PART II:  ARRIVALS

In a way, you are now beginning the second of two rather different books which, for convenience, I have called "Parts I and II."  Earlier, you have read about my "process" -- the path by that I have come to whatever degree of maturity or small wisdom I may now be said to possess.  You are about to read of the "content" of this process -- thoughts, opinions, values and beliefs that themselves stand out as major products of my life.  
As editors might agree, it is a common mistake of inexperienced writers that they start writing their books before firmly establishing a topical outline.  Such a mistake can produce the kind of discontinuity through which I now ask you to pass, between the two halves of Journeys in a Common Life.  Quite a different explanation is simply that I didn't feel inclined to mix up political commentary in my life history.  Thus, the two halves of this Journey allow me to claim a degree of conceptual purity.  Unlike some things you can read these days, my editorial opinions are at least labeled as such.  Of course, you are at liberty to make up your own explanation.  Mine is that "it just felt right.”

CHAPTER V:
PSYCHOLOGY AND OTHER FOLK TALES

-- Some Thoughts About Believing -- 
As you might guess from the title of this chapter, I don't have a particularly high opinion of some of the theories that psychologists preach as revealed Truth about human behavior.  However, I am not obsessive about this opinion, nor do I restrict my criticism unfairly to one group of professionals.  It happens that I also don't care much for the pronouncements of a lot of politicians, economists, medical doctors, religionists, journalists, insurance salesmen, and self-described "scientists" of all stripes.  In the company of such worthy authorities as William Shakespeare, I suspect that the world might be a happier place if our citizens hitched up their courage now and then, and hung a few lawyers.  I would extend the same courtesy to a number of television evangelists. 
Of course, practitioners of such professions may accuse me of being an incurable skeptic and a grump.  The accusation would be at least partly accurate.  When I must deal with entrenched bureaucracies of whatever type, I tend to become a grump.  In defense of the charge of skepticism, however, I am inclined to recall a quip that is sometimes attributed to humorist Will Rogers:  it's amazing how much of what everybody knows, ain't so.	
To that I would add that it's amazing how much of what the so-called "experts" in our culture know, ain't so either.  So I'll take my rap for being a skeptic.  What I'd like to do in the next few chapters of this book is to share some ideas with you that have helped to make me this way.  Then you can decide for yourself if you're willing to stand at the bar of judgment beside me, to accept sentence.  
These days, it is fashionable to believe that we live in an age of science, facts and rational progress.  Though the belief may be fashionable, even a slight examination of current affairs and the public press calls into question whether this belief is true, however common it may be.  In a supposedly rational age, it is fascinating to note the ascendancy of belief systems that explicitly deny the rights of individuals to hold any opinion that is not written in large script, in The Book.  To be fair, please note that conservative Christians and Moslems are not alone in their orthodoxy with respect to the printed page.  Political activists of both the Left and Right are at least as obnoxious, if more subtle.  Only the titles of the Books are different.  
Some advocates of science also seem to pursue their own ideology with a fervor that imitates religious fanaticism.  If a phenomenon can't be measured by instruments known to reputable scientists, by definition it does not exist.  Conversely, if an idea concerns technology, it is assumed to represent progress regardless of its long term consequences.  I am still trying to figure out how supersonic transport aircraft came to be regarded as progress, when we can already communicate anywhere in the world in seconds.  However, this glaring contradiction didn't keep technologists from lobbying governments to build Supersonic Transports, simply because such hardware became possible.  We're still trying to find out what jet exhaust may have done to the ozone layer, but that didn’t seem to matter at the time.  
I suspect we've passed close to an important concept in the term "ideology".  Our age seems to be full of "-ologies”, and "-isms".  We daily encounter psychology and astrology, nationalism and anarchism, and a hundred more; each competing for our attentions, for our supposedly immortal souls and for our donation of just a few dollars, please.  More basically, in each of these "-isms" we find a system of ideas competing for our invested belief.  Believing in something (or asserting the truth of an idea for which we lack conclusive proof) is generally what human beings do when we are confronted with the necessity to act or to decide important issues under circumstances where we do not know everything we desire to know about the likely results of our acts.  I have no complaint regarding the necessity of belief.  We could not act in human affairs without believing in something -- or indeed, believing in large numbers of things.  There are a frightful number of things that none of us knows for sure.  What I do have problems with, however, is the attitude that many believers express toward a concept called "empiricism". 
An empirical idea system is one in which we can test what we believe against some body of accumulated experience and careful observation.  If such a body of experience does not exist, we can propose and attempt experiments (tests) in order to accumulate new information.  Most scientists will tell you that the ability to do such testing is what makes something "science".  However, we all know about another category of ideology that has to do with the way the world “ought” to work: that category is morality.  There are literally hundreds of millions of people in the world who will tell you after even the least bit of encouragement (and frequently over your vehement protests), exactly what moral standards would prevail if all men were believers in their version of the True Way.  The problem with such assertions, however, is that the moral standards proposed as "absolute truth" have a tendency to vary markedly between groups of moral believers. 
There are vast differences between empirical and non-empirical belief systems -- and between empirical and non-empirical believers.  With an empirical ideology, one may verify at least some elements of the truth by conducting experiments and observing results. However, it is usually much harder to verify a moral ideology.  When somebody proposes to me that a particular aspect of the physical world works in some defined way, I can respond: "Oh, really? What is the evidence for that proposition?"  However, when one asks the philosopher for evidence that supports his or her belief in a moral principle, the result is rather often a dose of fire and brimstone rather than an offering of evidence.  By questioning a moral ideology, one becomes an "infidel". We all know what happens to infidels. 
If I seem a little harsh with convinced believers of various types, I'm not going to say I'm sorry.  I'm not.  One of the surest ways to stand my neck fur on-end is to ask me to listen to the passionate exhortations of a preacher gesturing before a crowd as he uses the magical phrase, "Ya’ gotta’ believe, brothers and sisters!" I am no less offended by the pious pronouncements of a candidate for office, proclaiming the arrival of "a new era of progress!" 
Horse feathers! 
The older I get, the more disgusted I become with people who glibly preach what they claim to be Universal Truth about proper standards of human conduct.  I don't know that kind of fraudulent huckster I dislike most: rabid religionists or avaricious politicians.  Some of the loudest preachers are among the least consistent practitioners.  The standards they advocate are too often for other people's behavior and not their own.  Political hacks are no better.  They've always got a solution for everybody's problems, if we'll just give them enough power and tax money to control everybody's behavior.  
However, one observation helps to balance my perspective concerning the orators who stand posturing before their crowds.  I simply remember that each speaker drew a crowd.  Somebody wanted to listen.  In fact, quite a large number of somebody’s wanted to listen, and perhaps to be told what to do.  A lot of human beings in our society belong to the broad category called "listeners." Many of us wish to be told what to do and what to believe, rather than going through the trouble of figuring out such matters for ourselves.  
For whatever reason, I seem to be a lousy listener.  Though I am certainly willing to be instructed by others' ideas, I am no longer content to be a passive receptacle of ideologies and "-isms".  I have spent the last thirty years of my life arm-wrestling with ideas that I wanted to accept as my own.  Some of my hardest -- and most rewarding -- experiences have involved learning that things that I had "always known", weren't really so.  Other things that I knew, turned out to be partly true in a different way than I had originally believed.  
As I grew up, I found that my family elders were neither wise angels nor malicious devils.  I was forced to learn painfully that love -- particularly love based on the fantasies of youth -- does not cure all ills.  People are not always well-meaning, though they generally wish to believe that they are.  Nations, including your own, do not always behave morally or even nobly.  Prophets are not always saintly, nor are their prophecies always true.  The Experts do not always know what they are talking about, and the Good Guys do not always win.  
Though such myths appeal to children, they do not serve us well as we encounter the larger world of adult life.  Life is too well populated with exceptions to the rules and with gray areas that overlap our tidy and often arbitrary border markers between good and evil, right and wrong.  When forced to challenge the simplicities we have grown up believing, we inevitably find that some of our myths must be laid aside and others elaborated to deal with the exceptions. This process of re-examination tends to make life more complex.  For a lot of people -- certainly for me -- it also makes life more interesting and rewarding.  Though I may be a skeptic, I like to think of myself as a constructive and useful skeptic.  I leave it to the reader to judge whether my opinion of myself is too high. 
-- The Shamans –
If I had to pick the single most powerful mythology by which I have lived my life and organized my attentions, it would probably be the myth of modern psychology.  I realize as I begin this discussion, that it may not be entirely apparent to some people that psychology is a myth.  However, I am hopeful that by the time you arrive at the end of this chapter, you will have become at least a little suspicious on this point.  Then, I suppose, some of the more radical members of your audience may be motivated to go out and find some other tin god to worship.  On that, we'll just have to take your chances.  
My contact with psychology as a field of human interest and with psychologists as prophets in the field (pun intended), has unfolded in a number of distinct phases.  I refer to these stages with some humor as "counseling, maturation, crisis intervention, re-growth, and healthy disillusionment".  During these phases of my growing up, I was a client in three different modalities of psychological therapy.  After completing my therapy, I continued to pursue a personal interest as an informal student of the literature of popular psychology for several years.  By means of this study, I came to understand a lot of things about myself.  I also came to disbelieve a lot of claims that have been made for the efficacy of "insight" in healing.  
I first saw a psychologist when I was 23 years old, for about the same reason most clients do: unmanageable emotional pain.  Not long after returning to my university from our marriage trip, Ellen and I found selves fighting continually about events that should not have been as important as they seemed at the time.  I gradually discovered that I knew almost nothing about living with the complex female person who happened to be my wife. I was intensely uncomfortable and uncertain of myself.  Likewise, a number of academic problems seemed to be associated with the stress of my new marriage.  I was "in over my head" and needed the services of a lifeguard. 
Not knowing quite what I was volunteering for, I trekked down to my University counseling center and signed up for an appointment.  I made this journey alone. To the slight degree that Ellen shared her feelings with me, she indicated that I had some personal problems that were disrupting our marriage, and that it was up to me to solve those problems. It did not at the time occur to me to challenge Ellen's assumption. 
After an initial interview, I was placed on the appointment schedule of a quiet lady psychologist.  Dr. Bethwell and I would talk once a week, for the next six months.  Actually, I talked and she listened, occasionally asking a leading question.  Bethwell worked in a counseling mode called "non-directive". The underlying theory of the technique was that the client will bring up for discussion whatever level of emotional conflict he or she is willing to deal with.  The non-directive counselor provides a sounding board against which the client is expected to work out his or her own solutions for problems that float to the surface. 
Up to a point, this approach proved to be well adapted to my academic situation.  A university counseling center is rarely equipped to deal with long-term personality issues.  The student population is too transient.  Thus such centers deal primarily in first aid and short-term pain relief.  With the benefit of hindsight, I must also admit that when I first entered counseling, I was unready to examine my life deeply.  Topics such as my unsatisfactory love life with Ellen were too painful to be faced directly.  So too, I avoided coming to grips with many old experiences and unexamined beliefs that contributed to my lack of self confidence in dealing with Ellen and others in my life.  
Looking back on the experience, my lasting impression is that contact with Bethwell was extremely tenuous.  Partly as a result of the sort of therapy she did and partly as a consequence of the kind of person I was at the time, there was an emotional distance between us.  I usually sat in her office in a straight backed chair, slumped against her desk.  She moved back and forth in an antique rocker, several feet away.  We rarely made eye contact.  I poured out my anxiety in a dull monotone and she listened in silence.  Though I felt many frustrations and angers in daily life, we rarely spoke of these angers.  Though I felt grievous pain, I did not grieve.  We each seemed to talk to shadows, each of us unreal to the other.  
Despite the distance between us, my talks with Bethwell seemed to help pull me through a period of stress.  I was relieved in some degree, by unburdening myself of feelings that seemed too threatening to be voiced at home.  Disagreements with Ellen seemed to abate.  My concentration and grades improved.  I began a thesis and made satisfactory progress toward graduation.  
Our attention was then diverted from our marital problems.  I was notified of  reassignment to follow school.  We began preparing for a move across the country.  Without realizing that we were doing so, Ellen and I simply shelved any uncertainties we felt as we prepared for the changes immediately in front of us.  As I began feeling better about the daily events in my life, I felt less need for talks with Bethwell.  We ended our counseling relationship and I went on to other concerns.  
In the five years that followed my introduction to counseling, I found gradually that the experience had not in any fundamental way affected my "way of doing business" in daily life.  During much of this period, Ellen and I marked time, as basic incompatibilities simmered beneath the surface of our relationship, unacknowledged and festering.  
Without being consciously aware of the process, I was discovering the untruth of one of the assumptions that people sometimes voice about the therapeutic process: the idea that one goes to a counselor to be healed.  It is usually closer to the truth that when first seeing a counselor, what we do only rarely has much to do with real healing.  What we are looking for is a relief from pain and anxiety: from symptoms.  That isn't the same thing.  
I had not entered therapy with a desire to change.  Indeed, I was not even aware that I needed to change.  I simply wanted to feel better.  The time spent with Bethwell seemed to accomplish that objective.  Only later would I realize that my immediate "want" was probably not what I needed over the long run.  If I have a complaint about Bethwell, it is that she failed to point out what should have been evident to any trained professional worthy of a license: that I was a long way from being finished with therapy when I left her office for the last time. I would be back. 
As I have related earlier, the next four years of my life with Ellen were punctuated by a shattering divorce.  The breakup was coincident with another move across the country for a further dose of graduate school.  When I arrived in California, I found that once again I was living alone, once again I was struggling with a difficult academic program, and once again I was in trouble on both accounts.  
