Hello Danny,

Welcome here.

I read your post today and I have a feeling that we might have been in the same places but at different times.  Ships passing in the fog, so to speak. 

I lived in Hartford, Connecticut (where I became a premie, born and brought up in Central CT), then from the ashram there I was transferred to the Miami Beach Broadripple Ashram (the whorehouse hotel), but I was so cloistered at DECA that I remember many more faces than names at the "ripple.  I was intensely focused on doing direct service for Maharaji at DECA, so the Broadripple most often was nothing more than a bed with my name on it, if I ever made it back to the Broadripple from DECA. 

From there I was transferred to Gainesville, where lived in a nice ranch-style sisters' ashram that was air conditioned with a swimming pool (can't say I remember the newspapers, though).  But, for the short while it lasted, if you did rent that house, it was super nice, so thanks!  Can't say I ever had a real bed there, though.  And I gotta say, I moved three times in less than a year in Gainesville -- all to poorer digs with no air conditioning -- and still no real beds -- just mattresses or pads on the floor.

Thre was a guy named Randy who was the community coordinator during the year or so I was in Gainesville.  I left the ashram on my own in January, 1981. 

Anyway, welcome to the forum.  Don't mind us and our personal foibles.  We're just like any bunch of folks who have left the same cult:  we feel love for each other, but sometimes we also fight like hell as if we are siblings.  As if having been in a cult together is in any way NORMAL!! 

I think you'll find that overall, this is a group of wonderful people to correspond with and I hope you stick around.  If nothing else, you definitely will learn something, because all of the folks here are super smart ones, that's for sure, with a helluva a lot of heart.

Meanwhile, I'm down with a grippe, so I'm back to bed now, to nurse my achy bones and cuddle with my favorite man (whose not my husband, sorry Tom) but my favorite author, Howard Frank Mosher.  I'm reading Waiting for Teddy Williams.  Mosher is better than any meditation, any day of the year.  The soothingest.author in the world, IMHO.  A woman lover and a story-teller extrodinanarireeeee...   I'm high on grippe fever.

Warm regards,

Cynthia Gracie, Somewhere in Vermont

P.S. If these folks deluge you with too many questions, well, just say so and they'll be glad to lighten up the load.