Truth Is All That Matters

Our Work

We have been in this work for ten years now, and over that time much has changed in the way in which I speak about what I see.  From the beginning, when we started, I could see very clearly what I wanted to say, but I had no vocabulary apart from ideas from philosophy and mystical spirituality to use in communicating this that I see so clearly, and this vocabulary turns out to be too limited for the task of speaking of so simple a thing — strangely enough, I think this may actually be because of its obsession with limitlessness.  But over time, much of the spiritual and metaphysical idiom has fallen away from me, and I have come to see that there is no better way to speak of these matters than in plain English (or plain whatever language is your own).  Because of this, much of what I said in the past now seems obsolete and inadequate to me as an expression of what I actually see and wish to convey.  We have made no effort to remove this outdated material from the web, because we think it might be useful for some to see the process of evolution that has gradually shaped the way we speak about our work.

The Vichara Conversation

I want to invite you to enter into an ongoing conversation with us about the human predicament, its cause and its cure.  By human predicament I mean the fact that a creature with such promise as humanity should, in such a short time, bring itself to the actual brink of extinction as a result of the efforts of each and every one of us to follow the fear of individual extinction into an endless project of survival at any cost, to protect ourself, to save ourself, from life itself. 

The story of how I met Gangaji, became all spiritual, and happened upon the secret of eternal happiness

In 1993, I was in a federal prison in Englewood, Colorado in the fifteenth year of my imprisonment for a number of politically motivated bank robberies and acts of sabotage I had done in the '70s. At that time, I was absolutely, utterly uninterested in anything spiritual. I had long since persuaded myself that all things spiritual were just stories we told ourselves to get us through the days without dying from despair at the obvious uselessness and hopelessness of our lives — lives that were in the end just dead meat walking and talking until it fell down dead again. I really didn't have any interest in anything spiritual. But in September of 1993, a friend of mine invited me to a meeting with a spiritual teacher who was coming to the prison — according to him, a gorgeous, blond, southern American woman — bringing some exotic, Indian spiritual teaching. He asked me if I would like to come to the chapel and spend a couple of hours with her. Well, of course I would. Her purpose was beside the point. I'm offered the chance to spend a couple of hours in a small group with a gorgeous, blond Southern woman with some exotic teaching to offer. What could possibly be the down side to that?

Accountability and responsibility

Spiritual teachers must answer to a higher standard of behavior and accountability than their students; we can not be excused for abusive, cruel behavior on the basis of any idea that we are inherently immune from criticism by virtue of our advanced state of realization. We are, after all, those to whom people come for help resolving the most profound and disturbing aspects of all human existence; we are those to whom they come seeking final release from the universal suffering that seems to be the natural lot of human life. And as such, like it or not, we are looked upon as being outside and above the norm, different from them, and answering to a higher call than service to ourselves and to our own happiness and gratification.

Those who come to us by and large are willing to lay it all on the line before us, hoping once and for all to be led by us to the end of suffering and confusion, and the snuffing out of the craving for happiness. They come to us preconditioned by thousands of years of hidebound tradition, believing us to be inscrutable and beyond the standards of normal human conduct. They believe that what we have to offer them is so mysterious and hidden from ordinary view that they have no basis for judging our conduct, since our conduct, however hideous, might be just what is needed to "wake them up."

We Need a New Model...

In ancient times, humanity worshiped old gods and spirits that were the source of all good and evil. In the spiritual model we have received from the past, which is still followed today, the teacher, the guru, has taken the place of these old gods and spirits. In this old model, we — the students, the devotees, the supplicants — sit at the feet of the master and yearn for the transmission of some energy or state that will shock them out of the trance of ignorance and propel them into a state that transcends normal consciousness, a state that clears — destroys, really — the mind; a transmission that ends ego and ego-thought, and creates within us an empty and pure new reality in which all things are seen clearly and peace and freedom and love reign unhindered and unobscured.