A GLOBAL PRESENCE
At a Sheraton hotel outside Orlando were more than 40 people from all over the world. They included re-birthers, yoga teachers and past life regressionists from France; an NLP counselor from Belgium; a seeker from Berlin; an elderly minister and his wife from Australia; psychologists, artists, Course in Miracles students and a smattering of former Scientologists from all over the U.S. Avatar, I learned had become a big hit in France, where it had been introduced by several former Scientologists and a well-known yoga instructor. There, it was called an "applied philosophy,'' and was growing roughly twice as fast as in the U.S. Whatever was going on, the course itself was one hell of a high. While I was there, I met a number of wonderful, often quirky, but unfailingly optimistic people. All of them had a sense of the common mission I had experienced back in Scientology days--to live in a world without insanity, criminality, war and other problems caused by the baser aspects of human nature. They were obviously intent on transforming not only themselves, but the consciousness of the world at large. There were none of the quasi-military overtones I had experienced in Scientology, only an atmosphere of common purpose freely created by the participants. Telepathy ran rampant. One day as I was in my room changing to head for the swimming pool, I got a mental image of a French student, Dominique Rochier, biting into a Dove Bar I had put in the freezer compartment of the mini-bar refrigerator. I took it out, got into the elevator and unwrapped it. The elevator stopped on the next floor down and Dominique entered.
As the door slid shut, he asked "Where you get zat?''
"At the 7-11 down the street,'' I replied.
"Want a bite?''
I held out the ice cream bar and he chomped into the corner, precisely matching the premonitory mental image I had seen a couple of minutes before. Honest. Would I make up something like that? During the course, it was announced that East German refugees were streaming into West Germany via Czechoslovakia, and that the Berlin partition was effectively over. I told Petra Shulte, the seeker who had come from Berlin to take the course, how lucky she was to be able to return home and watch such a large real world persistent mass dissolve before her eyes. As before, Palmer occasionally sauntered into the course area and chatted with people, but remained mostly aloof from the daily activity. At the end of the course, I learned that the contract Avatar Masters were required to sign had been revised since I first started the course. The "licensing fee'' to be rebated to Star's Edge was now 25% for the first ten students, 20% for the next ten, and 15% thereafter. Palmer had instituted a multi-level system. Masters whose students went on to become Masters themselves would receive "grid payments'' of 10% of Masters Course fees paid by their protegees' first ten Avatar students, and 5% of the fees paid by the next ten students. In my case, of course, the payments would go directly to Star's Edge, since I had originally taken the Avatar Course from them. The system for the French was different. They were to pay 25% fees for their first twenty students, and 20% from then on. They also received a straight 10% commission of $300 for any of their students who went on to the Masters Course.
I had some qualms about this payment system from a business standpoint. The 25% initial fees to be paid at the beginning seemed almost usurious and counter-productive. They would strap new Masters who were trying to set up a practice with extra expenses exactly when they could least afford them. The "grid system'' commission payments were paid pretty much at the whim of Star's Edge, and would provide a significant cash float between the time they were collected and paid. But I signed the contract anyway. Who wanted to dicker in an atmosphere of such limitless, boundary-less consciousness? At least I went in knowing I would be required to pay commissions for every student I taught. I later talked to several Avatar Masters who went through the course totally unaware of the terms of the licensing agreement until they came to it at the end of the course materials on the last day of the course and were told they had to sign it in order to deliver the course.
GRADUATION DAY
On Sunday afternoon, after the course ended, Palmer hosted a party at the Star's Edge headquarters a few miles from the hotel. Palmer and the three trainers live in a large ranch house situated on several acres of land, surrounded by empty horse stables and outbuildings. The office is a converted recreation room. There was a catered barbecue lunch, kegs of beer, vats of iced tea and ice buckets filled with soft drinks. Entertainment included an interpretive dance by a young woman from New Caledonia and a "snoot flute'' rendition of the Star Spangled Banner by two U.S. Masters, who prefaced the performance with a suggestion that world leaders counter hostile feelings by playing their national anthems on the instrument while looking into a mirror. (The Snoot Flute is a small red plastic device played by blowing through the nose which makes the performer look ridiculous.) There was a performance of "Mad About Nothing,'' a charming one-man show by a French Master named Michel Langinieux. He created his participatory theatrical adventure based on the techniques developed by his friend Douglas Harding, the English architect and Zen master, for producing an instant sense of "the void.'' Susan Sweetland sang ``Amazing Grace,'' a tradition at the end of the Masters Course, and brought tears to most eyes. The party was marred by one disturbing event. A French student staggered on-stage as Palmer was announcing something and began mumbling incoherently, though happily. Palmer led him offstage, but he returned again, obviously disoriented, and was again led away. I later learned that he had been doing a considerable amount of drinking during the course. As it turned out, he had a history of autism and acute depression replete with suicidal inclinations. I heard that he was not licensed as an Avatar Master, but I have no idea whether he would now be selling the course and guiding students toward self-realization had he not caused the scene at the party. He stayed on in Orlando for a brief period after the course. During the next week, he was returned to the hotel by the police a few times, once after having passed out on the shore of a nearby lake inhabited by alligators. Finally he was put on a plane back to France by some acquaintances who called his girlfriend to pick him up on the other end of the flight.
