R. D. Laing: Of Scientism, Spirit, Madness, and the Healing Genius of Relationship

by William Stranger

R. D. Laing’s disciples are mounting a determined effort to reintroduce his ideas to our culture. I delivered the first part of this paper at their second R. D. Laing in the 21st Century Symposium, held at the Esalen Institute in August, 2016. Mad To Be Normal, a movie about Laing’s life and work starring David Tennant, has just been released.

The World’s Greatest Unpublished Spiritual Book

by William Stranger

Some two decades ago, Adi Da Samraj wrote The Scapegoat Book, a brilliant free rendering of what may well be our planet’s most profound traditional spiritual text, the Ashtavakra Gita. In 2008, I was asked to write an introduction to the book. Although The Scapegoat Book itself yet remains unpublished, I believe it is time for the world to get a preview of what it has been missing.

Faith and Disillusionment: An Interview with Dr. Michael Eigen

by Regina Monti

Michael Eigen is widely acknowledged to be the finest, most profound psychoanalytic writer of our time. In a review of one of Dr. Eigen’s works, Christopher Bollas writes:  “Eigen has not only assimilated the works of his intellectual tradition, they have traveled a dense journey into his unconscious and returned in the form of spontaneous original thinking, as rare as the authors he admires.  Do we know of any one who writes like an evocative amalgam of William Blake, Mark Twain, Freud, and Raymond Chandler?  Eigen’s voice is unique; his vision is singular yet embracing, his mysticism is of this earth yet transcendent, and each of his chapters is a wonderful ‘spot in time’.” Dr. Michael Eigen is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University, and Senior Member of the National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis. He is also the editor of the Psychoanalytic Review.

Dr.Michael Eigen was interviewed in September 2006 by New York Institute for Psychotherapy Training (NYIPT) faculty and supervisor, Dr. Regina Monti.  Dr. Eigen has a relationship with respected NYIPT going back to the 1970’s when he was a teacher and supervisor at the New Hope Guild.

Richard Grossinger: The DharmaCafe Interview

On the occasion of his monumental three-volume work on psychic science and consciousness, we sit down for a long overdue conversation with the co-founder of North Atlantic Books.

Continuous Creation from Electric Plasma versus Big Bang Universe

by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

The Big Bang Universe, 95% unobservable in hypothetical dark matter and dark energy, is giving way to one alive with electric plasma currents accumulating mass and transferring energy over galactic and intergalactic space in a cosmic extravaganza of constant creation

Daniel Sheehan’s Riveting Legal Memoir Is a Real Education

by Dan Hamburg

One of the most storied civil liberties attorneys of our time, Daniel Sheehan’s riveting memoir, The People’s Advocate, reveals the hard work, intense opposition from public officials, and even physical danger faced by those who go to the mat for the rest us. His book is much more than a great entertainment. It is essential education for anyone who wants to understand the tasks and trials confronting the American people today.

Lewis Thompson—England’s Great Poet-Sadhu

by Wayne Owens

Lewis Thompson’s extraordinary collection of aphorisms, Fathomless Heart, is a seminal event in the modern encounter of East and West. A work of magical, incandescent genius, it is also one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary/philosophical treasures.

For Those Who May Be Interested: My Health Journey to Date

A Letter from Bill Stranger

As you will see in this report, your kind and generous donations have done much to put me on a healing path.

    If I had awakened one morning two years ago to find myself in the condition I am in now, I would have thought myself hugely cursed. But looking at the progress I’ve made since last July, I can only be grateful for how much I have improved. It hasn’t been an easy path from there to here. After having my legs more or less cut out from under me, I spent the next seven months trying to get my health maintenance organization (HMO) to understand that their firm diagnosis—namely, that mine was a simple case of persistent anemia caused by an inadequate amount of dietary protein—could not possibly explain my ever worsening symptoms.

    Even though my family and friends could clearly see my steady decline with their own eyes, my assigned nurse practitioner (qualified M.D.’s are in short supply in Lake County) discounted my reports of increasing disability and resisted my requests for a referral to competent doctors at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.

