100% Living & Dying With John-Roger | with Phil Danza, Head of NOW Productions

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NDH: NDH: How did you start working for J-R?

Phil Danza: In 1974 I was living in Berkeley and coming to southern California for seminars. I was at a seminar here and before it starts I raise my hand and say, “I need a ride to the airport.” J-R says, “I’ll take you.” I thought, “Wow, this is great.” After the seminar we hop into this limo that he had in the early days. Michael Sun was driving. And J-R goes, “Hey, do you want to see my house?” I say, “Sure,” and we come here to Mandeville. They had just bought this place. He takes me in the house and my memory is that we go immediately downstairs. He walks me in and we’re in an unfinished basement, just one big room, the ceiling isn’t in, no lighting, and it’s just filled with junk. We’re standing here, and I’m thinking why is this guy showing me his junk room? What is the deal? And of course this ended up being where my offices were for the last forty years. At the time I wasn’t thinking about moving out of Berkeley or coming down here to work or anything like that.

I look back on it now and see that he was saying to me, “Here’s the space you’re going to be working in.” Actually a year later I started duping tapes here as my first volunteer job. It took me a while to actually reflect back on that moment in time and realize what it was all about. But there was no explanation. He didn’t say anything like, “In a couple of years you’ll be working here.”

NDH: So what’s it like working with J-R?

Phil Danza: PD: It’s funny. If you move into loving and cooperation, and the oneness and the partnership and the one accord, it’s fantastic. If you step outside of that it’s going to kick your butt. It’s going to be really hard to work that. But if he gets that you’re putting forth your best effort, he’s just there for you. I love the clarity. He was incredibly clear about what he wanted. I enjoyed that. Even though the bar was high in terms of quality, it was something you could reach, and he would support you.

You had to remember that he was the boss. But you could ask him anything and he encouraged that. What didn’t work was any kind of dishonesty or withholding — not telling him stuff. The whole game was to constantly dialogue, and tell him what was going on. There was no part of the work that was too small. You could talk about anything. I’m sure a big part of that was getting the light in there.

For me, the person that started here and the person that’s here now is the same Soul, but in terms of training, and how I perceive things, I’m completely different. I loved having him as boss. It was just the best. Not that it couldn’t be difficult, because you could be asked to do a lot. There was just this clarity and crispness in how things were done.

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NDH: Sounds like a lot of work, but fun at the same time.

Phil Danza: You have to understand that back in the day we were all young and we were working seven days a week, and that’s just what we did. There was nothing else going on. It wasn’t like there was another life. Staff was small. It was just so good to have that kind of focus about what we were doing and how he wanted things done. I certainly learned how to write memos. (This was before computers.) You typed or printed it out and made three carbon copies of everything. We knew email was coming someday, you could just feel that things were headed in that direction as computers developed. I don’t know if it made things better. At first it was fun because it was new, but then it snowballed and you could copy all of staff instead of just three people. It made things easier and faster, but I don’t think it really simplified the process.

I used to like the fact that I could call J-R on the phone. We would just knock out the work. He wasn’t messing around or joking around when it came to the work, and we picked that up so we really wanted to get the job done well.

Nobody could keep up with him. He had so much energy. He was just this powerhouse. We would travel for weeks, months. There was one time when we traveled for about three months straight. I think that later on he tried to retire to the ranch up in Santa Barbara, to Windermere, but being who he was of course he was going to draw a crowd. And the next thing you knew people were giving him horses and the whole Windermere thing grew. So I don’t think he ever got to retire, and I don’t think he’s retired even now.

The physical guy J-R was a no-nonsense guy but he was also fun. Some of my favorite times were when the business was done and you’re just sitting in the kitchen, and he would start to tell stories. I loved listening to him talk. He could just go on and on with great stories. When I would get around him all questions would leave my mind. It was just a blank slate. I’d plan to ask him questions and I’d get to him and they would just be gone. It didn’t matter. Darshan was on, and you were in that energy field, and you just had to figure that if it was important it would show up later.

NDH: Did you appreciate all that while it was happening, or did you take it for granted?

