Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Before Swami hauled me in, I had risen rapidly (age 23) to the verge of very great prominence in both academic, governmental and industrial circles. I was a classic “fair haired boy.” But just before everything jelled for the sort of career many can only dream of, I pulled out because none of it was on terms that agreed with my inner necessity. In the space of 6 months, I went from the top to the bottom socially and also, of course, financially. Nor was I especially happy. My parents tried to have me committed and only my sister’s not signing the paper — California law at the time in re these matters was draconian — prevented that event, which was supported by big money and society from the east coast and would have issued in lobotomy physical or chemical and body then used as a medical test bed. The hate was very great. I disappointed so many and so powerful. They wanted revenge.
At this point, Swami intervened and hauled me in. He protected me and I know that without Him the folks would have had their way with me.
The academics made one last effort to pull me back, in 1973, after Swami had assured me of a happy life, and I almost went, but pulled out at the last moment — a day before boarding the plane for a prestigious conference in Vienna — and they haven’t had kind words for me since. This particular group of academics was the circle of Maggie Mead, her daughter Cat Bateson and the Wenner Gren Foundation.
The last major thing I had done in that “career” was to produce the bulk of a book for Prentice Hall and with Robert Theobald, with whom I was associated for 3 years, even before graduating at Union in 1969. The title was Habit and Habitat and it was an early environmental volume. It caused a split between Bob and myself because I did the research which showed that the environmental mess was a lot messier than anyone, including Bob, wanted to admit at that point. He wanted to present it as manageable — humanist attitude — and I wanted to present it as manageable but also reflecting some fundamental distortions that needed to be handled by measures more compelling than sweet reasonableness. The latter approach was taken from the governmental level, eventually, but when we were producing the book that concept was considered too extreme by Bob, actually distasteful philosophically.
So I pulled off the project and it was published under his name only but the content is largely mine, with the seriousness of the condition de-sharpened.
I self-published a little classic which forecast the home computer — I had also told IBM about that machine in 1972, before the chip was out (a blood uncle was senior IBM VP and an in-law uncle ran IBM legal) — in 1971, but have no copies. The title was Attitudes. It was my first effort after declaring independence.
[Actually, an original copy of Attitudes and originals of many others of my works dating from the 1970s and 1980s, including the ones mentioned below, came back to me unexpectedly and rest now in our home and online here.]
Through the 70s, thousands of pages were written and most discarded or given to acquaintances. One was titled Jesus of Nazareth and God and another Notes To Myself: The History of the World. Having no publishing connections and no one past Mary who really valued my work that I knew of, most of it was just pitched. We were so poor for so many years we could not afford to carry around paper and often even to buy it. When I left Theobald and before and even after Swami picked me up, I was content to eat horse food, for a while, and for three months in Berkeley, water, flour and honey.
Mary came to be with me in 1975 and we were married two years ago in order to keep my Metro benefit clearly in her domain. Otherwise, we would just continue living together.
In about 1990 a lawyer here of about 20 years my senior and I made contact at our Episcopal Church — St. Thomas Episcopal Church, which is a hoot because St. Thomas is the “Apostle to India” in Christian tradition — and he encouraged me to keep my writings by merely liking them and, like myself, being of the east coast establishment, valuing education and literary brilliance. So almost all the writing I will mention below date post 1990. Some is from the mid 80s. Interestingly, his name is Lucius, which means light bearer. My Sephardic buddy, also my senior in years, is named Lucie. The same name: Lucie and Lucius. 🙂
My writings are collected here:
The principle work is here:
The coloring books, which are by Mary with my words are here:
And the book of epigrams or pithy sayings starts here:
The time on flour, water and honey in Berkeley was the critical intellectual juncture of my life, when I learned adwaitha and realized that is where I should be. It was in Berkeley. And I was staying rent free compliments of an elderly widow who knew my plight and took pity on me. She and her husband had owned the Hotel Manila where General Douglas and Mrs. Jean MacArthur lived for years before and just into the WWII. Funny world. I later named our second son, after the General.
