A local devotional singer and her yogi parents are raising consciousness and making miracles happen. GT’s Damon Orion illuminates their spirited tale with exclusive interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Ram Dass and The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

 
The spiritual teacher Ram Dass has a great line: “We’re all God in drag.” In other words, behind all the costumes—the individual body types, social roles, personalities, occupations, etc.—each of us is a manifestation of the same divine consciousness.

As Oprah Winfrey’s voice spills out of my phone, the truth of those words hits me not as a concept, but as a palpable sensation. There’s an unshakeable feeling that something vast, formless and unfathomable is expressing itself through the metaphor of this moment. In the grand earthly melodrama, I have been cast as a reporter charged with the noble and intimidating mission of interviewing a woman who has interviewed the Obamas, Bill Clinton, Paul McCartney and Bill Gates. And Oprah, the goodhearted, down-to-earth megastar, has phoned me to discuss her connection to a Santa Cruz-based singer named Snatam Kaur, whose spiritual chants she listens to each day before meditating. In particular, I’m interested in hearing Winfrey’s description of an unexpected encounter that she had with Kaur in 2012.

“No, I cannot describe that experience,” the entertainment icon states, noticeably energized by the mention of the event. “I’m going to start crying if I start talking about it. It is still one of the greatest manifestations I’ve ever had. It fills me with such hope: just, ‘Oh, my gosh! That can happen! That unbelievable, magical thing can happen.’”

Long story short: On the eve of her 58^th birthday last year, Winfrey was sitting with a small group of friends at her house in Maui. Slightly after midnight, she and her guests were nearing the end of a five-hour conversation. Winfrey, who was scheduled to interview the aforementioned Ram Dass two days later, began singing Snatam Kaur’s “Guru Ram Das,” a devotional chant to a different spiritual guide with a strikingly similar name.

“Maria Shriver, one of my dear friends, was sitting next to me, and she said, ‘What are you singing?’” Winfrey recalls. “I said, ‘It’s this woman. You wouldn’t know her.’ And she said, ‘I do know her, because I listen to her music every night! She’s helped me through so much!’ So we start screaming: ‘Oh, my God! You love her? I love her, too!’”

Then the truth came out: Winfrey had considered inviting Kaur to sing for her birthday, but had decided against trying to track her down and fly her to Maui at the last minute. “I said [to Shriver], ‘If I had known you loved her, I would have done it,’” Winfrey says.

At sunset the following day, Winfrey and her friends were kicking back on the porch, enjoying some cocktails after a two-and-a-half-hour land-blessing ceremony with a native Hawaiian priest. Out of the blue, one member of the group, Omega Institute’s Elizabeth Lesser, stood up and read a poem. “And then she said, ‘I want you to know that this is one of the great manifestations. You manifested this,’” Winfrey explains.

Lesser rang a bell, and a turban-clad Snatam Kaur descended the stairs singing “Ong Namo,” the song that had first attracted Winfrey to her music. “And the tears just shot out,” Winfrey states. “I just started sobbing, because I couldn’t figure it out: ‘How did this happen? How did this happen?’”

It seems that after Winfrey had gone to bed the previous night, Shriver went from room to room, plotting to bring Snatam Kaur to Maui. In the morning, they tracked Kaur down and offered to fly her to Maui from wherever she was, only to learn that she was already in Maui, 20 minutes or so from Oprah’s place.

Winfrey’s voice rises in pitch as she retraces the events that led up to the birthday concert. “What are the chances that we would have that conversation … at midnight?” she asks rhetorically. “The word amazing is so overused, but that was just jaw-dropping.” She likens the experience to the time when she desperately wanted to be in the film The Color Purple, but thought she had lost the part. “I was literally praying: ‘All right. I’m gonna let it go. I’m gonna surrender it,’” she says. “And the second I said, ‘I surrender it,’ there was a phone call. And it was Steven Spielberg.”

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

Snatam Kaur was—and is—no less stunned by her encounter with Oprah than Winfrey herself. “Miracles do happen, I’d have to say,” the Colorado-born, California-bred vocalist offers. In Kaur’s view, the first miracle was the fact that she was already in Maui when she was invited to Oprah’s birthday party, while the second miracle was seeing Winfrey chant mantras that Kaur had experienced in the yoga community. “Suddenly seeing such an iconic figure as Oprah chanting our chants made the world seem a lot smaller to me,” she states.

Kaur, an internationally known touring musician with 10 albums to her credit, explains that kirtan (Indian devotional singing) is a key part of the Sikh tradition into which she was born. The mantras that she chants are intended to cause “the energy of the mind to shift to the realization that the divine light is within,” and the pronunciation of these words is designed to stimulate the glandular system as the tongue taps the roof of the mouth. Kaur references an MIT study in which the brainwaves of participants who uttered one of these chants were shown to move from a stressed-out “red” state to a calm “blue” state.

The soft-spoken, unassuming singer says her earliest exposure to kirtan came via her mother, Prabhu Nam Kaur, one of the leading musicians in the western Sikh community. “As things got a little challenging in our lives, my mom would always go to the chanting, and it would do something special for her. [I felt,] ‘I want some of that!’” she laughs. Kaur would later journey to northern India’s Golden Temple, a Sikh sanctuary situated on a lake founded by Guru Ram Das in 1574, to study kirtan with the same musician who taught her mother. “I felt lifetimes of pain and suffering release from just being there,” she says.

