When I show up for breakfast with Sheen and Estevez a few days later, the guy who delivers our coffee and pastries is clearly tickled to discover whose suite this is. Sheen takes a couple of minutes to chat with him, and ends up giving him a tip consisting of all the Canadian money he has on his person. (After all, he won’t need it back in California.) It might be tempting to dismiss all this as limousine liberalism, but the only conclusion you can draw after meeting the guy is that Sheen is insatiably interested in people. In the course of a half-hour conversation supposedly about “The Way,” he asks me about my parents, my ancestry, my hometown, my education and my attitudes about religion. (In between serving me coffee and orange juice.) I’ve never been so thoroughly interviewed by a new girlfriend’s dad, let alone a movie star.

Estevez, who is now 48 but looks only slightly older (and a bit shaggier) than he did in “The Breakfast Club,” is a more reserved character with a dry wit, content to let his dad do most of the talking before gently nudging the conversation back toward its subject. He’s been working mainly as a director since the late ’90s, but “The Way” is only his fifth feature, and the first since the sprawling, Altman-esque “Bobby” in 2006. It’s unmistakably the result of Sheen and Estevez’s intertwined sensibilities: the extroverted people-pleaser (and devout Catholic) on one hand, the more detached aloof observer (and agnostic) on the other.

This tale of a Southern California golf-playing ophthalmologist who takes the 500-mile pilgrimage from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in his dead son’s place is an odd mixture of ingredients and characters. (Sheen’s companions include Deborah Kara Unger as an enjoyably salty Canadian backpacker, and Irish actor James Nesbitt as a burned-out writer.) It’s sometimes clumsy and naive, and flirts with sentimentality the whole way through — but I found its dignity and sincerity, and the rough, rude, everyday magic of its journey, ultimately irresistible. (And that was before Estevez explained that in some sense it’s a remake of “The Wizard of Oz.” More on that below.)

“The Way” has no clear distribution plans at this writing, but based on the standing ovations it’s been getting in Toronto, it has the potential to connect with soul-searching, recession-era audiences on an intimate level, something like a more relaxed, more guy-friendly and arguably more coherent “Eat, Pray, Love.” As Estevez notes, it might also do wonders for the innkeepers and tavern owners along the Camino de Santiago (or Way of St. James), a series of linked pilgrimage routes, with origins deep in the Christian past, that had fallen into obscurity by the 1980s but is expected to attract 200,000 travelers this year.

This isn’t the first time you guys have worked together on a movie. What’s the relationship like on the set? Martin, when you’re the actor and he’s the director, do you have to stop being Dad?

Martin Sheen: I don’t even know him on the set! [Laughter.] You know, our relationship is so cemented. I’ve never really thought of him as my son, I’ve always thought of him as my brother. I was 21 when he was born. He showed up and I was like, “OK, you’re the guy.” He got short shrift in the early years. He was born in the Bronx and we got evicted when he was a baby. We lived in every borough but Queens. He got mugged in front of our apartment building in Manhattan a few years later. The other kids have no memory of the hard times — or maybe their hard times are a different story. But this guy knows me in ways I don’t even know myself.

What happened with this character was — you know, I’ve been doing this all my adult life. I got a lot of bits and faces I can do, I’ve got my bag of tricks. So it’s like, which one do I do now? OK, number eight. I got it.

Emilio Estevez: Yeah. I know ‘em all.

M.S.: Yeah, he ain’t having it. We shot the film in sequence, so on the first day I’m out there speaking a little Spanish and talking to people. He took me aside and said, “This is Martin. He’s not welcome here. You’re Tom. Tom voted for Richard Nixon and George Bush twice. You belong to a country club and you think it’s great! You don’t do any charity work. You’re not a nice guy! You’re a moron! It hasn’t happened for you yet! You don’t even see these people! Dismiss them!” And that was it, man. Every time I was Martin …

E.E.: Cut! Stop. You’re wasting everybody’s time.

M.S.: You know what he said the other day? I hesitated to agree although I thought so all along. He said it’s the best thing I’ve done since “Apocalypse Now.” And if that’s true it belongs to him.

E.E.: No. That’s yours. All I did was get out of your way. That’s a director’s main job after the casting, which is maybe 90 percent of it.

