The Joy of Uber Driving

by Yamini Redewill

  By this time, I was right in the middle of one of my proudest achievements as the wardrobe designer of the Flo TV series at Warner Bros. This was a spinoff of the Alice show with Linda Lavin, where Polly Holliday first played the character Flo. Right after my trip to Geetam, I made arrangements to go to India, even though the show was not finished with its first season.

  I rolled up my Gohonzon (sacred object of worship scroll), gave it back to my senior leaders, packed my bags, and left for India with my shades-of-red wardrobe and my new name and mala. Before I left, the credits on Flo now showed my name as Ma Veet Yamini. When I told my boss Rita Riggs that I was leaving for India before the end of the season, she sarcastically said, “Whatever gets you through the night.” How synchronistic . . . she had no idea how close she came to accurately describing the meaning of my name.

  I was sorry to leave my family on the Flo show, as I was to leave my Buddhist family. Time to join a new tribe that resonated with my soul’s purpose.

  Being the romantic dreamer that I was, I packed everything into a large trunk that I thought would be needed for an infinite number of years in India. There were no thoughts of ever returning to America. I was a “lifer” for Bhagwan. But nothing had prepared me for what I was to encounter when I got to India. The plane landed around 2 a.m., and I shared a taxi with two other sannyasins to go from Bombay (now Mumbai) to Pune, which was about a five-hour drive. Little boy beggars followed me to the car and tapped on the window while a policeman batted them way with his billy club. I looked apologetically at them through the window, confused and shocked by the brutality.

  Pulling out of the airport, our cab picked up speed to about eighty miles per hour without any headlights on and drove down a long narrow unlit country road that stretched for hundreds of miles. This was very unnerving, but what we saw along the way made it pale by comparison. We saw overturned trucks with bodies of people strewn about. I would guesstimate that we saw at least three such incidents that night. My cabbie didn’t pay any attention and quickly sped by. Then we were stopped by uniformed police at two different posts who asked to inspect our baggage and in return demanded baksheesh, a socially required donation/fee. I was seeing the underbelly of the Indian culture, which I would run into in many different ways, counterbalanced with the serenely beautiful and spiritual side. But looking back, the underbelly of India is small potatoes compared to the US, where corruption on a massive scale is becoming our commonly known reality.

  I have to pause, here in 2016, because I have been distracted and heavily involved emotionally with what is going on with our nation’s politics. Suffice it to say, there is a strong stench of incitement of violence going on here. What started as an unbelievably outrageous joke has turned into an actual threat to the security of our country and the world and now, specifically, to an opposing candidate’s life. It is August and we’re ninety days away from the 2016 election.

  It has been a wild ride since Donald Trump came on the scene and brought his reality show to politics. We joked about his orange face, his fake comb-over and tiny hands. This narcissistic, misogynistic, racist, xenophobe has dominated the news every day with a new outrageous comment that would have disqualified anyone else from running for president. We keep thinking the latest “gaffe” will undo him. But he seems to get away with murder, which is truly frightening in light of what he said yesterday. He suggested his Second Amendment people take matters into their own hands should Hillary get elected and appoint her liberal anti-gun judges to the Supreme Court. There is a lot of concern about what this kind of talk will lead to, given the volatility of his supporters. He’s now calling Clinton and Obama the “founders” of ISIS. It takes only one unstable person out of the millions who own guns and are influenced by Trump to go off the rails and think they are doing the country a big favor by killing either Clinton or Obama. I’m hoping that whatever unseen forces have protected Obama all these years are also on the job for Hillary.

  As the landscape began to light up with the rising sun, we arrived at the ashram* around seven. I dragged my trunk to the place where I was told Swami James stayed, which turned out to be a grass hut with an earthen floor. I peeked in and heard snoring. He was sound asleep, surrounded by a mosquito net, so I quietly went back outside to sit on my trunk and think. I watched other sannyasins silently floating in and out of the complex in long cotton robes as if in a dream. I had on a stylish knee-length red dress, along with high heels and a maroon fake-fur jacket. At this point, I decided to go mainstream and secure a room in a local luxury hotel for at least a week so I could get acclimated. I hailed a rickshaw, which regularly drove by this complex. It took me to the nearest upscale hotel called The Blue Diamond Hotel.

