Newport Beach Conference : Mystics, Scientists Will Gather to Promote Peace

Robed and sandaled, they will come to chandeliered hotels in the resort city of Newport Beach to champion the spiritual.

They will traipse down plush corridors into makeshift meditation halls to demonstrate compassion, forgiveness and universal love.

They are the leading Catholic, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim mystics--including Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet--who will join a group of equally well-known scientists for an unusual million-dollar spiritual conference called Harmonia Mundi on Oct. 2 through 7 at the Marriott and Le Meridien hotels.

The gathering is a unique effort to bring together eminent Western thinkers and spiritual leaders from a variety of the world’s major religious traditions, said Roger Walsh, a professor of psychiatry at UC Irvine and a conference speaker.

So far, about 1,300 people, mostly professionals from around the world, have paid up to $700 to register for the upscale conference focusing on peace through personal transformation. They will be able to receive instruction from the mentor of their choice and observe the leaders in dialogue.

Popular interest in Eastern contemplative traditions escalated with the counterculture of the 1960s. The Orange County conference now signals an emerging shift into the mainstream, particularly among professionals who want to integrate ethical values into their life and work, Walsh said.

Yet organizers said they aimed to avoid association with such stereotypes of “new age” spirituality as crystals, and deliberately cultivated a sophisticated approach. The Harmonia Mundi stationery contains the names of Harvard scholars. In full-color brochures, the location is billed as “California elegance at its best.”

“It’s imperative to do that to establish our credibility,” said organizer Ronald Wong Jue, a Newport Beach psychologist and founder of the East-West Foundation, a new Fullerton-based nonprofit organization that is sponsoring Harmonia Mundi. Jue, a third-generation Chinese American who was raised as a Baptist, has put together a network of 100 volunteers, including Newport Beach attorney William P. Tanner III and actors Richard Gere and Marsha Mason.

Shirley MacLaine Not Invited

Although popular actress and “new age” author Shirley MacLaine expressed interest in attending the conference, Jue said she would not be invited as a presenter. “We didn’t want to take a pop approach,” he said.

What Jue calls the conference’s “bottom line” is to promote global peace through personal transformation: an awareness of the unity of all life that he believes that the variety of mystics can demonstrate for others.

According to Walsh, Jue’s meeting of the minds is a classic idea whose time has come.

“The late 20th Century is the first time in human history when we’ve had all the world’s religions available to us. It’s easy in this time, particularly in California, to forget how rare and recent a phenomenon that is,” Walsh said. “In some cultures, if you even tried to investigate another religion, you might end up on a funeral pyre.

“We’ve never had this opportunity before. Sooner or later someone had to start doing it. And he (Jue) is one of them.”

Jue, 51, has always thought big. As a senior psychology major at San Jose State, he invited philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Alan Watts to a conference he was organizing without money. Sartre declined with apologies, but Watts appeared for free, Jue recalled.

The idea for Harmonia Mundi surfaced almost two years ago when Lobsang Rapgay, a former religious secretary to the Dalai Lama and a resident of the city of Orange, told Jue, who is president of the Assn. of Transpersonal Psychology, that the Dalai Lama would be interested in a dialogue with American psychologists.

‘Greater Ramifications’

“I wrote to His Holiness and developed a program,” Jue said. Then in August, 1988, he traveled to the Dalai Lama’s mountain retreat in Dharmsala, India, to clarify details of what had become an expanded program.

“As we got into it, we saw it had greater ramifications. I said, ‘Here’s a man promoting global peace through personal transformation. Why not bring together masters who live the faith and understand contemplative traditions? Why not get to the heart of religious tradition? Not to talk about ideological differences, but how to achieve love, compassion and forgiveness?’

“When you reached a state of higher consciousness, you can feel the unity of all life.” Jue said.

Besides the Dalai Lama, spiritual leaders who will demonstrate their faith’s mystical devotional practices at the conference include Catholic priest Thomas Keating, Christian meditation and prayer; Srimata Gayatri Devi, Hinduism; Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man and Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, Kabbalah and Hasidism--both branches of Judaism; Nur-al-Jerrahi, Sufism, a sect of Islam, and Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg representing Buddhism.

Mother Teresa has declined an invitation to the conference, but Jue still hopes that she will change her mind. “She feels she’s going to die, and wants to finish her mission in China,” he said. “But she’s capricious.” If she doesn’t respond to his continued appeals, he said, he will show an eight-minute interview he taped with her this spring at her mission in Tijuana.

The program will also include performances by international groups of sacred music and poetry.

Some to Get Honorariums

Some contemplatives, including the Dalai Lama, will receive honorariums, Jue said. The exiled Shartze Monks of Tibet agreed to perform the Invocation of the Eight Buddhas of Medicine for the first time outside of Tibet, partly because they need money to build new monasteries in India, Jue said. Their performance in Irvine will kick off a five-month U.S. tour.

Jue is an acknowledged “unknown” in the moneyed circles whose backing he needed to stage such an ambitious conference. He said he managed, by writing letters and networking, to create a nonprofit foundation, a work force of 100 volunteers and a board of 21 directors including actor Gere, who is executive director of the New York-based Tibet House, a nonprofit foundation to promote appreciation for Tibetan culture. One contact often led coincidentally to another, he said, eventually leading to donations and grants from five foundations to support Harmonia Mundi’s $1-million budget, which pays for the organization’s Newport Beach office, five computers and three secretaries.

“The expenses are enormous,” Jue said. Travel costs for the Dalai Lama and his entourage alone came to $28,000, he said. Jue only recently began taking a salary from the foundation when he had to cut back his psychotherapy practice because of the demands of planning the conference.

While the conference is already a “success” by virtue of its taking place at all, it also will be a “credibility event” that will determine future activities of the East-West Foundation, said Charles Reis, a fund-raiser for the Newport Harbor Art Museum and one of the conference volunteers.

Jue said he hopes that conference proceeds will help the foundation to provide an academic chair in psychology at some university, to continue publishing educational books (Harper & Row is publishing a commemorative volume of sacred poetry for the conference), newsletters and videos, or to conduct workshops on the subjects of spirituality, personal transformation and internally centered ethics.

Showcase for Dalai Lama

He said he also hopes that the conference will showcase the spiritual side of the Dalai Lama, who, Jue contends, has been shortchanged by media portrayals as a political leader.

The Dalai Lama was exiled to India following the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, and has submitted peace proposals to Chinese authorities. But he is also Tibetan Buddhism’s ultimate religious authority, considered by some to be the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion.

At the conference, the Dalai Lama will also speak at several evening programs at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center that will include sacred poetry readings and rare performances by the Tibetan monks and international musical artists.

(Because the program is not wanted to be elitist, Jue said, tickets for evening sessions will be available for as little as $10.)

The musical programs provide the ideal symbol of the harmony he is trying to achieve, Jue said.

“I want to get beyond talking about brotherhood and start showing what to do,” he said. “We’re not imposing a brand of peace, but showing a way of being peaceful.”