My Friend and Teacher Dr Kim McKell

She was a delightful woman, only a few years older than me (I was 25), with a wry and wonderfully ribald sense of humor. In her very delicate way, she loved to shock people with her honesty and directness. She was an acute judge of character--and the most amazing thing about her playful and shocking jokes was that she was almost always right. She was very widely educated and clearly brilliant, though usually as a maverick, original thinker and contrarian.

She comes from a long line of Philadelphians (the first person in the family plot was buried in 1799, a Burke related to Edmund Burke, the Irish orator and political philosopher).

In 1952, she graduated of the Univ of Southern California. There she had met Alan Watts while he was giving a seminar.

After college, she attended the Art Students' League in New York City and studied portrait painting.
In the mid-50s, she moved to San Francisco looking for Alan Watts. Thus she connected with Haridas Chaudhuri and the California Institute.

She changed her name as a sign of personal independence. She was certainly a counter-culturalist, though in keeping with her contrarian, heterodoxical persona, she called herself a conservative and registered as a Republican.

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Kim was writing a magnum opus dissertation on psychological themes in Tantric Tradition in Hinduism and Buddhism. I proofread the final draft. It was titled "The Psycho, Physical and Spiritual Aspects of the First Two Chakras."

The hypothesis was that the various movements and trends of thought in the development of modern psychology could all be correlated with the mythology and imagery of the seven chakras in Tantric spiritual anatomy.

Kim's analysis was really quite astute. There's a way in which it's obvious, once you see it. But making these connections was a original insight. And it certainly proved helpful to me in conceptualizing the Tantric system. What she was writing about in the 60s was very similar to how Ken Wilbur would conceptualize the continuum of consciousness a decade later.

Very simply, this tradition identifies 7 major spiritual centers that characterize human personality and associates these levels of consciousness with locations in the body.

From bottom to top, they are:
chakras

First chakra -- dealing with physical materiality, survival and bodily health -- associated with the anus.

Second charka -- dealing with sex, sexuality, attraction/repulsion -- associated with the genital organs

Third chakra -- dealing with anger, aggression, fear, emotionality -- associated with the abdomen

Fourth chakra -- dealing with love, affection, compassion -- associated with the heart

Fifth ckakra -- dealing with self-discipline, ambition, seslf-expression and communication -- associated with the throat

Sixth chakra -- dealing with consciousness, awareness, self-image, self-experience, world creation within the mind -- associated with the "third eye," pineal gland, and frontal cortex of the brain

Seventh chakra -- dealing with transcendence of self, mystical vision, connection to God/Higher Self (Brahman/Atman) -- associated with the space just above the head

Kim's insight was that these also correlate with the history of psychology and modern psychiatry.

First chakra with Freud, oral/anal//genital stages of ego formation, survial anxiety, hysterical symptoms

Second chakra with Reich, orgasm, bioenergetics, relaxation of muscle tension involved in personality patterns

Third chakra with Adler, the will to power, inferiority complex, compensatory behavior

The higher chakras then with Jung, individuation, dreams, myth, religion, spirituality, the collective unconscious. In Jungian thought the evolution of personality moves through the stages of the heart, awareness of the shadow, being able to see clearly without neurotic "blinders," and transcendence of self -- the issues of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th chakras.

Later psychologists would break from this original "psychoanalytic" approach created by Sigmund Freud. The issues of the higher chakras were dealt with by Rogers (and the notion of "unconditional positive regard," a 4th chakra experience), Albert Ellis (and rational-emotive therapy, a 5th & 6th chakra approach), and then in the 1960s, when Dr. McKell was writing about this, the development of so-called Transpersonal Psychology (which understood psychological maturity in a spiritual, not a mental illness context, clearly a 7th chakra experience.)

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As a young woman, Kimberley had lived in Haiti and could speak very authoritatively about Voudun-- "Voo Doo," the ecstatic trance/spirit possession religion of the Caribbean. She was amazingly fluent in the world's religious traditions, a great advertisement for her own intellectual and professional education.