  *The Osho ashram in Pune, India, is now a first-class commercialized resort, retreat center, and “multiversity,” unrecognizable from the Rajneesh ashram I remember in 1981. (Bhagwan changed his name to Osho after leaving Oregon in 1985.)

  Here I was in Bhagwan’s Holy Land. I could feel his energy all around me (it was like the scent of Jasmine) and couldn’t wait to see him in person at his daily two-hour discourse in Buddha Hall. After settling into my hotel room and sleeping for a solid three hours, I got up and hurriedly returned to the commune in something simpler and more appropriate. I registered for some workshops and received a communal introduction/instruction sheet and a schedule from Ma Anand Sheela, Bhagwan’s assistant secretary. This is when I found out Bhagwan was in strict quarantine, because someone arrived with chicken pox, and he wouldn’t be speaking for a while.

  PING! I answered a call from a man named José. Pulling up to the area where he should be, I saw a disheveled Latino sitting on the curb with his head in his hands. I thought to myself, Oh no, he’s a homeless drunk. Turned out he was very sick, having a reaction to the medication given to him for lupus. He was also an Uber driver, so he had a plastic bag handy in case he vomited, which he thought might happen before we reached his destination: the emergency room at Kaiser. I expressed my sincere concern for him and engaged in a conversation about Uber driving, saying I was writing a book about it, and asked if he had any great stories he could share. This seemed to take his mind off his condition, and he was excited to relate a couple of stories that he loved. By the time we got to Kaiser, he was feeling much better and smiling. He thanked me for listening and caring. I drove away happy that I didn’t allow my initial judgment, which was so completely wrong, take over and prevent me from having the kind of exchange we did. I was glad that I could help this sweet man in his time of need.

  It was a full month before Bhagwan came out, and to make matters worse, he went into complete permanent silence. No more discourses and no more darshans (personal dialogues and energy transfers) by him. Drawing from my experience with the Buddhist organization and the victim mentality I’d acquired, I narcissistically believed that it was because I was there.

  Well, I was dead-on right. In bringing my victimhood condition to India, I called in an experience that resonated with that mindset. For years as a Buddhist, I felt victimized because I was never promoted to senior leader status and therefore denied access to special meetings with our headquarters chief and others I admired. Now it reflected exactly in the fact that Bhagwan was unavailable to me in the ways he had been to thousands of others for years. Had I come just a month earlier, I would have had a completely different experience. In fact, my friend Krishna Prem at Geetam kept warning me to try and get to India as soon as possible. What did he know, and why didn’t I heed his warning? Simple. I was a victim and had to play it out by experiencing it fully. Not being able to hear Bhagwan’s discourses nor receive his darshan was the perfect setup for me to continue feeling like a victim.

  I signed up for a handful of workshops, which was customary upon entering the commune. The first one, Centering, was three solid days of being asked and asking another only one question: “Who are you?” After listing all the ways I defined myself over and over again, I began to realize I’m non
e of those things. There was a moment when all preconceived ideas of myself disappeared and I experienced a connection to my heart that was a moment of complete and utter bliss.

  Coming out of that blissful state, I happily went to my Gestalt Art workshop, thinking I would be showing off my artistic talent, but instead I was thrown into my prior condition of being a victim through a form of Gestalt therapy. I was then allowed to scream at Bhagwan’s portrait on the wall until my rage and self-pity dissolved into a puddle of sweat and tears on the floor.

