The Enlightenment Cycle Balance by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Balance. Spiritual balance is the ability to be happy in spite of circumstances. Spiritual balance is the obvious answer to the obsession that sometimes accompanies religious practice, occult practice, philosophical understanding. The obsession, the assertion that one is right. That something you’re doing is better than something someone else is doing. The way you’re doing it is better than the way someone else does it. Spiritual balance is how you deal with opposition. Opposition outside yourself and opposition within yourself. Spiritual balance is Tai Chi. It’s the center of things. It’s the place where yin and yang meet, where all things come together. In chakras, it’s considered the heart chakra, Anahata, the central chakra, three above, three below, which symbolizes happiness and love, psychic oneness, spiritual understanding. So, pure and simple, balance is happiness. Happiness in spiritual practice, happiness while meditating, happiness while working, while playing, in pleasure and pain, in sickness and health, in life and in death. In all circumstances, that’s balance.

How do you do that. How can you be balanced in a world like this. You’ve got to be kidding, right? Well, the world has always been this way. At least in one form or another. I mean, I’m sure in the Middle Ages and the ancient Chinese civilizations or the mystery world of Egypt, ancient Atlantis, you pick a universe, a cosmos, it doesn’t matter. There’s always something going on, there is always somebody on your case. Dogs have fleas, people have each other. We are born to die. Life is a continuing tragedy, tragic comedy. Everything and everyone we love, suffers. We suffer. How can you be happy. Life is a horror show, isn’t it? Well, certainly. Yea. Obviously. Anybody who doesn’t see that has not grown up and known life. Spiritual balance is the ability to, in spite of all that, remain happy. Not to be hostile to your neighbor when they’re being hostile. Not to get caught up in the trivia. Spiritual balance, in other words, is the ability to climb up the mountain and be in a world light. The lack of spiritual balance is to get so hassled by the details of life and trying to get everything straight so that you can climb up the spiritual mountain that you never do. You want to have a great run today. But there were so many thing that you had to do first. Running is your favorite thing. It’s when you feel best. Your body’s alive, your mind is awake. Everything’s great. So you had to make the bed, had to meditate, you had to work, you had to clean. And by the time it came your moment for running, you were so tired that you didn’t run. That’s the lack of spiritual balance.

Spiritual balance is the ability to get above it all. To see that there’s something more noble, call it divine, happy, bright, brilliant to this thing we call life. Spiritual balance is the ability to be straight with yourself. The purpose of life is happiness. What else could it possibly be? The purpose of life is something, of course, that we choose. Life doesn’t have a purpose. Don’t be absurd. The cosmos just is. But by choosing a purpose, in Yoga we learn, in Buddhism we learn, that by choosing a purpose, we choose an outcome. Our purpose, our intent is the outcome immediately. So if you feel the purpose of life is happiness, Enlightenment, understanding, then that’s what you will experience. If you feel the purpose of life is struggle, Darwinian fitness, dog eat dog, then I guess you’ll be eaten by a dog. I don’t know what’ll happen. Or you’ll eat a dog. You experience or become what you focus on. That’s one of the principal rules in Yoga.

So balance is to choose happiness. To feel that the purpose of life is to love, not necessarily to be loved. To be happy, to be conscious, to be aware, to be fulfilled. And if that’s what you seek, that’s what you’ll find. Yoga and Buddhism are simply a methodology, a way, of becoming one with the part of us, with the part of ourselves, that is happy. There are other parts of us. There are parts that are miserable, there are parts that don’t care, there are parts that hate, there are parts that love. There are parts that are cruel, there are parts that are kind, there are parts that are reasonable, there are parts that are unreasonable. You know! You know, you live inside your mind. Quit kidding. You’re not fooling anybody. You know what’s going on inside your mind. Everything. Everything. The more moral you pretend to be, the less moral you are. The less moral you try to be, the more moral you are. You know how it is, we all do. We all live in it. And everybody’s experience is about the same. Frustrating, sometimes happy.

But some people have found a secret to living, a secret to happiness. They practice Yoga and Buddhism. Esoteric Buddhism. Esoteric Yoga. Not just going to the temple, being there at a ceremony, dressing up. That’s the church Buddhism. Real esoteric Buddhism, real Yoga, is to move beyond this world. It involves the use of the mind. To take the mind from the planes of the earth and transpose it into planes of pure and perfect happiness. To transpose your awareness field beyond this life, beyond this moment into the planes of light. The planes of light exist. Just as the earth exists. Just as the oceans exist. Just as the ages exist, the planes of light exist. They’re just beyond this dimension. Just a little way down the street. Yoga is a method of unifying the energies of the body, mind, and the spirit and directing them towards infinity, towards the planes of light, towards the one perfect creation that is inside your own mind. The planes of light are inside your mind. Infinity is inside your mind. Eternity is inside your mind. Happiness, the Grinch, everything is inside the mind. All heavens and hells and anything between or outside them. Nirvana is inside the mind. Not the brain, not the cell structures. The mind, the intelligence principle, the Bodhi, consciousness, awareness, that which we are, that which we seek to be. Everything’s inside the mind.

The question is: Where is it? How do you get there? Will it fulfill you? Is there a greater ecstasy? A greater happiness? So balance, spiritual balance, is the principal that allows the mind to be still. You can’t expect the world to settle down, everything to work out in order for you to practice meditation and to be happy. If you’re waiting for the perfect person, the perfect meditation, the perfect day, there’s no such thing. You’re the perfect person, this is the perfect day, this is the perfect meditation. Life is what you make it. But you have to do something. You have to get control of your mind. You got to get your power up and do something. Not just sit around. Dr. Suess says, “You can’t just be sitting in that waiting room.” Everybody’s in the waiting room of life. And oh, the places you’ll go. This final look. Everybody’s waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for everything. You’ve got to go do things. Yoga is not a waiting, it’s a doing. Today. And balance is the hardest part of all the things in Yoga, all the things in Buddhism, self discovery, and the Enlightenment Cycle. Balance is the most difficult thing. Because it’s overlooked. It’s not intrinsically the hardest thing. It’s no harder than anything else. But because it’s underestimated, because we don’t really consider it deeply enough. It’s overlooked. That‘s why it’s the hardest thing. We think, in other words, that it’s not important to be balanced. In martial arts, one of the first things you learn, one of the most important things, is to be balanced. If you’re not balanced, anybody can knock you over. If you’re balanced, then you’re in pretty good shape. You know you can defend yourself.

