1974

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

A few weeks ago, I read a book entitled 1974 by Francine Prose, a writer I’ve admired ever since I read her marvelous book, The Lives of the Muses, in the early 2000s. But her most recent book was very different. It was a personal memoir of the time when, still in her twenties, she was just beginning to find some success as a novelist. And, as she relates, it was also when she was spending a lot of time in San Francisco, having promiscuous sex – those were the days when we were still under the influence of organizations like the Sexual Freedom League, years before the AIDS epidemic occurred. But the main story she tells in her memoir deals with her relationship with a man named Tony Russo whose name may not be familiar to you, though he was well known then. So let me fill you in about Tony Russo.

He had been a close friend with Dan Ellsberg, the man who had brought the Pentagon papers to the attention of the world in 1971 – documents that showed that President Lyndon Johnson had lied to the American public about the war in Vietnam in order to find a justification for prosecuting the Vietnam War. The exposure of these falsehoods created an uproar at the time, and Ellsberg was soon tried, but was not convicted.

Tony Russo, like Ellsberg, had spent time in Vietnam, had interrogated many Viet Cong (the North Vietnamese soldiers), and soon learned the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. Moreover, he became determined that the American public should know the truth. So, he hooked up with Ellsberg, and, according to what he later told Prose, it was he who convinced Ellsberg to spend many hours photocopying the thousands of pages comprising the Pentagon papers. But Russo was not so lucky as Ellsberg.  He was sentenced to prison for a time and was beaten while a prisoner before he was released.

So, when Prose met Tony Russo, he was a sort of cultural hero to people who had been opposed to the war.  Prose was a bit in awe of him, being just a novice author herself, and admitted she was a little star-struck when she met him. Tony took a shine to Prose and they started to hang out. 

But most of the time they spent together, which was extensive, they just drove around San Francisco late at night while Tony fascinated Prose with his tales of his experiences in Vietnam and with what had happened to him since. He was a crazy driver, making sudden abrupt turns, thinking he might be tailed by government operatives who meant to harm him. Prose had a lot of sangfroid in those days, apparently, so she literally went along for the ride. Eventually, of course, they did have sex, in Tony’s messy apartment, but it was awkward and not satisfying. But they still spent a lot of time together and – skipping ahead to the end of their relationship – Tony turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic.  The last part of his life, by which time Prose had to disconnect from him, is very sad to read about.  Ellsberg was still a hero – I have personal friends who knew him well – but Tony Russo became a forgotten man.

Reading Prose’s book, however, brought back many memories for me. I had been born in San Francisco and spent the first years of my life there. And later, when growing up, I often went to San Francisco.  Although by 1974, I was teaching in Connecticut, but, as it happened, I also spent a good part of the summer of 1974 in the Bay Area. Just as 1974 was a pivotal year in the life of Francine Prose, so it was for me – and for the country, still riven by protests against the war, which would culminate with the Watergate scandal and, ultimately, with Nixon’s forced resignation in August of that year. 

Musing on all this caused me to recall many memories of that year, particularly that same summer when my own personal and professional life underwent some momentous changes.  So, stimulated by Prose’s book, I decided to recount some of those events in this blog.  This was my life before I became involved in my work on near-death experiences, but what occurred that year, I can now see, were the necessary precludes to and helped to shape my forthcoming career as an NDE researcher. 

To set the stage for what is to follow, I need to backtrack  a few years.  In 1971, I had my first LSD trip, which was life-changing.  I have always regarded it as the most important spiritual experience I’ve ever had. I had a second trip the next year and also swallowed a psilocybin mushroom in my continued explorations of what was then called "altered states of consciousness."  But a key turning point occurred in 1972 when I attended a conference on the then nascent field of transpersonal psychology, which had been co-founded by Abraham Maslow, who previously had been one of the fathers of humanistic psychology. Discovering transpersonal psychology and listening to some of the then luminaries in the field, whom I was later to be befriended by, was a revelation to me. Once I became familiar with transpersonal psychology, I could see that was the field for me.  I returned to the university incredibly excited and began to offer courses with a transpersonal slant and write conceptual articles for The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

But the most important event in my early life as a transpersonal psychologist was when I was able to attend a month-long program in transpersonal psychology in Berkeley in the summer of 1974 that was co-sponsored by Esalen Institute and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.  It was then that I was able to have first-hand exposure to the leading people in the field, such as Stan Grof, another one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, his then wife, Joan Halifax, Jean Houston, Charlie Tart, Arthur Hastings, and many others. All of the people I mentioned eventually came to be my friends and helped me enormously in my career. It was also then that I fell in love with Jean Houston, a beautiful and brilliant woman whose IQ I figured must be about 200!

