CHAPTER 3

CHRONOLOGIES

Timothy Leary - Icon of the "Psychedelic Revolution"

Timothy Leary is a transitional individual. In the era when the post-Hiroshima "baby boomers" were growing up he was a psychology professor at Harvard University and thus a member in good standing of the scientific establishment. His experiments with drugs, well documented in his autobiography (Flashbacks) were conducted in 1962, about the same time that the fear of a nuclear holocaust peaked, with the United States and the Soviet Union coming to the brink of an exchange over the stationing of Russian missiles in Cuba. These experiments, in which he was involved as participatory observer, in true post-quantum, post-Hiroshima, TV-age fashion, were probably the first to be attempted in a democratic way on human neural pathways. They were haphazard at times, as early experiments in a new field often are, but, by his account, they were conducted in a manner scientific enough to satisfy the hierarchy. However, he wrote in his autobiography:
."..There was not much chance that the bureaucrats of Christian America were going to accept our research results, no matter how objective.
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 multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligent good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived." (109)
Leary had joined the ranks of the quantum theorists, which many in the scientific establishment had not yet done, but more, Leary's understanding of Einsteinian/quantum realities, as well as that of those who worked with him, was experiential:
"Micheal's heaping spoonful (of LSD) had flipped my consciousness into a dance of energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations and each illusory form was simply a different frequency.
It was the most shattering experience of my life." (118)

"Janiger...had abstracted a list of the typical reactions to LSD...
"The most frequent reaction, checked by almost every LSD subject, was: 'Everything is alive.' The second most frequent reaction: 'It comes in waves.'"
I laughed, 'Waves. Your tests confirm an observation we've made at Harvard - that the activated human brain experiences the world the way it is described by the equations of Einstein and quantum mechanics.'" (133)

Due to political altercations directly relating to his drug experiments, Leary lost his post at Harvard. He then became, as he terms it, a kind of cheerleader for transcendentalism, "turning on" celebrities, intellectuals and prisoners alike, in the process becoming somewhat of a celebrity himself, usually portrayed in the print media of the time as a semi-mystical psychedelic guru. By 1967, his name had become synonymous with the "hippie" movement, which extolled drug use, hedonism and non-Christian philosophies.

The hippie movement occurred in a climate of political unrest in the United States, as baby boomers vociferously protested American involvement in Vietnam, a war many saw, not only as needless, but as something foisted upon them by the military/political establishment. The post-Hiroshima, TV age generation of quantum participators had matured and were now engaged in open confrontation with authority, which was the power behind the TV images. The hippie movement was a "cool" phenomenon, one which required participation at the level of synaptic connections. As could be said about any organization or group, in order to appreciate it, it was not sufficient to merely observe it. One had to be part of it. Unlike most groups or organizations, however, it lacked a clearly defined center. There was no rallying ideology, no central figurehead. It was made possible by the climate of neural commonalty of TV, but it sought deeper meaning than was transmitted in these images. Many hippies, members of a maturing generation, were about to leave home.

By his account, in his transition Leary made some fairly powerful enemies within the religio-sciento-political hierarchy from which he was exiled. One possible reason for this, to which he alludes in his account of dealings with one Mary Pinchot from Washington (154), was that certain elements within the US. government were experimenting with the same drugs he was using, but their purpose was mind control. The very nature of government secrecy means that this will never be known for a fact, but by 1965 he was being pursued by legal authorities, and by 1968, much of his energy and money was being spent fighting protracted legal cases brought against him for drug use. As he was told by his lawyer:

"What's happening is the Nixon administration has announced an all-out war on drugs. They know they can't stop the people from using dope, so the best they can do is jail the symbol." (282)
In 1970, he was sentenced to ten years in jail for using marijuana and sent to a jail in California from which he escaped and left the country. He was subsequently rearrested in Afghanistan by the FBI and spent the next five years in prison.

Part of the government campaign against Leary involved discrediting him in the media. One way to do this, certainly, was to have him labeled as a criminal. There is a permanent stigma attached to people who have been in jail. Other, more subtle ways, were the use of ephitets in newspaper headlines, like "drug-king" and other ways of associating him with the emerging culture of heroin and cocaine abuse, a culture as old as humanity . This tactic seems to have worked. One place where he was disavowed was in the world of rock music (demonstrated by a derisive song by the Moody Blues called: "Timothy Leary's Dead"), a world strongly influenced by the psychedelic revolution, and where he had had close connections. Since his release from prison in 1975, he has remained a marginal media figure at best, largely forgotten, with seemingly not much chance of ever being taken seriously. Info-Psychology, written while he was in jail, was originally titled Exo-Psychology and had an emphasis on extra-terrestrials, which made it also marginal, but he has since retracted this emphasis. In the introduction to the revised edition, he writes:

