Talk:Millennium '73/sources

Millennialism

There is a fanaticism about the behavior of premies in the Guru's presence which is often amusing to an outsider (the day before, three premies managed to climb up an air shaft leading into the Celestial Suite) but sometimes borders on the kind of violence not uncommon in millennial movements and at least once, in Detroit, crossed over the line.

• Levine 1974

Comments by DLM members and others at the Millennium '73 festival.

Misc sources

"I don't know whether it's the air conditioning, but you can really feel something. "

• Boyle 1985

One premie (a True Believer who renders personal service to the Guru) ap­proached me, giggling endlessly and in­sisting that I touch the blossoms he offered. "Do you know who touched these? The Lord of the Universe." Even­tually he wandered off, still giggling.

• Goldsmith

The smiling premies kept saying, "It's a different feeling. You'll like it."

• Elman

Mackaye

One T-shirted youth, trying to find an unlocked entrance so he could leave the stadium, said angrily. "I came to check it out. but this is a real bummer. No one who was really God would let himself be put up on a throne like that.

An 18-year-old believer from Los Angeles who works as a file clerk in a bank, for example, said he and other members of the communal household in which he lives are expected to contribute 30 per cent of their earnings to the work of the mission. For him an ex-Episcopalian, ex-devotee of other Indian spiritual ways ranging from the Self-Realization Fellowship to Ananda Marga, alumnus of Esalen Institute In Big Sur, Calif., and a reformed marijuana smoker, it is clearly worth it. "I don't need any external stimulation because the Absolute is inside me to listen to whenever I want", he said cheerfully.

Blau

"I'm intereste In peace, explained Charley Price of Austin who is 26 years old. , • t "This seems to be where 1 t s at. I feel the energy." And he added what many of the young followers told_, a visi- • tor: "It's not. - somethm-g I I think, it's something I feeL" Kathryn Barkley; who lives in' a Los Angeles .. ash- , ,ram, or _ spiritual center: for , devotees, said· her participa- " ,'tion was Ujust another step" I ~n the peace activities she had engaged- in, since her graduation from Stanford in 1969. t Miss Barkley,' the wife of . Anthony J. Russo Jr •• ', a de-, ' fendant in the Pentagon pa­pers case, said that a~hough he was not a follower of the . guru, "he sees, the changes in me. Anger doesn't happen to me any more," she said.­"There is ,no anxiety. ,There are changes in my tone, of • u VOIce, my eyes. - One prominent figure in', the peace movement of 'the nineteen-sixties, Jerry Rubin, showed up at the Astrodome, apparently at the urging of­Mr. Davis, and was heard to remark. UI don't like this movement!' He looked som­ber and declined ~o elaborate.

Baxter

They danced around clapping their hands and singing and bowing to the Guru until they were blue in the face. Divine Light, Incorporated President Bob Mishler bowed before the thone and presented the Guru with a Golden Swan. They went ape again. As one seasoned Guruwatcher later described it, "You couldn't help being a little 'blissed-out' yourself watching thousands of people freak out of their minds."

Dreyer

A bearded premie from Boston, though no Krishna-symp, voiced disillusionment with the Divine Light treatment of the Krishnas. "Rennie Davis, who is supposed to be such an advocate of free speech, isn't letting these folks have theirs. He's working with the police against these people."

Morgan

I was in the Astrodame with a premie from Atlanta, Neal Hoyman, while the stage was being erected, and Bal Bhagwan ji dropped in. "Ask him for an interview," I said to Neal. "If it's proper to approach him I will," Neal said, "but remember, he is my Lord."

