Yogananda, Gurdjieff, Jung & I AM: My Adventures In Life and Consciousness

By John Maxwell Taylor

Yogananda, Gurdjieff, Jung & I AM: My Adventures in Life and Consciousness is John Maxwell Taylor’s wild romp through sixty years of consciousness-raising meditation to find bliss, joy, happiness, and our true nature as humans…

Are you ready to join him on this journey?

Inspired by yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff, and mystical psychologist Carl Jung, John Maxwell considers himself a rock ’n’ roll mystic, who came to spirituality when he was a singer/guitarist in the 1960s. As flashy as was his life then, so was his spiritual transformation: for a moment, the world literally disappeared in the light of God. 

In an engaging style, with thrills and humor sprinkled throughout, John  Maxwell invites the reader to become emotionally connected not just with him through his autobiography but with themselves. He offers his own life lessons that can be applied immediately to readers’ own lives so that they too can fulfill their destiny. Unlike most Western self-help books that preach thinking about concepts, John Maxwell offers a more truthful path forward into enlightenment: feeling through direct experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781977272508

Book preview

Yogananda, Gurdjieff, Jung & I AM

My Adventures In Life and Consciousness

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2024 John Maxwell Taylor

v1.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Outskirts Press, Inc.

http://www.outskirtspress.com

Interior Layout design by Howie Severson

Copy Editor Phil Goldberg

page 75: Benllech Village courtesy of The Francis Frith Collection.

Photographic publishers since 1860. www.francisfrith.com

page 433–436: From Eros Ascending: The Life-Transforming Power of Sacred Sexuality by John Maxwell Taylor, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2009 by John Maxwell Taylor. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

Outskirts Press and the OP logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A gift is pure when it is given from the heart to the right person at the right time and at the right place, and when we expect nothing in return.

—THE BHAGAVAD GITA

Contents

Preface

1. Seeing The Light in Hollywood

2. The London Scene 1968: Apple Records, Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, or Yogic Bliss?

3. The Mystical Isle of Anglesey, Horse Riding, and California Daydreaming

4. Monastic Leanings, Physical Tests, and Health Spa Adventures

5. An Amazing Healing, Altered States and the Blissed Out Milkman

6. Enlightened milk delivery. Miraculous insights, awakening, shocks, and confronting the unconscious with Carl Gustav Jung.

7. High voltage personal growth at Findhorn while falling in love with a dynamic American ex-nun. A match made in heaven for the ex-hermit of Anglesey

8. Ogilvie Crombie (ROC) sees Lahiri Mahasaya overlighting the author at Findhorn producing a permanent cellular connection with bliss. America and marriage are calling.

9. San Francisco and marrying Susanne. Should we serve the New Age with transplanted Findhorn members or seek inner freedom by following Yogananda’s path?

10. Marital bliss and the blessing of children. Remembering my own childhood and musical influences.

11. Applying Transformational Theater principles to create plays and music that could change the world..

12. Faustorama and backstage dramas. Wagnerian swans, courtly love, miraculous materializations, and visions of future destiny.

13. Success! Transformational Theater works! Bringing Jung to life on stage in a 20-character, one-man play pays back for what I have received from him. And the public loves it..

14. Beating off-Broadway at its own game. New York and the Gradiva Award.

15. Over 250 performances in five years, playing Jung changes your life. You can’t walk in those shoes without being transformed..

16. Creating and recording CrazyWisdom, a musical based on the life of Gurdjieff. Artistically another success! This is the objective art Faustorama strove for but couldn’t reach.

17. A demonstration of non-doing (being walked through) produces a vibrant experience of the bliss-filled nature of creation in someone else..

18. The esoteric vision of twin soul spiritual destiny predicated in Faustorama becomes an unexpected reality in 2004. True love conquers all and heals the past.

19. The inspiration arises to create a large-scale symphonic oratorio as a healing myth to rebalance life on earth with the natural order of the universe..

20. My weekend with Marylin Ferguson, author of the Aquarian Conspiracy, and how wokeness betrays that promise of an enlightened New World..

21. Signs along the way, from rings on our fingers to 2001: A Space Odyssey, symbols of right living guide us towards our destiny. The true transformational theater is life itself..

Preface

IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE WORD PROCESSOR, AND THUS began the age of information. Then came the self-help book industry, a fruitful and multiplying annual market expected to rise to $14 billion by 2025. But from Its throne in Silicon Valley, the Creator looked upon Its creation and wondered, why do all these books look and sound as if they have been written by the same person? And the designers of the algorithms texted back, saying, It is by Your own edicts, such as: thou shall not use long sentences lest the people become bored or confused when they could be texting.

