A Yoga Science Memoir How Yoga Science Appeared As the Unexpected Fruit of a Life Lived in Both Yoga and Science

A Yoga Science Memoir How yoga science appeared as the unexpected fruit of a life lived in both yoga and science

Scott Virden Anderson 2/3/17

Apart from quoting brief passages for the purpose of review, permission to quote from this publication should first be obtained by emailing the author at [email protected] with request for permission.

This image was generated by a contract graphics designer in ~2009 under instructions “to create with mathematical precision, a double logarithmic spiral” and then “to have a set of vivid visible spectrum color bands running from red to blue starting on arm 1 of the spiral to arm 2, and then from blue back to red from arm 2 to arm 1.” Although far from perfect as a graphic, with the current revision of the websites of the Yoga Science Foundation and the website devoted to the Yoga Science Project, this will henceforth be used as a symbolic representation of the “brainstorm” that produced the “yoga science” of the Yoga Science Project whose story is told in this volume.

Dedication

This book was inspired by my dear friend Wolfgang Lukas. It is therefore dedicated to him with the heart- felt wish that he and his work flourish for the benefit of countless beings, both soon and into an indefinable future.

Table of Contents

(NOTE: each listing here is an active link to that section)

A YOGA SCIENCE MEMOIR ...... 1

DEDICATION ...... 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... 4 TABLE OF FIGURES ...... 7 FACING QUOTE ...... 8 PREFACE...... 9 INTRODUCTION ...... 10 DISCOVERING EIGHT KEY EVENTS IN MY LIFE AND THEIR DECADAL RHYTHM ...... 11 ZEROS—0 – 9 YEARS ...... 14

BIRTH IN MANHATTAN AND EARLY YEARS ...... 14 “HEY, SCOTTY CAN’T READ!” ...... 16 SUMMARY ...... 17 TENS—EARLY PREMONITIONS OF YOGA SCIENCE ...... 18

FALLING IN LOVE WITH SCIENCE ...... 18 DISCOVERING THE “INNER NATURE” AS WELL ...... 19 DOING WELL IN SCHOOL! ...... 20 EARLY RELIGIOUS TRAINING, AND “SCIENCE VS RELIGION” ...... 21 WANDERING IN D.C ...... 21 A MAJOR “CONTINGENCY EFFECT”: SUMMERS AT UCLA WITH LOWELL LINCOLN WOOD ...... 22 FOUR YEARS AT HARVARD ...... 24 SUMMARY ...... 27 TWENTIES—DECADE WITH SWAMIJI AND THE INTEGRAL YOGA INSTITUTE ...... 28

FIRST MEETING SWAMIJI ...... 28 TRANSFIGURATION IN THE ARLINGTON STREET CHURCH ...... 30 SECOND TRANSFIGURATION AND A SECOND INITIATION ...... 31 HARVARD GRADUATION AND SUMMER JOB AT LAWRENCE LIVERMORE LABORATORY ...... 32 PRIVATE AUDIENCE WITH SWAMIJI AT SFO ...... 33 FROM BOSTON’S WINTER… ...... 35 …TO CALIFORNIA SUNSHINE & WORK IN ELECTRON MICROSCOPY ...... 37 LIVING IN THE IYI ASHRAM ON DOLORES STREET ...... 39 THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA “SPIRITUAL SCENE” ...... 41 MEETING OF THE WAYS RADIO SHOW ...... 43 MOVE TO YOGAVILLE WEST ...... 44 KEY DECISIONS IN BOSTON ...... 46 MOVE BACK TO CONNECTICUT ...... 47 GRADUATE SCHOOL IN GENETICS ...... 48 CLOSING YEARS OF MY TWENTIES ...... 49

SUMMARY ...... 50 THIRTIES—MY FIRST TEN YEARS WITH BUBBA FREE JOHN ...... 51

CONTEXTUALIZING BUBBA ...... 51 A VERY BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE COUNTER-COUNTER-CULTURE, NEO-LIBERALISM, AND THE PRIVATIZATION OF SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE THE 1970S ...... 52 PART 1—“ROMANCE PERIOD” & MEDICAL SCHOOL ...... 55 BUBBA AND I MEET AGAIN ...... 55 “GARBAGE AND THE GODDESS” & “THE GORILLA SERMON” ...... 57 MY THIRTIES BEGIN, & MY “CONVERSION” WITH BUBBA ...... 57 LIFE AS A DEVOTEE OF BUBBA FREE JOHN ...... 59 MOVE TO FARMINGTON & BEGIN MEDICAL SCHOOL ...... 59 LOCAL DEVOTEES: THE SPRINGFIELD LADIES ...... 63 THE YOGA SCIENCE “KOAN OF NO TIME” ...... 64 ELECTIVE ON THE PHYSIOLOGY OF FASTING ...... 65 “ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE WHOLE BODY” ...... 66 RESEARCH FOR THE RADIANT LIFE CLINIC ...... 66 “WHAT TO REMEMBER TO BE HAPPY” IMPRESSES MY DAUGHTER MEGAN ...... 68 FIRST DARSHAN WITH DA FREE JOHN ...... 69 MOVE TO DAVIS, BEGIN INTERNSHIP IN PSYCHIATRY ...... 70 “SCIENTIFIC PROOF” & KEN WILBER’S INTRODUCTION: “ON HEROES AND CULTS” ...... 72 “THE EATING GORILLA COMES IN PEACE” ...... 73 SECOND DARSHAN IN THE PAVILLION ...... 73 FIRST YEAR IN PRACTICE ...... 74 “SCIENCE AND THE CULTURE OF ECSTASY” ...... 74 PART 2—A DEEPER CONFRONTATION ...... 75 MOVE TO LAKE COUNTY AND JOIN THE CLEARLAKE MEDICAL CENTER ...... 77 STRESSES OF A RURAL PRIVATE PRACTICE...... 78 DA FREE JOHN MOVES TO FIJI ...... 78 STRESSES ON OUR FAMILY UNIT ...... 79 “LOVE OF THE GOD-MAN” CELEBRATION ...... 80 DEVOTIONAL LIFE IN LAKE COUNTY...... 81 THE SCANDAL OF 1985 ...... 82 OPTIMIZING CELLULAR BIOCHEMISTRY FOR HEALTH AND LONGEVITY ...... 83 “THE DAWN HORSE TESTAMENT” ...... 84 “THE DEATH EVENT” ...... 84 SUMMARY ...... 85 FORTIES—THE YOGA SCIENCE SUMMAPREQUEL ...... 86

REVELATION IN WESTERN FAITH CATHEDRAL ...... 86 THE INDOOR YAJNA ...... 87 THE HARMONIC CONVERGENCE ...... 88 SYSTEMS, CHAOS, AND FRACTALS ...... 90 THE NEW PARADIGM MOVEMENT ...... 91 THE SCALE-RE-ENTRANT FRACTAL VORTEX VISION—FALL 1987 ...... 92 HIATUS & MOVE ACROSS COUNTRY: 1988 – 1990 ...... 94 “THE SUMMAPARADIGM” PAPER: 1990 ...... 96 PLUNGING INTO ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE ...... 98

DISCOVERING ISSSEEM AND SUBTLE ENERGY SCIENCE ...... 99 CALLED TO RETREAT IN FIJI...... 99 MOVE TO FAIRFAX, CALIFORNIA ...... 100 REDISCOVERING EAMES’ “POWERS OF TEN” FILM ...... 101 PLAY WITH TOFFLER’S “THIRD WAVE” & KEN WILBER’S AQAL ...... 102 DA AVABHASA’S HEALTH CRISIS ...... 103 SUMMARY ...... 104 FIFTIES—THE TIME/SCALE SPECTRUM TOOL BEGINS TO EMERGE ...... 105

TUCSON-II AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE TIME SPECTRUM AS A KEY YOGA SCIENCE TOOL ...... 105 REFLECTIONS ON PSYCHO-TOPOLOGY ...... 107 MY FATHER DIES IN LATE MARCH OF 1996 ...... 108 HEART-TO-HEART WITH ADI DA ...... 109 HEART RESEARCH FEVER ...... 110 THE BAY AREA ALTERNATIVE MEDICAL COMMUNITY ...... 111 WE MOVE TO THE COUNTRY ...... 112 RETIREMENT OF “DOCTOR, DAD, & DEVOTEE” ...... 113 BEGIN STUDY OF TIBETAN BUDDHISM ...... 115 ON THE BOARD OF YOGA RESEARCH & EDUCATION CENTER ...... 115 CONNECTING WITH INDEPENDENT PHILOSOPHER KENT DUANE PALMER ...... 116 SUMMARY ...... 117 SIXTIES—TAKING THE TIME/SCALE SPECTRUM PUBLIC ...... 118

FINALLY EXTEND THE SUMMATIME SCALE TO THE PLANCK SCALE ...... 118 “THE SUBJECTOSCOPE” ...... 119 DEBUT OF YOGA SCIENCE AT ISSSEEM 2008 ...... 121 THE SCIENCE & NON-DUALITY (SAND) CONFERENCES AND MY PROPOSALS FOR “A SCIENCE OF NON-DUALITY” ...... 124 2010 INTEGRAL THEORY CONFERENCE AND MY CRITIQUE OF KEN WILBER ...... 129 BEGIN WORKING WITH DANIEL P. BROWN PHD ...... 133 DEVELOPMENTS SINCE 2011 ...... 135 SCALE RELATIVITY & “THE SPIRITUAL PSYCHOPHYSICS” ...... 136 UPDATING THE TIME/SCALE SPECTRUM GRAPHIC ...... 138 FURTHER INNERMOST REFLECTIONS ...... 139 TIME-FRAMING OUR PROBLEM ...... 139 A NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NON-SEPARATENESS ...... 140 IN SUMMARY—FOR NOW ...... 141 APPENDIX 1: META-LEVELS OF PSYCHOTOPOLOGY ...... 147 APPENDIX 2: TABLE OF PRINCIPAL NAMES OF ADI DA SAMRAJ ...... 149 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 150

Table of Figures

(NOTE: Each listing here is an active link to that figure)

Figure 1 "His Holiness" Poster of Swami Satchidananda by Peter Max ...... 28

Figure 2. Swami Yogananda ...... 36

Figure 3. Vishnu wielding the Sudharshana Chakra ...... 38

Figure 4. Photo from cover of first paperback edition of “The Knee of Listening” by Bubba Free John 51

Figure 5. Cover of “Method of the Siddhas” by Bubba Free John ...... 56

Figure 6. Mind map of author’s 1980 report on crystals ...... 74

Figure 7. “Psychic Energy System” from “Sacred Mirrors” by Alex Grey ...... 89

Figure 8. Spherical vortex images from the author’s “SummaParadigm” paper ...... 90

Figure 9. Images of the Uroboros—classic (L), and “Cosmic” (R) ...... 92

Figure 10. From Sheldon Glashow’s sketch of the Cosmic Uroboros ...... 93

Figure 11. Images of the “extended SummaTime Scale,” November 2006 ...... 118

Figure 12. Figure from the author’s “Subjectoscope” paper of 2007 ...... 120

Figure 13. “The Antropic Cosmological Timeline” from author’s SAND09 presentation, “Non-dual Scienific Cosmology” ...... 125

Figure 14. Graphic from author’s “Topoloptics” paper, 2010...... 130

Figure 15. The “AQAL-ACT” Composite Diagram, 2010 ...... 132

Figure 16. “The Cosmic Mandala” by Adi Da ...... 133

Figure 17. First of two 2011 revisions of the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum (for time) diagram ...... 138

Figure 18. Second and final of two 2011 revisions of the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum (for time) diagram ...... 138

Facing Quote

Throughout history, esoteric schools of spiritual growth have been kept alive in scattered precincts among rather secret societies. Spiritual transmission, a kind of ultimate education, has been passed on face-to-face in the setting for the most part of small communities via a kind of apprenticeship between guru and disciple. Now, however, confronted with the job of world transformation, it seems obvious to me that the psychophysics of sadhana will have to be more fully understood in an applied scientific sense if true spirituality is ever to move out of the confines of secluded ashrams and hermitages to assume a global destiny.

From “The SummaParadigm,” 1989 (author’s unpublished manuscript)

Preface

In the late ‘80s it became clear to me that in order for our species to survive with a benign future, we would need to develop a scientific understanding of what is known in the yoga tradition as sadhana. Sadhana here refers to the human developmental process whereby an ordinary individual fully realizes his or her true nature as non-separate from the cosmos and the sentience that pervades it. This is what it means to be liberated from the illusion of separate existence. A related term from the Christian tradition is soteriology—“understood by scholars as representing a key theme in a number of different religions and is often studied in a comparative context; that is, comparing various ideas about what salvation is and how it is obtained.”1 Thus, what I propose is a scientific soteriology.

For science even to contemplate such an undertaking, however, it will first need to move beyond its fixation on gross material processes and begin to embrace the deeper complexities of life and mind. Currently, most scientists seem to feel certain that life and mind will succumb to an exclusively material-based explanatory approach. The evidence from the yoga tradition argues otherwise: there are also subtle and very-subtle (or “causal”) dimensions of our existence that simply cannot be reduced to material processes since both are pervaded by awareness, which is itself demonstrably not the result of material interactions, but rather the context within which all three, matter, life, and mind, arise. Thus I came to argue for a “science in consciousness” as opposed to a science of consciousness that looks to objectify consciousness as the result of (or as “emergent” from) material phenomena.

What I describe below is how my grappling with these issues for decades eventually resulted in the discovery of a simple but little-used way of presenting cosmological time scales that yields unequivocal correlations with the traditional yogic categories gross, subtle, and causal (or very subtle). I have recently come to refer to this as the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum (PHSS). Like any spectrum with which we might be familiar, it represents a range of phenomena that are simultaneously present across a range of scales. I propose that the PHSS, interpreted in terms of yoga, is a foundation stone for the construction of the scientific soteriology our world needs in order to avert a dark future for our children and the children of our children.

1 From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteriology 9

Introduction

What I call “yoga science” emerged and assumed a life of its own within my experience. Over the past few decades, I’ve attempted to describe it in various ways and via various venues. I’ve also undertaken to use all the means I know, including some of our new cyber-resources, to “find the others”2 who might be thinking along the same lines.3 That search, simply put, has been unsuccessful to date―although I’ve found a number of sources of partial validation of some of its aspects (suggesting that I’m not totally crazy), the “yoga science” that I’ve have been seeing emerge seems unique to my own experience and not under consideration elsewhere. This could change at any time, of course, by discovering that comparable considerations have been underway elsewhere (as if often the case with innovative ways of thinking).

I recently embarked on a focused effort to develop a present-time description of yoga science. The best approach, it seemed, would be the simplest, to “begin at the beginning” and give a fairly detailed sketch of the life experience that was the ground out of which yoga science emerged. The reason for this was simply that what might otherwise appear to be a rather solitary exercise of formulating yoga science can be seen more clearly as the result of the influence of various “historical contingencies,”4 rather than as following a plan or pre-conceived framework.

Certainly, to understand anyone’s personal history from a “scientific” perspective requires including the context as a first principle. This amounts to taking as much as possible the perspective of an anthropologist or social scientist. Perhaps of major importance in the context of my own case were the major world events that attended my conception and gestation. I was conceived on the night of the celebrations of VE Day, May 8, 1945—my parents were stationed in Bogota, Columbia at the time.

Then, just three months later in August, there were the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were surely among the most world-shocking events in history—the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare to date—and were associated with the near sudden and simultaneous death of some 130,000 people and countless domestic and wild animals. What impact might that have had on a developing mammalian fetus, even thousands of miles away? Current findings in epigenetics, which studies how events external to the body can affect the expression of our genetic potentials, suggest such impact could be both significant and persistent. (Thus, these events were formative not only for me, personally, but for millions of others as well.)

Even in my early years I recognized to some extent that growing up as the child of a US Foreign Service Officer exposed me to a far broader range of cultures than typical for the vast majority of my fellow Baby Boomers. This left me feeling a bit like an outsider in my “home” culture. Indeed, English wasn’t even my first language because so much of my daily life in the language acquisition years was spent with Spanish speaking women hired to care for me and my younger sister, Joy.

2 This is a memorable admonition given by the pioneering psychonaut Timothy Leary. It resonated with me especially as echoed in the work of Terrence McKenna. 3 Two caveats: I’ve generally eschewed social media; and it is entirely possible that there is nothing “non-obvious” (i.e., truly original) in the yoga science I propose. 4 http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Historical_contingency 10

Years later I learned about the pioneering research that had been done in Chicago a few decades before I was born on the “marginal man.”5 This research uncovered the deep psychological consequences of living at the border between major cultural nodes or life worlds—cultural ways of life enacted through distinct complexes of social processes and networks. In retrospect, it is easy to see that being a marginal man served as fertile soil for the seeds of yoga science when they were planted just two decades later. Thus it seems that “circumstances conspired” starting early in my life and in ways completely apart from any intention of my parents.6

Discovering Eight Key Events in My Life and their Decadal Rhythm

In late January 2016 and again in late February I had dental surgery. As my surgeon was wrapping up, he asked me, “Have you noticed any significant changes in your health since the first surgery a month ago? Many people do after this kind of procedure, you know?” I responded in the negative, but the question was provocative and stuck in my mind.

I went directly from his office to that of my integrative physician for an intensive sequence of “post-op” IV treatments that included ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation, high-dose Vitamin-C, and glutathione. These procedures required me to relax in an easy chair for about three hours during which my surgeon’s question continued to reverberate. Just the day before I’d received news from my yoga science friend, Wolfgang, that he had finally submitted a first draft of his dissertation and thus I found myself reflecting anew on the forthcoming potential challenge of making a rich and up-to-date communication of yoga science to him.

With that in mind I found myself reflecting on and beginning to write down a chronology of key events, trying to recollect details, dates, and sequences of significant events that might relate to how yoga science came about, even back to the early decades of my life. My instinct was to assemble some sort of consistent history7 of the “yoga science project.” Over the three hours I sat in that easy chair, I began a process that eventually yielded this memoir.

Early the next morning, while in hypnopompic awareness just before full waking8, it occurred to me to take a more careful look at the chronology I’d been assembling the day before. I wondered, “Might there be a pattern I’d not noticed before?” Since I was scheduled later the next morning for a 2nd round of IVs, I now had the opportunity of a second three hour session in the easy chair for this exercise. Within a few minutes, a pattern leapt out at me: indeed there has been a series of key high points, a cluster of them for every turn of each decade of my life—in effect, a “decadal” pattern.9 Since I'd just passed my seventieth birthday, this meant I was now about a month into my “eighth decadal” (the first being the “zeros” of my first ten years of life).

5 Park, Robert Ezra. "Human migration and the marginal man." American Journal of Sociology (1928) 6 Conceivably, we might propose that the impulse towards yoga science that seems inherently present in my case must therefore have come from previous lives, but that’s going too far for most in the West. 7 In the literary sense, not the quantum mechanics sense. 8 A distinct state of consciousness that has yielded significant new insights, now and then, throughout my life. 9 Although I’ve long been a keen student of chronobiology, I’ve only just today discovered that there is some recent evidence for the conceivably related 11 year solar sunspot cycle being reflected in our physiology: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3663595/ However, such an 11 year cycle would probably not, over five or six decades, correlate well with the 10 year pattern I’m reporting here. 11 This was a new idea for me: a ten-year cycle, a relatively long time in anyone's life comprising as it does 3652 days (or 3653 depending on leap year frame shifts). There are times in life when it seems a great deal happens in a single month, and there certainly were many individual years over which it seemed huge changes had taken place. However, reflecting on the major insights that unfolded over multiple decades, I began to see that there was, indeed, a clear “decadal” pattern apparent in the unexpected unfolding of yoga science.

Beginning with birth, a second high point at around age 11, and then roughly every nine or ten years thereafter, there has been a series of key “life-changing” or “especially memorable” events that had a significant impact on the choices I made in the years that followed, each choice creating, in effect, a path of inquiry, discovery, and integration. More to the point of this memoir, these events and their influence on my developing sense of things seem to reflect major themes related to yoga science and how it emerged over time:

Zeros (1946-1955): Introduction to the inner world of vision, dream, and hallucination via an assortment of deliriums, medical drugs, and fevers was accompanied both by family explorations of nature and falling in love with everything scientific (thanks to receiving a microscope).

Tens (1956-1965): After several years failing to learn to read, a move to Vietnam had the effect of changing that to its extreme opposite, opening up the universe of books, ideas, a broad range of topics, and eventually the desire to be a “Renaissance Man” and to somehow reconcile science and religion, all on the heels of an unbidden but powerful experience of the arbitrariness of “my” existence.

Not long into my Twenties (1966-1975): A mystical vision, in person, surrounding a famous Indian yogi literally blew my mind, leading me to a dialog with him in which he encouraged me to pursue both yoga and science, which began my “two lives” in earnest, as well as marriage and becoming a father.

Thirties (1976-1985): Completing a Masters degree in genetics and a medical degree, I began practicing medicine while at the same time taking up a comprehensive life-practice according to the American spiritual teacher, Bubba Free John, while also now being a father of two, a “father-yogi-physician”.

Forties (1986-1995): Spiritual experience sitting in meditation with Bubba Free John precipitated deep personal investigation culminating in a fundamental notion of “The Summa” paradigm, with multiple themes that later became part of yoga science.

Fifties (1996-2005): Beginning to communicate openly about my developing “SummaParadigm and the SummaTimeScale” via various professional venues is coupled with another extraordinary, personal encounter in meditation with Da Love-Ananda leading me to extended research into the source of the heartbeat (and the “seat of consciousness) in the sino-atrial node.

Sixties (2006-2015): Discovery of the full “Scale Spectrum” unfolds into “yoga science” proper— understood as an offspring of the marriage of yoga and science with a “hybrid vigor” advantage—and the Yoga Science Foundation.

12 Here at the start of my Seventies, the discovery of the decadal rhythm led to this memoir, which has occupied my spare time this year. However, already in view ahead is a further elaboration of the Planck- Hubble Scale Spectrum PsychobBioPhysics.

Here are these “findings” in tabular form:

Cycle Cycle ~ age ~ Key event Key outcome # name range dates at start of cycle as cycle unfolded 1 Zeros 0-9 46—55 Born a “senior Boomer” Fall in love with science 2 Tens 10-19 56—65 Wonder: “Why am I me?” aim to be a generalist and reconcile science & religion 3 Twenties 20-29 66—75 Encounter Swami more specifically, aim to be a Satchidananda yogi scientist 4 Thirties 30-39 76—85 Recognize Bubba Free John Mature gradually as a yogi as my guru physician 5 Forties 40-49 86—95 Experience of non- Conceive of “The separation with guru SummaParadigm” 6 Fifties 50-59 96—05 Experience “Heart-to heart Conceive of “The SummaTime with guru Scale and related study the “sino-atrial node” of the heart 7 Sixties 60-69 06—15 Discover Scale-Spectrum Formulate Yoga Science and develop the YS Foundation 8 Seventies 70 + 16 + This discovery > this piece, Construction begun of a decade just begun Planck-Hubble Scale-Spectrum PsychoBioPhysics Table 1. Summary of key events and the decadal pattern in the author’s life

Using this decadal pattern as an organizing tool for what follows here, I’ll use the “cycle name” listed in the second column of the summary table above as titles for the seven chapters, leaving a Seventies chronicle for the future.

As a final task in preparing this memoir, my wife Susan suggested I review these thumbnail descriptions of the decades. In the process I was struck by what appears to be a novel possibility: that there is a correlation between the decades described here and distinct stages of unfolding of a complex psychotopology. However, since this observation remains tentative at this point, I simply outline the possibility in a brief piece as Appendix 1.

13 Zeros—0 – 9 years

Birth in Manhattan and Early Years

My mother lived in Colombia and Spain during her first pregnancy, but she “was delivered” (of me) in New York City at Women's Lying-in Hospital in Manhattan (now the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center) on February 3, 1946. Numberless books have been written about that period in general and what was going on around the world at that specific moment in history seventy years ago. If Strauss and Howe10 are correct, this moment coincided with the beginning of a new “saecular cycle,” each of ~80- 100 years duration. They identify an inflection point between the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. Among the defining characteristics they identified of such inflection points is a widespread sense of discontinuity coupled with a surge in hopefulness about the “new beginning.” I was born right at the start of one such new beginning as part of the first wave of Baby Boomers.

Although my father had just recently been transferred to Valencia, Spain, when the time came for my arrival he sent my very pregnant mother back to New York for the actual delivery. Thus we spent the first three months of my life in Manhattan living with my grandmother who was herself in the midst of an emotional meltdown over her recent separation from my grandfather. My father flew to New York and accompanied the two of us back to Valencia for the balance of his two year tour. We then spent two years in Havana, Cuba during which time I took ill with whooping cough, anthrax boils (all over my head), scarlet fever, and frequent middle ear infections. I was put on long-term aureomycin therapy and only became more and more sickly. There was also a new addition to the family at that time, my dear sister, Joy.

It is sometimes said that the very first complete sentence a child speaks has a formative influence on their entire subsequent development. As the story of my first sentence was told in my family, at about age two and still in diapers, I was found sitting under a bush in the back yard in Havana digging in the ground with a table spoon. When asked (in Spanish) what I was doing, I replied, “Estoy trabajando,” -- “I'm working.” Pondering the possible “formative influence” of this sentence, my impression is that a recurrent theme over all the decades of my life has indeed been that “work” is pleasurable, satisfying in itself, even if engaged alone, and even if others view it as “play.” In almost every case since, if there were not some kind of deep satisfaction and joy in a circumstance of “work,” I would either find a way to transform it or soon abandon it.

We were then sent for a nine month stint in Lisbon where I was taken off all medications by a Portuguese “country doctor” my father found who was more to his liking, and my health began to improve. One memorable incident during this time involved collecting garden snails. I found the creatures fascinating and enthusiastically gathered a small pail with dozens of them which I left in the bathroom when it came time for bed. Next morning they had crept out of their container and were

10 “The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny,” William Strauss and Neil Howe, 1997, Broadway Books.

Zeros Chapter 14 spread all over the tile walls, floor, and ceiling, including bath tub, mirror, sink, and toilet! I was delighted with this unexpected behavior, and although my mother was horrified, my fascination with living things was reinforced.

Our next two year tour was in Madrid. Here I had some additional childhood illnesses that were “usual” at the time: measles, German measles, and mumps. However, I was well enough to spend endless hours in the spacious yard of our home and discovered more fascinating living things there: caterpillars. I collected several dozen in a cardboard box with enough mulberry leaves to keep them well-fed. Imagine my astonishment some days later when I found the caterpillars were all gone and in their place were dozens of silky white cocoons! My parents tried to inform me about what to expect next, but I could not really imagine it and we were transferred to our next post before the butterflies emerged.

During these early years in Spain, Cuba, and Portugal, I was mostly looked after by local care givers hired by my parents. Thus it happened that my first spoken words were in Spanish and it wasn’t until we moved to Virginia Beach in 1954 when I entered first grade that English became my principle means of communication.

Since there was nothing my father loved more than being out in nature, when it came time for family recreation we would routinely take excursions out into the country or the sea shore. These were typically short trips out of the city with a picnic. Often he and I would take a sort of “nature walk” during which my father loved to closely examine the trees, their leaves and flowers, and the smaller plants along our path. He would occasionally take a small piece of foliage, crush it between his fingers, smell it, and if it smelled good, taste it—modeling a habit that has added olfactory and gustatory dimensions to my enjoyment of the natural world ever since.

My mother and father both loved the romantic symphonic repertoire of Western classical music and frequently played recordings of them at home. I have vivid memories of several occasions when my father put on a piece of music he especially loved, such as Dvořák’s New World Symphony, turned off the lights, had us lie down on the couch or floor, and we listened together to the entire piece in the dark. I recall a marvelous feeling of being surrounded and embraced by the warmth and richness of the sound and the love of the music. Thus, regular intimacy with music as well as nature became primary influences that shaped the development of my interests and ways of seeing things beginning in my earliest years—with both detail and ardor.

Because of the kind of lifestyle my parents led as a Foreign Service couple, they had many opportunities to travel to live in a host of different places. Indeed, we enjoyed a great variety of natural environments on the East Coast of the US, the Caribbean, Japan, the Philippines, Spain, and especially Viet-Nam. Thus, I was immersed as a child in a wide variety not only of cultural life worlds, but also of natural settings.

Through this ever-pleasurable immersion I discovered a love of the endless variety of the details of natural forms, the many kinds of leaves, insects, stones, and everything that you could find in the natural world. I was also fascinated by the variety of human artifacts like stone arrow heads, keys, and coins. As I got a little older I got interested in stamps and geography and collected examples from all around the world—my favorite being the comparatively uncommon triangular stamps being issued at the time.

Zeros Chapter 15 Thus exposed early on to so many different kinds of peoples, environments, and cities, I got a feeling for the extraordinary variety of habitats, languages, and peoples in our world. This appreciation only grew and extended naturally into the many ways that science has revealed countless details about the world that we cannot ordinarily see directly. I found it intrinsically delightful to explore the world and to try to understand its seemingly endless depth and complexity. So it was “vast and profound” for me even then.

“Hey, Scotty can’t read!”

We moved from Virginia Beach to Norfolk, Virginia in 1955, into an old Victorian with wrap-around porches, and I was enrolled in second grade. My father’s posting here was to serve as political advisor to Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (which later became part of NATO). My life was marked by carefree play and exploration around our property and the larger kid-friendly suburban neighborhood. About a year later, however, when I entered third grade, my teacher realized, “Hey, Scotty can't read. He’s been faking it.” It was true. I found it impossible to recognize the difference between the many words beginning with wh- and th- and tended to reverse syllables when speaking (making “napkin” into “nakmin”). It was as if these syllables were scrambled in my mind. I couldn't distinguish even simple words like then, there, that, these, where, when, what, and who—basic elements of written English.

My summa cum laude parents freaked out and tried to coach me at home, clearly anxious about it and not familiar with how to work with the realities of what we now know (as I understand it) is a kind of perceptual developmental delay—a delay in the development of the complex neurologic circuitry associated with reading. In any case, this was yet one more bit of evidence that I took to mean that I was different from others, different in a way that was significant enough to be very distressing to my parents. And, equally important, it impressed upon me the sense that I was looking in on the world of my reading peers as if from beyond some kind of “margin.”

We now have reason to suspect that forceps delivery under general anesthesia and subsequent bottle feeding—standard medical practice in 1946—can have serious detrimental effects on the newborn that can include developmental delays. In my own case, this could well have been the source of the difficulties I was having learning to read. Decades later, as this condition was beginning to be recognized in younger Boomers, it was initially called "minimal brain damage"—the first official recognition of what we now know as ADD/ADHD. It thus seems probable that I sustained some kind of brain “injury,” even if “minimal,” from the general anesthesia, nutritional deficiencies and/or toxic exposures during pregnancy, forceps delivery, exclusive bottle feeding, international travel, and/or the several week post- partum when I was placed in a bassinet and then taken once a day in to visit with my mother for twenty minutes to half an hour.

We now suspect strongly that any one of these kinds of interventions—standard obstetrical and pediatric practice at the time—can have a certain “morbidity” associated with them. They can have a kind of impact that can be long-lasting in some but not all individuals. Some percentage of the millions of babies born in hospitals during the 40s and 50s of the Boomer generation exposed to these same obstetrical and pediatric practices suffered clinically significant injury as a result. However, these kinds of subtle injuries more often than not go unrecognized even today. Among the many things that emerged many years later during my decade in alternative medicine (the 1990s) concerned early life developmental physiology and psychology and how the details of one's environment in the early stages Zeros Chapter 16 of pre- and post-natal development can have huge impacts on later life developmental and health outcomes.

On the other hand, it seems entirely possible that such “minimal brain damage” may have served to attenuate in me the strength of the “left-brain dominance” that is otherwise characteristic of our WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Developed) culture.11 This may have played a role in my apparent inability to choose a strictly left-brain oriented life in science, and thus may have been instrumental in the eventual emergence of the whole-brain orientation of yoga science. And it may also have been another factor contributing to my feeling of being somehow on the margins of society, including academia.

Summary

Reflecting now (in my seventieth year) on this first decade of development, my impression is that “I” began in mystery, with a body born in Manhattan appearing somehow with an awareness that gradually began to cohere with memory forming a thread of a story—“my story.” As this story line unfolded, moments of heightened awareness, often when out in nature, were separated from one another by stretches of illness punctuated by unusual inner experiences—all seemingly strung together. Toward the end of the decade, a dramatic shift in perspective began—namely, science began to draw me into a far more detailed appreciation of nature.

11 “The Weirdest people in the world,” Joseph Heinrich et al, Behavioral & Brain Sciences (2010), Pages 1-75. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

Zeros Chapter 17 Tens—Early Premonitions of Yoga Science

Falling in Love with Science

Near the start of my second decade, Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957, and I was launched first into books, and then shortly into science. My father had accepted a new post as Deputy Chief of Mission in Saigon, Viet-Nam, and once again, context became a powerful formative influence: the radical change in environment seemed to cure my reading troubles overnight, and soon I was diving into the fattest books I could find. The Bible was most ready at hand and I have vivid recollections of sitting in the one air-conditioned room we had at the time in our “residence” in Saigon—out of the sweltering tropical heat and humidity—reading the Bible cover to cover. I’ve somehow been drawn irresistibly to fat books ever since! The sudden emergence of the ability to engage with books was to be catapulted from one life-condition into another entirely different one, from a kind of darkness into a vast and pleasurable world of ideas, discovery, science, art, and beauty with, above all, a growing sense of intellectual confidence that “hey, I can do this!”

My father later recounted how he had gone to visit one of his senior and most respected colleagues at the State Department on one of his trips back to Washington DC early on during our two years in Saigon. In discussing his career plans, he had been strongly advised to consider thinking ahead about my education. It was suggested that if he were to enroll me in one of the better college preparatory (“prep”) schools, I would have a much easier time gaining admission to a better-quality Ivy League college when that time eventually came.

The Sputnik launch had sensitized Americans to the deficiencies of science education in the US. In this light, my father looked to give me things that might foster my learning science. Thus, he brought back to Saigon a Gilbert Chemistry Kit which resulted in many hours of most enjoyable and “educational (guided) play” in basic chemistry. Returning from a second trip to Washington, he brought a microscope kit that introduced me to the wonders of the animate and inanimate world as visible under a simple compound microscope. Yet another gift was a small boxed collection of semi-precious crystals and minerals with a booklet that taught how crystals display key features of their atomic structure and gave instruction on how to grow crystals of sugar, salt, or alum at home.

I became further engrossed in the details of the natural world that I already had come to love but was now even more richly revealed by science. Microscopes, insects, sea shells, rocks, chemistry, geology, electricity, and stars all became subjects of my fascination. Everything scientific was delightful to me and became a way of relating to my environment, woven into the fabric of my being, integral to how I see the world, and all about discovering joy in the beauty of nature, both by direct sensory experience and by scientifically informed knowing.

In 1962 I became fascinated with the Grand Canyon as a “book of geologic history.” This was my introduction to “deep time”—the unimaginably vast stretches of Earth’s geologic past. My mother Tens Chapter 18 arranged a cross-country summer train trip for herself, my sister and me that included a visit to the Grand Canyon. She found a book on the Canyon in the local library written for teenage readers and gave it to me. I was totally taken with the story of how Earth’s long geologic past was exposed by the much shorter time (still numbering in the millions of years) the Colorado River took to cut nearly a mile through the layers of rock. When I finally arrived there with my mother and sister on our cross-country trip, the magnificent beauty of the place sealed the deal for me—trying to appreciate viscerally the vast stretches of time to be found in nature became part of how I relate to things. I visited the Canyon again in 1968 and 1973 and each visit was a memorable thrill.

Discovering the “Inner Nature” as Well

An incident that took place when I was eleven or twelve is perhaps one of the early markers of an opening to previously unrecognized “inner potentials.” I had fallen ill with yet another middle ear infection and had been treated by my parents with Paregoric.12 I was lying in bed in my upstairs room of our house in Saigon. There was light in the room, so it was sometime during daylight hours that I experienced something like a lucid daydream in which I discovered that I had conscious control of sensory volume settings and mental imagery. For example, as I lay there I could turn the volume up or down on the sound of the air conditioner that was humming in the room—without touching it or any volume-controlling device. In my altered state I had effortless voluntary control of the perceived volume of hearing! Likewise, when some dreamlike human-like forms appeared in my visual field, I noticed I also had effortless voluntary control over how big or small they appeared. The experience was striking and memorable—unlike anything I’d experience before (or since).

Perhaps because I did not subsequently find any way to exercise that mental capacity intentionally and over time, it never reappeared—perhaps some developmental window closed in my own body-mind. I don't know. Perhaps, as some in the Eastern spiritual traditions might say, it was somehow a spontaneous “ripening of karmas of previous practice."13

On another occasion, I was standing in the hallway in our house in Saigon looking up towards the steps opposite the entry door waiting for my mother. For just a moment, I had a vivid sense of myself as being in no way confined to the space of my body. At the time I recall assuming this meant I was really in or from some “other place.” However, as I reflect back on the experience now, what I was experiencing but didn't have the words to express at the time, was a sense of being a nonlocal presence—one that was not identified with this body-mind, or this moment in time.

In the next moment, the question arose, “Why am I me?” (Meaning “why, given this clear sense of not being confined to this body, am I appearing here seemingly so exclusively associated with this specific body?”) As my mother came into the hallway just then, I asked her this question. To which she replied immediately and without hesitation, “You'd feel awfully strange if you were someone else wouldn't you?” I immediately appreciated that she had missed entirely the point of my question. I thought to myself, “No, that’s the whole point. Why should I feel strange as someone else, it seems so obviously

12 A popular prescription remedy of the time—“camphorated tincture of opium.” 13 This phrase is used by Tibetans in reference to uncommon experiences that may appear in an individual that are thought to stem from spiritual practice in a previous life.

Tens Chapter 19 and totally arbitrary that I’m “me” and not someone else!” The moment passed, we headed out, and I never mentioned it again, but what lingered was an abiding felt sense of there being somehow, some other “dimension” to my being that, at the same time, was decidedly not a “fit topic for conversation.”

Continuing to reflect on this incident from my current perspective, I can see that I was not really surprised by her response. Somehow, in my eleven year old mind, I saw it as typical of the clever and quick-witted kind of exchanges she and my father engaged in routinely. They were both very sharp and their interactions were often playful and witty—somehow an integral part of their summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa14 relationship. But, I also saw that the weight of their influence was changing since by then I’d become a bit more comfortable having a different perspective and felt no need to “push it”.

Doing well in school!

During those 2 years in Saigon, for reasons that I can't account for, my health improved. Somehow I was thriving in the tropics even though the heat and the humidity were sometimes oppressive. Having learned to read, I started reading a lot, in fact it seemed like one of the things that characterized my delay in reading was an abiding enthusiasm for big books mentioned above. I gather that our contemporary understanding is that a kind of brain retraining can occur spontaneously that includes the deployment of a set of compensatory mechanisms in the person who has had ADD/ADHD—brain wiring workarounds that help the system self-regulate, that enable reading comprehension, and that assist in the day to day academic competitions of school.

In any case, I had done pretty well in school in Saigon and when we moved back to the States in 1958 to the suburbs of Washington DC, I did pretty well in school there as well. A year later I did well enough on the Secondary School Admissions Test to be admitted in to one of the most prestigious boarding schools in New England with a total student body of only 200 boys. At the beginning of classes in fall 1959 we were given placement tests to stratify the student body into A, B, and C sections in the key subjects English literature, beginning Latin (!), and math. Being an entering class of only about 40 boys, we were placed accordingly into three or four “sections” of around five to a dozen students each. As a result of mediocre performance on these additional tests, I was placed in the “dummy” (“C”) sections. Fortunately, I managed to do well enough that after several months I was “promoted” to the “B” sections, and by the start of my 2nd year was doing well enough to place in the “A” sections.

A great deal of learning and growth occurred during my five years at Groton. My love of science translated into academic successes in math and science. I became especially enamored of logarithms and the slide rule based on the logarithmic principle with which we could do multiplication and division via the simple addition or subtraction of lengths. We routinely did calculations to three “significant digits” with the help of the Vernier scale on the cursor. We were learning algebra, trigonometry, and exponents and routinely got to apply many of these tools to problems in physics, chemistry, and biology classes. As a result of all this, early in my fifth year at Groton, in the fall of 1963, I passed the “Advanced Placement” exams in math, chemistry, biology, and “natural sciences” and was accepted for “early admission” the following year into the sophomore class at Harvard.

14 They had both graduated from college with summa cum laude honors and were subsequently inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Tens Chapter 20 Early Religious Training, and “Science vs Religion”

I was about twelve when my mother, despite being an avowed agnostic herself, decided that my sister and I should get some basic training in the Protestant religion she was raised in. I don’t recall her ever saying as much, but I later suspected this was to please her mother, whom we called “Wela” (short for abuela— grandmother in Spanish), who had fallen ill in the same time period. Thus my sister and I were driven every week for eight weeks to the local Episcopal Church in McLean, Virginia, to spend several hours in catechism class to prepare us for “confirmation”—the second major Church ritual event after baptism. I recall there being talk in the class that this ritual might be accompanied by some unusual experiences, but when the special Sunday finally arrived, nothing special happened for me.

A few years later I was sent to boarding school at Groton where religion was front and center: Morning Prayer services were held daily before breakfast in the small but elegant gothic stone Chapel with full pipe organ. On Sundays there was a full formal service in the morning and a second evening service before dinner. The headmaster of the school was a tall and imposing elderly figure, a highly respected Episcopal minister, who routinely gave eloquent sermons every Sunday. He set a high ethical standard for the whole school and it seemed that everyone, students and faculty alike, looked to him for guidance. Every Sunday afternoon, students were welcomed into his home for “tea and cookies”—an event that combined the warmth of informality with a sense of trepidation generated by his imposing personality.

As a member of the church choir for all five of my years at Groton (gradually moving from soprano, to alto, to tenor, and finally to bass as adolescence unfolded) the rich repertoire of Christian church music resonated strongly with my already deep love of music. An indelible aesthetic impression was made by the poetry of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the inspiration of the headmaster’s regular sermons, the resonance of the organ in the stone Chapel, and the lofty idealism of service that permeated the education at Groton. This was a religion that made a deeply felt kind of “sense” to me for all those reasons. During those same years, however, the challenge posed to religion by science was a frequent topic of discussion—typically framed as: “given the obvious conflict between science and religion, could they possibly be reconciled somehow?” I understood this conflict as follows: on the religion side we have God as the creator and mover of all things and beings; on the science side we have a vast impersonal nature of things and beings whose mechanisms are being revealed by the application of a rational discovery process (with no need for God). God is central for religion, but not needed for science. The science faculty at Groton featured skilled instructors in math, physics, chemistry, and biology. Thus, in the setting of the religious faith orientation of the school as a whole, there was a clear and ever-present tension with scientific ways of thinking. My closest friend at Groton, Andrew Porter, was himself the son of an Episcopal minister and keenly interested in science. We discussed the “science vs religion” issue endlessly for years. Somehow it seemed intuitively obvious that they could be and should be reconciled. However, no one seemed to have an answer as to how they might actually be reconciled. This issue played a formative role for yoga science.

Wandering in D.C

Tens Chapter 21 In the summer of 1963, while we were still living in Virginia, I decided to make some use of my months out of school by exploring some of the cultural riches of Washington DC. I would often take the bus into the city from the stop a few blocks from our home. Left to my own devices, I wandered around the heart of “Our Nation’s Capital,” spent many hours in the visitor’s gallery of the US Senate (where I observed the mostly tedious processes of the Senate in summer session), rode the underground tram that runs between the Senate Office Building and the Capital building, but mostly reveled in the vast collections of the nineteen Museums of the Smithsonian, with special focus on the Museum of Natural History, and the National Air Museum (still, at that time, located in the “Tin Shed” temporary building behind the headquarters of the Smithsonian—the famous “Castle” on the Southern side of the Mall). I became familiar that summer with the many fascinating exhibits in the Air Museum on the history not only of powered flight, but also of rocketry and space travel. As a result, when I would return to these exhibits, I often knew exactly what I was looking to see again, and could readily pick out the items new to the exhibit since my previous visit. This familiarity played a key role in my later discovery at the Air and Space Museum of the Charles and Ray Eames film “Powers of Ten.”

A major “contingency effect”: Summers at UCLA with Lowell Lincoln Wood

Following graduation from Groton in 1964 I flew to Los Angeles to take up a summer job at the UCLA Geophysics laboratory of 1960 Nobel Prize winner, Willard F. Libby. Getting the job was unexpected and quite remarkable in itself, being the result of what may be the first of a series of incidents that I have earlier referred to as “historical contingencies” which seem to have played such a significant role in the shaping of my life experience, and leading specifically to the ideas of “yoga science.” Sometime in 1963, Saul Weinstein—an award winning organic chemist at CalTech—gave a keynote presentation at a chemistry conference in Marseille where my parents had moved a year earlier (my father’s final posting as Consul-General with the State Department). During his stay in the area Dr. Weinstein was hosted by my parents and taken on an outing to see the Roman ruins in Nîmes. During an outdoor picnic, Dr. Weinstein was stung by a bee to which he had a severe allergic reaction and began to go into life- threatening anaphylactic shock. My father managed to wrestle his limp body into the car and drive him at high speed to a hospital in Nîmes where he was successfully treated.

Early the following year, anticipating my graduation from Groton, my father contacted Dr. Weinstein to ask if he might have a summer job position for me. Dr. W. said he did not but referred my father to his colleague Willard Libby at UCLA who, as it turned out, did. Thus, by virtue of a bee sting, I was offered a fascinating and consequential paid summer position in the lab of a world-class chemist!

Willard F. Libby had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1960 for his development of the carbon-14 dating method. Among the many graduate students in his geophysics lab at UCLA was Lowell Lincoln Wood. Lowell and I hit it off immediately: we were both night owls, lovers of all things scientific and the classical music repertoire (a perennial favorite of all-night radio programmers). Lowell recognized my enthusiasm for the work I was assigned—managing the analysis of water samples gathered from all over the world for their tritium content in a first effort to map the distribution in the global hydrosphere of this rarest form of “heavy water.”15

15 Used in nuclear weapons, among other applications.

Tens Chapter 22 There were also many other kinds of work going on in the lab, and I was introduced to at least a half dozen other experiments being done by different graduate students at that time. It quickly became obvious, however, that Lowell was hands-down the character in Libby’s lab with the most spunk, the most energy, the highest intelligence, and the greatest capacity for mischievous play. He was a third or fourth year graduate student when I first met him; and he had already worked out with Libby that his dissertation project would involve analysis of data from one of the early geophysical satellites, making extensive use of cutting-edge computing resources at UCLA with which Lowell was familiar.

In any case, there were also times when the entire lab would take part in some special event or other. One especially memorable such event was a trip up the Owens Valley to visit the radio-telescope array at Big Pine, near Bishop, California. We were to drive from LA in a convoy of “Unicars” belonging to the University that could be used for approved field trips. No sooner were we out the door of the garage when Lowell said to me, “Here, Scott. You drive.” All I had by way of a driver’s license at the time was a California certificate that permitted me to operate my Honda 60 motorcycle. So, this was my first time behind the wheel of a car, driving, which I then did for around 12 hours from Los Angeles to Bishop. Quite a thrill-ride!

