listening to Warrior Saint.
Welcome to Earth.
you
teacher is known generally as Yogi.
And I actually met Yogi Bhajan in 19.
Well, actually, I met him indirectly, would say starting in 1977 when I started on this path that I'm on this spiritual path that I'm on.
And I started, you know, without getting into, you know, we'll probably talk another time about my entire trajectory into this, but whatever my trajectory in life was at the age of
24, almost 25, a week before I was 25, I took my first Kundalini Yoga class in an ashram in Brooklyn.
Right?
And it's really weird because uh I mean, it's kind of like the serendipity of your life because it was one of these again situations and I've had this many times in my life that
there's a lot of times that my head's been turned like 30 degrees in one direction.
And if it had only been turned like 15 degrees in that direction, the entire course of my life would be different.
This happened many times.
Actually, almost all the significant events in my life actually were serendipity that easily could have been another way, but weren't.
And that one was, I was walking in midtown Manhattan in 1977.
my neck was turned 30 degrees away.
At the corner of my eye, I saw a window of the Coliseum bookstore, I believe.
And there was a book called...
Kundalini the evolutionary energy of mankind.
Yeah, is there anybody man named Gopi Krishna and you know, this gets back into our drug talk a little from other episodes, but you know, I was at that point in my life I like
doing LSD and these kind of things and something about the book cover just drew me in and again I made the decision not only to see it but I that's interesting the book kind of
drew me in I went into the store sort of flipping through it and the guy described something that seemed very much like an LSD trip
but not LSD.
So I'm going that's there.
And the word kind of caught in my head, the Kundalini and, and, uh, and then I found out they were actually people teaching Kundalini yoga in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn.
Right.
And I go to this ashram and it was funny.
So that, so first of all, I'm thinking, it's Kundalini yoga.
has to do with this guy, Gopikrishna.
Right.
And then I don't know if you, you you've heard of this guy named
from the 60s called Richard Albert Ramdas.
He wrote Be Here Now.
He was a very prominent uh new agey kind of writer in the 60s from Harvard, interesting guy.
And I had his books and I saw him speak so I knew him.
So this is the two funny things.
So first I see there is in the yellow page is a class of Kundalini Yoga.
I go there and uh something it has to do with this Gopikrishna who wrote the book.
Secondly, I get to the ashram address and there's a sign on the front door that says Guru Ram Dass Ashram.
So I'm thinking, oh, this must be like Richard Albert's ashram, because he's Ram Dass.
I never even heard of Ram Dass.
So I'm thinking that's the same guy.
Wow.
I read his books.
How lucky am I?
Was it?
Well, this is what happened.
I knock on the door.
A guy opens the door, he's got a beard, guy more or less my age, mid-20s.
He's all dressed in white, he's got a white turban and a long beard.
And I'm like, what?
It became clear that neither was this anything to do with Gopikrishna or Ramdas.
This was a whole nother thing.
And of course, my first reaction, this being in the 70s, was I actually was walking into a cult.
This was some kind of, I did, I thought this was some kind of cult and I got very, very concerned.
But I land up, and I did walk through the door and the thing that kind of got me to walk through the door was actually the smell.
Cause they were, when we talked about this today about the yogi tea, they were actually brewing yogi tea in the back, you know, the background because they often would serve it
after class.
So the first thing I,
smelled when I walked through the door was the yogi tea and that was enough to seduce me into the room for the yoga.
At the time was it branded as yogi tea or just tea?
No, no, there was something called yogi tea that yogi budgen, who I'll talk about in a second, he brought a lot of teachings including food and things like this.
there was something called yogi tea.
And actually what yogi tea is, is chai.
mean, if you go into Jackson Heights, you go to Indian Place, he asks for chai.
That's what
pretty much what yogi tea is.
all these spices.
So it was all these spices I never smelled before.
So that kind of just seduced me in.
And the next thing I know, I'm in the yoga room doing yoga, but I was kind of, the smell kind of got me in.
Otherwise I would probably run away.
And the guy teaching the classes, a guy with a white turban and a white and this, and I'm like, I'm trying to wrap my head about what's going on in this room.
But he did this Kundalini yoga.
It was very, very powerful.
And you know, we've talked about that in other classes, you know, its effect on me was really life transformational.
And it landed up that I learned soon enough that the person who had brought that whole thing to the United States, you know, the person who brought that particular yogic
practice from India, Kundalini yoga.
And I saw his picture.
His picture would be like on the walls of this place.
But I didn't know who this was.
So clearly I didn't know what was going on there.
So what I could gather was there was something called Kundalini Yoga.
There was a guy from India who brought that there.
They had his picture around.
It looked like a pretty powerful guy.
ah Clearly these were his followers.
I didn't quite know what that meant because I never had seen one of them before.
Didn't even know what...
their existence was.
And so I'm thinking, well, this this is a some kind of guy here.
I don't know what to make of it.
Uh, I know that, uh, I was initially kind of, uh, put off and a little scared about that because I had been pretty much brought up with and exposed to ideas, uh, of any person
having that kind of
Power and influence over others, you know, they we know there was a time of only first of all, I was a hippie Yeah, so I didn't you know, didn't trust anybody.
I really didn't trust anybody and I didn't even trust myself No, that's another conversation.
But but I I didn't I was like anti-authority So as a hippie, I kind of was like anti-authoritarian anything that represented authority
and I was at that age that I was against.
So clearly this guy was in charge of something.
I was kind of put off just by that whole energy.
then of course that was a time that a lot of teachers were coming from over the East and you had the Munis and the Hare Krishnas.
