By Mark Ellis –
His father, Benson Fong, played Charlie Chan’s Number Three Son in six movies about the fictional Honolulu police detective. In addition to acting, Benson and his wife, Maylia, also ran a chain of successful Chinese restaurants in LA named Ah Fong.
As a result, their son Oden grew up in a privileged environment surrounded by many famous names. “I sat on the knee of most of the biggest movie stars that have lived, people like Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, June Allyson, and Fred Astaire,” Oden said, in a testimony delivered at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in 2008.
He admitted to being a “spoiled child,” growing up in an affluent household set atop the Hollywood Hills with a spectacular view of LA.
It wasn’t long, however, before Oden recognized that many of the glitterati in that world were deeply dissatisfied. “I realized that everyone around me, regardless of how high they climbed their ladders, they were never, ever content. They were never happy,” he observed.
Oden grew up without any Christian influence in his family. “We didn’t believe in God. Our background was basically listening to my father teach us his own philosophy and also a little bit of Chinese philosophy here and there.
“So we always just believed, like everybody else, that we were born into the world by accident through a cosmic explosion that happened eons ago, and a giant burp happened in the universe, and then everything came into being. And we were just gonna do whatever we could to make our little dent on the planet and then go our way.”
Despite the secular indoctrination, questions emerged internally that caused him to drop out of the LA scene and seek refuge in the coastal art colony of Laguna Beach.
His move coincided with the counterculture revolution of the ’60s, with African Americans fighting for equal rights and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) engaged in antiwar efforts at many campuses throughout the country.
“There was another movement happening at the time, and that was enlightenment through the usage of psychedelic drugs,” Oden recalled. “Coming from Hollywood, I started smoking pot when I was pretty young…After I left high school, I moved away from my home and started to experiment with psychedelic drugs.”
He wanted to “find himself” and explore pathways to God, which led him to Tibetan Buddhism.
He studied the Bhagavad Gita and helped establish a Hari Krishna temple in Laguna Beach. “I became part of the subculture, and I was befriended because of my guitar playing and singing by some musicians who lived out in the Laguna Canyon. So I went out there to jam with them, and I was kind of adopted into the Timothy Leary family. They called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”
While they looked like a harmless group of long-hairs, the police labeled them the Hippie Mafia after their commune began manufacturing and distributing LSD and hashish. “They were basically responsible for manufacturing most of the psychedelic drugs, LSD and other forms of psychedelic drugs, that were being distributed all over the world. And I became a part of that family,” Oden explained.
On December 26, 1968, Leary was arrested in Laguna Beach, California for the possession of two marijuana “roaches”, the remains of two joints after they had already been smoked. In January, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody for a prior arrest in 1965, for a total of 20 years to be served consecutively.
“Timothy got arrested early on, and so I used to take care of his wife, Rosemary,” Oden said. “Rosemary had connections to everyone. In fact, she was like my backstage pass to any concert back in those days. I’d walk with her up to a Moody Blues concert, and they just opened the doors because she was Dr. Leary’s wife.”
Because of Oden’s continued involvement with the Brotherhood, he and his cohorts were awash in cash. “I found myself elevated into the same kind of funny place in society, but this is a subculture of society where we had hundreds of thousands of dollars to play with every single day because of the amount of drugs that we were manufacturing and selling. We used to smuggle marijuana across the border down here in Mexico regularly, and we were so rich we actually used to light our joints with hundred-dollar bills to blow people’s minds.”
Having previously found emptiness in Hollywood, he developed similar conclusions about the drug-fueled rock and roll lifestyle. “We got to the very pinnacle of where we were and there was nothing there, you know, all the movie stars and the rock stars and all the people that we hung out with when I was growing up.
“You get to the top of the lot, there’s nothing there, and you see people like just totally blitzing out and doing funny things like you see in the media today. And the hippie movement, it was the same way. And so, I finally decided that I was going to really find out if there really was a God.”
To find God, however, he chose the unconventional pathway to enlightenment advocated by Leary and others, using psychedelics.
“I took a vial of what was just the pure content of our product out to the high desert and snorted it all. It was about a hundred and fifty doses of what they call ‘sunshine LSD.’ And what transpired after, I can’t even really explain. I do know that they couldn’t resuscitate me. They couldn’t get me breathing again. My heart stopped beating, and I did, yes, I did have one of those after or out-of-the-body experiences to a certain extent.
In Oden Fong’s near-death experience, he received a startling and frightening glimpse of hell.
“I basically was in a place of darkness, and everything that I had learned in the past told me that what I should do is look for the light. Look for the light, and then you’re gonna go into your next incarnation. You’ll just be reincarnated over and over again till you get it right, you know what I mean? It sounds fun, doesn’t it? And so, I’m looking for the light. I’m looking at the light. There’s no light. It’s just total darkness, total blackness.”
Cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 25:30
“All of a sudden, I started to realize that I was just in darkness forever, and I was a conscious living entity living within that darkness. And as I started to succumb to it, I started to sense the presence of other souls that were in that same place, screaming and crying out in agony.
Unexpectedly, Oden realized he was one of those voices. “I invoked every single name that you can imagine, every guru that I had studied under, all of their gods, every deity, every demigod that I could remember their name, and nothing happened.
In desperation, he cried out to a name he had long resisted.
“The very last name that I cried out to, because I never wanted to be a Christian, was the name of Jesus. I said, ‘Jesus, if you’re real, save me! If you’re real, save me!’ And I was screaming it at the top of my lungs.”
Then something remarkable happened in response to his heartfelt cry.
“All of a sudden, in that darkness, the darkness began to quake. Like the whole universe was shaking, and there were flashes of light, and brighter and brighter and brighter. And I actually came to in the middle of the desert, and I was alive. I was breathing. And there was a man standing in front of me whose countenance was so bright that I had to avert my eyes and my whole body away from him.”
His eyes were like a flame of fire; and his feet like burnished bronze, when it has been caused to glow in a furnace…his face was like the sun shining in its strength. Revelation 1:14-16
“It was almost like it was noontime, and the sun was shining up above, and this person, the image and outline of this person was so bright that I couldn’t look. And even when I turned around and I started to try to bury myself under the sand to get away from the sight of this person, I could still see him. And then I heard a voice that I’ll never forget. I still remember it today. It makes me cry and shiver and rejoice and laugh all at the same time.
“It sounded like the sound of many waters. It sounded, it filled every single molecule in the air. And he basically just said this. He said, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ And I remember that after I heard those words, I waited for a long time, and then I turned around, and it (he) was gone. Although there were little flashes of lightning and everything.”
When Oden returned home, he began to share what happened with his friends. “They thought I just had a big psychedelic experience. And my old brethren from the Brotherhood that are still alive today say that Oden flipped out on LSD and became a Jesus Freak and never came back.”
Oden doesn’t shy away from the Jesus Freak moniker. “That’s my reputation. And it is true. They waited for me for years to come back.”
He continued to live in Laguna, but God directed him into the path of some Calvary Chapel people. “They would come down and play music with me and preach in my backyard, right in the middle of Laguna Canyon where the whole Brotherhood lived.”
As many as three or four hundred people gathered there, listening to music and hearing the gospel preached with boldness.
“If you would just give Jesus a chance, if you just give Jesus an opportunity to come into your heart and to show you that He’s real, He will.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, if you’re on the edge of death, if you’re still living and breathing, if you just open up your heart, He will come in and you’ll never be the same. I can attest to that.
“I’m living proof that with all of my wildness, God has taken me and transformed me into a whole different creature. It’s only by the grace of God and because of His love for me and for you and for all of us.”
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