Quandaries

Dr. Wendell Johnson ( 1906 – 1965) was an American psychologist, actor and author and was a proponent of General Semantics (or GS _[1]). He was born in Roxbury, Kansas and died in Iowa City, Iowa. The Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center, part of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is named after this scientific pioneer. He is known for the experiment nicknamed "The Monster Study."

Considered one of the earliest and most influential speech pathologists in the field, he spent most of his life trying to find the cause and cure for stuttering -- through teaching, research, scholarly and other writing, lecturing, supervision of graduate students, and persuading K-12 schools, the Veterans Administration and other institutions of the need for speech pathologists. He played a major role in the creation of the American Speech and Hearing Association.

Johnson's book People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946; still in print from the Institute of General Semantics) is an excellent introduction to general semantics applied to psychotherapy. In 1956 his Your Most Enchanted Listener was published; in 1972, his Living With Change: The Semantics of Coping, a collection of selected portions of transcriptions of hundreds of his talks, organized by Dorothy Moeller, provided further general semantic insights. He also published many articles in his lifetime, in journals, including ETC: A Review of General Semantics. Neil Postman acknowledges the influence of People in Quandaries in his own GS book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976, Delacorte, New York):

I am tempted to say that there are two kinds of people in the world -- those who will learn something from this book (People in Quandaries) and those who will not. The best blessing I can give you is to wish that as you go through life you will be surrounded by the former and neglected by the latter.

_[1] General semantics is a program begun in the 1920s that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial launches under the names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) fully launched the program as "general semantics" in 1933 with the publication of Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.

One Who Knows.

Ralph Moriarity de Bit(1883-1964) was born on Christmas day, 1883, in rural Kansas. Around the turn of the century, economic forces pulled him westward, to very rural Idaho. He worked in forestry and established a family. While working in the woods, he began to hear a voice that gave him instructions. This impulse led him eventually to Spokane, Washington, where he met an Indian immigrant named A.K. Mozumdar, reputedly sent to the U.S. by his guru, Arumda, to teach meditation to Americans. DeBit identified the voice he heard in the forest with Mozumdar's voice, and became his disciple. DeBit remained with Mozumdar in Spokane, living with him and working beside him essentially as an apprentice for seven years. Mozumdar gave deBit the name “Vitvan” meaning “one who knows” after an enlightenment experience, when the younger man was 34 years old. Vitvan founded the School of the Natural Order in 1946. http://www.sno.org/index.htm
He spent four years in Greenwich Village, then established himself as a semi-itinerant spiritual teacher in the American West beginning in 1921, settling for a time in Los Angeles, then during a long period from 1925 through 1942 at an ashram named Po-Ahtun near Bailey, Colorado, then with a change in his pedagogy a change of place, to a center called Eschatologia near San Diego, and finally establishing the Home Farm of the School of the Natural Order in very rural eastern Nevada in 1957.
Mozumdar, had been trained in a Hindu tradition known as Shaktism, and its characteristic teachings—a model of the human body in terms of subtle energy flowing through channels and centers (chakras), the descent of a divine energy (Shakti) and ascent of an occult force (kundalini), for starters—feature prominently in Vitvan's major works.
Vitvan read Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski[1]. Before his exposure to Korzybski, Vitvan's teaching were expressed primarily in theological and metaphysical terms,similar to Mozumdar. Afterward reading Korzyski, Vitvan became convinced of the need to scrap this approach and begin again in with a non-metaphysical mode of expression. He traveled to Chicago to study with Korzybski personally in 1938, then returned to the Po-Ahtun ashram and destroyed all his manuscripts and printed materials, sold the ashram, renounced metaphysical thinking entirely.
[1]http://goalhypnosis.blogspot.ca/2011/02/map-is-not-territory.html