During the whole trip we tuned into one classical music station after another, driving with the windows down—the weather being hot but dry, and the passing scenery drop-dead gorgeous. We did a quick side trip to the Bristlecone Pine National Park to see the oldest trees in the world. Then, another hour further north to the radio-telescope array which was one of the early efforts to create a “synthetic aperture.”16

It was great fun for me to learn about all that even though I couldn't exactly follow the sophisticated math involved. All the same, my love for mathematics motivated me to keep working hard at it. As a result, I developed a kind of “mathematical intuition” over the years of both serious and playful engagement with mathematical concepts including asymptotes, limits, exponentials, and logarithms and the many phenomena in physics and chemistry they are used to help analyze. Some of these phenomena were newly discovered and quite “mind boggling” at the time such as the quantum tunneling phenomena whereby electrons are observed to pass through a nonconductive barrier—the “Josephson effect”, discovered in 1963.

Another interest Lowell and I shared was in three specific science fiction works that had become especially popular in that era: “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke, “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein, and “Dune” by Frank Herbert. These works all depicted various “psychic powers” that are uncommon, hidden, or “potential”—seen in the “special children” that begin appearing at the end of “Childhood’s End,” in the Martian Michael Valentine Smith in “Stranger,” and in the spice-consuming navigators of “Dune.”

I spent three summers working at UCLA and a fourth summer after graduation from Harvard at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory working directly for Lowell. In addition, Lowell and I corresponded in writing and by phone during my college years and on several occasions he visited me in Cambridge. In retrospect, I received a number of formative lessons from Lowell, lessons that will play a major role in the story of yoga science as it unfolds from here:

16 One of my very favorite findings in astronomy: the resolving power of a telescope of diameter d can be approximated by two much smaller telescopes set a distance d apart.

Tens Chapter 23  Think big—always think in the most expansive terms possible.  Think applied science—i.e., how can science be applied to solving practical problems?  Think “orders of magnitude”17—many scientific problems can effectively be thought through in such terms using “back of the envelope” estimates.  And lastly, in a key (and largely unintended) lesson, I got to know Lowell as a dreamer and “hidden visionary” no doubt because we shared a keen interest in “our inner potentials.” In 1968 (part of the following “Twenties” chapter), during my last year in college, he shared with me a number of strikingly “anomalous” personal experiences he was having that he could not discuss with the rest of his scientific and increasingly politically influential colleagues. I still have his original descriptions of these events hand-written on hotel stationery.

Lowell went on to an “illustrious” (or to some, “notorious”) career as the “right hand man” to Edward Teller—“the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Working closely with Teller and the leadership of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLL, “Your Nation’s Weapons Lab”) throughout the ‘70s, he lobbied the US Congress for ever-increased funding for advanced weapons research. He then played an instrumental role in the Strategic Defense Initiative (known popularly as “The Star Wars Program”) launched in 1983 under President Reagan. He personally recruited on behalf of the Hertz Foundation over a hundred top science graduates from across the country to form the “O Group” at LLL. His escapades as a leader in that group were depicted in “Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the Young Scientists Behind Our Space Age Weaponry,” by William Broad (1985, Simon & Schuster) in which Lowell is portrayed as the Darth Vader character.

Wikipedia currently reports that just last year Lowell surpassed Thomas Edison’s record for the largest number of issued “utility patents” in the US: 1,094. These include patents on laser compression as a means to thermonuclear fusion, climate engineering, innovative medical devices, atomic reactor automation, computer methods, and many others—reflecting Lowell’s great breadth of expertise as an applied scientist.

Four Years at Harvard

As noted above, I was admitted to Harvard as a sophomore. Thus, in my second year I was a junior, my third year a senior, and my fourth year an "AP student in fourth year of residence."

In that first year, although living among other freshmen in the Quad, I registered for courses in second year math and first year physics in keeping with Lowell’s advice. In both cases, however, I was now competing for the first time with dozens of super smart and highly motivated people. I found the culture created by these students to be personally distasteful: too intensely “wonky”—what we might now call “nerdy”—and for me imbalanced. It might be okay for a summer working at UCLA, but not really my choice of how to live for the entire academic year.

17 Orders of magnitude are written in powers of 10. For example, the order of magnitude of 1500 is 3, since 1500 may be written as 1.5×10³. I recall Lowell using (as an even shorter hand): for this same example, “1.53”

Tens Chapter 24 Because I was in an ambiguous position in the class structure at Harvard, there were some extra hurdles I felt obliged to navigate that first year (on top of the intense academic demands) including two that were social:  I was “punched" by various “clubs,” as they were called—Harvard’s equivalent of college fraternities, each with its own building, often in historic locations around Harvard Square. There was a definite social hierarchy among these clubs that made it seem like the rank of the club that punched you was a really big deal. On the other hand, I was really not particularly attracted to the social club scene.  At the same time, I was attempting to find my way in sexual relationships for the first time. This revolved around two major kinds of events: the “mixer”—large formal dance parties with same- age young women from the local colleges, and private parties of various kinds.

It was at the start of my second year that I decided to drop out of the social club scene, quit the mixers and parties, and take a closer look at “the theater scene” that I suspected might be more to my liking. I signed up to try out for a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance.” I was thrilled to get a bit part and soon discovered that the kind of social contacts taking place here in the “theater crowd” indeed felt to me much more natural and relaxed. It was in this context that I was now able to begin to get more seriously (and as we thought of it at the time, more “meaningfully”) into the “whole boy/girl thing.” It was here in Harvard’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society that I met my first wife and the mother of my two daughters, Carolyn Firth.

It was at this same time that I made the fateful decision—fateful in ways that will become clear as this story unfolds—to deviate from the advice that Lowell had given me to "stick with math, physics, and chemistry," and instead switch to biology. My efforts in the preceding year to adhere to the hard sciences track had left me feeling uncomfortably one-sided compared to the richness of my earlier life, and I had already long been drawn to the study of living nature.

Perhaps this was another manifestation of the issues discussed at the end of the “Zeros” chapter above around the serious troubles I had had learning to read. If it is in fact true that there is significant lateralization of functions in the human brain,18 then perhaps my brain has leaned to the right compared to the average. From the perspective of my right-brain—the more holistic side—any over-involvement in left-brain focused analytical activities would eventually lead to dysphoria and a felt sense that “something is missing.”

Given my experience up to this point, I felt comfortable living in a right-brain mode: I was familiar with it, and I'd had many positive experiences with it in the past, especially in nature, listening to music, and in the sort of absorbed solitary play that I reveled in as a child. I suspect that I had come to feel that the right brain holistic function is inherently positive, life-affirming, and altogether good. I think it's fair to say that this is probably why I found the “wonk” culture distasteful—it seemed to leave out this “holistic” aspect of my own lived experience. The more strongly left-brained cultural emphasis impressed itself upon me then, and continues to impress itself upon us all now. It is our dominant culture in the West, in the developed countries, and increasingly in the developing world as well.

18 For an especially dramatic portrayal of the experiential dimension of brain lateralization, see the now famous TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, “My Stroke of Insight.”

Tens Chapter 25

In any case, I deliberately transitioned out of that "wonk culture" and made formal application with the college administration to change my declared major to biology, which seemed a natural choice for me. I started taking the courses I would need to satisfy the criteria for a biology major instead. Plus, now I felt the freedom to take courses in other subjects I was also interested in, such as:

 Ecology, where I was exposed to new ideas regarding “the web of life,” the many factors that determine if a population will thrive or dwindle, and the constant of change over time everywhere in the biosphere.  Sociology, where I learned about the pioneering work of Robert E. Park and his paper from the 20's, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man." (Referenced above, footnote #6)  Spanish, where in attempting to recover some of the fluency of “my first tongue” I eventually realized that I’d only had the kind of fluency that a child is capable of at five and six—to be fluent now at 19 or 20 was a whole other matter.  Architecture, which I considered seriously as a career possibility. I was soon dissuaded by one of the professors at the Carpenter Center who laid out for me how, in his opinion, the profession was actually structured to exclude new entrants.  Art history, with a survey course that introduced me to the full sweep of Western art.  Literary criticism, which introduced me to the important cultural role played by critics.  Government, a basic course that was memorable not so much for its rather breezy content as for the colorful lecture style of JFK’s former economics advisor, the famous John Kenneth Galbraith.  Astronomy, two memorable courses: o a general survey with a basic textbook, which I remember finding on the dry side, (especially comparing it now to the totally “juiced up” presentations by such people as Neil deGrasse Tyson and his recent upgrade of Sagan's “Cosmos” series) o a course on planetary science, with Carl Sagan visiting from Cornell. In this setting Sagan appeared curiously anxious nearly all the time. It seemed he couldn't relax with students. Some years later I heard that the problem was that he didn't feel proficient in mathematics and was therefore nervous before an audience of second and third-year Harvard science majors who might spot his weakness at any moment—he was literally “sweating the math,” as we used to say.

In the biology courses for my major, there were several especially memorable ones:  An introduction to evolutionary biology with the then already well-known entomologist E. O. Wilson. His lectures were lively and provocative. In retrospect he was already developing the scientifically exciting new idea of group selection for which he later became world-famous through his book, “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” of 1975. There was also a most memorable guest lecture by the 1937 Nobelist Albert Szent-Györgyi on “Bioenergetics”—providing a fascinating bridge to the physics and chemistry with which I was already quite familiar and with which I became much more familiar with in the following decade.  For my “senior thesis”—composed in the spring of my third year—I reviewed the evidence for the then highly contentious “theory of continental drift.” Having been exposed to ideas from geology via the Grand Canyon and from geophysics while working at UCLA, the evidence looked extremely solid to me. My advisor was dead set against the theory, but still gave me a passing grade.  Finally, in the Spring of my final year, I did a psycho-physics elective with Drs. Tursky and Shapiro on the seventh floor of the William James Building; I learned to use a then state-of-the-art 16 Tens Chapter 26

channel polygraph, hooked myself up (with respiratory rate, heart rate, galvanic skin response, and surface electro-myography on forearm), and looked to identify objective correlates of a specific feature of yoga relaxation I had learned experientially—that I could “push” relaxation into the body, either into a specific area, or into the body as a whole. In the brief time I had for this, I was not able to identify any such “correlates,” but it did introduce me to the field of psychophysiology that became so important in later years.

Summary

Toward the beginning of this decade, a most memorable anomalous experience while wide awake led me to ponder frequently thereafter the seemingly arbitrary nature of my existence. Meanwhile, school work helped form a complex network of ideals and ideas from across many subject categories of our culture while focused on the abiding question of how religion might be reconciled with science. There was an ongoing love of both details and possibilities in life—on both analytical and holistic sides. These first two decades left me with a sense of how I had been shaped largely by contingency and how, perhaps as a result of unusual experiences, I found my mind, interests, and impulses somehow “different” compared to those with whom I was associated at home, at school, and at college. On the one hand this left me feeling special in a peculiar way, but in another it left me sensing that, having taken to heart the motto of Groton School “Whom to serve is perfect freedom,” I would have further to travel in order to discover what form my “service” would take and how I might come to terms with the “science vs religion” issue.

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Twenties—Decade with Swamiji and the Integral Yoga Institute

First Meeting Swamiji

The key event that set the tone for my Twenties decade, and that best marks the beginning of yoga science, was meeting His Holiness Sri Swami Satchidananda in the fall of my fourth year at Harvard— academic year 1967–1968.19 I recorded some of the details of that event just a few years later in a chronicle composed in two sittings, in 1972 and 1973, covering these early, dramatic years as a student of Swamiji.

Two features of the chronicle stand out on re-reading: I saw Swamiji as extraordinary and I saw myself as “special.” As I have learned since, grandiosity and inflation go hand-in-hand with low self-esteem. Thus, what I was expressing in these ways was likely symptomatic of an underlying emotional tone that had developed earlier in my life. As I’ve described above, a principle antecedent may have been the peri-natal factors, manifesting later as trouble learning to read and still later in my felt sense of being something of a misfit at Groton and Harvard, resonating with Heinlein’s title “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

Here are some of the highlights from my piece dated Nov. 30, 1972 that aimed to be “a chronicle of my experience with Swamiji.” The chronicle begins in October 1967 describing my first sighting of an image of Swamiji in a bookstore window across from the Brattle Street Theatre in Cambridge—a poster that later became famous as “His Holiness” by artist Peter Max.

Figure 1 "His Holiness" Poster of Swami Satchidananda by Peter Max

This is what is printed at the top of the poster: Yoga is over four thousand years old, but it may be new to you. Yoga is a scientific system that makes you the master of your senses, instead of being a slave to them.

19 Note: I actually turned twenty in the middle of my second year at Harvard—my “junior year” (academic year 1965–1966), as outlined above

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Yoga is not just standing on your head, as many people think, but learning how to stand on your own two feet. Yoga is not a religion; yet it embraces all religions. Yoga can teach the young the wisdom of age, and teach the old the secret of youth. Yoga will introduce you to someone you may not know, Your Self. Swami Satchidananda will introduce you to Yoga.

Looking at that image I thought to myself at the time, “I’ve noticed that every winter here in New England I tend to get into a funk20 that I suspect is due to the long winter nights and lack of exercise. However, I hate the smell of gymnasiums and squash courts. Maybe doing some yoga postures might help, and surely this man knows something about yoga!”

I also described several items indicative of the mind-set I was in when I met Swamiji:

 During the previous Spring I’d reflected on what I called “how the world will be saved”— referring to what seemed to be an acceleration taking place across human history that implied, when extrapolated into the future, an ongoing exponential process of complexification that I felt would somehow lead to a most positive future;21  The preceding summer—during my last extended visit to Marseille—the final post of my father’s career—I’d recalled having a spontaneous and striking out-of-body experience while sun bathing on the front patio of our home on the Corniche overlooking the Chateau D’If.  It might have been on that same visit to the Brattle theater that I walked out of “Last Year at Marienbad,” went across the street to purchase a copy of “Childhood’s End” by Arthur Clark, and spotted in the bookstore window as I went in, the poster of “His Holiness” shown above.

I’d seen enough of the old classic films to be ready for something culturally more challenging. Clark’s vision of a global spiritual transformation was deeply moving, not to mention his explosive visionary ending! And yet it was Swamiji whose living-iconic but relational presence became the most lasting influence. The moment at which I met him was charged with significance, a sort of triple conjunction— between Swamiji, Arthur Clarke, and moving beyond “the classic art film.”

As I recall, the talk advertized on the “His Holiness” poster was just a few days after that incident. This, my first event with Swamiji, was held in the basement of the Boston YMCA—billed as a “yoga talk and demonstration.” There were a dozen rows of chairs set in front of a built-in stage toward the rear of which was a low dais surrounded by many flowers. Incense filled the air, Indian music played softly in the background and the room was brightly flourescent-lit. The event began with a hatha yoga demonstration by a group of five or six fit-looking young men and women wearing white pajamas. Then, the Swami came in, dressed in his signature pink/orange robes, and sat on the dais.

I did not record and don’t recall specifically any of what he said, but I came away deeply struck by his soft-spoken simplicity, his graceful gestures, and his sense of humor that seemed a bit simple to a Harvard man, but which was endearing nonetheless. I also left with an abiding sense that I had just found the truth of the Biblical sayings of Jesus in the form of a man who was actually living them, had put them to the test of experience, and was manifesting a glowing and wonderful directness as a result.

20 Today we would probably identify this as some form of “seasonal affective disorder.” 21 Contributing to this way of thinking was my reading of Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin’s “Phenomenon of Man” (1955), sometime in the preceding year or two.

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I had been trained to think of the life of Jesus as an unattainable and practically un-seekable goal. Nobody had ever presented me with the possibility that the Golden Rule was actually livable. Swami Satchidananda did just that, and I knew I was changed just by seeing it in him.

A few weeks later, I wrote:

At the final cast party for “Patience”22 Debbie Fiedler presented me with a roll of paper. I unrolled it and gleefully exclaimed, “Swamiji!” It was a flyer announcing another talk by this marvelous being only a few days hence.

A lecture was scheduled at a venue with which I was not familiar—the Arlington Street Church,23 which turned out to be a “national historic” building in the center of Boston—a huge step up from the basement of the YMCA!

Transfiguration in the Arlington Street Church

Perhaps the most unexpected and memorable experience of my life was quasi-contemporaneously recorded in some detail in the following excerpt from the chronicle—I go on about all of this experience because of the significance of having had it:

Being in a church was itself associated automatically in my mind with “spiritual things”—vague as that was to me at the time. It is a beautiful old church in Boston with magnificent stained glass windows, simple enclosed pews, a rich red carpet, and all the rest of the interior intricate woodwork painted white…

Swamiji sat on a simple cushion set on an oriental rug on a table at the front of the center aisle (just below the central Unitarian altar). The room was brightly lit as before and there were flowers and incense that blended to create an atmosphere of strange awesomeness. Swamiji was clothed in a bright orange simple pajama that stood out like the flowers against the white in the light. His whole person seemed to be totally at home in this setting… After being introduced he gave a long talk which I did not record and don’t recall. Then he had us all sit up straight and chant “Om shanthi” together. He intoned some more complex chants softly to himself, and during this soft solo chanting the strangest thing occurred.

I had kept my eyes on him as if I were looking intently at a sunset trying to catch every nuance of the spectacle. Then, all of a sudden, but gently, and with no jarring whatsoever, everything in my visual field disappeared save Swamiji’s face in the very center. Everything else in my peripheral vision was now replaced by a white light of the color and luminosity of clouds illuminated by the sun when you fly through them. I was not even startled, for some reason, by this peculiar change in my visual field. I made a split-second decision to experiment with this phenomenon and looked away from his face. Instantly, and again with no sense of startling suddenness, everything returned to “normal.” There were the people in front of me, about three pews worth, and there was Swamiji

22 The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta performed by the Harvard G&S Society in the fall of 1967. 23 Description and a few pictures are at http://www.ascboston.org/about/building.html, many more are available via Google/images

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and the table and the flowers, and there was the white interior of the church with all its ornate detail.

Again I looked at his face, and again the entire visual field went cloud-bright, luminous, and somehow alive, not at all like an illuminated surface, rather like a vast sea of little microscopic light sources all blending together into an atmosphere (as it is with sunlight on cloud). This time I noticed that his face changed too: it was now the glowing face of a radiant young clean-shaven man, the beard and the age totally gone. Only this shining face remained in a brilliant halo of light that filled my visual field. I could make out his chin and his slender neck, never seen before. I quietly marveled at the sight, but somehow didn’t seem startled—there was a profound peace with it all that was somehow deeper than the other content of the experience.

I noticed now bright and brief flashes of color occasionally broke the cloud light… brilliant blue and red and yellow… I knew somehow that this was due to slight movements of the heads in front of me that were somehow disturbing the diffuse steady white glow. The experience lasted for what seemed like several minutes, at least thirty seconds, and perhaps a long as five minutes, I could not tell for sure. What was more important was the calm I felt, the tremendous power of the experience, the sense of having been touched by something holy and god-like.

In the weeks that followed I went through a lot of turmoil trying to understand this experience. I sought out the new Integral Yoga Institute (IYI) branch center that Prudence Farrow had been sent by Swamiji (from his base in New York City) to establish in Boston. Although it was a bit of a hassle to get there from Cambridge by public transport (my Honda 90 was out of commission by then and I did not have a car), I started taking hatha yoga classes, helping with clean-up and painting, took part in my first kirtans (devotional group chanting), and attended a special “feast” event with Swamiji himself when he returned to Boston to give a second talk at the Arlington Street Church several months after his first.

Conversations at the IYI touched upon how “what Swamiji wants is American saints.” This recalled the feeling I had had that first night in the YMCA of “a whole new range of possible futures to dream of… maybe even sainthood as a straight-forward and loving simplicity.” In one private conversation I had with Prudence, I told her of my transfiguration experience and she allowed as how lucky I was, that she had never had any such experience, and that Swamiji “calls very few that way.”

Second Transfiguration and a Second Initiation

In the months following the dramatic event described above, I became involved with Carolyn Firth through Gilbert & Sullivan, and she later became my first wife. I was eager to share my enthusiasm for Swamiji with her, but for some reason I did not tell her about the visual transfiguration I’d experienced. As part of another visit to Boston, Swamiji gave a second lecture in the Arlington Street Church and this time, my new love came with me. Amazingly, I had a second transfiguration experience at the end of this lecture, very similar to the first, except that this time the cloud light was golden in color. Even more amazingly, Carolyn turned to me wide-eyed, unprompted after the event ended, and whispered loudly, “Did you see that? It was all gold!”

As we prepared to leave, I noticed that there was a line forming to greet him at the front of the church:

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Feeling, “I want to thank him, that is all I want to do, just thank him from the bottom of my heart. He has just remade my universe into a far more wonderful place,” but when my turn eventually comes, I feel so small I cannot look him in the eye, I just reach for his outstretched hand and looking down, say “Thank you…”

It was the next day, as I recall, that Swamiji offered a hatha yoga class in the rectory of the church. There were about sixty of us packed into a medium-sized room. After leading us through the postures, Swamiji had us lie down and led us through a deep relaxation. He had us tense and relax the body part by part— first tensing the part as tightly as we could, holding that for some seconds, then relaxing as deeply as we could. Then we did the same with the whole body.24 Then after feeling the whole body for a bit, he had us turn to the breath—to simply observe or feel the breath coming in and out of the nostrils, in and out of the lungs. Then he had us turn our attention to the mind, to “observe the thoughts like logs floating down a stream” passing before us. In his soft slow deep voice he said,

“Now the mind is as calm as a still lake, you can feel the peace of that stillness and that deep calm.” I feel that and I feel a peace like I have never known. I am experiencing a stillness, a palpable and quietly impressive peace that seems to touch me ddeeeeeppp down. Again, all I can do on leaving is take his hand and thank him. This time I mutter a “thank you for coming back to Boston. Thank you so much.”

After this introduction—a kind of initiation into “natural mind” meditation, for me second only to the transfigurations in significance—I attempted to establish a daily practice of what Swamiji had led us through in that class (which turned out to be the only hatha class I ever took with him personally). I took up a vegetarian diet and made some first attempts at fasting for one or two days—both practices that I learned about for the first time at the Boston IYI. As the Spring of 1968 unfolded as my last semester at Harvard, I was gradually filled with a new-found sense of health, energy, and purpose. Carolyn and I began living together and resolved to spend the summer together in California.

Harvard Graduation and Summer Job at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

As graduation neared, I cashed in my twenty-first birthday/graduation gift from my parents (~$600 worth of stock) to buy a used Volkswagen van that I outfitted as a simple camper to convey Carolyn and me to California. After a graduation ceremony marred by a protracted heavy rain storm, we made our way to Western Connecticut to say our goodbyes to Carolyn’s parents, and then down to Rehoboth, Delaware, for a farewell visit to my parents before heading West across country.

Lowell had moved from Los Angeles up to Livermore—site of “Your Nation’s (nuclear) Weapon’s Laboratory”—to become chief assistant to Edward Teller (known to many as “father of the hydrogen bomb”). Lowell had offered me a summer job—one that focused on biology since I had rejected his

24 This exercise, I came to discover a decade later, was a version of Progressive Relaxation developed by Edmund Jacobson at his pioneering psychophysiology lab at Harvard in the 1920s! Jacobson’s work had become popular in the 30s and 40s in England from where it was transmitted via the British Raj to north India. Physical fitness was subsequently advocated as a way for Indian men to strengthen themselves for the fight for independence from the British. Hence the “routines” of hatha yoga were developed—especially by the Canadian military—into a daily fitness program. Here, decades later, I was learning Progressive Relaxation techniques that had literally gone all the way around the world to return whence they came, now in an almost unrecognizable form, as a seemingly integral part of a class on “hatha yoga.”

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advice to stick with chemistry and physics. In the meantime, however, one of Lowell’s favorite protégés had been killed in a car accident; he was now deeply depressed and distant, and I saw little of him all summer. I managed to do a bit of work collecting data on fossil stromatolite layer thicknesses that he then used in an ongoing study of earth-moon orbital relations going back as far as 3+ billion years ago.25

Just before leaving Boston to head West, I’d purchased a copy of “The Science of Yoga: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali” by I. K. Taimni—a verse by verse translation that I’d been referred to by someone at the Boston IYI. This was my introduction to the more scholarly side of the yoga tradition—I was entranced by the systematic presentation of the yogic path and read slowly through the book a number of times over the subsequent years.

However, I’d also jotted down in the back of the book the dates that Swamiji was slated to be coming through San Francisco on his way “around the world” in the fall of 1968.

Private Audience with Swamiji at SFO

Toward the end of the summer Carolyn flew back to Boston to prepare for her final year of college. I continued on for some weeks working at the Lab, but my attention was being drawn back to yoga. I started reading Evans-Wentz’s “Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines.” I was very taken with the descriptions here of ascetic yogis and their marvelous accomplishments or siddhis.26

I recalled that Swamiji was soon slated to be stopping over in San Francisco. The inner turmoil that had been initiated by the transfiguration experiences the previous year was still ongoing, albeit reduced in intensity; and I was still feeling, “I have to speak with Swamiji about it to get his guidance.”

I called the New York IYI to confirm his itinerary and drove to the San Francisco Airport at the appointed hour to find that I’d somehow confused AM with PM. When I figured out that he was staying at the San Francisco YMCA, it was already too late to meet with him. So, I resolved to stay the night at the Y if I could in hopes of somehow meeting with him the next morning before his flight. I managed to slip a note under the door of Swamiji’s traveling companion, whom I’d met previously in Boston, Hari Zupan, appealing for a meeting with Swamiji.

Early the next morning I met up with Swamiji and his entourage and discovered they were not flying out until three PM and had an outing planned to Muir Woods. In a caravan of several cars, with me in my VW bus, we made the windy road up to this National Park. As it turned out I had with me a “Golden Eagle” pass I’d used on family vacations that now made it possible for Swamiji’s entire party to enter free of charge! We wandered through the magnificent giant redwoods with many in the group snapping pictures. At one point, Swamiji sat down in a hollowed-out giant tree trunk, and I (presumptuously) sat down right next to him—my head on fire with the questions I wanted to ask—wondering, “will I ever get a private moment?” In minutes, we headed off again further down the trail that loops back to the parking area.

25 This data supported his theory that the moon had formed very close to the earth and had progressively moved away as it lost orbital energy to tidal friction. 26 “Psychic powers” being only the lesser of the two kinds of siddhi—supreme and ordinary—supreme siddhi being full Buddhahood itself.

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Before long, someone proposed we try the park snack bar. Since it was a mid-week morning, we were the only patrons. Swamiji noted the living redwood cuttings that decorated each table and commented, “Our food should be living, too.” Amusingly, his grilled cheese sandwich arrived first, and he offered me a bite, then a bite for everyone else. I offered him some of mine when it arrived (I can’t recall if he accepted.). After our snack, I walked next to him and told him that I was working at a laboratory where they make weapons that can kill millions of people in an instant. He seemed curiously unimpressed and made a remark that confused me—something about the people fighting in Viet-Nam. But, now it was time to rush off to the airport and we were on the move again, my questions still unanswered.

The caravan made the hour+ trip to the airport with not much time to spare. There was parking to handle, all the bags to check, and we got to the gate with only eight minutes before boarding was scheduled to begin. Repeatedly throughout the day I’d tug at Hari’s sleeve and whisper, “I need to talk with Swamiji,” But somehow the occasion was never quite right. By now I was becoming distraught. With only minutes to spare, I was called over to an area of the waiting lounge that was “under construction” and there, in one of a row of bright orange waiting room chairs behind a curtain of construction plastic, Swamiji was sitting calmly.

He gestured to me to come and sit next to him and asked, “What is it?”

At last, I could ask my question. “Swamiji, you remember when you spoke in Boston at the Arlington Street Church last year?”

“Yes.”

“When you were chanting at the end I saw your head surrounded by a mass of light and your beard disappeared and there were colors flashing. What was that?”

“It was nothing special. It was just my aura. You should not let it disturb you.”

Rather nonplus at his reply, I unburdened myself of another question. “Swamiji, I’ve been reading secret teachings and they say that…”

He cut me off, shook his head, and did a gesture of dismissal with his hand saying, “You shouldn’t worry about that, it is very esoteric.” I marveled at his use of the word—one more sophisticated than I’d heard him use previously, but clearly apt given that I was referring to an esoteric tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

“But Swamiji, how can I practice yoga when I’m working at a place like the Lab where they are designing weapons and…”

“Well, you do a little yoga and a little physics, too.”

This was my introduction to Swamiji’s strict refusal to take sides when confronted with any dichotomous choice. In this simple non-problematic instruction seemed to lay the key to the “reconciliation of science and religion” that had so exercised our minds and “vexed our spirits” at Groton. I stopped. He smiled, took my hand, patted me on the head, and I was quietly filled with peace. These were not the “radical” answers my mind seemed to want, but somehow I was satisfied—all in about two minutes. Boarding was announced, and with one final hand shake from Swamiji, they were gone: first to LA, and then around the world for six months.

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I returned to Livermore and began exploring new options since I was not in the least bit inclined to stay at the Lab past the end of the summer, even if I had been offered some sort of continuing job opportunity. The atmosphere at the Livermore Lab was every bit as exclusively left-brained as the physics and chemistry departments at Harvard. I was moved to flee as soon as possible. However, if I were to leave Livermore, I’d need to find some other “deferrable” position or risk being drafted into the US Army and shipped off to fight and possibly die in Viet-Nam.

I felt most fortunate again to discover that I might secure a position in the Peace Corps, that there was a program to train volunteers for service in Nepal (how perfect for an aspiring yogi with vague attractions to Tibetan Buddhism!) about to start just a short distance from Livermore, and that as long as I was in the Peace Corps I’d qualify for continued draft-deferment. How perfect was that?

Thus I spent that fall living in a converted migrant worker’s camp—“Cactus Corners”—on the outskirts of Davis, California, trying to learn basic conversational Nepali, and taking part in the Peace Corps training. Included in the program were regular counseling sessions that gradually uncovered my less-than-fully- considered motivations for joining the Corps. At the Christmas break I decided to leave the program, return to Cambridge, ask Carolyn to marry me, and seek out a teaching job that would allow me to continue my draft deferment.

Carolyn accepted my proposal and we moved into an apartment near the Harvard campus. She completed her senior year at Radcliffe while I secured a job teaching English and Math to third and fourth graders at a private school in the nearby town of Newton. We were married at the end of March in Trinity Church, Cambridge, with Lowell as best man.

From Boston’s Winter…

Given my years of experience with New England winters, I was not surprised to have a rough time during the early months of 1969. However, I was now seriously committed to developing a genuine yoga practice: attempting to do hatha yoga regularly, reading Taimni’s Yoga Sutras, and often recalling the transfigured vision I’d had of Swamiji not so long before. Looking ahead both to the end of the school year and my deferment, I decided to apply for Conscientious Objector Status and spent long hours composing the personal statement for the application and collecting letters of reference.

During this time I read “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by Swami Yogananda. After Swami Vivekananda, he was one of the main yogi pioneers in the West in the ‘20s and ‘30s. I was deeply impressed by this book. It opened up even further the vast, new, and wondrous world that Swamiji had introduced me to so personally and so powerfully. I sent my father a copy of the book, knowing that he had been stationed in Bombay in the 30s, thinking he might find it interesting. He took one look at the picture of Yogananda on the cover of the paperback and reported, “I recognize him—I issued him his visa to come to the United States in 1936.” Thus I discovered that my father had been the “visa officer” at the US embassy in Bombay at the time (but, he never even opened the book).

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Figure 2. Swami Yogananda

In April, I organized a talk for Swamiji to take place in Harvard Square at the Unitarian Church. It fell to me to get the posters printed, place them everywhere I could around Cambridge, and arrange for Swamiji’s travel to Boston with a possible overnight stay in the area:

Right up to the last moment there was a question as to whether or not Swamiji would stay overnight or catch the next shuttle back to New York after the lecture… It began to rain when Swamiji arrived and my spirits drooped even though I was glad to see him. He calmly asserted that “Nature’s way is best…” Meanwhile, Lowell had arrived out of the blue and waited to meet the man of whom I’d begun to speak so often…

When it came time for me to introduce Swamiji to the assembled few in the Church, I was filled with joy to describe as something precious the nature of my relationship with the man who had already changed my life. Swamiji listened patiently for a long time, finally cut me off, first with a gentle rebuke for talking too long, then with a stern warning against pride, but finally saying, “One must have beautiful sight to see beautiful things.” He then gave his usual talk about the mind and the nature of what was to be done in life… At the end he took a few questions and then asked to be taken immediately back to the airport.

In the chronicle I record how, despite that disappointment, I was “beginning to sense the light within” during this time as the seasons turned through spring, which always came as a great relief to me. In an especially dramatic moment, I experienced a deep heart opening on May 11, 1969 accompanied by a tearful certainty that everything would work out wonderfully.

Swamiji returned to Boston toward the end of May and offered anyone interested initiation into bija mantra japa. This process included an extended ceremony at the Boston IYI center. At the high point of the ceremony, initiates were ushered one by one into a room where only Swamiji was present. The idea was that he would look into the unique configuration of each initiate and pick a specific “seed” (Sanskrit bija) syllable for them that would then be used as part of a simple mantra—OM (bija) NAMAH—to be repeated silently or out loud as the practice of “mantra japa.”

After that initiation, I began silent mental repetition of the mantra as often as I could during the day, as Swamiji had advised during the ceremony. Later that day, Carolyn and I drove to Western Connecticut to

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her parent’s home. Rising early the next morning before sunrise, I began my mantra meditation outdoors in a secluded spot near the house. Almost immediately upon assuming the lotus pose and beginning the silent repetition of my “bija mantra,” I experienced a huge rush of loud sound, brilliant white light, and oceanic energy rising up the back of my neck and into my head. My reaction was to leap up directly from the lotus pose to a full standing position, certain that my life somehow depended on my NOT surrendering to that rush—it was gone instantaneously, never to return.

Shortly after Carolyn’s graduation at the end of May, I was called by my draft board down to McLean, Virginia for an interview concerning my application for Conscientious Objector Status. It became obvious during the interview that the three member board took a very dim view of yoga and my avowed commitment to ahimsa—the spiritual practice of “harmlessness.” I left feeling quite certain that my application for CO status would be rejected, and about a month later a letter to that effect arrived from the Board.

…to California Sunshine & Work in Electron Microscopy

Carolyn and I had agreed to move to San Francisco after her graduation. We found an apartment and she landed a good job at a rare books dealer downtown. Meanwhile, I spent months that fall looking unsuccessfully for work, but continuing my study and practice of what I’d learned from Swamiji and his IYI: vegetarian diet, fasting, hatha yoga, and mantra meditation. I also found myself drawn to the notion I kept reading about in my yoga books of rising before dawn to meditate—bhrahmamurth—and began a routine that would continue for many decades of trying (and quite often failing) to get to bed early enough to permit such an early rising. However, the impulse was regularly reinforced by the deep sense of calm that I’d observe in these early morning sessions, especially when meditating outdoors on clear days witnessing the exquisite beauty of the almost imperceptible replacement of the night sky by the light and colors of dawn.

It was during this “semi-retreat” time that I had a vivid dream during an afternoon nap:

First I’m in a large circle of people holding hands, facing inwards. The circle is rotating around to the right. I become aware of a larger circle outside the one I’m in, composed of larger beings, moving more slowly, and inside my circle is yet another smaller circle, composed of smaller beings, moving more rapidly. Slowly at first, then picking up speed, I move into the faster moving circle, first one, then the next, moving faster and faster, until, in an instant— whoosh!—I’m released into a vast calm empty space and I hear the word, pronounced distinctly and emphatically by a male voice: “Chakra!”—Sanskrit for wheel or circle—used in yoga to refer to the energy centers in the central axis of the body.27

I didn’t know what to make of this dream at the time. However, only a few months later Swamiji came to town. During a whirlwind visit, with not a moment to spare for me to tell him of my dream, he gave me the name Sudharshan—“holy vision,” which he translated for me, literally from the Sanskrit (from the indo-European roots) as “dr for vision and su meaning holy, pure, or clean.” I soon discovered that The Sudharshana Chakra is the name of the flaming discus of Hindu iconography that the god Vishnu uses to destroy his enemies. You can see it illustrated here, spinning on Vishnu’s right index finger:

27 Perhaps both a subtle-body dream initiation and an early intimation of my “scale-re-entrant fractal vortex” vision of 1987.

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Figure 3. Vishnu wielding the Sudharshana Chakra

For the remainder of my years in the IYI I was known by this name, Sudharshan, or “Darsh” for short.

A couple came from the New York IYI to open a center in San Francisco and soon I was helping them, taking hatha yoga teacher training, and starting to teach the occasional class. Carolyn and I moved in with an old college friend of mine whose elderly grandmother had had to move out of her lovely home in the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco and into a nursing home. I worked for some months painting and helping generally to fix it up before I finally found a job. I got this job was thanks to another serendipitous circumstance: my sister Joy was out for a walk in the hills of Los Altos where she lived and happened to run into her neighbor, Joe Goodman PhD. They got to talking and she mentioned that I was looking for work. It turned out he was in fact looking for a lab assistant. I landed the job, and it turned out to suit me perfectly: electron microscope technician serving the Pediatric Nephrology Department at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, run by veteran hematologist and long- distance runner Joe Goodman.

Having enjoyed so many countless hours playing with optical microscopes earlier in life, I was thrilled to learn how to operate and spend time every day for several years with an electron microscope (EM). I thoroughly enjoyed all the details of collecting kidney biopsy specimens at the hospital, fixing, staining, and sectioning them for examination, taking and developing the EM photographs produced by the scope, and especially taking the scope apart for maintenance. Dr. Goodman was often away at conferences and as the only tech in his employ I had pretty much free reign in the lab. I also took advantage of having free access to the library of the medical school to research many topics of interest.

Particularly interesting to me was to discover that just down the street from my EM lab was the lab of the pioneering psychophysiologist Joe Kamiya. I befriended his technician Beverly Timmons who was at the time assembling the first comprehensive bibliography on meditation research. Thus I began to acquaint myself with some of the technical issues being explored. It's in this period that I started collecting papers on scientific topics related to yoga found at the medical school library just a short walk over the hill from the EM lab.

Although it had been some years since I had stepped back from doing physics and chemistry to major in biology at college, with that background, I could appreciate a great deal about what the EM images I was making on a daily basis revealed. Electron microscopy uses beams of electrons created by high voltage to reach magnifications that permit imaging of macromolecules, prominently bilaminar cellular membranes and the ribosome protein factories within the cells. Thus I acquired a familiarity with these

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details of our living structure at scales between the atomic and that of the common objects of everyday experience.

The freedom I had working alone in the EM lab permitted me to read during lunch breaks and even take a short nap—which I often did in the darkroom with the photographic timer set for 15 or 20 minutes. During one of my post-lunch nap periods, I found myself doing a sort of thought experiment: I imagined a day in some future time when it would be possible to recline in a comfortable chair equipped with a device that can simulate (or cause to arise) any experience desired. What experience would I want to have? As I pondered this question, another followed, “What difference could it possibly make to actually have any experience I could imagine?” That spontaneous question totally stopped my mind for a memorable number of minutes. I later thought of this as a “gedanken” (a “thought experiment” of the kind made famous by Einstein) that demonstrated to me the virtual certainty that desiring experiences of any kind was inherently futile.

Living in the IYI Ashram on Dolores Street

Early in 1971, the San Francisco IYI—then located in a small basement apartment on Geary Boulevard— was abuzz with meetings to seek out and acquire a property in town that could accommodate up to a dozen residents and have spaces suitable for holding regular hatha classes and other kinds of events. Although I was occupied with work, others in the growing IYI community managed to locate a lovely and historic old Victorian located at 770 Dolores Street, which dated from the turn of the 20th Century and had survived the Great Fire. Although it would need some work to serve our purposes, the building seemed to have “good bones,” we could move in right away, and the price was workable so long as future residents kept paying their share of the not insubstantial mortgage.

Thus, Carolyn (now Sujata) and I (Sudharshan) moved in and joined the original complement of “ashramites.” Swamiji had given explicit directions about our daily and weekly ashram schedule of classes, daily group sessions to hear and discuss the teachings (satsangs), events of group responsive chanting accompanied by harmonium, drums, cymbals, and tambourine (kirtans), and a few special holy day celebrations from the Hindu calendar. The customary “formal” attire in the ashram—worn by the hatha teachers when teaching a class or whenever the occasion called for it—was a unisex two-piece outfit of loose-fitting pants and tunic top to roughly mid-thigh, typically in white or pale blue light cotton twill. The design allowed freedom of movement for doing the yoga postures and sitting comfortably on the floor.

With a dark green carpet, we converted the spacious attic into the main room for classes or group practice of hatha asanas, morning meditation, kirtans, and other formal group events. A gong was hung in the rear stairwell leading up to the attic routinely used in the morning for wake-up and as a “call to meditation.” We had very little furniture—Sujata and I had a mattress set on a plywood platform raised up on concrete blocks making room for storage underneath.

The main floor had the formal entry facing East, with a lovely classic stairway up to the second floor. There was a set of back stairs—originally for the servants—that connected all four floors. The hardwood floors were in decent shape in what had been the living and dining rooms. There was a small room under the stairs that served as the ashram office, and a large kitchen in the rear. The second floor had four bedrooms and several bathrooms. Sujata and I originally moved into the large front master

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bedroom with its own bath, but we were soon moved to the smaller front bedroom sharing the bath with half a dozen others in the hall as the larger room was converted into a dorm for four or five men.

The basement had a separate entrance that we cleaned out to set up a reception area and men’s and women’s changing rooms. That way, people taking yoga classes or attending events could easily come in through the basement at street level, register and pay for classes and then climb up three stories of the back stairs to the attic room. The whole arrangement worked so well that when I went back to visit the place thirty years later just this past June, it was largely unchanged.28

There are any number of special occasions etched into my memory from that time: a number of visits by Swamiji29; meeting some of his “brother monks” of their guru Swami Sivananda from his Ashram in Rishikesh (Swamis Venkateshananda, Chinmayanda, and most memorably Sivananda’s successor as head of the Divine Life Society, the saintly Chidananda); visits by other Indian celebrities including Ramamurthi Mishra, the extraordinary “singing saint” Sant Keshavadas, and the remarkable siddha yogi Swami Muktananda. Right across the street lived the integral philosopher Haridas Chaudhuri, long-time student of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and founder of the California Institute for Asian Studies (which later became the still prominent California Institute for Integral Studies).

To mark the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Sri Aurobindo in 1872, Dr. Chaudhuri organized an impressive celebration in a large hall in San Francisco. He asked me to lead the assembly of several hundred in a kirtan. Why me? We’d been holding regular weekly kirtan events at the IYI. Sometimes I’d serve as leader of the call-and-response chanting (typically with harmonium and drum accompaniment). For some months after we moved into the Ashram, these events were attended by an older man whom I later learned was a professor at UC Berkeley. Turns out that to his professional colleagues he had been referring to me as “the foremost exponent of the Hindu kirtan” and hence the invitation from Chaudhuri!

At some point, maybe a year into our stay at the ashram, after we'd moved into the smaller front room with lovely morning sun I had a number of brief visions. In one I was surrounded by a crowd who were loudly praising Manu.30 “Hare Manu! Hare Manu!” the crowd was shouting (“Hail Manu”). In another little visionary moment, I was looking out a window of a monastery over a courtyard with a few scattered monks and across a landscape that I knew to be India. As I recall, I knew somehow that I was wearing orange monastic robes. I took all this to suggest that perhaps in a previous life I had been a Hindu monk of some sort (I did not yet know that Buddhist monasticism had been dominant in ancient India for many centuries, and that wearing yellow/orange robes was common to Hindu and Buddhist monks alike).

During this time I compiled six translations of the Yoga Sutras (that I still have on my book shelf). Comparing translations was the main way in which I learned the sutras. I told Swamiji of my interest and worked briefly with an early version of what eventually became “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali:

28 Although the basement entry has been closed off to make for more living quarters in the basement. 29 Most memorably for me was a personal interview I later had with Swamiji in the same master bedroom of the IYI Carolyn and I had lived in earlier. I voiced some impatience with the seeming slow pace of my practice. He counseled me to “just allow the lotus to grow slowly up from the mud, then bloom—then its fragrance will be released and appreciated by all.” 30 The Laws of Manu formed the legendary basis for the first Hindu legal code dated to sometime around the several centuries on either side of the birth of Christ.

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Translation and Commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda,” (Integral Yoga Publications, 1978)—still the most popular translation at amazon.com.

From the start I’ve been especially taken with a number of these aphoristic statements (in my own non- scholarly language):

1:2 – “Yoga” is freedom (from, beyond, and) in mind-forms.31 1:3 – Then the seer rests in his or her own (true) nature. 1:4 – At other times, the seer is assimilated with mind-forms. 1:7 – Right-knowing is based on directly cognizing, correctly inferring, or reliable testimony. And especially Book 3: on the capabilities that open up as the practice matures—“the Vibhuti” or “powers” (or siddhis). Called out in this third book are fifty-six distinct ways of developing such capabilities. Of particular interested to me are powers of knowledge on both the atomic and the cosmic scale (in several verses) and of the details of our yogic psychobiology. Toward the tail end of my year and a half living in the Dolores Street Ashram, Swamiji asked me to teach Raja Yoga, which I did for only a couple of class sessions before we moved out of the city.

The San Francisco Bay Area “Spiritual Scene”

These were the peak years of the “consciousness revolution” that some believe had begun with the great “Be In” held in Golden Gate Park in January of 1967, followed by “the Summer of Love.” The San Francisco Bay area was perhaps the main focus of that movement, and those of us who identified with the “spiritual but not religious” minority within that movement found ourselves surrounded by an almost endless array of gurus, groups, and groupies.

From our base living in the IYI, we could explore this “scene” in many ways: large gatherings and “festivals” of many kinds were being held during the good weather months; some groups held weekly open air events in Golden Gate Park, such as Steve Gaskin’s “family” (in the wet and cold weather his meetings were at the Family Dog auditorium on Ocean Beach), the Sufis of Sufi Sam; the Hari Krisnha people who seemed to be everywhere; and other groups were building centers (such as the eminent Chinese Buddhist Master Hsuang Hua), the Sufi students of Pir Vilayat Khan, the Hindu students of Master Subramuniya (who later became Sivaya Subramuniyaswami), the Happy, Healthy, Holy organization of the Sikh Yogi Bhajan, Sri Chinmoy—a close disciple of Sri Aurobindo—and the colorful “mountain yogis and their Mantric Sun Band” of Ajare Warwick.

Especially meaningful for me in those years was the contact I made across the street from the IYI at the California Institute for Asian Studies mentioned above. Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri invited me to spend time in their extensive library and when I asked specifically about Sri Aurobindo, he loaned me the library copy of “The Life Divine”—a massive tome that some consider to be Aurobindo’s masterpiece. As I tried

31 In my current reading of “Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between mind and body,” edited by Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston, (Routledge, 2013), I’ve run across what strikes me now as another candidate best translation of this seminal sutra I’ve seen yet, by Ian Whicher (in “The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga,” SUNY 1998) as “Yoga is the cessation of the misidentification with the modifications of the mind.”

