To come to this day, after such long journey,
Where there's no longer a journey left.
Where you can finally merge with the beloved.
Okay. I am rolling.
My name is Will.
I always wanted to know, why am I here?
What is the point?
How do I live a meaningful life?
I wanted to know everything.
Hasn't everybody asked themselves these questions?
The truth about the mystery of the universe.
I went to my great grandmother's open casket when I was four
and became fascinated by the concept of life and death.
I was raised catholic. I was even an altar boy.
I was quite fascinated by all of it.
Jesus carries the cross. They're nailing him to the cross.
They're all at point bloody, and...
I started making movies when I was a kid.
I found an eight millimeter camera.
At first there were just fun and blowing things up.
I had grown up pretty lucky.
But as a kid, nobody seemed very content or happy to me.
So I decided there was something deeper,
a secret that nobody seemed to know.
But then I went to college and I started
to use film as a way to explore the meaning of life...
To explore my world.
But by the time I finished film school, I wasn't closer to knowing who I was,
what I wanted, where I was going,
and most importantly, why.
I moved back home after college.
My mother was very disturbed to find out that I was gay,
and she told me to get the hell out of the house, and go support myself.
This is what led me to my huge adventure.
This is my story about what happened to me
on my 22-year search for the truth.
[♪ Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede]
♪ I can't stop this feeling
♪ Deep inside of me
♪ You just don't realize
♪ What you do to me
♪ When you hold me
♪ In your arms so tight
♪ You let me know
♪ Everything's all right
♪ I-I-I-I-I'm
♪ Hooked on a feeling
It was the middle of the '80s and the yuppie generation.
We were all searching for something different.
This was not my path.
I had got accepted into grad school.
I was going to get a Ph.D. in child psychology
and I had my whole life planned out.
And then I met some of these people.
They were so alive,
living from their heart, and playing
and jumping in ice cold rivers,
and hiking through the forest at night,
and oh, my God, I want me some of that.
Some of them were some of the smartest,
most beautiful people I had ever met in my life.
We started it. This is what we wanted.
It was our little utopia in the middle of this big, giant city.
Constantly, you were being fed,
like, your soul was being fed
with love and with inspiration and awe.
I wanted everybody, everybody in the world,
to experience this.
I can remember feeling so fulfilled.
I said, "Dad, I want to give my life to God."
And he was on the next flight out there,
to come get me.
The people that were there were looking
for spirituality, but all of a sudden,
you had a built-in family.
- [♪ Alive by Cabot Budlong] - ♪ On earth this day
♪ Livin' on earth
♪ Well, what more can I say?
♪ La-la-la-la-la-la la-la-la
♪ La-la-la-la la-la-la-la-la
♪ La-la-la-la la-la-la-la
What would you like to surrender right now?
And the person in the middle will say
whatever they are surrendering.
Money...
bad words...
Attachments to money...
and to sex.
...this person's body, we take away your attachment.
You're already through the air, so throw it away.
I fell into a group of the most amazing people I'd ever met.
It was my sister, Amy, who first told me about her friends,
who called themselves the Buddhafield.
People ask me all the time, "How did you end up there?"
I was raised in Catholic school, and...
I always had a lot of questions for the nuns.
When I would go home and tell my mom what I asked,
she would say you can't ask them that.
And I'm, like, no, I want to know.
I wanted to know myself
beyond the superficiality of the world that I was living in.
Life can't be just this thing where you just live and work and die.
There's gotta be something more.
I grew up with a family of really expressive,
artistic hippie-type characters.
I also had no guidance growing up.
Living in Chicago, where I grew up in the streets, was very violent.
And when it came to the Buddhafield,
not really knowing what real love was,
that's what I started to feel, like, really deeply.
I always had this yearning to know really why we're here.
I grew up with a very, uh, fundamentalist, uh,
fire and brimstone church with the fear of God and all.
My mom kicked me out of the house when I was 15,
so yeah, I was looking for stability.
When I came to the group, it felt like,
okay, this is going to be for life.
It was like a marriage.
I grew up with a real problem with authority...
major authority problem.
Really hasn't changed much, actually, I have to tell you truthfully.
When I was very, very young, I wanted to be a scientist,
then I wanted to be an artist.
And there was always a running theme through it
that I wanted to be enlightened.
I felt very lost, and I felt empty,
like there was something missing.
As a child, I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on in my family.
Suicide attempts every couple months,
a lot of abuse, um...
I wanted to be a politician.
I wanted freedom.
I wanted freedom somehow from this self.
We were letting go of our minds.
We were dropping our egos.
I just started experiencing a higher part of myself
that was beyond anything that I'd known.
And it was the teacher who was guiding us every step of the way.
The first time I met the teacher was
at one of the Buddhafield's weekly meetings
in West Hollywood called Sat Sang.
I was told his name was Michel.
He just was soft, and his energy was just, um, still, you know.
And I just thought wow, what a beautiful man.
If you think of tomorrow, you're unhappy.
If you think of the past, you can become miserable.
And happiness is wherever you are.
Wherever you are is where happiness is.
He spoke as if he had gone into the cosmos and come back,
and was here to tell us about it and take us there.
Have you made contact with the eternal,
or are you still obsessed with the momentary?
When are you going to wake up?
When are you going to realize what you're doing
with this precious energy,
with this precious opportunity?
He told us he had a master
that had led him to a great spiritual awakening.
You speak around here and you listen to what is said to you
and you'll be liberated.
That much I can tell you.
I wanted to have a spiritual teacher
who could teach me how to be free.
I wanted a mentor.
I wanted somebody who was going to guide me.
They do this in India all the time. There's gurus there.
This is just the modern-day version of that in America.
♪ It's so easy to be in love
♪♪
He was contemporary.
He wasn't some little old man
with a gray beard sitting in a dhoti.
He was wearing speedos and Ray-Bans, you know,
and he was dancing, and he was doing, you know, contemporary music.
He spoke four or five languages.
He was amazingly humorous, witty...
Very playful, like a child.
He could do something like, oh, my God, I can't believe you just did that.
He could dance.
He was artistic.
He was all those things we all wanted to be.
He was unlike anyone I'd ever met before.
He encouraged me to drop all my ideas
of what I thought I was supposed to be.
I finally felt like I was on the right path.
I attended every meeting, every group outing we would take,
and even went to Michel's weekly individual
hypnotherapy sessions called Cleansings.
I really felt like something important was happening in my life.
- Namaste. - Namaste.
Well, look who arrived.
What's Holy Company doing?
I really fell in love with...
other people first.
What are you doing?
We were together 24/7.
We lived together, we ate together, played together.
Everybody that I knew was in the Buddhafield.
