Take Me for a Ride Part 25

"Here you are sitting next to a fully enlightened teacher,"

he said bitterly, "and all you can do is live in a world of fantasy."

Rama was right, I decided, as I pushed the broom down the long driveway in Malibu. I was living in a world of fantasy. There, shaded by billowing, yellow smoke and accompanied by a talkative real estate agent, was Harrison Ford, quietly stepping toward Goldie Hawn's house, toward the "Last Incarnation of Vishnu." Ford wore dungarees.

Rama introduced himself as the renter and as a teacher of advanced meditation.

Anne introduced herself as a friend of Rama's.

"Sure is a blade runner kind of day," I blurted.

Ford said h.e.l.lo and went inside with the agent. We followed.

When the entourage reached the master bedroom, Rama gazed at the ocean and declared, "The Force is strong here."

But Ford did not seem interested in Rama's a.s.sessment of the local mystical energy field. Nor did Ford seem interested in Rama's recollections about his fire fighting days. (Rama failed to mention that he had fought the fires while in a prison camp, where he had been serving time for selling drugs.) Ford was interested in the construction of the house, and now he had seen enough.

He started to leave.

Rama handed him a Self Discovery, the free, promotional publication that had taken the place of WOOF!. Rama gave him an issue that had been distributed throughout southern California.

On the front cover was a blowup of Cindy, a beautiful, young, blond woman, meditating on the hood of Rama's red Porsche.

Inside were stories from The Last Incarnation. On the back cover was Rama's past-life resume advertis.e.m.e.nt, in which he claimed: "1531-1575, Zen Master, j.a.pan; 1602-1771, Head of Zen Order, j.a.pan; 1725-1804, Master of Monastery, Tibet; 1834-1905, Jnana Yoga Master, India; 1912-1945, Tibetan Lama and Head of Monastic Order, Tibet; 1950- , Self Realized Spiritual Teacher and Director of Spiritual Communities, United States."

Ford took the issue and left.

"It's just like in Star Wars," Rama noted as Ford drove away.

"He doesn't really believe in The Force."

There was more to tell of that particular story--my house burned down that day. And while disciples gave generously when Rama took up a collection, no one could have replaced my birthday gift from Rama.

I found it lying on the scorched foundation, reduced from a sleek, red bicycle to a meteor-like lump of distorted alloys.

But of all the sketches I could have written for The Last Incarnation, perhaps the most telling would have been the story of "Rama and the Enlightenment of Women." "Certainly we welcome men into our organization,"

Rama often announced. "But our primary focus is on the enlightenment of women." His interest in helping hundreds, even thousands, of women seemed a genuine reflection of his commitment to the underdog.

When I first met Rama in 1978, his crusade for women had already begun.

"Unless you are close to enlightenment," he had told potential women disciples, "you will lose a great deal of your spiritual and mystical power through s.e.x and through s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps."

Over the years, Rama spent many hours counseling and persuading women seekers to leave their boyfriends and husbands in the name of gender equality and higher spirituality. In 1981, for instance, weeks after the coup, he wrote and published in WOOF!

(Issue #2; January, 1981): "Dear WOOF!, I love the spiritual life and the vital life too. What should I do? - Sproutarina J. Prana

"Dear Sproutarina, Your difficulty is that you are burning the candle at both ends and sooner or later you are going to melt. I suggest a day in the desert alone, a good movie, or a powerful occult experience.

You see, Sproutarina, G.o.d loves you no matter what you do. If you want the vital, you can have it, and if you want the psychic you can have that too. But you can't have both, at least not in our Centre.

Decide which will really fulfill you and choose that one. Only you can decide what you want in this lifetime."

Rama--who preferred the term "having s.e.x" to "making love"-- occasionally softened his position on s.e.xuality and invited followers to relax, accept their human nature, and do whatever worked for them.

"Hey, Kate!" he once said in an Italian accent. "You go out with-a my boy Mark, and I'll take plenty good care a-you!" It was understood that Rama meant business when he donned his G.o.dfather persona, and I subsequently enjoyed a several-month relations.h.i.+p with this young disciple. Yet when I asked Rama if it was possible for a man and woman to have an emotionally and spiritually supportive relations.h.i.+p, he smiled, shook his head, and said, "Even if you find a woman whose consciousness is spiritually refined, it still wouldn't work-- because yours is not..."

