Doctor of truth, the life of David R. Hawkins 9781938557019, 2012907757

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Copyright © 2012 by Scott Jeffrey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Dust jacket design by Glen M. Edelstein Cover portrait by Laura Hartman Maestro © 2012 Creative Crayon Publishers 230 Kings Mall Court, Suite 142 Kingston, New York 12401 ISBN: 978-1-938557-01-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012907757

To the humble search for truth …

Contents

Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface Prologue: The Dilemma of Existence PART I Early Years (1927-1946) Chapter 1: The Beautiful, the Good, and the True Socialite Elopes with Musician Art, Morals, and Science Spirituality and Religion Bullies and Girls Chapter 2: Early Spiritual Experiences An Entrepreneurial Spirit The Infinite Presence From Religionist to Atheist Early Escapades and His First Drink Chapter 3: Second World War Aboard the Minesweeper On the Streets of Shanghai PART II Doctor of the Mind (1946-1965)

Chapter 4: Psychoanalysis Debunking the Proof of God Medical School Freud, Rado, and the Lion Chapter 5: Early Influences Bill W. and Alcoholics Anonymous Tiebout’s Ego and the Process of Surrender Chapter 6: Hell The Addict’s Mind Zen Descent into Hell Chapter 7: Transformation Spiritual Conversion Psychic Powers PART III Healer (1965-1979) Chapter 8: New Psychiatry North Nassau Clinic A Brief History in Mental Health Treatment Orthomolecular Psychiatry Chapter 9: Clinical Success A Community for Recovery Notoriety Chapter 10: The Healer and His Critics The Healer’s Way Perils of Innovation

Chapter 11: Many Lives Mill River Estate Dancing, Death, and Dying Chapter 12: A Constant Quest Woodstock and Psychedelics The Human Potential Movement Chapter 13: Self-Healing Physician, Heal Thyself Letting Go of Negative Emotions A Course in Healing PART IV Transitions (1979-1995) Chapter 14: Out West Sedona Monastery for One A Reclusive Yet Active Life The Miraculous Continues Chapter 15: Temptations A Teacher’s Shadow The Void High Pass Chapter 16: New Beginnings A Miraculous Tragedy Creative Mind The Physician Returns Luck of the Third Adventure

PART V Teacher (1995-Present) Chapter 17: Map of Consciousness Strong or Weak Creating the Map Power versus Force Chapter 18: A Teacher Emerges Final Doorway A Huge Spiritual Mountain Bulwark of Knowledge His Community Chapter 19: A Closer Look at David R. Hawkins Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements About the Author

Preface

I first met David in February 2003 when I was granted an interview for a book I was writing. I spent over a month preparing a concise list of questions for this sixty-minute encounter. Anxiously, I parked at his rural desert compound and followed a small sign down a bush-lined, winding dirt path to his tiny log-cabin office. I took a seat in a fifty-square-foot waiting room on a wooden bench draped with a Native American blanket. An old radio playing classical music served as a noise buffer for his visitors’ privacy. The office door opened and an old man motioned me in. The warmth of this handcrafted space, built by David himself, was undeniable. The good doctor seemed mortal enough: slicked-back, thinning gray hair, wrinkled skin, and a small, frail frame. The only unusual physical attribute was his deep, penetrating blue-gray eyes. Sitting beside a large, hand-carved desk, I nervously took out my questions, a notepad, and a digital recorder. After a few moments, mysteriously, my anxiety melted into what I can only describe as peace. I was unable to ask a single question—each seemed nonsensical, unimportant, or obvious. Dumbfounded and embarrassed, I apologized for wasting his time. Smiling, David told me not to worry, quelling my obvious feelings of guilt. He started asking me questions, engaging in everyday conversation. Eventually, I thanked him with a quick hug and slipped out the door. At his lecture that week, I picked up a copy of his second book, Eye of the I. On the return flight from Phoenix, what I read on page seven made the hair on my neck stand on end: “Visitors who had traveled many miles to ask questions suddenly knew in the Presence of that aura the answers which came about through inner understanding that made the original question irrelevant. This occurred because the Presence recontextualized the illusion of a

‘problem’ and thus caused it to disappear.” In that moment, I knew David was an extraordinary man.

The quest for realizing higher truth eventually leads us to contemplate the domain of the mystic and its fascinating imagery. Some imbue the mystic with magic and mystery; others project onto the mystic the image of God. Still others view the mystic with skepticism and contention. If we define a mystic as one who apperceives a reality beyond our ordinary perception, it seems David R. Hawkins can claim this title. David is an interesting subject for a biography. He’s led a diverse and full life, reinventing himself and his career multiple times: from psychoanalyst to orthomolecular psychiatrist to recluse to psychiatrist again to spiritual teacher, each pursuit woven with a thread of healing and recovery. For students of David’s work, it’s natural to have curiosities about his life: What sort of childhood did he have? What kind of person was he? What influenced him to become who he is today? A biography can humanize larger-than-life characters. We find, as Carl Jung said, “we’re all in the soup together,” and as Joseph Campbell knew, “we’re all walking a hero’s journey with its challenges and upsets, allies and enemies, high moments and low ones. We each have strengths and moral defects, intelligences and blind spots, defining memories and difficult regrets. Together, we are going to traverse the life of an unusual soul driven to realize truth both for himself and for others. I began this biography in January 2005 with the blessings of David and his wife, Susan. To better understand David’s influences and the whole of his life experience, I’ve conducted over twenty hours of in-person and phone interviews with David, as well as about a dozen interviews with key people from his life. I’ve devoured every printed word he’s written (including four unpublished manuscripts), every recorded lecture he’s ever given (over 500 hours), and more than fifty radio interviews in an effort to understand the many facets of his life. David is an avid student of philosophic and healing modalities, and as his biographer, I wanted to understand the work

that has influenced him. I submerged myself in courses and programs David has studied, and reviewed several hundred books, articles, and journal papers related to his vocation. Although no biography can truly be called “definitive,” I’ve done my best to explore David’s life circumstances, with one major exception. Compared to most biographies, this one contains a dearth of information about the subject’s family life, omitted at David’s request to protect their privacy. From his perspective, most private matters are insignificant and routine to earthly life. In fact, he wonders why anyone would want to read his life story at all. This biography is unique in that it has been written by a former student of David’s work. I was an avid student and supporter from 2001 until 2010. As such, I am intimately familiar with David’s material but I also possess a greater degree of objectivity since I began exploring other teachings and interpretations in late 2010, which has given me a perspective I clearly lacked when I began this project. I still believe David to be a great man who lived a remarkable life, and I present this biography from this viewpoint. Students familiar with bits and pieces of David’s life story (as offered in his books and lectures) will likely notice variations in how these are presented herein. Where this story deviates from David’s telling, it does so based on available evidence. Based on external sources, earlier recordings, archival information (like school transcripts, past income statements, and mail correspondence), unpublished manuscripts, and interviews with his friends and colleagues, I discovered many inconsistencies with David’s recall. I also found that certain things David shared with me in private interviews were either inaccurate or only partially true. It seems David’s not interested in details and the accuracy of his statements (something he professes publicly). He has a tendency to exaggerate and a flair for the dramatic. The life story told here is based upon available evidence.

Prologue The Dilemma of Existence

I am. I exist. The realization came to him while sitting outside in a little red wagon, soaking up the morning sun. David was three years old. This was not a thought, nor did it take the form of words, nor was this sense of existence experienced as “personal.” Like being yanked from the pitch darkness of a cave into the bright afternoon sunlight, the experience of existence was startling and unwelcomed. This nonverbal awareness was immediately followed by a disturbing realization: since I exist, it is possible I might not have come into existence. It was like an unanswerable Zen koan fit for a Buddha, and it became the riddle of David’s lifetime. “This dilemma of a seeming choice between existence as a body versus the illusion of nonexistence is believed to be a possibility,” David explains. “With the awareness that ‘I exist,’ immediately arose the fear of nonexistence. The possibility arose in this mind that ‘it could have been that I wouldn’t have come into existence’.”1 It wasn’t a fear of death, but of nothingness; not of dying, but of not being. His mind feared “voidness” as a reality. “The fear was not of having no body,” he says, “but of not experiencing an ‘I’.”2 David asserts that the sudden awareness of the possibility of nonexistence created the “I,” an individualized sense of being. This “I” then feared the idea that it might not have come into existence. In that moment, David believes the “I” of what we call “David R. Hawkins” was born. This inner confrontation of existence versus nonexistence was the first of several spiritual experiences that occurred at an unusually early age—experiences David says were so shocking that they took thirty years to normalize and over sixty years to resolve. This journey

set the tone for the ultimate purpose of David’s life: to try to uncover the ultimate truth. As human beings, we know we exist—we know we are—and in spite of the challenges of life, for the most part, we cherish our existence. The possibility that we may never have existed is more frightening than the notion of death itself. Sure, we don’t want to die, but to never have existed? A drive to understand existence and the reality of the personal self consumed the young David from the start of his conscious life.

PART I

EARLY YEARS (1927-1946)

CHAPTER 1

The Beautiful, the Good, and the True

Socialite Elopes with Musician Ramon Nelson Hawkins, David’s father, was a practical man who balanced his vocation and his passion. A warm, affable soul and a talented musician, Ramon was a well-known classical pianist at the University of Wisconsin where he led an orchestra called Red Hawkins, a reference to his auburn hair. He started performing at fraternity and sorority events during college. His popular small-town orchestra was booked every weekend and played year-round, entertaining audiences at the local Lake Michigan resorts along the Wisconsin waterfront. Ramon wasn’t only creative and artistic; he was also analytical, holding degrees in both chemical and mechanical engineering. Ramon utilized his dual degrees as a safety supervisor and managed several of the country’s earliest gas stations and repair garages in the emerging automotive industry of the 1920s and 1930s. Operating exclusively in Wisconsin, there were over a hundred Wadham gas stations serving the state’s early auto owners. Wadham stations looked like a descendent of McDonald’s, with a bright red, curved, pointy roof akin to a Chinese pagoda. Before gas stations, many people stored gasoline in buckets at their homes. Now, auto owners could drive up to a Wadham station and use a mechanical pump to deliver gasoline directly into their cars from underground storage tanks. Alice-Mary McCutcheon, Ramon’s bride-to-be, was native to Wisconsin. A petite woman standing five feet tall and weighing less than ninety pounds, she had fair skin, soft green eyes, and wavy brown hair. Sociable, supportive, and versatile, she was also a talented musician, but of a different breed.

Alice-Mary’s grandfather was David G. Hooker, a kind, patient, gentle man who acted with firmness and precision. Born in Poultney, Vermont in 1830, Hooker moved to Milwaukee to practice law in 1856, becoming mayor of Milwaukee in 1872. In 1878, he joined forces with his former law partner Henry L. Palmer, president of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company headquartered in Milwaukee. As general counsel, Hooker was responsible for ensuring the stability of Northwestern’s securities amidst depressions and economic downturns. Hooker worked at Northwestern until his untimely death in 1888, leaving a sizable trust fund to his family. A portion of that trust went to Alice-Mary, one of David Hooker’s five grandchildren. Alice-Mary’s pedigree afforded her and the other women of the family social status. Although Alice-Mary was a fulltime homemaker, she wasn’t simply a woman of high society who frequented cotillions and formal debutant balls. She was a skilled pianist who wrote her own music and had a passion for the arts, including ballet, symphonies, and opera. Her personal scrapbook highlighted her diverse interests, with clippings on science, philosophy, personal improvement, psychology, and art. Like her husband, Alice-Mary nurtured both her creative and intellectual faculties. Alice-Mary was a bona fide “flapper.” The flapper era began after World War I, celebrating a new breed of women in a new era of freedom. Set in the Jazz Age, these young, hip, expressive women loved to dance the “wild” movements of the Lindy Hop, the Charleston, and the Shimmy. The fast-paced lifestyle of the flappers involved social interaction, sexual expression, smoking cigarettes, and drinking alcohol. Their newly-minted independence marked by the right to vote, shorter hair, make-up, and less restrictive dresses personified the flappers, signifying the birth of the modern woman from the ashes of the Victorian image of womanhood. In the wild, roaring twenties, Alice-Mary McCutheon met Ramon Hawkins. Ramon fell in love with the vivacious, petite woman instantly. They bonded over their mutual love for music. Ramon, however, was a member of the working class and a professional musician, neither of which commanded respect by the standards of

the social elite into which Alice-Mary was born. So when Ramon married the debutant on April 29, 1926, the scandalous caption in the local newspaper read, “Socialite Elopes with Musician.” Roughly one year later, on June 3, 1927 at nine o’clock in the evening at Columbia Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, twenty-yearold Alice-Mary Hawkins gave birth to David Ramon Hawkins.

Art, Morals, and Science The Hawkins family lived in the suburbs of Milwaukee. The city’s World War I efforts grew it into the nation’s fourth-largest manufacturing center. Many successful Milwaukeeans, mostly industrialists and affluent brewers, began migrating northward to live along Lake Michigan’s shore, establishing suburbs like Fox Point, Whitefish Bay, and Shorewood. These early suburbs were still highly rural, with expansive fields and farms. Most homes were equipped with a wood-burning stove, the smell of kerosene wafting through the house from a host of kerosene lamps. The Hawkins family rented a house on Holton Street for fifty dollars a month in what was then called Whitefish Bay Village. In the early ‘30s, they purchased their first home on North Port Washington Road, which runs up the middle of the Town of Milwaukee. Port Washington Road was part of the county, with River Hills to the west, Bayside to the north, and the more affluent Fox Point to the south. The two-story, ten-room house, constructed with hand-wrought nails and situated on half an acre amidst adjacent farm fields, had a large garden and a chicken coup occupied by several chickens and ducks. Guarding the chicken coup was Dilly, the family goat. The family spent most of their time downstairs in the living room, dining room, den, music room, and an enclosed outside porch. The family’s three bedrooms were upstairs. The roomy suburban-style home, equipped with a radio and their Model A Ford in the driveway, was well-suited for the Hawkins family, with plenty of space for Ramon, Alice-Mary, David, and his younger sister, Sally-Claire. The property

was positioned between Lake Michigan, a mile to the east, and the Milwaukee River, a mile to the west.

Highly introverted and introspective as a youth, David summarizes his early years as “boring.” He describes “an impatient waiting-out of childhood, wanting to get it over with in order to get on with what was more real and meaningful.”1 As a small child, David was characterized as “a little old man,” appearing serious while puzzling over the difficulties of human life. His formative years took place during the Great Depression, and the question of survival was always important to him. David’s upbringing offered a diverse, well-rounded environment for development and growth. The Hawkins’s home was relatively harmonious, uplifting, and loving, powered by a passion for music and the arts. Music played a large role in the household. The modest suburban home featured two upright pianos in the music room, with both parents teaching David and Sally-Claire to play. David’s mother, coming from a highly educated, upper-class background, surrounded David with the arts, taking him to classical performances of great pianists and violinists, symphonies, operas, ballets (like Sadler Wells Ballet), and science museums. His father, to whom David felt very close, nurtured his creative side. When a piano tuner came to their house, the man (who also played the violin) got David interested in the stringed instrument. Shifting his attention to the violin, David eventually began scoring his own music. David describes his father as “very learned and a heart person,” recalling with affection, “I loved him intensely. He and I got along extremely well.”2 In addition to Ramon’s glowing positive qualities, he had bad habits, too: smoking and drinking, two vices his son would pick up as a teenager. Ramon was a stern, conservative, moralistic man with a clear sense of law and order. This often led to heated emotions at the dinner table. Milwaukee was socialistic from 1910 to 1940, and as a staunch Republican, Ramon found a lot to dislike with the general ideological tone of his community. Add to that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s democratic administration and new unions legislature,

and Ramon often found himself in an uproar. Ramon was strict, allowing no signs of negativity or vulgarity in or out of the home, and David and his sister learned the lesson well. Ramon wasn’t always so stern, however. He went to college during the 1920 Prohibition. How could a musician with his own band play for college crowds without alcohol? He would load the trunk of his Stutz Bearcat, an earlier form of the sports car, with booze to sell at their gigs—fifty dollars per trip. The bass player in his orchestra also brought an extra bass with a hidden door in the back filled with booze.

David’s sister, Sally-Claire, was born in 1929, a year and a half after David. Her temperament was a stark contrast to David’s, but they were still close. David’s ultra-introverted tendencies counterbalanced Sally-Claire’s extreme, extroverted personality. While David was quiet and timid in social settings, Sally-Claire was extremely confident—she often started a conversation with strangers. David preferred his own company or that of adults. SallyClaire was almost never alone and generally the leader of her group. She could be somewhat aggressive at times, eager to have her own way. David’s temperament was even-keeled and steady in most situations. Sally-Claire was moody, alternating between extremes. She was quick to excitement, upset, or depression. David was highly responsible, even as a preteen. When his mother put them on the streetcar to ride alone, she instructed SallyClaire, “Now, sit next to your brother.” As the memory of these instructions began to wear off a few stops later, David’s sister ran up and down the aisle, laughing and giggling. David shrank down in shame and embarrassment, pretending he didn’t know her. As children growing up in the Midwest along Lake Michigan’s shore, they acclimated to bone-chilling temperatures and harsh winds. David and Sally-Claire used to run outside in the winter mornings to check the thermometer. The target temperature was anything below negative twenty. As most kids walked to school, if the harsh below-freezing temperatures were dangerous, school was cancelled. When the temperature gauge read “–22,” it was cause for

celebration; “–18” and they sadly marched upstairs to get ready for school. When their parents weren’t home, David and Sally-Claire would race to the piano where each child interchanged the words “phew” and “stink” while hitting the ivory keys with defiant joy in their eyes. Growing up, they played joyfully together at endless games of table tennis, badminton, and croquette.

When he was very young, David’s mother read him The Wizard of Oz. He found the story entrancing and assumed it was real. When his mother told him that the places in Oz didn’t exist, he instantly became disillusioned with fiction, deciding to not waste time reading stories. As a contemplative preteen, he immersed himself in philosophic discourse, circa 350 B.C., devouring the classics found in his parent’s library. Both parents were voracious readers, and they passed on their love for knowledge to David and Sally-Claire. The Hawkins household checked out more books from the public library than any other family in Milwaukee County for many years. Often, each family member read an entire book each day, and the whole family went to the library weekly to exchange the small stack of books from the back of their Ford with another for the week ahead. David’s father, a proficient speed-reader, taught the skill to his son. David was the quintessential bookworm, absorbing information at a staggering rate. By twelve, he says he ranked first in Wisconsin for his age in both reading speed and comprehension. David recalls reading an average of 500 books each year. He possessed a photographic reading ability: his eyes only needed to stop twice on the page to comprehend the whole page. With each book, he kept personal notes, summarizing the most important lessons learned. It’s uncertain who originally introduced David to ancient Greek philosophy. His father favored more practical reading as well as books on music and aesthetics. Most likely it was his grandfather, Frank McCutcheon, an avid reader of the classics. Equipped with an unusual mind, an appreciation for beauty and aesthetics, and a deep-seated attraction to truth, David was entranced by the intrinsic elegance of ancient philosophy. Whereas most readers focused just

on the content of philosophic discourse, David was excited by the brilliance and inborn genius of the great thinkers. He loved to explore how those extraordinary minds worked. The Greek philosophers became mental companions, perfectly suited for David’s quiet, introspective way of being. And so this atypical teen dove into the texts that formed the foundation for Western civilization, books like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Plotinus’s The Six Enneads. It was in Plato’s dialogues that David discovered his intellectual moral mentor in Socrates, who never wrote anything yet in many ways represents the pinnacle of Western wisdom. Socrates questioned everything, intuiting that each soul must find truth within, not simply from the external acquisition of knowledge. He believed that we all know the truth and need only to awaken it by means of his dialectical questioning method. The Socratic dialogues, found on the pages of Plato, probably spoke to a deeper knowing within David’s developing psyche, acting as an initial bridge to the farther reaches of human understanding. To David, while Plato and Aristotle were both intellectually brilliant, Socrates possessed the greater wisdom, like that of a mystic. The influence Socrates had on the direction of David’s life cannot be understated. David was raised during a period of great economic unrest and political confusion. As an intelligent and aware youth, he was tuned in to the suffering and concerns of the adults around him. Older men rarely changed their conversations when the quiet and introspective David entered the room. Although he appeared distant and unaware, David listened to the strife of his elders. For David, Socrates offered a way out of the suffering of his time. The solution was found in the pursuit of truth. The goal was to uncover the absolute good. No one told the young mystic-to-be that this was impossible— that Socratic discourse was only a form of philosophy and that mankind had been struggling with these issues for over two millennia. The inner struggle of the paradox of existence combined with a high IQ (he joined Mensa in 1963) provided a unique breeding ground for intellectual and existential pursuits. David’s parents

supported and fed his intellectual curiosity (although they were unaware of his existential angst) and cultivated his love for the arts.

David found many ways to challenge his intellect. As an amateur chemist, he memorized the entire Periodic Table of Elements and their atomic weights. He was one of those kids who received decent grades without needing to study—reading his school material only once, he was able to mentally encode and access it. When David went to his McCutcheon grandparents, he visited the home of William Atwood, a biologist, a horticulturalist, and head of the science department at Milwaukee State Teacher’s College. Atwood had an endless collection of things to fascinate a teenage boy, including different species of snakes and mice. An inviting and inspiring mentor, Atwood turned David into an amateur entomologist who studied and classified thousands of insects, including specimens that went on exhibit in the college’s science laboratory. David also became friendly with Professor Atwood’s son, Bill, with whom he’d eventually become fraternity brothers as a student at the same college. (Over sixty years later, David and Bill still keep in touch.) David’s parents weren’t the only ones to cultivate his intellectual curiosity and love for beauty. Many of his weekends were spent with his other grandparents—Frank Herbert and Mary Jane Elizabeth Lavender Coffey Hawkins. Frank Herbert Hawkins was born and raised in Rhode Island. (The Hawkins are descendents of Roger Williams, the English theologian who settled the colony of Rhode Island, arriving in Boston just over a decade after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.) He married Mary Jane, born in County Roscommon in central Ireland, arriving in the United States when she was in grade school. For forty years, Frank worked for the world’s largest shoe company, United Shoe Machinery Corporation, known as “The Shoe,” headquartered in Boston. When The Shoe gave Frank a promotion to Midwest district manager, Frank, Mary Jane, and their son Ramon (David’s father) moved from Rhode Island to Wisconsin.

While everyone in the family was a big coffee drinker, Mary Jane herself managed to consume about ten cups of coffee and tea each day. Every Saturday afternoon, she and her husband listened to the Grand Opera together while sipping coffee. David can still recall the thrill one year when Richard Wagner’s entire four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, was presented. David’s other favorites included La Bohème, Tristan and Isolde, and operas by Borodin, Taunhauser, Lohengrin, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Boris Godonov. Mary Jane was an influential presence in David’s early years. Although she had been brought up Catholic, she later became a Baptist and a Christian Scientist, believing in the positive effects of beauty and literature. She read Shakespeare while David was perched in her lap, immersing him in literature and the arts whenever possible. When she was pregnant with David’s father, she regularly listened to classical music. Although everyone thought the Irish woman was crazy for thinking the music would influence the unborn child, she stuck to her regimen. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” she would say. Ramon turned out to be a great classical musician with his own love for centuries-old classical scores. Frank Herbert was also wellread, owning an extensive collection of books on the SpanishAmerican War, in which he himself fought. David’s great aunts from the Hooker (McCutheon) side were artists and humanists—they were intellectually sophisticated with offbeat humor, collecting nonsense doggerels such as the anonymous poem “The Whango Tree” and snippets like “‘Tis the Voice of the Lobster” from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The inscription on the cover of this family-prized scrapbook of verses reveals the Hooker brand of humor: “Dedicated to the few people with a real sense of humor” and “Compiled originally by Barbara Jean Greenwood from the memories of the Hooker clan and added to by various descendants, many of whom have actually descended.” The anthology was signed: “Authors mostly forgotten (several insisted).” In addition to a very intellectual and aesthetic environment, there was a great emphasis on humor in David’s family, no doubt influencing his witty and comical onstage presence during his public

lectures later on in life. One high school teacher noted, “Underneath his cool exterior is a fine sense of humor.” The McCutheons were especially learned. David’s grandfather, Frank McCutheon, was the proud owner of an expansive Napoleonic library. Frank offered to give David the entire wall of books when David was a teenager, but David didn’t want to be weighed down, dragging the books around the country. This disappointed his grandfather, who later donated the books to the Milwaukee County Library. David had a close bond with both sets of grandparents, who took him fishing in the nearby Milwaukee River. David recalls the lovingness and pride both grandfathers had when showing him off to their friends. His maternal grandmother, Alice-Ashley McCutheon, was described by the rest of the family as saintly and as “the sweet matriarch of our family.” She provided David with timeless wisdom like, “If you haven’t got something good to say about somebody, then don’t say anything.” David’s other grandmother used to say, “Beauty is as beauty does,” a saying that mystified him for years. David reportedly became the youngest member of the Milwaukee Art Institute at age twelve. In grade school, he won an award from the University of Wisconsin’s art department for his talent with watercolors. The art staff encouraged David, telling him he could pursue virtually any vocation he wanted, but the Great Depression was on, and money was tight. David didn’t continue with these artistic endeavors because he was financially unable to purchase the materials—the cost of canvases, stretch boards, and pigments simply became too expensive. David’s interest in art was further curbed by his father’s realism: “You can’t make a living in art.” With his love for nature, David wanted to be a forest ranger, but financial concerns once again steered him a different direction. The Seashore Test, developed by psychology professor Carl Emil Seashore, measured musical ability. David reportedly placed at the top of his age group. David ranked at the top of multiple skills tests, including verbal, spatial, and musical. His keen intellect allowed him to remember an entire score, and his musical talents gave him the

ability to effortlessly and spontaneously compose a piece of music, a skill he maintained throughout his life. David started violin lessons at a very young age. Getting to his lessons after school was no easy chore: he had to walk a mile, then take the public bus. While music might have been a viable vocation for David, it wasn’t intellectually challenging, something he required. From Ramon, David received a sharp analytical mind, creativity, affability, musical ability, and moral fortitude. From Alice-Mary, David was given culture, an appreciation for art, enrollment in high society, and a high level of energy and enthusiasm for subjects of interest.

Spirituality and Religion David attended elementary school at Maple Dale School, a tworoom schoolhouse with third, fourth, and fifth graders in one room and sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in another. The building was located less than a quarter-mile from his home on Port Washington Road. David walked home for lunch each day, crossing Dane Road, a large vacant lot, and his neighbors’ lawn. As typical as David’s outer world appeared, his inner world was far from normal. His ego—that which one identifies as oneself—was very fragile. He describes it as practically nonexistent at times. Sitting in his fifth grade class at Maple Dale, his identification as a personal self—including his body, mind, and name—would begin disappearing into the state of existence itself. “It seemed like it would disappear into nothingness, into the infinite Void, into infinite awareness itself, and the individual self would no longer exist again,” David reflects. “It was constantly threatening to disappear into nonexistence. I would intensify my identification with this personal self to bring myself back to being here now, this person named David.”3 When this infinite state began to take over, David struggled to identify with the “personal” self, toggling back and forth, “from ego to Spirit, from the individual ‘I’ to a universal ‘I,’ from limited and localized to unlimited, infinite, and all-present.”4

As he struggled to maintain his individuality, David wrestled with the issue of existence versus nonexistence throughout his childhood and early adolescence. He recalls: “The personal self would sometimes begin slipping back into a greater impersonal Self, and the initial fear of nothingness would recur.”5 Unbidden, the state of seeming nothingness unfolded throughout his early years, periodically frightening David to his core. In fact, it was the continual demand for performance in David’s young, active, and intellectuallydriven life that kept him grounded and identified with the personal self. Whereas the quest for self-realization in a region like India is age-old, in Christianity God is generally viewed as transcendent, something existing apart from oneself that cannot be realized in the present because God is “out there.” Religion, therefore, wasn’t useful to David, and he never told anyone about his inner experiences. As a boy, he was spiritually-inclined but knew nothing about esoteric teachings. Nevertheless, religion and church life did play a big part in the boy’s upbringing. His family were strict Episcopalians, and all of his great-grandfathers and great-uncles were Freemasons. Ramon Hawkins was an observant, fervent religionist. He eventually became the choir director and actually died while playing the organ during church choir. The Hawkins family went to three different local churches. They attended all religious observances at Cathedral Church of All Saints, the local Episcopal Cathedral in Milwaukee with Gothic Revival architecture, where David was baptized on July 17, 1927. David studied for his confirmation under Father Crevison, an intelligent, chain-smoking priest. The Hawkins family, especially Ramon, were friends with Episcopal clergy as well as the dean in the cathedral, Dean Manard, who frequently came to dinner. Located in downtown Milwaukee, All Saints was the family’s primary church where they attended every weekend service. David was also an acolyte and a boat boy (responsible for holding the incense boat), serving the bishop in a different church, St. Paul’s Episcopal. The distinct aroma of the incense being poured over burning charcoal is still imprinted in David’s mind. St. Paul’s

was a socialite sort of church the family attended on occasion. As a soprano soloist in St. Paul’s choir, David went there every Saturday afternoon and Wednesday night for practice. The third church, Christ Church, was attended for convenience. The Episcopal minister there was Father Day, a narcoleptic who often fell asleep while he was talking to David. Located in Whitefish Bay, the family attended services at this small, suburban church when they didn’t have time to drive downtown to All Saints. Whereas All Saints was more of a high-church, Catholic-like experience with incense and a huge choir in a large cathedral, Christ Church was more “low-church”: a simple, more Protestant-like experience. The boy’s church experience had its high moments. As a prepubescent soprano, he sang obbligato: one octave above the sopranos in the choir. His St. Paul’s choir once performed with a full orchestra at a large cathedral (probably All Saints), as incense suffused the structure and sun poured in through stained-glass windows. David sang a solo of “Panis Angelicus” (“Bread of Angels”), a hymn written by Saint Thomas Aquinas, with a full orchestra accompaniment from the balcony. He describes the experience as other-worldly. “There was no sense of a personal ‘me’ having anything to do with it. I remember the knowingness that I was being sung through from the angelic realm.”6 David says everyone in the cathedral cried. Stunned by the presence of incredible beauty, David had difficulty holding back tears, which would have ended the hymn. David had a profound sensitivity to beauty, and found great meaning in attending “high church” with its beautiful cathedrals. He was enchanted by the beatific sounds of the organ and choir, the aroma of incense, the warm glow of the sun through the colored windows, the pageantry of the processional, and the towering architecture. His strict religious upbringing made David highly scrupulous. He was extremely hard on himself, with no allowance for error. With sweltering guilt, he’d seek out the priest to ask forgiveness because he forgot to thank his mother for making Jell-o for his birthday. Like most children, David would get frustrated when his mother called him in for dinner while he was playing stickball with his friends. He believed his angry thoughts were sinful and would leave a black spot

on his soul that God could see. David hid in a dark closet whenever he thought he was in trouble. He and his family went to confession on Saturday afternoons, and he was expected to remain sin-free until communion on Sunday morning. David dreaded this period, fearful that a sinful thought would pop into his mind which might lead to a disaster, like being struck by lightning. To reduce the window of time in which he might sin, David went to the last confession at four on Saturday evening and attended the earliest communion Sunday morning at seven. During that fifteenhour period, he tried to look down to prevent any impure thoughts. The family drove to church in their black 1929 A-Model Ford convertible. David and his sister sat in the rumble seat, an upholstered backseat that actually flipped up from where the trunk is located in a modern sedan. As the rumble seat was not enclosed within the automobile, the passengers were at the mercy of the elements. The children nestled together with a wool blanket covering their heads to stay warm in the harsh Wisconsin winters. During summertime, however, they loved the freedom of the open road. Billboard advertising was becoming popular during this time, and on the way to church, David saw an advertisement for Jantzen’s “Petty Girl” swimsuit featuring a bodacious blond wearing a formfitting, red swimsuit created from a new technology that made elastic fibers possible. As a fourteen-year-old boy with testosterone coursing through his veins, David was unable to divert his eyes, and he was petrified of having an “unclean” thought. He was relieved to get to communion—and not die. David had spiritual counseling with a wise parish priest for his morbid scrupulosity. The priest taught him to develop tolerance for imperfection.

Bullies and Girls With his high IQ and social awkwardness, David struggled throughout adolescence. He recalls that a conversation was “never interesting unless it led to a product or acquiring new information.”7 David struggled to adjust socially and to view the intellects of others

with forbearance and modesty. His high school guidance counselor noted, “David is either far too sophisticated for his years, or his inability to make friends easily makes him appear so.” One of his teachers referred him to a school psychologist and then counseling. Another teacher gave him additional reading, including Greek and Roman mythology, which occupied his insatiable appetite for learning and further distanced him from his classmates. David was too mature for his age, preferring adults as companions. Even without the challenges of a high IQ, adolescence would not have been fun for him. Compounding his social difficulties was his small frame, unsuited for a boy’s active life. He had little in common with other kids who seemed, as David recalls, “overly aggressive, loud, physical, and senseless in their activities.”8 He did, however, try to fit in. He showed up in a helmet and shoulder pads to football practice, only to have the coach tell him, “Dave, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t want you on the field.” The coach and the school doctor reasoned that one good tackle and his bones would break, ejecting him from team sports and gym class. Physical education was almost always the worst grade on his report card. David tried out for the swim team, figuring he could handle a noncontact sport. He was told he was too short to compete. A perpetual squinter, David was born with weak eyes. He wore glasses even as a young boy, graduating to bifocals and later to trifocals. He jokes that he couldn’t see a football before it hit him in the nose—just one more reason to stay away from athletic competition. Lacking size, strength, and social grace, equipped with thick glasses and low self-confidence, David was an easy target for bullies, and he got beat up regularly. In one instance, he accidentally stepped on a kid’s heel, and the kid turned around and pushed him. Since David was trained by his parents not to be aggressive—to be a good Christian—he “turned the other cheek” and didn’t push him back, especially since it was during school. Instead of intervening, the coach denounced David to the class, calling him “yellow,” assuming he was too cowardly to fight. It was a salient lesson for

David: seeing the limits of turning the other cheek, he learned to stand and fight when necessary. David was challenged often, and after his coach confronted him, he rarely backed down from a fight even though he knew he wouldn’t win. He became “too macho and proud” to run away. Each time he entered a new grade, he attracted the attention of the class bully. David learned to do what he could to avoid confrontations. After being ambushed by a bully on his walk home from school, he’d find another way home to avoid the next encounter. David wasn’t safe in church either. After choir practice on Wednesday nights, the boys went from long, white gowns in the church choir to the basketball court. David got beat up during or after these games by the other choirboys on an almost weekly basis. David’s Grandfather McCutheon, tired of seeing his fourteenyear-old grandson getting picked on, took him to lightweight boxing champion Richie Mitchell’s gym in Milwaukee. There David learned the “manly art of self-defense.” Falling well below the weight requirement for the fly-weight division (boxing’s lowest weight class), he was placed in the “mosquito-weight division”: a new class David’s instructor created just for him. David learned that his main asset was speed, and his strategy became to catch his opponent off-guard with a fast punch. The next time he was bullied, David quickly knocked down his attacker, giving him a bloody nose and ending the fight. After that the other kids left him alone, which increased David’s self-confidence and sense of safety. In new environments, however, he still attracted confrontation. While visiting his grandparents, the Hawkins in Milwaukee, David played one day with some local kids in an alley. One of them challenged David, who was no longer afraid to fight. Ready with his fast left and right cross, the “street fighter” kicked David in the groin —something the choirboys in his town would never do—and then kicked him in the ribs when he was down. David learned a valuable lesson: “Never depend on ‘Marquis of Queensbury’ rules when you are ensnared by a seasoned, tough street fighter, or you’ll end up on the pavement being jeered at by the street-smart crowd to whom gentility is a sign of weakness and an easy mark that brings

contempt for what is perceived as effete.”9 It was a wake-up call that served him well for years to come. Overall, David’s restriction on physical activity didn’t bother him. To him, the general interactions of most boys seemed aggressive and primitive. While the other kids were playing with toys, wrestling, and competing in sports, David entertained himself by reading ancient philosophy from his parents’ library. David’s serious, quiet, shy temperament might have led others to believe he wasn’t interested in girls. His first love affair had a tragic ending. Shirley, the cook’s daughter at the Maple Dale Elementary School, was David’s first kiss. He used to wait patiently for Shirley after school, hoping to walk her home. The kids used to run excitedly to listen to the Hiawatha each day at 4 p.m. Created in Milwaukee to stimulate travel during the Great Depression, it was the first streamlined passenger steam locomotive. One afternoon, by twisted fate, Shirley’s mother’s automobile stalled on the train tracks, right before 4 p.m. Shirley and her mother died upon impact. Most of David’s early loves weren’t so tragic. In fact, they were mostly “love from afar,” as David was not the kind of boy to be aggressive or forward with the opposite sex. But he was a lover and romantic at heart. “I first fell in love with women when I was eight years old,” he recalls. “I was always falling in love, and when I fell in love, I lost my appetite. Consequently I was always skinny and have been throughout my life because I was always in love with some wondrous creature. I would become enamored and completely preoccupied with the loveliness of my adored one.”10 His first forbidden crush was with his third cousin. David was eight and she was thirteen. He sat in silent admiration and “went into bliss at any favorable attention that she showed.” When her family moved back to Michigan, David “practically died of a broken heart.”11 Because he was getting so skinny, his parents took him to the doctor, who pumped him full of vitamins. David never revealed to his parents why he wasn’t eating.

Recovering from the pain of his cousin’s departure, the next object of his affection was his teenage babysitter, who read him romantic poetry, and Miss Irish, his beautiful, redheaded, third-grade teacher. Then there was Louella, the woman next door with whom David spent every available moment when he was twelve. A sexually-expressive, “modern woman” of little inhibition, Louella read David passages from Havlock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex. Recalling the severity of his shyness, David later wrote, “Nobody was more self-conscious, shy, and timid than me when I was young. I couldn’t speak in public. I dreaded parties, and it would take three weeks to crank up the energy to ask a girl for a date.”12

CHAPTER 2

Early Spiritual Experiences

An Entrepreneurial Spirit For David, life was austere and amicable at the same time. Despite numerous hardships, he felt he had a very advantageous childhood, which included a heavy emphasis on self-reliance and resourcefulness. One time his shirtsleeve ripped, and he taped it and held his arm close to his body so no one would notice. His mother made his bowties. And when winter came, David’s grandmother knitted a cashmere sweater for him—the kids at school taunted him because it was homemade. Following the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression continued into the 1940s. With many business foreclosures and failing banks, a quarter of the American workforce (fifteen million people) were unemployed. A city best known for its breweries, Milwaukee struggled after the grain conservation program in World War I and then the adoption of Prohibition. Despite Milwaukee’s diversified industries, it was hit hard during the Depression. Seventyfive percent of Milwaukee’s workforce lost their jobs. Agriculture was Wisconsin’s dominant industry, and it was hurting, too. Low prices for milk, cheese, and butter coupled with a long drought created challenging times for Wisconsin’s farm families. Decades earlier, to meet the growing demand for kerosene, lubricants, and greases, the petroleum industry grew quickly in late Nineteenth Century America. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller acquired a host of petroleum businesses and clustered them under Standard Oil Trust in 1882. The United States Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Rockfeller’s oil conglomerate in 1911, and the Standard Oil Company of New York (later called Socony) was born, along with thirty-three other companies.

Ramon Hawkins managed several Wadhams Gas Stations, part of Wadhams Oil Company, headquartered in Milwaukee. AliceMary’s father, Frank McCutheon, as well as Frank’s brother-in-law Robert, were executives at Socony. Robert Bomgardner (“Uncle Bob” as the family called him) was the ultimate gentlemen and very friendly to David and his sister. Uncle Bob was married to Claire Hooker, Alice-Mary’s sister. As an executive for Socony, he traveled to New York City periodically, bringing back stories of the big city for David and the rest of the family to listen to wide-eyed, no doubt planting the seed for David’s later move to New York for psychiatric training. Vacuum Oil acquired Wadhams Oil in 1930, and a year later Socony merged with Vacuum Oil, forming Socony-Vaccum. (The company, renamed Socony Mobile Oil Company in 1955, was the predecessor of Mobile Corporation.) The McCutheons’ positions in Socony guaranteed employment for their family, including Ramon, throughout the Great Depression. Even with Ramon’s secure job and his moonlighting as a piano player and head of the Red Hawkins orchestra, times were still financially difficult. David’s mom constantly needed medical attention for chronic asthma, anemia, and other illnesses. To help the family through the hard times, Grandmother McCutheon gave them extra cash from the dwindling Hooker trust fund. Scarcity drove David to enterprise. As a boy, he always had a forsale sign by the side of the road for one thing or another. The Hawkins’s half-acre home sat adjacent to an open field, giving them ample room to build a large garden and chicken coup. Their chickens and ducks supplied David with eggs to sell year-round. Dilly the goat, under David’s care, guarded the garden outpost and provided goat milk for the family and for sale. David sold whatever he could, from tomatoes and cucumbers to puppies and rabbits. Highly motivated and enterprising, he collected a huge mound of newspapers, magazines, and salvaged scrap metal little by little from miles around. A scrap dealer came around the neighborhood and bought the entire pile for six dollars (eighty-nine dollars today), quite a prize for the boy.

David’s enterprising spirit created opportunities for him as a teenager. When he wasn’t reading a book or selling something by the side of the road, several jobs kept him busy. He earned his way to summer camp at Woodcraft Camp in Wautoma by selling cookies door-to-door. He was also the resident babysitter for the families in his neighborhood. Trustworthy and responsible, David had a roster of mothers who depended upon him to watch their kids after school and on Saturdays. David also earned ten cents per game setting pins at the local bowling alley. Jumping between lanes, he was able to set pins on two alleys at the same time, netting him twenty cents per game. Afraid his son would get hit by a flying pin, Ramon forbade David from setting pins, so David told his father he was going someplace else when he was headed to the bowling alley.

The Infinite Presence The self-reliant, ambitious David wanted to attend Shorewood High School—considered a better school than Rufus King High School, which was zoned for his neighborhood. In order to attend, David had to earn money for his tuition, so the eighty-five pound boy took the largest paper route in rural Wisconsin—an impressive seventeen miles per day, especially arduous in bitter winters. With a hundred customers, he netted forty dollars plus tips each month for books and tuition. David lived just under nine miles from Shorewood High and hitchhiked four times every day: first from his house to town, then across town to school, and then he did the same thing to get home. Hitchhiking was safe in those days, and as a kid with an armload of books, he found it relatively easy to catch a ride. When he was having difficulty, he used a “magic trick”: he turned around seven times while saying “seven-seven-seven.” Although he knew it was silly, somehow his seven-seven-seven trick did the job. Delivering papers amidst the harsh Wisconsin winters taught David how to “white-knuckle it” and push through difficult times with “steely determination, no matter what,” an attribute he would call

upon later in his philosophical studies, medical school, psychoanalysis, and spiritual work. David seemed naturally wired with strong discipline, a driven self-sufficiency, and determination that enabled him to do whatever it took with Zen-like focus. He was obliged to deliver newspapers every single day, regardless of weather conditions. At six o’clock on a winter evening in 1939, while he was delivering papers, a heavy blizzard ripped through the town at a bone-chilling twenty degrees below zero. David was miles from home on Brown Dear Road, which runs between Fox Point and River Hills, a couple miles from the nearest farmhouse. There were no lights on the road; he biked in darkness. A fierce Lake Michigan wind gusted, knocking him over and blowing his papers from the handlebar basket across the snow-covered road. His pants were frozen stiff; his knees felt completely numb. He cried in frustration, praying that his papers wouldn’t blow away because he hadn’t finished his route. In Wisconsin, the snow banks adjacent to the roads often grew as high as twelve-feet-tall by mid-winter from plowed snow and heavy snowfall. After multiple storms, the snow bank on Brown Dear Road had crusted over with ice. Desperate, David hollowed out a hole in a ten-foot-high bank and climbed in, utterly exhausted, to take cover from the fierce wind. Within minutes, he says his body disappeared into a “delicious warmth” of incredible beauty, with a feeling akin to sitting near a roaring fire, accompanied by a profound peace—and he was * overcome with exquisite joy. “Time stopped, and the awareness of oneness with eternity replaced all thought or sense of a personal self,” David recalls.1 In that moment, he melted into a blissful state of peace, accompanied by a suffusion of golden light. “The light had the quality of touching me and being with me as an infinitely loving consciousness that was enveloping and dissolving,” he reports.2 Then came an ineffable presence of infinite love, which was “timeless and eternal, no beginning and no end … a foreverness. That which I am is eternal, infinite love without thought or pronouns. The reality of what you are is not different than infinite, perfect love. That’s the revelation of the truth of your own existence.”3

A gentle, yet powerful energy as strong as steel coursed through David’s body. The personal self—what he thought he was— dissolved, obliterated by profound love. David’s mind grew silent—all thoughts stopped, and only the infinite Presence prevailed in that moment. David realized his own nature as that presence of love: “That which I am, in truth, existed before all universes and will exist beyond all universes.”4 In actual time, the event lasted perhaps thirty minutes, but subjectively for David, it was eternal: “The state of the true Self experientially lasted for eons of timelessness. The experience was total, and at every instant it was all-encompassing, timeless, serene, and complete. There was nothing missing, nothing lacking, and nothing further to be accomplished. It was a state of profound love, peace, and completeness that is beyond description.”5 In this sublime state, David had difficulty “returning to the body,” as he felt complete and total. As he describes, “It is like being home, and as you come back into the body, you feel homesick. There is an intense desire to return to that state.”6 An abrupt awareness of someone forcibly shaking his knee yanked David from his state. Ramon had been worried because David was late for dinner and it was snowing so hard, so he had driven his car along David’s paper route to find him. During this experience, David says he sensed an invitation to leave the world and go beyond physical existence, but if he left, his father would think he’d died. Feeling responsible, Ramon would be stricken with a lifetime of guilt and grief for allowing David to do his route in a blizzard. Although the realization of the Presence of love made the concept of death seem absurd to David, he had compassion for his father’s fear of it. “For love one will [remain in the body], but not for any other reason,” David explains. When David regained normal waking-state consciousness, his father juggled the emotions of relief, anxiety, and anger, reacting with, “Don’t you ever do that again! Don’t you know you can freeze to death?”7 David was unable to explain the experience he had to his father or anyone else. He’d never heard similar stories in church, other

than those reported by saints. As an adolescent, David had no context within which to hold the experience, nor did he understand its meaning or significance. The event was never mentioned. This subjective experience permanently changed David. His fear of death was eradicated. The concept of death seemed preposterous in light of his realization. In the presence of Divinity, David realized his own immortality. David witnessed how all things are transitory. The world now seemed provisional. This once-scrupulous boy became agnostic: “Compared to the light of Divinity which had illuminated all existence, the god of traditional religion shone dully indeed; thus, spirituality replaced religion.”8 Out of respect for his family, he continued his active church life, but doubt in the god of old replaced his fear of sin.

From Religionist to Atheist Roughly three years later, at the age of fifteen, another realization altered David’s inner path. As he enjoyed a carefree walk through the woods on a sunny day, entranced by beauty and silence, suddenly time stopped, and there was absolute stillness. In the same way the loving state arose in the snow bank, David suddenly witnessed the immensity and totality of the suffering of all mankind throughout all of time. Having experienced the highest light, he would now realize the deepest darkness. This “knowingness” was potent, overwhelming, and catastrophic, “as if the doors of hell opened up.” Just as the experience in the snow bank was unpremeditated, this new revelation didn’t occur on account of David pondering human suffering. It seemed to emerge out of nowhere, suddenly. It was as if everyone’s suffering was simultaneously projected onto one screen for David to see and feel. He recalls: “I suddenly got the totality, the immensity of the world’s suffering … I just became aware of its totality, and in that instant, I couldn’t believe in a God that would allow that.”9 David fell from a high spiritual state of infinite love into great dismay. He pondered with angst, How could God have allowed such

suffering to occur? Despite the experience in the snow bank, his religious conditioning led him to believe that God was the cause of everything in the world, and if God is Creator, He must have created suffering, the teenager reasoned.10 David quickly went from blaming God to deciding that anything that allowed such total suffering could not be called “God,” nor could he worship it. He decided religion was “old-hat, based on belief systems of dead people.”11 The god of old—the god of retaliation, punishment, anger, and jealousy—the god who could throw people into eternal hell out of his hatred for their wickedness—was vanquished for David. This once-devoted religionist completed the metamorphosis into a confirmed atheist, freed to be his own person, responsible to himself and to society without the guilt that once imprisoned him. The experience also marked an intellectual shift within his psyche: reason and intelligence became his guide for behavior, as opposed to blind faith. In truth, David’s shift toward atheism began with his experience in the snow bank. Prior to that, he had read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, which took a dim view of Judeo-Christian scripture. Paine, a founding father of the United States, was a bright, learned man who believed in God, but not in institutionalized religion. Paine wrote: “The word of God is the creation we behold, and it is in ‘this word,’ which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.”12 His Age of Reason promoted “freethinking” instead of being blindly influenced by Christian doctrines and church rules. Paine exclaimed, “My own mind is my own church.”13 This notion was liberating to David, who lived in constant fear of an external judging force. David, too, became a freethinker, as Paine’s exposition gave him the courage to become critical of his religion, losing faith in religious authority as the arbiter of truth. As David recalls, “Becoming an atheist resulted in an exhilarating sense of freedom, as though the heavy chains of sin and guilt had been thrown off.”14 For him, the experience “marked the end of belief in God as a belief system.”15 He stopped going to church. Truth would be discovered experientially or it wouldn’t be discovered at all.

David had numerous discussions about this experience with his father. Ramon didn’t understand why David became an atheist, since both he and David’s mother were very religious. For David to become an atheist must have been a horrifying shock to them. Ramon was upset because, from a traditional Christian viewpoint, his son’s soul would be damned to hell. David’s developmental shift had effects in the outer world: his schoolwork suffered. Whereas he had received exemplary marks across all his classes in ninth grade, the following year (which included his experience in the woods), his grades dropped to mainly C’s, a few B’s, and a D in German. (He seemed to recover in his junior year, once again receiving A’s and B’s.) Regarding his obvious lack of interest in high school, his transcript comments report, “David has not made the most of his four years, for although he is a boy of exceptional ability, he has not contributed a great deal to the school by way of service. On many occasions, he has disregarded school rules.” This disregard for school rules occurred after becoming a freethinker.

Early Escapades and His First Drink Outside of reading and listening to classical music, David’s most pleasurable activity was philosophic discourse. He had two intellectual buddies: Louis (“Louie”) Rove, the son of an academic professor, and Manfred (“Manny”) Wallner, a doctor’s son. Louis and Manfred both lived in Fox Point, an affluent town next to David’s. Fox Point didn’t have its own high school, so the two boys went to Shorewood High, where they met David. David was already an atheist, and both Manny and Louie were also nonbelievers. Manny recalls: “David was the most ungodly person I ever knew.” Together, Louie, Manny, and David discussed philosophy endlessly, critiquing Plato’s Republic from every conceivable angle while listening to classical symphonies, playing chess, and sipping wine in front of the fireplace. Louie, in particular, didn’t fit in with the other kids. He was a homosexual and often acted outrageously. Louie tried to get his two

best friends interested in homosexuality, but although they loved their friend, it wasn’t their thing. (Louis Rove later became the director of an AIDS rehabilitation clinic. His son is Republican strategist and Fox News contributor, Karl Rove.) The boys’ favorite hangout was a Greek restaurant where they drank concentrated coffee in little demitasse cups. David’s mother and grandmother were big coffee drinkers. It’s possible that his lifelong love affair with espresso began in this Greek diner. David enjoyed the Greek music and coffee so much that the owner once tried speaking to him in Greek. When David explained that he wasn’t Greek and didn’t speak the language, the owner thought David was ashamed of being Greek and therefore lying, for the man couldn’t imagine an American frequenting his establishment, drinking espresso, and streaming endless nickels through the machine to listen to Greek music. David loved Greek music so much that he went to Greek nightclubs just to hear the sound. He frequented the diner during high school, college, and medical school. David’s personality began changing at sixteen. Liberated from the shackles of religious dogma, the once-repressed boy became an adventuresome teenager. Manfred described him as “intelligent, bright, adventuresome, ready for anything,”16 a description David’s colleagues confirmed years later. Although quiet and introverted, freedom from sin and guilt opened up new dimensions to David’s personality. David had expensive tastes even though he always seemed strapped for cash. The trio smoked two expensive and hard-to-find cigarette brands: the Turkish import Murad and Melachrino Cigarettes from Egypt, often given to David as gifts from Grandma McCutheon for his birthday and Christmas. Although the three musketeers were highly intelligent and mature in many ways, they were far from subdued. David was ready to experience life fully. Living within a mile of Lake Michigan, the boys often wandered along the beach looking for adventure and plotting their next scheme. They frequented movie theatres, but teeming with testosterone and curiosity, they spent more time sneaking into the Empress Burlesque Theater to watch the strippers and satirical entertainment.