THE AVATAR CENTRE OF S.F.
I went back to San Francisco and published the required "fictitious business name'' ad in a weekly newspaper describing myself as the proprietor of the Avatar Centre of San Francisco. The next thing I did was transcribe Palmer's original taped lecture, which was still being distributed in an edited version, and publish it as a twelve-page printed booklet. I was soon joined by Dominique Rochier, Michel Langinieux and Philo Mourier, another French graduate of the Masters Course I had met in Orlando. All had decided to come and hang out in San Francisco for a while. Philo stayed for a few months until he returned to Paris. Things went slowly at first. I hadn't anticipated the amount of personal growth competition that existed in the San Francisco Bay Area, or the number of people who expected enlightenment to be free in the Eastern tradition. But by placing ads in some weekly papers and taking a booth at New Age fairs, I was contacted by several hundred interested seekers, and started training some students on the course. I discovered that those who had received previous training or counseling in mental practices breezed through the course in 70 hours or so. Others -- particularly those who had a tendency to rationalize, and approached philosophy from an intellectual rather than an experiential standpoint -- had a rough time getting through the exercises in Section II of the course. Some needed 100 hours or more to complete the entire course thoroughly. It soon became evident to me that everyone who took the course needed to come back and review it at least once, if only briefly. Since the course is proprietary and confidential, students leave with only what they can remember. No matter how blissed out they become when they take the course for the first time, they inevitably have more work to do after they settle back into everyday reality. Once they do, many find that they have pretty well discreated the techniques they learned on the course along with everything else. Many who come back after a month or so open the course materials and say, "I don't remember reading this. Is it new?'' I also discovered that Star's Edge wasn't good for many referrals unless I ran ads in the Avatar Journal, and that the referrals appeared to be based on the size of ads Masters ran. Instead of running larger ads, I wrote a couple of articles, for which Star's Edge gratuitously paid me $100 per page. That brought in some students. The biggest advertiser in the magazine was a man from Phoenix who ran a two-page spread in each issue. He listed future course schedules across the U.S., instructing prospective students to block out 30 hours of time within a four-day period. After he made a foray through San Francisco in November and delivered the course to several people, I got a call from one of them. She said most of the people on the course hadn't completed it. They were told they could finish up when the Master returned four months later. She guessed the reason the course hadn't gone very well might have been the San Francisco earthquake, which shaken up the Bay Area on November 17. I didn't think it polite to point out that the course had concluded on November 16, and her teacher had flown out of town for another engagement the morning of the 17th, only hours before the quake occurred. I spent at least 40 more hours working with her gratis.
Eventually another student from the same course showed up. He had AIDS, and was low on energy. He said he hadn't necessarily expected to cure himself with Avatar, but at least thought he might figure out the karma that had caused him to become afflicted. Now he was under the distinct impression that his teacher had ripped him off and skipped town with his last $2,000. I worked with him as best I could over the phone and on the occasions when he felt well enough to make it over. Then one day I called him and he said he had been too ill to do anything. I didn't hear from him again. I wrote a letter to the itinerant Avatar Master and told him he had better clean up his act before a bottle of snake oil appeared in his hand, referring to the photo in his ad which depicted him in an evangelical pose with an outstretched hand. I enclosed a bill for $1,000, the least I figured he owed me for the work I had done with his incomplete students, and sent a copy to Harry Palmer. I never received a reply from either of them, though I later heard that the wayfaring Master had been instructed by Star's Edge to increase the time of his courses to a minimum of six days. By then, he had been delivering 30-hour courses for about a year, and was said to have "completed more than 80 people.'' Over the next year, I managed to give the course to about a dozen people. After paying the expenses of promoting the course and royalty payments, I didn't net much from the Avatar Course. I was still writing ad copy to pay the bills. Teaching the course was, however, a joy. Every time I saw students pop loose from the subconscious dramatizations that had been controlling their lives, I got a vicarious thrill that made it worthwhile. My most interesting referral came from--well, I should say through--a trance channeler in Florida. One day a marketing executive from a local financial services company called me up. He had gotten the number by calling an information operator. He said he had recently moved to the Bay Area. Before leaving Florida, he went to his channeler and asked his personal astral guides what he should do as the next step in his spiritual development. One of the guides told him to check out the Avatar Course. When the channeler came out of his trance, he said he really didn't know anything about the course, but there was a bunch of information different people had left on a table in the hall. On the table my prospect found a tape of Palmer's 1987 lecture. He stuck the tape away for some months, then came across it while unpacking some boxes after his move to California. He had listened to earlier the day he called while riding to work on the Tiburon Ferry. He signed up for the course shortly after our first visit, and was ecstatic with the results.
