John E. Fetzer: The Quest for the New Age
Bruce Fetzer: Yeah, if I could follow that up because I think that also gave him a sense of having less fear. And because he was serving something greater, he was able and more comfortable in taking risks. And I think that also reinforced his insight where he wasn’t clouded by fear but actualized by love.
And so, if you think about it, he started his first business at the beginning of The Great Depression and kept betting the farm every time as he bought his radio network and TV network, then cable, then sports and so on. It’s very rare for anyone to succeed at any one of those businesses, especially when you’re at the forefront of an industry.
There were so many times he could have gotten wiped out, but he compounded loss very, very rapidly. He also thought only of the public service first.
Victor Fuhrman: As the owner of the Detroit Tigers, did he apply his spiritual ideas, how do you manage a team spiritually?
Brian C. Wilson: Well, I think part of it, it’s built into his business practices. It’s also, the people he surrounded himself with, which I think was tremendously important for his success.
A ball team is really an ideal community that takes special care. And so, to create that kind of community, it takes a kind of spiritual touch.
Now, although John Fetzer was into all sorts of interesting spiritual practices, he rarely talked about these to his business colleagues, and he rarely asked the baseball team to follow his lead. But, he did in a couple of instances that are very interesting. When John Fetzer began practicing transcendental meditation in the middle of the ’70s, at one of the spring trainings, he suggested that the team might want to take up transcendental meditation and so facilitated that. And several the players took it up and found great spiritual value. And, it helped their athleticism, as well.
Victor Fuhrman: Bruce, tell us about some of your great uncle’s donation to various foundations of research such as Duke University and the Stanford Research Institute.
Bruce Fetzer: Well, when John started funding in this area, he was always interested in the frontiers of the times. Had he lived until today, he would have gone beyond what he did in the past and would be looking at today’s frontiers.
When he started this out in the ’70s, he was interested in, as a frontier, elements of consciousness. And so, where do you go to look? You look at possibly parapsychology and the different aspects of that. JB Rhine at Duke University was one of the first laboratories that was looking at precognition as well as PK.
He had worked with Bill Tiller at Stanford University looking at some PK effects. He was interested in the Stargate Project on remote viewing at Stanford Research Laboratory. He was interested at the Para Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory with Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunn at Princeton, who were looking at PKs there as well. So, he was always interested in the frontiers of what the potential links are and understanding what consciousness is, how to measure it and how to develop it more fully.
Victor Fuhrman: Did he ever meet Ingo Swann?
Brian C. Wilson: I believe he did. He took a visit to SRI it must have been in the early ’80s, and he met the group that was doing the research on remote viewing.
Victor Fuhrman: For those who are not familiar with it, remote viewing was actually done initially as a government project as part of a form of espionage or psychic espionage and turned into something much greater. There are several books on Ingo Swann and the Stanford Research Institute if you’d like to follow up on that. So, why did Fetzer keep his spiritual search secret so late in life?
Brian C. Wilson: Well, I think the reason, the first thing was he was a very private person. And I think, temperamentally, it suited him to keep his search a secret. But, there were also business considerations because Southwest Michigan still today is a very conservatively Christian area. And he was concerned that if his advertisers and his listeners knew that he was exploring these various metaphysical currents, which could be found everywhere in the Midwest. The Midwest has always been a hotbed of this kind of spirituality. But, he was concerned that it might actually impact his businesses and his licenses.
Late in life, I think it became almost a habit for him. He was very adept at compartmentalizing the various aspects of his life. In fact, one time, he basically said, if anybody writes a book about me, it’s gonna be the nine lives of John Fetzer.
Victor Fuhrman: It’s fascinating to me. If you had taken any other mogul of any other industry, and they were living the second life and pursuing the spiritual life that he was pursuing, I guarantee you somebody would find out about it, somebody in the press would find out about it. How did he keep it from the press?
Brian C. Wilson: Well, that’s a good question. He did later in life do two or three interviews with either local magazines or national magazines like Psychic Magazine or New Frontiers. So, it was out there, but I think part of it was that, when he was basically becoming public with this, it was the height of the New Age movement in the 1980s. And I think people were more accepting of it, at least then.
Victor Fuhrman: Bruce, how did your great uncle ensure that his legacy would be carried out after his death?
Bruce Fetzer: It was very important to him to select people that understood what the vision was and actually had a personal practice. And so, he selected the trustees very carefully at both the John E. Fetzer Institute as well as the Fetzer Memorial Trust, which was created as a result of his estate.
So, the trust is a special case where it exists for a period of time and then funds out of existence. But, it was his five closest associates that he appointed permanently, to help guide the ship.
The other thing he did that was interesting, because he was very unconventional at a lot of things, is he stipulated that, after his death, there would be no Chair of the Board. And so, he was very interested in the board working together, congealing and aligning around and staying aligned around that mission, so that it wouldn’t veer off track.
Victor Fuhrman: And what were some of the projects that were carried on?
Bruce Fetzer: The mind the Mind-Body Movement very much became actualized through Bill Moyers series on Healing in the Mind, as well as the Harvard Center on Alternative Medicine. Some of the other big splashes we focused on were emotional intelligence, relationship-centered care, and the notion that the doctor/patient relationship is an asset, not a liability, and the contemplative mind in society, which actually, by promoting contemplative practices, has spawned some 50 million plus Americans integrating some type of contemplative practices. We’re working on science programs, updating his view of what’s at the frontier via the Fetzer Franklin Fund by looking at the frontiers of the nature of reality.
What we plan to do is look for theory and evidence that might help shift the paradigm from everything being local and random to being non-local and possibly inter-connected.
So, those are close corollaries with mysticism and spirituality.
Victor Fuhrman: This is so wonderful. The book is called John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age. Brian C. Wilson is the author.
“Photograph(s) courtesy of the Fetzer Institute”
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