She took out a Kleenex and wiped away the moisture around her eyes as she continued, in between hiccups. “Excuse me, I seemed to have gotten the hiccups. This sometimes happens when I get (hic!) emotional. This poor woman has been to hell and back! I thought I had an exclusive patent on this one (hic!) but apparently not. Like me, she was beaten every day by her schizophrenic mother from the time she was just a toddler (hic!), unbeknownst to her father. Her mother always told him that the bruises and scars were from household accidents (hic!). Once when she was seven, her mother locked her in the basement for two days without food or water while her father was gone on a (hic!) business trip.”
I interjected, “Wow! That’s unbelievable!”
“Yes, and when he came home and found her, he didn’t believe her story (hic!), knowing she had an overblown imagination that always tended on the (hic!) dramatic side. He thought she may have accidentally locked herself in the basement for an hour or two (hic!) while her mother went shopping. My story is similar in that my mother was having affairs while Dad was gone on business trips (hic!), and she would beat me and threaten to kill me if I ever told him. Once I did tell him, but he (hic!) didn’t believe me, as mother was very clever in manipulating the truth and convincing him otherwise. While he was out of the house, she hit me so hard I fell to the floor unconscious.”
I cried, “Oh no, how awful!”
“He also accused me of making up stories or exaggerating the truth and wouldn’t believe anything I said. That’s the part that hurt the most. Hmmmm, I think my hiccups are over now, thank God!” She sighed and said, “Gee, I didn’t mean to burden you with these gruesome childhood stories. Somehow I felt it was safe, and I needed to talk to someone about it before I exploded! You seemed so open and available.” I nodded with my mouth still open from disbelief.
She looked at me and asked if I was OK. I nodded again and tried to smile reassuringly. She seemed to be fully recovered from her emotional breakdown, expressed primarily through the hiccups. I dropped her off at her destination, and she apologized and also thanked me for lending an ear and hoped we would somehow meet again. I felt a strong connection to this remarkable woman. Oddly, right after she left, I got the hiccups.
WHAT I DID FOR LOVE
And Love Is All There Is
My overzealous opportunism completely backfired on me. Instead of fitting in with the ruling class on the ranch as the wife of Tosh, I was shunned and excluded and eventually kicked out.
This brings me to the inevitable culmination of my ranch experience, when I was forced to start paying $450 a month to stay. I had no money and my parents had all but disowned me, so I could not and would not ask them for help. Instead, I set about begging fellow sannyasins for money and was able to get the first month’s rent. I naively thought this would change their minds and allow me to stay without paying. I was very proud of overcoming my loathing and fear of begging by actually getting results. Apparently, the mas in charge didn’t share my self-congratulatory opinion. So they asked for another $450, which I again managed to round up. But when they asked me a third time, I knew it was useless, so I quit and agreed to leave in three days.
I was devastated. I doubled over with uncontrollable spasms of pain as tears poured from my eyes like waterfalls for three days. On the last day, a moment of awakening occurred when I looked up through wet puffy eyes to see Bhagwan on the TV in the hotel bedroom I was cleaning, repeating over and over again, “Be a light unto yourself.” Oh, beloved Bhagwan, you know me so well. How can I leave you?
But I did. And when I took my seat on the plane back to LA, something amazing happened. It felt like a strange but beautiful entity had completely taken over my body and mind, and I had a feeling of profound serenity and peace. Instead of tears, words of wisdom began pouring from my mouth as I gathered a small group of passengers around me who hung on every word.
I didn’t know me. Who the hell am I? I asked that question a million times at the workshop in India, but this was a whole different thing. I was suddenly inhabited by a very unfamiliar energy, certainly not the poor, pitiful victim I had been so comfortable being most of my life. That old, worn-out pair of shoes had been replaced with a shiny new pair that would take me on a whole new journey of self-discovery.
