The New Myth (First Draft)

7/27/2019 The New Myth (First Draft)

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The New Myth: Frederic Spiegelberg and the Rise of a Whole Earth, 1914-1975

Ahmed Kabil

Abstract. The present article provides, through the life and teachings of a little-known Germanscholar of religions named Frederic Spiegelberg (1897-1994), a novel account of the uniquehistorical and intellectual developments that converged in the San Francisco Bay Area from1951-1968 and subsequently informed and enabled many of the defining chapters of recentglobal history. Separately, these developments are known as the dissemination in the West ofAsian religious perspectives and practices, the San Francisco Renaissance, the rise of the hippiecounterculture, the widespread blossoming of environmental awareness, and the Silicon ValleyRevolution. Together, they comprise the New Myth. The New Myth: synchronous with and inreaction to the planetary spread of technology and the global experiential horizons suchtechnology discloses, a constellation of holistic integral thought emerged in various domains inthe West that was characterized above all by a spatiotemporal emphasis on the Here and Nowand the realization of unity through the recognition and transcendence of polarity. The origins,afterlives, and implications of this constellation of thought are only now being discerned. Thestory of Spiegelbergs lifelittle known and largely forgottenfunctions as the conduit throughwhich the New Myths historical and intellectual contours are traced and thereby renderedintelligible.


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The New Myth: Frederic Spiegelberg and the Rise of a Whole Earth, 1914-1975

Ahmed Kabil

Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things Ive done in my life,

Steve Jobs, the founder and then-CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world told

reporter John Markoff of the New York Times in 2001 as they watched the psychedelic fractals

of Apples iTunes visualizer undulate across the screen. People who havent taken acid will

never fully understand me.1

Jobs first psychedelic experience came in high school, and his trajectory afterward was

typical. He attended Reed College, a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon that was

culturally counter yet academically conservative, and where five years earlier Timothy Leary

extolled the students to tune in, turn on, and drop out. As Isaacson notes, many of Reedsstudents took all three of those injunctions seriously, and Jobs was no exception. He still

dropped in to classes, but only those that interested him, such as calligraphy.2

Outside of class, Jobs was receiving an education of an altogether different kind. The

goal was to remember: LSD shows you that theres another side to the coin, and you cant

remember it when it wears off, but you know it, Jobs recalled later. It reinforced my sense of

what was importantcreating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the

stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.3 Fieldwork came in the form

of meditation retreats, psychedelic sessions, extended stays at Robert Friedlands All-One

communal apple farm, and a seven-months-long adventure in India in search of enlightenment.

The India trip was motivated by Dr. Richard AlpertsBe Here Now (1971), a psychedelic

meditation manual in the Hindu tantric tradition whose esoteric aphorisms regaling the divine

bliss of consciousness emblazoned on brown pulp and whose mysterious blue cover of a radial

mandala bracketed with the injunction to Remember, Be Here Now continue to draw in

curious seekers to this day. Alpert was Learys partner-in-crime at Harvard in the early 1960s

when, inspired by the pioneering work of Aldous Huxley and their own experiences with

psychedelics, they initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project as director David McClellands ill-

fated attempt to establish Harvard Psychology as the paragon of the discipline. By 1963 Alpertand Leary were fired. Leary retreated to a mansion in New York to keep running experiments.

Alpert went to India, found a guru in Neem Karoli Baba, and returned to America in 1967

1 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 384.

2 Ibid., 33.

3 Ibid., 41.


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barefoot, bearded, and calling himself Baba Ram Dass with the steady gaze of conviction in his

eyes.

After readingBe Here Now, Jobs and fellow Reed student Daniel Kottke decided they

would go to India to find Alperts guru. But by the time they reached the foothills of the

Himalayas that Neem Karoli Baba called home, he was already dead. Members of his

community remained, however, such as a westerner, Larry Brilliant, whom Neem Karoli Baba

named Subramanyum and with whom Jobs would remain lifelong friends. Brilliant was an

epidemiologist who would one day lead the successful WHO global campaign to eradicate

smallpox, cofound the Seva Foundation with Baba Ram Dass (a nonprofit organization created in

1978 best known for restoring eyesight to 3 million blind people) and cofound the WELL, one of

the first and most successful online communities, with technologist and futurist Stewart Brand in

1985.

Be Here Now, along with Shunryu SuzukisZen Mind, Beginners Mind(1970), formedthe twin pillars of Jobs practice during these early days of spiritual exploration. Zen Mindwas

also a meditation manual, albeit steeped in the fierce discipline of the Zen tradition and

expounded by its chief transmitter to the West in the 1960s. WhereBe Here Now spoke

esoterically about the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ consciousness, and Hindu deities like Shiva,

Kali, and Hanuman,Zen Mindemphasized focus, discipline, simplicity, and clarity. WhereBe

Here Now emphasized an open surrender to the present moment,Zen Mindemphasized posture.

IfBe Here Now andZen Mindwere the gospels of Jobs curriculum, then Stewart

Brands Whole Earth Catalog (1968)was the bible. Its worn pages accompanied him to Reed, to

the commune, to India and beyond. But how to describe it? To many, it was an

incomprehensible mass, a shopping catalog in the spirit of Montgomery Ward of seemingly

unrelated products, disciplines, and lifestyle approaches. Brand called it Access to Tools, an

attempt to generate a low maintenance high-yield self-sustaining critical information service.4

Jobs called it Google before Google existed. No cultural document from the period better

captured the ethos of the counterculture, and few were more pivotal. Though the impact of

works like Silent Spring (1962)and the Port Huron Statement(1962) received more attention at

the time, the prescient Whole Earth Catalog can claim a stake in the founding of both modern

environmentalism and the information revolution in Silicon Valley. The Catalog captured anew alchemy of environmental concern, small-scale technological enthusiasm, design research,

alternative lifestyles, and business savvy that created a model of environmental advocacy5

4 Fred Turner, From Cyberculture to Counterculture(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 78.5 Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2007), 2.


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But to many, the Whole Earth Catalog remained a mystery that they were content never

to unravel; its incomprehensibility suggested that the catalog was almost too full of ideas and

subjects to come to terms with an overall synthetic view of them all.6

Almost. For the Catalog did offer a viewon its front page, in factand the seemingly

unrelated contents within could only be understood by reference to it. It was a view of the

whole earth seen from space, and it was under this banner that the Catalog integrated the various

trends in the countercultural, academic, and technological communities of the late 1960s.

It was on LSD while gazing at the San Francisco skyline on the rooftop of a North Beach

apartment in February 1966 that Brand realized that seeing these images would change the

world. There I sat, he later recalled, wrapped in a blanket in the chill afternoon Sun, trembling

with cold and inchoate emotion, gazing at the San Francisco Skyline, waiting for my vision. He

would not have to wait long:

The buildings were not parallelbecause the Earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; itclosed on itself. I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recentlecturethat people perceived the Earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of all theirmisbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred miles, I could see that itwas curved, think it, and finally feel it. But how to broadcast it?7

The vision became a question: why havent we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?

Whether Brands famed campaign, where he showed up on college campuses around the country

dressed in hippie freak regalia selling buttons that posed the fateful question, ultimately resulted

in NASAs decision to release the photographs is a matter of debate. That these images changed

the world, and we how think about it, is not.

For Brand, the whole earth was an icon, one he hoped would supplant the mushroom

cloud as the dominant lens through which we saw the world. As an icon, it symbolized two

facets of Brands philosophy: first, a holistic, integral, microcosm-macrocosm understanding of

reality expressed through cybernetic whole systems theory that sought to overcome eternally

troublesome distinctions between, among other things, man and his tools, organisms and

artifacts, and self and world; second, the conviction that technology, when used appropriately,

can function as a tool for personal liberation.

