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 sexual 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 masturbate, 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 sex." And there was the one about his former wife. "At one point in the relationship," 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. "So, what's wrong with Rama?" "You mean the one who lists his past life credentials--dates and all-- in full-page ads? The one who *specializes* in women?" "Uh, yeah." "He isn't bringing women to enlightenment, Mark. He's bringing them to bed." "Come on," I countered, trying not to admit to her or to myself what he had been doing for years. "So he has a girlfriend. What's wrong with a spiritual teacher having a girlfriend?" "There's nothing wrong with that," she said firmly. "But he is sleeping with many, many women." "Where did you hear that?" "From a number of women I met at a meditation retreat in San Diego. They fell for his line about being lovers in past lives."