Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad

Authors of The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power

DIANA: As a woman, I realized early on that authoritarian structures were not to my advantage. My youth involved a struggle to free myself from contraints and from the great confusion produced by sex role and religious conditioning. In my teens and twenties, training my mind was the only route to freedom I saw available. Understanding different ideas and viewpoints did begin to free me from the limitations of the belief systems implanted in me. Eventually I received a doctorate from Yale believing this would surely give me a firm foundation for autonomy, financial security, and credibility in a world that at that time (the sixties) held neither women's work nor opinions in high regard. During that time, I was one of the founder's of the Women's Movement and taught the first courses in Women's Studies both at Yale and Duke Universities.

Upon becoming a college professor and finding myself a presumed authority, I wanted new vistas to explore. So I began investigating humanistic psychologies and Eastern spirituality. A constant theme was trying to resolve the "riddle of the sexes"--how power plays itself out between men and women--and to demystify power, outmoded paradigms, and covertly repressive values. When I visited various ashrams, cults, and newly arrived Eastern gurus, I encountered rigid sex roles and feudal, patriarchal mindsets that did not impress me as being products of the East's much vaunted "enlightenment." Unwilling totally to dismiss their intriguing and enigmatic notions of Oneness, "cosmic consciousness," and enlightenment, however, I made reluctant allowances for cultural differences and proceeded to see what I could learn about these esoteric phenomena--while keeping my critical and rather suspicious faculties intact.

While on this "spiritual quest," in 1972, I happened to attend Joel's workshop on yoga, Eastern perspectives, and the nature of consciousness. It was a relief to hear his balanced perspective toward the value I intuited in Eastern views and practices--minus the mystifications, reverence for tradition, authoritarianism, and false claims. He was not teaching a system of thought or body of beliefs, but rather presenting a methodology that involves, in daily life and relationships, turning the mind on itself to observe the ways it filters experience. This methodology enabled me to conclude that in spite of its unique offerings, the Eastern worldview has dangerous blind spots and imbalances, and much unconscious and covert, as well as overt, authoritarianism.

Joel and I have been together since 1974, when his book The Passionate Mind, based on transcripts of his lectures, was published. We both strongly feel that all "spiritual" authoritarianism needs to be unmasked. This is especially true for Eastern perspectives (the most sophisticated form of it) so that we Westerners can utilize whatever insights they may offer without getting trapped in their hierarchical and patriarchal worldview in the process.

JOEL: Even as a child, I was always interested in issues of power and control. I hated being told what to do. In the sixties, having focused on consciousness, I became aware that you cannot divorce consciousness from power. I spent years of post-graduate work trying to find the answer to the riddle of my existence. I put all of my hopes into thought and science for answers that became more elusive the deeper I went.

During those years I was concerned with the excruciating questions of meaning that young people sometimes agonize over: "Why am I here?" "What's living about anyway?" and "What in the world should I be doing with my life?" I first looked for answers along a traditional, academic route while working toward a doctorate in philosophy and later psychology. Eventually my studies in philosophy came to resemble for me the game of tic-tac-toe, where you come to a point that you know the game of arguing different positions so well that you never lose. But this provided little consolation as I still wasn't getting the answers I was looking for. So in line with the fashion of the times, in the early sixties I "dropped out" and began to investigate the Eastern worldview and practices which were filtering into the West.

I was especially interested in the differences between Eastern and Western approaches to the mind and to the structure of thought. In this vein, Eastern epistemology (epistemology being the study of how you get to know--or think you know--anything) particularly fascinated me. This was my first contact with the concept of "looking-within" for truth. Looking-within brings a quality of awareness in which the mind turns inward upon itself, to observe its own workings and conditioning processes. I had previously intellectually known through my studies in psycho-linguistics that language structures the way one perceives the world. Through looking-within I was actually able to directly experience the structures of my thought. This is tremendously valuable and qualitatively different from theories, beliefs, or knowledge of the external world.

I saw how my mind is a habit-builder that influences and filters whatever I experience, as well as the way I experience it. I observed how the very thoughts I was thinking were far more mechanical and self-serving than I imagined or liked. I saw the self-protective nature of the way my mind works: how I dodge, justify, and deny things with it--how I separate myself from others out of fear, or out of a need to feel special or superior. I didn't find all this particularly comfortable, but I did find it extremely interesting.

These earlier concerns led to my current interest in authoritarian power, which boils down to examining to the ways in which people control one another and even themselves. By focusing on investigating the human mind's desire for the comfort of absolute certainty, I have been led with Diana to look carefully not only at how other people use this tendency for their own manipulative purposes, but also at how broader ideologies are constructed whose main covert purpose is control as an end in itself.

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