Regardless of Brands intentions, the whole earth image soon acquired a life of its own,

one far removed from its initial connotations. As the most ubiquitous and widely disseminatedimage in human history, the whole earth has seeped into the ways we relate to the world to such

a degree that our ability to discern its history and implications is obscured. Historian Benjamin

Lazier, in one of the first attempts to historicize these developments, sees an epochal moment

6 Ibid.

7 Robert Poole,Earthrise: How Man First Saw The Earth (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008)149-150.


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emerge in 1968 that he claims inaugurated an era that we still inhabit. He calls it the Earthrise

era:

Broadly speaking, the Earthrise era comprises several important developments. The first is therise of an Earthly vision, or a pictorial imagination characterized by views of the Earth as awhole. Hear the word Earth, and the images likely to flash through the mind are descendants oftwo views afforded by the Apollo missions. One shows the Earth half-cloaked in shadow as itfloats over a lifeless moonscape. It arrived on Christmas 1968 and is called Earthrise: hence,the Earthrise era. A second photograph, from December 1972, shows the disk of ourterraqueous planet suspended in the void. It is officially titled Blue Marble and is reputed to bethe most widely disseminated photograph in human history. Its frameless framethe voidhas left it especially open to appropriation. These two images and their progeny now grace T-shirts and tote bags, cartoons and coffee cups, stamps commemorating Earth Day and postersfeting the exploits of suicide bombers. In other words, this pictorial imagination is not simplythat. As a stand-in for the idea of the Whole Earth itself, it has acquired an iconic power thathelps organize a myriad of political, moral, scientific, and commercial imaginations as well.Views of Earth are now so ubiquitous as to go unremarked. But this makes them all the moreimportant, and their effects historically novel. Our ideas and intuitions about inhabiting the worldare now mediated through images that displace local, earthbound horizons with horizons thatare planetary in scopethe distinction between earth and sky surmounted by that between Earthand void. These intuitions have dovetailed with new habits of speech, a vocabularyand asecond key development of the Earthrise era. But there is something peculiar about thisvocabulary. It is just as global as Earthly, if not more so, and it is peculiar because the Earthas seen from space is often perceived as the natural or organic antithesis of an artifacual globe.Still, there is no avoiding the fact that as common expressions, the word globalization and thephrases global environment, global economy, and global humanity simply did not existbefore the Earthrise era, and this explosion of globe talk is part and parcel of changes in theWestern pictorial imagination that at first glance seem unsuited to it8

Lazier situates the Earthrise era as a chapter in a larger story about the crisis of Western

modernity, specifically concerning the displacement of the grown by the made in the modern

age. It was an anxiety shared by a host of Western thinkers in the early twentieth century, who

broached the issue through meditations on technology and the relationship between organisms

and artifacts:

Although Germanophone in origin, this tradition has migrated across both national anddisciplinary borders, with several important afterlives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Ithas also bequeathed several foundational stories about the modern relation of the natural to theartifactual, now spoken, often unwittingly, by technophobes and technophiles, philosophers andlaymen alike. They include, first, a story about the early modern reversal of the ancientinjunction that art is to imitate nature. This story narrates a momentous change: from an ancientunderstanding of human artifice as indebted to the rules nature gives to man, to a modernapproach for which nature is an imitation of art, and artifice a means to dominate that to which itwas in thrall [] If this first story is a tale of human mastery, the secondthe modern victory ofinstrumental reasondiscovers a powerlessness at the heart of modern human self-assertion.Something about our attempts to master the world has gone awry, this story goes. Technical

8 Benjamin Lazier, Earthrise; or: The Globalization of the World Picture in The American Historical Review,Vol. 116, No. 3, (June 2011), 605-6.


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achievement has become compulsion. Freedom from a hostile or stingy nature comes at the priceof a new form of servitudeto the inexorable power of the things we make, as Max Weberonce put it, and still more to the technological impulse itself9

One of the traditions foremost interpreters was Martin Heidegger (1887-1976), perhaps the

twentieth centurys most important and controversial philosopher. He had spoken presciently,

almost prophetically, since the 1930s about the self-perpetuating nature of the technological

attitude that challenges man forth to subdue the natural world now presented to him as an object

of his conquest. Heidegger traces this dominion of the technological in our lives to a confluence

of developments in the West over the last three hundred years that yielded what he calls

calculative thinking, reckon[ing] with conditions that are given, tak[ing] them into account with

the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. This calculative thinking has set into

motion the dominion of modern technology while obscuring western mans fundamental relation

to Being.10

9 Ibid., 605.

10 The result is that, according to Heidegger, we are all of us today in flight from thinking. Though we donot admit it, this flight from thought is the ground for thoughtlessness. And this thoughtlessness is its own

kind of thinking: calculative thinking. And it is calculative thinking that is the danger: Its peculiarity consistsin the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are

given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus wecan count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates []

Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, notthinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is (Martin Heidegger,Discourse on

Thinking [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], 46). Both kinds of thinking, the meditative and the calculative,

are needed for man. The method of meditative thinking lies in dwell[ing] on what lies close and meditat[ing]on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home

ground; now, in the present hour of history (53). This meditative thinking demands effort and practice, and isin need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft. But it must also be able to bide its time, to

await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen, for we are plants which whether we liketo admit it to ourselves or not must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to

bear fruit (47). Here we come to the crux of Heideggers sentiments on just what modern man has lost. Why,asks Heidegger, does the work of art flourish? Because the artist is able to mount from the depth of his home

ground up into the ether. A work rootedin its home groundmay blossom forth into the ether (48). ForHeidegger, man today has lost this rootedness. Traditional notions of home, as mediated through ones culture,

creed, conventions and customs, are uprooted by the technology of this atomic age. The advances andplanetary scope of technology and the calculative thinking it portends have rendered home meaningless for

man. We are driven from our homeland, both in the physical sense of increased resettling in the big cities andin the spiritual sense of wandering to and fro around the ever-tightening circle of technological forces without

a ground from which to rise. Such is the spirit of the age into which man is born. Its symbol is the atom bomb the harbinger of the new energies discovered and set free in nature by modern technology. The ground that

enabled modern technology to do so has its roots in the Western intellectual tradition, namely, in Cartesiandualism and scientific materialism. The result is a relation of man to the world in which the whole earth

appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed any longer toresist (50). Technologys planetary reach is uncanny enough, but for Heidegger the true danger lies in our

unpreparedness for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in thisage (52). As such, there is no way to stop it.


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In an interview withDer Spiegel in 1966, Heidegger singled out the photographs of the

earth from space as exemplifying this process of the uprooting of man by the global spread of

technology. In these very photographs one sees the displacement of the grown by the made and

the dominance of calculative thinking over meditative thinking in the atomic age:

HEIDEGGER: Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions andthe functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears peopleaway and uproots them from the earth more and more. I dont know if you are scared; I wascertainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We dontneed an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only havepurely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.11

All of this is curious when we reflect on the example of Stewart Brand. Where Brand saw the

whole earth icon as an iconoclastic overcoming of the mushroom cloud and the calculative

thinking it symbolized, Heidegger saw it as the epitome, indeed, the culmination, of that very

thinking. Brand understood the earth cybernetically as a system and all the phenomena within it

as interconnected, self regulating systems. Doing so, he believed, allowed an overcoming of the

eternally troublesome distinction that so assailed Heidegger, that of the natural and artifactual.

The same teleological principle is in effect for organisms and artifacts, for man and his

machines, this thinking goes. They are both self-organizing and self-regulating, and as systems

function as components within other interconnected systems. Any further distinctions, argued

Brand, were unnecessary. Mans tools were simply an extension of himself.

To this Heidegger countered that technology, above all, is not a tool, and no longer has

anything to do with tools.12 We are not the ones using technology. Technology is using us.

When the world presents itself as a system, Heidegger contends, it is simply exemplifying the

attitude of calculative thinking. That which stands before us becomes a picture, presented in all

that belongs to it and all that stands together in it as a system. The photographs of the earth

from space mark for Heidegger the culmination calculative thinking, the moment when, as he

puts it in theDiscourse on Thinking, it rules the whole earth.

Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man isprepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and havebefore himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to place before himself13

11 Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger (1966).

web.ics.purdue.edu/~other1/Heidegger%20Der%20Spiegel.pdf. Scanned from Gunther Neske & EmilKettering (eds), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 41-66.

12 Ibid.

13 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),129.


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The fundamental event of the modern age, Heidegger concludes, is the conquest of the

world as picture. No bigger confirmation of his claims can exist than reflecting on the

transcript of the first astronauts from space as they become the first humans to see the whole

earth. Just prior to taking the iconic photograph of Earthrise, they have the following exchange:

Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Heres the Earth coming up! Wow, that ispretty!

