Eliot Hurwitz
— 5th — (1977) Jimmy Carter
Produced slide shows for meditation center; studied mime and dance; Naropa Institute studies in theater and video; directed interview shows for N.Y.C. cable TV; two years as assistant director for producer of medical educational TV; currently freelancing in TV production, mostly quality industrials, and developing my own programs for a transitional society.
— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan
Is it possible for a spiritual teacher of the great stature of Jesus or Gautama Buddha to appear in these times in the West? It is of course possible. Has this in fact happened? I am certain of it. For the past three years I have been a student of Da Free John, an American-born spiritual Master. To my knowledge, this is a unique occurrence, of great spiritual and cultural significance. In addition to demonstrating all the signs and powers of initiation and instruction in the company of students, Da Free John is highly articulate and in his written works presents a cogent and powerful argument of the ancient high Truth, freshly expressed and free of association with inherited dogmas or archaic cultural forms. In the past year, I have been working, along with Saniel Bonder (also class of '72), on the editorial staff of the Laughing Man Institute, the public education division of the Johannine Daist Communion, which is the community of Da Free John's students. and devotees. We publish the books of Da Free John, new editions of classic spiritual literature, various internal material and The Laughing Man Magazine: an alternative to religious provincialism and scientific materialism, which I believe is currently the best journal of its kind. If this is intriguing to you, write me a note — there is a great deal to tell.
— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan
The Friend has come into my body for the center.
Unable to find it, he draws a knife, strikes anywhere. (Rumi)
— 20th — (1992) George H. W. Bush
It is very difficult. The joy grows more intense, less predictable, and the frustration seems endless. I am alternately aghast, heart almost stopped in fear, but awake, even ecstatic with recognition! Then lazy again, and hidden in my small self. This ego (this sense of being an ultimately distinct, separate individual) is not any entity at all, it is an action, my own action! And it is suffering. Everyone fears his death and sees it on every side. If you don't see it, it is because you are not looking at what is in front of you! (distracted by the image machine of perpetual youth). It is all a shameful lie, and it is destroying our world. We compulsively clothe ourselves in dreams of personal victory. Not only the emperor, NOBODY has any clothes on at all! And frankly, we don't look all that juicy in our naked bodies either.
I was not born with an innate taste for this ordeal of understanding, but it has been given to me as a free gift by my Heart-Master, Da Avabhasa (formerly known as Da Free John and other names). Da Avabhasa is the hole in the universe, through which the unborn Light streams. Hard to look at, harder to breathe it down. But at last it is only happiness; it is the "wound of Love" that endures this constant insult of mortality and betrayal. And consents to give and give and Give…
— 30th — (2002) George W. Bush
Past five years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration doing sustainable development policy, first in Washington, D.C. in final few years of the democratic administration, now on an extended assignment in San Francisco Bay Area wrestling with regional growth issues in context of treasure of SF Bay coastal estuary, or what is left of it. Listening to distant/approaching thunder of earth changes. Focus on communities. How we can live together says everything about how we are constantly creating our emerging realities.
Writing, speaking, organizing a bit around community issues. Living close to group of friends of fifteen-to-twenty-plus years standing and some new ones; scheming to build our Cohouse place; still laboring to give birth to intimate, human scale, spiritual sanctuary/community in the midst of amazing stupidity, selfishness, gluttony, blindness, fear, weariness (our own and others'). Partner of twenty-three-plus years Magdalena Valderrama, starting her own new local business, so we're becoming regular respectable community citizens. Son Lake Samuel Valderrama Hurwitz is fourteen, right now on the edge of merging into teenage acceleration lane-I still feel that madness myself! And I pray for him and his generation with their bright hearts. Also ongoing koan-life of devotion to my Ishta-Guru ("personally chosen form of worship") Adi Da Sarnraj. Still breaks my heart open regularly to feel such open-eyed, disillusioned compassion and brightness/Joy. For me: flashing awakening/crashing dullness, flash/crash/flash. My idealisms take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. So much the worse for me, I guess. Still alive-dancing down the light! Tonight going dancing with M at one of the jazz/kirtan/rave sessions sprouting around town these days. Our most recent fad is Indian cookery, hosting friends on Tuesday nights-call ahead and you are welcome.