Balance is a central principal in all building, in architecture and design. If a thing is unbalanced, it falls apart, it falls over. It’s a principle, it’s a way of trying to talk about being at the center of things, to use that word. So to be balanced is to be happy. When you’re happy, you’re at the center of things. When you’re happy, it’s pretty tough to knock you over. You can handle whatever comes along in life. You can handle the bright days, the dark days, and the intermediate days. So happiness is found, then, principally in meditation . When the eyes are closed, when the mind is still, when you’re fixed on a chakra and you go through that magical doorway into the inner world where everything is still and beautiful and perfect. You let the mind relax and flow into eternity, into light, into brightness, into happiness. It’s there, but you have to connect with it. You have to exert some effort. And you’ll notice a subtle smile form on your face. A lightness will fill your being, a brightness. All the fake, dull thoughts that you think, all the ridiculous philosophies, the necessities. All the things that won’t matter a bit when you’re dead, but boy do they seem to be overpoweringly important when you’re alive. These things fade away, for a while, for a few minutes. For a while, the heaviness, the awesome responsibility of being human goes away and you get to play in the fields of light, you get to play in eternity, in the brightness. And that brightness is powerful. It’s not simply a transient happiness that you experience in meditation which creates balance. It’s a transformative light. Light transforms, inner light. It’s very powerful. The inner light is the most powerful thing there is.

You know, sometimes it’s hard to see something in human life. We see what we see. If the fog rolls in, we can’t see anything. If it’s there for a while, we forget that there’s anything to see. That wall of fog, a couple of hundred yards away is the perimeter of our vision. And the mind automatically adjusts and we forget that there’s anything else. We deal with what we can see between here and the bang, sorry, the bank of fog. (I’m sitting here looking at a bank of fog. I’m wondering if I can get increased interest on my checking account there. I don’t know.) I’m on the bay, the speedboats are passing and the fog’s rolling in. And a little while ago, I could see for several miles, when I just started this tape. But now I can see only a few hundreds yards. That is what we call maya, illusion. Symbolically represented. The fog prevents us from seeing what’s right there and we forget about it. So most people get so caught up in life that they forget that the purpose of life is to be happy. That happiness is something that is wonderful. They spend so much time trying to be happy, that when it’s time to be happy, they just forget. It just rolls away, nothing anyone can do about it, except that person. Nobody can make you happy but yourself. Things occupy us, people occupy us, but they don’t make us happy if we’re honest.

What makes us happy is to have a spiritual experience. To experience spirit, something not so gross as all this matter around us. Matter is fun for a while. But ultimately it’s the spiritual experience, the ecstatic transcendence where we leap beyond what we know and call the world into the eternal light where nothing is for sure, nothing is certain.

That experience of the deepest ecstasy in meditation, that’s happiness or whatever you want to call it. Peace, stillness, something beyond the transient frustrations, the pain of the body, the despair and disillusionment of mind, the sorrow of the heart. Beyond all of that nonsense, there’s brightness. So Yoga is fulfillment, sitting and meditating. Leading a compact, fun, bright, tight life. Blowing your ego out the door, and your self importance. Letting go of the things that hurt you as they hurt you, holding onto things that are happy. When they change and they start to hurt you, you let them go. I mean, what else would be intelligent, what else can you do. You love someone. And you love them because it’s happy. Then suddenly, you’re unhappy loving them. What do you do? You get burned. You stop loving? Well, no, you just stop loving them, you just move the love someplace else. If you’ve got your money in the bank, and the bank’s credit rating drops and it’s a problem, you don’t give up banking, you just move your money to a bank that’s better. Love has very little to do with the person, it comes from us. You can love a surprisingly great number of people. They just have to fit the right parameters. Love comes from ourselves, not from someone else. You can love infinity, eternity, Scottie dogs, sports, work, play, feelings of being alive, the earth, the sky, the fire, the wind, fancy cars, swimming pools, challenging experiences, technological understandings. There is a lot you can love. To love is to be balanced. To extend oneself beyond, just the sense of self. Of what matters to me today, of what I think is going to please me, of avoiding what I think is unhappy, that’s balance. That’s happiness. If you become obsessive in your spiritual practice. If you just try and try and try and try as you push and push, you’re not going to be happy you’re going to be obsessive. If you try to make everything work out perfectly, try and just make everything come together just the way you want to, once in a while it will happen and it will be pretty, but it’s nice when it doesn’t, sometimes it’s nice when unexpected things happen. What is perfection anyway in the physical. It’s an idea we have. And when it doesn’t happen that way, we get all bent out of shape and frustrated and angry and unhappy and we take it out on everybody else including ourselves. On the other hand, there are five fingers. On the other hand, the possibilities of perfection beyond the conception of limited order that an individual might have, the possibilities are greater. Take chaotic mathematics, for example. The universe is chaos. I guess you could see it as chaos. But chaos is wimping out. It’s wimp talk. Snivelers. Snivelers say that there’s chaos, friends. There’s no chaos, there’s just people who don’t understand what’s out there and they have a label for it and they don’t want to deal with it so they call it chaos when it gets over their chip size. There’s no chaos, there’s just different levels of order in the universe. Chaotic mathematics is essentially the study of chaos, that is to say, it can’t be chaos if you can study it. It has order, there are just different types of order. Don’t be a sniveler. Don’t say you can’t be happy, you can’t be Enlightened. How do you know. It’s all chaotic, nothing ever works out. Sure, all kinds of things work out everyday. And they dissolve and it’s another day. There’s growth, maturation; watch a plant grow, tell me things don’t work out. All those cells working together, striving toward the light, putting out new buds, new leaves. Life’s a miracle, all that RNA at work. Life’s a miracle, miraculous! We’re miracles. So don’t deny yourself the possibility of the miracle of happiness. Cause then you can be balanced, you can approach anything and everything or nothing and all will be well.

