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Kesey brought diverse groups of people together. Rama made a special effort to keep friends, lovers, and families apart. Yet despite their differences, I sensed that Rama had been shaped in his youth by Kesey's pioneering experiments with Eastern culture and Western counter-culture, consciousness and drugs, expression and art, and freedom and control.
I now realized that if I were to remain a disciple, I would need to humor myself about Rama's claims lest I rekindle the debilitating conflict between my rational and mystical natures. I had the impression that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters kept a sense of humor about their experiments, and I wondered how they might deal with someone afflicted with Rama's particular brand of enlightenment.
Rather than accepting the abuse as I had done in the past, I found myself thinking about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I thought about how main character Ken Kesey convinced himself during a drug experience that he could access god-like powers. Kesey, writes Wolfe, was able to step back and realize that he was only hallucinating.
I thought about how, during the trip, Rama seemed to be flipping out of control. "Maybe Rama is not okay," I thought. Meanwhile, my readings and reflections on Kesey had located Rama within a cultural context which, like the knowledge that the Wizard of Oz was a man behind a curtain, largely deflated his projected images and metaphors.
"Maybe, unlike Kesey, he can't step back and get a perspective." During the drive from Aspen to Boulder, I also realized that Kesey never charged "tuition," never tricked followers into buying lavish gifts for himself, and never claimed to be the anti-Christ. Kesey drove around America with his community in an old school bus. Rama led us separately in cars.
"I joked that he would already have a built in market for the sequel, The Return Of The Thirteen Mystics." But Nelson had not taken lightly the way young Frederick had been affecting undergraduates during his free lectures on meditation. In 1975, Nelson recommended that Fred read about Ken Kesey and about Charles Manson.
Rama, who often claimed that he took so much LSD in the '60s that he never came down, also convinced himself that he could access god-like powers. But Rama went further than Kesey. Rama professed to be an actual incarnation of a god. Rama professed that a few dozen disciples were causing extensive, invisible damage to a metropolitan area. "Maybe Rama has been hallucinating since 1969," I thought.
In the mid-eighties, Rama sent Nelson self-promotional brochures, tapes, and books; in 1986, Rama wrote in a brochure that Nelson had been one of the three most influential people in his life; in 1988, Rama confessed to Nelson that he only wanted to make some money, that he no longer maintained a following, and that he had finally learned his lesson about Ken Kesey and about Charles Manson.
The lesson was that while both charismatic leaders had experimented with drugs and with young peoples' lives, Kesey learned to check his power over others. Manson did not. "Yet it was difficult for me to guide Fred," Nelson explained. "Though he was my student, he was Chinmoy's disciple." Professor Nelson was a tall man with a strong, kind voice.
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