Saniel Bonder
— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan
During my years at Harvard it became obvious to me that we are all suffering profound self-possession, regardless of our opinions, beliefs, activities, etc. For the last eight years I have lived in the company of a spiritual adept who teaches the most profound way of transcendence of every kind of self-possession. His name is Master Da Free John. He is a uniquely American Teacher, though his work has implications for the world altogether; it includes a thorough critical appreciation of the entire "Great Tradition" of human culture, East and West, and a radical evolutionary vision of our transformation, both bodily and culturally.
I have been a principal editor of Da Free John's teaching during my years with him, and I urge you all with all my heart co consider this wisdom and this opportunity not only for personal transformation but for the highest cultural reformation of humanity. Feel free to write to me or call me at any time. If I am not at my home address listed above, you can reach me via The Laughing Man Institute's central offices in Clearlake, California. But whatever you do, please read this teacher's books. An inconceivable power of happiness, total compassion, and radical understanding of this bewildering human experience is available through this teaching. Master Da Free John transmits that power directly to those who respond to his teaching argument and approach as students. This is an extremely rare opportunity. At least be willing to consider it with an open mind and heart.
— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan
The past five years — whew! A lot of humbling — and I don't mean anything fancy; basic human stuff. A constant (a) confrontation with my own limits, illusions, and airhead idealisms that, in my Crimson days, nearly got me banned from the Features page, and (b) communion with the joy of heart that makes life capital "M" Mysterious. Being real with myself and others seems to require both (a) and (b) in significant doses. I'm very grateful to have an authentic teacher and a community of fellow practitioners. I'm also grateful for the years at Harvard — wish I'd made better use of the place.
The state of things? The best or most useful observation I can offer is that, as a member of a somewhat unconventional, experimental spiritual community, I've gotten much more of a taste for how religious discrimination works than I ever did as a Jewish kid growing up in a small Protestant southern town. Members of so-called "cults" are the new niggers, the new kikes, etc. C'est 1a vie… the fray of these past few years has also ground off some of my "horns." I'd love to see or hear from old Harvard/Radcliffe friends. If you are ever out in the S.F. Bay area, please do give me a call.
— 20th — (1992) George H. W. Bush
Wrote a sacred biography of my guru, Da Avabhasa (The "Bright") and went on a speaking tour around the world, 1990… expect the book will have a lot more readers in the twenty-first century! Divorced 1988, new partner, Markela, same year. Lived on an island, Sri Love-Anandashram, in remote Fiji, 1989-early 1990. Now living in California. Just wrote a novel-no publisher as yet. Am, have been living close to the heart of a spiritual/cultural Krakatoa-my guru's life and mission-that will be left around the world in coming decades, but who knows how and to what effect? Remarkable ordeal of deepening Happiness while the mortal fragments of living crumble all around: Guru's Grace. As a character in my novel, Charley Bass (sound suspicious, Marlin? "Fecundity!"), says, "There is no one who does not need a Teacher." Two decades ahead of my time, or two millennia behind? Or both? Will I live to find out? Lerman-Horvitz- Houghteling-Boster, etc.: my love to you, good friends, and God always in your hearts!
— 25th — (1997) Bill Clinton
AFTER, as a freshman, participating in the Strike, joining the Crimson, nearly getting expelled for standing on what I thought was Kissinger's desk (it wasn't) during a demonstration, and trying to instigate an educational alternative we called "Harvard New College," midway through our sophomore year I found myself despairing. It appeared that everyone, on every side of every issue, was walking around as if in a shroud of self-imagery, or a cage of mirrors. Myself included! That prompted a great longing for the divine in my life. By the time I graduated, I had been to India for a semester and had already undergone spontaneous (no dope) initiations into sublime mysteries of Being.
