No Reason: 21 Years with Western Baul Master Lee Lozowick

NO

REASON

21 years with Western Baul Master Lee Lozowick

Copyleft 2022 by Clinton Callahan. All rights reserved. Copyright owner Clinton Callahan hereby grants permission for readers to reproduce, evolve and distribute any part of this book for discussion groups, seminars, workshops, trainings, websites, articles, newsletters, ezines, films, television, theatrical presentations, application programs, computer games, etc. provided that the distinctions, maps, and experiments are attributed to Lee Lozowick , and that copies include the following copyleft block:

World copyleft 2022 by Clinton Callahan. From the book, No Reason: 21 years with the Western Baul Master Lee Lozowick. Author grants permission to reproduce, evolve and distribute this material (except as spam), even if you get rich and famous, provided that the distinctions, thoughtmaps and experiments are attributed to http://hohmsahajmandir.org, and that this copyleft block is included on each copy. All rights reserved. PossibilityManagement http://possibilitymanagement.org, is open code thoughtware. http://hohmpress.com, http://westernbaul.org, http://clintoncallahan.org, http://startover.xyz

Photographs used with permission of Hohm Press and Hohm Sahaj Mandir.

Book cover, layout, and design: Anne-Chloé Destremau.

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ISBN: 979-8-9928874-1-9

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There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

-          Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

THE END

If you’re really listening here, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.

-          Andrew Harvey

Yogi Ramsuratkumar never spoke to me. Until tonight.

It is 03:18 Sunday morning, 29 March 2020, nearly ten years after Lee Lozowick died. I am in the medieval German town of Ravensburg (if ever there was a logo for Lee Lozowick, it is a raven standing on a skull, as on the cover of his first Shri music cassette: Accused). I am in self-imposed lock-down to avoid expanding the death list of the COVID-19 Corona Virus. Farmland and low rolling hills surround this village. The Schussen River runs nearby, flowing carelessly south into Lake Constance.

During the past couple weeks, I experienced weird subtle stabs of pain behind my left rib cage. It scares me. I don’t know how long I have to live. (Does anyone?)

On 24 March, the day before my fifteenth 53rd birthday, as a birthday present to myself, I call Sharron Ragan, the psychic in Atlanta, Georgia, who in the early 90s told me I would move from Arizona to Germany and write seven books, something I had, at the time, no evidence to believe could possibly ever become true. During the call she tells me about a friend of mine who might die early from an illness he is not yet aware of, yet says nothing of the sort to me.

I contemplate a quote I recently read aloud to Anne-Chloé Destremau from John Fowles’ The Magus. Early in the story, the main character cannot sleep and reads an antique pamphlet which he finds on a dusty bookshelf near his bed:

ON COMMUNICATION WITH OTHER WORLDS

To arrive at even the nearest stars, man would have to travel for millions of years at the speed of light. Even if we had the means to travel at the speed of light we could not go to, and return from, any other inhabited area of the universe in any one lifetime; nor can we communicate by other scientific means, such as some gigantic heliograph or by radio waves. We are forever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time.

How futile all our excitement over aeroplanes! How stupid this fictional literature by writers like Verne and Wells about the peculiar beings who have evolved in the same way and with the same aspirations as ourselves. Are we then condemned never to communicate with them?

Only one method of communication is not dependent on time. Some deny that it exists. But there are many cases reliably guaranteed by reputable and scientific witnesses, of thoughts being communicated at precisely the moment they were conceived. Among certain primitive cultures, such as the Lapp, this phenomenon is so frequent, so accepted, that it is used as a matter of everyday convenience, as we in France use the telegraph or telephone.

Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained.

This is the only means we shall ever have of communicating with mankind in other worlds. Sic itur ad astra.

This potential simultaneity of awareness in conscious beings operates as the pantograph does. As the hand draws, the copy is made.

