35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘WE SHOULD SHARE OUR SEX ENERGIES’
Many orange and beaded young Westerners were crowding
outside the gates, which looked as if they’d just been opened. Ma
Tantra fled from the taxi, dissolving into the walking river of orange
and hair. Perhaps she was embarrassed to be seen with someone in
blue jeans and a cream cotton waistcoat who had shaved – although
not recently.
Pulled along by the flow, I eventually found myself in a large
garden next to an enormous hall with a roof supported by a forest of
pillars, but no walls. Inside it, at one end, on a white podium about
twelve feet square and four feet high, sat an empty armchair. Plush
and roomy, it was supported by the sort of steel column and splayed
legs that typists’ seats usually feature. This, I learned, was the
bhagwan’s chair. Once he had sat there himself, directing
meditations personally. Now he did not, his chair handling the job
on its own.
And this first group meditation of the day was something else.
‘Dynamic meditation,’ they called it. An hour later I had thought
up far more appropriate names. The process had five stages. I was
told this by Ma Yoga Parvati, a young girl with about ten times
more hair growing from her scalp than anyone I’ve yet seen. A
good foot thick and at least a yard long, its dense frizzled strands
looked as if she plugged her fingers into an electric socket for an
hour every day, then stuck her head in a kiln. It made her face seem
unusually small – the face of a little child with rosebud lips peeking
through a hedge. She wore a shapeless orange frock made of
something like frail corrugated gauze and held up on her shoulders
by two straps not much sturdier than sewing thread.
Stage one began before I’d realised it. All around me hundreds of
people suddenly began breathing very fast and very noisily through
their noses. It was like being trapped in the midst of a bloodhound
convention. Soon bodies started rocking back and forth in time to
their breathing. Those who had colds were soon in trouble. It was
not just air that many started exhaling, and there was not a
handkerchief in sight.
This segued into stage two – which frightened the hell out of me.
People started screaming and jumping about, shaking their bodies
violently. Some began to laugh or cry as well, still screaming and
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