It is perhaps understandable that I turned again to the therapeutic professionals for answers to the disorientation and confusion I felt.  During this revisit, however, I would be forced to risk a more fundamental kind of baptism by fire.  I was hurt deeply enough that I needed to work on some real changes in my life, rather than seeking cosmetic pain relief.  
I began my second period of counseling with another female therapist.  I was referred to Mrs. Irish by one of the women I briefly dated, who was also her client.  I started weekly sessions that resembled and yet also differed from my long talks with Bethwell five years earlier.  The differences were important in both a positive and negative way.  
Bethwell had been silent.  Irish was much more active.  She and I had a great deal more real human contact and communication. I began to open a lot of long-unexamined drawers in my mental attic.  We talked of some of the conflicts in my disintegrating marriage.  For the first time in a counseling relationship, I was able to cry deeply -- something that I had needed to do for years.  
In this opening to my deeper feelings, there was tremendous vulnerability for me.  I became aware how angry and frustrated I felt with Ellen.  In a few weeks, I came to rely on Mrs. Irish's good instincts as a guide to dealing with very unfamiliar and threatening emotions.  This kind of dependency is not unusual for clients in therapy.  It is a part of a phenomenon that some therapists label "transference". However, my reliance on Mrs. Irish proved to be a serious error.  She too was dealing with difficulties in her non-professional life.  These problems prompted her to decide abruptly to take a long-postponed vacation.  I learned of this decision when she phoned, two days before our scheduled appointment, to say that she would be leaving immediately, to be gone more than a month.  
From my standpoint, Irish could not have chosen a less opportune time to depart.  I was entering the early stages of a legal and emotional divorce.  There was a lot of confusion in my private and professional life, that I was just starting to open up in our counseling sessions.  My counselor had led me into the early stages of some difficult growing up, only to leave me to fend for myself -- without prior warning -- just as the going got tough.  I felt deserted and betrayed.  
When Irish returned from her vacation, I acted on the resentment I had felt building during her absence.  I told her I was convinced we could not continue to work together. She flatly refused to accept responsibility for the precipitous timing of her departure, or to acknowledge that she might have made an error in not referring me to an interim counselor during her absence.  Our telephone conversation was polite but not friendly.  
In my brief work with Irish, I had seen signs of a deeper layer of fundamental life issues lying beneath the particulars of my daily emotions.  I had begun to believe I might cope better with the frustrations I was experiencing, if I could find a trustworthy person with whom to explore that deeper stratum.  Working through a university counseling center again, I was referred to a well regarded psychologist who had offices on the west side of Los Angeles. I made an appointment for yet another consultation. 
Hank was a grizzled, physically powerful, older man who had been doing therapy for long years before such activity became fashionable in California.  I was quite impressed with him, even in the brief period we spoke.  He had an aura of perception about him, and I doubt he missed a cue or clue concerning my feelings and preoccupations. 
We laid out in a tentative way, some of the issues that were troubling me.  He then asked how I felt about the potential expense of a long term therapy.  Analyst or professional therapist time could cost from $35 to $75 dollars per hour (in the early 1970s), and one to two sessions per week were common. I explained that I was just re-establishing a home after divorce.  Though I could afford a continuing investment in therapy, my resources were limited.  There was no possible way I could afford $100 dollars per week for months on end. 
I then learned that there were alternatives to poverty.  Hank's professional association included people with talents in a variety of fields, at several levels of their professional training.  He suggested that I work with a senior student under his supervision who was then completing her formal academic courses.  Ruth had counseling interests in several of the areas Hank and I had discussed, and was willing to adjust her fees based on the ability of her clients to pay.  She was also gaining a reputation with the committee who supervised her academic work, as a highly skilled counselor.  I agreed to Hank's suggestion. 
My first appointment with Ruth was early in a fall afternoon.  I threaded my car across Los Angeles and up into the canyons that overlook Hollywood, to find her office and home on a quiet, heavily wooded street.  She did most of her work in a studio room on an upper floor of the house.  The space was light and airy, the floor covered by many throw pillows and the walls by surrealist paintings and tapestries.  
Ruth was an intense woman in her late forties.  Her gray-black hair formed a lion's mane of uncontrollable curls about a face marked by more than its share of experience.  That face was dominated by large brown eyes that I learned over a period of years could alternately became a brimming, unreadable well, or be transformed into two piercing laser lights that left not a bone unmarked.  
As we began, she explained the nature of her training and her work.  She had herself spent several years in one of the conventional psychotherapies and then continued to study under a senior teacher at the Gestalt Institute of Los Angeles.  She was nearing completion of a degree in marriage and family counseling.  She did individual sessions with some clients and led others in a weekly group session during an evening.  From time to time, a senior therapist might sit in to monitor her work with clients.  Most of the time, she would work independently.  
We spent a little over an hour talking, seated comfortably on throw pillows that padded her studio floor. I related some of the difficulties I was experiencing, and explained my recent jarring encounter with Mrs. Irish.  Ruth assured me that when she took vacation, she referred clients to others in her professional group.  I also explained my limited finances.  On a chance remark, she was able to suggest a mutual solution. As a reasonably skilled carpenter, there would be plenty of opportunity for me to trade services with her.  She too had been through a divorce, and her home had not been actively maintained for almost four years.  We agreed to trade time at $6.00 per hour for my repairs, versus $25.00 per hour for hers.  
I left my first session with Ruth with an impression of a forthright if by no means simple woman who had experienced much.  This impression would be confirmed in the almost three years we worked together.  She had known a lot of personal pain and had been forced like me to do her growing up a little late in life.  She had worked at more than one profession and had known personal struggle and poverty.  Through a stormy marriage to a sculptor, she had often been the primary wage earner in her household.  Her divorce had been an unfriendly one.  
I got to know Ruth both professionally and personally.  For several months, I did weekend repairs in her house and garden, in return for therapy sessions in her studio.  We gradually built a connection that seemed to have qualities a bit different from the client-counselor relationships described to me by others who have undergone therapy.  We did not socialize casually or become particularly close as friends.  But there were many weekends when I was invited to join the family for an early supper following a day of my labors in the house.  I came to know Ruth and her daughters as a family.  It was a welcome inclusion.  
Theirs was not always a happy or organized household.  People came and went in bewildering array.  Ruth had her share of problems raising two daughters alone, as adolescence set in (if the phrase calls to mind a disease, the condition it describes was perhaps analogous).  Ruth had more than one lover during the period I knew her and more than one disappointment with lovers.  As she entered her middle years, she seemed destined to spend more of her life alone than she might have wished.  Sometimes her fate chafed.  
During therapy sessions in Ruth's studio, our connection was much different and much deeper.  I found myself quickly involved in an intensely personal relationship.  There were times in our sessions when it became almost physically painful to meet Ruth's gaze, because of emotions that emerged into awareness under that gaze.  But by accepting that variety of pain, I became more aware of ways I had avoided dealing with other feelings in my life.  Ruth's intuitive skill amplified my own desire for change and improvement, creating opportunities to finish a lot of old, painful business that needed releasing from my life.  What we shared in these sessions seemed to be an outgrowth of the Gestalt training from which Ruth drew her primary methods.  
After several weeks of individual sessions, we agreed that I would join Ruth's evening group.  Besides providing financial relief, the evening group offered a wider range of therapy techniques and a chance to meet others involved in similar exploration.  This exposure proved to be highly productive.  I was able to see in use, an unusually broad array of therapeutic technique.  
At various times, our sessions employed the Gestalt theater concept.  We also did physical energy work with neo-Reichian body centering and awareness techniques, dream analysis in a Jungian framework, role-playing, free association, interaction games, Kundelini Yoga meditations and variations on Encounter.  Ruth borrowed freely from any school of thought that she thought might assist the business before us.  Though a session occasionally "flopped", there were usually more payoffs than penalties in this free format.  The two and a half hours spent each week were growing-up times. 
The largest payoff in the evening group was interaction with other participants.  If there was one rule in our work, it would probably have been summed up in the phrase "no bullshit".  A faker or an uninvolved tourist would quickly have found himself out of place in this assembly.  Not for this group, the casual "testimony" of the unrepentant sinner.  Here, the objective was change.  Likewise, there was little room in our sessions for ego-beating or revenge games.  Eight to twelve of us gathered weekly to share the stuff of our lives, confront our demons, and outgrow our shortcomings.  Sometimes the emotions that emerged were pretty scary.  But on the whole, the process was genuine and the people authentic. 
In the evening group, I was one of the more "straight" members.  The only other professional working as a client was a 65 year old CPA sorting out relationships to his children, after the death of his wife.  The rest of us were a less common assortment.  There was an aspiring writer of movie scripts who had not yet sold any of his work.  One of us was a working actress of considerable reputation.  Among this changing group were a couple of struggling students, an accomplished but chronically unemployed musician, a housewife trying to decide whether to leave her abusive husband and crazy-making children, and a part-time insurance salesman toying with the idea of acting out his fantasies of bisexuality. 
In the weeks we met together, other clients and issues came and went from the group.  One client, who stayed with us for a few weeks, was herself a therapist trying to deal with the agony of deep emotional depression.  Another lady flailed about quite a lot, trying to deal with the persistent emotional echoes of rape in her early life.  In one therapy session, the males in the group were subjected to a consciousness-raising on the subject of sexual harassment.  In another meeting, the group hosted a dialog between a distracted single mother and her manipulative twelve year old son.  
Over time, the group became both a support and at times an uncomfortably accurate mirror to my deepest feelings.  The group process was well suited to revealing personal inconsistencies, and I rapidly encountered some of my own.  I had come to therapy very alone and very hungry for personal acceptance, unconditional love.  I expressed this deep desire in various ways during our first sessions.  There was a lot of supportive feedback.  However, as I continued to struggle with my sense of dependency and insufficiency, I came up against the resistance of others who were willing to be tougher on me than I was on myself.  
After several sessions, I was confronted by one of the group members.  The challenge cut deep: "Damn it, man! I've come to group for the last six weeks and heard nothing from you but the same old litany of 'love me' bullshit! When are you going to learn that nobody will ever love you all the time? You're really a burden, you know? You limp around, wailing about how powerless you are.  When are you going to get off your behind and start using some of your own power? The few times you've let it peek out from under the covers, you've been delightful! But if you won't own up to your own power and competence, how the hell can you expect us to lend you ours? You don't want a loan of support… you want a permanent crutch!" 
The impatience and anger in this outburst were frightening and frustrating. I cried more in that session than I had in any before.  Unusually, I went home in a continued internal uproar.  I felt judged, rejected and pushed aside from the support I had begun to feel from the group.  When I returned the next week, it was with profoundly divided feelings.  I wondered just how much of this sort of treatment I could take.  For a while, I was a pretty shaky participant in our meetings. 
During the next few weeks, I went through a transition.  I found that the challenge I had received would not have stung so much had it not touched a vulnerable place.  There was truth and candor in the irritation expressed by my therapeutic compatriot.  I had entered the group without awareness of my deep hunger for uncritical acceptance by others.  I had also not been fully sincere in my expressed desire for my own development.  This was a continuation of a pattern I had constructed earlier in life. 
For many years, I had been acting out a role.  As my challenger aptly pointed out, I had denied my own personal power and capacity, and my disclaimed responsibility for controlling my life.  I had perceived myself to be the victim of circumstances and of power exercised over me by others.  This perception had then become self-fulfilling.  I had perceived myself as deficient; as un-loveable; as difficult.  I then acted out these qualities in my relationships to other people.  As long as I could draw on the "help" of others to deal with my perceived problems, I could avoid accepting responsibility for problems that I created for myself. As long as I was figuratively a "poor little boy" in a man's clothing, I did not have to take the risk of real failure.  I did not have to try with all my resources, to cope -- after all, what can one expect of a "little boy"? 
These understandings emerged gradually during a watershed period.  In a sense, I resigned from the group and then rejoined it as a different sort of participant.  My work in our sessions changed.  I began exploring more of my own creative power and sufficiency rather than my previous sense of inadequacy.  I continued occasionally to cry, but the neediness I had earlier felt, was balanced by a greater empathy toward the needs of others, and a greater trust in myself.  
I grew closer to others in the group.  With the strength of this bonding, came a willingness to be angry a little more often when I found others making demands on me that seemed unreasonable.  I played fewer head games with other group participants and with the "civilians" outside our sessions.  I avoided fewer real issues and at the same time found calmer and more constructive ways to deal with anger.  
In individual sessions with Ruth, I became aware of deep feelings that I had previously denied or refused to act upon.  I came to recognize some of the distorted or disproportionate feelings of dependency that I had acted out in my marriage to Ellen.  I also saw that I had not been the only "guilty" party in our conflicts, or perhaps even the primary culprit a part of the time.  Ellen's vindictiveness, her deep emotional rigidity and her preoccupation with the material trappings of success had also played a part in our mutual troubles.  Recognizing where I had contributed to our difficulties, I was able to stop taking responsibility for more than my share of the trouble.  
Changes occurred in life outside the therapy group.  For a while, these changes were not comfortable for people who were close to me.  A friend of several years reacted violently to the news that I was seeing a therapist.  He interpreted my involvement as a personal rejection of values I had grown up with and felt very threatened by my willingness to engage in such "nonsense".  Ultimately, we grew apart.  Strains also developed between my parents and me.  They too found my therapy threatening, having heard that most psychiatrists preached a doctrine of parental guilt for the abominations that adult children became.  They interpreted my therapeutic work as a judgment of my upbringing.  In a different sense than they realized, they were correct.  We argued a few times about our respective points of view.  
