In the midst of this came the internet explosion, and I began to
create a little website that became a labor of love and service. Year by year, page by page, and file by
file, I was building an extensive online resource of free multimedia resources
for those who were seeking the kind of teachings, music, videos, and writings
that I'd learned from my gurus and was now offering to the world in my own little
way.
When work possibilities arose, I would accept them, especially if
they were helping to bring more light rather than darkness to the world. I would always do my best on these
projects, and would often receive great gratitude from the clients. I was a
simple monastic at heart, doing my best to live my nature even in the
not-so-monastic world. And for some unscrupulous folks with less
integrity, I must have looked like an easy mark.
This came to a head at a time when I'd just completed a beautiful
video for the city of San Diego about their CalWorks welfare-to-work
program. I worked with the heads
of various San Diego agencies, worked with a wonderful film crew as we
interviewed over 50 people on camera and filmed many relevant scenes from
classes, jobs, and childcare facilities.
The CalWorks video was a huge success that ended up being used in
ways that went way beyond its initial purpose. The piece was shown many times
on television, and was also shown to new welfare clients. I had composed and sung a song of
encouragement throughout the video, and was moved to know that my efforts were
helping to soothe people's hearts and give them faith and self-respect during
their time of extreme need.
Many of the people I interviewed for this video were clients who
had gone through severe financial difficulties, drug addictions, homelessness,
domestic violence situations, and mental health challenges. I would
deeply connect with each person before our filmed interview, and would sit
right next to the camera so they could converse with me as we filmed.
Looking deeply into these people's eyes, I would feel a deep love and respect
for each one of them. My guru's teachings about seeing God in each other
came leaping up as these challenged souls would open up their most vulnerable
thoughts to share with the camera and me.
I'm sure one reason these interview subjects felt so comfortable
with me was because I was also one of them. I certainly had been through
my own extreme challenges in recent years, and probably had earned less than
some of them had in previous years — in fact most of the clients were
better dressed than I was!
CLICK HERE to View the "Faces of CalWorks" Video
Help with realplayer here 
During the very moving experience of filming of these interviews
and scripting and editing the final video, I was able to tap into this
experience of oneness. And just as the CalWorks program was helping to
provide paying jobs for these unfortunate people, so it was also providing me
with a job that finally paid a proper and good wage.
With this wage, I was able to purchase a computer with multimedia
software that would come to create many more good works in years to
come. When you live under the poverty line and a bit of money comes in,
you definitely get to find out more about what your priorities are.
One interesting element of this blip of financial abundance on the
radar of ten years of earning under the poverty line came when I had occasion
to actually step into a mall to buy something. It had been a long time
since I went shopping for anything other than immediate necessities, although
during my Hollywood days, I'd been to many malls, and had sometimes literally
gone shopping without needing anything, just looking for things I might like to
buy.
Another surprise was to find out how much garbage was generated by
purchasing products. It seems that somewhere during my first years of
low-income living, packaging had
became very intricate and abundant, and much less simple or ecological.
During these short times of financial resources, I had a lot more garbage to
deal with, and that included throwing away some very nice little boxes and
other kinds of wrapping that were used to protect each piece of each appliance
or other product. It looked like a lot of waste, and I had to make myself
throw away all the nice jars and cardboard squares that I thought one day could
have been used for something. Perhaps this is how some people become
hoarders and packrats. They don't have much for some time, which gives
them more respect for the potential usefulness and value of things than to just
throw them out as trash.
Soon after as this CalWorks project was completed, I was
approached to do another project, and then another one and another one. All three of these subsequent projects
ended up being financially disastrous, with one paying for my work with bad
checks, another not paying at all, and some very strange entanglements with
educational and government departments whose improper behavior translated into
more losses for me.
With poverty and other challenges coming at me from many directions,
I also had the same choice as Job — how to receive what was being given,
in this case poverty and many other challenges. One line that often came to
support me when another pile of bricks in my life collapsed was, "Either
you trust God, or you don't." Perhaps this idea also came to Job
during his times of trial.
CLICK HERE to view a video from this time where I speak and sing about: Trust God! Trust Love!
While I might have enjoyed comparing my plight to that of the
honorable Biblical figure Job, there was also a looming image of Sisyphus, who
was condemned by the Gods to have to keep rolling the same rock uphill 
throughout eternity. I was creating and creating and giving and giving what I
thought would be very helpful for society at this important time in human
evolution. I worked every day and approached each book, CD, video and other projects
with enthusiasm and optimism, even when, taken all together, these many efforts
had barely brought in even enough finances to pay my expenses for a few months
of those ten years.
At the same time, many people were touched by the books, music,
and videos, and the guests to my website offerings quickly grew to hundreds
every day. But as several
marketing experts have lectured me, having a lot of website traffic with
everything being offered for free does not bring in money. You'd think I could have figured that
out!
