The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  In the purple time, Siri and me were reading about a lot of spiritual paths, and going to hear different spiritual groups and gurus. Some of them we listened to were Swami Satchidananda, Yogananda, Swami Muktananda, and J. Krishnamurti, and we sometimes ate at the Hare Krishna temple and heard talks by people who didn’t have big names or followings. I had started down this path in high school and college when I got involved with a spiritual/therapy group, then Zen, then Buddhist groups, then Baha’is. My granny had helped me to start seeking. She had told me stories about the old days when the young people in our community had to “seek.” They would dress in white and go out into the woods alone and wait on their vision. They would stay out there until the vision came, until they were new and bathed in light. She would sometimes shout out of nowhere, startling me, “You need to be seeking your soul salvation!” Since childhood, I had been seeking and seeking. But I wasn’t looking for Jesus. I was looking for the perfect moment, the perfect light. So I had read a lot, and thought a lot, and in the purple time, I read and thought a lot more.

  Siri and me were thinking that we would find a path we both liked and could be on together. I met lots of people on different paths, and I had friendships. But somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew I was like a black engine with its piston pumping almost fast enough for me to take flight, or to fall apart. Even in the purple time, when I could relax some, I couldn’t slow the motion inside me; I couldn’t slow the momentum of my life or the rhythm of my heart. So I was part of those around me, but I wasn’t. Some of them were so settled in themselves, in where they were living and what they believed. They weren’t used to running, hiding, or falling apart. I was determined to keep holding on to Siri, though, to the purple time, to the yellow house.

  But one day I met Rajneesh sannyasins, dressed all in red, with their beads and their malas. One day I tasted their scent, and it tasted like home. One day I was reading a book of Rajneesh lectures, and suddenly my search was over, but Siri’s was still going.

  When I declared that I had to go to the commune, the life we had together was over. It’s funny how things can sometimes end, just like that.

  Siri was frightened for me going to the Ranch. Like everyone I knew, she was terrified. They were thinking about Jim Jones and the mass suicides at Jonestown. They were scared I would end up drinking poison Kool-Aid and dying. I had to put up a wall in my mind to keep from hearing what people said. To keep from feeling their anxieties. Once the wall was up, things were quiet and I could think better.

  Siri was trying to talk to me because she was upset, but I just wanted to get away from her feelings. So my feelings ran away. When my feelings run away, I am left alone in a wilderness, like a slave who was headed north and suddenly there are no stars. Even worse, there is no sky and I can’t remember anything. Why am I here in this field? I hear dogs barking. Trees turn to wolves. So I turn into a wolf and bite anything that comes near me.

  That’s what I did with Siri, so she thought I had stopped loving her, when I just wanted to go to Rajneeshpuram. I needed to, and I was scared. I couldn’t think about two things at once, and I was thinking about going. So I couldn’t think about Siri’s feelings. I needed her too much to leave her, but she didn’t know that. So she left me. She left me and went to Yogi Bhajan. She left me and became a Sikh. She dressed all in white, with a turban. She left me and got married and went to live in an ashram. She got up every morning and meditated, while I disappeared in red, into burnt henna, into sannyas, into a mystic rose.

  When I was going to Oregon, I was fleeing a yellow house. I was as lost as a kitten. I was a black man, in a purple time, in a green Plymouth Valiant, out in the cold. I was like my daddy sitting in his blue DeSoto, belonging nowhere. I went with a friend from my psychic school, and we left on a Monday because “Monday” is red and we were going to a place that was as bright red as a blossom. She made homemade muesli. I filled the tank with gas, and we found some sleeping bags. That’s all the planning we thought of. Early Monday morning, we took off in my Plymouth Valiant, my reggae boat, headed to Rajneeshpuram.

  The first night on the road, we slept on a beach. We fell asleep to the shhhhhhhh of waves breaking on wet sand and withdrawing back into the sea, to a sky full of stars. I was a little nervous but so excited. I had forgotten that there were any other choices, that there were any other roads. I seemed to belong nowhere I had ever been, with no one I had ever met, doing nothing I had ever seen anyone do. So what did I have to lose?

