A way to higher consciousness

The Living Love Center

The next step in my spiritual journey was meeting Ken Keyes. It was at a place called the Living Love Center. He had written a book, Handbook to Higher Consciousness, and through a set of unbelievable, crazy, magical circumstances I ended up in the middle of the night at his remodeled Greyhound bus which had a big message written on it:

LIVING LOVE, A WAY TO HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS.

Ken Keyes became my spiritual teacher. In his path to higher consciousness you work on your conditioning, your programming. Basically, it was a reprogramming. Osho was not in favor of reprogramming. He was more about “just wipe out the programming, and don’t put in a new program!” But it was a step in the right direction, and I was very happy living there. I became Ken’s right-hand man. He had polio when he was younger, so he was in a wheelchair. I was his caretaker, looking after him.

That’s where I met Tara, then called Betsy Gilquist. She was from Minneapolis and later became my wife and partner for seven years.

I was very happy at the Living Love Center. Ken was very wealthy from real estate in Florida. He had bought a huge building in the North Campus area in Berkeley. It became the Living Love Center, offering groups and seminars and workshops. He gave me the title Operations Manager. I was doing the shopping, running errands, as well as looking after him. It was a very happy time in my life, and I loved Berkeley, as it was in those days.

This was the beginning of the spiritual revolution in the Bay Area. It was 1973, and all the spiritual movements had established their bases in San Francisco or Berkeley. There were the Muktananda people, the Zen people, the Sufis, Satchidananda Yoga, the Kundalini yoga people, Yogi Bhajan and his Sikh movement, and then the Living Love Center.

I was the Living Love Center representative at the Meeting of the Ways, where all of the above got together about once a month. We would sit together in a circle and talk and share.

Discovering Dynamic Meditation

One person who really struck me, because she was so different from all those serious spiritual seekers, was Ma Yoga Sushila… a large Jewish mama from Chicago. She had been in Bombay with Bhagwan. He had sent her to start a center in the Bay Area and had given her a bunch of malas and some sannyas names on his official letterhead. “You will meet some people who will want to be initiated into sannyas.” Her center was in her little apartment in San Francisco’s Sunset District. In these meetings I always felt that I wanted to find out more about whatever this woman was into. I felt there was something special in it.

Tara and I started going to the Dynamic Meditation, which was every Tuesday evening at the Unitarian Church in Berkeley, and every Friday at the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. We loved it! I was a very shy, repressed guy, afraid of my emotions, and unable to express anger at any cost. As everybody was blindfolded, you could just go crazy and express. I loved it!

Eventually there was a spiritual gathering in an old lodge in Sonoma County, and I joined for the weekend. Sushila was there to present Bhagwan and the Dynamic. During the first evening, there was some music and dancing, and after it was over, while I was just wandering around before going to bed, all of a sudden I came upon Sushila. I looked into her eyes, and everything stopped. There was a gap. It was something very unfamiliar. I didn’t know what it was. It was just a gap.

After that, all I wanted was to hang out with her, the whole next day and the rest of the weekend. The next morning, before Dynamic, she asked me to help her carry a huge photo of Bhagwan from her Volkswagen van to the meditation hall. Then I did the Dynamic – I really loved it!

While hanging out with her, she told me that she had been with Ramdas, with Maharaji and Neem Karoli Baba. Ramdas had written that famous classic Be Here Now, which I had read. I was very interested in him and wanted to hear more stories about Ramdas and Neem Karoli Baba. She told me she had taken care of Ramdas when he had hepatitis. But then she added, “But let me tell you about the Ultimate. Let me tell you about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.”

I said, “Well, yeah, okay.” I was more interested in this other guru, but okay. She told me her stories about being in Bombay, and about the meditation camps in Mount Abu. I was now hooked.

When I got back to Berkeley, to the Living Love Center, and met with Ken, he informed me that he had just been invited to a Humanistic Psychology conference in Florida to give a talk about Living Love, his way to higher consciousness. I drove him there, along with two women who were his lovers – or in competition for that position – to this conference in the countryside. And there was a group of sannyasins who had driven down from New York to present Bhagwan and Dynamic Meditation!

Rakesh was there, from Toronto, and Christ Chaitanya and Satya Bharti. They had a little booklet with information about Bhagwan. We did Dynamic, and Ken, in his wheelchair, did it as totally as he could, with all the breathing and catharting. After Dynamic he was lit up like a Christmas tree. He anyway had a radiance, an aura. He was really beautiful.

