My Introduction to Siddha Yoga

In 1986, I had been wandering up and down New Zealand for about four years, sleeping under bridges and trees, on riverbanks and beaches, and in barns or derelict buildings. I worked on farms for food and spent much time hiking alone in the mountains.

In January that year, some friends at a hippy festival invited me to come and stay with them for a month. They were regulars at the Siddha Yoga Centre just across the road. We used to get stoned and go to the centre and chant our brains out. The centre was run by a very sweet old lady in her tiny meditation room. It was full with six people but sometimes we’d squeeze as many as twelve in, sitting knee on knee. In spite of us singing off key and mangling the words, the chants were always ecstatic. I loved the exotic-ness of the Sanskrit mantras and the incense.

The old lady must have been an angel; she never chided us for our singing, the way we dressed or our being late. She never asked us for money but always provided tea and biscuits. She accepted us just as we were and was always glad to have us there. Unfortunately, this wasn’t typical of Siddha Yoga.

This was just after the split with Nit and all references to him had been removed. Nevertheless, one devotee, who preferred Nit to Gurumayi, kept a secret stash of photos, which he showed me. So I was vaguely aware of that scandal from the beginning. However, I trusted my friends’ judgement and if they didn’t see a problem, neither did I.

I visited my SY friends again in January 1987 and began to use their place as a base for my travels and attending satsangs when I was staying with them. I was longing to get to India and the Auckland Centre had arranged discounted airline tickets for devotees to fly to Ganeshpuri for the Mahasamadhi celebrations. I wasn’t really a devotee at that stage but bought a ticket through them any way. On my way to India, I stopped in at the Auckland Centre. It couldn’t have been more different to what I was used to. It was large and spacious. There were maybe fifty people attending, all dressed as if for church. It was very formal and tightly run. The singing was sweet and in tune. And it had all the charm of a prison cell. It just left me cold. As one friend put it, it had no Shakti.

My Introduction to GSP, August 1987

I arrived at Bombay Airport in bare feet and with a sack-cloth bag containing only my passport and a toothbrush, and no plan. After wandering around the Bombay slums for half a day, I figured I might as well go to the Ganeshpuri Ashram that I had heard so much about. I had no idea how to get there but with some help, I got on the right bus. Then everyone on the bus took turns practising their English on me.

When the bus pulled up outside GSP, the other passengers indicated this was the “Asram”. Five-storey white stone buildings were surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass. The front was patrolled by security guards. I had never seen a picture of it but I was so sure this could not be the ashram that I stayed on the bus and carried on to Ganeshpuri village.

When I came to the Nityananda Samadhi Temple, I thought I had found the ashram. I rented the cheap, mosquito-filled room from the Nityananda Trust and settled into “ashram” life.

A couple of days later, I was wandering through the forest on a hill overlooking the village when I came across yet another ashram. This consisted of one lone sadhu and his stick hut. Inside was a puja with a cheap poster of Hanuman repeating Ram Ram. This sadhu was very welcoming. As we talked, he pointed through the trees to the five-storey building I had seen from the bus. “Muktanand Asram, very bad.” He said.

I made a mental note and the next day made my way there and booked in for three days. The first shock was that it was Rs100/day. Although that included food, it was ten times the cost of a room in the village, which in turn was more expensive than I was expecting. The next shock was that I was presented with a form to sign that said the accommodation fee was a donation. I asked how it could it be a donation if the fee was compulsory? The registration woman just looked at me as if I was an idiot. Uneasily, I paid up.

A lot of people had a problem with the compulsory donation. There was a reason for it. Under Indian tax law, donations to ashrams are non-taxable, whereas accommodation charges are taxed. The ashram was ripping the government off for tens of thousands of dollars a month. The subject was broached with GM by letter, but to no avail and with no response.

The ashram was very quiet at this time. It was monsoon, Gurumayi was away and there were barely a hundred people in residence. I stayed just three days but it made a deep impression. Then I left to see something of India, before returning for the Mahasamadhi celebrations.

Mahasamadhi, October 1987

GSP was a hive of activity in October. Gurumayi had returned and the ashram was packed with people. This time I stayed for three weeks before taking off to travel again. Only two things of note happened during this time.

One was that I bumped into the New Zealand SY co-ordinator, Jessica. She was horrified that I had been travelling round India – why would I waste my time when I could be in the guru’s house? She took an instant dislike of me and later, went out of her way to make things difficult for me. For instance, a year later when I applied to be on staff, she also insisted I had to have an aids test. This was simply untrue. In 1988, when you had the test, you had to fill out a questionnaire with every detail of your sexual history and you had to have counselling. When you got your test results, you had to have more counselling regardless of the result. Jessica then sent nasty report on me to GSP recommending I not be put on staff. And she did not send the accommodation form she was supposed to, so no one was expecting me.

The other thing was an incident that I saw from a distance. Every year at Mahasamadhi, there was a big giveaway of blankets and pots to the advasis. This started after Baba died and as the reputation of the giveaway increased, the number of people coming increased each year. I heard stories that 100,000 people turned up that year but who really knows? Anyway, there was a riot. The ashram spin was that union activists saw GSP as a soft and wealthy target and had stirred up trouble for their own gain. At that time, almost all the labourers employed by GSP were local people. The ashram always paid the minimum legal wages. The excuse for this was they didn’t want to distort the local economy. As I heard it, the local workers were demanding a wage increase to normal rates. There may have been some union people involved. I don’t know. But after the riot, George Afif and some others burnt down the huts of the ringleaders. Local labourers were fired and from then on, all labour was brought in from outside, typically 500-600km away. Some workers came from as far away as South India, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. The giveaway was stopped from then on.

January 1988

I returned to GSP from travelling after Christmas. This time I was given the seva of chain-sawing in Dakshin Kashi. On the face of it, this was a good idea as I had done this for a living. However, the seva desk didn’t know that. I told them that I didn’t have any shoes but they didn’t care. I had to hope my chainsaw skills would protect me. I don’t know what the swamis thought of me. At this time, I dressed in a purple knee length lungi, orange kurta and bare feet. I had long hair and a beard. (Later they tightened up entry requirements to keep people like me out).

One day I was standing in the field covered in dust, sawdust and sweat, holding a chainsaw in one hand. I was talking to a friend when out of the dust appeared a ghost-like apparition on a bicycle, all in spotless white. It looked at me and said, “You should get some shoes, chainsaws are dangerous.” and peddled off into the haze. Me and my friend looked at each other and he said “Who was that jerk!??” It was Swarupananda, chief butt-licker to George.

Actually, I didn’t get much chainsawing done because the chain was always blunt when I started and I spent most of my shifts getting it sharpened. The other chainsaw-operators seemed to have no idea what burying the blade in gravel and dirt did to it or they didn’t care. Only the garage-walas were allowed to sharpen the saws. Michelle, a French-Canadian, used to swear when he saw me coming, because it meant he had to sharpen the saw yet again.

It was at one of these sharpening sessions that I met David Kempton, Durgananda’s brother and an ashram manager. He was his usual charming self (like a pit bull) and suggested he could use the chainsaw to cut off my beard. I said “No thanks mate, I’m quite ‘attached’ to it.” as I tugged on it (Zen joke about attachments) and my friend and I laughed ourselves silly. David was less amused and later I saw him pointing me out to Yogiram Brent as a troublemaker.

Before long, I was shifted to late night dish shifts. These often finished around midnight but I would be too hyper to sleep. Since the cave was closed and meditation was not allowed, the only option was to go up to the roof and smoke a joint and watch the stars. I got busted for being up there… because being on the roof at night was verboten. The same security guy used to catch me every night. He used to bust us in the dishroom too, for doing the final puja too enthusiastically. He had little imagination and no sense of humour and I imagine he is still being used as a SY doormat somewhere. I’m sure he had no idea why we used to laugh all the time.

In January 1988, they had not yet demolished the GSP meditation garden. I was busted several times for (shock! horror!) trying to meditate there. During the day it was too busy and in the evening they put the sprinklers on. At night they had regular security patrols to prevent troublemakers disrupting the routine by meditating. The garden was bulldozed to make way for the Shiva Bowl disaster (see below) and all the coconut trees that were shifted, died.

At the end of January I went back to New Zealand and came back in November intending to stay long term. In the mean time, I attended another centre in NZ that was small but vibrant and where no one was put off by my appearance. With the help of the centre leader, I tried to get a long-term visa for India and to be put on staff. However I was blocked by Jessica, who I mentioned above, and by Yogiram Brent who was the GSP manager at the time. So I went to GSP on a tourist visa. Jessica had failed to pass on the housing request to so the housing department had no idea I was coming.

