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From The Oregonian, a Special Report, Sunday, July 15, 2001, by Richard Read Securing a spiritual empire
An architect, a computer science professor and a doctor gather with friends on a sun-dappled evening in a brick manor in Portland's leafy Kerns district. For them the stately 1910 manse radiates a benevolent calm that be lies its location just steps from a seedy stretch of Northeast Sandy Boulevard, where a Jiffy Lube screens the house from passers-by. Inside the building lives their teacher, Swami Chetanananda, a 52-year-old self-styled spiritual leader. A heavyset, shaven-headed man draped in orange cloth, the Kentucky-born guru claims to transmit a divine energy so powerful it can knock over a disciple or provoke shrieks of ecstasy. The sprawling Gothic structure houses about 75 devotees of the swami -- raised Catholic in Indiana as J. Michael Shoemaker -- many of whom hold respected jobs ranging from lawyers to business managers. The swami's followers also run a yoga school, The Movement Center, that offers classes to hundreds of members of the public, ranging from professionals to expectant mothers. Sometimes, yoga students go on to meditate and become disciples. Yet periodically, traumatized people emerge from the gated compound of the Rudrananda Ashram, or spiritual center, saying they surrendered their hearts, minds and souls at the behest of the swami. In return, ex-members say, the swami abused them and other followers sexually, spiritually and financially, from the 1970s to the present. During the past three years, former disciples of Chetanananda slowly have summoned courage to describe their experiences. The Oregonian interviewed 59 former followers and 17 current members of the Nityananda Institute, the tax-exempt church that runs the Portland spiritual center. The former followers of Chetanananda -- pronounced chay-tahna-NAHnda -- include a 44- year-old owner of a Massachusetts sheet-metal company and a 75- year-old healer from India. A New Mexico chiropractor, a Portland psychiatrist, a Tennessee home maker and a Boston cook also came forward to tell their stories. Many of these former followers say Chetanananda controlled their lives and threatened people who tried to leave him, inflicting severe psychological and spiritual damage. One woman says he persuaded her to give him more than $400,000 that vanished in failed investments. Eleven ex-disciples say that despite his proclaimed vow of celibacy he had sex with them -- sometimes violently. They say their awe of him as a spiritual being, father figure, teacher and counselor left them incapable of true consent. Chetanananda repeatedly re fused requests for an interview. Last Thursday, he sent The Oregonian a five-page typed statement in response to a letter summarizing the allegations. "I have never abused any women or children or men," Chetanananda wrote. "I have never threatened any person who wanted to leave our community. I have never coerced anyone, period." Chetanananda wrote that he long ago renounced his "supposed" vow of celibacy and has had sexual relationships with mature, consenting adult women over the past 30 years. He said his conduct was appropriate in his community. He said that he had made mistakes, and that he and his organization had changed during 28 years. He denied trying to control his students and said they were free to come and go. "I find it incomprehensible that people could say these things," Chetanananda said. "It breaks my heart." Alexis Sanderson, a professor of Eastern religions and ethics at Oxford University in England who has lectured at Chetanananda's ashram, says the swami is a "generous-hearted and pleasant individual" who leads an open and tolerant group. "Accusations of sexual malpractice are the standard way of attacking religious practitioners," Sanderson says. Like the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose followers built a Central Oregon commune during the 1980s, the swami appeals to educated people from middle- or upper-class backgrounds who yearn for deeper meaning in life. Unlike the Rajneeshees, who perpetrated assassination conspiracies, poisonings, buggings and fraud, the guru and his followers are not accused of such crimes. Kent Burtner, who directed the former Cult Resource Center in Portland, has counseled several former disciples of Chetanananda. Burtner says the swami's organization exemplifies the kind of smaller group that is becoming more prevalent than the large organizations that once made public pitches at airports and bus stations. Sociologists, therapists and authorities on cults say smaller groups can recruit more dedicated members privately through yoga and meditation classes, for example. City records show that the swami's
followers have held top positions on the Kerns Neighborhood Association
board since 1994, when Sharon Ward -- the institute's executive director
and the guru's sister-in-law -- began her first term as chairwoman. Ten
other disciples have held elected positions on the board in the
neighborhood of about 5,500 resi dents. Devotees prostrate themselves toward Chetanananda's empty, spotlit couch. The guru's languid, disembodied voice addresses them through ceiling speakers. The practice isn't always easy, says the swami's recorded voice. You must bring your attention inside. The disciples fall silent. The sound system hisses, then clicks off. The only reminder of the sunny day outside is the faint rumble of traffic on Sandy Boulevard. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I graduated from Connersville High
School. . . . My favorite hobby was the hereafter test -- that's when you
take a girl out in the country on Friday night and say: 'Honey, if you're
not here after what I'm here after, then you're going to be here after I'm