Tim Galloway, 35, is a California tennis pro who was once ranked seventh nationally, and who graduated from Harvard in 1960. In 1971, he heard that Guru Maharaj ji was speaking in Carmel. "I went because he was a 13-year-old from India with six million followers, and I wanted to see a saint," Galloway said. "When he said, 'I can show you. God,' I concluded he was either a fraud or a prophet. But what if it were true? I canceled a day of classes and followed him to L.A. He was answering questions in a group, and I asked him by what authority he spoke. He said, "If this knowledge fully satisfies you, you will know by what authority I gave it, and if it does not satisfy you, you will know that what I gave you was not pure water or that you were not really thirsty." Galloway took the knowledge and felt peace. "I wasn't worried about whether I was giving a good lesson or what my girl friend thought of me," he said. "Then I spent two months meditating in India, and I returned believing beyond a reasonable doubt that Guru Maharaj ji was the lord on the planet again. He had so many opportunities to present a more convincing image, but I could never catch him pretending. The first time I saw his devotees put garlands of flowers over his head. If he'd wanted to present a convincing image, he would have thanked them and worn the garlands, but instead he brushed them aside. I could have done better myself. "All Americans are trained to see through con artists. Harvard trained me to tear down every belief and construct and see the irrationality of it. But what to think of a kid who gicks up a can of shaving cream and starts squirting people with it? And I'm supposed to think he's the perfect master? But he's merely saying, 'If tbat puts you off, how much do you really want this knowledge?'" Now Galloway lives in an ashram and has written a bock called "The Inner Game of Tennis." He practices celibacy, which he calls Aquarian Age birth control. "Like anybody," he said, "when the urge came I looked for ways to satisfy it, but the urge just isn't coming. It's not a conscious effort; I just don't feel the need. In an ashram, there are 20 or 30 people; if they were all going to bed with each other, it would be havoc. You stop wanting to; there's a higher desire. There was that moment, but it's only a moment. Meditation is permanent; it's more blissful than orgasm." Dr. Robert Hallowitz is a 29-year-old neurophysiolegist and a research associate at the Laboratory of Brain Evolution Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington. A short, intense, bright-eyed man, he talks as if he were delivering a lecture. "In March, 1973, I came into contact with Guru Maharaj ji. I had a skeptical reaction; I couldn't accept him as a godhead. But with my clinical background, I saw that something was really moving the devotees in a positive direction. During a four month period I sat down and talked with nearly 100 premies. The common denominator was that they came from what we call the social dropouts. By all Establishment Standards they had been living desperate lives, unproductive and antisocial. I was impressed because I know that when encounter groups and other forms of therapy deal with this type of despair, the recovery rate is minute. "It was visible on the faces of these premies that they were experiencing a radiant and intense peace. And it was infectious; I began experiencing the saure thing. I felt marvelous. I said, I don't know who Guru Maharaj ji is, but he's giving a valid experience and I want it. Since then, I've had experience so intense as to be beyond my capacity to imagine, and if that's suggestion, it's very strong. I've come to the point where I know there is a Supreme Being and He is one with that 15-year-old boy." Hallowitz is convinced that the guru's teaching is consistent with recent brain research, and that meditation techniques provide a way for man to control an imperfectly designed brain away from fear and stress and toward pure thought and inner peace. Because of his evolutionary inheritance, Hallowitz says, man is burdened with a primitive orientation towards fear and survival, which sets the tone of individual and institutional behavior, starts wars, and destroys civilizations. Scientists are already studying the physiological effects of meditation as a way out of this bind. They have found decreased heart rates and oxygen consumption, increased galvanic skin response and low-frequency alpha activity that may be correlated with states of subjective relaxation. Hallowitz believes that receiving knowledge from the guru "involves a lowering of response to stressful situations, a heightening of capacity for pure thought, a scaling down of body processes, libido, appetites and sleep requirements - it changes the organism's perspective of the environment; we no longer view the environment as stressful, we are no longer draining our vitality. What I'm saying is that meditation brings about physiological transformations that have tremendous implications for our physical and emotional we11-being."

Snell

In rapid succession three Sony recorders conked out. When I mentioned that to a young woman who was a member of the public relations staff, it was as though I had offered her my fraternity pin. Stars danced in her eyes. "It's the great spiritual energy that Goom Rodgie gives off," she said. "When he is giving a talk, you'll see lots of premies just dozing off to sleep. His energy simply stuns them."

I sprinted backwards barely in time-and slammed hard into a uniformed policeman. "Hey, buster, you tryin to start sumpin', or sumpin'?" he said, speaking slow and steely, like Shane. "No, Sir!" I said and apologized profusely. He cooled down. And then, nodding out toward the arena, he said, real friendly-like: "Ain't this just the damnedest thang you have ever saw?" "Damnedest" was the word for it.

"THESE PEOPLE, the devotees, are more `into' respecting their bodies and taking care of themselves," said Dr. Robert R. Newport of Guerneville, California. Dr. Newport had come to Houston to attend Millennium '73. He is a psychiatrist. He also has received Knowledge. He is a premie. He said: These people are feeling better-that's why you don't see any scowl lines on their faces. I think one of the greatest evils in the world is the phrase "I need." It comes from our ego, the "me" position, the "my" position. Now, notice these people in the Divine Light Mission. You won't hear them saying, "I want this" and "This is for me," and they won't be fighting with each other. Watch the traffic guards in the hallways, and watch how the devotees listen to their authority. There's no battle with authority.

Levine

When I ask one of them what he's been up before receiving Knowledge, he tells me he had "done a little bit of college, a little bit of revolution, a little bit of acid" - an admittedly sketchy life history that may fit 98% of the crowd here today.

"He was here just two minutes and he blew everyone's mind," a premie next to me tells his friend, and one understands just what he means, for to look at a blissed-out premie is to peer into an empty house through spotless windows-there is that same unlived-in quality about his face. Another premie comes rushing up to me with a red carnation from one of the Guru's leis in his hand. He's hysterical, laughing and sobbing at the same time, and he offers me a petal plucked from the flower, screaming: "Do you know who's touched this flower? The Lord of the Universe . . . this flower!"

I walk over to three premies who are holding up papier mache heads of Popeye, Olive Oyl and Brutus on broomsticks. Washington, Franklin and Lincoln I can understand, I tell them, but why Popeye? "Knowledge," one of them answers, "is the Ultimate Spinach."

