Over a six-month period in my late thirties the nerves in nearly all my teeth went berserk and I had to endure a horrendous number of root canal treatments, virtually one after the other. Toothaches developed where enamel was intact; a vicious abscess in the root of one tooth turned me into a jabbering wreck; and I won’t forget or forgive the pasty faced dentist who broke a needle inside a root canal he was excavating and left it there, sealing up the tooth and sending me home after I paid his bill.
The pain was quick to come on and relentless, day after day, 24/7. I traipsed around dentists’ offices all over London trying to find out why my teeth were behaving the way they were. A specialist at London’s National Health Dental Hospital curtly informed me that because I wasn’t a referred case he wasn’t even going to look inside my mouth; and when I protested, somewhat helplessly, he replied, “Blame Mrs Thatcher!” (the then Prime Minister who eviscerated the National Health Service). I got through the days and interminable nights with over-the-counter painkillers, more than 600 of them during six months of purgatory; needless to say I was a zombie most of this time.
One day driving to work, numb from medication, I pulled out of a side street to join a busy road but neglected to check the oncoming traffic in the lane I was joining: a car smashed into the side of my vehicle. Another time I loaded my van so poorly with lumber for a job I was doing that when I braked for a red light the stacked lengths of wood, resting on the edge of the front and rear bench seats, slid forward and smashed through the windscreen.
There was some light relief, from a young Australian dentist who tried (and failed) to make sense of the chaos inside my mouth. He was sleeping in his surgery, he told me, because his wife was driving him mad. I was his first appointment one morning and had to go and buy him a cup of coffee to help wake him up; he drank it while he lay in his sleeping bag, and when I told him I wasn’t in a hurry he reached for his guitar and strummed it for a while before getting up; he was still in his pyjamas when he went to work on me.
On my first visit to a dental surgery in New York, the dentist took a scornful look inside my mouth and laughed: “Don’t tell me: British dentistry!” He compared the work that had been done on my teeth to Russian dental practice: “When someone needs a filling,” he said, “they steal a hubcap from a parked car and bring it to the dentist; he cuts a piece from it and hammers it around the patient’s tooth.”
More than a decade after everything had settled down a dentist in Hong Kong University’s dental clinic told me that when stuff goes awry in the mouth, as it had done with me, it’s often the case that the patient is depressed and run down. This simple diagnosis, very obvious yet elusive at the time, pinpointed the cause of what had happened to me: I’d been in withdrawal, not from drugs or drink, but religion.
I lived an isolated life in single rooms; I was lonely and conditioned from an early age to believe I lacked intelligence, and I had a truly terrible diet; these were the staples of my existence for an inordinately long time, added to which was an incapacity to sustain for longer than a few months any romantic relationship; I was programmed for failure in every endeavour I undertook. Life with my future wife followed this pattern: escalating difficulties of one kind or another had eroded our relationship to the point where I couldn’t keep my end up anymore; we’d split once before, gotten back together again, only to fall back into the same old patterns of self-destructive behaviour that had driven us apart in the first place – we just couldn’t figure out how to be together. Two options loomed: change or separation. Partly as a reaction against my inability to come to terms with separating I took a leap in the dark and threw myself into the Arica School’s ‘The Nine Hypergnostic Systems’ training programme – because it held the prospect of change.
This was where I was introduced to the spiritual philosophy of self-described mystic Oscar Ichazo, of whom I knew nothing, and his school, of which I was equally ignorant. For a period of two weeks I left home early in the morning and came home late at night and saw little of my partner. I had a brief affair with a Spanish woman on the training, and for a while it was touch and go whether my relationship with Sophia would survive. Immersion in the Hypergnostic training was intense and productive: when it concluded I was in a radically different state of mind from the addled condition I’d been in at its start, and it was because of how this change had been ordered that I thought if Sophia and I did some of this work together it would help us clarify the issues we were finding it so difficult to address as a couple. At the very least it offered hope.
