Chapter 9: Bedeviled

Scam artists have always been my greatest teachers. The yogi was one of these. He came to one of the classes that I was teaching at my Uncle Drunvalo's mystery school in Questa, New Mexico. The yogi was a wealthy man, and presided over a large group of followers in Los Angeles. He had heard of me and my work, and was eager to learn all that he could about it. In his session, he kept asking the same question over and over. "There must be something between darkness and white light," he kept insisting. "There has to be. Aaah-chooo!" The yogi had allergies and blew his way through an entire box of Kleenex during his session. Finally it came to him.

"Clear light!" he announced triumphantly. "Clear light!" I knew that he was right. The concept of using the cleansing power of clear light, rather than white light which invites its polarity, has since become key to my work. I was in a small way indebted to the slight, sneezing man on my table; feeling that we had something to learn from each other, I would later accept his offer to come and teach at his ashram in Malibu, California. It was a decision that I would have reason to regret.

I was seeing clients at a hotel in Los Angeles on the day when the yogi invited me to come and work at his center. Of the six people that I had scheduled that day, the first three clients that I saw were all beautiful women. Curiously, they were all dressed to kill as well, like they had just stepped off of a movie set. I dutifully covered each of them with white sheets while I worked. At that point in my career, with my heavy investment in polarities, an instant's distraction could cost me dearly. Without my continuous concentration and focused intent, the hotel might suddenly find itself awash in uninvited guests, and far worse things were possible.

The phone rang minutes after I had finished with the last of the women. It was the yogi. Thirty minutes later, I was relaxing like a maharajah in the back of a white stretch limousine watching Malibu glide by through the tinted windows. If I had had my eyes open I would have seen in the improbably dressed women and the limo, warnings to me that all was not as it seemed. Instead, I thought that I had arrived. I would maintain that belief by draping a clean white sheet over everything I saw at the yogi's center, just as I had when I saw the women, until the time when the sheet was finally ripped aside.

The yogi's retreat was everything that he had promised, a secluded and tranquil paradise. The main house, where the yogi lived, offered a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean. Below the house were big permanent sleeping tents, gardens, a temple, and numerous outbuildings. The yogi had the rest of my day's clients delivered by limousine. I gratefully accepted his offer to spend the night. The next day I worked on his paramour, the most beautiful of all of the beautiful women who inexplicably filled the tents and the gardens on weekends. The yogi sat directly across from me as I worked on her, watching my every move. Halfway through the session, he leaned over her so that his face was inches away from mine. "How dare you," he hissed. "How dare you know all of these things that I've struggled for twenty years to learn." Intent as I was on holding a space for my client's healing, I assumed that the yogi was being ironic or clever. This was my second mistake.

After my session with Yonanda, his girlfriend, the yogi extended an invitation for me to stay with him permanently and teach. He had a beautiful cottage that I could live in and I could continue to see my paying clients whenever I wanted to. The teaching excited me the most. I wanted to teach more than anything.

My first student, not coincidentally, was Yonanda. She quickly became my constant companion, attending all of my sessions. As flattering as it was to be shadowed everywhere on the compound by such a striking consort, I didn't have time to think of the ramifications. Stranger things were happening.

The first thing that I noticed was that my possessions were somehow being moved. I had arrayed all of my sacred talismans out on the back porch railing of the secluded cottage the yogi had rented to me. One day, I looked out at my talismans, and realized that three of them-two wood carvings of a dolphin and a whale, and an antler carved into a fetish-were missing. All of the crystals and other items that I'd placed on the railing on either side of them were untouched. The railing itself overlooked the steep side of an arroyo, so that the deck was about fourteen feet off of the ground. There was no way that I could think of for either man or beast to get up there.

The dolphin and the whale were particularly important to me because they were the things that I would physically hold when my work made me doubt my sanity. I searched high and low, hauling myself up and down the slope of the arroyo by grabbing onto fistfuls of chaparral. Finally, I had to leave. It was Sunday afternoon and I had to drive for ten hours to get back to my weekday job at the printing company. I brought all of my remaining things in and put them on the coffee table. There wasn't very much that you could take from me at that point in my life that I would miss, except for those three little things. I couldn't believe that they were gone.

