We had actually arrived a day before the Millenium. The next day we spent with thousands of other premies greeting Maharaj Ji back at the airport. A stage was set up out on the tarmac where we waited forever for Maharaj Ji to.fly in. When he finally arrived he gave satsang for a bit — told us how happy he was we were there — and left. As we hoped, the event made the evening news. Houston, like all America, had half an eye open waiting to see just what Maharaj Ji was planning to show.
That night we leaf letted outside our hotel. I remember running in to two people I had met on a beach once in Vancouver before I received Knowledge. Myles and Annie were sitting around a fire one night with a few other people, getting stoned, singing and looking into the flames. I walked by, sat down and soon the three of us were bearing our hearts about our spiritual insights and aspirations. We all agreed that we were looking for something along those lines, yet had no idea what it might be. We spent much of the next day together, then they left to go home to Nova Scotia and that was the last I saw or heard of them. How perfect it was to run into them here. They too had received Knowledge earlier that year. I also ran into some people I had known years before in Toronto. They were premies now too. Maybe this really was the start of the Milleniurn.
When I made my way through the picketing Jesus freaks and Hare Krishna folk and into the Astrodome, I was slightly bothered. I hadn’t known exactly what to expect but it was certainly more than a few thousand premies scattered on the floor and almost no one at all sitting in the bleachers. Where was everybody? Either America was late in coming or the expected turnout had been greatly exaggerated. Well, it didn’t matter that much. Even if no one came, I was lucky enough, by His grace, to be there. I could clOse my eyes and listen to the Mahatmas give satsang. No problem there. That’s what I would do, just meditate and wait.
That night Maharaj Ji came and gave satsang, but not before Blue Aquarius warmed up the audience. Bhole Ji was not a small man. In fact he was quite obese. Still, in his capacity as Shiva his dancing was supposed to dispell all illusion. Thus, while the band played on he tried to bounce a bit for his over—generous fans. Many premies were oohing and aahing. I couldn’t help wonder if my heart was just too cold, that I couldn’t feel the simple love that was then being showered upon us all. I just wanted Maharaj Ji to get on with it.
When Maharaj Ji finally came he gave what might be considered a routine satsang. There was no problem there; I loved Maharaj Ji and was happy, as always, to hear him speak. This time he told a long, rambling story of a man who wanted a comic book. After a long period of unsuccessfully trying to find it, he eventually gives up. A small kid then knocks on his door, offering him that very comic he was looking for. The man, however, is so frustrated at this point that he can only slam his door in the kid’s face. There is no way, he thinks, that anyone, let alone a little kid like this, could have found what he himself spent so long searching for. Finally the kid knocks again. This time, when the man opens the door, the kid pulls the comic from behind his back. Regardless of what the probability might have been, the kid now shows him the goods, and the man can only speechlessly accept.
Well, I understood what Maharaj Ji was getting at. That was fine. But was that it? I couldn’t help wonder what the next day would bring.
In fact the next day, and the third as well, brought just more of the same. Nothing happened at Milleniulfl. If Maharaj Ji had indeed ushered in a thousand years of peace, we weren’t aware of it. No premies spoke in such blunt terms. Perhaps few even thought this way about our omnipresent Lord. But the press laboured under none of our constraints and thus Millenium essentially back—fired for Maharaj Ji. The press finally gave him all the publicity he originally sought, only its tone was one of caustic ridicule and not the reverence we had all hoped for.
Ron bumped me from my flight back. My seat was given to a pregnant sister who had decided only at the last minute to come. Hence I got to ride for three days with a busload of premies, none of whom knew exactly what they were returning from. As far as we had known we might never return home again — some premies doing advance service at Millenium and privy to all the latest rumours were calling back home and telling people not to bother bringing their winter coats for the trip home. Now we rode silently, still giving satsang over the bus’s public address system, still singing devotional songs, but with a new subdued spirit. Nothing at all had happened. It was hard to stop thinking about it.
There was still a lot of life left in the body. In many ways Millenium was just the historical beginning for Divine Light Mission, as we rallied admirably throughout the next few years. We soon grew accustomed to looking back on the naive excessiveness of Millenium as everything from Maharaj Jis play to just the “lesson we all had to learn”. Some even thought that for all we knew maybe Maharaj Ji really had somehow inaugurated the New Age then. Maharaj Ji himself never seemed to want to talk about it. But naive or not, our pre—Houston enthusiasm was a factor of a simple faith we had: our experiences were so true, our love was so strong that if Maharaj Ji said anything at all we accepted it verbatim as indubitably certain. We had surrendered our minds, in the most functional sense of the word; when some real thinking was called for, any independent evaluation at all, we deferred to Maharaj Ji. Millenium, for me anyways, was the first real step back out of that arrangement.
