Rene M. Querido, LLD has been involved with Waldorf education for the past 50 years. He was educated in Holland, Belgium, France and England and studied mathematics and physics at London university. He has lectured throughout the world on historical and educational topics.

In the first quarter of this century, the Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner articulated one of the most extraordinary worldviews in modern times: Anthroposophy. Filled with profound insights that are simultaneously practical and spiritual, it has given birth to numerous successful and enduring initiatives in such fields as Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, the Camphill communities for those with mental disabilities in need of special care, and many creative developments in architecture, medicine, and even banking. In fact, the Waldorf schools now constitute the largest grouping in the world in the field of private education. Yet Anthroposophy remains in general, poorly understood and little recognized outside Europe, despite its many achievements.

Given the exploding interest today in alternative forms of education, Lapis felt it was time to talk to one of the major influences in the development of Waldorf schools in America, Rene Querido. Born in Holland and brought up in a family with no religious orientation, he escaped the invading Nazis and came to Britain as a child in the midst of the Blitz. He was introduced to the work of Rudolf Steiner by an enigmatic Cockney workman while working in an art store, and went on to teach in one of England’s early Waldorf schools. He first came to the States in the early Sixties and returned in the Seventies to establish Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California, the West Coast’s leading center for Waldorf education. Now retired, he discusses here the nature of his life’s work and the deeper spiritual insights about the world to be found within Anthroposophy.

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RW: What was the Anthroposophical movement in America like in the early ’60s?

RQ: Very primitive in a certain sense. Here in New York we had one of the main schools, founded in 1928, just opposite the Metropolitan Museum and apart from that there was just a sprinkling. So it’s amazing how it grew from there. I had quite a lot to do with that, especially later on. When I came back in ‘75 I was invited to start Rudolf Steiner College Training Center for Teachers and we had only 12 students at the time. Now there are 250 and we have branches out in San Francisco so it’s really grown. There were no schools in Oregon, no schools in Washington state and we helped to start them, trained the teachers and acted as advisors and so on, up and down the coast. It was really quite an extraordinary time.

RW: So since 1975 the Waldorf schools in America have grown significantly?

RQ: Yes. I would say they grew enormously from about 20 to about 170 in the US and Canada. And the schools always start in an interesting way. We as teachers don’t really do very much, it’s the parents. What do we need to start a school? Well I usually say we need a group of dedicated parents who are prepared to find out something about Waldorf education and about the spiritual background of anthroposophy and they should really form a board of trustees and agree to be together for at least five to seven years. And they need seed money and they have to invite advisors, so there are regular articles and lectures published.

RW: Why do think there has been such a phenomenal interest in Waldorf education so that it looks like there’s been about a thousand percent increase in the number of Waldorf schools in the last 20 years or so. What do you think is missing in modern education that the Waldorf schools are providing?

RQ: Well, to be quite frank I think that most state schools don’t meet the needs of the children and one could put it like this: Education comes from the word educare, to bring out, and it’s not only of course the intellectual abilities that have to be promoted so to speak. No. It’s the whole child. And the whole child consists of body, soul, and spirit. And if you merely go for one thing, for one part, then usually the two others are excluded and the soul aspect of the child is very important, the spiritual aspect. So it depends upon how you look at the child. If you think of a child as a spiritual being who incarnates and brings something with her or with him, then our task is really to not just put things into the child but to bring things out and to be sensitive to know what really lives in the child and what particular aspects the child can really become himself or herself. So if you think of that for a moment, some children are very musical, others are mathematically inclined, others are great artists, and it’s up to the teacher to bring that out. So it’s not a question of stuffing knowledge, it’s something far more subtle than that. And we feel that Waldorf education is holistic and it touches upon the hands, the heart, and the head…in that order. So that in the younger grades we do a terrific amount of activity and then out of the activity the heart is warmed, the feelings are warmed, the artistic life becomes creative. And out of the creativity the head awakens. It’s that way around, and not the other way around. Parents then, not always very consciously go into a Waldorf school and they see the paintings, they see the work, they notice what the children are like, and how the teacher deals with the children and they say that’s the sort of education I want for my children. I don’t want this hardened, rigidified type of learning where the individual can’t really express himself.

RW: I remember visiting the Sydney Waldorf school in Australia. On their open house day I was struck especially by the graduating class — their artwork was up all around the walls and it just struck me that as they concluded their education, every single one of these young people seemed to have become an artist in some way. Even those that were going on to study science at university, even they had become creative artists in some way. I really had a strong impression of Waldorf education truly galvanizing the creative impulses within all those who participate. I don’t know how many graduates of Waldorf schools we have in the States right now, but is there anything you could say about the kind of career choices they’ve made or how they’ve adapted to life — how Waldorf education has helped people not just as education per se, but as a preparation for life?

RQ: Yes. Many of them of course have gone to the major universities and have done very well. I’ve been involved for 49 years so I’ve also got many former students, some that are now fifty and sixty years of age, and what I’ve noticed is that they’ve worldwide interests, they’re cosmopolitan, (we have two foreign languages right from the beginning.) They’ve traveled a great deal, they take a great interest in people and their careers, they usually have had to do with people and not with things. I know many who’ve gone into social activities of all sorts, not only teaching of course. The interest in people predominates and a great sense of compassion and wanting to help.

RW: It’s a funny thing that despite the breadth of anthroposophy’s contribution to the world, from Waldorf schools to biodynamic agriculture to the Camp Hill communities for those in need of special care to anthroposophical architecture, banking and so on, compared to some of the Eastern spiritual paths that have become so popular since the ’60s, it remains relatively unknown. What’s your view of what its special spiritual gift is at this moment?

RQ: Well, it’s very much in its practical applications I would say. Because not everybody is interested in deep philosophical spiritual backgrounds. But as you find an anthroposophical doctor that can cure your particular illness, you’ll also be very impressed. And if you find that you’re a gardener and what you plant grows more satisfactorily if you use some of the biodynamic compost then you’ll be impressed or your children go to a Waldorf school. So I think in America particularly, much depends on the practical applications. That is what impresses people first and then they might say I’m interested in the source, let’s have a look at that, how does that function. I mean Steiner put it in a meditative form almost, it’s in prose with meditative form. “Seek real practical life, but seek it such a way that the spirit is not deadened for you. Seek the spirit, but not with supersensible lust, not out of selfishness, so that you can apply it in life in the practical world.” And that’s an interesting thing. Practical life very often deadens the spirit, but spiritual striving very often, not always, but very often becomes selfish. It is not a giving but wanting for oneself: blessedness, happiness, contentment, all those sales points of so many of the spiritual movements today. And fundamentally a spiritual path should lead one to be more practical and more able, more giving, more loving in the world — with one’s fellow human beings.

RW: Now from an anthroposophical perspective what do you see as the major challenges humanity faces as we cross the threshold of the millennium?

RQ: Well you’ve used the word threshold and I think it’s perhaps fair to say that especially since the beginning of this century, we have crossed the threshold of consciousness. We have begun to have inklings of another world apart from the world of the physical senses you might say. It’s a question then of developing those faculties. I think they have to be developed because we will not get answers to the deepest questions of life on earth by merely looking at the physical scene, neurology, physiology, whatever you like. Examining things under the microscope — that won’t solve the human problems. The human situation can only be solved as a social situation if we are able to develop new powers of understanding. I think there will be more and more young people born with supersensible insights or the beginnings of it

RW: Now what if we look at the darker side of what is happening right now. What does anthroposophy see as the directions that we need to avoid that may be powerful in the present culture but that we need to move away from if we’re going to have an appropriate evolution in the next century.

RQ: Well I think there are illicit ways of coming into the spiritual world, through drugs etc. and we should be careful that we go through the gate in the right way because otherwise certain things in the soul can be so harmed that we’re out of balance. The other thing is that anthroposophy has the task rightly understood of meeting evil. It can’t bypass it. I think there are many young people today who want to work spiritually in situations which are very very dark and offer a great sacrifice in doing so. For example, in working with the mentally handicapped and working in prisons, in working with the homeless. All those aspects I think are really penetrating to the depths and not just theoretically. In South Africa we had a school, for example, that had mixed races during Apartheid and managed to keep open. The authorities tried to close it, the white people of course, but they didn’t succeed because the school was so highly regarded. Yes. And in Sao Paolo, Brazil, you have a Waldorf school in the slums. It’s operating on a shoestring and it’s largely financed through friends in Europe. They work under the most difficult circumstances, but they function and they attract teachers who’ll work for practically nothing.

RW: As we stand here now at the end of the century, let’s look first at the positive signs you see and then let’s look at the darker or negative signs. Let’s start off with the positive. What do you see that’s happening right now that we can all feel good about?

RQ: [laughs] That’s not an easy question. But one can also say that nothing productive has ever come without chaos. That sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? Even the birth of child requires the chaos in the womb. And what is true physiologically, biologically, is also true spiritually. The lying, the machinations against human beings, it’s absolutely dreadful. If you read the newspaper one is given to weeping. And yet out of all that chaos something positive will come. That’s what we have to hold onto otherwise life becomes unbearable, totally unbearable. And then the fact that the individual can still make a difference. This is another thing that is very important for young people to realize: that it’s not corporations who are going to save the world, it’s not big business, it’s the individuals who commit themselves to a task. I’m thinking of the French group, Doctors Without Borders. Of course the Red Cross and Amnesty International are other examples. I think that in those types of things there is great hope for the future.

RW: So despite the many indications of decadence and difficulty that surrounds us you remain optimistic.

RQ: Well because I also think and this is perhaps very typical of anthroposophy that it speaks of the reappearance of the Christ, but not as a physical being, not as a physical incarnation — but on the etheric plane, the plane of the life forces. One can oneself find ways of, what shall I say, entering into these deeper aspects by imagining or sitting in an absolutely darkened room for awhile and then lighting a candle and noticing that the darkness was huge and the candle is very small but that one candle can transform the whole of the darkness. And I think that’s the nature of the spirit of the human being. We just have to set ourselves alight and then our spirits will shine forth, however small it may be. So we mustn’t lose heart! We’re just beginning.

– Waldorf educators acknowledge within every child a spiritual core that is far greater than the immediate presence. To allow this individual genius to manifest as completely as possible is the teachers true task.
– Education is seen as an artistic process. All subjects are presented in an aesthetic manner that allows the senses of wonder and joy to continue to grow as the child learns about the world.
– Teachers stay with their classes for several years, allowing parents and teachers to develop a relationship and become partners in best meeting the child’s needs.
– Children study all academic areas including two foreign languages from first grade, as well as a practical arts program, rather than being tracked into a particular stream of study. Teachers see children as whole beings in the process of realizing their potential rather than as empty vessels in need of filling.

For more information please call the Rudolf Steiner School: (212) 327-1457.

David J. Passiak is the Associate Editor at Lapis magazine. He holds an MA in Religious Studies from Arizona State University and has recently finished his third year of a PhD program in Religions of the Americas at Princeton University, from which he is currently on leave. David is now a Program Associate in the Religion and Conflict Resolution Program at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding.

A pacifist and a Quaker who eventually served as Defense Minister of South Africa; an activist for gender and racial equality unjustly imprisoned three times, the most recent of which was for an entire year in solitary confinement; a member of the African National Congress who refused to pick up a gun in her struggle to end Apartheid; a loving wife and mother of two sons — Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge is a remarkable woman who truly defies categorization.

Among her many other professional affiliations, she is an activist for Women’s Rights and Peace, serves on Portfolio Committee on Land Affairs and the Parliamentary Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women, is a chairperson of the multi-party Parliamentary Women’s Group and the ANC Parliamentary Women’s Caucus, and she is involved with a number of other organizations, including WOW, a network of local women leaders.

The Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding (www.tanenbaum.org) awarded Nozizwe with their Peacemakers in Action award to acknowledge her religiously motivated efforts to peacefully resolve conflicts, efforts that at times involved risk of her own life. This past May, she and other Peacemakers in Action from around the globe, along with foreign diplomats and renowned scholars, convened in Amman, Jordan for a retreat hosted by HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal. Participants shared their respective perspectives on the ways in which religion can help facilitate, rather than exacerbate, conflict resolution. (Interested readers should keep their eyes out for the forthcoming volume Peacemakers in Action: Profiles in Religious Conflict Resolution, which will contain a synopsis of the outcomes of the retreat and case studies of Peacemakers’ efforts around the globe. It will be published by Cambridge University Press by the end of 2004, and edited by Harvard Professor David Little.)

As someone who has an immense amount of wisdom to share on the subject, I sat down with Nozizwe during her most recent visit to the US to talk about nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution and the ways in which models developed in South Africa after the death of apartheid might be translatable to other situations in the world, such as the present conflict in Iraq. I began by asking about her experiences in South Africa.

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge: I think that the experience that we had in South Africa gave us a very good perspective on conflict and ways to resolve conflict. The choice that we made in 1990 after the negotiations, or rather, after Mandela was released from prison, when the organizations that had been banned (the ANC, the PAC, the South African Communist Party) became unbanned, and we sat down with our former enemies and negotiated the future.

The choice was based on the desire for a different kind of South Africa, a South Africa where we can all work together, where we could all build the country together. We had been divided immensely, and religion had been used as a dividing tool. We saw a need therefore to put aside our differences.

This wasn’t easy. I always want to emphasize that it wasn’t easy, but we were guided by the love for our country, and the need for us to build the future where our children could live side by side. And I think the choice that was made was the best choice, because I think now we can start anew, having had so many years of violent conflict.

David J. Passiak: Could you reflect upon your experiences in South Africa and ways in which we could learn from them in terms of solving other conflicts, and also in relation to the development of foreign policy.

N: I think that it is important to start with some basic values that we all cherish, because I think different societies, different communities, each have a set of values that they hold dear which have been a part of their societies and their lives forever, if you can look at it that way. Then say, “What is it that is common among us with regards to this value?” and you will find there is quite a lot that is common.

If you take the example of the types of conflicts that are taking place around the world, you will find that what developed into hatred, into violent conflict, could easily have gone the other way. It then becomes possible to see a different future, a different way forward. If perhaps I can be more specific, I think a number of the conflicts around the world, even though they may be of a religious nature, tend to be conflicts that are based on the unequal distribution of resources — issues of social, issues of injustice, issues of inequality — and then different concepts become identified as the basis for the conflict.

In South Africa, race became a major dividing tool. But as I understand it, the real conflict was about power, about control of the resources. But then as I said earlier, religion also got involved as another dividing tool. So whether it’s violent conflicts that may actually lead to war or whether it is at the level of gender relations or personal conflict, if you go to the bottom of what actually may be responsible for the conflict, it is a conflict of who decides, of who makes the decisions, who controls the resources.

D: So it’s issues of power, exchange, and inequality.

N: Yes.

D: Now in South Africa, you mentioned the issue of race, and in preparation for this interview, I read that you also experienced intra-ethnic conflict. I think that a lot of the readers may have an oversimplified view of conflicts w/in South Africa and think of them solely in terms of black and white. Could you talk a little about intra-ethnic violence in South Africa?

N: The violence in South Africa got so entrenched and became so much a part of life, that it transcended to include divisions based on race, went into the arena of ethnic violence and actually characterized itself as ethnic violence. And to us, just close to the end of the period before the negotiations, where there were quite a few huge conflicts that could have been characterized as black on black violence, we had an understanding that this was an extension of the violence that had started which was based on race.

The situation was that in order for apartheid to survive, the apartheid rulers emphasized the differences between the different ethnic groups and allocated resources unequally, which then led to I would say a kind of stigmatization of some of the ethnic groups. The actual situation that I describe here where we had what was called black on black violence, it was actually the same violence, just taking a different form.

D: So you would interpret that as inevitably a byproduct of the apartheid system?

N: Yes, because the system was deeply entrenched and very brutal, and it actually bred other forms of violence. If I look at domestic violence, for example, I want to make a link with the racial violence in the sense that domestic violence happens in white families, it happens in rich families, in happens in black families, it happens in poor families. But there is an understanding that because violence was seen at the broader level being used as a way to resolve conflicts, it then became entrenched, and became used and seen as a tool to resolve other forms of conflict, whether it is in the home, or in the society, in the community.

D: So are you suggesting that people learn to resolve conflicts through violence because that’s what their experiences taught them?

N: Yes.

D. In recent years there has been a great amount of civil unrest throughout Sub Saharan Africa, in terms of civil war, and there are a number of war torn regions now. How would you characterize these conflicts, and do you think that the roots of that violence may be similar to what you describe in South Africa?

