Welcome...

I would like to take a moment in welcoming you to my site. Below is a brief introduction to myself and my ideas.

In some ways one could say my story began in 1971 with graduation from the University of New Hampshire. The five years prior included all the major movements and events that we often refer to as, “the sixties.” By this time, the campuses were becoming quiet. Most of the big names such as John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as well as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix, were already dead. Though the Vietnam war had not yet officially ended, the public will to continue it was broken. I found myself completely lost in a sea of confusion, spiritual bankruptcy, addiction, and pain. At that time I asked myself three questions that have governed my career up to, and including this presentation. Those three questions, which I will articulate further on, led me to over thirty years of study and teaching in such diverse fields as: Psychology, World Religions, Addiction and Recovery Theory, Ecology, Systems Theory, Cosmology, Biology, as well as Literature and the Arts. The synthesis of my thinking about all the above, has been codified and called The Architecture of the Soul.

Going back to pre-1966 , the days of the Beach Boys, the early Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I see a world less complicated and perhaps more naive, but for me equally painful. Since 2001 and the breaking of the Catholic abuse story by the Boston Globe, many of us have had to deal with the terrible distortions that were present in the post World War II culture. The use of religious symbols, rituals and trappings, to dominate, subjugate, and deeply injure children, has left scars in thousands of us, myself among them. When religious officials injure children, there is a deeper abuse then what we normally think of as abuse. For the child it is as though God was personally rejecting, vilifying and degrading the value of their young personhood.

This destruction of the child's experienced relationship to the Sacred, separates the child from his or her real self, from lived relationship, to their cultural and planetary context, and leaves the child feeing alienated in the vastness of the cosmos. In a word, it casts the child into Hell.

Such was my experience from the fourth to the eleventh grade, in the Catholic schools of that time.

As is now also becoming evident, many children were also living in very destructive home environments. There were certainly those who were treated well and were loved, but the silly triteness of 1950's television and commercials served as a collective false self and denial mechanism, covering fairly widespread sexual and physical abuse of children, not to mention women. Those of us brought up in alcohol addicted homes, and there were many of us, experienced all forms of abuse on a regular basis. Because children have nothing but their own experience, nothing to compare it to, this kind of abuse was often accepted as the norm. When the abnormal is accepted as the norm, terrible distortions in the self take place. To heal these distortions that sometimes reach back to the cradle, and sometimes even in utero, one must die, in a psychological sense, in order to be re-born, i.e. regenerated. I have had this experience, because I had no other choice than to go back to my source and be remade. In doing so I have become convinced that the present “mental health establishment”, while helpful for many, is nowhere near deep enough for some. I was born in the spring of 1947, when the country was healing from the trauma of World War II.

Following graduation from college in 1971, and in the the grip of addiction illness as mentioned earlier, I asked myself those three fundamental questions. First, what's wrong with me? Second ,what's wrong with the world? And third, what can I do about both? It was less threatening to begin with the second question, than it was to face the full legacy of abuse and madness that was inherent in question number one. So, I embarked upon a decade-long study of the history and evolution of culture, in order to try to gain an insight into what the human cultural animal really is and where we went wrong, if we did. Working part time jobs, I began to devour shopping bags full of books about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucius, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

After a few years, I began to understand that there were deeper roots beneath these cultural architectures. I began to read Jungian's such as Joseph Campbell and Erich Neumann, and a host of peripheral authors associated with them. I became very interested in the psychology of C.G. Jung. His rejection of the narrow parameters of the Freudian model, and his insistence upon the efficacy of religious symbolism seemed more consistent with my own conclusions at that time and now. His theory of the collective unconscious came to me as a revelation, and served to re-sacralize a cosmos which I understood to be mechanical. Suddenly, the vision of an organic and living cosmos, suffused with mind, or spirit, or holiness, changed everything for me. Having lost an experience of God due to abusive Catholicism, there suddenly seemed to be an opening which could lead to a re-enchanted life. Along with a study of Shamanism, which seemed to me then and now to be the true psycho-spiritual root of priesthood, I began to understand psychological health as occurring within the context of a spiritual experience. By then I felt I had enough understanding to face question number one.

Parallel to, and intertwined with all the above topics, I had become deeply enchanted by the poetry of T.S. Eliot, in particular with his Four Quartets. The Quartets came to have the same significance for me as say Beethoven's 9^th Symphony, or Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. In response to the Four Quartets, I began what turned into a 1400 line mystical poem that would be nine years in the writing. It would come to include not only the above constellation of ideas, but also a great deal more that was to follow. That poem came to be called Jonah: A Prophecy at the Millennium.

On a very lonely January or February night, in the early 1970s, unable to sleep, I opened a thin book by Teilhard de Chardin called How I Believe. In the wee hours of the morning, after finishing the book in one sitting, I experienced a vision of the beginning, the evolution, and the destiny of the cosmos. Overwhelmed and frightened by the vision I cut it off and could not re- experience it, however, I now understand it to be the announcement of everything which would follow. De Chardin caused me to see that there was a way back to God.

There was a moment in 1978, when I became aware that my attempt to live like T S. Eliot on Monday through Friday and turn into Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger on the weekends, could no longer work. I had above all to understand that I understood. There could be no further impairment of my ability to think or experience in the spiritual realm. I had to know that I knew. To this day I have not had another drink or drug, for that reason.

