Weeks before, Atmananda gave me permission to attend his parties-- provided that I did not "vibe" the women.

"Don't look at them as women," my brother had suggested, quoting Chinmoy and Atmananda. "Look at them as seekers.

When you look at them as women, it hurts their evolution."

I a.s.sured him I would try.

After I moved to Stony Brook, I started going to Atmananda's parties regularly. At one party my brother and I arrived at Tom's house, left our sneakers by the door, and went inside.

Atmananda, Sal, Anne, Tom, and a few other disciples stood in the kitchen.

They looked bewildered. The air smelled charred. Black, gooey gobs darkened the floor. Atmananda was not talking. Something was wrong.

When Anne had lit the stove moments before, an explosion singed her hair and propelled chocolate and marshmallow covered graham crackers across the room. Now, as we cleaned the mess, Atmananda began to speak.

"Guru protected us from the Negative Forces," he said in a rich, lulling voice.

I told myself that the explosion had probably more to do with the gas being left on than it did with Guru and the Forces.

"The Negative Forces want to hurt Guru's mission,"

Atmananda continued grimly. "But they know not to challenge an avatar directly. Instead, they go after his disciples-- particularly those wide open to doubt."

For months I had grappled with the concept of Negative Forces.

Perhaps they existed, I told myself, perhaps they did not.

In either case, I did not take them seriously. Now, though, I tried to imagine what they looked like. I pictured ma.s.sive, menacing storm clouds in a dark, foreboding sky. I imagined the "clouds" were aware of my current thoughts. Suddenly the clouds seemed real.

I felt jolted. I looked around the room. 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.

At an Italian restaurant during one party, Atmananda suddenly slapped Sal on the back and, adopting the voice of the G.o.dfather, cried, "Heyyy Sal! You plenty-fine kinda guy!"

"Sure I'm plenty-fine, but I'm also plenty-hungry!" Sal replied with an equally zesty accent, but without slapping him back.

Atmananda then denounced Sal for rescuing a maiden who had been held against her will in "a large vat of ravioli."

"What's wrong with that?" I asked.

"Sal, tell the baby what'sa wrong with that."

Until now I had enjoyed their antics, but the transition from being the editor-in-chief of my high school paper to "the baby"

felt awkward. Yet at seventeen, I was the youngest in the group, the average age of which was twenty-one. Atmananda was twenty-seven.

And I had learned from Chinmoy and Atmananda that humility was the quintessential spiritual quality. Besides, I loved the attention.

Sal replied that rescuing maidens was wrong because he should have been at home meditating.

I looked again at Sal, a twenty-year-old with a large, creased forehead.

He had studied computer engineering first at CalTech, and now at Stony Brook. He also studied guitar and drama. He cradled the eggplant parmigiano hero lovingly in his hands and closed his eyes before each bite, as if bracing for the next dose of ecstasy.

"Observe the maestro chow hound," Atmananda announced.

We laughed.

Sal had apparently adjusted to his role as chow hound.

He continued to eat as if nothing happened.

"If only Sal could focus on the Infinite rather than on the eggplant,"

Atmananda noted, "he would be the first among us to realize G.o.d."

It was fun eating out with Atmananda. After dinner, we often continued the fun and the fight against the Forces at the movies.

One time, Atmananda took us to Warlords of Atlantis. He bought five buckets of heavily b.u.t.tered popcorn, Tabs, c.o.kes, diet c.o.kes, boxes of licorice, Sno-caps, and Raisinetes. Then, from the fourth row-- Atmananda claimed that four was a power number--we watched a film which, at the time, seemed extraordinary.

Atmananda sat by the aisle of the nearly empty theatre. He whispered something to Sal, who told Tom, who told my brother, who told me: "Atlantis was once a real city."

"Atlantis was a real city," I told Anne, who told Dana, who told Suzanne.

Meanwhile, juxtaposed at an intersection of transmigrating junk food, I further divided my attention between monitoring what needed to be pa.s.sed, trying not to notice the women, and watching a man on the screen discover a lost world of magic and conflict under the sea.

"We all had past lives in Atlantis."

"We had past lives there." Pa.s.s the Raisinetes. A hidden city of magicians, seers, and warriors, where the laws of physics do not apply.

"We were together then."

"We were together." Pa.s.s the napkins. Crystals have a non-physical power.

"Atlantis was destroyed by the greed of its inhabitants."

"Atlantis was destroyed by greedy people."

Afterwards, we drove back to Tom's and caught the last few minutes of The Twilight Zone. It was late. I was getting sleepy. Atmananda began to repeat how Guru had saved us from stove-demolishing Ent.i.ties.

I entered a state of mind where I heard his words, but did not scrutinize them. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he suggested that we meditate on the Transcendental which Tom placed on a table by the television.

In the months that followed, Atmananda accepted me into his inner circle of friends. But not every encounter with him, I quickly learned, was a party.

One morning Atmananda emerged from his cottage in Stony Brook carrying a thick stack of posters. Bluejays, doves, sparrows, and chickadees flocked around a feeder. Sal, Paul, my brother, and I stood nearby.

Atmananda approached, but the little birds remained.

"Ellaow," he said in a c.o.c.kney accent.

"Ellaow," we echoed.

"WHAT...is your name!" he demanded, quoting from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

"Sir Waff-noid," offered Sal.

"WHAT...is your quest!"

"I seek the higher worlds."