In the late afternoon Alan shows up at the Peace Plant and explains that he has ODed on satsang and has been spending his time alone in Houston, trying to resolve his doubts about the Guru and wondering if he should become a premie in the Knowledge session marathon that will take place the week after Millennium. He's a likable kid, dark and slightly built, with big brown eyes out of a Keene painting and a soft-spoken sincerity that makes the struggle he is going through even more affecting. Ever since Rennie Davis returned from India last winter, full of wild tales of a boy-god who would save humanity, Alan has felt obliged to investigate the Divine Light Mission as a kind of self-appointed emissary from the peace movement. He has long seen his own political work and spiritual growth as two disconnected halves of a single emerging Truth, but at this point he is only moderately hopeful that Guru Maharaj Ji can provide the missing link. After we find a quiet corner of the courtyard, Alan begins by telling me that he grew up in Woodland Hills, a conservative, upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. His parents were church-going Catholics, and he remembers the childhood comfort of knowing that if he died he would go to heaven, as well as a growing awareness of the distance between his parents' religious ideals and the lives they led. He describes himself as a high achiever who was elected a class officer in junior and senior high school, received consistently high grades and joined the school track and baseball teams. After the Watts rebellion of 1965, Alan focused his energies on social matters, working one summer and fall for VISTA and helping to plan a radical study program during his freshman year at UCLA. In the middle of his sophomore year, Alan enrolled at Berkeley, where he spent an academic quarter in an ecology program and tried unsuccessfully to work out an individual major that would integrate psychology and social structures, the interior and exterior halves that would never quite come together. He got caught up in the anti-war demonstrations at Berkeley, took a few acid trips and finally dropped out of school during the Cambodian invasion in the spring of 1970. It was a time when he felt a need to balance his active, achievement-oriented nature with a more reflective, inward-reaching side that he felt he'd neglected too long. He lived with a girl who was into Japanese potterymaking and dabbled in Eastern mysticism, and partially under her influence he read Krishnamurti, who taught him that only a revolution in human consciousness could produce changes in the structure of society. He also read a lot of Jungian psychology and began to write down and analyze his dreams each morning. He studied astrology and found that his dreams could be grouped into cycles that varied with the phases of the moon. He started practicing a kind of breath-control meditation that seemed to release centers of tension throughout his body, leaving him with a floating feeling. He dipped into Reichian theories of character armor and biopsychic energy. That summer he hitchhiked to a spiritual festival in Boulder, where various gurus spoke and the energy level often seemed incredibly high. (Swami Satchidananda said something that Alan had come to believe more and more: that his generation in America had gone through great transformations which would enable it to become the architects of a New Age, characterized by radically different psychic and social forms.) The last day of the festival was held in a field high in the Rockies. When it started to rain in the afternoon people formed a large circle and began chanting Om. Soon a tiny blue hole in the sky opened up above their heads and the rain stopped in the field, although it continued to come down in the surrounding forest. The next fall Alan worked as a gardener and taught in a free nursery school in Berkeley, but the new psychic states he was experiencing became his consuming interest. Weird things began to happen to him. He would wake up at five in the morning already in a deep meditative trance and often float over his bed for hours. On several occasions he had the sensation of leaving his body and flying around the room. Often, he would experience his body as a stream of undifferentiated energy that seemed the stuff of the universe, millions of mad molecules trapped in a temporary mold. Once his body turned into a tunnel through which wind rushed at great speed and another time it transformed into a flock of chirping birds. He found that if he looked at his hand long enough while meditating it would disintegrate like an aspirin in water and eventually disappear completely. Alan claims that none of these strange experiences were drug-induced, nor were they particularly susceptible to voluntary control. (In fact, whenever he willed himself into a trance, nothing much seemed to happen.) There were moments when he thought he was going crazy, but for a long time he decided to give in to the experiences because he felt he was learning a great deal about himself from them and wondered where they would lead him. By the spring of 1971, however, he had begun to suspect that the balance he was seeking between his emotional and intellectual faculties, the inner and outer realms of consciousness, had now shifted dangerously in the opposite direction, and he moved back down to Los Angeles in order to cool off for a time and renew contact with his family and old friends. Tom Hayden, whom he had known in Berkeley, was now directing the Indochina Peace Campaign from Los Angeles, and Alan soon found himself heavily involved in radical politics again, organizing slide shows on North Vietnamese culture, arranging lectures for Movement speakers and attending a constant round of political workshops. One day, after a long meditation Alan had what he describes as a vision: pictures of political leaders he admired flashed through his mind-Marx, Lenin, Ho, Jefferson, Lincoln, F.D.R.-followed by a scene of a new kind of self-reliant rural collective in America, a small center of light in the midst of darkness, where the spirit of brotherhood would prevail and the most modern technology the country could provide would be used to make life more harmonious and pleasurable rather than more fragmented and anxiety-ridden. He wrote up the vision as a proposal, and when Rennie Davis came to Los Angeles for a speaking engagement, gave it to him to read. In time, Alan became fairly influential within the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC), but his old douGbetnse arabtoeudt Movement politics continued to plague him. The constant disputes and petty bickerings within the Movement seemed a reflection of the old ego-oriented values of American society at large. On the other hand, most of the religious organizations he had checked into-the Hare Krishna kids and the Jesus Freaks and a Zen community or two-seemed to him blatantly escapist. He still had not found the connecting link. When Rennie Davis returned from India last winter, he called Alan and told him: "This is the most important day of your life." He came over and talked for six hours straight about the Knowledge he had received in India and how it would bring the world to a state of harmony a million times greater than anything Alan had envisioned in his proposal for self-reliant communities. As it happened, Alan had picked up a copy of And It Is Divine in a bookstore earlier that same day and decided to learn more about the Divine Light Mission, so that when Rennie explained that this was a perfect example of the "incidents of coincidence" that occurred with astonishing regularity along a devotee's path to the Lord, Alan's curiosity was piqued even more. In the next few months Alan frequently visited the ashram in Los Angeles and read all the DLM publications he could get his hands on. There was much that he liked about the organization. It seemed unusually outwardreaching and talked about feeding, clothing and sheltering humanity, although the details were admittedly a bit sketchy. The Divine City, an electronic Eden which would soon be constructed somewhere in America as a model of communal living, was not unlike his vision of rural collectives. The need to change human consciousness and create new values before the social structure could be altered was a conclusion Alan had already reached. And the attack on mind as the main instrument of deception and ego as an illusion of individual control-well, Alan knew that something else was in control all right. But was it Guru Maharaj Ji? About this time he had been reading Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism and he wondered if the Guru, by demanding total submission from his devotees, wasn't in fact the last defender of the old paternalistic order. He was also beginning to feel the strain of dividing his personal loyalty between Rennie and Tom Hayden, who took a rather jaundiced view of the Guru, saying he had already received Knowledge from the North Vietnamese. Then in mid-July, when he had nearly decided that the Divine Light Mission was just another spiritual trip, he had a strange dream. He experienced four different scenes of extreme adversity, then found himself playing with Maharaj Ji on a huge canopied bed, feeding him organic health-food sandwiches with a feeling of happiness that he had never known before. At the end of the dream Alan bent down to kiss Maharaj Ji's calf and woke up thinking that maybe Reich was wrong, maybe the trouble with totalitarianism was that it denied the gift of submission freely given. Just before Millennium, Alan traveled to Dayton Ohio, for an IPC national conference and found the discussions far removed from his present concerns. On the last night of the convention, when he had to decided to go to Chicago for the contempt trial or Houston for Millennium, he had another dream about Maharaj Ji. Alan was in a classroom watching Pablo Friere-the Brazilian activist-priest whom he thought best integrated religion and politics-on television. Next he was seated in a steeply-tiered auditorium where Maharaj Ji was about to give satsang. He noticed many of his Movement friends in the audience and smiled warmly at them. When Maharaj Ji began to speak, Alan saw a luminescent cathedral inside him. Later, in some night kitchen, Maharaj Ji took two chemical vials out of a refrigerator and explained to Alan that the one containing a dark brackish liquid was the mind of man, while the other, which held a clear liquid, was his soul. The next day Alan headed for Houston.