The three teens went to funeral homes, posing as schoolnewspaper reporters who were interviewing people, a harmless fib that helped the boys explore a darker side of life. Manny and Louie once dressed David as a woman in a skirt and blouse, with lipstick and other details, so they could perform a social experiment at the Empress Theatre. Manny and Louie eventually had to rescue David, who had inadvertently been picked up by a drunken sailor trying to feel him up!

David’s time for juvenile exploration was limited, of course, by his schoolwork, music lessons, and various jobs. The grueling summer of 1943 was spent working at the Cedarburg Pea Cannery in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. As a factory worker, he and the rest of the crew worked until the day’s production of peas was canned, crated, and stored. Very often, he worked past midnight in the steaming warehouse, and then had to be ready for work at six the next morning. He earned a cool sixty cents an hour, and an extra nickel for every hour after twelve daily hours worked: the longer the day, the better the pay. One day at work that summer, David discovered the onepointedness of mind described in Zen. With absolute attention on his task—lifting and stacking cartons of canned peas—he passed the twelve-hour mark and reached total exhaustion. I can’t. I can’t lift another box. I can’t, he said to himself.17 Then the “I can’t” barrier gave way as “inspiration flowed in, and with an absolute, unreserved resolve, there was the gritting of teeth and the absolute refusal of the barrier, which was then broken. Almost instantly and amazingly, the boxes became nearly as light as a feather and the activity was joyful and devoid of effort.”18 In the pea cannery, David was introduced to the social pressures of drinking. Driven by curiosity and the desire to fit in—to be “one of the boys”—David had his first drink of hard liquor at sixteen. When his parents went to sleep, David began raiding the liquor cabinet, pouring whisky into an old peanut butter jar—only small amounts that his parents wouldn’t notice. Once he had stored up enough, he would sit behind a haystack and drink straight Kentucky

bourbon under the harvest moon’s light. A feeling of delightful relaxation swept over him; exquisite warmth coursed through his body. His senses came alive: the smell of the evening air infused with wet hay, the moon expanding into a larger orb of light, and in the middle of the silence, a bird would sing to David. The beauty of the experience brought tears to his eyes—the seeds of alcoholism were planted. David, Mannie, and Louie enjoyed drinking together. They mainly drank wine because of its accessibility, but ultimately, they drank whatever they could get their hands on. There was one bar that didn’t ask for ID, a dive bar in Milwaukee called My Office that still exists today.

CHAPTER 3

Second World War

Aboard the Minesweeper World War II was raging. David came from a long line of servicemen with a devout love for country: His great-grandfather George Nelson Hawkins served in Rhode Island’s Battery “D” during the Civil War. Frank Herbert Hawkins, David’s grandfather, fought in the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. Ramon Hawkins was in the army infantry, stationed stateside in Texas during World War I. In December of 1944, his son, David, enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Impatient with adolescence and ready for war, David graduated high school a semester early to enlist. His small physique had made years of gym class unbearable, and it now posed a new problem: the weight requirement for service men was a hundred pounds. David weighed ninety-six pounds. The recruiting officer told him to come back after consuming large quantities of bananas and cream for six weeks. David stuffed his face. When he returned, the recruiting officer, after gently working the scale with his thumb, winked, “Yup, you just made it.” The draft age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen in November 1942, but David went active at seventeen years old with his parents’ permission. Basic training at the naval boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois was no picnic for the ninety-nine-pound ectomorph. David’s first job was steam-cleaning garbage cans in ten-below-zero Lake Michigan wind. At five o’clock each morning, his group ran one mile around the lake. Taking advantage of his small build, David often hid in a locker during the run, sliding out when the group returned. He got caught once and had to do two laps around the lake. The Great Lakes Naval Training Station in North Chicago has been in operation since 1911 and today is the only Navy boot camp in the United States, having sent over four million sailors to the fleet.

Following the traditions of his youth, David became a member of the Blue Jacket Naval Choir. The once-soprano had transitioned to alto, then tenor, and now bass. Following boot camp, David was sent to Naval Service Training School (sponsored by the neighboring Ford Motor Plant) in Dearborn, Michigan, where young sailors learned diesel- and gasoline-engine repair, electrical-skill training, and sheet-metal work. Students were screened for aptitude, abilities, and fitness for this intense three-month program located on the Rouge River. The V-12 program was introduced in 1943 to produce collegeeducated, commissioned officers to man ships and aircraft from the Navy’s massive shipbuilding program. After the decimation of Pearl Harbor, this program was designed to help combat Nazi Germany and support the war effort in Europe, the Pacific Ocean, and the contiguous lands of Japan. David enlisted in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, a mentally and physically demanding undergraduate-level program worth seventeen credit hours, including ten physical training hours a week. Sailors were given swim lessons at the Dearborn training school, which David enjoyed because he was a proficient swimmer. As a child, he had been petrified of swimming, despite summercamp lessons. One summer day while sailing with some friends on Lake Michigan, David was tossed overboard in fun. After frantically straining to stay afloat, he flipped onto his back, relaxed and kicked, swimming the reverse breaststroke. From that moment on, he loved swimming. The training program at the Rouge plant was heavily involved in teaching radar technology, a prerequisite for becoming a radar technician, which was David’s ambition. But more men were needed for battle in the South Pacific in the summer of 1945, so David, eighteen and eager to get out to sea, never finished his radar training. Instead he entered active duty on January 29, shipping from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor. While David lived only a mile from Lake Michigan, this was his first time seeing an ocean, and he instantly fell in love with the Pacific. It was a slow trip out for the anxious young men, taking weeks to reach port on an LST (“Landing Ship, Tank”), a cargo ship used to

transport supplies, vehicles, and troops. With twelve hours of shore leave, David had ample time to get drunk. It didn’t take much, either, as he was amazed to find himself completely wasted on only two beers. He was called for duty aboard an auxiliary-motored Yard Class Minesweeper (YMS), a 136-foot-long wooden ship with a displacement of 320 tons, originally designed in 1940 for home defense by the architects at the Henry B. Nevins Shipyard at City Island, New York. It was a functional wartime ship with a compact design ideal for sweeping mines. World War II was largely a sea battle. The most devious enemy for 700-foot heavily armed and armored battleships and cruisers with a 35,000-ton displacement was not an opposing ship of greater specifications, but a floating sphere the size of an inflatable exercise ball. While torpedoes and missiles could be detected and neutralized using countermeasures, the sea mine remained elusive to detection or eradication by the massive war ships. In fact, mines sunk nearly twenty-five percent of all lost ships during the war. The sophisticated sea mines of WWII contained 600 pounds of TNT and came in two main types. The first was called a contact mine—a hypersensitive, horn-covered mine containing sulfuric acid, exploding on impact when a ship’s hull came into contact with it. These large metal mines were typically tethered to chains anchored at the bottom of the shallow sea, suspending them below the water’s surface. The Yard Class Minesweeper cleared the seas of these destructive devices, much like a fishing vessel trawling the open water for its bounty. To remove these mines, the YMS had buoy-like floaters attached to the ship by steel cables, spread like airplane wings sixty feet from each side of the ship. As the ship traveled at ten knots, the cable picked up the mine, sliding it toward one of the cutters spaced roughly every ten feet, which sliced the chain anchoring the mine, causing it to float to the surface. Then, target practice: the crew used twenty-millimeter-caliber anti-aircraft guns anchored in the gun tub to trigger the mine from a safe distance. The second class of mines was called influence mines. Technologically advanced, they included acoustic mines (triggered by sound vibrations from the ship’s crew), pressure mines (triggered

by the sudden change of water pressure as a ship passed over), and magnetic mines (set off by the magnetic field of a ship’s iron or steel hull). Hitler’s Germany had developed the deadly magnetic mine and produced over 200,000 of them. These mines needed new technology and techniques to neutralize them—the YMS, with its wooden round bottom and nail-free deck, was ideally suited for this task. To explode the magnetic mines, the YMS was equipped with a massive generator at the stern of the ship, hooked up to a large spool of heavily insulated metal cables. Two buoyant electrically charged wires were trailed a hundred yards behind the ship at unequal lengths. The generator sent a 50,000-volt charge through the exposed end of the wire (the drum tail), and the charged current connected with the salt-water-conducting sea, creating a magnetic field that exploded the surrounding magnetic floating mines at sea level. To avoid tripping the magnetic mines with the magnetic field of their own ship, the YMS was equipped with a degaussing system: a copper wire wrapped around the ship at sea level, which created a magnetic field in the opposite direction, thereby canceling out the field of the minesweeper. The minesweepers created safe passage for the larger trailing battle cruisers. The modest efficiency of the minesweepers was summarized in their motto: “Wherever the fleet goes, we’ve been!”1 Five hundred and fifty minesweepers were commissioned, making it the largest production run of any warship in WWII. Built at Wheeler Shipbuilding Corp in Whitestone, New York, the YMS-46 (the forty-sixth commissioned minesweeper) was readied for battle. Its twenty-two-person compliment was part of the United States Third Fleet. The yacht-like ship was equipped with a minimal armament of one three-inch, fifty-caliber gun mounted in the ship’s prow (called the “deck gun”), two twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, and two depth-charge projectors along with two depth charges. In addition to exploding mines at a distance, the twenty-millimeter guns connected to a swiveling chair, allowing a sailor to maneuver and aim at attacking enemy aircraft. The ship’s propulsion was powered by two General Motors 500-horsepower diesel engines with a top

cruising speed of 13 knots. The round-bottomed YMS never stopped rolling, even in what looked like calm waters. It wasn’t well ventilated either, with diesel fumes wafting through the ship. David boarded the YMS-46 in Okinawa under the command of a second lieutenant, which is generally an entry-level rank for commissioned officers. The skipper, “a nice, personable gentleman,” as David recalls, was young, and so was his crew. David went out to the fleet as a coxswain, which is technically a boatswain’s mate, third class (BM3). The ship was filled with a motley band of characters: coxswain LeRoy Pinard from Oklahoma (“Okie”); the gunner’s mate from Indiana, John Whybrew; and the machinist from West Virginia, George Waybright. Seaman first class James Reed of Massillion, Ohio and Paul E. Matushek, Jr. of Chicago, the electronic technician’s mate, along with Allen Rose, the ship’s cook from Michigan, were also part of the crew. Collegiate football player Big Red Hawkins (unrelated to David) always accompanied Jimmy Sanders, the chief boatswain’s mate, on off-sea adventures. The crew’s mission was to sweep mines ahead of the amphibious assault forces in the East China Sea. It was “hazardous duty” in the truest sense: The all-wood-encased vessel was ideal for sweeping magnetic mines, but not for taking a shell or a contact mine. If a contact mine even grazed the ship (the fate of over ten YMS ships during the war), there were likely no crew members left to tell about it. When the ship swept for mines, the hatches were sealed and all crewmembers remained above deck. If a mine hit the ship, the compression in the chambers would kill a sailor on impact. An exploding mine once shot a piece of shrapnel at David, nicking the skin and just missing his jugular vein by an eighth of an inch. (That particular piece of shrapnel now rests peacefully in his jewelry box as a souvenir from the war.) Because of the hazardous duty, the crew received the same higher pay and better-quality food as submarine officers. When David reached his assignment in the South Pacific, Germany had surrendered, but the battle with Japan was still raging. The YMS started in Okinawa before sweeping mines off the coast of Taiwan. Although Japan surrendered in the late summer of 1945, the

crew continued sweeping for mines after the war, as it took time for news to reach the YMS out at sea. Little clothing was needed during the hot, moist summer months in the South Pacific. David was on night watch from midnight to four in the morning, suited only with a pair of shorts held up with a duty belt holstering a forty-five caliber. David’s strong aesthetic needs were adrift at sea, as things like the arts and beautiful music were scarce. Periodically, naval ships equipped with a Victrola (an early-brand phonograph) received shipments of seventy-eight-RPM vinyl records to help boost morale. David found one classical score—“Largo” from Xerxes, by Handel. During his night shift, around two in the morning when the rest of the crew was sleeping, he quietly played “Largo” on the upper deck, enjoying a beautiful state and feeling “saved” by listening to the music. One night, a crewmember overheard. The next day, he demanded, “Where is that goddamn record?” He broke it, saying, “We don’t want any of that long-hair stuff around here.” Beautiful music was considered feminine and not appropriate for “real men” at war. This was David’s first experience with the working class, who were hostile to anything deemed “airy-fairy,” like art museums or classical music. David discretely visited museums on shore leave, not telling anyone. Boat hooks (six-foot steel hooks with wooden handles) were used to bring small ships to dock in rough waters and to secure a small boat’s position against a larger ship too big to dock at shore. On one occasion, a released contact mine was floating perilously close to the YMS, its horns dangerously near the ship’s hull. David found another use for a boat hook: reaching to keep the mine from contact, lest the wooden vessel be blown out of the water. A frightened crewmate around David’s age came over to assist, asking, “What happens if it blows up?” With a calm glance, David matter-of-factly replied, “Well, then we die.” Engulfed in a wave of equanimity, the seaman realized calmly, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Instantly, the seaman lost his fear of death due to David’s fearless acceptance of death, a realization implanted in him from the presence of infinite love six years prior. For David, “death had lost its authenticity.”2 Miraculously, the mine did not connect with the ship. The experience was more of a physical strain for David than anything, as he wasn’t built for the Service and he knew it. He recalls carrying his duffle bag up the side of a ship: “Another ounce and I would have fallen off the damn thing.”3 David’s tenure at sea provided many opportunities for death, and not always by impending mines. On October 9, 1945, shortly after Japan surrendered, Typhoon Louise struck Okinawa, with steady 100-knot winds gusting up to 120 knots, and torrential rain, often horizontal, lasting twenty straight hours. The devastating storm sunk or damaged almost a hundred vessels, including seven minesweepers, and rocked the small YMS-46 for three grueling days. Typhoon Louise caused the greatest causalities of any “battle” during the war. Everyone except David and a boatswain’s mate were seasick and afraid. The two men, somehow exhilarated by the experience, took turns at the ship’s wheel during the typhoon. In another close call, David almost got cut in half by a steel cable tied to a mooring buoy, knocking him overboard into the swift current of the Huang Po River in Shanghai, which was filled with floating dead bodies. (Although the river’s name wasn’t meaningful to David at the time, it foreshadowed a crossroads later in life when he discovered inspiration and spiritual direction in the writings of Huang Po, the Ninth Century Zen master.) The YMS-46 and another warship were docked side-by-side in this incident. With the strong current, David could have easily been crushed like a tomato between them. Instead, the current swept him to the front of the ship’s prow, where he straddled one arm and leg on each side, hugging the ship patiently until a rescue boat was sent to scoop him up. The sea contained magical moments, like when the waters became phosphorescent, and when the ship passed through schools of flying fish that flopped around on the ship’s deck. But for the most part, life at sea for twenty-two young men far from home wasn’t very exciting, so they created their own amusement. The crewmen would shoot craps on payday. Analytical David figured the mathematics of

shooting craps and correctly surmised (as all casinos know) that as long as he started the game with more capital than his opponents, he’d win. The chief boatswain’s mate, Jimmy Sanders, asked David if he boxed. David nodded, recalling his “mosquito-weight” training. When the towering and well-built Jimmy Sanders wanted to go a round with him, David figured he’d surprise his opponent with his secret weapon. They put on gloves and entered the gun tub. The crew watched with excitement. Jimmy flattened David with one blow. Nevertheless, David earned the crew’s respect just for entering the “ring.” He later discovered that the fast and deadly Jimmy Sanders was the boxing champion of the Third Fleet! Jimmy’s punch was not something David’s body would forget anytime soon. On another occasion, when David was sent up to paint the ship’s mast, his pesky fear of heights froze him to the top of the twenty-four-foot pole, and he was literally unable to let go. Jimmy came up in a boatswain’s chair and said affectionately, “Shorty, if you can’t let go, I’m going to have to coldcock you.” (In those days, people didn’t worry about being politically correct. If you were bald, you could get called Baldy; fat, Fatty; and short, Shorty. At five-foot-six inches, David graciously accepted the latter nickname.) Frozen to the mast, David quickly shot back to Jimmy, “Well, okay, if you gotta, you gotta.” Jimmy cocked his arm, ready to hit him. Spontaneously, David’s body let go, resolving the crisis.

It is difficult to appreciate the torrent of emotions a young person experienced during hazardous duty. Nearly all the men on the YMS46 drank alcohol during the war, even while working. But where do you get alcohol while drifting in the East China Sea? As a boatswain’s mate, David lived in what’s called the boatswain’s hole: a compact, six-by-six-foot private cabin below-deck in the back of the ship. He had to share the space with a bunch of ten-gallon paint

cans. (To protect an all-wooden vessel from salt-water erosion, fresh paint was often applied to seal the ship.) Whenever the crew hit a port, they picked up whatever fruit they could purchase from the natives, and David, the ship’s unofficial moonlighting bartender, fermented it for about ten days to create alcohol (“joy juice” or “jungle juice”) in the empty paint cans. When the skipper made his inspection rounds, he assumed he was seeing paint canisters used to refinish the deck. The crew looked to David as their joy-juice supplier, and he always kept a home brew cooking in the boatswain’s hole. Incidentally, as was common during the war, David recalls that over fifty percent of the ship’s crew became alcoholic, including David. His love for the buzz of drinking started in the fields of Wisconsin, becoming more problematic during the war and worsening over the coming decade.

On the Streets of Shanghai The upside to navy life came after the war was over. David and his crewmates explored the cities of Shanghai, China’s largest metropolis with over twenty million people, and Formosa, the main island of Taiwan located off the coast of mainland China. David was enthralled by the communal living and sense of oneness on the lively streets of Shanghai in particular, as he witnessed a dentist pulling a patient’s tooth in front of a rowdy live audience, seas of endless merchants, and dozens of chefs cooking the local cuisine, filling the streets with wonderful aromas. His crew enjoyed the night scene, so they frequented the bars of Shanghai, switching from their jungle juice to locally-brewed beers. The minesweeper sailors were constantly provoked and ridiculed by the cruiser and battleship sailors in a Freudian-like comparison, calling the YMS crew “kitty sailors.” Now, word was that Jimmy, with his fierce left jab and deadly right cross, could by himself clean out a whole bar. But Jimmy never had to fight solo—the collegiate linebacker, Big Red, was always alongside. Big Red once knocked David unconscious while they

were both drunk when the ninety-nine-pounder jumped up to land a punch during an argument the two of them were having. The three young men were close buddies, with the kind of brotherly kinship that evolves with living in tight, dangerous quarters during war. As soon as the “kitty sailor” insults started flying, Jimmy and Big Red would push David aside, and a fight would ensue. The formidable duo would “clean up the whole joint,” as David recalls. The duo often used their considerably smaller companion as bait to start bar brawls as well. David didn’t mind since the outcome was always the same. David only witnessed Jimmy get stopped once: Jimmy had a guy pinned against the wall, and the man pulled out a small French pistol. “Okay, okay,” said Jimmy, backing off. David loved the Orient and loved being in China. One morning, while visiting a small shop in Shanghai, he saw an attractive, solidebony Buddha. Although he had little money, he had the advantage in his negotiations with the shop owner: shopkeepers felt if they missed the first sale of the day, they’d have bad luck all day. The shopkeeper kept coming down until he reached what David was able to afford: the bargain price of six dollars. David lugged the statue around with him in his duffel bag, and today it sits on his dresser. Despite being an atheist, on Christmas Eve in Shanghai, David found a Catholic Church and attended midnight Mass to enjoy the intrinsic beauty and historic pageantry, and the incense, choir, and orchestra of a great cathedral. On January 12, 1946, the YMS-46 headed home, passing through Pearl Harbor before arriving in San Francisco to be decommissioned. To save the government money and to save the crew from having to box, catalog, and warehouse equipment, most of the ship’s items were dumped overboard. Back in San Francisco, before being discharged, David was visiting an art museum when a lady tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Sailor, would you like to make some extra money? You can pose for our artists. We pay ten dollars per hour.” Never one to pass up the opportunity to make a few bucks, the sailor thought, Ten dollars per hour … Oh boy! They wanted him to pose in the nude. David went through with it, keeping a towel over his lap while the students sketched in charcoal.

“Ten bucks was a lot in those days,” he recalls, smiling.

David was honorably discharged from the Naval Services on June 29, 1946. The experiences aboard the YMS-46 turned the boys into men, teaching them to work together like brothers. Under hazardous conditions, the male bonding aboard the ship was lifelong, with the surviving crew keeping track of each other for fifty years through letters and random phone calls. David would hear on the line, “Is this Shorty?” “Who the hell is this?” he’d smile warmly. Every reconnection included tears as the men rekindled the love and camaraderie they shared. Decades later, one by one, they all died. To his knowledge, David is the last surviving crewman of the YMS-46.

PART II

DOCTOR OF THE MIND (1946-1965)

CHAPTER 4

Psychoanalysis

Debunking the Proof of God Back in his hometown, in September of 1946, David enrolled in Milwaukee State Teacher’s College (now part of the University of Wisconsin), set on going to medical school. Reunited with his boyhood mentor, Professor William Atwood, David explored the natural and biological sciences, excelling in zoology, anatomy, ornithology, general physics, and organic chemistry. David scheduled his electives in the morning so he could work the rest of the day. In the aftermath of the post-war Depression, unemployment was high among the returning veterans. While over eight million unemployed WWII veterans received twenty dollars per week for fifty-two weeks from the “52-20 Club” as part of the G.I. Bill, David worked three jobs. He maintained a personal belief that unemployment might apply to others, but never to him, and he always found job opportunities plentiful. With high unemployment, door-to-door sales for roofing and siding were competitive, especially in conservative towns around Milwaukee where people didn’t appreciate the intrusion. David astutely noticed that the average door-to-door salesman, with his jacket, tie, and briefcase, was offensive to housewives. David took a different approach, wearing slightly dirty overalls, a blue workman’s shirt, and a utility belt. He traded his briefcase for a toolbox, and in the minds of the conservative Milwaukeean, David symbolized the honesty of the blue-collar worker. His appearance and disarming straight talk broke through homeowners’ initial resistance, making it easy for people to say yes to his roofing offer. David excelled in his demanding sales position, covering his draw early in the day in time for his next job.

Reminiscent of his role as “jungle juice” supplier for the crew aboard the minesweeper, now he was a relief bartender at night. The alcoholic-in-training seemed at home in an environment where fellow drinkers bought shots for the bartender all evening. Other nights he drove a cab in the Milwaukee area, adopting an aggressive style more akin to New York City driving. With his quiet and introspective disposition, David gravitated toward jobs that benefited from strong listening skills, like bartending and cab driving. These skills would later serve him as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Despite plenty of part-time work, David always seemed strapped for cash—a peculiar recurring theme throughout his life. When he needed extra money during college, he washed windows. Using his experience in door-to-door sales, he used even a half hour of free time during lunch to wash windows, never having to knock on more than three doors before finding a gig. If David found himself at the local coffee shop with his friends without a nickel for a cup of coffee, he’d run down the street, wash a couple of windows, and return with the funds for coffee and a meal. When he wasn’t attending classes or working, he hung out at the local Greek restaurant, where he enjoyed mastika, a Greek liquor made from the resin of the mastic tree. At the restaurant he could do homework in his own private spot, away from the other students.

Two years later, as a matter of economics and convenience, David transferred to the largest local college, Marquette University— a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee. It had an excellent faculty, he loved the Jesuits, and he couldn’t afford to travel to school. David also reasoned that the school was his rightful place because if a person intended to refute a subject like theology, he’d better know what he is talking about. After all, if you’re going to be an adamant atheist, you should know everything about that which you attack. His tenure at the Jesuit university was an obvious contradiction. Although the revelation of the totality of human suffering left David an atheist, or someone who didn’t believe in the god of Christianity, at least, his understanding was still maturing. He was becoming more of an agnostic again: a person who does not know if God

exists and believes the existence of God is unknowable. “I was an intellectual, a freethinking agnostic who says, ‘By virtue of reason, the existence of God can be neither proven or disproven’.”1 In spite of his rationale for enrolling at Marquette, the Jesuit university was not a likely stomping ground for an agnostic, especially one firm in his belief that the Catholic depiction of God was false. David found himself taking courses on the philosophy of man, natural theology, theory of ethics, applied ethics, philosophy of conduct, logic, and contemporary American philosophy. His earlier studies of the ancient Greek philosophers were helpful, and he found his new courses valuable, especially those in logic and American philosophy, which complemented his personal studies in ancient philosophy. He respected his professors and the obvious integrity of the Jesuits but was critical of theological concepts, especially Saint Thomas Aquinas’s proof of the existence of God as primary cause. Aquinas was a unique blend of philosopher and saint, merging the worlds of the intellect and faith into one. Aquinas felt it was necessary to demonstrate that God can be known without sheer reliance on doctrine and faith, that reason can be used as a guide to faith. He put forth five logical proofs for the existence of God in his famous Thirteenth Century Summa Theologiae. These proofs deal with the notion of causality, or what Aquinas called “primary cause,” a concept inspired by Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” where God must be the cause that sets everything in the universe in motion “in the beginning.” All that is in motion is moved by something else, Aquinas argued, and if we trace backwards, from each thing moving to the thing or person that set it in motion, we cannot continue indefinitely: we cannot find an infinite regression of movers. At some point the process had to start: there had to be a first mover, who began the first motion. This constant, this unmoved mover, or first cause, Aquinas called God. David had an adverse reaction to this argument when he read it. He says that the notion of God as the primary cause seemed hollow and facile to him, an empty, intellectual deconstruction. “If there is a God,” criticized twenty-one-year-old David, “He’s eternal, and that which is eternal can hardly have a primary cause, because prior to

that which is eternal, there’s no first.”2 In so saying, it seems the young student missed the point Aquinas was making, for the Doctor of the Church was not arguing that God had a primary cause but that God is the primary cause. Regardless, David maintained a B average in his theology courses. Every Friday, the students met at a local hangout, drank beer from personalized glass mugs, and discussed philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. Unlike David, most of the students at Marquette had faith in religion. He was a novelty for being agnostic yet demonstrating a working knowledge of doctrine and theology. He even used his beliefs regarding the errors within the proofs of the existence of God to earn an occasional free beer.

When David returned from the service, he purchased a black 1934 Chevy Coop two-seater for thirty-five dollars. When he was out for a ride with a college buddy, Hooper, the car broke down: out of oil. They found themselves at the University of Wisconsin rathskellar, situated on Lake Mendota on the Madison campus. The young men had only about ten cents between them, enough to purchase a single pint of beer. As they looked out over the lake, soaking in the sunshine in the outdoor seating, a bird dropped a “gift” directly into their mug. Broke, David looked at Hooper and said, “I’ll get a spoon.”

Medical School By age twenty, David was interested in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. Acquainted with the inner, subjective realm, by the time he entered medical school, he was interested in being psychoanalyzed. “The complexity and intrigue hidden in the unconscious—the complexity of the human condition—was extremely attractive,” he recalls.3 David went to medical school to become a psychiatrist. His strong foundation in biological sciences—entomology, in particular, inspired by his mentor Atwood—easily transitioned to human physiological systems. He was fascinated with anatomy and

medicine, but ultimately, found most facets of medicine, like surgery, too “mechanical.” David’s interest in the complexities of the mind, spurred perhaps by his appreciation for ancient philosophers, made psychiatry a perfect fit. The idea of psychoanalysis—to psychologically investigate the mind and provide treatment for mental illnesses—was highly attractive to his introspective intellect. When David was first introduced to Sigmund Freud’s work, he found it inspirational. This was Freud’s era: the psychoanalytic movement was in full swing and represented the leading edge of clinically understanding the human mind. Freud was an atheist, and his model didn’t need God to explain the nature of the mind. This pleased David. There were other reasons for David to enter medical school. The physician was the projected ideal vocation of the time, as you were helping others and serving an important purpose. David’s family, in particular, was ridden with serious illnesses: both his mother and father could have died without medical attention. The physician was a hero, swooping in to save the day. The Hawkins family life was dominated by the prevalence of physical illnesses. Sometimes David would have to watch his mother have an asthmatic attack during dinner. She would run to the window, gasping for a full breath of air, while the family watched in anxious concern until she recaptured her breath. When she died, David sensed “she was happy to leave the body and be free of chronic pain.”4 Everybody except his father had pervasive allergies —hay fever and allergic reactions plagued the household. Ramon Hawkins was bedridden for two years with septicemia. David’s sister, Sally-Claire, had many ailments requiring multiple surgeries. Fortunately the man she married was a military serviceman, because without solid insurance coverage, her extensive medical bills would have bankrupted the couple. In 1960, Sally-Claire died in a diabetic coma from multiple surgeries, two days before her fortieth birthday. Becoming a physician was David’s highest aspiration even though there were no physicians in his family. Ramon had engrained in his son the need to make money, and a career as a physician

offered the potential rewards of the “good life,” appealing to David’s entrepreneurial soul. David’s core reason for entering the world of medicine, however, may be rooted in his transition beyond religion five years prior. “From my observation, religion didn’t seem to have the answers,” David recalls. “I was brought up in the Protestant [work] ethic, and the family was very religious, but that didn’t seem to stem the tide of sickness and suffering which I saw afflict most of them. And so my god became science and the intellect. Reason and logic would find the answers to man’s problems, I thought.”5 In realizing the totality of human suffering, David rejected the notion of a vengeful god and found himself embracing humanity. He would first search for life’s answers in psychiatry, committing his life to relieving suffering.

Thanks to the GI Bill for World War II veterans, which provided one year of fulltime education and training plus time equal to their military service, David was able to afford medical school with the help of a litany of part-time jobs. These included being assistant manager of Fox’s State Street Theatre, where he was eventually was promoted to junior executive, and of Princess Theatre, which featured low-budget action movies and westerns. David started an accelerated program at Marquette University School of Medicine in September 1949, finishing two degrees (both his B.S. and M.D.) within only seven years. Few salient memories remain with David from medical school. One of the only unpleasant experiences he recalls was as an intern, witnessing the horrors of the pediatric ward. Watching the suffering of small children lying in their hospital beds, frightened, desperate, and crying for their mommies, David knew he would never be able to tolerate pediatrics. He later recounts: “My avenue for the relief of suffering was through understanding, and to me, [children] were too little to be able to converse sufficiently to change the whole context of their suffering.”6 Working every other night at the disease-control unit of a state hospital, David treated typhoid, whooping cough, and polio. The polio epidemic was sweeping the nation, with tens of thousands of

new polio cases each year. The worst outbreak in the nation’s history came in 1952. The head of the hospital was often intoxicated and off the premises, leaving David as a senior medical student in charge of running the night shift. (Successful polio vaccination trials were announced in 1955, after David’s stint in the hospital.) One summer, David got his first taste of psychiatry while working at Milwaukee County Asylum of the Chronic Insane in the ward filled with patients claiming to be Jesus Christ or Napoleon Bonaparte (they kept Jesus and Napoleon on different ends of the ward to avoid competition).

The rigorous and demanding schedule of medical school curbed David’s inner quest. Medical textbooks replaced philosophy, and his curiosity turned to psychology, psychoanalysis, and the complexities of the human mind. The challenging topics of medical school suited his keen intellect, keeping his mind busy with continuous study and exploration. Graduating medical school with honors, he was granted Alpha Omega Alpha membership from the Honor Medical Society: medical school’s summa cum laude equivalent for academic and professional achievement. Dr. David R. Hawkins, or “Doc” as he came to be affectionately called by students and colleagues, interned at Columbia Hospital on the east side of Milwaukee, where he was born twenty-six years prior. The internship proved to be another physical and financial challenge, as he worked a hundred hours weekly, pulling all-night shifts every other night. He was paid only a hundred dollars a month (twenty-five cents an hour), with no extra time for additional part-time work. He lived on Kraft dinners at fifteen cents a box and stayed in public housing. The hospital cafeteria served food until midnight. There David would pick up two sandwiches: one for dinner and the other (wrapped in a napkin) for lunch the next day. Public housing didn’t allow pets, but the animal-loving David smuggled a male cat into his two-bedroom apartment. When the cat started meowing, David became concerned someone would hear him. One day he decided to sedate the cat by sprinkling potassium bromine, the cheapest sedative he could find, in the cat’s breakfast

food. When David returned from classes, the cat stumbled toward him before falling over and purring blissfully in his stoned state. (Incidentally, this was not the last time David came home to a drunken pet.) David had married nineteen-year-old Sally Louise Kenney the year he started medical school. Sally gave birth to their first daughter, Lynn Ashley Hawkins, during David’s final year of medical school in July 1953. After completing his rotating internship on July 1, 1954, David moved with Sally and Lynn Ashley, to New York, making a home on Hillside Avenue in Queen’s Village. New York City offered the highest-quality psychiatric training available for David’s residency, and he was eager to be psychoanalyzed by one of Manhattan’s leading analysts. In February 1955, their second daughter, Barbara Catherine Hawkins, was born.

Freud, Rado, and the Lion Post-war Manhattan was emerging as a cultural and economic world headquarters. The construction of towering steel and glass corporate meccas was underway, with expansive luxury apartments on the Upper East Side now available to house the flourishing whitecollar Manhattan workforce. Expensive shopping boutiques popped up all along Madison Avenue to satiate the appetites of the newly wealthy, who seemed to crave art and music, helping establish New York as a cultural epicenter. In 1954, David began his fulltime residency at Manhattan State Hospital on Ward Island, directly below the Triboro Bridge. He was placed in charge of newly-instituted, intensive, multiple-treatment wards, and the work was all-consuming. To earn extra money, David * sold his blood to various blood banks. Although a person was only supposed to give blood once every six months, donors weren’t tracked between banks, allowing David to visit a different bank every three weeks. Eventually he had to cut back on his fifteen-dollar-perpint payday due to anemia and faintness. In February 1956, David was awarded a coveted fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital. This highly competitive position offered five

months at full salary and an extremely high level of training from the top psychoanalysts in New York City. When the “financially-strapped” twenty-eight-year old walked into Mount Sinai, the main secretary for the program called David into her office to reprimand him. “You can’t be dressed like that around here,” she explained. A Jewish friend of David’s in New York City, upon hearing of his dilemma, said he had an uncle who owned a clothing store on the Lower East Side. David was given a deal on a summer-weight cord suit for only twenty dollars (it retailed for fifty dollars—way out of David’s budget). He wore the same suit every day for the five-month fellowship. In the same year as his fellowship at Mount Sinai, David became the supervising psychiatrist for the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and served as a staff psychiatrist at the New York Neuro-Psychiatric Center, which offered psychiatric services to lowincome patients. This experience educated him on the needs of this particular community, whom he enjoyed serving, and after his tenure at the center, they referred private, low-income patients to his private practice.

The 1950s was an exciting period of development in psychiatry and ushered in the rise of psychoanalysis in America. Psychoanalysis in the U.S. was less than a half-century old, beginning with Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud’s landmark lectures at Clark University near Boston in 1910. In Freud’s private practice, he noted most of his patient’s complaints were emotional, without observable physical issues. Using techniques like hypnosis, talking through current and past experiences, dream analysis, and free association, while watching for innocent slips of the tongue (which later became known as Freudian slips), Freud began noticing patterns in how his patients thought and behaved. These included traumatic effects that early life experiences had on a patient’s adult behavior, and the meaning hidden in the unconscious, revealed in dreams. Freud believed that making patients aware of unconscious blocks in the psyche could help reverse pathological behavior.

Freudian theory stimulated David’s early quest for universal understanding. Freudian psychology sought to explain why humans do what they do—their motivations and behavior—and offered an exciting new lexicon for exploring the inner world. Similar to many great Western thinkers like Aristotle, Freud highlighted the pain/pleasure principle: humans make decisions to seek more pleasure or avoid pain. Freudian theory accentuated the concept of the unconscious: a primal reservoir of desires, needs, and psychic forces that influence human behavior. Freud’s work outlined the mental mechanisms of defense, such as repression, regression, displacement, condensation, projection, denial, isolation, and reaction-formation—most of which became integral to David’s understanding of the psyche. As the first fullfledged psychology of the ego, Freud’s theories offered a remarkable explanation of how the ego functioned, utilizing concepts like the id and superego, and the division of the mind into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious aspects. Freud was on a quest to “define the ultimate nature of things,”7 and psychoanalysis was his method for defining relationships among phenomena in psychological terms. Although today Freud’s work has fallen out of favor and is often criticized on numerous grounds, it birthed and nurtured a relatively new field of discovery. Freud demonstrated that it was possible to explore the human mind—not just the brain—unveiling a psychological, investigative method for examining mental life. By maintaining a unique kind of clinical relationship with the patient over time using the techniques Freud prescribed, an analyst could discern a patient’s mental landscape. From the 1940s through the 1960s, psychiatry was heavily psychoanalytical and mainly Freudian, with heated debates emerging between strict Freudians and various factions, as well as with other groups like the Jungians (Carl Jung’s group) and the Adlerians (Alfred Adler’s group). The elite psychiatrists of that era were themselves psychoanalyzed, so practitioners were all students of their craft. Biochemistry—the use of psychopharmacology for influencing behavior—played only a mundane role.

By contrast, contemporary psychiatry is predominantly “biological psychiatry.” The central and almost single focus of psychiatry since the 1980s is brain chemistry, as revealed by the bustling fields within neuroscience. Today it’s common for patients to have a psychiatrist who writes prescriptions and a psychologist who discusses their problems with them in a psychodynamic environment. Outside of certain areas (like New York City), psychoanalysis is almost nonexistent. The Indian sage Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj notes that in Marathi (his native tongue), the word for psychiatrist translates as “doctor of the mind.” He comments: “Unless the doctor of the mind first understands what mind is, he will not get anywhere. Whatever goes on is based on the mind. The main question he should address in the first place is: What is it that the mind itself is based on? What is that of which mind is the content? Then he will get somewhere.”8 David certainly agreed. His inquisition into the mind itself and his search for truth was intense, and psychoanalysis was an initial way for him to explore the psyche. The psychoanalytic approach pushed its practitioners to subjectively understand themselves and the nature of the mind at a much deeper level than the psychiatric approach encouraged. Maharaj’s point was that a doctor of the mind must first understand that which he hopes to heal: the mind. Many of our modern-day shamans—psychiatrists and psychologists—seem more focused on categorically diagnosing mental illness and providing treatment based on the category than on holistically healing the patient. There are, of course, powerful healers who buck the current trend. New York City was the country’s hotbed for psychoanalysis from the ‘30s through the ‘50s. Numerous psychoanalytic subcultures emerged, led by various dissidents with conflicting perspectives on psychoanalytic theory and practice. David gravitated to Freudian theory and chose to pursue analysis through what was known as the “Columbia group” at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research. The clinic was America’s first training institution organized within a university. Although David wasn’t trained there, he was influenced by the founder, Hungarian psychiatrist Sandor Rado. Rado established the

Columbia group in 1955 and was a pioneering analytic theorist and a controversial figure in the history of psychoanalysis. Rado, along with fellow psychiatrist Abram Kardiner, who joined him at Columbia, was among the high-profile so-called dissidents in the emotionallycharged “New York Psychoanalytic Civil War.”9 Rado developed an analytical theory called Adaptational Psychodynamics, which he considered a basic science for the study of human behavior. Based mainly on Freud’s pre-1905 theories (up through The Interpretation of Dreams), Rado focused on producing an ego psychology that better explained psychological motivations with empirical and observational evidence. Rado’s approach was biologically grounded, since he pursued scientific methodology in studying human behavior. In Rado, we see a pragmatist similar in many ways to David in his later psychiatric approach. Freud’s clinical observations of human behavior through such techniques as free association helped reveal his patients’ unconscious drives. Freud’s theories and process of working with patients helped establish the psychoanalytic movement, now known as “classical psychodynamics” or “Freudian psychoanalysis.” His discoveries, such as how a patient’s current behavior is influenced by his developmental history, the role of infantile dependence, and the lasting importance of the formative period of childhood, led to advancements in understanding human behavior. Rado labeled his theory Adaptational Psychodynamics to distinguish its theoretical framework from the actual treatment of psychoanalysis. Incorporating the thinking and research of great minds like William James, Walter Cannon, Sándor Ferenczi, Abram Kardiner, and David Levy, Rado was influenced by the developing structure of the scientific method and the growing biological field. Adaptional Psychodynamics places a psychoanalytic method of investigation within the genetic and physiological fields of the human being. Whereas Freud’s theories were based solely on instincts and “energies” which were impossible to quantify or observe, Rado’s group took a pragmatic approach. Similar to how adaptation plays a critical role in the theory of evolution, this perspective on Freud’s work sought to study behavior within the framework of a person’s life cycle. Rado’s fundamental notion was that organisms evaluate and

then adapt their behavior based on what will better provide for their survival and overall health. An inability to successfully adapt, then, leads to mental illness. Adaptational Psychodynamics included more factors than Freud’s original work, incorporating a social and cultural context to help examine motivation and behavior. Freudian theory, in contrast, related all of an individual’s social behavior to instinctual forces. For this reason, some called adaptational psychodynamics a “modernization” of Freudian theory. Although Rado’s work has fallen into psychoanalytic obscurity, he was a pivotal figure in the history of psychoanalysis, developing the curriculums and protocols for psychoanalytic training that are still the basic models used by psychoanalytic institutes today. David was well-acquainted with Rado as he stewarded the psychoanalysis department at New York State Psychiatric Institute, which facilitated the training for the New York School of Psychiatry at Manhattan State Hospital, where David did his residency.

Also in 1956, David became accepted as an analysand (a patient being psychoanalyzed) by Lionel Ovesey, a clinical professor of psychoanalysis at the Columbia clinic. Born in Manchuria to Ukrainian emigrants, Ovesey was one of the center’s first graduates, working alongside its founders, Rado and the others. Ovesey was a creative researcher and theorist who wrote a landmark book on the psychological effects of oppression on minorities and who, with Abram Kardiner, crafted a pioneering set of critiques of Freud’s instinct theories. Kardiner was a well-respected analyst, psychiatrist, and psychocultural theorist born in Manhattan—probably best-known for the development of “basic personality structure.” In 1921, Kardiner sought analysis from Freud and was accepted as a patient and student. In psychoanalytic terms, Freud was David’s greatgrandfather. Within the ‘50s psychoanalytic New York City community, the analysand took great pride in his analyst—you were who your analyst was—and David had landed a prized catch. Your analyst was either from the East Side or the West Side, and according to

David, the elite analysts took residence on the East Side. Ovesey’s office was on East 83rd Street, and the doctor was from Columbia, which gave David status among his colleagues. Getting accepted by Ovesey was no easy feat. Post-war New York saw a large influx of individuals applying for psychoanalytic training. This trend necessitated a rigorous selection process, as there were many physicians like David looking for training, and a paucity of qualified analysts and instructors. Rado’s group had some of the most rigorous standards. David had to wait an entire year; besides being interviewed by Ovesey, he had to undergo a battery of interviews and psychological examinations. The purpose of these tests was to evaluate the trainability and capabilities of the patient, but also to ensure that there was no underlying psychosis, like latent schizophrenia, that psychoanalysis would make overt. Psychoanalysis can affect someone similarly to how Zen meditation can, throwing you into a psychotic state if you’re a borderline schizophrenic. Ovesey reviewed David’s test results, conducted the interview, and said, “I’ll start seeing you in September.” Being accepted by Ovesey triggered anxiety attacks in David that later became severe during treatment.

David’s analysis with Ovesey took place four days per week for five straight years (1956-1960), during which time David opened a part-time private practice in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City and took low-income patients who couldn’t afford more expensive fees. He saw many patients for a mere eight to ten dollars, a third of the standard fee. In classical psychoanalysis, the analysand lays on a couch almost every day of the week for fifty minutes. Sitting behind you, totally out of sight, the analyst generally remains silent, only making occasional interpretations. This arrangement brings up anxieties and emotionally-charged thoughts, which may then be projected onto the analyst. Combining this emotional upheaval with dream analysis leads to an extensive exploration of the repressed unconscious. During his psychoanalysis with Ovesey, David developed anxiety symptoms like claustrophobia, panic attacks, and ongoing

anxiousness. His neuroses became so intense that he was unable get into an elevator, drive across a bridge, or drive through a tunnel. He felt trapped: he couldn’t be by himself, but also couldn’t be with anybody. He was claustrophobic (couldn’t be in an enclosed room) and agoraphobic (afraid of being outside in open spaces). The anxiety worsened, but Ovesey was pleased with his progress because repressed conflicts were getting closer and closer to the surface. The Oedipus complex is an extremely powerful psychological confirmation within the unconscious. A concept Freud borrowed from Greek mythology, immortalized in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, this complex is defined by the childhood desire to rebel against the father image and incestuously return to the mother. For Freud, the Oedipus complex marked an important stage in an individual’s psychosexual development, which was often repressed, even in mentally-balanced people. One day David was lying on the analyst’s couch in terror with a pulse of 120, hardly able to breathe or to speak. He reported a dream of being killed by a lion, while a woman stood in the background. As David recalled the nightmare, a terrible fear overcame him. When Ovesey asked him what he thought the lion represented, David said he couldn’t think of anything other than a very dangerous animal that could kill you. The analyst calmly asked David, “What’s my name?” David replied, “Uh, oh. Lionel—Lion.” Incidentally, Lionel Ovesey’s colleagues generally called him “Lion.” (In another dream David had reported to Ovesey, David drove an old, beat-up car, but under the hood was a pristine Cadillac engine. The decrepit exterior disguised the inner power and prestige of the vehicle. The innocuous appearance of the car shielded David from the unconscious fear of being attacked or killed in instinctual male competition, another expression of the Oedipal drama.) Suddenly, while on the “Lion’s” couch, the anxiety attack became severe, as David had projected the father image onto his analyst. David then saw how he had projected competitive fears onto all males: the issue at the root of the Oedipus complex. The neurosis and all the related symptoms disappeared, and he says he

recovered from decades of obsessive-compulsive scrupulosity, reducing or eliminating psychological conflicts and difficulties relating to other men. According to David, his psychoanalysis was successful.

During his analysis, David was still an agnostic, and he and Ovesey both took a dim view of religion. David became very sick with hemorrhagic diverticulitis and bleeding ulcers—probably the result of excessive drinking—requiring recurrent transfusions of multiple pints of blood. While lying in the hospital bed in a morbid condition, he found himself hovering above his body: “Here I was in what seemed exactly like this body, only it didn’t seem to weigh anything, and you could almost see through it. And there I was, five or six feet over the body.”10 Weightlessly hovering in the air, still in possession of all his sensory faculties, he looked down at his physical body, which appeared like it was about to die. He recalled that he was something other than the body, but knowing it was not time to “leave,” he re-entered it. At the time, David had never heard of “out-of-body” experiences, so he didn’t know what to think about the event. He shared the experience with his analyst, who surmised, “Well, it must have been a toxic psychosis.” “Yes, you’re right,” David agreed. “I guess I did some kind of duplication of the body ego image.”11 They both concluded that it was a toxic brain reaction, and so negated the experience’s validity. In the late ‘50s, this type of “paranormal” phenomenon was not openly discussed—especially professionally. To avoid being perceived by their colleagues as “cuckoo,” the two men never discussed the experience with anyone else. Around a decade later, the concept of out-of-body experiences entered mainstream awareness with books like Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body. David loved his analyst, calling Ovesey a “great and wonderful friend.”12 Much like David, Ovesey had rebellion in his blood, “always ready to do mortal combat with the doctrinaire.”13 David’s battles

with the doctrinaires were yet to come, but he was already influenced by powerful minds in his field, providing him with additional courage and inspiration. Even though the adaptational model and the thinkers of the Columbia group heavily influenced David, he remained more of a classical Freudian analyst in his practice. Regardless of their different approaches, perspectives, and theoretical underpinnings, these early titans in psychoanalytic history were committed to the same thing as David—an unwavering search for truth, the mark of the psychoanalytic field at the time. As Freud reminded his field of analysis, “Finally, we must not forget that the relationship between analyst and patient is based on a love of truth, that is, on the acknowledgement of reality, and that it precludes any kind of shame or deception.”14 Although David still hadn’t found the answers he was seeking, he was deepening his understanding of the mind and how it related to the world.

CHAPTER 5

Early Influences

While David’s understanding of the psyche deepened with analysis, psychiatric residency, and other trainings, his alcoholism worsened. At the time, he perceived his alcoholism as a curse. In retrospect, he feels it proved a great blessing because as he searched for sobriety, he met several extraordinary souls who influenced his future direction.

Bill W. and Alcoholics Anonymous As the story goes, an alcoholic named Rowland H. traveled from the United States to Switzerland to see eminent psychiatrist Carl * Jung to get sober. After returning to the States, Rowland relapsed, and Jung advised him to seek for a religious experience—Jung evidently knew several alcoholics who had “found religion” and remained sober. With humility, Jung believed that where his psychoanalytic approach failed, spiritual experiences could succeed. Rowland joined the Oxford Group, a popular Christian-based selfhelp movement, where he found sobriety. Rowland told his friend Ebby about it, and Ebby achieved sobriety, too. Ebby introduced Bill Wilson, a hopeless alcoholic, to the Oxford Group, which led to Wilson’s sobriety and the inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous. An alcoholic since his service in World War I, Wilson, better known as Bill W., had been hospitalized numerous times, unable to break his addiction despite his best efforts and the loving support of his wife, Lois. When Wilson’s old drinking buddy, Ebby, showed up at his home sober and a changed man, Wilson took note, agreeing to attend one Oxford Group meeting. Wilson showed up plastered and was escorted out of the meeting several times. For the fourth time, Wilson checked himself into Towns Hospital, an institution that specialized in the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction, led by William D. Silkworth. Silkworth believed alcoholism

was an illness, whereas most people viewed it as a moral weakness. Ebby came to visit, and at Wilson’s request, his friend explained again how the Oxford Group worked: you realize you are defeated, you admit it, and you turn your life over to the care of God. Defeated himself, feeling guilt and remorse over his behavior, particularly toward his wife, Wilson felt hopeless. He knew when he left the hospital he would once again begin drinking; his own will was not strong enough to stop. Ebby had mentioned the need to surrender the intellectual mind to the unknown—to the unknowable. But how could a highly intelligent, analytical man who appreciated rationality and science let go of the intellect? Worse yet, Ebby claimed his transformation occurred as a consequence of God, not of his own doing. This thought made Wilson even more uncomfortable. But Ebby pointed out that Wilson could create his own notion of God. The main idea was to surrender to a Power greater than oneself. With this, Wilson resonated. In a moment of despair, coupled with a humble willingness to have a Higher Power enter his life, Wilson decided: I’ll do anything, anything at all. If there be a Greater Physician, I’ll call on Him. Then, without faith or hope, Wilson cried out, “If there be a God, let Him show Himself.”1 Wilson had, as they say, “hit bottom.” The room filled with light, and a powerful Presence melted away the terror of the prior moment. For Wilson, this spiritual experience inwardly proved the existence of God, although for the remainder of his life, he questioned religion.2 He was insistent that AA be a spiritual program, not a religious one. This openness and the use of terms like “Higher Power,” “Power greater than ourselves,” and “God as we understand Him” helped make the program accessible to people from all religious and secular backgrounds. Wilson called AA the “language of the heart,” and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions were mainly “principles of ego reduction, and therefore for the reduction of our fears. These were the principles which we hoped would hold us in unity and increasing love for each other and for God.”3 Wilson’s transformation occurred in 1934. In the late ‘50s, he began focusing his writings on matters like acceptance, surrender,

humility, honesty, release from fear, God, and the language of the heart in AA’s newsletter, The Grapevine. Wilson’s influence on David was profound. We can find the kernel of many of the core precepts of David’s later teachings in Wilson’s talks and writings, where Wilson recorded timeless spiritual principles from his own understanding. Wilson lived in Westchester and spent most of his time in New York City. David met Wilson around 1960 and eventually adopted the man as his mentor, forming a brotherly friendship and collaborating on numerous projects with him throughout the ‘60s. Wilson, who was over thirty years David’s senior, had a strong influence on many aspects of David’s world. It was with Wilson that David would explore the psychic domain. It was with Wilson that David met another of his spiritual mentors, Helen Wynn. And it was through Wilson that David learned about the benefits of megavitamin therapy for alcoholics, leading David to establish one of the country’s largest mental health clinics that helped heal thousands of patients from around the world. David was one of the physicians called into attendance when Wilson was nearing the end of his life in 1971. Wilson was suffering from brain anoxia, caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, and David prescribed various nutrients and other protocols designed to improve brain oxidation. David, along with several other psychiatrists, had to smuggle the nutrients from Canada, as they weren’t yet legal in the United States. Near Wilson’s end in 1971, David reports that his friend drifted into semi-conscious states. On one such occasion, Wilson mumbled, “In my Father’s House, there are many mansions,” quoting John 14:2.4 According to David, Wilson had a powerful alignment with God based on faith and his spiritual conversion, whereby he fully experienced the presence of God. Out of Wilson’s conversion moment in 1934, AA had arisen. The profundity of Wilson’s experience led David to hope that he, too, could experience the presence of God and reach a state of intrinsic truth, although he remained skeptical. In 1960, following the completion of his analysis with Ovesey, David sought treatment for his alcoholism from another psychiatrist, Harry Tiebout.