I recently watched a video about The Farm, a commune in Tennessee, which began in the sixties and had roughly 1,500 residents at the peak of their existence. They were a group of hippies who gave all their money to the commune with the understanding that they had part ownership (moral, not legal) of the property and that they would be taken care of, as it was their obligation to help take care of others. They were avowed vegetarians and grew their own food and built everything from the ground up, like we did. They were a lot less sophisticated than we were in their building achievements, but they managed to sustain the commune for twenty-five years.
What is so interesting is the juxtaposition of their experience with ours. What eventually brought them down was a complete reversal in philosophy when they ran out of money. They decided people had to start paying dues and therefore go to work on the outside. They began imposing strict rules and deposed their spiritual leader, an ordinary guy who had gained everyone’s love and respect with his leadership skills and pure and simple wisdom. He was against the new plan, so they voted him out. The heart and soul of the project was impaled. Soon they started leaving in droves, and the commune came to an end around 1985, exactly the same time Rajneeshpuram ended with the departure and imprisonment of Bhagwan. Our demise began with Ma Anand Sheela’s greed for power and the gradual oppression experienced by the members. Another similarity was the fact that The Farm was secretly observed for years by the FBI, who finally raided the commune believing they were cultivating fields of marijuana, which actually turned out to be kale.
I was deeply impacted by this video, remembering our own innocence and pureness of intentions having been corrupted eventually by people of lesser values and questionable intentions. It is a bittersweet memory in this day, where we are now becoming numb to the daily dose of nefarious absurdity and dark rhetoric in our politics and the unfathomable violence occurring here and abroad.
I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW
An Artist and Dabbler in the Supernatural
My new shoes were broken in on the streets of Whittier, where my mother reluctantly let me stay in her upstairs garage apartment. Dad’s wife refused to let me stay with them. I was not exactly welcome at Mom’s either, but this actually became the perfect temporary solution in so many ways. Being thrown into this situation with my mother brought us closer together like never before. There was some tension at first, but in time, we found out who we were for each other and developed a kind of mutual respect on a level that hadn’t existed before. We went beyond mother and daughter, with all the baggage of our prior history, to becoming good friends. I had a whole new appreciation of her, and she began to understand and appreciate me from a much different perspective. My rampant narcissism had given way to a more caring and mature individual ready to pitch in and help and to take responsibility for her life. It took my mother a while to call me Yamini, but once she did, all connections to our past negative relationship seemed to melt away.
Having totaled my car before going to the ranch, I was left with only my “new shoes” and the local bus line as my modes of transportation for the first two weeks. I was in good shape, having done physical labor nine hours a day seven days a week at the ranch, so I was well prepared. I walked and bused to interviews for jobs and bused to the job where I was hired part-time as a typist and receptionist.
Finally, my dad offered to help buy me a used car. He picked out a Volkswagen Diesel Rabbit, which would have been OK if it didn’t have diesel fumes and a noisy engine, and if it wasn’t almost as bumpy as the truck I drove on the ranch. Beggars can’t be choosers, so I accepted it with gratitude. At least he hadn’t completely disowned me, and fatherly love was again possible. This poor excuse of a car actually did the
job of getting me from point A to points B and C. Point B was my job and point C was the Utsava Rajneesh center in Laguna Beach, where I meditated, danced, ate lunch, and socialized with my beloved sannyasin friends every Sunday.
PING! Standing on the corner of Hyde and Beach at Fisherman’s Warf were two thirty-something couples wearing Red Sox T-shirts, waving happily at my approach. They were going to the Giants vs. Red Sox game at AT&T Stadium, of course. This was a twenty-nine-minute drive for less than two miles’ distance. My GPS was crazy that day. Thinking it knew what it was doing, I followed instructions exactly and wound up going in circles many blocks away from the drop-off location. They didn’t seem to mind and began laughing at a private joke about lawn gnomes. Being a little high on beer, they had a hard time pronouncing it, saying something like “Who’s got a long nose?” and several variations thereof. The car literally shook with laughter.
