I actually hate talking about all the flash that happened around Rama. Especially here, because people are so hungry for flash, and so jealous of it actually happening for other people, as opposed to only reading about it, or hearing it in other people's stories.
For me, looking back at the Rama trip, the thing that made it the most interesting, and the reason I hung onto it as long as I did, was not the flash; it's that it was FUN. Those of you who paid your dues in the TM movement probably can empathize. How much of what we did for and around Maharishi was actually FUN? I have a friend from the TM Daze who still cracks me up from time to time when he uses a certain phrase. I'll ask him how the movie was that he was so look- ing forward to, and he'll occasionally say, "It was a real boatride." I'll crack up, because I know *exactly* what he's referring to. Maharishi would announce one of his Lake Geneva full moon boatrides, and you'd get all excited. "Oh boy, a boatride." And then the boatride would happen and you'd all be standing around, cold and damp and shivering, waiting for the FUN to start. Thing is, it rarely did. Maharishi would gaze out at the moon reflecting on the water and we were kinda expected to stand there and watch him gazing out at the moon reflected on the water and that was it. Big whoop. But around Rama, things were FUN from time to time. I mean, we'd go out on "movie dates" together. The name of the movie and its showing time or the actual theater were never announced. You were expected to find it on your own somehow, using only your "seeing." In Los Angeles or New York, with hundreds of theaters to choose from. And so you'd show up at the theater you thought was most likely, and 9 times out of 10 there would be Rama and 200 other students in line. FUN. Having private dinners at Windows On The World, or at Nirvana, the Indian restaurant overlooking Central Park. Having full-dress dinners and meetings at the Pierre, the men all in tuxes, the women in their finest evening gowns. Renting an entire club and having a private rave party, music provided by our own techno-fusion band Zazen. Going to a Tangerine Dream concert together. Flying to the Caribbean to go scuba diving. Touring the Louvre together. FUN. After years of the TM movement, it was refreshing to be part of an organization in which not only were events like these perceived to be part of the spiritual path, FUN was perceived to be part of the spiritual path. Thirteen years after I walked away from the trip because it was no longer as FUN for me as it had been in the past, what I look back upon with the most fondness and with the most thanks for the spiritual lessons they taught me are not the moments of flash. They were the moments of FUN.
