Month: January 2018

Over the years these scenarios, or consciously designed opportunities to create new habits, in the face of familiar difficulties, would take a wide variety of formats and were designed very differently for each of the members of our community, depending on the person. Each of us had our own unique baggage, or “stuff” as it was commonly called, so each of us had very unique paths and scenarios that MD designed for us. In some cases there would be a group scenario with multiple components and these were very interesting and could be extremely challenging.

The reason these scenarios could be so challenging is that they had to be real in order to work. You can imagine that if one didn’t believe what they were experiencing was real it would just be a farce, or a game, and wouldn’t have the power to evoke real change in the person. In many ways these scenarios were just the same as what any of us undergo in our ordinary life, the same as the trials and frustrations that we encounter every day, but the main difference was that these were created with the specific purpose of changing some negative and unloving part of ourselves, and done in a controlled and consciously directed situation by MD, and could, in effect, speed up the rate of transformation in our lives many times over what we might achieve on our own just living out our ordinary lives.

This was a spiritual training course at least as much, if not more so than a spiritual community. We lived in community, and served one another, and learned to love one another, but all of this was context and environment for the primary goal of our own individual transformation and growth. But through this individual growth we were bound to transform the group as a whole and ultimately have a more joyful and healthy community as a result of our collective individual efforts.

The training course, or community had few overarching rules, however one thing, which MD often repeated to us, was that if one wanted to leave the training, they were of course always free to do so, but to do so with forethought, and to let others know ahead of time; to never run away in the heat of an inner struggle. He explained that this was to our benefit because leaving in a rational and well-thought out way was conducive to health and a balanced life; but to run away in the heat of an inner struggle, when we are losing to some negative aspect of ourselves, when we are overcome with anger or fear or some other inner disturbance, to leave in this way would be damaging to us. Just as victory over these elements within us engenders a feeling of freedom and joy, losing to these elements will usually lead to feelings of sorrow, resentment, unforgiveness or other things that cause us harm throughout our lives.

Over the four plus years that I took the course and lived in the community, I experienced a number of stages in the training. These stages weren’t overtly stated, nor did I pay them much attention at the time, but in retrospect I can see them. In the beginning, we all went through a sort of initiation or introduction to the work, which also included shedding of our old lives and becoming new and refreshed. I can’t speak for others who took the course, as it was certainly complex, and unique for everyone, but my sense is that this progression was generally true for the few that began and remained in the program for the duration.  The initial year or so was a time of strengthening, and healing, and preparing for greater challenges that would come later; it was a time of almost constant joy, with laughing and adventure and excitement. Later stages maintained a great deal of this initial joy and humor and lightness but increasingly the scenarios and challenges became more serious and difficult as we delved into deeper layers of our inner lives and these tested us to, or perhaps beyond our limits at times; or at least we felt like they were beyond us at times, whether they actually were or not, is beyond me to say with certainty.

In order to focus fully on this course of training, we left our worldly lives behind. In addition to selling or giving our possessions away we also let go of other familiar aspects of our former lives in order to achieve freedom. On the mundane level we changed our clothing, our eating and our sleeping habits. On a more profound level, one of identity and sense of self, for some of us, we also changed our names, or MD gave us new ones. I had already experimented a little in college with using my middle name instead of my given name so when I was given a new name, I felt prepared and willing to accept something new, and it didn’t feel strange. I was given the name Jaikananda, which by my understanding means ‘victory to bliss’ in Sanskrit. I went by Jaia for short. Not all of us were given new names at first, some were given new names years later, and some were given many new names over the course of the training; as with most aspects of the program it was unique and different for each of us. One of the members of the community, who joined fairly early on, never had his name changed but kept his birth name throughout the entire time. My name was changed one more time to Francis about a year or two later, and eventually I had it legally changed to this, but for the beginning of this journey I went by the name Jaia.

Our diet was simple and delightful. There were variations to this over the years due to circumstances, but in general it was a vegan diet with very little processed sugars. Some scenarios would involve other types of food, as various members worked on habits around baked goods, or candy or things like that, but apart from these specific reasons, in general we ate very simply. For myself, and the others that I spent the most time with, we typically wouldn’t eat anything until lunchtime, or if we did, we had oranges or bananas. This also was a typical lunch, although sometimes we’d have avocado sandwiches. Dinner was nearly always a wonderful hot dish of primarily potatoes and carrots with various spices along with a green salad with shredded carrots and thinly sliced tomatoes. One would expect after a short time of a diet like this it would get boring but amazingly it never did; in fact, at least for me, it was always satisfying and I never got tired of it even though we ate this way for years. Beverages were equally simple as we almost exclusively drank water or rice milk. Again, there were exceptions to this due to other factors but this was the general rule of thumb.

