"You are caught up in trying to be someone you are not, and it is clearly not working. You are fighting yourselves for no apparent reason. Look, it's easy. You can stay the way you are and continue living someone else's dream, or you can come with me on a walk to nowhere. Leave aside your petty jealousies, your hates, your desires, your attachments, your fears, and enter the worlds where 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, after having renamed his organization "Church of Atlantis" (C.O.A.), Atmananda decided to distribute WOOF! The Voice of Southern California to tens of thousands of San Diegans.
WOOF! provided work for Atmananda's devotees and helped bind the fledgling group. We illustrated, laid out, distributed, and laughed over each edition. We laughed, for instance, at Atmananda's fabricated advertisement about an imaginary bank (Issue #3; January, 1981): "Interloka Bank is pleased to announce the opening of a new branch in Mark's room. We will be giving away the first 500 customers as valuable gifts... We at Interloka are dedicated to serving you totally, and are proud to take you for all we can, whenever we can. We are the only authorized distributors of the GOLDEN GWIDcard... Interloka Bank—We Own You... " Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, the desire to believe in our friend and mentor, or the need for comic relief that blinded us to the grim foreshadowing of Atmananda's humor.
I laughed the hardest at Atmananda's ads and columns in which he satirized televangelists, Indian gurus, the Moonies, and New Age healers (see Appendix A). I felt justified in laughing at other spiritual groups, partly because they seemed to merit it and partly because Atmananda said that they needed to be laughed at. He wrote in an editorial (Issue #6; March, 1981): "WOOF!, the all-natural and organic paper that millions use to line their bird cages, makes fun of it all. We act as a consumer's representative for you in the field of New Age consciousness. We feel that if what people have to offer is genuine then they won't mind us poking a little fun at them. And if they do mind—then maybe the products or services they offer deserve careful scrutiny, and we should re-evaluate the truthfulness of their claims... "
In my naive, sleepless stupor, I accepted Atmananda's mission of poking fun at others, and did my best to train and coordinate the WOOF! distribution teams.