Dr Alberto G Garcia

SCOTTISH SECOND SIGHT

by

R.D. LAING, DIANA GABALDON,

AND THE TAISCH OF MY GRANDMOTHER

Primitive Capital Accumulation Part 1

Island of Skye.

As children, my sister and I sometimes traveled to the tiny town of Parkhill, Ontario, to visit my paternal grandmother, born Katherine MacDonald.  This Canadian town was so small and quiet that the local newspaper would announce our visit.

Grandma was a widow.  Her grander days in Chicago and St. Charles were behind her.  The geranium perfumes were left in bottles and the fur-collared coat kept in a closet. Aprons covered her dresses. She did still use lipstick, but now it mostly missed its mark. Yet her big-hearted, self-effacing and good-natured demeanor remained unchanged. 

Not much happened in and around my grandmother’s shingle-sided home, which was large but simple and sparsely-appointed. Occasionally I could hear the distant sound of an automobile passing on the unpaved street.  The slow movement of time was evident by the movement of light and shadow as the day progressed. Mechanical time made itself known by the abrupt eruption of loud chimes from an imposing grandfather clock.  

The Parkhill home.

Grandma was a big reader, as was I.  On one visit, when I was about 15 years old, I brought along a new book to read I had picked up at Krochs & Brentano’s bookstore in the Chicago Loop.  It was called The Politics of Experience by the psychiatrist and philosopher R.D. Laing.  That book had a profound influence on me.

More than 50 years later, I prefaced my own book, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia with a quote from Laing’s book:

Our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

And immediate experience of, in contrast to belief or faith in, a spiritual realm of demons, spirits, Powers, Dominions, Principalities, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Light, is even more remote. As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-mindedness even to conceive of their existence.

This quote from Dr. Laing seemed an appropriate introduction to a book about a man of such love and remarkable accomplishments as Dr. Alberto Garcia, a man who cultivated direct experience of a spiritual realm invisible to most. 

The Scottish Legacy

When reading The Politics of Experience in Parkhill, I didn’t know that Laing was a Scotsman.  Nor did I know less than 200 years ago, in Scotland fairies were said to freely gift the experience of Second Sight, the ability to see with the “third eye.”   The erudite Dr. Laing was undoubtedly familiar with the writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson about his travels to the remote and strange islands of the Scottish Highlands around 1774.  The Londoner Dr. Johnson was known in posthumous centuries as the most distinguished man of letters in English history.   

Dr. Samuel Johnson

During his travels to the islands, Dr. Johnson was confronted by the phenomenon of Second Sight.  In his book, he struggled to understand this seeming “breach of the common order of things.”

It is the common talk of the Lowland Scots, that the notion of the Second Sight is wearing away with other superstitions; and that its reality is no longer supposed, but by the grossest people.  How far its prevalence ever extended, or what ground it has lost, I know not.  The Islanders of all degrees, whether of rank or understanding, universally admit it, except the Ministers, who universally deny it, and are suspected to deny it, in consequence of a system against conviction.  One of them honestly told me, that he came to Skye with a resolution not to believe it.

By the term Second Sight, seems to be meant a mode of seeing, superadded to that which Nature generally bestows.  In the Earse it is called Taisch; which signifies likewise a spectre, or a vision. 

The Second Sight is an impression made either by the mind upon the eye, or by the eye upon the mind, by which things distant or future are perceived, and seen as if they were present.  A man on a journey far from home falls from his horse, another, who is perhaps at work about the house, sees him bleeding on the ground, commonly with a landscape of the place where the accident befalls him.  Another seer, driving home his cattle, or wandering in idleness, or musing in the sunshine, is suddenly surprised by the appearance of a bridal ceremony, or funeral procession, and counts the mourners or attendants, of whom, if he knows them, he relates the names, if he knows them not, he can describe the dresses.  Things distant are seen at the instant when they happen.  Of things future I know not that there is any rule for determining the time between the Sight and the event.

This receptive faculty, for power it cannot be called, is neither voluntary nor constant.  The appearances have no dependence upon choice: they cannot be summoned, detained, or recalled.  The impression is sudden, and the effect often painful.

That they should often see death is to be expected; because death is an event frequent and important.  But they see likewise more pleasing incidents.  A gentleman told me, that when he had once gone far from his own Island, one of his labouring servants predicted his return, and described the livery of his attendant, which he had never worn at home; and which had been, without any previous design, occasionally given him.

Our desire of information was keen, and our inquiry frequent.  [W]e heard many tales of these airy shows, with more or less evidence and distinctness.

Strong reasons for incredulity will readily occur…..  It is a breach of the common order of things, without any visible reason or perceptible benefit. 

Yet Dr. Johnson’s own intelligence, knowledge and attainments made it hard for him to reject the existence of Second Sight simply because it appeared to be contrary to the “common order of things.”  By

presuming to determine what is fit, and what is beneficial, they presuppose more knowledge of the universal system than man has attained…..

The holders of this talent in Scotland, however, bore no resemblance to those, like Issac Newton, who were well-known to have upended understandings of the world. To the most sophisticated and accomplished Johnson, it was hard to believe that such an ability would be found in a “a people” he perceived as  

very little enlightened; and among them, for the most part, to the mean and the ignorant.

On the other hand, their very simplicity and guilelessness (the absence of capitalist profit motive in the excercise of their Second Sight) was perhaps reason to take their reports seriously.

By pretension to Second Sight, no profit was ever sought or gained.  It is an involuntary affection, in which neither hope nor fear are known to have any part.

This faculty of seeing things out of sight is local, and commonly useless. 

 Those who profess to feel it, do not boast of it as a privilege, nor are considered by others as advantageously distinguished.  They have no temptation to feign; and their hearers have no motive to encourage the imposture.  [For the Highlanders,] there was neither shame from ignorance, nor pride in knowledge; neither curiosity to inquire, nor vanity to communicate.

To talk with any of these seers is not easy.  There is one living in [the island of] Skye, with whom we would have gladly conversed; but he was very gross and ignorant, and knew no English.  The proportion in these countries of the poor to the rich is such, that if we suppose the quality to be accidental, it can very rarely happen to a man of education; and yet on such men it has sometimes fallen.  There is now a Second Sighted gentleman in the Highlands, who complains of the terrors to which he is exposed.

The foresight of the Seers is not always prescience; they are impressed with images, of which the event only shews them the meaning.  They tell what they have seen to others, who are at that time not more knowing than themselves, but may become at last very adequate witnesses, by comparing the narrative with its verification.

To collect sufficient testimonies for the satisfaction of the publick, or of ourselves, would have required more time than we could bestow.….  I never could advance my curiosity to conviction; but came away at last only willing to believe. 

Upon examination of a broad range of human history, Dr. Johnson concluded that Second Sight is not in truth a breach in the order of things.

[C]onsidered in itself, it involves … impulses, or visionary representations, has prevailed in all ages and all nations…..  [The] Second Sight of the Hebrides implies only the local frequency of a power, which is nowhere totally unknown; and that where we are unable to decide by antecedent reason, we must be content to yield to the force of testimony.

Additional testimony from beyond the horizon of modernity and the edge of history can be found in old records.  In Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness, I happened upon William MacKay’s Notes on Highland Superstitions (Nov. 12, 1885) in Volume III of Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club. MacKay reviewed Scottish records dating from as early as the year 1655 to show how Christians vigorously stamped out practices like the offering of oblations of milk upon the hills, fire worship amidst fields of kale, and “adoration of the holy wells.”  These pre-Christian practices were the products of the experiences of a people who from time immemorial had belonged to the land, engaged in simple routines that allowed for a good deal of silence and opportunity for subtler aspects of the world to be noticed and known.   