Phil Danza: You take those things for granted when they’re happening. You don’t think that there will be a day when that’s not here. And then when it ends you look back and go, “Oh wow.” But I did know early on that this was special. I remember putting a mic on him at some seminar in El Paso and I said, “I just want you to know, J-R, that these are the good old days.” I knew it. I knew that this wasn’t going to go on forever, that he was a magnet, that people would be pulled in, that this darshan was there, and the people who got into that would be lifted. You can hear it when you listen to the tapes or watch the videos. People would be laughing—and the jokes weren’t always that funny—but it was just the Spirit. The spirit hits you and you’re in that zone, being lifted. Gosh, the juice was present. The darshan was on 24/7. It wasn’t like it was on from 9:00 to noon. It didn’t work like that. All you had to do was be in the room.

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NDH: Was it just a physical training for you, or was it spiritual, or both?

Phil Danza: What worked also with him was that my intention was to do the best that I could do, and then use my skills, and he would help to hone those skills. I also knew to give him space, that he needed that. He might be looking like he’s reading something but he’d be working. I knew to leave him alone because he’s busy. I still laugh at all of that. I’m still coming to terms with how mystical that was, in terms of what he was doing. You might be sitting there working on something and he’d say, “there’s that thing right there in your body, let’s take that off of you.” At one point he said to me and my wife Brooke, “You have to take into account that you’ve never been to the hospital.” I hadn’t even thought about that. When you look at how many hours we worked, and all the travel, you realize that you never got really sick. He was letting me know how much support I was getting.

I don’t know if people realize how much we worked, and how little equipment we had to work with back in the day.
I look at what we had to work with at some of those big venues and think about then compared to what we use now, it was amazing we pulled it off. It wasn’t always easy physically.You were being called on a lot to put your body on the line.

He was a taskmaster, he was demanding, but when you mastered a task, believe me, you really learned something. I see lots of people in my field who don’t have that kind of training. They don’t have that kind of carry-through that a lot of us got trained to do. It was a good training ground, even though it was painful at the time. You’d wonder why we were so close-tolerant about stuff, but that’s what really makes it work. He was a guy who could go very wide or very narrow in focus, and he could move those in a moment.

I don’t want to pretend like it was all cookies and cream, but it was cookies and cream if you stayed in the zone and ordered up cookies and cream. If you didn’t want to bring your best you would get your butt kicked. I would watch people try to give it the short effort and it was obvious immediately. It was great, great training, and a lot of it was strength-building. His consciousness was so experienced and so wide, that I did a lot of running to catch up. If you wanted to learn, it was great.

He was one of the more brilliant people I’ve been around. He knew so much about so much. But if he didn’t know something he’d tell you that too. As I got more experienced in audio and video, I would build trust and he would give me more to do. But I’m under no illusion that it was anyone but J-R and the spirit who built this. I just followed and did my job. When I got involved there was just his little house in Baldwin Park. There was no Windermere or Insight, or Prana. Later as all those things came online it got busier and busier, and you’d constantly have to adapt. And then there was the travel schedule on top of that. And satellite broadcasts, and then webcasts after that.

Then all of a sudden we’re going to do a 2000-person guest event for Insight at the Convention Center downtown. We’ve never done an event for 2000 people. All of a sudden you’re in this huge room and the game is on. That kept happening as things grew. It was never stale, it was always moving.

J-R always kept up with the latest technology. He had the first mobile phone, which was like a whole suitcase. Then all of a sudden one day he wanted a walkie link between Windermere and Los Angeles. That was a completely new thing for us to arrange, but people didn’t have much cell service at Windermere, and J-R wanted a way for us to communicate. There was just one mountain peak that had line of sight down to LA and we found it. It was wonderfully challenging, and a bit of a white-knuckle ride, too to get it set up. When we were done people in LA could communicate instantly with people at Windermere and J-R could get daily reports on the business there. And one time J-R called and said he was down near the Mexican border and he was getting the walkie signal from Windermere! It was fun, but the main thing was we were supporting the work.

