Esalen's Resident Alien: Secular Sceptic in a Utopian Community

Esalen’s Resident Alien

Seymour Carter: Secular Sceptic in a Utopian Community

Interviewed by Ken Dychtwald

January 14, 2010

A video recording of this interview was made at Esalen by Daniel Bianchetta.

Editor’s note:

I adapted the following text from a raw transcript of the interview.  My objective was to maintain the rough texture of contemporary spoken language, or what I would call fractured syntax. I believe this is not altogether out of keeping with Seymour’s ideas about the fractured nature of identity. However, my overriding purpose was to make sure that Seymour shines through all the language.

I think the reader will come away from this interview with a pretty good idea about the life and times of Seymour Carter.   He is a unique person.  His life was lived at the fulcrum of an era.  Seymour and his cohorts liberated a whole generation in a way that ensured failure of the inevitable neo-conservative counter-attack.  Their revolution may be over, but it need not be forgotten.  It was the precursor of a new age that is just beginning. 

To my mind we stand at the horizon of a new form of society.  It will be built upon the scientific investigation of positive emotions and "high jen" culture.  And it will be supported by new forms of psychotherapy combining mindfulness, neuroplasticity and attachment theory.  The door to this kind of transformative work would have remained closed, but for iconoclasts like Seymour Carter.

John F. Callahan for

The Gestalt Legacy Project

April 1, 2010

[Seymour died in the Ukraine after a massive heart attack in November 2012.]

Copyright © 2014 by John F. Callahan for The Gestalt Legacy Project

ISBN: 978-1-304-96834-0

ante-mortem Seymour Carter © 2010

All rights reserved. For private use only. This material may be reproduced for personal, non-commercial purposes if all copyright notations are retained without alteration. Not to be reproduced for profitable use or distribution. Do not publish or sell in any form, by itself or as part of another work, without express written permission.

Secular Sceptic in a Utopian Community

Seymour Carter:

I want to begin with a meditation. Let’s just sit for a moment with our eyes closed.

Ken Dychtwald:

Okay.

Seymour Carter:

We’re going to attend to our breathing and to our pulse rate....

[Pause]

Now I want you to tune in to your inner experience.

[Pause]

Now I want you to get ready to open your eyes...

Take a moment to make the transition from being inside to being outside. 

[Pause]

Stay with attending to your breathing and your heart rate as we do this...

Contacting and withdrawing... It’s all just coming and going...

This is part of my Gestalt game.

Ken:

Good.  Now how are you feeling?

Seymour Carter:

I feel really good.  I feel really up for this and intrigued. 

I’ve left a lot of emptiness in preparation for this, so I feel well-engaged to start.

Ken:

Why do you think we’re doing this interview?

Seymour Carter:

Why?  Well, I’m doing this because a lot of my life has been passed here at Esalen, over the last 48 years, and that life has been unrecorded, because I’m not a writer.  I have experienced certain unique philosophical, personal and community relationships over almost 50 years, that are, in a sense, unique. Now I’m looking back at my life with the feeling that, My God, what a rich and wonderful life I’ve had! 

My early life ambition was to be an artist, a painter.  I have studied art for most of my life.  As a child, I was only able to create art. I couldn’t do linear things like mathematics.  Grammar just escaped from me. 

In any case, my earliest studies led to my being here.  My earliest studies were art and the nature of interesting form.  So, when I came here, to Esalen, I came after many, many years of preparation, ready for, I think, the kind of body-mind teachings that were here. 

Ken:

One last question, before we get started, and then I’m going to do some straight interviewing. 

Let’s say this is many years from now, and there are people watching this interview who maybe never knew you...

Seymour Carter:

Right.

Ken:

By then, you and I will no longer be around.

Seymour Carter:

Or course.

Ken:

What do you hope they will feel or think or sense, as they have this experience of you?

Seymour Carter:

Well, I feel it will be as if they are watching an artist - someone like Toulouse Lautrec or Van Gogh.

They will be seeing someone who is a very, very embedded person - embedded in his own time, and on the leading edge of this culture’s perception of what it is possible to be, as a human being.

Ken:

Good.  All right.  So, I’m going to start out interviewing you Esalen style, and ask you a very straight-up, simple question. 

The question is, Who are you?

Seymour Carter:

I am Ojo Pojoaque,

Eye of the Casino,

Esalen’s Resident Alien,

A Secular Sceptic in a Utopian Community.

I am a devotee of Surrealism, Irony,

And the fractured Nature of Identity,

A maverick Social Scientist,

The last member of Esalen’s Team of Therapists

Who revolutionized Psychotherapy in the 1960s.

As a child, I was very interested in biology and the nature of identity.  So, when I look back upon my life, at the ambitions I had as a child, and see where I am now, finishing the last third of my life, I feel I have accomplished what I really wanted to do. 

I grew up surrounded by fundamentalist Christians in Washington State - in a little town called Opportunity, Washington, on the border of Northern Idaho.  In that place I lived with the remnants of the original Native American people - a group of people who had been decimated by the racist American politics of that era.

It was that growing up - surrounded by different forms of identity, different ways of life - that interested me. Very early and at a very young age I began to be interested in the question of identity.  What is a personality?  Even as a young child, I was interested in what it is to be a personality. 

As I said, I was very poor in school at linear types of learning.  But I was a very gifted reader.  I was very good at reading.  I could read a lot of information.   And I was good at art.  So, I concentrated on that.  I later found out that I was dyslexic, and I had right-left cognitive reversals. 

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