SERENE

San Diego, California, 1997

Rachel

I can feel the rose oil on my skin. Mother Serene says that being chosen as the Bride of Passion is an honor. We who are candidates speak together about what it all means.

“The Guru selects the one who can bring Omshanti closer to alignment with our guiding galaxy.” Elouise looks up at the blue sky as she says this. Her head is always in the clouds.

I have a more practical guess. “He likes young girls. I’ve seen him staring at my ass when we dance the Shiva and Shakti at the monthly full moon celebration.”

“Rachel, you should be dancing as Kali, the menacing one. You are always seeing the darkest aspects of existence.” Linda is jealous because I was chosen over her. We have always been rivals, but I am the one who got his stares, and I am the one who is to be his bride of passion.

All those girls who were not selected perform the ritual of preparation inside the passion chamber. I did this last year, when I was twelve, so I know what is done to the room where it all takes place. First, the water bed is layered with rose petals. I remember seeing the soft red tongues undulate like a crimson sea as I pushed down on the end of the bed.

Another girl sprays the room with lilac scent so it becomes a floral paradise of odors that mix with the burning frankincense-jasmine incense. The smoke curls from the black rods stuck inside the tusks of the statue of the Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of new beginnings. One girl climbs a ladder to clean the ceiling mirror, which has the characters of the Hindu Trinity pasted on it. Brahma, the Creator. Vishnu, the Preserver. Shiva, the Destroyer or Transformer.

Every bride enters the passion chamber to the recorded music of Ravi Shankar. Guru says that since we are all one family, our surname fits our nature. Serene is a state of calm joy, peaceful tranquility that can withstand the rigors of the outside world and the passions of the inside demons of temptation and fear.

However, as I enter the chamber, I do not feel serene. My heart is racing, and my palms and forehead are perspiring. No matter what my parents have told me about this ceremony, something inside me says it is not natural. Before we came to Omshanti, we lived together in Ocean Beach.

My parents are scientists. They work for Guru to develop technology that helps humanity. I might one day become a scientist, but right now I want a time machine to take me out of this room! My father said we were Jews, and my mother read me the Hebrew Scriptures every night before I went to sleep. It is one of those stories that fills my consciousness as Guru walks toward me inside the chamber.

Linda stands next to me as I recline on the bed, my perfumed body rippling on the waterbed like a lotus. She extends the red satin pillow to me. On it are the daily passion pills that are given to those girls who have had their first menstruation. I take one and place it on my tongue. I swallow, but my mouth is dry, so I gag.

Guru has a silver goblet in his hand, and he places the rim to my lips. I drink the dark blue liquid, and it is my first taste of wine. As he waves Linda away, I can hear her bare feet padding softly on the wood floor, and then the door shuts behind her. Guru says two words before my entire mind is taken over by my Jewish fantasy: “My bride.”

I stand with my people on the top of Mount Masada in Israel. It is just after the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, and they were now coming after us. We know there is no hope. We are outnumbered. They have the weapons, the monstrous battering ram on the 300-foot platform. We can hear the wheels turning in the desert sand as the platform approaches the cliffs on the west side. There is only one way out because without suicide, we will be forced to worship their false gods.

Omshanti has taught me to worship false gods. And now, the tall dark man with the flowing beard is grabbing at my nightgown. I have no underwear. I have no escape.

I remember the quote from Josephus because we discussed it one night after my mother read it to me. I was told that the mystical meaning behind the quote was that we can only escape persecution by dwelling in the mystery of Yahweh’s Kingdom:

“We must not choose slavery now, and with it penalties that will mean the end of everything if we fall alive into the hands of the Romans. God has given us this privilege that we can die nobly and as free Jews and leave this world as free Jews in company with our wives and children.”

My passion is taken from me inside this chamber. As Linda cleans up the bloodstains on my legs and inner thighs, I come back to this world. I think about my parents coming to America.

My parents never spoke much about it. They were a part of the contingent of orphans allowed to immigrate to an abandoned Bronx YMCA in the summer of that year. My father came from Russia and my mother from Poland.

My mother told me there was a small staff of local Jews who welcomed the international contingent of children to this building in the hot summer of 1946. “Our receiving center in the Bronx was a dark multi-storied structure, an absolute fire trap, with many small rooms and few bathrooms. Not a tree nor bush was in sight from the front stoop, we were surrounded by asphalt.” My mother told me this when we lived in Ocean Beach. She said she was five years old and my father was seven.

My father never talked about anything related to these days. He was found by Russian troops abandoned in a field after the fleeing Germans had come through the night before, shooting every Jew they could round up. Somehow, one of the Russian peasants, a non-Jew, had taken him to this field and left him there.

Imagine waking up in the Tower of Babel every morning. These children came from Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and many other countries. They did not understand each other, nor did the American staff understand them. Their Jewish orthodoxy was as varied as their national origin, but a few spoke Yiddish. Even that language was of little help since each region of the world where it is spoken has developed a distinct dialect.

