Behind the Scenes at Avatar
by Eldon M. Braun There are a few possible reasons why you may not have heard of Harry Palmer's Avatar Course. If you live in the U.S., you must not take New Age Journal or Success Magazine; subscribers of those magazines receive complimentary copies of the Avatar Journal through purchased mailing lists. Or maybe you're simply not interested in self-improvement. Or you're not tuned into the right channeler. Otherwise, you should already have gotten wind of the "instant enlightenment'' course called Avatar. Thousands of people in the U.S. have paid $2,000 to take it. It is offered by a few hundred teachers, called Masters, in every American city of any size, and is growing by leaps and bounds. If you live in France and haven't heard about Avatar, you are way out of touch. There, it is proportionately far more popular than in the U.S. If you live elsewhere, expect to hear about Avatar soon. It is currently taught in 31 countries. Avatar is the fastest-paced growth course since est, as free-spirited as a Rajneesh seminar, and a lot cheaper than Scientology . What's more, like all the above, it works--assuming you believe it does. Thousands of seemingly credible people do. The Avatar Course has even earned rave reviews from professional therapists and counselors. One is Emma Bragdon, Ph. D., psychotherapist and author of the book The Call of Spiritual Emergency.53 . After taking the Avatar Course in May, 1990, she called it "the most empowering week of my life,'' and said, "I reclaimed my birthright: to be awake, to be in control, and in joy.'' She now teaches the course herself. The Avatar Course is not presented as a cult, an organization that demands strict allegiance, or a set of doctrines. Graduates are only subtly encouraged to proselytize it. Unlike Scientology, the principal mental technology studied by its developer, Avatar really isn't much of an organization. The entire company that licenses the course worldwide and teaches licensees to deliver it consists of four people.
THE END OF THE BRIDGE?
In June, 1987, I got a phone call from Al Holmes, whom I hadn't seen for years. We had taken courses together at the San Francisco Church of Scientology ten years earlier. A couple of days later he and Bill Offerman, another former Scientologist, showed up. They wanted to tell me about something new. Both of them had recently returned from Elmira, New York, where they had taken the Avatar course. It had been developed several months earlier by Harry Palmer, a former Scientology mission holder. They were obviously impressed. From their description, Palmer had figured out what L. Ron Hubbard missed during the thirty-odd years he spent developing hundreds of Scientology processes. Or maybe Palmer had discovered what L.R.H. purposely omitted in order to keep his followers buying more and more courses as they followed the elusive carrot of self-realization along the ever-lengthening "bridge to total freedom.'' My visitors invited me to come to Millbrae, a suburb south of San Francisco, to hear a lecture Palmer would be giving soon. He and a few course trainers had recently begun to travel around the U.S. delivering courses organized by former Scientologists. They had just completed a stint in Santa Monica, and were due to show up in the Bay Area in a couple of weeks. When they left, Al and Bill gave me a cassette tape of an hour-long lecture by Palmer. I had taken quite a few Scientology courses over the past 15 years. In 1982, when the church began using heavy-handed tactics to extort money from independent mission-holders and became involved in scandals over its attempts to intimidate disaffected members, I demanded the last $1,100 I had in my "advance payment account'' for future courses. To my surprise, it was returned promptly. Then I got some more counseling from offshoot organizations that had sprung up. By that time, there were quite a few former Scientologists around. Those people who fled the church tended to be the people I had most liked and respected when I met them in various Scientology centers. Those who remained were mostly the robotic true believer types who provide tender fodder for the first cult that promises them an exclusive way to escape the angst of everyday human existence.