Photo by Jasper Johal

If there is sexual abuse in the home, frequently by an uncle or a friend of the family, sometimes from the parents, sometimes allowed by the parents, sometimes with the parents unwilling or unable to acknowledge that it is happening, the child is deeply betrayed right down to the core of their being. The result is almost always a profound sense of being “no good,” not worthy of better care, not deserving of anything. Quite often these children are told by some adult authority in their life such things as, “you are used goods,” “nobody will want you,” “it’s your fault,” etc.

Abuse patterns are, generally, passed on from generation to generation. We have all seen, on numerous occasions, or personally experienced, the child of abusive parents marrying or developing relationships with abusers whose abusing patterns are very similar to what the person grew up experiencing as a child. In almost every case, a sexual abuser will have been sexually abused as a child, and an alcoholic will have grown up in an alcoholic household.

All the situations I have seen where there is self-demoting sexual activity as a problem for women have always been tied to sexual abuse. The abuse is not the wound, the wound is always the conclusion or story: that we are no good, dirty, shameful, stupid, bad, etc. The wound that comes from being abused is the almost always inevitable conclusion that one is at fault, that one is ashamed of what happened, in sexual abuse in all its forms (from having sex imposed on one when one is unable to say “no”, through incest, pedophilia and rape), the result is feeling dirtied and unworthy. I use the phrase ‘story’ because I wish to make it clear that this wound is mutable, it is a story that can be changed.

The subconscious exists only in the present. There is no past and no future. There is just, “now”. When a wound gets implanted in the subconscious, it is always there, as, in the subconscious, it is always “now”. (Positive feedback loop:) When a person believes that he or she does not deserve to be happy, to do well, to be loved, and/or does believe that she/he deserves to suffer, we then set out to prove and justify that belief over and over again. We wind up with a repetitive pattern of behaviour. This is easiest to see in addictive behaviour, manifesting in eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual addiction, but it manifests in many other forms.

There is a strange flaw in our basic design as human beings. If a person has an abusive father, they are most likely to select an abusive spouse. People tend to re-create the circumstances of their childhood household .The more negative the circumstances, the more likely they will be re-created. Alcoholism and sexual abuse have been, for the most part passed down through generations upon generations.

The thing is that the child’s frame of reference is quite small, and the parents are the center of the universe. If the parents are abusive in some way, there are several things that almost always happen. The child unconsciously works out how to blame itself rather than the parents, resulting, in most cases, in both lack of self-worth and guilt. If a parent is beating the child, for example, this is frequently accompanied with verbal abuse, reinforcing the message to the child that the child is “no good,” “worthless,” “too much trouble,” “should never have been born,” etc. To the child this is taken as literal. The image of the self as “no good” penetrates deeply into the core of the being. The guilt message is, “If I could only be better, then they wouldn’t have to beat me.” The life path is determined, always trying to prove that one is OK, but never being able to do it. “Doing” cannot do it, as there is nothing that will ever be enough. The child could become another Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Bill Gates, Dr, Salk, Jerry Garcia, and still feel unworthy.

In the case of one or more alcoholic parents, there are generally profoundly erratic behavior variations on the part of the alcoholic parent, varying from affectionate to violent. The child has two typical responses, self blame for “eliciting” the parent’s anger and shutting down of emotions. The alcoholic parent’s behavior is very unpredictable. Over and over, the parent will be loving, perhaps very apologetic, resulting in the child opening its heart, then to be crushed by a drunken rage, again and again. After a while, the child unconsciously shuts down, having become unable to play the game any more. The long-term consequences are substantial, as the person who grows up this way may find it hard to love anyone, and most especially to love oneself.

Almost every child of an alcoholic parent makes a promise as a young child to never be like the alcoholic parent(s). However, growing up in an alcoholic household is going to be wounding. The child will almost always grow up feeling unworthy of being happy, and deserving to suffer. What then, is the worst thing that one can do? Break the promise and become an alcoholic like the parent(s). Thus alcoholism has been passed down through the generations for hundreds of generations.

In spiritual practice, many of us find frequent opportunities to experience guilt. We promise ourselves that we are going to do a certain practice every day, or that we will stop doing some habit that we perceive to be demoting or unhealthy, and then find that we are not able to do (or not do) the thing we promised ourselves. Then we call ourselves names, feel like we failed, are “no good,” etc. The thing is, that most of us have been wounded one or more times in our journey across this world ocean, some of us have been profoundly wounded, and some of us have been regularly wounded in multiple ways. The “wounds” I am speaking of are wounds to one’s self esteem, wounds to one’s capacity to allow oneself access to life’s abundance. We all seem to have some sort of inner meter, or measuring system, through which we determine, on a subconscious level, how much of life’s abundance we allow ourselves. In this case by “life’s abundance,” I am referring to the quality of life of one’s life, and one’s financial and spiritual prosperity.

It is possible to change the story; it is possible to heal one’s wounds; it is possible to regain one’s innocence. I know this, because I have been witness to this healing many, many times. It is why I do this work that I call, ‘Healing the Wounds of Life.’

