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March/April 2008

THE NEXUS INTERVIEW

Electile dysfunction and the
Modern Politician

An interview with Steve Bhaerman, aka Swami Beyondananda, about the importance of political activism, his new gig as a political humorist, and his life of poking fun a the "New Age"

by RAVI DYKEMA

When I was broke, naïve and idealistic 27 years ago I worked as a tree pruner high above Madison, Wisconsin. I was also editor of a tiny spiritual organization’s newsletter and wanted to turn it into a real magazine. Somebody showed me a magazine from Anne Arbor Michigan called Pathways. It was about holistic health, eclectic spirituality and creating a better society (remember the “New Age?”). My partner, Chris Guilfoil, and I visited Anne Arbor and met Steve Bhaerman, also a former tree pruner and co-publisher of Pathways. He wrote a humor column on each issue’s inside back cover called “Ask the Swami”. Steve wasn’t making much money but he paid his printer, so Chris and I started Attunement Magazine and printed Swami Beyondananda’s (Steve’s) advice on the inside of our back cover too.

Over the next 26 years I watched Steve/Swami become a regular contributor
to many Nexus-type magazines, write four books, Driving Your Own Karma, When You See a Sacred Cow, Milk It For All It’s Worth, Duck Soup for the Soul, and his latest, Swami for Precedent: A 7-Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile Dysfunction, and tour the country performing his comedy routine. He also designed and led workshops on Comedy as a Healing Art.

Pre-Swami, Steve Bhaerman started an alternative high school in Washington, D.C. and co-authored a book about his experiences, No Particular Place to Go: Making of a Free High School. A political science major in college, he later taught history to autoworkers at Wayne State University in Detroit as part of the Weekend College.

As you will see, middle-aged Steve Bhaerman aka Swami Beyondananda has a serious side, and he, like perhaps you and I, can’t sit by anymore and hum while bombs burst and ice caps melt. So he has focused his wit on politics with his latest book, Swami for Precedent.

We caught up with Steve recently by phone from his home in Santa Rosa, California.

(Steve’s views may disagree with yours, yet he offers food for thought in this important election year. We would love to hear from you, too.)

RD: You wrote Swami for Precedent three years ago, but it’s still very apropos to the current election--and it’s very well researched.

SB: Yes, I did a lot of research (you can find references and links on the website, wakeuplaughing.com). My background is in political science, which, as we know, is an oxymoron. Over the past several years, people have gotten so involved in personal growth and new age movements, and when you mention politics, they say “Oh! Well, I just don’t want to go there.” Now we have to recognize that “there” has come here. It’s come right to our front door and into our private spaces, and there’s no escaping it.

So I went back to my background in political science almost four years ago, when I started writing this book, and what I found out was how much I didn’t
know. Swami says the good news is that the “up-wising”--people waking-up and wisening-up--continues. The other news is that the more we wake up, the more we realize how much there is to wake up to. It’s a funny book, written from Swami Beyondananda’s perspective, but underneath the humor, there’s a strong thread of seriousness.

RD: Tell us more about Swami Beyondananda, your alter ego.

SB: I started performing as Swami Beyonananda at the end of 1986, so in 21 years, I figure I’ve given between 750 and 1,000 performances. And there’s the Swami Beyondananda column, which started out as unbelievable advice and morphed into “Ask the Swami” and “Dear Swami.” It’s been running for the last 20 or 21 years in about 15 publications. I also have a blog where I post the “Beyond the News” column, which you can sign up for at wakeuplaughing.com, and then a more serious political blog called “Notes from the Trail.” I’m certainly reaching hundreds of thousands of people, directly or indirectly. We’re at a time right now where it’s so much easier to narrow cast your message because of the Internet, and to reach a specific audience. This year I have way more shows than last year because this book-writing will be done very shortly, and I can get out on the road.

RD: How did you get started in your career in humor?

SB: I had been teaching history at Wayne State University, which I absolutely loved, and I was really good at it. But I got laid off and took the only job I could find, as a tree trimmer for the City of Ann Arbor. This was kind of a dark night of the soul for me. At the time, I was working on a sequel to my book on alternative education, but I was having no luck finding a publisher. I was working on it one night, and I distinctly heard a voice say, “Let go of the book. It’s the past, and you need to focus on the future.” Of course, the voice never answered my question, “So what’s the future?” I found out a couple of weeks later when the city tree folks put me with this new guy, who turned out to be a brilliant psychologist disguised as a truck driver. He suggested we start a humorous newspaper for our fellow workers. We did, and it changed my life and career. I began to see the power humor had to change one’s perspective, to tell the truth in a way people could hear it. Two years later, I started Pathways magazine in Ann Arbor, and that’s where the Swami got his start.