— 35th — (2007) George W. Bush
In 2003, I left the federal government after twelve years in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where I had been working on sustainable development issues, finishing up with a three-year stint doing regional smart-growth planning for the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I'm working in Napa Valley with local government (the county and five cities), especially on the nexus of transportation, land use, and housing issues, and with the local business community (economic development corporation) on long-range community sustainability strategies. Magdalena Valderrama and I mark twenty-eight years together this year. Our son, Lake (an illustrator with promise!), started this fall at the Ringling School of Art and Design, so we are full-fledged empty nesters. We have also been studying process work facilitation methods. (Think Carl Jung meets Don Juan in a town meeting setting.) I love living in Napa, not the least because it's close to the meditation and retreat sanctuary that we have been associated with for twenty-five years and the community that revolves around that center. Dancing down the light!
— 45th — (2017) Donald Trump
In September 2015 the Valley Fire swept through Lake County, California — the third-worst wildfire in state history. I had retired to Lake County a few months previously (after twenty-five years of work in sustainable development policy for federal, state, and local governments). We had recently purchased a small home across the road from the Mountain Of Attention meditation and retreat sanctuary in the Lake County hills, which was established in the early 1970s by our guru, Adi Da Samraj. The fire, which burned over 75,000 acres, destroyed over 1,300 homes in the area, including our house and the homes of over one hundred of our friends. The core buildings of the Mountain Of Attention sanctuary were saved, but the entire Cobb Mountain community has been seriously traumatized. (The Red Cross has characterized the effect on the community as comparable to Katrina on New Orleans.)
So, rather than easing into a semi-retirement life of more intensive meditation and moderate service work to the sanctuary, Magdalena and I have been catapulted into an intensive cycle of local service and work to serve the relief, recovery, and redevelopment of our community. Especially given our careers in community organizing and development, nonprofit administration, and (in Magdalena's case) even some experience with disaster response and preparation, we found ourselves unusually well prepared to take on significant roles in the community's disaster response and recovery management. Within weeks after the fire we established a new nonprofit corporation, the Seigler Springs Community Redevelopment Association, as a platform for our disaster response work. You can read a detailed chronicle of the unfolding story we are involved in at our blog here: http://www.livingincommon.org/blog.
We are focused on three main areas of activity: (1) Ongoing disaster case management for fire survivors. We have received funding from the American Red Cross for a full-time staff member to work directly with those fire survivors who are still struggling to find their feet. (2) Active participation in the newly established "Cobb Area Council" (http://cobbareacouncil.org), through which we are working collaboratively with the county government and the local community to plan for and support the long-term redevelopment of the community. Lake County has historically ranked close to the bottom of California's fifty-eight counties in many key socioeconomic indicators and is heavily challenged to provide the institutional and economic framework and supports that such a recovery needs. At the same time, the Cobb Mountain community is filled with creative and committed neighbors who are finding a new spirit of collaboration in our shared post-fire world. (3, and the most intensive) We have embarked with a group of our longtime friends on an ambitious rebuilding project in the fire area.
Rather than rebuild our single-family homes, we have assembled a seven-acre site of burned parcels on which are planning a collaborative village project called Bright Village, which will house forty people, including both affordable-housing units, market-rate units, and extensive common space, using a modified cohousing design model. So we laugh that all of a sudden we have become real-estate developers! We are envisioning the Bright Village as demonstrating the most advanced practices in fire safety, water conservation, permacultural design, and on-site food production, as well as an architecture that is explicitly rooted in the spiritual aesthetic principles that Adi Da Samraj articulated during his decades of teaching work with us. We are establishing the village as a cooperative that includes active self-management and intensive cooperation. For now, and for the coming several years, we are involved in all of the legal, financial (investors welcome!), organizational, architectural, and construction minutiae of bringing the village to life. I hope that I will be able to report the completion of the village at our Fiftieth Reunion!
— 50th — (2022) Joseph Biden
Eliot - 50 odd years
The summer after that first year in Jordan (1970-71), having been “initiated” into the Ananda Marga yoga practice at the beginning of the school year (an experience that I could only compare to LSD at the time), Sandy and I lived together in the ashram on Wendell St, a few blocks away and then in September traveled together to India, taking a leave from Harvard to sit at the feet of the Ananda Marga Guru, Baba Sri Sri Anandamurti, who gave me the name Vibhuti, meaning “holy ashes” (what is left when the fire consumes all), by which I was known for the next 7 or so years. A principal attraction to Ananda Marga for me was how the way deeply integrated an esoteric yogic/spiritual practice with a very active commitment to social justice and advocacy, which manifested in an energetic involvement in local politics - truly a "blood sport" in India. While Sandy and I were there with Baba, he (Baba) was arrested by the Indian national police on charges of murder and spent seven years in prison before being acquitted of all charges. While in prison, there was at least one serious attempt on his life. During all of the brouhaha surrounding the arrest, organizational schism and general madness, (many other tales to tell) Sandy left the Ananda Marga, and I stayed on, in fact intending to join the Ananda Marga renunciate monastic order. Only my vow to my family to return and finish my degree brought me back to Cambridge that spring, though I did not return to Jordan J, but instead received permission, given my monastic intentions, to live out my senior year at the Wendell St. ashram.
