We got PO boxes, we listed our phone numbers as private, we stopped inviting people to our homes, we disappeared from the Internet, and we hid from cameras. We didn’t even tell people we were going to Egypt (if we did, they would psychically be on the trip with us). We lied to our friends and families. We danced around direct questions about our lives.
In March, we arrived in Egypt. Before I left, I gave a sealed envelope to my boyfriend, a snowboarder I had met just before I became Lakshmi’s student. I told him I was going away but that I could not disclose where, and instructed him to open the envelope if I didn’t call him ten days later. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. I told him not to worry, that I was going on a retreat and would have a better experience if no one knew my exact whereabouts. He was concerned and began to argue with me but, in the end, agreed to not open the envelope.
In Egypt, we met the senior students for the first time. Many of them were overweight, sluggish, and forlorn. Some of them had been in the program for more than twenty years. They looked worn-out and haggard compared with our group of energetic, fit, bright and shiny eager puppies. I couldn’t figure out why they all looked so incredibly dejected. We were walking a path of magic, on our way to Enlightenment. We were learning the secrets of the universe. What the hell was wrong with them?
Very few of them made an effort to interact with us. They seemed miserable, so we, in turn, avoided them as much as possible.
While in Egypt, I had another experience of total dissolution—similar to, but much more intense, than the one I experienced the first time I sat in front of Lakshmi. We were visiting the step pyramid of Djoser, at Saqqara, and Lakshmi told me to touch it with the palm my hand. When I did, I immediately dissolved into white light. I felt myself being drawn toward a gigantic orb of light that was pulsing with love. I knew this orb was my Source. I was absorbed into the orb and was suddenly back Home, where I started, where it all began.
The feeling was so blissful that it is difficult to explain. I wanted to stay there forever. I felt as if I was there forever. But, in the far distance, I kept hearing a name: “. . . Renee . . .” Some part of the back of my mind registered that this is what they used to call me. It was one of my many names.
Just then, a hand touched me, and I opened my eyes and returned to my body.
“Please don’t touch the pyramid,” a guard said.
Emily had been calling my name, trying to get me to take my hand off the pyramid. Even though she was standing right next to me, her voice had sounded a million miles away, and I had barely noticed her touch.
“Where were you?” she asked, slightly scared, slightly annoyed, slightly envious.
“I don’t know,” I said. There was no way I could possibly explain it.
When I got back on the bus, I asked Lakshmi about it. “What is the deal with the step pyramid? Where did I go? I felt so much more energy there than I did at the Great Pyramid.”
She smiled, her eyes twinkling with mischief and love. “I’ll tell you this evening,” she said.
Later that night, she told us that her Teacher had built the step pyramid and had hidden his power there, away from the Great Pyramid. I glowed in the aftermath of my experience. I felt supercharged with light. The renewed feeling of love and light and God (or Source) and bliss and utter pristine stillness and expansion entrenched me further on this path. I had to know more and there was no way I was going to back down before I became completely Enlightened and able to help others do the same.
When we returned from Egypt, my responsibilities grew again. Lakshmi wanted to teach a new series of public seminars over the summer and needed my help booking venues.
She called one day to say, “I have a huge vinyl poster that needs to be picked up from the printer, driven downtown to a movie theater, and then strung up in the lobby. I need you to do this because I know you will get it done properly. So far, you have proved that if I want something done immediately and correctly, you are the person to call.”
I felt elated.
“There is a lot of light in this poster,” she told me. “You will have to be extremely careful while driving. I want you to get in your naval chakra and stay there until the task is complete. Then I want you to check in with Vishnu and let him know you have safely completed the task.”
I felt like a Secret Service agent delivering the President. Over the next few weeks, I helped Lakshmi place radio ads and newspaper ads and helped her print hundreds of posters and postcards. The artwork on her advertisements was beautiful, and each time I looked at the posters and flyers, my mind went completely still from all the energy they emitted and my eyeballs felt like they were floating in light. Lakshmi called this experience “getting baked.”
“You are going to feel totally baked after picking up the posters,” she would say. I did, and I loved it.
I was now speaking to her or e-mailing with her daily. I quit computer programming classes in order to be more available for her. She approved of this because she knew I could also have a successful career as an event planner or project manager, and she was now leading me in this new direction. I also quit teaching dance, excited about spending the majority of my time in service to my guru.
Lakshmi soon decided to combine the senior student seminars with the new student seminars, so I suddenly had a lot of work to do with Vishnu: changing databases, combining mailing lists, and looking for larger venues.
Lakshmi had told many of us, myself included, that we should learn karate, but we had had difficulty finding a good dojo in town.
“It will make you strong,” she said. “It will make you disciplined. It will help you handle the power of this Lineage, and the loud kiai—the yell—when you strike will encourage you to be fierce.”
Once she found out I had spent most of my life dancing ballet, she said, “Ballet is just as intense as karate, if not more so. It is the same thing, the same training. Ballet is warrior training. You do not need karate, but I still think you should take some classes if you can find a good dojo. Learning to kiai will be good for you.”
