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I Want the Growth Movement Back

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Raven Lodge, workshop area at Cold Mountain Institute, 1975

 

 

An “encounter group” in the 70s was run on “shares.” We’d talk about whether someone was “cooking” or just “trolling.” If they were cooking, was it just a “hot” share or a “red-hot” share?

People were breaking through on every front. And when their issue came up (cast a stick among dogs), usually someone would react (and the one who is hit is the one who will howl). We learned to take responsibility for our issues.

The red-hot share was the next piece of work. That piece of work might have been with someone who looks like their Dad or Mom, or they may have been triggered by something someone said – whatever –  away the one who was hit went.

We did gestalt, bodywork, psychodrama, rule reconstruction, bioenergetics, on and on the techniques went, which by the way were collected by a human-relations firm in Ojai back then. I can probably dig up the name.

I’m eager to get this whole way of being restarted after the Reval.

***

May I reminisce for a moment?

I entered the growth movement in 1975, when I signed up for a three-month encounter group with Cold Mountain Institute, Cortez Island, BC.

This expensive decision was spurred on by my Dad’s recommendation. He’d taken the course himself and I was impressed at the difference in him.

He said that my views on sex were Victorian.

Well, damn, that settled the matter.

Download Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! V5 Growth at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V5-Growth-R5.pages

Cold Mountain Institute had a barge on Granville Island in Vancouver, on which I took their introductory, one-week encounter group called “Come Alive!”

It didn’t take much loosening up in the group to see how rock-solid I was and to sign up for the longer, three-month, residential course.

I’ve already written on what it was like after three months, on the very last day. (1) Nobody spoke.  There was nothing more to say. It was what it was and it’d be what it’d be. We were perfectly at rest.

And this is what came of it and from it (plus the est Training, enlightenment intensives, guru seva, etc.).

***

We lost the growth moment to the jobless-recovery, automate-the-workforce-out-of-existence recession of 1982. (2) A seller’s market in labor became a buyer’s market seemingly overnight and we were told: “Stop finding yourself, pal: It’s time to get back to work — if you still have a job, that is.” (3) and “Social Darwinism is respectable again.” (4) No heart anymore, there.

Social Darwinism (survival of the fittest)  really was respectable again. The go-go 80s and damn-the-torpedoes 90s lacked G/NESARA (5) and so the working and middle classes fell ever more behind in all economic indices.

And human growth was not “in” any more. We shaved our beards, traded sandals for Oxfords again. (OK, Hush Puppies for me.)

We were labelled the “Me” Generation. No one understood Self-Realization. We were cast as self-absorbed, lazy, off in another world. You could definitely say we were off in another world. It was becoming a “counter culture” and the deep state saw that and eliminated it.

Anyways, I want it back. I want that wonderful growth work back – Encounter, Sensitivity Training, Art Therapy, Bodywork, Meditation, you name it.

And the flower children? Why not? What harm were they: “Make love, not war.” Were they not our leading edge? Findhorn, Krishnamurti at Ojai, Ram Dass in Los Angeles, on and on. What harm?

We have a ways to go before our public life is free of such threats as mass shootings even, never mind being ready for “getting to know you.”

I had my first “peak moment” of knowing who I am in an Enlightenment Intensive in that Cold Mountain retreat.  (6) All of these disciplines moved us closer and closer to the truth of who we are.

We can use them, maybe not this moment because the social climate is too dangerous. But after the deep state is gone, we can learn and grow from the accumulated technologies and wisdom of the growth movement.

Download Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! V5 Growth at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V5-Growth-R5.pages

* Let's Go! Let's Grow! V5 Growth R5

Footnotes

(1) See “Last Lunch at Cold Mountain,”

(2) See:

(3) David Olive, “The New Hard Line,” Report on Business Magazine, October, 1991, 15.  See also:

(4) Loc. cit.

(5) G/NESARA is the Global/National Economic Security and Reformation Act, promising prosperity for all. See What’s Next?
 Vol. 5: G/NESARA at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Whats-Next-5-2.pdf

(6) In this week-long Enlightenment Intensive, the group leader invited us to come up and talk to him if we thought we’d had an experience of the Self. What did I know? At some point I thought I had and got up to talk to the teacher. I got no more than a few steps when he told me to “Sit down!”

Wahl, goldarn it.

Some time later I actually did have an experience of the Self and I did not need the teacher to validate it. I got up and walked out of “the hut.” I had what we were looking for. On the path to “the lodge,” I passed a pile of horse manure. It smelled so sweet that I ran my hands through it. Yep, life is good.