Anders: Hey, dont take that, its not scheduled.

Borman: (Laughter). You got a color film, Jim?

Anders: Hand me that roll of color quick, will you

Lovell: Oh man, thats great!

Anders: Hurry. Quick

Lovell: Take several of them! Here, give it to me

Borman: Calm down, Lovell.

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When the interviewers ofDer Spiegel ask Heidegger if theres any way to influence the

seemingly inevitable onward march of global technology and the mode of being it reinforces,

Heidegger answers cryptically, Only a God can save us.

We are as gods, Brand proclaimed on the first page of the whole earth catalog two years

later.

What are we to make of these pirouettes? Does Brand overcome Heideggers distinctions

between the natural and artifactual, or does he exemplify the very process of calculative thinking

Heidegger disparages? How do we understand the technophilic ethos engendered by Brand that

has bequeathed to us not only the Earthrise era, but technologies such as the personal computer

and internet that typify both thinkers attitudes about technology?

The present article broaches these questions through presenting a vignette of the life and

teachings of a little-known and largely forgotten professor of comparative religions named

Frederic Spiegelberg (1897-1994). Through the lens of his life and teachings, several contours of

the developments outlined above are rendered intelligible. Many parts of the tale have been told

before. But the whole, as history, has not. To be sure, the full breadth of the story, with all the

origins, afterlives, and implications, is outside the scope of this article. The goal here, then, is to

point to key moments in a tale that stretches across traditions, continents and eras.My central contention is that the path of Spiegelbergs life discloses a hitherto obscured

constellation of holistic, integral thought and the network of thinkers who disseminated it. The

constellation of thought and the network of its promulgation reveal a history of the spiritual

14 Poole,Earthrise, 1.


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revitalization of the West, one undertaken through rediscovering and appropriating the Wests

shared origins with the East. The goal was to discover a way of being suitable to the age of

global technological modernity. I call the network the drive towards wholeness. I call the

constellation of thought the New Myth. Synchronous with and in reaction to the planetary spread

of technology and the global experiential horizons such technology discloses, a New Myth

emerged in various domains in the West that was characterized above all by a spatiotemporal

emphasis on the Here and Now and the realization of unity through the recognition and

transcendence of polarity. These efforts culminated in a convergence of developments during the

late 1960s that have informed and enabled many key developments in world history since, most

notably the rise of environmentalism, personal computing and the Internet.

A theologian by training and a professor of comparative religions by vocation,

Spiegelberg was in a sense an ideal albeit typical scholar, occupying a stable post at Stanford

University for three decades with the odd publication here and there before retiring to a quiet lifein his bay front apartment overlooking Ghirardelli Square.

But Spiegelberg was anything but conventional. His interests ranged far and wide and

East and West. As well versed in Greek and Latin as he was in Sanskrit, Spiegelberg

administered Rorschach tests to Indian yogis, dabbled in the dark and disreputable arts of

alchemy and gnosticism, and exalted heresy and iconoclasm as paths to salvation. He possessed

the largest collection of Tibetan ghost traps in the West, and grew convinced that an earlier

encounter with the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo infused him with a divine energy he could

summon and transmit in lectures. Spiegelberg warned his followers he was not a prophet, yet

made prophecies nevertheless. He spoke of vast changes in store for the world, and believed his

endeavors were to play a key part.

And he was right.

Spiegelberg stood knee-deep in the currents of East and West at the crucial moment of

their confluence. His actions and ideas were pivotal in transmitting the New Myth to the West, a

mode of Being that could embrace and transcend warfare, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and

the global spread of technology. His story tells of three overcomings; the first is an overcoming

of the spiritual crisis of Interwar Europe symbolized by world war; the second is an overcoming

of the mechanized outlook of postwar cold war American society symbolized by the mushroomcloud; the third is an overcoming of the widespread belief that technology was an antagonistic

force in the aim of global unity, symbolized by the whole earth.

The trajectory of the drive towards wholeness in brief:

World War (Part I). Disillusioned intellectuals in war-ravaged Europe forsook the

dominant rational approaches of the Western tradition after the collapse of the liberal ideal.

They revived ancient debates long-thought settled through countenancing the heretical


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understandings of God as expressed in gnosticism, pantheism, and alchemy, Greek

understandings of man and nature as expressed by the presocratics, and Eastern understandings

of the divine as expressed in Daoism, Zen Buddhism, and Indian yoga. This cross-cultural

pollination yielded much fruit, such as the understanding of Being developed by Martin

Heidegger that subsequently informed the philosophical trends of existentialism and

postmodernism, and C.G. Jungs theories on myth, symbols, and archetypes that informed

psychoanalysis and the burgeoning field of comparative religions.

Mushroom Cloud (Part II). World War II forced many of these European thinkers to

become refugees and flee to the United States with little but their ideas. But ideas were enough,

as New York and San Francisco emerged as postwar hubs of transmission where the unique

cross-cultural thinking engaged in during the interwar period could remain pursued. The center

quickly shifted West, however, as the postwar Beat generation came of age. Inheritors after two

world wars of a mechanized society defined largely by the threat of nuclear annihilation, theBeats were as disillusioned as their interwar counterparts, and their migratory journeys on the

road across America appear to confirm Heideggers sentiments on the spiritual homelessness of

man in the modern age. They eventually found a way, however, in the methods of the East (Zen

Buddhism and Indian yoga) disseminated by teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area through

learning centers such as Stanford University and the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Though the Academy of Asian Studies was short lived, its legacy continued as the cluster of

writers, artists, philosophers and poets that gathered there in the early 1950s continued to meet at

institutes they themselves created in the tradition of this cross-cultural transmission, such as the

Esalen Institute founded in 1961, the California Institute of Asian Studies founded in 1968, and

the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, founded in 1975.

Whole Earth (Part III). The disillusionment that marked the earlier Beats gave way in

the late 1950s and early 1960s to a utopic optimism informed by the interwar-postwar

combination of Zen Buddhism, Indian yoga, western psychology and alchemy. Once the early

1960s were underway and psychedelics entered the scene, a noticeable shift occurred in these

thinkers attitudes towards technology. Technology has produced a chemical, wrote Allen

Ginsberg at the time, which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilization leading

up to that pill absurd.

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The technology against which they rebelled, long seen as a harbinger ofdoom and responsible for the mechanized postwar American society, was now viewed as a

potential tool for liberation. Now countenancing ideas on technologys potential, the thinkers of

the drive towards wholeness latched on to the insights of cybernetics theory. Emerging out of

15 Peter Conners, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (SanFrancisco: City Lights, 2010).


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breath, by the sound of my own voice and the movement of my own fingers the moment that I

touch this bewildering, surprising, unexplainable, perfectly miraculous reality itself as an

astounding mystery,thatis the miracle of being.17

He brought this understanding of being and the spiritual experience that informed it with

him to the German Academy. He arrived there at a unique time in modern European history.

The war eroded faith in the liberal idealan ideal that was supposed to deliver modern man

from the dark ages and religious superstitions with its vaunting of the liberal trappings of the rule

of law, a constitution, individual liberties, property rights, and a market society. Yet here we

were, having marched headlong down the long bloody path from the French revolution in 1793

to the upheavals of 1848 to the aftermath of the bloodiest moment in human history. If this was

the path to Enlightenment, it appeared as if the final nirvanic insight would all but confirm

Hobbes eternal words spoken three centuries earlier inLeviathan that, rather than promises of

life, liberty and property, mans lot was a life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.The result was crisis. The liberal project, writes Benjamin Lazier in a study on

theology in Interwar Europe (2007) had derived much of its impetus from a confidence in the

capacity for human progress, and could not help but falter as the trust proved folly. The war in

particular dealt a deathblow to a faith in the progressive moral perfection of man, and in its wake

came a post-liberal ethos more at home in crisis than in calm. 18 In theological circles this ethos

manifested as crisis theology. Age-old debates about man, god and world were revived as many

of Europes greatest thinkers broached the crisis of the West through resurrecting the heretical

traditions of gnosticism and pantheism to ask whether and why God had forsaken them.

