here I hang
out--worlds of pure joy, light, and bliss."

Several minutes later, Atmananda announced it was time to meditate. I
wanted to rub my eyes, yawn, and stretch out on the soft blue rug.
Instead, I sat there spellbound, drifting in and out of a dreamless
sleep. At one point, I woke and heard, "When you attain enlightenment,
your selves dissolve in the clear light of the void. Maybe you exist,
maybe you don't. It no longer matters." Then, as Atmananda rehashed
the details of his own enlightenment, I dozed off again.

After the meeting, I went to my room. "I need time to think," I
reminded myself. As I drifted off to sleep, I could still hear my
housemate talking.

Of the original one hundred San Diego Chinmoy disciples, roughly ten
formed their own Chinmoy Centre, forty set out on their own, and fifty
followed Atmananda. While some aspects of Atmananda's program remained
the same, others intensified. He repeatedly warned, for instance, that
the Negative Forces would prey on those who did not meditate regularly,
those who diluted their power with doubts about him, and those who did
not regularly attend his meetings. He began holding "crucial" meetings
each night to help us "combat the Forces." The meetings began at
around seven-thirty p.m. and lasted at times until dawn.

I attended each of Atmananda's meetings and, with only two or three
hours of sleep per night, quickly grew fatigued. Once my boss at the
UCSD Computer Center found me asleep with my upper body resting on a
noisy, three-and-a-half-foot-high mainframe printer. 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 was occasionally buoyed by the realization that I desperately needed
rest, that I needed time to think, and that I needed to take a break
from Atmananda's all-night meetings. But I was mostly slapped by waves
of fear of Atmananda's Negative Forces, and pulled under by the weight
of shifting etiquette, meta-rational rhetoric, and sleep deprivation.

Roughly two weeks into the post-coup program, Atmananda began to
publish WOOF! The Weekly Newsletter of Anahata. Having named his
organization after the anahata chakra--the "psychic energy center of
love"--he initially distributed WOOF! to the fifty Anahatans. Weeks
later, aft