Ralph White is co-founder and senior fellow of the New York Open Center, America’s leading urban center of holistic learning. A pioneer in the consciousness movement, he is author of the compelling new memoir, The Jeweled Highway: On the Quest for a Life of Meaning.
Born in post-war austerity Wales, he set out to find a deeper of understanding of the world on adventures that led him through West Coast counter-culture, hitchhiking to Maccu Picchu, a mission for the Oracle of Tibet in the remote Eastern Himalayas, and the exploration of numerous spiritual and esoteric paths. He has been intimately involved in the creation and development of three major centers of holistic learning – the Findhorn Foundation in Northern Scotland, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, NY and the New York Open Center itself. He is also a seminar figure in the annual Holistic Centers’ Gathering which enables participants to put their fingers on the pulse of the consciousness movement.
He taught the first fully accredited course in holistic learning at New York University, has directed a twenty one years series of conferences on the Western Esoteric Tradition, and is an international speaker on spirituality, the development of the consciousness movement, and the rediscovery of the lost esoteric history of the West.
Jonathan Bricklin, author of The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment, interviewed Ralph about the contents of his memoir, The Jeweled Highway. Read on to learn more about the search for meaning and the culturally transformative work that has resulted from the Quest.
PART ONE
In which Ralph speaks of his early years in Wales, his alienated adolescence in the gritty industrial North of England, his disappointment in academic philosophy, and the beginning of his Quest for Meaning in the mystical landscape of the SouthWestern deserts of the United States.
Jonathan Bricklin: You experienced a dichotomy in your childhood, as you shifted from the wild beauty of north Wales, to life in the industrialized North of England. Let’s begin with the first half of your childhood, in what you call ‘The Tibet of the West.’
Ralph White: I was describing the Celtic world on the Western edge of Europe where there are many beautiful, sacred islands like Iona and Lindisfarne with centuries of history.
I was fortunate enough to spend a part of my childhood on the coast of North Wales on the Irish Sea. I loved to be in the natural world ,walking the tidal pools on the Irish Sea, hearing the crash of the waves, the cry of the seagulls. While the mountains of Snowdonia and Wales were visible through the kitchen window. That was a beautiful and soulful time for me, very nourishing.
I wasn’t born into those circumstances. I spent my first four years in the working class row houses of Cardiff, the capitol of Wales, playing on bomb sites in the aftermath of the Second World War.
I had a beautiful interlude in the North of Wales which I will always be grateful for. At the age of nine, we moved to the north of England to what William Blake described as an area of ‘dark, satanic mills.’
Where you said you couldn’t see across the street…
Right. It’s a soot-covered grimy northern world where the industrial revolution got going, highly polluted. The chimneys belch into the air from the woolen mills that had been there for 150 years and create a very oppressive environment,. The fogs that the Bronte’s write about in Wuthering Heights, the mists and fogs come down from the moors, mixing with the industrial toxins from the multiple chimneys. This is where the World’s original proletariat lived and worked, the part of the world where Marx and Engels thought the revolution would begin. Moving here from Wales was a difficult transition for me, but it had a great saving grace. When I was 13-14 years old the Beatles burst onto the scene.
Love me do. Those harmonica chords…
Yeah, those harmonica chords, exactly. I can still recall, to this day, the very instant I first heard John Lennon’s harmonica in Love Me Do in a changing room after a cross country race in the Cone Valley in the Penine foothills of Northern England. I was hooked from that opening harmonica phrase all the way through. One of the great things about living in England in the sixties was the outrageous music.
You cover your 60’s college experience at Sussex, a wild swinging scene of sorts, yes?
Yes, that’s true. I was able to get out of that restricted world and go to the University of Sussex in Brighton which was known for its hectic heterosexuality. It was the hip place to be in England during the 60’s. It was a world of mini-skirts, Jimi Hendrix playing at the student union, Fleetwood Mac in the local pub, and the early blues clubs. It was a wonderful, liberating scene for me.
You were studying American Studies?
Yes. I eventually shifted to a degree in American Studies, which was unusual at the time. There were not many places in Britain where you could do American Studies. That’s what led me to come to America in 1970 as a graduate student.
You said, “Chicago was a rich stew a great place to gain a quick understanding of the heart of American culture.”
It really was. I can’t say I devoted much of my time in that year in Chicago to academic study.
I learned a lot about America fast because this was not very long after the riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Vietnam War was still raging. Quite a few of the students I was teaching at the University had just come back from Vietnam, others were Black Panthers or part of the black radical movement. Others were really desperate to keep their grade point average up so they wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam.
