Darlene Yarborough

Crestone Spiritual Alliance Representative and member of Humanity and Unity

Interview Conducted by: Addie Schwarz & Ashley Mersereau on February 27th, 2008.

Darlene first visited Crestone in 1984 with her husband for a two week seminar on sacred geometry and sacred architecture. During a visit to India for the opening of a free hospital for the poor, she met Sai Babbah who became her spiritual inspiration. She met her first guru, a woman named Guru Maiin, that came to her in a dream and began to use this guru to guide her own spiritual practices while at home in Dallas, TX. She and her husband moved to Crestone in 1994 and did her practices alone for there was no group similar to her previous one in Crestone. In 2004 Sai Maa came to Crestone, and Darlene was her real estate broker involved in helping Sai Maa buy her Ashram and her home. During a bad health incident, Sai Maa was able to help Darlene find health and peace, and since that difficult time she has been studying under Sai Maa’s teachings. “Sacred geometry is working with the geometric forms that underlie nature, the movement of the planets, the sky, and underlie the formations of water, of flowers, of everything. It applies to music, astronomy, mathematics, and geometry, the teachings of Plato…” “my husband was never spiritually tied to a religion but he said his path was to create beauty, and God is beauty. He was here to create beauty and that was it. And he didn’t need any particular way” on spirituality “Sai Maa was there for me. I spend my time back and forth, I am a teacher now with her, what they call a master teacher. I haven’t done a whole lot of teaching yet, but I have helped with the Diksha and with many things in here, including being their representative to the Crestone Spiritual Alliance. I am very connected to this community as a real estate broker.” “I am not a person who lives in the Ashram, I am a person who lives in home, does a work life and then does the retreats and the teachings, and carries on in that path” “Some beings have the capacity to read energy, and some more than others. There are people who see beyond the physical level and Sai Maa is one of those people. She teaches healing. The Diksha is a form, in a way, of transmitting light which produces Hema in the body.” “she brings in people to teach who have skills and perhaps you might say devotion. And when we say devotion, its not devotion to her, but devotion to yourself really, and your own desire to improve yourself and know yourself from a different way. And you decide that you want to see this possibility of change in yourself and therefore she asks certain people to do this with her.” Personal relationships with Guru “Sai Maa is an amazing Guru in that she can have a personal relationship with so many people at one time. And I experienced this, and it didn’t mean she was having a personal relationship with just me, she was having a relationship with so many people and be able to key in and know when you need to have a connection. ‘My love is the same for all of you, but my relationships are different, so don’t judge me by the relationship.’ The relationship may look more close here or more distant there but my love is the same.” “I can name probably five people personally that Sai Maa has helped them to live through health crises. In this community there were at least four. She has personally assisted us to live through health crises, and not only to live but to really come through it with good health.” Drilling effects “I think it effects this whole community at large very strongly. As a real estate broker, I deal with people coming in here who decide that they want to live here. I see that all of it is based on a quiet community that is very much strongly related to nature, and some people just want that kind of quietness, and they like the idea that there are spiritual communities here that they might connect to or they might not. And they often come here and later connect to a spiritual community, I have been in this community now over 13 years. I see that some people come here to connect with a particular teacher and they want to be able to engage in the teachings in retreated manner. Some people come into retreat, there are people up in the mountains who have been in retreat for three years! So its all different levels. As you narrow that down and we look at the Temple of Consciousness, those people live in the Ashram itself, they lead a contemplative life they have a discipline. It relates to having quietude and having this atmosphere, I call it a rarefied atmosphere because we don’t have a lot of electrical things going on here like you would in a bigger city, we don’t have street lights, nature is a great part of that. The Ashram in particular would be greatly impacted if we had light, and noise, and pollution here. Sound travels big time here.” “We don’t know if there are going to be just two exploratory wells or if this is going to turn into big time production, we just don’t know.” Landscape “we are located on the Southern boundary of the Baca Grande, that means that the Sand Dunes national Park is on the other side of that area over there, and I have no idea how far the drilling would go.” Connection to this place “we felt inclined to live here the first time we came just for the peacefulness of it. The feeling we had was just one of wonderment. That this was a place so unusual that we felt that maybe we could live here. I remember laying on rocks at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center (it was Linden Farm at the time) and it was just magnificent to lay on the rocks, look at the mountains and see the experience of this place. I had never been to a place like this before.” Sacred There was the sense of the Native American at the time. Since then we built our own home and when we dug for our sewer and water lines we unearthed Native American ceremonial pieces in my own yard. Its very interesting to unearth it, I know that all around here there are Native American artifacts. The sense is to me that this was a special place for them, and we probably have more here then we know. Energy “There is what you might say an energy here. The reason I say that is through my own experience of it, especially as a real estate broker, I have had people walk into my office and tell me stories about their dreams of coming here, or that they were given a message to come here, or all kinds of ways and stories that come from all walks of life. That is often poo-pooed, but I don’t poo poo it because I’ve heard it over, and over again and I think that people get a message, they have a dream, they have something happen and they actually come here and move here.” “I was in Spain in 1992 and I had a vision of the mountain up here, and the voice said ‘the Arabians say there is a substructure in this mountain’ and I continued to have a vision of this mountain with women lined up along the road and then there were visions of things happening in the world, floods coming, and earthquakes and all kind of things, and we were lifted off the road and I was taken inside the mountain. There were people in the mountain, and I was asked a question, and the question was ‘would you help start a new religion?’ and that is a scary question to people because the word religion in this world is so often misused. But I think religion is a really good word. And the vision was continued on to show things in the world, different catastrophies and such, and after the vision ended, I moved here within the year…when I think back 13 years later as to what did it mean to start a new religion, I think it is this place, about going beyond the old definitions of religion and looking at new ways to live. I like the term that the new religion is the religion of love. We don’t have exact names for it, but we have a religion of love here.” “the theme of the inner: we have to know ourselves. If I consider myself sacred per say, that means I consider you sacred because you are the same within yourself as I am. It would be how we viewed the world, an inner perspective.” “I had no intention of being on a “path” but I had the experience inside that was a real experience of my being, of my peacefulness and of a state of being that I had not experienced before. And that went on and on and on, it did not stop. That’s what let me continue to practice. I could verify within myself that I had an inner world.” “the word guru means someone who can take you from darkness to light” “after finding my practice of yoga, the first thing that happened to me was that I felt that my life get easier, it was a lightening of my load, I felt that I had been carrying it on my shoulders and all of a sudden it was lifted up, and I went ‘oh, I’m not doing all of this, its not all up to me’ and I got this sense that there was something beyond the way I had always lived and labored, I had lived a good life but I had labored a lot. That got my attention really well because I knew that I’d like life to be a little bit lighter, easier, and more fun.” “Sai Maa said that this place made her work easier, it let her do her work easier with us, so we can evolve easier, and that is her work, to help us evolve.”