I’ve been teaching Yoga for a while and Buddhism. Many, many, many lifetimes. I’ve had lots of students, disciples, long time ago. Many lives ago, I had great teachers, radical. Radically wonderfully teaching. 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 in each of us. And it’s the quality of gentleness, but strength. Silliness, but maturity. Optimism, but a sense that it’s not going to be easy, if not impossibility difficult, but we’re going to get it done anyway. A quite fortitude which is renewed by a persons love of light. People come and people go in spiritual practice like in everything. And then there are those who stay and grow and really, to make it, really develop, really become transiently happy and ecstatic, bright beyond conception. The ones who do that, I think, have a love of light that they allow develop. I think most people are chicken, snivelers. Like we say in east LA, “Snivelers, man, there snivelers..” There afraid, afraid to experience their brighter side. You have to be courageous in life, too. Allow a lightness to engage your being. It’s easy to be a jerk. Just look at the worlds. No need to be unhappy when you have so much to be happy about. That’s what I call a jerk. When you’re given this human body in this weird, interesting world. The possibilities of exploring so many things, not just Yoga and Buddhism. But, there’s so many interesting things to get your mind and body into and spirit into. To be unhappy with all this weird stuff around us just seems to me to be such a waste. That’s a jerk. Intelligence, on the other hand, is the apprehension of the newness of each moment and being creative not just sitting there, and if there’s nothing good on TV, being frustrated, but shutting the thing off, disconnecting it and going and taking a kayaking or cross country skiing, or something. Do something. Don’t be in the waiting room, waiting, waiting, waiting for the perfect person, the perfect career, the perfect meditation teacher, whatever it is. Just go do something, something fun, something bright, learn something, be a student of life But if your a sniveler, whiner, complainer, you’ll never be happy. We all have that side, but we get it under control. Get a little stoical and take the pain. But then turn your attention with the will. Study the great teachings of the teachers, read books that expand you, that are bright. See films, plays, art forms that elevate your consciousness, that bring you into a sense of how beautiful this world is, how beautiful other worlds are, how beautiful Nirvana, the transcendental is. Chill out. Life is hard work no matter what you do. There is always going to be pain, there is always going to be pleasure. But what is not always going to be there is balance, happiness. Its a personal decision, that’s what I trying to tell you, my young friends. To be happy is not something that happens because your born and you live on this earth. Nor is it something happens to you because your rich. I have a lot of wealthy students. They’re not necessarily any happier. I know a lot of wealthy people in West Los Angeles. They’re not necessarily happy, and in other places. Money doesn’t make you happy. You might as well have some if you can, but that’s not the ticket. Health is nice, it doesn’t make you happy. Only notice it if it’s not there. Fame doesn’t make you happy. It just makes you look in the mirror a lot. Worry about how you look today. Fear of audiences. They’re fun things to pursue, if you get a kick out of it, but what makes you happy is not being born, not having a human body. It’s not this world. It’s a decision. It’s a decision you make every day and that you renew, that you strengthen. You decide to be happy, you find out how, you find the happiest person you know. Not happy in a facile sense. Were not talking Rodney Dangerfield who makes me laugh, but I have no idea if he’s personally happy. You find a spiritual teacher. Someone who doesn’t just look majestic and says 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 the external caretaker personality they choose to manifest. Someone who’s 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. It’s a way of being, it’s a conscious decision, and the short cut to happiness, spiritual balance is to meditate. If you meditate twice a day, and not just sit there, but meditate. Raise your attention with your will power to a brighter sphere of consciousness. Learn the discipline of meditation and practice it, hopefully, in 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. It doesn’t just come otherwise everyone would be happy in the world. Hardly anybody’s happy for a moment. Take a walk, today and look at how many people smile. Not many. Look at how troubled they are. 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 is just like in a fog bank. They can see 100 yards and that’s all. Real happiness is something most people never know. What we experience in Yoga, in deep meditation. The ecstasy is beyond what human beings call happiness yet it’s human beings who experience it, who practice Yoga. If you’re interested in happiness you want to be balanced in life. You want to be able to handle death and life. Success and failure. Then I would suggest that you practice Yoga and Buddhism. Not just go through the motions. Not just do what everybody else does, find a teacher who is happy, focus your life on happy and beautiful things. Put a smile on your face, even if you don’t feel like it. Don’t sit there, go do something. And don’t expect that its fun unless you make it fun. You’re here to work on things, that’s when your happy. Work on things, not with an obsession, but with a smile, a sense of brightness. There is pain in any endeavor. Happiness doesn’t just mean that everything works out. Usually nothing works out, but you get a kick out of it anyway. It’s fun to push it sometimes, to use your will to see how far you can get in life. In college, in high school, you get all As, it a game you play. If you don’t play the game you’re missing all the fun. How many can you get. In the human world, its how much money can you make. If you miss that, you’re missing the fun. There are ways to creatively use your will. When you sit down to meditate, its how high can you get, how bright can you be. When you workout, its how clean a workout can you do without pushing so hard that you hurt your body and you cannot workout the next day. But within that parameter, how hard can you push it. When relaxing, its to relax completely and let go. When its loving, its to love completely and then move your love around, of course, if you get hurt, change S&Ls. So balance is wisdom. Balance is the ability to be happy in the most chaotic or even boring, transient circumstances of any type. Put a smile on your face. Do it. Don’t sit in the waiting room of life, go do something. Happily. Hopefully, it will involve meditation and Yoga and Buddhism.

The Enlightenment Cycle Buddhism by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Buddhism. It’s presumptuous for me or anyone to talk about Buddhism. ‘Cause it’s so vast and so complete and there are so many aspects of it. So without being presumptuous, I will talk about Buddhism. I’m an Enlightened teacher and my name is Rama. I’ve been teaching Buddhism for lots of incarnations. And I teach it in this incarnation. But none of us really teach Buddhism. Buddhism is a way of life. It’s Yoga and we practice it. People can watch us practice it. They can learn how to practice it by watching, by observing, by listening, by becoming sensitive. But I think it’s something that life teaches us. We are teachers, we are necessary, but life is the real teacher and always remember that.

Buddhism is the Enlightenment Cycle and there are different types of it. Principally, there is short path and long path Buddhism. The long path is more the religious aspect, that is to say, the church aspect. The practice of reading sutras, healthy ways of living, things like that. A certain amount of prayer, a little meditation. The esoteric aspect of Buddhism, which is short path Buddhism, is meditation. And I’m a teacher of Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism, primarily, which are the two short path, primary short path forms of Buddhism. The short path Buddhism, which is Kundalini Yoga, involves the release of the Kundalini energy through the chakras or energy centers to create very rapid Enlightenment. It is also taught with empowerments from a teacher, someone who is Enlightened, who has experienced Parinirvana and gone through the graded stations and stages of Enlightenment and has the Siddhas, the powers, necessary to utilize in the teaching process. It’s a very complicated process. The short path is, of course, the silly path. It’s the path with the smiles. ‘Cause you have to be funny or you won’t last long. It’s about releasing energy. It’s about being enthusiastic, overcoming all fears, doubts, worries, and anxieties. Basically being perfect all the time and knowing that you’re not. That’s Buddhism, the short path, getting shorter all the time. So please put on a smile and a sense of humor if you are going to continue listening.

