Meeting Remarkable People

Wet, Writing In My Tent
May, `80

Well here I am again, eating Cheez Whiz, Bar-B-Q potato chips and
drinking the beer left over from yesterday. I didn't plan it this way,
but that's the rest of the story. It's raining.

To finish yesterday's cut short by darkness journal entry-- in my
three-day stay at JFKU, in addition to the classes already mentioned,
I attended two more. In the first one, we sat around and smelled test
tubes. The ingredients, or rather the odors, were supposed to heal
"wayward souls." I misread the schedule for the other class and got
there at about the same time it was letting out, but I still managed
to talk to a couple of the students, which brings me to my last
disappointment concerning JFKU.

I would have appreciated it very much if one of the students I had met at JFKU would
have offered me a place to sleep, (I tented in the trees behind the school
playground) or at least a shower, but that didn't happen. Besides lacking in
hospitality, the students I met seemed to be lacking in another way. It
wasn't that they weren't into the whole JFKU experience, indeed, the
consensus had it that this was the only place in the country where one
could get an accredited M.A. degree in mysticism. What bothered me was
that I didn't run across any extraordinary people. Instead, I found
financially struggling students enrolled in an extraordinary program.
Maybe I expected too much. Maybe it was stupid of me to expect to see
Ram Dass imitators walking around campus. I found no "guru type" people at JFKU.
However, before I left, I did find one "guru type" person.

On Wednesday, I took the Bart (bay area public transportation) to the
end of the line, and then hitched-hiked to Petaluma. I was going to
see Bill Fannin. Back at CMU, in a conversation with Larry Simmons
(Larry was the Time, Space, And Knowledge seminar facilitator), I
expressed a desire to seek a more spiritually oriented education. "If
you ever get to California," he said, "look up Bill Fannin." I figured
why pass up the opportunity, so there I was, in California, not far
from Petaluma, on my way to look up Bill Fannin.