“We used hands, feet and facial grimaces to get our message across the language barrier. We played Jacob’s ladder, a string game played by children all over the world, to establish a common ground with the other young people,” my mother said.

The campers spanned the ages of one to officially eighteen, although they knew that some of the boys were older but were able to disguise their chronological age to qualify for a United States visa. The youngest child, found naked in a hayloft outside Kiev by a U.S. soldier, was estimated to be between one and two years old. “She came to the Bronx nameless, and we had a little naming party for her a few days after she arrived; we gave her the name Ruth, our director’s name.”

I loved to hear these stories from my mother. They were the only connections I had with my past other than our lives together as a tiny family of three. When my parents were able to graduate from college in New York City, which had very inexpensive tuition in those days, they got married. As they were both engineers, they had a lot in common, and they were even able to work at the same company, IBM. They were transferred to UCSD in 1969, where IBM was financing a computer research project.

When Guru Sharma came to San Marcos in 1990, he offered them a job. They had seen him in his orange robes in downtown San Diego. My parents worked on their own assisting the homeless on weekends. Sharma was building up his ashram in San Marcos, and when he told my parents about his belief in science and human freedom, they became his first converts from the professional research and development community. I was ten when we moved out of our house in Ocean Beach to the commune in San Marcos. I was twelve when I was chosen as the Guru’s “bride of passion.”

A boy named Seth runs up to me that day as I am walking back to our dormitory. His eyes are wide, and his voice trembles. “Your parents are dead! I saw them take their bodies out of the lab.”

Guru

Bhagwan Sharma told them when they entered Omshanti that they were born anew. Just as he was able to come to America without the burdens of the past, so he presented his followers with a new way of seeing this world of illusions. The answer to this mysterious existence, where we attempt to become citizens of a country whose leaders believe military power is the only way to achieve respect, is to grasp local control over the body politic.

He began in 1990, with 208 followers, when the United States started its decline and was losing its center. He drove his Volkswagen van down Market Street, where the newly homeless could be found, and he recruited members for the new colony of Omshanti. He told them he would inspire them to think as one and to learn to work in gardens and laboratories in return for free food, guided meditation, and joyful dancing. He told them that the only way out of this nation that runs on the greed of the senses is to learn the ancient lesson of serenity.

With every new individual and family group that was brought to the rented compound in San Marcos, he was counting votes. He knew they would grow and survive only if they were able to vote enough members on the city council. All of his hopes and dreams of establishing a commune of scientific progress and spiritual harmony rested on whether or not they could gain control of that council form of government.

The date is May 21, 1992, and they have grown into a group that owns this ten acres of land with the fifteen buildings and the Omshanti Temple. They are now a 501c, tax-exempt religious organization with 875 followers. They are growing by an average of fifteen new members each week, and they recruit from other states and countries.

He now has a Rolls Royce instead of the damaged VW, and serenity permeates his every step inside Omshanti. As a licensed California pastor of the Hindu faith, he can perform marriages, which he does. However, all of the couples understand that their loving bonds are not trapped inside monogamous ritual. Instead, sexual love becomes just as important to their serenity as spiritual love. If they can share their possessions, even their wives, then they can share love on all levels of existence.

No longer does Omshanti become trapped inside the box of conformity and militant ritual. They dance, they sing, and they share joy, and they hope to keep their Andromeda Galaxy moving toward this Milky Way. Our planets have beings who share physical love and inner spiritual harmony, and Omshantians believe it is their purpose to grow in numbers so that when Andromeda finally mixes with Earth’s galaxy, all humans will be prepared for the changes that will occur.

Until then, he can only create the serenity of passionate openness by initiating these brides of passion. The steps are exactly sixty-three from his room in the Serenity compound to the bridal suite. In Nepal, the living child Kumari goddesses are worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists. But they are prepubescent, and his goddesses must be women.

The power of his lingam can only be raised by entering a virgin yoni. It is, indeed, the left-handed Tantric method. His spirit is sated from this ceremony, and he does not prohibit homosexual or bisexual activities as a path to awaken the Kundalini snake inside. He only wants followers to show love and devotion toward others with whom they perform coitus.

He chose her because her parents were martyrs. She must learn that her love extends outward to encompass the universe, just as she has the universe contained within. Monogamous family constructs serve capitalistic masters. Not that having mistresses or misters is discouraged on the outside.

No, as long as the capitalists benefit from the sins, straying from the nuclear family is permitted. They must show them all how love is to be shared, just as wealth of mind and spirit must be shared. Her parents realized this, even though they died attempting to show the world how it can be possible to harness Eros to control violence.

She gags on the passion pill, so he gives her a drink from his chalice. He looks into her dark eyes and says, “My bride.”

After he cleans up, he can see the boy running toward her on the quad. They must have come to collect the bodies. When she begins to scream, he knows her time with Omshanti is over.