The critical spiritual juncture in my life occurred earlier.
Anyhow, those three months at Berkeley, alone with Swami and paper and finally an ancient typewriter I begged to have on loan from a shrink who said I should be in a straight-jacket, were the critical juncture in “straightening it all out.” At the end of it, surprise, some folks from San Diego who had heard of my condition appeared and offered to take me for a meal. They took me to … International House of Pancakes !!! Swami loves the jest. And they gave me a $50 bill, which I promptly spent on Goethe’s Color Theory and a tome of Kandinsky prints. Franciscan nuttiness, but I loved it and the Goethe and the Kandinsky were the basis for my education theory, which we put into practice with the homeschooling here and which was by any measure successful.
James Agee is the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — book title, about Southern USA sharecropers. I had thought it might be Walt Whitman. I also thought it was in the hymnal, but it is not.
I studied Bateson from his classified papers for Naval weapons and VA schizophrenia (to him, systems) research in the 60s. I got his work through association with a pal of Margaret’s, Maggie having been the mother of his child, Catherine, who was at Amherst last I heard. I did not meet him but we corresponded and I am afraid I was a bit insolent for our age differential because I pointed out that he had no credibility being an environmentalist while chain smoking — which he did until C got him. He was man enough to admit I was right, but our age differentials was too much for the friendship to survive the bolt — from his point of view.
Also, much as I loved him and championed his work, I always felt that Grace is too important a phenomenon to be disregarded, especially in the academic realms — where it was then and is largely now still regarded as ludicrous superstition. He knew it is the salient fact of life, but he did not tell the Navy that, at least not directly. Still, I think he was a very great man and he saved my skin from the real bastards on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, NYC, who tried to cashier me for another instance of insolence — thinking for myself. And then I took after Hislop! 🙂
The material Gregory had in public prints got surpassed in a way — expanded might be a better way of putting it. But the classified stuff was incomparable, in my experience, and I have not seen it equaled much less surpassing anywhere except, from another direction, by Paul Tillich. Bateson internally was ahead of Teilhard even. I think this is why he smoked. It was to calm him from intuition which was leaps ahead of articulation and to which articulation never caught up, at least not in public.
Gregory was a theologian working as an anthropologist as Tillich was an anthropologist working as a theologian. Wonderful cross-discipline but impelling intuition far ahead of peers and usually of conceptuality as well where Bateson was concerned. Tillich was Franciscan in piety — Gregory wanted to be — and so knew how to handle the dissonance.
The solution to the conceptual problems, in my ‘umble opinion, is the three-fold structure Swami constructs all to. I grasped this truth while on 3 months of flour and water. It was the seminal intellectual breakthrough of my life and Swami induced it — after previously showing me what a schizophrenic break actually is … and not making me go through it, but seeing it for what it is.
I am a BD (now MDiv) graduate of The Union Theological Seminary, NYC, (1969), ordained by the United Church of Christ (1970, Scottsdale Congregational UCC, AZ), living as an Episcopalian (since 1976) and working as a transit operator (bus driver) for King County Metro Transit of the Puget Sound (Seattle) area of Washington State. [Note: I resigned from KCMT 11SEP07 after 23 years of service without a preventable accident.]
We homeschooled our three children and for that task I developed an integrated approach to the entire academic curriculum respecting, hopefully, all appropriate fields of human endeavour. I named this integrated approach Quintivium — reflecting the five elemental principles and resulting five senses that education aims to refine — and our eldest son produced the WWW’s first Homeschooling Homepage, almost four years ago, using this integrated approach to organize links for students. I kept up his seminal work and have expanded it.
