Rama - A Life of Wonder

by Jackie Madison

Dr. Frederick P. Lenz, widely known as Rama, was a pioneering spiritual teacher, author, and visionary. His teachings blended ancient Eastern tenets with modern living and personal empowerment. His life was dedicated to guiding individuals toward greater awareness culminating in enlightenment and helping them achieve brilliance in all parts of life, with meditation and mindfulness as the foundation. He lived a dynamic and exciting life of beauty, exuberance and joy as he showed his students that enlightenment is in everything - in every part of life. He reflected this in everything he was.

Rama was born in San Diego, California, but was raised in Connecticut. He began having a curiosity regarding Buddhism when running across books in the library. As a teenager just out of high school, he journeyed west to experience the youth revolution, heading to San Francisco and landing in San Diego. In what would become a pivotal moment in his life, he was arrested for possession of a marajuana cigarette. This led to him being sentenced to a work camp on Palomar Mountain. There he discovered what would become his true passion and life long work - teaching. He started mentoring illiterate men at the workcamp, as well as immigrant workers who couldn’t speak English. The joy and thrill that he experienced when someone learned to spell their name or speak in English was a spark that would inspire him to ultimately get his PhD in Comparative Literature and begin a teaching career.

Another milestone moment for him at the Palomar workcamp came when sitting on a boulder watching the sunset. He found himself spontaneously meditating and moving completely out of the physical realm into an ecstatic state called samadhi - a transcendent experience of oneness with existence. It’s the feeling everyone is after with love, sex, drugs, extreme sports, the sense that there is something beyond what can feel like a solid, trapped sense of being human. This experience would ignite his one-pointed quest towards merging with the truth of existence.

He joined a spiritual community while completing his undergrad and graduate education. During this time, he meditated often for twelve to fourteen hours a day. He loved to meditate and was asked to start giving meditation workshops. He also started writing books about the things he was learning and discovering during his tenure as a meditation aspirant. He was invited to give lectures and book tours all around the world, as well as to appear on popular television talk and radio shows.

During this time, he continued learning and growing as his meditations continued to brighten and expand his consciousness. After completing his graduate education and book tours, he moved back to San Diego and started a meditation center. This was the beginning of his life as a spiritual teacher.

At first, there were a handful of students who he met with regularly - people from all walks of life, and many college students. As time went on, he spent more and more time in ever deepening meditations, moving into higher awareness that continually shifted and expanded his consciousness and opened his mind to greater understanding and brilliance. There came a period when he went into a meditation that lasted for a month. During this time, he was in the deep state of meditation - samadhi - and the transformations he was going through were becoming more evident to his students. At the end of this intense and illuminating phase, he felt that he was merged with existence in a whole new way. It was no longer just during his meditations, but became on-going and ever present. His students were also experiencing many phenomenon such as brilliant light exuding from him as he sat in meditation. It was an experience of ecstatic transcendence for all who were present. This lead to his true beginning as an enlightened teacher.

Rama continued to evolve into greater realization attaining full liberation. He was moving far beyond the human condition that can be the stifling imprisonment that many humans feel in different ways. What the Buddha called human suffering - the nightmare of the day - that happens when we are inculcated into the human views and definitions of what life is and isn’t, what and who we are and aren’t. When Rama meditated, the room turned gold - a fluid, ecstatic light infused all who were present. He taught many students through the years. He was a brilliant teacher who reached into eternity for truth and didn’t accept the status quo of society or the human condition.

He was a true revolutionary in his ability to merge with all of existence inwardly, yet outwardly, he was disciplined and conservative in that he always aligned to truth, never to the expectations of society, students or family. He was adamant that his students handle themselves with integrity, what he called etiquette, meaning, bringing their highest consciousness to student activities and integrity to their lives. He was very hands off with students, empowering them ongoingly through meditation workshops, journeys and special events, with the only expectation that students practice meditation and mindfulness in all aspects of life. He encouraged students to use the light, power and joy of meditations to create an exciting and fulfilling life.

"I’ve been teaching yoga and Buddhism for a while - many, many, many lifetimes. I’ve had lots of students, disciples. A long time ago, many lives ago, I had great teachers, radical, radically wonderful teachers who brought me through the enlightenment cycle like I’m bringing some people through the enlightenment cycle in this and other lives. And the thing that I’ve noticed, that I learned from my own teachers a long time ago in another universe, the thing that I’ve observed in the successful students that I’ve had over the lifetimes, is a quality which I think you can develop. I think it’s something that’s in each of us, and it’s a quality of gentleness but strength, silliness but maturity, optimism but a sense that it’s not going to be easy, if not impossibly difficult, but we’re going to get it done anyway, a kind of quiet fortitude that is renewed by a person’s love of light."