Carl Gustav Jung said that archetypes speak the language of grand rhetoric. In other words, they don’t talk like you and me. Take the archetypal figure of Moses in the film The Ten Commandments. While herding sheep at the foot of Mount Sinai, he sees a light near the summit coming from a bush that burns with a fire that doesn’t consume it. He doesn’t say to his friend Joshua, "Hey Josh, I’m gonna climb up there and check it out. Instead, he says, I shall turn aside and see this great sight. It’s a wonderful line because it carries an ancient echo of mystery and reverence toward the transcendent. But what does turn aside" mean? And not just to Moses. What can it mean to us today?

If we really want to know the truth about life and ourselves, we have to turn aside from our commonplace ways of thinking and doing. We have to ascend the mountain of knowledge within our own consciousness. The bush that burns with a fire that does not consume it is the tree-like spine and brain. Surrounded by our human flesh and blood, this central core constitutes the foundation of our physical existence. The vital life energy emanating from this inner tree is the blaze that powers up and illuminates our consciousness when we turn aside from the often senseless chaos of modern life to seek this wonder within. To ascend our inner Mount Sinai, we must climb beyond our habitual ideas of who and what we think we are and the collective sense of human limitation. Scaling the heights of soul awareness, we come face-to-face with the light of the Eternal Living Mind, the source of being within us all. And if we were to ask this Light for its name, doubtless it would say to us, as it did to Moses, I Am That I Am.

The self-help we need is to know by direct experience that this great power is the underlying reality of all that we are! Paradoxically, to ascend, we need to get out of our heads, into our bodies, and into our lives. A man from whom I have learned much, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a character if ever there was one, used to tell his students, You must feel, you must feel. Your mind is a luxury. Jung went even further saying, The world has sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.

But how do we get out of our heads which are on information overload? It is not through grasping at still more concepts or attempting to fix this or that aspect of our personal limitations. We need to be moved emotionally and spiritually as our minds search for true knowledge. This is where art comes in. Plays, movies, and music can touch us in such a way that all our senses become involved in giving us an experience that we can feel. Books can do this too, particularly when they engage us personally, allowing us to become temporarily identified with the experiences being written about. The books that have moved me the most have been about other people’s life experiences. Some of them have changed my life forever.

Walt Whitman wrote a poem called I Sing the Body Electric. That is what I have tried to do while writing this autobiography through words that I hope will sing in your soul. I am very proud that half of my heritage is rooted in Wales. It is a country known as the land of song, a place where hills, valleys, and mountain streams give rise to poetic masters of written words like Dylan Thomas and voices such as Richard Burton’s to speak them. Professionally, I am a composer of orchestral music, a playwright and songwriter in the pop music idiom, an actor, and a singer. Through this, I have learned that words can be made to sing in the mind of the reader or listener with a sense of immediacy that transcends the fashionable literary styles of any era. Drawing on these gifts, I have endeavored to give this book the sweep and color of a fast-moving symphony and the immediacy of a good pop song, with hooks to draw your interest and keep us moving forward to the next eventful scene. And I have used my actor’s ability to flesh out different characters to make them come alive in the theater of the reader’s imagination.

As I describe my adventures pushing the dynamics of consciousness seeking on the island of Anglesey, I want you to feel the Druidic atmosphere of that glorious place, its natural beauty, and its power to transform lives. When I go to live at Findhorn, the pioneering spiritual community in northern Scotland, I want to take you with me to experience what it is like to live with brothers and sisters from many countries, creating a model eco-village of the future. Or stand on stage with me, facing audiences as I perform my 20-character, one-man play on the life of Carl Gustav Jung. By the time we get to that part, you will have traveled with me through my inner journey, getting to know Jung’s living ethos and how his spirit is still alive and surrounding us all, and how we can learn to draw upon it to attain psychological wholeness. Likewise, when I describe the bliss that comes from seeking divine realization through the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, my prayer is that you feel a taste of that bliss as you read about some of the amazing things that have come to me through his ever-increasing spiritual world legacy.

The more we immerse ourselves in the presence of the First Cause of everything, the more we come to know our true selves, and the less we depend on quick fixes. Embracing instead the total story of our lives and saying yes to everything that has happened to us with a resounding shout of gratitude for our existence is heroic. We are all on a heroic journey, and the telling of our personal stories to ourselves and others can give meaning and purpose to our lives. In the ancient story, the people of Israel were in bondage to oppressive Egyptian taskmasters who compelled them to make bricks out of mud without straw. Today we are in bondage to the bricks of material consciousness and what I call false personality, the straw men and women we become when we have no sense of who and what we are as spiritual beings.

