ng 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."

During the drive from Aspen to Boulder, I also realized that Kesey
never charged "tuition," never tricked followers into buying lavish
gifts for himself, and never claimed to be the anti-Christ. Kesey drove
around America with his community in an old school bus. Rama led us
separately in cars. Kesey brought diverse groups of people together.
Rama made a special effort to keep friends, lovers, and families apart.
Yet despite their differences, I sensed that Rama had been shaped in
his youth by Kesey's pioneering experiments with Eastern culture and
Western counter-culture, consciousness and drugs, expression and art,
and freedom and control. I wondered if Rama, by assigning the book,
had been trying to reach out vicariously to his past and to an
influential leader of his generation.

When we arrived in Boulder, Rama seemed to flip between supportive and
abusive personas more rapidly. One moment, he was calm and kind; the
next, he was ranting about how the Negative Forces, which