An excerpt from my book, Stepping Stones
The First Five Years of Sant Bani School (1973-1978)
available on amazon.

What I Brought to Sant Bani School

It seemed that education was in my blood. Not only were both my parents teachers but in the 1950s we lived on the campuses of different independent schools. While we returned to New Hampshire every summer, the school year was spent teaching at Chadwick School in Los Angeles, followed by Southern Arizona School in Tucson. As I was entering fifth grade we came back to New Hampshire for good when my father, Lansing L. Bicknell, returned to teach at New Hampton School where his career began in 1937. My mother, Ruth G. Bicknell, taught in the primary grades at Lang Street School in Meredith for several years before transferring to the New Hampton Community School.

What I remember most from those early years was the strength of my family. Though my brothers and I fought at times, mostly we had lots of fun, especially driving our parents crazy with puns at the dinner table. Whether I was at school, in the dining hall, in the dormitory,[1] exploring the surrounding woods and streams, or on the tennis courts, I always felt the love and support of my parents.[2]

When I got old enough to reflect on my early childhood I understood how lucky I had been to grow up on a secure and beautiful campus surrounded by forests, rivers and hills, all of which my friends and I could access at a moment’s notice. [3]

When I was thirteen I ran a summer camp for the children of our neighbors on Murray Hill Road in Hill, New Hampshire. As all their names began with a “K” we called it “Kent Kamp!” Three days a week we sketched and painted, constructed wooden gizmos, made our own playdough, practiced archery, learned to box, performed magic tricks, read, took nature walks, picked blueberries, acted, and played cards, croquet, ping pong and badminton. While I passed along “skills” taught me by my two older brothers we all had fun.

In the 1950s and ’60s New Hampton was an all-boys “prep” school, a solid link in the chain of traditional New England boarding schools. As my father was a history teacher, coach and athletic director and my mother a highly regarded 2nd and 3rd grade teacher in the local public schools, it perhaps is not a surprise that I worked hard at my studies and loved sports.

The quality of the faculty was high and I learned a great deal. While there is much I could share about those four years a moment that has always stood out for me was when my 10th grade Geometry class sat for our end-of-year final exam. Our teacher, Skip Howard, handed out the exam (and the requisite “blue book”) and noted that it consisted of five of the most challenging problems in geometry he could find. He let us look them over and then shared that as he was only interested in seeing what each of us could do with them, the whole exam was optional. He explained that he had already given us our final grades as he knew the quality of work each student had done over the year. After noting that we were free to leave and that it would not affect our grade if we chose not to tackle the problems, he left us on our own. We were dumbfounded, and we all chose to sit there for the required two hours and do our best to solve those geometric mysteries. I was moved by the powerful pedagogy of an adult who was hungry to know what I thought, who trusted me completely and who knew me so well that a final exam was superfluous.

A couple of weeks after graduating from New Hampton[4] I shipped out of Montreal on an old freighter with a school friend, Erik Hvoslef, and headed across the Atlantic to Norway. Living in the city of Oslo with Erik's uncle, we worked for a few weeks in a government bottling plant prior to spending time in a summer cottage on Oslo Fjord. While initially grousing how terrible it was that the “socialist government” took half of our weekly pay, Erik and I began to notice all the services available like health care for all and free passage for elders on public transportation. Most striking of all was the absence of huge economic gaps among Norwegians.

In our time on Oslo Fjord our host, an attorney about to send his son to New Hampton, explained to us that he earned $10,000 a year and was taxed $4000, leaving him $6000 to live on. This was enough for a nice house in Oslo as well as a summer house on the water. The nearby fishermen were making about $2000 a year and were subsidized another $2000 from taxes. This meant that the fishermen's families had only $2000 less a year to live on than his family, and he was very happy to share his income to lessen the disparity. During evening conversations, he asked us challenging questions such as why the United States was getting more engaged in Vietnam, and how come our country spent so little on education compared to, for example, the Scandinavian countries. As neither Erik nor I knew enough to respond well, we ended up questioning the value of what we had learned in school. While loving the beauty of the fjord we were exhausted by the nightly grilling and were happy to rent a car so we could experience more of the natural beauty of Norway.

