| My
Realizations An Autobiography of Julian Lee I came from a broken home but was blessed to have a father with a devout attitude about the Catholic Church who prevailed on my mother to raise us Catholic. I grew up both loved and neglected, and learned to be my own person. I became a young musician and aspiring songwriter, then became deeply interested in religion. I married and had four children, and became an astrologer because of deep fascination that came from the apparent reality of astrological coherence. I was strong in it, and uncovered a more accurate and more useful form of astrology. Basically, I discovered that the "relocated natal chart" was the more accurate chart for everyday use, and that multiple charts exist in an individual as layers, or "markings." But religious and spiritual questing dominated my life. Astrology was just a way to become fully cognizant of the "predicament" we are in -- that of having karma, limitations, involvement in a dualistic experience, and one that fluctuates and is impermanent. Astrology laid bare that situation, encompassing a genuine "law of the world." It was full enough worldly knowledge for me. I was more interested in religion, and the concept of grace or salvation; the things that might give us satisfaction despite all, and freedom. This was my passion in life. I became deeply interested in yoga -- the true yoga that is the search for God within through cessation of thought and samadhi. The interest in questions of God, religion, and spirituality have dominated my mind, along with a concern for society and the moral order that ensures prosperity for the many. This blossomed in a knowledge about meditation (yoga) of India, and the reality of the Saint. I attained a true guru, and was given many, many things in my spiritual quest. Later in life I set out to do a bit for helping the young men, and women, caught in this dark porn age, and lead them to the higher ground of real religious life. I sought, also, to revivify Christianity and some of the other religious traditions by contributing what I could to religious knowledge, for the sake of the peoples; for the sake of men, women, and children and their happiness. I was richly blessed by God, more than I ever imagined could be possible, or dreamed could be when I was younger. I owe that to the grace of guru, and a bit of effort on my part to meditate and be chaste, and my ability to develop a devotional attitude toward God and guru. This "bhakti" or devotional attitude started young and was a gift of the Catholic Church to me. God is real, and responds to those who seek Him. The four paragraphs above are the shortest summation of my life. What follows is details, hopefully interesting ones. This is my autobiography. As a child I was a shy kid. Mother always said I was "the sensitive" one. My experience with my brothers and family did not give me self-confidence. I had a great deal of pride that probably came both my own karmic inheritance, and wounded pride from my early life. If a boy at school insulted me, I was quick to come right back on him, take him to the ground, and go to the brink. Jim W., Pat F., Mike M., Bobbie G. -- we all tasted dust together. (And my salutations to them all.) But my brothers were not to be challenged. I remembered as an adult seeing an old family movie for the first time. My dad was a camera buff and especially loved photographing his boys and taking movies. In those days, fathers were more morally restrained and decent, thus they liked having sons. (When men become immoral, they distance themselves from male friends, and from their sons.) Dad was proud of his boys. We were all dressed up for church in our suits. We had short-cropped hair. It seemed Dad was directing us to assemble a certain way and I was trying to find my place in the group. We were four. My little brother Joe was in the group, and my two older brothers. I looked about four years old, lamb like, rather dear. My two older brothers were very strong and dominant. And one thing about them in those days: They were not kind. As I scurried about in my dignified suit-and-tie, blond buzz hair shining in the sun, trying to find my place in the group, suddenly one of them delivered to me a savage slug. The White European races have many splendid virtues including love of beauty, serviceful skill, and humanitarian idealism. Among these many splendid virtues of the White Europeans, a warrior-like, aggressive nature has often acted as a fault rather than a virtue. Especially the fault of warring against each other in great fratricidal wars. I believe that some of the White European male's aggressive, quarelling nature comes from inner pain through the loss of so many fathers in great wars. This includes the emotional loss of fathers who, though still living, were so damaged by their participation in wars that they withdrew emotionally from their sons. My father was like that. In World War II 50 million were killed, mostly men. We have no proper conception of how much the loss of so many future fathers, brothers, and sons affected the White Gentile societies over time, and led to their later direction. Missing fathers and emotionally remote fathers created the seedbed for the "angry White youth" of the 1960's. My brothers were expressing, even at an early age, a son's rage over a lack of father. Watching the movie my attention perked up. I observed the boy's behavior. He scrambled away looking fore a safer side, face turned downward but only enough to hide it without being noticeable. He did not cry, and tried to disappear while at the same time, appear, because he seemed to have been eager to appear in a family picture. The Family in this moment had seemed like such a Great Thing. That is how dad had made it seem. So I absorbed this hit as if it had not happened. Nobody seemed to notice my getting slugged. It did not cause any holdup in the project. I could see my face working hard not to reveal pained humiliation as I scurried for a place among my titan brothers. My face did a good job of hiding it for a boy so young. Looking down at the ground just slightly had helped keep me from crying in front of my Dad and brothers. I had probably already learned that this would only invite razzing or worse from my brothers, or impatience or disappointment in my father. But I could see it, and it was hard to see. Having a certain detachment from the figure in the picture, and now being a father with kids of my own, I looked at the innocent child that I was and thought, "That was a poor, innocent boy!" I found it surprising to see it later, as a full grown adult. I had no memory of that moment. It happened so fast, like the wink of an eye. I think my mother felt my pain through the years, but there was nothing she could do. When I was a toddler and receiving too much persecution from my brothers, her habit was just to snatch me up and let me ride, above the maelstrom, on her hip. Womens' hips are surely designed for her toddler to ride, one arm free for serving the rest. But this she couldn't do forever. Now walking, I was down with the tigers. In general my mother and father were not able to successfully intervene in the steaming cauldron that was life with my brothers, and I've often reflected that my two older brothers affected my personality just as much as my parents did -- or more. They had their own pains and frustrations as sons, but they took them out on me. True Yoga I was blessed to be taught to read. I thank my father for buying a Reader's Digest library of children's literature. Through the years I scoured every story. Dad probably didn't think much of it, and the art wasn't very good. But it enriched my mind and kept me reading. I also thank the editors and publishers. It began a long romance with books. After many years of reading my favorite book became the Yoga-Sutra and the Yoga-Vasistha. The Yoga-Sutra is an acquired taste. But when you are really interested in the ultimate truth and how to get there, this is where you end up. It is lean reading, and covert. I have many translations of it. It states that "yoga" is contact with, and merging with, God within. It describes God as fundamental bliss and Pure Consciousness which creates all, is obscured by the ego-mind, and also as fundamental Identity that is personal. It states that the first "action of Yoga" is austerities, or self-mortification. One minor, peripheral thing it mentions is the idea of holding a posture for a long time for the purpose of becoming "free from the pairs of opposites," i.e. unaffected by sensory states of heat, cold, etc. (Christian saints and mystics figured this one out, too.) It states that the most effective austerity is meditation, which draws the mind away from the world, and the life force away from the carnal senses. Because the mind is the source of all sensory entanglements, and actually is the world. So setting aside the mind is finally setting aside the world and choosing God, who is obscured behind the ripples of the constantly moving mind. So I started meditation at 28. Sadly, the whole word "yoga" has become dumbed-down, subverted, besmirched, distorted, corrupted, waylaid, glamorized, sideswiped, side-tracked, circus-ized, corporatized, Hollywood-ized, fame-o-tized, grotesqued, sexualized, materialized, monetized, and feminized, American-womanized. If that run-on sentence gives you the impression that I consider the western/feminine subversion of yoga to be a horrible misfortune, that was the point. It is part of my mission in life to stand for what Yoga actually was, and is, and especially to admonish those who think that it in any way mixes with lust, moral corruption, or material and bodily goals. Yoga is not about making yourself healthy. That's a mere side benefit of seeking God and it requires no postures whatever. It is not about making your butt smaller so you have a good female self image, or to get a boyfriend, or to chat with your lady friends. It's not about posing for pictures and playing Buddha, and having cool yoga clothes. It's not about getting tattoos, piercing your body like some savage who hates what God made, doing calisthenics on the floor, grappling with a sexy partner, climbing up jagged peaks, being a rock star, being a feminist, or sitting on the beach. It's not about endless sexual lust. It's not about health food. It's not a cool profession for you, so that you can "help" anybody who gives you a 30 buck monthly tuition. It's not about pranaming like a devotee when you are not devoted to anybody. All these are debasements of yoga. You don't even start in yoga until you want to renounce the world and sensual enjoyments. Yoga is about purifying yourself and knowing God. It is entirely about the mind and its direction and subjugation. And it doesn't live in the same house as lust. Yoga is: Cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. (The 2nd sutra.) And it is most facilitated by meditation on God combined with chastity and bhakti. Then the Seer is established in his own real and fundamental nature. (The 3rd sutra.) Purity lets you do it. Austerities are how you purify, and are the "basic action of yoga." (Another of the sutras.) The most important austerities are celibacy, meditation itself, and fasting. Then you get to contact the Great God within. And that's it. And that's religion. Seek And Ye Shall Find In my teens I studied becoming a priest. My dad seemed to be quietly happy about that, which surprised me. Then I found that priests had no answers to my questions about religion, Christ, and God. At least the priest who came to my house. The one my mother invited me into her studio to meet. I guess they had responded to my letter to some of the orders. My mother shepherded me into the room to "meet Father so-and-so." But they stupidly didn't say what it was about. I would have been delighted if he had come out with it and acknowledged that he knew I was interested in being a priest. What's to be ashamed of? It was the 70's. Priests had lost confidence. The times were raising questions that they were not answering well. (This was just my own sin manifesting as world confusion.) So it was a lame meeting and a lame conversation. I didn't know why that fellow had become a priest. He did not seem to have been interested in any of life's big questions, because he had not even the semblance of an answer for any. Then I spent my young life trying to sort out what was essential to Christianity and what wasn't. I made many mistakes. But as Christ said, "Seek, and you shall find." So the quest was not without fruit. My nose is now noticeably red from meditation, which draws the life force up to higher bodily centers and away from lower, and reduces my sense awareness. You may not have heard of this phenomenon. Well, by the grace of my guru I can report about a number of phenomenon such as this, things only known in remote corners of India. My extremities are somewhat numb from this practice of withdrawing energy from the senses. I can feel my feet just enough to walk. I also developed two long, vertical indentations up my skull. Fruit of meditation which makes you more intuitive. Indian yogis, saddhus, and meditators represent these by painting two long parallel lines up their foreheads with chalk. These are not "Catholic" things. But then again, some of them are. I hear the blissful inner sound of Aum, and feel it's vibration in my body, at all times except when in traffic outdoors. This has been true for many years and came after long practicing Yogananda's first two kriyas. I never had to make effort to do the second kriya (listening for aum), because I did the first one so assiduously that I was soon hearing Aum with open ears. For some time I did not know what it was and was asking other persons, "Do you hear a sound like this...?" So the 2nd kriya came easy to me by doing the first one well, and with devotion for the guru. Going to India Within If I concentrate on it, I come so close to truly "falling in" that I pull away. It is truly the Comforter. Just a bit of it is enough, and I hear more than that. I see the divine light of bindu usually several times a day. One day I asked a saint, Karunamayi, to give me the experience of the highest samadhi. I had written my request on a card in the clearest, most beautiful handwriting I could manage. She is a wish-fulfilling guru. If she says a thing will happen, it happens. She just has to say it. This is one of the siddhis or spiritual powers of those merged in God. For God makes everything true through speech, starting with His primordial divine sound. As she looked at the card she stroked my head and said, "My son, this will very soon come true." In 21 days it descended on me and went on for two nights and a day. It took hold of me like a beast and I found that I fought it off, in concern and some fear. As the process appeared it just brushed up against me as from behind and I felt the welling up of never-known Greatest Bliss. I had been tipped back in my chair and as it first came on. Feeling I would fall back on my head I straightened up and tried to shake it off by focusing on my room. I had been like a small bliss fish up to then, and I thought I knew joy. But now I found I was a very small bliss fish indeed. It would be as if a minnow thought he was the biggest fish of the pond, lifelong. Then suddenly he feels something brush up against his minnow back, and it's the touch of an inconceivably large blue whale. That was how this bliss seemed compared to my usual bliss: vast, immeasurable, and all-fulfilling. This bliss was very emotional. By immediate instinct I knew it was taking my mind. I knew I would fall backwards onto the floor in my wooden chair. So I wrested away from it. As it came on my breath was suddenly removed from my lungs, utterly and completely. I didn't exhale it. It simply disappeared, and I was aware that my heart was not beating. In this state the chest cavity feels suddenly vacant, like an immense cold space. I knew the feeling from before in sleep and semi-sleep states, and understood it. But I'd never had it so clearly in the fully conscious state. It is a strange state and only assiduous yogis get comfortable with it. I found I wasn't yet. I stood up, but the state kept coming on, including the cessation of heartbeat. That oceanic emotional bliss was gone now. Instead my consciousness was aware of nothing but "I exist," and now a very fine, very keen or "high pitched" bliss instead. I found I could walk around in this state, touch things, and do things -- but the world seemed a phantasm. Now there was a tug-of-war in me, between the "above" uncreated realm and this world. The samadhi kept trying to take my mind away from "world," to make the world disappear, and I kept struggling to keep aware and connected to this life below. I laid down to sleep, hoping to escape into the dream world. In sleep I was in-and-out of this pure "I am" state, dreams, and awareness of my body. My heart remained shut down. When I woke I felt the samadhi come for my mind again and again throughout the day, like a great pull that wanted me to turn to the transcendental and make the world dissolve. And I kept shaking it off and trying to anchor in the world. By now I had sensed the power and profundity of what was happening and had begun to have an emotional reaction to it. I knew that if I gave myself over to it I could never be the same person after. I feared I would not be able to carry on with my life, my duties, my bills, my clients, or my children's needs. This was all delusive ego talking, of course, because the Divine would have taken care of everything. But I felt I was attached to the limited, dualistic life I had always known. But the samadhi had me in its jaws and kept taking my mind with force. I began to beg to God: "God, I still like the idea of setting a child on my knee, and pointing out a star, and speaking to her as if it is a distant thing, and separate from us. I'm not done with all the experiences and stories this dualistic life, this world of separateness, can offer." I wasn't ready to be a Nityananda, a blissed out avadhut, laying like a log in the street, incompetent for this world but a beacon of divinity to all. I was too used to this karma and this game. A clear vision came to me of what was happening and the decision I was making. It was like a family that had spent its life traveling, like gypsies. Lifelong they had journeyed in quest of the Holy City. All their fathers and mothers had been traveling, too. And the grandfathers before that. All they had known was traveling, traveling -- trying to get to the Holy City. Everything was organized around it, all their relationships, and this was the life they knew well. Suddenly they come over the crest of a highland and, Lo! The Holy City! It sparkles. It's immense. It's a site and creation they've never seen. They know it's full of good things. They know it's full of many living beings, most greater and different from them. What would be the psychology of such a family? Such a caravan? How would they really react upon coming over that crest? First joy, wonderment, thanks. Then some fear. Because they would know that their entire way of life was about to end. They were about to enter the Divine, but it was the divine Unknown to their minds. What they would do, most of them, would be to set up camp there near the city, on the crest of the hill. Then they'd begin to make expeditions into its fringes. Get to know some of its lesser inhabitants, and get used to the idea of ending the life they'd known for so long. This was the decision I was making: To set up camp near the edge of the Great Holy City, to remain close, but to not fully enter. So I turned away from the final attainment of yogis, though I learned what it was like, and was well comforted by this event in my life, knowing that my austerities, meditation, and spiritual search had not been without fruit. But I was never bereaved about it, because I already had two things that were full well enough, and one was my devotion for guru, and the other was Om. These are full well enough for my life. And this was the fulfillment of a prophetic indicator in my original initiation dreams. In those dreams I decided that I was not ready to merge with the light yet and end "the game." But I also constructed this -- during the dreams -- as a concept that not doing so would allow me to benefit "others" still in the game. This is the Bodhisattva illusion. There's really nobody "out there" to save. All exterior flaws are projections of your own impurity. But it is fun to think there is and stay in "the game." This so-called "Bodhisattva vow" is nothing but a decision by those who still are enjoying the dualistic game and don't want to end it yet. That's all it is. It is supposedly made because the yogi is deciding not to get enlightenment until "all others are enlightened." But true knowers know there is nobody really "out there" to save. All "unenlightened external people" in your world-dream are nothing but the projections of one's own dualistic impurities and karmas. As you purify yourself, the world gets purified or "saved" on it's own. Then when in the dualistic world, one tries to do his duty to the people. But always keeping in the back of his mind: "All this is just me." The Bhagavad-Gita states that the yogic sages attains an awareness that "there is no longer any [external] work to be done." After a second night in this fight with the great tiger of samadhi, I woke up in a normal state. An interesting thing is that I was reading something on the internet as this samadhi came on. And I believe that the subject matter, of what I was reading, had something to do with the timing of its occurrence after the blessing of the Indian guru Karunamayi. I had been reading an article about the inherent noble instincts of men to protect their women and children, no matter what the cost. The article had described an event in California in which an angry employee had entered an office building with a shotgun, and had begun stalking through the building blasting whoever he could find. It told about a couple who worked at the building, a husband and wife. People were trying to barricade themselves in their offices, but the killer was shooting through the locks and murdering them anyway. The young man had been separated from his wife in the building. As soon as he realized what was happening he went directly to her knowing the shooter was coming that way. He got to her office just in time to place his body over her as the gunman burst through the door. One more shotgun blast later, the killer was taken down by the swat team. The young husband was dead. His wife, untouched. He did it without a second thought, because she was her wife and mother of his children, and he was a man. It was while reading that, in the very moment, that my nirvikalpa samadhi came on. The Warrior's Yoga The Bhagavad-Gita is one of the richest and most abstruse religious scriptures in the world. It's entire theme is the quest to re-unite with God through various techniques called "yogas." It is like an enumeration and explication of the various yogas that the great Vedantic culture of India evolved for effecting the Divine reunion. So it ranges all over -- from the detached and God-focused attitude of the "karma yogi" (not 'doing good deeds,' but doing whatever is duty with detachment and thought of the guru or deity) -- to the "bhakti" or devotional attitude, to arcane verses about breathing techniques and discussions of the various lower gods. But the outstanding theme is that the whole conversation takes place in the midst of a battle, on a battlefield, and is given to a warrior undergoing stress over the war. The truth is that warriors, always doing their duty, and always facing death, get close to God automatically. They are the ultimate karma yogis, doing duty alone with no thought of self and with detachment from outcomes. The warrior is surrendering himself and his ego for duty. Surrendering the self and the ego is the very goal of the highest spiritual practices of yoga. It is because warriors, in fact, have a transcendental experience on the battlefield with their fellows that the ordinary world always seems dull and empty ever after. They learn to ignore the frightening "wrathful deities" of the battlefield and hew to one focus, duty alone. This is yoga. Then by doing their duty with no selfishness or clinging to security, they attract a divine blessing. So this is one form of yoga that is not explicitly named in the great Bhagavad-Gita. But it did not need to be, because this warrior yoga is being described in the book from start to finish. It is the very substrate of the book. The warrior knows he could die at any moment, or lose his worldly station, and looks right in the face of death. In doing this, he necessarily comes into his "self" -- the self that abides through all changes and conditions. Trauma and emotional disturbance come more for a warrior when he is filled with fear, disconnected from divine faith, and overcome with emotion. That is, when he is not spiritually prepared for war. As with most tales, myths, and folk legends -- they contain truth and are founded on reality. Such is true of the tales and scriptures about the reward of a warrior. I have found in my life that the more I do my duty, regardless of the consequences -- the more divine and occult blessings come to me such as inner divine sound, and miraculous solutions. When you do your duty with no thought of self -- even unto death -- your own soul rewards you in the next state because your soul knows the truth about what you did. Thus it was that while reading about the detached yoga of a young warrior in a California office building, who laid over his cowering wife as a powerful shotgun drew upon him -- that I was given the gift of samadhi. As time passed this experience -- along my initiation dreams and experiences I've had in meditation and sleep -- gave me much to think about and ponder. It gave me awareness of the kinds of experiences, sensations, and soul situations we experience in the death process, and how long conditioning and clarity of purpose are required to make the higher use of them. I have been able to write about the death process for the minds of my White European people, perhaps in a more accessible and critically-focused way than is in available in such texts as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Because of the samadhi experience and others, I think about the coming death event -- and the huge opportunities of it -- on a daily basis. Spiritual Life The most important things about my spiritual life, I have left out and shall, as one should. I gave up the passion for fame in my 20s and only write this to to help other young men, and because in these politically treacherous times it is prudent to write one's own biography than to let others do it. I have a guru, Paramahansa Yogananda. After tearfully requesting that he accept me as his disciple, though I was unworthy, I had a series of dreams that were powerful initiation dreams. After that time I began to have spontaneous bodily movements, many of them the classic yoga postures and poses. I had a number of other strange events and manifestations after that also. I did not understand the movements of my body at first. But I was soon led to a book called "Play of Consciousness" by Swami Muktananda that explained them and I understood all was well. The guru and the guru principle is the most powerful and precious thing in my life. Most people don't understand the guru principle. And even those who do often don't understand that you must ask. You have to ask him to accept you, take you on, and make you his disciple after preparing yourself a bit. The luckiest thing about my life is that I intuited that was true, and I really asked. Yet all these are small things compared to God. Because this was only done by grace, and grace is what I still need to do that. I encourage all young men to be religious, austere, free of sense-addictions, and to seek God according to their lights. I want to see Christianity great, vital, and strong again. I am hoping to provide young Christians with vital things they may be missing from their own tradition. Or simply things that are forgotten. Especially I want to awaken them to the ideals of "guru bhakti" as applied to Christ by Christian saints of old, and to the understanding of meditation technique. Again, many of these meditation techniques were uncovered by Christian saints of old. I am writing this autobiography to help others understand me and my work, and some of my message, after I am gone. I also find myself to be a political dissident in these times, the sort that has many natural and powerful enemies. It is always good to write one's own biography rather than letting one's enemies do it for him. This is the truth about my life and my views. My Family and Early Life My mother and father had six children, four older boys, and two younger girls. I was third, with two brothers above me. Poverty My family was basically poor. I wasn't really sure about it. It was a realization I came to as I matured. But there was not much around the house of treats or fun-foods. I remember having to scrounge just to find a piece of bread. Then hunting up something creative to make it more than a piece of bread. No butter? Well, aha! Here's some catchup. My brother cut a little hole in the middle of the bread and filled it with catchup. So I tried that. It wasn't much, but it obscured for the moment any thought that I was starving. We didn't have "nothing" -- there was one last piece of bread, and some catchup! Such lives make men resourceful. But there was much temptation in the stores. Once at the age of four, while my mother was shopping, I stole a "Power House" candy bar from the market. At home mother immediately spotted it. Alarmed, she knew I had stolen it. She put me in the car right that moment and drove me back to the store. We walked in and she handed it unopened to the manager. All was fine. But I sure was on pins and needles. Such actions by parents starting young teach right from wrong and forge the character. But the parent has to take the time, and realize when something big is happening. I honor my mother for that moment, considering she had three other boys on her hands and it was coming up to dinner time -- her busiest time. But she drove me down there without a moment's delay. Conscience and Sin Three years later temptation struck again. I had stopped into a little temporary shop, a sort of trailer, that sold sundries. I saw a package of Kool-Aid. That looked pretty good. It was only five cents. I stole it. That night I took the well-hid booty and ate the purple powder. The Kool-Aid powder, though colorful and promising pleasure, was very strong stuff. It was not meant to be eaten. I became immediately sick. I threw up, relieved. But I was tortured for months by my sin. Finally I went in to Catholic confession. I waited my turn then found myself in a dark room. I heard gentle murmuring coming from beyond a shuttered window as the priest spoke with someone else on the other side. Then the shutter slid open and a bit of light shown through some black, sheer cloth, and a voice said something formal to me, asking my name. He was very gentle. I felt I could tell him my sin of stealing the Kool-Aid, and finally did. He asked, "How much was the package of Kool-Aid?" I said, "Five cents." He prescribed that I say some specific repetitions of Catholic prayers. I was happy to have that solution, and I carried it out, unburdened finally by my sin. Unfortunately, as I grew and the secular world around me became more and more corrupted and disturbed, the question of sin became more confused in my mind. But such is the exquisite conscience and sensitivity of a child's mind, and such was the emptiness of the cupboards in the house where I grew up. When you try to practice self-honesty, you are really creating a relationship to God within, the Divine Watcher within. I remember our nuns doing lectures to us kids -- at very early ages -- about the inner conscience. It is that Divine Watcher within who rewards you or punishes you according to your honesty. The inner conscience is an aspect of inner God. When you work to keep the conscience clear, it is actually working to clear the path to God within. It is an aspect of God's compassion that even when we fail, break promises, or occasionally clutter the path, He is still reaching out to us past the clutter. He rewards his sons and daughters just by seeing them make efforts -- exactly like a human father. My Dad My father was Lithuanian and had grown up on the south side of Chicago. He joined the Marines underage when World War II broke out. Victor was like an only child. He had one brother but much older, and a persecutor in his life. One of the things the brother did was got my dad into fights. I guess my dad had shown himself, at some point very young, as a canny fighter. His brother would float rumors to neighborhood bullies: "Vick said he could lick you." The insulted bully would then go hunting for my father, still a young boy of four or five. For pride my father would have to fight, or take the jeers of his brother and the rest. A showdown would be arranged. His brother would actually take bets on the fight. Dad was literally forced into fighting by his brother. In old age my dad related the full story of this and I recorded it. Later he joined the Marine Corps at 17, fudging on his age to get in, just after the U.S. declared war on Germany and Japan. He became his platoon's sergeant. Along the way to that he was chosen as the fighter for his platoon in boxing matches against the best men of other platoons. Once in the ring he delivered a roundhouse punch to the other guy that was too much. He said he heard and felt the fellow's jaw break and it made him feel terrible. He decided: "I'm not doing this any more" and quit then and there. He was a good man and didn't ever want to be a fighter that way. Because he was good at it, and fast, he managed to retain a flawless, handsome face. Father was an affectionate man. He was a toucher. Dad would grab you if you came near him and give you a squeeze. He had big, beautiful and able hands. His hands looked like they could do anything. I wish I had inherited his big, beautiful hands but I partially got my mom's stubbier hands. They're O.K. I can play a fast guitar lick with them. But they are nothing like my dad's beautiful hands. I always notice the hands on a person, particularly on a woman. I feel I can sense a person's real character just by looking at hands. Full yet graceful hands on a woman somehow move me. It seems to represent virtue, good karma and servicefulness. He had pet names for his kids. Mine was "McGurt." One of his habits was to grab you, press his face to yours and make a "plaaatttt" sound against your cheek. It tickled and was only slightly annoying. We could feel its purpose, which was to transmit fatherly affection. He seemed to do this especially much to me. When I was very young