CHAPTER 14
Crisis of Questions

No matter what you do, this darkness and this cloud is between you and your God and because of it you can neither see Him clearly with your reason in the light of understanding, nor can you feel Him with your affection in the sweetness of love. Be prepared, therefore, to remain in this darkness as long as must be, crying evermore for Him whom you love. For if you are ever to feel Him or to see Him, it will necessarily be within this cloud and within this darkness. And if you will work with great effort as I bid you, I trust in His mercy that you will achieve it.¹

MEISTER ECKHART

When conceits are silent and all words stand still, the world speaks. We must burn the clichés to clear the air for hearing.

Conceptual clichés are counterfeit; preconceived notions are misfits.

Knowledge involves love, care for the things we seek to know, longing, being-drawn-to, being overwhelmed. ²

ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

By the late 1950s, Bob Greenleaf was getting restless. He was successful, secure, and admired in his job at AT&T, in his endeavors with outside companies and universities, and in the work he and Esther pursued with 204 the Quakers. He was still deep into an era of seeking—meeting unusual people of accomplishment, reading mind-expanding books, preparing for an end that he could not quite yet fathom. Time was passing, though; he was in his fifties. Bob had a crisis of questions: What was his personal greatness? Did he have the courage to claim it? How could he best design the remainder of his life to make his contribution to individuals, organizations, and society? Should he stay at AT&T until age sixty-five or take an early retirement? Several shadows of his psyche still held him back, but what were they, and what could he do about them? Precisely at this moment in his life, when he was open to answers and new questions, the right people, ideas, and experiences appeared to nurture the unfolding path of his life.

In 1957, Bob and Esther attended the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology organized around the theme of “The Roots and Fruits of Hostility.” Bob presented a session on “Meeting Hostility in Others” and Esther conducted a workshop on painting.³ Jungian analyst Dr. Martha Jaeger presented a session on meditation. Jaeger, who was therapist to Anais Nin when the writer had a breakdown in 1942, was well known at the conference, having made her first presentation on “Training in Pastoral Psychology” in 1943 and through the years conducting workshops with titles like “Functions of Symbols,” “Neurosis as a Means of Self-Discovery,” and the “I Ching.”⁴ At some point, Martha Jaeger said to Esther, “Why don’t you try painting what you feel rather than what you see or imagine?”⁵ That question started Esther on a new era of abstract painting.

Two years later, Dr. Jaeger would also be a key figure in Bob’s life, but first he would work with a remarkable person he met at the next year’s Friends conference at Haverford College—Dr. Ira Progoff.⁶ With his plastic-rimmed glasses framing a somewhat round face and penetrating eyes, and a half-smile that could break into a wide grin or shift subtly into utter seriousness, Progoff was one of those people who really was as wise as he looked.

When he was very young, the Brooklyn-born Ira Progoff watched his grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi, rise from a prostrate position before the Ark and tell him, “You are the one who will do great things.”⁷ Progoff had no idea what those things would be until he discovered Swedenborg, Lao Tsu, Whitman, Martin Buber, Jan Christiaan Smuts, and dozens of other luminaries, completed his Ph.D. on the social meaning of Carl Jung’s psychology, 205and then studied for two years with Jung in Zurich, where he also met the Zen master D. T. Suzuki.⁸ At the time Greenleaf met him, Progoff was Director of the Institute for Research in Depth Psychology at the graduate school of Drew University in New Jersey and had written, among other books, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (1956), the first publication in what would be a classic trilogy on depth psychology. He was not yet famous for his Intensive Journal system that would give thousands of ordinary people a tool to connect with their emotional and spiritual depths, but he was already recommending journals for his patients. Furthermore, he believed that psychotherapy should be for gifted and ordinary people as well as the emotionally crippled.⁹ “An awareness of man’s spiritual nature has gradually replaced the materialism upon which psychology was based in its analytical period,” he wrote. “Its special knowledge is directed toward enlarging the capacities of life in modern times, thus making it psychologically possible for a revitalization to take place in the arts, in religion, and in all the fields of creative endeavor.”¹⁰