My aspirations to focus on giving were altruistic, but also
self-protective. As an artist, I
felt that jumping too deeply into materialistic concerns and business
negotiations could dampen my creative flow, which in spite of the challenges
was indeed flowing abundantly. As
a spiritual author, I could see how easy it was to be pulled into the illusions
of worldly interests, even for spiritual teachers. I wanted to serve humanity without being corrupted by
humanity.
Then, my company was hired to do projects with the United States
Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Reserve, and the
National Institutes of Health.
HUD and the Federal Reserve
In the midst of my time of poverty, I was hired to produce a
series of videos for the Interagency Federal Task Force initiated by President
George W. Bush, and headed by HUD and the Federal Reserve. The purpose of the
program was to teach financial responsibility to the poorest residents of
central California so they could eventually buy a house for their
families. It was called, "Una Casa Para Mi Familia".
The task force members from HUD, Federal Reserve, and Citibank all
wanted to show the videos at their meetings about one month after we completed
filming. This meant I had to put all other projects aside and work every
day, often long days and sometimes overnight, to log the many hours of
interviews and additional footage, write a script, and edit several drafts of
the videos until they were polished and ready to be shown.
The task force also hired a wonderful camera crew that I'd
recommended, and we approached this project as a labor of love and created a
series of excellent videos at a very low price, due to the social merits of the
project.
We quickly created DVDs of the videos and sent them overnight to
the various meetings. Copies were sent by the task force to President
George Bush through his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso
Jackson, as well as to many senators, business owners, and others government
and private organizations.
The videos were shown at a large Federal Reserve Board meeting and
in meetings held by the task force, Citibank, Ruiz Foods, and others. Many of the task force members received
kudos and benefits from these beautifully-produced videos – a 40-minute
documentary, 10-minute overview, and several shorter Public Service
Announcements – and the main videos were available on the task force
website for 6 months. Once the task force received all these videos, the camera
crew and I were paid for the
project with a series of bad checks.
My company and the camera crew had been hired on behalf of the
task force by one of the main steering committee members, who had been
designated a key leader of the initiative and given extensive authority on
behalf of the task force. Who would have imagined that nobody on this
major federal task force headed by HUD and the Federal Reserve had thought of
doing any kind of background check on this woman before giving her this major
position of responsibility? She'd had tons of legal troubles in the past from
her improper actions, and a history of being fired for mental issues.
Carolyn had heard about my video skills from her new housemate,
Betty, who was an acquaintence from the San Diego meditation center.
After we'd already begun the project, I received an email from
Betty titled "Warning!!!" In it, she described an awful
situation where Carolyn had moved into her house as a renter, and then had
terrorized and traumatized Betty into letting her stay there for free, using
threats, blackmail, and other unscrupulous means to con Betty out of other
money as well.
This email from Betty was so bizarre that I wasn't sure which of
them had gone off the deep end. I
assumed the truth must be somewhat less than what Betty described, however, I
later found out that this kind of behavior was part of Carolyn's modus
operandi. Along with having a crazy, con artist side, Carolyn also
presented herself as a competent and caring businessperson. Based on my experiences of her, I
suppose that Carolyn was probably a combination of both extremes, and most
likely had a mental illness such as multiple personality disorder.
With her competent, caring side, Carolyn had convinced the San
Joaquin Valley Financial Education Task Force members to give her a leader
status on the task force. She was starting a company that would stand to
benefit greatly from the association, and she enticed members of the task force
to support her with inappropriate incentives, such as promises of wealth and
jobs for some of the steering committee members. I participated in a
conversation with one of the task force members from HUD, who was planning to
quit her job with HUD and be hired by Carolyn's company as soon as her company
began rolling in the expected millions. Other task force members had
received promises of stock options with Carolyn's company.
With the approval of all the board members, Carolyn had hired my
company and the camera crew to produce, film, script, and edit these videos for
the task force.
It didn't take long before the warning signs started coming.
Carolyn forgot to bring our first check to the shoot. The motel phoned me
after our shoot at Ruiz Foods in Dinuba, because Carolyn had paid for the
crew's stay with a bad credit card number. Carolyn showed other signs of
a person capable of cracking under stress, and she tossed off lies more easily
than truth. Without making you read through all the trying circumstances
we went through with this poor woman, let's just say that we were dealing with
someone for whom if she said something, that meant it was less likely to be
true than if she hadn't said it.
Even before all the videos were completed, sent, and shown in the
many venues, the camera crew and I had received bad checks, but there was
always an excuse of what mistakes the bank had made or some assistant who
didn't really exist had neglected to change the number of this or that.
