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

Ahmed Kabil Abstract. The present article provides, through the life and teachings of a little-known German scholar of religions named Frederic Spiegelberg (1897-1994), a novel account of the unique historical and intellectual developments that converged in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1951-1968 and subsequently informed and enabled many of the defining chapters of recent global history. Separately, these developments are known as the dissemination in the West of Asian religious perspectives and practices, the San Francisco Renaissance, the rise of the hippie counterculture, the widespread blossoming of environmental awareness, and the Silicon Valley Revolution. Together, they comprise the New Myth. The New Myth: synchronous with and in reaction to the planetary spread of technology and the global experiential horizons such technology discloses, a constellation of holistic integral thought emerged in various domains in the West that was characterized above all by a spatiotemporal emphasis on the Here and Now and the realization of unity through the recognition and transcendence of polarity. The origins, afterlives, and implications of this constellation of thought are only now being discerned. The story of Spiegelbergs lifelittle known and largely forgottenfunctions as the conduit through which the New Myths historical and intellectual contours are traced and thereby rendered intelligible.

The New Myth: Frederic Spiegelberg and the Rise of a Whole Earth, 1914-1975 Ahmed Kabil Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things Ive done in my life, Steve Jobs, the founder and then-CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world told reporter John Markoff of the New York Times in 2001 as they watched the psychedelic fractals of Apples iTunes visualizer undulate across the screen. People who havent taken acid will never fully understand me.1 Jobs first psychedelic experience came in high school, and his trajectory afterward was typical. He attended Reed College, a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon that was culturally counter yet academically conservative, and where five years earlier Timothy Leary extolled the students to tune in, turn on, and drop out. As Isaacson notes, many of Reeds students took all three of those injunctions seriously, and Jobs was no exception. He still dropped in to classes, but only those that interested him, such as calligraphy.2 Outside of class, Jobs was receiving an education of an altogether different kind. The goal was to remember: LSD shows you that theres another side to the coin, and you cant remember it when it wears off, but you know it, Jobs recalled later. It reinforced my sense of what was importantcreating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.3 Fieldwork came in the form of meditation retreats, psychedelic sessions, extended stays at Robert Friedlands All-One communal apple farm, and a seven-months-long adventure in India in search of enlightenment. The India trip was motivated by Dr. Richard Alperts Be Here Now (1971), a psychedelic meditation manual in the Hindu tantric tradition whose esoteric aphorisms regaling the divine bliss of consciousness emblazoned on brown pulp and whose mysterious blue cover of a radial mandala bracketed with the injunction to Remember, Be Here Now continue to draw in curious seekers to this day. Alpert was Learys partner-in-crime at Harvard in the early 1960s when, inspired by the pioneering work of Aldous Huxley and their own experiences with psychedelics, they initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project as director David McClellands illfated attempt to establish Harvard Psychology as the paragon of the discipline. By 1963 Alpert and Leary were fired. Leary retreated to a mansion in New York to keep running experiments. Alpert went to India, found a guru in Neem Karoli Baba, and returned to America in 1967
1 2 3

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 384. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 41.

barefoot, bearded, and calling himself Baba Ram Dass with the steady gaze of conviction in his eyes. After reading Be Here Now, Jobs and fellow Reed student Daniel Kottke decided they would go to India to find Alperts guru. But by the time they reached the foothills of the Himalayas that Neem Karoli Baba called home, he was already dead. Members of his community remained, however, such as a westerner, Larry Brilliant, whom Neem Karoli Baba named Subramanyum and with whom Jobs would remain lifelong friends. Brilliant was an epidemiologist who would one day lead the successful WHO global campaign to eradicate smallpox, cofound the Seva Foundation with Baba Ram Dass (a nonprofit organization created in 1978 best known for restoring eyesight to 3 million blind people) and cofound the WELL, one of the first and most successful online communities, with technologist and futurist Stewart Brand in 1985. Be Here Now, along with Shunryu Suzukis Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (1970), formed the twin pillars of Jobs practice during these early days of spiritual exploration. Zen Mind was also a meditation manual, albeit steeped in the fierce discipline of the Zen tradition and expounded by its chief transmitter to the West in the 1960s. Where Be Here Now spoke esoterically about the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ consciousness, and Hindu deities like Shiva, Kali, and Hanuman, Zen Mind emphasized focus, discipline, simplicity, and clarity. Where Be Here Now emphasized an open surrender to the present moment, Zen Mind emphasized posture. If Be Here Now and Zen Mind were the gospels of Jobs curriculum, then Stewart Brands Whole Earth Catalog (1968) was the bible. Its worn pages accompanied him to Reed, to the commune, to India and beyond. But how to describe it? To many, it was an incomprehensible mass, a shopping catalog in the spirit of Montgomery Ward of seemingly unrelated products, disciplines, and lifestyle approaches. Brand called it Access to Tools, an attempt to generate a low maintenance high-yield self-sustaining critical information service.4 Jobs called it Google before Google existed. No cultural document from the period better captured the ethos of the counterculture, and few were more pivotal. Though the impact of works like Silent Spring (1962) and the Port Huron Statement (1962) received more attention at the time, the prescient Whole Earth Catalog can claim a stake in the founding of both modern environmentalism and the information revolution in Silicon Valley. The Catalog captured a new alchemy of environmental concern, small-scale technological enthusiasm, design research, alternative lifestyles, and business savvy that created a model of environmental advocacy5

4 5

Fred Turner, From Cyberculture to Counterculture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 78. Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2007), 2.

But to many, the Whole Earth Catalog remained a mystery that they were content never to unravel; its incomprehensibility suggested that the catalog was almost too full of ideas and subjects to come to terms with an overall synthetic view of them all.6 Almost. For the Catalog did offer a viewon its front page, in factand the seemingly unrelated contents within could only be understood by reference to it. It was a view of the whole earth seen from space, and it was under this banner that the Catalog integrated the various trends in the countercultural, academic, and technological communities of the late 1960s. It was on LSD while gazing at the San Francisco skyline on the rooftop of a North Beach apartment in February 1966 that Brand realized that seeing these images would change the world. There I sat, he later recalled, wrapped in a blanket in the chill afternoon Sun, trembling with cold and inchoate emotion, gazing at the San Francisco Skyline, waiting for my vision. He would not have to wait long:
The buildings were not parallelbecause the Earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; it closed on itself. I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecturethat people perceived the Earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of all their misbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred miles, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. But how to broadcast it?7

The vision became a question: why havent we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? Whether Brands famed campaign, where he showed up on college campuses around the country dressed in hippie freak regalia selling buttons that posed the fateful question, ultimately resulted in NASAs decision to release the photographs is a matter of debate. That these images changed the world, and we how think about it, is not. For Brand, the whole earth was an icon, one he hoped would supplant the mushroom cloud as the dominant lens through which we saw the world. As an icon, it symbolized two facets of Brands philosophy: first, a holistic, integral, microcosm-macrocosm understanding of reality expressed through cybernetic whole systems theory that sought to overcome eternally troublesome distinctions between, among other things, man and his tools, organisms and artifacts, and self and world; second, the conviction that technology, when used appropriately, can function as a tool for personal liberation. Regardless of Brands intentions, the whole earth image soon acquired a life of its own, one far removed from its initial connotations. As the most ubiquitous and widely disseminated image in human history, the whole earth has seeped into the ways we relate to the world to such a degree that our ability to discern its history and implications is obscured. Historian Benjamin Lazier, in one of the first attempts to historicize these developments, sees an epochal moment
6 7

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

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

Lazier situates the Earthrise era as a chapter in a larger story about the crisis of Western modernity, specifically concerning the displacement of the grown by the made in the modern age. It was an anxiety shared by a host of Western thinkers in the early twentieth century, who broached the issue through meditations on technology and the relationship between organisms and artifacts:
Although Germanophone in origin, this tradition has migrated across both national and disciplinary borders, with several important afterlives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. It has also bequeathed several foundational stories about the modern relation of the natural to the artifactual, now spoken, often unwittingly, by technophobes and technophiles, philosophers and laymen alike. They include, first, a story about the early modern reversal of the ancient injunction that art is to imitate nature. This story narrates a momentous change: from an ancient understanding of human artifice as indebted to the rules nature gives to man, to a modern approach for which nature is an imitation of art, and artifice a means to dominate that to which it was in thrall [] If this first story is a tale of human mastery, the secondthe modern victory of instrumental reasondiscovers a powerlessness at the heart of modern human self-assertion. Something about our attempts to master the world has gone awry, this story goes. Technical
Benjamin Lazier, Earthrise; or: The Globalization of the World Picture in The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 3, (June 2011), 605-6.
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achievement has become compulsion. Freedom from a hostile or stingy nature comes at the price of a new form of servitudeto the inexorable power of the things we make, as Max Weber once put it, and still more to the technological impulse itself9

One of the traditions foremost interpreters was Martin Heidegger (1887-1976), perhaps the twentieth centurys most important and controversial philosopher. He had spoken presciently, almost prophetically, since the 1930s about the self-perpetuating nature of the technological attitude that challenges man forth to subdue the natural world now presented to him as an object of his conquest. Heidegger traces this dominion of the technological in our lives to a confluence of developments in the West over the last three hundred years that yielded what he calls calculative thinking, reckon[ing] with conditions that are given, tak[ing] them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. This calculative thinking has set into motion the dominion of modern technology while obscuring western mans fundamental relation to Being.10

Ibid., 605.