Old Habits
Old demoting
habits
die hard
like trick
birthday candles
that won’t
stay out

I reported this prediction because in this election, we are faced with a very significant choice in relationship to the Middle East and the state of the world. We would never have been involved in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, had it not been for George W. Bush and the neo-cons who were steering his administration. What could be stupider than starting a land war in Afghanistan, where so many nations have come to grief in trying to control that uncontrollable country? President Obama, has been stuck with trying to get us out of there without making it look like we gained nothing, even though we most likely did not gain very much at all.

The same neo-cons are steering the Romney-Ryan campaign, and if they get elected, we will probably see war with Iran not too long after the election. Iran is not Iraq, and the consequences of war with Iran are beyond our knowing. Here, I will refer to Dan Ellsberg, with some parts of the book I am working on:

I have just recently renewed a relationship with Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers fame. He and his wife, Patricia, attended the same Couple’s workshop, led by Robert Gass and Judith Ansara, that Prabhu Nam and I attended (2011). Daniel and I spent quite a bit of time talking with one another. I am not sure of when it was that we had first met. I had invited him to speak at the Meeting of the Ways event called, Aspiring to Enlightened Action in the Nuclear Age, at Stanford in 1982, where I attempted to bring together the anti-war and the emerging “new age” spiritual communities. (This conference, by the way, was the one at which Professor William Hermans brought us Einstein’s last words.)

There was a time that we (in the USA and much of Europe) were enormously concerned about the threat of nuclear war. But now, that sense of threat has diminished enormously. However, as Dan keeps pointing out, it is not that the threat has enormously diminished, but, rather, that the perception of the threat has diminished. The threat, as he has been pointing out since I first heard him speak at that Meeting of the Ways conference, remains. He says that if we do not do something about it, that sooner or later, there will be nuclear incidents. I now remember what he said at the conference, back then in 1982, and is still saying: That if we do not find a way to change the situation, there will be a nuclear attack somewhere; that everyone around the world will be enormously upset. There will be meetings and conferences about what to do, and that nothing decisive will be done, and then there will be another such attack, more hullabaloo, and then another, until it becomes part of a deteriorating world that we try to accommodate ourselves to. This is a pretty grim scenario, horrible to think about. We (humanity) need people like him who can warn us of dangers ahead, that we might not otherwise be able to be aware of. And then there is the question of how we can allow ourselves to hear him, and do something about it.

Perhaps I am being overly dramatic, but I think we may be at a kind of crossroads here. We recently saw Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister), who is very closely aligned with the American neo-cons, try to use this election to force Obama to start a pre-emptive war with Iran. It took some real grit for Obama to refuse to go down this road.

If Romney wins the election, there will be some kind of an event that will provide apparent justification for war with Iran. And if that happens, the Middle East Pandora’s Box will open, and where and how it might end is not known.

I was thinking about the genesis of hate and cruelty this morning, after reading the morning paper, which I have been doing for many, many years.  Maybe I should stop reading the paper every day, perhaps once a week would do.  I noticed, several years ago, when I went to India for six months, that when I came back, it did not seem like anything had changed, that I had not missed anything.  This morning there was more news about Israel tearing into Palestine, and, of course, more bombings in Israel.  There was also that bizarre picture of John Walker Lindh, looking like he was tied up in some S&M bondage flick.  Is that how we treated all the Taliban we captured?  We are sowing some pretty terrible seeds.

In 1982, I organized a three day 3500 person ‘Meeting of the Ways’ conference at Stanford University bringing together people from the spiritual and anti-war communities, which Joanna Macy later referred to as an historic event.  A 15 part PBS series called “How Then Shall We Live?” was created based primarily on the conference.  During the conference, a dignified elderly man approached the staff, asking to speak, saying that he had a message from Albert Einstein.  As this was a very successful conference (one session had 35 well attended workshops at the same time)  “everybody and his brother” was trying to get last minute spots to speak or lead a workshop, it took a couple of days for the man to work his way up the chain of command, until he and his request reached me.  I was sufficiently impressed by him that I gave him a spot just prior to the major plenary session of the Conference, which featured Yogi Bhajan, Swami Satchidananda, Baba Ram Dass, Daniel Ellsberg, and Joanna Macy.

His speech was as follows:

PROFESSOR WILLIAM HERMANS:  Einstein’s Last Words

Delivered at the Meeting of the Ways Conference – Stanford 1982

“I was, my friends, a volunteer in the first World War and survived it through a vow on the battlefield of Verdun, “God save me and I will serve you as long as I live.”  One million French and German soldiers were killed on the battlefield within 9 months, but I’m still alive and speak to you now, 86 years old.

Mr. Einstein [and I]  had contact in 1921, when I was in Berlin, a student to prepare for a position in  the League of Nations in Geneva.  Einstein knew about my past and I visited him as often as I could in Berlin and later in Princeton, and this is what he said to me shortly before his death in 1954 in Princeton:

“Billy Hermans,” (we spoke German together when we were intimate friends), “mark this.  We go toward a third World War  and this war will break out in the Middle East.”  I was amazed.  I said, “You know I was in the first World War and then served on the American side as an officer in the second World War.  Now we must regard this.  What then?”  “What then?”, he said.  “Nothing, what then.  One fourth of mankind will survive this war and they will live in caves, and then the fourth World War will come and then they will fight it out with clubs.”

I said, “Dr. Einstein, that is impossible.  We must do something together.” “No,” he said, “I am done.  I soon will die, but if you want to do something for the world, try to found two things.  Since you made a vow at Verdun, you may well have been chosen for that part.”