So talk to me about the Camino de Santiago. Have you guys known about it for a long time? What got you started on this road?

E.E.: Well, it really comes from Martin’s background. He had known about the Camino his whole life.

M.S.: My father was a Gallego [native of Galicia, in northern Spain]. He grew up in a village very close to Santiago de Compostela.

E.E.: I’d never heard you talk about this until, like, seven years ago. You went to that reunion in Ireland.

M.S.: To my mother’s village, in Tipperary. May 22, 2003. She would have been 100 years old. She died in 1951, she was only 48. By that time we were losing siblings by the score: My mother had 12 pregnancies, and 10 survived. When there were only five of us left, I said no more funerals before we have the celebration. So we gathered in this little village, we had this great celebration, and I said: “I’m going to Spain, and I’m inviting everybody to do the Camino.”

It was Emilio’s son [Taylor Estevez, an associate producer on "The Way"] who was kind of compelled to go. He was working as my assistant and he spoke Spanish, so he became my guide. And one of my oldest friends, Matt Clark, who plays the “rabbi priest” in the film, he went too. I had about 10 days until I had to get back and start filming for the new season on “The West Wing.” We thought about doing it on horseback, but you’ve gotta take all your stuff and bring mules to carry it. We thought about renting bicycles. Finally we thought, hmm, we’ll do it the all-American way. We rented a car. [Laughter.]

The miracles began to happen instantly. Emilio’s son met his future wife at the first place we stayed, in Burgos. Where the little boy steals the backpack, in the film? That’s where Taylor lives now. You can see his in-laws in the film. Julia was working that night, and she and Taylor hit it off. They’ve been together ever since.

E.E.: He’s been living there for seven years. He’s totally assimilated into the Spanish culture and lifestyle. They got married last August.

What an awesome story! But how did you get from Taylor falling in love with a Spanish girl to making a movie about the Camino?

M.S.: So originally we were thinking about a documentary tone. I was saying, “Emilio, man, this place is filled with miracles. It’s just magical out there, you’ve got to write a story.” He was doing another story, and I was bothering him. [Laughter.] I thought it was a story about two old guys out on the road, and a young girl who falls in love.

E.E.: I said his idea was too sentimental. So the conversation continues, and I said, “I think I’ve got it. It’s about a father and son.” Usually, the father-son dynamic in films, it’s about the ghost of the father. It’s “Hamlet.” And the son becomes the father, or some reasonable facsimile. This is the reverse. By the end of the film, Tom [Sheen's character] has in fact become Daniel [Estevez's character], and become free.

Talk a little bit about how you assembled the group who travel with Tom on this journey. It’s such a nice collection of characters.

E.E.: Well, I had a Dutch friend who lives down the street. He’s big, larger than life, a wonderful drunk. So he was an inspiration for Joost [played by Dutch actor Yorick van Wageningen]. And I met Deborah Kara Unger while I was writing the script, and I said OK, we’re gonna make the female character Canadian.

She’s a total pistol in that role. Just so completely angry at the world. I loved her.

E.E.: She’s terrific. Really, really broken and terrific. And then I was in a bookstore in New Mexico, and I bumped into the Jack Hitt book, “Off the Road,” which is different stories from the Camino. I read it, and I said, OK, here’s our fourth character. [Meaning Jack, the Irish writer played by James Nesbitt.] Here’s our Scarecrow. Because essentially — I’ve sort of kept the lid on this, but it really is “The Wizard of Oz.”

Whoa. You’re kidding! I totally hadn’t thought of that, but it’s so true.

E.E.: Yorick is the Cowardly Lion. Deborah’s the Tin Man with the broken heart. Martin is Dorothy. And I’m in the box. Daniel in the box is like Toto in the basket, because he keeps getting away. “Come back, Toto!” [Laughter.]

It’s safe to say this was a different scale of production than “Wizard of Oz.”

E.E.: Well, you saw the size of our crew. It was like doing a Wim Wenders film. We traveled 800 miles, shot on super 16. We shot the whole thing in sequence, using mainly available light. We were on the go the whole time. It allowed us to develop and discover things along the way, and have it happen organically.

M.S.: I think our crew was smaller than the one we had making “Badlands” with Terry Malick, or about the same size.

