Rama asked that we sit up straight. He put on electronic music, slowly scanned the audience, and raised his hands above his head. Many of us gazed at him intensely. It didn't matter that those occupying the same room as him were, during meditation, supposed to evolve hundreds, even thousands of lifetimes. We still tried to absorb as much spiritual light as we could. Then, he might end with a quote from the teachings of Lao Tzu, Castaneda's Don Juan, or Christ. At the next Centre meeting, Rama might announce that everything had changed and that we were in an extremely poor state of consciousness. "At the weekly Centre meetings," I told Donald Kohl's father, "Rama teaches us to realize our full potential. He teaches us to love and respect life." I did not describe, however, Rama's fixation on death. "Someone in San Diego is trying to kill me," Rama once told devotees in a turret of the castle he was renting. "I am moving to Los Angeles. I suggest that you do the same." Another time Rama turned to me and said, "Do you realize that I can kill you at any moment?" "He's only joking," I thought. "No, really," he went on. "I am extremely strong and could kill you in an instant!" Repeatedly during the '80s and early '90s, Rama expressed a desire to take disciples for a ride in a Lear Jet into a snow-capped mountain, into the other worlds. "That would be a clean way to go," he said. One time after a beach meditation, Rama asked five or six disciples, "What do you see?" "I see red," said Sal. "I see blood, destruction, war, global apocalypse." "Very good," said Rama. Repeatedly during the '80s and early '90s, Rama slept with numerous women devotees, several of whom claim that he took no measures whatsoever to prevent the potential spread of AIDS. Also in the 80s, Rama encouraged followers to secure software contracts in ADA, a computer language used to control the United States' hardware of war. On the night before his thirty-fifth birthday, Rama invited thirty or so disciples to a party. He had been either ignoring or abusing many of us, so the invitation came as a welcome surprise. Unlike other recent events, there was an upbeat feel to the party. He had asked Anne, for instance, to spend time decorating the room with colorful balloons. "Maybe," a few of us thought, "things are going to get better." During the party, though, Rama demanded that a handful of us confess, one by one, before the other disciples, that the demons had succeeded in talking over our souls. "Anne is the worst," Rama proclaimed, lashing out at her. "She either looks like a witch or a whore." Then, in a seeming attempt to exorcise the demons, he told us to meet him the following day at the Los Angeles coroner's office. He wanted us to witness an autopsy.