In 1969, during what became known as the Summer of Love, I was working as a stewardess for United Airlines, out of San Francisco. Work life was Miss Stewardess, prim and proper, and in the off-hours a hippie in Marin County. United had announced a special program for airline volunteers to have a work experience in Asia and I had applied to the Tom Dooley Foundation for a position working with Tibetan refugee children in a day care centre at the carpet factory in Jawalakhel in Nepal. When I flew to Kathmandu to check out my future post, I met a hipster there named Milan Melvin who had been married to Joan Baez’ little sister, Mimi Farina.

Warner Brothers wanted to make a movie about a caravan of freaks crossing America giving free concerts (they had 25 tie-dyed tee-pees and 150 freaks in 15 psychedelic-painted school buses giving free concerts across the country). Milan Melvin was the caravan master leading them on his chopped Harley, with his long dark hair flying in the wind. When they got to New York, Warner Bros chartered an Air India 747 and flew them all to the Isle of Wight festival in England. From there they handed out enough money to everybody to get home and half of the freaks took that money and went to Kathmandu. Milan stayed on and when I arrived, I went to look him up as one of the contacts I had, and I didn’t return to my hotel room for three days.

I loved Kathmandu and checked out the post I wanted to take on. I flew back to San Francisco, where I met up with Milan again; we spent the night in a sleeping bag on a friend’s floor, and when we woke up in the morning I said cheekily, “If we got married, you’d have the same airline discounts as I do!” He responded smilingly, “Oh yeah?” He then did a special on Bill Graham on the radio station, and Tom Donahue (who started KSAN with Milan) married us (me being topless) between takes with a Universal Life Minister’s card.

Almost immediately after that we returned to Nepal, for a four-month period working with the Tibetans. Milan had just finished writing the book, Colloquial Tibetan in Common Dialect, so I learned the language, and for the next three years, more or less ‘became a Tibetan’. Together we built another day care centre in Boudhanath which was very fulfilling for both of us. We financed it through donations from the Grateful Dead and our families. We also traded in Tibetan goods such as antiques, turquoise, and coral, carpets, exporting such goods to America.

I felt strongly that I didn’t want to return to living in America but wanted to discover more of Asia, and so eventually we came to Bali where we lived for six months in 1975; we designed and produced a hand-made silver jewellery collection we intended to market, and kept pursuing our persistent dream, which was to own a boat and sail around the world.

While I was in Bali and my husband in India to buy stones for our jewellery project, I met a lovely woman by the name of Christina Foley. There was something so special about our instant heart connection which truly touched me somewhere deep; it was a recognition of some kind, triggering some unknown longing in me…. I was sorry to say goodbye when she left to follow her dream of Montessori training in Hyderabad.

We sold our collection in America very successfully and returned to Bangkok via Egypt and then Jerusalem, looking for Eilat stones. We also visited Hong Kong to check out boat builders who seemed to be quite out of our league. Settling then in Bangkok, we set up a silver casting factory to produce the designs we had created in Bali.

We wound up living near the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok for more than two years and enjoyed many trips to Phuket where we went scuba diving. We finally bought a ferro-cement hull, a double-ended shrimp quarry boat 52 feet long, right about the time our son, Mocean Chandler, was born. He spent the first year of his life mostly on that boat, which we re-rigged into a Chinese junk and named ‘Lorca’.

Living in Bangkok, one meets lots of travellers passing through. At a friend’s house, I met such a traveller who was introduced to me as Swiss Peter, but he told me his name was Bhikshu. He was wearing red jeans and a mala around his neck which had a photo dangling from it. I was very curious. “What can you tell me about the man whose photo you are wearing?” I asked. He said, “I don’t know what to tell you, I’m just in love with the guy.” On some level, it made perfect sense to me that if somebody is in love with a person to wear their photo, and was more than satisfied with his answer; I didn’t investigate much further because I sensed what he had experienced was truly something indescribable.

About a year later, who should show up at our door but Christina Foley, the lady I’d met in Bali previously. I was so happy to see her again! We all hugged and made a fuss, and she said very clearly, “But now, my name is Sanghamitra.” I looked at her and saw she was wearing an orange robe, and that mala, again! She took some good-natured teasing from the boys, but I was fascinated. I wanted to hear all about her recent life in a place called Poona in India.

She stayed for a couple of days in Bangkok, so we took her along on a weekend trip on our boat. She loved the snorkelling, and I loved the stories she told about her new teacher, Bhagwan. She invited me to meditate with her, calling it the Nadabrahma meditation; we took a little tape recorder and went up on the roof of the boat which was anchored and gently bobbing. We started humming….

Well… in those days we were getting high a lot, but that experience, on that little roof top on a boat, made me higher than anything I’d known before, and I was hooked. Before she continued her journey, Sanghamitra gave me a photo of her master Bhagwan wearing a big smile, which the boys would only let me put up in the boat’s little loo. The loo fondly became known as ‘The Bhag’.

While we were still preparing the boat for its maiden voyage and expanding our silver jewellery business into a gold chain enterprise, I experienced a certain restlessness and also a fondness and fascination about this Bhagwan, and soon I took our eleven-month-old baby and embarked for a month’s holiday to Poona.

Need I say more? Well, yes. It was love at first sight. My first chance to see Bhagwan was in a morning discourse where I had to sit way in the back as I didn’t pass the sniff test, and I had to wrap my hair in a red scarf. When he entered the hall, he appeared small in the distance and this amazing man seemed not to walk, but to float. I was instantly in love seeing him approach and take his seat. Here was pure Grace.

I did not take sannyas that first time, because I had a macho husband and a child, and this boat dream was yet unfulfilled. With Mocean a little more than one year old, we finally set off on our maiden voyage, leaving Thailand on the Ides of March. For a while, life was reality vs. the dream; the dream being dropping anchor on white sand beaches and experiencing total freedom, while reality was smelly boat harbours and lots of restrictions. I realized much later that the freedom I had been seeking all along couldn’t have been found out there, but later, inside; in Poona.

Within a year, all but the child were finished, and I returned with my boy to the Master. Then I became Ma Prem Atta, and my life was filled with joy and celebration, and remains so today. I am eternally grateful to Osho, and am still “in love with the guy”.

 

“I don’t want anybody to cling to me, to be attached to me in any way. My whole effort is to give you total freedom and methods so that whatever you want, you can create it within yourself. Not even God is needed, nothing is needed – you are enough unto yourself.

This is the great blessing of existence to every human being. You are made with such perfection – but you never explore it, it remains dormant.

Just become an explorer of your own interiority, of your own subjectivity, and you will find thousands of ecstasies, immense blessings, unimagined, undreamt of.

You are a paradise, but you have forgotten yourself. You are looking everywhere except within you, and that is the only place where you are going to find the treasure, the truth, the beauty.”

Osho, Beyond Enlightenment, Ch 21, Q 2

From the book, Past the Point of No Return by Ma Anand Bhagawati