Tiebout’s Ego and the Process of Surrender American psychiatry was still in early development in the ‘30s and ‘40s, with heated debates unfolding between the Freudians, Jungians, and Adlerians. Fortunately, Harry Tiebout was openminded, willing to borrow any and all forms of therapy. This was a quality David admired and shared. Tiebout needed ingenuity in addition to open-mindedness because he was treating patients with an illness for which psychiatry offered no solutions: alcoholism. In 1939, Tiebout received a draft manuscript of what would become Alcoholics Anonymous (affectionately known among AA members as “the Big Book”) while he was at Blythewood Sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. Although the principles contained in the manuscript where foreign to the psychiatrist, he was intrigued. He shared the document with two alcoholic patients at the sanitarium. One of these was Marty Mann, who later became well-known as the first female in AA to get sober. After reading the manuscript, not only did the alcoholic patients stop drinking, they also exhibited a remarkable change in attitude and overall personality, going from angry, intolerant, and egocentric to forgiving, open, and loving. After witnessing the transformative effects of the Twelve Step Program, Tiebout spent the remainder of his life immersed in all things AA. Studying the spiritual principles of the Twelve Steps, he did his best to analyze and communicate why it worked from a psychiatric viewpoint, thereby extending the reach and awareness of AA within the professional community. Tiebout’s studies led to several seminal papers, including “The Act of Surrender in the Therapeutic Process.” In attempting to break down what happens in the surrendering process, he identified the internal qualities of defiance and grandiosity in alcoholics, as well as external circumstances where the alcoholic has no other options. The child-like quality of defiance provides the alcoholic a protective shield from the truth, allowing him to experience a false sense of confidence and inner strength. The ego mechanism of grandiosity fortifies the feeling of power coupled with arrogance, superiority, and a need for instant gratification. He notes that in alcoholic patients,

“the unconscious mind rejects—through its capacity for defiance and grandiosity—what the conscious mind perceives.”5 It isn’t until the alcoholic runs out of options, no longer able to act defiant and grandiose, that a complete surrender can occur, leading to sobriety. When the unconscious forces of defiance and grandiosity are removed, surrender can manifest. The father of modern psychology, William James, also wrote about the necessity of surrender and “letting go” for spiritual experiences to unfold in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Wilson read around the time of his spiritual conversion. Another influential paper by Tiebout, “The Ego Factors in Surrender of Alcoholism,” reads more like a spiritual treatise than psychiatric discourse. Here Tiebout draws a distinction between the psychological ego and the Ego. Freud broke down the ego construct into distinct subdivisions: the id or animal instinct, the superego or conscience, and the ego, which acts as a mediator between the id and superego. Freud’s work focused on the id’s primitive, animalistic drives and the superego’s mechanisms of restraint. From Freud’s perspective, instincts and sexual drives form the basis for the entire developmental path. In contrast, the Ego is part of an infant’s nature that persists into adulthood. Tiebout honed in on the Ego’s primary quality—omnipotence, or what Freud called, “His Majesty, the Baby”—the inability to accept frustration, and the tendency to be hurried and to require immediate gratification. Tiebout began deconstructing the mechanisms that keep the alcoholic from sobriety by identifying the Ego’s unconscious drives. He realized that the childish Ego thought itself to be the center of the universe, and if that quality was not removed—at least temporarily—the alcoholic had no chance of finding sobriety. In “Alcoholics Anonymous: An Experiment of Nature,” with his understanding of the Ego mechanisms, Tiebout went on to identify four critical success factors in AA’s program: hitting bottom, humility, surrender, and ego reduction. He viewed hitting bottom as “an emotional state of hopelessness and an inner conviction that one cannot continue as one has been going.”6 It is important to point out that from a psychiatric perspective, the concept of hitting bottom was

not only alien, it was horrifying, as the traditional psychiatrist supported the alcoholic, even if it precluded the patient’s sobriety. Humility provides the substance for the alcoholic to remain sober, as it helps keep the ego in check. Surrender occurs when the individual accepts defeat, putting his faith in “a Power greater than himself,” as Step Two of AA’s program explains. The fourth factor, ego reduction, also flew in the face of traditional psychological thinking. Freud viewed the ego as a control mechanism that needed to be healthy and strong in order to effectively balance the powers of the animal id and the parental conscience. From the psychoanalytic and psychological viewpoint, the ego played an important role in society, and it was the role of the analyst or psychologist to help the patient form a positive or healthy ego. But Tiebout believed that the big Ego represented a “narcissistic remnant” of childhood, and that if this narcissistic core persisted, it would lead to egocentricity and narcissism. The role of therapy and of the Twelve Steps, then, is to reduce the narcissistic drives of the Ego, that is: ego reduction. Tiebout believed that alcoholics needed to reduce their Ego to find sobriety. Ruth Fox, the founder of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, with whom David lectured on occasion, disagreed. She held that the alcoholic’s ego wasn’t strong enough and needed strengthening to be healthy (a more traditional psychological viewpoint). Tiebout is considered the first psychiatrist to incorporate the principles of AA into his clinical practice and is credited with helping cure the first female alcoholic in AA. Not only was Tiebout an enthusiastic supporter of the AA movement, he also treated and later became friends with AA co-founder Bill Wilson. Wilson saw Tiebout regularly in treatment for Wilson’s depression, years after Wilson’s initial sobriety. When David was still struggling with his alcoholism * and depression, Wilson recommended that he meet with Tiebout. Alcoholism and depression often go hand-in-hand, as was the case with Wilson and with David’s family (his mother and father suffered from both). So David went from exploring the unconscious through five years of classical psychoanalysis to yet another form of depth analysis with Tiebout, focusing on uncovering the roots of the ego itself. Seeing

Tiebout served a dual purpose for David in the early ‘60s: the treatment of his alcoholism and depression as well as mentorship from a psychiatrist who understood the psychology of recovery. In his analysis with Tiebout, David recounts how Tiebout filtered dreams and memories through the lens of the narcissistic ego. If David had a dream about a chicken scratching, Tiebout would ask, “How does the ego feel about scratching for a living?” David would reply, “Oh, the ego hates it.”7 Any information presented from the unconscious, often in the form of dreams, was interpreted from the ego’s viewpoint. With this therapeutic approach, David had the opportunity to increase his understanding of the ego’s unconscious mechanisms. David later called Tiebout “the world’s expert on the ego and its unconscious representations.”8 David met with Tiebout regularly for several years, becoming a close colleague up until the latter’s death in 1966. Tiebout was nearing the completion of a manuscript when a second heart attack took his life. David and Tiebout had been corresponding about the project, and after Tiebout’s passing, David thought it would be tragic for the world to lose his inspired writings. David approached Tiebout’s wife and offered to complete the editing of the book at no charge. For an unknown personal reason, the widow declined. David thought it was odd; the work never made it to print.

With Tiebout, we begin to see the bridge between David’s psychoanalytic work and his spiritual quest manifesting through his profession. His experience with psychoanalysis gave David his first inkling of his conception of the evolution of consciousness, demonstrating how the ego is an intrinsically instinctual animal in origin rather than merely a social-human or cultural construction. As said, Freudian psychoanalysis viewed the ego as the organizing structure of the mind comprised of the id, ego, and superego, where the ego counterbalances the forces of the unconscious and a person’s conscience. Adaptational Psychodynamics retained this Freudian viewpoint, but added the social and cultural perspectives. In Tiebout’s work, however, the ego

denotes the narcissistic ego, similar to how AA conceptualizes it. Here, the ego—or egotism—means narcissism. So from the perspective of Tiebout and AA, the ego is more of an “enemy” whereas in Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego needs to be strengthened by understanding how it functions. David’s experience with Rado’s Adaptational Psychodynamics and interacting with pioneers like Tiebout helped David begin to see the ego from a more expansive or “spiritual” perspective. For example, in Rado’s historic paper, “The Psychoanalysis of Pharmacothymia,” Rado suggested that the ego is addicted to the “high” of the substance, not to the substance itself: “The ego grieves for its lost bliss and longs for its reappearance.”9 This new context for addiction had a huge influence on David, becoming a foundational principle in his clinical work as well as his later teachings. In David’s psychoanalytic practice, he adopted a combination of the various approaches. His seven years of analysis with Ovesey and Tiebout were rewarding both professionally and personally. He learned to discern when a patient’s problem was narcissistic, when he or she was compensating for inferiority and unconscious guilt, and from the Freudian viewpoint, he tried to make the patient conscious of these unconscious mechanisms. David saw patients at his Fifth Avenue office (just south of Ninety-Fifth Street) for over five years.

CHAPTER 6

Hell

David completed his analysis with Ovesey and Tiebout. He was a working psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a private practice and his own clinic. His first marriage had failed, and he was onto his second. But all of this was overshadowed by an existential angst and a serious drug and alcohol addiction.

The Addict’s Mind David’s addiction, this “progressive and fatal illness that did not respond to any treatments available,”1 continued to challenge the good doctor, who was just beginning his illustrious career. Alcoholics are often willing to give up life itself for the high—the bliss state— experienced when intoxicated. Alcohol and drugs can also silence negative feelings, albeit temporarily. “To be really stoned,” David recalls, “is to be exposed to the exquisite beauty of all things. It lays you back—takes you out of the picture. And then reveals exquisite beauty … What’s being revealed to you is that all things are sacred —including you. If you stay in that state, the world calls you enlightened. If you come out of it, the world says you were stoned.”2 David’s exposure to alcohol began with his parents. He came from a drinking family. Coupled with depression, his parent’s drinking got progressively worse as they aged. By the time David moved to New York, his parent’s marriage had fallen apart. Ramon and AliceMary’s casual drinking had turned heavy. Ramon had liver trouble, and both of his parents’ alcoholism eventually proved fatal. David had an additional problem: as a physician, he had easy access to prescription medicine. As the body’s tolerance to alcohol increases, it becomes more difficult to achieve the high. The withdrawal from the high brings the opposite state: depression. To avoid depression and achieve the high, David started mixing prescription drugs with alcohol.

The addict’s denial was no different for David, even though he was a psychiatrist and aware of the ego’s mechanisms of defense. “I never thought I was abusing pills,” he recalls. “I was taking thirty-five a day because I felt I needed them.”3 He juggled up to forty pills daily combined with a pint of booze and anything he could smoke, drink, or inject. As a cross-addict, David says he was one of the first people in the United States to discover that tranquilizers were addictive. A new sedative called Librium, a precursor to Valium, was released around 1959, and it was heavily advertised as helping alcoholics. The drug was used during the withdrawal period, but if you had a propensity for addiction, you simply shifted your addiction from alcohol to Librium. David used Librium to get sober, and got hooked. And then “I drank my way off it,” he says. He later played with a whole suite of tranquilizers. David was playing pharmacologic roulette. As a psychopharmacologist, he manually manipulated his own consciousness with “uppers in one pocket, downers in the other.”4 David created alchemical concoctions combining a little Demerol with terpyridine, paregoric (powdered opium) with chloral hydrate. He had a “whole box of goodies” to titrate himself into “a really mellow state during the day.”5 And as the day came to a close, he would swallow a Dexedrine, a psychostimulant used to increase wakefulness and reduce fatigue. Explaining the psychology of addiction, David says, “In the addictions, it becomes, If I get the right dose of that drug … The thought that the source of happiness is outside oneself accompanies all these states of weakness and victimhood.”6 With the help of the Twelve Step Program, David first achieved sobriety in late 1962. On December 24, 1963, he left his office and drove to Bonwit Teller in Manhasset, a store that specialized in expensive women’s apparel, to buy his wife a present. On Christmas Eve in Long Island, the upscale department stores stayed open exclusively for professionals—people who didn’t have any other time to shop for the holidays—and they offered complementary alcoholic beverages to their wealthy patrons.

The woman serving drinks asked David, “Would you like scotch or bourbon?” David instinctively replied, “Scotch.” In that instant, his one-year sobriety evaporated. After his relapse, his alcohol and drug problem worsened. Desperately, he realized that without spiritual help, he could not recover. Unless he believed in God, he would die. By the time David reached his lowest point, as is the case with many alcoholics, his life—including his physical body and his personal relationships—was in shambles. David, however, was a “functional alcoholic”—few if anyone in his clinic suspected he had a problem. He showed up for work every day and publicly drank like a gentleman at night. But at home, he got smashed. Like his parents, David was prone to depression. Alcohol and depression appear to be genetically linked, often going hand-inhand. Unsuccessfully, he tried various hospitals and sanitariums to address his condition. The severity of his alcoholism led to projectile vomiting accompanied by a fierce headache, an experience that terrified him. As a physician, David knew the physiological and biochemical effects of his drinking and worried about his brain and liver. Realizing he couldn’t stop, that he was out of control, he began to panic. “Alcohol used to get me high and happy,” David recalls. “All of the drugs did … but after a while, even on the drug, I couldn’t get the effect anymore … when the drug stops, what comes up is enormous anxiety.”7 The withdrawal from sedatives brought fear that swept over David in waves, finally leading to delirium tremens where “some kind of nameless terror would begin to take over your consciousness and the hair would go up on the back of your neck. And paranoia would start and you just lived in a state of stark terror.”8 Like many alcoholics of the time, including Bill Wilson, David checked himself into Townes Hospital. He did this three times, once having to be shackled to a bed like a raving lunatic. On his last visit, the physician told David that if he didn’t stop drinking, his liver would burst and he would bleed to death in a few months. David reflects back on the experience as he exited Townes at 293 Central Park West for the last time: “I was just kicked out of Townes Hospital, and the chloral hydrate was just wearing off, and

my knees turned to water. I came apart. The walls crashed in on me. I thought I was going crazy. I didn’t have any choice … I was disintegrating right on the sidewalk. My whole psyche was coming apart. Stark raving terror was coming over me.”9 He walked down the block, thought Fuck it, and stopped off at the first bar. Taking a seat at the bar, he told the bartender what the doctor had just told him. He was drunk within an hour. Even at the cost of his own life, he could not stop. “What’s so peculiar about addiction to drugs and alcohol,” David explains, “is that you’re even willing to risk your physical body, marriage, job, position, reputation, and all your money. … You’re willing to throw it all down the drain.”10

Zen David’s exposure to Wilson, Tiebout, and the tenets of the Twelve Step Program were no doubt valuable to him, but David was still agnostic, and according to the tenets of AA, you had to believe in some kind of Higher Power in order to get sober. With no belief in God and no control over his addiction, an internal crisis emerged. David had tasted the Light in the snow bank, but still questioned his existence. His reading of the great ancient philosophers kept existential questions alive in his psyche. Then, the theological emphasis in his first year at Marquette rekindled his questions about spiritual reality. The deeper questions were always present, even after his revelation in the woods, even as an atheist and then an agnostic. Never was there a point when David relinquished the quest for truth—always he was a student of it. The driving question was: “If there is no God, then what is the core of the truth of existence?”11 Spurred by his earlier transcendental experiences, he believed the ultimate Reality could be experienced in the here and now, not restricted to an afterlife. Seven years of analysis didn’t quell David’s search, as “there was an inner core within [my] consciousness that was desperate to reach some great truth.”12 His reality was still rooted in reason and science. “I was a thinker and a practical doer, a pragmatist,” David recalls. “In philosophy, I was a logical empiricist. I

only believed that which could be verified through human experience.”13 But his intellect wasn’t yielding answers. A period of very intense inner searching began. Trying to find God as an agnostic is paradoxical: how could someone who believes that God can’t be known find God? David’s search brought him in contact with religious movements like the Quakers, the Ethical Culture movement, and Religious Science (Science of Mind), but it was in the teachings of the Buddha and the practice of Zen that David would find solace and an accessible spiritual path. After World War II, America saw a rise in interest in Zen teachings. Prior to Alan Watts (a popular British writer and expositor of Eastern literature and philosophy), the mysteries of Zen lay hidden from Judeo-Christian culture. Watts’s popular The Way of Zen was published in 1957, and the West became tantalized by this Eastern philosophy and life practice. Buddhism, with its dharma and “right law,” was perhaps too reminiscent of David’s religious days as an Episcopalian. One was to follow scriptural teachings expounded by Buddha, the founder. By contrast, Zen—a mystical branch of Buddhism—“keeps itself away from the Buddha,”14 as it is a direct pathway of experiential knowing. A brief description of Zen from Watts, contrasting Zen with other religions, helps explain the attraction David must have had to this path: “After all, creeds, dogmas, and philosophical systems are only ideas about the truth, in the same way as words are not facts but only about facts, whereas Zen is a vigorous attempt to come into direct contact with the truth itself without allowing theories and symbols to stand between the knower and the known.”15 The Buddha didn’t use the term “god” in his teachings. He instructed his initiates that they could realize the ultimate Reality— achieve Nirvana—without relying on faith in a god. The same was true for Zen practice. Without a punitive, judgmental god that stirs guilty and sinful feelings, David was free to explore the inner, subjective terrain. Zen Buddhism seemed to offer the fastest route, so David figured he could do “an end run around God through Zen Buddhism.”16 As Watts explains, “It has been said that the difference between Zen and other forms of religion is that ‘all other paths wind

slowly up the mountainside, but Zen, like a Roman road, thrusts all obstacles aside and moves in a direct line to the Goal’.”17 Zen required strong discipline and tenacity—two qualities David had in abundance, except when it came to his addictions. It was the religion of “going right ahead with no looking back.”18 Following David’s experience of the totality of human suffering in the woods, he was no longer willing to follow any teachings on faith and trust alone, vowing to only pursue reality via direct experience, which formally began with his own psychoanalysis. David subscribed to First Zen Institute of America’s monthly periodical, where he learned the value of formal Zen meditative techniques. With the practice of zazen (seated meditation), he began meditating daily for two full hours: one hour every morning at 5 a.m. in order to be at work by 6:30 a.m., and another hour in the evening before dinner, after an intensely busy work day. But Zen wasn’t helping his addiction or depression; nor was it subduing his existential angst.

Descent into Hell As a thirty-seven-year-old alcoholic, David entered a state of profound apathy, cut off from his family, colleagues, and friends. No one understood him, and even if they did, there was no way to help. David felt close to death, sinking into deep depression for months. Instead of fighting the alcoholism, however, he decided to dive into it, taking him to the depths of his misery. On January 10, 1965, David decided sobriety was unattainable: “It was not possible. It would never happen to me. And I hit a state of hopelessness and black despair. I decided I would have to leave this world.”19 He was about to take his life with fifty cc’s of Demerol, when he had the thought, You know, in a second or two this could be tacky. David recalls this moment, laughing: This could be embarrassing if I ain’t right about this whole thing.20 The avowed agnostic had a precious moment of doubt. Instead of taking Demerol, David decided to give it one last shot.

Everything was on the line. His survival depended on the development of spiritual awareness, which for an agnostic, was not easy. But he was driven to discover truth. Demerol by his side, he closed his eyes, taking a meditative posture with a relentless drive to reach truth—no matter what. David entered a state of inner spiritual agony—a profound depression of the spirit itself. Reaching into the depths of despair, he found himself in experiential realms of hell. An intensifying agony “walked through” David’s mind. But he dove further still. On the right he passed a sign reading, Abandon all hope ye who enter here, for there was no returning. The line is from Dante’s Inferno. David says he never read “The Inferno” prior to this experience, and believes he directly cognized a sign that actually exists in hell. It is possible, of course, that he had previously heard the very famous line quoted somewhere and remembered the word (in his “hell” experience) without consciously knowing it. David dove headlong into eternal damnation with no hope, no choice … that was his strong feeling. Once you start down this path, he says today of the hellish experience, there is no turning back: “As the depths of the psyche were explored with fixity of purpose, the intense meditative state led to realms of severe despair and eventually to the depths of hell in timeless dimensions of eternal agony, in which one is forever cut off from the Light. The depths are endless … The terror of eternal isolation without any hope of its termination or even relief by extermination, for there was not even the possibility of death as the ultimate escape.”21 As he descended, David found endless suffering, total helplessness, and total aloneness. Where the upper levels of hells are characterized by pain and torture, David says the lower levels are marked by the complete lack of hope—an endless agony with no hope of recovery or redemption. Here, in this timeless suffering of the spirit, he reached a pit of existential blackness, a spiritual despair from which he felt there was no escape. In this darkest-of-dark psychic domain, “there was obliteration of all hope of deliverance. There was emergence in total spiritual darkness and the agony of existential terror and aloneness.”22

At death’s door, with nothing left to cling to, with unbounded abandonment and unending despair, a silent voice arose from within him and cried out, “If there is a God, I ask him for help.”23 David didn’t hold his breath, since he didn’t really believe there was a God. Then, reality ceased and disappeared. Everything blanked out.

CHAPTER 7

Transformation

Spiritual Conversion Oblivion came. David doesn’t know how long he was unconscious— a few minutes, hours, or maybe a day. Consciousness returned, but not like before. “The mind and all sense of a personal self disappeared,” David recalls. “In a stunning moment, it had been replaced by an infinite, all-encompassing awareness which was radiant, complete, total, silent, and still as the promised essence of All That Is. The exquisite splendor, beauty, and peace of Divinity shone forth. It was autonomous, final, timeless, perfect, the Self of the manifest and the unmanifest, the Supreme Godhead …”1 Evidently, the saying that heaven and hell are only one-tenth of an inch apart held true for David. In his awakening from unconsciousness, the unity, glory, and beauty of Divinity shown forth as all existence. David once used an array of narcotics to experience what was now there on its own. In his “God shock,” David instantly lost his desire to drink and never touched alcohol or drugs again. “It was like going from an absolute blackness,” David says, “feeling totally cut off from God, into a state in which what had stood between me and God had been removed, and I was now standing in that infinite Presence.”2 This “major transformation of consciousness,” as David calls it, on January 10, 1965 marked the beginning of his permanent sobriety. In this high state, “The person I had been no longer existed. There was no personal self or ego, only an infinite Presence of such unlimited power that it was All That Was. This Presence had replaced what had been ‘me,’ and my body and its actions were controlled solely by the infinite will of the Presence. The world was now illuminated by the clarity of an infinite Oneness, which

expressed itself as all things revealed in their infinite beauty and perfection.”3 From eternal damnation, the “pits of eternal spiritual darkness,”4 David was lifted into eternal ecstasy, where the Light of God was revealed to him. But how did it happen? Having passed the point of no return, entering the very lowest levels of hell itself, the agnostic had made a final plea to his Creator. He recalls that he must have gotten a “touch of humility” as the thought arose, Maybe there is a higher power.5 The ego’s stronghold, its firm grip as an individual self, is formidable. “Extreme agony and despair [can be necessary] to crack the ego’s tenacious hold.”6 As he later described it, an archangel heard David’s cry, and the archangel “answered,” lifting him out of the pits of hell. According to David, the infinite Presence held him in absolute safety—strong as a rock, yet soft and gentle, like a warm blanket. He lived in this state for months. After such a remarkable transition of consciousness, what can be said? This subjective realization—so far beyond ordinary human perception—left him speechless. And yet from the perspective of common appearance, nothing had changed. As David explains, “You can’t just tap someone on the shoulder on a street corner and say, ‘Guess what, my personal individual self disappeared and now there is only the allness of the infinite Presence’.”7 David didn’t speak about the transformation to anyone. Although most of his family lived outside of New York, David says they sensed, even long-distance, that something about him was different. Neither of his parents were spiritually-minded, despite their religiosity, so David didn’t try to explain what he was experiencing to them. He did describe his state to his wife, Margaret, who tried to understand it, but his experience didn’t seem real to her. David’s kids were only adolescents. It took about nine months in 1965 for David to adjust to the experience of this higher state of consciousness, all the while * continuing to practice psychiatry. The intensity of the spiritual experience diminished with time. As David explains, “The dazzling light shining forth from the splendor and magnificence of creation

slowly faded into the background … I found out that I could use the ego without becoming captured by it again. And that’s the way I do it now.”8 Why did David remain in active life instead of choosing to stay in the sublime state of the infinite Presence by retiring from activity? “I had a responsibility,” he explains. “I had a huge clinic and couldn’t just quit my duties.”9 It was the call of duty—a sense of stewardship —that propelled David back into earthly life. Since what was real and important to almost everyone was meaningless to him now, David had to learn to make those things seem real and important when he interacted with other people. Money, fame, fortune, power, success, achievement—why would someone need and desire such things? But devoid of such desires as motivators, David had to figure out what to do while operating in the world. To re-energize his human motivation, he told himself it was important to pay attention to people. He told himself this in the repetitive way you would train a dog to learn a desired behavior.

Psychic Powers For thousands of years, Eastern spiritual literature, especially from yogic traditions, has spoken about siddhis, psychic powers that emerge from the activation of the spiritual energy called kundalini. According to tradition, kundalini energy fuels the body’s energy system (through the acupuncture meridians) and is also known as life force or chi energy. Kundalini is a Sanskrit term meaning “coiled up like snake,” as the energy is said to be dormant and coiled up like a serpent at the base of the spine, where the root chakra (energy center) is located. Once the kundalini is “awakened,” siddhi phenomena may arise naturally. The siddhis began for David shortly after his 1965 transformation. In his case, the experience of energetic sensations and experiences lasted for over five years. They came autonomously and spontaneously. Initially, the kundalini energy began to flow whenever he closed his eyes. David would enter into a beatific state, experiencing an

exquisitely pleasurable energy running up his back, down over his face, into the region of his heart, and eventually coursing through his brain. David describes this surging energy, often accompanied by a burning sensation, as exquisite and even orgasmic. Although he couldn’t control the flow of kundalini, he found that if he thought about it going into a particular area of his brain or part of his body, the energy naturally flowed there. The first of the siddhis David experienced is psychometry, the psychic ability to obtain information about a person by touching an object that belongs to them. A scarf was left in David’s office. David assumed it belonged to a patient, and while wondering whose it was, he picked it up, instantly knowing it was his secretary Estelle’s. Even though it made no sense for Estelle’s scarf to be in his office, David had a “strong knowing” that it was her scarf. He was correct. With the dawn of the siddhis, David noticed that what he held in mind as a wish tended to appear rapidly—beyond random chance. For example, after he drove into New York City to see an opera at Lincoln Center, a parking spot immediately became available right in front of an exceedingly busy traffic area. Due to his inner state, David reports, such occurrences became common and weren’t even surprising when they happened. He also noticed that he now possessed the ability to navigate unfamiliar territories without using a map. Merely holding the target destination in mind, he intuitively knew when and where he needed to turn. He could drive to places he had never been without directions and not get lost. When driving in a brand-new area, he once knew that five miles down the road there would be a Mobile gas station on his left. This form of siddhi experience was highly reliable in his life for a period of years. Spontaneous healings of other people through David’s kundalini also occurred. Always happening unexpectedly, these healings manifested for people with psychosis, depression, and physical ailments who entered into his aura, while David merely witnessed the occurrences. Once a person who was lame, walking with great effort, sat down near David on a park bench and after five minutes got up and walked away without a limp. Once, as David sat under a clock outside the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, a woman came by

ranting and raving, talking to herself loudly through psychotic hallucinations. She had paranoid delusions about someone who was supposed to meet her underneath the clock, and made excuses for why her illusionary boyfriend wasn’t there. It was obvious to David that no one was coming. The spiritual energy flowed from his heart to the delusional woman. After a few minutes, she stopped ranting and quieted down, then walked away in a peaceful, sane state. “The energy aura which emanated from the Presence had infinite capacity,” David says. People wanted to sit near it because, in that energy field, they automatically went into “a state of bliss or a higher state of consciousness and experienced that feeling of divine love, joy, and healing. In it, disturbed people became calm and selfhealed.”10 Eventually, he got used to these synchronistic events and came to almost expect them, although it was always a delight whenever they happened. As a psychiatrist, he found such experiences entertaining. They represented a novelty, especially for someone medically trained. He read about these phenomena in spiritual literature in the mid ‘60s and knew not to attribute “specialness” to himself on account of them. He also knew that siddhi phenomena were transitory and that he should not get attached to them. Even after David’s transformation, his psyche remained aligned with a “skeptical, logical, left-brain scientist type.”11 He was skeptical, but pragmatic. He didn’t completely discount something because it seemed unlikely. He was open to experimenting and exploring various “taboo” areas, but required first-hand evidence to validate any phenomena. Perhaps the most seductive aspect of the siddhis is the paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy (communicating with others without use of the five senses), telekinesis (moving objects with the mind), remote reviewing (psychically seeing places that are far away), perceiving auras, and levitation. Apparently, all of these phenomena can arise spontaneously when the kundalini awakens. Some of these siddhis, David discovered, can be trained under certain conditions. During his friendship with Bill Wilson in the late ‘60s, they explored some of the psychic phenomena and siddhis that

accompanied their states of spiritual awareness. Wilson was very open-minded in all areas of investigation and explored the paranormal extensively in the latter part of his life when he played only a minor role in AA. Wilson would learn a new technique, teach it to David, and then they would explore it together. Wilson did much of his exploring with Helen Wynn. Wynn, a Utah-born former actress, met Wilson in the ‘50s. Wilson’s womanizing was well known in AA circles, and while the two did have an intimate relationship at least initially, Wynn eventually blossomed into Wilson’s soulmate, even though he was still married to his wife Lois.12 Wilson got Wynn a job at the AA Grapevine, where she worked her way up to editor of the publication. She helped shape the publication into a widely read bulletin with news, essays from members nationwide, and Wilson’s writings. Full of life, cheer, friendliness, gratitude, and a positive spirit, Wynn became a devoted supporter of AA. She also had a major influence on David, becoming his mentor and exposing him to new dimensions of the psyche. Together, Wynn, Wilson, and David explored interesting curiosities and oddities of the paranormal, such as teleportation, levitation, and seeing auras. In a small gathering, accompanied by a friend who was a Jesuit priest and a professor from Fordham University, David found himself in a room learning to levitate objects. Although neither the priest nor David believed in levitation, they played along. They each took two fingers and put them under an arm of a third gentlemen, Russell Smith, a cousin of Dr. Bob, AA’s co-founder. This 220-pound, sixfoot-two-inch physician from Michigan sat in a chair as David and the priest each put two fingers under his arms. Shockingly, they lifted him right up. David exclaimed, “Holy catfish!” Right after they lifted the 220pound man, it dawned on David that he just had a hernia operation and wasn’t supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds! For a while, the group “levitated” everything. They needed to move a large, heavy picnic table, so they “levitated” it right over to the desired location (using the technique described). Another time they levitated Wilson’s wife, Lois, at their Stepping Stone home in

Westchester. She shot up as if she weighed less than a feather, hitting her head on the ceiling. Wynn was apparently adept at seeing auras, but David was skeptical. Wynn said, “Come on, I’ll show you how to do it. Sit right here next to me.” David sat down as Wynn instructed while she directed his attention to a man across the table. “Look beyond him and a couple of inches above the top of his head,” she coaxed. David immediately saw the man’s aura, but wanted to see if it was real and not just hypnotic suggestion. He naively expected an aura to appear uniform and centered around the person with a fullcolor spectrum, as is often depicted in books and magazines. This person’s aura, however, was lopsided to the left with a grey field, as though ectoplasm was hanging predominantly over his left ear, with almost nothing to see to his right. David asked Wynn, and she confirmed exactly what he was seeing, giving David the confirmation he needed. Years later, David met a psychologist from Edgar Cayce’s ARE Clinic in Phoenix who offered psychic diagnosis by observing people’s auras. When David was with her, he had the ability to see auras in vibrant color, watching the colors shift in response to changing emotions. Similar to his experience with Wynn, however, when he left the psychologist’s side, he once again lost the capacity. (David points out that although there are a lot of fakes and charlatans, psychic phenomenon is undoubtedly real. If you sit in the aura of a clairvoyant person, you can be clairvoyant, as Wynn demonstrated firsthand with David. He noticed that whenever he was with Wynn, he could see auras, but he didn’t have this ability without her presence.) During this period, being in the presence of loving glances or beauty of any kind made David cry. David later observed this condition—crying in the presence of unconditional love—in monasteries, where certain monks might cry uncontrollably for a period of a year or more. Watching reunited couples rejoice in an airport almost made David miss his flight on several occasions. While David subjectively experienced kundalini strongly for five or six years, he says that some of the siddhis and other mystical experiences that began occurring in 1965 continue to this day.

PART III

HEALER (1965-1979)

CHAPTER 8

New Psychiatry

North Nassau Clinic To return to the narrative of David’s professional practice, we need to backtrack a bit to the late ‘50s. This had been a very busy time for David. In addition to shuffling between hospitals for his residency and fellowship and pursuing his own psychoanalysis by the two doctors, he had begun building his private practice at 1143 Fifth Avenue, where he practiced traditional psychoanalysis with patients one or two days a week. His private apartment was less than twenty blocks away at 953 Fifth Avenue, on the ninth floor facing the building’s rear, away from the noise of buses and other street traffic. Both addresses were choice locations, overlooking Central Park. On top of these activities, David had found time to open a mental health clinic. His experiences working with low-income patients at the New York Neuro-Psychiatric Center left him with a concern for people who couldn’t afford proper mental healthcare and who didn’t qualify for government programs through welfare: the lower middle class, who weren’t poverty-stricken, didn’t qualify for government support, and couldn’t afford private fees. To help serve this demographic, David—only thirty-one at the time—wanted to open a clinic, but doing that in New York State was no easy feat, potentially taking years to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to get licensed. Fortunately, David was a friend of Bob Roberts, who had married into the Rockefeller family. Roberts’s father-in-law made one phone call and got the needed state license almost instantly. There was only one proviso: Roberts would be on the board of directors to ensure the clinic functioned legitimately. The arrangement gave David freedom to explore alternative healing modalities that might be considered dubious practice by the medical community of that era.

So in 1958, David opened the North Nassau Mental Health Center, a non-profit, tax-exempt, voluntary institution licensed by the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and chartered by the state’s Department of Social Welfare. The center received no governmental funding; it was self-supporting, relying exclusively on patient fees, donations, and fundraising. The plan was simple: offer mental health services to the lower middle class at a reduced rate. David explained to a local reporter: “The middle-income patient has no place to go. If a person makes a lot of money, he can get private care. If he’s poor, he can go to public clinics. But the man in between has been neglected.” David borrowed money for start-up expenses and rented a few thousand square feet of office space at 1691 Northern Boulevard in Manhasset, Long Island, within driving distance from where his family lived in Oyster Bay. He painted the walls, shopped for furniture, set up offices, and hired initial support staff. It was an enterprising endeavor: he rented space for fifteen offices. David reasoned he should lease more rooms than he needed and sublet them, since the more space he rented, the cheaper the square foot. The sublets paid the rent, and as the clinic expanded, he accommodated his growing staff’s need for office space merely by allowing the sublets to expire. In addition to Ovesey and Tiebout, David had numerous other psychoanalytic mentors. In fact, for the entire fifty-year period he was in practice, David had at least one advisor, aware as he was that he, like everyone else, had blind spots. He trained for a semester every year for almost a decade with Lewis Wolberg, Chief Director of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health and author or editor of twenty books. This eminent psychiatrist had launched the Postgraduate Center for Psychotherapy in 1948. It was the nation’s first multidisciplinary training and treatment institute to provide advanced training for mental health professionals and to meet the overwhelming need for mental health treatment. Wolberg’s “mental health team” of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers was initially controversial. Following a similar model, David attracted psychologist Charlie Kapotes and social worker Louis Bershen as early practitioners to

serve his growing patient roster. He also attracted therapists with extra time who were willing to work at the clinic for considerably lower fees than they normally received. This was helpful to the therapists, as in private practice most therapists have “dead time”: open spaces in their calendars with no booked patients. A psychiatrist that normally charged forty dollars hourly in his private practice (in 1958) might earn between eight and fifteen dollars hourly in David’s clinic, but that still provided extra income and more clinical hours helping patients. It was a win/win scenario for both the therapists and the patients who could now receive affordable mental health care. When the clinic opened, it only offered treatment services in the evenings and on Saturdays, when David was free from his other professional obligations. This was convenient for the clinic’s patients, who were off work at those hours. The clinic quickly attracted seventeen psychiatrists, four psychologists, and two social workers, each donating part of their time at lower rates, serving roughly 500 patients the first year, according to David. The clinic was off to a good start, but a synchronicity of events, starting with a letter from Bill Wilson in 1966, stimulated a new movement in psychiatry, and David and his clinic were primed to play a central role.

In David’s professional headshot, taken in 1967, his wavy black hair laced with silver highlights was combed from left to right. He stood in front of an ornate wooden bookshelf lined with medical texts, his right arm resting on a handcrafted leather desk chair. A dense, peppered mustache covered his upper lip, extending toward his chin on either side of his mouth. A custom dress shirt peeked from beneath a wool jacket, accented by a silk-striped bowtie (the bowtie was part of his standard attire). The only unusual accessory was the fine watch on his left wrist, featuring a black leather band, slightly wider than the watch face. His blue-gray, penetrating eyes peered through gold-framed, thick bifocals. His contemplative gaze and quiet demeanor seemed magnified by his conservative attire.

David personified what it was to be a psychiatrist. One friend described him as “a real Freudian”—seeming detached as you talked, but analyzing the meaning behind every word. Although he appeared stern and serious, within lay a gentle soul. During the summers, David hid a butterfly net in his office. When a patient left, he would catch any flies in the room, freeing them out the window. David remained an avid reader, finding time to read amidst his intense work schedule. He never went anywhere without a book. On his daily commute by bus, subway, or train, David consumed books. On his trips to New York City from Long Island, he could speed-read an entire book, then another on the forty-five-minute commute home. Even following the transformation, the determined, entrepreneurial drive the younger David exhibited continued to thrive. He was an overachieving perfectionist with obsessivecompulsive tendencies. These were accentuated by bouts of severe depression, incapacitating migraines, and chronic ulcers. He could not go to sleep unless the checkbook was balanced. He offset his obsessive tendencies with a creative mind that didn’t like getting stuck in social standards or the status quo. Although he was aware of what others thought about him, he didn’t seem too affected by their opinions. Undeterred, he had big plans for the future.

A Brief History in Mental Health Treatment Dominated by Freudian concepts, the psychoanalytic movement was growing strong in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Psychoanalysis was proving effective for dealing with some neuroses, but ineffective at addressing patient psychosis. The psychoanalytic belief about schizophrenia, for example, was that it was induced by intrapsychic conflicts or by authority-figure conflicts. Freud believed that psychoanalysis was ineffective with schizophrenic patients because they were unable to form a * transference relationship with the analyst. Without being able to “transfer libido from himself to the therapist and make the therapist a love-object,”1 analytic treatment could not progress. The psychoanalytic approach to schizophrenia in the ‘60s was largely

steeped in concepts like “schizophregenic mothering.” Social workers worked with a schizophregenic mother to see how she was twisting her poor child’s mind, leading to his psychosis. Many Freudian analysts believed that if the cause of anxiety and fear for the schizophrenic patient could be identified and the patient made conscious of it, the patient could refrain from psychotic behavior. The psychoanalytic movement largely disregarded biochemical causes for mental illness. While Freud was pioneering the psychoanalytic movement, German neurologist Emil Kraeplin was breaking new ground in his biochemical approach to psychiatry. In the early 1900s, psychiatrists didn’t know the diseases they were treating. Some patients who had a specific set of symptoms recovered quickly with minimal treatment, while others progressively worsened over time, requiring hospitalization. Kraeplin loosely classified the range of patients based on treatment outcomes into two general groups, despite the diversity of symptoms: manicdepressive insanity and dementia praecox. The manic depressives eventually recovered, but those with dementia praecox (later renamed schizophrenia) generally became incapacitated. The classification of these two groups laid the foundation for modern psychiatry. Where Freud focused on neuroses (functional disorders of the nervous system) involving “mild” forms of mental illness, Kraeplin focused on psychosis, severe mental illness where the patient’s inner world impairs normal contact with the external world. John Conolly described insanity as “a disease of perception combined with an inability to tell whether these changes were real or not.”2 Schizophrenia represented a “group of perceptual disorders caused by a variety of biochemical abnormalities.”3 Freud recommended psychoanalysts avoid working with schizophrenic patients, as he believed their technique was ineffective with this population. Similarly, Jung concluded there must be an organic factor he called “toxin X” in schizophrenics that needed to be treated before psychoanalysis could treat the patient the way it does with hysterics. (Jungian analysis, however, proved more effective in dealing with psychotic patients than Freud’s model did.) With the release of synthetic drugs like Thorazine, an effective tranquilizer used for psychotic patients, biochemistry and

psychopharmacology began to play a larger role in psychiatry. While the psychopharmacology field was emerging, nutrition and the biochemical effects of naturally occurring substances on the brain were gaining more attention. To explain the development of this new field and David’s role in it, we need to first understand the field’s history. Interestingly, in the web of interconnections, Bill Wilson and alcohol once again played a leading role.

While Wilson maintained sobriety following his spiritual transformation in 1934, he continued to suffer from depression that began in his teen years. Wilson’s drinking had largely masked his depression, which was undeniable after sobriety. For the remainder of Wilson’s life, he searched for a cure both for himself and for the many AA members who suffered similar maladies. Depression and alcoholism are intimately related: many people with depression begin drinking to alleviate both depression and anxiety. By lifting the depressed person’s spirits, alcohol provides a temporary relief. Ultimately, however, alcohol is a depressant that worsens the situation. Wilson was treated by Tiebout twice a week for his depression and other neuroses. To many members of AA, Wilson’s depression meant, in some way, that the Twelve Steps didn’t work. Tiebout, however, understood that AA’s Twelve Steps didn’t preclude other psychological problems like depression. The exchange between Tiebout and Wilson influenced both men, and helped Tiebout gain greater insight into the nature of the ego and the process of surrender. In the decade following Wilson’s sobriety, depression was a debilitating enemy often accompanied by severe exhaustion, tension, and anxiety. Long after his founding role in AA was over, Wilson searched for chemical cures for alcoholism. On a crosscountry trip in 1943, he was introduced to Aldous Huxley. Wilson and Huxley hit it off and became spiritual brothers. To Huxley, AA and its success proved the existence of the human soul.

Through Huxley, Wilson heard about the work of avant-garde psychiatrists Abraham Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond. Hoffer and Osmond were among the first psychiatrists to experiment with treating schizophrenics and alcoholics on a psychotherapeutic level with lysergic acid diethylamid (LSD) made by Swiss manufacturer Sandoz laboratories. LSD was both mysterious and legal at the time. Huxley, Wilson, Wynn, and others began experimenting with LSD. Hoffer and Osmund’s medically-supervised experiments included those with Huxley, who later penned The Doors of Perception (1954) based on his experience being on mescaline, another psychedelic substance. The work inspired research into psychedelics. Aldous and his brother, British biologist and scientific humanist Julian Huxley (head of the UN’s World Health Organization at the time), were big supporters of Osmund and Hoffer. In fact, the two psychiatrists named their research institution The Huxley Institute for Biosocial Research. David eventually sat on the institute’s board, and in 1979, he received the Huxley Award for “inestimable contribution to the alleviation of human suffering.” “Hitting bottom” was a consistent experience with AA members who achieved sobriety, as Tiebout documented. Hoffer and Osmund initially thought LSD would induce delirium tremens in alcoholics, essentially scaring the alcoholic into recovery by producing a hittingbottom effect. Instead, in most cases, the substance made the subjects happy, sometimes euphoric, occasionally inducing spiritual visions and unparalleled clarity. When Wilson heard about these results, he thought LSD as a psychedelic substance might induce a spiritual experience similar to the one he had at Towns Hospital the night he embraced sobriety. “Psychedelic,” termed by Osmund with the help of Huxley, is derived from the Greek word psyche meaning “mind” and delos meaning “to make visible.” Taken with the appropriate “set and setting,” psychedelic substances illuminate a more expansive reality (beyond normal perception), temporarily opening the mind’s gates to the Light of Consciousness. “The experience of life itself, in its pure form, is ecstatic,” David says. “LSD, taken under the best of possible circumstances, has allowed many people to experience that exquisite and infinite awareness of the truth of all reality.”4

LSD was outlawed in the mid-1960s. Once it was made illegal, LSD quickly became a notorious street drug synthesized in basement laboratories. When taken without supervision or proper training, LSD and other hallucinatory drugs induced a negative psychosis, better known as a “bad trip.” Hoffer and Osmund found that the B-vitamin niacin, an effective therapeutic agent with moodstabilizing effects, mitigated the effects of LSD. Interestingly, the niacin compound also alleviated some symptoms of schizophrenia. The two psychiatrists began treating large numbers of schizophrenics in the early ‘50s with high doses of niacin, and the concept of “megavitamin treatment” was born. Many of their schizophrenic patients were alcoholics, so they quickly learned that niacin was an effective treatment for alcoholism as well. Wilson first met Hoffer at a Parapsychology Foundation meeting in the early ‘60s in New York City. Hoffer gave Wilson, who was in his sixties at the time, niacin to help relieve his edginess. Bill began taking a gram of niacin after each meal, and within two weeks, he felt better—his depression, anxiety, and fatigue lifted. Wilson’s personal experience with niacin, as well as the results Hoffer and Osmund were having in their efforts to detox alcoholics and schizophrenics, inspired Wilson to become an outspoken advocate for the supplement. This led to the adoption of the vitamin’s new name, “B-3.” By this time, AA had around ten thousand groups worldwide, and Wilson’s organizational role was mainly political. Whereas AA was helping alcoholics heal “spiritually,” they were still plagued with many emotional and physical problems that made sobriety uncomfortable. For the last decade of his life, Wilson became a huge advocate and promoter of niacin and encouraged all AA members to take it. He also shared Hoffer and Osmund’s research with eminent figures from a variety of medical backgrounds, including physicians from within AA. Wilson’s outspoken role with B-3 created constant tension between him and the AA organization he had co-founded. Since Wilson wasn’t a physician, the AA organization felt he had no business advocating a vitamin, finding his promotion of B-3 inappropriate. Wilson, committed to helping his fellow alcoholics, never relented, but was not allowed to use AA resources.

David contributed to two of Wilson’s three Vitamin B-3 therapy booklets, promoted throughout the AA community, on the viability of niacin treatment for recovering alcoholics. In the final years of Wilson’s life, David and a small group, including Helen Wynn, met to update the B-3 therapy booklets. When Wynn retired and moved overseas, the B-3 office transferred from Wilson’s home at Stepping Stone to David’s North Nassau clinic, becoming the distribution center for the B-3 booklets, which had been ordered by over 30,000 people in a few short years.

Orthomolecular Psychiatry From the ‘50s through the ‘80s, schizophrenia was the dominant issue in the medical industry, hospitalizing more patients than cancer and heart disease combined, filling twenty-five percent of all hospital beds in the United States. Prior to 1966, the North Nassau clinic deployed standard treatments for the full spectrum of psychiatric illnesses using psychoanalysis, group therapy, individual therapy, electroshock treatment, and pharmacotherapy. A large portion of David’s clinic’s patients were alcoholics, schizophrenics, and alcoholics with schizophrenia. Standard techniques proved ineffective, making these patient populations “untouchable” for many psychiatrists. Because David was unwilling to turn these lost souls away, he had to be willing to experiment and observe the results. In early 1966, David received an enthusiastic letter from Wilson about Hoffer and Osmund’s research and the niacin treatment for schizophrenia and alcoholism. Wilson explained that many AA members (especially those with schizophrenic symptoms) who took niacin were experiencing favorable effects. He said Hoffer and Osmund’s research demonstrated that niacin was doubling the recovery rate of schizophrenic patients.5 Part of David’s psychiatric training was in neurology at New York University Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn in the late ‘50s. There he learned that organic “causes” for psychiatric disorders could be diagnosed. Some psychiatric problems were psychological

in origin while others were organic. Hoffer and Osmund’s report about niacin treatment seemed plausible to David. He began exploring the biochemical model despite his strict psychoanalytic training which, during that era, refused to acknowledge an alternative approach to treating mental illness. Even though the information in Wilson’s letter presented promising case studies and treatment efficacy, few physicians were ready to experiment with the treatment. Led by David, the North Nassau Mental Health Center was one of the first clinics in the United States to embrace the new megavitamin therapy, and the first to demonstrate positive treatment results working with schizophrenics and alcoholics using vitamin B-3. David and his staff began using megavitamin therapy to treat alcoholics and schizophrenics in April 1966 by focusing on restoring the body’s proper biochemistry. While the average daily requirement of niacin was about 15 milligrams, studies showed that patients with schizophrenia needed between 200 to 500 times this amount to eliminate their symptoms.6 High doses of niacin (vitamin B-3) or niacinamide were combined with ascorbic acid (vitamin C), pyridoxine (vitamin B-6), vitamin B-12, vitamin E, and lithium (a trace mineral). This approach introduced the concept of overall wellness, a relatively novel idea in traditional medicine at the time. Special diets were suggested that eliminated sugars and certain carbohydrates, and patients were put on exercise regimens. When necessary, patients were also put on thyroid medication, mild tranquilizers, and antidepressants. One patient, a thirty-three-year-old housewife and mother of four children, had been ill most of her life and had been schizophrenic for five years. Her financially-endowed family sent her from hospital to hospital, psychiatrist to psychiatrist. After she had endured shock therapy in addition to large doses of psychopharmaceutical drugs, her physicians, as a last resort, recommended a lobotomy (a rare suggestion in 1968, given the irreversible complications that often resulted). Right before the scheduled operation, her family convinced her to try a new therapy and transferred her to a hospital where David practiced. After ten weeks of the megavitamin treatment, she recovered. David reported that, two years later, she was taking care

of her kids, was active in their school and social activities, and maintained a part-time job—all with no psychotic symptoms. Another patient, a twenty-eight-year-old man, was mentally ill and had been institutionalized for four years at an expensive, private hospital that specialized in psychoanalytic treatment. His family had spent close to $200,000 (over $1 million today) trying to help him. Despite daily psychoanalytic sessions, he worsened, eventually refusing to eat. He was transferred to David’s care, arriving in wet sheets and restraints. The patient admitted to David that he was committing suicide by starvation, unable to handle the agony of his illness. Electroshock therapy commenced along with the megavitamin therapy and tranquilizers, and in ten weeks, he was discharged from the hospital, soon returning to work and an active social life. Cases like these continued, fueling the clinic’s conviction about the new treatment’s efficacy. Attracting this challenging patient population became a blessing for David, as the North Nassau clinic proved to be an ideal testing ground for megavitamin therapy. As a result of the clinic’s success rate, David began to view psychosis as a genetically determined, abnormal brain chemistry that could be corrected with large doses of vitamins and minerals in conjunction with psychopharmacology. David still used analytic methods for neurotic patients, but began using biochemical techniques on patients with psychosis.

From 1966 to early 1970, the North Nassau Mental Health Center treated over 2,000 schizophrenic outpatients with megavitamin therapy. David wrote: “The great majority of [schizophrenic patients] have exhibited very marked improvement. Most of them could be called recovered, if we define ‘recovery’ as the ability to function satisfactorily in the community with little or no professional help.”7 Keep in mind that psychiatry didn’t consider recovery from schizophrenia a reasonable objective.8 Using orthodox psychiatry, the average patient with schizophrenia came to the North Nassau clinic approximately 150 times each year. With this new megavitamin-treatment approach, patient visits were cut by 90 percent and showed impressively higher

recovery rates (over 75 percent, compared with 40 percent from tradition therapies).9 Instead of fifteen years of in-patient care, David’s Long Island clinic saw patients only fifteen times the first year, and a half dozen times the second year. By cutting down the number of visits, the clinic also massively reduced the cost of treating patients.10 North Nassau was now serving a staggering number of people. Psychoanalysis is very involved, spanning numerous years and requiring frequent sessions. Consequently, analysts can rarely see more than twenty patients yearly. After working with this biochemical approach in his clinic for over a year, David walked into his office one day and asked his secretary about the person seated in the waiting room. He learned that he had already seen this patient for several visits. Excitedly, David realized he was serving so many new patients using this method that he couldn’t keep track of them all, as patients were recovering quickly and making room for new ones. Megavitamin therapy proved so effective that within a year of starting the treatment protocols, David’s clinic permanently closed its patient electroshock-therapy unit. By 1968, all clinic patients were assessed for biochemical abnormalities that might be contributing to their difficulties. North Nassau was the first clinic to insist all patients be screened for biochemical, environmental, and nutritional factors before being accepted for treatment—a highly controversial but effective tactic. By 1971, the clinic was doing more than just administering treatment to patients; it was training roughly fifty psychiatrists each year in the megavitamin approach to psychiatry.

