Behavior Toward Level 24 TIME

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Behavior: Toward Level 24
TIME
MAY 29, 1972 12:00 AM EDT
“Lie on the floor, your feet pointing to the sound source, and absorb the music.
Listen with the soles of the feet.” Those are the directions for doing the
“Audicon Plantar,” one of the basic exercises in a training program now being
advertised and offered in a dozen cities by a new mystical movement: the New
York-based Arica Institute in America, Inc. By following the mental and
physical regime prescribed by Arica, trainees are told, they may well “regain
the Essential Self,” achieve “total serenity” and “unity with emptiness,” and
ascend to a beatific level of consciousness arcanely called “the Permanent 24.”
Arica’s guru is Oscar Ichazo, 40, a Bolivian ex-philosophy student who let it be
known in 1970 that he was planning a training retreat for North Americans in
the Chilean city of Arica. Among the 50 seekers who made the trip—and paid
from $4,000 to $7,000 apiece for the ten-month experience —were artists,
housewives, businessmen and a few scientists (among them Dr. John Lilly, the
dolphin expert, who had previously tried to achieve higher consciousness on
LSD trips). Almost half were disenchanted defectors from Esalen, the encounter
center at Big Sur, Calif.; all were searching for the good life, and, under Oscar’s
tutelage, 42 concluded that they had found it. These survivors established the
institute, became its faculty, and launched the first classes last October.
Central to Arica’s classroom work is a repertoire of exercises similar to the

Audicon Plantar and loosely based on Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim Sufism
and Tibetan Lamaism. Exercises called “Mentations” require the student to
“concentrate your attention into each separate section” of the body for a
2 of 8 6/28/24, 02:39
“concentrate your attention into each separate section” of the body for a
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prescribed time: 8 minutes 40 seconds
Digital for the colon and kidneys, 10 minutes 45
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seconds for the liver, and so on. “Active in the World” calls for lying
motionless, forearms supported on elbows, palms facing the feet, while feeling
“the tissues of your body actively engaged in the dance of Life.” The
instructions for “Passive in the Cosmos” specify one arm held straight up from
the shoulder while the believer feels himself “absorbing the vibrations of the
solar system and beyond.”
A peculiar kind of meditation is included—about the planet Jupiter and the

color blue if it happens to be Thursday or about Saturn and black if it happens
to be Saturday. (“Think black. Your center of zero is black. Now see that black
vibrate … Feel it running up your leg …”) In addition, there is a mix of Egyptian
gymnastics, African dances and Hindu mantras or incantations (“Owwwww” or
“Ommmmm”).
Basic Causes. Some 170 students have “graduated” from Arica training, another
60 will finish in August, and registrations are coming in for future semesters.
Oscar is sure the trainees will fare well: “If the body is cleared of tensions, the
trouble in the head is diminished. If Arica doesn’t make you happy, it will at
least make you happier than you were.” One of his disciples is even more
enthusiastic. Everyone, Arica Instructor Bill Gay insists, can achieve the
nirvana of Level 24 (though Levels 12, 6 and 3 are beyond the reach of the
ordinary trainee). Once there, “you have built up the essentials, broken the ego
structure and have all the tools you need to continue to grow. You can empty
your head any time you want to, and you are in the here and now and know
what’s going on.”
Such euphoria seems almost certain to fade. To its credit, Arica rejects
alcoholics, drug users and the conspicuously disturbed. But like the encounter
movement, it attracts chiefly those with emotional problems, yet does not try
to help them come to grips with the underlying causes of their difficulties. For
some, it could even be the source of new worries —of a financial nature.
Exclusive of board and room, the cost of three months’ Arica training is a
whopping $3,000.
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Behavior: Toward Level 24 | TIME https://time.com/archive/6639629/behavior-toward-lev...

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