The Arica School’s stated purpose is to provide the tools needed to achieve spiritual enlightenment through the clarification of consciousness (clarify: make something clear, intelligible and free from ambiguity) by refining and transforming the energies of mind and body. A lot of this work is done on trainings presented by sponsors licensed by the Arica School; the trainings are numerous, complicated and demanding, but they can induce distinctive refinement in the quality of individual consciousness. A substantial part of the effort devoted to generating these subtle states of mind derives from the use of meditation techniques and kinaesthetic disciplines sourced from the mystical storehouses of old religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, Sufism and Christianity. And woven through the grid of trainings is a web of philosophical and intellectual theory developed by Oscar Ichazo. In general, Arica work promises to:
Formulaic trumpeting aside, this is pretty much how it happened. The ambience of the trainings we participated in, their composition and design, were conducive to identifying why we had grown into the kind of people we were, and why we were unable to be the kind of couple we wanted to be. Most often this was done by employing an analytical process Aricans refer to as “karma cleaning” and we used it to examine the emotional and psychological obstacles preventing us from being a loving couple. As the pieces of the puzzle fell into place we began to see how our respective behaviours had been conditioned by our personal histories: the kind of upbringing we’d had, parental expectations, the failure of previous relationships, frustrated expectations of each other, to name a few of the fields dug over. Thus began a healing process.
….open and accelerate the path towards spiritual and transcendental knowledge by clarifying one’s process, culminating in the attainment of a higher state of happiness, equilibrium and understanding.
http://www.arica.org/system/abttrain.cfm
It wasn’t too long before an example of my own psychological disfigurement pushed itself to the front of the line: I was afflicted with a crippling reticence about showing physical affection – for example, I disliked being cuddled; it made me really uncomfortable. The ability to express and receive physical affection had been extinguished so far back in my family I couldn’t imagine it into existence; how to take even a first step in dismantling this physical frigidity was beyond me. I have written about this chilly corner of my consciousness and I can see that what I say below should be edited further, but I can’t do it, I cling tenaciously to these scraps of memory:
In my history are pockets of silence, moments of sweetness suffused with an overarching sadness, such as this ghostly clip which unreels across my synapses: I am 11 or 12 years old, curled up in bed beneath a few old army blankets and unable to sleep because I am cold; I never wore pyjamas, I’d never had them. In the half-dark mam floats to my side and spreads her winter coat over me, then turns and slips noiselessly out of the bedroom.
There had never been hugs or kisses from her; she’d never wrapped me in her arms and I’d never felt the heat of her body against mine. She never pulled her children close – no one had ever done that to her, not even as a child; she’d never known the warmth of a loving embrace; neither had her children.
When I was a young man I’d sometimes turn up out of the blue, having arrived from God knows where, the front door of the flat would open, and there she’d be, her eyes lighting up, her face softening at the sight of me, her head tilting a little to the side as she said, ever so softly, “Hello, lad.” The impulse to put my arms around her would surge up, but I couldn’t do it – it was an action sealed in permafrost. I’d step over the threshold and walk along the hall to the living room, where my dad, no matter how long it had been since he’d seen me, would remain sitting in his armchair by the fire; the most I’d get would be a sidelong glance and a twitch around the lips. “Hello dad,” I’d say; and there might come an acknowledging croak.
Poor dad. At meal times the dining table was a minefield: the evening’s Echo or the morning’s Daily Post, would be spread out in front of his plate, claiming all his attention; not a word would be uttered by him or to him while he read and ate; his children and his wife might as well have been invisible. If he did speak it was usually an explosive outburst because mam had put something inedible on his plate or his children were not behaving.