After receiving the first letter about megavitamin therapy from Wilson, David was introduced to Hoffer and Osmund. Along with four other early-adopting psychiatrists not affiliated with his clinic, David joined Canadian psychiatrists Hoffer, Osmund, and Ross Maclean to form the Scientific Advisory Committee on Therapy of the American Schizophrenic Association (ASA). Their inaugural committee meeting was held at Brunswick Hospital Center on Long Island on January 21, 1967, and the committee gathered every six to twelve

months in a different city to share their experiences and corroborate their research findings. Traditionally, academic medical research requires publication and then validation from the overall medical community. It often takes many years for new treatments to be approved. This avant-garde group of clinically-oriented psychiatrists, however, took a more streamlined approach: each member would discuss the innovative treatments they were using, and other members would then test and corroborate the results in their own practice. This trial-and-error-andretesting framework accelerated the discovery process, as these pioneers worked fast to serve their patients—being interested in results, not publication. In 1968, the Scientific Advisory Committee was brainstorming names that properly captured this new approach to treating perceptual impairment with vitamins. That same year, two-time Nobel laureate and Stanford University professor of chemistry Linus Pauling proposed the term Orthomolecular Psychiatry in an article he published in Science. The medical community was now aware of the possibility of using vitamins as therapeutic agents, not just in prevention. The article created a backlash, as many medical practitioners became defensive and even hostile toward Pauling’s claims (especially since he was not a medical doctor). It was a hostility that would only grow over time. Nonetheless, a new field of treatment was emerging. Ortho is from the Greek, meaning correct, true, optimum or best, and molecular refers to natural substances of living matter. Orthomolecular, then, literally means to use the correct molecule to treat disease. The orthomolecular approach to psychiatry treated mental illness by facilitating the optimum physical environment for the brain. According to orthomolecular theory, different cells require different quantities of nutrients. Brain cells might need higher levels of B and C vitamins compared with other organs, for instance. The approach didn’t just include administration of megavitamins for the perceptually impaired. It also prescribed diets, rest, exercise, and when necessary, injected doses of medications and megavitamins. Using the orthomolecular approach, David’s clinic emphasized subtleties and details deemed trivial by modern medicine. Whereas

the traditional medical model only asks questions about a patient’s symptoms, the orthomolecular approach looks at the overall context of the patient’s life to diagnose illness. For example, patients with zinc deficiency may crave salt, leading them to over-salt their food, increasing their thirst and water intake and increasing the copper stored within their bodies. Hereditary history, food intolerances, mineral imbalances, and occupational hazards can all be factors in diagnosing mental illness, as these orthomolecular practitioners discovered. The orthomolecular approach, or megavitamin therapy as it was regularly called by laypeople, was designed to correct perceptional disorders by balancing out the brain’s nutritionally deficient biochemistry. Orthomolecular Psychiatry, like Alcoholics Anonymous, says that the patient has a “biochemical illness with grave psychological and social consequences.”11 This generally came as a relief to patients and their families, as David explains: “Most patients and their families had been greatly confused in the past by evasive, vague, and often conflicting statements from previous doctors. We found that this honest and open approach was beneficial and helpful. It relieved considerable family misapprehension and guilt, and led to an optimistic outlook.”12 Intuitively, David understood how the emotions of the patient’s family often affected treatment results. He felt sorry for the parents of schizophrenic children because they were blamed for what was a genetic malady. At the height of the psychoanalytic era, this emerging field of Orthomolecular Psychiatry was shedding light on the awareness of individual body chemistry and the unique nutritional requirements of schizophrenics; the patient’s background and family history were deemed irrelevant to this effort. David proposed the term Orthomolecular Psychiatry based on Linus Pauling’s usage of the phrase at a committee meeting, and a new field of medicine was solidified. At this same committee meeting held in Vancouver, British Columbia in spring 1969, Hoffer mused how unfortunate it was that so much valuable information was being shared with the members, but not with the psychiatric community at large. Plus, all of these “rogue” psychiatrists were receiving constant

requests for reprints of their research papers and information about their treatments. Hoffer suggested, “What if we wrote a book? We could all contribute chapters.” Then he turned to David and said, “You’re going to be the editor.” 13 David was still relatively young in his field and was shy in these group settings. Caught off-guard, he gulped, hesitated momentarily, then reluctantly agreed to the role assigned him. David asked Pauling to write the book’s foreword, but later Pauling volunteered to instead co-edit and have W.H. Freeman and Company publish what became Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Treatment for Schizophrenia (1973). In corresponding with Pauling at Stanford University, David revealed: “As you know, I am primarily a clinician, and my contribution has been mainly to translate the findings of biochemical research into practical clinical treatment methods, and then develop delivery systems to get these methods most efficiently to the greatest number of patients. As a result, we have treated more patients utilizing Orthomolecular Psychiatry than anyone else in North America. Therefore, I am personally pleased that you will be co-editing the book, as it will counterbalance my deficiencies in the areas of theoretical science and chemistry.”14 David contributed three papers to the book, wherein he explained how his clinic addressed the needs of a large volume of schizophrenics and alcoholics through a community-based model.

CHAPTER 9

Clinical Success

A Community for Recovery It’s easy to see why David was drawn to Bill Wilson, as David walked a similar path as his mentor: developing alcoholism during a world war, becoming a dedicated drunk, wrestling with severe bouts of depression, and believing in reason rather than faith until achieving sobriety through an intense spiritual conversion, never relapsing thereafter. David found his relationship with Wilson extremely meaningful, born as it was of their shared recovery from alcoholism and their shared appreciation of the Divine. David shared the stage with Wilson on numerous occasions, lecturing together at Schizophrenics Anonymous of New York and the Guest House, established in the old Scripps-Howard mansion in Detroit, Michigan—a converted recovery house run by the Catholic Church for alcoholic and addicted priests. Perhaps the most important result of Wilson’s influence on David was David’s construction of an innovative healthcare system integrating the Twelve-Step Program into a community for recovery. David’s holistic treatment approach addressed the physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns of his patients—as well as the important relationship between patient and family that often got overlooked. Following his sobriety, David aligned with a series of organizations, including a halfway house, youth agencies, self-help groups, and a large hospital, to form a local community complex that supported schizophrenics, alcoholics, and their families.

Beyond physically treating patients, David understood and appreciated the power of the Twelve-Step movement to heal. At the

source of this group’s power, David says, was unconditional love: AA group members didn’t judge one another. They simply supported each other unconditionally. David noticed alcoholics remained sober as long as they went to meetings and maintained the proper megavitamin treatment. In tandem with a biochemical approach addressing the physical components of illness, David utilized the Twelve Steps in the treatment of schizophrenia, alcoholism, and other addictions. He aligned his clinic with a sister of AA, Schizophrenics Anonymous (SA), co-founding a local Long Island chapter. The widespread success of AA poured into every variety of addiction and mental illness, including gambling, overeating, and narcotics. SA followed the same Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of AA, but substituted “schizophrenics” for “alcoholics.” SA also placed stricter attention to the physical components of the illness and the importance of continued medical treatment. “In the SA group,” David explains, “the patient increases his knowledge of the illness. He learns the meaning and implications and names for the various symptoms he may experience. Irrationality is quickly quelled; a patient soon learns that his paranoia is just ‘paranoia’ and nothing more, and that it is only a symptom due to his altered perceptions.”1 This new community model, conceived of by David and a philosophy professor at Fordham University who was a recovering alcoholic-schizophrenic named Father Joe, was dubbed by Wilson the “Dr. Hawkins-Father Joe model.”2 One thirty-four-year-old man had a long history of treatment for schizophrenia, alcoholism, and drug addiction, consuming an average of forty pills a day including Librium and Valium. After numerous arrests, car accidents, and incidents of violent behavior, his family abandoned him. He was a violent drunk, but even without alcohol, he was delusional with frequent hallucinations, leading to depression, which triggered more drinking. He was too mentally ill to comprehend AA’s Twelve Steps. Taken into David’s care, the man was put on heavy doses of non-addictive tranquilizers and megavitamins, and taken off sugar due to his previouslyundiagnosed hypoglycemia. He started attending SA meetings, and within several months, his schizophrenia symptoms abated. Soon

after, he was able to follow the Twelve Steps and stopped drinking. Within a few years, he got a job, married, and had a child, remaining active in AA and SA, helping others recover. Even after successful orthomolecular treatment at North Nassau or Brunswick Hospital, however, schizophrenic patients had difficulty adjusting to life at home and being a member of their community. To ease the transition into home life for patients and their families, David partnered with Gateposts, a halfway house in Bayside, New York. David sponsored Gateposts, which was the “first halfway house in the United States for young schizophrenic patients that used the total orthomolecular psychiatric treatment approach,”3 including prescribed diets, rest, medication, and megavitamin injections when necessary. Gateposts became a community-oriented environment for healing, accommodating roughly twenty residents at a time. Each patient was given more responsibilities as their impairments were reduced. The aim of Gateposts was for patients to become self-sufficient and re-enter society within three to six months. An activities center was also brought into the fold to help recovering schizophrenics become fully stabilized and rehabilitated. In a supervised environment, patients went through various activities designed to prepare them for the working world. All of these affiliate centers were designed to ease the transition from being perceptually impaired to being supportive members of society. This humanistic approach, devoid of bureaucracy, adopted a holistic viewpoint that involved the patient, the family, and the overall community to help facilitate recovery. This integrated community system wasn’t complex. In fact, part of its effectiveness was its simplicity. David was surprised to discover how rare it was for family agencies to align with a mental health clinic. This is just one way in which the system was unique. The positive energy emanating from David’s clinic rippled throughout the community. The Youth Consultation Service of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island was a fifty-year-old social work agency operating as an outpatient clinic for those in need. Like many agencies, the service had a long wait list and an insufficient budget to meet the demand. Each year they had to close their doors for four

months to catch up with the backlog. Obviously, this was problematic when a fifteen-year-old pregnant teenager would come in for help and get told to come back in four months. In a coordinated effort, David’s clinic supplied psychiatrists to the agency and provided clinic facilities and a diagnostic test for schizophrenia. Soon it was discovered that most of the agency’s time-consuming patients had undiagnosed schizophrenia. Thereafter, if a patient scored within the schizophrenic range, David’s clinic took over treatment. If they scored lower, treatment was left to the agency. Using the orthomolecular approach, the agency was able to double its caseload and eliminate its wait list for the first time in half a century—all while operating within the same budget. Other agencies began hearing about such results. David and his staff started providing training and education in day-long symposiums. These “mental health fairs,” held at Long Island universities like SUNY Stony Brook, brought together local self-help groups and organizations and helped increase public awareness for the clinic’s services. In 1966, to better address the needs of the clinic’s schizophrenic and alcoholic patients, David aligned his clinic with Brunswick Hospital in Amityville, Long Island: a large, 600-bed general hospital with a 160-bed psychiatric division. David ran the alcoholic ward and was a director of psychiatric research. The sheer volume of David’s practice gave him leverage to negotiate a direct hospital affiliation with Brunswick, making his North Nassau clinic the only independent clinic with an affiliation. Brunswick, in essence, became the in-patient wing of North Nassau, and the clinic became the outpatient clinic for the hospital. With this symbiotic relationship, David was able to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and get new patients admitted within an hour. As David’s clinic grew, his private hospital practice at Brunswick expanded into one of the largest of its kind, reportedly requiring the hospital to erect an additional hospital wing to house David’s patients. He maintained an average of forty inpatients, whom he saw three mornings a week. Through David’s leadership, Brunswick was

the first hospital in the United States to institute orthomolecular treatment on a large scale for patients with schizophrenia.4

Besides the effectiveness of using the orthomolecular approach for schizophrenics, alcoholics, and drug addicts, what was most remarkable about the treatment was the cost savings of David’s integrated community model. All of the organizations David cofounded and aligned with to serve the patients of his clinic (the halfway house, the local SA chapter, youth agencies, and activity centers) were self-funded and self-sustaining. The active members were mainly current or former patients and their families, who freely offered their time and energy to support the groups that had contributed to their own lives. The economic advantages of the integrated model, combined with the effectiveness of orthomolecular treatment, are demonstrated by the Youth Consulting Service’s ability to double its caseload within the same budget. In the mid-1980s, modeling the success of his clinic’s integrated community complex, David outlined a model for low-cost treatment clinics in Central and South America. According to David, his approach cost 75 percent less than the conventional clinic by eliminating the bureaucracy found in most facilities, centering the model around people instead of the institution. His experience led him to believe this model would at least double the usual recovery rate, while treating over three times as many people.5 David’s model utilized recovered addicts, alcoholics, and their families as a primary resource throughout the recovery process. Similar to the credo of AA, in his model “one serves oneself by serving others,” providing a “strong network source of referral and a powerful support group,”6 with a medical staff providing an “organizational shell that interfaces with bureaucratic officialdom and fulfills governmental requirements.”7 The model was designed more as an informal club than a clinic, with a warm, inviting, supportive atmosphere including comfortable chairs, beverages, and the like. Resembling a community clubhouse, the model clinic was to serve as a central meeting ground for the

numerous Twelve-Step groups in the community. Through community and patient contributions, research grants, other donations, and public funding, the clinic would eventually become self-supporting. In his proposal titled, “A Design for Very Low-Cost, CommunityBased Drug and Alcoholism Clinics,” David displayed the influence of Wilson and AA, concluding with the words: “What has been proposed above is an innovative model designed to treat large numbers of people and whose power and thrust is based upon the ‘language of the heart’.”8 David submitted his proposal to the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in the Americas. For the merit of his paper on the low-cost community treatment model for Third World countries, David was knighted as a Knight Brother of the Sovereign Order of Hospitaliers of St. John of Jerusalem in the Americas in August of * 1989.

Notoriety David had suffered from a lifelong public-speaking phobia. In a flash, he could be stricken with debilitating stage fright. Playing a rabbit in a class play during kindergarten, his job was to hop across the stage to a tree. Stricken with fear, he froze, missed his cue, and wouldn’t come out. The severity of the phobia was so great that David once became tongue-tied while explaining insulin shock to two nurse interns during his residency. He cut the talk short because his voice actually failed. David interned at Columbia Hospital in Milwaukee. During a three-page case presentation to the staff at a monthly meeting, he read to the end of the first page. His heart pounding and his throat tightening, he could tell his voice was about to fail. He staggered to the end of the paragraph and finished. Everyone applauded, not realizing there were two more pages left. Wilson put together a conference at Fordham University in the mid-1960s to discuss megavitamin treatments for alcoholics and schizophrenics. When he invited David to speak, David couldn’t turn

down the opportunity. Before the event, he wrote out the entire speech and planned on reading it word-for-word—without ever looking at the audience. During the speech, however, he accidentally made a fun, unscripted remark, and the audience laughed. David laughed, too, and the spell was broken. From that moment onward, he began employing humor and laughter in his public talks—qualities his grandparents valued and taught him in his youth—as an effective technique to reduce stage fright. Speaking and lecturing became an enjoyable and rewarding experience after that. It’s fortunate that David transcended his speaking phobia when he did, with worldwide notoriety only moments away. His professional stature was growing. He founded the Academy of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, becoming its president for ten years. He was also chief editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry and president of the Federation of Mental Health Centers. David’s first speaking event in Europe took place in September 1971, where he gave the presidential address to the Academy of Orthomolecular Psychiatry in Dean’s Yard in London’s Westminster Abbey. There, he was elected president of the academy in a meeting attended by thirteen Nobel Laureates (all of whom had some involvement with vitamins and nutrition) and 113 influential charter members from around the world. After the publication of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, David entered the media circuit. As a leading expert in this emerging field, he was interviewed numerous times by Barbara Walters, often joined by Linus Pauling, and made appearances on McNeal-Lehrer, The Today Show, The Morning Show, The Noon Show, and many other television programs. David and his work were referenced in over a hundred local and national journal articles, including magazine features, newspaper reports, and clinical papers. His work was also referenced in over two-dozen books, most of which were written for the mass market, including Megavitamin Therapy (1973) by Ruth Adams and Frank Murray, which sold over 100,000 copies and was essentially a homage to David, his clinic, and the orthomolecular approach. As David became well-known in his field, he began traveling nationwide as an in-demand speaker for both medical and

nonmedical groups, lecturing at universities like Harvard, Notre Dame, Massachusetts Medical Center, Fordham University, and University of Southern California Medical School. Hoffer noted that David was one of the foremost teachers of Orthomolecular Psychiatry and one of the field’s best pioneers.9 Physicians began approaching David from all over the world, asking him to teach his unusual, effective methods. He consulted for numerous government and private institutions, including the U.S. Government’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the U.S. Navy, Ampex, DuPont, and the AFL-CIO Local 770 union group as well as a Zen retreat center and both Catholic and Protestant ministerial organizations on Long Island. David was a consultant to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn regarding alcoholism in nuns, establishing a self-help group for nuns in Brooklyn’s First National Bank building. Meeting with the group regularly was no easy task, requiring a train ride from Brooklyn to New York City, then to the Long Island Railroad in Pennsylvania Station, with a cab back to his clinic. (No doubt, the commute provided ample time for reading.) A nun once arrived at David’s clinic with her mother superior. The sister came into his office alone, and David could tell she had been drinking. When confronted, she replied defensively, “Oh my heavens, never.” After helping her let go of her denial, David inquired how she got hold of alcohol while she was with mother superior. She admitted she had a small bottle of cough syrup from the drugstore fastened to a string underneath her habit, tied around her waist. Both of them ended up laughing at her deceptive prank before he pointed out that it was a self-destructive habit, leading to serious problems. The nun was willing to go to the diocese’s AA group David had established, and eventually, she recovered.

Leading from the heart, David inspired a team of clinicians at his North Nassau clinic to serve their patients and heal the mentally ill while offering a variety of low-cost treatments. The clinic did advanced testing (like sublingual testing for food allergies) that could

not be obtained elsewhere. They offered a complete battery of psychiatric and physical tests to diagnose mental disturbances. The pragmatic group was sympathetic and accustomed to innovation— their sole motivation was the patient’s recovery. In an upbeat and enthusiastic environment, the clinic seemed to perform the miraculous. Perception-impaired people on welfare were treated, and according to David, most were off welfare within the year.10 The clinic facility no longer just housed office space. It now hosted an array of research and diagnostic tools, including its own in-house specialized laboratory for biochemical testing and analysis, a neurological clinic, a licensed medical laboratory, a nutritional dispensary, and on-staff nurses. It even had its own ten-channel GRASS electroencelphalography, designed for scanning brain activity. The clinic’s administrator for fourteen years, Mollie Schriftman, was David’s sergeant-at-arms, a dedicated and intelligent person who supported him as the clinic expanded. David described Schriftman as “very logical and reasonable.” She was responsible for the day-to-day management and operation of the clinic, allowing David to focus on his patients. The atmosphere at the 1691 Northern Boulevard clinic was electric in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. The clinic’s positive energy attracted a host of medical pioneers. Charles Tkacz was a pediatrician as well as a child psychiatrist at the center. Tkacz treated behavioral and emotional problems using the orthomolecular approach (allergy diets), and he was one of the first child psychiatrists in the country to do so. When David left the clinic years later, he appointed Tkacz chief of staff. Jose A. Yaryura-Tobias was the clinic’s research director, who conducted studies to isolate subgroups of biochemical disorders that lead to mental illness. Charles Kapotes, a psychotherapist and a psycho-diagnostician, was diagnosing ADHD before the term existed. Another psychologist at the clinic was proficient at hypnosis, working with three hypnotized people in three different rooms at the same time. The efficiency of the Long Island clinic was also nothing short of miraculous. This wasn’t a hospital with hundreds of beds; the clinic

had only twenty-five small offices in which to treat thousands of patients a year through David’s diagnostic procedure, without any government handouts. As David describes it, “We worked like a clock.”11 North Nassau was the place to go for incurable mental illnesses, and the word was out. The recovery of some difficult high-profile cases helped the clinic attract patients from all over the world. David treated patients who had “been to all the top experts” but weren’t recovering. Patients flew in from everywhere. It was common to see the clinic’s waiting room filled with patients from Venezuela, Nairobi, Iceland, South America, Germany, India, Australia, and England. Some wealthy patients came from Ethiopia and Paris for treatment— every month. With the growing influx of patients, David had to rent an additional floor in the building to house ten more offices. The staff of three morphed into a team of fifty. There were psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, an EEG technician, nurses, and lab technicians. Whenever someone told David that they got a busy signal when calling the clinic, he added a new phone line, accumulating ten inbound telephone lines and twelve office assistants. A few patients weekly mushroomed into over a thousand new patients annually. More than two thousand outpatients came from word-of-mouth. The clinic’s board of directors saw numerous celebrities, including songwriter Hal David (who collaborated extensively with Burt Bacharach) and Broadway producer Manheim Fox (producer of the Sophisticated Ladies musical). According to David, his North Nassau clinic became the largest psychiatric practice of its kind in the country, specializing in nutrition and mental health.

CHAPTER 10

The Healer and His Critics

The Healer’s Way Through compassionate eyes, David treated patients from an expansive, holistic framework: physical diagnosis and orthomolecular treatment (physical), psychotherapy when needed (mental), and alignment with various support and recovery groups (spiritual). Although trained as a psychiatrist, David viewed his calling and dedication primarily to be that of a physician. He explains, however, that a physician is not necessarily a healer, for a healer not only treats patients but with compassion and dedication, cares deeply for them, without becoming attached. David notes that in our current medical paradigm, the physician is not a healer but a “service provider,” which limits one’s effectiveness as a healer, in his opinion. Medical journals have become cold, he believes, with academic science seeming to overlook the fact that it is treating real people, not mere “cases.” “My approach to patients was eclectic,” David writes. “I utilized every possible modality of therapy that could be of help. I was always patient-oriented rather than peer-oriented and, consequently, I was concerned with the relief of suffering of the patient and the family, even if I couldn’t bring about a cure. There was always some way to reduce the suffering, and that was my main objective.”1 Throughout his career, David was a pragmatist: “I became a scientist with a skeptical, pragmatic mind. I am very impressed by what works and am very unimpressed by the hypothetical and the theoretical. I am interested in what brings about results and what one can replicate through one’s personal experience.”2 He wasn’t interested in data and theory for its own sake. Rather, he was moved by healing and alleviating suffering.

With open-mindedness, he knew each patient was unique in what would “work,” so he experimented until he helped them feel better. David was not interested in limiting his treatments to using only current scientific methodologies. Instead, he focused on achieving an improved clinical response. He studied various alternative fields of medicine and healing: psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, Orthomolecular Psychiatry, biological psychiatry, mysticism. David was constantly evolving his understanding of the human condition, leaving no stone unturned. A colleague of David’s noted: “He was constantly searching—a man on a quest to find his niche.”3 In Orthomolecular Psychiatry, David shares his insight as a clinician: “In the final analysis, science is a creative art. Data by and of itself is meaningless; meaning results only from interpretation. Correlation of data with the scientist’s personal experience results in a progressively comprehensive synthesis; the concept of Orthomolecular Psychiatry provides a new conceptual framework from which to interpret a great mass of data.”4 David understood the importance of context: having a framework from which to derive meaning. For him, Orthomolecular Psychiatry provided a larger context than traditional psychiatry. It was from this perspective that he says he was able to help thousands of patients heal from the most severe mental illnesses. As the medical director at North Nassau, David hired many psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers through the years, some who were effective in treating difficult cases, others who were not. He came to believe that the clinician’s intention had a profound effect on the recovery rate. Two physicians using the exact same treatment on the same kind of patient could get two totally different results. “Some therapist had a very high improvement rate and other therapists had a lower improvement rate, even though they had the same academic backgrounds,” David recalls: “I found that the person who was the most loving, in its generic meaning—loving not on a personal level but caringness and consideration—made a big difference in the patient’s response.”5 David’s intention was for the patient to recover. That’s what he held in mind: You ARE going to recover.

When Medicare and Medicaid first emerged, David experienced the enormous hassle of dealing with these institutions and their barrage of forms. He was, however, committed to treating anyone he could. His solution was to tell Medicare and Medicaid patients that he would rather treat them for free. David told his older patients at North Nassau to “just pay me what you can.” He treated many elderly patients at no cost; however, he received an abundance of knit sweaters, fresh fruit, paintings, blankets, and homemade baked goods. Since David found himself working with hopeless patients who had seen every type of physician, he grappled with how he would treat these people: would he stick to academic medicine to gain the approval of his colleagues, or would he do whatever was in his power to help heal them? In adopting and utilizing nontraditional alternative healing techniques, he might be effective as a healer, but he would lose face with fellow psychiatrists who frowned upon nonscientific treatments. David believed that on his deathbed, he would answer to God, not to his colleagues. “I was born with a high IQ and all kinds of talented abilities,” he says. “That’s what I am answerable for when I leave this planet. I decided that my obligation was to the patient and to God.”6 David still remembers the day he made this decision. He had diagnosed a patient who suffered from bouts of anxiety, depression, erratic behavior, and sudden rage attacks as being a functional hypoglycemic, a diagnosis his colleagues would never accept or respect because hypoglycemia was not considered a medical disorder. With courage, David prescribed four grams of Vitamin C, a high dose of Vitamin B3, and a sugar-free diet. By adopting a holistic approach, David quickly learned that many important factors in recovery were overlooked by traditional medicine —factors like functional hypoglycemia, cerebral allergies, food intolerances, and improper nutrition. North Nassau utilized a variety of approaches that were (and largely still are) perceived as taboo because they weren’t verified with double-blind studies published in peer-reviewed journals. Such approaches included cerebral allergy testing, applied kinesiology, glucose tolerance tests, and nutritionaldeficiency testing.

David’s first exposure to alternative treatments occurred at age twelve, before antibiotics. As a child, he had severe reactions to poison ivy, at one point landing in the hospital for ten straight days with a high temperature, dying of septicemia (an infection that started as dermatitis from poison ivy). The staff physician didn’t know how to treat him. David’s mother went to see a medicine woman on the Wisconsin Dells Indian Reservation who gave her a brown salve with which to treat her son. Thankfully, the hospital doctors allowed her to use the salve. They watched as droplets of poison bubbled on top of the salve as the toxins were extracted from the boy’s skin, curing the allergic reaction. David’s recurrent hemorrhaging duodenal ulcers began in medical school, persisting in different places for over two decades, never fully healing, unresponsive to all traditional treatments, including six years of psychoanalysis to address his mental stress. As a result, David had been living on antacids and antispasmodics for twenty-five years, unable to drink his favorite elixir: coffee. When he learned about acupuncture and its painless treatment despite needles being inserted into the body, he booked a trip to Washington D.C. to be one of the first acupuncture patients in the United States. At the time, acupuncture was under scrutiny, and patients were required to bring extensive documentation, including x-rays before and after treatment. During his first treatment, the Chinese acupuncturist inserted a needle into the side of David’s wrist and it went right through, coming out the back. David screamed in pain. Through his translator, the Chinese man said, “Ho, ho, ho, bad ulcer, huh?” According to David, acupuncture cured the duodenal ulcers by the third treatment.

When a patient entered David’s clinic, the person was screened for biochemical, environmental, and nutritional factors before being accepted for treatment. (Screenings included the Hoffer-Osmund diagnostic test for schizophrenia, glucose tolerance tests, heavy metal analysis, EEGs, and cerebral allergy tests.) David and his team observed how EEGs changed when blood sugar levels start to drop, demonstrating the effects of hypoglycemia on the brain.

While the average medical professional looks for overt signals or causes in making a diagnosis, David understood the importance of subtleties. This appreciation for the complexities of the human body and mind as well as the subtle imbalances that lead to mental disorders helped the clinic diagnose and treat patients that other institutions could not. Intuition became David’s guiding light as a healer. One “chronic schizophrenic,” who had seen ten well-known clinicians and professors of psychiatry at leading universities, was brought by his family to the clinic, where he was put on a sugar-free diet with megavitamins as well as a rotation diet in order to reverse cerebral allergy toxicity. David’s clinical mind silently said, he’s “as mad as a hatter,” so he ordered a hair analysis for toxic materials. The patient had sprayed horticultural pesticides in his employment, and David thought this fact might be related. Recalling the results, David writes, “The hair analysis (as clinically suspected) showed mercury poisoning. Rotation diets revealed cerebral wheat allergy. The patient was placed on a gluten-free diet, and the mercury was chelated out with massive doses of ascorbic acid. The psychosis disappeared, and the patient returned to normal life and functioning.”7 David notes that all of the above procedures fall outside of standard medical practice.

In the memoirs and case studies of world-renowned physicians and healers, you will often read of their innovative approaches to difficult cases. David’s story is no different. A psychotic forty-fiveyear-old patient who had been ill and hospitalized many times in one decade had physicians who advised his family to commit him. The man was being cared for in the top floor of his family’s three-story house, where he shouted, screamed, and cursed all night, but he wouldn’t leave his room. He refused to take any medication. When his symptoms were at their height, his mother had to slip plates of food under his door as if he were in a jail cell. Working with the mother, David devised a scheme: the patient was a coffee fanatic, and so, following the orthomolecular approach, his mother was to mix powdered Vitamins B-3 and C into his coffee

and mask the taste with a lot of chicory. Unaware that he was taking vitamins, the man improved. Within months, he was eating with his family, reading the daily paper, and conversing normally, hallucination-free. The mother became concerned because her son still didn’t know about the vitamin treatment, and he was still resistant to taking supplements. Every time she suggested he take vitamins, he would say, “Mom, why should I? I’m so well.” David engineered another creative scheme: he suggested giving the patient a safe drug that would cause side effects he wouldn’t like. When her son complained about the side effects, the mother would leave the apartment, pretend to go to the drugstore, and return with the “antidote,” which, of course, would be niacin (B-3). The plan was successful, and the man began taking vitamins on his own. Hoffer, noting David’s innovative approach to a difficult case, said, “I doubt there are many psychiatrists that would be that innovative to do that sort of thing.”8

The world’s most helpless found their way to David’s door. Mute catatonics were rolled in, restrained, and covered in wet sheets. David recalls, “In consciousness it would arise, What, God, do you wish of me?”9 David would instantly intuit what was wrong with the patient, his own reality connecting with the patient’s deluded reality. As David peered into the patient’s soul in a fashion similar to Mother Teresa, a healing would emerge. Realizing the perceived reality of the patient, he observed that “[the] soul would open itself up, and in that second, the miraculous occurred, and you could see that the soul within was healed.”10 Even though there wasn’t necessarily a physical change in the patient’s condition, when David witnessed the patient’s inner healing, perhaps marked by a peaceful glimmer in the eyes, he felt his job was done. The catatonic might later decide to talk or might not, but that didn’t matter to David. Once the inner Light became the patient’s reality, David says, all fear of death disappeared, and what happened to the patient’s body became irrelevant to David.

In one particular case with a catatonic, David intuited what was wrong and spoke telepathically to him: You’re blaming God for what the ego has done to you. The man jumped up from his stupor, began speaking, and walked away. The nurse witnessing the event, dumbstruck, called it a miracle. David wrote a few words at the request of the clinic’s administration for North Nassau’s thirtieth anniversary that illuminates his intention as a healer: “Our purpose has been the relief of suffering through loving service and innovative research to find better ways to bring those who are in pain out of the darkness and into the light, and to re-establish hope. In our alignment with these principles, we have been rewarded with the joy of knowing that we have been allowed to share in and contribute to the divine purpose of the universe.”11

Perils of Innovation The path of the innovator winds through a choir of critics. In The Prince, Machiavelli illuminates the dangers of innovation: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Geniuses understand that every field, including medicine, is in a constant state of evolution. Knowing this, they often take a novel approach to solving problems that threatens the existing order, leading members of the old establishment to take a dogmatic stance, suppressing and squashing the new approach when possible. The psychiatric community attacked Freud and his work. The Freudians ostracized Jung and renounced Adler as well as Rado. In a similar attempt to maintain the status quo, the psychiatric and medical fields ousted Hoffer, Hawkins, and the rest of the orthomolecular clan, openly insulting Linus Pauling (who had already been awarded two Nobel prizes) by calling him senile because he thought he could help people by giving them vitamins.12 The term orthomolecular became anathema. Using the term and practicing its ways brought criticism and attack. Even with the positive media

attention, many practitioners of orthomolecular treatment abandoned the approach, and other psychiatrists feared losing their license if anyone discovered they were using vitamins in their practice. Orthomolecular practitioners, however, couldn’t deny the results they were seeing in their patients. Using the methodology, symptoms like hallucinations and erratic behavior often disappeared when patients were placed on sugar-free diets and high doses of particular vitamins. Hopeless alcoholics unable to remain sober—even with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous—achieved sobriety and lived normal lives. David had patients who had been given electric shock treatments for years in an attempt to alleviate their depression, to no avail. When he placed them on a sugar-free diet, their depression lifted. He put patients with paranoia and delusions on Vitamin B-6, took them off potatoes, and watched them recover. Patients who had lived with mental illnesses for years were often well within thirty days of entering the North Nassau clinic. And yet David’s professional colleagues—even some in his own clinic—were upset that he was using vitamins and special diets to treat mental illness. “So what was I to believe,” David reflects, “the criticism of my colleagues or what was obvious from what my patients were telling me? And so I stuck with the patients instead of the colleagues.”13 How did this happen? How did an emerging field, with its astounding clinical success and media attention, fall out of favor? The American Psychiatric Association assembled a team of five psychiatrists and one consultant with what seemed to Hoffer, Osmund, David, and colleagues to be a clear agenda: stop the orthomolecular and megavitamin treatment movement. In July 1973, the APA task force published a report entitled, “Megavitamin and Orthomolecular Therapy in Psychiatry.” According to those familiar with the therapy, the bias and ignorance found in the forty-four-page report is easy to discern: there’s a clear lack of understanding of what the orthomolecular approach to psychiatry really entails. The authors only referenced old published papers without contacting any orthomolecular psychiatrists to ask them about their treatment protocols. They didn’t have any experience as clinicians using Orthomolecular Psychiatry, and they didn’t mention

any of the papers more recently published in Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Treatment for Schizophrenia. It seemed the task force hadn’t actually studied orthomolecular or megavitamin therapy at all. They had reviewed the original B-3 therapy that lacked more recent documentation from over a decade of experience by practitioners. After the publication of the APA report, many orthomolecular practitioners published responses defending their approach, and in the American Psychiatric Journal, Pauling highlighted the report’s bias, errors, and misunderstandings, including the task force’s final statement that highlighted the overt bias and pejorative language of the investigators: “Under these circumstances, this Task Force considers the massive publicity which they promulgate via radio, the lay press and popular books, using catch phrases which are really misnomers like ‘megavitamin therapy’ and ‘orthomolecular treatment,’ to be deplorable.”14 The task force attacked orthomolecular practitioners because of their lack of controlled experiments, stating, “Their credibility is further diminished by the consistent refusal over the past decade to perform controlled experiments and to report their new results in a scientifically acceptable fashion.”15 This is true, but from the perspective of these physicians, controlled experiments would require them to provide orthomolecular treatment for a certain number of schizophrenic patients and deny this treatment for a similar number of patients. The principles of medical ethics and the sensibility of these pioneering physicians simply didn’t allow it. The medical profession relies on double-blind studies, where a specified treatment group is tested against a control group. Orthomolecular practitioners rely on subtle details that differ from patient to patient. As no two individuals live under identical conditions, a true control group, in the practitioners’ way of thinking, isn’t possible. When it comes to food allergies and hypoglycemic treatment, the control group would have to have precisely the same genetic composition, environmental background, dietary history, and so on as the group undergoing treatment. David felt that double-blind studies weren’t that important when the results of treatment can easily be demonstrated clinically.

David and other orthomolecular psychiatrists found that there was no single nutritional recipe for treating schizophrenic patients. Each case was unique. The idea was to determine the exact nutritional deficiencies in the patient’s biochemistry and to address those through high dosages of targeted vitamins. This involved trial and error. The patient might start on a daily dose of four grams of niacin, four grams of Vitamin C, and fifty milligrams of Vitamin B-6. Some patients required as much as twenty-seven grams of niacin a day to counterbalance their perceptual disorders. Of course, critics of the orthomolecular approach, including the APA task force, could have set up their own well-designed, controlled clinical trials. Noting the psychiatric community’s contention toward his work, David lamented, “It is sad that professionals who know the least about this approach are the most vociferous in opposing it.”16 Most orthodox psychiatrists and psychoanalysts were firmly against the orthomolecular approach, leaving practitioners like David to navigate the vast waters of the medical establishment with few friends or allies. As David relayed in his January 1968 letter to AA physicians, published in Wilson’s Second Communication, “As a pragmatist, I was only concerned whether it was clinically beneficial to our patients. I had no intention of proving anything scientifically, nor am I interested in it now.”17 It seems apparent that David was fortifying his position to shield his clinic from the criticism that was already being brought upon his group. In reflecting on the state of the field of psychiatry a decade later, David writes, “When the [medical] profession rededicates itself to helping patients as individuals instead of sterile intellectualism, it will regain the status it once enjoyed. Ninety-nine percent of what relieves human suffering has nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific method as it is construed today.”18 David’s tone and sentiment toward his profession is hard to miss, but after over a decade of contention with many of his colleagues and the field itself, he had little need for subtlety.

Overall, the medical community believed that high doses of vitamins could be harmful—even toxic—to patients, a belief that remains today. According to Hoffer, however, in decades of research and clinical uses, these practitioners found no such toxicity.19 Contrast the effectiveness and harmlessness of megavitamin therapy with the many side effects of psychopharmacology, and one can’t help but wonder why the megavitamin approach didn’t become mainstream. Although Hoffer previously had 150 published papers in established journals, he and others were unable to publish their positive findings on nutrition and brain chemistry in any of the mainstream journals after the discrediting began. (Incidentally, Rado and others from the Columbia group were also locked out of mainstream psychoanalytic journals after they departed from orthodox Freudian theory. David was thrust into the critic’s wake from the beginning of his career.) In response, the black-balled physicians established their own organizations and journals, including the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, to help disseminate the group’s findings. As Hoffer recalls, “The psychiatric establishment was violently opposed to our work, which did not have the support of the drug companies who were promoting their own products, the tranquilizers.”20 As vitamins can’t be patented, pharmaceutical companies had no financial incentive to package, distribute, and promote them. Despite a great many extraordinary successes, David was unable to get foundation grants for research and equipment, relying instead on the generous donations of healed patients. The North Nassau clinic had grown accustomed to controversy, starting with North Nassau’s practice to screen patients for physical indicators— biochemical, nutritional, and environmental—before accepting anyone for psychotherapy. Although controversial, the approach was practical: why begin a slow, years-long process of psychotherapy if the patient’s symptoms could be lessened or eliminated in a matter of weeks or months? Only after the clinic determined that the physical indicators of mental discord were absent or resolved would the mental component of any remaining illness be addressed through therapy or psychoanalysis. David points out how psychiatry

generally operates in the reverse: “Formerly, the patient went through years of therapy, and if the problem still remained, only then did they look at possible biochemical causes.” Addressing the physical and biochemical elements upfront saved patients money and allowed the clinic to build word-of-mouth publicity, thus treating more patients. Even though orthomolecular medicine is becoming more mainstream after over fifty years of research and practice, the field of psychiatry is still resistant to nutrition-focused treatment of mental illness. Only holistic practitioners and progressive medical professionals have embraced this approach. Today, Orthomolecular Psychiatry is all but extinct, and psychopharmocology dominates the field of biological psychiatry.

David’s frequent diagnosis of hypoglycemia was an area of frequent controversy. An unusually low level of sugar in the blood (glucose) starves brain cells that burn glucose for fuel. In functional hypoglycemia, the sharp rise in glucose from our diets (loaded with sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco) leads the pancreas to oversecrete insulin, which plummets the blood sugar level. When a hypoglycemic eats sugar, the blood sugar level spikes, insulin is released, and the sugar level dives quickly thereafter, leading to symptoms like the shakes and emotional disturbances like anger, anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritability, paranoia, crying, and violent as well as bizarre behavior. When new patients called to make an appointment, David instructed them to stop consuming all forms of sugar (including alcohol) until they saw him. By his account, at least 25 percent of his patients were “cured” (asymptomatic) by the time of their appointment, pointing to the profound impact sugar can have on mental health.21 David’s understanding of hypoglycemia wasn’t just theoretical or clinical—it was experiential, as he was afflicted as well. After David learned about hypoglycemia, he was able to observe his severe emotional reactions and depression when he consumed sugar, and the relief that came from a sugar-free diet. Yet he was

simultaneously reading the Journal of the American Medical Association and its critical attacks on the existence of hypoglycemia. He recalls, “And so I was faced with the same conflict I had faced many times before—my own personal and clinical experience versus the intellectualism of my colleagues, which flowed generally from the ‘learned’ universities. I had long ago learned that logic and science did not have the answers to man’s dilemmas.”22 (Today, hypoglycemia is an accepted medical diagnosis.) EEG tests demonstrate the effects of hypoglycemia on the brain, as EEG results change when blood sugar levels decline. Most people believe that sugar gives one a quick burst of energy. As David explains, however, this is only true if you’re already in a hypoglycemic state. If your blood sugar is already normal, sugar does not provide an energy burst. Rapid mood swings, anxiety, depression, rage, fatigue, and mental confusion—eliminating sugar greatly reduced them all. Calling the average diet the “fatal all-American supermarket/Madison Avenue/TV-ad/teenage diet,” David knew nutritional imbalance was at the root of many illnesses. He observed: “Functional hypoglycemia was probably the most common misdiagnosis in the medical field, certainly in the psychiatric field.”23 Alcohol is another trigger for hypoglycemia, so naturally many alcoholics have considerable mood swings, often battling depression and anxiety. David published a work with Wilson on hypoglycemia and how it relates to alcoholism. His clinic developed its own biochemical research laboratory where they conducted about ten thousand glucose tolerance tests on alcoholics and people with related emotional disorders. The effects of the glucose tolerance test are easy to observe. Upon consuming sugar, a person with a hyper-insulin response exhibits a tolerance level below normal. The patient may then begin to shake, and in some cases, become irrational, psychotic, or even violent. David recalls one lady tearing off all her clothes and jetting out of the North Nassau clinic, down Northern Boulevard. Picture a large lab director in his long white coat running after her, yelling, “Come back, Mrs. S, come back!” The woman’s blood sugar level had dropped too low, and she had become psychotic.24

Cerebral allergies (allergies that effect mental health) was another topic of vehement controversy. David’s clinic tested patients for food and environmental intolerances that negatively impacted the patient’s biochemistry. Discovering and eliminating specific food intolerances could potentially eliminate a patient’s symptoms. A very diluted solution of a substance like potato would be placed on the patient’s tongue. David observed that some patients became psychotic and irrational immediately, pointing to a clear cerebral allergy to the substance. David recalls one intractable case where a chronically paranoid person was tested with something like a 1:1,000 dilution of potato extract on his tongue; he instantly became psychotic and delusional. His hospital chart had clear instructions: do not allow potato.25 Clinicians at North Nassau put food substances like peas or milk under the tongues of catatonic schizophrenics. If these patients were allergic, within several minutes they became catatonic. Removing the food from their diets often eliminated the mental illness. David points out there’s no “scientific proof” for things like hypoglycemia and cerebral allergies, noting, “If you’re going to wait around for scientific proof, you’re going to be long dead because the proof of many of the simplest things in life took many decades.”26

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, David believed that he discovered that the orthomolecular approach to psychiatry provided a cure for Tardive Dyskinesia, a crippling neurological disease. TD arose in patients, particularly schizophrenics, who were taking a class of tranquilizers called Phenothiazines and was irreversible in about 35 percent of patients. TD patients suffered from involuntary facial grimacing, twitching, and other repetitive movements. A blight on the medical profession, the disease led to numerous malpractice suits and increased malpractice insurance rates. With conventional antipsychotics, the risk of TD was 3 to 5 percent per year of exposure to the drug, jumping to as high as 25 percent in elderly patients.27 And yet, at North Nassau, with its thousands of patients

through the years—many of whom were administered this class of tranquilizer—David didn’t see a single case of TD. David, along with psychiatrist Charles Tkacz from his clinic, wrote a paper on this observation in 1981 entitled, “A Preventive Measure for Tardive Dyskinesia.” It was rejected from all the peer-reviewed journals before being published in Orthomolecular Psychiatry, the journal David edited. No one paid attention. Redoubling his efforts, David decided to conduct a survey of eighty orthomolecular physicians who treated a total of 58,000 patients over a 10-year period. David reported that the disease is 99.5 percent preventable with a combination of antipsychotic (neuroleptic) drugs plus high dosages of Vitamin B-3, C, and B-6.28 The new study entitled, “The Prevention of Tardive Dyskinesia with High-Dose Vitamins: A Study of 58,000 Patients” was rejected by all the major psychiatric journals before being published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. Several years later, David published a twenty-year longitudinal study with 61,000 patients. According to David, the major peer-reviewed journals wouldn’t touch the study because it documented the use of vitamin treatment, considered taboo in the medical community. While this likely plays a role, it’s worth examining other reasons why this and other papers David wrote weren’t accepted in peer-reviewed journals, as it speaks to a recurring theme in David’s later “consciousness research.” The American Journal of Psychiatry cited the following reasons for rejecting his paper: The authors have consistently asserted these kind of very interesting and provocative findings for years, but have yet to provide data based on a credible experimental design, choosing instead a testimonial and hyperbolic-type of presentation, with publications in their own journals and meetings and not in wellreviewed, critically-assessed literature. The main problem with this phase of the experience again is that details of methods (diagnoses, doses, times of treatment, etc.) are very vague, and there are no methods presented for the definition and rating of TD. The latter is the key problem with the approach, which remains uncontrolled and testimonial in nature. A minimum

scientific requirement would be to define their diagnostic methods and rating methods for TD, to show that their diagnosticians can replicate ratings done by competent raters, with high reliability. At present, we cannot tell if the claims are based on an important pharmacologic effect or due to poor sensitivity to the diagnosis of TD. The burden is on them to demonstrate competence in rating known cases of TD and in supporting their rating methods (as being other than casual and clinical impressions). A proper study would be even more welcomed. It could be as simple as having raters crossed by populations: they rate in other clinics and others rate their cases; half of the cases have not had megavitamin treatment.29 Put simply, David didn’t apply the scientific method as prescribed by his field. In David’s defense, he didn’t intend the report to be scientific: “The findings we present here toward a preventive for TD were unanticipated, fortuitous, almost unscientific and anecdotal, yet they point the way toward a safe and effective preventive for this puzzling disease.”30 David was always interested in healing his patients, not validating his methods.

CHAPTER 11

Many Lives

Mill River Estate When David started his clinic in 1958, he purchased a small house in Westbury, Long Island for eleven thousand dollars. A little over a decade later, he sold the house after purchasing twenty-five acres in upscale Upper Brookville in North Shore Long Island, an area where today’s home values start at $1.5 million, with numerous manorial estates valued at over $25 million. Upper Brookville is part of a small collection of towns that make up an eighteen-square-mile area called Locust Valley. In the early 1900s, the great barons of industry and the ultra-rich, including J. P. Morgan, Jr., the Vanderbilts, and the Rockefellers, settled in Locust Valley, building secluded estates and private country clubs. The exclusive area on Mill River Road, dubbed “Millionaire’s Row,” was populated with a variety of magnificent mansions and estates, many of which were owned by third- and fourth-generation wealth. David’s property on Mill River Road sat adjacent to a hundred acres of undeveloped woods, providing the needed privacy for his future estate. David always valued privacy and seclusion. He was an active physician with notoriety, eager to create a wooded oasis conducive to contemplation and friendly gatherings, where he could construct his own home. He and his family lived in the threebedroom gatehouse for a few years before he had enough money to begin construction on the main house. David was interested in architecture, spending two years researching the architecture of Sixteenth Century French houses, traveling to France to study Norman-style architecture. On a trip to Paris, he acquired illustrated books of the period architecture for guidance and inspiration. As an amateur architect, he visited about

half a dozen French homes in Normandy, noting the exact angle of the roofs, patterns of floorboards, solid brass ball-bearing door hinges, and other details he wished to emulate. Returning to the States, he crafted the blueprints for his future home and began searching the New England region for needed material, like old oak beams from barn wood. The estate, designed by David himself, was constructed in the early ‘70s. David got his hands dirty, doing a great deal of the woodworking, stone masonry, and cement work himself. The large Sixteenth Century French country Norman house and estate was an architectural marvel. Two wings extended out in opposite directions from a large, cylindrical, castle-like entrance with a majestic spiral staircase ascending eighteen feet to the second floor. The left side was the “girl’s wing,” with rooms for all three of David’s daughters. Extending out the right wing over the four-car garage was the servant quarters, housing the cook, the maid, and the chauffer. The house was built with two fireplaces, a library, and a tool room to house David’s extensive tool collection. The elegant slate-roof structure featured exquisite detail and embedded wood cross-sections throughout the design. Surrounded by trees, the house was too large to fit into a single photograph. The estate also included two three-bedroom gatehouses occupied by various housekeepers and groundskeepers. Architectural Digest wanted to feature his Mill River estate. David declined, wanting anonymity for his personal life. As a well-known psychiatrist, he needed to be careful. Numerous dangerous situations had arisen over the years from paranoid, delusional patients who had to be avoided. Naturally, he didn’t want his home publicized in the media. The main house was situated far off the road, with a gated entry and watchdogs for added security.

David’s mother’s side of the family was part of the social elite— the “social registry.” His mother, grandmother, and great-aunts were all debutants. Even though David had an austere childhood during the Great Depression, he was still exposed to a number of highly successful and affluent people. As an introspective introvert, he

carefully observed their mannerisms and way of interacting in social situations. He noticed how the richest people tended to be inconspicuous, relatively undemanding, only displaying their symbols of success when appropriate: “Many of the richest people in the world that I have known felt that it was unseemly to be ostentatious in their display of wealth because it created envy, discomfort, hostility, and jealousy in others.”1 David inherited from his mother what remained of the Hooker’s trust fund (established by David Hooker’s role at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company) after the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression—$23,000 ($135,000 today). More importantly, with this pedigree, David inherited an understanding of the social elite. The most frequented social clubs in the area were the exclusive Creek Club on Lattingtown Road and the Locust Valley Beach Club. The Creek Club, founded by J.P. Morgan, had an eighteen-hole golf course, thirteen tennis courts, four bowling alleys, a clubhouse, a thousand-foot-long beach, a saltwater pool, and a rigorous selection process for new members. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were frequent guests. These clubs were also well connected with Palm Beach, Florida, where the Breakers Country Club held the same status as Long Island clubs. In New York City, the great clubs for this social network included the Colony, the University, and certain exclusive men’s clubs. When David moved to the Oyster Bay area on Long Island, he was elected into a highly-exclusive social club, where he had the opportunity to spend time with the chief executives of major foundations, international investment banking institutions (like the president of J.P. Morgan), and numerous other extremely wealthy families. Most of the group’s members—especially its board of directors—were the invisible movers and shakers of industry who avoided the public eye and dealt only through personal associations and unprecedented subtlety. David explains that this ultra-rich group tends to live “off-the-radar,” enjoying quiet lives outside of the limelight. This Locust Valley area group was so private that, according to David, its name isn’t even known to the public to this day.