N: Well, I was very interested to study the conflicts in Sierra Leone and to compare it to the conflicts that have developed or evolved over the years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I read various books which gave me an understanding that the violence that we see — this very brutal violence where limbs are chopped — has a very direct link to the period during colonization, when as a way of subjugating the ethnic communities, brutal force was used to force them into becoming laborers, and in turn, those who resisted were subjected to very direct and brutal violence.

When I look at the present form of violence, it is just a continuation of that where people were rendered powerless through a system that really took away from them what all of us hold so dear. Each and every person values security to feel that you can have your next meal; that your children can grow up in a safe environment; that you will not be exposed to harm; and that you’ll also be able to participate in the democratic process, in the decisions that are made about your life, and government. All of those issues — these are the basic values that all of us share.

And when this is taken away from you — just take the actual issue of human dignity and human security — when these are taken away from you, you are then left in a situation where it is quite easy for you to be mobilized into a violent force, which will then be used to overturn whatever ruling power is there. But then what then happens often is that people — as I said, in some instances — become used by people who just want to replace whatever power is there and take over that power.

The situation becomes very important. Again, I keep reflecting on my experience. In the fight or in the struggle for democracy, you create what you want to achieve, you make that a part of what you do and how you struggle. So I am saying that if what you want to achieve is peace, then that should reflect in also how you struggle for that peace, so that the end becomes the mean. That is how the desire to strive for nonviolence is so strong in me, because I’m saying if what you eventually want to achieve is peace, then as you struggle for that, it’s best to actually try to develop nonviolent means.

My understanding is that — it’s almost perhaps from the teaching of Gandhi — in order to live what you want to be, you believe it. Whatever it is that you want to achieve, it becomes a part of you as you go towards that. So, for me, it is a totally incorrect way to say that in order to achieve peace you must prepare for war. My approach, and my understanding says that in order to prepare for peace, in order to achieve peace, you must prepare for peace, which then means that in your own personal life, you must look for ways to solve conflict in a nonviolent way. You must also find ways to relate to others in a nonviolent way.

D: Within the US, during the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, coverage by most mainstream news media was very much in support of the war. For example, there were a number of embedded reporters and almost no criticism or questioning of US foreign policy. I know that you were in New York at one point, and were involved in some of the marches in protest of the US led invasion in Afghanistan. Could you reflect upon the contemporary situation with the US and its media coverage abroad?

N: Yes, the situation that you described is very worrying, because the media plays a role where it becomes an extension of the violence itself. I think that the different forms of media need to play a role that actually helps to give people a much broader understanding of what the issues are, instead of maybe just giving them a more limited view.

I know that with the war in Iraq there was for some time quite a good spread of different perspectives with the BBC, with a number of other news media. And that was important for us to see a number of different perspectives rather than just one perspective where one viewpoint is fed down people’s throats to say, “this is the truth and the only truth.”

I think the media can play a very clear role in educating and informing people about other realities. Embedded journalists. There’s a problem with that because, again, as I said, it’s fighting the war from a different side, only it’s not just bombs and guns, but visuals, which can be very powerful, giving a war one perspective. I remember at one stage watching or reading about the war — I can’t remember which war it was — there was so much bombardment by very destructive messages, which I think was emphasized by the media to serve a particular purpose.

D: We’re at a point where sovereignty has been transferred to the Iraqi people, there will be a trial coming of Saddam Hussein, and there are a number of things going on in that particular region. Could you talk about your own experiences and the possible ways in which models developed in South Africa, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, could be translatable to other situations around the world, and to Iraq in particular?

N: Well, I’ll start off by saying that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a very important part of the reconstruction and development of a new culture and of a new South Africa. Although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was able only to relate to violations of human rights, we were also aware that what it touched was just the tip of the iceberg.

But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had a very important role for us. What was key was that there was a strong desire for reconciliation, which, in terms of our understanding, would help ensure that the experiences that people had gone through would not be repeated. There was a very strong message of saying, “never again would South Africa ever see that type of violence play itself out.” It was important for the whole nation to participate in that process. So, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a very public process.

You cannot just assume that by taking the view that the people must be punished, they must therefore go through a process of being tried, that the desire for justice would then bring about a fuller reconciliation. What we chose was to go through a process where there was a broad participation.

We invited people to come forward who had been responsible for violations of human rights and invited those who had been victims, bringing the victims and the perpetrators face to face. This gave the opportunity for the victim to know who their perpetrator was, and to find a way to heal, because we actually realized that the wounds were very deep. We needed to find a process of healing, and for the perpetrator to also face the person who had been the victim of their actions. It’s really a situation where you make it possible for people to confront their actions.

What was critical was getting to know the truth, which in itself is a very important part of the process, but the end product being to reconcile and move forward. The concern we had was that if we had gone through the process of the Nuremberg trials, our desire for justice and for people to pay for their crimes would not have satisfied the long-term desire for peace and for this terrible cycle of violence to never be repeated.

I think what’s seen in other situations around the world, where it has been hoped that through those trials it would bring about the end of violence and conflict, in fact there had in many instances been a repetition of the same violence many years down the line. So — and we did actually study a whole lot of experiences around the world — we chose the truth and reconciliation way. It actually is a process. We can’t say, for example, that overnight we’ve solved all those problems. And as I said earlier, we also broadened our understanding and our thinking by looking at what other ways people were subjected to brutal systems of deprivation, of violence.

We then said the whole process of reconstruction and transformation in South Africa must actually involve the redistribution of resources, which should involve affirmative action; it should involve a transfer of the land to people whose land was taken away from them; it should involve a process of economic justice, of gender justice. So, all those components are part of the same process, to correct the wrongs of the past and to move together to the future.

So, you asked specifically about Iraq, I think right now there are people who are concerned that the perpetrators of the violence in Iraq should actually be brought into a form of national process, so that at the end, what you would have is a process that brings together all of the components, not just one side. You may perhaps think in terms of the newspapers reports that have shown former president Saddam Hussein being tried in a court of law. That may just satisfy one aspect of the peace process there, but I think what is needed is a much broader based process of reconstruction, which would involve the people of Iraq into finding each other and moving forward and rebuilding their country.

D: Religion has played a central role in your own life and your motivations for facilitating peace and conflict resolution. Yet throughout the world, in many instances religion is seen as a component of national and international conflicts. Could you talk about how religion has helped guide you and shaped the decisions you’ve made and the possible role religion could play in helping to facilitate conflict resolution?

N: I think that religion has a very important role in assisting with the resolution of conflicts, and I think we must recognize the role that religion has had and continues to have in creating conflict. So, the values — the very basic values that are central to the different religions, values about respect for life, the fact that each person must do unto others as they would have done unto them — are basic components which I think inform us individually. But then these should be the basic component that brings the different religions together in saying, “We ought to all be working towards what in our own personal life we would like to have, so let’s all work towards that together for our broader, wider society.”

My experience has been that it’s important to start with yourself, and to work to strengthen those aspects which are positive that would link to the next person’s religion, which would then bring those values together in a positive way. I saw in the Tanenbaum retreat a very interesting, and for me quite a positive example, of how the different religions can actually work together. These people coming from all different religious beliefs were all working together and sharing, and I think this can be replicated in the different conflicts in the world. For example, we had two people from Africa, from Nigeria, from different religions, who were working together in their country, which I think again is an illustration that it is possible.

We need to start believing that a peaceful world is possible. Even though where you start may be extremely violent, and you cannot believe when you look at it a different situation would be possible, it is best to start by believing that it is possible, because I think that is what then would lead you to overcome whatever is in your way to try to reach that goal that you are striving towards.

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In his new book, The Inspired Heart: An Artist's Journey of Transformation, Jerry tells the story of his metaphorical death and rebirth as an artist and as a man. The Inspired Heart is a self-portrait of the life of a man guided by a desire to connect to the divine, and armed only with an unwavering faith in Grace to sustain him. In sharing the tale of his remarkable survival and his surrender to life experience, Jerry writes that he hopes "to bring the mystery of this survival back to the tribe as a story.

INTERVIEW BY RALPH WHITE

SPEAKING WITH JERRY WENNSTROM
(Oct 29th, 2004)

Jerry Wennstrom is the author of The Inspired Heart: An Artist's Journey of Transformation; further information on his life and art can be found at his web site www.handsofalchemy.com, as well as in the Parabola video In The Hands of Alchemy: The Life and Art of Jerry Wennstrom. http://www.parabola.org/

1) Jerry, you wrote in The Inspired Heart "art was the church of the 1970's." Tell us about the art world in New York in the 1970's. What was your role in it?

J-In many ways the art scene in the late 70's was something fashionably safe to hang our hats on. Art, and more importantly, the life of the artist had achieved celebrity status by the late 70's. Artists doing some of the most ridiculous things imaginable were being heralded as the wisdom keepers of this new church. Most of us had read about the poor, starving artists of the past who had not been recognized until after their death. Somehow, there seemed to be an unconscious need to collectively repent the oversight. By the late 70's artists could do no wrong! They were no longer the fringy characters living quietly in the back alleys. Mainstream culture had discovered the back ally. It was Soho – the high-end hangout and place to be and be seen.

Art has always held some element of the sacred so there was some legitimate reason for mainstream culture to eventually recognize this area of possibility?late though it may have been. The essential inner power of any true movement is illusive and will vanish the moment it becomes recognizable as a form in the world. The source of inspired breakthrough will always offer up its gems in the lowlands of the unconscious where few of us are willing to go. It is the loneliness and danger of the landscape that keeps most of us at bay. Like the queen-muse wandering incognito in a bad neighborhood, she goes where no clever strategy and ulterior motive might recognize her and seek to exploit her glory. There, where there is danger, she seeks only authentic relationship and ruthlessly dismisses any impersonations. Most of us however, hope to meet up with her at the front of the bandwagon in the safety of the well-attended party on the hill.
As far as my own role in all of this goes? I certainly had a longing to join the party. However, this possibility never felt real to me. Instead I trusted the beautiful and terrifying spirit of the time that I intuited was beckoning us forward into some new, unimaginable expression in the void. This is what I gave myself to.

2) Most people cannot imagine the idea of intentionally destroying works of art that had taken so much personal time and energy to create. Why did you feel destroying your art was necessary?

J-Einstein says, "Matter never dies, it changes form." If, as I suspected, art was beckoning us forward in the direction of some greater formless experience, then the "matter" and attachment to the objects of creation would only change form and offer up something unexpected and more alive. This is what the experience of destroying the art did for me. There is no question that the act of destroying my art and giving everything I owned away involved a huge risk. I was very aware that my initial impulse might have been misguided or even insane. Realizing this, it required every ounce of courage for me to trust the small seed of intuition and higher sense of beauty I perceived, enough to let it all go.

I sensed something important stirring within that needed my full attention. Fasting helped direct this attention inward, so I fasted for as long as it took for me to see what life was asking of me. I had no idea that the final expression of this focus would be to destroy my art and give everything I owned away. After a month-long fast, two choices became clear to me. I could keep doing what I was doing and continue to live as (what felt like) a fear-based idea of an artist, or I could give myself to some formless allurement that I can only describe as something that offered Life in full measure. Making this decision was not based on reason, so there was not the logical scenario guaranteeing some identifiable, beneficial outcome. With intuitive clarity I knew that these were my choices and I chose the formless allurement of life.

It is mostly in retrospect that the true gift of this choice has revealed itself to me. I find it a bit ironic and something of a cosmic joke, that, as an artist, I have been acknowledged more for having destroyed my art than I ever was for creating it! This paradox embodies the true spirit and deeper meaning of the word "sacrifice," which means, "to make sacred." We lay our dreams and precious attachments on the altar, with a willingness to let them go forever, and the whole of our beloved creation is sanctified and returned to us in ways we never would have imagined.

3) In having no possessions, your story seems to indicate that you were actually able to be more generous with those around you. Why do you think this is?

J- Giving up possessions certainly set the conditions for acts of immediate, uncalculated generosity. Unconditional trust requires that we remain completely present and keenly aware of the needs of the moment – we can't afford to do otherwise when we know our very life depends upon it! When we have nothing more to lose, the ego has the potential of stepping out of the way and allowing the needs and suffering of others to come into the light for a compassionate response. We also develop some long-forgotten sensibility of how to manifest what is truly ours. We learn to metaphorically "paint" what we need on the cave wall and then go out and catch the beast. There is an efficiency that comes into play when we no longer depend upon the accumulation of things to make us feel safe. We come to realize that we need much less than we originally thought and the emptiness we once feared becomes our greatest asset.

4) How did you survive during this time, often without money and not knowing if you were going to eat on any particular day? Could you please describe to us the nature of your faith that enabled you to live like you did?

J- I survived by doing my best not to interfere, by trusting unconditionally and by accepting every experience that came to me as if it had been dealt by the hand of God. I could never have continued this strange and lonely journey if I had not seen how well this level of trust carried my life. The simple fact is, as long as I did not act on my fears life continued to unfold naturally, in the most miraculous of ways. If it had not, some essential part of my humanity would not have survived. If I had given into my fear and given up when things became difficult, my journey would have been devoid of any real substance or integrity.

5) You spent a great deal of time after your departure from the art scene fasting, in celibacy, and in silence. What did you learn from these sacrifices? And how did you satisfy your need to express yourself during this time?

J-At some level I feel I did not choose fasting, celibacy and silence — they chose me. They were unexpected teachers and taught me things I never could have learned in any other way and I learned something different from each of them.

Fasting taught me how to find nourishment in an inspired moment and to trust and act on my intuition. It taught me the importance of right timing in relation to these actions. It taught me about places and moments of real power that nurture the soul, which then nurtures the body. There is nothing more insistent than hunger and the primal instinct of the mind bent on survival to set one off in the direction of the barn, so fasting taught me the fierce discipline of trust under any circumstances.

Celibacy taught me how to redirect my sexual energies and how to hold and become my own feminine and not project it onto every illusory attraction that promised comfort and fulfillment. It taught me to easily remain present with others, especially women, and to enter into the heart of communication without an agenda or the interference and confusion of personal desire.

To answer your question on how I satisfied my need to express myself; I would have to say that my ideas of how one personally expresses oneself did not hold up in the face of the demands of some larger expression. Like many of us, I feared the void and believed expression needed the channel of a literal form, perceivable by our 5 senses. I learned by facing my fears that this was not true and that the soul will always find a way to express itself. What I learned in a seemingly expressionless void was how to allow expression to come through in unexpected ways on its own terms. Sometimes it would be a glance; sometimes a word, and sometimes it would be a purely energetic experience – alone or in the presence of another person. Joseph Campbell writes in his book, The Inner reaches of Outer Space that the most sublime expression of art is formless and it leaves us in a state of awe. The mystics know about this level of expression. What I learned is that the universe will express itself with or without our willing participation or our ideas of how it should be done. The beauty of the human experience is to become a willing and grateful participant in the flow of inspired communication. Sometimes the flow of communication takes literal form and is perceived as art and sometimes it does not. An inspired moment is a reality in and of itself.

6) How was returning to sexuality after 15 years of celibacy? That must have been a powerful process. Are sexuality and creativity tied together in your world?

J- After 13 years of celibacy I became quite comfortable with the discipline and had finally accepted it as a way of life. However, it was exactly at this point that things changed for me, and I became involved in a kind of tantric exploration of sexual energies. This period lasted for about 4 years before I married at age 45. At the time I was following my intuition and knew nothing about the tantric experience. As a reliable guidepost, fear often led the way. I walked into the areas of my life that I feared the most. After becoming hugely invested in the disciplined life of celibacy for so many years, sexuality was one of those areas. It was sheer terror for me to return to the exploration of sexuality, fearing I would lose my way. While remaining just outside of full sexual expression, I learned how to hold the powerful energies of sexuality. This allowed for a veritable 'Garden of Eden' experience to occur with another human being without 'the fall.' And here-in lies another paradox. The 'sexiest' time of my life was the time I spent exploring unfulfilled tantric sexuality!

7) You built a 40-foot stupa with your own hands on your property in Washington. (With virtually no background in carpentry!) Could you describe for us the importance of having sacred space in the desire to live a spiritual life?