The summary of the last quarter century for me is, after leaving Harvard I kept right on going in that same direction, full bore. Within a year or so after graduation I came upon the teachings of an American-born adept, who later took the name "Da" with various honorifics and descriptives. I was as ardent a devotee as I could be until 1992, when it became imperative to find my own integrity again (I'm not going to get into the details here; it's too big a subject). To my continuing delight and amazement, leaving him and his community seemed to be just the necessary catalyst for the very transformation I had all those years sought so earnestly and yet, it seemed, so fruitlessly. Within only months afterward, a summary clarification of Being opened for me and became a stable realization. What to call it? When a friend at the time (December '92) squirmed around the language of "realization" and "awakening," I said, "Let's just call it 'coagulation.'" Who cares what it's called? The thing itself, however, was worth all the questing and all the failure, despair, and desolation too.
In the years since, I have found myself moved to be of service to others seeking a similar "coagulation," an integration of the total Being that really marries the polarized opposites of our nature and experience: Eastern/Western, male/female, spiritual/sexual, light/dark, happy/sad, active/passive, etc. It's an ongoing transformation; the changes for me since 1992 have been coming at warp speed, "white hot." Having entered my own clarity precisely by breaking free of the autocratic guru/devotee mold, I tend toward a rather Jeffersonian-democratic approach to matters of spiritual communication, transmission, and culture. The titles of my one (self)published book and two others presently (Sept. '96) in the works are pretty descriptive: The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart: Divinely Human Self-Realization and Sacred Marriage-A Breakthrough Way for "Westerners"; The Incarnation of Mutuality: A Waking Maiden Sutra on the Immortal Nectar of Conscious Love-Trust; and I Dreamt That Lincoln Had a Dream: The American Spirit of Democracy and the Coming "Divinely Human" Civilization. The first two should be available by the time this Class Report is out. So should a compilation of writings by friends and co-workers in my radical tantric "Temple of Being." Their book's tentative title is, Opening the Gateway of Mutuality.
What else to say? I was married twice, and divorced twice, in the spiritual community in which I spent so many years. Have been to India again, also lived in Fiji for a year. Never had any children (too dedicated to serving my guru and his fellowship's work), but now definitely considering a family. I have a wonderful intimate partner, Linda Groves, who is also a superb yogini/colleague in my work. It's been an arduous and amazing journey, and I am thrilled beyond words to have come into what I regard to be basic human wholeness and freedom-in which both my divine selfhood and my animal nature are fully up and running, with no inherent conflict or stress, and appear to be spontaneously dedicated to the service of others and the world (my plenty of faults and limits notwithstanding). I can't really come up with more sound bites about what the hell I've fallen into here with my. friends, except to say, if you're haunted by non-fulfillment of the spirit that moved so many of us back in our undergraduate days, but have no juice whatsoever to turn East anymore or, for that matter, West, or anywhere else, except into deep acceptance of your own whole being truth, well, I'd love to hear from you. Ma-Tam (as in "Mt. Tamalpais") Temple of Being, P.O. Box 688, Larkspur, CA 94977-0688; (415 461 2554).
— 50th — (2022) Joseph Biden
My life so far:
“What a long, strange trip it’s been…”—and a wondrous one. Thank you, Jerry Garcia…This is an updated, Jordan J specific version of the Red Book entry coming out soon. I apologize in advance for the length. And for taking till the last minute to get it to Jim.
Jim, what a kind, generous, and exquisite thing you’ve done creating and curating our own website! Something for us to treasure for the duration. Thank you so much.
I was born in 1950 in NYC to first-generation Jewish Americans, with roots in eastern Poland and western Russia. My parents and younger sister Ellen and I moved to a nearly all Protestant small town in North Carolina, in ’57. From there I went to Webb, a small, old-timey, then still overtly Christian-oriented Southern prep school in the rural hills of middle Tennessee. Its kick-ass academics and leadership training got me into Harvard with, surprise, an “Honorary National Scholarship.” Its even stronger focus on honor, integrity, and doing the right thing no matter what—I got all that from parents too—soon helped lead to my almost getting kicked out of Harvard, and much later prompted one of the most important choices of my life; see below.
Freshman year in Grays, I was a culture-shocked basket case in the wilderness of protests, counterculture, college life at Harvard, city life in Boston/Cambridge. Lot of time smoking dope on our ratty couch in the main room. Joined the Crimson though the managing editor threatened to silence me for lack of appropriate journalistic objectivity. Did get to cover that period of the political gyrations and unrest in the Social Relations departmental major that attempted to combine Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology. That department lasted at least long enough for me to get my BA in it as a single major before it split back into its constituent specializations.