To become a member of the exclusive enclave, David spent a day in New York City being escorted by his sponsor to meet each member of the board of directors. As the day continued, David visited J.P. Morgan, Citibank, E.F. Hutton, and the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was introduced to titans of industry, Wall Street financiers, and bank presidents. Although these board members were evaluating David for membership, he found each one to be cordial, gracious, friendly, and compassionate, solicitous of his comfort physically, emotionally, and socially. As David recalls, “Each one of them leaned over backwards to put me at ease in what could otherwise have been an awkward situation. Each one of them could have bought and sold me a hundred times over and yet they treated me with precise equality.”2 Even though David didn’t have the wealth of this elite group, he had other desirable assets. Ultimately, acceptance into this group was a matter of class, and David understood the subtleties of aligning with this exclusive group because of the training modeled by the Hooker side of his family. David reveals: “Anyone can have real, genuine ‘class’ by merely accepting who they are at any given moment or level of life. Real class means being ‘genuine’.”3 While some wealthy individuals flaunt their riches, when everyone’s family owns a yacht, lives on a large estate, has servants, and is a member of the North Shore Yacht Club, there’s nothing to flaunt. This group avoids being ostentatious at all costs. Celebrity and publicity were considered a vulgarity. David was a paradox of the social elite, subject to reverse snobbery. “My personal opinion of people who paid excessive prices for things,” David explains, “is that they were sheep to be sheared, and I would remember the quote: A fool is soon parted from his money. I had the opposite problem, and I traveled with the thrift-store snobbery crowd. In this crowd, the status symbol is the incredible bargain that you got. In fact, a friend of mine who is also a thrift-shop snob, and I were always in competition to see who had gotten the best bargains.”4 In the mid-1970s, David had the chance to buy a used Bentley at an unusually low price through a friend, but turned it down because a Bentley was too ostentatious. David drove a 1946 Packard

convertible with a straight-eight engine, a car he enjoyed driving at high speeds on the smooth New Jersey turnpike (it began to “float” when he gunned it to ninety miles per hour). When unobtainable parts needed to be replaced, David was forced to store the car. Major financial transactions happened mainly as a result of connections. As always, it was more important who you knew than what you knew. Being approved as a nonprofit organization and establishing a medical facility in the state of New York, for example, involved a great deal of paperwork and bureaucracy. It could easily take years. But one phone call, and David was able to start his clinic with little effort simply because he knew the right person. Lester Lanin’s Orchestra was the norm for debutante parties and cotillions, and David’s now-teenage daughters participated. As he recalls, “There is no social event of importance amongst the social registry crowd that didn’t have the music of Lester Lanin. It was de rigueur. One of the secrets of his glaring success was he played the music that pleased you, that brought out the best in you.”5 From David’s recollection, Lester Lanin was booked over a year in advance, and you had to be a member of a certain society for him to even consider playing for your event, which must be formal with white tie and tails. David, never a fan of large social gatherings and with an aversion to dancing, made a habit of arriving late and leaving early.

Dancing, Death, and Dying David was terribly awkward on the dance floor. Despite taking dance lessons, he was self-conscious and found dancing painful— literally. In addition to his awkward movements, David had cervical arthritis, and the discomfort in his neck only added to his distress. Yet he wanted desperately to dance, and he was angry and frustrated with himself for his inhibitions and inability to move freely. Outside of a slow waltz or a foxtrot (which were no longer “in” during the ‘70s), David tried to avoid dancing. This wasn’t always easy, as his social group frequently danced at parties.

One night during a causal social affair with rock music and freestyle disco dancing, his daughter Barbara managed to coax him onto the dance floor. Knowing her father had just taken disco dancing lessons, she said the magic words: “Dad, don’t look at your feet. Forget about your feet. Just look at my face. Just move your body the way I move my body and forget about your legs and your feet. They will automatically go in the right place.”6 Barbara’s statement triggered a miracle. David started focusing intensely on his daughter’s expression and the way she held her body, forgetting about his legs entirely. “Sure enough, as I got into her attitude,” David recalls, “her feeling space and its bodily expression, I found myself dancing. Frankly, there was nothing to it; it was effortless. I didn’t even think about it; it just began to happen as though of its own … I felt free as a bird, and suddenly I got so high I could hardly believe it. I just felt a surge of joy, liberation, and an increase of energy, and I danced my head off.”7 After returning home that night, David started dancing again alone in front of the mirror, chanting “God” in his mind to each beat of music. With his inner being illuminated in a blissful glow, he spontaneously recalled a lifetime in detail where he was a sacred Hindu temple dancer in India. As he recalled this ancient dancing style, the exact instructions entered his mind, and his body simply traced the pattern—no thinking required. In that instant, David realized: “Once I started to dance, I discovered I already knew how.”8 Not only could he dance effortlessly, but he had unlimited energy to dance. David was mesmerized by the experience. He says he inadvertently discovered the secret of Sufi dancing—the whirling dervishes: “I was merely the joyful witness of it—doing it all by itself. It was possible to dance nonstop—even for days. There’s no need for food. No need for sleep. No capacity for tiredness. And then I understood how the whirling dervishes danced the way they danced. You are in a state of ecstasy, and you are beyond time. Beyond all things but ecstasy, and the energy of ecstasy dances you.”9 This once timid dancer became unstoppable. He could spin endlessly without dizziness or fatigue. With a feeling of effortlessness and weightlessness, the longer he danced, the more

power and energy he had. “The inner power was ‘limitless.’ I found that as I danced, the body would hit a certain inner balance as though it was moving around an invisible inner center … like a top. Once you start a top, it spins effortlessly, and that’s the way I danced … sometimes I danced for many hours on end, and the inner experience never changed.”10 After five hours of dancing, David felt high, having more energy than when he started. What was once a painful chore transformed into an incredible joy, suffused with higher energy and light. David’s daughter, in a few simple words, was able to reframe what none of the professional dance instructors could. David started going dancing regularly with a group, including his daughter. He and his daughter, according to David, became well known with the local disco owners for “lighting up” the dance floor. The two of them entered into an experience of oneness, becoming telepathically linked. They could anticipate each step the other would make, dancing in perfect harmony. To outside observers, it looked as though they had danced together for years. His experiences on the dance floor with Barbara changed his life and led to a marked improvement in his self-esteem. He was wearing women out, one by one, as they were unable to keep up with him. With an endless reservoir of energy, David could go dancing in the evening, close up the discos at 2 to 4 a.m., get up at 7 a.m., and function perfectly fine at work all day, reportedly thriving on three to four hours of sleep. David says, “It was like I had wanted to dance for a thousand lifetimes, and finally, I could dance again.”11

After this spontaneous recall of a previous lifetime, David became interested in the subject of past lives. He was comfortable with hypnosis (a psychologist at his clinic used it with patients, and David had gone to a trained hypnotist in an attempt to stop smoking cigarettes). David now learned a simple self-hypnosis technique where you would put yourself into a trance by counting from one to ten, then visualize yourself in an elevator punching a certain floor

button. When you got out of the elevator, you would, purportedly, reexperience a particular lifetime. Using self-hypnosis, David found himself in a large, muscular body back in the Sixteenth or Seventeenth Century—a heavy leather apron covering his torso, exposing his warrior-like arms, a large steel hammer resting comfortably in one hand. David was a blacksmith. In David’s present life, he was constructing his estate on Mill River Road and was researching Sixteen Century blacksmith shops. Before he developed Vibrations Syndrome (Raynaud’s Syndrome) in his fingertips, his plan was to construct his own bellows and practice blacksmithing at home. With the pain, loss of sensation, and impending gangrene from limited circulation in his hands and feet, David was always cold, and he couldn’t use a metal hammer. He tried to design an electromagnetic hammer so he could do blacksmithing without having to hit the anvil with a hammer, but to no avail. His house had a porte-cochere, a thin cement driveway opening where cars could drive through the house with protection from the elements. In his past-life recall, however, the driveway of the blacksmith was gravel, and he could hear the oncoming hooves of four horses with a coach that suddenly wheeled through the portecochere. The lead horse had thrown a shoe, and the driver had come to David, the blacksmith, to fix it. Instead of stopping in the porte-cochere, the horses began to gallop. The rear horse’s front legs kicked up into the air, and just as the horse came down to crush David’s chest, David went out of body, and that lifetime ended. Although certain mystical sects of Western religion do believe in reincarnation, mainstream Christianity does not. In Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism, however, reincarnation is an accepted, common belief. In his psychoanalytic work, Jung encountered numerous meaningful coincidences, finding that children were able to recall events and information they could not have experienced in this lifetime.12 More recently, psychiatrist Brian Weiss has popularized the concept of reincarnation through his past-life therapy with patients, captured in his best-selling books.13 David has recalled numerous past lives that he’s shared with his lecture audiences: dying by the Ganges River, being a knight during

the Crusades, being a thief in Paris, and a pirate, a galley slave, a warrior, and a Hinyana Buddhist monk, to name a few. One day he was contemplating his past-life experience as a blacksmith when another apparently ancient memory sprang up of helping the dying. In this one, he was in a disembodied state (not incarnated): It came back first as an experience on a battlefield, and I remembered being with dying people, looking at their agony, fear, and physical pain. Suddenly, there was this infinite lovingness and infinite state of being with the person who was dying. Before my very eyes, they would become transformed. They would leave the physical body behind, and all the wounds would heal. It was my love united with the love of God, as though I turned the heart over to God, and now the energy field of angelic beings who are Absolute Love poured through, but my consciousness was there with this dying person. The exquisite love of that energy would then heal all the wounds and the fear. I would see the fear, and the person’s eyes would open again. They would look at me, and I could see they were just melting with the experience. All the terror, fear, guilt, and feeling of being separated dissolved, and they would look at me with recognition. Then I saw that they would see that which was significant or divine to them, and that I, myself, was formless. The same experience has also happened in this lifetime.14 As a physician and a healer, David was with many patients as they passed. In those moments, he describes, it was as if his love joined with the love of God, as though the energy field of Absolute Love poured through him.

One sunny day in the mid-1970s, David was strolling through the woods on his property when he suddenly “got” that his mother was dying. It was like a call to come see her right away. David had grown apart from his mother. Alice-Mary, a hypochondriac who was always

sick, had remarried twice and was now living with her third husband in Florida. With David’s busy schedule, he didn’t get many chances to visit her. According to David, the two weren’t emotionally close due to “differences of opinion” about a few things and her constant focus on her failing health. David returned to his house and called home to find out his mother was in the hospital, suffering from liver failure. David knew she would soon be leaving the body. He booked the first flight out. When David entered his mother’s room in Lakeland Hospital, he saw her connected to an oxygen tank and other devices that were artificially keeping her heart going. Her room was crowded with hospital personnel. Since David was a big-name specialist from New York, this little hospital was going to make sure nothing went wrong. Immediately, he felt psychically connected with his mother, feeling the emotion of her experience. First, he felt tremendous relief from her, as if a great tension had lifted upon his arrival. Then he experienced a state of absolute ecstasy as his mother left her body in a state of infinite joy. It seemed to David that she had waited until he arrived to finally leave—she wanted him to experience the release with her. “Nobody was ever happier to get out of her body than my mother,” David says. “For years she had been hoping to get out, and when she did, she was very, very happy.”15 David realized she was gone before the hospital staff did, and he telepathically sent a message to the cardiologist in the room: “She’s dead. You can turn off the machine.” The cardiologist turned to the nurse and said, “Turn off the machine.” The nurse obliged, put the stethoscope to Mary-Alice’s chest, and said, “She’s dead.” The staff looked at David expecting him to begin grieving, but he didn’t. Instead, David was experiencing a state of ecstasy, joined in spirit with his mother. One nurse intuited what had happened. Looking at David, she broke into a big grin, saying, “Boy, was she ever happy to leave.” David replied, “You got it. She sure was.”16 They smiled at each other, understanding what was going on, but everyone else in the room seemed perplexed.

After retiring from Wadham Oil, David’s father, Ramon, owned and operated a 160-acre tree farm in Wisconsin. He later sold the tree farm and retired to West Linn, Oregon with his third wife. David occasionally took his daughters to visit their grandfather, but the presence of children made Ramon nervous, keeping their visits brief. Ramon died at the organ of his church from a ruptured aortic aneurism on January 30, 1972. David’s recalls visiting his ninety-plus-year-old grandmother Hawkins in a nursing home. With her Alzheimer’s, she told David in a confidential tone, “Oh, I have a grandson who is a psychiatrist in New York City.” David replied sweetly, “Well that certainly sounds interesting, Granny.” He asked her to tell him more about her grandson. Then all of a sudden, she broke into tears as she realized who she was talking with.

CHAPTER 12

A Constant Quest

Woodstock and Psychedelics The ‘60s marked a profound shift in Western culture, where the collective consciousness drove passionately for independent freedom. Authority was first questioned, and then condemned. It was a time of creative expression, both intellectually and artistically. It was also a time of massive drug and alcohol use. David’s clinic saw its boon during the ‘60s hippy days and the ‘70s aftermath. Drug addiction was more prevalent than ever before. David’s mentorship from Harry Tiebout, Bill Wilson’s influence, and his own experiences as a former alcoholic and drug addict made him a recognized, sought-after addiction specialist. North Nassau specialized in treating alcoholism and drug addiction. The clinic administered free B-12 shots to alcoholics and members of AA. David estimates that he treated around ten thousand addicts during his career. Many of the drug- and alcohol-addicted young men David treated had an aversion to psychiatrists. Psychiatrists of that era tended to judge drug use and addiction as a moral weakness, so the drug subculture prescribed niacin for a bad trip and avoided psychiatrists whenever possible. By contrast, at North Nassau and their syndicate of community services, addicts felt welcomed and supported instead of ridiculed, and David successfully treated even the most difficult cases. The drug-oriented subculture embraced this new megavitamin approach via word-of-mouth: one formerly-addicted peer would bring another peer in for treatment. David seemed attuned to New York’s East Village drug subculture and the sensitivities involved in treating those who wanted help. One particular patient had experienced behavior problems since sixth grade. Despite receiving treatment from renowned and qualified

psychiatrists, his condition worsened. At twenty-three, he found himself addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines, taking a laundry list of over twenty substances (including LSD, Demerol, opium, morphine, and heroin). He lived on the streets of Manhattan, where his $140 daily consumption of speed led to needle hepatitis as well. After being picked up by police, the man was sent to Bellevue Hospital before being transferred to David’s ward at Brunswick Hospital. David was able to stabilize the patient’s condition with an orthomolecular treatment that included megavitamins, larges doses of niacin, and small doses of tranquilizers. Fourteen months after being discharged from Brunswick, the man no longer had schizophrenic symptoms, and he’d lost his craving for drugs. This transformed young person went on to become a fulltime counselor of drug-addicted youth. He represented one of David’s many remarkable turnaround stories. David was also the psychiatric consultant to the LSD Rescue service and HOTLINE, two organizations serving the psychedelically distraught. In 1969, through his work with the LSD Rescue Service, David heard about an event called “Woodstock” that was about to make history. He routinely treated patients who had “bad trips” (temporary LSD-induced symptoms of psychosis) by applying “love” to the patient and massive doses of Vitamin B-3. When taken recreationally without the appropriate mind-set and setting, LSD often triggered bad trips, which included panic. Hoffer and Osmund had discovered that large doses of B-3 along with therapy helped bring people down, so David figured he could be of service to the LSD Rescue Service during Woodstock. The service reportedly treated over 400 youths for adverse drug reactions at the festival. David arrived at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York a day before the big event, staying at an elderly woman’s private home on the property. When he awoke the next morning, he saw “hippies hanging in the trees, on the ground, and on the woman’s porch.”1 The elderly woman panicked, and David calmed her down, explaining that these were peaceniks into peace, love, and music.

The August event was drenched in rain, creating a mud floor for the outdoor venue. Attendance soared at the nonstop rock fest to over 250,000 people by the second day, backing up traffic for at least ten miles. Food ran out almost immediately; the only food that made it into the event area was a truck of watermelons. There was no fresh water, either. Everyone was forced to drink unbottled water with chlorine that caused many people to gag. David was fortunate to have access to fresh water at the elderly woman’s house. David enjoyed the landmark cultural phenomenon and developed a love for rock ‘n’ roll. He recalls, laughing, “Woodstock was the ultimate expression of the philosophic school of Herbert Marcuse: total freedom, hedonism, and the collapse of the whole Protestant ethical system.”2 He was enthusiastic about legendary rockers like The Who, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and others he discovered at Woodstock. He became an aficionado after the event. In the late ‘60s, two cultural iconic establishments came and went in a few brief years. On Second Avenue in the East Village of Manhattan, Fillmore East opened in March 1968 to house the creative rock bands spawned out of the radical decade. In this cramped theatre that seated fewer than 4,000, legendary bands like The Grateful Dead, The Doors, The Who, The Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin graced the stage of what became known as “The Church of Rock and Roll.” David enjoyed hearing the bands of this era, especially after Woodstock. He recalls sitting at the bar next to Janis Joplin, who was drinking Southern Comfort. When she was on stage as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, David watched her fascinate an entire audience singing “Ball and Chain,” with everyone standing on their seat. Around the time Fillmore East entered the New York scene, the Electric Circus became a word-of-mouth sensation. Located a stone’s throw away on St. Mark’s Place, this nightclub personified the creative ‘60s culture. Part of the dive club’s allure was its lowbudget setup—located upstairs rather than at street level, booming with ultramodern, experimental music; psychedelic strobe lighting; a movie screen projector; inexpensive canvas backdrops; and a large dance floor coated with sawdust. The Electric Circus provided a

unique atmosphere for Manhattan’s ultra-creative and intellectual types to sit, chat, dance, and drink, and was frequented by people like Andy Warhol and his crew. It was a fun place for David and his friends to explore a new “liberal style” of dancing. After they closed the Electric Circus to renovate and modernize the establishment, the funk was gone—and so was the crowd. The East Village Other, a vanguard underground weekly newspaper, sprang up in the late ‘60s to showcase the leading trends in the psychedelic culture. David recalls that EVO displayed great artwork and forecasting: what EVO talked about surfaced in society a few months later. “In the early days of Fillmore East,” David recalls, “people would smoke grass and say ‘om,’ and it was very peaceful. But then, slowly, we saw a change. People began to get drunk, which is a whole different energy than smoking pot. It’s difficult to get violent on pot, but it’s easy to get violent on alcohol.”3 When David saw the advertisement in EVO for the Altamont free concert (organized by the Rolling Stones) in Northern California on December 6, 1969, with pictures of pistol bullets decorating the ad, he decided not to go. The event was touted as a Woodstock for the West. By the Stones’ third song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” someone had been murdered at the edge of the stage. Reminiscent of his favorite pastime as a teenager, David hung out in the old Italian coffee houses on Bleeker Street discussing life, art, philosophy, and politics. Late ‘60s New York City was a creative era filled with an explosion of aesthetics, art, and culture, aligned with David’s interests. For twenty arduous years, his Long Island clinic was a mecca for patients with intractable mental illnesses, but even with limited time, David still pursued recreational experiences to bring balance to his life.

David experimented with LSD twice. He spent months preparing for the experience with meditation and periods of fasting. Helen Wynn took LSD with Bill Wilson on numerous occasions. Wynn chose an ideal location in a secluded wooded area on Long Island. With Wynn as his spiritual guide, David took 150 micrograms of LSD, later calling it the “ultimate drug.” David felt that LSD took him to the

highest level of consciousness: “I stood there in the presence of the Infinite Oneness of the universe,” David recalls. “What Buddha and Jesus talked about was stark ravingly it. There’s no mystery left about it. It was beautiful … It was so incredible. Absolute transcendence … I lifted right through the top of the box [on his Map of Consciousness] and experienced what is.”4 Reflecting on LSD use prior to it becoming a recreational street drug, David says, “People in the great days of LSD took it with proper preparation. A year of meditation, fasting, and spiritual study. [They] took it once and … walked into that which always was and realized the truth of what that was and never took it again. Because it was very obvious that it wasn’t the drug at all. All the drug had done was remove your inability to witness that which is …”5 David’s experience taking LSD had a lasting impact on him, as it seemed to illuminate the spiritual goal to which he was heading.

As a consequence of his diverse practice and connections with pioneers like Hoffer, David worked in many areas of mental health, including establishing recovery houses for alcoholics and innovative rehabilitation clinics. With fellow psychiatrist Ross MacLean at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, he instituted a recovery program for alcoholics based on the therapeutic use of LSD in a highly controlled environment. Accompanied by a spiritual guide, a patient was given a large dose of the substance and blindfolded, being guided through an inner journey to discover their own intrinsic reality. The recovery rate for alcoholics who were “untreatable” by the rest of the medical community was an astounding 50 percent using this methodology.6 MacLean’s work was an outgrowth of the original psychedelic research by Hoffer and Osmond. Hollywood Hospital treated more alcoholics with psychedelics than any other institution in North America.7 David visited another group using a similar technique in Argentina during Christmastime. Tour groups of recovery patients took psychedelics together in a group meeting once every two

weeks. Certain techniques comparable to Native American sweat lodges were used. Here too, the recovery rate was surprisingly high. During his trip, David had the opportunity to take a side trip to Machu Picchu. This excursion required him to first go to Cusco, where he visited the cathedral and the local churches. The streets of this southeastern Peruvian city were filled with the sweet aroma of incense, which David followed to the entrance of the Sixteenth Century Cusco cathedral. As he walked in, he noted a nativity scene with a huge pot of incense in front of the altar, smoke rising through the sunbeams. In the back, an organist and flutist were playing music while elderly women with long black cloaks clicked coins and bobbed their heads in rhythm. It was an enchanting Christmas celebration, reminiscent of midnight Mass in the Catholic cathedral in Shanghai. David observes that somehow when he was in a foreign culture, he became more aware of the inner spiritual reality that lies within the core of religion.

The Human Potential Movement The fight-the-system sentiment of the ‘60s matured into a renaissance of self-growth and reflection in the ‘70s. The art and music industries were seeing explosive growth through a counterculture that advocated perpetually exploring oneself and one’s personal relationships. New schools of thought were emerging in social and humanistic psychology as the field became more expansive, reaching mainstream popularity. Humanistic psychology, pioneered by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, began to look at traits of mentally healthy people. Until Maslow’s work, psychology and psychiatry exclusively focused on mental illness—neurosis and psychosis—without understanding the qualities and attributes of positive, mentally sound individuals. Guided by this “third force” in psychology (psychoanalysis and behaviorism being the first two), the Human Potential Movement came into being. Following the end of the Vietnam War, institutionalized religion began to break down in the United States. Instead of giving an offering to their church, people were willing to pay for a seminar on

self-improvement or spirituality. The Esalen Institute, a retreat center in Big Sur, California, grew in popularity, attracting intelligent, spiritually minded people interested in exploring workshops on yoga, meditation, art, music, ecology, experiential psychology, and Gestalt Therapy. The ‘70s made a valiant surge toward self-growth and personal development and, from the perspective of David’s life quest, the decade represented a timely emergence. Truthfully, there was never a time in David’s life where he wasn’t on “the search.” It had taken him from a study of ancient Greek philosophy to free thinking influenced by Thomas Paine’s writings, to medical training and studying the mind through psychoanalysis, to testing out different religions, to adopting Zen practices and studying Buddhism, to exploring the occult with Bill Wilson, to studying nutrition and biochemistry and their affect on mental illness. By the mid-1970s, David’s single-minded interest in Orthomolecular Psychiatry had waned. Although David was still interested in alleviating the suffering of others, he had more personal motives to engage in the next phase of his quest. Years of drinking had taken their toll on his body. His perfectionistic, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, too, had left their mark. The stress and tension of building a large practice, interacting with the mentally ill, and weathering contention and ridicule as a professional had affected his physical health. Plus he had a host of chronic problems that had persisted for decades—depression, migraine headaches, and a series of ulcers.

Werner Erhart’s Est (Erhart Seminar Training) emphasized personal responsibility for your life situation and was attended by approximately six-hundred thousand people. Today, there are thousands of seminars and personal development programs available worldwide. Est was largely responsible for catalyzing this movement on a massive scale. The training was intended for middleclass citizens looking to improve their lives—not the hippy or New Age folks. Est taught that we are each a product of our decisions and emphasized the importance of personal integrity and

taking responsibility for one’s life. It included adages like Do what you say; say what you do and What is, is. What isn’t, isn’t. In an Est seminar, a person learned to stop making excuses for their life circumstances and to stop projecting blame onto others. Erhart spoke about the “payout” we get from negative emotions, showing his attendees how we love the dramatic “stories” we tell others and ourselves. By confronting these hidden payouts, Est promised to help you seize your life by liberating you from the “emotional stacks” that kept you from living a free, fulfilling existence. Est was like a religion of self-motivation and self-reliance.8 In 1975, after reading an article in The New York Times about the popularity and controversy of Est, David went through the sixty-hour training and the supplemental workshops offered by the organization. He loved the program’s frankness, viewing it as a course to help bring about personal integrity and self-honesty. The influence Est had on David is easily noted in hearing his lectures and their references to Est terms and concepts like “experiencing out” an emotion (also a concept in Zen), “recontextualizing a problem” so you see it differently, and creating a “make-wrong” where you’re “playing the victim.” Est was David’s first stop in the Human Potential Movement, but it was only the beginning of this next chapter of his life.

CHAPTER 13

Self-Healing

Physician, Heal Thyself When David married his second wife Margaret, he inherited a third daughter, Kathleen Phelan Hawkins, from Margaret’s first marriage. Although Kathleen was similar in age to her two half-sisters, Barbara and Lynn, she was markedly different. Whereas Barbara and Lynn seemed wired for white gowns and cotillion balls, Kathy was a laidback, free spirit aligned with ‘60s sentiments. In 1971 while David was working on Orthomolecular Psychiatry, she sent him a card: “I hope you get done with your book before I get home so we can ride in the jeep and groove. Well, I got to split now, so keep the faith, Honey.” They had a deep connection, and David had a special kinship with Kathleen, loving her as if she were his flesh and blood. Their personalities were highly compatible. When Kathleen came home on break from college, she discovered a lump on the side of her neck. David thought it was a swollen lymph node, but the oncologist grimly told them it was Hodgkin’s disease. Following radiation therapy and surgery, David and Maggy watched their twenty-year-old daughter get sicker and weaker. On July 4, 1976, the day of the nation’s bicentennial, Kathleen died. The untimely death of his beloved daughter shook David to his very core and strained his relationship with Margaret, who was devastated by the loss of her only natural daughter. David was intensely angry and distraught, and his profound grief sent him on a quest for emotional healing. He studied Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on death and dying, watching with clinical detachment as he went through denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. The grief persisted. The tragic event catalyzed David’s next search for spiritual answers, leading him to explore a host of programs and techniques.

His clinical work as a psychiatrist began receding into the background. David reflects on the irony of his situation: “I had devoted my entire life to the problem of human suffering and the ways in which it could be relieved. I had spent endless years of study and research into its causes and its cures. The relief of suffering was the focus of all my daily activities in both my personal and professional life. Despite it all, I found myself back in the midst of it in my own personal life.”1 Plato realized that the “most skillful physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of diseases in their own persons. For the body, as I conceive, is not the instrument with which they cure the body; in that case we could not allow them ever to be or to have been sickly; but they cure the body with the mind, and the mind which has become and is sick can cure nothing.”2 As both a child and an adult, David, his parents, and his sister were all afflicted with chronic illnesses, and David accrued dozens of diseases in midlife, many of them simultaneously. In the mid ‘70s, after the shocking death of his beloved daughter, more than ever he needed to find healing for himself. He began scaling back on his practice and reducing his role at the clinic.

During a typical workday, David arose at 5 am to meditate for an hour. Arriving at Brunswick Hospital at 7:30 a.m., he attended to thirty or so patients with various psychoses and related illnesses before turning his attentions to administration of his clinic, including hassling with insurance companies and their endless forms, legal threats, and tensions around his controversial treatments. After work, he’d return to his Mill River Road estate, meditate for another hour, then change into blue jeans and a casual shirt to work on his home construction, gardening, or lawn before retiring for the evening with some kind of spiritual book. Externally, while David’s life seemed busy, it didn’t seem unbalanced. Internally, however, the dis-ease within his body

included a host of over twenty-five ailments. By age fifty, he reports having all of the following at one time: chronic migraines, nearsightedness and astigmatism, ear aches, sinusitis, various dermatitis, gout, hypoglycemia, elevated blood cholesterol, a duodenal ulcer, pancreatitis, gastritis, colitis, diverticulitis, spinal arthritis, Raynaud’s Syndrome (vibration disease), a pilonidal cyst, Tietze’s Syndrome, lobar pneumonia, Dinghy fever, various heart failures, and atelectisis, among other things. Somehow, even with migraine headaches, cramps in his abdomen (from colitis and diverticulitus), and stomach pains (from the ulcer), David managed to work and treat his patients. His career as a physician and psychiatrist who dealt with the mentally ill’s disastrous life situations and their highly emotional families—plus the added pressures of running a large clinic and pioneering controversial treatments—had taken their toll. David’s childhood scrupulosity tended toward perfectionism in his adulthood. He was able to forgive others but not himself, leading to an intolerance of his own humanity. His obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist tendencies mixed toxically with his overachieving personality. David’s list of food restrictions due to his many ailments and allergies was astounding. Migraines, hypoglycemia, duodenal ulcers, gastritis, and colitis all plagued him. He couldn’t eat meat because of the gout. He couldn’t eat pastas because of the hypoglycemia. Seeds could aggravate his diverticulitis, so tomatoes and most fruits and vegetables were off the list. He says the only thing he could eat during this time was spinach, carrots, or lettuce. Most members of his family had severe allergies, living on antihistamines. His grandmother, mother, and sister had hay fever and reacted to substances like ragweed and hay with swollen, itchy eyes. His list of allergies included pollen, ragweed, horse dander, dog hair, dust, wool, feathers, chocolate, nuts, food additives, eggs, cheese, food dyes, caffeine, saccharine, synthetic fabric, aluminum, insect sprays, chlorine, smoke, seeds, and so on. “There was nothing I could eat that was safe,” David admits. “Nothing could be worn. No air to breathe. My body had all the reactions and diseases to prove it. I even quit going out for dinner.”3

“When I look in retrospect,” David writes, “it boggles my mind how the body kept going in the world and functioned as well as it did … I had lost twenty-five pounds … I looked rather thin and haggard. Later, some of my friends told me they made bets on how long that body was going to last. Most of my friends estimated that it would probably keel over at about age fifty-three.”4 With all of these ailments, David maintained his professional commitments with the same steely determination and iron will he cultivated as a boy on his Wisconsin paper route. “It carried me past and through all obstacles and had the power to push aside anything that interfered with that effective functioning,” David recalls.5 Dealing with hopeless cases and severely ill patients and their suffering families demanded a certain detachment, and with the objectivity of a scientist, he was able to suppress all of his emotions in order to serve his patients. The toll this emotional suppression took on his physical health, however, could no longer be ignored. David was perplexed by his physical challenges and wondered, How could a successful, highly educated professional man, functioning creatively in the world, leading a balanced life, who had been thoroughly psychoanalyzed and treated with many therapeutic modalities, still have this many physical ailments?6

Just as his body began rapidly deteriorating, David was lunging into the Human Potential Movement and exploring various techniques like emotional releasing through the Sedona Method and forgiveness as prescribed in A Course in Miracles. As he began applying these spiritual principles to his life, one by one, each chronic illness began to spontaneously heal. Throughout his healing, David stayed true to the basic dictum that guided him in his clinical work: everything is physical, mental, and spiritual. In addition to praying and surrendering the result to God (spiritual) and canceling out an illness’s belief system (mental), David generally did what was necessary in the physical domain, like taking medication for his migraines.

As he approached fifty, his migraine attacks were increasing in frequency, duration, and severity. For about three months, David had a migraine every single day! Psychoanalysis, acupuncture, and other techniques didn’t seem to help. David had a standing chiropractic appointment three times weekly. His chiropractor was the only person able to help alleviate the pain, but as luck would have it, the chiropractor moved out of town unexpectedly. Fortunately, the drug Imitrex offered some relief, but not a cure (which would come later). By utilizing alternative approaches in conjunction with standard treatments, while also addressing illnesses on the mental and spiritual level, David says he found a balanced approach to healing that avoided extremes.

Letting Go of Negative Emotions One of the Est trainers told David about another program called Mind Freedom, later renamed the Sedona Method. The Sedona Method was based on the idea that negative emotions persist because we hold onto them. By releasing the emotion—letting go of one’s resistance to it—the Sedona Method teaches that you can be free of the emotion. The concept of releasing or letting go, of course, was not original to the Sedona Method: Letting go was part of the AA lexicon, and Wilson often spoke about “getting a release” from alcohol.7 Psychoanalysis held concepts similar to those taught by the Sedona Method as well: In Self-Analysis (1942), psychoanalyst Karen Horney outlined ten “neurotic trends” that all boil down to one’s need for approval, power/control, and self-sufficiency (drives similar to those outlined in the Sedona Method). Horney developed a theory of neurosis and psychoanalytic techniques for removing the “excessive demands” of one’s neurotic needs. Letting go was also a popular concept in workshops by Ken Keyes (letting go of emotional addiction) and others in the Human Potential Movement. Buddha taught that the cause of all suffering is attachment. Numerous Zen texts had defined a similar goal as the Sedona Method: to release both your attractions and aversions. The mind constantly wants to change what is: by “releasing” on the desire to

change what is, healing can occur. “[The] body knows how to heal itself the minute we let go of resistance,” David explains. “Those who have tried Zen meditation know that the first thing taught is the handling of discomfort of the physical body by letting go of resisting the experience, canceling out thoughts about it, and becoming one with it, thereby disappearing it.”8 Since we are “at the effect of that which we resist,”9 transcending our resistances is at the crux of spiritual healing and advancing our consciousness, according to David. When he heard about a method of letting go of emotional attachments, David was excited: “If you could release yourself from your attachments, the end is certain. So as soon as I heard that, I said, ‘Well, fantastic!’”10 David immediately signed up and attended two consecutive weekend workshops in the Sedona Method held in New York City in 1976. This emotional releasing technique offered a specific way of letting go of unwanted thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Through the course, David learned to stay aware of his feelings, to give them room to be present without trying to change them. Through a series of questions, he learned to remove the pressure that builds behind negative emotional states and to simply let the energy out, leading to an experience of inner freedom. The day David learned the technique in a small, twenty-person training seminar, he immediately started to experiment with it. He was scheduled for surgery the next Friday for a lower gastrointestinal “stress-related” illness, but by the time he finished the weekend seminar, he physically felt different. The structural abnormality (he doesn’t specify what it was) had miraculously disappeared. David canceled his surgery. After the course, taught by Virginia Lloyd, David met the man behind the Sedona Method, Lester Levenson. Years before, in 1952, Levenson had undergone a second heart attack and was told by his doctors he might drop dead any minute. Returning to his Manhattan penthouse apartment to die, the forty-three-year-old physicist isolated himself, undergoing an inner process that led to a higher state of consciousness and the alleviation of all of his physical

symptoms. Levenson soon became a spiritual teacher and later developed the Sedona Method. David described Levenson as “a true sage. No trappings. No robes. No incense. Nobody genuflecting. No mobs of people chanting mantras. Nobody swaying in hypnotic ecstasy. Just an ordinary person you would pass on the street. And it’s only when you speak to him and he realizes your degree of interest [that] he opens up to you.”11 David was aware of his tendency to intellectualize. Between his psychoanalytic training, a high IQ, and his love for reading, he habitually tried to think his way through problems. His emotional blindness often blocked him from realizing solutions. The suppressing of powerful negative emotions was the “kink in his armor,” blocking his spiritual evolution.12 As a physician, David had perfected the objectivity and detachment necessary for clinical work. Emotions were compartmentalized out of necessity. His training demanded it, since emotions were seen as obstructions to the search for logical answers: “As I looked at this area, I began to suspect that there had been a cost to that detached objectivity in the face of so much stressful professional and life events.”13 Although his emotional detachment served him in his clinical work, as he approached middle age, he began noticing the toll these suppressed emotions were taking. As David looked within, he realized, “All the emotions that I had pushed down—all the tons of feeling that I had stuffed out of awareness so as to clear the decks for action—now came up. … I learned how to be aware of these feelings, their nature, and a multitude of descriptive terms … I was somewhat dismayed at my lack of connectedness with my own inner feelings. I saw my masculine protest about entering this whole unfamiliar dimension.”14 Now he was beginning to integrate an entirely new dimension to his life experience, opening him up to the feminine principle: “I saw that my fear of feelings, due to not knowing how to handle them, and my resentment at being their victim, had accounted for my rejection of [women] and the resultant typical male rationalization that the

world of feelings is for women only and unmasculine.”15 David saw how his perspective limited his understanding of women. Now, he could be more sympathetic and feel closer to the opposite sex. “I had rejected feelings because they were illogical,” David reflects, “but I paid a great price. I had cut myself off from half my life and diminished the quality of my relationships.”16 David was so impressed with the effectiveness of the Sedona Method that he took the advanced training to learn more specific applications of the technique and the subtle ways the mind holds onto old attachments and belief systems. Whereas Est got David to see that his feelings didn’t necessarily relate to the reality of the moment, the Sedona Method gave him a way to transcend his feelings altogether. As David describes: “The beauty of this method is you don’t have to be afraid of feelings. I used to be afraid of feelings because there didn’t seem to be any effective way of handling them. Now, I’m no longer afraid of feelings … hit me with anything. It doesn’t make any difference because whatever the feeling is, I can handle it as it comes up.”17 David’s personality was in a state of evolution. Although he initially appeared reserved and timid, as he went through these various programs, he became more expressive and confident. He began applying the Sedona Method to his many stress-related illnesses. To find some peace from his strained marriage and his active work life, David took refuge in a friend’s private cottage behind a large, 200-acre estate on Long Island, rarely leaving for a week or two. This private sanctuary was so secluded that not even his car could be seen. He kept his whereabouts unknown—even to his wife. After his daughter passed away, the increased emotional pressures led to the return of his diverticulitis with massive hemorrhaging. Forgoing blood transfusions, determined not even to go to the hospital this time, David was determined to do his own inner work, no matter what the cost: “I put all teachings I had learned thus far on the line—I made a decision: either this stuff works or I check out.”18 Letting go of all his resistance to the pain—without naming or labeling the discomfort—he laid down for four straight

hours. The bleeding stopped and the cramps subsided; the diverticulitis was healed. In November 1979, around Thanksgiving, David broke his foot while chopping wood. Instead of getting a cast, he consciously chose to let go of resisting the experience, allowing the pain to pass through him without labeling it. By Christmas, he was dancing. David has described in detail the process of “releasing on pain as it arises” during numerous public lectures. He once twisted his ankle badly while in a park in San Francisco. Closing his eyes, he surrendered to the pain, which came in waves. If he resisted the pain, he would easily have wound up in a cast. Instead, he sat down on a park bench and let the pain sweep over him. Curiously, the suffering was minimal. In choosing to fully experience the sensations —without resistance—he didn’t become the victim of an accident. Within three or four minutes, he was walking with only slight discomfort.19 David’s fear of heights, as evidenced by his experience atop the twenty-four-foot mast on the YMS-46 during WWII, was so severe that he couldn’t get within a half mile of the Grand Canyon. “You would have to strap me to a stretcher to get me to the edge,” he revealed. “I think I would go unconscious with terror.”20 After releasing on his fear of heights over the course of several years, he was able to sit on the edge of the canyon, his legs dangling, and look down. He was even able to go up in a hot air balloon for a friend’s wedding without anxiety or panic. Witnessing firsthand the transformational effects of the Sedona Method—changing his entire body chemistry by shifting his consciousness—numbered his days in psychiatry. He found what he believed was a more effective way of facilitating healing and recovery. David recalls, “I discovered that consciousness is more powerful than anything else.”21 The more he explored his mental processes and his emotional states, the less faith he had in psychiatry: “Curiously enough, psychiatry knows absolutely nothing or very little about the mind. Isn’t that odd? Psychiatry knows nothing about the mind. Here we are today talking about a method called ‘releasing’ that psychiatry hasn’t even heard of. The most powerful and effective tool I’ve seen

for overcoming emotional difficulty, and the profession hasn’t even heard of it.”22 Even Orthomolecular Psychiatry appeared limited to him now, as consciousness superseded any and all biochemical issues. His exploration into mental and spiritual techniques became all-consuming.

Toward the end of the ‘50s, David had a spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in a hospital bed. Around the same time, Robert Monroe (a composer, broadcaster, and businessman with an engineering background who had been experimenting with sound patterns to induce altered states of consciousness) was having his first of many such experiences in his own bed. Instead of dismissing the event as David did back then, Monroe began to study and document his OBEs. His results were reported in Journeys Out of the Body (1971), a popular book David read after his experiences with Est and Mind Freedom. David was intrigued by Monroe’s experiences and the process he had engineered for going out of body, so he enrolled in Monroe’s ten-day program in August 1978 at the Monroe Institute in Virginia. Lying on a floor mat, he was given a headset playing different frequencies for the left and right ear that apparently entrained the brain to an altered state of consciousness, allowing one to leave the body at will. David found Monroe’s voice incredibly calm and powerfully peaceful. He enjoyed exploring the altered states of consciousness and volitional astral projection techniques for traveling beyond the physical world. He realized that even if you were not born with the capacity to have a spontaneous OBE like he did in 1959, you could still learn to do it at will. On one astral trip, David re-entered the body and noticed that he was looking out the back of his head toward the floor—he had reentered backward. He had to back up and “re-dock,” aligning his etheric (astral) nose with the body’s nose. “What a fun experience!” he recalls. He learned how to project himself wherever he wished. For example, he says he was able to project himself into a closed box

and see what was in the box. In this particular case, it was a meeting badge that said, “Hello.” Explorer teams of five people would coordinate to meet in a particular astral domain once out of body. Some got lost, but others were able to connect in different dimensions. David learned various healing techniques through the experience; overall, he found it to be interesting on multiple levels—psychiatrically, physically, mentally, and experientially. Typically, he shared his experiences and various findings with the staff of his clinic, however, his experience with Monroe seemed a bit “too far out” for even his staff. David explored plenty of other “far-out” modalities during these exploratory years. In addition to the full range of paranormal exploration with Wilson and Wynn in the ‘60s, David explored paranormal phenomena on his own. On one occasion, in the early ‘70s, he joined a group in a field where a psychic had predicted aliens were planning to make an appearance. Alas, while standing there, the psychic decided that the conditions weren’t right for them to appear. David saw several psychics during this phase to determine if there was any validity to their capabilities. Although skeptical, he was not close-minded.

A Course in Healing It appeared as though David was being guided from one technique to another, each one adding to his powerful repertoire, expanding his understanding of himself. While David was at the Monroe Institute, his instructor told him about the book A Course in Miracles. It has unusual origins: the text was not authored as such, but rather (reportedly) sprang from an “inner dictation” between 1965 and 1972.23 The unlikely scribe was an agnostic—Helen Schucman, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. The work consisted of a 669-page textbook, a 488-page workbook, and a manual for teachers published in 1976 while David was fervently exploring alternative healing modalities.

As Schucman describes, “The writing was never automatic. It made me very uncomfortable, but it never seriously occurred to me to stop. It seemed to be a special assignment I had somehow, somewhere agreed to complete.”24 William Thetford, Schucman’s colleague and a professor at Columbia, supported and encouraged her through the arduous seven years it took to complete the work. Interestingly, Schucman remained agnostic even after completing the dictation of ACIM; she never embraced the principles it taught. Thetford, on the other hand, identified with the power of the Course’s spiritual principles right away. Judith and Robert Skutch, as the Foundation for Inner Peace, funded the first publication of the book. Originally, the manuscript was printed on copy paper and circulated via word-of-mouth, mainly among small groups of people on Long Island and in New York City. David wrote to the Foundation for Inner Peace in California and discovered fortuitously that the printer of the book, Saul Steinberg, had offices in Amityville, Long Island, less than twenty miles from his clinic. David met with Steinberg immediately, receiving a copy of the manuscript. At that time, fewer than 25,000 copies were in circulation. ACIM came none too soon for David. Even though he had initial success with the Sedona Method, he was still suffering physically, emotionally, and spiritually, still grieving the loss of his daughter. “When I met David,” Steinberg recalls, “he was a very troubled human being crying out for help.”25 When David first entered Steinberg’s office, he was hunched over, looking beat up by life. As soon as David opened the ACIM workbook (at that time, all three books were bound separately), he says he knew it was a work of spiritual genius. “When I saw the truth written out on the page, I said, ‘Wooo!’” he laughs. “[I realized that] in and of myself, I’m not able to know anything. That is startlingly true. That’s stunning. That’s genius.”26 He’s humorously said during public lectures that after reading the first page, he “nearly fell off the toilet.” A Course in Miracles teaches that there are no private thoughts. Initially, David resisted this notion, believing his “thoughts and feelings were private affairs and nobody else’s business and that all

minds were separated.”27 Eventually, however, as he followed the daily lessons, his perspective began to change. ACIM is a course in forgiveness. It teaches that upsets and grievances occur because of how you’re seeing things. By letting go of resentments, forgiving oneself and others, and trusting in God’s will, miracles occur. The workbook portion of ACIM offers 365 lessons, one for each day of the year. As students go through these lessons, they report that their perceptions change. Events and circumstances that were once dramatic and devastating are met with equanimity. A sense of peace and love prevails, as students stop harboring resentments toward themselves and others. Similar to prior techniques David had practiced, such as the Sedona Method, ACIM taught its students how to release negative emotions— especially guilt. This technique taught releasing them through forgiveness. In 1978, David became a student of ACIM and quickly became a member of Moderator Training, ACIM’s trainer program. David explains the nature of miracles as taught in ACIM: “Miracles happen. It’s only by our assent. A Course in Miracles says it’s only by our agreement. By our willingness, miracles can happen through us. Just be willing.”28 Applying spiritual principles doesn’t imply wishful thinking. David didn’t try to talk himself out of his illnesses through positive thinking and affirmations. He applied the lessons of ACIM each day through a contemplative way of being, the same way he lived the Twelve Steps and other systems of healing and recovery. The first half of the 365day course was designed to “de-program” one’s current perception (the perception that reveals a world of separation and that’s driven by fear, resentment, and grievances). The second half of the course cultures a “higher” perspective on reality, one devoid of separation, where the love of God is experienced. As one moves from a separate self to an expression of Spirit, miraculous healings of various degrees are said to occur. ACIM proved to be a powerful tool for transcending illnesses.

After working with the orthomolecular approach in the ‘60s, David had gone on a sugar-free diet. Because of his cholesterol concerns, he had stopped drinking milk, which reduced his headaches. One day he was spraying his newly built house with commercial insecticide. Within minutes, he had an intense migraine. He connected the insecticide with the headache, concluding he was having a reaction to the insecticide. This was confirmed later when he noticed that if he went to Brunswick Hospital within a week of insecticide spraying there, he also got a migraine. One day several years later, David went to visit a friend. She opened the door of the house, and David immediately whiffed insecticide. Backing up, he told her he couldn’t enter, that he was allergic to insecticides. They sat on the porch instead. Spontaneously, his mind received a message—not in the form of a thought, he says, but a “knowingness”—that he was immune to the inhalants. He remained skeptical, but the message was insistent: enter the house. David went inside and inhaled. “I had a sudden feeling of freedom,” he recalls. “How wonderful to be free, and then I saw the power of my own mind! … I no longer was a slave or a victim, and I saw my ticket to freedom.”29 Like Bill Wilson, David and both his parents were highly susceptible to depression. David had already made the connection between depression and alcoholism, but it wasn’t until he learned about hypoglycemia that he had a way of dealing with his depression. After David achieved sobriety, he began substituting sugar and sweets for alcohol, as many recovering alcoholics do. To celebrate the end of each successful-yet-challenging workweek, David indulged in a double hot fudge sundae every Saturday night. Every Sunday he got depressed and sometimes had anxiety attacks. After a year or two, he made the connection between sugar and depression. He took the five-hour glucose tolerance test administered at his clinic and couldn’t get off the couch after three hours. His hypoglycemia was so severe that he couldn’t drive home. He immediately went on a restricted diet eliminating all sugars, sweets, and starches, and the depression disappeared. Later, as David began understanding the nature of belief systems and their relationship to illness, he realized that his belief in

hypoglycemia was operating within his body, expressing his mind’s belief in hypoglycemia. He began “canceling” the belief system and stating the truth as taught by ACIM and other New Age schools of thought: I’m only subject to what I hold in mind. This was not simply a positive affirmation or a mindless repetitive mantra for David. At a deep level, he was acknowledging that his experience was the result of a belief. He was affirming his reality as Spirit, making the conscious choice to extricate the destructive belief from his being. After David spent over a year canceling the belief—a considerably longer time than most people would persist—his blood sugar leveled off, and his hypoglycemia disappeared. He was able to indulge in hot fudge sundaes, pecan pies, and other delectable treats without repercussions. Years later, a medical association asked David to give a series of lectures on hypoglycemia. After giving these short talks a few times each month for three months, the symptoms returned: when he ate sugar, he got the shakes and felt anxious, depressed, and emotionally unstable. He realized that the talks were reactivating the belief of hypoglycemia in his mind, reaffirming hypoglycemia as a reality and psyching himself into the illness. David stopped giving the talks, and after re-canceling the belief system for a month or two, he once again found himself symptom-free. To help transcend various illnesses and cancel out their source belief systems, David rehearsed statements like I’m an infinite being. I’m not subject to that. I’m only subject to what I hold in mind. This does not apply to me. And I hereby cancel it and refuse it.30 As he explains, based on his understanding of ACIM, the mind directs the body, testifying to the dictum: “The body will do what the mind believes.”31 By refusing a particular belief system, David says, you don’t “give in” to the collective power of the belief and thereby you can release yourself from its collective energy. “I learned that the culprit was not the world—it was all in my own mind—all of that negative programming and conditioning,” David adds.32 David experimented with using the belief-canceling technique on his high cholesterol, and his cholesterol came down spontaneously. David began eating three eggs every morning for breakfast (with an abundance of cheese), yet still maintained a low cholesterol level.

He began adding other dairy products, and over time, all of his food intolerances and allergies disappeared. Sometimes he would wake up in the morning with a “knowing” that a particular health challenge was gone. David’s sensitivity to poison ivy had been severe since childhood, including terrible reactions that had sent him to the hospital twice. Appling the principles of ACIM and identifying with Spirit, not the ego, David says he transcended the allergy. He woke up one morning knowing he was immune to it, and to confirm, he dug up a bunch of poison ivy and started playing with it: he had no adverse reaction. David was a guest on a television program that day called “The Power of Consciousness in Self-Healing,” so he took the poison ivy with him to the interview. Visibly frightened, the interviewer told him “not to get that stuff near” him. David brushed his hand through the poison ivy on occasion to demonstrate the power of ACIM principles. Gout was another problem for David. When he walked along a sidewalk, a crippling pain could spontaneously shoot through his leg, as if someone had jabbed a knife into his shin. He kept gout medication in his pocket and stored a cane in his trunk for emergencies. Gout restricted his diet, and even a tiny bite of pâté would trigger a reaction. David treated his cat, Wally, like royalty. David tried to feed him raw chicken liver and kidney, but the cat wouldn’t touch it. David sautéed the kidney and liver with onions, bacon, and a dash of catnip. Wally still refused. David, with his English heritage and memories of his grandmother’s kidney pie, salivated over Wally’s meal. Looking down at the pan, David instantly knew the gout was a figment of his imagination: “All of a sudden, I saw that my whole dietary limitation was just a crazy belief system … I am an I am an infinite being. I am not subject to this. I mean this is absurd.”33 Just like his insecticide sensitivity and hypoglycemia, David had canceled out the program for gout. He sat down and ate half the pan of fried liver and kidneys, finishing the rest of the pan the next day. He had no gout attack, then or ever again. Each time he experienced a spontaneous healing or an illness remitting on its own, his focus toward spiritual healing, away from

psychiatry, was strengthened. It was becoming obvious to David that spiritual techniques and aligning with higher consciousness offered a faster route to alleviating suffering—both for himself and others. (In his later life, David largely abandoned the self-healing principles he used in the ‘70s and ‘80s, citing that this is “just a phase you go through in [your] spiritual development.”34 Where he once believed that germs were simply a belief system held in mind,35 for example, he now applies instant hand sanitizers, like Purell, continuously, especially on the days of his public lectures. Apparently he feels it is a lot of work to keep cancelling out belief systems, and that it’s just easier to use the sanitizer.)

During a four-day holiday weekend, David invited eleven students of ACIM to his Mill River home, stipulating that the group stay silent during its visit. During this intimate retreat, if you want to say hello to someone, you simply embraced him or her. The group found that they functioned perfectly without verbal communication— they just knew what was on the other person’s mind. While sitting at the dinner table, for instance, one person would think “salt” and someone would pass him the salt. All twelve students reportedly developed telepathy. On the final evening, with the twelve of them sitting at the dining room table, waiting for the meal to be served, David looked up and was struck by the remarkability of what they were all experiencing. “It was like eleven Christs looking at me. And for a moment, psychically, there was absolute silence—not one thought-form in the air.”36 In that blessed moment, all telepathic communication stopped, and the group experienced their collective oneness as consciousness. Looking at each other in disbelief, they were stunned by the realization of what they all were, in truth. The telepathic experience ended after everyone went home.

