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Conversation with Kenneth Green
Part one: the Los Angeles IYI

Krishna, Swami Satchidananda, and Narayana, circa 1969.
(From Ken Green's collection, photographer unknown)

From an oral history point of view, Kenneth Green is an example of a key witness—a holder of vital information about Trungpa Rinpoche's life and work. He served as Trungpa Rinpoche's Nangsi Kalon, or Minister of Internal and Cultural Affairs, and as a director of Vajradhatu and Nalanda Foundation from their inception in 1973 and 1974, respectively, until 1990. In this capacity, he worked closely with Trungpa Rinpoche to establish and administer the Vajradhatu seminaries, Kalapa assemblies, Naropa Institute, major contemplative centers, dharma art programs and installations, and a host of cultural events. As part of his training and responsibilities, Ken was empowered by Trungpa Rinpoche as one of the first generation of Vajradhatu teachers and meditation instructors.

Ken now lives in Boulder, Colorado, where in addition to being the executive director of Golden Sun Foundation for World Culture, the president of Windhorse Productions (a multimedia/film company), he is currently entering mediation practice. He began his spiritual journey, as a disciple of Swami Satchidananda in the mid-1960s. In this first of a series of Chronicles interviews to follow, Ken talks about his life in the early counter-culture days of NYC, his years with the Integral Yoga Institute, and the beginnings of his close friendship with Thomas Rich, AKA: Narayana, later known as the Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin.

WF: So, where to start.....can you talk about the first significant thing that connected you to dharma, to Rinpoche?

KG: Well, it started when my mother was very pregnant with me. It was January 1945, she and my dad went to a movie at the Devon Theater in the Bronx and her water broke. The movie they were watching was An American Tragedy, the Josef von Sternberg's film based on Theodore Dreiser's novel. So I figure I knew at that point, I was on my way [laughing]. And if I was ever to write my memoirs . . .

WF: That will be the opening page?

KG: Right, right. [pause] In some ways I feel the karma of my life led me to Rinpoche from an early age. I was always kind of off the beaten track and somehow not fitting into the status quo, even when I tried. Right through high school into college I was playing with mind altering drugs, getting involved with eastern mysticism and the occult. I would spend countless hours, days, weeks, pouring over books on the Rosicrucians, Ancient Egypt, the Theosophists, Lobsang Rampa's The Third Eye, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Journey to the East, Evans-Wentz's Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and so on. One day a friend of mine gave me a very strong dose of LSD (my first) along with Leary's Psychedelic Book of the Dead and Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. And that was that. I moved to Manhattan, eventually dropped out of college (my last year at Hunter College/CCNY) and became a full time journeyman. This was the sixties and "something's happening here but I don't know what it is." Well, maybe it was the "Age of Aquarius" that seemed to spring up overnight. Coast to coast, the sixties were in full swing, and there again was that pesky feeling that I was heading somewhere and it wasn't corporate America.

WF: And at some point in there you must have met Satchidananda.

I met Swamiji in 1966, at the very early stages of his work in America, and I made close friends with Peter Max who had brought Satchidananda over from Europe. So I became a vegetarian, began to do a lot of yoga, and actually began to understand that the mysterious journey to the east involved a lot of discipline. There was decorum and devotion and respect and it wasn't just a matter of dropping a pill and dropping out and having these inner, seemingly inner, visions. He was a real earth principle for me and for all of his students. We needed to drop back in.

I was fairly sick in Sri Lanka with dysentery, and was being treated by Swamiji's doctor, who was a Buddhist practitioner. He was a Theravadin, a very sweet man who had great devotion to Swamiji. There was none of the hostility that is sadly happening in Sri Lanka these days. He explained to me in very simple terms how Hindu and Buddhist views of incarnation and impermanence are different. He used the analogy of a candle. He said that in Hinduism you have a candle, which is like one incarnation, and to move to the next incarnation you light another candle and each lifetime you exist as a specific candle, which is Self or Atman. In Buddhism you incarnate as the flame itself, which is always changing and fluid. It's not solid, but at the same time, the past is bringing it forward.

WF: That's a lovely analogy.

