In the fall of 1984, Rama took twenty-eight disciples for a ride
around the western United States. The purpose of the trip, he said,
was to *see* which city we were supposed to move to. I was glad
that he had invited me. I liked the idea of searching for a home.
I loved to travel. And I looked forward to an exercise in *seeing*.
"This is going to be fun," I thought.
The trip began in a parking lot in southern Malibu. Rama raised
his arms, made a whistling sound, and said, "The ocean is your friend.
You do not know how long you have left in this world. You may never
see the ocean again in this lifetime. You should say good-bye."
It was a poignant moment for me. I loved the ocean.
"Good-bye," I thought. Then Rama strode to his Turbo Carerra.
It no longer bothered me that Rama owned two Porsches at a time
when many disciples were struggling to meet the increasing tuition.
If he got what he wanted, I figured, maybe he'd go easy on us during
the scorching demon-and-brimstone monologues. Besides, at three
a.m. in northern Malibu, he once took me over one hundred and
twenty miles an hour. The acceleration had been breathtaking;
the ride, smooth.
The disciples now turned from the ocean to their cars.
Anne, Dana, and I walked to our gifts from Rama--two Mazda
RX-7's and a Honda Civic Wagon, respectively. Then we drove
east by northeast into Los Angeles, the high desert, and southern Nevada.
Rama had divided us into four groups, with three cars per group
and two or three disciples per car. The groups caravanned separately,
and we met two or three times a day, typically at a Denny's restaurant
or at a Best Western motel. I rode with Alexander, a spare,
devout UCSD recruit who had impressed the Centre with his ability
to place second or third in a marathon. Perhaps from a lack of social
self-esteem, Alexander never said much, but he spoke with me,
and I enjoyed his company.
The following day, Rama invited me and Alexander to ride in his group.
It was at a rest area in southwestern Utah that Rama approached me
and said, "You had better stop vibing Laura. I am fucking her."
A UCSD recruit in her early twenties, Laura had large, dark eyes
and ample social self-esteem. She spoke so fast that she often
slurred her words. She was currently riding with Rama.
"Sorry, Rama," I said, startled by his raw honesty.
We pushed on to Denver and then to Boulder, where we stayed
in a motel near the university. We assessed the city in terms
of jobs, housing, computer courses, and mystical power spots.
Two or three days later, Rama asked us to *see* if we should stay
or move on to Boston. He seemed pleased that we voted to stay.
Boulder, after all, was commuting distance to computer jobs in Denver;
it had a respectable university; it was beautiful in the winter and cute
the year round; it felt at least a mile high until several days later,
when Rama accused us of destroying it with our powerful Negative
Energy Field.
"Pack your things," he ordered, and we cut a path south toward
Albuquerque along the Rockies' edge.
There was something about the open road and the blue Colorado
sky that absolved us of our guilt from having decimated a city,
because Alexander and I were anything but upset. The Beatles'
White Album was playing Sexy Sadie, a song satirizing an Indian guru.
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 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.