David most likely met Jerry Jampolsky at Judy Skutch’s New York City apartment. Located at 1 West Eighty-First Street, the

Skutch apartment was a common meeting place in the ‘70s for people in the alternative health and paranormal fields. Judy Skutch gave Jampolsky, a psychiatrist whose life was in shambles, one of the first manuscripts of ACIM in 1975. Jampolsky experienced a personal transformation while doing ACIM, inspiring him to found the International Center for Attitudinal Healing that same year. ICAH was an organization committed to supporting the emotional needs of people in crisis, offering no-cost self-help groups for people with chronic, intractable, serious illnesses. The center’s approach, derived from ACIM principles, reportedly saw recoveries from almost every kind of illness. When David heard about Jampolsky’s work with Attitudinal Healing and how it was helping people recover from hopeless diseases, he flew to Tiburon, California to meet him and to learn how the center used ACIM therapeutically. Although less engaged with psychiatry than he had been, David’s primary focus was still on health and healing. He liked how Jampolsky set up the center as experiential rather than intellectual, and as nondenominational rather than religious, stripping the religious components from ACIM to make it more palpable to a wider audience. In a safe, supportive environment, patients shared their feelings, alleviating the sense of fear and isolation that generally accompanies intractable illnesses and enjoying a sense of belonging to the group. Guided by principles like acceptance, love, and nonjudgementalness, and living in the present moment, the center paralleled much of AA’s dictums. (ACIM actually offers complementary guidelines to AA’s Twelve Steps. Many people in recovery use ACIM to support their Twelve-Step work.) David invited Jampolsky and his staff to his Long Island estate for the weekend so he and his team could learn from Jampolsky how to set up an Attitudinal Healing center. On April 23, 1979, the Attitudinal Healing Center of Long Island opened in David’s clinic in Manhasset, with Saul Steinberg, the printer of ACIM, becoming its vice chairman. Similar to their Tiburon counterpart, the Long Island center was a nonprofit offering free services for people with hopeless, incurable, and intractable illnesses. (There are now over sixty centers worldwide.)

At the new Long Island center, David says he saw every kind of difficult and incurable disease in about eight different groups. By simply applying the principles taught in ACIM to all ailments and illness, many people recovered.

Triggered by his ACIM daily practice, David noticed he was affecting electrical devices, such as hi-fi equipment, strobe lights, and automobiles. According to David, electrical defects in his car repaired themselves after he pictured them being repaired by “Divine Harmony.” He says he could, on occasion, turn strobe lights in the room off and on merely by seeing them off and on in his mind. David had four McIntosh 100-watt amplifiers attached to an elaborate stereo system in his Mill River home. One day the system stopped working properly, and David called in a high-fidelity specialist for repairs. The owner of the repair company brought a young technician—it was his first day on the job. While the boss was in the other room, the new technician accidentally blew out one of David’s 100-watt amps. David noticed the kid was worried about what to tell his boss, since the amp was clearly working fine when they arrived. David figured that if he put his attention on the amp, it might help, so he went into a semi-trace state, seeing the amplifier’s perfection. Energy shot through him like a bolt of lightning, and the amplifier started working perfectly. Witnessing this phenomenon, the young man declared, “I saw that! How did you do that?” David explains that most people go into denial when they witness a miracle. This kid, however, did not. Instead, he intuited what had happened and became highly inquisitive, immediately asking questions. David told the young man, “Well, I’ve been doing A Course in Miracles, and that seems to be what brought it on.” “I’ve been looking for something like that. It’s just what I want,” the young man replied. “I just happen to have one extra set,” David told him.37 David was so excited about ACIM that he had purchased fifty copies for family and friends. Only one ever did the course to David’s knowledge: his “sweet, old ex-mother-in-law who went to Mass/Catholic Church every single morning.”38 David thought she

would be the last person in the family to do ACIM, as it’s viewed as sacrilegious by many Christians. David had only one copy of A Course in Miracles left by the time the amplifier incident occurred, and he believed it was meant for the young technician. Before he left, the young man tore open the carton with the three-volume set and read Lesson One. David believed the incident had been designed for the technician’s benefit, to prove that miracles are possible.

In 1979, David’s friend Ren introduced him to another emerging movement called rebirthing, which reportedly has therapeutic and awareness-expanding possibilities. Practitioners of the technique view birth as a traumatic event and believe that re-experiencing the birthing process has therapeutic benefits. Rebirthing uses specific breathing techniques aimed at emulating the breathing patterns at birth. David experienced roughly ten rebirthing sessions in a group of four or five people, with Ren as their trained instructor. The rebirthing process takes about twenty minutes. David says you connect back to your higher Self, but then the remaining ego pulls you away from it. As he describes it, “When you go through the process, you don’t feel like you’re in a body at all. The body becomes weightless and moves of its own [accord]. It’s sort of a mystical-like state. You’re out-ofbody. It’s an amazing experience, subjectively.”39 With his Freudian demeanor, David always had an issue with touching people, but after going through a rebirthing session, David hugged his friend Randy Richmond, a fellow participant, revealing, “I’ve never hugged a man before.”40 This represented, no doubt, a psychological breakthrough to David. Once, while doing rebirthing with Ren, David says he had “permission to leave the body” (meaning, to die) from his Higher Self. The experience was reminiscent of the high spiritual state he experienced in the snow bank as a boy. The body “becomes irrelevant, with no significance and no reality. Instead, you begin to experience that which is—an experience of incredible peace and lovingness outside of time and space. [There is] just pure consciousness and awareness. [You are] exquisitely aware of an

infinite being that [you are] ‘at one with.’ You don’t remember what you did or what you have, but what you are!”41 During the session, Ren yelled to David, “Breathe!” David had no desire to breathe, but heard the desperate appeal in Ren’s voice, “Please breathe!” Ren was the first trained rebirther in his area, and it might ruin Ren’s career and fill him with guilt if David “checked out,” so out of love for his friend, he inhaled.

As a dedicated seeker, David explored other popular movements like Transcendental Meditation, a meditative technique popularized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although TM helped advance the awareness of meditation in the United States, the technique didn’t do anything for David. He also investigated chakra balancing, guru initiations, reflexology, polarity therapy, iridology, bodywork, psychodrama, Jungian psychology—he even went on Marriage Encounter Weekends with Margaret. Many techniques that David learned he taught to his staff, who would use them, when appropriate, with patients. He held weekend meetings and brief seminars at his home to keep his staff informed about approaches to healing outside of traditional psychotherapy. The Mill River estate acted as a training and retreat center for these alternative modalities, with David and Margaret constantly hosting groups. David attracted a small group of spiritually-minded people on Long Island who explored a variety of programs and techniques and who joined together as students of ACIM. The group included David’s wife Margaret, Randy Richmond, Paul Steinberg (Saul’s brother), and Betty Martin. Together, they would attend workshops and drive up to see spiritual teachers (like the Karmapa and Swami Muktananda) in the borsht circuit, a resort area in the Catskill Mountains only two hours from New York City. David joyfully recalls his visit with Muktananda, who sat with a bushel of orange knit caps by his side. Muktananda would wear one of the caps, say hello to a few visitors, and then hurl the cap toward the audience. Devotees would rush for the cap because they believed it was infused with the energy of the teacher’s aura.

PART IV

TRANSITIONS (1979-1995)

CHAPTER 14

Out West

Sedona At fifty-two, David decided it was time for a major life change. He was going to leave his life in New York, including his family, successful clinic, private practice, professional responsibilities, rented Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment, six-thousand-book private library, and multimillion-dollar Long Island estate: David was going to move to Arizona. A number of factors prompted his decision to move out West. The original idea came from one of the spiritual teachers David studied with in the ‘70s—we’ll call him Sam. Sam had recently moved from New York City to Sedona, and his enthusiasm about the area impressed David. Sam was also preparing his students for the “end times,” advocating survival communities, and urged David to join him. It was during the Carter administration in 1980 that the price of crude oil almost tripled, reaching a level (adjusted for inflation) that wasn’t surpassed until 2008. Spurred by fear, the energy crisis fueled many apocalyptic prophecies, as psychics and survivalist groups channeled future realities of a return to pre-industrial society. Although a pragmatist in many areas of his life, David trusted Sam and was part of this movement in the early ‘80s, so he bought into this mentality. He brought farming equipment with him from New York to prepare for an agrarian lifestyle and stocked up on caseloads of Pepsi, David’s favorite beverage following his sobriety. Few marriages survive the death of a child; David and Margaret’s was not one of them. Moving away from Margaret seemed like the best option at the time. This was another factor in David’s moving West. Finally, David’s interests had shifted the previous four years from psychiatry to spiritual programs like ACIM, the Sedona Method,

rebirthing, and so on. He was immersed in the “new consciousness” movement and eager to live in a New Age Mecca. David left his clinic to Charlie Tkaz, a pediatric psychiatrist on his staff, and put a few other affairs in order. (The clinic struggled after David’s departure, but remained open until 2000.) His family, friends, and colleagues were dumbfounded, wondering if David had gone crazy or was headed toward a nervous breakdown. How could he so easily flick aside all the worldly success, prestige, power, influence, and money he had earned? Reaching a profound inner state of peace and stillness, he no longer felt the pulls of his professional life, retreating deeper into his own subjective states of being. He packed a few belongings (including his spiritual books, a small writing desk, tools, and gardening equipment) into his weathered, three-quarter-ton 1965 Willys stake-bed pickup. The teal vehicle had four two-by-fours reinforced with chicken wire on each side of the rear flat bed, forming walls. All items were secured to this with one-inch-thick twisted rope. David’s good friend, Randy (J.R.) Richmond, accompanied him, convinced by a worried Mollie Shriftman (the clinic’s administrator who was running the clinic at the time of David’s departure) to join David on his expedition. Knowing her former boss had Mr. Magoolike tendencies, she figured Richmond could help ensure that David didn’t drive off a cliff or get assaulted at a truck stop. A former patient and fellow former drunk, Richmond had become a close confidant of David’s. The two had undergone experiential journeys into various spiritual techniques and occult practices. Suffering from alcoholism at age twenty-five, Richmond had been taken by his parents to “the best physician” for treating alcoholism, becoming David’s patient at Brunswick Hospital. Years later, after Richmond achieved sobriety, their friendship blossomed beyond that of doctor/patient to a mentor/apprentice kinship, with David being eighteen years Richmond’s senior. In the late ‘70s, as David began to lose his passion for psychiatry, Richmond would visit him at work, where the two men would chat about life for an hour or two over lunch. They made an usual pair: David was short, buttoned-up, bowtied, and reserved, with a bold, adventuresome side. Richmond was

strikingly tall, and after 300 acid trips, still managed to remain sane, alert, and present. To the casual observer, both men exhibited high degrees of eccentricity and were best described as “characters.” Both were highly intelligent and philosophical, united by their quest for higher truth. While David was thoughtful with his words, displaying a natural detachment in conversation that one would expect from a Freudian analyst, Richmond was up-close-andpersonal, “telling it how it is” without hesitation. Obsessivecompulsive David was neat and tidy. Richmond was messy and disorganized—a quality that would drive David crazy while they lived together out West. David appreciated Richmond’s frankness, humor, and innocence. Richmond loved David’s deep thinking. While both men were arguably “out there,” there was a saneness each appreciated in the other. Both David and Richmond were well-read and highly articulate. There was never a shortage of interesting topics to discuss at length. While David was studying A Course in Miracles, Richmond was studying at the Jungian Institute. Richmond also became a student of ACIM and spent a great deal of time hanging around David’s clinic or the Attitudinal Healing Center. The Human Potential Movement was in full swing toward the end of the ‘70s, and David and Richmond were experiencing much of it together. On August 5, 1979, they headed west. The daringness of this five-day road trip can be fully appreciated by considering the shape of David’s fifteen-year-old, beat-up truck. An amateur mechanic, David had done a lot of the repairs himself through the years, and it was nothing short of miraculous that the truck survived the journey. Somewhere along the open highway on their way to Arizona, the water pump, which David had wired himself, began to fall off. David knew he had to simply twist a certain wire in a certain direction, but alas, among all the tools packed in the truck, there wasn’t a single pair of pliers. He figured he could make it a few more miles before they would be stranded on the highway. Miraculously, a couple hundred feet later on the right side of the road, they spied a brandnew pair of pliers (David reports that they looked unused). According to ACIM, as soon as the need arises, the solution presents itself. Such is the way of siddhis and synchronicities.

The truck was in poor shape, exacerbated by the load. If they drove over fifty miles per hour, the front wheels would hover, prohibiting steering. As David was driving the switchbacks from Flagstaff to Sedona, Richmond turned to him and asked, “Can you actually see where you’re going?”1 The Human Potential Movement of the ‘70s was ripening into a movement toward higher consciousness and social transformation. As people worked on improving themselves, they became more aware—of themselves, those around them, and the world at large.2 Having intensely ridden the wave of these movements for roughly five years, David was headed from one New Age hot bed in New York to another in Sedona, Arizona. Verde Valley, with its cottonwoods and the Verde River cutting through it, is a large agricultural and ranching region in central Arizona that includes the towns of Cottonwood, Clarkdale, Camp Verde, Jerome, and Sedona. Over the last three decades, Sedona has become the Beverly Hills of the Verde Valley. Although the surrounding area is arid desert, Sedona itself is an accessible Shagri-La. Oak Creek Canyon, with its river gorge along the Mogollon Rim, connects Sedona and Flagstaff with thirteen jagged miles along Route 89A. At an elevation of 4,500 feet, safely nestled within a ravine and protected by massive rock formations, the Oak Creek Canyon/Sedona area boasts a unique ecosystem, being one of the few places in Arizona that experiences all four seasons. When David arrived in Sedona, it was a small rural town with fewer than 6,000 residents. Today transformed by an explosion of New Ageism and tourism attracted by the Red Rock region, the town back then was already a way station for spiritual vagabonds. With its dramatic landscape set within a valley of iron-rich red sandstone, Sedona is known for its hidden canyons and towering standalone rock formations, guarding the town with prosaic names like Bell Rock, Coffee Pot, Cathedral Rock, and Giant’s Thumb. Sedona was one of those places that people stumbled upon accidentally before deciding to live there.

Sedona was a ranch town. Many people had gun racks on theirs cars and rifles in their trucks. Cowboy hats, blue jeans, leather vests and boots, and a holstered gun were regular attire for many of the town’s inhabitants—including David. Sedona was quiet and beautiful —ideally suited for a person looking to retreat into solitude. It wasn’t uncommon to awaken to cattle grazing in the backyard. Sedona attracted essentially four kinds of citizens: The first were young people who saw Sedona as a place to raise a family (this group became the merchants, providing goods and services to the area). The second group was comprised of retired, conventional men and women with experience in business and a wide range of professions (this group kept the stores busy and formed the town’s economic base). The third set of citizens was the artistic community, consisting of writers, painters, crafts people, and musicians inspired by Sedona’s Red Rock landscape. (As more galleries and performing arts centers opened, Sedona become known as a thriving, artistic town). The fourth group consisted of spiritual seekers from all over the world who were drawn to Sedona, forming a kind of spiritual social network. In its early formation as a New Age hotbed, Sedona attracted many specialists in paranormal phenomena: energy healers, psychic surgeons, past-life readers, psychics and the like, many of whom were attracted by so-called energy vortices located throughout the Red Rock region. These vortices are believed to be swirling funnels of subtle energy, publicized by writers in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.3 Located 125 miles north of Phoenix, Sedona’s tourism fueled and still fuels the town. Around 1980, Sedona hosted two million visitors annually. Two decades later, after an explosion in New Age fare and other forms of commerce, tourism has doubled, putting Sedona in a neck-and-neck race with the Grand Canyon as the primary tourist attraction in Arizona. The town of Sedona, now lit up every night along four-lane Highway 89A and blanketed with commerce, had only two traffic lights on the entire two-lane highway back then, splitting West Sedona down the middle with sparsely situated structures on either side. These included Flicker Shack, the local movie house. It was a wide-open space surrounded by soaring red rock faces. There was

one grocery store, Sedona Market, located in the “Y” intersection where 89A meets 179—the first place in town to offer organic produce and health food. There was only one restaurant, which, according to David, closed at eight o’clock nightly. No high school existed yet. Telaquepaque (pronounced “T-LOCK-ay-POCK-ay”) was the commercial and creative centerpiece of the town and the main shopping area. It was closed all winter. Inspired by an artisan’s village in the Old Mexico suburb of Guadalajara, this shopping and dining complex had red-tiled roofs and cream-colored stone columns decorated with wrought iron, clay pots, and lush vegetation. The walking areas were paved with stones and stone tiles, and the boutiques offered Western clothes, Indian crafts, fine jewelry, and art —much like the Telaquepaque today. Located uptown, Paula’s Gold Dust Cafe provided an ideal gathering place for Sedona’s New Age community. Paula, the establishment’s owner, was considered by many to be the spiritual mother of the area’s inhabitants. With pot and cigarette smoke wafting through the small eatery, the locals hung out like college students at a coffee shop. The café’s interior was surrounded by bookshelves filled with spiritual books so people dining alone could read while they ate, eavesdropping on conversations about dreams, psychic phenomena, and UFOs. David, with his soft spot for ranchtype kitchens and greasy-spoon diners, ate at Paula’s cafe several times a week, especially on Thursday nights when they served chicken and dumplings. David’s favorite waiter was skilled at past-life recall. While you were reviewing your menu and placing your order, the waiter was analyzing the past relationships your dining partners had together and the karmic lessons they were presently working through. (David says he was able to see what the waiter was seeing on these occasions.) Slight-of-hand tricks like moving pencils and bending spoons was a popular craze in Sedona. David and a few others practiced these paranormal tricks in the cafe, spooking the waiters. No doubt, it was an unusual community. And it was an interesting era, where spiritual

seekers “checked out” all sorts of oddities like Kirlian photography, energy medallions, and pyramid power.

Soon after David’s arrival in Sedona, he experienced a ringing in his ears. He asked within: Well, God, what’s with the ringing? Though he didn’t receive an answer, he thought there might be a “message” in the ringing, so he stopped resisting the noise and merged with it. He asked God again—still nothing. A lot of the spiritual seekers in Sedona didn’t have telephones— they simply didn’t need them. David was thinking of his friend, Elan, and he synchronistically saw him at the post office. “The Father said not to pay attention to that ringing in your ears,” Elan said, out of the blue. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the nervous system getting used to handling higher energies.” David had not told anyone, including Elan, about the ringing. He joyfully thanked Elan, to which the man replied, “Thank the Father.” Exchanges like this were commonplace within the laidback, trusting, spiritual Sedona network. When David moved there, he was concerned about the gas shortage, so he bought a Volkswagen advertised in the local paper for $5,000 with a check for the full amount, driving away without providing any identification or contact information. David never locked his home or his car door. Crime was rare. Sedona’s first courtroom and jailhouse was established in 1960. The facility doubled as a library and public meeting room.

Monastery for One The popularity of Sedona tourism overflowed into the adjacent Village of Oak Creek, only twenty minutes away. In 1980, the village was relatively barren, with one gas station, one restaurant, and the Bell Rock Inn. The stark contrast between the East Coast and the Arizona desert was mind-blowing: red rocks and blonde desert sand replaced green grass, trees, and blue ocean. David and Randy Richmond

moved into a large, unfurnished, six-bedroom brick house in Oak Creek on Sun-Up Ranch Road—housing that was supplied by David’s spiritual teacher, Sam. After unloading their truck, David and Richmond stopped in at the Army Navy store, where they picked up essential home furnishings: two army cots, sleeping bags and blankets, crates for nightstands, and a bunch of candles. A trunk they brought from New York was converted into a table. They picked up plates and silverware from garage sales. Both men slept in the main living room, candles everywhere. They left the front door open, allowing animals to roam in and out. Like ascetic monks, they often sat silently in the living room: David writing, Richmond reading. His friend might say, “Hey, Dave, maybe we’ll go into town tomorrow.” David might reply, “Oh, yes. Maybe we’ll split an apple.” Laughing, they shared the joy two people derive from the simple life. Richmond moved out months later to get a place of his own, and David’s ashram for two became a monastery for one. To round out the large, empty space, David purchased a used sofa and plush chair, the latter became his main spot for daily meditation. He often kept only a six-pack of Pepsi and a piece of cheese in the refrigerator, he says, celebrating on Saturday nights with an apple. With no needs and no shortage, he had no experience of poverty. The sizeable property lacked shade and protection from the Arizona sun. David planted baby fruit saplings all around the house to give the space life and to attract deer. He even installed an irrigation system to nurture the trees. (Decades later, the saplings have transformed into towering fruit trees.) The Spiritual Life Institute, run by sandal-shod Carmelite priest William McNamara, was less than two miles from David’s house. David had heard about this monastic community that attracted fallen monks and priests looking to reconnect with God and Jesus Christ. The monks of the Spiritual Life Institute came to call themselves Zen Christians. Father McNamara was unusual. For example, he advocated saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. He was just the kind of guy David would seek out, which he did on his third day in Arizona, and the Carmelite monk gave him permission to visit the

sanctuary any time. David spent many hours there in meditation and contemplation, often well into the night. David was becoming more accustomed to a hermetic lifestyle, spending much of his time in contemplation, meditation, reading, and writing. Although some people can appreciate such a turning inward, away from the concerns of the world, most don’t understand how an intelligent, skilled, and successful man could make such a radical change. In Sedona, David found a community who appreciated his new lifestyle. During the time of Buddha, ascetics were revered as pioneers inwardly searching to alleviate human suffering. Today, action—not contemplation—is viewed by the world as having paramount importance for human progress, and solitude is considered suspect. It was the same back in the ‘80s, when David came to Sedona. To his New York contemporaries, he was an eccentric who had gone off the deep end—an irresponsible misfit who had abandoned his career. Living in solitude, David often meditated on his worn, used couch. One day, he dropped something, and when he bent down to pick it up, he noticed a nest of black widow spiders—they had been beneath him the entire time, and never bothered him. David saw them as a reminder to “live and let live.” During this period, David says he lost track of his body, at times forgetting to eat for days. Once, not realizing he was still in a body, he walked right into a wall, expecting to walk through it. Another time, he was startled by his image reflected in a mirror, thinking there was someone else in the house. During one radio interview, the host asked David if he had found security in his spiritual path. David replied, “I have total security, each and every moment. And everything I need is supplied as I need it. There’s absolutely nothing I need. I have it all.”4 With little interest in worldly affairs, David didn’t own a television nor did he read any periodicals on current events. He found out about the assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981 two months after the event.

The Chapel of the Holy Cross is considered one of the top tourist attractions in Arizona and arguably the most impressive landmark in Sedona. (It was named the number-one tourist destination in the state of Arizona by Red Rock News, July 8, 2007.) The brainchild of Marguerite Bruswig Staude, this simple, contemporary, trapezoid-like structure embedded in Sedona’s red rocks offers a beatific surrounding for the peaceful energy emanating from within the 250foot-high concrete walls. With no steeple, the chapel’s facade features a ninety-foot-tall stone cross stretching the complete height and width of the unique chapel, its base extending far below the building underground. A thick glass face runs across the entire south wall, behind the altar. The stark interior provides a serene backdrop for prayer and meditation. With no land development surrounding it in the ‘70s, the Chapel of the Holy Cross could be seen for miles, from as far as Interstate 17, the main highway connecting Phoenix to Sedona. Open twentyfour hours a day, it was one of David’s favorite places to meditate overnight. With candles burning and angelic music in the background, David would sit quietly until break of day, leaving in the morning as tourists began arriving. Alone in this chapel, David went into states of high ecstasy—“an exquisite joy beyond all time and expression,”—where he says he often “lost all [cognitive] functioning.”5 At other times, he danced tirelessly for hours. During these meditative states, he says his body disappeared, replaced by the experience of kundalini energy flowing up his back and into his brain. The energy seemed to shift in intensity to wherever he directed his attention. Words pose a limitation in describing the experience, David says, as there was no “person” to experience the energy. Instead, the energy was self-existent, self-aware, selffulfilled, and beyond time and space. In these high states, David says he often had permission to leave the body permanently, but he rejected it because it would be “unseemly” for the chapel administrator to find a dead body in the morning. Eventually, a “knowingness” came to him that “this, too, must be surrendered to thee, O Lord.”6 Kneeling, he surrendered the exquisite state of ecstasy, and a new state of infinite peace emerged.

David still had ties back East. From 1979 to 1983, he flew to New York quarterly for his clinic’s Board of Directors meeting until he officially terminated his partnership with the clinic in 1983. The same year, he was nominated to be New York State Commissioner of Mental Health. It would have meant more trips to the East Coast. David felt honored, but declined the nomination. Through all of his spontaneous healings and miracles, the grief from the loss of his stepdaughter remained the most profound loss David had ever experienced. “The loss of love,” David recalls, “recurs throughout many a lifetime, so it was a major stack [of negative emotions]. I really didn’t know how I was going to survive it … The agony of the irrevocable, terrible loss of love was probably the worst, and it ran day after day after day.”7 David was committed to transcending his suffering. One day, with the fixity of focus that comes from years of meditation and spiritual training, he began letting go of the grief every instant, nonstop. Staying within this state of intensive fixity, he continued to let go every split second, day after day. After a while, his confidence was shaken: “As the days went by, the process seemed endless, and I wondered if I had attempted the impossible.”8 Seeing this doubt as a defense mechanism, he let it go and continued releasing. During this time, he traveled back to New York for one of his clinic’s board meetings. On a cold, wet Sunday afternoon on Long Island in January 1981, on the eleventh day of unswervingly letting go, David was sitting alone at Rothmann’s Steakhouse and Grill on Northern Boulevard, not far from his clinic, when … “Suddenly in an instant, the world as I had known it was miraculously transformed. A profound sense of inner stillness and peace beyond anything I thought imaginable occurred. The experience was beyond time. In fact, time had no meaning whatsoever, nor did space exist in the way in which we commonly experience it. All things were connected. … There was only one life expressing itself with one Self through all living things. I no longer identified with the body and had no interest in it. It was no longer any more interesting than any other body in the

room … There was a rock-like quality to the imperturbable stillness, and I saw that my real Self was invisible.”9 “That which was David,” he says, “disappeared, and in his place was an infinite Presence in absolute stillness and absolute perfection without any form.”10 Although the realizations from this experience were strikingly similar to his 1965 spiritual conversion (which David counts as the start-point of his “enlightenment”), he describes this * new experience as an intensification of the Presence. Still sitting in the steakhouse, intuiting the power of his mind while in this profound state, he experimented by holding the thought “butter” briefly in mind. The waiter immediately arrived at his table with more butter. The thought “coffee” yielded the same result. “No words seemed necessary. I was able to communicate with anyone on a level of silence,” he recalls.11 With the intensification of the Presence came the cessation of his grief over the loss of his daughter. Following the experience in the steakhouse, David saw that everything was happening spontaneously. He drove to a meeting in New York City that evening. Although no one noticed any change in him, his experience of others was transformed. Standing on FortySecond Street and Broadway Avenue in Times Square, David noticed that “everyone seemed to be intensely alive. Their aliveness shown forth from their beingness, and I saw the Self that was the same as my own shining forth through their eyes. I listened as my body spoke, and it spontaneously carried on a normal conversation and behaved in its usual and accustomed way.”12 The next afternoon a thought arose in David’s mind: “Now that I knew the way to Reality, I can return to the consciousness of being that individual person which I had hitherto believed I was. Just as the air in the room does not experience the contents of the room, I no longer experienced my own existence … The desire to experience the individual self became re-energized. I saw that I had the option of releasing it, but there was the return of memory of things yet to be finished in the world, and as the sense of I-ness returned, the choice stood before me.”13

A Reclusive Yet Active Life

Compared with his active life as a psychiatrist in New York, David may be said to have become reclusive. Yet he was very active in his local Sedona community and even with his New York community, through his periodic travel. Soon after arriving in Sedona, he began teaching courses on the various spiritual techniques he had learned back East. Although no longer a clinician, David’s drive to alleviate suffering in others still motivated him. The Hindu Upanishads teach that the chief cause of human suffering is ignorance. His quest had led David to a similar conclusion. Through both his inner and outer exploratory work, he felt he was unearthing important truths about the nature of consciousness and reality—truths that had a profound impact on people. David lectured extensively to the enthusiastic Sedona community from 1979 to 1984. He gave lectures and workshops on the Sedona Method, A Course in Miracles, meditation, and other techniques, with seminar topics like “Increase Spiritual Growth and Awareness.” He was a guest on numerous radio shows speaking on topics like “Consciousness and Spiritual Techniques to Improve Health and Reduce Stress.” Several times a year, he flew to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to lecture small groups on “Spiritual Awareness and Consciousness Techniques in Self-Healing.” David says he had no desire to travel during this period, but he did visit a number of spiritual teachers and attend many local gatherings. “If you said you were enlightened,” his friend Randy Richmond reflects, “Dave and I would show up and check it out.”14 Over the course of roughly five years, David visited with Swami Muktananda, Lee Sannella, Bhagavan Nome, J. Krishnamurti, Swami Swahananda, the Karmapa, and Kirpal Singh. He drove to the desert of Thousands Oaks, California for a ten-day retreat with Ramesh Baleskar, Nisargadatta Maharaj’s pupil and translatorturned-teacher who was visiting from India. David says he and Baleskar discussed the seeming conflict between Allness and Nothingness as the ultimate Reality, the dilemma that arose for David at age three. It was in his barren house on Sun-Up Ranch Road that David began to first listen to his muse. Sitting at a small wooden desk from

his home back East, David wrote for hours at a time. Although he had rid himself of his six-thousand-books collection, he once again began accumulating an extensive library, this time exclusively spiritual, organized on different tables by topics like Buddhism or Jewish mysticism—literary altars to the major spiritual and religious traditions. These sacred books, which included the teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramana Maharshi, Huang Po, and the complete works of Vivekananda, graced the halls of his large, otherwise-empty house. With the same voracity with which he tackled ancient philosophy and medicine, David turned his attention to Eastern literature, especially resonating with the Zen Master Huang Po. Whereas Socrates was David’s intellectual childhood hero, Huang Po was his spiritual mentor at this time of his life (David was in his fifties). Sometimes life events foreshadow better than the best fiction: if you recall, during World War II, David fell into the Huang Po River, and to live, he had to surrender to the current. Now here he was learning surrender to the Infinite through the writings of Huang Po. Although David says he never had a formal guru or spiritual teacher (outside of Bill Wilson and “Sam”), Po was a great influence on David. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: The Transmission of No Mind, published in 1958, talks of the nature of mind and nonduality and the importance of surrendering attachments, conceptual thought, and negative emotions such as fear. All these concepts became part of David’s later teachings. Upon arriving in Sedona, David gravitated toward the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, two Indian sages from the past century who appeared to have spoken from the nondual state (of total enlightenment). David says he had already experienced the states of consciousness they describe: “The first time I read Ramana Maharshi, I instantly knew that he knew what he was talking about because I had already experienced that state. The states that I read about had already occurred before I read about them. It was very interesting to me that other people had experienced these same states.”15 The teachings of these Indian Masters, closely related to the Advaita Hindu philosophy, resonated strongly with David. They teach

that advaita, or nonduality (“not-two”), personifies the ultimate state of consciousness as a reality beyond opposites and definitions, prior to any form of conceptual elaboration. In Sedona, David began teaching courses on nonduality based on his understanding of the teachings of Sri Ramana and Sri Nisargadatta. At this stage in David’s own spiritual development, he appears to have been uncertain of his future path. He explored many alternatives during this period, including joining the monastic Ramakrishna Order founded by Swami Vivekanada, Sri Ramakrishna’s closest disciple. David was turned away due to his age (you need to be under thirty to join). David also considered becoming a minister for Unity Church. Unity takes a more positive and progressive approach to Christian teachings without the drivers of sin and guilt, incorporating the universal precepts found in other religions and in teachings like A Course in Miracles. He enjoyed the notion that spiritual truth would become his occupation. The program, however, required a year or two of training in Kansas City, and David wasn’t motivated enough to commit to that. He did, however, give several sermons at Unity Church in Sedona on ACIM. Over two decades later, as part of the teaching staff of Unity’s School of Ministry, David began annually visiting the church’s headquarters at Unity Village in Kansas City. (He has spoken at over a dozen Unity churches in the United States and has given the keynote address at Unity’s annual conference in Missouri.) Instead of joining an existing organization, David decided to found his own. He established the Institute of Applied Spiritual Studies before changing the name to the Institute for Advanced Spiritual Research in 1983. The focus of this one-man, not-for-profit institute was, according to David, to explore and teach consciousness-raising techniques related to self-healing to help people overcome their illnesses and evolve spiritually. On his quarterly trips to New York, he gave lectures on healing and recovery as well as talks to ACIM study groups. He traveled to San Francisco and Detroit, speaking at ACIM conferences on selfhealing. David started the first ACIM classes at Sedona School, a small facility on Brewer Road where he taught Tuesday classes

weekly for almost three years. He called them “A Course in Miracles and Metaphysics.” ACIM continued to grow in popularity in Sedona, and David invited his old friend, Jerry Jampolsky, now the best-selling author of Love is Letting Go of Fear (a book based on ACIM principles), to speak to their ACIM group in March 1982. They jammed about 300 people, with standing room only, into the Flicker Shack theatre for the event, entitled “Attitudinal Healing.” David was invited to join a group led by Pat Flanagan, best known for his writings on the power of ancient pyramids, on a trip to Egypt in November 1981. David’s expenses were paid in exchange for him teaching nightly classes on ACIM during the trip. David had always wanted to meditate in the pyramids. Alone within the total darkness of the Great Pyramid, he meditated through the night. David was always attracted to places of spiritual significance, like the Egyptian pyramids and Machu Picchu. Impressed by the incredible beauty of gothic sculpture and architecture, he eventually visited most of the world’s great European cathedrals as well as the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Alaska, the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and the cathedral of Saint John of the Divine in New York City.

The Miraculous Continues We might assume that a miracle involves an earth-shattering event with light breaking through from the heavens and angels singing from above. It is this notion of miracles that causes many people to overlook true miracles, according to ACIM. A Course in Miracles teaches that miracles are natural: they happen all the time, and they are everyone’s right. Only after a change in perception, however, can we recognize and appreciate the miracles around us. One evening at an ACIM class in Sedona, David was sharing his personal experiences with self-healing when a women asked, “Well, why do you still were glasses?” Viewing poor eyesight as a structural defect rather than an ailment, he reflected, Good question. How come I need to still wear

glasses? Here I am, a perfect being with all power at my disposal, and I just never thought of it.16 David was near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other. With astigmatisms in both eyes, his sight had deteriorated, and he had been fitted for trifocals. That night, he slipped his glasses into his pocket and resolved to transcend his poor vision. Everything was fuzzy. For about six weeks, he could barely see. Driving was challenging—especially on the switchbacks around Mingus Mountain. He would manage to see the cliff’s edge just in time to turn the wheel. One dark, rainy night, David was driving Interstate 89A to Unity Church. Having a moment of doubt, he thought, Well, God, if I’m never going to see again, I guess I am just never going to see again.17 In the next instant, he intuited that he was receiving a lesson in faith and trust. “Within myself,” David says, “I suddenly knew that I would always see what I needed to see, but I was unable to see what I wanted to see.”18 Surrendering to God, he said, “Whatever your will is to be, I will agree to that.”19 The moment he understood this lesson, a truck turned from the opposite side of the street, its headlights illuminating where David needed to turn. “It was as if God lit up the road and said, ‘Turn here’,” he remembers. Although anxiety arose often while he was driving, David continued to surrender the fear and anxiety to God. Interestingly, David had been reading the Indian mystic Ramana Maharshi when he decided to remove his glasses. The font in the published books from India was small and faint, making it a challenging read, even with normal vision. After he began his vision experiment, he was unable to read books, newspapers, or magazines, yet he was able to read Sri Ramana’s books without difficulty. When he went to his Tuesday night ACIM class, he discovered that he could read the ACIM text without a problem as well. David says he learned to simply trust in the Holy Spirit, going about his day as usual. After six weeks, the fear and anxiety that came with near blindness dissipated. He reached a state of inner peace, where everything was “perfectly okay” the way it was—he

had fully released and surrendered his desire for normal vision. If his sight didn’t improve, it was fine with him. While he was sitting in his friend’s kitchen, suddenly and without warning, “A profound sense of inner stillness and peace occurred and a feeling of oneness with whatever it is that runs the universe. And in that instant, suddenly my vision returned totally and perfectly.”20 He could now read the calendar on the wall across the kitchen. He was able to see clearly across great distances and read fine print in dim light effortlessly. David didn’t wear glasses after that, storing them all in a box. After forty years of myopia and astigmatism, he was now blessed with perfect vision. He passed his next driving vision test without glasses, and without effort. After he turned eighty, David went blind in one eye and suffered macular degeneration and loss of vision in the other eye. He had to give up driving. He hasn’t applied any healing techniques to the condition. Some ask why a person who has given lectures on selfhealing hasn’t healed the ailment. David replies, “Because of the inheritance of the karma of being human, which involves mammalian protoplasm which is time-limited, and no human being has become immortal in the physical domain.”21 The “miraculous” that began occurring after David’s 1965 transformation continued. Before moving out West, his faithful Willys truck broke down, leaving him stranded in Upstate New York on the side of the road. A friend David hadn’t seen in many years happened to drive by and helped him. Another time, a tire blew, and David was stuck on a cloverleaf exchange on his way to Phoenix International Airport. A stranger offered assistance, like an angel swooping in to save him. The man removed David’s tire, drove to an auto repair shop to get the tire fixed, and returned to replace it. The man wouldn’t even accept gas money for this good deed. David blessed him, and the man went on his way. ACIM teaches that miracles are happening all of the time; we just don’t notice them. To David, as a stranded motorist, being rescued by a good samaritan signified a miracle. Back in New York to receive an award from his former clinic for the alleviation of human suffering, David was standing on a street

corner with a friend. David held in mind a cab, and a cab pulled right over. His friend responded, “That’s very clever, let’s see you do it again.” After the ceremony, David did it again. This time a limo pulled up. The driver said, “I’m for hire for an hour.”22 His friend was astounded. Soon after moving out West, David was driving near the Mexican border to Patagonia in southern Arizona. He didn’t have a sense yet of the vast distance of the desert. Expecting to come to the next town in a few miles, he drove for hours without ever seeing one, an unfamiliar experience for a New Yorker. Finally, he turned off his old truck’s engine to take a break. When he turned the ignition to restart the truck, smoke poured from underneath the hood. He thought, My God, the engine is on fire. Drained and dehydrated from heat exhaustion, David was an inexperienced desert hiker, miles from the nearest town, with no water. Even if he opened the hood, he knew he wouldn’t be able to locate the fire’s source because he had turned the truck’s engine into a rat’s nest of wires by fixing things himself. In the mid-summer’s sweltering heat, David figured he was finished. He thought, Well, I guess you’re going to die now. If it’s time to leave, I’ll leave. While he waited to leave his body, accepting and totally prepared to die, an intuition arose: use the screwdriver to poke a hole in the glove compartment, and pour coffee into the hole. David poked a hole and poured his remaining coffee into it, where it sizzled, extinguishing the electrical fire, allowing him to drive to the next town. David describes the intuition as a “knowingness instruction” or “nonverbal knowingness”—“the voice of Spirit, of God”—another example of the siddhis.23

For many years, David did an abbreviated version of the prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi every morning: “As your servant, O Lord, I give what you have given me.” The drive behind this devotional act was to be “willing to be a channel for Thy Will.”24 Instead of looking to receive energy, as is common in many spiritual practices, David radiated nonjudgmental compassion: “You become a channel of God

and radiate out unconditional love. You give all that you are infinitely capable of giving, you just be that to the world. You are an antenna of radiance … As you do this, you see what the world is crying for, and automatically, you radiate that, and you suddenly realize who you are … You serve the world thusly.”25 The kundalini energy, according to David, was activated during seemingly random occurrences. As the kundalini started to flow, David would wonder where it would take him next. Once while driving down I-17, the kundalini streamed from his heart region, down the highway and around a blind corner where an automobile accident had just occurred: a car was overturned, the wheels still spinning. David asked for guidance, if he needed to stop to provide medical assistance, but he says he “got” that he should keep driving. He claims the energy radiated behind him for a few miles before dissipating. A few miles later, there was another accident. This time, a squad car was present. David sensed the prayers: Oh God, please help us! The energy from the Self, David says, simply radiated from him—he only witnessed it, without ever stopping his car. David perceived himself being an antenna—a channel for God’s will—that sent energy where people needed it. While visiting Chicago, David saw a crowd of young bouncers and patrons outside a bar, ready to fight. A thought of peace entered David’s mind, and he just loved them all. David says he stood on the sidewalk for a few seconds as this powerful kundalini energy flowed from him toward the men. In a moment, their postures changed. Dropping their fists, the aggressive young men grinned sheepishly and patted each other on the back, some re-entering the bar. As soon as the event was over, the kundalini energy stopped. As with the automobile accidents, David says he sensed that a couple of the men were praying. “There is a willingness to be a servant of God,” David says, “to forget about the personal self, and instead to allow one’s consciousness and energy to be used by angelic forces. Our infinite Self is everything.”26

Although David turned away from his Protestant upbringing after his revelation of human suffering, his spiritual transformation as an

adult renewed his interest in Christianity. Material that repulsed him as an atheist now provided inspiration and confirmation. David observes: “Once you become spiritually motivated, certain things appeal to you befitting certain stages in your evolution.”27 While searching for spiritual truth, he explored a vast array of spiritual texts, finding truth and practical wisdom woven through all spiritual teachings. Psalm 91 became one of his personal favorite spiritual texts. For a while, he recited it daily, using the words as a form of contemplation. One day David was walking along Shelby Hill Road, approaching a cabin on a deserted ninety-acre property he was considering buying. As he started up the cabin’s stairs, he paused. A few feet ahead, framed by the doorway, a giant rattlesnake was coiled, staring at him, tongue flicking, poised to strike. “In that instant,” David recalls, “there was a flash of fearful thoughts, and then the thought that I could get a club and hit it, or I could run, or I could yell for help. I did not have a gun, but somebody might shoot it. All the self-protective thoughts that social consciousness had programmed me with were present.”28 David realized that one moment of fear, however, could cost him his life. He began letting go of wanting to do anything about the situation or to change anything about the snake, surrendering to God at a deep level. Releasing on the experience, he became the witness and entered a new dimension: “It was like a magical energy surrounded both of us. We were suspended in time. All emotion disappeared, and there was a profound peace and total safety … time stopped. The snake was also suspended by that energy.”29 Witnessing, David and the snake looked at each other curiously, having never seen the like of the other before. Minutes passed. As David watched, he began to look upon the snake as a brother, experiencing a profound love. David says that our general belief is that fear is the source of our safety, that if we aren’t fearful, we won’t survive. However, David believes the absence of fear ensures our survival—we survive in spite of fear, not because of it. David and the snake peered into each other’s souls, both feeling completely safe. Out of that field of peace,

satisfied, the snake went his way, rattling his tail. David described it as if someone “unpaused” the video player and life resumed. Several months earlier, David had experienced what became a prophetic dream where he saw himself stepping over a serpent. This “dream episode” was unusual for David, as he says he had stopped dreaming after his 1965 transformation. (He says once in a great while he’ll get a slight vignette that lasts a few seconds, but he doesn’t know if it’s an actual dream or not.) Afterward, David had other encounters with rattlers. Commenting, he observes: “When you solidify your faith in the Lord, the Lord does respond. In that moment, whether you live or die is irrelevant. You know your ego is still holding on if you insist on living.”30

CHAPTER 15

Temptations

A Teacher’s Shadow David was especially excited about one of the techniques he learned in the mid-1970s—and had great respect for the teacher who taught it. This person was Sam (pseudonym), the man who invited him to Sedona and let him stay in a house he owned. David was an avid supporter and promoter of numerous techniques and programs. With his reputation and medical background, his advocacy worked to legitimize movements like AA, the Sedona Method, and ACIM. Sam appeared ordinary, displaying none of the trappings of a traditional guru—no robes, incense, chanting, or special titles. When Sam spoke, however, David sensed the depths of his spiritual understanding. With unbridled enthusiasm, David used his credibility as a psychiatrist to promote Sam and his work, offering talks and seminars, conducting radio interviews, and even penning a 75,000word manuscript based on Sam’s work (the manuscript was never published). On one of David’s quarterly trips back to New York, Margaret expressed concern to him privately after hearing Sam exclaim at one point, “Look at all the money we can make.” She warned David, “He’s just after your connections.” David didn’t believe it. Through his social network, David had access to influential people, such as presidents of institutional finance firms, and Sam wanted to be introduced to them. Once David introduced Sam to a friend of his, the president of a large investment bank, and witnessed Sam working the man for money by promoting his various products and services. David didn’t like it.

Sam reportedly leveraged David’s credentials as a big-name psychiatrist to promote his techniques and classes at every possible opportunity. David became Sam’s poster child, a key selling point for Sam’s weekend courses. One day David and Sam met at Three Guys Restaurant on Madison Avenue, around the corner from David’s Fifth Avenue apartment. The two men were discussing the future of the technique and David’s potential role as director of Sam’s organization. Having been a consultant to numerous monasteries and dioceses, aware of monks’ and nuns’ inner battles with sin, David had come to perceive sin as merely an attachment of the ego. From David’s experience, Sam’s technique helped release the concept of sin, resulting in a greater degree of freedom. David was willing and excited to teach the religiously devoted for free, and he shared his enthusiasm with Sam. As he did so, David recalls a terrible energy emanating from Sam, as “if the doors of hell had opened,”1 and a negative entity spoke through Sam: “Jesus Christ and the Buddha were just astrals,” claiming that it (the entity speaking as Sam) was higher than both Christ and the Buddha. This “entity,” as David perceived, began speaking through Sam, furious at the thought of not charging for the technique. The entity went on to claim angrily that money was always due for any such teaching. Although David had never believed in “being possessed,” that belief was forever altered by this experience. David witnessed that, in the presence of “demonic entities,” there was a prevailing smell like rotten eggs. David later discovered what he believes to be the true story behind Sam and his technique: David met a young woman, a student of Sam’s, who had achieved a very high state of consciousness. When she told Sam what she did to realize her high state, Sam apparently positioned her as his protégé, as if she reached her advanced state as a consequence of his teaching. According to David, this young student was the one who discovered the core methodology that Sam started teaching. Sam claimed the technique as “his” and exploited her. With her disillusionment, this woman eventually crashed emotionally. When David met her, he says she

was taking about five Prozac a day to fight off the severe depression * —an aftereffect of what has been called “spiritual rape.” As David began getting over his disillusionment about Sam, he realized errors in the technique itself and in Sam’s teachings. He says Sam taught that love is an attachment, a form of gaining approval from others. For David, personal love may be an attachment, but agape (from the ancient Greek)—universal love—is ultimate freedom. If you let go of love, David experienced and observed, you end up “flat.” Sam’s group, according to David, became gain-seeking and, ultimately, unloving. Collaborating with an engineer in the early ‘80s after moving to Sedona, David worked out a design for a modular housing development. The project, called “Space Form,” designed architecture aesthetically aligned with the terrain, situated for maximum utility and environmental friendliness. The housing units were going to be virtually invisible, with half the structure below ground. David envisioned a small, spiritually-oriented community that wouldn’t interfere with the natural beauty of the surroundings—an ecological, low-energy housing alternative conceived decades before such ideas were mainstream. With a small spiritual group called the Sedona Fellowship, made up of several of Sam’s students, David secured 160 acres along the Coconino National Forest, about 40 minutes from Sedona, with the intention of creating a remote spiritual community. According to David, Sam sued several members of this group, claiming they should contribute to some kind of main retreat center. The Sedona Fellowship eventually sold the land to another spiritual group, which built a retreat and teaching center on the property. It was Sam’s prophesizing of the “end times”—a return to agrarian life—that instigated David’s move to Sedona. As David became disillusioned with Sam, he began to see the fallacy in the end-times belief. David admits his own naiveté in his early enthusiasm for Sam. David’s mortal weakness, he says, has always been that he sees only the innate innocence of people—not their whole personality—a recurring theme throughout his life in a variety of relationships.

The Void After the Three Guys Restaurant experience in New York City, David parted ways with Sam. He needed to move out of the house Sam had provided, so he began visualizing the house he wanted: a secluded property with trees and running water—not common attributes of land in the Red Rocks. But as David believed from personal experience, what you hold in mind tends to manifest. Mary Lou Keller owned Keller Realty. She was a well-known Sedona local, who ran a nondenominational church in her house and who organized many of the town’s early New Age activities. Right around the time David began picturing his ideal property, he received a call from this lady, a good friend of his. “The house just came up for sale, and it’s a good bargain,” Keller said. “It’s four acres on the creek, with woods. There’s only one person I want living next to me, and it’s you.” David jumped at the opportunity. Beneath Cathedral Rock, with a tributary of Oak Creek cutting through the property, David moved into a secluded 750-square-foot, 3 ½-room log cabin. He soon planted fruit trees, vegetable gardens, and colorful perennial beds. He built a smaller three-room cabin on a front corner of the property, to be used as an office or additional living quarters, behind which he erected a chicken coup, reminiscent of the one he had while growing up in rural Wisconsin. Each chicken in his “Happy Chickens Organic Eggery” had a name. David loved taking care of animals, and raised chickens, ducks, pigeons, rabbits, llamas, and Barbados sheep on his beloved ranch property. He also loved cultivating organic gardens and fruit trees years before the organic movement reached popularity. Three additional cabins were constructed years later. When David needed extra cash, he rented his extra cabins to weekenders, and had a groundskeeper living in a cabin in exchange for maintaining the property. A natural stream cuts through the land (which David still owns today), powering a large water mill he designed and constructed by hand. Walking along labyrinth-like pathways through the gardens and around the cabins evokes feelings of peace and tranquility.

One sweltering hot Arizona summer day, David’s body overheated, suffering a condition like heat stroke, while he was out in the garden. Vultures began circling low overhead—David figured this was a sign he was about to leave the body. He lay down and waited, in an almost-suspended state, prepared to die. Eventually, he managed to sit up on a nearby rock, disappointed at the anti-climatic unfolding of the event. The vultures eventually flew away. One might ask: why didn’t he simply go inside his house and take a drink of water? As David continued with his meditative practices, he continued to create further dissociation from his body. While he avidly sought healing for his physical ailments and emotional distress during the ‘70s, by the ‘80s, his increased dissociation from his body seemed to lead to a series of “it’s time to leave the body” experiences, like this one. David had a similar experience meditating on a rock on a local trail. “The mind stopped … Suddenly, you’re beyond time and location. You feel complete bliss. Whether life stops then is sort of irrelevant; you don’t have to continue in the body anymore. The body is a volitional choice,” he believes.2 In a bliss state, characterized by what the Hindus call sat-chitananda (being-pure consciousness-bliss), David sat motionless for hours. This state of profound peace, David reports, is beyond description and accompanied by timeless love and compassion, and what happens next is up to God’s will: “In that state, you need nothing from the world, nor does life need to go on or not go on. It makes no difference … That which I am at this moment is complete and total, all-satisfying forever.”3 David thought it was the “end of the trail.” Unable to get off the rock, he figured someone would eventually see him and call the police, who would take him to the hospital where a physician would label him catatonic, send him to a mental institution, and give him an antipsychotic like Thorazine. Still in a state of bliss, David became okay with this scenario—he was not identified with his body-mind; nothing was going to disturb his state of sat-chit-ananda. Then, he remembered an obligation to someone he loved—a family member he had to pick up from the airport—and his body got off the rock. David says that only the power of love could have done that.

