Seven Injured at Levitation Party
by Steve Osborne
The invitation said simply, "We're having a levitation party, featuring Swami Mayami, Sage of the East. Bring your own soul."
It was from a friend, Ernie, who delved into all things spiritual, but never too deeply. I've always suspected that the hidden motive for his metaphysical searchings had something to do with picking the winning Super Bowl teams.
But I decided to go anyway.
"Enter my humble temple of wisdom," chanted Ernie when I arrived the night of the party.
"Humble, yes; temple of wisdom, hardly," I quipped. Why be kind? He still owed me $10 from the last Super Bowl.
"Swami Mayami's over there." He pointed to a rotund man in an orange robe sitting cross-legged in the corner, surrounded by a couple dozen granola-type people.
The spherical swami looked familiar. Then it clicked. "That's Peter Ureyens from high school!"
Ernie put his hand over my mouth. "Shhh! Swami doesn't like to dwell on his past life."
"But I thought he was an exotic dancer."
"He was, but he put on a little weight, so he went to India and studied with a guru. Now he gives levitation parties."
Pete - I mean Swami Mayami - had launched his discourse, so we sat down on the outskirts of the gathered multitude and listened. He said a lot of things like "We are the Cosmic Knowing," and "We are the 'I' of the astral essence," - the kind of practical stuff you can put to use the minute you leave.
Then he said it was time for the levitation and chose Ernie as his guinea pig, probably because he was skinny and wouldn't take as much spiritual muscle to get airborne. Ernie stiffened visibly but complied, and within moments was stretched out on his back in front of the massive mystic.
After five minutes of deep breathing, showing the whites of his eyes, and chanting, Swami Mayami put his hands out over Ernie's prostrate form and clapped nine times.
I gasped. The granola-eaters gasped. Ernie actually began to rise up off the floor and within seconds was hovering in the air just a few feet below the ceiling like an anorexic Goodyear Blimp. A stunned silence filled the room until Ernie groaned and said he was airsick and needed to throw up.
The swami clapped again nine times. This time nothing happened. He looked perplexed and clapped once again, but Ernie remained aloft. Deathly pale now, Ernie looked cau
tiously down just in time to see a worried swami leafing frantically through a small black book.
"Get me down, Pete, or I swear I'm going to be sick all over everybody."
Swami Mayami finally located the right section, and after a few quick read-throughs, intoned something in Sanskrit, made what appeared to be an obscene gesture, and flipped his nose with his forefinger.
Ernie's long, bony form tilted slightly off the horizontal and zipped off headfirst through the air as if he were on an invisible, greased slippery slide. His head made an elliptical impression in the sheetrock as he caromed off the wall and shot back through the air in the other direction, this time at a more radical angle that sent him rocketing into the horrified crowd below like a 747 crash-landing in a residential
neighborhood.
When the paramedics had carried off the last casualty, I slipped out the door, not wanting to have to explain the unexplainable to the reporters. As I walked down the dark street to my car, Swami Mayami, who beat a hasty retreat immediately after the accident, stepped out of the shadows.
"Was anyone killed?" he whispered.
"No. They said Ernie should be up and around in a week. But his speech may be slurred for years. What went wrong, Pete?"
"I panicked and read the wrong paragraph. Are they looking for me?"
"They're looking for a Hindu mystic named Swami Mayami."
He quickly stripped off his ocher robe - exposing a "This Bud's For You" T- shirt and a pair of cut-off Levis - and stuffed it down into a hedge. "Well, there goes another career."
"But you really did levitate him," I pointed out. "For someone who couldn't pass physics, that's impressive. How did you do it?"
He pulled out his black book. "It's all formula stuff. You've just got to get the words and gestures right. A real yogi explained it all to me in India. But I didn't stick around for the why's. I just wanted to pick up a little recreational levitating and hit the party circuit. I should have listened to what he told me."
"What was that?"
"He said, 'Don't misuse your powers. Recreational levitation is only advised on one occasion: after eating excessive quantities of Mexican food.'"
©2000, Steve Osborne. Printed in the June-July 2000 Issue of the Conscious Creation Journal. http://www.consciouscreation.com (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use - please include this copyright notice.)
Steve Osborne is a full-time freelance writer from Salt Lake City. In addition to writing for top national corporations, he has published close to 300 magazine articles and several books. Visit his web site at: www.osbornewriter.com
