The Abode of Yoga

BOOK ONE I. Mahasamadhi . 1. A New Beginning . 2. A New York Goodbye . 3. Guru's Death . II. Growing Up . 4. David Moretti . 5. Three Muskateers . 6. The Book . 7. Camp de Mar . 8. Shame as a Driving Force . 9. On to High School . III. Searching for More . 10. The Seed Begins to Sprout . 11. Prahlad . 12. The Last Straw . 13. Awakening . 14. Novitiate . 15. Prakash . IV. Early Days on the Path . 16. First Steps on the Path . 17. School Days . 18. A New York Dream . 19. Idolatry . 20. New York at Last . 21. Goodbye . 22. Tightening the Screws . 23. Planning . 24. A New Leader . 25. Alo Devi . 26. Making the Grade . 27. April '83 . 28. "Outer" Graduation . V. Coming Into My Own . 29. Rick . 30. Names . 31. Made Man . 32. God's Banner . 33. Back Home . 34. December 1983 . 35. Phanindra . 36. A New Year . 37. The Summer Games . 38. Jigisha . VI. Closer to New York . 39. Pulin . 40. The Gospel . 41. Anugata . ...

I WAS NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU AND I THOUGHT This is the story of a few pivotal experiences of my 31 years in the Sri Chinmoy Centre. Telling it makes me feel sad, mad, ashamed, and foolish for staying and serving for so many years after I knew things were not as they should be, starting with our divine leader. Still, when I finally left the Centre, I swore to myself that I would never tell what I knew about him, and until recently I thought I never would. But when I left the Centre, I thought I knew what was true about Chinmoy, when actually I knew almost nothing. Now, as the real Chinmoy is gradually being revealed by piecing together all of our experiences with him, it seems I can’t keep my own story tamped down any longer. It needs to be told.  It’s not a good story, not a happy story, and I am not a heroine – on the contrary. But life is telling me it’s time to speak up. I probably should have spoken long ago. I definitely COULD have spoken about 40 years ago. Maybe I...

I have tried many times over the past 5 years to write about my experiences in the Centre (aka Sri Chinmoy Centre), what happened to shatter my faith in CKG (aka Chinmoy Kum ar Ghose or Sri Chinmoy) and why I finally left but I always got stuck on all the details. Here is my attempt at telling you my story. I joined the Centre in December 1986. I was friends with Nirbachita and Jeevan , who are the sister and brother of Yogaloy. In August 1986, Liz went to New York for an August Celebrations to see what her brothers were doing. She heard about CKG and the Centre from them and thought she'd check it out for herself. Liz came back to California and told me all about CKG, the Centre and all the cool people she had met. Right from the start I believed everything she told me about CKG. She gave me a Transcendental Picture and a few books to introduce me to his teaching. We started to attend the meditation classes in Cupertino, where Giribar was the Centre leader. For the first...

Though it drives many of my readers crazy when I say it, I am and will always be grateful to Sri Chinmoy. He changed my life for the better. That's an objective fact. I may not know much, but I do know who I was before I joined the Center and who I had become by the time I decided to leave it. I was a better person. For that, I'll always be grateful. A lot of my friends have argued that Guru did nothing, that he added no value to our lives as disciples. In effect, they're arguing that whatever good experiences we had -- whatever progress we may have made in our personal development -- was the result of our own efforts, our own self-discipline. I've no doubt this is true for them. It's not so for me. For a few years in the mid-1980s, I experienced an exalted sense of being. Was it actually exalted? It felt that way to me, and Guru made it possible. I'm not selling myself short. I played a part in my own experience, obviously, and perhaps the most important par...

I take my coffee black. I prefer it that way, without the milk and sugar that makes it so much easier to get addicted to in the beginning. I feel the same about religion. Magic and magical thinking are the milk and sugar of spirituality. It's what makes embarking on a religious life so attractive in the beginning. Perhaps it's even necessary at the start, even though in the end it becomes a disability. Like the old analogy of the two thorns -- sometimes it's necessary to use one thorn (or negative quality) to help extract another one stuck in your foot. Perhaps stories of saints, miracles, and the supernatural are necessary in the beginning to inspire one to tread the path of yoga. In the end, though, belief in these stories -- magic as I call it -- must be discarded, just as one discards the second thorn after it has helped you remove the one in your foot. I'm not saying that the path of conscious personal development -- the path of yoga -- need be bitter like the co...