I remember the clearing sessions. I remember sitting in a large semi-circle, 3 or 4 rows of chairs in the Temple on Rose St., facing the altar with Sri, Melickia, Mahanta, and other “Innies” walking around us all, outside the circle, yelling at us, berating us, telling us how bad we were, etc. I remember I was sitting in the first row towards the right end of the altar (my right side towards it) & Sri was hitting one of the chairs behind me with a leather belt, and then I jumped up, turned around facing her and screamed at her. I remember feeling so bad I offered to not wear my medallion in public and they jumped on that and ordered us to wear our medallions under our clothes only, not to let them be seen by anyone in public. I also remember we were not allowed to attend classes, except I think for Gopi Celta’s ‘A Thought Away’ psychology rip-us-apart, spit us-out, and make us believe we were something worse than we ! were class. We were not allowed to go to the boutique, or to the Temple for anything other than we were allowed to go to Sunday evening services as long as we sat out in the lobby listening on loudspeakers because we couldn’t see what was going on, or in the very last row. Many times, if we got there early enough and were fortunate enough to get seats in the last row, we were made to leave and banished to the lobby, especially if there were new people or others more acceptable than we were who came to service. Imagine, six months of total degradation, and we all took it because we were so scared not to, we didn’t want to die and we were sure we would if we left.

I remember at least one time when all our class gathered at Brent’s and sat out on the lawn to talk about what was going on and what we were going to do, etc. I remember after the break-up, Radiance calling us all to ask who’s side we were on and if we answered we were with Sri, we were invited over to Lia’s and her apartment. When we got there, Sri was sitting on an ottoman with her back to a wall. I remember being told that Melickia and Mahanta had taken over the Temple and we were all going to relocate to Long Beach, and we had 2 weeks to do it. Also, we were told (I don’t remember if it was the same time or later in LB) they had had to put us on probation to save our lives, to keep us out of the way of M&M. I had just gone from Temp to Perm with NCR in La Jolla and had to tell them there was a power struggle & split in my church and I was moving to Long Beach with my group. Thank goodness I transferred to NCR in Santa Monica.

Somebody rented a large 18 wheeler and we loaded up I think at least 5 households of stuff to go to LB. Deva, who had been suspended from ML was allowed to come back and moved to LB with the rest of us. At the time I was living with Jarana, Agni, & Aljara in an apartment complex on Grand. I think Deva and also Persia lived in that same complex. I remember our stuff went to several different garages in LB until we could find places to live. Two boxes I ‘lost’ in that move held a white hand-crocheted little girl’s dress with a wine colored ribbon around the neck and sleeves that my mother had crocheted for me while she was pregnant with me, and two sweaters, booties and hat that Matt’s other grandmother had knitted for him when he was a baby. We slept in the LB temple for several nights, in the ‘throne room’ and ‘dome room’ in our sleeping bags. It seems that there were about 200 in our class because I remember when we got our Mantras, it took over a month to do it on Sunday nights, and they read out a whole lot of names at each service.

Rhoda

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