And now I will tell you what Einstein wanted me to do.  Now, still I am alive at 86. “Found”, he said, “a world youth parliament.  The Russians, the Chinese, the black people in Africa – everyone has to become a member.  If those will not become a member now but later, you must start now – a world youth parliament.”  The second thing I should found was a cosmic religion.  He said, “Religions, for 2000 years, have forfeited their purpose.  They made a pact always with political powers to grow their own religious power.  You found a world parliament and a cosmic religion.”

This, to do, may be someone among you here, my friends, who will help me.  I’m still alive and I have my son here, too, who will follow the Einstein admonition to found two things to save ourselves of a third World War.  The two things, a cosmic religion including all existing religions, but a religion of absolute love.  A religion that starts not now of difference between Christian and Jew and Moslem, between black and white – a religion of absolute love.  The second thing we found is a world youth parliament.  I thank you for listening.”

__________________________________________________________

In 2002, I had concluded the above by writing: “I would like to understand more about the genesis of hate.  The work before us is so vast.”

I have come to understand the genesis of hate, which is one of the main subjects of the book I plan to have out by next summer, where I have written:

The connection between corporal punishment of children, the beating of children as a manifestation of parental rage , and anger and rage in men, has profound implications to the state of the world. Where there is child beating, there is almost always fear, anger, and rage.  Not always, of course, but most of the time.  Angry self-righteous religious fundamentalism has its roots in this anger and rage. War, as a core instrument of foreign policy; terrorism, skinheads, Ku Klux Klan, fascism, any “ism” which preaches hate of some group of “others’; all these are rooted in fear, anger and rage, which was developed in abusive childhoods.

From the book I am writing:
“We (humanity) are engaged in a kind of race, between our capacity to destroy ourselves and our capacity to learn how to love one another: Indeed, the great question of our time is whether humanity can survive as a viable species on this planet.  For, either we will change the way we live on the planet, and become a mature species able to live in harmony with one another and our environment, or we will destroy ourselves, either directly, through nuclear war, indirectly by destroying some or many, critical aspects of our environment, or by some combination of the two.  In recent years, it has become apparent to me that the decision as to whether or not mankind will continue to live on this planet will be made in during our lifetimes.  I do not mean, of course, that some group of people will sit down and have a vote, consciously making said decision.  But, rather, that in that race between our capacity to destroy one another, which is still growing by leaps and bounds, and our capacity to love one another, which is also growing; that we will at some point come to some critical juncture wherein whatever action gets taken will lead to one or the other result: a war, a peace, a treaty, an election, a corporate decision, something along these lines.   Whether our learning how to love one another, live and thrive together is growing fast enough, remains to be seen.

The Zoroastrians used to speak of the eternal battle between the forces of light and darkness, and in a way, this is the battle that has been going on for us (humanity) down through the ages. On one side there is the culture of hate and anger, which frequently manifests as patriotism, religious fundamentalism, and pedagogical beliefs that promote child beating, and in many cultures, suppression of woman.  Frequently there is a very strong correlation between physical abuse of children and sexual abuse, and most certainly between physical abuse of children (whether or not it is perceived by the parents or teachers as physical correction) and the violence and hate we find all around us.

There is that which promotes love and trust, and that which promotes fear and anger.  It is important to understand that having the capacity to love and trust, does not make one weak, but, rather, can make one strong.  For those people, whose life circumstances have placed them in the anger place, this is pretty much inconceivable, but, nevertheless, it is the case.  At the same time, we must recognize that most of the conquering, pillage, and rape, that has been, and still is taking place around the planet, has been done by those who inhabit the angry space.  Angry, violent people make good soldiers, as it is certainly easier to kill and hurt when you cannot see the humanity of the other.  But, if we are to go beyond being a cancer on the planet, we are going to have to go beyond anger and fear as a filter through which to view the world, of war as a way of being, and as a core instrument of foreign policy.”

Presidential candidate Romney seems to be an example of the kind of consciousness that I have come to see as a socially accepted form of socio-pathology; that which allows business people to conduct their businesses without regard the impact on other human beings or the environment. Whatever their faults, Presidents, Carter, Clinton and Obama, stand for the light, for the greater good of humanity.

We stand on the brink, on the edge.  It is a time to step up, to ask oneself what can I do now?

More on this in my other post “What is at stake in this election?”

I am home, and deeply and profoundly grateful to say that I am feeling quite excellent.  When I left for Europe at the end of April, I was required to be shuttled about the San Francisco and Frankfurt airports by wheelchair.  On the return home, with Prabhu Nam Kaur, I was able to take the lead in dealing with our luggage for first time in three months, during which time, Prabhu Nam Kaur, who is close to being only half my weight, had been doing all the heavy lifting (grocery bags for example).

With respect to my healing, I very much wish to appreciate Sarab Prakash Kaur (Caroline Eder) who organized my workshop in Berlin, was my host there, and who is an excellent physiotherapist (as they call that work in Germany).  She pretty much worked on me every day for the ten days I was with her, and made a profound transition in how I was feeling.  Then, when I was in Vienna, I was worked on by Jagat Joti Kaur (Kristin Krautsack), who helped move my healing further along.  I include their emails here, because if you are anywhere near their respective cities, and need physical therapy, I heartily recommend both of them.