But in addition to hearing these people speak about their work, there were also a great many extra-curricular activities for us participants.  They included a peyote ritual, a float tank experience, a session which taught us how to massage (I found I was good at this) and an exercise involving Grof’s holotrophic breathwork, which can induce profound altered states of consciousness.

By the way, it was during this program that Nixon was forced to resign. We hardly noticed.  

Of course, I got to know a number of the other participants in the program, and became especially friendly with a Canadian artist named Kay McCullough who shared my admiration for Jean Houston.  After Jean’s talk, we both went up to her and said, “Would you marry us?” (We meant we wanted to marry Jean, not each other.) Jean roared. (Later on, as you will read, I had much more contact with Jean, though I was never able to convince her to marry me. She claimed that her husband would object.)

Joking aside, that personal initiation into the world of transpersonal psychology and getting to know many of the foremost people in the field was of inestimable importance in shaping my professional career and preparing me to do my work as a near-death researcher, which would begin two years later.

When I returned to the university for the fall semester, I was somehow able to wangle the funds to create a new interdepartmental course, which I believe I called “The Nature of Consciousness,” or something vague like that.  How I even managed to get permission for such a course is left only for the gods to know.  In any case, it was held in a large lecture hall and was packed with eager students to hear the roster of guest speakers I had lined up for the course.

Since his was now fifty years ago, I don’t remember most of them, but I do definitely recall that Stan Grof and Joan Halifax were among them.  I no longer remember anything from their lectures, but I do remember two events that I have never forgotten. One was a frolicsome snowball fight they had down by a frozen Mirror Lake. The other was a special workshop on holographic breathwork where I met a woman named Linda whom I definitely fancied. As a joke, I remember I sent her a bagel afterward along with an invitation to meet me for lunch. She didn’t consume the bagel and also resisted my amorous overtures, but she quickly became my best friend and for many years thereafter was my confidant, meeting me every few weeks for lunch and gossip.  We’ve stayed in touch all these years, and she even shared my passion for Roger Federer. 

But I digress.

Another one of the speakers was Jean Houston, and I do remember talking with her afterward. I was still keen on her, and she seemed to enjoy my company, too.  She even invited me to her Foundation for Mind Research in New York for a two week-long workshop. By then, I had read her and husband’s book on psychedelics, so she didn’t have to ask me twice.  I was thrilled to spend more time with her.  I even toyed with the idea of writing her biography. I never did, of course, but she did appreciate my interest in her.

The workshop was experiential – it featured exercises from her and husband’s book, Mind Games, which I eventually used in my own classes. I also remember that she introduced us all to a new musical discovery, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which I have since come to hate since you can’t even enter an elevator these days without hearing it.

I left still awed by this dazzling woman, and grateful for what I was able to learn from her.

That same semester, I also taught a graduate course in transpersonal psychology. It attracted a diverse group of students as well as a philosophy professor and a Catholic priest both of whom became good friends of mine. But I also recall a rather hard-bitten phlegmatic woman who seemed out of place in that class. The reason I remember her so vividly after all these years was because of her response to some excerpts from an article I read to the class.

The article was written by a psychiatrist named Russell Noyes and was called, as I recall, "The Experience of Dying." The term near-death experience hadn’t yet been invented, but that’s what Noyes was writing about. So, as I was quoting the first of these excepts, the woman I mentioned began quietly to sob. That’s when I first realized how powerful these experiences where. That planted a seed of interest in me, and you know how that seed grew in time to lead to my life as a near-death researcher – a woman’s tears did that. 

Perhaps needless to say, my burgeoning and all-consuming involvement in the field of transpersonal psychology did not only affect my professional life – and my life in my department (it’s a good thing I was a full professor with tenure then!), but also my personal life.  Especially my marriage.

My wife had been freaked out by my psychedelic experiences and the changes it had wrought in my personality and extracurricular activities.  I was now spending a lot of my time reading spiritual books, such as the classic, The Autobiography of a Yogi, spending time in Ashrams, going to talks of Eastern gurus, and consorting with any number of souls seeking enlightenment.  I also set up a little mediation room in my house complete with incense and candles.  

All this didn’t just perplex my wife; it frightened her. She wondered what had happened to the man she married.  

She became extremely depressed, so we eventually entered couples therapy to see if we could save our marriage from disintegrating.  