However, such discomforts proved to be secondary issues.  As I grew toward greater independence and self confidence, I also learned that blaming other people for acting in character was a waste of time.  Certain windmills would continue turning in the world, regardless of any angry thrusts from me.  I could change only my own attitudes and control only my own actions, not those of other people.  Whatever I could not change, I could either learn to accept with grace or decide to move away from.  The choice was mine.  
After an unstable period, my relationship with my parents firmed dramatically.  Growing older probably had a lot to do with the process, but working with Ruth also provided a better vocabulary for dealing with family issues helpfully.  For the first time, Dad and I were able to share deeper feelings and a visible kind of love.  I was able to say to him, "Dad, I'm not blaming you for anything you've done in bringing me up.  You did the best you could with what you had.  At the same time, I hope you understand that if I ever get the chance to raise a son of my own, there are some things I may wish to do very differently." He was able to say to me, "Son, I know I never explained 'why' to you very much.  I just didn't have the time or energy, and that's always been a hard thing for me to do." Our feeling showed in the sincere bear-hugs we were able for the first time to share without embarrassment.  
Changes were also inevitable in life with Beegee.  Whatever grace I exercised in parting from this very important lady may have had something to do with Ruth's guidance.  By recognizing my own dependencies, I was better able to recognize Beegee's.  Though the two of us weathered a number of emotional storms and ultimately parted, we were not in any deliberate way unkind to each other.  There were regrets, but no grudges.  
After two and a half years of working with Ruth, I found that it was time to pass on to other involvements and interests.  I had finished graduate school and started a challenging new job.  I hadn't met anyone with whom I felt I could establish a permanent home, but I believed I would eventually do so.  If I was not always happy with the events of my life, I was at least satisfied that life was what I made it.  I was walking under my own power, and it was time to go.  
Ruth and I scheduled a closing session.  We were both surprised by how quickly the years of our work had passed.  We were both in some subtle way, "in the middle of things" in our lives, unfinished with major phases just begun.  We felt a warmth and respect for each other and a gratitude for shared experiences.  Each of us cried a little -- grateful tears.  
We parted as friends and as far as I know remain so, despite a silence that has lengthened in our correspondence.  Ruth later left therapeutic practice for a theater with wider audiences.  She has produced several radio projects and acted in a series of national road show plays.  Her girls are grown now and there are more grey hairs in her mane.  Ruth, if you should chance to read this commoner's Journey, I wish you satisfactions that wear well.  
I hope that my description of the time I spent with Ruth and her therapy group conveys something of the power and healing that I shared with these people.  I grew up a lot, as a result of things that I learned as Ruth's client and student.  These changes have since prompted the favorable comment of family and friends who have known me from early childhood.  Between my 28th and 31st birthdays, I became a more solid and self-sustaining person.  
I also became a more curious person.  Curiosity as we all know is sometimes a mixed blessing.  Mine prompted me to continue reading about the healing process I had experienced.  This reading would eventually bring to an end, any advocacy of psychotherapy that might have been expected of me.  The deeper I dug into the popular literature of mental healing, the more I encountered ideas that seemed wildly at contradiction to my own experience.  
I examined a variety of theories about psychology and human personality.  I found widely divergent claims and counter-claims on even the most basic principles and definitions.  I also found a general lack of consensus concerning the nature of both "mental disease" and "neurosis".  A lot of the theories of psychology didn't seem to apply to the sort of therapy I had done.  Some of the theories of the particular school that had trained Ruth seemed to differ from what I experienced.  
In the years since, I have become convinced that there might be considerable truth scattered through the debris of psychological verbiage that is published every year.  However, it seems to me that very few of these truths are well understood by practicing professionals in the field, much less by clients.  The term "psycho-babble" has become very real for me.  
Much of what I did in the therapy theater flies directly in the face of orthodox psycho-therapeutic doctrine.  Contrary to the theories laid down by the Freudians and their imitators, my therapist was not an impersonal, god-like figure upon whom I "projected" my conflicts and saw my complexes unraveled.  I wouldn't recognize an Electra complex if one walked up to me and introduced herself (itself?).  
Ruth was as much my friend as my counselor -- a particularly tough and capable sort of friend.  I knew her to be involved with me as a person, even if I was not intimately a part of her social circle.  Likewise, though I respected Ruth tremendously, I did not in any obvious way experience the kind of therapeutic dependency that Freudian theory teaches as a necessity for healing.  I was at all times a responsible and aware party in a two-way contract.  
Very little of the learning I experienced in group work had much to do with the "insight" that is frequently advertised as a primary curative tool in various talking therapies.  There were few "breakthroughs" or intuitive flashes.  I did not become bogged down (as did some others whom I knew had done therapy in other contexts) in a dissection of my early life or traumas.  I did not learn that my lack of self confidence proceeded from any failure of my elders to raise me well.  
My process of learning was much simpler: I ran into people who had experienced real emotional pain and personal abuse; these people recognized my manufactured bullshit for what it was and weren't afraid to call it by its proper name.  I weathered some personal thumps until l was willing to change my approach to other people and to issues of personal responsibility.  There are times in every life, when a verbal thrashing is every bit as much a healing or correcting influence as an understanding ear.  When I was due for a tongue lashing, I generally got one.  The main "insight" involved was learning to recognize when I was doing things that deserved such a response.  
As I continued reading in psychology, I learned that theorists are still arguing over the role of Mother Nature versus family nurture in the formation of individual personality.  I personally find this argument moot.  For whatever my observation may be worth, I have seen little evidence that supports the notion of some theorists that human beings are "formed" by the good and evil things that parents do to us in childhood.  
The people I met in therapy frequently reported having established patterns of behavioral or emotional maladjustment, beginning almost from their first cries as "colic prone" infants -- long before the supposed errors of their elders could have warped them.  Sometimes there seemed to be a weak link between the problems we experienced as children and the troubles we created as adults.  However, the links I saw were tenuous except in one case of extreme physical and emotional abuse.  I was surprised by the number of problem-prone people whom I met, who seemed to have grown up in placid and supportive homes.  
I was personally forced to unlearn one of my own unexamined assumptions about child rearing, as I did therapeutic work.  Probably the most tenacious of all the unspoken dogmas about modern child-raising is that parents are directly responsible for the screw-ups of their offspring.  I learned that if I was going to grow up and assume possession of my life, I had to stop blaming anybody but myself for the peccadilloes I had created.  Such blaming may create convenient scapegoats, but it does not contribute very much to growing up.  By an interesting coincidence, I noted that people who insisted on blaming others for their troubles rarely remained in our group for more than a few meetings.  Whether this properly suggests a general principle, I am still uncertain.  
Much of what I did in the therapy theater probably did not deserve the title "therapy" at all.  I was passing through a period of intense searching and self-testing.  I went through a personal emotional crisis with the interest and aid of a group of friends.  The important difference in this process is that I hired these friends with a measure of deliberate intention to engage in such a process, when circumstances did not provide them accidentally.  Most of what I learned in therapy could have been taught in some other form by other friends.  
I acknowledge that some of the techniques we used in Gestalt Theater were unusual and thought provoking. More valuable than the techniques was the recognition that others around me were struggling with problems far more severe than mine.  I had not been singled out for more than my fair share of adversities.  Recognizing this simple equity humbled me enough to break a habit of "poor little me-ing" myself.  The further I travel from the period in my life when I went through counseling, the more I have become aware of just how incredibly lucky I was to meet Ruth and her group.  During that period and many times since, I have met horrible examples of the ways people can go (or be led) astray while growing to maturity.  
In Los Angeles in the Iate-1970's, I met people who had been paying an analyst $150 dollars each week for five years or longer, as their lives hung in indecisive suspension.  When these people complained of the treatment they were receiving, their analysts had the continental gall to mutter apparently wise incantations about "transference" and "self sabotage".  
Bull feathers!  In my not-very-humble opinion, what these people were suffering from was in considerable measure, the therapy to which they had subjected themselves! 
Though I did not meet such people personally, I have read of and heard about other victims of our modem psycho-babble who have gone to a weekend self-help seminar and returned with shattered relationships and confused perceptions of reality, wondering what has happened to them.  More recently, national press articles suggest that a substantial number of the female clients of male therapists are subjected to sexual overtures, outright seduction or rape.  
Such widespread evidence of the failure of psychology to protect the interests of clients and of the failure of psychologists to regulate the predators in their own ranks has not in any obvious way hampered the spread of half a hundred new "therapies".  The variety of people practicing some form of counseling or talking cure in America is simply huge! We have psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, social workers, marriage and family counselors, school counselors, sex therapists, motion specialists, Rolfers, behavior therapists, clergy, self-help motivational seminar leaders, and a spectrum of others who are literally making billions of dollars from the "treatment" of America.  One does not require a great deal of skepticism to suspect something just a little strange or crazy is going on here.  
About the time I began wondering whether the head doctors are any saner than their clients, I read a book that proved to be a major eye-opener.  In 1978, Martin L. Gross took on an entire profession, with a book titled The Psychological Society (Random House, NY, 1978).  As far as I can see, Gross won the contest without even breathing hard. It is worthwhile to review and elaborate on some of the important points he makes.  
Those who practice as professionals in treating society's mentally ailing have not been among the easiest of our medical practitioners to evaluate.  Many psychologists and psychiatrists have stubbornly resisted the efforts of advocates both outside and inside their chosen profession, who have increasingly demanded that ways be found to measure the performance of healers.  Though psychology has claimed for itself the status of a healing (if not always "empirical ") science, its more outspoken critics suggest that the state of the discipline is more consistent with a designation of "black art".  
Some of the most severe problems in modem psychology may be observed in our few remaining mental hospitals.  In these institutions -- and in recent years increasingly on the steam grates and street comers of our major cities -- you will encounter extreme cases of what candid investigators believe is an unethical failure of patient treatment.  Here, you will observe the discards from years of trying to treat severe perceptual disorders by means of what are called "talking therapies".  Almost nothing has worked in the treatment of the severely disabled, and what has worked has almost exclusively comprised drug treatment.  
This failure did not keep clinicians from using the talking therapies for almost 30 years, trying to reach and heal severe depressives and schizophrenics.  Learned doctors urged handicapped people to talk out their early childhood traumas, while the anxious parents and friends of these unpredictable and sometimes destructive maniacs stood by in agonized silence, wondering what they (the parents) had done wrong.
	It has only been since the 1970s and 1980s that the evidence for genetic factors in schizophrenia has become so well known that psychologists have been forced to admit that childhood trauma was never the source of the disorder.  Likewise, there is considerable evidence of a role for brain chemistry in severe depression.  Except perhaps as an ancillary measure for patient reassurance, the talking therapies have little effect on such chemical disorders.  This hindsight does little to assuage the guilt and frustrations of parents who have agonized for years over their inability to reach and help their offspring.  Nor can it recall the tens of thousands of depressives who have committed suicide while undergoing a talking therapy.  
	Such discoveries would in themselves have been unsettling.  The reaction of professional counselors to the new work is perhaps even more so.  Experiments with chemical factors in mental disorder have commonly met with concentrated derision and occasionally deliberate suppression by highly trained "analysts" who have persisted in using discredited methods despite their demonstrated ineffectiveness.  This pattern has extended even to the assertion by some therapists that well-evaluated psycho-active drugs can never be trusted because some patients display negative reactions or side effects.  
	Moreover, one need not look to the extremes of mental dysfunction, to uncover significant ethical problems in the healing arts.  Serious questions remain unanswered -- if not deliberately ignored -- concerning the effectiveness of the many techniques used to treat less severe disorders called "neuroses".  
Since the early 1950's, efforts have been made to evaluate the relative effectiveness of the many modes of treatment for neurosis.  Martin Gross reviews some of the more fascinating outcomes of these efforts.  Studies have examined the impact of the frequency of therapy, the use of group versus individual treatment, and the effects of the home environments from which clients have come.  To the vast disappointment of many in the profession, almost all studies have come to a single result: there is little difference in the rate or degree of improvement observed in people who enter verbal therapy in the many widely differing schools of technique.  After periods of six months to a year, about half to two-thirds of all clients who enter treatment will report improvement in their complaints.  This improvement occurs without regard for the particulars of the method of treatment.  
What comes as a profound shock, however, is a further type of comparison.  In institutional programs of the 1950's and -60's that treated moderately impaired clients, there were often more applicants than beds to house them.  This divergence produced long lists of clients awaiting admission.  A few brave experimenters compared rates of improvement among those placed on such waiting lists, with the improvement of those who were treated.  Like those in treatment, about half to two-thirds of the waiting people got better.  They got better to about the same degree as those who were treated.  At the very Ieast, this comparison suggested that "sick" people were not being well served by hospital isolation.  At the worst, this phenomenon calls into question whether our counselors actually do anything worthy of the price we pay for their services! 
It is understandable that the psychological community has debated the significance of such results.  What is not so understandable is that the community continues to train doctors in many of the same methodologies used in the 1950's, while it continues to debate thirty years later!  Psychologists who have bothered to study the experimental results, have gotten a rude shock to their convictions of moral and therapeutic superiority.  This shock has not, however, lessened the attraction of their art to thousands of aspiring healers who continue to knock on the doors of filled university classrooms.  Schools are turning out more apprentice counselors and therapists than our society can absorb -- and still they keep coming.  
When such a Lemming phenomenon occurs in human affairs, I must wonder if something a little peculiar is involved.  It seems possible to me that people might have a preoccupation with healing and healers, as a result of our growing suspicion that much of our world is nuts! This inference begins to have the smell of something bordering on mythic truth.  
