Inner-peace movement

You go where the road and the sky collide with the shimmering Pacific, pass the beach clubs, gas stations and the golden roadside Buddha for sale, until you see a horse and rider galloping across Zuma Beach. At a hillside mansion up above, you open a heavy carved door and find the Malibu swami Kali Ray, seated in the lotus position, as members of her morning yoga class emerge from meditation. A candle burns in the center of the darkened room, and the rush of an unseen fountain mingles with soothing music that sounds vaguely like sitar.

Sitting on yoga mats with Swami Kali are an actress, a real estate agent, a publicist, a Hollywood jeweler; interspersed with them are more serious young devotees.

“Yoga helps us to regain our natural happiness and inner peace,” Kali is saying, her hair twisted into long braids, her clothes the flowing, apricot-hued robes of a spiritual master. “We can be like interior designers of our mind. Like an interior designer, we can move all the furniture, change everything around. We have these thoughts, this old baggage. We see it. Then we release it, and it all falls away. What remains is what we need.”

Buoyed by the popularity of yoga and Zen meditation, swamis like Kali are riding the crest of a new wave of fascination with Eastern spiritualism. Anyone, from Hollywood actors to your stockbroker, might offer a personal testimonial about yoga, and some are taking the next step: exploring the spiritual underpinnings, visiting Buddhist temples or retreats or even developing a relationship with a swami.

In transient Los Angeles, where many live far from their roots -- religious and otherwise -- and personal experimentation is an enshrined tradition, it is less unthinkable for a Douglas Aircraft engineer like Stanley Guy to segue from Southern Baptism to meditation and ordination as a swami.

“People are looking for a deeper understanding of life, and the best way is to go look,” says Guy, whose quest led to a new nom de transcendence, Brother Achalananda.

Hollywood, the capital of personal reinvention, is particularly fertile ground. Here, swamis mingle in the living rooms of industry heavyweights. Filmmaker David Lynch and actress Heather Graham are among those who have thrown their support behind building a 12,000-square-foot palace to achieve world peace through transcendental meditation in L.A. -- one of 3,000 such centers envisioned by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles’ former guru. Los Angeles actress-yogi Sally Kirkland counts the late Swami Satchidananda as one of the most important influences on her life (along with Jesus, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Shirley MacLaine). Laura Dern and Lindsay Crouse were devoted to Satchidananda as well. Diane Ladd once had an assistant hunt for a cashmere sweater for him in just the right shade of apricot, and Carole King donated 600 acres to one of his ashrams. “The same qualities of glamour and grandiosity that go with the movie business make people more open to expansion of spirit,” says Sally Kempton, a pioneering feminist journalist in the 1970s. She turned her back on that life to move to Los Angeles and spend 20 years, until 2002, as the Swami Durgananda. “There’s something in the atmosphere that amplifies spiritual consciousness,” she says.

In most of the United States, a swami -- a spiritual leader generally anointed by a senior member of a spiritual order -- might be written off as a religious UFO with about as much street cred as snake oil. In Los Angeles, by contrast, swamis are pandered to by politicians, courted by celebrities, spoofed in movies, invited to officiate alongside Catholic clerics and sought out as speakers for medical and business conferences.

“When I tell people back East I have a swami, people imagine a dirty old man who looks like Peter Sellers,” says the real estate agent in Kali’s class, Constance Chestnut, a petite, dark-haired woman. “But she’s blond and from Kentucky with a Barbie-doll figure.”

Chestnut herself is an atheist. She is from a successful Hollywood family: Her late husband, Don Devlin, produced “The Witches of Eastwick”; her stepson, Dean Devlin, produced “Independence Day.”

“When I started here I was recently widowed and drained after my husband’s bout with cancer for years,” Chestnut says. “Somebody told me there was a woman who taught yoga in her home. I thought she was a housewife in Malibu. I walked into this ashram. It transformed me. People don’t recognize me. It is amazing. It’s a typical yoga miracle story.”

She says she is not a follower of Kali, just a yoga student. But she has come to value Kali’s mantra of self-love.

“It’s an unanticipated benefit, one I treasure now,” Chestnut says. “These are little pearls of wisdom, not empty platitudes. What did she say the other day, about the lotus bloom rising out of the muck? It’s powerful stuff.”

There are many dedicated practitioners of Buddhism and Hinduism in Los Angeles County, especially in Asian immigrant communities.

But a more touristic approach to Eastern spiritualism has also been a tradition here since the 1920s, long before Hollywood types began their 1960s pilgrimages to gurus in India. The city’s rather notorious openness to maverick spirituality drew such swamis as Paramahansa Yogananda, who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship here. Yogananda compared his adopted city to the Indian capital of spiritual fusion, Banaras, dubbing Los Angeles “the Banaras of the West.”

