This is a photograph of Sri Swami Satchidananda and me which was taken the same year that I met him. The inscription says, "Beloved Peter, May the Lord bless you with peace and joy. Love, Swami Satchidananda". The original photograph is my most valuable possession, even more valuable to me than the Einstein letter of recommendation for my father, considering the source and the nature of this blessing!

This is a photograph of Swami Karunananda, one of Sri Swami Satchidananda's first and most advanced disciples. It was Karunananda who introduced me to him.

My story began a long, long time ago, in another age, and in another universe. My grandparents and parents renounced God because of their horrendous experience in Nazi Germany and they tried to raise me as an atheist. Somehow when I was very very young, I became convinced that they had the whole thing ass backwards. At age 7, I had a best friend named Pauli Griffin whose family was Catholic, and they showed me framed portraits of Jesus Christ that hung in their living room. I was immediately drawn to Jesus and I had a strong feeling deep inside that I had been alive during Jesus' time. Pauli's family took me to church with them once and I sat there gazing up at the wooden figure of Christ on the cross which had a bright beam of sunlight cast upon it from the window off to the right. Suddenly, the carved figure came alive and squirmed in agony. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, I felt like I must have watched Jesus go by on the donkey on the way to his trial, and that I had just yawned and walked away without realizing who he actually was.

During my teenage years, my religious thoughts faded into the background and at age 16, I entered the sexy rock and roll world and became obsessed with music and girls. But many years later when I was playing with Magic in South Lake Tahoe and feeling as if I were on top of the world, I began to think about spiritual matters again. I read the book "Autobiography of a Yogi", by Paramahansa Yogananda, and things began to click inside my brain immediately, as I was reading it. It occurred to me that most people only turn to God when they are in mortal pain, crying out for help when they need it most. I decided to be different (like I do quite often), and that I would turn to God at the height of my happiness. So I began to meditate by using the instructions in the book. Because I was living with the rest of the band members in one small house, it was noisy most of the time and I had tremendous trouble concentrating. Eventually, I gave up meditation in frustration and once again, I put my spiritual yearnings on the back burner.

To digress just a bit, my wife Mona and I had always had what was then known as an "open relationship." We were both very much in love with each other, but at the same time, we were completely free to have other lovers. That relationship ceased to work for me when she really fell in love with a doctor named John. We were living in San Francisco in a very classy neighborhood in Noe Valley off 24th Street. One night when she went out to be with John, I just couldn't stand the thought of her REALLY falling in love with another man, so I went out wandering the streets in desperation. I felt that I was searching for something, but I didn't know what. I saw a huge and beautiful Victorian building on Dolores Avenue by 20th Street that had a very interesting Yoga yantra by the front door, so I climbed up the steps and rang the doorbell, hoping to find someone I could just talk to about my feelings. The house turned out to be The Integral Yoga Institute, and lo and behold, who should open that door but Swami Karunananda, whose photo you see above. She let me in, sat me down in the living room, and listened silently while I told her about Mona and John, and also about my extreme frustration with not having one single song of mine ever being picked up by a record company. After listening to me, she said "Peter, it feels to me like you're just going to have to give up your musical ambition because it seems to be causing you rather constant unhappiness, and there's simply nothing you can do about Mona and John. In fact, you kind of asked for it by choosing that lifestyle. Now we have a program here that we call "Karma Yoga", and what that means is that you can move in here and live with us without paying any rent, but you will have to do whatever chores we give you to do and you must practice the yogic lifestyle while you live in our house." I realized that she was right about having to give up my killer ambition, so I accepted her offer to move in because living with Mona's love affair was driving me up the wall. I moved into one of the guest bedrooms with a few other young men who were sleeping in bunk beds.