Spiegelberg saw it differently. God had not forsaken us, we in our abstract rationalizing

had simply forgotten that he was as near to us as the present moment. It is, Spiegelberg later

wrote, the instantaneous experience of the Being of Being in all its transcendence in and as this

most immediate Here and Now.19 Through identifying with the fundamental aspect of Being

rather than our constricted ego, we experience a world transformed.

The problem, then, was to develop modes of thought that reacquainted us with this

fundamental component of our experience since forgotten in the modern age. In a set of notes

from this period titledEx Oriente Lux, Spiegelberg ruminates on whether the East can provide

the ground for a spiritual revitalization of the West. Today, he writes, we realize [the divine

17 Frederic Spiegelberg, The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (London: George Allen, 1960), 53.

18 Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), 5.

19 Frederic Spiegelberg,Zen, Rocks, Waters (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 22.


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reality] has to come from within and beyond. Yet maybe the direction from where to get the

stimulation could still be East.20

These first inklings of East-West synthesis led Spiegelberg to taking full advantage of the

German academys offerings on windows to the East that at the time were rather extensive. He

took courses on Indology, theBhagavad Gita, Sanskrit, Islam, Zen Buddhism, and the mentality

of Modern Japan. Yet Spiegelberg recognized that one could not turn Eastward and assimilate

its beliefs and practices wholesale, and so he found in his Western teachers similar attempts to

discuss the fundamental experience of being, here and now, that he experienced in the wheat

fields.

Martin Heideggers thought would ultimately prove the most influential for Spiegelberg,

though more so in later years than in Marburg.21 In Heidegger he found a true revolutionary, a

thinker whose ideas on being (Dasein) and the here and now (hic et nunc) resonated deeply with

Spiegelbergs own experience and were unlike anything he had ever read by a Westernphilosopher. He immediately drew connections between Heideggers insights and those of the

East, despite Heideggers apparent fidelity to his Greek and German intellectual heritage. It was

too obvious, to too many of his students, Spiegelberg later put it, that a certain amount of

parallels were there.22

Spiegelberg started teaching at Dresden in 1927, and it was there that he met Carl Jung.

Through Jungs pioneering work on myth, symbols, and the relationship between self and world,

Spiegelberg found an interpretive model for comparative religions far surpassing contemporary

approaches. Jung determined through his confrontations with the unconscious that the

experiences disclosed to him were not random permutations of neurosis rooted in sexual trauma

as his teacher Freud proposed, but rather transmitted symbols from the unconscious to the

conscious mind. These symbols pointed to the perennial experience of mans attempts to

20 Undated Notebook in the Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0638), Department of Special Collections and

University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.

21 Spiegelberg in a 1976 interview: There are so many teachers who became friends and from whom I,knowingly or non-knowingly, derived much of my own thought that I will only mention still in the strict line

of philosophy the most influential man. That was Martin Heidegger. Not as a lecturer, nor in personal contact,

which I enjoyed in Marburg for years, but through his books. And even more so through his books which hewrote in times when I no longer knew him and met with him. In America I think I have read every line that

Martin Heidegger has ever written in his life. I made it a point to search for every article that he published orthat was published about him. And no other philosopher or philosophy professor seemed to me so

immediately related to my own search for the essential answer to the ultimate questions of existence. This hasbeen my interest, I might almost say my main interest throughout my life. Mukunda Mukowsky,

Conversation with our Philosopher President in California Institute of Integral Studies Newsletter (June1976), 1.

22 Frederic Spiegelberg, The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, 51.


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balance the complementary facets of consciousness and unconsciousness. The recognition,

acknowledgement and control of the unconscious by the conscious is called by Jung the process

of individuation, the process by which a person becomes a psychological in-dividual, that is, a

separate, indivisible unity or whole, the process of coming to selfhood.23

The purpose of myth has always been to tell this story of individuation. That is, Jung

found that the symbols expressed in his personal experiments and in the dreams and psychoses of

his patients shared striking parallels with the myths of myriad spiritual traditions, past and

present. He concluded that the symbols disclosed an archetype a symbol of the unity of

conscious and unconscious and a link between the individual and the cosmos of which he is

part.24 A Tibetan mandala, for example, is an archetypal symbol signifying the wholeness of

the individuated self as a microcosm of the macrocosm of which the self is part.

The two outlooks of Jung and Heidegger informed Spiegelbergs seminal intellectual

contribution, the Religion of No Religion. He first published the Religion of No Religion as alecture in 1938 at the London Buddhist lodge. Spiegelberg was a refugee at the time, having fled

Nazi Germany in 1937 after being dismissed from Dresden for going to a conference banned by

the Nazis. While in London, he serendipitously wandered into the only Zen Buddhist specialist

in England, a brilliant 21-year old named Alan Watts (1915-1973). Watts would go on to

become the principal popularizer of Zen Buddhism to American audiences in the 1950s and 60s,

as well as the central teacher of Zen to the Beats, but that comes later. For now he was simply a

prodigy hanging around the London Buddhist Lodge. He had already written a book on D.T.

Suzukis interpretations on Zen Buddhism, and Spiegelberg found him an almost superhuman

being, a young lad with eyes of an angel.25

Spiegelberg begins the Religion of No Religion by asserting that the spiritual experience

of Being Here and Now is the ground for the forms, symbols and rituals of religions to emerge.

These symbols, if they are to be successful, must point to that fundamental experience of the

miracle of being as well as to the unity of man and cosmos. Inevitably, the time will come when

these symbols become meaningless because they fail to adequately convey the experience to

which they point. What results is an iconoclastic reaction in which the symbols are thrown off as

illegitimate, because they do not accurately express the miracle of being. But the cycle is ever to

repeat itself. Indeed, it is the repetition of this cycle of the change and renewal of the miracle ofbeing that is the history of religions.

23 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (La Salle: Open Court, 1975), 206.

24 Ibid., 207.

25 Letter to Rosali Spiegelberg, Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0631).


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The process begins with the astonishmentor miracle of being, in which the individual

realizes that God or Being is in all and everything. Following the astonishment is a feeling of

pantheistic mysticism, which means here that the limits between the ego and its opposites, such

as the cosmos or God, are wiped out, and one all-combining feeling of community spreads over

the entire universe.26 All symbols of God must be abolished, for they can only mean a

separation from him. This pantheistic moment results in apsychological inversion where that

which stands before man becomes an inner reality of what Spiegelberg calls the all penetrating

holiness. Inevitably, the process repeats itself, as the astonishment of being always culminates

in new attempts to reify it through names and symbols: The paradox of a religion of no-religion

is produced by the fact that the human mind cannot grasp and realize any feeling or fact without

giving it a name.27

The Religion of No-Religion was the fruit borne by Spiegelbergs experience as a refugee,

of being forced down to the barest essentials, of holding on to only that which is whollynecessary for survival. It was at once a dialectical theology,28 a mode of being-in-the-world, and

an explanatory tool for the historical trajectory of religious traditions.

Spiegelberg saw it more as a passport, a belief of universal currency necessary for safe

passage through the coming turbulent Atomic age an age, he feared, where many would

wander futilely in search of home amidst the ruins of the worlds spiritual traditions as visions of

mushroom clouds dotted the skies and obscured the divine light. We are rapidly moving away

from traditions and former ways of life that, in a few years, will be no more than distant

memories, he wrote. The sudden developments of technology are changing our life beyond

recognition. We are passing into an era of unknown experiences, call it the atomic age, or what

you will. All that we can carry with us from the past is essential, the things without which men

cannot live. And to cross the border safely, we will need some sort of passport that all men will

recognize, some belief that has a universal currency. 29

And so Spiegelberg made his way to America, bouncing around on the East Coast for a

few years before winding up at Stanford University in 1941. He carried little with him but his

own ideas. But as we shall soon see, that was more than enough.

26 Spiegelberg, The Religion of No-Religion, 22.

27 Ibid., 55.

28 Dialectical theology is a theological approach based in Protestantism that covers a range of orientations. The

transcendence and revelation of God is typically emphasized, as it was by Spiegelbergs teacher and the best-known crisis theologian, Karl Barth. As we shall see, Spiegelbergs understandings of Barth, as well as that

of his other teacher and good friend, the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, both typify and confound thegeneral distinctions of dialectical theology.