After graduating in early ‘73 I continued to live at the ashram and by the following fall, I was living in California, on the staff of the Ananda Marga training center for renunciate practitioners, under the direction of Judith Merkel (class of ‘68, and currently a senior Ananda Marga renunciate in South America), though my monastic ardor had somewhat cooled by then.
The next spring I spent a three month intensive workshop on Balinese mask dancing (well, that was Berkeley ca 1974!) while continuing my yoga practice. By summer, I was ready to return east and wrote to Sandy in New Orleans, where he was teaching school, suggesting I come to visit him on my way back. He replied that this would be unnecessary since he had “found the real deal guru” in Bubba Free John (?!?*$?), was in fact now living just north of San Francisco and suggested we meet up at the Buena Vista Bar in San Francisco. I don’t think I’d had a drop of alcohol in several years at that point, and was still nursing fantasies of yogic bliss based in a fairly ascetic routine and devotional ecstasy. So the afternoon was awkward to say the least, given that “Bubba” had initiated among his students a period of spiritual instruction designed to undermine any such yogic pretentions as mine and Sandy was literally exploding with the excitement of that revelation (to be frank, very much on the mark but let’s just say not readily understandable or receivable by me at the time.)
I spent the summer at the inaugural session of the Naropa Institute in Boulder (more stories) where I was excited by their theater and video programs (using the very first Sony consumer “portapak” video gear) and by the new year I was living in Manhattan, where I had grown up, enrolled as a student at the American Mime Theater and working in the noncommercial TV business thanks to introductions by the Harvard alum network. I also continued to be very active in the Ananda Marga campaign to get Baba Anandamurti released from jail, including appeals to the UN and the International Court of Justice. Into the Ananda Marga mix came three sisters, recently arrived from the Philippines, aka “the Bhakti sisters" due to their infectious devotional chanting, including the eldest, Magdalena, who I met as “Savitri” or “the Radiance of the Divine Being.” Savitri, meet Vibhuti!
By 1977 my yogic seeking had been significantly undermined by my seemingly intractable neuroses, despite some very cool meditation experiences, and I decided to “take a break” from my serious seeking, stopped meditating and started dating. I did continue to be friends with the NYC Ananda Marga crowd and in December 1978 I asked Savitri out. Short story shorter: I quickly realized that I was falling in love - maddened, distracted, fascinated, aroused, enchanted. By April we decided to marry.
Throughout all of this time, I continued to follow the unfolding story of Bubba Free John from a distance, purchasing each of his new books as they came out, frankly as much to keep track of what my old bud Sandy (now Bubba's principal editor and frequent author of each volume's Introduction) was up to, but mostly impervious to the main Thrust of Bubba’s spiritual propositions. Then in November of ‘79 I attended a short presentation about his teaching at a midtown hotel. It was the first time I had seen him on video. It was a thunderbolt to me. The crystalline clarity of his discourse, the pure physical radiance of his presence, the free delight and humor he displayed, felt like a drink of purest well water. (I did not know it at the time, but Bubba Free John had also just gone through a major transition in his teaching work signified by a re-naming: He was now Da Free John.) I was stunned. I was NOT looking for a guru. I had just ended a 7- year intense devotional relationship with Baba Anandamurti. But I could not deny the attraction. I joined a local "study group." Around this time Sandy sent me a pre-publication copy of Da’s new book, "Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House", containing for the first time his analysis of "social reality" and guidance on a "radical politics for ordinary men and women." I was in real trouble now and I knew it. It took me another year before I had to acknowledge the depth of my visceral response to Da. In the Spring of ‘81 Magdalena and I moved to Lake County California, about 2 hours north of San Francisco, near Adi Da’s “Mountain Of Attention” retreat sanctuary, and were married within the community in December. You can imagine that I am skimming over a great deal of drama and revelation. But of course that was only the start of it!
For ten years, between 1981-‘91 I worked within our community doing audio visual production, and was also responsible for preparing Adi Da’s (as he has been known now since the mid 90’s) spoken discourses for public audio release, which meant I was focused day by day listening closely to his spoken (recorded) instruction.
