d 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 God."

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 buttered popcorn, Tabs, Cokes, diet Cokes, 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 passed, 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." Pass 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." Pass 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 Entities.
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