My circle, my family, was the Buddhafield.
I lived in a house with about eight people.
It was warm and safe.
Nobody ever went hungry.
Nobody was ever gonna be homeless.
You always had a place.
Everyone was supporting each other with helping with food,
helping with cooking. It was-- It was so idyllic.
I didn't drink caffeine, I didn't drink a glass of wine.
I mean, I can't imagine living any cleaner.
It was really advocated that we exercise and take care of ourselves.
This was a lifestyle.
We lived in houses, we paid our own rent.
We had jobs.
I did personal training.
I owned my own business.
I was very successful with money.
If I had a job, obviously, my money went
toward my rent and my groceries,
but whatever needed to be bought or built,
we all pitched in and paid for it.
- Need some help. - Another example of service happening.
Service was an action you did selflessly.
It was just for others, for God.
I loved service.
I calculated and I did service 40 hours a week, plus worked.
We started doing service for a couple of quadraplegics
that were involved in the group, and helping them through their day.
It made me feel like...
like I had a purpose.
By the time I was in my late 20s, I had taken on the role
of the group's de facto filmmaker.
That would be your first committment...
to dedicate your life to certain knowing
and your spiritual master's work on this earth.
My films were like a way of giving back to the group.
They were the perfect medium for sharing Michel's teachings.
I even directed a commercial for Wings,
a hair product made by some members of the group.
The profits we earned helped fund the Buddhafield and the master's travels.
There was enough support within the group
for me to do what I wanted:
capture our experiences and share Michel's message of love.
We used to joke, even in the early days,
if this was a cult,
at least it was a really good cult.
One of the first people I wanted to help bring into the group
was my middle sister, Lori.
My brother and sister said you have to come up here.
It's so beautiful. You'll get all the healing you need, and
heal from your eating disorder,
and heal from your rape trauma.
I knew I needed healing.
I mean, I knew I was messed up.
That's something I've always known about myself.
We supported Will, Amy, and Lori to do whatever it is they wanted to do.
If they needed more answers,
my husband and I thought we had worked to give them those answers,
but apparently, we didn't do enough.
They needed something that they weren't getting.
Something happened. Something deep in me in that moment said
I will never leave this.
One day, I asked someone to ask if there was anything I could do for him.
It sounds so small.
He said you can make me a fruit salad every morning.
So I would go to the store and I would buy the most beautiful fruit I could find,
and I started carving Buddhas out of papaya.
I carved the last supper out of fruit.
I would spend hours, and it was within my being
I was making a fruit salad for God.
One day, I came home and my roommate, who was very closely serving the master,
was taking one of my fruit salads and sliding it into a blender
and making a smoothie, and I was just like...
And I kept making those fruit salads, even though I knew he wasn't eating them,
because there was no other way that I could give him anything.
Shakti is the transference of energy from the master to the disciple.
We'd just leave there so blissed out and high-- without drugs.
My body started convulsing
and all these kinds of things kind of started happening.
When he touched me, I was no longer myself.
There was a profound experience where I felt a current,
where I felt like, oh, there's electricity happening.
And I see this sort of, like, flashing light, like-- like lightning,
sound so loud, like a jet airplane.
It's pretty addictive.
I was experiencing an LSD-like state.
Colors were moving around him.
There was a phenomenon attached to this, now.
It's not just these good feelings I'm having.
Now there's this, like, flashing light happening inside me.
More than shakti, there was a greater experience
that only Michel could reveal to us.
It was the ultimate step we needed
to take us to enlightenment.
We were told, uh, that he would have a day set aside where we could come
and ask him for the direct experience of God,
and he called it the Knowing.
The Knowing was based on this book called the Bhagavad Gita.
It's this Hindu book where Krishna reveals the--
the direct experience of God to his disciple, Arjuna.
I was like, yes,
that resonated with me.
I was like, I knew, I knew it was possible.
The Knowing was the realization
of being able to see and hear and taste God.
You could only comprehend what it means
to finally have God be revealed to you in His purest form, finally.
That was
something that I
felt like I had been looking for my entire life up to that point.
I had gone to school, I had a degree, I had a great job, I was engaged,
and yet, when this happened, it was like,
all of that meant nothing.
So who wants to ask for the Knowing today?
One of the things that made the Knowing so intriguing
was that not everyone was going to be able to receive it.
I wanted what I thought he had.
I wanted the Knowing.
I wanted this promise of enlightenment.
A ceremony would occur over the course of several days,
where individuals were able to ask if they were ready for the Knowing.
Those chosen would receive the experience of God.
He said you have to give everything up and I will know,
because you will be asked before you receive this experience.
I'll know if you're telling the truth or not.
So I was like, I better really do some soul searching.
As devoted as I was,
I was still nervous that he wouldn't think I was ready.
One night, he spoke to me alone.
He had something he needed to tell me.
He said that he had been up all night fighting with God,
fighting for my life.
I was fated to have a terrible accident.
I was supposed to die.
He said I needed to follow his guidance and I would be okay.
It was so hard to believe,
but I trusted him.
The very next day, I would find out if I received the Knowing.
This day was going to meet God, okay?
Not the president, not Brad Pitt.
This was God.
So you didn't want to take this lightly.
We were up in the woods, and he looks into your eyes
with, like, you know, this open-eyed meditation that's so overwhelming.
And he said, "What do you want?"
And I told him that I wanted to have the Knowing revealed to me.
He said, "hmm," but it was very doubtful.
He was really playing with that for me.
He said, "Bow down," and I did,
and he said, "You will receive the Knowing, and you will know God directly."
And he said, "I think you're ready for it."
Something in me changed, and literally, for three days,
I thought I was on an acid trip.
And I-I felt atoms,
and I saw things, and I kept checking myself,
like, wow, is this real?
And every time I connect to the light, I'm just...
I'm so amazed.
It's not like there's just a light.
There's, like, colors, and patterns, and they keep changing.
I mean, there's, like, these spinning checkerboards.
The brightest little dots, and each one is a little rainbow.
Then these little electrons come flying all over the place.
I wasn't trusted to have the Knowing revealed to me.
Basically, he'd said, "Not this time, Emiliana.
"I think you're not quite ready, yet."
My sister had been there for six years working like a slave.
I mean, like a slave.
Of course it made me feel inadequate.
It's like, all I ever wanted was to attain this merging into God and disappearing.
I was looking around at people who had been there, like,
no way as long as me.
Everything was always explained off by being, "they're just older souls."
So it was really hard.
He just strung her along.
Strung her along.
It was especially hard for me when my brother got the Knowing and I didn't.
The Knowing was finally shown to me,
and it wasn't what I was expecting.