J-Most lives have such an excess of packaging. It is important to set aside a special place where we honor the real substance of our lives and reverently express our holy longing. It is clear to me after building the tower, that the creation of a special place, even if it is a simple altar, pleases the gods and goddesses. When I built the tower, as you said, I was not a carpenter and had no idea what I was doing. However, the process of building the tower was pure magic for me. I worked long 15-hour days all summer that year and I was in bliss most of that time. Friends would arrive and help or offer the perfect advice. I would find what I needed, just as I needed it, at the local recycle. Everything fell into place so beautifully. And when the tower was complete, nine Tibetan monks literally happened along and blessed the tower with a 45-minute ritual. It was the monks who first called the tower the "Flaming Stupa." Laura Chester followed suit in a chapter about the tower in her book Holy Personal. The name just stuck after that. It is interesting to me that my tower has gotten the attention that it has, since I did not know how to build when I started. I mentioned this fact to a friend who is an accomplished finish carpenter and he said, "If you knew you what you were doing you never have built anything that exotic!"

8) Earlier in your life, your artistic medium was paint. Your art now is more interactive, three-dimensional, and mechanical. How does this art more reflect your current life with Grace than the art you destroyed years back before your metaphorical death?

J-I guess you might say that the new art comes from a more conscious grace. There is a saying, "Fools and children are divinely guided and protected." Like the fool, I guess my path as an artist was divinely guided in some mysterious way, for which I am most grateful. This is in spite of my willful attempt to control what I thought I was doing as a young artist. Fool's guidance brought me to the proper edge where I could confront the possibility of a leap into the void. This confrontation offered me the opportunity to choose conscious Being over mindless doing.

I feel the new art is more an effortless expression of the fullness of this Being. Now, all of the aspects of life are given equal consideration, equal importance, and there is a mystery that seems to come through the work that is larger than my control. This mystery never fails to surprise me.

9) The materials you use to create these days are found objects or objects that find you. You have used objects you have come upon at garbage dumps, in nature, or people's discarded items for your interactive art pieces. How does the seemingly serendipitous way you come across materials for your art affect your relation to your artwork?

J-Sometimes I feel as if the art pieces have a way of their own and know what they need better than I do. Someone will give me something or I will find a piece at the recycle yard and it will fall perfectly into place on the art piece that I happen to be working on at the time. One naturally feels blessed when this happens. The feeling is one of humble gratitude for the presence of a conscious universe. I am sure many artists have this experience when they are deeply involved in the creative process. It is as if, for just a moment, one becomes a willing participant in the conscious expansion of the "Big Bang." To feel we are doing our part to allow the mystery a say in what we do, brings about great joy and this joy translates to others.

10) There is a shamanic quality to the art you are creating. Do you think these pieces carry any magic with them?

J-It is difficult to say exactly where the magic resides, but there is certainly a kind of magic that is available in any creative process. Sometimes a work of art will carry with it something of the eternal. This touch of the eternal is what we call "great art" and we do so mostly without really knowing why.

There may be something unconsciously shamanic about my art as you suggest — others have said this. The shaman has the ability to bring spirit into matter for the benefit of the individual, the tribe and the collective whole. This is not unlike the role of the artist, however, it is not as complete an experience for the artist as it is for the shaman. Generally speaking, the artist is someone who, rattling around the unconscious, occasionally stumbles upon the prized "philosophers stone." It is a rare event for an individual to be thrown into the full blast of a shamanistic death experience and to come out of it fully awakened and able to translate the experience to others. There are probably many more half-shamans walking the streets these days, talking to themselves or conversing with spirits of a questionable origin. The land of the shaman is not as easy to inhabit as some would like us to believe.

11) Your story is the journey of one man's striving towards what you refer to as 'wholeness.' Could you please describe your concept of 'wholeness?' What do you think are the greatest obstacles in modern life to achieving wholeness?

J-Wholeness is the fullness of possibility available to all of us now, like never before. I would say wholeness is a powerful force coming through our
collective consciousness and it is raising havoc with our small ideas of our relationships, our overall reality, and ourselves, as we know it!

The parents of the baby boomers had the luxury of living in a state of half-ness, where each partner in the relationship was able to happily occupy half of their whole story. Something was acceptably complete in what they held as a couple. The generations that followed have not been able to do this – even when, for sentimental reasons, they try. It is really a much deeper issue involving our polar opposites and where we choose to set up camp in relation to these dueling aspects of ourselves. Jung talks extensively about the polls involving the masculine and feminine aspects of our selves. The problem begins when we project the undeveloped aspect of our nature onto another person. We often do this when we fall in love by falling in love with is our own reflection — exactly as we have projected it! Seven years later we feel betrayed by the beloved's inability to hold or live up to the projection. We may actually come to resent the person for the mysterious power they have over us –a power we had no business giving away in the first place!

In a particular kind of way, consciousness is demanding more of us now. I personally believe this is why there is such a high rate of divorce and why there is general discontent for anyone trying to live a partial life. When we least expect it, the undeveloped parts of ourselves crash the gates like unruly children refusing to be ignored.

We have an opportunity like never before, to transform first ourselves and then our world, into something whole and fully alive. There is some powerful new awareness coming through. It is hovering in place, available to anyone open and willing to do the necessary work required of our time.

12) So if art was the church of the 1970's, what do you think is the church of our present decade?

J-Radical departure from the known and unknowing trust and openness to the mystery is the real "church!" The prayer required of this church is a fierce and courageous discipline and the ability to hold the tension of the polarities we are experiencing in our world. To accomplish this we must first be willing to turn and look at the shadow of our own creation and give this area of the psyche the conscious attention it needs. The false church is best represented by the projection of everything evil outward onto others. The most flagrant symptom of this disease is fundamentalism in all of its forms and our refusal to take responsibility for our part in what we see going on in the world around us.

[Edited Version]

The following interview was first published by Lapis in 1996. We bring it to you a second time to mark the passage through the gate of death of one of the most creative and spiritually honest artists ever to cross our paths.

     LAPIS: Frederick, I would like to ask you about your early life.  I know you were born in Maastricht in the Netherlands, and in many ways your life has spanned this whole century.

     Franck: For me, the century began on the 4th of August, 1914 when I was five years old.  On that day, I remember walking with my grandfather and seeing a proclamation pasted on a wall by the Dutch army.  I also remember the first bombardment of Visey, which is a little town 16 kilometers south of Maastricht.  I saw a zeppelin fly over–sometimes I think I imagined it, but I remember my father saying, "Look at that!"  Then, almost at once, endless files of refugees started to trek over the border past our house.  It is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.  I remember an old man in this endless file of people.  He was carrying a little cage with a canary in it.  I was standing there eating grapes, which I started to throw.  It was a kind of impudent gesture of compassion.

     Later, the refugees camped in an abandoned church very close to our house, and I would take them big bowls of sausage and pea soup that my mother cooked.  This went on for all four years of my elementary schooling.  At one point, a small plane, one of the first little biplanes, flew over and dropped a bomb in our playground.  Fortunately, it was a very poor bomb and it didn't explode.  There were endless processions of wreckage, endless streams of the wounded and dying in improvised ambulances passing by our window.  For me, this was the beginning of my mentality against killing and violence.  I developed a kind of allergy to war.  This began the tenor of my whole life.

     In 1929 when I was 29, the Belgians began to dig the strategic canal a half a kilometer from my house.  It sliced through a local mountain which, to us, was as high as the Alps.  They sliced right through it to build the canal.  One day when I was on a walk, I saw that they were building machine gun emplacements in the sandstone wall.  I felt that something was going to happen again, and I swore I would get out in time.  My family just thought I had an obsession with war.  In the end, they sent me to a psychiatrist friend.  The upshot was that, after our visit, he called my uncle and said, "I think we should consider booking passage to America."  In other words, after speaking with me, he too was convinced that war was quite possible.

     My father died, and I decided to go to Edinburgh, because my mother implored me not to go too far away.  In Edinburgh, I got my degree in dentistry, and practiced for three years.  But I always wanted to get out, and so came to America to explore it.  I thought it was awful.  I wasn't sure whether to stay in Europe and be overrun by Mr. Hitler or to live in this terrible place. 

     Eventually, I decided on America, and I wasn't sure what to do to make a living.  I was always very schizophrenic.  I had been tossed into a health profession, but my love was painting, drawing, music, and, another perversion, theology.  But the only thing I could earn a living with was dentistry.  I got my degree in Pittsburgh, and then later was on staff as a teaching resident in oral surgery and anesthesia.  In 1943, there was some question that I might be called up for service (in the armed forces).  It was not that I did not want to, it was just impossible.  It was my allergy.

     LAPIS: I know that in your early years in New York, you had a downtown studio in Greenwich Village.

     Franck: Yes, it was on the corner of Bleecker Street and 6th Avenue.  I think, although I can't prove it, that it was the original home of Edgar Allen Poe.  At the time that I found it, it was election headquarters for Honest Joe.  He was never elected, perhaps he was too honest.  It was a wonderful studio. Underneath it were little stores, a pizza parlor and a vegetable and a fish shop.  From my studio, I could smell the fish and chicken.  It was a wonderful atmosphere.

     Except for the two and a half days every week that I practiced dentistry on Madison Avenue, I would go to this studio and paint.  In those days, I had an exhibition every year.  I got a name and sold well, but became more and more suspicious of the art world.  I discovered it was not a world at all.  It is a little competitive subculture in the overall chain of culture in America.

     It was the early fifties.  Everyone had this flush of victory, and so there was this American ambition to offer a genuine "American art".  Artists wanted to rival, if not K.O., the European masters from della Francesca via Rembrandt and Turner to Picasso.  What happened was this canonization of self-expression–which was just a euphemism for self-indulgence–of the Abstract Expressionists, of Jackson Pollock, De Kooning, Motherwell and their epigone.  These men had every right to do what they did, but this right was usurped and exploited by curators and dealers.  The art sellers were infatuated with originality for originality's sake, innovation for innovation's sake.  Museums from coast to coast competed mindlessly to become showcases, to offer fashion shows of the New York approved haute couture of the year.  An absurd and dizzying race between the avant gardes of meaninglessness had started.

     I found that the concept of "art" itself became addled.  Inanities touted as art became a cottage industry for stylish merchandise.  There was a great emphasis placed on being non-objective.  Being non-objective also made any spiritual, social, or ethical commitment superfluous.  Which means that art had become dehumanized.

     Art which had always been assumed to arise from the heart or somewhere close to the deepest recesses of the human spirit, now had to spring either from highbrow design or else from the deepest Freudian unconscious.  It was institutionalized, and marketed with superb sophistication and unlimited hubris.  Limitless resources were available.  Meaninglessness had become an important vested interest.

     LAPIS: What about your relationship with Albert Schweitzer?

     Franck:  As it would happen, I met Albert Schweitzer by coincidence.  I had a patient, a South African heiress, who knew Schweitzer and told me that he needed an oral surgeon for his clinic in Africa.  Well, I was already living a schizophrenic life between Bleecker Street and Madison Avenue, but I jumped at this chance to go to Africa.  Why?  Well, first of all, I had been raised on Schweitzer by my mother, and I wanted to find out what motivated him, and to meet the people that he was working with.  Another motivation was that I wanted to be in intimate touch with Africa.  I knew that being there would give me the pressing urge to draw its people.  When you start to draw, as I draw anyway, it requires an absolute identification with what you draw, you have to become it.  To draw Africa, I had to become an African, and did for a little while.  I completely identified with those people.  Later, this also happened for me in Japan.  While there are cultural gaps and contrasts, as soon as I began to draw, I became Japanese as much as I had been African.

     As far as Schweitzer is concerned, I admired him.  He was really 100% devoted to anything that suffered.  I had seen him practically weep for an elephant that had been shot, or for any patient in his hospital.  In Africa, it was thought that if you can give somebody penicillin or some injection, that you could do immense good.  But he did more; he did surgery, he oversaw the men who worked for him.  He went, after all, as a missionary, on the condition that he would not preach.  This was because, after his book on Historical Jesus came out in 1908 or 1910, he was considered by the orthodox Protestants as a kind of heretic.  He didn't try to convert anyone.  But in what he did and in his motivations, he was a Christian presence.

     LAPIS: In the early 60's during the Second Vaticin Council, you went to Rome.

     Franck: Yes, but first I wrote a book on Schweitzer.  You know, writing is also very addictive.  They say, never write a book because, once you do, you will always go on to write another one.  I kept on writing and drawing, never selling my drawings, despite a great fear of destitution.  I can't sell my work.  For me, art is the opposite of merchandise.  So rather than trying to sell my drawings, I kept them.

     Around this time, I also bought a house, sight unseen.  It was a total wreck, but there was this river next to it; it was the spitting image of a river that ran past my great grandfather's house in Maastricht.  It was the same exact color, and I thought, "Here is where I would like to live."  That coincided with my going to Vatican II.

     What I didn't tell you before is that, I grew up in a totally agnostic family.  My father and my grandfather were somehow socialists and very cavalier.  But the rest of the town was 99.9% Catholic, in a very Irish way, which means it was very radical Catholicism with a beastly dictatorship in every sense of the word.  However, there was still a very archaic underground Catholicism which was Neolithic with magic and very mystical.  This attracted me very much.  Actually, I don't have an agnostic nature at all.  Catholic symbolism became the roots from which I could hang my first formations on the meanings of life.

     Around 1962, I had a revelation.  I called my wife and said, "We are off to Rome."  I had grown up with this love-hate relationship with the Holy Mother, but my relationship to Catholicism changed the first time I heard Pope John speak.  I knew something was different.  To hear him speak, I believed that the Vatican meant what they said for a change.  When I look back at that time, I still don't believe I was being naive.  There was this monstrous institution at the point of converting itself into what it is supposed to truly represent.  It seemed like a sign of hope.  But, of course, later it was all perverted.  On the other hand, there is still a marginal Catholic world now that is part of the inheritance of this "opening of the windows".  To me, they have a spiritual sense of reality in the real profound sense of reality, which you can call spirituality. 

     Pope John, I call him a Christian or a Catholic Bodhisattva.  He was a man who totally overcame all the effects of ego.  So he could not imagine, I'm sure,  representing the whole Catholic institution.  He did not worry about himself.  He said, "My bags are packed," by the time he was ready to die.  For me, there are three people in this century for whom I have absolutely unbounded devotion: there is Albert Schweitzer, who was a human being in the first place, but not a Bodhisattva.  Pope John was a human being in every respect, and a Bodhisattva.  And the third is D.T. Suzuki.

     LAPIS: How do you work artistically?

     Franck: When I can't draw, I feel mutilated.  I have never meant to imply that my own scribblings of humans, trees, landscapes, or light effects exemplify art.  My drawing simply results from the addictive eye-to hand reflexes without which I feel dead.  My eye identifies and becomes a reflex, and in that moment the image falling on my retina is transferred directly to my hand, registering the tremors of the sight.  Although this process depends upon sight, it has nothing to do with my perception of what I see.  I am not involved.  I cannot interfere, or even think about what I should do with an image, because if I do, it doesn't work.  It is purely intuitive.  Visual reality is partly, and here we begin to theorize, we could say that visual reality is the transparent "maya" of the phenomenal world.  Drawings are a probing of the Real, not as in what is hidden behind appearances.  Appearances are the manisfestations of the Real.  If you draw with this in mind and keep on doing it, and never, for God's sake, think that you're going to use your illustration for something like an exhibition, than you can become in total touch, through the drawing, with yourself.

     Drawing is like my life force, whatever that is, seismographing itself on a piece of paper.  At times, these graphs of the eye's perception are so obsessive that they convert themselves into ink paintings in which all color is muted into blacks, greys and whites.  At other moments they turn themselves into steel or stone icons that seem to summarize the process.  Creating sculpture, working in steel, is also in a sense maya.  Maya is constantly in transference, and the artist wants to make it concrete again.  This is why I call my sculptures, "icons".  Icons point at the window of the sacred or what you would call, the window of reality.

     I don't invite these icons to come, they just come, as if I were doodling in steel.  For instance,  my work entitled "Seven Generations"–that came about when I was taking a phone call.  I scribbled something down and later when I looked at it, I found it interesting.  It became the Seven Generations sculpture.  To my astonishment and joy, it seemed to communicate something or other, so that at times replicas are commissioned.  It's as if I had been mumbling something to myself and suddenly a voice behind me says, "Yes!"  Whose

voice is it?  It doesn't matter.  What matters is that it is the vox humana.

     LAPIS: You have had the Seven Generation sculpture exhibited in Trenton and Sarajevo.  What about the Unkillable Human?  Could you explain its origin?

