A CONVERSATION WITH THE SHERPAS (continued)
TK: Well, I was born in Memphis, and I grew up in the Deep South, I wouldn't say being dragged to church, but my family was very religious. I grew up in the Episcopal Church. But I don't know, I didn't really connect with it that strongly. And as I got older and I was a troubled teenager and rebellious and all that, I associated the church with a lot of stuff that didn't feel right to me, stuff about my family and society in general. I thought there was a lot of hypocrisy in the church, a lot of talking the talk that didn't result in walking the walk.
And then I kind of threw out the baby with the bath water. I called myself an atheist for a while, when I was in my twenties. And when I was in my twenties I started doing some therapy and some personal growth work, and I was very careful to couch it all in secular terms. But after a period of time, I guess it started breaking down for me. I realized that I just couldn't avoid that there was a spiritual element to lots of things in my life. And one of the things that helped me turn the corner was I was introduced to this book called A Course in Miracles.
TPR: Really? I didn't know that.
TK: And I studied it for four years. I studied it for four years, and it was transformational for me. It taught me to pray. It taught me to allow for things that I didn't understand. It taught me to go with things that I felt but couldn't really articulate, to trust that the feelings were real. It brought me to trusting my intuition more about things, the way love was speaking to me without being in a system that I could nail down. I eventually got to a certain place where I started feeling that A Course in Miracles had been a great gift in my life, but there was something else coming. It was a very powerful, hard to describe feeling, except that I knew it was the real thing. And I guess a few months after I started having that feeling and talking about it to my wife and other people, a friend of mine sent me this thing called The Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course. And to make a long story short, it was that thing I felt coming. I knew it. I knew it intuitively. And I've studied it for almost seventeen years.
PM: And that is Muktananda, is it not?
TK: It's Muktananda's movement that he brought over from India, yeah. And for me the thing that's beautiful about Siddha Yoga is that it is a practice and a discipline. It's just a big love thing, and about trusting love.
PM: It's a Bhakti Yoga thing, right?
TK: Yeah, yeah. Test its efficacy, you know, it holds water. When you trust love, and you open to your feelings without sacrificing love, shit happens. So I've got a guru, Guru Mai.
PM: And where does she live?
TK: She lives part of the year in India at the Mother Ashram.
PM: And is she American or Indian?
TK: She's Indian. She grew up with Muktananda. And part of the time she tours around the world. Their ashrams are centered around the world. She's a young woman. She's in her forties.
PM: Wow.
TK: But one of the beautiful things about Siddha Yoga for me is that when I would go on the retreats, I was really drawn to this meditation area in the woods near the Ashram, which has some beautiful statues of Jesus as a man, Mary with the baby, a St. Francis. And I began to go to this place and pray and meditate. And something happened that began to draw me back towards re-examining the Christian tradition that I grew up in. And Thich Nhat Hanh was part of that, when I read Living Buddha, Living Christ. Also one of Matthew Fox's books--he was a Catholic priest who was tossed out of the church for talking too much love, basically. Emmylou Harris turned me on to his teaching. He wrote a beautiful book called Original Blessing. It says, "This is Christ's message, it was original blessing, not original sin. It was original blessing."
PM: I've got to get onto this.
TK: And so now I'm attending the Episcopal church again.
TPR: You are?
TK: It's a very liberal church. It's way rooted in social activism. My girlfriend brought me into it. They support a big program in Nashville for getting prostitutes off the street, and off drugs and alcohol, helping them get reoriented into another kind of social structure in their lives, and being self sufficient.
PM: I've heard of that, what's that program called?
TK: It's called the Magdalene Project. [TK's phone rings, it's his girlfriend Robin, she's brought some promo materials he needed.]
I just think that Siddha Yoga is a living path. It's about love in action. And when I'm close to it, I think it comes out in the songs--not in the way of trying to manufacture spirit in a song, but just the way all real creativity expresses what's going on down deep, what's going on in the fabric of your life and in the substance of your being. One of the things I really love about working with Michael and Tom is that they're into it. We don't have to struggle to communicate when we're working on "One Heart" or "I See Myself in You," or songs like that.
PM: You don't have to explain it to each other, you know what you're talking about.
TK: Yeah. And plus, I'm not into New Age music at all.
TPR: I'm not either.
TK: Preachy stuff turns me off. It's got to be an organic thing.
ML: We're always careful about that, too, when we're working on a song--even talking about a specific line, like, is it too preachy? Does it sound sort of judgmental? And it's more of a shared observation, instead of saying "This is how you should see it."
TPR: Well, we kind of straddle that line in "Gitanjali." I mean, it's very spiritual.
ML: It is, yeah.
TK: I love that song.
ML: But everybody is not going to get it or agree about it. Everybody doesn't have to get it in the same way. continue
