Rama Speaks: The Teachings of Rama-Dr. Frederick Lenz
"You don't need a teacher 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." Rama-Dr. Frederick Lenz, 1992
We think that the classic Enlightenment of the Buddha is far beyond our reach. What if it wasn't?
As more and more people have found meditation and mindfulness to be beneficial, there has been little information on the underlying process, which Dr. Frederick Lenz (1950-1998), known to his students as 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. 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's complicated.
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. While many of the things he taught can be found in spiritual books, many cannot, and none all in the same place.
Over a dozen years, Rama recorded 120 talks for his students covering all aspects of this process. Rama Speaks has nearly 200 extended quotes from these tapes, in which he discusses each part of the enlightenment process in depth. In these tapes he taught how to become fully enlightened, carefully breaking down the steps and how to do them in today's world.
At its core, this book presents the self-discovery process. Nearly half of the book is him speaking to his students, spliced in from the recordings he made for them (the excerpts in the audiobook are from his actual recordings). Each chapter is devoted to an interdependent group of topics and presents the different aspects that he emphasized at different times, so that you get a complete picture. The chapters are arranged in a developmental order, beginning with the basics and culminating in the samadhis. While the reader/listener may know about the spiritual topics he discusses, Rama explains how there are many sides to each one.
The book includes the meditation methods and other techniques he taught us, as well as several photos of him. As the title of the book says, the idea is to let Rama speak, directly to you.
"Beyond the world of thought and sensorial impressions, there are planes and dimensions of perfect light, knowledge and radiant perfection. Meditation is simply a process of moving your awareness field from the awareness of this world, from the awareness of time and space, into eternity, into the eternal dimensions." Rama-Dr. Frederick Lenz, 1992
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