"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 sex, 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
reasserted itself in his mind as the number of people attending
his talks gradually dwindled, which he attributed to a diminishing
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.