who seeks to control the world, is dead, the superman, who seeks to
control only himself…will reign.”
The Omniraja, red faced, then threw his arms up to touch the
heavens, and the crowd that lay prostrate at his feet roared its pledge
of support.
So the Omniraja was nothing more than a doomsayer carrying a sign
reading “The End is Near.” People had been doing that since they
invented signs. I wondered, suddenly and with great concern, what it
was I was doing there.
The evening’s lecture seemed to be unnerving for many.
Everyone shuffled silently out of the auditorium rather than cheering
and frolicking as was normally the case. How did all this fit in with
Yippee’s theory that something global and menacing was actually at
work here? His lecture shouldn’t have depressed me so. Even if his
predictions were right I would be dead within the next ten years so I
would likely miss the apocalypse.
I walked back to the hotel and solemnly laid down on the
springy mattress. Somehow I had made an error in coming to this
place—I wasn’t finding anything here that would help me find myself.
Tree said that I would know it when I arrived at the right place. But
I really had no idea where else I would go. Suddenly I felt
excruciatingly lonely and started to cry into my pillow. The lack of
anything even remotely familiar in my environment was causing me
to feel as if I had no world to stand on. It had crumbled underneath
me and the sensation I had was one of free fall, with my stomach in
my throat and the nerves in my upper spine tingling with panicked
sensations of powerlessness. Falling and falling and falling and
falling, until finally plunging into the dark, sticky, warm sanctuary
pool of the unconscious, asleep.
CHAPTER 27
The next morning I woke early. On the way to the ashram I stopped
by the bakery where the sanyassis all ate breakfast and spoke of
crystals and astrology and past lives all sorts of other wonderful
things that no one could ever prove. It reminded me of the nonsense
that I enjoyed spouting in College, a willful contradicting of reality
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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