The next day a woman from the ashram called to say that my dolphin had been found. It was in a tree in the arroyo behind the cottage, at eye level with the balcony. Neither of us could figure out how it got there. Nevertheless, she retrieved it for me and put it with the rest of my things inside the cottage.

The wind was whispering of a storm over the mountains by the time I returned the next Friday. I woke up several times during the night to hear the cabin creaking restlessly over its wooden stilts like a ship dragging its anchors. One of the first things I did in the morning was to pick up the phone. I held the receiver close against my ear. Silence. I found the plug still in the jack, the wire severed with almost surgical precision. I pried the plug out of the wall jack with a screwdriver, got a new cord for the phone from one of the staff, and hooked everything up again, feeling a surge of relief when I heard the reassuring sound of a dial tone again. I made my phone call, got a busy signal, and decided to try later.
Ten minutes went by. I came out of the shower to find the line dead a second time. I yanked on the cord that I'd just installed. It'd been cut, again. My heart began to race. Someone or something had to have been in the room in the last ten minutes. It was then that I noticed that the dolphin was missing for the second time. What the hell! I thought. Why would someone cut my phone line and steal my dolphin?

Then I heard a low menacing growl. The cat that had moved into the cottage with me stared under the end table, its tail lashing back and forth like a bullwhip. I recoiled in disgust when I saw what the cat was staring at. There, in a kind of a cubby hole under the table was a big black rat, nearly as large as the cat. Between the rat's paws was my precious dolphin. The rat was methodically eating it.

I marched straight to the bedroom and my suitcase, where the small .22 caliber pistol that I'd carried since my run-ins with the bikers waited. I grabbed it and a flashlight. I was furious and I was loaded for rat. The rat didn't even blink at the flashlight, nor when I shot it, but the cat shot straight up in the air like a rocket. "Sorry kitty," I said sheepishly.
I lifted the top off of the end table and yanked my dolphin out of the rat's paws with righteous indignation. The cat pranced after me slavishly as I carried the rat out by its tail. I barely had enough time to get the rat safely interred and grab a glass of orange juice before I had to start my first class.

Forty students waited for me in the main house. Rats be damned, I thought to myself, teaching was my life's work. I asked what they wanted to work on that day. One of the four leaders, a woman -- the whole place was run by women -- spoke up and said, "We'd like to know what we were doing in our past lives." I felt like a magician at a children's birthday party. I rubbed my hands together to convey my workmanlike enthusiasm. They had asked me to do a trick that I knew how to do.

"Okay people," I announced. "Past lives it is." I cleared a space and arranged the four women in a circle, with their heads nearly touching and their feet facing outward in the four directions. "We'll all go there together." I led them all through a regression and had them envision themselves spiraling back through time. First, one of them started shaking, and then two of the others. I steadied three of the women and addressed the one whose life we were all going to explore.
"I'd like to speak to the dark energy around your head," I told the woman, "if it could speak to me now what would it say?" Instantly the woman's face contorted into a snarl.

"I'm angry at you!" she yelled. Right away I could hear shuffling all around us as the rest of the students discreetly moved back.

"Who are you?" I inquired calmly. My clients screamed at me all the time.

"You know who I am!"

"No I don't. Why don't you tell me?"

"You know who I am!" In between yelling at me she snarled, hissed and spat. I was used to that too. Her friends weren't. She was one of the most angelic-looking women that I'd ever seen, before I had anything to do with her. You could practically see her halo. Now she was rolling around on the floor and cursing like a sailor. I knew what most of them were thinking. I'd seen The Exorcist, too. That movie was nothing but trouble for someone in my business.
I switched my tack. "Where are you from?" I demanded. The woman spat at me again. I could hear an "aaah" from the crowd, like the sound you hear at the circus when the trapeze artist nearly falls off the high wire.

"Where are you from?!" I demanded again, raising my voice for emphasis. The woman smiled smugly at me.

"I was in the rat!" she snarled.

That was nearly enough to knock me off my high wire. I took a deep breath.

"Who are you?" I asked again. My client writhed and shook her head from side to side, presaging an utterance of great significance. You could practically see it traveling up her throat like a UPS truck.