It's beautiful, and it reenergized something I had been feeling for a long time, beginning with reading Evans-Wentz, that there was something about Buddhism. I became a Hindu yogi because I fell in love with Satchidananda, but there was something about Buddhism, and I wanted to learn more.

I returned to New York, and worked as a production assistant on some films, but my real interest was in spirituality, yoga practice and life with Swamiji. I taught a lot of yoga classes. This was when I first met Allen Ginsberg, who had also recently returned from his India adventures. He and Peter Orlovsky would come to the IYI for kirtan (chanting) and yoga classes. We would meet again, under the umbrella of the Vidyadhara. Alice Coltrane, and Jeff Goldblum were yet other New York notables that came for yoga classes. It was a marvelous time of transformation—hippies becoming yogis. One day Swamiji called me into his chambers in New York and he said, "I'm going to California on a teaching trip and I would like you to come along. If there's some interest there, maybe you could stay and teach yoga." And then he says, "I'm picking someone to be your partner—this gentleman by the name of Tom Rich."

WF: So he was Tom at that point? Not Narayana?

KG: Swamiji named him Narayana soon after that, before we left for LA. Tom used to come to yoga classes and—this comes pretty much as a surprise to a lot of people—Tom, when I met him, was a very shy man. He was withdrawn and introverted. It was only later that I learnt he was quite the dandy, heavily into the gay scene on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Here was a skinny, self-effacing guy who didn't say very much, and could hardly look people in the eye. He had a little Gurdjieffian mustache. He worked as a nurse's assistant. He was not the confident stylish guy that he became years later as the Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin. He was a different person. When Satchidananda put us together for this trip to LA, I said something like, "Oh Swamiji, could you give me someone with a little personality? He's such a bore. He's so straight." Well, he was anything but straight. I had no idea.

This was 1968. Narayana and I and a married couple, by the names of Vijay and Sri, set off by VW bus to California. The plan was that, if there was enough interest, Narayana and I would stay in LA, and Vijay and Sri would settle in San Francisco. During that trip across the country, Narayana and I started to warm up and become close friends. It was the beginning of a great friendship that would lead us to our root guru. We had a copy of Gurdjieff's Meetings With Remarkable Men and we read it out loud to each other. It really struck a cord. We didn't know much about Gurdjieff. I still don't. But what we read seemed accessible, contemporary. It was bringing spirituality into our time, into our culture. That really made an impression on us, and it became very much of a theme for the two of us when we got to LA. We'd say, "Wouldn't it be great if we could set up a center based on different traditions?" We wanted to explore. We wanted something that related to the world we lived in—almost like a spiritual laboratory or institute of some kind. We knew that Swamiji would probably never approve, but it became an ongoing dialogue. You know, "Maybe it's not just a yoga center. Maybe it's something more." So we were renegades from the very beginning of our friendship. From the day we arrived in LA our focus wasn't purely on Hindu yoga. At the same time, we had a lot of devotion to Satchidananda.

We arrived in LA. Swamiji gave talks and a lot of people came to hear him. LA was great in those days. I'm no fan of Los Angeles by a long shot, but it was a particular window, 1970, things were happening. LA was filled with potential yoga students, countless fuzzy freaks, Hollywood beautiful people, lots of very sensual women, and great avocados. There was no question about it. The interest was there. So when Swamiji left, Narayana and I stayed and started to set up the Los Angeles IYI. At that point I had been teaching yoga for a good two years, and that was my real love—to be a yoga teacher. These days, just about every other person you meet is a yoga teacher, especially in this town [Boulder], but back then it was just beginning. I guess it was cutting edge.

Swamiji taught Integral Yoga, which meant we practiced all the major branches of yoga: hatha, pranayama (yogic breathing), raja (meditation and mantra practice), kriya (cleanliness and purity), karma (service), and most important bhakti (devotion). We studied Patanjali, the great Hindu scholar and practitioner who, similar to Gampopa, codified the teachings of yoga. We read the Bhagavad Gita, and we practiced devotional chanting. So it was a synthesis, a full course of study and practice and there was an awful lot of emotion and heart to the whole process, which is really a wonderful aspect of Hinduism. I feel very fortunate to have had that background in Hinduism, which is really the mother religion, the mother culture of Buddhism. Satchidananda may have had a very manly appearance with his long white beard and towering stature, but he also had a lot of feminine energy, a lot of loving kindness. He could also be a very stern father figure at times, but his teachings were very nurturing and very healing.

