Ryker: 3. In The Beginning...

That was the start of the satsang meetings – Angelo and I hanging out. Different people would wander in and out. At that time he certainly didn’t consider himself a teacher – except in acting. But to me, he was the most amazing person I had ever met. He was so sure of himself. And he transferred that surety to me. It made me trust him. He really thought outside the box and challenged a lot of my small-minded ideas of the world. He exposed me to a world of different cultural things that I had not been exposed to before. And he challenged everything that I had concluded about myself and the world. It was refreshing because at every moment I was being challenged to be more than I was. So that felt really good. It felt good to be challenged. It was like “inner exercise” somehow. I thought I had found something really important. And I became an absolute zealot.

How those little individual meetings turned into what we called “satsang meetings” is really involved so I’ll try to be as brief as possible. The acting classes started turning into more of a “psycho-satsang” thing. You see, Angelo was a hypnotherapist and he also taught this acting class. So he would bring some of his hypnotherapy patients into the acting class and some of the acting students would become his patients. It became this weird mix. The acting classes became more about psychology and “working on yourself” (meaning exposing your weaknesses and fears and vomiting them out using acting exercises to do that.) Angelo always saw a real similarity between the two acting exercises and psychological tools for growth. And then on top of that, there was a lot of spirituality that he would throw in because he was into that as well. So one day, all the people in class came to me and wanted me to be their spokesperson and tell him that they wanted more acting in the acting class and that they weren’t into the spiritual stuff. So I felt compelled to say that to him. Because it WAS an acting class. That’s what they signed up for. But it was morphing into something else. And so I called and told Angelo that. And he said, ‘Is that really what you want?’ And me, personally? No, it wasn’t. I wanted to learn more acting skills. I wanted to be a performer. But also, the spiritual quest was becoming deeply important to me. It felt like a natural fit. So that was a rift-making thing between us. He seemed to feel perturbed by the mutiny of the class. And underappreciated. And very judgemental against these people. Because they “obviously had no idea what they were being offered” because if they knew they would never make such a request. But the point was that they answered an ad in the paper for acting classes and were getting psychology and spirituality within the acting class. Less and less acting and more into that. So finally the acting class stopped and turned into a class for only his patients. Around this time… through a series of events, I was going to a satsang in Miami by a friend of his, Ceuta, who was supposedly initiated into this experience in the same group with Angelo. He and I would go, every once in a while, to her satsang meetings; but, through a series of amazing and bizarre events, I started going to these satsangs twice a week on my own. I was really into it. I was meditating. I was doing service. I wanted that. And Ceuta asked me why I wasn't having satsang in Ft. Lauderdale. When I said I didn’t know, she suggested, “Well why don’t you go ahead and have meetings up there.” I said, “Me?” And she’s said, “Why not?” At this time I was 22.

So I invited anybody in “class” that wanted to come. I sat down in this room and there were only about 6 or 7 of us. And I started to read out of a book called, The Aquarian Gospel, because that’s what Ceuta used to do. She would read a passage and then expound on whatever she had read. And I started to do that and then, right in the middle of it, Angelo stopped me and said “I’m sorry I have to stop you. This isn’t Satsang. You’re not really aware of what Satsang is.” Then he started to share. And from that day on, he sharing in the meetings.

A whole bunch of different people came and went. But Satsang really started when I was 23 – about 3 years after I met Angelo. I met a couple of people at college and there were a core group of 7 to 15 of us at any given time that were very dedicated -- to a monastic level – an astringent level – a military level – of relentlessly looking at the ego. Because by this time, Angelo had taken over (in a “controlling” way) and made sure that everyone was constantly confronted with their shortcomings. So I took up that rally as my own responsibility since I saw these people more. So right from the start, I felt “This is my responsibility.” And I was a huge zealot. I would share satsang with anybody… at the bank… anywhere. Because I felt like I had found my purpose. I would be on these people every day to make sure they were meditating and I would confront them and say “Look, you’re falling for your old ego” and all that stuff. And it was right about that time I started to see Angelo for therapy. I hadn’t thought I needed it until then.

Therapy was interesting. In the way of seeing what was in my subconscious and bringing it out. Realizing that there’s a lot of unhappy moments of my childhood. Not trauma but… you know… every child is unhappy about certain things. Which I didn’t even really think about. I initially thought of myself as a very happy child. But the deeper I dug, the more dissatisfaction and confusion I found. And Angelo spent quite a bit of time pointing out how wrong my initial assertion had been.

At this point, it was all about Satsang. And people were encouraged to see him for therapy. We had meetings one night a week and informally, he and I and a few other people would go to the movies a few nights a week. We would eat popcorn and drink diet Pepsi. At that time, he thought he was hypoglycemic so he was very into that regimen. That was his big deal at that time. He ate protein. Lots of protein. No sugar. That was one of the first tenants of spiritually-correct eating. No sugar.

During this whole time, I approached everything with a very deep sacredness but I also felt the responsibility of bringing these people and inviting these few people and being resonsible that they really get the point of this somehow. Which, to me, the point was meditation. Which I was experiencing as “the direct experience of god” that he showed me. That was the point of these meetings so that this experience could be shown to other people. It was the point to prepare them, to see if they were sincere enough and they wanted to dedicate their lives to knowing God. And I took that up as my banner.