JOSEPH GELFER

Recently, the Dalai Lama keeps making an appearance in my thoughts. Just before Christmas I saw him at the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Last week I was listening to some macho James Ray talk about injectable DMT and guzzling large jugs of ayahuasca, when he referred to the Dalai Lama as the “Big DL”, which made me chuckle given its double entendre. And today we read of the DL meeting Obama. Way before I got in to writing seriously, in those days when I used to do things just for fun rather than something to write about and critique, I saw the DL in his hometown of Dharamsala. Here are the notes from 1998:

After we had been in Dharamsala for a couple of weeks, we discovered we were lucky enough to be in town when the Dalai Lama was due to give a week of public lectures. When the security office opened to release passes there was a mad rush of queues and people trying to get photos taken for their pass. In a moment of pure spiritual tourism one Chilean – I saw his passport – took out his Osho community membership card and cut out the photo for his security pass to see the Dalai Lama. Osho had been pipped at the post.

Everyone was most excited when the day of the first lecture came around. People began queuing early at the gates of the Tsuglagkhang, the Dalai Lama’s temple, hoping for a good spot to place their cushions. Just before the main man was due to make an appearance, a ripple of excitement passed through the third of the outdoor temple reserved for Westerners. At first I thought the show might be beginning early but, as I turned around to see what was happening, I did not see the famous little man I was expecting, but another. There, dressed all in black with Indiana Jones-style glasses and a nap-sack was Richard Gere.

Gere had with him a painfully thin and beautiful assistant who was also dressed in black. In that moment, were the Dalai Lama to have come out, I am not sure who out of the two would have received the most adoration from the Western women present. Gere weaved his way to the front of the temple, for he had a comfy cushion securing his spot in advance, and took his position with open notebook. During that week Gere turned up each day looking progressively more rugged and pious as his grey beard began to grow. What a saint.

That was in a simpler world, when film stars and the DL in India seemed innocently amusing, rather than yet another tired example of glossy magazine-style spirituality. It was also pre-Web 2.0. If I was there in my early 20s now, I’d probably tweet it on the spot:

OMG in India at the DL’s monastery: Richard Gere here looking holy LOL!

This week I was a guest on The Spirit of Things, which can now be downloaded. If you’re used to listening to this show, you might find it a bit scrappier than usual: maybe something to do with the subject matter. The highlight is probably some interesting points between Steve Salerno and me about the James Ray sweat lodge fiasco.

Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

Guests

Jackie Frank is Editor of one of Australia’s highest circulating women’s publications, Marie Claire magazine. She has worked as Fashion Editor of British Elle and at American Elle and Mademoiselle magazines. She recently appeared as a judge on Channel 7′s reality show, Make Me a Supermodel.

Dr Joseph Gelfer is an Adjunct Research Associate at the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. He is founding and current editor of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality and author of Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy (Equinox Publishers, 2009). Aside from masculinities and religion, Joseph’s research also includes countercultural spiritualities such as the 2012 phenomenon: his edited collection 2012: Reflections on a Mark in Time will be published next year.

Steve Salerno is a feature writer, essayist and investigative reporter whose articles have appeared in The Observer, The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He received world-wide attention for his ground-breaking book of the Self-Help and Actualization Movement, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.

In Numen, Old Men I write about the ridiculous lengths the men’s movement has often gone to demonstrate manliness and its appeal to archetypes. Today we read the sad, but somewhat inevitable news related to a Spiritual Warrior Event run by James Ray in which two people died after two hours in a sweat lodge. Check out the write-up over at Beyond Growth and SWANS®SONG.

From Numen, Old Men: “For a man to access the Wild Man he must retreat into his psychic depths, into the forest, into a pre-Christian pagan space of hirsute manliness. Bly intends the Wild Man, with his relationship with the young boy of the Iron John story, to be an example of how men can be initiated into adulthood and the deep masculine. This would be a worthy exercise if it enabled boys to flourish for both their own sakes and the good of the community, but instead Iron John ‘celebrate[s] violence and killing as the means to establish male identity’. This is the archetypal path established by Bly. … This disturbing precedent is continued with Moore and Gillette encouraging men to access the warrior in the male psyche, whose natural presence is indicated by the fact that chimpanzees resort to battle, and men’s fascination with war movies such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket. Moore and Gillette would have their readers believe it is natural for mythopoetically inclined men to imagine themselves operating within the presumably dark and oppressive jungle … these appeals to archetypal models promote largely oppressive and violent masculinities.”