"I did not realize that the first wave of Alien Intelligences which would teach me the quantum language of the galaxy would be found, not out beyond the walls of the Van Allen belt, but would appear in my own house in the year 1979 in the form of my Cyber-son Zachary piloting his way around the info-space of video games and the asteroids, planets and constellations of data to be explored in computer software." (Intro. iv)
Time goes on, and as of 1988, when I heard Dr. Leary speak at the Whole Life Expo in San Francisco, he was involved in the development of computer software for classroom use. It was with great regret that I recently read a small piece in Time magazine reporting he has contracted terminal cancer (Time. Sept. 11, 1995).

Passage to India
As we mentioned above, by the height of the Vietnam War, many "baby boomers" had grown up and were leaving home. Some of course went to Vietnam. A favorite destination for jet-setting wanderers from the sixties counterculture, however, was India, where teachings were sought "at the feet" of spiritual masters. One of the most publicized examples was the short stay of members of the popular music group the Beatles with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, originator of Transcendental Meditation. Less publicized but more significant was Richard Alpert's conversion to Baba Ram Dass at the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba. Since his adoption of this name, Ram Dass, a companion of Leary's during the period of experimentation with drugs at Harvard, has been an important and influential teacher in America.

If drug use in the sixties was at times indiscriminate and undisciplined, it was not moreso than the appropriation of eastern mythologies by western spiritual novices in the seventies. India, a poor country, welcomed the injection of tourist capital the migration of spiritual seekers represented, but there lurked a subtle resentment at the compromising of their culture by free-as-a-bird feel-gooders obviously unwilling to make the lifetime commitments they had always thought the master/disciple relationship demanded. By the late seventies, the press scorned the teachers who attracted western disciples, calling them "godmen." A frequent target of their derision was Rajneesh Chandra Mohan, a controversial figure who by this time was known publicly by the inciteful title of his choice: Bhagwan, a title usually reserved to address masters of the highest caliber (like Buddha) with the utmost respect and devotion. He was another transitional individual.

Rajneesh, earlier known as Acharya, or teacher, was a philosophy lecturer and had become known in his country during the '60's as an influential and seductive orator, traveling widely throughout India and speaking frequently to large gatherings. He was admired for his scathing intelligence and his charisma, but he was distrusted for these same qualities and dismissed by many as a charlatan. In the late sixties, he began initiating his closest followers into sannyas, a Sanskrit word which means loosely "renunciation of the world" or "embarkation on the path of self discovery." By the mid-seventies, he had ceased traveling altogether, and began initiating western seekers into sannyas, inviting them to come and live with him in a spiritual community which was established in Poona in 1975. In 1979, I became a sannyasin and joined this community, and in 1981, Rajneesh and his entire retinue moved to Oregon in the United States where they lived until he was expelled from that country in 1985. I lived exclusively within the community from 1980-1985 (one year in Poona, four in Oregon), but since 1987 have been only marginally associated with it.

Autobiographical Sketch

At this point I would like to offer a brief autobiographical chronology in order to relate some of the circumstances under which I became a sannyasin :

LSD
By the time I left home and the Catholic Church to study physics at university, Woodstock had happened, and the first human footprints were on the moon. The year was 1970, and drugs were more or less a fact of life on campus. I took to smoking marijuana quite regularly with my roommates, and tried LSD for the first time in the middle of my second year. I had nothing like the kind of experiences of cosmic consciousness one hears about, but I did experience some quite powerful hallucinations, and a lot of fear. I attribute this to the facts that my father had recently died, and I was living away from home for the first time. At that time, the fear was a primary object of awareness, and blocked any deeper experiences I might have had but by the next year I was more settled and took the drug again. This time, with Cartesian detachment, I had the opportunity to witness a flurry of hallucinatory images without much meaning, and concluded that the drug was a catalyst which functioned to make the neurons in the brain fire more quickly, like a computer on overdrive. I was accustomed to witnessing this kind of brain activity in my studies, and this seemed more of the same, only much faster and without the same content, but again I missed flying into outer space or experiencing cosmic unity with the universe or any other experiential superlative. Still, it was fun, if a bit disorienting.