gone.' " Michael Shoemaker, an Indiana University dropout, changed his life forever when he walked into an Asian-art store in New York in 1971. Years later he would repeatedly enthrall his followers with his own life tale: In those days Shoemaker was a seeker himself. The cocky 22-year-old with wavy dark hair was a former football player and swimmer powerful enough to boast of winning barroom scraps. The son of a pharmacist and a nurse, both devout Catholics, he studied yoga in Bloomington, Ind. Someone gave him a photograph of guru Albert Rudolph and the address of his Greenwich Village art and antiques shop. Shoemaker introduced himself to Rudolph, a plump man with gentle brown eyes set below bushy eyebrows and a bald pate. "I looked at him, and I felt my heart shatter into a thousand pieces," Shoemaker said during a 1997 lecture. "From that moment on, I never had one second's doubt about the power of the experience into which I had entered." At 42, Rudolph prospered from importing antique Asian religious statues and paintings. The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants welcomed a constant stream of spiritual seekers to his store and home. They knew Rudolph as Swami Rudrananda. Rudi, as he was nicknamed, traced his lineage of enlightenment to the late Bhagawan Nityananda, an Indian guru whose name is translated as "eternal bliss" in Hindi. Shoemaker moved for six months into Rudi's ashram, in Big Indian, N.Y. There, as many as 200 disciples labored on weekends to refurbish two ramshackle hotels the art dealer owned in the Catskill Mountains town. Members of the ashram's full-time community of about 50 people opened a bakery, a restaurant named Rudi's, a construction company and an advertising agency. Shoemaker returned to Bloomington in August 1971 to begin a satellite ashram for Rudi. Before he left New York, the budding spiritual leader raised an awkward subject with his mentor. "I said to him, 'Rudi, I'll need some money to do this,' " Chetanananda said during the 1997 lecture. "And Rudi looked at me and smiled and said, 'Michael, any schmuck can do it with money.' " Shoemaker, it turned out, was no schmuck. Rudi died two years later in the crash of a plane piloted by a disciple. Former disciples of Rudi's say Shoemaker beat out rivals for the title of successor. By the late 1970s, the kid from Connersville, Ind., who told disciples he once aspired to be a Catholic priest, had built a spiritual empire. Bloomington's newspaper, The Herald-Times, ran prominent stories at the time about Shoe maker, reporting that he held majority shares in the Rudi Group, Inc. The stories said the corporation included five bakeries called Rudi's and the Tao Restaurant, a natural-foods eatery that moved Bloomington beyond chicken- fried-steak fare. Shoemaker founded the Rudrananda Ashram and helped run a related foundation, both tax- exempt organizations, the news paper said. And he owned an antique store, Rudra Oriental Art, the paper said. More than 100 followers inhabited five houses in Bloomington. Shoemaker claimed hundreds more students nationwide, with ashrams spread from Massachusetts to Ohio, Michigan and Colorado. In 1978, an Indian guru named Swami Muktananda initiated Shoemaker as a swami, as Hindu spiritual masters are called. He went through a ritual in India, to be reborn as Swami Chetanananda. The Hindi name is translated as "the bliss of pure self-awareness." Disciples say Chetanananda told them he was initiated as a sannyasi, which -- as he said, and experts agree -- is a spiritual master who abandons all worldly de sires. Eastern religions scholars say these desires include wealth, status and sexual gratification. Some people came to the guru after Western religions failed them. Ruth Knight, who as a girl ducked out of the family pew in Catholic church, says she wanted more out of life than a small-town Midwestern existence. Knight sat up and listened one spring day in 1978 when an Indiana University extension professor of psychology urged his students to leave Fort Wayne and do something significant. She moved to Bloomington. One day Knight attended one of Chetanananda's retreats. She clutched flowers in a sweaty hand while lining up in "darshan," a ceremony in which the swami greeted disciples individually in front of a room full of followers facing him cross-legged on cushions. Knight was so nervous that she said in a 1986 talk that she couldn't remember handing the swami her flowers or receiving his gift, usually a piece of sweet food that he blessed. But she vividly recalled the reassuring look she received from Swamiji, as she called him, using a respectful title disciples describe as a term of affection. "It became clear that I wasn't the shy person I thought I was," Knight, who is still a devout follower of the swami in Portland, said during the talk. "It is said that simply to sit in the presence of a teacher brings great benefit, and judging from stories about Nityananda and from our own experiences with Swamiji, that is true." For Knight, meditation felt completely natural, a way to explore the depths of her soul. She dropped out of college and ran the ashram's kitchen. Others came to the guru shattered by trauma. They had endured incest or other sexual abuse, illness or injury, suicidal tendencies or drug use, the death of a parent or divorce. Gunner Anderson says he was a college dropout, depressed, con fused and doing drugs, in 1974 when he heard Michael Shoemaker speak at the Ann Arbor, Mich., ashram. Shoemaker quoted Rudi. Life is a shit sandwich, he said. But you don't have to eat it. A year later, Anderson reached his lowest point. Then he remembered Rudi's sandwich. Anderson moved into the ash ram. Shoemaker taught Rudi's breathing techniques, designed to draw divine energy into the body. He told students to "surrender" the mind, shedding thoughts and emotions so that dormant energy coiled at the base of the spine could rise and eventually bring enlightenment. The energy, recognized in yoga and tantric teachings and known as kundalini, may be awakened by a guru's word, touch, look or thought. "The force enters between the eyes of the student as he sits be fore his teacher," Rudi wrote in his book, "Spiritual Cannibalism," published in 1973. "It works down through his chest, into his sex organs, then up the spinal column." Anderson says he stopped doing drugs. He took Shoemaker's advice and returned to complete his architecture degree and attend graduate school. He started a design business. By 1978, Anderson sat each day at 6:30 p.m. in the meditation room of the Ann Arbor ashram, a former fraternity house, gazing