The result is that, according to Heidegger, we are all of us today in flight from thinking. Though we do not admit it, this flight from thought is the ground for thoughtlessness. And this thoughtlessness is its own kind of thinking: calculative thinking. And it is calculative thinking that is the danger: Its peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates [] Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is (Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], 46). Both kinds of thinking, the meditative and the calculative, are needed for man. The method of meditative thinking lies in dwell[ing] on what lies close and meditat[ing] on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history (53). This meditative thinking demands effort and practice, and is in need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft. But it must also be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen, for we are plants which whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to bear fruit (47). Here we come to the crux of Heideggers sentiments on just what modern man has lost. Why, asks Heidegger, does the work of art flourish? Because the artist is able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether. A work rooted in its home ground may blossom forth into the ether (48). For Heidegger, man today has lost this rootedness. Traditional notions of home, as mediated through ones culture, creed, conventions and customs, are uprooted by the technology of this atomic age. The advances and planetary scope of technology and the calculative thinking it portends have rendered home meaningless for man. We are driven from our homeland, both in the physical sense of increased resettling in the big cities and in the spiritual sense of wandering to and fro around the ever-tightening circle of technological forces without a ground from which to rise. Such is the spirit of the age into which man is born. Its symbol is the atom bomb the harbinger of the new energies discovered and set free in nature by modern technology. The ground that enabled modern technology to do so has its roots in the Western intellectual tradition, namely, in Cartesian dualism and scientific materialism. The result is a relation of man to the world in which the whole earth appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed any longer to resist (50). Technologys planetary reach is uncanny enough, but for Heidegger the true danger lies in our unpreparedness for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age (52). As such, there is no way to stop it.

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In an interview with Der Spiegel in 1966, Heidegger singled out the photographs of the earth from space as exemplifying this process of the uprooting of man by the global spread of technology. In these very photographs one sees the displacement of the grown by the made and the dominance of calculative thinking over meditative thinking in the atomic age:
HEIDEGGER: Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I dont know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We dont need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.11

All of this is curious when we reflect on the example of Stewart Brand. Where Brand saw the whole earth icon as an iconoclastic overcoming of the mushroom cloud and the calculative thinking it symbolized, Heidegger saw it as the epitome, indeed, the culmination, of that very thinking. Brand understood the earth cybernetically as a system and all the phenomena within it as interconnected, self regulating systems. Doing so, he believed, allowed an overcoming of the eternally troublesome distinction that so assailed Heidegger, that of the natural and artifactual. The same teleological principle is in effect for organisms and artifacts, for man and his machines, this thinking goes. They are both self-organizing and self-regulating, and as systems function as components within other interconnected systems. Any further distinctions, argued Brand, were unnecessary. Mans tools were simply an extension of himself. To this Heidegger countered that technology, above all, is not a tool, and no longer has anything to do with tools.12 We are not the ones using technology. Technology is using us. When the world presents itself as a system, Heidegger contends, it is simply exemplifying the attitude of calculative thinking. That which stands before us becomes a picture, presented in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it as a system. The photographs of the earth from space mark for Heidegger the culmination calculative thinking, the moment when, as he puts it in the Discourse on Thinking, it rules the whole earth.
Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to place before himself13

Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger (1966). web.ics.purdue.edu/~other1/Heidegger%20Der%20Spiegel.pdf. Scanned from Gunther Neske & Emil Kettering (eds), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 41-66.
12 13

11

Ibid.

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

The fundamental event of the modern age, Heidegger concludes, is the conquest of the world as picture. No bigger confirmation of his claims can exist than reflecting on the transcript of the first astronauts from space as they become the first humans to see the whole earth. Just prior to taking the iconic photograph of Earthrise, they have the following exchange:
Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Heres the Earth coming up! Wow, that is pretty! Anders: Hey, dont take that, its not scheduled. Borman: (Laughter). You got a color film, Jim? Anders: Hand me that roll of color quick, will you Lovell: Oh man, thats great! Anders: Hurry. Quick Lovell: Take several of them! Here, give it to me Borman: Calm down, Lovell.14

When the interviewers of Der Spiegel ask Heidegger if theres any way to influence the seemingly inevitable onward march of global technology and the mode of being it reinforces, Heidegger answers cryptically, Only a God can save us. We are as gods, Brand proclaimed on the first page of the whole earth catalog two years later. What are we to make of these pirouettes? Does Brand overcome Heideggers distinctions between the natural and artifactual, or does he exemplify the very process of calculative thinking Heidegger disparages? How do we understand the technophilic ethos engendered by Brand that has bequeathed to us not only the Earthrise era, but technologies such as the personal computer and internet that typify both thinkers attitudes about technology? The present article broaches these questions through presenting a vignette of the life and teachings of a little-known and largely forgotten professor of comparative religions named Frederic Spiegelberg (1897-1994). Through the lens of his life and teachings, several contours of the developments outlined above are rendered intelligible. Many parts of the tale have been told before. But the whole, as history, has not. To be sure, the full breadth of the story, with all the origins, afterlives, and implications, is outside the scope of this article. The goal here, then, is to point to key moments in a tale that stretches across traditions, continents and eras. My central contention is that the path of Spiegelbergs life discloses a hitherto obscured constellation of holistic, integral thought and the network of thinkers who disseminated it. The constellation of thought and the network of its promulgation reveal a history of the spiritual

14

Poole, Earthrise, 1.

revitalization of the West, one undertaken through rediscovering and appropriating the Wests shared origins with the East. The goal was to discover a way of being suitable to the age of global technological modernity. I call the network the drive towards wholeness. I call the constellation of thought the New Myth. Synchronous with and in reaction to the planetary spread of technology and the global experiential horizons such technology discloses, a New Myth emerged in various domains in the West that was characterized above all by a spatiotemporal emphasis on the Here and Now and the realization of unity through the recognition and transcendence of polarity. These efforts culminated in a convergence of developments during the late 1960s that have informed and enabled many key developments in world history since, most notably the rise of environmentalism, personal computing and the Internet. A theologian by training and a professor of comparative religions by vocation, Spiegelberg was in a sense an ideal albeit typical scholar, occupying a stable post at Stanford University for three decades with the odd publication here and there before retiring to a quiet life in his bay front apartment overlooking Ghirardelli Square. But Spiegelberg was anything but conventional. His interests ranged far and wide and East and West. As well versed in Greek and Latin as he was in Sanskrit, Spiegelberg administered Rorschach tests to Indian yogis, dabbled in the dark and disreputable arts of alchemy and gnosticism, and exalted heresy and iconoclasm as paths to salvation. He possessed the largest collection of Tibetan ghost traps in the West, and grew convinced that an earlier encounter with the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo infused him with a divine energy he could summon and transmit in lectures. Spiegelberg warned his followers he was not a prophet, yet made prophecies nevertheless. He spoke of vast changes in store for the world, and believed his endeavors were to play a key part. And he was right. Spiegelberg stood knee-deep in the currents of East and West at the crucial moment of their confluence. His actions and ideas were pivotal in transmitting the New Myth to the West, a mode of Being that could embrace and transcend warfare, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the global spread of technology. His story tells of three overcomings; the first is an overcoming of the spiritual crisis of Interwar Europe symbolized by world war; the second is an overcoming of the mechanized outlook of postwar cold war American society symbolized by the mushroom cloud; the third is an overcoming of the widespread belief that technology was an antagonistic force in the aim of global unity, symbolized by the whole earth. The trajectory of the drive towards wholeness in brief: World War (Part I). Disillusioned intellectuals in war-ravaged Europe forsook the dominant rational approaches of the Western tradition after the collapse of the liberal ideal. They revived ancient debates long-thought settled through countenancing the heretical 9

understandings of God as expressed in gnosticism, pantheism, and alchemy, Greek understandings of man and nature as expressed by the presocratics, and Eastern understandings of the divine as expressed in Daoism, Zen Buddhism, and Indian yoga. This cross-cultural pollination yielded much fruit, such as the understanding of Being developed by Martin Heidegger that subsequently informed the philosophical trends of existentialism and postmodernism, and C.G. Jungs theories on myth, symbols, and archetypes that informed psychoanalysis and the burgeoning field of comparative religions. Mushroom Cloud (Part II). World War II forced many of these European thinkers to become refugees and flee to the United States with little but their ideas. But ideas were enough, as New York and San Francisco emerged as postwar hubs of transmission where the unique cross-cultural thinking engaged in during the interwar period could remain pursued. The center quickly shifted West, however, as the postwar Beat generation came of age. Inheritors after two world wars of a mechanized society defined largely by the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Beats were as disillusioned as their interwar counterparts, and their migratory journeys on the road across America appear to confirm Heideggers sentiments on the spiritual homelessness of man in the modern age. They eventually found a way, however, in the methods of the East (Zen Buddhism and Indian yoga) disseminated by teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area through learning centers such as Stanford University and the American Academy of Asian Studies. Though the Academy of Asian Studies was short lived, its legacy continued as the cluster of writers, artists, philosophers and poets that gathered there in the early 1950s continued to meet at institutes they themselves created in the tradition of this cross-cultural transmission, such as the Esalen Institute founded in 1961, the California Institute of Asian Studies founded in 1968, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, founded in 1975. Whole Earth (Part III). The disillusionment that marked the earlier Beats gave way in the late 1950s and early 1960s to a utopic optimism informed by the interwar-postwar combination of Zen Buddhism, Indian yoga, western psychology and alchemy. Once the early 1960s were underway and psychedelics entered the scene, a noticeable shift occurred in these thinkers attitudes towards technology. Technology has produced a chemical, wrote Allen Ginsberg at the time, which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilization leading up to that pill absurd.15 The technology against which they rebelled, long seen as a harbinger of doom and responsible for the mechanized postwar American society, was now viewed as a potential tool for liberation. Now countenancing ideas on technologys potential, the thinkers of the drive towards wholeness latched on to the insights of cybernetics theory. Emerging out of