In so many ways this was an eye-opening journey for an 18-year-old. I recall that on the flight back to America I wondered, for the first time, what it might be like to settle and live in a country other than the United States. Were there, in fact, alternate places and/or ways to live that might be an improvement on what I saw in my native country?

In September I headed to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I had not been on the campus until my parents dropped me off a couple of days before classes began. I plunged into all the normal first-year courses and played on the freshman soccer team. Toward the middle of the year I started to explore alternate ways of approaching the mystery called “life.” This was prime time for a generation that, as it came of age, was eager to push boundaries in its restlessness to find the full extent of what life had to offer. In our hearts we knew that there had to be more than had been presented to us thus far.

After a summer divided between working with children in the Dwight Street Projects of New Haven and living with friends in an apartment on River Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I entered sophomore year seriously wondering what might lie beyond the horizon of “the American Dream.”[5] To broaden my perspective I enrolled in Religious Studies 34a, a seminar in modern Hinduism where we studied in depth the lives of four colossal figures of nineteenth and twentieth century India: Sri Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahatma Gandhi.[6]

 The professor, Dr. Norvin Hein, was a scholar who approached each student like he did the historical giants in the course: as if we mattered. As a burgeoning hippy with an awakening consciousness, I was thrilled to read about these lofty figures. When I saw the black and white photo of the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna so completely lost in samadhi (God-intoxication) that his disciples had to support him by the elbows, I was thunderstruck. As I stared at the photo taken September 21, 1879, I thought, “Wow! This saint was alive when my grandfather was a boy!” I understood at that moment that saints not only existed 2000 years ago but recently as well—which meant that somewhere a saint might be alive in 1966.

 In the midst of my awakening sense of spiritual possibilities, I wrote incredibly enthusiastic papers for Professor Hein. This kind and tolerant professor in no way belittled my far-reaching papers; he in no way advised me to stick to safe scholarly analysis. On the contrary, he was supportive of my search, took it as real, and thereby validated my growing hunger for more knowledge about the spiritual life. In his plain brown suit, wire-rim glasses and humble demeanor, Professor Hein honored the birth of a quest in my heart. By appreciating my writing as “showing the priceless ingredient of courage to tackle a problem head-on,”[7] he strengthened my resolve to search for a spiritual path.

Along with the seminar in modern Hinduism I took a course in Chinese literature (in translation). The inner flame was fanned as I read through the many poems from Cold Mountain, written by a Zen Buddhist who, one thousand years before, stepped away from worldly pursuits to seek inner knowledge. With a couple of other students I petitioned to live off-campus, a choice previously reserved for married students. At a requisite meeting with the well-known head of the housing quad where I lived, Thomas Bergin, I was informed that if I were allowed to follow my plan I would “miss out on the true-Blue experience of Yale.” I acknowledged the accuracy of his observation and responded that perhaps I was looking for something else. Yale College granted our petition and we moved to a beach house in East Haven.

In the next few months I concluded that being a university student was neither what I wanted or needed at that point in my life.[8] With the Rolling Stones' “Ruby Tuesday” whispering in my ear to “Catch your dreams before they slip away” and visions of a utopian community dancing in my head, I dropped out of Yale in the spring of 1967 with Michael Folz, a close friend who was a brilliant songwriter. Our goal was to create good music, make a lot of money, and then move to the Canadian Rockies to build a community where we could live in peace and harmony. We moved to NYC to start a band with some students at Columbia University.