at towering oak trees outside. He took his attention deep inside. Tension began to melt away. Sometimes the meditation frightened Anderson, it was so in tense. At other times his heart, which felt leaden like a rock, began opening with an incredible, euphoric sensation. People talked about love and sang about it, but he says he felt love actually surge through him. He couldn't explain it to people who had not tried meditation. Years later, he left the swami, feeling that the spiritual practice had drifted from its Hindu roots and become rigid. Still, Anderson says, the ashram probably saved his life. Former followers say that Swami Chetanananda demanded obedience. A 47-year-old marketing executive says she recalls every detail of an encounter with the guru in 1978 that changed her life. The former disciple spoke on condition that her name be withheld, because she still feels she could be drawn back into the group if members knew how to find her. Back then, she was a college student from a small-town working-class family. She approached the guru's elevated chair in the dining room of his Bloomington ashram as disciples finished eating. Large air-brushed paintings of Rudi and Nityananda loomed above rich Oriental carpets. The swami listened to her attentively, his smooth brow fur rowed below a shaven scalp. She was learning to surrender. She gave him her complete trust. He held that power over a growing number of disciples, who would gladly take his word on which colors to wear, whom to date and what career to launch. The woman told him about the break-up with her boyfriend, her abortion and her loneliness. She felt vulnerable and lacked direction. But she was excited to be departing on a college year abroad, and relieved to find someone who could make decisions for her. Shoemaker paused, she recalls. No, he said. You should stay here. The woman left the room and canceled the trip. She says that Chetanananda told her not to date anyone, and to focus on her spiritual work. She says that later he orchestrated her marriage to a fellow devotee and conducted the ceremony, as he did with other marriages between disciples. The swami now says: "I have never conducted a fraudulent marriage ceremony." He also says that while he has occasionally given advice, he has never forbidden anyone from doing anything. The woman says she didn't hesitate to do his bidding. Any doubts, she felt, were mere expressions of ego. But some relatives and friends saw their loved ones' transformation differently. Lawrence Eyink, a Cincinnati building contractor and ex- Marine, and his wife, Mary, a former teacher, told reporters in 1979 that their 24-year-old son had been brilliant, a top runner and vice president of his high school senior class, before joining the swami's group. The couple said that four years before, Dan Eyink had dropped out of college, moved into the Cincinnati ashram and begun working as a dishwasher. He had cut himself off from his family and former friends, they said, calling home for money and cursing out his mother. "It seemed like his eyes were dead," Lawrence Eyink told a reporter. "He had a mechanical smile." Family members had abducted Eyink in 1978, but he escaped. So the couple got a court order granting them temporary guardianship over their son. Three men helped family members grab Eyink again late on March 15, 1979, as he left work as head chef at Cincinnati's Mecklenburg Garden Restaurant, an ashram-linked business. But ashram leaders fought the parents in court. Headlines turned ugly. "Fear Backdrop in Cult's Fight for Ex-Member," the Pittsburgh Press said. "Cult Case 'Captive' Freed by Judge," said the Pitts burgh Post-Gazette. Eyink, now a Portland doctor who says he still sometimes attends classes in the big, brick manor, was allowed to return to the ashram.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some followers grew disenchanted. Craig Benson, a student of Rudi's who had moved with his wife into the Bloomington ashram in 1976, said years later he felt Shoemaker's initiation as a swami had been a mistake. "I don't mind if someone says, 'I am God, and so are you,' " said Benson, who quit the ashram in the early 1980s after he says meditation sessions turned into lengthy devotional chants. "But when they say, 'I am God, and you're not,' that indicates a spiritual limitation that I do not agree with." Chetanananda told followers that he longed to move from the college town to a place where he could make a national mark. By 1982, Chetanananda decided on Massachusetts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A broken trust. Eleven women, all ex-disciples, say Swami Chetanananda's seduction of them was an abuse of the revered spiritual teacher's profound power over them as they sought enlightenment through him.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dana Swift's life hit bottom one day in February 1988. She warmed herself by an open oven door, watching roaches climb the kitchen wall. At 24, the Boston bartender had done drugs, done boys, done everything that interested her. Please God, she remembers thinking, in her apartment near Cambridge, Mass., there's got to be more to life than this. She reached for the Yellow Pages. Manicures. Massage. Mattresses. Swift says she hated her boss at another job, who sexually harassed her. She was mad at her boyfriend, who was mean. Severely traumatized as a child, she felt worthless. She says she just wanted to withdraw from everything. On some level, she knew she needed help. Mausoleums. Media. Swift wore black, her standard uniform. The outfit, set off by hostile gray-blue eyes and red hair, warned people off her path. There it was. Meditation. Swift dialed a few numbers for meditation centers. Then she hit upon one. "Nityananda Institute," said a woman's cheery voice. The woman invited Swift to a Sunday open house to hear Swami Chetanananda field questions. Chetanananda, an American-born guru originally named J. Michael Shoemaker, had moved his group of about 60 followers six years earlier to Cambridge, Mass., from Bloomington, Ind. Swift attended a talk by the orange-robed guru, who sat cross-legged on a wide wooden chair above Shiva, an attack-trained Rottweiler named for a Hindu god. Disciples taped the swami's Sunday talks and other lectures, and sent the cassettes to members of a tape-of-the-month club. Swift recalls soaking up the teachings, thirsting for the swami's divine energy, drinking in his every word during evening lectures. She felt euphoric, as if she were deeply in love. She worked to surrender herself
