With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
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I spoke recently to someone who arranges workshops for one of the leading new age organizations. He shook his head sadly when I brought up the high prices. The problem, he said, is that nearly everyone insists on being well-paid; even relatively unknown and inexperienced workshop leaders ask for $1,000 or $2,000. And the more popular ones want more than that.
How much? I asked. You wouldn’t believe it, he said. He told me about negotiations with one human potential luminary who, for a weekend workshop — one weekend, Friday through Sunday — wanted $25,000. She said she was worth it; clearly, she’d considered her own potential. They settled on $17,000 — not bad for a weekend’s work, given that the work was mostly talk. Not cheap talk but still, just talk.
Talk is valued these days, especially when it’s called something else. Not too long ago, people would gather at night in auditoriums or church basements or someone’s living room to hear how to improve themselves; this was called a lecture, and was usually free, or cost very little. A workshop, on the other hand, was where many of these same people had spent the day, sawing boards or shaping clay on a potter’s wheel, making things, working. (As in, “Let’s stop talking and get to work.”)
What a curious evolution: workshops are now usually held in thickly-carpeted conference rooms in deluxe hotels or perhaps at rustic country lodges, amidst the swish of tall pines and the gentle lapping of hot tubs. The idea, I suppose, is that this encourages more profound contemplation of the matters at hand; after all, sitting on a hard folding chair in a stuffy basement on a steamy Summer night is enough to make some people question why they’re there in the first place; they may wind up at the ice cream shop and never get around to considering their potential.
Not to mention the money. Having paid twenty-five or fifty or a hundred dollars to listen to someone talk, one is presumably less inclined to wander away. One listens, one weighs, one appreciates what is said. Or so it’s been explained to me, the idea being that we value most highly that which we’ve paid for most highly, rather than what we get for free. Free. It’s like a dirty word — a concept that’s suspect, really; rather passé. Free love got us herpes, remember? There’s no free lunch. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Occasionally there’s a free lecture listed, but it’s almost always an “introductory” talk on the Friday night preceding a weekend workshop, for which there’s still time to sign up. (My father used to work for a company that advertised tremendous savings on an inexpensive set of encyclopedias — but it wasn’t the same set the salesman offered when he arrived. The cheaper edition was available, if a customer insisted, but he had to understand that compared to the deluxe set it was a disappointment: an appetizer, not a meal.)
Perhaps I’m being small-minded and unfair. Along with the obvious hucksters, there are thoughtful and compassionate people giving workshops. It’s a wonderful thing for them to be so available; often their very presence is healing or inspiring. Would I deny them a comfortable living? Aren’t they as valuable to the rest of us as airline pilots or advertising executives or lawyers who earn $100,000 a year? Spiritual healers, massage therapists, psychotherapists, meditation masters — these are our guides through the labyrinth of the Self, and what a dark and winding maze our lives can be! We need a little help, God knows. (In another day, that help was perhaps more readily available from neighbors or relatives or friends; from elders who were teachers by virtue of having survived their own troubled lives; from artists too filled with visions and weirdness to fill out an application for a grant — I mean the intricate and often invisible web of fellowship we have traded in for “networking” and workshops and appointments. Neighborhood help and family counsel sometimes carried their own price tag, of meddling and bad advice, the tyranny of do-goodism, indeed all the human sins. But have those sins been eliminated because we’re paying in cash now for our “growth”?)
To learn who we really are, to learn how to care for other people, how to sort out true from false, how to go down into our lives sure of nothing but the grief at the bottom of the stairs — this is important. But how much can we ever learn about this from another person?
I’m struck by those teachers who seem to capitalize on this very ambivalence — that is, who say quite openly that they can’t really teach anything, only life can do that, yet want to be paid for this reminder.
But what’s the real reminder? Are they living examples of what they teach? Is there any other way to teach but by example? What sort of example is it to turn self-knowledge into a commodity, for marketing?
Yes, they can still put on an exciting workshop, which sends people away momentarily inspired, giddy with their own possibilities. But what happens when the high wears off, as it must? What essence of the teacher remains, after the memory of the weekend — like the memory, really, of any excitement: a brief love affair, a visit to a foreign city — has turned to ashes, and the wind of a new day, a new problem, scatters the ashes totally? What’s left then? What’s been taught?