November 1988

This time when I turned up at GSP, I was dressed in a bright yellow kurta and pant, bare feet and beads. My hair was long and bleached yellow, and my beard was also bleached and in dreadlocks with little bells tied to the end of each one. I was given seva in FC where all the misfits and freaks were sent. By now I was starting to learn how appearance-conscious and superficial the ashram ethos was.

David Kempton made me his special project. I only cut my hair after four months when I was satisfied that David Kempton had given up all hope that I ever would. We made a bit of a performance of the whole thing. I had my hair cut in secret. The dark roots replaced the yellow hair. I changed into clothes I hadn’t worn before, and I took off my glasses. This made me almost unrecognisable. Then I had my friend Richard take me around and “introduce” me. Only one person actually recognised me. That was Indirananda. Some people took YEARS to realise that the hippy with dreadlocks, and the short-haired Gorakh were the same person. On someone’s suggestion, I presented the dreadlocks to GM at darshan, wrapped in a silk cloth. The darshan swami, Ishwarananda I think, asked me what they were and then gave them back like I’d handed him dog turd.

In May 1989 I was put on staff. This was a huge relief to me as it meant I could stay indefinitely and not just 6 months at a time. I still did not get a stipend however. And like all things SY, there was a dark side. Long term staff were put on a student visa, but there was no way any of us were students. So effectively we were committing visa fraud. The ashram got around this by inventing a bogus series of courses in “Indian religion and philosophy.” and the like. From time to time there would be staff meetings to remind us which course we were on. They had six years worth of bogus courses.

Seva Stories

My seva from Nov 88 to May 89 was in FC. FC stood for Facilities Co-ordination but we referred to it as Fetch and Carry, F***ing C***s or Finding Chocolate. Mostly it involved shifting 2000 mattresses from one location to another, then shifting them back again. It was a dumping ground for oddballs. It was definitely not a place for bad backs. When the sleva desk threatened people with FC, they often developed bad backs in a flash. (People faced with dishroom seva developed sudden soap or water allergies). But I enjoyed FC and I liked the people I worked with. The people in FC were often real characters.

The two main guys then were Don Orlik and Richard Gonzales. When Don first saw me at the seva desk, he said to Richard, ” I sure hope we don’t get that guy!” However, we got along really well. Don was a conservative type who believed in calling a spade a spade. Richard was ½ Apache Indian, looked like a gorilla and liked to playfight, but had a heart of gold and was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Working with them was never dull. It got us fit too. I remember carrying 70lb suitcases two at a time up 5 stories of narrow stairs for 8 hours at a stretch, and racing each other as we did it. The two suitcases weighed more than I did.

There was a Zen quality to FC. Housing would ask us to move something. Later we would tell them we had moved it, even tho we hadn’t. This would prompt them to ask us to move it somewhere else. Again we would tell them it was moved when it wasn’t. The art was in trying to figure out how many times you could do this before something actually had to be moved.

One day we got to move GM’s old massaging bed to the clinic. As soon as we got it behind closed doors, I decided to try it out. I wasn’t content to lie on the bed and soak up GM’s (bad back) vibes, I grabbed the cord and plugged it in. It vibrated! I had quite a session on

it but I never could figure out how it was supposed to help a bad back. Anyway, now it had my good back vibes in it.

FC was great for getting to places the public never saw. In GSP, swamis and VIPs were allowed to put personal belongings in storage while they were away. There were a number of rooms full of their suitcases and trunks. While I was in FC, we would sometimes be asked to clear a room for occupation and we would have to move all the gear to another location. All these suitcases and trunks shared common keys, and we would take a peek at what was stored in them. You would be amazed at the crap that people kept: cheap plastic nic nacs, plates, spoons and cups stolen from the amrit, dirty magazines, old rags, mouldy books, tea bags etc etc. These were often kept for years. Sometimes people never came back. Eventually the belongings might be taken to the free box.

I remember Akka Pratt had a LOT of stuff in storage and when she came back it was delivered to her room. Two days later she sent most of it back into storage. I couldn’t help thinking that if she didn’t use the stuff when she was there, then when was she going to use it??

Some of the swamis were amongst the worst hoarders. Vimarshananda and Akhandananda had a room each! Radhananda had the biggest collection of junk not even worthy of the free box! Sometimes being asked to clear out a swamis belongings was the only hint that they had left SY. This was the case for Vimarshananda and Radhananda.

When I left for 2 weeks and came back on staff at the end of May 89, I was put in charge of some adivasi labourers moving rocks. These guys did it tough. Minimum wages and atrocious working conditions in the deep mud of monsoon. It was a strange sight to see Swarupananda pedalling through the mud, taking infinite care not to soil his perfect white clothes. One day I cut my foot with a large rock. The advasis showed more concern over it than I did myself, more than any ashramite. No one in the ashram cared about their welfare.

Vege Wash

After a month, I was moved to vege wash and chai making. This started at 3am and finished at 10pm every day. The catch phrase around the ashram at the time was ” Do whatever seva you’re asked to do.” and I took this a little too literally. They had me sweeping the bakery too and I was also running the library. Testing the chai gave me a sugar rush late at night so that my 5 hrs of sleep were mostly spent lying awake waiting for my alarm to go off. After 2 months of this I was completely run down and would literally fall asleep on the job. The cut on my foot was not healing and David Kempton used to hassle me about it every day. Finally my sub-conscious won and I developed a mysterious illness which didn’t go away til my seva had been re-assigned! I recovered just in time not to be sent home.

Generator Plant

One of my recovery sevas was in the generator plant. Andre, a French-Canadian, was in charge and Roine and I were his assistants. They laughed when I told them my assignment was only temporary. They said I would never leave the generator plant until I left the ashram – and they were right! Roine pointed out that the walls surrounding the plant were covered in barbed wire like a prison. No chance of escape. Roine left India two months later. A month after that, I was put in charge when I mutinied over Andre’s incompetence. Un til then I had known nothing about electricity or diesel engines. Over the years I became a self-taught expert on both, rewiring the control panels and completely overhauling the diesel generators.

This was a 24 hr on call seva as I had to be there any time the generators were running. They would start automatically if the mains power failed and this happened at least once a day and all day on Fridays. Initially I had to monitor the mains voltage and turn the generators on if it was too high or low. I wired in a voltage monitor so the generators would start automatically. The generators also had to be on if the video crew were shooting, or if GM was attending any function. This meant I could not go to any program, chant or intensive if GM was present.

I also looked after a portable generator, which was towed to various remote locations. This required bicycling 5 or 10km in the noonday sun to look after it. In the summer, it would be 40ºC in the shade, but this was cooler than the main plant, which was around 65ºC (149ºF) when the generators were running.

At times the generators were required to be on almost 24hrs a day which meant long hours for me. My record was 153 hrs of seva in one week. (that does not include meal times). There were sometimes promises of help but nothing came of this, probably because I did not make enough of a fuss. I also had the Mukteshwar Library to run and late dish shifts to attend.

Dishwashing

Dishwashing was one of several sevas that you would never see VIPs, swamis, or management doing. Dishwashing was a classic. I must have washed enough dishes for a couple of lifetimes but you would only see the above types if GM was there (when you had to book a place!) or if they had been sent to set an example in one of the dishwashing recruitment drives. It was amazing the number of people who developed allergies to dishwashing powder or hot water.

Getting people to do dish seva in the amrit at GSP was always hard. It was hot and wet and sweaty, and worst of all in SY, it wasn’t glamorous. The dishes had to be taken from the pavilion up to the dishroom, which was on the second floor. There was a kind of dumb waiter that was used to lift the tubs of dirty dishes upstairs and to bring down the tubs of clean dishes. It had a simple arrangement, an open box suspended from a chain in the lift shaft. There were up and down buttons both upstairs and downstairs, but it would not operate unless both the upstairs and downstairs doors to the lift shaft were closed and you had to hold your finger on the button to keep it moving. The box in which the dishes sat did not have a front or back. As a result it was very common for things to fall out of the tubs and jam between the shaft wall and the box. Removing these was easiest done by jogging the dumbwaiter in the opposite direction it had been operating. Then you could reach in and clear the blockage.

Death in the Dishroom

One night something rather unfortunate happened. The dumbwaiter was upstairs and jammed by a knife right at the back. An Indian teenage boy pressed the down button to no effect. So he reached inside and removed the knife. Because he had kept pressing the down button, the chain had unwound and so the only thing holding the dumbwaiter up was the knife. When it

was removed, the dumbwaiter, which weighed several hundred kilos, went into freefall, landing on the boys back, breaking his spine and crushing him.