In agreement with authors such as Martin Gross, I suggest that there is very much in what we have come to regard as the "psychological movement", which resembles not so much a science as an ideology or a mythology.  Psychology is basically a story about the world, a theory about the internal functioning and dynamics of human beings.  This story is generally couched in terms that are deeply comprehended only by a select few in society.  There is an attraction in the psychological ritual, for common citizens who possibly deserve the designation "true believers".  Indeed, I would assert that psychology is a belief system, not a science.  Like other churches and cults, it has priesthood.  As in a church, one may not reap the benefits of the faith, without investing belief in its prophets. And as in other churches, attempts by outside investigators to evaluate the outcomes of the religious practice, are quite frequently regarded as anathema.  
I suggest further, that the appeal of the psychological belief system lies in its promise to explain ourselves to ourselves, at a time when we are profoundly confused over who we are and what we are capable of becoming.  The mythology of psychological healing concerns itself with the search for certainty and identity, in a world that is sometimes well characterized by an absence of both commodities.  
We live in times that have challenged or overturned once-certain assertions and roles for many people in western society.  All of us are immersed in rapid and accelerating change having many dimensions. Such change is disconcerting.  In the last hundred years, society has lost touch with many of the key figures of earlier cultures who performed the functions of our present psychologists: those who told us who we were and what society expected of us.  An age of technology and industry uprooted us from the farm and drove wedges between the generations of the family.  An age of rapid communications inundated us with competing values and expectations.  
Once, we could have consulted a parent or grandparent to decide what we wanted to do in life -- if, indeed, such a decision between alternatives was even possible.  To deal with the occasional pain and confusion of everyday life, an uncertain youth could have visited with the half-blind old woman who sat on her weaving stool in the next small house, or we could have talked to the kindly, balding old man who ran the corner soda parlor.  We could have gone to confession and asked a priest for advice.  Now these figures are mostly gone or discredited.  We have lost our wise old men and wise old women.  To replace them, we go to the doctor or therapist with credentials on a wall.  
There was a time, as I began to sense the myths of the psychologist's art, when I grew righteous and wrathful over the fraud that supposedly learned men and women were working on the rest of society.  In return for fifty minutes of therapeutic silence, these fakers were filling cash boxes with the loot of a generation.  I am no longer quite so certain, however, that my outrage was deserved.  The professionals have been doing in large part what their society has asked of them.  We asked for certainty and wisdom in which to invest our belief, and they assumed a mantle of wisdom.  They gave us analytical ritual to replace the lighting of candles and murmurs of prayer; transference in return for transfiguration.  We cannot fault our new priesthood for doing what was asked of it.  
Never the less, we are no longer forced to continue patronizing the psychological professionals as if they were prophets of a new religion.  We can discriminate a bit more in our offerings of belief and tolerance.  We can fairly ask psycho-healers to demonstrate the evidence of their claims.  We can confront them courteously with the knowledge that they are certain about much less than they once thought they knew about large classes of "mental illness".  We can prompt our new wise men and women to acquire the most basic kind of wisdom: the acknowledgment of great amount that we do not know.  
In a hesitant and sometimes back-sliding way, even the Freudians are beginning to re-examine their assumptions.  I have recently noted the appearance on national television of a few repentant sinners from the profession who have said publicly what a lot of people have suspected privately for years: that the term "neurosis" is meaningless word noise. There is no such "disease". Neurotics aren't sick.  They are more properly viewed -- and perhaps treated -- as habitually unhappy human beings who have been made so by their own inappropriate decisions and actions.  
Even the American Psychiatric Association has begun to recant; in recent editions of text books such as The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Association has restructured and renamed large areas of its lexicon.  Homosexuality has since the late 1980s come to be defined as a behavioral maladjustment rather than an illness automatically requiring intervention and "treatment".  Even this designation has not stood up well before the probing inquiry of investigators who find it difficult to rationalize the idea that perhaps ten percent of the US population is "maladjusted" simply because they do not choose to practice a mainstream notion of what constitutes "normal" gender attractions or emotional love.  Likewise, an increasing number of "mental" disease conditions are being recognized as complex chemical problems, best treated by chemical remedies.  
Though some of the priesthood are still arguing over the theology of such heresy, the trend is observable. The professionals are at last trying to determine how much of what they "know", is actually so. Perhaps this self examination will lead to a little more truth in advertising -- or to a new mythology.  It is hard at this early date to say what will occur. 
All the same, as increasing numbers of people have recognized the ineffectiveness of most methods for treating severe disorder, we may also be finding that for less crippling problems, some healers seem to have a genuine skill.  The most common of modern ailments is not schizophrenia, but loneliness and alienation.  Unlike schizophrenia, loneliness can frequently be remedied by following wise counsel.  Perhaps we don't call them shamans any more, but like shamans, our scientific mental healers do help some people to exorcise their demons and return to life with greater personal peace.  
I observe that some therapists are also growing up with their patients.  I have been pleasantly surprised to hear of a few cases where a creeping sense of therapist responsibility has prompted a professional to advise against prolonged use of his or her own skills.  The financial drain and family disruptions that can accompany counseling are not always worth the outcomes.  Now and then, a head doctor will hear the ailments of a plaintive client and refer him or her to a medical colleague for physical examination.  On rare occasions, both kinds of professional will stand before a plaintive client and jointly declare the ultimate heresy: "There is nothing physically or rationally wrong with you.  You simply need to Iearn to be happy more often." 
There are people now in society, who can assist the rest of us commoners in the business of learning to be happier.  Among the mass of hide-bound, confused, or simply misdirected healers, there are quite a few individuals who may deserve the appellation "wise".  Of whatever background, qualifications, or theoretical persuasion, these people emerge because the culture demands that they be developed.  They come to be known for their vision regardless of the particulars of their training, barring the unhappy eventuality that they stumble into ideas so overwhelmingly stupid in their education that they are diverted into other fields such as economics or law.  After these wise persons have shed the more foolish teachings of the formal schools, they become valuable resources to others who need guides for modem living.  
Though I have not yet encountered a psychological professional who is obvious in his or her skepticism concerning the theology of the field, I expect to soon.  One of these days, I'm going to walk to my car in some Mall parking lot and find a mimeographed flier on the windshield.  The advertisement might read something Iike this: ''Having trouble making friends? Out of work? Lost a close relative or loved one? ARE YOU IN PAIN? Then join a transition group, led by 'Rolf Psycho-tech', MS, MFC, Journeyman Professional Friend.  We don't do therapy here.  We do life change and growing up.  Rates are negotiable within reason.  Phone us at _______" 
In the meantime, while the truth-in-advertising movement is getting on its feet, a lot of people are still searching for a professional friend to lead them through a bad period.  Most of us will get better without formal help.  But we're pretty disconnected from the community of folks who used to help informally.  We're lonely, and we don't mind diverting some time and hard earned cash to find somebody we can respect, whose persona is powerful enough to give us a kick-start in the growing up process.  
So what do we look for in our wise men and women? What should we expect? 
Within quite broad limits, what you see -- when you're looking carefully -- is just about what you'll get.  If your alarm bells go off when you are in the surroundings where a wise man works, then go ring somebody else 's door bell .  If you get the uneasy feeling that this lady with whom you hope to go mentally skin diving is just a bit flaky, then you might just have a point.  Act on it.  
If I walk into the office or home of a therapist and see a genuine Ming vase resting on a table of inlaid teak in the entry hall, I'm going to wonder.  Is this person of Asian descent? Does he or she do work that is good enough to earn the kind of loot normally required to purchase such works of art? Can I really afford to spend several months here? 
On the other hand, should I find myself wandering up the rear stairs of a dingy inner city brownstone flat in search of a stubbled medico dispensing psychoactive wonder drugs, I might also wonder. Is this fellow an urban variety of Al Schweitzer working with the disadvantaged? Or have his eyes and license been checked by a State certification board lately? 
Probably your best clue to finding a competent wise person is a referral by someone who has also spent time with the Master -- and has finished that time successfully.  Students still working with a teacher may tend to overlook some of his or her failings; people still doing their own healing sometimes want rather desperately to believe in the competence of their healers.  Those who have completed the course and gone on to other things may be more objective.
When you are meeting a wise person for the first time, there is absolutely nothing obscene about asking how many of his or her clients have been in the practice for three years or more.  If that number is a substantial fraction of the doctor's client load, you might want to ask yourself just how slowly you can afford to get well. 
Whether or not the agreement is obvious, there is generally some kind of spoken or unspoken contract between a wise person and his or her students.  If the contract is long-term, then you have to hang around for a while to exercise your options.  If it is short-term, you will either deal with less fundamental problems or with the same problems under greater pressure, with greater personal responsibility and risk taking.  Either way, you get at the most, what you pay for.  You can't complain later if you initially forgot to ask what it was you were paying for. 
It may reasonably be argued that a lot of folks become candidates for the psychiatrist's couch these days, precisely because they are neither organized nor assertive enough to ask the kinds of questions that I propose.  There is a lot of truth in this argument.  If you feel so confused that you don't know that way to turn, ask a more clear-headed acquaintance or relative to help you find a healer.  Go to your city or county Department of Family Services.  Or failing all of these, write a letter to Dear Abby or Anne.  These ladies are an institution. There is a reason they got that way: they answer letters, frequently offer sound advice, and genuinely try to help. 
When you go to your wise man or wise woman, I don't think it will hurt to keep a couple of other things in mind.  There are things that wise men cannot do and that wise followers will not ask them to do.  They cannot magically force us to do what is "right for us" -- particularly in the distorted terms that we or others around us may have defined as "right". They cannot erase our limitations for us.  At the very best,  counselors can only point out where we are stuck and then suggest how to get moving again.  The wise person can only offer his or her experience as partial proof of larger principles that we must then adapt to our own use.  We do the work, and sometimes, it is hard work.  
Experience is not only the best teacher; it is generally the only teacher.  Whatever you refuse to act out in your experience, you will simply not learn.  You may also be helped by recalling that in human affairs there are a lot of ways to go wrong, but there are also a lot of phenomena that are self-limiting.  A large number of the crises that lead us to the therapeutic couch or primal scream closet will tend to get better over a few months whether or not we work with a professional to "get well". The human animal is marvelously adaptable.  Most of us know how to lick our wounds.  If we choose to do so in the company of a herd of friends and an old lead Moose, that's all right.  If we're inclined to do our healing alone, that's all right for a lot of us, too.  
You may ask, "But what about the others? What about the guy who is seeing yellow spiders on the walls or the lady who hears voices from a broken radio? Are they going to get well spontaneously, too?" To this inquiry, I must answer in a way that may not satisfy you and certainly does not satisfy me: “Yeah...what about these folks? Are they going to be better off talking about supposed childhood traumas, than they would be under treatment with mood altering drugs? The evidence doesn't seem to support that proposition very well." 
The American social consciousness is now caught in a crisis of its own making with respect to people whose behavior we commonly consider dangerous because it is very bizarre.  In the late 1970s, courts decided that unless a person acts in a manner that is physically dangerous to himself or others, no matter how strangely he or she may be acting, that person can no longer be involuntarily locked up "for his own good" -- or for ours.  A result of this decision is that many such people now live on the streets of major American cities.  
Mood-and-consciousness altering drugs such as lithium and anti-depressants are known to help many of those who otherwise find themselves living on steam grates and under highway bridges.  One of the problems with such treatment, however, is that a sizable number of those who can be helped to function more effectively in society refuse to accept medication.  It is my own view that the social awareness that has filled New York City's Grand Central Station with muttering, crying, crazy vagrants in the name of their "freedom of choice", has abridged the rights of the larger and saner majority of society's citizens.  Here, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of suggesting that there can be such a thing as too much freedom.  
As a society, we already recognize an obligation to protect our public life from physical violence acted out by schizophrenics and similar crazies.  It gives me no great pleasure to suggest that we have failed to recognize an important obligation of lesser degree: the need to protect the families of impaired people and the public at large, from the emotional violence acted out by disoriented personalities who refuse drug treatment for their disabilities.  
I would not propose that such people be locked up permanently in asylums, in the manner of twenty years ago.  I would think, however, that some type of treatment probation ought to be legally enforceable if requested by those who most often care for the nonviolent impaired: their families.  A message should be stated clearly: "accept drug moderation of your bizarre and abusive behaviors, or society and the law will restrict your freedom to offend bystanders." 
This isn't a comfortable position.  But for now, it's the only one that I find honest enough to repeat in intelligent company.  
If you are reading these pages, it seems rather likely that you are not one of the folks who see spiders.  If you and I do not always perceive reality in the same way, our private realities at least overlap.  If I am a little bit sane (whatever that term really means), then so are you.  Thus we are in a better position than the seriously impaired, to decide how we shall live from day to day and by what beliefs we will organize our lives and attentions.  
You, I think I know how to reach.  We can try to convince each other of the truths behind our beliefs, if either of us has an idea that seems pressing enough to warrant such labor.  
In the meantime, let us continue our journey together, along a slightly different path through the modern mythologies that abound in our times.  Let us turn from our mental healers, to consider a different category of witch doctor: the practitioner of modern medicine. 
-- The Surgeons –
When I refer to "modern medicine", I am speaking of something a bit larger than the multitude of doctors, hospitals, laboratories, and miracle cures that have so proliferated in our society.  I am also alluding to a generalized attitude in our culture.  Every year, medicine seems more to resemble a vast engineering corporation engaged in the selling of technological dreams.  Some of the dreams, it seems to me, have proven to be nightmares in disguise.  A lot of our citizens now seem to be on the verge of waking up from these fantasies in a cold sweat.  
