Rather than accepting the abuse as I had done in the past, I found myself thinking about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I thought about how main character Ken Kesey convinced himself during a drug experience that he could access god-like powers. Kesey, writes Wolfe, was able to step back and realize that he was only hallucinating. Rama, who often claimed that he took so much LSD in the '60s that he never came down, also convinced himself that he could access god-like powers. But Rama went further than Kesey. Rama professed to be an actual incarnation of a god. Rama professed that a few dozen disciples were causing extensive, invisible damage to a metropolitan area. "Maybe Rama has been hallucinating since 1969," I thought. "Maybe, unlike Kesey, he can't step back and get a perspective." During the drive from Aspen to Boulder, I also realized that Kesey never charged "tuition," never tricked followers into buying lavish gifts for himself, and never claimed to be the anti-Christ. Kesey drove around America with his community in an old school bus. Rama led us separately in cars. Kesey brought diverse groups of people together. Rama made a special effort to keep friends, lovers, and families apart. Yet despite their differences, I sensed that Rama had been shaped in his youth by Kesey's pioneering experiments with Eastern culture and Western counter-culture, consciousness and drugs, expression and art, and freedom and control. I wondered if Rama, by assigning the book, had been trying to reach out vicariously to his past and to an influential leader of his generation. When we arrived in Boulder, Rama seemed to flip between supportive and abusive personas more rapidly. One moment, he was calm and kind; the next, he was ranting about how the Negative Forces, which had been co-inhabiting our bodies, were causing his hair to fall out and affecting the health of Vayu, his advance-souled Scottish terrier; then, flipping again to the other extreme, he encouraged us to move to a new condominium just outside of Boulder where "we could all live close to one another." No one reminded him that only weeks before, we had left the city in psychic shambles. The dream of living and working together--of community-- lingered on, and Rama had us fill out rental applications. When he found out that I had signed up for a less expensive condo unit, he gently chided me. "You just don't get it, Mark. That's your old self trying to reassert itself. You need to have more space. You need to live in a clean, healthy environment." I tried to explain to him that I needed money for Centre expenses and also for food. "Don't worry, kid," he said. "I'll subsidize you. I want you to be happy."