I don;t have time to edit this, but this was among the more seductive cults to appeal to disaffectted middle to upper middle class teens in Hollywood and environs when I was growing up.

food was decent...


more later. Judith

okay, here's one some folks from LA may remember from those
years...The Source on the Sunset Strip, communal spiritual home to
the disaffected, often upper middle class teens of Hollywood and
environs, with a pretty decent vegetarian restaurant (though the
commune itself was all raw foods most of the time),with umpety-ump
lost teens renamed lovely and Gardenia and Hermes and Rinzai and
Little Rosebud, under the leadership of Jim "Father Yod" Baker, whose
blood son Bart went to our high school for a while (he was a little
younger than me. he was OK; I never knew him too well, lived with his
bio-mom mostly, joined his dad's community and wore white too for a
few weeks, seems to have done all right onhis own, I don;t know much
about what became of him.) for many years, they always wore white
(you could often tell who in my junior high had taken to The Source
when they switched to wearing white Oaxaca-type peasant dresses, or
the equivalent for oys) and Yogi Bhajan instructed them in yoga, and
the Earthly Spiritual Father was guru and teacher to every one of
them. they moved to the bay Area and started another restaurant, and
changed their name to the path fo TEN, which stood for The Eternal
Now (I ate at some little health food place they had in the City once
with a freidn who recognized the name of their band...could tell you
about some children of famous people who sojourned there...another
post?)...then eventually went to Hawaii and father eventually died in
a plane crash...Jim Baker had been a leather worker (my mother had a
belt made by him and inscribed to her, a gift from my dad that never
fit after she had chidlren...but that's a red raw herring...)