Sometime in the early-1980s, while waiting for the late-night movie to begin, I turned on The David Susskind Show. Featured were a group of homosexual men who said that thanks to a teaching called Aesthetic Realism, they realized that their sexual tendencies were the result of a maladaptation to the world. They claimed that following the teachings of Aesthetic Realism allowed them to live married, normal lives. Besides that, I only remember that its founder was a man named Eli Siegal. Siegal was an immigrant from Latvia under the Russian Empire and grew up in Baltimore.
When he was in his 20s he moved to New York and got involved in the poetry scene. He wrote many beautiful poems, including the shortest poem in the English language “One Question” written in 1924:
I-
Why?
In 1925 his poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” won first prize in The Nation magazine’s poetry contest. This attracted the attention of William Carlos Williams and later, Kenneth Rexroth, who acclaimed him as a genius. Siegal said his goal in the poem was to create a unity of what seemed like total opposites, for example, American Indian Tribal Wars, the weather, and French Symbolist poetry. These ideas of the unity of human experience led to the school of Aesthetic Realism.
Siegal summed his teachings in three points. "One—Man's greatest, deepest desire is to like the world honestly. Two—the one way to like the world honestly… is to see the world as the aesthetic oneness of opposites. Three—The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.”
An Aesthetic Realism center was established in Soho in New York; it’s still active. Its controversial homosexual reorientation teaching was suspended in 1990.
I’m now reading the first book he wrote on Aesthetic Realism called Self and World. In the preface, written by his wife, I came across the following statement: “I believe Self and World to be the greatest book ever written. If you think I am saying greater than the Bible or Shakespeare, yes, I am.” Outside of the value of the book, this remark struck me as one of a True Believer, one that could be made by an adept of any one of various schools of thought that propose The Answer.
There’s a lot of competition. L. Ron Hubbard claims the top prize for coming up with a philosophy-religion meant to answer all human questions, Scientology. I read his book Dianetics a few years ago. The terminology he uses, like Clear, Pre-Clear, Thetan, Engrams, Auditing, etc. gave an entertaining Space-Age feel to it as well, worthy of his other calling of sci-fi author. His ideas were interesting, particularly those dealing with overcoming ingrained negative ideas of oneself which cause us to waste our time and how to get what you want through aggressiveness training.
There’s also Aleister Crowley's Thelema. This too has a lot of terms involved with it: Adept, Initiate, Grade, Sex Magick, True Will, The Great Work. Crowley was talented at coming up with clever phrases such as “Every man and every woman is a star” or “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” There are Thelema Chapters called Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in various cities. I once attended a meeting here in Paris (where it’s classified as a cult and illegal) to learn about the group. I think Sex Magick attracted many people. Curiously, the couple doing the presentation didn’t correspond to what’s usually considered sexy, looking rather like middle-aged CPAs, but who knows what happens once the lights go down?
And there’s G.I. Gurdjieff, the Armenian Teacher who was active in New York and Paris in the 1930s-1940’s. He founded a school called The Work, or The Fourth Way. He too, had terms: Waking Sleep, Self-Remembering, Identification, The Chief Feature, The Moving Center, Mechanicalness, and The Real I, Food for the Moon, The Ray of Creation, The Law of Seven, etc. Like Siegal, Hubbard, and Crowley, Gurdjieff also wrote voluminously and with talent. His most famous book, Meetings with Remarkable Men was made into a film by Peter Brook.
In his teachings, he develops the idea that we’re asleep, and that real knowledge has been lost and it is the job of the True Teacher to find it again.
The list goes on of schools and their related terms: Helena Blavatsky —Theosophical Society (Root Races, Masters, Akasha, and Ascended Masters, Rudolf Steiner—Anthroposophical Society (Anthroposophy, Etheric Body, Astral Body, and Waldorf education), P. D. Ouspensky — developed his own Fourth Way groups after studying with Gurdjieff (higher centers, self-remembering, and esoteric evolution), Meher Baba—The Baba School (Avatar, sanskaras, and God-realization), Paramahansa Yogananda —Self-Realization Fellowship (Kriya Yoga, Self-realization, and Cosmic Consciousness), Sun Myung Moon—“Moonies” (Divine Principle and Blessing), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—Transcendental Meditation (higher states of consciousness), Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—(witnessing, Zorba the Buddha, and dynamic meditation), Roberto Assagioli—Psychosynthesis (subpersonalities, Higher Self, and will), Werner Erhard—EST i.e. Erhard Seminars Training (rackets, stories, and getting it), Ken Wilber—Integral Theory (AQAL, quadrants, lines, states, and stages), Sri Aurobindo—(Integral Yoga, Supermind, and evolution of consciousness).
And though it may ruffle the followers of the above, why not include Charles Manson? He had a group, “The Family.” and though he didn’t leave any books, he had teachings, giving long exegetical harangues to the “Family” about their role in the coming Apocalypse on a regular basis. He had terms, too: Helter Skelter, The Bottomless Pit, Being "One" or Ego Death, "No Sense Makes Sense," Death as Transformation.
A decisive moment for these movements comes when the Teacher dies. While the truth of the teachings is the ultimate proof of longevity of any school of thought, efficient organization, as in the case of Scientology, may also hold a key. But there are other more fundamental questions. Where do Teachers come from? What drives someone to teach others The One Truth? And where do the Followers come from?