Perhaps his life could have been saved if the people there had not panicked. What needed to happen was for someone to hold the door-closed switch in (the doors couldn’t be closed because the body was in the way) and press the up button to get the weight of the dumbwaiter off the boy so he could be pulled out. Instead, people started screaming and Swami Akhandananda ran downstairs and turned off the power to the whole complex. Now everyone was standing in complete darkness, people were screaming, and rescue was impossible. It was about an hour before the body was removed from the lift shaft. Exactly what happened after this is unclear. The body was quickly removed from the ashram and the dumbwaiter was disabled without official explanation. There was no trace of blood by the next day. No announcement about the death was ever made and I do not know what the boys family was told. As on other occasions there was “no death” in the ashram. The cover up was so effective that most people in the ashram at the time were unaware of it.

GM was in the ashram at the time, which may have been why Sw Akhandananda was in the dishroom. I wasn’t on that particular dish shift myself but I found out about the death the next day from several people who were present. We discussed it in the electrical dept because it was one of our electricians who designed the lift and its “safety features”. We were trying to come up with a simple way of preventing it happening again.

Assengear

There was time around 1992 when George had been on a spending spree and all the ashrams were put on credit control. We were informed that we could only order material if it was essential, and if it was to be used immediately. We were not allowed to hold stock. I thought this was particularly silly given that I used a new set of filters on the generators every 10 days, and

it took that long to get thru the approval process. I got round this by ordering two months supplies at a time, and lying. Each order had to be approved by the electrical manager, then by the construction head, then by the ashram manager, and finally by the finance committee, before going to the purchasers.

I knew none of these people had a clue what they were signing. So one day I ordered an Assen Gear. I gave it a part number, said it was needed right away, and it sailed thru the approval process. The purchasers had great trouble getting their Assen gear in Bombay, in fact it seemed no one could get their assen gear anywhere in India. So I went to Don Bartoe, the purchasing guy, and said “Do you mean to tell me that the purchasing dept. cant get their assen gear, no matter how hard they try??” and then the penny dropped. Don was smart and extremely hard to fool, and I was delighted that I had put one over on him. Don was furious that he’d been had, but had to admit grudging respect that I’d pulled it off.

Garbage

I remember an Aussie one summer who was put on garbage duty and used to find all sorts of things, especially when rich Americans were in residence – full suits, money, unopened chocolate bars, CD’s. I don’t think these people had any concept of recycling. I found some walkmans in the freebox one time, and tried them out to see which ones worked. The one that didn’t I threw away, or would have except that one of the Indian electricians asked if he could have it. I told him it was broken. No problem, he knew someone who could fix it. I had to carry it outside the ashram for him though, in case he was accused of stealing it. In India almost anything can be recycled, from plastic bags to cardboard, empty cans, you name it.

Library

Mukteshwar Library

One of my sevas at Ganeshpuri was looking after the Mukteshwar Library. The official ashram library was off limits to “commoners” such as myself. Over the years, housekeeping had gathered left-behind books in a cleaning room in the Mukteshwar building. I took it upon myself to organise this collection and actively collect more books. The library grew and the cleaning supplies slowly got moved elsewhere. Eventually we had about 2000 books. The most popular were the comics. If you haven’t seen them, in India they have comics that tell the stories of the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Srimad Bhagavatam and spiritual legends as well as historical figures. These are popular with adults and children alike. So much so, that it was impractical to lend them out, and so I only allowed them to be read on site. And so I would have up to a dozen Indian children (and adults) sitting on the floor reading. This was the limit – the library room was not much bigger than a kitchen table.

Because the number of books was small, and because I checked each book, I got to know them very well. People would come in looking for a book with no more description than “its sort of orange” and I would grab a book off the shelf and say ” its this one” and I would be right. Certain books would be donated that were not supposed to be in circulation, such as old

Gurudev Vani magazines. These were the original SY publication and had stories of Baba, GM and her brother. Because these were supposed to have been burnt, I kept them hidden and only lent them to trusted people. The same went for certain issues of Siddha Path, Gurudev Vani’s successor. (It was in one of these I read GM’s remark about Swami Nityananda’s offspring being demons. I heard the names of the two female swamis he got pregnant, and had abortions, from a number of old timers who heard GM’s demon speech in person)

Devahuti and the library

One time, the receptionist, Devahuti, had been promoted to ashram manager but no announcement of this had been made. Soon after, a request came one night from GM (?) in Fallsburg for a particular spiritual comic. First Devahuti checked the official Siddheshwar library without luck. Then she came looking for me (as custodian of the unofficial unsupported ‘rebel’ Mukteshwar library).

At 10:30pm, she banged on the dorm door waking everybody up. I had just got to sleep after a 20hr seva stint and was in no mood for anything except sleep. When I asked her what she wanted, she demanded that I open the library immediately so that she could read comics. She gave me no hint that she was the ashram manager or that she was doing this in an official capacity. I don’t take kindly to petty tyrants. I asked if should could come back the next day. NO! she said. So with my usual subtlety, I told her what she could do with her comics and where she could put them. She SCREAMED while I went back to bed. Some of my room mates threatened to punch me if I didn’t make her go away.

The next day I found the locks on the library door changed and when I went to the key department, they told me I had to see the manager to get a key. I was less than impressed that the manager was Devahuti. We had another yelling match before coming to an agreement. No doubt this made interesting reading back at Fallsburg. A secret record of all “incidents” like this was in the managers office. By the end of my stay I had a whole series of black marks against my name.

Jenny Shurrock and the library

The Library was tolerated but not supported by the ashram. The incident with Devahuti was not the only stoush I had with ashram managers. The worst was with Jenny Shurrock. Jenny was blond and around 6ft 3” – tall. She had a strong authoritarian streak and liked to throw her weight around. She hid this behind a sweet-and-innocent persona. She had no problem handing out favours to her friends. But if you fell out of favour, she could get very heavy.

I came into the library one day to find a large pile of books on the floor and Jenny merrily pulling more off the shelves and adding them to the pile. She was “removing inappropriate material”. Up to that time I had never turned a book away and so had accumulated a number of trashy novels (i.e. no spiritual content) and the ashram was probably right to keep the focus on the spiritual side of

things. However, the list of books that Jenny, in her complete ignorance, considered inappropriate included Jnaneshwari, the Bible, lives of saints, the complete works of Shakespeare, and pretty much anything not published by SY. I was not impressed.

Jenny had housekeeping take a large pile of books away to be destroyed. So when no one was looking, I went to housekeeping, sorted through the pile and took a bunch of the better books back. No one ever found out. Later Jenny had Swami Gitananda (the Library Swami) come in to vet the library. When he finally came, it was obvious that he didn’t want to be there. He gave me a tick of approval and left as quickly as possible. I tried to get some guidelines as to what sort of books were deemed OK but he seemed reluctant to discuss it. Later I found out why.

Siddheshwar Library

One monsoon they opened up the Siddheshwar Library to staff. Several of us made a beeline for it. What a shock! It was a shambles. There were stacks of books not shelved, shelves of books in random order. They used three different cataloguing systems and to find a book you might have to check all three systems. Three copies of the same book might each be catalogued under a different system. It was anyone’s guess where a book might be once you found it in the catalogue. Most surprising, it had all the trashy novels that I had been forced to throw out! Perhaps there is a spiritual value to romance novels that I am unaware of? Although there were many great books, the place was a mess, and I couldn’t help thinking that it must have reflected the state of Gitananda’s mind.

Sickness Stories

Malnutrition

For the first 3 years in GSP, I kept getting sick. I was used to sleeping outside all year round and eating a very basic diet. But I never got sick until I went to India.

Looking back, it was mostly a case of getting run down from a combination of overwork, lack of sleep, and a totally inadequate diet. I was repeatedly getting vitamin and iron deficiencies, and mysterious losses of energy (read malnutrition). The Annapurna (Indian style kitchen) diet when GM was away tended to be white rice, chapattis, and thin boiled tasteless squash in place of dal. And it would be the same thing, every day, for weeks. At times, I would find myself gagging on it. You just cant do hard physical labour on that sort of diet. I had little choice as I had no money to eat in the Amrit (western food at western prices). Most westerners had money, or were on reasonable stipends and had amrit passes (something I never got). Indian ashramites had their diets secretly supplemented with sweets, fruits and dishes not served to the public.