I saw light and heard sound.
There was no denying the beauty I was experiencing.
But I was overwhelmed that too much was being asked of me,
and I was getting in too deep.
This is the real drunk me.
Drunk with the Divine.
Hey, what's happening here could be put in a history book...
I would say.
Fifty years from now, they will say,
"And there was a time where this master work understand
"as old as the time... he got..."
They were not knowing.
They cannot be put this in history books.
And that this is the real thing that counts.
I loved doing service,
and eventually, Michel pulled me in close
to do service for him directly.
I was always told it was an honor to serve him,
and I felt privileged.
I could ask him anything and he became very accessible to me.
I started finding out details about his life.
In addition to being an actor, he had been a dancer in the Oakland ballet.
He danced and worked out constantly.
I became one of the people who massaged him,
and gave him adjustments...
what we called body workers.
Eventually, I moved into the apartment next door to his with Phillipe,
and we transformed our living room into a dance studio for his use.
I am a very devotional person.
I love to honor,
and so I started putting all of that energy into him.
He said, "You're just using me as an excuse.
"We all have excuses.
"People bow to the buddha, people bow to Jesus,
"and you're using me as that.
"I'm not anything."
And we were feeling special, and important, and loved, and supported.
We were constantly telling him how much
we loved him and how amazing he was,
and how, you know, we couldn't live without him, and...
really, 150 or however many people telling you that all day, every day,
that's pretty powerful.
Michel was very disciplined,
and ballet was a daily ritual for him.
And it became ours, too.
I loved it. I was in heaven. It was my favorite thing we did,
and 90% of the rest of the people hated it.
Dance was living hell.
Drop it, right now. You don't have time for this bullshit.
Do that pass again.
And do it right.
It was like going through school again.
You have to know this. We have twice ... or things to remember.
I remember people crying in that class. It was intense.
It's tough love. He's giving them tough love.
Have you ever seen anything more silly
than two people having sex?
Yeah. Yeah.
He was very clear with me to abstain from having sex.
I couldn't even have a relationship in the group.
He said it was too dangerous and that my energy needed to rise.
What happens during sexual orgasm, a little death.
One who has experienced the orgasm of meditation,
that's the greatest orgasm.
What I remember him saying was basically that sex was a low energy.
Didn't have sex for three years.
The ones that had been there a long time had gotten way over it.
It was like, it became the Booty-field.
After a while, it was like this spiritual haven of beautiful people that...
"Well, we don't have sex. We don't have--"
In fact, everybody's fucking everybody,
but it was on the-- on the down-low.
He took me traveling with him and a few other helpers.
Don't get the camera wet.
Okay.
Of course, in addition to all the fun and meditation,
we have our regular duties, serving Michel.
I was his masseur, and I was on call, 24/7.
I had never felt so good in my life.
Healthy, loving, and loved.
I did have my doubts, but I worked hard to overcome them.
To be a person is to be a mask.
And you never know who you're talking to behind the mask.
The real person is somewhere inside that mask.
You had to stand naked in front of God
as he's made you in your body of light.
The master only represents God on the earth,
and if you can stand naked in front of your master,
you can stand naked in front of your God.
Know that.
So the teacher was a hypnotherapist,
and he would invite me in for therapy, which he called the Cleansing.
And he charged people $50 a session.
We all had therapy every week.
In regression hypnotherapy, you tried to go back to trauma,
relive it, and then change it so that they are empowered.
Well, he'd say, "I'm going to count to ten, and you're going down the steps."
And he has this really deep hypnotic voice.
Okay, close your eyes.
Back in time, down the steps.
Then he'd snap his fingers, and--
"You're there. How old are you?"
"Where are you now?"
And within a few minutes, I was wailing and crying
like I'd never cried in my life.
And then, you know, you'd, like, hit the pillow and scream and cry, and--
When you were done, I mean,
you literally would just float out of that place.
It was amazing.
I divulged every secret, every thought,
every fear-- exposed it all.
Whatever transpires here, between you and I, should be kept here.
Do you have anybody that you talk to
about everything that you do or think or say?
My mother was very, very involved in our lives,
and so much of my Cleansings
went back to my childhood.
So there was a natural
thing that made sense about keeping some distance.
Michel gave us all new names to help us move beyond our past
and to create a new way of seeing ourselves.
It was a common practice in the group.
Amy was now called Emiliana.
Lori was called Cristal.
And I was now named Francesco.
It would come home to us and told us that
they had changed their names,
and that this was what they wanted to be called.
And I said, well, we're not going to call you that.
We gave you your names, and that is what we're going to call you,
and you might as well get used to it.
They came for dinner and said, well, what we came here for is,
we want to tell you we want to detach from you.
I went, what?
I mean, I couldn't believe it.
You're going to detach from the family?
We'd had such a happy childhood with these children.
So my father, who I was very close to, was dying.
He told me that I couldn't go see him.
This is so you break the bond with him.
And I would make airline reservations, and I'd cry and cry and cry,
and then, I would cancel them.
But it was so difficult, just so difficult.
I always-- my intuition was working overtime.
And I just kind of suspected it might be a cult.
No, I did not feel like I was in a cult.
He always told us
for a non-group,
we're an anti-cult.
Namaste.
You have fallen under the spell of this controlling,
brainwashing fellow.
I am beg you, please.
That's not funny.
My family had hired a private investigator
to follow me, and they found that I was with this group.
He went back to my family and said, oh, this is a benign group.
They're not dangerous.
It'll be harder for you to pull her away.
It'll be more damaging. Just let her be.
My family freaked out.
They said I was brainwashed.
They wanted to hire somebody
to deprogram me.
I was an adult. They couldn't do anything.
I mean, we all joked. We knew that we looked funny
following a man in a speedo,
but it turns out, some people didn't see it the way we did.
There was this guy, Kenny,
who fell in love with this girl in our group.
And she was this beautiful model type.
He was not in the group.
He was not a model type,
and he was not very nice.
This guy was stalking,
and his motivation was to tear down the group
so that he could have this girl.
Kenny started to attack Michel, saying he was a cult leader,
telling us what we could and couldn't do.
He went to Cult Awareness Network,
which was an organization run by Rick Ross.
When you have leaders who, that claim to speak for God,
cannot be questioned by their followers,
and have little, if any, accountability,
uh, you have a very volatile mix.
So he pulled in Cult Awareness Network
to try and make us look like we're holding her captive.
Parents who paid Cult Awareness Network to go in,
kidnap their children, and deprogram them.
This was Michel's worst fear,
that the Buddhafield was going to be called a cult.
Now, it was no longer talking about the Knowing,
and it was no longer talking about God and love.