At that point, we had HUD and the Federal Reserve eagerly awating these videos
on a very tight deadline, so we just focused on getting the project completed
in time, and assumed that any problems with these checks would be taken care of
either by Carolyn or the task force.
The stalling went on for month after month, and as usual it came
during a time of life-and-death finances for me. Eventually I alerted the
rest of the task force to the problem, and they quickly found out that Carolyn
had been lying to them about many things. She was immediately booted off from having any participation in the effort,
and the coordinator of the task force, the head of HUD for central California,
promised that he would talk to all the partners and make sure we were paid for
the excellent videos that they had all been pleased with.
Then came months and months of this guy stalling and promising and
postponing, and then finally came word that they couldn't find funds and were
not going to pay us anything.
One of the many sobering lessons I learned from this experience
was that it is one thing to offer my works for free by inspired choice, and
quite another to have thieves steal my good works. This situation wouldn't
have been as big a deal if I wasn't down to zero money. I would have just thought it was an
interesting lesson and moved on. Instead, I did what I could to contact everyone involved – up to
President Bush – to ask them to right this truly inappropriate wrong.
I got to see what it felt like to work in a collections agency,
but in this case I was trying to collect on bad checks that had been passed on
behalf of the United States Federal Reserve and the Department of Housing and
Urban Development!
I didn't really Carolyn responsible for these problems, even though she was the one who had fooled the interagency task force into making her a financial leader of their initiative and had then passed bad checks to us on their behalf. Having discovered some of her problematic history of similar events and having watched her in action personally, I felt that Carolyn's dishonesty was probably more a reflection of her mental issues than simply greed or thievary.
But the heads of this initiatve from HUD and the Federal Reserve were a different story. In the midst of promising payment during three months of stalling, the HUD representative who
headed the task force looked at my website and was interested in the fact that
I was a spiritual author. He asked
if I would do him a personal favor of reading through his personal
"recovered Catholic" writings, and he asked for this favor in the same email where he was again guaranteeing payment, either from the task force partners or the department of Housing and Urban Development, which had made extensive use of our videos. I reluctantly agreed to read through this man's writings
because he seemed to be tying this
request into his assurance that the camera crew and I would be paid for the
work we had done – as if I wanted to read the ramblings of this head of a
bad-check-passing financial education task force!
In the end, the HUD representative showed as little integrity as
the con artist, and, after playing stalling and trickery games for many months,
simply blew off this debt. I'm sure the Pope didn't shed too many tears
over losing this creep from his flock. The others involved with this
"financial education" task force, many of whom were good people with
integrity, fell in line behind these few bad apples.
I had a front row view into how many problems in our government
and other organizations start — one person with a lack of integrity
brings in others who have a lack of integrity, and those with good integrity
feel obliged to support the bad actions of those above them on the
organizational totem pole. Everyone has something at stake – whether a
job or an agreement between their company and the government agency – and
they're afraid to call out misbehaviors out of fear of losing their personal
benefits.
At first, the very high-integrity representative to the project
from Citibank expressed outrage that we hadn't been paid, because Citibank had
actually given $4000 to the task force specifically to be used for our
pay! Then, someone must have told
her to be quiet about it, and the small light of integrity on this task force
was extinguished. Ultimately, this program that had shown so much potential to help
so many, as we portrayed honestly and enthusiastically in the videos, ended up
being a complete failure that did little or nothing to help the immigrant
workers it was intended to help.
CLICK HERE to view one of the financial education videos we produced for this "bad check passing" federal task force.
Many of the speakers featured in this video were certainly coming from the right place in terms of wanting to help people in need. Some even expressed being upset by the behaviors of the coordinators in charge and their bad decisions, including allowing my company and the camera crew to be paid for this work with a series of bad checks.
"No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."
-- Lily Tomlin
Now even though I was fretting about this situation, I was also quite clear that I had brought it to myself in an esoteric, power of thoughts way. With my growing distaste for money, I had come to a place where I preferred to do my work for free, and indeed, most of my works were charitable, with little or no pay and sometimes considerable expenses. This feeling of freedom in giving was part of my nature -- a part that had grown stronger during my decade of offering selfless service freely in the monastic ashram environment. In Hollywood I had made myself overcome this shyness about money enough to receive generally good pay from the work I did, but now I just didn't have it in me to wheel or deal. I wanted to trust God and the universe to bring me whatever I was meant to have, and I didn't want a drop more than that.
This surrendered awareness and commitment would stay strong deep inside me even when my mind was concerned or upset about the outer events. It's something I write about in the chapter of Secrets of Spiritual Happiness titled Cultivate Dual Awareness.
