(This is the third article I've published in Maya's and her daughter Radhaa's series, Awakening Starseeds, Volumes 1-3. I appreciate the honor of being included in their book series (which is available on Amazon). I wanted to punch Rajneesh in the nose, pull back my fist, and ask him a question: “If we are not the body, it and the world all being the illusion of maya, would you mind if I punch you in the nose again?” I didn’t, of course. I had nothing…
(This was my entry into the recently published book, Awakening Starseeds, by Radhaa Publishing. While most of the entries of this international assemblage deal with soul shaking/awakening experiences, mine goes to the bare bones of our matter and what matters.) Barely beyond high school, I came face-to-face with death and birth working for a funeral home that also ran the local ambulance. I dealt with old dead bodies, and on the ambulance, watched some die, saved a few from death, and helped deliver a slippery…
Gurus My first night in Bombay, sleeping on the woven mat cot, a small lizard dropped on my forehead. “Yeow!” I jumped. “What happened?” I heard from the other room. “A lizard landed on my head!” “Very auspicious,” they said, laughing. In the hot summer of 1971, at age 26, I had left my seminary to tour India with my guru/friend, Dr. Vasavada, and to meet his guru, the Blind Saint of Vrindivan. By the time I got my funeral director’s license in 1967…
What and who are we, and whither would we go, and why, really? I start to answer these questions, not by copying what others say, or by mouthing what others expect me to say as a minister, but by honestly saying what I think I know. As you know, I entered ministry via a route through embalming. At 18 I looked closely into death. It awakened a wonder at the structure of our bodies and an appreciation for our precious, limited life. Too…
Bucky Fuller, one of the more innovative and colorful engineers of our 20th Century, saw early boats as the strong shape of a dome upside down. Typical of his far-reaching sort of thinking, he once speculated that early boats either went with the wind or against it. In the west, we admire the daring-do of earliest ship captains fighting the wind by using it, angling sail and rudder just so to travel zig-zag out of the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and up to Europe. This…
When I met Shri Bhagwan Rajneesh in a posh hotel in Bombay I wanted to punch him in the nose. I had gone to India sick of the west’s view of earth as merely a place for a divine drama that leads to an afterlife. In India I found its counterpart: a yearning for an instead-of life. Rajneesh sported a Rolex as he knocked the communists for wanting worldly improvements. He assured us the body isn’t real and neither is this world; they’re merely…