Many of my friends and students have expressed interest in how I became involved in all the things I seem to be involved with, and who were the people who taught me what I seem to know.

Since I know that many of my friends and ex-students read every article on this blog it seems fair, in a series about metaphysics and spirituality to give a summary of that history for them. If anything I write seems outlandish, outrageous or just weird, you are probably right. Take it or leave it and read on until something makes sense to you. Nothing is ever wasted.

It will be best for me as an Elder to start anywhere and go forwards and backwards in the story as elderly people do instead of trying to set everything down in temporal order as some brilliant novelists can do. I shall write this like a gossipy person talking to you in a restaurant. One thing will remind me of another and that of another and so the story may weave about from day to day or even from decade to decade. If you want to enter this particular labyrinth after that particular warning…read on.

We may as well start about the time I met my first certifiably enlightened being, Sunyata. This meeting I have dealt with in ‘Back to Basics for the Honest, Second Sighted and Magickal’ posted on 10/4/2009.

At that time, because of being let go from a second corporate earthquake, I part owned and was running a neighborhood newspaper on the north side of Chicago. It was called The Contemporary Times and was distributed free over the north side, from as far up as the border of Evanston to as far down as the Magic Mile.

There were only three of us involved in running it and I was the only writer for a long time. I wrote the nine or so standard articles under nine different names, in nine different styles and had fans for all of them. The second article was always on occult material and was very popular in the early 70’s. I wrote it under the pen name of Bill Postel…a red light to anyone studying alchemy who would know of William Postel, a pretty famous British alchemist. I remember meeting someone in a restaurant who found out that I was the editor of the paper and talked about the encounter he had with the elusive Bill Postel in a pub in Evanston. I told him that I was impressed because Bill never came to see me, he just sent in his copy.

We always had a whole page devoted to classified ads and any metaphysical or spiritual institution or being could advertise free of charge, with a maximum space allowance of course.

We had hundreds of such ads in every issue. It was probably because of this service to the metaphysical community that I was invited to meet with Sunyata.

OK. It isn’t possible to encounter a high being without something happening in your life. If you are alert you may even notice it. And the next ‘sign’ that turned up could hardly have been avoided by the dead, which in some of life’s areas described me well.

The Contemporary Times ran advertisements for just about everybody along five blocks of Lincoln Avenue on either side of Webster. Another of my hats was selling ad space in the paper. One day we saw the owner of a new establishment called Café Figaro. He was just finishing scrubbing the cobblestones outside his place and told us he would be open very soon. So Shirley and I went to check it out. The man running it was an extraordinarily handsome man with a Yugoslavian name, that to his surprise I pronounced properly, names being one of my studies. His wife made amazing sandwiches in their tiny kitchen and they were served with real coffee, to be eaten outside on the patio, as in France.

I wrote a review of the place under my restaurant reviewing name of Léon Guerolt, in memory of my favorite French teacher. I suggested that it should be called ‘Europe on Lincoln’ by the inside group. Yuppies in the area took note. Business boomed and soon our host could employ a waitress. And such a waitress! She had an exquisite bone structure like some Spanish royalty, high cheek bones, arrogant posture like a flamenco dancer, flaming long red hair and was dressed head to foot in bright orange. Not inconspicuous. Turns out that she was a red-headed Sicilian, the type who often explodes into earth shattering rages to intimidate the gang bosses in movies about the Mafia.

Since we ALWAYS talk to waitpersons to show that we think they are real people, we talked to this apparition. Round her neck and hanging down to mid chest she had a necklace that looked like it was made of some kind of seeds, and at the bottom of it was an oval crystal in which was embedded a photograph of a smiling East Indian gentleman with a long beard.

I asked her who he was. Her reply sounded like someone blowing bubbles next to an under water mike. It took three tries to slow her down enough to get ‘Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’ out of it. It turns out that he was her guru and she had lived in his Poona ashram in India for some years. So I asked if he had written any books. She replied that he had, but she never read books. For some reason I was interested in this bearded gentleman and pressed her until she said that she could borrow some from another devotee.

True to her word she produced some of his books next time we had coffee at Figaro. Now I had been reading metaphysics, alchemy, astrology, Zen, magick, etc., etc. for decades, but these books just blew me out of the water. Apparently Rajneesh would just come out every day and talk to his flock extemporaneously and the recorded talks were transcribed as books. I had read ‘Principia Mathematica’ by Bertrand Russell and Whitehead with some difficulty as a young mathematician. I thought I had a grasp of what a high intellect was. This man seemed to know everything about anything, like my boyhood hero Merlin, who he resembled.

I read a dozen or so more of his books, each on a different subject, each one coming from a place that I could sense but not own; quite different from other authors. By this time we were on speaking terms with the orange wonder woman and had learned about her own utterly astonishing story. I asked her how I could get in touch with Rajneesh to tell him how much I agreed with his amazing mind. “Why don’t you become a devotee?” was her pragmatic reply.

I pointed out that traveling to India might be small potatoes to her but was a significant obstacle to me. “Just write to him at the Poona ashram,” said she, “He always answers letters.”

Now I had been a member of the British Society of Psychical Research and knew what a sensitive could pick up from a handwritten letter. So I borrowed a typewriter, wrote the letter with it, signed it left handed, used my home address in Chicago, and sent it off. What happened next convinced me that this person was certainly not just an extraordinary scholar, but had other unusual gifts.

