NOTE: This article was published in the International Cultic Studies Association e-Newsletter in 2005: Vol. 4, Issue No. 2: http://www.icsahome.com/articles/on-avatar-benjamin-en4
On Avatar
by Elliot Benjamin, Ph.D.
I first became introduced to Avatar, Harry Palmer’s new age spiritual, philosophical, and psychological organization founded in 1986, at an evening workshop at a metaphysical bookstore in Bangor, Maine in the summer of 1997. There were only 3 people (including myself) attending this event, and one of the people described what he heard as the “new est”, Werner Erhard’s popular new age large group experiential organization prominent in the 1970s that merged Western psychology with Eastern spirituality.
Harry Palmer, a psychologist, ex-hippie, and ex-Scientologist–known to all Avatar students as simply “Harry”–professes to not be a guru, but I’m afraid that I do not entirely agree with him on this point. For Palmer has a quite similar impact upon his followers that Erhard had upon his followers in est. And Palmer is an exceptional businessman who has made a fortune with Avatar. The costs of doing Avatar are quite high; not including traveling around 1,000 miles in my car over the 9 days, the cost of tuition was $2,300.
The workshop leaders are called Avatar Masters–and they all spend an additional $3,000 (not including the extra travel and motel costs, etc.) for an advanced Masters’ workshop. There is also the Avatar Professional course, $2,500 plus extras, and the supreme experience to be with the “most enlightened being on the planet”–the Avatar Wizards’ course–which costs $7,500 plus extras. So as you can see, Harry Palmer is quite the businessman. Approximately 100,000 people have taken the Avatar training, and it is being offered in over 60 countries all over the world. He has not written very much, and his writing style is quite terse–but also quite impactful, as his books have been translated into a number of different languages. His primary book is “Living Deliberately” and his follow-up book is “Resurfacing”, which describes the first section of the 3 section Avatar 9 day training course. A few years ago he has written “The Masters’ Handbook”, which is presently available only to Avatar graduates–and I am considered to be one of these enlightened beings. “The Masters’ Handbook” is chock full of excellent business advice on successfully selling and becoming a professional Avatar Master. Palmer’s marketing and salesmanship abilities do remind me of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, an exceedingly dangerous and extremely cultish organization that I experienced for 2 years in the 1970s. Hubbard and Palmer share many philosophical, spiritual, and psychological similarities as well.
After having done the 9 day Avatar training in the summer of 1997 without quite completing it, 2 years later–in July 1999–I did a review and completion of the Avatar course. It is common for Avatar graduates to do a review of the training, and the review costs are reasonable–in the neighborhood of $200. Both my original Avatar course as well as my review course were quite meaningful to me. In particular I liked the way the Avatar masters encourage, support, and train you to not give up on your dreams. They call these your “primaries”, and if the course goes well you end up feeling like you are capable of attaining the deepest goals, dreams, and desires that you have in life. The emphasis is very much upon going into your deepest spiritual self, referred to in Avatar as going into “source”. This is not very different from the notion of
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empty mind, or Buddha consciousness achieved thru meditation. The Avatar techniques to achieve this state of mind are actually quite simple and pleasant, having to do with feeling and noticing what is in your environment thru a series of exercise called “feel its”. Once this state of calm and relaxation is achieved, it is time to learn how to put total intention into overcoming the barriers of attaining your cherished goals, the barriers being called “secondaries”. So the Avatar process can be described as going into source to eliminate your secondaries in order to attain your primaries. The bottom line of Avatar is that you decide how you feel and what you experience. In other words, you have the capability to control what you experience in life, thru coming from a place of source, and visualizing what you want. This basic Avatar technique has remarkable philosophical similarities to the essential beliefs in both Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations With God philosophy (see my essay “On Conversations With God” in AFF
E-Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 2, Septermber 2004) as well as Helen Schuman’s Course In Miracles. But the
9 day training grounds of Avatar is tremendously powerful and impactful, and extremely intensive.
I must also give credit to Avatar for not interfering in what a person decides his or her primary to be. For me, I was in the midst of wanting to believe that the new relationship I was involved in was going to be the beautiful life-long relationship I so much wanted to experience. The Avatar masters at first tried to gently convey to me that the lack of communication in this relationship was a very poor sign for attaining my primary–in this particular relationship. But I was so stubborn and persistent that I refused to be open to what they were obviously seeing more clearly than I was. But true to Avatar form, they let me continue to work on making this my dominant primary and finding ways to attain it, though they did convince me to leave a little room for openness in case it turned out that this was not the relationsihp for which I had been praying for such a long time. When this relationship did finally end–about 6 months later–for much of the reasons my Avatar masters saw in advance, I felt a strong appreciaiton to Avatar for allowing me to
experience this (i.e. choose to experience this–in Avatar language) in the way I seemed to have wanted to.
But what happens after the 9 day Avatar training ends? Well, there are the regular mailings every two months or so of the Avatar journal–full of inspiriational writings by Harry Palmer and various Avatar graduates, Masters, and Wizards. And there are new books and tapes put out by Harry Palmer. But the real emphasis is for the Avatar graduate to take the next step–to do the Avatar Masters’ course and become an Avatar Master him/herself. Aside from the extreme expense of doing this, my basic feeling after completing the Avatar review course was that I already had gotten what I wanted to get out of Avatar. There are some valuable tools in the Avatar training–make no mistake about this. But the follow-up courses in Avatar are financially exorbitant, and I could see the dangers of becoming addicted to Avatar if I were to succumb to these temptations. However, it was also true that I had gotten a jolt from Avatar that I had not experienced from anywhere else in quite the same way. It was this impactful jolt, coupled with a smooth sales pitch from one of the Stars’ Edge trainers (the elite of Avatar) at a vulnerable time in my life that persuaded me to go to
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California in May, 2001 to do the Avatar Masters’ course.
