Holy Hell

To come to this day, after such long journey,

Where there's no longer a journey left.

Where you can finally merge with the beloved.

Okay. I am rolling.

My name is Will.

I always wanted to know, why am I here?

What is the point?

How do I live a meaningful life?

I wanted to know everything.

Hasn't everybody asked themselves these questions?

The truth about the mystery of the universe.

I went to my great grandmother's open casket when I was four

and became fascinated by the concept of life and death.

I was raised catholic. I was even an altar boy.

I was quite fascinated by all of it.

Jesus carries the cross. They're nailing him to the cross.

They're all at point bloody, and...

I started making movies when I was a kid.

I found an eight millimeter camera.

At first there were just fun and blowing things up.

I had grown up pretty lucky.

But as a kid, nobody seemed very content or happy to me.

So I decided there was something deeper,

a secret that nobody seemed to know.

But then I went to college and I started

to use film as a way to explore the meaning of life...

To explore my world.

But by the time I finished film school, I wasn't closer to knowing who I was,

what I wanted, where I was going,

and most importantly, why.

I moved back home after college.

My mother was very disturbed to find out that I was gay,

and she told me to get the hell out of the house, and go support myself.

This is what led me to my huge adventure.

This is my story about what happened to me

on my 22-year search for the truth.

It was the middle of the '80s and the yuppie generation.

We were all searching for something different.

This was not my path.

I had got accepted into grad school.

I was going to get a Ph.D. in child psychology

and I had my whole life planned out.

And then I met some of these people.

They were so alive,

living from their heart, and playing

and jumping in ice cold rivers,

and hiking through the forest at night,

and oh, my God, I want me some of that.

Some of them were some of the smartest,

most beautiful people I had ever met in my life.

We started it. This is what we wanted.

It was our little utopia in the middle of this big, giant city.

Constantly, you were being fed,

like, your soul was being fed

with love and with inspiration and awe.

I wanted everybody, everybody in the world,

to experience this.

I can remember feeling so fulfilled.

I said, "Dad, I want to give my life to God."

And he was on the next flight out there,

to come get me.

The people that were there were looking

for spirituality, but all of a sudden,

you had a built-in family.

What would you like to surrender right now?

And the person in the middle will say

whatever they are surrendering.

Money...

bad words...

Attachments to money...

and to sex.

...this person's body, we take away your attachment.

You're already through the air, so throw it away.

I fell into a group of the most amazing people I'd ever met.

It was my sister, Amy, who first told me about her friends,

who called themselves the Buddhafield.

People ask me all the time, "How did you end up there?"

I was raised in Catholic school, and...

I always had a lot of questions for the nuns.

When I would go home and tell my mom what I asked,

she would say you can't ask them that.

And I'm, like, no, I want to know.

I wanted to know myself

beyond the superficiality of the world that I was living in.

Life can't be just this thing where you just live and work and die.

There's gotta be something more.

I grew up with a family of really expressive,

artistic hippie-type characters.

I also had no guidance growing up.

Living in Chicago, where I grew up in the streets, was very violent.

And when it came to the Buddhafield,

not really knowing what real love was,

that's what I started to feel, like, really deeply.

I always had this yearning to know really why we're here.

I grew up with a very, uh, fundamentalist, uh,

fire and brimstone church with the fear of God and all.

My mom kicked me out of the house when I was 15,

so yeah, I was looking for stability.

When I came to the group, it felt like,

okay, this is going to be for life.

It was like a marriage.

I grew up with a real problem with authority...

major authority problem.

Really hasn't changed much, actually, I have to tell you truthfully.

When I was very, very young, I wanted to be a scientist,

then I wanted to be an artist.

And there was always a running theme through it

that I wanted to be enlightened.

I felt very lost, and I felt empty,

like there was something missing.

As a child, I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on in my family.

Suicide attempts every couple months,

a lot of abuse, um...

I wanted to be a politician.

I wanted freedom.

I wanted freedom somehow from this self.

We were letting go of our minds.

We were dropping our egos.

I just started experiencing a higher part of myself

that was beyond anything that I'd known.

And it was the teacher who was guiding us every step of the way.

The first time I met the teacher was

at one of the Buddhafield's weekly meetings

in West Hollywood called Sat Sang.

I was told his name was Michel.

He just was soft, and his energy was just, um, still, you know.

And I just thought wow, what a beautiful man.

If you think of tomorrow, you're unhappy.

If you think of the past, you can become miserable.

And happiness is wherever you are.

Wherever you are is where happiness is.

He spoke as if he had gone into the cosmos and come back,

and was here to tell us about it and take us there.

Have you made contact with the eternal,

or are you still obsessed with the momentary?

When are you going to wake up?

When are you going to realize what you're doing

with this precious energy,

with this precious opportunity?

He told us he had a master

that had led him to a great spiritual awakening.

You speak around here and you listen to what is said to you

and you'll be liberated.

That much I can tell you.

I wanted to have a spiritual teacher

who could teach me how to be free.

I wanted a mentor.

I wanted somebody who was going to guide me.

They do this in India all the time. There's gurus there.

This is just the modern-day version of that in America.

He was contemporary.

He wasn't some little old man

with a gray beard sitting in a dhoti.

He was wearing speedos and Ray-Bans, you know,

and he was dancing, and he was doing, you know, contemporary music.

He spoke four or five languages.

He was amazingly humorous, witty...

Very playful, like a child.

He could do something like, oh, my God, I can't believe you just did that.

He could dance.

He was artistic.

He was all those things we all wanted to be.

He was unlike anyone I'd ever met before.

He encouraged me to drop all my ideas

of what I thought I was supposed to be.

I finally felt like I was on the right path.

I attended every meeting, every group outing we would take,

and even went to Michel's weekly individual

hypnotherapy sessions called Cleansings.

I really felt like something important was happening in my life.

- Namaste. - Namaste.

Well, look who arrived.

What's Holy Company doing?

I really fell in love with...

other people first.

What are you doing?

We were together 24/7.

We lived together, we ate together, played together.

Everybody that I knew was in the Buddhafield.

My circle, my family, was the Buddhafield.

I lived in a house with about eight people.

It was warm and safe.

Nobody ever went hungry.

Nobody was ever gonna be homeless.

You always had a place.

Everyone was supporting each other with helping with food,

helping with cooking. It was-- It was so idyllic.

I didn't drink caffeine, I didn't drink a glass of wine.

I mean, I can't imagine living any cleaner.

It was really advocated that we exercise and take care of ourselves.

This was a lifestyle.

We lived in houses, we paid our own rent.

We had jobs.

I did personal training.

I owned my own business.