Three weeks later I received a letter, not at home but at the newspaper office, an address I never used on letters. It came from India and was written by Rajneesh apparently. He said that he accepted me as a devotee and my new name was Swami Prem Narayana and that I should wear orange to remind me of that. How that letter, sent in reply to the one from my home address, turned up as addressed to me under my name as editor of The Contemporary Times, after all my precautions, clinched the deal.

I bought an orange shirt and neckerchief and told the Lincoln Avenue crew of owners, clerks and waitresses that my new name was Narayana. I just mention that in that area I was often called Leonidas, the name my Greek restaurant friends called me, and still do. One of the Health Store ladies asked me, “What does Narayana mean Leonidas?” She had never been able to pronounce the vowels in Leonidas properly so it sounded very funny. I told her that basically it was one of the names of god. She was suitably impressed.

Well that long distance association with Rajneesh went on for a few years. I loved his books and his tapes, though Shirley never managed to stay awake for more than ten minutes of that edgeless voice on tape. Shirley became the recipe columnist for the newspaper and acquired her own following. Eventually we were married and I had changed my name to Douglas Buchanan so that she, born of parents named Buchanan could have her maiden name back.

Our orange friend also married and became pregnant. Very soon after that she told us that her husband had suddenly decided to become celibate. That rang a bell because I knew a lady in England whom I eventually married temporarily in America to beat the harassment of my employer by the Feds. Her first husband waited until she became a converted Catholic so that he could marry her without sinning, and the same week decided to become a monk in a monastery. That’s another story. But we were both empathetic to the situation of the orange one and as she was determined to leave the marriage we took her off to our place for her pregnancy, and Shirley learned Lamaze techniques in case her help was needed some months down the line.

Our orange visitor used to go to Chicago by train once a week. We never enquired where or why until she was several months into the pregnancy and though she was very small seemed to be carrying a large burden. So eventually we asked her where she went once a week when it was a mile to the train and it was hard for her to walk.

She told us that she was attending a meditation group in Chicago. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it in case we thought she was guru hopping. The guru of this group was someone called Swami Muktananda. It made no difference to us which guru interested her, but I asked my usual question, “Has he written any books?” She said that he had written one and she would get me a copy on loan.

That totally amazing book was called A Play of Consciousness. It was about the search of this young Indian boy who left home at fifteen to find someone who could guide him along the path of liberation. He ended up with an avatar named Nityananda who insisted that after his enlightenment he took over the message of Siddha Yoga.

Now Rajneesh I could understand. He was my kind of guy. Knew a great deal about many things and used dozens of different techniques with his devotees. Very intellectually satisfying approach, though some of his dynamic meditation techniques weren’t for me. I’ve always been solo by choice.

This new guru in my world was obviously one of the greats, but his approach was more like Bhakti yoga, the yoga of Divine Love. That was an emotion, and emotions were pretty sparse in my life. I just couldn’t stand the sight of people who jumped up and down and pumped their arms with what I supposed was joy. People who nodded their heads and tapped their feet when listening to music just irritated me. Extravagant actions and sounds were an antipathy to me, and yet this Muktananda really resonated with something in me and I wanted to know more.

That was when our orange whirlwind dropped another bombshell. She was going off to California to attend an intensive given by Muktananda in person. We were not surprised that without income she had managed to arrange that. She was the most amazing manifestor I have ever seen or heard of. For example. She received from whatever lived inside her the message that she must go to India. She found which flights connected from O’Hare and just got in the boarding line at the airport. When she was about three people from the desk a man came up to her and asked if she was going to India. She said that she was and he said that he had just had to cancel his appointment and gave her a one way ticket. She lived her life like that, so knowing that going to California cost plenty, staying at the ashram or surroundings cost plenty and paying for an intensive cost plenty was not what surprised us.

What began my mind spin was the fact that if I emptied my rather lean bank account at that point I could actually go to the intensive. I had zero chance, as far as I could see, to get to India to see Rajneesh, so I had what I later realized was quite common, the intense inner debate about which guru to choose, as if they weren’t all actually manifestations of the same reality.

But my non-stop clever mind could always think of more pros and cons than I could deal with. So I did a most unusual thing for me, though it was standard practice for more psychically aware devotees. I went to the meditation room and lifted the picture of Rajneesh from the mala round my neck up to my lips like a radio phone. Addressing his picture as though it were a person would always put us in touch with him, he had said. That was too far out for me, but this time I had no choice.

So I said to the smiling face in the crystal, “You two are driving me nuts. Give me a definite sign that even I will understand as to the best thing for me to do now.” Immediately, to my intense surprise I heard his totally unmistakable voice. Not the sort of thing that happens to me. It said, “Choose a book. Open it at random. Put your finger on a page. Then read where your finger is.”

I thought, “Great. I’ve got about twenty feet of your books here. Choose a book.” But I ran my hand over the backs and one of them seemed to want to stick, so I pulled it out, opened it without looking, put my finger on the page and then read what it said. And this is what it said: “If you ever get the chance to be with an enlightened man go and sit at his feet.”

I was still in slight shock when there was a loud crash in the living room. When I went to see what had caused it my framed picture of Rajneesh had apparently leapt off the wall and hit the floor some feet from the wall. Next day my mala, the necklace with his picture on it, just exploded. One moment I was wearing it and the next moment the shark tough fishing line had broken and the beads were all over the floor. Clearly I had been moved over to the jurisdiction of the other guru. Even someone of my dull perceptions could figure that out. Thanks Rajneesh.

That’s enough impossibilities to get on with. I’ll continue this abbreviated story next time.