Of the people who took the course from me, only one told me he felt that he hadn't really gotten what he expected out of Avatar, and speculated that might have been because he had glossed over some of the exercises to please me. I invited him to come back for another go at it. Along the way, I published a couple of newsletters, got together with some other Avatar Masters from the Bay Area and started delivering "Section I Workshops'' based on the Creativism workbook, which by this time had been republished in a glitzy four-color version with New Age airbrush art from past issues of the Avatar Journal and a couple of new exercises. Most of the people who took the workshops were pleased with them, and a few went on to take the complete course. I was informed by a local Master that Avra Honey Smith had recently remarked that anyone giving these seminars should be getting an 80% sign-up rate. When I asked how many workshops Avra had conducted herself, the answer was none. Was someone else achieving this rate? If so, I'd like to talk to them. The Master hadn't heard of any. Avra hadn't mentioned any.. She simply said that anyone not getting 80% of participants to sign up for the rest of the course was "still stuck in an identity.''
TROUBLES WITH HARRY
In the spring of 1990, I received a call from Del (not his real name), a friend of one of my students who lives in New York City. His friend, a professional Neuro-Linguistic Programming counselor, had told me the course allowed him to reach the state he had been searching for all his life. He had talked to Del and recommended that he take the course in San Francisco. I offered to put him in touch with someone in New York, but he said he believed a skilled instructor was important. I had been highly recommended, so he was pretty well set on coming out to the Coast. A couple of months after we first talked, he called to tell me that he had decided to go to Orlando and take the course at Star's Edge instead. I told him to do whatever he wanted. Then I recalled Palmer's earlier statement that Star's Edge wasn't going to be delivering the Avatar Course. They had, in fact, recently added a fifth staff member who was hired specifically to supervise the course there, and had run a full page ad in the last Avatar Journal. The basic Avatar Course was obviously seen as a sideline profit center in its own right. Looking back over my years in business, it was clear to me that Palmer was making the short-sighted mistake of "going direct''--the equivalent of General Motors opening a retail showroom in front of the car factory. Legitimate companies sell products and services either directly or through licensees, but almost never both ways. I confronted Palmer on the subject in a way I felt pretty certain would get home to him, considering his heavy emphasis on being paid commissions for each and every student who receives the course. I simply waited until I owed more than $1,500 in payments for books and licensing fees, deducted $1,500 (the $2,000 course fee less Star's Edge's $500 commission) for the student they had recruited and enclosed a check for the balance. In an accompanying letter, I reminded him of his previous promise not to compete with the ``network'' and informed him that a number of other people had heard him say the same thing.
Star's Edge had just announced the first delivery of the Wizards Course to be held in January, so while I was at it, I reminded him of his earlier statement that "There was nothing after Avatar.'' When he introduced the Avatar Course, he had repeatedly assured prospective students that any future developments would be added to the basic course and made available free of charge. The Wizards Course, subtitled "The Avatar Materials, Part V,'' had initially been priced at $20,000. Part I was now offered at a special introductory rate of $5,000, to be increased to $7,500 the next time it was offered. In my letter I asked him to simply drop the course materials in the mail, since that was what he had promised to do when he first promoted Avatar to former Scientologists as "the end of case.'' His response was a letter full of Scientology argot, a parody of L. Ron Hubbard's vernacular, warning me that I should reconsider, meaning to pay up. Palmer explained that Star's Edge only delivered the Avatar Course so Masters could experience watching students go through it. During the past year, he said, more than 1,500 prospective students had been referred to licensed Masters, while only about 20 had received the course at Star's Edge during Masters Courses. As for Del, Palmer said the trainers had asked him to leave during his second stint there because of a "conflicting hidden agenda.'' The letter was an entertaining parody, and was signed ``Ron, er, Harry.'' There was just one problem: Palmer did not address my questions about his earlier statements at all. When I questioned a few other Masters who had been there to review the Masters Course that year about how many people were taking the Avatar Course at headquarters, one commented, ``Bullshit! There were ten or twelve new people when I was there, and they gave six Masters Courses in Florida last year.''