As you might have guessed, I was introduced to this subject by another book.  Though the volume is somewhat dated, it still makes fascinating reading: Dr.  Robert S.  Mendelssohn's Confessions of a Medical Heretic (in paperback, published by Warner Books, 1980, New York) .  Reading through Mendelssohn’s compilation of statistics and case studies tended to confirm suspicions that I had held for a long time, concerning the medical profession.  Some of these statistics are restated or updated, below.  
When you walk into a doctor's office or clinic these days, you will encounter an array of technical tools and procedures that is (to say the least) highly intimidating.  You can expect to be X-rayed or probed with ultra-sound and drained of sufficient blood to conduct a minimum of five to ten complicated blood tests.  That's just for openers.  If something irregular shows up in your blood work, there's a fair chance your physician will slap you into a hospital for even more extensive testing.  You can expect to pay over $500 per night for the bed you sleep in while there.  You should also be prepared for over $5,000 dollars in diagnostic procedures, and innumerable specialist consultations -- in an "average" case.  
As Dr. Mendelssohn and others have pointed out, there is increasing evidence that if you thought you were going to the doctor to preserve your health, you may find that you were mistaken a sizable fraction of the time.  Although medical technology available to the doctor (and in consequence, the cost of his services) has increased dramatically in recent years, there is little to suggest that this technology has made us healthier.  In a lot of cases, an overdose of technology can actively make us ill. As modern medicine has become increasingly complex, there has been a tendency to overlook the issue of just how effective the various "miracle procedures" actually are over the long term.  Since 1950, however, medicine has discovered that some of its most fashionable new treatments simply do not work as well as advertised by the loudest of the advocates.  Some treatments have caused problems even larger than the diseases they supposedly cure. 
It is well to remind ourselves that widespread confidence in doctors and their ministrations is quite a recent phenomenon.  Only 130 years ago did an alert doctor notice a connection between the number of infections occurring in surgical cases and the cleanliness of the operating theater.  During the American Civil War, it was common for a surgeon to walk into a clinic directly from the street, proceed directly to his operating theater, and go to work in his shirt sleeves. Such doctors scoffed at the germ theory of disease. Dr. Lister died a persecuted man, even as his theory was beginning to be accepted. 
In the 1880s, it was common for country doctors to treat fevers by "removing bad blood" -- a procedure passed down from earlier practitioners who worked with leeches.  We now know that fever was reduced by forcing blood pressure to dangerously low levels.  Patients who got better did so in spite of the doctors, not because of them.  At the time, however, laymen could not readily justify their fears of the supposedly wise men who did such idiocy to them.  
Only as late as the 1920's could medical professionals begin to claim real miracle cures.  Aspirin came into common use for pain relief.  Later in the 1940s, penicillin and sulfa drugs began to eliminate bacterial infection and pneumonia as major causes of the mortality statistics.  In more recent years, drug treatments have proliferated.  Thousands -- if not tens of thousands -- of preparations are now marketed.  A really peculiar footnote to all of this is that doctors still don't understand quite how Aspirin works to decrease inflammation and fever.  Our knowledge of important details of other drug chemical processes is at least equally dim.  
Ignorance hasn't hampered treatment.  Critics have observed a well documented tendency of doctors to dose a wide range of problems with drugs whose effects are either uncertain or positively known to be useless.  The most general abuse may have been the persistent use of antibiotics to treat viral infections like the common cold.  Doctors have known for thirty years that viruses do not respond to antibiotics.  Only quite recently have the same doctors denied the pleas of supplicant patients asking for such treatment, because of severe side effects that antibiotics can cause.  
Some of modem medicine's worst errors have occurred with respect to the "miracle drugs".  Too many substances have been released to a demanding public before side effects were well known.  Examples include thalidomide, responsible for hundreds of massive birth defects in the 1950s, and DES, a synthetic hormone used experimentally on over two million women -- later producing a high incidence of thyroid tumors in its users and vaginal cancers in their female offspring.  Even where side effects are well documented, potentially dangerous preparations have been prescribed widely, with only the most cursory attempts to evaluate the individuals consuming them.  Some physicians now view female hormone treatments as falling into this category.  
A nightmare aspect of our promotion of medicinal drugs is that familiarity may have changed our attitudes toward less beneficial foreign substances.  We live in a drug-oriented culture.  Serious investigators suspect a connection between our widespread over-prescription of tranquilizers and our tolerance for more deadly abuses.  Particularly in the late 1970s, concern grew that people by the tens of thousands were wandering through their days so over-medicated on tranquilizers that they hardly knew where they were, much less what they were doing.  Why then do we wonder why a new generation has become militant about its so-called "recreational" use of marijuana and cocaine? 
Drug treatment of disease has produced some ethically thorny questions for society to debate.  The surgical side of the same coin can be equally difficult territory.  By the estimates of the American College of Surgeons itself, medical schools in the early 1980s were churning out almost twice as many surgeons as were actually needed by the American economy.  One might suspect, in the face of this statistic, to find a surplus of the service that is provided by the surgeons, namely surgery.  There is evidence to support this suspicion.  
Examples of unnecessary and potentially harmful surgery include some very common procedures.  Almost all tonsillectomies in children have proven to be unwarranted.  Many hysterectomies in young women are of doubtful utility.  The number of Caesarean sections performed by doctors in large US hospitals is coming to be regarded as suspiciously higher than the rate in rural or non-US hospitals where infant survival rates are just as high if now higher.  The once highly praised heart arterial bypass operation has proven to provide only a modest improvement in the life span of the average heart patient.  
Accumulating evidence of this misdirection, however, has only gradually affected the amount of surgery being performed.  Medical history is rife with examples of new procedures that seem to show promise of saving lives and improving health, but later turn out to be disappointingly ineffective.  Some of those who teach medicine estimate that almost half of what a surgeon learns in medical school will be out of date within five years after graduation.  Partly, the doctor finds he or she must add to earlier knowledge.  Partly also, however, the doctor has learned a lot that must be thrown out because it is wrong.  
One need not dig too deeply into drug or surgical treatment to find serious grounds for concern over the effectiveness of medical technology.  You can look immediately at procedures used to identify people as candidates for treatment: diagnostic testing.  On this subject, Dr. Mendelssohn’s book is particularly informative.  
An X-ray machine is now a fixture of many up-and-coming medical offices. However, results obtained from this tool are highly mixed. In controlled experiments during the 1970s, where doctors are asked to interpret X-ray prints, results of analysis typically vary widely.  About 20 percent of physicians will interpret the same print differently when seeing it for a second time, a few days after an initial viewing.  This questionable performance coincides with evidence that excess exposure to medical X-rays can cause some of the tumors that these tools are used to detect.  
Accuracy rates in interpreting electro-cardiogram and electro-encephalograph (heart and brain machine) printouts are simply abominable.  In some studies, false alarms were generated more often than accurate diagnoses.  Sometimes, more conditions go undetected than are alerted by the use of such devices.  Interpretation of blood test results is equally poor.  Investigations of major testing laboratories have commonly found that more than a quarter of real problems are missed and a slightly smaller number of false alarms are generated.  In one study of an entire state (New Jersey), only 20% of the laboratories produced acceptable results more than 90% of the time, for a group of common blood tests.  
The documented ineffectiveness of some medical tools occurs against a backdrop of ever-increasing medical costs and a widening medical involvement in the affairs of everyday life.  We are being treated more often, more expensively.  Doctors' fees have been a significant element of this cost growth.  Half of all doctors now earn more than $150,000 per year.  Surgeons as a group average significantly higher, and in medical special ties such as radiology the average may top $200,000.  Students in medical schools are candid about the fact that high earnings are one of the attractions of the medical specialties.  
It strikes me that large numbers of people must be investing an awfully large amount of confidence in our surgical healers, if we are willing to pay them so well.  It also seems reasonable to me to inquire concerning whether the doctors' performance seems to justify our confidence.  In many cases I fear that it does not.  
Contrary to the expectations of many patients, doctors are quite human people, susceptible to at least the average degree of human imperfection and folly.  The rate of suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental incapacity is believed by some investigators to be significantly higher in doctors as a group than in the population overall.  The fraction of licensed doctors who are habitual drug abusers, may exceed five percent.  Likewise, doctors have been involved in some of the more lucrative frauds of our times, in publicly funded health care and insurance plans.  
In light of the involvement of significant numbers of doctors in potentially dangerous or illegal activity, we might expect that the medical profession to be deeply concerned with identifying those in its fraternity whose excesses should mark them for elimination.  However, if we judge from statistics of state boards of review or hospital certification committees, such concern is rarely expressed in any official way.  The number of doctors whose licenses have been revoked for cause -- even in the face of conclusive evidence of malpractice, incompetence, or mental incapacity -- is minuscule.  In an average year, fewer than two hundred are eliminated from a profession with numbers in the hundreds of thousands.  
There is an unspoken commandment in the medical profession: "speak no evil of a colleague." Those who violate this rule are in far greater danger of financial harm than their brethren who have stood rightly accused before their peers, only to be permitted to move quietly into other hospitals or other states.  
My personal experience with the medical profession has thankfully been limited.  As a child, I spent three days in abject terror in a hospital, having my tonsil s removed. I survived my quota of childhood diseases.  A doctor stitched up a dent that Daniel added to my skull.  In later years, a doctor's error in closing a wound on fingers run through a power saw cost me days of pain from infected stitches.  
When I was fifteen, I twisted my spine in an accident.  To deal with this difficulty, my parents committed a heresy that probably saved me considerable later trouble.  They took me to an osteopath (a medical doctor with extra training resembling that of a chiropractor).  The doctor twisted my spine to straighten the misalignment that he found there and repeated the procedure a few days later when muscle spasms hampered my mobility.  I've since been told that a "normal" orthopedist would probably have put me in traction in a clinic or hospital for several days.  However, under less conventional treatment, I got better in a few weeks without impoverishing my uninsured family.  
The family had little to do with the surgeons.  Though the protection of our Christian healing ministry was not always effective, we at least did not believe in submitting ourselves to the medicos without well established cause.  The common cold got no antibiotics in our household.  
I also remember my grandfather's relations with the profession.  Though I doubt he taught them very much, observation of some of his tribulations with the doctors taught me quite lot. As he reached his late seventies, Gramps increasingly became a candidate for the kind of health care recommended by modern doctors.  He had high blood pressure and was a bit thin, under weight standards applied to younger men.  Though he got a lot of exercise on his long walks about town, he had other less healthful habits.  He smoked a pack of cigarettes every day and chewed tobacco.  He drank a quart of whiskey every week of his adult life.  He "got about" as he called it, and was rumored to have an occasional live-in girlfriend.  
The local police knew the old man well and seemed to like him.  They picked him up on his late night strolls, when the combination of his high blood pressure and one too many celebrations left him sitting on a street curb several blocks from home.  The taxi service they offered was most of the time graciously accepted.  
Gramps' personal habits rarely caused him trouble with the medical profession.  Though he went through a yearly physical examination for the prescription of his blood pressure medicine, this was about the only contact he had with doctors.  He made certain that in this one exception, he was well protected.  He patronized an older doctor who had grown up in the same region as Gramps.  The "exam" consisted primarily of listening to Gramps' heart and questioning him carefully about how he was feeling.  The doctor's attitude seemed to be "if it works, don't fix it." For Gramps' high blood pressure, he prescribed the lowest dosage that he believed would do any medical good.  
There was one doctor visit, however, when Gramps encountered a few problems.  His regular practitioner had gone on vacation and referred Gramps to a younger colleague just entering practice in the medical group.  The new doctor was a creature of an entirely different species.  He subjected Gramps to a battery of blood tests, an X-ray, and the indignity of a prostate examination.  He proposed an immediate increase in Gramps' medication. The young doctor questioned the old man about his diet, smoking, and drinking habits.  At the end of this interview, he was blunt: Gramps had to give up tobacco entirely and at least cut down on his drinking.  He needed more regular rest.  He should stop messing around with women half his age before his activities prompted a stroke or a galloping case of the Clap.  
Gramps left the office, a troubled man. Two weeks later, Gramps got an appointment with his regular doctor.  My mother was present to hear the exchange that unfolded.  Gramps poured out his tale of woe to the old sawbones.  He was nervous and upset, he said.  This young whelp was trying to take away from him the only things that made life enjoyable. Doc sympathized.  He called in his younger colleague for a consultation with Gramps. 
The new doctor was called on the carpet.  "Son, if you try to take away this old man's smokes and his chawin' tobacco and his quart of Kentucky God-Awful, you'll succeed in killing him within the year.  If you raise his drug dosage, the first thing you know, he won't enjoy his socializing with the ladies and he'll be too dizzy to take the walks he needs.  That might be a good prescription for a younger man, but not here.  The next time he comes in for his examination, let's make it a point for me to do his workups.  In the meantime, you leave him the heck alone.  He knows what's good for him..." 
Gramps lived to the age of 83, dying quietly in his sleep after a short illness.  He told close relatives that he had pretty much accomplished what he set out in life to do, and wouldn't greatly mind if the Creator "took a mind" to send him on to other business.  Somehow, I think the Creator may have heard him, even if a few of His medical servants on earth did not.  