It's talking about what are we gonna do?
He said, I'm no longer in a position
where I can do my work in this environment.
We need to get out of here.
Michel didn't really give anyone warning.
In the middle of the night, he grabbed me, his cook, another body worker,
said, "Pack your bags. We're going."
And I'm like, "Where are we going?"
We're just going.
I had no credit card, no money,
no bank account, no phone.
You know, I was living underground with him.
Everyone else stayed in Los Angeles for the time being
to await instructions.
Eventually, he would decide where they should go.
Namaste, Michel.
Thank you for reminding me to be a thousand-percent disciple.
I'm so deeply in love with you.
There's no meaning in my life except you.
And whatever it takes to be with you again,
whatever fire, I am willing to go through.
Thank you for my life. Namaste, master.
It was like losing my family
all over again.
You don't want to give that up
and be tossed back into the-- the dogs of L.A.
And I was so devastated.
We were just left behind.
Think it's all I could really say is thank you.
Thank you for letting me love so much.
My heart is yours, my lord.
I wanted to go with him.
I never, ever wanted to be without him.
We went to all these places trying to figure out
where we were going to live next,
and how were we going to protect ourselves.
His behavior started to become obsessive.
He convinced all of us that
every Christ figure that walked the earth had been killed
because they brought very unconventional and radical ideas
that society didn't like,
and so they would kill 'em.
I was as close to him as anybody,
and I still didn't know who he was.
I don't think anyone really knew who he was.
I think he may have had his mother die really young, or something.
His brother died when he was real young.
I know that he had come from a wealthy family.
Some years in the '60s in San Francisco...
At least that's what he said to me.
...dark arts groups.
I know he came to America to be a movie star.
He wanted to be famous.
His first name was Jaime Gomez.
His stage name was Michel Rostand.
He was an actor,
and, I assumed, probably a good one,
until I saw some of his acting.
I know he was in Rosemary's Baby.
I know that he was in the movie Rosemary's Baby.
Oh, he was in Rosemary's Baby.
His whole role in this movie was just, like,
a millisecond at the end of it, looking into the camera.
According to some that had come around,
they saw him in some pornographic movies.
And I just thought that was such hogwash.
He never made it to be a star,
although I'm sure that was his intention.
He'd use his hypnosis, his spiritual understanding,
and his acting methods,
and they all kind of merged into this way of coming to God.
We were on the road for six months,
trying to find a place where we could settle down,
where the whole group could come join us.
And he decided Austin, Texas was the place.
One of his disciples bought him a house in the suburbs.
He changed his name so anybody who was looking
for Michel Rostand couldn't find him,
because he was now just called Andreas.
After we had been under the radar long enough,
Andreas felt it was time to bring everyone back together.
He wanted everyone to move out in small pods.
People broke their leases, sold their homes and their belongings,
and began to pack.
People trickled in to Austin, and we recreated the Buddhafield.
New people would show up all the time.
We were sharing this love that we were experiencing
with other people.
I would say the word recruit.
We were all recruiting.
And I recruited lots of people, myself.
He was looking for people who were open,
and that was his instruction.
And then, he started recruiting
people that knew how to do ballet, 'cause he loved ballet.
He used yoga classes to recruit more members
so that he would always have more people coming in.
It was a very interesting group of people
'cause they were all beautiful.
These beautiful bodies and these little speedos,
and the girls were so beautiful, and--
You couldn't miss them.
Even though he wanted new disciples,
Andreas was still hesitant to let anyone get too close to him.
He kept telling us that there was still a lot to be afraid of
from the outside world.
Well, as you can see,
the fire has indeed engulfed the vast majority of this compound.
- The latest figures we have-- - Just 100 miles north of us, Waco happened.
We watched in horror as 72 members of a presumed cult died
during a government raid.
This freaked him out,
'cause he thought what happened to David Koresh was going to happen to him.
This was a spiritual leader who was being demonized and running this group,
and he was afraid that people were going to draw parallels,
and they were going to see him as that.
I did feel like I needed to protect him at times.
In Austin, it was "keep the group secret." It's sacred.
Sacred things need to be kept secret.
We did exercises in class to practice in case the FBI captured us.
You're going to tell them that you don't know any Andreas.
You don't know anybody.
I wasn't sure if the FBI was after us or not,
but I would do whatever it took to protect him or the group.
Even though I wasn't a very good liar, I did it.
I had no integrity at all.
I would lie to my mother for him.
We were instructed that we had to lie to my parents
all the time.
I rarely had any interaction with anyone outside the group.
Even my parents, who lived nearby in Ft. Worth,
had no idea I was in Austin.
Here, my brother lived three hours from my parents.
There is no reason for us having to keep up this lie.
They're not going to come and inspect your ashram.
I had to come up with elaborate lies.
I told them I moved to Atlanta, and to Mexico, and anywhere
to give them a reason not to expect to see me.
He would have people that were going to Europe
get a postcard and mail it to my parents.
Here's a postcard I sent from Florence
when I was Francesco.
He'd send me all these little gifts from these places
to prove that he was writing me these letters, and--
And I still saw through it.
And it's sad, and it broke our hearts, really.
Bye, Will.
We just had to hope it would all work out.
Nice having you.
My role increased in the Buddhafield,
and I had a group of new disciples eager to do service with me.
I set out to make our house in Austin a place of peace and beauty.
By the time we were finished, we had built not only a massive garden,
but also an aviary complete with peacocks, exotic birds,
even a wallaby.
The garden became our sanctuary,
and his house became like a refuge from the outside world.
Things quieted down.
Time went by, and we didn't hear much
from Cult Awareness Network anymore.
We thought our lives might be getting back to normal.
But the demands of the Buddhafield,
and Andreas, became greater and greater.
The aviary, with all the birds and bunnies, was overrun by rats.
We would lift up a rock, and hundreds of rats would go running out.
He asked us to kill the rats.
Then we armed ourselves with shovels.
I would hit them over the head or we'd have to decapitate them.
It just went on and on and on,
killing these furry little creatures.
It was like he was playing a game with us,
like he was turning us into his own personal little warriors.
Andreas loved to dance, and he said he wished he had a theater.
So I found this amazing piece of land.
He told me to buy it and he said, "Let's build a theater, design a theater."
Teacher would come out some days and he would look at it, and he would say,
"I don't like the back of this building.
"I don't like where the windows are. I don't like the walls.
"Take it down." And we would.
We would literally unbuild the building
and rebuild it again for him to come out and look at it.
He would take me into his room and he would say,
"Why are you taking so long to build this building?
"If I was doing this, this would have been done a year ago.
"You're delaying my work. You're creating karma."
