Denomio: 3. Joining the Austin Group

I remember that I really wanted to communicate with Angelo. I was struggling with these feelings -- questioning if he was really my master. Remember that it was 2 years before I met him so I had feelings of “Well, I've never met him. He’s never told me that he was my master and I’ve never told him he was my guru... So how do I know?" Then, when I finally meet him in Satsang, there still isn't any direct communication. It’s not long before some of the other people (that had known him before) started going to the garden and I was put on the back list of people waiting to get cleansing with him or waiting to be allowed to go to the garden. My only way to communicate with him was to write him letters. It was frustrating... in part, because it reminded me of my father. When I was 8 or 9, I was in contact with my biological father but he wanted us to write him – and I didn’t like writing. I just wanted to be like, “OK, here we are. Are we going to hang out?” So this was reminiscent of that same childhood dynamic with my father. Also, Angelo’s accent was fairly thick so I didn’t know how much he understood of the English language. I remember asking people “How is his vocabulary? Can I use this word?” People chuckled at that… but he didn’t have the best grammar so how was I supposed to know?

I got to work with other people in the Buddha Field. I got a job working at Whole Foods and then I was a construction assistant with someone for a while… so I would go to work and then do the normal BF routine: class on Monday, Satsang on Thursday, movies on Friday... outings on Sundays…

The first several years in the group were very transformative. There was a lot of personal transformation. It was evident with everyone really. One of the ways that the Buddha Field likes to describe itself… somebody outside the group once described us as “the beautiful people” and everyone laughed at that... but we kind of liked it also and we adopted that idea as having a certain amount of truth to it. I met a lot of people who were transformed and a lot of people with a lot of gratitude for their lives. And we fed that within ourselves -- because a lot of us had been completely neurotic going in. So suddenly, there was a little bit of stillness and silence, and an experience of loving something beyond ourselves and that was transformative. And I think we were all fairly self-congratulatory about that. And we kind-of collectively made the decision that that was because we were “on to something” that nobody else on the planet had. Or, if anybody else had it, then it was very, very rare. It was a self-fulfilling hypnosis, but at the same time we WERE meditating, we WERE going into stillness, we WERE doing selfless service, and we WERE, as a group and individually, striving for something higher. And that is transformative – for us and anyone around us. Because we were searching. And most people had no clue.

I struggled with meditation all the way through. I’d occasionally be transported or get really blissed out, but for the most part, I didn’t enjoy the process of sitting down to meditate. It was very difficult for me to shut my brain down. There was certainly a tangible experience of Shakti -- of a vibration in my third eye -- but it was the strongest when I was in action... when I was walking through the grocery store and my third eye would start vibrating. At that time, I attributed that to Grace. I attributed it to “God connecting to me.” --- Although I remember playing with my third eye as a child. In detention, I would sometimes drop into a zone where I would feel this vibration and I didn't know what was causing it but I would enjoy it. Then it would start to disappear and I would be like, “No, no, wait… come back" But I didn't know what was happening... why it was there. I also remember putting my hand up next to my third eye (not knowing it was my third eye at the time) -- and feeling the vibration and going “WOW”. Also touching other people's third eye... actually I wouldn't touch them ... I would go right up next to it ... and some people could feel something and some people couldn't... like my mother couldn’t. So I've spent a lot of time being aware of that spot between my eyebrows, but it was hard for me to sit and formally meditate. Sometimes those two hour meditations felt like torture... especially… there were other people who loved it and they would be like, “Oh it's only two hours and you just have to surrender” but for me it was hellish. Sometimes I would want to run screaming out of the room and sometimes I would leave early..get up and walk out... So dynamic meditation (in service or walking around connecting to my third eye) was much easier than sitting and connecting. And I attributed that to Grace. (pause) Perhaps I thought Angelo was facilitating that for me, or helping me with that... but I never thought it was because he was there that it was happening. I didn’t think it was coming from him. But there was definitely an idea that it was through his Grace that it was happening. But what I thought it was… the analogy… the sun shines all over the planet but we happened to be in Palm Springs where it was really hot. Like Angelo was this magnifying glass that facilitated it in a stronger way than other people. So I did think it was about him, in part.

Once I read a book on Bhakti yoga and I told Guinevere that we were doing Bhakti yoga and that got back to Angelo. He really didn’t like that term. We weren’t doing any particular style of yoga, we were doing a modern synthesis. We were doing it all. In certain ways, we were. There was a devotional aspect, there was a selfless service aspect, as well as a meditation aspect.

Once I started receiving guidance, I used discrimination in following it. I generally did what I was guided to do -- but there was usually a bit of a fight or questioning with it. I had the idea that Angelo saw clearly and that if I wanted the rewards that were being offered that I needed to trust and to drop my mind and my ideas. My ideas were the things holding me back and if I’d just surrender... and sometimes that would be how I could get through it. I’d say “This doesn’t make sense, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe I'm being asked to do this -- not because it's the best thing ever -- but because I get to use it as an excuse to move beyond my conceptions and into something else."

I don't know that I ever thought I’d become enlightened but I thought I could lead a life filled with grace and divine perfection and that I wanted to be in the Tao... to be in the flow of that grace.

I did feel Angelo had special powers. There were multiple times that he gave Shakti (the act of touching the third eye) where I would feel some sort of electrical transmission and I witnessed that in those around me as well. There were stories that people would retell about him being psychic, or about his Sita powers, and there were little incidents. Like a couple of times at Barton Springs, and I’d go up to use the bathroom or something and maybe spend some time looking in the mirror and not come immediately back. Later, Angelo would mention something about the mirror and I’d be like “How did he see that I was checking myself out in the mirror?” Eventually, it became obvious that there aren't a whole lot of things up in that bathroom... But at the time… I didn’t see him like the Jesus thing of raising the dead, but I believed the anecdotal stories and by witnessing the transformative effect on people's lives… it seemed that there was this grace there. That he was more than your average human being. That he had powers that transcended space and time. What they were specifically... I wouldn't be able to pinpoint. But I believed that he had vision. He had told me when I first started coming around (in Phoenix) that he had a vision of me every day. Like he would be walking on his daily walk and my image would pop into his head and he told me that story two or three times...that for several weeks before he even met me, I’d pop into his consciousness. And that I had been his disciple in a previous lifetime. So, yes, I believed that he was perceiving things that I had no concept of.