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 hoard 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 assumed 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 assigned, 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 compassionate 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 god-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 god-like powers. But Rama went further than Kesey. Rama professed to be an actual incarnation of a god. 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."