After a few weeks we had very little music to show for our efforts[9] and, fed up with sleeping on dormitory floors, we decided to hitchhike west. Our goal was to find the next area in the country that would explode in “hipness” as had happened in San Francisco, become a top local band there, and get launched to stardom like Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead. Following a variety of adventures with assorted characters in Minneapolis, Kansas City, Reno, Sparks, Denver, the Grand Canyon, Oak Creek Canyon, San Francisco, and Denver again, we decided that the Denver/Boulder area would be the new mecca. I had classmates from New Hampton who were at the University of Denver (DU) and the University of Colorado-Boulder, so there were more floors we could sleep on. After a short time Michael headed east to gather the other members of the band while I stayed with a friend from New Hampton who was attending DU.

On my twentieth birthday, May 13, 1967, I checked in with my parents who told me that my cousin had been killed in Vietnam, a very sad reminder of the current state of the world. I reflected long and hard on how my search for a more meaningful way of life related to the sacrifice my cousin made. I found no easy answers but understood I had to continue my quest. As a good friend of mine observed, our generation was “eager to move beyond the boundaries of our inherited culture,”[10] and I was “all in.”

Exactly one week later, my friend and I were shopping for groceries when he said hello to a young woman across the aisle. I inquired, “Who is that?” and he responded that she was a casual acquaintance named Karen Hawkinson. I asked him to introduce us, which he did. It turned out that Karen had been wondering who I was and within a very short time we were inseparable. She was a sophomore at DU but decided to stay with me rather than return to her home in Minneapolis for the summer. As none of the Columbia University musicians were willing to leave NYC, the dream of becoming the best rock band in the Denver/Boulder area quickly faded and Karen and I decided to head back to New England.

We returned to New Hampshire to live with my parents and were married on my father's birthday, September 4, 1967. I was now a college drop-out, married, and had no gainful employment. Initially Karen took a job at the Laconia Dunkin' Donuts and I became a night watchman for New Hampton School, and in the winter we moved on to work at Loon Mountain Ski Area. As we were still hungry to find a more meaningful way of life we avidly studied various spiritual movements. A long-time faculty member at New Hampton, Dave Rice, heard of our interest and suggested we might want to visit Sant Bani Ashram in the neighboring town of Sanbornton. This news came as such a surprise as I had no idea there was an ashram anywhere near where I grew up.

Mr. Rice wrote out directions for us and on a lovely March day in 1968 we were off to explore in my brother’s Volkswagen “tomato” bug. After driving for a long time up a narrow dirt road[11] we came to a simple wooden sign that said in big letters:

WELCOME

TO

SANT BANI ASHRAM

*

Please don’t kill our neighbors,

the birds, fish and animals

Expecting pagoda-shaped buildings and monks in saffron robes, we knocked on the front door of the Big House, a 200-year-old colonial building. An elderly man with flowing hair and a long white beard opened the door and, with twinkling eyes and a gentle voice, welcomed us to Sant Bani Ashram. This was Gerald Boyce, a native of Franklin, New Hampshire, who had traveled around the country decades earlier on his own quest. After meeting Master Kirpal during his visit to New Hampshire in 1963[12] Gerald decided that what he had been looking for all his life had come to him. Another elder, Betty Shifflett, made organic peanut butter sandwiches for us on home-made whole wheat bread and served us herbal tea. We were invited to ask as many questions as we liked, and after a couple of hours we left with a small amount of literature on Sant Mat and almost all our questions answered.

While we did not meet Russell and Judith Perkins at that time we soon learned that Jim Cluett, a friend from New Hampton School, had just returned from a six month stay in India with Master Kirpal. As Jim was on his way to Florida, Karen and I decided to hitchhike down the East Coast and connect with him in Fort Lauderdale. Along the way we wanted to visit a few other centers of spirituality as our interest had been piqued. Shortly before we left New Hampton my father took Karen aside and asked if she really wanted to embark on this trip or was it something she was doing because she loved me. When she responded that she really wanted to go, he confided, “Well, secretly I really admire you both!” As had been the case from earliest childhood I felt the support of my parents as we set out on our journey.