completely. "The teacher takes on the student's tensions and processes it and gives it back to the student as energy." -- Chetanananda, in remarks recorded March 13, 1988 -- the month after Swift first saw him -- for the March tape-of-the-month. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Swift remembers a meditation class that March. She dropped her black jacket on the floor and sat on it. Chetanananda's closest followers took choice seats on pre-placed pillows. They chanted in unison. Swift closed her eyes in meditation. When something touched her forehead, she jumped. It was Chetanananda, holding two fingers between her eyebrows. The guru was giving shaktipat, funneling energy into her. Some disciples groaned at his touch and keeled over. Others convulsed. A few responded with loud screams that struck Swift as primal, they were so eerie. The guru's institute owned four houses near the Radcliffe College campus. According to a later chronology published by the institute, followers opened Rudi's Bakery, named for his late mentor, in Boston in 1982. The next year, the chronology said, they launched Rudra Press, a publishing company. Chetanananda recruited editors who say they produced books from his lectures. He attracted some wealthier members. The institute's newsletters repeatedly thanked donors for helping with expenses in Cambridge and on Martha's Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod where the institute owned a retreat center and some acreage. On this day in March 1988, Swift's knees began to hurt. She strove to breathe into her chakras, the seven internal energy centers recognized by yoga practitioners. She fought the urge to shift her knees. She thought she could feel the energy flowing, dissolving crystallized tension deep inside her. She felt the sense of euphoria fill her. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "You can continuously choose to discover and live in a finer realm than the one you travel in," -- Chetanananda, in a tape-of-the-month recorded March 13, 1988. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After an evening lecture that March, Swift noticed that as usual Chetanananda's favored followers disappeared upstairs. She watched Sharon Ward, a lawyer who was the guru's right-hand woman and administrator, walk up to the swami's third-floor apartment. She saw John Robert "Bob" Shoemaker, the guru's brother, whom Chetanananda married to Ward in a ceremony that month, head up the stairs. Swift remembers feeling secure in the self-contained community, where disciples renounced meat and alcohol. Without venturing outside the group, followers could see lawyers, homeopathic practitioners, massage therapists, computer experts, a tax accountant or jewelry and carpet dealers. To Swift, it began to seem normal that people asked the swami what clothes they should wear, whether they should dye their hair, what style of eyeglasses to wear, whether they should date another disciple. One day, she says, the swami told her not to wear black. She bought a new wardrobe full of colors. Swift says she yearned to feel close to Chetanananda. But she felt that the inner circle consisted only of chosen followers with money, looks or useful expertise. She wondered what happened in his inner sanctum. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "A real spiritual teacher does not in any way need to control you or your thinking." -- Chetanananda, on the tape-of-the-month, recorded April 24, 1988. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Years later, two followers who climbed those stairs recalled how special they felt. They described the guru's routine in his private quarters, on condition that their names not be used. In his suite on several evenings that spring disciples filled wooden bowls from a buffet on a glass table set below track-lit Tibetan artwork. They sat on pillows on the floor facing their leader. The followers noticed the appetizing smell of brown rice and vegetables filling the room. Chetanananda settled into a plush leather armchair, a former member of the inside circle recalls. More than once, he turned on the movie "Repo Man," watching Emilio Estevez play the street punk who began repossessing cars after his parents gave his college money to a televangelist's cult. One of the ex-followers recalls Chetanananda beckoning a student to sit just below him. He gave the man shaktipat. Soon the disciple fell backward. Casually, the guru returned to the movie. At the end of the evening, disciples quietly competed to gather dishes for washing in the apartment's cramped kitchen. Disciples also cleaned the swami's suite, picked up his socks, washed his car. The point was to serve the guru and keep him happy, no matter what it took. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Literally I have, you know, 20 people in my room from 8 o'clock in the morning 'til 10 o'clock at night. It's continuously changing, but it's there." -- Chetanananda, April 24, 1988, talk. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally in April 1988, Chetanananda invited Swift to his room. But she says she thought it odd that he led her upstairs by the hand. She pulled her hand away. In his room, he sat on a small couch and patted the seat next to him. She says she concluded he was propositioning her. Other women disciples said years later that, despite Chetanananda's vow of celibacy during his 1978 initiation as a swami, they were accustomed to sexual advances from the guru. In all, 11 women told The Oregonian that Chetanananda had had sex with them while they studied with him. They provided detailed accounts corroborated in multiple cases by people they told at the time. Given the swami's profound influence over them then, the 11 women say the sex was damaging. "Sex is never appropriate for a person in the role of counselor, psychologist, doctor or teacher," said one of the women. She was a medical student in 1997, when she says he seduced her after they each drank a bottle of wine in his suite inside the Portland ashram. The women said that far from being consenting adults, they felt they could not say no to a spiritual teacher they trusted with their souls. Chetanananda refused repeated requests for an interview with The Oregonian. Last Thursday, he responded to questions with a typed statement in which he acknowledged having had "sexual relationships with mature, adult consenting women" during the past 30 years. The guru wrote that the last vow he took during his initiation in India was to renounce all other vows and to return to teach. He is not celibate, he wrote. In 1997, Chetanananda said during a talk that his spiritual practice had evolved. "For me, purity has nothing to do with what you eat or don't eat and who you sleep with," the swami said then. "If living in a bordello and doing whatever every night is what helps you do it, that's fine, too. For me." In his statement last week, Chetanananda said that while it was inappropriate for high-school and college instructors to have sex with their students, his situation in a long-standing community of "consenting adults" was different. "Anyone who is offended by the existence of such relationships simply should find a practice and a teacher with whom they agree," Chetanananda wrote. Swift says she never had sex with the swami and didn't dwell on his conduct that day. She says she chose to sit apart from him in his room that day in 1988, and searched for a safe subject of conversation. When you stay with your parents, she said, do you attend Catholic church with them? The swami glared at her. My father is a . . . bigot, she recalls him yelling, pounding the arm of a chair. Swift sat in confused silence. The swami asked after a romantic interest of hers. He's fine, Swift said. But the swami shook his head. No more, she recalls him saying. So when the guy phoned a couple of days later, Swift cut him off cold. Swift felt that if the guru had asked her never to talk to her best friend again, she would have cut her off, too. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "If you're going to do any kind of deep experiencing . . . the first thing you're going to have to get through is that piece of plastic in your head called the mind. It's just Saran Wrap." -- Chetanananda, May 11, 1988, in a talk the month after Swift visited his room. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another woman -- then one of Chetanananda's closest disciples, and now one of the 11 who say he had sex with them -- says she bounded up the back stairs to his apartment May 19, 1988, eager to see the man she considered God. The woman, who spoke on condition that her name be withheld, remembers it this way: They stepped into his bedroom. His orange T-shirt, baggy black sweat pants and bikini briefs fell to the floor. They made love. The woman says they had been lovers since Oct. 12, 1987, when she submitted to him while groggy from pain medication and tranquilizers that she took following surgery. She says Chetanananda, who was staying for three nights as a houseguest of her and her then-husband, said that her troubled marriage was destined to fail. The swami told her, she says, that she had been his princess in Germany during his last life and would be his queen in this life. She recalls the swami saying that she had been sent to him by Rudi, his late mentor, and Nityananda, Rudi's guru. She believed that an omniscient being had fallen in love with her. Yet, she says at other times, when the swami became distant and withdrawn, she felt a sense of dread bordering on fear. She says he had violent, painful sex with her, and her fear grew. In his statement last week, the swami did not specifically respond to a question about whether he had had violent sex with women, causing them injuries. "I am not violent," he said, however. "I have always tried to act in the best interests of everyone who practices here." The woman says she woke from a nightmare several nights later, terrified. She told the guru that in the dream, she stood at the intersection of four corridors. She looked down the corridor ahead of her and saw a black dog. She looked down the right passage and saw another black dog. Down the hall behind her, she saw a third black dog. Along the left corridor stood a man with a gun. She had no way out. She says the guru told her to remember what Rudi had said: The only way out of Dodge City is straight up. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Open yourself completely every day. . . . Don't worry about the beauty or the pain of it. . . . There's no growth without distress and disturbance." -- Chetanananda, tape of the month for June 1988, less than a month after the second woman of the 11 says he had had painful sex with her. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The same woman says Chetanananda telephoned her a few weeks later. He asked her to buy him a handgun for his collection of firearms. The woman felt sick. She never bought the revolver. She felt the guru's attention and affections diminish. She felt that the request for the gun had been a test. She says Chetanananda had sex with her most recently in 1996. Ever since the violent sexual encounter, the woman felt isolated. She faulted herself for failing somehow. But she was not alone. A third woman says the swami arranged in Bloomington for her to marry a follower she barely knew. She says the guru had sex with her twice while she was married. A fourth woman says she performed oral sex on the guru at his request after she gave him therapeutic massages. She says that in 16 years of giving massages as a nurse, she had never had sex with other patients. She says she believes that her desire for a strong father figure led her to submit to the guru. A fifth woman says Chetanananda seduced her in Cambridge and continued having sex with her about every six weeks for six years. She says he told her that she should devote her energy to a spiritual path instead of having a boyfriend, and that he would try to be a boyfriend for her. "I simply wanted him as a meditation teacher," she says. "I was incredibly