he'd come home from work on the bus. As mother was fixing dinner, to get us out of her hair, she would sometimes say, "Why don't you go down and greet your dad at the bus stop." The three of us -- Mark, Vick, and I -- would be delighted to oblige. Sometimes we would hide behind some bushes at the nearby apartments so as to ambush him. As he'd step out the bus we'd burst upon him. On seeing us he'd let out a delighted "Ho Hoh!!" and we'd be on him. I still remember him stepping out of the bus in his black suit, so strong and agile. The bus seemed an odd place for him to be. It seemed like a captive tiger in a constrained, small world. The love of a son for his father is the most natural thing in the world. Seeing his pleasure at our ambush we'd dare our usual thing, which was to beset him. This involved all three tackling him around the feet and actually trying to bring him down. We had learned we couldn't actually do that. He was too big and strong. So there was no harm in trying and it was great fun. It amounted to dad plodding home, in dark suit and briefcase, with three laughing boys fastened around his feet like weights, while he endeavored to break us free with tickling. It occurs to me now how the passengers of that bus must have several times witnessed this scene and smiled. He was always proud of his little sons. He never expressed irritation at our affectionate boyish attacks. After all, he was unconquerable. We felt we could throw all of our best shots at him, throw all of our boyish energies at him, yet he was unfazed. Wrestling and rough housing with my brothers was also a part of my boyhood, one that I still miss sometimes to this day. Dad was a very careful man. But when there was danger, he was fearless. Once as a Boy Scout I got bored with a campout near home. I hoofed it home around 3 a.m. The doors were always open at our house. The nearby church doors, too. It was early spring, winter thawing. As I crept across the dark living room floor I saw a white shape coming at me fast. "Dad?" I queried. It was him in his T-Shirt. I heard him gasp as he barely stopped in time the blow he was about to deliver. Angry at the near miss on his own son, he said, "I was gonna deck you!" That's what a man is like when protecting his family. He hears the slightest sound downstairs and "Boom!" he's on him, ready to deal with whatever it is. Once later with my own family we lived in a haunted house. On the 1st or 2nd night my wife woke me: "Honey, the lights are on downstairs and there is someone walking around."We had turned out the lights. Boom, I was there. A good fighter appreciates the element of surprise and knows sometimes it's the only chance. Plus, he wants to throw himself into it before giving himself the chance to think and possibly get fear. Nobody was there. A boy becomes, in many ways, like his dad. I myself never shrank from fights. And having a chip on my shoulder from the razzing I took from my brothers, I was quick to get into them. One thing I noticed is that when you fight a fellow, you usually end up very good friends. Why? Because you saw the truth about that fellow while fighting him. You go right to the brink with him. You hit him and intimidate him, yet this one doesn't back down and comes right at you. He hurts and you hurt. But you see him come at you again, on principle. He's losing, yet he still comes at you and doesn't quit. They're laughing at him, yet he rises again. So you see his valor his courage. You see what he's really made of. You see he has real class. Now you don't want to fight any more. You see he's as great as you. Really, you see his nobility in a way that few ever will see. So you get a special respect. I was a fighter, and I understand fighters. The guru I ended up choosing, Paramahansa Yogananda, was also a fighter, and he was fearless. Maybe that's part of the reason I was drawn to him. My guru was was the reincarnation of Arjuna, the ideal devotee and warrior, and also William the Conquerer. (Yogananda remembered his life as William the Conquerer.) It must be an overwhelming feeling of brotherhood and respect that fighting men get for each other, when they fight together. I can also understand how soldiers from two opposing sides also get a respect for each other, one with a human validity that transcends the politics of the situation. I can understand U.S. soldiers from the war getting a profound respect for the German soldiers they were fighting, thinking, "These were really men and they were really fighters." The famous Christmas time peace, where British and German soldiers shared a smoke with each other briefly before resuming shooting at each other, is something I can easily understand. And I can understand how, after fighting with your buddies and seeing their valor and nobility, then seeing them killed and maimed before you, it must enrage your soul and give you a heavy load for the rest of your life. Such was the case, I believe, with my dad. Dad fought in the brutal Pacific Theater and was on the island of Saipan and there were huge losses for the Marines on those islands. I have often thought that my past life probably involved WWII, in the European theater. This based on my early interests, dreams, and chills I'd get hearing about certain places and aspects of the war. Also because of the father I chose. I assume I was in the European Theater, on either the British or German side, and airplanes were involved. Probably not by flying them, but me jumping out of them. I've never had the slightest interest in flying in airplanes. My father did, making sophisticated flyable motorized planes by hand as a boy, then getting a pilot's license in later life. But I loved the idea of jumping off high things when I was young. I had a strange faith in it, sometimes deliberately precipitating long falls from swingsets or trees with great delight. I'd hit, and it would hurt, but I'd do it again later. I seemed to always want to jump off of things, with some sense "I can surely fly!" I loved hanging off of high tree limbs. One rather high one broke, and I am lucky I was rightside up rather than hanging upside down at the time, or I might not be here to write this. I also loved clambering up and over high walls and fences. No neighbor's yard was ever safe from me. I did love drawing warplanes by age five or six, and I was very good at drawing. Hearing about wartime France and Germany I could feel what it was like there. From childhood I had a recurring dream where I'm in a shot-up city, a battleground town in Europe, and I am hiding in a the ruin of a building and out of bullets. I have an obsession to find more ammo, or scrounge for another gun, even that of a dead man. The enemy, an ominous presence or thought, is always somewhere nearby, approaching, and I'm hiding, mostly separated from others. The gun and the thought of the gun was the one comfort. 'If I can just find more bullets, things will be fine.' I never had such an event occur in my real life, or saw it in films. It was probably a scene from a past life, possibly the last scene. But I get emotional hearing about the men of the R.A.F., or the paratroopers who dropped into France and Germany. Once I met a man who was a real paratrooper into France in that war. I wanted him to tell me about it. But he wouldn't. I feel strangely comforted and charmed by the sound of women speaking in German. Till about age 12 my favorite play with other boys was to "play war." Basically, if you could come up with some passable guns, it involved hiding out and stalking each other, and I guess who ever could make the most realistic machine gun sound with his mouth would think he'd got the other guy. We never really had any clear rules. But it was delightful crouching in hiding, in the middle of a war, with your gun and no soul in the world knowing your mysterious location. So near to danger. So "on the edge" in life. Those moments deep in some neighbor's hedge, or in some shadowy overgrowth, keeping safe but ready to pounce from the silence, were some of the most exquisite of my life. Some years on we discovered that big dirt clods made realistic "grenades." You'd throw it and it would explode in bits that looked just like shrapnel. But some less gnarly boy chickened out and his parents declared it unsafe. The magic began to die. I think we were influenced a little by marketing and the television shows like "Combat," obviously marketed to the huge veteran demographic. On the other hand, some boys didn't seem much interested in this kind of thing. I don't know how bad the fighting that my Dad saw on Saipan. Those islands were places of great death and butchery for the Marines. I think the war certainly upset him, because he never wanted to talk about it. It seemed to exacerbate a beer drinking habit he'd gotten in the Lithuanian neighborhood of Chicago. After Saipan he was in occupied Japan after the Truman administration dropped the atomic bomb there. Life got more interesting and easy. I heard he had done a bit of work as a hack interpreter there. My impression was that he enjoyed Japan and gained a certain respect for the Japanese culture. He brought back tremendous souvenirs, including a kimono and two beautiful samurai swords that my brothers and I occasionally cut our fingers on checking if the blades were still sharp. Ouch. Once my dad told me about how the American men in Japan found the Japanese women who were easy pickings because many had lost their husbands, many were impoverished, and the Marines were a victorious army. He said that a little Japanese woman tried, in fact, to latch on to him. He said many men took advantage of the women. Then he let on to me -- and this was his purpose for the story -- that he did not succumb to that temptation. From such critical decisions throughout life character is built, and karma is piled up, whether good or bad. He told me several stories like this during his life, designed to convey the proper moral direction in life. Once he said that he remembered the exactly circumstances of each of the conceptions of his six children. He said, "I remember them all because it was not some random, casual thing." He was conveying that he took sex seriously and did not abuse it. Then he said, "You were conceived when your mother and I were having a little campout, in a tent, in our back yard." Dad had a big picture book we called "The war book." It was blue. There were many amazing photos of the war in the Pacific and I used to love looking at it. It shows a group of marines surveying the nuclear ruins of Nagasaki from the deck of a ship. You can pick out my dad in a crowd of men on deck just from the back of his head and upper body, easily identifiable by his son, especially since dad kept wearing the same crew cut after the war. He worried occasionally in later years about possible affects from the radiation. He had that Virgo trait of little worries over health. It was never an issue affecting anything. Just something I register about him now in retrospect. It was a sign of his attitude about the war that he never once showed us the book himself or spoke about it. It was something we just regularly pilfered from his library. He also never pointed out to us that he was in one of its pictures. We discovered it ourselves. My father was voted by his men as 'best marine' of his platoon after the war. I don't know the actually designation, but it relied on certain technical qualifications (such as marksmanship) and the will of the men, who voted. It gave him an option to become a kind of elite, do-nothing sea-going marine wearing a very handsome dark blue uniform and white gloves. But he turned it down, he said, because "I couldn't leave my buddies."I think he saw some of the gruesome scenes of war, and probably the killing of some buddies. So he never talked about the war itself. My older brothers had pulled something out of him before I came along. So sometimes I'd find myself in a chorus saying, "Tell us a war story." But he'd get a irritated and we stopped asking for this. But he could tell other stories, and sometimes did, around the fireplace. He was very good at this and could be sometimes pressed into it. He seemed happiest when a family time was unfolding with his boys. Mind you, my mother seldom praised my father, and never spoke of any of these things. These are simply the observations of a son. Around the house he always wore a white T-Shirt and shorts. He kept his hair in a crew cut. But a rather long crew cut. Chestnut brown and thick, it could grow pretty full yet remain a crew cut, still standing up straight. I think it was the hipster in him, possibly, that enjoyed sporting that longer crew cut. He was particular about hair and never let it go. He expected us to be the same way. He taught us how to comb it, and to put a part in it. On the side, not the middle. The discipline of the hair is actually a profound symbol of the discipline and cultivation of the sexual energy, the animal energy. All clothes and ways of dress contain symbolism and transmit values. Cultures that lose moral restraints go for big hair and finally wild hair. Cultures that restrain and cultivate the creative energy restrain and cultivate the hair. When his sons started wanting to grow their hair long, influenced by the '60's media, it bothered my father greatly and there were great battles over it. I know now that he saw it has a collapse of culture and tradition, and a fall from basic discipline. He was actually right. But we had psychological reasons, in our context, for wanting our hair long. While stationed in occupied Japan father painted tremendous paintings of local scenes, including an exquisitely done portrait of a red-headed woman in a patterned scarf. It had Norman Rockwell quality. (A painter I admired.) I don't exaggerate. I was a pretty good artist myself and was more-or-less flabbergasted that my father, who did not grow up aspiring to art, could have painted those paintings, then never pursued art again or talked about it. But there was his signature, and there was no controversy about it. It seemed he could do anything except music. But he didn't think much of any of this. As a teen he had once worked in a machine shop, a tool-and-die factory. The best old machinist, on retiring, gave him his own box of tools because Dad was so gifted with machines. I saw the box one day and asked, "Where'd you get that." He didn't tell me the "I was so good with machines" part. I just figured it out. He was. A master craftsman only gives you his tools when he sees that in you. Dad was Virgo-city. He loved figuring out how things worked, fixing them, and making them work better. One of his favorite lines -- and it's really a classic Virgo line -- was "We have things down to a system now." That's what Virgo always wants to do. Improve conditions by systematizing everything. It's from his instinct to better serve. In the Marines he was trained as an aerial mapmaker. Now that's Virgoville. You can't be making maps for military operations and make many mistakes. I think it's how he learned surveying, and learned to love flying. In peacetime with his family he had a surveying scope and would survey our land, and land he once considered buying. His head was full of so many things I didn't understand. Once while working on improving an electric engine he said to me, "I wish I could take everything that's in here" (gesturing over his head) "and put it in there" (placing his hand over my head). That's how fathers feel. I learned later in life, through mystic knowledge, that this is exactly what fathers do, without fail, simply by thinking of their children. He loved tools. He had a workshop full of them and hated it when we misplaced one or abused one, which four active boys were wont to do quite regularly. He made impressive architectural drawings in the course of planning his do-it-yourself remodels, and I think what he really wanted to be was an architect. He was a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. He was always reading something (one of the ways he neglected his kids, too). Father was also a great dresser with a keen sense of style. This came from his Libra rising. My brothers and I might come up to him dressed in new suits for church, and he'd pull and pinch and move things around like a tailor getting us 'just so.' He would point out how a quality fabric had a nice "hang" to it while a cheaper fabric didn't. He had an amazing long, dark blue cashmere coat that I found in the attic years after the divorce. It was of such quality that it had to have cost a lot of money. I wore it on one of my runaway trips, which had evolved later into a saddhu-like quest for truth, when I left during one of Iowa's worst winters. It was good insulation. I'm sad to say I abandoned it, well-worn, deep in Texas. On another of my runaway trips, his standard issue wool Marine Corps blanket, which was too short to cover yourself without curling up, was all that kept me alive at night. I'm happy to say I gave that to a wandering fellow, near lake Flathead in Montana where I was sleeping in the woods with other cherry pickers. He had less that me for warmth. Later in life dad became a Little League baseball coach. It seemed that those boys became like his missing "buddies" of the platoon. He was very devoted to teaching the boys how to grow in their game, play fairly, and try to win. I wish he had devoted even 5 percent of that attention on me. Once I was on one of his teams. But he seemed to make a particular effort to ignore me, probably to spare himself any accusations of favoring a son. He never threw ball with me or developed my athletic side. My little brother Joe got that attention. Maybe he just sensed I was the philosopher type, or an arty type. But I was game for it, had he tried. Sons are nurtured just by having their fathers direct attention to them doing anything. But his coaching was clearly an altruistic work and he was a beloved coach by many of the families because he put the boys first, and played fair. He would get emotional about conflicts with other coaches he deemed less ethical. Once he quit an insurance position over an ethical matter, standing up for an associate he felt was being wronged. He had been offered, and refused, to go into the more lucrative side of insurance -- sales -- because he said, "I can't fluff things up and sell people things that they might not really need." Predictably, he wasn't the best moneymaker and he was a terrible cheapskate. He hated to buy anything new, and he'd build whole additions to houses from parts he'd scrounged and salvaged. He was always salvaging things, then creating beauty and order from them. Yet he would sometimes splurge bizarrely on himself on some elegant fancy, like the day he drove home in a long Cadillac car. Or a Pontiac convertible with leather. He had a lot of pride and liked status symbols. That was one thing that suited my mother well and dad gave her a lifelong addiction to big, quiet, air-conditioned, stereophonic Cadillac car interiors. Mom used to say dad was "talented," and that he was "handsome," and a "a good man." But they were incompatible. There seemed to be things about him she disliked. I was never sure what. I actually never heard him criticize her and I never heard them fight. I do remember how they murmured to each other in the bed at night, talking about family things. She'd refer to him being "sarcastic." But sarcasm was actually her forte, not his. I can honestly say I never once even heard my father gossip about another, much less make fun of anybody. He hated what was on the T.V. He detested shows like "Laugh In" and would say, "What a bunch of fakes" etc. Seeing a long-haired rock group he'd say, "Look at those bums." He'd say that for his sons' hearing, to instruct them in values. But when it came to personal relations, and real people, he had high ethics. Those who were his enemies or antagonizers, he'd be silent about them. He and my mother were in various battles and tensions with the Jewish neighbors next door for years, yet I never heard a word about it. I also never heard the word "Jew," not even knowing myself that they were Jewish until I reached the age of fifty. Those of other races, he'd watch them from a distance. If engaging with them, he was friendly and respectful, but just cordial. He wasn't a glad hander like mom. Everything about him was honest. Possibly my father criticized my mother sometimes in private. Once I asked my dad near the end of his life, "Why did you and mother divorce?" and he said, "I don't know." Well, I know. They were incompatible. And the world was changing too fast. And he had a little drinking addiction that got bigger as the world spun out of control and their marriage started to become troubled. The sixties were a crazy time. Everything was changing radically and it bewildered my dad. And he had wanted an old world woman who valued hearth, home and family. She was not that. My mom was not that woman. Later I became an astrologer and found out that my Father was Libra rising, Virgo sun, with Pluto in the First House. The later item gives one a strong quality of Scorpio, including intuition, fearlessness, and experience dealing with power and with war. My father was always observing and quietly taking things in. He would sit for long hours on his haunches outdoors, surveying some recent work he had done, making plans for the work. He was always building something or improving the house or property. He took on major undertakings. He would be out there as night fell, usually with a beer and a cigarrete. You could see the light from his Winston from the distance. And if not on the outs with him, it was fun to sit and chat with him. He would be in a relaxed and pleasant mood at that time, and seemed to enjoy the companionship and conversation of his children. I found that dad often know many things, deep things, about people in the neighborhood. He would know the whole story of some legal matter concerning the land, or what was going on among several families. Later these things would pop out, years later, and I wondered how he knew these things because he didn't visit anybody and was not a gossip. His profession was insurance adjuster. He would go to the site of disasters and determine "what really happened." So he had this penetrating mind, related to the Pluto-is-First. Another thing he seemed to love was predicting the dates of the births of his children, and the sexes. He seemed to take pride in some kind of power of cognition, and was apparently accurate most of the time. I noticed he sometimes made such predictions regarding other familys' pregnancies if they were friends of the family. Much later I learned he had dabbled briefly in astrology. But he was basically a very practical, technically-minded Virgo. He always had a workshop down in the basement full of many tools and materials and I spent happy hours down there learning -- all by my self through sheer interest -- how to make things. I loved Dad's quiet workshop. The smell of sawdust from his latest project. The smell of oil, and all his beautiful tools lined up neatly in their places on a fiberboard wall with hooks. My brother Mark when through a phase of making his own cool belts and leather bracelets using leather working tools, down in dad's shop. Finding my older brother there, I followed him like a pest and soon was haunting the workshop also. One time he showed me a bit of how it was done, happy to have some company while he worked. And I took up the leather-making craft briefly. I made some cool belts. When I was around four, back in our original bungalow house, I asked my dad. "Why did you give me this name?" I remember where I was, beside the refrigerator. He looked down with a quiet smile saying, "We looked up in a book of saints and there were no saints with that name yet." I remember just being vaguely perplexed. I didn't know at all what he meant. For a moment, I flashed on: "Oh, he thinks all my brothers are to be great, but not me." Then I fled from that thought, and mused, "Well, that was I guess a neat way to pick a name for your kid. Why not?""Neat" was a lingo I picked up by that age. I was always picking up "lingo" from my brothers and school mates. I didn't ask Dad for further explanation of most things. I left it at that and forgot about it until old age. Later on, my father figured strongly in some of my spiritual experiences, including a series of three "initiation" dreams I had when I discovered my guru in this life. One last thing I noticed most about my dad: People, especially women, seemed to respect him. I remember being a bit amazed by an almost reverential tone in the way mothers would would talk to, and about, my dad. Just the way they'd even say "Vick." The truth is, he was handsome. But he never flirted with the women. More than that, he had an integrity. It was that tone used by others that first hinted to me that my father was a very good man. Cultural Collapse It would be fair to say much of my mind, even starting young, has been taken up with observing and coping with the religious, cultural, and racial collapse that has beset the White European peoples. As I grew up, my neighborhood, city, and nation was indeed a White European place. It was also a predominantly Christian environment. Much of my teens involved a process of watching the assumptions and values of White European culture -- and especially it's moral and religious underpinnings -- come unraveled. I remember walking into bookstores and magazine stands and always coming out shocked and disturbed. It seemed every time I went in and scanned the magazines or books, there was a host of new disturbances. Some new taboo was being broken. Some new envelope was being pushed. Some new "revolution" fomented. Even as a boy of 13 I found it disturbing. It took me many years to understand that my own sin was creating this situation. Then it took many years more to perceive that, externally, these changes were being fomented by a particular race, the Jews, who had a centuries-long hatred for Christianity and Gentile culture. They lived among us unnoticed, blending in, while always feeling themselves profoundly different and inimical to us. They had created for themselves the advantage of psychological invisibility. It was, in fact, these very same Jews who were behind most of the disturbing taboo-breaking literature I was constantly seeing in the magazine stores, most of it published from out of New York City. I didn't understand that then, but I see it now. I would say that the predominant thought of my human mind, from the teens on up, has been grappling with this cultural and religious collapse, trying to find its true cause and conceive of valid and effective solutions for it. It boils down to the Gentile Christian peoples being told many lies. Lies about themselves and their own history. Lies about their ancestors, lies about their religions, and lies about the Jews. The lies told about the Jews are such as to make it psychologically difficult or impossible to even talk about them, giving them psychological invisibility in the culture so that they can act unhampered with full force. In my later years, about 40's on, I came to see how important it was for Gentiles to become aware of Jews, their motivations, their cultural agenda, their influence on the Gentile societies, and their power. This was a very difficult step for me. But as I saw the extent of their influence, I found I had no moral option to remain silent. Their terrible creation, Communism, must also be spotlighted and it's many new forms and guises thoroughly understood. In my teens, however, I did not even have a clear concept of right-and-wrong, moral understanding, much less spiritual understanding. This was because religions naturally become moribund over time. Thus I had to quest for that knowledge before I could understand society. My Mother My mother was a spirited, affectionate Pisces and daughter of a respected school principal who later became superintendent of schools for West Des Moines. She was, in some sense, a dignified sort of society belle with three sisters. This was because of her father. First she was a "daughter of the teacher," then "daughter of the principal," then "daughter of the Superintendent." It was like being in a political family, but one that was more respected. because my grandfather had a strictly wholesome role in the community, was the surrogate authority figure to everybody's sons, and was popular and even beloved. I have a vivid memory of being with Grandpa Amos driving down main street in West Des Moines. At that time, around 1961, not so many people were driving yet. The downtown area of West Des Moines was filled with people on the sidewalks, of all ages. How fortunate am I that I have even fleeting memories of what American towns felt like before White people foolishly turned their communities into car hells, instead of human towns, with the God-damned, hellish and ignorant thing called the automobile! The few days of my early childhood where I remember those pre-car hell times, are priceless to me. (Among the White Gentile peoples' many noble virtues, "delusion of technological progress" is one of their outstanding faults, and if you love your people, one has permission to also criticize them.) So there was Grandpa, being a big wheel he was driving a car. What was surprising was that nearly everyone on the street, it seemed to me, was smiling and waving at him. I forgot now about the bottle of Orange Crush he had given me. Old people were waving at him. Teenagers waved at him. Mothers with babies waved. Strong, handsome pre-Porn Age males waved at him. Everybody was waving at my grandpa. He was waving back at each one. As he did, he chuckled with real pleasure. It was true what my mother always said about him: "Your grandpa Amos loves People. So people love him." My mother had the same quality, in spades. Driving around town she'd always be seeing someone, waving, and laughing with delight. She loved her father very much, considered him great as others did, and seemed to identify more with him than with her mother, with whom she had a strained relationship. On her deathbed she was thinking of her father Amos much of the time and actually appeared to become him. She'd cry out, "Daddy!" I looked over one night, and there was Grandpa Amos lying on the bed, so identified was she with him in her final days that she was indistinguishable from him physically. I looked again and again, and couldn't distinguish her from grandpa. Mom was inclined much towards art: Drawing and painting. She went to the University of Iowa and was an art major. She was basically an unconscious woman driven by unconscious drives. Her chief trait was to be a social gadfly. She used to say to me "You are a people lover like your grandfather." Or, "Like me." She saw herself as an embodiment of her father Amos. It was basically true, but there was more to me than that. More like, I was interested in all people and can, with a humanitarian's eye, appreciate them all. I would say I can find something to like and praise about anybody I meet and I like to cheer any and all. I have the capacity to care about a stranger, which was something my dad lacked or didn't display. On the other hand, there are few people who I really like. I prefer my family first, even when they are painful. Then my church, then my community. And that's the way I think it's supposed to be. The world can't be your family. World is world. Your family is your family. "Family" is not some meaningless word that can be applied to anything. The importance of family was something my dad understood, and that knowledge later ripened in me, though I and my siblings were psychologically harmed my mom and dad's divorce. People want, and need, to be part of an intimate group first, then groups of decreasing intimacy with more abstract ties. (Town, nation.) The family is meant to naturally serve that purpose. Nobody loves you as much as your own family and is willing to sacrifice as much, and upon that fact rests the true well-being of children. And that's why all children need their own parents and people to get the best in life, and what life has destined for them naturally by karma. Those who want to attack the family and its natural legitimacy are power-trippers and meddlers who want to manage and control the world, weaken human beings, and make them needy and dependent on those who love them far less. In my view, my mother scattered herself too much among too many people. She always had a smile, a good word, and a laugh for literally everybody and for this reason she was very popular with those outside her family. She seemed to be obsessed with "being elsewhere" or "being with so-and-so" or talking to so-and-so. I have many memories of waiting with my brothers in the station wagon while she visited some friend, inside of some house, for "just a minute." It seem it would always be an eternity before she came out. I do not know. Maybe it was just 20 minutes but felt like an hour. Those were hellish times. I am sure some of the waits were a half hour. She just couldn't talk-talk enough. Likewise, at home she was often on the phone. Here she might talk to someone for a good hour, the whole time me and other siblings hanging around her with one need or another, but unable to get her attention. Those were hellish times, too. I realized this was partly a function of the bizarre ways that American towns and neighborhoods were set up, especially the suburban model, which basically isolates mothers at home, destroys the everyday social connections that obtained naturally before the unholy automobile proliferated to destroy the natural conditions of human towns and neighborhoods. So she was an absurdly isolated mother because of the unforeseen consequences always associated with western man's technological invention. From that point-of-view, I understand it. But her mind was more on the world than on her kids. Later, she had the whole world coming through our house daily and my home became a public place. There was no place to hide from strangers. If a room started to become comfortable to me and my brothers, and we started to hang out there and get to know each other, she'd soon break it up by re-arranging the furniture for some other purpose. Rarely did a room remain the same for more than a few months. Never once did she create any sort of "family room" or place intended for the children to feel at home. Family patterns did not develop under her single-mother reign. It was dad who had the family vision. But she was given all the power in the divorce. We all kept to our rooms after dad was gone. She liked it that way I think. At her funeral memorial, there was a huge houseful of people. They came all day. I didn't go. There was a great big box of letters written about her gushing with admiration. I didn't read them. I read one and the fatuous stupidity of her fans made me ill. All they knew is her outer persona. As a mother, she didn't have my heart because her mind was really not on her kids or her family. What she did