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

15

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experiments with cold war weapons technology, cybernetics cast reality in terms of feedback, information, control, and interaction between interconnected systems. The antagonistic distinction between organisms, on the one hand, and machines, on the other, was transcended for a view of reality that saw all phenomena in terms of self-organized, self-regulating systems. From here came the notion that technology was simply a tool, an extension of the individual who himself was a tool, a whole system that was a component in the larger system of which he constituted an inextricable part. That larger system was the whole earth. From this Archimedean point emerged modern environmentalism, the rise of personal computers and the Internet. It was a vantage point that saw man and machines, nature and technology, East and West, God and self, as two sides of the same coin. Or, more appropriately, as reciprocal components of an interconnected system. Frederic Spiegelberg helps shows us how. Part I. World War (1914-1945) Born on 24 May 1897 in Hamburg-Harvestehude, Germany to liberal-minded Lutheran parents, Spiegelberg had a fairly leisurely and aristocratic upbringing. He displayed voracity for learning early on, and his father prudently allowed him an unusual amount of freedom in pursuing his interests. The defining moment of Spiegelbergs life occurred when he was a 20 year-old Latin theology student at the University of Holland. After reading some verses of Rilke, Spiegelberg went on a walk through wheat fields dotted with red and blue flowers and had his first spiritual experience. It came as the edifice of his Christian faith was crumbling under the weight of philosophy and the steady pounding of academic rational inquiry. Staring out on the fields, he perceived holiness as existing everywhere and in everything around him. Past and future receded into the present moment, and the young Spiegelbergs normal categories of ego-bound experience dissolved into an eternal bliss of the all-penetrating holiness.16 Spiegelberg called this experience the miracle of being. The moment, he wrote of the miracle of being some years later, that I get over the narrow limitations of my reasoning and feel driven instead to experience the bewildering, monstrous miracle of this our being here and now, in this moment on earth, [] When, instead of raising my eyes to nowhere beyond in order finally to hallucinate some Life Power there; if, instead of doing anything like that, I am puzzled, stimulated, enthused by the hardness of metal, by the clicking of time, by the warmth of your
16

Frederic Spiegelberg, The Religion of No-Religion (Stanford: James Ladd Delkin, 1948), 18.

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breath, by the sound of my own voice and the movement of my own fingers the moment that I touch this bewildering, surprising, unexplainable, perfectly miraculous reality itself as an astounding mystery,that is the miracle of being.17 He brought this understanding of being and the spiritual experience that informed it with him to the German Academy. He arrived there at a unique time in modern European history. The war eroded faith in the liberal idealan ideal that was supposed to deliver modern man from the dark ages and religious superstitions with its vaunting of the liberal trappings of the rule of law, a constitution, individual liberties, property rights, and a market society. Yet here we were, having marched headlong down the long bloody path from the French revolution in 1793 to the upheavals of 1848 to the aftermath of the bloodiest moment in human history. If this was the path to Enlightenment, it appeared as if the final nirvanic insight would all but confirm Hobbes eternal words spoken three centuries earlier in Leviathan that, rather than promises of life, liberty and property, mans lot was a life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The result was crisis. The liberal project, writes Benjamin Lazier in a study on theology in Interwar Europe (2007) had derived much of its impetus from a confidence in the capacity for human progress, and could not help but falter as the trust proved folly. The war in particular dealt a deathblow to a faith in the progressive moral perfection of man, and in its wake came a post-liberal ethos more at home in crisis than in calm.18 In theological circles this ethos manifested as crisis theology. Age-old debates about man, god and world were revived as many of Europes greatest thinkers broached the crisis of the West through resurrecting the heretical traditions of gnosticism and pantheism to ask whether and why God had forsaken them. Spiegelberg saw it differently. God had not forsaken us, we in our abstract rationalizing had simply forgotten that he was as near to us as the present moment. It is, Spiegelberg later wrote, the instantaneous experience of the Being of Being in all its transcendence in and as this most immediate Here and Now.19 Through identifying with the fundamental aspect of Being rather than our constricted ego, we experience a world transformed. The problem, then, was to develop modes of thought that reacquainted us with this fundamental component of our experience since forgotten in the modern age. In a set of notes from this period titled Ex Oriente Lux, Spiegelberg ruminates on whether the East can provide the ground for a spiritual revitalization of the West. Today, he writes, we realize [the divine

17 18 19

Frederic Spiegelberg, The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (London: George Allen, 1960), 53. Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), 5. Frederic Spiegelberg, Zen, Rocks, Waters (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 22.

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reality] has to come from within and beyond. Yet maybe the direction from where to get the stimulation could still be East.20 These first inklings of East-West synthesis led Spiegelberg to taking full advantage of the German academys offerings on windows to the East that at the time were rather extensive. He took courses on Indology, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit, Islam, Zen Buddhism, and the mentality of Modern Japan. Yet Spiegelberg recognized that one could not turn Eastward and assimilate its beliefs and practices wholesale, and so he found in his Western teachers similar attempts to discuss the fundamental experience of being, here and now, that he experienced in the wheat fields. Martin Heideggers thought would ultimately prove the most influential for Spiegelberg, though more so in later years than in Marburg.21 In Heidegger he found a true revolutionary, a thinker whose ideas on being (Dasein) and the here and now (hic et nunc) resonated deeply with Spiegelbergs own experience and were unlike anything he had ever read by a Western philosopher. He immediately drew connections between Heideggers insights and those of the East, despite Heideggers apparent fidelity to his Greek and German intellectual heritage. It was too obvious, to too many of his students, Spiegelberg later put it, that a certain amount of parallels were there.22 Spiegelberg started teaching at Dresden in 1927, and it was there that he met Carl Jung. Through Jungs pioneering work on myth, symbols, and the relationship between self and world, Spiegelberg found an interpretive model for comparative religions far surpassing contemporary approaches. Jung determined through his confrontations with the unconscious that the experiences disclosed to him were not random permutations of neurosis rooted in sexual trauma as his teacher Freud proposed, but rather transmitted symbols from the unconscious to the conscious mind. These symbols pointed to the perennial experience of mans attempts to

Undated Notebook in the Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0638), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. Spiegelberg in a 1976 interview: There are so many teachers who became friends and from whom I, knowingly or non-knowingly, derived much of my own thought that I will only mention still in the strict line of philosophy the most influential man. That was Martin Heidegger. Not as a lecturer, nor in personal contact, which I enjoyed in Marburg for years, but through his books. And even more so through his books which he wrote in times when I no longer knew him and met with him. In America I think I have read every line that Martin Heidegger has ever written in his life. I made it a point to search for every article that he published or that was published about him. And no other philosopher or philosophy professor seemed to me so immediately related to my own search for the essential answer to the ultimate questions of existence. This has been my interest, I might almost say my main interest throughout my life. Mukunda Mukowsky, Conversation with our Philosopher President in California Institute of Integral Studies Newsletter (June 1976), 1.
22 21

20

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

13

balance the complementary facets of consciousness and unconsciousness. The recognition, acknowledgement and control of the unconscious by the conscious is called by Jung the process of individuation, the process by which a person becomes a psychological in-dividual, that is, a separate, indivisible unity or whole, the process of coming to selfhood.23 The purpose of myth has always been to tell this story of individuation. That is, Jung found that the symbols expressed in his personal experiments and in the dreams and psychoses of his patients shared striking parallels with the myths of myriad spiritual traditions, past and present. He concluded that the symbols disclosed an archetype a symbol of the unity of conscious and unconscious and a link between the individual and the cosmos of which he is part.24 A Tibetan mandala, for example, is an archetypal symbol signifying the wholeness of the individuated self as a microcosm of the macrocosm of which the self is part. The two outlooks of Jung and Heidegger informed Spiegelbergs seminal intellectual contribution, the Religion of No Religion. He first published the Religion of No Religion as a lecture in 1938 at the London Buddhist lodge. Spiegelberg was a refugee at the time, having fled Nazi Germany in 1937 after being dismissed from Dresden for going to a conference banned by the Nazis. While in London, he serendipitously wandered into the only Zen Buddhist specialist in England, a brilliant 21-year old named Alan Watts (1915-1973). Watts would go on to become the principal popularizer of Zen Buddhism to American audiences in the 1950s and 60s, as well as the central teacher of Zen to the Beats, but that comes later. For now he was simply a prodigy hanging around the London Buddhist Lodge. He had already written a book on D.T. Suzukis interpretations on Zen Buddhism, and Spiegelberg found him an almost superhuman being, a young lad with eyes of an angel.25 Spiegelberg begins the Religion of No Religion by asserting that the spiritual experience of Being Here and Now is the ground for the forms, symbols and rituals of religions to emerge. These symbols, if they are to be successful, must point to that fundamental experience of the miracle of being as well as to the unity of man and cosmos. Inevitably, the time will come when these symbols become meaningless because they fail to adequately convey the experience to which they point. What results is an iconoclastic reaction in which the symbols are thrown off as illegitimate, because they do not accurately express the miracle of being. But the cycle is ever to repeat itself. Indeed, it is the repetition of this cycle of the change and renewal of the miracle of being that is the history of religions.

23 24 25

Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (La Salle: Open Court, 1975), 206. Ibid., 207. Letter to Rosali Spiegelberg, Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0631).