And even with all that was built, it was never really about the physical level. And yet he assisted me in training me how to handle that level, so that nothing was excluded. The physical was just something to be handled while we’re here. He was smart about it, and he got a bunch of people around him who would handle the physical stuff. But even with all that he never really got to retire. He just moved to another level. And he was never not the boss. I don’t think I could have worked for anyone better because the training was so multi-level. You were just immersed.

And as you attune more into the spirit you can handle the physical even better, because a part of you is paying attention. Then more and more the levels start to become one. If you listen to that voice it will guide you. One
morning I got out of bed to go to the bathroom and this voice said, “J-R’s water heater.” That’s all it said. It was so clear. I put on my clothes and went outside to the small shed that housed his water heater, and that thing had come off the slab of cement that it was sitting on, and it was tilted so it was no longer being properly vented. It was a fire hazard. That sounds like woo-woo stuff but it’s also very practical. That voice doesn’t yell; it’s quiet, you hear it, and you just move on it. It happens all the time. I still don’t feel like I’ve scratched the surface of the mystical part of working with J-R.

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NDH: There was so much to learn and so much to do. How did you take care of yourself?

Phil Danza: When I hit forty my body just kind of crashed and I couldn’t work all those hours anymore. I was not doing well. I had to find a new way to take care of myself. I kept trying to go back to the old way, and it was like, that’s not going to work, dude. I had to re-learn how to work, sleep, exercise. It starts to meld into one, where the physical thing I’m doing is for God, spirit and the oneness, but if I do less of that it’s still no less. It’s still all good. I don’t know how many times I’d see J-R and he would say over and over, “Take care of yourself.” It would be the first thing out of his mouth when he saw me. There’s the whole romance of working for the Traveler, and within that you still need to do SE’s, sleep properly, eat properly. I realized that there was so much to do that you could work 24/7 and you’d never get through it all, so I might as well chill out and do things the best I could while taking care of myself. It’s not about being lazy, it’s about being wise, and using a more efficient approach to this level. And I found that when I went through all that, J-R was so there for me. He’d check in with me almost every night on the walkie. “Hey…what’re you doing?” He was letting me know he supported me.

NDH: And there was such matter-of-factness and practicality about the whole thing. I remember putting on his mic at a workshop and he asked how I was, I said fine, how are you, and he said, “I feel like I’ve been beaten up by a baseball bat.” Meaning he had been taking on so much karma from other people. What struck me about it was the neutrality. Usually when someone tells you something like that there’s something on it, some attempt to get pity or some self-pity. But there was just this absolute neutrality. And the next day his face and eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and he looked like a mess, as he sometimes did during workshops when he was taking people’s karma through his body. And I’m putting on his mic and he just starts cracking up. And I start cracking up. And we’re both standing there laughing at the absurdity of the situation, in spite of the situation, like two fools just laughing in the middle of this storm. And then the next day he looks great.

Phil Danza: Yeah there are so many times like that, where you’re tired, and he’s tired, and you’re just going to go do it anyway. And when it’s done it’s like, let’s go get something to eat. It was always about carrying on but having fun at the same time.

And even towards the end he wasn’t talking as much, but he was still so present. He was just more economical with words, more “zen.” I remember helping him into the car, and I was just going through my process, processing all my junk in my head, and he just looks at me and says, “You can be fearful or you can be bright.” He could sum up your whole process in a few words. And that’s been a guiding light for me ever since.

But spirit is always present, and he’s still present. We can’t call him on the phone but when we go inside the answers are there. I’m still aware of how much I don’t know, how much I listen to him say the same things in seminars and I’m still working on those areas. That seems to go with the dumbness of the physical level. I remember once putting his microphone on at Conference and asking, “Hey is there something you need?” And he says, “Yeah, remember to press record.” There was always that practicality.

In the very early days I came into work one day where we had all the duping equipment for tapes, and then there was a workbench where another guy used to service all the gear. This guy says, “Oh man you just missed it. J-R was just here and he comes downstairs and goes to the workbench and says, ‘Is this the tape deck that’s been messing up my work?’” The guy says yeah, and J-R takes the tape deck—it was an old reel-to-reel deck—and he just drops it onto the concrete slab, and it just shatters. And J-R says, “Well that’s the last time it’s going to do that.”