So the LA IYI was a yoga center, but it also became quite the wild place. We developed the reputation very quickly, and ultimately fatally, of being the renegade center of Swamiji's mandala. In the beginning, Narayana and I lived in a small 1930's Hollywood bungalow apartment on Cherimoya Street, sleeping on the floor and teaching here and there. Before long we found a place to have our ashram. It was in the Hollywood Hills on Benda place, an old rundown mansion that had once been owned by Marlon Brando and Wally Cox, who were best of friends and did a lot of real estate deals together.

WF: Wow, Marlon Brando and Wally Cox? Strange pair.

KG: Totally strange, but very Hollywood. Frank Zappa lived there before us. It was probably on close to an acre of land, which is huge for land in the middle of Hollywood Hills. The property, if it exists now, would probably be worth well over ten million dollars. It was a grand old place from the twenties or thirties, and about ten of us got together and fixed it up. More people began to come around and a core group formed. Many of these people later became students of Trungpa Rinpoche. There was Rachel Faro (Nirmala), Julie Nowick, later Sheen (Jyoti), Latha Barasch (Lalitha?), Eddie Shapiro (AKA Swami Eddie, AKA Swami Brahmananda), Dheeran, Bob Altman (Bapu), Carol Heller (Chime), Danny Mann (Lakshman), and Anandi, Rachel Faro's daughter, who was born there. That was the first time Narayana and I assisted in a birth. Narayana went white and almost fainted. We tried this again, in Vermont, with Rinpoche, when Lila gave birth to her first son Vajra. But I am getting ahead of myself. Back to Hollywood, we painted and put down carpet, we did the grounds—it had a big swimming pool—and we turned it into our very own xanadu. It was a yoga xanadu. It was great. And over the course of our time there—a year and a half or so—we were lost in the realm of the gods, and I say that with a big smile. It was splendid. At any one time there were about ten to fifteen people living there. It was an ashram and a commune of sorts, but it never got sloppy. We were very neat, especially Narayana, and the place always looked impeccable, and in many ways we had a lot of discipline. We woke up early. We did do our meditation and yoga. We taught. We did retreats, and we were pretty orthodox about certain things. And about other things we weren't.

Members of the LA IYI on the steps of their ashram, circa 1969.
Photo from Chime Heller's collection, photographer unknown.
Click the photo to enlarge.

As a sidebar, there was a woman who came every week to do yoga. She was from New York, Jewish, big nose, big bushy hair, beautiful eyes and a great personality—and when our car broke down, our Nash Rambler, she gave us something like $350 to fix it, which was a fortune for us at the time. So I said something like, "My god, what do you do?" And she said, "Well.....I do some music stuff." We knew her as Carole Goffin, which was her married name, but much later we found out she was Carole King. So Narayana and I became friends with Carole King who was a lovely person, very self effacing. She never wanted anyone to know she was this famous person. And other Hollywood celebrities started to come by: James Taylor, Tina Louise, who played Ginger in Gilligan's Island, Felix Cavaliere of the Young Rascals, Stacey Keach, and a whole array of folks from the music, film and television world.

Carole King Stacey Keach Tina Louise

There was a certain wildness that set in. I was girl crazy. Narayana came out of the closet for the first time since Christopher street and went boy crazy. The sexual revolution was at its height, we were all quite young and restless, and so, in terms of, the Hindu vows of Brahmacharya, of celibacy—there was just no way. So even though there was an unspoken taboo in terms of the Hindu purity thing, there was a lot of sexual mischief in the ashram. It was playful and fun, which was very much the nature of that era. At first we were pretty pure in terms of drugs, but towards the end, some grass turned up and then some acid. Eventually—perhaps the most playful and dangerous influence of all—Trungpa Rinpoche entered our lives, but I am getting ahead of myself again. Throughout all of this, Narayana and I were continuing to have this ongoing dialogue about wanting something more, some bigger view or possibilities of spirituality. We were restless.