The writer of this pamphlet is not a spiritualist and is not interested in spiritualism. He has for some years been investigating telepathic and other phenomena on the fringe of normal medical science. His interests are purely scientific. He repeats that He does not believe in the ‘supernatural’; in rosicrucianism, hermeticism, or other such aberrations. 

He maintains that already more advanced worlds than our own are trying to communicate with us, and that a whole category of noble and beneficial mental behavior, which appears in our societies as good conscience, humane deeds, artistic inspiration, scientific genius, is really dictated by half-understood telepathic messages from other worlds. He believes that the Muses are not poetic fiction, but a classical insight into scientific reality we moderns should do well to investigate. 

‘Coincidentally’, in these same days I hear a man explain in a YouTube video how he ‘spontaneously’ recovered from cancer through connecting with the benevolent consciousness at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Lying awake in bed in the early morning hours of 29 March 2020, I decide to see if I can jack-in to that benevolent healing force. I make sure I have my Center, my Grounding Cord, and my Bubble Of Space, and then send my request over to the center of the Milky Way as a probe. Almost immediately a blast of ‘warm and good’ energy returns causing my whole body to quiver.

After a few moments of enjoying pleasant healing vibrations, Yogi Ramsuratkumar slips in sideways and skyjacks my connection with the healers!

As soon as He sees that I recognize Who is talking to me, Yogi Ramsuratkumar says, "It is time for you to finish your book about Lee Lozowick."

Tears well-up as my heart begins to ache. For no apparent reason I am softly crying. What Yogi Ramsuratkumar says makes no sense to me! I have not even started to write a book about Lee Lozowick. How could I possibly finish one?

I call up every rational argument I can think of against writing any kind of a ‘Lee Lozowick book’. I say, "Listen,I am already trying to finish four other manuscripts! If you scan all of Lee Lozowick’s students, I am certainlynot one who would be authorized to speak about Lee’s life, thoughts, feelings, actions, relations, intentions, etc. I mean, I lived in France most of the time! Lee only visited Europe for a few months each year, and when there He was mostly on the road and not at His French Ashram. I don’t have the proper spiritual perspective. My work is not endorsed on any of the Hohm Sahaj Mandir websites. Plus! Lee is no longer here to confirm if writing a book about him is what He truly wants me to do." You know the drill. Blah, blah, blah.

Yogi Ramsuratkumar sweetly side-steps every argument by reminding me that it was I – during Lee’s 1991 India trip with ten men – who opened the door for Vijay Fedorschak to write Hohm Press’ first book about Yogi Ramsuratkumar. To balance things out, it is only fair that Yogi Ramsuratkumar now gets to tell me to finish my ‘Lee Lozowick book’.

Bypassing my whining entirely, Yogi Ramsuratkumar starts detailing the contents of the book, chapter-by-chapter. Within a few seconds I am so inspired by His enthusiasm that I slither out of bed, open a Word file for a new book project on Ansible (my computer), and begin typing these words you are reading now.

This book turns out to be a confession:

I confess how much I love Lee Lozowick. I confess how much Lee Lozowick gave to me. I confess how much Lee Lozowick unleashed potentials in me that would never have come forward except through His extraordinarily skillful unreasonable invitations to challenging experiences, combined with devastating feedback, and His radically-ever-present Love.

If this book works, it will not have been written by Clinton Callahan. It will have been written by Yogi Ramsuratkumar, Lee Lozowick, and the Muse. Its purpose is to tell stories of a few facets of the life of Someone who overturned the spiritual scene 1 January 1975 with His seventy-one-page Spiritual Slavery book, and then skyrocketed lifelong through the world as the astonishingly radiant Lee Kepa Baul. I propose we use these tales as a chance to celebrate His blazing life together.

It is a bad time for me to write about Lee Lozowick. Corona Virus panic-buying has stripped bare every shelf in town of tissues and toilet paper. I am forced to use my shirtsleeves to wipe my nose and the tears pouring down my cheeks.

We go on.