For Berlin: Caroline (Sarab Prakash) Eder and in Vienna – Kristin (Jagat Joti) Krautsack.

There were two themes that seemed to reoccur in most of my workshops during this recent five-week tour:

In my first workshop on this tour (Berlin), I suggested to one of the journeyers (In these self worth workshops we refer to the leader as “the guide,” to the person being led on the healing journey, as “the journeyer,” and to the witnesses, as “the witnesses”), that she tell her younger wounded self: “you are welcome here” (in the world).  Initially, she was absolutely unable to say that to herself.  She broke into tears.  It was a while before, by the grace of Guru Ram Das, she was able to truthfully say to herself. “Little one, you are welcome here. You have a place here. I am glad you were born.”  During the rest of my tour, I was sensitive to when it was appropriate to ask journeyers if they felt welcome here in the world.  I gradually came to realize that it is quite a common and important theme; that there are many people who have never felt welcomed into the world, and have never felt that they have a place here, or belong here – or anywhere.

Another journeyer succinctly stated the other theme: “It is hard to allow myself to think/feel about my relationship with God, as it felt that God was not there for me when I was a child. I don’t understand how He works & how I should trust Him.  Seems like He has the easy part (That now that I am supposed to be spiritual, I should love him, but when I needed him and those awful things were happening to me, he was not there).  How do you fit God into all the terrible things that have happened in the world?”  Responding to that was a significant piece of work, especially since I have had the same issue for most of my life.  I had been either and atheist or furiously angry with God over the Jewish Holocaust from age six to sixty-six.

This question, “How can there be a God that allows such things?” is not an abstract philosophical discussion, but a core issue in the lives of many people on the planet, whether or not it is acknowledged in the cognitive mind.  For most people who have been abused in one way or another, who have received substantial wounds to their self worth, the question is, “Can I trust in life? Is it OK to open oneself to feeling, to being present, to hope, to love?”  If the answer is “No,” which is frequently the case, then one’s capacity to be present in life is limited, and one cannot fully play the game of life.

I do not think I can overstate the importance of this Self Worth work, “Healing the Wounds of Life” that we are doing.  If you do not feel that you are welcome here in the world, and/or, that you cannot trust, then you wind up going through the motions of living, but you are not fully alive, not fully present, and are limited in being able to have a meaningful, fulfilling, and loving relationship with another person.  I think these issues are relatively universal, but are rarely acknowledged, as they sit in the subconscious.  And in sitting in the subconscious, they guide one’s life, establishing the parameters within which one lives.

The good news is that these wounds can be healed, that one can change one’s story and open oneself up to trust, to be present, to live and to love.  I have seen in some people that there can be anger that there have been so many years of one’s life, when one was living under the thumb, as it were, of a subconscious mind that believes that one does not have a place in the world, doe not deserve to be, and cannot trust.

For myself, I can look back at various times in my life that I have spent years of not being present in one way or another, and in my mostly unacknowledged shadow side, felt quite negative, angry, and guilty towards myself and my consciousness.  However, rather than lament the past, I can only be grateful for the present, for being healed.  For example, I really did spend 60 years being angry with God, and while I was living my life, there was always a limit on the depth of relationship I could enter into with another; there was always fear, however tucked away from my awareness it may have been (and where there is fear, there is always anger); and, of course, it is rather hard to merge oneself with the Divine if you angry with it.

Now, my personal question is how to carry my transcendent morning meditation experience into the day.  This morning, at the end of chanting, sitting in that wonderful space, I was aware of three beings: Guru Ram Das, Ramakrishna, and Kali Ma.  Kali Ma is relatively new in my life, coming to me from two interesting directions; from Ramakrishna, and from an oft repeating experience in the lives of mostly women journeyers who find themselves confronted with a darkness in their lives.  My first inclination, while guiding their journeys, was to try to lead them into the light.

Fortunately, I have been blessed with the gift of listening and the awareness that while I am guiding the journey, I am not leading it, as it is not my journey.  So I have been led by the journeyer to go with them as they embrace the darkness and celebrate it.  And in that embrace, have to come to acknowledge and experience Kali.  In the rational Western mind, you may prefer that I do not deify this energy pattern, but I find that I can much more clearly embrace this energy, this core aspect of the feminine Divine, if I allow myself to see it as Mother Kali, the Mother of the Universe.

Back to my morning meditation:  I am grateful to say that Guru Ram Das is just about always there, as the last thing I do in morning sadhana is chant the Guru Ram Das chant for 11 minutes (also the last thing I do before going to sleep).  It is to him that I offer my prayers and who I rely on when guiding journeys.  Ramakrishna is a new teacher in my life, but this morning, as my mind was full of the daily details of life, of planning this and that, I found him a little withdrawn, as he does not wish to involve himself with doing in the world.  But Kali Ma’s love is fully unconditional.  It does not matter what one’s state of mind is in any way at all.  If you turn towards the Mother, there is only love and unconditional acceptance.

Earlier this week after finishing the book, I started reading Great Swan all over again, and in the very beginning, when the narrator is taking us along to greet Ramakrishna for the first time, I felt like I was actually there in his presence greeting him.  I could feel his love and his accepting me into his circle.