I was still quite shy. I couldn’t imagine yelling like that. She was right; it would be good for me. Apparently, Vishnu was a fourth-degree black belt and, according to Lakshmi, “the greatest martial artist to ever incarnate.” I asked her if he could teach us; I mean, if he was “the greatest martial artist to ever incarnate,” I wanted to train with him. Lakshmi soon gave Vishnu this new task; he started with just the volunteers.
The small group of us met on the beach to train with him when he was in town. It drew the volunteers even closer together. It also drew us closer to Vishnu; he was now our sensei, and we looked up to him with reverence. The training was not easy; he made us run laps in the sand, swim in the freezing water, do tons of pushups, and practice kicks and punches until our limbs gave out. We loved every sweaty, salty, sandy second of it. Most of the volunteers were Lakshmi’s and Vishnu’s “security team,” so I was training with a group almost entirely made up of military men and women. I felt tougher and stronger with every class, and I watched my body change; already very strong from dancing and yoga and surfing, it became even stronger. Stronger mind, stronger body. I was ready for the next step.
Throughout June, July, and August, in addition to our monthly weekend classes and our beach trainings with Vishnu, we also got to attend Lakshmi’s public University of Mysticism events. This gave all of us more time with the two of them, which we loved. Lakshmi even organized a Sunday-afternoon beach meditation in June and a Sunday hike in July; we were getting to see her (and Vishnu) seven or eight days a month at this point. By the time September rolled around again, the volunteers were a family, with Lakshmi and Vishnu as our parental figures. We goofed off when they weren’t around; we straightened up when they appeared. We looked at both of them starry-eyed. We spent more and more of our time together and less and less time with friends outside the group.
In the fall, Lakshmi decided it was time for Vishnu to t
each all of her students karate, and I was asked to help Vishnu locate a training space. He found possible training spaces all over town and requested I show up at these spaces to check them out with him, which I always did.
Each time I showed up to a possible dojo space, he seemed excited to see me and always took the time to ask how I was doing, with a warm smile and sparkling eyes. He told me he trusted my sense of energy and that I would be able to help him decide which space was “energetically clean enough” to become his karate dojo. One day, as we were walking back to our cars after looking at a space, he casually mentioned that it wasn’t appropriate for me to surf in a bikini immediately after the martial arts classes he held on the beach. He said he noticed too many of the male students staring at me, which he explained was “not good for my energetic body.” I felt surprised by this. I had spent most of my life in a tiny bikini. But I decided to embrace it. He seemed to really care about me, to be looking out for my well-being. It made me feel protected. I felt . . . fathered by him. He said now that I was working so closely with him and Lakshmi that the other students would want to “fuck me or fight me” and that I had to be careful how I presented myself. He began calling me daily.
Over the summer, I had talked three more of my closest longtime friends, Jessica, Matt, and Paul, into joining the group. All three of them came to the public seminars and were awed by what they experienced. Lakshmi seemed to be in rare form. In one seminar, she paced the stage swearing like a sailor.
“Fuck the Dalai Lama. Fuck Mother Theresa,” she said. Fuck this, fuck that, fucking this, fucking that.
The auditorium had been close to full when the event began; people started running for the door when she started in with the f-bombs. After more than half the audience cleared out, Lakshmi sat down. She sighed.
“That’s better,” she said. “Those people didn’t want to be here. I helped them out by making them so uncomfortable they had to leave. Now we can get down to business. What do you want to know?”
The remaining people still felt uncomfortable, she could tell, so she said, “It is important not to take life too seriously. I think the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa are Magnificent Beings that do wonderful work. But it is amazing that we all get so upset by the comments made by strangers. We must learn to control our minds. We must learn to not be yanked around by the events that surround us.”
As the public events progressed, she got sillier and sillier, making the audience roar with laughter, shocking them with her profanity. In another event, she explained The Bhagavad Gita: She called Govinda/Krishna (the charioteer and incarnation of God) the “taxi driver” and said Arjuna (the greatest warrior that ever lived) was “sniveling like a pussy.”
“Stop being a pussy and go do what God made you to do,” she paraphrased Krishna. Again, she had us howling with laughter.
Immediately after, she got serious when she read the passage that starts with “Some say this Atman is slain, and others call it the slayer. They know nothing. How can it slay or who shall slay it?”
She paused for dramatic effect and said it was her favorite passage in any book. She read it beautifully, and most of us were weeping when she was finished. And, as always, she stressed the importance of sharpening our minds with meditation and rocking our careers.
My friends loved her. All three of them relocated to California in order to become her students. Now, I had five of my closest longtime friends in the sangha. My thrill at having Matt, Jessica, and Paul suddenly in California was quickly squashed, however. Vishnu strongly suggested I not spend time with them.
“They will be changing rapidly and need to integrate on their own,” he said. “They hold a lot of energy from your past; they will pull you backward. You have been a student for over a year; you are much more advanced. Now that you are so close to Lakshmi and me, your energy affects us. You don’t want to harm us with old energy, do you?”
No, of course I didn’t. I allowed my friends’ calls to go to my voicemail. Eventually, they became volunteers, and I could spend time with them again, but by then, a distance had formed between us. I was Lakshmi’s and Vishnu’s “right hand woman.” They were simply volunteers. We all knew I was different.
