فصل 26

26

Get Thee to an Ashram

March of 1976 marked the official formation of Temple of the Universe as a federally recognized nonprofit organization. To this organization, I signed over the ownership of my ten acres along with the Temple building, Donna’s cabin, and my house. I was back to owning nothing but my van, and that was exactly the way I wanted it. I was almost thirty years old, and my financial life was very simple. I was earning less than $5,000 a year, I had no assets or debt, and there was nothing I longed for that money could buy. I liked being free from having to deal with finances. I wanted to quiet my mind, and keeping life simple was certainly a help. Amrit’s group had offered the Temple 15 percent of the retreat profits, but I refused. We had not made anything from the other retreats, and there was something very beautiful about keeping it that way.

Amrit’s visit was by no means the end of the retreats or of visiting teachers. Our address and phone number were now everywhere in the New Age community, and whoever was touring Florida tended to drop by for at least an evening lecture.1 We ran annual retreats for Mataji and Amrit for many years and ran two very large retreats for Ram Dass, an immensely popular American spiritual teacher.

By now, Donna had become an integral part of my life. There was way too much work for one person to do, and she perfectly filled in the gaps. Aside from preparing for Sunday services, she handled all the kitchen responsibilities for the retreats and even allowed me to move my phone up to her house so that she could handle the Temple calls. Donna and I ended up spending more and more time together, and a tremendous love flowed between us. The events of the preceding few years had not just been happening to me; they had just as much happened to her. That created a powerful bond between us, and in the summer of 1976 we decided to make it official and get married.

The thought of getting married again was not completely comfortable to me. I was still holding on to the concept that all this external activity in my life was temporary. I would soon be allowed to return to my days spent in meditation and yoga. This relationship with Donna was forcing me to surrender my concepts of what I thought should be going on. I had not been looking for love or marriage, but the powerful flow of life managed to bless me with both. Fortunately for me, Donna was very spiritually oriented in her own right. We each enjoyed our quiet time, and we had no intention of giving up our separate houses once we were married.

As if things were not changing fast enough, returning home from our July wedding trip to Amrit’s revealed that another phase of our lives had already begun. It seems that once we had started holding evening and early morning services in the Temple, periodically someone would spend the night in the Temple’s guest room. When we returned, we found that not only had someone stayed there the whole time we were gone, but a very sincere seeker named Radha Kautz had stayed in my house. As in the case of Sandy a few years earlier, no one had actually asked to move in; they just ended up living here. Donna and I had just returned from visiting a spiritual community—now it appeared we were supposed to live in one.

The fact is, I never even dreamed of starting a spiritual center. It all just happened by surrendering to the flow of life. Though there was at least some internal resistance each step of the way, I just kept letting go. Sharing my place of solitude certainly wasn’t what I thought I wanted, but that’s because I didn’t understand that serving others is much higher than serving yourself. Nowadays, almost forty years later, people sometimes ask me how the Temple community got started. What am I to tell them? I know perfectly well that I didn’t do it. The best I can say is that I let go of myself and allowed what was meant to be—to be.