If Socrates or Buddha or Jesus had charged, if Gandhi had asked for a few rupees at the door, if Van Gogh had signed up for health insurance before cutting off his ear, would that have changed anything? Are such questions ridiculous? Was it ridiculous for a therapist friend of mine, unsure whether to raise his rates to $55 an hour, to pay another therapist $55 an hour to discuss his dilemma?
What’s need and what’s greed? What’s a fair price for something as intangible as growth? In a democratic society what are the consequences of creating an aristocracy of the psychologically fit, or of a new age movement that trades salvation for pre-registration? These aren’t easy questions — at least, I don’t have easy answers for some of them — but why aren’t they asked more often? Why do we allow greed to masquerade as altruism? Why do we glamorize certain teachers — and, as an editor, I’m guilty of this, too — while ignoring others: say, the ones who work in public schools for less than $25,000 a year, let alone a weekend, but who surely perform no less valuable a service? Indeed, what is a teacher? How do these healers and guides and helpers, having placed themselves in the hazardous and questionable role of leading the rest of us toward a better world, figure out not only what to charge but whether they’re not creating more harm than good? For even with the best of intentions, don’t they subtly reinforce the myth that the words of others are more important than our own beliefs and our unique, untranslatable reality? Don’t their very livelihoods depend on the dependency of others?
We live in a culture that encourages us at every turn to satisfy ourselves. It’s good for business. Besides people don’t need much encouragement; such abundance as most of us enjoy has been the dream of countless generations. My grandparents were grateful for the chance to spend a month in the stinking, overcrowded hold of a North Atlantic freighter so they could make a new start in America. My mother, who shared an overcoat and shoes with her sisters during the Depression, still stocks up at the supermarket on things she doesn’t need, because a full pantry suggests the security she never had.
Karl Marx imagined that the workers, given the opportunity, would overthrow the system that oppressed them, but American history suggests that the workers, given the opportunity, are more likely to fight for a raise than a revolution.
Accustomed to getting so many of our needs met, it’s no surprise that we soon imagine we can get all our needs met, not just for food and clothes and entertainment but for affection and understanding and spiritual enlightenment. Is it any surprise that growth has become a growth industry? It’s as legitimate a response to consumer need as this year’s new line of swimwear — and for reasons that are not so different, after all. The boredom and restlessness that drives people out of their homes and to the mall for a night of shopping is the same ache that drives them to Esalen and Omega and the wholistic health center down the block. It can be argued that writing out checks for workshops rather than new swimsuits more directly addresses the unhappiness; sometimes, I think this is so; often, it is not. The point is that there’s somebody on the other end to take the check. America provides.
So, why am I fussing about the high price of workshops? I’d do just as well to complain about General Motors’ earnings last quarter. It’s just one more inequity in a system based on inequity. Che Guevara said “the true revolutionary is motivated by great love,” but it doesn’t follow that everyone who talks about love is a great revolutionary. In fact, the ones who talk about it the most, for the highest pay, are all too often defenders of the status quo. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass stated it succinctly:
I have to ask myself what it is that I want. And I have to be honest with myself that I want happiness, I want peace, I want joy for all beings, yes, but I also want my security, I also want my little piece of the Rock. I want maintenance — a little bit of the status quo. I want some things that are covertly reinforcing Secretary Haig’s position. I have to fully expand to realize that who I am is all of it, not just some of it, not just the good guys. And that’s a little hard to do, to see the way in which I am covertly reinforcing the paranoia that results from the economic disequilibrium of the work at this moment.
Which is to say, they’re human, these teachers, with their pride, their insecurities, their investment portfolios. If we pretend they’re something they’re not, that’s our own anguish talking, needing to make heroes of some people and diminish others. I know the pain of looking to someone else for proof of my existence, of making their experience legitimate and mine counterfeit. It’s a bad deal and it’s costly and not just in money. The price of freedom is something else entirely.
— Sy
Sy Safransky
I just read your editor’s note, “Talk Isn’t Cheap,” which laments the high prices of workshops and criticizes workshop instructors as well as workshop-goers with an eloquent but one-sided cynicism which obliges me to reply.