Woman carrying peat on the island of North Uist

On Leakey’s Bookshop shelves was also an old copy of Alexander MacKenzie’s The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer, first published in 1877 in the City of Inverness.  This book collected very specific predictions preserved from the 17th Century of a Highlands prophet and peat-digger with a particularly large third-eye. Many predictions came true.  Others did not. The seer’s Gaelic name was Coinneach Odhar, which in English means “dun-colored Kenneth.”  He foretold his nation’s loss of Second Sight: “the people will degenerate as their country improves.”

Contemporary monument to Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer.

Through subsequent centuries, some in Scotland have retained a Second Sight or continued to cultivate it. This was one of the purposes of Freemasonry (which originated in Scotland) and affiliated occult groups like the Rosicrucians.  The Scottish poet Henry Adamson wrote of this in 1638:

For what we do presage is not in grosse,

For we are brethren of the Rosie Crosse;

We have the Mason Word and second sight,

Things for to come we can foretell aright.

The masonic Scottish Rite and a UK-originated Rosicrucian order were the main lineages to which Dr. Alberto Garcia was a student from approximately 1922 to 1962 while he lived in Austin Texas. 

In the Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia, I document how some of the more recent scientific knowledge and research relating to human consciousness has confirmed the fact of Second Sight and provided plausible scientific explanations for these phenomena.  There are reasons why Second Sight may not be a breach of the common order of things.

Why did Second Sight Wear Away?

What was going on in Scotland in the years before and after 1774 that would cause the spontaneous and vivid experiences of Second Sight to be diminishing?  Two interrelated factors, perhaps. 

Second Sight was condemned by an encroaching Christian church and state, who defined such awareness and ability as demonic, a form of witchcraft. The law, where the English-speaking world of Scotland or England had jurisdiction, began in 1542 to forbid witchcraft and to torture and burn witches.  The great jurist Edward Coke drafted the 1604 Witchcraft Act which imposed the death penalty on those who communed with fairies and other spirits and powers.  By 1775, witches were no longer burned at the stake, but “magical” powers were condemned by the clergy and it was still a crime to admit to them. 

A second factor in the decline of the faculty of Second Sight, was the mass uprooting of people from their lands and ways of life of long silences and ancient rhythms. The capitalist market imposed itself and came to define relationships among people that replaced the duthchas and other feudal relationships that bound everyone to the land, and had provided a commons and subsistence to all.  About this, Karl Marx wrote: “for the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself.” A relationship with nature characterized by oblations of milk upon the hills, fire worship amidst fields of kale, and “adoration of the holy wells” was disrupted and the earth’s surface transformed into parceled commodities. Nature became an instrumentality of capital, a thing—parceled by metes and bounds and allocated to those handful with the means and willingness to most ruthlessly and profitably exploit it as owners. 

A poem of the era singled out prominent land surveyor John Roy and estate manager Patrick Sellar:

Sellar and Roy were guided by the very devil,

when they commanded that the compass

and the chain be set to measure the land.

I saw a dream,

and I would not mind seeing it again,

if I were to see it while awake,

it would make me merry all day.

A big fire was ready

and Roy was right in the middle,

… and there was iron about Sellar’s bones.

Roy divided the land into parcels suitable for serving capital and Sellar carryied out evictions so violent that one earned him a charge of homicide. Mass evictions, and other elements of the Highland Clearances, sent dispossessed Highlanders to urban slums to adapt to the schedules and sensibilities of the capitalist industrial revolution

“Before 1760 there were few completely landless people in the Scottish countryside,” according to historian T.M. Devine.  But it “by 1830 had become a different kind of society.”  Social transformation in the Gaeldom of the Western Highlands “was more traumatic and cataclysmic than anywhere else in Scotland.  The Highlands moved from tribalism to capitalism in less than two generations.”  Whole communities were cleared and replaced with sheep. 

Portrait of Scots being removed from their feudal homes during the Clearances.

The island of N. Uist as it looks now after the Clearance.

Karl Marx wrote about this in his book Capital, and used it as a paradigmatic example of “primitive capital accumulation,” the process by which fundamental resources from which people create their livelihood are taken from them and appropriated and used to create the wealth of capital. Marx called primitive capital accumulation the “original sin” of the capitalist political economy, the pillaged source of all capital. Highlanders dispossessed of their land and other resources joined the massive labor reserves of industrial capitalism, their labor transformed into a commodity in the service of the owners of capital.  Many migrated to the slums of cities.  Glasgow harbored the largest and most impoverished slums of Europe.

Glasgow slums

Other dislocated islanders took overseas jobs within the British Empire or migrated to Canada or the United States to occupy lands dispossessed from Native Americans by the primitive capital accumulation carried out by the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere.

Marx identified the condition created from this dispossession as one of alienation.   

Diana Gabaldon

The contemporary world’s most significant popularizer of Scotland is the novelist and screenwriter Diana Gabaldon.  Her Outlander novels and television series are the product, among other things, of an immense amount of historical research.  Before becoming a fiction writer, Gabaldon was a scientist with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, a master’s degree in marine biology and a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology.  In February of 2021, I had the opportunity to ask this brilliant woman about Second Sight and the observations made by Dr. Samuel Johnson.  The occasion was a Zoom event sponsored by the San Miguel de Allende International Writers Conference.

Diana Gabaldon, as I expected, was familiar with Dr. Johnson’s writing on the subject.  I asked her, in light of her background as a scientist and her knowledge of Scotland, whether she thought the Scottish Highlanders were putting one over on Dr. Johnson or were suffering from some sort of delusion regarding Second Sight— or whether Dr. Johnson was reporting a real phenomenon. She responded that this is a real “thing” that is very much still alive in Scotland.  She mentioned an experience of being hosted in a castle in Scotland by a very successful and wealthy man who in all sincerity warned her about the ghost there that he and others had seen.

Second Sight in contemporary Scotland was the subject of research by Shari Ann Cohn at the University of Edinburg in 1996. Her surveys showed that 16% of the people in the Highlands said they have experienced Second Sight, a claim made by as many as 33% in the northeast Grampian area of Scotland. But only 10% in the cleared islands of North and South Uist still claimed to have experienced the gift of Second Sight.

Halloween celebrated in the Highlands, early 20th Century.

Second Sight of My MacDonald Grandmother

During my Parkhill visit, while I was sitting in a comfortable chair in my grandmother’s home in Ontario, reading R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience, I knew my grandmother’s parents were MacDonalds and were Scottish.  I loved the opportunity to hear bagpipes played at social gatherings.  But at the time I had no idea that Laing himself was a Scotsman born in Glasgow. 

Only recently did I learn that my grandmother’s mother Flora MacDonald also was born in Glasgow, born of parents from the very islands Dr. Johnson visited 100 years earlier.   Flora’s father Donald MacDonald was born on the Outer Hebrides island of North Uist to a family of farmers.  He perhaps was among the 1,300 people removed from their homes in North Uist during 1838 and 1843 to be replaced by sheep. He came to Glasgow to sell his labor as a joiner. His wife, from the Island of Skye, became in Glasgow a servant in homes of the better off.  They left Glasgow with their daughter, my great grandmother Flora, for Canada. 