     Franck: Yes.  There is this unkillable human at Hiroshima, and I had seen the shadow of this human being burned into a concrete wall.  The image haunted me.  After Hiroshima, I came home and dutifully I took a steel plate and placed on it the form of the mutilated human.  Before the sculpture was finished, the second figure fell out.  It was unplanned.  Now it is an empty negative.  You see the victim rising as a phoenix from the ashes.

     LAPIS: As you look back on all these 86 years and this extraordinary century that has had outstanding individuals like Schweitzer and Pope John but that has also seen so much horror, are there any concluding thoughts that you would like to give us?

     Franck: We were talking about icons and the phoenix rising.  Well, a man who has a Buddha of mine, a man with money near Washington, called me and asked if I would be willing to do a sculpture for Newark, N.J.  I said, "Newark!"  It was not exactly the place to think of for a sculpture.  But I went to the city anyway to look around.  I was deeply impressed with a project that was started 27 years ago by a young priest.  After the riots, he wanted to do something to rehabilitate the community.  He raised funds for 27 years.  He built three thousand houses, seven day care centers, he converted an old stone church into a community center.  The church is done quite well, worth looking at.  So I got very enthusiastic.  I thought, this place is much better than having a sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.  This place has a consciousness.  So now, for instance, the phoenix you see here, I made a larger one for Newark; a phoenix rising from its ashes.

     The placement of the sculpture is very appropriate.  On one side is an elementary school and on the other side is public housing, senior citizen's apartments.  The sculpture is placed in the middle.  I designed the space as a community garden where the kids and the seniors can work together planting vegetables and flowers.  It has been dedicated and they are now working there.  For me, this is wonderful.

END

Russell D. Hemenway has been the National Director of The National Committee for an Effective Congress since 1965. A former foreign service officer, he was the national presidential campaign manager for Governor Adlai E. Stevenson, and is currently the Chairman of the Fund for Constitutional Government, President of Citizens Vote, Inc., and Director and Executive Committee member of the Fund for Peace, The Population Institute and The National Security Archives.

Ralph White: Could you begin by telling me something about the history of your involvement with the National Committee for an Effective Congress, and the work you've been involved in, in combating the extreme right in America?

Russell Hemenway: I've been with the Committee since 1965 — thirty five years. We're now celebrating our 52nd year. We were founded in 1948 by Mrs. Roosevelt and some of her colleagues. The NCEC and the rise of the influence of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy were coincidental, although that was not the principal reason the Committee was organized and founded. We became known as the important opponents of the Radical Right. As a matter of fact, we coined the term, "Radical Right." I was not involved. In those days I was in France as a student and then in Greece as a young foreign service officer.

The NCEC endorsed six candidates for the United States Senate in 1948 — including the young mayor of Minneapolis named Hubert Humphrey, and a young Congressman from Tennessee named Estes Keefover. There were six and they all won.
1948 was also a crucial year nationally, because Truman had beaten Dewey in a dramatic election that nobody had predicted. He also had beaten Henry Wallace, who was a very strong third-party candidate, heading the Progressive Party. In 1948 I was still an undergraduate. I'd been in World War II and then I'd gone back to Dartmouth College to finish after the War.

In 1948, I cast my first vote by absentee ballot. For a good many months of that campaign, I was for Henry Wallace. I thought his policies made a lot of sense. He was very far left. He was Red-baited terribly by everybody, including Truman. Henry Wallace was not a Communist, but he was extremely progressive. He had been Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture. He lived in Westchester, and did some amazing things in experimental agriculture.

After the war was the beginning of the Red Scare and the Cold War. The lines were beginning to harden. It was the wrong time for Henry Wallace. He began to go downhill very sharply at the end of the campaign. So, I left him. I never really worked for him, but I was for him. I ended up voting for Truman because I didn't want to waste my vote, and it was clear that a vote for Wallace would not have meant anything. I wanted to beat Tom Dewey.

RW: I know the Committee was involved in the motion to censure McCarthy.

RH: That was important because then McCarthy began to play a major role. He wouldn't have if he hadn't had the support of people like Nixon, who Red-baited Jerry Vorhees when he ran for the House in 1948, and when he ran against Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate. He was a virulent hater, liar, and demagogue. And, now people are trying to resurrect Richard Nixon. Actually, as president he was fairly bright, did some good things, but he had no respect for the Constitution, and was perfectly willing to subvert it, which he did, and was driven from office.

Nixon haunted my entire life, from 1948 on. I could never get rid of him. Every time I turned around, there he was. When I was running Adlai Stevenson's campaign for the presidency, the one thing that Governor Stevenson and I shared was an absolute hatred of Richard Nixon. And I never knew Governor Stevenson to hate anybody. But he really didn't want to lose to Nixon. In his hesitancy in 1960 to become an active candidate, he said to me, "What if I lost to that son of a bitch?"

McCarthy was a cheap demagogue. But at that point in time, the guy arrives on a white horse waving a bunch of papers saying he's got the list of 206 Communists in the State Department — he didn't have one. No one ever went to jail; no one was ever indicted. He never turned up one person, and over the course of three or four years in American politics, he ruined the lives of countless citizens. John Service, one of the greatest China watchers we've ever had –McCarthy destroyed his reputation and whole career.

In those days Maurice Rosenblatt was running the Committee and he was writing all the speeches for Senator Flanders of Vermont, who was a conservative Republican but a very decent guy who thought Joe McCarthy was a very dangerous man. You needed someone like Senator Flanders to carry the fight against McCarthy because he was a Republican. Coming from the Left, it didn't mean as much, and most of the Left, liberal senators had collapsed. Some of the great liberal heroes — Senator Lehman of New York, and Senator Benson of Connecticut — totally laid down before this steamroller (McCarthy), didn't do anything. Jack Kennedy didn't even vote on the censure. He disappeared and went to Florida. Massachusetts was a hotbed of McCarthyism.

So, the Left wasn't doing anything. But Flanders stood up. And then we decided at one crucial point to send Telford Taylor, one of the founders of the Committee, who had been the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, a very distinguished lawyer and close friend of mine, up to West Point to see if we could draw McCarthy's attention to the Army, and it worked. McCarthy attacked the United States Army, and he attacked the Secretary of the Army, Stevens, and people began to say, "What is coming off?" He said he had a list of 18 senior staff members of the United States Army who are Communist infiltrators.

And that's when the Army McCarthy hearings began. There were public hearings, and the United States Senate and McCarthy stood there at the Government Operations Committee….I'll tell you an interesting vote. When the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1952, McCarthy came in with a request for a budget for the Investigative Subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee of the Senate. He became chairman of that subcommittee. He asked for a budget five times higher than it had ever been before, he wanted to hire accountants, investigators. He said there were Communists all over the place and they're infiltrating the Army, and the State Department is a hotbed, even the White House. General Eisenhower seems to be a dupe.

The Senate had to vote on this budget. The vote was 95 to 1. And who was that one person? Bill Fulbright of Arkansas. Fulbright stood up and said, "I've never heard such nonsense in my life. If we give this man the budget he's looking for, we're crazy. All he's going to do is destroy us. He's a complete demagogue. I wouldn't vote him a dime." Everyone else laid down, they were too scared to resist. I'm talking about the most liberal guys: New York, New Jersey, the Northeast, not a peep.

That strategy worked, and when he was finally censured in the Senate for lying, he said that the National Committee for an Effective Congress masterminded the censure movement. It's not me saying that we did it; it's Joe McCarthy saying we did it. And from that moment on, our reputation was enhanced and we were known as the most prominent group opposing right wing politics. And we still are.

RW: What has stayed the same or what has changed, from the 30s up to the present, in the radical right?

RH: The 30s was a depression. The system had failed us. No one was working and everyone was experimenting with all kinds of things other than democracy. They were looking at socialism and communism — we've got to do something to feed people so a man could take care of his family. We were on our knees. Then we went right into World War II and that saved us economically. There have always been strong right wing elements in this country. Today, it's more focused on religious conservatism.

In the late 1960s, they really decided they had to get organized and use their power politically and professionally. The way to win elections was to be organized on the precinct level and not just sit there and talk in the churches and sermonize about how the welfare cheats were stealing their tax money, and how the Blacks and the Hispanics were taking over America, and how the Jews were responsible for all our ills. With their anti-Semitism and their racism, they decided to get organized. Paul Weyrich, who was a young kid out of the Young Americans for Freedom — taught Jerry Falwell how to organize something they called the Moral Majority. Pat Robinson came along — his father had been in the United States Senate. The Reverend Robinson decided to get organized politically and so did a lot of other fundamentalists.

As the fundamentalist/evangelical movement began to grow in this country, and the mainline churches began to lose strength, it became a formidable element in politics because it could get out the vote. They registered their members in the churches, and they learned on election day to get them out. They organized phone banks and learned how to distribute literature. They learned how to lie and exaggerate and distort. Any candidate who wasn't 100% opposed to abortion under any circumstances, or who refused to accept the teaching of religion in the public schools, or who was against any part of their conservative social agenda, was marked for defeat.

The Republican Party, which is not particularly well-organized, and not very strong at the local level, became very dependent upon this element to get the vote out. The right worked very closely with the Republican Party, until, a few years ago, when it became apparent that they were taking over the Republican Party at the grass roots, so the change over the years is that, whereas they have always been an element in propaganda, the right wing in American politics has now become very skilled in electoral politics. They know how to train people to work in precincts and ring doorbells and to do all those things necessary to maximize their vote. They have been very effective. A few years ago, Bob Dole's campaign manager, said, "You cannot get a nomination for the Republican Party today in the U.S. without supporting the agenda of the Christian Right, the Christian Coalition."

It's in primaries where you nominate the candidates that the Right has real power because normally you have a very low voter turnout. Under 30 per cent of the people vote in primaries, so anybody who can deliver a block of votes can have a tremendous influence.

Also, you have to understand how vulnerable most candidates are. They are insecure — they don't know what to do next. They don't know quite how to move — if I do this, what happens? Should I do this first? Candidates are extremely insecure. This is something I've noticed after over 50 years in politics.

So, if you're a pro like some of these campaign consultants you read about, and you walk into the room where everybody is concerned about what they're going to do, you start snapping your fingers, saying "Okay, we're going to this and that, and now you do that." 90% of the ideas are probably lousy, but it doesn't matter, because a couple of them might be pretty good. The candidate is snowed and is delighted that finally here is somebody who knows what we do next. How to budget, how to organize, who to hire, what to do. So they're willing to put themselves in the hands of these pros.
This is the kind of thing the NCEC does for progressive candidates for free, without the ulterior motives of the campaign consultants. We teach them how to organize, budget, to do precise precinct electoral targeting and demographic targeting, and show them a road map for campaign organization. That's one of the most important services we provide.

The right wing is very political. It's not Joe McCarthy waving papers in the air and saying everybody's a Communist. The Christian Coalition has 800 chapters in 50 states. They control the Republican Party in probably 40 of the 50 states. They don't control it here in New York, but it's an important influence. Pataki and Giuliani and D'Amato are still pretty much in control of the party here in New York. But in most places, the Christian Coalition controls the machinery of the Republican party and they know how to get out the vote.

They had a little dip in influence, but now Robertson has taken over. This was when Ralph Reed left and went on to make a lot of money as a consultant. Pat Robertson was left bereft in terms of how he was going to run it. He had to take it over himself. But now they're building back up. They are an enormous influence in these Republican primaries. They made a difference in South Carolina. They got into a little trouble in Michigan because Michigan is a very Catholic state, and that business with Bob Jones University did not do Bush any good because Bob Jones is known to be anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and racist. It was a mistake in terms of Bush's campaign.

Every Republican candidate endorsed 100% the Christian Coalition agenda: prayer in the schools, no abortion under any circumstances, flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, the whole array of Neanderthal legislation. So that's why we have to elect a Democrat, because there's going to be two, at least three appointments in the Supreme Court over the next term. Some members are not well, even Mrs. O'Connor is sick, Renquist is sick and he wants out. If Bush is there, those three people are going to be replaced by virulent conservatives. It could change the direction of this country for decades.

For that reason alone, even if Gore was the biggest liar we ever met, it still doesn't matter. We've got to beat George Bush.

You're not going to win this thing on the far left. And Bush is not going to win it on the right. Very few Americans consider themselves progressive or liberal. How many people would you think would say that they were liberal? About 20%. How many call themselves conservative? About 30%. The rest are in the middle. You can't win elections on the far left or far right.

RW: In your 50 years in political life, what are your observations about changes in the caliber and quality of people who are entering or seeking public office?

RH: We are attracting a more mediocre person into public service on all levels. I can say very strongly that I used to be thrilled to meet the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In congress, there were people of enormous quality, but there aren't too many of those people left. Giuliani's not atypical, he's probably a lot brighter than most people. And Mrs. Clinton, she has certain problems as a candidate. I personally don't think she has got a good sense of humor; it always helps in politics to have a sense of humor.

Fifty years ago it was fun, I mean, I had Gypsy Rose Lee as a constituent. I looked forward to going out and circulating a petition. Now if you ring a doorbell, they call 911, so most campaigning is done by telephone and telephone is not as good as face to face.

Getting on the ballot was easier then, we could get you on the ballot, meet in somebody's living room, raise a little money and run a campaign — it could be done. Now a lot of people say "oh yeah, I'm a Democrat" but they're not registered.

If we're going to save the system, we have to attract a better quality of people into public service. That's not going to happen if we have Vietnams, Watergate, Irangate, because the impact of those events to the average person is devastating. It makes them think "it doesn't matter, you're all the same." We have twenty percent of our people living in poverty, and we're the richest country in the world. People don't understand that the quality of their own lives would be better if everyone's was better and how little it would cost to improve things. It would cost peanuts. Peanuts, compared to what they’re spending on star wars. And if George Bush, or any of those other clowns get in…it's going to be the same old party line.

Today, if you're going to run for public office, you've got to accept the fact that everything that's ever happened to you in your life or your family or people with whom you've been involved is fair game, and may very well be part of campaign fodder. That discourages a lot of people. And anybody who goes to Congress or to a state legislature or a city council, anybody who has the responsibility of representing people in this system of government, should not have their finger to the wind to feel how the wind is blowing on every bloody vote. They should be people with enough quality, sensibility, intelligence, and good judgment to know what's best for their constituency and the country and to vote their conscience. Today, you get a lot of people whose major concern is being re-elected and how a vote is going to affect my campaign funding.

Basically they want the job. Most of these guys have the best job they're ever going to get. They're paid $135,000.

RW: What do you see as the future of progressive politics in this country?

RH: I think the future is the same as it is today. Progressive politics is minority politics. There will be a time when the Democrats can take control of the House or control of the Senate, or elect a president as we did with Clinton, but that does not mean that we've got a progressive country. With progressive politics, you're always going to be on the defensive. Every election is going to be crucial and there are going to be enormous threats from the right. Right now, there are about 45 or 50 elections we look at and work with carefully. They are the closest.

The NCEC has about 90,000 people across the country who support us, and a budget of a couple of million bucks. We're probably the most respected organization of this kind in the country. Our job is defensive. Progressive politics is very defensive. It's keeping the Right at bay, and trying to elect as many reasonable people as possible. It can't be done without people being involved. It requires maximum participation. People complain they want change, but they don't get it. Why? I'll tell you why — they don't want it to change. If all of those people who didn't vote, voted now, we'd have one hell of a country.

John David Ebert is a culture historian whose various essays and interviews have appeared in Lapis, Alexandria, The Quest, and Mythosphere. He is a contributing editor to the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, now in preparation by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. This interview is a chapter from a larger work entitled Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age.

It was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who in 1927 drew the initial sketch for the big bang hypothesis when he said that the universe must have originated from a sort of “cosmic egg” of matter and energy. Consciously or not, Lemaître was invoking ancient myth, for the image of the cosmic egg as the origin of the universe goes back to the Orphic cults of Greece, and even beyond, to Egypt. For when the human mind is confronted with realms which are beyond the bounds of experience, the mythic imagination goes to work, populating the dark hinterlands of our maps with dragons and chimeras. The narratives of science, accordingly, almost always conceal mythic patterns, if you look closely enough.