There are three questions we must ask ourselves. Where have we come from? What is the purpose of life? Who am I? When I used to travel extensively, giving workshops entitled Living the Power of Being and Presence, I would call for three volunteers to join me on stage to participate in a demonstration using kinesiology. I would then ask them one by one to extend their left arm and say to the audience, "Hello, I’m… followed by their name. Then I would physically push down on their arms. No one could ever resist when I did this. Each arm would go down immediately under light pressure from me. Next, I would ask them, each one in turn, to say instead, I am that I am, and my personal expression is…" and then say their name. Then I pushed down on their arm once more. In this second instance, I could not move their arms downward in the slightest. The audience would always cheer and applaud as the participants declared their names with power and authority, easily resisting the pressure I was applying to their arms…no matter how hard I pushed!

As long as we are who we think we are and spend our lives trying to get other people to acknowledge that phantom construct, we shall be weak people. What is so empowering about saying I Am That I Am? It is because we are invoking the name of the God who really has no name but is the source of power that lies at the center of our very being. On the cover of this book, you can see the words I AM next to the names of three great beings who transformed my life. It does not refer to my personal self. Instead, it refers to that same Source that spoke to Moses through the burning bush, commanding the prophet to return to Egypt and deliver the people from the Egyptians. Moses said to the Light…"How can I lead this people out of bondage? What words can I speak that they will heed? And the voice of the Light answered, I will teach thee what thou shall say. Then, Moses, rationalizing, said, If I say to your children, the god of your fathers has sent me, they will ask what is his name. And how shall I answer them? The immortal answer is the same today as it was in ancient times. I Am That I Am. You shall say, I Am That I Am hath sent me unto you."

This is not something we have to say to others literally. Rather we must feel it within ourselves and stay centered there while dealing with the inconsistencies in human behavior we encounter daily in the improvisational theater of life. The choice before us today is the same as in ancient times. Shall we spend the golden coins of our fleeting days trying to impose the limited ideas of who and what we think we are upon others? Or learn to willingly make ourselves available for a higher power to flow into the world through us, one that is beyond our personality structures? This does not mean that we come across to others sanctimoniously but rather as sharp-witted, courageous individuals who can stand unshaken in the face of unprecedented societal madness and speak incisively when the need arises.

The night before I started writing this book, I had an interesting dream. I was upstairs in a house where, on the ground floor, various Hollywood types were having a party I was supposed to attend. As I descended the stairs, a woman I knew was coming up them. When she saw me, she said, Oh, there you are. Come down. You’ll never believe it, but Billy Wilder is here. For those of you who don’t know him, Billy Wilder is the acclaimed director of several classic Hollywood movies, such as Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, and Some Like It Hot, hard-hitting dramas and comedies that expose the blind spots of human behavior. He is also known for his acerbic wit and willingness to call things as he sees them.

Billy Wilder, I thought. How cool is that? When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw that the room was full of various affected showbiz types who were in the grip of what I call false personality. That is to say, possessed by their self-manufactured social image of who they think they are or need to be. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, the idle chatter stopped, and everyone turned to stare at me with curious expectancy. Entering the room, I noticed a couch on my right. Two women were sitting on it, one at either end and an old man was lying on his back stretched out between them. The woman nearest me, a frozen-faced gossip columnist with a cigarette, shot a glance of contempt my way, which I ignored. I started to walk past the couch, but glancing down I saw Billy Wilder lying there. He was wrinkled, weak, and infirm and looked like he didn’t have long to live.

He looked up at me with great curiosity, and I took hold of one of his hands. As we gazed into each other’s eyes, the woman on the other end of the couch, another Hollywood snob type, put a sneering look on her face and said to me, So, you’re going to try and write your life story. Who do you think you are? Nobody cares, so why would you do it? I slowly turned my head in her direction and said with quiet authority….To direct the movie of my life to its intended conclusion. I was still holding Billy Wilder’s hand and returned my gaze to his eyes, which were now sparkling with life as I finished saying my line. His wrinkled old face broke into a smile, and he said, That’s the way, Kid. You tell them. Good for you. Then I woke up.

