"Rama wants to see you!" she exclaimed.

My impulse was to press the accelerator. After all, he might try and get me to stay, as he did years before in La Jolla.

But I felt that I had come a long way since 1981. I felt confident that I could handle myself. Besides, I was curious. I let Laura lead me to him.

Rama, Anne, and a few others were in the room. They looked somber.

Rama had us stand in a circle and hold hands. He told us we were a tribe. It felt odd, holding hands. It wasn't the sort of thing he'd normally have us do. After a brief meditation, he took me to another room and gave me a long hug. I drove away feeling sad.

For the next few days I rode east, driven by childhood memories of New England, and by the notion that I had *seen* Boston as the target city.

In Nebraska and Iowa, I felt good about my decision to leave.

But I had developed no system with which to support my new interpretation of the world, and the decision seemed more distant with each pa.s.sing state. I had devised no language of rebellion, forged no icons of discontent, and, on a more practical level, had no sense of what I wanted to do or whom I wanted to be.

I had met Rama when I was seventeen. Now I was twenty-four. I had never experienced successes or failures from following a path of my own design.

I had been deprived of this ritual of pa.s.sage into adulthood.

I had come of age in a destructive cult.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was packed away somewhere in the back.

I arrived in Ma.s.sachusetts feeling frightened and confused.

I felt drawn to southern New Hampshire where, eight years before, I had worked one summer on a farm. I found Rico, a younger friend from the farm days who was now a senior in high school.

I had not seen him in years. I wanted to tell him about Rama and the organization but did not know where to start.

"There are bad people out there, Rico," I told him. "You have to be careful. Whatever happens, always follow your heart."

I drove away, Rico later recalled, with a frightened look on my face.

I called my parents in New York and asked them if they wanted to see me. They flew to Boston, and we went to a restaurant near Gloucester, Ma.s.sachusetts. I felt happy to see them but could not share the burden of my new found freedom.

Days later I sat in traffic in the suburbs of Boston. I felt completely alone. I missed the disciples. It was true that we had fallen for Rama's line about stealing one another's power.

It was true that we had allowed Rama to foster, through ongoing whispering campaigns, a climate of fear and compet.i.tion.

But I didn't care. The disciples spoke the same language as I. They were my friends.

I missed Robert, a UCLA graduate who, in 1982, was drawn to a lecture on the works of Carlos Castaneda. Months after joining the Los Angeles Centre, he was approached one night in Pacific Palisades by two white men. Robert was black. The men were angry that his girlfriend was white. They each pulled out a gun and took aim.

They said: "Get out of the car." Robert was concerned that they would rape and kill his girlfriend. He made a quick decision.

He slammed down hard on the accelerator. When the bullet entered his head, he kept driving. He pa.s.sed familiar streets.

He had grown up in Los Angeles. Blood streamed down his face.

He drove to a hospital where, in the weeks that followed, he did miraculously well. The experience cemented his devotion to Rama, who took credit for the recovery.

I missed the Stony Brook disciples. I missed Paul, the computer wizard with the silly grin. Sal, another computer genius, had taken to heart Rama's caveat that disciples were stealing his power.

But beneath his fears was a gentle, humorous soul, and I missed him.

I missed Rachel, the doctor, who had continued to support the Centre financially, and who had apparently forgotten about the "Garage Door Opener Incident." Dana, the former model and occupational therapy student, often grew icy with the power that Rama gave her over other disciples.

But I knew that as Rama's office manager, hers was a particularly trying position (she typically slept three or four hours a night), and I missed her. I missed Anne, the nurse, who had known Rama the longest, and who was also under intense pressure to perform.

Once I overheard Rama advising Anne to accept her "true" cold and callous nature. Despite his remark, she mostly lived up to her spiritual name, Prema, which symbolized a higher form of love.

I missed the disciples whom Rama had dubbed "a.s.sholes of the mountains."

I missed UCSD recruits Doug and Eric, whose adventuresome spirit and love of the outdoors was evident in their winter a.s.saults on 12,000 foot peaks. And I missed Mike. Tall, with thick red hair, Mike looked, ate, and at times acted like a wild Viking.

In reality, he was a wild UCSD medical student. Once he told me that he occasionally slept in his Volkswagon bus in campus parking lots.

