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99Th Monkey : a Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus

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The 99th Monkey Also by the Same Author Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That Is Heartbroken Wild Heart Dancing The 99th Monkey A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments Eliezer Sobel Copyright ©2008 by Eliezer Sobel All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part or in any form or format without the written permission of the publisher. Published by: Santa Monica Press LLC P.O. Box 1076 Santa Monica, CA 90406-1076 1-800-784-9553 www.santamonicapress.com [email protected] Printed in the United States Santa Monica Press books are available at special quantity discounts when purchased in bulk by corporations, organizations, or groups. Please call our Special Sales department at 1-800-784-9553. This book is intended to provide general information. The publisher, author, distributor, and copyright owner are not engaged in rendering health, medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice or services. The publisher, author, distributor, and copyright owner are not liable or responsible to any person or group with respect to any loss, illness, or injury caused or alleged to be caused by the information found in this book. ISBN-13 978-1-59580-028-2 ISBN-10 1-59580-028-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sobel, Eliezer, 1952- The 99th monkey : a spiritual journalist’s misadventures with gurus, messiahs, sex, psychedelics, and other consciousness-raising experiments / Eliezer Sobel. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-59580-028-2 1. Religions. 2. Religious leaders. 3. New Age movement. 4. Spiritual biography. 5. Religious biography. 6. Sobel, Eliezer, 1952- I. Title. BL85.S63 2008 299’.93092--dc22 [B] 2007041436 Cover and interior design and production by Future Studio Los Angeles Portions of this book were excerpted from articles that originally appeared in Quest Magazine, Yoga Journal, The New Sun, the New Age Journal, and Paul Krassner’s book, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy. For Shari Contents Prologue . .9 Chapter 1: Ram Dass . .21 Chapter 2: Primal Therapy . 33 Chapter 3: Werner Erhard & the est Training . 39 Chapter 4: Hilda Charlton & The New Sun . .67 Chapter 5: Gurus & Saviors: Muktananda, Rajneesh, Maitreya, Adi Da & Sai Baba . 77 Chapter 6: Chareeva, Actualizations, Michael Wyman & the Moonies . 99. Chapter 7: Haiti . 113 Chapter 8: The Manual, the School & the Workshop . 121 Chapter 9: Gabrielle Roth, Esalen & Big Sur . 135 Chapter 10: Sex . 157 Chapter 11: Drugs . 171 Chapter 12: From Lama to Jerusalem: Father Theophane, Rabbi David & Shoshana Cooper, Rabbi David Zeller & Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Asha Greer . 189. Chapter 13: Forty-Day Solo Retreat & Paxil . 213 Chapter 14: India, the Burning Ghats, Nepal & the Dalai Lama . 223 Chapter 15: Brazil & “The Vine of the Soul” . .247 Chapter 16: McChaplain . 263. Chapter 17: Singing at Auschwitz . 277 Chapter 18: Return to India: Christopher Titmuss & Andrew Cohen . 289. Epilogue . 303. Acknowledgments . 309. Jean Cocteau was once asked, “If your house was on fire, what would be the one thing you would save?” “The fire,” he replied. Prologue here was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys—the irrepressible Macaca fuscata—living on the island of Koshima in T1952; incidentally, the year I was born. Scientists provided the monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand, and observed that they generally seemed to relish the new treat in spite of a certain un- pleasant grittiness. One day an enterprising young primate named Imo discovered that if she took her potato down to the water’s edge, she could rinse off all the dirt and enjoy a much tastier meal. Imo taught her mother and playmates the trick, and gradually, over the course of six years, one monkey after another adopted the practice. Then in 1958, a remarkable event occurred: the number of potato-washing monkeys reached what is called a “critical mass”— 99, say—and when the next potato was washed, it caused a tipping point, and suddenly, not only did the entire monkey population on Koshima Island start performing the new procedure, but all of the monkey populations on neighboring islands spontaneously began washing their potatoes as well. “The 100th Monkey” became the name New Agers and fu- turists used for this unusual phenomenon, and they extrapolated from monkey experience to show that this is also the way the hu- man community makes dramatic, collective paradigm shifts into new ways of thinking, being, and behaving. Once a critical mass of people have transformed