GLOBALMAN
Maui Weekly, July 15, 2004
by Joseph W. Bean
'Evolutionary Agent'
Ed "Jor-El" Elkin is not your ordinary psychologist. In fact, everything he does is not ordinary. Elkin is focusing his considerable energies and he is planning to change the world, one person at a time to prove it.
Maui has its share of colorful people. We get used to them. We barely notice how interestingly different they are. Then there's Ed "Jor-El" Elkin. You don't become accustomed to his brand of colorful. Every time, he surprises you in a new way. He even seems to trail some kind of glittering rainbow of astral hues, leaving people he's barely spoken to changed, and more colorful.
Some of the Jor-El palette can be understood. Much of it has to be accepted on faith. Before we speak of his standard introduction -- "a visitor from the twenty-fourth century" -- let's look at the Elkin biography that is taking place in our time.
Ed Elkin was born in 1936 in New York into a very large Polish-immigrant family a good number of decades ago. Like many people everywhere, especially out here in the middle of the Pacific, Elkin eventually felt a need to separate from his birth family. There. That's a key. Ever since, he's been eagerly seeking family and participating in situations that gather large groups of people. "In fact," he says, "I had a lot of discomfort about being alone."
Preparing for his career, which he now describes as "Evolutionary Agent," he has looked at his own discomforts and addressed them. For instance, he has repeatedly faced his issue about being alone. In various New Age and Eastern religious situations, like the Arica Training and at the Rajneesh Ashram in India, it has been a focus.
Before discovering his future self and becoming a catalyst for evolution, he was involved in the hip, the New Age, the sixties revolution. "I have been in the personal growth field ever since I discovered that the human potential movement existed," Elkin says. He became vice president of the Quest Center, which was an Esalen Institute-type growth center in Washington , D.C.
Younger people who took up the flower-power banner in the '60s dropped out to get in. More like the leaders of that revolution, Elkin entered through the ivy-surrounded doors of academe, eventually getting his doctorate in Psychology. He initially wanted to be an actor, but his role model, an older brother, was a physicist. So, he studied every science until there were just two left. "There was geology and psychology," he remembers, "the science of earth or the science of people."
Choosing psychology was really a no-brainer. Elkin was as comfortable studying the science of people as hippies were singing We Shall Overcome. But he was no hippie. He was a scientist. In fact, like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Elkin's science led him to government-funded research with drugs, including psychoactive drugs -- some of which, like LSD, would later be called psychedelic. He had discovered drugs and altered states of consciousness when, as a 25-year-old Ph.D. in psychology, he traveled in Europe and North Africa surrounding his year in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar.
After the research on drugs was abandoned and LSD became illegal, Elkin says, "I discovered the human potential movement, and by using non-drug methods, I shifted my attention over to growing myself." He trained with Fritz Perls in Gestalt Therapy and was told by the famous therapist, "I am I and you are you." Then he studied with Richard "Ram Das" Alpert who told him, "I am you, and you are me."
"Simultaneously, it is true," Elkin says, "that we are alike and we are different." Given that insight, he continued his studies of himself and, through that medium, of all of us. He worked with or studied under many teachers and gurus in the mid-twentieth century while also marrying and having a daughter. His theater dreams came up again and he began to weave theater with therapy. Slowly, he was developing his own thinking and healing his own personality.
Elkin has created many workshops. One of his favorites is the "Conscious Evolution Adventure: An Interactive Theater Event" in which people enact all the stages of evolution from a single fertilized egg cell [through acting out all the familiar forms] until they become single individuals in the body of humanity and celebrate.
At the end of 1988, Alan Cohen invited Elkin to do the Evolution Adventure as part of his annual year-end program on Big Island. In January 1989, on his fifth visit to Maui, Elkin decided to stay. Since then he has lived on the Valley Isle, rarely doing traditional psychotherapy, but remaining available to do that. He puts more energy into theatrical performances, his poetry, keeping the world engaged and informed through multiple list-serves online and into his career as a catalyst for everyone's evolution.
Elkin has called his life journey. "Along the Consciousness Trail." Along the way, as was inescapable at that time, Elkin was given other names. The guru Muktananda gave him the name, Raman. His Tibetan Buddhist teacher gave him the name, Karma Tzewang Dorji, and there were others. Elkin became comfortable with meaningful alternatives to Edwin Harvey Elkin, his birth name.
Wondering where the "Jor-El" came from? During a ritual on Maui in 1991, participants had the opportunity to discover their "future names." Elkin discovered his twenty-fourth century name as Jor-El A'dam Ra. Jor-El (which is the name of Superman's father) felt good, and it stuck. Through Unity Church and human potential groups like the `Ohana Connection, he now has a huge family of choice or, more precisely, an intentional family, as he says, "of people I share so much with."