WHAT JOHN LILLY MISSED
A couple of days later, I plunked the cassette I had been given into the tape deck. It had obviously been recorded impromptu on a portable tape recorder by someone in the audience. I had to pay rapt attention just to make out most of the words. Palmer's description of the Avatar course was exactly what a disillusioned former Scientologist was ready to hear. He said he had discovered these secrets when he undertook a prolonged series of experiments with his own consciousness in a sensory deprivation chamber, also known as a Samadhi tank. It was the same method used, sometimes in conjunction with LSD, by John Lilly in the late 1960's to simulate out-of-body experiences and achieve altered states of consciousness. In an anecdote straight out of a TV sitcom, Palmer described the day his wife came home to discover her dining room taken over by the tank.. While suspended in an Epsom salt solution, floating in absolute silence and removed from all sensory feedback from the physical universe, he saw beliefs floating like bubbles in an "infinite sea of consciousness,'' and came to the conclusion that beliefs were the key to everything. Even the physical universe was just a solidified, generally agreed-upon belief system. The procedures he developed using this discovery, he said, were "the end of case''--case in Scientology terms meaning the sum total of all the mental and spiritual blocks accumulated throughout all one's lifetimes. His basic thesis -- that beliefs create a person's reality as self-fulfilling prophesies -- was one that had been expressed in many places from the Vedas to A Course in Miracles to information channeled through mediums from astral plane entities such as Seth and Bashar. Scientologists were all familiar with the dictum, "You are totally responsible for the condition you are in.'' The difference Palmer said, was that he had discovered a profound though simple technique for finding and "discreating'' hidden negative beliefs that manifest as real life problems. No longer was it necessary to spend years dissecting one's case with the long, expensive and complex techniques of Scientology. Not long afterward, I received a phone call from Margie Hoffman, the Registrar (salesperson in Scientology lingo) of Palmer's Creative Learning Center in Elmira, New York. She wanted to know whether I was going to take the course. I told her I'd come to the lecture and see. She wasn't pushy in the least, but something I got from talking to her gave me the feeling I probably would. She was one hell of a salesperson, even though she didn't really use any sales tactics. When I attended the lecture in Millbrae, about thirty people showed up. I had seen most of the people in the audience at one time or another.
AN ANTI-GURU?
Harry Palmer appeared. He was in his early forties, red-haired, with a neatly-trimmed full beard. He wore a T-shirt which outlined a slight paunch, blue jeans and running shoes. He spoke softly, with a persona of absolute humility. "Aw, shucks,'' his manner seemed to imply, "how could such an honor have been bestowed on me?'' He began with the statement that "Avatar is what you've been looking for.'' During the next hour, he expounded on the same basic theory I had heard in the taped lecture: if you can really and truly change your beliefs--not just wish to change them or pretend to change them--reality will follow suit. Two basic skills were needed. One was the ability to take the leap of faith needed to achieve a gut-level sense of responsibility for creating one's own reality. The other was learning the confidential technique that enabled Avatars to discreate unwanted beliefs with ease and replace them with ones that would be more self-fulfilling. The term "discreate'' was used, he explained, because it didn't require any effort to eliminate beliefs you didn't want. You simply decided to cease creating them unconsciously as you had been doing all along. A couple of the beliefs he used as examples, if their effects could be eliminated, would indeed make conventional mental therapies such as psychoanalysis obsolete, and would eliminate the need for all the elaborate and expensive "upper levels'' of Scientology. One was the theory that past experiences impinge on one's everyday reality. Just get rid of the belief that the past affects you, he said, and it won't. Another was the idea propounded by L. Ron Hubbard, Tibetan Buddhism and various shamanistic schools of metaphysics that