their essentially materialist worldview to a spiritual one, for example, the entire population of the planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride. The dirty sweet potato of being a self-centered, acquisitive, power-hungry crea- ture, blindly bent on the destruction of life as we know it, will be 10 The 99th Monkey gently washed in the stream of loving-kindness, peacefulness, and the desire to serve God and humanity, ushering in a golden age of peace and prosperity for all people. Fat chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the 99th Monkey. If you don’t get me, you don’t get your critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age simply through my con- tinuing to be a resistant little putz. (If it makes you feel any better, I recently learned that this whole story about the monkeys and the potatoes is not accurate, that it didn’t really happen that way at all. That really annoyed me, considering that I’d just based a whole book on it.) I met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New York when I was 23 years old, several weeks after completing the est training in Boston, which was several months after having spent one and a half years screaming my head off in Primal Therapy. I was desper- ately trying to cure myself of being me, a futile pursuit that would continue for three decades, and would take me all around the world to meet shamans, healers, and gurus; stay in ashrams and monas- teries; sit for long hours on meditation cushions; chant in foreign tongues; and live up to 40 days in primitive huts on solo retreat. I experimented extensively with psychedelic drugs, ancient spiritual techniques and outrageous new ones. I was massaged, shiatsu-ed, and rolfed; took hundreds of consciousness workshops, human potential seminars, and self-improvement courses; sat with psychics, channels, and tarot readers; experienced Primal, Gestalt, Prologue 11 Bioenergetics, Object Relations, generic talk therapies, and anti- depressants. And that’s the short list. (The complete one gets em- barrassing. Suffice it to say that it includes learning the Tush Push exercise in a Human Sexuality weekend—you don’t want to know—as well as having an obese female therapist sit on my head at Esalen Institute, so I could re-experience being smothered by my mother.) As editor in chief of The New Sun magazine in the ’70s and the Wild Heart Journal more recently, and through being a freelance spiritual journalist, it has often been my job to do all these things. Like a scout sent ahead to report back, I often saved others a lot of time: “You don’t have to go deep into Brazil to do all-night rituals involving the ingestion of ayahuasca, chanting in Portuguese to Oxum, the Mother of the Waters, and throwing up out of a church window at four in the morning—I already did that.” Most stories like this end with an epiphany: the seeker finds what he or she was looking for, writes a book about it to inspire oth- ers, and then, with any luck, appears on Oprah and becomes very wealthy. Unfortunately, in my story, I remain more or less the same guy—or as my friend Eddie Greenberg would say, the “same old schmuck”—at the end as I was at the beginning. An earlier version of this book was turned down by one publisher, who said, “The main character’s story just doesn’t seem to hang to- gether.” Buh-buh-buh-but, I thought: This is a memoir; this is auto- biographical . I am the main character! But he was right. My story doesn’t hang together. Whose does, really? Nothing bugs me more than those self-help authors who start out as a complete mess, find a magic solution, and then try to sell the rest of us on a new and improved way to live, while 12 The 99th Monkey getting very rich in the process. At least this much I can promise you: apart from a few laughs and some good stories, this book will very definitely not change your life. Fortunately, every bona fide spiritual teacher worth their salt will remind you again and again that you don’t need to change your life in order to get enlightened, find God, or be your true Self. Again and again, we seekers of truth are told that our pri- mordial, essential nature is always already the case, always and only available now, no matter what the circumstances of our inner or outer lives, and therefore all desire to change our inner or outer lives in order to somehow get closer to the ever-elusive spiritual prize is not only fruitless, but is actually the problem itself. Seeking truth, God, enlightenment, or Buddha-Nature is the equivalent, it has often been said, of a fish swimming endlessly in search of wa- ter. Once our great quest has commenced, we have already missed the point and are on the wrong track.
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