If you want to get to know Jor-El, just watch the social horizon for a vivid kaleidoscope of color. That's where you'll find him. :o)
Maui has its share of colorful people. We get used to them. We barely notice how interestingly different they are. Then there's Ed "Jor-El" Elkin. You don't become accustomed to his brand of colorful. Every time, he surprises you in a new way. He even seems to trail some kind of glittering rainbow of astral hues, leaving people he's barely spoken to changed, and more colorful.
Some of the Jor-El palette can be understood. Much of it has to be accepted on faith. Before we speak of his standard introduction -- "a visitor from the twenty-fourth century" -- let's look at the Elkin biography that is taking place in our time.
Ed Elkin was born in 1936 in New York into a very large Polish-immigrant family a good number of decades ago. Like many people everywhere, especially out here in the middle of the Pacific, Elkin eventually felt a need to separate from his birth family. There. That's a key. Ever since, he's been eagerly seeking family and participating in situations that gather large groups of people. "In fact," he says, "I had a lot of discomfort about being alone."
Preparing for his career, which he now describes as "Evolutionary Agent," he has looked at his own discomforts and addressed them. For instance, he has repeatedly faced his issue about being alone. In various New Age and Eastern religious situations, like the Arica Training and at the Rajneesh Ashram in India, it has been a focus.
Before discovering his future self and becoming a catalyst for evolution, he was involved in the hip, the New Age, the sixties revolution. "I have been in the personal growth field ever since I discovered that the human potential movement existed," Elkin says. He became vice president of the Quest Center, which was an Esalen Institute-type growth center in Washington , D.C.
Younger people who took up the flower-power banner in the '60s dropped out to get in. More like the leaders of that revolution, Elkin entered through the ivy-surrounded doors of academe, eventually getting his doctorate in Psychology. He initially wanted to be an actor, but his role model, an older brother, was a physicist. So, he studied every science until there were just two left. "There was geology and psychology," he remembers, "the science of earth or the science of people."
Choosing psychology was really a no-brainer. Elkin was as comfortable studying the science of people as hippies were singing We Shall Overcome. But he was no hippie. He was a scientist. In fact, like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Elkin's science led him to government-funded research with drugs, including psychoactive drugs -- some of which, like LSD, would later be called psychedelic. He had discovered drugs and altered states of consciousness when, as a 25-year-old Ph.D. in psychology, he traveled in Europe and North Africa surrounding his year in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar.
After the research on drugs was abandoned and LSD became illegal, Elkin says, "I discovered the human potential movement, and by using non-drug methods, I shifted my attention over to growing myself." He trained with Fritz Perls in Gestalt Therapy and was told by the famous therapist, "I am I and you are you." Then he studied with Richard "Ram Das" Alpert who told him, "I am you, and you are me."
"Simultaneously, it is true," Elkin says, "that we are alike and we are different." Given that insight, he continued his studies of himself and, through that medium, of all of us. He worked with or studied under many teachers and gurus in the mid-twentieth century while also marrying and having a daughter. His theater dreams came up again and he began to weave theater with therapy. Slowly, he was developing his own thinking and healing his own personality.
Elkin has created many workshops. One of his favorites is the "Conscious Evolution Adventure: An Interactive Theater Event" in which people enact all the stages of evolution from a single fertilized egg cell [through acting out all the familiar forms] until they become single individuals in the body of humanity and celebrate.
At the end of 1988, Alan Cohen invited Elkin to do the Evolution Adventure as part of his annual year-end program on Big Island. In January 1989, on his fifth visit to Maui, Elkin decided to stay. Since then he has lived on the Valley Isle, rarely doing traditional psychotherapy, but remaining available to do that. He puts more energy into theatrical performances, his poetry, keeping the world engaged and informed through multiple list-serves online and into his career as a catalyst for everyone's evolution.
Elkin has called his life journey. "Along the Consciousness Trail." Along the way, as was inescapable at that time, Elkin was given other names. The guru Muktananda gave him the name, Raman. His Tibetan Buddhist teacher gave him the name, Karma Tzewang Dorji, and there were others. Elkin became comfortable with meaningful alternatives to Edwin Harvey Elkin, his birth name.
Wondering where the "Jor-El" came from? During a ritual on Maui in 1991, participants had the opportunity to discover their "future names." Elkin discovered his twenty-fourth century name as Jor-El A'dam Ra. Jor-El (which is the name of Superman's father) felt good, and it stuck. Through Unity Church and human potential groups like the `Ohana Connection, he now has a huge family of choice or, more precisely, an intentional family, as he says, "of people I share so much with."
If you want to get to know Jor-El, just watch the social horizon for a vivid kaleidoscope of color. That's where you'll find him. :o)
