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Guy Spiro: Baba, please give us a thumbnail version of your story.
Baba: I was born in Laguna Beach in southern California in 1945 and spent my childhood on the beach, surfing and getting into the ocean at a young age. But I started to feel very disappointed in the materialistic reality that was going up very fast around me. The whole suburban thing was exploding and the trees were being cut down. All the eucalyptus groves around where I lived were being cut down, and that reality was really harsh on me. I felt very out of place, like a stranger, completely disconnected from it. My connection was the ocean. I was a long distance swimmer and I would spend a lot of time swimming, hours and hours.
GS: That put you in a state right there.
Baba: Yes, the pranyama, doing the pranic breathing ... I would do the butterfly stroke, my favorite. Pulling that prana in and being in the ocean for hours at time would really tune me into a vast kind of openness. I couldn’t quite put that together with my mundane reality, with my parents, and with high school.
GS: Was your family religious?
Baba: To a certain extent. They went to church and were very conservative minded. I was definitely the strange one of the family and just didn’t quite fit in anywhere. It was a difficult time for me. I started reading Alan Watts
and got into an intellectual understanding of cosmic consciousness and alternative reality.
GS: Was Alan Watts your starting point?
Baba: Alan Watts, I guess, and I read a lot of poetry, Alan Ginsberg and the beat poets. Bob Dylan had just come out and I began playing guitar and singing folk music. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I didn’t know my purpose of life and realized I needed to find something, someone who could teach me something about how to live. I did know that I had to begin my journey. I had to get out of this country because I wasn’t vibing with it at all.
