Potential Human

When I arrived in San Francisco in 1973 at the height of the gay liberation movement, organizations like the Gay Liberation Front (founded after the Stonewall Riots in 1969) were not just concerned with gaining rights. They opposed America’s racist and capitalistic institutions and challenged the traditional gender roles and relationship models of the nuclear family.

As college graduates looked for work in the midst of a recession, many young radicals came off the streets and the GLF splintered into a variety of factions. By 1975 the movement’s commitment to re-inventing America gradually morphed into simply seeking a seat at the table.

Many San Franciscans turned their attention inward as a robust Human Potential Movement became the newest revolution to sweep through the Bay Area. The concept of an innate, limitless capacity for personal growth in every individual heralded a New Age that took various forms. Gestalt therapy, encounter groups and primal scream sessions challenged conventional psychoanalysis and new self-help groups promised life-long learning. Eastern practices like yoga and meditation became westernized as ashrams popped up all over California.

I could not walk the city streets then without running into saffron-robed Hare Krishnas handing out flowers or Scientologists in short-sleeved shirts and clipboards inviting me to come to their office for a “personality test.” After a few of these encounters, I learned to cross the street when I saw them coming.

One afternoon I was lying on a blanket in Lafayette Park with a new boyfriend when a fresh-faced guy with curly red hair sat down on the grass and asked a few innocuous questions before popping the big one.

“Hey, would you guys like to join me for dinner with a few friends tonight?”

“Get the fuck outta here!” my blanket partner shouted back.

The redhead jumped to his sandaled feet and scampered away.

“Watch out for those guys, they’re Moonies,” he warned.

I looked back at him blankly.

“You know, followers of Reverend Moon. If you go off to dinner with one of those guys, you’ll never be seen again!”

On my way to work one morning, I spotted a friend walking down Sacramento Street with Oscar, her gray Afghan. As the scent of her patchouli oil stung my nostrils a good five seconds before we greeted each other, her bright, yellow sari reminded me that she had just returned from a trip to India.

Christened Julie Andrews, she looked and acted nothing like her movie-star namesake. In her mid-twenties and barely taller than her dog, her long blonde hair hung down either side of her round face with a pair of blue-tinted granny glasses perched on her nose. Although she patterned her look on the folk singer Mary Travers, she was a trust-fund kid from a family in Grosse Pointe, Michigan who had moved to San Francisco to seek out alternate lifestyles.

“Hi, Julie and hello Oscar.”

“His name is Shanti now,” she corrected with a beatific smile.

 “Oh, okay. Hello there … Shanti,” I said with a nod.

After chatting for few minutes, Julie told me that she was going to an event for Swami Muktananda at an ashram in Berkeley that night.

“Would you like to come?” she asked. “It’s a rare thing for Baba to visit California.”

“Oh, well sure. I’ll try anything once,” I replied.

At the appointed time she picked me up in her forest-green Triumph and we drove across the Bay Bridge to a non-descript building off Shattuck Avenue. Upon entering, I tossed my sneakers onto a pile of Birkenstocks in a small foyer and made my way to a large room full of people sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“We’re in luck,” Julie whispered as we claimed a space in the back. “Baba’s giving Shaktipat tonight.”

“What’s that?” I asked, struggling to fold up my legs.

“You’ll see,” she replied before putting her index finger to her lips.

As we settled into silence, I noticed Muktananda sitting on a tall box at the front of the room. His smooth, mocha skin stood in stark contrast to the multitude of white faces before him. His skinny body was draped in maroon and orange cloth. His dark, brown eyes gazed out from below an orange knit hat that accentuated a red dot at the center of his brow. A single peacock feather rested on a pillow to his right.

When I looked down the long aisle that separated the space into two sections, I noticed a large brass tray that lay before him on the floor. It was piled high with apples, bananas, oranges and strawberries in varying states of ripeness. A sicky-sweet odor permeated the room.

When she saw me staring at the tray, Julie leaned over to my ear again.

“Baba loves fruit, so people bring it as an offering.”

An interpreter in full Indian garb stood silently next to Muktananda. As the guru spoke Hindi in a squeaky voice, he paused at regular intervals for translation. Tired after a long day’s work, his philosophy did not move me. In the midst of the enthralled crowd, I tried not to look bored while indulging in a lot of inner eye-rolling.

After a half-hour lecture, the audience formed a single row in the middle aisle to participate in the ritual of Shaktipat whereby the guru confers spiritual energy from himself to another person. As each person approached, some kneeled or just bowed before Muktananda as he lifted the peacock feather and tapped it lightly on the crown of their head.

When the time came for me to join the line, I was glad to untangle my aching legs. As we inched forward, I fixed my attention on the guru’s face. Every time he tapped someone’s head, his eyes brightened, his smile widened and his face seemed endlessly animated with joy. When he tapped Julie’s head they both broke into a giggle. 

