"But if it is the highest good that you seek," he said, returning to a gentler tongue, "you have come to the right place." I suppressed a yawn. He had been speaking awhile, and it was well past midnight. Exhausted, too, from the shock of Atmananda's sudden grab for power, I became mesmerized by the sound and the rhythm of the words. "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.