Buddhism is the Enlightenment Cycle, as I said before. It’s about becoming Enlightened. The essential premise of Buddhism is that there is Enlightenment, there is Nirvana. Beyond this world, beyond all worlds, there is something radiant, perfect, and eternal. It creates these worlds and all aggregate formations. At the same time, it is beyond them. We call it Nirvana. We could call it anything you wanted to, God, the Tao, Brahma, whatever you prefer, God. The names don’t matter. It’s that eternal reality which nothing can describe. It’s beyond words.

Buddhism, Yoga, is a practice. It’s a way of yoking or joining your mind to that eternal reality and at the same time viewing this world and all worlds as part of that reality. Buddhism is about living a very grounded, happy, fun life, being energized, and being good at everything you do and getting better constantly. It’s about utilizing the full power of your mind, body and spirit, your emotions, everything, to enjoy life, to experience its multifaceted sides.

The essential practice in short path Buddhism is meditation. Meditation is a process in which you stop thought, transcend dimensionality, and merge with the perfect light through the planes of light and the causal worlds, beyond the astral, and there you experience light. As you go into light, for longer and longer periods, as you progress in your meditation practice, you transform, you become illumined, you overcome all limitations, all sorrows, all pain, you learn not to be bound by desire and eventually you transcend death itself.

So this is the Enlightenment Cycle. It’s the process of uniting your consciousness with eternity, of being eternal, eternally aware. And at the same time being poised, graceful, balanced, and having a most excellent sense of humor. What matters is the pathway. What matters is that you walk down it and enjoy it. If you’re practicing Buddhism, if it’s real Yoga, then your life is better every day. That doesn’t mean that better things happen to you, that’s just life. Who knows what will happen, it’s an adventure. But if you’re really practicing correctly, the litmus test to true practice is that you like yourself better. You like your life better. You feel better. You can see in every month, every week, every year an improvement in the states of mind you exist in. An improvement with how you handle both difficult situations and easy situations.

The best way to learn Buddhism is, of course, if you have an Enlightened teacher or if you don’t have an Enlightened teacher, a teacher that is much more advanced than yourself. There are two types of teachers: exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric teachers can explain the outer forms of Yoga. How to conserve energy, gain energy, utilize that energy to go into higher planes of consciousness. They can explain practices, teach you all kinds of valuable things and techniques. But they don’t have the transmutive power of the full Kundalini. Only an Enlightened teacher, an esoteric teacher, can actually empower you, transfer power from themselves to you, so you can much more rapidly escalate your spiritual development. If you’re going to college and if you have a scholarship, or in graduate school you have a fellowship, you can progress much faster. Instead of having to work a job and go to school, you can put all of your time into school and get through a lot more quickly. So empowerments are designed to aid or speed the student’s progress on the short path. Normally it would take a much greater period of time to amass all the power necessary to go into Enlightened states of attention. But an Enlightened teacher can actually transfer power to their students in the same way that a wealthy person can give somebody money. So, it’s something tangible, power. You cannot transfer knowledge, not really. You can’t transfer heart, or the sense of loving things. You can expose someone to it. But you can transfer power, certain types of gradated Kundalini. So part of the short path is the transfer of power. And this power is to be used to aid yourself and to aid others. Never for anything destructive. Buddhism is a practice in which we learn to avoid injuring others and ourselves. It’s a practice in which we learn to respond to beauty and to respond to difficult circumstances with patience, with a sense of calm, with clarity. Because we know we’ve lived before and we will always live, in one life time or another, because we experienced that in meditation. That knowledge comes to you and that power. We’re not really afraid of things. We’re not afraid of death, we’re not afraid of life.

Needless to say, there are always people who will give you a hard time cause you’re a Buddhist, or because you’re an anything. We live in a world that is extremely dogmatic. And people don’t understand. People of the earth are fairly simple to be honest with you. I mean they’re still killing each other in wars and polluting their planet, yelling at each other and shooting at each other. So how far along could they be? Not too far. So, do expect, if you do anything well in life, that you’ll always receive a lot of criticism and that there is always misunderstanding. Don’t let it trouble you. What matters is that you meditate, you’re seeking Enlightenment, and you’re on the pathway to Enlightenment. And you’re having fun. Don’t look for reassurance in the eyes of others. Look for reassurance in your own eyes. Only you know if Buddhist practice is improving the quality of your life. And if it is then that should be enough.

Buddhism is a very comprehensive way. There is a lot of etiquette in it. There is a great deal of etiquette. Etiquette is an intelligent way of doing things. Over the centuries, ways of saving energy have been evolved by Buddhists, by people who practice Yoga. And these methods are the etiquette of Buddhism. Energy conservation is a very, very important part of the practice of Yoga, of Buddhism. We only have so much energy. And in order to exist in higher spheres of mind, you need more energy. Energy comes from releasing the Kundalini through the practice of meditation. You gain energy that way. You gain energy through empowerments from Enlightened teachers. You gain energy by going to power places, by making pilgrimages to sacred places where the earth vibrates faster. You gain energy by doing happy things, by being successful, overcoming obstacles and obstructions that will get your power up. You gain power in strange ways, sometimes. I mean, in other words, things that you might not think release energy, do. Athletics, which you might think might just tire you out, releases certain types of Kundalini. Certain foods have more energy than others. And there are ways to deal with life and with people, very intelligent methods, so that you can coexist with other people and not lose all your energy. Just cause someone is in a bad mood, doesn’t mean they have to pull you into it. Just cause someone is unhappy, that doesn’t mean that you have to be pulled into it. So the etiquette of Buddhism is not, if it is a real practice, it’s not bullshit. It’s real. It helps you lead a better life, helps you conserve energy, so that you can live in higher states of mind.