A son, Lake Samuel, born in 1988 (now a senior concept artist at Wizards of the Coast, producers of Dungeons and Dragons materials and “Magic the Gathering” gaming products)
In 1989 Magdalena and I began playing key roles in a dramatic performance designed by Adi Da, “The Mummery Book: A Parable Of Divine Tragedy, Told by Means Of A Self-Illuminated Illustration Of The Totality Of Mind”, a truly shamanic text, “a Purifying Fire, of all-Illuminating "Brightness", That will, forever, Burn a Living Light, within the natural Fire-place of your incendiary heart of ego's "I". Over the decades I have “played the part” of the central character, Raymond Darling, in many phases, including his terminal confinement in the “State Mental Facility”. The Mummery Book is the opening volume of Adi Da’s “Da Orpheum Trilogy”, (as yet unpublished) which I believe to be among the greatest works of literature ever penned, rivaling Joyce, Dante, Goethe. These days, one of the highlights of my year is to perform an extended monologue from the text. One of my close friends here, a Tendai Buddhist priest, has called it “a 45-minute-long koan.” My entry in this year’s “Red Book” is a selection from this text. But I digress.
In 1990 a searing month-long retreat with Adi Da at his principle hermitage sanctuary, an island in Fiji, that set a bellows to that living light in the fire-place of my heart.
In 1991 Magdalena, Lake and I moved to Washington DC - a real,”phase shift” for us. I got a job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), first as a staff writer and eventually as part of the team staffing NOAA’s participation in the grand Clinton/Gore program of “Sustainable Development” - a heady time for environmental policy after 12 years of Reagan/Bush and an early initiation for me into the depths of the epochal global environmental crises of our time. I became focused on policies related to “sustainable communities”, while also living in Potomac within our own intimate devotional community of Adi Da’s devotees. It was the beginning of a “career” for me and I put myself back to a study of basic communitarian literature. Magdalena worked for several “Beltway bandits”, was fortunate to be involved in cutting edge work on group dynamics, and became a highly skilled facilitator. We became involved with the world of “intentional communities” and made our first attempt to organize a Cohousing development. During this time we enjoyed several month-long retreats in Fiji, California and Hawaii. By 2000 the Washington scene had become unbearable and we escaped back to California just ahead of the Bush 2 era.
After our return to California in 2000 I continued to work in development policy, first at the State/regional agency level (the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, etc.) and then at the county scale in Napa county, a 12-year gig that literally “grounded” me, finally, in street-level retail-politics as played out in the high priced dirt of Napa Valley. Being back in the Bay Area of course allowed us to re-integrate in the large California Adi Da community, including our second attempt at a Cohousing development that might integrate our experience with group process and “intentional community” systems with Adi Da’s guidance on “sacred cooperative culture.” Another expensive dead end there, sad to say.
Some of the most useful training that Magdalena and I have done over the years is in a form of group dynamics work called “Proces Work” developed by Drs. Arnold and Amy Mindel, founded in Jungian psych but applied to the collective, with a sharp shamanic sensitivity (see Arnie’s “Deep Democracy of Open Forums” and “Leader as Martial Artist” among other volumes). A powerful aspect of this work involves sensitivity to the myriad forms and dynamics of status or privilege in any group and how to navigate the often hidden signals and vectors involved. We also trained in and practice “Asset-Based Community Development” of which much could be said.
In June of 2015 Magdalena and I retired, finally back in Lake County, purchasing a home across the road from our beloved Mountain Of Attention, foreseeing a life of simple service, meditation and cultivation of sacred cooperative community. Three months later, while we were visiting our son Lake in Seattle, the Valley Fire, which was the first of soon-to-be regular mega fires now endemic in this part of the world, swept through southern Lake County, destroying over 1000 homes, including ours and a good swath of our community.
Quickly Magdalena and I realized that our decades of experience in government and nonprofit work at all levels, and our depth study of community group process/dynamics, equipped us, perhaps uniquely in our community, to serve the relief, recovery and regenerative processes that we knew would be required. So we have done that, now for the past seven years. It has been by far the most intensive, demanding, creative, exhausting (now at 71 and 66) work we have ever done. There have been two simultaneous dimensions to this work
Our most immediate objective was housing. Our little neighborhood had lost nearly 40 homes and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to attempt an ambitious redesign of our neighborhood along the lines of all the progressive models we have come to know: affordable housing projects, intentional community/Cohousing developments, permacultural designs etc. and bringing all of our past experiences to bear. This was, for me, an “all chips on the table” exercise, which consumed me for six years and which, by about a year ago, I had to admit had been yet another failure in the housing development department, my third in as many decades. It was a bruising effort on many fronts, with the final coffin nails provided courtesy of Covid-19! We are still without a permanent home.
