Yogi’s Followers Keep the Faith at Scenic Retreat on Encinitas Bluff

It was nearly 50 years ago that Paramahansa Yogananda, a Hindu religious leader, traveled down from Los Angeles with his faithful to visit his special place--an isolated point high above the ocean, surrounded by sea and sky.

“I saw a building jutting out like a great white ocean liner toward the blue brine,” he wrote in later years. “The stately central hall, with immense ceiling-high windows, looks out on an altar of grass, ocean and sky: a symphony in emerald, opal and sapphire.”

What Yogananda described in his “Autobiography of a Yogi” was a hermitage, a 16-room mansion built on the edge of the Encinitas bluffs, a hiding place from the bustling Western world, built for him by one of his followers, a Kansas City insurance executive. It had been a welcome-home surprise for the swami after his return from India, where he had gone to renew his faith and to preach his doctrine that the best in the religions of East and West could be melded into a single faith--the Self-Realization Fellowship.

During the decades that followed, Yogananda stayed at his Encinitas hideaway most of the summer and many winter weekends, commuting in a bus that had been sumptuously furnished complete with window curtains, transforming it into what probably was one of the first motor homes.

The townsfolk of Encinitas wondered at the plump, ochre-robed Indian with his fashionably dressed retinue trailing along in expensive cars and disappearing into the groves of trees that protected the yogi’s private retreat from the stares of curious non-believers.

Sidney Shaw, an Encinitas native, recalls that the Yogananda was “a pretty good neighbor” despite his strange ways. Shaw lived “about three houses away” in his parents’ house, later converted into Shepherd Restaurant, a still-popular vegetarian in-spot on Pacific Coast Highway.

Shaw remembers those early days before the high, white walls and lotus-topped towers rose to hide the Self-Realization Fellowship from public view. He often played tennis at the fellowship courts with C. Richard Wright, the swami’s right-hand man, and sometimes chatted with the Yogananda, a pleasant man with a British accent, Shaw said, but fatter and darker-skinned than his portraits would lead one to believe.

In those early days, the Yogananda often could be seen walking the grounds in flowing robes, attended by his disciples, Shaw said. “They would surround him, laughing and talking and feeding him grapes, waiting on him hand and foot.”

There was a general air of suspicion among townsfolk about what was going on there on the point, Shaw said, especially after “they struck some sort of a deal with the county” and closed two public streets through the SRF compound, forcing local residents to detour out to the busy highway, the main route between Los Angeles and San Diego until Interstate 5 was built.

If the street closures caused some friction between the SRF and Encinitans, it was forgotten in the decade-long fight to prevent the state from turning the coastal highway into a freeway. “They gave money and volunteered their time,” Shaw said of the SRF members’ part in the successful effort to have the eight-lane freeway moved to the east of the seaside community.

Since that time, Shaw said, the fellowship’s ties with the community have grown. “There’s always been someone from there on our Chamber of Commerce, and they’ve been pretty good neighbors over the years, if a little standoffish.”

Jeffrey Quillin, a Richard Chamberlain look-alike who serves as co-administrator of the Encinitas SRF, smiles at the description of the fellowship’s founder and of the early-day goings-on at the fellowship.

Yogananda, Quillin explained, “was a joyous man” who shared his pleasures as well as his religious beliefs with his disciples. What “went on” at the hermitage when the swami was alive (he died in 1952) were get-away weekends from the religious man’s heavy schedule of meetings and speeches and tours around the country and the world, Quillin said.

Although the hermitage was built as a retreat for Yogananda, where he could get away from the fast-paced Western world that taxed his inner peace, “he was too generous, and soon he was building buildings for his disciples, inviting them down to share in the beauty of the place,” Quillin said. Outsiders may have pictured the fellowship as the site of bacchanalian revels, he said, and even, as one rumor had it, a nudist colony, but it never was more than a getaway place where the Yogananda and his followers could relax, unwind and enjoy themselves.