When I reached the front of the line, I dipped my head. After I felt the feather whisk against my hair, I looked up and saw a frown on Baba’s face.

Uh oh, he doesn’t like me, I thought as I slinked back to my place next to Julie on the floor and re-folded my legs. But I could not stay silent.

“He looked so stern when he hit me with that feather,” I whispered in her ear.

“Oh, he’s just mirroring what he sees in front of him,” she replied with her eyes closed.

After the ceremony, we headed to a nearby Japanese restaurant. Midway through dinner, I still could not shake my discomfort with my Shaktipat experience.

“Julie, I’m not a stern person at all,” I protested. “Muktananda doesn’t know me from Adam. I’m a very upbeat guy.”

She stopped mixing her wasabi and ginger and looked up from her California roll.

“Actually, Ralph, you’re pretty intense most of the time.”

She returned to her dinner as I poked at my teriyaki chicken and took a long gulp of warm sake to wipe the image of the scowling guru from  my mind. 

The EST training was known to most San Franciscans in those days. It was a self-actualization seminar conducted over two weekends whose graduates lauded its value in a lingo all their own. After they “got it” at the seminar, they “created space” to enjoy more authentic lives.

Unlike the cults, EST graduates did not accost people on the street; they simply invited their friends to an informational meeting in a hotel. The training intrigued me despite its detractors who pointed out that participants were only allowed to go to the bathroom during specified ten-minute breaks.

My co-worker Graham blew into the office at Transamerica one Monday morning fresh from completing the EST training. He swooped over to me in the break room where I was hanging over a styrofoam cup of coffee trying to steel myself for another soul-pulverizing day of filing tax documents.

“Ralph, you’ve got to do the seminar! It’s really changed my life!”

His enthusiasm took me by surprise. It was so different from his usual sarcastic demeanor.

“I’ve been a little curious about it,” I admitted.

“Great!” he roared. “I’ll take you to a Guest Seminar tonight and you can hear all about it.”

When he raced into his office, I wanted to follow behind him and take it back because I thought he said “Gethsemane.” We all know how that turned out.

I met Graham at the Jack Tar Hotel on Van Ness that evening and he accompanied me to a small meeting room.

“Try to keep an open mind,” he said before dropping me off to head down the corridor to a bigger room full of fellow graduates.

About twenty people were scattered in chairs set up class-room style. I took a seat on the outer row with an empty chair beside it. Within a few minutes, a pretty, blonde woman in a colorful Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress entered and stood beside a flip chart at the front. After introducing herself, she flipped the first sheet and took us through the purpose of the training.

My ears perked up when she said that it was designed to produce a “transformation” that allowed our problems to “clear up in the process of life itself.” When she got into the logistics of the seminar and the questions about the bathroom breaks came up, she just smiled and addressed it head on.

“If you really have to go, no one will stop you. You might be confronted on your way out of the seminar room.”

I thought about my tiny bladder and began to squirm in my seat.

“Bathroom breaks are restricted to give trainees an opportunity to look at their resistance,” she continued. “Many times going to the rest room can be an avoidance of something going on in the training, something that you don’t want to face. An assistant at the door will encourage you to look at that on your way out. That’s all it is.”

That didn’t sound so terrible; it even made an odd kind of sense.

Toward the end of the seminar, I started to feel uneasy when she suggested that we give up alcohol during the full two-week period of the training. I spaced out for a few moments as I wondered if I could abstain for so long. When I tuned back into the room, she was asking us to close our eyes.

She took us through a two-minute, guided meditation called a “process.” Once we were settled in, she asked us to “experience” the person to our right and to our left. When we opened our eyes again, she asked for someone to “share their experience.”

Since I was on the end of a row and the seat on my right was empty, I figured I had nothing to say. A long silence ensued that made me so uncomfortable that I raised my hand.

“When I was concentrating on the empty seat beside me, I suddenly got incredibly sad and lonely,” I blurted without thinking,

Feeling very exposed, I waited for her reaction but she just nodded and moved on to some other hands that popped up around me.

After listening to a few more people, she flipped the last sheet on the chart and ended the seminar by telling us how much the training cost. As expected, it was way beyond my budget. I was about to write the whole thing off when someone else in the room voiced their financial considerations. She countered with one simple statement.

“Your friends asked you here because this is an opportunity to change your life. How many times have you passed up opportunities because of money? If your intention is strong, the money will be there. You just have to make the decision.”

It was my first exposure to woo-woo, manifest-what-you-want thinking. It was a definite sales pitch, but recalling Graham’s heartfelt excitement, it felt more like a leap of faith than a scam. in spite of my meager finances, I filled out a pledge card and signed up for the next seminar in April.

When I stepped out of the room, I picked up my money worries at the door.

