Conversing with Swami Beyondananda is like hopping inside a verbal funhouse.
And beware: You will keep interrupting yourself. With your own giggling.
“I can answer your questions, and you can question my answers,” he began during a phone interview last week.
He has been a swami for about three decades now. The Sanskrit word has two meanings: one who has mastered himself, and “husband.”
So this swami is both. He seeks to be the best man he can be, and he’s a spouse who travels the country with his wife, Trudy Bhaerman.
She calls him Steve and, in fact, Steve Bhaerman is the swami’s alter ego. Under that name he’s given many lectures and written a book, Spontaneous Evolution, with biologist Bruce Lipton.
But while we’re learning Sanskrit vocabulary, “Beyondananda” is the swami’s play on ananda: bliss. He’s beyond bliss, and coming to Port Angeles. He’s leader of the Right to Laugh Party, to which he proclaims, “Everybody’s invited!”
The swami’s next party, set for 7 p.m. Friday in Peninsula College’s Little Theater, will start with 35 minutes or so of “wisdom disguised as humor,” or maybe it’s “humor disguised as wisdom,” from the turban-wrapped pun-slinger.
He talks politics, but not in a way that many other beings across the universe have been heard to do.
His favorite yoga pose is tongue in cheek, his main principle is that “the best way to overcome gravity is with levity,” and ultimately, he declares, “the truth will upset you free.”
In his addresses to various groups — from a Texas Realtors’ association to the postmodern hippies at the Oregon Country Fair — the swami hopes to bring people together through hilarity.
“We have a deeply united body politic,” he says. “Everybody realizes that what we have isn’t working.”
Yet “when we laugh, it takes us out of our heads. It puts us into our hearts. What humor does is it disturbs our habitual ways of thinking,” and creates new neural pathways. In other words, anyone can be struck by enlightening during a brainstorm.
We’re all evolving together, the swami says, but it’s easy to forget that when one feels disconnected, separated from one’s fellow beings.
“We’re living in dualistic mind. It’s this or that. White or black. Democrat or Republican,” he said. “We need to bring together the best traits of both parties. Then we can talk about how do we want to progress, and what do we wish to conserve?
“We have the red and the blue tribes who are manipulated into separation, so they don’t get together to compare notes and see what we have in common.”
In the second half of Friday’s presentation, the swami will open up to questions — any kind. People can ask about personal issues and about where the world is heading.
“But I am much more comfortable predicting the past than the future,” the swami quipped.
To put a finer point on it, he promised: “I will answer or evade all questions.”
The swami makes his home in Santa Rosa, Calif.; he grew up in Brooklyn’s public housing projects, and was forced to use humor as a tool and as a weapon.
He became a nondenominational “FUNdamentalist,” not with Ten Commandments but offering One Suggestion: “Let’s go for heaven on Earth, just for the hell of it!”
Contrary to the way things appear, the sky is not falling, the swami said. “It only looks that way because we are ascending.”
Tickets to see Swami Beyondananda at 7 p.m. Friday are $20 in advance at Port Book & News, 104 E. First St., Port Angeles, and Pacific Mist Books, 121 W. Washington St., Sequim.
Remaining tickets will be available for $25 at the door of the Little Theater at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Proceeds will benefit Protect the Peninsula’s Future, an organization monitoring local air and water quality and the local Sierra Club Chapter.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