Hitchhiking south we stopped for a couple days at the Vedanta Center in Cohasset, Massachusetts, founded by Swami Vivekananda in the late 1800s. We knew of Swami Vivekananda's extensive early work in the 1890s in Chicago, New York, Boston and San Francisco through our study of Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda's spiritual teacher. As we had been reading the works of Edgar Cayce, a well-known psychic who became famous for his healing work in the first half of the 20th century, next up was the Edgar Cayce research center in Virginia Beach, Virginia.[13]

We arrived in Florida and after more study and conversation with initiates of Master Kirpal we decided that Sant Mat was just what we had been searching for. We were initiated on May 20, 1968, exactly one year after we met in Denver. For the first time since dropping out of college I could now envision returning to Yale. As mentioned above, Judith and Russell encouraged me to do this as it would be good preparation for starting a school. “Mother Yale” was very forgiving and welcomed me back with open arms. Karen and I rented an apartment on Dwight Street and I enrolled in classes for the fall of 1968.

I spent the first year immersed in Spanish literature and in the spring applied to be a Scholar of the House, a special program that allowed a student to focus on one project the entire senior year. My goal was to study the esoteric writings of two 14th century English mystics, Walter Hilton and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, through the lens of the writings of the 16th century Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross). Accepted into the program I squirreled myself away in the chauffeur’s quarters of an old estate in Woodbridge, Connecticut, just outside New Haven and read and wrote, read and wrote.[14]

A very exciting event happened in that we welcomed our son Christopher in January of 1970. Now approaching graduation, I knew I needed to find meaningful work and doubted there was much demand for someone well-versed in 500-year-old Christian mystical practices. Even though I had always enjoyed working with children, I was not eager to enroll in a certification program requiring a series of courses. During my time in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library I got to know some librarians who recommended I become a children's librarian. Shortly after commencement I enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Library Science but stayed only a few days as I found the daily commute from rural Woodbridge to New York City to be too much.

Russell and Judith invited Karen and me to build a house on Sant Bani Ashram, so we moved to Sanbornton in the summer of 1970. I was hired by Merrimack Valley Child Care Center in Concord, New Hampshire, to be assistant teacher for the four-year-olds. Over the next two years I advanced to head teacher and then program director while I earned an M.A. in Early Childhood Education through a non-resident program at Goddard College in Vermont.

The research for my Master's degree examined ways to provide emotionally healthy environments for child care facilities. Too often the prevailing mode was a kindergarten model designed to “socialize” students who came in for half-days a few days a week. Child care centers had very young children who needed to spend the entire day there and what made sense was to create a program that would allow them the kind of freedom and choice they would have if they were at home. Dr. Millie Penhale, the child psychologist who served as my consultant throughout the degree program, helped me focus on how best to meet the spatial needs of young children. In the end we designed several large-scale moveable indoor structures that allowed the children the freedom to simply “be” without feeling that adults were constantly hovering. At the same time staff felt very comfortable that the children, though not always in sight, were safe. Through this work I gained an understanding of how important it is for children to have lots of opportunities to explore, to learn and to be on their own rather than be driven by a rigid schedule of Playdough at 10:15, Snacks at 11, and Outside Recess from 11:15 to 11:30. A critical experience in my two years at Merrimack Valley Child Care Center was the daily reminder of how much I enjoyed working with children!

Following Merrimack Valley I was hired to be a Child Care Consultant for the State of New Hampshire. My duties included traveling around the state to help start-ups, working with social workers and legislators on how best to regulate child care facilities, selecting four distinct programs to be filmed as models for diverse approaches to nurturing environments for young children and trouble-shooting issues that came up as more child care centers came into being. While most aspects of this role were informative and interesting I rarely had a chance to work with children directly, which I sorely missed. Once the plan to start Sant Bani School had wings[15] I jumped at the opportunity.