Another Catholic priest, Teilhard de Chardin, attempted a more deliberate synthesis of science and religion, but the veneer of scientific imagery that he painted over his theology was more like a vast, crumbling Diego Rivera mural of evolution beneath which the older canvas of Christianity and its mythic structures are still visible. Teilhard’s two main cosmic principles are really God and the Devil in disguise. The benevolent force of Evolution is driving the cosmic drama to its Omega Point, in spite of the resistance put up by the dark force of Entropy. It is the same drama, precisely, in Zoroastrianism, the progenitor of all Near Eastern dualism, in which the god of light, Ahura Mazda, is in cosmic contention with the lord of darkness, Ahriman, and, as in Teilhard’s narrative, the victory of the former at the end of time is already assured.

Science and religion may have a lot more in common than most of us realize, and on the basis of these shared archetypal patterns, are conciliation of sorts might be built. That they may share identical archetypes does not mean that they perform the same functions. The function of religiosity is to awaken a sense of awe with respect to the mystery of the cosmos, and to do so through a transformation of consciousness. The function of science, on the other hand, has never been the alteration of human consciousness, but to render an accurate knowledge of the cosmos through an explanation of its processes. Science is addressed to the intellect, whereas religion normally bypasses the intellect to galvanize emotional energies. The Scholastic debates of the Middle Ages between Aristotelian rationality and Augustinian faith has reawakened for us, today, in the conflict between science and religion.

For mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, resolving this antinomy has been something of a life task. He was educated at Santa Clara, a Catholic university, where he discovered the works of Teilhard de Chardin,which first introduced him to the interface between science and theology. When attending graduate school at the University of Oregon, he realized that this interface was of no interest to most of the scientists there, and in fact, was largely an embarrassment because “as scientists we were trained not to ask these deeper questions”.

Although he took his PhD in gravitational dynamics, the nature of the cosmos as a numinous revelation remained for him the primary interest. He taught at the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California from 1983-1990. His first book Manifesto for a Global Civilization (written in collaboration with Matthew Fox) is a brief exploration into the shortcomings of Augustinian theology and the mechanistic paradigm, emphasizing the need for a synthesis of science, religion, and ecology.

In 1984, he published The Universe is a Green Dragon, a delightful Socratic dialogue sketching out the lineaments of this synthesis. The book was dedicated to Thomas Berry, his most important mentor, whose lifetime of investigation into the religions of the Far East and current ecological concerns immediately caught Swimme’s attention when in 1980 he came across a paper written by Berry, called “The New Story”. For Swimme,the paper echoed his own thinking about the possibility for a new cosmology that transcended the antagonism of science and religion, and for the next decade or so he and Berry worked out the contours of this synthesis, which was published in 1992 as The Universe Story.

He has also produced a series of video courses: Canticle to the Cosmos (1990), Soul of the Universe (1991), and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. Currently, he teaches at California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program.

JOHN DAVID EBERT: In your first book Manifesto for a Global Civilization you state that in order for science to thrive in the coming age, its mystical core should be celebrated. Does this mean that science should be transformed into something that more closely resembles the function of religion?

BRIAN SWIMME: I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but let me just make it clear that I don’t think science should become religion. I think science is a distinct activity. Religion and philosophy are distinct intellectual achievements, but they’re really not separate and to pretend that they are is no longer viable. During the 19th century, scientists were happy striving after knowledge, and the questions beyond that were seen as non-scientific, whereas today there’s a realization that every activity of the human has multiple implications. When I talk about the mystical core, I think the urge of the scientist to understand is ultimately mystical. It has to do with a deep desire to taste and touch reality. So it’s not that science should become religion, but that science and religion should work together toward something else.

JE: How certain are we of our model of the Big Bang? What’s the evidence for it?

BS: The evidence would be threefold: the first is the expansion. If you look at other galaxies in the universe, they’re moving away from the Milky Way. And if you look at galaxies that are twice as far away, they’re moving twice as fast. So if you think about that for a minute, it means that the universe is moving apart like some rapid expansion from an initial point. And so that would be one major piece of evidence.

The second would be – and Lemaître was the first tospeculate about this – that if this began at the great explosion, there should be evidence of that explosion around. George Gamow and his collaborators actually calculated that the remnants from that explosion would be a form of radiation at ten degrees above absolute zero. And then in 1965, Penzias and Wilson actually located this background radiation at 2.75 degrees. So it was lower than even Gamow calculated it, but again, a remarkable discovery.

The third major piece of evidence is the presence of hydrogen, lithium, and helium in the Big Bang scenario. Early on in the universe there’s a moment when light elements can be created, but only in a certain amount. And so there are exact predictions made in the model about how much hydrogen, helium, and lithium there would be in the universe and these have been remarkably consistent with the empirical findings. So the background radiation pretty well eliminated the other models, but since that time more of this has come in. The most recent one would be from the COBE satellite, discovering the ripples from around 300,000 years after the birth that we now think gave rise to the galaxies.

JE: Stephen Hawking is excited about these quantum fluctuations. Can you explain why they’re significant?

BS: If we go back 15 billion years, we have this expanding universe. If the universe is perfectly symmetric and homogeneous – and we imagine that’s how it began – then the universe would simply expand forever and never form any structures. But for structures to actually come about there had to be some break in symmetry, some sort of fluctuation. And one way to imagine this is that at the quantum level we have this foaming of material, space, time, and energy, and that this initial foaming was inflated very rapidly so that those fluctuations at the quantum level suddenly became macrofluctuations – and those are what Mather and Smoot captured on the COBE satellite – they’re what gave rise to the structure of the universe.

You see, if the universe were perfectly symmetric, then early on, for every particle of matter there would be another particle of anti-matter and everything would just annihilate, and there would be nothing left but light. But there’s a slight, tiny, tiny asymmetry. So for every billion anti-protons, there turns out to be a billion plus one protons and so this strange little piece of asymmetry is what gave rise to everything. The same thing could be said now about the structure of the universe in terms of the galaxies: these fluctuations at a micro scale are what enable the Milky Way and Andromeda and other things to come into being. It’s just overwhelming.

JE: Where does the idea of God fit into our current cosmological narratives?

BS: Most scientists would just ignore the question. But many really good scientists have thought about it, too, and there would be a variety of opinions. My own way of relating a sort of classical theological thought with this modern scientific story is to think in terms of the origin of the universe coming out of emptiness. That would be the way in which some scientists would talk about it. We would say that the quantum vacuum, really, is the origin of the universe. And the quantum vacuum is a mysterious realm. It has nothing in it, there’s no thing there but it’s a realm of generativity. And this is remarkably similar to the kinds of speculations coming from theologians such as Meister Eckhart, who talked about the super-essential Darkness of God. Now obviously, when they’re investigating the quantum vacuum, scientists are not saying to themselves, “I’m investigating the Godhead!” I’m simply pointing out that there is a remarkable correspondence between these two ways of investigating ultimate reality. Now if you say that the quantum vacuum really is a scientific way of exploring the Godhead then you begin to see the contours of a new kind of theology, one that would draw upon both traditional sources and contemporary science.

JE: You contrast the current view of irreversible time given by our scientific narratives to that of the old mythic view of cyclical time. Can you describe what implications our current cosmology has for cyclical views of time and history?

BS: There are cyclical patterns that we’re involved with and we’re quite aware of them. There’s winter, and new people are born, new people are dying, and they go through this cycle over and over again. And that I think is a deep understanding from cosmologies all around the world. But the scientific one adds to that the discovery of irreversible time. For instance, we have no way of validating the statement that if life extinguished on earth, it would recreate itself. But rather, the mainstream theory would be that the emergence of life on planet earth is a one-time event because the actual emergence of life alters the conditions which enable life to come about. So that irreversible aspect to creativity adds a degree of drama to the other cosmologies that they would not otherwise have. There’s something dramatic and even tragic about the loss of a form of life. For instance, we’re on the verge of losing the higher primates, like the gorillas. Well, in a cyclical cosmology one could fail to really feel the depth of that event because there would be a sense of earth replenishing itself and the gorillas would come back. But in our understanding the gorillas would never come back, ever.

JE: James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have put forth their model of the Gaia hypothesis, in which the earth seems to behave like a living organism. Likewise, you have suggested that the universe can be thought of as a self-organizing being. Can you describe this idea?

BS: Well, for instance, Lovelock and Margulis point out that the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere is not a random number. It’s the highest concentration that the atmosphere can really bear and support life. If it were much higher, you would have spontaneous combustion. So there would be a big destruction of life. If it were much lower, the more complex organisms would not have come into being. So, one of the things they point out is, it’s not an accident that the earth organizes itself so that oxygen will be around 21 percent.

In an analogous way, if you look at the universe as a whole and go back to the expansion of the galaxies, they’re moving away from each other at a certain rate, and you can measure the rate, but it turns out that the rate is not random. Again, like the percentage of oxygen, if the rate of expansion had been just slightly higher, then looking back over 15 billion years, we would have a situation where the universe would have expanded rapidly and never would have formed a structure. The formation of a structure is such a delicate event. So even a slight change in the expansion would have made the galaxies impossible. On the other hand, if you slow the expansion down just slightly, even a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent, the universe would have expanded out and then collapsed back into a massive black hole after maybe a million years.

So you can think about the expansion of the universe as a way in which the universe is proceeding so that life might come forth. Now, that statement I just gave you would be a cosmological assumption. And some people call it the strong Anthropic Principle. I’d just like to point out that in a certain sense, it’s a conception of the universe that’s new. The idea that the universe could be involved with its own unfolding simply wouldn’t be conceivable scientifically a hundred years ago. Now, in no way has it been advanced as a theory, it’s simply in the minds of some scientists as a new way of thinking about the universe as a whole.

JE: In your lecture series Canticle to the Cosmos, you say that the reason the universe created chlorophyll was to capture sunlight and that the reason the universe created human beings was to capture the depth of things. What did you mean by that?

BS: I meant that there seems to be the possibility of developing human sensibilities so that we can become deeply moved by the magnificence of existence. Now, it’s quite possible to avoid that kind of development and to throw yourself into a more simplistic pursuit of money or whatever else, and that too is a human life. But I just mean there is the possibility for evoking sensitivities and sensibilities that respond very deeply to the majesty of the universe. So it seems to me that the whole tradition of poetry and music and art and religious expression comes out of humans who have developed this capacity to be moved to awe. That really is what I was trying to get at.

But to give one example, a human can go outside and look up and see the Andromeda galaxy. You can see it with your naked eye, no telescope or anything, it’s just there. It’s slightly different than the other stars, and if you have really good eyesight or a set of binoculars you can actually see that it’s a galaxy. You can see the spiral structure. And it’s just so remarkable because as you’re looking at that, the light that’s entering your eyes took two and half million years to get here. It left Andromeda right when the first humans were discovering how to use stone tools. The eye that I’m using to see Andromeda has been shaped by two and a half million years of human development, starting with those first stone tools. You know, it involved mathematics and language and all this, and eventually we’ve arrived at a place where we can now see Andromeda and know what we’re seeing. And the light that we’re seeing has been traveling toward us all that time, for two and a half million years, so that to experience Andromeda is to experience not only the depth of the galaxies, it’s also to experience the depth of the human. And I just mean that that kind of experience is something like what a chlorophyll molecule does in capturing sunlight. We capture instead wonder or amazement that so easily could have been missed.

JE: In your book The Universe is a Green Dragon, you articulate a philosophy of “cosmic allurement”. Can you explain that?

BS: It’s just the idea that in physics we’re always looking for what causes things to happen, and we’ve arrived at four fundamental interactions: the gravitational, the electrical, and then the strong and weak nuclear forces. Basically everything we’ve looked at in the universe is a combination of these forces. I mean, there’s nothing we’ve found that doesn’t involve these. So I was reflecting on that and I realized that if you look at 15 billion years of cosmic evolution, it means that everything that’s happened is a weaving of these fundamental interactions. And it doesn’t matter what level you look at: asteroids, stars, galaxies, planets, the first cells, or multicellularity – at any level these four will be at work.

So then I thought, well, what if you looked at the human world from that perspective? If you look at the galaxy, the reason stars are moving about the center is this common gravitational attraction. And I realized when I thought about my own life that so much of what I do comes down to fundamental attractions of various sorts to things that I was interested in or drawn to. And we say, “Well, I’m interested in studying cosmology because I find it fascinating and whatnot”, but why do you find it fascinating? See, ultimately, it comes down to this power we call fascination, so it’s similar to trying to understand why a star goes around a galaxy. It’s attracted by gravity. Well, but why? What’s gravity? So it’s a way of simply pointing to the fact that things happen in the universe because of these fundamental powers and one of them is the power of attraction. On the plane of stars, we use the word “gravity” but we’re really using the word “gravity” to point to a fundamental power of attraction. And on the level of the human, we say “fascination” or “interest”. But once again, that’s pointing to the same power of attraction, just in a different form.

And so, much of my work is always an attempt to understand the human in terms of the cosmos, because during the last 300 years we’ve isolated the human from the cosmos. We think of ourselves as an appendage or an addendum, but it’s so wrong now that we understand it’s all one story. So I was trying to reflect on the ways in which our understanding could be deepened if we embedded it in the larger story of the galaxy or of the earth. And it’s simply a way of recognizing that what fascinates us, what draws us as individuals, is utterly mysterious. There’s no reason for it, it’s something we discover and experience that’s at the core of our lives. And it’s to be explored with a real sense of awe that it would have been captured that way.

JE: You co-authored with Thomas Berry a book called The Universe Story. In that book, both of you say that we are moving into an Ecozoic Era. Can you explain what that means?

BS: The Ecozoic Era would be a vision, and our hope is that the human species will move in this direction. It’s a fundamental shift. If we look at our situation today on the planet, there’s a great deal of destruction taking place. And in our own thinking, a lot of this comes from the gap between the human and the natural world. So if we’re talking about human rights, the natural world has no rights. Or if we talk about the GNP we’re talking about human economics. We’re not thinking about the economics of the birds. In terms of our religions, we’re talking about the relationships between the human and God and we don’t imagine that the natural world is the locus of God. So there’s a separation between the human and the natural world that permeates society and the Ecozoic Era would simply be an era when we would see ourselves as embedded within the earth community. We would begin with the fundamental respect for all of life, in fact, all of the components of the earth. That would be the basic orientation of the Ecozoic. And the one challenge of entering the Ecozoic would be to invent a way of human life that is mutually enhancing throughout the natural world. So rather than just focusing on human benefits, we would look for a way of increasing those benefits while at the same time increasing the benefits to the natural world.

Born to British parents in India in 1952, Andrew Harvey at nine was sent to England to begin his education. At twenty-one, he was elected the youngest Fellow in the history of All Soul’s College, Oxford. But academic life began to feel hollow to Harvey. Sick at heart, he abandoned what he had come to see as “the concentration camp of reason”, and returned to India to look for a spiritual path.

There, he studied Hindu mysticism at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo and with Tibetan Buddhist master Thuksey Rinpoche, drawing on the latter experience for his 1983 book A Journey in Ladakh. He returned briefly to Europe, but a lingering dissatisfaction haunted him.

Back in India again, Harvey formed a relationship with a seventeen-year-old Indian woman known as Mother Meera, whose followers still believe she is an avatar, a divine presence in human form. Harnessing his articulateness and devotion, Meera made him her spokesperson, and for nearly fifteen years he spoke and wrote eloquently on her behalf. As he became her most important evangelist, he developed an obsession with Meera which he would later characterize as a dangerous blend of misguided spirituality, eroticism, orientalism, and a “subtle sadomasochism”. Harvey is gay, and as Meera fought his efforts to come out with increasing fervor and bitterness, their estrangement grew.

In January 1994, he made a final break with Meera. A writer and radical mystic, Harvey now lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His new work, The Return of the Mother, critiques the role of the guru and eloquently develops his view of the sacred feminine and the Divine Mother.

LAPIS: I know you’ve remarked elsewhere that it’s a tragedy that so many people who are on a mystical and spiritual path tend to ignore the great social, political, and environmental issues of the age. Could you elaborate on this?