And I didn't know what this group was, but my initial reaction was this was another one of those cults and this guy was the head of a cult.
So...
I didn't even know what a cult was, except what I was reading in Time Magazine.
so I'm going, wow, this yoga feels good, but I don't know who this guy is, and I'm feeling a little uncomfortable and threatened.
Yeah, what is this all leading to?
Yeah, but something intuitively was saying to me it's leading to something, and I'm a little uncomfortable, but something's going on here because I've never felt anything like
this before.
And so I kind of was intrigued and I kept this kind of at an arms distance.
So what happened, that was in 1977 and so for the next year I would say this and then this guy Yogi Budgen, I got to learn a little about him through his followers and from what I
had read in books and stuff.
I was kind of curious about him but I never had met him personally.
But I was impressed with what he was teaching.
I never had been around anything quite like that.
And what did do for you?
Like what after you took the first class, what changed?
Well, and again, it's much different for me now, but the big switch for me back then, and again, it kind of comes off our last conversation talking about LSD and drugs.
So I would actually say that it would be in the area of altered consciousness, which I was very interested in back then, about the very existence of altered consciousness from what
we'd call regular.
ordinary kind of day-to-day consciousness and most people are and I I kind of felt It was there it was there for the taking and I was very compelled by it about what I read and
then I had experimented a little with LSD and stuff so in having like an LSD experience that kind of Validated that an alternative consciousness does exist.
So I was very very Compelled by this and I had read
uh, the teachings of some spiritual masters from thousands of years ago and people would talk about this.
So I was kind of compelled with this.
And so what happened very early on practicing cleanliness yoga and this doesn't happen to everybody, but it happened to me was that very early on practicing this, I was actually
experiencing experiences that were way out of the box.
from anything that I experienced in ordinary consciousness.
So there was some kind of technology that I was practicing that came from this guy.
Yogi Bhajan.
I mean, wasn't just, it was kind of, I think, derivative, derivative-ly through him, because it's not like he made it up.
He got it from somewhere.
But he was the one who brought whatever this technology is at this time and place to the West.
so I'm practicing this.
And I, at this point, had
I was 20, you know, 25, 26, I'm sorry, 24, 25.
And I had already played a couple of years with meditation and yoga.
I'd been doing yoga meditation on and off since I was 19.
And so when you did that, what did it do for you?
Uh, that was like really good too.
I mean, it would, uh, slightly alter my perception, which was intriguing in itself.
Uh, it did all the things you even hear about yoga these days.
It relaxed me.
Yeah, de-stressed me, made me kind of connect with a part of myself that I ordinarily wouldn't pay attention to, all those things.
So it was all good.
Did you ever use yoga and LSD and meditation in combination?
Oh boy, that's going to be, well, that'll be a story up the road because I definitely want to share with people what happened when I was doing that.
But that's the longest story and that's why I would never do that again.
Because that's You gotta tell that story.
Well, it's jumping ahead a little.
You wanna hear that now?
It's jumping a little ahead.
This was after I started taking...
Well, actually, let me just...
I'll get into one minute because it's kind of chronological and it's almost like around the corner.
So I started doing Kundalini Yoga actually in 1977, in March of 1977.
again, you were asking me, it gave me a...
Definitely much expanded experience of reality that I that I never even had doing LSD It may take an LSD like taking aspirin Wow, yeah Wow because to me LSD has no I mean I
thought when I'd taken LSD when I was younger that was just like the most mind-blowing thing and having actually practiced Kundalini yoga, you know, that's like that's like
nothing.
It's like it's like child's play
So I I experienced something that was like a hundred times that and so I kind of lost my interest in these kind of things and and so But it was a little I get into how I did the
LSD But but it was a little different type of experience, but it was a bigger experience, but it was different It was not like like an acid tripping Multiplied it was something
fundamentally different but bigger.
Okay, it's like still a little bit of apples and oranges
But it was a bigger experience.
And then I experienced something that was dramatically stronger than anything I had experienced doing anything else.
And I couldn't quite explain that one away.
It made no sense to me.
But it was like I accessed something that I didn't know even existed actually, except maybe intuitively.
And so that was my first actual experience of yogi bhajan was being...
indirectly through his teachings and so I experienced I was compelled about what kind of guy would bring this here and and and I read about his teachings and all I could get was
He was a something of a different cat than the other people I've been around Okay, there's some I mean, I don't know why but something about him.
There's very different from what I had seen and then now you talked about the drug thing what happened to me was I I immediately just
just jumped in with both feet to doing this yoga.
I nothing.
I was doing this like four hours a day.
Wow.
was doing yoga.
I mean, like I just jumped in.
fact, I went to this yoga class and they told me that there was something called sadhana, which is getting up four o'clock in the morning and it's, you do the exercise sets and the
meditation and these are things I bought a manual and I got up the next morning four o'clock in the morning.
And in fact, in fact, uh, these days I kind of struggle with it a little bit more, but when I started doing this, I'd
From that first morning, I didn't miss one morning for the next 15 years.
Every day?
Every day.
four to eight?
From four to six thirty.
Every day for 15 years.
Didn't miss one day.
And again at night you wouldn't?
No, no.
No, maybe not something else.
But that was, I did that practice and I got up four o'clock the next morning after my very first class.
And so I was really into doing the yoga because it was giving me this like super high.
And I loved it and I kind of
For a while I kind of lost interest in everything else.
All I wanted to do was Kundalini Yoga because I was just so intoxicated with it.
And then it was about four or five months later, and during that four or five months I actually kind of was not doing all these other things that I had been doing.
I respected the people who were in the ashram and they didn't do drugs and they didn't drink.