I ask about some unopened cartons and am told they contain opera glasses, a variety of buttons, and two items used in the meditation: earplugs and something called a "barragon," a wooden elbow-rest in the form of a T-bar. "That's what Christ meant when he said you should carry your cross upon your back," a premie informs me.

After a few minutes the peanut-butter-and-jelly brigade is still abuzz with the unexpected darshan it has just received from Bal Bhagwan Ji. "There was light around him, now that I think about it," one premie says to no one in particular.

A young woman stands up and tells a kind of parable about a potter who shapes his pot with two hands, the hand inside being the meditation and the hand outside being external events. "We're not complete yet," she concludes. "We're waiting for Guru Maharaj Ji to shape us." Another premie gets up and says: "We're just one big family, just brothers and sisters. Our Lord, our Father, has come to us and all we have to do is play. Today I wake up and I'm in a Charlie Chaplin movie and the next day maybe it'll be a horror movie and the next a soap opera. Once you receive Knowledge you know it's all just a movie-and Guru Maharaj Ji is the director." A third premie: "I was having doubts today and it was like a cloud hanging over me. But listening to satsang I realized that everything's perfect. I understood what Guru Maharaj Ji meant when he said that angels may drop flowers over the Astrodome. I was sitting watching the sunset earlier and now I realize that Guru Maharaj Ji made that sunset so that I could enjoy it, so that I could feel at one with the universe." The satsang drones on, one boneless monologue after another, for nearly two hours, until finally a premie picks up his guitar and leads everyone in a song from Blue Aquarius' new album: "Rock me, Maharaj Ji, and roll me tonight/ Rock me, Maharaj Ji, and say it's all right/Say it's all ri-ight/Say it's all ri-ight."