At that stage, I still had faith that the food was OK. In one of Baba’s books, he talks about how rich and nutritious the Annapurna food is to supply the energy needed for meditation.

I ended up with hepatitis. See below.

The Golf ball

This began with a tiny scratch on my foot which became infected. It swoll and swoll until it was the size of a golf ball and became incredibly painful. I had to raise my foot to sleep. We had a squat toilet and when I used that, I also had to keep my foot raised, otherwise the pain was overwhelming. This took some ingenuity.

When I went to the clinic, Apoorvananda announced there was nothing he could do. He seemed strangely apathetic about what was obviously a serious infection. I went back to my and over the next few days, I tried squeezing it to get the pus out, without success. The top opened to look like a small angry volcano but although I could see the pus, it wouldn’t come out. When I dragged myself back to the clinic, people were screamed at the sight of it. Apparently, the pus had attached itself the muscle tissue below the skin layer and had to be torn away in pea-sized lumps. This was incredibly painful. Worse was having the resulting cavity packed to prevent it closing.

I’ve never had anything like this before or since. Nor do I know of anyone who’s had anything like it. It was just one of those weird things that happened in Ganeshpuri.

Hepatitis

This happened at the time of one of the first global intensives by audio from Fallsburg. For us in India, this meant that for each of the 3 days, it ran from 5pm to 8am, i.e. it was a night intensive. Between 8am and 5pm, we had to eat, sleep, and for me, carry out my normal seva required to keep the generators running all night. So essentially I had no sleep for 3 days. It was called an intensive after all. So it was no surprise that I got really tired, struggled to stay awake, and as the intensive wore on, I became too weak to sit up. But still I battled on. During the breaks I would sit like a zombie and dribble into a glass of water.

Meanwhile I turned yellower and yellower till I looked like Bart Simpson. No doubt if I had known I had hep and mentioned it in the intensive, it would have been labelled as a sign of intense shaktipat cleaning out particularly nasty impurities.

After the intensive had finished, I rested for 4 days but did not really improve. Reluctantly I went to the clinic and the first thing Swami Apoorvananda asked me was when my last gamma globulin shot was. My heart sank. I think the worst part of the illness was the trip into Bombay hospital by van. It was monsoon and the roads were full of potholes, every part of me ached and every jar felt like I had been dropped off a building. The hospital was air conditioned to what felt like arctic temperatures and there wasn’t a blanket in sight. I shivered the whole week I was there.

The best part was the colour change. My shit turned white, my urine turned brown like coca cola, and my skin turned yellow. I did a triple take the first time I went to the toilet! No one had warned me! By the time I was diagnosed, the worst was already over and by the end of the week in hospital, I was feeling OK, if a little fragile.

Meanwhile back at the ashram, they disinfected the clothes I had been wearing in bleach so strong, that it literally dissolved my trousers leaving only the zip! When I returned to the ashram, I was put into isolation, occupying a room in the clinic. I was allowed to sit outside on a couch however.

A friend doing puja duty started bringing me flowers from the temple so I set up my own puja with my Birkenstocks on the ground as padukas, flowers arranged all around them, and me sitting on the couch above in a meditation pose with more flowers draped around me. Then I would hold my own darshan for passersby, using an Indian broom in place of GMs peacock feathers.

The following year they finally gave me a stipend – the minimum Rs1000/month. To put this in perspective, a meal in the amrit was about Rs100. The amount you got, and even the fact that you got a stipend, was confidential of course. Anyway, this small amount was enough for me to be able to supplement my diet with some better food, and I didn’t get sick again. BTW one reason the stipend was confidential was that in India the payments were illegal…unless you had a work permit which is VERY hard to get, and no one did.

Food Stories

Food Server Supervisors

At times, the food was really good, especially when Gurumayi was there. Other times it was awful. The food servers were another problem. Often certain dishes were rationed, even when there was plenty. To me this was just plain wrong. The worst was a guy named Dipak who had a gripe against my friend Richard, and by association with me. He would dish up tiny portions and say come back for seconds. When we went back he would say No Seconds.

Or if we were being served sitting down, he would instruct the servers to serve everyone else but us. This was serious for both of us as we were doing hard labour, and especially for Richard because he loved his food SO much.

Another time, there was an Annapurna supervisor who took the silence requirement very seriously. (Silence only applied in Annapurna. Management ate in Amrit so talking there was fine). I used to wind him up. At first, I’d talk when his back was turned. After a while, he figured it was me. Then when there was someone else talking, I’d put on a grin to make him think it was me and when he lectured me about not talking, I’d make him feel guilty by saying that I wasn’t talking till he started talking to me and I’d accuse him of interrupting my quiet time. I got so good at this that I could drive him nuts just by smiling.

Amrit Passes

During my time at GSP there were only 6 people on staff who did not have amrit passes. Two were independently wealthy, another got one only after his parents complained to GM about how badly the ashram was treating him! The fourth was Premnath the Mexican (see ice cream), the fifth was my girlfriend who was only there the last two years of my stay, and the last was me. Why the last three of us didn’t get one I don’t know. I asked for one and was turned down w/o an explanation. Premnath asked and was told to “Worship the Annapurna Devi.” He took this to mean eat at Annapurna, but it was a rude way of saying it. I know it seems like a simple thing but not having a pass was a major burn for me that lasted for years, not least because of the malnutrition I suffered from. People with passes tended to take them for granted.

When I finally got a stipend, most of it was spent at amrit, not just for the nutritional aspect but for some variety. Protein deficiency was a major for me. I didn’t crave sweets as much as anything with protein. When I left the ashram and started eating fish, my weight went from around 59kg to 90kg (130lb to 200lb)

Ice Cream

Towards the end of my stay, when the price of icecream in the amrit had skyrocketed, one of the Indian boys, Sudhir, and I would raid the (locked) amrit icecream freezer at the end of our dishshift (~11pm) and pig out on the roof of the amrit. Sometimes we would jump across to the next building and go to Premnath’s office. Premnath was a very funny Mexican sound technician who had been treated poorly by the ashram. Part of this was because of his natural exuberance, which didn’t sit well with management. His drumming was always ecstatic so he was always the last choice for that. He would have friends round late at night in the sound room to listen to (non SY) music and we would have an icecream party! Stolen fruit always tastes better!

Soft Drink

One day I was having a drink with a couple of friends in the amrit pavilion at GSP. It was rather quiet as it was outside normal opening times, and GM was away. I was telling a story, and as is my habit, I was waving my hands wildly in the air. As I did so, I knocked over my bottle of fizzy drink. It had just come from the freezer and the liquid inside was ice cold. As the bottle fell over on the glass top table, the drink spilt out. Miraculously, none of it spilt on the table. Rather it seemed to form a tubular jet, and rose in an arc through the air, travelling out over the edge of the table. At that very moment on my left, Gail, a woman with an ample bosom, was bending over getting something from her bag. Her blouse hung low revealing a large area of soft pink tender flesh. The jet of ice cold liquid continued its trajectory just below her face, just above the

line of her blouse, scoring a direct hit between her breasts. She screamed at the top of her lungs and Frank, being the lech he was, immediately offered to dry her off and leaned toward her with a cloth. Gail being an Ozzie female had no problem fending him off even as she dried herself. I was unable to offer any help at all as I was laughing uncontrollably and continued to do so for some time. Gail was somewhat less amused.

The remarkable thing for me was the way I perceived it. From the moment I knocked the bottle, it was sublime perfection. The timing was perfect, the angle the bottle fell, the trajectory of the drink, the timing of and falling of the blouse were all sublimely perfect. The choice of target was perfect. A tenth of a second later or a few millimetres either way and it would just have been a mess. I knew that if I tried to do this a million times I could never recreate it. I could never get the liquid to come out of the bottle the way it did that day. It was an ordinary event and yet incredibly perfect.

Ashram Personalities

The ashram seemed to cultivate strange personalities. This was odd given the strong emphasis on conformity.

Tyagananda

Tyagananda was one of the temple swamis. When I met him, he had a brain cancer. This was left untreated for years. He was a complete nutter and not in a nice way. He could be extremely aggressive. He liked barking and my friend Richard used to like to set him off by barking at him. They would get into this frenzy of barking and howling. Then Richard would walk away and Tyagananda would continue howling.

Janardan

At one time my seva supervisor was a guy called Janardan. He was intelligent and famous for having a short temper, usually triggered by someone’s stupidity coupled with an unwillingness to change. He lost his temper a lot in SY. On one occasion he tried to run someone over with the jeep. The person had to leap for their life. It was common to see Janardan kick peoples backsides. It was tolerated for years but he finally stepped over the mark when he kicked a trustee and swore black and blue at him.

