Psychology: Outside
In
They spend the day precariously groping their way, helping each other inch their feet along parallel ropes strung a dizzying fifty feet above the ground. Many report exhilaration on the far side of fear — a "breakthrough experience" when feelings of self-limitation dissolve into the belief they can do anything they set their minds to.
The next day, however, the group of nearly fifty AT&T executives divides into teams to play the Samurai game, a simulation exercise of warrior martial arts where things don't go well at all.
"Essentially everybody loses," said Chris Majer, whose Sportsmind, Inc., was teaching 3000 of the huge utility's managers how to realize their creative potential. "The idea is to find out how you behave when you and your team lose."1
Seekers of full human potential also play the Samurai game at Esalen Institute, the Northern California bastion of once-shocking consciousness-raising techniques. But at Esalen, the Samurai simulation focuses strongly on death.
Participants are invited to "enter the state of consciousness of a medieval samurai, to live intensely in the moment, and to experience symbolic death and rebirth." And before returning to the office on Monday, wrote Alice Kahn, "we were to join in 'a symbolic battle to the death . . . to experience the ultimate futility of war and the value of every moment of existence.' "2
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Esalen, cradle of the human potentials movement and known in the countercultural heyday of the 1960s as the wild frontier of the touchy-feely and the primal hot tub, has come of New Age. Through the years Esalen has attracted such celebrity intellectuals as writers Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, historian Arnold Toynbee, scientists Linus Pauling and Fritjof Capra, architect R. Buckminster Fuller, theologian Paul Tillich, former California governor Jerry Brown, and a host of psychologists — Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, B.F. Skinner, Rollo May, and Abraham Maslow.) The latter, lost in a dense fog one night during a vacation trip, mistook Esalen for a motel and ended up forging a long, symbiotic relationship with the institute.)
Some of Esalen's outlandish excesses have been curbed, and less extravagant claims are being made there these days. But the meat and potatoes seminars are still meditation, psychotherapy, Eastern religion, and massage and body-work — the core of New Age consciousness. And since Esalen was founded in 1962, many of its concepts have gradually permeated nearly every YMCA and university extension program in America.
Psychology — under a kaleidoscope of mutant schools and theories — has shaped the modern world, molding its beliefs and lifestyles as no other influence. Most of this has happened only since World War II. But to understand all this, and how the universal "oneness" seeped into the collective unconscious of the New Age, we need to go back to Freud, the famous creator of the psychoanalytical school of psychology.
Sigmund Freud (1856—1939) believed that strong and often competing subconscious forces and instincts are the engine for the human mind. He used trance induction and hypnosis techniques to ferret out repressions from the unconscious, holding that sexual repressions were the basis for most human ills.
According to Freud's theories of determinism, these biological instincts constantly clash with the moral standards imposed by society. Freud, who was familiar with occult literature, also thought that belief in God was a sign of neurosis and that man was a being neither different from nor superior to animals.
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Not all of Freud's disciples totally agreed with their brilliant and eccentric mentor. One of them, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875—1961), questioned Freud's tying of all human behavior to selfish and infantile sexual impulse, and Jung embraced spirituality as a vital component of personality. Thus, in Jungian psychology there was room for religious thought and mystical experience.
Jung also posited the "collective unconscious," which has been defined as "a reservoir of psychological images and forces accruing through all history and shared by all people."3 These experiences, Jung said, are "the primordial images which have always been the basis of man's thinking — the whole treasure-house of mythological motifs."4
Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck calls the collective unconscious the theory "in which we inherit the wisdom of the experience of our ancestors without ourselves having the personal experience."5
Some identify the channeling phenomenon as a way of tapping into the pool of this shared, or collective group memory. Religious studies professor Carl A. Raschke notes: "At one remarkable stroke the notion of a 'collective unconscious' became, for Jung, a construct which for the first time in the history of mainline thought could be cited to warrant not only the claims of mystics, but the odd and often convoluted metaphysical statements of seers, spiritualists and Gnostics . . . . He insisted that the meaning of human history actually was to be found outside of history — in the collective unconscious."6
But we hasten on to the next major stages in the psychological drama: humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology.
One of the chief architects of the humanistic school was Abraham Maslow (1908—70), whose concept of "self-actualization" became a buzzword in the human potentials and pastoral counseling circles of the 1970s. Self-actualization, or growth values, were at the top of Maslow's totem of human needs. And capping them all was transcendence: a person's ability to reach out beyond individuality and become united with the whole of reality.
Since our "inner nature is good or neutral rather than bad," Maslow wrote, "it is best to bring it out and encourage it
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rather than to suppress it. If it is permitted to guide our life, we grow healthy, fruitful and happy."7
This seemed like good news for those who wished to assign humanity a slot one notch above the animal kingdom and quach scientific determinism by restoring freedom of choice, dignity, and responsibility to the human equation. But Maslow's transcendence was the universal potentiality of human nature, not the supernatural breaking in via a transcendent and personal God.
