Spirits in the Mountains · Jan 20, 06:13 PM
Spirits in the
Mountains
Va.’s Blue Ridge Region a Magnet for Diverse
Centers of Enlightenment
By Theresa
Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 14, 2008;
C01
FABER,
Va.
As the
story goes, Sri Swami Satchidananda was flying over Buckingham when he saw the
land below and picked it as the site of Yogaville. The founder of the Gathering,
another spiritual community along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, was in New
York when, it’s said, he dreamed of the abandoned hospital in Schuyler that
would take his group a year to find and a decade to rebuild.
Others
speak of an indescribable energy that might have drawn them
here.
“There’s
something about the mountains,” said Bill McRae of Sevenoaks Pathwork Center in
Madison. “The world’s most spiritual people are in the
mountains.”
Whatever
the reason, a spectrum of spiritual communities has settled and expanded over
the years in rural counties near Charlottesville, creating in many ways an
enlightenment hub. It is a place where Tibetan monks can be found minutes from
New Age mystics, and jewelry stores sell such items as Om necklaces. People
travel from other countries just to spend weekends here, and suburbanites have
been known to abandon their lifestyles to stay.
That’s what
Alan Scherr, 58, did before he and his 13-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed
in the Mumbai terrorist attacks late last month. Today, hundreds are expected to
attend a memorial service for the two at the Synchronicity Foundation in Faber,
where the Scherrs, along with wife and mother Kia, lived for 11 years, practicing high-tech meditation in
the relative solitude afforded by being three hours from
Washington.
Neighbors
say that before the deaths turned an international spotlight on Synchronicity,
they knew that the group existed but could describe little about
it.
Just as
they knew there were others—many others.
“It’s just
a really diverse grouping, with everybody being accepting of pretty much
everything as long as you’re good and kind,” said Julie Bendle, a Nelson County
real estate agent who has found property for those who came for retreats and
decided to remain. “These people feel comfortable being here and are totally
accepted, which is not to say a lot of people, myself included, don’t know what
they’re all about.”
Within a
short distance from Synchronicity, one can find groups rooted in the most
traditional Eastern practices and others pushing the boundaries of modern
beliefs. In less than a half-hour drive, one can meditate with Tibetan monks at
Ligmincha Institute, ponder the role of extraterrestrials with members of the
Gathering and explore human consciousness through sound at the Monroe Institute.
A little farther northeast lies the Sevenoaks Pathwork Center.
The center
serves as a school for psychological and spiritual healing and a retreat for any
group that needs one. On some days, one can find a class of mostly Catholic and
Jewish middle-aged suburbanites talking about their “wounded child,” and on
others, one can stumble upon Buddhists retreating in silence or shamans beating
on drums.
Karl
Hohenstein, 58, who grew up in Buffalo as the son of a housewife and an
engineer, gravitated here after a motorcycle accident left him injured. It
seemed a logical evolution from the massage classes he was taking. He liked that
Pathwork focused on transforming the worst in people, “all the things we bury
and choose not to see about ourselves,” he said.
Why he has
stayed for 20 years, working at the center, is another story.
“There’s
something here that I haven’t ever sought to define, but something energetic,”
Hohenstein said, adding that he believes it is strongest when daylight starts to
fade. “Sometimes, when there’s no one here, I feel like the air in the land is
full of voice or creativity. I’m serving that.”
For a
while, he also lived at Yogaville.
More than
an hour away, off a windy road that crosses the James River, the Yogaville compound in Buckingham County
houses about 250 residents. The community is large enough that it has its own
phone book, credit union and elementary school.
“We live in
a village, which I think is the natural, healthy way that people are meant to
live in the world,” the Rev. Paraman Barsel said one day last week. “And the
reason people feel so alienated in the city is because it’s so unnatural to not
know your neighbors.”
