But he was already careful in matters that could seriously complicate his life. He impregnated none of the girls he entertained in the back of his father's 1938 Chevrolet sedan; he had an older youth buy condoms for him.
He excelled in class from the beginning, through his high intelligence, his energy, and his determination to be superior. He read voraciously. At age thirteen, in the tenth grade, he read his new history textbook on the evening of his first day, and claimed never to have looked inside it again. No one doubted him. His memory was remarkably responsive. He got an A in the course, as he did in every other course he took. Math he did with only quick and partial homework, enough to get the feel of procedures, and earned a perfect score on almost every quiz and test.
In high school he did not participate in sports, although he'd been outstanding in playground sports in grade school. He was small, of course, and there were a lot of chores to do on the farm. And as he told at least two friends, he'd outgrown athletics. Instead he read his way through the village library. Beginning when he started high school at age twelve, he'd go home from school at four o'clock, do chores, including milking several cows by hand, eat supper, and often bicycle five miles of gravel road back to Opdal, to the library. Sometimes he was the only person there besides the librarian. He'd return the books he'd borrowed at his last visit, usually six or eight of them, browse the shelves for an hour, and start home with another load. In winter, when the gravel road was snowy, he'd jog or ski in, if he couldn't borrow his father's car.
Years later he'd be remembered as the first person in Opdal school to use a book bag—an old skier's knapsack.
Among much else, he read H.G. Wells' Outline of History; the books and essays of Elbert Hubbard; and of all things for a boy in an ethnic farm community, the Harvard Classics. Norwegian was the language at home, and he read Ibsen in the original Dano-Norwegian. He read Nietzsche and Kant, Freud and Jung, Kierkegaard and Swedenborg, Ramakrishhna and Yogananda. He read Plato and Alfred Korzybski. Intellectually further afield, he even read Heinrich Harrer and Alexandra David-Neel on Tibet. The librarian in Opdal was delighted to have a young reader with such an avid desire to learn, and through interlibrary loans, ordered whatever he requested that her shelves did not have.
Perhaps most impressive of all, for someone so young, he became the devotee of none of the great men whose books he read. He read critically, absorbing and analyzing, gradually evolving his own basic cosmology, his own metaphysics. Listening to ex-schoolmates reminiscing on his boyhood, one might wonder if he hadn't been born with his philosophy and metaphysics. The closest thing he had to a real confidant was Morten Jacobsen, an older was three times promoted. But business success was not what he was looking for. The experience was useful, as was the modest investment portfolio he acquired, but after two and a half years he quit, having arranged employment as a staff assistant to Congressman Harvey Lingdal of Wisconsin.
The congressman might not have hired the energetic youngster if he'd known of Haller's association with witchcraft on Long Island, in a coven that ritually used drugs and hypnosis in an era when drug use was rare. Haller and his Long Island friends saw witchcraft as a way, or hopefully the way, to expand their individual powers. Hypnosis and drugs were tools in their witchcraft.
Leif Haller had no more intention of climbing to power via a political ladder than he'd had in doing it via the stock market. Later he'd tell friends he took the job for the knowledge, experience, and insights it could provide. He was already fixated on becoming the world's most powerful man by other means: He intended to develop psychic powers to go with his remarkable intelligence.
By the time he moved to Washington, he was already disenchanted with witchcraft. It's not clear how much he'd ever really expected of it. After his Long Island experience, he still considered that there was validity in some of its principles, but he'd concluded that the subject was based too largely on erroneous theories, and too cluttered with superstitions, to be useful as it stood.
Besides, it is clear that he planned to build his own system. He would write that its two branches, theory and practice, would grow simultaneously and in parallel, practices being based on theory, with further theory growing out of experience with practices.
The Making of a Guru
Haller soon found his job as a congressional staff assistant too demanding on his time; sixty- and eighty-hour weeks left far too little time for study and experimentation. So after five months he left the capital and went to Los Angeles, there to try his hand at applying the procedures he'd concocted.
The first thing he did was grow a beard—a rarity at the time. It's been suggested he grew it to camouflage his youth, but more likely it was to project a specific image. People who'd known him as early as his university days say he looked more mature than his years. While he grew his beard, he worked as a warehouseman for an auto parts chain. Finally, suitably bearded, he rented a tiny office on Melrose Avenue, and opened for business as a mystic counselor, under the name Swami Suvarnananda; suvarnananda in Sanskrit meaning Bliss in Gold. (Haller's humor could be sly or broad; in this case it was both.) For a time he made a sparse living at best, perhaps converting investments to cash when necessary. Some of his clients were deeply troubled; some had little money, but needed repeated counseling sessions.
He regarded these as necessary learning projects, and tried to see them through to successful conclusions, continuing to work with people who could no longer pay. Later he would say that it was during his Swami period that he refined his cosmology and his theories (he called them "the laws") of the soul and mind, as well as his basic principles of counseling.
With experience and a modicum of success, he moved to a better office, shared a secretary with a chiropracter, billed himself as Dr. Karl Mogens, psychoanalyst, and affected a cultured Danish accent. The diplomas on his wall, he once said, were the best that money could buy. As the good doctor, he had numerous rather impressive successes, and through word of mouth developed a profitable practice. Within six months he'd moved to a still nicer office, with a secretary of his own.
In working out his early procedures, Haller borrowed heavily from the work of others. He was influenced by Freud's early work in regression, work done before Freud became fixated on sex as the key to the psyche. And by Jung's work. Though Haller rejected Jung's concept of archetypes, he adapted his use of the psychogalvanometer in compiling and evaluating, with the patient, lists of psychologically charged words as a wedge and lever in analysis. He was also strongly influenced by Alfred Korzybski and Edgar Cayce.
Some of these works he'd read in his teens, others in the UCLA library. Later he would mention reading case histories of idiot savants. There is no evidence that he borrowed any practices from witchcraft.
It seems clear that his tenure as a swami and bogus Danish analyst was the first project in a long-term plan. It also seems clear that the plan was to culminate in himself as superman, surrounded by an expanding corps of supermen who would be subordinate to himself. The phase after the swami/Mogens phase was the establishment of the Institute for . . .