Before long other psychologists were building upon Maslow's assumptions that persons are good by nature and that human potential is unlimited. Among the best known and most influential of the human potentials psychotherapists was Carl R. Rogers (1902—87). One of Rogers' chief contributions was his belief in not making diagnoses — a technique known as "client-centered" therapy. The approach stemmed from Rogers' assertion that individuals always hold within themselves the answer to any problem, and therefore the role of the counselor is simply to create the proper environment for the solutions to emerge. This is done by simply reflecting back the client's feelings rather than guiding or directing him or her.
Because, in Rogers' view, human experience is the center and source of meaning, self-realization can be accomplished apart from responsibility to other persons, tradition, or an objective God who makes moral demands. One is only responsible to one's own feelings. Only you can judge your values, Rogers said.8
Elevation of personal growth as the highest good has been sharply criticized on grounds that its assumptions ultimately lead to a psychology of narcissism, asocial irresponsibility, and personal license. Nevertheless, humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology, the most recent entrant in the human potentials lineup, have made enormous impact on Western culture. And the New Age script has copied, line for line, their basic tenet: One can realize infinite potential — become enlightened — because personal experience equals reality, and reality can be created by focusing on the self.
Ken Wilber, a leading New Age exponent and figure in transpersonal psychology, traces the stages of psychological growth through fourteen levels which mirror the seven Yogic
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chakras of Eastern mysticism. At the "most realized state," he maintains, a person experiences higher consciousness — the goal of mystics through the ages, the essence of Maslow's "peak experience," and the apex of transpersonal psychology. At this stage, says Wilbur, "we are in touch with the divine; the physical is lost in the spiritual; we become enlightened."9
One of the most potent popularizers of the old/new concept of spiritual growth through oneness with deity is Scott Peck, whose The Road Less Traveled emerged from feeble beginnings to reign almost two years as number one on the New York Times bestseller list.10
What does God want of humans? Peck asks in the book. What are we to grow toward? What is the goal of evolution?
[N]o matter how much we may like to pussyfoot around it, all of us who postulate a loving God and really think about it eventually come to a single terrifying idea: God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination. This is what we mean when we say He is the Alpha, and the Omega, the beginning and the end . . . .
It is one thing to believe in a nice old God who will take good care of us from a lofty position of power which we ourselves could never begin to attain. It is quite another to believe in a God who has it in mind for us precisely that we should attain His position, His power, His wisdom, His identity.11
As the human potentials movement migrated east from California, it had by the end of the 1970s already spawned 8000 different "therapies," Alvin Toffler wrote in The Third Wave. We can only briefly tour a few New Age psychotechnologies here. But notice the "divine within" in all of them.
Down the coast from Esalen is a half-sister, Elysium Institute, known for its "clothing optional" seminars and hydrotherapy pools. Elysium offers sessions on the "New Age Focus," featuring such leaders as psychic Robbie Jacobson: "She will help you to focus on yourself, to capture the source of your own abundance, to tap into the power of universal consciousness, and to create your future by developing your own clairvoyant techniques."12
Shakti Gawain, who leads workshops on visualization at
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the Shakti Center in Marin County, California, talks about trusting intuition above reason:
At first you may find that the more you act on intuition, the more things in your life seem to be falling apart — you might lose your job, a relationship, certain friends — your car might even stop working! You're actually changing fast and shedding the old things in your life that don't fit you anymore. As long as you didn't let go of them, they imprisoned you. Now, as you continue on this path, things will just fall into place. Doors will open in a seemingly miraculous way.13
Composer-musician Robert Fritz has developed a program called Technologies for Creating which teaches that persons can create the results they want in their lives. Fritz assumes that the so-called superconscious — also called "higher self," "inner teacher," and "spiritual guide" — can be activated. By tapping into the superconscious we allow the deeper, spiritual side of ourselves to emerge, he says.14
In the Hawaiian process of Ho'oponopono — classes are regularly presented throughout the world by The Foundation of I— "Self-I-Dentity consists of the three aspects of the Self or Mind in partnership with the Divine Creator. The SELF — subconscious, conscious and superconscious . . . exists in every atom and molecule of Creation." The Self-I-Dentity process is not limited to humans, according to the foundation's brochure, but may be used for both animate and inanimate objects and applied to "any problem or situation." Note the Jungian concept in Self-I-Dentity: "If we can accept that we are the sum total of all past thoughts, emotions, words, deeds and actions and that our present lives and choices are colored or shaded by this memory bank of the past, then we begin to see how a process of correcting or setting aright can change our lives, our families, and our society."15
The Cauldron of Thoth journey of empowerment with Nicki Scully induces altered states of consciousness "in which previously inaccessible information becomes available from our internal wellspring of the collective, our Cauldron."16
The concept of "progressive deepening" through "process meditation" has also been widely popularized by the national
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"Intensive Journaling" workshops of psychotherapist Ira Progoff. (We'll say more about him in chapter 22.)
Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whom we met earlier in our Who's Who of New Age gurus, has been one of the most successful mixers of Eastern philosophies with Western psychotherapeutic techniques. He combined dance and bioenergetics, Gestalt and hypnotherapy, encounter and sensory awareness, and created dozens of new and hybrid groups. Pushing therapists to the limit, Rajneesh admonished them to trust their intuition.
"If they were stymied, they were to relax, breathe deeply, touch the mala [bead necklace with the guru's picture pressed in a locket], or summon up their Master's image. He would be there, with the appropriate response, working through them."17
The goal of the spiritual pathway along which he sent his disciples, said Rajneesh, was for them to disappear into the oneness of God: "The enlightenment happens only when the ego has disappeared. The ego is the darkness of the soul, the ego is the imprisonment of the soul, the 'I' is the barrier to the ultimate . . . You will never encounter God. If you are there, God is not there because the seed [ego] is there. When you disappear, God is there; so there is no encounter, really."18
That process is akin to various forms of tantra, a ubiquitous form of New Age "transcendence into the one" allied with the concepts of Tibetan Buddhism. Through exercises designed to strengthen and purify sexual parts of the body, tantra attempts to deliberately and irrevocably dissolve human identity.
As Brooks Alexander describes the practice: "Tantra unravels the normal world of perception and understanding and reweaves it into an intricate network of occult correspondences that ultimately vanishes into the One . . . Tantra is how the world looks as it disappears."19
Something like the line in the country and western song: "I thought happiness was Lubbock, Texas, in my rearview mirror." Or maybe reminiscent of the laws in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where people approach objects by walking away from them.
And the list of mass-marketed psychotechnologies goes on: est (Erhard Seminar Training, now called the Forum),
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Lifespring, Actualizations, and a plethora of other short-term seminars compact the "One for all" into intensive meetings where old beliefs are torn down and values are restructured through a potpourri of Freudian theory, behavior-modification techniques, Eastern philosophy, and transpersonal psychology.20
Frances Adeney, whose analysis of the human potentials movement has been widely cited in Christian literature, says of est:
[It] is geared toward stripping a person of values, mores and religious beliefs so that one may begin "freely" choosing values and creating one's own reality. The humanistic assumptions of the perfection of the individual and the potential for transcendence are crucial for est . . . The world is illusion; you see whatever you choose to see. You may create anything you like around you, and in fact, all you see is your own creation. Everything in essence is one; you are perfect; you are God.21
Followers of Africa, a nationwide spiritual organization, search for the "essential self" through such techniques as Egyptian gymnastics and African dances. Its workshops and intensives also involve chanting mantras and meditating by concentrating on colorful wall symbols known as yantras. The goal is to achieve the divine life, somewhat akin to the satori sought by Buddhists.22
A key ingredient in all New Age psychotechnologies is evolution toward a consciousness that seeks to explain the meaning of everything through an amalgamation of mystical and scientific perceptions. Thus, New Age "science" and psychic phenomena merge in the psychology of the Self. The next step is to look at scientific support for this mystical worldview.
Chapter 20 || Table of Contents
1. Chris Majer, interview with author, Seattle, Wash., 21 December 1987.
2. Alice Kahn, "Esalen at 25," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 6 December 1987.
3. Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 74.
4. Cited in John Klimo, "The Psychology of Channeling," New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 62.
5. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 252.
6. Carl A. Raschke, Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism in the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980), 145–46.
7. Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968), 5.
8. Jeannette DeWyze, "An Encounter with Bill Coulson," Reader [San Diego], 20 August 1987, 19.
9. Karen Hoyt et al., New Age Rage (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1987), 121–22.
10. "Psychiatrist Scott Peck's Best-seller Came by 'The Road Less Traveled'," Brain/Mind Bulletin, 26 May 1986, 1.
11. Peck, The Road Less Traveled, 169–70.
12. "Elysium Institute Seminar Schedule," JOTS: Journal of the Senses 81 (October–November–December 1987): 26.
13. Shakti Gawain and Laurel King, "Trusting Your Intuition," New Age Journal (July–August 1987): 50.
14. Neal Vahle, "Robert Fritz and Technologies for Creating," New Realities Magazine (January–February 1987): 27.
15. According to material assimilated at Celebration of Innovation Workshop, San Francisco, 7 November 1987.
16. Ibid.
17. James S. Gordon, Golden Guru: The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Lexington, Mass.: Stephen Greene Press, 1987), 66.
18. Cited in Hoyt et al., New Age Rage, 213.
19. Ibid., 148.
20. Goothuis, Unmasking the New Age, 79; Frances Adeney, "The Flowering of the Human Potential Movement," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 4, no. 1 (Winter 1981–82): 15.
21. Adeney, "The Flowering of the Human Potential Movement," 15.
22. Russell Chandler, "A Sampler's Directory to Meditation Groups," Los Angeles Times, 13 February 1977, pt. 2, 1.
