The Guru and the Gadfly

How could it have come to this? Peter McWilliams and John-Roger's best-selling Life 101 series of books was the sort that could make a nation of self-help addicts bounce about in weepy hugging frenzies. You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought, with its uplifting aphorisms for health, happiness and harmony, had sent Oprah's audiences into book-buying rapture. The authors even adorned their We Give to Love tape package ($19.95) with painted hearts and the question: "If you were arrested for kindness, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"

But kindness was probably not among the accusations McWilliams and John-Roger were slinging at each other in the parking lot of the Hollywood municipal court one warm morning last autumn. John-Roger, a twitchy-faced cherub with a stylish perm, was probably not thinking positive thoughts as reporters poked microphones through the window of his Lexus. And McWilliams--who had devoted more than 15 years and given perhaps $1 million to John-Roger and who had worshiped him as a friend, a father, a hero, as the only living man whose calls God himself returned--did not look particularly blissful as he charged across the lot disheveled and sweating.

"Get your hands off that camera!" McWilliams shouted at John-Roger's frequent companion of late, a doe-eyed young actor who had slipped in behind a cameraman and was apparently trying to unplug his audio jack. The cameraman glared, the actor backed off and John-Roger--J-R for short--did one of those embarrassing slink-off-with-microphones-in-your-face exits, leaving a triumphant McWilliams with the cameras all to himself.

A cantankerous libertarian who had built his small Prelude Press into one of the most successful self-publishing enterprises in the country, McWilliams had believed John-Roger's claim that he anchored an awesome spiritual force known as the Mystical Traveler Consciousness. He had believed J-R when he promised to use his cosmic connections to keep McWilliams healthy--as long as he kept putting J-R's name on the books McWilliams now says he alone wrote.

Then John-Roger started demanding royalties and McWilliams started taking Prozac and quicker than you could say Love 101 (the vanity plates on the Lexus McWilliams gave J-R in the ultimate act of postmodern devotion), the two were squared off in litigation. Threatened with financial ruin, McWilliams reverted to coping mechanisms he knew best. He spit out another book--Life 102: What to Do When Your Guru Sues You. And he countersued.

As it happened, another longtime devotee of John-Roger's, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, had recently taken a high-profile role in her husband Michael's race for one of California's Senate seats. McWilliams saw an opportunity and launched a barrage of acerbic press releases that riddled the political landscape like cluster bombs. Arianna--beautiful, rich, cunning--fought back in style.

The camera crews had arrived at the Hollywood court after receiving anonymous tips that McWilliams faced a misdemeanor hearing for assaulting a meter maid--charges McWilliams contends are vastly overblown. John-Roger and several associates showed up to watch McWilliams squirm. But their appearance backfired--the reporters seemed more interested in hammering J-R about his ties to Huffington. J-R split in disgust. And there stood McWilliams, an undisputed media master, calmly telling reporters that John-Roger was a manipulative cult charlatan who had used him--and was still using Arianna Huffington--to infiltrate the highest levels of power.

Power, politics, Prozac and Lexuses--if ever there was a tale for the Nineties, this was it.

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John-Roger was born Roger Delano Hinkins to Mormon parents in the tiny mining town of Rains, Utah on September 24, 1934. As a boy he played tennis at North Emory High, read Napoleon Hill's The Laws of Success and attended Mormon "mutual improvement" meetings. About the only thing that set him apart from his classmates, he would later say, was his ability to spot colorful "auras" around people.

Eventually, Hinkins moved to Salt Lake City and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Utah. In 1958 he headed to San Francisco, and then on to Los Angeles, where he landed a job at Rosemead High School as an English teacher. In 1963, doctors hospitalized Hinkins for kidney stones. During his stay he slipped into a coma, as the result of what might have been a sedative overdose. When he awoke, he says, there was another entity within him. It identified itself as "the Beloved" but later said, "You can call me John." Hinkins put the two together: John the Beloved. "When I opened my eyes," he says, "I remember my mother sitting there saying, 'Who are you?' and the voice said, 'I am John.' She said, 'Is Roger there?' The voice said, 'Yes, he's in here too."' Hinkins began calling himself John-Roger, living with the knowledge that he had been handed the keys to the highest powers in all universes, the Mystical Traveler consciousness and Preceptor consciousness.