At the 1958 Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, Dr. Pro-goff was the key speaker. His topic was The Cloud of Unknowing, the mystical classic by the fourteenth-century monk Meister Eckhart. Progoff’s translation and commentary of the work had been published the previous year, making it widely available for the first time. Progoff specifically remembered Bob from that conference. “Robert Greenleaf, one of the participants, an executive with AT&T, turned his life around after that meeting. He went on to early retirement and opened up the most creative time of his life. “¹¹

To protect confidentiality, Progoff did not mention that Greenleaf was also one of his “dream therapy” clients during the year following the conference. He urged Bob to begin keeping a journal—Bob’s journal efforts had been spotty for the last fifteen years—coached him on how to remember dreams, consider their symbolism, and engage in waking conversations with dream figures—a technique he called “twilight imaging,” adapted from Jung’s “active imagination” approach.¹²

Bob bought an illuminated pen so he could record dreams without waking Esther. Some nights he wrote snatches from three or four dreams. Then, every week, he brought his nighttime dramas to the good doctor for discussion and reflection. Perhaps Bob’s dreams could give him insight into what to do next in his life and how to do it. Dr. Progoff certainly thought 206that could be the case. He believed that certain dreams (but not all) carried the seed-nature of a person, and through working with them on a consistent basis, recording and enlarging upon them, one could generate a flow of new thoughts, ideas, insights, intuitions, awarenesses, and guidance regarding which areas of one’s life needed examination.¹³

Bob worked with Progoff for nearly a year, switched to Martha Jaeger for another year of dream analysis, and continued to record occasional dreams through 1962. His journal from this period contains descriptions of dreams, comments about their possible meanings, waking “twilight imaging” conversations with dream figures, and traditional journal entries. It makes for fascinating reading.¹⁴

Analyzing the meaning of dreams—those of oneself or others—is tricky because dreams have so many layers and are intensely personal to the dreamer’s situation. Even though Jung taught that certain universal, primordial archetypes emerged in dreams, he never believed in the value of a rigid “catalogue of meanings.” Nor did Progoff. He sought to “evaluate” clients’ dreams, not interpret them¹⁵ The best we can do today, decades after Greenleaf scratched out his dreams in darkness, is look at common themes and Bob’s own notes on interpretations.

On the surface, some of his dream scenes express his developing ideas about education, awareness, and management.

These perorations were the exception. Most entries were—well— more dream-like, but communications was a recurring theme. In a surprising number of dreams Bob spoke tenderly to animals—an owl, dogs, rabbits, cats, birds, squirrels—and listened as they whispered back. (The only dream animals he harmed were rats.) In several dreams, he found himself invited to participate in radio panels where many could hear his message.

Bob has healing abilities in several dreams:

One group of dreams concerns Bob’s relationship with his anima, which is the “inner face” of the female psyche. “The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of female genes, and that is something that does not disappear in him,” said Jung. “It is constantly present, and it works as a female in a man.”¹⁶ A woman must confront the animus, which holds male traits in her unconscious. Full maturity requires addressing the hidden power of the opposite gender. “If the personality is to be well adjusted and harmoniously balanced, the feminine side of a man’s personality and the masculine side of a woman’s personality must be allowed to express themselves in consciousness and behavior. If a man exhibits only masculine traits, his feminine traits remain unconscious 208and therefore these traits remain undeveloped and primitive. This gives the unconscious a quality of weakness and impressionability. That is why the most virile-appearing and virile-acting man is often weak and submissive inside. A woman who exhibits excessive femininity in her external life would have the unconscious qualities of stubbornness or willfulness, qualities that are often present in man’s outer behavior.”¹⁷

In one dream both the anima and a “shadow” appears. As Jung defines them, shadows of the psyche are repressed material, the things we do not want to remember or confront. They cannot be eliminated, but their negative power can be transformed into positive strength if we bring them to consciousness and accept them as part of the whole self.

Bob’s unpredictable mother appears. In one dream, he and Esther walk toward a railroad track and watch Burchie Greenleaf walk down a track to the right. Burchie’s track slopes down into water and she keeps walking until she is submerged. They have to rescue her.