Later I have dinner with Bob Hallowitz, a 30-year old neurophysiologist who received Knowledge last April, an event he describes as perhaps the most magnificent experience in his life. I am puzzled and a bit shaken by our conversation. Here is a man who clearly answered the Guru's call to "give him your love and give him your minds," and he has such a fine mind that I can't help thinking it may not have been an even trade. Hallowitz, who has just strengthened his attachment to Guru Maharaj Ji by becoming a vegetarian, orders three dinner salads and remarks on the practical benefits of his new lifestyle. Rather than require blind faith, he says, the Divine Light Mission offers an experience, the Knowledge which every person can test for himself. As we begin to eat, Hallowitz tells me about a little experiment he carried out not long ago in which he offered up 20 peanuts to Maharaj Ji by touching each one to his forehead, putting aside two that somehow "didn't feel right." Afterward he de-shelled them all and found that those two were rotten. Presumably this is not the sort of experiment Hallowitz performs in his research at the Laboratory o! Brain, Evolution and Behavior of the National Institute of Mental Health, but he assures me that his work there also corroborates the effectiveness of the Knowledge. Scientists investigating the human brain, Hallowitz explains, have developed a theory about its evolution not unlike the superimposed strata of geological time. According to this theory, the core of the human brain, which includes the hypothalamus, resembles the brain of a reptile and performs only instinctual responses necessary for survival. The next layer, the limbic lobe, which developed at the time of the earliest mammals, adds the element of memory. This is the behaviorist brain of salivating dogs and rats in mazes, where survival-oriented responses are capable of adjusting to past experience. These two older brains, in conjunction with the endocrine system of glands, control such basic human drives as hunger, fear, lust and anger. The third and most recent layer, the neocortex, is the only part of the human brain capable of abstract thinking. Theoretically, a person who is sure of his continued existence in one form or another, aware that he is part of a universal energy flow, will be less controlled by the fight-flight syndrome programmed into the older layers of the brain. According to Hallowitz, there is a growing body of scientific evidence suggesting that one physiological link between higher and lower consciousness is the pineal gland, which was long thought to be a vestigial organ but might in fact turn out to be the brain's master switch, the Third Eye of mystic tradition. The pineal gland, this theory goes, secretes a hormone that inhibits the action of the rest of the endocrine system, thus allowing human beings a measure of independence from the older brains with their orientation toward the basic values of survival. And what seems to happen during meditation is that the secretion from the pineal gland increases, allowing a person to exist at peace with himself and the world. In his own life Hallowitz has seen the meditation work wonders. A few weeks ago, he tells me, a shopping bag he was carrying broke as he was leaving the supermarket and it hardly fazed him, although that was just the kind of incident which would have sent him into a spinning rage before he became a premie. He describes himself as having been an intense compulsive person, quick to anger and bearing a large load of self-hate. Like my friend Alan, he also searched for a unifying Truth, which he failed to find in his biological studies or, earlier, in his parents' reformed Jewish tradition. A year ago he first heard about Maharaj Ji from a young chemist at work who seemed to be a much happier person after becoming a premie. Hallowitz eventually received Knowledge at the Washington D.C. ashram, and after a month of diligent meditation, he had a dream-a new version of a nightmare that had haunted him for years, in which he was always killed in some gruesome manner. In the dream he was alone in a bare white room with a much larger man waving a pistol at him and muttering, "I'll kill you, you bastard." Finally the man placed the gun against his temple and fired. At that moment Hallowitz experienced the full power of the Knowledge as he had never experienced it before-an intense white light that filled his head, a sound of celestial bells chiming in exquisite harmony, the indescribably sweet fragrance of the Holy Nectar and the vibration at the root of his being that is the Word-all this accompanied by a feeling of "finally going home," of ultimate peace beyond description. Strengthened by this experience, Hallowitz began meditating more intensively than ever mornings and evenings; this created constant friction with his wife, who viewed his devotion to Guru Maharaj Ji as a threat to their marriage and another in a long list of enthusiasms he would pick up, only to drop weeks or months later. But Hallowitz feels certain that he has finally found the Truth and has come to Millennium, over his wife's bitter objections, hoping to ask Mata Ji how he can resolve his marital problems and to talk with the Guru personally about his future service in the Mission. As I drive him back to the Houston ashram, he reads me a letter he has written to Maharaj Ji explaining his research work and requesting an interview. "l am crying warm tears of love to see and talk with you," the letter concludes: "I would rather be no other place than at your glorious feet." He points out a tear stain in the lower left-hand corner of the letter.

Kelley Ramparts

"Why are you so opposed to Guru Maharaj Ji?" one young premie woman innocently inquires of a Krishna at the gate. "Since when does the Supreme Lord recommend that you push in on your eyeballs, plug up your ears, and taste spit, all the while sitting under a blanket, as the proper way to receive Him into your hearts?" snorts the Krishna. The premie is aghast, her face ashen. Not only has he reviled her Lord, but in the process revealed the most sacred of secrets: the Knowledge Session, wherein the Guru instills his devotees with holy divine grace. (The incident makes the next day's Houston Chronicle.)

"There's so much energy here - that's what counts, and wait till tonight - the stadium will be full," pleads one premie press liaison. "Yeah, full of empty seats," retorts a jaded journalist. "You really can't judge this until Guru Maharaj Ji himself appears," she persists.

On the morning of the second day, the Guru holds a press conference at the Astroworld Hotel, and Bob Hallowitz asks me to take him along. As we drive over, Hallowitz admits he really doesn't want to discuss his scientific research with Maharaj Ji so much as to be near him for a few minutes, a remark in keeping with a curiously regressive element in the behavior of premies which seems to make even the adults act like teenyboppers getting a piece of their favorite pop idol. In this sense Realist editor Paul Krassner's term for premies -gurupies-is not wide of the mark.