Back at Rosemead High, Hinkins remained teacherly. He wore nice ties and corduroy jackets and swept his brown hair back from his high forehead in an average-guy wave. But his classes weren't exactly normal. Often, he'd pull down the shades, turn off the lights and lead his students on imaginary excursions through forests and along shores, creating scenes so vivid that some teens were knocked out of their chairs.

It was in 1967, on a trip to Disneyland, that Hinkins decided to break the news of his life changes to one of his colleagues, a young gym teacher. The two ate frozen bananas, wandered through rides in the Magic Kingdom and blasted away in the shooting galleries. Then, as they chugged through the forest on the park's Santa Fe Railroad, Hinkins casually revealed that he had been given a special dispensation to serve humanity.

"He spoke of how so many people were 'sleeping,' unaware of the 'Light,' unaware of their own divinity," the teacher subsequently wrote. "He spoke of the work he would be doing to assist people into awakening and said that it would be 'big.'

"I remember thinking clearly--some hours into our talk--that either this man was completely crazy or I was privileged and honored to be at the beginning of a wondrous adventure."

Eventually, Rosemead's new principal caught wind of Hinkins' unorthodox teaching methods. One day, the principal went to Hinkins' third period class, slammed on the lights and jarred the kids out of their reverie. "Mr. Hinkins . . . I never want this sort of nonsense to happen again," he said. Soon, the school and Hinkins decided to part ways. But Hinkins didn't leave alone. Twenty-five years later, that gym teacher and at least one former student remain devoted to the Traveler.

After leaving Rosemead High, John-Roger had developed a small following of "votaries" who would make three-dollar "love offerings" to hear this spiel: that the Traveler and Preceptor worked within an individual to help him break free of the cycle of reincarnation and achieve soul transcendence.

Over the years, some cynical followers labeled John-Roger "the human Xerox machine" for what they termed his propensity to use material from other sources ranging from Eckankar to television evangelist Gene Scott. Some people found J-R's teachings an impossible hodgepodge. For many, the mystery of the Traveler was that he didn't get pelted with overripe fruit and sent back to teaching Our Town.

No one seems to have found John-Roger charismatic in the traditional sense. But even those who initially sneered at J-R found themselves returning to seminars to stare into a cup of water, which was said to absorb their pain, to gaze at the flame of a candle until they saw the Traveler, to sing, share their feelings and chant "Ani-Hu," which J-R called the sacred names of God.

By 1971 John-Roger had incorporated his budding organization into the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA--pronounced "Messiah"), thereby not only making it tax-exempt but also exempting its financial records from public scrutiny. Soon he and his staff of handsome young men--called "the guys"--were touring the country, charging up to $60 for such MSIA services as "light readings," "aura balances," "polarity (continued on page 136)The Guru and the Gadfly(continued from page 106) balances" and "inner phasings." Several followers were so smitten with the teachings of the Traveler that they turned over large inheritances. One woman donated a house and property overlooking Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. The church bought a 6000-square-foot estate in the fashionable Mandeville Canyon area, and it purchased the Busby Berkeley mansion in Los Angeles, naming it the Purple Rose Ashram of the New Age. A holistic-style health center followed, along with a publishing company and the Kor-E-Nor University, later named the University of Santa Monica. Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys, actresses Sally Kirkland and Leigh Taylor-Young and assorted low-profile but high-income benefactors were drawn into J-R's fold. With the help of eager young followers, "Light Centers" opened in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Berkeley, as well as in Paris and London. John-Roger and staff added new training sessions and seminars at an impressive clip.

But the lure of mysticism had started to fade as the age of disco flourished. Self-improvement and self-analysis replaced satori as seekerdom's quest du jour. So it was something of a godsend when a young man who had been a trainer with John Hanley's controversial Life Spring organization came to John-Roger with an idea. Their meeting of minds created Insight Transformational Seminars, a multisession workshop that fused aspects of group therapy with high-pressure self-improvement. The first year alone (1978), the program brought in plenty of new souls and more than $1 million.

