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Laxer, Mark Eliot

"Take Me for a Ride: coming of age in a destructive cult"

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.


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