"Eternity is all around us at every moment," he said gently, "be absorbed. Nirvana is a world of unlimited ecstasy, be absorbed.

Go see the new Schwartzenegger movie, be absorbed. You are doing much better lately, be absorbed. Don't forget that we will soon be meditating together on the golden beaches of Maui, be absorbed.

Be proud that you are taking a stand against the Negative Forces, be absorbed. Don't be so hard on yourselves--give yourselves a break-- be absorbed. Learn humility and you will learn the secret to happiness, be absorbed. A desert trip is coming up soon, be absorbed.

Forget not that our mission is to spread light in the world, be absorbed. Our friends from past lives will soon be joining us, be absorbed."

Rama asked that we sit up straight. He put on electronic music, slowly scanned the audience, and raised his hands above his head.

Many of us gazed at him intensely. It didn't matter that those occupying the same room as him were, during meditation, supposed to evolve hundreds, even thousands of lifetimes.

We still tried to absorb as much spiritual light as we could.

Then, he might end with a quote from the teachings of Lao Tzu, Castaneda's Don Juan, or Christ.

At the next Centre meeting, Rama might announce that everything had changed and that we were in an extremely poor state of consciousness.

"At the weekly Centre meetings," I told Donald Kohl's father, "Rama teaches us to realize our full potential. He teaches us to love and respect life." I did not describe, however, Rama's fixation on death.

"Someone in San Diego is trying to kill me," Rama once told devotees in a turret of the castle he was renting. "I am moving to Los Angeles.

I suggest that you do the same."

Another time Rama turned to me and said, "Do you realize that I can kill you at any moment?"

"He's only joking," I thought.

"No, really," he went on. "I am extremely strong and could kill you in an instant!"

Repeatedly during the '80s and early '90s, Rama expressed a desire to take disciples for a ride in a Lear Jet into a snow-capped mountain, into the other worlds. "That would be a clean way to go,"

he said.

One time after a beach meditation, Rama asked five or six disciples, "What do you see?"

"I see red," said Sal. "I see blood, destruction, war, global apocalypse."

"Very good," said Rama.

Repeatedly during the '80s and early '90s, Rama slept with numerous women devotees, several of whom claim that he took no measures whatsoever to prevent the potential spread of AIDS.

Also in the 80s, Rama encouraged followers to secure software contracts in ADA, a computer language used to control the United States'

hardware of war.

On the night before his thirty-fifth birthday, Rama invited thirty or so disciples to a party. He had been either ignoring or abusing many of us, so the invitation came as a welcome surprise. Unlike other recent events, there was an upbeat feel to the party. He had asked Anne, for instance, to spend time decorating the room with colorful balloons.

"Maybe," a few of us thought, "things are going to get better."

During the party, though, Rama demanded that a handful of us confess, one by one, before the other disciples, that the demons had succeeded in talking over our souls.

"Anne is the worst," Rama proclaimed, lashing out at her.

"She either looks like a witch or a wh.o.r.e." Then, in a seeming attempt to exorcise the demons, he told us to meet him the following day at the Los Angeles coroner's office. He wanted us to witness an autopsy.

The next day I watched two men saw the skull of a "John Doe"

hit-and-run victim. The saw whined. They peeled off the face.

The air smelled acrid. My stomach felt bloated. "That could be me on the table," I thought. I wanted to retch. The pathologist measured the brain. I found myself thinking about life.

Not in terms of Rama's increasingly fearful descriptions of the world, but in terms of my gut feelings. "Something happened," I wrote in a journal that I had recently started. "I felt it, a change inside me..."

After the autopsy, I noticed the way I breathed. I noticed the way my blood pulsed through me. I slept more; I had been sleeping only five or six hours a night. I watched the way light played off ripples in a body of water. Rama had failed to appear at the coroner's that day. Until the next Centre meeting, his world seemed small.

Mr. Kohl listened to my descriptions of Rama and of the organization.

"Tell me, Mark," he said. "Does Rama pressure the disciples to be a certain way?"

"Well, technically we're not really disciples. We're students.

Think of the organization as being like a university.

Sure, there's some pressure, if that's what you want to call it.

But it doesn't come from Rama. It comes from each of us wanting to do well."

I did not mention that Rama often threatened to spend less time with his disciples because we maintained an abysmal level of consciousness and because we bombarded him with Negative Occult Energy. "You should understand that I will still love you no matter what you do," Rama lectured. "But when you ignore my suggestions, when you succ.u.mb to the Forces, when you don't keep up with your tuition payments, you are setting yourselves up for a multi-lifetime pattern that will be extremely difficult to break.

You are also letting down those we were sent here to help.

Many of you don't seem to realize that you can easily be replaced.

Believe me, there are plenty of seekers out there who would genuinely appreciate the opportunity that the Infinite is providing here."

Nor did I mention to Mr. Kohl that Rama followed through with his threats of replacement. In 1984, for instance, he kicked out four hundred followers after looking at their photos and reading their recently submitted essays. The purge gave him greater control over the remaining four or five hundred, who now lived in constant fear of getting kicked out. As for the outcasts, many had developed psychological dependencies on Rama. They continued to write him letters, to appear regularly at public lectures, and to send him money.

Because he maintained their names and addresses in a database, he could always swap them back in when the current batch burned out.

Nor did I mention that, in response to the intensifying pressure, I had dropped out of UCSD a year before Donald, a sensitive, bright UCLA undergraduate, committed suicide.

The longer I spoke with Mr. Kohl, the more I became aware of-- and uneasy about--the discrepancy between what I knew and what I was willing to admit about my teacher and my organization.

I felt particularly uneasy knowing that at one Centre meeting, Rama had promised to take closer devotees for a ride through the death worlds in a Porsche. After I hung up the phone, the uneasiness did not disappear. Though I did not openly entertain doubts about Rama, my ability to separate myself from his world, and to view myself as an individual, was suddenly infused with new life.

17. On High

"How would you like to get out of the spiritual rut you are in?"

Rama asked me in the spring of 1984.

"I would like that very much," I replied. I knew that there was something wrong with my life. For years I sought enlightenment, but was no longer happy. For years I sought the Spirit, but was no longer animated. For years I sought the Self, but was no longer me.

I was ready to try anything, I told him.

He offered to give me LSD. "I suggest that you take it," he said.

"But you should only take it if it feels right."

In the past he had used Chinmoy's line that hallucinogens damaged the subtle body. But the potential benefits, he now explained, outweighed the risk, provided that a fully enlightened teacher was around to supervise. "Don't worry," he added with a smile.

"I am very familiar with the drug."

I was startled by the offer. As a teenager, I had responded to similar solicitations with: "I'm high on life--drugs would just bring me down." But the buzz of youth had long disappeared, and I knew that the rut ran deep. Sensing, too, that three years before Rama had diffused my internal conflict with Stelazine, I wondered if LSD could quell my recently resurfacing doubts.

There were other factors involved. Months before, Rama had asked Tom, the ba.s.s-guitar-playing disciple who had finally moved west, to compile a tape of songs from the late '60s. "I want to tap into the people who had been involved in the early consciousness movement,"

Rama explained. Subsequently, the list of musicians whose songs Rama played at Centre meetings and at public lectures-- without regard for copyright law--grew from Tangerine Dream, Walter Carlos, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and the Talking Heads, to now include the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Traffic, and Jimi Hendrix.

Perhaps my decision regarding the LSD was affected by the music.

Perhaps it was affected by my fascination with the drug scenes in the Castaneda books. Perhaps it was affected by my realization that, according to the dictates of Rama's etiquette, there were grave karmic consequences for those foolish enough to ignore his suggestions.

I told him it felt right.