UCSD and The National Institute of Mental Health
Right around the same time that I realized this federal financial
agency was not going to make good on the bad checks they had passed to the
camera crew and me, I was thrown off-course by yet another corrupt government
agency together with an esteemed educational institution.
A successful UCSD scientist, Dr. Guest, had heard about the
successful video I'd produced for the Department of Health and Human Services
CalWorks program. He asked to meet
with me, hired me to produce some videos to use in procuring a large grant, and
also proposed that his department partner with me to submit a Small Business
Innovations and Research (SBIR) grant to the National Institute of Mental
Health.
The idea of the Small Business Innovations and Research grant is
to fund projects that bring scientists together with businesses to bring more
beneficial works to the world. The entire process would be funded by NIMH, and
the small business, in our case my budding Night Lotus Productions, would own
the products and be allowed to sell and distribute them in the future for
profit. If approved, this project would bring in nearly a million dollars in
grant funds and an ongoing flow of income in the future — money that
would have served to fund many good Night Lotus projects.
At the time, I was earning under the poverty line, and would say
yes to nearly any project that came up. This one sounded especially promising.
While working on the project, I witnessed what I felt were
unethical behaviors by the scientist and the head of SBIR grants at NIMH
— these preferential treatments were toward helping our project, but
still concerned me, because I am not used to or comfortable with lying, hiding,
or cheating.
The scientist's assistant and Edith, the NIMH woman overseeing
these grants, were friends with one another, and Edith would give preferential
treatment to the scientist's many grants. I saw other scientists sometimes express jealousy about the scientist's
abundance of grants, which Dr. Guest seemed to enjoy while chuckling them off
with a slightly smug look of pride. I don't know if these other scientists knew
or suspected that Dr. Guest had his own “mole” at the NIMH. The UCSD department
actually referred to this NIMH friend as "the mole," as in, "Did
you talk to the mole today?"
When visiting San Diego, "the mole" would stay at the
home of her friend, the scientist's assistant. Edith was also helping the scientist to get a seven million
dollar grant, using the video prototypes that I'd produced, filmed, and edited
for the scientist at extremely low rates since we were doing the SBIR project
together.
Edith ensured that our project received the smaller Phase I
funding to produce the prototype video, and suggested that we would be on a
fast track to having our Phase II grant accepted. She offered special
guidance on how to maximize our proposal — none of which was allowable
under the strict grant-funding rules. Edith also suggested that we include
in the grant request a proposal to do some work that she knew had already been done previously by the
scientist's department, because she thought it would help to fatten up what we
were offering to do under our Phase I accomplishments.
Basically, this major executive at the United States National Institute of Mental Health was telling us to lie and reference these already-completed bibliographies as something we would be doing slowly and falsely tracking in our monthly progress reports.
I was uncomfortable with the air of dishonesty in this department --
such as being guided to fudge this or that fact or figure, as was apparently
done all the time in their grants. This dishonest reporting went against
my own commitment to integrity and honesty, and was disturbing on many
levels. However, I felt that the universe had brought me this project to
do, and that I had to acquiesce to the realities of this grant-funding world,
of which I had almost no knowledge. After all, even "the mole" had
made it clear that she expected us to fudge some of the facts and figures in
our work and reports. When in Rome. . .
In spite of my misgivings about all this fudging and dishonesty, I
didn't insist that we follow strict integrity rules. I was trying to fit into a
world that seemed to run on illusions and secret handshakes, and I was quite
sure that speaking up too much would mean the end of their interest in working
with such a goodie-two-shoes.
We received some small initial funds for Phase I of the grant to
create multimedia training modules in mental health research ethics, with most
of these funds going to the scientist's department and the ten friends that
he'd asked me to put on the list as highly paid consultants, while telling me I
shouldn't actually ask them to put any time into the project, other than
filling out a simple questionnaire about the final completed video.
I saw how some scientists were giving each other financial
benefits from their grants, with the understanding that those scientists would
also include them on their grants — it reminded me of politicians greasing
each others' palms.
In spite of having to give into into some of these improper
circumstances, I insisted on doing a great job on this video. I thought it was
a wonderful idea use of video production, and I was, after all, the official
“Principal Investigator” of the project.
Dr. Guest received pay from the project and was supposed to be the
main scientific advisor, but as soon as we received the grant, he withdrew
himself almost completely from our efforts. His department was like a
grant-making machine where the emphasis was on receiving grants rather than on
properly fulfilling the purpose of those grants.
I saw on Dr. Guest's official annual report that our Phase I grant
had been his only official professional accomplishment that year, and realized
that he had received what he wanted or needed from the project and had other
things to do now that we'd received the grant.