"You really do that?" I asked.

"Yeah. The cops don't like it, though."

"What do they do?"

"They shake the van and try to get me to come out."

"Do you?"

"Nah. I usually go back to sleep."

Perhaps Mike's unique way of doing things, as well as the pride with which he questioned authority, contributed to his standing in the Centre as a less-than-model disciple.

"I'm glad that you are friendly with Mike," Rama once told me.

"But you should understand that he's not really into our program.

I can see that he's in it for himself."

I missed Tom, the ba.s.s-guitar-playing disciple from Stony Brook whom Rama had put in charge of security. (Rama, based on fears that his psychic vision excluded those who wanted to shoot him, had a.s.sembled a team of volunteer disciples and professional security guards.) Tom, one of Rama's closest disciples, was the first high-profile follower to leave the Centre.

He left largely as a result of the "Omelet Incident."

The "Incident" occurred in Rama's kitchen in Malibu. Rama sat with Tom and Fran, a tall, young UCSD recruit with a long, powerful stride and a glint of the wild in her eye. Rama liked to say that Fran had spent past lives in Africa as a hunter, and that she was one of two disciples with the potential of attaining enlightenment in this life (I was the other). At around 2:30 a.m., Rama asked Fran to cook him an omelet. Perhaps she was tired from having accompanied Rama and Tom that night to the San Francisco Centre meeting.

She burned the eggs.

"You are in a lousy consciousness," Rama accused her, stewing over the omelet. "Your level of spirituality has been plummeting!"

Then he continued to lambast her.

Tom was struck by the contrast between Rama's lofty language onstage and his cra.s.s behavior at home. After mulling over the double standard for several days, he sent Rama a note that he was leaving the Centre.

Rama called him and shouted at him for roughly twenty minutes.

Rama told him that he was a low life and that he was blowing it for future lives. Despite Rama's warning, Tom left his apartment and prepared to move back to the east coast. A day or two later, Dana told me that Rama wanted me to track Tom down and have him call the Centre. When I succeeded at my "Warrior's task,"

Tom spoke with a very different Rama.

"Don't worry about all the negative karma," Rama a.s.sured him.

"I'll absorb it for you." Rama also told him that he was not really leaving so much as he was being kicked out. But I did not yet know the details of Tom's sudden departure as I sat in rush hour traffic in Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, feeling dejected and lonely.

I missed Fran. I missed Kate and Pat, each of whom I had gone out with.

I missed Ed, a quick witted UCSD recruit with a pa.s.sion for mysticism and Jimi Hendrix music. We had studied together at a computer school in Los Angeles and, back in 1982, we had bicycled from San Luis Obispo to Monterey, California. I missed Alexander and Marty and Elizabeth and Carl and Karen and Jeff and...

I missed my brother. Dan had already left Chinmoy to join Rama's Centre in San Diego. But the closeness we once shared was buried by too many months and too many miles, by unspoken resentments on his part, and by a l.u.s.t for power within Rama's organization on mine.

Ultimately, though, it was the acquired belief that "the past is dust"

that kept us from searching and sifting through finer elements of memories' shifting sands.

In 1983, my brother nearly left the Centre. He had been hanging out with Bill, a burly, bearded, freedom-loving forest ranger who decided that Rama was taking advantage of women disciples or, to put it in his words, Rama was "dipping into the company ink."

My brother, too, decided that Rama was out of line, and the two of them were planning to leave. When Rama found out, he summoned me to his house.

"Your brother is about to blow it in a big way," he told me.

"This is your big chance to help him. Get him to call me." I did, and Rama persuaded him to stay.

I missed my friends and my brother and now, as I roamed the streets of Concord, I wondered if I would ever see them again.

I thought about contacting pre-Rama friends but I feared that we shared little in common. Besides, I had treated several of them as if they were spiritually unrefined, and now it felt awkward to ask for their support.

Later that day, on my way to Walden Pond, I saw a man in his seventies walking slowly toward me. "It's an omen of death," I thought nervously.

Quickly turning back toward the car, I saw a brief flash of light-- a reflection from something I could not see.

"It's the Forces!" I told myself and slipped down a fearful stretch of imagination back toward a nightmarish state of mind.

Rama's Forces were back. I got in the car and locked the door.