Although I always enjoy a movie directed by Billy Wilder, there are several other directors above him on my A list of all-time favorites. So why would he show up in my dream and give me a thumbs up, as it were? He was telling me to go ahead and write my autobiography and not to care what naysayers make of it, me, or my understanding of life and my journey through it. There will always be some people who don’t get you and others who will go out of their way not to see you. To truly see or be seen is a recognition of Being, not of false personality.

In my dream, Billy Wilder and I saw each other Being to Being in a room filled with people presenting their self-manufactured fake personas to one another. The opposite of this is meeting each other soul to soul, which is what I am hoping we will do as you read what follows. With luck, we will meet Being to Being. For those who can’t or won’t, well, you know who you are. But for those willing to see and be seen, let’s be off on our adventure together… to see what we can see.

Chapter 1

Seeing The Light in Hollywood

ON A BALMY SUMMER EVENING IN 1967, I SAT IN THE MID STALLS OF the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles in a state of excited spiritual curiosity. I had come to hear an introductory lecture on the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda and the life-transforming possibilities that awaited those who embarked upon a journey to self-realization. In recent months there had developed in me a burning desire to know if there is a God or not, and if so, is He or It, or whatever that might be, knowable by we mortals. Living in Hollywood will do that to you if you have a basic inclination toward truth. After you have seen enough of talented people riddled with insecurities trying to cover up their fears behind masks of invented false personalities, you might start asking yourself, is that all there is? So here I was, accompanied by my friend, an actor/singer named Bob Corff. We had come to find out if this Yogananada chap had his finger on the button of truth.

Since Yogananda had passed away in 1952, I was hoping the speaker that evening would be able to deliver the enlightening goods on behalf of the departed yoga master. Around 7:30 p.m., a small gentleman named Brother Anandamoy walked onto the stage. Taking up his position behind a centrally located lectern, he began to speak softly in a voice slightly tinged with what I took to be a German accent. I later found out he was of Swiss origin. He laid out in a simple, direct manner, that God was indeed real and knowable if and when we learn to still the restlessness of our minds and emotions through time-tested meditation practices. About five minutes into his talk I felt the need to rub my eyes. A strange white mist seemed to be filling the room, a cloudiness that made it difficult to see the speaker.

I assumed that staring fixedly at him behind the podium was straining my eyes in some way. So I blinked several times rapidly. But the white mist persisted and as this Brother Anandamoy got deeper into his talk, it began to thicken and then changed color into a golden light that spread throughout the room. Now I could barely see the heads of the people seated in the rows in front of me. But curiously, I began to see the speaker with absolute clarity. In front of the lectern had been placed a large vase full of orange flowers, probably chrysanthemums, and these suddenly began to emit rays of deep golden effulgence. Every time the speaker said the word God or Truth or made any point essentially revealing the divine underlying nature of creation, this golden light, now surrounding not just the flowers but the podium and the speaker, would shoot out in all directions. It seemed intoxicated with itself as if it were experiencing the joy of its own bliss-filled eternal nature as the great power that lies hidden beneath the seeming solidity of the material world. And I began feeling that joy in every fiber of my being.

The talk lasted close to an hour, throughout which time the ecstatic light persisted. When the speaker finally wrapped things up I knew by direct experience that when he said, God is ever conscious, ever existing, ever new joy and bliss, he had been speaking the truth. When Anandamoy left the stage, the light vanished. As the house lights went up and people began to stir, I turned to my friend Bob and said, Did you see the light? He snapped his fingers at me like a hipster and said, Yeah, man…I saw the light. His answer took me by surprise because I was assuming that everyone had seen it.

We sat there for a while as the attendees started to filter out. Then I noticed that the speaker, this Brother Anandamoy, having exited the stage, was now standing in the auditorium before the front row of seats, answering questions and doing a bit of follow-up with a small group of people. I got up and went to join them. Eventually, the others departed, and it was just him and me. He looked at me with a kind of quizzical detached interest as I said, Almost the whole time you were speaking a great light filled the room. It seemed intoxicated with its own being. What was that? Without batting an eye, as if what I had said indicated nothing out of the ordinary, he offered, Well, sometimes God just gives us a little come on. For emphasis, he raised his right hand between us and crooking his forefinger, he made a beckoning gesture with it. And that was it. I was hooked.

As Bob and I exited the hall, I was stepping into a world and a life that would never be the same. Today it is fashionable even among people who consider themselves spiritual to exclude God. They speak instead of the Universe or lean towards the void or the Nirvana of personal extinction. But in his talk, Anandamoy had said that God is ever existing, ever new conscious ecstasy and bliss. And knowable! But you don’t have to simply believe it. Through meditation, you can prove to yourself whether this is true. The question now for me was how to make that knowing a permanent, ongoing, sensed and felt reality every minute of every day in a world where people, by and large, know nothing of or care about what I had just seen and heard.

