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and new about New Age California was actually not new at all. I learned for the first time
that astrology, spirit guides, hypnosis, channeling, gems, talismans, meditation and visu-
alization were part of esoteric Renaissance culture in Italy six hundred years earlier. But
there was a major difference: the practitioners of these esoteric arts were not barefoot hip-
pies but, rather, Renaissance princes, bishops and scholars, men of profound seriousness
and philosophical formation. For several generations the vital streams of California's un-
derground apparently flowed above ground in the streets of mainstream Renaissance cities.
When I felt ready a few years later to go back to graduate school and make another pass at
completing my Ph.D., I dreamed of connecting contemporary humanistic psychology and
New Age culture with its ancestral Renaissance background.
In California in the 70s and the 80s, new therapies, new models of the psyche, new tech-
niques of enlightenment and lots of other new things, including the bow-and-arrow and the
wheel, were being invented on a daily basis. Since the culture of therapy and the human
potential movement was completely a-historical, it fed on the fantasy of being on the cut-
ting edge of radical novelty.
My ambition was to help this “California Renaissance” grow some historical roots and re-
cognize itself in the context of a Western tradition that ebbs and flows through the cen-
turies. The great flowering of esoteric culture during the Italian Renaissance was, relat-
ively speaking, the manifestation of a specifically Western, indigenous spiritual tradition:
Florence was certainly closer than India, Tibet or Japan. It was because this tradition had
been so successfully suppressed that late twentieth century seekers were looking so far
afield on the one hand, and reinventing the wheel on the other.
I looked at numerous graduate programs in psychology seeking a possible venue for such
a project. The schools seemed to be evenly divided between places that taught you how
to diagnose and treat neurosis and psychosis and what the law required of you, and places
that tortured rats and mice in the never-ending quest for higher understanding. I fit in like
a rhomboid in a square hole. I eventually discovered
The Union Institute
(today renamed
Union Institute and University
) which offered a unique, alternative approach. Their typical
student, I learned, was 43 years old and had two graduate degrees. That fit like a glove.
The Union Institute was fully accredited and had been around for over twenty years. The
school had about a hundred full-time faculty on its staff scattered all over the country. As a
part of the process you got to hand-pick a graduate committee that included two Union fac-
ulty members, two or more recognized specialists in your area of study, and two current or
former Union students as “peers” with whom to collaborate. Their program was designed
for adults in mid-life whose interests didn't fit the standard mold and who wanted to pursue
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