7
The other notable thing that was happening during that time was the newfound adventure
of spiritual discipline. Aided and abetted, of course, by the introduction into my life of an actual
living Indian Guru—for whom I will always have David to thank. I’d been introduced to my
Guru the first night I ever went to David’s apartment. I kind of fell in love with them both at the
same time. I walked into David’s apartment and saw this picture on his dresser of a radiantly
beautiful Indian woman and I asked, “Who’s that?”
He said, “That is my spiritual teacher.”
My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my
heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: “I want a spiritual teach-
er.” I literally mean that it was my heart who said this, speaking through my mouth. I felt this
weird division in myself, and my mind stepped out of my body for a moment, spun around to
face my heart in astonishment and silently asked, “You DO?”
“Yes,” replied my heart. “I do.”
Then my mind asked my heart, a tad sarcastically: “Since WHEN?”
But I already knew the answer: Since that night on the bathroom floor.
My God, but I wanted a spiritual teacher. I immediately began constructing a fantasy of
what it would be like to have one. I imagined that this radiantly beautiful Indian woman would
come to my apartment a few evenings a week and we would sit and drink tea and talk about
divinity, and she would give me reading assignments and explain the significance of the
strange sensations I was feeling during meditation...
All this fantasy was quickly swept away when David told me about the international status
of this woman, about her tens of thousands of students—many of whom have never met her
face-to-face. Still, he said, there was a gathering here in New York City every Tuesday night
of the Guru’s devotees who came together as a group to meditate and chant. David said, “If
you’re not too freaked out by the idea of being in a room with several hundred people chant-
ing God’s name in Sanskrit, you can come sometime.”