Soon, ruling the spiritual realms seemed insufficiently ambitious for J-R. In 1983, his ministers decided to create something called Integrity Day, to be held on John-Roger's birthday. Over the next several years, the nonprofit John-Roger Foundation presented Integrity Awards to high-profile heroes at blacktie galas. The press flocked, as J-R, now described as "an educator and humanitarian," posed with such figures as Jonas Salk, Ralph Nader, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa.

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At the age of 29, Peter McWilliams had already written and published several books, made a fortune and lost it on a greeting card company, experimented with a panoply of enlightenment peddlers and several times sunk into despair. In 1978 he came across an advertisement for an Insight seminar and signed up.

During the first part of the intensive training, facilitators flogged participants with negativity, forcing each to confront the wretched facts of their pathetic lives. Then, when the room was a quivering mass of raw emotion, the trainers shifted gears, revealing each seeker's inner beauty, rebuilding their self-esteem. McWilliams was hooked.

John-Roger had appeared only briefly at that training. But as McWilliams continued down the Insight path, he learned that all roads eventually led to MSIA and the Traveler. "It didn't take long for even a brain-damaged garden slug to realize there was no divine order or energy in MSIA," McWilliams would later write. "Alas, I lacked such intelligence. More accurately, whatever intelligence I had was short-circuited by the Insight process." Within the year, he had completed advanced Insight. A photo taken at graduation shows him with a frizz of curly hair and a lobotomy grin.

Soon McWilliams became an MSIA minister, an Insight facilitator and an aggressive recruitment hound, going so far as to drag his own mother to events--a phenomenon Mary McWilliams, who considered herself a devout Catholic, still recalls with mild bewilderment.

If McWilliams had grown up in California's San Gabriel Valley, he might have been class clown in one of Roger Hinkins' post-Beloved English classes. Instead, he launched his convoluted spiritual search in the equally unlikely environs of suburban Detroit, where his father ran a drug store's cigar section and Mary stayed home to raise her boys.

While Hinkins led students on virtual field trips, adolescent McWilliams dropped LSD and chased psychedelic visions through his own inner cosmos. He contorted into yogic pretzels and grooved on Bob Dylan and the Jefferson Airplane, he got into sensitivity training and got popped twice for marijuana possession. When the Beatles came home from India with praise for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's transcendental meditation movement, McWilliams latched on to that too, eventually becoming one of the white-haired guru's elite inner circle.

But McWilliams' quest didn't keep him from skipping in the mainstream of suburban creativity. "A playbill from that period has my name on it an embarrassing number of times," McWilliams recalls in Life 102. The credits, he says, went on endlessly, including: "Program written, designed, typed and printed by Peter McWilliams."

Such preternatural confidence didn't sit well with everyone. The priest who baptized him, McWilliams says, later became his teacher. One day in catechism, the good father got fed up, threw McWilliams to the floor, kicked him and said that if he had known how Peter was going to turn out he would have drowned him during baptism. ("I must admit," McWilliams writes, "I was a behavior problem.") Peter, who had received his first typewriter at the age of seven, learned that writing well is the best revenge, and his mother recalls one time that Allen Park High sent him home for satirizing teachers.

It was never a secret that McWilliams was attracted to his own gender. "Come on," says his younger brother, Michael. "When you listen to the soundtrack of Gypsy at nine?" At 17, Peter fell in love and began writing verse. It's easy to envision the poet sitting in a suburban coffee shop at dawn, scribbling such lines as:

I must conquer my loneliness alone.

I must be happy with myself or I have nothing to offer.

Soon McWilliams' entrepreneurial instincts gave his creativity a kick in the pants. While still in high school, he produced several books of love poetry, printed them in his basement and distributed them to local bookstores. Inside, readers found such verse as this:

Why must I always fall for chicken shits on ego trips?

But poetry ultimately took a backseat to McWilliams' other passion of the moment: transcendental meditation.

