Sincerely yours,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Assistant to the Arhat

Gentlemen:

We are in receipt of your several inquiries as to our tax-exempt status as a religious organization. But we have never claimed to be such; in fact the Arhat and his spokespersons have repeatedly placed on record, in nationwide press and television interviews, his" marked distrust of organized religion in any form-Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Judaic, Shinto, Zoroastrian, or shamanist. Unorganized religion-the sort that each human being harbors inchoately, often without knowing it-is more our métier.

Our tax-exempt status instead rests securely upon our amply justified claim to be an educational institution. We administer courses in hatha-yoga, zazen, shiatsu, acupuncture, bioenergetics, dynamic meditation, pranayama, dance and aerobics therapy, the sitar, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, the Upanishads and related classics, arid-area irrigational techniques, intuitive ecology, vegetarian food-styling, solar-panel engineering, zero-sum mechanistics, spiritual. reprogramming, post-materialistic Marxism, subtle-body anatomy, and a host of other reformative subjects, not to mention tutorials in enlightened accounting and business techniques (as opposed to unenlightened, as practiced on Wall and Main Streets). Most of our instructors have advanced degrees from such bastions of conventional learning as Harvard, Yale, Duke, Kenyon, Utah State, and the University of Southern California. We ourselves award degrees ranging from the B.Med. (Bachelor of Meditation) to the D.Phil.Med. Our most recent catalogue is enclosed, along with completed or partly completed Forms 1023 and 990.

"Partly" because our extensive records have been left in some confusion by the sudden retirement of our former chief accountant, Ms. Nitya Kalpana; it has fallen to me, though bereft of any formal training in business mathematics or double-entry bookkeeping (in fact, I skipped math beyond plane geometry, being rather foolishly infatuated at Concord Academy with the French teacher, whose third-year class met at the same hour as trig and introductory calculus), to straighten matters out. If you have on file any previous tax returns filed for Ashram Arhat I would be grateful for them, to use as a guide. Rest assured of one thing, however, gentlemen of the IRS: religious or educational, tax-exempt or not, our organization owes you absolutely nothing for fiscal 1985, because we have been running at a terrific loss.

Voluntary contributions, our main source of income, have dropped catastrophically, due principally to basically uncomprehending reporting in the Arizona press, beginning with the Forrest Weekly Sentinel and spreading to the media nationwide, but also perhaps due to the ripples or eddies (vrittis) that occur within the cosmic spiritual currents. The fees paid for lodging and instruction by our sannyasins (permanent students) and by enlistments in our many short-term (two- to eight-week) courses or therapeutic programs are significantly lower, as are receipts from sales of books, posters, fabric and ceramic products, and agricultural produce. Meanwhile, the expenses of maintaining and expanding our ashram facilities to a level commensurate with our exalted aims have increased formidably. Our best estimate is that between two and three million dollars has drifted away within the present fiscal year.

Not, of course, that we expect the Reagan government to make up our losses. But we don't expect to be dunned for money we don't owe, either. During my attempt to fill out your forms, a number of questions arose; let me mention only the most nagging:

In Form 990, Part VII, yes-or-no Question 79 asks, "Was there a liquidation, dissolution, termination, or substantial contraction during the year (see instructions)?" As I say, there seems to have been a contraction, but how substantial relative to previous years I have no way of knowing with the incomplete information at hand. My sense is of a material contraction of some duration, amid a deceptive explosive spiritual growth. The instructions I am parenthetically instructed to "see" do not seem to be attached or included, or else I have not grasped what instructions (in your sense) are.

Re Schedule A of Form 990, Part II, "Compensation of Five Highest Persons for Professional Services (See specific instructions)": Does spiritual guidance delivered in platform lectures and darshans (informal teaching sessions, with questions and answers) and in the even less tangible form of physical proximity and meaningful silence and abstention from public appearance constitute a "professional service," and does compensation include limousines and bejewelled timepieces as well as cash? Again, what instructions?

Page 2029-8 of Form 1024 lists four columns of numbered types of Exempt Organizations and invites us to "select up to three codes which best describe or most accurately identify your purposes, activities, etc." Number 030-"School, college, trade school, etc."-of course is one. And even though we are not 001 ("church, synagogue, etc."), number 008-"Religious publishing activities"-is rather tempting, since our books are indeed-in the broad sense specified above-religious. But number 260 ("Fraternal beneficiary society, order, or association") also appeals to a number of us here, since fraternity (which I assume includes sorority) is our goal, not only for ourselves but for all mankind. Along the same lines, under "Advocacy," numbers 520 ("Pacifism and peace") and 529 ("Ecology or conservation") seem very much to the point, while others in the same "Advocacy" category, such as 522 ("Anti-communism") and 539 ("Prohibition of erotica"), do not. But no doubt just two or three code numbers are all you need, and I am being, as a novice tax accountant, much too conscientious.

Yours sincerely,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Temporary Accountant,

Ashram Arhat

Dearest Pearl -

I'm sorry to have been so slow to answer your letter. The truth is, darling, it hurt your mother's feelings a teeny bit. Of course I'm delighted that you and Jan had such a lovely summer in Europe-it was brutally hot here, and people, even the ones that didn't get heat stroke, began to act very testy-not Vikshipta, the vile-tempered German I mentioned before-he actually left in July and I've heard is trying to get a counselling job in Seattle or Portland or some other cool misty place, but my guess is he'll be back; there's even less of what he wants out there than in here-but the women I work with. The sannyasins call us the "godmothers," not entirely kindly I think. Perhaps women together all day and night are too much of a good thing-tHat female attentiveness begins to work on the nerves, one begins almost to long for a man, who doesn't notice anything-your own father certainly didn't have that among his faults, that tireless nervous susceptibility-I mean bursting into tears or storms of rage over each imagined slight or deviation from utter devotion. In the nature of my expanded duties here I've been spending more time with the Arhat himself, and one woman, called Durga, who still claims to be his chief executive assistant-though she does nothing these days bjit agitate and storm and sulk and consort with the security forces, young men full of guns-is jealous of me, and another, Alinga, my dear housemate, is jealous of bint, our adored Master. I used to think women were so prone to jealousy, because the patriarchal society denied them any power except that which they could extract from interpersonal relationships, but now I wonder if it isn't more biological than that-the women here have power enough: the Arhat in his total goodness and rather playful fatalism grants them all of it, really-and relates, at a wild guess, to the vigilance female mammals have to have in regard to their young when they're helpless, which continues even when no children are on the scene, except the infant we forever carry inside us, waiting to suck and be fondled. There are, as I know I already wrote somebody, a few children here, brought by single mothers or mated couples and even one or two born in the clinic since I've come, but by and large children are one area where the Arhat isn’t totally accepting and benign. He calls them "human tadpoles" and speaks of the overpopulation in India and parts of Africa and the starvation as a horror worse than Hitler's extermination camps because nobody's able to invade and stop it, and indeed the Western nations' efforts, shipping in food and inventing new kinds of wheat and rice, just postpone the problem and make it eventually worse-I think his own experiences when very young whatever they were were so horrendous that just the sight of a child is painful to him. The ashram keeps a little school up through sixth grade but older than that the children are bussed to the Dorado Regional High School forty miles away and come back as you can imagine with a great many conflicted and angry feelings from their contact with the children of the "Outer States." They are encouraged to drop out as soon as they legally can, at sixteen, which is in a way sad, since their parents here tend to be if anything owreducated.