Baba paused. The dark room, heady with the smell of sandalwood, was utterly still.
“This bliss, or ananda, is the peace that passeth understanding that Jesus spoke of. It is within each one of you right now, far brighter and vaster than the sun. You must train your mind to be still and look inward so that it can begin to perceive your spiritual reality. Everyone likes to come to Southern California because of the bright warm sunshine. Oh, it makes us very happy. The beautiful light. We love to go to the beach and lie in the sun and feel its warmth. If we get a nice tan, we will be beautiful, too. Everyone will want us. But you have a light inside you brighter than ten thousand suns and a beauty surpassing anything on earth. Still your mind through meditation and you will perceive it. Then you will not need jewels to make you happy. You will not need cars or houses. Or boys or girls. Or money or fame. You are happiness. You are joy. Plunge into meditation and the light within you will burn up all your pain and sorrow. All your shame and disappointment. Meditate. Meditate. Meditate.”
Here, presumably following his own advice, Baba closed his eyes, lowered his chin to his hairy chest, and placed his hands together in his lap in dhyana mudra, the back of one hand resting in the palm of the other, thumbs touching. Again, I wondered if I was misjudging the big-butted guru. Spiritual truth is a tricky thing. In the mouth of someone who doesn’t fully understand it, the truth becomes a lie. It is dead and empty. In Baba’s mouth, it was thrilling and alive. His gloss of Vedanta’s most essential principle was flawless.
Ganesha stood up by the door and bowed toward Baba with his hands steepled in front of his chest, then turned to the room.
“For those who are new to meditation, Gurudev recommends tratakum. This is a very simple meditation that anyone can do. While breathing slowly and deeply, fix your gaze on one of the candles on the altar near Gurudev. If you keep your gaze steady on the flame, it will still your mind. Each time you catch your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to the candle flame. We will now meditate for forty-five minutes. Baba will answer questions in the library afterward.”
I knew all about tratakum. Fixing your attention on a single object. It did indeed steady the mind. Continuing to take deep, slow breaths, flooding my blood with oxygen, I visualized the pink diamond necklace and waited for those around me to sink down into whatever meditative state they were capable of reaching.
After ten minutes or so, I opened my eyes and slowly swiveled my head to reconnoiter. To my right, Reggie was curled up like a giant baby in a fetal position with his head resting on two of the round cushions, snoring softly. He was holding the third cushion to his chest like a child holding a doll. Everyone else in the room seemed equally unconscious of their surroundings.
Ganesha had opened one of the French doors partway to let fresh air into the packed room, where fifty people were steadily inhaling and exhaling the atmosphere, extracting oxygen, adding carbon dioxide and moisture. Slowly, carefully, I unhooked my legs from the lotus position and stood up. My knees ached and my ass was numb. I did a dozen shallow knee bends to get the blood circulating, then tiptoed to the door, taking care not to bump anyone.
I watched Ganesha’s face as I slipped out. He didn’t stir. In the hallway, I resisted the delinquent impulse to rifle the cash register and headed straight for the stairs.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hallways went in two directions from the landing at the top of the stairs. Down one was a series of small, minimally furnished rooms, each with a bed, a chair, and a cheap dresser-and-mirror combo. The rooms were lit by white-glass globe ceiling fixtures that blinked on when I flipped the wall switch by the door. On one dresser there was a well-thumbed copy of the Kama Sutra. The drawers were empty.
The closets held bathrobes, flower-petal-strewing robes, scented oils, and a few miscellaneous devotional items such as velvet ropes and blindfolds. So. Baba was a rascal, after all-not that I thought sex was sinful or anything silly like that. But the context made me angry. In itself, Vedanta is pure good, the most accurate earthly map to enlightenment for those who seek it. The foolish prejudice it faces in the West comes mostly from people’s fear of the unknown and the entrenched resistance of rival philosophies, both religious and secular. But sneaky fuckers like Baba hurt the cause, too, periodically giving yoga a black eye by screwing dopey chicks or absconding with the funds. I had never heard of a legitimate yoga ashram where women were for sale.
At least there were no whips or handcuffs.
Down the other hallway were three larger bedrooms set up like dormitories with four bunk beds apiece, so that eight people could sleep in each room. Two were cluttered with girl stuff and had female clothes in the closets and dressers. The flower girls. The third was less cluttered, had men’s clothes in the closet.
A fourth bedroom, larger still, had a king-size bed and a view of the floodlit garden behind the house through tall casement windows that filled the exterior wall. Mary’s white jeans had been tossed negligently on the orange bedspread and her flimsy white T-shirt was balled up on the floor. I wondered if the massive guru had been in the room when she peeled off her pants and panties, then shooed that thought away like a bird from a rail. You can’t let your mind wander when you are perpetrating a cat burglary.
Aside from the evidence of Mary’s desirable presence, Baba’s lair wasn’t debauched. There was a meditation nook with a dusty altar, complete with candle, incense burner, and bell, and a bookcase full of paperbacks by a bewildering variety of spiritual teachers, the top shelf packed with books by Chogyam Trungpa, the controversial crazy wisdom master who founded Naropa Institute. A foot-tall antique ceramic Buddha in a niche beside the bed radiated an aura of holiness so tangible that I had to resist an urge to bow down before it.
Set end to end along the length of the wall opposite the windows was an oak banker’s desk, a computer desk with a new Macintosh, printer, and scanner, and a worktable piled with documents and blueprints. Some of the blueprints were street plans that showed the section of Pacific Avenue where Mrs. Sharpnick’s flophouse was located and blocks north of there. Others were construction drawings for a large hotel.
The papers were a complex mix-minutes of Venice City Council meetings, construction and real estate documents written in dense legalese, sheaves of letters to and from various individuals and city and state entities. Two names appeared frequently: Herbert Finklestein and Anthony Discenza. The second name was familiar, but I couldn’t think where I knew it from. Evidently, Finklestein and Discenza were principals in a limited liability partnership formed to develop a resort on the Venice shore, and that they were using the city’s power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire property over the protests of landowners and neighborhood groups. There was litigation pending. The closing date for the financing was on Wednesday. If the money wasn’t in place by then, the main twelve-acre parcel, which comprised more than half of the proposed resort, would fall out of escrow.
Turning from the worktable, I saw a small clock on the desk that showed eight forty-five. The position of the clock’s hands shocked me like a bare wire. I had either lost track of the time during meditation or spent longer scanning the legal documents than I realized. Satsang would be over at nine o’clock. Only fifteen minutes remained to look for the diamonds and get back downstairs before the adepts opened their starry eyes and stretched and looked around to see if Krishna had materialized.