I am also reading three other books.  I mostly read two or three books at a time.  What is unusual at this time is that they are all quite lovely, each in their own way, spiritually oriented books: “The Forty Rules of Love” (Elif Shafak) about the meeting of Rumi and Shams, the great Sufi masters; “Longing for Darkness – Tara and the Black Madonna” (China Galland); and “Shantaram” (Gregory David Roberts. I just read, today, a deeply moving chapter (The Pilgrimage to the Black Madonna) in “Longing for Darkness,” in which the author describes herself and a million other people on a profoundly physically challenging pilgrimage, two weeks of walking up to 50 kilometers (30 miles) a day.  Much pain and suffering, cold, rain, blisters, hunger, fear, and then the author shares the beauty of the camaraderie and love shared with her particular group of pilgrims, which I found deeply moving.  There is a photo of some portion of the million people in a square at the monastery, and a sign, in Polish, which translates to, “We Want God.”

“We Want God” – You see I am thinking that I am a highly developed spiritual fellow, although also knowing that I am very much just another pilgrim. So, I had been thinking how blessed I am, and how special it is that is has been given to me to be able to pray, “May I love Thee.” And then here are a million Polish pilgrims whose collective prayer boils down to “We Want God.”  I am always astounded to learn the many ways in which I find myself being arrogant and condescending.  I was reading about all this pain and suffering of their pilgrimage, and thinking, more or less, “there they go, doing the Catholic suffering thing,” but the beauty of what the pilgrims shared after reaching the end of their pilgrimage, moved right off the pages of the book and into my heart, extending my feeling uplifted today right through the afternoon.  So that I am still writing after 4 PM, when I mostly have never been able to write after lunch.

Suffering.  I have rejected suffering as a part of spiritual practice. Perhaps it has a greater role than I had thought.  I have been in profound physical pain for a substantial part of every day for the last two months.  I had been having a problem sitting in my usual meditating posture, a half lotus, for the past six months.  There would be sufficient pain after a relatively short time (I had been accustomed to sitting in this posture for long periods of time) that I would have to extend my left leg to get relief.  I assume that this is related to that major auto accident I had back in 1980 when I broke my pelvis in three places, as there are often lower back and hip issues that arise upon occasion.  While I have frequently experienced pain as a result of that injury, I had not previously suffered from the pain.  If it was there, it was there, but it was not a factor to my sense of well-being.

I explored various healing modalities trying to deal with whatever was going on that was limiting my ability to sit comfortably, finally going to see an orthopedic surgeon, who sent me to physical therapy. They did something in physical therapy while going very deep into both the psoas and piriformis muscles that led to a profound irritation of my sciatic nerve on the left side and pain that was exquisite; on a scale of 1 to 10, it was 11. And, it went on and on, until today – I had a Cortisone injection into the area yesterday, which is just beginning to take effect.

The pain in the morning was the worst; just going the half a dozen steps to the bathroom was hellish.  It was immediately afterwards that I would struggle into the kitchen to make my coffee – having become a fanatic about it  – needing to sit on a chair while doing it.  Then I would take my coffee over to the couch, open up Great Swan, and dive into Ramakrishna’s holy presence.  This pain was suffering, overriding almost everything, but it would leave my awareness when I was with Ramakrishna, which I followed with morning chanting. Was there a relationship between my physical suffering and the deep place I would go to?

Yogi Bhajan used to lead what he called White Tantric Yoga, where participants would sit in long rows of couples facing one another, generally holding postures while chanting mantra, for 30 minutes or an hour, frequently quite painful, with the overall effect being quite elevating.  There often seemed to me to be some correlation between the difficulty of the postures and the resultant elevation at the end of the workshop. And, a totally new thought for me: when we do my healing workshops we go through a valley of suffering while listening to the stories around each persons wounds, emerging at the end into a state of truly profound elevation, with the participants feeling like they are beginning life anew.

I was very grateful to be able to spend some time with Joan Halifax, a wonderful human being, at the recent SVN conference, where she was one of the featured speakers.  I brought up the subject of suffering and spiritual practice, and she said; “now you sound like a Buddhist.” How strange that I have sort of blocked out thinking about the role of suffering, when in each Self Worth workshop I lead we have to dive so deeply through each person’s suffering to come out the other side, to the place of forgiveness, self acceptance, and inner peace.

I was introduced to SVN through one of my closest and oldest friends, I will just give his first name here, John, another person who is of inherited wealth, who has used his inherited wealth as a trust for humanity, and about who I once wrote, is “the only person I know who suffers from an excess of likeability and competence”.  He is now not the only person I know of for whom that is true, but I met all the others through him.  John, who was/is friends with Josh and Wayne, was amongst a small group of people who were drawn together out of the isolation that they each felt from being a person of inherited wealth, and therefore, suffering the consequence of never knowing if someone was befriending you for your money or for yourself.

The decided to form a group called “Doughnuts,” where they could comfortably hang out with one another and feel safe.  As these were all people of social consciousness, their spending time together led them to develop the Threshold Foundation, which they created to have a vehicle to use their philanthropy as consciously as possible.  After a while they wanted to create an organization through which they could work together more through their collective “doing” rather than “giving”.  They also thought it would be interesting and important to include people who had become successful as socially conscious entrepreneurs, as their interest was to work together effectively.