I was just horrified.
And he'd say, "This is all just a teaching for you.
"It doesn't matter when the building gets built.
"What I care about is you awakening through this process."
"And if you don't get this building done by next week, this--"
And I would just go, "Did that just happen?"
Once the theater was built, Andreas began choreographing ballets.
We would rehearse eveery day for hours.
People would drop everything, including their jobs, to make it to rehearsal.
These ballets were astonishing.
Fabric would be ordered from L.A. and flown in
so that we could have these elaborate costumes,
and sets would be designed.
It was something extraordinary.
Everybody was involved.
We would rehearse them for a year,
do costumes and everything,
and we'd only show these ballets once,
to ourselves,
and that was it.
He lived, like, a multi-millionaire's life in the simplest form.
He had a chauffeur. I drove him around.
He had a cook. People cooked for him.
He had people cleaning his house.
Everywhere he went in public,
I brought along a special chair.
It was huge.
It was on a back pack. It was about like this.
So, on one end, he's, like, totally paranoid and trying to be secretive.
And on the other end, he has this entourage of people who are
setting up a throne for him anywhere he goes in public.
He would call me and he would say, "What are you doing?"
And I'm, like, "I'm in bed."
And he'd say, "You better get out of that bed! You've got service to do!"
It was all designed to show how devoted you really were.
He wanted to control the social lives, uh, interactions of everybody, what they did.
It was presented as your spiritual guidance,
what's best for your soul.
We weren't supposed to read books, watch TV, listen to the radio,
and I never did any of it.
He became upset with me one day
when I told him that I'd bought a TV,
and he'd later said, "Oh, you did that behind my back."
And I was like, "I didn't know that I had to go and tell you
"before I'd made the decision to buy a TV."
I got a dog at one point. It was not acceptable.
It wasn't okay to get a dog.
I ended up having to give the back.
The public humiliation was just too intense.
I felt like I was this horrible disciple because I had gone and gotten
this little puppy without asking his permission.
He didn't like dogs.
With my friend, Danielle, we used to say,
when he'd be crazy, and, like, nyuh, doing all of these weird expressions,
she'd look across the room and she'd go,
"We're going to be here for the rest of our lives."
I mean, it was kind of nice when it first started out
and it wasn't all about adoring him,
It was about achieving some kind of spiritual growth for yourself,
not licking his feet.
[♪ La Femme Fatale by Andreas]
♪ If you think untainted
♪ In a woman's body
♪ You can be a copy
♪ Or you can be
- ♪ La femme fatale - ♪ La femme fatale
♪ La femme fatale
- ♪ La femme fatale - ♪ Every man is the possible catch ♪
She's just really sexy, and she's going to come down,
she's going to be flirtatious,
and that whole thing, and everyone else is flirting--
Femme Fatale was a song Andreas wrote.
about the negative effect sex has on spirituality.
I jumped at the opportunity to make something
that wasn't just about the Buddhafield.
But the song also served as a public satire against the woman
who Andreas thought was being too sexual.
I didn't want to be a part of an attack,
but I went ahead and made a very funny video.
It was a big hit.
♪ La femme fatale ♪
He did not like anyone to have a n-- a normal, natural sex life.
And how he treated sexuality in general was juvenile.
Uh, there was a young lady in our group named Sophia.
She was an amazing--
She spent her whole life just wanting to be a bellerina.
She danced beautifully, and, of course, he made her, like, his prima ballerina.
Andreas wanted her to spend time with me,
to be close to me, but not to have sex with me.
He knew, all the time, knowing that I was developing
this romantic attachment for her,
because I was telling him so.
He had told five different women not to date me
because it would be bad for my spiritual development.
It's a very confusing subject.
There were so many mixed messages about sexuality.
Like, we were told, you know, that we are not our bodies,
and don't get stuck in sex, and don't get stuck in your senses,
and transcend all that stuff.
And yet, we were all obsessed with how we looked.
You know, the women all wear makeup,
people had plastic surgery,
the guys all had to go to the gym,
people waxed their bodies.
He really did not like fat people,
did not want anyone in the group that was not just physically a starlet.
Oh, he wanted everybody to be starlets.
And so, he was suggesting
that this person have their eyes done,
or suggesting that this person have their cheek bones,
or another person have their chin.
He sort of got obsessed with it.
We were going into his bathroom
and just finding piles of mascara and fake eye lashes
and concealers.
He wore makeup, like, every day of his life.
I remember one time, I was in water with him
and he had an eye lash on his cheek, and I'm, like...
trying to signal to him to flick that off.
But I didn't know about the plastic surgery, but it started to look evident.
He was always telling us, this is the body,
it's going to be a carcass one day, it's going to die.
And here he is, over here, doing his eyes, his eyes, his this, his lips,
constantly doing stuff to his body.
- Are you filming? - Yeah.
But he started to look very deformed and, um, and-and scary-looking, really.
It was of a total dichotomy of what the teaching was.
And I knew he would have other people do plastic surgery
before he did it
so that he would see if it was safe,
or how it looked,
and I never questioned it.
No one was gonna say, dude, your makeup's running.
No one would dare. I wouldn't dare.
- Here come Prince Edbu. - Ooh.
There he goes.
He almost got me.
- Do you understand what he just did? - Yeah. Yes.
You opened that door, it almost slammed me.
I'd always turn the camera off when Andreas was yelling.
We would use this term:
"You need to drop your mind."
That was something you would say to someone, and-- and it was almost...
It was critical. It was...
"Hey, you're not in line with what's going on here."
You don't wanna be in the mind. No thoughts.
If you're having thoughts,
you're not connected to meditation and to God.
There's a term, it's called mutual complicity.
You can't have a teacher without followers.
The benefits outweighed the craziness.
So you started to accept the questionable stuff.
You just started to accept it.
It's like any family.
And I think a lot of us compartmentalized.
A lot of us rationalized...
Always. And he certainly helped us rationalize everything.
The only truth that's left is the truth that I am told,
and who is the highest authority in the group?
It's the master.
You wanna have kids?
No.
Good.
Spiritual growth and children...
don't always go together.
I told him I was pregnant,
and he said, "Get an abortion."
I did not want to have this abortion,
but he said I couldn't be in the community
if I had the child.
I had the abortion.
As soon as I'd hear his voice,
I would go into surrender mode and do whatever he said.
I was with somebody in the community
that I was really, really in love with,
and I set it up so that I would get pregnant,
'cause I thought, oh, that would be okay.
Andreas had told him he would be kicked out
if he didn't get me to have an abortion.
So I had to get another abortion.
In all the years we were together,
not one child was born.