They didn't smoke and so I didn't make any lifetime commitment to it.
So I was like, you know, I'm not going to smoke a drink or do that because I'm going to put my head into this.
But the funny thing is I was still into the Grateful Dead and I went to a Grateful, this is my drug story.
we went, I, that fateful day actually, actually kind of changed the course of my life.
ah It was actually, I believe Labor Day weekend.
of 1977, I went with a bunch of friends to English town, New Jersey for a big concert with, I still remember this was the Grateful Dead and Santana.
Nice.
Yeah, and the Marshall Tucker band.
And it was a big full day.
were a quarter of a million people.
were 250,000 people at this concert.
And I'm at the concert.
It's a beautiful day.
I'm into the Grateful Dead.
And I remember even to this day that before coming in,
to the concert, we were waiting to get in.
And I was there doing all this very powerful Kundalini Yoga exercises and meditations to get myself in the space.
I was a hippie back then, so I'm going to get myself, I'm very much a beginner too in all this, so very innocent.
I'm going to do all this really powerful Kundalini Yoga to put me in a space where I'm going to be really high going into Grateful Dead concert because...
You know, I used to go there and take acid.
Instead of dropping acid, I was going to do all this powerful Kundalini yoga and go to the Grateful Dead concert.
So I'm in the concert.
I'm really enjoying myself.
I'm feeling very expansive.
I'm sitting next to a guy and he's got some, you know, blotter LSD.
And I'm thinking, you know, this would be a cool idea.
about, I did all this yoga and I'm really expansive and now I'll take LSD and that would be like really cool, the two together.
And I kind of ignored the fact that people were telling me this is not such a hot idea.
Who was telling you that?
The people who would teach me the Kundalini Yoga.
They go, don't mix this stuff.
That's a nasty cocktail right there.
But I'm thinking, I know, I was very rebellious.
I don't want people telling me, I know what's best for me.
I can handle it.
They don't know me.
That was my attitude.
Yeah, I can take LSD.
And I know how to handle it.
I've done LSD.
I've done yoga.
I know what I'm doing.
But meanwhile, I basically was a beginner.
I didn't know what I was doing.
And I dropped this Ellis Day and I can tell you this, that I had lot of experience doing uh those kind of drugs, but nothing ever happened to me like happened to me that day.
And I was totally in another planet.
And so much so that I lost my friends.
And I...
I had a car, was borrowing my parents' car.
got to that from, I was living in Long Island with my parents at 25, going to law school, right?
And borrowed my father's car to take my friends, but I lost my friends and lost my car.
In fact, I didn't even know what planet I was on.
And somehow I find myself back in Manhattan.
I don't even know how I got there.
But the car and my friends are back in New Jersey.
I mean, I don't even know how I'm in Manhattan.
I figured out how to get back to Long Island.
I get back the next morning.
My parents are eating breakfast.
I walk in the door and they look out the window and my father goes, where's the car?
And I'm going, I can't handle that.
You know like I'm going to bed.
This is every he's going why I'm going just leave me alone I'm going to bed and of course, I couldn't sleep and long long story short is I I just kept rushing on this LSD and I
found myself in the hospital
And I found myself in the psych ward.
When did you go to the hospital?
That day.
They left to do something and I actually felt like I was losing my mind.
And I was in trouble.
And I got somebody off the street to take me to the hospital.
And they put me in a psych ward and they started shooting me up with Thorazine to bring me down.
But that didn't bring me down at all.
Finally, my parents somehow showed up at the hospital.
I don't know how they got there.
They brought me home and I still wasn't coming down.
They took me to the hospital again a second time and they brought me into the emergency room.
And at that point I had the thing happened to me that you hear other people talk about, but it happened to me.
It did.
I was on there and the doctors didn't know what to do with me and I saw my whole life flash in front of me.
from my birth all the way through to that moment.
And actually that was death time for me.
mean, I had that really changed my life because I actually had the choice at that point to die or to live.
And it was interesting because I had just this glimpse of clarity among all this craziness that I could go and that's fine, but...
I had enough clarity to know that I did not want to live that way.
That was not going to be a life.
So somehow I just actually, for some of my life I think I had experience of what real choice and commitment is.
I actually made, within that I had the choice to live.
And I just thought I was going to live.
And somehow I just kind of came somehow back a little bit.
But they released me, but for the next three months, I was literally burnt out.
My brain was burnt.
I mean, it was like somebody just throwing on a barbecue.
And I was a pretty smart person.
mean, I'd been in law school and I actually, it took me a couple of weeks where I could even read.
I couldn't read.
And people would talk to me.
I had no idea what they were talking about.
All I knew is that that was not right.
That was like really, really bad.
And I had this sense that my life actually could be ruined.
But I had enough, again, I just had enough residue of clarity to realize that I had a very important choice to make in my life, that I knew I didn't want to be the person I was
raised to be, which was to be a tax lawyer living in Long Island with a nice Jewish wife, you know I'm saying, commuting on the Long Island Railroad to Wall Street, which is okay
for some people.
That really didn't hold much interest to me, but that's what I was programmed to do.
And that wasn't gonna work out.
And I really still believed in this lifetime that I could experience something just vast beyond belief.
And I just knew it deep within myself.
And I realized that was like a turning, one of the turning points in my life because I realized that it was either going to be drugs,
or was going to be spiritual development, but it wasn't going to be both.
Because that was my experience is that that stuff is a nasty cocktail.
And the reason it happened, of course, is that when you do yoga and you meditate, you kind of open up your doors of perception.
mean, you really even on a physical level, know, you know, your spinal cord and everything's kind of opening up.