have was a basic physical affection for her kids. This made her an emotional anchor in life-saver in my otherwise deprived childhood. She was basically available, even as a single mother, because she found a way to work out of the home. If I came to her near the state of emotional collapse because of some upset, or because of being out on the deserted island of my family life for too long, she was always a listening ear. She would listen with empathy, would not criticize or judge, and would be strongly comforting. At that times I would always explode into a fount of tears and felt much better afterward. This is something mothers are supposed to, at least, be. And she was that. She was also very lavish with praise. She would always focus on whatever positives she could think of about you, and was slow to criticize while my father was quick to criticize. She may not have known my mind that well, but what she did know, she praised it to the skies. If I ever asked for anything, really wanting it, she would always get it. Thus when I got interested in music and asked for a guitar, there it was. She would do anything to get me a thing that I really wanted. I did not ask for much, but when I did, it was there. Thus easily commenced a life of music for me. My father was terribly stingy. But mother was permissive, generous, and lenient. Dad was a hard place in many ways. He had rules and expectations, and was often stern about them. But she was a soft place of safety if you could get her. Though she was on the edge financially all the time, she made our poverty obscure and far away. She put a big grand piano in our home and let me doodle on it for years until I became a pretty good pianist by ear. It was a strange light pastel green with some beautiful hairline cracks in the paint just a bit here and there. Now play me any pop song or carol and I can analyze its structure in seconds, and be playing it's correct bass parts and chords, including some of the right inversions and fingerings. Being a piano player is a great way to create fun at parties. That's because my mother never complained about my years of hammering on the family grand. My brothers put up with it, too. One of the greatest things my mom did is to counsel me, starting young, to never smoke, never drink, and never do drugs. She emphasized all three to me. I held to that except for much later, in my late forties, I got the notion to smoke a pipe and occasionally do that. I think it was because the smell of the tobacco makes me feel more connected to my dad. One of my favorite memories is the smell of Saturday and Sunday mornings when I could come out and find my dad relaxing at the kitchen table. My mom would be in the kitchen fixing things. The smell was that of bacon, eggs, sausages, and coffee mixed with the morning newspaper, and most pleasant of all, the first sweet puff from his Winston. My mother hated dad's smoking, I later realized, and considered it low class. But for me it was just part of the smell of my dad. Then there was the music. It was always on during those mornings and nights. They both loved the radio on KRNT and KSO. And the music that flowed from that little radio from 1957 to 1962 was the greatest magic of my life. My Brother and Sisters The oldest was tall and brown-haired Mark. I admired him him greatly. To me he was Mr. Cool, the best at everything. He was the best looking (I always considered myself the unfortunate one in looks), the most popular, the most skilled. In his teens he was the manager of a teen dance club in my town that was the "hippest" thing going. As a young teen I went and lurked around my brother's operation, called "The Nowhere," watching bands and watching girls, and trying to stay out of his way because he treated me like a nuisance as big brothers often treat their little brothers, especially in places where he wanted to be as "cool" as possible. Little brothers have a way of spoiling your "cool," because they are always way less cool. This is natural. Just as with my father, I sensed that many people admired Mark, and I was so proud of him. I also sensed in him, retroactively, a basic insecurity. I realized later that he was never so confident of his "coolness," but was just putting himself out there as best he could. But he was once the student council president of my prestigious high school, Roosevelt High, and I was impressed to see the "campaign posters" of him featuring a hand-painted portrait of himself, done by his girlfriend. He was a flashy dresser, always having the latest thing for men, even working at THE cutting edge clothing store downtown, where you could get the best duds. In the ferment of the 1960's, he was what could be called an "aesthetic hippie" type. They cared about good music, art, and elegance more than politics. I became the same sort. He did develop a bohemian political world view, where I tended to retain a conservative one. He liked weed and wine. I was a teetotaler. One of the best things about my older brothers was ransacking their music collections. His final interests were architecture, design, crafts, and family life. He married a wonderful woman and had five children. I remember him successfully making a beautiful wardrobe, for pay. He had a job for years creating accurate architectural models for architectural firms to use as project displays. I was amazed to see him, in later life, sitting there and sewing himself a white shirt by hand. In later life he took to letting his yard grow wild and became a beekeeper, trying to save the bees in their hour of need, and discomfiting the neighbors with his wilds. My brother Mark is an amazing guy! Though I deeply admired my oldest brother, he was hard on me in my youth and considered me a pest. He mostly had sharp words for me and not words of encouragement or affirmation. Later, at the death of my mother, we had a talk about that and he softened suddenly, seeming to register everything and adjust his ways. From that time on, we had many excellent and sometimes uproarious conversations. All his children, my nephews, were intelligent and creative like the rest of us. The next brother down, the blond Victor, was also a very strong personality. He was a strong intellect, an acerbic wit, a scholar of sorts, and later a bohemian type and epicure who was the city's music maven. He had radio shows where he played selections of jazz, or any genre, with intelligent commentary. He always knew a little bit about everything. When young, he seemed to be loaded with historical knowledge of Europe and the wars. He loved to play with hordes of small plastic army soldiers and reenact history battles. He was highly verbal and was a tease. In any conversation he would find some way to give you a little mockery, a little jab. He loved sarcasm. All of my family seemed to be experts in sarcasm, and this apparently came from my mother because I never remember a sarcastic word from my father. Later I noticed that all my mother's sisters, and they were a group of four women, were even more sarcastic than us boys and I realized there was the mother lode from our art had flowed. I have to assume that the original fount was my grandmother on mother's side. Possibly because of these aunts and my own mother, to this day I appreciate a woman who has the capacity for cynicsm and clever mockery when directed at those who deserve it. Maybe it's a fault of mine, but a female with a rapier wit can get a guilty laugh out of me, and an uproarious one. I could enjoy the conversation of such a female for hours, whereas others might be put off by it, as long as she herself has some class and some morals. In the movie "Pride and Prejudice" featuring Colin Firth, the rich man Bingham has one such sister, a dark-haired and elegant cynic. Though the character was not that good-looking, and could be described as negative and conspiring, she was one of my favorite persons in the tableau because she was just like my aunts. But this trait trait of cynicism and sarcasm in Victor -- the sharpest wit of my brothers -- made him prickly, hard to talk to, and hard to stay close to. In later years it was difficult to get straight, sincere word out of him. He continued his career in radio and became a noted radio interviewer of authors, and was known for being the best informed interviewer or the author circuit, having usually actually read his guests' books. I always sensed in him a tender heart, and a lot of emotions. But with the later divorce of my parents, all of us became very distant, and he perhaps more than the others. I was next in the line. Then there was Joe: Witty, funny, exceedingly handsome, a ladies' man, a sporting fellow, one of the guys. He enjoyed baseball, then basketball, then hockey, then hunting, then golf, and even archery. He seemed to do it all. Joe was the most lovable of the group, with emotions closest to the surface. But again, I became distant from all my brothers partly through my solitary nature, and partly through the divorce and the way it was handled (or not handled). Under Joe was Kathy, the first girl. I felt close to her in childhood and fond of her has the first girl. We ended up increasingly distant with the divorce. She became a very wholesome, noble-minded New England gardener, wife, mother, and Buddhist and will always be a dear sister to me who I am proud of. She has a wise, sensible, and compassionate heart. Finally came Patty, who was basically raised as an only child though she was closer to Joe and Cathy. By the time she was "on the radar" as a personality, I was distant from the home and family, and was never close to Patty. She became very handy with carpentry, cars, and practical things (a lot like her father) and I have always had a bemused pride and admiration for her because of her abilities. She also has a great wit and sparkling sense of humor (when she's not mad or hurt). She had all of my aunts' trenchant wit and ability to analyze people, and then some. Patty is a dear who I wish I had been closer to and more supportive of, growing up. Basically, the divorce was a kind of explosion and the six strong personalities in our family went into different orbits, far apart from one another. There was great sadness in the story of my family of origin. All of us were intelligent and creative personalities, and we all had a distinctive kind of family quality to our minds and manner of speaking. When I am with my brothers I am always highly entertained and delighted with their wit and way of viewing things. It feels like "me" and I am very at home with it, except when they are being overly negative or putting in knives. The same is true with Patty, she has that family mind that is uniquely ours, and is the most like my mother in terms of sparkle and deft conversation. The Isolation of the "Middle Child," A Mother Present but Not Present As the third I was basically a middle child and had the middle-child experience. That is, I was basically missed, or unnoticed compared to my older brothers and my younger sisters. At least it felt that way. This often creates a child who is in large measure unknown to his family as there is not enough attention to go around. I was aware of it by the age of four, with a strong feeling of being neglected. It also, I believe, creates a strong observer. You tend to back away from the complexities and conflicts of the family, observe, and learn. You don't get listened to a lot, so you become strong at listening. Both of these qualities -- observing and listening -- ended up being at the basis for my strong career as an astrologer that came later. My mother's mind was always on housework. She was a neat freak. You couldn't get comfortable or hide a mug of tea anywhere. It seemed she was always washing dishes or cleaning the floor. I would get to wondering, "If I disappeared, I am not sure anybody would miss me." To test this theory, and also to punish my mother who I sensed had her mind on many other things besides me, I ran away from home at least five times, starting at the age of four. I remember walking out of the house on a winter's day to undertake this. I had seen pictures of hobos and "runaways" having a stick with a cloth sack hanging off the end, a handkerchief stuffed with their belongings, and hoisted over their back. This looked like the way it was done, so I tried to cook that up. It seemed like too much trouble and thought, so I abandoned that and just walked out the door. I ended up crouching beside a neighbor's garage, in a place just outside our yard, and waiting, hoping, that my mother would notice I was not in the house on this cold wintery day. I waited for her to miss me. It seem that hours were wearing on, and as they did, my heart sank lower and lower. Soon I was very cold, and night had begun to fall. I had positioned myself by this garage because it was both outside of our property (I never left our property at these hours and I was trying to make a statement) and it was in view of the window where my mother washed the dishes and could look out. I could actually see her face there. I was hoping she would notice me there and at least get curious about why I was crouching in the snow alone by that garage, on such a cold winter, for so long, and with night now falling. She never looked out at me. She never saw me. I never heard her call out the door. I could have easily heard it. As I got colder and the night got darker, my concept of running away from home got more and more confused. I really didn't want to run away from home or my mom. I just wanted her to know that I existed and to care about it in some way. A little bit would have gone a long way. Look at me. "What have we here? What are you thinking right now?" Right now I was just doing an experiment to see if my hunch was correct or if I was just imagining that she never had her mind no me. The experiment wasn't going well. I didn't even have proper mittens. That was probably one of the saddest moments of my life, there at four in the snow by that garage as the night settled and the bright snow went gray. Finally.nature and the weakness of a four-year-old boy worked their natural arithmetic and I came into the warm house, beaten and disappointed. It was warmly warm but there was no joy in entering. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it was just a vagary of fate. Maybe there was steam on the window and she couldn't actually see me though I could see her and I was just a dark shape stooping in snow against a white painted garage. Maybe she just assumed I was on my latest trip to the planet Mercury with Sage Rastus the Kid Doctor. I had one last hope that she would express some relief or dismay when she saw me again, like "Where have you been??? I have been so worried about you!!? But no cigar. Maybe it was just the way she was that day. I put thoughts in my mind that might enable me to go on living, and tried to forget about it. I vaguely recall she might have said, "Where have you been?" but not overly interested or concerned, just slightly annoyed. Or possibly she did not say a thing and never even noticed. That is probably what actually happened because I seem to have blocked that out. I had many other experiences like that with my mother, where I got to thinking, "Is she even aware that I am here?" And I repeated the same actions which became bolder and more capable over the years, each time going further. Finally in one instance I left during the hardest Iowa winter in 40 years, and ended up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In later years, when I was a parent, I realized that my mother was aware of me in her own way, and did have part of her mind on me. Later I saw that she would write about me often in her diary, starting young, noting what was going on with me and making observations. I realized that part of her approach was to simply give me a long leash and allow me a lot of freedom. Both of my parents were creative people. Later with my own children I found that I was happy and contented with a child as long as she was at least creatively engaged. I always was. I was always working on one thing or another -- digging for fossils, building a plane model, learning guitar chords. I think it was her habit to be satisfied and leave me alone as long as I was creatively engaged. I think she was aware of me most of the time; she just didn't convey that to me. So I grew up feeling neglected and it was painful. I think this is stronger for the middle child. Parents can give you, usually, only just a bit more than they themselves have been given. And my mother got little attention from her own mother, and likely improved on that with me. One thing she was very good at was praise, acceptance, and positive words. Once she would decide to put her mind or you for a moment, she tried to make up for her long neglect with a surfeit of positive words. It was a lifesaver. More about that later. But after the pain of it, the middle child becomes his own person. With benign neglect comes freedom, freedom to explore, learn, become anything you can dream of. With lack of attention there is also lack of demands. This may make the child immature since fewer demands and responsibilities are placed on him. But he becomes a unique and intrepid individual unafraid to go his own way, even unsupported. This was me. So as a middle child I had much freedom. Then even more when my mother became a single mother with sole custody at the age of 13. I was basically unsupervised. At an early stage this freedom saw me exploring music, musical performing, then finally religions. I cultivated musical ambitions long. But at one point other karmas intervened and I abandoned all that in favor of a spiritual search. I became deeply curious about ultimate questions, what is true, and especially which religion is true, if any, or the truest. Though I grew up Catholic and went to a Catholic school for eight years, the truth of that religion was never really presented cogently or convincingly by the nuns or priests. They seemed to be running on automatic and possibly didn't even conceive of the kinds of questions that could arise in a young man's mind in the roiling 1960's. The big ones were about sex. And it was a sign of the still relatively uncorrupted early '60's that people still had Sex listed as a Big Question. They were a more intelligent people, because it is. Music Besides my own inner childhood mind, music was the only transcendental thing, the only real magic in my life till the age of six. My father always had the radio on. I was spiritually fed by the songs I heard. The languid voice of the woman who sang "We'll Sing in the Sunshine" was like a distant aunt or supplementary mother figure to me. This wandering song entered my heart so that I could look to the west as it played and visualize far away places, woods, and wandering people. Then there was "King of the Road." Later I ended up writing a few "wandering" songs. When I listen to some of my own songs, I hear strains and nuances of those late 50's and early 60's "wandering" songs. There were a lot of happy songs featuring strong male choruses interplayed with female choruses. I realized years later that my dad's generation loved this music because it hearkened to life with the men in the war, how the men would sing marching songs together in strong male voices. The women of America, during the war, were very attuned to their men and supportive. Their voices, in these choruses, evoked their support, and the natural ideals both held for marriage and conjugal happiness. Basically it was the sound of moms and dads happily singing to each other, and great spiritual food for youngsters. I saw a movie where the actor Tom Hanks was playing a manager to an early 60's band. He had himself penned a song that went "I love you lots and lots and lots." When I heard it, I realized that Hanks had grown up with the same kind of music. The song is a worthy attempt to recreate the choral effect, the male-female principle, and the basic innocence of these songs that my mom and dad so loved. One song that really fanned my imagination was "Downtown" by Petula Clark. We lived on a quiet dead-end street and there was no traffic. But sometimes my mother would pass through more urban areas of Des Moines in the car. I could see and feel in that song the excitement of the city life, and it's lights, as she sang. I would relate it's sophisticated mood to the street scenes I had just seen with my mother and the world became magic. Her voice was so clean, and sincere, and I really registered female empathy as she sang, "And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you. Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to guide them along." The lyrics suggested that the world outside was full of beautiful and sophisticated young men and women who were also kind. In the 1950's and early '60's as I'd see wholesome young men hoofing past me on the way to college in the Drake University, pleasantly smiling at children in a natural, big-brotherly way I think it was true. At least truer than today. These singers and artists were really playing the role of lesser gods in this world, and had huge impact on the mind and soul, especially for the young. My mom and dad played such good music around the house, and later it gave me a great respect for melody. As I evolved later into a musician, I had a value that melody was the most important and powerful aspect of songwriting, and labored hard to pull from the skies an original melody. The music of my mom and dad, and later the Beatles, placed a very high bar before me. The Beatles, Rock Music, and the Sixties I remember the moment that I learned that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. We were still a very innocent nation then, and most can remember exactly where they were when they heard. I was in a new and exciting game of kickball in gym class, around the 2nd grade. I even remember just where I was standing on the gymn floor. An upper door flew open and in came Sister Michael Agnes, a nun I'd never had in class who was quite heavy and probably specialized with younger students. She bustled in as only heavy people can do, her white linen flying, and her face was red. Standing above us on a raised platform she cried, almost convulsively and, we suddenly saw, through tears: "Teachers! Children! President Kennedy has been shot! All classes are dismissed." It was the first and only time that happened. So I knew something big had happened. Other big moments occurred for the young in the 1960's. In the same way, I can recall the exact moment that I heard my first Beatles song. I can remember where I was standing, what the radio looked like, and very tone of the transmission. The moment is fixed in time. My little ears perked up and my consciousness, like an elevator, was suddenly drawn up to a joyful higher floor. The song -- I heard the DJ say -- had the impudent title of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." I was transfixed by the vocals, the way they soared and cut through the very air. I was jaw-droppingly awed by George Harrison's guitar, the way it jangled and talked to you, reached out and hit you on the head with brash young genius. What IS that? Who ARE they? How do they DO that? Nobody had ever sung like that, or played guitars like that. Change. Later another moment came: The first time The Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan show for all of America to finally see 'face-to-face.' I can remember that moment and place so well I can still smell the air and see my dad watching the set with us, skeptical. With dad there, it felt naughty to watch the Beatles. My heart was in my mouth the whole time fearing he would be disgusted and turn off the set over their long-haired look. I felt like nothing had ever been so important to me in the world, than to simply see them. I remember feeling that if he did that, something inside of me would Die. He let us watch. Because my father was a clever man and he could see that, even though their look and sound annoyed him, they were highly musical and had unmistakable talent. Basically, he was too fascinated himself. It probably also helped that they had the nice dark suits, ties and swashbuckling boots. I didn't know this at the time, but my father had been a bit of a clothes peacock himself earlier on. And they delivered. They released something in your soul. And what were they? Four creative young men in harmony. Full of life. Being what young men are supposed to be: phenomenons, hyper-new, bold and beautiful, manly and artful, having some kind of knowledge only the young know. There they were in their nice black tailored suits and white buttoned collars. It's hard to understand, now, how against the backdrop of the plain, conservative, regimented 1950's their slightly longer hair was beyond cheeky and had a talismanic power. Add to it some pointy boots with slightly elevated heels, and now there was a vague sense of menace. But look at their boyish enthusiasm and esprit-de-corps, plus music that was from God's own melody-arbor, and it amounted to a male spiritual phenomenon and cultural revolution. We young people actually did view them as some kind of demigods, and the feeling was overwhelming. Each new Beatles song that came out, in that period, placed unnamed longing into winters, made a springtime feel more spring, changed whole summers of days and nights, and made the future bigger and more alive. What I was actually hearing, was the sound of male energy, the sound of young men. It was the genius of the young male, along with his sexual energy like a mating call, distilled into music. A young man is full of energy, the creative energy. He does amazing things. He fights. He howls, and sings high. He creates. He tries to impress. In those lyrics, too, I got my first introduction to the idea of male-female attraction: "I want to hold your hand!" Why? a young boy asks. He seems to want to do this very badly. Later it would all be clear. But it's a mark of how innocent was the age that a song could reach such emotional construction simply around the lyric, "I want to hold you hand." May we have innocent ages like that once again. To boys and girls, you couldn't help but love the Beatles for putting so much emotion and drama into the innocent sentiment of holding a girl's hand. It was raw, fun, and beautifully innocent. Girls screamed over the Beatles and went hysterical. Young men, too, were deeply moved in their masculine hearts. It spoke to your manhood and your own creative nature. Many years later I realized why women screamed. First, there was the backdrop of the 1950's which were very conservative, uniform, and self-controlled. Our parents generation had survived the war and come out on top by being disciplined, regimented, uniformly conformist, and following orders. For them, that's where safety and prosperity had indeed come from. The Beatles represented a break from order and unleashed -- albeit in ignorant ways -- the growing sexual potential of the "baby boom" generation as they matured. Basically the Beatles, and much that came later, stirred up the sexual potential of young men and women and broke the cultural boredom that was setting in, for young people starting to think, late in the 1950's. But women screamed over the Beatles because they were intrepid young men in harmony. The "in harmony" part is very important. They were doing something new, different, and creative together, and they were doing something brave. (Breaking social conventions.) These are the things young men are supposed to do. So though my father would see the hair and say, "They look like girls," they were in fact acting precisely like men. And they were in harmony, and creating. What does this say to the female bones? They see "young men in harmony" and their bones say: -- We will have a successful hunt -- We will get through the winter -- We will repel the enemy -- We can procreate. Thus they screamed, in feminine joy. Young White European men, if you want your beautiful White European women to come after you that way, and worship you as Gods, and become your wives: Be in harmony with each other. That's what makes you strong, and makes you strong for them. They need this. And only your moral regeneration will put you back in harmony with other men of your kind. One of the greatest faults of the great White race is the tendency of its men to fight amongst each other, and the Jews know this and exploit it, and it only weakens you for your women. Start by being slow to criticize each other and using less demeaning, crude, and insulting language. Then go even further in brotherhood and friendship. Only moral regeneration will make all this clear. Later at the age of 13 I developed a strong aspiration to become a musician, songwriter, and musical performer like the Beatles and so many of the other groups that had come before and after them. I developed an aspiration to be a songwriter that was so heavy I thought I would break in two if I could not write a Great Melody right there and then at 13. I started playing the guitar, dabbling on my mother's piano. Later at 16 I formed a rock group. And I started trying to write melodies, placing a huge expectation on myself. One melody did float out of me at 13, as if by magic, which later became a song. When a man is in his higher nature, he gets more than adequate thrills and satisfaction from things like music, good literature, poetry, beautiful buildings, the happiness and purity of children, walks through field and wood, and moonlight on untouched snow. When he is in his lower nature and sinking into ignorance, he starts getting most of his thrills in the form of the sex thrill and its biological and spiritual self-destruction. Mrs. Christians Everyone has persons in their life who turn out to be important, though you may not register how important they are except with the passage of time. People you wish you could go back and give them something. Tell them how much they meant in your life, and that you love them. When I was around 8 my mother said she wanted to take me to meet a person, "Ruth Christians." I went. I met her. The memory is vague but I remember the house. It had a feeling of quiet and civilization about it. It was a "coolness" that is hard to describe. I believe I had been seen by Ruth, and she had asked me some things. It was sundown. I believe that one or more of my siblings was along. This would have created a kind of "overwhelm" state in the house, because Ruth was a solitary and stately woman. I say she was "stately." Well, she was, yet she was diminutive. She was a small, birdlike woman physically. But she dressed in an elegant, Old World manner. Her hair was often done up into a largish bun behind her. She always had some sort of jacket on, but a feminine, decorous jacket. She had a sober mien but would flash into the most delighted smile on the spot, and then her eyes would sparkle with delight. Ruth seemed to be from the more monied classes of the east, as transplanted to the midwest. There was a sense that she came from a higher culture. Not a venal one. Not a gratuitous one. She came from a culture that was both religious and austere. They had been a church people. Yet these people were elegant and refined. Katherine Hepburn. Ruth reminded me of that sort of woman, and the sort of eastern society Hepburn hailed from. She also played it in her movies. It was a kind of aristocracy but a moral, Christian rooted aristocracy. You could feel it in everything about her. The very way she moved shed grace. She never hurried. She never rushed. She moved through her house like an experienced maiden of the woods would move through a forest glade taking care not to upset or startle any creature. She gently glided. Nothing was ever to be done brusquely or crudely. If she handed anything to you, she handed it carefully. It might be wrapped. She'd make sure you grasped it in your hand. Soon after that mother said that Ruth Christians had sent me a game, called "Schnertz" I believe. It was a kind of card game. I found it touching that this very old woman would bother to send me the card game. The cards were of quality. The game, and her idea that I might sit and play it with comrades, suggested a world of civilized refinement. At some time later I was there again with my mother and Ruth said, "Julian, I want to give you this book, 'The Yearling.' I think you will like it. It's about a boy who finds a small deer..." I was somehow touched that this old woman I didn't know felt it was important to give a boy a great, thick book. There were evocative pictures in it. Seeing how important the book seemed, and how she wanted me to read it, I did. It was difficult reading because it was a bit over my level. But I got a sense from it. I could see through the years why she gave it to me, and what she was wanting to share. It was a book about the innocence of boyhood, the beauty and greatness of nature and God's creation, and the importance of family. The boy had a lot of quiet moments alone in Great Nature. This was what Ruth Christians valued, and this was what she wanted for me, and for me to value. Later mother said, "Ruth Christians will pay you to go mow her lawn." Mom did not often crack the whip to see me work, but she seemed avid about seeing me do this. I went to her house on my bike, about 7 blocks away. She greeted me with a very warm smile at her door. Thus commenced years of taking care of the yard and house for Ruth Christians, and later working in her at-home art ceramics business. She became my first spiritual friend and mentor. After I had worked a few hours I would get a call from her door. She'd say, "Julian, are you hungry? I have lunch for you." I had mowed some lawns by them but they never offered you lunch. But Ruth was from a civilized culture. I'd come in and she would have a beautiful table set with very healthful food, which was one of her little obsessions. We would eat, and she would make conversation. I was surprised that conversation was not random or hurried. It was according to protocols and gentle rules. I was not used to real conversation an the table. She would ask something. She'd listen to your response. Then she would comment, or ask another thing. And what was touching was that she would ask me things about myself. I was but nine or so. But she seemed to be inquiring into my mind. What I believed. How I viewed things. She was really interested. But there was one main thing Ruth always wanted to talk about with me, and that was God. She wanted to know what I thought about God. She gently probed, finding out how my faith was developing. She must have liked my answers, because we never had an unpleasant moment in those days. She would always tell me, "I've been reading this book and it says..." And we would talk about what the author was saying. She especially loved books and themes that spoke to faith, to cultivating the faith, and a genuine, felt, relationship with God. These were the books that moved her most, and I could see that she herself was a woman cultivating an active faith in God. I can see now that