Take Me for a Ride: Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult

Appendix D: Excerpts From Rama's Ads and Brochures

1. Bicycle Ride--Walden

After I left Rama's inner circle in 1985, I occasionally bicycled to Walden Pond, where I read about Thoreau's experiment with self-reliance. My seven years in the cult of Rama--Dr. Frederick Lenz, who was known early on as Atmananda--had deeply shaken my confidence. Atmananda often assured me that I was possessed by Negative Forces, that I was barely able to function in the real world, and that I was fortunate he did not drop me off at a mental institution. I met him in 1978, when I was seventeen.

Thoreau helped me recall a time, before Atmananda, when I was strong and self-reliant. I had been an avid cyclist. Pedaling thousands of miles each year helped strengthen both my legs and self-esteem. Throughout my teenage years bicycling and self-confidence were inextricably linked, and I grew to believe I could ride anywhere, under any conditions. I tried to approach life with a similar gusto, which may explain why, in 1979, Atmananda invited me to move with him to southern California to start a spiritual centre. From 1979 to 1981, I lived with him by the cliffs of La Jolla where I witnessed his rise to power. Today, in 1993, he controls the minds of several hundred computer consultants, businessmen, doctors, and lawyers. Each year he extracts from them roughly ten million dollars.

As I gazed at Walden Pond in search of calm, the wind spawned new waves, and the surface swelled with complexity. I recalled what Atmananda had said after I returned from a five-day bike trip in California. He announced in front of other disciples that my aura was dark. He also said that I had been attacked by nocturnal, mountain-dwelling Entities which "cause neurosis and psychosis, obliterate lifetimes of spiritual evolution, and can possess your soul."

Atmananda's Entity-prevention program included studying with a fully enlightened teacher, meditating regularly, and avoiding solitary excursions into nature. Yet in the spring of 1986, nearly one year after I left him, I reminded myself that I would rather be possessed in my world than potentially perfect in his. I planned to pedal across America not with an exorcist, but with a puppy.

On May 31, 1986, as warm, moist air pushed pockets of fog over Walden Pond, I lifted the four-month-old Siberian husky, Nunatak, into the doggie-carrier. The carrier rested on top of the bicycle trailer, attached to the frame of my 12-speed. Strong headwinds soon strained my muscles, shook the lush canopy of foliage, and pelted me with large drops of rain. As I began the journey west, the front tire raced through puddles while my mind raced through painful memories and questions. How had my years with Atmananda affected me? Why was it so difficult to leave him? What was it about my past that led me to him?

2. Zapped!

"Lights," said my father and for a moment, except for the phosphorescent hands of the clock on the wall, the room went black. With a flip of a switch, he suddenly reappeared: a tall, thin man with thick glasses, standing beside the glowing enlarger. As a child I sat for hours under a dim yellow light, mesmerized by images appearing on paper submerged in trays filled with smelly liquid. Yellow, my father taught me, has no apparent effect on the light-sensitive specks coating photographic paper.

The unorthodox images which leapt from the walls of our house seemed as eerie as the darkroom experience itself: there was a photograph of a llama's head as viewed through a distorting fish-eye lens, there was a photograph of a shredded poster of a man's face, and there were many abstract photos which seemed to defy description. My father, a production manager at a New York publishing company, perhaps saw the world in a different light than his peers.

My mother was an elementary school teacher with black hair and sometimes kind, sometimes intense eyes. A generous and caring woman, she put her career on hold for more than a decade to raise a family. She met my father in upstate New York on a hike sponsored by an outing club.

When I was fourteen, I sensed that my father was growing tired, detached, and depressed, but I did not understand why. He expressed abstractions better than emotions, and found it difficult to vent the angers and frustrations which had accumulated from work and from home.