NOTE: These chapters do not include exact reproductions of my articles published in Lee Lozowick’s Tawagoto magazine, or in Volume III and IV of the Hohm Sahaj Mandir Study Manual. I have taken the liberty of upgrading the text in several ways, namely: changing to the present tense, first person imperative ‘you’ form, dropping the ‘Mr.’ wherever I had written ‘Mr. Lee’, and adding bits-and-pieces here-and-there from what I have learned in the meantime. All I can say about this is: Jai Guru.

CONTENTS

1970: Tender First Steps

1991: Seeing Krishna

1991: Three Days With Yogi Ramsuratkumar

1992: Yes

1993: 33 Hours With The Spiritual Master

1994: 42 Years Of Foreplay

1995: Being Annihilated In Love

1995: What Is It Like To Be The Student Of A Western Baul Crazy Wisdom Master

1995: Arizona To France

1996: The Road’s Ahead

1996: Stopping The World

1997: Radiantly Ordinary

1997: Interviewing Alexandro Jodorowsky

1998: One

1999: Lee Lozowick In His Own Words

2000: Some Amazing Things (Psychologically Speaking)

2000: An Evening In Arnaud Desjardins’ Garden

2000: Divine Alchemy PART 1

2001: Some Thoughts On Service, Sanity, And Magic

2001: Divine Alchemy PART 2

2002: Lee Lozowick In His Own Words

2003: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

2004: 8 Poems To Lee Lozowick

2006: Being Alive In The Face of Breakdown

2006: Requiem And Conscious Death In The Western Baul Tradition

2006: Handbook For Creating Ordinary Human Relationship

2010: Lee’s Death

1989 – 2010: Guru Feedback

2014: Circular Meetings

2015: Self-Deception

Diving Deeper

Sample pages of Lee Lozowick’s edits:

1. 1970: Tender First Steps

What I love most to hear from a person is stories about their initial steps along their journey towards becoming the person they are today. "How did you begin on the Path?" I ask. The twists and right-angle-turns are impossible to predict, but they make faultless sense in hind-sight. Their inconceivability substantiates legends of the ruthless compassion of E.C.C.O. (Earth Coincidence Control Office, per John Lilly).

My story is no different. It begins on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) suburb west of Los Angeles, California, in my 1970 Rolling Hills High School graduation non-ceremony. That is the day I legitimately escape from my parent’s bubble.

The first moment my mother puts me in kindergarten at Silver Spur public grade-school, I know something is horribly wrong. The daily ‘pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America’ is empty and scary to me. Something terribly important is fundamentally missing. Nonetheless I sense how satisfied my parents are that I have finally entered the school system, and that if I somehow refuse to go, it would become a significant problem. No one is there to hear the depth of the pain that I feel when my stuffed animals and plastic toy figures all inexplicably lose their life.

Since I am the first of three brothers, I copy my father’s survival strategy and become a ‘good boy’. Both of my brothers copy other relatives and became ‘bad boys’, smoking, drinking, partying, ditching school, and getting low grades. Our difference in survival strategies sadly forces my brothers and I to become adversaries. I remain mostly alone in my childhood.

I spend my free time reading science fiction novels, adventuring along on my elbows and belly through sewer pipes under the roads using a candle in a jar for light, learning to pick locks and make small bombs from watching 1960s American television: The Avengers, Mission Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and building a small laboratory in my parents’ back yard using large wooden pallets I scavenge from my father’s work. I roof it with aluminum sheeting used back then in the newspaper printing process. Fortunately, I do not blow myself up.

During the last year of high school, I am put into a history class. My teacher never speaks to me, until one day he says, Hey Callahan. I say nothing. Why is it that I get a paper from the head office listing all the gifted children in this school, and of all the students in this class only your name is on the list? I don’t know anything about this list. he continues, And last night when the curtain goes up at the school play, you are the only actor on the stage! No answer is required. And here you are, the whole year in my class, and you don’t say anything? I understand things enough to know that he just answered his own question. He is an asshole. But I am a good-boy, so we are in stalemate.

