Dr. Frederick Lenz (1950-1998), known to his students as Rama, taught over a thousand people he accepted as direct students an unusual blend of spiritual practices for 20 years, all directed towards the classic Buddhist definition of complete enlightenment. He explained to us that the process has many interdependencies and stages. It was a combination of insights and techniques shared by Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Hindu Vedanta and Yoga, and Native American mysticism. These were implemented through a unique approach to living in the modern world and built upon a foundation of meditation and mindfulness.
As more and more people have found meditation and mindfulness to be beneficial, there has been little information on the underlying process, which Rama called "self-discovery." Self-discovery is the pathway to enlightenment, in which you realize that your ego is like an island in the middle of an ocean, and eventually that you in fact are that ocean. Each meditation is taking a swim in that ocean. Self-discovery is becoming the ocean. Enlightenment means the dissolution of the finite self into the infinite mind, but how is that actually done? It is quite a long and complex process.
Over a dozen years, Rama recorded 120 talks for his students covering all aspects of this process, but who has time to read or listen to them all? Rama Speaks consolidates these talks into a single book, presenting the essential concepts in a sequence that lets the reader understand his model of the mind. It includes the meditation methods and other techniques he taught us, as well as several photos of him.
In these talks he taught how to become fully enlightened, carefully breaking down the steps and how to do them in today's world. While many of the things he taught can be found in spiritual books, many cannot, and none all in the same place.
The book has nearly 200 extended quotes from these tapes--five and a half hours in the audiobook, all spliced from Rama's original recordings--in which he discusses each part of the enlightenment process in depth. As the title of the book says, the idea is to let Rama speak, directly to you.
"It's through the conscious removal of the focus of the mind and the body to the realm of spirit, to the realm of happiness. Now when I talk about the realm of spirit, happiness, nirvana, Enlightenment, I'm not talking about something ideal or imaginary. There are realms of light that exist that have always existed and will always exist. They're much more solid than the transient, sensorially perceived or mentally perceived reality that you're currently experiencing. They're just behind the world that you see. Oh, there are countless dimensional worlds, but they're no different than this one, really."
"So a teacher is not someone who you have to have. That is to say, you don't need them perpetually. You need them to show you how to get through the doorway, but once you get through the doorway, you're on your own. Then you have to grow and experience Enlightenment. Then you come back-if you want to go through a higher doorway-and so on and so on. They show you how to refine yourself until you're able to enter into nirvana on your own. Then no more teacher. Guess what? Only Enlightenment everywhere."