I asked what it was all about, and they elected to let one of the girls explain the “real” urban legend around lawn gnomes. They all said they were from Sacramento, and I began to think maybe this was one of Sacramento’s secret attractions. She said that generally if you place a lawn gnome in your front yard, you are advertising that you’re a swinger and that the game is on. I wondered out loud how the little old ladies with lawn gnomes in their yard dealt with the constant knocks on their doors for some custom they knew nothing about. We all howled. I told them I had to put this in my book, and they began negotiating for a penny apiece per book sold. I remarked, “That’s even funnier than your lawn gnome story.”
After about six weeks and six visits to Laguna, I hooked up with a few other sannyasins that wanted to go in together on renting a big house with four to six bedrooms in Laguna. I drove around one day into the hills of Laguna and happened upon a beautiful modern wood-and-glass house in a cul-de-sac with a For Rent sign. The door was wide open, and no one was on the property but me. This was a good omen, no doubt. I walked into a three-story palace with huge two-story windows overlooking a half-acre of beautiful gardens, a gazebo, three redwood decks (one for each level), and a Jacuzzi. This was our Valhalla on Meadowlark Drive. We took it, and several others joined us for a total of ten residents in six bedrooms. I paid a little more for a room to myself, which was on the bottom floor with French doors out to my own deck.
I set out to find a job in Laguna and landed one with a local chiropractor as his assistant and receptionist. He taught me a lot about alternative healthcare, and I assisted in administering healing procedures as well as managing the front office. Turns out, his wife was also a sannyasin, and her name coincidentally was Yamini. (I am not under any illusion as to why he hired me.) I don’t believe in luck, but there was something wonderfully mysterious about our connection. He was a sannyasin “wannabe” who went with us to meditations and parties at Utsava, wearing his obligatory red shirt and a hippie rainbow headband. I thought it a bit silly and strange but kept my opinion to myself, of course.
I began my exploration into the arts and metaphysics and later became an art festival creator/producer. It started with a ceramics class, after which I immediately bought a kiln and set up a studio in the garage. I spent twelve to fourteen hours a day on weekends and five to six hours some weeknights making ceramic jewelry, decorative masks, and crystal light boxes (popular at the time). I experimented with all kinds of shapes and glazes and couldn’t wait to see how they turned out after firing. It became an obsession. I soon had enough inventory to start selling and participated in local fairs. What I didn’t sell, I kept as gifts or for my own enjoyment
I also participated in a local channeling group every Tuesday and Friday night. About ten of us, including the other Yamini, gathered in South Laguna in a house belonging to a woman named Pam, who channeled Quan Yin and an extraterrestrial called Katar. Once, we all witnessed Katar’s flying saucer, which hovered over the ocean very near to us for a good seven minutes. Earlier when he spoke, he had promised to show us his vehicle, and then, while Pam was channeling Quan Yin, it suddenly appeared. Not believing our eyes, we all looked out the window at the scene behind her. She always sat facing us in front of a big bay window overlooking the ocean. There was no denying that this was a spaceship, and there were ten witnesses who could testify to that reality. We never saw it again.
Every night, the sessions usually put us all in a trance, which we later tapped into, and with Pam’s help, some of us learned how to channel our own enlightened disembodied entities for each other. In our house there were three of us who had been trained by Pam to channel and did so for each other, usually at night. The sessions always left us blissed out with love and a heightened level of awareness.
One day I went to the library to find art books as inspiration for my ceramic creations. One artist who stood out for me was Alphonse Mucha from the Art Nouveau era. I brought home a book of his work, and that night I inadvertently channeled him with his mixed European accent. I was fully conscious and could enjoy his messages as much as everybody else. He turned out to be very funny and lighthearted but spot on with his answers for some who confirmed that fact. The next day, I opened the book and saw a picture of him, but it was a double exposure, causing him to look like a ghost as he merged with his living room background. I felt this was another demonstration of his humor by alluding to my experience of him the night before. (Recently while Googling him, I found many well-defined photographs and wondered why the author had picked one that was obviously a mistake!)