Ontario, Canada, however, did not offer complete relief from privation and tragedy. My grandmother’s father (like her mother, a MacDonald) one Sunday in 1907 put on his suit, went out the barn and shot himself dead.  He had been suffering from incurable cancer.  Faced with poverty, my grandmother Katherine MacDonald was sent away as a child to relatives, who beat her and treated her with exploitive cruelty.   

My grandmother Katherine MacDonald on the upper left with her siblings on their Ontario farm. As the oldest child in a family without a father, she assumed many responsibilities for her siblings.

Katherine eventually returned to her mother’s farm to help care for her siblings.  Due to her own perseverance she went to school, became a nurse, and traveled to the United States to care for patients during the great flu pandemic that followed World War I.  In Illinois she met my grandfather Louis Rockwell, a lawyer from the small picturesque town of St. Charles.  They married and she gave birth to my father. 

Contemporary photo of the St. Charles, Illinois, home of Louis Rockwell and Katherine MacDonald Rockwell, where my father grew up. During the Great Depression, hobos left marks on these trees, alerting others that my grandmother was a soft touch for those in need of food.

A well-documented family story gives testimony that while the Scottish Second Sight diminished, vestiges have survived the centuries of persecutions and Clearances. 

During World War II, my father Frank joined the Navy and served in a unit called Argus 11, which was embedded within the Marines.  As a radioman he provided morse code communication from Guadalcanal and other Solomon Island battlefields in the South Pacific.  Unbeknown to his family back home in Illinois, he was part of a force that invaded the island of Rendova at the end of June, 1943.  Back home, upon going to sleep on or around July 1, my grandmother had a horrible dream.  She could see bombs blowing up around my father and see a piece of shrapnel pierce his back.  Frank was hit!  She woke up in fright and anguish from this unusually vivid dream, and told her husband and daughter Anne about it.  She also wrote it down.

In due time my grandmother received a telegram confirming the accuracy of her dream, and telling her that her son was OK.  More details came later.  Around the time of that dream, at 1:30 pm July 2, Solomon Island Time, my father’s unit was among the U.S. forces hit by 50 to 60 bombs that were dropped with unusual accuracy by Japanese Ki-21 Mitsubishi bombers. Hearing the bombs falling, my father leaped out of his cot.  As he ran towards a trench filled with rainwater, his cot was demolished by a bomb.  A large piece of shrapnel blew into this back.  All this reverberated in the heart of Frank’s mother, sleeping 7750 miles away, on the other side of the earth. 

 

Mud-covered casualty of July 2 Rendova air raid.
My father’s purple heart medal from the raid. He lost this medal at some point. I had never seen it. But in writing this blog, when I did a search of images for Rendova and his Argus unit, this is the only responsive image that showed up. The medal is now apparently in the custody of a war memoralbilia collector.
My father, lower right, with friends at Green Island in 1944. My father’s good friend Bobby Webber (kneeling next to my father) and 83 others were also wounded in the July 2, 1943 air raid.  My father was evacuated from the island to receive medical treatment.  He returned to service for the invasion of the island of Munda.

Epilogue

Other unnumbered accounts of 20th Century Second Sight exist of mothers during World War II who have seen the precise circumstances of death of their sons as they occurred thousands of miles away. At least one of these remembrances can be found in other blogs on Scottish Second Sight.

Within days of circulating my Scottish Second Site blog to a neighbor of mine named John, he approached me to tell me his own family story. John grew up in Somerset, England at a time when England was besieged by bombing raids and rocket attacks from Hitler’s Germany. John’s much-older brother was in the Royal Air Force. When John was the age of four, he remembers his mother reporting an unusually disturbing dream. She had seen his brother being shot down in his plane and fall into the Mediterranean where he died. Word soon arrived that this is tragedy had indeed occurred exactly as dreamed by John’s mother.

John describes his mother as being very much of the land. She and her ancestors lived on farms maintaining the life and ways of the primeval English countryside.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (2020); R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (1967); Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Hebrides (1825 ed.); Alexander MacKenzie, The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (1977 ed.); William MacKay, Notes on Highland Superstitions (Nov. 12, 1885) in Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club (Vol. III); Henry Adamson, The Muses’ Threnodie; Karl Marx, Capital (abridged ed. 2008, transl. David McLellan); Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1977); T.M. Devine, The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 (2018); Argus Unit 11, United States Navy Argus Historical Group=argus1-12/argus-unit-2/; Alfred Weinzierl, Ki-21 Sallys Attack Munda and Rendova, Pacific Wrecks, http://www.pacificwrecks.com/japanese/munda.html; Eric Hammel, Munda Trail (1989); S. A. Cohn, A Survey on Scottish Second Sight, The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1994, no. 835). Additional contemporary accounts of Second Sight are found in a blog called Second Sight among the Scots Irish in the McCain’s corner website and the comments to that blog (July 17, 2015).

Thanks to my sister Sarah for contributing her memories and checking mine, as well as providing some background research on family experiences with Second Sight.

AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA Part I

by

Contemporary Fascists in Austin, Texas, and the Deadly 20th Century Fascism supported by some of my relatives through The Texas Company

On a Saturday afternoon in or around 2012 at the SxSW international music festival, I was with my nephew on a closed downtown street.  We looked up and were startled to see coming down the street towards us a grim and silent group displaying an array of long guns, as well as a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.   Some were dressed partially in military camouflage.  In this festive urban environment full of revelers from around the world in jeans, shorts, and t-shirts, the camouflage served to highlight rather than hide the marchers’ military purpose.  

The complete lack of visible police presence was notable.  I had participated in many protest marches, some even during SxSW—and there was always a significant police presence. Occasionally the police would arrest or attack protesters.  During the annual state high school track and field competitions, which drew a large number of African-Americans from around Texas, the police presence was draconian, as if they were preparing for an invasion.  But on that Saturday afternoon, not a single member of the police force was to be seen near this armed group resembling some of those who would in 2021 march on the US Capitol to try to attack and kidnap members of Congress.   

This armed military display at SxSW seems to have been a spectral harbinger, a soundless dirge amidst the loud music. 

Right-wing Violence and Intimidation Escalates in Austin

Since then, armed right-wing groups made their presence increasingly known in Austin, targeting people on the Left, as well as the black and brown communities in East Austin.  They attacked and beat-up marchers celebrating May Day.  They occupied a park in East Austin, and intimidated others from using it to distribute free food.  

Armed fascists showed up to support the gentrification of East Austin, at a time when the gentrification process there was the most intense in the country. One morning in 2015, Sergio Lajarazu recounted, “I was driving by like any other day, taking my daughter to school. That’s when I saw it: my life’s work under the bulldozer.” His landlord, without warning and in the middle of a lease, bulldozed Sergio and his wife’s Jumpolin piñata shop.  The Mexican American tenants apparently were an obstacle to Austin developers’ displacement of Mexican Americans from their affordable homes and leases. The landlord characterized his actions as a form of beautification, comparing it to a clearing away an infestation of “roaches.”

The quick demolition of Jumplin by the landlord.

In subsequent months, I joined demonstrators organized by Defend Our Hoodz and others on the sidewalk outside to protest the Blue Cat Cafe business brought in by the landlord to replace the piñata shop. 

One of many protests and pickets outside of Blue Cat Cafe. The camera caught me in the back unwittingly holding my sign upside down.

