and his nondual “Dawn Horse” teachings (par-
ticularly regarding sexuality) as “something prehistoric, literally ‘before
time,’ prior, primordial, sidda, something already perfected, realized,
‘always already the case.’ ”121 And he concludes his article on Jones/Adi Da
by remarking that “the best way to ride the Dawn Horse is to not ride it
at all, but simply to let it appear, to cease being a practitioner, to welcome
its manifestation as if out of nowhere, which, it turns out, is also a kind of
everywhere.”122
And there are other figures who offer immediatist teachings in a
way similar to that of Cohen. For instance, Canadian New Age spiritual
teacher John de Ruiter (1959–) moved from being a Christian (Lutheran)
pastor to being an independent spiritual teacher/guru. De Ruiter began
life as the son of a shoemaker, and did go into that line of work, but
then felt called to the ministry, and there he began to move from con-
ventional ministry to a more mystical, inspired approach, finally leaving
the church to become an unaligned spiritual teacher, at first with meet-
ings in his home in Edmonton, Alberta. De Ruiter said that he had a
226 America n  G urus

spontaneous awakening experience when he was seventeen, and again


later in life, after which he published the book Unveiling Reality.123 From
this point on, he began to give more extensive public teachings, often
by remaining silent and maintaining eye contact with his audience. In
2006, a Canadian sociologist, Paul Joosse, at the University of Alberta,
completed a thesis on de Ruiter’s silent satsang approach, analyzing it
as a way of maintaining charismatic authority over the audience, and
also giving the impression of intimacy.124 De Ruiter developed a center,
the Oasis Edmonton College of Integrated Philosophy, where he teaches
that “the easiest, most effortless, and perfect answer can be known by
all.”125 De Ruiter maintains that he teaches a “direct path to awaken-
ing,” that it is “not necessary to be a seeker,” and that “we should not be
attached to any method of practice.”126 De Ruiter’s immediatism does
resemble the neo-Advaitin gurus discussed in this chapter and in the
conclusion, but it is not clear whether there is any connection other
than shared immediatism.
We could, of course, continue here with more possible examples—for
example, of the former teacher of American Zen Buddhism in the tradi-
tion of Philip Kapleau, Toni Packer, who left formal Buddhism behind
and created a nonsectarian meditation tradition; of Clark Strand, a for-
mer American Zen Buddhist monk and subsequent author of Meditation
Without Gurus and creator of “green meditation,” “the way that nature
prays,” who argues that there is a spontaneous meditative state that we
naturally experience around four in the morning, a primordial or pre-
historic kind of naturally timeless consciousness.127 There are numer-
ous other spiritual teachers who have emerged since publication of The
Book of the Enlightened Masters. We have seen how immediatism, mostly
unaligned with existing religious institutions or organizations, character-
izes the teachings of many of these influential Western gurus or spiritual
teachers. Now we will turn to the phenomenon of widespread immediatist
teachers, for by early in the twenty-first century it was not a case of one
here or there:  as it turns out, there were many dozens, even hundreds
of them.
18

The Immediatist Wave

He is a genial man who looks like a typical grandfatherly retiree or pen-


sioner. He sits in a chair in front of his audience, and he speaks with
conviction, challenging his audience. He tells them that our ordinary
consciousness is dreamlike, and that “the dream we are living has abso-
lutely no purpose.” We only need to wake up, he says, and “that awakening
emerges outside of the dream, outside of time, and is completely beyond
the grasp of individual effort, path, process or belief.”1 He says “enlighten-
ment is a sudden, direct, and energetic illumination that is continuously
available. It is the open secret which reveals itself in every part of our lives.
No effort, path of purification, process or teaching of any kind can take us
there.”2 When audience members ask him questions, he challenges the
notions of personal identity that underlie their words, turning their ques-
tions back upon them. He is one of the first and most influential of what
has become a cultural phenomenon: immediatist spiritual teachers.
Immediatism is a term that I invented to describe this phenomenon,
which sometimes is referred to as “Neo-Advaita,” or “the satsang network.”
But both of the latter terms emphasize the Hindu aspects of the phenom-
enon, and not all of the immediatist spiritual teachers can be described in
that context, even though it is in the background. Although immediatism
comes out of Advaita Vedanta nondualism [the word advaita means liter-
ally “nondual”] and out of particular lines of influential twentieth-century
Hindu gurus, including Ramana Maharshi and Papaji or Poonjaji, the
immediatist spiritual teachers represent a distinct new global religious
phenomenon with many American representatives. These immediatist
gurus simply do not exist in a Hindu cultural context, even if they in some
respects derive from it.
228 America n  G urus

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

True meditation has no direction, goals, or method.. . . True medi-


tation [is] abidance as primordial consciousness.. . . The simple yet
profound question “Who am I?” can then reveal one’s self not to be
the endless tyranny of the ego-personality, but objectless Freedom
of Being—Primordial Consciousness in which all states and all
objects come and go as manifestations of the Eternal Unborn Self
that YOU ARE.11

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

spiritual illumination in the presence of a guru-figure. Their teachings


draw on the self-inquiry tradition represented by Ramana Maharshi, whose
name often recurs in the books and talks and websites of the immediatist
teachers, as well as on the related but disparate currents represented by
Poonjaji, Nissargadatta Maharaj, Ramesh Balsekar, Jean Klein, Rajneesh/
Osho, and Adi Da (Franklin Jones). Steven Bodian reflects on his debt
to some of these figures and to Adyashanti, the immediatist guru who
authorized him to teach, musing that Vedanta and Buddhism are histori-
cally close, and that’s no doubt sometimes true.13 But the two are not the
same. And what the immediatists teach is, as a student of Jean Klein put it,
“you don’t have to do any practices to be who you are.”14 The message that
“there is no path to follow” is appealing to many, of course, but Buddhist
traditions present paths to practice and collections of distinctive tradi-
tions, doctrines, and teachings. The absence of these is, some say, part of
the appeal of immediatism, precisely because it dispenses with them, but
that absence is also exactly what makes immediatism “Buddhistish” rather
than Buddhist.15
Another prominent West Coast immediatist guru is Gangaji, who also
practiced Vipassana, Zen Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism before stay-
ing with Andrew Cohen and then visiting Poonjaji in India, after which
she began to teach in the American satsang style. In her autobiography,
Just Like You (2003), there are only passing references to her Buddhist
practices, and in her book of teachings You Are That (2007), there is little
trace of Buddhism.16 Rather, there are large swaths of the books devoted to
Poonjaji, her Indian guru, and not too surprisingly, the accounts of him
are rather parallel to those of him by Andrew Cohen, with whom Gangaji
also studied and later broke from.
Gangaji teaches very much in the characteristic immediatist style. She
writes, “I do not have anything to teach you. . . . I  am not asking you to
do anything or to get anything new.”17 Rather, she points only to “pure,
pristine consciousness. In this instant, you are in satsang.” “Realization,”
she continues, “is so utterly simple,” and “all striving, all practicing, all
comparing, and all codes are realized as irrelevant in the vastness of this
utter simplicity.”18

I am not attempting to teach you this. There is no way possible to


teach who you are. There is no way possible to learn who you are.
The message I bring is simply that in the heart of awareness, you
recognize without a shadow of a doubt the truth of your own being.
232 America n  G urus

All that is required for that recognition is to pull your attention


back from the usual fixations and preoccupations. Let attention rest
in the truth of satsang, formless and present as the core of being.19

Asked about enlightenment, Gangaji replies “enlightenment is a word


that points to the recognition of totality as self.”20 This definition, like the
title of her book You Are That, appears to derive from or at least alludes to
classical Vedanta.
There are quite a number of other women satsang teachers, among
them Catherine Ingram (1952–), Annette Knopp (1965–), Marlies
Cocheret de la Moriniére (1959–), and Pamela Wilson (1954–). Among
the more well-known of these is Pamela Wilson, who taught “The Sedona
Method”®, an American New Thought course that “consists of a series
of questions you ask yourself that lead your awareness to what you are
feeling in the moment and gently guide you into the experience of letting
go.”21 She then discovered Advaita Vedanta, and began teaching satsang
relatively soon thereafter. She teaches numerous satsangs and retreats, and
in an interview, she said that “if you can hang out with someone who’s rest-
ing, it’s the fastest way home, because everyone else will give you home-
work. In the old days, apparently, people needed homework,” but today
“it’s really all about the deep resting invitation that is a Sage.”22 Hence,
she says, “anything I bring this warm touch or warm gaze to, returns to
its naturalness.”23 What Wilson and, indeed, nearly all of these women
satsang teachers offer may be derived from Vedanta, but it is expressed
through a colloquial, informal, often maternalistic language that seems
pretty far removed from traditional forms of Hinduism.
Another such teacher was Arunachala Ramana (Dee Wayne Trammell,
1929–2010), who said in 1973 that he was directed intuitively to a book-
store in Houston, where he found a purple-colored book bearing a photo
of Ramana Maharshi. Upon seeing the photo, his website informs us
posthumously, he “immediately and directly underwent an instant, radi-
cal spiritual awakening and transformation of his total being.”24 At that
moment, his web hagiography has it, he “experienced everything around
him as if it was floating in an ocean of pure Consciousness that was actu-
ally himself.” And “at that moment he came to the end of his search and
the need for any further seeking.”25 He subsequently visited Muktananda,
the well-known guru, who gave him the name “Ramana.” Trammell/
Ramana died in 2010, and although the community he founded main-
tains a retreat center in North Carolina and an ashram in Tiruvannamalai,
The Immediatist Wave 233

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:

The pace of modern Western society is simply not conducive to


spiritual seeking or practice. Nowadays, people expect quick results
and are unwilling to accept that the gaining of this knowledge is
likely to take a long time and require effort, patience[,]‌and disci-
pline. It is hardly surprising that any method that tells the seeker
that what they seek is already the case is likely to prove popular.36

The fundamental danger, he observes, is that “you may come to believe


that you are enlightened yet remain essentially in ignorance.”37 People in
modernity have come to want and expect “instant results,” and the satsang
immediatists appear to give those results, so they are attractive to a large
audience. But, he concludes, what they offer cannot be recommended for
those who wish to understand and live an authentic Vedantic path.38
Certainly there is a New Age dimension to satsang immediatism. These
teachings are appealing not only because they purport to offer immedi-
ate spiritual gratification, but also because they often are bundled in with
the notion of the collective evolution of consciousness (the essential belief
in a New Age dawning upon us, as a collective evolutionary transforma-
tion, like a wave on which we are carried). The New Age is also appealing
because it does not necessarily require effort or patience or practice on our
part—a New Age is something that happens to us. Hence, for instance,
David Bingham says that “self-realisation is something that is becoming
universally available.” “There’s now an opportunity for consciousness to
reveal itself to itself on a grand scale.”39 Andrew Cohen, as we saw ear-
lier, along with Ken Wilber, also has moved toward an evolutionary and
New Age perspective; the New Age and the notion of the evolution of con-
sciousness is a consistent undercurrent in immediatism, even if it is not
always as visible as it is in the works of Cohen and Wilber.
The Immediatist Wave 235