Preparing for the Opening of Sant Bani School

Recognizing that my background was in early childhood education rather than elementary school instruction, I sought training to be as prepared as possible for teaching six students spanning grades 1-7. My natural inclination was to adopt a child-centered approach and I gravitated to a curricular model known as “the British Infant System.” The core curriculum was built around the child’s natural curiosity, and a classroom was set up with various stations filled with manipulative materials and a number of directed problems that the students could work to solve, individually or as a group. The teacher served more as a facilitator/coach than a repository of knowledge, with a “learning through play” pedagogy drawn from the works of educators like Johann Pestalozzi, Bronson Alcott, Frederich Froebel, Maria Montessori, John Dewey and Jean Piaget.[16]

[1] When we were in grade school Stuart and I shared a small dorm room surrounded by 10th grade boys that was downstairs from my parents' faculty apartment.

[2] Example: when I was five years old my father and I developed a game. As we walked along a city street in Tucson he would hold my small hand in his. When he gently squeezed once, I would turn my hand into a fist, which he continued to hold. After a while (the time varied) he would give my fist two soft squeezes and I would open it up to hold his hand “normally” once again. We would continue playing this as we walked along. The amazing thing is that we never said one word about it; it naturally developed and became something we both looked forward to. On another note, my mother saved a lot of my artwork and creative writing from my youngest years, giving me the message that what I did was worthwhile. As I look at these pieces today I am grateful for her efforts on my behalf. 

[3] I had an inkling of self-reflection (my first “Ah-ha” moment perhaps) when I was sitting on a bench in front of the house I now call home. I was twelve years old and my friends and I enjoyed watching the summer traffic crawl through the center of quiet New Hampton Village as, prior to the completion of Interstate 93, Main Street was part of the direct route to the White Mountains. When my family and I were driving from Arizona to New Hampshire twice a year I had the habit of looking out the window at children in the towns we went through and thinking, “I am so much luckier than those kids who are stuck in this town. I get to be driving across the country.” As I sat on the bench watching yet another car go slowly by, I saw a child peering at me from the window. Instantly I thought, “Look at that poor kid, stuck in that car while I am so lucky to be living here in New Hampton.” I immediately caught the irony of my thinking and burst out laughing. When a friend asked me what was up I tried to explain that I had just seen how I view everything from my own perspective—and then, selfishly, think that is best. While I struggled at the time to find the words to convey the impact, the truth of that moment—of my sudden realization of how self-centered I could be—never left me.

[4] June 6, 1965.

[5] Which, in our youthful exuberance, we summed up as “a better job, a bigger house, and two (or three!) cars in the garage…”

[6] From the Yale College course catalogue: “Religious Studies 34a, Modern Hinduism. A study of the creative Hindu religious leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to types of religious experiences.”

[7] Written comment by Professor Hein on my paper, “Correlations of Sri Ramakrishna, Psychoses, and LSD” handed in on November 2, 1966.

[8] Given my long hair and bell-bottoms (one of a handful of students who looked like that in late ’66) I received mixed support at Yale: very positive from the professors yet openly hostile from many of the students as I was yelled at, sworn at, spat at, ridiculed, etc. When I returned as a married student in the fall of ’68 everything had changed as the ’60s look was in full bloom on campus.

[9] An exception was a rendition of John Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale” set to a stirring arrangement that rose in a crescendo that rang out, “Truth is beauty – beauty truth” over and over again. Our lead guitar player was Chris Donald who went on to play for the “doo-wop” revival group, Sha Na Na.

[10] Thanks to Don Macken for this great phrasing.

[11] Osgood Road used to be a mile and a half of dirt road, especially challenging in mud season!

[12] See Introduction.

[13] The Edgar Cayce center is called the Association for Research and Enlightenment, or A.R.E.

[14] My Scholar of the House thesis, The Ascent to God, is available on request. My advisors were the renowned professors Jaroslav Pelikan and A. Bartlett Giamatti. Dr. Giamatti went on to become President of Yale, and then Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

[15] See Introduction.

[16] See, for example, http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2086/Infant-Schools-in-England.html