I came straight into the thick of America in one of its most compelling places. Chicago was a set of ethnic city-states and you had to get street-wise very fast. My first American friend was about to be drafted.
You called him the sanest person you met?
Yes. His name was Dennis. I have no idea what happened to him, but he was one of the sanest people I met. He had himself committed to a mental asylum to avoid the draft, and then escaped.
He was, in theory, an escaped lunatic. He was my first guide to Chicago.
You took a trip on Route 66, out to the American Southwest…
It was the American Southwest that opened me up spiritually. I grew up with a father and grandfather who had been involved in the horrors of the First and Second World Wars,and so I grew up with a strong awareness of the Holocaust, and of events like Stalin’s starvations and purges.
As a young man, I thought about whether there was some deeper order to the cosmos, some divine level of reality. It was certainly nothing that was perceptible around me. I set off on a search, and the first journey on that search was in December of 1970 down Route 66, into the beautiful deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, with those huge starlight skies, the vast empty spaces.
I heard The Sound of Silence for the first time at the site of the Native American ruins in the painted desert in Arizona. Those were truly transformative experiences for me and that’s what began to open me up. The open skies and landscape really helped to open my heart and I realized that some of the negative take I had on reality was derived from the fact that I had shut myself down.
I realized that I had a lot of freedom to open myself up to a richer experience of the world.
In some ways this brings you back to Wales and your childhood. You said your heart lifts up to the empty sky in Wales.
It was the mystery and beauty of nature that really stimulated that for me.
It’s a real turn in your life…you were struggling to find your place in society and yet you had this incredible cosmic experience that made you identify with the oneness of the universe.
I knew that I was experiencing fresh states of consciousness. States of expansiveness, openness, peak experiences, states of unity with the universe.
Let’s talk about when you found yourself in Vancouver where you heard George Harrison’s song “Beware of Darkness” from All Things Must Pass. Frank Sinatra called “Something in the Way She Moves” (George Harrison’s song) the greatest love song ever written.
He did.
You called Beware of Darkness, “the greatest intuitive knowing of the love that appeared to me, the very engine of the cosmos”
Yes. Actually, that was back in Chicago after the experience in the Southwest where I had an experience listening to George Harrison’s great album All Things Must Pass, and particularly that song Beware of Darkness. It spoke to me very personally because I had been predisposed during my youth to a dark view of the world.
That song is about not getting too sucked into a negative take on reality, despite the fact that we’re surrounded by all kinds of frauds and horrors. So that was an insight that came to me. I had a sense that the very motor engine of the universe as it were, is love.
I think I had just reached a point at that time in my life, I was 21 or 22, when something in me, my own soul, was emerging in a fresh way and I was discovering the inner mystic, spiritual person, or the inner esotericist.
Conventional career paths do not suggest themselves in that state of being and mind. You certainly didn’t take one. With very limited means you took yourself to South America, yeah?
Well, when I left Chicago I went to Vancouver. Although I felt very at home there. I had a mixed experience. I loved the counterculture but it was difficult to make a living and I found my life there a little too dull.
One day I saw a picture of Machu Picchu on TV and just had a tremendous intuitive prompting, “I’ve got to go there.” I started hitchhiking when I was 16, and I always wanted to keep on going until the end of the road.
On January the 3rd 1973, I set off from Vancouver and I made it all the way to Machu Picchu.
You called Machu Picchu, “a feeling of organically generated magical reverence.”
It took me six months to get there and it was worth the wait. I experienced Machu Picchu as one of the sacred places of the Earth. Sacredness had nothing to do with the actual structure, but a sense that there are certain places on the face of the Earth that just have a special quality where the Earth and the Heavens meet in perfect harmony.
That made me open and interested in visiting other places in the world that had that sacred quality to them. One of the reasons I set off to hitch-hike to Machu Picchu was to visit those ancient cultures. I had a sense that there are some deep mysteries that haven been lost and that we need to regain. At the Open Center I’ve done a twenty-year series of esoteric quests for the lost spiritual history of the West. It has turned into a real theme of my life. Maybe one day I’ll actually do one in Peru and go to Machu Picchu and look at what scholars and others have pieced together from that remarkable culture.
You spent a year as far away from a metropolis setting as one can pretty much get. When you came out of that you saw an American movie and what you remember was the strained faces…
After I had spent some months in the Andes, traveling with indigenous peoples, hitchhiking and being under those vast starlit skies. I had a sense that some of those tiny specks of light were not just stars, or even planets or galaxies.