  Late the next day, when we got near the Ranch, I could feel a deep silence with skin I didn’t know I had. I could taste it. Touch it. It was as if my sixth sense stepped out of me, like a person of its own. Then it faced me down and moved back into me and took me over.

  At the gates of Rajneeshpuram were guards with machine guns. When I saw them, I had to work hard not to have a seizure. I was afraid of guns. There were more guards perched on the surrounding hills. It was like going through a checkpoint in a dark spy movie, crossing the border from one country to another. I hadn’t expected the tenseness or surveillance. Once I was inside, I didn’t think much more about it, but I felt it, with the hair on the back of my neck. I put myself in take-in mode. Watch. Watch. Taste. Touch. Feel. I could turn on think-about-it mode sometime later. I wouldn’t know for a while anyway all the things there were to think about.

  I didn’t know what to make of the Ranch, a new-age city in the middle of nowhere, kind of like in a science-fiction movie. It wasn’t just the things, like the buses, all of the buildings and roads. Dairy farm. Vegetable farm. Honeybees. Meditation hall. Airport. Sewage plant and reservoir. Fire department and boutiques. Restaurants and mall. It wasn’t just the new-age stuff like crystal readings, massage, aromatherapy, and chakra balancing. It was the vibe. It was the way sannyasins were in their bodies. Their movements were different from people on the outside. Like the movements of people in movies are different when they are taken over by aliens. The movements here were more relaxed, freer, more alive. But sometimes “crazy religious” people seem that way. I would just have to keep my senses and mind open and see.

  I felt the Ranch first with my eyes. Everything was red. Everyone wore shades of red. I could even close my eyes and feel the redness. It was like being inside a giant rose. And the aroma of the rose surrounded us, like the dust of the brown hills. It was the scent of all those who had ever meditated. Delicate, but unmovable. I was inside it. I could feel its heart beat. When sannyasins moved along paths and roadways, the ochers, rubies, scarlets, carmines, crimsons, cerises, vermilions, rouges, russets, auburns, hennas, maroons, magentas, puces, fuchsias, lilacs, plums, lavenders, and mauves of their shirts and pants, skirts and hats, socks and even shoes, were like petals of the blossoms we were inside of. Moving in wind. Dropped in a winding stream.

  Every day after lunch there were drive-bys. They were a little weird, but I stayed open. The shades of red would line the roads of Rajneeshpuram. It was an intensity that even the greatest painters would shy away from. Thousands of red lips. Thousands of red petals. Singing and playing tambourines. Swaying to universal “oms.” “Oh, Bhagwan, take me high as the eagle fly!” And Bhagwan would come along, driving slowly, slowly, in one of the many Rolls-Royces that rich sannyasins had given him, smiling. He would stop often and move his hands up and down, as much dancing as his aging body could manage. But that was enough to send the sannyasins near his car into rapture. Some of them reminded me of black women in church, struck with the Holy Ghost. The procession would last over an hour, and then everyone would slowly disperse. The blue of the sky would then have more space to spill back into the landscape.

  I felt the Ranch secondly with taste. The taste of dust, of sagebrush, of the surrounding brown hills. There was a dryness that lingered on my tongue, on my skin, despite the sweat that gathered as I moved here and there in the heat. And there was a taste of redwood that seemed to get inside me. Redwood was in some of the buildings. I could touch it. It was so so
ft that I had to be careful not to leave any imprint. It was soft like bacon that had been overcooked and could fall apart from too much handling. It was soft like water, like pinesap before it hardens. There was the taste of new lumber. Of pine, of cedar, in the small A-frame lodges, or in the co-ed bathrooms and showers. There was the taste of soaps and sweat and rosemary oil that sannyasins used to “feed” their meditation beads. There was the taste of the all-vegetarian meals in the cafeteria. Of lots of brown rice, tofu, and tahini.