About three years ago I noticed that an Astronomer at the University of Torun in Poland had copied our homeschooling site — also called Sri Sathya Sai Baba RishiKul — and carried it on his department’s server. I wrote and asked if he would mirror it and he was all too happy to do this. He is a fellow devotee of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, about Whom one can learn from links on our page, and that was the original point of attraction he had to our Homeschool / RishiKul site. RishiKul is a Sanskrit compound word meaning School (Kul) operated by a Sage (Rishi).
But for my mother’s regrettable disdain of the South and especially Texans, I would have been reared there. Instead it was Southern California, which was not unpleasant in the 40s and 50s. We were in the groves (Claremont, specifically) east of the Patton estate at San Gabriel. Claremont was and is an education town, though doubts regarding that particular evaluation have not been without proponents from time to time.
Our children homeschooled from grade 5 for the oldest, grade three for the second and grade 2 for the youngest. The district recommended it because I was such a pill insisting on the children’s having solid academics to appease their curiosity and capacity. In other words, we were gently “flushed out” for being a pain in the program. Private school was beyond our means and I did not know any I trusted anyhow. Still do not.
However, as high school age approached, opportunities in online learning came our way, through contacts and another district, which had some thinkers resident, and finally our second started part-time public high school because his academic needs exceeded my ability: drafting, advanced math, etc.
We were lucky to have settled in this state. WA is an education state. The Constitution stipulates education as the central activity of the state governmental. This is a felicitous vision that has had felicitous consequences through the years.
For example, the homeschooling statutes were put in (early 80s) by folks who could talk with the legislators and be trusted. So the statutes are enabling rather than restricting. They were written to promote, not to confine. And so homeschoolers here got a good name early and worked easily with district and state education authorities. This has continued. Adversarial relationship is non-existent except perhaps in some individual cases locally. Nothing systemic.
Quite the reverse. Homeschoolers — and yours truly in particular — have been able, through personal trust and networking, to broaden even district practices through administrative initiative/interpretation at the state level, thus avoiding legislative bickering. Specifically, I initiated a broad-based consensus that alternative education should be enabled K-12 instead of the usual 9-12 and the enabling was done by a State Office of Superintendent interpretation of existing statute rather than by having the legislature rewrite the statute.
The consensus was so broad-based — even including the teachers’ union — that no one now even knows from where the impetus came. That is good “social change” in this old 60s fellow’s method of evaluation: let the rock drop into the water without causing a ripple.
Now K-12 students –e.g., homeschoolers — can come in and out of their local school campus daily for this class/activity and that and get credit plus give the district seat-time (finance) for the time spent. Everyone benefits. And from this districts are establishing distance learning curricula, slowly, of course, because they have to develop and test the accountability factors. But it is being done. All because alternative education is now allowed K-12 to districts who want to develop it. And since it is administrative interpretation rather than statute change, districts have latitude respecting what they can develop, some using it more, some less and some not. However, the opportunity is there. That was the hurdle, the accomplishment: to open the opportunity. Now folks can make of it as inspiration and initiative would do.
Well, late in the 80s Boeing and other tech firms installed by statute a program called Running Start whereby 16 year olds could take two years of college level work at tech school, junior college or college and have it paid for by the state because they are still of secondary age. This has been one of the greatest boons for children of this state since having parents.
All three of ours used it. Our eldest graduated at 18 from an 18-month college-level diesel tech course and has been with Cummins ever since. He is almost 21. Our second earned an AA in Civil Engineering from another tech college just before heading to USMA. (He turned down several $50K/year plus full college corporate offers to attend USMA. He is very good at what he does.) Our youngest is in the first of a two-year police science course at the local junior college and will earn the AA before entering the Academy Prep School or the Academy (USMA) itself … she aspires.
Our second made a judicious comment over Christmas break, which was that homeschoolers should go to college rather than to high school because the peer pressure in high school against these normal human being homeschoolers is so great and even at times violent as to be unnecessarily disruptive of the homeschooler’s educational activity. Of course, that phenomenology was what got us to homeschooling in the first place. But as a strategy for connecting from homeschooling to the public/private schooling activity I think his comment is monitory. He was distracted needlessly when he was high schooling, even though it was part-time.