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reading through it in the limited time I could set aside each day for reading, I was impressed by his elegant Victorian English and his sophisticated vision of “integral yoga” (compared to the streamlined version I was learning from Swamiji). I was also impressed by the subtlety of his description of the law of karma, and a point he made about how a devotee can sometimes exceed his guru, or “reach deeper into the Divine,” as he put it. Not long thereafter, I read and was deeply impressed by Satprem’s biography of Aurobindo, “The Adventure of Consciousness”.

There were a series of exciting developments in the “spiritual scene” outside of the IYI during this time. One of the first of these was the work of Charles Berner and his wife Eva, creators of the “Enlightenment Intensive” and the Institute of Ability. The two young men who had opened the IYI center in Los Angeles32 became very interested in their work and arranged for a special IYI-exclusive Enlightenment Intensive to be held at a retreat house they had established in the high desert of Southern California. About forty of us packed into a converted three-bedroom home out in the middle of nowhere for an extended weekend intensive. I won’t describe the process we went through, but will focus on just one outstanding experience, fleeting as it was, that I had during the retreat, one which made a profound and lasting impression on me:

On the last night, after several days of the truly intense intensive, I had a vividly, lucid, and most memorable experience while sound asleep: I’m suddenly blissfully aware as a luminous presence in the midst of an infinitely dark space. That was it. I have no idea how long the experience lasted, but when I woke up, I recognized it as having become awake, and with the capacity to form vivid memory, while still in deep sleep. I knew that this yogic experience is described simply in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (from Swamiji’s translation):

1:10: That mental modification supported by the cognition of nothingness is (what we call) sleep.

This experience has stood out on many occasions since then as an indelible experiential demonstration of the truth of the Yoga Sutras and of an important aspect of the deep psyche that is rarely acknowledged in our culture.

Not long thereafter, more excitement was generated when Swami Muktananda came to town on his “World Tours” in 1971 and again in 1972. Baba Ram Das (whose work I’d first encountered while still at Harvard in 1968 via recorded talks) toured with him as his “warm up act” and always provided informed and humorous introductions in his signature style. During the second visit, a number of us in the IYI invited the Swami to speak at “our” ashram. This was a mistake on our part, as it turned out, because his “shaktipat diksha” teaching was not entirely consistent with Swamiji’s Integral Yoga33. All the same, the presence in the Bay Area of Baba Ram Das and the hundreds of adoring followers and would-be followers had made for such charismatic theater that we were all enthralled.

I had a number of memorable contacts with the visiting Swami Muktananda: one morning in pre-dawn meditation at the large Berkeley estate he was offered for his week-long stay, he stopped and patted me on the head as he made his way to his dais through a huge crowd in the near-pitch dark; later that

32 Kenneth Green and Thomas Rich. 33 You’ll recall that Swamiji had dismissed “esoteric” in our first conversation at SFO. Now I’d suspect it has more to do with long-standing differences between different yoga traditions in India: here between Satchidananda’s leaning toward South Indian Saiva Siddhanta vs Muktananda’s toward Kashmir Shaivism.

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afternoon, as I was cat napping after a mid-day meal of heavy Indian food, I was dreaming of him, but woke up suddenly, sat bolt upright, and discovered that he was peering through the open door into the motor home where I was dozing with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. With only the briefest glance he was off again.

Some days later I had the pleasure of driving Baba Ram Das to the San Jose airport to see the Swami off on the next leg of his World Tour. As Babaji was about to board, he apparently said that he really liked my sunglasses, so I immediately gave them to him and received a second pat on the head—all, I was later told by some of his local devotees, most auspicious forms of contact. Perhaps this all had something to do with my connecting just a few years later with two of Swami Muktananda’s principle students in the US, Swami Rudrananda and then, more significantly, Bubba Free John.

Another much-publicized visitor to the Bay Area in those tumultuous years was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I first heard him speak at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco one evening. He struck me as highly articulate, but I found him hard to follow34 and hard to make sense of. He was somehow intriguing but enigmatic. I was also present at a historic meeting he had with Suzuki Roshi in the jam packed main hall of the San Francisco Zen Center. However, they were both so soft-spoken that I could not make out a word of what they said to each other.

My final contact with Trungpa was some months later when he came to help inaugurate a center his students were opening in a narrow store-front in Berkeley. There was a simple front entry space and a main room with a stage about two feet high. When I got there—wearing my pale blue yoga pajamas for the “special occasion,” I found the room packed with a raucous group of beer-drinking, cigarette smoking rowdies, noticeably less scruffy (or colorful) than the typical hippy. The only place I could find to sit was on the far edge of the stage next to the wall. A little while later, Alan Ginsberg sat himself and his little harmonium down on the floor in front of the mic at center stage and began chanting in Sanskrit with great passion and energy (I don’t recall anyone following his lead). I watched the whole scene in amazement.

After a very long time, Rinpoche finally entered from the rear, wearing a suit as I recall, limped to the front of center stage, and sat down on a thin cushion on the stage floor immediately in front of Alan. It was obvious that he was very drunk. As the room quieted slowly, Alan’s chanting stood out more and more until it was just him chanting loudly, his eyes closed, head thrown back. Then Rinpoche, looking directly at him, repeated a number of times, “Fuck you.”

I have no recollection of hearing anything I could construe as a coherent message in the following hour or so and I had no idea what to make of it all. All the same, the two young men leading our Los Angeles IYI decided to leave IYI and become students of Trungpa—one of whom (Tom Rich) went on to become the notorious Vajra Regent Osel Tenzin.

Meeting of the Ways Radio Show

In the fall of 1971, one of our resident ashramites connected with the Public Radio station in the Bay Area, KQED-FM, and was, to his amazement, offered a weekly hour-long slot on Saturday nights. We scurried about for weeks trying to figure out what we might offer by way of programming to fill an hour

34 The volume on his mic was set way too low.

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of air time on the Bay Area PBS radio station, every week. It took only a couple of weeks for us to realize that the task exceeded our resources.

In the same timeframe, however, local fans of Buckminster Fuller had organized a “World Game” event that was very lively and well-attended. At that event I met the engineer at KQED-FM who was working with the IYI to prepare its “Satsang” radio show, Steven Hill—who later went on to establish an award- winning music label, “Hearts of Space.” I also met a fellow who had been active in a local collective called Video Free America with whom I subsequently enjoyed an extended friendship.

It may have been at the World Game event itself that the three of us got to talking about KQED-FM and the trouble we at the IYI were having filling an hour of weekly programming. By way of background, KQED had recently given Steve a full four or five hour (!) Saturday night slot (from 8PM - 1AM, as I recall): Satsang was currently in the 8-9PM slot, and between 10PM and 1AM he had started a program called “Hearts of Space” featuring the profusion of new “contemplative music” coming from a wide variety of artists—(now listed at Wikipedia as “the longest-running radio program of its type in the world”).

The 9-10PM open slot became “Adventures in Consciousness” featuring extended readings from Satprem’s biography of Aurobindo by the same name, and eventually also including readings from “The Urantia Book” that was also beginning to get a hearing in the Bay Area. Not long thereafter, we came up with the idea of converting Satsang into some sort of “Bay Area spiritual group cooperative show” that would feature groups in some sort of rotation. I frankly don’t recall who it was who first came up with the idea, but since I “took it on”—maybe it was mine. Over a period of weeks I contacted over a dozen Bay Area spiritual groups and about ten of them agreed to participate.

Thus was born “Meeting of the Ways” as a weekly Saturday night show that ran as such through most of 1972. When Carolyn and Megan and I moved up to Lake County in the fall of ’72, I turned over the reins to Will Noffke. Sometime in 1973 (I believe) the program was incorporated into Michael Toms’ “New Dimensions Radio”. The groups involved included the IYI, The Sivananda Yoga Center, Yogi Bhajan’s 3H0, Pir Vilayat’s Sufi group, the Sri Chinmoy Center, Master Subramuniya’s group, and a number of others. I worked with each group doing live in-studio interviews of their master and/or devotees as requested. Thus, for the better part of 1972 I was host to the show broadcast on the PBS radio station to the whole of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Amusingly, fast-forward twenty years, I discover that my dear Susan heard me on some of those Meeting of the Ways broadcasts, relaxing on a Saturday night after waitressing at Chéz Panisse in Berkeley, looking out across the Bay as the evening fog rolled in, and being quite taken with my voice…

Move to Yogaville West

In the midst of all these goings on, Carolyn became pregnant and she and I moved out of the Ashram in late 1971 to prepare for our first child. We attended classes in the “Bradley Husband-Coached Method” that were offered in conjunction with a progressive obstetrical practice. In early February of 1972, after a 12 hour labor, Megan Firth Anderson was delivered in French Hospital, shockingly (to me) bright purple at first and a bit “worse for wear.” A little while later that day, as we began to recover, I was allowed to see her through the window of the nursery—just as illustrated in so many cartoons I’d seen

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over the years. I’ll never forget that sight of her bundled up in the bassinet, lying on her side, her little angelic face piercing my heart with an indelible love.

Meanwhile, the IYI was involved in seeking out a rural property where extended yoga retreats could be held. We had held a ten-day silent yoga retreat at an old Boy Scout camp the previous fall that had been a big success and got us thinking about a permanent rural property. One was located in Lake County, about a 2½ hour drive North of San Francisco at Seigler Springs—an aging hot springs resort with an old hotel complete with commercial kitchen, several large dining rooms, a bath house with indoor and outdoor plunge pools, and dozens of small cabins. It looked perfect and the price seemed reasonable if only we could raise the money from among those in the extended Bay Area IYI community.

After some months of vigorous fundraising, enough for a down-payment was secured and we took possession of the property in the early fall of 1972. I made arrangements to leave my position at the EM lab, turned over the reins of “Meeting of the Ways” to Will Noffke—and a few months after the initial crew, moved with wife Carolyn and our baby daughter Megan into a small house about twenty minutes from the property. The prospect of getting out of the city was very appealing to us; however, the only work I could find was selling advertising for the local newspaper. Thus, to economize, after a few months we moved into one of the poorly insulated cabins on the Yogaville property just in time for an unexpectedly harsh winter.

Swamiji named the project Yogaville West and we had high hopes of being able to make it self- sustaining with retreat income to cover the monthly nut. However, we discovered, only after the purchase, that we would need a use permit from the County in order to hold retreats, and it turned out that the aging septic infrastructure would require a very expensive upgrade. Thus, although Swamiji came in February of 1973 to stay for about six weeks and we were able to hold one ten-day silent yoga retreat with him (by permission of the County using Port-a-potties), it was becoming increasingly obvious that the IYI community was stretched beyond the limits of its financial capacity, carrying mortgages plus expenses on both the Dolores Street house and the Seigler Springs property.

Meanwhile, the grim financial prospects for our budding family in Lake County—at that time California’s poorest and least populous of all counties—were also increasingly obvious, especially against the backdrop of the Arab Oil Embargo. Thus, Carolyn and I made the decision in the late spring of 1973 to move back to the East Coast. My several years of working at UCSF had sensitized me to the possibility that I could potentially move from being an electron microscopy technician to perhaps being a researcher of some sort, but we had no certain plan, only a general confidence in the prospects that Carolyn might find work and I might continue my education. We purchased a large used car able to pull a U-Haul trailer and packed up our stuff. Carolyn and Megan flew to Boston where her father offered us temporary use of his in-town apartment. I drove the U-Haul across the country with help from my father who graciously met me in Kansas City to helped me drive the rest of the way East.

Before my departure, however, I made a final visit to San Francisco and had a fateful encounter at the opening of the film “Sunseed” at the Palace of Fine Arts. The film was the first to offer a sympathetic portrayal of some of the key spiritual teachers that I’d had contact with in the Bay Area over the preceding several years and through “Meeting of the Ways”. In the lobby outside the film a number of groups had set up card tables to offer books and brochures on their activities. A group I’d not seen previously came up from Los Angeles—students of one Bubba Free John. I had a brief conversation with the man sitting behind the card table and came away thinking, “upstart American guru.” After Carolyn

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and I left, Seigler Springs was put up for sale. Only some months later did I discover that the property had been purchased by the spiritual group from Los Angeles headed by that very same Bubba Free John.

Key Decisions in Boston

Since the main reason we’d moved back East was for me to advance my career, I launched into a series of explorations in Boston’s rich academic environment while we were temporarily quartered in a small down town apartment loaned to us by Carolyn’s father. What ensued over just a few short weeks was a series of incidents and discoveries that were highly consequential in shaping the future course of my life.

During my time with “Meeting of the Ways,” I’d learned about the pioneering work in sociology of the Russian-American Pitirim Sorokin. I’d read and loved “The Crisis of Our Age” (1941, Dutton) that aimed to summarize for a popular audience his extensive academic publications. I’d also learned that he had founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard and the Center for Creative Altruism with support from Eli Lilly (grandson of the founder of the pharmaceutical company). Thus I traveled over to Cambridge aiming to find out, “Whatever happened to Sorokin and his Center?” I walked into the Department of Sociology, asked to speak to the chairman, and was ushered into the office of Talcott Parsons. The very chair that he was sitting in and the room that he occupied at Harvard, just a decade before, had been occupied by Sorokin. Parsons, a short and rather heavyset man with a greasy complexion and gruff manner, dismissed me immediately saying “We have no use for Sorokin at Harvard anymore.” It turned out that Sorokin and he had had a bitter academic and personal rivalry—Parsons, whose orientation to sociology was strictly analytical and “positivist” was diametrically opposed to Sorokin’s “historicist” method that looked to identify large-scale cultural patterns. As far as I can tell, Sorokin’s contributions to sociology, his tenure at Harvard, and the work of his Center have all largely been “expunged” from Harvard and his extensive archive of papers ended up in Canada.

In order to get my feet wet in the job market, I found a short-term research assistantship at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital doing bibliographic research for the medical staff. I was given a list of topics to look up in a massive computer print-out of current medical publications. In a spare moment, I looked up a topic of particular interest to me—fasting. “Prayer and fasting” is a recurrent phrase in the Bible, and, as noted above, I’d been introduced to fasting in conjunction with yoga while at the Boston IYI back in the late ‘60s. During my subsequent years in San Francisco, I’d explored the literature on the topic available in health food stores such as Herbert Shelton’s classic “Science & Fine Art of Fasting” (Natural Hygiene Press, 1963, with multiple editions since), and other books by Arnold Ehret and Paul Bragg. Swamiji had encouraged us to experiment with this and a number of other naturopathic practices as part of the “yogi lifestyle.” Thus I’d done a number of “fasts” of various sorts, mostly using fruit and vegetable juices and herbal teas. I had seen my physical energy and mental clarity both benefit greatly from these practices and now thought to learn more about them from a medical science perspective.

Thus I was delighted to discover that the bibliography I was working with cited a series of recent papers by George F. Cahill Jr. MD on “the physiology of fasting.” Better still, Dr. Cahill was located at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. I arranged to visit Dr. Cahill, told him of my interest, and he gave me reprints of several of his technical research papers published in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. It was immediately obvious that my BS in biology did not equip me to read such material with much comprehension. The idea thus formed in my mind that I would have to obtain an advanced degree of some sort just to appreciate Cahill’s work. Just a few years later, this became one of the principle

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motivations for going to medical school, and as soon as I was equipped with a medical education I plunged into reading Cahill’s work in depth (see below Section “Elective on the Physiology of Fasting”).

However, at this point I was also seriously considering the possibility of graduate training in philosophy as the closest thing I could find to yoga in our academic system at the graduate level. However, as I looked more carefully into what was going on in American universities in general and philosophy in particular, it became painfully clear that the rigid, to me offensive and unattractive orientation of what was called “positivism” that I’d encountered in Talcott Parsons was all the rage in philosophy across all the major academic institutions in the United States. I decided that current academic philosophy and I would not be a good fit.

Move Back to Connecticut

Since graduate school in neither sociology nor philosophy looked attractive, I decided to look for a job at the University of Connecticut (UCONN)—only a forty minute drive from Yogaville East where the Integral Yoga community had its original Yogaville property in the township of Pomfret. One day, I drove the two and half hours out to UCONN from Boston thinking to look first for something in electron microscopy. I walked unannounced into the basement EM lab of Dr. Wachtel and asked if he might have work for me. He said he had no openings, but that a couple of floors above us he knew that Dr. Claire Berg was looking for a lab assistant. As a bacterial geneticist, Dr, Berg thought my background as an EM tech would be a sufficient fit for the research assistant position she had in mind, and hired me on the spot for a full-time position with a good salary.

I then drove into Pomfret to see if I might find a place for us to live in the vicinity of the Yogaville ashram. I picked up a local newspaper and in the “for rent” ads found a house advertized just three miles from the ashram. I called up the landlord and arranged to see the place right away. He showed me around his former home, a two story house with three bedrooms on a 40-acre farm, an apple orchard across the street, and a rent that I would be able to afford easily on the salary that I had just secured—it all seemed like gifts from above.

I called Carolyn from a gas station on my way back to Boston and told her that I had secured a job at UCONN and a house in Pomfret. She was delighted. We moved into the old farm house and I began commuting into Storrs where UCONN is located. Thus began a new stage of my yoga science odyssey: working now in bacterial genetics and simultaneously a respected senior member of the Integral Yoga community. Our house was big enough for me to have a bedroom study, complete with large closet with a window that I turned into my meditation room

Despite my work and family responsibilities, I was able to be somewhat active in the ashram. I was invited to serve on the Board of Directors (as if I knew something about doing that sort of thing). I organized a retreat on “yoga and the professions” which managed to attract all of six people. It didn’t amount to much, but it did reflect my orientation to "professionalize," if you will, my participation in yoga as best I could. I was gradually learning more about how science operates and beginning to get an inkling of what it might actually take to bring a new subject (like yoga) into the realm of science and to bring it under serious and sustained scientific scrutiny.

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At some point, Swamiji asked me to work with him to develop some sketches of the “LOTUS35 Temple” vision that had taken form in his mind. Over a period of months on the project, I produced some initial drawings at his direction that were featured at the first fund-raiser for the project, which was realized in Buckingham Virginia some years later.

Graduate School in Genetics

After about a year working with Claire Berg, learning more about and loving molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry and membrane biology, I decided, with her encouragement, to begin a Master's degree program. My course work included introductory courses in biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, and cell biology. I discovered not only that I could perform academically, but more importantly, I really enjoyed the experience.

Toward the end of my first semester in grad school, perhaps in October of 1974, I had a private audience with Swami-ji, told him about my working in genetics and about my Master's degree program. He said to me, “Why don't you go into medicine?” I replied “Oh, I have a family now and I couldn't do that.” Here I was giving voice to my certain impression at the time that the demands of medical education would be beyond my capacity. Reading popular reports of the rigors of medical training had left me with the distinct impression that it would be way too physically demanding for me. In the preceding years I had discovered that I needed to gauge my energy expenditure carefully to avoid getting exhausted. I'd begun to appreciate that I was living now with some 15 years of sleep deprivation: starting at Groton, continuing at Harvard, with sleep period regularly squeezed since between all the distractions of living in San Francisco and hoping to be the yogi up before dawn. I felt this had taken a bit of a toll despite all the other health-positive effects I’d experienced from the practice of hatha yoga and the IYI lifestyle.

However, soon after Swamiji’s suggestion I took part in a regional IYI teacher’s retreat with Integral yogis from all over the East Coast, many of whom I’d not met before. There were fifty or sixty of us together for a long weekend in an old summer resort, as I recall, in upstate New York. In speaking with some of the others on the retreat I learned that a number of them were contemplating further education. I was especially impressed by one young woman who was preparing to apply to chiropractic college. Having so enjoyed my fall semester in grad school, it now seemed clear that this was all I needed, “Of course, I should apply to medical school.”

Thus, as I returned to my second semester of grad school at the start of 1975, I researched what I’d need to apply to medical school and arranged to take the Medical School Admissions Test. By that point I had spent some time looking into the possibility of continuing my graduate work in genetics into a doctoral program with Claire. However, I could see clearly that academic research was extremely demanding. In working closely with her for several years I had witnessed the intensive amount of work and concentration that it took to maintain the funding for her research lab operation. I’d seen the thick and complex application forms she had to complete every year to maintain her grants from such funders as the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Science.

I had also gotten to know her one doctoral student, Mark Rossi. Mark was a bright and very nice guy finishing up his Ph.D. work. In getting to know him over a period of several years, I came to understand the limited mobility, financial, and other career opportunities that he would face with a Ph.D. in

35 For Light Of Truth Universal Shrine. See https://www.yogaville.org/about-us/the-lotus/

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bacterial genetics from the UCONN. I could see clearly that what he had in mind for his future was not really what I was looking for. It seemed that a degree in medicine would be much more flexible, considerably more lucrative, and much more aligned with my intention to maintain both “sides” of my life: my ongoing practice of yoga and a career in “science of some sort,” plus wife and children, a place to live, and all that the girls might need by way of schools, colleges, and everything else.

Closing Years of my Twenties

During my several years at UCONN I continued to stay in touch with developments in the “spiritual world,” especially as they might connect with science. It was perhaps during the spring semester of 1975, my second semester in grad school, that I got permission to audit a course with Kenneth Ring, professor of psychology at UCONN. Ken went on to international fame after publication of his book on near-death experience, “Life at Death” (Morrow & Co., 1980). His popular weekly course was all about new ideas flowing into psychology from the “spiritual scene” on the national and international level that I had been so involved with in San Francisco. Class sessions featured either a prominent guest lecturer or a film. Thus I got to see a number of the early films made by Elda Hartley (see Hartley Film Foundation, “Wisdom Across the Ages”) and to meet, most memorably, Stan Grof and Jean Houston speaking about their pioneering work with LSD psychotherapy and easing the pain of dying.

Another guest lecturer was Bernard Glueck Jr. who was doing pioneering research at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital near Boston on Transcendental Meditation. I traveled up to Boston to interview Dr. Glueck and wrote up my findings in an article that was published in the February 1975 issue (vol. 7, #1) of Integral Yoga Magazine as “The Psychophysiology of Mantra Meditation.” The opening sentence read, “We are in the midst of a vast historic process: that of the meeting, courtship, and marriage between East and West.” Clearly, I was already contemplating “big ideas” related to yoga science.

Another most memorable event from this time occurred one evening after a formal “satsang” gathering with Swamiji in the main hall at Yogaville East. Some of us stayed afterwards to discuss preparations that were underway for a special Hindu holy day celebration to take place over the following days. As the time went on there were fewer and fewer of us in the room; most people in the ashram had other obligations. We ended up with only three of four of us in the room with Swamiji and it became a very sweet occasion of interacting with him in a more open-ended, informal, and intimate way. At one point there was a pause in the conversation and I asked Swamiji if he might describe the moment of his enlightenment.

He paused briefly and then related how there had been a time fairly early on in his sadhana when he'd been intensely meditating in South India near his hometown. His wife had died and his two boys were in the care of his extended family. He had gone into yoga retreat in a small hut. Taking only a cup of milk a day, meditating day and night, he’d come to the point of seeing clearly and steadily the luminosity of his mind. He recounted how suddenly and spontaneously he had recognized that the light he was seeing was not separate from his own being. That was it, apparently.

It was most striking to me that it was only after this experience that Swamiji referred to as his “enlightenment” that he began his tour of India looking for his guru. He spent several years wandering all over India as a sadhu in the traditional manner, meeting many of the great teachers active in the

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1940s including Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi. Rich details of this story can be found in his biography by Sita Wiener.36

Summary

With Swamiji’s admonition “do physics and yoga,” it seemed natural to take “physics” as standing for science in general, and eventually medicine as the best avenue into a comprehensive technical study of the human body/mind. Meanwhile, Swamiji’s yoga felt to me deeply consistent with the religion I had come to know in my early life. Thus in Integral Yoga I delighted to discover that the “reconciliation” might be within reach. However, doing all this as a “householder” was an especially demanding combo that would simultaneously limit and balance my yogi scientist impulses and fascinations. Sustaining the will to continue in this choice was the idealism of the time about the virtues of “incarnating fully” in the service of a greater principle, and to that end I felt surrounded by Swamiji’s inspiration—he was so simple, direct, refreshing, and wise.

36 The original edition is called simply “Swami Satchidananda,” published in 1970 by Straight Arrow Books. A second expanded and revised edition titled “Sri Swami Satchidananda: Apostle of Peace” by “Sita Bordow and others” was published in 1986 by Integral Yoga Publications.

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Thirties—My First Ten Years with Bubba Free John

Introduction

I’ve heard it said of today’s Millennial generation that “adolescence these days does not end until 30.” This statement has been especially striking to me personally. On the eve of my 30th birthday, while out on my routine before-bed twenty-minute walk in the fresh air around our rural farm house in Pomfret, Connecticut, it struck me, under a cold and crisp starry sky, “I guess I’m really an adult now, finally!”

In the previous chapter I’ve told the story of my Twenties decade living in lively relationship to His Holiness Sri Swami Satchidananda, a widely revered spiritual teacher. Before I launch into the story of my Thirties, however, I feel I should pause and give a bit of background on the extraordinarily charismatic and highly controversial man who became my second spiritual teacher and with whom my life was deeply involved for the next twenty-five years.

I should also note that this chapter turned out to be the last to be written and the part of this Memoir hardest to tell: how and why I fell in love with Bubba Free John, left my beloved Swamiji, and turned my life upside down in my endeavor to be a “true devotee” of this controversial guru. Although I played only a relatively minor “supporting role” in the extraordinary and little-known drama of his life, he played a major role in mine.

Contextualizing Bubba

Figure 4. Photo from cover of first paperback edition of “The Knee of Listening” by Bubba Free John

Bubba Free John was born Franklin Jones on Long Island, New York on November 3rd 1939. The details of his early life can readily be found in outline on Wikipedia, and were perhaps best described in his first book, his autobiography, “The Knee of Listening” (1972, CSA Press). A key point is that while his spiritual awakening in 1970 can be seen as something of a literal fulfillment of the “consciousness revolution” of the 1960s, his years of “Teaching Work” which began in 1972 coincided with the rise of a powerful and extremely well-funded cultural and political reaction to “the ‘60s” that gained steam in the ‘70s and became dominant in 1980 with the election of Ronald Regan as President of the United States.

This conservative reaction movement specifically targeted many key features of the counter-culture of the ‘60s. Insofar as he felt he was the literal fulfillment of the consciousness revolution, this targeting was deeply felt by Bubba as it began to gather steam in the late 1970s. It went on to become so huge

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and pervasive that an adequate portrayal of its features would take us far beyond this effort to portray the roots of the yoga~science. However, it is, in my view, so relevant and important that I feel it necessary to give at least a brief introduction to what I think of as “the counter-counter-culture” because of its deep impact on how both “yoga” and “science” have developed in the years of its corrosive hegemony ever since. As a brief interlude for historical perspective, I offer the following:

A Very Brief Introduction to the Counter-Counter-Culture, Neo-liberalism, and the Privatization of Science in the United States since the 1970s

It is not widely appreciated that the counter-culture movement of the 1960s had deep roots in the history of Western Culture. We Boomers most often like to think of ourselves as having originated just about everything that characterized the often beloved “revolution” of our youth. Meanwhile, as Americans we are generally more often than not deeply ignorant and disdainful of history as boring and irrelevant. Thus, it can come as something of a revelation to discover that in many cases there is truly “nothing new under the sun.”37

A “Bigger” History

A strong case can be made that there has been a long series of “consciousness revolutions” throughout the history of so-called Western Civilization going way back into the Bronze Age. Thus our 1960s upheavals represented a resurgence of a species of cultural energy with a very long pedigree. Likewise, these “revolutions” seem inevitably to have provoked reactions on the part of another species of cultural energy. Here I’ll call out just a couple of these because of their historical prominence and the high degree to which they are relevant to the yoga science story as a whole.

The life and legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, for example, clearly had revolutionary features in the context of the ancient world. Jesus’ message and method both held such a deep appeal that Christianity— supposedly based upon them—went on to become the dominant world religion. However, on closer inspection, in the first few centuries of the growth of Christianity, deep tensions developed between those who sought to live the message and methods of Jesus as salvatory in a most direct, personal, and contemplative way and those who endeavored to incorporate his message and methods into social, political, and economic structures. We might describe this tension as between inner-directed and outer- directed forms of Christianity. By the time the First Council of Nicea in 325AD—convened by the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine—the outer-directed impulse had become ascendant and the inner-directed contemplative “Desert Fathers” and their sympathizers anathematized. “Yoga” (here including the intensive contemplative training practiced by the Desert Fathers) was taken off the table and the rational mind became privileged on the basis of Aristotle’s dichotomous philosophy that systematically enforces the so-called “law of the excluded middle.”

Fast forward 1100 years to the Italian Renaissance and we find another resurgence of non-dichotomous thinking that was hugely influential. As a result of Mongol attacks on the cities of the Black Sea, scholars bearing the works of classical antiquity fled to Italy where they were “re-discovered” as a large corpus of Greek documents that had been kept hidden away in the Byzantine Empire. Key figures for this story

37 Ecclesiastes 1:9 New International Version (NIV) “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

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include the seminal Italian scholars Pico della Mirandola and Marcilio Ficino.38 They were instrumental in reviving the inner-directed impulses that became the “humanism” of the early Renaissance. Scholars of our time exploring the roots of Western Esotericism trace its origins to these two men. Thus “hermeticism,” “neo-platonism,” Kaballah, magic, and astrology all underwent dramatic development during this period and spread widely across Europe. The inevitable reaction on the part of the dominant and outer-directed Catholic Church took place in due course and became ascendant in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Once again, and not without the violence and bloodshed of the Spanish Inquisition, the rational mind was privileged and, most significantly, the foundations were laid for what has since become our incomparably influential global enterprise of science and technology that we like to think of as stemming from “the Enlightenment”—which was actually the conservative reaction to the humanism of the Italian Renaissance.

Fast forward again to the late 1800s and we find another great upsurge of “humanism” in Western societies in the form of early communism: idealistic, utopian, and even “religious.” With the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, communism came to play a pivotal role in the history of Europe and the United States. However, its rise was perceived as a grave threat to the existing political and economic order. Once again, the inevitable reaction came, this time in the form of extensive anti-communist activities, both overt and covert across the Western world. Once German and Japanese totalitarianism had been defeated in World War II, attention turned once again to working against the perceived threats of global communism.

Especially influential in this round of conservative reaction was the Mont Pelerin Society, established in 1947 by a group composed mostly of economists convened by Friedrich von Hayek39 to “discuss the state and possible fate of classical liberalism.” Members of this group went on to play key roles in establishing “neo-liberalism” as the dominant political, social, and economic ideology of the United States with the election of Ronald Regan in 1980. It was this neo-liberal ideology that was the principle driver of the counter-counter-culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

Here is the paragraph that introduces Wikipedia’s current article on this:

Neoliberalism (or sometimes neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy. The implementation of neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of financialization, with the financial crisis of 2007–08 as one of the ultimate results.

No longer threatened by “communism” alone the strongly outer-directed neo-liberal stance perceived threat in all the inner-directed impulses, and increasingly, these all came to fall under the rubric “New Age,” including the entire spiritual wing of the counter-culture. This is what Bubba Free John came to feel most acutely in 1978 with the media frenzy triggered by the Jonestown suicides. As part of his spiritual path, Bubba had not only been trained in Christian history as a Methodist seminarian, but he

38 A concise review of this history, developed by contemporary scholars of Western Esotericism, is given by Elizabeth de Michelis in Chapter 1 of “A History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotercism” (Continuum, 2004). 39 Economist and philosopher who also made important contributions to psychology and complexity science.

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was also a most astute observer of human behavior and could see clearly that he would himself almost inevitably become a target of the rising countervailing trend. As the mainstream media’s campaign to “get the gurus” picked up steam, Bubba became an irresistible target.

The Privatization of Science

The impact of neo-liberalism on science has been massive and pervasive. Whereas I was raised to think of science as an exercise of free rational enquiry, it has largely been taken over by large corporate interests. Only recently has the public begun to learn about this. One does have to become something of a “rocket scientist” to comprehend both the highly-complex “inner workings” of contemporary science—how it is ideologically driven, how it is funded, and how its research is published—and how its actual functions in the larger economy are veiled by the mainstream media via deliberate dis- information and propaganda. These are strong statements, I grant you, but with some investigation I propose they can be confirmed by any open-minded individual. A key reference for me has been “ScienceMart: Privatizing American Science,” by Philip Mirowski (Harvard University, 2011).

Extraordinary synergies can be found in the combination of multiple technologies.40 Indeed, high levels of investment have driven and incentivized the development of evermore complex and compact technologies with ever greater functionality. Science and technology have thus co-evolved so rapidly over the course of the past century as to reach what many feel is now “exponential growth”, rising inexorably towards previously inconceivable levels. These synergies have also spawned a small, but powerful, global financial elite, the core of which includes the principle beneficiaries of the neo-liberal policies of the United States since Ronald Reagan.

The privatization of science means that science now functions within an economic orbit around a neo- liberalist pole of world view and policy. When thinking about anything scientific, therefore, we now need to think of science itself as an industry that has been privatized by a neo-liberal right wing faction. This implies, then, that we need to think (and feel) clearly where we stand relative to this bifurcation and polarization of our life-world by the neo-liberal forces that have led to dramatic increases in income inequality without much by way of improvement in the lives of the billions at the bottom. Using the tools of modern academic socio-economics and network dynamics we can get a pretty clear picture of what's been going on here—one that is well documented and based in good quality scientific research, even if not well-publicized.

The key point to keep in mind is that it has been specifically in the period since Reagan came into office in 1980 (and a little bit before then) that the socioeconomic reaction against the counter-culture began here in America. The result was the anathematization, the condemnation, the marginalization, and the literal punishment of an aspect of human culture, namely the “left” side that operates and cooperates more closely with the “inner-directed” and holistic functions most typically localized in humans in the right brain.

For the record and as a corollary to this counter cultural reaction generally, I would also like to make clear my view that what unfolded in the press as a major scandal around Adi Da toward the end of this decade was likewise inflamed by the same reactionary influence pervading society at the time. For it was in this environment of cultural, political, and religious polarization that Adi Da first emerged in the

40 Some trace this discovery to the early Indo-Europeans whose technologically-empowered descendants now dominate the globe.

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‘70s as a “spiritual teacher,” and eventually endured a storm of both praise and blame stimulated as much by the atmosphere of the time as by any genuine consideration of his work. An internet search will quickly reveal the amount of energy and passion that has gone into the controversy that still swirls about him. Over time, he was effectively anathematized and marginalized to such a degree that interest in him and his remarkable work now seems anemic at best.

If I’m to honor my teacher Adi Da, his contribution to yoga science, yoga science itself, and my decades of consideration of it, then I need to try to make clear my own “devotee response” to Bubba Free John, the name by which he was known when I first met him. Hence, the story you're going to hear is the story of how I fell in love with him as I thought a devotee would with his guru, what I did in the context of that love relationship, and how the seeds of yoga science, planted by Swami Satchidananda, were fed by that love during my thirties.

Part 1—“Romance Period” & Medical School

From what I've written above of my decade with His Holiness Sri Swami Satchidananda, it should be clear that the groundwork was laid there for what was to blossom in relationship to Bubba Free John: The Integral Yoga of Swami Satchidananda had served as a rich experiential introduction to a full spectrum of the ancient yogas: hatha yoga (body discipline), raja yoga (mind discipline), japa yoga (training via mantra repetition), bhakti yoga (cultivation of devotion), karma yoga (selfless service), and jnana yoga (cultivation of wisdom). Swamiji had offered a concise statement of the goal of Integral Yoga as "a body of perfect health and strength, mind with all clarity and control, intellect as sharp as a razor, will of steel, heart full of love and mercy, a life dedicated to the common welfare, and realization of the true self."

I had engaged Integral Yoga as fully, intelligently, and energetically as I could over a period of over eight years. As a result, my health had improved dramatically, I was in a committed love relationship with a talented wife, together we had an adorable daughter, and I was building a career in science. Our family’s return to the east coast from Yogaville West seemed to be a great success.

Bubba and I Meet Again

My work with Claire Berg was financially rewarding and intellectually invigorating. However, at the same time, for some reason I still had questions about what I was doing with Swamiji: is there a deeper way to understand my own mind and my own experience? Is there a way for me to engage yoga in a more complete or effective way in this specific place and time in history (and especially as a householder)? Thus in my off hours I found my mind returning to some of the intellectual, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and economic questions that had starting percolating in college and had formed the basis for my considering graduate school in philosophy. During the winter of 1973—not long after moving to Pomfret—the time of year when in New England I would typically go into a “funk” over the cold and the dark, I continued to ruminate in a way that I thought somehow "philosophical," but which was also simply spontaneous—just the way my mind seemed to operate.

As an expression of that “mind at work,” I’d come up with a list of books that I wanted to read. I had read the massive Whole Earth Catalogs in some detail and had drawn a reading list from its more “intellectual” offerings (or “tools” as they were dubbed in the Catalog). Carolyn and I agreed to drive up

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to Boston to do some shopping during which we visited one of our favorite former stomping grounds— the Harvard Co-op Bookstore. I had my list in hand, and Carolyn had our just ambulating daughter Megan in tow.

We arrived at the Book Store to discover that the remodeling that had been done since our last visit required us to go up an escalator before actually entering the store. At the top of the escalator, opposite where the escalator ended, was the shelf of New Books, and who should appear there but Bubba Free John! Leaning on the shelf facing out was the same striking cover on the paperback first edition of “The Knee of Listening” (Figure 2) that I’d seen just the previous fall at the “Sunseed” film opening at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco! Next to it was his second and latest book “The Method of the Siddhas.” I simply grabbed a copy of “The Method…,” purchased it, and we went on to our next shopping adventure of the day. Without a second thought I totally abandoned the whole “intellectual project” that I’d set up for myself and became focused entirely on the teaching of Bubba Free John.

. Figure 5. Cover of “Method of the Siddhas” by Bubba Free John

Over the following months into the spring of 1974, as I slowly read through “The Method of the Siddhas,” it was somewhere around page thirty or so that “the event” took place. A phrase I’d heard Bubba use in talking about this “method” of his—how he “works with his devotees”—referred to how a devotee might find themselves responding to him as guru with what he called “an intuitive sympathy.” At that point in my reading, I noticed a feeling, beautifully described as that very intuitive sympathy, beginning to form in me with this “upstart young California guru.” I had the distinct sense that he was speaking directly to me.

On top of that, in terms of the explicit content of these talks, Bubba seemed to be addressing most explicitly and humorously the myths and foibles of “the spiritual movement” with which I was so familiar (and, more importantly, identified). I was so struck by his characterizations, their sophisticated precision, put with such colloquial richness, humor, and depth of articulation. In truth, I was stunned. I’d never expected anything even remotely like this! Given the nature of my commitments at that point in my life, I recall very clearly making a snap decision henceforth to live this “method of the Siddhas” that Bubba was describing, but in relation to Swami Satchidananda. After all, I was “otherwise occupied—

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already fully committed with work, my Master’s degree program at UCONN, and my ongoing family and IYI relations.

“Garbage and the Goddess” & “The Gorilla Sermon”

In the spring of 1975 my somewhat tormented and driven friend from Yogaville West, Ramakrishna, arrived in Connecticut. During the time the IYI had occupied Seigler Springs, RK as we called him, had served as head of the maintenance and repair (M&R) crew for Yogaville West. In late 1973, when the property was sold to Bubba Free John’s Dawn Horse Communion, RK had stayed on to help train their M&R crew in the many ins and outs of the rambling acreage and aging infrastructure of Seigler Hot Springs since “he knew where all the pipes were buried.”

Meanwhile, RK had moved his wife Radha and their newborn daughter to Angwin, a small town about a 40 minute drive South of Seigler Springs. Thus, for the whole of Bubba’s most dramatic, wild, and eventful first “Teaching Demonstration” year at Seigler Springs—known in Adidam (as his community is now known) as “the Garbage and the Goddess period”—RK was around Bubba and his intimates a lot. In fact, RK found himself so greatly drawn to Bubba that Bubba invited him to live in his house! This was, I believe, an unprecedented invitation for any man in those days.

It seemed a perfect test: Ramakrishna had a pregnant wife (who really didn't want to have anything to do with Bubba) living nearby, but he clearly had a strong devotional response to Bubba. What should he do? He put in a phone call to Swami Satchidananda, described his situation, and asked for Swamiji’s advice. Swamiji responded clearly—and I know this because RK actually recorded the whole conversation and played it for me the following year when he got back to Pomfret. Swamiji said very clearly that Ramakrishna should do whatever his heart was moved to do. Swamiji was also clearly refusing to give him any specific direction as to whether or not he should take up with Bubba and leave his wife and child, or cleave to them and turn Bubba down.

In any case, Ramakrishna's response to Bubba was still obvious and deep and now he was here talking to me in my living room in Pomfret, pouring his heart out about all of this, and playing for me the tape of his conversation just a few months earlier with Swamiji. I can hear Swamiji clearly saying as I just reported, but it turns out that what Ramakrishna heard Swamiji say was that he should definitely get away from Bubba and honor his preexisting commitment to Radha and the baby!

Meanwhile, Ramakrishna brought back with him from California a copy of the two-LP set of Bubba’s talks that had been released in 1974 titled “The Gorilla Sermon.” He loaned me the LPs and I started listening to them, over and over again. In the process I was confronted with a growing appreciation for how, despite that fact that my earlier idea of living Bubba Free John's “method” “in my relationship to Swami Satchidananda” was becoming more and more painfully incongruent, I could not reconcile my attraction to Bubba with my own already deeply committed situation. However, Ramakrishna’s story seemed to stand in stark contrast with the key first lesson I felt I had learned from Swamiji: reject simple dichotomies and look to discover what lies beyond (or beneath) them—the deeper import of “you do a little yoga and a little physics too.”

My Thirties Begin, & My “Conversion” With Bubba

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My situation at the very beginning of my 30th year: I’d been having to work hard to maintain an unbiased position relative to a growing inner tension—my decade of devotion to Swamiji pulling strongly one way and the attraction to Bubba Free John pulling strongly the other. I also had in mind something I had read recently in “The Method of the Siddhas,” namely, “Happiness is our prior condition.” In my meditation on the morning of my birthday, February 3, 1976, I found myself reflecting that if this truly were my very condition, it must be true of me even now, in the midst of that felt tension.41 Looking to feel more deeply into that “prior condition” within which the tension I was feeling can be understood to be appearing, I was moved to engage in an “experiment” of “taking a vow of happiness.”

This idea of “taking a vow” drew upon what I’d absorbed of Bubba’s teaching to that point, but also pointed to the obvious fact that I was remaining noncommittal with regard to my relationship to him. So, I drafted up a sheet describing my vow and began implementing it on the spot. I was feeling full of life and exuberant for days. However, as February rolled along I could not maintain it: my family seemed to call for a practical hands-on kind of engagement, my life remained busy and complex, and by that time I'd also decided to take the entry exams needed for application to medical school. How could I become a “devotee” in the midst of such a busy a life?

However, another major item arrived in that same timeframe in the form of a book, namely, Garbage and the Goddess: The last miracles and final spiritual instructions of Bubba Free John,” consisting of Bubba’s talks from mid-1974 and published later that year (but which I didn’t get hold of until late 1975, and didn’t actually start reading seriously until early 1976). As I read this book I felt a new kind of energy begin moving in my body mind—I don't think there's any other way to put it. Thus, one morning in early May, while driving to work in Storrs from our house in Pomfret, I'd slowed down at the blinking yellow light at the junction in Abbington, when I suddenly realized, “Bubba Free John is my guru.” My very next thought was the obvious justification, “if I’m going to live the Way of Radical Understanding (as he called it) in relation to anyone, it will really only make sense to do that in relation to Bubba.”

When I got to the lab, I immediately phoned Swamiji. I reached him at his then new winter quarters in Santa Barbara. I began, “Good morning, Swamiji. I want to let you know right away that I've just realized that Bubba Free John is my guru.” After only the slightest pause, Swamiji said “That's great! It's wonderful when you find your guru. You have my blessings.” I was completely blown away by his response—“on cloud nine”—euphoric.

Soon I got hold of the Dawn Horse Communion by phone and spoke with somebody appointed to take calls. I told them of my recent conversion and my interest in being a student of Bubba’s and could they please send me some instructions on what I should do next. When that material arrived it advised me to get a copy of Bubba’s then latest book, “The Way That I Teach,” describing in detail the disciplines that Bubba was now asking devotees to take on.

In retrospect, I was becoming a student of Bubba’s about four years into his ongoing “Teaching demonstration.” This was the term Bubba had coined for the nearly continuous round of dramatic incidents that he precipitated in his community during the years 1972-1986. I had not yet read “The Knee of Listening”; I’d missed the opening of the Ashram in Los Angeles in April of 1972; I’d missed the

41 This is rather reminiscent now of how the matter is characterized in Dzogchen, which might be put along the following lines: our nature is already perfectly awakened; all I need to do is “feel into it,” discover it, and once having discovered, keep entering into it, and thus familiarize myself with that process of entering to the point where it becomes more and more automatic, and finally, I am simply and fully entered.

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“The Method of the Siddhas” talks at the Ashram; I’d missed Bubba's trip to India in 1973 during which he’d changed his name from Franklin Jones to Bubba Free John; I’d missed the move to Seigler Springs and the whole “Garbage and the Goddess” period; I’d missed “The Way That I Teach” talks in 1975; and as I was on my way to medical school I’d be missing what was called “Indoor Summer” then underway in summer of 1976 during which many people around Bubba got “spiritual names”—most of them strikingly original, humorous, and spot-on characterizations.

Life as a Devotee of Bubba Free John

As a new “corresponding student,” the Communion suggested I contact “Jambo Dry Duck” in the Boston area. I called Jambo (Jim Steinberg) and was invited on the spot to a weekend house party that they were going to hold at their new center in Cambridge (as I recall). I arranged to be away from home for the weekend, drove up to Cambridge, and spent a raucous two days and nights with the six devotees recently propelled out of the Indoor Summer gatherings at Seigler Springs all the way across country to establish the so-called “Boston seed community.”

During that weekend I got to see some of the “classic films” (on VHS) that had already been made of Bubba including “A Difficult Man” and “Laughter” (shot first in video), and a number of videos including his spontaneous talk to several hundred devotees called, “The Three Minute Mosquito.” The dynamism, humor, and intelligence of these talks cannot be conveyed in print, but just to give you a little hint, here are a couple of short clips currently available on YouTube: the first is titled “Hearing and the Critical Argument,” the second “What Do You Do With Emotions and Feelings.”

Bubba struck me as so novel as to be potentially (humorously) an alien from another star system. I could feel a strong bond forming with Bubba and also with the array of characters in the “seed community” who had so obviously been deeply impacted by Bubba. Even though my relationship with these individuals was never close, I still feel an abiding affection for them. No doubt this was in part simply because the time itself was so enjoyable. They were so loose, so happy, so young, and so full of ideas and energy and devotion that I couldn't help but love them.

