The core and largest part of my monastic life, and it still is for me, was in meditation, psychic and metaphysical disciplines. Our relationship with our abbot/spiritual guide was extraordinarily close and steeped in long and very demanding experience in "Pure Awareness" meditation, yoga, psychic development in seeing auras and astral sight, the power of blessing and healing energies and assisting others with auric energies, the metaphysics of the inner worlds and ceremonies, the spiritual psychology of five states of mind and seven bodies of man, and the cultivation of tremendous will power in manifesting unfoldment, good works and change in life patterns.
I have lived in a timbered monastery in the desert mountain region of Nevada, near Sugarloaf Mountain, where the night skies were crystalline and just a powder of snow drifted outside the windows as we worked on printing presses; a monastery in the heart of San Francisco's Presidio area where the meditation hall was so powerful that an inner high-ee sound could always be heard; a stonewalled monastery in the arid region of northern Sri Lanka, steeped in history and soaked during the monsoons; a retreat hut on the shores of the Kona Coast, Hawaii, with little food and abundant hours of meditation; a gated classic chalet-type monastery on the island of Mauritius, where a river flows into the northwest Belle Mare Lagoon, a small quaint monastery in the Queeens area of New York, where the ceremonial bells were loved by the neighbors; and a large, walled monastery campus on the island of Kauai, Hawaii—where we lived in concrete cells, meditated in 3-hour vigils, tended bees and gardens, and served in publishing and teaching.