So in terms of being good yogis, good students of Swamiji, Narayana and I, along with many of our ashram brothers and sisters, were beginning to run into a problem. In a nutshell, I think the problem was that the more we let go, the more we ran into a wall. The yoga path as it was being taught by Swamiji didn't quite work in America, at least not for us. The teachings and the practices were not transcultural the way Buddhism is, and I would say it's still a problem today. Hinduism is an extraordinary tradition, but it's rooted in mother India, and if you really want to follow the path, you have to almost . . . if not speak pigeon English . . . you have to take on a lot of the cultural trappings. To some degree you have to go native.

Narayana and Krishna

At that time, while Narayana and I were students, Swamiji expected that we would remain vegetarian, and we would practice. But he didn't have anyone take vows of celibacy. This changed after we left. But in the beginning, he left it somewhat up to us. I think his approach to training and taming his students was similar to Trungpa Rinpoche's. Both of them, when they arrived in the West, listened and watched before they acted. First they took time to learn about us and experiment to some degree. I think part of Satchidananda's learning process was the mistakes he made, and I believe I was one of them, and I think the Regent was too—but, if I may say, positive mistakes from the perspective of where things went.

We were close students and I think Swamiji was cultivating Narayana and myself, as well as a few other close students, to move his organization and his work forward, and in a way we failed him. I don't say this out of any regret at all, and my relationship with Swamiji remained really good afterwards, and to this day I hold him close to my heart. But after we left, he had to clean up his organization to some extent. We caused a lot of gossip.

Now, at some point we met a gentleman by the name of Charles Berner. Do you know who he is?

WF: I don't think I do.

KG: Charles Berner ran the Institute of Ability. Earlier he had been involved in Scientology, but had broken away and set up his own thing. He had a big center out in the desert, and a place in LA, and he conducted these "Enlightenment Intensives", as he called them. He had this whole system worked out where you would do these intensives and you achieve these different levels of enlightenment. Lila Rich was one of Charles's senior students and when I met her, I thought she looked like a Hindu goddess. At that time her name was Irene. Later she was Lila. Swamiji named her that. Swamiji and Lila had a very good connection.

Krishna, Lila, and Narayana

So there was a gathering of these two tribes, the IYI yogis and the abilitists, and there was a lot of synergy. Many of us "yogis" did his enlightenment intensives in this beautiful place in the southern California desert. Now I have to say that what he was doing was totally wiggy, but it was an amazing experience for us. He provided a great opportunity for us to loosen up from IYI, and it was a critical part of the chain of events that eventually led up to meeting Trungpa Rinpoche. This went on for about six months, this romance between the IYI and the Institute of Ability. It should be duly noted that Narayana and I achieved all sorts of levels and shapes of "enlightenment." There was a panoply of flavors, and we were not shy to brag about it. We were pretty far out by now. During that time, Lila and Narayana got together, and I think this was also about the time that Swamiji starting hearing about our adventures. I am sure he was understandably concerned.

WF: So by now, it must be 1970. Had you heard about Trungpa Rinpoche at all?

At some point Judith invited a Tibetan to give a lecture at the East-West Center and she told us, "You have got to meet this man. He's a young Tibetan lama and he's utterly amazing." Now Narayana and I would sometimes slip away from the IYI and go to the movies. It was part of our bad boy thing. We'd sneak away from the ashram and get a pizza and go to the movies. So the night came. We went to the talk at the East-West Center to see this lama. It was a blistering summer night. We waited and waited in the back of this really hot room with no air conditioning, filled with a lot of dowdy matronly women. We looked at the room, we looked at each other, and we said: "Pizza and movie." As we were heading out the door, we saw a young Tibetan man in western clothing walking up to the speaker's seat. We took off not knowing who he was, but that was our first glimpse of Trungpa Rinpoche. Isn't that interesting? . . . and the film we went to see was A Clockwork Orange.

WF: Yeah, that's really interesting.

KG: We might never have seen him again and it was only putting the pieces together much later on and doing some research that I found out it was Trungpa Rinpoche.

WF: So how did you meet Rinpoche?

WF: He was a messenger.

KG: Yeah that's right. Maybe, in this case, the messenger became the message. We can get into their meeting and what happened after the next time we talk.

WF: Okay. Until next time. Thank you very much Ken.