Wed, 26 Mar 2008
Alain's Other Side
Alain Naude is one of Baltimore's homeopathic practitioners. He has a long and distinguished history as a homeopath and gets a mention in Julian Winston's book, The Faces of Homeopathy. For someone so famous, however, there's very little information about him on the web. This is how he likes it. When I posted my note from his talks on the web, he asked me to take them down. A pity, because he had some entertaning stories to tell about Pierre Schmidt. He's well regarded by my friends who have gone to see him. His style of practice is that of a die-hard Kentian. (Homeopaths will know what I mean and I suppose others won't care.)
The "other side" of Alain is his association with Eastern spirituality, especially Jiddhu Krishnamurti. Alain was Krishnamurti's secratary and I've read a book of Krishnamurti's talks where Alain is one of the interlocutors. It seems that Alain gave lectures on Krishnamurti's thought back in the Seventies in the Bay area, which was ground zero for that decade's spiritual bazaar. Charity emailed me a link to a blog post about Alain's career as a spiritual teacher. (Thanks!) The tone of the post is rather bitchy, but the personality that comes through the snark is recognizably that of Alain. Here's a taste:
A portly, tweedy, 40-something Afrikaner, Alain Naude, nee Eugene Alan Naude, really stood out from his fellows, who were mostly wearing orange schmattes and using lavishly vowelled, polysyllabic pseudonyms. He had a credible patina of European culture and a plummy, vaguely British accent. He was setting up shop in a little-trafficked corner of the Bay Area's bustling spiritual marketplace, promoting an out-of-the-counter-culture-mainstream path of his own devise. It didn't require any chanting, name changes, dip-dyed costumes, or barfing: just attendance at each and every one of his discourses, which were delivered to small groups in word-of-mouth locations.
