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Elaine DeVore
Elaine DeVore, at the tender age of eleven, realized that she struggled with the vague answers she received from traditional Christianity when she asked more probing questions. So ...view moreElaine DeVore, at the tender age of eleven, realized that she struggled with the vague answers she received from traditional Christianity when she asked more probing questions. So she began looking elsewhere for those answers about the nature of life and spirit. When she discovered Buddhism, she thought she’d found what she needed. What it did, however, was to help her realize that there was more to every religion on the face of the Earth, but you had to look beyond the surfaces to find what you sought if those surfaces didn’t answer the questions. For many years she studied many religions, Eastern and Western, delving deeply into the more esoteric, mystical aspects of them. She found a new world of meaning in doing so.
Later on, she found that Joseph Campbell had found a similar thing about religions, and said that each and every religion on the Earth had the whole truth, but you had to look past all the human interpretations and requirements to the core messages as given by their original teachers, and you would find the same truths in each.
When she graduated from high school, she began college at UC Berkeley. She found within a short time that college wasn’t what really interested her, and when she visited an aunt in Los Angeles, she found the Otis Art Institute and immediately knew that art was the path she wanted to follow. She was able to live with her aunt during her time there, and finally felt fulfilled in her direction. She also met and married her first husband there. Most of her life, she had been a musician, as was her mother, who had been a very accomplished pianist who had played organ and piano in the movie theatres of the 20’s.
When Elaine was in her early 20’s, she had an astrological reading, and the person who did her reading didn’t know what to tell her. She only said to her that she recommended that she become an astrologer herself to study her horoscope and to glean what she could that way because she was uncertain what to say about her chart. This triggered her insatiable curiosity and she began to study astrology, at the age of twenty-one. A year later she had her daughter, then two years later, after losing her first husband to an accident, she met and married her second husband with whom she later had her son. Among all her activities as mother of two children, she was able to pursue her life’s dream of having art as her vocation. Her second husband made his living with ceramics, and she helped in that endeavor, and then began doing her own art and pottery. She also studied music during this time, continued learning astrology and philosophy with the Rosicrucians, and with Manly P. Hall, one of the world’s most eminent philosophers and astrologers of the 20th century. She ended up teaching an astrology seminar some years later at the Philosophical Research Society, Manly Hall’s organization. Also, after her children were grown, she began to write music.
In the 60’s to 70’s she became involved in Ernest Holmes’ Science of Mind church, and eventually, by the end of the 70’s, became a minister in that church. Always, though, her interest remained with the more esoteric side of study. By the 90’s, while she and her daughter were part of a group that created and administered a center called the Art of Living Center, she began writing this book. The AoLC was a place that gave people in a rather conventional religious community a place to come to discover what lay beyond the traditional ways of understanding religion...with classes in a number of philosophies. Many people were brought together from many walks of life and study, and began finding others with similar beliefs. The Center thrived for eleven years, but it seems that it had fulfilled its purpose by the time it closed in 2002.
Elaine now has two grandsons and lives with her daughter on land purchased by her and her husband in 1977 in the forest outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. The land is off the grid and has only solar power for electricity, and water is either hauled or comes from rain and snow melt. It is a very peaceful, pleasant life after such an active, busy life. It is a life for which she is very grateful.view less