people were afflicted by "entities,'' or other beings, whose effects might range from inner conflicts to multiple personality disorders to mass political aberrations.. The upper levels of Scientology by this time consisted largely of auditing actions to free oneself of multitudes of electronically implanted beings which had been stuck together as a solution for a population crisis on a planet in a faraway galaxy. (That's another story, and a long one. It has been told already in the Los Angeles Times, Forbes Magazine and several books about Scientology.) Entities are just a belief too, said Palmer. If you don't believe they exist, they won't affect you any longer. Palmer said he didn't want to become anyone's guru, and as evidence laid out an ethical and humane sounding plan for delivering and administering the course. A Masters Course was being developed for people who wanted to teach the course. They could deliver the course in whatever framework they chose, so long as they maintained high quality standards. They would pay a 15% licensing fee for each student they trained in order to support research and the activities of Star's Edge, the central licensing and training organization. There would be a Senior Avatar Council composed of Avatar Masters (trainers) who would vote on policy. He was considering a limit of 100 licensed Masters in the U.S. Once enough trainers were available throughout the U.S., Star's Edge planned to stop offering the basic Avatar Course, and would serve as a training facility for Masters, as well as offering free review services for any students who had trouble "integrating,'' or assimilating the course materials. The most decent and humanitarian thing he promised, from the viewpoint of people who had spent time in Scientology, was that there was nothing after Avatar. Palmer said he had no plans to add additional courses. If new processes or enhancements were developed in the future, they would be included within the Avatar Course and made available free to anyone who had already completed it. Many people who had bailed out of Scientology had already spent upwards of $100,000 in their attempt to reach the other side of L. Ron Hubbard's long bridge, only to have it lengthened and restructured every couple of years. Each new discovery Hubbard made seemed to carry a higher price tag than that last. To them, another $2,000 (discounted to $1,500 for the initial course offered by Palmer and the trainers) was no big deal. Besides, at any time during the first part of the course, through the point when you read the secret process and were ready to receive a guided "initiation session,'' you were welcome to a full refund of the course fee. It sounded fair enough to me, so I signed up with about 20 other people. Just about all were former Scientologists, including a number of local luminaries. One was Peter Monk, the man who had first introduced Werner Erhard to Scientology shortly before Erhard developed the est course.
ONÂ COURSE
The Avatar course was taught by Avra Honey Smith, who was presented as Palmer's wife (I later heard they weren't officially married), assisted by Susan Sweetland and Margie Hoffman. Palmer didn't participate in running the course; he simply strolled in and out of the course room occasionally. The women who taught the course were collectively known as the "Avatar Angels.'' The course began at the El Rancho Motel in Millbrae. Later, as more people showed up, it was moved across the Bay to the Travelodge Motel near Jack London Square in Oakland. Students were enrolled in typical Scientology fashion, which included signing a legal agreement not to divulge the confidential materials of the course, and to pay $10,000 for each infringement if they did. We read mimeographed materials and listened to a number of taped lectures Palmer had recorded. At the beginning of each tape was a warning delivered by Margie Hoffman. It stated that anyone not authorized to hear this information should stop the tape now, because the information had been known to cause severe personality changes. Oh, boy, I thought. I was ready for a few of those. The content of the course was pretty much the same as the one delivered today except that the reading materials and tapes were full of Scientology jargon. Some of the ideas were Scientological, though there was also a heavy dose of Vedantic wisdom and a few Zen touches. At that time, the course was delivered as a single unit. Today, it has three sections.
