Bending the Curve of Culture

Naropa Institute celebrates 20 years of contemplative education

Flatirons 
Fall/Winter 1994-95
Original draft, by Tom LaRocque

"I have a hard time," he says, "coming clean about my thought process with somebody standing here with a notepad. It's a superficial treatment of something serious."

To me, it seemed a fair inquiry: "Tell me about your mental state."

Anywhere else, the same proposition might have sounded absurd. But this, after all, was Naropa, where awareness of one's mind is what it's all about.

The Naropa Institute, on four densely peopled acres bordering the CU campus, practically demands delving into matters mental and spiritual. While CU students next door plot corporate careers as accountants, Naropa offers instruction in meditation, "disembodied poetics," and contemplative psychology.

Contemplative this, contemplative that. The principles of Buddhism pervade: Contemplate, advised the Buddha, and disengage from the world's more trivial affairs. You'll be better for it, and so will the world. Naropa aims to blend the East's spiritual, inward-looking approach to education with the more practical, scholastic traditions of the West. One room in the main campus building is equipped with gomdens, on which meditators sit silent and cross-legged, and an altar.

Naropa is "Buddhist-inspired" but non-sectarian and open to all, a liberal arts college accredited by the same body that legitimizes CU and, for that matter, Stanford. Of its approximately 800 undergrad, graduate, and continuing-education students, less than half call themselves Buddhists. But more than half "are involved in some sort of contemplative practice," says admissions director Jana Lynn, PhD.

Many Naropa graduates work in the arts, in academia, and in healing disciplines such as psychotherapy and massage. Yet somehow, careers seem beside the point.

Naropa was founded 20 years ago by one of the West's foremost Bhuddist scholars, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. (The title "Rinpoche" means spiritual leader.) Born in 1940, he fled Tibet at age 19, after the Chinese invasion. He and other Tibetan refugees rebuilt their Bhuddist lives in India, then Chogyam went off to Oxford University, where he learned English. In 1970, he began exporting his Bhuddist teachings to the United States.

Naropa's inauguration in Boulder followed a seminar in Fort Collins, organized by the Rinpoche and attended by an indeterminate number of students young and old, curious and hungry for his new, spiritual form of education. After little recruitment effort, dozens of instructors volunteered to share knowledge at Naropa. Original faculty members included author Ram Dass; poet Allen Ginsberg; composer John Cage; film maker Baird Bryant; and a host of psychologists, anthropologists, scientists, and Buddhist scholars.

The institute always retained a bear-hug embrace of arts and letters. Literary lions made the place a home, or at least a hangout. At seminars and speeches, Naropa has hosted William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, and countless other literary heavyweights. The institute has been a breeding ground for beat poetry, still practiced by faculty members Anne Waldman, of Boulder, and Ginsberg, who resides in New York.

Ginsberg and Waldman met at a poetry conference in Berkely. They toured with Bob Dylan in the 1970s, members of the singer's stable of "poets in residence." The two collaborated in naming Naropa's poetry school the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, agreeing on the term "disembodied" to suggest Kerouac's work was very much alive, unlike its creator. Kerouac died a broken alcoholic in 1969.

A memorable Naropa conference was dedicated to Kerouac in 1982. Emily Hunter, now a Naropa trustee and its special events coordinator, recalls sitting on a porch at a house at Chatauqua between formal events of the 1982 conference. A half-dozen artists were there, including Kesey and photographer Robert Frank.

"It was a perfect moment in time; a beautiful, warm, sunny Rocky Mountain morning. Someone was playing guitar, and there was this constant joking, serious joking, by everybody. It was a mutual recognition of certain kinds of warriors coming together, and it was wonderful to see these people who make art every moment of their lives, making art."

Using both hands to draw in the air, Hunter describes American culture as "a curve." Its middle is occupied by mainstream artists and thinkers. At the curve's edges, causing it to bend, are many of the people traditionally associated with Naropa. "We know so little in this country about how to recognize people who are actually bending the curve of culture," she said.

One attempt at recognition was set for July 2-9, 1994. A tribute to Allen Ginsberg, titled "Beats and other Rebel Angels," would include presentations by Kesey, who planned to roll into town in a psychodelic tour bus. Also participating, the promoters promised, would be Lawrence Ferlighetti, founder of the City Lights Press; poet Waldman; and Amiri Baraka, Phillip Glass, David Amram, Andrew Schelling, and others including Ginsberg himself.

Naropa's open-arms orientation has attracted practitioners of all kinds of art, not just the written word. As I toured the campus last spring, on the semester's final class day, I peeked into a "Creative Process" class. It was nearly silent, and one woman was on the floor miming childbirth or something. Two men, both greatly amused, were engaged in a gentle mock boxing match. A woman was repeatedly knocking a tissue into the air.

The instructor was Barbara Dilley, who served as president of Naropa for 10 years, concluding in 1993. "Creativity is recognized not just as a form of personal expression, but as a means of living one's life," she explained. The participants were inter-arts students; practitioners of all kinds of art.

Art study at Naropa includes dance, acting, theatre, music, sculpting, and painting. Many instructors believe strongly in a connnection between the arts and healing disciplines such as pyschology. Verbal approaches to therapy are more conventional, but at Naropa, many seek healing through artistic self-expression. Other art instructors, according to Dilley, avoid psychological and spiritual associations.

In an unoccupied office upstairs in the Lincoln School Building, I took a crash course in meditation. Under the tutelage of Bruce Cressman, Naropa's "practice coordinator," I sat cross-legged on a gomden, my gaze fixed on a desk drawer. I breathed deeply, letting my thought process "go." I kept thinking, "I've got a three o'clock." Cressman assured me even my most mundane thoughts were acceptable. Then I was gone.

Rain drove me under the eaves of the Ginsberg Library Building. A former student in a backwards baseball cap stood nearby, and expounded on education at Naropa. "In terms of American culture, it's a completely radical and magical thing," said Ethan Neville, 26. "An education here isn't just a slip of paper, it's a fundamental understanding of your own mind: Who are you, what makes you human?"

A common misconception about Naropa, he said, is that "it's a spiritual, metaphysical, trippy kind of place." Buddhist principles are most useful in accomplishing everyday tasks, he said. When the rain stopped, he returned to work on a landscape crew sodding the lawn.

"Ooooh, cigarettes, ooooh," said a young woman, as a fellow student pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. I expected to hear a scolding about second-hand smoke. Instead she asked, "Can I have one?"

Naropa's spring graduation was held at the Chatauqua Auditorium. Caps and gowns weren't worn, but one student sported a beanie with a propeller, and a cape of purple and gold—"Naropa's school colors," he noted. For summer, he and friends planned a "triathlon," first following the Dead to 10 cities, then attending the Woodstock reunion, and finally seeing the Dalai Llama drum for world peace in Arizona.

Don Ruggles, a business-suited petrochemical salesman from Texas, spoke of his son's graduation. Tracy Ruggles, 25, was receiving a bachelor's degree in writing and literature.

"Trace has never had the energy level he has now," said his father. "He's gotten interested in computers, and software that writers use, and for the first time in his life, he's following his own direction. I can see Naropa was exactly the thing for him. It was the time for him, and the place he needed to be."