Perhaps his most vivid shadow, however, one that he was forced to confront a number of times during dream therapy, was his bad temper. 209In 1960, he had a dream about a squirrel that dug its claws into his arm and would not let go. The image haunted him. In his journal the next day he wrote, “I still have the problem of my deep violence—or is it that? Gerald Heard says it is frustration. Perhaps there is a creative drive that is blocked. I wonder what it could be?” So, he “cleared the screen”—entered into a restful, open state—and had an imaginative conversation with the squirrel, who spoke of violence and yet another shadow—Bob’s desire for comfort and security.

By this time, Bob had been working for several years on a book he called The Ethic of Strength and had also been writing a short paper, titled “A New Religious Mission,” in which he speculated on the emergence of a religion that “probably will not be exclusively Christian and which, while ultimately conservative (because it will work to assure the future), will have the initial impact of being disturbing and unsettling to older, conservative people.”¹⁹ In his conversation with the dream squirrel, Greenleaf wondered if his interest in an emerging religion was part of his capacity for greatness. The answer: perhaps, but that was not the point.

Two years later, one of Bob’s dreams showed how he could harness the power of his anima to address the shadow of violence.

Readers of Greenleaf’s writings, and even those who knew him well during his lifetime, may wonder about this shadow of violence. There is no account of him aggressively harming anyone—especially his family— but there is no doubt he could have a bad temper. By all accounts, Bob 211followed his father’s advice to “keep sweet” with Esther in spite of their occasional disagreements, but the next chapter shows how his children experienced another side of Bob during their childhood and teenage years.

To his lasting credit, Bob was honest about his shadows, and had the courage to confront them directly through dream work, reading, reflection, and changes in behavior. Therein lies the plot of Bob’s mythic epic— a recognition of the dragons living in his depths, a struggle where he confronts them, fights the good fight, and makes friends with them so he can use their power to emerge into greater consciousness. In his reflections on one dream in which he joins two other men to pursue an “altruistic idea,” Greenleaf wrote, “I have taken my shadow along. I accept him.”

In spite of his hole-in-the-hedge philosophy, Greenleaf’s dreams exposed his anxiety about leaving the security of AT&T. Responsibility to his family was part of his concern. The message of the dreams: Get over it.

One dream was especially prescient, anticipating the future role of his work.

Reading the dreams as a whole, one can see a progression, a determination to leap into the next era of life. “There have always been reactionary forces in the world, forces that would sterilize the life process, that would inhibit growth,” he wrote in a journal entry. “One would not want a world without them. It would be a pretty dull place. Growth is meaningful only when the opportunity is won against the opposition of reactionary 212forces. Growth is the measure of the man against the opportunity.” And Bob was growing, emotionally, professionally, and, especially, spiritually.

A circle, a triangle, and a cross are drawn at the top of one journal page. Written below are notes on how to focus on the three symbols, and this prayer “to sharpen perception.”

1. Lord give me the strength to do your work.
2. Free me from my deeper violence.
3. Clear my mind to hear thy voice.
4. Clear my speech to convey thy word.
5. Give me the sense to serve where you want me to serve.
6. Help me to keep in contact with thee under stress.
7. Help me to hear and speak thy word under stress.
8. Make me a loving, feeling, warm person.
9. Help me to be gentle and constructive.
10. Give me the strength to withstand evil.

_______

Simultaneously with his dream therapy and journal-keeping, Bob entered more far-ranging zones of consciousness through his friendship with Gerald Heard. When he met Gerald at Wainwright House, he encountered a legend. Some say that if history had any justice, Heard would be a legend to this day. Gerald was an intellectual Irishman who grew up in England, a close friend of Aldous Huxley, a man who enjoyed a reputation in the 1930s as a “prodigiously energetic polymath, writer, broadcaster and man of ideas.”²⁰ In Down There on a Visit, Christopher Isherwood modeled the character of Augustus Par after Heard. He also called him “witty, playful, flattering, talkative as a magpie, well-informed as an encyclopaedia, and, at the same time, life-weary, meditative, deeply concerned and in earnest… If you couldn’t get hold of Bernard Shaw, perhaps he was the next best thing… the most fascinating person I’ve ever met… “²¹ Heard wrote 213thirty-eight books on topics that included natural theology, the evolution of human consciousness, flying saucers, novels, science fiction, prayers, and meditations.²² He had a photographic memory and knew, or had known, everyone from W. H. Auden to H. G. Wells to the Swami Prabha-vananda, but Greenleaf found him to be “a lonely man.”²³