14

The process begins with the astonishment or miracle of being, in which the individual realizes that God or Being is in all and everything. Following the astonishment is a feeling of pantheistic mysticism, which means here that the limits between the ego and its opposites, such as the cosmos or God, are wiped out, and one all-combining feeling of community spreads over the entire universe.26 All symbols of God must be abolished, for they can only mean a separation from him. This pantheistic moment results in a psychological inversion where that which stands before man becomes an inner reality of what Spiegelberg calls the all penetrating holiness. Inevitably, the process repeats itself, as the astonishment of being always culminates in new attempts to reify it through names and symbols: The paradox of a religion of no-religion is produced by the fact that the human mind cannot grasp and realize any feeling or fact without giving it a name.27 The Religion of No-Religion was the fruit borne by Spiegelbergs experience as a refugee, of being forced down to the barest essentials, of holding on to only that which is wholly necessary for survival. It was at once a dialectical theology,28 a mode of being-in-the-world, and an explanatory tool for the historical trajectory of religious traditions. Spiegelberg saw it more as a passport, a belief of universal currency necessary for safe passage through the coming turbulent Atomic age an age, he feared, where many would wander futilely in search of home amidst the ruins of the worlds spiritual traditions as visions of mushroom clouds dotted the skies and obscured the divine light. We are rapidly moving away from traditions and former ways of life that, in a few years, will be no more than distant memories, he wrote. The sudden developments of technology are changing our life beyond recognition. We are passing into an era of unknown experiences, call it the atomic age, or what you will. All that we can carry with us from the past is essential, the things without which men cannot live. And to cross the border safely, we will need some sort of passport that all men will recognize, some belief that has a universal currency. 29 And so Spiegelberg made his way to America, bouncing around on the East Coast for a few years before winding up at Stanford University in 1941. He carried little with him but his own ideas. But as we shall soon see, that was more than enough.

26 27 28

Spiegelberg, The Religion of No-Religion, 22. Ibid., 55.

Dialectical theology is a theological approach based in Protestantism that covers a range of orientations. The transcendence and revelation of God is typically emphasized, as it was by Spiegelbergs teacher and the bestknown crisis theologian, Karl Barth. As we shall see, Spiegelbergs understandings of Barth, as well as that of his other teacher and good friend, the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, both typify and confound the general distinctions of dialectical theology.
29

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

15

Part II. Mushroom Cloud (1945-1958) O, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? And what did you see, my darling young one? In 1952 an eight-year old American child named Frederick Moore, Jr. witnessed what countless of his generation coming of age in the postwar West only imagined: the aftermath of the mushroom cloud. Moores family lived in Tokyo, his father stationed there as part of the occupation force. The young Moore saw the ravages of radiation sickness in children and dogs that wandered like walking dead in the nuclear-charred ruins of former cities. 30 For Moore, the experience informed a pacifism so strong that he would single-handedly change the world time and time again throughout his life through the sheer force of his conviction. Yet hardly anyone knows his name. He remains the unsung hero of the antiwar protests of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution we still a part of today. In 1959 he attended Berkeley but refused to partake in the mandatory ROTC program. Given the ultimatum that he could either take the class or leave the school, the young Fred Moore set the standard for antiwar protest on college campuses by setting up a table outside of Sproul Hall and declaring that he was going on a seven-day fast to protest mandatory ROTC. A letter Moore wrote at the time to the US Attorney General, William P. Moore, encapsulates his anti-war beliefs:
Dear Sir: This letter is to inform you that I, Frederick Lawrence Moore, Jr., will not register for the draft. Due to my religious beliefs I cannot comply with any law that opposes them. I follow a Higher Law. A law called LOVE. I am opposed to war, and I will not participate in killing, whether directly or indirectly. I will neither serve, nor support, any organization or action in which I do not believe. My services are to all mankind. Sincerely, Frederick L. Moore, Jr.31

A hard rains gonna fall means somethings gonna happen, said Bob Dylan in 1963. Frederick L. Moore made sure of that. *** At Stanford Spiegelberg grew entranced by the writings of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian freedom fighter and saint whose philosophy is known as integral yoga.32 He traveled in India in
30 31 32

John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (New York: Penguin, 2005), 61. Ibid., 62-3.

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

16

1949 on a Rockefeller Grant where he received darshan from Sri Aurobindo.33 Upon his return, he founded the American Academy of Asian Studies, a center of cross-cultural dissemination the likes of which had never been seen before. There was at that time not yet any competition in the way of live Asian studies in America, not even in the Bay Area, reflected Spiegelberg in a 1976 interview. We did not have at that time any ashrams or Zen monasteries, of which we have so many today.34 Indeed, in an article for the New York Times (written in 1950, the year before the Academys founding) reviewing D.T. Suzukis Essays in Zen Buddhism, Gerald Heard (18891971) reacts positively to the work and the promise of Zen Buddhism for American society, yet notes the unsuccessful reception the Eastern faiths typically elicit out of American audiences. He attributes the lukewarm response, not pejoratively I might add, to the West having outgrown its medieval regard for contemplation as a high or even respectable vocation.35 Heard, the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, studied history and theology at Cambridge and was later a science commentator for the BBC. He forged a lifelong friendship in England with Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), and emigrated with him to Hollywood, California in 1937. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy based on the Upanishads that stresses the divinity of human nature and experience. Huxley, like Heard, would become a Vedanta initiate.36 In the article, Heard singles out the Eastern interpretations offered by Alan Watts, now a 36 year-old Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern, as having roused little more than a faint
realityIt is important to note that, according to Sri Aurobindo, a true harmonization of the totality of human experience is not possible through mere criticism of the categories of common sense and science, or through logico-empirical analysis of different types of human judgment, or through conceptual formulation of onesided spiritual experience. Such harmonization can adequately be achieved only on the basis of integral spiritual realization, which means immediate experience of reality in its fullness of content and rich diversity of aspect. Haridas Chaudhuri, The Integralism of Sri Aurobindo in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1953), 131-2. Kripal defines darshan as a kind of sacramental seeing in which the essence of the god or guru is transmitted into the viewer through the mystical medium of sight. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No-Religion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 55.
34 35 36 33

Mukowsky, 5. Gerald Heard, On Learning From Buddha in The New York Times, 4 June 1950.

Shortly after his initiation into Vedanta, Huxley released the Perennial Philosophy (1945), which he defined as: the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.36 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1945), vii.

17

esthetic curiosity.37 Watts left Europe in 1938 not long after Spiegelberg and went to New York to study Zen. Dissatisfied with his Zen teacher yet still committed to spiritual pursuits, Watts decided to enter the priesthood in 1945 and moved to Evanston, Illinois. And in the priesthood he may well have stayed had not a fortuitous string of events taken place in short succession in 1950. The first was an extramarital affair; the second, his young wife annulling their marriage; the third, getting kicked out of the ministry; the last, a letter he received from Frederic Spiegelberg. Spiegelberg was starting a graduate institute to open in 1951 geared towards a wide-scale spiritual transformation of the consciousness of the West through the teachings of psychology, Zen Buddhism, and the integral ideas of Sri Aurobindo. Would he like to join him in San Francisco? How convenient. Happily, Alan Watts replied, Circumstances are so arranged at present that I could come out to San Francisco this winter. Spiegelberg then set about calling a first-rate man from Aurobindos ashram to join him and spread Aurobindos message to the West. After some correspondence, the Bengali integral philosopher Haridas Chaudhuri was recommended, who at the time was the head of the Philosophy Department at Krishnagar College in Bengal. The question was brought to Sri Aurobindo himself, Spiegelberg recalled. He approved of Chaudhuris coming with us with the word Acha (Of course!).38 Two months later, in December of 1950, Sri Aurobindo died. In his letter asking for Chaudhuri to join him at the Academy, Spiegelberg wrote that Aurobindo is the guiding light of this earth and the prophet of our age. I believe that the last most important contribution that Sri Aurobindo made before passing was to send you here.39 And just like that, the man who would become the most popular Western interpreter of Zen Buddhism (in Watts) and Sri Aurobindos vision (through Chaudhuri) were brought to San Francisco. And here Watts and Chaudhuri would remain until their deaths in 1973 and 1975, respectively. The Academy was a brazen attempt to expand the consciousness of the West so that the world did not end in a nuclear holocaust. Indeed, there were no illusions among these early teachers of the true purpose of the Academy. Here, the mission statement from the initial brochure announcing the program:

37 38

Ibid.

David Ulansey, The American Academy of Asian Studies: A History, California Institute of Integral Studies Archives, CIIS Library, San Francisco, Calif., 4.
39

Ibid.

18

The development of human consciousness has called at many times during history for a special effort of men to realize and bring down to earth the visions of their spiritual leaders. Today we are well aware of the necessity of unified mankind. To help the growth of this coming reality is the object of numberless associations who thus fight on all sides the forces of darkness and retrogression. It is the conviction of the founders of this Institute that a merging of the highest values of Western and Eastern civilizations will establish the decisive foundation for the next upward movement of the evolving human mind and society.40

The institute had all the expected struggles, namely, difficulties in acquiring funding and credibility. Clearly, recalled Watts in 1971, we were just another California cult trying to assume the mask of a respectable educational institution. But then only twenty years ago it was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to human beings with the normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable. Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat. This was very largely the subject of discussion at the weekly colloquium of the Academys faculty, at which Spiegelberg was the invariably provocative moderator, and which became an event increasingly attractive to San Francisco artists and intellectuals.41 The Academy functioned as a hub around which ideas on Being influenced by the East and the Interwar scene were promulgated to the Beat Generation. Like their interwar counterparts, the postwar Beats were disillusioned by the mechanized ideals of cold war American society, the valueless abyss of modern life.42 After World War II, Allen Ginsberg recalled, there was a definitive shrinkage of sensation, of sensory experience, and a definite mechanical disorder of mentality that led to the cold war.the desensitization had begun, the compartmentalization of the mind and heart, the cutting off of the head from the rest of the body, the robotization of mentality.43 And like Frederic Spiegelberg, they were after the ragged ecstatic joy of pure being,44 as they put it, in which existence itself was God. Through the American academy of Asian studies, the Beats saw that the East could them provide paths to the experiences they sought. Heres Michael Murphy, a student of Spiegelbergs at Stanford and the Academy whose life was changed by Spiegelbergs courses on Sri Aurobindo, on what the Academy was like in the early days:
40 41 42 43 44

AAAS Program Announcement, Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0631). Alan Watts, In My Own Way, (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 286-7. John Clellon Holmes, This is the Beat Generation in The New York Times (16 November 1952), 10. Conners, White Hand Society, 62. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking, 1957), 195.