The Vedantic critiques of immediatism are interesting and often make


more subtle distinctions between kinds or groups of teachers, but there is
also another set of oblique critiques from a different angle. One of these
appears, surprisingly enough, in a book otherwise filled chiefly with inter-
views of various immediatist satsang teachers. An author interviewed in
Conversations on Non-duality is Daniel Brown, who is not in the Hindu or
satsang movement at all, but rather did his Ph.D. on the Tibetan Buddhist
meditation tradition called Mahamudra, serves as a clinical professor of
psychology at Harvard Medical School, and, among other books, published
Pointing Out the Great Way:  The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra
Tradition (2006).
Brown points out that according to Tibetan Mahamudra tradition, there
are stages of awakening, beginning with opening “up to a level of aware-
ness that I like to translate as ‘ever-present awareness.’ It can’t come and
go because it’s not interfered with by time; it’s always right here; and it’s
vast.” This level is sometimes translated as “storehouse consciousness.”40
“That’s a profound state,” Brown continues, “but it’s not awakening, it’s
a precursor to that.” “There’s a whole other set of instructions that one
would need, to go from non-duality to awakening to the Buddha bodies,
full enlightenment.”41 The interlocutor then remarks “Quite a few of the
people who are in a nondual state will say that there’s no one to move for-
ward to wherever. They say there is no self.” “That may be,” Brown replies,
“that they have understood something of the emptiness of self, and they
may also have non-duality. But there are still operations of consciousness
that need to be addressed with certain kinds of instructions that will lead
to awakening. That’s where the relationship and the teachers come in.”42
And, he points out, one needs a foundation in compassion. Without that,
full enlightenment isn’t possible.43
What makes Brown especially interesting is that he offers a particu-
lar Tibetan Buddhist traditional perspective on the stages of Mahamudra
meditation, but he also acknowledges related aspects of Vedanta and, by
implication, some of the immediatists as well. What Brown presents is
not a perennialist approach, since he distinguishes between and does
not conflate these related but distinct traditions.44 Instead, he offers a
broader Buddhist understanding of what enlightenment is, according
to the gradual path of stages, while at the same time recognizing the
direct path of “pointing out” instructions in Tibetan Buddhism, without
directly engaging or critiquing the immediatists whose work we’ve been
considering here.
236 America n  G urus

Immediatist gurus are quite an interesting phenomenon, which one


could perceive from a variety of angles. They can be seen as a religious
response to a consumerist society that emphasizes instant gratification,
commodifying a promise of immediate enlightenment without effort; they
could be seen as part of an American tradition of snake oil salesmen; and
they can be seen as misguided or as misleading. But I do not think such
dismissals do entire justice to the phenomenon here. Brown’s approach
seems to me more productive, because he presents definitions, stages,
and context for meditation practices and consciousness transformation
and awakening, within which one can understand particular claims of
enlightenment and particular teaching approaches. After all, there are
very sophisticated meditation traditions that have been developed over
millennia, and it would certainly be wise to allow them to provide a larger
context for contemporary claims or teachings. In our conclusion, we will
further explore different ways of understanding American immediatism,
and seek to understand more broadly divergent interpretations of these
new religious phenomena, because we still have to engage some of the
larger questions that this phenomenon raises. We will address some of
the larger significances of American immediatism as outlaw religion in
our final chapter.
19

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

to master the teachings, as they have been carefully handed down


in the various spiritual traditions. This implies that the modern
New Age craze[,]‌far from being a viable teaching[,] is [one] of the
West’s symptom[s] of spiritual decline. It is an impatient, individu-
alistic ideology that plunders the world’s authentic spiritual tradi-
tions to assemble an “instant” path to a counterfeit enlightenment
that confuses bliss with pleasure, self-transformation with being a
self-made success, and hard-won spiritual riches with quickly got-
ten material wealth.1

This is a powerful indictment of many and perhaps all of the figures he


discusses, which also could be seen as extended to all modern forms of
“instant nirvana” immediatism. 2 Is this sweeping indictment correct, and
if so, what are its implications?
It is self-evident, but needs to be said, that although these forms of
immediatism share the insistence that direct spiritual realization is possible
238 America n  G urus

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

There are, of course, different ways to think about the “mainstreaming”


of immediatism in the latter half of the twentieth century, which is what
we have seen in our survey. One interpretation is that what we are seeing
is largely a cynical opportunism, a kind of spiritual materialism exempli-
fied by Rajneesh, who, scholar Hugh Urban argues, was consummately
successful at commodifying an instant spirituality, complete with the
frisson of sexual license. Urban points out that Rajneesh’s US operation,
based in Oregon, was able to bring in an estimated $120 million in just a
few years, indeed a remarkable sum.4 An expanded version of this argu-
ment could extend to other Western immediatist gurus, who, the cynic
might say, are effectively spiritual confidence men. A  related argument
would label the immediatist guru an outright charlatan or fraud, as Jeffrey
Masson concluded regarding Paul Brunton in My Father’s Guru (1993),
and as some others concluded regarding Rajneesh, Jones/Adi Da, and var-
ious self-declared gurus.5 And related is the perspective of someone like
R. C. Zaehner, who came to regard Asian-religion-derived contemporary
nondualism as leading more or less inexorably to antinomianism, immo-
rality, and social dissolution.6
Another, less jaundiced perspective would be that the immediatist
guru is not necessarily a charlatan or fraud, or a confidence man, but
rather has bowdlerized or bastardized a spiritual tradition or traditions, yet
nonetheless may have something to offer some devotees. There are two
directions such a case could go:  that the immediatist guru bowdlerized
the tradition in good faith, so to speak—“meaning well”—or that it was a
knowing or deliberate bowdlerization. A version of this view came from a
colleague at another institution when I was writing this book, a specialist
in Hinduism, who, upon hearing that I was including Jones/Adi Da, said
“he never would have been accepted as genuine in India.” In this inter-
pretation, the guru is somewhere between a confidence man, a showman,
and someone who might have offered some spiritual benefit nonetheless.7
Often those who come to this kind of conclusion have left the guru and/
or group, and in looking back, do not want to dismiss entirely their five or
ten or fifteen years of devotion.8
Still another perspective is to regard some of these figures as offering
some real insights, or as describing more or less authentic spiritual teach-
ings, but in a popularized form that inherently makes what is actually
on offer distorted and potentially even harmful. For instance, in Tibetan
Buddhism, there are restrictions regarding who can or should hear certain
kinds of teachings. Often, certain kinds of teachings, for instance, in the
240 America n  G urus

Mahamudra or Dzogchen traditions, are not open to a general public; they


are open to those who have become somewhat established in the tradition,
and have engaged in preliminary practices. The reason typically given is
that hearing such teachings without preparation might be harmful or at
least not beneficial. But some authors, notably Ken Wilber, give out their
own form of “emptiness” teachings in books; and according to Tibetan
Buddhist tradition, this may not be beneficial for all readers.
Then there are distinctions between the phenomena or states that dif-
ferent immediatist gurus assert or urge followers toward. In this inter-
pretation, the type of consciousness that this or that figure claims may be
valid so far as it goes, but is not necessarily complete or high enough. We
see this in a variety of ways. In the mid-1980s, representatives of Laughing
Man magazine—a Jones/Adi Da outreach publication during the Da Free
John period—went to visit Bernadette Roberts. They sought to “rank” her
on their seven-stage scale, whereas she in turn, after consulting books
by “Mr. Free John” that they left with her, concluded that he, for his part,
had not gotten to “infinite Divine space,” and that in fact “all other paths”
than that of Jesus Christ “stop short of ultimate Truth.”9 Roberts does not
dismiss “Mr. Free John” out of hand, but rather says that he simply hasn’t
gotten to “the turning point” and the “no-self event.”
Sometimes, of course, this kind of mutual spiritual ranking or
assessment is in fact a circular self-validation. For instance, Ken Wilber
sometimes responds to critics by saying that they do not have sufficient
“altitude” to understand what he is saying, or that they do not understand
his system properly; if they did, they wouldn’t be critical.10 Someone on a
“third tier” is not comprehensible to someone who is only at a “first tier,”
or someone who is “indigo” is beyond someone who is at a “green” stage.”
Hence, Wouter Hanegraaff offered the critique that “[a]‌ll psychological
and spiritual perspectives developed in the history of humanity are neatly
assigned their proper place somewhere within a comprehensive hierar-
chy, but Wilber’s own perspective is located at the very top of the pyramid
or even beyond, and it is from that supreme position that the rules of the
game are established.”11
Then there is the possible interpretation that, in at least some cases,
these different figures have come to a similar understanding of truth,
but there is no sustained way to realize it via immediatism. And it is
the case that immediatism by its very nature—typically dismissing tra-
ditional modes of practice, and asserting immediate direct individual
spiritual knowledge in the present moment, as for instance Eckhart Tolle
Conclusions 241

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

the postmodern battle against [authentic] philosophy. . . is a sheer


parody of the true deconstruction of error by means of the elenchus.
Being thoroughly parasitic, it involves an element of ruse and dis-
simulation in an attempt to shake the philosopher’s confidence in
reason—but instead of leading to the reason-transcending noetic
unity, it invokes a Typhonian fragmentation, partiality, dissolution,
alienation, simulation, “otherness”. . . and nonbeing.14

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

Immediatism is fundamentally individualistic, even though some of


its adherents dream of new societies and cultures. As an institutionally
unsanctioned, outlaw religion, it is not surprising that immediatism has
thrived in the United States, especially in the American West. Although
I did not approach this book under the assumption that immediatism is
especially American, long study of the subject suggests that there really
is a deep connection between immediatism and American culture—that
immediatism recurs in an American context, just as does the trope of the
American Adam, or American Eden.18
In some respects, American immediatist gurus resemble American
evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes being “born again.” Like
“enlightenment” for immediatists, being “born again” happens spon-
taneously, mysteriously, as grace, and in both cases, there is a celebra-
tory culture that is built around a communal affirmation of the devotees’
immediate spiritual gratification. Further, “born-again” preachers have a
celebrity culture and amass sometimes megachurch and television fol-
lowings, while immediatist gurus also often have large followings, online
videos, “channels,” and the like. In both cases, a “celebrity culture” pre-
vails; and in both cases, one finds that the celebrity religious figure may
fall from public grace through scandal, only to be recuperated. And the
celebrity guru or preacher may accrue considerable, even ostentatious
wealth. These two apparently compatible groups have more than a little
in common.
There are diverse political implications for immediatism, because
whereas many of the immediatist spiritual teachers or gurus are accused of
being authoritarian, some of their writings and teachings suggest visions
of decentralized future cultures. Stephen Gaskin was certainly a charis-
matic leader in the hippie community of the late 1960s and 1970s, and his
vision for the future is unambiguously democratic and constitutionalist.19
Andrew Cohen’s vision, like that of Ken Wilber, is a bit more difficult to
characterize, as is that of Jones/Adi Da. These figures are often accused of
being authoritarian, and certainly in some cases are guru-centric and have
produced guru-centric communities.
Yet when we think about the political implications of Western
guru-figures, authoritarianism is not necessarily the natural consequence.
In fact, the logical result of immediatism would seem to be what we might
term “enlightened individualism”—that is, if immediatism is based in
the idea of direct spiritual knowledge or illumination, in principle acces-
sible to everyone, then a democratic, shared communal spirit would be
244 America n  G urus

a natural result. The political outcome of immediatism, in other words,


on its own terms at least, ought to be not authoritarianism, but rather a
shared or communal spirit, and decentralized communities based on an
ethos of altruism. Indeed, a number of such communities emerged in our
narrative, from Brook Farm to Alcott’s Fruitlands to The Farm, as well as
numerous other communal experiments during the 1970s and after, some
immediatist, some not.
This brings us to a related issue, one that came up more than once in
critiques of the more dramatic cases of immediatist gurus. And that is the
role of kindness or compassion toward others, after all presumably part
of any enduring community. Some critics of this or that contemporary
Western guru-figure have remarked, on reflection, that their former guru
never seemed to show very much compassion for them or for others, or
that their former guru was egotistical or narcissistic.20 And in fact, when
we look at the immediatist literature we have surveyed in this book, rela-
tively little of it (with the notable exception of Ram Dass’s work) refers
directly to compassion or to the importance of compassion in religious
practice; and in some cases the guru’s apparently abusive or authoritarian
behavior seems—despite apologetics defending “crazy wisdom” or “rude
boy” behavior—less than compassionate, to put it mildly. Appearances can
be deceiving, it is true.
But in Mahayana Buddhism, insight and compassion are said to be ulti-
mately one: if the fundamental insight of Buddhism is anatman, or no-self,
that is, emptiness or sunyata, the expression of that insight through wis-
dom is at the same time compassion for others. The Prajnaparamita Sutra
begins with Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, meditating
on the Perfection of Wisdom, and asserting that form is emptiness, and
emptiness is form. Compassion, wisdom, and emptiness are united in this
essential Mahayana Buddhist sutra. “Compassion is Mahayana Buddhism,
and Mahayana Buddhism is compassion,” the Mahaparinirvana Sutra
has it.21
And there is more that may be relevant here. In Tibetan Buddhism
there is an admonition—repeated in some ritual texts—that “those who
know emptiness are careful.” A story related to the meaning of this phrase
is well-known—it is that of an individual who misunderstood Buddhist
teaching on emptiness as nihilism, who ultimately became a demon
responsible for much suffering because his behavior was so wantonly
destructive, and who was ultimately tamed by one of the wrathful deities
in Vajrayana Buddhism.22 The point of this story is that Buddhism teaches
Conclusions 245