I skip out on my 1970 high school graduation ceremony by registering for a National Science Foundation Summer Science Program for physics and math entirely across America in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is as far away as I can get from my parents and brothers without actually leaving the country. I earn pocket money by roving the streets early Saturday and Sunday mornings, collecting aluminum cans and coke bottles that I turn in for cash, sometimes having to step around pools of blood and broken glass from the previous night’s activities. By the end of summer, I arrive at my college campus: California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.

The lady at the registration desk say, "So, young man, what would you like to study? I am shocked. No one ever asked before. I decide to tell the truth. I want to learn magic, healing, transformation, meta-physics, para-physics… She interrupts me saying, We offer physics." I sign on the dotted line.

Sleuthing around campus I discover The Bulletin Board! One announcement particularly catches my eye: an invitation to learn Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation (TM). An unexpected tingle goes down my spine. Finally, I get to explore something that actually interests me!

My mother provides thirty-five dollars per month for food at college. The cost of the TM initiation is exactly thirty-five dollars! For one month I collect fallen walnuts and apples, steal saltine crackers and ketchup packets from salad bars, and discover how to scrounge half-rotten fruit and vegetables from dumpsters behind grocery stores without getting caught. My diet is strange for a month, but it liberates enough cash to start my spiritual path. I begin practicing TM of TM in the AM and PM (Twenty Minutes of Transcendental Meditation in the morning and in the evening). It goes well.

In 1974 the Cal Poly Bulletin Board opens up another doorway when I discover a flyer for a two-weekend workshop that promises to unleash my psychic abilities or they will give me my money back. It is an offer I cannot refuse. The workshop is called Silva Mind Control (named after José Silva, now called Silva Method). John Magera is my trainer. After the two weekends I do not ask for my money back. Being psychic is our natural state.

Much later I learn that simultaneously on the East Coast of America, in the town known as Orange, New Jersey, a man named Lee Lozowick – a professional stamp collector – is studying the ideas and practices of José Silva and begins delivering the same seminar that changes my life. Is this mere coincidence?

It is September 1974. I begin my final year at Cal Poly with the sadness and frustration that I am not learning what I came there to learn. My guts move me to try something completely different. I design and post mimeographed flyers advertising a weekly Thursday Night Meeting that would begin 9 January 1975 at seven pm. I sit in the back row as seventy-six students pack into the tiny room in the Student Union. I had never given a talk before in my life. I am sweating and shaking as my friend Roger Taber nudges me to go forward and say something. I don’t remember what I said, but we start meeting weekly on Thursday evenings for the rest of the school year. As a result, five of us from the group spend Fall Quarter of 1975 self-organizing and co-creating an Unschool for ourselves on the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas. It is heavenly there on the beach. We do experiments and go on adventures. The aliveness of our mutual endeavor inspires me still today.

Confident, I join a Los Angeles project to set up an experimental educational community on Roatan, an island off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Within hours of everyone arriving on the island we all get arrested and sent back to the USA. I am in shock about how badly this turns out after my previous success. Clearly I have more to learn about navigating human collaboration in small groups…

With only fifteen dollars in my pocket, I ride my ten-speed Schwinn bicycle from my parent’s house in Los Angeles south to San Diego where I work for a while as a lab assistant in an air pollution technology research firm.

In Los Angeles, 1976, I get to participate in a one-day seminar with José Silva himself, along with my parents. What I remember most is overhearing a 12-year-old girl brag that she can bend spoons with her mind. My parents and I go to Denny's Diner for lunch where I steal one of their heavy-duty stainless-steel teaspoons. Back at the seminar room I find the girl, hand her the spoon, and say, Please show me how you can bend this with your mind. She sits down quietly on carpeted stairs, focuses on the spoon while stroking it with one slender finger. In about nine minutes she hands the spoon back to me, bent ninety-degrees on a tiny radius. I still have that spoon today.