I think this story taps into something that’s clearly out there in the culture right now, but can be difficult to put into words without sounding dumb. It seems like so many people in our culture are thinking about their lives in the context of all the stress and all the electronic gizmos, all the economic hardship, and looking for something more.

M.S.: Everything’s being ripped away. You’re losing the house, you’re losing your job, and yeah, you’re right, people are beginning to focus on what’s really important.

I’ve joked with my friends and co-workers that unplugging is itself becoming a hot cultural trend. Everybody wants to get off the grid for a while, or they say they do. I feel like this movie is touching that nerve.

M.S.: Well, as Americans, we’ve been told, “You can do it.” We’re told to be macho and take responsibility and conquer the world and all this. We don’t give any support to community. Community is an afterthought, but when we get in touch with our loneliness and our guilt and all of these things that are so human, we begin to realize that until you start relating to other people’s brokenness, you can’t heal your own. That’s the beginning of community, I think.

Some people may go into this thinking that the Camino is only for the most intense kinds of Catholics, or anyway for believing Christians.

M.S.: Oh, no. We met maybe a half dozen of those, at most.

E.E. That doesn’t describe anybody in our little group. Martin’s character is lapsed, Jimmy’s a nonbeliever, Deborah’s character is out there hiding out, and Yorick is just a fat Dutchman trying to lose weight. A lot walk the Camino as a sport, or for exercise, or because their friends and family are doing it. There isn’t necessarily any religious motivation at all.

M.S.: You know what’s interesting about the Camino? Like the French guy says in the beginning, you go on your own. It’s for yourself. And 90 percent of the time, you see us walking in single file. It’s very rarely four abreast or all together. It’s so deeply personal. Some people are praying, some people are reflecting. They’re together for meals and sleeping, they aid each other. But when people are walking, they’re alone and you don’t bother them.

I really appreciate that you’re trying to deal with religion and spirituality in this movie in an open-minded, non-cynical fashion, without totally embracing it or totally rejecting it. That’s a difficult thing to do. Our country is so messed up around religion.

M.S.: No kidding! [Laughter.]

I know — what a brilliant observation, right? But you guys call our attention here to a tradition of Western spirituality that runs deep in our European roots and has very little to do with organized religion. The Camino de Santiago is a perfect example. I feel like so many educated Westerners go toward the Eastern spiritual traditions partly because they don’t see that or understand it.

E.E.: Sure, they want a response to the dogma of Christianity. They go to Hinduism, they go to Buddhism, just because it’s something different than their parents. They want to get away from that. I think it’s a knee-jerk reaction.

M.S.: Religions separate us, by their very nature. Spirituality unites us. That’s the key, and if spirituality is not about humanity, it’s not spiritual. I am a practicing Catholic. I love the faith. I’m not nuts about the institution, but the faith is mine, everywhere I go in the world. The belief that God became human — that’s genius, man. And that God would choose to dwell where we would least likely look, inside ourselves and each other. The genius of God in our humanity, I love that.

Every culture has that — the Hindus, Muslims, all of them have it. That’s the fundamental belief in all true believers, that God is present, God suffers and is broken with us. That’s why the Catholics never removed the corpse from the cross. Our hero is a convicted criminal. He was tried and convicted in a kangaroo court and then he was murdered. That’s God. We’re embraced by that. The most fundamental, most basic, most sincere beliefs — that’s not religion. It’s spirituality. It’s transcendence. People are looking for transcendence now more than ever, I think. Sometimes our transcendence becomes drugs, alcohol, money, power, sex, and they’re so shallow. It’s we ourselves, we must surrender ourselves to our brokenness. That’s the beginning of community, and that’s what this film is all about.

What they probably won’t know is that the unnamed guru is a hugely controversial figure who has disappeared from public view amid allegations of manipulation, financial misconduct and intimidation. And as that guru’s organization, the Siddha Yoga Dham of America (SYDA), has come under fire, her own guru (yes, gurus also have gurus), the “old lion,” has been accused of sexual abuse, molestation and sexual intercourse with minor girls.