One day, Vishnu told me I was to accompany him to a beach about two hours away to scout out a location for a karate class. He said two others from my sangha would join us and that I should meet him in a certain parking lot at a certain time. This was the first time so few of us had been singled out for an all-day outing with him.
He called as I was on my way to meet him, saying the other two wouldn’t be joining us, and asked me to stop in a store and buy two sandwiches.
“I’ll take care of drinks,” he said.
I was really nervous at the thought of spending so much time alone with Vishnu. With two other sangha mates, it would have been nerve-racking enough, but spending the entire day alone with him made me feel slightly petrified. At the same time, however, I felt extremely honored that Lakshmi would allow me to go on this trip. I imagined her resting after the last event, gathering her energy, and trusting me enough to send me on this outing with her man.
I was waiting in the parking lot when Vishnu showed up in the shiny, sparkling clean SUV with tinted windows. After climbing into the car, I suddenly realized I was sitting in Lakshmi’s seat. Vishnu was wearing volleyball shorts and a T-shirt; I hadn’t expected to see him so dressed down. He looked at my outfit—business casual—and told me I was dressed wrong, that I needed clothing I could get wet and sandy in. My house was three minutes from the parking lot, and he said I should drive home and change, that he would wait for me. So I drove home, changed, and drove back in less than ten minutes.
I barely spoke during the awkward forty-five-minute drive. Vishnu rambled on and on about how you call a gun a weapon and about all the different components and how they work, and why different guns are used in different situations. I tried to remember it all, thinking it must be important somehow, but it was too much information to take in at once.
At some point, he said, “We’re here,” and stopped talking as we passed an empty ranger booth that led to an empty parking lot. In silence, we walked from the parking lot to the sand—a challenging descent on a narrow path through bushes and trees down a rather steep and jagged cliff. When we finally reached the sand, he took a few steps toward the water and sat down, so I sat down next to him. The beach was deserted. As I began pulling the sandwiches out of my backpack, he pulled from his a bottle of French champagne and two glasses.
I was shocked and suddenly afraid. This was Lakshmi’s man—wasn’t he? At events, she would talk about her journey to Enlightenment and say, “And, as you can see—” she would motion with her head toward Vishnu, “—I think everything turned out okay.” All the students assumed they were a couple. They wore matching rings on their wedding ring fingers. Why did he bring a bottle of champagne to drink with me, alone on this beach? He opened it, holding his massive hand over the cork so it didn’t go flying, poured it into the flutes, handed me one, and said, “To us.”
The color drained from my face, and I held my breath.
“Renee,” he said, “you have tremendous power. It is an honor to have you work with us, and I look forward to getting to know you better.”
I exhaled. I took a few sips. I had not been drinking for months, and I did not want to be drunk in front of my boss, but I did not want to be rude, either. When he wasn’t looking, I poured the rest of my glass in the sand. We ate in awkward silence.
Suddenly, he said, “I want to show you something. I want to know if it seems familiar.”
He got up, walked about ten feet away toward the ocean, kept his back to me, and started doing tai chi and karate moves.
Familiar? I had no idea what he was talking about, but I wanted to sound evolved, so I said, “I can tell that you had a lot of military past lives.”
This made him smile. He loved telling us about his military past lives.
Then he asked me to dance for him. I wanted to disappear into the sand. Dance for him? Alone on this beach? I had on a little white T-shirt and yellow sweatpants with a bikini underneath. Instantly, I realized my outfit was too tight, the material too thin. It was too see-through.
I got up, awkwardly, and walked a few feet away. I did some ballet leaps, a few pirouettes, and then some more modern dance–style lunges and yoga-type balances. I threw in a few Argentine tango moves. I couldn’t look at him, afraid to see the expression on his face. The emptiness of the beach scared me. The water was crashing along the shore and I was wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into.
Next, we went for a long walk, and he told me that he was “turning into a force of nature” and that, because of his line of work, he suffered from PTSD. He also told me that being around me helped him, that I could help him. I had previously offered, in a thank-you card I wrote him after the first time he taught us karate, to help him in any additional way possible. I did not, of course, mean romantically. In fact, it never even crossed my mind. At the time I wrote the card, I had been dating and was in love with the snowboarder I met in Colorado, and this man, my Spiritual Teacher’s man, while attractive and sexy in his serving and protecting of Lakshmi, honestly, when he was up close, on this beach, not in his role of bodyguard or sensei, wearing volleyball shorts and a T-shirt, telling me to dance for him, seemed old and overweight to me. He was handsome, yes, but in an older-man, father-figure type of way.
He kept talking. Suddenly I felt sorry for him. As he softened and admitted his vulnerability I wanted to help, felt flattered that I could help. I relaxed a little. Although being on the beach alone with him felt strange and uncomfortable and a bit scary, something about it also felt really right. I was so lost, so desperately searching. I had been craving for parental figures since I lost my father at fifteen years old. Walking along the beach with this older man made me feel like maybe I had found the mentor I was looking for. With him and Lakshmi in my life, I was no longer alone. I had older, wiser, Enlightened people to guide me.
The Burn Zone Page 6