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You had to get there about an hour early to get into the room, and I remember that there were a group of us then from down at Stanford. We used to have dinner at the La Fontere up here about five in the afternoon, and there was this enormous excitement about coming in to the old Academy at First and Sansome Street down south, and then over on Broadway, to get there early enough to sit in on those first meetings. And the electricity then was really enormous. There were some hundreds of students who started to gather around that Academy. In those early days there were a number of poets who contributed later to the San Francisco Renaissance: Gary Snyder used to come to those colloquia, and occasionally Allen Ginsberg. Most people forget this, but a considerable amount of the inspiration for the poetry of the Beat Generation came right through that Academy of Asian Studies. Michael McClure and David Meltzer, Phil Whalen, Ginsberg and Snyder...I would say all of them either directly or indirectly were influenced by Haridas Chaudhuri, Alan Watts and Frederic Spiegelberg, either directly or indirectly, and some of them would be in the audiences of those early colloquia and in those classes.45

The institute collapsed by the mid 1950s but its progeny live on today. Michael Murphy established the Esalen Institute in 1962 in the spirit of the American Academy, Spiegelbergs Religion of No Religion, and Aldous Huxleys ideas on human potential; the California Institute of Asian Studies was established by Spiegelbergs colleague Haridas Chaudhuri in 1968; and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where Spiegelberg served on the Board of Advisers, was founded by his colleagues and friends Robert Frager, Jim Fadiman and David J. Hall in 1975. Assessing its legacy shortly before his death in 1973, Alan Watts wrote:
The American Academy of Asian Studies was one of the principal roots of what later came to be known, in the early sixties, as the San Francisco Renaissance, of which one must say, like Saint Augustine when asked about the nature of time, "I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don't." I am too close to what has happened to see it in proper perspective. I know only that between, say, 1958 and 1970 a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting, religion, communications techniques in radio, television, and cinema, dancing, theater, and general life-style swept out of this city and its environs to affect America and the whole world.46

Spiegelberg maintained his post at Stanford for the short duration of the American Academy of Asian Studies, where he could oscillate between the roles of guru and professor depending on the situation. If an impressed student in one of his introductory courses to comparative religions at Stanford stayed after class asking for more, Spiegelberg directed him or her to North Beach. Such was the case in 1956 when a young student from his comparative religions class approached him asking where he could find people who thought this way. Oh, well youll find none of that in Stanford, Spiegelberg chuckled. When I want the news, I dont look for it in the paper, he added. I go to the poets. What do you mean, the student asked. North Beach, Spiegelberg said after a pause. Go to North Beach.

45 46

Ulansey, 6-7. Watts, In My Own Way, 284.

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And with that, young Stewart Brand made his way to North Beach. And in a sense, he never left.47

Part III. Whole Earth (1958-1975) How to describe those strange things that happened in the decade we call the sixties? To say nothing of the unprecedented global upheavals, wars, crises, movements, and protests, how to describe the sequence of events that led to the technologies of the military industrial complex merging with the ideas of the counterculture to give us computers and the internet? How to describe the shift in the attitude towards the boogeyman of technology, long-seen as an instrument of government control and worldwide uprooting and annihilation, now seen as a tool of personal liberation and global unity? How do we account for the role of psychedelics in catalyzing this shift? How do we account for the fact that, for the thinkers of the drive towards wholeness in the 1960s, technology, systems theory, integral yoga, zen Buddhism, and psychedelic experiences all came to be seen as methods to bring about a consciousness of the miracle of this, our being here and now? A Liberation of Earth and Being Through Technology In an essay based on a lecture given on 21 August 1958, Frederic Spiegelberg used the example of the Beats to compare Martin Heideggers thought with Sri Aurobindos. Speaking on the occasion of Sri Aurobindos 100th birthday, Spiegelbergs goal was to show that the ideas of Aurobindo and Heidegger were compatible and manifested in the example of the Beat Generation. Time was of the essence, for the Beatniks of North Beach, as Spiegelberg called them, were no longer a secret now that Jack Kerouacs On the Road (written in two weeks in April 1951 but left unpublished until 1957) was a mainstream cultural phenomenon. In the essay, he groups Heidegger and the beatniks together by virtue of their shared central message: an emphasis on the here and now and directly experiencing the present moment. Both Heidegger and the Beats hold that the rational mind is overemphasized, and here Spiegelberg feels they share the outlook of Vedanta and Aurobindo particularly. Spiegelberg also wanted to use the examples of Aurobindo and the Beats to broach Heideggers new ideas on technology. Indeed, since the publication of Being and Time in 1927, Heideggers writings took an increasingly mystical turn as he devoted more and more of his attention to what he called the question concerning technology. As he had before, Spiegelberg
47

Email correspondence with Stewart Brand, 13 December 2010.

21

drew attention to the zen-like quality of Heideggers message, yet also found in him a global vision that strikingly called to mind Aurobindo. Heidegger had not yet been translated to English, but Spiegelberg nevertheless engaged in a detailed exposition on the congruence of thought between Aurobindo, Heidegger, and the Beats using his own translations of Heideggers work. In his essays in The Question Concerning Technology (1977), Heidegger mysteriously speaks of a saving power in the essence of the danger of technology, and associates this saving power with the coming to presence of a god. But where danger is, writes Heidegger quoting the poet Holderlin, grows the saving power also.48 Only when we can reach the insight of how technology enframes us, how technology challenges us forth to order the world as standingreserve, do we see how the truth of Being is hidden from us.49 It is only once we can discern that all mere willing and doing in the mode of ordering steadfastly persists in injurious neglect [of Being] that we can give utterance to insight into that which is. When we give utterance into that which is, it is the constellation of Being that is uttering itself to us.50 Will we understand this insight, asks Heidegger. Will we, he asks, correspond to that insight, through a looking that looks into the essence of technology and becomes aware of Being itself within it?51 Esoteric remarks, to be sure. Spiegelberg understood Heideggers ideas on the saving power as countenancing technology as a tool to achieve Beings task of liberating earth. In this Heidegger strongly echoes Aurobindos ideas on global unity. Comparing the two, Spiegelberg believes they both share the same understanding of Dasein (being-there). Spiegelberg feels translating this term to Being in English is inaccurate. It is, rather, the be-power itself.52 In Aurobindos schema, the equivalent term would be sat rather than bhava. It is the essence and key word of Heideggers existentialism, Spiegelberg writes. Everything is Sein. And there cannot be anything that is not ultimately a part of that all-comprising Beingness. Even becoming is an expression of Being. This statement can be found in Aurobindo.53 The limited personal subjectivity of the ego veils man from understanding the divine as Aurobindos gnostic being, which is none other than the god Heidegger speaks of. As such, the worlds spiritual traditions have declined and the miracle of being is forgotten because of mans rationality. Whether the
48 49 50 51 52 53

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 28. Ibid., 48. Ibid. Ibid., 49. Spiegelberg, Sri Aurobindo and Existentialism in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, 53. Ibid., 53

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god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men and even less by the theological aspirations of philosophy and natural science, writes Heidegger. Whether or not God is God comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being.54 For both Heidegger and Aurobindo, writes Spiegelberg, there is only one hope. Here, they both quote Nietzsches idea of the Superman. When it comes to testify to a mentality that is greater than the degenerated mentality in which we find ourselves as a whole in this century, superman is called for, and to characterize him we must say he will have true existentialist mentality, which looks for the direct experience rather than for the taming of reality by our mentality. This superman will have to be more daring than any man who ever walked. And therefore, because he is more daring, he will be able to say more.55 For too long we have cried for individual salvation, thinking only of ourselves in the constricted terms of our egos, when our task has been otherwise. What is the task then, if it is not man? asks Spiegelberg. Aurobindo and Heidegger have the same answer: the earth. For both Heidegger and Aurobindo, Earth needs man to liberate her, maybe even Being itself. Dasein needs man.56 Heidegger and Aurobindo agree that because all is sein, because all is sat-chit-ananda, nothing is to be thrown out or rejected. Everything has meaning as expressions of Dasein. Spiegelberg then draws a link between the Vedanta understanding of the divine play of Brahman, lila, where the divine plays hide and seek by searching and finding itself through us (coming to consciousness of itself), with Heideggers notions that Dasein Being itself comes to self consciousness in our own longing.57 We do not need to escape technology to achieve Beings task of liberating earth, Spiegelberg says of Heidegger.
The world of science and technique does not at all preclude a jump beyond itself, says Heidegger. We do not have to get away from civilization, to do away with all our gadgets and with the alltoo-fast progress of technique and science. Rather, the more you go into science, the more you talk to the great men of science, the more you meet an awareness of the mystery, the more it becomes possible to take science itself as a jumping board. It does not any more today seem that science would drive us away from the opening of the greater gates toward higher realization. Aurobindo in his Savitri has said that many times. He agrees completely with the existentialist message as Heidegger presents it.58

54 55 56 57 58

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 49. Spiegelberg, 54. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 58-9.

