Let's see. Where do I begin? How about at the beginning? My name is David and I was born and raised in south Texas, graduated from Texas City High School and attended Texas A&M and U.S.C. (on a national Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship) before enrolling at U.C.L.A. where I received my undergraduate and graduate degrees. While at U.C.L.A. I was active in the Student Leadership Assembly, a tame forerunner of the far more infamous Free Speech Movement at our sister campus up north.
My doctorate was in experimental and physiological psychology with minors in aerospace medicine and engineering biotechnology. I completed my degree work while on a NASA pre-doctoral fellowship (probably the first behavioral scientist in the nation to get one) before moving on to an NIMH post-doctoral fellowship at Yale School of Medicine.
While at Yale I attended rounds in pediatric cardiology, assisted in a series of canine heart transplant experiments, and taught an advanced graduate seminar in the Fundamentals of Autonomic Psychophysiology. It was all very interesting stuff but I ultimately decided that a lifetime of academic research and college teaching really wasn't my cup of tea.
My interests were too far ranging to be limited to the laboratory or classroom, so I left academia for Washington, D.C. and a job at the U.S. Office of Education (which, as you will soon see, was a whole lot more exciting than it might at first sound).
It was the mid-60s and I quickly became involved in the radical educational reform and student power movements, the Black Power Movement (despite my skin color), the human potential movement, affective education, futuristics, the anti-war movement (I was a volunteer organizer for Federal Employees Against the War in Vietnam) and psychedelics (with the inimitable Bill Harman as my guide and under conditions that were all completely legal, legit and above board I must hasten to add).
My official title was Advanced Planning Officer of the Bureau of Research but my unofficial title was "radical in residence".......for obvious reasons.
During my tenure at the Office of Education I did a lot of traveling around the country, promoting educational reform, visiting innovative programs, giving rabble-rousing talks, and having great, 60s-type experiences. Much of my time was spent in Northern California -- Berkeley, Haight Ashbury, Marin and Big Sur -- including many long, idyllic stays at Esalen where I had a standing invitation from co-founder Michael Murphy, bestowing on me a nebulous status midway between paying guest and paid staff member -- although I wasn't either one.
The summer of 1968 found me at San Francisco State University as a Visiting Professor of Psychology leading free-ranging encounter groups -- officially listed in the college catalog under the more prosaic heading of "small group dynamics." I also organized and moderated an Esalen event in San Francisco which explored three divergent views of the future, as put forth by my erstwhile colleagues, Carl Rogers, Alan Watts and Herman Kahn (and reported verbatim in The Oracle). I also gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the National Student Association (Teddy Kennedy had to cancel at the last minute -- something about having to head to Chicago a bit early because there might be a demonstration or two at the Democratic National Convention).
Back in Washington things were hopping. I was launching a program to study the future and its educational implications, co-founding the World Future Society, and, folly of follies, turning down a six-month appointment to the White House staff (in part due to my opposition to "Johnson's" war). I was having breakfast with Bucky Fuller, phone chats with Isaac Asimov, lunch with Doris Kearns (at the White House Mess), drinks with Alvin Toffler, and dinner with Carl Rogers (but not all on the same day).
From suburban Washington I headed north to rural Vermont, serving as a sort of vice president at Goddard College for a very short time. Then, not finding work in the U.S., I left Vermont for Haute Nendaz, Switzerland to teach futuristics at a small, experimental college located in a ski village high atop a mountain outside of Sion (the day I arrived, with my travel-weary young family in tow, the administration announced the imminent closing of the school). On the way home several months later I stopped off in England and ended up spending a year there teaching part-time (at the British Open University and Schiller College) and attempting to launch a business called Leisure Learning.
On my return to the U.S. I pursued a rather haphazard career that included work as a college teacher and administrator, health care executive, and chief lobbyist and executive director of a statewide environmental group. At times I dabbled in party politics, e.g., serving as a Vermont delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention and then member of the National Carter-Mondale Advisory Committee on Citizen Involvement.
I also spent many years doing consulting work of one sort or another, including varying stints as an educational, management, alternative energy, appropriate technology, organizational development, and even Y2K preparedness consultant. While living in Kathmandu I served as the senior expatriate adviser to a Nepali non-profit organization working on contracts from the U.S. and Canadian international development agencies as well as the U.N. Development Programme.
Over these many years I simultaneously pursued my more right-brained interests, e.g., as a trip guide, flotation tank floater, meditator, encounter group leader, Kripalu yoga enthusiast, and regression therapist (specializing in past lives and alien abductions). I have worked as a personal growth facilitator, couples counselor and rebirther; have given psychic readings at psychic fairs; done energy training work with friend George Leonard at his Mill Valley dojo and hemi-synch work through the Monroe Institute at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I also took vows as a lay Zen Buddhist monk under Zen Master Baba Nagarjuna Moohar at the Sang Yun Dea monastery in South Korea.
Everything sort of came together for me in my last full-time position as Dean of the Graduate School for Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University. This was a rather phenomenal program with an extraordinary complement of students, staff and faculty dedicated to the pursuit of consciousness studies, transpersonal and somatic counseling, holistic health education, and arts and consciousness. A very fitting end to my rather checkered career, wouldn't you agree?
As you might imagine, having devoted my life to the dual goals of social change and the expansion of human consciousness, I found the possibilities inherent in the 2012 prophesies quite fascinating.
Now with December 21, 2012 safely behind us I find myself both relieved and disappointed......relieved that nothing terribly amiss occurred and disappointed that the many potential promises also failed to materialize.
However, I am still left with an abiding interest in many of the areas that were intertwined with the 2012 meme and I believe that I have a unique perspective to bring to bear on their exploration.
I say this because, on the one hand I have tremendous respect for the scientific method and pride myself on my analytical abilities and hardheaded pragmatism, while on the other I have an abiding faith in the existence of a larger Reality that goes far beyond the ken of contemporary science and the boundaries of rational thought.
Maybe somewhere at the nexus of these two very different perspectives we can uncover some hints of the truth of the matter.....or at least have fun trying.
Note: If you have any questions or comments I can be reached via [email protected]