Rama was hands on in terms of teaching students how to become seers, to use their intuition in life's decisions, to integrate the teachings into everyday life and to ultimately become wise and become their own teachers. But, he was very hands off when it came to the personal lives of his students. He expected students to figure out their own lives and rarely got involved, unless a person had a question, in which case he would turn them back to themselves to answer their own question. He ran a squeaky clean center - no ashram politics. Everything was handled professionally, in a business-like manner, with a grace and elegance that were brought to all scenarios, which usually included periodic meditations at a university lecture hall or hotel conference center, or dinners held at beautiful venues in various cities all over the world. There was no "party line" with Rama - he didn't allow for it - for groups of people to formulate cliques of who's cool, or who’s in, or, who has special access and knowledge. And there were no "ashram patrons", no rich students who gave him all their money, who he would then be forced to treat in special ways. No. Instead, he charged tuition, in a university like manner, equally across the board. In this way, people used all the power and energy they were gaining from meditation and empowerments, and applied it to living a balanced, dynamic life, using all elements of daily living to learn about love, truth, compassion and humor and to go more deeply into light through their own personal practice.

“You decide to be happy. You find out how. You find the happiest person you know, but not happy in a facile sense. We'’re not talking Rodney Dangerfield who makes me laugh, but I have no idea if he's personally happy. You find a special teacher, someone who doesn't just look majestic and say the right words, but someone who themselves is obviously intrinsically happy in a very deep and quiet way. Someone humorous, someone you can see if you probe their depth beyond just the external caretaker personality they may choose to manifest, someone who is really at peace with themselves. They’ve got it wired. You learn happiness from someone who knows it, like you learn mathematics from someone who knows it."

One of the things about Rama is that he lived the adage of freedom — samsara is nirvana. Meaning, eternity is in everything, enlightenment is in everything. It's in consciousness and it's in the physicality of the world. Everything comes from the same source and returns to the same source. We are all that existence. Therefore, we don't need to run away to a monastary and avoid living in the world. Instead, Rama taught students how to see truth everywhere — in so-called ordinary moments like grocery shopping, getting a haircut, or building a career — these experiences, too, can reflect the depth and beauty of direct perception. Through career, one could generate progressive abundance: to create a beautiful home that could serve as a meditation sanctuary, to gain the mobility for holy journeys of power and transformation all over the world, and to pay it forward and help others.

"Balance - It's a way of being. It's a conscious decision, and the shortcut to happiness, to spiritual balance, is to meditate. If you meditate twice a day and not just sit there but actually meditate, raise your attention with your willpower to a brighter sphere of consciousness, learn the discipline of meditation and practice it in, hopefully, a very beautiful way - if you do that, and you have a teacher to direct you who is happy, not just someone who has good PR, then you will find happiness. But it doesn't just come. Otherwise everyone would be happy in the world. Hardly anybody's happy, not even for a moment. Take a walk today and look at how many people smile. Not many. Look at how troubled they are. Look at how unhappy, how stressed out. Whether we go through the ghetto or we go through Beverly Hills, they're stressed out. They're not happy out there. And even the ones who are happy (what they call happiness) are just looking at the fog bank. They can see a hundred yards and that's all. Real happiness is something most people never know. What we experience in yoga, in deep meditation, that ecstasy is beyond what human beings call happiness. Yet it's human beings who experience it, who practice yoga."

The long and the short of it was, Rama didn't have a problem with money, sex or materialism. He taught that it's all in your intent. If you make money and use it to spread the Dharma and to live in fields of light, then money isn't so bad. If you have a relationship and you learn from it, to give, to love, to offer your highest consciousness to your partner, then sex isn't so bad. If you use your money to create a life of beauty, with furniture, clothes, a car, food, that vibrates with you, that is high vibe and fun, then materialism isn't so bad. But because Rama didn't kow-tow to traditional, staid religions, because he didn't appear in traditional garb, because he didn't seem like the world's notion of a holy man, he got lots of heat from traditionalists and media. Rama was outrageous, but in a beautifully radical, free, powerful, loving and compassionate way. He didn't live to be understood by humanity.

If you're bucking the system, if you're going beyond ego and teaching others to do the same, why would the collective ego of humanity like you? They don't. As a matter of fact, an enlightened person is the ego's worst nightmare. Why? Because their life is about going beyond ego - busting it, exposing it, transcending it. So, it's true, the planet didn't understand or accept Rama. But when it comes to enlightenment, when have they ever?

Rama was enlightened and as such, he was not hampered by the physical. He had come to understand the nature of life and death, of the physical and the immortal. He had dissolved over and over in samadhi - the highest meditation - merging with pure light. He was liberated - the ultimate freedom that keeps progressing into newness and truth every minute. He had transcended the human plane, yet he chose to be here to teach his students. He was able to teach them inwardly, through a heart connection of truth. He continues to do so, with all of his students and with new students who find him and connect with the ever present enlightenment that was and is Rama.