Regardless, I wasn't going to get bogged down by this scientist's
disinterest. Another knowledgeable
scientist in the department had a great attitude and was willing to act as a
surrogate scientific advisor for the project. With Daniel's help, we
filmed, produced, and edited a very fine and powerful documentary-style
prototype video on the history and practice of informed consent –
beginning with the notorious dastardly experiments done by Nazis on Jewish
people who had been incarcerated in their concentration camps, through the
Nuremberg trials, and other improper medical decisions that had resulted in
today's rules, which were also carefully explained by various experts in our
video.
Informed consent consists of the safety guidelines that are
necessary to curtail medical research on human beings. The project was an
excellent union of science and my video company's small business skill, which
is exactly what the Small Business Innovations and Research program is intended
to support. Our "mole" at NIMH said it was the most exciting
project of any of the ones she was working on, and she seemed to be certain
that we'd receive the important Phase II funding, and even described how we'd
be able to parlay that funding into a marketing budget to sell the product,
with my company owning the product 100%.
CLICK HERE to play the main video produced as part of this National Institutes of Mental Health/UCSD project.
After using our grant to spice up his accomplishment report for
the year, Dr. Guest received a big promotion to head an important institute
along with his duties at UCSD. Just days before we were traveling to Washington DC to meet with our
project's NIMH liaison, aka “the mole,” this scientist called me into his
office and told me he was going to have to quit the project. I was
surprised but still hopeful that we would be able to find another expert
scientists who would actually care about and participate in the Phase II
process. After all, we'd already interviewed a number of top-notch scientists
in the field, who had all been excited about what we were doing.
Just a few days before he, his assistant, and I were to fly to
Washington DC for a meeting with Edith at NIMH, the scientist asked me not to
tell Edith the mole about his promotion or that he was leaving the
project. I didn't know why, but he
spoke with his usual tone of authority and knowing what would be best — I
naively assumed he was doing what would be best for the project, but
apparently, he was creating this air of dishonesty for his own reasons.
Due to the scientist's request, our meeting at NIMH with Edith was
filled with misinformation, as the scientist acted as though he was going to be
fully active in Phase II of our project. Being dishonest violated my most
important commitments in life, and it was a very uncomfortable meeting for me,
despite the NIMH woman's enthusiasm for our project.
Almost immediately after our meeting at NIMH, the scientist
dropped our project like a hot potato, and showed no interest or support in
helping to move the project to the next step with our other interested expert
scientists. Soon afterward, this scientist received a seven million
dollar grant based on the videos I'd produced for his department.
I learned many things from this situation — I had
compromised my integrity to go along with the shady aspects of this situation,
and had one more shocking view of government corruption, favoritism, and waste
of funds. I also got to see firsthand
how some successful people get that way – by using and stepping on others
to further their own careers.
I had spent nearly three years working very hard for almost no pay
to create our Phase I production, and in the end, neither our scientific
advisor, Dr. Guest, or our SBIR supervisor, Edith, even watched our beautiful
hour-long documentary about the history and modern-day application of Informed
Consent as part of our series of research ethics training modules.
Philanthropic Woes
Within a two-month span, I had found out that HUD and the Federal Reserve
were not going to make good on the bad checks my camera crew and I had received
from their representative, and had also found out that after nearly three years
of work on the NIMH project, the scientist and his “mole” had derailed Phase
Two of our project. Now, once again, after all these efforts, I had nothing to
live on except a couple of nearly-full credit cards. After trying to fight these corrupt government agencies for
months, I finally gave up, feeling quite somber and devastated.
It was at this point that I received a call from the man who was
currently heading the philanthropic wing of my guru's work. This organization did great work in
India and also in Mexico, California, and New York — offering eye camps
to restore sight and fix crossed eyes, giving food and milk on a daily basis to
school children, making micro loans so the poorest women in India could start
small businesses, and much more. The head of this organization didn't know me and perhaps hadn't heard
any of the negative rumors. He
wanted to know if I'd be willing to edit a video for them as service, meaning
without pay. As always when called upon to support my guru's works, I said I
would be happy to do it. Even
though this video wouldn't do anything to help my financial situation, I looked
forward to delving into such a positive creative project.
I jumped wholeheartedly into nearly two months of deep immersion
in creating this very full video. A basic script had been written, but I had to go through about a hundred
hours of footage to find the right shots to include, and choose music pieces
from whatever CDs and recordings were available. This video was narrated by the wonderful actress Phylicia
Rashad, whose personal nature was just as kind and generous as the motherly
role she played on the Cosby Show for many years in the 1980's.
I had nothing left — barely enough funds available to borrow
from credit cards to pay my rent and basic bills while editing this video. I did have editing equipment at home
and loved being able to serve my guru's work from right in the midst of my life
in Cardiff by the Sea. For the next month and a half, I worked morning till
night on this new labor of love.