  The third way I felt the Ranch was with touch. Things felt right. All the patterns of paths and gardens felt right. They felt right to my feet. They felt right to my hands as I walked along and touched a leaf, or a wooden railing, a doorknob, a bench, the headboard of the bed, the cotton of the bedspread, the arms of a chair. The angles of rooms, of buildings. The closeness and distance of one thing and another. The shapes things made together—the buildings, bridges, groves, gardens. The stone Buddhas and lanterns. The sparse beauty of Zen texture everywhere I turned. Everywhere was named for an enlightened person. Buddha Hall. Lao Tzu Grove. Jesus Grove. And so each nook had its own light, its own texture, its own spirits. I could almost have closed my eyes, the way I did at home, and moved around and been all right.

  Sannyasins touched a lot. Instead of talking most of the time, like people on the outside did, they tried to stay tuned in to an inner silence. I could go for days with only a few words. That was like being in heaven. When people passed on the paths going from here to there, we sometimes hugged and melted into each other. We hugged into the silence that filled the air like water in a jar, and after a while, sometimes a long while, we parted, wordlessly, with a smile. That was like being in heaven too. Quietly holding and being held.

  The Ranch was like a school, without gray concrete. Someone had asked, “What is a building?” and gotten a different answer than the people who build gray concrete. These were rooms that breathed like cedar and redwood. I loved those kinds of buildings. They suited my spirit. And what is a building for? To capture space, to mix it with light and shadows. It’s like diving into the ocean, and while you’re underwater, taking a bucket, or a cup, or a pretty box, and letting it fill up. When I went into buildings with wood, I could hear the trees still talking. The rooms would let the inside light and space rise up like music and put their fingers on the glass and walls to feel the heartbeat of space outside. Timber framing and open beams rested in each other’s arms and locked fingers.

  Some museums were like that. So the artwork and the trees could talk to each other. So people who went there could stand in the spaces where light and lightness met and be baptized. Lodges where new-age therapy groups met for retreats, meditated, talked about feelings, cried, hugged, and ate vegetarian lunches were like that. They usually had trees outside the windows and nearby saunas or yurts. They had prisms or crystals hanging at windows and breaking light into rainbows. They had smoothly polished hardwood floors. Like the places I went to study yoga or breathwork or tai chi, or to get a cosmic massage. The places I went to get my homeopathy or get my tarot cards or my astrological chart read. The places I went to get the lines in my palm translated into the past and future. There were always soft voices and friendly faces in those buildings and rooms. There was always a sweet scent. People in there left the colors around their bodies open so that I could taste them.

  In the school of Rajneeshpuram, I meditated, read, and fell more deeply into my nature. The books were discourses Bhagwan had given over the years. There were hundreds of them, going back to the first ashram in Pune. I couldn’t put them down. They were the books I would never find another person to talk to about. My favorites were Bhagwan’s The Book of Secrets; My Way, the Way of the White Clouds; Journey Toward the Heart: Discourses on the Sufi Way; and Only One Sky: On the Tantric Way of Tilopa’s Song of Mahamudra. There were books on Patanjali’s yoga sutras, Rumi’s Sufism and whirling dervishes, Zen masters, Kabir’s poetry, Gurdjieff’s experiments with consciousness, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. When Bhagwan spoke, he brought them back into this world. He was like a conjurer. He opened a portal and one by one and they came through. He called it the “Buddhafield,” a place where spirits of the enlightened could walk the earth again. It was so quiet in the Buddhafield, like being among the stars.

  To people outside, Rajneeshpuram was just a weird place among the weirdnesses of the 1980s. But the silences, the sparks, the textures of life that held it together weren’t in the twentieth century at all. People outside were saying a lot of things about the Ranch, most of them not very good. It would turn out that some of those things were true. But I wasn’t paying any mind to what people were saying. I was tasting the things that were goodness and light, things that could sustain me.