It seems to me that Gramps' experience suggests something fundamental about modern medicine: our medical prophets are mostly unaware that they administer a myth under the label of "science".  They have grown just as fascinated as the rest of us with the flashing lights and trembling indicator needles at modern medicine's altar.  They have fallen victim with the rest of us to the conviction that a little technology -- or perhaps a lot of technology -- is capable of curing any ill and that all ills should be so treated.  
Physicians of an earlier era at least recognized that there were limits to their knowledge, even if they were not always wise in observing such limits.  Newer doctors whose dedication to technology approaches religious fervor are too often unaware of their own limits and of the natural variations between individual patients.  Rushing to apply the tools of a machine age, medicine has too often lost awareness of individual needs, in its search for "golden averages" by that to measure and calibrate populations.  Individuals are transformed into sets of data on a record and then ignored as people.  
The doctor too often analyzes the record instead of the patient.  Righteous in their pride and convinced of the technical superiority of their knowledge, some of our modern practitioners suffer from a degree of professional and personal arrogance that borders on downright obnoxious.  One of my first and most memorable exposures to this attitude was on the occasion of my daughter Caroline's birth.  
As soon as Ellen learned that she was pregnant, she began a program of pre-natal examinations by a gynecologist.  Her diet was watched to be sure she did not gain too much weight -- though her doctor never explained just how we might determine what "too much" was.  The development of the baby was monitored carefully.  These services were provided by an older doctor who initially impressed Ellen as being sensible and competent.  We were to see, however, that first impressions are not always accurate.  
When Ellen decided to bear Ellen as much as possible by "natural" methods, we began to see hesitation from the medical community.  We found a local chapter of the La Leche League, an organization that promotes breast feeding and gives moral support to mothers who wish to use it.  There was also a local training program in Childbirth Without Fear.  We learned of both programs through the Red Cross.  Ellen's doctor could only refer us, as he had little contact with either group.  For several weeks, Ellen and I learned about techniques for breath control and muscular relaxation in childbirth, supervised by a Red Cross volunteer.  The group leader had had three children using such methods, the last of that was delivered at home.  However, as we explored further in the direction of natural childbirth, we encountered active resistance from medical professionals in our area.  
We were located on the outskirts of Boston.  Since Ellen expected a January birth, we found that our options for childbirth assistance were severely limited. There were simply no trained midwives available. Ellen's doctor strongly discouraged childbirth at home.  Another physician whom we consulted, indicated that in any season other than winter, he might have been willing -- but he could not support us during periods when weather might delay an ambulance.  Thus we were forced to plan for the birth at a small hospital a few minutes from our home along a well maintained snow route.  It did not occur to us at the time to ask why roads considered safe for us to reach the hospital quickly, were not considered safe for ambulances to reach us in similar time.  
We visited the hospital to learn more of their programs for child birth assistance and newborn care.  We were shown what was then regarded as an innovation: birthing roans located near the operating room in the pediatric ward.  There, properly supervised husbands and wives were permitted to bring infants into the world "naturally", but with nearby access to all of the tools of modem technology. 
We then asked about a living-in arrangement for mother and baby.  Learning that Ellen wished to keep her child in her room for the duration of their stay in the hospital, the chief pediatric nurse reacted with considerable hostility.  Such procedures were under consideration at the hospital for the first time, and might or might not be available to Ellen.  It would depend on whether there were few enough babies on the ward for the nurses to "afford the extra work" that this arrangement might involve.  
After the months of our preparation, Caroline decided to come into the world.  We made an early morning drive through the snow to the hospital.  Ellen was dilated several centimeters when we arrived, and the baby was near emergence.  
As we checked Ellen into the birthing room, we learned that the doctor who attended us would not be the same physician whom Ellen had been seeing for the past seven months.  Ellen's primary doctor had left a few days before on a hunting trip.  A colleague took over his medical practice for the interim.  We met the new doctor for the first time when he was called to the hospital.  He was a total unknown to us.  The doctor examined Ellen and listened for Caroline's heartbeat.  As he watched in silence, I timed Ellen's contractions and reminded her of the rhythm of her breathing.  It appeared that the baby was nearing birth.  At this stage, however, a hitch developed in the process.  After four hours in labor, the doctor decided that the baby must be positioned incorrectly.  He believed she was facing to the rear, though she had dropped into the birth canal and was otherwise properly placed.  She was large.  He advised Ellen to move into the operating theater where the baby could be helped along with forceps.
The Doctor advised Ellen to accept a mild anesthetic to help her cope with the pressure of the child, which she accepted.  An hour later, mother and child were moved into the operating roan.  I was halted at the door by a nurse who informed me that the doctor did not allow untrained participants in "his" operating theater.  
During the hours that Ellen spent in a recovery room coming out of anesthesia, Caroline lay in a warmed bassinette in the nursery.  Three hours after birth, she was taken briefly to lie on her mother's breast and several hours later she was moved into Ellen's room.  We first saw her as a squirming red bundle with two large bruises on her scalp.  
In the two days Ellen remained in the hospital, Caroline began to suck.  She was given a little water as Ellen waited for her breasts to freshen.  The nurses asked rather skeptically whether Ellen wouldn't prefer to start the child on a formula.  She was expecting to return to work in only a few months, wasn't she? They seemed a bit peeved when Ellen replied that she intended to give her baby the best beginning she could.  
We paid our hospital bills ($500 in 1971) and took the baby home .  During the next two weeks, we were assisted by an older lady who came to us from the La Leche League.  A retired nurse who loved kids, she was a parental gold mine in this initial period.  She cleaned, cooked, helped Ellen and I learn to care for Caroline and generally reassured us in the unfamiliar business of being parents of a newborn.  She also informed us of some of the realities of modern medical care, including ways in that the attending doctor had probably gone a bit wrong during Caroline's delivery.  
The first mistake had been long before the delivery, on the part of Ellen's regular gynecologist.  Once an approximate date of birth had been projected, the doctor could have had the courtesy to refer to his calendar and note the proximity of his regular hunting vacation.  Of course, babies do not always come on time.  However, if there was doubt as to his availability, it would have been appropriate for him to at least introduce Ellen and me to the backup physician.  What the doctor did instead was to assume that any surgeon would be competent to do the necessary work.  Any alienation that this assumption might create in the prospective mother and father was presumed unimportant.  
When the stranger who delivered Caroline first palpitated Ellen's belly, he should have been able to determine the position of the child -- and most likely would have been if he had ever seen her before.  Even when Caroline's position was discovered, the doctor might have avoided a forceps delivery under anesthesia.  The baby could have been turned with Ellen fully conscious, and she could then have pushed the child out.	Preferring to "operate" rather than assist, the doctor instead moved into "his" theater, rejecting me as an unknown quantity and therefore a risk factor in an environment where he was otherwise in control.  
What Ellen, Caroline, and I experienced is probably similar to situations many people continue to find in medically supervised childbirth. Though attitudes have changed in recent years, change has been slow and uneven.  Despite giving lip service to the heal thy desire of both mother and father to participate in birthing, many in the medical profession continue to do everything in their power to assure that birth will occur with one party unconscious and the other waiting in anxious ignorance outside the operating roan door.  For the less than five percent of all births that display problems of the type Caroline had, over ninety percent of births take place in hospitals.  There, the doctor is in control.  
It should be added that in the hospital too, the chances are generally greater that infections will occur in surgically controlled natural processes like childbirth.  Births that occur at home have a better survival rate, with less impairment for the mother or child due to complications.  Even allowing for the fact that difficult births are generally sent to hospitals, there may be another factor involved in this record of performance: hospitals are quite simply among the dirtiest places in the world! 
As hospital costs have risen in recent years, there has been a well documented trend of cutbacks in non-technical areas like house cleaning, in order to afford new hardware and technical specialists.  Several studies of hospital hygiene in the late 1970's suggested that one result of these cutbacks -- particularly in larger facilities -- has been that the level of infectious bacteria in hospitals is significantly higher than in the average hare. Even where sheets are sterilized properly and often, it is much less common for mattresses and walls to be cleaned regularly.  Likewise, a major carrier of contamination between the very ill and the relatively healthy is the gauze mask worn by some doctors themselves.  Another important avenue is the unwashed hands of doctors doing daily rounds from patient to patient.  
In the reading I have done in recent years on medicine and health care, I have seen confirmed time after time, the proposition that modern medicine and its adherents are wading deeper and deeper into a bottomless swamp.  Costs have risen so high that even the most dedicated patients are given pause.  It is decidedly unclear that these costs have been accompanied by a general betterment of health, despite well publicized benefits to a few patients who would otherwise have died or remained impaired.  The contribution of modern medical technique to life expectancy pales beside the much more important effects of improved sanitation, treatment of water supplies, and attention to healthful exercise and nutrition.  
Death itself has become a cause celeb' for the critics of modern medicine.  Medicine has become the custodian of legions of vegetable people who lie abandoned in nursing homes or plugged into machines in geriatric wards.  Too often, medicine succeeds in making death not only hard -- that for many people it would be anyway -- but also undignified and desperately alone, that it need not be.  Fearful of being sued by the avaricious or religious relatives of some patients, doctors refuse to be agents of the natural process of death for any patients, including lucid souls who beg for release.  
It is my belief that much of the crisis of modem medicine has evolved from a cause to that few doctors and even fewer patients would admit: in the past 30 years, we have built layer upon layer of medical service and technology on a foundation of money.  That money came from Federal programs such as Medicare, intended to help people who needed but could not afford medical care.  However, our good intentions have foundered on a forgotten principle of political economics: you can bet that any activity that is subsidized by government is going to become a growth industry.  More health care money equals more health care providers.  More money does not automatically equal more health.  
Another uncomfortable truth about medicine in our age is that the great bulk of our medical expenses are incurred not in the promotion of health, but in vain attempts to repair the damages of a lifetime of unhealthful behavior.  Some studies estimate that over half of American medical expense occurs during the last year of life -- under conditions where the prospect of recovery is frequently quite unlikely and is known to be unlikely before treatment is ever begun.  
America's greatest killers are now heart disease and cancer.  The evidence is conclusive that by far the largest number of American heart attacks is caused by a diet that is grossly too high in saturated fats, refined sugars, and cholesterol.  Much of our colorectal cancer may be related to a deficiency of dietary fiber.  Compounding our too-rich, too-fat diet, is a general aversion to regular physical exercise.  Nearly all of our lung cancer is a result of smoking.  AIDS, our most recent epidemic crisis, is also, in a different sense, a "life style disease". In large measure, we are literally killing ourselves, and then asking medicine to intervene after the damage has been done.  
Modern medicine, it seems to me, is approaching not only an economic crisis, but also a more fundamental crisis in confidence.  On the one hand, society seems to suffer from a case of technology-gone-mad, in its ever more complicated efforts to diagnose and cure illness. On the other, we are challenged to realize that a large number of illnesses can be avoided by non-medical means, if we are willing to change personal habits.  But are we willing? That isn't clear yet.  
In the meantime, great resentment builds toward doctors and their assistants; toward the wealth and isolation of this privileged class; toward those who have, so to speak, "led us down the garden path" to an illusory salvation in modem science.  Missing from the discussion are harder questions: how did this mess happen?  Were we all taken in by the flim-flam man and his snake oil? Or would it be fair to say that the victims of this mayhem have cooperated in its creation?  
I personally find it altogether too easy to lump medical patients into one group called victims and medical professionals into another group called villains.  For all of its fallacies and occasional excesses, medicine attracts to itself people who genuinely wish to heal and to help others.  Some of our practitioners succeed in this desire despite any misdirection heaped upon them by their education.  Those who do not reach this worthy goal may be accounted victims as much as the rest of us.  
I wrote earlier of what I called a "psychotherapeutic priesthood" having developed following the elimination of guiding figures of authority in daily life.  I would propose now that the same phenomenon has created a surgical priesthood with even greater prestige and power.  Doctors have become respected figures despite their mistakes, partly because our culture needed figures to revere and respect.  This particular priesthood has simply learned to wear white laboratory coats over its purple vestments.  
The rapid pace of human history has forced a lot of us to try to become rational thinkers before we were truly ready.  Faced with the loss of our innocence to science, we have invented a new set of mythic stories and adapted a rational-sounding language to disguise our irrational motives and expectations.  Doctors have developed their Latin incantations into a high art, as they have become our confessors and the instruments of our absolution.  It matters little that the underlying human ailments that these incantations supposedly name and treat, are sometimes no closer to resolution than before we applied the fancy names.  
When a machine age fractured families and communities into fragments manageable enough to fit into an assembly line, people learned to respect -- and at the edges of awareness, perhaps even to worship -- the machine.  It should not surprise us that medicine employs so many machines.  The hardware has become necessary to our respect for its masters.  Without machines, doctors would have been only another group of itinerant clergy.  
Thus, I find I must resist the simplistic view of the world that prompts some commentators to rise up in righteous wrath and point the finger of accusation at "those people who did it to us".  Even when events actually produce a villain who can properly be accused, we forget that the villain had customers who wanted to believe.  Much of the time, conflicts that we label as "us against them" are in truth more a matter of "us against us".  A mythology may be told by story tellers, but the story tellers have an audience.  That audience is you and me.  
-- Wise Men, Scientists, and Teachers True –
So far, I have suggested that a lot of our medical and mental doctors are involved in promoting a kind of folk tale; a story about human affairs that contains a degree of truth, but probably a different kind of truth than advertised.  I will suggest now that some other kinds of doctor are practicing mythologists as well.  There is good reason for you to remain at least a little skeptical of the advice of many "experts" concerning the nature of the world around us and of our society.  If you become skeptical enough of the experts, you may begin the difficult process of trying to evaluate what they say, rather than listening uncritically to "the wise".  As fraught with error as individual thought can be, it seems to me superior to a comfortable and unthinking collective acquiescence.  