The neighborhood continued to picket the cat café.  Paul Gray, the brother of the owner of the Blue Cat Café, was a military veteran and member of the Neo-Nazi military group called Vanguard America; he soon would join an offshoot called Patriot Front. Gray brought his friends and was joined by others recruited by local media rageaholic Alex Jones to confront the anti-gentrification protestors.  These military-trained fascists intimidated and assaulted anti-gentrification protestors.  The police tasered an anti-gentrification protestor and seemed to offer little protection from the fascists who were trying to disrupt these regular demonstrations.  

Paul Gray

The Patriotic Front apparently are book burners too.  In November of 2017, the Patriot Front showed up in front of Monkeywrench bookstore in Austin, a gathering place for leftists and known for hosting Marxist intellectuals like Gayatri Spivak, activists from El Salvador, and brave young Dalit women from India. 

An Antifa Response

While police did little to protect people from fascists, anti-fascists took action to make it clear fascists were not welcome in Austin.  Neo-Nazis and their local employers were identified.  People were encouraged to call the businesses giving employment to fascists and as a result it appears that some were fired. 

Around the time Paul Gray showed up at the Blue Cat Café, he scheduled a neo-Nazi rally at the Texas Capitol.  He described it as an effort to support “Gov. Abbott’s and Pres. Trump’s policy on enforcing border protection, helping the Border Patrol and police forces in their service, and all our Texas congressmen who want to put America first.”  Antifa groups sounded the alarm and I answered the call to surround the neo-Nazis with the counter-protestors.  We outnumbered the fascists, made a lot of noise, and made sure their rally was frustrated. 

A small gathering of Vanguard America and other fascists at the Texas Capitol on June 17, 2017. Organized by Paul Gray.
Antifa participants surrounded the fascists and drowned them out.

Within a few months, neo-Nazi demonstrations organized by Paul Gray’s group Vanguard America occurred in Charlottesville Virginia, where one of the white supremacists drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist counter-protestors, killing one of them. 

Police, Military, Fascist and Corporate Cooperation

A massive hack of regional police data sharing centers in July of 2020 demonstrated police collusion with corporate and right-wing violence.  This hack, which included the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, revealed that the police were targeting Muslims, American anti-fascists, and people lawfully protesting police violence. The police were defining these kinds of people as terroristic threats.  Right-wing domestic terrorists were largely ignored as threats.  In some respects, the fascists were considered allies.  A black anti-police-violence protestor in Dallas was arrested and placed in jail for five months before the charges were dropped; the basis for his arrest had been a video prepared by Alex Jones’ Infowars.

The hack showed that the police cultivated a secret network of citizen informants from churches, security agencies, and other sources, reminiscent of the actions of the FBI in the 1940s and 50s when they enlisted 100,800 members of the American Legion at 16,700 posts to spy on left-wing Americans in their own communities. Documents from the police regional surveillance centers show an interest in bizarre conspiracies favored by the right such as so-called efforts to install Sharia law in the US.  The hack revealed the close allegiance between the nation’s police and big oil companies and big banks like Chase Bank.  Targets of “anti-terrorist” police surveillance in Austin included anti-fossil fuel activists.  

When the Austin police killed Mike Ramos, the Mike Ramos Brigade was formed. The Brigde and many others organized large demonstrations downtown and near the police station in 2020.  At one large demonstration at the police station, police casually fired many rounds of so-called “non-lethal” projectiles into the anti-police-violence protestors, causing permanent brain damage to one protestor and permanent loss of an eye by another.  Dozens suffered less serious injuries. Right-wing extremists with guns showed up to support the police.  A few of the protestors against police violence also carried weapons to protect themselves. 

 

During one march on Congress Avenue, within a few feet of some of my friends who were there, a military sergeant arrived in a car, seemingly intent on repeating the murder and mayhem from Charlottesville.  He drove up to the march, stopped, and then accelerated his car directly into the crowd, holding his steering wheel with one hand and a pistol in the other.  When protestors approached the car to try to stop it, the driver quickly shot into the crowd, killing protestor Garrett Foster. 

The driver turned himself in to police who briefly interrogated him and accepted and repeated to the public his lies about the incident.  The police released him within hours, without questioning any other eye-witnesses.  The police even hid the identity of the shooter from the public.  Activists were able to identify the killer as Sgt. Daniel Perry.  The elected head of the Austin police union made statements indicating that Daniel Perry gave Garrett Foster what he deserved; the police union blamed Foster’s death on the activists who opposed police violence. According to the police union head: Garrett Foster “was looking for confrontation and he found it. The Feux Mike Ramos Brigade needs to be stopped. The only people out of control during this incident was the Feux Brigade.”       

         

It was not surprising to me that violent right-wing fascist groups grew and become emboldened enough to stage a violent attack on the US Congress on January 6, 2021.  Paul Gray’s Patriot Front was there. So were the Proud Boys, although its leader, Enrique Terrio, was revealed to be a longtime police informant.  Members of local police forces as well as the US military participated in this insurrection. I was not surprised when the head of the Chicago police union, elected by its 12,000 members publicly defended the violent insurrectionists and expressed sympathy for them.  The insurrectionists were encouraged by President Trump and funded by oligarchs.  

With this act, finally these fascist groups who have been terrorizing people in Austin and many other parts of the country began to be recognized as the terroristic threat that they are.

Skeletons in My Family Closet: Oil Companies and Fascism

I do have a unique perspective on fascism and of the support that exists for fascism among US oligarchs.  More than ten years ago, I had opened a door to a family closet and found some skeletons, hidden away in the Fox River Valley of rural small-town Illinois where I grew up.  

In the 19th Century, my great aunt Harriet Rockwell of St. Charles, Illinois, had married grocery clerk Ed Baker who by a strange quirk of fate inherited in 1918 half of the John W. Gates fortune.   His niece, 15-year-old Dellora Angell, inherited the other half.  This surprise inheritance put them among the top .0001% of Americans in terms of wealth. When Dellora reached 19, she married Lester Norris, a St. Charles classmate from public school, who was trained as an illustrator. 

Newlyweds Dellora and Lester Norris.

Despite Ed Baker and the Norrises being a regular part of my father’s family gatherings when he was a child, I had never met them and knew little about them. I grew up on the other side of the tracks in a town near to their homes in St. Charles.  In the second decade of the 21st Century, I became curious and learned that the bulk of the Gates fortune inherited by these two was in shares of The Texas Company, known by its brand-name Texaco.  Ed and Dellora inherited enough Texaco shares to make Baker and the Norrises collectively the largest shareholders in the company.  I also learned that in 1927, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini sat to have his portrait drawn by Lester Norris, a portrait that Norris kept on the wall of his office in St. Charles. 

Portrait of Benito Mussolini by Lester Norris

Lester Norris was elevated to the Board of Directors of Texaco in 1933 and served until 1973—making him the longest serving member of the Texaco Board.  During his tenure, my research revealed to me that Texaco had provided oil for Hitler’s navy, assisted Nazi espionage, and provided all the oil necessary on credit to General Franco to make his fascist coup in Spain a success. Texaco supported various fascist coups around the world.  Fascists have been installed in governments with the blessings of some of the most powerful people in the United States.

In my attempt to understand the phenomenon of Lester Norris and Texaco, of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia and his life, and of the recent eruption of an aggressive US domestic fascist movement, I have developed some understanding of how fascism comes about and what measures against fascism have been shown to be effective in the past. 