The Avatar Masters’ course was held in a luxurious hotel in the plush surroundings of the island of Coronado, outside of San Diego. I spent approximately $5,000 including hotel and transportation, and maxed out my credit cards in order to do so. Why did I do it? I suppose I was ready to take a plunge into something uplifting and self-supporting after going through an extremely upsetting personal experience in a romantic relationship that involved losing important aspects of my self. And it was most certainly a plunge; 200 people, many of these Avatar masters reviewing the course, from all over the world. There were 6
Stars’ Edge trainers and 3 assistant Stars’ Edge trainers running the course–the elite of Avatar. And we even got a surprise visit from none other than Harry Palmer himself, and his quite intense wife Avra. However, I ended up completing the course with only an “Assistant” Avatar Masters’ license, which meant that I could not teach Avatar to others, and would have needed to do a review of the Masters’ course to upgrade my status–which would have meant a few thousand more dollars for hotel and transportation, even though the review course is free. But what actually happened on this course? Well, I got myself into a great deal of trouble with the Stars’ Edge trainer who appeared to have the most power and influence over who was given the status of becoming an Avatar Master and allowed to teach Avatar. I was quite outspoken in my concern over the expense of Avatar, the emphasis on selling Avatar to find your own students, and I freely questioned the Stars’ Edge trainers on how much money they were making for delivering the Masters’ course. The particular Stars’ Edge trainer whom I had my difficulties with took offense at my brazenness, and became suspicious that I was taking the course for fraudulent purposes, even asking me if I was a reporter for the New York Times. He gave me various “self-repair” processes to work on, but I have no doubt that in the end he was not willing to trust me to deliver Avatar to others.
I was actually being open to becoming a truthful and bona-fide Avatar Master, and had even formulated a plan to co-deliver Avatar with a woman from Cincinnati who was a professional sales/marketing director. She was going to do the marketing/sales part and I was going to lead the actual teaching–as we planned on doing the Section 1/Resurfacing part of the course in Cincinanati on a weekend in August, 2001. But all of this fell by the wayside once they gave me my Assistant Master status. It is true, as they tried to explain to me, that my status could have been lower–as there were some students who got no license at all. The only benefit of my status compared to no license was that I was allowed to “assist” a “Qualified Master” (official status with many Avatar requirements) on an Avatar course, which I would need to pay for unless I brought my own students. I was one of the first ones to finish the actual course (which content-wise was little more
than the original Avatar training course), got many compliments on how I was working with other Avatar students and masters, and many people who were further behind me were given the higher licensing status of “Intern Master”, which enabled them to teach the Section 1/Resurfacing weekend. I felt extremely hurt, embarassed, and dejected when they told me my status, and my efforts to persuade them to reconsider fell
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upon deaf ears. But deep down I knew that there was a good higher reason for this, and it was a signal to me that I was not supposed to be taking the easy way out and become a bona-fide Avatar Master, feeling the comforts and comraderie of being part of a new age spiritual organization, learning how to be a successful new age businessman, selling Avatar to the world, etc. I chose to be myself at the Avatar Masters’ course, and I got what I got. I chose to not sell the ideas of Harry Palmer to the world, given that I had so many problems with the financial ethics and also felt uncomfortable with some of the philosophical beliefs and practices.
I think back to my essays on Scientology, as described in my book “Modern Religions: An Experiential Analysis And Expose”, where I discussed the problems with the 100% technology, i.e. following 100% the ideas and techniques of the person in charge; L. Ron Hubbard. in the case of Scientology. And I realize that Avatar is essentially no different from Scientology in this regard. Harry Palmer has come up with some siginificant and effective ideas and techniques to help people actualize their dreams. But the procedures are repeated verbatim according to Palmer’s instructions, from Source List to the Creative Handling Procedure to the Initiation Session. This verbatim repetition most certainly reminds me of the Dianetic Auditing sessions of Scientology, and I have no doubt that it is far more than a mere coincidence that there are these similarities of procedure between Scientology and Avatar, given that Palmer himself is an ex-Scientologist.
So the viewpoint I choose to adopt (in Avatar language) is that my low status of “Assistant Avatar Master” had enabled me to make a narrow escape from yet another new age spiritual organization. I have spent around $8,000 on Avatar, and there was an intensive sales pitch at the Avatar Masters’ course to sign up for the next Avatar Wizard’s course, the 13 day training in Florida that costs $7,500 plus all the extras.
But I have learned so much–both about Avatar and about the dangers of new age spirituality in the 2000s.
As a paraphrasing of the first statement on the Avatar Source list describess: I am happy to be who I am. And this “me” has been telling me that it is time to go back into action–not do any more course work on Avatar and not teach Avatar officially to others–but to offer to others what I have learned of Avatar as well as all my other new age spiriutality studies, and to facilitate heart felt dialogue and discussion surrounding the search for authentic spiritual truth.