"I was captivated with TM and wanted everyone everywhere to learn it," he writes. McWilliams even wrote a best-selling book on the subject. But by 1977 he had drifted away, cutting his final ties when the Maharishi's Sidhi Program promised to teach students to walk through walls and levitate. During his TM days, McWilliams had also studied religious science. After religious science he dabbled in Stuart Emory's actualizations and Werner Erhard's est. Then he found Insight.

McWilliams' early involvement with Insight and MSIA preceded a second burst of success he achieved with The Personal Computer Book, a witty paperback endorsed by William F. Buckley that persuaded many people to buy their first Kay-Pro or Commodore PC. McWilliams became a pro-PC talking head on TV and wrote numerous articles--including some for Playboy--on the joys of home computers. So he was rather preoccupied when the MSIA had its first major collision with controversy.

While planning the first Integrity Awards gala in 1983, a few staff members had broken the MSIA taboo against expressing negativity. Quietly, they discussed the myriad shortcomings in integrity that they had witnessed, from John-Roger's wild outbursts in private--during which he'd claim to be under assault by negative forces--to what they saw as his squandering church funds on losing stock ventures and get-rich-quick schemes. They wondered why someone who was supposedly "aware of all levels at all times" recorded phone calls and, they said, used a sophisticated network of microphones to listen in on conversations in the Insight building in Santa Monica. Someone even suggested that, given the way J-R and his staff lived, their vows of poverty might be seen as hypocritical. The most stunning revelation, however, was that two of the young men on the staff--both heterosexual--said that John-Roger had persuaded them to have sex with him, assuring each that he alone was receiving that spiritual honor.

John-Roger has denied these charges. But as the accusations spread, at least 50 people left the movement, many saying they were emotionally devastated and claiming to have realized on leaving that John-Roger had brainwashed them. After the exodus, several key defectors received bizarre and intimidating letters and phone calls. Their tires were slashed and paint thinner was thrown on their cars. They said John-Roger had threatened them, though he publicly denied it and was never charged.

J-R did, however, remind those who stayed in the movement about a powerful, vaguely satanic force known as the Kal Power or Red Monk, which affixes itself to people who get caught up in negativity. Forewarned, the MSIA faithful fled to the other side of the street or dashed out of supermarkets when someone who was said to be possessed by the Red Monk approached.

Most of MSIA's 3000 to 5000 initiates, ministers and discourse subscribers remained loyal, dismissing the accusations against John-Roger as rumors. The teachings spread to South America and Australia and even took root in parts of Africa. By the 1987 Integrity Awards, the movement had gained such momentum that J-R announced a self-esteem program called Ace that was about to push into the public schools--in a sense, taking the former teacher full circle. In the next year, an army of volunteers persuaded 47 states and 200 cities to declare Integrity Day on John-Roger's birthday. Senator Alan Cranston even introduced legislation that would have declared a National Integrity Day. But in August 1988, the Los Angeles Times published a two-part series that outlined criticisms that former MSIA members had leveled against John-Roger. The Integrity gala was canceled, National Integrity Day collapsed, at least one school district backed away from the Ace program and another wave of followers left MSIA.

But again, most of J-R's admirers remained loyal. Instead of an Integrity gala, the faithful threw John-Roger a birthday bash and presented him with the "symbolic gift" of a $750,000 house near the foundation's new 140-acre ranch in Santa Barbara.

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Joshua Tree National Monument park in California is nearly a million acres of eerily anthropomorphic cacti, sculpted boulder piles and howling coyotes. It's the sort of place where visionaries have their visions, where the wind speaks in tongues. In late 1988, John-Roger found himself being driven across this landscape by an anxious Peter McWilliams. Earlier in the year, at least in part to help diffuse the pending bad publicity, McWilliams claimed he had collaborated with J-R on the first book in the Life 101 series, You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought, and released it through his own Prelude Press.

The volume's subtitle was "A Book for People With Any Life-Threatening Illness--Including Life." But since its publication, McWilliams had begun to wonder if his own life weren't at risk. A dear friend of his had died from a rare strain of tuberculosis, with McWilliams at his bedside. McWilliams was concerned he might come down with the disease. As he and J-R drove across the desert, listening to U2's Joshua, Tree, McWilliams asked the omniscient Traveler if McWilliams had TB. "Yes," he recalls J-R saying. McWilliams pondered his own mortality. Then J-R offered a release. As McWilliams tells the story, J-R said: "If you keep writing and publishing the books, I'll handle the health issue for you."