When I joined, the  membership criteria was that one had to be an entrepreneur who had founded an organization that was socially conscious in some way, and had an annual gross income of at least $3 million, there were other related criteria for senior officers of much larger businesses, for non-profits, and for community elders like Ram Dass.  I had joined through my founding of Rainforest Products and my role, at that time, as Vice President of Marketing for Golden Temple cereals.  A nice thing about membership in SVN, is that once one has joined one can continue to be a member even if one’s circumstances had considerably changed.  There was, and is, a vetting process through which one had to prove the social consciousness of one’s enterprise – income alone is not enough.

It was a great pleasure to be back in a community in which everyone has their shoulder to the wheel in some way, each person working to serve the greater good, frequently in ways that are quite brilliant.  I have sometimes found that in the world of yogic practitioners that folks can be quite wrapped up in their inner process, in their own personal progress, with the state of the world feeling and seeming quite remote – something out there – almost as if it has nothing to do with us – like a TV program more or less.  At SVN, the world is with us, humanity’s collective pain (which there is plenty of) and the state of the global environment, is real and palpable.  But, this is not a place where people complain about how terrible things are, not at all, but, rather, where the conversation is more about what to do and how to do it better.

I led an abbreviated form of a Self Worth workshop there, perhaps more accurately described as an introduction to that work (rather than a workshop), with a brief dip into an interactive process, in which I asked participants, “How might your wounds be impacting your life, be limiting your ability to allow yourself to succeed in life, have abundance in all areas of life?” I was quite pleased with how it unfolded, as I felt it was the best short presentation I have ever given.  It was received with much approbation, with many people coming up to me throughout the conference to thank me, or share what came up for them.  I should add, that I also led a brief healing experience – as I would never open up experiencing one’s wounds without a healing of some kind.

As the conference went on, I became aware, that while just about everyone there is quite successful in the realm of doing, they are not any more successful in their personal relationships than are most other people.  I spoke about this in the closing circle on the last day, mentioning what Daddy Bray said to me about “being a radiant example of how to live on the planet,” and that as we (SVN members) wish to be examples to others, we need to live our lives in such a way that people would say, about us, that they would like to live like us, that they are inspired by us; and that in order for this to happen, more inner work is required.  I was blessed in that what I said flowed in a moving and compelling way.  Again, many people thanked me and said that they would like to see this happen.

Now, back at home, question is how to make it real and actually begin to do something.  I am attracted to bring my work here.  It would be truly interesting to see what would happen if a significant portion of this important community could more fully unleash their power – a very exciting prospect.

Remembering what Guru Ram Das told me, the first time he blessed me with a vision of himself, when I understood him to say that he has merged with one; that the one can manifest in any form, and, when I call on him, Guru Ram Das, the one can choose to manifest to me in that form. So then, in what form would I find Ramakrishna?  In some divine manifestation of Dakshineswar, surrounded by Mahendra,  Rakhal, Narendra (who became Vivekananda), and the rest of his companions.

I saw him then (I see him now), and bowed.  I know that when he was in his body, he did not have any non-Indians (as far as I know) come to see him.  Now, there must be many, and especially Les Hixon, that great man, who seem to reach liberation in five different spiritual practices, while appreciating the uniqueness of each and the commonality of all.  I am humbled to follow in his footsteps.  I addressed Ramakrishna – knowing that if you were to ask him for a blessing, he would respond by saying something like, “I am only a pillowcase, you must go to Kali-ma for your blessings.”  “I said, “I have heard that you cannot stand the touch of an impure person.  I have my imperfections and have accepted myself as imperfect. O beloved child of Kali-ma, I thank the Mother for bringing me into your presence, and humbly request that she permit me to receive the flow of her energy through your touch.” I felt his touch and began to soar, and somehow found myself checking in with Guru Ram Das, and asking him if it is alright, for me to be asking and receiving a blessing from Ramakrishna.  And felt his loving reply, “I already showed you that we are the same, different aspects of the Divine.”

After a while, I opened my eyes, and bathed in a chapter of Great Swan, which I followed with my morning chanting, feeling grateful.  When I got up, the pain was there again, but it is only pain, and not so strong as it was for a while, when it brought suffering and the diminution of my consciousness.  I have not been doing my usual morning physical exercises for a while, as it seems that no matter how gently I do them, the pain gets worse.  I have by now seen, chiropractors, acupuncturists, an orthopedic surgeon, an osteopath, massage therapists, and physical therapists. The pain was actually caused by the first round of physical therapists, as they triggered the sciatic pain (almost said “my” sciatic pain, but I do not want to own it) by pushing too hard and going to deep.  Have had an X-ray, and MRIs of my hips and my lower back.  Some lines from a Jimmy Hendrix  song comes to mind: “there must be some way out of here.”  I am open to it manifesting.

I went with my wife and my daughter Snatam to an art gallery in the Castro district of San Francisco, where there was a show of Ma Jaya’s artwork. The “Castro” is one of the main gay communities on the planet. I heard this raucous shriek as we walked in (“we” were always obvious in our white clothes and turbans), and this somewhat wild looking woman walked up to us, saying something to the effect of, “Yogi Bhajan sent you to be with me. Now you have to do whatever I say while I am here.” In my mind, I went, “uh oh, this woman knows our drill.” There is a level of hospitality that is common in the Punjab, where Sikhs come from (which may be common all throughout India, but I only know the Punjab) that is far beyond what we understand to be hospitality in the USA, in which the host drops just about everything to serve and care for the guest. In my position as head of our little community in the San Francisco Bay Area, I often received and hosted various dignitaries (mostly either spiritual leaders or Indian political leaders) on behalf of Yogi Bhajan. My instructions were to treat them as I would treat him.