That
afternoon, he was eating a lunch of lentils, rice and sweet potatoes with three
other reverends in the community, including his wife, Lakshmi Barsel. A
vegetarian diet is part of the rules in Yogaville, which also prohibit drinking,
smoking and using illegal drugs. Other than that, Paraman Barsel said,
individuality is embraced. He describes himself as a Jewish man from
Philadelphia who never thought he’d live in the country.
“We’re all
about loving and appreciating all paths, all people,” Barsel said, adding that
he knows there are critics who characterize the place as a cult. “There’s people
who think Elvis is still alive. But I really think anyone who comes and
sees it, more than just for five minutes with their mind already made up,
eventually ends up concluding this isn’t a cult at all. These are regular folks
who are trying to lead a healthy, peaceful life and service-oriented
life.”
A shrine
built in the likeness of a giant lotus flower, its pastel pink petals jutting
skyward, has altars featuring each major religion, leaving space for
lesser-known ones and those yet to be discovered. Lakshmi Barsel sat there
silently one day last week.
Born Linda
Magnetti and raised Catholic in San Francisco, she said “a crisis of faith”
eventually brought her to this point.
“I couldn’t
accept that there was only one path and everyone else was sadly mistaken,” she
said.
Similarly,
people at the Gathering speak of different religions as pieces of a whole. They
wear yarmulkes and pray the rosary. Members also wear rings depicting the Star
of David around a cross.
“Everyone
knew their church wasn’t giving them the whole story,” said Esther Kern, 55, who
was raised in Oxon Hill. “Everyone was looking for something more and found it
when they found Tom and Isis.”
Thomas and
Isis Ringrose started the group in New York and moved it to Schuyler in the
1970s. Kern joined them after taking a nursing job at the University of Virginia hospital and is one of four remaining
members who live in the meticulously refurbished house. The rooms are decorated
in themes of distant lands and times so that one can go from the Italian dining
room into the English library, or from a Chinese bedroom to one set in Persia.
When the group was larger, Kern said, members would switch bedrooms every few
months to expand their experiences and possibly channel their previous
lives.
In addition
to more traditional faiths, the group also believes in reincarnation, psychic
abilities and extraterrestrial beings.
“All of us
felt all of it was right,” Kern said.
At the
Monroe Institute in Faber, it doesn’t matter what a person believes, Executive
Director Paul Rademacher said. It is about experiences. In modest,
dormitory-like rooms, beds are almost entirely enclosed behind walls to minimize
outside distractions while participants use the group’s “Hemi-Synch” technology. The group says that by receiving
different tones through headphones, the two hemispheres of the brain start to
work together, altering the states of consciousness.
“We don’t
have any dogma here. Anybody can come here with any belief. It doesn’t matter to
us. But we do ask them to at least consider the possibility that they might be
more than a physical body,” Rademacher said. “We don’t tell them what that more
is. That’s up to them to discover. We just try to provide the context for that
exploration to happen.”
Robert
Monroe, who was in the broadcasting business, started experimenting with sound
after having repeated out-of-body experiences in the 1950s. He founded the
institute in the late 1970s, and since then it has drawn thousands, including 26
Japanese visitors last week.
As part of
the program, each would spend about an hour in a room big enough for only a bed.
There, they would lie in complete darkness on a mattress filled with a water and
salt mixture, listening to sounds, including ocean waves, flow through
headphones.
“Potentially, what’s going on here is actually more
important than maybe what’s happening in Washington, because what we’re looking
at is the transformation of human consciousness,” said Rademacher, who was a
Presbyterian pastor for 15 years. “When you change consciousness, you see the
world differently.”
He said
that he doesn’t know all the reasons why the institute ended up in Faber—an
area even some locals describe as “the middle of nowhere”—but that he doesn’t
doubt that unseen forces might have been at work.
“I’ve been
told that there is a huge crystal structure under Nelson County,” he said.
“There are influences that can’t be seen that guide events whether we know it or
not.”