I used that as a reference point for people who would come to work for NOW Productions. I would say, “Look, the game here is fix it or get a new one. But it has to work. Because J-R does not want stuff messing up his media.” That’s always been the guiding light in terms of how things would be done. He’s always loved his media and would always check what he was putting out. As we went from cassette to CD to MP3 to iPods—whatever it was, he was always there checking his stuff. I always thought that was cool. Although he was an English teacher and loved books—I always thought books were kind of his first love—he also really loved his media.

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NDH: What was it like editing his work?

Phil Danza: In the early days he would come downstairs and check tapes with us here in the editing bays. He would come into the audio bay with me and tell me what he wanted. He was very clear about how he wanted his stuff edited. He would go, “I want this, this this,” and I’d say, “What about this?” and he’d say, “If you can get that, great.”

J-R always used to talk about his “ghost writers” (in spirit) who would assist him in giving seminars. If you listen to his original recordings, they are so clear. The English, the syntax, everything is so clear that working with the recordings is just so easy. And he was smart enough that he knew that if he blew a word he could just repeat it and we could fix it in post. He was a really savvy guy. I’ve worked with other people’s media and they can be all over the map in terms of sentence structure, and you’d have to sit there and kind of work to re-create something. I’ve worked on J-R recordings where it was like, the seminar starts here, and it goes here, and then it’s Baruch Bashan, and there’s almost nothing to fix. He would pause for tape changes, or sometimes he’d say, “We’re going to cut this part out,” but it was just so clean.

On some recordings you can hear him doing the intro, telling jokes, and then all of a sudden the spirit would come in, the seminar starts, “BOOM” and he would just go, and it’s just “on.” He would sometimes tell us that sometimes in the beginning of a seminar he was just talking to fill the space, waiting for spirit to get the script to him. And you can hear where the seminar starts so clearly on the recording.

He was always flexible, always open to finding what would work. If he was on stage and his mic needed to be fixed, he would stop everything to fix it. It was never a nuisance. It would have been more off-base to not take care of something like that, because the recording was going to live on. Very practical. He would always come back to the sound table and check in, and ask how things were going. I’m still amazed that we never had a live sound check with him. That was his style. There were no sound checks in the early days for people who were performing. It was all spontaneous. You could put 3×5 cards on his chair with questions, and he’d answer them. He could do all this amazing mystical stuff and then crack a joke. He could have a great time even telling bad jokes, and crack up. Sometimes it even got into kind of a standup comedy kind of thing.

He loved to joke. I remember we were doing a workshop in Yucca Valley, CA and I didn’t like the food. I just thought I’ve got to get out of there and get something to eat. So I jump into the car and head into town, and there’s a Denny’s. I’m thinking that this is great,
I can get some steak and eggs, I know I’m on a timeline because I have to get back, and I’ll just sit down quickly at the counter next to this old guy. I sit down and order. All of a sudden I get this,
“BAM,” and somebody is hitting me on my shoulder, and there’s J-R sitting right there. I hadn’t recognized him at all. I’m like, “J-R, how did I not know it was you?” He said, “Well, I kind of had the ‘cloak’ on.” There was that kind of fun, and magic at the same time.

You didn’t always know what was going on, but you could always just talk to J-R. It wasn’t all about the higher realms and spirit and clearing karma. I remember picking up the phone at the house once and I hear this crowd noise, and it’s J-R saying, “Do you hear that? I’m at the Laker game.” It was so cool, because he knew how much I like basketball, and he was like, “I want to share with you that I’m enjoying being here, and I care enough to call.” You miss that kind of stuff.

He was very clear about what he wanted, and when we produced what he wanted it worked great. Our intention was that we’ll spend the 25, 30, 50 hours to get it right, so J-R just has to watch it one time. That’s how that went. He rarely had changes. But the “scripting” was so good that usually it didn’t take that much time.