it is possible to go astray if one is not careful, and that an absence of com-


passion (which the figure of the rudra-demon symbolizes) indicates such
a mistaken course, but that there are also skillful means to correct one’s
course, so to speak.
Some scholars have sought to divorce mystical insight from ethics,
but as it turns out, this is a perspective frequently characteristic of the
immediatist movement itself.23 It is a perspective implied by the life of a
figure like Adi Da, who claims to be the world’s most enlightened being,
but whose reputation is one of abusive behavior; and this apparent cogni-
tive dissonance is also found in extreme immediatism more broadly. For
instance, Tony Parsons writes in As It Is, “There is no longer any question
of right or wrong at all. It is seen that the apparent separate entity is only
a dreamed character in a novel that is being lived through by the divine
energy, which is all there is.” Asked how one knows what is right and
wrong, he replies “You will not know and neither have you ever known.”24
Parsons thus expresses classic antinomianism, the claimed supercession
of ethics, and it is how many of the scandals in the guru circuit come
about: the guru-figure claims illumination, which puts him/her in a dif-
ferent category than others, followed sooner or later by an assumed license
to ignore conventional ethics.25 What is lacking, in virtually all such cases,
is compassion, basic human kindness.
This seems to be more or less the conclusion of Georg Feuerstein, who
in the later edition of his book Holy Madness—on “crazy wisdom” gurus
(including some of the immediatists we have looked at here)—tells us
that he became a practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism, and that this tradi-
tion offers “the most sophisticated understanding of these important mat-
ters [concerning enlightenment].”26 After a brief overview of some Tibetan
Buddhist teachings regarding enlightenment, he concludes that “we are
entitled to remain skeptical about teachers who claim to have become
‘enlightened’ overnight and show none of the overwhelming signs of
mastery talked about in Anuttara-Yoga and other advanced approaches of
Yoga.”27 But he does not condemn his “crazy wisdom” teacher(s) either.
Lama Surya Das also wrote critically about immediatism:

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

amuse myself, I  think of this pernicious already-enlightened as


Premature Immaculation. When an American once asked, Zen
master Suzuki Roshi said: “yes, we are all perfect, and we can keep
perfecting ourselves forever.” Another time he said: “Yes, it’s true
that everything is perfect as it is and we are perfect as we are, but we
could still use a little tweaking.” Thus have I heard.28

The term “premature immaculation” certainly is memorable. In American


Veda, Philip Goldberg summarizes criticism of neo-Advaitin extreme non-
dualist immediatism as an attempt to “squeeze the square pegs of relativ-
ity into the round hole of absolute unity,” which “has had unfortunate
consequences.” In effect, immediatist gurus say, “you’re already enlight-
ened, so stop with the striving and the seeking, and just snap out of it!”
But “hearing such statements, seekers often eschew practices that might
actually facilitate their realization.”29 Of course, not all of the immediatists
in this book belong to the broad category of neo-Advaitin Hinduism.
Still, when we survey the guru-figures we have considered in this book,
almost all of them do belong (broadly speaking) to the Hindu religious
family, and the concepts of enlightenment we see in figures like Jones/
Adi Da, Cohen, and others often reflect the Hindu concept of atman (self)
as transcendent, rather than the Buddhist concept of enlightenment deriv-
ing from realization of anatman (no-self). This is a significant distinction,
which we see exemplified in a recent autobiographical account by Robert
K. C. Forman, called Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be (2011).
In this book, Forman discusses his spiritual experiences as a practitioner
of Transcendental Meditation who was taught by its founder, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi himself. Forman describes “enlightenment” in that tradi-
tion as “witnessing,” because in it, “silent consciousness” “is experienced
as wholly separate from activity.”30 His own experience of spiritual illu-
mination comes spontaneously, and is distinctly dual. He experiences “a
moving, thinking, feeling, embodied thing, a Robert if you like,” and he
experiences “an unmoving, witnessing, unchanging conscious thing, an
‘It.’ ”31 One sees a similar dualism in works by scholar-practitioners who
identify more with the Hindu family of religions.32 But contemporary
American extreme immediatist nondualism also derives from Hinduism.
Bernadette Roberts, the California Catholic mystic whose work bears
some similarities to Buddhism, asserts that most contemporary New Age
and American guru figures derive from an amalgam of Western psychol-
ogy and Advaita Vedanta. “You can hardly talk to anyone who has not
Conclusions 247

already bought into this popular way of thinking,. . . a combination of


Western psychology” and Hinduism’s “Advaita belief system,” she writes.33
The advantage of this paradigm, Roberts thinks, is that it means people do
not have to “deal with any ‘Transcendent,’ ” because “self turns out to be
the Transcendent.” In short, she alleges, “this new spirituality boils down
to a focus on self alone.”34 Certainly not all of the figures we have looked
at are the same, but Roberts’s larger point is still worth keeping in mind.
The kinds of enlightenment accounts and claims we have discussed
in this book do differ from what we see in Buddhism, where the empha-
sis is consistently on emptiness, or shunyata, and on compassion. The
foundational insight of Buddhism is that there is no permanent or endur-
ing self (anatman), and in Mahayana Buddhism, this insight is expanded
to include the recognition that the world or phenomena also is empty (a
recognition implicit already in the Buddhist concept of dependent origina-
tion, that all phenomena derive from chains or concatenations of interde-
pendent causes and effects). In Buddhism, one also finds a classification
of bhumis, or levels of absorption and awakening insight, with particular
attributes for each ascending or deepening level. And Buddhism empha-
sizes the unity of wisdom and compassion. My point here is that enlight-
enment in Buddhist tradition, broadly speaking, does not look identical to
many of the enlightenment concepts, accounts, or claims we have seen in
this book.
An apocryphal story from Kathmandu, Nepal, is relevant to this ques-
tion: one of the American immediatist gurus discussed in this book is said
to have been in Nepal visiting various Buddhist and Hindu teachers in order
that they confirm his claim of enlightenment. It had happened that the
guru-to-be had broken his arm in an accident just before his trip to Nepal,
and so his arm was in a sling when he went to visit a Tibetan Buddhist
teacher in a Nepalese monastery. In his audience with the teacher, who is
well-known for his unpredictability, the American guru-to-be announced
his enlightenment, upon which the Tibetan Buddhist teacher reached out
and smacked his broken arm, and he cried out. “You can come back and
talk about your enlightenment when you don’t feel pain when you’re hit,”
the Tibetan Buddhist teacher is reported to have said.
It is possible that from a grand perspective, what we are looking at in
the emergence of independent Western spiritual teachers is a broader and
growing phenomenon that, even if it presents some culs de sac, none-
theless also may represent the emergence of something larger than its
individual representatives and their works or communities. For, to put it
248 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

there is a real phenomenon here, without passing explicit judgment. Its


significances are still to be explored.
The West is still in the midst of coming to terms, not only with the
advent of Asian religions in the West, but also with their assimilation.
Certainly immediatism is part of that process, but as we have seen, imme-
diatism also arguably has roots in the West itself, in the Platonic tradi-
tion to be sure, and also in classical Christian mysticism. It may well be
that, as Asian religions and, in particular, Vajrayana Buddhism become
more deeply rooted in the West, there will emerge new forms of “outlaw
religion” that more accurately and completely continue, for instance, the
full Buddhist tradition while at the same time acknowledging and even
drawing from the deep roots of the West as well. For certain, the American
religious outlaws we have surveyed here will not be the last—without
doubt, there will be more immediatist literature. Perhaps our challenge is,
and will continue to be, compassionately and wisely discerning the wheat
from the chaff.
Notes

C h a p t er   1

1. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato: New


World, 1999); Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth:  Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
(New York: Plume, 2006).
2. I realize that Tolle was not born in North America, but nonetheless, like
Krishnamurti, that is where his work became popular and where he located him-
self much of the time. For the most part, though, in this book I concentrate on
American-born gurus. In particularly instructive cases, I include proto-gurus or
gurus who were not American-born but American-located.
3. Andrew Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters:  Western Teachers in
Eastern Traditions (Chicago: Open Court, 1997).
4. Originally, I intended to use the term “primordialism” in this book, but for vari-
ous reasons, I decided against it, concluding that by and large, the term “imme-
diatism” is more appropriate because it emphasizes more clearly the rejection
of practice and training. “Primordialism,” in this context a metaphysical term,
in English is relatively recent, first appearing in the middle of the nineteenth
century in scientific literature. The word “primordial” can be traced back at least
to the late fourteenth century. See The Oxford English Dictionary, “primordial.”
“Primordialism” is sometimes understood in a narrow way as referring to a the-
ory of linguistic and cultural “natural growth,” according to which ethno-cultural
groups are envisaged as having developed their own particularities as a natural
process (Naturwüchsigkeit). Such a notion is much narrower than what I would
mean by the term, though it could be related, for both usages have their Western
origins, not in the works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Johann
Gottfried Fichte (1762–1814), but rather much earlier, in the schools of Pythagoras
and Plato. “Immediatism” entails claims of immediate spiritual illumination or
252 Notes

liberation without relation to praxis; “primordialism,” by contrast, connotes a


metaphysics of primordial reality, which does not necessarily entail immediatism.
5. See Harold Bloom, The American Religion:  The Emergence of the Post-Christian
Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), and Omens of the Millennium: The
Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead, 1997).
6. As regards Jonasian “Gnosticism” and its misuses, see Arthur Versluis, The New
Inquisitions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); see also Arthur Versluis,
The Mystical State:  Politics, Gnosis, and Emergent Cultures (Minneapolis:  New
Cultures, 2011), 15–24.
7. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Chapter 8, “Prospects” (Boston: 1836).
8. There is a related, if antipathetic, current in Western American literature, for
instance in the works of Cormac McCarthy (1933–), arguably the finest American
novelist of the twentieth century. McCarthy’s fiction is stark, grim, and fatalistic;
it resembles or reflects the pitiless American Southwestern desert where much
of it is set. McCarthy’s characters do not seem to exist in a Christian cosmos,
and of one memorable character in Blood Meridian, Judge Holden, a huge albino
murderer, we read:
Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum,
nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he
would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling
of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore
of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring
to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia
will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his
commencing.
See Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West
(New York: Random House, 1985), 309–310.
The book begins with the rejection of monotheism, as Holden ejects a preacher
as a fraud. The Judge is indeed a memorable literary figure closest to Melville’s
Ahab, but unlike Ahab, seems to be more than human, frighteningly primeval
rather than primordial, “standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun
like some great balden archimandrite.” See McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 272–273.
In McCarthy’s fiction, as in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, nature and man
largely are represented as ruthless, and illumination is momentary, individual,
and aesthetic, but theirs is a cold aestheticism, in some respects not entirely
human; and nature is not the nurturing and friendly pastoral realm of some eco-
logical writers, but pitiless and harsh. Man kills man with impunity, just as man
kills animals, or again animals kill man. It is an unforgiving world that we see in
McCarthy’s fiction and to a lesser extent in Jeffers’s poetry; both authors present
literary worlds that we might term “primeval” rather than primordial—character-
ized by moments of beauty or lyricism, but also by fatalism and an undertow of
Notes 253

suffering, with release by annihilation. McCarthy and Jeffers represent a persis-


tent strain in American literature that may have a relationship to immediatism
akin to that Melville had to Emerson—providing a harsh and sometimes harshly
critical alternative.
Primevalism, if we may call it that, is highly skeptical of modernity, but not
for romantic reasons—for instance, that civilization corrupts our better nature—
but because the primevalists’ view of humanity is like the primevalists’ view of
nature. In their view, this world is characterized by pain and suffering and by
moments of illumination, by both good and evil—and what these authors offer
is a bleak acknowledgement of the truths of our existence. There is an austere
beauty in primevalist literature that deserves a study of its own, and central to
this investigation would certainly be Herman Melville’s and Cormac McCarthy’s
fiction. But we are not going to go down that side road in this book. Our focus
here will remain on immediatism and its implications. See Arthur Versluis, The
Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), for a detailed discussion of Melville and Gnosticism. An initial start on
such a discussion concerning McCarthy’s work is to be found in Wade Hall and
Rick Wallach, Sacred Violence (El Paso: Texas Western, 2002), in particular, Rick
Wallach, “Judge Holden, Blood Meridian’s Evil Archon,” 1–14. See also 143–158.
9. See Philip Goldberg, American Veda:  From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga
and Meditation (New York: Harmony, 2010), Thomas Forsthoefel and Cynthia
Humes, eds., Gurus in America (Albany:  State University of New  York Press,
2005), Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America:  Hindu-inspired Meditation
Movements in America (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2010), and
Leigh Schmidt, Restless in America:  The Making of American Spirituality (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). See also Catherine Albanese, A Republic
of Mind and Spirit:  A  Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), and Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen: American and
the Religion of No Religion, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and
The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007). See also “Remembering Ourselves:  On Some
Countercultural Echoes of Contemporary Tantric Studies,” in Religions of South
Asia, 1(2007)1: 11–28.
10. See Jan Assmann, Robert Savage, trs., The Price of Monotheism (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3–4.
11. See Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions (New  York:  Oxford University
Press, 2006).
12. See Gilles Quispel, Gnosis: De Derde Component Van De Europese Cultuurtraditie
(Utrecht:  HES, 1988). For a discussion of Quispel’s work, see Wouter
Hanegraaff, “Reason, Faith, and Gnosis:  Potentials and Problematics of a
Typological Construct,” in Peter Muesberger, et  al., eds., Clashes of Knowledge
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2008): 133–144.
254 Notes