Sometimes our birds would escape when we were feeding them,
and they'd fly away,
never to be seen again.
And so we had to protect them for their own good.
Just because the door is open
does it mean you have to go through it?
No.
If the door is taking you away...
Sometimes, an open door is a closed-up room...
a jail.
There were a lot of people who didn't stick around.
Of course they were demonized.
When I left the group, immediately,
everybody was told something awful.
We were told, "Do not communicate with them.
"They're in their minds."
There was rumors that I had turned into a prostitute,
or I was running prostitutes out of my house.
When people started to assert their own independence,
he would crack the whip.
It was tightly controlled
that if you were to go out on your own,
bad things were going to happen to you.
If I ever left the group, within a year, I would be dead.
Why?
Because I would be out from under the wing of his grace.
He had told me on a couple of occasions,
if I wasn't with him, I would get AIDS.
And I would die.
And I believed him. I believed him.
The thing was was that he was a hypnotherapist.
That means he had his finger in the psyche of every person that he was dealing with,
and every person, he dealt with completely different.
So he manipulated each and every personality that way.
You only have one opportunity to be with me-- for once in a lifetime.
And this was literally brainwashing.
We were doing
hypnotic work with people,
every day.
It's brainwashing.
I got to do some of the films that we did for our group.
My character is, uh, in the middle of the desert,
and the apocalypse has happened.
In the scene he bends down to get water, and then he realizes
that he's not alone, that the master is there.
Here we are, we're actors in front of the camera.
We get this thing with shaktis happening.
And I wasn't sure whether or not it was an act...
or whether it was real.
Then I started thinking, maybe... maybe the whole thing is an act.
Something's wrong here.
Thoughts came in all the time.
I was always getting the message
and I chose not to listen.
I was, like,
"What the fuck has this turned into? It's become a circus."
And the shakti of the Divine Mother has become...
twilight.
And some of the older people that had been around since the beginning
were kind of looking at each other, going,
"Uh, I didn't hear where this suddenly changed
"to 'it's all about him' instead of 'all about your inner experience.'"
Action.
I wouldn't refer to him other than anything he was,
an out-of-work actor
who stumbled on the role of a lifetime.
One of the people that had been around for a long time
wrote an e-mail
and he sent it out to, like, everybody in the Buddhafield.
There was this e-mail that was sent out
about all this stuff, and it was like, "What the fuck is this?"
The author of the e-mail was leaving the group,
and he laid out serious accusations towards Andreas.
By far, the most damning accusation in the e-mail was
that Andreas had, for years, been forcing
young, male disciples into unwanted sexual relationships.
Andreas immediately told all of those around him
that the letter was full of lies, and not to read it.
And all of a sudden, there started to be this division.
Some people didn't believe it, some people did.
Because it's just some letter somebody wrote,
and they could write whatever they want.
I didn't have, personally, any reason to believe
what those things were saying.
And some people coalesced around him.
And even I did, initially. I wrote a rebuttal to the letter.
Um, yeah, it was-- it was bullshit. I mean...
I'd been in a sexual relationship with him.
I knew that everything on there was pretty much true.
Well, how it started was in the private therapy sessions.
Being a young man, and very new to sexuality at that time,
have a lot of questions,
so you're talking to your therapist about these things,
and so he's got this dossier of information on you.
Have you ever had sex with a guy?
No.
Have you ever wanted to?
You can be very honest with me.
And somewhere in there,
he started running you through homosexual fantasies.
"Who do you find attractive?" And then start naming women.
He's like, "No, like a guy." You know, it was like,
being attracted to women had, like, no validity whatsoever.
Do you fantasize?
- Yeah. - What do you fantasize about?
What will it be like?
One day,
it was after a therapy session,
and... he...
asked me to kiss him.
I was thrown. I did not want that.
I wasn't looking for that.
That moral stuff that's been put in your head...
Yeah?
...it is not your voice.
You need to get to what is authentic,
'cause you're carring so much problem in there.
The first thing he had me do
was just around the body.
It was like, oh, you don't need to be uptight
about your body.
See, you can take off your clothes and be unattached.
It's not a big deal.
I felt like I was doing spiritual work initially.
Then it started to get, like, ah, come closer to me.
And he sat in his throne, here, very upright and I'd be in front
of him, on my knees, and he would-- he said,
"Just do whatever you want to do, whatever comes naturally."
And what came naturally to me was I wanted to get away.
He started having sex with me, not that day, but over a period of time.
And it became a regular thing-- every Tuesday and Saturday night,
after the gym.
It was like clockwork, and, um, I had never been fucked before.
And, um,
I was totally not down with it,
and I was hinting at it, and expressing it,
and he's just ignoring it,
like, completely ignoring.
I mean, imaging having sex with somebody, male or female,
and, you-- they're just laying there,
you know, just there, like, spaced out, not paying attention to you.
"Oh, do you like this?" And your answer is something like,
"Yeah, sure."
And they just keep fucking you, 'cause they don't fucking care.
You know, you're just a sack of meat to this person.
That's when I began to hate him.
I resisted and I didn't want to be with him,
and I would cry, sometimes, and he would say, "Okay, okay.
"Let's go down the long flight of stairs
"go back to your childhood... Who is it that you're resisting?"
And I'd be, like, "I'm resisting you! I don't want to have sex with you!"
He's, like, "No, no, let's go back to your childhood,
"when somebody wanted you to do something and you didn't want to do it."
He was a master. He was masterful...
at getting what he wanted.
And somehow, after this process, I would be bowing at his feet, saying,
"Oh, my God, thank you.
"How do you always bring me back to this beautiful place?"
And I'd get fucked again.
You can't say no.
No is against the rules.
And then I had to pay him. I had to pay him for fucking therapy.
Fifty bucks, every time I'd go in.
So, here's your bullshit therapy,
We're gonna fuck, give me $50.
What a deal. Can you even imagine?
This went on for every single Monday of my life
for five years.
Here I am, like, helping this guy every day
with his chair, with all these little details of his life,
and I hate him.
But still, somehow, I'm here in this group,
going through the motions serving him,
and it was just,
I felt like I was going mad, and--
Yeah.
I felt like I was going fucking mad.
Sophia saved my life.
God. Thank you so much, Sophia.
Thank you.
She knew something was funny with me.
She knew when Andreas told her not to hook up with me,
that there was something not right there,
and so she ignored him.
And so we developed a romantic relationship.
At age 28, 29, she was my first girlfriend,
like, a real girlfriend.
How could you?
We trusted you. We trusted you.
We trusted--
We trusted you.
I still felt like I owed him everything.
I feel like such an ass saying it, you know, I was so stupid.
