“And pay attention to who they're fucking.” Kenneth 8.12.21

 “By their fruits you shall know them.” Matthew 7:16-17 

“And pay attention to who they're fucking.” Kenneth 8.12.21

Examine the myth of the “Man who Knows,” “The Person who never sleeps.” And other bullshit that persuades us to give up our power.

Who we were

Where we came from

What we were seeking

What we found

What we did with it

The involvement of the traditional religious practices

Claudio’s banquet table concept

Abby Hoffman, and the Hoffman Process

Jerry Rubin and est https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rubin#Post-activism

The Vietnam War

The Apollo Space Project and Edgar Mitchell

The Sexual Revolution

Haight-Ashbury and drugs

Psychotherapy

Educated, even the painters and house builders

Scientology/the nexus of a pragmatic epistemology and spirituality

“The One who knows.”

I ask myself why so little has been written about those early days? There was some reckless experimentation. Sexually it wasn’t Peyton Place even though at times that’s what it felt like. The rumblings of a generation that was fed up, about ready to explode. 

When G.I. Gurdjieff died in Paris in 1949, beside his recondite writings, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and All and Everything, he left a large body of oral teaching that spanned nearly four decades. He also had many devoted students. Though he did charge certain senior students to work with other interested people across the globe, he died with no clear transmission of a spiritual lineage. As with many powerful spiritual systems, it attracted a lot of interest, some from sane people who were intent on realizing the goals of liberation through self awareness and observation that Gurdjieff advocated. In other cases people seem to have been attracted by his unorthodox teaching methods. Several hung out a shingle with “The Work” predominantly displayed, and felt it gave them license to behave badly.

When I joined Claudio Naranjo’s group, I heard Kathy Speeth tell a story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child. Her parents were prominent New Yorkers who had been students of A.R. Orage, perhaps continuing to work with Jane Heap or Willem Nyland after Orage’s early death. One version of this story is that it happened during the summers that her parents spent in Paris studying with Gurdjieff at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard in the 17th arrondissement. That is unlikely. Kathy was born in 1937 and the Second World War began in September of 1939. Her meeting with Mr. Gurdjieff was probably on one of his trips to the United States, and he did make one trip to the United States after the surrender of Germany so the timing sounds likely.

Why am I making such a big deal about the exact time that Kathy sat in Gurdjieff’s lap and where it took place? I want to avoid the sloppy thinking that comes from blurring facts with lovely stories.

Alex Horn was known for late night early morning marathon sessions on a secluded ranch north of San Francisco. My only experience with Horn was at San Francisco’s Everyman Theater of 24th Street and Mission where I watched a preposterous production about the assassination of JFK staged by Horn and his then wife, Sharon. Horn prowled the audience before, after and during the intermission. That was enough for me.

Horn claimed that he was in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff, but there is no evidence of a real connection. I would assert that Horn, attracted to the power he could reap from Gurdjieff’s unorthodox teaching methods, created a cult. I know several people who were not Claudio’s students but had been in Horn’s group. They report sexual exploitation, coercion and even physical violence. For example, Horn would instigate a dispute between several of the men in the group and then instruct them to have a wrestling match, or even fist fight without gloves. Horn was also a known sexual predator with a voracious appetite for young women. His Bible was not anything that Gurdjieff or Ouspensky wrote but rather “Atlas Shrugged.”

E.J. Gold claimed to have been authorized to teach as “The Beast” by an esoteric Sufi School. As far as I can ascertain from any factual history, he fabricated his connection with Mr. Gurdjieff. He was also the author of a cult book called “The American Book of the Dead.” When I met him, I could not shake the feeling that he was devoid of compassion. He invited anyone of the SAT group to come to Southern California and do an intensive training. By the time my friend Hal Slate arrived at a secluded bunker somewhere up on the Grapevine, the title and authority of “The Beast” had been given to one of Gold’s very young disciples who had learned everything he needed to know by performing for three days straight with a garage rock band made up of people who had no musical training. I am happy that I was spared the treat of sharing their musical enlightenment. 

Ripping a page from the script of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, “The Exterminating Angel,” Gold seized on an unexpected change in the weather to concoct a scenario that it was the end of the world and all his trapped guests had to make some serious ontological choices. Hal escaped, walking out of the canyon on foot during the freak Southern California blizzard. As the saying goes, “Never miss the opportunity provided by a catastrophe.” I would add, “real or imagined, there are always several choices available.”

Of all the Gurdjieff students and teachers whom I met, Pamela Travers was remarkable. The real Mary Poppins had actually been Gurdjieff’s student. Because I’d actually read some of her books, despite all the technicolor dancing and singing I knew that Poppins would be very English prim and proper with a mystical bent. And here was a middle aged woman, not at all glamorous, as much the portrait of an English nanny as my imagination allowed, who was also very present. She talked and answered our questions in a completely no nonsense way but with a lilt in her voice; she mentioned that she still met with a group and she named one of Mr. Gurdjieff’s senior students as the group leader.

When Claudio began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram, he introduced Henry Korman as a person who would possibly inherit his SAT groups. Korman was leading a group in New York but had agreed to come and work with anyone who wished to continue to do what we imagined was Gurdjieff’s Work.

