Onward to glory I go!

After the performance, Atmananda said that the level of our
consciousness was dropping, so he had us meditate for about twenty
minutes. Then he said, "We are going to play The Game."

"What game?" I asked, feeling bolder after having performed with him.

"Part of The Game," he replied cryptically, "is to figure out what The
Game is."

"The Game is The Intuition Game," said Sal. "You want us to intuit
something."

"Right."

I wondered if Sal could read Atmananda's mind.

"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 suddenl