Take Me for a Ride: Coming of Age in a Destructive CultLaxer, Mark E.
Religion
Take Me for a Ride: Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult
Laxer, Mark E.
Cults -- United States; Lenz, Frederick, 1950-
In a motel just east of San Diego, Rama left us one evening
to conduct a Centre meeting in Beverly Hills. When he returned,
he berated us for not working together and for not even *trying*
to maintain a decent level of consciousness in his absence.
"You are acting like a hoard of angry sorcerers," he snapped,
borrowing a phrase from a Castaneda book. But he was wrong.
Paul, Karen, and I had stayed up late that night trying to come
up with a catchy name for his proposed software company.
Furthermore, we had meditated together, we had maintained something
of a meditative consciousness, and we had tried to *see* which city
we were supposed to move to.
In the past when Rama contradicted the facts, I had assumed
that he was right while my *seeing* was wrong. But riding across
America's west was making me feel big. And memories of traveling
rogues from Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which I had read and
reread in high school, was making me feel good and rebellious.
And Tom Wolfe's experimentally:::::punctuated, day-glowingly huemorous,
sa-tir-ically lyr-i-cal The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
which Rama had recently assigned, was making me want to view
the world through the sharp, detached eye of the narrator.
"Maybe Rama really can't *see* all that well," I suddenly thought.
"Maybe he's making it up as he goes along."
The following day, Rama asked the group to *see* if we should
stay in San Diego, return to Boulder, or move to Boston.
When our vote was split, mostly between Boulder and Boston, he gave
the word to move on. So we drove around again to Los Angeles,
Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, where, by the intersection of Interstate-70
and Route 82, he announced that we had arrived at a crossroad:
we could continue the search for a home, or we could take a side
trip to a posh resort in nearby Aspen.
By now the disciples had been out of work for nearly a month,
and a few of us were running 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account