So everything is flowing.
And now you're you're introducing
this other substance in and it's like it's it's it's tsunami.
Right.
It just runs rampant.
But if you had been some if I've been closed down.
Yeah.
Then it would have been I was too open.
Yeah.
I was actually too open and my nervous system was not anywhere close to being able to really sustain that experience.
was too was it was just it was really like getting electrocuted getting your brain electrocuted.
ah But somehow I was meant to survive that to have a story to tell about that which I think I do and so I came back to this life and took me three or four months, I finally
kind of got back to you know square one wherever square one was and and then I decided that uh You know, I didn't want to have kind of like this life I was programmed to have
but neither did I want to be in the drug culture anymore and I kind of realized that
there had to be another path for somebody like myself.
that's where I went into.
So now that's in 1977.
So then I think it was about March of 1978, I met Yogi Bhajan for the first time.
Did I tell you about how I met him on a blind date?
No.
Oh, no.
is guy, I forget because I tell these stories, I forget who I tell them to.
I actually met Yogi Bhajan on a blind date.
All right.
I get a crazy life.
this is a 19.
So I knew that he, was going to be in Manhattan to teach what we know to be a tantric yoga course with men and women.
It's really kind of interesting.
know, many tantric sex.
yeah, but it's not like that.
That's what people think.
But no, that's, that's, there's different types of tantric.
There's three, there's white, black and red tantric.
You're referring to red tantric.
Red tantric is using sexuality to achieve liberation.
Okay.
And
That's dangerous.
I mean, you know, I'm sure that they can do it, but you know, it's, you know, good luck.
mean, that's tricky business.
I wouldn't fire you.
think people are crazy to fall into that because maybe they'll experience liberation and maybe they're just gonna have a total meltdown.
So that's not really, really smart to practice.
Yeah, I mean, I think what people understand about tantric sex is that it's withholding orgasm.
Uh, there's some of it.
I'm pretty well read in that.
think in general, I know that's actually not true.
Okay.
And, and I think actually, people are just not honest with themselves in the West.
I mean, look, they're interested in sex.
Okay.
So the longest amount of sex possible.
Well, the thing is, is that they like sex and they want they believe there's some kind of liberation.
So wouldn't it be cool to do that just doing what I like to do?
So it'd be great.
I could have liberation going to Yankee games.
That would be perfect.
I could go to Yankee Stadium and have liberation.
So they love the sex, and they're trying to convince you that their real interest is in spirituality.
But it's not.
So in the East, it's a little bit different because there's not that attachment to it.
So if you're coming in and you're not honest with yourself,
You're not very, people are not very sophisticated either.
I mean, it takes years to really understand any of this stuff and people think they know more than they know.
So that's kind of like the red, red Tantric.
Black Tantric is black magic.
All right.
So that's also, uh, maybe an over your head there.
mean, you may be out of your league.
Yeah.
Okay.
And fine.
People could do what they want to, but just be careful what you're doing.
You know, I mean, uh, it's, it's not like it's risk free.
All right, so, you know, it's dangerous.
That's very, I mean, I'm not claiming that one can't have some sense of liberation doing those things, but you know, you're playing with fire.
So just get ready to be burned by fire.
Right.
Yeah.
And white tantric yoga is, using the polarity of male and female energy, but it's not sexual in the way that we're familiar with sexuality.
It's more just using, you know, that yin yang thing.
So he's, he's.
He's a Mahantantric.
So one of the things he brought here was this white tantric that he actually learned from a Buddhist.
It's not necessarily a Sikh thing.
He learned it from a Buddhist and the people lined up and is male and female and they look at each other and there's certain meditations and there's certain energy that goes through
the group.
So I'd heard about this.
So he was giving one of these things in Manhattan.
And it's funny because I was working as a cab driver.
was going to law school.
I was working as a cab driver and everybody knew in the cab company that I was kind of like the flaky one.
So I was into these weird things.
So somebody who was in the cab company.
You're the only white cab driver with a turban.
Back then, Back then, the only people who drove cabs were like the old guys, the old Irish guys with the hats and the cigars.
And then also would be like, you know, out of work artists and, you know, people that like artists and, and, uh and aspiring writers and people like that.
was a different taxi driver than today.
Yeah.
Did you have a beaded seat cover?
yeah.
In the summer I did.
Yeah.
It was really hot and sticky.
They had leather seats.
It was, yeah, I did.
And back then I didn't have a turbine.
I mean, I was, I wasn't a seat yet.
Okay.
I was just
Law student, you know, and I was a hippie basically like that was stone most of the time I was driving cab I mean, I I was like a hippie driving cab, you know, and and so they they
knew I was into these like weird things So so one of the other cab drivers.
Hey, you know, I know I know a girl who's kind of into the things that you're into You know, you should give her a call sometime So I knew that in this tantric yoga thing.
It was male female things.
So I thought well, that's
I'm gonna call this woman I never met and ask her if she wants to be my partner in this.
Well, so I bring her to this thing.
And she had no idea what she was getting.
I didn't even know what I was getting into, but I had been at least doing Kundalini Yoga for a year.
She had no idea.
And I brought her into this thing.
was like, why do all these people wear in white and turbans and this guy walks in.
And so this is what happened.
I'll tell ya, that guy walked in the room.
And I forgot that I even had a partner.
I forgot what her name was because I was much more interested in him than I was in her.
And I remember that to this day, he walked in that door and my life changed in one second because I didn't know who the hell he was.
But I never had seen anybody like that in my life and still haven't actually.
He came in and he started like, and at this point I've been around all these like famous teachers from the East.