Autobiographies are usually written in chronological order from birth to the present day and tend to place emphasis on linear details of personal history. Memoirs can be written chronologically but often move back and forth in time and place, emphasizing emotional experiences and interiority and, in the case at hand, spirituality and consciousness. This book is a combination of all of the foregoing and might be best described as an autobiographical memoir, which gives us a literary landscape in which we can move back and forward in time as need be and freely encounter the famous (and infamous) who crossed my path. It also allows the celebration of the external and internal adventures of my journey in equal measure.

Reading the autobiographies, memoirs and journals of people I admire or whose lives I have felt compelled to study has been a rich source of extended education and inspiration for me. The actor in me got to study with Laurence Olivier, by proxy, as it were. Through his writings and film performances, I was able to look into his mind and feelings, strengths and weaknesses, defeats and victories, and this helped me to rise, through empathetic resonance with his journey, to benefit from his experience in my own life, on stage and off. As a composer, struggling through Richard Wagner’s massive egomaniacal book My Life was difficult at times. But he inspired me to work at a deep mythic level, pushing myself to try and create my version of what he saw as music and drama of the future.

Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi was not only Steve Jobs’s perpetually at-hand go-to book for daily inspiration but has been mine too. Likewise, Carl Gustav Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections is a highly personal account of his lifelong explorations in self-awareness. The thing is that when you get to know someone through an open expression of their personal journey, you can relate to them on a level of emotional resonance. This enables what you learn from them to become part of the atomic weight of your being, the amount of air you displace through presence when you walk in a room. Yogananda said, Truth is absorbed not with the mind but with the atoms. There, in a nutshell, lies the basic problem with most fix me self-help books. These can initially stimulate the greedy left brain seeking to grab at concepts as life preservers floating on the titanic ocean of endless human discomfort and suffering. But since these are only grasped mentally and not emotionally, the reader soon starts to sink again and begins looking for the next fix to come along.

My proposition to you is that a well-told spiritual life journey will engage not just our heads but our hearts and souls. It will expand our consciousness in such a way that we become filled with a buoyancy that makes us feel we are walking on the surface of the ocean of the material world’s delusions and not drowning in it. Looking back over the last eighty years of my journey, I can clearly see that the spiritual side of life on earth and the worldly dramas being acted out here are two necessary and complementary aspects in the energetic force field of an all-powerful, immanent and yet transcendent, intelligence. Jung’s famous quote, Reality lies at the point of tension between the opposites, indicates something within ourselves that must fully embrace the human experience while we, like that Creative Intelligence, also remain centered within at a point of transcendence. No matter how difficult the human experience can be at times, even the most seemingly ordinary events that occur in our lives are in effect, conspiring to push us towards what Jung called individuation. Seen in this way, the real-world dramas as well as the spiritually refining experiences of life, are complementary and necessary aspects of a whole system, essential to the process of becoming a psychologically integrated human being.

Achievement of this seems to require that a certain psychic heat be generated within us to fuse together all the far-flung aspects of the psyche into a living whole, at the center of which is the Self. Without the friction generated by the dramatic incidents we have to deal with each day and the difficulties we must overcome, would we ever seek to find within ourselves a central column of calm power around which the whirlwind of our personalities can safely revolve? To that end, I shall be passing on to you, throughout this book, many insights into various states of consciousness I have gathered from many sources or have developed myself. I use these to live from an expanded state of being and presence and personal magnetism while fully embracing spiritual and physical aspects of life simultaneously.

Before encountering the teachings of Yogananda and afterward

With this in mind, I also feel free to include in this story of my life journey not just the adventures and experiences in and of higher consciousness but also colorful personal tales of my adventures while Living in the Material World, as Beatle George Harrison put it. Through adopting this approach, we shall encounter some of the people I met who either helped or seemingly hindered me along the way, plus situations that were, unbeknownst to me at the time, ultimately working for my good. And what good is a story without saints and villains to deliver some flashes of color and a few laughs in a sometimes drab and difficult world? Also, we should not ignore the fact that even the most seemingly trivial incidentals in our lives may be there as a vital means of moving us from one place to another on the path to the true Self. For example, take how I came to be seated in a particular seat on a particular evening when I literally saw the light at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. It all began with the weekly washing of my laundry.