Eventually we found a way to run wires through the ceiling to his bedroom so he could check his media there. We could call him on the intercom and say, “OK J-R,” and we’d press play, and he could lay back in his bed and listen. Later on we set up playback machines and made him copies.

J-R was always on the cutting edge of technology. When he went to Japan in 1988 he said to me, “We’re going
to Tokyo, is there some electronic equipment that you need?” I said, “Yeah, a couple of the new DAT digital tape decks.” You couldn’t buy them here yet. That changed everything, in terms of being able to stay on the cutting edge. We always had that great support from him. What I liked was that the bar was always set very high, standards were the highest, and then he would step up to support and make it happen. It wasn’t just idle words.

It didn’t happen without his green light. That’s the way it was getting out the thumb drives and remastering all his work. When he said yes, all the support was there, and I loved that consistent approach. Now there are about 96,000 pieces of media in our vault. There may be other catalogs as broad in scope about the human consciousness, but I don’t know of one. J-R touches on just about every aspect of human consciousness. I’m still amazed by
it, and I still continue to find new things. And at the same time the core teachings are so simple.

As I go through the media database that starts in 1968, it was just MSIA. There was no USM, Heartfelt, Insight, Windermere, etc. He would do five or six seminars a week. I would be amazed at how he could teach school and do that schedule. I just chalk it up to the fact that he was plugged into something special. Back in the day he’s going all the way to Thousand Oaks to do a seminar. Just the amount of seminars he did was amazing. Seminars were $3, or $5 for couples.

I had my first light study with J-R in San Francisco in 1971 that was one hour one-on-one with J-R for $50. I remember after that first light study saying to myself, “This guy gets me.” He could just sit with you and tell you how you’re wired, what your karma was. He could show you not just what your positive stuff was, but also the negative stuff, the flip side, so you could clearly see the choices you could make. What I got was, “you’re powerful either way, so choose wisely.” It was so clear.

One time when J-R was in the Bay Area doing seminars and light studies we asked J-R if he wanted to take a tour of Alcatraz—the old prison had just opened up to tourists. He said OK, and we were in there taking the tour and a guy comes up to us and says to J-R something like, “Have I met you?” and J-R goes, “No.” And the guy walks away and J-R says, “He’s seen me in spirit and thought he knew me here.” And I thought that was so cool, it was like, J-R was always working, always doing his thing, even when I thought we were doing something mundane.

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NDH: How has your life been different since he’s been gone?

Phil Danza: I think when anybody important in your life is not around physically, it takes some time to sort it out. You know your life is going to be different but you don’t know how it’s going to be different. I think I’m still in the figuring it out phase. One thing is sure, you can’t replace it. That darshan that was always around him was a very addictive thing. But spirit is always present. So now that he’s not here physically, it means spending more time going inside and connecting with that. In a way it’s a good thing because you can get kind of spiritually lazy being around him physically.

He’s been gone about ten months now, and I’m still getting in touch with how much I miss him. I remember him telling me about parents dying, and how you reach a point where the pain goes away, but you always miss them. I don’t have that much pain about him, but I remember in the first month or so after he was gone, looking over at his chair in the living room and thinking, “Oh he’s not there.” I miss having him here. I’ll probably never get over missing him.
I still miss my mom and dad, too, they passed over many years ago.

Brooke and I miss working and traveling with J-R, but we’re so thankful that we were able to assist him with travels to so many countries and working with so many wonderful people.

The thing I feel blessed about is that as he was gradually less available, there was a long good-bye where he wasn’t hanging out as much. So it was not a big shock or a big break when he died. I give thanks for that. But I still miss him. But the cool thing is that because that spiritual part is active, the experience goes on. It’s not like it’s over when he drops the body. We’re still hooked up.

But you miss the little things, going by the kitchen and waving hi, going out to eat with him. But the positive part for me is I still work with his media, so I get to see and hear him every day. We just prepped 136 excerpts for the PAT 8, for the trip to France. It’s all still engaged, still really active. The ride doesn’t end. He’s still so active, and he’s still there. You call on him and that energy is right there.

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This article was published in the September | October 2015 edition of the New Day Herald Online Magazine, available via ISSUU.

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