  We were thrown into many exercises involving sexual relatedness. Once, I was put in the center of the room with a young man, and we were told to flirt with each other through only eye contact and sensuous body movements. It was awkward at first, but after some coaching by the facilitator, we ended up in an embrace. Then we were given one piece of letter-sized paper and a child’s watercolor set and paintbrush and instructed to paint for the next six hours on that one piece of paper. I was done with my composition in thirty minutes, but no, I had to continue for the next five and a half hours on that same piece of paper. This was an ego-smashing exercise for me, which, despite my sincerely held doubts, yielded acceptable results in the end. I then went home with a complete stranger that night, as ordered, and slept with him in a hammock outdoors. I don’t remember how we hooked up: if I initiated it or if he did. Nevertheless, he was a cute, curly-haired Italian who was very respectful and sweet.

  We were both kind of shy, this being the first such experience for both of us. We gingerly climbed into the hammock and lay on our backs, cuddling close and looking up at the starry sky. Suddenly, I felt his hot breath on my neck and a hand sliding over my belly and softly brushing my left breast as he brought his hand up to my face, preparing me for a tender kiss. My whole body responded with electricity, and the kiss became a tsunami of passion. I don’t remember what happened after that except it was orgasmic. I felt like a wild animal and couldn’t get enough. I must have consumed him, because there was little left of him after that, nor me, for that matter. My thirteen years of celibacy became ancient history that night, like dust in the wind. Exhausted, we laughed and scooped up our clothes to cover our bodies as we lay together, blissfully ready for sleep in the softly rocking hammock. The moon winked at us between rustling leaves on the trees above us, and in the distance, a peacock howled its approval.

  Bhagwan once said that monogamy was unnatural and intimate relationships should last only a year and a half at most. I don’t believe he meant this as a fact but rather as a device to shake up our preconceived ideas on sex, love, and marriage. This may have been good news for his male sannyasins but not for most women, who, the minute they let a man “inside,” become attached and strive for a long-term relationship.

  Marriage Is Really a Dilemma

  “Without marriage there will be no misery—and no laughter either. There will be so much silence . . . it will be Nirvana on the earth! Marriage keeps thousands of things going on: the religion, the state, the nations, the wars, the literature, the movies, the science. Everything, in fact, depends on the institution of marriage. I am not against marriage; I simply want you to be aware that there is a possibility of going beyond it too. But that possibility also opens up only because marriage creates so much misery for you, so much anguish and anxiety for you that you have to learn how to transcend it. It is a great push for transcendence. Marriage is not unnecessary; it is needed to bring you to your senses, to bring you to your sanity. Marriage is necessary and yet there comes a point when you have to transcend it too.”

  —Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, TAO: The Golden Gate, vol. 2, talk 9

  I believe the workshops were designed to smash the illusion of our unconscious dependency on relationships for our happiness. The only commitment that was emphasized by Bhagwan was to one’s own awakening (self-love).

  “Both males and females must ultimately become androgynous and harmonious sexual beings. They must learn to complete their own circuit of life’s energy without sexual union with another and therein, be in resonance with the cosmic, oceanic energy field always present. Then the feelings of sex are transcended; one is in love with all that is.”

  —Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, The Mustard Seed

  Finally, after one month, Bhagwan made his appearance every morning for music satsang. He was driven in a white Rolls-Royce limo to behind the stage area from which he appeared. He walked slowly to his chair while scanning the room and making eye contact with everyone with a Namaste (hands in prayer) gesture. He then sat and closed his eyes while musicians played enchantingly beautiful flute and sitar music. Our heads were bowed and eyes closed in deep meditation with the music. Once, without thinking, I opened my eyes and saw that Bhagwan was looking straight at me. It was a serendipity moment. Then drums and percussion instruments were added to pick up the beat, and he waved his arms rhythmically to stir up the energy. Many of his musicians went on to become world-renowned New Age instrumentalists, such as Kitaro, Deuter, Deva Premal, and Miten. Music meditations were a central part of the Rajneesh program.

  Buddha Hall was a massive white tent with a cement floor accommodating about three thousand people, mostly from India, Europe, Japan, and America We were packed like sardines in kneeling and cross-legged positions on the floor. We had to leave our shoes at the door while an attendant handed us a cough drop. They prohibited any coughing during satsang. You would be escorted out if you coughed. I had a chronic cough from smoking, but I learned very quickly to control it with tears streaming down my cheeks. I was never escorted out.

