John E. Fetzer: The Quest for the New Age
Victor Fuhrman: Bruce, what did your great uncle mean when he used the word spirituality?
Bruce Fetzer: He used spirituality in two ways: one as a practice but then also as a place. So, regarding practice, it’s going inside. It’s any variety of interworking practices. So, spirituality did not include any particular dogma or constraint, but it also included very much the personal commitment to waking up and to creating some impact materially in society to bring in an awakening peace and harmony and love.
Victor Fuhrman: When you talk about going inside, he was an early practitioner of meditation, wasn’t he?
Bruce Fetzer: Absolutely. He wrote a book called America’s Agony in which he talked about the conscious and the subconscious. One of the ways of going beyond the monkey mind that we face in everyday life is to quiet the mind through inter-practice or meditation. There are any number of ways of doing that, but John practiced several them. He also exhorted other people to do that.
Victor Fuhrman: And did he have a personal teacher or guru, or is this something he developed on his own?
Bruce Fetzer: He would often be working with teachers. So, he started out, one of his earlier teachers was Maharishi and transcendental meditation. He would advise them on radio broadcasting. He worked with a book called A Course in Miracles, which is a channeled material. He also, in his final five years, was involved with the movement of spiritual inner-awareness. But then, he also worked very carefully and closely with psychics in his later years, as well.
Victor Fuhrman: Brian, in what sense was Mr. Fetzer a New Ager?
Brian C. Wilson: Well, we have to be careful with the term, of course, because New Age has taken on a kind of pejorative meaning. But, for John Fetzer who wrote about himself as a New Ager, the whole idea was that individual spiritual transformation would ultimately lead to a global spiritual transformation or the New Age, the Golden Age. For John Fetzer, the idea was that spiritual practices would not only have personal benefit, but if practiced assiduously and by enough people, eventually would have a larger global impact.
He became a Free Mason in the 1930s and carried through with that. He became a 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason in, let’s see, ’69.
From there, he got into older traditions like Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism. So, he really ran the gamut of metaphysical traditions in the United States. He was a seeker who was really open to a variety of different metaphysical traditions.
Victor Fuhrman: Was he a follower of Edgar Casey’s work?
Brian C. Wilson: Very much so. He came into contact with Casey’s writings during the ’30s. Later on in his life, during the period of the early Fetzer Foundation in the 1970s and ’80s, he actually funded projects that were run through the Association for Research and Enlightenment Clinic in Arizona. He was fascinated by Casey’s readings, and by Casey’s approach to spiritual evolution and conscious evolution.
Victor Fuhrman: Brian, did Fetzer believe that science and spirituality conflicted or not?
Brian C. Wilson: No, he believed that science and spirituality were two sides of the same coin essentially, that true science would recognize spirit and spirit would only be recognized through a spiritualized science.
In fact, John Fetzer’s vision for the New Age was that, in addition to individual spiritual transformation through individual practice, he was also very interested in exploring creating a spiritualized science that would speed the process towards global spiritual transformation.
Victor Fuhrman: Did he ever believe that he was a reincarnation of someone else?
Brian C. Wilson: Yes. He believed very deeply that he had lived through many past lives beginning all the way back to Atlantis. And in each case, he had a spiritual mission that he was charged with carrying out. And he believed that his last life, his present life was going to be a period in which he could actually be successful in carrying out that spiritual mission.
The Fetzer Institute really was the result of was this idea that it was the fulfillment of a variety of lifetimes of experience and wisdom.
Victor Fuhrman: What energy modalities did he pursue?
Bruce Fetzer: He looked at a lot of different types of healing and diagnosis. He very much believed that, in addition to us being physical and chemical entities, that there’s an energy signature to it. Is subtle energy something so minute that we can’t measure it yet or is it something from another realm?
He was very much interested in, for instance, alternative forms of diagnosis that could catch things way before they become diagnosable with traditional techniques and then also to treat them at that level so that the side effects would be very much minimized. He explored a vast array.
Victor Fuhrman: Did he study reading the energy field?
Bruce Fetzer: Absolutely. He worked with mystics, and one of the things he was personally interested in is trying to create an atlas of what, for example, cancer might look like years before stage one detectable. These are very unconventional thoughts, but if you can imagine, a successful entrepreneur like John Fetzer is a visionary pioneer and entrepreneur. He really chose not to be constrained by convention. He was trying to push the frontier in all domains.
And so, he was also interested in very rigorously analyzing these things, bringing them into the lab to find out what really is true and what’s not. So, he didn’t approach it as a true believer, but as a true pioneer and considering anything and everything.
Victor Fuhrman: Brian, did John Fetzer work with mediums and spiritual advisors?
Brian C. Wilson: Yes, very much so. John Fetzer believed that, to some degree, he had some psychic power. In fact, he attributed his business intuition to a kind of ESP. But, he was very mindful of his limitations, and so he sought out the best psychics and mediums and advisors that he could find.
During the 1960s, he was a great friend of the famous psychic Jean Dixon, and during the 1970s, he had readings by a very famous spiritualist medium in England named Ena Twigg. And then back in Kalamazoo, he had some spiritual advisors, and the most important was Jim Gordon. Jim Gordon really during his last decade became his personal psychic and channeler. And Gordon’s channeling of Ascended Masters and other beings really helped John Fetzer formulate what the mission of The Fetzer Foundation was going to be.
Victor Fuhrman: How did he reconcile his intuition with business decision making?
Brian C. Wilson: Well, he believed that his intuition really gave him insight into not only good decision making but how to surround himself with the best people and building teams and building relationships in his businesses. Now, the interesting thing about John Fetzer was that the business was important, and making money was important. But even more important than that was the spiritual goal: what were you going to do with this money? This became a real live issue for John Fetzer, especially during the 1940s when his businesses were taking off. How do you handle money spiritually, correctly in a way that it becomes a moral force?
And so, he was thinking about these issues long and hard, and he really believed that his success was due in part to the fact that he had the right intention regarding his wealth.
Victor Fuhrman: Bruce, for your great uncle, what was the spiritual meaning of wealth? What did money mean to him in the spiritual sense?
Bruce Fetzer: Well, money was a form of energy to him, and, it was leveraged by dedicating it in service to the spiritual call. He really felt that his legacy was to help catalyze a global awakening, and by doing that, he dedicated his funds in a way to exploring in every respect the frontiers, frontiers that were the nature of reality, but also what are the frontiers of spiritual practice that help accelerate and catalyze in the best way possible.
He thought first of serving the public, of doing the greater good, and the money flowed back to him. But, the money that flowed to him was given to him as a steward for something greater, and it was always the something greater that he was giving it to.
Victor Fuhrman: Interesting how he could balance and reconcile his desire to be helpful and to build this wonderful community, this wonderful world essence that he was talking about and balance with finance.
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