I spent two years recently negotiating fees with teachers of workshops as a program coordinator at Omega Institute. For several months I was responsible for facilitating payment of honorariums to more than one hundred teachers, and my education in the potency of money deepened tremendously as a result.
From my point of view, most of the teachers I dealt with deserved more money than they got but the sponsoring organization could not afford to pay them more. I was often in the position of representing both parties — Omega Institute and faculty members I had invited to teach. I came away from that experience respectful of requests made by teachers for sums of money that grew with their recognition that minimal payment, mere survival, is not enough. Thriving — expanding one’s work and capacity to teach — costs money, but the cost is well worth it.
The example you cited of one teacher receiving $17,000 for a weekend workshop is grossly misrepresentative of what workshop leaders make. As for “unknown and inexperienced workshop leaders asking for $1,000 or $2,000,” the example taken out of context is impossible to evaluate; $1,000 is not an unreasonable amount of money to be paid for a five-day workshop taught by a professional in a particular field.
I want your readers to know, from someone who has been there and witnessed in detail the financial transactions, that these people are not getting rich; many of them are often barely getting their expenses paid, in return for having given an enormous amount of energy to large numbers of people for reasons that have nothing to do with money. In my view, they are anchoring a vital and revolutionary new form of education that is not dependent upon traditional form or politically controlled universities. They are making accessible to thousands of people the results of personal research, in areas of study that have been unsupported or unknown in American society, with years of work and committed focus behind them.
When they choose to become “the teacher,” and to charge for their work, they are little different from you and THE SUN magazine, in the sense that you charge enough for the magazine to meet your needs, and to sustain an “alternative” publication, charging a higher price than most mass media publications. One difference between addressing the public as a magazine editor (in print) and addressing the public as a workshop leader is that in a workshop setting, the speaker’s beliefs and assumptions are actively challenged by participants who are anything but passive sheep looking for an outer authority figure. The best teachers stay wide open to those who challenge them, and integrate what they learn into their ongoing work.
I suggest that you consider teaching a workshop for a fee which you consider fair, on writing, or whatever realm of experience you are drawn to (perhaps, “How to write a critique of workshops without ever going to one?”), because you are not so different from the workshop leaders I came most to admire, who are making a living doing what they love to do, and stimulating other people to do the same without ever stating that intention. It is what I want to do, which is why I left Omega last year, with gratitude that such a place exists, despite its limitations. I daresay you would be an excellent teacher out-of-print, and would have experiences that could only enrich what you write.
I’ve followed the progress of you, your friends, and your magazine for about four years, and I finally have something to say. First off, I am aware that you may be tempted to call this “a yak with a yuppie.” At this point I’m not sure which animal I’d rather be.
How about a hangnail sketch of me? At “functions” I’m a Neiman-Marcus-clad self-possessed hyphenated wife of an industrial executive. Around town I’m president of the Mental Health Association and an amusing luncheon speaker. At home and at ease I’m a thirty-six-year-old mother of a sticky toddler, both of us in jeans and unpolished. I drive a Mercedes, live in a country club, and vacation at Hilton Head. Made up your mind yet?
I have a guru, I teach yoga, and I lost publishing opportunities at the university when I refused to shock rats to test their fear responses. Finally, I’m slowly getting over an ulcer with the help of a good therapist. And I still subscribe to your magazine.
My point is that the suburbs can shelter more than taxes — seekers can exist in styles other than those typically outlined in your magazine. Having lived it both ways (poverty and back-to-the-land in the Sixties), I’ve concluded that it is definitely the inner landscape that determines growth and happiness, not the exterior trappings.
Sharing THE SUN with my friends is problematical. Most of them avoided the Sixties (how?) and don’t relate to the pick-ups and the second-time-around clothes, but they have the desire to find that elusive missing link between who they think they are and who they are meant to be. I can share selected articles but not the whole issue (or gift subscriptions) because there’s no yuppie corner for them. I’m not suggesting that a “Better Homes and Gardens Presents The Sun” is in order, but I did want to let you know that there are potential customers, financial and spiritual, out here.
