Enlightenment at Stanford

[Note: The names in the following have been changed to protect the usual suspects.]

Especially when compared to its archrival Cal across the Bay in Berkeley, Stanford has always had this reputation for being a very conservative school. It's a great place to start a career and to become successful in a very narrow, first attention sort of way, but as far as pursuing any of the mystical arts or enlightened consciousness, forget it! People are far too busy working on their resumes or pursuing the next job interview to care about any of that sort of stuff at Stanford. To some extent this is just a product of the times in the 80s and 90s, but it is also definitely very characteristic of Stanford as a school.

I'd come to recognize the importance of career, partly because I'd seen friends of mine who were spiritually evolved but didn't have the money side of life nailed down go to some really weird places and not be able to get out. And that was definitely why I came to Stanford: to develop my career. Yet to be perfectly frank, I was bored at Stanford--to me career was a means to an end, where the end was to reach some kind of higher consciousness. People at Stanford who pursued career only for its own sake I found rather boring. At one point, one computer science instructor showed a spark of individuality when he boasted of carrying drugs in his backpack and advising undergraduates to take MDA. After some arm-twisting by the drug czar in the Bush administration, Stanford suspended and then fired this instructor. I guess Harvard did the same thing to Timothy Leary, so perhaps it was not a surprise. But it made for a rather dull environment.

Just prior to my meeting Rama, in late 1991 and early 1992, I gather that Rama had seen that there were a lot of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who would be drawn to self-discovery, and it was the right time for them to begin that study again. I think that Rama saw that there would be students both at Stanford and at Cal who who be drawn to the study. Indeed, the two schools seemed to complement each other to a degree, as folks at Cal would be drawn to the mystical, nagual side of the teachings, and people at Stanford would have very strong tonals.

However, there was definitely a strong resistance at Stanford to the idea of pursuing anything mystical. I first met my "mentor", Kevin, who introduced me to Rama, around the Summer Solstice 1992. The first public meditations held by Kevin were in the vicinity of Stanford but not right on campus. There were a number of Stanford students in attendance and we discussed a little the idea of whether others at Stanford might be interested in self-discovery. We decided to leave it for awhile since it was not possible to form new student clubs at Stanford over the summer. At the beginning of the fall, thought, I talked about the idea a bit more with Kevin and then with a few others at Stanford who had shown some interest. What I quickly found, though, was that while the idea of self discovery might interest people, and they would definitely be drawn to the energy, when it came time to make any level of commitment to self-discovery, something about it really seemed to frighten them. It was as though they had their lives all very carefully laid out for them, and as long as they could use self-discovery as a "shot in the arm" to empower their existing lives, it was all well and good. But when they began to sense that they might lose control of their carefully designed lives, that was really scary to them. In self discovery people eventually come to understand that there is nothing in life that you can control, but that's an especially difficult lesson for folks at a place like Stanford, with their very strong egos, to contemplate. A lot of my friends, who'd initially shown some level of interest, began to give me vague warnings to "be careful" without really providing a good reason for their opinions.

To get the new club off the ground, we needed a number of signatures from interested students. On the deadline to get the new club started, we were still three signatures short. Somehow, though, the universe intervened to help us: a group of three students saw one of our flyers and called up on that last day; Kevin and I went to meet them, and they all signed on to the new club immediately. So we had our official club, and we settled on the name "The Mind Club".

Meditation classes were held at Stanford all that fall and the next winter. We found, though, that the Stanford ego was still something really strong. While hundreds of students attended the Mind Club's introductory classes over the course of that year, only a small number were interested enough in self discovery to meet our teacher Rama, and an even smaller number studied with Rama for any length of time. Still, though, it is always wise not to judge the outcome of any Dharmic task, and helping to introduce even a small number of students to an enlightened teacher was definitely good karma for all concerned.

On a number of occasions, Kevin confided to me that there was a group known as the Cult Awareness Network that might try to disrupt our activities. Apparently, although some of us found the experience of meditation to be truly magical, and many were simply indifferent, there were a few people who were actively hostile and didn't believe that meditation should be taught anywhere in America. This latter group was small, and consisted of a combination of former Rama students who felt they had an axe to grind, parents of Rama students who disagreed with their adult childrens' spiritual choices, and deprogrammers purely interested in profit. This group would attempt to label any small spiritual community as a dangerous "cult" in order to discredit it and set the stage for persection.