Re my near expulsion: During or maybe after the strike I was part of a political science building occupation protesting the University’s complicity with Dow Chemical, makers of the horrifying torture weapon Agent Orange. (A do-the-right-thing-no-matter-what choice.) Thought I’d stood on Kissinger’s desk that day. The admin gents up on the 20th floor told me they’d almost thrown me out, revoked my honorary (as in non-financial) scholarship, and warned me not to blow my reprieve. They also said, ‘Oh, by the way, that wasn’t Dr. K’s desk…'
I never regretted any of that, but came back sophomore year with no wind left in my activist sails. I’d become convinced we’re all ego-bound, as if living in a cage or shroud filled on the inner walls with other-excluding, inward-facing mirrors. This insight was not a result of any reading or other influences. Arose out of who knows where. But I knew I needed major help of another order entirely.
That led to first a religious awakening, aided by Martin Buber’s I and Thou, and then an Eastern-mysticism spurred spiritual quest for enlightenment. Eliot and I were close fellow journeyers in all that back then. I experienced a couple of blow-out samadhis or satoris, full or nearly complete dissolutions in the Unknowable, in ’70 & ’72. That convinced me we need to stably realize this greater human potential/birthright so we can definitively live outside and ungoverned by that cage or shroud. Been on that case my whole life since. Feels like a deeper level of the revolutions that humanity much needs and are so hard to come by. So in some ways I never stopped being an activist.
Main spiritual influences: Autobiography of a Yogi; a kundalini yoga guru starting early junior year in Cambridge, then in India in the first semester, of our senior year along with Eliot; later, ’72-3, the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi. Most of this was opening up while I was living in Jordan J during the school year. I graduated after summer school ’72.
One of my somewhat vivid memories of our Jordan J time was the “Great Cookie Bomb” “attack” on Lamont Library that a bunch of us cooked up in the kitchen there. Such a sweet thing to do, baking and passing out oodles of cookies to fellow students burning midnight oil in the library during mid-terms in frigid Cambridge. Such an idiotic thing that I seem to remember was my personal contribution—don’t know if anyone else even agreed I should do it—calling Lamont and telling someone to expect a “cookie bomb” to go off soon. Which resulted in the library being emptied, ruining everyone’s cramming! And the campus police, who, when I went and guiltily told them what had actually happened, hid me in their offices without saying a word while, if I recall correctly, Cambridge police and maybe firemen searched the whole library. And of course found no bombs. The campus police told me to shut up and not move, that I could get charged with terrorism (or whatever they called it back then). Sheesh. PS, I’m sure Charlie can correct anything I’m remembering wrong here…
Starting late ’73, I spent nearly 19 years as a disciple/devotee of the American-born tantric adept Adi Da Samraj, whom Eliot continues with (Adi Da passed in 2008). I can't begin to do justice to what I see as his unprecedented gifts to humanity. Nor, however, what I’ll simply call the often extremely challenging behaviors and communications of our guru in his chosen mode as supreme spiritual monarch. I understood the stated logic of all that then and still do. My own journey eventually took me in a different direction.
I went through two marriages and then divorces in that community; no children then or since. Wrote a full-length bio of the guru that was published in ’90, well-received for hagiography. But it wasn’t given to me to remain in that work. Finally left in August ’92. I was not expelled; it was entirely my own choice. In fact, I later learned, the guru was not even informed that I had departed the work until several weeks had passed.
I felt that, in all my efforts to surrender ego to the divine through the guru, I’d lost my moorings in personal, yes egoic, integrity (the Webb School personal honor code corrected my course). And I knew the guru had lost faith in my capacity to awaken in this lifetime, which is what I’d come to him for. He’d long since started referring to most of those in my vintage as “failed cases.”
