Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Never have I felt so loved and loving -- in a trans-personal or all-personal sense -- as in a Moonie training session. These words, these descriptions, cannot get the flavor of it right, the sense not only of unity, but of being taken out of the mundane world of ordinary life, into a higher, deeper, more real world, that cannot help but elicit from us a gigantic Yes! -- as if in our heart of hearts we know that this new world is our birthright. A world that existed perhaps before the Fall of Man.
It is Sunday morning. Some idiot walks cheerfully into the Chicken Palace, creaking the wooden floorboards, playing a guitar, and singing, When the Red Red Robin Comes Hop Hop Hopping Along.... He passes down one alley and up another between the rows of sleeping bags. You bestir yourself and glance around, looking for something to throw at this singing idiot, this rude interrupter of your delicious slumber -- but -- wait a minute. You are suddenly awake, and, come to think of it, you feel refreshed, and -- you catch yourself just in time from starting to sing along, to join in with this infantile ditty. Next, you think, he will sing, You Are My Sunshine. He does.
You get out of your sleeping bag and stumble over to the door of the Chicken Palace, vaguely thinking about finding a place to urinate. As you walk out into the bright and oddly happy sunlight -- who is standing there to meet you with a joyfully insipid smile on her face but your spiritual parent! Ahhhhh -- nuts. You mumble something about having to take a leak and try to wave her away but she takes you by the hand and walks you up the hill to the outhouse, and stands outside (standing outside listening to you, you think) and then when you come out she takes you by the hand again and leads you to the shower stalls, and you think, Oh Christ, it's happening again.
Later I find, through turning the tables on this pretty girl and pumping her for information, that she has been strung out from Minneapolis to Timbuktu, addicted to heroin, raped by Arabs in the Sahara desert, meditated in the Himalayas, had been on LSD, peyote, hashish and methedrine; she had bounced and been bounced all over the world, and she has landed in a Moonie training camp being nice to me.