What then kept drawing me in were Bubba’s spoken recordings, photos, videos, movies, books, articles, and any number of raves from friends of mine. I don’t recall running across a single negative thing about Bubba until later in the ‘70s: a vague rumor about a disaffected devotee threatening to take Bubba to court on unknown charges. I had no idea what that was all about, but this was the era of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers revelations that made clear to millions of us that there might be all kinds of “dirty tricks” going on behind the scenes here in these our beloved United States of America. I figured someone might possibly be looking to gain something by making false accusations against Bubba, so I didn’t think much about this rumor, continued on with my busy life, and looked to deepen my connection with Bubba.

Move to Farmington & Begin Medical School

Duty called. It was time to move to Farmington to start medical school, to help Carolyn set up our new apartment so as to accommodate both our four-year old Megan and a second daughter due any day.

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The University of Connecticut, School of Medicine is located in Farmington, a suburb of Hartford. At the time it was a brand new medical school, only three years old. It featured a huge medical center facility with all the latest state-of-the-art everything, including a spacious library, labs, teaching theaters, student lockers, and an integrated full-service hospital. For the first few months, I hitchhiked to school rather than wait for the city bus. Our apartment was right on Farmington Avenue—I could just step out our front door in my galoshes, overcoat, and Cossack hat, and hitch a ride the five or six miles to the medical school campus. However, that soon got old as the winter deepened, and with help from Carolyn’s father, we soon had a used classic slant six Plymouth Valiant sedan.

By way of introduction to my medical school years, reflecting on the experience as a whole, the first thing that stands out is the degree to which I felt incredibly fortunate to get into medical school at all. I had decided fairly early on in the process of applying to medical schools that I didn't want to go to Harvard, BU, or Tufts simply because I did not want to live again anywhere near the big grimy metropolis of Boston. The only out-of-state school that I looked at and actually applied to was the medical school in Albany, New York (unfortunately, another grimy city). Early on, however, it became clear that I might pin my hopes on the University of Connecticut at Farmington, a brand new medical school, gorgeous campus, semi-rural setting, world-class facilities, top-flight instructors, all for in-state tuition.

What I heard later was that in creating a new medical school, UCONN had copied the methods used by the University of California (UC) to build its world-class university system ten years previously. UC had demonstrated that with a load of money you can build a great university. UC had attracted top academic and research talent from all over the US. So, Connecticut did the same thing, only on a smaller scale. Although I was quite familiar with the UC system, tuition for out-of-state applicants was prohibitive and we were far from ready to go back to California.

The application process to the UCONN School of Medicine was completely impersonal. They used the same kinds of admission algorithms for automated selection of applicants that UC had found worked so well. Although I learned later that there had been a huge amount of graft and corruption involved in the construction of the new campus, the application process struck me as straight-up and ethical (but I never delved into any of the political and power games that must have been going on behind the scenes).

In any case, a medical education at UCONN MED was a very attractive proposition financially. As a state resident my tuition would be only a couple of thousand dollars a year. Not only that, because of my age and other criteria that I think they also factored into their algorithms, I was considered a good candidate for scholarships and loans. However, I was not accepted on the first round of admissions sent out in May—“too old” I was told. However, I was put on “the waiting list” about 25 or 30 names down. I was also told that being that “high up” on the list virtually guaranteed that I would eventually be accepted because so many who'd been accepted in the first round would decide not to come to UCONN since they’d also been accepted at more prestigious Ivy League school higher up on their list.

Sure enough, in early August, almost exactly a month before classes were scheduled to begin, I got notice that my name had come up and I'd been accepted. In conversation with the financial aid office, they assured me I was also a good candidate for a favorable package of loans and scholarships. They knew I’d been working for some years and they counseled me to get a formal statement from my father that I had not been his dependent over those years.

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Meanwhile, Carolyn found us a place to live—a simple and inexpensive three-story three-bedroom apartment. Megan had a room upstairs in front, and Carolyn and I were in the back. Downstairs we had a living room, dining room, and kitchen, and in the basement was a garage/storage area and utility room. In that utility room I set up my desk and my “Communion Hall”—ideally a separate room set apart for this purpose, or some kind of a defined space, potentially even as small as a closet. What I had in Farmington was just the upper half of a small coat closet in the basement. I'd been sensitized to making use of such a small area for meditation during my years with Swamiji where I’d also learned the rudiments of how to appoint, light, and configure such a “sacred space.”

Carolyn was now nine months into her second pregnancy. Thus, in the midst of our moving and getting settled we were thinking about the imminent arrival of our second daughter, Emily Virden. We knew from an ultrasound that it was a girl and we thought she was properly situated in utero for delivery— during prenatal exams she had been found to be in breach position and the OB had done an “inversion maneuver” in the office. One week after I started medical school Carolyn went into labor early one morning. We drove to UCONN’s Dempsey Hospital where we had arranged for the delivery (literally in the same building as the med school). Emily was found to be in breach position again and arrangements were made for a Cesarean delivery. I’ll never forget the immediate and powerful love-bond I felt when first holding her in my arms. All went well with mother and child and soon I was back in class.

Before long I began having occasional phone conversations with one of the doctors in the Dawn Horse Communion in California. As I recall, these began in my very first semester in medical school. I was being drawn into the orbit of the “Radiant Life Clinic” that was in the process of being set up by the various doctors and healers in the Communion. A familiar tension re-entered my life: on one side the immediacy and emotional pull from family, and on the other the pull from the Communion and the intensive engagement that typified the life of a devotee of Bubba Free John.

Thus began the balancing act I was called to engage that now also included a third major pull from the many obligations of medical training. My life became a three-way deal reminding me of the “I Led Three Lives” TV series I’d watched years before.42 Beginning in medical school I was a doctor, a husband and father of two, and a devotee of Bubba Free John: “doctor, dad, and devotee.” Thus, during this and the better part of the following twenty five years of my life, it's actually not just “yoga and science,” it's yoga, and science (in the form of “scientific” medicine), and family. From a Hindu perspective, this was a fairly classic path with precedents going back into Vedic times: countless individuals had been physicians (or healers, respected in their communities), family men (good husbands, good fathers), and scholars and/or yogis, either simultaneously or sequentially. I didn’t fully appreciate that at the time, however, and for the most part it was a constant and rather stressful juggling act.

Life in our apartment on Farmington Avenue developed a routine. Although classes typically started pretty early, I attempted to get up in time for at least twenty minutes of “devotional practice.” Most of my medical study took place in the evening after the kids were in bed. I had built out the space in the basement with the desk I had made at Groton, with a shelf added on top for my medical books, and a tiny workshop space in the back with my tool kit—all built around the furnace adjacent to the stairs up to the kitchen. Down a narrow hall from the bottom of the stairs there was a door out to the parking lot behind the apartment. The narrow drive-in garage next to that hall we used for storage.

42 The show portrayed a middle class American who infiltrated the secretive Communist Party on behalf of the CIA.

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There was a small coat closet adjacent to my basement study area around three feet deep and four feet wide. Into that closet I built a sturdy platform I could sit on set at about 30” high. The space underneath I used for storage. At the right side of the upper space I built a low shelf for an altar, and hung a curtain in lieu of a closet door. On the altar I eventually placed a framed “Sign of Da” designed by Bubba (who had recently taken a new name—Da Free John—see appendix for details) for this purpose—a beautiful piece of sacred art embroidered in threads of primary colors.

My obligations as a “corresponding student of the Community” included tithing (minimal for a full-time medical student), daily engagement of devotional practice, some kind of service function, vegetarian diet, and regular exercise. Master Da (as we now often referred to him) elaborated all these disciplines in great detail in a series of books during that period: “No Remedy” (1st ed ’75, revised ’76), “Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun” (’77), “Bodily Worship of the Living God” (1978), and “The Way That I Teach” (1978). These books represented a far richer description of sadhana (spiritual practice) than I had seen before. The daily practice Master Da detailed as “the bodily worship of the living God” was poetic, deeply moving, and to me a traditionally authenticated path of confession, instruction, aspiration, commitment, and praise.43

What was going on at medical school during this time is a whole other story which I won't detail here in order to stay focused on the yoga side of my life equation during this period. However, I will mention one especially important discovery: browsing in the gorgeous UCONN medical school library in late 1976 I ran across the Progressive Relaxation work of Edmund Jacobson (as I mention in a footnote in the “Twenties” Chapter, Section “Second Transfiguration and a 2nd Initiation”). Later in my fourth year of med school I was able to delve a bit deeper into this work. Then much later, in 1981, my ongoing interest led to my meeting briefly with Jacobson in Mill Valley just a few years before he passed. In the mid ‘90s I met his student and colleague Frank McGuigan at one of the medical meetings I attended and discovered his work on “subvocalization.” This work supports Jacobson’s hypothesis that what we experience as “verbal mind” is strongly correlated with what McGuigan called “covert behavior” on the part of the muscles of verbal expression. This work added scientific depth to Jacobson’s finding in his clinical practice that most patients needed ten times as many sessions of guided relaxation with the neck, face, and eyes as with the rest of the body put together. I was left with the feeling that this will be important to follow-up as we move toward a psycho-biology of sadhana.44

Meanwhile, Master Da beautifully described an engaging way of life in the books just mentioned—a way of life “turned to the divine.” His writing was so poetic, so eloquent, so richly detailed in these books that I felt confirmed in the decision I had made to take my leave of Integral Yoga. In daily sessions of “devotional practice” in my little cubicle Communion Hall I tried to mobilize my best understanding of the whole affair that Master Da described: the actively exercised practice of devotion to God and Guru, and to guru as God.

I felt this was putting me in deeper contact with my heart-mind, as he described—the heart-mind that is what he referred to as “the Heart itself.” Thus I exercised the circuits of devotion building on the modest

43 I’d like to link to the full text of these daily devotions (as detailed in “Bodily Worship of the Living God,” but they are not to be found online. They are something that you, dear reader, might be interested in looking into more deeply because of their historical connection to the Bhagavad-gita (of which they are “free renderings”) and because, at least to my mind, are some of the most exquisite communications of Bubba Free John. 44 This may relate rather directly to the sophisticated work on emotional expression done by Paul Eckman in recent decades.

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familiarity picked up previously in life.45 Swamiji had introducted me to bhakti yoga over the previous decade—an orientation we look to evoke especially in our kirtans, our sessions of group “devotional chanting” (a practice that Jai Uttal and others have since made quite popular).

Local Devotees: The Springfield Ladies

Sometime in 1978 I was put in touch with a group of middle-aged housewives living about thirty minutes north of me in Springfield, Massachusetts. They too had recently become “corresponding students”— each living in their own family homes. One was the chain-smoking wife of a man who, as I recall, had just died; another was married and still had two kids at home (she ended up staying in Adidam); and several others. These women had originally come together around the works of the teacher E.J. Gold, as I recall. They were about 10 or 15 years older than I and came from a more mainstream middle-class background than my countercultural-leaning, longhaired, pajama-wearing, yogi background.

In any case, we shared a number of daylong retreats together before I left the East Coast at the very end of 1979. During these occasions, we listened to tapes of Master Da, studied his teaching, talked among ourselves and got to know each other a bit, and on one occasion, had a full weekend retreat with one of Master Da’s close devotees from California, Michael Wood. Michael was sent specifically to share with us the unique kind of “satsang” energy that was otherwise only available in Master Da's immediate company. It was thought to be “available” by spending time with his close devotees. Thus, Master Da would sometimes send specific devotees out to these regional communities around the world. As the years went by this became an important way of establishing and maintaining a connection with those individuals who weren't in a position to come and actually live in his “immediate sphere” (as it was called).

On this occasion sometime in late ‘78 or early ’79—in the third year or so of my medical school career— Michael came to spend the weekend with the five of us. One of the most memorable things for me that Michael shared with us was that Master Da had recently received a letter of praise and recognition from a prominent countercultural author, Ken Wilber. Further, that after some discussion, Master Da had told the devotee handling his correspondence (Saniel Bonder), to “Leave him alone; he will do me more good out there than he ever would in here” (or words to that effect).

This was reported as the explicit instruction Master Da gave for how his devotees should relate to Ken. This was big news at the time because it was among the first recognitions of Da Free John by a prominent third party (after Alan Watts) as someone to be taken seriously. It was generally agreed that the PR benefit that the Dawn Horse Communion got from Ken Wilber's endorsement would not have been anywhere near as great if he had become a formal devotee.46

45 I’d learned a little about devotion to Jesus at Groton via both formal lessons and church choir. Swamiji would sometimes speak of bhakti yoga as part of his Integral Yoga, but he didn’t emphasize it—in fact he sometimes criticized our devotional chanting as “overly enthusiastic” and not expressive of the peace and calm—the shanthi—that was always his main communication. 46 Here we can see “the emic/etic distinction” in operation—commonly encountered in academic work—our society privileges the etic (“objective”—consensual), whereas a practitioner is seen as privileging the emic (“subjective”—personal) perspective. Yoga science assumes a foundational non-separation within which all distinctions arise.

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The Yoga Science “Koan of No Time”

In the “Meeting of the Ways Radio Show” section of the last chapter, I mentioned meeting Steve Claydon in the fall of 1971. Around the same time that Carolyn, Megan, and I moved to Lake County in the fall of the following year to be part of the Yogaville West experiment at Seigler Springs, Steve moved there as well. Having joined the IYI and taken “novice” initiation from Swamiji in the meantime, he became Brother Arjuna and served as bookkeeper for Yogaville. I remember him with a slightly crooked smile, almost always in white pajamas with a bright orange novice’s bandana around his neck.

When Yogaville West had to close up shop, Steve moved across country and joined the community around Yogaville East where he and I resumed our friendship. In the following years he was an active presence around the ashram, involved in helping build a new residence for Swamiji on the Ashram property. Eventually he married Swamiji’s secretary Amma (in around 1975). When Ramakrishna returned from his high-energy exposure to Bubba Free John at Seigler Springs and I began to get interested in Bubba’s teaching, Steve was one of the few people in the IYI with whom I felt I could speak freely.

Come the summer of 1976, a few months after my “conversion,” Steve had become so taken with Bubba that he decided to leave the IYI and his wife and move back to Seigler Springs to become part of Bubba’s Communion. With his extensive background in AV, he was soon “doing the sound” for Bubba’s talks, making cassette recordings that were immediately transcribed, and then soon edited into the steady stream being published in the Communion’s magazines and books. In this capacity, Steve kindly began bootlegging cassettes and mailing them to me in Farmington.

Thus it was that I heard, perhaps as early as late 1976, Bubba’s talk given September 7, 1975 to a large audience in the Pavilion at the Mountain of Attention, “Sex, Laughter, and God Realization” which begins as follows (my transcript from the original recording):

There are three things I want to talk about today. These are: it is not true that anything has already arisen, God is not the creator, and there are three things always dissolving the world for men—they are sex, laughter and God realization. [After a stretch of raucous laughter, he continues:]

All of this arises spontaneously, by virtue of its own Law, as a modification of the Real. Even in the affair of your sadhana, in enquiry47 for instance, you continually tend to make the assumption, while you observe what is arising, that something has already arisen, and that you are that. The presence in which you observe what is arising and enquire of it and so forth is an assumed presence—you tend not to inspect it. It is identifiable as the sense of “me”, or the body sense, the sense of being present conditionally, as limitation already, and from that point of view then, you observe these things arising, and you enquire of them, and they are undermined to some degree, but it is not perfect enquiry, perfect understanding, until this uninspected dimension that you assume is itself understood and enquired of.

Everything arises in the moment, now. Everything that arises is a modification of your condition. Not only your thoughts, then, your body also, your sense of yourself separately, this

47 Discussed at length at the time, it could be characterized as the practice of asking oneself, not just verbally but tacitly, in the context of a committed relationship to Bubba Free John as guru, “avoiding relationship?”

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is also something arising. It hasn't already arisen, it arises in this moment; the sense of me arises in this moment, just as thoughts arise in this moment, just as the body sense arises in this moment—you do not enter into this moment from a conceived point of view then, a limited point of view. This will become plain to you upon the realization of Only God.”

What so struck me then, and continued to strike me again and again over the subsequent years for decades, was the potential scientific implications of what Bubba was clearly saying here about the conditional nature of time—or as I might now put it, the non-fundamentalness of time.

Interestingly, this section was routinely left out of later both recorded and printed versions of this otherwise famous talk of Bubba’s. Only much later did I discover the degree to which it summarizes an central point of an entire tradition of Buddhism—Dzogchen—a tradition with which Bubba was entirely unfamiliar.

Time plays such a crucial role throughout science that if it were to be shown to be somehow not fundamental, science itself would have to be altered in a radical way. Thus it was for me that the phrase, “it is not true that anything has already arisen,” became a deeply provocative “koan.” I came back to it again and again over the years, pondered it as deeply as I could, trying to understand it viscerally, looking for it to “become plain” to me, as he would say, and considering the potential re-framing that science would need to undergo if it turned out to be true.

The matter of time was perhaps especially relevant to me because throughout my years from college on, I was learning about one biochemical, cellular, physiological, or electro-physiological system after another, each one functioning with its own characteristic frequency, cycle, or rhythm. What later became the SummaTime Scale (in 1996) and the time spectrum of yoga science (in 2010) grew directly out of my decades-long consideration of this seminal “koan” of Bubba’s.

Elective on the Physiology of Fasting

Toward the end of my clinical rotations in my fourth year in med school, I decided I was finally ready to read and understand the extensive and original research done in the ‘60s and ‘70s by George F. Cahill, Jr. and his colleagues on the physiology of fasting that I’d first discovered in 1973 (Twenties Chapter, Section “Key Decisions in Boston”). Well known scientist, Robert L. Jungas, head of the physiology department at UCONN, offered to supervise me in a month-long elective. He stipulated I give a noon lecture to his department to present my findings at the end of the month. As I mention above, “prayer and fasting” has a long history in spiritual life. Swamiji had us experiment with fasting, and fasting had also now become part of an annual “spring cleanse” discipline in the Dawn Horse Communion. I saw this as a fascinating yoga science topic.

I spent countless hours in the library, making copies of the many research papers published by Cahill and his colleagues, poring over them, learning the details of the extensive changes that take place in human endocrine and metabolic systems under the condition of water-only fasting.48 Cahill’s decades of research on fasting at the Joslin Diabetes Center used diabetics as test subjects for whom extended water fasting was considered a reasonable experimental protocol. His research documented extensive

48 Perhaps the main adaptation among the many dramatic and healthy metabolic shifts with fasting is that brain metabolism shifts from glucose to ketone bodies formed from fatty acids, thus sparing protein muscle mass.

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benefits in his subjects, which he and his collaborators described in a whole series of articles. However, when it came time to present his findings to his colleagues in medicine in 1970 via the prestigious New England Journal, the word “fasting” was replaced in the title by “starvation,”49 and the piece passed with little notice—once again, millions in public research dollars went up in smoke and for the most part vanished.

Cahill’s overall finding most striking to me was that humans typically adapt well to water fasting and can easily tolerate it for weeks at a time. In later years a theory came out as to why diabetics are so prevalent in our society: genes for diabetes permitted our forebears to live longer in times of caloric deprivation (i.e., degrees of fasting). I took to telling my diabetic patients that they were “designed by evolution for starvation” and encouraged them to look into water-only fasting and caloric restriction as therapeutic interventions. However, few were brave enough to try it—our society so privileges eating over not eating as to make “three square meals a day” a strong cultural norm.

My lunch-time summary slide presentation was given in the Physiology Department’s conference room packed with about sixty people and was well-received. I was delighted finally to understand the rich body of work wherein Cahill and his colleagues had documented so unequivocally the large array of benign and health-enhancing changes that take place naturally in response to water-only fasting. This month of research came just as I was about to complete my medical training. Two decades later, I spent four years doing medical supervision of in-patients undergoing water-only therapeutic fasting as the culmination of my twenty years in medicine, as you’ll see in the Fifties chapter. Fasting thus became the bookends of my medical career.

“Enlightenment of the Whole Body”

Published in 1978, “Enlightenment of the Whole Body” (EWB), by Bubba Free John, stunned this third year medical student yogi. As I recall, I got hold of a copy soon after it came out. I’d seen some of its earlier talks and essays as they’d be published in the Dawn Horse Magazine and some as recordings of talks that Steve continued sending me as his bootleg cassettes. When I got the book it was fall 1979, and I was in my final months at the UConn Med.

I was especially drawn to the section in EWB titled “The Heart is the Key to the Enlightenment of the Whole Body,” which describes (starting at Page 373) a robust yoga science hypothesis regarding the central importance of the sino-atrial node in human psychophysiology. This hypothesis was seminal for another area of yoga science dealing with psychophysiology in general, and the sino-atrial node in particular—a theme that re-emerged with dramatic intensity after my “heart to heart” with Bubba (become Adi Da Samraj) in 1997 two decades later.

Research for the Radiant Life Clinic

As suggested above in the section “Move to Farmington & I Begin Medical School,” not long after I started classes at UCONN Med I was given the list of then outstanding research projects that Bubba had placed before the Radiant Life Clinic (RLC)—things like cures (or effective preventive strategies) for cancer, aging, menopause, and common viral infections (seriously).

49 “Starvation in man.” G. F. Cahill, NEJM, 282(12):668-75, March 1970.

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Familiar as I was already with the penchant of gurus in classical yoga to ask the apparently impossible of their devotees, I was not too surprised—Bubba had been very clear, after all, that his “method” was that “of the siddhas.” Despite the fact that I was a long way away from California, I took the matter seriously and thus kept my eyes open throughout my years in medical training for any hints of new ideas with regard to all the “diseases of civilization.”

Early in my second year, as I recall, the Community doctor I’d been in contact with previously notified me that he would be attending a conference at Cold Spring Harbor, in New York and asked if I could drive down and meet with him for a day or so. This I did. The keynote topic of the conference he was attending, as I recall, was the about-to-be-announced development of the first effective antiviral drug that later became Zovirax. He and I had dinner together in a small place near Cold Spring Harbor where he regaled me with stories about Bubba and his “work” (play) with the doctors and healers in the community, and especially how he humorously criticized their tendencies to “play the doctor-patient game.”

It took some years before this phrase of Bubba’s came into focus for me—at first I had little idea what specifically he was pointing to. Over time, however, especially as I began seeing patients during and after my clinical training, I came gradually to understand how Bubba was pointing out how the ego operates in social situations, especially ones as highly charged in our society as the relationship between doctors and patients.

My focus, however, remained on the “grand challenge” that Bubba had also issued to us all in the RLC: get on with the real business of promoting robust health. I was familiar with the “health movement” that was such an important aspect of the ‘60s counter-culture as a result of my previous decade in the IYI, and on the whole I was already more experienced in the topic than were other members of the RLC. In any case, I was well aware of the fact that doctors are not trained to heal, specifically, let alone prevent disease, but rather only schooled in the diagnosis and treatment of disease via a “prescribed” repertoire of patented tests, medicines, radiations, and surgical methods. As for “health promotion,” that was nowhere to be found in the lexicon of medicine—there is no medical specialty in “health promotion,” nor are there professional medical journals devoted to this topic.

Thus I was incubating yoga science in this way as well. By the end of medical school, I wrote up two pieces to describe the literature sources and the health topics that I was following in an ongoing way in the name of the “RLC-Research Department.”

“Principal Sources” included

 AM News—the weekly newspaper of the American Medical Association (AMA)  JAMA—the monthly journal of the AMA  Archives of Internal Medicine  Lancet—the most prestigious British medical journal  The New England Journal of Medicine—the most prestigious US medical journal  PNAS—Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  Science—the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science  Science News—a popular science news weekly magazine  Scientific American—a more in-depth monthly science magazine  Brain/Mind Bulletin (added in 1982)—covering the emerging world of “New Age science.”

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“Items of potential interest to staff at Radiant Life Clinic” is a six page single spaced alphabetical list of topics that ranged across both mainstream and alternative medicine: alternative medical systems and methods, bioelectric effects/microwaves, birth control, breast feeding, cancer cures, death and dying, diet/adverse effects, diet/beneficial effects, metabolism, environment/pollution, esoteric anatomy (ancient and contemporary), exercise, fasting, fever/sweat/sauna, food additives & toxins, health care issues, herpes II, immunology, light & body, neuroendocrinology, stress/emotions, subtle energies/energy healing, systems biology, temporomandibular joint, Turin shroud, holistic health movement, and yoga and meditation. I accepted the assignment to keep an eye on all these areas as a perfect fit for my “generalist” orientiation.

“What to Remember to Be Happy” Impresses my Daughter Megan

Bubba’s first children’s book was the remarkable “What to Remember to Be Happy.” With lively illustrations and a memorable text, it was an instant hit. A few years later a recording of a young devotee boy reading the text was set to music by award-winning composer and devotee Ray Lynch. In that form it was heard by a wide public via copies of tapes and radio broadcasts and in recent years it has become available on YouTube.50

The book was composed several years after the Indoor Summer period of 1976 during which Bubba had led his devotees in an extended consideration of what it is exactly that we know, or think we know. The conclusion of months of sometimes intense but almost always playful reflection and dialog was, “you don’t know what anything is.”

In this way, Bubba deepened our appreciation for introspective examination and, for many of us, made a profound point of the fact that at the core of all our presumptions of knowing and naming there lays an irremediable mystery. The wonderful thing about this little book for children is that Da was able to cast this deep message into language that speaks directly to children to make this fundamental point about our human existence.

As soon as the book arrived in our apartment in Farmington, Connecticut, I brought it to my six year old daughter Megan. Sitting together on the couch, I began to read. Partway through, it was obvious that she was becoming agitated by the suggestion Da was making that she did not, in fact, actually and really know what anything is! I tried to continue reading, but her agitation only seemed to increase. Then suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, she “got it,” her facial expression turned to one of marvel and amazement, and she turned to me with joy and said, “I don’t know what anything is!” My love for her was instantly magnified.

Megan has gone on to become a committed devotee and remains so to this day. Years later, amusingly enough, she became the intimate partner for a few years of the young man who, as a boy, had done the reading on that recording.

50 This was released originally as a track on Ray’s long-unavailable album “Truth is the Only Profound.” It was repackaged at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiiDc1gC640

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First Darshan with Da Free John

By working through the summers to accrue credits, I was able to complete medical school in three and a half years in the fall of 1979. I managed to have my very last month-long “rotation”—as each segment of clinical training in med school is known—at the family practice program at UC Davis Medical School hosted in Santa Rosa at Santa Rosa Community Hospital. During that month I spent a bit of time on the in-patient unit, but most of my days were in the out-patient clinic—considered a model family practice in those days.

It was at the very end of that final rotation that I was invited up to The Mountain of Attention Sanctuary (formerly the Seigler Springs I knew so well) and given a “service function.” I had, as of that very day, completed all the qualifications for my MD degree. I drove the hour and a half up to the Sanctuary from Santa Rosa, reported to the welcome cabin (named Fresh Milk), and was escorted down into the Sanctuary proper to what later became the zoo area—at that point it was more like a small farm yard.

Master Da’s Brahman cow Shakti was housed in a small fenced enclosure with a shed. The “farm hand” Glenn Johannes, the devotee in charge of my service there, proceeded to hand me a shovel, and with great mirth and delight had me shovel the dung out of Shakti's stall. This was my introduction to the new residents of Seigler Springs and the “Communion” of Da Free John: spiritually astute, playful, humorous, mischievous even, but basically loving. I immediately became a big fan of Glenn, Shakti, and of shoveling cow shit. I was never really expected to take that up as a regular service function simply because I clearly would have my hands full as a community doctor. As it turned out, there was so much health “shit” going on in the community that there was more than enough to keep a whole team of doctors busy “shoveling.” Meanwhile, the medical doctors serving as core members had recently (in 1978) legally incorporated the Radiant Life Clinic as a nonprofit in the State of California.

I was invited to stay on for a few days in one of the devotee households nearby as Da Free John was expected to “give darshan” the day after next. The tennis court below Fresh Milk had been converted into a volleyball court and recently a huge white tent had been erected there. This was now the late fall after the famous “Day of the Heart” event had taken place in the spring of 1979 shortly after he had revealed his new name, Da Free John. Marking as always a change in his way of working with devotees, he was no longer going to be “Bubba, the brotherly friend,” he was now going to be “Da, the Giver.” He was no longer going to identify with us, play along, and give instruction in the context of our foibles. He was going to serve instead a process of a complete devotional way of life that would be disciplined and transformative.

After a day of a few brief first meetings with some of the community doctors, the day of the darshan arrived. I knew that I’d have to be up early for the event scheduled in the big tent immediately after early morning meditation. The event was so early I was glad not to be asked to attend the even earlier morning meditation reserved for more fully-active devotees. However, in the wee hours of that morning I had a vivid dream of Bubba as I had known him up to that time, but in the dream I embraced him as Da, “the one through whom God is gracious, the giver.” This was about to be my first meeting with the guru in the flesh, but the dream was so vivid I felt it was the actual first meeting with him. Immersed in his incredibly sweet embrace, my heart felt certain, “There is just simply no question you're home now.” I woke up, moved to tears, sobbing in the dark right around Brahmamurth, a couple of hours before dawn.

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In the dark I continued to reflect: “Another life drama is about to begin. I’m about to fly back to Connecticut to pack up my now family of four for yet another move across country, but I haven't yet nailed down exactly how we’re going to pull all that off. I still need to plan it all out and set it all up.” The emotional force of the dream, however, was overwhelming, coming to consciousness with this deep sense of heart connection, thinking I was about to meet him in the flesh for the first time, and yet somehow aware that the deed was already done. Only after a long while did I fall asleep again.

As it turned out, I’d not allowed quite enough time for the trip to the Sanctuary and arrived at Fresh Milk a little bit late, in a light rain, maybe a few minutes after seven AM. Even though I was late, I was allowed to enter the Sanctuary and proceed down the path from Fresh Milk towards the tent because it was such a significant event. I saw no one else around but could hear beautiful devotional group chanting coming from the tent in preparation for Bubba’s arrival. Suddenly I spotted him, wearing what looked like a white bathrobe with a large hood pulled over his head. He was a bit further down the hill, just stepping onto the path heading straight towards me some fifty feet away. I stopped in my tracks. I performed the devotional gesture (palms first held up facing out, then slowly folded at heart with a deep bow at the waist), and then stood mesmerized as he walked quickly towards me and then, at the half way point, turned sharply to his right onto the path leading up to the tent.

I followed him into the tent at a respectful distance as the chanting dissolved into loud expressions of joy and praise. Bubba had instructed us on the function of Darshan—literally “sighting” (of the guru) in the Great Tradition of spirituality, and we appreciated that such occasions were special opportunities to open ourselves as fully as possible in devotional heart-surrender to him in person, and that any spontaneous expressions of joy were entirely appropriate.51

I was struck by the intensity of the devotional energy of the hundreds of people in the tent. However, in order to see Da over the crowd, dozens of us in the back row were standing on folding metal chairs that didn't feel completely stable. My subjective state at this point was thus undermined, mixed in with that familiar dysphoric lack-of-sleep feeling, the excitement of it being my very first time, of not having had any breakfast, and of having had that powerful dream just an hour before that broke my heart. It was if I was in a bit of shock from all this. For me it was, “Oh my God, there he is in the flesh! But, hold on, I feel I’ve already met him, maybe not spiritually (as you might define it), but certainly emotionally and on a heart level.” The whole visit had confirmed my attraction to Bubba and my conviction to take a big step into a circle that was much closer.

Move to Davis, Begin Internship in Psychiatry

By wrapping up med school mid-year I had the disadvantage of having to scrounge for an unexpected mid-year opening some place. However, I had the simultaneous advantage over the rest of my class who had to go through the laborious “match” process of residency/internships. Much as with the process of applying to medical school, graduating medical students had to complete one comprehensive computerized application form on which they could specify their top three institutions offering medical

51 Shown clearly in the picture on pages 62 and 63 of “See My Brightness Face to Face,” 1997 Dawn Horse Press. Da has just sat down, devotees are clapping and swooning, the men with their backs turned are going up the side aisle having just escorted Da to his seat. I can be vaguely made out in the back row about six in from the left wearing my then routine outfit: a light colored cotton turtleneck with a wool shirt open at the collar. The angle of the shot includes only the men sitting to Da’s right, the women were on the left.

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residencies. On their side, each institution had filed “student wanted” forms for as many as they wished. The only additional documentation required was an official medical school transcript. Once these forms were in, fourth year med students had to wait for the computers to come up with their official “match” or “wait list” positions.

I knew exactly where I wanted to be: Northern California, excluding San Francisco and Berkeley as too grimy and congested. That limited my choice immediately to the UC Davis/Sacramento Medical Center. With a few phone calls I located an intern opening in the psychiatry department, arranged to fly out for an interview, landed the position, found a lovely house to rent in Davis, and flew home, amazed again by how smoothly yet another trans-continental family move seemed to be shaping up.

The psych internship began with six months of medicine rotations in one month blocks: in-patient general medicine, post-surgery, and emergency room; out-patient medicine, orthopedics, and pediatrics. For the second half year, psych rotations included: in-patient psych, psych emergency, pediatric acute psych, pediatric chronic psych, and chronic psych at Napa State for two months. This experience provided me with convincing proof that I did not want to continue on into the second year residency in psychiatry—psychotherapy had clearly lost the battle with psychopharmacology and I could not see myself being happy “pushing pills” to disturbed patients.

The high point of my internship came with the discovery that the head of the psychiatry department at Napa State Hospital was a long-time friend of Karl Pribram. He had invited Karl to give a series of weekly luncheon seminars on his novel “holographic theory” of brain function. These seminars took place over a period of six weeks that just happened to coincide with the two months I spent commuting the hour every weekday morning from our home in Davis, down I-80 to Napa. Karl’s seminars gave me a good sense of his theory—including how he saw the important contribution of David Bohm—and also gave me a feeling for Karl as a person. As I recall it was at the last seminar that he arrived missing a finger recently bitten off by a famous signing chimp named Washoe at the Institute of Primate Studies in Oklahoma.

In the years that followed until his death in 2015, Karl published twenty-five books, hundreds of papers, and is thought to have made a major contribution to the emergence of cognitive neuroscience. His “holonomic brain theory,” meanwhile, became very popular in the New Age circles I gravitated towards where it was considered for some time in the ‘80s as a leading candidate for a “new paradigm” that would, once and for all, “break the stranglehold of scientific materialism.” It didn’t.

As my year of internship came to an end, I saw three options for my next career move: continue in the psych residency, take the position I was offered in the highly-regarded Family Practice residency program at UC Davis, or get my medical license and start practicing medicine somewhere nearby. The first option I’d already set aside, as noted above. The second offered a path toward Board Certification in Family Practice, but would only pay resident’s annual salary of $13K for the three years of the program. The third option, I came to discover, offered me four day weeks and a $65K annual salary immediately. As father of two, contemplating a mortgage and a career of service to Da Free John’s community, it was a “no-brainer.” Thus I began work at the Yolo County Hospital out-patient clinic about 20 minutes from Davis, and we made the decision to buy a home in Davis to “stop throwing money down the rent hole.”

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“Scientific Proof” & Ken Wilber’s Introduction: “On Heroes and Cults”

Early in 1980 I received from the Communion’s Dawn Horse Press a pre-print manuscript for comment titled “Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House: Prophetic Wisdom about the Myths and Idols of mass culture and popular religious cultism, the new priesthood of scientific and political materialism, and the secrets of Enlightenment hidden in the body of man”. This collection of talks and essays by Da Free John became a seminal education (which I’ll discuss further, three sections hence, in “Science and the Culture of Ecstasy”). Da seemed to see clearly the profound implications of the cultural sea change that was underway in the form of the “counter-counter-culture” and the rise of neo-liberal ideology (outlined at the start of this chapter, but not known by any such name at the time) marked that same year by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States.

When the book was published later that year, it featured a remarkable foreword by Ken Wilber, entitled, “On Heroes and Cults” which was, I believe, Ken’s first published endorsement of Da Free John—and what an endorsement it was! The full text of Ken’s essay is available here. To highlight just a few short excerpts:

… my opinion is that we have, in the person of Da Free John, a Spiritual Master and religious genius of the ultimate degree. I assure you I do not mean that lightly. I am not tossing out high-powered phrases to "hype" the works of Da Free John. I am simply offering to you my own considered opinion: Da Free John's teaching is, I believe, unsurpassed by that of any other spiritual Hero, of any period, of any place, of any time, of any persuasion.

The essay ends with:

… it is becoming quite obvious that no one in the fields of psychology, religion, philosophy, or sociology can afford not to be at least a student of Da Free John. At least confront the teaching; at least study what he has to say; at least consider his argument. Since he is indeed a true Hero—an authentic and supremely enlightened Spiritual Master—please make use of him while he is alive, while he can serve you in direct, living relationship. Do not repeat the past mistake of denying such a Spiritual Master while he walks among us. Do not meet him with benign neglect. Do not wait until decades or centuries after his death to acknowledge what he is. As a simple start, study his written teaching. And I think that if you will work carefully through even one of Da Free John's books, you will find you have been taken apart and put back together again in a form that will be only Mystery to you, only Release in God, only Radiance in the Divine, and only Joy in the obviousness of it all.

This was for me a most articulate confirmation of my own already deep and growing appreciation of Da Free John. Only a few years later, however, when Da became the target of law suits and negative publicity, Ken began to “walk back” these words and gradually distance himself, for whatever reason. It should be noted, as well, that Ken did not follow his own advice to “make use of him while he is alive, while he can serve you in direct, living relationship,” (except, of course, insofar as he may well have continued to read Da’s publications), since he never formally became a devotee. Curiously, this might be seen to be in keeping with Da’s explicit instructions to his devotees in 1976. In any case, Ken’s appreciation of Da seemed to me to remain largely on an intellectual level.

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“The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace”

Subtitled “The Transcendental Principle of Life Applied to Diet and the Regenerative Discipline of True Health” and published in 1979, this hefty volume was assembled from the many dialogs Da Free John had had with devotees in general, but most especially with the medical doctors and other healers of the Radiant Life Clinic over the preceding years. As he led his Communion through extensive experimentation with “diet and health disciplines,” Da Free John consistently contributed novel insights from his unique perspective couched in his creative use of English. The book included the best that the alternative health movement of its day had to offer totally re-framed for devotees. For over a decade the book served as a key resource for our practice of healing and the dietary disciplines. Here is a summary description of its contents taken from the book itself:

1) How the true principle of health is Love, or the feeling-connection to Infinite Life 2) How reactive emotion is the root of all food obsessions and common health failures 3) How the life-energy received and distributed through the breath is the primary form of human food 4) How the regenerative vegetarian diet is the best daily diet for health and well-being 5) How we can compensate for physical and emotional imbalances through right diet and health practices 6) How diet is a necessary aspect of a pleasurable, mature, and regenerative sex life 7) How to use fasting, herbal remedies, and dietary modifications to purify and regenerate the body.

As the alternative health movement grew steadily through the ‘80s and ‘90s, the need for revisions to the book became a staple issue for both the Radiant Life Clinic and the Editorial Department of the Dawn Horse Press, one that has yet to be fully addressed (for various reasons). Some of the key practices from the book became institutionalized in the community; others were gradually let go as the plethora of health resources and opinions came “on line” in the ‘90s via the internet. (Then there was the whole raw food debate—discussed later.) For me personally, however, virtually all the many topics the book sought to address remained high on my “research agenda” throughout my twenty-five years in the community.

Second Darshan in the Pavillion

Sometime in the early fall of 1980 devotees were invited to sit with Da in the open air Pavillion at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary. He had spent most of that year at his small retreat on the island of Kauai and had returned “to reclaim the Sanctuary.” As was the case for me in many occasions, both with Swamiji and with Bubba, I felt something communicated by Da that day during the twenty minutes or so that he sat in silent darshan looking around the room, seemingly at each one of the several hundred of us individually, that was not specifically related to the words he spoke subsequently.

It was a warm Indian Summer day in Lake County. There was a gentle breeze that kept the heat at bay. Devotees had been seated in the Pavillion, full to capacity—I was way at the rear. We sat in silent meditation for some time before Da entered and took his seat on the East side, while we continued in silence. I gazed intently at Da sitting perhaps thirty-five feet in front of me, and after some time I noticed that I could clearly see the movements of both his breathing and his heart beating in his body. After a

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while, I relaxed my attention and took in the larger scene that included several still fully leafed trees just outside, and in the distance of the mid afternoon, the pale wooded hills. I then marveled when it became obvious in my feeling that there was absolutely no actual separation between the moving body of Da, the leaves moving in the gentle breeze, and the sun-lit hills behind him. I was transfixed by that “seeing” for what seemed like a long time.

First Year in Practice

I found my work at the Yolo County clinic quite delightful—in fact, it became the most enjoyable work experience of my practice career (until my very last position). I had two experienced nurses at my beck and call, and many of the patients were local Mexican-American farm workers with whom I got to use my rusty Spanish.

During that first year of practice in 1980, with the much welcomed free time afforded by a four day work week, I did a number of research projects, mostly for the Radiant Life Clinic. However, the most memorable request I received came via Steve Claydon directly from Bubba, “to write up a research report on crystals.” Exactly how this came about was an amusing drama in its own right which I won't detail here. In any case, Steve, again instrumental in my relationship with Da, told me months later that my report had been very well-received and that it had sat on Da’s night stand for some weeks— considered as a certain “blessing regard” of me personally. Just for fun I’ll reproduce here the “mind map” that served as the frontispiece for the report:

Figure 6. Mind map of author’s 1980 report on crystals

(I’ll digress for a moment longer to say that one of the many reasons I loved my brother-in-law Robert Weston as I did was because he turned me on to mind maps that he had learned to use working directly with their originator Tony Buzan.)

“Science and the Culture of Ecstasy”

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Da’s writings triggered some extensive reflection on my part during 1981, my first year in medical practice. His critique of science was based on his assessment that it was:  bound to dilemma via an enforced separation of subject and object;  culturally bound to gross phenomena only, excluding the subtle, causal, and radical dimensions of our greater reality; and  usurping the power of other ways of relating to existence—most particular the holistic.

I wrote a brief essay, “Science in a Culture of Ecstasy,” which summarized some of my thoughts. I attempted for the first time to put Da Free John's critique in my own words. I suspected I might be drafted into a position of leadership in the local Northern California Radiant Life Clinic because there had been such an exodus of previous members of the Clinic. Most of the crew from Lake County moved to Hawaii where Da had established a new residence. So, I felt I needed to clarify my own thinking not only on medical topics, but on the larger issues involving science given Da’s trenchant critique of science and how medicine appeals to science as its underpinning.

In retrospect, this effort presaged some features of yoga science. In conjunction with that essay, I did a couple of mind maps, one around the same topic as the essay, and another, which might be interesting to reconsider at some point, around the term adeptology which I drew from Da Free John's admonition to the Clinic to "study the adept.52" I was exploring how this might be a core organizing principle for the development of a genuine “science of man.”53 This became a recurrent theme, appearing later in my “SummaParadigm” paper of 1989 and most recently in a writing project initiated this past March, “Elaborating the Yoga Science of Total Reality” (still “under construction”).

“Scientific Proof…” gave a novel socio-cultural positioning to Da Free John’s teaching. Thus, when I met Worth Summers, another local area devotee who was Professor of Sociology at Sacramento State University, he and I got together on a number of occasions to brainstorm around this notion of “science and the culture of ecstasy.” In March 1982 I ended up writing an unpublished six page essay “Science and the Radical Teaching of Da Free John.” Worth, meanwhile, produced far more extensive draft materials and a project introduction for what he proposed to be a “festshrift” book. I think that was the first time I'd ever heard the term—a perhaps slightly snobbish academic term meaning a volume of articles by various scholars praising the work of one of their colleagues. Here the “scholar” being praised was to be Da Free John.54

Part 2—A Deeper Confrontation

In 1982 I moved the eighty-five miles up windy mountain roads from Davis to Clearlake to take up a position as General Practitioner in and co-owner of the Clearlake Medical Center. This move was from a comfortable middle-class college town to the backwoods of Lake County known in those years as California's least populated and poorest of all counties per capita. I wanted to make this big change in

52 “Adept” referring to the incarnate Realizer. 53 Although “science of man” was a term apparently coined by David Hume in the 18th Century, I drew my appreciation of the term from the work of Teilhard de Chardin and some of the more avant garde thinkers of the ‘50s and ‘60s including Sri Aurobindo and Pitirim Sorokin mentioned in the last chapter. 54 Such a book was published two years later that included an essay by Dr. Summers, “Humor Suddenly Returns: Essays on the Teaching of Master Da Free John—a Scholarly Tribute,” edited by Georg Feuerstein, Dawn Horse Press, 1984. A brief description can be found here listing the individual contributors and their essays.

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order to participate more fully in the Community of devotees of Da Free John. I had a vague sense that there would be challenges ahead since Da consistently portrayed himself as being a “sacrificial fire” for his devotees, a fire purposed to spiritual transformation. However, I had no way of knowing just how difficult that confrontation would turn out to be—especially since I had up until then felt that my life was quite definitely “charmed.” What ensued was unquestionably the most difficult five years I’d ever experienced till then.

What the guru was calling all his devotees to do first of all was actually “to move beyond childish and adolescent” patterns of dependency (the childish mode) and independence (the adolescent mode).55 In “Breath and Name” (1977), a collection of his essays on this subject was introduced by the editors of the Dawn Horse Press as follows:

This presentation summarizes Bubba’s criticism of our commonplace motivations, and the interpretations, worldly and philosophical, which we mistakenly impose on the spiritual Way of Life. Taken by itself, this essay introduces the unique nature and human implications of Bubba Free John’s Teaching and his spiritual Presence.

Whereas most of the devotees in the Lake County community that I entered in 1982 had been steeped in this criticism along with Da’s “spiritual Presence” for nearly a decade, for me this was a first-time plunge, and came after he had moved away from Lake County. What I encountered in Lake County was a sort of cultural and psychological fire storm, a living environment unlike any I had known before. Many years later I encountered a book that describes something of what it was like for me: “In Over Our Heads,” by Robert Kegan (Harvard, 1994).

Although Kegan’s work is focused on the deep challenges that anyone faces in our modern society in making a full transition to adult responsibilities, I was experiencing many of these same kinds of challenges combined with the additional intensity created by the call to engage in a genuinely spiritual relationship to Da Free John. As I’ve written above, I’d thought to myself with some amazement, under the stars on the eve of my thirtieth birthday in 1976, “I’m an adult, finally!” Yet here now, a full five years later, I was plunged into the deep end of what would be involved in the process of becoming an “adult” as conceived in Da Free John’s community.

While in Part 1 above, the overall mood is still the one of general lightness and graceful “smooth sailing” that had previously characterized my “charmed life,” now, I hit a whole pack of “speed bumps”—both internal and external—making for a great intensification of my doctor/dad/devotee three-way life. The litany below of challenges was the substance of this difficult period, but it was also combined with a consistent sense of deep inspiration. It seems important to introduce this period this way in order to do it justice.