Perhaps the most opulent measure of his success is the Fellowship’s Lake Shrine property spilling down the Pacific Palisades near the coast. On a recent Sunday morning, the fog lends the shrine the dreamlike quality of a Chinese watercolor as a swami delivers a sermon on reincarnation.

“You need a strong inner core to survive in Hollywood,” says actress Jud Tylor, 24, who played Suzanne Somers in “Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Three’s Company’ ” and appears with John Goodman in the upcoming “Home of Phobia.” It was Tylor’s third visit to the shrine.

“The last two or three months, I’ve been auditioning nonstop, and I need an outlet,” she says. “It’s pilot season, and I’m not doing yoga as much as I like.”

Newcomers like Tylor are common these days: Attendance here is up 40% since the mid-1990s, according to directors.

“It’s like a massage. You go because it feels good,” says film producer Stephen Grudenic, 32, a practicing Christian who is a sometime visitor.

“It’s more accepted here,” says Christine Lapinsky, 32, a surf wear seller who relocated from Manhattan three years ago. “East Coasters in general think that anyone who does these kinds of things are flakes.”

After the death of George Harrison, one of the most high-profile members of the Self-Realization Fellowship, his family and friends gathered at the Lake Shrine’s small Windmill Chapel for his funeral. The service was performed by Brother Mitrananda, who knew Harrison. Ravi Shankar was there with his wife. The service was designed “basically to give inspiration to people,” recalls Brother Achalananda, who was also there. “To help the people who lost the loved one, to let them know it’s OK, everything’s cool, carry on. That we are not this body, we are souls, and the soul is immortal and goes on to different forms, and drops the overcoat and goes into the astral world of light and energy.”

The recent Sunday service on reincarnation has a similar tone.

“This material world is not a safe place,” the officiating swami says. “If we build our nests here, they will be washed away. We need to find our God within ourselves.”

Jesus Christ gazes from the altar alongside sainted Indian spiritualists. Some retooled Hindu truths in the swami’s talk seem as in tune with contemporary life in Los Angeles as with the wisdom of the ancients.

“Reincarnation is fun to think about,” the swami says. “But this present life and this present moment is the most important thing. That’s where we’ll connect with God.”

“This is so free and easy,” says first-time visitor Melissa Marshall, 47, a Fairfax High special education teacher, who heard about the Lake Shrine from people at her yoga class. Marshall was raised a Jehovah’s Witness.

“With Jehovah’s Witness I felt so trapped and negative,” she says. “This is such a free way to worship. So positive. And I love it.” Just a few years ago, she says, “I would have viewed this as a cult.”

But the image of Eastern spiritualism has changed since the days when Hare Krishnas panhandled in the airport.

When Brother Paramananda of the Self-Realization Fellowship stepped away from the Material World, he was a young actor named Bruce Mars. Among his roles: a “Star Trek” space cadet whose latent aggression is unleashed on a planet where all subconscious desires come to life, allowing him to terrorize Capt. Kirk.

Now he sees his spiritual journey manifesting itself in mainstream America.

“The words ‘karma’ and ‘reincarnation’ are being thrown around everywhere,” said the swami, now 68. “Even in sports -- at some TV basketball game, a guy tried a shot and couldn’t make it, and the radio announcer said it was his karma. I went the whole hog and became a monk and walked away. Nowadays people don’t have to run away to meditate. There are doctors, lawyers, a mother with three children -- anyone can do it. There’s more acceptance.”

And for today’s spiritual aficionados -- who gravitate toward Zen Buddhism or toward Hindu-based sects or both -- the options for casual engagement have never been greater.

Zen centers have sprung up in many California cities. In the last eight years, the Buddhist Khandakapala Center has expanded from a students’ living room in Los Angeles to a temple with seven branches in the city. The website of the spiritual bookstore the Bodhi Tree -- named for the tree that legendarily shaded Buddha as he contemplated universal truths -- posts daily events that run the gamut from spirit channeling to chanting sessions with spiritual troubadour Krishna Das.

Recreational spirituality is also available. The Tassajara Zen monastery in the Ventana wilderness above Big Sur, billed as the first such monastery in the West, is one of a number of California religious centers that host secular visitors part or all of the year. They are generally in spectacular natural settings and offer yoga, meditation, hot springs, massages, hikes or even 10 days of observing a silent monastic regime.