The central practice, as I suggested, is meditation. And just in your overall understanding, you keep hearing me say, well Buddhism is Yoga, Yoga is Buddhism. Buddhism is not a singular way. It’s a compilation of ways and it’s organic. It changes. It’s the science of self discovery. Buddhism is Yoga. Yoga was started, who knows when, a long time ago, when the first person learned that they could still their thoughts and experience eternity and access the higher planes of mind and the spheres of perfection that exist in the mind of the universe, in the central nexus of Nirvana. Buddhism does not have a start and an ending. It was not started by any historical figure. It’s a body of ways and beliefs and traditions which will enable a person, when practiced correctly, to experience Enlightened states of mind. Occasionally in each age, in a different land, a Buddha is born. That is to say an Enlightened person, who simply recodifies in a new land, they recodify the ways, the practices, they make changes that are just intelligent changes that adapt to a new century, a new culture. But Buddhism doesn’t come from anybody. It exists by itself. It’s the practice of becoming completely conscious, overcoming depression, fear, anxiety, jealousy, the things that cause us pain, attachment, and learning to exist in beautiful states of mind.

So Buddhism is a way and there are lots of forms of it. And you find a way that suits you the best. No way is better than another. There is short path, long path, Hinayana, Mahayana, there are many aspects to it. But the central point of all Buddhism is not the aspects, not the etiquette, not the books that have been written about it, but the practice of meditation. If you meditate, you are a Buddhist. Meditation is silencing the mind. Making the mind still. Your thoughts are like a curtain that separate you from reality. When they stop, suddenly you can see eternity. The longer you can stop your thoughts, the deeper is your vision and your mystical experience, the deeper your journey into realities, into higher planes of consciousness and knowledge. So the practice of meditation is something you learn a little bit each time you meditate, a little more about. You need to make your mind calm, quiet, and still. That’s the essence of all practice. Meditation is a letting go. A letting go of the ego into the Clear Light of Reality. There is a higher light. In Buddhism, we call it the Dharma Kaya or the Clear Light, the suchness, the essence we call it in Zen. It’s there. Ineffable and perfect. When you meditate, you allow that light to filter through your being. To come into your mind, body, and spirit and essentially to purify you. Just like bathing in a waterfall or taking a shower. It washes away the dirt and makes you clean. So the light of Enlightenment, the Dharma Kaya, the Clear Light purifies all samskaras, all karmas, all experiences that you’ve had in this and other lives. It washes them away, energizes you and perfects you. In Buddhism, you know, it’s the funniest thing to try to think about, you really can’t. There is nothing that you essentially do in practice, except stop thought. And that’s the ultimate. So you might say Buddhism is about what you don’t do. You don’t think. You don’t make stupid mistakes. You avoid them. You become conservative, concerned, and conscious. Naturally you make millions of stupid mistakes. That’s the learning process and that shouldn’t bother you. But the idea is to avoid the really big mistakes by learning what’s what. What reality is and what it’s not. What practice is and what it’s not.

Buddhism isn’t about temples and incense and shaved heads and robes. It’s not about church. There are aspects of Buddhism that involve that. I guess people enjoy that. That helps them, it strengthens their practice. But real Buddhism is about meditation. It’s an individual experience, it’s an individual journey to Enlightenment. Someone else’s journey may inspire you, but it won’t enlighten you. You need to have your own journey into Enlightenment. Each time you meditate, you’re on the pathway to Enlightenment. You’re experiencing higher mind and higher light. You’re a traveler, a mental traveler on a journey which we call life. And death is not the end. It’s just another step in the journey. The journey is eternal.

If you’re interested in meditation in this lifetime, and Buddhism, you’ve probably practiced before. We’re drawn back again, in each lifetime we pick up where we left off. You may have a great deal of past life knowledge and power stored inside you and the way you access it is by practicing meditation. It’s best to meditate twice a day, in the morning and the evening. If you meditate in the morning, you will energize your body, mind, and spirit, clarify your purpose, and just become happy. Then you’re happy all day, successful all day. And then at night, meditate again and enter into the world of light. Fill yourself with light and you will have a perfect night. The central theme or theory of Yoga or Buddhism is that happiness not something that you really gain in the world. In life, we see most people trying to become happy through their careers, their relationships, their school or athletics, hobbies, pastimes or whatever. Certainly, a certain amount of happiness can be gained through those things, but also, it would appear, judging from most peoples experiences that more unhappiness is gained than happiness. There aren’t many happy people around. You don’t see many smiles in the world. So happiness does not necessarily come from experience nor knowledge. Yet there is happiness in knowledge. Happiness in knowledge, for sure, can come from meditation. There are worlds of happiness and knowledge outside of this dimension. Meditation is a way of getting to them. If you sit down in the morning and meditate you will experience happiness, knowledge, you will gain power. Then all day long, you will be happy. No matter what happens, you will be happy. If you have a happy day, well then great, enjoy it. But if you don’t, you won’t lose you happiness, you’ve stored it up in your morning meditation. And then you will gain more in the evening.

Meditation puts an end to the dependency for happiness on physical things, on people. If you love someone and they die, your life can be ruined. You can be miserable. But if you meditate, not so. Of course, you will experience sadness, that’s natural. But because you meditate, and you see that there is no death and because you experience radiant happiness in your meditation and in the practice, you will be happy no matter what happens. This is a world where people age, they grow old, they die, they despair, their lives don’t work out as they thought, nothing seems to. It’s a transient place. Things come and go fast, like youth, wealth, health. Visit an old age home, visit a cancer ward. Things don’t always work out so well. But if you’re a Buddhist, if you practice, you can take these things in stride. Every year you grow older, you can grow wiser. The West is a funny place, the East too. But I think the West is even funnier in certain ways. I like it. But it’s strange. People here think that youth is what it is all about. This is the youth culture. And old age is where we hide our people away in homes and they’re stupid and sick and senile. What a weird concept. It seems, as people grow older, if they lead an intelligent life, they get more powerful. They get wiser. They become happier. But you have to lead an intelligent life. If you meditate and if you practice Yoga, then your body shouldn’t end up a mess at 50 or 60 or 70.

You should be mobile, you should be in good shape. Most people use up all their energy and become old cause they’re so stressed out. Cause they don’t have any balance in their life. They’re not grounded in happiness. They’re not grounded in the spirit. If you practice Yoga, if you meditate, do some exercising, lead an intelligent life, then every year you get older, every day that passes, you can become more Enlightened, more aware, more conscious. That’s the normal way, that’s the healthy way. That should be everyone’s way. Then there is no despair. Old age is not a time when you sit around and feel jealous about all these younger people running around in convertibles. I mean that’s not a problem, you did that, you enjoyed it, it was interesting, but it was facile. You were young then, you didn’t have power then. As you grow older, you should be more intelligent and you should enjoy what the kids do, but it’s not what you do. You should be off having new adventures in different fields of attention. It’s a more graceful way to be.