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In the essay, Spiegelberg provides his own translation of Heideggers quote of the poet Holderlin concerning Beings task of liberating earth:
Earth. It not this what you long for? To be resurrected invisibly in us. Is it not your dream one day to become invisible? Earth invisible. What, if not transformation Would be your urgent task? Earth O Beloved One, I will.59

The Iconoclasm of Stewart Brand Like Spiegelbergs teacher Martin Heidegger, Stewart Brand remains keen on asserting that hes not a religious man. Spiegelbergs course was Brands first exposure to Eastern idea systems. He cured me of religion, Brand said later. In looking at Brands notes from his course with Frederic Spiegelberg, he appears most struck by the paradox of unity within polarity and the various means to express that paradox, such as the symbol of the mandala and the Daoist/Buddhist notions yin and yang, and dao. He quotes extensively from Carl Jung and Richard Wilhelms Secret of the Golden Flower (1931). The boxed exclamation points after the quoted passages appear to register the shock of influence. The trajectory of his later life and projects confirms it. This initial encounter with Eastern thought brought about by Spiegelberg provided Brand with the blueprint of a constellation of thought whose claims of a divine unity of immanence and transcendence he would confirm experientially through the use of psychedelic drugs and encode scientifically through systems theory and cybernetics. A noteworthy quote speaks of Jungs notion of outgrowing, whereby an individual may outgrow an insoluble problem through raisingthe level of consciousness. From a wide view, the insoluble problem lose[es] its urgency.60 For Jung, [t]he greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, because they express the

59 60

Ibid., 55.

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

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necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.61 Brand would seize upon this notion of the polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. Though here applied to the individual, the idea applies in the Golden Flower to the cosmos at large:
[The philosophy of The Secret of the Golden Flower] is built on the premise that the cosmos and man, in the last analysis, obey the same law; that man is a microcosm and is not separated from the macrocosm by any fixed barriers. The very same laws rule for the one as for the other, and from the one a way leads into the other. The psyche and the cosmos are to each other like the inner world and the outer world. Therefore man participates by nature in all cosmic events, and is inwardly as well as outwardly interwoven with them.62

Hence, the polarity inherent in the self-regulating system of man the individual is the same as that of the self-regulating system of the world at large. If this sounds familiar, its because its a hallmark insight of cybernetics and systems theorythe very approach Brand would later vaunt in his Whole Earth Catalog. Here the cybernetic insight is expressed almost verbatim, but in a spiritual context. This spiritual expression of the polarity in every self-regulating system stands as Brands earliest known exposure to systems theory.63 After Stanford, Brand spent two years as a parachutist in the army. In December of 1962 he signed up for an LSD session, his first psychedelic experience, with the International

61 62 63

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

A word on the history of this field is in order. In the early 20th century, the sciences came to grapple with the breakthroughs in quantum mechanics that tore asunder the Classical Newtonian paradigm of physical processes. From out of the wreckage emerged the field of thermodynamics unscathed, and with it the principles that gave birth to the whole system models of the ecosystem and biosphere. The whole system model eschews the traditional boundaries between organic and inorganic entities by centering them within the supraentity of the system, of which they are mutually formative. According to this line of thought, theres no distinction between organism and artifice because both are self-organized and self-regulating, reflecting a certain systemic wholeness. Out of whole systems theory emerged cybernetics in the postwar era, and through its study of information, communication, and feedback reframed the ecosystem conceptual tool in technoscientific terms. By focusing on behavior rather than structure, cybernetics founder Norbert Weiner placed organisms and self-directed machines in the same order on the basis of the purposeful behavior that both share.63 Weiner saw in information feedback the mechanism by which entities fight entropy. Systems use information feedback to maintain dynamic equilibrium, or homeostasis. Cybernetics demonstrated the potential for systems to go awry by way of positive feedback loops. The techno-scientific discourse of cybernetics reframed the debates of various fields in terms of information feedback. In the sciences, cybernetics met with ecosystem theory and redefined organisms as self-regulating machines. When applied to social systems, we begin to see the far-reaching implications of positive feedback: unless variables within systems respond to one another through communication, feedback, and circular causality within the set limits, system failure may result in the form of, say, an escalating nuclear arms race. See William Harold Bryant, Whole System, Whole Earth (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2006), 59.

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Federation of Advanced Study, an organization with ties to the Stanford Research Institute and Douglas Engelbarts Augmentation Research Center. SRI and its wing the ARC transitioned over the 1950s and 60s from nodes of defense oriented military technology sponsored by the Defense Departments Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) into centers of cybernetic exploration of networking and communications. Human-machine collaboration became a vision that would eventually yield the Internet and personal computer. Voices in the community like Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, and Joseph C.R. Licklider saw a future of unprecedented possibility. Heres Fred Turner:
Licklider, like Bush and Engelbart, envisioned the computer becoming a communications device; along with the user and as part of a whole information system, it might, properly deployed, be of use to humanity as a whole. Man-computer symbiosis, he suggested, should produce intellectually the most creative and exciting [period] in the history of mankind.64

Engelbart, for his part, saw the individual and the computer, like the group and the computer system, as complementary elements in a larger information systema system that would use cybernetic processes of communication and control to facilitate not only better office communication, but even the evolution of human beings.65 Brand and Spiegelberg each collaborated with SRI and ARC separately over the course of the 1960s to participate in bringing about this vision. Spiegelbergs friendship with Stanford psychologist Jim Fadiman and SRI Research Engineer David J. Hall led to consulting opportunities and eventually to Spiegelberg serving on the Board of Advisors for their Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in the 1970s. Brand, for his part, hung out often with the community, and was videographer for Douglas Engelbarts infamous Mother of All Demos event in 1968 that showed off the framework of tools that would one day become the personal computer. But that comes later. The man in charge of administering LSD to Brand in December of 1962 was Jim Fadiman, a Stanford psychologist and friend and colleague of Spiegelbergs who later worked at ARC with Engelbart as the division explored networked computing.66 Fadiman would remain a lifelong proponent of psychedelic use. His first experience came when his former undergraduate advisor at Harvard, none other than Dr. Richard Alpert, dosed him as Alpert, Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley were on their way to a Copenhagen conference to

64 65 66

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 109. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 61.

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speak of the promise of psychedelics in clinical psychology. The greatest thing in the world has happened to me, and I want to share it with you, Alpert told his former student.67 Brands insights after this initial psychedelic experience are typical. Here, from a journal entry two months after his first dose:
Through open, innocent, active living in the present a powerful efficiency exists. Much occurs and is learned from and becomes wisdom which informs subsequent happening. But it is always in terms of the present, what is going on. Now, expand the present. Make it all time, and all time it. Immediately the present loses its anxiety and becomes comfortable, not eternally vanishing, but eternal. In eternity ambition is meaningless, and failing is insignificant. So is succeeding. Doing is all. Being. Being. Is. All. Is. Being.68

Being is all, and all is being. Yes, it certainly seemed that drugs like LSD and psilocybin had the potential to catalyze the consciousness that the figures of the drive towards wholeness sought. The early optimism for psychedelic use among these thinkers is striking, and the benefit of historical hindsight allows us to see it as nave. But hindsight should not lead to oversight, and the simple fact remains that for the thinkers of the drive towards wholeness psychedelic use was pivotal, both for engendering an awareness they previously reached through other methods and for bringing about a marked change in their attitude towards technology.69 As Ginsberg put it, Technology has synthesized a chemical which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilization leading up to that pill absurd.70 The shift is encapsulated in the trajectory of three government projects. The Cold War mentality, the epitome of the mechanized calculative thinking Heidegger so disparaged, led to
67 68 69

Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 49. Journal entry (20 February 1963), Papers of Stewart Brand (M1237).

Heres Ken Kesey on the impact of the psychedelic experience for those growing up in coldwar America: The first drug trips were, for must of us, shell-shattering ordeals that left us blinking kneedeep in the racked crusts of our pie-in-the-sky personalities. Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! S we looked, and were looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining knightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again Fred Turner, From Cyberculture to Counterculture, 60-1.
70

Conners, White Hand Society.

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projects in the 1950s like the CIAs MK-ULTRA program (which saw LSD as a potential weapon for mind control in the Cold War), the development of the Stanford Research Institute as a military think tank, and the advent of cybernetics as a means of bolstering defense-oriented military technologies. But where the danger is, grows the saving power also. Somehow, in the apotheosis of the cold war attempt to control came the primal cry to be free. The technology driving the cold war ever onward to increasing mechanization was the very technology that led the way out. LSD, cybernetic systems theory, and the technologies that became the Internet and personal computer were embraced as tools for global and personal integration and unity. Will we see the lightning-flash of Being in the essence of technology, asked Heidegger. Will we correspond to that insight, through a looking that looks into the essence of technology and becomes aware of Being itself within it? After his first psychedelic experience, Brand immersed himself in techno-mystical San Francisco communities like USCO and Ken Keseys Merry Pranksters. Kesey was a subject in the MK-ULTRA experiments in 1961 and was dosed with LSD, psilocybin, and IT-290. He liked what he saw, procured a stash for himself and his buddies, and started a burgeoning Bay Area artistic scene frequented by the likes of Richard Alpert, Jerry Garcia, and Page Browning.71 This eventually transformed into the Merry Pranksters, and Brand soon wrote Kesey and became a key member. The Merry Pranksters famed journey across America in a psychedelic bus in 1964 captures the celebratory albeit nave techno-utopic psychedelic optimism of the period well. It also symbolized a transition, a passing of the torch from the Beat Generation towell, to whatever these folks imagined themselves to be. Jack Kerouac, the so-called King of the Beatniks, would have none of it when Ken Kesey and the rowdy bunch of Pranksters finally made it to New York and showed up to a Madison Avenue apartment party in November 1964. His best friend, and the hero On the Road, Neal Cassady, served as the Pranksters bus driver on their journey further as they careened ever-precariously around the corners of too far. This would be the last time the two would see one another. Cassady fully embraced the Prankster way, as did Allen Ginsberg, who also showed up that night. Most at the party were looking for an endorsement, tacit or otherwise, from Kerouac that the Pranksters marked the natural evolution of the Beats.72 But Kerouac said no. He spent the evening on a couch, getting increasingly drunk and repeatedly denying the proffered acid tabs. By now he was a broken man, his good looks (Dali

71 72

Ibid., 61.