29 Frederic Spiegelberg,Living Religions of the World(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1956), 18-19.


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Part II. Mushroom Cloud (1945-1958)

O, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? And what did you see, my darling young

one? In 1952 an eight-year old American child named Frederick Moore, Jr. witnessed what

countless of his generation coming of age in the postwar West only imagined: the aftermath ofthe mushroom cloud. Moores family lived in Tokyo, his father stationed there as part of the

occupation force. The young Moore saw the ravages of radiation sickness in children and dogs

that wandered like walking dead in the nuclear-charred ruins of former cities. 30 For Moore, the

experience informed a pacifism so strong that he would single-handedly change the world time

and time again throughout his life through the sheer force of his conviction.

Yet hardly anyone knows his name. He remains the unsung hero of the antiwar protests

of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution we still a part of today. In 1959 he attended

Berkeley but refused to partake in the mandatory ROTC program. Given the ultimatum that he

could either take the class or leave the school, the young Fred Moore set the standard for antiwar

protest on college campuses by setting up a table outside of Sproul Hall and declaring that he

was going on a seven-day fast to protest mandatory ROTC. A letter Moore wrote at the time to

the US Attorney General, William P. Moore, encapsulates his anti-war beliefs:

Dear Sir:

This letter is to inform you that I, Frederick Lawrence Moore, Jr., will not register for the draft.Due to my religious beliefs I cannot comply with any law that opposes them.

I follow a Higher Law. A law called LOVE.

I am opposed to war, and I will not participate in killing, whether directly or indirectly. I willneither serve, nor support, any organization or action in which I do not believe.

My services are to all mankind.

Sincerely,

Frederick L. Moore, Jr.31

A hard rains gonna fall means somethings gonna happen, said Bob Dylan in 1963.

Frederick L. Moore made sure of that.

***

At Stanford Spiegelberg grew entranced by the writings of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian

freedom fighter and saint whose philosophy is known as integral yoga.32 He traveled in India in

30 John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said(New York: Penguin, 2005), 61.

31 Ibid., 62-3.

32 An integral vision of reality implies two things: first, immediate contact with the inmost nature of existencein its manifold richness of content; second, an integration of such different provinces of experience as commonsense, science, art, morality, religion, and the like, in the light of ones immediate insight into the heart of


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1949 on a Rockefeller Grant where he received darshan from Sri Aurobindo.33 Upon his return,

he founded the American Academy of Asian Studies, a center of cross-cultural dissemination the

likes of which had never been seen before. There was at that time not yet any competition in the

way of live Asian studies in America, not even in the Bay Area, reflected Spiegelberg in a 1976

interview. We did not have at that time any ashrams or Zen monasteries, of which we have so

many today.34

Indeed, in an article for theNew York Times (written in 1950, the year before the

Academys founding) reviewing D.T. SuzukisEssays in Zen Buddhism, Gerald Heard (1889-

1971) reacts positively to the work and the promise of Zen Buddhism for American society, yet

notes the unsuccessful reception the Eastern faiths typically elicit out of American audiences.

He attributes the lukewarm response, not pejoratively I might add, to the West having outgrown

its medieval regard for contemplation as a high or even respectable vocation.35

Heard, the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, studied history and theology at Cambridgeand was later a science commentator for the BBC. He forged a lifelong friendship in England

with Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), and emigrated with him to Hollywood, California in 1937.

Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy based on the Upanishads that stresses

the divinity of human nature and experience. Huxley, like Heard, would become a Vedanta

initiate.36

In the article, Heard singles out the Eastern interpretations offered by Alan Watts, now a

36 year-old Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern, as having roused little more than a faint

realityIt is important to note that, according to Sri Aurobindo, a true harmonization of the totality of humanexperience is not possible through mere criticism of the categories of common sense and science, or throughlogico-empirical analysis of different types of human judgment, or through conceptual formulation of one-

sided spiritual experience. Such harmonization can adequately be achieved only on the basis of integralspiritual realization, which means immediate experience of reality in its fullness of content and rich diversity

of aspect. Haridas Chaudhuri, The Integralism of Sri Aurobindo in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 3, No. 2

(Jul., 1953), 131-2.

33 Kripal defines darshan as a kind of sacramental seeing in which the essence of the god or guru istransmitted into the viewer through the mystical medium of sight. Jeffrey J. Kripal,Esalen: America and the

Religion of No-Religion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 55.

34 Mukowsky, 5.

35

Gerald Heard, On Learning From Buddha in The New York Times, 4 June 1950.36 Shortly after his initiation into Vedanta, Huxley released the Perennial Philosophy (1945), which he defined

as: the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; thepsychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that

places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing isimmemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of

primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one ofthe higher religions.36 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1945), vii.


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esthetic curiosity.37 Watts left Europe in 1938 not long after Spiegelberg and went to New York

to study Zen. Dissatisfied with his Zen teacher yet still committed to spiritual pursuits, Watts

decided to enter the priesthood in 1945 and moved to Evanston, Illinois. And in the priesthood

he may well have stayed had not a fortuitous string of events taken place in short succession in

1950. The first was an extramarital affair; the second, his young wife annulling their marriage;

the third, getting kicked out of the ministry; the last, a letter he received from Frederic

Spiegelberg. Spiegelberg was starting a graduate institute to open in 1951 geared towards a

wide-scale spiritual transformation of the consciousness of the West through the teachings of

psychology, Zen Buddhism, and the integral ideas of Sri Aurobindo. Would he like to join him

in San Francisco?

How convenient.

Happily, Alan Watts replied, Circumstances are so arranged at present that I could

come out to San Francisco this winter.Spiegelberg then set about calling a first-rate man from Aurobindos ashram to join

him and spread Aurobindos message to the West. After some correspondence, the Bengali

integral philosopher Haridas Chaudhuri was recommended, who at the time was the head of the

Philosophy Department at Krishnagar College in Bengal. The question was brought to Sri

Aurobindo himself, Spiegelberg recalled. He approved of Chaudhuris coming with us with

the word Acha (Of course!).38

Two months later, in December of 1950, Sri Aurobindo died. In his letter asking for

Chaudhuri to join him at the Academy, Spiegelberg wrote that Aurobindo is the guiding light of

this earth and the prophet of our age. I believe that the last most important contribution that Sri

Aurobindo made before passing was to send you here.39

And just like that, the man who would become the most popular Western interpreter of

Zen Buddhism (in Watts) and Sri Aurobindos vision (through Chaudhuri) were brought to San

Francisco. And here Watts and Chaudhuri would remain until their deaths in 1973 and 1975,

respectively.

The Academy was a brazen attempt to expand the consciousness of the West so that the

world did not end in a nuclear holocaust. Indeed, there were no illusions among these early

teachers of the true purpose of the Academy. Here, the mission statement from the initialbrochure announcing the program:

37 Ibid.

38 David Ulansey, The American Academy of Asian Studies: A History, California Institute of IntegralStudies Archives, CIIS Library, San Francisco, Calif., 4.

39 Ibid.


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The development of human consciousness has called at many times during history for a specialeffort of men to realize and bring down to earth the visions of their spiritual leaders. Today weare well aware of the necessity of unified mankind. To help the growth of this coming reality isthe object of numberless associations who thus fight on all sides the forces of darkness andretrogression. It is the conviction of the founders of this Institute that a merging of the highestvalues of Western and Eastern civilizations will establish the decisive foundation for the next

upward movement of the evolving human mind and society.40

The institute had all the expected struggles, namely, difficulties in acquiring funding and

credibility. Clearly, recalled Watts in 1971, we were just another California cult trying to

assume the mask of a respectable educational institution. But then only twenty years ago it

was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to

human beings with the normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable.

Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be

corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of

common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat.This was very largely the subject of discussion at the weekly colloquium of the Academys

faculty, at which Spiegelberg was the invariably provocative moderator, and which became an

event increasingly attractive to San Francisco artists and intellectuals.41

The Academy functioned as a hub around which ideas on Being influenced by the East

and the Interwar scene were promulgated to the Beat Generation. Like their interwar

counterparts, the postwar Beats were disillusioned by the mechanized ideals of cold war

American society, the valueless abyss of modern life.42 After World War II, Allen Ginsberg

recalled, there was a definitive shrinkage of sensation, of sensory experience, and a definite

mechanical disorder of mentality that led to the cold war.the desensitization had begun, the

compartmentalization of the mind and heart, the cutting off of the head from the rest of the body,

the robotization of mentality.43 And like Frederic Spiegelberg, they were after the ragged

ecstatic joy of pure being,44 as they put it, in which existence itself was God. Through the

American academy of Asian studies, the Beats saw that the East could them provide paths to the

experiences they sought.

Heres Michael Murphy, a student of Spiegelbergs at Stanford and the Academy whose

life was changed by Spiegelbergs courses on Sri Aurobindo, on what the Academy was like in

the early days:

40 AAAS Program Announcement, Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0631).

41 Alan Watts,In My Own Way, (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 286-7.

42 John Clellon Holmes, This is the Beat Generation in The New York Times (16 November 1952), 10.

43 Conners, White Hand Society, 62.

44 Jack Kerouac, On the Road(New York: Viking, 1957), 195.


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You had to get there about an hour early to get into the room, and I remember that there were agroup of us then from down at Stanford. We used to have dinner at the La Fontere up here aboutfive in the afternoon, and there was this enormous excitement about coming in to the oldAcademy at First and Sansome Street down south, and then over on Broadway, to get there earlyenough to sit in on those first meetings. And the electricity then was really enormous. There weresome hundreds of students who started to gather around that Academy. In those early days there

were a number of poets who contributed later to the San Francisco Renaissance: Gary Snyderused to come to those colloquia, and occasionally Allen Ginsberg. Most people forget this, but aconsiderable amount of the inspiration for the poetry of the Beat Generation came right throughthat Academy of Asian Studies. Michael McClure and David Meltzer, Phil Whalen, Ginsberg andSnyder...I would say all of them either directly or indirectly were influenced by HaridasChaudhuri, Alan Watts and Frederic Spiegelberg, either directly or indirectly, and some of themwould be in the audiences of those early colloquia and in those classes.45

The institute collapsed by the mid 1950s but its progeny live on today. Michael Murphy

established the Esalen Institute in 1962 in the spirit of the American Academy, Spiegelbergs

Religion of No Religion, and Aldous Huxleys ideas on human potential; the California Institute

of Asian Studies was established by Spiegelbergs colleague Haridas Chaudhuri in 1968; and the

Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where Spiegelberg served on the Board of Advisers, was

founded by his colleagues and friends Robert Frager, Jim Fadiman and David J. Hall in 1975.

Assessing its legacy shortly before his death in 1973, Alan Watts wrote:

The American Academy of Asian Studies was one of the principal roots of what later came to beknown, in the early sixties, as the San Francisco Renaissance, of which one must say, like SaintAugustine when asked about the nature of time, "I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don't."I am too close to what has happened to see it in proper perspective. I know only that between, say,1958 and 1970 a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting,religion, communications techniques in radio, television, and cinema, dancing, theater, and

general life-style swept out of this city and its environs to affect America and the whole world.46

Spiegelberg maintained his post at Stanford for the short duration of the American Academy of

Asian Studies, where he could oscillate between the roles of guru and professor depending on the

situation. If an impressed student in one of his introductory courses to comparative religions at

Stanford stayed after class asking for more, Spiegelberg directed him or her to North Beach.

Such was the case in 1956 when a young student from his comparative religions class

approached him asking where he could find people who thought this way.

Oh, well youll find none of that in Stanford, Spiegelberg chuckled. When I want the

news, I dont look for it in the paper, he added. I go to the poets.What do you mean, the student asked.

North Beach, Spiegelberg said after a pause. Go to North Beach.

45 Ulansey, 6-7.

46 Watts,In My Own Way, 284.


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And with that, young Stewart Brand made his way to North Beach. And in a sense, he

never left.47

Part III. Whole Earth (1958-1975)

How to describe those strange things that happened in the decade we call the sixties? To

say nothing of the unprecedented global upheavals, wars, crises, movements, and protests, how

to describe the sequence of events that led to the technologies of the military industrial complex

merging with the ideas of the counterculture to give us computers and the internet? How to

describe the shift in the attitude towards the boogeyman of technology, long-seen as an

instrument of government control and worldwide uprooting and annihilation, now seen as a tool

of personal liberation and global unity? How do we account for the role of psychedelics incatalyzing this shift? How do we account for the fact that, for the thinkers of the drive towards

wholeness in the 1960s, technology, systems theory, integral yoga, zen Buddhism, and

psychedelic experiences all came to be seen as methods to bring about a consciousness of the

miracle of this, our being here and now?

A Liberation of Earth and Being Through Technology

In an essay based on a lecture given on 21 August 1958, Frederic Spiegelberg used the

example of the Beats to compare Martin Heideggers thought with Sri Aurobindos. Speaking

on the occasion of Sri Aurobindos 100th birthday, Spiegelbergs goal was to show that the ideas

of Aurobindo and Heidegger were compatible and manifested in the example of the Beat

Generation. Time was of the essence, for the Beatniks of North Beach, as Spiegelberg called

them, were no longer a secret now that Jack Kerouacs On the Road(written in two weeks in

April 1951 but left unpublished until 1957) was a mainstream cultural phenomenon. In the essay,

he groups Heidegger and the beatniks together by virtue of their shared central message: an

emphasis on the here and now and directly experiencing the present moment. Both Heidegger

and the Beats hold that the rational mind is overemphasized, and here Spiegelberg feels they

share the outlook of Vedanta and Aurobindo particularly.Spiegelberg also wanted to use the examples of Aurobindo and the Beats to broach

Heideggers new ideas on technology. Indeed, since the publication ofBeing and Time in 1927,

Heideggers writings took an increasingly mystical turn as he devoted more and more of his

attention to what he called the question concerning technology. As he had before, Spiegelberg

47 Email correspondence with Stewart Brand, 13 December 2010.


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drew attention to the zen-like quality of Heideggers message, yet also found in him a global

vision that strikingly called to mind Aurobindo. Heidegger had not yet been translated to

English, but Spiegelberg nevertheless engaged in a detailed exposition on the congruence of

thought between Aurobindo, Heidegger, and the Beats using his own translations of Heideggers

work.

In his essays in The Question Concerning Technology (1977), Heidegger mysteriously

speaks of a saving power in the essence of the danger of technology, and associates this saving

power with the coming to presence of a god. But where danger is, writes Heidegger quoting

the poet Holderlin, grows the saving power also.48 Only when we can reach the insight of how

technology enframes us, how technology challenges us forth to order the world as standing-

reserve, do we see how the truth of Being is hidden from us. 49 It is only once we can discern that

all mere willing and doing in the mode of ordering steadfastly persists in injurious neglect [of

Being] that we can give utterance to insight into that which is. When we give utterance intothat which is, it is the constellation of Being that is uttering itself to us.50

Will we understand this insight, asks Heidegger. Will we, he asks, correspond to that

insight, through a looking that looks into the essence of technology and becomes aware of Being

itself within it?51

Esoteric remarks, to be sure. Spiegelberg understood Heideggers ideas on the saving

power as countenancing technology as a tool to achieve Beings task of liberating earth. In this

Heidegger strongly echoes Aurobindos ideas on global unity. Comparing the two, Spiegelberg

believes they both share the same understanding ofDasein (being-there). Spiegelberg feels

translating this term to Being in English is inaccurate. It is, rather, the be-power itself.52 In

Aurobindos schema, the equivalent term would be satrather than bhava. It is the essence and

key word of Heideggers existentialism, Spiegelberg writes. Everything is Sein. And there

cannot be anything that is not ultimately a part of that all-comprising Beingness. Even becoming

is an expression of Being. This statement can be found in Aurobindo.53 The limited personal

subjectivity of the ego veils man from understanding the divine as Aurobindos gnostic being,

which is none other than the god Heidegger speaks of. As such, the worlds spiritual traditions

have declined and the miracle of being is forgotten because of mans rationality. Whether the

48 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 28.