Today, Quillin said, the Encinitas compound is more of an organized commune than a retreat. The 90 to 160 persons within the fellowship walls on any given day include an enclave of postulants--men and women working, studying and meditating in preparation for becoming monks and nuns--retreatants from around the world seeking religious recharging, teachers, and employees who keep the grounds and buildings in spit-shine shape and the religious institution humming.

Although the postulants still work in the nearby SRF fields, raising produce for the fellowship’s vegetarian meals, the little cafe that lured coastal highway travelers with its promise of “mushroomburgers” closed in the late 1960s because, Quillin said, “we had to examine our priorities,” and concentrate on religious pursuits.

Also gone from the bluff, irreverently nicknamed “Swami’s” by the local surfing set, are two caves built into the face of the ocean bluff and once the meditation place for Yogananda, who praised the solitude interrupted only by the sounds of wind and wave.

The Golden Lotus Temple of All Religions and an adjacent lotus pond, built by Yogananda and his disciples uncomfortably close to the ocean bluff edge, collapsed and fell to the beach in 1942, but not before the temple tower was rescued. The lotus-topped columns were relocated to the highway frontage of the 23-acre fellowship property and serve as picturesque attention-getters to passers-by even today.

Shaw recalls that the temple toppled because of faulty pond construction which allowed water to seep into the ground, softening the bluff and causing it to give way. But Quillin said that nature, not man, caused the collapse.

The SRF bluff, like many along the California coastline, is plagued with underground water draining from inland hills. When the runoff softens claylike soil within the bluff, the slippery layers cause the ground to shift and create landslides along the face, he said.

Loss of the Golden Lotus temple was just the beginning of the fellowship’s bluff problems. Surfers discovered that the waves off the SRF point were among the best around. The surfers’ persistence wore paths in the already-fragile bluffs as they took shortcuts down to the surf.

The fellowship fought back, posting their land with off-limits signs and bulldozing the slopes in an effort to stabilize them with landscaping. Coastal Commission regulators came down hard on the SRF leaders, charging them with gross violations of state laws designed to protect the fragile bluffs, causing a major bluff collapse and blocking access to the beach.

Quillin said that the brouhaha was a misunderstanding between the religious and environmental groups, mixed with some political naivete on the part of SRF leaders. A compromise finally was reached in which the fellowship gave a public easement along its bluffs to improve access to the popular surf spot. Landscaping then was allowed to proceed. SRF sentries, accompanied by a German shepherd, patrol the bluff to enforce the agreement.

Not that SRF grounds are off limits to the public. The wrought-iron gate to the Meditation Gardens is unlocked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, and the 50-year-old hermitage opens its doors on Sundays from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m.

Within the mansion are priceless antiques of teak, inlaid mother-of-pearl, ivory and jade, offerings from the swami’s followers. A Ming Dynasty chair where Yogananda once sat, an ornately-decorated table presented the yogi by Sarah Bernhardt, mementoes from admiring Madame Amelita Galli-Curci, leading coloratura soprano of her day, all rest exactly as they were when Paramahansa Yogananda lived in the villa.

The study where the religious leader wrote his autobiography--ranked sixth on the paperback best-seller list in 1982--looks as if the yogi had left it only a moment or so ago, perhaps to take a walk with his dear friend, Luther Burbank. Daily, even though no one will see it, a nun places a fresh bouquet of flowers on the Yogananda’s desk.

Although 50 years seem only a blink in time compared with the centuries in which the world’s major religions evolved, the milestone has caused a ripple of activity in the measured serenity of the Encinitas compound. Gardeners are manicuring each leaf, bloom and blade of grass and workmen are painting and puttying to remove the scars of age from the hermitage.

Everything will be in readiness by November when, without parades or other fanfare, the Self-Realization Fellowship disciples will celebrate in their hearts the 50th anniversary of the joy that the founder of their faith experienced as he gazed out over the Encinitas bluffs to the ocean and saw “a symphony in emerald, opal and sapphire.”