I have two unerasable snapshots of him and me together. One evening when I was very young he took me to an amateur boxing tournament in a converted cinema; we are sitting in the gods, looking down on the illuminated stage at the teenage sluggers banging away at each other; just the two of us, watching neighbourhood kids boxing. Another evening: I couldn’t have been more than nine or ten; he took me to the circus in Sefton Park, but just before the show began he handed me off to another man outside the entrance to the Big Top, someone I’d never seen before in my life. I remember looking up at their two serious faces, watching them talk but unaware of what was passing between them; then my dad left; I don’t remember him even saying goodbye. Of my night at the circus I recall only the feeling of bewilderment at being in the company of this stranger, and wondering all the time where my dad had gone. When the show ended he was waiting for me outside and explained away his absence by saying there’d been something wrong with his ticket; it didn’t occur to me until years afterwards that he’d probably gone off to see his fancy woman, the one mam always screamed about in her drug and alcohol fuelled rages.
The extent of my father’s interest in my scholastic life began and ended when he bought me an Oxford Geometry Set for use at my new school, an institution tailor-made for well brought up boys from middle-class homes in the suburbs. If I wasn’t a misfit when I started at my new school it didn’t take long before I became one. Beatings, harassment, rugby and cricket (games I never played anywhere else), verbal and physical intimidation were my lot, but I never mentioned any of this to mam or dad. As soon as I was old enough to leave home I did.
In the years after mam died I didn’t see much of my dad; I visited, but infrequently: it was a 200-mile drive and there was nothing to look forward to at the end of it. I’d bring him a bottle of whisky and books, but I could only take him in small doses: we had nothing to talk about, no back and forth; we’d had a lifetime of non-communication and it was no different now. A confusion of mismatched emotions assailed me when I took in his decrepit, friendless state; his life now revolving around meals on wheels, a book to read, a glass or two of whisky perhaps, cigarettes, and spartan rations; early to bed, early to rise; no day different to any other one. Each time I left I did something he’d never done to me: I kissed him – on the cheek – and watched him squirm.
Imagine growing up and only being touched by your parents when they hit you; and never being able to touch them, ever. The core achievement of the Arica trainings was liberation from the wreckage of my early life. Extricating myself from the stranglehold it had on me was a testing struggle as so much of the man I’d become had been seeded in early childhood; disengaging from destructive patterns of behaviour was only possible by gaining a deeper understanding of the damage done in those early years.
Digging to reach an uncamouflaged self was gruelling, but there was no alternative, as a couple we had to excavate the bad history before its grip on us could be broken. Deconstructing the past in the way we were doing enabled me to say to Sophia: I want to be loved; I want to be a loving person.
The Arica work gave us an extraordinary boost and provided much more than we had bargained for; it put our lives on quite a different footing, especially with regard to cuddling. It’s not exaggeration to say it was a life-changing experience, and we were aware of that. Arica took up more and more of our time, so much so that it began to mesh with our social life, but this was no bad thing: we’d made new friends in the Arica community and the intelligent, interesting people we formed relationships with exerted quite a strong influence on us. But our indebtedness to them for their support through hard times blinded us to a weakness in the way our friendships worked, as we were to discover.
A project Sophia and I got off the ground was a newsletter, Afterwords, intended for an Arican readership scattered around Europe; its purpose being to keep alive the friendships made during Arica trainings. It was an unofficial publication, a rough and ready, cut-and-paste job in the days before email and desktop publishing. It never had a big circulation but it was, for a brief period, a labour of love and was well received by its readers. The penultimate issue contained an interview with Brian, a major sponsor of Arica in England, which I gave the artless title “A Long Interview”. Sophia, my co-editor, conducted the interview but there was no spark in her fellow interlocutor’s responses to the questions she put to him and the finished piece was a dull read.
Unknown to us both, some of Brian’s peroration touched on historically contentious issues within the small Arica community, prompting one of its disgruntled members to pen a pugnacious rebuttal of his views. As editors we took transparency seriously and published the letter in the next issue, which set the cat among the pigeons and led to a call for a general meeting of the senior Arican clergy, to which the editors were invited; the author of the letter was pointedly not invited. I was too sick with flu to attend but Sophia went along; she phoned me mid-way through the evening, sobbing as she talked. She had been trashed by the conclave and accused of power seeking.