naive and trusting and didn't know any better." The women spoke on condition that their names would be withheld, saying they feared retribution and deserved anonymity as victims of sexual abuse. Women said the guru linked sensuality with his spiritual practice. They felt the swami establishing a special bond during open-eye meditation, when he stared into the eyes of advanced students. "Being extra close to the guru means that you become extremely special," said a sixth woman, who said that she had had sex with Chetanananda three times. "You don't object. This is the guru, remember?" A seventh woman described lingering psychological and emotional scars from an intensive four-year sexual relationship with the swami. "I honestly thought it was going to get me all the way" to enlightenment and God, she said. "He led me to believe that he was the way to get there, and if I didn't continue to participate there would be great harm to me." Diane Asay, a current disciple, said students bear responsibility for choosing to have sex with the guru. "I've watched people climb all over people to get into his bed," Asay said. She says jealous former lovers are going public to hurt the swami, who is helping to lead a grand spiritual reformation that will make their complaints appear trivial a century from now. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I don't get any points in heaven for all the people I brought in. I don't. It benefits you." -- Chetanananda, at his birthday retreat, July 23, 1988. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Former disciples say the sexual conduct described by the 11 women affected a wider circle of people. Swift says that a distraught young man, one of the swami's most committed students, came to her apartment in the summer of 1990. She says he told her that his girlfriend, also a disciple, had told him that Chetanananda had had sex with her. His girlfriend said it had happened a few times two years before. Swift was stunned. She was hearing for the first time that her teacher was not celibate. She tried to console the young disciple. Yet sex between gurus and disciples is common, sociologists and other experts say, due to some gurus' absolute power over devoted followers. The New Yorker magazine reported in November 1994, for example, that some women who followed the late Swami Muktananda, the man who initiated Chetanananda as a swami, said the guru from India had had sex with them. Muktananda, who died in 1982, preached celibacy. Scores of devotees left his organization after hearing of the sexual allegations, The New Yorker reported. Swift says that in 1990, after the young man left her apartment, she paced around swearing about Chetanananda. She felt the guru's students were lost beings seeking help and that he was taking advantage of them. The man says he stewed for a month. Then a college graduate in his 20s, he had studied under the guru for six years. He spoke on condition that his name not be used, because he says he still has affection for the community. He says his girlfriend's revelation broke his heart. He confronted the swami on the ashram's back porch. It's not a big deal, he remembers the guru saying. She made the advances; what was I supposed to do? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Now personally I think celibacy is total baloney. In India it's one thing. But here it's something totally different." -- Chetanananda, April 1992 tape-of-the-month. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disciples recall Chetanananda speaking repeatedly in Cambridge of his frustration over the ashram's cramped space. They say the Boston area had proven a more difficult place than expected for Chetanananda to woo recruits and gain stature. Key disciples searched the nation for a new site, almost buying a former alcohol rehabilitation center in Florida. Then a disciple's relative in Portland mentioned Laurelhurst Manor, a former retirement home for sale at 1021 N.E. 33rd Ave. One evening in late 1992, disciples recall, Sharon Ward announced in the crowded meditation room that the institute would move to Portland, Oregon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Spiritual growth is about surrender, not about understanding. Whenever that part of you that wants to figure out, or know why, or what for, or so on or so forth, kicks in, kick it out. Kick it out." -- Chetanananda, in an April 21, 1993, talk. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Swift says she felt numb and indifferent. People outside the ashram sometimes asked her whether she had a feeling or opinion about anything. She had overcome the anger of her old life. The only thing that moved her now was her devotion to the spiritual practice. In the spring of 1993, disciples lined up amid snow flurries to pass hundreds of boxes out of the Cambridge ashram to trucks. They watched a crane hoist a stone Buddha from the ashram over the street. Swift joined the move to Portland. Wherever the swami went, she would go, too. The high price of enlightenment. Ex-disciples say Swami Chetanananda leaned on his followers to pay for the trappings of his spiritual organization and for investments that failed. Hone Ames doodled furiously in the kitchen of her Cambridge, Mass., home in 1989. Even many years later, she still clearly recalls cradling the phone as Swami Chetanananda pressed her for more money in 1989. "Resist," Ames wrote in the margin. But resistance is a slippery slope, Ames recalls Chetanananda saying: If you resist, you end up in a pit, you cannot dig out. The whole point of this spiritual practice is that you've got to commit. Ames says the swami asked for another $62,500 to invest in the conversion of a run-down New Jersey apartment building into condominiums. Come on, Hone. Hone. The swami coined the nickname for Ames as one of his closest insiders. He'd tease her about it. Call Hone. Hone on the range. There's no place like Hone. Now that she's left the swami, the nickname she left behind reminds Ames of the person she says she was: Completely controlled by the man she worshipped and feared as her link to God. She says she remains traumatized by the financial losses and psychological pain she and her family