teacher was at one of the buddhafield s weekly meetings in west hollywood called satsang. i was told his name was michel. he just was soft and his energy was just still, you know. i just thought wow, what a beautiful man. if you think of tomorrow, you re unhappy. if you think of the past, you can become miserable. happiness is wherever you are. wherever you are is where happiness is. he spoke as if he had gone into the cosmos and come back and was here to tell us about it and take us there. have you made contact with the eternal, or are you still obsessed with the momentary? when are you going to wake up? when are you going to realize what you re doing with this precious energy, with this
buddhafield as my family, i was alone. he told me he was only working with me this way, and i could not tell anyone because they would not understand. nobody had the complete story. so some people knew some things, other people new other things, i knew the thing that i knew but nobody was allowed to really talk to each other about it. i had no clue that he had been seducing so many of the men in the community. when i heard the stories about what was actually happening, that was when i was like you mother [ expletive ]. along with the confessions of sexual abuse came other stories. he told me to say i had cancer and i had to tell my best friends, my lover, everyone, and i had to keep that a secret so
and some of the older people that had been around since the beginning were kind of looking at each other going i didn t hear to where this suddenly changed to where it s all about him instead of all about your inner experience. i wouldn t refer to him other than anything he was, an out-of-work actor who stumbled on the role of a lifetime. one of the people that had been around for a long time wrote an e-mail and he sent it out to like everybody in the buddhafield. there was this e-mail that was sent out about all this stuff, it was like what the [ expletive ] is this? the author of the e-mail was
loved to be. he was unlike anyone i had ever met before. he encouraged me to drop all my ideas of what i thought i was supposed to be. i finally felt like i was on the right path. i attended every meeting, every group outing we would take and even went to michel s weekly individual hypnotherapy sessions called cleansings. i really felt like something important was happening in my life. namaste. namaste. look who arrived. i really fell in love with other people first. what are you doing? we re not doing anything. we were together 24/7. we lived together, we ate together, played together. everybody that i knew was in the buddhafield. my circle, my family, was the buddhafield.
buddhafield and i had a group of new disciples eager to do service with me. i set out to make our house in austin a place of peace and beauty. by the time we were finished, we had built not only a massive garden but also an aviary complete with peacocks, exotic birds, even a wallabee. the garden became our sanctuary and his house became like a refuge from the outside world. things quieted down. time went by and we didn t hear much from cult awareness network anymore. we thought we might be getting back to normal but the demands of the buddhafield and andreas became greater and greater. the aviary with all the birds and bunnies was overrun by rats. we would lift up a rock and hundreds of rats would go running out.