Rama Speaks

Rama-Dr. Frederick Lenz (1950-1998) taught Tantric Buddhism to several hundred Americans for nearly 20 years. I was a student of his for 16 years, and have continued to study his teachings. Our practice consisted of living and working in the world while doing a great deal of chakra meditation, study of spiritual texts and psychic development.

He recorded over 120 instructional audio tapes for us over a 12 year period. Rama Speaks is a detailed overview consolidating this material into a single book. It includes six color photographs of Rama plus the two yantras, also in color, which we used. The aim of the book is to present Rama's model of the mind, how to navigate life, and the pathway to enlightenment.

The book provides many extended quotes in which he carefully teaches self-discovery, his term for the spiritual growth process. He taught that the ego-based human being does not "attain" enlightenment. Instead, "becoming enlightened" means that you completely dissolve into the original mind, the totality of what you really are. This description, however, doesn't explain how the process works. That's what Rama taught us.

While many of the things he taught can be found in spiritual books, many cannot, and none all in the same place. While he was a controversial spiritual teacher to some in the media, no one ever examined what he actually was teaching. As the title of the book says, this is letting Rama speak.

"If you sit down and meditate in the morning, you will be filled with happiness, and that happiness will last you all day. Then, in the evening, you'll meditate again and you'll wash away any of the debris you picked up during the day-wrong views, that sort of thing-that can lead to unhappiness. You'll be filled and flooded with a different kind of happiness, the happiness of the evening. Then you'll be happy all night. Meditate in the morning and wash away anything you picked up in the dream plane. It's a cycle, the enlightenment cycle. It's based on meditation.

The role of the teacher is to make sure that the practice is pure, that is to say, that the methods are taught properly. By giving proper empowerments and by guiding the student, you make sure that they really are going into the planes of light and they're not fooling themselves. Because the astral and the astral dimensions are not places of great happiness necessarily. As I said, they're just like journeying to another country....

Then the rest is up to the light. As you go into the light, it will cause you to become happier and happier. Each day, you will gain a deeper happiness, a more subtle or perhaps a more profound happiness, and that happiness will free you from the desire-aversion cycle or syndrome.

It sounds pretty good, doesn't it? It's better than it sounds. And it's such a simple thing that people miss it. It's worth your while to sit, to practice meditation-if happiness is one of the important things in your life."

"When there is no self, there is enlightenment.... The longer we can stay in the thoughtless state, the more the obscurations are washed away, because when we stop thought a tremendous amount of energy is released. That energy purifies the mind....

So if you want to become enlightened... you have to clear up your mind completely.... We do it a little at the beginning, and then more and more, and then eventually it consumes us, literally, until there is no self, there is only light."