Here in outline are the main “speed bumps” I ran into here:  As doctor o Super busy private practice

55 Demonstrating the early origins and later importance of Adi Da’s essay, “Moving Beyond Childish and Adolescent Approaches to Life and Truth” (extensive excerpts of which are available here), the essay was developed from the dialog with devotees portrayed in the final chapter of “Garbage and The Goddess” (1974) called there “The Way of Dissolution and the Way of Experience.” It was revised and published as Part I of “Breath & Name: The Initiation and Foundation Practices of Free Spiritual Life” (1977) and reproduced in Chapter 2 of “Scientific Proof” (1980).

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o Tax problems . IRS Tax audit . “recapture of accelerated depreciation” o Two mortgages & declining property values o Declining medical insurance reimbursements o Problematic professional partnership o Concluding in a personal bankruptcy  As dad o Trial separation in ‘82 o Complicated school situations for girls o Community pressure cooker o Harsh Lake County climate o Concluding in divorce  As devotee o The bad news: . Da gone far away in Fiji . The Scandal of ‘85 . Weaknesses in the “culture”

The good news over-all: a deepened devotional orientation in the midst of much learning from high- intensity “life experience.”

Move to Lake County and Join the Clearlake Medical Center

In early 1982, one of the Clinic doctors in Lake County offered me his general practice at the Clearlake Medical Center where I would be joining another GP and an internist in a three-man office. I only needed to agree to continue paying a share of the monthly mortgage payments on the practice, which were to be taken out of an anticipated healthy income. This was an offer I couldn’t refuse—step into an up-and-running private practice just twenty minutes from the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary? It seemed like another “no brainer.” The only hitch was that Carolyn, who by this time had become deeply involved in the Davis public school programs from which Megan and Emily were both now benefitting, was not interested in uprooting our family to the “back woods” of Lake County where schooling for the girls would be much less attractive.

With other strains in our relationship as well, we embarked upon a “trial (partial) separation”: I’d work mid-day Monday through mid-day Friday in Clearlake, return to Davis for the weekends on Friday afternoons, and head back to Clearlake on Monday mornings. We would try this for a year and then re- evaluate. This was a less than ideal situation, but I was able to establish myself in a general medical private practice with a full complement of patients from the start, and the girls were able to continue with their high-quality programs in Davis. This arrangement lasted through 1982.

In early ’83, Carolyn had a change of heart56 and we found a small private school in Lake County that we felt might work well enough for the girls. We put our house in Davis up for rent, bought a small house just minutes from the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary, and finally became active, local resident

56 On her own initiative, Carolyn decided to attend a weekend “No Remedy” seminar in Marin and was deeply impressed by the exercise of first “writing a letter to God,” and then writing “God’s answer.”

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members of Da Free John’s community a bit later in the spring. The strain on this doctor/dad/devotee dropped down a number of notches—at least temporarily—but, it wasn’t long before the many other demands outlined above began pressing in. For some months we relished being together again in a cozy home and received a friendly reception from devotees.

Stresses of a Rural Private Practice

However, as it turned out, the medical practice was extremely demanding: I ended up working 72 hour weeks with every third night and weekend on call, “carrying” three to five patients in the hospital at all times (meaning that my beeper could go off with a call from the nurses any time of day or night). This was a huge change from the comparatively laid-back four day weeks of out-patient practice I’d enjoyed the year before. Then, not long after I’d started working in Lake County, the IRS found reason to audit my 1980 tax return. This was highly stressful at first, but thankfully I soon realized I could engage the “relational practice” advocated in the community (to “stay in relationship at all times”) with the IRS auditor directly, relate to him or her without fear, and the situation was resolved fairly swiftly and without much expense.

However, with the purchase of a small home in Lake County in 1983, I was now managing mortgages on two homes (our home in Davis was now rented). Steadily declining health insurance reimbursements to doctors became the norm under Reaganomics/”managed care.” Forecast in my very first week in medical school, “health care reform” was now manifesting as considerably less pay to doctors—not a good situation for a family man with two mortgages.

My colleagues and I at the Clearlake Medical Center attempted to create a professional partnership with the pharmacy and the optometrist with whom we shared the building to upgrade the physical plant. It looked like a good idea initially, but after endless hours of deliberations between us, fees from consulting attorneys and accountants, and much paperwork, we all ended up losing money on the project and were never able to upgrade the building.

In the wake of the passage of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, property values had declined substantially and the equity we had been trying to accumulate in our home in Davis was wiped out. My tax accountant in Clearlake had proposed that claiming “accelerated depreciation” on the Davis rental would reduce my tax burden—good news at the time. However, just a few years later, when we prepared to move back East and I went to sell the home, now in a weakened real-estate market, the tax law required me to “recapture” that depreciation which led to an income tax bill I simply could not pay.

The net result of all these economic downdrafts was that I was forced to declare personal bankruptcy in 1988. Adding insult to injury, I later discovered that the attorney assigned as “trustee” to my “estate” was fraudulently abusing the system and delayed settlement of my case for several years. This, in turn, was a big factor in my subsequent divorce.

Da Free John Moves to Fiji

Roughly coinciding with our move to Lake County in 1983, the global Daist Community located and purchased (from the famous actor Raymond Burr) the ~4000 acre island of Naitauba (pronounced N-

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eye-tum-ba) in the Western Lau Group in Fiji as a permanent remote retreat sanctuary and home for Da Free John.57

Upon his arrival Da was welcomed by the resident Fijians (numbering around sixty) in a traditional kava- kava ceremony during which Da impressed everyone by sitting completely silent and still, in cross-legged posture, for over four hours straight. The ceremony included an extended explanation of who we considered Da to be, given by one devotee in English and translated into Fijian by another who had learned just enough Fijian to be effective. The Fijians soon accepted Da as being their new Tui, or sacred chief, with his name translated into Fijian for “The Adept of Love” as “Dau Loloma.”

Another memorable event occurred at the very end of 1983. As part of a dedication of a new “communion hall” bure (a Fijian thatched roof structure) built expressly for the Fijians, Da gave a talk, entitled, “Mark My Words,”58 that included a striking and expansive prophecy for the 20 years ahead—a prophecy that played a large role in the cultural and psychic life of devotees until nearing 2003, when it gradually became clear we would never be able to claim the prophecy fulfilled.

Stresses on our Family Unit

The Lake County Community of Da Free John was a pressure cooker. Virtually every waking hour was devoted to some aspect of the “life disciplines” that included a tithe of 10% of income, generally vegetarian diet, daily exercise, study, and meditation, weekly small group practice discussions, regular attendance at devotional ceremonies, formal weekend celebrations at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary every few months (involving extensive preparation), a formal service function, and, ideally, the cultivation of a “sacred art.” Over these years there were a number of dramatic events surrounding Da Free John’s activities that contributed more “heat” to all this such as the “Love of the Godman” Celebration described in the next section.

Later in 1984, in a dramatic shuffle, Da moved a number of his resident devotees in Fiji into an area previously occupied by pigs. The purpose was not somehow to imply that anyone was a pig, but rather to establish a different way for couples to relate to each other, breaking conventional assumptions about “being a couple.” The old building lent itself easily to renovation as a residence for the number of people, now separating physically from their partners, and needing a place to stay. This initiated the “Pigville” housing shuffle for all devotees, not only those in Fiji, that separated men and women into separate living quarters—a new “architecture of living” that was designed to help deepen our awareness of emotional/sexual habits.

In mid 1985, a scandal broke where Da, having been sued by several disgruntled former devotees, was now pilloried in the local San Francisco press—his picture featured on the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle and even on the popular Today Show on national television as “sex slave guru.” This was a time of heart-break and bewilderment for most of Da’s devotees. Many of us came to feel quite put adrift—shipwrecked.

Then, in early 1986, came “The Death Event” in Fiji in which Da appeared outwardly to die. Although he soon revived, he began communicating that he was now once again in a different spiritual relationship

57 This dramatic turn is described and illustrated on pages 82-87 of “See My Brightness Face to Face” (1997). 58 Found posted online 6/25/16 at http://archive.is/64bRM

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to devotees. Taking the name Da Love-Ananda and assuming the orange dress of traditional Sannyas renunciation, he undertook a prolonged fast, and then began a world tour beginning with a visit of several months to the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary in Lake County, California. What ensued was an unprecedented conflagration in the community, where the effect of Love-Ananda’s activity was to undo virtually all of the cultural, economic, and institutional structures that had previously grown up around him.

The following year, back on Fiji, Love-Ananda engaged in what he called the “Indoor Yajna” (“yajna” meaning a wide-ranging spiritual pilgrimage, like the one he had done “outdoors” in the US, Europe, and Australia the year before) characterized by discussions which were recorded, transcribed, and transmitted daily to the Lake County community as it struggled to get back onto “new feet.”

Also stressful for us was the sometimes harsh climate in Lake County: in the rain shadow of the coastal mountains, the County is quite dry. This makes for hotter summers and colder winters than we’d grown accustomed to in Davis and San Francisco—painfully reminding us of the hard winter we had experienced there at Yogaville West a decade earlier living on the very property that was now The Mountain of Attention Sanctuary.

During the dramas of 1986 (to be described more fully in the next chapter), Carolyn and I again drifted apart: I was strongly drawn to the intensified practice being offered by Love-Ananda whereas Carolyn felt deeply impacted once again by the apparent limits of my commitment to our family. These strains went on to intensify after our move East, and in 1990 we filed for divorce, but that’s getting well ahead of the story.

“Love of the God-Man” Celebration

Back in early 1984, before the scandal or the Death Event, Da Free John had returned from Fiji and invited the entire world-wide community to Lake County for a week-long “Love of the God-Man” Celebration. In order to accommodate all the devotees visiting from around the world, guests were parceled out among the dozens of households in Lake County. Six devotees from Australia and New Zealand were packed into our small home for that week. The event was something of a “trial by fire” for our family, an initiation into the often dramatic situations generated by the intensive, energetically expressive, and heart-felt devotional responses that were the “cultural norm” in the community.

Among the memorable events of that celebration was my first experience in setting up and staffing a first aid station for the nearly 1000 devotees who attended major events “in the tent” (again set up on the former tennis court at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary). Thankfully I had only minor “emergencies” to deal with.

One of the “tent events” was especially for children in the community. Parents in the community, subject to the same time pressures as everyone else, often had a very difficult time staying adequately attentive to the needs of their children, especially since most formal events with Da were for adults only. It was especially significant, therefore, when Da held events to which children were invited to “have Darshan” and “give gifts.” He made a deep impression on many of these young people, some number of whom are still devotees today. The children’s event during this celebration was the first time my daughter Emily had been in Da’s Company, making the event especially memorable for me.

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During that celebration the Laughing Man Magazine published by Da’s devotees convened the medical doctors in the community assembled from around the world for the celebration for a discussion of “radical healing.” In the months that followed, I was asked to write an introduction for the piece that was eventually featured in a special issue of the magazine: “Health Beyond Cure.” During the “round table,” the doctors in the community shared lessons learned in serving Da Free John and his Radiant Life Clinic. Taking part in the production of this article was especially instructive for me since, as noted above, I had not much personal contact with most of the more experienced doctors in the Clinic.

Particularly helpful was the discussion of what made “radical healing” different from either conventional medical or holistic approaches. The key was the capacity developed by genuine devotees to “be in communion,” the mind and body relaxed beyond problems, such that healing can occur spontaneously. This was especially to be engaged relationally in conjunction with the ancient practice of the laying on of hands. In contrast, both conventional and holistic practice tends to focus on a perceived problem and the dependency of the patient on the practitioner to identify and fix it: dubbed by Da “the doctor- patient game.” In the context of my clinical practice of medicine, I rarely had the opportunity to engage in the radical healing practice, but the principle of the conventional practices was made vividly clear in the incidents the doctors shared which resonated strongly with experiences I’d also had by then in my four years of intensive clinical practice.

Devotional Life in Lake County

In the community devotional life there was quite a bit of good news. Despite all the difficulties I’ve discussed, I continued to feel deeply inspired in the midst of the intensive daily routine by the richness and seemingly endless flow of instruction that seemed to pour constantly from Da Free John as his spoken and written teaching. Regular group devotional events were marked by feelings of heart-fullness that were deeply refreshing. On a regular basis I took these opportunities to reflect carefully on the words, the meanings, and the embodied engagement these events offered as sacred instruction from our beloved guru Da Free John.

I took this all to heart since I felt the way of life addressed every dimension of my being that I was aware of (and no doubt others as well). At the same time, my primary “service function” as a physician kept me in close contact with the ordinary human health issues of both my regular patients and of devotees. In both cases, I endeavored to “move beyond the Doctor-patient game” and serve my patients with care and to the best of my abilities.

Simultaneously, and seemingly as an integral part of this flow of spiritual instruction, Da continued to address what he saw as the critical deficiencies of “scientific materialism.” Not only had this long been a central issue in my life, my specific devotional service function kept me in close contact with the many scientific and health research topics I’ve outlined above. Thus I paid especially close attention to Da’s communications on this topic. Particularly memorable for me in this regard was the publication in 1984 of “The Transmission of Doubt: Talks and Essays on the Transcendence of Spiritual Materialism through Radical Understanding.” Here are two brief quotes:

Intellectual inquiry into the objective phenomena of experience certainly has its value, but psychic inquiry into the experiential universe is not only equally essential, it is primary, and it is more

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fundamental to the individual. Indeed, such psychic enquiry is absolutely essential for human happiness. (Page 64)

To transcend the limitations that are obvious at the present time, we must transcend all the historical alternatives. We must transcend the limited disposition of science that now dominates as well as the limited disposition of the orient that seems to be its primary alternative. In order to transcend all these limited features we must simply and directly observe and consider our condition as a whole, prior to making any of these limiting presumptions, prior to assuming or engineering our existence as a choice between the occidental and the oriental dispositions. We must conceive of our condition, or existence, as it is altogether. We must witness it and see that it is altogether existing and real in every dimension, not just in one dimension or feature. And our real existence, our free and happy existence, is to be realized only in the asana, the attitude, of our total Condition, rather than in our choice of a single aspect of that Condition. (Page 91)

Da’s call for us to embrace the whole of our lived experience resonated strongly with my ongoing impulse to continue living in my “two worlds.” Regularly refreshed in this orientation as coincident with my life as a devotee, I endured the various difficulties I encountered as “symptoms of purification” and soldiered on.

Meanwhile, however, some of the limitations of our devotional culture began to stand out:

Da’s move way away to Fiji meant that most of those who had been involved in previous years in the creation of the Radiant Life Clinic left with him as well. Thus, one other new devotee doc, Greg Higgins, and myself were left largely to our own devices to “pick up the slack” and manage locally the Clinic’s three major areas of responsibility identified by Da: clinical services to the devotee community now increasingly world-wide, education of the community in the life disciplines, and ongoing research of the many areas of interest (outlined above in section “Recruited to do Research for the Radiant Life Clinic”). Greg and I agreed that he would focus on the first, I the third, and we would share education—a plan that worked fairly well given that we were both “independent characters.” However, it also meant that we had to learn pretty much on our own many lessons that had already been learned, but not “passed on,” by members of the Clinic before us.

Devotees were supposed to help each other through the many challenges outlined above via weekly meetings of what were called “devotional groups.” These were composed typically of between four and ten “peers” of the same sex (where “peers” might mean devotees with some sense of shared history or affinity, or might sometimes mean a more random collection—new and relatively “unknown” devotees were more likely to end up in the more random groupings). In any case, the many demands on my time meant that I was often unable to attend my group, and when I did, I found them only very occasionally helpful. In retrospect, I suspect it was rather a “blind leading the blind” sort of situation.

The Scandal of 1985

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As mentioned above, in 1984 the Lake County community underwent a major housing shuffle referred to as “Pigville.” Megan had already gone off to the Communion’s experimental boarding school, The Garden of Lions, Carolyn and Emily moved into a room with Steve Claydon’s wife and daughter (who was about the same age as Emily), and I moved into a trailer with two other men. This was “the new architecture” that Da asked us to engage for a few months as an experimental way of deepening our “emotional-sexual self-understanding.” At the end of the experiment, however, rather than move back into the home we owned, we were asked to form a “household” with Steve Claydon and his wife and daughter.

Then, in early ’85, a sex scandal washed over our community like a tsunami. As noted above, several disgruntled former devotees brought civil charges against Da Free John that were picked up by the media and blown up into a major story. There is still a huge amount of coverage of all this on the internet today. I’ll not attempt to paint a full picture of the highly contentious issues that continue to be debated among those “trying to make sense” of the dramatic contrast between Da the Great Realizer and Da the manipulative sex fiend portrayed in the press. It must be emphasized, however, that for the media, having found a great source of sensational material in the horrific drama that played out in Jonestown in November of 1978, “gurus” and “cults” became prime targets for exposés everywhere. There were plenty of gurus around in those days to keep this media frenzy going for years. It probably helped them that in Da Free John they had another “Jones” to bring down.

My own response to this media debacle was this: I felt that I understood something about the tantric yogic principles behind the kind of sexual play that Da Free John had engaged with some of his most intimate devotees, and I trusted deeply his consistently demonstrated heart-orientation. I’d never once felt “abused” by him in the slightest. On the contrary, I felt his blessing whenever I “turned to him.” I really could not imagine that the hyperbolic stories in the press reflected what had actually taken place. However, although I could keep moving forward, there were many devotees who were stunned, deeply saddened, and at times bewildered by this turn of events—a turn that hounds the legacy of Adi Da to this day and has profoundly diminished his influence.

That said, the current Wikipedia article on Adi Da presents a fairly balanced picture. It contains a few things that strike me as likely wrong, particularly with regard to Franklin’s use of hallucinogens. I’m not convinced it was as extensive as is implied here but perhaps it was—I cannot know for certain. In the mid-80s I’d read the unedited first draft of Adi Da’s “The Knee of Listening” by special permission—the 1200 pages version before it got compressed down to 400 pages for the CSA Press first edition. As I recall, he did participate in LSD experiments at the VA Hospital, but I don’t recall reading that he did much LSD thereafter.

Optimizing Cellular Biochemistry for Health and Longevity

Not long after the 1982 publication of “Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,” by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, Da requested that the Radiant Life Clinic do in-depth research on the various longevity programs they proposed. Their work focused on the aggressive use of dietary supplements and various kinds of “cognitive enhancement” strategies. After much investigation, a few years later, we concluded that for all their promise we were not able to identify reliable evidence of safety, efficacy, and cost- feasibility among the many interventions that Pearson and Shaw and their many followers advocated. All the same, this did turn out to be a useful introduction to a field I later entered into more deeply: nutritional medicine.

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In 1985, in the course of my ongoing Clinic research, I came across the innovative work in treating cancer and addictions with selenium-lipid compounds of European-trained New York chemist Emanuel Rivici. After some extensive further investigation, I wrote up a twenty-six page report on his work and sent it to Da’s personal physician for consideration. I won’t go into the details here, but Revici’s work renewed my appreciation for how specific molecules can have powerful effects on human cellular and organismal function. This became a major theme in my life less than a decade later when I transitioned into the practice of nutritional medicine that I looked to base upon scientific understanding of cellular biochemistry.

“The Dawn Horse Testament”

The first edition of Da’s “Dawn Horse Testament” (DHT) was published in the fall of 1985. In it, he spoke in a voice markedly different from his previous works—and stylistically different as well, since the text was now filled with capitalizations as he continued his “creative work” with our language so as to better communicate his radical message. Despite the limited time in my daily routine for reading, I found this book to be a magnificent and original work.

As a result of my previous decade with Swami Satchidananda, I had some exposure to the ancient traditions of mantra yoga. I was familiar with the notion that mantra is to be distinguished from prose and poetry by virtue of having a sacred function—a unique kind of spiritually connecting and enlivening impact. In any case, the idea that “mantric force” can be carried by sound, or by written or spoken word, is an integral part of the “Great Tradition.” That may have made me unusually receptive to the new kind of “Work” that Da Free John began doing through the DHT—what I would describe as a much more deliberately mantric use of English.

I don’t believe there had ever been English like this written before: it looked weird on the page and it also sounded weird when recited. BUT, there was something about it. I can only say for myself that I felt reading the book as an opportunity to be enlivened and deepened in appreciation of the “Divine Domain” that Da Free John seemed so keen to share with his devotees.

“The Death Event”

Just a few weeks before my fortieth birthday, Da Free John underwent a dramatic “death event” after a period of intense frustration with the failure of his devotees to respond to his years of “teaching work”—this came right on the heels of his completing the “Dawn Horse Testament." The event has been summarized recently by former devotee and ongoing advocate of Adi Da, Ed Reither,59 in an essay titled “Failure in the Way of the Heart” that explores in some detail Da Free John’s prophetic words concerning the inevitable eventual “failure” of his work. Ed writes:

“Clearly, this is both a simple and complicated matter. For Adi Da, this failure took a very ominous turn when on January 11, 1986, in complete despair at what He felt to be the failure of His Life's Work, Adi Da Samraj fell to the floor in his house on his Hermitage Island in Fiji. He had fallen into a deep Yogic "Swoon,” in which only the faintest of life-signs were seen by the

59 http://www.beezone.com/intro.html

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doctors and devotees that ran to his aid. This incident, later to be known as the 'death event', marked a pivotal turning point in the way in which Adi Da would from that time forward 'work' with his devotees. This event marked the time in Adi Da's life when he moved away from what was known as his 'Teaching Demonstration' to what now would be called his 'Blessing' Work.

Later, Da wrote:

That submission to others became summarized in the Death Event in 1986 and was brought to an end there, and now a new Work continues as a potential, if people will make use of my Company. If they will not, there is no Work going on. In a moment this method was relinquished....due to the failure of My Teaching Work... this was a despair collapse bodily and emotionally... an utter relinquishment of the body...giving up the body… then the turnabout... the despair disappeared... no more giving the body up to death... I was simply (as always) ‘standing In and As my True Nature.’ Adi Da Samraj, 198860

It perhaps should be kept in mind that Adi Da taught in a world that, to many observers, is less than perfect! In the essay, My Work Is Necessary, but It Must Also Fail,61 it could be seen that Adi Da was prophesying his own failure and therefore his death. It seems a little “dark” to suggest this, but where does conditional existence leave all of us? Whatever the reasons, the outcome in this world is the same and we are only left with Divine Paradoxes.

Devotee: Master, when will you be satisfied? Adi Da: (with a smile) When you all glow in the dark!

After this event, Da Free John entered into seclusion, took the name Love-Ananda, fasted away a lot of weight, and began wearing the orange cloth symbolic of traditional sannyas renunciation. Stunned by the pettiness and nasty tone of the media witch hunt of the previous year, devotees were now stunned again to see the radical transformation that took place as Love-Ananda slowly emerged from seclusion in the spring of 1986.

Summary

What was the net effect of all this? This was the stage upon which the next major act of yoga science would unfold. It’s as if both my life and mind had been deepened by the “confrontation” of these years in order for something novel to emerge. One aspect of this was a new capacity for intuiting awareness as set apart from the pressures of life. And along with that capacity came a new appreciation for paradox in life, for richness of nuance, for depth of love, all wrapped in an elevated heart-aspiration. Da Free John was a most dynamic and inspiring teacher. As Da Love-Ananda, this dynamism became a fire storm consuming everything in its path and his transition from the one to the other culminated this difficult period for me.

60 Out of curiosity, I contacted Ed for a citation here. He wrote back that this is a composite of two parts: the first is a direct quote from a transcript of a classic 1988 talk Adi Da gave in the Hotel “There is Nothing Left But Ash;” the second a paraphrasing of the gist of what Adi Da as quoted from 1989 in Saniel Bonder’s Introduction to the 1991 edition of the Dawn Horse Testament on pages 16 and 17. He’s looking further into this. 61 Published in “Enlightenment of the Whole Body,” 1978, p158

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Forties—The Yoga Science SummaPrequel

Revelation in Western Faith Cathedral

“The Death Event” of January 11th, 1986 led Da to take up a renunciate lifestyle, do a long fast, start wearing orange exclusively, and change his name to (Swami) Love-Ananda. This was the initiation of what would be known as “the Sannyas62 Period” that lasted for most of that year. In late April, “The Naitauba Swami” (as some of us called him) came to Northern California and stayed for several months at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary—his several hundred acre rural retreat in Northern California located at the old Seigler Hot Springs resort where he had been based for most of the preceding years of his “Teaching Work” (1974-1985). As soon as he arrived, he initiated among his devotees an intense round of formal presentations—such as his first formal recitation of the “Love-Ananda Gita,” discussion groups, dietary restrictions, living and relationship re-arrangements, and meditation sessions all of which drew many hundreds of his devotees deeper into relationship to him.

About a month into that whirlwind, I pulled the midnight to 4 a.m. Sanctuary guard shift. At the pre- dawn shift change, I dashed down to Western Face Cathedral for the meditation session with Love- Ananda scheduled to begin at 4AM just as the doors were about to close. I found my way to an unoccupied place on the soft carpet at the very rear of the hall (the place was packed), the lights were turned off, and shortly, in the dark, I could hear the slight rustle of Love-Ananda taking his seat at the front, roughly eighty feet away from where I was sitting. Perhaps twenty minutes into the sitting, in continued pitch dark, in an unexpected moment, I was given to know with complete certainty that there was no actual separation between me and him; that he was me, and I him, simply put. Somehow, the love I had for him was him and me at the same time.

I understood that moment to signal an initiation into a deeper kind of heart-relationship with Love- Ananda than I had previously enjoyed. Whereas before I’d held myself as subject devotee with him as object of my devotion, the subject-object distinction had been shown directly in that moment to be false. Having seen that, I could not subsequently “un-see” it (as devotees might have put it) and resume my former stance. I came to appreciate that in order to honor this deeper reality, I needed to make a number of practical life changes, but I didn’t really know where to begin. I attempted to “step up” my engagement and take on new commitments in the community of practice, but I still had my busy medical and family obligations to maintain as well.

A few weeks later, shortly before our “tropical cyclone” Love-Ananda left Lake County on his Yajna (or world tour), I was handed a copy of the new book “Megabrain” by Michael Hutchison along with an “official” (i.e., “direct from Love-Ananda”) assignment for The Radiant Life Clinic to research and report on this book. At the time I was so completely preoccupied with all the things that he had asked us to do when he was there with us that it was only a couple of months later when the dust began to settle that I finally took a first look the book. You’ll see below how I subsequently construed the SummaParadigm paper (that I didn’t finish until 1989) as my report of the research I undertook on behalf of The Radiant Life Clinic into Michael Hutchison’s book.

62 Sanskrit for “formal renunciate”

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The Indoor Yajna

Love-Ananda left The Mountain of Attention in late May to visit his communities around the US, Europe, and Australia before returning to Naitauba in the late fall. The Lake County community living on and around the Mountain of Attention was in turmoil—Love-Ananda’s months among us had been something of a “shock and awe” display of how powerfully he could stimulate intense activity and drama among his devotees—something he had done with regularity throughout the preceding years of his “Teaching Work” and with which many devotees were quite familiar from those earlier years. He had effectively upended pretty much the whole of the complex pattern of community life, and the financial impact of implementing all the changes he made left the Northern California community in significant debt.

The winter of ’86-’87 in Lake County was thus exceptionally quiet as devotees struggled to raise the money to cover that collective debt, make sense of all that had occurred, and manage all the practical fall-out. We also received regular updates on Love-Ananda’s Yajna, as he moved around the globe like a whirlwind, but locally, we were, for the most part, “in recovery,” and the pace of community life fell way off.

Some months after his return to Naitauba, Love-Ananda held a four month series of dialogs in the summer of ’87 with his closest resident devotees—this period came to be known as “The Indoor Yajna.” As usual, these discussions were transcribed and distributed to the principle centers around the world where selections were read to the larger membership. As it happened, I was given access to the unedited transcripts, and I attempted to keep up with them in my effort to make sense of what had happened in the Cathedral the previous May. I still have two large three ring binders here in my office containing these transcripts—I’ve held onto them perhaps because of the turning point in my life they came to represent.

Without reviewing these many transcripts, my recollection of them is that the principle topic was “the self-contraction.” Love-Ananda was working, in his characteristically tireless way over many months, to help his devotees really “hear” his “radical argument” that our suffering is our own activity. In other words, in the face of experience, we are always and constantly generating a complex pattern of reaction. As the epitome of that reaction we create, in effect, a cramp, which he had illustrated from his very first public talk in 1972 with his hand clenched into a fist, a kind of implosion that is the “self- contraction” so vividly captured on the cover of the first edition of “The Knee of Listening.”

Reading those transcripts in the early morning cool of my study through that hot summer, I came to a deeper felt sense of the self-contraction. Based on my familiarity with biology, I interpreted the self- contraction as a complex expression of evolutionary pressures on living organisms that generate defensive mechanisms from the molecular level on up through our various levels of organization. I felt we could understand the organization of bodily energies, in a circumstance of evolutionary competitive pressures, as inevitably curling back upon themselves in an attempt on the part of the organism to defend itself and strengthen itself against competition. I saw this as the basis, seen plainly in the glorious complexity of biology, of what we find as a vast repertoire of defense mechanisms on every level of biological organization.

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The Harmonic Convergence

During that Summer of ’87, I read in the Brain/Mind Bulletin of an impending astrological event that was being widely publicized in New Age circles as “The Harmonic Convergence.” Here is what Google has to say about this today:

The Harmonic Convergence is the name given to one of the world's first globally synchronized meditation events, which occurred on August 16–17, 1987, which also closely coincided with an exceptional alignment of planets in the Solar System.

I decided to participate in this event in private retreat as an opportunity to contemplate more deeply what had been for me two outstanding events of the previous year: my moment of non-separateness in the Cathedral, and Love-Ananda’s ongoing call for us once and for all finally to “hear” his radical argument regarding the self-contraction—something he regarded as just the necessary first step in the authentic spiritual process he referred to as The Way of the Heart. Thus I engaged my daily morning meditation sessions over the period of the Harmonic Convergence and for some weeks thereafter with these two issues foremost in mind.

Since the community was still recovering from the previous year and still very much in “low gear,” it was clear to me that I would have to take full responsibility for my own practice, for the most part without help or input from others in the community of practitioners. And thus I began what I came to think of as my “Walkabout.” Here is Wikipedia’s thumbnail description of this term:

Walkabout historically refers to a rite of passage during which Indigenous male Australians would undergo a journey during adolescence, typically ages 10 to 16, and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months to make the spiritual and traditional transition into manhood.

In my perhaps characteristically “developmentally delayed” way (a decade or two late), something about this ritual seemed especially apt at this point in my life. The “wilderness” I felt I had to “inhabit” was my own complex mind. I felt I’d been graced to understand, based on Adi Da’s Blessings to that point, that the key to a deeper understanding of the two issues before me would be found via a deeper commitment to devotional inquiry than I had demonstrated previously. I felt this might lead to the discovery of some as yet unseen pattern operating in my own mind.

In order to fully engage my complex mind in the process (of hoped-for self-revelation), I began to sort and index the dozens of file boxes of material that had been collected over the previous decade by members of the Radiant Life Clinic—almost all of whom had left California to be with Love-Ananda in Fiji. Over the previous decade of my participation in the Clinic I’d become very familiar with all of its principle concerns and had come to feel those concerns as very much my own—principally:  To be a member in good standing of the RLC, comply with all necessary requirements for State licensure (be it as physician, nurse, chiropractor, acupuncturist, or other);  Develop expertise in optimizing bodily health and longevity for the sake of spiritual practice;  Find effective preventives and cures for the common diseases of aging;  Develop a deeper understanding of the “the esoteric anatomy” (which includes gross, subtle, and causal dimensions of the body-mind) and its role in spiritual practice.

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Thus, in addition to my daily meditations as noted above, in my spare time I slowly sorted through the many and diverse materials our Clinic members had assembled over the previous decade, comprising approximately two dozen bankers boxes full of files, and indexed them by topic using a HyperCard Stack that I developed for the purpose on my Mac Plus.63

One of my main personal interests, dating back to my years with Swamiji, was electro-biology. In the mid ‘70s, (as I describe above in the Section, “The Closing Years of My Twenties”), I’d written an article for the Integral Yoga Magazine on electro-psycho-physiology research done comparing biofeedback with mantra meditation. While in medical school a few years later I’d done an elective on psycho-physiology that focused on the emergence of biofeedback in the late ‘60s from the earlier work in experimental psychology on operant conditioning. Thus, as I worked through the Clinic files, I was especially interested in the many references to a wide variety of reported energy phenomena associated both with states of bodily health and disease, with psychological problems, as well as with spiritual experiences. In the Brain/Mind Bulletin I found references to efforts to develop methods for imaging these bodily energies.

The visionary work of artist Alex Grey, “Sacred Mirrors,”64 was completed in this same time frame and perhaps the most famous from that series of paintings illustrated the etheric level of the human energy system:

Figure 7. “Psychic Energy System” from “Sacred Mirrors” by Alex Grey

Also published around the same time was the first major publication of former NASA engineer turned energy healer Barbara Brennan, “Hands of Light.”65 Common features in the work of these two authors were images of the human energy field, widely diffused in the New Age community. Especially provocative for me was the notion that the overall shape of the human energy field is that of a spherical vortex and illustrated in greater detail in Barbara Brennan’s book:

63 Probably recoverable from the old SCSI hard drive I still have. 64 Later published in “Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey,” 1990, Inner Traditions, Rochester VT. 65 “Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field,” Barbara Brennan, 1988, Bantam.

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Figure 8. Spherical vortex images from the author’s SummaParadigm paper

What I began to appreciate, in the fall of 1987, was that this might be the literal bodily energetic structure of Love-Ananda’s “self-contraction.” Curled upon itself into something like the basic shape of a clenched fist, the spherical vortex has only an apparent “inside” and “outside” since essentially it is a form that swirls the outside into its inside and then back out again. It seemed to me to be a good fit. It also seemed to suggest a new way of understanding non-separateness—the “inside” of the spherical vortex isn’t really separate from its “outside” and there is no thing at its very center.

Systems, Chaos, and Fractals

Other topics that became wildly popular during this same period were systems theory, chaos, and fractals. Regularly featured in Brain/Mind Bulletin, these were hailed as offering new scientific windows into the vast complexities of nature. I had a VHS copy of the “Infinite Zooms” film that takes us deep into the Mandelbröt set in then state-of-the-art color graphics using the resources of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications—it was mesmerizing.

I read carefully through James Gleick’s popular 1987 introduction “Chaos: Making a New Science.” I also read Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger’s 1984 “Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialog With Nature” that gave a popular introduction to the sophisticated work chemist Prigogine had done to reveal how the laws of thermodynamics could be understood as allowing order to emerge from chaos. And I read the two books by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana “Autopoiesis & Cognition: The Realization of the Living” (1979), and “The Tree of Knowledge: biological basis of human understanding” (1984). These books impressed upon me how a unified account of biology and psychology might be possible and I began to think in terms of a hierarchical triad of kinds of systems with increasingly complex dynamics— building on Maturana & Varela’s terminology:  complex self-organizing systems,  autopoietic living systems, and  reflective cognitive systems.

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This triad became a recurrent theme in the years and decades to follow as yoga science slowly took on greater definition.

The New Paradigm Movement

Yet another hot topic during this time, especially in New Age circles, was “the New Paradigm.” It seemed self-evident to those inclined to New Age thought that their ways of thinking stood in stark contrast to those of “the mainstream.” Over the course of the preceding twenty years, what had originally been a small but vocal counterculture in the 1960s had morphed into a substantially larger, but still mostly peripheral, New Age movement. Finding ways to legitimize the new ways of thinking became a major pre-occupation for New Age leaders. The “New Paradigm” emerged as one rubric among these efforts.

Distinguished neurosurgeon and academic Karl Pribram made a key, if unwitting, contribution to this movement with his “holographic theory” of brain function, which he first began to articulate in the 1970s.66 This became one of the first candidate “New Paradigms”—one in which New Age thinkers could find great resonance—even literally since “vibrations” and “harmonics” were already popular notions. Drawing on the “classic” work of Thomas Kuhn67 they appropriated (and I argue mis-appropriated) Kuhn’s concept of “paradigm shift” as a key feature in the history of science. There were a flurry of publications on the putative emergence of a “new paradigm” that included, prominent among them for me, Ken Wilber’s seminal contribution to the discussion in ReVision Magazine vol 9, issue 1, Summer-fall 1986.

However, I decided to do my own careful reading of Kuhn and came to discover that his definition of “paradigm” was at odds with the one in common use in the New Age. Whereas the term “paradigm” was being widely used in the sense of a new conceptual model (or new worldview), Kuhn had very specifically used the term to refer to a concrete result of scientific experiment that is a “universally recognized scientific achievement that for a time provides model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”68 I was not seeing any such “concrete results of scientific experiment” being talked about in New Age circles.69

Along with my study of Kuhn, I'd been contemplating the question, “is consciousness a new paradigm for science and if so, how?” Could a “science of consciousness” become some kind of "new science of man?" This seemed to be the crux of the matter: how could science, committed as it is to the objects of experience, even begin to tackle a “science of consciousness” where consciousness is understood to be the essence of our subjectivity? In other words, how can some “thing” inherently subjective become an object of scientific research?

66 For an overview of this history, see “A Holographic View of Reality,” by David S. Walonick posted at http://www.statpac.org/walonick/reality.htm 67 “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” 1962, University of Chicago Press 68 Kuhn, op-cit, pX. 69 Two caveats are perhaps called for here: 1) Pribram’s work continued to develop and did have something of a genuinely paradigmatic impact in neuroscience in the ‘90s (see the article by Walonick referenced above), and 2) the New Age definition of paradigm was so widely diffused that it is now one of the usages readers will find in Wikipedia.

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While I was busy with all this reading and questioning, I was also continuing my spiritual practice. Indeed, my Walkabout retreat was thoroughly interwoven with the devotional orientation, practice, and enquiry of the daily schedule of puja, service, study, and meditation—core patterns in the devotional life of devotees that gradually had been set back in place following the disruptions and aftermath of the events of 1986. Thus, while my mind was deeply engaged with these scientific questions, I was at the same time looking to deepen my spiritual practice. Underlying these parallel efforts was a growing certainty that the non-separation I had experienced in the event in the Cathedral with Love-Ananda was in some way key to something new about both the scientific questions and the spiritual process.

The Scale-Re-entrant Fractal Vortex Vision—Fall 1987

My daily practice was not only to study the new currents of thought, but also to “feel into” them— applying Love-Ananda’s language and injunction—by entering as deeply as I could into meditation on them, allowing the body and mind to relax as completely as possible, and, in effect, invoking the synthetic and intuitive capacities of “higher mind.” That was my best understanding of the enquiry I was capable of at the time.

One morning some months into my Walkabout an insight leapt out at me: the spherical vortex is both a fractal form across scales, and those scales are “re-entrant” (meaning that somehow, the largest and smallest scales are directly connected). This was a vivid day-time flash (as we might have said in those days), a vision of what I described immediately thereafter as the “scale-re-entrant fractal vortex.” This came on the heels of reading the various books mentioned above in the context of my ongoing Clinic files project and the overall twin objectives of my Walkabout retreat. I’d been reflecting on how it all might fit together when, out of the blue one day, sitting in my study, I saw (somehow)  the spherical vortex, replicated via fractal “self-similarity” across scales;  the hierarchy of systems noted above—complex, autopoietic, reflective—nested across scales, each arising within the other; and  the scales themselves as “re-entrant,” meaning the largest and smallest scales come back together, as in the Uroboros:

Figure 9. Images of the Uroboros—classic (L), and “Cosmic” (R)

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Perhaps you will understand my delight when twenty years later, in 2007, I discovered that pioneering cosmologist Joel Primack and his wife Nancy Abrams had come up with “The Cosmic Uroboros” 70 shown above on the right that beautifully illustrates the “scale re-entrant” notion.

Their color design was based on a sketch Nobel physicist Sheldon Glashow had drawn in 1982 while reflecting on his Nobel work (unifying the electro-magnetic and the weak fundamental forces) with New York Times journalist Timothy Ferris. He had been struck for years by the image of the Uroboros and how it aligned with the way in which the universe in its beginning at the Big Bang itself started out at the smallest end of the size scale.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the Cosmic Uroboros, so here is the original graphic done from Glashow’s sketch:

Figure 10. From Sheldon Glashow’s sketch of the “Cosmic Uroboros”

I eventually came to feel that I had seen something important about the structure of the mind itself, its “mind-stuff,”71 the time-mind,72 space-time-mind, or space-time/awareness, in which case we’re referring to a vast complexification of the spherical vortex on a cosmological scale—a primordial spherical vortex self-complexified into a vast array of fractal forms spanning the entire scale spectrum.

70 Featured in their “View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos,” Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, Riverhead Books, 2007. 71 This term was coined by the famous late 19th Century British mathematician, Arthur Cayley, whose “Construction” of the complex algebras with Leonard Eugene Dixon we’ll revisit below. He was also the first to introduce the notion that space might itself have a structure—an idea that was picked up and credited not long thereafter by Albert Einstein. I first saw the term “mind-stuff” in one of the first books on yoga that I read, in 1969, “The Science of Yoga: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,” by chemist and Theosophist I. K. Taimni, 1961, Quest Books. 72 I first proposed that Time=Mind at the 2011 SAND Conference (details will be found at p128 below).

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There is a contemporary depiction of a similar notion—the spherical vortex as a fractal self-similar form across cosmological scales (but without the “scale re-entrant” idea) rendered in state-of-the-art video graphics (focusing visually on the spherical more than the fractal). New Age web personality Foster Gamble says that he has been “obsessed” with the spherical vortex for decades.

Here’s a link to Foster’s childhood vision (not unlike my own described earlier in this section): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0kBHcHxXZw

A bit fuller description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7wkgnlgjoY

More recently I've begun to wonder how these vortex structures in space-time-mind create themselves—are thus “self-constructing”—and having self-constructed, they self-complexify. Thus, cosmic evolution happens as such structures gradually move up the scale spectrum from matter, to life, to sentience, and to us; or, in the terms I was using back in 1987, from complex, to autopoietic, to reflective systems.

Hiatus & Move Across Country: 1988 – 1990

Returning to my chronological narrative, Carolyn and I decided in early 1988 that we should move back to the East Coast to seek better job opportunities for her and schooling opportunities for our younger daughter Emily than were available in economically depressed Lake County. In preparation for yet another transcontinental move, we decided that we would aim for the Southernmost and the most temperate portion of the Northeast Megalopolis (the “conurbation” that stretches from Boston down to Washington DC) that we both considered “home base.”

Thus I flew to Washington, DC and in a few days located a good job at a busy out-patient clinic in Manassas Virginia. Back in Lake County, Carolyn and I sent Emily ahead by air, loaded a U-Haul truck with all our belongings with our car on a tow trailer behind, and headed East.73 Once in the Washington area, we identified Fairfax, Virginia as having a “best” middle school for Emily and located an apartment in that school district. Fairfax was a suburb with a reasonable commute down to my job in Manassas, and Carolyn found editorial work building on the volunteer experience she’d had with the Dawn Horse Press.

However, Carolyn and I continued to struggle with the impact of the bankruptcy we’d been forced to declare in California, still complicated by the delay in getting the case settled brought about by the corrupt attorney assigned as the trustee of our “estate.” We also struggled with deep ambivalences we’d come to feel about our relationship to Love-Ananda who seemed to have become uncomfortably more and more demanding since the “Divine Emergence” initiated by the “Death Event.” After long and painful deliberations, Carolyn decided against remaining as a devotee whereas I decided to re-affirm my participation. Along with these decisions we felt it would be necessary for us to undergo another trial separation—but this time with a considerably stronger expectation (than in 1982) that we would eventually decide to divorce.

73 This trip was made memorable by a second visit for me to the Grand Canyon, and by our taking turns reading out loud the historical novel “Sarum,” by Edward Rutherfurd—portraying Salisbury England across thousands of years beginning with the last Ice Age up until 1985—thus feeding my nascent interest in the broadest sweeps of history, which later became so important for the yoga science.

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Thinking to advance my medical career, in the fall of 1990 I took a position with a medical group—Vein Clinics of America—based in Chicago that was looking to open clinics around the country to offer an innovative therapy for various kinds of venous disease. They asked me to attend a three month training program in Chicago which precipitated Carolyn’s and my decision in favor of a trial separation. During those months living as a bachelor in Chicago, I intensified my study and devotional practice, served as liaison between Love-Ananda (now using the name, Da Avabhasa74) in Fiji and one of our Radiant Life Clinic doctors engaged in a radical rejuvenation research project75 in India, and composed, at long last, a draft of my report on Michael Hutchison’s “Megabrain” that became “The SummaParadigm” paper described in the following section.

Over the holidays of 1990-1991, Carolyn and I decided to continue the trial separation on my return from Chicago by my moving into the Community ashram in Darnestown, Maryland. There I lived in the basement with several other bachelors for a number of months, now commuting into Chevy Chase to the medical building that housed the Vein Clinics office I was initially assigned to upon completion of my training. Meanwhile, word of my separation from Carolyn was making its way via the high-speed grape vine of the Community to the several “match-makers” among our number. I had barely moved into the Darnestown Ashram when I got a call from Fiji asking, “How would you like to move to Fiji and marry Susan Pottish?”

I firmly declined the invitation, insisting that I was still married! However, the seed had been sown, and when, only a few months later Carolyn and I made the decision to divorce, I was again invited to make a connection with Susan who had, by then, moved back to California from Fiji. On short notice, I flew to California one weekend for a date with Susan, discovered a strong mutual attraction and many shared interests, and we agreed to take an amusing next step: consult the astrologer in the Community—she had a strong reputation for “getting it right” when it came to couple’s compatibility.

In a three-way phone conference several weeks later, Susan and I were astonished and delighted to hear that we were a “near perfect fit” (and so our twenty five years since has proven). Not long thereafter, Susan came East to visit her ailing father in New York City, did a week-end train detour down to visit me, we enjoyed a “cosmic kiss on a tree stump” under the stars on the night of Mother’s Day, 1991, outside the Ashram in Maryland (now located in Potomac), and “the deal was sealed.” Several months later she moved across country and we rented a small apartment together near the Ashram in Potomac where we lived until we moved back to California in 1994.

I’m moved at this juncture to elaborate a bit on what an incredibly graceful relationship Susan and I have enjoyed and how much I appreciate her. Blessed with great looks, sharp mind, financial good fortune, and a heart of gold, Susan has been a full partner in the emergence of yoga science over the past quarter century we’ve been together. Over some thousands of “breakfast seminars” (almost daily since around 2003) she and I have discussed together virtually every single aspect of yoga science. With

74 See Table of Principal Names of Adi Da, Appendix 2 75 This was an especially important incident in the extended “Kayakalpa Project” of the Radiant Life Clinic that attempted (unsuccessfully) to discover and implement the details of the radical rejuvenation process described in “Maharaj: A Biography of Sriman Tapasviji Maharaj, a Mahatma who Lived for 185 Years,” 1986, Dawn Horse Press, which includes an extensive introduction by the author of this memoir—a writing project I undertook in 1985 on request by the Editorial department, and which included some extensive back and forth with Love-Ananda.

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her keen interest and probing mind Susan has helped clarify many key points. She may see herself as “just a humble biofeedback therapist,” but she is extremely sharp and caring. Thank you, Susan!