We live in an American society that has aptly been characterized as a "meritocracy".  The term implies a social order based on earned merit or value.  The Great American Myth is indeed, the self-made person who works his (or more recently, her) way to the top of the social anthill.  We wish to believe that our most prominent leaders and thinkers have come to be in such positions because they are uniquely gifted and capable.  We hope that those whom we empower as our experts are uniquely wise.  
Part of the time -- to my considerable amazement -- American social life actually seems to work this way.  Our system of relatively free enterprise enables hard working people with good ideas to improve their lot.  Part of the time, however, our system does not operate entirely (or even mostly) on earned merit. Sometimes our leaders became prominent not out of any particular competence, but because they happen to have wavy hair and a glib tongue.  Sometimes our experts are offered their expert status because they tell us what we ask to hear -- or worse, simply because they are "educated".  
Americans are among the most vocal people in the world concerning the value of an education.  Since 1950, we have believed that a four year college degree is the surest ticket to personal success.  We depend on the degree as the great separator, the great evaluator, the decisive mark of a person's value in the labor marketplace and elsewhere.  This is, of course, a rather stupid way to value people.  
Though we would like to believe education builds both character and wisdom, it requires only a little observation to learn that some of our most educated people are among the least wise.  It is quite possible to become lettered without ever becoming truly literate; to learn tools of communication without ever being forced to develop something worth saying.  I observe that this occurs fairly frequently.  
Our mass concentration on education as a means to evaluate persons has produced some really strange distortions in our public life. This is particularly true when one compares our dependency on education with our expectations concerning success.  
Is it not true that most Americans fear for their own or their offspring's success if we lack a college degree? Is it not also true that after many of us complete this coveted license, success eludes us because there are no jobs for such over-qualified people as us? More basically, how many people do you know who want to become something called a "manager"? We have become a nation of managers, aspiring to status as white collar workers in corporations.  However, if you examine what a white collar worker actually does in an industrial organization, you learn that he or she is usually a part of the financial overhead that productive enterprises must endure in order to employ blue collar workers who actually produce things that others will buy.  This is success -- to become part of the overhead?
I doubt our aspirations will change overnight. Even if we suspect something is a bit strange in the American preoccupation with diplomas, for the time being we will continue to use such instruments to decide who is employed, who is elevated to moral and social leadership, who deserves to be called an expert.  I suspect we rely on educational credentials primarily because nobody has yet come up with a better way to identify the most elusive of human traits: potential.  If a person has the persistence to survive the obstacle course of his or her degree, we can at least hope that the aspiring job candidate will grow into whatever size shoes we throw at him or her.  
Regardless, I wish we would someday get around to asking ourselves just what it is that we are teaching our soon-to-be experts about the world and about their own areas of supposed expertise.  This is a pet peeve of mine, I admit.  In my profession, I meet some delightful and creative people.  I also meet some of the most Gawd-awful dumb-bells! These latter folks seem to have passed through school without having acquired the slightest idea of what it was for.  
I have met people who literally revel in the dandy technical hardware they are designing, but who couldn't for the life of them tell you what earthly good it will do anybody.  I have supervised engineers who spent weeks or months grinding out a solution on a computer, without bothering to ask first if the problem they've been given is even real, much less whether its formulation is logical or the solution intuitively obvious without all of this grinding. Engineers and scientists are peculiar this way. We are notoriously task-oriented.  We sometimes forget to ask if the tasks mean anything.  
An engineer in graduate school spends an enormous amount of time studying several varieties of applied mathematics.  What he (or in recent years, "she") doesn't learn very well and later has to learn for him/herself, is that the math has some really important limitations.  Let me illustrate with an example.  
Let us say we are concerned about a moderately well-behaved object like a two million ton rock, flying through space toward the vicinity of the earth.  As science fiction buffs might fantasize, this rock is getting inconveniently close to the atmosphere and our Government wants to deflect it before it falls on something embarrassing, like Manhattan.  So we launch a Space Shuttle and put a few rocket engines on the surface of this monster and get ready to light a match.  One might now be interested in determining where in the Universe this rock is going to travel when the "go" switch is turned on.  A large crater in the midst of Moscow would also be embarrassing after all this fuss and bother.  
So we ask the engineers to tell us exactly where the rockets might throw the rock.  They then have an interesting problem.  Unless we have been very careful in placing the rocket motors, the engineers must solve a set of at least twelve complex mathematical equations.  I say "at least" because the number will grow considerably if we have been unlucky enough to draw a rock that changes its shape or rigidity under the thrust of the rockets.  It either of these two conditions happens, we're up a creek without a paddle: computer solutions for this kind of problem tend to be rather approximate.  Approximations, as we all know, give politicians who want to know "for sure", the hives! 
But we'll assume the rock is well behaved.  The math is still pretty complicated.  In its most general form, it is highly unusual for something of this type to be fully solved on a computer, though it should be theoretically possible to do so.  For most problems smaller than the hypothetical rock over Moscow, such solutions consume too much time and money.  
So the engineers "simplify".  They ignore about half of the relationships as "insignificant".  Having done that, they get a pretty good approximate idea of where the rock will go when the rockets are turned on.  They also remind you politely that they are not legally responsible for "acts of God" or errors in the data you have given them about the rock.  You turn on the rockets at your own risk, hoping fervently that they have checked to see that the moon won't get in the way, either.  
I have no great complaint with the approximate nature of an engineer's work.  A lot of quite useful things have been done with the rough tools we have.  What bothers me more is that many laymen and not a few engineers have become fascinated with the appearance of exactitude that attends mathematical solution of problems.  The expectation of exactitude can prompt the politician who commands the rocket ignition, to crucify the poor bastard in the computer center who did the best he could with the data and methods he had, when things don't quite turn out right.  When the engineer himself has such expectations, the result can be disasters such as the Veranzo Narrows bridge collapse on the Hudson River, or destruction of a Space Shuttle with all crew aboard during takeoff on a cold morning.  
We sometimes stubbornly insist on trying to pare problems down to the size that can be solved with our mathematical tools, before bothering to apply the most powerful tools of all: horse sense and judgment.  For the latter, there ain't a substitute known to man.  
In the academic courses I have taken for three degrees, I must have spent over half of my time trying to learn mathematical methods that typically don't work very well on any problem large enough to be really challenging.  I learned a lot of things that would ultimately have little to do with what I actually do as an engineer.  I was immersed in thermodynamics and fluids and college physics and math so far beyond differential equations that you can't see the light under the exit door any more.  
It does not surprise me, however, to learn that of all the engineering graduates being produced by colleges and universities these days, a large fraction of engineers rarely do very much that is directly related to their courses.  It's more likely that within ten years, the engineer will be managing other engineers -- and doing so with a distinct lack of formal preparation for business or personnel management.  Why, will somebody please tell me, do tens of thousands of struggling neophytes have to wade through circuit design in order to produce a few hundred first-rate circuit designers? Do we really have to jump through this many hoops to I earn how to think? 
I suppose I should be grateful.  As an engineer, I was at least spared the obstacle course that medical doctors go through.  Those poor souls must endure a minimum of four years of "pre-med" study before they are allowed to begin anything directly related to the skills they eventually want to practice.  They must then cram six years of education into three years of medical school and two years of hospital residency, at 80 hours per week.  It is not surprising that so many doctors enter practice without having been exposed to a serious course on the ethics of patient relationships, or the mechanics of business accounting.  
It seems to me that doctors could be a great deal better balanced as people and considerably more competent as doctors, if the education system started them out in nursing school for three years and then polished them with three years of medical skill training.  Regrettably, educators don't seem likely to try this approach any time soon.  Doctors find the idea insulting.  
The educators do seem to have a rationale for the breadth of studies required of engineers, doctors, and other professional people.  The idea seems to be that since one cannot predict exactly what a highly trained person will ultimately do for a living, you have to expose him or her to a bit of everything and hope that enough sticks to provide a starting point for I earning on the job.  There is some sense in this approach, but there are also some problems.  
If we are really determined to turn out generalists, why can't we do a better job of teaching them to think creatively -- as contrasted to "analytically".  Why do so many highly educated people flinch from asking whether it makes any sense to build the latest widget, before charging off to seek public funds for their enterprise? Somehow, apologies for the open-ended nature of knowledge do not satisfy me on this account.  Too much of the product that inventors turn out is merely a repackaging of ideas that are already well known.  
I also have difficulty not only with the breadth of what we teach, but also with its literal accuracy.  I consider it amazing how much mythology we teach under the misnomer "science".  It is also amazing how unscientific a lot of our so-called scientists can be when called upon to defend their pet dogmas.  
At least one glaring example of this problem comes to mind.  Of course, I do not suggest that one example proves any general rule.  However, one case can suggest that there are other examples lying in wait for us, a little further down the road.  
We dutifully expose our kids to an explanation of the development of the world and of the human species, under the general title of "Darwin's theory of evolution".  Educators scream in righteous rage when religionists try to invade their turf, demanding equal time for the "Creationist" view.  Yet the educators are conspicuously silent when challenged on a central point of their teachings: there is almost no evidence in the geologic record to support Darwin's contention that evolution occurred "gradually" through many tens of millions of years.  
Our rocks do indeed display the increasingly complex forms predicted by theories of evolution, and there is ample evidence of the millions of years over that some species have existed and evolved.  However, the geologic record does not show us the myriad small changes and subtle variations that presumably should link one species to the next in its evolutionary chain.  Instead, we see a record disrupted by many sharp discontinuities.  Entire species are wiped out of the chain, seemingly in a single generation, to be replaced by species radically different from those that came before.  There is evolution in the record, but it is far from gradual.  It could rightly be called catastrophic.  
To expand on this concept, I would refer the reader to another book: Immanuel Velikovski 's Earth in Upheaval.  Written in the 1940's, this work has since been republished several times in paperback.  Velikovski points out in considerable detail, the evident failure of geologic evidence to fit a theory of gradual evolution.  When the book was first published, much of the scientific community spent years trying to discredit Velikovski and suppress his work.  The community was later without apology when many of Velikovski predictions proved correct, as it became possible to test them.  
One may agree or disagree with Creationists concerning the ultimate Agency behind the development of life on our planet.  But if God decided to create the world in a single stroke, then she seems to have wiped the slate a few times during a period of hundreds of millions of years.  The fossil records do not support a five thousand year version of creation, any more than they do a gradual mutation of all higher forms.  It has been only quite recently that paleontology has proposed a more consistent theory of evolution: that of "punctuated equilibrium".  Largely without acknowledging their debt to Velikovski, modem researchers of the geologic past are now acknowledging that species change seems to proceed rapidly in brief periods, separated by relatively longer periods of quiet. These brief periods of rapid change suspiciously resemble the "catastrophes" described by Velikovski.  
In an age when we seem to revere scientists, I am disappointed by the unscientific thinking that I see on the part of some who laid claim to the title.  As Velikovski pointed out, the method of science does not demand that a theory be morally "good".  It only demands that theory provide a consistent explanation for a body of careful observations. If one finds an observation that contradicts the theory, then there are three options: (1) we can show that the observation is not related to the theory, (2) we can expand the theory to fit new data, or (3) we can throw out the whole mess and start over with a different explanation of the data.  
Too often in practice, what actually happens is that scientists simply ignore new data that challenges their theoretical dogma, until they reach retirement or are confronted with public censure.  Very occasionally, scientists even resort to fraudulent claims to protect their hard-won professional reputations and Government research grants.  
It seems to me that a society should be able to demand of its scientists at least some slight measure of what is called the scientific method.  By this I mean that scientists should be able to demonstrate two things.  First, we should be able to show clearly that ideas proposed for general acceptance by non-scientists, do actually pertain to the body of observations that such theories supposedly explain.  Scientists should then be willing to make predictions about the real world that can be tested in practice.  If an idea cannot be tested, we should regard it as a theology or a speculation, not a theory.  
This is not quite, of course, the way the real world works.  We continue to accept the proclamations of those whom society has elevated to status as its leading thinkers -- and then sit in embarrassed silence when what they say does not fit our own observations.  The other side of this sad record is that the few of us who are brave enough to propose new ideas are just as likely as the experts to demand acceptance on faith, rather than demonstration.  Idiots, one and all! 
Some of the pronouncements of the scientists seem to fly in the face of large bodies of personal experience shared by many our people.  There are at least a couple of very common  examples of this problem: psychic phenomena and flying saucers (UFOs) . Those who seriously propose that either of these phenomena might be real are either laymen who are disregarded or trained scientists about to be ridden out of the scientific community on a rail.  Authorities supposedly interested in the orderly observation of the world stubbornly exclude even from consideration, events that they have not personally recorded on instruments.  Worse, they exclude data they have observed, if it does not square with their prejudices.  
Concerning phenomena that have been called "psychic", the scientific community seems without limit to its scorn: "poppycock" is a commonly used term.  Though they give credit to a few psychics as sincere in their beliefs, scientists have almost uniformly condemned the full range of psychic phenomena as falsehood.  Because such occurrences do not register on technical instruments, telepathy, clairvoyance, psycho-kinesis, precognition and dousing cannot be real, they say.  What is forgotten in this condemnation is that the phenomena continue to occur and to be observed with sufficient frequency to be accepted widely by common people, as real.  We may accurately argue that clairvoyance is not understood.  But I don't think we can argue convincingly that it doesn't happen.  