McWilliams seemed perfectly healthy, yet he took to writing books as if his life depended on it. In each volume the formula was the same: The wisdom of John-Roger and McWilliams alternated with upbeat, inspiring, sometimes merely quirky quotes from famous folks on a facing page. The book Do It!, for instance, offers these words from R.A. Dickson: "Love your enemies just in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards."

Long before such sentiments took on resonance, McWilliams and J-R took to the airwaves to promote each new volume. Among the callers to various Larry King Live shows were former MSIA staffers who called J-R a guru and his organization a bizarre cult.

McWilliams usually defended his messiah with aplomb. In one less graceful moment, a TV posse from Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told show swept into a bookstore where the two were signing their latest collaboration. The subsequent, exposé on MSIA featured classic cornered-weasel footage of McWilliams' straight-arming the camera, giving America a close-up of his palm.

Running interference was the least a man could do for someone he felt was holier than Jesus; beyond that, McWilliams proselytized like a televangelist on Christmas Eve. Mary McWilliams took the Insight trainings her son shoved down her throat in stride. "I was surprised," she said, "that so many people seemed to have so much bottled up inside them, so much pain and hurt." But McWilliams' younger brother, Michael, had felt the pressure of brotherly persuasion since childhood and wanted no part of Insight or J-R. Frustrated, Peter tried every trick to get him to attend. Finally, Michael says, "He told me that if I didn't take Insight, I was going to die of cancer."

Michael, a television critic for The Detroit News, feared he had lost the brother he loved. He offers this explanation: "I think a lot of people in cults see parts of themselves reflected in the leader. It's a narcissistic thing, a mutual admiration." What Peter saw, Michael believes, was the charming and manipulative facet of his own personality--"that kind of barely concealed lust for power over other people." Not that power-mongering is Peter's dominant trait. "But art is ego. It is self-gratification. It is manipulation of the audience. Maybe Peter's writing wasn't enough and he saw in John-Roger a perfected version of what an artist is. In a way, J-R's art, his power, is the manipulation of human souls."

Not every soul, however, is equally malleable. The history of MSIA is littered with tales of people whose psyches were frayed when they stumbled upon the Traveler. Some say John-Roger and the MSIA-aligned organizations helped them to heal. Others didn't do so well.

In 1971, Stephen, a 21-year-old senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was introduced by a friend to John-Roger. Recently heartbroken, upset about Vietnam and money, his mind still reeling from bad drug experiences, Stephen eased into the group and began attending seminars, studying the discourses. Within months, the university counseling center diagnosed him as schizophrenic--a condition that in all likelihood would have emerged with or without MSIA.

According to a doctoral dissertation titled "Schizophrenic and Spiritual States," Stephen believed the MSIA suggestion that John-Roger was assisting him "on the inner levels." When he finally wrote to John-Roger, asking that he stop "working with his mind," J-R agreed. A psychiatrist involved with the movement referred him to medical professionals. But the image of the Mystical Traveler had burrowed deep into Stephen's brain. "I thought John-Roger was saving me from all my suffering," Stephen told the dissertation candidate. "Little did I know he was creating it. The devil came before me in spirit--Mr. Hinkins. They say the devil appears as an angel of light. I could see his eyebrows and his hair, all glowing different colors. He said, 'I will give you anything you ask for."'

For 11 years, this vision of John-Roger played a tormenting game of hide-and-seek in the young man's mind. Finally, at the age of 32, Stephen hanged himself in his bedroom.

Given the fine legal lines they sometimes walked as counselors and purported healers, MSIA ministers were always concerned about potential liability. "The game is 'hot potato,"' an attorney affiliated with MSIA once wrote in the movement's newspaper. "Try to do your best to assist the troubled individual and then place the liability elsewhere, where it belongs, with those licensed individuals who society thinks can best handle the problem."