I learned that she was a spiritual leader, seen as a manifestation of Kali, who like myself had been a Jew from New York, who had devoted herself to serving people with AIDS. This was before any of the various AIDS cocktails had come into use, when AIDS was still pretty much a death sentence. It seemed that many of her students were gay. I was requested to attend her the next morning at what she called a “Darshan” at someone’s home in the same neighborhood – where she was staying.

The next morning, I found myself in a very crowded living room, where Ma was seated on a couch that was elaborately set up as a kind of throne, or teacher’s seat. Everyone else was seated on the floor. People were taking turns sitting before her, at her feet. She and they would look at one another intently for a little while, then they would have an inaudible dialogue, and the person would stand up with their eyes shining, and someone else would take their place.

I was standing up leaning against a doorframe with my arms folded across my chest, looking at the scene before me with a cynical and jaded eye, when she said, “Sat Santokh, come here” indicating that I should sit before her. Still feeling quite cynical, I sat before her, and she asked me, “What do you want.” Vastly, to my surprise, I find myself shaking as I sat before her, saying to myself that there seems to be much more to this woman than I had thought. I replied, “I would like to learn how to open my heart.” She simply nodded her head, and said, “OK.” I got up and continued to watch every person take his or her turn in sitting before her. This continued with time out for meals throughout the weekend. As things were finishing up on Sunday evening, she turned to me and said that she would like me to go with her to LA and spend the week with her, and I agreed to go.

In that next week, I went with her everywhere she went, seeing the face of AIDS in a way that I could not have previously imagined. We went to the dying wards at the general hospital where the patients looked like concentration camp victims with their skin wrapped around their bones; to a ward that was filled with psychotic AIDS patients; to another place where their were parents with AIDS trying to care for their children; a place where parents and children had AIDS; and many other such places of many different kinds where the people were in every stage of dealing with AIDS. We did this all week long, and somehow, none of it really penetrated to my core. I seemed to withdraw inside and look at it all with a kind of dispassionate eye.

Then on Saturday, there was to be another Darshan, this one under a tent with room for several hundred people, right in the middle of LA. Ma sent out several vans to many of the places we had visited to bring people from their wards and rooms to attend the Darshan. This was in the days when many people in the Gay community had begun to find attending funerals to be a regular part of their lives, and it was also a time when many of the AIDS victims found themselves to be alone; with their lovers having died and their parents and family having disowned them. A very lonely time – so what Ma was doing was a real service. Just prior to the weekend, Ma had requested me to ask my wife to join us for the weekend. My wife is an accomplished singer of devotional music.

As the day went on, I found myself watching a procession of the people I had been seeing all the previous week, still with the same dispassionate eye, but also with an unusual feeling working its way through me. It was like being at one of these movies, when after the movie is over and the credits are running, when you have a last and unexpected chance to one more time see the people you had become connected to during the course of the movie. A man was rolled in on a wheelchair, and Ma introduced him as having CMV, an AIDS related blindness. The man began to cry, and almost everyone else began to cry as well.

Ma asked Arlo Guthrie, a long time devotee, to sing something to relieve the situation, and then she turned to my wife and asked her to sing, and my wife sang the most powerful version of Amazing Grace that I have ever experienced. It seemed to come through her rather than from her.

When I grew up in the Bronx, I knew nothing about the existence of homosexuality. Indeed, I never even had heard of divorce before a cousin of mine divorced when I was a teenager. Mine was a very sheltered world. But everything changed for me when I moved to the Village (Greenwich Village) at 18, and, shortly thereafter, began to engage with the WRL, where more of the staff and board members were gay than not, including all of my three major mentors, Ralph Di Gia, David McReynolds, and Bayard Rustin. Afterwards, I thought I was comfortable in the gay world (and that I had no prejudices in relation to it), but I found in hanging out with Ma that I was out of my comfort zone in relating to the muscle guys, the cowboy guys, and the very tough and scary looking dikes. They did not feel like part of, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, my “karass” – the community within which I was comfortable. To me they felt like the “other.”

When Prabhu Nam Kaur (my wife) began to sing “Amazing Grace”, everyone began to sing with her, and their eyes were all shining with the beauty of the shared experience. I was singing as well, and I found myself looking around and meeting the eyes of many people. I looked at the muscle guys and the cowboy guys, and the scary dikes, and I saw the love and beauty in their eyes, and my heart opened to them and to everyone else in the room. I began to sob uncontrollably, and one of Ma’s assistants, who I knew had a profound disliking for men (based on some very negative experiences) came and put her arms around me, holding me and comforting me.

The next morning, I went to say good-bye to Ma with Prabhu Nam Kaur, before we left for home. As we stood before her, she looked at my wife and me, and, before I said anything, she smiled and said, “you’re welcome,” anticipating my thanking her for the experience, perhaps before I was fully aware of what a profound moment that had been for me.

Thank you Ma. It was a privilege to know you.

Ma Jaya’s Mahasamadhi
5.26.1940 – 4.13.2012