Ruth had a real, living, relationship with God. He was the thing always on her mind. The thing about Ruth was that she was pious, faithful, and pure. She had married late in life, to a man named Ward. She would mention him now and then. She always spoke to him with a palpable respect and wifely devotion. And yet they had been married only briefly and then he died. That was long ago and she never married again. I found her respectful tone for her departed husband amazing and strange. And as I grew, and continued to work for her in my teens, I came to feel by instinct that the two of them had never crossed the line into the carnal. She loved all the beautiful things, and the subtle things. Her house was filled with the most beautiful and tasteful ceramic art that used light for its effect. She had made it herself. She specialized in a kind of porcelain panel that looked like nothing much until you placed a light behind it. Then it became a wonderful picture full of variations of tone from light to gentle browns, as the light came through the thinner areas and less the thicker. The effect was very subtle and beautiful. You could get lost in the picture and taken out of this world. She had another kind of ceramic wall plaque that looked like nothing much without light. But a light shining down from above it would catch non-descript ridges, lumps, or depressions in just such a way that an amazing picture would emerge, created by light and shadow as it glanced over the amorphous ceramic features. So something that looked like nothing became, with light, an entrancingly beautiful picture of light and earth. She especially loved art featuring children, and Madonas with child. Everywhere she sought beauty, and she always related this beauty, in one way or another, to God. Ruth also had a large collection of books. I began to ask if I could borrow one now and then. I always returned them! Here I commenced my love of spiritual books. She had one with a faded red binding called "The Inner Splendor." It attracted me and I borrowed it. I still remember being in bed and reading one poem from it: I felt I didn't know what it was about. Yet it was one of the few poems I ever memorized. I wanted to know. And something in me told me already it was full of truth. Another was "There Is a River" about the "sleeping sage" Edgar Cayce. These books had a great influence on my mind and stirred my interest in religious and metaphysical knowledge. As I grew older I began to appreciate what a gem of a woman she was. I began to love our conversations down in her pottery studio. She always played the FM classical music station on the radio, adding to the sense of culture and history that already permeated her space. By 17 a conventional lonely buck I had developed the knack of visualizing what older women might have looked like when they were younger. I realized that Ruth was probably exactly the sort of woman, in her youth, that I would have swooned for. I thought of what an ideal conversation mate she would have been. What an elegant and proper wife. I realized she was probably pretty, as all women are in youth. She never asked me about my personal life. She didn't ever ask, "So, do you have a girl friend?" That was not proper discussion. She was too pure to even broach the possibility. Or, maybe she just didn't want to know. But I recall once I got the chance to say it. We were talking about compatibility of personalities, or some such. She might have averred to the fact that I might be married some day. I slipped it in meekly, "It's too bad for me that I was born so late." I remember her looking down at her work and continuing to brush the ceramic. She made no frown. She made no gasp. But I saw the reaction. In her deep womanly wisdom she gently let it pass. I learned about piety from Ruth, and about purity. And I learned about devotion. I learned it by conversation, but more by osmosis. The very air of her house had purity about it. The ferns that grew on the edges of her lawn had purity about them. The squirrels that came down from the tree for the food she'd leave them -- they seemed pure. Everything in her environs had a sanctity. I wish I could go back in time and be more serviceful and devoted to Ruth. To visit her in her old age, and tell her she'd been my first true spiritual teacher. She taught me about the reality of a felt, personal relationship with God, in her case through Christ who she spoke of much. She taught me about the ancient validity of a moral life, and how to live in age gently and beautifully. She also taught me about the nature of the higher classes, the true higher classes of people, rooted in Christianity, who have long existed in our European nations. The Fame Bug For some reason I dreamed of fame starting young. First it was the idea of being an actor. Then later, rock musicians seemed to be more culturally important and weighty, having a creative product, the power to preach, and present ideas in lyrics. I always felt there was something amiss about me for wanting to be famous. I was not sure if that was a normal desire. I was embarrassed about it. Once I chatted with a fellow at a coffee shop who had been a psychiatrist. He said that this desire was a normal part of the youthful mind and an expression of youthful potential and power. In any case, I felt secretly guilty about my desire for fame and would later analyze myself, thinking, "I must want fame because I never got much attention in the family. I was never considered important. So I got this unnatural desire to be important." This line of thinking emerged along with later philosophical and religious yearnings. Later this evolved into "bigger and better" ways to "be important." Along with a dawning religious search, came the thought, "Well, the really important people are the ones who truly help the world." So the complex of fame-and-importance-through-saving-the-world was born. I have looked at politicians and other personalities through this lens ever since: I take them to be people with this psychological problem, along with a misunderstanding that they can save the world through standing and gesticulating, etc. I evolved out of the fame bug. Later when I began to teach about the importance of celibacy in spiritual practices, I did put my name before the world. But in that case it was something I truly did not want to do. I was not happy to make myself known as a recovered sex addict or any such thing. I am a private person and do not like having things known about my personal life. And I was too educated and savvy by then to take the "fame-through-guruhood" bait, that so many fools were pursuing in the 70's onward. So I put myself out there, by this time, as service. I saw how dark and corrupt the world had become, and how morally confused young men had become. I saw that an evil porn age had befallen us, and no man was raising a message contrary to lust; throwing a lifeline to young men left to the pornographer dogs. I knew that a message about continence or celibacy would have little credibility or weight without a fellow signing his name, and fleshing out a real human being to go with the message. It was for that same reason that I later encouraged other men to speak personally at the celibacy website, to allow their pictures, etc. It gives more weight to the message. So finally in the end, I allowed the possibility of fame for the sake of service. I wrote a hasty little book, "Bliss of the Celibate," and put my name and picture there, and acquired the domain www.celibacy.org. I also began to create daily audio messages at the site, to give further personal credibility to the message. It worked. Men around the world were affected. Many began writing me. Taking up the quest for purity, some of them I invited to make audios as well, to add even more credibility to a message that was never heard with any vigor anywhere else. But I love privacy, anonymity, and obscurity most. Fame often comes unasked to high and low. All kinds of characters have fame thrust upon them for reasons great or silly. I have often felt powerfully protected and blessed to see that preserved in my life when it could have been so easily been taken away. Religion The foundation of religion comes in several layers. The first layer is human unhappiness. If we did not experience human unhappiness, there would be no need to think of religion, seek religion, or manifest religion. When we sleep we often feel sublimely happy. Thus in sleep we don't seek religion. If we were in a wakeful state of constantly new happiness we would have no occasion to seek religion in the waking state. This is because religion is happiness. Reversed, happiness is religion. Thus, those who are happy don't seek religion because they already have it. Yet every human being in the normal waking state encounters, finally, profound unhappiness. The recognition of life's unsatisfactory aspects is what engenders the quest for religious knowledge. All of the great religious founders spoke to this fact. Christ said, "You have the poor with you always," i.e. the world is inherently flawed and dualistic. He also said "Sufficient to the day is the evil there of," meaning every day of our lives has flaws and sorrows, plenty enough. The "First Noble Truth" of Buddha is simply, "Life is suffering." What a stark thing! Yet that's what he says. The beginning of religious wisdom, for the Buddha, was the recognition of the unsatisfactory and unhappy nature of life and world. The Yoga-Sutra, which is a profound, terse manual on how to return to God, has a similar saying: "To the wise, all is suffering, because of the reality of duality and the impressions we receive of the dualistic experience which can only engender more dualistic experiences." In the Yoga-Vasistha the prince Rama starts acting depressed. They call the sage Vasistha to analyze the problem and Rama laments to the sage, having realized the samsaric and pointless nature of material existence. Vasistha says, 'Ah, this is auspicious. Now this boy is ready to receive religious knowledge." So the beginning of religious knowledge, and religion, is in fact sorrow and frustration with this world. Religion is, in fact, an instinctively manifested program for regaining our lost happiness. I say it is instinctively manifested because everyone "manifests" outer religion and religious knowledge, based on his karmic conditioning and the depth of his soul cry in his unhappiness. The Divine Incarnation Then comes the next plank or foundation of religion, which is the being or person who comes along and shows, somehow, that we can be free of this sorrow and limitation. He often manifests miracles and freedom from ordinary laws, and at the better level, a joyful consciousness impervious to outer conditions. If there was not such a person, there would be no hope for most of mankind. But this person gives us faith that we can have some escape from the unhappiness of the natural world, or in the case of a happy life, from the uncertainty and fear of death. We may meet this person, or hear of him or her, or simply read about a figure from history who manifested some kind of freedom from life's sorrows and limitations. He usually passes on to others this same ability for freedom. It may show as miraculous feats by these others, or simply as an inner freedom that gives a happiness impervious to any outer conditions -- the better of the two. Religions forms around such persons. A great and mighty religion formed around the figure recorded as Jesus Christ and I was born into a family that had embraced, however awkwardly, his religion as the solution to life's sorrows. Through performing miracles Christ showed the simpler minded that there is a higher law and that we do not have to be bound by life's dualistic sorrows. The principle by which we could be free of sorrows and limitations came to be called grace. This person shows himself to be free of the limitations and laws by which we strike against sorrow, and proclaims that we can have similar freedom if we follow his prescribed path. The Path Understanding what, truly, is the nature of that founder's path is part of the difficulty and challenge in religious knowledge. In the world I entered, there was some confusion about it. Religion seemed to have provided the world, and my family, with much good. It seemed to have ordered life, created systems, laws and rules by which the European peoples had grown and prospered. It certainly created great edifices where one could step in and feel a sanctified space and time for thinking of God. Most European Christian churches are created in such a beautiful way that you can't be in them and not think about God. (May God bless and preserve our people.) That was, alone, enough fruit and substance to validate the beauty of Christianity. It created great music, great art, stable families, abundant children, and culture itself. But at the same time, my religion seemed to have many empty or confusing areas. I was never really sure what "heaven" really was, or where. But I was told that we would go either to heaven or hell upon death, depending upon how we were here. This seemed to be what "salvation" meant -- having the ticket away from hell and into heaven upon death. There was a list of "good actions" (with much missing from it) and a short list of "bad actions" (with much missing from it) to prevent the hell path upon death. But there was not much motivation here in the present world for pursuing the good actions. Only the hope of avoiding hellfire upon death. For most persons, if they had the slightest doubt about the scenario, there was not enough inducement to perform good actions and avoid sinful ones. The sinful ones seemed too fun. Basically, my religion, though old and elaborate, did not explain very much for a roiling young mind to get settled down. It did not tell me what to do with the developing sexual feelings I had starting in my teens. There was a sense that they were "dirty" and that there were sins attached to these feelings, but it was not explained why, or what to do about them. Later I started finding out that there were other religions, and even different varieties of Christianity. My mind wondered why there were other versions. Were some more right or less right? Different congregations seemed to have different attitudes about life. I began to doubt whether I had the "one true religion" because I had never really evaluated it against the others. Perhaps my religion failed to answer many question because it didn't have all the answers? This is how a young man thinks. In reality, Catholicism did have all necessary answers secreted in the spiritual practices of its saints. However, these were not being offered to me, and I was not ready for them anyway. One thing that hurt was that some of the most religious people around me seemed unhappy. Here I speak primarily of the nuns. It is my belief now that the best and most fitting religious teachers have joy on their faces when they teach religion, especially to little children. This was seldom seen in my Catholic school. The priests, too, seemed dry and dull as they delivered sermons. Rarely animated with joy or spiritual enthusiasm. There was not much affectionate love from either nuns or priests, ever for these little dear children they had in their custody every day. The head priest at my Church, Monsignor Walker, had a distant, cold demeanor. I believe that in eight years he never once laid eyes upon me or acknowledged my existence. He certainly never called me by name. Some of the young priests seemed slightly depressed or insecure (God bless poor Father Lindsay), or they bullied rather than impressed us with character and male brilliance (God bless poor father Terry). The clergy was not attracting the best of the men, which is what young men need to be around. It occurs to me now that many of these nuns were unhappy women. In many cases they were a very sad or ever terrifying thing for young children to be around. They had perhaps entered the convent because of disappointing or embittered lives. Now, their spiritual culture had failed to impart to them a compensating spirit-born bliss that might have made them a pleasure to be around despite it all. It's my belief now that the best religious "fathers" are men who really HAVE been fathers in real life. This would be the way of the Orthodox churches. They truly appreciate children and the value of a son. In like manner, the best female teachers -- especially for young ages -- are the women who have been mothers. They have a natural nurturing softness around which children thrive. The one thing my Catholic school did right was choosing the softer, more motherly nuns for the 1st and 2nd grades. Thank God in heaven for that. My first two nuns were young and basically warm towards children, reducing the trauma inherent in school for such young children. Simply her ability to smile sweetly now and then throughout the perversely long day away from mother helped keep our life force from completely ebbing away by 3 p.m. Yet in all this was a spiritual culture and my soul imbibed it. The austerity of some of the nuns was itself a kind of elixir that deepened my own sense of the seriousness of life, and perhaps even the inherent unhappiness of life. Why do you enter a convent, indeed? Because you give up on the idea of happiness from the conventional worldly life. So though I was not around women with little capacity to addict me to motherly softness, I was around women steeped in wisdom. The truth is, some of these nuns and priests were true God-seekers. And that made proximity to them a blessing whatever the emotional impact on a child. Sometimes their wisdom was harsh, but it was still wise. Sometimes they reserved their softness only as reward for your effort and firm character. I had been a natural artist and illustrator from childhood. I was always receiving praise for it, such that I had learned to hide my work from most people. I often fest bad feelings when being praised for my drawing, because I felt sorry for those who could not draw as well. I also feared their jealous feelings, which I could sometimes feel. It happened that in that time, at that age, to be able to draw well was considered a Big Thing. I didn't understand why this was so, but it was. People would gush at me. Girls would talk to me. Once in 4th Grade Sister Bernadette brought to me 5 drawings of bears. They were cartoonish, fun, pastel decorations of 5 bear heads. They were commercial decorations you would buy from the store. She wanted to use these to decorate her room for Christmas, but could only borrow them from another nun for a bit. She wanted them duplicated, and she wanted me to do it. She said, "Take these home and reproduce these for me." I was amazed at the request, that she assumed I could do it, because they were very well done drawings. But I was proud to be asked. I did it, and brought back my five versions. She was very pleased and posted them on the walls of the room. One of the children asked her, "Sister, who drew those bears on the wall?" She said, "I did." That was that. At the time, I thought, "Wow. Amazing. That seems unfair." But now in my age it's easy to see that the nun was practicing wisdom and protecting me. She knew that if she said "Julian did them" it would hurt me. It would have done two things: First, it would have made me cocky and superior feeling. I was just entering the age where I was looking for things to distinguish and elevate myself. The ego and competitive pride was stirring. I already had cocky enough tendencies. Second, it would have stirred jealousy in others and they would have taken it out by distancing themselves from me, and harassing me unaccountably. This nun saved me all that, though it seemed "unjust" and cruel at the time to deprive me of credit. She did a third wonderful thing, and that was she prevented me from taking a path to become an artist. I was so good at art this could have easily happened. But I was destined for different things, different pursuits, than making pretty pictures. If I had gotten much "play" out of that project, I would have done it again, and learned what it could get me in terms of prestige and later, money. I might have gone down that road. Instead I expanded into other directions. Behind the austerity of the nuns, there was much character-building wisdom. But not enough. They couldn't tell me what do do about Playboy magazine. They couldn't explain why our town was turning into 4-lanes full of strangers driving too fast in four-wheeled dangerous isolation units. Or why technology was taking over our world with no resistance. They couldn't explain why my mother and father were no longer speaking and now mother was talking to me on my morning paper route about divorcing dad. They couldn't explain why I was so drawn to long-haired rock and roll musicians and why I shouldn't be. They couldn't even explain to me why or why not I should smoke marijuana or take pills. Thank God I had a mother who explained that, because they certainly didn't help. They could not explain if it was wise or unwise to spend hours in front of a television set watching whatever the New York and L.A.-based media interests felt like cranking out. My religion was lacking much explanation and guidance. Not adequately warned about the nature of sin, especially the new and sophisticated forms of sin our culture was spawning, I began to burn up in it. I damaged myself long and hard in sin. Wandering The Guru Principle Being born a Christian, I was introduced to the guru principle, though nobody called it that. Christian conceptions of Christ, I found later on, can be seen as elaborations (or sometimes distractions from) the guru principle. In the guru principle, you make you guru your one-and-only. You see him as the representative of God for you. You meditate on your guru as God. This is very beneficial. The Catholics have a tradition of devotion, which the Hindus call bhakti yoga. When I was very young I saw holy cards depicting angels and saints. The saints were expressing the attitude of piety and devotion. As a child I understood it. I saw that attitude of reverence and devotion, depicted in the cards. The Catholics did not have a good lexicon for talking about this. Later, when I read about the tradition of bhakti-yoga, I understood that I was first exposed to bhakti-yoga in those Catholic holy cards as a child. I saw pictures of saints and pious Christians with their hands together, pointing upward, heads bowed down. In India this posture is called a mudra, a mudra expressing devotion for God or guru. As a child in Catholic life I also adopted this mudra when talking to God, not knowing what it was. That common Christian mudra puts you into an inner posture of devotion right away. How lucky I was to be born into a Catholic family, with it's tradition of saints, unconscious bhakti-yoga, and devotional mudras! A child is more pure and innocent. He has a great capacity for faith. Early in life I accepted that there was a God, and that He always heard your prayers. Somebody told me this. I don't know if it was a nun, or who. But when I heard it, I believed it, in faith. A child sitting in the devotional mudra, hands together, and praying to a God he believes in without question, is one of the fortunate ones on the planet. It is a very auspicious state! In Hindu terms, I was an unconscious bhakti-yogi from an early age. And every young Christian child, praying to God in faith, hands together, is that and more. It is very good for children to be around men and women of faith from an early age, and to be taught faith, and trust in God, from an early age. It sets them off right, on the deepest path. My prayers often didn't work. But it was the posture and attitude that was auspicious and later attracted blessings. I also made "promises to God," which I didn't keep. My first was at the age of seven on the first day of school. I saw a little girl walk into the other 2nd grade class down the hall. One look at her and I thought she was the most beautiful creature that could ever walk the earth. I thought of her all day, agitated by her great beauty. I had been told that if you made a promise to God, you could never break it. I later learned the girl's name was Martha, but on that day, I didn't know her name. That night I made a solemn "Promise to God" that "I would marry that girl!" Such is the mind of the young person as he approaches God. He asks for all sorts of things he doesn't need, or things that will be bad for him. Just like a wise and benign parent, God sorts things out and gives him what really benefits him, and ignores the silliness. I never married Martha, and it was probably for the best. That was just the first of many crushes and infatuations that torture a boy's soul during a lifetime. World Problems and "Saving The World" -- My views on race I grew up in the typical American middle class media-dominated life. My views were shaped by the messages received from television, movies, and school just as much as from my parents. In fact, my folks actually failed to talk about a great many things and to pass on their views. Possibly they themselves had uncertain views in flux. That has been one of the characteristics of our age. In the media message, whether television, movies, or schoolbooks, the sins or wrongs of Whites, especially with regard to blacks, were over-represented. The textbooks, and later television programming, made much of the story of slavery and made it clear there were brutal slave owners. The matter of black civil rights, and the "Jim Crow" era, and the behavior of southerners as the federal government invaded states and forced whites to "integrate" with blacks -- this was also constantly presented to me as a youth. Forced integration of whites with blacks was presented as victorious moral progress. This propaganda presented to my young mind a schema of what "world problems" were. Later I realized that the real "world problems" were things like lust, lack of spiritual search, weakness of family, anger, addictions, and inner emptiness. More basic things. But growing up as a kid, the all-surrounding message made me believe that world problems were all about Whites not going around enough patting blacks on the back, or being their friends, or blacks facing so-called "prejudice," or blacks not getting jobs because of the "prejudice" of whites, etc. etc. This was my concept of 'world problems' as a youth. Idealistic white youth are naturally stung and distressed by these images and concepts of his ancestors, and he gets a certain urgency and even militancy about righting these 'wrongs.' The world was always being presented to me as a place where everybody was in conflict. It wasn't the deadliness of the Great Wars that were the focus, but the idea of everyday social conflict, the whole idea that "people just don't get along." That everywhere there is a problem of racial, religious, or class "division." In reality, as I understood later, division is as natural in society as cell division and organ division in the body. People feel most happy and comfortable belonging to particular groups, groups of increasing intimacy, down to the family finally. We don't want to just belong to this huge mass, some kind of Wal-Mart Worldwide Wombat Community. We want to belong to different special groups that are our own. But in media, and in school, these differences were always presented as though they were dire flaws in the human condition, and that there were always unhappy outsiders to the "white world." I realized much later that a certain group in our society was quietly presenting this view of the world. So a young man you get to thinking how to "fix the world" and "save the world." That is natural to young men and women, especially the Europeans I think. That evangelistic and White impulse to improve everywhere and make justice everywhere. This is related to our Christian heritage, too. So the mind starts working, and trying to figure out, based on the "information" I had, what would "improve the world." The logic ends up being, "If everybody would renounce racial division, and also religious division, everybody would then be happy." Writing that line, I now see how absurd it is. But that was how I thought as a young man, and how many young men and women think think today. My point is that this "solution" was a response to a particular set of "world problems" that had been constantly presented: racial and religious division. Now after analyzing it 50 years, I think that these are the true "world problems": -- Your own lust -- Your own lack of interest in God -- Your other addictions and impurities -- Your lack of service and attentiveness to your own family, clan, village, and people. In that order! These are the "world problems" really worth worrying about! Everything else, should you worry about it or try to fix it, is just a distraction. Since the outer world is your own personal dream in the first place, attending to these first three, alone, will eventually eradicate all other apparent problems in the world-dream, from their very root. All "world problems," including many serious personal ones unique to you, dry up and blow away by attending to the first three. World problems are a function of your own impurity and nothing more. This is especially and spectacularly true in connection sexual lust and incontinence. And this knowledge is from the grace of the Lord. A Seeker's Life I read "The Imitation of Christ" while staying in an empty, austere room at my dad's house in my teens. It spoke powerfully of penances, detachment from the world, and the love of Christ. At that time I had been considering becoming a priest, and was strongly attracted to that. I was very affected by "The Imitation of Christ." That spirit of renunciation took strong hold of me and I wanted to feel it more and more. I gave away all my possessions at that time, even my old art and love letters from girls. Even my albums and music had been extremely important to me in my teens. I wanted to wander homeless like an early disciple. Later I did. I started fasting at that time and have done many since then. Two weeks on just water is heaven to me. And even the pain and suffering of that because you then sense your soul. Although now if I fast I come close to death (my heart actually stops) because there's not much more there in my body for the fast to "eat up." I am actually highly inclined to such ascetic practices that do destroy attachment to fleshly comfort, and I wish I could still fast. I highly recommend it for overcoming passions and conquering the flesh. If you came to my house and told me you were a Christian, I would make you fast every Sunday, at least. Thing is, you don't have to do a lot of austerities to get results, and get God to notice. They say that "Shiva is the God who is easily pleased." The image of Shiva is, for me, one of the ideal conceptions of God. For many years now I've eaten only once a day, in the evening, and then not much. Long ago food lost its interest for me. Fasting helped with that. Despite my spare diet I don't get thin, and have more weight than before, because I have learned how to draw in divine food through meditation. ("Bread that you know not of.") Most of eating is the addiction to the pleasure of it. I simply care very little about food now. I never drank, and I never used any drug but aspirin. My mother said to me: "Don't take drugs." I listened and never did. It sometimes angers me when I hear people say to parents, "No use telling them not to do it. You can't control your kids. And telling them not to do it will just make them want to do it." This is both absurd and grotesque advice, and an abandonment of both your parental power and duty. It would only be true in some cases, with some children, and only for a while. Generally when you love your mother, because she loves you, you listen to what she says. Same with the father. My mother saved me from the damage of drugs simply by telling me, from an early age, how they become addictions and damage you, and telling me it would break her heart if I ever used them. I made that decision young, and stuck to it through all kinds of situations. I wandered homeless and penniless, by choice, for long periods starting at 19. It gives a great detachment from society, the comforts of home, stature and pride. Once from Des Moines to Seattle, with only my father's wool Marine Corps blanket. Another time to Corpus Christi, which I chose because it had the name of Christ in it. One of the best experiences was walking through the "badlands" part of northern Yellowstone Park, utterly alone under a full moon in one of God's most beautiful places. I owe a debt of gratitude today to the few people who had the faith to pick me up late during that lonely night. One rescuing car contained a young husband and wife who lived in Yellowstone. I also remember a nice white military man in southern Texas and his gentle, trusting, brown-haired wife. I always remember that soldier taking me into his home with his wife, just for a moment, to play me one song from one vinyl record. It was a record of a Christian singer with a beautiful, soaring, and pure voice. He really wanted me to hear that for some reason. I still remember that voice. I loved music, and singing, and that one voice has always been a benchmark in my head, a voice to strive for in my own singing. Then I hitched on. May God protect you. But also a debt of gratitude to God for not letting them stop too often, and leaving me in beautiful lonely, and pure places, places that still live in me today. I've slept many times in culverts and stood in the rain and had to scrounge for food and got used to hunger. It helped me see the world clearly. I highly recommend it, by the way. If you were to come to my house, I would make you do the same. My Attraction To, and Involvement With, The Baha'i Faith I was developing interest in what could be called the "mystical," the idea of saints. But this was vague. Because of this mental setup I had been provided by mass media I ended up joining the Baha'i Faith around the age of 18. It teaches that there should be "one religion" and that "humanity is one." They also teach that there should be "one government" over all. The logical young mind reasons that if one entity, that had assured positive values, could control and dominate everything, then all major problems and sorrows and troubles in the world would disappear. I now see how naive this is. But then I thought the Baha'i Faith was the thing that was going to make all human troubles disappear. They also had a scripturally based ostensible posture towards mysticism. There was a "spiritual" atmosphere to some of them that came from its basically Sufi devotional elements. Only later did I realize what this was so as to describe that way. It comported well with the existing sense of "piety" that was a gift of the Catholic Church, helping to further develop the sense of "devotion," which I learned later is basic to religious development. Since that time, long ago, I became a lot wiser