I've been around their shtick for years.
You go in, they had their robes and the rose and they put like a feather over your head and you're blessed.
I'm like wiping away your karma and here's a rose.
And people really would like buy into this, and they'd be very sweet and you know, and you know, and.
know, clear their aura and the whole and they have their disciples and this.
you know, just there's something that it was very nice, but I didn't quite connect with that.
And he came in the room and he came in the room and going, Whoa, what is that?
And he, he started like yelling at people.
I mean, he didn't, he didn't like brush away their aura as he was like, man.
I he obviously knew some of the people.
And he would be nailing them.
And I'm thinking to myself, now I don't know the people he's nailing, but I think whatever he's saying, think he's really getting to the bottom of this.
Yeah, sounds like he knows what he's talking Yeah, and he was not cut mints in words.
A very powerful personality, and he started talking.
And now I'm kind of almost mesmerized, because I never actually saw somebody like this.
uh
And he's talking and my first reaction was that I didn't understand what he was saying because he had a strong Indian accent.
And the stuff that I did understand that he was saying, I didn't actually agree with.
And I found myself debating in my head everything.
Everything, that was a lawyer in me.
Everything he was saying, I was trying to negate.
That was how my mind was.
He's saying this and I'm thinking, prove it to me.
You know, yeah, well, that's not my experience.
That's you.
You're from India.
You know, I mean, I'm playing all these head games.
Everything he's saying, I'm questioning.
Everything he's saying, I'm debating.
My reaction to him is, I don't like that guy.
I'm glad that I'm not one of these mindless disciples of his.
That was my thought.
They're getting abused.
Oh, not even abused.
I'm going, thank God I'm my own person.
And, you know, I really love this yoga, but, you know, thank God I'm not one of these mindless people who are just following him all over.
So even as I'm doing all this stuff and he's saying to do this and this, I'm doing everything, but I'm going through, and it was like for three days.
It was that night and two days, it was a whole weekend.
the whole weekend I kept coming back, but I kept going through the same thing.
I don't like him, I don't agree with him.
You know, I enjoy the yoga, but...
you know, just at arm's length.
But I kept thinking to myself, I scared myself because I keep looking at him and thinking, that's who I want to be in my life.
I want to be like him.
I'm thinking, wow, well, how can I be like, to be like him if I can't stand him?
If I'm questioning, if I'm debating him, but I kept thinking to myself, that's a real man.
That's actually the first real man I've seen in my whole life.
That's what a real man is.
He's got balls.
totally, totally got balls.
But not that, it's not, I met guys who had balls, but I never, I never saw a person who had steel balls who had a heart as big as him.
So that's the trick.
And I never, I saw, I saw very sweet.
mean, I was around men who were very sweet and well intentioned and loving, you know, I've been around guys who were like very like tough as hell.
tough as nails, but all of them were lacking something.
And now I'm with a guy who's absolutely, I mean, a very, I mean, super hard oriented, sweet, generous, uh wise man who's got balls of steel.
So they were, whoa, you know what?
Wow.
I mean, I was like so out of my uh point of reference.
I hadn't have actually met anybody like this.
And so that was very compelling.
But it also was a little scary because I didn't want to end up like these other people who clearly were like Joe Smith wearing turbans and beards and like I don't want that to
happen to me.
So that was 1978 and I would say that my next, he lived in Los Angeles so I actually didn't see him personally except if I went to some event, some national event that he was
at.
which I started going to.
I started going to these solstice retreats and he was the center of attraction at all these things.
But, you know, for the next two or three years, I went through this whole big inner conflict about how I was going to relate to him.
So, but that, you know, I was telling you earlier, there was like a whole nother relationship because I never had a relationship.
And the relationship like this was really from the beginning with me and him is that
I always felt a mix with him of love and hatred.
I was always pissed off at him and I always loved him.
It was like he always, you know, it was like a very different relationship than a parent or a school teacher.
was kind of like he, his job, and that's how he described himself as a spiritual teacher.
Now I find myself in this role.
It's a very different role, but he always, he always described his role, not as a person, but his role as
a person who really kind of sculpts.
It's kind of like a sculptor and you're subjecting yourself and he's going to chisel you.
he's either going to break you or he's going to chisel you into something really beautiful.
And in a way I kind of let him chisel my life.
And how he taught was he would challenge you.
That's how he taught.
He taught a lot of technology, he gave a lot of stuff, but he would really test you.
to see where your limit was.
And as you kept passing every test, you just kept getting stronger and clearer, wiser.
And to this day, that's my path.
That's to me the best way to learn.
So he really took everybody out in the school of life.
He made you be real and really challenged you.
that was, so eventually in 1980,
Now I'm 28.
Actually I was just about to be 28.
I was 27, almost 28.
I actually decided, and it was something that he actually said to me, he kind of decided that I was actually going to even take on his religion.
Which was Sikhism.
Which is Sikhism.
I wasn't raised that way and of course I was scared like hell.
And I remember that I, you know, was...
And I think I was telling you about the story about how I the secretary and, you know, I took her to, I forget sometimes who I tell these stories to, but, uh, you know, I, I, I
moved into an ashram in Oregon and I, I, I lasted for one week.
This was back in 1979.
I last it for one week and I left and I got a fifth of Jack Daniel's.
and just hitchhiked to New York, swearing all of this off.
I still wasn't wearing a turban yet.
This was before all that.
This is when I was in my formative time with it.
mean, I was going crazy because I was kind of between two lives and I just couldn't make my decision about what life I wanted to own, my old life when I want my new life.
And I pushed myself to actually move into an ashram to kind of experience it.