The film, like the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir on which it is based, doesn’t name the real-life ashram or guru, and Gilbert has never revealed the guru’s identity. Readers of the book are instead treated to breathless but abstract passages like this: “Then I listened to the Guru speak in person for the first time, and her words gave me chill bumps all over my whole body, even across the skin of my face. And when I heard she had an Ashram in India, I knew I must take myself there as quickly as possible.”

But if you’re somewhat familiar with India’s spiritual landscape, it’s easy to figure out that this “feminine, multilingual, university-educated” guru is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — the head of the SYDA. For starters, India doesn’t have very many female gurus, and fewer still that speak impeccable English and reside in the United States. Gilbert also dedicates a sizable chunk of the India portion of her book to the troubles she has with the “Gurugita,” an obscure 90-minute-long hymn that Gurumayi’s devotees are required to chant every morning. Having been to a Siddha Yoga meditation workshop myself, I’m well acquainted with the tedium that is the Gurugita, and as far as I know, Siddha Yoga is the only Hindu spiritual order to have made the Gurugita such an essential part of a devotee’s daily practice. The ashram in the book is located in a small village just outside Mumbai, while SYDA’s India ashram is tucked away in a rural idyll called Ganeshpuri, some 50 miles from Mumbai. The book is littered with other telling biographical details about Gilbert’s guru that match up with Gurumayi — that she joined the entourage of an Indian swami (a Hindu religious teacher) as a teenager, that she served him as a translator for years before being given guru-hood, and that she was only in her 20s when she became his successor. Earlier this week, the New York Post drew the same SYDA connection to “EPL,” as others have. When Salon contacted Gilbert’s publicist at Viking to confirm that Gurumayi was in fact her guru, we were told, “No comment. Liz has always made a concerted effort to respect the privacy of the ashram.” But the evidence is overwhelming.

Known to her followers as just Gurumayi, Malti Shetty is undeniably beautiful — slender and brown-eyed, with dimples that dig deep commas below her high cheekbones. Shetty says she is the sole successor to SYDA, a new Hindu religious movement that is based on the tradition of Vedanta. Her predecessor and guru, the man who appointed her to his throne, is Swami Muktananda.

SYDA is headquartered in a large complex in South Fallsburg, N.Y., a town set in the Catskill Mountains. In the 1980s and ’90s — the decades during which the SYDA reached its height of popularity — the foundation was said to have some 70,000 followers across the world. Its devotees, mostly the wealthy and well-educated, included celebrities like Melanie Griffith, Isabella Rossellini, Diana Ross and Don Johnson.

In 1983, an exposé by journalist William Rodarmor in CoEvolution Quarterly (a Stewart Brand magazine that eventually became Whole Earth Review) suggested that before his death, Muktananda had been having sex with several young girls in his ashrams. The septuagenarian guru, said the piece, used to stand behind a curtain and spy on girls in the female dormitory. He even had a special area equipped with a gynecologist’s table that was used for his sexual dalliances. In public, he announced that he was celibate, insisting that sexual acts took away from spiritual energy. But in private, a parade of girls would be trooping in and out of his bedroom all night. The story even describes the violence and intimidation used by Muktananda to control his devotees. There are accounts of him beating hapless Indian peasants outside the ashram grounds, of stabbing his valet with a fork, and of sending burly enforcers to take care of devotees who refused to toe the party line.

In an account posted on the website Leaving Siddha Yoga — which encourages former devotees to come forward with stories of their abuse and mistreatment — a former devotee, Joan “Radha” Bridges, describes her sexual encounters with Muktananda. Bridges, then 26, says she was slowly wooed by Muktananda’s translator, Malti Shetty. As the account reads: “I was given an invitation by Malti to come to the Boston Ashram with a small entourage. This was a privilege — I was thrilled to be included.” Soon, Muktananda started kissing her and grabbing her breasts, eventually pulling her into his room to inspect her vagina. The next night, she says, Muktananda brought her back into his quarters. “All the while he told me, ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ and, ‘Don’t tell your husband.’ Muktananda put me on a high table, pulled my legs back to expose my vagina and pulled out his flaccid penis. He placed his penis as far up inside me as he could and remained in that position a very long time.” It took years for her to accept that she had, in fact, been a victim of sexual abuse.