There were at least 6 or 7 other swamis besides Karunananda living in the house at that time and every single one of them was a powerful soul, well worth knowing. I practiced Hatha Yoga every day and actually ended up teaching Hatha classes to beginners. One day Karunananda said to me, "Swamiji is coming to San Francisco for a visit. Would you like to meet him?" Of course, you know what my answer was. He used to give what they called "Satsangs." These were occasions when all sorts of disciples and interested people would come to see him and he would sit on a big chair, expound extemporaneously about whatever came into his awesome mind, and then take questions from the audience on any subject that people really cared about. The room was well lighted and I simply couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a white light radiating from all around his body. It was his aura. I had NEVER seen anyone's aura before and I have never seen one ever since that time. After listening to him talk several times, I became convinced that I had finally met a true spiritual Master. For me, the key thing was that he was able to express the true spirit of Jesus better than anyone I had ever met, including any number of Christian preachers and pastors who always seemed to me to be way off the mark. So I decided to take mantra initiation from Karunananda. At one point during the initiation ceremony, Karunananda put some drops of holy water on the top of my head and I immediately felt a completely unique electric type of tingle flow from the top of my head down to what is called "the third eye" (the 6th chakra) in my forehead. Ever since that moment, I've felt a gentle pressure there as if somebody is pressing gently on my third eye with their finger, and when I repeat my mantra in my mind, the pressure just intensifies.

As a side note, I should mention that I was at the original Woodstock. Many people today don't know that it was Sri Swami Satchidananda who opened up the festivities by sitting up there on the stage before any music began, meditating, talking for a bit, and then giving his blessing on the entire event while the helicopter flew overhead and dumped flower blossoms down over the audience. I didn't get to see this opening ceremony, and I only mention it because I think it's interesting in hindsight that this most powerful Swami became my Guru and that even though I was at Woodstock, I missed him completely that time. In my not-so-humble opinion, his blessing had everything to do with the fact that Woodstock was so successful and went down in history as the best and most unique rock and roll music festival ever.

After I finally did meet him, I took advantage of every opportunity to be in Swamiji's presence and to receive his Darshan (spiritual blessing). One day when I was living at the Institute, I got a phone call from my sister who lived back in New York telling me that our mother had experienced a physical and mental breakdown. Apparently the poor soul spaced out, forgot where she lived and got lost, and went into the nearest police station for help in the mistaken belief that police are there to help people who are having mental trouble. Of course they immediately had her committed to Bellevue, New York City's worst mental hospital. When my sister told me this story, it hit me like a sledgehammer that my time had finally come to live out Jesus' primary teaching about forgiveness, but I really had no idea how this should be done. One day when Swamiji was leaving at the San Francisco airport a few of the senior disciples and I went there to have some special time with him while he waited for his plane. Because of the conflict I had experienced with my mother for my entire life, and because I had completely failed to resolve those problems with her, I had decided to request his blessing for her and to do whatever he told me to do. With that kind of favor in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to prostrate myself at his feet. After a very brief moment of lying there on my stomach in the airport lobby, he said, "Get up, Peter" because he did not like that kind of public display. So I got up on my knees and gazed directly into his huge dark black eyes. It felt like I was looking right into the center of the universe. When I asked him for a blessing for my mother, he said to me, "Peter, you can't change somebody else's karma." I held his steady gaze (no mean feat, I can assure you), and I said right back, "Swamiji, I know that, but the Bible tells me to honor my mother and I believe in you, so I'm asking you for a blessing anyway."

Somebody had given him an apple as a token gift, and usually when people gave him things he just thanked them graciously and put the gift aside. This time, he held on to the apple, rubbing it gently with his huge hands, and kind of tossing it back and forth. He looked directly into my eyes and said, "Peter, take this apple and give it to your mother. Ask her to eat it, and tell her it's from me." With tears in my eyes, I did exactly what he told me to do. I was superstitious in a silly kind of way, so I put the apple into an airtight plastic container (as if his spiritual energy would somehow leak out), and I sent it to her at Bellevue Hospital in New York airmail special delivery along with a letter explaining where I had gotten it and what she was supposed to do with it. Because my mother was an atheist, I thought she would probably just throw the apple away but to my complete surprise, I got a phone call from her a few days after I had sent her the apple and she was crying. She told me that it was the sweetest thing anybody had ever done for her and that she had eaten it right away. It was then that I realized what I had to do. I took the first available plane to New York so that I could get my mother out of the hospital. Bellevue had a policy that required the signatures of two doctors in order to release an inmate and I couldn't find two doctors who would do it. When I saw my mother in the hospital, I was astounded to see that she had apparently aged beyond her years. This 70 year old woman looked like she was over a hundred years old with wrinkled skin kind of dripping off her bones, and she kept on aging incredibly quickly every time I went over there to visit her. I came to believe, and I still believe to this day, that Swamiji interceded for her with God, and although he was right about nobody being able to actually change somebody's karma, God heard his prayer and speeded it up. Her greatest fear in life had always been to lose control of her body and mind and to have to spend her old age in a hospital where she had to take drugs that she never believed in. After about two months of having to live out her worst nightmare, she died in her sleep, and when her soul vacated her body, she was clutching a photograph of Swamiji that I had given her. After closing her little clothing boutique for her and selling her house, I left Larchmont and went back to California, satisfied that I had done everything I could possibly do for this woman who had given me such problems from the moment of my birth. I felt released from her because I believed that The Good Fisherman of Souls had caught my atheist mother, and I still feel that way to this day.