MDA (Ecstasy)
Later that same year I was invited by my roommate's girlfriend to take a new drug she had obtained called MDA (which today would be called "ecstasy"). This was altogether different from any LSD experience, not wild and crazy, but mellow and secure. In the middle of the session, which occurred in early spring, I was watching ice floes break up in a small creek when Liz (the girlfriend) approached me and asked "How can you say there is no God?." The result was shattering. In a flash of significance and, yes, ecstasy, the ice floes became iridescent and my thinking stopped and I sat with a smile on my face and an "Ah, yes - This!" feeling which lasted (it seemed to me) a nanosecond. When my normal thinking processes rushed back (like a cloud), I knew immediately that I didn't want to spend my life in an office studying equations.

In retrospect, I can now suppose that I came to the conclusion in that moment that I had been hiding behind a physicist persona, one which I liked because it implied intelligence. I did not have a satisfying relationship with my father, who was an alcoholic, and I desperately wanted to compensate, in effect to gain recognition, by being "the best" at something. He valued "brains," and being a physicist was about as smart as you could get, but deep down guilt gnawed at me, Christian guilt, guilt common to many children of alcoholics. In the suggestible state the drug produced (which was powerful) probably any kind words could have reached me and possibly convinced me of anything, but I am still puzzled by the potency of those particular words. At any rate, I gave up academia then and there, though, being a practical sort of fellow, I finished my degree for the sake of completeness.

Findhorn
There followed a five-year period of fairly aimless wandering and dabbling in various artistic pursuits until one day I picked up a copy of The Secret Life of Plants by Christopher Tompkins (who also wrote The Secrets of the Great Pyramid), which described the Findhorn Community in Findhorn, Scotland. I was filled with wonder and resolved, since I wasn't doing anything better, to go there. I was looking for a community with a sense of purpose to be a part of, a spiritual community that was non-denominational. As luck would have it I discovered that just down the street lived MaCleary Drope, a local artist. He wanted to create a space to focus the energies of the alternative community in our city, London, Ontario, and had recently dedicated his house to this purpose, naming it, appropriately enough "Focus." He was sponsoring a workshop that very week (coincidentally enough) with a member of the Findhorn Community. Naturally, I attended and my resolve to go deepened, but I had second thoughts. Then one day a book arrived at the door- The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist by Lawrence LeShan. It was not inside an envelope and it was not mail. Moreover, I was not at home. I was staying with a friend, and it came to her mailbox. On the inside cover it bore the name of a person I later found out lived at Findhorn. This was mysterious and unexplainable - my second thoughts disappeared.

Introduction to Rajneesh
Findhorn was a nice place, and definitely had the spiritual orientation I was looking for. Though I had never heard of Mircea Eliade at the time, I can now surmise that it was an effort to consciously create a "sacred space" (Eliade 20). I stayed there for a week, participating in a week-long orientation group and when I returned, I went to see Mac to explore the possibility of creating our own like-minded community, only to find that he had recently returned from the Rajneesh Ashram in India. He now wore flaming red clothing and a beaded necklace with Rajneesh's picture in it. He explained that he had taken sannyas and been given a new name, Swami Bodhi Anando, and that his house was now a Rajneesh Meditation Center called "Unmada." As I sat talking with Mac/Bodhi, I could not help glancing at the large picture of Rajneesh he had placed over the kitchen table. "I don't want to get involved with a guru," I remember saying. In response, he invited me to do a meditation exercise with him, one which was always done at dusk. It had been devised by Rajneesh, who called it "Kundalini" meditation, a description of which is more appropriate in the discussion which follows. It appealed to me, as did its morning counterpart, "Dynamic." I stopped smoking marijuana, which had become an off and on pastime, and returned regularly to Bodhi's meditation sessions, eventually taking sannyas myself through the mail. I was given the name Swami Anand Narayan. In the spring of the next year, 1979, I traveled to India and met Rajneesh in darshan (Sanskrit for "meeting with the Master").

The Rajneesh Ashram
From the years 1976- 80 thousands of post-Hiroshima wanderers were attracted to the Shree Rajneesh Ashram in Poona, many more, in fact, than could be accommodated in the one acre owned and operated by Rajneesh Foundation International. They spilled into surrounding hotels and apartment complexes or built bamboo huts in open fields and during the day they crowded the roadway in front of the ashram in their bright orange clothing. When one took sannyas , one took a vow to do three things: wear orange clothing (actually saffron, the traditional color and also the "color of the rising sun"), use the new name given by Bhagwan (as he was known to his sannyasins ), and meditate once a day. The orange clothing was one more method the iconoclastic Rajneesh used to thumb his nose at the traditional Hindu establishment, for whom initiation into sannyas of non-Hindus was at best humorous, at worst a trivialization of the institution. Traditional Hindus were enraged, and there was at least one clear-cut attempt on his life .