“The SummaParadigm” Paper: 1990

In the fall of 1990, with encouragement from a fellow devotee in my men’s group at the Darnestown ashram in a position of community leadership, I attempted to put down on paper a summary description of what I’ve described above took place in 1987, and what I felt were my key discoveries. I thought of this paper as my long-overdue report on Hutchison’s “Megabrain,” published in 1986. The book consists of an in-depth review of various efforts underway at the time to boost brain performance—especially via various kinds of acoustic and electrical stimulation technologies.76

I composed a draft report during my Walkabout as an experiment, composed in the form of a technical scientific paper, and circulated it among some of my fellow devotees. With some helpful feedback from them,77 I submitted a second draft to a conference of “Advocates” of Love-Ananda held in Germantown Maryland, October 19-21, 1990. However, there was, right at that moment, a new crisis brewing in the Community,78 and as a result my paper received only cursory attention in the midst of the hubbub. I was also totally occupied with the training program in Chicago. That and a number of other practical affairs led me to set the paper aside.

Re-reading “The SummaParadigm” now, I find there are quite a few things there that still resonate. A seed had sprouted in that “moment of sameness” in the Cathedral in May 1986—a sprout that has since grown into the Yoga Science Project and the Yoga Science Foundation. This paper was my first attempt to articulate my discoveries. Since then I have often found myself reflecting on the following statement that I first wrote in that 1990 draft:

Themes articulated here are still very much alive and I find that I still stand by that statement of 1990, most particularly with regard to the following six points:

76 For an overview of what happened to Michael later (an accident left him quadriplegic, but he went on to develop a unique and effective yoga practice to the point of a remarkable spiritual awakening) see http://megabrainworld.com/ and especially Thom Hartmann’s moving 17 min video tribute following Michael’s passing in 2013. 77 My favorite response was from George Greer who said Zen-ly, “very much like a bone.” This was a humorous reference to one of Love-Ananda’s critiques of his devotees to the effect that we tend to take his teaching, go off on our own, and gnaw on it like dog with a bone. Spot on, really. My “excuse” was that neither Love-Ananda nor any of his devotees were, to the best of my knowledge, interested in what I felt (and still feel) were the important issues being considered in the SummaProject. 78 This crisis was part of a response on the part of Da Avabhasa to the events of the US-led Desert Storm invasion of Iraq.

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1. the importance of the history of esoteric schools of spiritual growth; 2. spiritual transmission as a kind of ultimate education; 3. the guru—disciple relationship; 4. the psychophysics of sadhana (yoga practice) 5. as an applied science; and 6. the global (potential) role for spiritual awakening.

Another point that stands out on re-reading is the connection between the spiritual process and the creative process as Bubba Free John had described his own sadhana in his first book, his autobiography, “The Knee of Listening.”79 The suggestion here is that when it comes to further analyzing and characterizing the spiritual process scientifically, it may be valuable to keep in mind the classical characterizations (and any more updated characterizations and understandings developed since) of the creative process. Here is the formulation I used back then—the five stages of the creative process from Mavromatis:80  an original intuition,  total immersion in the “problem,”  use of altered states of consciousness,  the often mysterious creative breakthrough, and  subsequent consolidation. So when we speak about development, both in terms of personal and spiritual growth, of both individuals and of collectives, these features of the creative process may also be characteristic of the growth process.

The SummaParadigm section of the conclusion of the paper suggests that we might understand “the Realizer” as the SummaParadigm. The idea here is that if we accept Kuhn’s definition of paradigm as a concrete result of scientific experiment, and accept the spiritual process as a most radical (or “summa”) kind of “scientific experimentation,” then anyone who awakens to full realization may become the “paradigm case” for a community of spiritual practice. It appears that something like this has occurred on many occasions throughout history: rare individuals willing and able to engage the experiment necessary to understand themselves to the point of full realization, communicating their experiment and its fruit to the best of their abilities, sometimes give rise to a community of practice that follows the paradigm of the founder.

Another thing perhaps to follow up on would be what John Archibald Wheeler referred to as a “law without law.” A paragraph in the SummaParadigm section of the conclusions deals with the issue Wheeler saw of “self-reference hiding quietly at the heart of modern science.” Wheeler had speculated that the laws of physics must ultimately also account for our capacity to describe them. He argued therefore that an ultimate law of physics would never be found since it would necessarily be self- referential. Thus he speculated about the possibility of “a law without law” that would avoid the self- referential paradox. I added in a footnote:

“Self-referential paradoxes are to be avoided because they appear to generate logical loops that go nowhere. For example consider the old trick of a card with a brief sentence on one side, “what is on the other side of this card is true.” Whereas on the other side are the words, “what is on the other side of this card is false.” Consider this for a few moments and you'll get

79 Jones, op cit. 80 Drawn from “Hypnogogia” (’87) by Andreas Mavromatis

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a taste of the self-referential paradox. My favorite is the one I came up with years ago that I dubbed “the one sentence proof of the existence of God”: there is an exception to every rule.81

In other words, to say “there is an exception to every rule,” is to assert a rule. If true, then there must be an exception to this rule as well: i.e., a rule without exception—which would be an “absolute” (like God is an absolute), which contradicts the rule. Thus the statement is simultaneously false and true. This is characteristic of “self-referential paradoxes.” These kinds of logical paradoxes were explored in depth by Bertrand Russell in his famous “Principia” with Whitehead. In order to “tame these monsters” and make them useful, he found a way to place them in a larger framework—his Theory of Types.

It was only twenty years later that I learned from Kent Palmer how this issue of “self-referential paradox” that had so fascinated me in this late ‘80s period had been an important topic of philosophic debate at the turn of the Twentieth century. In the ‘70s Russell’s “Theory of Types” had been the foundation upon which Kent had built his own theory of “meta-levels” that became a key tool for yoga science later on (see the “Sixties” chapter).

Plunging into Alternative Medicine

Susan and I had been living in Potomac only a brief while with me commuting to the Vein Clinics office in Chevy Chase when we began to feel a significant negative economic impact of three major world events: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Desert Storm invasion of 1990, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For me the economic impact was felt in that insurance reimbursements for the mostly “elective” procedures we were doing at Vein Clinics were drastically cut back—it turned out “civilian” insurers were also being used heavily by US Military personnel and they were seeing a huge increase in claims and cash outflow. The Chevy Chase clinic saw a significant fall-off in clients, and I was relocated to Vein Clinic’s locations first in Baltimore, then in Philadelphia. This worked for less than a year.

In the fall of 1992, I researched possible work options, negotiated a friendly separation from Vein Clinics, and finally took the plunge into alternative medicine. The stature of the field had come up considerably with the establishment by the US Congress in 1991 of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, just up the road from the Vein Clinics Chevy Chase office. Thus, I felt that the risks associated with this move82 were perhaps now manageable. I received a friendly reception at the Annandale Medical Center directed by the experienced nutritionist John Stauch, PhD. I joined his staff and proceeded to get intensive “on the job training” in the field that I began thinking of as “nutritional medicine.”

I looked to base my practice of nutritional medicine on the extensive clinical experience of such pioneering physicians as Jonathan Wright and Alan Gaby at their Tahoma Clinic in Washington State, and on the deep understanding of clinical applications of cellular biochemistry pioneered by Jeffrey Bland, PhD. I took formal training and certification in chelation therapy through the American College for

81 As a rule, the statement implies a rule without exception… 82 In 1992 I was well aware that alternative medical practice was frowned upon by the medical mainstream. Over the coming few years, as I myself entered the field, I became even more acutely aware of the “risks” involved— especially after reading the deep exposé by journalist P. Joseph Lisa of, as he describes, “collaboration” between major institutions in the US to “protect consumers” from “drugless” and “unproven” therapies in his landmark 1994 book “Assault on Medical Freedom”.

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Advances in Medicine. This was a heady time for me. Nutritional medicine, involving as it does the inconceivably complex interactions of genes, cellular biochemistry, metabolism, endocrinology, immunology, and neurochemistry with a vast array of the molecular constituents of foods (and supplements), was a deep intellectual challenge. I loved it—at least at first. There was, in addition, a huge array of new kinds of testing procedures available to monitor the status of various cellular and organ systems—each of which required learning how to interpret the results into “actionable items” for clinical intervention.

Discovering ISSSEEM and Subtle Energy Science

Another exciting new opening took place in those years, the launch of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM). Formed in late 1989, anticipating the “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War,83 ISSSEEM aimed initially to set a high scientific standard for its work, publish a peer-reviewed professional journal, and hold an annual conference.

I first heard about this new organization from the Brain/Mind Bulletin and became a member right away. The first Annual Conference was held in 1991 and was considered a great success. I attended the second Conference in Boulder Colorado in 1992 and came away with mixed feelings: it seemed to me that the level of enthusiasm voiced at the Conference from the podium about the establishment of the Office of Alternative Medicine was out of proportion—I was certain that ISSSEEM would face a steep up- hill struggle in its effort to make “subtle energy” research eligible for serious funding and scientific legitimacy, no matter what kinds of “scientific evidence” they might produce.

That said, when it finally came time to begin seeking out critical peer review of the Summa/yoga science in 2006, ISSSEEM was the first organization I turned to. They were a lively, welcoming, and heart-full group. They were consistently encouraging and helpful. They eventually asked me to serve as Board Chair, first “Temporary,” then “Acting,” and finally “Transition (final).” I ended up being in charge of the process of the disposition of assets when ISSSEEM dissolved itself in 2012 to become the International Research Division of Holos University Graduate School.

Called to Retreat in Fiji

Ulimately, far more important than ISSSEEM for me was a phone call I received while in Boulder from my daughter Megan, by then living in Fiji on Naitauba, which was now renamed Love-Anandashram. She reported that over several days of recent conversations with Da Avabhasa (after the name change of 1990) she had been asked repeatedly to her face, and with great force, “why hasn’t Scott come on retreat?” Adding, no doubt, more mischievously, “Looks like you’ll be the one to bring him The Father Force.” (This refers to the term in Da’s teaching for the side of parenting that includes the enforcement of necessary disciplines.)

Thus, in late 1992, I began to get serious about “going on retreat.” I was dubious at first. I had seen many devotees go through the very extensive preparations, and the travel was costly, but mainly I simply could not imagine how I would get the required full month off from my busy medical practice— I’d not taken more than a few days off at a time since I first began medical school! As it turned out,

83 Which, it should be noted, never materialized.

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however, when I mentioned taking a month off to John Stauch, he saw no problem at all, and pointed out that while I was gone I could continue to make money since my several dozen IV-chelation patients could continue their treatments with stand-in supervision by one of the other doctors at the center. A path opened up!

Shortly after the start of 1993 I was advised that August would be the best month for me to go on retreat and I began engaging more intensively in all the many practices expected of a devotee qualified to go on a three-week meditation retreat in Da Avabhasa’s Company on Naitauba. Despite the tedium of the many practical arrangements to be made, the process of preparation became more and more joyful and I could feel a familiar sense of “being in a more direct relationship to Da” growing in intensity as the months counted down.

On my own, I made the decision to engage in a daily devotional practice of recitation of the “Dawn Horse Testament”—by then in the form of the magnificent 8½”x 11” hard-bound 1991 Revised Standard Edition. Over the course of the spring of 1993, I recited out loud, alone, in my study in Potomac, the entire text. It is difficult to describe the effect this had on me. In the previous chapter I described the arrival of the first edition in 1986, in the period between the Great Scandal and the Death Event. Now what stood out was the deeply uplifting “mantric” force that I felt arising in the act of actually speaking out loud the peculiar but powerful language that Da Avabhasa used in this volume. I felt with certainty that I was thus actually connecting with him, as he so clearly states in the book itself is always possible via just such devotional recitation.

The retreat itself was a dramatic tale that could be told in detail at some other time perhaps. The impact on me was that I felt renewed and deepened in my love for Da, and perhaps newly capable of responding to him. However, no sooner had I returned to the Annandale Medical Center than I became aware of irregularities in billing procedures. During the fall of ’93 I fretted a great deal about this since I found John Stauch unresponsive to my concerns. Susan and I resolved to move to California as soon as Emily was ready to enter college that fall.

Move To Fairfax, California

In yet another graceful trans-continental move, after helping Emily move into her freshman dorm at the University of Virginia in late August 1994, Susan and I drove to California. We’d sent our stuff ahead in a moving van, and before the van arrived we located a rental home in Fairfax, a Marin County suburb of San Francisco. I’d earlier flown to California and landed jobs working part-time in two well-established San Francisco area alternative medical clinics. There I continued my “on-the-job-training” in nutritional medicine.

Not long after this move, Susan and I discovered the “Artist’s Way” process—popular in Marin County at the time—described in the book with the full title, “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” by Julia Cameron (1992, Barnes & Noble). The objective of this twelve week process is to “make your life into a work of art.” It involves flexible application of two basic tools:  the morning pages: a daily discipline of writing in longhand, first thing in the morning, three pages of whatever comes to mind  the artist dates: blocks of time (between several hours and a full day in length) set aside specifically to “let the inner artist out to play”—preferably on a weekly basis.

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Combined with these, there are week-by-week instructions in the book on various additional exercises designed to nourish your “inner artist.”

This process was attractive to me, the would-be yogi scientist, because in writing the “SummaParadigm” (as described above) I’d come to a deep appreciation of the many parallels between the “spiritual process” and the “creative process.” Now that my life seemed to be settling into a new pattern, I was moved to engage my life more deliberately in these terms. Susan and I shared many interests, so, she too took up the daily writing practice, and together we shared memorable “artist dates”—weekend afternoons outdoors, sitting in folding chairs overlooking the Pacific from the top of Bolinas Ridge a short drive from our home in Fairfax.

There were several themes recurrent in my morning pages and the contemplations triggered by the process: my ongoing fascination with the interface between science and yogic spiritual practice, and how genuine scientific research might be turned to such an enterprise. I began to imagine how an independent research organization might be set up, and, most importantly, how it might be funded by the licensing of intellectual property developed by its research activities—a dream way beyond my capacities at that juncture, but at least a conceivable way forward for the SummaProject.

Rediscovering Eames’ “Powers of Ten” Film

After our move back to California in August of 1994, my medical practice in San Francisco was a bit slow to take off, and one day I ran across an announcement for an open showing of short computer graphics films at the annual SIGGRAF Conference in San Francisco (an organization devoted to digital graphics). I took a few hour leave from the office to attend the show. I was delighted by the latest version of Pixar’s short “Luxar Jr.” – the friendly little swing-arm lamp. I was even more delighted, however, by a new color version of my already much-loved classic film by Charles and Ray Eames, “Powers of Ten,” which I had first seen over fifteen years earlier, during my brief stay in Washington DC way back in the summer of 1969

At that time, I’d paid another visit to the “Tin Shed” of the National Air Museum. I was especially drawn to a new exhibit featuring a ten minute black and white film: “A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe” by the (I learned later were) well known commercial designers Charles and Ray Eames. The film takes the viewer on two zoom- journeys, moving smoothly across powers of ten from the view a few feet above a picnicker dozing in a lakeside park in Chicago: the first journey takes us out to the limits of the visible universe, the second in to the nucleus of a carbon atom in the hand of the sleeping picnicker. It offers a remarkable perspective on things, the likes of which I’d never seen before.

Some years later, I’d found the film featured again at the massive new addition to the Washington Mall, the National Air and Space Museum that opened with much fanfare in 1976. I was again taken with the unique effect the film had on me: it was as though another dimension of our existence was being opened up—a “zoom dimension,” if you will. The film seemed to make obvious that in addition to the usual parameters we use to locate things in our world (following Descartes), the x, y, and z axes in space, and the t axis in time, we also need to consider another “where” in terms of relative size. This film thus became a seminal influence for the later development of yoga science by offering a way to begin thinking scientifically about the universe as a whole, across all its scales, that is simultaneously “vast and

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profound,” from the largest down to the smallest. My readers are encouraged to stop reading here and view the short film on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKGnsoF1kKM.

Play with Toffler’s “Third Wave” & Ken Wilber’s AQAL

Much was made in the US of the “Republican Takeover” in the 1994 mid-term elections. As a result, Newt Gingrich was on the cover of Time Magazine late in the year and the lead article featured the long friendship between Newt and futurist Alvin Toffler. I’d read and enjoyed Toffler’s “Third Wave” sometime after it was first published in 1980, so I got a copy of his then latest book, “Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century,” (1990, Bantam), and enjoyed it as well. I got to thinking, “What would happen if I plot Toffler’s three waves, in terms of years ago, on log84 paper? Might it be possible to “linearize”85 what was an obviously accelerating set of waves?”

I dug around in my files for some log paper I’d been carting around since high school and found that on a simple log-log plot, indeed, Toffler’s three waves formed a rather nice straight line. This got me to thinking: what happens if I extrapolate this line? Could I predict when the “Fourth Wave” might occur? In short order I saw that there was no “predicting” of any kind possible from a “time ago” logarithmic plot—a “Fourth Wave” would inevitably be followed by the fifth and the sixth and so on, in an accelerating sequence into shorter and shorter times before the present, never getting to now, let alone into any “future.” The result seemed amusing, but I didn’t see a way to make anything of it. So I set it aside and went about my otherwise busy life.

Not long thereafter I ran across Ken Wilber’s “Sex, Ecology, & Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution” (SES) (1995, Shambhala). As I read slowly through this intellectual feast of a book and learned of his AQAL scheme for the first time,86 I began to wonder if there might be a relation between my log plot of Toffler’s Waves and some of the great evolutionary milestones that Ken outlined. So, I tried playing around with my log plots a bit further to see what happened if I extended them back in time toward the Big Bang.

I soon found that the log paper I had didn’t have a sufficient number of powers of ten (or “logs”), so I thought to try looking on the World Wide Web87—this “new new” thing that had only recently begun to enter the daily news. Using the free and smoothly downloaded and installed Network Explorer I signed onto America On-Line for the first time, set my username (which I still use!) and password, and went immediately to the “software download” section, did a search for “graph paper” and within minutes had downloaded grphpapr.exe. A few minutes later I was happily printing out perfect multi-log graph paper

84 Meaning here: logarithmic. 85 Here specifically referring to how a process that exhibits exponential growth can be plotted as a straight line on log paper—a high-school math procedure I’d learned at Groton. 86 In the course of writing SES, Ken had made a “creative breakthrough” in understanding how the many evolutionary and developmental schemes he found in existing literature might all be incorporated into a simple matrix composed of four quadrants combining “interior I and exterior E” with “subjective S and objective O.” He proposed that in all four quadrants (IS, IO, ES, and EO) it is possible to describe both evolutionary and developmental lines. Thus he named his scheme All Quadrants, All Lines, or AQAL. 87 This thought arose because on the previous day Susan and I had attended the Marin County Fair where we’d been astonished a) to discover an Adidam booth, b) demonstrating a WEBSITE (what is that?) under construction filled with “links” to the many works by and current images of our Beloved Da.

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with as many logs as I wanted. This was my first experience of “seek and ye shall find” on the web—and I thought to myself, “wow, that was totally amazing!”

As I extrapolated my Toffler Wave log-line backwards in time, it traversed dozens of logs to get to the Big Bang. I began to assemble estimates for when, in years ago, key transitions had taken place in evolution: first living thing, first eukaryote, first metazoan, etc… I looked to see if I could discern any pattern to these evolutionary milestones in relation to Toffler’s Waves. They would have to have negative numbers. For example, maybe first life on earth would work out to be Tofflerian -6th Wave or some such. But I could not find any pattern that made sense.

I also tried to see what would happen if I extrapolated the Tofflerian line forward deeper toward the present. I ended up with some neat plots of Tofflerian Nth Waves disappearing into fractions of a second ago and it seemed obvious there was really no end to it, and perhaps no “point” to it either, so I set my math toys aside again.

Da Avabhasa’s Health Crisis

In late spring of 1995 Da Avabhasa experienced a health crisis on Naitauba—his peripheral vision was diminishing rapidly, a classic sign of a glaucoma emergency. I was mobilized to find him a top-level eye specialist in the San Francisco Bay Area on very short notice. He flew in from Fiji a few days later and, after extensive testing, had surgery to address the problem. This was the first time I’d been so closely involved in his personal health care. It was also the first time I’d been able to reconnect with him in a meaningful way since my meditation retreat on Naitauba less than two years earlier. It was demanding service that required my attending to many practical logistical details. I was able to take a few days off work on short notice in order to devote myself to the task, and all ended up working out well.

In a remarkable demonstration of determination and focused effort to improve his eyesight, Da tirelessly applied himself to countless visual tasks, many involving arts and crafts—he took an avid interest in glass paperweights, for example, which he would hold and look at very closely for a long time. It seemed his love of birds and small animals was magnified—he would look to perch them on his arm, hand, or finger and look intently at them, as if to catch their every nuance of coloration and expression. His peripheral vision appeared to recover after his surgery in a way considered highly unusual.

Da also began to engage in an intensive development of his own visual art: he began with black-and- white photography, then moved to color photography, and eventually to digital art. By the time of his passing in 2008 (abruptly, and without any preceding warnings, as he was working in his art studio), he had produced a huge number of works, some designed to be monumental fabrications, and he had begun to be recognized in high-level international art circles including the Venice Biennale. He spoke and wrote extensively about art in terms of “transcendental realism.” An overview of his art can be found at www.daplastique.com.

It was for me a striking commentary on how our mainstream press operates that Adi Da’s passing was not even mentioned (as far as I’ve been able to determine). Twenty three years after national press coverage in 1985 of his “scandalous” behavior, he had apparently become totally news-irrelevant. The only mention of his passing to appear in a periodical was on a Los Angeles website devoted to art with the title “Artist Adi Da Dies at 69.”

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Summary

In recounting these details of my life, it strikes me that the story might leave the impression that I bounced around from one location or event to another without much in the way of an “internal logic.” The lived experience, however, has felt almost the exact opposite—in the midst of it all, there has been a sense of a continual unfolding in a quite specific direction. Especially since the time of my “Walkabout,” I have felt that I’ve been given a blessed opportunity in this life to “follow a thread of consideration.” The “original intuition” was to engage life in the dual terms: both spiritual practitioner (of some sort) and scientist (of some sort) simultaneously and over an extended period of time. This intuition gradually clarified itself and all the other elements of my life came to revolve around it. Here in my forties, it seemed that an inner certainty about this intuition became more active and even pro- active as I nurtured it with deliberate attention, with an ongoing orientation of devotion, regular study of developments taking place across the sciences, and a sustained effort to give it verbal expression as the SummaParadigm. However, these efforts to communicate were still very much “in-house”—i.e., taking place within the community of Da Avabhasa. Yes, I was always looking to “keep tabs” on what was going on “out there in the world,” as devotees might have said, but I did not seriously consider looking for external venues for presentation or publication. In the midst of all the changes of this decade, I had a persistent sense that the outer features of my life were shifting around so as to make more room for the Summa.

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Fifties—The Time/Scale Spectrum Tool Begins to Emerge

Tucson-II and the emergence of the Time Spectrum as a key Yoga Science Tool

The December 1995 issue of Scientific American featured a delightful article by Australian mathematician turned philosopher David Chalmers titled, “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience.” In this piece, Chalmers identified “the hard problem of consciousness research” as relating to the bare fact of conscious awareness itself. He pointed out that despite the clear progress in understanding some of the key brain mechanisms of sensation, movement, memory etc., no one had even the slightest clue how to explain the apparently irreducible fact that no matter what the contents of conscious experience might be, conscious awareness itself remains yet “to be explained.” Thus he distinguished between the “easy” and the “hard” problems of consciousness research and pointed out that most researchers were hard at work on the “easy” ones.

In this same time period Adi Da Samraj (as he was now beginning to be known—see Table of Principal Names of Adi Da following the Table of Contents) had held a series of gatherings with a small group of devotees in his home at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary in Northern California. Over many hours over a period of several weeks he discussed the matter of consciousness in great depth. These were not “scientific” explorations, but rather discourses informed by his deep spiritual understanding and in an articulate and sophisticated vernacular unique to Adi Da. These discourses were, as was routine in his community, recorded and transcribed, then excerpted and shared with the worldwide student body at regular weekly gatherings.

I heard a number of these transcript readings and the co-incidence with Chalmers’ article stood out. So I contacted Chalmers at his office in the Math Department at UC Santa Cruz, told him how much I’d enjoyed his article and requested some reprints “to share with interested colleagues.” He suggested I consider participating in the upcoming second Conference, Toward a Science of Consciousness, that was to be held the coming April in Tucson, sponsored by the University of Arizona. He offered to include with his reprints the program announcement and the “call for papers.”

Drawing upon the earlier work I’d done on my “Summa Project” and in light of the recent considerations of consciousness by Adi Da, I began to consider how I might address Chalmers’ “Hard Problem.” As I contemplated this, it dawned on me that my log plots of time past might hold some clues after all. I had by then conceived of a single time line extending from the Big Bang deep into the tiny fraction of a second ago represented by the “yocto-second” of 10-23 seconds.88

I composed an abstract titled “The SummaTime Scale—a tool for ‘Hard Problem’ Research” that was a first exploration of some of the possible implications and applications of this “new view of things” I was just then beginning to consider. Here it is (at the word limit prescribed for abstracts to this conference):

88 I had settled on that for the proximal end of my “SummaTime Scale” for two reasons: the yocto was then the smallest prefix with an agreed-upon name (as per the SI accord), and it seemed to correspond with the diameter of a fundamental particle—the proton—insofar as the yocto second was said to be “the transit time of a photon crossing the diameter of a proton.”

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Begin Tucson-II Abstract: “The SummaTime Scale: a tool for ‘hard problem’ research:”

The most appropriate way to represent time may be—as with many other biologically relevant parameters (e.g., pH, intensity of light or sound, etc.)—with a logarithmic transform. A logarithmic scale of time past in SI units of seconds can span a range from exa (1018) to yocto (10-24) seconds encompassing the most remote event for which we have a time estimate—the ‘Big Bang’ (in the range of exa seconds)—to the shortest time interval for which a prefix has been assigned—the yocto second (often represented as the length of time it takes a photon to cross the diameter of a proton).

A salient feature of this time scale is that nowhere on it does the “now” of conscious experience appear. When, then, is now? Or better still, when am I? Any and all events in cosmic, evolutionary, cultural, or personal history can be placed somewhere on this scale-- likewise with any observable phenomenal process in the psychophysiology of the body/mind/self. However, that which is most immediate to our own awareness—our own personal “now”—has no obvious “place” here. Where then do we look for “The Link” between consciousness and our psychophysiology?

I suggest that this scale allows various hypotheses regarding this question to be considered in a new light: in terms of where on the scale they fall and how they relate in and to time altogether. The SummaTime Scale suggests that conscious awareness is not ”in time” at all. Rather, we are associated with time via mechanisms yet to be elucidated. Or, it could be argued that to be an object of science a phenomenon or process must “have a place in time” or else it isn't subject to scientific rules of engagement. In this case, science could not be expected to provide an answer to the question of exactly how we are linked to our experience. In either case, however, the SummaTime Scale provides a potentially useful way to compare various theories concerning The Link.

The SummaTime Scale suggests other possibilities as well: perhaps all of time (and its vast range of scales over some 42 orders of magnitude) is somehow “contained” in ”now.” This represents a topological inversion of our usual “point of view” wherein we conceive of ourselves as existing in (or at) a “point in time” that somehow creeps along on a line stretching from infinite past to infinite future with us trapped in a zero between two infinities.

Here we suggest turning this point in time—inside out and we become instead ourselves the infinity which contains time. Consciousness is the container of time, rather than epiphenomena arising somehow in history as a “result” of a complex of evolutionary processes. Such a view is more compatible, it seems to me, with the “Great Tradition” of the totality of human experience. It also suggests that our view of science altogether may need likewise to be “turned inside out” to produce a “science in consciousness” that I call the SummaScience.

(End of abstract)

I composed two other abstracts for a total of three (see Tucson-II Abstracts) each of which addressed an aspect of the Hard Problem. I felt pretty certain that the program organizers would be unlikely to want to hear from an amateur like me. Thus, I was astonished when all three were accepted for poster presentation. I was further surprised and delighted when all the abstracts were published right around

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my birthday in 1996 (along with the rest of the conference program) in the Higher Education Supplement to the London Times! It felt a bit like a “coming out party.”

To begin the abstract above I make the not entirely immodest claim, drawing on my basic understanding of psychophysics by then, that “the most appropriate way to represent time may be to use a logarithmic transform.” Note however something I came to appreciate more fully only later: when you use a logarithmic transform on time, you have to make a decision between two distinct approaches; starting time at the Big Bang, or starting at “now.” In other words, one has to choose between the “forward or the backwards looking logarithmic cosmological time scales.” The former is preferred by cosmologists; the latter—the one used here—has been little used before now, as far as I’ve been able to determine (with a few exceptions as discovered subsequently and recounted in what follows).

Reflections on Psycho-topology

Where does my preoccupation with “psycho-topology” come from? From early cogitations, meditations, and study on the subject of the relationship between the seer and the seen after Patanjali. That was the language I had learned from Swamiji in the early 70s in the Integral Yoga Institute, and where I gradually became, as the years went by, one of the more senior members. In any case, Swamiji had introduced me to Patanjali, and in Patanjali the subject/object dichotomy is represented linguistically as the relationship between the seer and the seen.

To possibly get some feeling for this, take a short break from reading and try the following:

In a safe and seated upright position, eyes open, relax as much as you can with a few deep breaths.

Turn your attention to what you are experiencing bodily in that relaxation.

Look further into what is actually taking place:

There is clearly a knowing—an awareness of a stream of experiencing

That itself consists of many kinds of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions.

Allow your feeling/knowing presence to fill your whole body.

Is there a “point of view” from which all of that experiencing is being known?

Feel into that question for a few moments.

Now, look at whatever is most directly in front of your visual field.

Can you imagine a “line of sight” from your two eyes out to whatever object you’ve chosen to look at?

If so, you might think of that line as an arrow.

That arrow I refer to as the Seer-Seen Axis, after Patanjali.

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I took this axis as a good starting place for yoga science.

Note: since for most of us the most prominent of our sensory fields is vision, and the largest part of the brain is devoted to vision, in the history of yoga vision has often been considered to stand for all the senses.89

Alternatively, the line-of-sight can be conceived (or “represented”) the other way around (as is sometimes found in yoga texts), as an arrow from the object that enters the eye.

Thus, there are these two options when it comes to representing line of sight. We can think of this as the basic topology of vision.90

The Tucson-II conference itself was mostly a disappointment. The main presentations seemed very heady and out of touch with any of the spiritual understanding of life or consciousness that I had been steeped in for decades. David Chalmers stopped by to read my SummaParadigm poster and commented, “Interesting,” and then moved on. Despite the high talk about the Hard Problem, no one seemed to have an approach that might lead to a solution. Most of the presentations were either highly speculative and philosophical, or reporting research on the “Easy Problems.” This label turned out to be a bit of a hard pill to swallow because these issues are not easy at all as far as the researchers themselves are concerned—unraveling the intricate cellular, biochemical, and atomic details of how the body and its brain actually function is arguably the most monumental project ever undertaken by science.

My Father dies in late March of 1996

In the middle of the story just told and just three weeks before the Tucson Conference, my mother called from Florida to report that my father had passed away (from complications of the prostate cancer he’d been diagnosed with ten years earlier). I went immediately to Florida to be with her and my sister and to help attend to practical arrangements. I had planned to flesh out my three Tucson abstracts as much as I could during that same period. As a result, however, that time gone, my three posters ended up being glorified abstracts.

My father’s passing, just seven weeks into my sixth decade, marked the beginning of this cycle whereas its end was marked nine years later by the passing of my mother (and Susan’s father just six weeks after that). During these years, Susan and I were both called upon to assume many new responsibilities

89 This is a good example of synecdoche—the “figure of speech” wherein the part is taken for the whole. Here vision is taken to stand for all the senses. 90 There is also a third option, which is to move the viewer perpendicular to the line of time. Since I originally saw the time spectrum as a finite line segment (e.g. the line of the PHSS for time), it seemed most appropriate experientially to situate the knower at the “now” end—our so-called “now,” seeming off the Planck end—the deep end. This had been how I presented the spectrum in 2009 (as the ACT – an “Anthropic Cosmological Timeline”). This was the “topological inversion” I talked about at Tucson-II whereby “we become instead ourselves the infinity which contains time.” With the later move perpendicular to the time line, I saw that we might find ourselves anywhere in an infinite sphere around the entire PHSS. Thus, whereas I originally placed the “eye of knowing” off the Planck end of the PHSS in the diagrammatic presentations I made, eventually I came to see that as an arbitrary assumption and began to consider other options. I eventually settled on portraying the “eye of knowing” as integral to the INNERMOST (see section in next chapter, “Updating the Time/Scale Spectrum Graphic.”

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involved in caring for our parents and their affairs before and after their passing. Soon after my father passed, my mother asked me to assume the legal responsibility of serving with her as co-trustee of my father’s estate. This initiated a new kind of “on the job training” in the many legal and financial ins and outs of US “death tax” law. Over time, I had to learn how to deal with some of the many kinds of accountants, attorneys, and tax specialists in our complex web of money professionals.

In the course of this, I learned the basics of what it means to be a “fiduciary” entrusted with legal responsibilities for the affairs of another person or organization—a kind of “selfless service” that was of a novel kind compared to my previous experience. However, I eventually discovered this education to be extremely useful when the events of the following chapter of my life began to unfold and I eventually assumed responsibility for the Yoga Science Foundation. I was also equipped by the learning of this decade to serve as fiduciary in other contexts as well—most specifically as Acting Board Chairperson for a major transition of the ISSSEEM organization in 2013 (more on this later).

Heart-to-Heart with Adi Da

In May of 1997, Da, now Adi Da Samraj, was back in Northern California for a time, and on one occasion devotees were invited on short notice, on a weekday afternoon, to sit with him “in silent Darshan”91 at his home, known as The Manner of Flowers—The Manner is Adi Da’s beautifully appointed residence at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary. I received a phone call with the invitation to this unusual event early in my lunch break, was able to reschedule the patients I was to see that afternoon, and drove the hour and a half up to the Mountain of Attention. I arrived early enough that I was able to spend some time preparing for the Darshan sitting in meditation at one of my favorite holy sites on the Sanctuary, Holy Cat Grotto.

When the bell rang for devotees to line up near the Manner, I was at the head of the line to be ushered in. We were instructed to offer our gifts at the dais where Adi Da would sit, and then I was directed to a seat immediately to the right of the dais, and then perhaps thirty other devotees filed in behind me, offered their gifts, and took their seats. At this time, the main hall where we were seated—a large, furniture-less living room—had been the site for many occasions of gathering and Darshan with Adi Da. As a result, the room was “thick” (as devotee’s often report) with the feeling of his presence.

When everyone was finally seated, we sat quietly for a while before Adi Da entered and took his seat. We all bowed in place and the Darshan began. As was often the case, Adi Da sat for a time looking out over our heads, seemingly to infinity beyond. Then he began to look at us individually. When his eyes turned to me, no more than eight feet away, we held our gaze for what seemed a very long time. I began to see the sweetest and most loving expression I’ve ever seen slowly appear on his face and felt his love at a depth and with a directness I’d never before experienced. My heart responded spontaneously in kind. Finally, still gazing at each other, tears began to flow freely. This lasted for what felt like a very long time (but was probably less than five minutes) before he slowly closed his eyes, turned his head slightly, and moved on to gaze at another devotee.

This “Heart to Heart” exchange with him turned out to be, in many respects, the culmination of my relationship with Adi Da Samraj, but first it initiated a period of several months of feverish research on

91 Literally “sighting,” traditionally used to refer to sighting of the spiritual master.

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my part (described in the next section). The following year I was swept up into our home construction project, our move to Ukiah, and my eventual decision to leave Adidam in 2002.

Heart Research Fever

In the months that followed that most remarkable and unexpected Darshan in the Manner, I became preoccupied with the psychophysiology of the physical heart, focusing on the key role of the sino-atrial node—as Adi Da had suggested two decades earlier in “Enlightenment of the Whole Body.” In the intervening years, Da had spoken or written on many occasions about “the heart on the right,” but the Clinic had not been called upon explicitly to explore this specific issue further (as far as I was aware).

In retrospect, the feeling I had after that Darshan was reminiscent of the portrayal in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” of the obsessive preoccupation on the part of the main character, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss), with the iconic shape of the national monument—the Devil’s Post Pile—where he becomes convinced the alien ship is going to land. After his “sunburn” from the alien lights in the opening encounter, he seems to go a bit mad, piling dirt in his front yard into a shape like the Devil’s Post Pile, then the mashed potatoes on his dinner plate…

The tools at my disposal to do this research now included the internet and my long-loved medical library—in gorgeous new quarters—at the UCSF medical school on Parnassus Heights. I plunged into a feverish period of research in my spare time to discover all the details I could about the source of the heart-beat, the sino-atrial node or SAN. Adi Da had long held this “heart on the right” as the seat of consciousness in the human body.

I summarized this research the following year in the abstract I submitted to the Tucson-III conference: Heart of Consciousness:

Sri Adi Da, summarizing the Great Tradition of spiritual realization and numerous realizers before him, has identified the physical seat of conscious awareness (or attention) in the sinoatrial node (SAN) in the upper posterior wall of the right atrium.92

In humans, the SAN is a thin oblong sheet of tissue about ½ inch in length composed of several hundred thousand specialized myocytes. The SAN has a poorly defined central core of cells numbering 5-10,000 out from which radiate columns of "transitional" cells to where the atrial muscle cells are contacted. The cells of the SAN are embryologically of mesodermal origin and begin their lifelong function as electrical pacemaker at about 21 days of gestation when the heart primordium is still anterior to the developing brain.

The SAN is thus the first "organ" to form and begin functioning. The electrical signal from the SAN initiates most contractions of the heart throughout life. Depolarization typically begins in the core area of the SAN and then travels slowly out to the atrial tissue. From there it radiates rapidly around the atrium converging on the atrio-ventricular node. Then it enters the cardiac conduction fibers via which it finally reaches the ventricular muscle.

92 Note added in writing this Memoir: as for the consequences of a heart transplant, this has not been worked out. It seems at least conceivable, however, that the connection of consciousness to the body-mind might be switched from one physical heart to another while leaving the outer aspects of the individual relatively intact.

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Ventricular contraction generates both an acoustic pulse and a fluid pulse that travel throughout the body. The acoustic pulse, traveling at the speed of sound in flesh, by a bio-piezo-electric process, generates the EKG. Thus we can identify three major processes whereby the heart serves literally to sustain every cell in the body: 1. the acoustic/electric signal may act as a principle zeitgeber for the body; 2. the fluid pulse of blood into the arteries may serve other functions via shear force and fluid pulse "massage;" 3. the delivery of molecular nutrients and removal of toxins and metabolites via circulation.

Heart-rate variability (HRV) has emerged in recent cardiology research as an indicator of overall health—the greater the variation in the beat-to-beat interval, the less the likelihood of death from all causes. HRV is largely determined by the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic tone at the SAN. However, there is a complex "neuro-cardiac" system that includes both afferent and efferent nerves intrinsic to the heart and the CNS-mediated baro-receptor system.

The SAN clearly plays a biological role central to the entire body. The esoteric tradition suggests that this role includes being "the seat of conscious awareness." As a comparatively small structure, the SAN seems a better candidate than the brain to house the "point" we know subjectively as our "point of view." Furthermore, it is located near where most of us point to when we refer to "me." Thus, consciousness may be even more intimate to the heart than to the brain. A dispassionate review of the biomedical facts makes the possibility seem at least worthy of consideration.

As noted in the page linked to above, this abstract was not accepted for the Tucson-III “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference. The reason given was that it was “unrelated to the topic of the conference.” However, I did slide lectures on the material at the Health Medicine Forum in the fall of ’97 (see following section), at the 2009 Science Day ISSSEEM pre-conference, and at the Calistoga Institute’s Heart of Health retreat at Mayacamas in 2010. Finally, this topic will likely become central to my proposal for a “Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum Psycho-Bio-Physics” (currently “under construction”).

The Bay Area Alternative Medical Community

By working in two alternative Bay Area clinics, I got to know a number of other key members and organizations in the loosely affiliated “altmed” community in the San Francisco area. Especially memorable for me were Richard Kunin’s (pronounced “k-onion”) Orthomolecular Health Medicine Society93 (OHM), and Leonard Saputo’s Health Medicine Forum. At annual meetings of OHM I met many of the pioneers in the altmed field, heard them present, and learned many useful “clinical pearls” (as doctors often refer to their “tricks of the trade”).

Leonard Saputo, MD had been brainstorming the concept of “Health Medicine” from his base in Concord California for several years when I first met him in 1997 as he began reaching out to the other altmed doctors around the Bay Area. On the basis of a generally positive response to his efforts, he set up monthly meetings as a “Forum” for open public discussion of altmed topics. He invited me to become active in helping organize a three day conference via which he hoped to reach a larger audience. I ended up serving on the “spirit committee” charged with overseeing the overall mood and feeling of the event.

93 http://www.ohmsociety.org/

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I chose not to make a presentation, but rather wrote up my thoughts in a short paper about health medicine that made central reference to my heart research as “The Heart of Health Medicine.”94

Richard Kunin asked me to serve on the board of OHM sometime in 1997. At the OHM meeting, I handed out a playful piece I’d written that took off from the seminal article “Orthomolecular Psychiatry,” by Linus Pauling, that had set the course followed by OHM. Using the same page layout as the original and borrowing some of Pauling’s phrases, I titled the piece “Orthomolecular Living”95 and outlined how we might extend Pauling’s insights into a more comprehensive “holistic” approach. I also coined the term “heteromolecular” and outlined four types corresponding to new categories of chemicals developed by human activity in the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Industrial, and Electronic eras (corresponding roughly to Toffler’s Waves).

The following year it occurred to me that perhaps I would need to extend the SummaTimeScale more deeply at the proximal end all the way to the Planck scale. I made mention of this in the keynote talk I was invited to give at the OHM meeting that year in San Francisco. But, I got busy with many other things and set the Scale aside again, this time, as it turned out, for nearly a decade.

As a result of my networking with other Bay Area altmed docs, I’d met Jeffrey Anderson, MD (no relation), a well-known and widely-respected expert in “environmental medicine.” Over the years Jeffrey had built a large practice with some of the most challenging patients imaginable—those suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities, environmental illness, chronic fibromyalgia, and the like. However, he himself had become ill in the course of working with patients exposed to a major chemical accident in the East Bay. Needing to cut back on his many hours of work, he asked me to help him and agreed to teach me all he could about how he worked with patients.

Starting in mid-1995, therefore, I began spending a day each week with him seeing and being introduced to his patients. For several years thereafter I was, as a result, working in three Bay Area altmed practices and acquiring rich clinical experience. Come 1998, however, Susan and I began dreaming of moving out of the city, and I thought to call to ask my friend Alan Goldhammer, DC,96 whose fasting center is about an hour north of San Francisco (in the direction we’d decided to move), if he might have a place for me. Turned out he had me on his to-do list that very day to call to invite me to come work with him! I jumped at the opportunity, turned my San Francisco patients over to a new young altmed doctor just joining the practice and thus began “the move north.”

We Move to the Country

In no small part because of how deeply we had enjoyed our “artist’s holidays” out in the Marin countryside over the preceding years, in early 1998 Susan and I decided we wanted to move out of the city (which included in our minds the suburbs) and into the country. We found an undeveloped property in Mendocino County near Ukiah which we were able to purchase with help from my father’s estate and proceeded to develop into an “off the grid homestead” centered around a straw bale home. We moved there in April 2000.

94 Copies of this paper are in my print files. 95 Also here in my print files. 96 I’d been following Alan’s work for over a decade as part of the RLC’s ongoing research into therapeutic fasting.

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In 1996 Susan had begun a home-based business (selling therapeutic-grade essential oils) that by 1998 was doing well enough that she did not need any longer to stay in the city. With my job at the fasting center only an hour from Ukiah, I was able drive there one day, stay over at the fasting center, work there a second day, and then drive down to work a third day in Marin, driving two hours home to the hills when done.

By this time I’d begun to see more clearly the limitations of what I’d been attempting to do over the previous decade in the name of “nutritional medicine.” The basic underlying problem is that biology is incredibly complex. Yes, we know a great deal about cellular biochemistry, microbiology, and physiology. And yes, we can run many kinds of tests that will reveal details about the status of various body systems. However, all the health medicine conversations I’d been part of left me feeling dissatisfied just dealing with health issues in terms of our biochemistry only—what about all the other arenas of meaning in our lives? What about cultural patterns and social and economic dynamics? What about aspiration and intention? What about spirituality? These kinds of questions were integral to my ongoing contemplation of the relevance of the Summa to my daily practice of medicine.

To make matters worse, two major practical problems face the altmed practitioner: making sense of the many dozens of kinds of test data available and discovering how the patient might afford to pay for the tests that might be required to find the key to their unique situation (assuming for the moment there is one). In the majority of cases, these kinds of tests are not covered by any of the principle health insurance plans—“alternative” tests are most often considered “not standard of care” and thus not eligible for reimbursement. Thus, many altmed docs face the difficult choice of confining their practice to the well-to-do, or make do with a very restricted set of tests that are covered by insurance.

Work at the fasting center thus came as a considerable relief. Although I could bring much of what I’d learned about altmed to bear with my fasting patients, I was not expected to “figure out” what was “wrong” with them in the same way. Rather, now my principal job was to first assess if they could fast safely and then monitor them medically as they fasted. The presumption begin that the body itself knows how to heal from a vast array of conditions if given the chance—and fasting has long been considered in some traditions as the most powerful natural healing intervention known.

Retirement of “Doctor, Dad, & Devotee”

A number of events conspired to produce a major life change for me in early 2002. Susan’s essential oils business had continued to thrive and grow. She’d been able to retire from her bio-feedback practice in 1999 after we moved to Ukiah and by 2002 income from the business had grown to where it could conceivably also replace the modest income from my medical practice.

Meanwhile, the 9/11 disaster in 2001 had produced so many insurance claims that the entire insurance industry was reeling. The carrier that had been providing my medical malpractice insurance decided in early 2002 to stop covering any altmed physicians as “too risky.” Not a single other carrier was writing malpractice coverage for altmed docs. In extensive conversations with my colleagues, I came to realize that I would not feel comfortable practicing medicine without malpractice insurance (as a number of my colleagues decided to do) because it would mean that my patients would not be able to recover any compensation if anything were to go wrong in the course of treatment.

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Finally, my mother fell ill, felt she could no longer manage on her own, and asked to come live with us at our new rural home to which we agreed immediately. Thus, I decided, with few regrets, to retire from medicine and I was able to help place my remaining patients with new altmed docs from among my many contacts in the San Francisco Bay area.

In the same time-frame (fall 2001), the editorial department of the Dawn Horse Press asked me to review a proposed revision of the “Da Upanishad”—originally published in 1989. The new version was proposed to be a “principle source text” for the Community at the time. To do this, I took the time I had newly available to recite the text out loud, in morning sessions, sitting on the small deck of our barn, over a period of about ten days. In contrast to the uplifting experience I’d had in 1993 with the “Dawn Horse Testament,” here I ran into two sources of cognitive dissonance.

