Take Me for a Ride Part 30

I asked him if I could turn up the volume. "Sure." Soon he asked me the same. Before long, the music was blasting, and we were singing Helter Skelter at the top of our lungs: "WHEN I GET TO THE BOTTOM I GO BACK TO THE TOP OF THE SLIDE, AND I STOP AND I TURN AND I GO FOR A..."

Several nights later, near Tucson, Arizona, the disciples looked out from a hill at the lights of the city below. "This is a real moment of power," said Rama. "It is essential that each of you speak with power and with respect for the spirit of the land."

I typically spoke very briefly at such a gathering unless I knew in advance what Rama wanted to hear. But now I went on and on about how in Tucson there was a healthy balance between people and nature, and about how if we moved here, we would heal. When I was done, Rama took me aside and said, "Kid--you're going to be all right."

But Tucson was not the right city, he later announced, so we continued the drive west.

In a motel just east of San Diego, Rama left us one evening to conduct a Centre meeting in Beverly Hills. When he returned, he berated us for not working together and for not even *trying*

to maintain a decent level of consciousness in his absence.

"You are acting like a h.o.a.rd of angry sorcerers," he snapped, borrowing a phrase from a Castaneda book. But he was wrong.

Paul, Karen, and I had stayed up late that night trying to come up with a catchy name for his proposed software company.

Furthermore, we had meditated together, we had maintained something of a meditative consciousness, and we had tried to *see* which city we were supposed to move to.

In the past when Rama contradicted the facts, I had a.s.sumed that he was right while my *seeing* was wrong. But riding across America's west was making me feel big. And memories of traveling rogues from Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which I had read and reread in high school, was making me feel good and rebellious.

And Tom Wolfe's experimentally:::::punctuated, day-glowingly huemorous, sa-tir-ically lyr-i-cal The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which Rama had recently a.s.signed, was making me want to view the world through the sharp, detached eye of the narrator.

"Maybe Rama really can't *see* all that well," I suddenly thought.

"Maybe he's making it up as he goes along."

The following day, Rama asked the group to *see* if we should stay in San Diego, return to Boulder, or move to Boston.

When our vote was split, mostly between Boulder and Boston, he gave the word to move on. So we drove around again to Los Angeles, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, where, by the intersection of Interstate-70 and Route 82, he announced that we had arrived at a crossroad: we could continue the search for a home, or we could take a side trip to a posh resort in nearby Aspen.

By now the disciples had been out of work for nearly a month, and a few of us were running low on money. The majority voted to continue the search. He led us instead to Aspen.

I told Rama that I felt uncomfortable having him pay my way.

"Look," he retorted, "it's my experiment."

"Does that make us your guinea pigs?" I wondered.

Later that week, in front of a handful of disciples, Rama harshly accused me of indulging like a child, of attacking him in the inner world, and of ruining the experience for the others. Then he issued a compa.s.sionate smile. "Don't take it so personally, kid,"

he said pleasantly. "Your consciousness got stuck, so I fixed it."

Then he swaggered away with the confidence of a heavyweight champion.

Rather than accepting the abuse as I had done in the past, I found myself thinking about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I thought about how main character Ken Kesey convinced himself during a drug experience that he could access G.o.d-like powers.

Kesey, writes Wolfe, was able to step back and realize that he was only hallucinating. Rama, who often claimed that he took so much LSD in the '60s that he never came down, also convinced himself that he could access G.o.d-like powers. But Rama went further than Kesey.

Rama professed to be an actual incarnation of a G.o.d. Rama professed that a few dozen disciples were causing extensive, invisible damage to a metropolitan area. "Maybe Rama has been hallucinating since 1969,"

I thought. "Maybe, unlike Kesey, he can't step back and get a perspective."

During the drive from Aspen to Boulder, I also realized that Kesey never charged "tuition," never tricked followers into buying lavish gifts for himself, and never claimed to be the anti-Christ. Kesey drove around America with his community in an old school bus. Rama led us separately in cars. Kesey brought diverse groups of people together.

Rama made a special effort to keep friends, lovers, and families apart.