I continued to take advantage of every opportunity to be in the Master's presence as the years went by. Making a long story a bit shorter, Mona got back together with me and decided that she wanted to have children. So we both agreed to stop the open relationship because we didn't feel that would be appropriate behavior for parents. Just before Jason was born, I took Mona to see Swamiji to receive his blessing for our baby. He put his hands on her pregnant stomach and gave his blessing. Coincidence, maybe, but Jason was born physically perfect. We didn't have the same opportunity before Alex was born and he was born with pyloric stenosis, a condition in which a stomach valve is closed so that he was unable to take in any nourishment at all. He had to receive an emergency operation during the first few days of his life, but he survived and we did take him to Swamiji for a similar blessing when he was still a baby. Jason and Alex were both born as incredibly advanced souls and I think it's possible that Swamiji's blessing may have prepared them to deal with the tragedy that was quickly approaching.

Many years passed, much water under bridge, and heap big trouble hit this brave on the morning of May 5th, 1994. The way it actually happened is very interesting to me in hindsight although it wasn't even remotely interesting at the time. I was cruising along thinking that my life was as good as it would ever get because I had my "soul mate", Mona, the best possible children I could ever imagine, and my dream home in Walnut Creek. Life just doesn't get any better than that. Mona and I had seasonal tickets to the Walnut Creek Reparatory Theater and we used to go out every weekend to see the new productions. We had the best box seat and on this particular night, I was being ecstatic over my life and was just sitting there checking out the audience down below and waving to people I knew or even didn't know. When the curtain went up, the orchestra started to play absolutely cacophonous "music" which deeply offended my musician's ears, and then insane action started taking place down on the stage. Some woman came out with pasties on her breasts and started shaking them around while children entered from the wings and performed summersaults and cartwheels. I watched and listened with growing horror as this meaningless and awful sounding thing developed, and then I said to myself, "I know what this is all about. The writer is trying to tell me that life is chaos. Sartre said it much better and I don't believe it anyway. I don't need this crap at all." So I sat straight up in my seat, assumed a meditation posture, and began to repeat my mantra in my mind.

Within just a few minutes, an INCREDIBLE thing happened which had never happened to me before. Previously, I had always had trouble concentrating on my mantra with other sounds disturbing me, but this time the mantra started to just roar in my mind, drowning out all other sensations, and it had the most gorgeous sound I had ever heard. Not only was it easy to concentrate on the mantra alone, but the sound was so beautiful that I simply couldn't help but listen to it in absolute awe. The very next thing I knew - boom! - I snapped clean out of my body and found myself in a universe filled with nothing but white light. I could perceive all directions at the same time and the feeling was like plugging my fingers into a wall socket and being electrified by unconditional love, peace, happiness, warmth, and pure life. There was a strong feeling of eternity, no sense of time, and I thought to myself, "There's nothing happening here but it's not in the least bit boring!" I didn't want to leave this place because I felt like I had finally been freed from prison and that I was home at last. So I just remained there in an ecstatic state. The next thing that happened is that I heard a voice saying to me, "Honey, what's wrong with you?" It was Mona, and her voice snapped me right back into my body again. I looked around, saw that it was the intermission, and realized that I must have been out of my body for quite some time. I said "Mona, you won't believe what just happened to me." She also thought the play was horrible so we left the theater and on the way back to our house in our car I told her about my incredible out of body experience. BIG MISTAKE ! No, I take that back. It was the biggest mistake of my entire life because she interpreted it as being evidence that I was going crazy. We had a huge fight over it and she didn't talk to me for days.

