"Rama teaches us a combination of spiritual paths like Taoism, mysticism, and Christianity." I did not describe what might happen at a typical Centre meeting. Rama, who usually arrived about forty minutes late, might begin with a discourse on the teachings of Lao Tzu, Castaneda's Don Juan, or Christ. Then, couching parables in modern terms, he might proclaim: "Short is the path of the fast lane on the freeway to enlightenment." Or he might say: "As the coyote tries to catch the road runner, so too tries the seeker to comprehend the life of a fully enlightened teacher through rational means." He might make the several hundred disciples laugh with: "Many are cold (called) but few are frozen (chosen)." He often lectured the men in the Centre that our untamed sexual energy had been stunting the spiritual growth of our sister disciples. He often lectured the women in the Centre that they needed to learn how to emotionally detach themselves from men. And he often lectured both sexes that he attracted very powerful souls, that we were way too powerful for our own good, and that we had been making him physically ill by relentlessly attacking him in the inner world. He lectured, too, about the inevitable eclipsing of the world's spiritual light, a process which seemed to be perpetually accelerating. "Haven't you been feeling it?" he asked. "Yes, Rama," came the inevitable response. "I feel it." Rama quoted Chaucer, Roethke, and Shakespeare. He also told a story (from The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury) about a Martian who, when approached by humans, transformed into the object of their desires. The Martian became a woman's dead son, for instance, until someone else walked by. "I am like the Martian," said Rama. "I am constantly being called upon to fulfill your desires." Rama might question disciples with a portable microphone, a la Phil Donahue. "Why don't you share what you saw tonight," he said, roaming the aisles. He seemed to enjoy interrupting us when our response was spiritually or grammatically incorrect. Then Rama sat in front of the auditorium, wiggling his toes and fielding questions, a la Chinmoy. "Rama?" a woman might begin. "Yes." "The men where I work are constantly sending me sexual energy. Each day I come home completely drained." "What do you do for a living?" "I'm a receptionist." "Why don't you study programming?" he suggested. "Software professionals tend to be less visible and, therefore, less prone to psychic attack." Rama often lectured on the nature of consciousness: "Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines." He taught that the next step along the path to self-knowledge was to debug those subroutines hidden in our minds at an early age by our teachers and, in particular, by our parents.