But with John-Roger's own university cranking out counselors, that line sometimes blurred. In November 1993 a young man accused Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of sexual molestation. For months, Bernardin lived with the humiliation of scandal. But in February 1994, the man dropped his charges after critics questioned the credentials and techniques of the Philadelphia hypnotherapist who had dredged up the memories--now widely regarded as spurious. She had received her master's degree, it turned out, from the MSIA-aligned University of Santa Monica.

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With the Life 101 series singing along, McWilliams decided it might be fun to put aside self-help for a while and take on a meatier subject. J-R wanted no part of the topic, so McWilliams went solo, writing an 818-page tome called Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society, a chapter of which was excerpted in Playboy.

Given subsequent events, two themes are of particular interest. For one, McWilliams argues that the impulse to repress alternative religions as cults is similar to the impulse that attempts to quash prostitution, pornography and homosexuality. As an example, he uses the case of the Reverend Jim Jones and his followers, who were driven from America, says McWilliams, by religious persecution. McWilliams describes the arrival in Guyana of Congressman Leo Ryan, who had brought along several "concerned relatives"--members of families upset that their loved ones had traipsed off with Jones. McWilliams offers an interesting take on the victim-victimizer relationship:

"One can only imagine Jones' feelings," he writes. "Ryan--uninvited and unwelcome--had used threats to enter Jonestown and brought with him relatives who had been central in taking away several of Jones' 'children."'

Before the confrontation ended, Jones' followers had murdered Ryan and his group, and another 912 men, women and children swallowed cyanidelaced grape Kool-Aid and crumpled dead in the dirt. "Most people who died believed sincerely the murder of their children and their own suicide was a religious and political act," McWilliams emphasizes. "That they were brainwashed into believing this is a given. That--for whatever reason--they chose to take part in this brainwashing is the important fact."

Another way Western culture restricts religious freedom, according to McWilliams, is through its taboo against peyote rites and similar drug-induced spiritual visions. "The irony," he writes, "is that most intense religious experience is based on a chemical change. Sometimes the chemical comes from outside oneself, and sometimes it is produced by the human body in response to a mental, emotional or physical change."

John-Roger had always preached against recreational drug use, and, like many followers, McWilliams was convinced that even prescription mood-altering drugs were taboo to the Traveler.

But by 1993, as readers thumbed the Life 101 books for answers to their woes, McWilliams remained unfulfilled. All in all, he says, the series had paid MSIA more than $400,000. McWilliams says he also gave the church more than $600,000 and bought the ashram a grand piano. And gave J-R that new car.

But his latest collaboration with John-Roger, Wealth 101, hadn't done well. And MSIA wasn't pleased with their profit-sharing arrangement. As it happened, McWilliams' search for selfhood was about to loop back on itself. In despair over money and other matters, McWilliams turned to a previous collaborator, a mainstream psychiatrist named Harold Bloomfield. "You're suffering, Peter," Dr. Bloomfield said. "You ought to consider that you have depression." The doctor suggested he start taking Prozac.

A few years earlier, the antidepressant Prozac had been saddled with a burgeoning image problem. Stories of Prozac-fueled suicides began appearing in the media. Most reports were later discredited. But the drug, which had rocketed to unprecedented psychopharmacological stardom, had fallen from its pill pedestal.

Then, in 1993, Dr. Peter Kramer published Listening to Prozac, which did as much to rehabilitate that drug's image as the Life 101 series had done for John-Roger's. "Prozac," Kramer wrote, "was transformative for patients in the way an inspirational minister or high-pressure group therapy can be--it made them want to talk about their experience. And what my patients generally said was that they had learned something about themselves from Prozac."

McWilliams popped the pills and within three weeks began feeling better--feeling, as Kramer's patients put it, "better than well."

"I also began feeling spiritual for the first time," McWilliams wrote. "I felt connected to God in a solid, unpretentious way. The discovery of this connection was no great 'hooray, hooray, I found God' but a slow clarification--like watching a Polaroid picture develop. It all seemed so natural--and simple. It had nothing to do with John-Roger's intricate cosmology I had so carefully memorized."