After living in Hollywood for eighteen months, pursuing my career in the music industry as a songwriter and recording artist, I had a nice Spanish-style apartment on Beachwood Drive but no car. Therefore, when it came time to do my weekly laundry, I would bundle everything up in a sheet and walk a mile or so down Beachwood Drive to a laundromat on Franklin Avenue.

One morning, about ten days before the event at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, I made this laundry trek with my bundle. But instead of going to my usual (and nearest) laundry on Franklin, something compelled me to walk past it, cross the road, turn right at the next corner and go to a somewhat shabbier laundromat on a side street. There was no logical reason for this. Why would I unthinkingly carry this burden of dirty clothes any farther than I had to?

Nevertheless, it happened, and soon my garments were busily churning away inside a washing machine. I sat down on a plastic chair to wait while they did their thing and, after a few moments, noticed some torn scraps of paper on the floor by my feet. On one of these fragments was a picture of a man with long black hair and lustrous eyes that seemed to be staring right at me. Who could this person be that was giving me such a knowing look? I picked up this image-bearing scrap from the floor and scrutinized it intensely. Then wanting to know who this man was, I gathered up all the other torn bits of paper and tried to piece them together. It gradually became clear that these torn pieces were part of a pamphlet about yogic meditation and some classes that were coming up soon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find enough bits of paper to complete the puzzle. Then I noticed that in a rack on the wall near the door, there were several intact pamphlets, so I got up and took one.

Now I could see the name of the person in the picture. It was Paramahansa Yogananda, a great Indian yogi who had come to America in the 1920s to bring the ancient techniques of meditation to the West. There was soon going to be an introductory lecture on his teachings at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, followed by four or five days of classes at which one could acquire instruction on various aspects of meditation practice. Even today, after decades of practicing the techniques I learned from Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization that Yogananda founded to promulgate his teachings, I am still humbled when I remember the first time I saw the face of this amazing divine personage, his image appeared humbly in the dust at my feet.

Humility is an interesting word. It could be used and abused to put people in their place and stop them from expressing their life experiences and talking about their journey on the spiritual path. For years I have refrained from setting down in print the biographical details of my life, lest I be accused (particularly by followers of Yogananda) of being on an ego trip. But now at the age of 79, as of this writing, I give myself permission to talk about what have been and remain the most meaningful core experiences of my journey through this world. For what else is a memoir but a written record of one’s experiences and the effect they have had on the author’s life?

I had arrived in Los Angeles in March of 1966, following up on an invitation by a Scottish guitarist/singer/songwriter I had worked with in Europe to form a pop/rock duo. Together, we would try to cash in on the tail end of the British Invasion of the American music industry begun by the Beatles and pursue fame and fortune via the Hollywood pop music recording scene. The plane bearing me towards this nebulous goal touched down at LAX an hour or so before dawn. My (about to be) partner Ralph Danks, who sometimes referred to himself as Gorbals Jim, in reference to the tough Glasgow slum area in which he had grown up, whisked me into a shiny Triumph TR6 sports car and we sped off towards Malibu.

As dawn was breaking, we pulled up at the back of a posh-looking house, and Ralph informed me that the house on the right belonged to Rod Steiger and the one on the left to Jack Lemmon, both well-known movie stars of the era. Depending upon your age, those names may now be somewhat obscured by the passage of time. But in 1967, their fame shone bright, and it was obvious to me that, what with the hot sports car and the classy beachfront homes, my partner in our musical adventure was no longer living in the Gorbals. We dropped my bags and guitar in the guest house, then walked through the main house and stepped onto the beach just as the sun was coming up over the mountains to the east behind us. As it lit up the ocean and ushered in the day, I stood before the great, gently rolling Pacific Ocean for the first time with a sense that something tremendous was going to happen in my life. Come fame or fortune, fair weather or foul, the vast ocean seemed like an invitation to expand into a future of hitherto unimagined possibility.

Appearances are seldom what they seem to be. It turned out that the sports car did not belong to my pal Ralph but to an actor named Jeremy Slate, the husband of the owner of the beachfront house, Broadway diva Tammy Grimes. They had gone to Italy for a couple of months, where she was making a movie, and had invited Ralph to live in the guest house while they were away. My buddy had a knack for ingratiating himself with those who could offer free homes, cars, and career opportunities. So my first home in the USA was a first-class situation.