Sripati

Sripati was a Vietnam vet. Some of his experiences were published anonymously in one of the early Darshan magazines. He talked about being able to sense where the enemy was, with no physical signs, and shoot them between the eyes in pitch darkness. Also of how his body would dodge bullets while he watched from outside.

But Sripati must have drunk too much agent orange. He could be dangerously violent. He was a member of Babas goon squad along with Joe Don Looney, Yogiram and Hanuman. Baba used the goon squad to deal to unruly ashramites and troublesome Indian sadhu and wrestlers.

I was warned early on to be very careful around Sripati. Sometime around 1993, GM had him stand up at a talk in SF and told everyone that he was completely crazy and dangerous and that everyone should be very careful around him. An ideal ashramite by SY standards? LOL

Some unruly teenagers who had been at SF told me how he caught them kicking in a door. They ran but he chased them with a piece of 4×2 wood, beat one of them up with it, and caught another and broke his arm. This would have been around 1990. I didn’t know this when I had my first run in with him.

I was pushing a trolley with some mats past the amrit. It was very quiet and there was almost no one there. The trolley however, had metal wheels and made a helluva racket. Sripati appeared on his bicycle and ordered me to desist until the amrit had cleared. I figured most of the noise has already been made, and no one seemed bothered, except Sripati. So I told him to fuck off! I said this without turning to face him, and while continuing to push the trolley. As a result, he didn’t hear me properly and thought I was French! This was confirmed as he tried to talk to me and I continued to tell him to fuck off and he left.

I dropped off my mats, and as I was coming back I was surprised to see my friend Somanath coming towards me. Somanath was French and Sripati had brought him to translate for me. I’m not sure who was more bemused, me or him. But the confused look on Somanath’s face still makes me laugh. We never let on to Sripati. Having Sripati think I was French worked to my advantage. He never tried to talk to me again.

Sripati’s main seva, apart from beatings, was killing things. One summer he went to war on the crows. Now, the Indian crows are very smart. It didn’t take them long to figure out who Sripati was, and that they would be shot if he got too close. They figured out what the range of his gun was and stayed just out of range. So Sripati built a hide on a trolley, and had an Indian worker push him around. This worked til they figured out who was under the hide. The crows response was to shit on the seat of Sripati’s bicycle. This was remarkable because there were a lot of bicycles in the ashram at the time. In a rack of 20+ bicycles, they would shit on his alone, leaving all the others untouched.

One time, Baba’s bodyguard, Rohini, Sripati and some others took an ashram van into Bombay. On the way back, the van broke down on the outskirts of Bombay. While they were fixing it, a crowd appeared and before long some snake charmers went through their act. When they were done, the snake charmers passed a hat for donations. Sripati responded by getting a tortoise that someone had bought, waving it around as if he was doing a puja, and when he finished, he passed his own hat round asking for donations. The snake charmers were not amused.

Robbie

I remember a slightly odd Canadian called Robbie who stayed at GSP for a while. He had lived alone on an island for 15yrs and would do things like pee in the hand basin while picking zits in the mirror. He refused to do more than 2 hrs of seva a day and couldn’t understand why I would do 14. He was strange but basically he was OK. He was thrown out for insisting Baba was his guru, not Gurumayi. David Kempton would not even allow him back in to visit the samadhi shrine or the Nityananda temple, which were in the public area.

Achyutananda

My favourite swami was Achyutananda, mainly because he was the least swami-like. He had been a bum/sadhu in India for 7 years before meeting Baba around 1970, and spoke reasonably fluent Hindi. He had a bar-room sense of humour and liked to wrestle. He was highly respected by the Indian workers, not just because he spoke Hindi, but because he treated them fairly and with respect. In the old pictures with Baba he was skinny as a bean-pole. By 1990 he had a major weight problem and was constantly on grapefruit or watermelon diets. I remember him eating 3 or 4 watermelons at a sitting. No doubt he was not asked to give talks because of his use of profanity.

Sevananda

The only interaction I had with Sevananda had to do with garbage. It was during a big festival and Annapurna needed somewhere to put the dozens of garbage bins of food slop. Pat McGee (ex drug dealer) told them to put it in the generator yard. Now, because it was festival time, I had the yard locked so kids wouldn’t climb on the 22,000 volt transformers and fry themselves. Without asking me, Pat cut the padlock and had the garbage cans dumped in the yard. Apart from safety concerns, they blocked access to the main 22kV switch. I rang Annapurna but no one knew anything about it. I probably wouldn’t have minded if they had asked but now I was pissed off. Frustrated with the lack of response, I cut power to Annapurna and refused to turn it on until they moved the slop.

A succession of Annapurna walas came down, only to be yelled at by me, culminating with Venkappa. He had been with Baba since day one of the ashram and had been one of his enforcers. He was highly feared and respected by the Indians. I don’t think he’d been yelled at in all his time in the ashram the way gave it to him. He backed off saying I was completely crazy.

Later when I had calmed down, Sevananda came by. I explained I had lost it, and why, and he nodded and said we all have our days. And then he arranged for the garbage to be taken away.

I gained a certain notoriety amongst the Indian boys as the only person ever to scream at Venkappa and get away with it.

Shiva Temple Swami

From time to time there is some discussion about GM singing off key. In GSP we had the Shiva Temple Swami. I was told his name once but wasn’t sure if that was really what it was. (Chitananda?). As far as I know he was not a SY swami but was an associate of BM’s and was allowed to spend the rest of his life in the ashram. He was a bit of a character.

Generally, he wore only a red lungi and padukas but used a red shawl and jersey when it got cold in the winter. He had coke bottle glasses, which he tended to wear askew on the end of his nose while he attempted to peer thru them. He had a good size pot belly which was only partly covered by the lungi.

His seva was looking after the Shiva Temple to which he was extremely devoted. His great gift was his voice, along with an amazing pair of lungs. Every morning around 4am, he would sing the Shiva Mahimna. The first time I heard this, I could have sworn that someone was strangling a cat or possibly someone was being murdered. Although I was sleeping hundreds of meters from the temple, his voice was so loud I could hear it as if he were right outside. It was only after a great deal of concentration that I was able to determine what the chant actually was.

The swami was a free being, and felt no need to stick to conventional melodies or ragas. Rather, he chose to improvise each syllable and could make a single one last as long as he chose. Furthermore, he rarely if ever repeated the same tune from one syllable to the next. So it was very difficult to pick out the words he was singing. Nevertheless, he poured his heart into it and it was one of the strange delights of Ganeshpuri.

Such spontaneity is not generally welcomed in SY. GM took her revenge on him making him take a vow of silence. This must have been a real burn for him. They didn’t like him at chants either. The thing was that his voice was incredibly loud and, on his own, he could drown out a thousand people chanting, even with the microphone volume turned up to the edge of feedback. And because his singing was out of step, it would put the lead chanters off. It didn’t matter where in the hall he might be singing. Thus, one of the hall monitors jobs was to stop him coming to chants. This was nearly impossible because he was stubborn and had a temper, and any attempt at forcible removal would have resulted in an unseemly fight.

On one occasion, the swami turned up early toward the end of a chanting saptah at which GM was to be present. It was imperative that he be removed. The hall monitors came up with a devious solution. They got one of the Indian boys to tell him that there was a special breakfast in the Annapurna and that it was almost gone. The swami rushed off and by the time he

figured out there was no special breakfast, and made his way back, the gates to guru chowk had been closed.

In 1990, they decided to do some maintenance on the roof of the Yagna Mandap, which was leaking. At the time it was decorated in Chinese style with dragons wrapped around the poles and everything in bright psychedelic colours. I really liked it. In the process of fixing the leaks, they removed the entire roof. Don’t ask me why. Then they decided to remove all the panels. Then someone (George?) decided to demolish everything and start again. This turned a small maintenance job into a huge project with the entire area re-landscaped.

The Mandap was eventually rebuilt in classic Greek style – all white, with fluted columns reminiscent of the Parthenon, except instead of being carved from marble, the columns were sculpted, at great expense, from concrete and then painted. The floor was polished slate and the area around GM’s chair had a false ceiling and recessed lighting. Above the yagna pit was a giant suspended blue globe. It did look nice. All very trendy – except for the roof. After all the time and money spent on the project, the one thing they hadn’t figured out was what to do with the roof. In the end they built it out of corrugated iron and painted it white. So imagine, if you will, the Parthenon with a barn roof.

