The idea for our School for Disciples came to me one day as I was chatting idly with my garbage collector. I was, as usual, yelling at him that he had no right to make four times what I was able to scrape together. Without paying the least attention to my tirade, he commented to his fellow-worker, as they slopped garbage over my yard that he guessed he'd go to one of these crack-pot gurus if he knew how to be a gullible fool like some other people.

A jest you say. Perhaps. But I have learned in my long term on this weary planet that what people say in flippant derision is often half-serious.

True it is that men and women do not know how to be disciples, though many secretly yearn for that exalted status. In a culture that breeds such untoward qualities as wanton rebelliousness, pseudo-creativity, love of license, a false sense of equality, and abject stupidity, it is no wonder that the True Qualities of the Disciple are ignored and eschewed. Such qualities include: obsequiousness, dependence, guru-worship, admission of stupidity, abject loyalty, and the Old College Try.

To fill this breech - as we at the Foundation for the Advancement for Knowledge and Enlightenment fill so many breeches - we have established a School for Disciples. This makes it especially nice, since our enrollees in the School for Gurus can Practice on the enrollees in the School for Disciples, and vice versa.

In these formative years, of course, the number of our enrollees is so limited that persons may be taking both curricula simultaneously. With our usual flair for challenge, we have met this one head-on. To distinguish when a person is acting as a student in the School for Disciples, we have them wear sack cloth and a few ashes, and when the student is performing in our School for Gurus he wears the standard garb of turban (with crest jewel), ankle-length ochre and paisley robe; or (at the student's discretion) black pinstripe American business suit and red tie, with Zodiac-symbol cuff links.

You may think that anyone who would enroll in our School for Disciples would automatically possess Disciple Qualities - since finding the School, let alone enrolling in it, constitutes a superhuman ordeal. Not a bit of it, we have discovered; perhaps just the opposite. The out-of-the-way student who has accidentally stumbled upon our School often feels a Haughty Pride in her perspicacity and intelligence in discovering such a Marvelous Institution. That, at least, is what some of the students evince when they show up at our back porch some rainy November night. We have a standing Rule not to listen to anything the applicant says. (We have found too often that people first show up at our back door and then just happen to see the small Plaque: A School For Disciples.)

To begin their training as a disciple, then, we require that all applicants come to the back door. If an applicant shows up at the front door, we first find out what she wants, slam the door in his face, and let loose our two gigantic dogs, half German shepherd and half Pekingese (in keeping with our multi-cultural approach). Incidentally, these Behemoths are chained, but their strange miscegenated bark sends shivers up the applicant's spine. At the same time, we flip on a light just above one of the signs on our front porch: Applicants for the School For Disciples Must Go to the Back Entrance. We find this first lesson in humiliation and fear breads an essential kind of humility and hatred. Granted, we lose a few applicants (87% at last count), but we feel, right or wrong, that only the person who comes through this first Lesson is fit to be a part of our Programme.

Now about our Curriculum for disciples. We start them off with a required course in Aping. Over the years that we have been sending spies to other pseudo-gurus' programmes and schools, we have found that most disciples are taught to ape their teachers, but with a faintly-detected tinge of embarrassment at being so dumb and unoriginal as to have to act and speak like someone else. We pound this touch of embarrassment out of our disciple-students. They are, I insist, not to feel foolish when they dress, sit, stand, look, hold their salad fork, and speak exactly like Me. In fact they are to feel flattered when others mock them for aping their Guru.

The final exam in the Aping course is an informal dinner where we invite outside guests. The student passes the course only if he nauseates at least two of the dozen or so guests by her repeating the exact words I ordinarily use, standing with left leg slightly bent and toes inward (as I stand), and sitting in the same quarter-lotus I use.

The guests, totally unaware of what is going on, sometimes comment to me that such and such a student seems to be aping me. "Yes," I say loudly, "some of these fool disciples seem capable only of mimicking their Betters." The guests assume I'm joking, so we smile amicably for a second or two before I rush off to some other guest to see if they're feeling the expected loathing for the students.