RD: You’re unique in that you specialize in poking fun at the consciousness community, spiritual teachers, and dietary regimens that claim to heal this or that.

SB: You’re absolutely right. But over the years, I’ve had three distinct missions. The Swami began as a way of poking fun at spiritual excesses--both the spiritual materialism, like chanting for BMWs, and pathological purity, like fasting and wearing only white. A number of people have tried to poke fun at this, but it ends up being insulting, because they’re not part of it. They have no compassion or understanding. But I’m coming at it as an insider, showing the shadow side of spirituality. I don’t think any of my stuff has ever been a put-down. That was the first part of my mission.

Then, in the early ‘90s, I began to do more programs and presentations on the healing power of humor. Not only is humor a tool for physical release, but it’s also a tool for spiritual healing. It’s medicine, a form of magic.

Then, as we’ve watched the political horror show unfold--which is simply the shadow that’s been unacknowledged rearing its reptilian head over the last five or six years--I’ve moved into applying the spiritual focus to the so-called political domain. My take on what we call “politics” is that these issues are much bigger than the political realm. They have to do with the foundation of who we are and how we act collectively in the world. We have, for example, the Ten Commandments. (Of course, Swami says “Maybe that’s too much.
Maybe we just need one suggestion, like we’re all in this together.”) For example, one commandment says “Thou shalt not kill.” Well, that got distorted right away to “Thou shalt not kill unless done in extremely large groups.” Somehow, we’ve been enabled collectively to do things we wouldn’t dream of doing individually. Part of the reason Swami’s material now encompasses things we would call “politics,” is that there needs to be a collective awakening, which is the amplification of the individual awakening that’s been going on for the last 25 or 30 years.

RD: You said you viewed the holistic spirituality world from the inside. How did you get into that world?

SB: I was the Indigo sheep in my family. I had friends and did the usual, normal childhood and teenage things. It wasn’t until I went away to graduate school at Antioch that I met my peers, folks who were up to something. I was at The Yellow Springs, Ohio, Campus in the summer of 1967. I was just a kid, and a lot of people there had already been in the Peace Corps for two years. I didn’t sleep the first three nights because I was talking to people; it was so interesting!

It wasn’t long after that, when I was doing my alternative school teaching in D.C., that somebody took me to a yoga class. That got me started doing Kundalini yoga. Shortly after that, I started doing Transcendental Meditation. I took the EST training, did rebirthing, went to various ashrams, etcetera, etcetera. Over the years, I’ve been integrating these early experiences into my own personal spirituality.

The Swami says “Each of us is totally unique, just like everyone else.” Each of us has an absolutely singular and unique relationship with spirit, and we can find those relationships in a variety of paths.You could even say these paths represent the chakras--the higher chakras are the meditative paths, the lower chakras tend to be the physical, earthy paths, and they’re all valid. Through our individual biochemistry and spiritual or metaphysical chemistry, we are attracted to certain connections with oneness.

Years ago, I performed at Yogaville, Swami Satchidananda’s ashram in Virginia. In the Lotus shrine, which is dedicated to all the religions in the world (even atheism), a big sign says “One Spirit, Many Paths.” That’s my belief: there are many, many different ways to connect and comprehend, and to make somebody else’s path wrong so that you can feel that yours is right doesn’t make any sense.

RD: So, from “One Spirit” to political humor; how’d that happen?

SB: When I started doing the Swami, one of my friends said “You know, of course, you’re going to have to integrate your whole self into this. Comedy is only one expression of who you are.” Comedy has been a great expression; as a comedian, I can say things and explore topics other people can’t deal with. But I’ve always had a serious side.

So as I watched the political events over the last 7 or 8 years, starting with the stolen election in 2000 and the events of 9/11, it became clear to me that what’s been missing in the political conversation is a universal sense of spirituality. When I talked to people about politics, they’d say “Wow! That makes so much sense. I never thought of it that way before.” As I began writing Swami for Precedent, it was a way to bring my whole self back in to my humor, all my experience and realizations.

RD: How do you and Swami see the current political situation?

SB: On a serious note: I’ve been following politics since I was a kid. I lived in Washington D.C., and I was surrounded by people with varying political perspectives. Now, however, I’m looking at politics from a much broader standpoint. I think we are on the cusp of either an evolution or the end of our species. The way things are going right now--the way resources are being used, the way population is growing, and the way those who want to control things are manifesting their control--we will either devolve into chaos, or be subject to a totalitarian political system in the form of neo-feudalism. We have that right now.

