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.

Following graduation from college in 1971 and in 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.

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 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 9th 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.