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 crass 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 assured 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, Massachusetts, 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 passion 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 lust 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.