Yet despite their differences, I sensed that Rama had been shaped in his youth by Kesey's pioneering experiments with Eastern culture and Western counter-culture, consciousness and drugs, expression and art, and freedom and control. I wondered if Rama, by a.s.signing the book, had been trying to reach out vicariously to his past and to an influential leader of his generation.

When we arrived in Boulder, Rama seemed to flip between supportive and abusive personas more rapidly. One moment, he was calm and kind; the next, he was ranting about how the Negative Forces, which had been co-inhabiting our bodies, were causing his hair to fall out and affecting the health of Vayu, his advance-souled Scottish terrier; then, flipping again to the other extreme, he encouraged us to move to a new condominium just outside of Boulder where "we could all live close to one another."

No one reminded him that only weeks before, we had left the city in psychic shambles.

The dream of living and working together--of community-- lingered on, and Rama had us fill out rental applications.

When he found out that I had signed up for a less expensive condo unit, he gently chided me. "You just don't get it, Mark. That's your old self trying to rea.s.sert itself. You need to have more s.p.a.ce.

You need to live in a clean, healthy environment."

I tried to explain to him that I needed money for Centre expenses and also for food.

"Don't worry, kid," he said. "I'll subsidize you. I want you to be happy."

So I switched to the most expensive unit and I was happy, and the other disciples seemed happy, and Rama seemed happy.

Boulder, after all, felt at least a mile high until a few days later, when Rama shouted at us for having once again destroyed the dream, the Light, and the city.

"This is crazy," I thought. After the meeting, I went for a walk.

I thought about how, earlier in the trip, Cathy had approached me and said, "This may sound funny, but is Rama...*okay*?"

"What do you mean?" I had replied.

"He's...well...it's just that something doesn't feel right."

"Rama is fine," I told her. "He just *sees* on a different level than we do."

But now, as I strayed from the condo grounds, I wondered if Cathy had been on to something. I thought about how the other disciples had seemed pensive lately, as if they too shared her concern.

I thought about how, during the trip, Rama seemed to be flipping out of control. "Maybe Rama is not okay," I thought.

Meanwhile, my readings and reflections on Kesey had located Rama within a cultural context which, like the knowledge that the Wizard of Oz was a man behind a curtain, largely deflated his projected images and metaphors. This enabled me to question elements of his world without fear of reprisal.

I questioned the Negative Forces. The Forces, I realized, had never affected me before I met Rama. Furthermore, they seemed to disappear as soon as I stopped thinking about them. "Maybe the Forces only exist in my mind," I thought. "Maybe they are a part of Rama's trip-- Rama's experiment."

I questioned Rama's claim that I was mentally ill and that I could hardly deal with the real world. I recalled my success as an undergraduate at a compet.i.tive university, as a computer operator and programmer, and as Rama's distribution coordinator. I recalled his claim that nearly *everyone* on the planet was mentally ill.

"Maybe Rama isn't qualified to diagnose mental illness," I thought.

"Maybe playing doctor is his way to control people."

At one point during the walk, I wondered what the consequences were for doubting the "Last Incarnation of Vishnu." But Rama had encouraged us, in the early years, to question him and to think for ourselves.

"Besides," I thought, "I haven't burst into flames yet."

So I went right on remembering, questioning, and thinking.

I thought about The Razor's Edge, a movie about one man's attempt to walk the narrow path between the spiritual and the mundane.

What struck me about the film was that the man does not have a guru.

Life is his teacher.

I recalled the hour-long conversation I had had with Donald Kohl's father, and suddenly the dam burst open and a flood of suppressed memories washed over me. I pictured Rama shouting "Fess up!"; announcing his name change; telling me to swallow the Stelazine; bursting into my room on the night that I wanted to leave...

I walked briskly back to the condo and knocked on Rama's door.

"Things don't feel right," I told him. "I think I need to take some time off."

"You have to do what is right for you," he replied.

I wanted to make a clean break. I still had a few hundred dollars.

I told him that I wanted to give him back the car.

He frowned. "Your desire to return the gift," he said, "is proof that you are mentally ill and that you can not function in the real world."

I did not want to stand around and argue. "Okay, Rama,"

I said and left. I felt primed for action. I was not scared.

I felt sure I was doing the right thing. I said good-bye to the disciples, packed, and started to back out of the lot, when I saw Laura in the rearview mirror, signaling me to wait.