49 Ibid., 48.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 49.

52 Spiegelberg, Sri Aurobindo and Existentialism in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, 53.

53 Ibid., 53


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god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men and even less by the

theological aspirations of philosophy and natural science, writes Heidegger. Whether or not

God is God comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being.54

For both Heidegger and Aurobindo, writes Spiegelberg, there is only one hope. Here,

they both quote Nietzsches idea of the Superman. When it comes to testify to a mentality that

is greater than the degenerated mentality in which we find ourselves as a whole in this century,

superman is called for, and to characterize him we must say he will have true existentialist

mentality, which looks for the direct experience rather than for the taming of reality by our

mentality. This superman will have to be more daring than any man who ever walked. And

therefore, because he is more daring, he will be able to say more.55

For too long we have cried for individual salvation, thinking only of ourselves in the

constricted terms of our egos, when our task has been otherwise. What is the task then, if it is

not man? asks Spiegelberg. Aurobindo and Heidegger have the same answer: the earth. Forboth Heidegger and Aurobindo, Earth needs man to liberate her, maybe even Being itself.

Dasein needs man.56

Heidegger and Aurobindo agree that because all is sein, because all is sat-chit-ananda,

nothing is to be thrown out or rejected. Everything has meaning as expressions ofDasein.

Spiegelberg then draws a link between the Vedanta understanding of the divine play of Brahman,

lila, where the divine plays hide and seek by searching and finding itself through us (coming to

consciousness of itself), with Heideggers notions that Dasein Being itself comes to self

consciousness in our own longing.57

We do not need to escape technology to achieve Beings task of liberating earth,

Spiegelberg says of Heidegger.

The world of science and technique does not at all preclude a jump beyond itself, says Heidegger.We do not have to get away from civilization, to do away with all our gadgets and with the all-too-fast progress of technique and science. Rather, the more you go into science, the more youtalk to the great men of science, the more you meet an awareness of the mystery, the more itbecomes possible to take science itself as a jumping board. It does not any more today seem thatscience would drive us away from the opening of the greater gates toward higher realization.Aurobindo in his Savitri has said that many times. He agrees completely with the existentialistmessage as Heidegger presents it.58

54 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 49.

55 Spiegelberg, 54.

56 Ibid., 55.

57 Ibid., 58.

58 Ibid., 58-9.


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In the essay, Spiegelberg provides his own translation of Heideggers quote of the poet

Holderlin concerning Beings task of liberating earth:

Earth. It not this what you long for?

To be resurrected invisibly in us.

Is it not your dream one day to become invisible?

Earth invisible.

What, if not transformation

Would be your urgent task?

Earth O Beloved One,

I will.59

The Iconoclasm of Stewart Brand

Like Spiegelbergs teacher Martin Heidegger, Stewart Brand remains keen on asserting

that hes not a religious man. Spiegelbergs course was Brands first exposure to Eastern idea

systems. He cured me of religion, Brand said later.

In looking at Brands notes from his course with Frederic Spiegelberg, he appears most

struck by the paradox of unity within polarity and the various means to express that paradox,

such as the symbol of the mandala and the Daoist/Buddhist notions yin and yang, and dao. He

quotes extensively from Carl Jung and Richard Wilhelms Secret of the Golden Flower (1931).

The boxed exclamation points after the quoted passages appear to register the shock of influence.The trajectory of his later life and projects confirms it. This initial encounter with Eastern

thought brought about by Spiegelberg provided Brand with the blueprint of a constellation of

thought whose claims of a divine unity of immanence and transcendence he would confirm

experientially through the use of psychedelic drugs and encode scientifically through systems

theory and cybernetics.

A noteworthy quote speaks of Jungs notion of outgrowing, whereby an individual may

outgrow an insoluble problem through raisingthe level of consciousness. From a wide view,

the insoluble problem lose[es] its urgency.60 For Jung, [t]he greatest and most important

problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, because they express the

59 Ibid., 55.

60 Journal entry (9 December 1957), Papers of Stewart Brand (M1237), Department of Special Collections andUniversity Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.


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necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only

outgrown.61

Brand would seize upon this notion of the polarity inherent in every self-regulating

system. Though here applied to the individual, the idea applies in the Golden Flower to the

cosmos at large:

[The philosophy ofThe Secret of the Golden Flower] is built on the premise that the cosmos andman, in the last analysis, obey the same law; that man is a microcosm and is not separated fromthe macrocosm by any fixed barriers. The very same laws rule for the one as for the other, andfrom the one a way leads into the other. The psyche and the cosmos are to each other like theinner world and the outer world. Therefore man participates by nature in all cosmic events, and isinwardly as well as outwardly interwoven with them.62

Hence, the polarity inherent in the self-regulating system of man the individual is the same as

that of the self-regulating system of the world at large. If this sounds familiar, its because its a

hallmark insight of cybernetics and systems theorythe very approach Brand would later vaunt

in his Whole Earth Catalog. Here the cybernetic insight is expressed almost verbatim, but in a

spiritual context. This spiritual expression of the polarity in every self-regulating system stands

as Brands earliest known exposure to systems theory.63

After Stanford, Brand spent two years as a parachutist in the army. In December of 1962

he signed up for an LSD session, his first psychedelic experience, with the International

61 Ibid.

62 Richard Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower (Abingdon: Routledge, 1931), 11.

63 A word on the history of this field is in order. In the early 20th century, the sciences came to grapple with the

breakthroughs in quantum mechanics that tore asunder the Classical Newtonian paradigm of physicalprocesses. From out of the wreckage emerged the field of thermodynamics unscathed, and with it the

principles that gave birth to the whole system models of the ecosystem and biosphere. The whole systemmodel eschews the traditional boundaries between organic and inorganic entities by centering them within the

supraentity of the system, of which they are mutually formative. According to this line of thought, theres nodistinction between organism and artifice because both are self-organized and self-regulating, reflecting a

certain systemic wholeness. Out of whole systems theory emerged cybernetics in the postwar era, and throughits study of information, communication, and feedback reframed the ecosystem conceptual tool in techno-

scientific terms. By focusing on behavior rather than structure, cybernetics founder Norbert Weiner placedorganisms and self-directed machines in the same order on the basis of the purposeful behavior that both

share.63 Weiner saw in information feedback the mechanism by which entities fight entropy. Systems use

information feedback to maintain dynamic equilibrium, or homeostasis. Cybernetics demonstrated thepotential for systems to go awry by way of positive feedback loops. The techno-scientific discourse of

cybernetics reframed the debates of various fields in terms of information feedback. In the sciences,cybernetics met with ecosystem theory and redefined organisms as self-regulating machines. When applied to

social systems, we begin to see the far-reaching implications of positive feedback: unless variables withinsystems respond to one another through communication, feedback, and circular causality within the set limits,

system failure may result in the form of, say, an escalating nuclear arms race. See William Harold Bryant,Whole System, Whole Earth (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2006), 59.


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Federation of Advanced Study, an organization with ties to the Stanford Research Institute and

Douglas Engelbarts Augmentation Research Center. SRI and its wing the ARC transitioned over

the 1950s and 60s from nodes of defense oriented military technology sponsored by the Defense

Departments Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) into centers of cybernetic

exploration of networking and communications. Human-machine collaboration became a vision

that would eventually yield the Internet and personal computer. Voices in the community like

Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, and Joseph C.R. Licklider saw a future of unprecedented possibility.

Heres Fred Turner:

Licklider, like Bush and Engelbart, envisioned the computer becoming a communications device;along with the user and as part of a whole information system, it might, properly deployed, be ofuse to humanity as a whole. Man-computer symbiosis, he suggested, should produceintellectually the most creative and exciting [period] in the history of mankind.64

Engelbart, for his part, saw the individual and the computer, like the group and the computer

system, as complementary elements in a larger information systema system that would use

cybernetic processes of communication and control to facilitate not only better office

communication, but even the evolution of human beings.65

Brand and Spiegelberg each collaborated with SRI and ARC separately over the course

of the 1960s to participate in bringing about this vision. Spiegelbergs friendship with Stanford

psychologist Jim Fadiman and SRI Research Engineer David J. Hall led to consulting

opportunities and eventually to Spiegelberg serving on the Board of Advisors for their Institute

of Transpersonal Psychology in the 1970s. Brand, for his part, hung out often with the

community, and was videographer for Douglas Engelbarts infamous Mother of All Demosevent in 1968 that showed off the framework of tools that would one day become the personal

computer.