As abruptly as he entered, the Guru suddenly gets up from his chair and heads for the door along a path cleared by a few WPC guards moving before him like a snowplow. Hallowitz a short, powerfully built man, struggles unsuccessfully to push his way toward him, then at the last minute drives through a hole in the crowd, stretches out his arm and manages to touch the Guru's foot. "I touched his foot! I touched his foot!" he tells me, beaming. Later he confides: I couldn't help myself. A premie before his Lord has no control over his actions." After the press conference Hallowitz hands the letter he has written to one of Maharaj Ji's personal attendants and joins a line outdoors of perhaps a hundred premies to wait for an audience with the Guru. The line stretches back from a glass elevator that rises four floors to the Celestial Suite.

Jacques Sandoz, a Swiss premie who heads Shri Hans Films, tells about an incident that took place at the Divine Residence in Los Angeles, where he held the end of a balloon between his teeth while Bal Bhagwan Ji stood on a balcony 40 feet away and shot at it with a BB gun to test his devotion. Another premie describes the time the Guru fired a pistol at a number of prized vases in the backyard of the L.A. Residence "to teach us the worthlessness of material possessions."

There is a fanaticism about the behavior of premies in the Guru's presence which is often amusing to an outsider (the day before, three premies managed to climb up an air shaft leading into the Celestial Suite)

While waiting in line I ask Hallowitz for his reaction to the Detroit incident, and he says: "That fellow could have been carrying a machine gun. But he's actually blessed, he's part of the divine plan, and after he receives Knowledge his physical pain will mean nothing to him." And a WPC guard standing nearby comments to a reporter for TVTV, a documentary videotape company covering the event for public television: "If it'd been me, I would have split his throat on the spot." When the reporter remarks that it seems a bit fanatic to kill, a man for throwing a pie, the guard replies: "On the spot!" Hallowitz and I stick around a while longer, until it becomes clear that the Guru is not going to receive him. Later, he is called over to the Divine Residence to treat Raja Ji for a sty and considers that darshan enough for one day.

"You have to understand," one band member tells me, "that Bhole Ji doesn't know music, he is music." Another claims that "Blue Aquarius plays the greatest music in the world because it comes from the Divine Harmony inside all of us," but admits that you have to be a devotee of the Guru to understand this-a kind of spiritual Catch-22 that crops up constantly in discussions with premies.

Gortner

People kept asking me, "Have you received knowledge? Have you seen the light?" When I said, "Yes," they oohed and aahed and said, "Far out, man. When did you get it?" And I said, "I was born with it." They paled a little and said, "Oh, you didn't get it through guru Maharaj Ji?" I said, "No. You don't have to receive it through him." "But guru Maharaj Ji says . . . ." They're such complete little zealots!

du Plessix Gray

I talk to a twenty-five-year-old German student whose father owns a supermarket chain. He tells me that the experience of Divine Knowledge is received in the following four ways: a brilliant light of almost blinding power perceived in the middle of the forehead, through that 'Third Eye' of ancient Indian tradition; a music of sublime beauty in one's ears; an extraordinary taste of 'nectar' in the mouth; and—the most indescribable sensation of all—a vibration sensed in the abdominal area which one can keep meditating upon twenty-four hours a day. 'I am meditating right now, as I talk to you,' he says cheerfully. 'But I cannot describe to you the Divine Knowledge any further than that if you haven't experienced it. Our Knowledge is not a religion, but an experience. Can I describe to you the taste of a mango before you have tasted it?'

I drive to Hobby with a thirty-four-year-old premie tennis pro who has been national hard court champion of the United States, and was captain of the Harvard Tennis Team in 1960. Tim Galloway is a handsome, thoughtful, gentle man with cornflower blue eyes. He immediately launches into an explanation of how Divine Knowledge has totally transformed his game of tennis. The Guru's meditation technique, he says, has given him such powers of concentration that he can receive service from the strongest opponent one foot behind the service line, with a half-volley. 'It totally reverses the Big Game,' he says modestly. 'There I am already in mid court, so I easily beat the server to net, and the next shot is a put away. The whole principle of meditation is to slow down inner time. People think too much when they play, they're always talking to themselves, the ego is telling the unconscious nervous system what to do. The point is to obliterate the difference between the teller and the doer, make the ego and the unconscious one. I've also devised an underhand serve which bounces off at almost a 90 degree angle to the flight of the ball….' Tim Galloway's book, Inner Tennis, which he wrote after receiving Knowledge, will be published by Random House this spring. I ask Galloway how he had come to believe Maharaj Ji was God. 'When I first heard him my only approach was to say to myself, He's either the real thing or a con artist.' Well the first times I saw him he just did too bad a job as a con artist. A good con artist wouldn't wear a gold wrist watch or give such stupid answers. When I was staying with him in India I once asked him how much time I should spend on work and how much on meditation and he just said get up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later, hardly a profound answer. I decided that if he was doing such a bad job of being a holy man he simply had to be genuine.' 'Did it ever occur to you that he might be a bad con man?' 'Then how could he have six million followers?' the tennis pro replied.