"I am the DEVIL!" she yelled triumphantly. The crowd went "aaahh" again, expecting the worst, but now I had a foothold, something to work with.

The demonic energy had been around the compound for years, moving from person to person, leaving when they felt centered and entering their fields again when they were vulnerable. When it was between people, it attached itself to the rat, and when it saw an opening it would jump like a flea from the rat to another one of the yogi's acolytes.

"Being in negative service for thousands of years is hard work, isn't it?" I asked encouragingly.

"Yes," it admitted.

"Are you ready to go home now, to a place where you can be more than you ever could here?"

"Yes," it said simply. It was over. I looked around the room and asked if anyone had any questions. There were many. I had some too. For the yogi in particular.

I opened my eyes and ears around the ashram after that. One of the first things that I noticed was that there was an omnipresent sound to the place, emanating from high fidelity speakers secreted in the high corners of every room like spiders' eggs. The sound was a kind of a low-pitched choral hum. It was somehow very familiar; I knew that I had heard it before.

I strolled back to the main house for dinner that evening, lost in thought. A group of women from my class waved at me. I waved back absently. I'd never seen so many beautiful women in one place in my life. They were all over the grounds, laughing, talking, and doing exercises. I felt like a guest star on Baywatch. "Is something wrong?" a voice said from beside me. I felt a gentle touch on my elbow. Yonanda had slipped free from a group of women doing yoga to walk beside me.

I shook my head. "Just thinking," I told her.

"You know you're our golden boy out here," she said. "The yogi thinks so much of you. It's important to all of us that you're happy."

Gears were spinning inside my head like in an antique cash register during a white sale. Golden boy, golden boy, golden boy. I turned the words over and over in my mind. Finally I rang up a total.

"Excuse me," I told Yonanda. "I just thought of something that I need to do." I disengaged myself from my shadow and jogged quickly up to the house. I knew where I'd heard that sound. I'd heard it in a movie called The Golden Child. In the movie the noise had been described as the sound of pure evil.

I caught up with the yogi as he strolled like an old patriarch through the dining room, hands clasped behind his back, surveying the meal preparations. He smiled warmly at my approach. "Listen," I told him. "I just realized something." I went on to tell him all about the movie and the meaning of the chanting. I pointed up to where the sound seemed to be coming from in the dining room. "That's the same sound," I told him.

The yogi smiled and nodded. "Yes," he told me. "It is. I use that sound to attract evil."

"To attract evil?" I repeated incredulously. "Why on earth would you want to do that?"

"Why to accelerate my student's lessons of course," he told me, acting as though it should have been obvious to someone like me all along. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Would you like to see my shrine?"
I dutifully followed him upstairs to his oversized master bedroom. It was like a temple in and of itself, beautifully furnished, with rows of votive candles burning 24 hours a day. He stopped in front of the doors to a big walk-in closet. I could feel the energy that emanated from inside. It was like walking into a wall. The yogi threw open the ceiling-high doors with a dramatic flourish. A row of shelves extended from the floor to the ceiling like bleachers. The shelves were completely populated by statues of Hindu deities. The statues were paired, so that beside each positive deity was its corresponding negative aspect. The energy washed over me like a wave. I took a step backwards. I thought about what students would have to go through in a place like this, with so much negativity all around them. And here, at the center of this energetic maelstrom, was the smiling cobra in front of me, bobbing and rubbing his hands together as he lectured excitedly about the rows of deities he had harnessed together to accomplish his ends.

I left that night, chagrined and a little wiser. Everything had suddenly become much clearer. I realized that my first student and constant shadow, the yogi's paramour, had really been sent to spy on me with the intent of eventually seducing me. The yogi saw my knowledge as power and wanted all of it. In my excitement over teaching, I hadn't noticed any of these things. I had ignored all of the subtle messages and it had taken a huge demonically possessed rat to convince me that all was not as I wanted it to seem.

