Everything was as it is. All that has changed is my perspective. I’ve run, stumbled, climbed, and fallen through life. I’ve plowed headlong into pits and briars obvious to others – more times than once, many more times than once – careening off of pain and pleasure to land in a heap on a perch that works for now.

This is how it looks from here…

Please forgive me for speaking in general terms. I speak of us as a movement, as a community. There were many individual exceptions.

We meant well.

Actually, it felt to me like most of us were trying, sometimes successfully, to convince ourselves we meant well… by my definition of well meaning, that is.

Most of us would rather have helped than done harm, and yet we helped Dad and his circle do great harm, either with a direct hand or by feeding the Temple’s unhealthy appetite in some other way.

We knew how to play.

Laughter was our favorite thing, with song and dance a close second. We were in great need of its relief, its release. The gloom and doom can really weigh on you after awhile, all that “us against the world” shit.

Our laughter could be pathetic and mean, and quite often beautiful.

It’s a doorway to harmony, to Oneness, to The Creator when seemingly very different people find the same thing funny.

We were not a “good” organization that turned “bad”, or lost its way. We were not healthy then sick. From the very beginning, we were ruled – not led but ruled – subjugated, and manipulated by a narcissistic, paranoid, bitter, disillusioned, delusional, and frequently ridiculous man, who was, as far as I can tell, pretty disturbed before he made it out of his neglected, poverty-stricken childhood.

Nearly every kind of person joined and stayed for every kind of reason – from purity to perversion, altruism to amorality. We were a mixed and mixed up bag. Compassionate, mean, passionate, depressed, courageous, cowardly, faithful, paranoid, vivacious, dull…

…HEARTBROKEN…

…and they taught me so much about soul and sacrifice.

Listening to my father and living with my Temple family (usually utterly against my will) nurtured the values that I hold dear to this day.

Maybe too dear.

My words could never do justice to the beauty and power of black and white and yellow and red, every skin color imaginable, dressed in every other color imaginable, swayin’ and bumpin’ and thumpin’ to somethin’s-got-ahold-of-me-gospel, and a good dose of sooty and sensuous soul. All our barriers crumbled, our lines rubbed out. You forget who’s who and who you are. We’d mix and melt and enter the music as it entered us. No past, no future, no thought stood a chance.

It’s hard to let that go, even when every inch of you screams at you to do so.

We championed all the “right” causes, but it seems to me that we were more against than we were for anything.

We hated hatred and were bigoted against bigots. We wanted to rule the rulers and torture the torturers. Everything and everyone – but us – was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is not how all of us felt or operated, of course, but as a whole this is how we felt to me.

We talked about waiting out nuclear Armageddon so we could build our utopia. I remember thinking, “When we dance on the ashes of the world we claim to love so much, maybe then we can stop talking about how fucked up it all is.” Of course, Dad never revealed the secret of how he would make us all radiation free.

We wanted to make others wrong, rather than do what we felt was best for ALL of us, inside and outside the Temple. Even when I resisted Dad, it was about making him wrong, about showing him how bad he was. It had very little to do with me asking myself what was best for the greater good – or just for me – and standing up for it.

A BATTLE OF EGOS.

INspiration and INsight were discouraged, dampened…punished.

So far I’ve found that change, growth…Evolution…REVOLUTION is, first and foremost (if not entirely), an inside job. In the Temple my insides felt crushed, not cultivated.

If I desire or dislike something too much, if I place my happiness and peace on the absence or acquisition of anything remotely material, I can be hooked, played, and left on the bank gasping for air, wondering what the hell happened and who I can blame – other than myself, of course.

As long as I hold myself separate from Creation, from The Creator, I am capable of doing and allowing great harm.

Dad and I and some others tapped into something deep and genuine in ourselves when we worked people, when we showed them what they needed to see, in order to get them to do and give us what we wanted. People saw the “good” works and looks of the Temple and the “genuine” warmth, compassion, and eloquence of the man who seemed to be the force driving it all, and they spent the rest of their Temple lives rationalizing and redirecting responsibility for the sickness that coated and snarled all of it.

We simply lost sight of the one thing that could have saved us. Albert Einstein describes it well.

"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of true science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead.

To know that what is impenetrable to us truly exists, manifesting itself in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religion."

I hurt people, directly and indirectly. I and a small group of young men humiliated and terrorized a man once on the orders of a man I despised, and whose approval and love meant more to me than I could ever have admitted. It got out of hand. He could have died. And I felt almost nothing but fear of ridicule and reprisal. And nearly a thousand people sat in the Jonestown pavilion and did nothing. Most of them cheered or otherwise showed their approval and many of them were probably horrified and terrified while doing so.

How am I capable of such evil?

When I lose my soul in my image of me, when your view of me is more important to me than the eternal in me, when all connection is lost to that part of me which is of God…

Here’s what I know:

This belief that you and I are separate, that your pain is not my pain, that your misery is not my misery, that your joy and peace and bliss are not mine…

it is a lie

Einstein called it an “…optical delusion of our consciousness…”

I believe this with all of my heart.

Problem is my mind and actions often don’t align with this, and my amends for the inevitable harm that results must be painstaking and thorough

And is between me and Our Maker

And it ALL brings to mind the words of the mystic poet, Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.”