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Steve Bhaerman and his alter ego Swami Beyondananda have been regular contributors to The Monthly Aspectarian for many years. Some issues seem not to be laughing matters, but the Swami would certainly say that laughing matters quite a bit. Here’s hoping that a little levity will encourage us to face the severity of these times and get out to vote.

—Guy Spiro

Guy Spiro: Steve, tell us what the Swami’s been up to.

Steve Bhaerman: For the past year and a half the Swami has been on a political mission. Mainly the mission is to turn devotees in to votees. There have been so many people who have great spiritual ideals but have thought that politics is down and dirty and not to be messed with. Somehow these lofty ideals will come true someday when the hundredth monkey jumps out of the tree. We need to realize now that we are the hundredth monkey. People will say I will be a hundredth monkey’s uncle, I am the hundredth monkey. More and more people are becoming aware that the current regime has been taking us fool-speed ahead the wrong way down the wrong road. As these people have awakened, the Swami realized that his mission is to assist in that awakening and to weave the political and spiritual conversations together so that those of us who want to head to dis-armageddon instead of Armageddon actually have a strategy for working together.

GS: I don’t know why anybody would think that meditation is enough without going out to vote. I am continually encouraging my readers to join in the peace prayer and meditation events, but we need physical participation as well.

SB: Swami says that voting is to regime change what buying a lottery ticket is to winning the lottery. Many years ago when we first started out we were doing a show in some unnamed town and the organizers’ strategy for doing this show involved sitting and meditating for an hour every morning imagining a room full of people. It absolutely worked. On the day of the event we had a room full of imaginary people. It’s great to have our head in the clouds as long as our feet are on the ground.

GS: What’s that Arabic saying, trust in Allah, but tie your camel?

SB: That’s right, we are tying the camels up. We’ve been very successful with this. The book, Swami for Precedent; A Seven Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile Dysfunction is taking off. Although the book seems to be about the election, it’s really about the ongoing process for those of us who believe in a world that works for everyone. This is an ongoing process and of course, the whole book is done with humor.

GS: Win or lose in November, the effort can’t stop.

SB: Really it’s a seven-step program that the Swami is talking about. The first step is let’s elect ourselves. Let’s dis-elect the leader and become the leader we’ve been missing. If we manage to dis-elect the misleader this first time around, then that would be an open door to all the other steps which can be put into place.

GS: Another four years of this regime is frightening. With nothing to lose, with no re-election looming, what gloves there are will come off.

SB: They have nothing to lose but our world. We’ve been traveling around the country quite a bit with this campaign and seen some things that are heartening and disheartening. When the Swami does jokes that show his political point of view, people applaud and they all notice how many other people are applauding. There are a lot of people out there who get it. On the downside, there is a lot of fear. We’re used to stepping out and expressing ourselves, but we did a show in the Southeast earlier this summer and people were afraid to speak out. They were afraid of being shunned, they were afraid of losing their jobs. Intimidation is a very powerful tool that these people have.

GS: I want to know where is this left-leaning media? Aside from a few obvious examples, the media is not siding with the left at all. If Clinton and the Democrats were doing some of the kinds of things this administration and its associates are doing, the roar of outrage would be deafening.

SB: The so-called leftist media seems almost non-existent. As the Swami says in the book, people have been wondering, what is George Bush’s Monica Lewinsky, and the answer is it’s the media. I think George Bush bought kneepads for all the members of the White House press corps. You have to keep in mind that, whatever attitudes individual members of the media may have, the networks and other major outlets are controlled by the same people who are buying our government.

GS: The rest of the world is seeing a far different war than we’re seeing.

SB: Swami calls it the Irony Curtain that has come down. Which is an invisible wall of impropaganda designed to separate the people from the truth. We are inundated with so much toxic BS that our skeptic system has overflowed and we can’t process it anymore. It’s the old Hitlerian thing of the big lie. You continue to repeat the same lies over and over again and they become perceived to be true. Yes, we’ve found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, yes, there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. You keep saying these things over and over again with the assistance of Fox News, and incidentally, in numerology, Fox is 666. But it’s not just Fox, it’s all the other media outlets who are just like Fox but not quite as bad.