What is fascism?  Fascism is a type of political gangsterism leading to terroristic dictatorship where non-white racial groups and left-wing groups are scapegoated and persecuted to perpetuate a capitalist society.  Fascism is ultranationalist and relies on certain religious or quasi-religious doctrines to justify itself. It also relies on a fun-house mirror of appropriated left-wing rhetoric.  Fascism is what oligarchs support when they feel their privileges and power are threatened by liberal or left-wing democratic political movements.  Fascism can be appealing to middle classes whose status and prosperity are threatened when monopoly capitalism destroys small businesses.  For example, since the demise of the Farmers Alliance and the Peoples Party in the 19th Century, monopoly capitalism has forced off the land more than 60% of farm owners, and employed Walmart and other international franchises to destroy rural small businesses.  These rural areas are where Donald Trump has proven to be most popular. Most of the people facing charges from the Capitol insurrection had prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes.  “Resentment and revenge are fascism’s prime emotions,” according to historian Alexander Reid Ross.    

An early and continuous financial supporter of the German Nazi Party was Henry Ford.  Other US corporations and oligarchs over time provided funds and other forms of support to the German Nazis. 

The first fascist government was imposed on Hungary in 1919. Among those who helped bring about the Hungarian fascist coup was US intelligence operative Allen Dulles.  Dulles would go on to support Nazism as an international lawyer for major corporations and as an intelligence operative with the OSS. Later, after he became a top official and then director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Dulles organized and supported fascistic coups in a number of countries.   In 1954, to give just one example, Dulles working with the oligarch Averell Harriman organized the overthrow of a secular social democratic government in Iran in order to protect the interests of US and British oil companies.  Dulles bankrolled and directed Iranian Nazi and fascist leaders, whose members had supported Hitler and Mussolini in World War II.  The new Iranian dictator imposed by Dulles was induced to retain Lester Norris’s man—the former Texaco Chairman Torkild Rieber—as his oil minister.  Although Rieber had been staunchly supported by Texaco director Lester Norris, the majority of other Texaco directors in 1940 forced him to resign when the press began to discover and report on Texaco’s assistance to Hitler.  Secular democracy has never returned to Iran.


Lester Norris’s man: Torkild Rieber, Chairman of the Boord of Texaco, on the cover of Time magazine.  After Hitler’s invasion of Poland had caused England and France to declare war on Germany, Rieber in 1939 traveled to Germany where he spent a weekend during the Christmas holidays with Hitler’s second-in-command Herman Goering at his hunting lodge.  Rieber had earlier agreed to provide Texaco oil to the German navy in exchange for Germans building tankers for Texaco.  In 1936, Rieber had offered to Spanish General Franco oil to fuel his fascist insurgency against the democratic government of Spain.  Texaco also provided a home in Scarsdale and an office in the Chrysler Building for a German spy who came to the US in 1940 to stoke sympathy and assistance to Hitler among the US elites.      .

Diego Rivera painting memorializing the overthrow of democratic government in Guatemala by the US.  CIA Director Allen Dulles is portrayed in dark suit with money pouch standing behind his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who is shaking hands with the new dictator who is prepared to create a dictatorial banana republic favorable to United Fruit Company.  The Dulles brothers were both lawyers and United Fruit had been a long-time client.

Torkild Rieber’s wife either jumped or was pushed to her death from their home in a Manhattan penthouse during the height of Rieber’s infatuation with Hitler. By 1954, Rieber was happily ensconced in an office at the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. That year, Rieber hosted the daughter of the fascist dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, flying her on his private jet from Washington to New York to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles where they were guests of honor at a party thrown by Hollywood mogul Jack Warner.

Rieber died in 1968, after Ed Baker but while Lester Norris was still on the Texaco Board. They are all dead now. Texaco owners Ed Baker, Dellora Norris and Lester Norris are entombed in the same St. Charles, Illinois cemetery where my father is buried. My great grandfather Henry Rockwell shares a large and spacious tomb with Ed Baker.

Fascism has long been deeply embedded in US society and government.  In part II of this blog post, I look back at the Antifa actions of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia of Austin and others.  In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Labor unions, a free press, and left-wing organizations were able to offer working class Americans alternatives to anti-democratic, fascist organizations and help position the national government to be anti-fascist.  Of course, it took war and enormous amounts of violence to defeat the fascism that had arisen in Europe with the essential help of German oligarchs like Kurt von Schroeder and Fritz Thyssen and US oligarchs like Henry Ford, the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the House of Morgan, and my relatives at Texaco. 

In part II I also identify oligarchs who have supported the insurrection and attempted coup or autogolpe on January 6, and draw conclusions from history and experience as to what can be done to stop fascism in the United States.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, unfinished manuscript history of Texaco; Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (2017); Michael J. Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (2018); Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (2021); Dustin Ray Hamby Exposed as Nazi Leader Chef Goyardee, blog of the Screwston Anti-fascist Committee (Sept. 20, 2019); Defend Our Hoodz, Facebook page; Centex Fascists, Autonomedia website; Shelley Seale, Conflicting stories surround controversial demolition of East Austin piñata store, Culture Map (February 15, 2015); Micah Lee, Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops, The Intercept (July 15, 2020); John Anderson, APD’s Secret Informants Eyeing Neighbors for “Suspicious” Activity, Leaked Documents Reveal; APD intel center puts spies among us, Austin Chronicle (July 24, 2020); John Anderson,  Austin Regional Intelligence Center’s Secret Informants Show How Profiling Works; “Middle Eastern”? Your info might be on file at Austin’s fusion center, Austin Chronicle (August 7, 2020); John Anderson, ARIC: Black Marchers With Guns? How the Huey P. Newton Gun Club got caught up in Austin Regional Intelligence Center’s snitching program, Austin Chronicle (Sept. 11, 2020); John Anderson, Local Activists Call Out Police and Find Themselves Flagged as Threats, Austin Chronicle (Aug. 28, 2020); Todd C. Frankel, A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble, Washington Post (Feb. 10, 2021); Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy, United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (2005).

Pedro Friedeberg

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Triptiko Triptiko Triptikstiko

A Surrealistic path from Austin to Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende.   

In The Life and Times of Alberto Garcia, I note Dr. Garcia’s probable contact and influence with University of Texas student Anita Brenner.  In my last blog post, I described how 17-year-old Anita Brenner’s experience with the occult, perhaps at the home of Dr. Alberto Garcia, caused her to leave the University in 1923, after her freshman year, and return to Mexico.  A voice at this séance predicted great things for her in Mexico, and with astounding swiftness the teenaged Brenner made friends with the artistic and political luminaries of the day.  Anita over the decades had an immense influence in making the world aware of Mexican art and in securing refuge for those persecuted for their race or their political beliefs.  

Mexico City architectural student Pedro Friedeberg during the 1950s worked for Anita Brenner’s magazine Mexico This Month. She encouraged him to quit architecture school and become an artist.  A few years later, in June of 1966, she featured him on the cover of Mexico This Month.   

The author of the world’s first surrealistic manifesto, André Breton, came to consider Pedro Friedeberg and Frida Kahlo the only two great surrealists in Mexico.  Only Pedro survives.

André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. Pedro Friedeberg’s mother served as a translator for Trotsky while he lived in Mexico.

Pedro’s recent comments on architecture perhaps prove the sagacity of Anita Brenner’s career advice:

“I admire everything that is useless, frivolous and whimsical. I hate functionalism, post modernism and almost everything else. I do not agree with the dictum that houses are supposed to be ‘machines to live in’. For me, the house … is supposed to be some crazy place that makes you laugh.”