And once I moved in, I mean, I barely last a week.
I almost just blew up.
I was so conflicted.
So the middle of the night, one night I just took my things and I just moved out and I got a fifth of Jack Daniels and I hitchhiked across the country to go back to my old life.
But I still kept practicing Quinlan yoga.
But I swear I never have anything to do with him or any of his students because I didn't want to be in what I perceived to be a cult.
You still perceived it as a cult.
Yeah.
So I was very conflicted, but I couldn't deny what was happening to me, which was all like amazing.
So I'm conflicted between these amazing experiences and my fear that was provoked by many other things.
So I went back to New York, but I was still actually practicing and even teaching Kundalini Yoga.
But I didn't want anything to do with the group or him.
So I was working in a law firm and then I a job working in law firm.
This is 1979 and I'm like meditating on my desk.
I went into a 1979, somebody in a suit and a tie.
meditating at lunch and everybody in the law firm is looking like, well, what is that guy doing?
At the time, this is like way, way ahead of the curve.
You would just sit on your desk?
Yeah, at lunch, just meditating.
And then people wanted to learn the yoga.
And so this is 1979.
I'm actually teaching people in the law firm about Kundalini yoga.
Ha!
Can you?
mean, very straight people.
One of the people, the office manager, right?
The office manager is very compelled, I don't think by being personally, but
She just, she didn't know anybody who was doing this kind of stuff.
It's a really great story.
So, so she's very compelled by this and she wants to start doing Kundalini Yoga.
And since I had not really kind of graduated to the levels of integrity with this, it was just wanting to have an experience.
I didn't see any problem with, with sleeping with her either.
And she was a married woman to boot, but I didn't, mean, then that I didn't care about those things.
So I land up teaching this person Kundalini Yoga and sleep with her.
So, but she was, I think really more interested in what I was doing than me as a person.
She was very intrigued by what I was into.
Cause this was like way ahead of its time.
I had a magazine and she saw the, the ad and she goes, well, she goes, I'm in New York at the time.
And she goes, well, I see this yogi budging guys giving a white tantric yoga course in West Virginia this weekend.
And I said, yeah.
And she goes, I want to go to that.
I want you to take me there.
So I said, listen, I've never seen that guy again.
I'm staying away from those people.
I'll teach you Kundalini Yoga, but I'm keeping my distance.
I don't want to be around him.
He's too dangerous to me.
So she goes, listen, if you're fucking me, you'll take me there.
So I guess, well, OK.
I guess I don't have a choice then, right?
So I take her to this thing.
She gets really inspired.
So now she had two daughters and one of them was a runaway.
The other one was very together.
All right.
I knew that.
Okay.
So during the break, the exercises of again, a white time to go across, she was my partner.
She goes, I want to talk to him.
And I'm like, well, great.
There's the line right there.
She's going, I want you to stand by me.
I don't want to do that.
She's going, look, you brought me here.
I want you to support me, I want to talk to him, you stand next to me.
It's okay, okay, I'll do that.
So I'm in line and we get up to the front and I'm very nervous because I'm thinking this is all wrong.
said, I have spent the last year doing everything I could to avoid this man and here I am right in front of him again.
How the hell did that happen?
And I did it myself, I put myself in this position.
I mean, go figure that.
So here it is, I can't get away from him.
And here I am, I'm like 10 feet away from him and I've done everything I could to be thousands of miles away and here he is again.
So we get to the front of the line and she says to him, well hello, my name is so and so and he's rolling his eyes and that's how he was, he's rolling his eyes.
He goes, what do you want?
And she goes, well, maybe I'm not happy in my work.
He's rolling his eyes, yeah right, right.
Well, maybe I'm not happy in my marriage.
And she's going down the whole thing.
Now she hasn't said anything about her children.
And then in the middle of it, he just puts his hand up and he says, your daughter's problem is ba-ba-ba-ba.
And if you want to deal with this, you need to do ba-ba-ba.
She just freaked and literally just ran out the room.
She just smoked, just ran out the room.
And now I'm standing in front of him.
I'm like, oh shit.
I mean, I can't believe this is happening.
And here I am, I went and I'm standing right in front of and he looked at me, he looked at me and he's going, what do you want?
And I'm thinking, what I want is I definitely don't want to be here.
And I just was like paralyzed and he just started yelling at me, what do you want?
I just couldn't even talk to him.
Third time he goes, tell me what it is that you want.
And I just said,
Well, you know what I want is to be a Sikh.
And I'm like, who said that?
Did I say that?
I mean, I was like freaked.
I mean, that actually came out of my mouth.
But deep down, that's actually is what I wanted.
But I had the whole thing locked up in me.
And I said I absolutely was stunned that I actually said that.
And I'm still like, I'm shaking at this point because I can't believe I said that.
And then.
He started saying some stuff I couldn't hear a word he was saying and I just got literally couldn't move I I couldn't walk and and Then he said to me and I had never I tell you this
truth I I known him for 30 years and at the point I knew him very very well in the years that followed I had never ever heard him tell anyone to be a Sikh Never not once except
one person.
That was me and he said to me give you head to the guru
which means basically give you a head and that's your life.
I never heard him say that to anybody in the 30 years I was around him, but me.
So I was not actually prepared for him to even have said that.
And I walked away and I Oh shit.
You know what he's really telling me?
He's not telling me, he's not telling me to be a Sikh, but he's really, he's doing me a big favor.
He's basically telling me to shit or get off the can.
That's what he's telling me.
He's doing me a favor here, actually.
Enough time.
