Take Me for a Ride Part 8

Don't be a shmuck-o, Manifest Light.

Tomorrow--may be too late, Now is never, My gazpacho, she cannot 'a wait.

Now is the right time, The food delight time, So open up 'a you mouth, And face the south.

Tomorrow--may be too late, Now is never, My gazpacho, she cannot 'a wait.

We sang and danced around Sal, who tried to maintain a dignified countenance but who ended up laughing along with the rest of us.

Then Rachel made cinnamon-spiced, hot apple cider and we sat around the fire sipping the brew. Later, Atmananda sang a revised version of I Don Quixote from Man of La Mancha:

Hear me heathens and wizards and servants of sin, All your dastardly doings are past, For a holy endeavor is now to begin,

I am I Atmananda--the humble and pure!

My destiny calls and I go, And the wild winds of fortune shall carry me onward, Oh whither soever they blow.

Whither soever they blow, Onward to glory I go!

After the performance, Atmananda said that the level of our consciousness was dropping, so he had us meditate for about twenty minutes.

Then he said, "We are going to play The Game."

"What game?" I asked, feeling bolder after having performed with him.

"Part of The Game," he replied cryptically, "is to figure out what The Game is."

"The Game is The Intuition Game," said Sal. "You want us to intuit something."

"Right."

I wondered if Sal could read Atmananda's mind.

"Some of you think that you can read my mind," Atmananda said, peering at Sal. "But you can read only those thoughts that I make available to you."

Sal had intuited that we had to intuit something but we still did not know what it was.

"Is it about the past?" asked Anne.

"When you intuit The Truth you get an answer, not a question,"

Atmananda stated.

"It's about the future," stated Dana.

"Right."

"You want us to look into the future," she continued.

He nodded.

"I see you traveling around the world giving lectures," she predicted.

"Many seekers will become disciples as a result of your talks,"

offered Tom.

"Guru will be happy with us," suggested Anne.

"We're going to put up a lot of posters," I added.

Atmananda said that we had done well but were forgetting something important.

We looked at him expectantly.

Then, in his Kermit-the-Frog voice, he said, "We're going to make millions of people happy."

"Make millions of people happy," I echoed.

Chinmoy seemed willing to look the other way when Atmananda, his chief recruiter, disregarded his etiquette on s.e.x, ego, cinema, individuality, and language. But his patience ran out in 1979, when a Queens disciple informed him that Atmananda was "playing guru."

Actually, it had been several months since Atmananda had made it a practice to scan the audience during the meditation part of his talks, as if he were channeling Divine Light. But now Chinmoy saw the light, and Atmananda was in immediate danger of being kicked out of the Centre.

When Atmananda learned of his predicament, he had an idea.

Fond of temperate climates, he had been wanting for years to move back to his birthplace, sunny southern California. This dream had recently rea.s.serted itself in his mind as the number of people attending his talks gradually dwindled, which he attributed to a diminis.h.i.+ng interest in spirituality in the New York metropolitan area.

But suddenly the idea of starting a Chinmoy Centre in a distant city seemed less of a dream than a necessity. He wrote Guru a letter asking if he could move to San Diego.

Chinmoy consented.

Weeks later, the phone rang. It was Atmananda.

I offered to find my brother.

"No," he said, "I want to speak with you. Why don't you come over?"

He lived about a quarter of a mile from my apartment in Stony Brook.

I jogged down Cedar Street and knocked on his door.

"Hi, kid. Make yourself at home." He offered me a yogurt.

I accepted.

He told me that he was starting a Centre for Guru in La Jolla, California.

Then, in an enchantingly anesthetizing voice, he explained that southern California rested upon a mystical power spot around which had congregated the nation's largest population of spiritual seekers. "Would you like to go?"

I realized that San Diego--San Diego!--was driving distance to the Sonoran Desert and to UCLA--Castaneda's frequent haunts!

I remembered Atmananda telling me that California boasted many lovely, friendly women! I realized that such a move would distance me from my parents, who continued to worry that I was in a cult!

I also realized that such a move would distance me from Guru.

But I now believed that the Light would reach me in whichever state I inhabited. Besides, I sensed that without Atmananda as a buffer, Chinmoy's highly regimented brand of spirituality would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to conform to.