I had a second out of body experience a few days later when I was out in my back yard. I was just walking around appreciating every square inch of the home I had created and all of a sudden there were two white swans in my swimming pool. I had been looking at the pool and I didn't see them come in. Because white swans are yogic symbols for God just like doves are in the Christian faith, I dropped to my knees, prayed to the swans, and the next thing I knew I was gone again! It was the same type of experience as before and when I snapped back into my body, the swans were gone. Needless to say, I didn't tell anybody about this one. The fights with Mona intensified over the next few days, and one night she threw me out of our bedroom and made me to go sleep on the floor in our family room. I couldn't sleep because I was so upset over these developments with Mona so I just lay there on the floor unable to sleep and meditated. The same thing happened again and I remained in the universe of white light until the sun rose. When I got up and went into our bedroom, she was gone. I went into my children's bedrooms and they were also gone. I didn't think anything was wrong until that night when they didn't come home. The next day when I understood that they were REALLY gone and that something cataclysmic was happening to me, I panicked and began calling Mona's friends who confirmed that she actually had left me and taken my children away. I didn't know what to do so I drove into San Francisco to be with one of my so-called "friends" who I mistakenly thought might be able to help me. When I returned to my home, it was shut up tight and the locks had been changed. I was slammed with a court approved restraining order which totally prevented me from seeing my children, talking to them on the phone, writing letters to them, or getting within 100 yards of my own home!

What I now call my Great Agony began in earnest. Since I was prevented from going anywhere near my home or my children, I rented a series of pathetic rooms that I was able to find that were within walking distance of my house in the mistaken belief that the close proximity would somehow allow me to be able to see my sweethearts. When I was STILL prevented from seeing my boys, my loneliness and pain increased and I started drinking heavily to kill the pain because I was having severe nightmares every single night about losing my children. This was actually what was happening to me during the day and that was horrible enough. Something must have snapped in the creative center of my mind, because entire songs started popping into my head - lyrics, music, and arrangements all at once, just as if I was hearing one of my own bands performing my song with me singing it up on a stage. I did not understand what was happening to me and I was absolutely baffled. I had given up performing and playing music altogether many years before because first of all, I had developed a terminal case of tendonitis which eventually caused me to have to give up playing drums for a living, and secondly, I had failed to sell even one single song to any record company. In my extreme loneliness, I realized that great new songs were being created in my mind and these songs were so good that I knew I had to do something with them. But I had no clue what to do because I had been out of the music business for so many years that I didn't know any musicians I could possibly record with. Besides, my ambition to succeed in music had been so strong that I had stopped singing altogether, not even being able to sing Happy Birthday at my children's birthday parties.

At that same time, someone mentioned to me that his best high school friend was a great guitar player who lived in San Francisco so I called him up and went over to visit him. He had a small 8-track recording machine and mixer set up in his basement and I showed him a song I had just written called Knight in Shining Armor. Because I couldn't play drums anymore, I used his drum machine which was something I had always been loath to do because I resented mechanical drum noises replacing real drummers. But I simply had no choice. Next, I brought out my trademark maracas and recorded one track of those. Then he recorded me singing the lead vocal in one single uninterrupted take. I had left room for him to put in two more tracks of slide guitars and I told him what kind of sound I wanted him to get. To my astonishment, he played the first thing that came into his mind and it was PERFECT. I had never had this experience in a recording studio before, not even at the fabulous Record Plant with Magic and Gary Kelgren. It struck me that something magical was occurring because the whole process was effortless.