Architecture degree or not, Pedro Friedeberg in 1961 did design a lotus house for Edward James surrealist compound in the mountain jungles of eastern San Luis Potosi.  The roof was lotus-shaped because James instructed Friedeberg that the house “should close during the day because the sun is so hot, and at night it should open so you can see the stars.”

Lotus House designed by Pedro Friedeberg for Edward James

Pedro’s parents were Jews who fled fascism in Europe and arrived in Mexico in 1939.  “I was born in Italy during the era of Mussolini, who made all trains run on time. Immediately thereafter, I moved to México where the trains are never on time, but where once they start moving they pass pyramids.”

His mother was a leftist who loved glamour.  The gardens of Pedro’s family home in Mexico City were designed by the architect Luis Barragan.  He recollects: “At an early age I was influenced by theosophy, Catholicism, atheism, Eastern customs and religions.  I was always fascinated by religious architecture: cathedrals, Aztec pyramids, synagogues, Gurdjieffian temples, and so on.”  But now he claims no interest in religion.  “I’m not really mystical,” he says.

In 1959, Pedro got his first gallery show, at Galeria Diana in Mexico City.  Today, Galeria Casa Diana in the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende permanently has his art on display.  Before I was aware of Pedro’s prominence and history, I was a regular visitor to this small and beautiful gallery that used to be the residence of him and Diana.  It is next door to the entrance to the bull ring that dominates a block near the center of this old colonial town.  Coming from the street into the gallery, Spanish colonialism meets Mickey Mouse, 21st Century pyramids, and op art.  The space invites transformation.  A couple years ago, on the Day of the Dead, I went to the gallery to silently gaze in the eyes of strangers and to be taken blindfolded through a vocal musical improvisation—all organized by a young Burning Man impresario.

            This is how Pedro Friedeberg greeted me one time at his gallery. 

Pedro Friedeberg

I once brought Dr. Alberto Garcia’s granddaughter Kay to Galeria Casa Diana.  At the time, I was not aware that Anita Brenner had in 1923 been invited to Dr. Garcia’s parties for Mexican students at his home in the south Austin neighborhood of Travis Heights.  Nor was I aware of the personal prophecy given to Anita during a séance at the home of Dr. Garcia or some other Austin occultist.  And I was not aware of Brenner’s role in encouraging and promoting Friedeberg. 

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia’s granddaughter Kay at Galeria Casa Diana

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (2020); Alan Grabinsky, 10,000 Hard-Boiled Eggs and the Art of Pedro Friedeberg At 82, the Mexican artist isn’t done collecting junk in his irrational house, Tablet Magazine (May 4, 2017); Pedro Friedeberg: Inventor of alternative realities (April 12, 2019), https://www.christies.com/features/In-conversation-with-Pedro-Friedeberg-8677-1.aspx; Philip Alvaré, Hands Down, Pedro Friedeberg’s Mexico City Home Is a Surrealist Delight\The eccentric artist’s abode is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, Introspective Magazine (February 16, 2020); Tessel M. Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult (2014); Patrick Lepetit, The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies (2014); Laurinda S. Dixon, review of Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 16 (Autumn 2017). 

Official website of Pedro Friedeberg:

Pedro Friedeberg

BEATS and BUDDHISTS IN Texas, India, Boulder and Chicago

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Chicago 7 Trial and Allen Ginsberg

In high school, I was the guy who read Playboy magazine for the photos and the articles.  Playboy exposed me to queer Allen Ginsberg and his radical ideas for human liberation.  In 1969 I tried to go see the Chicago 7 trial where those supporting the anti-Vietnam-War Festival of Life were accused of inciting a riot.  Allen Ginsberg testified as a witness.  By that time, Ginsberg was a celebrated poet, and had used Sanskrit mantras to try to calm the Chicago police riot.  

Ginsberg chanting Sanskrit mantras in Chicago’s Lincoln park during 1968 Festival of Life

In the Playboy article, Ginsberg reminisced:

[The afternoon of] the day before the the convention began–a lot of us were wandering around Lincoln Park when unexpectedly the police showed up with guns and clubs. Nobody knew when the police were going to attack…. Police fear everywhere. So I sat down and began chanting [the mantra] OM. I thought I would chant about 20 minutes and calm myself down, but the chanting stretched into [eight] hours, and a big circle surrounded me. A lot of people joined in the chanting.

After about 15 minutes, my breathing became regular … as if I was breathing the air of heaven into myself and then circulating it back out into heaven. After awhile, the air inside and out became the same–what the Indians call prana, the vital, silvery, evanescent air.

Then I began to feel a funny tingling in my feet that spread until my body was one rigid electrical tingling–a solid mass of lights. it was around 8 pm now and I’d been facing the [100-story] John Hancock Building, which was beginning to light up. I felt like the building except I realized that it wasn’t alive and I was. Then I felt a rigidity within my body, almost like a a muscle armor plating. With all this electric going up and down and this rigid muscle thing I had to to straighten my back to make a clear passage for whatever flow there was: my hands began vibrating.

If there’d been panic and police clubs at the moment, I don’t think I would have minded the damage. Clubbing would have seemed a curiously impertinent intrusion from skeleton phantoms–unreal compared with the natural omnipresent electric universe I was in.

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Alan Watts and the unknown siddha.

Allen Ginsberg was an ur-Beat.  In The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia, I write about the presence of Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and other Beats in Texas while Dr. Garcia lived there –in the late 1940s. 

Burroughs had substantial agricultural properties in Texas, including a marijuana and poppy farm in the East Texas piney woods. Fifty years before the arrival of these Beats, this area of Texas had been populated with socialists — as well as Hermeticists and Rosicrucians: people who practiced an alchemical tantra, followers of the big hashish importer and prominent Civil War-era, black, rights activist Paschal Randolph. The Beats were unaware of this legacy and had no idea that a being, a siddha, like Dr. Alberto G. Garcia was living in Texas, practicing tantric yoga, raising kundalini up his spine through glowing spinning chakras, and selflessly serving humanity.

For his citrus operation in South Texas, close to the Texas border, William Burroughs relied on workers who he called “wetbacks,” leaving him plenty of time for psilocybin, booze, Benzadrine, heroin and schemes to raise cockroaches as chicken feed.  Ginsburg complained to Burroughs about his exploitive practices and would have appreciated the politics of Dr. Garcia.  The doctor’s discipline and sobriety, however, would not have been appealing to the Beats.     

Dr. Garcia’s life and experiences in Texas as a Mexican American and as a yogi adds perspective to the Beats as men (they almost all were men) and as seekers of nirvana and other freedoms.  In the book, I disclose the scathing and insightful comments Dr. Garcia wrote about the about Beat philosopher Alan Watts.   

William Burroughs & Allan Ginsberg 1952
Neal Cassady

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Of the Beats, it was Allen Ginsberg whose spiritual search seemed deepest and most profound.  More than a decade after leaving Texas, Ginsberg traveled to India where he met in passing a 24-year-old Tibetan monk named Chögyam Trungpa.  Trungpa failed to make any impression on Ginsberg.  In 1970, Ginsberg again happened to run into Trungpa on a Manhattan street, where he talked him into giving up his taxicab for him and his father.   Chögyam Trungpa had come to the United States to teach a Buddhist tantric yoga.  Trungpa was a “Rinpoche,” a reincarnate guru.  Ginsberg became Trungpa’s student and helped him create a Buddhist university, the Naropa Institute, in Boulder Colorado, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  Later while looking at old photos, Ginsberg saw a photo of himself with the young monk Chögyam Trungpa in India in 1963.  He had completely forgotten he had met him there. 