I-I thought, like, wow, he's doing this for me,
and I never told anyone.
Not until everything fell apart.
I knew right there it was, like, oh, my God, I see now.
I see what he's been doing. It was so clear.
The curtain has been opened.
The curtain's open. Broke my heart. You h-- you hurt people.
One after another,
young men started sharing stories of abuse
with friends and confidants in the group.
All these boys came out.
All these boys.
So they, one after the other,
in tears, came and said, well, this happened to me,
and this happened to me, and it escalated,
and then it got worse.
I was hearing more and more stories.
A lot of brothers were, uh, heterosexual, and he...
He abused them. He sodomized them.
I'm not here to compete with anybody about anything,
'cause I don't have any agendas with you,
except if you're sincerely...
wanted to grow up, maybe this would be offered to you.
Do you follow?
He took 120 minds and manipulated each one and their own story.
Nobody ever knew. No--
The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing.
I never knew what was going on with you.
I knew you, intimately, for 25 years,
and never knew that you were suffering.
Never.
If I had known that you were suffering as much as you did,
or that my other brothers were suffering as much as they did,
I would have put a stop to it from the get-go.
It's true.
He started having sex with me when he took me to Hawaii.
I didn't understand what was happening.
He kept saying that everything he was doing was for me.
He told me his master had brought him close the same way,
and it was very special.
He was saving my life, he told me.
I would die without him.
Yet he was still that person in my life who could take me to this God experience,
and I was dependent on him for that, in my mind.
And even though I had suspicions that I wasn't the only one,
I kept quiet, and protected him.
I couldn't show anyone what I was feeling or what I was going through.
And despite having the whole Buddhafield as my family,
I was alone.
He told me he was only working with me this way,
and I could not tell anyone because they would not understand.
But nobody had the complete story.
So some people knew some things,
other people new other things,
I knew the thing that I knew,
but nobody was allowed to really talk to each other about it.
I had no clue that he had been seducing so many of the men in the community.
When I heard the stories about what was actually happening,
that was when I was, like, you motherfucker.
Along with the confessions of sexual abuse
came other stories.
He told me to say I had cancer,
and I had to tell my best friends, my lover, everyone,
and I had to keep that a secret so that he could
be the great healer and heal me of my cancer that didn't exist.
It was, like, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
Was 70% of it a lie? Was 80% of it a lie?
And finally, we discovered
that the rumors of him being a porn actor were, in fact, true.
As more people were finding out about the truth,
a few started to confront Andreas.
And I said, "You can't do this.
"This is our community and you are destroying it."
I literally confronted him. I go, "What are we doing?"
He'd completely deny it.
He'd say, "Radhia, I know that you're hearing this,
"but I haven't done that."
He just had this innate belief that you just keep telling the story
and they'll believe it.
I had to take a stand.
I knew there were a lot of innocent, new people there
that would not even know what was really going on.
I was, like, okay, enough.
This is what I needed to leave.
It got to a point where I didn't care.
It was, like, okay, I might be dead in a year,
but it is better than being here for another second.
And I said, no more. I am not your sex toy.
I'm done. I'm not going to take any more.
He looked at me and his eyes went black.
His eyes got different,
his face got different, it was freaky.
It was clear to me, when I was looking at him,
that I was dealing with a madman
that was grasping at straws
to try to keep everything together.
That's when the spell broke, and I was, like, you have nothing for me anymore.
In a period of a week, boom, boom, boom, all of a sudden, everybody started leaving.
He was on his heels. He was backpedaling.
The Buddhafield was falling apart.
It was devastating to watch my closest friends leave,
and I began to feel the need to join them,
but as much as I tried,
I couldn't get rid of my sense of obligation to Andreas.
He still denied everything,
and he wanted a chance to tell his side of the story to those who would listen,
so he asked me to grab my camera one last time.
We were summoned, uh, to a house, uh, one evening,
that there was going to be a message from Andreas.
And they put up this big video screen and they showed this video.
What this is cannot be putted in a biographical letter.
It doesn't need résumés about its story.
What this is...
is free...
untouched...
unpolluted...
not apologize.
There were some people
that, for the first time I saw in a gathering, that got up,
and, like, I don't know, 10 or 20 people left
while that video was going on,
because it was so disturbing.
I am in you.
But in truth,
there's no "I," and there's no "you."
Now, come.
May all beings wake up.
You could hear a pin drop.
Nobody bought it.
Everybody was questioning things in their head.
But then he did something that surprised us all.
He decided, after 17 years,
it was time for another Knowing session.
A few loyal members took him up on his offer,
including my sister, Amy,
who still had no idea what had happened to me.
And now, he's desperate to hold on to those of us who still trusted him.
So he-- he revealed the Knowing.
And he was awful.
He wasn't even connected to me at all.
The day after, we went for a walk,
and he came up and he put his hand on my wrist,
and he says, "You know, Emeliana,
"these people are trying to destroy your master,
"and I need to know if you know someone
"or if you can find a way to
"have them taken out,
"get rid of them.
"If not that, find someone who can just destroy their lives
"through the IRS, or whatever way."
People he wanted harmed,
they were the two people who were behind exposing the truth
of what was really going on with him.
The guy who wrote the letter and Radhia.
You know, it's--
How did this shatter?
How did everything shatter?
How did I come here being so hated and so ostracized
and demonized when I loved someone
so much and gave my life for so long?
Yeah, I don't know who he was at that point.
To see that and finally start
having my realizations about Andreas,
that everything he did was a manipulation for some
narcissistic, maniacal end.
This thing was fucked.
Some members warned Andreas,
if he didn't stop his work,
they would press charges against him.
We convinced him he would be left alone
if he promised to stop being a teacher.
I didn't want to see him harmed,
but I wanted all this to end.
So I reluctantly flew with him and a few others
to relocate him to Hawaii.
Here I was, returning to the place where the abuse all started.
But finally this time,
I was done with the lies.
And I was done with him.
So, after 22 years, I left...
without saying goodbye.
I had just had 200 of my closest friends, who I considered to be family, gone.
It was kind of like a bomb went off,
and, like, a village that I lived in was totally destroyed.
That was the feeling it was.
I miss that community.
It's like a big death...
of your family all at once.
I did so much service for him
and didn't worry about the future
that when it was over,
I had $45 to my name, I didn't have a bank account,
I didn't have anything.
I remembered just laying on the floor in fetal position.
It was like I was dropping through this trap door.
It was black and there was no bottom.
Where am I gonna find that awe?
Who's gonna make me dance in the forest?
You know?
Who's gonna make me be willing to sing when I can't sing?
I questioned everything I thought
when I came out of the group.