RD: Where do we have neo-feudalism?

SB: Right here in this country, because of the growing gap between rich and poor. We’ve been colonized, essentially. It’s become clear to me that the political puppet show is basically a diversionary tactic, and that things don’t change that much because the same people are essentially in charge. During the Clinton administration, for example, there was globalization --going into third-world countries, selling them expensive projects that they couldn’t pay for, and then putting them in a state of permanent debt. Meanwhile, in this country, we are in a state of permanent debt too. The Federal Reserve issues money as debt. So every child born into this country is born in original debt. And debt is a form of slavery, because it cannot ever really be paid off. It just seems to multiply.

If our government decided it would issue dollars coined by the United States based on the amount of real wealth available, and used those dollars to pay
off the national debt, it could be done within a matter of a decade. But what’s really going on--and I don’t want this to sound like some paranoid conspiracy theory--is that a small group of people who have a lot to say, also have a tremendous amount of money. They have access to military force, they own the mainstream media and, for all intents and purposes, control the content of television, radio and mainstream newspapers. So what’s happened is the actual people of America have become economically and politically disenfranchised.

Now, there are two kinds of people in America: those who have woken up to that, and those who haven’t. The good reason to not wake up to it is because once you wake up, you have to do something about it. I’m creating an organization tentatively named The Department of Heartland Security, which is designed to give voice to “We, the people” through local and national wisdom councils, and provide the moral majority that’s been missing, the stuff that 90 to 95 percent of the people in this country agree on.

What’s happened is that we’ve been divided into two tribes, the Blue Democrat tribe and the Red Republican tribe. Each of these tribes gets its own separate news and has its own separate belief system. If these groups ever compared notes, they might be able to approximate the truth. But because they are each given pieces of the truth, and lots of distortion, while the tribes are arguing about issues like whether it’s more wrong to kill the born or the unborn, a very small group of people can manipulate and control everything, because we cannot constitute a majority. We, the people, keep getting separated by these very divisive issues, like prayer and abortion and so on.

When you hear people on the left railing about the religious right, chances are they’re talking about a very small percentage of those people. Many evangelical people don’t share the political views of George Bush. Meanwhile, on the right, you have people writing books about liberals, and it’s totally made up stuff; they’ve created a straw man. The right and the left are both fighting against a non-existent enemy, while the real enemy--the forces that are milking us and bilking us for the commonwealth— continue to milk and bilk.

Forty-five years ago, we imagined our current world as being much different. We thought that around this time, we’d have lots of leisure time because of modern labor saving devices, and we’d be working a two-day week. Instead,
we now have to work two jobs to make what our parents and grandparents made 50 years ago.

RD: I remember those predictions - one person could perform so much work in a day with increasing efficiency, we would clearly be selecting enhancements to quality of life over massive increases in productivity--but, no, we chose productivity. No matter whether we consciously chose it, that’s what we ended up with.

SB: But it’s not even productivity. In the late 1940s, we made a deal with the devil: we created a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy with our government. That’s where we promise not to ask them what they’re doing to “protect us,” and they promise not to tell us. We’ve empowered a secret government, and we’ve empowered a military industrial complex that has spent $15 trillion in that period of time on weapons, on “protection,” on destruction. That has sped the destruction of the planet and the depletion of resources.

So there are three reasons why we don’t have more money in our bank accounts, and why the U.S. dollar is now worth less than the monopoly dollar. First is we’ve been on a debt economy ever since the 1930s. Second is military spending, which isn’t necessarily infrastructure. It’s something that is either stored or destroyed. Third, our so-called economy is nothing more than a Las Vegas casino. Over the last 15 or 20 years, some 80 to 90 percent of our so-called profit has come from speculative entures—meaning, of course, that there’s nothing of value underneath it; it’s all air. Here’s an example: let’s say you go to the bank and get a loan for $10,000. That’s new money. That’s not old money the bank has sitting around; it’ new money that’s being put into the system. And so by that much, it’s diluting the buying power of the dollars that already exist.

RD: Is that really the way it works? I thought banks were loaning out the money they had received from depositors.

SB: There’s a certain amount of money each year that the banks are essentially given by the Federal Reserve to loan out, and that’s new money. That’s the Federal Reserve diluting the money supply. Of course, as you know, the Federal Reserve is a privately owned organization. It’s not a government agency. Very few people know that; we’re not supposed to know that.

As I start to compare what the left knows and what the right knows, the right, particularly the Ron Paul, Libertarian right, have a very clear understanding of what it means to issue money as debt. So when they’re against big government spending, they understand that that’s what dilutes the money supply and makes our dollars worthless. Of course, there’s a lot more to this, and it’s going to be in my new book, Spontaneous Evolution.