In the course on Aping, you see, we draw a very sharp line between True Aping and mimicry. The former is the art of exact and unashamed duplication of every behavior of one's guru - Without Embarrassing the Guru. While mimicry is the false art of echoing someone's behavior just enough to show their absurd eccentricities, nervous twitches, and quirks. With the destructive up-bringing that most people suffer in this culture, many of our students must spend several years before they can pass beyond mimicry to True aping.

When I am around other gurus with my student-disciples, I sometimes use another ploy. These gurus can see through the students' abysmal efforts to ape me, to the mimicry. "Yes," I say to my fellow-gurus in a half-serious tone, "these students just won't learn to ape their Betters, will they?" I then slap a nearby guru on the back. Strange it is how these gurus continue to be confused by this tactic, not knowing whether I approve or disapprove of my students' ridiculous behavior.

Aping, I explain to my students on the first day of class, is absolutely essential in their early training. Having no true personality of their own - only a lot of rag-tags of obsessions and lusts - they must try to copy a Real Personality. Some day in the distant future, I opine to the students on Welcoming Day, they may be able to contrive their own Real Personality just like mine.

I must say that some students do rather well in aping their teacher. Just this weekend, one of my prize students came out with the same kind of doggerel, sick humor that marks my own brand of joke. When the other students hissed and booed her, pelting her with rotten fruit and stones, I knew that she was at long last on the Royal Road to Guruhood.

Another required course in our School for Disciples is Obsequity, or Sounding as Though You're Kneeling While Actually Standing. ¹ After studying the lives of various Viziers, American Cabinet Members, selected sex-starved husbands, and members of the Charles Manson fan club, the student faces the final testing in their course on Obsequity. Having inculcated the qualities of Flattery, Wheedling, Self-deprecation, and Toadyism, the student now must display these virtues. But - and here's the stroke of genius - he must express these characteristics to a machine. The student must assume and maintain the perfect attitude and bearing of Obsequity while speaking to a robot with a tape recorder inside. The least flutter of inservility, the slightest hint of non-groveling and the Royal Thumb is turned downward. Here is the final examination dialogue:

Tape Recorder: What do you want, you ass?
Student: O Beneficent Giver of Mercy, grant me to speak with Thee and Learn of Thy Infinite Wisdom.²

Tape Recorder: Begone, you slime, you lack even the wile of a jackal.
Student: A thousand pardons, Light of the Ages, but a few words from Thy Golden Mouth and I shall be eternally grateful.

Tape Recorder: Your father was born under a basket, you toad-eater.
Student: O Love Unfathomed, even Thy chiding is like music to my heart.

Tape Recorder: Your mother wears army boots and your sister was wed in a football jersey.
Student: Gracious art Thou to allow me the bliss of Thy presence and the solace of Thy words, O Worthy One.

Tape Recorder: Bug off! You bore me with your truckling truisms.
Student: Yet shall I serve Thee always, my King.

Each student's tape is studied carefully to detect any edge of sarcasm or diminution of ingratiation. Those who pass the course are allowed initiate stage membership in the Royal Order of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant.

The most difficult seminar in the curriculum for disciples is Resiliency VII. It is a full-year seminar and unlike other courses, it has no fixed time or content. It occurs, I explain to the advanced students permitted the privilege of participating, in everything that occurs. At the end of the year, I pick out those elements within the past twelve months which were (unknown) parts of the seminar, and review them with the individual student. Here, for example, is the work of a student who failed the seminar:

Guru (October 13): (to the students) This schedule I'm posting is the course of study we'll be following for the next year.

Guru (October 20): (to the students) This Completely Changed schedule I'm posting is the course of study we'll be following for the next year.

Student (October 20): But I just got started doing things from your first list and now there's an entirely different list of things to do.

[See why this student failed?!]

This is the work of a student who passed the seminar:

Guru (March 30): (to a student, kindly) You ought to go on a fast; you're abhorrently fat these days.

Student (March 30): Yes, I've been feeling a bit overweight, about twenty pounds.

Guru (April 1): (to the same student, half humorously): So you decided not to go on a fast, still as ugly as before. Why not keep eating until people can't stand to look at you. (Chortling to himself).

Student (April 1): (under her breath) (Why don't you take a running leap, buster!)

[See why she passed!- (under her breath)]

¹ The course teaches how to get the proper genuflection in one's voice.

² The examination board must be able to determine, without question, which words the student speaks are capitalized or not.