and and saw how my Baha'i interest stemmed from that particular view "world problems" I'd been presented. I joined them and became active and hard-working for it. I rose to some positions of responsibility, such as becoming an elected member of a "Local Spiritual Assembly," and the "Secretary of the District Teaching Committee" which was a state committee, and being a "traveling teacher" and performing music at Baha'i events, writing songs for them, and many things. I grew intellectually though, and gradually realized things that made me pull away. I had been attracted to it for two main reasons: 1) My programming on internal setup thinking "religious division is a problem," and 2) mystical elements in the Baha'i Faith, which were attractive to my soul and a true enlargement of my religious understanding. At this time also another saintly woman came into my life. Another Female Mentor I attended a public meeting given by Baha'is at the Des Moines YMCA around 1977 around at age 20. I remember my excitement. I found out later Bahai's had a word for "non-Baha'is" who came to their meetings: I was a "seeker." I liked that word. Indeed, it was what I was, a seeker of truth! The great question that roiled in my mind was "Why are there so many religions? Which one was true?" That is a natural and honest question for a thinking young man. Religion seemed like an important thing bearing on great questions of personal destiny and world condition. It seemed one of those matters a thinking person should try to get right. I was on a quest to learn what is really true and false, and boldly embrace only the true no matter the cost. That's how young men are. What a great thing to be. It was a heady feeling to be among those others who had also been seekers of truth, people free enough in mind to involve themselves with something new and heterogeneous. And all for Truth! To destroy confusion! And bravely save the world! Sorting them out, it seemed there were not many of the faithful, perhaps ten, and not many "seekers" either. That just made me more special. I learned later I was a phenomenon of weight to them: A young fellow coming sight-unseen to one of their meetings in a religion that had a dire time getting and keeping members. "Seekers" like me were rare. In retrospect I see the Baha'is at that meeting were not even sure how to act with me. That was just one of many scenes of Baha'is "not knowing how to act." An inordinate focus on rules, along with a mystifying confusion about culture and rules -- like, how to treat a new visitor to your recruiting meeting -- is a basic of Baha'i life. They find themselves without a culture, always trying to invent one, and nothing ever sticks. But I was unphased, joyful at the imminent prospect of religious discovery. One of their books was called "Some Answered Questions." I liked that title! They showed a short slide show with audio in which a small black man with a high-pitched voice was holding forth. He was in a suit, speaking in a certain lofty, ornate style characteristic to Baha'i "administrative" bodies. On the personal level he was not especially appealing. I found him rather odd. I wondered what was supposed to be so important about him. But I was a big-minded Gentile, eager to consider the worth of all. I learned later his name was Glenford Mitchell, and he was one of the Baha'is' "affirmative action" blacks. That sounds insulting, I know. But the religion placed great covert importance on racial "tokens" in high places -- having always "a black," a "native American," an "Asian" on every body and board. That's just the truth. Any fulfillment of a "racial diversity" fetish makes their day. Baha'is practically get an orgasm if they can concoct a photo op containing a black, an Indian, a Jew, and a few Whites. Writing this now I say it with some cynicism and disgust for its materialism, unnaturalness, and absurdity. But at the time, I thought it was cool! Progressive. Enlightened. Big hearted. All of humankind must be United! When people become bored, they want to relieve their monotony with "diversity." And Whites have gotten, well, bored. Though the alien fellow had no appeal to me and I found his voice annoying, I was a young man of spacious mind, and with my media upbringing, eager to be large-minded and embrace all peoples. The "alien" breaks the monotony for young people. And even if this guy was boring and bombastic, as a Mars-in-Gemini I knew how to "scan." You scan the many features of a situation, sorting out minor points from critical, gradually building the largest possible picture of thing. I sensed the little black fellow was just a small player in something much larger, and nobody seemed to have much real regard for him anyway. They just thought it was cool that he was black. So did I, because I was raised in the noble Gentile spirit, and as a young man I was eager to 'fix the world.' I was more impressed by the group itself, which was made mostly idealistic, interesting White folks. Maybe there was one token, uncomfortable "other race" sitting there. There was an old man, bearded and balding and with 1950's Allen Ginsburg glasses. Later I learned he was a hippie-turned-gray, had lived at the commune called "The Farm," done things like LSD, and into things like the "channeler" called "Seth." It turned out later he was a real philosopher and metaphysician capable of solving abstruse theological problems. But here he was was being "the man in the house" and bumbling with the filmstrip equipment best he could. There were some other older people, which impressed me. There was a smart and dashing young handshaking fellow named Richard. He had a mobile pager hanging from his hip. These were new and advanced at the time, the precursors of cell phones. I recall his pager going off "beep beep" at the end of the meeting, a new sound to me. Impressive! Only important people had pagers then. These people are the top of their fields! And then I saw a very amazing old woman. Like news of the JFK assassination, or seeing John and Paul's beaming faces sing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" the first time, the moment I laid eyes on her is etched in my mind. She was bird-sized and exceedingly old, elegantly turned out, but not in that crass way some elderly women do. She was a cultured woman of the old east coast, like Ruth Christians. A true Victorian holdover, I had never seen such an ancient creature. I learned later she was 98. She seemed to have difficulty just getting up and moving. She had no cane and no walker. Instead she had a couple of attendants close by, holding her arm caringly to be keep from falling as she moved with difficulty. I saw that her hands were gnarled like the burls of the aged tree in Mrs. Allen's back yard. I learned later she had much advanced arthritis and was in constant pain. This just made the contrast between her body and face all the more striking. But even with her advanced age, infirmity and other these details, there was not one thing ugly or repulsive about her. In fact, she was the one magnet in the room. Because what stood out was this: She radiated divine bliss. Later I heard some of the Bahai's covertly using the term "radiant" for certain Bahai's, a term found in their texts. When Baha'is say "radiant" they often aren't sure what they mean. But every now and then they like to use terms they see in their books, as long as nobody analyzes them too deeply. However, a few of the deeper Baha'is I met later used it to refer to a shining attractive quality that comes from having a real inner spiritual life and felt connection with God within. The Hindus call it tejas or effulgence and it is especially associated, in Hinduism, with chastity and austerities. It comes from one's own inner bliss, and divine love which is only one aspect of bliss. Much later I learned Baha'is had little interest in what the term "radiant" means or implies. And many of their words. If they looked into Sufism a bit they'd understand it more, but they tend to not like looking into such things. I later learned they are, in practice, anti-mystical and minimize the personal God-realization ideas in their own sacred literature. But at this moment I didn't know any of that. At this moment all there was was This Woman! In that sterile YMCA assembly room I saw my second spiritually radiant being in my life, a new Ruth named Ruth Moffett. She was moving with assistance from a tall, quiet man in his late 20's with unusually long brown hair and a beard. His movement was smooth, quiet, and strong. He had soulful blue eyes and was the very picture of the artist-hippie flowering in the 1970s. He was attending her dutifully, but unobtrusively. He matched her turtle-slow pace, seeming one with her as he gently held her arm to keep her from falling down. I learned his name was Paul. Right now all I saw was a shining face wreathed in furs as Ruth beamingly greeted a few participants. Though nearly 100, she still had dark reddish hair. Not dyed, but real color. But it was the face that got you. She combined great age with a pure and joyful childlike quality. The only face that compared was the face of Ruth Christians who, years ago, greeted with delight a 12-year-old boy arrived to mow and clip. Only in retrospect did I realize how special was Ruth Christians. But I knew this Ruth -- the Baha'i Ruth Moffet -- was special as soon as I saw her. She had something the others in the room didn't. Something to do with spirituality. Something to do with authentic religion. Something to do with God. Ruth Moffett had the personal charisma that comes to all, reliably and without fail, who really love God. Certain people were avid to come near her. I saw she greeted all with the same radiant attitude, which felt to me like love. She had a particular thing she did, which was to affectionately press the side of her face against the other's face. She was short, but whatever person she met or greeted, she would raise her face and press her cheek against theirs. I wondered if this was some charming old Baha'i practice. Those who knew her would do the face press. She'd keep keening up with her other cheek until they pressed that one. She'd giggle and say in a low voice that was not quite hoarse, but crunchy: "To keep the balance!" I thought: "I have to meet this woman." I wondered if it would be o.k.. Would she care to meet me? Was it appropriate? Do you have to know her first? I vaguely questioned if I was worthy. But something about her manner was utterly welcoming, the same way they say God is when people have near-death experiences. I stole a chance to insert myself into her little crowd, and somehow made contact. It's all a blur. I'm pretty sure I reciprocated her face-pressing rituals, which seems odd to me now. Not that I didn't like the idea, but I didn't know her. I don't know if I shook her hand, but I think I did because I remember the hands so well. I do remember clearly her delight and personal acceptance. She said something to me. When I left the building I felt better about myself, more elevated, and accepted by someone important. I think she invited me to come to her house that night. Because of Ruth Moffett at that meeting my heart transmitted, "This thing really has something. There's something in this religion." The others seemed inept and mediocre compared to her. But I understood the concept of saints, and that saints are special. Thus began a romance with the Baha'i Faith, then a marriage. It took many turns. It really started when I arrived at her home that night, very near my own neighborhood, on beautiful Cottage Grove, an avenue of old homes divided by tree-planted median. It was only with years and understanding that I comprehended how amazing that moment really was. I came to understand that Ruth seldom went to the official Baha'i functions in town at that time. I also didn't realize it at the time, but there were certain Baha'is in the room, especially the more important functionaries of the meeting, who ignored Ruth and kept their distance. They didn't speak the tall longhair at all. I came to realize within a few months that this radiant creature was among enemies at that moment. A few in the room actively hated her. But all I sensed then was the dawn of new knowledge and the mysteries of the universe whispering from beautiful, distant, heights. I was in Baha'i action that very night. Her house was easy to get to. So close! Throughout life I had ridden my bike, walked, and driven my car past her home many times. It was quite near a very seasoned late-night hippie deli I frequented called "The Blind Munchies." Yet I never knew such a person lived near me. It goes to show that one never really needs to move. All things can be provided to you right where you are, given time and transits. When one is ready a door is opened, a portal. The new is revealed right in your own domain. When we travel for the sake of God or realization, it's only an exercise to demonstrate to God your willingness and desire. But the travel itself is not really necessary. Because when you are ready, God can reach you wherever you are. So I was in at her yellow two-story house -- the color of knowledge -- as night fell. What a place and what a time! Ruth had traveled the world in search of religious knowledge and her house felt like it. It had pleasingly clean wooden floors, a few exotic rugs here and there, and was over-furnished in that elegant old Victorian style, full of old things. Especially it was loaded with books and mystical artifacts. Photos of saints. I remember a picture of the Sikh guru, Guru Nanak. There was an arrangement of a few chairs next to an old floor lamp, and a little table with Baha'i prayer books, a candle, and rosaries. Ruth was never married. I learned that she was a writer and had two published books sold through Baha'i agencies. One was called "New Keys to the Book of Revelation," the other, a more popular one, was about prayer: "Doah on the Wings of Prayer." Ruth was from a time when being a virgin was not uncommon, and the story was that she was one. I found that it was a little community. There were other Baha'is living there, including her attendant Paul, his wife Josha (pronounced yosha), and a talkative fellow named Henry. Her home was in the university district and was frequented by various and sundry seekers, decades-mutated beatniks, young idealistic freshly-married Sikhs in White (usually pretty White Europeans), mystics and quasi-mystics, many coming from afar to visit a personage. I had entered a kind spiritual Bohemia that everyone longs for an some time in life, and only a few ever attain. It was a a heady feeling. I was hearing new words. There was so much to learn. It turned out that Ruth Moffett was a "pioneer" figure in the Baha'i Faith, having gone to Palestine, where its center had become located, and met one of its important founders. This was Shoghi Effendi, the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Baha who was the son of the Baha'i Faith's iconic founder. Shoghi Effendi was considered one of the three "founders of the faith" and its lineal authority during his lifetime. His writings are somewhere in the category of scriptures to Baha'is. Ruth had met him more than once, talked with him, sat at dinner with him, and corresponded with him. This, and her historical life stretching back through cultural periods long-gone gave her a definite nimbus. She was so connected to the founding of the Baha'i Faith that one thing we found in her house, after her death, was a glass disc containing a hair from the head of Baha'u'llah himself, who was the Baha'i Faith's lofty, mysterious prophet-founder. Ruth was strong in two things: She was a compendium of knowledge, and she was a bhakta -- a practitioner of religious devotion. Baha'is don't know what words like "bhakti" and "bhava" mean, but their scriptures are dripping with bhakti! And Ruth Moffet was capable of getting into genuine bhavas. I didn't know the words either at the time, or what was in Baha'i books. However, I didn't need to. Because I had Ruth Moffett in front of me. Bhakti is an emotional devotional feeling when thinking of God or guru, and bhava is a full identification with one's guru or spiritual teacher, giving a great bliss and sense of oneness with them. A prayer meeting commenced with Ruth at the center of it. Then I got to experience first-hand both bhakti and bhava, as well as the power to transmit that. Thus commenced one of the higher spiritual idylls of my life: Attending Ruth's 10 p.m. prayer gathering. Ruth introduced me to two fundamentals of religion: meditation, and guru-devotion. This was not discussed as such. It's one of the peculiar features of Baha'is that they labor in an amorphous intellectual fog, often unwilling to discuss religious concepts outside of their narrow proprietary lexicon. They couldn't talk about meditation. They didn't talk about devotion. But this was what Ruth was about: Meditation and guru-devotion. Baha'is called it "prayer," but Ruth went beyond that. And Baha'is never used the word "guru," or even "devotion." This is odd considering the guru idea is strong in so many other religions and Baha'is purport to embrace and reconcile many religions. The lack of a working lexicon dealing with "devotion" is also odd given their literature is brimming with devotional attitudes and language. There inability to absorb the word "guru" is also strange, since that's what their founders, in fact, are supposed to be for them. But Ruth was the sort of intelligent woman who had figured things out. She had found the meat. She had gotten to the essence of the Baha'i faith's highest good: God communion and guru-devotion. The truth was, Shoghi Effendi had become -- in the best classical yogic sense -- her guru. She also had the the devotee-guru attitude to the other founders, 'Abdu'l-Baha and Baha'ullah himself. But it was Shoghi Effendi who she had known personally and this had caused her attitude of devotion to flower. This was not about romance. Not being attracted to a man of power. Ruth related to him as a religious figure, a God-man. She was the devotee; he was the representative of God. This is the guru principle. Then when she prayed, she really showed you how to pray. Baha'is have developed some narrow, truncated conceptions of prayer, seeming to believe that the height of prayer is to recite the published "Baha'i prayers" from memory. I had grown up understanding that prayer was finally between you and God, a conversation you had with Him as with a friend. This is the Christian understanding. When I saw the Baha'i prayers, I understood them for what they are: Lessons in how to pray, what attitude to take. The Baha'i prayers contain attitudes of supplication, of humility, and surrender. They are filled with high, beautiful words of aspiration, as one should use when trying to address the deity. They awaken the feeling of bhakti, in fact. But each one of the prayers was originally a spontaneous effusion from a founder's heart. They were not intended to be the limiting template for human prayer, but guides to attitude. I memorized prayers. Such memorization was given high value among Baha'is. And I found it inspiring to hear others recite those beautiful thoughts and words. But the best prayers to God are the words from your own heart. Think of it: If you have a friend you love, and you're hoping they communicate with you, do you want them reading something to you that somebody else wrote? Or do you want them to speak their own words to you? Of course, this is what God wants from his children: Their authentic words from their own heart. This was all a small matter to me; it never became big in my mind. But I was saddened in later years that Baha'is had as if forgotten how to pray, and some Baha'i children actually grow up without this simple, natural, concept taught to them: Talk to God. Say what you want. Say what you really feel, just like a friend. So I understood what the Baha'i prayers were for: To show you the nature of the bhakti attitude; the attitude of devotion. They are beautiful and lofty expressions that often sweep you away. If one studies them, his own manner of prayer becomes informed and elevated. However, and this is sort of funny: If you are in a Baha'i prayer group and speak original words from your heart in the old manner of so many churches -- you will be considered very naughty. It just isn't done. This is just one one the many absurdities about the Baha'i Faith. But fortunately I had happened onto Ruth Moffett, and she was apparently immune to all of this. Because when she prayed, she really prayed. She spoke from her own heart. Sometimes she would recite a Baha'i prayer, or have others do it. Other times it was her own orison, but imbued with that lofty language and longing spirit that is so evident in the Baha'i prayers. To hear a noble person's real devotional thoughts in the moment, addressed to God, is a transforming experience. So both these kinds of prayer went on at Ruth's prayer circle. What was happening was that Ruth was using prayer as prayer was meant to be used -- to put you into a divine state. As she would close her eyes and speak to God -- whether from her own heart or repeating formal words -- she would go into a bhava. I did not know this at the time, but that's what it was. And you would go into it. The state of bhava is a smooth, relaxed condition in which you become deeply identified, in mind, with the object of one's prayer. That can be "God," but God is abstract. Thus it works better when you address yourself to one of God's representatives who you can visualize, relate to humanly, and feel connected to: The Guru. This is what Ruth was doing, and it was very affecting. Bhava is very blissful. It is definitely a different state. Well guess what? According to the Hindus and yogis, God is of the nature of bliss. So whenever you are getting bliss, you are getting close to the Goal. At those 10 p.m. prayer meetings at Ruth's I got my first conscious experience of religious devotion and ananda, or bliss, which is a universal religious phenomenon and perhaps the essential important aspect of religion. God comes and creates his religions so that we can know his bliss, and be freed of this world's sorrow and limitation. And religious practices show the way to this bliss. Though the Baha'is have very undeveloped concepts about meditation, Ruth was using the prayers -- sometimes very short, mantra-like repetitions -- to put herself and others into meditation states. I didn't know it, but I had stumbled into a Baha'i household where the atmosphere of devotional mysticism was alive and well, though this was dying out and covertly suppressed in the broader Baha'i community. Ruth had a quality of gravitas and a serious mind. Religion and morality were serious matters for her. I remember her sitting at her kitchen table all day studying texts, magazines, references, her own manuscripts -- all with a very grave look on her face. She was basically a scholar who had gone to Oberlin college in an era when few women attended college. But she was also the ideal moralist and pedagogue. There was a seeker who started coming around to Ruth's house. She she was a freckled redhead who I remembered being in many plays in my high school. Now she appeared to be mentally disturbed. Soon we heard she was in the mental ward at Methodist Hospital . We visited her there, and she was smoking a cigarette. I had never smoked, and with my newfound "Baha'i evangelism and charity" impulse, I was wanting to connect with her and make her feel as comfortable as possible. I was aware of my own judging thoughts about smoking, and I wanted to keep myself from having them. So I also picked up a cigarette and smoked along with her, without inhaling. Ruth was a de facto guru authority to the more thoughtful Baha'is, and back at the house she was informed about it. Apparently avid about my own moral development she became very grave, said it was terrible, wrong, unwise. She said that I would encourage that girl to smoke too and I had to set an example. (Though I think she had been long addicted.) So I didn't do that again. Despite Ruth's natural gravity, two things were set against it so that anybody with a heart found her immediately endearing: 1) Her spiritual life had brought out an effusive, joyful nature, and 2) her age and weakness gave her a vulnerable, truly childlike quality. This combined with her gravity and earnestness made most people, especially the real spiritual men and women, adore her. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also getting exposed to the guru principle. My first exposure to the guru-principle was hearing about Christ. And the apostles, too! Then seeing holy cards with saints praying to Christ. Then hearing about praying to saints themselves. Kneeling in a dim church before a statue of Mary, or Joseph, and praying to her for a boon. This was all activation of the guru principle. The guru-principle is present in most religions, but it is often not enunciated or laid out as an essential religious power. It is particularly sketchy in the Baha'i Faith. But it lives there anyway for the perceptive. Now I see it clearly. It was always there, developing in my life. One of the ways you enter into it is thinking of the guru a lot. Or, reading his words. Later, thinking of the guru in devotional ways, and talking to him in the same manner. Another powerful way is actually serving the guru. I remember being eleven and asking a certain nun if I could carry her briefcase for her as she was returning to the convent at the close of school. Sister Eleanor Therese She was an austere nun, rather old, and the terror of all seventh graders. There was no moral matter, even an oblique one, that was not of grave concern to Sister E.T. She demanded the strictest attention and concentration of mind; all attention on her words. Talking in class? Don't even think about it! She had a rule that if our pencil or pen rolled off our desk we were not to stoop and pick it up or take our eyes from her. She would come pick it up for you instead. I still remember her black garments swooshing past me, like a close encounter with a rare and terrible bird. At one time a fellow named Andy arrived late for class, first class of the day. She asked him in front of the class, "Why are you late?" He answered, "I overslept." She asked, "Why did you oversleep?" He answered, slightly humorously in the frank, Saggitarian attitude native to Andy, as if mocking her just a little: "I was tired." Displeased, she said, "I want you to go run five laps around the field" -- a large outdoor field that was our recess area. Then the kicker for the "attitude": "And you're to do it every morning before you come in, for the rest of the year, and be on time for class." Andy did it, the rest of the year. And there was a rule for us to go with it: Nobody was to turn their heads to look out at Andy running laps. She said "Even if you hear a bomb explode out there, you are to keep your attention firmly on me and what I'm saying." My guru, Yogananda, used to say: "Stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds." She even took issue with the way we boys and girls stood in the hall or outside! Once she gave us a genuine lecture and exposition on the subject of slouching. I had seen fellows in upper grades slouching, their hips jutting out as if they didn't care about a thing. The casual look seemed "cool." I remember deliberately standing with a slouch because I thought it looked cool. Funny to think that in that atmosphere of rectitude even a boy putting his weight on just one leg stood out as something catchy. She gave us a fiery lecture one day against slouching. She said we should always stand with our weight balanced evenly atop both legs. She linked it to a negative medical outcome in which our hips would sooner wear out, and we'd become crippled. She said spine then sits in a slight curved, and we could develop troubles of the spine, too. But there was a profounder purpose here. Her real motive was that in women, slouching with a hip thrown out is slutty and provocative. In men, it is a lazy and dissolute attitude which evokes lazy and dissolute mind. It's also feminine in a man. Maybe she didn't want to say these things, but I know she felt them by instinct. The fact is, this teaching comported fully with occult laws of the body and of yoga. The way we posture our body impacts our own mental state. This is one of the secrets of yogic asanas and mudras. They create occult impact on our own mind. On the everyday level, the man who stands erect gets an inner attitude of moral rectitude to match it. For the same reason the discipline-hungry army life teaches men to stand ramrod straight. Same with women. A straight standing female transmits rectitude and purity to the mind. In the entire Yoga-Sutra, ancient manual for God-realization, there is only one instruction regarding the body: "The spine should be settled but erect [when practicing meditation]." A meditating yogi needs to learn to sit for long hours with his spine erect. The prana and kundalini-shakti is hampered and misdirected if he doesn't. Every boy growing up making an effort not to slouch is preparing himself for this. So here Sr. Eleanor Therese was preparing us all for the path of yoga by teaching us to keep, not only our spine, but our entire bodies, erect! With Sr. Eleanor Therese we had to use different "spiritual muscles" than we were used to using. These were the faculties of detachment, concentration, and renunciation. She was actually teaching us real yoga, which is essentially detachment from the world and full focus. She was teaching us the saint's faculties of austerity, renunciation, and concentration of mind! But who would know? She was the only nun I ever heard make an issue of the creeping decadence seen in the young women as they matured. Though the girls wore uniform outfits -- dull green tweed skirts, white shirts, and dark green jackets -- they had begun sporting makeup, hose, and sexy girl things things like jewelry. It was never an issue with anybody else, but the diminutive Sr. Eleanor Therese was not going to stand for the slutification of her girls. She'd berate some girls when they came into class and send them to the bathroom to wash it off. When they'd come back in, some had been crying. But the girls looked more wholesome -- and more approachable and honestly beautiful -- under Eleanor Therese's rule that year. In her mind, this was all so that we would have the way clear to know God through the saintly principles of self-control, austerity, and strong mind. Sr. Eleanor Therese never joked, never laughed, never smiled. She was all business. To relieve the stress, we joked. A certain wit -- the only one who I'd ever heard actually impressed this nun with is mind -- had coined an underground nickname for her: Mighty Mo after the formidable Navy battleship. This wit was a WWII aficionado. Actually, it was my brother Victor who coined it. But you never heard "Mighty Mo" anywhere within three blocks of this nun. You simply didn't mess with Sr. Eleanor Therese. She didn't have any "pets" among the students. Well, there was said to be one. That was my brother Victor himself, the only kid rumored to be even close to that status with her. See, Victor had literary brilliance. Apparently, this moved her. I was made of lesser academic stuff. My experiences with her were all painful. She had once pulled hard my sideburns out in the hall, a trick I'd never heard tell of. My, it hurt. She spoke sternly to me all year long. And once she made me stand humiliated in he middle of the class until I crashed on the floor in a clinical faint. My crimes were typical adolescent stuff: asking dumb questions, goofing merrily out in the hall past the bell, or turning to joke with my pal three seats back about a girl we liked to mock. That's when I had to stand at attention amidst my sitting peers -- including every girl I'd ever hoped to impress -- until I turned to stone and collapsed face-first on the hapless kid in front of me. When it came to academics, I had no better luck with her. At one time I handed her a hand-written assignment. She took one look at it, ripped it in two, and handed it back. She was drastic. Referring to my penmanship, she said tersely, "You made no effort to write well." That hurt! This was not to mention the "F" grade she'd given on another paper, with a caustic remark about the level of my effort. It was true, I was lazy. Who knew? But there was one more thing she said after she shredded my work, one saving grace. She said: "You can do better than this." Now I wanted to measure up. We learned to respect this woman and make efforts. One day late in the year I got a hard-won decent grade on a paper. I think it was a B-plus. I had made an effort, and now seeing her grade I was on Cloud 9! I felt expanded before God in His cosmic imperium. Occasionally I saw girls now even tarrying after class to get instruction about lessons and papers from the Sr. Rarely the boys! She was tougher on us because we were to be men. Boys avoided her like the plague. My heart feeling big, I saw her abandoned by cautious students as usual at the end of the day, getting ready to leave the school. I tarried unobtrusively as the others left, waiting for every last one to go then said, "Sister, would you let me carry your briefcase?" I had seen other kids do it over the years with kinder nuns. I had heard one brave soul, a girl, had even requested and been allowed by Sr. Therese. I understood something, and that was what this nun represented on this earth. None of this was personal. She was a nun, and on this earth she represented purity and devotion to God, and God was standing behind that purity and devotion. She answered me sparely and honestly, "Yes, you may." I owe that nun -- and the Catholic Church -- a debt of gratitude today for having the guru-principle alive. She understood why a Catholic boy asks to carry a nun's briefcase, and the religious and spiritual development of young men was what this one cared about. Thus she consented. So it is that one of the best memories of my life is a short two minutes carrying Sister Eleanor Therese's black briefcase. She walked wordlessly beside me. I remember the clean smell of her full Dominican linen, her smooth, cool presence. I wondered about the nature of such a person, the nun. I remembered seeing a little chapel in their convent containing kneeling furniture where nuns would kneel and play.What a mystery is a nun! She had a solitary quality even among the other nuns. I never saw her chatting with another nun except rarely, in a strictly businesslike fashion. As I walked beside her she "smelled" like wisdom. I "felt" that she had an interior spiritual life that showed on the surface only as sobriety and silence. At the close she gave me a thanks that was proper and courteous and no more. But as I walked home I felt sublimley elevated. See, she consented to be served for my sake, not hers. The yogic adept Swami Muktananda points out, quite archly, that