The sannyasins then gathered at his feet around him, but I had so much energy after Dynamic that I grabbed this woman – it was Karen from New York – lifted her on my shoulders and ran off into the forest (we didn’t do anything…). I was quite young then…

When we came back to be with Ken, he was so excited about Dynamic Meditation that he said, “When we get back to the center, we’ll do this every morning.” And he wanted me to lead it! Instead of doing our kundalini yoga breathing exercises, which was what we were doing before. But I didn’t want to lead it because I wanted to just do it! But of course, leading it, I could do it as much as possible. So we were doing Dynamic in the Living Love Center! But, together with Tara, I was still going to the meditations run by Sushila. We both felt attracted to Bhagwan, and it became clear to us that it was time to move on.

It was hard for us because we loved it at the Living Love Center. So, with much regret, we informed Ken that we were going to leave him. He was not so happy about it, but the pull was so strong. I actually thought it was stupid to have to wear this costume, the orange robe and the mala. I also thought that you can study on your own, that you can meditate on your own, that you can grow into a higher kind of human. You don’t need a guru. That’s not needed… but we couldn’t deny the pull.

We knew some people from the Living Love Center who had a little cabin near Lake Tahoe, near the border to Nevada, and we knew we could get jobs in the gambling casinos, very easily and quickly, and earn some money to travel to India. We did that for some months.

We also knew that if we got married we could get money from family and friends. We didn’t feel a need to get married. We were in love. We were together. We were a couple. There was no doubt about that. But we thought, “Okay, if we can gather more money together, then let’s go for it.” So we got married in an outdoor ceremony, at a lake outside Minneapolis where her parents had a cabin.

Getting married… and taking off for India

We mostly got money as gifts, because people knew we wanted to travel, have an adventure, go to India. So we didn’t get the traditional plates and cups and silverware and stuff like that. We then traveled to Buffalo and had another wedding reception for my family and friends, and collected more money. Pick up the money and run… That’s what we did.

I like to do things on a holiday. It’s then easier to remember the date. So we booked our flights for the fourth of July. We had already taken sannyas in San Francisco in the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church. Let me tell you that story.

One of the first things we read from Bhagwan was a little booklet saying that seriousness is a disease, and that you don’t need to take anything in life seriously. That really struck us. We thought, “Wow, that’s the man for us!” It really impressed us. He even said, “You don’t even have to take my sannyas seriously.”

Dynamic was every Friday in the church, and it just happened to be the first of April, April Fool’s Day, a Friday. So we thought, “Well, that fits perfectly with his message of seriousness as a disease.” So we took sannyas on the first of April 1974, in the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church. I guess I must have been 26.

Then the flight to Bombay, on the fourth of July…

Sushila – she was a crazy one – had said we didn’t need a visa. “You just get a landing permit, stay overnight in Bombay and then you get a visa.” And then added, “There’s a guy, Moses. You can meet him at Dipti’s Juice Bar near the Taj Mahal Hotel.”

So we landed in Bombay. They were very strict with us. It was not so easy. It was not like Sushila had said. They almost made us get on a plane and fly back. We were a little pissed off at her, and I think she had a deal with Moses from which she would get a cut, a percentage from his business.

At the airport they told us we needed to fill out a form, but they didn’t have extra copies for us. So they asked us to go to a certain street in Bombay where they made copies – people sitting on the street with typewriters. We should get more copies of the form done and come back. Maybe Moses didn’t help us then? I don’t remember exactly. But we ended up getting a three-month visa.

We hadn’t booked a hotel. It was really strange to be in India for first time and looking for a cheap hotel. We didn’t want to spend too much money because we didn’t have much anyway. Walking into doorways there would be people sleeping on the floor. We thought maybe they were dead bodies. We eventually found a hotel and stayed overnight. When we turned the faucet on, brown water came out, so we knew we wouldn’t be drinking that water.

In those days there were no flights to Poona, so we took a taxi, up the mountains. I was really struck by the way they drive, blowing the horn more often than not. In America and Europe, it’s different; you blow the horn in an emergency, if you need to get someone’s attention. But you don’t keep your hand on the horn for a long time; so that was very striking. Of course, a totally different culture; the chaos and the smells and the crazy energy.

So we arrived in Poona. Bhagwan had just moved there on Enlightenment Day, the 21st of March, and this was the 5th or 6th of July. It was all new in the Poona Ashram. There were no groups, just Dynamic. Teertha was there already; we found a place to stay, and eventually Australian Maneesha arrived, a very sweet young woman. I think she was a nurse. She was staying in the same place as us. The landlady was, I think, a Mrs. Patel.

Meeting Osho

We met with Greek Mukta to get an appointment for darshan. There was a misunderstanding – we were supposed to come that very evening. I hadn’t understood it right and we went shopping in MG Road.

The next day Mukta asked, “Well, where were you?”

I said, “Oh, we went to MG Road,” which could have sounded a bit offensive… She gave us another appointment, but then Tara got sick. She came down with something, and I went alone for my arrival darshan.

Bhagwan was in the back garden; there was just an Indian couple with their children, and me.