I learned later when I was at Berkeley, those specs of light are galaxies of galaxies! When you spend months under those starlit skies with the indigenous peoples of that part of that world, it does something to your consciousness. When I came down again to sea level, I hadn’t seen a film in months. I went to see WUSA. It was about a radio station and has Paul Newman in it. Being in the city again, and seeing that movie with the contortions in people’s faces, the stress, the anger, the worry, the hatred…it was a wild time in America.
It all added up to a moment of complete intuitive clarity. I saw very clearly that Western industrial civilization was destroying the biosphere, and was deeply damaging the Earth and our souls as well. We really needed to create some kind of alternative. That came to me when I was 24 years old. You could say that’s provided a kind of agenda for my life, creating an alternative, a holistic and ecological alternative to mainstream culture – this has been an ongoing theme of my life.
At the end of that year-long adventure in South America you were in Bogota, Colombia of which you write, “No one who has spent a year of their youth in the poor quarters of Bogota can claim much innocence still intact.”
I ran out of money in South America and wound up living for a year in the slums of Bogota. This was 40 years ago of course and Bogoata at that time was a Dickensian kind of city. There were schools of pick-pockets., and abandoned children sleeping under the doorways with their only companions abandoned dogs. It was an education in street life, and a politically regressive environment. It was a world rife with corruption. Most people suffered as a result. When I finally left I came away with a real appreciation for constitutional democracy and a fair legal system,.
Bogota was a great place to spend a year if you were 24-25 and wanted to really push the edge of experience. I think a lot of young men want to do that, want to step outside the normal bounds of conventional existence and live on the edge. I certainly did for that year.
After leaving Bogota, you spent a year in California, what was that transition like?
I went to see a wise Chinese doctor, a pulse diagnostician, who could tell you how long it was since your last cup of coffee. I’ll never forget Doc Wong feeling my pulse when I got back from Colombia. He laughed and he just looked at me and said, “You carry on living like this you’ll take ten years off your life.” I remember that felt very true to me. It was my first real introduction to Chinese medicine.
I was in the San Francisco Bay area for a year after that, a joyful participant in the spiritual and erotic freedoms of West Coast counter-culture at that time.
After my year in Bogota, to be in California in the liberated sun-drenched, flower-filled world of Berkeley in 1974-75, felt like a blessing. To be exposed to multiple different spiritual paths that were going on there. To be able to return to an exploration of these different forms of consciousness development. I had many different mystical experiences in the mountains, in the Andes. Now the task for me was, how can I replicate, or taste them again through a more disciplined spiritual practice.
And then you found yourself at Findhorn, in the north of Scotland (the alternative spiritual community that has today become a well-known eco-village )
One weekend I was up at a little Sufi community in the Napa Valley and came across two books that were really pivotal to me. One was a little pamphlet by Paul Hawken called Findhorn: A Center of Light, and another was John Michel’s famous book on the ley-line system of Britain called The New View over Atlantis.
I resolved at that point that I should go back to my native country. I wanted to go to the sacred places scattered throughout Britain. I also wanted to visit Findhorn, an alternative spiritual community in the far north of Scotland, about 25 miles east of Inverness.. It was not spiritually affiliated with any one particular path, and it didn’t have gurus. I’ve never been interested in gurus. I believe that we’re living in a time of freedom and we have to figure it out for ourselves. So, I thought yes, I’m going to go there next time I’m in Britain.
I did wind up going there. I arrived in Findhorn in the North of Scotland in a snowstorm late on New Year’s.. When you entered the community it was almost as if you stepped through a palpable wall of love and into a different world. It was a special time.
Findhorn today is an eco-village and a holistic learning center as well as a spiritual community. It’s continued to flourish and thrive. At Findhorn there was a concept of a network of light. What they mean is that emerging on the planet are points of spiritual holistic and ecological consciousness that together represent what we need to go into the human future. I’ve always felt a lot of truth to that. As I write about later in the book, there is now an emerging global network of holistic centers and holistic learning centers. We’re going to know each other more and more and there is a sense that we’re part of something much larger. We’re facets of that larger diamond of an emerging consciousness.
The fusion of the spiritual and the practical?
The thing about Findhorn is we weren’t just talking about it, or meditating, but people were actually building. The main thing was building the community and creating the place., and in that way fuse the spiritual and the practical. It was a great place to be in my late twenties. I needed to heal from some of my wilder adventures in more distant parts of the world and I needed to find community. Here I am all these years later and many of those people are still good friends of mine.
