I'd had a brief professional involvement with someone who had lived in this ashram, and one day I received a phone call from her asking if I would be interested in a project that would take me to India. Her contacts had asked her if she knew anyone who would be right for this job, so she sat down to meditate on it. She said that she knew this would sound strange to me, but I had appeared in her meditation as being the person who was meant to go. Although I was skeptical, at the time I was also quite broke, and an all expense paid trip to India seemed far preferable to spinning in the void of Hollywood unemployment.

At the ashram, I didn't understand the Sanskrit they were chanting, but the sound of it had a powerful effect on me. Because I was an employee and not a devotee, at first I didn't participate directly in the chants. I would sit and listen to people chant from across the road.