    It seemed to me my ever increasing dysfunction and pain was fast bidding to become terminal. Kouraleen had to massage my arms and legs just go get me out of bed in the morning, then help pull me to a stand on wobbly knees full of pain. My shoulders and arms had lost nearly all their strength and ached much of the time. My hands were so swollen I could barely hold a fork. I could no longer sleep under blankets because they were too heavy to move. By the end of the year I could no longer take a bath—one of my few avenues of relief—because even together Kouraleen and I did not have the strength to pull me out of the bathtub. She had to wash me in the shower, dress me, make all my meals, serve me on a tray, clear and wash the dishes, and then go to work a few days a week. It was now high winter and I spent my days in a chair piled high with cushions to provide me just enough elevation to rise to stand on my own to go to the bathroom when she wasn’t around. Knowing that if I fell down I would not be able to get up again on my own, I used a rubber tipped walking stick to move around the house. I had terrible, unbroken insomnia that prevented me from getting any of the desperately needed cellular repair that sleep provides.

    Finally persuaded to address my insomnia, in late January my HMO sent me to an M.D. in Ukiah to be instructed in proper sleep hygiene. Fortunately, that doctor had previously spent a couple of decades working in intensive care. After his pro forma talk was finished we had a serious conversation about my symptoms altogether. He was surprised to learn that my primary care health practitioner had not quickly read them as likely signs of an autoimmune disorder. So, although it was outside of his remit with the HMO, this M.D. took it upon himself to order a number of additional tests, including one for “antinuclear antibodies”. Antinuclear antibodies are produced when the body begins to attack the nucleus of its own cells. The ANA test came back positive. Further tests showed I have an extremely high level of antinuclear antibodies, accompanied by a massive increase of inflammation throughout my body. Even then, however, my HMO could offer nothing more than a consultation with a tele-health rheumatologist.

    Hearing this, my longtime friend Scott Anderson, a retired M.D. now living in nearby Santa Rosa, interceded. He found a first rate team of rheumatologists in another HMO, likewise in Santa Rosa, that was willing to take my Medicare insurance. My visit to Todd Hofeling in mid-February quickly revealed what I had been missing over the previous seven months. Enormously knowledgeable and empathetic, Dr. Hofeling spent a full hour taking my case, listening to Kouraleen’s observations, and—wonder of wonders—actually conducting a full, hands on physical examination! After intensive further testing, the rheumatologist concluded that I have an autoimmune disorder called Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease (UCTD). UCTD usually happens to women in their late twenties and early thirties. Its rapid onset so late in my life (probably through exposure to some kind of toxic invasion) was both unusual and unfortunate because I have less vitality and a much smaller runway of time in which to deal with it. The disease had already been given seven months to cement itself in my tissues. The good news is that to date there appears to be no lasting organ damage—a saving factor I attribute to my TCM doctor friend Angelo Druda’s herbal prescriptions over the previous months.

    The rheumatologist’s concern is that my UCTD might develop into a more debilitating form of autoimmune disease, some precursor symptoms of which had already begun to appear. He put me on hydroxychloroquine, a drug originally created to prevent or treat malaria that had since also become the standard treatment for UCTD. I was told it will take three to four months to show signs of effectiveness. Meanwhile, I was advised to watch carefully for signs of Raynaud’s Syndrome (in which stunted blood circulation turns the hands white and blue) and for any indications the disease is invading my lungs. The long and the short of it is that, although hydroxychloroquine might be able to bring my UCTD under control, it cannot not cure it. Accepting that outcome would have left me in perpetual limbo and, at my age, make it increasingly unlikely I could fulfill the service for which I had been preparing much of my adult life.