            In 1975, on a summer break from college, I attended Naropa Institute.  I had already been doing the Yoga-Sutra-based practice of Transcendental Meditation.  I wasn’t looking for a guru.  In spite of the great heights many humans have reached, I was well-aware of human frailties and the corrupt pull of the contemporary world.  I was suspicious of any approach to yoga that required submission to a human being.  But I knew Chögyam Trungpa to possess an unsurpassed eloquence on matters of spirituality.  And I wanted to see what was there for me to see.

            At Naropa I sat in on Allen Ginsberg’s class on poetry, and got a salute from him in front of the school in apparent recognition of the bliss I happened to be feeling at the moment.  I took classes in Gestalt Therapy, Tai Chi and physics for non-physicists.  I attended readings by Ginsberg and by William Burroughs. 

Burroughs was not a student of Trungpa—or even a Buddhist.  But Ginsberg got him and other Beat literary luminaries to appear at the Institute.  In the 1950s, Burroughs had left Texas to avoid a conviction for drugs.  There at a party, by drunken and careless mistake, he shot and killed his wife.  Burroughs sought to exorcise his demons using the legacy of magic practices taught by Aleister Crowley.  (Crowley had headed a Rosicrucian organization and in 1914 had associated with and shared teachings with Dr. Alberto Garcia’s Rosicrucian magus and maestro George Plummer.)  When I saw Burroughs at Naropa Institute, he looked a bit grim and hollowed out, like a businessman trapped in the same demimonde as the dark characters in his book.  I enjoyed his readings more than his writing.  He read with a sarcastic voice of a huckster, a voice that seemed oddly familiar to me.  His performance revealed to me far more humor in the text than had been evident from my own reading of it.

From left to right: Chögyam Trungpa, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in 1975.

The highlight of Naropa Institute was the weekly lectures by Trungpa, held in a high school stage.   Trungpa would sit wearing a western business suit, and drinking what appeared to be water out of a large glass.  It was universally understood that the “water” in fact was saké.  We sat on the gymnasium floor.  Often, I ended up sitting near the poet W.S. Merwin and his girlfriend Dana Naone.  Trungpa had long given up the monk’s vow of renunciation.  He was very engaged in the world with all of its “vices,” which he saw as just more material to work with and use to gain enlightenment.

Buddhist Reginald Ray documented that when Trungpa was a young boy in a Tibetan monastery, even then one of his young companions noticed “there was something unpredictable, uncanny, and somewhat frightening about him.”  Trungpa delighted in puncturing “spiritual materialism” and with genius he wielded withering and aggressive blows to “the ego.”  At this time, my ego was rather puny, so I was not drawn to pursue his teachings.   It was amusing, though, to witness his handling of the Beat poet Gregory Corso – who periodically attempted to disrupt Trungpa’s lectures with drunken shouting.  Three months after I left Naropa Institute, W.S. Merwin and Dana Naone got quite fed up with Trungpa when they experienced him at his most aggressive extreme.

W.S. Merwin & Dana Naone

I never did any Buddhist practice while I was at Naropa.  I just kept doing my TM and learned some Tai Chi. 

My only direct interaction with Chögyam Trungpa was at a café owned by his disciples.  I was eating dinner with my dorm mate John.  His eyes got big when he noticed that his guru was sitting at an overcrowded booth behind me, smoking, drinking and whooping it up with his wife and friends and students.  As Trungpa’s party was breaking up, he stood up and pivoted over to our table to return a chair he had borrowed before we even arrived.   John and I both kind of stared.  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche looked at me and said, “You are welcome.”  Yes, he nailed me.  My interest in manners was non-existent.  I tended to perceive manners at best as something beside the point or at worst something oppressively bourgeois and manipulative. It was an accurate and gentle little lesson Trungpa gave me. 

Agnihotra

Ironically, while at Naropa Institute I learned no Buddhist techniques – but instead I picked up a Vedic fire ritual called Agnihotra, a ritual that was practiced in what is now India, Nepal, and Pakistan thousands of years before the birth of Buddha. My dormmate had been practicing Agnihotra every day before he came to Naropa Institute.   After his arrival at Naropa, he had asked Trungpa about Agnihotra and Trungpa told him to drop it if he was going to be a Buddhist.  This is despite the fact that early Buddhist Pali texts extolled the benefits of Agnihotra. 

Agnihotra was mentioned in the Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda, which were compiled perhaps 5000 years ago.  And from these Vedas also came yoga and the Yoga Sutra practices I had been doing and still do.  Agnihotra is a short ceremony performed precisely at sunrise and sunset, with mantras amplified by the flames of a fire. Performing Agnihotra subtly opened something up in me.  Every ceremony seemed to strengthen my wakefulness and vivify prana in a palpable way.  It was a way to give thanks for manifest existence.  Like Transcendental Meditation, one purpose of Agnihotra is to promote peace and harmony in the environment.

More than fifteen years later, when I was living and practicing law in Washington, D.C., I attended an Agnihotra ceremony at a large group home in the Maryland countryside.  Passing through the large house I walked by other much-longer Vedic rituals being performed, with chanting and the pouring of large ladles of ghee in the fire.  And twenty years after that, while I was initiated into some Yoga Sutra siddhis, surprisingly I seemed to hear and sense in another realm sounds and sights of similar Vedic offerings and chants.

The Dalai Lama and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Reincarnation

In January of 2011, my law firm gave me a three-month sabbatical, and I went to India.  Most of the time I was in India I was involved in legal advocacy for displaced shanty-town dwellers and for a national movement to block foreign big box retail stores like Wal Mart from the Indian market. The photo below is of me at a tent erected on the side of a major highway in Delhi to provide shelter for a few of the 100,000 people whose homes had been burned and bull-dozed to make way for accommodations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Me with children whose homes had been destroyed by the City of New Delhi.

In March, I headed to the Himalayas and Dharamsala and McCleod Ganj, home in India to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.  I was going to hang out there with my friend Jamie for a few days.

I was familiar with Tibet’s predicament.  When I was working for Justice Lloyd Doggett at the Texas Supreme Court in 1994, a top jurist from China came to visit the Court.  He had been a judge in the trial of Mao Tse Tung’s wife after Mao’s death, when the Chinese Communist Party had turned against the Cultural Revolution.  At the reception, in front of some of the Supreme Court justices, I questioned this eminent jurist, laying a foundation, and tripping him up with a cross-examination about the Chinese judicial system and how it was that a group of three Tibetan nuns could have been recently sentenced to long prison terms merely for singing Buddhist hymns.  Probably no one had ever done this to him before and it probably was extremely embarrassing to him.  His next stop was the UT law school.  I had alerted local Tibetan exiles and they appeared in full force to protest the Chinese occupation and colonization of Tibet.  A Republican federal Fifth Circuit judge who appeared with this Chinese jurist apologized and expressed shame and embarrassment that this Communist jurist should have been accorded such an impolite reception in Texas.  There I was again, with my bad manners.  But I don’t think Chögyam Trungpa would have minded.