PART TWO
In which Ralph speaks about the early years of Omega Institute, the founding of the New York Open Center, his love of the work of Rudolf Steiner, the global network of holistic centers, and the challenges involved in moving our culture in a more healthy and sustainable direction.
You returned to America after Findhorn and found life difficult ..
I came back to America after three and a half years in the North of Scotland there.
I was just surviving doing this that and the other, and nothing was really working. I thought it was important to make clear in the book that my life didn’t just unfold from one interesting episode to another, that there were fallow times, confusing times, difficult times.
You then found a new focus for your energy ..
Through a twist of fate, a fortuitous synchronistic development ,I wound up being invited to come and work in the programming department at Omega Institute which was still in its early years.
I wound up becoming Program Director.
We found this old family camp in upstate New York, which was really run down and had been empty for a decade. I had this interesting experience in the late seventies and early eighties of creating these centers from scratch from big, run down neglected things that seemed to have no purpose any longer in this world.
That was a fascinating experience because it was the beginning of the holistic world. In the early Omega it was a small team of us who took on a huge task. We found and restored a run down Yiddish camp, Camp Boiberik, and that became the site of the current Omega.
Those first summers of Omega were a fascinating time. We would have a new shaman coming out of the Amazon, a new Tibetan teacher coming out of the Himalayas, some new body work technique coming in from California, or some form of African dance we hadn’t seen before and so on. It was vibrant and colorful. There were a lot of young people and it was very energetic and multicultural.
You then moved on to New York City, and your involvement in the creation of the Open Center. Were you coaxing some people out of retirement? People who hadn’t thought to teach because there were no centers for them to teach in?
There may have been some people like that. When I came to New York and started the Open Center from scratch I remember I brought R. D. Laing over to America, the great Scottish psychiatrist. He hadn’t been in America in years. I remember bringing over Colin Wilson the multitalented writer on many aspect of consciousness.
These were both people who were challenging the paradigms of the field that they worked in?
Absolutely. People like R.D. Laing and Colin Wilson. It was wonderful to bring them over when they hadn’t had an American audience in a long, long time. I’m sure there must have been a few people who were more or less in retirement. It was a vibrant time and there was alot going on and it was new and it was fresh.
At Omega and then at the Open Center we were pioneers in bringing the holistic world view and holistic learning into the City. Conventional wisdom in the early 80’s was something that would never work in New York. Of course it had worked up at Omega, but not in the City, the City was the “real world.“
I know if I go to the Insight Meditation Society for nine days I can leave with this beautiful retreat mind. But after three days in the City, it’s gone. The environment of the City is stronger. Maybe I need to go ninety days, I don’t know. Is that your experience?
That is what I used to think. Whether it was Findhorn or Omega, people would have great experiences, but then the dreaded moment would come of, I have to go back to the real world.
Part of our thinking in doing the Open Center was let’s do it in the real world. It didn’t get more real than New York, or grittier in the early 80’s. The City was at a nadir (getting worse and worse) of crime and violence and mayhem. It was a challenge to think that we could create a place that was devoted to noble spiritual and ecological values. The Open Center to this day remains one of the few major urban holistic centers. It’s a difficult thing to do.
How did you decide who should teach at the Open Center, how did you distinguish between legitimate presenters and others?
I used to come into the Open Center in the morning and there’d be a pile of ten letters waiting for me that had just come in overnight from people wanting to teach.
Among the offerings, there was a lot of new age flakery, crystals and channeling being approached in an ungrounded way, It was important from the beginning that the Open Center should be devoted to programs that had substance, depth and integrity. That’s what we always shot for. I was always looking for the deepest most profound teachers in all these areas.
We’re talking 1984, well before the internet. Now it’s so accessible finding out about holistic and new paradigms, anybody can hit YouTube. But in that day it was not so easy to find, these visions and these ways of looking.
In those days you had to come down and see the people in person, or read their books. The internet has changed all of that.
What was the impact of the early Open Center?
I think the early Open Center in the 80’s down on Spring Street had a very beneficial impact on New York. I meet people today who came regularly all those years ago. Of course, now the Open Center has been open so long that we’ve actually educated generations of people. You’ve got active people in the consciousness world now who were educated in many ways. I met someone who was brought as a child by his mother to the Open Center in 1985 and is now a very well published writer. It’s been sweet to see how this has impacted the culture over the course of decades.