    It so happens that UCTD can be cured. I have no way to account for the benefits of the many prayers offered by you and so many other friends. What I do know for sure is that your donations funded a healing regime that slowly but tangibly began to work in the following weeks, not the 3-4 months hydroxychloroquine (which I’m also taking) needed to ramp up. I decided to sign up for care from Global Natural Health Solutions (GNHS), an integrative medical group created by Kim Elia and Mitchell Fleisher. Mitchell Fleisher, a very impressively credentialed M.D. who has already overseen the cure of a number of cases like mine, is GNHS’s Medical Director.

    I am still at the beginning of my healing. As many of you know, I have always been thin. I’ve weighed around 150 pounds for most of my adult life. Today I weigh 135 pounds, and my physique shows it! Even so, although my strength and mobility are still quite limited, I can now get out of bed or up from a chair by myself, climb stairs, prepare a simple meal, and even walk half a mile without assistance. In fact, for the first time in five months, just this morning I was able to get into and out of my bathtub without help. In this, I have also been helped along by the low impact exercise I do daily on the sophisticated rebounder that Sara Touralette and Scott Gough gave me. This would not have come about from taking the hydroxychloroquin alone. The GNHS homeopathic and nutraceutical protocols have clearly done much to accelerate my healing. In addition to regular homeopathic consultations and taking the recommended daily homeopathic formulation, I am also swallowing, in seven tranches taken throughout the day, 78 nutraceutical capsules prescribed by Dr. Fleisher. Many of them are extremely expensive, highly bioavailable formulations not typically found on Amazon. Dr. Fleisher now recommends that I begin a three month course of peptide therapy, which is too expensive for me at the present time.

    All this has enabled me to get back to work on a project that has occupied me for the past 25 years and that I hope will be a real service to both the Dharma and the world. Back in April, 2023, a Japanese foundation pledged to endow the project with $25,000,000, which they subsequently failed to deliver. I am now working with a truly reliable group of talented colleagues who have good prospects of funding the venture out of the profits they hope to realize from a new technology they are currently bringing to market. I’m keeping the details of the project itself under wraps until the money actually comes through. All I can say for now is that it has attracted the enthusiastic interest of very talented people who wish to serve a cultural renaissance here on Earth. Should we be successful, you all will be among the first to know.

    Thank you again for your support. I am deeply fortunate to live among so many friends—some from many years back—who have been profoundly Touched by Bhagavan Adi Da and who so kindly and generously reached out to help a gurubai such as myself.

Love,
Bill

Herbal, Pharmaceutical and Real Medicine

by Sidney Kurn, M.D.

If doctors who practice integrative medicine are still a scarce commodity, how much more so medical specialists who still maintain an integrative orientation? Sidney Kurn, a respected California neurologist, is one of that especially rare breed. In this article he gives us a little education in both the science and the business of pharmacological medicine, and its herbal alternatives.

The Mysticism of Space

by John Davidson

The physical universe is thus no more than a dance of energy spun out of the space that defines it. It seems that the scientists have verified this at a deeply fundamental level. What they have as yet been unable to determine is the source of the energy that keeps it going.

Louis Dupré: The DharmaCafé Interview

Louis Dupré from DharmaCafe.com on Vimeo.

DharmaCafé interviews Louis Dupré, a brilliant and enormously learned Catholic cultural historian and philosopher of religion with a soul deep enough to write respectfully on the likes of Marx and the Romantics and to conclude his anthology of Christian mysticism, “Light from Light”, with selections from a monk named “Abhishiktananda”.

“The Evil Tongue”: A Speech Lesson from a God-intoxicated Rabbi

In the early part of the twentieth century, Rabbi Israel Meir HaCohen of Radun, known as the the Chofetz Chaim (also spelled “Hafetz Hayim”), was a guiding moral light for Jews throughout Europe and the Middle-East. He was revered as a “Cohen Gadol”, “a crystalline figure of genuine purity and simplicity, of creative faith and optimism, of unbroken consistency of purpose and action” who was “an embodiment of all the attributes and virtues of the true hassid.” In this passage from Rabbi Moses Yosur’s biography, Saint and Sage, Hafetz Hayim admonishes us to always practice right speech.