In 1994, the New Yorker revisited these accusations in the article “O Guru, Guru, Guru,” written by Lis Harris. Harris found several other women who said that Muktananda had forced them to have sex with him. But she also chronicled Shetty’s behavior as the new guru. Shetty displayed many of the same traits as her mentor. She ran a hate campaign against her brother, who had been named as a co-successor by Muktananda, beating him and isolating him until he finally gave up his claim on the SYDA’s spiritual mantle. She denied all allegations of Muktananda’s sexual abuse and shielded other sexual predators inside the ashram, including a man called George Afif, who was convicted of statutory rape. Harris’ piece even hinted that Shetty herself had had sexual relations with Afif. “While I was working on the story,” Harris told Salon, “I was constantly followed [inside the ashram]. Men with walkie-talkies wouldn’t let me go anywhere on my own. They were always asking my driver questions. A woman who I worked with in the ashram’s kitchen was even noting down every word I said. It was very Big Brother-like.”

The organization tried hard to keep the New Yorker from publishing the story, even threatening it with litigation. According to Marta Szabo, a one-time devotee of SYDA who wrote the book “The Guru Looked Good,” Shetty once called a secret meeting to chant and perform “weird Reiki” against Lis Harris and the New Yorker’s then-editor, Tina Brown. “When the article finally came out, they took every copy of the magazine that they could find and burnt them in a great pile,” Harris says.

Rumors also abound of untold millions stashed away in Swiss bank accounts. (Rodarmor’s exposé features Muktananda talking about just such a thing.) The foundation’s workshop fees run into hundreds of dollars, and devotees who work at the ashram are mostly unpaid. “Just the money I collected from a single intensive [meditation workshop] amounted to $14,000,” says Szabo. Daniel Shaw, a former devotee who now runs Leaving Siddha Yoga, says that using human conduits to ferry cash from the U.S. to India was a common practice within Siddha Yoga. “I’ve been asked to carry large amounts of cash under my clothes during several trips to India. Others used to carry jewelry,” he says.

Charges have never been pressed against the organization. Shetty stopped speaking to the press soon after she became Gurumayi and has not publicly addressed any of the accusations in a long time. But when Rodarmor spoke to her for his piece in 1983 — just after she had taken on the mantle of guru-hood — she denied all allegations of sexual abuse against Muktananda and of the existence of Swiss bank accounts. In Harris’ piece, the group’s swamis (high-ranking members) steadfastly maintained that Muktananda never broke his vows of celibacy. The SYDA did not respond to Salon’s request for a comment.

SYDA is now a shell of its former mid-’90s self, despite the bestseller and newfangled Hollywood associations. The South Fallsburg ashram, which once hummed with as many as 4,000 devotees, looks forlorn. Many defectors say that they left because of Shetty’s increasingly authoritarian behavior and her subtle attempts at control and manipulation. “She was just mean. She humiliated me in public. She certainly wasn’t enlightened,” says Szabo, who was once part of a team that edited and rewrote parts of the public talks for which Shetty was revered.

In 2004, presumably about a year after her encounter with Gilbert (whose book came out in 2006), Shetty disappeared from public life. Now followers only get an occasional video message from their master. Shaw believes that the appearance of websites like Leaving Siddha Yoga caused Shetty to retreat into a world where she has full control. Others say that she’s just tired of playing guru.

It’s anyone’s guess if “EPL’s” film release will cause a renewed surge in SYDA’s membership. Or if a new wave of popularity will force Shetty to come back into public view. But Gilbert’s account of her time in India, her naive view of her guru as a “compassionate, loving” and “enlightened” master, and her faith that Muktananda was a “world-changing” and “self-realized” leader are all a sad chronicle of the human need to find spiritual anchors, and then to believe that these ordinary, and often deeply flawed, men and women are the path to our salvation.

. . .

Read Siddha Yoga Dham of America’s response to this story.

As almost everyone reading this will already know, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the autobiographical and presumably truthful story of a woman who “pulls a geographic” (as some 12-steppers say) on an epic scale, fleeing first her troubled marriage and then her relationship with a hot, younger boyfriend for a year-long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali. Gilbert is a sharp and amusing prose stylist and an openhearted critic of her own foibles and failings. She’s aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else’s dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.