So Buddhism and Yoga are great practices because your whole life is streamlined. Your whole life becomes a way achieving success and it doesn’t end at a certain age. It gets better and better. But you have to stay centered in the practice. Now, there is a lot of confusion in the West and in the East, about meditation. Some people astral travel, they go into these astral states above the body where they get spaced-out and disassociated. They think that’s meditation. Not at all. Meditation is a beautiful and perfect state in which there is tremendous light, energy, and humor. If you are not becoming happier, more centered, and better at what you do in the physical world, if you can’t relate better to people than you could before, if your conversation isn’t sharper, you’re not funnier, if you’re not more street wise, you’re not meditating. You’re spacing out. You’re in the astral. And that is not meditation. There is kind of a new ageism that you see in the West, you see it in the East too, where people walk around with this sort of disassociated look and they think they’re being spiritual. There is nothing spiritual about being disassociated, that’s just being disassociated. Spirituality is a graceful and beautiful state of mind. And it’s sharp and very physical, too in certain ways. And martial arts comes out of Buddhism and Yoga. And in martial arts you learn to use the body in a very dynamic and very graceful way, a very powerful way, so certainly, certainly in martial arts, you can’t be spaced out or you’re going to get a foot in the face. And I think that’s a good way to look at Buddhist and Yogic practice.

Buddhism and Yoga makes you funny, gives you a sense of humor about life, about yourself. If you’re becoming just a prig or if you’re getting spaced out, if it’s about social climbing, who’s who in the Buddhist set or sect, it’s not Buddhism. You may call it that, but it’s not pure practice. Pure practice is about the transcendence of ego, being clear, centered, being kind, being detached also in a positive way. Leading your own life and not being afraid to, but always being a student, never being superior, you know it all and there is no more to learn, there’s nothing you can learn from anyone else.

There is no competition between teachers, if they’re really Buddhists. There is only a smile between them, a true acknowledgment that we are all in the world of light together, how great that we practice. How great that other people are having fun, too. When you see this egocentric competition between students and teacher, they’re people in very early stages of practice. We have to allow latitude for that. You don’t just become Enlightened in a day, a week or a month or an incarnation. It’s a beautiful process, but it takes a while. So tolerance, Buddhism is about tolerance to an extent. Having the tolerance in the practice with people who have trouble with it, who become egocentric, who turn it into politics, into a click, into, oh all the different things that can happen. In other words, by applying the vain human emotions and the ego to practice and energizing them with Kundalini, one achieves nothing.

This is about selflessness, stillness, flexibility, and strength, wisdom, and humor. These are human words, English words that are trying to divine … define … interesting Freudian slip … trying to define spiritual states that are beyond words. But if you walk into a place where people are allegedly practicing Yoga or Buddhism and you don’t feel comfortable and they don’t seem to be in touch, you’re right. Time to go somewhere else. But then, sometimes that’s part of what students do. You go to the university for the teacher, not the students, unless you’re just looking for a social experience. If the teachers are great, they will teach what you need to know. Your university days will come and go. But if you learn something from your teacher, it will help you your whole life. So in Yoga and Buddhism, you look for the right teacher. There’s no best teacher, there is no competition. There is the one that works for you. Good teachers are usually hard. That was my experience in college and graduate school. They are difficult, but they are understanding. They demand more from you so you can get more from yourself. But in Buddhism, there is a sense that the teacher is not responsible for your education, you are. In the West, we feel if we come into a class, somehow the teacher, if we pay them, is suppose to educate us. Not so in the world of Enlightenment. In Enlightenment, you have to convince a teacher, not only that you’re worthy of teaching, but then that they should show you some of the secrets. Buddhism is all about secrets, you know. Secrets are things most people don’t learn because they are not enthusiastic enough, or bright enough or patient enough, or funny enough. Or still enough. So, you have to have a yen for that which is infinity, for brightness. And you have to be willing to overcome your meanness, and your separativity. You have to be flexible and open-minded. Then you have what we call the apprentice or the student spirit. The spirit of the young monk. Young monkish. Buddhism is something you practice regardless of sex, religion, color, age, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you love light, you want to learn, and that you’re willing to overcome your limitations.

There are those in the West, particularly where Buddhism is not that well known, as I said before, who will give you a hard time because you practice. Employers will be bigoted. Several of my students and students of others teachers have experienced that. There are nasty groups out there who try to put us out of business because we practice Buddhism, even in the good old USA. It has nothing to do with the Constitution, they’re just the KKK of the spiritual world. And they don’t like it. Some people think of it as a third world religion. Next joke. Welcome to Japan, who is currently buying the world out of a Buddhist based mentality. A nation that is doing rather well, if you check the Yen. Buddhism lends to good business, a good business sense. As not only the Japanese illustrate, but all Buddhists illustrate. It’s a very sophisticated thing. But, you know the West is a very young culture. America is only a few hundred years old. And it’s a great place and I love it and I enjoy teaching here. But there is not a lot of knowledge about Buddhism, one of the largest and oldest religions in the world. It is the oldest religion, Yoga is. Yogic practice. So I do warn you, if you practice, it does get a little rocky sometimes. People will give you a hard time about it. But don’t let it bother you. It’s always that way in a new culture, in a naive culture. America is a great place. It’s a wonderful place to practice Buddhism, the whole world is. And just as the Soviet Union and the demigods who ran it fell apart, so all nations fall apart where there are demigods. Eventually light prevails. You just have to be patient. So practice Buddhism, learn to be Enlightened, put a smile on your face, go find a great teacher, meditate, and stay funny. That’s the essence of all practice; Enlightenment with a sense of humor. That’s always the best.

