Encountering the Theory

In November 1975 I was invited by a friend to attend a talk by Arthur Young at the nearby Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley. I don’t remember much, but I recall disagreeing with everything that he said and writing him a letter to that effect – a very uncharacteristic action on my part.

Arthur had spoken of four levels and seven stages, which seemed to me at the time to be arbitrary at best. I wrote this wiseass story about a young man who got a job on an apple-packing plant. His job was to sort the apples into five boxes by size. At first he was totally confused – each apple was unique. But after a week on the job he reported to his boss, “You know, apples come in five sizes.”

Yet somehow, I went back for more, and Arthur invited me to an upcoming weekly series of teaching sessions to begin in December. I think early on he recognized me as the intelligent layperson (a.k.a. useful idiot) with whom he could work to refine his approach. I recognized him as a person of charm, wit and intelligence from whom I could learn a lot. And as the occult principle dictates, “What you resist, you become.”

Just before the teaching series was to begin I learned that my father was dying and so I would miss the introductory sessions. On my return in January I learned that Arthur’s brother had died at around the same time and I hadn’t missed anything. I was born in 1948, the year Arthur and Ruth were married. On some level it seems that I became the son they never had and he was the father I had just lost.

(I should mention that it was in this same numinous month that I began working on my first Murphy’s Law book. It was the success of this little volume that gave me the freedom to do all the subsequent work with Arthur.)

I studied at the Institute that winter and began meeting privately with Arthur in his study in the living space at the back of the building. I read The Reflexive Universe and Geometry of Meaning, which were being prepared for publication. Then Arthur showed me several essays that he was putting together for the upcoming Which Way Out collection, asking me for comments.

This put me in touch with my inner editor. I began marking up his essays with corrections and suggestions. When it was time for Arthur and Ruth to go back East for the summer he asked if I would join him there to continue our work on the essays. I drove cross-country and spent a precious and memorable several weeks at their place in Downingtown, Pennsylvania – working in the barn, the garden and around the property in the mornings and in Arthur’s study/living room in the afternoons.

In the evenings, after a sauna, we would talk and I would explore the library and learn of Arthur’s myriad other passions – astrology, parapsychology, art, UFOs, the Shakespeare authorship question, and more.

I would visit Downingtown every summer. In the end we worked closely together for 20 years on his books, articles and other writings.

Everything Arthur wrote he would first enter in longhand in his extensive journals. In Berkeley, theoretician Frank Barr and I would meet with him twice weekly in the study where Arthur would discuss his latest thoughts and journal entries and we would plot various futile schemes for getting the word out about the Theory. Ruth would usually be there too. At the end of the evening we had nothing to show for our efforts. Ruth had knitted a shawl.

Throughout the years, Arthur Young continued to attract interesting people from around the world who would hear of the Theory of Process or were interested in Arthur’s earlier work on the helicopter. Now a senior citizen myself, I’ve come to realize how rare it is for an old guy to be surrounded by young people who are interested in what he has to say. At some point I became program director for the Institute, where most weeks we would have an invited guest come to address our small cadre – always just the right number to fill the room.

Around 1978 I came up with the idea of doing a video about Arthur and his work. I had been a film major in college and so had a bit of knowledge in this area. Working with my friends, all of us unpaid, we spent months recording interviews, teaching sessions and conversations in and around the Institute. We set up a rough editing system and scripted and produced The Reflexive Universe documentary.

It was a no-budget operation. In those days, before digital video, a program had to be assembled sequentially from the beginning. In order to make any changes or insertions you had to start from the beginning. So the “finished product” was the place we ran out of funds.

The documentary was well-received, but I realized that Arthur himself was more fascinating than my filmmaking abilities. So with his financial help in procuring rental equipment we produced, over the next couple of years, the Reflexive Universe, Geometry of Meaning and Why Seven? teaching series; the Beyond Science interview series (with the help of my friend Chuck Fauvre who stepped in at the last minute when the interviewer we had scheduled showed up drunk); three-way discussions with Arthur and Fritjof Capra, Lawrence LeShan and Elizabeth Rauscher (hosted by Harris Freeman, the friend who had first invited me to the Institute); and a “helicopter interview” in Arthur’s workshop in Downingtown.

After all of this, I still had ambitions for a second (never-to-be) documentary which we called Project B. This led to the many intimate interviews with Arthur Young that were eventually excerpted to become the Yoga of Thinking video series.

In 1986 Jeffrey Mishlove and I began the Thinking Allowed public television series. Arthur and Ruth were among our early supporters and the name in fact came from an unfinished Young manuscript. Arthur, who was Jeffrey’s mentor as well, was a frequent guest on the program.

On the day of Arthur Young’s death in 1995 there was a vibrant halo around the sun, so notable that it was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle the next day.

In 1996, just a year later, I created the first version of the Arthur Young website–and managed to get the domain name before the same-named big eight accounting firm realized what was happening. I also created a Google Video page that transformed itself into the current Arthur Young YouTube page.

When Arthur was with us we were constantly seeking new ways to increase the Theory’s exposure. He passed away just a couple of years before the Internet became widespread. Who knew that 30 years after his death his videos would have tens of thousands of views on a medium yet to be imagined.