the real beneficiary of religious devotion is one's self -- not the devotion object. This is because the attitude of devotion is a higher spiritual state, and one step away from bliss. The deeper spiritual mystery is that God Himself is of the nature of devotion. Thus when one puts himself into the devotional state, he makes himself right for God-contact and God-mergence. As I walked along carrying Sr.'s briefcase I didn't understand any of this. But the little boy who walked home afterwards had a bit more pep in his step and a little more love of life, thanks to a nun who said "yes" when asked, was profoundly silent while I walked beside her, and knew that this was enough; that nothing should be said to add even one thing to what it was. Guru-Bhakti Through Service Ruth Christians was also an early guru figure. And I served her. So was Sr. Eleanor Therese, and just for one brave moment, I served her. Now I was visiting this mystical historical Baha'i personage Ruth Moffett. By God's grace I fell into serving her, too. Others around her were doing this too. It appeared to me, by some instinct, that this is just what the wise do with a spiritual figure like Ruth. The quiet attentiveness of Paul, her walking assistant, was wordlessly instructive to me. The fact his wife was attending to her personal needs like a maid, too, cooking, cleaning, and helping her get dressed and undressed. It was all for religion. These people were a kind of devotee, serving a woman they considered spiritually great. My God idyll was short-lived. It turned out that Ruth and her household were shunned by the general Des Moines Baha'i group. Her and her household were considered forbidden. Many of them had constricted spiritual concepts as well as petty social jealousies of Ruth. She was an old eastern aristocrat. Even though she was 98 years old, could not function on her own, had no family, and was an historic religious personage, they didn't like that people were serving her. There was an ethos in the Baha'i Faith, a kind of communist ethos, that nobody should be regarded as special. I began to get into trouble with the rest of the community, and even the impressive nine-member "Local Spiritual Assembly," for my visits to Ruth's house. At one point this "Spiritual Assembly" even intervened by formally directing me to not attend her next "deepening" meeting, a meeting where Baha'is study their scriptures in more depth. Fortunately I had a kind of protection around me and this was: Being a babe-in-the-woods. I was too new to be awed by the "Spiritual Assembly" diktat, and too broad-minded fail to see this was simply a group of very human beings engaging in silly dramas fueled by jealousy, politics, and power maneuvering. What was happening was they considered me an important "find," a strong potential new "seeker," and they were trying to make sure that I did not get "corrupted" by currents running through the Moffett household they considered to be heretical or off-base. It was all based on absurdities, something about Ruth having once 'thumbed her nose' in some manner to one of the "administrative institutions," or her being "too much of a personality," etc. Just rubbish. God is a Personality, too! In retrospect I see it was the townies who were religiously corrupted or at least retarded. But at the time, I was trying to befriend them all, not wanting to upset anybody, but just learn what the truth is. I was a seeker. So I ignored their command that I not attend her Wednesday meeting. In response, the "Assembly" sent a representative to that meeting to 'monitor' and intimidate. Ruth's classes were long and detailed. She used charts and diagrams, and expected you to concentrate deeply and long. Thankfully, there was a tea service and cookies on the table, and everyone took notes. As our grumpy "LSA monitor" Ernie King -- the former LSD tripper from The Farm -- looked stoicly on, I had too many spiritual stars in my eyes to notice how tense the others were in his presence. It's all very funny looking back on it. After the visit from Ernie King the household of Baha'is ritually walked around Ruth's house late at night carrying incense and chanting the mystical Baha'i phrase, "Allah-u-Abha." They said they were trying to protect Ruth and her work from the negative energy of the Baha'is in town. Wide-eyed, a true seeker, I just took it all in and joined them. I already felt spiritual devotion for Ruth. It seemed self-evident to me that a God-loving, saintly human being who could transmit divine love and devotion to others -- the saint -- was the highest fruit and purpose of religion. It seemed self-evident that God would want this for all, and that committees and "institutions" composed of petty, dysfunctional individuals (which is often the case is the Baha'i Faith) could not be considered superior to such a person. Plus, I liked the idea of mystical chants and making circles around stuff for protection. At least I was game for it. So I walked around the house too, chanting to protect Ruth Moffett from well-meaning idiots, the Baha'is in town. I also liked them just fine and enjoyed hanging out with them, but this was what we were doing at the moment. I guess it's part of the Gemini nature (I have Mars-in-Gemini) to be able to see all sides of an issue. So I chanted and incensed. It was a delicious austerity in the cold Iowa snow. The upshot is I ended up serving Ruth Moffett. The "Assembly" applied so much pressure and social ostracism to these people they ended up fleeing town. It may have had something to do with my arrival. Because suddenly many things fell to me, and my presence seemed to have released them. I started standing in to serve this devotional God-loving bhakta, Ruth Moffett. Once I had simply carried a nun's briefcase, lit candles before St. Mary, and delivered sacred items in ancient choreography, in white linen, for priests at morning mass. Now I did practically everything for an abandoned Ruth Moffett. I walked her to the car, helped her get in, then helped her back into her home. I drove her around town. I even drove this 98-year-old out to little Iowa towns in my funky car, in snowstorms, so she could do one more Baha'i teaching lecture. I was unemployed at the time. What a grace! I began showing up every late morning just to be sure she was all right. Finally I took over everything, including the duties of the woman Josha, who had fled. She had very little food around, but she seemed to always direct me to something or other. She told me to find some "summer squash" down in her cellar, and I found it. She told me how to cook it, and I started cooking for Ruth, though I was no cook. She had me make tea and set out cookies for deepenings she was planning. But though the house had often had people around, more and more I was the only one around. The Assembly had begun directing people to avoid her house. One day she asked me to help her get into her downstairs trundle bed for her afternoon nap, and to please cover her up. I felt very honored. That was my attitude. Finally it evolved into my getting her to bed nights. I didn't live there, but I started coming to get her into bed, because she couldn't do it herself. I even ended up rubbing her gnarled, arthritic limbs each night with oil so she could sleep. This is what Josha had been doing, it turned out. This was her routine. We had a method to get it done without seeing her body. You'd pull her dress off, top up, and she'd be fully covered in a slip, but arms and lower legs exposed. As an old Victorian era woman from the 1800's, it must have been an indignity for her to be thoroughly abandoned and some 1970's 20-something male undressing you. But she was always humorously charming about it. When I'd pull off her dress, looking away, she'd say, "Skin the cat" and giggle. As I'd rub her gnarled hands, arms, lower legs and feet, she'd close her eyes and express thanks. I never remember her complaining, being negative, worrying, or criticizing anybody over her personal lot. Except when a broad religious or moral principle was at stake she always spoke positively. It was slightly creepy for me as a virile heterosexual to have such contact with an elderly female's body. Though I managed not to see anything I shouldn't, there is naturally an "ick" about it. It's something women should more properly do. However, I learned that Richard -- the fancy young pager company tech -- had actually been filling in the same way, and with the same ambivalence. There was a spiritual teaching in it. Hindu saddhus and Buddhist ascetics go to graveyards to be around dead bodies to remind them of impermanence; the falsity of the world; the impermanence of bodily charms. Women do age and lose those physical charms! That became clear. Though there was some sense of "this is not right" to be a male serving a female this way, I kept on. I believed the Bible talk about charity. I was the type of idealistic young man who'd take homeless drunks off the street into his home, even bathe them and give them haircuts, getting in trouble with landlords and ending up robbed for it. I believed in Christian ideals of charity. And this was Ruth Moffett. Where were the Baha'i women? It was the first time I'd been a "massage artist." Later, I used to rub my kids' feet and shoulders with hands that first learned about this human service on the gnarled, mishapped hands and feet of this Baha'i saint. When the community learned their new "golden boy" -- the smart new seeker with possibilities -- was undressing Ruth Moffett and putting her to bed, there was a great stir. Special meetings were called. Phone calls were going back and forth. Assembly emissaries were showing up at the house. Some of these, too, were the ugliest people I happened to know in this group, who actually hated Ruth Moffett though unworthy to judge her. There was one ugly character, a brunette on the Assembly, who specialized in helping Latinos and spoke Spanish. She spoke vile things about Ruth, had romantic designs on both me and Richard, and actually saw this 98-year-old as female competition! She regarded her with a bizarre jealousy because we were helping her get undressed, and not a hint of compassion for this elderly creature. But saner heads, seeing the situation through my "new seeker" eyes, realized how absurd and embarrassing it was. They got the idea of acting like a proper community and tried to find a new female, a home health aid worker, to replace the departed Josha. I was soon to be relieved. But until she was found, I soldiered on. I disliked the strangeness and cultural confusion of the situation, and I learned cultural confusion follows Baha'is around like a cloud. But there was one memory I do cherish without reservation. That was when Ruth, warm and gratefully soothed by the joint massage, would be ready to be put to bed. With the relaxation effect and increased circulation from my unskilled but sincere massage, she glowed all the more. Smelling fragrant from the oils, finally in her night clothes, we'd wend our way across the hall to her room. Now I just had to get her up onto her high Victorian bedstead. I guess Paul had been the one who did this, but I'd had no instruction. At that time I'd just sweep her off her feet and into my arms like the son she never had, and deposit her in her bed. Sometimes I'd do it by surprise for fun and she'd giggle. As she clung to me like a child I'd insert her into her opened bedding then cover her up. I well remember the beaming, childlike face -- the same one I'd seen that first day -- as I carried her. Last thing I'd do is remove her glasses and her hearing aids. Then she looked different, softer. Her hair was very thin. She felt so much a child I began to sing a Baha'i chant I'd heard as a goodnight lullaby sometimes. Leaving, I'd finally put the saint to bed by saying "Alla'u'Abha." She would say it back in a tired croak. Correctly translated it means "O Though Great God of Glory-Bliss!" I'd heard Baha'is say it. But using it to say "good night" to her was my own idea. So was picking up Ruth Moffett. I still remember her shining moon face as I'd leave. Soon they had some woman to take care of Ruth, for pay, a sort of hippie-ish, loose woman with frizzy hair. It was the first time, I think, that her help had not been a Baha'i; not been a devotee. Within a month or two Ruth Moffett died. Only as the years passed did I realize how lucky I was to know Ruth. It was lucky because she modeled the devotional attitude so important in religious life and helped me know meditative states. I knew her in her greatest pain, betrayal, and humiliation yet she was radiantly blissful. So I may have known her during the state of her highest spiritual flowering. The divine incarnation called Krishna says in the text: "Even a little bit of this yoga gives freedom from great pain." Life and karma contain a great deal of pain. But if you sincerely seek God -- who is free of pain and dualities -- He gives you the grace of a divine connection that mitigates a great deal of it. The King passes on some of his strength and untouchability to his child. Even by seeking him a little! Ruth was clearly a practitioner of bhakti-yoga -- the highest kind of spiritual practice in the Bhagavad-Gita. And her pain-wracked body with ever-joyful demeanor was a proof of divine grace given by "yoga," or divine union. The mystical Baha'i "Hidden Words" says: "Look within thyself and thou shalt find me standing within thee. Mighty and self-subsistent." Ruth was curious enough about these words of Baha'u'llah to find out what they mean. That year there was a video presentation at a Chicago convention that noted great Baha'is who had died that year. There was a picture of Ruth and the audio simply said: "And the indomitable Ruth Moffett." That was apt. Nobody in that huge convention hall -- including all the pompous big shots and "administrative" snoots who created such presentations -- knew her like I did. Her spirit was indomitable. It was also a sly reference to the fact that Ruth, according to what I'd heard, had bucked a Baha'i administrative body at some point. She was indomitable working on a new manuscript daily right up to her death. She was indomitable keeping teaching activity alive -- her Wednesday deepening -- despite the ill-will and intentional neglect of the established Baha'is. She was indomitable getting into my marginal car and traveling through Iowa snowstorms, just to "teach the Baha'i Faith" to strangers, even in her last months. She was not dominated by poverty, by cynics, or by pain. Because she was a real devotee. As Ramakrishna said, "God protects his devotee. He follows after him like a mother cow follows its calf." My relationship with her was, though intense, very brief. She was not long for this world, and part of a whirlwind of transition in my life, a transition into a new religion and a new lifestyle that would last over a decade. But there was one more bed I had to carry this woman to. My last "service to guru" was carrying her, with five others, in a heavy casket across the green sod of a graveyard and depositing this child-of-God into His sweet and restful earth. The pallbearers for Ruth's heavy casket were all Baha'i men, and some of the most avid and devotional Baha'is. I became part of a crew helping to sort through her estate. Central to that crew was a married couple named Jeff and Marian K. Jeff was another one of the truly spiritual Bahai's. Real bhaktas, too! And it was contact with him, as well as the amazing testimony of spiritual life evident in Ruth's house later, that kept me attracted to a basic spiritual core in this religion. In Des Moines a light had gone out. But most of the Baha'is did not realize this. I saw that there were wide varieties of religious understanding among Baha'is. This was fine with me. Because I understood that's just how people are, and I had spiritual inspirations like Jeff and Marian to keep me interested. They even knew about this thing called "meditation." Plus: We needed to Save The World the world by getting everybody to Believe The Same Stuff!!! Soon I was elected as a member of the "Local Spiritual Assembly," moved to a new town to try create a new assembly, had a Baha'i wife, and Baha'i children. All things grow and develop in this life. You will find that you sometimes meet people who remind you of someone from before. They will have an uncanny physical resemblance, similar personality traits, and there will be similar issues or dynamics between you. But the new one will be on a higher level, a finer grade, the issues less gross and more civil. They are like "octave" persons, higher octaves of important persons you have known before. This happens because life moves in circular cycles, and because we have conditioning/programming from past experience and people. So, there are particular "characters" who gradually re-emerge as we go through incarnations, evolving with us as we evolve. These people are like mile markers showing your spiritual progress in life. The more you see of these octaves in your life, the faster you are making spiritual progress. Funny thing: Ruth Moffett looked uncannily like Sister Eleanor Therese. Both were very small. Both were grave and severe. Both were strict moralists. And both had a spiritual life, though Sr.'s was more hidden from me. I can glean from this that Sr. Eleanor Therese, who used to praise my brother Victor for his literary skill, was both a scholar and metaphysician. She probably even had red hair. No effort is ever wasted and God never misses a thing. First a boy carried an austere nun's briefcase down a lane to her convent. Later a man carried the great bhakta Ruth Moffett to her nightly bed. God love and praise pure nuns! Years later I find that whenever I encounter a Dominican nun with the spirit of womanly purity I get bhakti. That is, I am moved to tears. Disillusionment The religion lost it's hold on me because I found out: 1) The true nature of the religion and its origins had been suppressed and distorted by the organization, and 2) The Baha'is actually had little interest in the mystical or spiritual life, actually rejected that part of their own literature and were mystic-phobic. They were a shallow people afraid of the inner life and moribund with an overemphasis on a faceless, rigidly authoritative and distant "administrative order." 3) Baha'is had, in actuality, a very materialistic, outward-focused world view and impulse. 4) My ideas that "race is a major problem" diminished simply through my own maturity and better understanding of the world. 5) I realized that agreement about a few intellectual ideas was not a guarantee of this vague (and now boring-sounding) thing the Bahai's were always calling "unity." 6) Finally, I had been exposed to the rich religious literature and spiritual practices of India and books like the Bhagavad-Gita and Yoga Sutras. The Baha'i literature, wonderful as it is, simply couldn't compare. There were many deficits that this Indian literature revealed in 'Baha'i', but a real and vital understanding of the "guru principle" was among them. Meditation My Yogananda's meditation techniques, and the very most important one, are given out freely in "lessons" that you can request from the administrative organization he left behind, Self Realization Fellowship. This easy availability of the lessons and that technique, I would offer, tends to fool people. It fools some people into not realizing the preciousness of the gift, or its efficacy. Over a long span of time it has occurred to me that attitude is everything in the spiritual life. The attitude with which you approach the guru, and any information he gives you through any channel, is of great importance. I think I was fortunate to be in the right attitude. My early Catholic upbringing had instilled in me some sense of devotion, which the Hindus call "bhakti." I had the idea of reverence. This is something that the Catholic Church is very good at. The whole thrust of Catholic Churches and icons; the way they are built, serves to evoke feelings of reverence. Reverence is, in fact, one of the great components of bhakti and perhaps one of it's greatest components. With full devotion one feels reverence for the object of his devotion. Rapture is not far away. Truly, you get from a guru, and from a technique, according to your attitude first, and according to your assiduity in practicing it, second. I have met people, including many people deeply into the SRF movement, and many avid followers of Yogananda, and chatted with them. Many times I have been surprised and confused by how little they seemed to have derived from those lessons or the technique. I often had the impression that they did not really view the lessons as being important. More amazingly, it seemed they did not view that technique as important, which is sometimes called "the first kriya." They seemed to be always interested in "higher initiations," especially what they called "the second kriya." What happened with me is I was never interested in any "higher initiation" because I became so engrossed in the first one, freely given by mail in the lessons. I was getting so much bliss in that, and finding so many depths, that it never occurred to me to seek out any "higher initiation." It was all I wanted and all I needed. What happens is that if you love and value that first initiation, you get everything. Inner Sound One day I noticed I was hearing a sound. I started asking people about it. I was saying to those around me, "Do you hear a low hum"? Nobody heard it. There is a story from the Oglala Sioux called the "Story of Jumping Mouse" and I played the role of the mouse then, humorously so, in fact. (It took some time before I realized what that story was about. I understood it much later.) This came about when I had been left all alone in a farmhouse in southern Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks. The house was owned by devotees of the Syda Yoga lineage, which started with Nityananda, then Muktananda, and then Gurumayi. They always had Syda yoga chants on, and the house had a tremendously spiritual atmosphere. I want to say that I realize in retrospect that this family was Jewish, or at least the father was. He was a very big devotee of the gurus of Syda yoga. When my family and I were there, he behaved very austerely and clearly had it in his mind that he wanted to be our "guru" figure and leader. When my wife and kids would be gone he would return to his accustomed mode which involved a lot of watching football games and drinking beer. However, they were devotees of a siddha lineage, and that was the place I was sent for some powerful developments in meditation. My wife and I had become confused about where to go when we came to the conclusion that Alaska did not contain the sort of people we wanted as a community, and I realized that my children had difficult charts there. She had a dream. She was walking across a big map of the midwest, remembering seeing Missouri and Arkansas. A great voice said "Go to Missouri." So we did. Through mutual friends we were put in touch with these people near Sparta, Missouri, just on the northern border of the beautiful and ancient Ozark mountains. We wanted to be part of some higher intentional community, and so did they. Were home homeschooling parents, and so were they. I was 'into' meditation and gurus, and we were told so were they. At that time I was also having spontaneous yogic movements of the body, and I did not know what they were. Thus we arrived. The first night there we sat around the kitchen table and chatted with the couple, getting to know them. We shared our spiritual interests. I modestly told them that I "had a guru, Yogananda." The husband -- I will call him Hector -- said, "I never thought much of Yogananda." He wanted the upper hand in spiritual matters. The next day, driving his land in his old truck, he said, "Would you like to spend 10 thousand more incarnations or would you like to get shaktipat and end with this lifetime." I didn't know what "shaktipat" even was, though it was what I had. I just humored him best I could, seeing that he considered his guru the only way, and that he wanted us to become "Syda" yoga people like them. I was not much impressed with their guru Gurumayi. Not putting her down at all. Just that some gurus in literature called to me and I felt an authenticity, and others didn't. One thing they had was a library, full of "syda yoga" books. Now, here was a treasure. I found the books of Muktananda, the guru of Gurumayi, and he felt very authentic and his words were a rich feast of knowledge. Most impressive of all was the photo of his guru, the avadhut (true renunciant) Nityananda. I expressed to the wife -- I will call her Martha -- how impressive he looked and felt; that I sensed he was the real deal. She expressed that she found him rather offputtingly strange. The wife was not as avid about the syda guru thing as the husband, possibly. Rifling through their library daily I soon hit on a book called "Play of Consciousness." It was a revelation. It told about the spontaneous bodily movements I was having. It turned out they were auspicious and fortunate and a manifestation of the moving kundalini. I was amazed and slightly befuddled. I had never heard of these in any of my readings so far, and I had considered myself a devotee of Yogananda, who never openly mentioned them. But hearing Muktananda tell about them was illuminating and gave me confidence in my path, to keep working, to have faith and continue. One day Hector and Martha left for a "syda yoga" intensive and my wife and children went up to Iowa to tend to some belongings in a storage unit and visit grandparents. They were pleased to leave me as protector of their home while they went to South Fallsburg, New York. In this home, while left alone and meditating and chanting very much, and roaming the hills of their 150 acres, I started to hear Aum. The very first time I heard it, it seemed to be the sound of many sages intoning Aum and I sensed them all in caves, as though I was looking at a high Himalayan valley lined with caves and all the sages were chanting Aum. It was brief, but that was the impression. Then I thought, "Maybe it was just a semi truck that just came by, over on the road." You know, that sound when a semi-truck is approaching you fast as you stand on road, just as it comes on. But later I listened and one could not hear semi trucks on the road. It was too far. From then on, it was a low hum or rumble always in my ears. I did not know what it was. This might surprise some, but it is not uncommon. Aum can take a number of forms, and when you are not particularly paying attention to it, it takes one form. When you concentrate on it with assiduity and respect, it takes other forms. I was very blissful during this time, but I did not know that it had to do with Aum. I was worried there was something wrong with my ears. It sounded like there was a grain elevator far away and it was grinding corn. I had lived in a town having some of these, back in Lamoni, Iowa. I asked Michael and Carol, "Are their silos or grain elevators near here?" They said, "No." Or I thought there were Caterpillar tractors over across the highway clearing land. I asked Michael, "Is there a construction project across the road?" He said "No." When they went to a Syda yoga retreat, leaving me alone in their house, I took the opportunity to investigate their refrigerator and freezer. I was certain that would solve the problem. I went near. They were making no sound. I even got the idea that there might be underground government installations, digging far into the ground in construction. Everything crossed my mind but Aum. But it was right in me. I had never expected to hear Aum. After this many divine things happened to me. But it was not until visiting here one more time, and being alone in one of their unfinished buildings, that I realized what it was. I decided to concentrate on it and listen. That is when I realized. I found that it was a blissful sound, and endless, and fully satisfying. It changes as you listen to it. Om gradually destroys your worldly desires because there is nothing better than it. My point here is that it came to me simply by loving and following assiduously Yogananda's very first meditation technique, the one many feel is unimportant. I remember once reading further into the lessons, where Yogananda talks about the "Aum Technique." He has you sit with your ears plugged, using a table or a device to prop up your arms, and trying to hear this inner sound. I remember thinking, "This seems to complicated and hard, I am happy with what I am doing." So I just went back to loving the breathless state of the first technique. It was enough. I did not know the word "kumbhaka" then, but this is what was happening. So, enjoyment of the 2nd technique followed naturally upon diving full into the first technique, and I never had to try for the 2nd. The Yoga Sutras says, "Yoga goeth forth from yoga." That means the more you do one valid technique, the more other techniques and perceptions unfold naturally. Once you hear Aum, you have all the meditation technique and devices you need. There is no further need for any techniques. All you need do is listen to Aum and love it. And you will love it, best. There is an expression by S. Neem Karoli Baba: "If you talk about your wealth or your sadhana, they go away." My excuse is that I want to help people, and I am leaving out much, and I don't intend on having a public position. I bring these things up for several reasons: 1) Devotees should realize how much has been freely offered to them. 2) They should have a greater appreciation of the power of the first technique. 3) They should realize that Yogananda works everywhere, in far away fields, and that his wildflower seeds of dharma blow far on winds of guru's world-compassion, and even far outside their little fences, and 4) One's relationship with a guru is personal and unique, and unmediated by anybody and any thing. 5) Attitude is everything, especially devotion. 