Part of the video showed the foundation's mobile dental hospital
that would go to schools in upstate New York, where many children couldn't
afford proper dental care. Hey,
join the club. Over the previous
years of living under the poverty line, the last thing I had funds for was
dental care. In fact, my mouth was
filled with needy teeth — from old missing caps to chipped teeth,
cavities, cracked dental work, and lots of toothaches.
Over this decade-plus of living under the poverty line, I went
through many dental and medical needs that I simply didn't have resources to
address. Sometimes I'd have a toothache for months on end before it would
somehow disappear, perhaps due to the nerve dying. It was a sad way to live for someone who had been brought up
with proper finances for such things. I had never liked going to the dentist, but at this point would have
really appreciated having some work done so I could chew food properly and be
free from the constant throbbing.
Of course, most people around the world live without having dental
care, and somehow they survive the pain of decaying teeth, although it was
great to see that this foundation was helping many of the children in upstate
New York to get the dental care they needed through the mobile dental bus. I would have liked to have hopped on that
bus for a bit of help, but of course, that wasn't being offered. What I did have was the opportunity to
serve others, and I was grateful to be able to use my skills to help.
The final video was beautiful. Dylan, the head of the organization who had asked me to do
the project, told me exuberantly that every single person who saw the video
LOVED IT!!!! There were
discussions about putting the video on cable TV, and an arrangement was made to
immediately print 1000 DVDs the next week to send to their major donors.
This apparent happy ending was like a magical dream come true, and
was healing for my spirit. Although I used to edit hundreds of videos for my guru's foundation
without having to go through any kind of extensive approval process while
living in the ashram, things had changes a lot over the years. Now, just about everything created by
any department had to go through a long sequence of approvals from various
committees, individuals, experts, and focus groups. It got to the point where videos were being created and
tossed out left and right, with people's time, work, energy, and care being
wasted and often disrespected.
Just the year before, I'd been called to the ashram twice to
script and edit several videos, including two major mini-documentaries for
another of the ashram's charitable projects that strove to preserve the
scholarly traditions of ancient India for future generations through many
wonderful projects.
I had spent a couple months scripting and editing beautiful first
draft edits of these two videos for this scholarly foundation — one was
completed at the main ashram, the other back home on my editing equipment. However, the head of this charitable
foundation never found time to give feedback or support the projects she had requested,
promising that she would for many months, and then eventually dropping the
project and asking me to send the video storage drive to her.
Personally, I thought the approach that was now being taken toward creative and service works by our guru's ashram and its auxilliary foundations was wasteful and wrong for
many reasons. First, it served to
squelch people's creative spirit — although one could also argue that it
gave more opportunities for them to surrender all their efforts selflessly,
without looking for even the fruits of having their works be used. Was it
spiritual testing or just poor decisions and disrespect for people's time,
energy, and donated funds? Things
can get confusing when you look at them from many angles. Also, throwing so much work away was
akin to throwing money down the drain. I couldn't see how this was a positive way for our guru's ashram or
charitable foundations to go.
But Dylan was the head of this branch of charitable service, and
he had promised me at the beginning of this project that we wouldn't have any
of those kinds of problems, because he was the only one who had to approve the
video. I spent a month and a half
creating a beautiful video as a labor of love. Not only did I not get paid for this work, but I also had to
spend hundreds of dollars from my quickly fading credit card balances to pay
for production and mailing expenses for the video.
Still, I was happy to find that Dylan and everyone else involved
loved the video. At one point I
asked Dylan if the scriptwriter was also happy with the final edit, and he
responded with his thick Australian accent, “Kumuda, don't you understand? EVERYONE here LOVES this video!”
Once I knew that the video was approved, I set about doing the
micro-polishing that had won me so many awards in Hollywood — finessing
every frame of every shot down to 1/30th of a second to flow
perfectly with the music and words. Even though I was feeling financially and
emotionally devastated from all the recent jobs gone wrong, my spirit was
lifted by feeling that I was contributing something beautiful for the good of
mankind and my guru's charitable works.
Then, just days before the video was to be duplicated onto DVDs,
came the call. I received a
mysterious message from Dylan saying that some anonymous person who was not our
guru but not otherwise identified, had one little comment about the video that
would require re-recording the entire narration and doing a complete re-edit
from top to bottom. Dylan asked me to send the video and audio drives I'd
meticulously organized and logged to him so that he could see if there was a
video editor who would be able to work with him on the re-edit during his
upcoming trip to Europe. Several
years later, the video was completed, quite butchered and not nearly as
powerful or beautiful as what we'd offered. Even though this sequence of events wasn't intended to be a
personal slap to me, it was one more disastrous event in a fairly disastrous
year.