White was the color of our clothing, though each of us had differing styles; my shirts had Nehru collars, while some of the other men had a more relaxed style of shirt. This changed in later years particularly due to work environments when individuals would be employed and required by jobs to wear other things, but in the beginning years we all wore white. At first it felt a little uncomfortable wearing only white, because we were setting ourselves obviously apart from everyone in the world, and I didn’t like drawing attention to myself, but very soon I enjoyed the white clothing because it gave me a feeling of peace and after a while I also loved the purity and the beauty of it. It occurred to me that my aversion to it wasn’t grounded in anything other than a fear of looking odd or doing something unusual. These certainly weren’t worthwhile reasons to be uncomfortable. Ultimately wearing white was joyful, simplified my choices and allowed me to focus on other more important things.

Our community was primarily nomadic and because of the fact that we never lived in one location for very long we didn’t sleep in beds. I had kept a very good sleeping bag from my former life in the world and used this for the entire time; I remember the first time sleeping in a bed, nearly five years later, how strange it felt and I didn’t like it. It took me several months to get used to the feeling of a mattress again and also the feeling of sleeping inside a house. Most of the time we slept under the stars, under a tarp if it rained, or in tents. We lived in places of incredible natural beauty in the mountains of northern California and Arizona, and in the deserts of New Mexico. Over the years I grew so accustomed to the feel of the night breeze, the sounds of the local animal life, and the beauty of the stars in the night sky twinkling over me as I drifted off to sleep, that it was a difficult transition to sleep inside a stuffy bedroom again when the time came to do so.

(to be continued)

~FS

Prior to leaving my old life and giving all of my possessions away I had already begun to follow MD as a disciple. Earlier in the year, as my graduation was approaching I was in a crisis; not knowing what to do next with my life and not liking any of my options. I woke from a dream one morning with a Latin sentence in my mind about being renewed and reborn. My Latin was not very good, even though I had taken four years of it in high school, and I’m guessing I completely botched the translation, but I interpreted it to be a message of encouragement to myself and others, that we can be reborn and made anew in a spiritual way.  I no longer remember the beginning of the sentence, but the end I remember was ‘…sacra creationem geniti sunt’ or roughly, ‘…you are born of a sacred creation’. I felt inspired to hike to the top of Mt St Helena, not far from my home, carve this sentence into a rock somewhere near the top of the mountain, and spend time reflecting and deciding my next move in life.

I packed my sleeping bag, some food, and a large mallet and chisel into my backpack and drove to the trailhead. It is about a seven mile hike to the top and provides beautiful views into the Napa Valley, overlooking Calistoga and St Helena in the distance. It was a windy late afternoon when I made the summit and quickly found a good rock face for my carving. I began to carve as the sun was setting at my back; I cast a deep shadow onto the stone where I was working, while a warm reddish-golden glow illuminated the rock around my shadow. It was slow going, since I had brought an old wood chisel, not one made for stone; but it was heavy-duty, and solid, and up to the task, even if it wasn’t the right tool for the job.

I finished my carving late in the night, fairly close to midnight, and the wind had really picked up. It was a full moon, or nearly full, and the night was clear. I was joined at the top of the mountain by thousands, or perhaps millions of points of light in the night sky. The silver moonlight and the rising wind thrilled me as I stared out across the night sky. There is an observation tower at the top or the mountain, which I climbed, and from the platform high above everything, one imagines they are on top of the world. I slept here for the night, with the wind howling about me and the moon looking down upon me with a cool magnanimity.

I returned home with a sense of hope. Several days later MD appeared at my door and told me he had been sent by my “brothers from the inner planes” to help me. I didn’t know I had brothers on the inner planes, but I could believe it, and it sounded possible, plus I was happy to believe that these brothers, and MD, were looking out for me, and were responding to my need, and my hope which had been engendered on the mountain several days earlier.

Very early one morning, MD arrived at my home, perhaps a little before 4 am, and knocked on the front door, waking us from a sound sleep. We let him in and he made his way into our bedroom, he then asked my girlfriend and me to join him sitting on the bed.  We sat there together in the dark and he explained to us that it was time for him to become our guru. If we accepted, we would become his disciples. I accepted, but my girlfriend did not. From this point our relationships changed; mine and MD‘s as well as my girlfriend’s and mine. He and I became teacher and student while she and I began to drift apart. It became clear that she was on a more conventional path and had goals that included a master’s degree, a career, children and all of those wonderful things, while I had chosen a different trajectory.