6) Westerners can achieve the yogic things and Yogananda is not a guru who uniquely lacks fruit, or one who uniquely or arbitrarily ended the principle of transmission and lineage. I reveal these things to make the above six points, which need making. Plus, I have no fear. There is a point at which God has you in his jaws, and never lets go. Certain things in the spiritual life are permanent attainments. I speak to serve, uplift, guide, and attract western men and women to the truth. My motives are good. Fame? It is no pleasure beside Aum. Only a terrible distraction. Being a guru? Again, it is no pleasure beside Om, and only a fool would seek out that distraction and burden. Religious Confusion of the Westerners On November 21st, 2009 I attended a strange event. It was also a wonderful event. Jai Uttal, the singer, was having what was called a "kirtan." I have attended such strange events many times over the years. But the strangeness of these events is never lost on me. At this event there was a great room full of people who tend to reject Christianity and even religion. They were a group of young western liberals and leftist types. I have had many conversations with these sort of people, and one of the confusing things they often say is "I am spiritual, but not religious." However, they were attending a decidedly religious event with great interest and fervor. If a Hindu from India had walked into this event, he would have thought, "How delightful, my Hindu religious culture is happening here in Portland, Oregon." To him it would be obviously a religious event, and the "spiritual not religious" statement would be absurd to him. He knows the obvious truth that religion and spirituality go quite together. Religion points the way to how to have spiritual experience. Religions themselves are the products and creations of those who have profound religious experiences. There is no disconnect between the two. Yet he'd see these westerners having this religious event and saying it's not religious, and saying such irrational things, hating the very thing that is giving them a spiritual experience. See, if I had said to most of these people, "This is a wonderful religious event," they would have been upset at my identifying it as such. Yet that's exactly what it was. What happened was that the people sang many, many religious chants in a foreign language, with great interest and as much involvement as is possible without knowing the meanings of words. The thought naturally occurred to me, as it always does: "These people are fine with singing about God, as long as it's a strange word for God, in a foreign language, and they are singing to the monkey deity Hanuman." I have seen this situation played out over and over in the west, especially back when I lived in California. These were people associated with a "yoga studio." Yoga always was a religion. As it stayed in America over time that has become more apparent to those interested in it. More and more, the religious aspects of yoga have crept into the western "yoga" culture, and yet you will find that these people are upset if you identify these things as "religious." By this time, in 2009, the religious aspects of yoga appeared to be very well present in the culture, yet not acknowledged as such. In the bathroom of this yoga studio was a poster with a long quotation from the Yoga-Vasistha, a religious scripture, and it had a completely religious and spiritual theme. In the great room the young westerners sang devotional songs to the religious deity Ram, the religious figure Radha, to the religious figure Krishna, and even the monkey deity Hanuman. Few of these people had much knowledge about the religious lore or principles associated with these figures. Yet they sang with eager abandon to Jai Uttal as he led the songs. What's clear is that those who have rejected Christianity and fled from it, and even those who reject the idea of religion itself, have a great hunger for religion. This hunger can be satisfied, or partially satisfied, or in some cases simply exploited -- by various and sundry parties. Jai Uttal is someone I admire, because he is a real bhakta. This means he takes a devotional attitude to a guru or religious figure. He also is a great musician and singer, and the bhakta tends to especially like to employ music as a device for inspiring the feeling of bhakti. So was in the room admiring who he was, and what he was doing, and also realizing the strangeness of the situation. If I had said in casual conversation "It is great to see you people getting some religion," see, it would have upset every person in the room. And yet my words would be completely true. Mistakes of the Christians I grew up in a Christian religion and cultural environment, and I have huge gratitude to God for that. It was in many respects the luckiest aspect of my birth. A conventional Christian will note, however, that I have wandered from traditional Christianity. Yet for me, my purpose was to learn what was true and essential in Christianity. My wandering gave me a deeper understanding and clarity about Christianity's worth. For me it was a misfortune to feel, in my youth, that the religion I had did not offer satisfactory answers to the social and religious questions developing in my mind. I would have rather it had offered clear answers. Because it was a great and profound religious tradition, and I would have rather not had to wander from it. After my studies and wanderings it seems it's the nature of religion to gradually grow cold and inert, requiring periodic revivification. There is nothing wrong with this. It's just the way religion is. And religion is natural and essential to humanity. And it is natural that Christians and those of other religions lose touch with the vital essentials of their faiths over time. The sufis describe the development of religion this way: A tree is vital and supple when it's young. As it grows greater, it also grows more firm and rigid. But in this state it is able to provide much shade and shelter many creatures in its branches. Later it nears the completion of its cycle in its present form. Larger but more rigid, it begins to lose life force. It's rigidity causes some branches to be broken by winds and storms. The tree starts to break up into pieces. Then the tree begins to die. As it dies, it becomes a home for other kinds of creatures. Even as it rots, it provides food for creatures such as bugs and grubs. This is the reality of religions. This is not a put-down of religions. Religions are necessary and natural to human beings for human order and well-being. But they have their cycles. In astrology there are 12 houses that deal with "realms of life." There is a Third House that correlates with "ideas, facts, and information." This is the "Gemini" house. But the Third House only deals with the "little ideas" and factoids. In the Third House the ideas are not joined and organized into coherent systems. That is for the 9th House, the opposite side to the Third. This house is the house of "big ideas." In the 9th, humans take the many small ideas and factoids of the 3rd and organize them into great philosophical and religious systems. To desire this is a natural aspiration and faculty of humanity, and correlates with Saggitarius. The Saggitarian energy is less interested in the multifarious factoids, but more in finding "what a group can agree on," or the common ground that, having established it, benefits human beings. The impulse is to take what knowledge there is, and find the highest, most coherent, and embracing System that benefits the majority of beings. Thus the 9th House is the "house of religion" and churches. This is a basic and important facet of the human mind and spirit. The Saggitarian impulse is to create systems of higher thought that benefit humanity, i.e. religions and churches. The concern is "what can we agree upon" and build something together. A bizarre facet of the modern west is that many wish to discredit the 9th house impulses as if there is something wrong with it. They wish to proceed as if the realm of agreed systems, religions, and churches is somehow inherently problematic. There is even a desire among the more liberal or leftist thinkers in the west to separate religion from spirituality. Later I will comment on how irrational this is. It's basically a kind of neurosis. But for now, I want to comment on the mistakes of the Christians. The error we find in Christian churches is always of the same nature: To lose hold of essential principles, in preference for externals and non-essential ideas. When this process sets in, Christianity becomes spiritually and morally weak. To be brief, my journeys and studies told me that these are essentials of Christianity that should be preserved and refreshed at all times: Seeking God is an Essential Christian Thing The search for God, understanding God as a reality within one's self. This relates well to Christ's "First Law," to love the Lord your God with all your strength and mind. If you don't already feel that love, the first job is to SEEK God so that you can love Him. Since most people don't really have a felt personal experience of God, and that is the normal human condition, it follows that the first expression of the "first law" is simply to be a seeker of God. So above all, Christianity should keep alive an imperative to seek God, so as to know God. When I go into churches I hear little about either matter. I hear little about knowing God, and what that's like. And I hear little about seeking God. I mostly hear the historical stories of the New Testament. But these have their best value only as they serve to emphasize these imperatives to seek and know God. The main message in Christian churches should be about the search for God within, and the results of knowing him. And this message should be primarily prosecuted by men and women who have had some success and experience with that. Those who feel illumined and can inspire others with the reality of that search and that God-experience. Which leads to the second Christian essential: Illumined Teachers (Clergy) is an Essential Christian Thing The clergy should be God seekers themselves and have spiritual illumination. Moral Self-Control is an Essential Christian Thing The role of morality should be understood. At this time, and for centuries, the significance of sexual morality has been implicitly understood in Christianity, but it needs to be explicitly understood. One of my greatest discoveries was the way that male sexual continence creates the possibility to have God experiences within, and that this was a basic foundational path for the great Christian saints, the saints of other religions, and for Christ himself. Where the understanding of morality's role in religious development is weakened or lost, Christianity will become discredited. That's because there will not be illumined teachers (clergy) to teach it, and because the Christians themselves will become morally confused and manifest moral and social breakdown, which further discredits their religion. Guru-Yoga or Guru-Devotion is an essential Christian thing Christ should be viewed with at least as much significance and weight as other religions apply to "the guru." By studying other religions I came into an understanding of "the guru principle" and its significance. I saw that this principle existed in Christianity in its own form. At the same time, the guru principle had become reduced and constricted in Christian culture. That is, Christians were not applying to Christ the same degree of focus and devotion that other religionists reserve for their gurus. By studying the guru principle as elucidated in other faiths, I saw how Christians could be instructed to take a more serious and fruitful attitude towards Christ. Because in fact, Christ is the "guru" of a Christian. Or He is supposed to be. Bhakti is an essential Christian Thing "Bhakti" means devotion. Hindus have a path of religious development they define as "bhakti yoga," and many of their adepts or commentators consider it to be the highest religious path. It can actually be viewed as a technique. In surveying or analyzing Christianity, many of those commentators view the western religion as essentially a "bhakti" religion. Based on my own experience, and knowledge of Christianity, this is valid. The lives and writings of the Christian saints are resplendent with the attitude of bhakti-devotion. It is my view that the more a Christian consciously understands the very idea of devotion/bhakti, the more profound will be his Christian religious experience. Thus the more attractive Christianity will be, and the stronger as a cohesive force for good in human communities. Austerities are an essential Christian Thing The life of Christ and the Christian saints demonstrate that austerity and penance is inherent to Christian religious development. Christ was a homeless wanderer. He fasted. He was celibate. The Christian saints and clergies, in various degrees, followed suit. The stronger the spirit of austerity and penance and moral self-control in its adherents, the profounder will be the joy of the Christian Church. It is the spirit of renunciation and austerity in Christian history that made Christianity great and gave it moral authority. If this understanding -- of the value of austerity -- dies, Christianity dies. The more Christians pursue the path of the austere saints and monks, the more Christianity will be revivified. God Works in other fields This is not an "essential of Christianity" as Christianity has existed, but Christians need to learn it and develop it. The Christian inability to understand that God works in other places, times, and fields has discredited Christianity and made the more thinking people leave it. Christians need to simply understand that God is the "lord of all names." He can and has appeared to other people in other times and places, in his own form suited to those people. People the world over have been seeking God according to their own lights forever, and God never ignores the cry of those who want Him. When Christians attack the religions of others, or their founders, without apprehending the many essential commonalities between them, it discredits Christianity. They also miss an opportunity to get greater insight and inspiration towards their own Christian paths, as I've cited above how understanding the "guru principle" as explained in Hinduism can give a Christian a much stronger devotional attitude toward Christ. Christians simply need to develop a more sophisticated intelligence applied to their own God. Since God is the lord of all intelligence and subtlety, Christians should manifest the same intellectual capaciousness. When Christian churches dispense with non-essentials and find ways to emphasize these essentials, Christianity will come back into aliveness and strength, which means its capacity to benefit the people as well as connect them into coherent community will come back. Now I wish to discuss the perplexing delusions of western liberals and leftists who embrace eastern religions such as Buddhism, yoga, and Hinduism while abandoning their Christian heritage. There are many irrational features to this phenomenon, as I will point out. As I sat in the Jai Uttal concert, and watched the people sing (and joined in, intelligently), my mind wanted to say to them: "You should have seen your
ancestors when they did this same thing. You
should have seen your generations of grandmothers and grandfathers
doing "kirtan" as well. Would you believe they did it in churches
especially reserved for this practice instead of gymnasiums and
convention rooms? They called it "hymns" instead of bhajans and
they called it "congregational singing" instead of "kirtan." But they
were just like this. You are getting blissed out. This is good. Do you
think
your ancestors did not get blissed out in their churches as they sang
their hymns and listened to religious songs? No, they got just as
blissed out as you. Even more. Do you think a religion thrives and
lasts for 20 centuries because it gives them "nothing" every Sunday?
No, your ancestors also sought bliss through God-worship and religious
singing. They had the advantage, too, of
having lyrics in their own language with ideas they actively understood
as they sang the words. It made it even better. They also got to evoke
their own
conditioning going back to childhood and tradition, and feel a
connection to their past religious ancestors. But you are exactly like
your ancestors -- seeking God like
them. They didn't have the word bliss. They used words like "glory" and
"rapture" instead, trying to talk about it. Weren't those grand words?
And yet you think you are rejecting your heritage. You think that you
are separate from your own best people. No, you are trying to approach
back to them, just doing it a bit neurotically and blindly. Sorry you
are limited to singing now about a monkey figure you don't know much
about and have no conditioning for, or a foreign cultural figure like
Ram or Radha when you have so many saints in your own traditions and
countries. But hey,
it's great that the impulse to seek God, so strong in your own
ancestors, is still manifesting in you even though you are sadly
denying your own bhakti-kirtan heritage, and separating yourself from
your own bhakti-kirtan Christian traditions. I salute you. But I'm sad
that you don't know it can be even better than this. Greater bliss.
Greater rapture. Greater connection to God and community. It used to
happen in your ancestors' churches. They could even slow down or
shorten the verses, make them more repetitive, speed up the song later,
do more call-and response, and even sing it in a foreign language for
you. And maybe they should. Those are musical style and cultural
matters. But don't think you are really doing anything different than
your great religious ancestors. Embrace them and find out how great was
their devotion and how beautiful their music and how fine their bliss
in church many Sundays."
If I had said these things to most participants, they would have been offended or confused. What has created this delightfully strange situation? Delusions of the Leftists I made the list above for things I consider truly essential in Christianity. Well, guess what's interesting? These things are also the real essentials of yoga, Hinduism, and much of Buddhism! I assert this based on a long study of these subjects, along with much personal practice, experience, and revelation from practice. So, I can imagine that asserting any one of them, to this crowd jumping and singing about Hanuman, would distress them just the same. If you say: "Devotion is essential to this path. When you put your hands together like that, it's a mudra expressing devotion. These songs are devotional" they get nervous. If you say "Moral self-control is essential to this yoga path," they also get nervous and defensive. If you mention guru devotion -- a thing the singer Jai Uttal actually tried to bring up delicately -- they also get nervous. About the only thing not really essential to the pure bhakti path is austerities. However, austerities is very, very essential to the path of yoga, and most of these people were very "into" some idea of yoga. The yoga-sutra presents "austerities" as the "first basic activity of yoga." Yet if you even said the word "austerities" to these people, they would think there is something wrong with you. So the strange phenomenon I witness is: -- They reject Christianity even though the paths they embrace are filled with similar things, and -- They actually reject many of the fundamental values in the things they flee to. The Hindu sitting in that situation is getting much more out of it because he understands the words and has many rich associations with the words and songs from his own conditioning and religious culture. Meanwhile, the westerner rejects many of the principles that would make the religion a powerful spiritual path for them. It's sort of like a cat or dog who wants to come near you, but at the same time is afraid and keeps drawing away. These people dearly want religion and a religious experience, but they also pull away and have many conflicts about it. Like I said, the liberals are basically neurotic in their connection to religion. This comes from conditioning, confusing cultural propaganda, and the failures of Christianity to remain fresh and vital. Basically, the westerners have neurosis concerning their own religious traditions. They they carry this same neurosis into their approach to other religions, usually rejecting essentials in those religions and keeping them at arm's length, causing them to fail to get the real depth value from those new religions. How is this remedied? It is remedied by the arising of saints who experience the fruits of the true paths, demonstrate them, and speak of them. All of this confusion can be cleared up. Romance of The Breath Spontaneously Yogic Movements/Kriyas Death One of the things I care to do, in this autobiography, is to pass on what I have learned about death. Perhaps one of the most fortunate blessings of my life is that I have been put through the death experience a number of times, in a number of ways. One result of that is that I ponder about death daily, inwardly preparing myself for it. Because one thing I learned from those experiences is that we are not prepared for it. One of the primal purposes of spiritual life, techniques, and dharma is in fact to prepare us for that strange moment. At death we face surprises. But there is one Big Surprise that is above all, and that is that you are presented suddenly with the real and vital possibility of all-fulfillment and all-satisfaction. Then because of our conditioning, we normally react badly to this opportunity. We are not used to even the idea of all-fulfillment and all satisfaction. Suddenly it is presented to us. We have a number of different reactions. One basic one is fear of it, because of the fact that it involves a complete transformation of your identity. We are not used to an identity that is all-satisfied, all-fulfilled, and all powerful. So we shirk away from it as foreign. This is a basic reaction that I had when God (who was coming to me as his very own, like I was his child and a lost fragment of himself) first met me and presented Himself to me, during these death experiences. It taught me a lot. Now I think of those moments -- because there were several, in different forms -- every day. I Plan for it. I rehearse it in my mind. I plan now what I'm going to do and how I'm going to react. I have it all straight now, to be fearless, to go for it, plunge in, trust. God does not give you hours or even moments to decide. He responds to your real instinctive reaction. At death, we have one big chance, then it's over and we are offered lesser chances. The best way to prepare, I found, is to contemplate God's true nature as all-fulfilling, all pure, all giving, all power, all light, and all good. This is hard to contemplate. It is because most people seldom contemplate God's nature that they are not ready for Him when he presents himself. So a basic sadhana to prepare for death is to contemplate God this way. A good place to start, if this is difficult, is to read some of the great Psalms praising God in the Bible, those Psalms of a God-devotee. Also, read the chapter in the Bhagavad-Gita where Krishna (one of the forms of God) describes his nature, and elaborate from that with your finest imagination! I was greatly aided by actually seeing it, so my faith in His qualities is now natural and strong. The World Actually Is a Slow Dream, Self-Projected I have also experienced the death process through a state called savikalpa samadhi. There are a number of features to this state, which I won't discuss here. But one is that you get to play with separations from your body. I went through a phase of being fascinated by this, by the leaving of the body. Truly, that world is more fascinating than this one. But I learned one very important thing during those explorations, that I wish to share here. That is, this world does not survive our death. When we die, we take the world with us. In like manner, after a dream is finished and you wake in your bed, that world is still inside you and exists nowhere but in yourself, the dreamer, as samskaras or astral body karmas. We are only reborn to "a world that we left behind," because we are so used to believing that's what happened. This is our conditioning. If we die believing "I am leaving behind a world that I want to come back to," that's what we'll do. At least for a time, until we figure out what's really going on. From this I also realized a more astounding thing, and that is that the world actually goes away each night when you sleep. It isn't there. So, we actually die nightly and dissolve the world -- in truth -- nightly. Through our conditioning, built up over so many lifetimes, we have come to believe in "a world," a continuous world that is "still there" whenever we wake. If you ask Joe to stay up and watch, saying, "Joe, check something for me. I'm gonna go to sleep and I want you to stay up and report to me whether the world stays here while I sleep," Joe will of course be there upon waking and report to you that the world didn't go anywhere. But this is actually only because of your conditioning. You have been believing in "Joe" or "others" in a populated world for a very long time, going back to inchoate lifetimes where this scenario started long ago. You have been firming up "Joe" and the 'contiguous world' idea for a very long time. But it is all just conditioning. You actually "resurrect" the whole mess -- the world and it's "others" saying the things you expect them to say, each time you wake. The scriptures, and other adepts like Muktananda, speak of this. They say that we resurrect the world upon waking in the twinkling of an eye as the life force changes direction. If you remember "sleeping in a bed" and being partially aware of "sheets and covers" and your body, what's happening is that the direction is fluctuating a bit. Your life force is coming back toward the world/karma, but not fully. In these brief moments of partial wakefulness, you are only partially re-manifesting the world (enough to feel body and bed). One of the ways I realized this was by getting outside my body and into my room. The out-of-body experience has unique features that distinguish it from ordinary dream. I found that once in my room, in my astral body, the room would start to mutate and morph. A window would appear were there had been none. A creature might be sitting outside the door. A door knob would become a portal to another dimension through simply looking at it. I realized that I myself was "holding together" the room through my inner "impressions" of it. But if I was not really interested in that room, I would not hold together the old room very long. I would let it morph, used to more interesting things when in astral consciousness. Once in the astral state, one has little or no interest in this world. It seems an utterly worthless, boring, non-thing. For this reason one has no desire, from the astral state, to hold together astral duplicates of the world, one's room, etc. Too boring! Whenever one tries to hold together parts of this world from the astral state, so that he can function in this lower world, he awakes extremely tired and unrested.This is because of the huge energy required to do it from that state. In the astral state, it takes tremendous energy to "hold together" the material world we have just abandoned. The world is held together more naturally and easily when in the waking state, with the full life force directed through our body, naturally erecting the physical world-dream. So, in the same way we "hold together" the outer world when in the physical body, but it is very easy to do because the "schematics" are embedded in our body; the karmas/impressions that resurrect it in it's present form. It's as though your body is a lens with markings in it. It shines a particular picture on the wall due to the nature of those markings (impurities, experiences, impressions). The "wall" is prakriti or God's screen of "nature." The "picture" the world that you experience. If you can change the markings in the lens-body through purification, the picture (world) changes. If you purify yourself, the world purifies. The world-purification process, going on along with your body-purification, comes out as an upgrade of the world, or reduction of outer world problems. I later learned that sexual lust is the greatest form of impurity, and creates the ugliest and most dire features out in a polluted world-dream. These experiences with the death moment, bodilessness, and the great light of God have taught me that it is wise to think of God as all-beautiful, all-powerful, and all-fulfilling daily. It is wise to constantly ponder what you would do if God suddenly offered you all that, and offered to let you merge with Him. One practice then, which helps greatly, is to practice merging with Him here and now, while in your present body. There are a number of ways you can do this. A good guru can teach you how. Think of death daily. And don't worry about leaving anything or anybody here. Because you take it all with you, just as a movie projectionist, after showing a movie to friends, rolls up the film and takes it with him. The Discovery that Chastity and Continence Are the Greatest Keys to Spiritual Knowledge, and World-Regeneration Lust and sexual-sin, especially the sexual loss in men, is the direct and prime cause of the most dire flaws in your outer world-dream, including pollution, over-population, ecological destruction, war, and more. You are creating the disturbance of the outer ground through disturbing your own inner ground, upon which the outer ground is raised up. For the male, nothing creates more world disturbance faster and more terrifyingly than sexual discharge. This rape of your body creates a matching rape of the world, in your outer world-dream. Try it and see. This is the actual ongoing "fall from the garden." Thus continence and chastity bring you back into the garden, and you see the world come back to it's better state. This was the most important realization I had in my life, and I realized that moral continence is the central founding cornerstone of all religions -- including Christianity -- and all genuine mystical paths. Every realization of the saints -- including Christ -- has come from moral continence and devotion, and every religion was birthed through the knowledge of sexually continent men. There is no true religion without moral continence, and there is no religious or spiritual knowledge without it. Brotherhood How the Wheel of Samsara Rolls It is human nature to get bored and want something different; to take for granted what you've always had and fail to see it's virtue any more. Especially if your culture has become somewhat homogeneous or uniform, with everyone living a certain way, or dressing a certain way, a boredom sets in. In the 1950's, European-Americans had survived a great war and were now prosperous. It was respect for authority, order, and homogeneous systems, all working together, that helped Americans win that war. So, uniformity and conformity were highly respected by the 1950's as the source of survival, strength, and prosperity. So, the men all had crew cuts and wore simple slacks and white shirts after the war. That was strength. That represented survival and our prosperity. The girls all dressed another way, and there were strong norms. This is the fruit of prosperity. Against this backdrop, some boredom sets in among the youth, and restless questioning of "what's it all about?" So in this context, late 1950's, any breaking from the norm, anything heterogeneous, creates a big sensation and excitement. This was the setup for the 1960's, the Beatles band, and all the rest. If the 1950's had not been so safe, uniform, and boring, the Beatles, etc. could never have been so exciting. So it's human nature to seek the different, the exotic, the heterogeneous in order to feel a thrill or excitement. I saw that the race idea had come to play this role for White people. They began to accept ideas that their white racial culture was basically boring, and expressions like "white bread" became accepted by them to refer to something "boring," with a racial connotation. They forgot to value what sort of wholesomeness and basic good character was there also. Good character and virtue -- such as our fathers fighting heroically in the war or White men working hard, serving, and perfecting systems for the general uplift -- were what provided that safe and prosperous world of the 1950's. Breaks in character, experimentation with vice, came into play as part of the "new" and the break from boredom. But I realize now that White racial communities always had their own diversity. If you could go back to a little White-European village, say, 100 years ago, you would find all kinds of characters there among the White people. All kinds of faces, personalities and types. Such that it was easy to create a play and cast a wide variety of characters. You can see T.V. programming from the 1950's or early 60's featuring all White casts. And yet, there will be all sorts of different "characters" in these shows, with different looks and personalities. In other words, Whites always had their own "diversity" from among themselves. But to appreciate it took more sensitivity, more nuance. Now, when you throw in all kinds of exotic characters from, say, Kenya or Laos, into that community, that extreme diversity makes the natural subtle diversity of that group fade from view. This prodding to extreme diversity makes a people fail to appreciate their own subtle differences, and makes them all appear to be the same, though they are not. I realized that this fetish about different races and physical types was really a kind of materialism, even a kind of carnal lust. A real spiritual person does not need a wide variety of grossly differing types around him to entertain him and engage him. He can see the subtle differences among his own people and that is plenty of entertainment and variety for him. The more spiritual we are, the less we need to be prodded by so-called extreme diversity, and the more we appreciate the subtle right where we are, with what we have. So the drive towards extreme racial diversity is a carnal, unspiritual impulse. And a people grows more spiritual, and has more subtle understanding, if it is left to generate its own types and varieties from within itself, rather than being overshadowed by extreme differences from Kenya or Laos, etc. If you need to have a grocery sacker of a deep black hue, with ritual scarring all over his forehead, to feel that people are interesting and life is interesting, there is something wrong with you. You are jaded to the more subtle around you and you are developing perverse tastes. The truly spiritual impulse, then, is to withdraw into your own people, into so-called boredom, but to find within them all that you require. This is what will truly preserve the cultural and racial diversity of the world. Appreciating your own people and growing their potentials. Later I realized, too, that the widespread negation of racial identity was especially promoted by one group with a very strong racial identity: The Jews. I realized that they hang together strongly as a racial or ethnic collective, but they encourage all other groups -- especially Whites and Europeans -- to abandon there racial identity. They do not view themselves as "White" in the sense that European Gentiles do. They are "Jewish," and only "White" as it conveniences them. They look down on "White people" and love to mock them. We have seen this now in the media for a long time, damaging the racial identity of so many young people. What this does is leaves Jews as the one remaining effective collective, and gives them increasing power and influence in their host (non-Jewish) countries. So, I realized that most of my ideas about "race differences" being a huge world problems were just implants I had received because of the Jewish racial agenda in the schools and media. Basically, Jews hang together strongly as a "people" and race while telling everybody else that "race is bad." I realized this is a great deceit and has been weakening the worlds' peoples and nations, and destroying the true diversity that it took the world so many eons to create. About the Jews Meditation, yoga, and personal purity give you two things: Clear vision, and penetrating perception. I grew up without much awareness of Jews except that they were one of the religions. My father never said a word about Jews. I never heard him even say the word "Jew." Neither did my mother. Never mentioned Jews even obliquely. I had 3 brothers and they never said anything about Jews. And two sisters. With dad having fought in WWII you might think he'd have some words about Germany, or the Jews, Hitler, or at least the Japanese. But he never even said an ill word about either the Japanese or the Germans, though he saw his friends killed on Saipan by them. My dad was just too noble to speak ill of other races. I had no friends that spoke of Jews. Well, I remember one fellow in about the 6th grade, a new kid in my Catholic school, who used to say things about "Jews" now and then. This kid was rather odd, different from the rest of us, and my sense of him was that he came from a poorer family or some family from "the other side of the tracks" as it were. In schools everybody likes to make fun of any odd kid. So, his mention of "Jews" now and then just built up his "odd" profile and we considered it one more thing to mock. He was a "hick." The Jews had long built up the "hick" archetype, in the media, as someone stupid to make fun of. I suppose he must have been trying to tell us "jokes" or some such thing, perhaps featuring Jews. He mentioned this maybe 2-3 times, enough for us to note this was on his mind. But I don't remember anything specific that he said. My appraisal at the time, as a boy of around 11, was that he had some improper or bigoted views possibly given to him by his family. And that was the only time I ever heard about "Jews" during my entire childhood, youth, and even into my 30's. I remember one thing though. Once my dad said to my brothers and I: "I think that each of you should some day read Mein Kamf." I remember my brother Victor, who was a sort of magpie and well-read on the history of the war, asking him, "Why?" in a challenging or teasing way. Dad wouldn't answer. In summary, I was completely in the dark and naive about Jews. In the culture, I was hearing increasingly about the experience of Jews in World War II. At the beginning, this was just one of many things that happened in the war, that Jews were put into camps by the Germans. Later, I started to hear that "six million" Jews were killed by the Germans, and that they had been killed deliberately in gas chambers. Later, after that, I started hearing the word "holocaust" and this was being used by Jews, and then later the mass culture, to refer to what happened to the Jews in WWII. I accepted it all. It seemed a very extreme and terrible thing to kill six million people just because of their religion, especially doing it methodically in gas chambers. The personality of Hitler and the German people began to seem more and more dark, and the idea of disliking Jews or even speaking about them seemed backwards, touching great evil. In other words, I was just like every other American exposed to the propaganda about Jews. The basic effect was to make it even more repugnant to talk about Jews, or even think about them as if they matter in any negative way. I was brought up not to judge people based on religion, either. Though Catholic, my mother and father never mentioned other religions in a negative way. The only way that race was ever mentioned in my family was my father's tendency to cite our Lithuanian heritage (he was full) in