  Bhagwan had devised over sixty-four variations of meditations, many of which involve music and dancing blindfolded. His most famous meditation, practiced daily by everyone, was a one-hour five-part series of movements called Dynamic Meditation, done first thing in the morning. Blindfolded, we begin the first ten minutes doing the “dragon’s breath” (pushing the breath out of our noses rapidly with our bellies), which would then move into ten minutes of screaming and pounding the floor with our fists and then ten minutes of jumping up and down with arms over our heads, shouting “Hoo, Hoo, Hoo” from the belly, then to 10 minutes of total silence and standing perfectly still with arms still up in the air, and then to the remaining time of dancing softly to music playing again. This was a very challenging meditation, but it can be life changing if done every day for three weeks (so they say).

  My favorite meditation was Vipassana, which was ten days of absolute silence while sitting blindfolded for hours at a time. Every forty-five minutes or so, someone would come up and tap you on the head with a stick to make sure you weren’t asleep. In between sittings, you would remove the blindfold and do the Zen walk (picture a movie of someone walking in very slow motion), which was so slow it would take thirty minutes to complete a circle around the relatively small area (a canopied rooftop porch). There was no talking, reading, writing, or even making eye contact with the other participants this whole time. Eating was also done slowly with extreme awareness of every morsel of food being digested. Try it sometime . . . the simplest food will taste like manna from heaven.

  One of the greatest things about this meditation is the awareness of life on the outside through the cacophony of recognizable everyday sounds. One such sound came from the stairwell leading to our rooftop, occasionally inhabited by a female who had two or three sexual encounters during those ten days. The lovemaking sounds were impossible to miss. It was a form of extreme discipline to control your teenage urge to giggle.

  PING! An attractive young couple in their twenties climbed into the back seat for a thirty-minute ride from Union Square in San Francisco to Sausalito in Marin. I started chatting with them, but they barely heard me and answered only with “yeah, uh-huh” and then giggled as they seemed to be locked into another agenda. Catching a glimpse of them pawing each other and in a passionate kiss, I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds of foreplay. When I perceived that it was getting out of control, I swerved the car, seeming to avoi
d an accident, but that didn’t work. So then I stopped suddenly while going down a steep hill, which successfully interrupted their little back-seat tryst. Finally, they either got the message or gave up. She smoothed her hair and took out her cosmetic bag to freshen her makeup. He coughed self-consciously while straightening his shirt. They looked back at me in the rearview mirror and smiled sheepishly when our eyes met (so cute). I nodded and said we were almost at their destination and commented on what a lovely day it was. They both responded in unison very enthusiastically, “Oh yes!” and then I heard a muffled giggle as he whispered something in her ear. They acted as if they had succeeded in getting away with something unnoticed by their Uber driver.

  Regarding Rajneesh’s infamous sex workshops, my experience of them is that they were liberating while being confrontational. As mentioned before, we were often instructed to go home with someone we didn’t know and sleep with them and report our insights about it the next day. Mostly, they were exercises in dismantling false beliefs we have about our bodies, and our fears of exposing ourselves to judgment, humiliation, and rejection. The commune’s restrooms had open stalls used by both men and women. It took some getting used to, but eventually, you thought nothing of it.

  It amuses me that while I write this, there are people in government who are so uptight about the transgender bathroom issue that they are trying to pass laws to discriminate against them. They believe this will protect the privacy of everyone else. Bhagwan was way ahead of his time and apparently still is.

  I got used to riding my bike everywhere except to downtown Pune, when I would take a motorized rickshaw or hitch a ride on the back of a motor scooter. I lived in a complex of four separate huts situated behind a mansion owned by a freethinking Indian princess who loved sannyasins. Apparently, sometime in the past, she went against her father’s wishes for an arranged marriage to a raja (nobleman) and was disowned by her family.