But that comes later. The man in charge of administering LSD to Brand in December of

1962 was Jim Fadiman, a Stanford psychologist and friend and colleague of Spiegelbergs who

later worked at ARC with Engelbart as the division explored networked computing.66 Fadiman

would remain a lifelong proponent of psychedelic use. His first experience came when his

former undergraduate advisor at Harvard, none other than Dr. Richard Alpert, dosed him as

Alpert, Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley were on their way to a Copenhagen conference to

64 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 109.

65 Ibid., 108.

66 Ibid., 61.


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projects in the 1950s like the CIAs MK-ULTRA program (which saw LSD as a potential

weapon for mind control in the Cold War), the development of the Stanford Research Institute as

a military think tank, and the advent of cybernetics as a means of bolstering defense-oriented

military technologies. But where the danger is, grows the saving power also. Somehow, in the

apotheosis of the cold war attempt to control came the primal cry to be free. The technology

driving the cold war ever onward to increasing mechanization was the very technology that led

the way out. LSD, cybernetic systems theory, and the technologies that became the Internet and

personal computer were embraced as tools for global and personal integration and unity. Will

we see the lightning-flash of Being in the essence of technology, asked Heidegger. Will we

correspond to that insight, through a looking that looks into the essence of technology and

becomes aware of Being itself within it?

After his first psychedelic experience, Brand immersed himself in techno-mystical San

Francisco communities like USCO and Ken Keseys Merry Pranksters. Kesey was a subject inthe MK-ULTRA experiments in 1961 and was dosed with LSD, psilocybin, and IT-290. He

liked what he saw, procured a stash for himself and his buddies, and started a burgeoning Bay

Area artistic scene frequented by the likes of Richard Alpert, Jerry Garcia, and Page Browning.71

This eventually transformed into the Merry Pranksters, and Brand soon wrote Kesey and became

a key member.

The Merry Pranksters famed journey across America in a psychedelic bus in 1964

captures the celebratory albeit nave techno-utopic psychedelic optimism of the period well. It

also symbolized a transition, a passing of the torch from the Beat Generation towell, to

whatever these folks imagined themselves to be. Jack Kerouac, the so-called King of the

Beatniks, would have none of it when Ken Kesey and the rowdy bunch of Pranksters finally

made it to New York and showed up to a Madison Avenue apartment party in November 1964.

His best friend, and the hero On the Road, Neal Cassady, served as the Pranksters bus driver on

their journey further as they careened ever-precariously around the corners of too far. This

would be the last time the two would see one another. Cassady fully embraced the Prankster

way, as did Allen Ginsberg, who also showed up that night. Most at the party were looking for

an endorsement, tacit or otherwise, from Kerouac that the Pranksters marked the natural

evolution of the Beats.

72

But Kerouac said no. He spent the evening on a couch, getting increasingly drunk and

repeatedly denying the proffered acid tabs. By now he was a broken man, his good looks (Dali

71 Ibid., 61.

72 David Sandison,Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography (Chicago: Octopus Publishing Group, 1999) 149-50.


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once called him the most beautiful man he had ever seen) ruined by the ravages of an alcoholism

so severe it would soon claim his life five years later at 47 when the blood that started pouring

from his mouth simply would not stop, even after 26 transfusions. No, Kerouac did not intend to

start this revolution. And he would not endorse it now.

Two years earlier Ginsberg had finally convinced Kerouac to try LSD with Timothy

Leary. Leary and Ginsberg were on a quest to turn on as many creative people as possible.

Kerouac, as a Beat Buddhist Catholic and one of his generations most talented writers, was the

holy grail. Dr. Leary, on acid as well for his psychedelic session with Kerouac, must have been

surprised when he started having his first bad trip. Perhaps up to that point he did not think such

a thing was possible. But Kerouac proved to him undeniably that it was. He stood up and

shouted at Leary (who was also raised a Catholic): Can your drugs absolve the mortal and

venial sins which our beloved savior, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, came down and

sacrificed his life upon the cross to wash away!? Leary was spooked. Later, Ginsberg askedKerouac about his trip. Walking on water wasnt made in a day, he replied. As David

Sandison notes, that response encapsulates Jacks later open distaste of the hippie movement

and its lazy assumption (largely inspired by the pronouncements of Leary and his acolytes) that

enlightenment could be achieved overnight through chemicals.73

It was advice the counterculture would have done well to heed. The cluster of thinkers

comprising the drive towards wholeness eventually realized that psychedelics did not provide

ersatz enlightenment so much as a temporary one. What goes up, must come down and

sometimes very hard. The cognitive framework of the ego, transcended through the psychedelic

experience, always seemed to return once the trip ended. If the disparity between ones every-

day experience of reality through the ego versus ones experience of reality on psychedelics was

too great, the reintegration post-psychedelic session could be bumpy. Some never reintegrated at

all. But by the time these beatnik psychonauts realized that, to quote Alan Watts, one should

hang up the phone once the message is received, it was too late. The demon scourge of LSD was

already loosed upon the American culture, brought about in no small part by the efforts of the

thinkers of the drive towards wholeness.

For his part, Brand remained optimistic that coupled with the right reintegrative

frameworks, psychedelics offered much promise, and at the very least yielded interestingprojects. Over the 1960s he would become a central node on the drive towards wholeness as he

coordinated projects between the technological, academic, and spiritual wings of the

counterculture. He interfaced perfectly with Beats and Hippies, scientists and mystics. His

projects during this period include the America Needs Indians Campaign and the Trips Festival.

73 Ibid., 148.


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And then, in March 1966, on a North Beach rooftop, Brand received his vision.

***

We do not know if Frederic Spiegelberg ever tripped. He cannot claim, like his friend

Alan Watts, essays on the congruence between contemporary psychedelic use and ancient

alchemy, or between the insights of LSD and cybernetics. But Spiegelberg participated in this

burgeoning techno-utopic cyberdelic scene in his own way, making his unique contributions to

Beings need of man to liberate earth through technology.

Perhaps the most interesting is a project he collaborated on with the Stanford Research

Institute in 1969. Titled Computer Processing and Bibliography of Literature Related to

Voluntary Improvement of Individual Performance (1969), the project had as its aim the

production of a global network of research information exchange concerning literature on yoga,

meditation, physiological feedback training, altered states of consciousness, and other

subjects related to voluntary improvement of individual performance.

74

As a consultant to theproject along with Haridas Chaudhuri, Spiegelberg was tasked with providing direction in

assessing a literature that was global, ancient, immense and poorly classified. The idea was to

use the latest technologies of SRI and SRIs Augmentation Research Center both to create and

catalogue the information service as well as to perform a series of experiments relating to that

literature. SRI had just become one of the first four nodes on ARPANET, the network that

became the Internet.

Why yoga and meditation? A few reasons. The first was, simply, to catalyze a mode of

being suitable to the modern technological age, one that could lead to the voluntary

improvement of individual performance. Here, from the research proposal:

Improvement of human performance has for some time been one of the prime aims of ourtechnology. This has been achieved, in our society, largely by providing the human withsignificant tools and automation procedures that, with proper training, augment his abilities toperform [] The goals of our technological culture at this time are epitomized by our explorationinto outer space, such as our landings on the moon and other technological feats requiring a highdegree of skill and expertise in controlling our external environment [] However, for theexploration of the inner man, our educational concepts, training methods, and research, seem lesssuitable.75

Far out is the only adequate term that could encompass the long-term goals of the project.

Through cataloging, researching, and integrating all the data on yoga, meditation, and alteredstates into an information system, the engineers hoped that man would soon, through mastery of

yoga, reach the ability to control computers directly through the voluntary use of brainwave

74 Computer Processing and Bibliography of Literature Related to Voluntary Improvement of IndividualPerformance, Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0631).

75 Ibid., 3.


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signals. Studies will undoubtedly soon be carried out using these physiological instruments in

conjunction with computers, in the most advanced type of man/machine communication and

human augmentation system we can imagine [] Many years may pass before significant

progress and useful results can be produced in the control of computers directly from brainwave

signals. In the meantime, it would seem prudent to explore the use of yoga, meditation, and

other t

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