On the other hand, in view of the career he chose, such early dealing with distraction and the elimination of ego prepared him to maintain through R-Day, Beast and, so far, the Plebe Year. As the saying goes, the enemy will be throwing a lot worse ….
For most homeschoolers, however, homeschooling to college would be the best path, if it is at all possible. Our second is right about that for reasons other than that mentioned, also: they are generally mature enough earlier, for example.
All conscientious homeschooling parents, however, are going to see that by at least age 16 their children need instruction which they cannot provide. The interests of the child will dictate a gradual expansion of their schooling to the private/public orbit just as the destiny of the child will dictate a gradual expansion of their accommodation to that same orbit. They grow up to fulfill their own destiny, not their parents’ wishes, and their educational resources must keep pace with their interests/career-needs.
Homeschooling is the core description of the ideal career, from birth to onward movement.
In hindsight, I think, at the risk of appearing to promote my own work, that the crucial benefit our children have had is the sense of an integration of the entire academic activity, an integration of inquiry. They do not get derailed by academe’s tendency to faction and society’s consequent tendency to fanaticism.
To get that integration — which I believe is plenary and perpetual for being primal or fundamental — I went to the structure of phenomenology, the basic five-ness, which our nation along with most others carries on our flag in the form of the five-pointed star (the Pentagram, the symbol of the Pythagoreans). Our United States Army proudly wears this Star, affirming its continuity with the ancient, timeless ideal of service in universal, dynamic harmony. The Pentagram embodies the Divine Proportion.
Our curriculum integration grew out of this fundamental and I believe the children benefitted accordingly, as the nation and world do from the US Army and indeed all of our Armed Services.
An articulation of my construction in this regard is here.
An effort to detail the full scope of our system of education is here.
My fundamental attitude is that I do not accept the taxonomies. I do not accept that something is a religion and something else is not. I do not accept that Christianity is a Western religion and Hinduism an Eastern. I do not accept the bifurcation of Eastern and Western to begin with. It is nonsense in every way.
I do not accept that there are good, better, best religions or good, better, best yogis or good, better, best philosophies or any such rot. Every religion on the Sarva Dharma Symbol is plenary and perfect. Not only so, but they are integral, one with the other. Hinduism cannot exist without Christianity, etc. This universe is 100% interdependent and no one knows more than someone else.
Nor do I accept that there is something better than religion. Such claims are hokus-pokus for an improper intent. Whatever man does that leads Godward is religion, binding up what has been improperly separated.
A Bharathia is one who upholds the principles of Bharat. Therefore, I am a Bharathia.
Judaism is a Christian denomination and Jews are one of several representatives of unitarian Christianity — along with Unitarians and Christian Scientists. Swami indicated this to Sandwiess when Sam asked where Judaism was in the Sarva Dharma Symbol and Swami pointed to the Cross. Sam himself told me this story. Sam said he told Swami, “That’s not good enough. We [Jews] want our own.” Ye Gods!
Judaism is not a separate religion. It is a Christian denomination. Jews are one kind of unitarian Christians. Christianity can be conducted either unitarian-ly or trinitarian-ly. Phenomenology demonstrates the fact. One of my key mentors was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. His intrinsic Dharma saved me at a critical juncture of my life. I never thought of the phenomenology of the process as anything but Christian. We worship the same God, we cry the same tears, we giggle the same laughter. We are the same. We are Christians, one unitarian, one trinitarian.
I do not accept the taxonomies which separate.
Unless the taxonomy is (1) demonstrably accurate — and I use that word accurate deliberately instead of the word true — phenomenologically and (2) continuously informed by the recognition that all communication is indicative (via symbols) never descriptive or definitive, I will not accept it.