That was not a school one left with a gold watch and a pat on the back for one’s decades of service. I knew there could be serious karmic consequences for breaking my vows of devotion and obedience. In darker moments, I felt like a disgraced failure of a devotee, an antigen in a cosmos still pervaded by my guru’s divine presence. However, to my total surprise, shortly after leaving I began rocketing through a spontaneous awakening process that had its own intrinsic power. That journey culminated, just 4 months later in early December ’92, in the realization I’d been seeking all those years. The ineffable divine Mystery I’d been blown out into now and again had “landed” in my heart and whole body, and soon proved to be un-lose-able.
It quickly dawned on me that the divine feminine, or She-Mystery, as tantric Goddess had profoundly (and playfully) quickened that whole shift. And I soon became “contagious”; friends began undergoing intense changes just from our contacts. Having spent all those years with a guru who explicitly assumed the role of divine monarch (his self-taken honorific, “Samraj,” literally means "king of all"), I became motivated to democratize this kind of awakeness as far and wide as possible. If I could go through that shift as an apostate to such a mighty God-Man…who couldn’t?
So that's what I’ve been doing ever since, with few credentials other than the direct effectiveness of the process itself for those who’ve dared it. For the first seven years I was convinced the work required me to have multiple intimate partners (I get how crazy that may sound; ah well!). Thankfully, Linda Groves, now Linda Groves-Bonder, showed up in ’94, and though monogamous herself, weathered my experiment with me until it crashed and burned in late ’99. It did cause a lot of pain for us and collateral damage to our fellow teachers and students in the community I’d founded and built with Linda’s and others’ help over the years.
Luckily for me, Linda and I married—explicit monogamy, nothing open about it—on the Winter Solstice in 2000. For five full years before that, to the day, we knew we were already married at heart. This coming December 22nd we’ll celebrate the 22nd anniversary of our legal marriage ceremony in the company of family and friends. A super heart-smart move. I used to say I’d cheerfully enter a “most happily married man on the planet” contest until it dawned on me—none of us who know we should win that contest would waste the time trying to prove it to anyone else.
Linda is such an amazing being, a brilliant embodiment of love, care, and deep wisdom; a lifelong artist and a great, full partner in our shared calling and work, also co-founder and partner with me in our company, Human Sun Institute. She got a BS in Art Education from Ball State University, was a professional singer and songwriter for years before we met, and for a few years in the 00’s was one of the backup singer “Lickettes” in the band Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, touring nationally and in Europe. She was also a professional photo-stylist for many years.
I should make clear, it’s not like we’re saintly beings. Hardly. We’ve both got plenty of “stuff.” But we process as needed and our commitment to one another and to our shared calling-mission is unshakable. And, really, we don’t even try to be “spiritual.” I cringe even to use the word.
Those of you aware of his work might appreciate this: Linda and I were Founding Members of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute and Charter Member teachers in his Integral Spiritual Center. Our own work though is not an offshoot of any previous or contemporary expressions.
Best known as Waking Down in Mutuality®, or just Waking Down®, our approach to democratizing and socializing this whole-body awakeness or singularity is, paradoxically, both ego-transcending and ego-friendly. And it’s been quite successful on an intimate scale. Over the decades, dozens have become illumined teacher-transmitters, many hundreds have also undergone the kind of permanent shift in being that I did, or something similar, and thousands have been helped, inspired, seen, met, and empowered in what we call “healing the Spirit/Matter split.” Saying all this, I feel blessed by an undeservable grace to be privileged to make such a difference in the lives of so many.
The basic transformation accomplishes the healing of that split in a fundamental way. We’ve called it a “second birth,” and I would suggest there are bio-spiritual factors that make this more than a metaphor. In any case, it’s not a be-all and end-all state. It’s not some kind of spiritual and moral perfection. In effect you still have to “get a life.” Continually outgrowing being unconsciously governed even by vestiges of the “cage or shroud of inward-facing mirrors,” plus all our traumas and ancient conditionings, requires persistent character refinement. No easy thing.
And, no surprise really, our ever-further-democratizing community of Spirit-embodying humans has run into its fair share of democracy’s special kinds of collective difficulties. A long-simmering founder’s crisis (yep, moi) boiled over in early 2014 into a grievance proceeding against me. It had some legitimate complaints—I did have serious anger issues, which I tended to conflate with my well-meaning founder’s passion for our experiment. But the proceeding also became in Linda’s and my experience a wild west kangaroo court, with no grounding in anything like current best HR practices for such things.