What the hell did I just do? How am I going to pay for this?

Graham rushed over from the other side of the hallway with eager eyes.

“Did you sign up?”

“Yep, I took the plunge,” I replied.

He hooted and pulled me into a bear hug, lifting me off my feet and swinging me around in a circle as his fellow graduates looked on with knowing grins.

When I got home, I made the mistake of telling my roommate Barry about my evening.

“Jesus, Ralph, why did you do that? It’s just a con job!”

“I don’t think so,” I responded. “Anyway, I’m doing it.”

It was the first time that I decided to do something without Barry’s approval.

“Unbelievable,” he said as he turned his attention back to a Veg-O-Matic commercial.

When my boss called me into her office the next week to tell me that I was getting a bonus that just covered the cost of the seminar, I began to think that there might be something to this manifesting business.

I returned to the Jack Tar Hotel on a Saturday morning in April to begin the EST training. It was held in a large conference hall from nine in the morning until midnight on both weekends. After picking up a name badge, I entered the room to find over three hundred attendees.

Since the crowd was mostly straight, I did my usual scan of the area to suss out if it felt safe for a gay man. When I recognized a guy I had seen in a porn magazine, I relaxed a little and found a chair a few rows behind him. A fantasy about a possible hook-up served as a distraction before I soon became engrossed in the training.

I cannot relate everything that happened on those two weekends because I was in an altered state, but a few episodes stand out.

The first night was spent tearing down our egos. A tall, handsome trainer with an expensive haircut strode back and forth across a high stage hollering into a microphone like a drill sergeant. Dressed in Gucci shoes, slacks, an open-collared shirt and a sport coat, he shouted that we were all “assholes.”

Somehow his harsh words did not felt cruel. Their sheer force seemed necessary to break through the concrete in my head.

He told us that we believed too much in our “acts.” An act consisted of the personality traits cobbled together from the past that made up who we thought we were and prevented us from “actualizing” our true selves. My menial job made it easy to embrace the idea that I spent most of my days behaving more like a robot than a human being.

When I got the notion that my “act” was a victim role, I raised my hand and an assistant scurried over and passed a microphone to me in the middle of a long row of chairs.

“I’m confused …” I started.

“Good!” the trainer yelled from the stage. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

My brain fizzled, but I continued.

“I get that I feel like a victim but I was victimized all through my childhood. I was stuck in a house with two alcoholic parents who fought all the time and made me feel …”

 “Well, boo-fucking-hoo!”  The trainer screamed back at me. “That was the past! If you are a victim now, it’s because you’re choosing to be. It’s not who you really are, it’s your act!”

Flustered, I tried to continue.

“I think you’re probably right. But why would I choose such a terrible act?”

The trainer glared down at me from the stage with piercing blue eyes.

“Because you don’t want to take responsibility for your own life.”

“Oh,” was all I said as I handed back the microphone.

As soon as I sat back down, I felt a small night-light flicker inside of me.

Another insight I took from the training was the concept that I am not my mind. During the second weekend of the seminar, the trainer took us through a long afternoon of de-constructing what “the mind” really is, namely a conglomeration of beliefs, ideas and reactions rooted in the past. He explained that the mind’s main goal of is to ensure its own survival by being right all of the time. It makes no distinction between being wrong and being dead.

“Not only that, the mind can kill you.!”

The trainer paused for effect.

“You’ve heard of the term ‘dead right?’ If you need any proof, just look at the news.”

A woman rose and grabbed a microphone to argue with him. He listened quietly as she described her miserable marriage and it soon became obvious to everyone that she was illustrating the trainer’s point.

“I can’t leave my husband! He needs me too much!” she cried.

“You can do anything you want,” the trainer responded matter-of-factly.

“But I’m just not the kind of person who would leave someone she loves!” she wailed.

“That’s just your act! You are capable of doing anything in your life. Your mind just thinks it’s wrong,” he shouted.

When she opened her mouth to object, he cut her off.

“Look it’s simple … do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”

I could see his words penetrate her walls as the mic drooped in her hand. She suddenly smiled, tossed the microphone back to the assistant and started to laugh. When she sat back down, the room erupted in applause.

I got a phone call from my sister in St. Louis at two in the morning before the last day of the training.

“Mom fell down the stairs,” she muttered.

So what’s the big news? I thought. Mom often tumbled down the stairs after a full night of drinking.

“She caught her ankle in the wrought iron railing and tore her foot off at the ankle.”

My mind went  blank.

“It was dangling from the Achilles tendon with blood spurting everywhere when the ambulance came! Dad said it was worse than anything he had ever seen in the war!”

I thought about my upcoming last day of the seminar and, as much as I did not want to, I asked the question.

“Should I come home?”

