"Hello, Dalai!" was Ma's brash greeting to the Dalai Lama at a gathering of religious leaders in Chicago. In May, the guru exchanged greetings with Pope Paul II at the Vatican.
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One night, a teenager named Lotus asks Ma's blessing for her plans to attend a language school in Guatemala.
"It's a poor country, a great tragedy," Ma tells her.
A young woman named Simone from San Francisco tells Ma: "I just had to come, I couldn't wait another month."
Ma instructs Simone to sit in front of her, which she does, cross-legged. Between long pauses, the guru speaks softly but firmly. "You have to get back your trust in life," she says. “What do you feel?”
"Warmth," Simone says.
"Let it spread throughout you," Ma says. "Now, breathe with your chest. She touches Simone's forehead. This kind of individualized treatment, Gorden Melton believes, is the basis for Ma’s relationship with her followers. “I call it tickling the kundalini,” he explains. “She does it once a year with people, sharing her power with them. They don't care so much about her words; the real depth is based on the power of the relationship.”
THE NATURE OF THAT RELATIONSHIP has been called into question by a handful of former chelas. They view Ma as a tyrant who bullies and badgers, claims spiritual superiority and silences dissent.
"The more I study about narcissistic sociopaths, the more I'm convinced that I lived with one ," says Roseanne Henry, a chela from 1979 to 1982 who is completing a master’s degree in counseling at the University of Colorado in Denver.
Fellow ex-member Sandy Schneider, who lives in New England, echoes the anger.
“Ma is very good at reading people, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, exploiting them," Schneider says.
Both women say they were sincere seekers when they came to Kashi. Henry was having marital problems and had been kicked out of the Catholic Church for marrying a divorced man. Schneider says she was seeking a "meaningful religious life" when a member invited her to visit Kashi in 1977.”
Once in the group, they say, they found it centered totally on Ma. "She taught that a guru is a spiritually enlightened being and has attained perfection," Schneider says. "She said you can't question her methods because her wisdom is in a higher place, and we're too earthly to see or understand it.
"I was devoted to the woman. I felt she could get me to God' Yet I was terrified at the same time."
Schneider describes sitting cross-legge4 before Ma one day, when, without warning, the guru kicked her in the forehead. She fell back and bounced up again, unharmed but humiliated. Ma merely said to the person beside her: "Isn't she a beautiful woman?"
Henry and-Schneider also mention frequent demands for money, relayed through senior chelas. Schneider says she held outside jobs as a cashier and a receptionist, and paid $2 each way for a Kashi van to drive her to work. She says she and other working chelas had to support those who didn't.
"I always owed money, for rent or,.food or whatever," she says. "But I had to pay $5 every so often toward someone else's expenses."
Schneider left the ashram after meeting her future husband, who was critical of the group and of Ma.
Henry's most serious charge is that Ma had her turn over her newborn daughter - asking her to-darken her hair and sign "Joyce Cho" on the birth certificate at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. The child whom Ma named Ganga, was one of four being raised as successors to lead the ranch someday, Henry says.
For Henry, the parting was a six-month process, starting when her husband- quit the ashram and ending, she says, when Ma wouldn't let her help care for Ganga. The couple at first left the child with Ma but then instituted legal proceedings to get her back.
In 1989, convinced that Ma might hide the child, Henry had five sheriff's deputies search the compound. They finally found Ganga at a theater in Vero Beach, where some River School students had gone for a field trip.
The girl, who has since been renamed, is now a 12-year-old seventh-grader living with her parents in the Denver area. Henry, who is vice president for the Cult Awareness Network of the Rockies, says she allows Ma to write and send presents. But she complains that the letters are signed "Mommy."
The guru's reaction to all this?
"I pray for that woman every day," Ma says of Roseanne Henry. "She's obsessed with trying to destroy me."
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Ma says she never commands anyone to worship her or sit at her feet.
"All they want to do is be with Ma," she says. "In India it's a sign of respect. At the Parliament of the World's Religions, I touched the Dalai Lama's feet."
Ma denies planning to raise babies as her potential successors.
"Why would a woman 40 years old want to start over?" she says. "At that age I was very busy serving people suffering with AIDS and Alzheimer's. When I'm gone, the board will decide what to do. It's their ashram."
As for the kick to Sandy Schneider's head, Ma. insists it never happened.
"I have a black belt in tae kwon do," she says. "If I'd kicked someone, they would have stayed down. But tae kwon do is not for hurting only for discipline. And nonviolence is main aspect of my religion."
Money demands?
"No one on the ashram has ever asked for money," Ma says. But Kashi president John Evans, a Berkeley lawyer who joined in 1978, admits there have been occasional collections for "those who can't' help themselves. It's like passing the plate at any church."
MA DOES HAVE HER ADMIRERS. Lee Eakin, Director of Social Services at the Palm Beach County Home in West Palm Beach calls himself a "big advocate" of Ma's ministry.
"She's not a Lady Bountiful - someone who comes with cotton gloves and a morsel in her paw," Eakin says. "With Ma, it's all hugging and touching, as if she was a longtime friend."
Ma displays a hyperactive vigor each Thursday, when her big tan motor home with a painting of Hanuman on the side pulls up to the county home. While disciples load carts with fruit, cheese, cookies and pastries baked at the ashram, Ma bursts through the home's double doors, flinging her arms wide and yelling, "I'M HEEEEERE!"
"Hi, Ma!" reply a half-dozen elderly residents in wheelchairs as she hustles over and gives each a crushing hug.