That led to an organizational split that took three years, including legal wrangling. To retain rights to my original IP, Linda and I had to register it. Our former colleagues did not contest that move; thus, Waking Down in Mutuality® and Waking Down® are our registered trademarks. But an attempt to find agreement for a license for the others to remain formal teachers of that registered work dragged on for more than a year, and became quite contentious before failing. Most of our former colleagues stayed associated with one another and created a new organization.
Sadly, there’s some dried blood still on the tracks—lost dear friendships and dashed hopes. I did a year and a half of therapy with a superb professional—which surely would’ve been more helpful for the shared work years before the crisis. But we all had shadow tendencies surfacing in the organizational challenges and divorce. Those governing patterns of reactivity could not have been avoided. One way or another, they would have surfaced.
All of which is, yes, sobering, you bet. Even with the best ideals and intentions, human collectives can go way off their own rails. (Sound familiar?)
Yet, from another perspective, it was an inevitable evolutionary differentiation. The other group has its own Dharma or essential principles that they acknowledge are based significantly in my original teachings. Working under the auspices of our Human Sun Institute, Linda and I have been liberated to clarify ours.
Our Waking Down in Mutuality teaching and other expressions of our approach are based in the “one great Heart we all share,” that we see “is coming alive and awake in, as, and through every body, and all of us together.” The essence of that Heart-nature was transmitted to me by Ramana Maharshi and Adi Da, each in their own way. Its further evolutionary democratization through our work is ongoing, with a life of its own that we try our best to cooperate with and serve.
So here I am at 71, nowhere near or wanting retirement, but also having to attend to critical practical matters. These include a partial reinvention from being a spiritual “teacher” (which over time has become almost as much of a four-letter word as “guru,” except it has seven letters) to a coach. Often working together with Linda in this supportive and evocative role, I specialize in work/life, body-mind-spirit integration and next-level emergence, especially for change-makers, leaders, and entrepreneurs. We particularly look to serve those who have a hunger for a transformational awakening that readily integrates deep spirituality with everyday living and impassioned contribution to others and the world.
My Adams House roommate David Lerman ’72 urged me awhile back to market to folks around our ages who are done with their main earlier careers and don’t want to geezer out, but feel a need to reinvent themselves, outside and in, for their own next emergence. We’ll see; lots of beginners’ mind is still at play for us at this point. We’re having good successes. Linda and I also continue our general Waking Down teaching and group formats along with offering our in many ways unique, personalized Heart-oriented coaching. All or nearly all online, of course, since the pandemic began.
I hope I’ve got long enough time left in this life to give proper, current voice, along with Linda and others, to the nature and breakthroughs of our work. From the outset it began to reveal disruptively non-conventional, relieving, and liberating qualities. This could sound wildly presumptuous and grandiose, but it’s evident to some of us that our orientation, over against so much of what’s come before, is in certain ways like Einsteinian relativity or even quantum mechanics in relation to Newtonian physics and cosmology: a radically worldview-shifting revolution, in this case in what it can mean and how it can fundamentally feel to be human. As I say that, my deficiencies and limitations as a servant of this shift stand out plainly to me. Among other things, I’m a reticent advocate. But there you have it. I also don’t feel at liberty not to say all this. The work certainly poses questions worthy of consideration.
Way back I began to feel we might be facing a “van Gogh syndrome”—as in, seriously ahead of our time, or maybe even seriously marginal for keeps. The metaphor is a bit of tiny-violins boo-hoo—we’ve “sold” a lot of our “paintings” that by their own account have changed people’s lives wonderfully and permanently. But it seems to us and others who’ve taken advantage of it that the work can be of far wider and deeper benefit to the human collective, now and in our further evolution.
So Linda and I have a calling to bring this “Heart”-awakeness—and its benign, body-embracing, humane, deeply moral-ethical, empathic, trust-enhancing, and psycho-culturally integral worldview—much more fully out into the everyday world. And that calling won’t stop breathing down my neck night and day until I’ve/we’ve honored and fulfilled it, far more than we’ve been able to so far.