Last night, cleaning up after dinner, I asked my wife how much of that long ago meeting she could remember; not a great deal, but being accused of wanting power for herself she did recall: “They thought we were after their power,” she said. We stood talking in the kitchen, incredulous still at how setting up ourselves as independent publishers had ruffled the clerical feathers. Our friendships thus became tainted with a mistrust we were never able to adequately resolve.
Despite this upset, we signed up to do the Hypergnostic training, the second time for me. I was short of money and I asked the sponsors, still smarting from our perceived betrayal, if they would sponsor me as a teaching apprentice; they did, though without much enthusiasm. I’d got it into my head that I wanted to learn how to teach the Arica work; it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The first step in the process was to participate in the karma cleaning groups as a facilitator. I’d had sufficient experience of this activity to know that a sensitive prompt at a decisive moment could trigger a person to “jump their level,” as an Arican expression puts it. It’s something of a balancing act, in that you must keep a low profile but at the same time be forward enough to encourage frankness. But the speaker may circle around a memory, instinctively keeping it at arm’s length because its complete resurrection would be too unsettling, and when this happens questions or prompts are liable to skip off them; or they might be feeling a charged emotion, for which no words can be found. Or the reverse may happen: an emotional issue opens up, an unburdening occurs and intractable tension evaporates.
Chloe was relating an incident which illustrated her mother’s pervasive influence on her adult life; at a key point in her narrative I asked her a question (now forgotten) about what she was describing, which caused her to pause; she held my gaze for a moment before turning her head and looking off into the middle distance; after a few beats she turned to look at me, an expression of shock written across her face. Since early childhood she’d thought of her mother as a helpful person, too much so in fact; it was an irritating but harmless character trait she’d long ago come to accept. But in a flash of insight she realized her mother’s obsessive helpfulness masked a serially controlling personality who was forever coaxing her daughter to make sacrifices on her behalf. The emotional jolt came from the realization that for her whole life she had been unwittingly complicit in her own exploitation.
My questions were a little too uncomfortable for two incorrigible haverers: a skeletal old queen I’d shadow boxed with on other trainings and the prickly younger sister of one of the sponsors. They found my forensic probing in the karma cleaning sessions too uncomfortable and refused to be part of any group I was part of. This led to my being summoned by two of the pious bullies who’d worked over Sophia. I’d witnessed similar occasions in the past when Aricans had decided an individual’s ego was out of control and needed to be checked: the weapon reached for was the Vajra taser, Manjusri’s Sword of Wisdom, wielded to cut through ignorance and reduce the ego, a procedure the Arica lexicon defines as ‘a reduction’. The two men set to like middle-managers scolding an employee who’d upset the customers. But even before this unpleasant encounter I had already begun harbouring doubts about the Arica School.
The zealots imbued with Arican theology were so wired with its circuitry, so protective toward ‘The Work,’ that it set them apart; their proprietorial reverence for their teacher wasn’t so different to the behaviour of cult followers who elevate their leader to a level beyond criticism. I never came across anybody who questioned Oscar Ichazo’s claim that the Arica School was a different entity to other, older schools of knowledge, that it was unique, in fact, because it:
…provides a contemporary method of enlightenment, employing biology, psychology and physics in order to clarify human consciousness with modern knowledge, producing freedom and liberation.
The Arica School: http://www.arica.org/overview/arica.cfm
One hears echoes of the fairground barker’s pitch for his snake oil. Promises of freedom and liberation are taken with a pinch of salt, but here they are vouchsafed as the outcome of a contemporary method of enlightenment (Something wrong with the old one?) produced with modern knowledge, of which a great deal is sourced from this ancient mystical school or that arcane source, then buffed and incorporated, most often without acknowledgement, into the body of Arica work. And then copyrighted.