A thirty-year-old doctor I have just met, a research scientist at the National Institute of Health, has collapsed into a friend's arms and is sobbing like a little child: It is the first time he has seen the Maharaj Ji in the flesh.

'Lila, did you see that lila?' a young girl runs out of the landing strip waving her arms excitedly. 'He surprised us, he played with us by coming down on the wrong landing strip!'

I have dinner with Bob Hollowitz, the young doctor whom I saw collapsed in tears at the airport. He is a graduate of the University of Rochester Medical School, happily married, the father of a newborn son. He is short and solid, with reddish hair and mustache and a very warm, welcoming manner. Like Tim Galloway, the tennis pro, and other adult premies I talk to he feels he had everything in life for happiness and yet was still searching for 'meaning.' Hollowitz begins his meal of salad and bread by touching his first forkful to the center of his forehead—the third eye—the premies' ritual dedication of food to Maharaj Ji. 'I'm suffering from the paradox of sufficiency and suffering,' he says. 'You see, I just didn't want temporary states of happiness as I occasionally found with mescaline… throughout the Sixties all my doctor friends were experimenting with various ways of expanding consciousness. But I wanted infinite happiness. I knew there was some cosmic truth that would be totally satisfying forever. I had gotten so close to it with some of the other experiences….' I comment that most traditional schools of meditation—be they Buddhist, Zen, or Vedantist—urge one to remain on the side of brevity, starting at a few minutes a day, gradually working up to an hour over a period of months or years. Since Bob is a neurologist, does he not see any danger in plunging overnight into two hours of blissing-out sessions? But like most other premies he is uninterested in the traditional East. 'That's where surrender comes in,' the doctor answers, his eyes gleaming with adoration. 'Our meditation is passive and effortless, we just let Maharaj Ji do it for us… you've had this Knowledge inside you right along without recognizing it, so what Maharaj Ji does is to fill in the picture with one fell swoop, one big package…. At the time I received Knowledge I still couldn't accept him as God but later when I felt the lasting magnificence of that peace of meditation I accepted him…. I had the most beautiful dream about him last night. We were playing together as if we were both children. He kept throwing me into a swimming pool….'

'I haven't been into acid much,' a boy lying next to me says, 'just about a hundred trips or so.'

'I'm going to check out this Knowledge,' a prepremie in a crazy cowboy outfit says, 'because it's like putting your cock into a new woman, you've got to do it before you know what it's like.'

After the satsang I have dinner with the Guru's personal physician, Dr. John Horton. The doctor has an extensive theory concerning the stimulating impact of Divine Light meditation upon the pineal gland, whose increased activity will eliminate all of humanity's aggressive drives. He also explains that the Perfect Master's duodenal ulcer must be understood on three different levels: 1) the habitual physical level—constant jet lag, changes of diet, fatigue, stress; 2) the spiritual level: it is a sign of his compassion for mankind, like the stigmata on Christ's feet; 3) the cosmic level, as a revelation of universal suffering. The diagnostician of Perfect Master's cosmic ulcer disturbs me more than any other premie I meet because he is the brightest, the most dedicated, the nicest of the lot. He is thirty, and has had a few acid trips, which he describes. I can't understand how they can have screwed up a first-rate mind to that degree. Some pathology of affluence is at work, as it is in Galloway, Hollowitz, all the other intelligent adult premies I talk to. Horton was an all-county football star as a teenager, went to college at Dartmouth and Columbia, has his medical degree from Duke University Medical School, had two years of Freudian analysis as part of his psychiatric training, and always considered he had everything in life for happiness. But he wanted more…at one point in our conversation, he says, as Hollowitz did: 'I wanted continual ecstasy!' Man's most basic drive, Horton says, is the transcendence of his ego; the sex drive is nothing more than one form of ego transcendence; and the transcendence offered by the Master's twenty-four-hour meditation technique is infinitely more blissful than sex.

However it is very difficult to talk to parents as most of them have requested not to be disturbed or interviewed. 'Some of them are a little embarrassed,' a premie explains. In the electric blue-and gold-walled luxury loges where the parents sit, an elegant woman with a Kenneth hairdo and a Bonwit Teller raincoat is trying to communicate with her teenage son, who sits eyes closed, blissed out by one of the mahatmas' speeches. 'It's a charming show, darling, and I love their color schemes, it gives me ideas for my living room.'

I talk to Gary Girard, who was the very first American to receive Knowledge and has been personal secretary to the Guru. He tells me that he first went to India in '68, when he was selling macramé belts on street corners and shooting dope all over Australia and the Far East. His father is a well-to-do California businessman, and Gary started the Asian dope circuit right after high school. Gary has a grandiose vision of the impact Maharaj Ji is already having on the world: 'I assure you that the President of the United States is on top of everything the Guru is doing. I'm convinced that the President of the United States just loves this because he simply can't deny the humanitarian work Maharaj Ji is doing.' 'Do you consider Nixon a humanitarian President?' 'Nixon has served the people well,' Gary answers. 'He only does what he can do. It's not his fault that he has a mind which doesn't function properly.' 'Why are there so few black premies in the United States?' 'Black people are not interested in Maharaj Ji because they're not interested enough in themselves.' 'What is your notion of equality?' 'Equality is not how much you have but same-sightedness, unity of vision, which is what we have.'