Perhaps part of the isolation came from the fact that Heard was a homosexual in a time especially intolerant of sexual deviation. When he and his partner Michael began visiting the Greenleaf home, Esther asked Bob who Michael was. Bob told her he was “Gerald’s secretary.” Esther accepted that and forevermore believed it. For all her adventures in art and creativity, Esther was quite reticent to talk about sexual matters.

In Gerald, Bob found another hole-in-the-hedge man who, according to Huxley, operated “between the pigeonholes.” His childhood had been terribly painful, beginning with a broken spine, a crushed vertebra, an incident at age twelve where he was run over by a horse and buggy, a bad fall that led to a broken shoulder, and more injuries during his young adulthood. “I wasn’t permitted to settle down,” he told Bob in 1958. “When I had finished my terribly inefficient education, I came out into the world realizing I must educate myself… Always, there were two consuming things [for me]: the great problem of human suffering and the problem of whether there is any meaning in life. Those two things were necessary to fend off this terrible melancholy so that one wouldn’t commit suicide.”²⁴

When it came to religious matters, Heard sought that which was both beneath and beyond the great faith traditions. He called it the Eternal Gospel, which was “on the one hand, that essential sense of obligation and intuitional moral knowledge which has emerged and become defined as the common denominator and working factor in all the great religions. On the other hand, it is that element owing to which those religions are great and enduring.”²⁵

This position reinforced Ira Progoff’s view of religion. After his World War II experiences, Progoff began to wonder what would have happened if Hitler had succeeded in destroying all the recorded wisdom of mankind. “Suppose all the Bibles of the world were burned, the Old and the New Testaments, the Tao Teh Ching, the Upanishads, the Koran, and all the others. If that happened, what would befall mankind?”²⁶ He decided humanity would renew the eternal spiritual truths with fresh wisdom, all expressing contact with the Unity of Life. “The great source is 214there to be contacted where ‘deep calleth unto deep,’ but each civilization and period in history has to find its own way of reaching it… It is a work that each person has to do alone, but it is helpful to know that many of us are working alone together.”²⁷

Gerald Heard was making his own contributions to eternal wisdom, and his influence on Bob Greenleaf was profound. He encouraged Bob’s reading and thinking about broad theological issues, the future of humanity, and the formal study of meditation.²⁸ They chatted about everything from Jung to organizational theory to witch doctors in South Africa and Catholic liturgy, but the most important area of new experience Bob encountered through Heard was exposure to the hallucinogenic drug LSD.

Lysergic acid diethylamide was first formulated in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hoffman of the Sandoz Chemical Works in Basel, Switzerland, but its mind-bending effects were not discovered until 1943, when the doctor accidentally ingested a minute quantity and had the world’s first LSD trip.²⁹ By the late 1940s, the drug had made its way to America, where it was authorized for experimental use. Psychiatrists were naturally interested. Not a small number first tried the substance on themselves, with the idea that if a therapist could experience something approximating a psychotic state, he or she could have greater empathy with patients. Then they began studying LSD’s effect on patients to see if it could alleviate depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, cancer pain, sexual dysfunction, or simple neuroses and, for good measure, enhance creativity.³⁰

By the mid-1950s, mind-altering drugs were emerging into public consciousness. In 1954, Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, in which he disclosed his experiences with mescaline and his belief that hallucinogenic drugs “bypassed… the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system” which protected us from being overwhelmed by the “Mind at Large.”³¹ William Blake once said it more elegantly: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Huxley had an answer for the reductionists who claimed that mystical and religious states were merely a function of chemistry.