There has to be some very deep rethinking and reforms of our economic system. No matter who is elected president, there is a very limited amount of leeway they could have, because changing things involves dismantling and rethinking the whole system. I think that can only be done by a group of citizens who are dedicated to expanding knowledge and going for breakthrough solutions, as opposed to I-win-you-lose scenarios.

To wrap up this part of the conversation, perhaps the best metaphor is a biological metaphor of the cocoon, as a caterpillar transforms into the butterfly. First, the old caterpillar cells start breaking down and new cells begin to pop up. At first, the caterpillar doesn’t recognize these cells and begins to destroy them. But at some point, the cells reach a critical mass, where they begin to cluster in communities and communicate with one another. Then there is a tipping point, and all of a sudden the organism becomes a butterfly. We’re in that space right now, the space between. There is something being born, and there is something dying. The old system is dying, and trying to resist dying, trying to keep itself alive through force and manipulation. The new system being born is based on the understanding that the only way we can survive as a species is to be in harmony with this planet. It’s a very expansive system; it allows us to be more of who we really are as individuals. If we’re not working for a machine, we have the opportunity to have a more balanced life.

RD: Working for the machine might translate to some people as “Gosh, I’ve got to make a living. But I don’t see an alternative.”

SB: Let’s look at it this way. When I graduated from Brooklyn College, up until the mid- or late-‘70s, college was free in New York if you had a certain grade point average—so I graduated from college owing no money. Nowadays, people graduate from college owing, at the very least, $30,000, and sometimes upwards of $250,000. Talk about original debt! You’re going into the workplace minus $100,000. So, because of that obligation, you then have to take a job that pays lots of money, which, most of the time, means working in a corporate setting. But that has its own built-in insecurities. For example, a friend of mine was a Silicon Valley executive, and he’s been unable to find work for the last 10 years because he was a high-paid executive. And when you reach a certain level of both competence and pay scale, the company will say “That was very nice, thank you, bye-bye. We’ll just hire somebody at the lower end.”

RD: Somebody with that $100,000 debt staring them in the face.

SB: Exactly. The companies know these people have to take something. They have to start working right away to pay off their debt. So all of a sudden, we have a whole bunch of people who are in economic tribulation, who haven’t even done anything yet.

RD: And they chose to go to college instead of go out and work and get the life experience.

SB: But that’s part of the scam. We live in such a commercial society, we take it for granted that money rules, so we go to college to learn a trade to make a living. I had a liberal arts education. I think of all the English and science and math classes I took, all these interesting classes, which I never used in my career. But they contributed to my mind being broadened, as opposed to stupefied.

There’s an old Tennessee Ernie Ford song that goes “You load sixteen tons, what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt, St. Peter, don’t you call me cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.” Back around the turn of the century, in these small mining towns, people would get credit through the company store. It was essentially a form of slavery that was even better for the company than the original slavery because the company didn’t have to house these people. They housed themselves. But they bought everything from the company store. Now we just have a more elaborate company store, only it’s CitiBank—which, incidentally, was just
bought by the Saudis.

That’s why the old fashioned rightwing people are waking up; they’re saying, “My God, the John Birch Society was right in 1960.” They were able to see that there was a distinction between people’s capitalism and corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism, international capitalism, has taken over. These multi-national companies might as well be countries. They have budgets the size of the economies of many countries, and they’re very organized. What needs to happen on a nationwide and a worldwide level is a citizens union, one that provides accurate information for the body politic that allows ways for the millions of people who recognize that our interests lie together to act collectively in our own behalf. That’s the only thing that will make a difference at this point, because we’ve been divided and conquered.

With this upcoming election, we’re stuck in a narrow-minded viewpoint of which side is better. Is George Bush better or worse than Hillary Clinton? I’m afraid the similarities outweigh the differences, even though I think this current administration is the worst abomination ever visited on this country. However, I don’t think our support of the American Empire abroad will change if Hillary becomes president. It will just put a little smiley face on it, and we’ll have the exact same problems we have now.

I wouldn’t reward with my vote any Republican, except for Ron Paul. When we put all our attention, as we are now, onto the circus of electoral politics, without even being assured that our votes are going to be counted accurately, or that they won’t be hacked from afar, we miss the bigger issues. The election has nothing to do with control of policy; that policy has already been determined, and we the people have been excluded from the governing process in almost every way.