Simultaneous with our housing project, we dove into active community organizing work in the Cobb Mt. community of Southern Lake County, where the Mountain Of Attention sits. As most places are when you get to know their depth, the Cobb Mt. Area is a remarkable locale. The fire also transformed it beyond recognition. One main effect was to break down historic barriers between various community sectors, including between the Adi Da community and our neighbors. I have just completed a community-based “Fire Recovery and Community Development Strategy” for the Cobb Area Council (which Magdalena helped form after the fire and of which I was the first chair). Magdalena has become widely recognized in the county as a leader in building a “fire adapted community”, playing a critical behind-the-headlines role building collaborative relationships here in one of the poorest of California’s counties. We are just now beginning work in partnership with the local Pomo Indian tribes to regenerate within the wider community some of their remarkable culture of stewardship of this so badly damaged landscape, damaged not just by recent fires but truly, as in the whole world, by the weight of modern material “civilization”.
The whole runup to the reunion party has been truly delightful. And to say it AGAIN - I am so sorry to not be there to dance and chatter away with you all. I hope that we can perhaps connect more personally via zoom going forward
My 50th reunion Red Book Submission:
In September 1971, I left the College for a semester to travel to India to receive Blessings from Sri Sri Anandamurti and receive instruction in his “Ananda Marga”, or “Way of Divine Bliss.” I was a student of that Way for 7 years. In 1979 my heart was captured by Avatar Adi Da Samraj, then known as “Da Free John,” and I have been his constantly astonished, grateful, heart-opened devotee for now 42 years.
All this is the Radiant Water of Consciousness Itself.
● Avatar Adi Da Samraj, www.consciousness itself.org
Death does not come to here, to happen to me.
Death is the something I must do, for Her.
For Quandra--Yes!--but, more than for my loved-one-in-the-world. Death is the something I must do for She--the One That Is the Mystery of "I's" Real "Me".
Death requires a loving, fearless, sorrowless, unangered volunteer of me. Death requires the feeling-heart's participation--enamored, self-forgetting, and without anticipation.
Death is an un-selfing kind of wind--a sudden weather, any day. Death is the body's True fidelity to life, to love, and to Reality--regardless of the weather and the day.
To die is necessary, in life's poor Mummery--but, it is not Right and True, unless it is enacted from the feeling-heart.
To die by yielding bodily, from the feeling-heart--as when in the Embrace of body-love--is perfect trust, beyond every thought of the little bed of "I"-and-"other"-in-a-room. Such feeling-death exceeds all loss of human love--by means of the human heart's felt constant Un-denial of the Divine Inherent Fullness of Reality's own Love-Bliss.
The One-True-Heart's Divine True Love must be All-Shown to life--by means of the body's universal kiss of feeling-heart-Found all-and-All--in death. Therefore, true love's Right death is how the body-"I" keeps faith--with the universe, and What Is.
Even all my life--this constant dying, with the feeling-heart, is the constant toll required of me. It is required, constantly, by the tolling Bell! and constant Call, that sounds--without a thinking thought--within the node and rhythmic chamber of my breast and belly-chest of Breath.
Life is not given, anywhere, to be a life apart--for its own sake. But, life is, always, to be a death of self. A Freedom-ritual of self-sacrifice--enacted, bodily, by the Open hand of feeling-heart's true love.
And the True Loved-One, of the feeling-heart, is not an "other"--ever, or at last--but, only That Which Is, forever. Always and Already--there.
Therefore, It Is Reality, Itself, That Un-confines me here--by Dying me, to death.
True Water Is the One Reality.
The One True Heart Is the One and Only Real True God.
And That True Heart-Reality Is "The Water-All"--That, always, Takes my human feeling-heart to death.
And ego-death--by feeling-heart's Free, Open hand--Is the Perfect Way to Realize the Only Truth. The Truth That Is the One True Heart--Itself.
And death of separate ego-"I"--by means of feeling-heart's true love--makes my true love, The Love Divine.
● from Part Three “The Judgement”, Chapter 2 “Quandra Loka” of “The Mummery Book” by Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Dawn Horse Press 2005
● Book One of the Orpheum Trilogy (unpublished)