David’s daily meditation led to continual bliss, similar to the bliss that emerged in the snow bank, and it became increasingly difficult to leave the bliss to return to worldly life. On account of this, he stopped his one-hour morning and evening meditations (a daily practice he had maintained for twenty years), but a high state still prevailed: “The incredible beauty of all things shone forth in all their perfection, and where the world saw ugliness, I saw only timeless beauty. This spiritual love suffused all perception; all boundaries between here and there, then and now, or me and you disappeared.”4 David intuited that his spiritual evolution was not over, as he had an “incessant desire to reach the core of ultimate truth.”5 He says the spiritual path he followed is not advised for most aspirants: “The pathway through the mind, the emptying of the mind, requires an extreme fixity of mind and focus. It requires a particular capacity … Huang Po went that way, and it is the way I went by realizing the nature of the mind.”6 His spiritual journey was about to come full circle, once again confronting the riddle that began his life’s adventure at age three: Is the ultimate Reality existence versus nonexistence? Still heavily influenced by Sam’s teaching, David believed that love was an attachment. Having apparently spent many lifetimes following the pathway of negation—negating everything, including identification with the body, mind, thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, memories, and experiences—including love itself— David re-energized this pathway, surrendering his attachment to love. This led David to a profound inner state he had experienced as a very young child. Engaged in intense meditative and contemplative practice, David says he re-entered the Void—the state of consciousness he says he emerged from at age three—also the state he claims he entered at the end of numerous lifetimes as a monk of the Hinayana tradition: “With the constant view of the pathway of negation, the condition of voidness would return—enormously impressive, infinite; beyond space, time, or description; omnipresent, all pervasive, unmoving, unmovable, beyond all thought or conditions.”7 In re-entering the Void, David once again experienced the terror of existence versus

nonexistence: “To experience God as the infinite Void, to never again return to existence—that which is the Void is beyond both existence and non-existence.”8 David describes the infinite space of his experience in the Void: “It was like you were being taken out beyond the universes, beyond the galaxies, and you were going to be left there forever, and the spaceship [wouldn’t] return; and where you are would never be documented—lost, alone, you might say, to become one with infinite nothingness.9 One thought remained in David’s mind: “That which I was, was infinite nothingness except for this one thought which began to energize itself—the will spontaneously required enormous power to re-energize and get back to the point where one could then go back out again.”10 Having experienced the presence of infinite love in the snow bank as a boy, although the state of the Void was impressive, he knew it was not the “ultimate state.” David reflects, “This time, however, there had already been the experience of the Presence, with its profound quality of timeless Love, and upon reentering the Void, the source of the prior error was discovered and thus was correctable by the recognition that Love is an innate quality of Divinity. It is, in fact, the primary quality of the Presence.”11 To David, the Void was missing “the exquisite softness, the at-homeness, the familiarity, the recognition or the essence of the totality of Reality as inclusive of Love.”12 David now believed the ultimate Reality to be not nothingness, but Allness. To him, ultimate Reality was not empty and still, but pervaded by the presence of Divinity in the form of infinite love. In recognizing the absence of the presence of Divine Love, he refused the Void as the ultimate Reality. In that moment, he says, he realized the limitation of the pathway of negation. Divine Love, David says, is “not to be confused with the emotionality/attachment of what is ordinarily perceived as human love.”13 “This quality of [Divine] Love,” David writes, “is beyond joy or ecstasy and is identical to the state of peace. Strikingly, the Void is very similar to the Ultimate State, except that it is devoid of the Love that is the very essence of Divinity. Without Love, the Void is like

infinite, timeless, empty space. Devoid of the quality that identifies it as Divinity, the Void is a limitation.”14 Roughly sixty years from when his initial dilemma arose in his consciousness, David believes he resolved the duality of existence versus nonexistence within, realizing that the difference between duality and nonduality merely comes down to the point of observation, or being the “observer.” When you drop the point of observation, David believes, duality disappears. “That which is, is forever.”15 Energized by a profound devotion to God, David says he passed through this state of consciousness, ready for what mysteries lay ahead: “From this point on, one proceeds not by negation but by affirmation, which is reinforced by deep prayer and supplication to God for guidance.”16

High Pass After returning from the Void, it wasn’t long before David was confronted with his next challenge: this time it was a spiritual test from an “astral domain” of seeming biblical proportion, bringing a final confrontation to the riddle that began at age three. While in a high state of consciousness, David reports that a profound temptation in the form of a “silent message” arose, similar to Satan’s temptation of Jesus Christ and Mara’s temptation of Buddha. In Satan’s third temptation of Christ, he took Christ to a high mountaintop, told Christ to bow before him and he would be given power over the world. The temptation, David interprets, was to surrender to Satan for power instead of surrendering to the love of God. Although there were no “entities” present, David says he was presented with a similar temptation that he now calls the high pass, short for the “high-altitude fail/pass test,” because, according to him, those who fail this test slip into the shadow, following in the footsteps of many fallen gurus. David says he encountered a “rarified Luciferic presence that promised great power if one went into agreement with it … One

could see and know that Christ had passed through that temptation and had also refused it.”17 David says the temptation came nonverbally: “Now that you realize that you are beyond all karma, you are free, without any consequence, to reign with great power because there are no consequences for your actions, and no longer are you subject to consequences.”18 And “the offer,” David clarifies, “is to join the power for power’s sake and reign in the Luciferic domain. The temptation is to the spiritual ego to obtain God’s power but to reject God’s love.”19 All David had to do was claim this power. Explaining the experience of this state of consciousness and its related temptation, David says, “You don’t need anything from anyone. People don’t realize what that means. You don’t need goodness from the universe. You don’t need permission; you don’t ‘need.’ I could take all the life on this planet to please me, and beyond karma, there is no consequence.”20 Knowing that you are beyond karma, believing that you’re beyond consequences for your actions, what limits would you see? What would drive your behavior? “One can become ruler of the universe,” David says.21 Emphasizing the magnitude of his decision, David explains, “It was a temptation at a level beyond imagination. It is a cosmic temptation. We are talking about being a power that rules worlds, not just being a big-time drug dealer in some ghetto neighborhood.”22 David says he backed away from the Luciferic temptation, passing through the “rarified gates” to a higher level of consciousness. He had an inner knowingness that this power he was tempted with was already innate and therefore, he had no need to claim any power: “The temptation was refused by the Higher Knowingness that the temptation was a false promise because the ultimate Reality is the Source of all Power. The Self is innately the Power and has no need to claim it as an acquisition. Power for its own sake as gain had no appeal. Frankly, it would have been a burden.”23 David believed there were those less adept who apparently weren’t as fortunate as he: “It was also obvious that not every entity that had reached this fail/pass test had refused the temptation … It

was clear that the great avatars had passed purely through this temptation, and it was also clear that it was at this point that a number of aspirants had fallen.”24

CHAPTER 16

New Beginnings

A Miraculous Tragedy Both David’s father and grandfather were adept handymen, so it was natural for David to work with his hands. Without any instruction in carpentry, David taught himself how to use every tool. In addition to planning his Mill River estate, he did a lot of the construction himself, learning the trades of masons and carpenters. His Mill River property received most of his creative energy during the height of his career in the ‘70s. David constructed a small cabin toward the front of his Rattle Bone Ranch property in Sedona for his private practice. A sapling was positioned close to where David was building, and he wanted to save it. While making an awkward cut around the sampling with a circular saw, it backed up on him, lopping off his left thumb. The shock was severe, but all of his mental training paid off: as soon as it happened, he stood still as the pain swept over him, surrendering to it and the shock at great depths. Miraculously, instead of gushing blood (what you would expect when a finger gets sliced off), there were only about six to eight drops before the bleeding stopped. It was a more severe challenge than when he sprained his ankle or broke his foot, but he was able to release on the experience similarly. David says that the body knows how to heal itself once we let go of resistance—there is no magic involved. David scoured the ground and leaves for his thumb, figuring if he could find it, he could have it sewn back on. Unable to find it, he started to cry. The invitation to leave the body arose again, and David knew that if he lay down, he would go. He thought of his children and unfinished obligations, and figured he would hold onto the body for a while longer.

After finding the thumb and putting it on ice, he began walking to his car to drive himself to the hospital. He says he heard an angelic chorus within his mind, chanting, “You are not a body; you are totally free” over and over again.1 It reminded him of a line from A Course in Miracles: “I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.”2 David drove himself to the emergency room. Once David was admitted, the surgeon told him they would have to put him to sleep. Concerned about his history of addiction, David insisted, “No, I don’t need anesthesia.” The surgeon seemed concerned and nervous. “I can handle it,” David reassured him. “I know acupuncture.” (Apparently, there are several acupuncture points that can create anesthesia in the body.) During the operation, while his friends gathered together to pray, David kept surrendering to the excruciating pain in every instant. As he continued to release his personal will to God, he says he was lifted up out of the body into a beatific state of infinite softness and peace, similar to his boyhood experience in the snow bank—the field was infinitely powerful and yet infinitely gentle and soft (a feather would seem rough by comparison). David knew he was being protected by angels: “As I said, ‘God, I can’t do it; you do it for me,’ I surrendered my burden and allowed that which is in the universe to handle it.”3 He became aware that “something” within was automatically handling the pain that did not involve his personal self. As the pain intensified, David witnessed “an energy field that expresses itself on the physical plane through the release of endorphins. The power of that field was automatically handling the pain. The pain and suffering were completely and totally released, and in their place was a state of infinite inner security and peace.”4 While the surgeon worked on David’s body, David was someplace else. He recalls looking at the thumb and feeling happy about it being removed because it represented something he wished to be rid of—somehow, it was spiritually symbolic. He says he was sad when the surgery ended, returning him to his body, because he left behind a state of infinite joy. What could have been a horrifically painful experience was ecstatic: “There was an exquisite knowingness that I was surrounded by infinite peace. I was infinitely

protected by the love of the universe, by God, and by the radiance of Divinity.”5 The surgery ended, but the surgeon had been unable to reattach David’s thumb. David had many rather severe physical ailments through his life, including intractable migraines and chronic duodenal ulcers, all of which eventually disappeared. The pain in the stump of his thumb, however, even after using his arsenal of techniques, persists to this day—he has not been able to transcend it. Neurosurgeons have advised David that there’s a neuroma at the stump of the nerve, but David is not inclined to go through another surgery (with the possibility of resulting secondary pain from the surgery) without anesthesia to have the neuroma removed. Instead, he has learned to ignore the pain, and says he only experiences it when he thinks about it. While the loss of the thumb was accidental, David believes the incident had a “karmic origin.” He says he swore an oath in a previous lifetime as a member of a secret spiritual group. Any violation of the oath (“may the reverse be my fate”) would result in a consequence such as mutilation. David believes that the karmic consequences of taking a solemn oath transcend individual lifetimes (he tells students never to swear an oath)—especially oaths that call forth a dreadful consequence if the oath is violated. He believes an oath remains a serious obligation to be fulfilled—although you may fulfill the obligation in one lifetime, you may unwittingly violate it in another. David has refused to take any oath—even to enter the brotherhood of the Freemasons, the oldest and largest fraternity in the world. The men on both sides of his family were Masons, including his great-grandfather, David Hooker, a thirty-third-degree Mason. (David still owns his great-grandfather’s sword, which is bestowed as part of an honorary degree.) David presumes that he may have violated a forgotten oath and brought about its consequences by going through a period of atheism in this lifetime. He believes the loss of his thumb wasn’t accidental, but the fulfillment of a karmic obligation. David had hernia operations where he also declined anesthesia. During one particular procedure, hoping and expecting to be lifted

into a beatific state like during his last surgery, he says he couldn’t surrender fast enough and instead met excruciating pain. The question arose in his mind, Why God? At that moment, David recalled a past life as a warrior skewing an opposing warrior’s groin with a spear. Lacking the temerity to put the warrior out of his misery, David left him to die an agonizing death. During his surgery, David recalled his guilt for not granting the warrior a quick death. David has had three hernia operations in this lifetime—all without anesthesia. He believes he has now paid his karmic debt. The nurse at his bedside uplifted his spirits during surgery. As she looked into his eyes, it’s as if her spirit were holding David’s spirit’s hand. He thought back to the American Civil War and battles where men had to have their legs sawed off without anesthesia. If they could do it, I can do it, he thought. Their memory gave him the courage and conviction to persevere.

Creative Mind In the mid-1980s, with no recurring source of income, David once again was short on cash. He had an enterprising idea. Gardening was becoming popular in Sedona, but there was no manure (and no local Home Depot). David found a dairy farm outside Camp Verde in McGuireville, about sixteen miles from his house, that had 600 head of cattle and heaps of manure. Purchasing a truckload of the stuff for ten dollars, the enterprising David delivered it to homeowners in Sedona and neighboring towns for fifty-five dollars a load. David’s childhood experiences helped cultivate a creative mind. His father’s analytical prowess and musical gifts combined with his mother’s artistic sensibility that nurtured David’s soul. In addition to being a courageous psychiatrist, David was a skilled musician, composer, architect, writer, carpenter, blacksmith, gardener, entrepreneur, amateur entomologist and chemist, farmer, mechanic, and inventor. A true Renaissance man, he possesses a wide depth and diversity of interests and accomplishments. David mastered the piano and violin as a child, and he was learning to play the bagpipes in his sixties until the loss of his thumb.

While he was musical and artistic, the majority of his creative endeavors were influenced by his intellect. Raised during the Great Depression with an austere childhood, David saw opportunities where others might give up. From selling duck eggs, goat milk, and scrap metal at the side of the road to selling books and roofing doorto-door, David did what was necessary to survive. In the process, he developed an entrepreneurial mindset that enabled him to start his clinic and found multiple organizations throughout his career, including the Federation of Mental Health Centers and the Academy of Orthomolecular Psychiatry. David was a prolific inventor. He created drill bits with measurement demarcations showing how far the drill had gone into a board. An avid chain smoker all his life, in his youth he invented a combination cigarette package with matches that enabled a flat packet of matches to be attached to a cigarette or tobacco box. David crafted an intricate diagrammed plan that demonstrated how the unit would be attached to the original package, including a stepby-step process detailing how his invention could be constructed to increase tobacco sales, with space for advertising purposes. The solution, to him, seemed economical, practical, and efficient. After inadvertently almost picking up a scorpion from his kitchen sink, David decided the highly venomous creatures needed to be dealt with, inventing what he called Scorp-Gard, a semi-tubular silicone surface (like a PVC pipe cut in half lengthwise) installed below doors and window sills to keep his home safe from the arachnids. The frictionless convex surface prohibited scorpions from accessing the house through the most common entry points, keeping the home scorpion-free. David went through the initial stages of patenting the design and sourcing manufacturers in the late ‘80s before abandoning the endeavor due to the costs and energy required. Around the same time, David was devising a concept for a modular automobile that allowed its owner to maintain the same car for a lifetime, replacing particular parts as needed. David sent his idea to Lee Iacocca, the president and CEO of Chrysler Corporation, writing, “Americans cannot afford the present car: ecologically, economically, internationally, tax-wise, or employment-wise. It’s a

lousy deal. You fork over fifteen grand, and a couple years later, it’s worth very little. You’ve lost a hell of a lot of money. People buy cars because they’ve got to, but not because they feel the automobile industry is their friend.”6 The “Lifetime Car’s” basic frame structure would have a lifetime guarantee, offered by Chrysler Corporation. David went on to list a litany of ecological, humanitarian, patriotic, and economic benefits of his new business model and product concept, and the pitch was designed for Iacocca to claim as his own. A Chrysler representative responded by saying it was not currently viable, as their car frames couldn’t be guaranteed for a long period of time. David explored a diverse range of projects. He had always had an affinity for Native Americans, feeling indebted to them for saving his life when he dying of septicemia, the infection triggered by poison ivy when he was a child. Interestingly, Native Americans were the first to populate the high desert country of Oak Creek Canyon. Navajo, Apache, and Hopi considered the area sacred. David learned about the detrimental effects of alcohol on the Navajo people, who couldn’t participate in a Twelve-Step Program in their native tongue. In 1992, David had AA materials translated into their language, and produced and directed a low-budget documentary film entitled, Alcoholism in the Navajo: Problem, Recovery, and the AA Program in the Navajo Language. In the film, he interviews a number of alcoholic Native Americans, illuminating the harmful effects alcohol was having on their families. Recorded in Arizona’s Monumental Valley, his film centered on an interview with Betty Holiday, a famous medicine women for the Navajos for over thirty years. She had never granted interviews, but agreed to David’s request because she believed alcohol to be the root of practically all Native American problems, including poverty and the collapse of many families. According to David, Native Americans react to alcohol differently than other ethnicities, as they lack alcohol dehydrogenases, a process in the body that metabolizes alcohol. In the film, David explains that alcohol destroys the spirit and the heart, which he says are one. David had to learn what Bill Wilson called the “language of the heart” to get over his alcoholism. David said, “The mind has the words, but only the heart has the power.

That which awakens the heart, awakens the spirit because the spirit and heart are one … with God. So to discover one’s own heart is to discover God. And that’s what cures the alcoholism in AA.”7 In the early ‘90s, David wrote a screenplay called “Macho/High Steel.” Set in the 1930s Depression in Manhattan, the story features a Mohawk protagonist named Buck, who is transplanted from his Indian reservation in Upstate New York to New York City. There he gets a job as a construction worker on the Empire State Building. With intrigue, romance, seduction, prejudice, drama, and Native American mysticism, the screenplay highlights the critical role Mohawk Indians played in American industrial history: they were the most skilled steel workers, but more importantly, they weren’t afraid of heights and were able to work on one-foot-wide steel girders fifty stories up—something others could not do. According to David, without the Mohawk people’s fearlessness, the New York City skyscrapers would not have been built. The screenplay explores the spirituality of the Indians and masculine and feminine perspectives, the Native American susceptibility to alcoholism, and its detrimental effects on their people. David felt the Mohawk people were never fully acknowledged for their contribution to the world, and thought it would uplift their selfimage if they received public credit. David enjoyed writing his oneand-only screenplay, but wasn’t up to the business of selling it, so he shelved it. The northeastern corner of Arizona where Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico converge is dubbed “Four Corners,” a predominantly Navajo and Hopi reservation land. In Oraibi, on a cliff overlooking the crops below, where rain had not fallen in about six months, David was honored to participate in the Hopi Indian snake dance ceremony (a rarity as “white men” are generally not allowed at these rituals). Prior to the event, David was given corn from Whitebeard, the Hopi chieftain, which David planted Hopi-style, six inches into the soil. The area was packed, and the group was sitting atop hogans (sacred homes). The best seats were reserved for the elders, who arrived with umbrellas (the sky was clear and sunny). Soon, the antelope dancers began to dance. Clouds started forming. After taking a psychedelic substance, the snake dancers danced

fearlessly with snakes in their mouths (mostly rattlers, which had been collected several weeks before the ritual). David watched in amazement as it began to rain primarily on the thirsty crops below instead of on the town of Oraibi. He believed he had witnessed the miraculous, musing, “Somehow they know how to work the synergy of nature and manifest that collective intent and faith.”8 The Hopis let the snakes go after the ceremony. One rattler slithered right past David. No one feared the snakes.

David’s interests were many. In the ‘70s, he took classes in tai chi and karate. He was a skilled archer from his years at summer camp. He enjoyed fashioning his own bows and arrows, and targets were positioned around his ranch. Since childhood, David always had an interest in art. Looking to generate additional income, he joined a couple of his friends to become the co-director of Masters Gallery of Fine Arts in Sedona, where he met world-class artists. The gallery was a dismal failure, due in part to poor management (according to one source, the person running the operations turned out to be unscrupulous). David did pick up a few impressive pieces for his personal collection, including a Salvador Dali painting and a Miro lithograph. The muse hit David with force in the early ‘90s. In addition to extensive renovations to his property and the screenplay, he developed the initial draft of his book Power vs. Force (originally titled, “The Nature of Power”) as well as two other manuscripts: “Success is for the Few” and “Inside the Male Psyche.” In “Success,” David borrowed from the principles in his consciousness studies and applied them to the qualities of successful people, demonstrating that success is something that a person is, not an achievement to be “obtained.” In “Male Psyche,” he explores the question, What really goes on in a man’s head? Part nonfiction, part quasi-pornographic fiction, this work was a definite departure from David’s other writings. He wrote at least five manuscripts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s— exploring topics including success, consciousness, male psyche, middle age, and emotions. Only Power vs. Force was published.

The Physician Returns In the early ‘90s, David’s career as a psychiatrist experienced a rebirth. Several local psychologists approached him, pleading with David to go back into practice because there were no psychiatrists in the area. David had lost money in the art gallery and was actively dating, so he needed income. Although his interests had shifted away from psychiatry for over fifteen years, he always maintained a foothold in his profession. (For example, he worked on several papers on Tardive Dyskinesia throughout the ‘80s.) After studying and passing the Arizona psychiatric licensing exam at the age of fifty-nine, he began seeing patients in the newly constructed cabin on his property. Why, after discovering a plethora of “consciousnessraising” techniques that he found life-changing, did David return to practicing traditional psychiatry? With the need for money being a primary concern, it seems likely that since he did not yet have an audience on which to build a career as a spiritual teacher, psychiatry was the most viable option. David also learned that a large rehabilitation center for teenage girls, Mingus Mountain Residential Estate Center, had no physician on staff. Occupying 150 acres, the center had 55 inpatient teenage girls—mostly admitted by court order—over 30 horses, and its own state-approved private academy. With around-the-clock therapy and a staff of over a hundred therapists and assistants, these girls who came from broken homes colored with abuse and other nightmares were given a new beginning. As part of their therapy, the girls had to take care of the horses. It was similar to dog-training programs in prisons, which improve inmates’ dignity, self-respect, and confidence. The center itself was established in 1985 by an altruistic couple who were later killed in an airplane crash. David served as the chief of staff for twelve years. The center was sixty miles away in Prescott Valley. To make the trip, David had to drive over a 7,200-foot-high mountain, which tended to ice in winter. Somehow, over the course of twelve years, he only missed a day or two. Bravery takes on a whole new meaning when you consider that he initially made the commute in his 1965 Willys truck, now with a more powerful 350-horsepower engine. He

later traded up to a 1984 Cadillac, still his favorite car today, which also received a new engine, paint job, and bodywork. David also started a part-time practice in Prescott. When he realized there were no psychiatrists to serve any of the nursing homes in the county, he began visiting all of them, driving over thirty thousand miles annually. He saw private patients one afternoon a week in Prescott, then visited four or five nursing homes before hitting towns like Camp Verde, Cornville, Cottonwood, and Oak Creek Village on his way home. As the consulting psychiatrist for Verde Valley Medical Center and Yavapai County for almost a decade, David left many mornings before daybreak and returned after dark—clocking over twelve hours of work—and he was in his sixties. David started feeling weak on his commutes over the highaltitude Mingus Mountain, eventually having to breathe from an oxygen tank, which he hid in his briefcase. One day, Sedona’s police chief pulled David over. “David, are you okay? You’re not driving right. I think something’s wrong with you.” David went to see a cardiologist, who told him he had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and that there was nothing they could do about it. As David’s illness worsened, an extreme pitting edema (called Anasarca) caused his body to swell. With a pulse of 160, he had swelling up to his abdomen. When it reached his heart, he knew he would die. At home, lying in bed, he was once again nearing the end. “I thought I was going to get rid of the body at last, and everyday, I watched it go down,” David recalls. “It was down to about one hundred pounds. It was just like bones and skin. I wasn’t too worried about leaving. I got everything ready to go and put all my affairs in order.”9 Peculiarly, David had a voracious appetite, consuming about 6,000 calories daily while still managing to lose weight. David went to the emergency room, where the internist on duty took one look at him and marveled, “You have the worse case of Grave’s Disease I’ve ever seen!” David’s cardiologist had misdiagnosed his illness: his cardiac failure was due to hyperthyroidism. Regardless, David was close to death. The physicians wanted to remove his thyroid, but David declined. He also

declined radiation. Instead, he employed his own “inner consciousness techniques” and took thyroid-suppressing medication. Eventually, he says, his body cured itself—again. David says he stopped labeling the illness, stopped holding it as a diagnosis in mind, reaffirmed that his reality was in perfect balance and harmony, and invoked God, the healer, for a miracle. After the goiter (swelling of the thyroid gland) disappeared and the hyperthyroidism healed, another diseased manifested. A chest xray showed a cavity (mass) in the apex of the right lung. His lung soon collapsed; he turned blue and couldn’t breathe. He required a thoracentesis, an invasive surgery where a long needle is inserted into the chest. Since David declined anesthesia, as you can imagine, the procedure was no picnic. David’s ailments continued. A biopsy showed an incurable and rare form of granuloma, an often-fatal inflammatory reaction that results in a spherical bunching of immune cells. David declined surgery and pictured it healing itself. After a few years, he says his chest x-rays were normal.

Luck of the Third Adventure In 1949, the same year David started medical school, he married nineteen-year-old Sally Louise Kennedy, a Midwestern girl. Their daughter, blond, green-eyed Lynn Ashley Hawkins, was born in July 1953 during David’s final year of medical school. In February 1955, after the family moved to New York, David’s second daughter, Barbara Catherine Hawkins, was born. By 1960, David’s marriage to Sally had collapsed. There were likely multiple factors at work, including David’s alcoholism, his intensely busy career, his psychoanalysis, personality conflicts between the couple, and differing values. Soon thereafter, he met and married Margaret Phelan. Born in New York in October 1930, Margaret had a very different temperament than David’s first wife. She embodied the energy of a New Yorker with traits of a prototypical Irish woman. Warm, intelligent, with a great sense of humor, Margaret seemed a better

match for David. She was beautiful, always fashionably dressed, with coiffed brown hair and brilliant blue eyes. At five-feet-fiveinches, she was only an inch shorter than her husband. By a previous marriage, Margaret had a daughter, Kathleen Phelan, born the same year as David’s daughter Barbara. By marrying Margaret, David inherited his third daughter, all girls being under the age of ten. Kathleen, as previously discussed, passed away in 1976 from Hodgkin’s disease. David’s marriage to Margaret collapsed after over twenty years because, according to David, there was incredible stress from the loss of their daughter and because of his shift to an intensely spiritual lifestyle, with its accompanying interests and activities. Both of his wives were “polite” about David’s spiritual direction, he says, but there was no alignment in the relationship, as intense spiritual work “just wasn’t their thing.” David didn’t know how to communicate his spiritual experiences, and he says he went decades without mentioning them to anyone. He believed the significance of his spiritual experiences would have no meaning to Margaret. David believes becoming extremely interested in spiritual work, spiritual groups, and spiritual practices provoked jealousy and resentment in his relationships, an inevitability, he believes, if one’s partner is not aligned in spiritual integrity and pursuits. If one spouse is an alcoholic and the other is not, the relationship works out, he says. But if the alcoholic spouse recovers, developing a spiritual orientation toward life (perhaps through AA), the relationship often erodes. In recovered alcoholics, David reports, the divorce rate is relatively high unless the spouse also becomes aligned with spiritual principles and attends recovery meetings (like Al-Anon). If one person in a relationship becomes spiritually motivated and the other is not, disillusionment in the marriage arises: one spouse lives by basic spiritual principles and the other continues with the usual “games” (playing victim-perpetrator, harboring resentments, being judgmental or codependent, and so on). The spiritually unwilling, David says, are unable to let the past stay in the past, whereas the spiritually aligned work to surrender and release upsets and grievances.

David believes this is what happened in his marriage to Margaret. Although she attended spiritual meetings and participated in various courses like ACIM, in the end, none of it resonated with her—or perhaps she just didn’t “get it.” Over time, David recalls, “The reality of it is that I was too committed to spiritual work. It was far more than she was willing to get involved in.”10 It’s also possible that David’s detached nature—a consequence of his personality, his psychoanalytic training, and letting go of all his attractions and aversions—was difficult for Margaret to understand. It would be natural for a woman to want her husband to be attached to his spouse and his children. Alas, David was unable to give her what she needed. David believes she became cynical, resenting him for his relentless focus on spiritual development, harboring jealousy and hostility. After the collapse of his second marriage, David disavowed the institution, determining never to marry again. Although he dated and lived with several different women throughout the ‘80s, he says he didn’t consider marrying any of them. David’s daughter Barbara (from his first marriage) had psychological difficulties. In July 1991, she threatened to jump off a thirty-foot bridge over a freeway in Charlotte, North Carolina. With the help of her sister, Lynn, who distracted Barbara, and several police officers, who grabbed her, Barbara was saved. Barbara told an officer she had psychological problems and was afraid of being locked away in a mental institution. Involuntarily committed to Mecklenburg County Mental Health, she managed to check herself out after two weeks. Twelve days later, on a rainy afternoon, she jumped off a forty-foot ledge of an uptown parking garage, escaping serious injury by partially landing on a fireman. She was recommitted to Mecklenburg. On July 15, 1995, at forty, Barbara took her own life. Susan Jane Humphrey was born on a family farm in Schaller, Iowa, popcorn capital of the world. Her family, including her parents, two sisters, and one brother, moved from Iowa to Phoenix when she was twelve. Susan loved Arizona right away. Her parents later

purchased a small place in Sedona’s Oak Creek Canyon, and Susan decided that if she could live anywhere, it would be Sedona. Susan’s father worked for Sperry Rand Corporation, a major military contractor in the ‘60s that developed satellite technology to compete with Russia’s Sputnick program. Working in a top secret, high-security area that contained the satellite blueprints, Susan’s father couldn’t tell even his family what he did. All Susan and the rest knew was that he worked for Sperry Rand in the reproduction department. As a child, Susan attended church in Schaller. The service was held outside, and she recalls watching the townspeople build the church after every Sunday mass. Though raised Presbyterian with her father as the church deacon and having a twelve-year perfect attendance pin from Sunday school, Susan wasn’t religious or spiritually oriented. She did, however, have a strong, steadfast sense of morality—a clear dividing line between right and wrong. She detested meanness in others, feeling people should be nicer to each other. Believing popular kids tended to be the meanest, she shied from popularity in her youth. Though quiet and timid, she could still be sociable with others. Susan loved to dance, taking modern dance and ballet while growing up. After a few years of professional modeling, she decided it was time to get married, which she says, “all of us do when we’re young and dumb.”11 She moved to Flagstaff with her first husband, to whom she was married thirteen years. Things fell apart when Susan got pregnant with her daughter, Sarah. It was a difficult period for Susan, and she quickly divorced and remarried, moving to Cottonwood—one step closer to Sedona. The rebound marriage was short lived. In the late ‘80s, Susan had manure delivered to her home in Cottonwood. She never met the delivery driver. After Susan’s second marriage, a friend told her about a psychiatrist giving talks at the Sedona Villa. Susan couldn’t get off work, but her boyfriend at the time attended one of the lectures. Each time, Susan’s path was averted just before crossing with David’s. A dancing aficionado, David had a dance platform installed behind his cabin where he and his friends enjoyed both disco and

Western-style dancing (line dancing was popular). He became president of Sedona’s country western dance club, and his dance instructor lived in one of his cabins for several years. One evening in the late ‘80s, David attended a country western dance class at the Elks Lodge in Sedona. There, he glimpsed Susan Humphrey from across the room. An overwhelming flash of energy charged between them, which David describes as “instant recognition.” They felt comfortable together instantly; their interactions were effortless and harmonious. While all external motivation and desire had left David years prior, there was a sudden “wantingness” to be with her for reasons he didn’t understand at the time. And it was the same for Susan. The romance began. They danced together that night and the nights that followed. Whenever classes were held, they danced together. David and Susan had a strong sense that they had known each other before—Susan would start to say something and David would finish the thought. Or David would say something and Susan would know exactly where he was going with his thinking. David was awestruck by this: Susan understood what he was communicating, quickly grasping what should be a new concept to her, that should take some explanation to understand. It seemed they knew each other instantly, or as Susan puts it, it was “like meeting your twin flame.”12 They were to be married in December 1991, but David was having a new addition built onto his main cabin, and it was taking longer than anticipated. Susan wouldn’t be able to move in right away, and more importantly, her ten-year-old daughter was bothered by the twenty-two-year age difference between David and Susan. Risking the relationship, Susan cancelled the wedding. The energy between her and David gave Susan the feeling that everything would be okay. She just knew she and David were supposed to be together; to her, it was destiny. Susan describes her connection with David as something she’d been searching for all her life. She reflects, “My whole life has been channeled toward Sedona, Dave, the work, the fulfillment of the work. [Meeting Dave] was like a picture completed … spiritual fulfillment, emotional fulfillment, and

you always have this sharing with this person … that’s really special.”13 David and Susan dated other people after she cancelled the wedding, but seemed to maintain their close connection. Whereas David was against marriage throughout the ‘80s, by the mid-1990s he insisted on marrying Susan. In 1997, she moved into the upgraded cabin David had built for them. Both of David’s parents were married three times, and on December 26, 1999, David and Susan tied the knot, each for their third time as well.

PART V

TEACHER (1995-PRESENT)

CHAPTER 17

Map of Consciousness

Strong or Weak In the late ‘70s, while exploring alternative treatments, David heard about an emerging field called Behavioral Kinesiology pioneered by psychiatrist John Diamond. David attended a one-day workshop led by Diamond who demonstrated, using Applied Kinesiology or “muscle testing,” that negative stimuli immediately weaken the body’s muscles. This response can be observed by applying downward pressure on an outstretched arm when a negative stimulus is introduced. Generally performed between two people (a subject and a tester), the test entails the subject extending an arm parallel to the floor and the tester applying downward pressure, thereby obtaining a baseline for the subject’s normal resistance level. Next, the tester makes a statement or holds an item to be tested (like a nutritional supplement) over the subject’s solar plexus, quickly applying the same amount of downward pressure to the arm, which either “stays strong,” indicated by the arm remaining parallel to the ground, or “goes weak,” indicated by the arm dropping. (The drop represents a momentary collapse of the autonomic nervous system and the body’s meridian system). The technique can be used with any muscle in the body, but the outstretched arm is most commonly used because the deltoid muscle provides a clear read of the muscle’s response to stimuli. David sat in Diamond’s seminar, watching how negative emotions and noxious stimuli (such as artificial sweeteners, pesticides, and fluorescent lights) made test subjects instantly “go weak,” while positive emotions and affirmations made subjects “stay strong.” By the time David witnessed muscle testing, he was accustomed to exploring the farthest reaches of holistic treatment. His colleagues

chided him because he prescribed acupuncture, nutrition, and Orthomolecular Psychiatry. These same colleagues believed functional hypoglycemia, cerebral allergies, and food intolerances didn’t exist. David knew otherwise, and having taken an oath to help his patients any way he could—even at the expense of his professional image—he wasn’t afraid to explore taboo practices. David was an open-minded skeptic, never discounting something without first testing it for himself. “The reason spiritual reality has always worked incredibly well for me,” David explains, “is because I put it to the test—either it is or it isn’t. I don’t want to hear teachers talking about things they haven’t even experienced.”1 When David witnessed the technique in Diamond’s workshop, he perceived its mechanism from a viewpoint different from that of the instructor: while tens of thousands of AK practitioners viewed the muscle test as a physical response to a local stimulus, David believed it was a response of universal life energy—irrespective of physical makeup or personal preferences. David’s experiences using spiritual techniques like the Sedona Method and A Course in Miracles had demonstrated to him the innate power of consciousness itself. Since, in muscle testing, the energy source only needed to be near the subject, David believed that energy fields were involved. (The stimulus and subject only need to be in proximity to each other. For example, the subject needs to be in view of pesticides, not physically touching them, to get a response.) David returned from this one-day seminar excited to teach muscle testing to his staff. In his search for volunteers, he went to the Attitudinal Healing office and said, “I’m giving a lecture on Applied Kinesiology, and I need a couple of volunteers. How about you folks?” He grabbed the first subject and tested him with negative substances. Starting with fluorescent lights, the subject stayed strong. Then he tested artificial sweeteners, to which the subject also stayed strong. Finally, David tested the man with pesticides: the muscle strength remained. Grabbing the next person, he found the same thing happening: the subject didn’t go weak as it was predicted she would. Perplexed,

David ran through each person in the Attitudinal Healing office: none of them went weak to the noxious stimuli. Yet he had not only observed the weakening during Diamond’s seminar but had personally produced similar results when he muscle-tested other seminar participants. David finally found someone in the office—his friend Randy Richmond—who went weak when tested with noxious stimuli. Because David’s local ACIM group served as facilitators for the Center for Attitudinal Healing, most of the attendees were avid ACIM students. Richmond, however, was currently working through ACIM’s 365-day course and was only up to Lesson 75. Curiously, a week or two later, when it came time for David to demonstrate the muscletesting technique to his staff, Richmond no longer went weak. Recognizing that all his volunteers happened to be ACIM students, David decided to conduct a study after moving to Sedona, testing a small number of people who were just starting ACIM. Testing them twice monthly, he determined that between Lesson 75 and 90, students appeared to no longer go weak to noxious stimuli. Something shifted within their field of consciousness, David surmised. He believed that students of ACIM transcended the prevailing and predominantly unconscious belief systems that noxious stimuli were harmful to the body, leading him to further experimentation.

Creating the Map Following David’s disillusionment and departure from Sam around 1984, he began developing his own body of work, combining important elements he had learned with his own experiences. He lacked a way of communicating his spiritual experiences to others, and felt that some kind of “map” of spiritual and worldly experience would be helpful. In the ‘70s, David had been exposed to numerous scales and maps as he explored the Human Potential Movement. From Virginia Lloyd, then director at the Sedona Institute, David learned about the “nine emotional states”: apathy, grief, fear, lust, anger, pride,

courage, acceptance, and peace. Courage represented the dividing line—emotions below courage, known as the acronym “AGFLAP,” were negative, while courage, acceptance, and peace (“CAP”) were positive emotional states.2 Next, through theosophy, David came in contact with the “Levels of Soul Evolvement,” an esoteric scale ranging from 0 to 800, showing a progression through minimal comprehension, basic human function, mastery of the material world, mastery of the mind, * spiritual awareness, cosmic awareness, and mastership. According to this scale, each person has evolved to a particular level: they’ve mastered what’s below that level and have yet to tackle what’s above. By the time David arrived in Sedona, he was “testing” the levels of everything and everyone by dowsing with a pendulum (a form of “divining”). Using the Levels of Soul Evolvement scale (an earlier form of what would later evolve into David’s Map of Consciousness), David begun “calibrating” everything from the Rolling Stones to telepathy. But the scale that put the pieces together for him came from another relatively unpublicized source: Vern Black’s Handbook for the Integrity Tone Scale, an eighty-page, self-published book. Black was a trainer in Est in the early ‘70s, and from his experience working with founder Werner Erhard, he developed the Integrity Tone † Scale. It consists of sixteen levels or “states of integrity” ranging from disloyalty at the bottom to empower/source at the top. Column titles across the top of the scale include State of Integrity, Emotion, Attitude, and Point of View. With each level offering a series of emotions, attitudes, and a point of view, a counselor could use the scale to identify the level of a person or situation and to instruct how to move to a higher level. Black’s Integrity Tone Scale formed the initial framework for David’s Map of Consciousness, but David must have felt that the Sedona Method’s emotional states coincided with his own experience better than Black’s States of Integrity. So with his colleague Glorian Ross, he used muscle testing to devise a Map of Consciousness with seventeen levels of

consciousness: Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, Pride, Courage, Neutrality, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason, Love, Joy, Peace, and Enlightenment.3 The scale is numbered from 1 to 1,000, with each of the seventeen levels having a specific designated number. For example: Fear (100), Courage (200), Acceptance (350), and Love (500). For each level of consciousness, David’s map offers a “God View,” a “Life View,” “Emotion,” and “Process.” At Reason (400), for example, the view of God is wise, life is meaningful, understanding is the dominant emotion, and information is processed by abstraction. David fleshed out the details of his Map of Consciousness from 1984 to 1988. He needed an explanatory Map of Consciousness for his lectures at the Sedona Villa, a twenty-six-bed inpatient recovery house run by Camelback Hospital. The audience was recovering addicts and alcoholics, a population David knew intimately. In order to explain the nature of addiction through his new understanding of consciousness, he needed to visually illustrate the lower levels of addictions and the progressively higher levels people can attain as they “devote their lives to a Higher Power.” Outlining the basic levels on a blackboard for his Thursday evening lectures, David shared his understanding of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to addiction and recovery. David believes his Map of Consciousness helped those suffering from addiction to find the way out of the ego’s “house of mirrors” and to realize permanent sobriety. As he explains, all things take their meaning from context and the way in which they are understood. Addiction is no different. David framed the addiction process in a new light—a context that he says uplifts and ennobles instead of feeding guilt and shame. Never talking down to his audience, David found that people in rehabilitation who had “hit bottom” were open to his ideas. Although he still discussed the role of nutrition in addiction, the main course title of his three-hour lectures was “Calibrations of Levels of Consciousness: Spiritual Validity.” David recalls a large, muscular man undergoing a spiritual conversion at one of his lectures, achieving permanent sobriety. Six weeks later, this attendee backed his truck to David’s house and unloaded a beautiful, hand-crafted bench made from a juniper tree

recently struck by lightning. David found this several-hundred pound piece to be of too fine craftsmanship for people to sit on, so he designated it as a coffee table instead. Carved into the table are Sanskrit symbols for “Allness” and “Nothingness.” Synchronistically, these words encapsulated a recent realization David had, which he hadn’t shared with anyone. With the help of his friend Saul Steinberg, the original printer of ACIM, David offered a series of one-hour lectures on healing and recovery, where he applied his map to various issues like stress, self-healing, aging, fear, weight loss, depression, alcoholism, cancer, and dying. David continued to refine his presentation of the map. By using the muscle-testing technique he learned from Diamond’s seminar, David believed he could calibrate the energy of everything, as everything existed somewhere on the energy spectrum represented by his Map of Consciousness: “It was obvious that the field of consciousness is like an infinite, motionless electrostatic field capable of responding concordantly to the level of strength of the energy of the stimulus.”4 For example, he might say, “Sigmund Freud calibrates above 400,” and his test subject’s arm might stay strong. “Sigmund Freud calibrates above 500,” and his test subject might go weak. David could then determine the precise “calibration level” of Sigmund Freud and, according to David, anyone else could confirm the same calibration level (in this case, for Freud: 499). For David, level 200 was the “dividing line between truth versus falsehood.” Anything below 200 (Courage) would make you go weak with his calibration method. Anything above courage would make you go strong. “What emerged was the observation that the kinesiologic response [via muscle testing] was essentially binary, in that all it was doing was differentiating truth from falsehood,” David believes. “This capacity to differentiate truth from falsehood was a quality of the test mechanism itself, and the results were independent of the belief systems of the subjects and therefore seemed to represent a quality of consciousness itself, independent of its personal expression, that is, universality and nonlocality.”5 Once David outlined his map, he began calibrating things with the same tenacity and single-minded focus he applied to other fields

of interest. At his ranch, he says he enlisted a crew of “researchers” that met every Saturday morning to experiment and discover the practical applications of the technique. The crew broke up into three or four groups of two, each team researching an agreed-upon area of interest before regrouping to share results. David was constantly testing with Susan after they moved in together, calibrating individuals, philosophic systems, religions, concepts, places, architecture, emotions, belief systems, music, spiritual states, and historic sages and mystics—if it came to mind, it would be calibrated.6 David was on a unique mission, as described in a 1986 mission statement for his one-man institute: “Our purpose is to utilize consciousness research to explore and validate spiritual realities and, in so doing, to develop a science of consciousness that will benefit mankind in multiple areas. We are dedicated to truth for its own sake as well as establishing a scale of relative degrees of truth as compared to an absolute.” David often likens his Map of Consciousness to a compass, a way of navigating between degrees of truth and its complete absence, explaining, “The tumult and suffering in the world are due to the inability of the human mind to discern truth from falsehood or spiritual reality from fallacy. Without a compass, mankind falls into the same pits over and over again. It cannot tell a true leader from a megalomaniac or a true spiritual teacher from an imposter.”7 Ultimately, for David, the map provided a working “science of truth,” illuminating the degrees of spiritual reality incomprehensible to the human mind. With his brand of muscle testing, he believes the map forms the basis for establishing replicable diagnostic criteria from which to evaluate and understand all forms of human life, presenting an Absolute from which to measure all phenomena in relative terms (1 to 1,000). “A means is now available,” he writes in reference to his map and his calibration method, “for not only discerning the truth from falsehood but also of calibrating the degree of truth as compared to the Absolute.”8 Just as we need a thermometer calibrated from an agreed-upon absolute zero to accurately determine the temperature, David believes the Map of Consciousness helps measure the relative energy of everything

compared to the Absolute (as, for him, the map’s seventeen levels of consciousness encapsulate the totality of human experience). According to David, it is the first time in mankind’s history that we have any kind of objective compass to detect truth or denote the various levels of truth. To David, the Map of Consciousness is more than just a theoretical framework—it’s a “very practical and pragmatic guide to understanding the evolutionary levels of consciousness to be transcended in pursuit of spiritual advancement, enlightenment, or self-improvement. It also provides a pragmatic outline of the obstacles to overcome in order to achieve higher levels of consciousness.”9As David sees it, his muscle-testing calibration method clarifies and solves the confusing dilemma of distinguishing essence from appearance, reality from illusion, and truth from falsehood.

Power versus Force By 1988, the Map of Consciousness was complete. David had presented some of the material to small local audiences—Sedona Villa, self-help and ACIM groups—and to larger audiences as a keynote speaker at several conferences. In 1989, about six months into his relationship with Susan, he showed her muscle testing. At first she thought it was bizarre, but she listened carefully as David explained the need to stay detached, impartial, with no investment in the result. Pointing to a blackboard David kept in his home, David showed Susan a carefully-crafted chart with six columns—the original Map of Consciousness he used at the Sedona Villa—and demonstrated how he muscle-tested statements using the map. Susan instantly comprehended. She loved how it explained why people do the things they do, how society operates, and why only some people succeed. Muscle testing using Susan’s right arm became a part of their daily life, a practice that continues to this day. Susan seemed to be David’s muse from the start of their relationship. Within three years of meeting her, he penned three

nonfiction manuscripts and a screenplay. Susan, however, had great enthusiasm for what she called “the work”—David’s Map of Consciousness and its related dimensions—and prodded David, “Why are you sitting on this? You really need to share this information with people. This is really important.”10 David says he wasn’t sure he had Divine “permission” to write a book on his brand of consciousness research. He knew if he wrote the book, he’d be asked to teach the material, and he recalls being reluctant to make that commitment. Having lived peacefully in a small town for a decade, he had become accustomed to anonymity and simplicity. He didn’t want people stopping him on the street in Sedona. He was also aware that he would be responsible to his students, just like a church has responsibilities to its members. Susan told him “the work” was his responsibility and she believed David was poised for the job. “When we met,” Susan reflects, “Dave had kind of come back into the world again. He was still a recluse, he was still distant at times, but it was like he knew there was something else he had to do.”11 In the end, David saw writing Power vs. Force as a moral imperative to share with the world what he believed was a technique for discerning truth from falsehood. David believed mankind had no way of saving itself, even with Divine revelation and great spiritual teachers, because of its inability to accurately discern the real from illusion. Also, David says he witnessed the profound effects the Map of Consciousness had on his Sedona Villa audiences and thought others could benefit as well. David started writing the manuscript around 1990, endeavoring, he often says, to create a bridge between the linear domain of reason to the nonlinear domain of spiritual reality. He thought he found his bridge in the New Physics, loosely borrowing concepts from quantum theory and chaos theory to explain his Map of Consciousness. For David, the levels of consciousness were the “determinants of human behavior,” and, as such, they had a decisive impact on every area of life. He applied the Map of Consciousness to all the major areas of life: politics, spirituality, business, art, sports, and health, hoping his readers would see the far-reaching implications of the discoveries.

David’s contemplative retirement ended by 1991. He was, once again, engrossed in a hyperactive professional life with a host of creative activities and social engagements. He saw patients on his ranch, commuted two or threes days a week to the Mingus Mountain Retreat Center, made his weekly rounds to the nursing homes, worked on numerous inventions, wrote, gardened, danced, and decided that he wanted to earn a PhD—all past the age of the average United States citizen’s retirement. Why would a sixty-five-year-old physician want to get a PhD? He thought a PhD would give the work more “fire power” with the reading public, lending additional credibility to his existing medical degree.12 David found an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal from Columbia Pacific University, a distance-learning college in northern California, and enrolled on March 21, 1991. His mentor for his dissertation was Sheldon Deal, a past president of the International College of Applied Kinesiology. David spent less than two years preparing his dissertation entitled, “Muscle Strength and Emotionally Charged Stimuli” while * still continuing his clinical work. He was awarded a PhD from CPU on September 30, 1995. CPU was never an accredited university. It had, however, received institutional approval to operate in the state of California until 1997, when it lost its license due to not meeting regulations and inadequate academic standards. David’s PhD is still technically valid, as it was issued prior to 1997. David says his dissertation was presented to a “university faculty where it met all of the strict requirements of a PhD doctoral dissertation … [It was] first presented to the most skeptical academic community.”13 When we consider that CPU is often called a “diploma mill” and that almost all of David’s courses were taken within two years (as opposed to the usual five) and that he created most of his courses (for example, “Wholism: The Concept, It’s Origins, and Implications,” “Advanced Human Experience and Behavior,” and “Independent Study: The Versatile Independent Scholar”), it seems there is reason to question whether CPU had strict requirements or a skeptical academic community. David didn’t know anything about publishing. He sent several of his manuscripts, including “Power vs. Force” and “Success Is for the

Few,” to someone in the industry, but this insider didn’t feel either work had commercial value. Ed Whalen, his editor at the time, had experience establishing small publishing houses and convinced David to self-publish. Since David didn’t have the funds to print the book, he took a second mortgage on his house and established Veritas Publishing (veritas being the Latin word for truth). David didn’t expect many copies of the book to sell, but Susan remembers him being elated when approximately 300 copies sold in its first year. Word spread about David’s book in small circles, with positive reviews in Brain-Mind Bulletin and other outlets. In 2001, author and speaker Wayne Dyer read it and was so impressed that he wanted to sell it at his nationwide lectures. Dyer contacted David to order the book in bulk. Generally, when someone orders multiple cases of books—thousands of copies—publishers offer significant discounts. When Dyer asked David how much it would cost to purchase a thousand copies, David replied in his usual no-nonsense manner, “Well, it’s $14.95 a copy. You can do the math.” Dyer was amused by David’s perspective. He ordered thousands of copies at the retail price and sold them at his lectures without making a profit (actually losing money due to shipping). Dyer shared Power vs. Force with the president of Hay House, convincing him to offer David a publishing deal. When Dyer approached David with the offer, David replied, “I’m not really interested. I enjoy publishing the book.” Dyer persisted, setting it up so that both Hay House and Veritas Publishing could publish the book, an unusual arrangement in the publishing business. Speaking to sold-out crowds at lectures and via his PBS specials, Dyer promoted Power vs. Force, giving the book traction it would enjoy for years to come. Following the publication of Power vs. Force, however, David still didn’t seem to have a vision for propagating his metaphysical teaching system. The year after publishing the book, he wrote and self-published Goodbye, Scorpion; Farewell, Black Widow Spider: How to Avoid the Stings and Bites of the Southwest’s Dangerous Arachnids—And What to Do If You Don’t, featuring his own “ScorpGuard” invention that he was trying to patent. David enjoyed

being a publisher so much that he started publishing other people’s books, including Margaret Chaney’s Red World Green World: The Hidden Polarities of Nature in 1997.

CHAPTER 18

A Teacher Emerges

David’s life didn’t change significantly following the publication of Power vs. Force. He mainly continued his obligations as a psychiatrist. A series of events began unfolding, however, that would propel him, full throttle, into the role of teacher.

Final Doorway David’s spiritual development continued after he traversed the high pass. One final confrontation remained. All of his awakenings and transformations in consciousness now “magnified a single remaining disparity: the persistence of a personal sense of a self as the core of one’s life and existence.”1 In the timeless, infinite, pristine silence with no mind to consult—no thoughts and concepts left—only the core and essence of life itself remained. He had surrendered everything to God except life itself. David realized that he still had the illusion that his “I” was the source of his life’s continuance—an inner belief within his ego that it is the source of his existence. Although the personal self had already dissolved to a degree, according to David, there was still the experiencing of life as life that needed to be surrendered: “At this point, awareness is identified with the quality of life itself. That is all that is left—just ‘life’.”2 It became apparent to David that “what is to be surrendered to God is the life of the self and its motive to continue to exist as the experiencer and seeming source and substrate of life (the last illusion).”3 David proceeded to surrender life itself to God. In laying down the belief in himself as the source of life, however, a great terror and agony—at an existential depth—overcame him. If I let go of owning myself as the source of existence and life, he surmised, I will expire and die forever. According to David, one actually experiences one’s own death. David describes it as the worst anxiety—it felt impossible

to confront. Facing this existential terror could be called “the final test.”4 “The last step,” he says “is intuited as a finality from which no turning back is possible, and thus there is consternation at the absoluteness of the finality.”5 With apprehension and moments of hesitation, David says he surrendered what he felt to be the core of life itself. What carried him through the terror, he recalls, was his faith in the Zen teaching that “all fear is illusion; no death is possible” and “to walk straight through, no matter what,” which he says came forth as a vibration from within his aura (not a thought). He believes it arose from one of his teachers lifetimes ago.6 More specifically, the message was, “Hold back nothing; completely surrender life itself to God. Be willing to experience death.”7 With his faith, he says the spiritual will took the last step. After a few moments of fierce anguish, “death” came. “Although the transition in [actual] time probably took less than a minute, when it happened, it seemed to occur at such a profound depth and was beyond control or recall. Like the collapse of a building or an earthquake, once the process started, it progressed of its own momentum and brought with it an associated temporary feeling of terror. It was as though the very structure of all that had been the core of reality was disappearing.”8 “The finality of the death was overwhelming,” David recalls. “At last, the agony was over and was replaced by splendor and magnificence—infinite stillness, silence, and peace. The mind was dumbfounded and overwhelmed with awe. It then went silent and disappeared.”9 David says he crossed over what he called the final doorway, laying down life itself to God: “On the other side of the doorway of death, all of life and existence opened up to the Glory of God.”10 After going through the high pass and the agony of ego death, David found the world suddenly lighting up: “Everything radiates forth as a consequence of its presence and inner light. And it’s the Light of Existence. The Light of Divinity shines through everything.”11

A Huge Spiritual Mountain One morning at around 4 a.m., Susan was lying in bed next to her sleeping husband in a hypnogogic state, having just awakened. Through her periphery vision, she noticed a bright light emanating from the corner of the room. What is that? she wondered. She turned, eyes wide, to see if a lamp was on. A beautiful, sun-like luminosity emanated, engulfing the entire room so no other objects could be seen. The light then moved toward Susan, entering her body at her heart. She felt this wonderful glow and intuited a “spiritual shift.” Although she still doesn’t know what the light was, she wasn’t afraid during the experience; she likened it to being “kissed by an angel.”12 When she shared the experience with David, he said matter-offactly, “Oh, it was life-changing.” “Well, okay, but what was it?” Susan inquired. “Divine Light,” David replied, recalling Bill Wilson’s experience with light at the time of his spiritual conversion in Townes Hospital. After her experience with the Light, Susan began to sense that she was supposed to help disseminate her husband’s spiritual teachings. David, however, was still an active psychiatrist and not in a position to teach and write fulltime.