The essence of it isn’t some grand sociological project. It’s the amazing blessing of being able to encounter other human beings in all their, our, many-sided complexity and uniqueness. Though our work has its particular intellectual and methodological structure, Linda and I approach every meeting and relationship something like improvisational artists of growth, healing, recognition, transformation.
One of the places we’ve discovered where we can show up is the now still relatively new Clubhouse audio platform online. We’ve found an especially welcoming community in the “Integral Leadership” room where we are co-moderators with a wise, deep, and loving-kind group of people.
Having published about a dozen books in various formats, I’m working, this time with Linda as full co-author, co-creator, and director of design, on what we hope will be our flagship and main legacy book, The Sun in Your Heart Is Rising: A Call to Help the Light in Every Body Shine. Earlier titles include Waking Down, Healing the Spirit/Matter Split, The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart, and Great Relief: Nine Sacred Secrets Your Body Wants You to Know.
I’ve also published a “novelized” play, While Jesus Weeps: Conversations in the Garden of Gethsemane, that I first started writing on that trip to India in 1971. Peter G. recently reminded me that a bunch of us did a reading of it in ’72, apparently done up in bedsheet togas! (We really did that?! Who were those kids?)
In 2011 I also published a hi-tech, sci-fi fantasy-yarn novel, Ultimaya 1.0, set in my South. A main character, “Charley Bass,” is in part an homage to another classmate, Charlie Marlin ‘72, whom I met in Jordan J. The book got a no-holds-barred positive notice in Kirkus Reviews (who call themselves “The world’s toughest book critics”). And I wound up on foxnews.com among other mainstream media venues to promote it. It hasn’t sold much though, at least, not yet.
Up to the minute, we’re looking to:
• complete a 10 year vision and plan this month, to fund and resource connections and other support for projects crucial to our remaining years of work and our ongoing legacy,
• replace our Jurassic-era website, sanielandlinda.com, this summer, and
• hopefully bring out a short, more widely accessible intro book on our work soon after.
Linda and I live in the wine country outside Sonoma, CA, renting the ranch house on an equine therapy ranch-center for children and young people on the autism spectrum. We are blessed just to be nearby. Thankfully, while the pandemic has raged on, and the whole dozen-plus earlier years we’ve been here, it’s a lovely place for us to hunker down in—two cats in the yard and house, gorgeous countryside in every direction, literally hundreds of wild birds that Linda lovingly feeds every day, her flowers, plants, and exquisite, warm, and loving design touches everywhere inside and out.
I’m a golfer, don’t get to play enough. Currently pursuing the grand dream of correcting my (evidently congenital) slice. Since the likelihood of “shooting my age” on a golf course is slim, for a year or so I was working up to doing that in push-ups. I got up to a huffing and puffing 61 on New Year’s Eve day in 2019, ta da!
Afterward I felt that much extreme exertion might not be medically wise. I do try to stay fit, with yoga, strength training, cardio, walking; so far I’m basically healthy, with a share of normal “aging-itis.” I occasionally play Native American flutes and now and again write poetry.
As a proud member of the Class of ’72, I’m grateful to still be putting to good use things I learned and experiences I had getting my BA in Social Relations at Harvard back now nearly half a century ago.
And, among other lookings back and now forward, I’m happy to be part of this delightful reunion of us Jordan J-ers, in some touch with those of you I know, and saying a warm hello to those I don’t!
Special affectionate regards to Eliot, Bob, Susan, Charlie, Jim, Terry, Lauren, Peter, Andrea, David, Rika, Cathy, Dinah, and others of you I can’t bring back memories of at the moment, but who played much-welcome roles in my life during our times there. Sighs in remembrance of Stretch and Olvidada. Blessings all!
I look forward to learning more about others of you too. I’m way behind in reading all your stories on our site but I surely will.
Thanks for taking all this in. I’m a little queasy about having gone on and on; Jim did encourage me to just go ahead and post it all, rather than trying to hack it into something I might think is more respectably—and respectfully of you reading it!— concise.
You can reach me at saniel@sanielandlinda.com or just call or text me at 415.847.5514. Love to hear from you! ~ Sandy