13. What is described here seems akin to wang or “empowerment” in Tibetan


Buddhism in some respects, and to darshan in Hinduism. There is a guru/dis-
ciple relationship in all of these traditions; and it is interesting to consider the
idea that in Hermetism, one had something analogous to these Asian gnostic
religious traditions. This is particularly interesting because Hermetism is some-
times (wrongly, in my opinion) labeled “cosmotheistic.” I do not think this kind
of terminology is very helpful. See Jan Assman, The Price of Monotheism, 73–75.
14. See Plotinus, Enneads, V.5.8, A.H. Armstrong trs. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984), V.179 ff.
15. See Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, [vol. II], D. Runia and M. Share,
trs., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), I.302.16–25.
16. See Emilie Kutash, The Ten Gifts of the Demiurge: Proclus’s Commentary on Plato’s
Timaeus (London: Bristol Academic Press, 2011), 214.
17. See Damascius, Sara Rappe, trs., Problems and Solutions Concerning First
Principles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 278.
18. Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, VII.ix.
19. See Arthur Versluis, Theosophia:  Hidden Dimensions of Christianity (Hudson,
N.Y.: Lindisfarne, 1994).
20. See Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions:  Heretic-hunting and the Intellectual
Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

C h a p t er   2

1. See Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Fox,


1904), Letter 3; see also Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Blom,
1925), 163–167, in particular, 166.
2. See Orestes Brownson, The Works of Orestes Brownson, Henry Brownson, ed.
(Detroit: T. Nourse, 1881–1887/1898), 20 vols., in particular, “Transcendentalism,
or Latest Form of Infidelity,” (Brownson’s Quarterly Review, July 1845), and
“Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism,” (Brownson’s Quarterly Review, July
1846), [Works, VI.113].
3. See Sydney Ahlstrom, An American Reformation:  A  Documentary History of
Unitarian Christianity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 7.
4. See, for instance, Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings [1744] vol. 11, and
Miscellanies [1740]: Entries 1153–1160, vol. 23, in WJE online, http://edwards.yale.
edu
5. See George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards:  A  Life (New Haven:  Yale University
Press, 2004), 93–94.
6. Marsden, 94.
7. See The Works of Jonathan Edwards, http://edwards.yale.edu, vol. 16, 793–794.
8. See Kathleen Raine, “Thomas Taylor, Plato, and the English Romantic Movement,”
British Journal of Aesthetics, 8(1968)2: 99–123.
Notes 255

9. Raine, “Thomas Taylor,” 99.


10. Joseph Torrey, The Remains of the Reverend James Marsh (Boston: Crocker and
Brewster, 1843/1845), 2nd ed., 25.
11. Charles Andrew Huntington, The University of Vermont Fifty Years Ago, 17,
cited in Roland Wells, Three Christian Transcendentalists (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1943), 16.
12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, James Marsh, ed. (Burlington,
Vt.: Chauncey Goodrich, 1829), 320–321.
13. Ibid, 317n.
14. Ibid, 530.
15. Ibid., 317. See, on Marsh’s Platonism, Select Practical Theology of the Seventeenth
Century, James Marsh, ed. (Burlington, Vt.:  Chauncey Goodrich, 1830). On
his relation to religious creeds and doctrines, see “Evils of Creeds,” Christian
Palladium, Extra No. 2, 1841, n.p.

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

1. See Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England


(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 107–108.
2. See Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism:  A  History (New  York:  Hill and
Wang, 2007), 86, 91, 303. The mention of Plato’s influence on Alcott is repeated
on 303, without elaboration.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), I.7.
4. Emerson, Nature, I.8–9.
5. Emerson, Nature, I.10.
6. Emerson, Nature, I.10.
7. Emerson, Nature, I.13–14
8. Emerson, Nature, I.15.
9. Emerson, Nature, I.17.
10. Emerson, Nature, I.30.
Notes 257

11. Emerson, Nature, I.36.


12. Emerson, Nature, I.38.
13. Emerson, Nature, I.38.
14. Emerson, Nature, I.39–40.
15. The “Orphic poet” may be an alter ego of Emerson, but it seems more likely,
given that these passages are in quotation marks, that the poet is, in part, Alcott.
16. Emerson, Nature, I.43.
17. Emerson, Nature, I.45.
18. Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, II.27.
19. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.40.
20. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.41.
21. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.81.
22. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.82.
23. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.96.
24. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.160–161.
25. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.160.
26. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.163.
27. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.170.
28. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.193.
29. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.194.
30. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.196.
31. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.203–204.
32. Emerson, Essays: First Series, II.204–205.
33. The earliest usage of “esoteric” is the Pythagorean distinction between the inner
disciples and those belong to the exoteric or outer circle.
34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, III.3–4.
35. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.9.
36. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.15.
37. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.16.
38. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.17.
39. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.113.
40. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.114.
41. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.157.
42. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.157.
43. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, III.165.
44. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, H.  G. Callaway, ed. (Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America, 2006), xxvii.
45. Emerson, Conduct., 33.
46. See Carl F. Strauch, “Emerson’s Sacred Science,” PMLA, 73(June 1958)3: 237–350.
47. Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 23.
48. Emerson, Conduct., 23.
49. Emerson, Conduct., 24.
258 Notes

50. Emerson, Conduct., 47, 51.


51. Emerson, Conduct., 55.
52. Emerson, Conduct., 61.
53. Emerson, Conduct., 61.
54. Emerson, Conduct., 125.
55. Emerson, Conduct., 126.
56. Emerson, Conduct., 127.
57. Emerson, Conduct., 149.
58. Emerson, Conduct., 144.
59. Emerson, Conduct., 144.
60. Emerson, Conduct., 152.
61. Emerson, Conduct., 162.
62. Emerson, Conduct., 162.
63. See Alexander Wilder, “Emerson as a Philosopher,” in Raymond Bridgman, ed.,
Concord Lectures in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Moses King, 1883), 71.
64. See Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England

(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 107–108.
65. Brooks, Transcendentalism, 107.
66. Brooks, Transcendentalism, 119.
67. Brooks, Transcendentalism, 123–124.
68. Brooks, Transcendentalism, 124.
69. Brooks, Transcendentalism, 125.
70. See, for instance, William Major and Bryan Sinche, “Giving Emerson the Boot,”
in The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 17, 2010), http://chronicle.com/
article/Giving-Emerson-the-Boot/63512/, where two professors of English
attempt to expel Emerson from the American collegiate curriculum.

C h a p t er   5

1. See Raymond Bridgman, ed., Concord Lectures on Philosophy (Cambridge,


Mass.: Moses King, 1883), 9–12.
2. Concord Lectures on Philosophy, 71. Wilder alludes to Emerson’s poem “Brahma”
here, acknowledging that Emerson’s Platonism has an Asian aspect or influence
as well.
3. See Concord Lectures (1883), 148–149.
4. See Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Lectures on Literature and Philosophy, Kenneth
Cameron, ed. (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental, 1975), 26–38.
5. Sanborn, Lectures, 26.
6. Sanborn, Lectures, 105.
7. Sanborn, Lectures, 105.
8. See Concord Lectures, (1883), 12.
Notes 259

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

Transcendentalists (New  York:  1943). On the Cambridge Platonists, see C.  A.


Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists (London:  Arnold, 1969). On the influence
of Neoplatonism on Blake and on Romanticism more generally, see Kathleen
Raine, Blake and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
21. See Arthur Versluis, Ex Oriente Lux: American Transcendentalism and the Orient,
op. cit., passim.
22. On The Platonist’s masthead was a quotation from William Archer Butler:
“Platonism is immortal, because its principles are immortal in the human
intellect and heart.” My earlier quotation from The Platonist is from Johnson’s
introductory statement reprinted in all early issues of the journal, and also rep-
resents a direct challenge to “this degenerated age.” His journal is “a candid,
bold, and fearless exponent of the Platonic philosophy—a philosophy totally
subversive of sensualism, materialism, folly, and ignorance.” See The Platonist,
I.i.1.
23. See on Boehmean mysticism, Robin Waterfield, Jacob Boehme, Essential Readings
(Wellingborough: Thorson’s, 1989); see also Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, C. J.
Barker, ed., 2  vols. (Watkins:  London, 1924, 1947). The standard editions of
Boehme’s work in German are Samtliche Schriften Faksimile, W. E. Peuckert, ed.,
11 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Frommanns, 1986), and Die Urschriften, Werner
Buddecke, ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Frommanns, 1963–1966). There
is no complete translation of Boehme’s work into English, save that attributed to
William Law, The Works of Jacob Behmen,. . . (London: M. Richardson, 1764–1781).
24. See Frederick Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott, An Intellectual Biography
(Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 289.
25. Ibid., 288 ff., 314 ff.
26. Moncure Conway, Autobiography, I.152–153 One suspects the evolutionism

Conway saw in Emerson was in large part Conway’s own. See my discussion of
Conway’s “earthward pilgrimage” in Ex Oriente Lux: American Transcendentalism
and the Orient, op. cit.
27. Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press,
1958), 3.
28. See Alcott, Journals, 46 (1871):  261–262, 416, quoted by Dahlstrand, op. cit.,
314–315.
29. See Odell Shepherd, Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1938), 481.
30. Shepherd, 481.
31. Denton Snider, A Writer of Books (St. Louis: Sigma, 1910) 341–343.
32. See A Mechanic’s Diary, (Washington, D.C.: E. C. Brokmeyer, 1910), 229–230.
33. Ibid., 230.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 233. In A Mechanic’s Diary, we get a sense of what it must have been like to
confront an intellect like Brokmeyer’s. While Brokmeyer tends to ramble, we at
Notes 261

times glimpse something like what Snider claimed he possessed, an intelligence


that could crush an Alcott like an anaconda. Discussing self-consciousness, for
example, Brokmeyer demonstrates the futility of trying to define terms in a
philosophical argument:

Suppose. . . I. .. undertake to discuss... the question of “what is and what is


not?” Some simple-minded fellow, wholly oblivious of the ridiculous, asks
me: “What do you mean by ‘IS’?”
Having defined what everybody knows, or supposes he knows, the sim-
pleton requests further a definition of the terms of the definition. These too
having been given, he renews his request, as each successive definition of
necessity involves new and undefined terms.
The only way out of this cycle is to realize that the process of knowing
builds upon itself, defines itself, and that this is the fundamental law of all
self-conscious awareness. See A Mechanic’s Diary, 59.
Brokmeyer then criticizes Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists because
though Plato discovered the “peculiar, the dialectical nature of the catego-
ries... and recognized them under the names of ideas,” though Aristotle
recognized that only self-determined intelligence can explain itself, and
though Proclus recognized that Plato and Aristotle were complementary,
none of them “had inquired into the law that governs self-conscious know-
ing in its activity, and thus exhibited the necessity of the results of that
activity.” See Brokmeyer, A Mechanic’s Diary, 59.