David Sandison, Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography (Chicago: Octopus Publishing Group, 1999) 14950.

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once called him the most beautiful man he had ever seen) ruined by the ravages of an alcoholism so severe it would soon claim his life five years later at 47 when the blood that started pouring from his mouth simply would not stop, even after 26 transfusions. No, Kerouac did not intend to start this revolution. And he would not endorse it now. Two years earlier Ginsberg had finally convinced Kerouac to try LSD with Timothy Leary. Leary and Ginsberg were on a quest to turn on as many creative people as possible. Kerouac, as a Beat Buddhist Catholic and one of his generations most talented writers, was the holy grail. Dr. Leary, on acid as well for his psychedelic session with Kerouac, must have been surprised when he started having his first bad trip. Perhaps up to that point he did not think such a thing was possible. But Kerouac proved to him undeniably that it was. He stood up and shouted at Leary (who was also raised a Catholic): Can your drugs absolve the mortal and venial sins which our beloved savior, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, came down and sacrificed his life upon the cross to wash away!? Leary was spooked. Later, Ginsberg asked Kerouac about his trip. Walking on water wasnt made in a day, he replied. As David Sandison notes, that response encapsulates Jacks later open distaste of the hippie movement and its lazy assumption (largely inspired by the pronouncements of Leary and his acolytes) that enlightenment could be achieved overnight through chemicals.73 It was advice the counterculture would have done well to heed. The cluster of thinkers comprising the drive towards wholeness eventually realized that psychedelics did not provide ersatz enlightenment so much as a temporary one. What goes up, must come down and sometimes very hard. The cognitive framework of the ego, transcended through the psychedelic experience, always seemed to return once the trip ended. If the disparity between ones everyday experience of reality through the ego versus ones experience of reality on psychedelics was too great, the reintegration post-psychedelic session could be bumpy. Some never reintegrated at all. But by the time these beatnik psychonauts realized that, to quote Alan Watts, one should hang up the phone once the message is received, it was too late. The demon scourge of LSD was already loosed upon the American culture, brought about in no small part by the efforts of the thinkers of the drive towards wholeness. For his part, Brand remained optimistic that coupled with the right reintegrative frameworks, psychedelics offered much promise, and at the very least yielded interesting projects. Over the 1960s he would become a central node on the drive towards wholeness as he coordinated projects between the technological, academic, and spiritual wings of the counterculture. He interfaced perfectly with Beats and Hippies, scientists and mystics. His projects during this period include the America Needs Indians Campaign and the Trips Festival.
73

Ibid., 148.

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And then, in March 1966, on a North Beach rooftop, Brand received his vision. *** We do not know if Frederic Spiegelberg ever tripped. He cannot claim, like his friend Alan Watts, essays on the congruence between contemporary psychedelic use and ancient alchemy, or between the insights of LSD and cybernetics. But Spiegelberg participated in this burgeoning techno-utopic cyberdelic scene in his own way, making his unique contributions to Beings need of man to liberate earth through technology. Perhaps the most interesting is a project he collaborated on with the Stanford Research Institute in 1969. Titled Computer Processing and Bibliography of Literature Related to Voluntary Improvement of Individual Performance (1969), the project had as its aim the production of a global network of research information exchange concerning literature on yoga, meditation, physiological feedback training, altered states of consciousness, and other subjects related to voluntary improvement of individual performance.74 As a consultant to the project along with Haridas Chaudhuri, Spiegelberg was tasked with providing direction in assessing a literature that was global, ancient, immense and poorly classified. The idea was to use the latest technologies of SRI and SRIs Augmentation Research Center both to create and catalogue the information service as well as to perform a series of experiments relating to that literature. SRI had just become one of the first four nodes on ARPANET, the network that became the Internet. Why yoga and meditation? A few reasons. The first was, simply, to catalyze a mode of being suitable to the modern technological age, one that could lead to the voluntary improvement of individual performance. Here, from the research proposal:
Improvement of human performance has for some time been one of the prime aims of our technology. This has been achieved, in our society, largely by providing the human with significant tools and automation procedures that, with proper training, augment his abilities to perform [] The goals of our technological culture at this time are epitomized by our exploration into outer space, such as our landings on the moon and other technological feats requiring a high degree of skill and expertise in controlling our external environment [] However, for the exploration of the inner man, our educational concepts, training methods, and research, seem less suitable.75

Far out is the only adequate term that could encompass the long-term goals of the project. Through cataloging, researching, and integrating all the data on yoga, meditation, and altered states into an information system, the engineers hoped that man would soon, through mastery of yoga, reach the ability to control computers directly through the voluntary use of brainwave
Computer Processing and Bibliography of Literature Related to Voluntary Improvement of Individual Performance, Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0631).
75 74

Ibid., 3.

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signals. Studies will undoubtedly soon be carried out using these physiological instruments in conjunction with computers, in the most advanced type of man/machine communication and human augmentation system we can imagine [] Many years may pass before significant progress and useful results can be produced in the control of computers directly from brainwave signals. In the meantime, it would seem prudent to explore the use of yoga, meditation, and other techniques as a means of developing the brainwave control that will be necessary for the direction of computers.76 Far out, indeed. While Spiegelberg was getting his computer kicks, his student Stewart Brand was becoming a celebrity. His Why Havent We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth campaign put him in the papers, and his Whole Earth Catalog (first released in November 1968) was a tremendous success. Started on a $10,000 inheritance after the death of Brands father, the Catalog had turned a profit of $100,000 in under two years. There was a constant need to release updates of the Catalog, as information on the vendors and products changed frequently. With each new catalog the readership appeared to swell in proportion to the growing total of pages. By 1971, at the height of the projects success, Brand decided that the time had come to move on, just to see what happens. After all, he realized that his catalog would soon become an artifact of its own. As he would several times in his life, Brand presciently realized that he stood at the forefront of a constellation of changes to come, and wanted to describe what he saw there. After bumming around the acid head computer programmers at SRI and MIT (These are heads, most of them, Brand wrote. Half of computer science is heads), Brand declared in a 1972 Rolling Stone article that Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.77 Brands Last Whole Catalog(1971) was the most successful, winning the National Book Award in 1972 to the horror of book critics everywhere. He decided to throw what he called the Whole Earth Demise Party, to be held at the lavish and expansive Palace of Fine Arts on 14 June 1971. Anyone who had anything to do with making the Whole Earth Catalog was invited. Expecting a raucous bash, thousands packed the auditorium with all the countercultural trappings, regalia, and contraband. Brand wandered around barefoot in a monks black Cossack meeting and greeting. But the real reason for the party soon emerged. At 10:15 pm, the director of the event, Scott Beach took the microphone and addressed the audience. Stewart asked me to offer you this, holding up a thick wad of $100 bills.

76 77

Ibid., 4.

Stewart Brand, Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums in Rolling Stone (7 December 1972).

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Theres $20,000 here. He said there is to be a consensus of opinion on what to do with the money and then the money is to be signed over to one person, to do whatever is decided.78 With that, Stewart Brand stepped back and observed what his faithful contingent of believers would do with $20,000 in Catalog profits. He was aiming to make a point about the counterculture, that it wasnt ready to do much of anything.79 And for most of the evening, and for some time after, it would appear Brand proved his point:
For three hours, suggestions of placing the Whole Earth Catalog in libraries were drowned out by cries of Burn it! Flush it down the toilet! Buy more nitrous oxide for the party! Get a local musician high! Throw it in the street! The man who [earlier] grabbed the belly dancer suggested using the money to build a gigantic plastic phallic symbol to insert into the earth. It went on for hours. Someone made a grab for the money and started distributing it. The pile was reduced to $15,000. Brand stood on the stage with a straight face, writing every suggestion on the blackboard.80

By dawn, Brand was asleep on the floor, with the smile of a man at peace with himself, satisfied that his ploy had revealed more about the values of the counterculture than the contents of his magazine the magazine that had become so much a part of it.81 Perhaps 100 people remained. And then decision was made by vote to give the remaining $15,000 to a young man named Frederick Moore, Jr. Most guests said they had not seen Moore before the party, an article at the time reported. But we know him because he introduced himself, one girl explained. Moore gave his occupation as human being and left in a van.82 Stewart Brand just shook his head, John Markoff reports. It had been an interesting experiment, but he never really expected to see Moore again. Maybe hell send a postcard from Mexico, Brand thought as he left the Exploratorium.83 Throughout the night, Moore had made his way to the open microphone struggling to make his voice heard. He was completely broke and had all but two dollars in his pocket. He took one out and burned it:
The point, he argued, was not about money, it was about people. He could see that the money that he so despised was being greeted as a savior and that people were being bought, which was typical; There were big arguments, and it was just the usual downer [] Out on the floor, Fred Moore kept talking to people about his idea of helping people directly by sharing information. He went up to the microphone again and tried to make his point: Now what almost happened with
78 79 80 81 82 83

Barry Lopez, Whole Earths Suicide Party in The Washington Post (14 June 1971), B1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 237.