Next I’d like to address the problem of Howard Jay Rubin. I think you should give the poor guy’s jaded spirit a rest. Send him here to do a piece on comparative church preschools or the evolutionary potential of the Junior Women’s Club. Then when he’s revived, you can send him off to do a decent search of spiritual communities that would be exempt from your blanket criticism of “Have Aura — Will Travel” teachers.
I read with great interest your “Talk Isn’t Cheap” editorial and felt that I had to respond. Although you attempted to cover yourself by balancing negatives with positives or “searching questions,” what came across was a primarily negative tone: if you charge money, you aren’t teaching the real thing. Obviously I wouldn’t rise to that bait unless I felt threatened, which I do. My spiritual teacher uses his earnings to support an ashram in Massachusetts where seekers can learn a new way to live.
Those teachers who are living examples of what they know deserve better than what they got in a backhanded way from your article. I think they endure enough burning in spreading their light without you giving them short shrift. I’ve received enough from my teacher to last me through thirteen years so far. When I begin to get cynical or falter along the way, I go to another of those infamous weekend workshops with him and get rejuvenated for another six months or a year. I didn’t miss the point of your piece, but I question your snapping at the true hand that feeds you.
These letters are in response to “Talk Isn’t Cheap” in Issue 112.
— Ed.
I know what you mean about workshops. I’ve been to a few and mostly they were disappointments. One of the problems is you go to hear someone speak, someone whose book you’ve read, and you find he has no more to say than he said already in his book. Worse, he can’t speak as well as he writes. That’s the way it was when I saw Fritjof Capra in D.C. And David Spangler — whose inspiring words I read first in THE SUN — was so boring I had to leave the room. This is a problem. I’ve come to the conclusion that a literate human with something novel to say can best get through to me by way of a book, not a lecture. A book, ironically, is so much more personal.
Buckminster Fuller was a grand exception. Though he left a wake of more than twenty-five books (a book, he said, is how a dead man can speak from beyond the grave, something he hoped to do a lot of), somehow his personality was too explosive for mere binding. There’s a movie he did, must be a whole stack of reels, called, “If you’ve got forty-eight hours I can tell you everything I know.” Can you imagine? And he could do it again too, reportedly had. He’d sit for two days and talk non-stop, tell you everything he knew, which was a lot. And no matter if you’d read all his books, still it came out sounding new, as if he had come upon a universe no one else had seen, and unsheathed virgin vocabulary expressly for the purpose of describing it to you, at least that’s how it sounded to me when I “experienced” Bucky in D.C. two Summers ago. It was the only workshop I’ve attended which didn’t leave me feeling as if I’d been ripped off, and I’ve been to some biggies too — Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Himayat Inayati, Swami Kriyananda. Bucky was different from all the rest. Cost me fifty bucks, but somehow it seemed free. Free! Free as if reality were twisting and folding through his mind and out his mouth, into our starved little brains. Where did the money go? It didn’t matter. It felt more like a tithe than a fee.
One thing did piss me off that evening. Two things. One, the guy who introduced Bucky — luminary Himayat Inayati — had never read him, indeed wasn’t quite sure even who he was. And there I sat with a poem burning in my hands, a poem I’d written for Bucky, a dedication, a panegyric, a god-damned love poem that would have been ideal as introduction. Still I wonder if I should have jumped up there and pushed Inayati aside and read my poem. When I heard three weeks later that Bucky had died I knew I should have, consequences or not. But what really pissed me off was that some radio clown on the sidelines saw my tape recorder and told me I couldn’t use it. “You can buy a copy after the lecture,” he said. (Fifteen bucks, right?)
“Obviously you’ve never read Fuller,” I said, “for if you had you would know about Bucky’s eternal commitment to Nature’s Law of Precession — and therefore his implicit permission for me to record his voice waves if I so choose.” This guy was flabbergasted, but before turning away he managed once again to tell me it was “illegal” for me to record, but I told him to shove it, that I was going to do what I knew was right and okay by Mr. Fuller, and if he wanted to try and stop me . . . etcetera. (Precession is empirical karma, so to speak — but do read all about it in Critical Path. It’s the most religious book I’ve read). Anyway, I got my recording, and it cost me a buck fifty.