Disenchantment began working on me like rising damp. The motif of Chogyam Trungpa’s seminal publication, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, began to influence my thinking: Trungpa uses the term “spiritual materialism” to refer to a process where spirituality is accumulated and measured, as if it is a kind of wealth. Rather than scaling back the influence of the ego, this capitalist model of spirituality instead nourishes an antithetical state of mind which the seeker, despite his or her best efforts, is blind to.
Once I began thinking along these lines I saw spiritual materialists everywhere! Dropping by to check in with a few friends who had just finished a weekend-long training in a hotel on the other side of town, I was introduced to Gene, an ageing, grey-haired New Yorker over on a visit. We shook hands and without preamble he asked, “What level are you?” Translation: How high up the Arican ladder had I climbed; ergo how far had I gotten on the road to Enlightenment? Gene’s ghoulish pallor, his half-lidded eyes and leery expression were momentarily distracting, but his question, with its underlying assumption that ascension through these trainings automatically conferred a higher level of consciousness, filled me with despair.
Little things, minor irritations that would have just slid by not so long before, fed a growing disaffection. One lunchtime Sophia and I took the training’s sponsors to a local café, The Quality Chop House, in Clerkenwell, the neighbourhood where Charles Dickens lived when he was writing Oliver Twist. We explained that it was, as it said on the signage, a “Working-class Restaurant,” and had been open for business since the 1870s. It was a historical curiosity and was perhaps the last remnant of London’s nineteenth century Chop Houses, unpretentious eateries where workers could eat a meal prepared from quality meat cuts, presented and served without frills, and still have enough money left over for a glass of beer. We slid into one of the cubicles with banquette seating and the waitress brought menus. When she returned to take the orders, our companions were still deliberating over their meal choices, asking the waitress if it was possible to have this or that dish without meat, or was it possible instead to have a combination plate of vegetables from other dishes? Our server, pen poised over her order pad, and visibly flustered, stood for a few moments in silence, then turned and walked off. She returned a few beats later, in the slipstream of the cook, a giant in check shirt and white apron; even before he reached our cubicle he was demanding to know why we were upsetting his helper, but with barely a pause his right arm swept towards the door: “All of you, out. Now!”
I thought of the Quality Chop House as living history: for more than a century its modest premises had been providing working-class men and women with affordable, nutritious meals; but my fellow diners, I could see, weren’t remotely charmed by the café’s unassuming ambience. It had been a mistake to bring them there; plain meat and two veg was too carnivoral for their sensitive palates. I was so ashamed by what transpired I never visited The Quality Chop house again.
Around the time we began disentangling ourselves from Arica, Andrew, an old T’ai Chi colleague and an investment banker, was gorging on its entire menu, eventually becoming qualified to teach several of Arica’s major public trainings. He went through everything, from Level One to Level Eight, but came to a halt before the delivery of Oscar Ichazo’s opus, the ninth and final training, which was being touted as the one that promised Enlightenment; but by then the wheels had already come off the bus for Andrew:
There is now (by my calculation) three and a half times as much work in the eighth level as in levels one to seven combined… we have no idea where the end of the eighth level is, except that we know there will be many more parts. It seems to me obvious that the eighth level goes on and on and cannot be brought to a close…
His disillusionment reached critical mass in Rodomontade (rodomontade: boastful or inflated talk), the website he created for the sole purpose of publicly excoriating his former teacher. The site catalogues Ichazo’s history of broken promises, his repeated failure to publish this or that book he said he was writing on this or that innovative feature of Arica theory; the unattributed borrowings from the work of others; the inflated claims made about the numbers of people who’ve done Arica work; the declining membership of the School; allegations of incest by his daughter; financial impropriety.
