Twenty-some years ago, my sister Janet and I signed up for a field trip sponsored by the Crystal Cathedral to a Vedanta monastery in the nearby Saddleback Mountains. At that time we were working together on a discernment newsletter called “The New Age Alert” and attended as part of our research. The field trip was being promoted as an educational adventure to examine the similarities and differences of two supposedly opposite extremes of religious expression. The tour guide was a lady who was a long-time member of Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and she introduced herself as an aficionado of comparative religions.
The day started with a guided tour of the Crystal Cathedral grounds after we all met up at the statue of Job in the courtyard. Then after the tour of the most decadent ostentatious so-called house of God on the planet (that’s another story altogether), we boarded buses that took us on a short jaunt to the nearby wilderness. A man with a shaved head, in a red robe, with a blank look on his face greeted us. He told us not to concern ourselves with the fact that we would be ignored by all the Vedanta monks because they are in silence.
The red-robed automatons kept at their work on the beautiful grounds of this gated cloister, without glancing in the direction of this group of mostly trendy Orange County housewives walking past. The blank stares on the faces of these men were a bit unnerving for Janet and me. They gave us the creeps, quite frankly. Their expressions remind me of the cult leader who led his thirty-nine followers to suicide to catch a ride on the Comet Hale-Bopp some ten years later.
The “holy man” who was our guide to the grounds led us into a beautiful den with a fireplace and a large mahogany desk upon which a vase of freshly-cut flowers had been placed. The room was filled with books in built-in shelving and the furnishings looked like a blast from the past of a bygone era. We stood around in a circle as the monk gave us the history of the den. He told us that this was the retreat of a famous author named Aldous Huxley. Huxley had waited out World War II there as a place to get away from it all and as he tried unsuccessfully to establish a religious college there. “‘After seven years, he turned the property over to the Vedanta Society,” according to a published report in the July 15, 2006 issue of the New York Times. ”’They were trying to combine Eastern and Western philosophy and religion, but were ahead of their time,’’ said Swami Tadatmananda, 70, who leads the monastery.” . . . . . .
Read the Rest of the Article Here.