36. See Frederick Conner, op. cit., 132.


37. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” Atlantic Monthly, 33 (January
1874): 92–101.
38. Ibid., 99.
39. Ibid., 101.
40. Ibid., 101
41. See The Platonist, II (1884–1885), 105.
42. See Paul R. Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest (New York: Temple University
Press, 1963), 66.
43. See Anderson, op. cit., 188.
44. Twentieth-century authors whose work reflects a direct Platonic influence
include the British poet Kathleen Raine, British architect Keith Critchlow, and
American publisher David Fideler, founder of Phanes Press.
45. One should not forget the single-handed effort of Thomas Taylor in Britain dur-
ing the early nineteenth century to translate the major works of Platonism. As
S. H. Nasr has pointed out, however, though he “stood opposed to the secularis-
tic and rationalistic premises of his day,” Taylor “stood outside the Christianity
of his day and sought consciously to revive Greek paganism as if it were pos-
sible to resuscitate through a purely human agency a tradition whose animating
262 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

1. Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman (New  York:  Johnson Reprint,


1883/1970), 183.
2. Bucke, Walt Whitman, 185.
3. Bucke, Walt Whitman, 185.
4. Bucke, Walt Whitman, 189.
5. Bucke, Walt Whitman, 123.
6. Bucke, Walt Whitman, 123.
7. Bucke, Walt Whitman, 12–57, 57–70, 73–98.
8. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness:  A  Study in the Evolution of the
Human Mind (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1901), 217–218.
9. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, 74.
10. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, 225.
11. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, 226, citing Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition, 15.
12. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, 229.
13. See Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1892), 2, paragraph 114.
14. Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok,” in Leaves of Grass, sections 7–11, in
The Complete Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (New York: Pellagrini & Cudahy,
1948), I.54–56.
15. Whitman, Song of Myself, section 51, in Complete Poetry, 113.
16. Whitman, Song of Myself, section 50, in Complete Poetry, 113.
17. Whitman, Song of the Open Road, sections 7–8, in Complete Poetry, 161.
18. See James E. Miller, Jr., A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1957).
19. Miller, Critical Guide, 6.
20. Miller, Critical Guide, 7.
21. Miller, Critical Guide, 21–23.
22. See James E.  Miller, Jr., Karl Shapiro, and Bernice Slote, eds., Start with the
Sun: Studies in the Whitman Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1960), esp. 15–70.
23. See Gary David Comstock, Whitman: The Mystic Poets (Woodstock, Vt.: Skylight
Paths, 2004); see also Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitman Handbook
(New York: New York University Press, 1986), esp. 296–298, on the “Whitman
Notes 263

cult” in early twentieth-century Germany. See also John McDonald, Walt


Whitman, Philosopher Poet (Jefferson, N.C.:  McFarland, 2007), for a histori-
cally broader and less thorough analysis of Whitman’s poetry. See also Jerome
Loving, Walt Whitman:  The Song of Myself (Berkeley:  University of California
Press, 1999), 175–177, for instance.
24. See, for instance, V.  K. Chari, Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism,
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), or V. Sachithanandan, Whitman
and Bharati: A Comparative Study (Bombay: Macmillan, 1978).
25. See Mitchell Santine Gould. “Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox,” Quaker History,
96(Spring 2007)1: 1–23. See also, for instance, Lawrence Templin, “The Quaker
Influence on Walt Whitman,” American Literature, 42(1970)2: 165–180.
26. Lawrence Templin, “The Quaker Influence on Walt Whitman,” American

Literature, 42(1970)2: 165.

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

12. Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy, 285–286. See also Leonard,


Transcendental Philosophy, 224–225. The term “meontic” was coined by Nicholas
Berdyaev—who was inspired by the work of Jacob Boehme and his concept of
the unground—to express something akin to what Merrell-Wolff means.
13. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968/1995), 132. Other figures in this tradition include Wayne
Dyer and Eckhart Tolle.
14. Roszak, Counter Culture, 132.
15. See Monica Furlong, Genuine Fake: A Biography of Alan Watts (London: Routledge,
1987), and Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Silver Springs, Md.: Skylight, 2001).
16. For instance, Michael Brannigan, Everywhere and Nowhere:  The Path of Alan
Watts (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).
17. Louis Nordstrom and Richard Pilgrim, “The Wayward Mysticism of Alan
Watts,” Philosophy East and West, 33(1980)3: 381–401.
18. See Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen (New York: Doubleday, 1965/1980
ed.), 23–24.
19. Kapleau, Three Pillars, 26.
20. Alan Watts, Buddhism:  The Religion of No Religion (North Clarendon:  Tuttle,
1999). It’s true that the book’s subtitle, “The Religion of No Religion,” comes
from Frederic Spiegelberg, later a phrase that Jeffrey Kripal also drew on for his
book on Esalen.
21. See Alan Watts, Theologia Mystica: Being the Treatise of St. Dionysius (West Park,
N.Y.: Holy Cross Press, 1944).
22. Alan Watts, In My Own Way: An Autobiography (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 290.
23. See Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit:  A  Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
(New York: Pantheon, 1947), 93–104.
24. Watts, This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience
(New York: Pantheon, 1958/rpt. 1973), 17.
25. Watts, In My Own Way, 37.

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

Arthur Knight, ed., The Beat Vision: A Sourcebook (New York: Paragon House,


1987), and most important, John Lardas, Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of
Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
5. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 135–136.
6. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 140–141.
7. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 138. See also Roszak, Where
the Wasteland Ends:  Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society
(New York: Doubleday, 1972).
8. See Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 242–265.
9. See R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the
Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
10. See Allen Ginsberg to John Clellon Holms, Dec. 13, 1950, in Ginsberg Papers,
1937–1994, 3:  44, Stanford University Library, cited in John Lardas, The
Bop Apocalypse:  The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs
(Urbana:  University of Illinois, 2001), 289. See also Ginsberg, “Siesta in
Xbalba,” in Collected Poems 1947–1980 (New York: Harper, 1984), 110.
11. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 519.
12. Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile (New York: Harper, 1986), 151–154.
13. David Brown and Rebecca Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations for
the New Millennium (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1993), 267.
14. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 267.
15. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 268.
16. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 275–276.
17. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 277–278.
18. Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940–1956, Ann Charter, ed. (New York: Viking,
1995), 447.
19. See Mike Wallace, “Mike Wallace Asks Jack Kerouac: What Is the Beat Generation?”
New York Post, January 21, 1958, 16. See also Kevin Hayes, ed., Conversations with
Jack Kerouac (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 3–5.
20. See Hayes, ed., Conversations with Jack Kerouac, 5–6.
21. See Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 281.
22. See John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse, 165.
23. Lardas, 165.
24. Allen Ginsberg letter to John Clellon Holmes, July 1949, cited in Lardas, 282.
25. William S.  Burroughs, The Letters of William S.  Burroughs:  1945–1959
(New York: Viking, 1993), 213, 221–222.
26. Burroughs, The Letters, 226–227.
27. Daniel Odier, The Job:  Interviews with William S.  Burroughs (New  York:  Grove
Press, 1969/1974 ed.) 52.
28. Odier, The Job, 74.
266 Notes

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

22. Leary, Neuropolitique, 71.


23. Leary, Neuropolitique, 72–73.
24. See David Jay Brown and Robecca Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations
for the New Millennium (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1993), 137–138.
25. Timothy Leary, “The Berkeley Lectures,” in The Delicious Grace of Moving One’s
Hand, (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 226–227.
26. Leary, The Delicious Grace, 234.
27. Leary, The Delicious Grace, 212, 226.
28. Leary, The Delicious Grace, 203–206.
29. In Millbrook, 93, Art Kleps did acknowledge the darker side of psychedelics,
observing that “[i]‌f things become extraordinarily magical, if there is a relatively
high degree of freedom from circumstantial restrains, people may respond by
freezing in terror, “freak out,” go paranoid, and that certainly cannot be called a
reduction of suffering.
30. Leary, Neuropolitique, 10.
31. Leary, Neuropolitique, 9.
32. Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, 83.

C h a p t er   1 0

1. Brown and Novick, eds., Mavericks of the Mind, 111.


2. Robert Anton Wilson, “Firing the Cosmic Trigger,” in Brown, Mavericks of the
Mind, 111.
3. See Kerry Thornley, “Introduction,” Principia Discordia, 5th Fed., (Lilburn,
Ga.:  IllumiNet Press, 1991), also available at http://www.ology.org/principia/
intro5.html.
4. There are multiple editions of the Principia Discordia in English, including
scanned images available on the web of early editions complete with handmade
diagrams and collages. See, for instance, http://www.fnord.org. Subsequent ref-
erences to the text are to Principia Discordia, (Seattle: Pacific Publishing, 2011),
chiefly for convenience’s sake, but I have compared quotations with the text of
the 1991 IllumiNet edition.
5. See Thornley, “Introduction,” Principia Discordia, 5th ed.
6. Principia Discordia, 15.
7. Principia Discordia, 13.
8. Principia Discordia, 73–74.
9. Principia Discordia, 72 [p. 70 in the 4th ed., 1970].
10. Principia Discordia, 65.
11. 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; see also Carole Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction,
and Faith (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 47–48.
Notes 269

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

1. Peter Lamborn Wilson and Arthur Versluis, “A Conversation with Peter


Lamborn Wilson,” JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4(2010)2: 139–143.
2. See, for instance, Simon Sellars, “Hakim Bey:  Repopulating the Temporary
Autonomous Zone,” JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4(2010)2: 83–108,
and Leonard Williams, “Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchism,” JSR: Journal
for the Study of Radicalism 4(2010)2: 109–137. Neither article gives even a hint of
what we are discussing here: the pivotal role of religion and of Islamic hetero-
doxy for Wilson’s thought.
3. Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (New York: Autonomedia,
1988), 195, 203.
Notes 271

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

Trédaniel, 1924), L’Ésotérisme de Dante (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1925),


L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vedanta (Paris:  Éditions Traditionnelles,
1925), La crise du monde moderne (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1927), Le Roi du
Monde (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1927), Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporal
(Paris: Éditions Trédaniel, 1929), Saint Bernard (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles,
1929), Le Symbolisme de la Croix (Paris: Éditions Trédaniel, 1931), and Les États
multiples de l’Etre (Paris: Éditions Trédaniel, 1932).
17. René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, Marco Pallis and Richard
Nicholson, trs. (London: Luzac, 1975), 13.
18. Guénon, Crisis, 111, 119.
19. See, for instance, René Guénon, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta
(New Delhi: Oriental Reprint, 1981), 179–183.
20. René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Baltimore,
Md.: Penguin, 1972), 194–195. See also Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps
(Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Incidentally, the Penguin edition was slightly edited,
presumably by Jacob Needleman, in order to remove Guénon’s critical remarks
about the negative influence of nomadic peoples, likely in part at least a veiled
reference to Jews.
21. Guénon, The Reign of Quantity, 196. See also 334–336, where again Guénon at
the end of the book emphasizes that the “primordial state” is truth, whereas the
dissolution of the world, as well as the malevolent powers that bring about that
dissolution, is in fact illusory.
22. See Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick Laude, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 5–8, 10.
23. Aymard and Laude, Frithjof Schuon, 11.
24. See Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung (Zurich: Orell Füsli, 1935).
25. See Gillian Harris and Angela Schwartz as “Primordial Meditation: Contemplating
the Real,” in Sacred Web, 20(Winter 2007): 19–120: see also William Stoddart,
Mateus Soares de Azevedo, and Alberto Vasconcellos Queiroz, Remembering in
a World of Forgetting:  Thoughts on Tradition and Postmodernism (Bloomington,
Ind.: World Wisdom, 2008), 52.
26. Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick Laude, Frithjof Schuon, 79. See also Renaud
Fabbri, Frithjof Schuon:  The Shining Realm of the Pure Intellect, M.A.  thesis,
Miami University, 2007, available via http://www.scribd.com/doc/45931822/
Frithjof-Schuon-The-Shining-Realm-of-the-Pure-Intellect-Renaud-Fabbri, 8.
27. Fabbri, Shining Realm, 4. Fabbri is referring here to Mark Sedgwick, Against the
Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
28. Nasr, “Foreword,” Aymard and Laude, Frithjof Schuon, xii. In his effusive intro-
duction to The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon (New  York:  Amity House,
1986), Nasr also emphasizes the universal rather than the Islamic or Sufi
dimensions of Schuon’s work.
Notes 275

