Our First: The Guru Named Sue

File under: Wackadoo Gurus

True confession: New Age™ looney tunes guru Elizabeth Claire Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant made this blog what it is today. Briefly: we were some kind of wayward/lapsed Christian/faux-Rastafarian, Orange County, California beach mishmash until we met Sue. She was 12-years older and a former stewardess and model. Our first night together brought a whole new way of seeing and being in relationship with the Universe, one that we knew we knew all along as we got caught up in the grandiose certainty of it all. Being the blank slate we were at that time, we gobbled up the "I AM" books that form the basis of Prophet's shtick, feeling every suggested sensation in perfect harmony with their description in the book. How could it not be real!

Being hooked on the books, the experiences they were associated with, and a really hot older woman, we attended a 4th-of-July celebration called the Freedom conference at the church's stunning Camelot campus outside Malibu, California. The property was nothing short of spectacular, and the conference was surprisingly well-attended. We wandered like a puppy-dog along with Sue as she told us what it was like to be Crazy Liz's personal secretary. Then she revealed that Camelot was under psychic attack by the CIA, even going so far as to lead us to a room of people praying in shifts at 90 miles-an-hour in an effort to create a protecting vibration from all the mind-ray machines aimed at us.

It was on that somewhat discordant note that we were ushered into an indoctrination presentation for first-time visitors. There we found a guy up on a stage, ready to pour Crazy Liz's Kool-Aid down our gullets. Folks were asking questions, for which they would receive massive doses of official CUT dogma from the guy.

Someone asked about rock music, and surprisingly to us, our indoctrinator's tune was a virtually identical copy of what you'd hear in any deep red Baptist church. "It's of the Devil, because it's from the jungle. It's animal in nature and stains our cosmic glory bodies," or something like that. We'd heard it all before on Christian radio, which we'd been listening to until we met Sue. Since we already had that groove in our brain, we were ready to swallow it all, until we asked: "What about reggae music?"

Same answer. "It's from the jungle, the rhythms pollute the soul." Only classical music afforded a benefit to its listeners, all other forms of music were inferior.  How could they not be, they were mostly ethnic, and some were downright dangerous.  

For sure, because as soon as we heard that, we knew it was all bullshit. As certain as we were in our new mystical life, we were just as certain in our old one, which was enjoying the OC waves and then sitting on the beach, listening to Jamaican music while we enjoyed some of California's finest Cannabis indica.

We tried to keep it going with Sue, but without the allure of more mystical adventures to far out spiritual planes, it just wasn't worth the close-to-3-hour drive to stay in her seemingly dangerously flea-infested home. It wasn't an easy breakup, mostly because she went a bit stalker on us. Thankfully, she was finally able to realize that we weren't worth the effort, especially since we'd already taken up with our old girlfriend, who had become remarkably more compliant since seeing us hijacked for a month or so by our first real spiritual teacher, the guru named Sue.