In a long introductory essay, Da described Swami Muktananda as having been the epitome of the Great Tradition of human spirituality. By this time in 2002, I’d become acquainted with a range of spiritual traditions, had begun learning about Tibetan Buddhism, and had recently read, “Dialog With Emerging Spiritual Teachers” (John Parker, 2000, Sagewood), featuring the contemporary “non-dualist” movement. I was struck to realize that I could not agree with Da’s assessment of Muktananda—it felt to me like a clear case of “premature closure”97: Da had concluded prematurely that this teacher, who had played such a key role in his sadhana, represented the pinnacle of all possible teachers. I kept this opinion to myself.

In a subsequent section of the book, Da proposed an all raw diet as the standard for all his devotees. My twenty years of clinical experience by that point told me that such a diet is suitable for only a very small minority of individuals and could potentially be hazardous to the health of most people if adhered to on a long-term basis. I made this point in writing to the editorial department as my main critique of the manuscript along with a reference to a new website—beyondveg.com—that discussed at length the problems people have with restricted diets. The editor-in-chief of the Dawn Horse Press proceeded to do his own research on this point, printed out the entire website into two huge three ring binders, and gave them to Adi Da along with his in-depth review of the matter. The dietary restrictions were relaxed a bit, but still eventually became “the gold standard” within Adidam, in effect to this day.98

Another problematic issue for me was that Adidam required that any public presentation or “outside” publication by an active formal devotee was subject to prior review and approval by the editorial and/or the legal departments of Adidam. Anticipating that the day might soon arrive that I’d want to go public with the Summa (later re-named yoga science), I felt certain that the resources for a fair hearing of my work simply did not exist within Adidam. I began contemplating leaving Adidam for this reason alone.

Also underway during this period was a process whereby devotees were asked to “renew their vows.” As I read through the formal statement I was being asked to sign, I realized that I could no longer attest to believing in the complete exclusivity of Da that had become part of the expectation for a devotee. I’ve not yet described here the transition that took place in the 1990s in which Adi Da’s “Divine Emergence” continued towards him taking the position of being “the one and only ever necessary or even possible Seventh Stage Realizer.” I’d been going along with all that up to now, but faced with signing a formal

97 “Premature closure” is a type of cognitive error in which the physician fails to consider reasonable alternatives after an initial diagnosis is made. 98 The revision of the Da Upanishad was published as “Santosha Adidam: The Essential Summary of the Divine Way of Adidam,” Adi Da Samraj, Dawn Horse Press, 2001.

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document, I could not bring myself to do it. After extended phone discussions with the Cultural Services Representative assigned to me at the time, and with the three principle reasons outlined above in mind, I took formal leave of Adidam in the summer of 2002—however, not without something of a heavy heart. Adding to this strong brew, I got word in August that Swami Satchidananda had passed away in India. In the midst of the other dramas of the period, however, I devoted only a day or so to mourning his passing.

Since by now both my daughters were at least approaching mature adulthood, I relinquished at much the same time my three-fold life as “doctor, dad, and devotee.” A number of things took their place: caring for ailing parents, ongoing development of our remote rural property, beginning study of Tibetan Buddhism, and a new “fiduciary” role on the Board of Directors of the Yoga Research and Education Center. In the sections that follow, I’ll say more about the latter two.

Begin Study of Tibetan Buddhism

One of Susan’s friends, a former intimate of Adi Da’s, had left Adidam in the early ‘90s and had married (~1998) a prominent Bay Area Buddhist author, Rick Fields. Through that association we began to learn a bit about Dzogchen teachings and teachers of Tibetan Buddhism. We learned also of the remarkable growth of interest in Tibetan Buddhism over recent decades in the West and the rapidly rising number of translations from Tibetan appearing in English.

Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche was the Tibetan master we were referred to as a leading exponent of the “pinnacle teaching” of Dzogchen. He was very active in the West at the time and conducting retreats in the US. We happened to be in Manhattan visiting Susan’s father at the same time as Norbu Rinpoche was leading a weekend Dzogchen retreat at the Church of St. John the Divine only a short distance away. We were able to attend several of the lectures of the retreat—enough for us to get a taste of the unique way Norbu Rinpoche has of “delivering the news” of Dzogchen.

We were both very interested and began reading Norbu Rinpoche’s already extensive works in English. Over the following years we took part in a number of 7-10 day retreats with him in Massachusetts, Venezuela, Baja California, Argentina, and subsequently for a number of years via webcast. It became apparent to us that, at least in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, there had existed for a thousand years teachings that resonated strongly with the original “Radical Understanding” Teaching of Bubba Free John that we’d been so attracted to just a few decades earlier. This came as something of a revelation to us both.

Since then our reading has branched out to embrace dozens of others among the many Tibetan Buddhist teachers of the past as well as those active in the West today—a few of whom we’ve met, as well as the ever-expanding wealth of translations of classic works in Tibetan Buddhism—especially from the now one (or more) thousand-year-old Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions—sometimes referred to as the “Essence Traditions” of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

On the Board of Yoga Research & Education Center

In mid 2002, already an eventful year, I discovered that Georg Feuerstein and his wife Trisha—with whom I’d enjoyed a close friendship as devotees for several years in Lake County nearly twenty years

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earlier—had actually established Georg’s life-long dream: the Yoga Research & Education Center (YREC) and were now living and working nearby in Santa Rosa. Not long after reconnecting with Georg and Trisha, they invited Susan and me to join the Board of YREC. After we reviewed the activities of YREC and what our responsibilities would be, we agreed. We took part in a number of Board meetings over the following months, and into 2003.

In late 2003, however, Georg abruptly decided to leave both YREC and his wife and take up with a younger woman. He had apparently concluded that the responsibilities he’d assumed as Director of YREC no longer suited him. In rapid succession, most of the other Board members resigned except one. The three of us left agreed to “picking up the pieces” all the way through to a conclusion. We negotiated a position for Trisha with the International Association of Yoga Therapists (which had been folded into YREC for several years) and agreed to support their becoming, once again, a non-profit independent of YREC.99

We spent several years supporting IAYT, clearing up a number of “loose ends,” and finally negotiating in 2006 the sale of the large rural retreat property held by YREC. Slowly I came to see YREC as being potentially the “independent research foundation” I’d been imagining in my “Artist’s Way” period nearly a decade earlier. In consultation with our legal team, we converted YREC first into the Yoga Research and Education Foundation and began making grants in support of innovative research and publications. Eventually, in 2010, we renamed the organization the Yoga Science Foundation.

Connecting with Independent Philosopher Kent Duane Palmer

As I began to contemplate taking the helm of the Yoga Research & Education Center (and making it into an organization “purposed to yoga science,” one day in late 2004 I Googled [“non-dual science”] and landed on a blog post using the phrase. The post turned out to have been authored in 2001 by independent philosopher Kent Duane Palmer. I emailed him and promptly received his reply suggesting I take a look at a recent long essay he’d written titled “Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory.” Right away he had me with that title since it so directly reflected the triad I’d come up with back in 1987 of “complex, autopoietic, reflective” (see previous chapter, section “Systems, Chaos, and Fractals”).

Although most of his essay was over my head, building as it does on technical literatures in systems theory, continental philosophy, and mathematics with which I had only the barest familiarity, Kent is an avid communicator and seemed very keen on discussing the theme of “non-dual science” that I had responded to. As a result, within just a few days, he drafted and sent me a 14 page article on the subject, “Non-dual Science: A Possible Non-dual Renaissance Within the Western Worldview.” I read the piece out loud over breakfast with Susan and we both responded with enthusiasm. It introduced us to a level of discourse that was substantially more sophisticated than either of us had ever delved into but argued in terms of non-duality that we related to easily.

Astonishingly, over the following several months, Kent drafted, in rapid succession, a book-length series of thirteen additional articles exploring the same topic. Thus, as Susan and I dealt with the terminal

99 Formed independently in the mid ‘90s, IAYT had run into financial difficulties and negotiated with Georg for IAYT to become a program of YREC’s with Trisha as program manager and editor of their International Journal of Yoga Therapy and with several of the founders of IAYT serving on YREC’s Board.

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illness of both my mother and her father in 2005, down times for me were often devoted to delving into Kent’s latest article and engaging with him in a lengthy email dialog. Typically, I’d pose a question or ask for some clarification and Kent would reply with a long email or, sometimes, yet another whole article!

In the course of these exchanges, it began to seem to me that we had a definite “intellectual impedance mismatch”—I ended up concluding that Kent reads, thinks, and writes ten times faster than I do. That said, he seemed interested in continuing our asymmetrical dialog and I continued to learn some valuable lessons—Kent’s meta-levels of being, the Hyper-Kleinian Bottle, and the complex algebras prominent among them. The latter became perhaps the most enduring contribution to yoga science. Another, however, was Kent introducing me to the idea that there is topology associated with each kind of algebra. I found these to be fascinating subjects. I detailed what was for me one of our most important exchanges in a blog post on my website in 2007: Afternoon with Kent Palmer.

Kent also made some very helpful paragraph-by-paragraph comments when I finally managed to write something more substantive than an email (see next chapter section “The Subjectoscope”). Also, in 2009 I prepared a summary poster for ISSSEEM titled “Science of Subtle Energy,” and asked Kent to take a look at it. We had some fairly extensive back and forth on the subject that might be worth reviewing at some point. Our relationship continued through the next four or five years and the impact on me was certainly positive. Most importantly, I feel, Kent gave me some much appreciated encouragement that my Summa line of thinking was not totally crazy…

Summary

The multiple deaths and endings of this decade further made way for the yoga science project to emerge in the decade to come—both as major new kinds of yoga practice (drawn from Tibetan Buddhism) and as major new inputs into the scientific consideration (via the sino-atrial node research and my continuing education with Kent Palmer). Starting with my father’s passing, I began taking on new kinds of responsibilities that taught me skills for navigating the complex legal and financial terrain of our current world that I would eventually apply in the service of yoga science. The time spectrum made its first appearance in a first public presentation effort at Tucson-II—and subsequently to my colleagues in the altmed community of the San Francisco Bay Area, although nothing much came of it in response at the time. Was I plain wrong, still “ahead of my time,” or simply not possessed of the skills needed to “make an impact?” I could not be sure.

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Sixties—Taking the Time/Scale Spectrum Public

Finally Extend the SummaTime Scale to the Planck Scale

When I retired from medicine in 2002, I thought it would perhaps take five years to transition to a “new life.” I intended that new life to involve rededicating myself to work more “full time” on the Summa Project that I’d been nursing along since 1987 in my spare time. Circumstances conspired to make that intention a reality. As I outlined in the previous chapter, Susan and I were asked by Georg Feuerstein to join the Board of Directors of Yoga Research and Education Center in late 2002. Over the years that followed we took a more active role in the direction of the organization, and I gradually reframed my Summa Project as an exploration of yoga science.

I worked intensively on this “reframing” throughout 2006 in between landscaping projects. I saw my first task to update myself on the various areas of interest that had converged over the many years I’d been working on the Summa: applied psychophysiology, real-time bio-signal processing, complexity theory, meditation research, science of consciousness, HRV research and the innovative HeartMath work, cardiac embryology and the electrophysiology of the sinoatrial node, cosmic evolution, transhumanism, transdisciplinarity, Edmund Jacobson’s theory of mind, somatics, motor coordination, embodied philosophy, subtle energy research, sacred geometry, etc… I later posted an extensive blog entry “’06 Recap” that aimed to summarize these many activities.

In late November I resolved finally to do the extension of the SummaTime Scale (STS) to the Planckian that I’d suggested in my keynote address to Dick Kunin’s Orthomolecular Health Medicine conference a full eight years earlier. I cleared a work space in our barn and mounted a 4’x8’ sheet of white board on a large free wall. In the center I taped a copy of the original STS from my poster at Tucson-II and cut and pasted an extension upwards to the Planckian. On Wikipedia I found some non-SI prefixes to use for the region of the Scale I had just added. Finally, I could stand back from the whole thing and try to take it in:

Figure 11. Images of the “extended SummaTime Scale,” November 2006 (I wasn’t able to get the whole thing in a single frame with my first digital camera. Plus, the date stamp is incorrect—these were actually taken in late November 2006.)

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I noticed immediately that the extension to the Planckian added as many orders of magnitude as about half the number in my original Scale. I had previously noticed that the heart-beat divided the original scale almost in half—actually ~18 orders of magnitude out to the Big Bang vs ~23 orders of magnitude in to what I called “the Quantum.” To try to capture the significance of this I came up with the notion that “there is as much time for things to happen between two heart beats as there has been time since the Big Bang.” But now I had three rather distinct regions—from the Big Bang to the heart-beat, from the heart-beat to the “Quantum region,” and then from there to the Planckian—each roughly 20 orders of magnitude in size (an original diagram of all this can be found two pages ahead).

I noticed that the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation lined up with the middle region of the Scale and I later noticed that the narrow band of visible light is almost exactly in the middle of the extended Scale as a whole. As I stood back and contemplated the whole picture, it struck me that the three regions might correspond in some way to the gross, subtle, and causal domains spoken of in yoga. I began to see that I could align the findings of science on one side and those of yoga on the other. Over a period of several days I posted items from my files on either side of the extended Time Line—symbols and findings from yoga on the left, spectra and charts from science on the right. I became increasingly convinced that I was really onto something here.

In the weeks that followed, as I continued to contemplate this new version of my logarithmic time toy, the 50th anniversary issue of New Scientist arrived with a marvelous article by mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, entitled, “What is Reality?” I’d heard Roger speak at Tucson-II and had been deeply impressed (even if not comprehending) by his hour long performance writing one equation after another for a full hour as he spoke. In this article in New Scientist he speaks of the astonishing precision with which physics has been able to predict experimental findings. In closing he shares his view that there appear to be “Three Worlds,” each with rather distinct properties, the physical, the mental, and the mathematical/platonic. I immediately thought of the three regions of my now extended Scale. Suspecting they lined up very nicely with Penrose’s “Three Worlds,” I went so far as to order a copy of his monumental recent book “The Road to Reality” despite feeling quite certain that I would not be able to understand most of it.

However, when the book arrived, I found that in the introductory chapters Sir Roger discusses his Three World conjecture at greater length and in such a way that I was further convinced there might be something to my observations. On Christmas Day 2006 I sent him an email with the correspondences I was seeing between my Time Line and his Three Worlds. About two weeks later I received a polite reply thanking me for my “intriguing observations” with a promise that he would let me know if he “had any further thoughts on the matter.” (No further word as of yet…)

“The Subjectoscope”

Somewhere in this same timeframe I also ran across a reference to the fact that astrophysicist Piet Hut had taken part in one of the dialogs that His Holiness the Dalai Lama had been having with top scientists for some years and to which I’d recently begun to pay closer attention. When I looked into his website, I found that he had been exploring Buddhism and had some very thoughtful things to say especially in his presentation to the Mind & Life Dialog in 1997, “Science in Search of a Worldview,” and, more recently his “Math, Matter, and Mind” paper.

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I was inspired to undertake my first effort to flesh out a description and evaluation of the newly extended SummaTime Scale. I looked to engage Piet in what I hoped would be a useful dialog. Here is the abstract and Fig. 1 of the paper I titled, “The Subjectoscope:”

Abstract – Based on the view of the “goal-as-path” schools within the contemplative traditions of an “always already” timeless state as the “True Nature” of our human condition in every moment, we present an interpretation of a logarithmic scale of the full range of time past (from the Big Bang to the Planckian) as a kind of “scope” that reveals the ordinarily hidden inner domains of our embodied existence. We observe how this “tool” suggests a way to align the full range of subjective phenomena with findings from across the contemporary Object- Sciences. We offer some speculations of how by thus effectively “turning cosmic time inside- out” a new avenue toward a theoretically robust “Science of the Subject” may open to further elaboration.

PROXIMAL 53.9 x 10-45s Planck time – “Planckian”

Causal Mathematical/Platonic

Inside-the-skin

~10-23s photon-proton transit time – “Quantian”

Subtle (incl. MindS) EMR (MindO)

~100s heart beat – “Heartian”

Gross Outside-the-skin Matter

~0.41 x 1018s Big Bang – “BigBangian”

DISTAL

Known Known Subjectively ~ Objectively

Fig 1. Rough sketch of the Subjectoscope as central black line with some tentative correlations from the Contemplative Traditions and from Science on either side. NOTE: Mind S and MindO refer to Mind known subjectively (including here a full range of subjective experience from somato-sensation to intuition) vs Mind known objectively corresponding to 1st and 3rd person forms of description (see text for further details). Figure 12. Figure from the author’s “Subjectoscope” paper of 2007

I was disappointed that Piet Hut was not willing (or able) even to look at “The Subjectoscope,” but I consoled myself with the thought, “That's just the way things are these days: he's a very busy academic

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and he's already involved in an intellectually dense discussion with Steven Tainer, long-time disciple of Tarthang Tulku.” (Piet has since returned to his primary focus in astrophysics.)

In the same time period I got an email notice from the Santa Barbara Institute that Alan Wallace had begun teaching meditation at the first Shamatha Project retreat. Via email I tried to interest him in reading and commenting on the paper, but he replied that he felt he was not sufficiently qualified in math to do so. The painful conclusion: in general it might not be a fruitful strategy for me to try to communicate my yoga science ideas to individuals already established in their respective fields—such people are generally too busy with their own ongoing work to give serious consideration to the work of others. This was also a key conclusion that I drew from the long conversation I had in this same timeframe at the 2007 ISSSEEM Conference with physicist Elizabeth Rauscher.100

Debut of Yoga Science at ISSSEEM 2008

As I described in the Forties chapter, I first heard about the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM) via the Brain/Mind Bulletin shortly after its founding by colleagues of Elmer Green in the early ‘90s. Elmer was one of my heroes and a scientific pioneer in psychophysiology and biofeedback whose work I’d followed for years. I’d always loved his characterization of biofeedback as “yoga for the West.”

I’d been a regular subscriber to ISSSEEM’s peer reviewed Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine Journal from which I read interesting selections in each issue as they came out.101 I attended the second annual conference in 1992, and despite my sense that the ISSSEEM community was being naive in its enthusiasm for the recent opening of the Office of Alternative Medicine I did meet some thoughtful individuals with excellent science backgrounds.

Fast forward to 2007, I began attending the annual Conferences on a regular basis. ISSSEEM was already on my radar and very much in my plan as the next organization to try to get involved in, seeking to find some kind of knowledgeable and critical audience. With the non-response from Piet Hut in early 2007, I was starting down the list of potential collaborators I’d drafted in 2004 in the piece Yoga is (Much) Greater than Science.

I felt I understood the language and the style of problem formulation that was characteristic of ISSSEEM. I was on the lookout to make some sort of trial submission for the 2008 meeting. In April 2008 I submitted through the ISSSEEM web site an abstract on some possible implications of the extended SummaTime Scale in keeping with the conference theme that year: “Energy, Intention and Healing.”

For maybe one or two years previously, there had been a day-long “Science Day” meeting ahead of the ISSSEEM Annual Conference. These consisted of presentations of more or less well peer-reviewed or invited pieces that were of a more technical nature. It was to that Science Day program that I submitted the abstract “Intention and the Causal Heart” under the auspices of the Yoga Research and Education Foundation:

100 Described in IEG Backgrounder. 101 I have a complete set of original print issues here in my office. SEEMJ ceased publication in 2010. I later arranged to make the entire SEEMJ archive available in full-text searchable format online.

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Problem: There is no consensual scientific definition of “subtle energy.”

This is a brief status report on progress towards a possible solution that reflects a forty-year private effort to find a technical scientific description of all three domains revealed by esoteric spiritual teachings and practice—gross, subtle, and causal:

When phenomena are arrayed by characteristic time (CT)—reflecting either average age or process duration—a time line is generated. This time line stretches from universe age (e.g., time since the “Big Bang”—currently estimated at 13+Byr) down to a “shortest possible interval according to modern physics”—the “Planck Time” of ~10-45s. A “SummaTime Scale” (STS) is developed in standard scientific logarithmic form, units, and notation.

Examination of this STS as a whole reveals some striking features: it comprises three domains of ~20 powers of ten each:  one comprising CTs for the vast majority of material processes  a middle part comprising the bulk of the electromagnetic spectrum, and  an inner part comprising CTs of the sub-quantum domain of mathematical physics

I propose that these three objective domains of science correlate with the subjectively perceived gross, subtle, and causal domains of esoteric spiritual teachings.

These three domains also correlate with distinct types of  systems dynamics type: gross-dissipative, subtle-autopoietic, and causal-reflexive, and  degrees of complexity (as mathematically defined via the division algebras): dissipative via complex numbers, autopoietic via hyper-complex numbers, and reflexive via ultra-hyper-complex numbers.

I predict that causal dynamics will be found characteristic of the variably non-local and entangled heart energies associated with intention.

These correlations suggest possible avenues for future scientific and technical characterization of the esoteric domains, including “subtle energies,” by simultaneously including the “causal energies” that represent the deep “inner context” of subtle energies.

What happened next was unexpected—I got a phone call from the acting president of ISSSEEM, Norm Shealy (MD, PhD), asking me to offer a 90-minute workshop at the general meeting. Inspired by his response, I developed a slide presentation over the following months called “Yoga Science: Toward a Comprehensive Theoretical Framework for ISSSEEM.” As breakout session EIH-1 at the 2008 ISSSEEM conference, the presentation was given “top billing” among the four or five workshops in its time slot.

In the presentation at the pre-conference “Science Day” on “Intention and the Causal Heart,” I expanded a bit on the abstract above and described my aim as being “to share what I have found thus far, invite critical comment, stimulate discussion among others better qualified to develop the approach technically, and serve a deeper integration of science and spirituality for the benefit of all.”

I prepared two handouts for the 90 minute workshop the next day: First, “Putting Subtle Energies on the Scientific Map” (PSESM) in 28 pages, consisting of an extended commentary on the brief report

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presented the day before. Second, a 28-page piece called “Case Studies in Subtle Energy Science” in which I proposed some thought experiments based on the new scientific map that I was putting forward. I put a lot of work into all of this in terms of the writing and the slide presentation, and I hoped that this would be understood as the work product of a serious project.

In the course of drafting these “background papers,” I reflected further on several key features of the “comprehensive time scale.” I realized that unlike various time lines we may be more familiar with that arrange events across time, the backward-looking logarithmic time scale I was exploring represents an instant in time. What it represents is thus “synchronic,” or “all at once,” as opposed to “diachronic,” or “over time.” I later realized that the notion of a “spectrum” more accurately reflects this fact—we’re so used to looking at rainbows, for example, we can appreciate readily that in a “spectrum” we are seeing a range of frequencies all at once.

As I thought about this synchronic representation, I drew upon the work of theoretical physicist Julian Barbour, as expressed in his book, “The End of Time: The Next Revolution in our Understanding of the Universe,” (Oxford, 1999), in which he gives a detailed description of the extensive exploration he has done of the possible implications of the “timeless” Wheeler-DeWitt equation in fundamental physics. In the book Barbour suggests how this equation might help us better understand “Mach’s principle”—that the instantaneous configuration of all matter in the entire universe somehow comes into play in establishing the momentum of any specific inertial frame (if I’ve got that right). Along these lines, I suggested that the universal time-scale spectrum represents a “PlanckPrint” configuration of the universe at a “Planckian instant.” (Below I describe how exactly I’ve since modified/updated my thinking about the nature of time in the “innermost” domain.)

The workshop was attended by only fifteen people and received what seemed like a lukewarm reception. I did get an enthusiastic response from Elmer Green’s daughter and long-time research collaborator Pat Norris, who felt strongly that I should submit the “Putting Subtle Energies on the Scientific Map” (PSESM) paper to the ISSSEEM Journal (more on this below). Acting president Bernie Williams was at the workshop and made only the brief critical comment, “Quantum goes all the way down—‘Quantum’ is the whole thing.”Fair enough given the naïve way that I was using the term “quantum” in my presentation. Bernie then introduced me to Garvin McCurdy, Lt Col US Air Force (Ret), who had also attended and had a number of technical things to say in response (a section of svamd.com documents the extended dialog I had with Garvin over subsequent years).

All that said, here is the abstract of “Putting Subte Energies on the Scientifc Map” (PSESM—still one of my personal favorite pieces):

The good news: a simple comprehensive time scale, drawn in strictly scientific terms, can be interpreted as a map of reality that includes subtle (and causal) energies. The bad news: hidden in this simplicity are a number of meta-levels of complexity that will keep scientists busy for generations to come. The scale reveals three distinct domains—each embracing a universe-sized span: our outer cosmic environment including our physical bodies, hidden within which is an inner energetic universe, and still deeper within which is yet a third entire universe of mind and information. Furthermore, this scale, viewed from a Yogic perspective, suggests that science will have to turn many of its current conceptions inside out: rather than looking for how our conscious experience arises from the body, we should look to discover how the body arises within our conscious experience, and rather than insisting upon “cause

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and effect” relations, we should look to discover how science might re-formulate itself in a timeless and a-causal context.102

Bottom line: as far as I could tell, neither the membership nor the leadership of ISSSEEM felt it was particularly important to have “a consensual scientific definition of subtle energies.” This non-response suggested to me a potentially critical deficiency in rigorous thinking in the ISSSEEM community. This prompted a lot of soul searching on my part which led me deep into the nascent academic study of Western esotericism that had grown up since Antoine Faivre's classic works were published, now thirty years ago, starting in 1986. This deep dive into Western esotericism studies was capped for me by Wouter Hanegraaff's PhD dissertation “New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought” (SUNY Press 1998). Hanegraaff makes a convincing case that our contemporary “New Age” is a direct descendant of a secularized version of the currents of Western esotericism that trace their roots to the Italian Renaissance of the 14th century. It was then that ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern esoteric works were first “re-discovered” by Europeans. I outlined some further details in a later blog post: Major Developments.103

Especially striking was Hanegraaff’s Chapter 3: “New Age Science” which highlights many themes that I’d found myself weaving into my Summa and yoga science contemplations. This caused me to reflect in new ways on my long personal experience within the New Age sub-culture, starting with Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga Institute in the late ‘60s, through my quarter century with Adidam, up to these new experiences at ISSSEEM, and elsewhere in the 2000s. Bottom line, I came to see my time at ISSSEEM in a new light as Hanegraaff’s scholarship slowly helped clarify my thinking. I saw that whereas my New Age involvements had been fruitful to an extent—I had gotten some helpful encouragement from Norm Shealy, Pat Norris, Garvin McCurdy, Bernie Williams, and a few others, the New Age orientation to science was not really about doing science, as I preferred, but rather more about trying to find scientific support for the alternative value spheres104 and worldviews that are characteristic of the New Age.

As it turned out, rather than finding collaborators for my yoga science project, I ended up being inducted into the leadership of ISSSEEM. Therein hangs a whole other tale that need not detain us at this juncture. My heart was already off onto another venue, this time with the Science & Non-Duality Conference and Community.

The Science & Non-Duality (SAND) Conferences and my Proposals for “A Science of Non-duality”

What happened with my participation with the SAND conferences and community was not dissimilar from what was happening at ISSSEEM. The fact that it was so similar stood out and became grounds for even deeper lessons in the limitations, for my purposes, of “science” in the New Age movement. However, I remained optimistic and when SAND was first announced I submitted my abstract titled “Non-Dual Scientific Cosmology.”

102 Reminiscent of some of what I’d presented at Tucson-II in 1996. 103 Amusingly, we’ve just been re-reading “Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World,“ and, in particular, how the author portrays the “discovery of Europe by the Mongols” in ~1240s. 104 As Paul Ray had studied in the ‘80s and ‘90s that led him to announce the discovery of the Cultural Creatives.

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In this presentation I described the Time/Scale Spectrum in terms of an “anthropic cosmology.” I chose this terminology based on my just having completed reading the fascinating 1986 tome by John D. Barrow & Frank Tipler, “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,” (Clarendon Press Oxford, and Oxford University Press New York). This reading was part of my effort to delve more deeply into issues raised by Primack & Abrams in their then currently popular book, “The View from the Center of the Universe” (reference above in the “Forties” chapter, Section “The Scale-Re-entrant Fractal Vortex Vision”—fall 1987).

Here is a summary graphic from the slides I prepared for the talk:

Figure 13. “The Antropic Cosmological Timeline” from author’s SAND09 presentation, “Non-Dual Scientific Cosmology.”

To simplify the presentation, I focused on the unitary aspects of the Timeline, rather than the more dualistic aspects that I’d previously focused on in “The Subjectosocpe” and at ISSSEEM in pointing to the correlations suggested by the Timeline between “subjective” and “objective” domains. As a result of this change, I presented the Spectrum horizontally rather than vertically as before.105 Here is my original abstract submission of 5/19/09 titled “Non-Dual Scientific Cosmology:”

The Anthropic Cosmological Timeline is the now-origin logarithmic timeline of all possible times past: from the Planck time, through the photon-proton transit time and the heart beat, to the theoretically inferred Big Bang. It turns scientific cosmology “inside-out” by depicting an observer-centered universe.

Conventional cosmologists prefer the Big-Bang-origin logarithmic timeline that expands the supposed earliest moments after the Big Bang and that avoids the “anthropomorphism” they fear. However, the now-origin version is equally valid scientifically, and expands the moments past but closest to now.

Initial analysis of the ACT reveals a number of unexpected features:

105 As I write this, an added potential virtue of the vertical arrangement has stood out: that it could be presented as a “road ahead” in perspective, emphasizing the proximal/distal distinction (as in the AQAL-ACT composite graphic below).

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First: fully 2/3rds of universe time scales lie within our bodies! The “outer world” comprises the remaining 1/3rd. This is a decidedly “embodied” cosmology.

Second: delimited by the range of electromagnetism in the middle, we note three domains of time spanning ~20 orders of magnitude each: OUTER, INNER, & INNERMOST. Within each we find a distinct kind of:  experience: environment, living body-mind, archetypal form;  structure: material, energetic, informational;  system: dissipative, autopoietic, reflexive;  algebra: complex, quaternion, octonion;  geometry: fractal, non-commutative, non-associative;  meta-level of complexity: simple, hyper, ultra.

Finally: we discover that the ACT does not portray “history.” Rather, all three domains are always arising simultaneously—nested in every Planckian instant as a cosmically entangled non-reducible event arising within a timeless context. Thus, life experience is a vast flow- ensemble of such Planckian instants.

Non-dual scientific cosmology describes a foundational framework within which a scientific revolution may unfold—a novel cosmology within which matter, energy, space, time, life, mind, self, and consciousness may all find coordinated alignment.

The “Big Bang” echoes in the body, here, now. The heart beat entrains the body, here, now. The apparently “separate self” arises in the heart, here, now; In the non-dual space of timeless awareness.

(Note: graphics are nearly essential to comprehend the many complex ideas presented here)

(I put this forward having myself had by then only a few brief glimpses of timeless awareness— glimpses that were, however, extremely compelling. “A little bit of timelessness goes a long way,” I used to say.)

Despite my initial enthusiasm for SAND, I could no longer entertain high expectations about what kind of response I would get because I was now seeing with increasing clarity that SAND was another New Age organization. However, I could not find any other suitable venues for my work, so I continued to do submissions to SAND for the 2010 and 2011 meetings. The 2010 submission and presentation went well as the debut presentation for the Yoga Science Foundation: “Founding the Science of Non-duality:”

Yoga Science is a new transdisciplinary field of study and practice—a hybrid cross between the experiential esoteric Yogas and Science. It is possible only now, at this unique time in history, where for the first time we may stand on the mountain of shoulders of all the world’s giants— here specifically: those of religion and esoteric non-dual spirituality, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Yoga Science takes this position not in the mode of conquest, but in the mode of open embrace, and with a sense of urgency that biggest picture approaches are critically necessary in the face of the unprecedented crises of our time.

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The discovery of the All Time Spectrum (ATS) (presented as the “Anthropic Cosmological Timeline” at SAND09) makes a genuine science of non-duality possible. Spanning all scientific time scales, the ATS divides naturally into three nested domains set in a timeless context.

- For esoteric spirituality, the three domains align with gross, subtle, and causal dimensions of experience in non-dual awareness. - For philosophy, the three align with “cosmological, epistemological/metaphysical, and mathematical pathways”106. - For mathematics: with complex, hyper-complex, and hyper-complex+ numbers, geometries, and associated meta-levels of complexity set in a zero-divisor (“no dualities”) context (the sedenion). - For science: with OUTER material, INNER bodily bio-energetic, and INNERMOST quantum-nonlocal psycho-informational structure-dynamics, all three synchronic within a Planckian Plenum/Void.

From these alignments novel approaches open up to a host of thorny contemporary issues: limits inherent in objective science; the “hard problem” of consciousness; scientific definition of “subtle energies”; scientific definition of “psi”; the roles of energy, information, and meaning in health and healing; and the full path of human developmental potential. The Yoga Science Foundation aims to serve the emergence of an empathic global awareness and participation via a new kind of collaborative but critical Yoga-Scientific enquiry.

The audio recording (yet to be posted) still makes for interesting listening, but the video recording was lost, so I couldn't use it on the YSF site. More importantly, it became painfully obvious at this second meeting that SAND was being abandoned by anyone with any kind of serious (read academic) scientific credentials. I suspected the New Ageyness of the whole enterprise had scared off the adventurous souls who did show up in 2009107 including Berkeley quantum physicist Henry Stapp, well known mathematician Lewis H. Kauffman, Ralph Abrams (famous for his pioneering work on chaos theory) and Barnard Baars, author of the “Global Workspace” theory of consciousness—all well known academics. None of them came back the second year (maybe one or two have since). Although something that could have been easily foreseen, for me, at least, it was a disappointment all the same.

There was one major high-point of the 2010 SAND meeting that had a lasting impact. Roughly two weeks before the meeting all the abstracts were posted. There I discovered one by one Newcomb Greenleaf that looked especially interesting to me because it appeared that he was currently an academic and with an interest in matters non-dual. I contacted him ahead of the meeting and we arranged to have breakfast together on the first full day of the meeting. This was the beginning of a friendship and a valuable collaboration that continued to this day.

Newcomb had spent fifteen years in academia, teaching and researching in mathematics. He left a tenured position to study Buddhism with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and took part in the first Mind &

106 These three terms were developed by sociologist Randall Collins and described in his magisterial book “Sociology of Philosophies,” Harvard University Press, 1998. He did not describe a fourth as context for these three. 107 Probably attracted principally by SAND co-founder Stuart Hameroff who had earlier been co-founder in 1994 with David Chalmers of the Tucson Conferences, “Toward a Science of Consciousness.”

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Life science dialogs with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Together with Francisco Varela, Newcomb co- directed the Summer Institute in Cognitive Science at Naropa Institute from 1978-1981. Newcomb is now on the faculty at Goddard College “teaching everything from mathematics to Buddhism.” In 2012, Newcomb agreed to join the Board of YSF and has served since, bringing us his rich experience as a gracious human being who is also mathematician, Buddhist practitioner, and educator.

By the 2011 meeting, I was suspecting this might be my last presentation at SAND, so I gave it my best shot. I think it was a really nice presentation, organized around the spectrum idea, presenting for the first time the idea of the “time spectrum.” Building on our everyday experience with rainbows, I describe how the rainbow is just a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and then, stepping even farther back, an even smaller portion of the total time spectrum. It was titled “The Time Spectrum Unlocks the Spiritual Psychophysics.” Here is the original abstract:

Since Capra’s “Tao of Physics” in 1975, we’ve been standing before the door to a psychophysics of consciousness—a genuinely spiritual science. Collective anticipation of such a hybrid has grown in successive waves over the two centuries since Swedenborg and Mesmer first proposed the possibility. The Time Spectrum key unlocks this door.

Spanning the sixty orders of magnitude between Planck’s “shortest possible time” and the apparent current age of the universe, the Time Spectrum is naturally depicted logarithmically. As such, it opens before us the vast range of time frames nested within the average human heart beat that are otherwise hidden—time frames we propose ALL relate to experience in an observer-centered cosmology.

Electromagnetism occupies a mid-range third of this span defining three roughly equal domains of twenty orders of magnitude each: an OUTER domain of the environment of the body out to the furthest reaches of the cosmos; an INNER domain of embodied experience; and an INNERMOST domain where we posit individuated time-bound awareness connects with non-individuated timeless awareness.

The phenomena characterizing these three domains relate to a cutting-edge tool of mathematical physics, the complex division algebras, the next extension of which attains “non- division”—an elegant model of ultimate non-duality.

Finally, these four domains—three of time, and one of a timeless context—bear striking parallels to the ancient sciences of mind found in the Indo-Tibetan yogas (among others). These traditions observe that our total reality embraces “gross, subtle, causal, and non-dual” domains. These alignments will be correlated with the leading contemporary theory in the science of consciousness—the Hameroff-Penrose model. Yoga science thus suggests how spirituality and science can begin to shed new light upon and enrich each other. The Yoga Science Foundation has launched the exploration of this new opening.

The presentations of 2010 and 2011 were shorter than in 2009, and the science-focused concurrent sessions they were part of felt crowded and cramped. I read these as additional signs of the deeper motivations of New Age science: nice to have on your side, but not to be taken too seriously.

At the 2012 meeting I decided to attend as a “talent scout” for the Yoga Science Foundation. As good fortune would have it, on the Saturday evening of the conference, as hurricane Sandy was bearing down

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on the East Coast, I met and connected strongly with physics graduate student Wolfgang Lukas. As he completes his PhD dissertation, my relationship with Wolfgang is moving towards a potentially more active collaboration—a collaboration that could make a contribution to moving yoga science beyond its New Age origins.

At the SAND meetings of 2013 and 2014 I pressed several of my friends there for feedback concerning the INNERMOST domain of the Time/Scale Spectrum which I’ll summarize below (in the Section “Updating the Time/Scale Spectrum Graphic”).

At the 2014 meeting, I had a memorable three hour conversation with Jeffery Martin, whom I’d first met at the first SAND Conference in 2009, when he was just beginning work on his dissertation at CIIS. Jeffery caught me up on his extremely ambitious ongoing efforts:  Via in-depth interviews of individuals claiming some sort of awakening, to find a way of characterizing “awakening,” or “enlightenment” acceptable to mainstream academic researchers (especially those in the emerging field of “positive psychology”). This was the subject of his dissertation at CIIS completed sometime in 2013, as I recall. The term he’d come up with is “Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience” or PNSE. He was in the process of turning his dissertation work into a book and he gave me a copy of the manuscript on a thumb drive— working title, “The Club of Fundamental Wellbeing.” Susan and I both read it, very much enjoyed it, and sent Jeffery some hopefully constructive comments. Our principle reservation being that Jeffery appeared to make no acknowledgement of the radical orientations of the non- gradual paths that focus on awareness itself.  Based on the findings of his dissertation work, Jeffery has since been working to develop a program of meditation training—which he has been calling the “Finders Course”—that would optimize the chances of success, defined as reaching a PNSE, on the part of anyone taking the course. This phase of his research work is still ongoing as I write and updated in a recent interview. It appears that he continues to find the PNSE terminology workable. He remains hopeful that by couching his work in the secular language of positive psychology he and the many academics he is networked with around the world will be able to develop a streamlined and scientifically validated system of training that will reach a very large audience “for the benefit of all sentient beings.” I wish him all the best possible good fortune and success in this.

2010 Integral Theory Conference and my critique of Ken Wilber

When Patricia Norris suggested emphatically that I should submit my PSESM paper to SEEMJ, I knew it needed substantial editing and revision in order to be ready for peer-review. In late 2008, I’d recently learned that Ken Wilber’s close student Sean Esbjörn-Hargens was offering his services as an editor for professional journal authors. So I hired him to do a critical review of the piece. As mentioned above, it turned out that SEEMJ was on its last legs at that point and the revised piece was never submitted.108 However, in the course of our dialogs Sean suggested that I might want to participate in the upcoming second Integral Theory Conference scheduled for the following year, in August 2010.

I’d already decided to try to get more involved with the integral theory people as the next potential venue for yoga science. Over the preceding decade I’d found much in Ken’s work to be useful or

108 The piece as revised was eventually posted on my website as “A Scientific Map for Subtle Energies.” However, the writing seems more labored and less appealing to me than the original draft.

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provocative, especially the All Quadrants, All Lines (AQAL) framework he introduced in “Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality” in 1995 (see “Forties” chapter, section “Play with Toffler’s ‘Third Wave’ and Ken Wilber’s AQAL”).

Thus, after the dust settled on SAND09, I plunged into an in-depth study of Ken’s unpublished work then posted on a sub-domain of the Shambhala web site. These were long draft sections of books that he had not yet published. (I no longer find these posted on the web suggesting that they may now be moving through the editorial process as part of the “many” books that Ken currently reports are “in the works.”)

Back on 5/31/07 I’d posted a blog entry titled “Topoloptics” that I now began to reflect upon further in the context of reading deeper into Ken’s work. I updated it in July of 2010 to include mention of my sino- atrial node findings from 1997. I also looked to weave in something from my years of consideration of bio-electromagnetism and subtle energies. The revised piece was posted as a germ of an idea in a three page pdf with graphics: “Topoloptics.” Here you’ll see the SummaTime Scale used as a kind of unusually horzontal axis mundi for the body-mind with an offset for the bio-electromagnetism (BEM) of the INNER domain between the heart and the eyes:

Figure 14. Graphic from author’s “Topoloptics” paper, 2010.

As I reflected on Ken’s then “latest thinking,” a number of connections with my yoga science project began to emerge. One had to do with a discussion Ken had been having about whether or not there were “primordial perspectives.” Thus, in the abstract I ended up submitting to the 2010 Integral Theory

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Conference (ITC) “A Central Axis for the AQAL Framework,” this was one of the issues I was looking to address. Here is the abstract:

An implicit “line of sight” connects me to the AQAL diagram. I imagine this line extending from the center point of the four quadrants, perpendicular to the plane of the diagram, into my point-like view. I propose to make explicit this “Central Axis” and to develop an analysis in scientific terms using The Anthropic Cosmological Timeline (ACT). The ACT extends from the Big Bang to the Planck time in log seconds with the timeless viewer off-scale. ACT analysis reveals three distinct time domains—OUTER, INNER, & INNERMOST—each comprising ~20 orders of magnitude.

An AQAL-ACT composite diagram is developed suggesting how AQAL quadrants are defined only for OUTER and INNER domains distal to where “point of view” itself arises as the source of attention in and as a structure/function such as the alaya vijñana. The INNERMOST domain is thus prior to the arising of mind and individuated attention—here the four quadrants are not yet differentiated.109

Additional Central Axis features: whereas AQAL is diachronic—portraying evolution/development across time—ACT is synchronic portraying a single Planckian instant (or “PlanckPrint”). Set within AQAL, PlanckPrints “tetra-arise,” and even the briefest “moment of experience” consists of a vast PlanckPrint ensemble accumulating “an apparent history” in the quadrants. Whereas AQAL is epistemic—describing forms of perspectival knowledge—ACT is ontologic—spanning all states constituting every present moment of being. Taken together AQAL-ACT describes a novel Integral-Radical framework.

Practical implications include:  explicit extension of Integral Theory into the full depth of timeless, universal, and non- individuated awareness;  a novel scientific tool for analysis of subtle energies and energy healing heretofore resistant to scientific study;  elucidation of the ancient conundrum among spiritual paths: “gradual” vs “non- gradual” (Adi Da’s “Roundabout” vs “Straightaway”);  a much-needed directly verifiable and embodied scientific cosmology that supports integral spiritual enactment.

This mouthful was accepted for poster presentation only (bad sign number 1). The poster I produced attempted somehow to present all this visually. As posted on my website in pdf, the presentation includes a number of pages added later in an effort to unpack the whole thing a bit further, note especially the graphic on page 3:

109 You’ll see a bit later how the time scale intervals also become indeterminate in the INNERMOST region.

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Figure 15. The AQAL-ACT Composite Diagram, 2010

I don’t think I succeeded, and the poster received only minimal attention at the poster sessions of the conference. In addition, however, as the conference opened with Sean’s welcome speech, it became clear to me that a) Adi Da had become taboo—not even to be mentioned (bad sign number 2), and b) there was a dense cliquishness about the “inner circle” of Ken’s students (bad sign number 3).

In any case, I was trying to bring to the attention of anyone viewing the AQAL diagram that there is an implicit axis between they themselves as the awareness engaged in registering the whole experience (the “SEER”) and the object being the AQAL diagram itself (the “SEEN”). However, I think it all just got tangled up in the intellectual weeds of the conference for all of its otherwise high purposes, intelligent execution, and youthful enthusiasm.

Another aspect of my participation in the 2010 ITC conference was the part I played on a panel on subtle energy. I’d been aware for some years of Ken’s piece “Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies,” posted as “Excerpt G” at Ken’s sub-domain of shambhala.com. It was also published pretty much without change in “the new Larry Dossey journal:” “Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing” in July of 2005. Given that subtle energy was such a keen interest of mine, I’d read and re-read this piece on a series of occasions over the years. In anticipation of the ITC conference, I wrote up ten pages of “reading notes” and posted these on my website. Here are a couple of the conclusions that seem relevant at this juncture:  (Regarding interpretations of quantum mechanics:) whereas the criticism of the many pop interpreters who give us “bad physics and bad mysticism” is not unfounded, I feel that what we are being offered here is only perhaps somewhat better physics and somewhat better mysticism. Yoga science aims to be the offspring of the marriage of best physics and best mysticism.

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 AQAL basically represents a view looking toward the Big Bang along the SummaTime Scale whereas Adi Da’s Cosmic Mandala is the view looking the other way—toward the Planckian. I propose these two are best seen as non-dual. The overall potential error here, in my view, is one of “causal reductionism”110—the error of assuming that reality itself might be described by the AQAL scheme—which is only one of the two possible perspectives along the STS—perspectives that I feel are best taken together and non- dual from the beginning since they are fundamentally synchronic in any occasion.

This last point again raises the issue of “psycho-topology” discussed above in this section and in the last chapter (section “Reflections on Psycho-topology”). In the AQAL-ACT diagram above you’ll see how I relate the ACT time/scale spectrum and Ken’s AQAL diagram. The opposite alternative is represented by “The Cosmic Mandala” proposed by Adi Da Samraj.111 Here it is in effect the Planck end of the time/scale spectrum that is at the center, with “reality” extending out from there. Some of the details of this scheme are discussed at the link above. Here is the image—imagine pinning this to the Planck end of the ACT and positioning yourself at the Big Bang end):

Figure 16. “The Cosmic Mandala” by Adi Da

The panel was attended by about 40 conferees, but the discussion remained largely superficial from my perspective.

Ken got sick again sometime in this same time period and many of the ambitious plans of his students went on hold. The Integral Studies program at John F. Kennedy University that had looked so promising and served as the venue for the 2010 ITC Conference had to shut down. I’ve not followed the development of Ken’s work especially closely since that time.