But I digress. The Shiva Temple was right next to the Mandap. As a result, it came in for its share of ‘renovation’. It had been built in the early days of the ashram in what had been a rise in the jungle on what was then the edge of the ashram. It was built in the traditional Indian style of

Shiva temples – it was quite small, about 3m x 3 m square with thick walls and just enough room to move around the lingam, which was quite large. It had a domed roof and a covered verandah. The temple was painted in bright colours, as they do in India. The entrance was guarded by Nandi the bull, but not even he could save the temple from the SY developers.

The Shiva Temple swami was very attached to his temple and I felt very sorry for him as they removed the lingam and Nandi, and then demolished it. Worse was to follow. They decided to rebuild it in the style of an Egyptian pyramid. All white, all straight lines.( the architect was Klaus, the German who misdesigned the Shiva Bowl). Space was at a premium and so the new pyramid had a small base and rose high and steeply to create headroom. It looked stupid and completely out of place next to the Mandap-Parthenon. The lingam was installed and there was more room than before. Problem – there was condensation on the walls. Ventilation at the top was required. So the top was cut off and a dome with little electric windows was placed on the apex. This dome looked something like an acorn, about a meter high with a mass of baroque curls at its base. I cannot tell you how silly this looked on top of the pyramid.

The electric windows were not able to be connected because the electricians were not allowed to rest their ladders against the outside of the pyramid and it was physically impossible to use them inside. Also there was no way they could hide the cable so there was no way they were going to be allowed to run cable inside or out. So the electric windows had to be left open all

the time.

Then one day the entire Mandap area was declared a no go zone. I used my access to the electric shop to sneak a peak at what was happening. They were removing the dome from the pyramid. I think that by declaring it off limits, George thought no one would notice it was missing. The official reason for the removal was that from certain angles it appeared that the

dome was about to topple, and this was making some people nervous. This was bullshit. The real reason was that the dome looked distinctly phallic, like grapes in a Michelangelo painting. The baroque curly bits looked like pubic hairs, the dome tumescent. Maybe George finally realised how stupid the whole thing really looked.

The dome was replaced by a flat piece of plastic, which leaked, while they figured out their next move. The pyramid remained truncated, and looked as stupid as ever. How the swami must have wished for his old temple.

Swami Nityananda

I was in GSP in the early 90’s when Sw. Nit visited the ashram and went into the Nityananda Temple and the Samadhi shrine, had darshan and had a little wander round the courtyard. It caused a major security panic. However by the time security got themselves sorted, S.N. and his entourage had had their little tiki tour and left. He was apparently very calm and relaxed and casual, in marked contrast to the SY people. I wouldn’t say he is allowed into those areas, maybe just that they haven’t managed to stop him. You have to give him credit for having the balls to front up on GM’s turf, even if she wasn’t there at the time.

George Afif

The first time I met George, I took an instant, intense dislike to him. Richard Gonzales and I were riding an FC trolley down the slope behind Guru Chowk when Richard suddenly hit the brakes (the soles of his shoes) and jumped off. George was wearing all white – white shoes with elaborate decorative embellishments, loose white pleated slacks and what appeared to be a white blouse. Now it WAS the 80’s, but to me it looked like he was dressed in women’s clothing and his manner seemed very effete. When he spoke sternly to Richard, I was stunned to see Richard kowtow before him. My impulse was to tell George to fuck off. But there was something evil and menacing about him.

George had the whole Ashram terrified. On the construction crew, the smart advice was to work downwind, as you could smell him coming a 100m away. (Due to the copious amounts of perfume he wore). This would give you some advance warning or give you time to hide. It was well known that George would talk to MC’s and speakers through an earpiece. At times, you would see them stop to listen, or even lean towards their earpiece straining to hear.

A friend of mine came across George in LA in the late 70’s. There was a program at the LA ashram and certain areas had been roped off. A hippy decided to take a short cut by jumping one of the rope barriers. George caught him and beat him up in a frenzied attack, continuing to viciously kick him as he lay unconscious and bleeding on the ground. In fact, it took three security people to pull George off. This was George’s background as a street thug in Lebanon coming to the fore. His brother served time for armed robbery.

The general understanding was that if George said something, it should be taken as coming from GM. In fact a common catch cry of management types was “GM says……….”. I suspected this was simply a ruse so that their authority would not be questioned. But the word was that GM might issue a command through any one of her insiders and that it would not be wise to question. George and GM always seemed a little too close. It wasn’t till I left the ashram the last time that I began to hear stories of George and GM being lovers and GM even having an abortion. Off course it is impossible to verify this.

Indirananda

I never heard anything bad about Indirananda, and from my interactions with her, she seemed like a genuinely good person. That story about her inheritance I heard directly from her. She said her family were completely opposed to her giving anything to SYDA and tried to fight it in court, but she was determined. It was from her grandmother and even though it was split amongst several grandchildren, her share (and SYDA’s) was worth about $5m. This could be a source of some guilt if she ever decides to leave SY. However, she was never interested in money. When she was 15, her father told her he worked 16hrs/day so she would never have to work a day in her life. She ran from the room crying, because to her that was the worst thing that could happen.

Aussie Robert

There was a time I was doing long seva hours. I was gone from the dorm by 5 am and didn’t get back till 11pm-1am. So I was almost never there. Strangely in my absence, some of my dorm mates developed a real dislike for me. One in particular was making death threats before he had even met me. He was an Aussie called Robert. He had the bed next to mine but he was there for two weeks before he even saw me. He had some serious psychological problems. By the first time we met, he already hated me. I had an electronic clock with hands. It was almost silent. You could just hear it tick if you put it to your ear

That was enough to bother Robert. Before our first meeting, he sent me a note with a picture of my clock and a bomb on one side, and my clock exploding on the other. He demanded I remove the clock or he would destroy it. After that our relationship took a downward turn. I refused to move the clock as I thought he was being unreasonable. He turned his bed around which solved the clock problem.

But over a period of weeks he vented his rage on my things. At first I would find my shampoo bottles emptied, my shaving cream suddenly finished, all my razor blades used. (He was the only other person in the dorm who shaved at the time.)

Then one night I came in at 1am to find all my sheets and blanket missing. When I turned on the light I found they thrown out the window and were covered in mud. In the process I woke everyone up which did not make me very popular. Same when my mattress disappeared. Then I came in one night to find my whole bed gone! I found it jammed in the bathroom doorway.

I was so tired I went to sleep right there. And being an obstinate bastard, I refused to let anyone past to the bathroom in the morning. As I said, “You f***ers put my f**ing bed here, now you can live with the f***ing consequences.” This almost caused some fistfights, and didn’t improve my standing in the dorm. Luckily, Robert got called back to Oz before someone got killed.

Sri Ram

In many ways Sri Ram was the perfect disciple and therefore was a bit strange. His personal puja was always immaculate and clean, his clothes were always clean, he followed the ashram schedule almost perfectly, never gossiped, didn’t have bad habits, didn’t care for praise and loved the ‘gurus’. Too bad he picked GM for guru.

I went with SriRam to Khar Road in Bombay to check out some pictures of Bhagawan Nityananda. We went to Suvarna’s shop and looked through ALL their albums. Suvarna’s father had been the official photographer. Sri Ram bought prints of every photo they had of Nityananda, about 900 in all. He had them all put in albums and used to keep them in the pharmacy for everyone to view. He left suddenly when his aunt died and decided he would never be returning and so he put nothing in storage, unlike every other long termer. What he didn’t take with him, he gave away. That included all the photos, which he gave to the ashram.

Teenagers

The teens in 89/90 were given special privileges. They were the first to get amrit passes. They were exempt from seva. There were special courses and programs for them. George let them use the ashram vehicles and they were allowed to go up to the reservoir. Gurumayi showered them with gifts and attention and they got front row seats with her. This didn’t make them any better behaved.

I enjoyed having teens in the dorm. It gave the place some real vitality as well as some soap opera type dramas. Tibor used to set his alarm clock for 4am every day. It would go off for about 4 minutes and wake everyone up except for Tibor. He never did get up at 4am, or even 5am. Tibor would get up between 10 and 12am, every day. This pissed everyone off. Tibor kept making promises but still set his alarm for 4am every day. Threats were made. Finally, Abhaya drowned the clock in the toilet.

Shannon had a habit of taking a long shower from 4:45am – until 5:30am and then going back to bed. All the people who wanted to have a shower before the guru gita (There were 16 of us in the dorm) either had to get up early or go without. Abhaya took action on this one too, had a fist fight with Shannon in the shower doorway.

