THIS JUST IN.."THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE EXISTS FOR ONE PURPOSE ONLY....FOR ME(AND YOU) TO EXPERIENCE THE JOY OF SELF REALIZATION" not sure who said that

SO, i've been thinking about writing something for some time now, and now seems to be the time....it's a pretty simple story, but rather profound, at least in my mind...

i had gone back to Ames, Iowa after returning home from India in the fall of 1971. it was early 72 and i was living with my friends out on their farm near Ames. i had brought with me a poster which featured a picture or photo, i forget which, of Prem Rawat, then still a young man, sitting in the lotus position in a Krishna outfit. i remember the background being bright orange. i don't remember what exactly the poster was for, but probably one of our early propaganda pieces advertising our newly found Guru. i had tucked the poster away in a storage space under a stairway or something along with some other junk. the space was one of those dark crampy spidery spaces only a few feet wide that is really just empty space and not a real closet. i wasn't particularly fond of the poster. that's why it was tucked away in the crampy closet and not on the wall. i had had some hard times in India, having gone there with no money, getting sick the second or third day, and struggling through much of each of those toilet-paper-and-proper-toilet free 45 days with a painful gut-ache and diarrhea....

one day one of our housemates, i think his name was Mark, gave us some LSD. it wasn't a real strong dose, but i got high. i don't remember much else about the trip except one thing::: what happened when i walked into the room that had the crampy closet with the poster in it. i thought about Prem, and probably my recent experiences in India with him, which were then only months old. suddenly i was overwhelmed by a huge wave of emotion. i began sobbing. i felt myself drawn into the crampy closet with the poster leaning against the wall. i thought about taking the poster out of the closet. but immediately i felt i couldn't possibly, and didn't want to move it even an inch. that all i wanted to do was lay down in that cramped space in front of the poster and feel whatever it was that was pouring through me, sobbing..

i've felt that kind of emotion only a few times......last time i think when my Mother died in 2005. i feel little pieces of it from time to time, but those were two of the flooding times...now that i'm thinking about it,,,,,

just about a year previous to this closet experience, i had dropped out of college after my first semester at Iowa State University and headed to the Rocky Mountains, the Boulder, Colorado area, to try to find some happiness. now it seems obvious to me that doing that was the equivalent of someone jumping off a ship in the middle of the ocean... a really really stupid thing to do....i had absolutely no experience of living on my own. no knowledge of how to survive....i was just winging it, alone and scared...i was totally LOST. it was JUST then that Prem had arrived in Colorado....my life, rather quickly, went from near total confusion to having some sense of purpose and direction on the deepest psychological(?) levels.....