In contrast, his relations.h.i.+ps with women were highly refined, Rama pointed out, because for him s.e.x had become an act of spiritual, not physical, self-giving. Nonetheless, after he got his housemate Anne pregnant in 1982, his self-giving nature was nowhere to be found.

Instead of offering her wisdom or support, he sat in the lobby of the abortion clinic, sorting and counting cash from a workshop he had given on spiritual evolution.

When Anne returned to the lobby after the abortion, Rama had disappeared.

Embarra.s.sed, she approached the receptionist.

"He went to a bookstore," the woman replied. "He said he'd be back later."

Women in the Centre were not supposed to let on that they were sleeping with Rama. Anne therefore felt that she had no one with whom to share the burden of the abortion. When she appeared depressed a week later, Rama, in front of another disciple, remarked, "If it's not one, it's the other."

Rama often invited women disciples to "talk" with him after Centre meetings, Anne recalled years later. But there, in his bedroom, they frequently exchanged more than words. Rama's relations.h.i.+p policy, she also recalled, required inner circle women to limit their relations.h.i.+ps to one man: himself. His justification for the policy was that it kept them from unwittingly transferring their partners'

lower male energy. Male energy, he frequently complained, very much affected his finely tuned, delicate sensibilities.

Perhaps Rama sought protection from "baby energy" as well; he managed to persuade one disciple in her late twenties to leave her husband and newborn child.

Despite his ability to invoke adoration and fidelity, Rama seemed concerned that his power to control female followers was not absolute. He therefore kept certain men from the inner circle, despite my recommendations.

"Jeff," I once advised, "is really smart. He's good with people, and he's a lot of fun to be around."

Rama hesitated. "I don't know, Mark; I'm worried about Dana."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't want her falling in love with him."

Rama was in a bind. On the one hand, he knew that Jeff would be an a.s.set to the operation. On the other, he sensed that Jeff was too bright (he had been an honors graduate student in chemistry at UCSD), too athletic (he played ultimate frisbee), and too good looking to be running around loose within the carefully controlled nest.

But Rama had a plan. He encouraged Jeff to form a relations.h.i.+p with Karen, who had previously followed Rama's advice and turned down an offer from Stanford medical school. He then encouraged them both to enroll in a computer science Master's program at UCLA, and to gradually phase me out as the poster and newspaper distribution coordinator.

One night in a restaurant in Los Angeles, Rama's story about wanting to help women took on a new twist. He had invited me to dinner with Nick and Sarah, a handsome young couple who acted in Hollywood and who had recently joined the Centre. When the waitress came to take our orders, Rama began waving and curling his hand.

Moments later, as the waitress was walking away, Nick asked, "What were you doing with your hand, Rama?"

"I was sending her s.e.xual pleasure directly through the inner worlds,"

he replied, glancing at Sarah now and again.

Stories of "Rama and the Enlightenment of Women" were all the more startling, I found, when narrated by Rama himself.

There was the one, for instance, about Sue.

"Sue once came in my room," Rama told me, "took off all her clothes, and flung herself on me. 'Please don't make me go home and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, Rama,' she kept saying, but I just sat there and meditated on the Infinite, until I entered samadhi."

There was the one about Harry, the main character from Lolita, one of Vladimir Nabokov's novels. "The point of Lolita,"

Rama explained to me, "is not that Harry repeatedly slept with a fourteen-year-old after kidnapping and drugging her.

The point is that Harry really did love her."

There was the one about the UCLA students. "Sometimes I walk the streets of Westwood," he said at Centre meetings, "and drain the undergraduates of their mystical power. Now, don't get all upset.

It's not like they're using it. Most of them are just wasting it on s.e.x."

And there was the one about his former wife. "At one point in the relations.h.i.+p," he told me, "I had to decide whether to be of service to the one or to the many." Rama often described his dream of living in a fortified desert compound with hundreds of heavily armed women devotees. Perhaps he broke up with his "jealous"

wife--"She kept imagining that I was looking at other women..."-- in search of the many.

Once I invited a friend from work to one of Rama's public lectures.

She was interested in meditation and had recently left her boyfriend.

"Thanks, but no thanks!" she exclaimed when I mentioned the lecturer's name.