Indeed, the experience of leaving a spiritual community and trashing the teacher one previously loved appears to be a common step that many spiritual aspirants need to take. Many spiritual seekers are initially devotees of the teacher, and are so enamored of the teacher's Enlightenment that they do not take responsibility for their own lives. A strong teacher like Rama, faced with such a devotee, will often force them out of the nest in order for them to learn to apply the techniques on their own. Angry about being forced out--even though it was actually done for reasons of love--the former student will often become very angry and trash the teacher they formerly loved with all their hearts. Eventually, this stage passes and they learn to love the teacher again, but from a more mature, independent perspective.

It seems that something like that may have been going on with the Cult Awareness Network members who were former students of Rama. But, at the time, it was "early days" in my own study with Rama and Kevin, and I didn't have the perspective to understand what might have been happening on a long term basis. To me, the Cult Awareness Network people were just stereotypical bad guys and gals.

Despite Kevin's concerns about the Cult Awareness Network, we had no direct, obvious interactions with anyone associated with CAN. The Mind Club's activities proceeded without any apparent external disruption. There were a couple of controversial encounters--it was clear that not everyone agreed with us--but there was no evidence of direct persecution by any organized group, just the occasional individual who disagreed with our perspective.

However, although we had acted perfectly within the Stanford University rules, and there was no clear precipitating cause, the University at a certain point elected to look more closely into our activities. Towards the end of the academic year, Nora Lowe, a representative of the University, attended one of our meetings, which I wasn't at, and asked Tara, a Mind Club member, for an official accounting of the club's activities. We were pleased to provide Nora with this--a copy of this document will be available online again soon. Still, this document did not seem to put Nora's mind at ease, and she called Kevin and I in for a meeting, to be accompanied by the campus chaplain.

We were totally shameless during this period, and not only did we continue our meditation classes during this investigation, but we also sponsored some larger classes for hundreds of Rama's newer students from all over the Bay Area. It was great to see, even while the university investigated us for being a "cult", to see all these happy new "cult members" from all over the Bay Area descending on Stanford and having a great time. Of course there was nothing the least bit sinister about what we were doing, but it was very amusing to think how offended these Stanford powers-that-be would have been if they'd known we were expanding our activities even as they were trying to shut us down.

When we met with Nora and Frank, the campus chaplain, Frank explained to us that his role in the meeting was to "brood over the fact that many young people have had their lives destroyed by joining groups such as yours". I guess Frank just didn't understand that the whole point of self-discovery is to have your life destroyed again and again so that you can finally find something beyond your narrow life. Frank announced several times that his role was to "brood over" this kind of thing. So Frank spent the meeting brooding, while we tried to justify ourselves to Nora. Nora eventually shut us down on the narrow technical grounds that we were too closely affiliated with Rama who was in charge of an outside organization. This was a bum rap since virtually every campus group from Stanford Republicans to the Stanford Judo Club has outside affiliations, but Nora was not to be dissuaded from her decision.

We didn't allow Nora's decision to stop us, however. Within 24 hours we had new, off-campus locations both for the introductory meditation classes and for the larger Rama group meetings. And those meetings for the remainder of the year were very high, enlightening experiences.

What were the reasons the University took action against us? It was never really clear. The only particular "red flag" cited by Nora were the flyers that we posted all over campus. Since it was evident that there were a few individuals who disagreed with our perspective, it is possible that someone had some connections with Nora and was able to arrange for us to be shut down. It is also, of course, possible that Nora simply saw the flyers and acted on her own best, but in my opinion erroneous, judgement to shut us down. We will probably never know for sure. Nora was clearly sensitive to our rights of freedom of religion and the risk of a lawsuit if that was violated, because she did offer an alternative for keeping us open if we identified more closely as a religious organization and affiliated with Frank, the campus chaplain. However, it was too late in the year to pursue that until the next academic year, and we had already decided the Mind Club was to be only a one-year project.

So what is the point of all this? Mainly I think it is that on the path you have to do your best to overcome obstacles, but not to become angry when occasionally the obstacles are big enough that you have to move around them. The campus may have thought they "won" by booting us off-campus, but we fought them as long as we could and then when we couldn't prevail in that battle, we continued to keep a high state of mind when we meditated off-campus. Ultimately it was Stanford's loss, not ours.