Wired 7.09: Street Brawl in the Twilight Zone
This is an article from Wired about Rama and his hijinks.
BTW, I think I spent a total of $2,500.00 over several years on my Guru. Luckily I never got super-involved - I was busy finishing my Ph.D. as Rama sank into super-maniacal craziness.
I was pretty sure that Rama wasn't especially enlightened - although his charisma level was very high - because he never tapped me for one of his computer companies. I was working on my Ph.D. in computer science and even as a starting consultant I made more money than most of the people that took classes from him.
People that studied with him reported seeing all kinds of strange manifestations. I never saw any of that, except one time when we'd been out in the desert and I was fairly sleep deprived. Even then what I saw wasn't overly spectacular - he was walking around and suddenly it looked to me like he went shooting backwards about ten feet. But this was at about 4:00 a.m. in the desert and from what I know now about how sleep works I probably had a quick shot of REM sleep. Not a big deal.
I kept going though because he was funny, interesting, and could keep a room full of hundreds of people dead silent for 45 minutes or an hour of meditation. Regardless of whatever power Rama had or didn't have, it is a very powerful experience to sit in meditation with hundreds of people.
Sometimes I would go to the Crystal Cathedral with Robert Schuller and experience the same thing. It's cool when hundreds of people are focused on one thing and there is a charismatic dude up front leading the proceedings.
It doesn't mean the leader is particularly enlightened - it just means the person is very charismatic and can control a big crowd.
I consider myself lucky, of course. Since I never got drawn into the inner circle I avoided the craziness and in the meantime I learned a lot about meditation and eastern religion and philosophy.
© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved
Your "cult" story is fascinating. . .I never knew! Do you mean here that Rama was also your Guru? I have to read all of this! In the past, we spent a lot of time discussing one particular cult that didn't implode, but transcended cult status to become a religion
ReplyDeleteThis triggered a lot of associations. Did you ever hear the story of Marjo Gortner? He was a child evangelist (like Jimmy Swaggart) [1]. Later, in his twenties, he was in the movie Marjo, where he went out on the evangelical canvas tent circuit, cynically performing miracles and being a combo rock star/evangelist. It is not in print as far as I can tell.
an IMDB review:
Hard-hitting, hilarious expose of tent revivals, 16 February 2004
Author: smokehill retrievers from Chancellorsville VA
This is the only film I have ever seen where I left the theater with sore gut muscles from laughing so hard. Gortner's well-produced expose of the tent-revival circuit shows the denizens of that world for what they are,which offended and embarrassed a great many fundamentalists and the preachers who often fleece them; these thugs were the direct ancestors of our modern,slick televangelists.
It's not so much that all of them are crooked -- though a good many are crooks and/or hypocrites -- but the overwhelming majority of even the "legitimate" ones tend to be businessmen and showmen first, preachers second (if it doesn't hurt the bottom line). There's an aphorism that states that every social movement starts out as a good cause, then becomes a business, and inevitably turns into a racket. This film portrays that in spades.
[1] a) Ever heard the Zappa Swaggart songs--hilarious!! b) did you know Swaggart is Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin?
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ReplyDeleteHmm. Received your email about the double-post. I don't know how to delete a comment - if someone knows, let me know!
ReplyDeleteYes, Rama was my Guru. I generally saw the best of him, since I wasn't part of the inner circle or even the medium circle. I just signed up for "classes" or meditation sessions, donated some money (so I did attend a couple of his special dinners), and tried to meditate and finish college.
But toward the end even I could see that it was all about money. He invited me to a special session in Palm Springs at some hotel there and gave a big speech about how people were working as waiters to support the cause and giving all of their money to him. This seemed fairly shortsighted on his part to me, because if I started waiting tables I was going to be a lot less valuable to his crusade than if I had a Ph.D. specifically in software engineering and specifically about the DoD language Ada.
I went out to my car at a break and got a piece of paper and made a list of pros and cons for continuing to attend "classes" with Rama. The cons far outweighed the one "pro", which was that he might actually be somewhat enlightened, and so I drove away back to Orange County and never looked back.
(Turns out when you are logged in there is a trash can icon you can use to remove a comment.)
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