Thank you for “Talk Isn’t Cheap.” I’ve been irritated, bored, and confused by every seminar I’ve been to, because of the underlying reasons that you pointed out. At the last seminar, although I enjoyed meeting a wide cross section of people, I found the leaders self-servicing, and their attempts to capture matters of the spirit insufferable. I also found that in order to be part of the group, I lost much of my usual more original thinking in attempts to get into realities that cater, seemed packaged and fabricated. I much agree with your ending sentence, “The price of freedom is something else entirely.” To me that means that each of us must, if necessary, be willing to walk our own tightrope, and then, and only then, is the limitless nature of Life available to live us, and for us to breathe fully of its infinity. The spirit packagers seem unaware (or conveniently practical enough) not to ever mention that life in its master realms is mostly indefinable, except occasionally in music, poetry, and prose, and that it is robbed of its inherent essence or poetry when sought for materialization. Also, as you mentioned, those who commune in an intimate and creative way will add to each other’s individuality — rather than ignite dependency. These unions also have the gift of sharing the indefinable.
I also want to express to Chris Bursk how extremely fascinated and moved I am by the magic of your two poems: “The Wing’s Caress,” and “Making Love with a Man with Wings.” [Issue 112] I feel I know someone just like your portrayal, and if I didn’t, I would be able to, because of your ability to speak of that which is usually of an ineffable nature. They are powerful and exquisitely subtle. I also like your saying that the prison is more sane than most places. I would be interested to know more about the “gutsy magazine, ‘I Know.’ ”
“The Art of Gratitude” by Brother David Steindl-Rast [Issue 112] was just as refreshing a gift to read as the subject itself. Quite an accomplishment with so gentle a theme. Thank you!
I like your gentle and not-so-gentle questioning of the fees charged by latter-day teachers of more or less spiritual workshops. It got my juices going.
In my experience, the feeling behind the relationship of teaching and money seems to be this: if the teaching works, no price is too high; money and teaching do not stand in easy ratio. If the teaching doesn’t work, then, of course, a penny is too much. But the question then becomes, how is the student to know ahead of time that it will work? Answer: it’s impossible to know. This puts the responsibility back where it was anyway, with the student: caveat emptor. Further, it falls to the buyer to be as clear as possible about what he or she wants. If understanding or enlightenment is the goal, no teacher can ever hurt you, financially or otherwise. But if the aim is feel-good or power or stardom or escape or love or any of the other all-too-human desires, then there will be bumps and pain. There are always bumps and pain.
A friend of mine once said: “Really, we cannot ask our leaders and teachers to be good. All we can pray is that they’re not too bad, that they’ll cause a minimum amount of damage and pain.” This strikes me as a reasonable petition — reasonable and realistic. The comment does not, however, respond to the forceful desire to have ethical, binding yardsticks against which to measure “teachers,” especially, for reasons hard to divine, teachers in the realm of the “spiritual.”
I think that binding ethical yardsticks are more easily available and applicable in the realm of ritualistic spiritual life, life in which a student may attend his place of worship once or twice a week, stick to the rules laid down for him, and understand the rules laid down for the hierarchy. But in the realm of so-called self-discovery (what used to be called the mystical), a great deal more effort is called for on the part of the student. He or she is up to his or her eyeballs in the big muddy. The precepts teachers follow in this realm may be broken or ignored by the best and the worst — and the student none the wiser either way. It takes someone of similar or greater capacity to call the shots. (Here again, if the student seeks enlightenment he is safe.) A difficult, dangerous passage.
I have a sense that at a very subtle level asking for money is not the right direction. But it seems equally clear that if a person is in a greedy place it will be all but impossible to talk him or her out of it. The best that can happen is that he or she will shift the greed to another ground — from monetary to spiritual greed, for example. So again, let the buyer beware.
You ask why “we” allow greed to masquerade as “altruism.” I have a feeling that “we” are unlikely to agree on any number of ritualistic standards, including perhaps, the definition of “altruism.” What works for you may not work for me. And, as one who paid money and then flunked out of a monastery, I must say that in the realm of the spirit, what doesn’t work is often working very well indeed — enriching and informing and expanding that which clearly does work.
I am not trying to suggest with any of this that there are not precepts and standards to which teachers may be held. I am trying to suggest that people who enter this realm of practice must of necessity take on a responsibility that was never missing. The final irony of the whole thing is, of course, that there is no way for the buyer to be aware. If he were aware, he wouldn’t be buying in the first place.