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

1. See Arthur Versluis, Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism


(Lanham, Md.: Rowman Littlefield, 2007).
2. I am familiar with a few mystics who have not published, or who remain
obscure. There are a few others whose work is not apophatic, or not Western.
Notes 277

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

27. Tolle, A New Earth, 259.


28. Tolle, A New Earth, 259.
29. Tolle, A New Earth, 261.
30. Tolle, A New Earth, 307.
31. Tolle, A New Earth, 309.
32. See “Online Offerings:  Reality,” http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.
cfm?ProdID=64&category=2.
33. Peter Kingsley, Reality (Inverness, Calif.: Golden Sufi Center, 2003), 556.
34. See the readers’ reviews of Reality on Amazon.com.
35. Kingsley, Reality, 428.
36. Kingsley, Reality, 429.
37. Kingsley, Reality, 391.
38. Kingsley, Reality, 546.
39. Kingsley, Reality, 547.
40. Kingsley, Reality, 556.
41. Kingsley, Reality, 558–559.
42. Kingsley, Reality, 559.
43. Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet, and the Destiny of
the Western World (Point Reyes, Calif.: Golden Sufi Center, 2010), back cover, top.
44. Kingsley, A Story, 59.
45. Kingsley, A Story, 128–143.
46. Nicolas Leon Ruiz, Book Review, Sacred Web, 26(Winter, 2010): 203.
47. Joseph Raul, “Foreword,” A Story, xiii–xiv.
48. Kingsley, A Story, 76.
49. Kingsley, A Story, 76.
50. Kingsley, A Story, 81.
51. Kingsley, A Story, 81.
52. Kingsley, A Story, 82.
53. Caitlín Matthews, “Is There Any Praxis Behind the Theory?” January 2, 2011,
www.amazon.com, A Story Waiting to Pierce You.
54. See Peter Kingsley, “Awakening to Life,” parts  1 and 2, (2008) http://www.
goldensufi.org/MP3/SC_08/SC10_Awakening_to_Life1.mp3 and http://
www.goldensufi.org/MP3/SC_08/SC10_Awakening_to_Life2.mp3, as well as
“Approaching the Heart,” parts  1 and 2.  He specifically discusses primordial
Sufism in “Awakening to Life,” part 1, in the first ten minutes.

C h a p t er   1 6

1. See Wisdom’s Goldenrod, www.wisdomsgoldenrod.org, and related web-


sites. A  good introduction to Brunton’s work is Joscelyn Godwin, Paul
Brunton:  Essential Readings (Wellingborough:  Thorsons, 1990); a somewhat
bitter memoir was offered by Jeffrey Masson in My Father’s Guru:  A  Journey
Notes 279

Through Spirituality and Disillusion (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993), the story


of his Jewish childhood under the spell of Paul Brunton [P. B.].
2. See also, in this regard, Brian Hines, Return to the One:  Plotinus’s Guide to
God-Realization (Salem, Ore.: Adrasteia, 2004). Hines discusses Plotinus as a
spiritual guide suitable for a twenty-first-century American.
3. Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900–1920
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986).
4. See Gordon Kennedy, Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology from Germany to
California (1883–1949) (Ojai, Calif.: Nivaria, 1998).
5. Stephen Gaskin, Monday Night Class (Summertown, Tennessee:  Book
Publishing, 2005), 8–9.
6. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 9.
7. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 15.
8. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 57.
9. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 57.
10. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 94.
11. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 97.
12. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 94.
13. See, for a slightly different account of Gaskin’s background and influences,
Arthur Versluis and Morgan Shipley, “Stephen Gaskin Interview,” Journal for
the Study of Radicalism, 4(Spring 2010)1:141–158.
14. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 178–181.
15. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 133, 155–156.
16. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 148.
17. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 147.
18. Gaskin, Monday Night Class, 147.
19. Stephen Gaskin, The Caravan (Summertown, Tennessee:  Book Publishing,
2007), 6. I am referring here to the revised edition, but did compare the text to
that of the original publication of The Caravan, which I have in a signed first edi-
tion. Stephen’s signature dedication is “Enjoy the trip.” I do not cite the original
because it is unpaginated.
20. Gaskin, The Caravan, 48.
21. Gaskin, The Caravan, 50.
22. Gaskin, The Caravan, 233.
23. Gaskin, The Caravan, 230.
24. Gaskin, The Caravan, 244.
25. Gaskin, The Caravan, 244.
26. Gaskin, The Caravan, 253.
27. Gaskin, An Outlaw in My Heart:  A  Political Activist’s User’s Manual
(Philadelphia: Camino Books, 2000), viii.
28. Gaskin, Rendered Infamous:  A  Book of Political Reality (Summertown,
Tennessee: Book Publishing, 1981), 254.
280 Notes

29. Gaskin, An Outlaw in My Heart, 3.


30. Gaskin,. .. This Season’s People:  A  Book of Spiritual Teachings (Summertown,
Tennessee: Book Publishing, 1976).
31. Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality (New York: High Times, 1996), 10.
32. Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality, 30.
33. Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality, 30–31.
34. Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality, 40.
35. Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality, 12.
36. When we visited The Farm in May 2009, there appeared to be no communal
spiritual or religious praxis or center—a few people had held a more or less
New Age style Native American sweat lodge several weeks past, and there was
an occasional meditation or yoga session, but there was little visible of the spiri-
tual enthusiasm that one sees in the chronicles of that early period from 1969
to 1971.
37. See Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, 107–118.
38. Richard Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now (San Cristobal, N.M.: Lama Foundation,
1971), 18–21. [The text is not paginated, as we see also in some other books of the
period, pagination being no doubt very square.]
39. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p., 28–30.
40. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p., 40.
41. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p. [p. 7 in brown text].
42. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p. [p. 4 verso in brown text].
43. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p. [p. 63 in brown text].
44. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p. [p. 77 in brown text].
45. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p. [p. 86 in brown text].
46. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Here Now, n.p. [p. 87 in brown text].
47. Alpert/Ram Dass, The Only Dance There Is (New York: Anchor, 1974), 172–173.
48. Alpert/Ram Dass, The Only Dance There Is, 174.
49. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1976/1987), 51.
50. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill, 52.
51. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill, 52–53.
52. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill, 59.
53. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill, 33.
54. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill, 161.
55. Alpert/Ram Dass, Grist for the Mill, 162.
56. Alpert/Ram Dass, Journey of Awakening:  A  Meditator’s Guidebook
(New York: Bantam, 1978).
57. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Love Now (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), xi.
58. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Love Now (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), xiv.
59. Alpert/Ram Dass, Be Love Now (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), 84.
60. See “A Conversation with Jeffrey J. Kripal,” JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism,
6(2012)1: 101–102, for instance, “There’s also a deep psychological or even spiritual
Notes 281

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

1. See “Da,” in Andrew Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters, 221.


2. See Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening (Middletown, Conn.: Dawn
Horse Press, 2004), 75.
3. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 76.
4. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 81.
5. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 83.
6. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 128–232.
7. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 268–272. On Schuon, see his
unpublished memoirs, 264–269, “The Holy Virgin,” in particular, on 269,
“Love overwhelmed me. . . And all at once she was there—a tall apparition, like
snow and sun. But to say more would not become me.” See Urban, “A Dance of
Masks,” 412–414.
8. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 317–318.
9. Franklin Jones [Adi Da], The Knee of Listening, 363.
10. See Saniel Bonder, The Divine Emergence of the World-Teacher Heart-Master Da
Love-Ananda (Clearlake, Calif.:  Dawn Horse, 1990), 112–116. Jones describes
himself as a “seventh-stage” guru, and Muktananda as only a “fifth-stage” guru,
in The Knee of Listening, 558.
11. See Bubba Free John [Franklin Jones], Garbage and the Goddess: The Last Miracles
and Final Spiritual Instructions of Bubba Free John (Lower Lake, Calif.:  Dawn
Horse, 1974); see also the documentary A Difficult Man (1974). There are some
interesting personal narratives about this period online, but recounting those
here would go beyond our scope.
12. Rawlinson, Book of Enlightened Masters, 229, note 13.
13. Jones, The Knee of Listening, 499.
14. Jones, The Knee of Listening, 635.
15. “Johannine” here derives from “John,” of course—but both that name and the
word “communion” have Christian resonances. The analogy to Pentacostalism
is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem.
16. Bubba Free John, Garbage and the Goddess: The Last Miracles and Final Spiritual
Instructions of Bubba Free John (Lower Lake, Calif.: Dawn Horse, 1974), 76.
17. Bubba Free John, Garbage and the Goddess, 49.
282 Notes

18. Bubba Free John, Garbage and the Goddess, 351.


19. Adi Da Samraj, My Final Work of Divine Indifference: Wherein I Constantly Abide
Only As I  Am, in Divine and Avatarically Responsive Transcendental Spiritual
Regard of all-and-All (Middletown, Conn.: Dawn Horse, 2007), 68.
20. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Life (Rochester,
Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2007), 99.
21. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Complete Yoga, 20–22.
22. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Complete Yoga, 86.
23. Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power
(Berkeley:  Frog/North Atlantic, 1993). See, for example, David Lane and
Scott Lowe, Da: The Strange Case of Franklin Jones (Walnut, Calif.: Mount San
Antonio College Philosophy Group, 1996), 26: “True, Da Free John (now Adi
Da) is a vitally interesting cult leader, but he has become so enmeshed in his
own ego trip that it is nearly impossible for the reader to wade through his
self-aggrandizing tirades and discover the rare philosophical jewel hidden there
from time to time.”
24. Kramer and Alstad, The Guru Papers, 112–113.
25. Kramer and Alstad, The Guru Papers, 113–114.
26. See David Lane and Scott Lowe, Da: The Strange Case of Franklin Jones (Walnut,
Calif.:  Mount San Antonio College Philosophy Group, 1996), 70. This book
was available online in several places, including http://www.adidaarchives.org/
scott_lowe_case_da.htm.
27. Edward Brennan and Georg Feuerstein, posted at http://lightmind.com/blogs/
blogarchive-054.html
28. See Rawlinson, Book of Enlightened Masters, 227; see also Bonder, The Divine
Emergence, 201–203.
29. There is quite a body of literature by erstwhile devotees critical of Jones/Adi
Da. One of the more thoughtful critics was Tom Veitch, who published under
the name “Elias.” See www.adidaarchives.org, www.lightmind.com, and related
sites for a better sense of this material. It is beyond our present scope.
30. See, for instance, the collection of resources at www.lightmind.com/blogs/
adiblog.html, posted by Tom Veitch, a student of Jones/Adi Da from 1975
to 1982.
31. Don Lattin, “Hypnotic Da Free John—Svengali of the Truth-seeking Set,” San
Francisco Examiner (April 5, 1985).
32. See, for instance, Jones/Adi Da Samraj, Reality is All the God There Is: The Single
Transcendetal Truth Taught by the Great Sages and the Revelation of Reality Itself
(Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008).
33. Ken Wilber, “The One Who Was to Come Is Always Already Here,” Vision
Mound 2(May 1979)9, available as a pdf here: http://www.beezone.com/Wilber/
kenwilber.html
Notes 283