Having achieved sobriety, in 1978, the years of psychological, emotional, mental, sexual, and spiritual abuse began to emerge. Now, however, I had a model in which to understand my pain. In my understanding at that time, the conscious level of my life was impaired by the presence of horrific contents in what Jung called the personal unconscious. I had come to believe that if I could journey down through that zone, I would arrive at the collective unconscious, if it indeed existed. Spurred on by Joseph Campbell's Hero model, and with the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a methodology for emptying, I proceeded on a path of profound confessional experience. My goal could be likened to one who is standing on the surface of the earth attempting to plunge down through the crust and mantel of the planet in order to arrive at the hot molten core. The Shamanic model!

For months on end the toxic contents emerged, along with deep instabilities, mood swings, and at times unbearable levels of pain. In the midst of that, while teaching a course on poetry, Carol Wallas appeared in my life. Stunned by the unexpected springtime of love, she became the next great level of realization and helping spirit in the ferocity of my search. In the instability of my journey we married in 1980, while others looked on with a side-wise glance.

I found myself with my paternity bestowed upon me in 1981 in the form of my beautiful first born daughter, Rebecca. In 1986, I was blessed again with the birth of my equally beautiful daughter, Kateri. Still driving a taxi cab, and working part time teaching jobs, it became clear that I had to do something drastic in order to support my family. At the end of a sleepless night it dawned on me that the one thing I could do, without impairing my search, was to teach Theology. With that in mind, I embarked upon three years of undergraduate work and then a Masters Degree in California in 1983.

While receiving my Masters degree, I had the good fortune to hear a talk by Father Thomas Berry. From deep within me a surge of understanding emerged, and though I didn't know it at the time, the next decade of my search was standing before me talking about the the destruction of the life systems of this planet. FR Berry was the founder and president of The American Teilhard Association. My vision back in 1972 or 1973 was lit up again within me. My overall search through the evolution of the cultural human had now led me to even deeper questions. The first of these was; how does the cultural animal function in the context of the life systems of the planet? Secondly, how does the planet and the solar system, which is its context, emerge from the larger structures of the cosmos? Thirdly, how does the cosmos emerge from the Divine Mind of Mystery? So again, I had three questions. From 1984 until 1990 I visited with Thomas Berry in NY for weekends, during which he transmitted to me his answers to those questions. Below, following this introduction, his answers are listed in the Twelve Principles For Understanding the Universe.

During our time together Tom continued to press me with his belief that we needed a cultural therapy. I asked him over and over again what this was and his answer was always “I don't know because we don't have one.” One beautiful Sunday afternoon while driving home from his center in New York, with Beethoven's 9^th blaring and my soul soaring, the idea presented itself that a cultural therapy would have to be a synthesis of the Twelve Steps of AA, and the Twelve Principles of Berry. Thus my first book Greenspirit, (to be republished under the title Cultural Addiction : The Greenspirit Guide to Recovery, 2006, North Atlantic Books) was born. Greenspirit was an attempt to understand psychology within the context of the global, spiritual tradition, which itself was embedded in the larger context of the life systems of earth, which itself is embedded in the cosmos, itself embedded in divine mystery.

Since 1990 I have been counseling those who are trying to recover from the ravages of addiction illness. I knew the answer to my first question, and it was that I suffered from addiction illness and was a victim of some profound levels of abuse. Secondly, I understood that western culture itself was functioning within the context of an addiction illness, wherein the life systems of the planet were being disrupted at the service of an addicted consumerism.

My third original question was answered by counseling, authoring and teaching. In 1992 I discovered the possibility of designing a doctorate through Union University (then the Union Institute) wherein I could attempt the creation of a new kind of psychology. To do so, I would have to weave together various strands of traditional psychology, spiritual psychology, earth psychology, and so on. That seven year project became the Architecture of the Soul, (which incidentally is scheduled to be published in the summer/fall of 2005, by North Atlantic Books). In the interim, the poem Jonah was completed, and other literary projects were completed as well.

With the degree received in 2000, and further studies in Spiritual Psychologies, especially with Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo, Thich Nhat Hahn and Eckhart Tolle, my present understanding had come to be the following: Main stream psychology, including the wide spread focus and emphasis on brain functioning while helpful and necessary, might not go deep enough. The time has come when the earlier psychologies such as the Vedic, the Buddhist and indigenous understandings of the soul must be synthesized with the modern and post modern understandings. Secondly, in doing so, the phenomenon of the individual must be understood to include his or her context. What this means is that not only must we explore the individual, familial, and cultural levels, of a human person, we must also offer a methodology that will allow that individual to re-link and prosper within the context of the other species of life, the life systems of the planet which support them, and the divine sense of the vastness and creativity of the cosmos.

It is that vastness and mystery that has inspired all the great teachers and prophets of all faiths. The human is not a brainbound abstraction existing only in a world of thought. To convince someone that that is the true nature of being is to further abuse them by forcing them to live in a structure infinitely less expansive than their true being. If a human person belongs to a family and a culture, they certainly are also citizens of a planet and cosmos divine by their very nature. To deny them that larger identity is to deny them their psychological and spiritual maturity and health. No longer can we afford to think of psychology as separate from global spirituality.

Nor can we think of spirituality as separate from the life-community, or the life-community from the planet, the planet from the cosmos, or the cosmos from God. We need a unitive and integral psychology. We have come to a time where the non- medical and medical models of the human person must become and are becoming one. Our job as counselors is to foster that new paradigm of psychology and spirituality. In doing so we will be in a position to arrive at a greater wholeness ourselves, and therefore able to lead our clients and students to a similar synthesis.