So maybe a workshop — a very expensive workshop — is just the thing for this one or that. Also, maybe not. Maybe it’ll be painful, maybe joyous, maybe very false indeed, but maybe true. “People believe what they want to believe,” Charles Williams wrote. Hell, I know people who are actually willing to spend money for anchovies! I’d rather go to a workshop than eat an anchovy (but not by much)!
There are many points of your editorial, “Talk Isn’t Cheap,” I’d like to discuss at length, but I’m going to address the complaint I seem to hear running throughout it, i.e., “Won’t somebody please tell us what money is for?”
I think the hardest part of human maturity is the fact that we really do have to reinvent the wheel on an individual basis when it comes to the big topics: Religion, Sex, Money, What Am I Gonna Eat Today, etc. Accepting anyone else’s answers (even Ram Dass’) will eventually make “their experience legitimate and mine counterfeit,” as you suggested. In the last few years I’ve completely reinvented my wheel of money, and the belief that I roll around these days — a belief which has greatly decreased my resentment about a number of things, including capitalism — is this: Money is Communication. Or, held in the light of your editorial, it could be expressed as Money Is Talk.
I stress that this is a highly idealistic, individual perspective which I am not ready to discuss in comparison to the concepts of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. But I do find it a useful starting point when trying to decide what I charge for professional services, or whether I am going to pay x amount of dollars for someone else’s product or service. If, for instance, some kind of human potential workshop is offered for $80 for a day, the question is simple: does there seem a reasonable chance that I will get $80 worth of communication (or increased potential for communication) out of it? To answer that, I have to figure out how much communication my $80 represents: how much sweat it represents, whether it is really needed elsewhere, and most importantly, whether I can pay the asking price respectfully. If the price makes me wince, I have to examine that reaction before I can come to a decision: do I suspect a rip-off here, or am I just unwilling to part with that much of my energy — for energy is what it is, even if it’s translated into paper.
In short, money demands maturity. It demands that we constantly face the question you put — “What’s need and what’s greed?” — and come up with a fresh and vital answer every time. It demands that we examine the world of buying and selling with a skeptical compassion, remembering not only to “let the buyer beware,” but also to “let the buyer care.” If you pine for a world where “people would gather in auditoriums or church basements or someone’s living room to hear how to improve themselves” for free, then you could do something about it: you could hold free workshops every week in THE SUN office on how to start and run small, philosophical magazines. Chances are you would soon find that you did more talking than you got back, that there was an uneven exchange of knowledge (not to mention a rapid disappearance of exacto-knives). Then it would be entirely reasonable to request a certain amount of communication — x number of dollars — up front. That would merely be a confident, mature way of saying to people you don’t know that you have something to communicate, a specialized energy, a gift, and that it is a gift freed by their trust. The fee is the simplest possible definition of the trust you request. It is a form of trust we can all understand, because it is one of the most common social contracts.
Again, I’m not arguing that money is commonly viewed this way, or used this way. But the fact that this particular form of communication is widely abused and used as a weapon against individuals and social classes should not poison our individual views of its potential. Because when it does, we are left with an ill-defined resentment of whatever economic system rules our society — be it American capitalism, or Soviet or Mozambican or Nicaraguan socialism. It’s the kind of resentment behind Ram Dass’ statement that “I want some things that are covertly reinforcing Secretary Haig’s position” and yours that “we live in a culture that encourages us at every turn to satisfy ourselves.” I think it’s closer to the truth to say that we’re a species of creature always tempted by gratification, and all of us — including Haig — pretty much want the same things. Whether we do damage or create grace in negotiating those wants depends on the quality of our communication. Our personal attitude toward what money means is as good a starting point as any for bettering that communication. If the stiff price of a workshop or teacher makes you think twice, then that may be a service, a valuable communication, in itself. You always have the option of communicating to the teacher that you suspect a rip-off — and I’m sure that would be the start of a most interesting dialogue.
In sum, I think your editorial articulates a particular resentment very well. But it left me hanging, because you implied at the end that you know something I’m sure I don’t. “The price of freedom is something else entirely,” you said.
So what is it? Believe you me, I’ll pay to know.