A comprehensive listing of institutional and individual sins charts the rupture of Andrew’s relationship with the Arica School and its founder, yet the grief I’m sure he must have experienced from the corrosion of faith is barely hinted at. He’d handed over the money and ploughed his way through Arica’s congested catalogue of trainings, edicts, decrees, manifestos, proclamations; but then concluded, somewhat belatedly, that his investment wasn’t paying the dividend he’d been promised. Andrew had believed he could achieve Enlightenment on an instalment plan that provided him with patented mystical exercises and meditations, but his escalating doubt tipped the scales and at the eighth level he terminated his contributions to the Oscar Ichazo pension plan.
With our friendships splintering, the drift away from the Arica School had a certain inevitability to it. Sophia made the telling observation that Aricans think it’s inconceivable that anybody could grow out of it, that there could ever be a time when the Arica work ceased to be a good fit. It had taken over our lives for several years but we had come to chafe at the amount of time, money and energy it required – that and the shenanigans of its more fetishistic practitioners.
Arica had been tremendously helpful when we were at a very low point in our lives and had straightened us out in a way we couldn’t have managed alone: after five challenging years I began to fall in love with the woman I eventually married, and for this I am indebted to the Arica School, but then we moved on. Sophia and I went to live in New York and embarked on a different kind of life.
Our first contact with Aricans in New York occurred in unusual circumstances: we received an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party in Manhattan; not free though, $50 entry fee for each head. We decided to go, thinking there would probably be a concessionary price for students and the unemployed; my wife had just started a Master’s programme in journalism at Columbia and I hadn’t yet landed a job. Anyway, we’d been hanging out with Aricans for the previous few years and we knew hardly anybody in New York so we thought it would be sociable to attend and hopefully get to know a few people.
When we asked the two ladies on the door if they were offering concessions to students and the unemployed, they turned to each other, as if to say, ‘Who are these people?’ They had no conception of what we were referring to. We explained that in the culture we’d just left it was accepted practice for cinemas, theatres, art galleries, concerts, social events and such like, to offer a discount to financially challenged citizens. But our two Manhattan ladies said, “Sorry, we don’t do that sort of thing here.” We paid the full fee and spent the evening circulating in a room full of strangers; we were two new faces in the Arica community, but there was no curiosity about who we might be, nobody approached us or were interested in making us feel welcome. We left well before midnight and returned to our apartment in Red Hook.
What has assumed mythical status in the history of Arica is the work Oscar Ichazo did in the early 1970s in Chile, where for ten months he taught a group of 50 Americans from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California; and after that New York, where he and his Arica graduates mounted 40-day and 3-month trainings. One has no doubt about how deeply the work must have affected those who engaged with it, and with Oscar himself, but he would have been a different creature back then, something like Gurdjieff perhaps, a charismatic teacher capable of mesmerizing those who came into contact with him. But thirty, forty years on, his claim that his body of work could bring a person to the highest level of spiritual illumination, achieved through training programmes formulated by himself, lost its heft. As the magic of his spells wore off the old wizard’s power faded. He passed away in 2020, aged 88.
I found more disillusionment on another disaffected Arican’s website, Metaton, authored by Stirling Doughty, another castigated malcontent. From it I have included an extract from a letter written by Oscar Ichazo, dated 2002, and directed to members of his School. It is in parts boastful and adrift from reality, and for these reasons alone is compelling reading:
You have been elected by the Arica Institute membership to proceed in the most delicate part of the historical life of our School. This is so because in the next year Arica will be presented in full to the general public worldwide. It will consist of the three major and final accomplishments for the School, related to the presentation of the first public work of the Arica theory in a book authored by me. Following this accomplishment we will present a completely restructured form of presentation and distribution of Arica trainings, scientific techniques, and personal instructions at various levels for the general public, professionals, and academic institutions. This material is designed to produce the most enthusiastic reception for the Arica news toward enlightenment and Humanity One. I can assure you that it will be an explosive event of enthusiasm toward the Arica work. This will attract a phenomenal amount of social energy in terms of actual money as well as human work and dedication. At that point Arica will be able to produce an ordered flow of information and assimilation of people in our School, which will acquire gigantic proportions.