AH: Well, what I’ve been saying in my work recently is that many of the mystical traditions that come down to us were formed in the second stage of the development of humanity, which I call the patriarchal stage. And this stage is characterized by a dissociation from matter, from the body, from sexuality, and from nature. Essentially these traditions are about evading this world, escaping from it into another world-achieving release, nirvana, moksha. This whole emphasis on not being present in the body, not blessing sexuality, and not honoring nature has in fact aided and abetted a kind of ignorance and denigration of the world that is now destroying it. So it’s not that mystics have ignored the world-the training mystics have received has encouraged a vision of the world as illusion, as maya, as fallen, as rancid with original sin, which has meant that people haven’t been given the tools to enter the world with fully embodied love. And that’s why it’s so important now-not important-but crucial that we find again a vision of the sacred feminine, that we bring back into full frontal consciousness the powers and the gnosis of the divine mother. Because it’s only through understanding the motherhood of god, the mother-side of god, that we can understand how to re-enter our bodies, and time, and light, and nature, and discover what we really are, which is divine children given these bodies in this time. We’re not meant to escape from them, but to enter them completely; we’re not meant to get out of being here, but to arrive here. The soul hasn’t come here as a kind of punishment; the soul has come here to complete its understanding of the universe through embodiment. And it’s when this radical reinterpretation of the whole mystical enterprise gains currency that the true mystical force, which fuses understanding of the sacred laws of reality with a passionate commitment to compassion and the action of compassion in every arena of society — when this fusion takes place, then an entirely new force, which is the mother force — will enter the world. This is what I’m dedicated to trying to help.

LAPIS: In your latest book, The Return of the Mother, you describe a vision you had of flames and fire emerging from the divine mother’s heart and you saw five sacred passions. The fifth passion was for service, so perhaps you could elaborate on the role of service and action.

AH: I would like to begin with my sense that the mother herself is in perpetual service. She is serving with the utmost and most impassioned imaginable humanity and tenderness absolutely every being equally in the entire universe. So everything, from the ladybug to the whale to the fern to the dolphin, everything is cradled by her and in her and attended to by her. Coming into contact with the mother is coming into contact with the immense force of love that is dedicated to the happiness, serenity, strength, and the well-being of absolutely every being. The real lover of the mother is not a master but a child, in love with the mother and with all of the mother’s creation dedicated in selfless love to try and help everything achieve unity and peace. So that’s the first point: that the connection with the sacred feminine is not real unless it is connected with the mother’s own passion for each being and a passionate commitment is born in the heart to serve absolutely everyone and everything. Secondly, there is no such thing as real love unless it is put into action, unless it is made real through action. All the greatest messengers of liberation to humanity have made this clear. Krishna makes it clear in the Gita, Christ makes it clear again and again and again — especially in the Sermon on the Mount and in the great passage in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, when he makes charity and the real service of other human beings the insoluble guide to who is really in contact with God or not. And the great Mahayana mystics have stressed the necessity of enacting compassion in this world, in their great idea of the Bodhisattva. So I think it’s clear that all the noblest traditions, however marred by patriarchy they might be in other ways, have had at their core a vision of service as being the real sign of whether someone is on the true path to enlightened love.

In a time like this, when the world’s very existence is threatened and we may have only twenty years in which to solve or begin to solve the problems that otherwise will become insoluble, there is absolutely no excuse for anybody on a spiritual path not to take totally seriously the passion of the mother, the service of Christ, the service of the Bodhisattva. One should try to enact service not merely in terms of their own private life, toward their friends and their family, although that’s where it must begin, but make a commitment to understanding what is actually happening in the world, in the corporations, in pollution, in the population explosion, and to dedicate themselves to a series of political choices that could end these disasters. What’s really needed I think is political, mystical activism, and why it needs to be all of those things at once is this: A political activism without mystic depth will simply not be able to stand the wear and tear and burnout of trying to fight for truth in an arena as corrupt and polluted as the one we will confront. A purely mystical approach will run the dangers of narcissism and quietism at a time when the healing through action is desperately needed. And only a fusion between them and a hands-on political application of that vision can give us the power, the strength, the stamina, the tireless intensity that we’ll need to turn this situation around. Service is not an optional extra, service is the core, the end, the goal of the whole spiritual enterprise. And it has never been more clear than it is now that only through service in all of its forms, including the service of truth and justice in the political arena, most importantly justice to women, justice to homosexuals, justice to animals, justice to forests, justice to the whole natural world-only through the application of this can the world now be saved and preserved. What do you think?

LAPIS: I agree. I think that sounds certainly right.

AH: And I’m absolutely sick to death — I have to say this — I’m sick to death of those so-called new age gurus and masters and adepts who are going around saying nonsense. For example — I won’t name him — X says that anybody who thinks that nature is sick now is themselves brain sick. Or that the crisis that we’re living through is in some sense a part of the divine plan and all we have to do is sit on our futons and pray. That is absolute nonsense. And it’s dangerous and cruel and deeply destructive nonsense, because we are not passive participants with the divine in this experience. We are co-creators, co-participators with the divine, and to co-create with the divine means that we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions. To take responsibility for ourselves and our actions at this moment means looking at how we have brought ourselves to a point of suicidal frenzies, suicidal violence, suicidal self-destructiveness and how we are in process of absolutely annihilating nature. Anyone out there who is saying that this is in any sense an illusion, that this is in any sense part of the divine plan, that in any sense we’re going to be saved from ourselves by direct divine intervention or some avatar or some light from Mars or some star suddenly appearing in the constellation of Ceres is deeply crazy, I think, and very unhelpful. It’s time that their quietism and their vanity and their signing off is exposed for what it is: something as sick as the system that they are supposedly trying to help us get out of, but with which, in fact, they’re in secret cahoots with.

LAPIS: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I take as a very legitimate perspective that of the Worldwatch Institute which says that we have twenty or thirty years to change this thing around, otherwise, in ecological terms we’re going to be in an irreversible position of environmental degradation.

AH: If we don’t do it within the next twenty years, it’s not that the world is going to end immediately, it’s that we’re all going to wish that it would end because we’re all going to be living in a hospital so degraded and stinking that it will be uninhabitable.

LAPIS: Yes, it’s been a long-time source of frustration for me at the Open Center that it’s so difficult to get people to come down for social, political, and environmental programs. Most people remain largely focused upon the inner journey, the psychological and spiritual, which too often gives very little sense of connection to larger social and political issues.

AH: The idea that there is such a thing as an inner journey without an outer journey is so false. The inner journey is a journey to a place where you discover that inner and outer are one. And that love embraces all things, especially the service to other beings. I’m afraid that the spiritual journey that most people have been on has been a high form of narcissism.

LAPIS: Yes, the standard critique of the so-called New Age by the mainstream establishment is that it is narcissistic, and I think that we have to grant that there’s some element of truth to it.

AH: I’m not criticizing the New Age from the mainstream point of view, I’m criticizing it from what I hope is the appropriate mystical point of view, because I think that we see in the lives of Christ, Buddha, and Rama Krishna what a really achieved mystic is-not at all someone who just sits and contemplates the image of light, but someone who tirelessly devotes themselves to implementing the laws of love and justice in the world. This balance between sacred love and sacred action is actually the essential mystical life, and what the New Age is proposing as the essential mystical life isn’t that-it is actually upperclass escapism.

LAPIS: Yes. For me, a holistic view involves an equal concern with both the inner and the outer worlds, and in so many cases we only have half of that.

AH: When the sacred heart is open, the outer world is known as shining within the inner world, and the whole world and everybody’s suffering in it and every injustice is felt as being one’s own suffering and one’s own injustice. So it’s not that the real mystical journey doesn’t take you to a place where you are free from pain and the pain of others, it takes you to the place where you’re strong enough to be able to stand the pain of others and to really see it without consolation and then to devote yourself to really working to help it.

LAPIS: OK. I want to look for a moment at some of your ten sacred suggestions, also included in your latest book. The fifth suggestion is to dissolve forever all schisms and separations between sects and religions. In the light of that, do you think that it’s possible for holistically-oriented people to engage in a dialogue with the fundamentalist movement that is so politically powerful in the US and in so many countries now?

AH: Well, I think that the fundamentalism all over the world arises out of panic at the catastrophe that we’re facing and that people desperately want false certainties and it’s going to be extremely difficult to unhook people from them. I don’t know how you can have a serious dialogue with fundamentalists-they refuse to budge from their positions, they misread their own texts, they have been horribly brainwashed, and this applies not just to the religions but also, of course, to followers of most gurus. They are in a state of hypnosis, they want certainty, and they will cling to it often by violent and corrupt means. I do think it would be wonderful to start some kind of dialogue, but would they attend? Would they understand? The problem with fundamentalism is that it almost excludes by definition the mystical point of view, because as soon as the mystical understanding has awoken, it’s quite obvious that there’s only one light here, one energy, one love-it’s been given many different names, but it’s fundamentally nameless and formless and spaceless and timeless, and it’s all one. But unless somebody’s had that mystical perception, and really understood its implications, how can the dialogue begin?

LAPIS: Well, good question.

AH: We’ve had the example in Rama Krishna’s life of someone who went through all of the disciplines of all the religions and proved in the laboratory of his own being that there was no fundamental difference with the goal that they were all going towards. He said to imagine the mother cooking a white fish for six different children. Each of them wants the white fish cooked in different ways, they each have different palates, but the white fish is the same. This is the unalterable truth, this is the truth discovered by Rama Krishna, by Rumi, by Kabir, by Lao Tzu, by nearly all of the very greatest mystics. But it’s a truth that is still to penetrate the human mind and unless it does penetrate the human mind and heart in the next twenty years, we’re going to kill each other.

LAPIS: Following on from some of that, very close to the conclusion of The Return of the Mother you say that there are dark forces that want the human experiment to fail and the world to be destroyed and that these dark forces are “everywhere more and more powerful, subtle, deadly, and ingenious” — a perception I share. I’m wondering if you could speak more about what you’re referring to there and how we might respond to those elements.

H: I think the first thing we should do is to admit that they’re there. One of the most corrupt things about the New Age is its moral relativism. How on earth could we deny the existence of an evil force in the universe after a century which has included the creation of a neutron bomb, Hiroshima, Cambodia, the construction of cities that are mind-annihilating ghettos of destruction, and the creation through television of an all-powerful media that mostly sells trash? So on every side we see the work of very dark forces. Satan has been declared dead in a horrible irony at the very moment when the dark forces are at their most powerful. I think it’s also time to recognize — and this is very disturbing to many people — that a great many of those people who are pretending to be spiritual leaders and spiritual gurus and spiritual popes are in fact not on the side of the divine transformation at all. This is a very, very extreme form of evil, which hardly anybody is willing to understand and look at. The great mystical traditions, especially the Sufi, Hindu, and Christian, have always been very clear about that because we don’t see evil, we don’t recognize evil. We have been corrupted by moral relativism that refuses to admit that it’s there, and in the spiritual world we’re very, very ignorant about occult power, that’s given all these dark processes a fantastic opportunity to flourish all over the world and in every arena. The only way that I found that I can bear the pain of waking up to the extent of the corruption, the cruelty, and the danger, is by reaching myself deeper and deeper and deeper in the inner experience of the love of god, of the love of the mother. And that inner experience can only be had through a really profound and simple prayer and through the continual practice of adoration and meditation in service to other beings. So that as you wake up to the extent of the danger, to the extent that want you to jump out of the window to commit suicide in a desperate moment, the only solution is to root yourself more and more in the love of god and to see that the love of god is a force of all kinds of guidance and protection. One of the things that I’ve discovered in the last two years is the extent and the power of the protection that is offered to anyone who tends to the divine, especially the divine mother. So I urge absolutely everyone to tend to and turn to the divine mother, confident that she wishes the total dissolution of these evils and confident that she will protect and guide and embolden and encourage anyone who turns to her in love and in need. It’s been my very, very deep experience that this is so, and I’ve been amazed at the extent of the protection that each of us can have — and the guidance — if we are humble enough to ask. So the evil is immense, the danger is immense, but the protection is also immense. If we as a human race are humble enough now to turn to the divine for guidance and for protection, amazing things could yet happen. Amazing possibilities could yet be born, but this turning demands a very radical look at what is going on, at the darkness of it, and a very radical understanding of the nature of the sacred feminine. This is why I’ve written The Return of the Mother.

Gary Lachman is an American writer living in London. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Gnosis, The Quest, ReVision, Common Boundary, LA Weekly, Abraxas, Journal for Anthroposophy, San Francisco Chronicle, and Lapis. He is the author of two volumes in the Paupers’ Press Colin Wilson Studies series. He has also been a composer and performer with the rock groups Blondie, Iggy Pop, and The Know.

Readers interested in finding out more about the Temenos Academy can write to:
Temenos Academy, 14 Gloucester Gate, London NW1 4HG, England.

“The whole scientific materialist ideology, which permeates our culture and is spreading everywhere, totally precludes the dimensions of reality that are concerned with meaning and value. If you are only concerned with scientifically measurable and experimentally provable information about the external world, you cut off all access to those areas of consciousness that are concerned with values and meanings.” — Kathleen Raine

For more than 50 years the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine has been a passionate and articulate champion of the spiritual life in human beings. Her early studies at Cambridge were in science, but she soon discovered her path lay in another direction. In works like Defending Ancient Springs, The Inner Journey of the Poet, Blake and Tradition, The Human Face of God, Yeats the Initiate, and many others, she uncovered the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy on 19th and 20th century English poetry and argued for a reawakening of its truth in our lives today. Her own poetry, collected in Stone and Flower; The Lost Country; The Oval Portrait and Other Poems; The Presence; Poems 1984-1989 and other volumes is characterized by a clarity and precision of language and a mystical love of nature. Her Autobiographies show her as a creative and sensitive mind in the midst of the intellectual and artistic revolutions of the 20th century, and a friend of some of its celebrated figures: Herbert Read, Edwin Muir, Elias Canetti, and Jacob Bronowski, to name a few. For many years now she has been dedicated to communicating the wisdom of our forgotten tradition through the work of the Temenos Academy, a modern-day “school of wisdom” teaching the “learning of the imagination” and the perennial philosophy, set in the midst of urban London. The list of names associated with Temenos reads like a who’s-who of alternative thought: Henry Corbin, Robert Bly, William Irwin Thompson, Joscelyn Godwin-again, to name a few. Sitting down to tea with her is like spending an afternoon with the history of ideas.

On a pleasant June afternoon this past summer I had an opportunity to meet and speak with Kathleen Raine at her home in Chelsea. We talked of her life, poetry, her work, India, feminism, the family, and the general state of things. At eighty-nine, Kathleen Raine has seen and done quite a bit. Lively, provocative, and challenging, she has no qualms about telling us what she thinks.

GL: In Defending Ancient Springs you write: “Like an underground river that from time to time sends up springs and fountains, Platonism emerges in different centuries in different countries, and wherever its fertilizing waters flow, then the arts are reborn and flourish.” How did you discover the Neo- platonic tradition in Romantic poetry?

KR: I read the books that Blake was known to have read, and one thing lead to another. I had to revise my entire view of Blake as a man who didn’t know very much and had gotten his ideas all out of his unconscious. He had contact, as I discovered, with Thomas Taylor, the Platonist. He read an enormous amount of “excluded knowledge” that modernism has for the most part eliminated for us. A whole context of esoteric studies. The Rosicrucian tradition for one thing and this enormously rich fund of Neoplatonic writings being translated into English at that time by Thomas Taylor. As I said, here I found an absolute gold mine of Blake’s sources.

Blake was in the context of the perennial wisdom at the time when the modern West was turning away from these things. And he actually knew Thomas Taylor. I found in my work that it was virtually certain that he would have known him, and sure enough some years later evidence was found in Canada that he had known Taylor.

Blake probably would have gone to Taylor’s lectures on Platonic theology at Flaxman’s, Blake’s friend’s house. He read virtually all Taylor’s works and clearly got a great deal from them. That was the basis of my original work on Blake. I had to give up the idea that it all came up from the unconscious. He read Plato, the Hermetica. He was in a different tradition from his time, and this tradition was the mainstream. And from time to time this mainstream surfaces and then goes underground again. Shelley also had this contact. He read the Greeks in the original. Coleridge as a boy read Thomas Taylor. So the Romantic movement was really a Neoplatonic revival. And then of course it went underground again and came up as American Transcendentalism. All Taylor’s works were taken to America by Emerson. It was a very powerful thing in America. The new situation, which isn’t an exclusively Christian tradition but a universal tradition, uniting all spiritual currents, really came first in America. Emerson was tremendously widely read in Persian and Sanskrit literature.

GL: It was the New World.

KR: The New World. I think it’s still true. There are some very good people in the States. I’ve done what I can in this godforsaken country. It’s hard work.

GL: It’s difficult here? Why?

KR: England is impervious to ideas. It always has been. Yeats said England had the poorest philosophical literature in the world.