Taking Refuge
As these three projects came crashing down during the same few
months, I hit bottom, then hit a deeper bottom, and then an even deeper
one. There was still no money, but
now I'd even used up my credit card balances on the cards those credit card
companies had jumped to offer me after I'd declared bankruptcy while writing
the first edition of Spirituality For Dummies.
I'd certainly tried to generate income through at least the first
two of these projects — one was scheduled to bring in $850,000 over the
next couple years, with the potential to bring in good income indefinitely as
we made our NIMH project available for sale to the scientific community in the
form of multimedia training modules for research ethics.
For the HUD-Federal Reserve project, I'd gone way above the call
of duty to not only produce and edit the original ten-minute video I'd been
hired to do, but also a forty-minute documentary that would provide the project
with more avenues to help those in need. But what I'd gotten in return was not only a series of bad checks, but a
lot of run-around with low integrity government officials who promised to pay,
and then stalled for month after month before letting our companies fall to the
side, unpaid for the work that they had so proudly showed to so many companies
and government agencies and officials.
And now even my two-month charitable, non-paying labor of love
video that everyone had loved, was thrown in the trash, with no reimbursement
of my expenses and barely a thank you.
Throughout these years, whenever time was available, I continued
to write and record and edit and add to the Night Lotus website of free
multimedia spiritual resources. I
felt that if only I had some funds, there were so many more projects I could do
through Night Lotus. But then I'd
also look at people who had plenty of money, and saw that many of them would
get preoccupied in the needs of maintaining their things, and didn't often have
the peaceful solitude that I found to be helpful for dipping into my soul and
expressing it's treasures in limited but still vibrant writings, music, videos,
and more.
I had thought Spirituality For Dummies would bring in some steady
royalties — it was a good book, all around. But like my other works, it seemed to be virtually
invisible. Some of the reasons for
this were spiritual people's aversion to the “negative” title, an inappropriate
photo on the cover of dark leafless trees around a stagnant stream with a few
rays of light barely streaming through the darkness. Also, the book had been
placed on the worst possible shelf in Barnes & Noble stores — the
very lonely Comparative Religions aisle.
When this 0% interest offer came for a loan that would allow me to
survive for a little bit longer, I was grateful. I was already in debt and
concerned about borrowing more, but at this point, my choice was to either
accept this loan and do my best to keep up the payments on my other cards —
which I did for several years — or to go homeless.
This new credit card allowed me to pay expenses and interest on
other debts for several months. I
knew I was digging myself a hole, but didn't feel I had another reasonable
option, and I still had hopes that something would come through. My health wasn't up to snuff, so
getting a basic office or food-service job wouldn't work. Also, after jumping
into these other projects, I was feeling more and more committed to following
the command I'd been given to share what I'd learned with the world. Clearly, the universe hadn't supported
my jumping into all these other projects and arenas. I felt that there was more I could offer to the world
through creative spiritual works, whether these works would be discovered
during or after my lifetime.
My friend Swami Nirmalananda had just translated the Bhagavad Gita
— India's most popular spiritual text — into singable English. He spent three years doing this
painstaking translation into the same meter that would be used to sing the
scripture in Sanskrit. The Bhagavad Gita was said to be around 3500 years old,
and apparently nobody had yet created a version that could be sung in English,
and therefore nobody had recorded it being sung. Wouldn't that be a great
project to take refuge in during this challenging time?
Since the swami is a monk and since we are friends, he agreed to
let me record the translation without requesting compensation. I was going to use my new credit card
to produce real retail CDs and see if they could be sold as a way to help
support our other works.
Recording the text was an amazing spiritual support for me at a
time when I'd just hit bottom. As
I would sing Arjuna's questions to his guru Krishna, I'd be feeling the same
distraught sorrow and desire to give up that he was expressing. Then I'd have to sing back and embody
the wisdom of Krishna's words as he comforted and enlightened Arjuna. Over the next month, I recorded and
edited all 18 chapters, and then put the whole thing online as part of the
Night Lotus website of 100% free multimedia spiritual offerings. So much for my business plan.
It's not so much that I didn't want to be paid for these CDs, but
that I didn't have resources to properly publicize the work, and also knew that certain potent forms of spiritual
wisdom are not necessarily the most appealing or fun for the masses. Since this
work was part of my deep soul calling, I would have paid to share these works
with people who might benefit from them. And in fact, that's just what I was doing — paying to create the
works and offer what came to be thousands of files online, free.
Truly, I felt an inner sense of being paid just knowing that
five-hundred or more guests from around the world were coming to my website
every day to check out and enjoy our offerings. As the Glorious Bhagavad Gita Sung in English explains
through the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna:
Arjuna said:
What, Krishna, is the description
Of
the man of steady wisdom,
Steadfast in deep meditation—
How
does he speak, or sit, or walk?