Robert Greenleaf read Huxley’s book and was fascinated. From then until the end of his days, he often used Huxley’s phrase to describe times in his life when “my doors of perception were opened a bit wider than usual,” like that afternoon when an innocent remark from Professor Helming became a roadmap for a career. Bob’s interest was piqued even more when Gerald Heard introduced him to Huxley and a small group of intellectuals who were experimenting with LSD, including Alan Watts, Anais Nin, Keith Ditman, Betty Eisner, and Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at UCLA who took LSD a number of times and was to become one of the best-known researchers on the drug’s effects.³³

In 1958, when the substance was still legal, Gerald Heard, Dr. Sidney Cohen, and a third person (with the initials JB) met Bob at Heard’s home in California and initiated him into the fantastic realms of LSD. Bob wrote up that experience, the first of several over the next few years.

Bob was open with his family about the LSD experiences. He had no choice. During and after the trips the children saw a more open, vulnerable, 216and joyful father. Newcomb was already living away from home and “thought it was strange,” but his two sisters kept him informed about the drug’s effects. “He was such a trip!” recalled Madeline. “He was relaxed, unpressured, unconcerned, he was floating, and he wasn’t a floaty guy. We were once in a rental house in New Hampshire with a big, long back yard, and a field behind it of black-eyed Susans. He sat out for hours looking at the black-eyed Susans. Finally it got dark and cold. He came in and Esther put a blanket around him. He sat, just ecstatic, just ecstatic, and it was wonderful to see him.”³⁵

Madeline’s older sister Lisa appreciated the effects of the drug on her father. “It brought him into deeper harmony with the complexities of his nature. He became much easier to live with, more grounded and centered in his own self. I really think it allowed his still calm and creativity to find its place. I believe the LSD opened up Bob’s doors so that he began to function much more effectively, in so many ways.”³⁶

LSD may have been legal under supervision of a doctor, but even before the days of Timothy Leary, it had a stigma attached to it. “We were told, ‘Never, ever, under pain of death, tell anyone about this,’” recalled Madeline, “because, of course, he worked for AT&T and we lived in a community where we went to school with the kids of presidents of AT&T. Not that I didn’t tell other people about it, but I never told him that I told anyone!”³⁷ Bob also had LSD sessions with “Uncle Bill” Wolf and others but never took the drug after it was declared illegal.³⁸

“This was an adventure, a mind-stretching adventure,” said Bob nearly thirty years later. “I regret that we are not a mature enough society to permit this drug to be used that way. I don’t question declaring it illegal because the way it developed, and the way it was being used—particularly in the youth culture—was very destructive. I am just glad that I had the experience while it was still legal because it meant a great deal to me.”³⁹

Bob never took marijuana or any other drug because he did not see that they had the same “developmental possibilities” as LSD. “To what extent my total perception of everything was influenced, I have no sure sense of that,” he said later, “but I have the feeling that it had a rather total effect, that I was more aware of everything, although the evidence is not as striking as it is in the case of color where the contrast between my color perception before taking LSD and after was quite striking.”⁴⁰

Huxley and Heard also believed that awareness was the drug’s great gift, if used appropriately, by the conscious choice of reasonably healthy 217people, and in the presence of a guide. In his final hours, Aldous Huxley took the drug in order to be “more conscious.”⁴¹ Dave Kahn, the businessman who made possible Edgar Cayce’s astonishing career as a psychic and was close to both Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, also wanted to use LSD to be more aware and pain-free on his deathbed, but by then the drug was illegal and he was denied the opportunity.⁴² Dr. Sidney Cohen continued his work and, in 1960, published a classic paper on its effects.⁴³ Ironically, some of his later research was cited by lawmakers to ban the substance.

After several years of personal introspection in the midst of professional action, Robert Greenleaf was moving closer to claiming his personal greatness. His life was his greatest teaching—to himself and others—but his writing would be the way he made a difference and moved his “little corner of the world” to every corner of the world. It was time to get on with it, but he still faced the challenge of integrating his learning into his family relationships.