34. Wilber, “The One.”


35. Ken Wilber, “The Dawn Horse Testament: An Appreciation,” available at http://
www.adidawilber.com/dawn_horse_testament_review/index.html
36. Ken Wilber, “The Case of Adi Da,” October 11, 1996, http://wilber.shambhala.
com/html/misc/adida.cfm/
37. Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision For a World Gone Slightly Mad
(Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 281–302.
38. Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, 282–283.
39. Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, 285.
40. Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, 286.
41. Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, 296.
42. See Hugh Urban, “Osho, From Sex Guru to Guru of the Rich:  The Spiritual
Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Thomas Forsthoefel and Cynthia Humes, eds.,
Gurus in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 174.
43. It is interesting that Wilber refers to himself in stages, i.e., as Wilber I, Wilber
II, and so forth—taking on different identities in some sense rather like Jones
denoting one stage with “Bubba Free John,” another with “Da Love-Ananda,”
and so forth.
44. Ken Wilber, One Taste: The Journals of Ken Wilber (Boston: Shambhala, 1999), vii.
45. Wilber, One Taste, 318.
46. Wilber, One Taste, 319.
47. Wilber, One Taste, 360.
48. Wilber, One Taste, 368–369.
49. Wilber, One Taste, 13.
50. Stephen Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality, 7.
51. Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern
and Postmodern World (Boston: Shambhala/Integral, 2006), 248.
52. Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 243.
53. Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 50–83, 231–273.
54. Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 18, 214–216, 221, 226.
55. But whereas Schuon scorned modernity, Wilber saw events in much more opti-
mistic Integralist colored lights. For instance, after the election of Barack Obama
to the US presidency, Wilber wrote “As the campaign progressed, Obama began
making increasingly Integral-sounding pronouncements. In fact, an Integral
analysis of his acceptance speech by Corey deVos and Clint Fuhs showed a
genuinely high percentage of Integrally-comprehensive language and ideas
(especially compared to the other candidates). It seems, in fact, that somewhere
during the campaign itself, Obama went from green exit (the pluralistic stage
of development, with its inherently high liberalism) to initial teal Integral waves
(the first Integral stages of development, with inherent Integrally-oriented polit-
ical stances). Increasingly his language and his values systems seemed to shift,
right before one’s eyes, into Integral spaces.
284 Notes

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

70. Cohen, My Master, 53.


71. Cohen, My Master, 46.
72. Cohen, My Master, 58.
73. Cohen, My Master, 57.
74. Cohen, My Master, 90.
75. Andrew Cohen, Autobiography of an Awakening (Corte Madera, Calif.: Moksha,
1992), 53–54.
76. Cohen, Autobiography, 55.
77. Cohen, Autobiography, 64–65.
78. Cohen, Autobiography, 101, 106. In a jarring moment, Cohen, in a letter to
Poonja, writes “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” The whole sequence cen-
ters on “Father”/”Son” issues, and the obvious allusion to Cohen as Jesus can
hardly be missed.
79. Cohen, Autobiography, 107.
80. Cohen, Autobiography, 107.
81. Cohen, Autobiography, 126–128.
82. Cohen, Autobiography, 125.
83. Andrew Cohen, In Defense of the Guru Principle (Lenox, Mass.: Moksha, 1999),
14–15, 5.
84. Luna Tarlo, The Mother of God (Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Epigraph, 2009), 287.
85. Tarlo, The Mother of God, 233–239, 281.
86. Andre van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues:  My Years With An American Guru
(Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Monkfish, 2003), 27.
87. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 187–188.
88. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 200, 206–207.
89. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 226.
90. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 227.
91. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 228.
92. William Yenner, American Guru: A Story of Love, Betrayal, and Healing—Former
Students of Andrew Cohen Speak Out (Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Monkfish, 2009), 56–57.
93. Yenner, American Guru, 63.
94. Yenner, American Guru, 62.
95. Yenner, American Guru, 62.
96. Ken Wilber, “Foreword,” Andrew Cohen, Embracing Heaven & Earth:  The

Liberation Teachings of Andrew Cohen (Lenox, Mass.: Moksha, 2000), xiii–xv.
97. Wilber, “Foreword,” Cohen, Embracing Heaven & Earth, xvi–xviii.
98. Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightment:  A  New Path to Spiritual Awakening
(New York: SelectBooks, 2011), 176.
99. Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, 176, 179.
100. Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, 179.
101. Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, 206.
102. Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, 207–208.
286 Notes

103. Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, 12.


104. Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, 15.
105. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 3.
106. Van der Braak, Enlightenment Blues, 136.
107. Saniel and Linda Bonder, “Transmission of the HEART,” http://heartgazing.
com/integral/
108. Saniel and Linda Bonder, “How to Receive Heart-Transmission Through Gazing,”
originally found at http://integrallife.com/awaken/spirit/how-receive-he
art-transmission-through-gazing. See also http://heartgazing.com/integral
109. Lola Williamson, “The Perfectibility of Perfection:  Siddha Yoga as a Global
Movement,” Thomas Forsthoefel and Cynthia Humes, eds., Gurus in America,
152–153.
110. Quoted in Peter Friedberg, “Integral Transformative Practice:  Practice,
Principles, and Promise,” http://www.esalen.org/air/essays/itp.html
111. George Leonard and Michael Murphy, The Life We Are Given: A Long-term Program
for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul (New York: Putnam’s,
1995). See also Leonard and Murphy, The Life We Are Given (Inner Workbook)
(New York: Tarcher, 2005).
112. See Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen:  America and the Religion of No Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9.
113. Michael Murphy, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons (New York: Broadway, 1998).
114. Kripal, Esalen, 48–51.
115. Kripal, Esalen, 133–134.
116. Kripal, Esalen, 67.
117. Kripal, Esalen, 67.
118. Kripal, Esalen, 67.
119. Kripal, Esalen, 237.
120. Kripal, “Foreword,” The Knee of Listening, xii, xiv.
121. Jeffrey Kripal, “Riding the Dawn Horse,” in Forsthoefel and Humes, eds.,
Gurus in America, 213.
122. Jeffrey Kripal, “Riding the Dawn Horse,” in Forsthoefel and Humes, eds.,
Gurus in America, 213.
123. See John de Ruiter, “About John de Ruiter,” http://www.johnderuiter.com/
about/. See also John de Ruiter, Unveiling Reality (Edmonton: Oasis Edmonton,
1999/2001).
124. See Paul Joosse, Charismatic Attraction and Legitimacy within John de Ruiter’s
New Religious Movement, M.A.  thesis, University of Alberta, 2006. See also
Paul Joosse, “Silence, Charisma, and Power: the Case of John de Ruiter,” in The
Journal of Contemporary Religion, 21(2006)3: 355–371.
125. See www.johnderuiter.com
126. For an introduction to his “direct path to awakening,” see the interview he did
on New Dimensions Radio, 20 December 2010, in which he describes “why
Notes 287

it is not necessary to be a seeker,” “why we should not be attached to any


method of practice,” and “the transmission taking place” in de Ruiter’s public
teachings.
127. See, for instance, Toni Packer, The Silent Question:  Meditating in the Stillness
of Not-knowing (Boston:  Shambhala, 2007), or The Work of This Moment
(Boston:  Shambhala, 2007). See also Clark Strand, Meditation Without
Gurus: A Guide to the Heart of Practice (Woodstock, Vt.: Skylight Paths, 2003);
see also Strand’s forthcoming book on what he calls “green meditation: reclaim-
ing the world’s oldest spiritual tradition.” See Clark Strand, “The Recovery
of the Dark,” (March 1, 2010), http://www.tricycle.com/online-retreats/
green-meditation

C h a p t er   1 8

1. Parsons, The Open Secret (Shaftesbury, England: Open Secret Publishing, 1995),


n.p., preface Tony.
2. Parsons, The Open Secret, 44.
3. See Phillip Charles Lucas, “When a Movement Is Not a Movement:  Ramana
Maharshi and Neo-Advaita in North America,” Nova Religio 15(2011)2:  93–114,
and Liselotte Frisk, “The Satsang Network: A Growing Post-Osho Phenomenon,”
Nova Religio 6(2002)1: 64–85.
4. Parsons, The Open Secret, 33.
5. See Doug White, “A Weekend with Tony Parsons, Dublin, Ireland, May 25–27,
2007,” at www.selfinquiry.org/assets/TonyParsons.pdf
6. Tony Parsons, Nothing Being Everything (Shaftesbury, England:  Open Secret,
2007), 42–43.
7. See Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening (San Jose, Calif.: Open Gate, 2000), 25.
8. Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening, 106.
9. Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening, back cover.
10. See Adyashanti, Spontaneous Awakening, 6 CDs (Boulder, Colo.: Sounds True,
2005), 6.11
11. Adyashanti, Spontaneous Awakening, liner note. In The End of Your World
(Boulder, Colo.: Sounds True, 2010), he writes “Awakening is a mystery. There is
no direct cause and effect, really. It would be nice if there were, but there really
isn’t a direct cause and effect (182).”
12. See Nancy Haught, “Delving into ‘Dharma Dialogues,’ ” in The Oregonian,
January 30, 1999, reproduced at http://www.catherineingram.com/interviews/
oregonian.html
13. See Steven Bodian, “Advaita and Zen,” originally at http://www.cuke.com/
excerpts-articles/zen%20advaita%20bodian.html 2005.
14. See Steven Bodian, “Advaita and Zen,” originally at http://www.cuke.com/
excerpts-articles/zen%20advaita%20bodian.html 2005.
288 Notes

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

40. See Daniel Brown interview, “The Great Way,” in Conversations on



Non-duality, 245.
41. Brown interview, in Conversations on Non-duality, 246.
42. See Brown interview, “The Great Way,” in Conversations on Non-duality, 246–247.
43. See Brown interview, “The Great Way,” in Conversations on Non-duality, 246–247.
44. Brown was coauthor of a book with Ken Wilber, Transformations of Consciousness
(Boston: Shambhala, 1986), where he explored comparatively meditation in sev-
eral different traditions.

C h a p t er   1 9

1. Georg Feuerstein, Holy Madness:  Spirituality, Crazy-Wise Teachers, and


Enlightenment (Prescott, Ariz.: Hohm, 2006), 428.
2. The term is the title of a book by Ashok Malhotra, Instant Nirvana: Americanization
of Mysticism and Meditation (Oneonta, N.Y.: Oneonta Philosophy Studies, 1999).
3. Hence the kind of Dzogchenesque language we see in some of Ken Wilber’s
books is almost never (perhaps never) found in books by traditional Buddhist
teachers when the expected audience is a general or exoteric readership. In tra-
ditional contexts, there is almost always a proviso that such teachings are not
intended for everyone, or something to that effect.
4. See Hugh Urban, “Osho, From Sex Guru to Guru of the Rich:  The Spiritual
Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Thomas Forsthoefel and Cynthia Humes, eds.,
Gurus in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 169–192.
5. Masson, more or less raised with Brunton, concluded, “In spirit, PB might
have been like the Indian sages he idolized.. . . But he did not really represent
any tradition, any body of knowledge, any other person—in fact, anything at
all. He was just a hodgepodge of misread and misunderstood ideas from an
ancient culture he did not know or understand. In this sense he was a phony,
a charlatan, a mountebank, an imposter, a quack.” Jeffrey Masson, My Father’s
Guru (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 160. Even harsher indictments of
Jones/Adi Da could be found on www.adidaarchives.org, which like a number
of sites, now can be accessed only via internet archives.
6. See R.  C. Zaehner, Our Savage God:  The Perverse Use of Eastern Thought
(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1974).
7. This seems to be the perspective of Jane Stork, Breaking the Spell: My Life as a
Rajneeshee, and the Long Journey Back to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 2009),
for instance.
8. See, for instance, the reflections of Susan Bridle in “A Legacy of Scorched
Earth,” and Richard Pitt, “Leaving the Guru,” in William Yenner, ed., American
Guru, 87–101. See also, Yenner, “Life After Andrew,” 118–123, where he writes
(122) “The thirteen years that I spent with Andrew Cohen remain a part of my
290 Notes