  Instead of going to class, I went to meditations three times a day. In a quiet room, with open wood, and soft pink pillows, I sat like a lotus and hummed while Buddhas floated beside me. Instead of studying for exams, I read for the sake of my soul. Instead of listening to lectures, I sat among the red flock of thousands and breathed in Bhagwan’s radiance and a quiet that there is no word for. We knelt and chanted, “Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami / Sangham Sharanam Gachchhami / Dhammam Sharanam Gachchhami,” prostrating our heads and hands to the floor at the end of each triplet. Instead of falling into an anxious river at night, and waking up out of breath from fighting white rapids and dog paddling in chilly waters, the way I did when I was in school, I slept. At night I would lie down and fall into a river of blue silence. I would float without effort. I would never completely awaken from it. The tea of Buddha sleep. The nothingness of sleeping, while awake, like rain when the sun is shining. There was a space that imagination cannot bridle. That became solid. There was a brightness that did not blind my eyes or give me headaches. That did not answer to the sun.

  I had read about and seen pictures of monks in orange robes. But I had never seen them up close. It was so foreign. But it was even more familiar. It felt so right. I wished that I could have stayed on the Ranch or in another of the ashrams. I wished that I could have just kept living with the Buddhas. I would have been at home. But, “If it’s for you,” my granny would say, “you’ll get it.” What I had were debts and loans to pay back, so I would have to find a job and work. I was desperate to “take sannyas,” to become a sannyasin, because I knew my time was short. I knew that at any minute, I could be sucked back into the world. Like in a movie when a part of an airplane is blown apart and passengers are sucked screaming into the sky. Bhagwan told the story once of a disciple who reached the fifth heaven, stayed there for a while, and then fell back into the world. When you fall back this time, he said, don’t forget. Remember your selves. Remember to meditate.

  Since I couldn’t stay, I would have to take it with me, like I did most things I cared for, on the run. All the rivers of love. All the light. All the amazing sensitivity, to senses, to the planet, to the forces of the universe. All the beautiful words: Samadhi. Moksha. Enlightenment. Satori. Satsang. I would have to take the idea that each of us has to find our own peace. That no religion or doctrine can give it to us. I would carry it in my heart, along with the other precious things. The red. The reds. All the reds.

  They didn’t let me take sannyas the first time I was at the Ranch. They said I wasn’t ready. They said I needed to meditate for three months and then come back. And I did. I was doing Dynamic, Kundalini, and Nadabrahma meditations at least twice every day, in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Nadabrahma was my favorite. It was based on a Tibetan meditation. I sat and hummed to the music of Tibetan gongs, then slowly opened my arms to the universe, and then slowly folded them. I was like a blossom, opening then closing. By the end of Nadabrahma, I was alive with such a silence. I was myself before the traumas, before I learned despair.

  When I returned to the Ranch, they said I was ready to melt and I could take sannyas. There was a large open building called Buddha Hall where Osho (he changed his name from Bhagwan) sat on a platform, faci
ng sometimes as many as a thousand sannyasins. When we took sannyas, our names were called and we walked up to the front where someone handed us a page with our new names and what the names meant and put the mala around our necks. The mala had 108 rosewood beads, each one for a different kind of meditation. It had Osho’s picture in round, hardened clear plastic at the bottom. It was like being baptized.

  When I took sannyas, I was so happy. My happiness is the main thing I remember. I don’t know what day or month it was, or what I was wearing, or anything else about that time when I was on the Ranch. It felt so familiar that I never doubted its truth. Its value. I never doubted that I had been with Osho in some other life. I remembered his taste. I remembered how much I loved him. I was happy to be rejoining so many familiar souls. I was happy to know I was sharing my journey. I was happy to have positive routines to help guide me. Meditations helped to center me, to lessen the times when my mind slipped away. They were like medicine. Of all the things I’ve learned, meditation has been one of the most important. Learning to meditate was a turning point. Without it, I don’t know how I would have survived. The university degrees wouldn’t have saved me. They wouldn’t have centered me or given me inner refuge in the storms of life.

  My new name was Swami Anand Prahlad. Swami meant a committed meditator. “Anand” meant “bliss,” and “Prahlad” meant “joy.” All men sannyasins were Swamis, and all women were Mas. Inside, I was secretly a Swami-Ma. Out of all the sannyasins, there were only a few second names. “Anand” was one of them. “Anand” was the path of the desert, which was finding oneself in solitude.