In 1979 I ‘accidentally’ discover Paramahansa Yogananda's book, Autobiography of a Yogi. Even though it is a whale of a book I do not want it to end. When it does, I immediately contact Yogananda's organization, the Self Realization Fellowship (SRF), and pay for their fifty-two-week correspondence course. At the end of my year of Hindu meditation practice they send me a written test to complete before revealing to me the secrets of their core practice: 'Kriya Yoga'.

I fail their test…

The genius fails their test…

This is an eye-opener.

I take it as a sign from E.C.C.O. and stop my SRF practices to go sailing around the world. By that time, Brenda (my first wife, and later on, mother to our two daughters) and I figure out the long hard way that in order to go sailing into the South Pacific you do not need to build a boat. You do not even need to buy a boat. All you need is to be accepted as crew of a boat!

We quit our jobs, get married, buy one-way air tickets to Honolulu, and hike the Kalalau Trail on Kauai. By September 1981 we are hanging around Honolulu harbor searching for a sailboat making landfall from California with a crew who hates each other so much – due to the psycho-emotional reactivity from the forced intimacies of sailing – that at first opportunity they abandon ship. As the captain searches for a replacement crew, we would appear. We don’t have long to wait...

Last minute I am running around Honolulu in a panic, having almost no time to pack before shipping out for the South Pacific with two other couples on the pink-and-purple hand-crafted 45-foot trimaran christened Moondog. My panic comes from having no book to read!

Panic leaves me open to E.C.C.O.’s influence, which directs me, oddly enough, to the Honolulu J. J. Newberry's discount book table. Frantically pawing through a pile of pulp-fiction, my fingers miraculously pull out a hardback copy of In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky.

How the hell did this get here? Another freak coincidence?

I devour this hefty tome during the entire one-month sea-crossing. Later I learn that Lee Lozowick is simultaneously studying Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way.

While cherishing the last few pages in Sydney, Australia, our roommate’s boyfriend – by mere ‘coincidence’ – saunters past. He glances over my shoulder, and casually says, You like that book?

Yes! I exclaim fervently.

Then, you need to call Ron Bosanquet. Here is his number.

I look at him quizzically, but I call Ron Bosanquet. Ron quietly asks me a couple of questions and then says, You can meet me at the café.

I explain what is going on to my wife, and then I go alone to meet Ron Bosanquet at the café. After a couple of minutes conversing, he says, You can come. We meet Thursday nights at seven. Here is the address.

Thursday nights at seven? That is the same as our Meetings in 1975! Is this also mere coincidence? I go to that address the next Thursday night at seven. There I have the profound experience that my life has not been in vain.

I find that the serious disparity I had felt my whole life between the vision and needs of my Being, and the spaces and gameworlds offered to my Being by modern culture, is not my own insanity. There are some parts of humanity – in this case, thirty Australian women and men – who also cherish learning the arts of practical transformation and procedures for evolving consciousness. Ron Bosanquet is creating and navigating the spaces of a living School.

During the Thursday night meetings, and through engaging the exercises they teach me to practice during the week, my life jumps tracks. After a week or two, Brenda tells me, I need to come to those meetings with you.

Why is that? I ask.

Because you are changing.

Try to imagine a woman speaking these words to a man born and raised in the capitalist patriarchal empire of the late 20th Century. What man do you know has actually ever changed? How much heart-break do women feel about trying to relate with uninitiated adolescents? Mostly women are forlorn, hopeless, and frustrated-as-hell about never seeing a man become more aware of himself than a dog.

The Gurdjieff Work provides Brenda and I with something truly extraordinary to stand on. Our Australian Tourist Visa is valid for six months. After Brenda is accepted into the School we decide to finish up our travels, earn some money back in the USA, and then emigrate to Australia to continue in the Work.

My, my… how plans can change…

Ronald Eric Giffard Bosanquet eventually went on to create Leonis School which still exists today outside of Sydney, Australia. Ron died 30 May 2017.

