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See this phrase translated! | |||||||||
| MENU Juice, and/or Fresh fruit Buckwheat Pancakes or Granola with homemade yogurt, or rice milk Coffee, or Morning Thunder TEA? |
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Now, for breakfast:
Juice, and/or Fresh fruit
 ERE, WE HAVE a wake-up call of a story. It
was sometime in the seventies, early
in the decade. Richard Alpert, of the Harvard LSD experiments
notoriety, had gone to India, and became Baba Ram Das. I had settled in to a variety of restaurant
jobs, here in Bloomington, Indiana. I made french fries and onion rings at one
place, now long gone, and learned to toss pizza at another. By the time the big
Demonstration in Washington, DC was being planned, a vegetarian restaurant opened
here, called the New Age Deli - way before the phrase "new age" became as familiar
as it has. Since I liked brown rice and veggies alot, I got a job as a cook. When
it came time to stage that huge Demo in DC, a fellow here with access to the funds
necessary, offered to transport all our workers to DC, in order to run a kitchen
for the expected thousands of demonstrators. I simply said that somebody had to
tend the home fires while the adventuresome sallied forth with the struggle, and
remained here. In the end, thousands were detained, illegally, in a stadium. They
filed a class action suit against the government, and won. One fellow I knew put
himself through IU's law school on his award... Anyhow, one of the owners of the New Age Deli, myself and six others took a trip to New England in a pick-up truck that had a camper shell. The driver of the truck
had owned a "head" shop, which he'd closed, so he was game for an adventure. We
were headed to Richard Alpert's family estate for a weekend yoga retreat. The
property was substantial, there was a nine hole course golf included...Baba Ram
Das' father had been an executive of some eastern Railroad. Yet, we had to endure
1000+ miles on that truck's steel "bed", with five people in back trading off with
two up front.At one point, when people's butts were starting to get sore, an argument ensued about what EGO (...and Ego "tripping") was. It occured to me
that people were simply getting cranky from discomfort. Suddenly, a "light bulb"
went on in my head...I asked, "Anybody got a pencil?" One was handed
to me. In a verticle column, I wrote five letters on the wood inside well of the shell,
the vowels, a,e,i,o,u. WhatmyPictures you doing that for, was the reply. So, I had everyone's attention. Then I wrote a phrase starting with each vowel. Looked like
this:A - a go cart E - 'e go, but 'e don'come back I - I go, too? O - Oh, go home! U - U go, too? The fellow doing most of the bickering looked cross. Then, a split second later, everyone laughed at ONCE...the kink ironed itself out, no more bickering for the
rest of the trip. I was discovering my comic potential!Our drive to New England was mellow for the remainder of the travel time. The yoga retreat was conducted on the grounds of the Alpert estate, near the main house. As
I have already mentioned, the place was big enough to include a nine whole golf
course, the senior Alpert being an avid golfer. Many movies have been made in the
past 25 years using estates of this size for on-location scenes, so the majority
of Americans who have never been a guest at such a place at least have visual
impressions from the cinema available to them at the nearest video rental parlor.
A film company was indeed filming this retreat for inclusion in a documentary of
eight separate spiritual paths, one I remember was with a Sufi master and his
disciples, and one was the "Breath of Fire" techniques of one Yogi Bhajan. I do
remember eventually seeing the finished film.One
afternoon session was conducted right on the fairway of the last hole of the
golf course, quite near to the house itself. Baba Ram Das instructed us in the
particular steps of some yogic meditation, which involved breathing, chanting with
eyes closed, as I recall. Then he said he needed to give us the legal disclaimer.
His father was out on the links with a foursome of players. So, Ram Das said,
"If you here someone shout "Fore!" you need to get up and walk off the fairway.
If anyone stays and does get hit by a ball, it's your karma"...He chuckled as he said it, and most folks laughed along with him. Nobody got hit! This holy man has comic potential, I thought. As our party of people were getting ready to leave and head to the south and the west, I found out from one of the others that a Satguru from India was being hosted for the first time in the USA by an American Swami
from New York named Rudrananda. Baba Muktananda was someone to see, that's for
sure.The
next portion of our "breakfast" here at Jesse's Cyber Café will be
devoted to my recollections of those weeks of my live spent in New York City,
and at Rudrananda's "Big Indian" ashram
retreat with the guru, the swami, and a few hundred other erstwhile seekers of
truth and Enlightenment. |