The next premie I talk to is a forty-three-year-old architect, formerly employed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who also sees Nixon as 'without fault' because 'when people are corrupt they produce a corrupt leader. It's the people's fault.' Larry Bernstein had been waiting for Maharaj Ji since 1949, when he read a prophecy by Edgar Cayce which said that in 1969 a boy born in the foothills of the Himalayas would lead the world. Larry received Knowledge because 'my destiny is to be infinite.' Larry is the designer of the Divine City which the Divine Light Mission is planning to start building next year. It will be suspended between the two cliffsides of a great canyon and will have a hall for satsang large enough to seat 144,000 people (a figure from the Book of Revelation). There will be no money or currency of any sort in the Divine City, people will take out whatever they need from the stores…and in 12,000 years, Larry says, there will only be saints on earth, everyone will possess cosmic consciousness.

I have come to see Charles Cameron, an Englishman who was instrumental in starting the Master's first European and American campaigns three years ago. That was when the ambitious, precocious, technology-adoring twelve-year-old Guru—frustrated by how little attention he was getting in his swami-swarming native country—decided to employ modern public relations methods to spread his message throughout the entire world. Cameron had been one of the first Westerners to help him out. He is a frail man in his thirties, an Oxford graduate in theology. We get into a car to go to the Astrodome. I ask him how long the Knowledge session will last. 'Once they're ready to receive it it goes just like that,' he says, snapping his fingers quickly four times, 'in just four seconds.' He looks at his watch. 'I figure they'll be out of there at around a quarter of three.' Like an abortion. I ask him how he can compute the session so precisely and he suddenly turns on me quite viciously. 'Look,' he snaps, 'I am very bad at facts. If you want to stay in this car with me please let's not talk about facts, all right? I am only interested in talking about one thing in the world, and that is love, divine love.' He leans back in the car, looking petulant. 'Until three years ago when I received Knowledge,' Cameron says in the course of his satsang on Maharaj Ji's love, 'I used to be able to discuss Gregorian chant, and John Donne, and Cocteau, and André Breton, and Plotinus, and Saint Thomas, and the difference between Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism, do you understand? I was an intellectual. But once you have received Knowledge you are incapable of having a socalled intellectual discussion. You can only have a discussion about Knowledge that happens to be intellectual.' We talked at length about that 'incidence of coincidence,' or lila, or divine play, in which premies have enormous faith. 'You can see it in Jungian terms if you wish,' he says, 'It's what he called 'synchronicity,' bumping into what you need at the moment you need it. That's lila, and it is being brought about by the common consciousness which is creating the universe.'

I had everything in life,' the beautiful English premie says to me as we sit on a plane bound for New York, chatting with Spanish and American devotees. 'Terrific grades at university, a super boyfriend, a lovely job at the macrobiotic shop. But somehow I was always trying on different egos for size. I came to Maharaj Ji by divine coincidence of course. I was in Amsterdam, and had just spent a solid night weeping, saying 'help me, help me' to the Universe. I couldn't say it to any one because I was an atheist, as my parents are. And that same morning a girl gave me the address of an ashram. I received Knowledge two days later. When I came home, my mother— she's a professor at the University of London, as is my father—kept showing me a picture of myself as a four-year-old, saying 'You've become like this again, so happy and peaceful….' You see we're all really children and we're just playing at being grown-ups.' 'Knowledge is just like a pair of roller skates,' an engineer from New York interjects crisply. 'You can use them or not use them. The main thing is that you have them.' The British premie spins around toward the New Yorker. 'Look, do you mind going back to your seat?' she barks out sharply. 'You're disturbing our talk, you're giving out bad vibes.' 'The British premies are famous for being tough, authoritarian,' she continues as the engineer goes dejectedly to his seat. 'That's one of the reasons I left England in order to give satsang in Spain. Spanish premies are about the loveliest, so gentle. Germans either freak out or make particularly solid premies, curiously gentler than the British. Americans are so insecure, America is a bad environment for saints. For instance Americans are always asking Maharaj Ji to come to the United States to have material reassurance of their faith.' Are all Knowledge sessions equally long? I ask. I describe the line at the ashram which I'd seen the previous morning. 'Oh, they vary a great deal,' she says. 'I know some people who got KnowledgGee nienr ated by four minutes yesterday because they had a flight to catch.' I ask her whether the rumor is true that the British premies who served as marshals at the Millennium were armed with guns. 'Certainly not,' she laughs, swinging her very long blond hair. 'But…what if they were… would you think it preposterous if they were armed? After all, wouldn't you arm yourself if you had the task of protecting God on earth?' The plane is landing, she is gathering her stuff. From the seat ahead of her she carefully unpins the picture of Maharaj Ji which she has been staring at for much of the trip. 'Ah, he has such a sweet face!' she exclaims. We exit from the plane. At the airport, she waves good-bye. 'See you in the Golden Age!' she cries.