One of us in Pam’s group, a girl named Penny Torres, went on to become a famous channel of Mafu, who has a huge national following and lives and works in Ashland, Oregon, with hundreds of his/her followers. Penny’s Mafu is very similar to J. Z. Knight’s Ramtha, who appeared on many TV shows and channeled five best-selling books in the eighties. They both inhabit their female channels, making them appear larger and more masculine, and both impart the same messages of “enlightened empowerment.” Lately, however, (after three decades) Penny has been publicly denounced by several of her ex-followers as extremely possessive, physically abusive, and an out-of-control drug addict. It has been said that J. Z Knight has also gone off the rails. I’m reminded of the old adage “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It seems rather odd that an enlightened entity would lead his host toward corruption and abusive behavior, which ultimately raises the question as to their authenticity. But it was all good entertainment for a while, and some valuable teachings were transmitted.
When I knew Penny, there was no hint of a distorted ego. She provides a good lesson for all of us to heed. So many of us are blinded by our own aspirations for greatness or enlightenment and are often led off a cliff by a “shiny new penny” that seduces us into submission. We lose sight of our own inherent greatness by looking outward instead of within.
I always had a tendency to do that myself. Thank God I chose Bhagwan, who wouldn’t allow me to become blinded by my attachment to him for very long. Through the confluence of uncanny circumstances and deep meditation, my codependency was curtailed and eventually shattered beyond recognition. He ushered in my new way of being with his intonation of “Be a light unto yourself.” His legacy lives on in over two hundred books and has grown substantially relevant in these troubled times.
THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
Starfair Visionary Arts Expo Is Birthed
PING! This is not from my Uber app. It’s a bell that just went off in my head while driving on a personal trip from Marin to Laguna Beach. I just had a new, provocative thought about my own channeling experience, that who I was actually channeling may have been my past self as Alphonse Mucha.
This may be a little confusing, as I’ve never heard of anyone channeling a past-life embodiment of themselves, but it could be possible. I had a vision some years ago that I was a lesser-known artist of that era and was kind of a rake (ladies’ man), with a mustache just like his, who painted beautiful women and then seduced them only to flippantly dismiss them. This can account for my karma (cause a
nd effect) of being abandoned by so many men I’ve loved in this lifetime. However, I don’t want to besmirch his reputation if, in fact, he wasn’t me. But I Googled his biography, and sure enough, he didn’t get married until age forty-six and had been well known for his posters of beautiful women since his early twenties. This gave him plenty of time to fool around. How hard would it be to imagine him being sexually aroused by his gorgeous subjects? The famous actress Sarah Bernhardt commissioned him to do her theatrical posters for six years. Coincidentally, I have photographed a few famous actresses and made them into works of art in my book The Natural Goddess.
Another interesting tidbit was how he later developed a passion to elevate women and the feminine aspect in a culture overrun by the industrial age and masculine dominance, which has been my passion for the past ten years. Also, he was a portrait artist, like I’ve been for years, first as a painter, then as a photographer. Also like me, he became more spiritually inclined later in life and shied away from being commercially successful in lieu of painting for the sake of pure art. Another similarity was his singing ability, which awarded him a free high school education.
But alas, after finding so many parallels that bolstered my theory of being Alphonse Mucha in a past life, I also found out he died four months after I was born in 1939. Oh well, it was a great story, so I decided to include it anyway. My belief now is that he is either one of my spirit guides, or his (my) spirit could have entered this body after I was four months old, which correlates with my theory that I spoke about earlier regarding my arguments for abortion.
Hmmmm, who can say for sure what is real and what is pure conjecture? But, I could go on and on about our artistic styles and how they resonate, which further supports my supposition. Nevertheless, it all makes for an interesting story. Maybe the point is: What have I learned in this life that makes me more evolved than who I perhaps was as Alphonse Mucha?
The Joy of Uber Driving Page 13