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Laxer, Mark Eliot

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


Rama increasingly used fear tactics to control the financially hard-pressed,
sleep deprived followers, many of whom worked more than one job.
He told them that if he stopped protecting someone who left the Centre,
they would suffer forever in the "seventh level of hell." He told
them that he wielded the power to create and demolish the universes.
He told them that he was no longer the "Last Incarnation of Vishnu
The Cosmic Preserver," but of "Siva The Cosmic Destroyer."
He emphasized that those criticizing him would invariably get hit
by a car or contract cancer.
Rama, who had not held public lectures since early 1988, required most
students to bring at least three new potential initiates per year.
He spent hours during the NPDS and ASI "computer" meetings coaching
disciples about what kind of people they should recruit and about
how they should go about recruiting them. He also told them
of his plan to have them recruit at universities in every state
in North America.
Rama came up with many new ideas between 1989 and 1991. He told
the disciples, for instance, that his former Guru was really "a
great big spidery Entity from hell." He did not mention that ten
years earlier, he had billed Chinmoy as "the Seventh Avatar.


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