In 1983, after our two-and-a-half-year, round-the-world edu-vacation comes to an end, we find ourselves right back where we started from: California… with one strange difference: we are pregnant.

Our first daughter is happily homebirthed in May 1984. I use every spare moment to study any Gurdjieff book I can get my hands on, but I terribly miss the magical transformational downloads and practices of Ron Bosanquet's living School in Sydney.

I search out and visit half-a-dozen Gurdjieff groups meeting around Northern California assuming that they too would be alive. Sadly, each one reveals itself to be nothing more than a cerebral debate circle. I eventually give up hope, trying to imagine how I could possibly have been so stupid as to have walked away from the only living School on planet Earth.

One summer afternoon in 1985 our little family drives from our home in Santa Rosa, California, to visit an outdoor Tibetan Fair in Berkeley. My wife takes off with her sister and our daughter. I meander around thinking about the next book I want to read: Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer by John C. Lilly. On a grassy hillside I spot two intelligent-looking women standing behind an unshaded folding-table strewn about with books. I stroll over, do not make eye contact with the vendors, push a few volumes aside and find: The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus by someone named E.J. Gold. I think to myself, This is it! This is my next book! I find a second book titled, Secret Talks With Mr. G., whom I automatically presume to be Gurdjieff. I pay for the books in cash, turn away happily with my treasure, and walk away.

Until one of the women shouts, Wait!

I pause and turn around, thinking perhaps there is some tax I had forgotten to pay. This does not appear to be her issue. Something else is afoot. I sense an imperative yet heartbreakingly wistful tone in her voice.

What? I ask cautiously, staying motionless.

You cannot just walk away! the woman wails from deep in her being. This does not explain anything to me.

Why not? I say testily, thinking to myself, Of course I can walk away…

She allows a teetering moment of silence, then reveals with surprising intensity, You cannot just walk away. We have been standing here for three days. You are the only person to even come over and look at the books. You don’t ask us any questions. You buy two books without hesitation! You think we can just let you walk away from here?

I have no answer to her question.

She writes furiously on a scrap of paper, says, Here! You must call Mike McDonnell!

With trembling hands, I take the precious little note from her fingers, barely able to look in her eyes. Could this be real? Could this be happening? I am unable to speak with the women further for fear of bursting out in tears. I walk away treasuring this little paper more than anything else I own.

That evening I call Mike McDonnell. Mike says, Can you meet me at the café?

Oh my god! It is true!

I meet Mike at the café. After a few questions, Mike says, Okay, you can come. We meet Thursday nights at seven. Here is the address.

Halleluyah!!! Holy Samolians! Thank Gaia! There is no way to express the depth of my joy. Life suddenly makes sense again! Magic lives! Someone is watching out for me! I am on my knees in gratitude to the whole Universe. I have just been guided to another living School!

Even now retelling this story after so many years, my chest swells, my throat tightens, and tears pour down my cheeks in unspeakable gratitude for the spaceholders of such Schools. They are so rare, so important in the big picture. My Being Celebrates the potential abundance of nonlinear Possibilities shared on an authentic path guided by the great Mystery. I love this Work.

Mike’s Thursday Night meetings are fabulous, for four years.

One summer weekend in 1988 Mike brings Brenda and I to attend his teacher’s World Wide Work Circle conference in Sacramento, California. We find ourselves in amphitheater-seating with Mike and some two-hundred of E.J. Gold’s students.

E.J. himself sits behind a long white table down in front of us with two powerful gorgeous women sitting on his left, and two additional powerful and equally gorgeous women sitting on his right. The room grows quiet and a solemn tension arises. E.J. finally asks his burning question, "How many of you have read my new book?"

Barely a handful of us raise our hands. I myself am only part-way through it, a labyrinthian journey to be sure. E.J. erupts out of his chair, furiously gesticulating. "I spend months writing this book for your development as a harmonious human being and you do not even have the discipline to read it!" All four women now stand up with him. The five of them turn to their right, and without further explanation, silently file out the door to our left.