In March 1994, with MSIA demanding payment of past-due book royalties, McWilliams wrote to John-Roger and told him he no longer believed him to be a direct link to God. He no longer thought the Traveler and Preceptor had the power to keep him healthy. In another letter, he warned that if MSIA pursued the money it said he owed, he'd "make John-Roger more popular on Court TV than the Menendez brothers."

MSIA went ahead and sued, demanding more than $407,000 in royalties and past-due promissory notes, which were secured, in part, by McWilliams' sprawling Laurel Canyon home and his new Lexus. So McWilliams pulled out his tape recorder and began spelling out his epiphany: that John-Roger had programmed him to believe J-R was a spiritual power greater than Jesus. On the title page of Life 102: What to Do When Your Guru Sues You, McWilliams, as usual, put John-Roger's name above his. Then he slashed it out and scrawled "Not!"

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Ever since the disintegration of Integrity Day, McWilliams had felt that he and Arianna Huffington were engaged in an unspoken competition to win John-Roger's approval; it was a sibling rivalry of sorts. For instance: John-Roger's Institute for Individual and World Peace was planning to build a retreat on its 140-acre ranch above Santa Barbara, using its 46 horses--mainly expensive Egyptian-Arabians--to take students on mounted visualizations, or horse awareness trainings, as they were called. From 1990 to 1992 Arianna gave $35,000 to the institute, while McWilliams contributed more than $54,000.

As McWilliams worked on the Life 101 books, Arianna--who had written best-selling biographies of Pablo Picasso and Maria Callas--researched The Fourth Instinct, a treatise on the notion that the need for spirituality is right up there with the need for sex, survival and power.

But Arianna's role within MSIA differed from McWilliams'. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Arianna--once dubbed "the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbing"--took it upon herself to introduce John-Roger into each social echelon she conquered. In 1986 she married Michael Huffington, the son of a Texas oil wildcatter, who was himself worth about $75 million. From the start, the couple had political plans, and it soon became apparent that Arianna's links to the Traveler were best kept out of the limelight. Michael Huffington moved to California and spent a record amount to win the Santa Barbara congressional seat. By 1994, when Arianna published Instinct, he was running as the Republican candidate for Democrat Dianne Feinstein's Senate position.

Although John-Roger is pointedly not mentioned in Instinct, the book is rife with MSIA code words and nods to the Traveler. While lucid in places, Instinct suggests that Arianna's fine Cambridge education atrophied under the influence of Aquarian Age numskullery. At one point, for instance, she gives a sober account of the "researcher" who scraped cells from a former Navy pilot's mouth, transported them to another laboratory and somehow strapped the cells and the pilot up to polygraph machines. The pilot was shown videos of a dogfight. And seven miles away, Huffington writes breathlessly, the cells in the petri dish squirmed in unison.

The book's big premise is that, as the millennium nears, humanity will reach the "critical mass" needed to create a new era of spirituality--"the Reign of the Fourth Instinct," as Arianna calls it. When this New Age notion became a central theme of her husband's Senate campaign, a strange alchemy occurred. "It is absurd to ask religious believers to check their convictions at the door of democracy," Arianna declared. And the religious right agreed. Hurt by Huffington's record-demolishing campaign spending, Feinstein's lead in the polls began to wither. Huffington's handlers, however, had not counted on the wrath of McWilliams.

When news of the lawsuit between MSIA and McWilliams leaked out in June 1994, the Los Angeles Times stuck the story inside its Metro section--mainly because it had the misfortune of running the day after O.J. Simpson's freeway escapade. By October, however, the Simpson case had entered the protracted jury selection phase, and the media turned to politics. Because one chapter of McWilliams' Life 102 charted Arianna Huffington's alleged effort to plant the Traveler's teachings in the Senate, and then the White House, reporters had a story they could sink their teeth into. For a few wondrous moments last autumn, even radio talk show hosts shoved aside O.J. to cheer on this violent collision between California's odd world of metaphysics and its even more peculiar political realm.

