Why Are Portraits of John of God and Gloria Steinem Beside Each Other at Omega Institute?

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Minimizes Clerical and Institutional Abuse in Christmas Message to Rigpa Students

January 4, 2019

Seeking Self-Reliance in Yoga After Cult Life Didn’t Work

January 8, 2019

So “John of God” used fake healing to gain access to women he would sexually assault.

Two somewhat-related things come to mind:

1) A personal memory about how one of the cults I was in overlapped with the John of God cult.

2) Questions about how the Boomers mainstreamed sociopaths and charlatans alongside their true heroes.

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1. A Personal Cult Memory

I never went to see John of God, but he had a following at the cult I was in at the time — Endeavor Academy. I distinctly remember one of the lead teachers at Endeavor going to him for a “spiritual surgery”. She brought a cohort of lightworkers who videoed the meeting. They showed the tape to the whole group as proof positive that he’d extracted a tumour from her belly that she didn’t know she’d had.

Of course she didn’t know, because she didn’t. You could see that the dude dropped a chicken liver out of his sleeve and pretended to pinch it out of a fold in her skin.

I sat there in the big room while people watched the chicken liver slither around and a lot of them stood up and started jumping up and down, doing the kundalini jitterbug, barking like happy dogs because a miracle happened.

What’s so strange about such moments, if you happen to be able to retain some sense of internal self/stability, is that the enthusiasm is somatically contagious, even while you know it is making you sick. It’s entirely possible to know on one level that you are in a mentally ill environment and on another level to want to participate in some way that will relieve the pressure of that illness. So the contagion works on two levels: you are infected, and then joining in seems as though it would be an antidote, or at least it would make things more tolerable.

The Endeavor leader, Charles Anderson, was as jealous of John of God as he was resourceful at co-optation. It really got his goat to see the women especially go bananas over having their chicken-livers removed. He had three responses, all hilarious in retrospect:

1. John of God is deluded:

“So he’s telling all those dead ones that their bodies and diseases are real! If that’s not killing them, I don’t know what is!”

2. John of God isn’t a big deal:

“I don’t need no damn pen-knife to take the log out of your eye!” (Quoting Matthew 7:3. This was followed by various hands-on healing performances that involved hitting us on the head or slapping our faces with his socks. The typical response was to both feel and perform some kind of kundalini shock upon impact.)

(#1 and #2 suggest that Anderson actually believed that JOG was performing “surgery”. Otherwise he would have called out the chicken liver.)

3. Let’s get John of God to come to Wisconsin so we can have a healing summit!

“We’ll see if that big dummy is actually interested in reality! We’ll see if he recognizes me!”

(#3 was classic. Anderson always fantasized about being on stage with spiritual leaders who were bigger than him, AND humiliating them at the same time with his intrusive eye contact. He also used to openly fantasize about having an intrusive eye-contact stare-off with John de Ruiter.)

Blink. Blink. Blink.

So that’s my little story of cult-overlapping. These intersections are happening all the time, because cult leaders share common cause, and often plagiarize each other, even as they must compete for recruits. Ken Wilbur endorses Andrew Cohen and Adi Da. Marc Gafni and Andrew Cohen endorse each other. Jivamukti endorsed Michael Roach. Sogyal Lakar wants to be like Trungpa. Dzongsar Khyentse defends Lakar even as an independent investigation shows it’s all true.

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2. Portraits in the Omega Institute Faculty Dining Room

This past fall I got to spend a great week with folks from the Yoga Service Council on a writing retreat at Omega. Omega donated the space. One of our breakout groups was allowed to use the faculty dining room, just off the main hall. This is where all Omega presenters come to eat, away from the crowds.

The walls of the room were lined with portraits of famous past guests. Like if you went to House of Blues and all the musicians are up there, holding silent court.

I took a video tour of the room. The lede photo above is a screenshot. Aside from Philip Glass in the top left, counterclockwise from the bottom left, we have:

John of God
Gloria Steinem
Eckhart Tolle

What kind of a place, what kind of a generation stitches these figures together with some pretence of coherence?

There’s Steinem, hemmed in between two men. John of God sells snake oil and assaults women, and Tolle mumbles dissociative word salad to cool a burning world.

All three have been at Omega. All three have appeared on Oprah.

Under the assumption that they share something in common, these men are elevated on either side of the feminist activist who actually got shit done.

I had this conflicting impulse to either take Steinem’s picture out of there, or take the other ones down. Who really deserves to be there?

Who will tell us what this part of the Left’s history means? How activism was kneecapped by and equated with self-obsession on the workshop circuit?

Who will show how John of God has been valued at places like Omega because, in part, he posed an alternative to the medical realism so essential to things like the reproductive rights movement? Or because he represented an acceptable, “shamanic” version of how to dominate (mostly women’s) bodies with charisma?

Who will study how Tolle has been valued at Omega because he let people off the hook of agitating for structural change, by telling people that conflict is all story in their minds?

When I think about the fractured Left, I keep thinking about this room, this photo gallery, as incoherent as a family’s. John milking charisma with that smile. Eckhart perpetually out-of-focus. Gloria, beaming fullness and generous agency.

I try to feel better about the world because at least I’m eating a vegetarian meal, and the folks at the table next to me are working on their chakras.

And when the sarcasm subsides I look out the window and know that the woods are still dark and deep.