positive terms, and make us aware of it. My mother never spoke of her racial heritage, to the point that I only know that her father (my grandfather) was fully Norwegian. Race was not any sort of issue in my family. My father's attitude towards other races was to view them respectfully, from a distance. So race was not an issue in my thinking about Jews. Besides, I had been led to believe -- like the rest of Gentiles (a new word I picked up much later for non-Jews) -- that "Jewishness" was only a religion, not a race. So it was that by high school when I left the Catholic school and entered public schools, I started to be in contact with Jews. But the interesting thing was that I had no idea that they were Jews. It was many years later, after observing the world for a long time, that I can go back remembering different kids in high school and think, "Ah, he was a Jew. Criminy!" or "Ah, that little group that was always together, they were all Jews. Figures." This was 30 years later. But at the time I had no conscious awareness of them. This set me at an emotional disadvantage and made my school life confusing, because these kids -- the Jews -- had particular ways of acting that I didn't understand. The main thing about the Jews back in school was that they didn't talk to you. Not only this, they also would not look at you. They could keep this up seeing you every day for four years. My friends and I, upon entering the public schools, were amazed and somewhat distressed by this phenomenon. This school seemed to us a bizarrely unfriendly place. We used to joke about the "invisibility" phenomenon, about how there were so many kids who seemed to never see you. I see now that these kids, the ones best at this, were Jews. I know that now by their look, by the others they spoke with, and other qualities. My friend Kevin was always talking about being "invisible" and was distressed about it. I went through 4 consecutive semesters in a rather intimate class, an acting class, and there was a group of kids who seemed to know each other well, constantly talked to each other, and joked and carried on. I can state with certainty that I was never addressed one word by this group during 2 years of classes, and I don't even remember being acknowledged by them or getting a "hello." And these kids were all Jews. I realized later that Jews, when mixed among Gentiles, tend to act this way. They have developed it over millenia and perfected the "no see you." I realized that they recognize who is a Jew, and who is a non-Jew, from far off while the Gentile remains oblivious. And they tend to not interact in any friendly manner with the Gentile. I realized that this has a definite affect on the social atmosphere of Gentile institutions, and even towns and villages. It lowers the bar of what are acceptable, civil attitudes in human groups. When there is a certain group of people that never says "hello," and even behaves as if they don't see you there, it becomes an acceptable norm for all to behave this way. In other words, the Gentiles start to withdraw, too, to be remote, too. The standard of interaction declines. Gentiles do not understand at this time the role that Jews play in effecting a great decrease in social warmth, and ultimately social cohesion, among Gentiles. I saw this in high school, but I did not know what it was. At that time I had a vague idea that these Jewish kids, these kids who never spoke to you or looked at you, were "something" different. At that time I did not know that Jews were a racial or genetic group. I didn't think you should be able to "recognize" the member of another religion by how they looked. That did not compute. I remember, though, looking upon some of these Jews as real curiosities. Their different look, and their remoteness. Eventually the drama department decided to do "Fiddler on the Roof." There were so many Jews among the students -- many big hams itching for big roles -- that I think the teacher had no choice. I think it was at that point that I started to get a glimmer what a cohesive people Jews are, and that there was a physical or genetic element to them. Many Jews were involved in this production. I see now that the important parts were given to Jewish kids. Because of this, I could later look back upon those years, and that play, and get an understanding of what Jews looked like. The play also had consultants, Jews helping the play be more authentic. One was a mother of one of the actresses. The play seemed to attract "strong" Jews. What this meant was that they had a certain look. At that time I became aware that there is a Jewish nose because there were so many men and women involved with this play with humped noses. I am not putting that down, just stating it. Much later, looking at Barbara Streisand, I realized, "Oh, she must be Jewish." So slowly, ever so slowly, it began to dawn on me that Jews were a racial group. My programming to never evaluate people racially had kept me from registering rationally what was right in front of me. High school so far had been a fairly lonely experience for me. And partly because of this amazingly cold social atmosphere. I had a few friends, Gentiles they were, but I was drifting apart from them. I had seen how close kids become when involved in play productions together. Part of what I was seeing, unbenownst, was Jewish kids feeling close. But I had hopes that I would feel more connected to other kids through the drama class and finally this production. But it was not to be. I felt strangely ignored all through the production. It was fairly anguishing because I didn't know why. It's true I was shy, but this was pretty ridiculous. I realize now that all these kids knew I was a non-Jew, and ignoring you was just their way. They all seemed to know each other, though, very well. I had one experience that should have made all this clear to me. Before the "Fiddler" production I had been cast as the lead in the play "The Importance of Being Earnest." Opposite me was a fellow cast to be my "best friend" in this satire and witty play by Voltaire. We got to wear period costumes and all. I was proud to be cast as the lead, but of course, nobody there gave me any strokes for it. It seemed that the drama teacher, a very old man, liked me and perhaps saw that I had been shunned for four semesters by the Jews in the class. The kid cast as my "best friend" was part of this Jewish clique that dominated the class. And he had strong Jewish looks. All through out the play, much to my dismay, he delivered his lines with strange twists and innuendos. He would get laughs out of a line that was not supposed to be humorous, and his little crowd in the audience, the Jewish kids, would be tittering at his oddly delivered lines. I realized soon that he was delivering his lines in such a way as to mock me personally, well outside of the intent of the play or the lines themselves. For example he would emphasize a certain word to take it out of the historical context into the modern context. He was doing his lines all wrong, from the play's point of view, with this personal mockery of me the actor behind the character. It was very difficult for me to do the play because of this fellow, and I just soldiered on, glad when it was over. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was getting a dose of the Jewish disdain for the Gentile, and his sense of "otherness" among Gentiles. There was simply no way these kids were ever going to be my friend because they were Jews, and they had been taught from birth that they were "other," and I was "other," and they were superior. If I had understood what was going on, I would have suffered less, and I would have become aware sooner in my life of other aspects of the Jews. But to think of Jews in any negative way was as if forbidden in the culture. I never dreamed that they thought of themselves as racially "other" or considered themselves superior. I still had some hopes with the "Fiddler" production that I might make some friends and feel less isolated by the time it was over. It was not to be. By the time it was over, I felt sadder that before, because despite being involved in their production for weeks, I still felt invisible on the very last closing night. One young Jew, perhaps sensing my isolation, did reach out to me and chat a bit on the last couple of nights. A good hearted young Jew that was. It made some difference and I didn't feel quite so bad. I even got a little crush on one of the Jewish girls in the play, not realizing of course what she was. I tried to talk of her, but nothing came of it. I got some kind of revenge in the end, retroactively. The drama teacher, who had the personality of a timid Englishman and was probably a Gentile, was aware of what was going on and that the Jewish kids treated me as a pariah. I was like a lamb in there, and he saw I had no idea what I was up against. So when the casting list came out he had cast me as their rabbi. God has a way of making things right in the end. Much later, long after leaving the Baha'i Faith and pursuing the path of meditation under my guru Yogananda, my vision was opened and I came to see clearly what role Jews have played in Gentile, or White-European societies for a very long time, and how they have duped Gentiles into their own racial and cultural destruction for Jewish benefit, while continuing to be bonded together strongly as a people. It became part of my mission in life -- just one small part -- to speak of these things, to reveal these things to Gentile eyes, so that the European peoples -- and the racial diversity of this world which the Creator created, and their nations, might be preserved. And so that all peoples could liberate themselves from the growing yoke of Jewish domination which is very real and harrowing now. Never did I hear while growing up that Jews pioneered, and then dominated, the original slave trade to the west. But even had I head that, it would have confused me because I was raised to believe that Jewishness was just a religion. And never did I hear, in many years of history classes, about the evil nature of Soviet Communism. Never did I hear that the founder and bankrollers of the Bolshevik Revolution -- the one that murdered and raped the royal family -- were primarily Jews. Never did I hear that the Communist razed churches and left Synagogues untouched. Worst of all, never did I hear about that greater Holocaust: The massacre of 40 million White Christian Russians, by the heavily Jewish Communists. Communism is indeed evil, and Jews and Communist goals have always gone together. But I had to get away from both schools and television to see clearly enough to see these outstanding facts of history and facts of our world. APPENDICES DETAILS ON MY DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE BAHA'I FAITH Realization: Agreeing About Few Ideas Does Not Guaranty Human Happiness or Harmony I realized that even if you have the smallest little church, and they have the most arcane and specialized beliefs or theology, and all of them say "uncle" or say "I do" to that particular special set of beliefs -- they will still argue! They will still experience division. Even one word is understood in different ways by two people, how much more the complex ideas strung from many words. Giving assent to some common intellectual idea or "principle" does not ensure human happiness or harmony. Inner human happiness assures human happiness. Realization Two: This Religion Is Not Really Spiritual I realized that the Baha'i Faith, which had an ostensible approach to the "spiritual," was actually very outer-oriented and material. I took some sayings of its mystic founder seriously, like "Look within thyself and thou wilt find me standing within thee." Or its frequent reference to the world as the "world of dust." I was so serious about the Baha'i Faith that I really went to the core of it, to its scriptural writings, and studied them more and more. There was a Baha'i "Book of Laws" that was supposed to be one of three "most important scriptures" and called the "Most Great Book." The Baha'is were always saying it "wasn't translated yet." I found out that it had a teaching that Baha'is were supposed to say "the greatest name" 95 times each day. This was a kind of mantra, though I didn't understand it that way just then. The Baha'is would say, "Westerners are not bound by the laws on the Book of Laws yet." But I would say to myself, "Who cares? If you really love the founder and the faith, why would you not want to do all that's in the Book of Laws now?" So, I started, right away as a new Baha'i, doing this daily chant. I got chanting beads numbered 95, and started saying it out loud once a day. Others were not doing that, but I did. I was devoted. At that time, the first time I started chanting "the greatest name" mantra, I started to get phenomena, strange phenomena in my face. I did not know what it was at the time. But this chanting of the Baha'i mantra (don't say that word to Baha'is, it might scare them) was the beginning of my real spiritual development and my first spiritual experience. But many years later, chanting other mantras, it came back and grew, and finally became something called "yogic kriyas." But the realization came later that Baha'is were not really that mystical or that devotional. I found that they shied away from the mystical life, the inward life, and the meditation life -- and from the things talked about in "The Hidden Words," which was their 2nd "most important scripture." This frustrated me, especially as I learned more about other religions. The Bahia's didn't have a word for "meditation." They talked about "prayer" but not meditation. Which leads to another realization... Realization Three: The "One Religion" That Wasn't Enough I found that though they claimed their religion encompassed the other religions, that it reconciled and contained the truths of the other religions, it did not. It just ignored many ideas in other religions. They were afraid and nervous about words like meditation and karma, even though other religions stressed meditation, and spoke much of karma. Leading to another realization. There are many concepts, and words, in the Bhagavad-Gita (for starters) that Baha'is don't know anything about. Their approach was to minimize and gloss over these things saying things like, "Well, that only applied to that time and that people. It is not relevant to today." Concepts like the ego or ahamkara? The purusha? (God as a person as contrasted to God as an abstraction) Concepts like "vrittis" (mental fluctuations)? These are passing ideas only pertaining to one time and people? Later I became interested in astrology. The Baha'i writings had been positive and affirmative toward the study of astrology, but I found that Baha'is didn't like it when I started to study it; seemed uncomfortable with it. Then later, the organization came out with different "translations" of those writings that were more astrology-negative. They changed what the founders had been saying, in these new editions. So I started to see that they had glossed over and ignored many ideas in other religions, and they were intellectually shallow and religiously shallow. One day I was handed the book Autobiography of a Yogi and it blew my mind open wider than I had thought possible about what religion is. I was gripped by that book, illumined, excited, and blessed. I realized then that I hadn't known much at all; I was just a dabbler and there was a whole world of knowledge I'd been unaware of. The idea that God really IS within. And that you actually CAN know God directly. That this is the real purpose of religion and of life. It was all there. The idea of saints was there. I had grown up with that, but it was only vaguely present in the Baha'i faith, which had an institutionalized aversion to assigning any special status to any person, or even acknowledging leaders on any level. I was happy to find there was so much more to know. I realized, too, that this search for God was higher, and bigger, than any of these world-fixing concerns of the Baha'i Faith. Finding God was more important than "trying to make sure all the races smile at each other and pat each other on the back." It was more important than pushing a family-wrecking "equality of men and women" (another Baha'i propaganda plank). It was more important than establishing "one world government" to enforce "no frowns, no troubles, no sorrows," worldwide. (A ridiculous idea if there ever was one.) The Hindu material made in clear that this was the over-arching concern and interest of the truly spiritual man, the real God-seeker. And that it was possible. And there was a lore, scriptures, techniques, and "sages" who could show you the way. My religious life truly began when I was handed that book by a Canadian native American named Larraine. I also started subscribing to Yogananda's meditation lessons by mail, which were published by the organization he left in California, Self Realization Fellowship. I remember when those came, and how when I started to read them, how spiritual it felt. Just seeing one in the mail became bliss for me. This was real knowledge. When I got the lessons from Yogananda, I finally felt I had a true spiritual friend and mentor. My faith was that he, himself, knew God and had attained the attainments of the sages. This was clear from his book. I also felt connected to all those other saints, yogis, and sages that he had visited, and to his own yogic lineage. I was very moved by all this. I read every word with great eagerness and faith. The lessons contain a lot of material that is like filler. Things that he might say at a public meeting on "positive thinking" or "harmonious human relationships," -- the "quality of living" things that a good teacher will try to present to the great unwashed masses; the people not that comfortable with hard mysticism. I also realized later, or found out, that these lessons had been edited or 'sanitized' by SRF monk editors over time. But still, it was my Yogananda's words, mostly, and I sensed his spirit. Over time I read his material more and more, and got so that I could sense his personality, his heart, and his mind. I felt that I could be right there with him in my mind just thinking of him. I started to develop bhakti, or the attitude of devotion for Yogananda. I made him my own. This is what you do when you have a guru. This is the secret. I read "Autobiography" again and again. One of my most special sections was the part where Yogananda first meets his true guru, Yuketeswar, after searching long and hard for a true guru. Yogananda was a canny analyzer of gurus and could not be fooled or accept false goods. And one day he is with a fellow monk going to the marketplace. He passes a little alleyway. At the back of the alley he sees a "sage" standing and looking straight at him down the alley. At that time, in that moment, he knew. He knew that was his guru. He thought in passing, "Who is that amazing sage?" Then is he tried to walk away, he felt himself pulled back as if walking against a current. It got harder to take each step as he tried to walk away. He says humorously that he tried it again (ever the experimenter) to see if it was imagination. He realized, "The sage is pulling me to him." Then in a trice he is at his feet claiming him as Guru. That scene was very moving to me, and I read it over and over again. I also had a fondness for Yukteswar, which came partly from the way Yogananda wrote about him with such respect, awe, and devotion. And partly what Yukteswar said, and the wise, profound personality there. Many years later a meditating friend I knew said Yukteswar was "the Clint Eastwood of gurus" which brought a smile. Many times after seeing that story, I would go back there in my mind. I felt cheated by life that I could not have been there, been there to see that moment. So I would picture that all time exists now, and the past too, and I would visualize that I could be a spirit, in the air, in the ether, and get to a consciousness that could put me back in the past, and I could float there in the air, back in the past, back in the alley, and I could watch Yogananda discover Yuketeswar. Sometimes I felt I saw it, and I was there, and that moment was mine, too. Because that moment of devotion and destiny was so delicious and luminous, it was the great luminous moment of Yogananda's life. And that is how he spoke of it. So as I studied Yogananda and the saints, I started to have these little meditations, trying to connect to them in different ways, trying to wish myself into their presence and be part of their lives, like a sprite from the future hanging in a past-moment air. Later I realized, and Yogananda taught me, that imagination plays a part of spiritual practice and spiritual realization and these efforts at imagining my guru and lineage were actually a potent spiritual practice that bore fruit. Realization Four: Trying to Save The World As Outer Obsession and Materialism I realized that all these Baha'is, all these world-fixers, dreaming of "one world government" and "race unity" were actually materialists. They were totally outer focused. They would get high seeing some black people mixed with Whites. We were racial fetishists. Baha'is get endless thrills from seeing different racial types among them, and they consider this to be a sign of their great enlightenment, power and reach. They're thinking was constructed like this: "Lack of race unity is the great 'problem' in the world. And look at us! We are showing people the way. We are showing that we have race unity. We have The Answers." It is really a childish thought, but that is how they thought, and I did, too, at the beginning. Then there was that "power" aspect. They got high on seeing their expensive Grecian buildings and gardens on Mount Carmel in Israel which were to be the "seat of world government" in the age when all people convert to the Baha'i Faith. I realized that these people were power-trippers, and that power tripping and the desire to control peoples through outer means was not a spiritual or enlightened impulse. It might have been "logical" to them as a way to "fix problems" (though stupid), but there was an element there of getting high on power. Seeing those glorious buildings you'd think "We're the tops. We're the best. We're gonna show 'em. We are the future world government." Eventually the more active ones -- myself included -- ended up dreaming of becoming a "Continental Counselor" or "Auxiliary Board Member" and giving speeches like these others and being a de facto Baha'i celebrity. People would fawn over these "Continental Counselors" in a covert fawning culture. (People do need spiritual leaders, even though the Baha'i faith didn't want to allow them.) This fame orientation, and especially a basic outwardness, was strong in the Baha'is. I realized that it was antithetical to the kind of spirituality of inward realization presented in Hindu yoga. Spiritual development involves renunciation and austerities. And one of the things you renounce is the desire for outer power and fame. Realization Five: Duped by Baha'i Faith Salesmen Later I realized that "Baha'is" had been duped. I began to get curious about this "Most Great Book," the Book of Laws, and why it "had not been translated yet." It was now 130 years on. I understood it had been written in Arabic. I started really wondering, "Is Arabic such a hard language to translate? Are Baha'is unable to afford translators though they can afford all these Grecian buildings made out of rare Italian white marble?" I went up to an "Auxiliary Board Member" in Alaska one day and said, "Has the Book of Laws been translated yet?"and she said "No," and I asked her when it would be, and she gave me a canned answer, and was mealy mouthed about it. I could see she was uncomfortable, too. Soon after that I found myself perusing the Baha'i community library in Palmer, Alaska. It was run by one of the families who had been there a long time. It was in their attic. I had asked if I could go up to see if I wanted to check out any books. That's what it was there for. I was very familiar with the Baha'i literature. My eye glanced upon a little black book spine with the words "Kitab-i-Aqdas" in big serif letters, like English Times Bold. I had never seen this book before in the panoply of Baha'i literature, black, with those gold letters in that particular typeface. There was a "Synopsis and Codification" of the book available, which was supposed to be a "stop gap" collection or summary from the actual book. But it had a different looking black spine and the covers were read. I thought, "Could it be?" I pulled it out. Indeed I had full translation of the "Book of Laws" suddenly in my hands. How did it get there? Why had nobody ever heard of it? Because we weren't supposed to know. It had been done back in the 1930's or 40's by an English scholar of Arabic who had lived long in Arabia and translated many Arabic works. I knew immediately it was probably a forbidden book. I was enough of an insider to know it. The Baha'is had the habit, going back decades, of suppressing certain books. They used to steal them from libraries, especially books by so-called "enemies of the faith" and the more sinister type known as "covenant breakers." I remembered going through the belongings of an historic Baha'i personage, Ruth Moffett, after her death. I had become very close to this Baha'i notable in her extreme age of 98 and I was helping with her estate committee. She even had some little vials that contained actual hair from the head of the founder, Baha'u'llah, who Bahai's consider to be an incarnation of God. We also happened across a stash of strange books about the Baha'i Faith we'd never seen. I was informed in hushed tones they were books attacking the Baha'i Faith by "Covenant Breakers." I remember viewing them as evil and not even wanting to look into them. I didn't want anything to upset the positive ideas and lifestyle I was developing in the Baha'i Faith. I didn't want any doubts. Faith is good. I was not ready for my faith to grow or change yet. Religious understanding always grows and changes as our minds grow. To attack the religion of another person, when it is providing him with good, stability, or virtues is destructive behavior. Anyway, I didn't want to see the books, because I was happy in my understanding of the Baha'i Faith, and growing as a person in it. But now, finding the book was an epiphany for me because I needed answers, and I had a creeping hunch that we had all been scammed. At that time I was ready for some new information. I was ready to grow into something new. And there was this forbidden book. I knew that I would not be permitted to even take it out of there. Trembling, I hid it under my coat and snuck past them with it, using a decoy of other books I was checking out, books I cared not one nit about. By this time I had become very disappointed with the personalities of Baha'is, and did not mind breaking faith with them a little if it meant uncovering truth. I remember wondering if this was a translation by some "enemy of the faith" trying to make the faith look bad, and if this was why it was suppressed. But it turned out this "Book of Laws" was honest and straight-forward with no agenda. It had been translated easily long ago by an impartial Arabic scholar from England. And it was short! It was clearly being withheld from the Baha'is, and the public, because it presented a very different picture of the faith" than what Baha'i teachers were constantly selling. It was far more Islamic in feel. More rigid. More harsh. More doctrinaire in that Quranic way. It contained odd daily rules and practices and it felt like culture shock. Strange things about women and their periods and what they had to do, which seemed to fly in the face of the "equality of men and women" idea. Rules about the haircuts of men. Odd little rules about how to eat food. Apparently allowing for polygamy among Bahai's, it merely considered it virtuous if men had no more than two wives, which also flew in the face of the Baha'is feminist teachings. I also noted that the book was palpably spiritual and full of devotion and piety, and that Muslim spirit of rectitude before God. It painted the picture of an amazing, deeply devout religious community. I saw in my mind the spiritual community that Baha'is were meant to become, but didn't. Because they didn't even have their "most holy book" I realized that what the sellers of the Baha'i faith concocted to sell to the masses was engineered for simply that: selling. The Baha'i Faith had become a concoction to be sold to "progressive" people. There was always this thing the Baha'is had called the "ten basic principles" of the Baha'i Faith. They would print it up on a card and recite them at teaching events. I realized that if you asked ten scholars come up a "ten basic principles" from Baha'i scriptures, none would arrive at the list the Baha'is were using. The "equality of men and women" -- on the Baha'i "ten basic" list -- is not even mentioned directly in any of the "three important scriptures." Martyrdom, on the other hand, is mentioned and extolled possibly a hundred times in these scriptures. But "the glory of martyrdom" is not on that card. The "oneness of mankind" is on the card. Yet the founder Baha'u'llah mentioned this idea only just a bit. No more than the average mystic. He did speak of devotion, or bhakti, in numerous places. Yet that's not on the "10 basic principles" card. Their scriptures are filled with references to the inner mystical life. Nothing on the card about that, either. The card mentions "the harmony of science and religion" as a "basic principle." This is taken from, perhaps, one statement from the founder that science and technology should accord with religious values and truths. Baha'is were listing this with a shallow understanding of it's import, and for disingenuous effects. See, the founders, including the Bab and Baha'ullah, were actually anti-technology and this had been suppressed. I found in my new unbiased translation that the Bab, an important earlier spiritual figure among the Baha'i founders, had forbade the use of certain new inventions and technologies. He even forbade traveling more than a certain distance from your home, probably in an anti-technology stance. (That would blunt any cultural need for automobiles.) His successor, Baha'u'llah, made other anti-technology statements. One I remember by heart was, "We have heard that an infernal engine hath been devised. Soon it's fire will consume the cities." This was a prediction that the automobile, the new sacred cow of the west, would destroy neighborhoods, towns as real human places, and culture itself. But I knew that Baha'is took this item about "the harmony of science and religion" and made it backwards. They believed it meant that science and technology should be accepted and pursued unhampered by religious ideas or "superstitions." That there was no fundamental conflict between them. The founders had meant the opposite thing: That technology and inventions be only pursued inasmuch as they comported with religious and social ideals, and not to the destruction of those. Science and technology were to be in accord with -- in compliance with -- religious cultural values. Not the other way around. Technology and invention were not absolute values for their own sake. So, this "Book Of Laws," in full translation, showed me that the 'Baha'i faith' we were sold had been concocted by modern marketing minds, intended to appeal to liberal or "progressive" thinkers in the west. Although by that time I could see the value of the mystical attitude in the text, and the austere rules orientation to daily life, I could see that it was not the faith I had bought. At that point, too, being so exposed now to yoga, meditation, the Yoga-Sutras and such, I could see that it was too primitive, to anciently Islamic, to really be my religion even in its true form. I was already becoming spoiled by the lofty voice of the Bhagavad-Gita and the rich arcana of mind and manifestation in the Yoga-Sutras. Quite disgusted with this discovery, but also quite illumined and freed up, I stopped activities and involvements with the Baha'i Faith. I had begun to find the people annoying anyway. Cut off from a real spiritual life, they were just like any other westerners. In fact, Baha'is seemed, by then, to be a motley crew of fairly flawed and dysfunctional people, just enjoying the community connection their faith afforded, along with the power-tripping elements and White guilt bandages it afforded. What the Baha'i Faith did have, and for this I am grateful to it, was the mystical scriptures dripping with the spirit of bhakti, and strict moral rules, though they were not encompassing and full. Hinduism and yoga seemed to offer even more noble visions of morality and devotion. Realization Six: "Racial Disunity" is not a Major World Problem I realized that "racial disunity" was not really, truly, one of the basic problems of the world. This idea had been concocted, I realized later, largely by Jews who came to gradually influence our academic and media environments. This propaganda was for their interests. It helped foment the destruction of racial identities and unique national identities, and this benefited Jews in their host countries. But that is another subject. I gradually outgrew my programming about how "bad" my White ancestors were and how important "racial" division was. I realized that it is entirely natural and appropriate to favor your own type, your own family, and your own people. I saw that this is what the "diversity" of the world is about. Baha'is always threw around the phrase "diversity. Most Baha'is had grown up with a white-guilt program from the schools and media, and like me, were looking for an "answer" to all the anguish it caused them, and felt they had found that answer in the Baha'i faith. So, most Whites in the Baha'i Faith are there, in part, because it helps them get rid of the "white guilt" sliver that has been inserted under their skin. As I grew, I realized that Whites were the ones who freed the slaves, and flirted with slavery only briefly in historical terms, that Africans themselves had been enslaving each other for ages, and that's how we came into contact with it. I also realized, much later, that it was primarily Jews who were the big slave traders, and that "Jew" means a race or ethnic group just as much as a religion, or more so. But Whites were taking all the blame. Also that slavery is still practiced in Africa, and even in Israel, while Whites long ago, in classic noble-minded fashion, outlawed it. We were always getting a bum rap in the media. I realized it was natural for different peoples to congregate together. This is the real "diversity" of the world. When you mix them all together, the diversity of the world has to perish, both culturally and genetically. Yet this gray-paint was what Baha'is were creating, and later culture and media in the west followed suit. |
18PT |