Nor did I understand that my mother freely gave to me what she, in her youth, had sorely missed: love. Oblivious to the magnitude of her workload--she taught full-time and was pursuing a Master's degree-- I grew angry with her as a teenager partly because she seemed insecure and overbearing, and partly because she expected me, my brother, and my father to help keep the house clean in the way that she wanted.

Despite my family's love for the outdoors, for our dog, and for one another, the emotional fabric that bound us together often seemed on the verge of ripping apart. And the problems only intensified as my brother and I grew older.

Two-and-a-half-years my elder, my brother was an avid backpacker and rock climber with jet-black hair, Gandhi glasses, and a gentle but determined disposition. He too felt that something in our family was "out of whack," and we occasionally discussed what we would do when we left home. But unlike me, he had no one to buffer him from my parents who, I was starting to discover, were only human.

I was a sensitive child. I was so sensitive that the sounds of someone chewing made me upset. I was a light sleeper. I was also a slob, a knee-jerk rebel, and something of a nerd when it came to doing things like making friends with girls. Nonetheless, I decided that I could work out whatever I needed to work out in a healthier environment than at home; the countdown to the last day of high school, after which I planned to set out on my own, began when I was around fifteen. Meanwhile, I read a lot and spent time with friends, some of whom also enjoyed hiking and bicycling.

In the summer of 1976, when I was sixteen, I bicycled from the White Mountains of New Hampshire to Boston with people from an outing club. One morning, as I watched my traveling companions prepare their daily dose of hallucinogens, I realized that I wanted to be part of their fellowship. The desire, however, was checked by a gut-level impulse to avoid drugs, so Jim, a sinewy guy stooped over a pot of boiling morning glory seeds, turned me on instead to The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This was a popular account of Carlos Castaneda's purported apprenticeship with Yaqui Indian medicine man Juan Matus, or Don Juan.

From the cover of the book peered a menacing and surreal painting of a crow.

"But a crow isn't always a crow," said Jim softly, paraphrasing Don Juan as he stirred the seeds. "Sometimes it's a powerful sorcerer in disguise."

Intrigued by the paradox of the crow, I plowed through The Teachings of Don Juan and through Castaneda's A Separate Reality and Journey To Ixtlan. At summer's end, still drugless and clueless as to whether crows were birds or sorcerers, I left Boston clutching a Castaneda book.

Back in New York, I chose to see the world less through the eyes of an eleventh grader taking honors physics and history, and more through the eyes of a sorcerer's apprentice. I incorporated into my daily routine Don Juan's recommendations. As an exercise in humility, I spoke aloud to plants. To *see* beyond society's description of reality, I tried to stop my thoughts. To expand my awareness beyond the confines of the waking state, I sought to wake within a dream.

My interest in what lay beyond the scope of traditional reality led to an interest in what lay beyond the scope of traditional education, and, that fall, I thought about switching to a public experimental high school founded in the late '60s. I firmly believed that I would thrive in a world without grades, attendance taking, tests, and requirements. In January, 1977, with the guidance of my brother, I managed to persuade my reluctant parents to let me join.

I chose to continue taking physics and history at the traditional school; other subjects I took at the non-traditional school where, in a creative writing class, I wrote:

Teachers force us to perceive, The surface world of reason: "A tree is but a pole with leaves, Whose habits change each season."

I thrived within a self-designed, academically rigorous educational program, but experienced no breakthroughs in my search for Hidden Realms of Perception until the following summer. The experience came when I was working ten-hour days and five-and-a-half day weeks on a farm in southern New Hampshire. In my spare time, I was designing and building an electricity-producing windmill, which ended up towering some twenty feet above Onyx, one of the tallest cows. Farm-crew members sometimes walked out to the hay fields to get high. One night, after smoking marijuana, I fell asleep and later saw, above where I lay, a cow, its head swaying gently to and fro. Though I thought I was awake it was but a dream, for when I woke from "waking," the cow had disappeared. This experience led me to believe that like Mr. Castaneda's mentor, I could consciously direct my actions within the context of a dream.

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