Kent Bicknell – 50th Reunion Essay

Kent Bicknell

57 Main Street

PO Box 357

New Hampton, NH 03256

kentbicknell@me.com

603-340-0644

Spouse(s): Karen Bicknell (1967)

Child(ren): Christopher (1970); Nicholas (1975)

Grandchild(ren): Nora (2005); Hayden (2007); Reece (2011)

Education: Yale (Scholar of the House) 1970; Goddard MA 1972; Boston University Ed.D. 1983

Career: Founder and Head of Sant Bani School (www.santbani.org) for 44 years (1973-2017)

Avocations: Meditation & spirituality; Thoreau, Emerson and Alcott; progressive education – then and now

College: Timothy Dwight

I was one of our class who had never been on campus until my parents dropped me off a couple of days before classes began. I plunged into the normal first-year courses and played on the freshman soccer team. Toward the middle of the year I started to explore alternate aspects of “the mystery of life,” eager to push the boundaries of our inherited culture. 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, I entered sophomore year seriously wondering what lay beyond the horizon of “the American Dream.”

To broaden my perspective I enrolled in Religious Studies 34a, a seminar in modern Hinduism where we studied the lives of four colossal figures of 19th and 20th century India: Sri Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahatma Gandhi. 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 when he stood, I was thunderstruck. I thought, “Wow! This saint was alive when my grandfather was a boy!” I understood at that moment that saints not only existed 2,000 years ago but recently as well—which meant that somewhere a saint might be alive in 1966.

I dove in and wrote enthusiastic papers for Professor Hein, who neither belittled my passion nor advised me to stick to safe scholarly analysis. He was supportive of my search, took it as real, and thereby validated my growing hunger for more knowledge about the spiritual life. By appreciating my writing as “showing the priceless ingredient of courage to tackle a problem head-on” (comment on my paper, “Correlations of Sri Ramakrishna, Psychoses, and LSD”), he strengthened my resolve to search for a spiritual path.

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. Given my long hair and bell-bottoms (one of a handful of students who looked like that in the fall of ’66), I received mixed support at Yale: very positive from the professors yet openly hostile from many of the students. I was yelled at, sworn at, spat at, ridiculed, etc. (all of which changed when I returned as a married student in the fall of ’68 as the ’60s look was in full bloom on campus). In the spring of 1967, with the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” whispering in my ear to “Catch your dreams before they slip away,” I dropped out of Yale and did not return until I had found my lifelong companion, Karen, and a spiritual path I have practiced for over half a century.