Having said this, I am encouraged by the Obama campaign because his message of bringing people together to face our problems instead of fighting about them is exactly what will bring about an “American evolution.” Whether or not Obama delivers on his promise, or even gets elected, the American people -- all across the political spectrum -- are recognizing how much we all have in common. It’s this common willingness to see beyond the “divide and conquer” context of “we vs. they” or “liberal vs. conservative” that will allow the body politic to evolve from manipulation and disempowerment. An Overwhelming Obama victory would signal a great shift, and might just send the Republicans back to a true conservative like Ron Paul.

Our political job for the next period of time is mobilizing the genuine moral majority here in this country, those who don’t believe our leaders should lie, cheat, steal and kill on our behalf or on their own behalf. Because of the way the media has been twisted, somehow torture is okay. Somehow it’s okay that we have no habeas corpus anymore, and if for some reason somebody thought that you or I were subversive, they could take us away and nobody would see us again. That’s exactly how the law reads now. These other conversations, even the conversation about global warming, become lesser conversations. The crucial issue is our own ability to have access to the ship of state, and we’re not anywhere close to the steering wheel.

RD: What would you say to people who think of the current political situation as so much of a downer, with so many conflicting arguments that make it so hard to assess the truth, that they’re not going to participate in the political process. They have, in effect, given up.

SB: First of all, I have to say it’s totally understandable to feel discouraged. You don’t have to pretend that you don’t feel discouraged. So let’s stop pretending that the problem can be solved through the existing political system. At the same time, look at the positives; people say “Oh, well, everything is run by just a small number of people.” I say, “Wow, that’s great news,” because it means there’s way more of us than there are of them.

According to what I’ve been reading, psychopaths and sociopaths comprise somewhere around 6 percent of the population; that would indicate that 94 percent of us are not sociopaths, that we wouldn’t kill or steal unless we were somehow forced into doing it. It’s important for us to coalesce around what 94 percent of us agree are our true values. And you know what? When you boil away all the extraneous matter, all religion comes down to some version of the Golden Rule. Whether you call it “Love thy neighbor” or the Law of Karma, it’s all the same thing. We need to create a moral authority around the Golden Rule, which is “This is our operating system for a successful planet.”

One of the reasons America has been successful is that in 1787, we decided to join in a confederation. Up until that time, there were border skirmishes between New York and New Jersey. Imagine the wasted energy if we now had 50 separate armies involved in skirmishes against one another. Instead, we said “We’re all in this together in this country, and we’re going to stick together, instead of going to war with each other.”

RD: So what would you say to motivate people who are boycotting the political process entirely?

SB: First, I would say we have to get out of our heads and into our hearts. In our heads, we have opinions and positions that separate us. Change will not come from positions. Change will come from the integration of old ideas into breakthrough new ideas that have not been tried yet. Just as in quantum theory, a quantum leap is a shift in behavior that’s not predicted by the particles as they are behaving. That’s what we need. We won’t get it by arguing with each other about abortion or religion in schools. I’m not going to convince the George Bush people that I’m right; they’re not going to convince me that they’re right. But if we can have a conversation where there’s mutual respect, we will understand that there are certain things that we absolutely agree on.

Jim Rough, a corporate consultant and seminar leader, developed a technique called Dynamic Facilitation, which is designed to assure collaborative and creating thinking in groups, and to get any group to come to a breakthrough consensus. He’s done this with group after group after group. What the groups normally come to is a realization that the system doesn’t work, so they begin to look beyond the system. For the people who are feeling disheartened and disenfranchised by the choices that they have, I say stay engaged. Unless there is an organized national boycott of the vote, which may be a strategy that we adopt at some point, individually staying home from the poles reminds me of this guy who comes home and finds his wife in bed with his best friend. He pulls out a gun and puts it to his own head. His wife and the friend start laughing. He says “What are you laughing at? You’re next!” So people who say, “I’m not going to be involved in any way,” those are the people who are shooting themselves in the head.

The way to be engaged is to understand that when you clear away the fog of brainwashing most people are able to recognize that at the heart of things, something’s wrong. The way to right it is at the grass roots, with people getting together, human to human, letting go of positions, and saying “Here we are, a group of humans, in this situation. What do we do now?” That’s where the solution is going to come from.

My job, for this next year, is to coalesce a healthy, central voice for “we the people,” so that those people who are feeling disenfranchised can say “I belong here. This is what’s going to reenfranchise me.” It’s good for people to feel disenfranchised, because they are disenfranchised. I applaud the courageous people who have stepped out and are being treated like they’ve got tin foil on their heads, because they are not afraid to look at reality. So number one, do not be afraid to look at reality, in the face, and recognize what’s really happening. Number two, get with a community of like-hearted people, and focus on developing the spiritual strength to face the shadow. That’s the job.