When I was walking towards him to go to touch his feet, my insides started turning inside out. I was sobbing. Bhagwan patted me on the back of the head and said something like, “I’ll take it all away. I’ll take it all away.”

I just grabbed his foot. As I had read somewhere that to show total devotion and surrender, you go flat on your belly – it was just a concept, an idea – but I did that.

And then he said to me, “How’s Tara?”

I picked my head up. I thought I was in some mystical first-time-with-the-guru scene, and then he’s asking a very mundane question about my new wife’s well-being!

That was my first darshan.

It was great to be in the ashram. It was like coming home. I was just thrilled to be there. I was very happy, but I wasn’t ready to take the jump and stay for years, although we played with that fantasy.

There were alternating Hindi and English discourses, and there was the possibility to do a 21-day meditation in Lonavala, a hill station between Poona and Bombay. When I went to darshan, I told Bhagwan that I wanted to do it, and he said, “Good.”

And then he asked, “What active meditations will you want to do?”

“Dynamic and Mandala meditation.”

“Good. And the rest will be just Vipassana,” he said.

He suggested to do it with earplugs and a blindfold. This really scared me. I thought that was too extreme. I didn’t do the blindfold, at least in the beginning, because I was afraid of maybe going crazy. So I went and did that retreat which was a great experience. There I had the experience of my kundalini rising, a really strong experience of that.

We stayed in Poona for four months. Before we ran out of money, a friend in Buffalo sent us some money so we could stay longer. We thought about staying forever – or whatever forever would turn out to be – but then I got sick. I was not very careful with my eating habits. I got the shits and was vomiting. Stuff coming out from both ends at the same time… That’s when we decided to go back.

At our leaving darshan. Bhagwan asked, “Where are you going?”

I said, “To my hometown, Buffalo, New York.”

I guess he felt it was energetically fitting for us to start a center. So he asked us to start a center in Buffalo. When my mind was getting into stress with “How am I going to attract people?” he said we didn’t have to make it a big deal, to just invite some friends over and offer the meditations.

Back to Buffalo

We found a nice apartment near the University at Buffalo, in an upper-class residential area, and started offering Dynamic and Kundalini. My cousin Mary and her husband came, then a man who was studying law at university. He eventually went to Poona, took sannyas and became Tilopa.

Then Chidananda came. He was from New York, a big tall man with a beard. He was into reggae, an astrologer, a very intense guy, who then moved into the center with us. Then came Ram Fakeer from Toronto. So we had a little sannyasin community.

My mother got me a job in the same high school where I had gone to school as a boy. She was a secretary for the principal. They needed what was called a ‘hall monitor’, somebody who was looking that the kids don’t destroy too many things during their breaks between classes.

I was wearing orange – I was very strict about that – and I think I had the mala underneath my clothes. The kids started calling me Mr. Orange. For my mother, I think, it must have been quite embarrassing. What I put my parents through… They were normal people, children of Polish immigrants, who lived a normal life, decent people, Catholics. And I was such a weird son. But they still loved me. In spite of what they called nonsense, my strange lifestyle.

I was earning a little money – it was a government-subsidized program, the school district didn’t have to pay for my job. So there we were in this very upper-class neighborhood, mostly professors and quite wealthy people (we rented the house from an economics professor who had gotten a position at Cornell University).

One evening the doorbell rang. We went to the door, and there were a couple of people, and one of them asked, “Is this the Rajneesh Masturbation Center?”

Behind them was Ken in his wheelchair! He had a good sense of humor!

They were on their way to New York for a visit, and also wanted to visit us. They had parked that big bus, LIVING LOVE, A WAY TO HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS, on the street in this upper-class residential area, to stay overnight before they traveled on to New York City the next day. That’s just a funny sidelight…

We had the center in Buffalo for about a year and a half, and then we decided to close it and go back to the San Francisco center, connect with Sushila, and see what was happening there.

We moved to San Francisco, to the Sunset District, not far from Sushila’s. We helped her with the center and with her little business. She was importing incense from India, which we were packaging, and she would sell it on to earn some money. We were also leading the Dynamic twice a week.

And Today?

Fast forward to 2026: what happened in between would fill a book (and I hope one day will).

From rags to riches and back to rags again! After 35 years with Latifa, during which we built an amazing wellness hotel in northern Germany, I’m now a widower. The place is in insolvency and I am suffering under the immense challenge to rescue this magical place. It’s extremely difficult, with many painful ‘learning experiences’ – I seem to be naive in the face of power plays and greedy sharks jumping on my situation. I’ve got health problems, but feel lucky to have survived so far. I am hanging in here and am curious to see what the future brings.

Related article

• Space Station number three – Dharmamurti remembers his move from Buffalo, New York, to the Bear Tribe in California – as told to Madhuri (Part 1) [Long Read]