can't have both, at least not in our Centre. Decide
which will really fulfill you and choose that one. Only you can decide
what you want in this lifetime."

Rama--who preferred the term "having sex" to "making
love"--occasionally softened his position on sexuality and invited
followers to relax, accept their human nature, and do whatever worked
for them. "Hey, Kate!" he once said in an Italian accent. "You go out
with-a my boy Mark, and I'll take plenty good care a-you!" It was
understood that Rama meant business when he donned his Godfather
persona, and I subsequently enjoyed a several-month relationship with
this young disciple. Yet when I asked Rama if it was possible for a
man and woman to have an emotionally and spiritually supportive
relationship, he smiled, shook his head, and said, "Even if you find a
woman whose consciousness is spiritually refined, it still wouldn't
work--because yours is not... "

In contrast, his relationships with women were highly refined, Rama
pointed out, because for him sex had become an act of spiritual, not
physical, self-giving. Nonetheless, after he got his housemate Anne
pregnant in 1982, his self-giving nature was nowhere to be found.
Instead of offering her wisdom or support, he sat in the lobby of the
abortion clinic, sorting and counting cash from a workshop he had given
on spiritual evolution.

When Anne returned to the lobby after the abortion, Rama had
disappeared. Embarrassed, she approached the receptionist.

"He went to a bookstore," the woman replied. "He said he'd be back
later."

Women in the Centre were not supposed to let on that they were sleeping
with Rama. Anne therefore felt that she had no one with whom to share
the burden of the abortion. When she appeared depressed a week later,
Rama, in front of another disciple, remarked, "If it's not one, it's
the other."

Rama often invited women disciples to "talk" with him after Centre
meetings, Anne recalled years later. But there, in his bedroom, they
frequently exchanged more than words. Rama's relationship policy, she
also recalled, required inner circle women to limit their relationships
to one man: himself. His justification for the policy was that it
kept them from unwittingly transferring their partners' lower male
energy. Male energy, he frequently complained, very much affected his
finely tuned, delicate sensibilities.

Perhaps Rama sought protection from "baby energy" as well; he managed