No one moves a muscle.

We hardly breathe. This cannot be happening.

The room is quiet enough to hear an angel fart.

Reality just slammed us irrefutably in the face.

No one knows what is going on.

This is unprecedented.

We have no place to put this situation in our mind.

The rug has been pulled out and we are in freefall.

E.J.… He just stood up and walked out on us… What is happening? He can’t take it anymore? We failed him? There is no hope for us? The game is over?

These thoughts are horrible beyond belief, beyond imagination.

We wallow in disgraceful, embarrassing pain. How could we have done this to him?

Fifteen minutes go by. Sweat trickles down our faces.

Twenty minutes… Still nobody moves.

Down at the right side of the conference hall, a door gracefully opens. A tall feminine angel floats in and turns to her right. A second angel somberly enters. Then a thin, long-haired bearded man enters in sober silence, also dressed in white, also turning to his right. Two additional angel-women follow him in. They are all barefoot.

The five radiantly-white Beings stand elegantly behind the same table E.J. and his women had abandoned. They sit down in wordless unison, and gaze benevolently upon us. This, however, fails to alleviate any of our pain.

This is my introduction to Lee Lozowick: a piece of consciously performed radical transformational guerilla street theater.

No one can predict what will happen next in this space. Everyone’s attention is glued on Lee.

Slowly, evenly, carefully, word by word, Lee builds out a bridge for us to cross over from where we are – spiritual ghosts in various states of shock, shame, outrage, fear of consequences, whatever psychological aberration we have not yet healed in ourselves – over to where E.J. invites us to thrive with him.

Someone gains the courage to ask a timid question. We start to put our hearts on the table. It might be frightening or painful, but this is the only way forward. Lee delicately fills in gaps with distinctions, stories, reasonability, and practical clarity.

During this conference Brenda decides she wants Lee Lozowick as her Teacher.

As you might imagine, that opens up multiple futures before me.

One future is where Brenda follows Lee to Arizona and I stay with E.J. Gold in Northern California. This, I estimate, would cause a fundamental divide.

Another future is where I bow before the forces of E.C.C.O. and join Brenda in asking to be a student of Lee Lozowick.

E.C.C.O. prevails.

It is Friday, 17 November 1989, the day before Lee’s birthday. The Western Baul Appearance Day Celebration is in full swing at the Prescott Ashram. Brenda and I with our two daughters have just driven nineteen hours from our home in Santa Rosa, California, across Death Valley, to this sanctuary, deep in the high Arizona desert. The phrase, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…’ cruises through my mind, but nonetheless I shiver in my shoes.

The hubbub of the Hohm Sahaj Mandir office surrounds me. Every desk and chair is occupied by someone doing something productive. I stand here agitated doing nothing. Each breath has a life of its own.

My nervousness comes from having just written a note on a scrap of yellow paper and placing it into Lee’s empty mailbox just outside and to the left of the sliding glass doors into the greenhouse. Lee’s mailbox is always empty. I cannot imagine how He does this.

The note I put there is not just any note. It is THE note:

My world enters a cusp moment, a state of indeterminacy. It is madness to try to predict what the Guru will do. He might not answer. He might say, "Come back next year after you have read all my books." He might say anything. What would I do then?

Not knowing what comes next is tough for a physicist, being so out of control, without a model to use for predicting how this is supposed to go. I wobble there aimlessly in some galactic waiting bardo while the universe zooms on around me.

Brenda wanders into the office, possibly to find me after settling the kids into childcare. That is when Lee enters the space through the glass doors like a hurricane with a mission. He catches my eye, stops, and clearly says one single word, "Yes."

Brenda sees the interaction and says, "Did you just ask Lee to be a student? I nod my head. She looks to Lee and says, Me too!" Lee confirms Brenda’s discipleship without hesitation, but I am too occupied with what just happened to me to notice what is happening to her.