The accouterments of high-end Zen go way beyond yoga sportswear. Now there are Zen alarm clocks with subtle chimes, Zen telephones that strike a Tibetan brass bowl when someone calls. Eastern-themed stores sell laughing Buddha and Hindu deities like Kali and Shiva against a backdrop of dreamy sitar music and incense. In this Material World, the universal principles of feng shui have become the province of interior decorators.

The popularization of Eastern spiritualism in Los Angeles is endlessly lampooned by Hollywood. In “Hollywood Buddha,” an unreleased independent film, a producer whose life is a shambles hires a guru who advises him to purchase a huge deity -- and his life magically improves. In “The Guru,” an aspiring actor from India falls for a porn actress and becomes a self-styled guru with more exotic poses than the Kama Sutra. In “America’s Sweethearts,” a heartbroken John Cusack is counseled by an Indian mystic whose wisdom begins with lines like, “Life is like a cookie.”

But some take Eastern mystics seriously.

Politicians have been making PR pilgrimages for decades -- since California Lt. Gov. Goodwin J. Knight sat at the Swami Yogananda’s side at the 1951 dedication of the Self-Realization Fellowship’s Hollywood branch. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti took ethnic pandering to a whole new plane in November 2000 when he walked into the Swaminarayan Hindu Temple in Whittier in his stockinged feet to accept the divine endorsement of Pramukh “Swami” Maharaj for his unsuccessful reelection bid. During a memorial service last fall at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Buddhist monks led meditation chants and a swami joined Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in leading prayers.

USC has two swamis-in-residence.

If L.A.’s swamis seem to be veering close to mainstream status, a seminal chapter in their long and rich history begins alongside the Hollywood Freeway, at the end of a road that winds under the Hollywood sign. The Vedanta Temple, a small turreted white replica of the Taj Mahal, sits amid a jungle-like garden with orchids, ponds, secret passageways and hidden shrines to Mother Mary, Krishna and Rama.

The Vedanta Temple is where the distinguished writers Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood became devotees of the Swami Prabhavananda. Isherwood, whose portrayals of a decadent Berlin teetering on the edge of fascism would eventually be the basis of the film “Cabaret,” penned a whole book about this scene, “My Guru and His Disciples.” Even Greta Garbo hung out here.

Vedanta’s deputy swami, Sarvadevananda, is a pleasant, ageless gentleman from Calcutta swathed in the familiar apricot robes. During a recent visit, he smiles pleasantly in the tiny, well-lighted room used for private counseling.

The “ananda” ending of many swami names, he explains, means “Bliss.” His own name means “All Knowledge Bliss.” Yes, he counsels a lot of people who come, “maybe seeking something higher. Maybe tired of life. Want peace. Maybe frustrated with something. Maybe want meditation.”

Most of the monks here, however, are decidedly American.

“Be careful Maharaj, you’re going to get burned! It happens every time,” growls an American monk in a gritty Brooklyn accent after overhearing repeated questions about who finances all this inner peace. The swami bursts out laughing, but later, he discreetly draws attention to pictures of a deceased, deep-pocketed Disney vice president photographed strolling with swamis of the order.

Another American monk named Atmatattwananda, who’s called Shiva for short, says California has a way of attracting pilgrims of all kinds. In the library, Shiva introduces Steven King, 27, a former Marine in torn jeans, jungle mocs and a five o’clock shadow. He has just arrived from Kansas City on a Greyhound bus. Why?

“Ultimately, to build a relationship and commune with God,” he says earnestly.

Kali’s Malibu yoga has made her something of a swami of the moment. She won’t name the Hollywood people she knows, though her publicist, Cindy Rakowitz, says Blythe Danner and Talia Shire are open about their association with her.

Swami Kali will say that she holds private meetings on a weekly basis with several prominent Hollywood actors, some of them Oscar winners.

“They call me their angel,” she says -- and she does seem other-worldly today, with her robes and what appears to be a tiny red sequin on her forehead.

“People tell me I’m their therapist. Their inspiration,” Kali says, drinking chai tea in front of bromeliads and an image of a blue Krishna embracing doe-eyed white cows. If Eastern teachings are about diminishing the self, in Los Angeles practitioners seem called upon more to cheerlead and bolster fragile modern egos.

“You really do have this caste and class system in Hollywood. It’s a little India,” she says. “Here” -- at her ashram -- “it’s all about inner beauty.”

Corin Norton, a young actress whose credits include a guest appearance on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” says Kali’s yoga helps her fight off internalizing Hollywood’s focus on physical appearance.

“It’s so unbelievably focused on the outside and on image. In the audition process everything’s so focused on the external stuff. It helps me to stay connected,” she says. “And it probably helps me get parts.”