Here she is in an Elizabethan gown with a statue of Tara

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California Institute of Asian Studies logo
The Sri Yantra

She was a student originally at the American Academy of Asian Studies; Alan Watts, the great interpreter of Zen Buddhism to America in the 1950s was Dean and President of the school. Kim stayed friends with Alan Watts till his death in 1973.

Kim with Bina and Haridas Chaudhuri

When the American Academy went into financial crisis in the early 60s after Watts left the administration and faculty and then lost its accreditation through the University of the Pacific, a group of students and teachers at the Academy joined with Haridas Chaudhuri to create the California Institute of Asian Studies in 1968. Chaudhuri was a disciple of the renown Indian philosopher and modernizer of Hindu Vedanta thought Sri Aurobindo. Haridas and his wife Bina came to America as apostles of Aurobindo's idea that Hindu tradition and Western philosophy could be unified in a great synthesis he called "Integral Philosophy." (The on-going conversation at the C.I.A.S. during my own years there was "what does 'integral' really mean?" In 1980, the Institute changed its name to the current title: California Institute of Integral Studies.)

Kim followed Chaudhuri to CIAS. She did her Masters thesis on "The Trinity Goddess in Ancient Britain, Egypt and India"; she was a real pioneer in Goddess study. She then joined the faculty. And at the time I arrived in fall of 1970 was one of the beloved and most provocative instructors.

Here are photos of her with the Tibetan Buddhist abbess, Ani Pagmo,
who had initiated her into Tibetan Buddhism, giving her as an initiate name,
that of the "Goddess of Compassion," Tara.

On Alan Watts' houseboat and in front of the Buddhist temple in Sikkim

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Along with another CIAS student, she had traveled to India; she and Steve Krolik explored not only the geography but the consciousness and the experience of India. And came home with lots of souvenirs.

Kim was an accomplished oil painter. Many of her paintings were of sights--and sites--she'd seen in India. She created amazing canvases, some of them reminiscent of Marc Chagal's style: mythological images floating in space, floating in consciousness, as it were. Her home was literally overflowing with canvases. And with holy objects from India.
vajra and bell

It was from Kim that I learned of the Tibetan meditation implements, the vajra sceptre and vajra bell that Tibetan Buddhist monks hold in their hands during meditation (my own set is pictured here), and of the image of the two vajras crossed that, after my first editor at William Morrow chose it for the cover of my book The Myth of the Great Secret, became a sort of personal spiritual logo for me.

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From Kim McKell and her classes in World Mythology, Jungian thought and Tantra, I learned a whole series of lessons that changed my life--all for the better, I believe. Among those lessons are:

• a sex-positive attitude, based in the tantric spiritual traditions of India

• techniques for visualizing and conceptualizing the chakras in meditation practice

• a mistrust of religions that teach guilt and so-called "patriarchal values"-- like authority and righteousness -- the Abrahamic Religions

• skepticism about spiritual systems that use numbers. Except for the seven chakras, Kim did not like system that assigned rigid hierarchies -- which she always said were revealed in the numbers.

• the vision of the continuum of consciousness

• appreciation of mythological painting

• appreciation of the unconscious and of techniques for reaching into the Deep Unconscious (like trance dance and spirit possession)

• the notion of "The Matriarchy," the semi-mythological idea that there was once a "Golden Age" on Earth when women ran the world and sex was valued positively

• and the understanding that in our time there has been a resurgence of "faith" in the Great Mother archetype. Modern feminism grows out of this newly recovered respect for women and women's power.

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After I had completed course work for my Masters in comparative religion at the Institute, I began working for Kim as a kind of personal assistant, janitor, and hippie carpenter. Kim lived in a neat house just off Holly Park Circle in the Outer Mission District. I worked for a year or so helping her convert the unfinished basement to an apartment. In the mornings, I'd work in the basement (singing the "Dies Irae," she reminds me), at lunch we'd go to the hardware store together for supplies, and in the afternoons I'd proofread her dissertation or consult on psychotherapy clients. I only half-joking called myself her General Factotum.

What a grand experience!

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Kim now lives part of the year in Washington, D.C. and part in Northern California. She still occasionally teaches seminars in mythology and Jungian thought.

Kimberley McKell, current day, wise woman wearing purple!
(There must be a red hat somewhere.)
--with another Tara in the background