More Than Apocalypse: The Deep Cultural Prophecy of Richard Grossinger’s “2013”

Richard Grossinger

Now that we have been suitably flattered and frightened by the purportedly Mayan deus ex machina of 2012, it is high time we rejected its myth of hardwired inevitabilities. In his latest book, “2013”, Richard Grossinger, America’s great unsung cultural prophet, melds his personal explorations and cosmic reflections to elevate prophecy to a more serving and liberating role.

Ego-Death and the Illusion of The Sixties

Now that Buddhism has gone mainstream, the ancient call to renunciation pretty well dropped off the map. But back in the edgy, apocalyptic sixties the name of the game was ego-death.

“Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole mind yet?”:  Positive Possibilities for Psychedelics

If the recent hit movie It’s Complicated and the spate of legalization initiatives queuing up in California are any indication, pot has finally achieved mainstream respectability. More remarkably, despite the unrelentingly repressive atmosphere that smothered the first decade of our brave new century, psychedelic research in America has entered its Golden Age. James Fadiman, perhaps America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use, gives us a valuable update.

On a Throne Made of Vanishing Ink

His iconic poetry stamped the beat generation and helped open the door to the psychedelic sixties. This immortal paen to beauty suggests that the late, great bard may have been even better at prose.

How to Befriend a Tree

Beginning practitioners of Chinese internal organ massage (Chi Nei Tsang) are taught how to commune with trees. Shouldn’t this be part of everyone’s education?

What’s So Positive About “Positive” Law?

In his review of Stephen D. Smith’s “Law’s Quandary,” Daniel Sheehan, one of America’s leading Constitutional lawyers, asks why the author stopped before the job was done.

“The Fissure of Humanity”

A key figure in the small group of British expatriate literary Vedantans who settled in Los Angeles after World War II, Gerald Heard’s psycho-histories of civilization outclassed those of Toynbee and Spengler. In this brief excerpt from his book “The Human Venture,” he issues a prescient warning about the liabilities of all empires.

Community Collapse in the West

A third of a century ago world-renowned architecture critic Martin Pawley described the high toll our suburban, single-family way of life exacts upon upon social cohesion and community happiness.

THE GREAT SECRET CORRECTED

Now that Rhonda Byrne’s runaway bestseller, “The Secret,” has garnered more than 2,400 reviews on Amazon.com, the crack DharmaCafé editorial team has decided to swing into action and offer its own review of the book.

Stephen Buhner Is Listening to the Plants

Like the speaking stones celebrated by poets, herbs too have a voice of their own. Each one speaks within a community so vast and in a language so rich that, taken together, these natural miracle workers truly represent one of humanity’s greatest treasures.

Sparks of Light : Faith, Hope and R.D. Laing

R.D. Laing was an iconic figure of the sixties. Unconventional, controversial, and undeniably brilliant, how people viewed him then— or remember him now — is itself a kind of historical rorschach test. Since his death, in 1989, he has been praised, plagiarized, imitated, vilified, and increasingly forgotten. Dan Burston, perhaps Laing’s most astute biographer, thinks it important that we remember him.

Descartes and Animals: What if they also think?

“Before humans shifted into rational thinking, we saw our world as reflections of us; we knew we existed as a part of the great web of existence. And we therefore understood that non-human animals are different from us in degree only. We did not see ourselves as distinct, as a completely separate species. We knew that other animals operate with awareness, understand the world in different, sometimes superior ways, and respond consciously to the world. We saw them with compassion.”

Fixing the Problems of Our World

by Richard Grossinger

In this excerpt from his latest book, “The Bardo of Waking Life”, Richard Grossinger once again demonstrates how much our poet/seers have to give to our public policy debates.

“Tacit Glimpses”: A Review of Adi Da Samraj’s “Transcendental Realism” and “Aesthetic Ecstasy”

At last year’s Venice Biennale and this year’s Winter in Florence exhibitions, Adi Da Samraj’s monumentally sized images have drawn both media praise and a rapturous public response. Art historian, art critic, and practicing artist Celia Rabinovitch assesses his recent essays on aesthetics.