Within weeks of my arrival, we had managers located in Beverly Hills and a recording contract with a new record company headed by Lee Hazlewood, writer/producer of Nancy Sinatra’s recent hit single These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ and an earlier string of hits by twangy guitarist Duane Rebel-’Rouser Eddy. Over the next two years, our managers were to ascend the ladder of success by handling the Turtles, Three Dog Night, and Steppenwolf. But what was to become of Jon and Raul? Who or what you might ask are they? And how do you pronounce that last name? Is it Ra-oool…or Rowl as in howl? No, insisted Ralph Gorbals Jim (who was forever changing his name)…it was all as in y’all. So easy for a DJ to pronounce, right? But you must remember our (not!) hits…the ones with such encouraging titles as You’re a Fool and You’d Better Go. There would be no Happy Together songs for us! We were too busy insulting people in ours and making them feel miserable. No wonder you never heard of us. Lee Hazlewood could get a hit with a song about a kinky boot-clad woman stomping a guy into the ground. But not us. I guess we were not the right kind of heels.

Fortunately, our managers, Reb Foster and Bill Utley, had faith in Jon and Raul (who stole the H from my John?) and our talent to the point that they kept us afloat financially for two years. They hired lawyers to change our visitor visas to permanent resident status through what was then a lengthy process of back and forth with the U.S. Immigration Department. We had to prove to their satisfaction that we were outstanding figures in our profession and would make a valued contribution to the American way of life. A far cry from today when illegal immigration is now being called undocumented. Until our honorable immigration process was finalized, we were not allowed to work at anything that might take income away from American citizens, such as performing live concerts. However, we could work in situations that gave work to citizens.

That meant we got to work in the top recording studios in Hollywood where sessions laying down tracks of our music, either for our own singles or other artists recording our songs, meant that we were employing members of the American Musicians Union. Through this, we got to work with top session players like now legendary Wrecking Crew, talents who have possibly played on more hit records than anyone in history. Also, with top recording engineers like Bones Howe, who was cranking out hits with the Mamas and the Papas, and in the hot studios like Western, United, and Gold Star. It was like being in record production boot camp, learning from and with the best. As we shall see, this training was to stand me in good stead years later when I began to produce and record my own songs, musicals, oratorios, and plays. These creations would reflect the different approach to life that resulted from my (quite literally) seeing the light after being introduced to the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda that eventful night in 1967.

What had happened to prepare me to receive that experience and change my life completely was not just one thing but a compendium of events, both inner and outer. Through the generosity and faith of our managers, we received a steady flow of advances from them based on our expected future pop star glory. Thanks to them and the filling of their own coffers from hits by the Turtles and Three Dog Night, in addition to my nice apartment, I got a tape recorder on which to lay down demos of my own compositions. These were coming more frequently as my relationship with my songwriting partner Ralph/Raul began to deteriorate. Curiously, this was happening as his relationship with himself, or his idea of who he had thought of himself as being, also began to disintegrate.

British rock musicians in the late fifties and early sixties had developed the art of the comeback and put-down to a fine degree, plus the art of being and looking cool. Anyone who wasn’t in that enchanted musical circle of cool, sarcastic behavior was called a pleb. And the general public was referred to as punters…Brit talk for those who bet on horses at U.K. racetracks, customers who flock to the sales, or clients of the oldest profession. Although I tried to look and be cool, I was never fully comfortable doing so due to a feeling of inauthenticity that came up when I attempted that kind of behavior. My pal Ralph-Raul was a master at this, and his put-downs and comebacks to people were accompanied by a hypnotic stare that could reduce Hollywood types and especially women to paranoid, submissive wrecks. He always gave off an air of being in possession of the ability to see right through people. And the fact that he was not very articulate unless spinning a fabricated yarn about himself added to his silent, mysterious aspect, which many women found irresistible. He had left a trail of conquests across Europe, some of which had consequences.

In 1967 Ralph told me about a scary dream he had. In it he worked in a lab as a white-clad assistant to some mad scientists who were performing experiments on people’s brains. His job was to sit behind a pane of glass before something like a recording studio mixing console, and, watched by some of his superiors, operate a death machine out in the main room. A couple of goons would drag a victim into the studio and strap him or her into a chair before a long barreled, ray gun contraption. This was then wheeled into a position where the tip of the barrel was an inch or so in front of the victim’s forehead, right at the point between the eyebrows. Then Ralph/Raul’s supervisors would signal him to press the button and fire the gun, the result of which was the termination of the victim. One day (in the dream), he noticed that the Nazi-like supervisors were looking at him in a peculiar manner. Next, the goon/thugs came in, grabbed my friend, and dragged him, struggling against them, into the studio. They strapped him into the death chair, wheeled the ray gun into position, and signaled the man in the glass booth to press the button and fire the gun. As Ralph/Raul told it, he found himself staring down into the barrel of the gun, terrified as the bullet came towards him with agonizing slowness. And just as it was about to strike home and blow his brains out, he woke up screaming.