GS: Domestically, the double-speak is amazing, the Clear Skies Initiative means dirtier air. The No Child Left Behind Program means fewer children being helped. It’s Orwellian.

SB: There is a strategy and Bush has succeeded with the No Child Left Behind. But in his dyslexic way, what that means is that the story on our financial well-being is Honey I Shrunk the Economy. So instead of having that one child left behind, all the rest of us are back there with that last kid, so the kid doesn’t feel so bad.

GS: One of the things I’ve been wondering is where are the real Conservatives? We’re finally now starting to hear from some of them, but this is not our father’s Republican party. Where is Barry Goldwater when we need him?

SB: We’ve heard from Pat Buchanen; he’s been against this Iraq venture from the beginning. Because of our dysfunctional political system, people tend to cluster towards the political parties even though the parties don’t exactly express their true feelings. There are people in this country who hate the Democrats more than the Republicans, and there’s people who hate the Republicans more than the Democrats, and so at election time they gravitate toward whichever party they view as less bad.

GS: Well, we know which party those people are going to vote for. It’s these undecideds, and how can anyone be undecided at this point?

SB: I think, really, all change comes from the middle. But this dysfunctional function of the media has been to keep people separated, to keep the left and the right from really having a conversation. It makes more interesting media, it excites people more when they see people arguing and yelling at each other. The Swami says that we need more For-ums and fewer Against-ums. The fact of the matter is, when I talk to my Republican friends, there are very few things separating what we believe in. Most of my Republican friends are not part of the religious right, but they tend to imagine that the Republican party is about less government and that it’s more friendly to business. But that’s not true these days. Swami calls them Banana-republicans because their policies are turning this country into a Banana-republic.

GS: The Neo-con heresy, which is what it is, flies in the face of true conservatism. Real conservatives don’t run record deficits. Real conservatives don’t preemptively invade other countries. These are just for openers. Goldwater would be foaming at the mouth.

SB: That’s exactly correct. He didn’t brook any of this BS. Swami says Bush has made great strides in the area of minority representation because clearly he is looking out for a smaller minority than any president in history, the billionaires. We can call what they do Psychological Operations, Psy Ops, brainwashing, we can call it NLP, but these people have perfected communicating the great lies over and over again. It doesn’t matter what really happens, it doesn’t matter what you believe, you say certain words and, like you say, the Clear Skies Initiative, those are all double-speak, 1984 names.

GS: Clear skies ... they must mean no birds.

SB: The Body Politic is in an emergency situation and we have to shift into an Emerge and See situation where we emerge from our own shadow. Last week I was at a 9/11 Truth Conference here in San Francisco. Anyone who really takes a look at the evidence sees that there was an obvious cover up by the so-called 9/11 Commission, or as we call it, the Omission. Swami says that here we are, the most powerful nation in the world, and we’re afraid of our own shadow. Throughout history from the founding fathers to the beacon offered by the Statue of Liberty to the breakthroughs we’ve made in this country in the area of human rights, it goes on and on. We’ve shined a lot of light on the world, but we now have a pretty heavy shadow.

GS: The Swami is coming to the Midwest?

SB: The Swami is travelling to the Midwest. I’m doing performances on Friday nights that is part of the Swami for Precedent Campaign. Our goal there is to make sure there’s plenty of light and laughter so that we encourage other people to vote. I call it the Votevator project, where we make sure that everyone that we know takes a step for the light. The choice is very obvious this time around. We’ll be there to create a lot of laughter. Laughter is very powerful right now because it creates encouragement, it allows us to feel more creativity and come up with out of the box ideas. One of the Swami’s tenets is, don’t get even, get odd. Humor helps us find the odd solutions that beat the heaven out of getting even. Then on Saturday mornings, I will be doing a Humor Workshop, Comedy as a Healing Art. This is for those who want to get a little more in depth about how they can spread the light of laughter, make changes and have a great time doing it.

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