lly did love
her."

There was the one about the UCLA students. "Sometimes I walk the
streets of Westwood," he said at Centre meetings, "and drain the
undergraduates of their mystical power. Now, don't get all upset.
It's not like they're using it. Most of them are just wasting it on
sex."

And there was the one about his former wife. "At one point in the
relationship," he told me, "I had to decide whether to be of service to
the one or to the many." Rama often described his dream of living in a
fortified desert compound with hundreds of heavily armed women
devotees. Perhaps he broke up with his "jealous" wife--"She kept
imagining that I was looking at other women... "--in search of the many.

Once I invited a friend from work to one of Rama's public lectures.
She was interested in meditation and had recently left her boyfriend.

"Thanks, but no thanks!" she exclaimed when I mentioned the lecturer's
name.

"So, what's wrong with Rama?"

"You mean the one who lists his past life credentials--dates and
all--in full-page ads? The one who *specializes* in women?"

"Uh, yeah."

"He isn't bringing women to enlightenment, Mark. He's bringing them to
bed."

"Come on," I countered, trying not to admit to her or to myself what he
had been doing for years. "So he has a girlfriend. What's wrong with
a spiritual teacher having a girlfriend?"

"There's nothing wrong with that," she said firmly. "But he is
sleeping with many, many women."

"Where did you hear that?"

"From a number of women I met at a meditation retreat in San Diego.
They fell for his line about being lovers in past lives."

Suddenly I recalled Rama on stage at Centre meetings, wearing short red
gym shorts, closing and spreading his legs, tonguing in a slow,
circular fashion the insides of his mouth. The memory repulsed me.
But the repulsion, I feared, was due to the Negative Entities within
me. And it was Rama, I quickly reminded myself, who had been trying
day and night to imbue the many with the fullness of his enlightenment.

"Well, I have been good friends with him since 1978," I replied, "and
he's just not like that."

When disciples Giles and Claire, a couple living in Los Angeles, heard
similar stories about Rama's sexual exploits, they spoke candidly with
one another.

"We were not judging him," Claire recalled years later. "But we were
concerned about what would happen to him and to our community if the
press found out. I