GL: Why do you think that is?

KR: What shall I say? England has produced some amazingly good poets. Even in my lifetime it has produced good poets, although Eliot was an American and Yeats an Irishman, and Edwin Muir was a Scot if you like… But nevertheless the poetic tradition in this country has been much more influenced by Platonism… I suppose the religion of the English poets is basically Platonic. Whereas philosophy has been very much linked to materialist science. Locke and Hume and later Russell and all that. Wittgenstein I think is rather different, not so impervious as the others. He was Rilke’s patron you know.

GL: You might call yourself a defender of tradition-”ancient springs”. But you’ve had some critical words about other traditionalists, like René Guenon.

KR: I think Guenon had no imagination whatsoever, as far as I can see. He seemed to think that there was a Golden Age when everything was right, and then, somewhere around the time of the Renaissance man, took a wrong step, and God has withdrawn from the world ever since. I don’t think that’s true at all. He was against Renaissance Platonism, which is a very wonderful and powerful thing. It produced Shakespeare, after all. His followers also say that you must choose your tradition and stick to it. Either be a Muslim or a Christian or something else, but don’t mix one with the other. I don’t think that’s true. In the present state of the world, whatever you are, you’re aware of the other traditions. Unless you’re a fundamentalist you can’t avoid eclecticism. We’re all open to all the currents. We can’t pretend we’re not. And so I don’t think a withdrawal into fundamentalism of any kind is realistic.

Guenon was very timely, you see. I think at the time he was saying things nobody else would say. Everyone believed we were going onward and upward with evolution, and everything was getting better. Nobody believes that now. Guenon said that on the contrary things are going from bad to worse. That needed to be said then. But not now. He’s also extremely contemptuous of his readers, adopting an attitude of intellectual superiority. That’s not what true sages are like. That’s not what Ramakrishna was like. Or Ramana Marharshi or Vivekananda. That’s not what holy men are like. They’re open and full of love.

Part of my criticism of the “traditionalist school” is their devaluing of the imagination. You can’t write poetry from that position. Poetry is an upwelling from within. If it weren’t for the presence of the universal teacher within each human being it wouldn’t be any use having a tradition. Tradition is the history and the record of the human experience of the sacred. Without that experience you’d have no tradition, it would have no validity. But it can serve to awaken the awareness of these truths. If you read Plotinus, Rumi, Plato, the Gita, something responds to it.

Yeats was very learned in the perennial philosophy. Extremely learned. Much more so than Eliot. He read everything, Arabic, Hindu, and finally committed to Vedanta. His last work was translating the Upanishads. Eliot had certain contact although not so much.

GL: He seemed to have withdrawn.

KR: He did, deliberately. He thought he’d be best understood within the English language and the Christian tradition. There are some references to the Gita in The Waste Land and in The Quartets, but it doesn’t go very deep. I see a watershed between Eliot and Yeats. Eliot stayed with the past and committed himself to western Christendom. Yeats foresaw that in the future Eliot would be less well understood (because he committed himself to Christianity) than Yeats himself would be by having opened himself to all sacred traditions. I think that’s true.

GL: In your book on India, India Seen Afar, you talk about the “India of the imagination”. Why India?

KR: When I reached India I felt home at last. No question. It’s still alive in India, although westernization goes on apace, and there are yuppies, and every village in Rajastan has television sets. India has become totally permeable to Western ways. Technology has made every primitive civilization, every civilization, totally permeable to this propaganda, which comes basically, I’m sorry to say, from America. I feel that the gods of Disneyland are very, very evil.

GL: It seems technology can promote the values of Disneyland but not sacred values.

KR: It can’t promote any values. It can give information.

GL: What do you think about the information age?

KR: Maybe the unification of the whole world, to which information technology has certainly contributed, could produce what Teilhard de Chardin called the Nöosphere, the whole world thinking as one. But unfortunately it seems to be on the lowest level. And yet, I don’t despair. The truth is that we are not trousered apes. We are part of the divine. And the god within recognizes meanings and values that occupied the human race long before this materialist civilization.

GL: Which is fairly recent, only the last 300 or so years.

KR: Indeed, that’s what Yeats says. He also said that “three provincial centuries over, wisdom and poetry return.” Well, perhaps they will. Tides do turn. I think a great many people aren’t satisfied with the information age, the age where money is the only value. And what can you buy with money? Platinum-plated motorcars? What do you do with it once you’ve got it?

GL: Do you think people want something else?

KR: Yes. But they don’t know where to get it. In this country I must say the one level on which you can appeal to many young people is the “green” way of life. My granddaughter and her husband and two children have gone off to Ireland and gotten a derelict farm. They’re doing all the things the Irish people themselves are just discarding, like cutting their own turf. They have chickens and goats and vegetables, and they’re getting a beehive. They’re doing a roaring business in barter and exchange of mushrooms and eggs and beans and cabbages for coffee and tea and such things. A lot of young people are going into that. They won’t think, but they’ll live the green life. I imagine that’s so in the States. But I think in America you are more prepared to use your minds.

GL: You think?

KR: I think in America you’re prepared to take up any crazy ideas.

GL: But there’s a shadow side to that, a faddish eclecticism about religion- how you can be Buddhist this week and a Hindu the next.

KR: Yes, and you’re prepared to do anything for six months, except of course any check on your sex life. Yes, it’s all very crazy and mixed up, and I’ve seen some of that. Nevertheless, I do believe that the seeds of the ancient civilizations fall to some extent on virgin soil in America. When I think of my next life-provided of course one does have a next life-my first thought is, “Of course I’ll get back to India.” But then I think “I wonder what it would be like in America?”

GL: You’d like to be reincarnated in America?

KR: Well, I’ve been very happy there.

GL: Would you be a poet again in your next life?

KR: Oh no! No.

GL: Why? Because you’ve done it already?

KR: I’ve done it already. I don’t have much faith in poetry.

GL: You don’t have much faith in poetry?

KR: At one time poetry implied that the poet was contributing a special kind of wisdom, passing a judgment of the values of eternity on the values of time. But now poetry seems to be just writing down whatever comes into your head. Any idea of poetic tradition and poetic technique has totally been thrown out.

GL: When do you think the change happened?

KR: With the modern movement, which is basically a materialist movement. The idea that there is a spiritual order on which poetry is supposed to draw is completely gone from our civilization. It’s just not there anymore.

GL: People like Ezra Pound?

KR: No, Pound wasn’t totally without these things. After all, he was a friend of Yeats. People talk about the influence of Pound on Yeats; I think Yeats also had a considerable influence on Pound. He dedicated A Vision to him. So he must have thought he’d understand. Pound brought the Noh theater of Japan to Yeats. I met him once. He was a most generous man, a really wonderful man. Not as good a poet as either Eliot or Yeats I think, but a great, great contribution to poetry. He really knew a great deal about world poetry, and his translations of Persian and Chinese are wonderful. No, I’m not anti-Pound.

GL: No. But you say the modern movement, and I’m trying to place that. Do you mean the poets of the thirties, the socially conscious poets, Auden…?

KR: Well, it’s the gradual loss you see. Eliot’s poetry is a lament for the loss of tradition. But people went on cheerfully after that and said “Oh well, we don’t need tradition. We reject the follies of our parents. We’ll write free verse and don’t need to know anything.” So we get poetry as self-expression, as therapy, social or political poetry. Or moaning about the universe. I don’t know why we should moan about the universe. I think it’s wonderful.

GL: What advice would you give a poet today?

KR: I’d say forget it, and do philosophy instead. Or learn history. Start to learn things. Temenos, after all, is trying to reestablish true knowledge. You see, you can’t write poetry when there’s no one who’ll read it intelligently. There has to be an ambiance in which you can communicate. Otherwise you’re talking to yourself.

GL: Do you see Temenos as a university of some sort?

KR: I’d like to think that might be so in the future. But it’s been hard work. Inch by inch we’ve managed to raise it from the ground. Right now we’re seeking accreditation for an MA course for our students, which I dare say we’ll get. We have a few students going out into the world. After all, Christianity began with half a dozen people. There weren’t awfully many people listening to Socrates. Things have to start in a small way. We’re doing it slowly and gradually. We have one really warm and enthusiastic supporter, the Prince of Wales, who is really a philosopher-prince. All this rubbish about his marriage that preoccupies the press continuously and this silly woman he married! God she’s such a bore! He never gets a word of thanks for what he’s doing, but he’s tremendously behind Temenos. We hold our meetings in his Institute of Architecture.

GL: You say you think our civilization is in its last stages. Is it a cycle? Where will the next flowering be?

KR: There may not be a next flowering. We’ve done enough damage to the planet to bring about our destruction. Look, if you have a civilization whose most powerful and advanced countries make the most profit by exporting weapons, what can you expect? What is the most profitable export of England, France, the United States? Arms. Weapons of destruction. Selling land mines to mutilate children in Afghanistan and other countries. We’ll send arms to anyone who’ll buy them, and then we say these dreadful Yugoslavs or these awful Iraqis-and sell them more arms. No civilization can survive whose principles are as low as that. The only thing we care about is money and markets.

Media people know where the money lies, and put in their papers and their broadcasts what they think will bring in the most money. How much lower can you go? They greatly underestimate the common man. The bottom line isn’t as low as the press makes it. But you can always lower it, and what they’re appealing to is the lowest and worst in human nature. And the only way it can be changed is by changing the climate of the world.

GL: Since the 1960s, and even earlier than that, there’s been a lot said about the Age of Aquarius, which, of course, goes back to Plato’s idea of the Great Year and the precession of the equinoxes. With the millennium closing in, there’s a great deal of talk about a spiritual resurgence. Do you see any signs of this?

KR: Well, there’s got to be one. I spent some time with the Hopi people. It was only a short time but it was unforgettable. Absolutely wonderful people. We were entertained by a village chieftain named Henry. He told us a lot about the Hopi prophecies. He said there are seven ages of the world. This is the fourth, the lowest. You see it comes down in the cycles. After that things get a little bit better. The fifth age will be a little better than the 4th. He said that here and there all over the world there are little shoots of the fifth age springing up, which I think is what we’re talking about. He couldn’t know about the Theosophical view of the evolution of the world through seven ages. It’s a universal view. One can only say that perhaps it corresponds to reality.

GL: I know this is off the subject but I have to say I’m very impressed that you’ve never tasted Coca-Cola.

KR: I never touch the stuff.

GL: That’s a distinction few people can claim.

KR: I don’t have a television set either. Why should I let people into my living room that I wouldn’t let through my front door?

GL: What would you say your life has been about?

KR: What’s my life been about? I suppose I’ve been on the human pilgrimage to discover what we’re here for and what we should do. I’ve made many mistakes, but I have at least learned by them. What’s the use of making mistakes if you don’t learn by them? They’re extremely useful from that point of view. I’ve made all of them, that’s how I know. And now I’m trying to teach the things I’ve found to be good and true, within my capacity. I think Temenos is going to go down in history, even it doesn’t blow up quickly into a university. That is what I would like. I’d like to see a university of wisdom in which truth was taught instead of all these isms and ologies. I think the universities have betrayed their task. They’ve betrayed their true task which is to teach human beings the good things by which we need to live. These don’t alter very much over the centuries or between the different religious traditions. They remain fairly constant, because things are as they are and we are as we are. You can only deviate so much from those truths without destruction. We have to get back to them. Or rediscover them. Discover who we are. The materialist definition of man is totally inadequate.

We have a lot to learn from the east. In the west, we study the external world, and get more information. In the east you change your self. You change your consciousness and then you see the world differently. If you realize that mind is the root of knowledge, then you work on consciousness. You work on mind. You work on yourself. Change yourself and then the world changes. With scientific materialist knowledge you can take a rocket to the moon and explore outer space, but wherever you go you bring your poor little self.

GL: Any advice for young people today?

KR: I think its very painful to be young. It’s terrible. I wouldn’t be young again for anything. I think it’s much easier now. Each decade I’ve found is less difficult then the one before. I’m in my ninth now and I can tell you it gets easier. Advice? Grow up.

This interview by Daniel Trujillo Rivas was first published in Chile and Argentina in the magazine Uno Mismo, February 1997.

In the early 1960s, Carlos Castaneda made an impact on the world when he published his first of nine books, The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. In this work he related his experiences as a sorcerer’s apprentice under the guidance of a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico. As a doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA, he encountered don Juan Matus while collecting information about medicinal plants.

From the moment of the book’s publication, the world of don Juan Matus became a subject of worldwide fascination. His works presented a vision of “the warrior’s way”: living impeccably, erasing personal history, using death as one’s advisor, and losing self-importance. Castaneda’s interactions with don Juan and his fellow teachers and apprentices depict a serious Western scholar who becomes the target of jeers and criticisms, who then puts aside his social paradigm, and awakens to the mysteries of the unknown.

Q: Mr Castaneda, for years you’ve remained in absolute anonymity. What drove you to change this condition and talk publicly about the teachings that you and your three companions received from the nagual Juan Matus?

CC: What compels us to disseminate don Juan Matus’ ideas is a need to clarify what he taught us. For us, this is a task that can no longer be postponed. I and his other three students have reached the unanimous conclusion that the world to which don Juan Matus introduced us is within the perceptual possibilities of all human beings. We’ve discussed among us what would be the appropriate road to take. To remain anonymous the way don Juan proposed to us? This option was not acceptable. The other available road was to disseminate don Juan’s ideas: an infinitely more dangerous and exhausting choice, but the only one that, we believe, has the dignity don Juan imbued in all his teachings.

Q: As far as I’ve been able to corroborate, orthodox anthropology, as well as the alleged defenders of the cultural pre-Colombian cultural heritage of America, undermine the credibility of your work. The belief that your work is merely the product of your literary talent, which, by the way, is exceptional, continues to exist today. There are also other sectors that accuse you of having a double standard because, supposedly, your lifestyle and your activities contradict what the majority expect from a shaman. How can you clear up these suspicions?

CC: The cognitive system of the Western man forces us to rely on preconceived ideas. We base our judgments on something that is always “a priori”, for example the idea of what is “orthodox”. What is orthodox anthropology? The one taught at university lecture halls? What is a shaman’s behavior? To wear feathers on one’s head and dance to the spirits?

For 30 years, people have accused Carlos Castaneda of creating a literary character simply because what I report to them does not concur with the anthropological “a priori”, the ideas established in the lecture halls or in anthropological field work. However, what don Juan presented to me can only apply to a situation that calls for total action and, under such circumstances, very little or almost nothing of the preconceived occurs.

I have never been able to draw conclusions about shamanism because in order to do this one needs to be an active member in the shamans’ world. For a social scientist, let’s say for example a sociologist, it is very easy to arrive at sociological conclusions over any subject related to the Occidental world, because the sociologist is an active member of the Occidental world. But how can an anthropologist, who spends at the most two years studying other cultures, arrive at reliable conclusions about them? One needs a lifetime to be able to acquire membership in a cultural world. I’ve been working for more than 30 years in the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico and, sincerely, I don’t believe I have acquired the membership that would allow me to draw conclusions or to even propose them.

I have discussed this with people from different disciplines and they always seem to understand and agree with the premises I’m presenting. But then they turn around and they forget everything they agreed upon and continue to sustain “orthodox” academic principles, without caring about the possibility of an absurd error in their conclusions. Our cognitive system seems to be impenetrable.

Q: What’s the aim of not allowing yourself to be photographed, having your voice recorded or making biographical data known? Could this effect, and if so how, what you’ve achieved in your spiritual work? Don’t you think it would be useful for some sincere seekers of truth to know who you really are, as a way of corroborating that it is really possible to follow the path you proclaim?

CC: With reference to photographs and personal data, I and the other three disciples of don Juan follow his instructions. For a shaman like don Juan, the main idea behind refraining from giving personal data is very simple. It is imperative to leave aside what is called “personal history”. To get away from the “me” is something extremely annoying and difficult. What the shamans like don Juan seek is a state of fluidity where the personal “me” does not count. He believed that an absence of photography and biographical data effects whomever enters into this field of action in a positive, though subliminal way. We are endlessly accustomed to using photographs, recordings, and biographical data, all of which spring from the idea of personal importance. Don Juan said it was better not to know anything about a shaman. In this way, instead of encountering a person, one encounters an idea that can be sustained — the opposite of what happens in the everyday world where we are only faced with people with psychological problems and without ideas, all of these people filled to the brim with “me, me, me”.