The physical scientists conveniently forget that some of the forces in their own theories are observable but not yet measurable or theoretically explained.  For instance, there is no scientifically satisfying explanation for the phenomenon of gravity. It simply "is that way".  We know gravity exists. Einstein and others spent the greater part of their lives trying to develop a General Field Theory that relates gravity to other commonly observed field effects such as magnetism.  Einstein failed, as have his students.  That doesn't keep scientists from believing in gravity.  The phenomenon is there, waiting for illumination by facts missing from our present theories.  
In the case of flying saucers, both scientists and laymen are perhaps less certain of their ground.  Rather respectable people employed in responsible positions have seen UFOs.  Groups trained as critical observers have seen objects from airplanes and on radar screens that behaved in ways impossible to flying machines we know how to build.  Though many sightings can be explained as misinterpretations of natural phenomena, there remains a body of cases that are well documented, convincing, and inexplicable.  On these strange occurrences, some scientists wisely remain mute, awaiting more evidence.  Other supposedly wise men are highly vocal in their derision.  
Discussion of psychic phenomena and UFOs is made difficult by the fact that many reports undoubtedly are based on a desire to believe, a desire for personal notoriety, or an impulse to commit fraud.  A few advocates of UFOs must candidly be assessed as nut cases.  Some of the so-called psychics make far too much money from their wild talents to be considered credible.  Understanding is far from clarified, however, by the lamentable habit of supposedly scientific observers of labeling as crazy people, all who see UFOs or experience psychic phenomena.  Sometimes I suspect that the rarest phenomenon in the realm of science is an open mind.  
I'm really not sure of just what lies at the roots of the experiences that so many people report.  I've never personally seen a UFO.  However, a couple of people whom I trust as stable, well-informed, thoroughly rational observers have told me they have seen such objects visually and on radar screens.  As a radar systems engineer, I have a pretty good understanding of natural versus artificial phenomena seen on a radar screen.  Atmospherics and ocean skip phenomena do not produce blips that turn at right angles at a constant apparent speed above 2,000 knots.
On psychic phenomena, I can be much more affirmative: my life has been crowded by such occurrences for over thirty years.  More than once I have been saved from serious harm by what I regarded as "unreasonable premonitions".  Two very close friends (my wife Anne, and Jean) report they have received waking visitations from some type of astral projection, or ghost of mine.  My mother and I, though widely separated in geography, frequently were mentally in some form of contact.  Once, she complained to my father of having a sudden cold chill and a brief "flash" or visualization of me in some kind of trouble.  A day later we confirmed by telephone the precise moment when I had slipped and fallen (harmlessly, as it turned out) from a snow-covered trail.  She had not been told of my plan to hike in the snow.  No possible process of subconscious association could have accounted for her reaction.  
At times I have detected the closely held secrets of complete strangers.  Some people have become very uneasy with this seeming ability to "read their minds".  On one occasion, I walked into an unfamiliar department of an organization where I worked.  I exchanged a few words with a secretary.  After she called one of the department's engineers to escort me into her building, I stood waiting for a few seconds.  For no apparent reason, I found myself voicing the most outrageous fantasy to this lady whom I did not know: ''Miss, I don't know quite why I have this feeling, but I think you've gotten one heck of an emotional beating, recently.  If my feeling is accurate, you might benefit from sitting down with a chaplain..." Her eyes at first grew wide, and then tears spilled over.  As a co-worker comforted her, she briefly related that her boyfriend had struck her on the previous evening after a prolonged emotional argument.  I had accurately seen her state of mind -- without verbal cues and after perhaps five or ten seconds of observation.  How? You tell me.  
My wife of fifteen years complains that by the time we are "old married people" I'll be holding both sides of most of our conversations.  Repeatedly, she will open her mouth to speak, only to have me utter precisely the words she had in mind.  Frequently, we will both speak at the same time after a long silence, on the same subject -- unrelated to what we had been talking about, just before.  
 A considerable part of this kind of "mind reading" is no doubt based on subliminal cues pieced together from the physical posture, breathing and eye contact of others. Psychotherapy also teaches some of those tricks of observation.  Mixed in with cue-recognition, however, seems to be a trace of something less explainable. Incidents of unreasonable intuition or astral projection such as I've experienced with my wife and a few others, have been too detailed and too specific to facts that I could not have known by conventional means.  There seems to be some kind of erratic mental information transfer going on in my life.  I don't know quite what this phenomenon is "for", and it is certainly not subject to my conscious control, but I've grown accustomed to it.  
My experiences of something that seems to deserve the title "clairvoyance" have bordered on the outright weird.  I particularly recall an incident that occurred in summer camp when I was sixteen...  
Hindsight suggests that I must have been just a little crazy as a teenager.  Like a lot of other kids my age, I day-dreamed a lot, fantasized a lot, and got myself into continual scrapes and embarrassments.  I also flirted with physical danger.  I spent a lot of time clambering up and down pillars and cliffs of fractured granite surrounding the summer camp where I worked -- in tennis shoes, without benefit of technique or equipment.  My uninjured survival was mostly a matter of luck.  
On one of my rambles, I took along two companions: my newly adopted-by-me sister Irene, and her 17 year old female camper friend (a girl who most of the time answered to the unlikely moniker "Camper Number One").  We went on a day's outing through a region of rugged ravines that older and wiser heads would have avoided.  Reaching one of the lesser peaks by mid afternoon, we turned downward along a familiar creek bed, toward our camp dormitories and a hot shower.  
Tired, foot sore and sweaty, we stumbled along the broken rock in the bottom of the dry water course.  Turning a sharp corner in the stream, we came out into a natural small bowl of stone.  High walls surrounded us on both sides and a thick bed of leaves covered a wide, flat area of stream bed.  About half-way across this sunny area, I very suddenly froze almost at mid-step.  Irene and Camper stumbled up against my outstretched arms.  With my head cocked to one side, I listened, beginning to feel increasingly foolish. I spoke softly, "Something isn't right here.  .  ." After a few seconds, we had seen nothing.  With my face flaming in embarrassment, I continued down the creek.  I could feel the girl s behind me, exchanging perplexed looks.  
We walked further down the creek, around another sharp bend, down a dry waterfall and across a long gravel bed.  A hundred yards downstream from my first pause, we came to another narrowing of the creek.  A tall Birch tree shot up from the creek bottom, leaving only enough space to pass between the tree and surrounding high brush.  At the base of the tree lay a large pothole in the roots, washed by the creek.  To cross the hole, we would have to step down to the top of a boulder that rested in its midst, and stretch a long step to the far side.  
As I came to the edge of the shaded hole behind the Birch, I found in some way I could not explain, that I was certain I would not step downward into the dark.  As the girls again drew even with me, I pointed into the shade.  "This is what was wrong." 
"What do you mean, Little Brother?" said Irene.  "I don't see anything." I scooped up a handful of small pebbles and dropped them rattling into the hole.  Only then did a sharp buzzing draw the attention of Irene and Camper to the coiled rattlesnake lying in perfect camouflage on the boulder that would have been our stepping stone.  The snake's body was thicker than my wrist.  
We backed out of the narrow creek quickly, climbed around the blocked thoroughfare, and continued onward toward our dinner.  A few minutes later, I sat down to calm the quivering in my legs.  We never attempted a "scientific" explanation for the knowledge or instinct that halted me many yards from impending danger and again on its doorstep.  We were almost certainly too far from the sleepy reptile to hear it buzz when I stopped for the first time.  At the edge of the pothole, something more than sight deterred us.  For lack of a more quantitative explanation, we've chalked up the experience to Divine protection.  Something certainly happened.  In thirty-five years, I have found no neat explanation in common experience, for what this something was.  
So be it.  I'm comfortable with not knowing how I have learned some of the things that I seem to "know".  I'm willing to be embarrassed when a hunch goes astray. On balance, such hunches have been an enriching and protective experience.  Have I perhaps become guilty of inventing my own variety of folk tale, false art, or mythology? That is certainly possible.  But whatever this phenomenon is, it seems to work for me.  I have to respect that outcome, even if I'm not certain of how it has been produced.  
-- Glimmerings –
I've suggested to you that a sizable list of people whom you and I usually consider leaders in our culture, have reached this lofty status because they preach to us familiar and comforting fairy tales.  Many of the tales happen to be untrue.  Doctors, therapists, scientists, teachers, and other wise men and women quite often speak to common citizens from the midst of a swamp of contradictions.  
I suggest now that we will continue to listen to such preachments, for a variety of reasons.  A high degree of gullibility is one of those reasons, for some of us.  However, another element also enters into the situation: a gleam of pure gold shines forth from the garbage pile of outworn doctrines and dogmas that passes for truth and wisdom.  Under the mythologies lie fundamental moral truths.  Some of these truths are worth preserving.
We go to our doctors seeking healing and well being.  Much of the time, these conditions will result even when the treatments are themselves later demonstrated to be ineffective.  What happens in these cases? The real healer may prove to be a culprit known in the medical community as "placebo effect".  
For a wide range of ailments -- including some forms of cancer -- when a doctor gives patients a chemically inert pill with the assertion that "this will help you" some patients will report and experience less discomfort.  Depending on the condition treated and the study you refer to, the fraction of people who report such improvement varies from ten to as much as fifty percent.  
Though some physicians are uncomfortable with this admission, competent people in the medical community have long acknowledged that many patients come to doctors not for treatment so much as for reassurance.  The investment of personal trust and expectation that clients make in their doctors, accounts for part of the healing in doctors' prescriptions.  
Placebo effect is not limited to lesser ailments, nor is doctors the only ones who have capitalized on it to promote healing. Possibly the most controversial healers of our times are Christian Science Practitioners and their brethren in other religious faiths who heal by laying on of hands.  Before you scoff at the efficacy of religious healers, you would do well to remember that in several States, the services of a CS Practitioner are fully reimbursable by major medical insurance plans.  
I realize that committed believers in various religious healing faiths and committed scientists in the medical profession may by now be howling in outrage over such ideas as I offer here.  However, I suspect that both medical and religious healers are dealing with fundamentally the same mechanism.  There is growing evidence that most people can benefit from a natural healing process that they do for themselves without being aware of what they do.  The body itself may have a high degree of nonverbal wisdom.  When sought out and acted upon, this wisdom can positively act to keep us well -- a very different thing from "repairing us" after we get sick.  For an expansion on this theme, I heartily recommend another book: Noel Cousin's Anatomy of an Illness (W.W.  Norton and Company, Inc, NY, 1979).  
People inside and outside the ranks of medicine seem at last to be willing to investigate not only how we become unwell, but also what we can do to promote wellness as a normal state of being.  In part through so-called "holistic" medicine, healers of many backgrounds are seeking to reunite the mind, body, and spirit of the common man.  Though there are doubtless many fast-buck artists mixed in with the genuine geniuses, there is also a healthy interplay of competing ideas boiling in the pot.  I don't know if the stew is going to taste as good as it smells, but I have hopes.  
What seems to be emerging from the holistic health movement is a set of radically new directions not just in "health care", but in life care.  Physicians are saying more frequently that if you want to be well, you shouldn't organize your life around un-well behavior.  Greater emphasis is being placed on diet and exercise.  State and local laws are prohibiting tobacco smoke in public places.  Greater thought is being given to the ways we handle the stress of civilized life.  We are learning to apply such tools as meditation, creative visualization and bio-feedback.  A spiritual dimension is being admitted into health care, as physicians recognize prayer in its many forms to be a powerful healing and health-preserving tool.  
In psychology, it is harder for me to read signs of change.  I suspect many people continue to be defrauded by shrewd operators who pass among the true wise men and women .  Self-help counseling groups and weekend motivational seminars have become quite fashionable.  Really outrageous prices are being charged for teaching basic, simple-minded techniques of relaxation and coping.  Occasionally, a marginally stable person who enters such a seminar gets into real trouble as a consequence of the "treatment" received from an ill-trained, insensitive, or amoral therapist.  I may be more satisfied with the progress in this field when I can find statistics suggesting that the time and money spent by clients in serious therapy before "graduating", have been reduced generally.  
In education and the sciences, it is hard to escape the impression that major changes are just ar01.md the comer. Common people are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the failure of public education as a means of passing on wisdom to the young.  Now and then, we also question the veracity of the wisdom itself.  I suspect we may soon see major changes in what the young are taught, the places wherein they are taught and the training of our teachers.  The directions of change are still unclear, but a lower involvement of Federal government seems inevitable.  
The sciences are moving in directions that would require a far better prophet than me to predict.  However, an interesting phenomenon is occurring near the foundation of the physical sciences. We are beginning to ask very fundamental questions concerning the nature of matter and of perceived reality.  As these questions are examined, the language of physics begins increasingly to resemble the vocabulary of some Far Eastern religions.  Terms are being sought to describe relationships and mutual interactions, rather than one-way, cause-effect, linear reactions (for more on this subject, see the works of Fritjof Capra and Freeman Dyson, among others).  The new vocabulary may eventually change some of the ways in that common people perceive their world.  
On a more mundane level, I find that scientists as a group seem a little more humble than they used to be.  One hears "I'm not certain" a bit more often. The popularization of science has had a cautionary effect on the more obvious frauds and pretenders in the field.  These influences seem to me to act in healthy directions. 
On balance, I believe at least a few Americans have become more skeptical of our wise men and women, even if we aren't ready yet to do totally without them.  Seeds of doubt have been planted.  A rebellion against outworn ideas and forms seem to be growing, erratically.  The process is disorderly and sometimes frightening.  But there are people within this process who will yet deserve the designation "wise".  We are a long way from home free, but there is hope for us. There are glimmerings....