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Updated: June 29, 2025
Another time, Atmananda read to me a letter that he had sent to Chinmoy: "As you know, I have been entering into highly advanced states of consciousness lately... " Unable to concentrate, I suppressed a yawn and lapsed into a long, thoughtless pause.
I sensed the disciples had taken Atmananda's caveat seriously. My stomach felt taut. I thanked Chinmoy silently. Atmananda had meanwhile flipped to a less somber mood. "One of the best ways to combat the Forces," he said, "is to have fun." So we went out to eat.
Adjacent to the kitchen was the meditation room, where Atmananda planned to conduct weekly meetings for the soon-to-be-recruited Chinmoy disciples. From the meditation room I could see the long, narrow yard and the large, wooden deck which he christened "the flogging platform." On the steep hill past the deck, legions of spidery plants advanced imperceptibly toward the garden.
Perhaps, though, the former plan would have regained some momentum had I known about, and had I analyzed, the problems currently fouling the air between Chinmoy and Atmananda. One problem was sex. Chinmoy, who taught that higher consciousness lay above the sweaty world of physical pleasure, often instructed us to avoid members of the opposite sex whenever possible.
"The past is dust," I now thought, recalling a saying that Atmananda had borrowed from Chinmoy. I walked to Third College. To Third College Lecture Hall. To TLH 104. I saw Atmananda's face on either side of the front wall. I had placed the two posters.
I kept this in mind one Saturday afternoon as I approached a health food store with Marty, a shy, soft-spoken UCSD student with a sense of wonder in his eyes. Marty had been a disciple of Chinmoy for about a year. Raising the WOOF!'s to the counter, I said, "Could we leave these by the door? They're free!" "Sure," the manager replied and he took one.
Then Rama sat in front of the auditorium, wiggling his toes and fielding questions, a la Chinmoy. "Rama?" a woman might begin. "Yes." "The men where I work are constantly sending me sexual energy. Each day I come home completely drained." "What do you do for a living?" "I'm a receptionist." "Why don't you study programming?" he suggested.
In San Diego, he raised membership dues to four or so dollars a week. Rachel, who took out loans to help the San Diego Chinmoy Centre get started, gave much more. As The Centre rapidly grew, so did the numbers in Atmananda's club. "Seekers used to live in monasteries and in caves," Atmananda taught at Centre meetings. "But Guru recommends that instead, we live in a city.
Nor did I know that he had once asked a girlfriend to slip out the window when another appeared at the door. Nor that he had recently been in deep trouble with Chinmoy. Nor that during the height of the controversy, he had admitted to Tom that he might leave the Centre before Chinmoy kicked him out. "What would you do if you left?" Tom had asked him.
About thirty minutes after the talk was scheduled to begin, Atmananda strode through the door. He wore a light brown suit. "Anne," he said, "did you bring the Transcendental?" The sari-clad woman who had sold incense at the last lecture placed a frame on the table beside Atmananda. The Transcendental was a photograph of Atmananda's Indian guru, Chinmoy.
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