I'm wasting enough time with this.
know, either gonna jump in and do really what I'm afraid to do, but I wanna do, which people do all the time.
I I wanted to do it, but I was too afraid to do what I wanted to do, or I'm just gonna kinda move on.
But I can't play this game anymore.
So I barely slept for the next month or two, because this was like I knew the biggest decision in my life, which it was, certainly.
And at some point, I can't even point to, just said, you know what, I got nowhere else to go.
What the hell am gonna do?
I got nowhere else to go.
So I was supposed to go to Florida the next month, you know, and I decided when I went to Florida, they were gonna have this retreat.
I was gonna take my seek values.
And the night before I went to Greenwich Village, with really kind of just finished my old life up.
So I a big steak dinner, because know, the Sikhs are vegetarians.
Nice big steak dinner, I got a big, big rum cocktail, you know, Bacardi 151 or whatever, remember it to be, because I wasn't going to be drinking rum anymore, because I was having
my last rum.
And I got stoned, that was going to be my last joint.
And I went to bed with the waitress and that was going to be my last waitress.
Wow, you had a good night.
I had a good night.
And then got up the next morning and the waitress said to me, well, when am I going to see you again?
And I said, never.
And she's going, you know, she thought she took it personally and she goes, why is that?
said, well, you basically I'm going to become a And she.
No, no, but I'm going to be telling about I'm going to be telling people about you for years to come, which I'm still doing right.
If you're out there.
Okay.
So I went I flew to Florida.
I when they had this ceremony that service, they called the people forward to take their vows who want to take their vows and Yogi Bhajan was sitting right next to me.
And he say a word to me and all I could think was fuck you.
That's all I could think, fuck you.
I was so angry.
I mean, I took my vows, I was so angry at him because I just saw my whole life go up in smoke and he never made me do anything.
Nobody put a gun to my head.
But I was thinking, you know, if you just had stayed in India, I would have had like a normal life.
But you know what?
From that day, I always trust my intuition.
I don't pay attention to anything else.
My heart was telling me, my intuition was telling me, you got to do this.
Even if you don't want to do it, you got to do this.
ah And I listened to that.
was smart.
And I did.
I took those vows and then my life was really kind of much stronger in this direction.
And it was a very hard transition, but that also at the same point deepened my relationship with him as my teacher because
actually by even doing that I recognized which was not a little thing.
This again gets back to this whole student teacher relationship is that you have many relationships in your life based on many different needs.
But at the end of the day and you know and different people serve different purposes in your life.
But this relationship with a spiritual teacher is that you're
actually putting your liberation in the hands of a person that you really are banking your life on the fact that you can trust this person.
Because if you made a mistake, uh is a mistake of immense proportions.
You're way off tracking your life.
You're going to get your life way off track.
You're going to sacrifice a lot and you'll never get it back again.
So you're walking in a way and you're actually saying, know, I'm actually, trust you so much that I'm willing to put my life in your hands.
Okay.
And you don't actually even have to like this person.
You don't have to agree with them.
And I didn't, but you have to trust them and you have to trust, you have to trust like two things and they're huge things.
First of all, and there's no other relationship in your life.
quite like this.
One is you have to trust that the person really cares about you unconditionally.
They unconditionally love you for who you are and they're not trying to exploit you.
Now a lot of people, you know, you may want to be around and trust, but they're going to actually exploit that trust.
So you have to trust that your trust in them is unconditional.
and they're not exploiting you.
The second thing is you have to trust they actually have the goods to deliver, not just their intent, not just that they're pure at heart, but they actually can deliver it.
And that's a very cold decision.
mean, you just have to trust your...
And in the end, what I've learned, why it was so helpful to me is that to really have...
healthy relationship with a spiritual teacher like this you have to be able to trust yourself because you're making that decision and you have to trust your You can't be like
in La La Land.
You're putting your life in somebody's hands You have to trust your judgment that somebody's the real deal and so I made a big big choice I basically put my entire life in
the hands of a stranger
and figured, know, this guy's, this guy's got the key to where I want to go.
And not only is he pure of intention, but that he actually is going to bring me to where I need to be, where I want to be.
And that is a, that's really scary.
That's real.
And it should be really scary.
And I think a lot of people actually make
biggest mistake of their life in choosing wrongly on this.
So I had to make a big decision.
I didn't have much life experience to make that decision on.
I made the decision that that was my guy.
And you know, for the next 30 years, he had a major influence on my life.
Although I was, you know, I whatever he said I should do, I just did it.
And I'm a very rebellious person.
But he said, you know, basically he said, jump, I jumped.
And there's no other person in my life I have that relationship with because I'm a very independent person.
But I decided that it was going to be one person on this planet who I would actually have that respect for that he knew more than I did.
And I felt that he knew more about me than I knew about myself.
And over the 30 years, he gave me a lot of reason to...
He did.
I mean, he was incredible, incredible person.
And he made my life tough.
And then he actually is the person who also delivered me to the Sikh path.
But at a certain point, I kind of separated a little bit from him.
at the end because I realized that his job was to deliver.
My job wasn't to worship him.
His job was to deliver me, which I believe he did.
And so my thing in life now is to kind of keep that legacy together.
But he was a tough teacher.
In fact, in my 30 years with him, I think I only talked with him maybe 10 or 12 times in 30 years.
So how would he teach?
Well, again, mean, one thing I learned from him is that you're teaching really 24 seven.
There's no time you're not teaching.
It's like as a teacher on a stage.
I mean, there's many ways he taught.
mean, when he was officially on, you know, and he's giving a class to me, he was like the hammer.
He was a really tough teacher.