That effort failed. I was not coming back. But going into therapy was fateful – I am tempted to say, fatal – for other reasons because for a concatenation of factors I won’t have the space to detail here, it led to a woman coming into my life who effectively served to break up my marriage and draw me into a relationship that I would ultimately come deeply to regret. 

At the time, I was grateful to her for rescuing me from a marriage that had been very unhappy for me, even before my years of psychedelic exploration. But over time, I realized that I had been lured away by an enchantress who had cloven feet.

But to tell that story, even briefly, we need to return to that tumultuous year, 1974.

She came with a rope. At the time, I couldn't tell if the rope was to save me or to hang me, but before long I was clinging to it as my only hope of salvation that might lift me out of my pit of marital despair. 

  

She had magical powers – indeed she was bewitching and I was enchanted by her. She was not beautiful, but she was very striking looking. She was exceptionally intelligent and her verbal fluency was so stunning, I was often in awe of her when she spoke. She was the most psychologically perceptive person I had ever met (and she had had years of psychotherapy too; she could dance rings around anyone she worked with).  She appeared to see so deeply into my soul and to be so aware of my tormented life with my wife that within an hour or so I had become completely beguiled by her. She also seemed to have occult powers and her presence was both dazzling and mesmerizing.  

I knew she was my rescuer and, within a short time, I took the rope she had extended to me and followed her.

Over the next few months, having been both captivated and captured by this woman, I made the break she had urged me to effect (“I want you to be my lover”) and started living with her in her apartment south of Hartford.  (She was then working as a TV reporter for a Hartford-based channel.). Needless to say, this tore my family apart.

I had to leave all my children behind, including my daughter, Kathryn, at least to begin with. (A few months later, I came for Kathryn – the scene was out of Dostoevsky.)  It was the biggest rupture of my entire life, a mixture of the most intense excitement and the most searing pain of loss. 

No one in my family knew my whereabouts. I lived rather like an outlaw at that time. I took the back roads into school in case my wife tried to track my movements. Meanwhile at the university rumors circulated about me. (One that got back to me, I remember, was that I was living with two 14-year-old girls! Where that one came from, God knows!)  My colleagues kept their distance — I think they were a little afraid of me.  I was a dangerous man, living out something scandalous, a subversive to the official academic culture of scholarship and professional propriety.  

What followed was two years of hell.  This period of my life is still so painful for me to recall and fills me with such shame that I will spare both you and myself from the horror of those years. Suffice it to say that eventually I had to break free of her.  I cut the rope that had bound me to her and, with my daughter, I escaped and took refuge in the home of a professor friend of mine.

Epilogue

One of the things that drew me to her was my learning how much she had suffered in life.  She evoked a tremendous sense of pity in me. 

After I was living with her, she began to disclose to me a good deal of her history of personal suffering and loss, which moved me unspeakably.  She recounted many instances of cruel mistreatment and abuse in the course of her childhood and her continuing difficulties and resultant sorrows through her many failed marriages. As a person with very permeable boundaries, her life had often been unbearable and she had already survived several nervous breakdowns.

It was only later that I came across Stefan Zweig’s novel, Beware of Pity. Had I read it before meeting her, I would have been on my guard. But only a fool would think you can save another person from their demons.  I was that fool.

A few years after I had made my escape, she sent a letter of apology to my daughter and me. She had joined A.A. and was trying to mend herself.  I don’t know if she ever did.

The last time I saw her was almost thirty-five years ago.  I was at the movies in Hartford when a woman walked up to me in the lobby smiling broadly. She was on crutches (she had broken her ankle), and I had no idea who she was. When I was with her, she was svelte, red-haired and physically very arresting.  This woman was pudgy, grey-haired and totally unprepossessing. But when she continued to smile, I knew – to my astonishment – who it was. I could hardly believe it. We had a few laughs, and she called me by one of her old favorite endearments, Uncle Dudley. After an uncomfortable moment or two, she hobbled into one of the theaters in the multiplex while I looked on before heading my way into another theater.  I never saw or heard from her or anything about her again.

I’m happy to say that after surviving that ordeal, my life definitely took an upward turn, especially after I discovered my true vocation as an NDE researcher.  I had been able to grew close to all my children again, reconciled with my now ex-wife (we were both happier when we no longer lived together) and had found my true love, a woman named Norma, with whom I came to live in what we soon dubbed our house, The Near-Death Hotel.

So, it all ended well, but as for 1974 – it was a hell of a year (double entendre intended).