In Praise of Holy Madness

“One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe who could be found on America’s streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adepts and enlightened iconoclasts honored by Allen Ginsberg and the beats, holy foolishness in the tradition of Saint Simeon with the dead dog tied to his waist and throwing nuts at the congregation, or Tibetan lama myonpas and India’s avadhutas. Perhaps such holy madmen are still out there among the homeless and the crack whores.”

Nondualism in the Clinic: Can Psychotherapy Help Two People Find the One Reality?

Transpersonal psychology—the umbrella term for psychotherapies that view human beings as more than just skin-encapsulated egos—has greatly expanded the scope of human psychology. In his review “The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy”, a pioneering anthology about the application of nondualist spiritual views in the clinical circumstance, transpersonal psychologist D. B. Sleeth wonders if some practitioners are overreaching.

The Heart of Community

“Our challenge is to rediscover the heart of local human community and find ways to realize the depth and richness of traditional cultures that yet allow us the creative freedom we have come to enjoy as individuals in the modern world.”

Reason and Religion: Irremediably Incompatible Bedfellows?

by floyd merrell

Like the poet e.e. cummings, floyd merriell writes his name in the lower case to stress the arbitrariness and non-necessity of our egoic self-identification. That humility is conjoined to one of the most interesting intellects in American letters today. In his many books, merrell has demonstrated how the obscure science of semiotics—especially as developed by the great American philosopher C.S. Peirce—can play a fundamental role in developing the emerging new paradigm of an evolving, self-organizating, irreducibly interdependent universe. Here we present merrell’s extended essay on the paradoxical nature of religious truth.

The Anthroposophic Doctor

Many good alternative health books have been written by naturopathic, traditional Chinese, and Ayurvedic doctors, some of whom are also MDs. In his well-written and user-friendly “The Fourfold Path to Healing: Working with the Laws of Nutrition, Therapeutics, Movement and Meditation in the Art of Medicine,” Thomas Cowan, MD and friends have finally given Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical approach its long overdue place at the table.

The Transcendence of Consciousness

For all that is being written today about spirituality and the “new biology,”  bestselling science popularizer Guy Murchie’s classic work, “The Seven Mysteries of Life”, published in 1978, may come closest to touching divinity.

Tanabe Hajime’s “Philosophy as Metanoetics”

by Steven M. Rosen

Tanabe Hajime, a founding member of Japan’s famed Kyoto School of Philosophy, studied under two giants of twentieth century philosophy, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (the latter’s own philosophy was likely influenced by Tanabe’s Buddhist views). “Philosophy as Metanoetics” was developed from lectures the author delivered in Kyoto during Japan’s disastrous war with America, Britain, and China, the shadows of which fall heavily across its pages. In this “appreciation and celebration” of Tanabe’s principal work, Steven M. Rosen (whose own pioneering writings are laying a foundation for a new non-dual philosophy of science) identifies key elements of Tanabe’s paradox-drenched philosophy and pauses to question whether the Buddhist notion of the relative self needs to be supplemented by a more dynamic vision of absolute being such as is found in some Western phenomenological thinkers.

Lessons from Alchemy and Chaos Theory: Part II

by Robin Robertson

Continuing our series of Robin Robertson’s “Lessons from Alchemy and Chaos Theory”, it is now time to be introduced to fractals.

Medicalizing Young Women - A Dangerous Trend

  A new drug just approved by the FDA, “Lybrel,” is one of a new breed of pharmaceuticals that profoundly interfere with a woman’s menstrual cycle. While a few members of the medical establishment have questioned their safety and value, these drugs have received precious little public discussion. In her forthcoming book “What Women MUST Know To Protect Their Daughters From Breast Cancer,”  a pioneering voice in the women’s health movement sounds a serious warning about these strange new interventions in the order of nature.