The first is available in book form. The Creativism workbook contains the basic theory of the course and contains exercises for locating subconscious beliefs that may be running one's life. The remaining two sections are confidential. Part II, which contains two basic exercises with a number of variations, costs $500. Part III, in which the technique for "discreating'' unwanted conditions is explained and used, costs $1,500. During the Feel-It exercises on Part II of the Course, the student simply regains the ability to experience the world directly--to feel things rather than translate perceptions intellectually. This is similar to some upper level process in Scientology called OT I and "old'' OT VII (OT meaning "Operating Thetan,'' a realized being). For example, in the OT VII process, the student "places intentions'' in various objects and people and observes their effects. The Avatar exercise consists of singling out an object, plant, person or belief (the thought forms Palmer described as "bubbles in consciousness''). Then the student gets a concept of the space it occupies, identifies with it and experiences how it feels. Further variations of this exercise entail consciously switching one's mental "filters,'' or judgments in a purposeful effort to change one's perceptions. See that guy over there? Make him a saint. Now make him a child molester. Feel any different? Finally, one consciously decides to see things just as they are, with no judgments attached. Direct experience of this sort gives the student a profound sense of tranquility and a perception of being at peace with the whole of creation. The second set of exercises on Part II consist of making repeated affirmations--a set of statements designed to "create one's own [subjective] reality.'' Unlike conventional positive thinking and visualization techniques, these exercises encourage the student to focus on any thoughts or reactions triggered by the affirmations. These are called "secondaries,'' and are seen as limiting beliefs which prevent one from "creating the personal reality'' voiced in the primary affirmation. The secondary responses, like the perceptual "filters'' explored during the earlier exercises, are eliminated by consciously and repeatedly exaggerating them. These exercises are done in pairs, with one student acting as a coach in the same manner as the Scientology Training Routines, a set of communication exercises. The technique for eliminating secondaries is reminiscent of familiar Scientology Creative Processes used for exploring different mental "mock-ups,'' including persistent emotional states and compulsive behaviors. The same technique is used in exercises called "Mood Drills.'' The person simply practices doing whatever it is deliberately until it comes under full control. From this perspective, it is easy to willfully stop doing it. Say you have a tic in your eye. If you concentrates on it and cause it to occur repeatedly until it becomes boring, chances are the tic will be gone, at least temporarily.
The content and effect of the "Source List'' set of affirmations are similar to those of the Scientology Power Processes, which involve repetitively giving answers to the commands, "Tell me a Source. '' and "Tell me a no-source.'' The end result is the same: a sense that one is source -- the seat of consciousness at the center of the universe, creating everything outside through conscious intent. The Power Processes were a standard part of the Scientology "bridge'' until the early 1980's, when they were declared unnecessary for most people, when it was conveniently discovered that they routinely "went Clear'' during lower levels of auditing, and could progress directly to the expensive upper levels. Many former Scientologists believe the real reason the Power Processes were discontinued was that they worked too well. People who received them often did not feel the need to buy more auditing for years. They sometimes gained such a sense of autonomy that they asked embarrassing questions about the motives of the organization.
After a few days on the Part II Avatar exercises, the student is prepared--and usually raring--to start Part III. After reading a little material explaining the Creation Handling Procedure an Initiation Session is delivered by a Trainer. The Creation Handling procedure is the one part of Avatar that everyone who took the course considered unique until a graduate came across a description of a Tibetan meditation technique taught by Tarthang Tulku. Tulku is a Tibetan lama who left the country after the Chinese invasion, and founded the Nyingama Institute in Berkeley, California in 1969. His method for eliminating unwanted thought forms and their effects, as described in the book Hidden Mind of Freedom is almost precisely the same as Palmer's "discovery.''
"Working with thoughts by opening them as they arise can bring many pleasant feelings, which--without attachment--also become our meditation. . . . We can even go into the thoughts that judge other thoughts, and, embracing this judging mind, become united with it."
"By relying on the light of awareness you can see that the difficulties you face are manifestations of your own concepts. Going deeply into your thoughts, you will see how you create your experience, how you alone are the judge who determines heaven and hell, good and bad. "
"Whatever experience arises, stay with it, expand it, and heat it up. If you remain within the intense core of the experience, the meditator unites with thoughts and emotions, and everything dissolves. Then awareness grows powerful and one-pointed. As thoughts and emotions are increasingly included within this field of awareness, they become more useful. Instead of being a cause of frustration or confusion, they become agents of well-being. . . . "
In recounting his sensory deprivation experiments, Palmer describes "pulling the plug'' on what he calls the circus of the mind and watching it disappear. After that, he was left in a state of pure consciousness where his concepts of things and beliefs seemed to float like bubbles in space. Even the idea of "self,'' as he explains, is "the bubble you view other bubbles from.''
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