Although in 1967, I knew nothing of Carl Jung or dream interpretation, I was able to figure out that this one seemed to signify that my friend’s days of being the supercool put-down artist were numbered. As we shall see, by letting go of all that nonsense better days lay ahead for him. While the rug of self-confidence was being pulled out from under his feet, my self-possession was turning into a magic carpet, one that was lifting me high above the Los Angeles smog and the haze of professional insecurity and shallowness that afflicted many of the denizens of Hollywood. Someone had recommended that I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, and this awakened a deep interest in Plato that prepared me for The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. Suddenly I was on fire. I could see that the pot and LSD show biz and music industry types I would run into at parties, for all their mind-altering experimentations, were truly clueless about the divine spiritual dimensions hidden behind the facade of the material world. Oh, they could ramble on about their perceptions of other realities when they were stoned. But I could now see that it was mostly subjective baloney derived from visitations to the endless alternate planes of imagination that run parallel to ordinary everyday thinking and perceptions about the solidity of the material world. In the long term, nothing could be built out of their experiences because when they came back from a trip, there was no one there to do anything with whatever it was they had seen and experienced. It was a phantasmagorical philosophical world of useless daydreaming filled with visions of a turn-on, tune-in, and drop-out utopia by undisciplined, ineffectual dreamers.

A case in point was the guy Ralph and I met who told us he had dropped acid, and when he looked in the bathroom mirror, there was no reflection of himself in it, just the wall behind where he was standing. Far out, man, as the saying goes. But what I was going to realize through the meditation practices I was learning from Yogananda’s teaching was that the blessings of expanded consciousness gained thereby will need a firmly grounded body-mind-organism to work through. Otherwise, the cup of human receptivity is not steady enough to hold the download of blessings being poured into it from the higher dimensions of light and bliss inhabited by the avatars of Divine realization.

Perhaps I was prepped to clearly see the limitations of LSD tripping while in Montreal for a couple of months in the winter of 1966, prior to flying to California to team up with Ralph. On the strength of having spent most of the previous year playing guitar for Johnny Hallyday, the Elvis of France, I quickly landed a gig playing guitar behind a Canadian night club act of some national popularity named Les Baronets. This was a three-man act modeled after the Four Seasons, of which one of the singers was René Angélil, later to become the manager/husband of Celine Dion. We did a few gigs around Montreal and the city of Quebec. It was during the last of these that I decided to answer the call of California. I’d had enough of being a backup musician, a rut I would sometimes fall into when my career as a singer/guitarist solo recording artist occasionally stalled. On the last night of my last gig with Les Baronets, prior to doing the show and leaving for Los Angeles, I went to a nearby restaurant to grab some dinner. I sat down at a recently vacated table where someone had left a copy of a weekly news magazine. On the cover, in large letters, was the word LSD. I placed my order and began to read an article about the phenomenon of a psychedelic drug craze, which was prevalent in California and was also rapidly sweeping the world.

I have never been a cigarette smoker nor had much interest in alcohol, so I was not intrigued by the possibility of altering my mind with hallucinogens. The things I read that determined me not to fall into the LSD trip trap after I arrived on the West Coast were (a) the stories of people who had bad trips and (b) the possible damage to brain cells that might occur as a result of ingesting these substances. Over the years, I had seen enough of what havoc drugs and booze could wreak on my fellow musicians and had managed to avoid such pitfalls, not out of any virtue on my part, but because I just had no taste for these things. For me at that time, making music was like a religion, something that I sensed would take me to a promised land. So indeed it turned out to be, as God was drawing me to that goal by my encountering Yogananda in California, a mind-altering experience not triggered by ingesting some currently fashionable chemical.

After my meal and enlightening read, I returned to the club, and we played the gig. It was a job that rendered me faceless, just standing towards the back of the stage, chugging away on guitar next to a sloppy drummer and nondescript bass player going through a series of bland pop songs performed by Les Baronets interspersed with corny jokes. Being the last night of the short tour, after their act was finished, a party began. The stars of the evening knew that I had been a minor pop star in France early in my career. Les Baronets were sitting at a table near the stage while the band and I trotted out some basic jazzy instrumentals that people could dance to. As we wrapped up one of these, René Angélil called out above the noise of the