Below: Residents of the Kashi Ashram worship at the shrine of their choice, including Christian, Jewish (left inset), Buddhist (right inset).Photos by Rick Jesse, below |
FOR THE PAST 17 YEARS, THIS self-described Jewish-Christian Hindu guru has worked quietly from her Kashi Ashram in Roseland, near Vero Beach. Last year, however, she burst on the national scene at an interfaith gathering in Chicago, where she spoke vociferously on the AIDS ministry. At 53, Ma cuts a colorful figure: long, thick black hair; a tilak or red dot on her forehead, symbolizing her marriage to God; blue tattoos on her arms - a lotus flower on one, the Hindu god Shiva on the other. Shunning the robed aloofness of most such teachers, she exhibits a taste for oversized T-shirts and black leggings.. The kind of clothes you might expect to find on a housewife from Brooklyn, which is what she once was. She grew up Joyce Green in a Jewish family in New York. Her father, Harry Green, had a varied "career," dancing, gambling and selling hot corn on the Coney Island boardwalk. She married a soft-drink delivery man at age 15, bearing three children - - a homey life that was shattered by her first vision in 1972. |
While doing yoga to reduce weight, she was startled to see Jesus - a vision so real, she says, that she could touch him. -1 Her immediate reaction: "Whadda you doing here? I'm Jewish!" The vision's response: "Teach all ways, for all ways are mine." Afterward, she began getting similar visitations from a Hindu teacher who called himself Nityananda. He directed her to Hilda Charlton, a New York teacher who sought to merge Eastern and Western spiritualities. Charlton told Joyce that Nityananda was a swami in Ganeshpuri, India, who had died more than a decade earlier. The visions' effect on the budding spiritualist was unexpected: On Good Friday of 1974, she says, she began to bleed from her hands and forehead - a shock to the devout Catholic fancily into which she had married. The stigmata or "wounds of Christ" are said to happen to holy people who identify closely with Jesus. Ma's devotees say the- phenomenon has recurred since, although she herself is reluctant to discuss it. |
Then, in the summer of '74, she began seeing apparitions of Nityananda's disciple, Neem Ka'roli Baba, who had died a year before. "He asked what I wanted to do with my life," she recalls. "I said all. He tapped my forehead three times and showed me the universe." This, she says, represented the unblocking of "The River" - her metaphor for the kundalini, or life force, in each person. It was Baba, she says, who bestowed on her the name Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati taken from the Sanskrit words for a holy woman," "victory," "purity" and "follower of the fortunate," She thus plunged into the Northeastern mystical subculture of the post-Woodstock era. She taught beside Hilda Charlton, then on her own. Among her early students was a relic of
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