Norton is among the people winding up a yoga class today, along with Rakowitz, the publicist hired to promote Kali’s new yoga DVDs.

“Wow. That was the most natural psychedelic trip I’ve taken without drugs,” says Rakowitz, from her mat. “Kali just took us on the most wild journey. I’m like, I feel really stoned.”

Publicists are far from unknown in this realm. At the Self-Realization Fellowship, one publicist arranged an appointment with a swami and two more sat in on the interview.

Kali is more unscripted. She leads you through the ashram (actually a $6,500-a-month mansion, and the rent, if you must ask, is split five ways with some of her followers), sweeping by a dazzling altar of carved gods and goddesses festooned with necklaces and interspersed with white and pink moth orchids. Music hums hypnotically, and something smells pleasantly musky and floral. After 10 minutes here, you find yourself relaxing.

“No matter what we’ve gone through in life,” Kali is saying, “we can tap into our natural state and be happy, just like the lotus was in the muck but reaches for the sun.”

At night, the Malibu swami’s floodlit ashram beckons mysteriously from the hill like the Hotel California. Inside, Kali has guided her more committed spiritual pilgrims through hours of vigorous yoga. Now she’s talking about healing the scars in your heart.

“There are some good scars and some bad scars,” says an earnest young woman, Kashi. “Is the good real and the bad unreal?”

Kali sighs. “No, it’s all really happening,” she says. “People parrot Eastern philosophy and say it’s all an illusion, but it’s real. We can learn to let go of the bad and move forward, to a deep, profound peace inside.”

Everyone strains for her next nugget. A recipe for profound peace?

Kali lets the promise of hope hang in the air, then continues.

“It’s all about the journey.”

Anne-Marie O’Connor can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Serenity sources

CENTERS

Self-Realization Fellowship: Center for yoga and philosophic teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda. Lake Shrine Temple, with a chapel, museum and shop, is open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 4:30 p.m. 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood center has a meditation garden, yoga classes, lectures and services. 4860 Sunset Blvd., L.A. Open daily 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

(323) 661-8006 or www.yogananda-srf.org.

Vedanta Society of Southern California: Temple and residence center with daily events. Temple is open 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Bookstore, with statues and religious items for sale, is open Mondays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 5:30 p.m. Sundays 10 to 11 a.m. and noon to 5:30 p.m. 1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood, (323) 465-7114 or www.vedanta.org.

Zen Center of Los Angeles / Buddha Essence Temple: A residential Zen center with daily services. Introduction to Zen practice -- sitting and walking -- is offered nearly every Sunday morning, 8:15 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., sometimes followed by a one-hour Dharma talk. $20 suggested donation. 923 S. Normandie Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 387-2351 or www.zcla.org.

Zen Center of Orange County: Meditation center offers classes and a monthly three-hour beginners’ workshop. Upcoming dates: April 4, May 2, June 6. $60. Registration required. 120 E. 18th St., Costa Mesa, (949) 722-7818 or www.zcoc.org.

TriYoga Malibu Center: Multiple yoga classes daily taught by Swami Kali Ray and others. Offers workshops, teacher trainings and satsang. Instructional DVDs and information available at www.triyoga.com or (310) 589-0600.

Shambhala Meditation Center: Buddhist center based primarily on the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism but also includes elements from the Zen and Theravadin traditions. Events, classes and regular group meditation practice. Wednesdays, 12:30-1:30 p.m. and 7:30-9:30 p.m.; Thursdays, 7:30-p.m.; Sundays, 9 a.m. to noon. 8218 W. 3rd St., L.A., (323) 653-9342 or la.shambhala.org

Khandakapala Buddhist Center:

A Western Buddhist meditation temple with a peace garden, meditation room and bookstore. Classes for beginners and guided meditations, $7-10. Also events in Glendale, Studio City, Long Beach, Pasadena, Santa Monica, West Hollywood. 1492 Blake Ave., L.A. (323) 223-0610 or www.meditateinla.org.

SHOPS

Bodhi Tree: This shop bills itself as the “world’s finest collections of instructive and challenging spiritual books from all disciplines, Eastern and Western.” The store also offers statuary, incense, greetings cards. 8585 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. (310) 659-1733 or (800) 825-9798. Also has an extensive calendar of spiritual events on its website, www.bodhitree.com.

Shiva Imports: Extensive selection of Eastern-related items, including statues of laughing Buddha, dancing Shiva, Ganesch and Lakshmi, spiritual candles. 1335 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica. (310) 394-1191.

Now & Zen: Mail-order and online house offering fountains, chimes and gongs, as well as Zen alarm clocks and telephones. (800) 779-6383 or www.now-zen.com.