Reflections

Even after I ‘left’ Yogi Bhajan (YB) and was ostracized by the entire community, I would contemplate the seemingly miraculous energy and unlimited knowledge he had. Even after so many years away, I continued to be perplexed over his amazing capacity to tune into each individual and to feed him or her the exact kind of messages that would keep them enthralled; how he could build you up on the one side, while demolishing you on the other side, until you were absolute putty in his hands; how he could be so expansive and seem wise and a paragon of equanimity,  then turn dark and full of rage on a dime. When I would question such expressions of anger, he would totally drop the anger, turning it off without a trace, and simply explain that he was just using it to test me. 

His energy and capacity to work and travel and go without sleep and always teach extemporaneously seemed to be gifts from God Himself.  And yes, God was a ‘He’.  There was nobody around him who was questioning that assumption. It was the end of the ‘60s, a time of ‘Women’s Lib’, but the circle surrounding the Yogi became very insulated from the ‘feminist’ issues raging in the mainstream culture. YB’s capacities were mind-boggling, and they added to the impression that he was super-human, that he was God-inspired, that he was divinely guided.  Ultimately, he held the position of a supreme being for his followers. To question his authority, his wisdom, his teachings and techniques, was to raise the evil scepter of doubt.  And doubt was the ultimate error, the fatal flaw, the sin that would take you all the way down. To give voice to any doubt meant you could not be trusted and even if you sat amongst the inner circle, your doubt created an isolating wall around you. 

He had warned us from the very beginning that “There will be those who will doubt me, those who will betray me. My back will have so many stab wounds it will just appear as one big scab. But don’t worry for me, I expect this. That is the fate of those God-men who just serve the humanity.” These words were spoken at a lecture during a large feast event at the furniture store on Melrose early in 1969. A few hundred people were in attendance, and when he spoke them they had the ring of prophesy.

Another phenomenon that always puzzled me was how his face was constantly shape-shifting. In the earliest years, I was his photographer, so when I looked through the camera lens, I could capture his singular image. But when I just sat in his presence, his visage would be in constant motion, with a hallucinatory quality.

What he quickly gathered around himself was a core of mostly young women who were naturally drawn to his power and charisma. It was the beginning of an ‘inner circle’. What was so enticing about that inner circle?  What made it so appealing?  First of all the attraction to being recognized by proximity to YB. It was a place of inclusion, a place of belonging.  There was always good food being served to everyone.  There is nothing like the fragrance of prasad, or the cinnamon, ginger and cardamom Yogi tea, as well as some entertaining interactions with YB as he would be expounding or making fun of someone or something.  It was better than television to sit in his presence, as he shape-shifted before your eyes.

Today I look back and see the young and naive woman that I was and how she was so susceptible to such manipulation. I was seeking safety in the world, protection from worldly abuse. I fell in love with the concept of surrender, the simplicity of devotion to a power that is greater. I hungered for a guide/guru to show me the path to enlightenment. 

From my current perspective, I can see that I was seeking the ultimate father-figure.   I hungered for freedom from worldly struggles and ego-driven activities. I wanted a spiritual teacher who could absolutely define what was a right direction for my life. Safety was actually the main quest. The world appeared very frightening to this small-town girl who had been transplanted into the big city.   The pain of divorce and being part of a whole generation, my peer-group, that was breaking away from conventional restraints, plus the larger conflicts of wars and leaders who were being assassinated, all made for a fearsome looking world.

The idealism of the 1960s, with its vision of changing the world, lined up with the primary theme that YB preached. He gathered around him a following of young idealists, many of them coming from the hippie sub-culture. He became our spiritual mentor. He taught meditation, yoga and vegetarianism and declared that we were spear-heading the transition to a new era, a New Age, the Age of Aquarius. We believed that we were evolving family values, building a nation-within-a-nation, replacing dogma and drugs with practical techniques for altering consciousness. We were replacing sexual freedom with monogamous and committed relationships. And we were shifting our allegiance from a Judeo-Christian God of wrath, to a relationship with a more internalized and subjective experience, an Eastern view of the Oneness or inter-connectedness of both God and humanity. We were rejecting the God of our fathers, as well as our families of origin. We were rejecting an entire culture of materialism and sexual exploitation of women. We were leaving behind our names, our lineages, our national culture, our style of dress, our religious upbringing.  We were finding whole new identities, a new allegiance, to an Eastern tradition where life revolved around yoga and prayer, service to one another, and music that told our story and defined our destinies. Life was largely lived within the temple, with hours of morning prayers, yoga, meditation, chanting, singing and evenings of yoga and listening to YB’s lectures, then preparing food to serve to families and communities.  

Devotion is intoxicating. Bowing is an act of surrender. We bowed a lot. Prayer and repetition of mantras is hypnotizing – we did that a lot too. However, I also had a particularly discriminating sense of logic that was always interfering with otherwise intoxicating experiences. Doubt seemed to be my nemesis. I struggled constantly to overcome the questioning of my rational mind. That rational mind was labeled by YB as ego. Overcoming and breaking that ego was defined by him to be the ultimate requirement for my enlightenment, my liberation.  Indeed my spiritual quest has been characterized by that conflict: the battle between head and heart, the battle between beliefs versus an inner guidance. My ongoing pursuits later brought me to teachings and systems that have allowed me to discriminate out that steady and quiet inner voice from the loud and dominating voices of the outer world and the critics, judges and parental voices of my own ego-mind.

Overall, I have perceived that throughout my life with YB, I was in a school, in a spiritual teaching about power. The charisma and power of YB had swept me off my feet. I confused that power with spiritual knowledge, with spiritual superiority, with God’s presence. Then, seduced by his power, I surrendered my own power before I had the discrimination to recognize what I was compromising. I subjected myself to that seemingly greater power of this self- proclaimed spiritually enlightened being, believing it was my route to redemption. I had been raised with some pretty strict Christian beliefs about redemption, about a savior dying on a cross for the sins of humanity. It was natural and easy to simply displace that symbol of redemption onto a living, breathing ‘master’.