Part One

It was the mid-late 1980s, I’m thinking Summer of ’86. Ram Dass was in L.A. scheduled for an afternoon Be-Here-Now-In at the Masonic Scottish Rite Temple on Wilshire Blvd. My first wife and I had become American Sikhs the year before. Unlike many American Sikhs, I preferred to wear blue as I identified strongly with the blue-clad, warrior Nihung Sikhs of  India, making me a black sheep at the Los Angeles Pruess Road Guru Ram Das Ashram. (Art Kunkin, founder of the L.A. Free Press, called me the “Blue Sikh”). I had a full, long brown and dishwater-blonde beard with a long, wide feline-looking mustache. Image is a BIG thing in Sikhism.

There were at least 300 people in the auditorium. Ram Dass was sitting on his tucket on the low stage, giving hugs to a long line of devotees. Would I go up and get in line? The atmosphere was very stoned and bhakti. Sitar, tambura and tabla playing. REALLY stoned feeling, lovely vibe. I was still standing at the back of the auditorium and stepped into the light. Looking at Ram Dass, feeling how much I admired him, having read everything he had written, 100’s of hours of talks and interviews.

Ram Dass, paused from his hugs, turned towards me, and trained his eyes on mine from a hundred feet away. He raised his hands above his head, a pranam salute of great respect. I knew he meant that for a fellow religious and I immediately got past my fear, and rose my hands in salute back to him, we held that for 3 or 4 long, long seconds, our eyes locked. And then both put our arms down, still locked on each other, then finally away to our respective business; he to his hugging people and sharing his love and respect for them, and me, to finding a seat as soon as possible so my knees didn’t buckle under me. Once seated, my wife and I exchanged looks, and I sat silently, meditating on the naam, really grateful and totally blown away. My self-importance shrank to human size. I was neither too big, nor too small. I just had this calm, oak-tree sense of Is-ness and Thus-ness.

Two years later, I was in profound spiritual crisis, although I had taken Sikh vows and looked forward to a long life of living in God, I also knew deeply that my inner authentic self was female. I knew it right to the core of my being. It was like being left-handed, I never questioned it. I took it for granted. But I always tried to hide it. My wife and I had split up in the meantime. I suffered through a long, hot summer of 1988, meditating and praying to the last human Sikh guru Siri Guru Gobind Singh-ji for an answer to my dilemma. At Sunday group worship, 200 Sikhs filled the Ashram room in front of the Siri Guru Granth Sahib-ji, the holy book and assigned-guru of the Sikhs, over 250 years earlier. I dressed in my renegade blue kurta and turban, entered the room and bowed on my knees to the Siri Guru Granth Sahib-ji to solve my dilemma once and for all, even if it meant giving my head, again, as I did when taking vows.

Two months later I left the Sikh Dharma. I attributed much of the courage that I mustered to Baba Ram Dass, not only for my long-standing admiration, but his pranam to me that day, religious to religious. He pranammed not to me, but to the clear light within me, the thing that would maintain long after my body withered and gone to ash. That clear light was my focus and my strength to honor the incarnation in which I had been born, and follow a very lonely and unlikely path that was to realize my authentic self. It took me another 30 years to get there.