(A personal note before continuing: I knew Elizabeth Gilbert some years ago, when we worked together at Spin magazine. (She was then married to the man she leaves at the beginning of “Eat, Pray, Love.”) She’s a wonderful writer and an even better human being. There’s no question that I think about her book — and the mediocre Hollywood movie resulting from it — differently than I otherwise might, because I have no doubts about the genuineness and generosity of Liz’s intentions. I’m not surprised that she ended up writing a bestseller, and she’s well suited to handle money and fame. I could speculate about her reactions to the merchandising campaign around “Eat, Pray, Love” — which encompasses clothing, jewelry, tea and candles — but then, many of her readers will have asked themselves the same question.)

At any rate, the secret of Gilbert’s book was not so much in the subject matter or the story but in the execution. Whether you find it captivating or maddening — and the marketplace has clearly voted for the former — it’s an artfully managed literary exercise, a thoughtful work of self-examination that’s designed to encourage the reader’s own. Movies don’t do that well, or at least not the kinds of movies people build around Julia Roberts. Inevitably, director Ryan Murphy’s version of “Eat, Pray, Love” (he also co-wrote the screenplay, with Jennifer Salt) is a shorthand romantic fiction, a pretty but hollowed-out imitation that’s one remove from Gilbert’s commentary on her experience and at least two removes from the experience itself.

Gilbert’s fans may enjoy the lovely locations and the appealing supporting cast — especially James Franco as her New York post-marriage lover and Javier Bardem as the Brazilian dreamboat who sweeps her off her feet in Bali — and Murphy works hard to incorporate snatches of her wry, warm prose without turning the project into an audiobook. But the story of “Eat, Pray, Love” isn’t really about people, places and things (although it has apparently done wonders for Bali’s tourist trade). The pasta dinners, the long sessions of Hindu meditation and the glorious, curtain-fronted Balinese gazebos are meant to be accoutrements that enable a questing consciousness to uproot itself from routine and make a crucial inward journey. That’s tough to convey when you’ve got Julia Roberts drifting around looking lovely and vulnerable in a succession of going-native costumes.

Roberts doesn’t look much like Liz Gilbert — although she has indeed absorbed some of her mannerisms — but after all she gets paid to look like Julia Roberts. She gives a nice performance here, ranging from brassy to vulnerable to drunkenly flirtatious. It isn’t her fault that the script tries to jam a memoir into the romantic-comedy template, spiced liberally with New Age nostrums, and can’t quite get it right.

Non-devotees of the book are likely to find Murphy’s “Eat, Pray, Love” an emotionally murky, inflated Lifetime Channel movie, alternately charming, cloying and dull. At 140 minutes, it’s much too long to tell a compact story, but not nearly long enough to explain itself adequately. Stephen (Billy Crudup), the suburban husband Gilbert ditches, appears in several scenes but is more like a personality-free ghost than a character; marrying him and leaving him seem like equally mysterious decisions, since he doesn’t exist. Her ensuing relationship with David (Franco), the underemployed, guru-devoted actor, appears to go instantaneously from hot late-night hookup to shacking up to angry, sexless unhappiness.

Murphy and Salt’s screenplay skips over logistical realities that Gilbert herself never conceals: She was a highly-paid freelance writer who financed her world travel with a substantial publisher’s advance; she had no job to quit because sampling Roman restaurants, Indian meditation centers and Indonesian oceanfront bars pretty much was her job. Gilbert’s first two travel episodes, sampling Italian cuisine and Indian religion, play out as reasonably diverting light comedy, the first frivolous and the second more rueful. Characters come and go quickly — Tuva Novotny as a Swedish gal-pal in Rome, Richard Jenkins as a heartbroken, aphorism-spouting Texan in India — providing Gilbert with teachable moments along the way.

Of course a few scenes in a movie can do almost nothing to explain why Gilbert spent months in an Indian guru’s ashram, or what it is she thinks she found there. And why should it? If the book flirted with the most hackneyed kinds of female escape fantasy, and dared itself to escape that genre, the film has almost nothing else to offer. When we finally get to Bali and rumpled Brazilian divorcé Felipe (Bardem) runs Gilbert’s bike off the road with his jeep, you can almost hear a collective sigh of relief from the filmmakers (and their audience). A lonely guy, a lonely girl, a comic pratfall and an exotic location — from here on in, we’re golden.

