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MSIA f*ck up
May 20th, 2007 | Category: drain, gtd, msia, f*ck up
Hey, ###,

Unfortunately somebody can not hold his tongue: here and there appear the messages about the relation of the GTD and David Allen to the MSIA. How do you like this:

David here - Well, we’re back. Thanks for your well wishes. FYI the spiritual organization I’ve been closely involved with for 34 years is MSIA (The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness). [msia.org] (Basically a group of radical-non-joiners who share a focus on a practical approach to spirituality).

on the David’s site? I have got an impression that we were not interested in such type of the disclosure. Frankly speaking, after all that McWilliams hysteria back then I did not want to hear any references to MSIA in our projects. We do not want to mess with John-Roger with all his freaks now; we do not want the “cult of personality” label back either. And we already failed to avoid the problems during the Huffington’s senatorial campaign.

I do not want to press on you but what could you propose to fix all considering the scale of the leak?

PS The financial patterns we polished back then with MSIA work pretty fine in the new environment.

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Getting Things Done Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency

The only thing Allen was allowed to have in his possession at Napa State Hospital was a spoon. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was pretty accurate," he says of the time he spent as a mental patient, "and Napa was one of the good hospitals."
...
These were dangerous years for young men unsure of their authenticity, and one day at a party Allen sat down next to a charismatic liar named Michael Bookbinder. He'd been a Formula One racer and also a paratrooper. He played flamenco guitar and knew karate. His costume included silk shirts with huge collars and puffy sleeves "in the manner of a gay buccaneer," as an acquaintance later recalled. He wore pancake makeup. He was a heroin user.

Bookbinder and Allen became close. Bookbinder taught him karate, and soon Allen was using heroin, too. He left his marriage, abandoned his academic training, and eventually found himself out on the street, practically penniless, "crucified psychically," as he would later put it, "absolutely at the bottom physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually." Worried about the radical change in his behavior, some of Allen's friends had him committed in 1971. At the mental hospital, Allen received stark lessons in simulated obedience. He learned to hide his psychiatric medication under his tongue instead of refusing it or spitting it out, and he studied what the medical staff seemed to want of him, so that they would pronounce him cured. "I made a decision to institute a high state of cooperation with the world again," he says.

After a brief period of hospitalization, he was released. Teaching karate to earn money, Allen struggled to pull his life together. One day, a student told him of receiving assistance from a spiritual master who balanced her aura. Allen sought him out. "In 10 seconds I knew he had something to teach," Allen says. "And in 35 years I haven't yet gotten to the end of it."

The man who put him on a new path was then at the inflection point in a long and varied spiritual enterprise. Roger Hinkins was born during the Depression in a poor mining town in central Utah. By the early '70s he had been introduced to Eckankar by its founder, Paul Twitchell, learned esoteric philosophy from a correspondence course, changed his name to Sri John-Roger, started a series of spiritual seminars, and given up his work as a high school teacher to found a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. The movement's theology holds that John-Roger is the Mystical Traveler, a benevolent consciousness guiding mankind, who in the past has appeared as Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Abraham Lincoln, among others. Some of the devotees lived in a Los Angeles mansion called the Purple Rose Ashram of the New Age. Allen was, and still is, a minister in the church.

When Allen met him, John-Roger earned money by selling transcripts of the Mystical Traveler's teachings, known as Soul Awareness Discourses. But in 1977, as a general reaction against the more colorful elements of the counterculture set in, he explored new directions. With a devotee named Russell Bishop, John-Roger launched the Insight Seminars, a largely secular program that soon found its way into major US corporations. Insight was not alone in bringing New Age philosophy into corporate training during the next decade. By the mid-'80s many corporate employees were being sent to classes and seminars taught by quasi-religious self-improvement groups like Lifespring, Transformational Technologies, and other branches of what was known, collectively, as the human potential movement. David Allen became an Insight trainer, and by 1983 he was consulting at Lockheed, where he began to filter the powerful techniques of the personal-growth movement through the pragmatic grid of corporate human resources.

That the inventor of their favorite system of personal organization has a decades-long devotion to New Age thinking causes fits of squeamishness among GTD fans. "If indeed GTD was conceived, implemented, and marketed with the intentions of drawing people into the MSIA cult," wrote one member of the popular productivity forum, 43folders.com, "how do we, as conscientious individuals, avoid becoming prey within the trap?" Allen explains that while he won't hide his beliefs, he doesn't want his personal faith confused with the message he has for people today. "The Marriott family supports the Mormon Church," he points out, but nobody refuses to sleep in their hotels.

Of course, a hotel is not an [b:f996ed2b78]installed thought process[/b:f996ed2b78], which is the way Allen describes GTD. Given that users of his system entwine GTD with their daily habits, it's only natural that they would wonder about its antecedents. GTD is pitched to rationalists. Such people tend to be cautious when considering schemes to change their life.

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I was a bit disappointed that Gary Wolf (the author of the Wired article) rather tackily framed my early adventures and explorations, as well as the work of John-Roger, in such a People-magazine-ish light. There's a bit of intellectual dishonesty in not exploring the content of what I learned in the process, nor examining what J-R actually teaches. And that was almost 40 years ago. Good grief. ...