I worked with Korman for almost 3 years, a group meeting twice a week and every Sunday. We began with an exercise called “Sensing, Looking and Listening,” then observations and questions from the group under Korman’s heavy-handed direction. Korman also organized elaborate dinners with exacting preparation, like the ones we read about in former Gurdjieff students’ memoirs. Sundays were dedicated to a work exercise, and once a month we would begin on Saturday and extend it throughout the whole night. This pattern of group meetings, intensive concentration and work coupled with sleep deprivation seemed to be something imitated from the way Gurdjieff is said to have worked with his students. Alex Horn and E.J. Gold also made ample, and often manipulative, use of forcibly breaking up normal cycles.

While there was none of the physical violence that was reported in Horn’s groups, my experience of Korman was that he was a bully. He had no qualms about interfering in the sexual relationships of couples in the group or openly sleeping with students. He tried to arrange for a woman in the group to introduce me to heterosexual experience. Thank god she had the presence of mind to say no.

After I had left Henry’s group, I was living in San Francisco, trying to piece together some of that frayed experience. A Jesuit whom I knew and worked with was a member of the San Francisco Gurdjieff Group. He arranged for me to meet Lord John Pentland. I arrived at a very upper middle class home in Saint Francis Woods at the appointed time for a congenial conversation with Pentland. He asked about my intentions, my experience, and talked about our mutual friend whom he knew well and respected. Pentland told me that one of his longtime students, the woman who owned Fields Book Store on Polk, would meet and talk with me while we decided if I should join the group. When he asked me if I had any questions, I asked if he knew Korman and about the exercise of “Sensing, Looking and Listening.” Pentland said that yes, he had heard of Korman. Then he asked me to describe the exercise completely and fully which I did. He then asked about some specific details, particularly the attention to breath, or really the absence of any instruction about the breath. He paused, then looked at me directly and said that the exercise had absolutely no relationship to anything Mr. Gurdjieff taught. He would not comment about its possible usefulness.

I’m not going to say that my time with Korman was completely wasted, but I cannot pretend that I was in any way participating in “The Work.” Just a quick footnote--Korman met Mr. William Patrick Patterson, and began work with him. He stopped teaching, admitted to a grave mistake, and wrote a letter of apology to his former students. He did not include me. I read a copy of the letter sent to a friend. He was in many ways a brilliant and important teacher for me, and I hesitate to put him into the category of an arrogant, destructive prick. Sadly he belongs in that bin.

Claudio Naranjo introduced Bob Hoffman, a tailor who had zero psychological training, to his students in SAT. Hoffman claimed to have had a psychic vision of Dr. Siegfried Fisher, a well known and respected psychiatrist and also a family friend, who revealed the secret of what Hoffman called Negative Love and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy that allowed us to undo the negative consequences of our childhood programming.

I spent the better part of a year doing the first version of the Fisher-Hoffman Process. Hoffman became infatuated with me, and within 6 months after I finished working with him, Hoffman began stalking me at Berkeley’s gay bar. a few more months invited me to dinner and raped me. He was a psychotic and a criminal.

The Soup of the Soup

Looking back, I find it odd that none of the teachers that Naranjo introduced to the group were conversant or really even interested in the Enneagram as he presented it. There were certainly authentic teachers, monks, therapists who were devoted to the Path of Liberation, but mixed in were some who lied about being in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff and fraudsters who made preposterous claims but really were just out for power, money or sex. It was the soup we swam in, and, like the air we breathe, no matter how careful we try to be, we cannot be certain that we’re not getting a whiff of poison.

Naranjo loved a Sufi story, attributed to Mulla Nasruddin, called the Soup of the Soup. A generous neighbor gave the Mulla a fat duck which his wife dressed and made into a fine dinner. Everyone was happy. The next day, a guest knocked on the door, “I heard that Mustafa gave you a big duck, do you have any left?” Of course observing the customary obligation of hospitality, the Mulla invited the guest in for some hearty soup made from the leftovers. The next day, a friend of Mustafa's friend smelled the still rich soup bubbling in the kitchen, knocked on the Mulla’s door, and asked to taste the savory dish. The Mulla invited him in. This goes on for several more days and several more friends of the friends of Mustafa. (In the West we’d call this a shaggy dog story). About the 10th day, after the now familiar knock on the door, the Mulla invited another friend of the friend of the friend of Mustafa's friend in for the remainder of the soup, but when the guest sat and tasted, he asked, “Where’s the duck?” The Mulla answered, “I’m sorry but all I have to offer you is the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck that Mustafa gave me.”

That is my impression of the end of our work with SAT. We were just rotely going through the motions of the Work of the Work, but we’d lost the taste of that fine fat duck that we were given for our feast. However we'd also tasted real Duck Soup that Claudio had served, and, with persistence and a bit of luck, we could buy a fat bird and recreate the recipe ourselves. We can, in the words of Lord John Pentland, create what Mr. Gurdjieff called self-remembering, “. . . a state of attention . . . a state of vibrant attentiveness, of inner alignment and attunement, which, when we are sufficiently still inside, possesses a potency reminding us that the real inner work is a response to a higher and deeper calling.”