It’s not even ironic that one woman’s painful and almost desperate attempt to reconnect with herself and the world became a calculated publishing phenomenon that has spawned a Julia Roberts movie and lines of prayer beads and leather-bound diaries. It’s just the way the world is in an age when the most desirable commodities are private experiences that, at least at first, do not present themselves as commodities at all. (Am I wrong, or is going “off the grid” nearing critical mass as a hot lifestyle trend?) “Eat, Pray, Love” is a minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that’s not a crime. The fact that we find it almost impossible to talk seriously about the pervasive emotional or spiritual or psychological yearning that a story like this represents — that’s a bigger problem.

Now “Eat Pray Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, who has an uncanny ability to produce books that speak (however irritatingly) to deep cultural undercurrents, has written about her own marital uncertainty. A story in Thursday’s New York Times offers details about her new memoir, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage,” which will be published by Viking in January. With the book’s proposed print-run of 1 million copies (!), the cultural referendum on marriage we have been participating in for what feels like forever now promises not to end anytime soon. Ambivalence about marriage, you might say, is the new black. (Gilbert was not only ambivalent about marriage, she was also ambivalent about her book about marriage — she threw away a 500-page draft before, um, committing to “Committed.”) 

Gilbert, who fell in love with a man in Indonesia on the “Love” leg of her now-famous tripartite journey (she calls him “Felipe” in the book), must be — having eaten, prayed, loved and written a memoir about it all — the most self-fulfilled, gratified, individuated, yoga-ed person in America. This either makes her a great candidate for marriage (and chronicler of it) or a terrible one. It will be interesting to see what she has to say about the institution, which she will apparently explore, not only by way of her own experience, as in her first memoir, but also through a discussion of historical and sociological studies, as well as interviews she conducted with family and friends. 

As for her firsthand knowledge, it was the disastrous demise of her first marriage that was the impetus for “Eat Pray Love,” and the author vowed she would never marry again. Her independence and pluck — one might even say bravery — evinced by the journey she undertook, both spiritually and geographically, was admired by women all over America. Many of them went on mini-quests of their own. (In my circle of friends, most of the women who loved the book are divorcees. What can I say? I’m not a divorcee.) So it will also be interesting to see how readers respond to Elizabeth Gilbert in the role of a wife. Because reader, she married him. (Felipe, that is.) 

Let’s hope the book about marriage is better than the book about love.

That night marks the beginning of Gilbert’s “conversation with God.” Though she is felled by depression, Gilbert, through prayer and meditation, realizes that she has to doggedly pursue that which eludes her (and most of us) — contentment, forgiveness, grace. She finds a spiritual teacher — an Indian guru with tens of thousands of devotees — and begins chanting with a group of her followers in New York, “regular-looking people praying to God.” After hearing the guru speak in person, and finding herself with “chills bumps” over her whole body, even the skin of her face — she decides to get serious about her spiritual practice. And so she sets off to Italy to explore the art of pleasure, to India to practice the art of devotion, and to Indonesia to practice the art of balancing both.

Gilbert’s voyage begins in Rome, where she rents an apartment in an upscale neighborhood and signs up for Italian lessons for no reason other than that the language is “more beautiful than roses.” She has taken a vow of celibacy because of her “boundary issues” with men, and yet befriends several handsome and charming Italians — one with the memorable name Luca Spaghetti — with whom she practices conversing and goes to soccer games. Gilbert surrenders fairly quickly to the Italian art of pleasure seeking. “All I had to do, for the first time in my life, was ask myself every day, ‘What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?’” Most often the answer is speaking Italian and eating, and Gilbert’s descriptions of food can be downright lusty. In a Sicilian pizzeria she samples a “thin doughy, strong, gummy, chewy salty pizza paradise … with sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts … the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide.” And then: “I love my pizza so much … that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me in return.” Gilbert arrives in Italy “pinched and thin,” and leaves a student of decadence, with 20 extra pounds and “the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity.”

