Taj (also known as Amy)
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
My real name is Amy. Oh, okay. I have a very common last name. And about 10 years ago, I decided, you know, there's too many in the world. So I'm just going to pick a different name. Oh, I love this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Well, I live in Portland, Oregon, where everybody changes their name.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
But my mom, who at the time was still living in New Jersey, she has passed since then, she freaked out because she was a therapist and the only person that she knew who had changed their name was a schizophrenic patient.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
She thought that was a bad omen. She thought that her kids were going cuckoo over here. You know, the topic I would love to briefly touch on with you, Dax, is improv.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
So I used to be painfully shy. And that comes out in the story because it happened just after college. And improv has really changed my life. And it's not that I was ever interested in being in front of the camera, but it's a mindfulness practice and also for helping you be a better human. So I just wondered if you had ever come across that approach to improv.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
I actually came across that myself. When I was living in Flagstaff, my next door neighbor was a meditation teacher. I was a lapsed meditator. And you know that old Reese's commercial where two people bump into each other? One has peanut butter and one has chocolate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
So it was like, you got meditation in my improv. No, you got improv in my meditation. So during the pandemic, we started teaching mindful improv and meditation using improv games.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
listening. Yeah. And you have to let go of your idea because let's say you start a scene with somebody and you think you're in a barn and they say, nurse, hand me the scalpel, something like that. And you have to just let go right away or else it's going to be like tug of war and just be present with what is and let go of ego.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And the less you try to be funny, I know you guys know if you're trying to put in the crazy things, it doesn't work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
They can be culty. I wouldn't call them cults. My experience was not with an improv cult. So this takes place in 94 when I was in my mid-20s. I was vulnerable to this because I had just gotten out of college a couple years before. I was just lost. I had been really successful in the structure of college. I was so shy. I just had no idea how the world worked.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
So I was looking for something to latch on to. So one day I saw a sign at a bookstore saying they were having a meditation class. And I went and it was in this little room above the bookstore. And it turned out I was the only student. It was me and this teacher. We did the meditation for a bit. And then he turned into my therapist for that day. And that was very attractive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Someone would listen to me. And he told me about his teacher who was going to be giving this free vegetarian dinner at a fancy restaurant in downtown Boston.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
No, you run. He said his teacher was named Rama. To describe Rama a little bit, he's this tall guy with a jufro, as we say in my background, blondish hair, very kind of awkward, but also very, very confident. That pulls people in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Well, his chosen name was Rama. And I think I can share the real name because it's all over the Internet. The story has come out about him. It was Dr. Frederick Lenz. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
He had a Ph.D. in literature, and then he chose from then on to call himself Doctor, which is already a little shady. Sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
He believed he was a reincarnation of St. Thomas More and Indian teachers and all kinds of people. It's never like I'm a reincarnation of a field worker. Right. I went and he gave a little talk. He was very into Carlos Castaneda and he wanted us to read those books.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
The thing that grabbed me was that we meditated with him and he was sitting on a little stage in front of everyone and he asked us to keep our eyes open and look at him while we were meditating. When we started meditating with him, I started almost immediately seeing light coming out of him and his face started morphing into an old man and then a child and then a woman.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And I would close my eyes and try and clear my vision and it just kept happening. And I thought, wow, there's something going on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
I blinked my eyes. He was normal again. So I thought, you know, this is part of channeling other entities. It's not like he's actually changing into someone else. So it wasn't terrifying. It was more intriguing to me. The senior student of his that had invited me to that dinner said that there was going to be this 10-day meditation retreat coming up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And it sort of felt like it was an audition to be part of the cult in a way. They wanted people to have headshots and full body, especially women, to have pictures to submit as part of the application, which you have to wonder what those are for. Sure. But I decided to go against better judgment. And we went to this summer camp that they had rented for the 10 days.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
A lot of the time he wasn't there. It was his senior students leading meditation sessions and talking about Zen Master Rama. That's the full name he went by. And they said that they had seen him levitate and teleport and projecting light from his hands. And apparently if anyone criticized him, if he had any enemies, he could cause them to get cancer or be in a major car accident.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Yes, very much. He also claimed to control the weather and pass through alternate dimensions and create and destroy universes. And I was just starting to get very skeptical at this point. We're on day three, four, and I'm like, I think I need to get out of here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And it did not feel like a place where you could just say, okay. Bye. I'm not into this. They were kind of, you are staying for the 10 days. You committed to this no matter what. So he had shown up for one evening, but he's talking about Kundalini. The image is this snake that's curled up at the base of each person's spine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And when you raise the Kundalini energy, that snake is supposed to come up. So that night I had a dream that the Kundalini snake was not inside me, but was wrapping around me and trying to just kill me. And I woke up with terrible cramps. And I decided to kind of embellish the cramps into, I think, that my appendix. I had to get to a hospital.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
So I finally got them to call an ambulance, get me out of there, from which I called my family and just went away from this whole thing. But I forgot to mention, he always would talk about his dog, Vayu. And apparently he believed that he was one of 12 enlightened beings on the planet, and Vayu was another one of the 12.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Yeah, and he believed that Vayu was the reincarnation of his spiritual teacher. I'm glad he didn't try to heal you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
No, I mean like with the appendicitis.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Well, he was not actually present. He had just come in for a talk and jetted off. He had all these mansions and lots of cars. He had a whole collection of Porsches and Mercedes and Range Rovers. And his senior students got together for his birthday and bought him a Porsche. They claimed to have memory of technology from Atlantis.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And Zen Master Rama said his form of Buddhism was what he called materialistic Buddhism.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Where it's okay to make a pile of money because that is a reflection of your spiritual progress.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
A number of years later, I read an article about how he died. But I did want to mention one thing I did see personally, which was that evening that he showed up, somebody had asked him if he would be able to drink a whole bottle of hot sauce without any physical symptoms. manifestation. You know how you would turn red and you would be in pain. So he did that. No big deal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
So the guy had something, but I wouldn't say it was for the good of all. Yeah. But his death really nailed that this was not a sane person because his dog had passed away. And apparently Zen Master Rama could not handle being in the world without this dog.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
So he committed suicide. Wearing a Versace suit and the dog's collar and tags, he was found in the water by one of his mansions. And he had over 150 Valium in his system. And he made a suicide pact with one of his followers who happened to be a former model. He had sort of a harem going. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
We had actually. So there's always that possibility. But there were other times where I hadn't eaten something and was sitting in some of the students presence and felt some interesting stuff. Wow. Wild.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
No, I just got out of it and stayed away. There's a quote from a documentary I saw about people who win the Powerball that I think really fits with this kind of person. In the quote, it's about winning the lottery, but I think it's if you attain a lot of money and a lot of power, it's like pouring Miracle-Cro on your character flaws. Ooh. Yeah, that's good. That's really good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
And the one that I saw years ago, it's called Lucky. There are some good stories and some negatives. It can't all be bad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
I also have a joke for you guys. If you want a really bad taste joke about cults. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Cults II
Why aren't there very many popular jokes about Jonestown? I think it must have to do with Kool-Aid, but I don't know.