After your first year at the Open Center you went to Hawaii, and you found your main teacher?
One of my most significant teachers I’ve had. After that first year at the Open Center, I was fried and exhausted. I’d poured my whole life-blood into getting the Open Center started and even though I was just in my 30’s, I needed a break.
I went to Kauai, the most Westerly of the Hawaiian islands, and decided to trek the Napali coastline trail, an ancient Hawaiian trail that clings to the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. I was on the trail for a week and it was exactly what I needed. It was deeply restorative. My consciousness slowed down to the slow rhythmic crash of the Pacific waves, those beautiful clouds, and the turquoise ocean.
When I got back I was camped out on a beach. I already had a mystical and spiritual world view, but I’d been feeling it was time to gain a deeper understanding into what happens at different levels of consciousness and how destiny, or even reincarnation actually works.
Some of our readers may remember the old B. Dalton’s bookstore on 9th street and 6th avenue. The night before leaving for Hawaii I picked up a book by Rudolf Steiner called The Tension Between East and West. I thought, oh, that’s a good topic to read in Hawaii.
How did the book affect you…
One day out on Haena Beach it started to rain, and I got in my tent . I picked up a book on Zen, but it didn’t really do it for me. I picked up another book, and then I picked up the third, which was The Tension Between East and West. I read the first three pages and it was like, BOOM, as if I had walked straight into a profound and beautiful reality. Rudolf Steiner was speaking exactly on my wavelength and was addressing the major concerns that had been arising in my mind.
He was a philosopher unlike the philosophers I’d been introduced to at University. In those days logical positivism was at its apex. This was a philosopher who had every bit that same level intellectual rigor, but who had a real feeling for the human soul, the dimension of feeling.
I’d been aware of him for years before but I’d never really entered into his work. For the next few years after that I spent as much time as I could reading Steiner’s work.
He gave 6,000 lectures, all without notes?
Yeah, none with notes. Compiled into over 300 books.
By your fruits you shall know him…
It’s surprising to me that in this massive explosion of consciousness and interest in spirituality we’ve had in America in the last 40-50 years that Steiner still remains a relatively obscure figures. People know about him mainly through the Waldorf schools.
But if you apply that old line from the Bible by their fruits shall ye know you them, you do have to say that Steiner left without question the greatest holistic legacy of the 20th Century. There’s no one else even close. Most of it, the practical stuff, came out of the last five years of his life. He’s known for that today.
The main body of his work was a massive treasure trove of esoteric wisdom. For some time now, I have been reading and practicing the spiritual meditations he was able to give us. He did not want to be on anybody’s pedestal. He wants people to subject everything he has to say to the most rigorous intellectual analysis, to not believe anything just on faith alone.
But he’s a direct conduit to what we call ancient wisdom?
I engaged in Steiner’s work for over thirty years and he is a man of unquestionable integrity. Many people knew him, including people like Albert Schweitzer and no one ever had a bad word to say about him. He is a person of intellectual brilliance, beautiful heart, and really an unparalleled level of esoteric and spiritual insight in the 20th century. He himself felt that his most important contribution was to return a correct understanding of karma and reincarnation to the contemporary world.
Hawaii and 1985 really opened me to that perspective.
Throughout the adventure of your life I find instance after instance of courage, and risk taking. Nowhere is that more in evidence than your Tibet experiences, which really astonished me.
After the first five years at the Open Center, I needed to take a break and refresh. I landed in Dharamsala where the Dali Lama is based in India, and spent a month at the Nechung monastery, the monastery of the State Oracle. I had always loved Tibet since I was a child. I felt very fortunate to be there. There was only one other Westerner at this monastery.
I was there when they were doing their invocation of Pehar Gyalpo, the Nechung Chogyam, the protective deity of Tibet. The Nechung Chogyam is the world’s last functioning political oracle and still provides political advice to the Dali Lama and to the Kashag, the Tibetan parliament. I’d asked the monks if I could join them for the last part of their ritual invocation.
Late in my visit, the senior monk came to me and said that they had some material they needed to get into Tibet. It was impossible for a Tibetan to do it, they felt it had to be a Westerner, and that was the only person who had the chance. He wanted to ask me if I would do it. They felt I was the right person. They said they would put me under the protection of the Nechung Chogram while I was doing this.