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this young person here, who I dont know, he started to talk about a project that he wants to do in which he didnt want money for. He wanted help; he wanted to get together with others. And people yelled that was out of orderActually, for a moment there we were almost getting down to it. If we are going to build a changein a changing new world, or whatever we want to call it, new age, then its going to be because we are going to work together and we are going to help each other [] We feel that the beginning of a union of people here tonight is more important than letting a sum of money divide us.84

And with that, Frederick Moore and $15,000 made off into the nightor early morning, to be exact. In the spring of 1975 he catalyzed what would become the personal computing revolution through cofounding the Homebrew Computer Club. The club encapsulated the Whole Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to the personal computer era something akin to what the Turks Head coffeehouse was to the age of Dr. Johnson, a place where ideas were exchanged and disseminated.85 From the first flyer: Are you building your own computer? Terminal, TV, typewriter? If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests.86 Perhaps Brand was mistaken. Maybe the counterculture was ready to do something. An engineer at HP saw the flyer and showed up to the meetings in cofounder Gordon Frenchs Menlo Park garage. He was incredibly shy and nervous, yet undeniably brilliant. His name was Steve Wozniak. Soon, hed start bringing along his old friend from high school, a bearded and impetuous acidhead with a messianic complex, fresh from India. His name was Steve Jobs. And the world would never be the same. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change it, are the ones who do.

Conclusion This article began by drawing the readers attention to a series of contrasts on the idea of the whole earth between the twentieth centurys foremost critic on whats wrong with technology with one of the twentieth centurys leading proponents on whats right with technology. Spiegelbergs example allows us to see the truth of both perspectives, and the story that led to them. I have said that Spiegelbergs is a story of three overcomings: of the spiritual crisis of Interwar Europe symbolized by world war; of the mechanized outlook of postwar cold war
84 85 86

Ibid., 236-7. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 60. Ibid.

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American society symbolized by the mushroom cloud; and of the widespread belief that technology was an antagonistic force in the aim of global unity, symbolized by the whole earth. Through an emphasis on Being, the Here and Now, and the realization of unity through the recognition and transcendence of polarity, the thinkers on the network of the drive towards wholeness sought to establish modes of being suitable to the technological age of global modernity that transcended the dominant approaches in the West that Martin Heidegger called calculative thinking. Certainly, Spiegelbergs understanding of Heidegger was unique. Nihilism and pessimism are hallmarks of Heideggers thinking, and the notion that technology could aid in mans task of liberating earth (and thereby Being itself) seems far out of line with the contrasts with which we started. Indeed, it seems plain far out. And if Heidegger were here I suspect he would disagree with Spiegelbergs interpretation. Cybernetics, viewing the world as system, seeing technology as a toolall of these epitomize for Heidegger the very apotheosis of calculative thinking in the modern age. The fundamental event of the modern age, Heidegger reminds us, is the conquest of the world as picture. But then, were still left with those curious comments on the saving power in the very essence of technology. Here is not the place to go down such a rabbit hole (and it is a rabbit hole, be assured of that). I will only close by saying that things are never as they seem. Recall Spiegelbergs lifelong comparisons of Heidegger with the East. It was too obvious, to too many of his students, Spiegelberg later put it, that a certain amount of parallels were there.87 Recent studies have conclusively demonstrated that many of Heideggers central concepts those that would establish him first as philosophys secret king and then, after his ascension, as arguably the twentieth centurys most important thinker were lifted, always in secret and at times wholesale, from German translations of East Asian texts. These include ideas on Being (in-der-Welt-sein, Dasein), nothing, emptiness, and the clearing, and the conceptual centerpiece of his arguments on technology, enframing (gestell). He displayed a systematic method for concealing East Asian concepts in Heideggerian garb until scarcely a trace of the original source material remained. 88

87 88

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

We may confidently assert the following Heideggerian concepts as being strongly influenced by East Asian thought: in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-world), gestell (enframing), sein (being), nichts (nothing), releasement, renunciation, simplicity, hiddenness, the fourfold, the nameless, boundless, and useless. Scholars have also highlighted the following Heideggerian concepts as deriving from East Asian thought, albeit with less confidence and more coincidence: the clearing (lichtung) world (welt), and earth (erde). The works from which he drew principal inspiration are the Wilhelm translations of the Daode Jing and Yijing, and the Martin Buber translation of the Zhuangzi. See Reinhard Mays Ex oriente lux (1989) and Heideggers Hidden

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Heideggers appropriation allows us to understand how Spiegelberg could claim in 1976 that no other philosopher [] seemed to me so immediately related to my own search for the essential answer to the ultimate questions of existence.89 It renders understandable Spiegelbergs lifelong suspicion that Heidegger was influenced by some degree by the East. And it lends credence to Spiegelbergs unique interpretations of Heideggers work. The contrasting yet complementary views of Brand and Heidegger live on in the Earthrise Era. Cosgrove (2001) elucidates this nicely when he contrasts the two discourses that have framed the Apollo images since the 1970s, the one-world discourse, on the one hand, and the whole earth discourse, on the other:
A one-world discourse [] concentrates on the global surface, on circulation, connectivity, and communication. It is a universalist, progressive, and mobile discourse in which the image of the globe signifies the potential, if not actual, equality of all locations networked across frictionless space. Consistently associated with technological advance, it yields an implicitly imperial spatiality, connecting the ends of the earth to privileged hubs and centers of control.90

Here we see Heideggers concerns well represented, echoing statements he made as early as the 1930s. Here, for example, is what Heidegger had to say in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935):
When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously experience an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneitythere still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?where to?and what then?91

But in the one world discourse we also see the cybernetic systems view of reality epitomized by Stewart Branda world viewed in terms of interconnected networks. Now, Consider Cosgroves definition of the whole earth discourse:
A Whole-Earth discourse stresses the globes organic unity and matters of life, dwelling, and rootedness. It emphasizes the fragility and vulnerability of a corporeal earth and responsibility for its care. It can generate apocalyptic anxiety about the end of life on this planet or warm sentiments of association, community, and attachment.92

Sources (1996), Graham Parkes Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987) and The Other Thinking in Ahmed Kabils Dao of Dasein (2011).
89 90

Mukunda, 5.

Denis Cosgrove, Apollos Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 263.
91 92

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 40. Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, 262-3.

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Here we see implications of rootedness associated with the images, rootedness of the sort Heidegger claims has been lost in modernity. This reciprocal interplay between the two discourses lies at the heart of our modern attitude towards technology. Spiegelberg allows us to see the interdependent nature of one world and whole earth, and how we came to live in both at once. Heidegger reminds us of the dangers of technology. And they are real dangers. But the simple fact remains that, even if its a whole earth disclosed by the very process he assails, it is one that instills the rootedness he feels has been lost in modernity. Where the danger is, grows the saving power also. Yes, we live in one world, with all the planetary imperialism that goes along with it. But we also inhabit a whole earth. All of which speaks to an attitude that can appreciate seeming contradictions and assimilate them within a larger story of wholeness. Technology can be used for good, technology can be used for evil, as it is a tool. But perhaps technology also uses us. Much ink gets spilled over Brands remark in the opening pages of the Whole Earth Catalog that We are as gods. (Why gods and not god? Is the statement alluding to the Greek deities? Perhaps the Zen conviction that we are all endowed with Buddha nature?). We would do well, however, to remember Genesis, specifically the Fall. Adam and Eve, having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, became as gods, knowing both good and evil. This has been the story of a peculiar tree of knowledge that bore some strange fruit. Certainly, few took a bigger bite than Steve Jobs. But the central seed sower was Frederic Spiegelberg, who experienced a miracle while walking in the fields that he spent the rest of his life trying to remember. Remembering that miracle is also what this story is about. Each of these thinkers did so in their own way, and each for their own reasons. Its all the same, its all the same, wrote Richard Alpert in 1971. Any trip you want to take leads to the same place. The miracle is always the same, and so the lesson is always the same: Remember, Be Here Now.

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Bibliography Brand, Stewart. Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums in Rolling Stone (7 December 1972). ______ Papers of Stewart Brand (M1237), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. Chaudhuri, Haridas. The Integralism of Sri Aurobindo in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1953). Conners, Peter. White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010). Cosgrove, Denis. Apollos Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001). Heard, Gerald. On Learning From Buddha in The New York Times, 4 June 1950. Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). ______ The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000). Holmes, John Clellon. This is the Beat Generation in The New York Times (16 November 1952). Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1945). Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). Kirk, Andrew. Counterculture Green (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2007). Kripal, Jeffrey J. Esalen: America and the Religion of No-Religion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007). Lazier, Benjamin. Earthrise; or: The Globalization of the World Picture in The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 3, (June 2011). ______ God Interrupted (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008). Lopez, Barry. Whole Earths Suicide Party in The Washington Post (14 June 1971). Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said (New York: Penguin, 2005). 37

Mukowsky, Mukunda. Conversation with our Philosopher President in California Institute of Integral Studies Newsletter (June 1976). Poole, Robert. Earthrise: How Man First Saw The Earth (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). Sandison, David. Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography (Chicago: Octopus Publishing Group, 1999). Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History (La Salle: Open Court, 1975). Spiegelberg, Frederic. Zen, Rocks, Waters (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961). ______ Living Religions of the World (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1956). ______ The Religion of No-Religion (Stanford: James Ladd Delkin, 1948). ______ Papers of Frederic Spiegelberg (SC0638), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. Turner, Fred. From Cyberculture to Counterculture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007). Ulansey, David. The American Academy of Asian Studies: A History, California Institute of Integral Studies Archives, CIIS Library, San Francisco, Calif., 4. Watts, Allan. In My Own Way (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 286-7. Wilhelm, Richard and C.G. Jung. The Secret of the Golden Flower (Abingdon: Routledge, 1931).

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