As Palmer and I began an exchange of letters, Michel Langinieux showed up for what turned out to be a three-month stay in San Francisco. He knows a number of people here from the days when he had lived in the area during the 1960s. During that time, he hung out with Alan Watts and other explorers on the outer realms of consciousness while teaching French drama at Stanford. He has been a student of Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding and Werner Erhard. He is on a first-name basis with just about everybody who is anybody in the worldwide consciousness-raising movement, as well as dozens of cutting-edge scientists, journalists and other thinkers he finds amusing. Michel calls himself a traveling minstrel. He officially lives in Paris, but spends most of his time flitting around the planet, stopping off a month or a few months wherever his fancy leads him. He supports himself modestly by performing the interactive show he gave when we both graduated from the Avatar Masters Course. In the show, he wears masks representing Harlequin, Pantelone and a character called, simply, "The Fool.'' During the performance, he proceeds to gently remove some of the psychological masks worn by the audience. As it turned out, he had already begun to unmask Harry Palmer. Since the Masters Course we attended in Orlando, Michel had dropped in on four more courses in Europe and the U.S. in order to hone his skills. Now he had a few concerns of his own about events in Europe. In Europe, the Masters Courses were getting so large that the training was obviously superficial. Courses had recently been given at a rural castle in France, in Nice, in Montpelier, and in Neufchatel, Switzerland. At the Swiss course, 250 people attended. The three trainers were obviously stretched too thin, yet most of those attending were certified as Masters and turned loose to deliver the course. There had been incidents.
In Nice, a psychiatrist taking the course became so agitated when he couldn't get a question answered that he picked up a table and smashed it. In Montpelier someone who had taken the Avatar Course without getting the results he expected showed up to confront Palmer and got a refund after causing a scene in front of the group. The training at that course was so lax that many new Masters were licensed without even practicing guided "initiation sessions'' on each other. Michel felt the Avatar course was being delivered in an increasingly unprofessional manner in France by people who obviously weren't qualified to teach it. Some Masters were surreptitiously cutting the price in order to win students away from others. Others were demonstrating the confidential procedures to the public at fairs. When asked about the lack of quality control, Miken Chappel had philosophically answered, "Some people have to get Avatar in spite of their Masters.'' Before he left Paris, Michel had run into one of the most successful Avatar Masters in France, a psychologist. With his partner, he had taught the course to about 200 people during the past couple of years at their counseling center in Boulogne. The man had talked to Palmer at a Masters Course and informed him that he thought a lower commission schedule might be in order for people who delivered as many courses as he and his partner. Would Harry consider lowering the fee to 15% or 10% at a certain point?
Palmer's response, said the psychologist, was to point a finger at him (a grave insult in French culture) and call him a "black heart.'' After attempting to talk to Palmer a second time about the matter and getting the identical response, he went back to Boulogne and cut off all further communications with Star's Edge. He and his partner are now reportedly delivering a course called "Global Brain.'' While visiting a Masters Course in the U.S., Michel had spent some time working with Mike (not his real name), a student who had obviously not yet assimilated even the basic Avatar Course. When he asked Avra Honey Smith why she was instructing him to do certain things, and pressed her for specific answers to questions about the criteria for completing the Masters Course, she told him that he basically had to please her, since she doled out the certificates. The trainers subsequently concluded that he was on drugs, and didn't pass him on the course. His conclusion was that he had been conned out of $5,000. Michel offered to put him through the Avatar Course again gratis, but he declined. When he questioned Mike about the first time he took the course in New York, Michel discovered that he was required to show up for only a couple of hours a day. Much of his time on the course had been spent not doing the exercises, but chatting about the course's theory from a philosophic viewpoint. As for being on drugs, he said he hadn't used drugs to any extent for years -- though he had shared a few joints with his Avatar Master during the 12 or 14 hours he spent on the course. There had been problems with the French translation of the new Creativism book. Palmer had originally asked Michel to translate the book. When he was told it couldn't be finished within his one-month deadline, he hired another translator who took three months, and whose work Michel regarded as incompetent. Michel and Marie Franciose Baracetti, a Paris newspaper editor, made numerous corrections, but most were not incorporated in the final edition before it was rushed to press with some 200 inaccuracies. One glaring error particularly bothered them. In the section of the book where Palmer justifies the price of the course by saying it is aimed at the successful middle-class stratum of society, the translation implied it was "not for the common people'' -- an elitist sentiment that has been anathema to the French since the revolution. An equivalent American gaffe would be to say an activity "is not for white trash.''