suffered. Ames, 59, still has her notes from that phone conversation with the guru Nov. 14, 1989. The words "briar patch" and "manifestation of fear" appear circled and underlined in the margins. The jottings reveal Ames' doubts as she financed ventures promoted by Chetanananda, the persuasive spiritual leader who now lives with his followers in a refurbished manor in Northeast Portland. Chetanananda refused repeated requests for an interview with The Oregonian concerning finances and other issues. Last Thursday, he submitted a typed statement in response to a summary of allegations. Chetanananda did not specifically respond to the allegation that investments he advised had resulted in losses of large sums of money for disciples and for him. "I have never coerced anyone, period," he wrote, in apparent reference to an allegation that he had coerced students to give him and the Nityananda Institute valuable gifts, to loan him and the institute money and to invest money to fund an opulent lifestyle. Ames recalls bearing down on her notes that day in 1989, caught between the man she idolized and the warnings of her father and a financial adviser. She says she wanted to help the swami create a retirement fund for his assistants, whom she pitied for their low pay and lack of benefits. The year before, Ames had invested $250,000 in the same New Jersey condo deal after what she describes as heavy pressure from the swami. She says he ostracized another disciple who declined, a fate she was anxious to avoid. Ames deposited the initial investment in an account she held jointly with the swami and one of his assistants. A copy of the wire transfer shows that the guru, using his original name, J. Michael Shoemaker, sent the money to the bank financing the condo conversion, which was developed by the husband of a former girlfriend. Ames provided The Oregonian with detailed documentation of investments and other transactions from 1988 to 1997, when she left the ashram. Now Chetanananda was telling Ames they needed more money. Ames doubted him, recalling her financial adviser's prediction that New Jersey's housing market was about to dive. But, she reasoned, the adviser wasn't all-knowing like the swami. So, on Nov. 16, 1989, bank records show, Ames deposited $62,500 into the joint account. She still has the check for that amount that the swami wrote to Executive House LP the same day. Ames says she couldn't say no to the guru. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "People are concerned about teachers
because they're afraid they're going to get ripped off. There's no
avoiding getting ripped off to some extent in this life." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Former disciples of Chetanananda say that they and other followers showered him with gifts, including Asian artwork, camera equipment, first-class air tickets and accommodations in Hawaii's Four Seasons Hotel and other luxury hotels. Newsletters routinely list dozens of members giving thousands of dollars a year to the institute, a tax-exempt church. Property records show that in 1999, longtime disciple Norman Bodek signed over his Northeast Portland house to the swami's Nityananda Institute, listing it as a charitable contribution. Bodek, who has since left the swami, ran Productivity Inc. The publishing and event-planning company gave jobs to dozens of disciples and -- according to Ames -- paid the guru a monthly retainer. Money, in addition to spiritual teachings, group meditation and sex with the guru, continues to bind disciples into the guru's inner circle, the former followers say. Ames was by no means the swami's biggest backer. But she says she dug into her savings, spending an inheritance from her grandmother and other reserves. Ames says that in 1987, as a college-educated resident of Bloomington, Ind., she joined Chetanananda's group after seeking his advice about her troubled marriage and her mother's declining health. Slowly, she transferred her devotion to God to the swami until she recalls seeing him as a Christlike figure. Ames viewed Chetanananda as a "spiritual atomic generator," a gifted astrologer and an all-knowing sage. When he walked into the room, she felt a rush of devotion and love for the man she considered divine, often leaving her feeling faint. She said she first invested $100,000 in one of his ventures in April 1988 after he told her about a computer program developed by disciples to pile up profits trading commodities. Bank statements she produced show that by August, the joint-account balance sank to less than $82,000. Within a year, the balance plunged below $300. Ames recalls the swami telephoning her at her home late that year with the bad news. She says he told her they'd lost all the money on chromium. Ames wouldn't let herself cry. She fought back doubts. This was a test, Ames thought. This was a chance to show that her devotion to the guru meant far more than money. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I'll move to Portland. I'll either
have enough people in that building to support it, or I'll go
fly-fishing." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ames studied documents spread across a Boston lawyer's broad kitchen table on an evening in early 1993. She was about to lend the Nityananda Institute $500,000 so the swami could finally build a proper meditation hall. Chetanananda and his followers had searched for months for new quarters to replace their cramped houses in Cambridge. They settled on a big brick building in Portland, Laurelhurst Manor, built in 1910 as the Anna Lewis Mann Old People's Home. Property records show that the institute borrowed $840,000 toward the $1.2 million price of the house off Northeast Sandy Boulevard. The institute and disciples later bought -- and still own -- a dozen other houses nearby. But the big brick building at 1021 N.E. 33rd Ave. needed extensive remodeling. Ames says Chetanananda told her the financial demands put him in a vise. Ames recalls thinking that whoever came up with the money for the hall would deliver salvation to the messiah. A written agreement shows that Ames made the $500,000 loan for up to three years. She charged 6 percent interest and asked that her support be anonymous. The institute listed its collateral as a house and land on Martha's Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod where the swami held retreats. The Vineyard property was up for sale. Ames toyed with the idea of giving all her money to the institute. If this man was God, she says she reasoned, why hold back anything? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "As a swami, of course, I don't have
