power," said Rama. "It is essential that each of you speak with power
and with respect for the spirit of the land."

I typically spoke very briefly at such a gathering unless I knew in
advance what Rama wanted to hear. But now I went on and on about how
in Tucson there was a healthy balance between people and nature, and
about how if we moved here, we would heal. When I was done, Rama took
me aside and said, "Kid--you're going to be all right." But Tucson was
not the right city, he later announced, so we continued the drive west.

In a motel just east of San Diego, Rama left us one evening to conduct
a Centre meeting in Beverly Hills. 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. When our vote was
split, mostly between Boulder and Boston, he gave the word to move on.
So we drove around again to Los Angeles, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado,
where, by the intersection of Interstate-70 and Route 82, he announced
that we had arrived at a crossroad: we could continue the search for a
home, or we could take a side trip to a posh resort in nearby Aspen.

By now the disciples had been out of work for nearly a month, and a few
of us were runni