The San Diego Union-Tribune called McWilliams' book "a kerosene-soaked rag in search of a flame." Newsweek dubbed the affair "Gurugate." When, in early October, 53 followers of the Order of the Solar Temple committed suicide in Switzerland, McWilliams was quick on the trigger: "Is MSIA's cult leader John-Roger capable of leading his followers into a mass suicide?" asked his faxed Gurugate Gazette. "You bet your Dixie Cup of grape Kool-Aid."

As media scrutiny intensified, Arianna spouted contradictory dates and denials: She hadn't participated in MSIA activities since 1987, she gave up her ministerial credentials in 1986, being a minister meant nothing, she never understood all that Traveler and Preceptor stuff. Finally, she declared herself a born-again Christian. The media reacted to her waffling like pit bulls to a meowing cat. The New York Times labeled Michael Huffington "the Manchurian candidate." A sampling of Arianna headlines from England would have to include this one: The pushiest woman in the world.

McWilliams' little blaze turned into a fire storm, generating its own weather patterns. Reports of Arianna's MSIA baptisms and accounts of what she said at seminars whipped talk show hosts into a fervor.

In 1988, actress Sally Kirkland had made J-R her date for the Oscars when she was nominated as best actress for her role in Anna. Now she hit the talk shows to defend J-R, the Huffingtons and religious freedom. Alas, talk show hosts insisted on edging the conversation to Kirkland's sexual appetites and lust for rubber dresses. After lampooning Arianna's MSIA ministry for a week, the Doonesbury comic strip ended with the right-wing character muttering: "It's getting too weird to be a conservative."

But the weirdness had just begun. Huffington and Feinstein debated on Larry King Live, and mid-debate, King pulled out a letter from John-Roger in which he said he was a Democrat and that Arianna was merely a friend. King never mentioned that he himself has touted Nobody's Business, or that Rama Fox, a recent love interest with whom he is now battling in the courts, was a disciple of John-Roger's.

At one point in the media madness, McWilliams arranged a "telephonic press conference" in which former ministers would gather to discuss, among other topics, which of them would have chugged Kool-Aid had J-R offered it. A reporter from a Christian journal pointedly asked McWilliams, "Are you a practicing homosexual?" "Absolutely," he snarled. "I practice as much as possible!"

In Life 102, McWilliams claims that Arianna called him during Michael Huffington's congressional race and asked him to phone a radio show to divulge dirt a private detective had dug up on the opponent. Arianna herself went on another show. When McWilliams called in to challenge her, she lashed out, alleging that the LAPD found "all the evidence of a pedophiliac" in a search of McWilliams' home. "He needs help, and the press and the media should stop exploiting a very sick man and allow him to find help," she said. Meanwhile, someone had anonymously faxed around police records showing that McWilliams' home had been searched after he hired a masseuse for an underage male he had photographed. No charges were filed (nor has McWilliams ever been convicted of child molestation).

As the election drew near, the whole affair wobbled madly, taking on a life of its own, becoming the sort of odd multimedia psychodrama that seemed so perfect for the Nineties. Then, with only two weeks left in the campaign, the Los Angeles Times' Dave Lesher turned up evidence that the Huffingtons, who had taken a hard-line stance against illegal immigration, had employed an undocumented nanny in their Montecito mansion. Abruptly, the media left John-Roger and McWilliams in the dirt as they chased down Nannygate.

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On November 8, as election results trickled in, Feinstein versus Huffington turned out to be the closest race in the nation.

McWilliams, sick with the flu, stayed home to watch the returns on television and pored over Huffington's published statements about him, preparing to file a new lawsuit. Sometime before dawn, the newscast sputtered out and McWilliams drifted to sleep. It was almost two weeks later that Feinstein finally was able to accept victory, winning by fewer than 200,000 votes, in a contest that had cost Huffington more than $27 million of his own money.

Nannygate had apparently been the deciding factor. But the vote was close enough that McWilliams could take a certain pride in the outcome. Even before the campaign ended, a woman who had been a follower of J-R's said, "My God. I'm glad Peter's not mad at me."

"It didn't take a brain-damaged garden slug to realize there was no divine order or energy in MSIA."