I agreed to do it. One day I met a guy in Katmandu who told me about a route into Eastern Tibet, last done in the 1920’s by an Austrian-American explorers called Joseph Rock, who wrote a series of articles called Journey to the Land of the Yellow Lama. It was into the world of Eastern Tibet, the Southeast Region of old Tibet, he world Muli the world of Kham, and the world of the khampas, warriors, fierce horsemen..
Another exotic part of the world, at least to many Americans, is the Eastern block of Europe. You spent some time there after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
When I got back from that round-the-world trip, including Tibet, it was just as the Berlin wall was coming down in the Fall of ’89. Suddenly the world of Eastern Europe, which had been so alien, so distant, so hidden behind the iron curtain, was becoming accessible again to the West.
We used to hear rumors in the 70’s that ten thousand Russian hippies had rioted in Leningrad because they’d cancelled a Santana concert. You’d hear vague rumors like this and think, could there even be Russian hippies? Is this possible? So it was a mystery, but I had gained the sense that there are people on this kind of holistic and spiritual wavelength all over the world.
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Russia itself had just come out of, in Russia’s case, 60 years of Communism in Eastern Europe, ever since the second world war.
We had a gathering in Hungry and I wound up being invited to Prague and Russia eventually, and stepping into this world just as it was emerging from decades and decades of intense political and spiritual oppression. I found all kinds of wonderful courageous people, people in Poland who’d been managing to get small Zen centers going during those years. That was a beautiful experience for me.
What it was like for you to spend time in Russia at that time.
I haven’t been to Moscow in a long time now. It used to be that you’d get to Moscow and it was like one enormous federal housing project, people living in these huge bland looking high rises surrounded by chimneys and the like. Yet, you would walk into one of those little anonymous apartment buildings and find that it was an intimate and as welcoming as a log cabin in the birch forests. I found the Russian people to be tremendously hospitable.
There was an enormous interest in what was coming from the West. Of course, they hadn’t seen the dark side of the West at that time, so for them it represented a fully positive source of freedom.
When you’ve had thirty-thousand nuclear missiles trained on each other for most of your lives and suddenly these enemies come together and recognize they’re basically on the same wavelength, the one realizes more than ever that what absolute madness it is to be considering obliterating these people because of some ideology that’s passing through there at that time..
Well the Beatles let us know, “…back in the USSR, don’t know how lucky you are.”
In fact, you heard the Beatles, didn’t you?
There’s a wonderful feeling for melody in places like Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic as it is. I would hear these beautiful old Beatles b-sides that would come surging on the radio out of nowhere, songs I hadn’t heard in years, but that had been preserved there. The whole world of Eastern Europe opened up as so soulful, so deep, so rich, so receptive, frankly to everything that the Omega, Findhorn, the Open Center, the whole holistic world view, stood for.
Again, it’s the pre-internet society and the way people would come together and the meals that went on all night and the singing and the songs. I fear that culture is in jeopardy
That was before rap and rock and disco, and all that stuff made its way into Russia. Even though I couldn’t understand the language it was the melody and the soulfulness. One day, I would like to do an esoteric quest for the soul of Russia, what a beautifully deep culture. I loved Russia,
It’s important for us to remember how wonderful the people are, even though Putin’s in power now and there’s a lot of ugly posturing. The Russian people are some of the most soulful and hospitable people I’ve ever met in my life and I look forward to going back there someday. It was a privilege to be there on some rickety old train, in the darkness, singing old Russian folk songs that could have been sung by soldiers going to the front lines in the second world war, to feel embraced and welcomed into that Russian world. I’ll never forget that.
There are whole societies that have that feeling. It seems now in New York City, the Open Center is one of those places where there can be a feeling and coming together in a more love-based environment. You said that one of the signs that the Open Center was working was when you saw couples coming together, relationships starting up.
Yeah! I’ve always felt that whenever Eros appears it is a sign of life and vitality. If you’re creating some kind of a program or some conference or some event, I take that as a blessing personally.
I always remember that first New Years Eve party we did down on Spring Street at the Open Center and we didn’t know who would show up. 100-150 people arrived. I think it was a group of 9 single women came, together, and every single one of them found somebody and left with someone that night. It felt like a little blessing from the Cosmos to say, “Keep it up.” And we did!
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To learn more about Ralph White’s work the following websites are helpful
www.ralphwhite.net His personal website
www.opencenter.org the Open Center’s site
www.esotericquest.org the site of the Esoteric Quest conferences
www.centersgathering.org the site of the annual Gathering of Holistic Centers
www.artofdying.org for information on the Art of Dying conferences and certificates
Ralph can be reached through info@ralphwhite.net