The inside of the ashram was a hodge-podge of psychic/sexual energy released during cathartic meditation techniques or the various "groups" that Bhagwan sanctioned, which were closed therapy sessions using techniques gleaned from transactional psychology, Reichianism or Tibetan occultism. Many of these groups were presided over by former professional psychotherapists or hypnotists, now sannyasins . The typical ashram day, which was the same seven days a week, was highly structured. It began with dynamic meditation which was followed by a discourse by Rajneesh. After breakfast came a period, punctuated by lunch, during which ashram workers went about their chores, while those so inclined participated in groups. Still others were free to just lounge about. At five o'clock, all were invited to join in kundalini meditation, then dinner was served. In the evening, at about seven thirty, Rajneesh met with a small group in darshan while in another corner of the ashram a large group participated in devotional singing and dancing.

For a detailed account of ashram life, the reader is referred to The Promise of Paradise by Satya Bharti Franklin, a woman who was deeply involved with the Rajneesh movement from the days when he first started giving sannyas to Westerners until the time he left Oregon. One senses in the title of Franklin's account a deep sense of disaffection with the movement, and in fact the book corroborates this.

CHAPTER 4

THE RAJNEESH PHENOMENON

Rajneesh and Gurdjeiff
Rajneesh had much in common with Gurdjeiff. He frequently spoke favorably of the pre-Hiroshima mystic.

One point of commonalty was an uncanny ability to inspire censure. Bennett has said of Gurdjeiff:

"There is one other characteristic of Gurdjeiff that I must refer to at once; and that is, his adoption of a deliberate disguise in the form of putting himself in a bad light...Now, this method-which is called by the Sufis, the Way of Malamat, or the method of Blame-was highly esteemed in old times among the Sufis, who regarded the Sheikhs or Pirs who went by the Way of Blame, as particularly eminent in spirituality. Such people represented themselves to the outside world under a bad light, partly in order to avoid attracting praise and admiration towards themselves, and also partly as personal protection." (Bennett 61-62)
An example of considered censure directed towards Rajneesh may be found in Feuerstein's exhaustive study of "crazy-wise adepts, cult leaders and gurus," Holy Madness:
"While Rajneesh's positive influence on thousands of hopeful spiritual seekers cannot be denied, there can be no doubt that his lack of discrimination and his personal idiosyncrasies and wiles caused considerable damage to many individuals. More important, of all the contemporary gurus, Rajneesh bears perhaps the greatest responsibility for warping the Western public's image of the guru-disciple relationship in particular and of crazy wisdom and Eastern spiritual traditions in general." (67-68)
In passing, let us note that Feuerstein's entire work is impressively academic, but the above criticism presupposes that the public ever had an un-warped image of the guru-disciple relationship, or that such a thing is even possible. In fact, such a notion contradicts the very basis of Feuerstein's book. Nevertheless, for many sannyasins , like Franklin, his first point is well taken. They were dismayed when rumors of Rajneesh's alleged indiscretions (like drug use, and abuse of close disciples) began to circulate after he was forced to leave his American commune, and the entire visionary experiment was discontinued. Many had devoted their life savings to the building of it and many had nowhere to go when it closed. Even Gurdjeiff was never seen in such a bad light by so many people.

Another characteristic Rajneesh had in common with Gurdjeiff was a propensity for experimentation. His signature meditation techniques were an example of this. A description of Dynamic meditation, taken from The Orange Book is written in language characteristic of the ashram in 1980:

" The Dynamic Meditation lasts one hour and is in five stages. It can be done alone, but the energy will be more powerful if it is done in a group. It is an individual experience so you should remain oblivious of others around you and keep your eyes closed throughout, preferably using a blindfold. It is best to have an empty stomach and wear loose, comfortable clothing.
First Stage - 10 minutes
Breathe chaotically through the nose, concentrating always on the exhalation. The body will take care of the inhalation. Do this as fast and as hard as you possibly can - and then a little harder, until you literally become the breathing. Use your natural body movements to help you build up your energy. Feel it building up, but don't let go during the first stage.
Second Stage - 10 minutes
Explode! Let go of everything that needs to be thrown out. Go totally mad, scream, shout, cry, jump, shake, dance, sing, laugh, throw yourself around. Hold nothing back , keep your whole body moving. A little acting often helps you to get started. Never allow your mind to interfere with what is happening. Be total. (italics added)
Third Stage - 10 minutes
With raised arms, jump up and down shouting the mantra HOO! HOO! HOO! as deeply as possible. Each time you land, on the flats of your feet, let the sound hammer deep into the sex center. Give all you have, exhausting yourself totally.
Fourth Stage - 15 minutes
Stop! Freeze where you are in whatever position you find yourself in. Don't arrange the body in any way. A cough, a movement, anything will dissipate the energy flow and he effort will be lost. Be a witness to everything that is happening to you.
Fifth Stage - 15 minutes
Celebrate and rejoice with music and dance, expressing your gratitude towards the whole. Carry your happiness with you throughout the day. (31-32)
If anything like a summary of Rajneesh's teachings could be said to exist, it would have to be very similar to these instructions. Kundalini, the evening meditation, is described thus:
First Stage - 15 minutes
Be loose and let your whole body shake, feeling the energies moving up from your feet. Let go everywhere and become the shaking. Your eyes may be open or closed.
Second Stage - 15 minutes
Dance...any way you feel, and let the whole body move as it wishes.
Third Stage - 15 minutes
Close the eyes and be still, sitting or standing, witnessing whatever is happening inside and out.
Fourth Stage - 15 minutes
Keeping the eyes closed, lie down and be still. (32-33)
As Deva Aneesha, director for the Osho Center for Transformation in Poona in 1992 notes, these post-Hiroshima meditation techniques, particularly Dynamic, were a creative blend of eastern wisdom and western psychological understanding:
."..I arrived in Poona in 1976 from Esalen Institute, a Reichian Therapist trained in California,...seeking what I sensed was the next step in my personal evolution... It turned out many other psychotherapists from the "growth scene" in America and Europe had the same feeling...Many of us had been drawn to him initially through his Dynamic Meditation, which we all recognized as a stroke of genius, coming out of the best of both Eastern and Western understanding." (Osho Times May, 1992)
Partly because of the influx of psychotherapists, the Poona Ashram became as well known as a therapy center as a spiritual retreat. Nevertheless, being an ashram , its orientation was qualitatively different from places like Esalen. A 1995 brochure from Esalen describes it as "a center to explore work in the humanities and sciences that promotes human values and potentials... - a center for experimental education." The stated goal of the Osho Multiversity, as of 1992, was "a simple thing: how to live meditatively" (Osho Times April 1992). This is, for anyone who has attempted it, a deceptively simple goal. Another characteristic shared between Rajneesh and Gurdjeiff was an interest in hypnotism. For Gurdjeiff, this led, according to Bennett, to an exploration of the root causes of human suggestibility. He found that:
"Behind suggestibility, there is a woeful ignorance of human nature, which is one of the awkwardnesses of our present situation. It is awkward just now because we know so very much about external nature, and so very little about internal nature, and this produces a rather threatening imbalance of our activity." (67)
Rajneesh, for his part, delivered his discourses in a manner that many sannyasins suspected to have been a hypnotic technique in itself . Posterity will have to take this on faith, as the use of television in recording his discourses was curiously old-fashioned. The technique used was to simply focus the camera on the face of the discoursing Rajneesh, and leave it in one place for the length of the lecture. It was probably hoped that the hypnotic effect would translate, but as far as I could tell, the result was not only uninteresting and sleep provoking, it was iconographic. Part of the reason for this concerns the nature of the medium of television, which is already hypnotic, but depends for this on engaging the mind through the manipulation of visual images. When these images don't change, the eyes seek stimulation elsewhere and are drawn away from the TV image, focusing instead on the material reality of the TV set on which is displayed an unchanging image of a "talking head." For a disciple, continual gazing at an image of the guru is a meditation technique common in, for instance, bhakti yoga , the purpose of which is to generate a feeling of devotion. This is not necessarily true for a non-disciple, however. Rajneesh as a "talking head" appears to me long-winded and abstruse, a far cry from how I experienced him in person. We can contrast this use of television with the 1990 video entitled "The Rajneesh Manifesto," in which parts of his discourses are used as narration for a progression of images relating to the present spiritual and ecological crisis faced by humanity, a crisis alluded to by Bennett above, and of which we shall have more to say presently.

Besides using it in his discourses, Rajneesh encouraged the use of hypnosis in the therapy groups. The term "dehypnotherapy," attributable either to him or to the leader of a group by the same name, Anand Santosh who later became known as Jeru Kabbal, was meant to signify the process of becoming disidentified with neural imprints through the use of meditation and hypnosis techniques. The techniques suggested by Rajneesh and taught by Santosh, which I experienced, were a soft alternative to drugs or any of the other more cathartic methods used in the ashram or referred to by Leary above.

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