Now in 2011, I was in the city that was the capital of the Tibetan government in exile.  My friend Jamie and I stayed in a cheap hotel, staffed by some very young Tibetan guys, who didn’t seem to take anything very seriously.  I insisted on space heaters at night the Himalayan temperature got quite cold.  Two ultimately were delivered to our room.  Besides emanating heat, however, they also emanated light.  Lots of light.  Enough light to brightly illuminate our room all night long.  It was like having two airport runway floodlights at the foot of our beds.  One night after Jamie fell asleep and I was about to lay down in my bed, the cord to the little reading lamp on our nightstand suddenly caught fire.  Flames shot up, died out and then shot up again.  I unplugged the lamp and we put the fire out.  We were greeted with smiles and laughter when I told the boys at the front desk what had happened.  A lamp that could not emit light because it burned itself up with hot flames, and a heater that emitted an immense light.  Was this Buddhist tantra?

Late on my next-to-last day in Dharamsala, I decided to try to visit the Karmapa.  The Karmapa is a figure like the Dalai Lama, but subordinate to him.  He officiates over another lineage of monks and was widely expected to temporarily take over the Tibetan Government-In-Exile when the current 14th Dalai Lama dies.  He is in his twenties and, like the Dalai Lama, is the reincarnation of his predecessor.  The Karmapa’s monastery is located further down in the foothills from Dharamsala, in a small village in a rural area about an hour or so away.  So I hired a little three-wheeled tck-tck to traverse the foothills.  These vehicles are like juiced up golf carts, with dashboard shrines.  The driver was in front with his wife and I was on the back seat.   I had been on these vehicles on the expressways of Delhi going 60-miles-per-hour.  It did not seem they were designed for that and it was unclear what they were designed for.  But they were the popular and affordable taxis of India. 

The Karmapa’s monastery complex with its central temple was beautiful and appeared immaculately maintained. 

Karmapa’s temple and monastery

The Karmapa heads the lineage to which Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche belonged.  By now, Trungpa had been dead for 24 years, and a reincarnation had been found.  Given Trungpa’s wild behavior in this last reincarnation, I had heard that the monks were keeping an especially close watch on the boy.  He was born in Chinese-occupied Tibet.  I wondered whether he was still in China or whether he too had escaped.  I thought that the monks at Karmapa’s facility might know where he is now.  But of the monks I talked to, some had heard of Chögyam Trungpa, but no one knew where his new incarnation was, or at least was willing to say.  The Karmapa had an open office on certain days and welcomed visits from Americans and others.  But the day I arrived it turns out the Karmapa was out of town.  His temple was locked up and deserted. 

I later learned that Chögyam Trungpa’s reincarnation, the 12th Trungpa, at the time was 22 years old and living in a monastery within Tibet.

The 12th Trungpa, Chogyam Trungpa’s reincarnation.

As I walked out of the monastery compound, the tck-tck driver and his wife were waiting for me to take me back to Dharamsala.  As we headed out of town and up the first foothill, it became clear that the tck-tck had developed some sort of mechanical problem that caused it to stall going up steep slopes with a heavy weight like myself aboard.  So, every time we reached a steep incline I had to get out and push the tck-tck and the driver and his wife up the Himalayan foothills.  When we got to the top, I jumped in and coasted down the hill until we reached the next incline.  This is how the up-and-down trip went, all the way back to Dharamsala.  But I was not bothered a bit.  I was so happy just to be in the Himalayas and be surrounded by so many yogis.  And I was happy to help these poor souls who owned the tck-tck get their injured vehicle back home. 

After I got back to the hotel, I saw that my future wife Joy had sent me a Facebook message from Austin, Texas, indicating that a major event was happening the morning, my last day in McLeod Ganj.  The Dalai Lama was scheduled to speak.  There was no sign or notice in McCleod Ganj that such a thing was happening.  I asked our young Tibetan hotel operators and true to form they were clueless.  On further inquiry from others, we learned that this day, March 10, was Uprising Day, commemorating the opposition to Chinese rule in 1959, a revolt that was put down by Chinese violence.  The Dalai Lama was supposed to make an address and it would be followed by a political march.  How strange it was that Joy, back home in Texas, was aware of this when Tibetans and tourists a few feet away from the Dalai Lama’s home were not?

Early the next morning, I was denied entrance to the Kalachakra temple complex where the Dalai Lama was speaking because I had a camera.  The speech was to be in untranslated Tibetan, so therefore I decided to hang on to my camera and photograph the surrounding activities rather than attend the speech. 

Dalai Lama speaking at the main temple across from his home.

After the speech was over, I was given a written English translation—and it was a bombshell!  The Dalai Lama had announced that he was stepping down as political leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile.  For centuries the post of Dalai Lama had encompassed both the spiritual leadership and political leadership of Tibet.  What the current Dalai Lama seemed to be saying is that he would no longer serve as the political leader of Tibet.  From now on, the Tibetans would elect their own prime minister who would be the political leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile.  By this act, the Dalai Lama ended a form of Theocracy and brought reform that was more consistent with 21st Century notions of democracy.

With predictable ridiculousness, the revolutionaries and dialectical materialists in the Chinese communist government objected to the Dalai Lama’s rejection of the old custom political leadership based on a reincarnated inheritance.  The Times of India reported as follows:

[T]he Chinese-appointed governor of Tibet said the exiled leader did not have a right to choose his successor the way he wanted.  ‘We must respect the historical institutions and religious rituals of Tibetan Buddhism,’ he said.  “It is not up to anyone whether to abolish the reincarnation institution or not.”

After the Dalai Lama’s speech, thousands of young Tibetans were on the streets of McCleod Ganj, holding banners, manning bullhorns.  It was Uprising Day.  A march proceeded along a forested road.  Some people sold copies of a newspaper within which the relative merits of the three candidates for the position of the Tibetan prime minister were being debated. 

Uprising Day crowd 2011
Uprising Day marchers

The tantric yoga of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia

Dr. Alberto’s yoga practice in Austin Texas, which stretched from 1922 or so to 1962, was derived from a tantric interpretation of the Yoga Sutra. Like some of the Tibetan practices, the teachings he followed involved energizing the chakras and bringing kundalini up the spine. It also included tantric sex. Dr. Garcia’s yoga involved adherence to a strict interpretation of the “ethical” yama and niyama limbs of the Yoga Sutra as well as self-less service. Like the yoga of the Dalai Lama, it involved participating in political and social revolution. The Dalai Lama has identified himself as a Marxist. While Dr. Garcia did not, he for most of his life affiliated with Marxist and Communist working class movements and defended communists during the McCarthy era. The story of this unique early Texas yogi is found in The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020); Allen Ginsberg: Spontaneous Mind, Selected Interviews 1958-1996 (Carter, ed., 2001); Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William Burroughs: Beats in South Texas (2006); Reginald A. Ray, Chögyam Trungpa as a Siddha, Recalling Chögyam Trungpa (Midal, ed., 2005); Tom Clark, The Great Naropa Poetry Wars (1980); H.W. Bodewitz, The Daily Evening and Morning Offering (Agnihotra) According to the Brahmanas (1976); Vasant V. Paranjpe, Grace Alone (1971); Vasant V. Paranjpe, Light Towards Divine Path (1976); Premenda Priyadarshi, In Quest of the Dates of the Vedas (2014); Michael Danino, The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (2010).

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

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Whether you have yet read my biography of Alberto G. Garcia or not, this blog is will provide additional material relating to Alberto G. Garcia, to other subjects covered in the book and in new upcoming books, and to my own life. The blog will include parts left out of the Alberto Garcia book, writings on yoga, on Mexican and Texas history, on Second Sight and other supernormal abilities.


You will have a chance to weigh in with your own comments and I encourage you to do so.