فصل 24

24

The Temple Is Built

I wish I could say that things went back to normal after Baba left, but they didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t until after he left that I began to see the real effect that meeting him had on my life. Baba was like a wind that blew into town and permanently changed the direction of my life from one of solitude to one of service. And that was a good thing because Gainesville’s spiritual community had been invigorated. Forty to fifty people were coming out to my place for Sunday services, half of whom had to sit outside on my decks. Plus, more and more people were sitting in on my classes at Santa Fe, especially once my second book, Three Essays on Universal Law, was published. My answering machine was getting calls from all over the state praising the retreat and asking when the next one would be. This was a timely question since at the retreat I was approached by a university professor who wanted us to host a retreat for his teacher, Ma Yogashakti, a lady saint from India known as Mataji.

The number of tasks life was giving me was out of control, but I was surrendering to it. My morning and evening meditations were my refuge. Throughout the day I took every opportunity to quiet myself and center within. Every time I got into or out of my car, I would slow down my breath and visualize Earth spinning through outer space. Before opening a door, any door, I would remember that I was walking through a door on this tiny planet in the vast emptiness of space. Fortunately, the energy flowing up to the point between my eyebrows helped me keep the focus of my attention there. I slowly began to realize that this life of constant service was the “other way” referred to in the dream I had. On my new path to awakening, life was no longer an obstacle to my growth. Life was now the battlefield on which I was to remain conscious enough to willingly permit my old self to be stripped away. But let it be clear, I still had plenty of resistance left in me that had to be overcome.

I kept getting pushed in the direction of hosting a retreat for Mataji. I had never heard of her, and I really didn’t want to do it. But I surrendered, and once again life had something unexpected in store for me. A few days prior to the retreat, Mataji and I were taking a walk on my land when she suddenly stopped and looked into the woods. She stood there motionless for a few moments and then said in a quiet voice, “Mickey, this is a very holy piece of land. Someday there will be a great temple here, and many people will come.” I clearly remember the voice in my head saying, Over my dead body! Yet, within six months, a temple would be sitting in that exact spot in the woods.

It was as though Mataji had been sent here to begin the process of turning my place of solitude into a spiritual center. More than once at the retreat she mentioned that there was going to be a great temple on Mickey’s land. I cringed every time she said it. The following Sunday after services, someone announced that if we wanted to build a temple, we needed to start raising some money. A few people made small donations, and others offered me their labor and some materials. I really didn’t want another building on my land, but it seemed everyone else did. Fortunately, by now I had become pretty experienced at ignoring what “I” wanted and, instead, following the flow of life.

That same Sunday, I walked down to my house, took out a piece of paper, and began designing the new temple. In just a few hours, I had a floor plan and a rough elevation of the building. I wanted to make the roof of the temple the main design feature, so I met with my friend Bob Gould, and we decided to give the temple a butterfly roof. A butterfly roof challenges conventional roof design because it’s low in the middle and slopes up on both sides. From the inside, the temple’s exposed-beam ceiling would be a unique and dynamic structure that looked like giant wings opening up toward the sky.

I designed the temple to allow about three times the sitting area afforded by my house. The very next day, I found the best spot on the land to locate the building and began clearing the site. It was, of course, exactly where Mataji had been staring when she pronounced that a “great temple will be built.” I had estimated that materials for the temple would cost about eight thousand dollars. Labor was not a problem; we would just do all the work ourselves. But the people who came out to my place on Sundays didn’t exactly have deep pockets. I had no idea where the money would come from.

The money just kept showing up the moment we needed it. Sometimes I didn’t even know where it came from. The closest we came to being stopped was on a day when only one or two boards were left in the materials pile. My coworkers were ribbing me that it had finally happened—we were out of materials, and I would have to send them home. I told them that as long as there was a single board left, we were not done. We broke for lunch, and I went out to check the mail. Sitting in my mailbox was an envelope with two thousand dollars in cash. There was no name, and to this day I have no idea who put that money there. Things like that just kept happening, again and again. The amazing part was not just that the money kept showing up exactly when we needed it—it kept showing up in exactly the amounts we needed to go to the next step.

That is how the temple got built. It took about three months, then suddenly one day it was done. In September 1975, we held our first Sunday service in the new temple. People brought gifts of spiritual items that had meaning to them. A professor of religion brought a beautiful wood statuette of the Buddha. Another person brought a picture of Jesus for the altar, and I went down to my house and got my favorite picture of Yogananda, which had been sitting in my meditation space since I moved in.

Little by little, the items in the temple began to represent all religions, all saints, and all masters. As its roof rafters stretched up toward the sky, the temple also belonged to those whose religion was the reality of the Infinite. This temple sat on the planet Earth, a tiny ball spinning through the vast darkness of empty space. It spun around one star, of which there were billions in our galaxy alone. This temple was universal in its embrace of all the religions, and it was universal in its embrace of the universe itself. Thus it came to be called—Temple of the Universe.