Months later, I would find out that I had only begun to plumb the debts of my naivete. The beautiful women that descended on the ashram every weekend were prostitutes, each of them paying two thousand dollars a week to the guru for the pleasure of HIS company. He used the white stretch limousine that he had bought from a country music star to kidnap them, ostensibly for the purposes of rehabilitation. He fed them, took care of their health problems, weaned them from their addictions, and taught them basic spiritual truths. When the women "graduated" from the rehabilitation program they were no longer streetwalkers hectoring cars on Sunset Boulevard: they had been transformed into radiantly healthy experts in tantric yoga, and they were thousand dollar a night call girls. Most of them remained totally devoted to the yogi. They helped bring in new converts; those who weren't prostitutes were asked to give the yogi all their worldly possessions as proof of their dedication. Several of the women were executives in the yogi's network of companies, all of which he had a very safe arm's length relationship with. It was a smooth operation that had made the yogi a millionaire many times over. The woman who told me all of these things set out to destroy him, but only succeeded in dislodging him from his Malibu ashram. As for me, I was to have one last encounter with Lucifer in physical form.
In the Fall of 1994, I was giving a three-day workshop on an island in Puget Sound. My comrade in arms, Shirley Holly, and I had just finished a full day of sessions, only to find out that the well at the compound where we were working had gone dry. Psychics get "dirty" doing their work just like gravediggers do, and the idea of going to sleep without a bath or a shower was inconceivable, so we drove across the island to soak at a hot spring before turning in. I had to drive slowly on the way back because of the combination of no streetlights, no moon, and fog rolling in from the ocean.

Shirley tugged urgently at my sleeve. "Look at that!" she whispered excitedly. I had already seen them. Two hitchhikers stood improbably on the road that had been deserted when we drove to the hot springs forty-five minutes earlier. "Look at them, Ken," Shirley whispered again, still tugging at my sleave.

"I see them, Shirley," I answered, as we both peered intently at the two figures.

"I'll just ask them if they're all right," she said, as though we had already agreed on a strategy. She rolled down her window halfway, like we had a dog in the car that might jump out.

"Of course they're not all right Shirley," I said. "We'll give them a ride."

Shirley's hand froze on the window crank. "Are you crazy?" she demanded. Shirley and I had worked together for years and she knew me better than just about anyone else except my wife, Mary. She had watched hundreds of my sessions before training as a practitioner herself. Having her ask me if I was crazy really meant something.

Shirley wasn't just concerned because I was about to pick up two hitchhikers on a deserted island road at midnight. The circumstances were ordinary compared to the hitchhikers themselves. The man introduced himself as Daryl, and winked broadly at me. He wore fingerless gloves and a satin cape over a tuxedo. His jet black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, his skin was as white as bone china, and he had eyes like two lumps of obsidian. His consort, who was ravishing, wore a mink coat, nylons, and high heels.

We'd hardly driven a mile down the road with them, when a strange unsettling feeling overcame me. I felt like a giant centipede was crawling up my back. Daryl was the name of the character that Jack Nicholson played in the movie, The Witches of Eastwick. Daryl was the devil. Daryl was in my car. I knew his vibration intimately from all the work I had done. Shirley and I glanced at each other. She had kept both of the passengers in the back seat engaged with a rapid fire series of inane questions, a sure sign that she was scared. The headlights washed over a rusted telephone sign. "We have to get out here," the man in the back said urgently. I slowed the car down.

"Here?" I said skeptically. Apart from a single light over the pay telephone, the building by the side of the road was obviously deserted.

"Stop," he demanded. "Stop." He bent over my window to shake my hand after he got out of the car. "God bless you," he said, letting the words drip with meaning. We watched them glide into the deserted building together and disappear.
Shirley cranked up her window with incredible speed as we drove away. She turned in her seat to stare at me accusingly.

"Do you know who those people were?" she demanded.

I nodded my head as I drove. "Yes," I answered evenly. "That was Lucifer."

"Well, I can't believe that you picked him up."

I had been thinking about that. What was he doing on that road and why did I pick him up? I had an answer. "So I could shake his hand," I said finally. We had come full circle, the devil and I. I no longer felt that I needed to call upon my legions of angels to hold him at bay. I no longer felt that he could kill me. We were no longer at war. Like a favorite teacher, he had come all the way to this small island to deliver me my graduation present. He had come to shake my hand.