The Spiritual Path: Benefits and Pitfalls with Dan Millman and Ronald L Boyer Circle For Original Thinking

With the advent of the nuclear age, Western science reached the pinnacle of invention, but lacked a critical understanding of its underlying wisdom or purpose. Carl Jung framed the problem as “modern man in search of a soul.” When the Western mind turned outward, searching for what was missing, it first turned to the East. A trickle of Eastern gurus soon became a flood, and by the late 1960s, all sorts of gurus, roshis, rinpoches, and other teachers were promising some form of mastery of life - if only one followed their path. Many Americans embarked upon this quest for spirituality, mostly in California, and later across the nation. Our guests, Dan Millman and Ron Boyer, were at the forefront of the California movement. They not only embraced Eastern wisdom; they took an active part in remaking Western psychology–at the time mired in psychoanalysis and behaviorism–into a humanistic “third force” of psychology that expanded the discipline to include religion, spirituality, and self-actualization. Along the way, they discovered not only the benefits, but also the pitfalls, of embarking on a spiritual path. This is their story.