“No, I’m calling from the hospital. They have her bandaged up on a gurney in the hallway. She’s too drunk to put under anesthetic for surgery so they’re just waiting for the booze to wear off.”

I detected some indecipherable screaming in the background.

“She’s out of her mind and cussing out Dad. It’s so embarrassing!”

Silence crept in between us.

“I’ll keep you posted,” she sighed.

As I was about to hang up, she added something.

“I’ve been going to Alanon for a while. Try a meeting, it might help.”

“Okay,” I said as she set the headset in the cradle of the payphone and a dial tone buzzed in my ears.

After lunch on the last afternoon of the training, we all returned to the seminar room to find the chairs moved to the side walls creating a large, open space. When each person was assigned a separate standing location in the room, we underwent a final “process.” The trainer told us to shut our eyes and picture someone close to us, someone to whom we needed to send an “undelivered communication.”

Positioned by the back wall, I closed my eyes and immediately imagined my mother lying on the floor with her obliterated ankle. I knelt down and quietly put my hands around the invisible wound. I held them there for a long, long time. My heart beat fast, but no emotions or words came as I clung to her wound. I stayed fixed in this posture until someone came over and tapped me on the shoulder.

“You need to stop now,” he whispered.

I opened my eyes and discovered that I was all alone in the back of the room. The chairs had been re-assembled and the all of the other trainees were in their seats. My concentration had been so intense that I had not even heard the sound of chairs being dragged across the carpet. Exhausted, I scoooted back to my seat, plopped myself down and soon discovered that my “process” had lasted for two hours.

When I graduated from the seminar on Sunday evening, I was both spent and exhilarated. Graham picked me up and took me out to dinner where I had four glasses of wine to make up for lost time. The next morning, I emerged from my bedroom with the zeal of a born-again convert let loose from the revival tent.

I leapt on Barry at the breakfast table.

“I want to invite you to a …”

“Back off, Ralph! I don’t want anything to do with all that crap!” he yelled.

At work, my boss tolerated my rhapsodizing about EST with a vacant grin. She had heard it all before with other friends.

“Thanks, Ralph, but no thanks,” she said before retreating to her office and closing the door.

I soon gave up my proselytizing and settled back into my old routines. My “act” re-asserted itself, but words like “experience,” “transformation,” “share” and “space” took permanent residence in my vocabulary while the insights that I “got” burrowed down deep inside of me to be re-kindled in later years.

After my mother’s surgery, my biggest fear was that she would not cooperate with the healing process. To my surprise, she took it on with gusto. My parents installed a hospital bed in the living room and a physical therapist coached her every day at home. The fact that he was young and handsome helped her stick with it. Finally getting the undivided male attention that she had craved for her entire life, she did her best to please the therapist. She soon graduated from bed to walker to cane. After several months, she walked unaided without a limp.

When I called to check on her progress, she grabbed the phone from my father’s hand.

“The doctor says I’ll be able to visit you in San Francisco and hike up those hills like a Sherpa!” she crowed.

I had never heard her so cheerful and confident.

Whether or not the “process” at the training made any difference in her recovery, I will never know. What I do know is that she never made it to San Francisco because she was shortly overtaken by a degenerative spinal-cerebral condition that confined her to bed. It was an affliction that no good-looking man could ever cure.

A few weeks after the EST training, I decided to check out an Alanon meeting in a church on Union Street. I entered a Sunday-school room whose cinderblock walls were covered with Easter eggs cut from colored construction paper. A small gathering of middle-aged ladies sat in a circle of folding chairs.

I was a few minutes late, so I stood in the back while a distraught woman told a teary tale about her feckless, booze-ridden husband. After ten minutes, everyone was nodding with sympathy as I grew restless, impatient and, finally, angry.

I can’t believe I’m standing here listening to this bullshit. She’s just running her act on us! I thought, cocky in my newly-minted higher awareness.

When the meeting took a break, I slipped out the door and marched up Union Street.

Sheesh, what a bunch of whining victims!

When I reached Perry’s bar, I ducked in for a couple of Irish coffees. By the time I decided to leave, two drinks had become five. As I staggered to the bus stop, my devious mind got busy and repeated the same two phrases over and over again.

What a bunch of losers! What can they possibly teach me!

Within four years I entered the same church for my first AA meeting. It took a few more years to find my way back to Alanon. Over forty years have passed and I am still going to meetings for addiction and codependency. It turns out I had a lot to learn from those losers.

Like everybody else, my life is peppered with fiascos, successes and sometimes dumb luck. Although I do not consider myself enlightened in any new-age sense, my zigzagging 12-Step journey helps me remain teachable on most days and that makes all the difference.

Through it all, the lessons born from total defeat are the most lasting. On my best days, these hard-won lessons make it possible for me to simply live each day on the planet as a right-sized human being … no better, and no worse, than anyone else.