Gilbert is prone to hyperbole — as the previous line suggests — and an excessive reliance on italics. She can be self-congratulatory and self-absorbed, which I suppose is an occupational hazard with a spiritual memoir like this. Yet Gilbert is also an irresistible narrator — funny, self-deprecating, fiercely intelligent. Throughout, her writing has the crisp, breezy quality of someone who has churned out thousands of words for glossy magazines, as Gilbert has. (She is also the author of a short story collection, a novel and the nonfiction book “The Last American Man.”)

After Italy, Gilbert heads to India. An experienced yogi, she applies to spend six weeks at an ashram run by her guru. The idea is to master the “relentless thought-processing, soul devouring machine” that is her brain. The schedule at the ashram includes pre-dawn meditations, scrubbing floors, vegetarian food, silent meditations in caves — and lots of socializing. Gilbert — vivacious, chatty, warm — makes friends easily and is soon anointed “key hostess,” in charge of making sure that visitors who come to the ashram for silent retreats are taken care of. (She calls herself “Julie McCoy Yogic Cruise Director.”)

It is at the ashram where Gilbert meets “Richard from Texas,” one of the many characters — notice I didn’t say people — who populate her narrative. Richard, with his no-nonsense, homespun wisdom, plays a critical role in Gilbert’s spiritual journey. When she is having trouble controlling her thoughts while meditating, Richard reminds her that “right now, your ego’s scared to death cuz it’s about to get downsized. You keep up this spiritual path, baby, and that bad boy’s days are numbered.” When she’s desperately missing her lover back in New York, he counsels: “You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone used to be.” After weeks of absorbing Richard’s advice — and doing some serious work to overcome the tripwires of her mind — Gilbert finally unites with God during a particularly intense meditation session. “I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and entered the void … I just was part of God. In addition to being God, I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe … It wasn’t hallucinogenic, what I was feeling … It was the deepest love I’d ever experienced, beyond anything I could have previously imagined.”

Like hearing about other people’s dreams, reading about other people’s spiritual epiphanies is, in general, just not that interesting — they’re really only meaningful to the person who’s having them. And yet, instead of rolling my eyes at Gilbert’s descriptions, I was captivated by them. Gilbert is such a sincere seeker, such a hard spiritual worker, it’s impossible not to applaud her breakthrough. Without getting all serious and preachy — without renouncing all worldly pleasures — she devotes herself to an intense spiritual practice, one that doesn’t seem so foreign or alienating as to be out of reach to the rest of us.

Finally, Gilbert takes off for Bali, and settles in a village of “pink clouds,” rice paddies, lush equatorial flowers. She goes there to study with a medicine man, Ketut, whom she had met two years earlier while on a magazine assignment. Her days on the island unwrap like gifts, with mornings spent in meditation and prayer, and afternoons sipping coffee with Ketut or gabbing with a bawdy healer named Wayan and her daughter, Tutti. Like I said, Gilbert seems to have an uncanny ability to befriend characters. All of the people who propel her story seem almost fictional because their words and actions are so perfectly crafted and her good fortune seems limitless. She comes to Bali with no place to stay but finds a pristine cottage on a hill with gardens for meditating and a red kitchen. Wayan needs money to buy a new house, so Gilbert sends a mass e-mail to her friends in the U.S. and raises $18,000. Gilbert has no intention of falling in love, but meets a sexy, older Brazilian man who becomes her passionate and attentive lover. Gilbert develops a serious bladder infection — which Wayan cures with herbs, in an hour and a half. Is it possible for one person to be this lucky?

People have been telling tales of spiritual transformation for centuries, and Gilbert’s isn’t all that different: Broken and spent, she finds God and returns from her journey healed. So it’s not so surprising that at the end of the book Gilbert is exactly where she set out be — content and balanced — with the bonus of being in love. It’s hard not to think, like the old woman sitting next to an orgasmic Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally,” “I want what she’s having!” But then you remember that Gilbert had freedoms that most of us don’t. In order to overcome ourselves, we need time, space, resources; it’s hard to find yourself when you have a full-time job, a couple of kids, a mortgage to pay. Most people who pick up this book will know from the very first page that they will probably never have the chance to take a similar trip.

Yet not once did I get the feeling that Gilbert was trying to convince anyone that her spiritual path is the only one, or the correct one, or that it’s even necessary to take one. Hers is a solo journey, and we’re just lucky enough to be along for the ride.