the usual signposts in life that tell me I'm a success or a failure. For
instance, when you're a swami, you don't get a salary." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ames says that in April 1994, Chetanananda called her into the study of his suite in the Portland manor. She saw his dark expression and braced for trouble. Ames had moved into the big brick building in 1993. Disciples had beautifully refurbished the structure, renaming it the Rudrananda Ashram. They added a spacious meditation hall financed by Ames' loan, with a two-story arched ceiling and a prominent statue of Nityananda, the Indian guru credited with beginning the swami's lineage. Fresh flowers arrived by air from California, former members say. French wine flowed in the swami's suite, they remember, with the empty bottles taking a discreet path to the garbage bin past disciples who shunned alcohol and meat. But Chetanananda appeared pained to Ames as he stood by the oval oak table in his office. Ames says he told her that the New Jersey condo deal had collapsed. All the money was gone. In fact, court records show, the troubled condo company, Executive House Associates LP, had filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy three years before. By 1994, lawyers were fighting over the last scraps. Later Ames asked the swami for documentation so she could write off her loss for taxes. He became furious and picked up a chair as though to hit her, she recalls. Ames says the swami told her to talk with his brother, attorney John Robert "Bob" Shoemaker, also a disciple. She still has the memo she received from Shoemaker saying that he had no information concerning the bankruptcy. "As you know," Shoemaker wrote, "the partnership never listed you as a partner. The investment was made in Swamiji's name, and his taxpayer i.d. number was used." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Egotism, . . . the fundamental sickness of human beings, is what people come here to be cured of. And you know, I run a hospital. I live here 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I'm on call for the last 25 years. This is not a benefit to me. It is a benefit to you." -- Chetanananda, on a tape-of-the-month recorded in January or February 1996 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ames says Chetanananda paid a visit in February 1996 to the ashram office where she edited his lectures on salary from Productivity Inc. Ames remembers him saying Productivity was in trouble and might stop paying his retainer. She heard him say ashram finances were dire. The Martha's Vineyard property still hadn't sold. Moreover, Pennzoil, owner of the neighboring Jiffy Lube on Sandy Boulevard, might build a carwash on a vacant lot next door to the meditation hall, spoiling the ambiance. A written agreement shows that the next month, on March 8, 1996, she signed a one-year extension of her loan to the Nityananda Institute. Some of the pressure was off the institute's finances. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I probably try to do too much
already, managing this place, carrying on my head the debt load that it
represents. I don't know if any of you have been $2.5 million in debt
before. All of you who have money pressures on you know what that's like.
Well, magnify it a bunch." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Walter Delaney, the rumpled, white-haired fire chief on the western tip of Martha's Vineyard, spent April 2, 1996, poking through the ashes of the house where Chetanananda once held summer retreats. Pop singer James Taylor had spotted the fire raging late March 31 across the bay from his home. Taylor called the Gay Head Volunteer Fire Department, made up of a crew of carpenters and fishermen. Fire trucks raced down Lobsterville Road. Firefighters found the two-story house blazing. They struggled to pump water from a nearby stream. But the wood-frame building was a total loss. Delaney lists the cause of the fire -- which broke out hours after six disciples had finished a weekend of painting and cleaning -- as undetermined. The fire, it turned out, was manna from heaven. The property would be easier to sell without the house. And the institute's insurance firm paid several hundred thousand dollars to the Nityananda Institute for the loss, according to a company spokesman who declined to give the exact amount. The month after the fire, the institute completed its purchase of the vacant lot from Jiffy Lube. Disciples in the great hall financed by Ames could continue chanting and meditating undisturbed. And the grassy lot was perfect for running the ashram's six Rottweilers, attack-trained by a man flown out from Boston. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The love and devotion we display
toward a teacher is a crucial part of the transformation process." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ames says she felt Chetanananda glaring at her across the desk in his suite Jan. 1, 1997. She recalls watching the swami's face turn bright red as he yelled at her, faulting her for skipping a kitchen chore. She says she had merely overlooked the job on an assignment sheet and was devastated that he would think she had missed it intentionally. And then it dawned on her. My God. This man doesn't even know who I am. She says her years of doubts about Chetanananda bubbled to the surface. The temper tantrums. The false predictions. The disastrous investment schemes. The insults and put-downs. His sexual conduct. Ames stayed inside the ashram for several more months, agonizing over her allegiance. During this time, she says, she was pressured to convert her $500,000 loan into a gift. But something had changed. She didn't think of Chetanananda as God anymore.
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