I sold my house and I took a job as a bouncer,
and, you know, reclaimed my masculinity.
I was so angry.
I was so bitter. I was so cynical.
I couldn't trust anything.
All of us who left the group
needed to heal.
- ♪ Happy birthday ♪ - Like many of my friends,
I tried to mend the relationships I had given up in the past.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
We embraced them.
We told them we loved them.
We never gave up on them.
I had prayed that they would come back and they did.
It was unbelievable, really, what they'd been through.
And I was glad that they were rid of this man,
and I just feel
a deep hatred, and I shouldn't. I'm not supposed to hate,
But I feel that
he really is evil.
Really evil.
There's this social interplay that happens between
highly co-dependent people and pathological narcissists.
Who is going to give a person,
who needs constant adoration and attention,
who is going to give that to them, ceaselessly?
Somebody who relies on him
as the source of their self-esteem.
And they'll say, "You seem like a normal, rational, intelligent human being.
"How did this happen to you?"
It was hard for me to admit that...
I was brain-- I was brainwashed, uh, and I was in a cult.
You know, looking back now,
he would do all kinds of things to draw you in to him...
endearing things.
And he made you feel special,
and you felt really loved.
There's something about seeing other people being devoted that makes you think,
"Oh, well, those people don't seem crazy."
It's what we do every time we come into a religion.
We take on their beliefs as truth.
You will do anything to defend that truth.
You subjugate your best interests
to the interests of the religion,
the group, the corporation.
That's what happens in a group-think system.
That's what keeps you there. Yeah, that's what kept me there.
And so, the better you feel, the more you get committed.
And then, somebody can get you to do anything.
I mean, I would have killed or died for him.
It's so common. It's everywhere.
Look around you. You've got a cult in your town,
I almost guarantee you.
I know. I see them all.
There's Andreas.
Andreas has created a new group,
and currently has over 100 followers.
I do think that he's created that sort of
hyper protection around him again.
Andreas was now calling himself Reyji, which means god king.
To this day, I don't understand.
Some people still stayed... still stayed when they were told the truth.
Without those people going along and being there,
he would not have been able to reconstitute the group.
It hurts me to see that he's still doing the same manipulation,
and it's sad, because
people give up their lives. You give up your power.
They're going to deny their own ambitions,
their own abilities and talents
for him.
Everything's going to be done for him.
The thing is, what I would say to them,
if I thought that they could hear,
was he is not it.
He is only here for himself,
not for you.
Now, could-could they hear that?
I know they couldn't. I couldn't hear it for 22 years.
Innocent people are coming, now, to this day,
and they're very sincere, and they should know.
They should know the truth.
Like, the only way we can get to him is undercover.
Um, otherwise, if he sees a camera, he will disappear.
In the beginning, when I came into the Buddhafield,
I initially thought that I was finding a deeper truth in my films.
I thought I was capturing life
and expressing love.
But really, I had just fed his cause
and contributed, in my own way, to hurting people that I loved.
Testing.
- What do you think? - Yeah.
Getting freaked out.
When did you get here?
My birthday.
Staying over there.
And what are you doing?
Just being alive and enjoying.
Me, too.
I mean, it hasn't been easy.
- You know what I mean? - Mm-hmm.
You have a lot of disciples, I see, huh?
No.
People come and go.
This is it, pretty much, like people pass through.
Well, all right.
Are you being a good boy?
No.
I don't know what that is.
Don't you think you should learn what that is?
Good and bad,
better to find out what is best.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you been being your best boy?
I'm just being.
For years I felt like I had no power,
no voice.
But I was wrong.
Sorry, Andreas, but somebody needs to stop you,
because you've hurt my brother, and you have hurt my other brothers
in ways that they will never heal from,
and you need to go down, you ugly, distorted, son of a bitch.
Fuck you.
It's sort of this tedious process of looking, sifting through everything,
and looking at the good,
and then letting go of some of the negatives.
There's a lot of good.
I feel like I'm much more clear,
much more knowledgeable, and much more aware
than I-- I would have ever been
if I hadn't gone through that entire experience.
I don't think about the bad.
It-- It doesn't come to my conciousness.
'cause I only remember what was good for me and what helped me.
And what helped me was...
this, this connection we have with each other.
It wasn't because of the teacher. It was because of us.
It was this beautifully crazy, insane, horrible experience
that has made me who I am today,
and I-- I can't wrap myself around it.
I'm really glad about who I am now.
I'm really happy with my life.
I have an amazingly rich, beautiful life.
I have an amazing...
I both regret it and I don't regret it,
and I'm super thankful, and...
really happy about who I am now, so...
maybe it's worth this.
Maybe it's worth the--
In 2006, I shot video portraits of some of my friends.
By the time I finished the video in 2007,
the Buddhafield as I had known it
had broken apart.
♪ We'll do it all
Some followed the teacher to Hawaii.
♪ Everything
- But most left.
♪ On our own
It was a confusing time.
♪ We don't need
♪ Anything or anyone
♪ Or anyone
♪ If I lie here
♪ If I just lie here
♪ Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
♪ Forget what we're told
♪ Before we get too old
♪ Show me a garden that's burstin' into life
♪ All that I am
♪ All that I am or was
♪ It's here in your perfect eyes
♪ They're all I can see
♪ I don't know where
♪ Confused about how as well
♪ Just know that these things will never change for us at all
♪ If I lie here
♪ If I just lie here
♪ Would you lie with me and just forget the world ♪
[♪ Sky Inside by Cabot Budlong]
♪ Raining down
♪ Down upon me and all around I feel it
♪ Raining down
♪ Rain down on me
♪ Rain until you heal it
♪ And the gray sky's overshadowed
♪ In the clouds up above me
♪ And see the clouds turning into clear blue skies
♪ And I'm asking, asking you to reveal it
♪ I'm asking, asking you to reveal that sky inside ♪
- ♪ Raining down - ♪ Raining down
- ♪ Down upon me and all around I feel it - ♪ O-o-ohhh
- ♪ Raining down, rain down on me - ♪ Raining down, on me
- ♪ Rain until you heal it - ♪ Rain until you heal it
- ♪ And the gray sky's overshadowed - ♪ Gray sky's overshadowed
- ♪ In the clouds up above me - ♪ Clouds up above me
- ♪ Somewhere on the other side - ♪ Somewhere on the other
- ♪ Falling down like love - ♪ Side
- ♪ And I see that cloud turning into you - ♪ Side, I feel that sky
- ♪ Then I'm asking you, asking you - ♪ Inside
♪ To reveal that sky inside
♪ Now I'm standing in what you rebuilt
♪ Sky inside
♪ Sky inside ♪