Q: Let’s consider the meaning of the word “spirituality” to be a state of consciousness in which human beings are fully capable of controlling the potentials of the species, something achieved by transforming the simple animal condition through hard psychic, moral, and intellectual training. Do you agree with this assertion? How is don Juan’s world integrated into this context?

CC: For don Juan Matus, a pragmatic and extremely sober shaman, “spirituality” was an empty ideality, an assertion without basis that we believe to be very beautiful because it is encrusted with literary concepts and poetic expressions, but which never goes beyond that.

Shamans like don Juan are essentially practical. For them there only exists a predatory universe where intelligence or awareness is the product of life and death challenges. He considered himself a navigator of infinity and said that in order to navigate into the unknown like a shaman does, one needs unlimited pragmatism, boundless sobriety, and “guts of steel”.

In view of all this, don Juan believed that “spirituality” is simply a description of something impossible to achieve within the patterns of the world of everyday life, and it is not a real way of acting.

Q: If you allow me to assert the following, your literary work presents concepts that are closely related to Oriental philosophical teachings, but it contradicts what is commonly known about the Mexican indigenous culture. What are the similarities and the differences between the one and the other?

CC: I don’t have the slightest idea. I’m not learned in either one of them. My work is a phenomenological report of the cognitive world to which don Juan Matus introduced me. From the point of view of phenomenology as a philosophical method, it is impossible to make assertions that are related to the phenomenon under scrutiny. Don Juan Matus’s world is so vast, so mysterious and contradictory, that it isn’t suitable for an exercise in linear exposition; the most one can do is describe it, and that alone is a supreme effort.

Q: Concentrating specifically on your literary work, your readers find different Carlos Castanedas. We first find a somewhat incompetent Western scholar, permanently baffled at the power of old Indians like don Juan and don Genaro (mainly in The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, A Journey to Ixtlan, Tales of Power, and The Second Ring of Power). Later we find an apprentice versed in shamanism (in The Eagle’s Gift, The Fire Within, Silent Knowledge, and, particularly, The Art of Dreaming). If you agree with this assessment, when and how did you cease to be one to become the other?

CC: I don’t consider myself a shaman, or a teacher, or an advanced student of shamanism; neither do I consider myself an anthropologist or a social scientist of the Western world. My presentations have all been depictions of a phenomenon which is impossible to discern under the conditions of the linear knowledge of the Western world. I could never explain what don Juan was teaching me in terms of cause and effect. There was no way to foretell what he was going to say or what was going to happen. Under such circumstances, the passage from one state to another is subjective and not something elaborated, or premeditated, or a product of wisdom.

Q: One can find incredible episodes for the Western mind in your literary work. How could someone who’s not an initiate verify that all those “separate realities” are real, as you claim?

CC: It can be verified very easily by lending one’s whole body instead of only one’s intellect. One cannot enter don Juan’s world intellectually, like a dilettante seeking fast and fleeting knowledge. Nor, in don Juan’s world, can anything be verified absolutely. The only thing we can do is arrive at a state of increased awareness that allows us to perceive the world surrounding us in a more inclusive manner. In other words, the goal of don Juan’s shamanism is to break the parameters of historical and daily perception and to perceive the unknown. That’s why he called himself a navigator of infinity. He asserted that infinity lies beyond the parameters of daily perception. To break these parameters was the aim of his life. Because he was an extraordinary shaman, he instilled that same desire in all four of us. He forced us to transcend the intellect and to embody the concept of breaking the boundaries of historical perception.

Q: You assert that the basic characteristic of human beings is to be “perceivers of energy”. You refer to the movement of the assemblage point as something imperative to perceiving energy directly. How can this be useful to a man of the 21st century? According to the concept previously defined, how can the attainment of this goal help one’s spiritual improvement?

CC: Shamans like don Juan assert that all human beings have the capacity to see energy directly as it flows in the universe. They believe that the assemblage point, as they call it, is a point that exists in man’s total sphere of energy. In other words, when a shaman perceives a man as energy that flows in the universe, he sees a luminous ball. In that luminous ball, the shaman can see a point of greater brilliance located at the height of the shoulder blades, approximately an arm’s length behind them. Shamans maintain that perception is assembled at this point; that the energy that flows in the universe is transformed here into sensory data, and that the sensory data is later interpreted, giving as a result the world of everyday life. Shamans assert that we are taught to interpret, and therefore we are taught to perceive.

The pragmatic value of perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe for a man of the 21st century or a man of the 1st century is the same. It allows him to enlarge the limits of his perception and to use this enhancement within his realm. Don Juan said that to see directly the wonder of the order and the chaos of the universe would be extraordinary.

Q: In The Readers of Infinity, you’ve utilized the term “navigating” to define what sorcerers do. Are you going to hoist the sail to begin the definitive journey soon? Will the lineage of Toltec warriors, the keepers of this knowledge, end with you?

CC: Yes, that is correct, don Juan’s lineage ends with us.

Q: Here’s a question that I’ve often asked myself: Does the warrior’s path include, like other disciplines do, spiritual work for couples?

CC: The warrior’s path includes everything and everyone. There can be a whole family of impeccable warriors. The difficulty lies in the terrible fact that individual relationships are based in emotional investments, and the moment the practitioner really practices what she/he learns the relationship crumbles. In the everyday world, emotional investments are not normally examined, and we live an entire lifetime waiting to be reciprocated. Don Juan said I was a diehard investor and that my way of living and feeling could be described simply: “I only give what others give me.”

Q: What aspirations of possible advancement should someone have who wishes to work spiritually according to the knowledge disseminated in your books? What would you recommend for those who wish to practice don Juan’s teachings by themselves?

CC: There’s no way to put a limit on what one may accomplish individually if the intent is an impeccable intent. Don Juan’s teachings are not spiritual. I repeat this because the question has to come to the surface over and over. The idea of spirituality doesn’t fit with the iron discipline of a warrior. The most important thing for a shaman like don Juan is the idea of pragmatism. When I met him, I believed I was a practical man, a social scientist filled with objectivity and pragmatism. He destroyed my pretensions and made me see that, as a true Western man, I was neither pragmatic nor spiritual. I came to understand that I only repeated the word “spirituality” to contrast it with the mercenary aspect of the world of everyday life. I wanted to get away from the mercantilism of everyday life and the eagerness to do this is what I called spirituality. I realized don Juan was right when he demanded that I come to a conclusion; to define what I considered spirituality. I didn’t know what I was talking about.

What I’m saying might sound presumptuous, but there’s no other way to say it. What a shaman like don Juan wants is to increase awareness, that is, to be able to perceive with all the human possibilities of perception; this implies a colossal task and an unbending purpose, which cannot be replaced by the spirituality of the Western world.

William Greider is the author most recently of One World Ready Or Not, The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism and Secrets of the Temple. National Affairs Correspondent for Rolling Stone, his latest book has been described by Robert Heilbronner as “essential reading”.

Lapis: You give your book One World Ready or Not the subtitle The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. Why manic logic?

WG: Well, this is not new in history. In the later stages of a boom cycle, the market always goes through extravagant enthusiasms, which turn literally manic, as everybody rushes to participate and then discovers that it’s all based on illusion, and then it crashes, or they panic and then it crashes. The authorities have of course tried to maintain order, bailing out losers during crashes and panics, but the historical odds are against them succeeding forever.

Lapis: What, in a nutshell, is the basic argument of the book?

WG: I’m suggesting that we are in the midst of an industrial revolution, very much like the industrial revolution of the late 19th century. Some of the same dangerous symptoms of pathology and recklessness are present again, and if we are sensitive beings and sensible societies we will attend to those problems before it’s too late, rather than let them play out historically into some sort of catastrophe. Of these symptoms, the manic behavior of global capital is in some ways the most dangerous. But fundamentally, the globalization of industry, with its new technologies and ability to disperse production across a broad front, has led to a growing gap between supply and demand. The multinationals create productive capacity faster than the world’s market of consumers can buy all the stuff they produce. This situation is similar to the disorder that built up in the 1920s, and I find it ominous.

Lapis: It’s become the prevailing orthodoxy in many political circles that economic globalization represents the future of the planet and that countries need to prepare in every way to compete in the global economy of the 21st century. What are the areas you think we are being most naïve about?

WG: I think naïve is a good word, because on the basis of my reading of history, naïveté has been our consistent shortcoming in dealing with economic crisis, whereas, in fact, the opportunity for firm self-knowledge does really exist. We went over the cliff twice in the 20th century because we were naïve. Let’s not do it again. The belief by governing elites, particularly in the United States, in self-regulating markets is little different from that held with a sense of triumph 80 or 100 years ago, but which then led to catastrophe. Today, in fact, plenty of ordinary citizens, workers or consumers or whatever, don’t have much faith in free markets, but then they don’t have much influence either. Anyone familiar with early 20th century history can see the links between the processes that led to global depression and the rise of fascism. It’s not a bad starting point for understanding where we are now. I’m not predicting the same set of events. I’m just suggesting we’re flirting with some of the same.

Lapis: How is it that the global financial markets are so fundamentally influential?

WG: First and foremost, the financial markets have the particular ability to move huge amounts of capital quickly around the world, thereby exercising an inordinate amount of discipline on corporations. True, the multinational corporations are powerful, but they are also insecure. When investors turn on them, the CEO is immediately fired. On a broader level, the movement of capital around the world also disciplines governments and even whole regions. If we don’t like your economic policies, say the big financial players, we’ll dump your bonds and you’ll suffer all kinds of collateral consequences. So, depending on how resilient and tough-minded a government is, it can either meekly follow the dictates of the financial markets or basically say, bug off — we’re going to run our economy the way we want — and subject foreign capital to local controls.

In fact, the dogma of free markets and deregulation is by no means a universal creed. Look at the successful Asian economies, virtually all of which manage to control commerce and finance in pursuit of national objectives.

Lapis: In your book you point out that China’s ability to both organize huge pools of cheap labor and provide a massive a consumer market gives it enormous influence in the global market. Do you think the reacquisition of Hong Kong will affect China’s strategy?

WG: Fundamentally, China, for all of its particularities, is following the same development strategy that Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and others have pursued — that is, to use the wage advantage to build an industrial base and sell industrial exports back to the rich markets of the West. They’re doing so in a perfectly straightforward and unsubtle manner, and you don’t have to complicate the issue with human rights proclamations to understand that this situation could, just by itself, push the contradictions within the global economic system to breaking point. It’s one thing to say, well, Japan developed an auto industry, then Korea did, and Taiwan did, and others are trying to move up the ladder. But when you consider that China’s 1.2 billion workforce, with wages averaging $50 a month, is quite capable now of producing aerospace components and so on, that’s when the wage differential kicks in with a vengeance. When the Chinese say they’re going to build an auto industry to rival North America’s within ten years — and the Western multinationals are all cooperating — they’re following the same logic, with even less subtlety, as those who preceded them. I think we’re headed for a long and nasty struggle over China.

Hong Kong is serving as a kind of beacon of what’s in store. As long as the British ruled Hong Kong, until the last eight or ten years, it was utterly undemocratic. It was only when their treaty rights were about to expire that they introduced elected government and some other niceties. So I don’t think we should become overly emotional about the plight of Hong Kong. And, in fact, China has been pretty candid about it. They intend to change Hong Kong into a regime probably very much like Singapore’s. Singapore is an authoritarian state, not a free society, and not a free market. It has a one-party government which happens to spread welfare rather generally through the population. Since we celebrate Singapore, how can we criticize the Chinese for what they intend to do with Hong Kong?

The advanced economies, and the US in particular, cling to a lot of hypocritical assumptions that need to be sorted out as we come to terms with the global system. I’m trying to persuade people to step back from their arrogance and look at the other end of the global system in a more objective way. For a lot of countries, colonialism is no distant memory. Remember how brutal the Dutch were in Indonesia, the British in Malaysia, and so on, and not so long ago. It’s a little late in the day for us to be self-righteous. We have to go beyond that.

Lapis: Do you think the advanced economies are going to be able to maintain their position through high technology, educational levels, and so on, or will educational levels in the developing economies eventually catch up?

WG: I’d be the last to argue against improving educational standards anywhere, but the problem is not education. It’s still wage competitiveness. Nonetheless, there’s a whiff of arrogance in the West about education. When other countries start approaching our levels of education, we just say we’ll study harder, we’ll do a couple more years of graduate school, and we’ll still be higher on the educational ladder. But there’s no way to stop other countries following the Western pattern, and they will — out of self-interest.

Lapis: Aren’t the hands of politicians tied these days by the dictates of the global markets?

WG: While I think one could argue that the Republicans in the US, or the Tories in Britain, are actually quite comfortable with a sort of business strategy for economic and foreign policy, it’s quite at odds with the principles of the Democrats or the Labor Party. Both Clinton and Blair have moved their parties away from their traditional working-class base to make what is essentially common cause with the multinational corporations. I don’t think there’s a single important matter in which Clinton has confronted the multinationals and gone against them. He’s made a lot of gestures, but when the fight was joined he’s always wound up on their side, frequently in direct opposition to the interests of organized labor and large chunks of his own party.

Here’s the gut of the matter: globalization produces winners, and it produces losers. The question for rich societies is, who does the process of globalization benefit: a majority, or a minority? That’s the question politicians of all stripes don’t want to face, because it raises not only economic issues but class issues. These are the issues that are surfacing. They’re inherent in the globalization process.

Lapis: Meanwhile, we see the weirdest mix of politicians opposing globalization, liberals on the left, Buchanan on the right, and Perot somewhere else…

WG: Well, one of the messages in my book, which upset some people who would otherwise agree with a lot of what I had to say, is that I detect a looming bifurcation of political consciousness into just two factions, one reactionary, the other internationalist. The reactionary side, which may or may not be qualified as fascist in nature, will certainly be highly nationalistic. Its creed will be: defend the homeland, defend domestic jobs, defend the people against foreign competition. People of conscience or progressive values, sooner or later, are going to have to choose, and they aren’t going to choose the reactionary route. So they’ll find themselves siding with the international perspective, but with no ground to stand on morally, or politically. That’s why I think it’s critically important for people who don’t want to wind up as reactionary protectionists to engage this new world, accept its reality, and start dealing with it in a proactive, informed manner, rather than letting it drift.

Lapis: How do you suggest we do this?

WG: First, we need to moderate the flight of capital and its daily movements. This can be done with certain taxes and controls that have been used before. But then we need to shift the focus of economic thinking away from the supply side and towards the demand side. We need to create greater wage equity internationally; we need to boost consumer demand internationally. Americans are not going to find a way out of the problems posed by globalization until they’re willing to make common cause with people at the other end, and that means supporting human rights, labor rights, free speech, freedom of assembly, and so on, so that people in poorer countries can develop the political means to control their own destiny. At the moment, we’re not doing that, not in China, not in Indonesia, not in lots of countries where multinational companies are content with the status quo. There are many other measures we can take without throwing poor people over the side. We need to turn the global system in a positive, equitable direction where everybody will benefit, including the owners of capital.

Lapis: At the end of your book, you say that many otherwise intelligent people have embraced the market with the kind of fervor they would bring to a spiritual code. Would you go so far as to say that the decline of religious belief in the West has been replaced by faith in the mechanisms of the market?

WG: Well, according to Milton Friedman’s alluring view of reality, the most important social and political questions can be solved by the market — optimally, magically even — and thus dispense with all the conflict and arguments in which society would otherwise engage. But it’s kind of insane that people would believe in such a doctrine. In fact, it has always struck me that while business people and politicians on the right pay lip service to the doctrine, they don’t actually behave according to it, or really believe in it. They believe in the political economy, they make deals, and they cope with reality as best they can.

Lapis: How optimistic are you that we’ll succeed in taking a more sane approach to globalization?

WG: I’m encouraged by the scattered evidence of people coming to terms with some of the basic moral questions — and that’s everything from leftist intellectuals supporting human rights in Burma to the Christian Right groups now actually advocating human rights in China. But I also see organized labor in Europe, the US, and Japan, putting aside some of their traditional arguments in order to see if they can develop a more practical global approach. There’s evidence like that.

On the other hand, the power of finance and the power of the multinational corporations is still overwhelming. There’s very little incentive for those interests to step back and say, wait a minute, we’re heading towards a cliff. It’s in the nature of human history that we will probably have to take some hard — I hope not cataclysmic — smacks before the world wakes up. That’s not rational perhaps, but as I read history that’s usually what happens.