فصل 30

30

The Ever-Expanding Temple of the Universe

By the spring of 1978, Built with Love was building fine custom homes and doing large residential remodels. Around that time, I stopped teaching at Santa Fe. The college invited me to stay, but only on a full-time basis, and I would’ve had to use a standard sociology textbook for all my classes. It was not as though a decision had to be made; life had already given me a full-time job. The transition to Built with Love had already taken place by then. I experienced none of the mental resistance that had been present during my previous periods of change. As natural as a snake sheds its skin, so this transition in my life naturally took place.

Not too long after I left Santa Fe, I was hired to build a beautiful house for Tom Jenkins, a professional golfer on the PGA tour. As it turned out, the Jenkinses purchased a piece of property just down the road from the Temple. Only one lot lay between our interior field and that land. To me it was like another miracle—I got to build my nicest custom home within walking distance of where I lived. And if I thought that was special, I wonder what I would have thought if I had known that someday we would end up owning that house, and it would provide the perfect home for some Temple residents.

This raises a very interesting topic: the expansion of the Temple of the Universe. We had six or seven people living on Temple property by the end of 1978. We were charging rent for anyone living here, and though it wasn’t much, at least no one was coming for a free ride. Built with Love taught us how to run a small business properly, and Radha ran the Temple’s affairs in the same professional manner.

As fate would have it, the person who moved into our only cabin with a kitchen loved cooking vegetarian meals for dinner. It didn’t take long before all of us started showing up at that house as regular dinner guests. We also got together there for holiday gatherings and birthday parties. That was pretty much as communal as we got. The people who lived at the Temple were expected to keep morning and evening services and to pay their rent—not so difficult. They were also expected to try their best to not get caught up in the incessant chatter of the personal mind—much more difficult.

It seemed as though Built with Love kept earning just enough money to allow us to purchase bordering properties as they came up for sale. I made that a game with life: if a neighboring property came up for sale and we had the funds available to purchase it, the Temple would buy it. It was then fascinating to sit back and watch how just the right people would show up to occupy those houses.

There are some amazing stories of how people ended up at the Temple, and these stories had a profound effect on my willingness to surrender to life’s flow. It was as though people were handpicked to show up at just the right time in their spiritual growth—and ours. Perhaps no story is more stunning than that of a student who ended up living at the Temple for many years. I remember that I first met her when I was teaching at Santa Fe one winter toward the end of my tenure at the college. I had entered one of my classes, and the students were complaining about how the overheated room was making them sleepy. I went to a window, opened it up, and started waving in fresh air. Shortly thereafter, a new student entered the room and found herself a seat. I often had unregistered students sit in my classes, so I thought nothing of it. I also thought nothing of it when this same student started attending meditation services at the Temple. She was very sincere in her spiritual practices and eventually moved into one of the houses on Temple property. It was not until years later that she related to me how she had wanted to come to my class for a long time, but she had been too shy. She actually became teary-eyed as she told me how appreciative she was that I had seen her procrastinating on the walkway that cold winter day and opened the window to wave her in. I was stunned to hear what she thought had happened that day. When I related my side of the story, she realized it was actually life’s hand that had beckoned her to rise above her fears and come into the class.

Things like that just kept happening. I became deeply committed to serving the unfolding of that force. In fact, if you had asked me toward the end of 1978, I would have told you that I had surrendered my entire life to the Universal Flow, and it had taken over every moment. It taught me how to keep regular spiritual practices while working in the world and how to support others to do the same. It taught me how to build and run a successful business that would support the ever-expanding spiritual work. It taught me how to serve others by sponsoring statewide retreats for leading spiritual figures and by providing a home for what grew to a dozen or so very special and sincere seekers. I saw this work as something that could continue to grow in a linear fashion. I would never have guessed that I had seen nothing yet. It would have been beyond my comprehension that everything I had been taught so far was just the foundation for what was coming next. No one could have guessed that all that had transpired during those early stages of my surrender experiment was just the launching of a multistaged rocket headed for the stars.