Ram had a real zit problem and spent a lot of time with his face in the mirror. He generally got up around midday. After he went home to OZ, he became a discipline problem, I heard.

Rasa wasn’t in my dorm but he spent a lot of time there. He was a real trip.

Swarupananda

One of the things I liked the most about ashram life was the sense of community. Of course not everyone had the same sense of community I did. One of these was Swarupananda aka the White Knight aka His Whiteness. He wasn’t a swami, only a wannabe. Stories circulated that he had taken a vow of brahmacharya, hence the whole white trip. However given his proximity to George, I doubt this.

Swarup wore all white. His shoes, trousers, shirts, skin, teeth and hair were all white. The only part which wasn’t was his nose, which was deep brown and firmly superglued to George’s backside. Even GM teased him about his whiteness, tormenting him at times by making him wear colours.

My only real encounter with Swarup was the one I mentioned above when I was chainsawing in Dakshin Kashi. It was such an anomaly to have anything so incredibly white in the heat and dust of the construction site. Swarup’s role was that of gopher for George. He had figured out that the way to get power in SY was to kiss George’s ass as hard and as often as possible and it worked. Generally, when the White Knight told you to do something, it meant it was a message from George.

The last I heard of him, GM was making him get married. That would be a trial for both given that Swarup didn’t have any friends and didn’t seem to like anyone other than his mirror.

Seamus

Seamus Cassidy was Irish – the only Irishman in GSP while I was there. And he was big. He was about 6’3″ (192cm) and 250lb (115kg). He had enormous hands like hams and a massive chest. His face was what you might call ‘rugged’. He reminded me a bit of Popeye and he liked to brawl just as much. He liked to say that he was the runt of the family – he would struggle to lift a 300lb hay bale while his bigger brothers tossed them around like feather pillows. As young men, the Cassidy brothers’ favourite activity was drinkin’ and brawlin’. They would go to a local pub, get drunk, start a fight and when it was over, go to another pub and start again. And they might do this several times in a week. SY must have been a bit of a change for Seamus.

The first I heard of him was when a young Aussie guy came to my library and told me how he worked in the cowshed with a mad Irishman named Seamus. According to him, Seamus was totally out of control. He would punch the cows as hard as he could if they didn’t do what he wanted. The Aussie was scared to death of him. Over time I heard a few more stories about the wild Irishman in the cowshed but I didn’t have much to do with him myself.

The cowshed went thru a series of moves, getting progressively further from the ashram proper. One monsoon it was moved about ½km beyond Tapovan in what had been a rice paddy. It was out of reach of the electricity lines and so the portable 3 phase 100A genset I looked after was taken out there to power the cowshed. It was supposed to be temporary but like a lot of things it dragged on and it started to bother me. I was concerned that the genset was being run on too low a load and it was also needed by other facilities. I checked the cowshed load and presumptuously assumed that it could better be run by a small single phase genset I had. I forget the details of what happened over the next two weeks, but it ended up with Seamus and I having a row in the amrit pavilion. We both got pretty mad and were screaming at each other. At some point it threatened to get physical, but didn’t because Seamus backed down.

What you have to picture is that Seamus was 192cm and 250 pounds of solid fight hardened muscle and I was 178cm and 125 pounds of skin and bone. We went eyeball to eyeball daring the other to have a go first. I’ve never figured out if Seamus backed away because he was afraid he’d kill me, or because he figured I was completely insane or both. I don’t think he knew what to make of me. Someone as scrawny as me should have been afraid of him and I wasn’t. I don’t think he was used to people not being afraid of him.

In the end he went and saw my supervisor and we had a very civil meeting and sorted out something that kept everyone happy. I’d like to say we became friends – I got to really like Seamus. He was a real man’s man. What I admired most about him was the effort he put into controlling his temper. I cant remember anyone else struggling as much as he did. But I think he was always a little wary of me, worried that I was a bit crazy and might have another go at him.

One incident comes to mind. GM took a bunch of children round to the cowshed (when it was on the side of Tapovan) and gave then all as much Haagen-Dazs icecream as they could eat. It was summer and very hot. But she didn’t give Seamus any. When he asked, she looked daggers at him. At that time, you couldn’t get icecream of any kind in GSP, let alone Haagen-Dazs in the heat of an Indian summer. Seamus had to bite his tongue and watch the kids scoff and dribble and throw bits of icecream at each other. I could sort of relate to this because I’d never had Haagen-Dazs (still haven’t) but Americans would talk about it all the time. So I became incredibly curious what it tasted like but there was no way to find out. Very frustrating, especially when I heard how much had been wasted.

Leaving the Ashram Story

There had always been grumpy and nasty people there but in 1993 and 1994 it seemed to get much worse. The ashram had a way of bringing out the worst in people. Bad behaviour in the name of the guru was encouraged. I really enjoyed GSP – when GM was away. The Gestapo and the cosmic police, the informers, arse kissers, power trippers and petty tyrants would go with her and the ashram became a very pleasant place to be again.

The way people were thrown out of the ashram varied. People in the inner circles were thrown a huge party by the ashram. Some staff going for a short visit home might be told not to come back just as they were leaving. Some people were simply given 3 days to leave. One newbie in the amrit kitchen lost his temper and threw pots and pans at the cooks and across the floor. He went back to his dorm. An hour later, the ashram manager, some heavies and some security guards went to his bed, ordered him to pack immediately and he was escorted out of the ashram gates. Someone who talked to him later in the village said he was extremely upset and couldn’t understand why he’d been kicked out. In almost every case, the timetable for leaving was less than 3 days. Rarely it might have been a week. In my case, it lasted 3 months and it took them two tries to get rid of me!

By the end of 1993 I was getting pretty fed up with the petty tyrants who made up the management hierarchy, and the petty rules that were added to constantly. Hardly a day went by without a staff meeting to announce the latest rules. Still I was determined to stay because at that stage I did not hold GM responsible for the managers’ individual actions. Also I still believed the line that putting up with all the bullshit was helping to burn away my ego.

What I didn’t know then was that they had a “Black Book” where-in they recorded everyone’s misdeeds. Each incoming ashram manager would peruse this book, taking note of troublemakers such as myself. I noticed that every time there was a change of manager, I would have a run in with them within a month. It was as if they had to stamp their authority on me. This incident would then duly be entered in the black book. After that, they would leave me alone. And so unknowingly I accumulated lots of “bad ashram karma”. I believe I had an especially large record in it.

Apparently, GM had told management to prune any long termers who “weren’t happy”. After I left, they pruned most staff who had been there long term but weren’t in the inner circle, even if they were “H.A.P.P.Y.” Anyway, I was always going to be a prime candidate for pruning.

My first expulsion was in February 1994. I was doing a dish shift one night. There was a new Indian teenager (“Suresh”) mopping the floor of the bakery. He started getting pissed off at me because I had to walk across the bakery floor with the clean dishes to get to the lift. Each time I did this I left a trail of footprints on the wet surface. There was no way of avoiding this as the dumbwaiter had been closed since the Indian teenager had been killed in it. To piss me off, Suresh started opening the lift door downstairs so that I couldn’t use it. I had to press the buzzer

until someone downstairs closed the door. This was adding more and more time to my dish shift. By 11pm I had worked off 28 years of bad karma and was quite tired and irritable. I was pressing the buzzer for more than 10 minutes and I could hear Suresh laughing downstairs and I got madder and madder.

I should have just abandoned the clean dishes and gone for the ice cream. Instead, I walked downstairs in a rage. I picked Suresh up with one hand and threw him against the wall, his feet about 6 inches off the ground, and screamed at him “DONT EVER F****N’ DO THAT AGAIN!!!!”. And with that I threw him, one handed, clear across the kitchen into a pile of large cooking pots. Then I turned and went upstairs, raided the ice cream freezer and went up to the roof to eat it with my friend Sudhir. Nalini, the Amrit Gestapo Officer duly reported me to the ashram manager.

The next day I was called to Utpaladeva’s office. (Utpal was actually one of the good guys, just carrying out orders, but later on he did try to make it easier for me….one of the few acts of compassion I saw in 6 years!). He informed me I had to leave. He didn’t ask me what happened or why. Nor did he say when. I shouldn’t have been surprised but it came as a shock. I decided to appeal and wrote a letter to Gurumayi. Swami Anantananda was dispatched to sort me out. He had a number of interviews with me over the next couple of weeks and when he had decided that I was not totally out of control, he reported back to GM (I presume).