He taught very tough classes.
physically, emotionally, psychologically.
um
He never taught down to people.
He taught from where he was coming.
And you had to either bring yourself up to see the view from where he was standing.
But as much time as not, he made no sense, but he was planting seeds that you'd actually understand what he was saying years later.
So there's stuff that I'm just now understanding that I heard 20 years ago.
And so he was just an incredible teacher that gave, and actually it wasn't just his words.
A lot of the other teachers that I was around tried to impress you with their words, but he actually gave you things that you could do and you'd have your own experience.
And I really appreciated that.
So he taught the technology, he pushed you to the max, ah and he taught, he was very, very funny.
And all the great teachers are funny.
Because you have to, if you take yourself seriously, you're off my list.
Because it actually is pretty funny.
The whole thing is actually pretty funny.
And if you can't be funny, then you're definitely not evolved.
So he was an incredibly funny, well-rounded person.
Also, he was very different than the other teachers.
You could actually talk to him about anything.
You could talk to him about music, food, jewelry, politics.
numerology, astrology, he actually could talk to you about anything and everybody.
I learned from him from that and that's the kind of person I've developed into.
I like to think that I'm the kind of person that could actually talk to anybody on the planet about what they're interested in, not what I'm interested in, what they're
interested in.
And that's because I'm interested in everything and everybody and that's how he was.
He was way out of the mold of what people think a spiritual teacher was.
I mean, you could find him at any sacred temple, but you could just as well see him on Rodeo Drive at a fancy Italian restaurant.
I mean, he just was, you'd see him at an orphanage or at a football stadium.
I mean, he could mix with anybody.
That blew my mind.
I never met anybody like that.
And uh he also built, as I was telling you before, a couple of very big businesses.
So the guy was actually a tremendous businessman.
And he was very political and he built a big organization.
He was personal friends of every president of the United States while he was live here.
I mean, he knew Reagan.
He didn't care for his politics, but he knew Reagan and Carter.
He was actually a good friend with Clinton, very good friends.
I mean, good enough friends they were on a first name basis.
he's here, some spiritual teacher wearing a robe from India and he's on a first name basis with Bill Clinton.
In fact,
One of the really impressive uh moments I had with him, I was with him and Clinton.
And you know, Clinton at that time was president of the United States, maybe the most uh visible person in the world.
know?
And a great public speaker in his own right.
know?
Charismatic.
Very charismatic.
And when I was in a room with him and Clinton, I was watching it, it was very interesting.
It was like...
My teacher, he's very great social skills, very elegant man.
But it was really clear in that room who the boss was, and it wasn't Clinton.
No, Clinton was looking at him as he was the boss, not the other way around.
He was taking his cues.
That's the man.
mean, Clinton walked in the room and he knew who the top dog in that room was.
Wow.
Okay, that's the president of United States.
but so my teacher wasn't just a regular guy.
He was so radiant that it was clear who had the top job there.
And it really made me understand that, you know, in this society here, you know, the people, you know, we look up at celebrities and movie stars and politicians and Donald
Trump.
You know what?
He was top dog, always.
And he's top dog because he actually had what everybody wants.
And then some.
And they knew it.
And they couldn't buy it with their fame and with their money and with their good looks.
Nobody could buy what he had, which is he had a connection with himself and with the universe.
And he was infinite in his radiance.
And it was really interesting seeing him around people.
who were far more famous than him and they knew it immediately.
They weren't even like a hundredth of the radiance.
And so it really convinced me that that is the highest calling in the life is to be president of the world.
He was like president of the world.
And he was like totally amazing.
that's so, and you know, but as I said, about my relationship with him, I was around him for 30 years.
I only talked to him 10 times and he never talked to me once in 30 years.
He never initiated.
No, I'd be there.
No, he'd actually he this how he was with everybody.
He was amazing.
There'd be like 30 people and he would relate to each person how that person needed to be related to for their personal growth.
And he did it all at the same time.
It's just amazing.
And uh like, for instance, you know, I by nature, I've got a very big ego.
I mean, that's that's my, you know, I came with my package.
I do.
I very big ego and he knows that and he had a very big ego.
you know, he channeled in the right direction, but very strong ego.
I got a very strong ego.
And what he did was he would be in a room, I'd be right next to him and he wouldn't even, every time, for 30 years he'd always look at me and if he ever said anything, he'd say to
me, who are you?
And yet he appointed me to all these positions and he ought to know he made, he appointed me to be a minister, he appointed me on all these councils.
And yet whenever he saw me, it's like, do I know you?
Did that for 30 years.
Was he just fucking with you?
I think in the way that you say yes, but out of kindness because the thing was is that for me to be the kind of person I need to be and for me to be of help to the world like I
needed to be, I had to like get over myself.
And he helped me get over myself.
That's what I needed.
Other people he was like super sweet with, how you doing, love you, but everybody was different and he dealt with me in the way that I needed to be dealt with, which was in my
case, he needed not to pay attention to me because that's exactly what I wanted.
I wanted attention and recognition and that's exactly what he wasn't going to give to me because that's how he was helping me.
And at the end, I figured the whole thing out and I realized
I mean, it's like a huge breakthrough in my life.
I didn't realize it up to then is that it took him 25 years.
So my life, but finally I had an experience with him.
I realized that I didn't need any attention recognition because I like myself.
I don't need anybody to validate me.
I don't need anybody to give me recognition.
I recognize my own self and I like myself.
And that's how you asked how he taught.
That's how he taught.
He was amazing.
He taught people by just giving them, putting them in positions where they had to deal with themselves in the way they needed to deal with themselves.
The guy was beyond a genius.
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