Take Me for a Ride Part 40

Several months later, Rama gave Karen a "Warrior's task."

He told her to call and instruct each of the nineteen to attend a private meeting. The meeting was to be held hundreds of miles south of Palo Alto, in an obscure park in the mountains of Malibu.

It was scheduled for December 5th, 1987--the following night.

They showed.

Under the guise of helping them protect their careers, Rama warned the approximately thirty people--the nineteen women and about eleven other disciples--that newspaper articles targeting him in a negative light were in the offing.

He spoke to them about the case of Annie Eastwood. A former follower, Ms.

Eastwood reported that during one encounter, Rama had misled her spiritually, abused her psychologically, showed her a gun, and demanded that she have s.e.x with him. Rama later told the press: "At no time during our evening together [with Annie] did I brandish a hand gun." But now, at the 1987 late night Malibu gathering, he admitted: "I did have a hand gun with me that night with Annie...

but I did not wave it around."

Later that night, Rama asked five or six people to walk back to the cars and wait in the parking lot. Anne and Rachel remained.

Rama faced the remaining disciples, roughly half of whom had partic.i.p.ated in one of his group LSD trips. "If anyone asks you about LSD,"

he said somberly, "you all *know* that I gave you a placebo."

Then Rama, perhaps nervous about what I had observed in 1984 and 1985, told the disciples: "Mark was always a little young, a little naive, a little stupid...he thought that I actually *had* given him LSD...we all used to indulge him...we all knew that it was just that goofy Mark again..."

Rama went on to say that one day they might have to explain "all this"

to a judge and jury. But under *no* circ.u.mstance, he warned, should they speak to the press.

Toward the end of the meeting, he told the nineteen that if they wanted to return to the Centre in this life, they must first hand in an essay--typed, double-s.p.a.ced--in which they were to confess to and apologize for their hurtful, wicked deeds.

After the meeting, Rama returned to his latest project: staging a national, six-month, six hundred and fifty thousand dollar "Zen" seminar promotional campaign. The effort included the placement of a two-page spread in the Sunday New York Times.

One page was a photo of himself; the other advertised his free talk on Zen and success at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center (see Appendix D). The full-page spreads also appeared in the L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Vanity Fair, and in more than a dozen college campus newspapers across the country, including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, UC San Diego, San Diego State, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.

Rama's aura of allegations came to light in the press in the midst of his national speaking tour: Newsweek, "Who Is This Rama?-- The master of Zen and the Art of Publicity is now having some very serious problems", 2/1/88; The L.A. Weekly, "The Cosmic Seducer: How Frederick Lenz Got Rich, Built A Clientele And Seduced Women", 1/28/88, and "Rama Redux", 9/1/88; The San Francisco Chronicle, "Zen and now: The gospel according to guru 'Rama'", 11/8/87, and "s.e.x, Fear Broke Guru's Spell", 11/27/87; The San Diego Union, "YUPPIE GURU: Ex-Disciples Turn On 'Master'", 1/10/88; and New Age Journal, "The Rama Drama", 6/1/88.

When articles began to appear, Rama cancelled several talks.

When more appeared, he stopped giving public lectures altogether.

In the spring of 1988, Rama had Karen call and instruct the nineteen to attend a middle-of-the-night meeting in the Mohave Desert, scheduled for the end of April.

Rachel and Anne individually expressed doubts about whether they would attend.

In the past, Rama had used the fear of Ent.i.ties and of bad karma to discipline his disciples. Typically, he had explained that he would try to protect those who strayed from his path.

But by now his role had dramatically changed. No longer the protector, he told disciples that if they disobeyed him, *he* would see to it that they had a car accident or that they came down with cancer.

He had Karen warn Rachel and Anne that if they did not attend the meeting, they would come to "serious harm."

They showed.

At the Mohave Desert meeting, Rama announced that the nineteen could return to the Centre, move to Boston, teach yoga, and bring him new students.

"Who does *not* want to come back?" he asked.

Anne, Dana, and Rachel reached their hands into the desert sky.

Afterwards, the devotees stopped at Denny's restaurant for coffee.

The dissenters sat together. Rama approached. Anne mentioned that the brakes of her car were not functioning properly, and that she had had difficulty getting to the meeting.

Rama took credit for the problem. He said: "Let that be a warning."

Then he told the three women that they had better not send him any bad vibes.

"One out of twenty women gets breast cancer," he told them.

"Five out of twenty women could get breast cancer. Twenty out of twenty women could get breast cancer. Some women get cancer of the uterus..."

I was shocked when I learned how Rama had treated Rachel, Dana, and Anne.

I was shocked that Rama's world had gotten so out of hand.

But according to what I read in the press, the experiences of my friends were by no means isolated.

In 1990, Anne and I sat together and read Rama's seven-page "Statement To The Press." Near the start of the "Statement," Rama lists the names of "credible persons who can verify the truth of my a.s.sertions."

I glanced at the names. "Karen Lever." True, she had been accepted at a number of medical schools, including Stanford.

She *was* extremely bright. But as Rama's mouthpiece, she was the one who had threatened dissenters with serious harm.

"Dr. Wayne Surdam" and "Dr. Ermano Rambaldi." True, they were an award-winning UC Berkeley scholar and a UCLA geologist respectively.

True, they *had* taken the study of spirituality to heart. But they had never gotten close enough to Rama to observe his *other* side.

"Richard Loftin." I did not know him. But during nightmare weekend in Seattle, he reportedly sat across from the three tripping women and giggled.

Rama continues in the "Statement":

Annie Eastwood alleges that we had a single s.e.xual encounter over five years ago in my home in Malibu, California. She has told the press that in hindsight, she now views the s.e.xual encounter we had together as forced.

She has alleged that during the course of an evening together I brandished a hand gun. She then states that she had s.e.x with me out of fear.

Rama then claims:

...at no time during our evening together did I brandish a hand gun.

Anne looked up from the "Statement" and said, "But Rama explicitly told us at the meeting in Malibu that he *did* take out a hand gun that night with Annie."

"Maybe," I replied, "Rama is playing off the difference in meaning between *holding* and *brandishing* [waving] a hand gun."

"What Annie perhaps did not know," Anne added, "and what Rama fails to mention, is that he nearly *always* slept with a gun by his bed."

Rama writes:

Ms. Eastwood continued to attend my seminars for another year after our night together.

This would not seem to be likely behavior on the part of a person who was allegedly forced to have s.e.x at gunpoint.

"No," I thought. "But perhaps on the part of a person who has been psychologically and s.e.xually manipulated and abused."

Rama continues:

Now, five years after the event and in concordance with a group of persons affiliated with Cult Awareness Network, she has decided that a gun was present during our encounter and that she was forced to have s.e.x with me. Her story is absurd and untrue.

...Lisa Hughes has a.s.serted in a variety of interviews that I forced her to take L.S.D.

while she was a guest at my home during the summer of 1987. She also alleges that in some way, which is not fully clear in her accounts, I coerced her into having s.e.x with me. She further alleges that I bought her presents and that while she was on L.S.D. I tried to convince her that she was possessed by 'demons.'

I never gave Lisa Hughes L.S.D. nor did I, as Lisa Hughes a.s.serts, take L.S.D. with her.