One afternoon he and I visited a local café and ordered a cinnamon roll and took our seats at an empty table near a window. A few moments later it was served to us on a plate with two forks. This was the setting for one of the earliest formal lessons that I remember as a disciple of MD. It was very basic and rudimentary but it has remained with me to this day. Essentially it was a game about giving and receiving, and the object was to pay attention to my inner emotional and mental state over the course of the game, and to draw conclusions about the nature of giving and receiving from these observations. These goals and objectives were not directly stated at the time, but were clearly intended, and I was to infer them and learn accordingly, internalizing them and making the conclusions my own.

MD pushed the plate with the cinnamon roll towards me and said something like, “Here, this is for you.” I took a bite. He then told me to offer it back to him. I actually wanted the whole cinnamon roll so I felt a little disappointed offering it back to him, but I did. He smiled and laughed and took a bite and said, “Thank you.” And then he pushed it back across the table to me and again said, “Here, for you.” I was much happier to receive it this time and I took another bite. “Now offer it back to me again,” he said. So I did and I felt happier this time as I offered it to him. We passed it back and forth several more times, saying, “this is for you” or something very close to that, each time with a smile. It became fun to receive the cinnamon roll and to give it again. “Do you see how giving and receiving are the same thing?” MD asked me as we ate. “There isn’t a difference between the two.” I understood what he was telling me, both giving and receiving were joyous actions made by two parties, and they both were the same; it made no difference whether one is the giver or the receiver in terms of the joy, fulfillment, or other good qualities one enjoys and participates in during the course of acting out generosity. This act of enjoying the gift of the good tasting cinnamon roll, and then of giving it away and letting another enjoy it, and then suddenly getting to taste it again, and then just as suddenly give it up again for the other person, made clear the joy of self-sacrifice, and the humble simplicity of receiving a gift very clear and understandable.

This was the nature of time spent with MD, he could take the commonplace and make it fun, and turn it into a life lesson of lasting value. Over the course of many months I visited him where he was living in a tent near the coast and my task was to bring him oranges when I came to visit. The goal of this task was to prepare the oranges and bring them to him with the purest intentions I could manage; without negative thoughts, or negative feelings, without any unloving inner motivation that would taint the gift of the oranges. The gift was the energy I put into the oranges rather than the oranges themselves. This was the essential basis for many, if not all of the subsequent lessons over the course of my next four years with MD; what was I doing internally, hidden from view, and was this loving or unloving. The fundamental question revolved around whether I was thinking and feeling with love; and on an even deeper level, was I moving on a spiritual level with love and in love, serving others with pure energy and intention, or was I being unloving.

The big question at this point would be, could MD really see into the depths of my being; the places hidden from view, which nobody else could see, and which in many cases I couldn’t see at first myself. My experience told me that I could trust this; though I couldn’t explain how he could do it, I became certain that he could do it, and that it would be to my benefit to listen and learn from him, and allow him to help me operate on myself and transform the parts of me that were truly unloving, turning them into something much closer to genuine love, and if I was able into love itself.

One time we were in my truck and MD was driving while I sat in the passenger seat. As we approached an intersection in town he let me know we were about to enter a simple scenario as a test for me. A scenario was a situation created to give an opportunity to grow and change. Scenarios were common tools MD used to teach his disciples; by creating a situation that would bring up some inner conflict or negative tendency, in which to be transformed by making a better choice in the heat of the moment; it was an opportunity for the person whose scenario it was, to begin a new response, start a new positive habit and to overcome old patterns that were destructive, or hurtful to themselves and others, or just an opportunity to overcome fear, or some other limitation.

This scenario was one of the first he created for me, and it took place in the main intersection of the small town I was living in at the time. When it was our turn to move through the intersection he drove to the middle of the crossing and stopped the truck. We sat there in the truck for a time while other cars began honking at us to move, and drivers angrily yelled at us. It helped that I was in the passenger seat and not driving, but at first it was still uncomfortable to be yelled at, and to be sitting stopped in the middle of the busy intersection. But I quickly understood that this situation was about maintaining my composure and my peace in the midst of anger being directed at me; it was set up for me, who never wants to make anyone upset, partly out of fear, to confront this fear and be unmoved in the face of other’s displeasure.  MD told a joke which lightened my mood and I sat relatively untouched by the mood of the other drivers in the intersection. After a time he started the truck again and we continued on our way. He complimented my inner composure and said I did pretty well with that difficult situation. As we drove away I did feel lighter, as if a burden of some kind had been lifted and also I felt a little stronger and more able to face the inevitability of others displeasure towards me, justified or unjustified, and more able to maintain clarity in the midst of a difficult situation, which could allow me to ultimately act with kindness and compassion towards others who are angry at me rather than act in reaction to them.

(to be continued)

~FS