And furthermore, unless the indication reflects a certainty that reality exists absolutely, independent of any apperception appertaining thereunto, I will not accept the indication as communication.
In other words, in Medieval terms, I am a Realist, not a Nominalist, although with Tillich and Swami I accept that Nominalism is phenomenologically accurate up to a point and so is not wrong per se but only wrong when represented as all-sufficient.
Ultimately all taxonomies — by which I mean phenomenologically accurate ones because if they are not at least this they do not deserve to be taken as taxonomies — disappear in the tautology intrinsic to the fact that that which has no second has nothing by which to indicate itself excepting a deliberately-induced-from-its-own-nature illusion. Heavy on the words deliberately and own-nature.
I am solicitous of emphasizing the grandeur of the Christian religion because so many and oft do spit at it so stupidly and for reasons neither savory nor informed. Here in this country among those attracted to Swami this stupidity is often promulgated from high places in the Sai Organization. But the prejudice against Christianity is society-wide at this point and so I am not only personally desirous but also duty-bound to set the record straight as occasion offers, both for myself and for those who care to pay attention.
Many fellow Christians despise me for this effort quite as thoroughly as secularists and Sai Org leaders do. From both the right and the left my person and work are condemned, and with equal vigor. Significantly, the reason for this disapprobation is the same for both sides: both are trying to lord it over flocks by building attractive and thoroughly inaccurate taxonomies and here am I saying (1) the taxonomies are inaccurate and (2) the intent behind them is reprehensible.
Not welcome news. Yet I am one of the handful who is impartial. Were I “just a bus driver,” I might be written off. Actually, I am a “worker priest” after the old Cistercian (Benedictine) model.
The axis of my effort is phenomenology. I appreciate the desire to try to find unity in denial of everything but I can say that it is bad yoga. The same person who says they deny is still eating and drinking and relishing. So the denial is bunk. We are embodied so the unity has to be grasped in that condition itself, in the phenomenology of life, and by life I include inner life, which has vast phenomenology. God meets us here in this best of all possible worlds. We have evidence of that on two Paws!
Any separation by way of taxonomies — East and West, religion and whatever, Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim — I will not accept. Not only so, but I will declare the purveyor of any such separation a charlatan with a reprehensible intent.
Phenomenology is my interest, my bedrock.
Update 1: Dezinformatsiya
Update 2: Political correctness is disinformation (dezinformatsiya) (and here) to camouflage truth. It descends from operations Cheka and its successors call aktivni meropriyatiya (Активные мероприятия, active measures). From the phrase Latinate media take the designation activist. An activist to them is a saint. More political correctness. A dissident, by contrast, as per Cheka indoctrination, is an enemy of the state/media — in which reposes ultimate authority — suitable for torture and execution.
Update 3: Global Divestment Day
Update 4: In May 1970 I was in Phoenix, soon to move to Wickenburg, researching a book for Robert Theobald: Habit and Habitat. Before the book completed and was published (1972), Theobald ripped up my research (January 1971), literally, telling me no one would believe it.
My source was The New York Times.
I parted brass rags with Bob, informed the editor, asking him to remove my name from the project and book, and renounced claim to royalties. My part of the advance was not recalled because I completed my work. Bob published the volume under his name with glancing inclusion of my research.
I was as interested in anti-war protests then as I am now: zero. Never struck me as more than small-potatoes intrinsically and extrinsically mostly glandular turbulence. And, for a steadily increasing number of drug-addled visionaries, anti-war protests embodied lefties’ well-led (by KGB for one reason, CIA for another) brazen and ruthless march against Christian culture. That march, then and still — not anti-war protests — strikes me as big-potatoes.
And incidentally, industrial and agricultural pollution in 1970 also was big-potatoes. It was so big it presented lefties with a target opportunity they could not possibly fail to miss or exploit. I had documented a book’s-worth of it.
Update 5: My 1961 Claremont, CA High School Yearbook
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