Begin Working with Daniel P. Brown PhD

In the course of my original conversation with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens in 2009, we spoke at some length about his deep appreciation for Adi Da Samraj and how during the two years he’d spent working closely with Ken Wilber, “Adi Da was never far from our conversation.” He also asked, “Have you seen Dan

110 Ken having written at some length on the hazard of “subtle reductionism” posed by reducing all phenomena in the two “subjective” quadrants of the AQAL diagram (on the left) to the two “objective” quadrants on the right. See, for example, “A Brief History of Everything,” (Shambhala Publications, 2007) p 174ff. 111 First published in the 1991 issue of “The Dawn Horse Testament,” (Dawn Horse Press).

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Brown’s “Pointing Out the Great Way”?112 It’s really terrific!” I vaguely recalled that I’d heard Ken mention Dan with high praise in several “Integral Naked”113 audios I’d listened to. I ordered a copy from amazon.com as we spoke.

When the book arrived, I immediately began reading it out loud, cover to cover, as Susan cooked breakfast, every day, for well over a month. We were thrilled at the richness of the concise detail with which Dan portrayed the meditative path and the sophistication of his translation method that made use of a careful semantic field analysis of technical terms from the Indo-Tibetan tradition. We were especially struck by a passage in the introduction:

From the essence traditions, like mahamudra and dzogchen, I began to appreciate that the depth of realization possible during ordinary concentration and special insight meditation was enhanced remarkably by shifting to the very subtle or extraordinary level of mind. In other words, the issue became less about concentration on the intended meditation object and much more about the level of mind brought to the concentration, and that, from the mind- perspective, shifting from the ordinary self-representation to the extraordinary essence of the mind’s real nature as the vantage point during meditation quickly brought the meditation practice within the range wherein awakening the mind was a definite possibility.

This was exciting for us both in terms of clarifying our personal practice, and for me in terms of yoga science: it clarified a key point that was consistent with all we’d learned from Adi Da over the years about “Radical Understanding,” and brought into clear focus the importance of “vantage point” in terms of the Dzogchen practice we’d learned from Namkhai Norbu; it also helped bring greater clarity into yoga science by providing a new language of “levels of mind” to correlate with my analysis of the time spectrum.

We made a number of attempts to find contact information for Dan in order to express to him our gratitude for his shedding so much clear light on these matters, but we could find, at that time, virtually nothing about him on the web. It wasn’t until I was introduced to his student Dustin DiPerna at the Integral Theory Conference in 2010 and he gave me the URL of Dan’s new website114 that we were finally able to connect with Dan. Turned out there was a “Level 1” retreat coming up the following month only a few hours’ drive from our home.

Susan and I attended that retreat in October of 2010. Since then we’ve attended a number of additional retreats with Dan and with four remarkable lamas that Dan has brought in to teach advanced practices to his students. We have felt deeply served by these teachings and contacts, and they continue to be the main source of guidance for our personal practice. Dan’s extensive background in clinical practice of psychology (including extensive professional training in hypnosis), his deep understanding of trauma and abuse (for which he has served as an expert witness in war crimes tribunals), his understanding of healthy early-life bonding and attachment, and his extensive experience as a teacher for Harvard

112 Full title: “Pointing Out the Great Way: The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra Tradition,” Wisdom Publications, 2006. 113 Integral Naked was a section of the website of the Integral Institute that featured audio recordings of dialogs between Ken and a variety of other leading-edge thinkers. It is still live on the web as of this writing, but it seems to not have been updated since 2009. 114 www.pointingoutway.org

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Medical School’s continuing education program are all brought to bear in the unique “pointing out style” he has developed for leading his meditation students into the depths via direct experience.

Over the past six years, in terms of yoga science, the teachings we’ve received from Dan and his lama colleagues, and the experiential deepening of our practice have together brought greater clarity to the many threads of the yoga science consideration I’ve woven over these past many pages. One teaching in particular that I’ll highlight here is from the Bön Dzogchen tradition called “The Six Lamps.” Originally transmitted around a thousand years ago by the quasi-mythical Bön master Tapihritsa, this beautiful teaching lays out a remarkably detailed picture of the origins and development of our ordinary human body-minds, and how we are inherently grounded in non- separation. It describes a series of levels of awareness (the “lamps”) whereby the body-mind is related to the “groundless ground” of awareness as the source and nature of all appearances through direct knowing. (These levels bear a striking similarity to the “Topoloptics” scheme described above).

Interested readers can find Tapihritsa’s text in the recent book “Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and Visionary Buddhism in Renaissance Tibet,” by Chris Hatchell (Oxford, 2014). This scholarly work compares three important texts from the early second millennial “Tibetan renaissance” that involved both Buddhist and Bön masters and extensive exchange among them. It has special relevance to the focus of advanced yoga practice on the visionary capacities of our psychophysiology. (At the time of this writing, Dan has completed a new translation of the Bön teaching on the Lamps under direct supervision of His Holiness of the Bön, Menri Trizen—publication forthcoming).

In the past Dan has made a key distinction between Buddhism as a “soteriological system” (meaning here: “devoted to realization of the true nature of our existence”—“the way things truly are”) and science as a means of acquiring practical knowledge. Recently, however, Dan has teamed up with Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, to explore the possibility of identifying “EEG signatures” for the key “levels of mind” that he teaches his meditation students to access experientially: subtle, very subtle, extraordinary and awakened. If this research bears fruit in the coming years, it would mean that it may be possible to develop EEG bio-feedback strategies to facilitate learning how to access these levels of mind. This could contribute to what I call a “scientific soteriology” that would represent a major development of yoga science.

Developments since 2011

I’ve made no formal presentations since SAND 2011. However, in 2011, at the prompting of a colleague, I undertook to write a book describing yoga science, hired a developmental editor (with the support of YSF), and devoted many hours over many months to the effort of “pulling it all together.” The working title for the project was “The Outing of Inner Time” (TOIT). Painstaking work led to the development of several chapters, the first of which got some most welcome critique from my SAND friend, Tom MacFarlane. I was hard at work on drafting Chapter 3 when it began to dawn on me that because I had not really succeeded in identifying my intended audience my editor was working overtime to revise the material into a form that might be understood by a broad non-technically informed readership. We’d agreed at the start to aim for a “well-informed Cultural Creative” audience, but her understanding of “Cultural Creative” did not include those with technical backgrounds.

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Simultaneously, I was becoming increasingly frustrated in not being able to communicate the technical juice that I felt was somehow the “life blood” of yoga science. Thus, when my colleague died suddenly in early 2012, I put the project on hold, rather relieved because with his passing, I now had a raft of new administrative and IT chores to handle and far less time for writing. However, many elements of the TOIT project are finding their way into this Memoir and the “technical elaboration” that I’m now beginning to contemplate.

In 2012 I helped out at SAND as an introducer at several of the concurrent sessions. The most significant event of that year’s conference was my meeting Wolfgang Lukas. 2013 was occupied largely in searching for a new home in Southern Oregon, preparing our home of fifteen years in the hills above Ukiah for sale—packing everything up, and eventually moving to Ashland in mid-2014. 2015 was a year spent largely dealing with personal health issues.

However, I have written a number of short essays over these recent years that I began pulling together last September anticipating that Wolfgang might be finishing his dissertation (October 2015 was one of his target times). I refer to this collection as “the YS journal.” When Wolfgang came to Ashland in October for a four-day retreat here at our home, however, he was still quite a ways from having his dissertation complete, and so the only items I shared with him were Dan Brown’s “Emptiness of Time” presentation from his Level 1 retreat (by permission) and an "Annotated Guide to Readings in Yoga Science” that I put together for him to peruse at his leisure.

Here are a few of these short essays (the first going back to a topic I explored in depth in 2012):

Scale Relativity & “The Spiritual Psychophysics”

What I want to do here is begin to spell out and make explicit, in at least a brief outline, the deep connection I see between Nottale’s Scale Relativity (SR) and my Yoga Science (YS).

1. The “scale” part of SR relates to what I now refer to as the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum. My “time spectrum” being one specific case: the spectrum of time scales.

a. In physics the time spectrum can be defined with simplicity as tp–> tU, where tp means Planck time, and tU means current age of the universe. (I have yet to confirm that Nottale explicitly describes a range of scales – my impression is that he simply defines a variable for scale (or “resolution of measurement”) and then begins deriving the major equations of physics in terms of that variable.) b. Meanwhile, I think a strong case can be made that time plays an especially (and mysteriously) central role in both physics and psychology. Countless thinkers throughout history have explored its mysteries and declared their inability to arrive at a definitive conceptual analysis – an inability that continues in physics to this day.

2. SR offers us a novel single mathematical physics for the entire scale spectrum which resolves thereby the century-old split between the well-established General Relativity of macro scale phenomena, and the well-established Quantum Mechanics of micro scale phenomena. a. In terms of time, SR thus describes a physics that is simultaneous across the entire scale spectrum. This is key for yoga science because yoga can be understood as a progressive

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relaxation into the experiential depths of simultaneity in the present with the limit case of that progression being “realization,” “awakening,” or “enlightenment”. b. Meanwhile, on the science side, SR creates a foundation (at least in principle) for the development of a vast array of scientific description and unpacking that remains deeply unified (and unifying) across the entire spectrum of scales.

3. Nottale has described the deep connection between the relativity of SR and emptiness in Buddhism (See his piece on “Relativity-Emptiness”). a. Both can thus be identified and understood as both unitary and universal features of experience – one in the language of science, the other in the language of (Buddhist) yoga. b. When applied to the conceptual separation of experience into “seer” and “seen” — observer and the observed, objects seemingly “out there” and the observing subject seeming “in here”—the relativity-emptiness of this concept itself can be known and understood directly. c. Thus, relativity-emptiness points to an inherent and universal non-duality.

4. Thus I propose, in the language of SR, that the scale spectrum is itself the “proper reference frame” for every moment of conscious experience (including potentially—depending on our definitions—“awareness,” “consciousness” and “mind”). a. As a physics of simultaneity, SR corresponds nicely with the fundamentally unitary nature of conscious experience. b. Meanwhile, in the deeper ranges of yoga, this unitary nature of experience assumes (famously) cosmic dimensions that correspond nicely with the cosmic span of the scale spectrum—in effect yielding an “anthropic” or “observer-centered” cosmology. c. Thus, what is directly experienced in yoga may be potentially, rigorously, and scientifically analyzed via SR.

5. As a final point: whereas I have described how the time spectrum of YS divides naturally into three time domains (INNERMOST, INNER, & OUTER) in accord with both yoga (causal, subtle, & gross—or Buddhist Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, & Nirmanakaya) and science (sub-quantum, EM, and outer cosmos), SR provides the tools of mathematical physics for us to greatly deepen that analysis. a. Already Nottale and his colleague Charles Auffray have begun exploring how this might be developed in biology—especially in terms of the movement towards the unified and unitary biology that is represented by his “systems biology.” In terms of the time spectrum, this represents an extension of SR analysis—first developed by Nottale the astrophysicist with particular reference to the OUTER time domain—now into the INNER time domain. b. However, yet to be undertaken are applications of SR to the INNERMOST time domain— the vast universe of time scales extending from the scale of the sub-atomic particles down some 20+ orders of magnitude to the Planck scale. It is here that I’m convinced we will find the key to the psychophysics—“the timeless space of awareness,”115 As I recall, Nottale makes passing reference in his book “Scale Relativity” to the fact that his formalism would have to be “complexified” in order to delve into this deeper domain. It is my understanding that such a project would involve shifting mathematical gears up to

115 To use the language of one of Tibet’s greatest Dzogchen yogi’s, Longchen Rabjam (1308 – 1364).

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the octonionic level of ultra-hyper-complex numbers, geometries, and topologies I’ve touched upon above. Such a move may be required for physics to penetrate into the INNERMOST.

Updating the Time/Scale Spectrum graphic

Another piece in the “YS Journal” is “The Time/Scale Spectrum” of 10/8/15. Here is the opening section and the two T/SS diagram modifications:

I’ve finally done a quick update on an Adobe Illustrator file from 2011 to mask and make just barely visible the time line in the INNERMOST region to indicate that in this domain the notion of “time interval” is indeterminate (in the opinion of several physicists I’ve consulted). This is one of the main feedbacks I’ve received on my presentations at SAND—from Tom MacFarlane and his brother-in-law and former Stanford classmate Marek Alboszta: one cannot extend the timeline into this domain (and still hope to be taken seriously in scientific circles) without serious qualification. Think of this as a revision on the science side:

Figure 17. First of two 2011 revisions of the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum (for time) diagram

On the yoga side, in order to align more directly with how understanding is unfolding in my practice, I’ll make an additional change and flip the “eye of awareness” in this diagram into the INNERMOST:

Figure 18. Second and final of two 2011 revisions of the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum (for time) diagram

So this becomes the “latest iteration” of the Time = Mind Spectrum. Including the “eye of awareness” within the framework of the time spectrum signifies its non-dual presence in (and

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perhaps as) the INNERMOST whereas the science revision points to a paradoxical kind of “non- local timelessness” of the INNERMOST domain of time itself.

Further INNERMOST Reflections

The INNERMOST is a vast time/scale domain, roughly 20 orders of magnitude by my best estimate. Because experientially it seems contained within the most minute fractions of a second, I’ve begun thinking of it as a kind of paradoxical “space mirror”—like a flat surface that is so compact as to have no thickness, like the surface of a mirror, but at the same time occupying all of space—the vast space of mind itself; the generative matrix within which sub-atomic and atomic matter, complexified matter, living matter, feeling matter, knowing matter, and realizing matter all arise.

Meanwhile, the INNER subtle domain is the realm of living matter phenomena—of bio- electromagnetism pervaded by mind and composed of complexified matter where matter itself, I’ve begun to think, after Penrose, is complexified gravitational mind—as gravitation pervades the universe at all scales, so does mind right along with it, or perhaps as Penrose might suggest, as it.

What makes our situation so special is that the kind of minds that we are blessed with have been equipped by evolutions—cosmic, galactic, stellar, planetary, biological, and cultural—not only to have this cosmic inherence but also a profound connection to structures of complexifying matter (the body), which are themselves made out of complexified mind. Somehow matter condensed directly out of gravity-mind (the assumption being explored here is that gravity itself is mind), or what the Tibetans might refer to as primordial mind—mind that is itself the structure of space-time, that is also the vehicle for, or itself the force of, gravity, and which, when associated with a hyper-complexified bio-matter form, does “have a sense of what it is to be appearing as that specific embodiment.”

Roger Penrose began proposing in 1989 in his book, “The Emperor’s New Mind,” that somehow consciousness was inherent in the very fabric of space-time. He went on to develop a theory—expressed in the language of mathematical physics—that he calls “Orchestrated Organic Reduction” (OrchOR). He subsequently teamed up with Stuart Hameroff to elaborate how OrchOR might be taking place in large but transient ensembles of microtubules in the brain that act as quantum computers and subserve a quantum-gravitational collapse that IS a moment of consciousness. Although it remains controversial, the theory has made a number of predictions, some of which have been confirmed.

Thus my proposal above is that gravity may be playing not just a cosmic role, but also a key role in our subjective experience as well. I’ve recently explored this a bit further and may be able expand this discussion in the future.

Time-Framing Our Problem

On 7/16/15 (sl rev 4/15/16) I drafted this brief note:

Distinguishing practical and existential, we here focus on the latter.

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Implicit is that new solutions to our human existential problem might succeed in so reframing our thinking as to aid in the development of novel solutions to our seemingly insoluble practical ones.

We propose that time is the crux:

As proposed previously (that time = mind), time appears as the core existential paradox.

We here analyze time into:  No time – achronic  Now time – synchronic  Flow time – diachronic

Although it seems probable that only the first of these is “absolute” and the other two “relative,” given that ordinary experience seems to be dominated by flow time, we could begin there. Historically, yoga has been taught most commonly in the sequence “gross, subtle, causal” (perhaps roughly equivalent to these three “kinds of time”—gross/diachronic, subtle/synchronic, causal/achronic).

Alternatively, we might better begin with the achronic. This would be more in keeping with the “radical” or “non-gradual” traditions of yoga such as Dzogchen (and Adi Da’s “Way of Radical Understanding”).

For yoga science, my sense is that all three are important:  The achronic suggests the possibility of an alignment between the timelessness of full yogic realization and contemporary work on timeless formulations in fundamental physics;  The synchronic (in the time/scale spectrum form I’ve proposed) appears to be a potential key to the alignment of all the yogas and most all the rest of science;  The diachronic is “history” (Big and small)—an invaluable tool for contextualizing our efforts in human cultural, developmental, and evolutionary terms.

A New Historiography of Non-Separateness

On 2/2/16—the day before my 70th birthday—I wrote the following, “Yoga Science: Historic and Historical”

I’m moved to reflect anew on these two features of yoga science, the historic and historical: the historic feature relates to the potentially global significance of yoga science; and the historical feature relates to the deep history of yoga science itself—how yoga science has emerged historically, over time.. (The other two critically important times of yoga science—the synchronic and the achronic—are elaborated elsewhere).

Although I’ve explored all this to some extent in the past, it feels as though a fresh pondering is in order given the ongoing unfolding of my study and practice.

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First: what do I mean by yoga science? As both yoga and science, in my view, have roots in the ancient world, they may have been intertwined from the very start of what we think of as “history”—with the emergence of records of human events—the most reliable accounts likely written only shortly after the events recorded. From the beginning, it appears that at least some of us human beings have been keenly interested in reflecting upon and exploring the totality of experience. Since our natural experiential field includes both “outer” and “inner” events, such reflection and exploration has inevitably involved both. In fact, the evidence points to the impossibility of separating the two. Thus, I see yoga science as a natural contemporary expression of the inherent non-separation of inner and outer experience.

However, for the most part in “modern times,” the writing of history (the literal meaning of historiography) of science and yoga have been pursued separately: the former extensively, the latter much less so. Thus, a principle aim of this note is to move us toward a new historiography in which this inherent non-separateness is taken fully into account.

I propose that we can consider yoga to be a very general term reflecting a predominant orientation to the “inner” aspects of experience, and science a very general term reflecting a predominant orientation to the “outer” aspects of experience. Both yoga and science have undergone long and complex development over the course of history—on a scale far beyond what I’ll be able to do justice to in this brief note. However, I propose that they are best considered together and that a new historiography of their joint development will shed important new light on the human condition and suggest new ways forward toward a full science of humanity.

I propose that it will be seen that yoga and science as thus outlined have nourished each other throughout history—yoga affording novel insights and science novel rigor. Going forward, I propose that yoga will illumine areas of science that remain yet undeveloped, and that science will help free yoga of illusions and superstitions. Together thus, I propose that yoga science could assume a central role in the harmonious development of global civilization: a deeper science combined with more reliably efficacious yoga.

In Summary—For Now

In bringing this memoir to a close for now, I’ll briefly highlight four topics: 1. How yoga science emerged in my life starting at age 21; 2. A brief update of some of the key technical features of yoga science; 3. A quick look ahead for yoga science; 4. An appeal for a wider hearing for yoga science—that you consider my analysis.

1. How yoga science emerged in my life starting from age 21

The autobiography in this memoir is an example of how natural it is for a human being to become inclined to explore the INNER and even INNERMOST domains in response to encountering an extraordinary being, where the mind and heart are suddenly opened and there is a feeling of

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spontaneous connection, attraction, and the sense of making a powerful discovery, all right in that moment:  Zeros: outer experience of nature and inner experience of mind altered were both spontaneous and compelling.  Tens: inner awareness was enhanced following the “why am I me?” incident, outer awareness by science, a cosmopolitan education, and the ambition to be a “generalist” and find a reconciliation between science and religion.  Twenties: Swamiji’s astonishing transfiguration display leads into the inner world of yoga, and, with further science education, a life of service in both yoga and science unfolded.  Thirties: Bubba Free John’s “Koan of Time” and a more comprehensive life of practice included both a deeper yoga and ongoing exploration of science as research director of the Radiant Life Clinic.  Forties: a striking experience of guru-devotee non-difference led to the SummaParadigm (direct pre-cursor of yoga science) proposing a novel approach to both inner and outer worlds.  Fifties: a first version of the SummaTime Scale was envisioned, and after a “Heart to Heart” with Adi Da, the science of the sino-atrial node of the heart emerged, and the Summa was communicated more broadly.  Sixties: after the “seminal discovery” of the “Extended” Summa Time Scale, a robust yoga science offspring emerged and was presented at ISSSEEM ’08, followed by presentations in subsequent years at ISSSEEM, at SAND ‘09 through ‘14, and at ITC in ‘10. Significantly, in 2012, I met Wolfgang Lukas and we began our ongoing work together.

2. A brief update of some of the key technical features of yoga science

Epistemic stance: Yoga science begins by withholding any decision in favor of “objective existence.” Rather, it presumes the inherent non-separation of objective and subjective.

Heuristic foundation From there, it accepts such a separation tentatively, as a heuristic tool or simplifying assumption, when it is both possible and necessary to obtain information about the world that might be of practical use to living beings.

Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum The principle such heuristic tool explored to date—one that seems especially well-suited to yoga science—is the Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum116 and its natural division into the three “Domains” INNERMOST, INNER, and OUTER.

The yoga science idea matrix:

116 The perhaps most directly descriptive name for “the backward-looking logarithmic cosmological time scale” that has so exercised me over the past several decades suggested itself this past August as the “Planck- Hubble Scale Spectrum” (PHSS). That has been my preferred name for it since. The most up-to-date graphic representation is shown above in this chapter in the Section “Updating the Time/Scale Spectrum Graphic” (Fig 16).

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Domain Yoga BioPsyche Algebra INNERMOST Causal nature of mind octonion INNER Subtle mind quaternion OUTER Gross body/world complex

The Yoga column should be familiar to most—it reflects terms from Vedanta (Sanskrit: karana, suksma, sthula) that were popularized in the West by the Theosophical Society in the late 1800s and have stood the test of time since.

The Psyche column draws upon the long history of contemplative observation in Buddhist history (and into the present) that underlying and suffusing all experience—all sensation, perception and conception—is a variously named but ultimately ineffable “nature of mind” (sometimes referred to as “primordial” or “pure” awareness). Whereas I launched the yoga science in 2008 with a focus on the subtle, the causal soon emerged as the most interesting and potentially novel area of yoga science investigation.

Although the Algebra column will be new to most117, it has yielded many insights into how a technical elaboration of yoga science might proceed. I’ve yet to find another mathematical formalism with such potentially robust application in the INNERMOST. Meanwhile applications in the OUTER and INNER can readily be found in science. Especially provocative for me have been the topological expressions of the complex algebras as possible pointers toward a robust psycho-topology.

The Sino-Atrial Node Scale Nexus An important additional technical feature of yoga science concerns the proposals here regarding the relationship between non-local and a-temporal “nature of mind” (in and as the INNERMOST), and the INNER energies and structures of the human body-mind. Here the key role of the sino-atrial node has been explored in some detail above: starting with Adi Da’s first identification of “The Heart on the Right” (treated in some detail in his EWB) reported in the Forties Chapter, then expanded in the Fifties Chapter Section “Heart Research Fever,” and finally in this chapter in the Section “2010 Integral Theory Conference and my critique of Ken Wilber” where I discuss and diagram how the PHSS may relate to our “psychotopology.”

The suggestion here is that it is at the sino-atrial node that a specific kind of connection is made between non-local, a-temporal, and pre-personal “nature of mind” and the “heart-mind” of the individual. The complex algebras may suggest some novel ideas as to how these key domain interfaces actually work. The SAN as armature of the body/mind may coincide with the organizing function played by the ahamkar in Ayurveda. This has also been explored extensively by the Institute of Heart Math and is well documented in the public health research demonstrating HRV as best predictor of all-disease mortality.

3. A quick look ahead for yoga science

Despite the decades of “pre-history” described above, yoga science is still very much in its infancy. As it continues to unfold, it appears to be moving toward a “Planck-Hubble Scale Spectrum psycho-bio-

117 Wikipedia has good introductions to “Complex Algebra” and “the Cayley-Dixon Series.”

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physics” as the technical basis for “a scientific soteriology.” Such a future will necessarily require extensive creative participation on the part of experts in the fields of math, computation, geometry, and topology as well as others in physics, systems biology, psychology, and social science.

On the yoga side, as contemplative science continues to develop, “best practices” for contemplative training should be developed so that individuals interested in pursuing yoga science can gain access to the deeper levels of contemplative insight as directly as possible.

The following outlines some of the key areas that stand out as candidate research topics for yoga science:

 Stay on top of: o Current well-known efforts specifically oriented toward realization of Buddhahood and worthy of close monitoring and scientific investigation:118 . B. Alan Wallace and his works in the lineage of the Dudjom Rinpoches . Daniel P. Brown and his work with His Holiness of the Bön . Other living transmission masters and their communities and solo practitioners? (Yoga science should cast as global a net as possible here.) o Current cutting edge university-affiliated scientific work in yoga science . The Shamatha Project . The Phenomenological Matrix Model . The Center for Mindfulness . Antoine Lutz’s collaboration in Europe o Contemporary candidate thought leaders in related areas . Ken Wilber & Dustin Diperna . Jeffery Martin & Mikey Segal . Others?

 Topics to explore more deeply o “Constructor theory” developed recently by physicist David Deutsch (already famous for establishing the quantum theory of computation several decades ago) and his bright young colleague, Chiara Marletto. This work on the foundations of physics could shed important new light on how information and life are both grounded in material processes. They have proposed a novel and sophisticated way to approach the uniqueness of living systems. This work could add new depth to the current “constructivist” movements in philosophy and psychology which bear a natural and deep sympathy with Buddhist approaches and hence with yoga science. o Nottale’s Scale Relativity was discussed above. Since his formalism seems to break down at INNERMOST scales, the question arises, are there any more INNERMOST- permissive formalisms available for mathematical physics? What would be involved in “complexifying” his maths in order to qualify it for the INNERMOST? Meanwhile, Nottale too, in his collaboration with Aufray, has described a new approach to

118 Meanwhile, there must be many unpublicized efforts toward Buddhahood as well. Worthy of closer investigation: current-day masters and students of Buddhism (including Zen, Chan, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, and all the other schools), Eastern Orthodox mysticism, Sufism, Kabbalah, and Yoga.

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living systems biology based on his Scale Relativity that may contain insights useful to yoga science.

 Hence, here are some possible research projects to be pursued in the coming years: o The Cayley-Dixon Construction (including its numbers, geometries, and topologies) . Brief hx and major elements; . Current and potential future applications in engineering;119 . Current and potential algorithmic representations. o Constructor Theory—can it be related to the PHSS or the Complex Algebras? o Nottale’s Scale Relativity-Emptiness and possible extension of his formalism into the INNERMOST via “complexification.” o Review of existing literature on bio-topology including the fractal topology of Aufray & Nottale. o Hameroff-Penrose Theory—still standing after twenty years, what is its status currently and how might it yield new insights for yoga science, especially regarding the notion mentioned in passing above of “gravitational mind”? o What might Stephen Wolfram have to say about some of the technical issues raised by yoga science? o Other candidates? Send us your thoughts.

4. An appeal for a wider hearing for yoga science—that you consider my analysis.

Regarding what we commonly think of as “human potential,” we come to suspect that the final yogic event—opening to Buddhahood—is an expansion/implosion of such magnitude in cognitive, affective, and conative120 capacities as to “beggar the imagination.” Could this final event be a psychotopological transformation corresponding to the end of the finite series of holarchic levels of the Complex Algebras? Such a possibility seems quite beyond mainstream scientific imagination.

Meanwhile, considering the three levels of Psyche noted above, if it appears at all, the INNERMOST is, for the most part, on scientific maps as “terra incognita”—for example, as “the realm of quantum gravity” that continues to elude physics. Additionally, when Michel Bitbol makes his key points in “Overcoming the Blindspot of Science” he does not articulate even a hint of the deeper wisdom of the Buddhist contemplative tradition when it comes to these matters. Basing his presentation on the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, Maturana, and Varela, the INNERMOST is seen only via philosophic conception rather than known directly via contemplative awakening. Thus, even for this sophisticated Western thinker, and even though he’s been exposed to the high Buddhist teachings, the INNERMOST remains in the background, never discussed explicitly.

Thus, the INNERMOST for science remains peripheral, unknown, ignored, or denied—a “blind spot” still. Whatever my personal limitations as a scientist, I here share my sense that we must not sell ourselves short by continuing in this denial of that which is the core of our very existence, awareness, and joy.

119 NOTE: quaternion notation is currently preferred by video game computer engineers for representing spatial transformations. Living things are a hyper-complex network of spatial transformations—where the quaternion serves powerful description. 120 The cognitive part of the mind has to do with intelligence, the affective with emotions, and the conative with [what online dictionaries refer to specifically] “the effort” in how one acts on those thoughts and feelings.

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We’ve got somehow to get beyond our own assumed limitation that “since it’s bigger than both of us, we should just go with the flow, and not ‘rock the boat.’”

Consider this: there is far more going on in the world of science these days than any “Renaissance Man” could possibly master. This, it seems, is a commonly held view today. But, how much does this contribute to our neglect of wholes—our studied refusal to permit even discussions of “wholeness,” let alone vigorous scientific exploration? If I examine my own mind, I find a strong opinion that we’ve been outgrown by our vast scientific knowledge. It’s as if I now assume that this is obviously true, and need not be questioned further—a key sign of something that is especially worthy of further questioning.

Meanwhile, the practical question we humans are confronted with is this: can we build future technologies that are demonstrably effective in widening the welfare of all sentient beings? What if we undertook to create collaborations that somehow tapped structurally into the heart-impulse and thereby plugged into a new kind of creative power dynamic? I suggest that this is an idea implicit in the notion of sangha. Could a more extensive and intensive cultivation of a yoga science sangha unleash a new kind of collaborative depth? The yoga science analysis presented here suggests the answer, “Yes, and we must!”

As suggested above, the creative process is the application to worldly problems of the same set of skills mobilized in a genuine sadhana purposed to Buddhahood. In that process, creative capacities we cannot conceive in advance tend to come on-line. Take a careful look at what some of Tibet’s great yogis accomplished! Read their life-stories. Then take a look at those who are alive still today.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you might have come to feel some sense of sympathy with the PHSS- view of things, even if some of my statements about it seem flat wrong, and others perhaps at best far- fetched. With all this in mind, I ask you to consider my analysis: am I on the right track? Does it hold water? Short of that, are there even scattered insights here that you might use?

If what I’ve proposed as yoga science does seem viable to you, then please consider further, might you be in a position to help take yoga science to the next level? How might you advance the project? Let me know what you come up with. It may make sense for us to team up.

You can reach me at [email protected].

May it be auspicious for all!

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Appendix 1: Meta-levels of Psychotopology

Observable in the Decades?

One of the themes running through this memoir is that specific topological structures may characterize our experience at different stages of personal and spiritual growth. Implicit in this notion is that as we grow, our way of experiencing may undergo a series of topological transformations. In reviewing the summaries at the end of each chapter and the thumbnail descriptions in the opening and closing sections, it struck me that a correlation might exist between the decadal pattern I identified in March of 2016 and just such a series of topological transformations. The following is a rough outline description of what these transformations may have involved in my case.

Zeros: Ken Wilber has said, in reference to our growth through the stages of development, “We all start at zero when we are born.” Reflecting on my first memories and what kind of “experiencing” was present during the several years before memories began forming, it may be appropriate to call this a zero-dimension awareness. Then, as memories began forming, such experiences were “strung together,” gradually more and more densely, to form a “thread” of one-dimensional awareness that underlies any story. Here the psychotopology grows out from a 0-dimension (0-D) into 1-dimensional (1- D) line.

Tens: as experience + memory becomes more complex, the psyche could be seen as expanding out from the line or thread of story into a horizontal 2nd dimension—into a world of fuller experience. This could be marked by the emergence of a new kind of self-awareness. Perhaps this was the significance of the “why am I me” experience at around age 11, following which my education led me into a highly complex world of ideals and ideas. Here the psychotopology grows out from the 1-D line into a 2-D “world surface.”

Twenties: following the transfiguration experience with Swami Satchidananda when I was 21, it felt quite literally that “a whole new dimension of reality” had been added to my experience. It felt like a “new axis of perspective” had come alive—a dimension of depth and spaciousness, of feeling, surrender, and commitment that I enacted during my years with Swamiji. Via dreams and initiations as well, I was led repeatedly to conceive of “my existence” as a disc—the “Sudharshana Chakra”—a two dimensional structure now viewed and knowable from outside within a three dimensional space. Here perhaps the psychotopology pops out of the 2-D “world surface” and sees itself as a whole within a 3-D setting.

Thirties: a recurrent theme during this most eventful decade was evoked by Bubba’s “Koan of Time.” Time is recognized conventionally in science as “the fourth dimension,” and this seems to coincide with the many “changes” I went through during this period and could mark the emergence of another psychotopological level—the 3-D structure now experienced and known as moving and changing in time (4-D).

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Forties: the striking, albeit brief, experience of non-separation from Love-Ananada that marked the beginning of this decade led directly to an extended contemplation of the spherical vortex as a representation of “the ego.” So now yet a fifth dimension was being added as a perspective from which the 4-D spherical-vortex-self was viewed. The vision of the “scale-re-entrant fractal vortex” emerged from that contemplation and may perhaps represent a kind of 5-D topology.

Fifties: here the SummaTime Scale emerged as a way to begin thinking about 5-D structures: to the familiar four dimensions of science, we must add the dimension of scale. Following the “Heart-to-Heart” with Da Avabhasa, I was drawn into a deeper contemplation of this “scale-re-entrant fractal vortex” structure as it manifests within our biology in the core life-function served by the sino-atrial-node. Thus yet another dimension was added as I undertook to step back from that 5-D structure to contemplate it as a whole. Thus this direct link to total embodied experience emerged and might represent a kind of six-dimensional (6-D) contemplation.

Sixties: with the extension of the SummaTime Scale to the Planck level, the fullest consideration of the complex algebras, and my efforts to communicate about what I saw as the revolutionary implications of what I came to see as the Time Spectrum, and then more generally as the Scale Spectrum, it felt as if yet another kind of dimensionality was being animated—one that moved more deeply into an ineffable psychic depth. Could this perhaps be represented as a seven-dimensional topology?

In tabular form, therefore, this hypothesis might look like this:

Decade Dimensionality Psychotopological structure Zeros 0-D → 1-D A mere zero-D sentience becomes a memory-enabled 1-D “story line” Tens 1-D → 2-D The 1-D “story line” complexifies horizontally into a 2-D world surface. Twenties 2-D → 3-D A 2-D disc is seen from the “outside” now defining a 3-D space. Thirties 3-D → 4-D The 3-D space becomes a dynamic 4-D spherical vortex in time. Forties 4-D → 5-D The 4-D vortex complexifies further across scales into a 5-D fractal form. Fifties 5-D → 6-D The 5-D form is seen in a 6-D space embodied as the sino-atrial node. Sixties 6-D → 7-D The structure becomes ineffable as a higher-dimensional complex.

Athough I’ll leave further exploration of these ideas (particularly the role of the complex algebras) for the future, I’ll just mention the possibility of an important correlation of the seven “meta-levels of psychotopology” I’ve identified here with the eight degrees of freedom (one real, seven “imaginary”) found in the Octonion. This could become an important feature of a yoga-scientific understanding of both human psychological evolution and development.

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Appendix 2: Table of principal names of Adi Da Samraj

Dates Name Notes 1939-1973 Franklin Jones Birth name 1973-1979 Bubba Free John “Bubba” had been a childhood nickname—“brother.” “Free John” was a revision of his birth name. 1979-1986 Da Free John “Da, The Giver” 1986-1990 Da Love-Ananda Includes name given by Muktananda in ’69: “love-bliss” 1991-1995 Da Avabhasa “Avabhasa” is a Sanskrit translation of “Bright” 1996-present Adi Da Samraj This has become his principal name, often shortened to “Adi Da.” Abstracted from a more extensive listing found on a site created by devotees of Adi Da: http://www.adidaupclose.org/Names/index.html

NOTE: each of these name changes was associated with “a different way of working with devotees.”

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge a host of individuals for the help they have given me, the teachings they have shared with me, the contribution that they have made to my development, and to the emergence of the yoga science exploration described here. Since the story told in this memoir spans most of my now seventy years, there may be any number of others who should be acknowledged here but whom I’ve neglected—please accept my deepest apologies if I’ve inadvertently left you out.

Most immediately, the emergence of yoga science since 2007 was made possible as an “unintended consequence” of the founding of the Yoga Research & Education Center (YREC) by yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein (1947 – 2012) in the late ‘90s. Georg and I had enjoyed a friendship at several periods in the past and I had learned a great deal from him about the sheer enormity of the yoga tradition. When in 2002 he invited Susan and me to serve on the Board of Directors of YREC, I never imagined that things would turn out as they have, but it was that invitation that led eventually to the development of yoga science over the past decade, and for that I am deeply grateful to Georg.

More remotely, my dear departed parents, Daniel Virden and Joy Virginia gave me countless gifts of love and support over many years and did all they could to foster in me the broad-minded, well-informed clear-headedness that they themselves enjoyed. They enriched my life in countless ways.

Yoga Teachers

My first yoga teacher, His Holiness Yogiraj Sri Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, entered my life in 1967 as a totally unexpected miracle. For nearly ten years he gently and consistently both guided my practice of yoga and encouraged my ongoing engagement with science. He was first to suggest I consider a career in medicine. The many lessons I learned and blessings I received from him serve me to this day.

My second yoga teacher was Adi Da Samraj. He was the focus of my life for over 25 years. It is not even remotely possible to express in words the depth of gratitude I feel toward him for so many years of most graceful teaching, blessing, criticism, and guidance. The opportunities he gave me to grow as a yogi scientist form the core of this present undertaking. His original observations about time and its relation to consciousness were the central inspiration behind the SummaTime Scale, and it was while sitting in his company in 1986 that I experienced a grace-filled moment of non-separateness that watered and helped sprout the seed of yoga science.

In the 2000s, I came deeply to appreciated the tireless work of Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche to convey the priceless gems from the vast treasury of yoga that he brings from Tibet, most especially that of Ati Yoga (Dzogchen) to which he has devoted his life. The ways of thinking and contemplating I learned from Norbu Rinpoche seemed to deepen directly the Summa consideration, and it was while I was a student of his in the Dzogchen Community that the Yoga Science Foundation came into being.

Since then, I’ve become a student of the Pointing Out Way of Daniel P. Brown PhD whose devotion to making more readily available to Westerners the profound depths of yoga contemplation is exemplary. Through Dan I have also had the good fortune to meet a number of additional and remarkable lineage

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holders in the Dzogchen traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Bön: Rahob Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Geshe Sonam, Chongtul Rinpoche, and His Holiness of the Bön, Menri Trizen.

Over the fifty years I have been involved in yoga I have also learned many valuable lessons and received many blessings from other teachers with whom I have had contact in one form or another. This includes Swamis Muktananda, Rudrananada, Chidananda, and Venkateshananda, Sri Aurobindo, Haridas Chaudhuri, Pir Vilayat Kahn, Meher Baba, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Yogi Bhajan, and Ajare Warwick.

Science Teachers

In high school, George Zinc, Roger Jarvis, Fitzhugh Hardcastle, Charles Rimmer, and Paul Wright were key formative teachers in math and science. During my college years and the year that followed, it was my summers working under and ongoing mentoring provided by Lowell Lincoln Wood at UCLA and later at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory that had the greatest impact on my way of thinking—far more than the conventional science education I received at Harvard.

Andrew Porter has been a life-long friend. With doctorates in both physics and theology, he provided great encouragement in numerous moments of scientific and philosophic puzzlement, and I benefited greatly from our many discussions. Thank you, Andrew.

I never found a physician mentor. I had been a Yogi for many years before I even entered medical school –Swami Satchidananda and Adi Da made all the physicians I ever met pale human beings by comparison. Likewise, it was in part a deep frustration in not finding anyone in science or medicine with whom I felt a real sympathy that led to beginning my “Summa experiment” in 1987. It was then that I first conceived of the need for some sort of independent research effort to pioneer work on a “SummaScience” that began twenty years later in the name of “yoga science”.

Candidate “Yogi Scientists”

By whose work I’ve been helped or inspired (in no particular order apart from #1):

Susan Pottish—my wife Susan began making a major contribution to the Summa Project soon after we got together in 1991. In addition to a remarkably consistent loving heart, she has a keen and articulate mind and we have had countless, almost daily, and invaluable discussions about the Summa and about yoga science ever since. She is an experienced yogini and despite her only having a BS in Psychology, she worked for years as a biofeedback therapist in a technically accomplished manner, and claims to have done extensive graduate work at “the S.V. Anderson School of Science and Health.”

Elmer Green – Whatever one might be inclined to think about the Theosophical leanings of his yoga, I feel his personal confession is at least “trending non-dual.” Plus, I feel his scientific contributions are unquestionable – from his PhD dissertation onward.121

Ken Wilber – Perhaps a dubious candidate, given the weakness of his scientific credentials, however, he

121 A comprehensive collection of Elmer’s published papers is available online as a special issue, Vol. 10 of the Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine Journal.

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is certainly one of my personal euhemeri122 and I especially credit reading his 1994 book “Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality” for helping me sort out the many strands raveled up in the Summa.

Rollin McCraty – a definite maybe – not sure about the exact nature of the yoga practiced at the Institute of HeartMath (although it does seem to be heart-based contemplation of some sort), and there are those who are skeptical the scientific rigor of his work at IHM. That said, his work resonates strongly with yoga regarding the central importance the physical heart (and the heart beat) itself.

Kent Duane Palmer – A remarkably deep and agile thinker, Sufi mystic, and systems philosopher, Kent has developed an extensive online oeuvre. My efforts in ’05 and ’06 to understand Kent’s ideas were important background for the key yoga science discovery I made regarding the extended SummaTime Scale in late ’06 and have informed my thinking ever since. Contact with him encouraged me greatly in my search to explore the possibilities of a “non-dual science.”

David Shannahoff-Khalsa – His original work on the nasal cycle formed a key yoga science inspiration going back into the early ‘80s. In the late ‘80s, Georg Feuerstein and I co-authored a magazine article on his work.

Herbert Benson – can’t really be sure about his yoga—did he ever “get into” TM himself? In any case, he certainly has been a major player in the mind-body medicine movement ever since his pioneering work with R. K. Wallace in 1972.

Francisco Varela – so sad to have him gone so soon. He was both serious yogi and scientist and clearly seems to have made some kind of integration of the two in his own person. He left us a dynamic legacy that includes the founding of neurophenomenology and the historic dialogs between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and leading scientists under the auspices of the Institute for Mind and Life, around which the new field of contemplative science has coalesced over the past decade.

Shauna L. Shapiro – steeped in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, this young woman first came to my attention with the article co-authored with B. Alan Wallace 2006 published in American Psychologist.123 She appears to represent a new generation of researchers in “positive psychology” that is playing a major part in the development of what is, in effect, applied yoga science.

B. Alan Wallace – Alan’s dynamic work is deeply inspirational. Although not a practicing scientist, he is an accomplished contemplative and a vocal champion in dozens of books for the possibility of a “science of the subject.” Alan spent twenty years helping put together the Shamatha Project that began data collection in 2007 and remains the most sophisticated study of meditation ever undertaken. His current long-term project, the Open Mind Study, aims to knit together a global network of centers of excellence in contemplative training and practice along with contemplative scientific study. This strikes me as a world-class yoga science effort.

Antoine Lutz, Richie Davidson, and Clifford Saron – Although I have no idea what kind of yoga these otherwise accomplished cognitive neuroscientists have “under their belts,” they at the very least fall squarely into my “would-be yogi scientist” category.

122 Usage borrowed from Eric Berne to mean those upon whose shoulders I take my stand—term typically applied to at least “semi-mythologized” individuals. 123 “Mental Balance and Well-Being” American Psychologist, October ’06, p690-701.

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Deepak Chopra – I’m thinking of Deepak’s tireless efforts to bring the yogic truths into the common vernacular – e.g., “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind.”124 His credentials in science are limited, as I understand it, to those of an MD, however, and as a yogi, I can’t really be sure there either (although I do recall being impressed by an interview I saw some years back in which he described in moving detail his relationship with Maharishi—especially when Deepak flew him from India and was caring for him for many months in his London apartment).

Friends of Yoga Science

Individuals who, through friendship, help, or advice, were sources of support and encouragement during one period or another of the slow unfolding of yoga science, (some of whom are no longer with us): A Marek Alboszta, Jeffrey Anderson, Michael Avery B Franz Bakker, Michael Bamat, Julian Barbour, Amy Beddoe, Maurizio Benazzo, Claire Berg, Alex Berzin, Siegfried Bleher, Saniel Bonder, Dan Bouwmeister C Jay Clarke, Steve Claydon, Tom Closser, Eric Chaisson, David Chalmer, David Christian, Marcia Cohen- Fields, Randall Collins, Bruno Comby, Melinda Connor, Mike Coyle D Irving Dardik, Prem Deben, Elizabeth De Michelis, Dustin DiPerna, Andrew Dorfman, Larry Dossey, Dan Dunphy, Jean Pierre Dujardin E David Eckel, Isaac Eliaz, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens F Nancy Faas, Prudence Farrow, Debbie Fiedler, Leslie Firth, Geoffrey Fisher, Jeffry Fitzsimmons, Richard Fura G Sheldon Glashow, Ben Goetzel, Phil Goldberg, Alan Goldhammer, Joe Goodman H Michael Hagar, Stuart Hameroff, Jan Hansen, Carl Harper, David Hassin, Kate Hastings, Greg Higgins, Steve Hill, Ruby Holladay, Jackie Hosmer, Henry House I J Edmund Jacobson Sr. and Jr., C. B Scott Jones, Shelli Joye K Bob Karlson, Loch Kelly, Richard Kunin, Sid Kurn L Tricia Lamb, Rich Lang, Paul Lehrer, Craig Lesser, Tad Latimer, Jacob Liberman, Jonathan Lynch, Paul Lynn M Peter Madill, Mark Mandella, Jeffery Martin, Bill McCauley, Rollin McCraty, Garvin McCurdy, Tom McEvilley, Tom McFarlane, Frank McGuigan, Sandra McLanahan, Leonard Mehlmauer, Richard Miles, Philip Mirowski, S. Mohan, Dennis Moncrief, Christina Munns N Sky Nelson, Darca Nicholson, Patricia Norris O Len Ochs, Jim Oschman P Terry Patten, James Paul, Giorgio Picenza, Denise Premschak Q R Dean Radin, Elizabeth Rauscher, Paul Ray, Glen Rein, Ed Reither, Brad Reynolds, Marguerite Rigoglioso, Fred Rohé, Beverly Rubik S Jerry Sacket, Geoffrey Samuel, Lee Sannella, Len Saputo, Wolfgang Saumweber, Kiran Schmidt, Charles Seage, Charles Shang, Moses Silbiger, Harry Spence, Matthew Spence, Jim Steinberg, Diane Stone, Darin Stahl, William Stranger, Thornton Streeter, Worth Summers, Maria Syldona T Max Tegmark, Helen Thomas, Tom Tryon, Jack Travis U V Jim Valby, Wilson Van Dusen, Adeline van Waning, John Viera, Reid von Borstel W Robert Weston, Bernie Williams, Michael Wood X Y Z Hari Zupan

124 1993, Harmony Books, New York.

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