The next day I watched two men saw the skull of a "John Doe" hit-and-run victim. The saw whined. They peeled off the face. The air smelled acrid. My stomach felt bloated. "That could be me on the table," I thought. I wanted to retch. The pathologist measured the brain. I found myself thinking about life. Not in terms of Rama's increasingly fearful descriptions of the world, but in terms of my gut feelings. "Something happened," I wrote in a journal that I had recently started. "I felt it, a change inside me..." After the autopsy, I noticed the way I breathed. I noticed the way my blood pulsed through me. I slept more; I had been sleeping only five or six hours a night. I watched the way light played off ripples in a body of water. Rama had failed to appear at the coroner's that day. Until the next Centre meeting, his world seemed small. Mr. Kohl listened to my descriptions of Rama and of the organization. "Tell me, Mark," he said. "Does Rama pressure the disciples to be a certain way?" "Well, technically we're not really disciples. We're students. Think of the organization as being like a university. Sure, there's some pressure, if that's what you want to call it. But it doesn't come from Rama. It comes from each of us wanting to do well." I did not mention that Rama often threatened to spend less time with his disciples because we maintained an abysmal level of consciousness and because we bombarded him with Negative Occult Energy. "You should understand that I will still love you no matter what you do," Rama lectured. "But when you ignore my suggestions, when you succumb to the Forces, when you don't keep up with your tuition payments, you are setting yourselves up for a multi-lifetime pattern that will be extremely difficult to break. You are also letting down those we were sent here to help. Many of you don't seem to realize that you can easily be replaced. Believe me, there are plenty of seekers out there who would genuinely appreciate the opportunity that the Infinite is providing here." Nor did I mention to Mr. Kohl that Rama followed through with his threats of replacement. In 1984, for instance, he kicked out four hundred followers after looking at their photos and reading their recently submitted essays. The purge gave him greater control over the remaining four or five hundred, who now lived in constant fear of getting kicked out. As for the outcasts, many had developed psychological dependencies on Rama. They continued to write him letters, to appear regularly at public lectures, and to send him money. Because he maintained their names and addresses in a database, he could always swap them back in when the current batch burned out. Nor did I mention that, in response to the intensifying pressure, I had dropped out of UCSD a year before Donald, a sensitive, bright UCLA undergraduate, committed suicide.