Great songs kept popping into my mind one by one and I continued to record in that basement studio for a while. The following summer I took a vacation to southern California and found a group of musicians who agreed to record basic tracks for me in another funky home studio. I would bring the finished basic tracks back to San Francisco and hire studio musicians to record keyboards, saxophone, various percussion sounds, and even a whistling track on Someday. Every musician I hired played the perfect thing on the first take and every time I opened my mouth to sing, the right sound came out. The reason I have related all this here is because in hindsight, it seems clear to me that the Great Agony I was experiencing was the key to opening up my creative center and for some strange reason, God was granting me one of my life's two great ambitions which I had never been able to realize in all my years playing music professionally. Up until that time, I had been feeling like a complete musical failure because in all those years of recording in various studios I had never gotten the "magic" or any real emotion on tape. Now I found myself doing it without having to record tracks over and over again. Literally every idea I tried worked. As people often say, God works in STRANGE ways!

So at about that same time I decided to do something a bit strange too. Because my spiritual journey began with Jesus, and because my birth name is Peter (the rock upon which Jesus said he would build his church), and also because I felt like I had been crucified by the sudden and catastrophic loss of my two boys, I decided to take on the name Peter Cross. I invented a mythical recording band which I called Crossfire to embody my concept of what happens when the two basic forces of God, creation and destruction, interact to project the material world of shadows that dance upon God's pure light. When I decided that I needed to create a production company to promote my music, I immediately hit upon the name Starcrost which really means star-crossed because I felt that my lucky star had been crossed severely by some kind of horrible evil energy. I wanted to find a unique spelling for the concept - thus, Starcrost. Immediately after conceiving of Starcrost Productions, I wanted to create an original logo for my production company and the idea just popped into my mind like one of my best songs. Starcrost Productions - what else could my logo possibly be except some kind of crossed star? And having a Jewish ancestry along with a belief in Jesus as Messiah, I wondered if it would be possible to superimpose a Christian cross over the Star of David, thus symbolizing the essential unity of the two religions. It took me all of 60 seconds to find out that it worked quite naturally and beautifully. I wanted the cross to be blood red to symbolize Jesus' and my blood being spilled in our Great Agonies. Please forgive me for making such a comparison but 10 years really is a long time to suffer so intensely all alone. That's where it all came from and it all relates directly to my spiritual journey.

As my descent into Hell continued and I was eventually forced to sell my dream home, I knew that I had finally reached the end of my rope. I was clean out of my mind with grief and so I decided that I was finished with the material life altogether. The only thing I had never done was to live the spiritual life (without desires) so I packed up all my remaining belongings and moved to the Integral Yoga Ashram in Buckingham, Virginia, where Swamiji, Karunananda, and all the other Integral Yogis lived. I moved into a horrible little bug infested basement apartment adjacent to the Ashram. I got to see Swamiji at least once a week, I saw Karunananda and the other swamis all the time, and way too many interesting spiritual experiences occurred there to relate here. But to make a long story short again, I completely failed to achieve any inner peace there at all and I absolutely hated the climate and the living conditions. There wasn't even a garbage pick-up available for anybody who lives there and we all had to drive 25 miles to reach a public garbage dump. I had to drive even further than that just to get to a food store which carried nothing but lousy food. I finally realized that I simply wasn't cut out for Ashram life and I had probably reached a point of diminishing returns with Swamiji's spiritual blessings anyway. So then I decided to return to California, the land I love the most, which I now call my home.

Swamiji passed away a couple of years ago and did a Mahasamadhi, which is Hindu for what happens when a spiritual Master transitions out of the body. Before he died, I had already asked him if I could become a disciple of Karunananda and he had written me a letter giving me his blessing for that. So Karunananda became my teacher and when she visited the west coast in March, 2004, I went up to Santa Barbara to see her. I had been in the process of emerging from my Great Agony and when I met with her, I told her that I was feeling happy for the first time since it all began over 10 years ago. She gave me a secret spiritual technique to make that happiness stick with me and I've been using that technique quite successfully ever since the moment she gave it to me.

Now after reading all of this, if any of you have any doubts about the truth of these most powerful swamis from what is called the Giri Order, I hardly know what to say. The Giri Order of Swamis has existed on earth since before recorded history in an unbroken chain of gurus. I know that everybody has to find their own spiritual path and I pray from my heart that nobody's path is remotely similar to mine. I certainly hope that mine is worth reading about and that maybe you will get something useful from all that I have been through.

Note:   This web page was written in July, 2004, almost exactly 10 years since the day when my precious boys were stolen from me.

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