Jin-Hee Moon, a Buddhist nun, runs the J.H. Moon Yoga Research Center in Kang Nam-Gu, Seoul, Korea. A former assistant to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for six years she studied Tibetan Buddhism in India and was the first Korean to be initiated by the Dalai Lama into Tantra before returning to Korea to set up her meditation center. In 1998, soon after Power vs. Force was translated into Korean, two generals approached Moon with a copy of the book, hoping to * bring its author to Korea. These government officials figured sending a servant of God, like Moon, would influence David to come to their country. Impressed by David’s work, Moon flew to the States with the

two generals and a Korean nurse from Wyoming to translate, and invited David in person, demonstrating their sincerity. Moon kindly “insisted” that David fly to South Korea. David responded with, “Come back tomorrow.” When they arrived the next day, David asked Susan to get a globe so they could see where South Korea was located. To Susan’s astonishment, David agreed to go. David and Susan’s trip to Seoul, Korea in July 1999 had two priorities. First, David says they acted as strategic consultants. North Korea and South Korea were apparently on the verge of a ballistic war. Meeting with South Korean government officials, David says they utilized their calibration method to diagnose the situation between the two countries in an effort to avoid war. Calibrating various strategic options, David concluded that if South Korea threatened North Korea with political power, North Korea would retaliate with military aggression. David says he calibrated that North Korea did not intend to use nuclear weapons or germ warfare, but if provoked, they would retaliate with military force. David calibrated North Korea’s leader, Kim II-sung, to be in the 400s (Reason). Using muscle testing, they surmised that unless he is politically attacked, he would not use military force (the same conclusions David arrived at in his Power vs. Force demonstration video, published in 1996, three years before this encounter).David’s advice was to support the North Korean leader’s political position and to ignore the military threat. South Korean congressmen and legislators agreed with the decision privately. It apparently proved to be the right move, as the ballistic level of the threat dropped within a few days. The second agenda was set by Moon herself: she wanted David to teach her students and members of her meditation centers, which he did. David’s influence and an awareness of his work continued to spread after his visit to Korea. Without effort on David’s part, large numbers of Koreans became drawn to him as a spiritual teacher, as if by a powerful magnetism. Power vs. Force and his subsequent book, The Eye of I, became bestsellers in Korea, something that never happened in the States.

David has an obvious love and reverence for South Koreans and their culture, which is clearly reciprocated. The South Koreans were extremely accommodating to him. For example, after they found out that he liked Diet Pepsi, they sent a group of people looking for it, eventually finding an obscure warehouse that carried it. If David indicated he liked anything, he soon found it packaged and ready for him. Visiting a museum store with hundreds of Buddha engravings, David paused to appreciate a particular carved, sandalwood Buddha. As he stood by the door waiting to leave, he noticed his guide bargaining with the storeowner, trying to buy the $5,000 statue. David quickly learned he had to watch what he said. It might have been tempting to exploit this group if David had “wanted” anything, but he says he merely acknowledges his relationship with them. He is seemingly unaffected by their adulation. Groups of South Koreans have continued to travel to Sedona, a twenty-four-hour journey on planes and buses, to experience just a short time in the presence of their teacher at his lectures and satsangs. (Satsang is an Indian term for an informal meeting held by a spiritual teacher.) David was invited back to Seoul in September 2000, this time solely to teach the “Calibrations of the Levels of Consciousness and Verifiable Spiritual Truth” to his devoted students. Prior to this lecture, it had been raining continuously for several weeks. After answering the last question, he requested that everyone turn to view the windows in the back of the room: the sun was bursting through the clouds, filling the room with a brilliant golden light as a rainbow emerged across the sky. Prior to this second trip, David was going through a transition where his body felt “as though the nervous system was handling more energy than it was originally designed to handle. The body’s nerves often felt as though they were high-tension wires burning with high-voltage energy and current.”13 These painful sensations continued while he was in South Korea, his whole body aching, requiring him to lie down periodically. Susan serendipitously picked up a book in their hotel room and started reading the story of the Buddha. “Dave, I know why you’re having all these aches,” she said. “The Buddha said that his bones

felt like they would break and crack … High spiritual teachers all go through the same physical problems.”14 “I never knew that,” David replied, immediately feeling relieved. The thrust of his second trip to South Korea was a five-day seminar and satsang David gave to Moon’s students in her meditation center, where he was given an unusual honor at a formal initiation ceremony. Here, on September 25, 2000, he was awarded the official title of “Tae Ryoung Sun Tosa,” which loosely translates as: “An enlightened being who comes to this world with great soul and gets enlightenment early.” Tae Ryeong also means “a huge spiritual mountain.” In comparing David to a mountain, his Korean cohort was acknowledging him as a true spiritual teacher. It was on this second trip to South Korea that David decided to embrace his role as spiritual teacher. Until this point, he had gone through periods of lecturing, sharing his insights about the Map of Consciousness, A Course in Miracles, the Sedona Method, and Eastern teachings. He had promoted other spiritual teachers like Sam and had taught the teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi, among others, but David didn’t perceive himself as a teacher—not yet. When asked in a 1996 interview if he would call himself a spiritual teacher, David replied, “I wouldn’t call myself that. What I am is a sharer. I share with the world what I have learned, for whatever value it may be to the world.”15 David’s reluctance melted away on his second trip to South Korea. David stayed in private practice until a few old-timer patients passed away. (His psychiatric insurance was more than he was making from his practice, but he continued to pay it because he didn’t want to desert his patients). He left his job at the Mingus Mountain Residential Estate Center and his role as visiting psychiatrist to local nursing homes. By 2002, all of his professional duties were fulfilled. Now, the former atheist-turned-agnostic-turnedFreudian-analyst-turned-Orthomolecular-Psychiatrist-turned-ascetic, became a spiritual teacher.

Bulwark of Knowledge

David originally started Veritas Publishing in order to self-publish his first two books: Power vs. Force and Goodbye Scorpions. The inspiration to write The Eye of the I: From Which Nothing is Hidden (published in 2001) arose around his first trip to Korea in 1999, as “the way of the mystic could now be explained … [so it] was comprehensible by the intellect.”16 The thrust of this work, David believes, is to illustrate the source of truth and spiritual reality as a subjective state in contrast to the mind’s exclusive focus on objective reality. To complete the trilogy, David wrote I: Reality and Subjectivity (published in 2003). In this work, he continued his ideas from Eye of the I, describing his understanding and interpretation of consciousness—expounding upon the nature of Divinity, the obstacles to self-realization, and the various pathways to realize God. David started gathering information for his fourth book in 2003 when he was invited to speak at the Oxford Union in England. He and Susan decided to travel to and calibrate most of the major cathedrals in Europe during their trip. David’s most voluminous work, Truth vs. Falsehood: How to Tell the Difference (published in 2005), was a large undertaking requiring exhaustive “calibration research,” including thousands of calibrations done over several years. Truth vs. Falsehood offers David’s perspective on the human experience from the highest levels of enlightenment to the lowest levels of hate and aggression. Regarding this book, David says: “The work to be presented is the result of a lifetime dedicated to discovering the core and essence of truth itself and how it can be recognized, expressed, and defined.”17 Susan says she thought her arm was going to fall off from constant muscle testing, as David was continually looking to do more calibrations for the book. In order to write about worldly affairs, David began paying attention to world news, becoming a media hound for several years (he still watches the news frequently). In his re-examination of the world, when he began watching the news and reading newspapers, he says he went into indignant shock. Coming from a conservative, traditional worldview—namely a Christian, Midwestern upbringing in

the mid-Twentieth Century—he was outraged by the expressions of moral and cultural relativism he found exhibited in society. Relativism is the viewpoint that everything depends on context. Taken to an extreme, a cultural relativist may conclude that all reality is simply based on the whim and caprice of a culture. David prides himself on being an absolutist (the opposite of a relativist). He calibrates “absolutism” at 650, signifying an enlightened viewpoint, while calibrating relativism at 180 (representing, for him, a destructive concept). He writes, “All truth is self-existent, total, complete, and all-encompassing, without location, duration, or parts. Because truth is self-existent, the subjective state of ‘I’ encompasses All That Is.”18 In other words, for David, truth is absolute. So the extreme relativism he encountered in the media triggered the rise of what he calls his “spiritual knight,” producing outrage and indignation. David felt compelled to share his truth as he understood it. Many of his calibrations reported in Truth vs. Falsehood were contrary to popular belief. David knew that this work would be criticized and that he would be subjected to overt negativity after its publication. (He was correct.) David wrestled with his inner spiritual knight on many occasions: “All of a sudden, a rage, an indignation at the violation of the truth of God came up over and over and practically fried my nervous system. Indignation at the desecration of truth and the glee of doing so was bad enough, but then the agreement of large percentages of the population was what brought up the outrage.”19 The indignation wasn’t personal, David claims, as he says he has no personal self left (following his enlightenment) to feel outraged or indignant. Nevertheless, the heart of the spiritual knight, damaged by what he perceived as blatant violations of truth, was a big problem for him. Each time the spiritual knight became activated, he would feel a sharp pain throughout his body, requiring him to clear the energy before he could function again. The pain, David believes, was “due to the inclusion of an impurity within the collective, and that impurity burns.”20 Despite the contention that arose around Truth vs. Falsehood, the general online attacks, and the negative reviews that followed,

David didn’t alter his course. “I don’t design everything I say to please people,” he explains, “because that would eliminate a lot of the things I have said already … It’s not my job to make them happy, but it is my job to save them as much suffering as I can by pointing out what roads lead downwards and what roads lead upwards. So I try to illuminate the roads that lead upwards to great joy and happiness … My intention is your enlightenment and the joy that goes with it.”21 Susan inspired David’s fifth book, convincing him that students needed a practical manual for moving “up” the Map of Consciousness. Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Doorway to Enlightenment (published in 2006) is David’s guide to his form of enlightenment. There he breaks down the pitfalls—the attractions and aversions that keep a person stuck at each of his levels of consciousness. Discovery of the Presence of God: Devotional Nonduality (published in 2006) represented the completion of David’s effort at conveying spiritual truth. Although David said he felt everything that needs to be said was presented in Discovery, he apparently had more to share. Following the writing of Truth vs. Falsehood, David continued to maintain an active interest in worldly affairs. From his perspective, the world had become less respectful of authority and more contentious, more narcissistic, and more susceptible to propaganda and indoctrination than ever before, nationally and globally. David also began noticing what he perceived to be destructive ideologies like moral relativism becoming pervasive in the media. David believed that relativism combined with Islamic terrorism represented a profound threat to all life, leading him to do a study of relativism and its philosophic origin, as well as of Islam and its philosophic, religious, and political beliefs. He believes that mankind’s capacity to accurately identify, recognize, and process truth has been impaired overall. To him, mankind no longer has any criteria with which to do that processing. He is incredulous at the realization that “falsehood” now has equal emphasis with “truth” in the media, even when the difference between the two is easily recognizable by him.

To address these concerns, at eighty, David crafted another lengthy treatise entitled Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man (published in 2008) to show the underpinnings of what he believed had become the fall and decline of Western civilization—from absolutism to relativism—and the “subversion of truth by the philosophies underlying relativism itself, which became popularized by media celebrities.”22 All forms of political correctness, activism, environmentalism, feminism—and most forms of post-modernism and the human rights movement—subvert truth, in David’s opinion. For example, to David, the fact that some citizens of the United States would like to remove the word “God” from courthouses or eliminate the Pledge of Allegiance from the classroom are clear signs that Western civilization is headed for a fall. David’s eighth book, Healing & Recovery (published in 2009) is a collection of transcripts from a series of talks he offered to ACIM students in the ‘80s. Addressing topics like depression, anxiety, crisis, cancer, stress, aging, sexuality, weight loss, pain, addiction, and dying, the good doctor shares new ways of perceiving illness through his Map of Consciousness and the techniques and spiritual principles helpful in transcending the full gamut of human ailments that lead to suffering. Inspiration often hits David at strange hours of the night. It’s not uncommon for him to bounce out of bed at 2 a.m. in order to write from sudden insight and excitement. He never learned how to type or use a computer. He has created more than eight volumes by writing over a thousand pages longhand on regular white, lined pads as well as talking into a miniature cassette recorder. His editor, Sonia Martin, then has to tackle the daunting task of deciphering David’s handwriting, which in the tradition of most physicians, is illegible. David devoted a decade (most of the 2000s) to writing these works and teaching the material for the “uplifting of mankind and service to God, which spring from the gratitude and joy of the subjective revelation of the truth of God, both immanent and transcendent.”23 All of his books begin and end with the Latin hymn, “Gloria in Excelsis Deo!” (Glory to God in the Highest). David has written his books primarily in the third person. In fact, in almost all of his writing, no first-person pronoun is used. He

believes that his work represents more of an impersonal observation of the phenomenon of consciousness through the mystic’s awareness. As such, the style of his writing is distinctly declarative. David says, “Writing the books was the fulfillment of an intuited obligation and desire to be helpful to other devotees along the way, to share what was learned and facilitate their enlightenment.”24 With his eight volumes and extensive lecturing, David intended to create a “bulwark of spiritual knowledge,” protecting his spiritual teachings in an effort to minimize misinterpretation.

His Community Power vs. Force was translated into more than seventeen languages, finding pockets of people worldwide hungry for David’s teachings. After returning from his second visit to South Korea, David and Susan decided to start holding monthly all-day lectures in Sedona. About fifty people attended the first seminar, held at the Creative Life Center. For the second lecture, the size doubled. By the fourth lecture, the event was sold out, forcing them to turn people away. With his background in medicine, David favors a didactic style of lecturing with slides, exhibiting an almost compulsive need to review all the basic material (his Map of Consciousness, calibrations of the animal kingdom, calibrations of Great Books of the Western World, and so on) for new people at each event. These public lectures became an ongoing platform for David to share his latest “calibration research” with students and attendees. The audience continued to grow, eventually booking up venues two years in advance. Lecturing in their hometown as well as in major cities across the United States, Canada, and Europe, David and Susan were often only home one weekend each month. Travel became restricted in 2005. David was lifting a skunk trap on his property when three thoracic vertebrae collapsed. Alone and in shrieking pain, he drove himself to the hospital with a broken back, anguishing in uncertainty over whether he would get there. His friend and orthopedist, Tom Peters, the same doctor who performed his

thumb amputation without anesthesia, told David he might need surgery. With the help of acupuncture and parasympathetic hormone shots, the injury healed itself over the course of several years. According to David, his back actually aligned on its own, fusing perfectly into place. Incidentally, David had three ribs broken two other times from big burly men hugging him. He has a brittle body at best. David later learned that he had unrecognized and severe osteoporosis, which is why his back snapped in the first place—one more ailment to add to his extensive roster. After the accident, David had to cancel many speaking engagements. Susan realized they had to take care of David’s body —that the work wasn’t just spiritual. She thought they were going to have to stop giving public lectures. After his back healed, however, his overall health seemed to return, so he continued his regular lectures every other month for about three more years. When he was around eighty, David suddenly lost vision in one eye and suffered reduced vision in the other. He had lived in the brilliant sunlight of Arizona for almost thirty years without protecting his eyes with sunglasses from ultraviolet radiation. This caused him to develop macular degeneration, which David now admits was due to neglect and ignorance. As a result of his combination of disabilities, many activities became restricted, and he had to give up driving and curtail travel, but he continued serving his students through his writing and less frequent lecturing. Pockets of people from around the world have been attracted to David’s work. A study group formed in Sedona, then in other cities, and then other countries. His Devotional Nonduality community, the term David uses and says he established in 2003, slowly grew into over a hundred study groups across the globe, and into discussion forums and social network conversations across the Web. With an inner longing for community, to be in proximity to their teacher, and to live in the stunning Red Rock region, students from all over the world began migrating to Sedona to take up permanent residence. In 2006, to serve this emerging community of seekers, David started offering free satsangs. In these two-hour question-andanswer periods, David fields a diverse range of questions from local students and anyone else willing to make the trek. He has a special

affinity for the satsangs because they afford spontaneity and reveal what people are working on. Speaking in his direct, almost confrontational style during these sessions, David has been called “the Bill O’Reilly of spirituality.” To a newcomer, he can appear rough, almost dispassionate, demonstrating detachment and coldness. But, ultimately, his love for his students and members of his audience generally shines through.

CHAPTER 19

A Closer Look at David R. Hawkins

An octogenarian, David R. Hawkins stands at five-feet, six-inches tall. He’s frail, with balding gray hair and piercing blue-gray eyes. Outside of a missing left thumb, there’s little out of the ordinary about his appearance. As for his personality, while you might not pick him out of a crowd, there is something different about David. As one friend put it, “If he was a monk and everyone was wearing a brown robe, he would be wearing a little red flower on his.”1 David is a unique individual with an eccentric streak, profoundly driven, searching for truth above all else. His personality is paradoxical and convoluted. Throughout his youth and career, he was private, introspective, and introverted. As a psychiatrist, he appeared reserved with a buttoned-up shirt and bowtie. It was rare to see even a hint of a smile under his thick mustache. But appearances can be deceiving, as David is both serious and humorous. In fact, one of his defining characteristics is his trademark humor. Quick and witty, he amuses himself as much as those around him. With his unusual brand of wit, cutting through the bullshit, David has been called the “George Carlin of consciousness.” In his writings, he avoids using humor to avoid appearing frivolous, but during his lectures, David’s humor is unleashed on an unsuspecting audience. Behind the buttoned-up analyst was a soul ready for anything. His colleagues perceived him as intelligent and driven, but also saw David as adventurous, innovative, and curious—always searching for something. Considered an “old soul” even in youth, his inner child was awake and alive. Although he’s now perceived as a teacher, David personified the perpetual student—highly inquisitive and reflective. When he heard about something new—a treatment method or spiritual technique—he immediately hopped on a plane, bus, or into a car to go check it out. He was a true seeker, willing to

put time in the trenches, experimenting with things for himself. Living by Buddha’s dictum, David put no head above his own. David is serious. He always loved to challenge the status quo and never liked being constrained by academic theories and standards. If he could test a theory, he did. As a pragmatist, he valued experiential reality over dogma and ecclesiastic doctrines. David always followed the same procedure: he’d read about something new (like Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body), intellectually comprehend it, and then participate experientially (like signing up for Monroe’s ten-day course) to see if what he had read was true. He championed the practical over the theoretical, which helps explain his preference for clinical medicine over academic science. Willing to go against popular opinion, he didn’t waste time worrying about what other people thought. Entrepreneurial and hard-working, David had a knack for identifying opportunity others didn’t see. An inborn relentless drive to achieve propelled him through jobs, medical school, and psychoanalytic training, as well as helped him build his clinic, private practice, and hospital practice. David had a strong tendency toward perfectionism, an excessivecompulsiveness born out of his morally scrupulous upbringing. He couldn’t sleep at night unless the checkbook was balanced. He was compulsively neat, keeping his things in order, knowing where each thing was kept. Being spatially driven, he could reach for a pen without actually seeing it, knowing right where the pen was supposed to be. He has had a mild form of dyslexia since childhood, confusing his 4’s with R’s, but this has never bothered him. (He says, “So what?”) With an IQ that society calls genius, David is highly analytical in his approach to life. No concept is ever too big or too daunting to explore; no valid question ever goes unexamined. David has been a true student of Socrates, examining all of life to the best of his ability. Over time, particularly through his explorations in the ‘70s, he complimented his analytical faculties by developing his emotional intelligence. David became a bookworm as soon as he learned to read, always finding time to read even when quiet time was unavailable.

When he was bartending, he read when bar traffic slowed. As a speed-reader, he says he could read an entire book on the forty-fiveminute commute to Manhattan from Long Island, and another book on his return. He grabbed a few precious minutes of reading time in the morning and few more in the evening. Reading more than one nonfiction book a day became a way of life for David, for many decades. And he took copious notes on these books as well. He has a passion for chocolate, calling himself a “chocolate freak.” He considers a double-chocolate hot fudge sundae the ultimate dessert. He prefers thousand island and bleu cheese dressings. He hates feta cheese and dislikes raspberry vinaigrette and other designer dressings. His favorite movie is Lost Horizon, a 1937 tale based on James Hilton’s novel about a man who discovers Shangri-la in the Himalayan Mountains and later risks everything to return to it. He’s more comfortable frequenting greasy-spoon-style eateries than fancy restaurants. Although he enjoyed living in New York City, he prefers cozy country atmospheres that are private and secluded, surrounded by nature—like his Rattle Bones Ranch. Cultivated by the arts, David maintained an appreciation for beauty, valuing a variety of aesthetics—architecture, art, music, and nature. He loves classical music, ‘60s rock, and opera, La Bohéme being his favorite (he’s seen that six times). While living in New York, he frequented the Metropolitan Opera even before the Lincoln Center Plaza was built, and supported the San Francisco Opera and the Phoenix Opera after moving to Sedona. David says that if he could be reborn, he would want to be the janitor in Chartres Cathedral, the most beautiful job he can imagine. Charmed by wild and domestic animals alike, David’s had his share of furry and feathery friends. As a boy in rural Wisconsin, his pets included a goat, rabbits, chickens, ducks, doves, geese, turkeys, and cats. Since that time, he’s had a donkey, pigeons, goats, llamas, sheep, a dog, and more cats. In the early ‘60s, while living alone in his Manhattan apartment, David had a kinkajou—a South American honeybear with a long tail, housed in a cage hung over his bathtub. Once the kinkajou managed to escape and discovered a crystal decanter with whiskey. David found him passed out on the floor, drunk. He later learned that

kinkajous have alcoholic tendencies (like owner, like monkey). The kinkajou recovered and a couple of months later, escaped again. David noticed that the same decanter, which hadn’t been restocked, was knocked over. The kinkajou was hoping to find whiskey again! David saw that the kinkajou was becoming listless with sad, dimlooking eyes, and decided he was lonely. David brought home a macaque monkey, a long-faced, medium-sized primate that David hung in another cage next to the kinkajou. The two monkeys seemed to hate each other, picking up anything they could grab and flinging it at the other. The kinkajou, however, began thriving with an increased * appetite and a shiny coat. As an automotive enthusiast, inspired perhaps by his father’s career as a mechanic, David has owned and maintained a variety of automobiles. He may have no recollection of what he did two decades ago or even yesterday, but he can easily recall the make, model, and year of every car he’s ever owned. His all-time favorite car was his 1946 Lincoln Continental, which he loved for its elegant, sleek, clean design. And yes, David has vices like the rest of us. He’s an ardent chain smoker, much like his mentor Bill Wilson and one of his favorite spiritual teachers, Nisargadatta Maharaj, who smoked while students asked him questions. David has smoked an average of three packs daily for over five decades, starting when he was sixteen. For many years, David grew his own tobacco, rolling his own handmade cigarettes and giving the organic tobacco as a gift to close friends. David tried to stop smoking several times in his life, even completing Jacquelyn Rogers’s eight-week Smokenders program. David believes that smoking somehow anchors him to the physical world, a consequence of the recurring sensory movement, without which he just “drifts off” due to his state of consciousness.2 They say that an addict is always an addict. When an addict stops using one drug, he often replaces it with another. Every society has drugs to alter one’s mind—some are socially acceptable while others are not. In American culture, for example, caffeine is an accepted drug. As an addict, David replaced his addiction to alcohol and psychopharmacological drugs with caffeine. His two greatest loves are espresso and Diet Pepsi. His love for espresso started

very young—both of his parents were coffee fiends. He was forced to give up coffee for a number of years because of his ulcer, but he found, paradoxically, that espresso did not bother his ulcer, so he began drinking it in enormous quantities (continuously throughout the day). David still avoids restaurant coffee, bringing his own espresso to restaurants instead. His kitchen has a special alcove designated for coffee, lined with at least three automatic coffee grinders and six espresso machines. Hot, warm, or cold, David loves espresso. His obsession with Diet Pepsi began after his sobriety in 1965, a year after the sugar-free caffeinated carbonated beverage launched. He always carried a satchel or a leather cooler bag with a strap that could hold a six-pack. David influenced his friend Randy Richmond, who became a Diet Pepsi addict as well. When the two men moved to Sedona to await the “end of the world,” they stored fifty cases of Pepsi. Even when David traveled to far-off lands like Egypt, his Diet Pepsi was close by.

David’s personality is diverse and as imperfect as the rest of humanity’s, filled with defects. He can be moody, curt, and “rough around the edges”—particularly with people he doesn’t know. The philosopher and Freudian-analyst side of David is quiet, reserved, and introspective, seemingly suffering from poor interpersonal intelligence. But he’s also a “guy’s guy,” part pirate and part HarleyDavidson biker, displaying a straightforward gruffness (sometimes rudeness) that can be unsettling. He can be down-to-earth or highly philosophical, detached from the cares of the world. His natural voice is gravelly with a very low tone—almost undecipherable, like he’s mumbling from the bottom of a barrel. Susan constantly says, “Speak up!” He has trained himself to speak in a more “normal” tone for everyday conversation. David can be very stingy. Molly Shriftman, his clinic’s administrator, once threw a book at him (A Course in Miracles, no less!) because he refused to give her a well-earned raise. Even though he lived on “Millionaire Row” in Old Brookville and was a

member of the social elite, he was frugal and thrifty, always hunting for a bargain, not wanting to part with his money. David watches the news on a continual basis to stay current on trends and politics. Until recently (when his eyesight began deteriorating), he still read books feverishly, particularly when he wanted to prepare for writing or for his public lectures. Having grown up in a strictly Christian, Midwestern, rural home during the Great Depression, he’s predominantly a conservative Republican (although he may resist this label) with ‘50s American values, favoring Fox News, commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, and conservative publications like The Weekly Standard. A traditionalist who believes in a definitive moral dividing line between right and wrong, he’s also a self-proclaimed “absolutist” who deplores relativism. The totality of his teachings are aligned with his absolutist value structure. Like his moral mentor Socrates, David shuns ornamental clothing, preferring to wear old, torn, raggedy tee-shirts rather than new ones. In the tradition of great philosophers, he prefers simple, modest attire over suits. (David believes that people in suits are less trustworthy.) Without Susan, he would happily leave the house in ripped shirts with missing buttons. David tends to get homesick, regardless of whether or not his living conditions are favorable: “I just got attached to whatever I thought was home, no matter what that home was.”3 David would continue paying rent on an old apartment after moving into a new one because he couldn’t let go of his attachment. This way, he explains, he could move back if the attachment to the old place was too much to bear. He later learned that “the sense of being at home is a specialness I projected onto every place I lived … That freed me from fearing loss of where I live because I knew that wherever I lived next would become imbued with that quality.”4 David has lived a rich life, influenced by guides like Wilson, Tiebout, Wynn, and the Twelve Steps, culminating in his spiritual conversion in 1965 and influencing his later teachings. With courage and conviction, he treated thousands of mentally ill patients, always exploring new treatments and challenging conventional practice, committed to serving his patients above all else. His investigations in

the Human Potential Movement expanded his understanding into new areas that helped him grow as a human being. Programs like Est, ACIM, and the Sedona Method shaped his thinking and challenged his model of the world. David traveled far—from Western philosophy to psychoanalysis, from alcohol and other mind-altering substances to Zen Buddhism, from the Twelve Steps to the occult, from mind technologies like Est and releasing to alternative healing practices, from the exoteric to the esoteric, to the final frontier of consciousness itself. Each new technique and principle he learned was assimilated into his growing trove of resources to help anyone who called upon him. Like Bill Wilson, David was a loner with few close friends, despite having many acquaintances and groups of people with whom he socialized. This was perhaps because of his detached nature. And David has regrets. Life took many unexpected turns. He made many mistakes, enduring more than his share of suffering and misery. But he accepts it all as the process of life. Through his hardships, David has learned, as he puts it, that “one’s own spiritual attitude and awareness—the spirit that resides within each one of us—gets us through the toughest parts of our lives, the hard lessons we need to go through.”5 David characterizes his life as arduous—intellectually, physically, financially, and even psychologically. He has lost two daughters and divorced twice. He’s endured a host of severe physical illnesses (including several hernia operations without anesthesia). David is no stranger to suffering. From his seventeen-mile paper route in rural Wisconsin through the development of his private clinic, his life’s path was vigorous and demanding. David reports that Thanksgiving and Christmas were often the only two weekdays off he had each year while running his clinic. Even in the ‘90s when he started his second career as a physician, he worked from morning to night, every weekday. After “retirement” and well into his seventies, he penned seven works, delivered over one hundred lectures and over a hundred interviews—all within eight short years. Now in his mid-eighties, David isn’t living the average retired life. Recording new audio programs, conducting radio interviews, and responding to an onslaught of weekly emails and letters, David and

Susan stay busy running Veritas Publishing. Susan is instrumental to David’s existence (if she doesn’t put food in front of her husband, he apparently forgets to eat). She performs the dual responsibility of taking care of David and their home while also serving as office manager for Veritas. With a full-and part-time staff of about six people, including office assistants, shipping staff, and a retired attorney living in David’s old office cabin, there’s no shortage of activity on the ranch. David’s affinity for animals remains strong—their home is overrun by a menagerie of animals, including a half-Australian sheepherder/halfborder collie named Kelsey, three cats saved from the local animal shelter, and a precocious parrot named Broccoli. The Happy Chickens Organic Eggery is an active chicken coup less than twenty yards from the main cabin. Loving and helpful people, a devoted staff, and beloved animals surround and support David. Now that he’s published eight books, it looks like David’s career as an author is completed. “I’ve pretty much reached the end of the subjects that I want to share with the world,” David reveals. “I feel that I’ve done what I can do as far as my contribution to society. The primary reason for my existence has been fulfilled. I’ve felt an obligation to share the things I’ve discovered with the world. I’ve fulfilled that obligation so I can leave the planet without guilt.”6 Age, naturally, has caught up with David.

When asked about his purpose in the world, David reflects, “To be that which I am to the world and explain it as clearly as possible in order to facilitate spiritual awareness and thus contribute to the relief of suffering. The energy field with which that function is accompanied does, by itself, silently contribute to the well-being of human life and diminish human suffering, which itself is a satisfaction and a completion.”7 David borrows a few elements from Advaita Hinduism through the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, but if he is a mystic, he’s probably best classified as a Christian one. After all, he emphasizes contemplation over meditation and makes heavy use of Christian terms, such as

“presence of God,” “Divine will,” and “Divine love.” He heavily emphasizes the goodness and love of God, as Christians do. Most Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Taoism (as well as esoteric Western systems like alchemy, Gnosticism, and Kabbalistic teachings) teach the integration of opposites—light and dark, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, Shakti and Shiva. But David’s system—consistent with Christian mythology— favors an ascension into the Light and an avoidance of darkness (darkness being classified as “anything below 200”). David calls his teachings Devotional Nonduality, a term he read somewhere that resonated with him. Devotional Nonduality, for David, roughly translates to “devotion to the love of truth.” The devotional path to enlightenment is generally called the pathway of the heart. It is arguably the core teaching David advocates, with a focus on surrendering life to God (for the love of God). With Devotional Nonduality, David teaches people to live life as a prayer, dedicating themselves and their actions to Divinity. David summarizes the message and role of the teacher of enlightenment, as he sees it: “The first thing the teacher does is inspire and represent what is possible. Where is the teacher? The teacher is within oneself. That drive to know God is God within oneself … and its expression here is the guru, so the guru is the drive to know truth, to know reality, to again become one with All That Is.”8

Notes

Prologue 1 Eye of the I, 267. 2 Ibid.

Chapter 1: The Beautiful, the Good, and the True 1 I, 140. 2 Private interview. 3 Dialogues on Consciousness and Spirituality, 8. 4 Ibid. 5 Power vs. Force, 292. 6 Footage from PBS project called “New Music for an Old Friend” provided by Veritas Publishing. 7 I, 140. 8 Ibid. 9 Truth vs. Falsehood, 270. 10 David R. Hawkins, “Inside the Male Psyche” (printout manuscript provided by David R. Hawkins), 154. 11 “Inside the Male Psyche,” 155. 12 “Success Is for the Few” (printout manuscript provided by David R. Hawkins), 243.

Chapter 2: Early Spiritual Experiences 1 Discovery, 20. 2 Healing and Recovery, 457. 3 Experiential Reality: The Mystic, compact discs by David R. Hawkins, presented at Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ,

December 8, 2007. 4 Private interview. 5 Healing and Recovery, 457. 6 Private interview. 7 Privatea interview. (Also, Healing and Recovery, 457.) 8 Eye, 336. 9 Dialogues, 14. 10 Discovery, 236 11 Enlightenment, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Unity Church, Atlanta, April 24, 2004. 12 Paine, Collected Writings, 686. 13 Ibid., 666. 14 I, 142. 15 Discovery, 236. 16 Manfred Wallner, phone interview with the author, October 3, 2008. 17 Serenity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ, August 2005. 18 I, 29.

Chapter 3: Second World War 1 Gault, Owen, “YMS: First In-Last Out.” 2 I, xix. 3 Private interview.

Chapter 4: Psychoanalysis 1 Enlightenment, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Unity Church, Atlanta, April 24, 2004. 2 Private interview. 3 A Unique Sedona Seminar, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ, December 2008. 4 Private interview. 5 David R. Hawkins, “Sedona Releasing Method” (printout manuscript provided by David R. Hawkins), chapter 1, 8. 6 “Inside the Male Psyche,” 167.

7 Kardiner, “A Methodical Study of Freudian Theory,” 521. 8 Ultimate Medicine, 103. 9 Frosch, John. “The New York Psychoanalytic Civil War.” 10 Dialogues, 13. 11 Ibid. 12 Private interview. 13 Person, Ethel Spector, “Obituary: Lionel Ovesey 1915-1995.” 14 Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”

Chapter 5: Early Influences 1 Bill W., My First 40 Years, 145. 2 Wilson wrote: “The thing that still irks me about all organized religion is their claim how confoundedly right all of them are.” (Cheever, My Name is Bill, 203.) 3 Language of the Heart, 268. 4 “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2, King James version. 5 Tiebout, The Collected Writings, 20. 6 Ibid., 72. 7 Serenity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ, August 2005. 8 Ibid. 9 Rado, “The Psychoanalysis of Pharmacothymia (Drug Addiction).”

Chapter 6: Hell 1 Power vs. Force, 294. 2 Consciousness: The Way out of Alcoholism and Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 19841988 (exact date unknown). 3 Correspondence to Tiebout, Sept 25, 1963. 4 Consciousness: The Contextual Transformation of Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 19841988 (exact date unknown). 5 Ibid. 6 Healing & Recovery, 406

7 “Consciousness: The Contextual Transformation of Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 19841988 (exact date unknown). 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Discovery, 21. 12 I, 365. 13 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 1, 8. 14 Chiang Chih-chi, as quoted in Huxley, Perennial Philosophy, 247. 15 Spirit of Zen, 18. 16 Private interview. 17 Spirit of Zen, 18. 18 Ibid., 119. 19 Consciousness: The Way out of Alcoholism and Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 19841988 (exact date unknown). 20 Ibid. 21 Discovery, 21. 22 I, 365-366. 23 Discovery, 21.

Chapter 7: Transformation 1 Eye, 3. 2 Healing & Recovery, 459. 3 Power vs. Force, 294. 4 Discovery, 237. 5 Hawkins (dir.), “Alcoholism in the Navajo: Problem, Recovery and the AA Program in the Navajo Language” (VHS), 1992. 6 Discovery, 237. 7 Private interview. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Eye, 12. 11 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 5, 18. 12 Hartigan, Bill W., 192.

Chapter 8: New Psychiatry 1 Kardiner, 511. 2 As quoted in Hoffer, Adventures in Psychiatry, 43. 3 Hoffer, Adventures in Psychiatry, 43. 4 Drug and Alcohol Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, “Office Series,” Sedona, AZ, 1988. 5 “The Vitamin B-3 Therapy: A Communication to AA’s Physicians,” December 1965. 6 Adams, “Orthomolecular Psychiatry,” 10. 7 Adams and Murray, Mega-vitamin Therapy, 145. 8 Hoffer, Adventures in Psychiatry, 112 9 Adams, “Orthomolecular Psychiatry,” 7. 10 Adams and Murray, Mega-vitamin Therapy, 146. 11 Wilson, ed., “The Vitamin B-3 Therapy: A Communication to AA’s Physicians,” 7. 12 Ibid., 18-19. 13 Abram Hoffer, phone interview with the author, November 16, 2008. 14 Correspondence from Hawkins to Linus Pauling, May 12, 1970.

Chapter 9: Clinical Success 1 Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 587. 2 B-3 Therapy: A Second Communication, 14. 3 Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 586. 4 “Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Niacin and Megavitamin Therapy,” Sept-Oct 1970. Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 584. 5 “A Design for very low cost community based drug and alcoholism clinics,” 15. 6 Ibid., 16. 7 Ibid., 17. 8 Ibid., 45. 9 Abram Hoffer, phone interview with the author, November 16, 2008. 10 Correspondence with Linus Pauling, June 26, 1970. 11 Untitled lecture, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Unity Church, Marin, California, September 25, 2004.

Chapter 10: The Healer and His Critics 1 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 1, 4. 2 Healing & Recovery, 300. 3 Charles Kapotes, phone interview with the author, March 23, 2010. 4 Orthomolecular Psychiatry, xix. 5 Interview with Matt Laughlin, “Consciousness & Medicine,” unified Health, Summer 2008, 7. 6 Ibid. 7 “Paradigm Blindness: Academic vs. Clinical Medicine,” 198-199. 8 Abram Hoffer, phone interview with the author, November 16, 2008. 9 Valid Teachers and Teachings, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ, November 2005. 10 Ibid. 11 “Greetings from the Founder” (30th Anniversary NNMHC pamphlet). 12 Abram Hoffer, phone interview with the author, November 16, 2008. 13 “Success,” 112. 14 “Megavitamin and Orthomolecular Therapy in Psychiatry.” (Task Force Report 7), American Psychiatric Association, 1973. 15 Ibid., 48. 16 Roth, Food/Depression Connection, x. 17 B-3 Therapy: Second Communication, 15. (Letter from Hawkins dated June 1967.) 18 Roth, The Food/Depression Connection, viii. 19 In a private interview with Dr. Hoffer, he said that in all his years of treating patients with megavitamins, he never found a single case of toxicity. See his “The War Against Vitamin Therapy.” 20 http://www.doctoryourself.com/life_hoffer.html (5/5/08) 21 Healing & Recovery, 266. 22 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 1, 5-6. 23 Private interview. 24 Valid Teachers and Teachings, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ, November

2005. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Kane, John. “Tardive Dyskinesia Circa 2006.” Am J Psychiatry. 163:1316-1318, August 2006. http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/ajp;163/8/1316(10/5/ 11) 28 “The Prevention of Tardive Dyskinesia with High Dosage Vitamins: A Study of 58,000 Patients.” 29 Nemiah, John (editor), comments from American Journal of Psychiatry, March 9, 1987. 30 Tkacz, Charles and Hawkins, David R., “A Preventive Measure for Tardive Dyskinesia,” Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Vol 10, Num 2: 119, 1981.

Chapter 11: Many Lives 1 “Success,” 230. 2 Ibid., 242. 3 Truth vs. Falsehood, 205. 4 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 10, 9. 5 “Success,” 33. 6 Ibid., 6-7. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Ibid., 18. 9 Meet with the Creator, audio cassette of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Dahn Center, date unknown. 10 “Success,” 8-9. 11 Death and Dying, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, “Office Series,” Sedona, AZ, 1988. 12 See Jung’s Synchronicity. 13 See Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters. 14 Healing and Recovery, 466-467. 15 Ibid., 465 16 Ibid.

Chapter 12: A Constant Quest

1 Private interview. 2 Ibid. 3 Transcending Obstacles, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, Sedona, AZ, September 2005. 4 Consciousness: The Contextual Transformation of Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 19841988 (exact date unknown). 5 Consciousness: The Way Out of Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, date unknown. 6 David cited this recovery rate by recall in a private interview. Hoffer confirmed this percentage in “Treatment of Alcoholism with Psychedelic Therapy” in Psychedelics, edited by Aaronson and Osmund. 7 Riley, Dick, “David Hawkins, Psychiatrist, Researcher,” Red Rock News, 1984. 8 Bartley, Werner Erhard, 62.

Chapter 13: Self-Healing 1 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 1, 1. 2 The Republic, 408e. 3 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 20, 6. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 See Bill W., Language of the Heart. 8 Healing and Recovery, 307-308. 9 Ibid., 308. 10 Sedona Method Interview, David R. Hawkins and Robert Scott, interview by Michael Toms, New Dimensions Radio, December 2, 1980. 11 Ibid. 12 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 1, 7. 13 Ibid., chapter 1, 8. 14 Ibid., chapter 2, 3. 15 Ibid., chapter 2, 8-9.

16 Ibid. 17 Sedona Method Interview, David R. Hawkins and Robert Scott, interview by Michael Toms, New Dimensions Radio, December 2, 1980. 18 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 20, 10. 19 Healing & Recovery, 306. 20 Sedona Method Interview, David R. Hawkins and Robert Scott, interview by Michael Toms, New Dimensions Radio, December 2, 1980. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 A Course in Miracles, viii. 24 Ibid. 25 Giving Up Illness through A Course in Miracles, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, June 11, 1983. 26 Resistance, interview by Nancy Lorenz & Elena Young, Beyond the Ordinary, October, 11, 2005. 27 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 18, 3. 28 Giving Up Illness through A Course in Miracles, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, June 11, 1983. 29 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 20, 11. 30 Healing & Recovery, 117. 31 Health, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, “Office Series,” Sedona, AZ, 1987. 32 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 15, 6-7. 33 Healing & Recovery, 69. 34 Private interview. 35 He calibrated this as “true” in the Power vs. Force demonstration video. 36 Private interview. 37 Giving Up Illness through A Course in Miracles, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, June 11, 1983. 38 Private interview. 39 Ibid. 40 Randy Richmond, in-person interview with the author, August 25, 2009. 41 Private interview. [my ital.]

Chapter 14: Out West 1 Randy Richmond, in-person interview with the author, August 25, 2009. 2 See Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy. 3 See http://www.lovesedona.com/01.htm (3/28/11) 4 Sedona Method Interview, David R. Hawkins and Robert Scott, interview by Michael Toms, New Dimensions Radio, December 2, 1980. 5 In the world, but not of it (compact discs). 6 Ibid. 7 Interview with Matt Laughlin, unified Health, Winter 2009, 20. 8 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 13, 3. 9 Ibid., 3-4. 10 Synopsis, part II, 13. 11 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 13, 5. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 6. 14 Randy Richmond, in-person interview with the author, August 25, 2009. 15 Dialogues, 62. 16 Sedona Method Interview, David R. Hawkins and Robert Scott, interview by Michael Toms, New Dimensions Radio, December 2, 1980. 17 Healing & Recovery, 215. 18 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 20, 15. 19 Healing & Recovery, 215. 20 “Sedona Releasing Method,” chapter 20, 15. 21 Private interview. 22 Ibid. 23 Peace, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Creative Life Center, August 8, 2009 24 Giving Up Illness through A Course in Miracles, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, June 11, 1983. 25 Synopsis, 14. 26 Healing & Recovery, 472. 27 Private interview.

28 Healing & Recovery, 278. 29 Private interview. 30 Ibid.

Chapter 15: Temptations 1 Grace, Fran. “Conversations with the Teacher: Annotated Transcript,” August 19, 2008. 2 Private interview. 3 Interview with Pamela Becker, “A Conversation with Knowingness,” Four Corners Magazine, April/May 2007, 37. 4 Power vs. Force, 296. 5 Discovery, 137. 6 Synopsis, 14. 7 “Nonduality: Consciousness Research and the Truth of the Buddha,” Indian Institute of Technology, 2004. 8 Dialogues, 41. 9 Ibid., 41-42. 10 Ibid., 42. 11 Discovery, 137. 12 “Nonduality: Consciousness Research and the Truth of the Buddha,” Indian Institute of Technology, 2004. 13 Discovery, 227. 14 Ibid., 23-24. 15 How to Tell the Truth About Anything, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2000. 16 Discovery, 227. 17 I, 258. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 259. 20 Dialogues, 42. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 43 23 Discovery, 238. 24 I, 258.

Chapter 16: New Beginnings

1 Healing & Recovery, 469. 2 A Course in Miracles, 386. 3 Healing & Recovery, 323. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 470. 6 Correspondence to Lee Iacocca, February 18, 1991, page 2. 6 Hawkins (dir.), “Alcoholism in the Navajo: Problem, Recovery and the AA Program in the Navajo Language,” 1992. 7 Private interview. 8 Dialogues, 27. 9 Private interview. 10 Susan Hawkins, in-person interview with the author, August 11, 2008. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

Chapter 17: Map of Consciousness 1 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, December 2000. 2 Lloyd, Mastering Your Emotions. 3 Drug Addiction and Alcoholism, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, 1988. 4 Discovery, 24. 5 Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, 82-83. 6 Radical Subjectivity: The “I” of the Self, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002. 7 “Templeton Prize Nomination,” 2003, 1. 8 Discovery, 198. 9 Transcending the Levels, xviii. 10 Susan Hawkins, in-person interview with author, August 20, 2008. 11 Grace, Fran. “Conversations with the Teacher: Annotated Transcript,” August 4, 2008. 12 Dialogues on Consciousness and Spirituality, 78. 13 Radical Subjectivity: The “I” of the Self, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002.

Chapter 18: A Teacher Emerges 1 “Nonduality: Consciousness Research and the Truth of the Buddha.” 2 Discovery, 228. 3 Ibid., 229. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 31. 6 Experiential Reality: The Mystic, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2007. 7 I, 278. 8 Ibid., 271. 9 “Nonduality: Consciousness Research and the Truth of the Buddha.” 10 The Clear Path to Enlightenment, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, March 8, 2008. 11 Private interview. 12 Susan Hawkins, in-person interview with author, August, 20, 2008. 13 Eye, 19. 14 Susan Hawkins, in-person interview with author, August, 20, 2008. 15 Dialogues, 82. 16 Private Interview. 17 Truth vs. Falsehood, ix. 18 Eye, 177. 19 Vision, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2005. 20 Spiritual Traps, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, September 2005. 21 In the World, Not of It (audio), 2008. 22 Private interview. 23 “Templeton Prize Nomination,” 2003, 22. 24 Private interview.

Chapter 19: A Closer Look at David R. Hawkins 1 Randy Richmond, in-person interview, August 25, 2009.

2 Private interview. 3 Alignment, Beyond the Ordinary radio interview, April 19, 2005. 4 Ibid. 5 Private interview. 6 Mazza, Gina, “Interview with David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD,” Holistic Networker, June 17, 2009. 7 Eye, 201. 8 Dialogues, 77.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, the biography was made possible by the gracious support of both David R. Hawkins and his wife Susan, who endured my numerous intrusions into their home (with over twenty-four hours of in-person and phone interviews) and who provided access to archival records, photographs, correspondence, recordings, and unpublished manuscripts. Additional gratitude goes out to all of the interviewees who kindly offered their time to share their experiences with David, including Abram Hoffer, Jerry Jampolsky, J.R. Richmond, Susan Hawkins, JinHee Moon, Manfred Walner, and Charles Kapotes. To Misty Williams for providing exemplary editorial support in the preparation of the manuscript and for continually challenging me to improve my writing. To Jessi Hoffman for her astute work in performing the substantive and copy edits. To Fran Grace for providing her transcripts of interviews she conducted with David as well as supplying the correspondence archives between David and Linus Pauling. To Kobit Beaver for generously providing a litany of archival audio recording and radio interviews conducted by David. To my parents for their continual love and support during my many untold whacky adventures. To Jenny Lee for encouraging me to embark on this six-year journey and for providing inspiration to see it through to the end. To Bolivar J. Bueno and Andrew Colyer for their friendship, support, and counsel throughout this project. Finally, to The Cult Branding Company team—especially BJ, Aaron, and Salim—for providing me with the space and time necessary to complete this work.

About the Author

Scott Jeffrey is the author of Creativity Revealed: Discovering the Source of Inspiration and is the editor of Along the Path to Enlightenment: 365 Daily Reflections from David R. Hawkins and Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self: Contemplations from the Teachings of David R. Hawkins. He lives in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York. Visit: scottjeffrey.com

* Although Hawkins labels this experience as a near-death experience (NDE) in some of his earlier writings and public talks, he later says that it was not. He went into the snow bank for protection from the harsh wind, but he says he never thought he was going to die.

* It’s unclear why David was still “strapped for cash.” Although he likely had student loans to pay off, according to his 1954 income tax returns, he earned $26,000, which is over $200,000 when adjusted for inflation. In 1955, his salary was $42,000, which is over $350,000 in today’s dollars.

* In current vernacular, it’s more appropriate to say “a person with alcoholism” than an “alcoholic,” since society has grown more conscious of the consequences of labeling people as their condition. In the 1950s through at least the 1970s, this was not the case. I’ve elected to use the vernacular of this period for consistency. No disrespect is intended.

* David couldn’t recall for certain if Wilson introduced him to Tiebout, but he said it was likely.

* Although David has said that he “left the world for nine months” and that “his colleagues urged him to return to practice,” there are no indications that he ever left his practice based on private interviews with both David and his clinic colleagues.

* Similar to my note regarding alcoholics, in the current medical vernacular, it’s more appropriate to say “a person with schizophrenia” or “a person exhibiting schizophrenic symptoms” than to label him or her “a schizophrenic.” I’ve elected to use the vernacular common in the ‘50s and ‘60s for consistency.

* This organization, however, is considered a “self-styled order” and is not acknowledged by the World Orders of Knighthood and Merit. See http://www.christusrex.org/www1/gtl/smom/selfstyled.htm (10/11/11) as well as Sainty, Guy Stair, “The Self-Styled Orders of Saint John,” 1991, located at http://www.chivalricorders.org/orders/self-styled/selfsty1.htm (9/2/10). I confirmed this with Admiral Andrew Gough of the Order of St. John via email correspondence on June 4, 2007 and with Jonathan Riley-Smith on June, 8, 2007.

* When David describes this experience in Rothmann’s Restaurant in his interview with Yun Kyung Huh, he says this was when the ego really died. (Dialogues on Consciousness and Spirituality, 41) When I questioned him about this in a private interview, however, he said that this was an error: he was confusing one spiritual experience with another.

* I’m reporting what David shared with me in a private interview, but I was unable to verify any part of this story with external sources.

* I received a copy of this scale or “map” from Randy Richmond, but was unable to ascertain the original source of it. From what I gathered from Richmond, it came out of the Theosophists’ movement in the Nineteenth Century.

† The Integrity Tone Scale is predated by L. Ron Hubbard’s/Scientology’s Emotional Tone Scale. Erhard had gone through much of Scientology’s training when he was still developing his own teaching system. Black claims that after he conceived of the Integrity Tone Scale, he saw a copy of Ruth Minshull’s How to Choose Your People (which contains Hubbard’s Emotional Tone Scale) on his coffee table. (Black, Love Me? Love Yourself, 142.) It seems likely, then, that Hubbard’s Scale was the original; however, his scale, too, was likely “borrowed” from many other sources.

* David later retitled his dissertation “Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and Calibrations of the Levels of Human Consciousness”— available for resale through Veritas Publishing, U.S.A.

* It’s possible these Korean generals had seen the Power vs. Force video where David calibrated that North Korea is stockpiling nuclear weapons but is not intending to use them. Instead, David calibrated, North Korea plans to blackmail other nations with them.

* While it may seem cruel that David kept his monkeys permanently caged, he came from an era when animal rights were unheard of.