By December 1990 we extract ourselves from E.J.’s School, sell our California house, move to an apartment near Prescott, Arizona, buy seven-tenths of an acre of buildable land across the stream and a couple hundred yards from Lee’s Prescott Ashram, and start designing up a passive-solar rammed-earth home. We find an ancient sky-blue house-trailer to put on the land in the meantime and move our little family into it. I give my bio-medical instrument prototyping business (Computer Effects Company) to my electronics partner Alan Friedman. I dedicate 1990 to becoming ‘financially independent’ as a multi-level-marketer selling NuSkin products in California, Arizona, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, finally maxing out so many credit cards that the banks won’t give me any more money. My fantasy world pops as debt overwhelms me. I go down.

Mr. Gurdjieff would say, "Good situation? Bad situation! Bad situation? Good situation!"

In this case, being insolvent is an extremely ‘good’ bad situation. My life plan is utterly crushed. I am, at last, destabilized enough from my self-commitment that E.C.C.O. can slide me sideways into circumstances that unleash my true life calling. This, of course, is only discernable in hind sight. In present time I teeter over an unnamed abyss.

I have become meek enough to accept an employment offer to work as a ‘secretary’ in a tiny Prescott, Arizona, training company run by one of Lee’s long-time students, Purna Steinitz. He needs a new assistant because his previous one was recently seduced by a female training participant. It is January 1991. I am too emotionally untrained to recognize the immense joy of my Archetypal Lineage.

2. 1991: Seeing Krishna

Sunday, 14 April 1991 – In the original Arizona Ashram Darshan Hall near Prescott

During several previous pre-Darshan rush-arounds I had grabbed a piece of fruit from our household fruit-bowl to give for Prasad. By doing this I learned the hard way that this does not energetically work. There is not enough consciousness in the gift. Prasad needs to be attentively selected, energetically cleansed, carried into the Darshan Hall with intention and forethought. Household fruit does not provide a clean enough bridge to transport divine energy between Teacher and student. Prasad is handmade or found or bought with the clear formulation that the object was already Prasad.

On this evening, Brenda and I get the kids and ourselves fed, cleaned, dressed and into the car early enough that we can drive to Smith’s Grocery Store for a ‘Prasad Run’ without being late for Darshan. A large, plump, fragrant, perfectly ripe, red-orange-green mango finds its way into my hands to lay at the feet of Lee Lozowick tonight.

We arrive at the Ashram without incident and approach the Darshan Hall door. I carry my daughter inside in my arms because she sprained her ankle just before we left the house. Brenda is so tense from doing bookkeeping all afternoon combined with rushing to arrive at Darshan on time that her right shoulder is hunched a full two inches above her left. A humorless set to her face and eyes tells me she is near her limits. I am emotionally Cramped up, trying to be a ‘good hubby’, yet deeply worrying that last year’s taxes are due tomorrow and I have completed neither the account books nor the forms. In this condition we hobble into the archetypal space of the Darshan Hall, a glorious celebration chamber with Lee’s seating platform front and center, and a massive, hand-carved wooden Bodhisattva statue blessing us imperiously from the left-front corner of the room.

Surprisingly, it is early enough that I can choose where to sit rather than squeezing onto the only available cushion at the back of the room in my usual ‘family man’ entrance. I see that in one row on the men’s side, the middle seat is taken by Bishwanath, the Indian Baul currently visiting the Ashram. Bishwanath is Sanatan Das’ elder son, with whom I feel some kind of rapport after having had a short, pantomimed conversation with him the previous weekend during our annual All Fool’s Celebration. To his left sits Abhi, his translator. The seat to the right of Bishwanath is vacant and I choose to sit there, completing the row, having the fantasy flash through my mind that I too am a ‘real Baul’.

Bishwanath sits in full lotus position, meditating. I manage a half-lotus as I settle