The Holy Lord (Krishna) said:
All
the desires of the mind,
His self satisfied by the self,
He
is called “of steady wisdom.”
Unshaken by adversity,
And
freed from desire for pleasures,
Free from passion, fear, and anger,
Steady
in thought—such is a sage.
Without attachment on all sides,
In
the pleasant or unpleasant
Not rejoicing or disliking,
His
wisdom is seen to stand firm.
And when he withdraws completely
The
senses from the sense-objects,
As the tortoise draws in its limbs,
His
wisdom is established firm.
Then Came Muffy
Soon after all these challenging events took place, I met Ms.
Muffy, a woman who was the president of the trustees of our largest local
new-age church. She hired me to
create a multimedia webpage for her, with graphics, audio files, logo, and
other elements.
Ms. Muffy and I met for tea and had a long discussion about the
project and our various life experiences. She was wanting to share her
“good news” positive world events reports, and also expand her prosperity
coaching practice. I shared with Ms. Muffy about some of my recent experiences,
and how I was wanting to heal some of the money issues that had come in part
from my negative associations with that famous money author whose career I'd
helped to start, and were manifesting as all these jobs falling through and not receiving proper compensation for my work. Muffy said that
along with paying me, she would help me to resolve some of my wounds and issues
that kept creating these devastating financial circumstances. This sounded
great.
I was very clear with Muffy about being in desperate financial
straits and having to be paid for this project. Muffy agreed, although
didn't seem to want to commit to an exact budget (first alarm) — the
general gist was that I would earn from $500 to $1000 for the project of
creating this multimedia website for her, which ended up taking over 50 hours
to complete.
While I was halfway through the project, Muffy told me that she
had hired a company to create a logo for her, but that she hadn't liked any of
their designs and wouldn't have to pay them for the designs based on some
loophole in their agreement. The
second alarm bell went off. My BS
meter had gotten better from dealing with a real, bonafide con artist on the
HUD/Federal Reserve project. But
once again, I was not in a position to lose this project by getting negative or
suspicious. This was going to be
my rent money for the next month.
Muffy asked me to create the logo instead, saying, “I'd much
rather have that $175 go to you anyway!” I agreed, and created several fine logos until we had one that Muffy
liked.
Muffy knew that I was right at the edge of homelessness, and she
agreed to pay, although I hadn't watched enough shows of Judge Judy to insist
upon a written contract. Actually,
I've watched a lot more Judge Judy shows since this time, and still don't like
having to deal with contracts unless absolutely necessary. I decided that
it is better to be generally trusting and sometimes be wrong than to go around
being suspicious and focused on what I was going to get from the situation. I
preferred the monastic approach of doing what came up to be done without
getting too concerned about the fruits of my labor, and trusting God in all
things.
Also, Muffy was the president of the trustees of our local large
new age church, so surely she was a trustworthy person.
Ms. Muffy also started phoning me for long hours of personal
advice for problems she was going through with her roommate and family, which
in all honesty was a part of the job I could have done without, but again
happily offered my listening ear and suggestions.
After I'd spent a month creating this beautiful multimedia website
for her "Good News" presentations, "Good News Muffy" became
bad news scruffy. Once the project was completed, I sent an email to
remind Muffy to pay me for the project. Again, this pay was meant to be
my rent money, as I was down to basic survival expenses.
Muffy phoned back, and left a message saying, "You know
Sharon, I don't think I've ever told you that I only earn $10 an
hour." Muffy then went on to tell me that she didn't have any money
(in spite of driving a fairly new Lexus), and explained that she was having to
leave town to take care of her ailing mother and would not be able to pay me
even a penny for all that work, ending with a callous, "Sorry about
that! Bye!"
I lift up my eyes to the hills —
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip —
He who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, He who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD watches over you —
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The LORD will keep you from all harm —
He will watch over your life;
the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forever more.
— Psalm 121
Just months earlier, I had been ripped off by the Federal Reserve,
HUD, and the National Institutes of Health, and now I was being plundered by a
representative of our local church. Since my intention was to focus on the
blessings and lessons that came through any and all circumstances, I would
often consider that perhaps the universe was putting me through these tests and
challenges to strengthen my fortitude and integrity, and to learn —
through repetition — to not get disappointed when things didn't meet my
optimistic expectations.
I was like the song sung by the music group Chumba Wumba, "I get knocked down, but I get up again; no you're never gonna get me down!" And as if to reinforce this pattern, right in the midst of these years of challenge, I was hired to edit a video for Amgen Pharmaceutical that was filmed during their 3-day convention and shown during their final meeting. This video used Chumba Wumba's song during the ending credits, so I heard the line about getting back up after being knocked down hund