The most significant outcome of the book is that it will catapult Arica into the attention of the world. I will also prepare, at the same time, the trainings which will be adapted for producing public acceptance that will make the School immensely popular, prestigious, and resourceful.
All this most important and delicate historical process will be in your hands, and since you have been elected, by a direct line of the School, you must feel the mantle of Archangel Gabriel upon you, which means the Divine Mind of Essential Will acting within inexorable certitude towards the accomplishment of the School as the transcendental tool for achieving the special goal of Humanity One. This great responsibility is upon you…
There is still a short period of time that the School will be living off its very limited resources; however, it will still be necessary to raise funds to finance the Institute’s basic operations, for consolidation, and to honour our commitments. During this very last period of internal tranquillity we have to dedicate ourselves entirely to complete the Telegnostic Meditations, so the School acquires the eighth Bhumi known in the Buddhist tradition as Acala Immovable, or the Third Holy, known as Non-returner, and this equals our Sixth Divine Gnosis under the title of the First Arica Holy or the Telegnostic Degree.
The tub thumping; the clarion call; the eager prose; the prediction of success to come; the ambitious eye on an unrealisable goal, veer toward delusion. The Arica School has only ever been a marginal presence among the religions and creeds of the Western world; its current membership could probably be counted in the few hundreds, perhaps less, a far cry from the 1970s when Arica rode a ripple of popularity in the USA and its founder was heralded by a few well-heeled New Yorkers as a Messiah for the New Age. Since then interest in the Arica School has diminished so significantly it may well be a defunct organization.
If one takes the claims Oscar Ichazo made in his letter at face value, he evidently regarded himself as still a player, but like the charismatic leaders of the sects and cults scattered around the USA in the twentieth century, he has made an almost invisible impression on the global stage. He and his School might amount to a footnote in the historical narrative of new religions; or most likely will not.
My disillusionment with Arica was crushing and for a time I remained profoundly depressed. In the aftermath of my disentanglement from the School and the concomitant loss of friendships, I resorted to heavy cannabis use and this helped anaesthetise the pain of separation, but it was too ferocious to be suppressed, hence the great uprising in my teeth. But in time I got over it, as one does with such things.
My breakfast reading this past few mornings has been Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite, published a few years before the launch in Chile of The Arica way to Enlightenment. This caught my attention:
I might suggest a fourth need of modern man which is precisely liberation from his inordinate self-consciousness, his monumental self-awareness, his obsession with self-affirmation, so that he may enjoy the freedom from concern that goes with being simply what he is and accepting things as they are in order to work with them as he can.
I cherish the Catholic virtues of my childhood: compassion, charity, humility; they still mean something to me, but such old fashioned ideas have no place, even minimally, in the Arica world view. It may be my working-class upbringing, leavened with my father’s radical Socialism, but Arica always struck me as a bourgeois kind of religion, best suited to people on the up with disposable income. I realise this is a perception based on my own prejudices; nevertheless, it’s a view that came to colour my relations with Aricans: the way they behaved – on both sides of the Atlantic – served to increase my disaffection; the relentless preoccupation with self, which seems to be an instinctual requirement for pursuing the Arica Way, and the often blind attachment to the words of Oscar Ichazo, were things I could not reconcile myself to.
In the years after Arica, with the anchor of zazen practice, the writing of authors like Chogyam Trungpa and Thomas Merton have been a source of inspiration and have contributed to my improving ability to fail better. Trungpa, despite his wildly aberrant behaviour and alcoholism, was an original and illuminating thinker. I included the short extract from Merton’s writing because it manages to fuse the essence of two apparently disparate religions; as he casts down he lifts up: his spare counsel, pure Zen and pure Catholic, sans frills, manages to convey the warmth of the old virtues I hold dear.
❡
Endless Buddhas 
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