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

Smith is accused of acting “irresponsibly,” engaging in psychological/sexual


abuse of women followers, and the like. Similar accounts can be found concern-
ing Adi Da, as we’ve seen, and are also alleged of some well-known American
Zen Buddhist teachers, including Eido Shimano Roshi, Richard Baker, and oth-
ers. Here again, Jung’s theory concerning mana (mentioned in the beginning
of ­chapter  14 of this book) provides some insights for an interpreter of such
behavior.
26. See Georg Feuerstein, Holy Madness, 446.
27. Feuerstein, Holy Madness, 453–454.
28. See Lama Surya Das, “Staying Enlightened,” http://www.surya.org/staying-
enlightened/, May 2, 2011 [February, 2005].
29. Philip Goldeberg, American Veda (New York: Harmony, 2010), 260.
30. See Robert K.  C. Forman, Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To
Be: A Journey of Discovery, Snow, and Jazz in the Soul (Winchester, U.K.: O Books,
2011), 34.
31. Forman, Enlightenment, 36.
32. See, for instance, the last section of Jeffrey Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift, where
he also refers to dual consciousness as characteristic of religious illumination.
Kripal is closest to the Hindu family as well, through his connection to Jones/
Adi Da.
33. Bernadette Roberts, Forcing the Fit, 1.
34. Bernadette Roberts, Forcing the Fit, 1.
Index

Advaita Vedanta, 188, 232–235 Boehme, Jacob, 31–33, 59


Adhyashanti [Steven Gray], 229–231 Bonder, Saniel, 216
Ahlstrom, Sydney, 19 Bowles, Paul, 144
Agassiz, Louis, 59, 64–66 Brokmeyer, Henry Conrad, 60–64
Aitken, Robert, 109 Brook Farm, 195, 244
Albanese, Catherine, 5, 161–162 Brown, Daniel, 235–236
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 3, 17, 18, 26–34, Brownson, Orestes, 18, 25
58–69, 195 Brunton, Paul, 188–189
Alcott, Louisa May, 29 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 71–74
Almaas, A. H., 175 Buddhism, 89, 92–101, 161, 174, 175,
Alpert, Richard, 109, 189, 196–201; see 176, 177, 179–181, 191, 236–249
also Ram Dass Buddhistish teachers, 230–231
American Academy of Religion, 192 Burroughs, William S., 95–108, 110,
American Akademe, 67 114, 115, 124–125, 136, 140
Antinomianism, 130–146, 149,
159–160, 204–205, 242 Carlyle, Thomas, 39
Arunachala Ramana [Dee Wayne Castaneda, Carlos, 102, 106–107
Trammell], 232 Chaldean Oracles, 42
Ascona, 189 Chittick, William, 139
Assassins, 133–134 Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, 198
Assmann, Jan, 7 Church of the SubGenius, 142
Aymard, Jean-Baptiste, 167 CIA [Central Intelligence Agency],
111, 131
Basilides, 177 Cohen, Andrew, 1, 2, 5, 163, 216–222,
Beat movement, 92–108, 203 228, 231, 234, 238, 243
Benares, Camden, 126–129, 134 compassion, 244
Blake, William, 21, 151 Concord School of Philosophy,
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 82, 26, 52–70
162, 164 Conway, Timothy, 233
Bloom, Harold, 2–3 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 164
Blumenberg, Hans, 155–156 Corbin, Henry, 139, 145
Bodian, Steven, 230 counterculture, 147–156, 189–201
294 Index

Crèvecoeur, Hector St-John de, 18 Gaskin, Stephen, 151, 189–196, 202,


Crowley, Aleister, 131, 134–135 212, 243
Cudworth, Ralph, 19 Ginsberg, Allen, 92–96, 127, 150
Gnosticism, 3, 9–10
Damascius, 11 Goddard, Dwight, 96
Darwin, Charles, 55–70 Goddard, Harold Clarke, 35
Deida, David, 216 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 39
Diggers, 150 Goldberg, Philip, 4
Dionysius the Areopagite, 12–13, Golden Dawn, Order of, 125, 131
89, 177 Gould, Stephen Jay, 57
Discordianism, 122–129, 159 Greaves, James Pierrepont, 27–28
DMT, 116, 122 Guénon, René, 164–166
Dudjom Rinpoche, 150 Gura, Philip, 35
dualism, 246 Gurdjieff, G. I., 197, 237
Guthrie, Kenneth Sylvan, 68
Edwards, Jonathan, 2, 19–22
Ellul, Jacques, 154 H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], 83–84
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 14, 17–18, 35– Hakim Bey [pseud. Peter Lamborn
51, 52–53, 86, 155, 180, 181, 195, 198 Wilson], 139–146
Empedocles, 183 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 162, 240
Enlightenment, 17, 216–222, 227–236, Hassan i Sabbah, 116, 124, 131, 133–134
237–249 Hermes Trismegistus, 190
Esalen, 216, 223–224 Hermetism, 9
ethics, 245 Hesse, Hermann, 117
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., 115 Hill, Greg, 123
Evola, Julius, 137 Hinduism, 89, 93, 161, 166, 174,
evolutionism, controversy over, 52–70 176, 179–181, 191, 196–201,
216–222, 239
Farm, The, 193–194, 244 Hofmann, Albert, 111
Fabbri, Renaud, 167–168 Huxley, Aldous, 3, 112, 135, 173
Feuerstein, Georg, 208, 237, 245 Hyatt, Christopher, 131, 134, 136
Fiske, John, 56–57
Forman, Robert K. C., 216, 246–247 Illuminati, 124, 131–138
Friedl, Herwig, 37 Immediatism. See Neo-Advaita
Forsthoefel, Thomas, 4 IOT [Illuminates of  Thanateros], 125
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, Ingram, Catherine, 230
35, 49, 59 Integralism, 213–214, 223–224
Fruitlands, 199, 244
James, William, 2, 81, 113
Gafni, Marc [Mordechai], 216 Jameson, Fredric, 147–148
Gangaji, 231–232 Johnson, Samuel, 56
Garrison, Jim, 124 Johnson, Thomas, 55, 57, 58
Index 295

Jonas, Hans, 3, 103 McLeod, Hugh, 93


Jones, Franklin [Bubba Free John, Da McKenna, Terence, 223
Free John, Adi Da], 1, 5, 202–211, McNamara, Patrick, 159–160
225–226, 237, 242, 243 Meister Eckhart, 1, 13, 37
Jones, Hiram K., 55, 57, 67 Melville, Herman, 100, 107
Joyce, James, 135 Merrell-Wolff, Franklin, 2, 84–88, 159,
Jung, Carl, 160–161, 203 188, 238
Justinian, 8 Millenarianism, 119–120, 153, 222
Miller, James E., 76–77
Kapleau, Philip, 88, 109, 226 Mokshananda, 229
Kerouac, Jack, 2, 96–98, 127 monotheism, supercession of, 95–108
Kingsley, Peter, 175, 181–187, 229 More, Henry, 19, 24, 40
Kleps, Arthur, 117 Muktananda, 203–204, 232
Kramer, Joel, and Diana Alstad, The Mumford, Lewis, 152
Guru Papers, 207, 219 Murphy, Michael, 216, 223–224
Kripal, Jeffrey, 104, 224–225, 245 mysteries, ancient, 6–7
Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 82–83, 159 mysticism, 175–187, 240–241, 249

LaCarrière, Jacques, 103 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 139, 168


Laing, R. D., 150 Neo-Advaitin immediatist movement,
Lasch, Christopher, 137 34, 173, 175–176, 225–226, 227–236
Laude, Patrick, 167 Needleman, Jacob, 173
Leary, Timothy, 5, 112–121, 131, 189, Neoplatonism. See Platonism
196, 223 New Age, 51, 161–163, 179, 222, 228, 234
Leonard, Ron, 85 Norton, Andrew, 26
Lowe, Scott, 207–208 Norton, Charles Eliot, 55
Lozowick, Lee, 237 Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], 21
LSD, 111–112, 122, 191, 196, 201, 228, 248 Nuttal, Jeff, 149

MacKenna, Stephen, 68 Occultism, 102


magic, black, 102, 137, 146 Oldmeadow, Kenneth, 173
Mahamudra teachings, 235–236, 240 Olympiadorus, 41
Maharshi, Ramana, 227, 228, 231 Origin, 8
Mana, 160–161 OTO [Ordo Templi Orientis], 125, 131
Manson, Charles, 117–118 Outlaw religion, 6, 99, 114, 129, 137, 173,
Marcuse, Herbert, 154 187, 194, 196, 215, 224, 236, 242,
Marijuana, 122–123, 133, 189, 195 243, 249
Marrs, Texe, 132
Marsden, George, 19–20 Packer, Toni, 226
Marsh, James, 23–24, 57 Parmenides, 183
Matthews, Caitlín, 186 Parsons, Tony, 227–229, 245
McLean, Cabell, 102, 105 Perennialism, 3–4
296 Index

Platonism [includes Neoplatonism], Snider, Denton, 61


6–12, 22–25, 31–33, 35–51, 52–70, Snyder, Gary, 2, 92, 95, 99, 109,
86–87, 109, 162, 166, 168, 173, 114, 127
195, 249 Spare, Austin Osman, 134
Plotinus, 10, 12, 19, 35, 41, 62, 87, 107 Spengler, Oswald, 97
Poonja, H. W. L., 216–218, 227, 230 Spiegelberg, Frederic, 88, 224
Pordage, John, 111 Spira, Rupert, 229
Port Huron Statement, 151 Spiritual anarchism, 127–129,
Primordialism, 248–249, 251–252 139–146
Proclus, 10, 41 SDS [Students for a Democratic
Protestantism, 17–25 Society], 152, 193
Psilocybin, 122 Stegner, Wallace, 203
Psychedelics, 109–121 Stoddart, William, 167
Strand, Clark, 226
Quakerism, 77 Sufism, 164, 166, 187
Surya Das, Lama, 245
Raine, Kathleen, 22–23 Suzuki, Daisetz T., 96, 109
Rajneesh [Osho], 228, 237, 239 Suzuki, Shunryu, 109
Ram Dass. See Richard Alpert Synesius, 41
Raul, Joseph, 185
Rawlinson, Andrew, 1, 173, 174, 202, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, 229
205, 226 Tarlo, Luna, 217–218
Regardie, Israel, 134 Tart, Charles, 134
Rexroth, Kenneth, 96 Taylor, Thomas, 22, 57, 68
Richardson, Richard, 35 Tertullian, 7
Roberts, Bernadette, 2, 175–178, 240, Theosophical Society, 164
246–247 Thornley, Kerry, 123–129, 131
Robertson, Pat, 132 Tibetan Buddhism, 99, 115, 184–185,
Rosicrucianism, 131, 133 187, 211, 235, 237–249
Roszak, Theodore, 92–93, 106, 149, Tibetan Book of the Dead, 115
154, 223 Tolle, Eckhart, 1, 5, 175, 178–181, 182,
Rudolph, Albert [Rudi], 203 229, 241, 242
Ruiter, John de, 175, 225–226, 229 Traditionalism, 139–146, 163–174, 213
Transcendentalism, 26–51
Sagan, Carl, 57
Sanborn, Franklin, 53 Unitarianism, 19
Satsang network, 227–236 Unmani, 229
Schmidt, Lee, 4 Urban, Hugh, 239
Schuon, Frithjof, 167–174, 185, 203 Uždavinys, Algis, 242
primordial gatherings and, 171–172
Shepard, Odell, 33 Van der Braak, Andrew, 218–219
Smith, Huston, 182, 213 Versluis, Arthur
Index 297

American Transcendentalism and Whitman, Walt, 71–80, 94, 142, 198


Asian Religions, 5, 17, 36 Wilber, Ken, 163, 209–216, 220–222,
The Esoteric Origins of the American 235, 238, 243
Renaissance, 5, 27, 100 Wilder, Alexander, 52–53
Magic and Mysticism, 100, 103, 175 Wilson, Pamela, 232
The New Inquisitions, 14 Wilson, Peter Lamborn, 125,
Restoring Paradise, 12 139–146
Theosophia, 12 Wilson, Robert Anton, 123, 131–137, 159
Voegelin, Eric, 155–156 Williamson, Lola, 4
Winfrey, Oprah, 1
Waite, Dennis, 233–234 Wordsworth, William, 21–22
Wallace, Mike, 97
Watts, Alan, 5, 87–91, 92–93, 110, 114, Yellowtail, Thomas, 169–170, 185
123, 127, 204–205, 223 Yenner, William, 219–220
Weatherman, the, 153
Weil, Andrew, 196 Zen Buddhism, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99,
Weishaupt, Adam, 124 123, 199, 229–230, 238

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