by Dharmādhyakṣa dāsa

On June 17, 1959, with summer vacation just a few days away, I walked onto my grammar school playground in a lighthearted mood. Just then my best friend Billy rushed over to me with wide eyes. "Did you hear the news?!"

"What news?"

"This morning Superman killed himself! He shot himself in the head with a Luger!"

At first I thought Billy was kidding, but soon I noticed that everyone in the yard was talking about the story-George Reeves, TV's Superman, had committed suicide. I couldn't believe it. A hero-how could a hero do that? I couldn't believe it. A hero-how could a hero do that?

As Emerson said, "It is natural to believe in great men." And in his book, The Hero, American Style, Marshall William Fishwick remarks that "people are ineffective without leaders. The search for paragons is inherent in human nature." In an article in Today's Health magazine, social critic Marya Mannes goes a little further. She says, "Unless we have some image of human greatness, of human excellence, to build on, we shall find it difficult to be animated by great dreams. We will be only moles burrowing in the darkness."

For its part, modern psychology calls its equivalent of the hero or paragon the "ego ideal." A person forms his ego ideal by picking out traits of parents, friends, and others in the society at large. Researchers are quick to point out that healthy models make for healthy people, while sick models, like Hitlers and Stalins, make for sick people and a sick world.

Social commentators are concerned about today's shortage of inspiring, healthy models. "Where Have All the Heroes Gone?" asks Edward Hoagland in The New York Times Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report talks about "The Vanishing Hero." So perhaps I was right, back there on the school playground, in feeling I'd been let down.

By the time I'd entered high school, most fictional heroes struck me as cardboard characters. I had to pass them by. Now, political leaders, past and present, replaced them. Then, in my freshman year of college, in 1965, the Watergate mood hit me early.

On the afternoon when Georgetown University played host to some members of Congress, I was one of the first students to trot up the steps of Harlan Hall. My mind was filled with anticipation. I wanted to get involved in government; it seemed a good way to work with people. During my first few months at school, I'd absorbed as much as I could of the theory and history of government, and now came a bonus-the chance to talk with the people who were making the history I was studying.

As I stood on the thick red carpet, the university's past presidents stared down at me from their portraits on the old wood walls. Even their grave faces couldn't douse my enthusiasm. In less than forty minutes I'd be sharing the room with the country's leaders.

While I was thinking this way, a congressman dressed in a blue blazer bounded up the steps and walked hurriedly across the room. Several friends and I approached him and started asking questions, but he seemed totally intent on wherever he was going. He never slowed down.

"Boys," he said, "I'm a Johnson Democrat. That answers all your questions. Now, where's the bar?"

As we stood there openmouthed, the congressman glided past us and ordered a bourbon on the rocks.

My other brushes with politicians only reinforced this first bruised impression. With the world so much in need of unity and cooperation, I felt turned off by so much small-mindedness. It all seemed like a cheating, losing game, and I didn't want to play it. So after my sophomore year I opted for a change-psychology.

At least psychology could tell you something about what was going on inside people. What surprised me was that all this inside knowledge of human nature just seemed to turn psychologists into pessimists. I'll never forget the day when one of my best professors, Dr. M., compared human beings to lemmings.

"The lemming is a peculiar breed of rat that lives in Scandinavia," said Dr. M. in his usual intense way. "Every so often-it seems to happen without any rhyme or reason-one lemming starts running frantically across the countryside. This 'running fever' spreads to the other rats, and soon a kind of mass hysteria infects them. For months and months they migrate, only to reach the coastline and a dead end.

" 'Dead end'-that's really what it is. Without hesitating, the lead lemming leaps into the sea, and all the rest follow him. The few that survive produce some more, and then they go through the suicide sequence all over again.

"Maybe we're like the lemmings. World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the Middle East,... World War III-it's a frightening thought, but if you look at our record,... maybe that's the best we can do."

In his book Motivation and Personality, psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about this kind of thinking. He chided not only psychologists but also many others in the intellectual community for denying "the possibility of improving human nature and society, or of discovering intrinsic human values, or of being life-loving in general." During my college days I empathized with Maslow's criticisms. Yet even more appealing to me were his positive insights about human potential.

Early in his career, Maslow had become disgusted with modern psychology's obsession for studying mental disease. He felt that the study of sick and crippled persons could only produce a sick and crippled psychology. Maslow reversed this trend by researching the dynamics of health. He wrote,

Maslow's research reached its height in his description of the fully healthy or "self-actualized" person. In Towards a Psychology of Being, he wrote, "In these healthy people we find duty and pleasure to be the same thing, as is also work and play, self-interest and altruism." In an earlier essay he had pointed out,

The self-actualized displayed clearer perception of reality, more openness to experience, greater spontaneity, and a firmer sense of identity. They also possessed greater creativity, treated different kinds of people equally, and had a greater ability to love. They valued justice, simplicity, beauty, individuality, joy, and honesty.

The more I read about self-actualization, the more I liked it. But there was one hitch. Maslow didn't know how the self-actualized got that way:

I still wanted self-actualization, but naturally I didn't know how to get there either.

By this time I was in my senior year. Most of my classmates (even those who shared my feelings) kept themselves busy by applying to graduate schools or jockeying for a job. I could have forgotten my predicament that way and buried myself in some institutional cubbyhole, but something inside me refused to allow it. "You can't fool yourself. You'll never be happy by doing that." With mixed emotions, I kept to that conclusion.

In other words, in so many ways this was a frightening decision to make. There were so many nagging questions. "Will I become an oddball and cut myself off from my family and friends?" "How will I support myself?" "Will I get into something worthwhile, or will I just wind up getting nowhere fast?"

At the same time, I knew that something was missing, from my life and from the lives of most people. I wanted to ferret out that "something."