Baracetti mentioned the translation problems in letters to other Avatar Masters. Palmer accused her of "black worming'' and treachery in general. Several months later, her license to deliver the course was suspended; she was forbidden to teach students pending her review of the Masters Course. She was told she could attend Masters Courses to be held two months later in Florida or three months later in Switzerland -- but was not invited to a course scheduled to begin in France ten days after the date of her suspension notice. Apparently someone at Star's Edge did not want to take the chance that she might express her opinions there. A Swiss industrialist, noting the mistakes in the translation of the book, asked how many copies had been printed. "Only 10,000? No problem. Burn them and print it again.'' Word has it that Palmer came close to having a heart attack. "Harry just doesn't seem to trust professionals,'' said Michel. "He hires nincompoops. He doesn't realize when people are supporting him. He sees support as betrayal.'' Michel loved delivering Avatar. At the time he showed up in San Francisco, He had given Part I workshops at no charge for more than 700 people in Europe and America. He liked sharing the work with people, and felt that a number of them had been transformed without taking the rest of the course. Now he had serious doubts that Palmer's management skills were up to maintaining the level of quality needed to deliver the course properly. "He has discovered a jewel and then misused it to satisfy his own idiosyncrasies,'' said Michel. "He seems to misuse gullible people to satisfy his own greed. It's anything for a quick buck.'' When I told Michel about my current disagreement with Palmer, and introduced him to some of the people who had originally taken Avatar back in 1987, he was surprised to hear about the upset in Elmira.
STILL SEETHING
On an intuitive hunch, I called Del, the man from New York who had gone to Orlando to take the course. Avra didn't really use any hard sell on him, he said, and he had initially felt comfortable about taking the course at headquarters because he assumed they knew what they were doing. When he went for the first time, he found the trainers a bit cold and reluctant to answer his questions. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the last day of the course was the highest day of his life. He decided to return and review the course the next time it was scheduled. In the meantime, after mentioning Avatar to some friends, he received a letter and some copies of newspaper articles about Palmer from someone in Elmira. When he went to Florida to review the course, he tentatively brought up the subject of Palmer's Scientology background, and was "told to go do Feel-It's as penance.'' The trainers, he said, wouldn't really acknowledge anything about Palmer's past. He felt they were being evasive. This made him uncomfortable, so he left of his own volition midway through the course. I vaguely recalled hearing about some articles in the Elmira paper, so I asked him to send me copies of what he had received. In order to make certain I had heard Palmer say what I thought he had said, I had just sent out several questionnaires to people who were present in 1987 when he was giving his first round of lectures. One was Margie Hoffman, the Avatar trainer who had caused a stir back in 1987 when she quit. While I was out one evening, she called from Elmira and had a chat with Michel. When I returned, he was aghast. "They say he's a crook!'' he exclaimed, rolling the R indignantly. "Still lawsuits after four years! He stole from 30 or 40 people! Some are bankrupt! They're screaming bloody murder! Margie and Linda Rosin testified against him in court in November!'' Something told me the merde had hit the fan.
The Elmira upset is described in a brief chronology entitled "Avatar's Time Track'' which appeared in the new edition of the Creativism book: "A few former employees, envious of Avatar's growing success, choose to explore aspects of betrayal and launch a broad publicity campaign to denounce Harry and his Star's Edge Organization.'' As it turns out, a few dozen people in Elmira see the events of October, 1987 in an entirely different light. Their version would read more like this: "Every student and client of Palmer's Scientology center, joined by all but two of his staff members, denounced him emphatically. They claimed he had systematically swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars from them, then slandered and blackmailed members of the group who threatened him with exposure.'' The next day after her conversation with Michel, I called Margie back and listened to her story for more than half an hour. No sooner had I hung up the phone than it rang. Linda Rosin, the former promotion manager of the center was on the other end of the line. The next day, more people from Elmira called. They all asked pretty much the same question: was someone finally going to do something to expose Palmer as he really was? He was described by various people as a con artist, a cruel and ruthless swindler, a master manipulator of people, a blackmailer and a compulsive liar, among other things. "The man is absolutely crazy,'' said Hoffman. "He's totally gone.'' Strong talk, that.
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