Dear Toby, letters to my gay nephew

I think I’ve known at least one man who was murdered. I say ‘think’ because I have known other men who died under suspicious circumstances, but one was definitely killed by another human. His case remains unresolved.  I met a very beautiful woman, Anne Gurney, who was in a self-help group I was part of in the late 1970 in Berkeley California. She had been a top executive at a high-end women's cosmetic company in New York City. It might have been Revlon or Max Factor. She always dressed for the role, elegant. She came to California to work for a new natural health care products company called Shaklee again in marketing as a C level executive. She was also very smart.  She had a friend, a gay guy named Ron something who tagged along with his partner. They were young New York gay men. Very elegant, but a bit quirky. The better looking dude was either her assistant or another vice president at Shaklee. If not rich they were aspiring to be. When Anne and Ron arrived from New York, ...

I knew that Allen was in town when there was a knock at the front door at 3:30 exactly. A young man, 21 but not a month more, clean shaven, holding a book, asked, “Is this the Philip Whalen Zendo?” I invited him into the living room where he sat down and quietly continued his reading.  Allen would be at the door shortly; I could hear Phil beginning to make his way up the stairs. He and Allen shared years of friendship. They were punctual. I began to prepare tea. I loved when Phil’s friends came to visit. Phil was on his best behavior. Not that he was normally badly behaved though in private moments he could be angry, even insulting. Despite being one of the foremost leaders of a movement that questioned the very roots of believing and behaving what my parents taught me, when he was proper, he was extremely proper. But there was another quality to the conversations with his poet friends. Their language was careful and measured. It was literate. I was always looking for any innuendos...

“Out of the bars and into the streets” It was something that we shared with other civil rights movements.

SAT, Naranjo, the Enneagram, the beginnings, and “the Work." Originally written for "The Enneagram Monthly" to be published in 2021 Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 – 12 July 2019) is gone. Óscar Ichazo (24 July, 1931 – 26 March, 2020) died less than a year later. The meditation teacher Ajahn Dhiravamsa (5 November, 1934 - 28 July, 2021) passed away more recently. Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us though I can find no obituary. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Kathy Speeth who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child and the Nyingmapa teacher Tarthang Tulku who had an enormous influence on Naranjo. At 86 Tarthang is still teaching though no longer traveling internationally. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West. My friend Dan Kaplan forwarded an email promotion for a course by some proponents of the Enneagram that promises to unlo...

The Foray into Scientology When I first heard about the idea, I thought what a quixotic enterprise, and then, what a totally bizarre idea, and then what total insanity, and then, why not? I had after all “fallen away” from a very rigorous religious practice but I still found solace in the very Jesuit exercise of the “examen.” If Scientology had some powerful spiritual medicine, why not raid the cabinet?  Aubrey is correct to mention that Naranjo was interested in what L Ron Hubbard called “The Tone Scale,” but he also was truly fascinated by the use of the galvanometer, skin response lie detector, known as the e-meter in Scientology, and the technique of tracing of memories back in time, called in Scientology shorthand, a “run-down,” perhaps even back to past lives. A note about “kath.” At one meeting I was present when two members of SAT described being trained as Scientology auditors. They described “beating the e-meter.” The ethics officer asked them if they were currently invol...