The Enlightenment Cycle Career Success by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

I’m a teacher of American Buddhism. American Buddhism is a new form of Buddhism. It’s a little different from our practice in the far east. In the far east, Buddhism is usually practiced in a monastery. You enter a monastery and you live your life there. And you get up at a certain time, you have your meals at a certain time, you tend the garden or copy manuscripts. You meditate at certain times. You study with a master or teaching monks. It’s a certain type of life. But in the west while certainly there will be Buddhist monasteries, I am sure, it seems to me that the best form of practice is to live in the world. To have your own home or apartment, condominium. Have your own car. It just seems to work better here. The spirit of the west, of America, is different from the east. The cultural conditioning is very different. And it seems harder for people here to work in teams. It seems to be more difficult for people here to live in harmony in a monastery. Certainly there are monasteries and convents that have flourished in the Christian tradition for a long time in Europe and America and other places in the world. But a Buddhist monastery is a certain chemistry, a certain laughter, a certain excitement, a certain brightness and ambiance. And it’s hard to capture that here. I think that same brightness here, is captured in another way. And that’s by living and working in the world. It’s certainly more challenging, in certain ways. And certainly about the same in other ways. As compared to living in monasteries in the far east.

So as a practicing Buddhist, in America, in the west, or even in the far east, in Japan or other places, if you don’t live in a monastery, then you have to have a job. In a monastery, you have a job usually, but here you have to live and work in the world. And most of the time that people spend in their lives is devoted to working. Whether it’s school or work, school is preparation for work and it’s a type of work and then later we finish school and go to work and we get a job. Working is not a 9 to 5 experience, it’s a lifetime. Most people get up around 6 to get ready for work 6:30, some even earlier, some later, off they go into traffic. They have to commute for an hour or two at times just to get to work, spend the day there, commute back. They have to make sure their clothes are ready for the next day. They may have to do some study for the next day if their job calls for it, particularly if they are in a supervisor or managerial position. Or an R&D position. In other words, for most people a tremendous amount of time goes into their work, the main thing we do in life to sustain ourselves just as bodies. It’s a very important thing and it consumes a great deal of our energy. And energy is the central study or component theme of Buddhist practice, of yoga, the conservation of energy and that’s why people live in monasteries. The idea was the walls of the monastery are not to keep you in but to keep everyone else out. Because you want to develop a certain type of life and most people in the world, they have other ideas on this subject. So Buddhist have, for a long time lived in monasteries so that they can spend a certain amount of time working and a certain amount of time meditating and they don’t want to use up all their energy working. You might say living in a monastery cuts down the commutation time, that alone will give you a couple of extra hours to do all kinds of things. And in a monastery, you live a relative simple life. You don’t have a lot of possessions. You don’t have to work as many hours to sustain yourself, so you have more time for play. And spiritual practice is not thought of as an arduous thing or a hard thing, but play. It’s the fun of life. If you think of spiritual practice as hard work, certainly there is an element of work involved in it, but if you think of it as unpleasant work, it’s not spiritual practice as I know it. It has nothing to do with it. Spiritual practice is what you do at the end of the day and you look forward to it. You can’t wait to get there. It’s the greatest date you‘ve ever had. You get to go meditate. You get to go see your teacher. You get to go get involved with a project that’s advancing your consciousness because the immediate result, not just the future result, of spiritual practice, if it’s genuine, is joy. Immediate happiness. A deeper understanding of reality. So, in the west, people spend most of their time and energy working. And it would be a difficult thing if we couldn’t gain something more than just dollars and cents from working. Because if you meditate for an hour in the morning, you have to get up an hour earlier than everyone else and if you need to meditate an hour at night, oh gee, there is not much time but to meditate and work and the problem is, of course, you come home you’re so tired from work you don’t have much energy to meditate and have a good meditation. Unless you use work in a Tantric way. Unless you use work as a way of advancing yourself. And that’s how I define career success.

Career success is using your daily work, school work, work in the world, work at home, doing the laundry, doing anything, all physical tasks, cleaning the car, any kind of work and specifically career itself, using career as a way, and scholastics, of advancing your mental state. Also obviously career success means making enough money to lead the kind of life you would like to lead as a practicing Buddhist. To be able to live in the kind of house, in the right energy area, to have the kind of car, whatever it is you need to shelter yourself from the abrasive forces of life that would be draining to you and keep you in lower states of mind. So the purpose of work is to make enough money to exclude the abrasiveness, to shelter yourself, to live well in other words and happily and successfully in a material sense. Also, with work to make money to assist others, if you enjoy that. To pay for your own spiritual practice, to advance yourself, and just to have fun. But by and large, I define career success as using your work to advance yourself spiritually. And you can do that with any kind of work, if you use work as meditation. Work becomes meditation, then 8 hours of work is 8 hours of meditation. It’s still important to do a morning meditation and evening silent meditation, meaning a sitting meditation, because it’s an entirely different level of experience. By doing a proper meditation in the morning, a good sitting meditation, you’ll open yourself up to the planes of light and that will enable you to do a strong work meditation all day, just to be in high states all day. And then of course, if you do that, when you come home, you will be able to meditate well again, because you won’t be exhausted as everyone else is because you have been gaining a kind of Ki or power from your work. That’s the secret. So meditation comes in different forms. And the best form of meditation, of course, is the one that makes you smile the most. And that’s the sitting meditation, but next is work. Work is a great way to meditate.