Another week rolled by and he came back to me and announced that I was on “probation”. This meant I had to be on my best behaviour – or else. It lasted till the end of April when Sw.A announced that I could stay. Just three days later, I had another incident. The generator serviceman had come for the monthly engine checkup. Normally he would check in at reception, get a badge and make his own way to the generator plant. This time, reception insisted that I come in person and wouldn’t say why. When I got there, they were very evasive and wouldn’t explain why I had to come in person. We had an argument over it, which I lost. Voices were raised but there was no yelling. I decided to make a formal complaint to management about reception’s treatment of the serviceman.

That should have been the end of it. But because it involved me (ashram troublemaker) and the daughter of a trustee, Swami A was brought in again. He talked to me and then to the Indian women in reception. When they sensed there was trouble, they made up a story that I had screamed and cursed and threatened them. With my word against theirs, I had no chance.

When Anantananda told me I had to leave, I felt as if the ground had opened and swallowed me. After he left, I wailed and cried and finally decided to commit suicide. About 8pm that night I went up to the top floor of the Mukteshwar Building and climbed out onto the outer ledge and thought things over while preparing to jump. I was there for about two hours. No one noticed me.

I had nothing outside the ashram. I had lost all contact with my friends, and I was not on speaking terms with my family. In fact I didn’t even know where they lived. They had also burned all the things I had left in storage with them. The only things waiting for me in NZ were an arrest warrant and some unpaid fines. In the end I decided not to jump, only because of the impact it would have on the people around me.

About 10pm that night I got off the ledge and went to my room, curled up in a ball and refused to eat, drink or talk to anyone. I don’t know if one or two days went by before people started getting concerned. By that stage, I was badly dehydrated, could barely walk and wasn’t thinking too clearly. I was carried down to the clinic and put on a drip. A LOT of people came to see me then which was extremely embarrassing.

When I was finally alone, Anantananda came in and gave me a speech. It sounded like it was from GM, certainly wasn’t his own words. I wish I had a copy of it now. I think it was intended to get me to pull myself together, but it was so off the mark it was laughable. It sounded like it could have been written for someone else because it sure wasn’t about me! This was one

of the indicators I later used when I started thinking really hard about GM’s credibility or lack of. Still no deadline was given for leaving.

My girlfriend and I took a two-week trip to the Himalayas and then she flew to her sister’s wedding in the States. My two best friends had left on a yatra round Maharashtra and when she went I felt very much alone. I still hadn’t been given a date to leave by. I had no seva and some people wouldn’t talk to me. I had been to hell and back and I was at an ultra low point emotionally. Going back into the world was a daunting prospect as I had burned all my bridges. What I really needed was some reassurance that things would work out, some glimmer of hope. At this point someone persuaded me that I should say goodbye to Gurumayi before I went. After all I had put in something like 24,000 hours of seva and lived in the ashram for 5½ years.

That final darshan was both a disaster and a blessing. When I went up to the chair, she looked the other way. The darshan girl got her attention and she looked at me with total disgust and said “What do you want?” I said “I’ve come to say goodbye.” “And…..?” she said and looked away again. I was already at rock bottom and this was such a kick in the teeth. It was obvious she didn’t give a shit about me, except in as much as the sooner I was gone the better.

For me this had been my test of the guru and she had failed spectacularly. She didn’t know what I was going through, she didn’t give me any support when I needed it and she didn’t care about me even a little bit. While I was devastated and although it took me some time to process this, this event became the litmus test that showed me Gurumayi is no saint and not even a half way decent person.

There were various small humiliations before I actually left. When I went to collect my passport they told me I needed the manager’s permission first – so I had to get the manager’s permission to collect my passport so I could be expelled. The housing office refused to give me back my linen and blanket deposits because they had lost their records of these. There had already been the embarrassment of the personnel office refusing to give me my stipend because I wasn’t doing seva, even though I was. When people left GSP, there was always a crowd to say goodbye. In my case there was no one, and I have to say that hurt. I left the ashram a week after the final darshan by local bus. I don’t think anyone even noticed that I had left.

Post Ashram Stories

Abortion

In August 1994 I wandered into a café in Leh, Ladakh and there to my surprise was a fellow kiwi devotee. Suneel could best be described as full on. He never did anything half-heartedly so as a devotee he was full on. So I was more than a little surprised when he told me of Gurumayi’s abortion. He said he had heard it from an old timer in Sydney that he regarded as reliable. Suneel was not one to gossip and he had no reason to lie. The story was that George was the father and that the abortion had been carried out during a three week period when Gurumayi had disappeared from GSP. This three week absence had set the rumour mills on fire but abortion had never been mentioned. I knew from the garage walas that Gurumayi had come and gone in the early hours of the morning. This in itself was odd. Normally there was a big fanfare whenever Herself came or went.

To Suneel it made no difference if the rumour was true, he was still the loyal devotee. For me however, it meant I needed to re-evaluate my entire time in SY. Guru’s are legendary, of course, for outrageous behaviour, the so-called crazy wisdom. In the end I came to the conclusion that I had no experience of GM other than as an ordinary, if slightly unusual, human being. That being the case, then even the suggestion of an abortion calls into question GMs integrity. This might be a rumour but then so were the allegations about Baba for a long time. And these rumours have come from within SY rather than from without.

A few things do give the rumour some credence. There is George’s statutory rape conviction, showing he has few morals when it comes to gratifying himself. Stories of his sexual predation of many of the darshan girls abound. One has Gurumayi interrupting him having sex with a darshan girl in Baba’s house. I’ve also heard that Gurumayi and George had sex, both before and after her sanyass ceremony.

When Swami Nityananda was dethroned, it was revealed that a couple of the swamis were pregnant (Hemananda and Purnananda). GM had them get abortions saying that the offspring of such an improper union would be born as demons. This shows at least that GM is not averse to abortion. In fact, sexual activity amongst the swami’s was rampant.

Personal Comment

I expected that the ashram would be a place to practice spiritual qualities – discipline, compassion, tolerance, even mindedness, harmlessness, lust-free-ness, moderation, insight, openness, etc, all those things that are so hard to do in the world because we’re constantly being distracted. Instead I found GSP to full of greed, lust, hate, envy, deceitfulness, obsession with appearance, secrecy and superficiality. Over time, I saw that good people lost their virtues and took on these negative qualities. The people who were valued were those were able to set aside their personal values, integrity and morality and replace them with blind obedience to the guru. If this meant law breaking or hurting people, then so be it.

It took me a long time to realise that the lack of spiritual qualities in management and the inner circle were not simply individual shortcomings but the result of a culture deliberately cultivated by Gurumayi.

If the guru insisted on kindness in the ashram, then unkind people would not even want to come or stay. A kind person would question any command that was hurtful, even from the guru.

In a guru-worshiping cult, the guru has the power to set the tone of the group as a whole.

For instance, do you give someone like George – known for his cruelty – unrestricted authority? Do you reward people for being snitches, and spy on your devotees? Do you set your ashram up with the focus on making money, or on being a source of charity? Do you encourage openness or keep everything secret? Do you threaten those that defy you, or do you engage in dialogue? Do you treat movie stars differently from ordinary people? Do you encourage people to wear $1000 saris in a fashion parade, or do you feed an Indian family for 3 years on the same amount? When someone tells you that one of your managers has committed a crime, do you punish the messenger or the manager?

SY did teach me a lot about personal politics, something I had been completely ignorant of before. The companies I have worked for since all have their politics, but nothing like as bad as SY.

I think SY attracted two main kinds of people. The majority were good, community minded people with a spiritual background who were prepared to accept that the spiritual journey required hard work, sacrifice and taking some things on faith. Give them a hit of shakti and they were prepared to accept almost anything from the guru as being true, especially when the

carrot of enlightenment is such a big carrot. Then there were those who found in SY an outlet for their own power and ego trips, a large body of easily manipulated people, and a ready made culture designed for avoiding personal.

We were constantly reminded, in the ashram, not to gossip. However the climate was one where all information was confidential or secret, and there was a complete dearth of information about the activities of the swamis, GM, and other personalities. In particular, swamis who left SY were never mentioned. In this climate, rumour and gossip are bound to proliferate. Combined with SY seeding false rumours, there are bound to be conflicting stories creating confusion and making it difficult to establish the truth. This is ideal for SY as it makes it easy for them to dismiss such accounts as unsubstantiated rumour spread by malcontents..

A Little Humour

Here’s one of my favourites:

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it: ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing’ and then you go and do it”.

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now”.

“Oh, I see.” said Pooh again.

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

–A.A. Milne

The House at Pooh Corner