Flitting to the office, she grabs the public-address microphone.
"Can everyone hear me? This is MAAAAA! Everyone's gotta come to the concert at 2 o'clock!"
Shortly before 2, the chelas start gathering the patients into the lunchroom for the concert, which consists of '60s standards like Mustang Sally. Ma cavorts around the room, getting the 30 patients to clap. She then walks up to the mike, suddenly serious.
"Welcome to our monthly concert - to memorialize those who are present not in body but in spirit," she says.
She reads a list of about 20 names of deceased patients, then smiles.
"Enjoy the music, wherever you are.
Leaving the home, the motorcade wheels off to Connor's Nursery, where HIV-positive babies are tended by nurses and volunteers. Ma and her chelas continue the TLC, cuddling and singing to the listless, rail-thin children.
IT WAS THROUGH DROPPING IN at' county-run hospitals, comforting people who had no one, that Ma first adopted her cause celebre five
years ago.
Many of the patients had AIDS, she found, but weren't acknowledged as such.
Incensed, she began steering her students toward AIDS work, majoring in joking, touching, complimenting and passing out sweets.
"AIDS patients are today's lepers," Ma says with some vehemence. "If Jesus were in the body today, he'd be going to the AIDS wards."
.She calls these patients her "children," and each becomes part of her photo collection.,She shows off the albums of faces - young men and women, tiny babies - as if they were born to her.
THE KASHIITES HAVE made their presence felt in many other ways during their 17-plus years in South Florida.
They founded the nonsectarian River School, with a student body made up mostly of non-Kashi members. Others participate in services such as Meals on Wheels and weekly visits to nursing homes.
The service work is supported by the River Fund, a money pool filled partly by donations from Kashi friends around the country. Also
helping is Ma's art, a series of moody "spiritual" paintings she began in 1983. The art appears on Christmas and Easter cards which often include response cards for the River Fund.
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Arlo Guthrie helped produce another fund-raiser, the Indian River Festival, bringing musicians such as Michael McDonald and Richie Havens to perform at various locations. But the conservation-themed concerts, which have drawn up to 12,500 people, have drawn criticism for generating traffic, noise and garbage in the name of the environment.
Some of the criticism, of course, is simply a fear of the unknown.
"You just don't know what’s going on behind those trees," says former Sebastian mayor Lonnie Powell. Has he ever visited Kashi or met Ma? He chuckles. "No, I wouldn't even get near her. It might rub off."
Kashi members dismiss such talk as redneck rantings. But Ma's image wasn't helped by a scuffle, in 1982 with a supermarket employee in Stuart. She claimed he propositioned her and tried to touch her. Witnesses said she and her followers were tearing open boxes of merchandise.
A county Judge fined Ma $200 and, told her never again to shop in Martin County.
The chelas got more attention in the late 1980s during a dispute over an expansion to an airport that has an approach directly over Kashi.
Several of Ma's followers took part in a successful drive to deny extra public funds to the airport without a referendum. Their opponents accused Kashi of being a cult and infiltrating local government.
The fracas was picked up in newspaper articles, then in the national newsletter of the Chicago based Cult Awareness Network (CAN).
CAN has collected a dozen newspaper articles on the group, which it sends out on request.
Kashi people chafe at the criticism.
"Using 'cult' was like using 'fire’ in a crowded theater," one member fumes.
Concerned about the perceptions the criticism was creating, Kashi members hired a team of scholars to examine their ashram. In December 1989, psychologists from Rutgers University conducted four days of tests, interviews and field observations. Their 55-page report pronounced the school a "warm and caring community" that developed
"knowledge and strength of character.”
They also found a lack of cultic traits, says J. Gordon Melton, Director of the Institute For the Study of American Religion, who worked with the Rutgers team.
"We didn't find pathologies such as untoward devotion or zombie like behavior. We sat in on a business meeting where they spent an hour discussing whether to take in more money or spend less. When Ma came in later, they'd already decided."
The Kashiittes have also tried countering the bad press with good.
Ma spoke in 1992 at a fund-raising dinner at Martha's Vineyard and was photographed with TV actor Paul Michael Glaser, whose wife, Elizabeth, is HIV-positive, and whose daughter died of AIDS. In May, she got Pope John Paul II to bless her "children’s" album during a public audience In Rome – and of course was photographed. She was quoted
in the May-June issue of Common Boundary, a magazine of spirituality and psychotherapy.
But it was at the Parliament of the World's Religions, held in Chicago, that she made her biggest impression giving two seminars and a major speech while nearby her chelas organized a show of her artwork.
She also grandstanded at a closed-door meeting, scolding the parliament’s 250 religious leaders for not making a statement on AIDS. The leaders took no action, but it was noted that the Dalai Lama mentioned AIDS during the Parliament's final session
Not that Ma was entirely serious in Chicago. Although she kissed the Tibetan leader's feet, she says she started the meeting with "Hello, Dalai!"
In March there was more travel, with Ma addressing a standing room-only audience of 400 at the Harvard Divinity School. She also spoke at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill medical school about AIDS and the need to care for its victims.
It is clear that Ma has tasted the big time and seems to like it. And if this tattooed lady ever makes it to the big screen, the scriptwriters will undoubtedly get plenty of help from Ma herself. As she likes to tell you:
"I touch thousands and they all love me and know my work. My life is to serve."
JAMES D. DAVIS is the Sun-Sentinel’s religion editor
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