There is a particular form of work that I recommend to people who practice meditation and it’s computer science. Being a computer programmer, systems analyst working in the data processing field. The mental structures that are used in computer science, particularly in working with relational databases, artificial intelligence are very similar to exercises that are done in monasteries. And when you are in school studying computer science, it’s literally like studying Buddhism. That is to say, in Buddhism, in Buddhist practice in monasteries, there are many exercises that we do to develop our mental powers so that we can meditate extremely well and go into other dimensions or states of mind that are ecstatic and lead to enlightenment. It’s necessary if you are really going to meditate well to do those exercise, which is why people always lived in monasteries. They would have the time. As I said before, it cuts down the commutation time. And also there is an environment that’s helpful for practice. And teachers are available, a certain amount of backup is available from other students and the environment. But really computer science is fascinating. Because in the study of it as students, you study computer science you will find that it will develop your mind. Makes your mind very strong. And it’s literally like doing Buddhist exercises all day long. And then of course, as a profession it’s wonderful because it gives you a tremendous amount of money. Computer science is a very lucrative field, a very clean field. It’s a non polluting field. There is always a job anywhere in the world because there just don’t seem to be a whole lot of people who want to do it and you can make lots and lots of money so that you can meet all of your expenses and do your Buddhism and just have a wonderful life in a material sense, aid others if you would like to do that. But as you study computer science and as you work in the environment, you develop this wonderful mental acumen and particularly with relational data bases and, of course, systems analysis and artificial intelligence. You see Buddhism is the study of the way the mind works. And in the beginning it’s explained to the students simply meditating, leading a happy, bright life, accessing higher energy fields, moving the Kundalini through the chakras, and so on. That’s all true in the preliminary stages. But as you advance in practice it’s necessary to develop a certain faculties and mental discrimination. One has to be able to hold a large number of relational concepts simultaneously in the mind. And in the more advanced stages, it is necessary to be able to grid, to literally unlock realities and dimensions with your mind. It isn’t just a physical power that does it, it’s an intelligence and you have to become very subtle to do this, your mind has to be extremely flexible. So, in the Buddhist monastery, in Buddhist practice, normally a great deal of time is spent doing mendala meditation. You learn to visualize and hold simultaneous concepts, usually visual concepts, in the mind during meditation. And after many years of doing this, the mind is developed in a specific way that enables you to pass through the dimensions into the higher planes of light and into the enlightened stages of attention. Relation database work, artificial intelligence, and related fields of computer science really involve the same mind set. Particularly artificial intelligence. What we are doing in AI is creating a mind, hopefully as pure a mind as possible, for a computer. We are replicating the way the mind works. And the mathematical fields that are adjacent to computer science, chaos theory, things like that, and also just the ability to program at that level requires a high degree of development. If you combine that with the practice of a morning and evening meditation, you will advance very rapidly in spiritual practice and at the same time you will work in an environment that is not as draining as many careers are and it’s extremely lucrative and it’s fun. Essentially computer science is the most misunderstood field there is. You’re being paid 30 an hour, 50 an hour, 150 an hour, whatever it is depending upon your level, to play games all day, to solve puzzles, and for a person who is interested in meditation that’s the way the mind works. That’s to say, a person who has practiced meditation in past lives who is interested in meditation, reincarnation, and psychic development, and related things in this lifetime, their mind works in a certain way because of their practices in past lives. So it’s very easy for such a person to do or be successful at computer science. They’ve already developed their mindset in past lives. And while a certain amount energy will initially have to be spent, certainly working at programming, working at learning the languages and just getting that mind set back., but once you get past a certain point you will find that, combined with, of course, your practice of meditation, and streamlining your life and doing all of that kind of correct, essential things that one does in Buddhism, you will find that your life and your computer science will progress, your spiritual life and your computer science will progress extremely, extremely rapidly. They assist each other.

Think of it this way. Let us suppose that in a past life you had a deep and very thorough knowledge of Japanese. And you lived in Japan for many lives. In this lifetime, you have no knowledge, consciously. When you begin to study Japanese, it seems like you will never learn it or let’s say it’s as difficult for you as it is for any westerner. Because the initial mind set you have in this life has nothing to do with your past lives. It’s what you’ve developed in this life and it’s trained in a non oriental based language. But if you are willing to be patient and learn the initial stages of Japanese, you will find that then suddenly you will jump ahead of most of your class mates in your knowledge and in your ability to learn Japanese. Because if you’ve known it in past lives, once you get through the basics if you’re patient and you gain a little bit of a mindstate, that will open up the doorway to past life knowledge. The same is true of meditation. If you’ve meditated in other lives and you’ve practiced meditation and had spiritual insights, meditation is something you have to learn again and you may be a little slow at first or just like anyone else. But if you persist, suddenly you will reach a point where there will be a break through and you will be astounded at how fast you will progress. Suddenly you will leap ahead of everyone else. Not that it’s competitive. If you’ve done a lot of practiced in a past life because it’s there to draw on, but you have to get to that place in each lifetime and that requires a certain amount of starting over. It doesn’t just come in most cases, sometimes it does, if a person is very, very advanced. But usually we have to recapture the mindstate through a certain amount of mental work in this lifetime. The same is true of the composition of music, designing buildings , architecture, just about any past life skill. You have to pretty much start over. You have to pay your dues, a little bit. But then you have the wealth of your past life knowledge to draw on. It just starts to come back to you. Anyone who is highly successful in this life has probably been in it for many lifetimes although they may not remember that. And once they were through the initial stages of learning suddenly the brilliance, that was developed in other lives for a particular field or endeavor returns to them.

So, most people who practice meditation if you’re a psychic at all, if you re drawn to meditation, your interested in spiritual maters, chances are you’ve done spiritual practice in other lives. And that spiritual practice has developed a certain mindstate which is extremely similar to the mindstate necessary to be a successful computer programmer, systems analyst, and AI expert. So while you’re at computer school or studying at the university, it may be difficult or even more difficult for you if you just haven’t done much work with your mind in this life. Once you get to a certain point, you will find that it’s a very easy career to be successful in, you will enjoy it thoroughly, and it’s one of the most lucrative careers there is, particularly, of course, if you then get into designing products and things like that, there’s no limit to it, to what you can do. And it’s a very nice type of work because you are helping people process information and improve their lives. Computers are tied in and will only be more so in the future with everything in our lives. And there is not much good software and there aren’t a lot of good programmers, so it’s a real service to humanity and the world to be a good programmer and particularly if you design great products you make it easier for everybody. Everybody has less headaches and their business works better, their life is better and of course you get rich and develop your mind in a yogic way, in a Buddhist way. So it’s really the best of all possible worlds. Naturally you can practice or be involved in another career and advance your mind and your spiritual practice, by being mindful, using your career to develop certain skills. But I have yet to see a career that is as similar if not almost the same in benefit as computer science is to doing the advanced exercises. So it’s like being in a monastery for 8 hours a day or 7 hours. You’re sitting there getting paid to do Buddhist exercises which are developing your mind. You do yoga all day and get paid for it. And it’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s lucrative and it’s non polluting. There is just nothing negative about it at all. And then if you did a good morning meditation, do computer science during the day, and then come home and do some more meditation, its literally the same effect as doing practice all day, it puts you in a very high place.

Think of career as a vehicle, it doesn’t have to be downtime. And that’s not just true of computer science. You could be sweeping the floor in a factory. Now you can just sweep the floor generally and gain nothing from it. Or you can sweep the floor intelligently, you can figure out the best way to sweep the floor, put your power into it, use it as a concentration exercise, be meditative about it, there are lots of things you can do with any task; you can stack firewood, fold your laundry, just organize your day. Each time you do something in a clear, sharp and definitive way, you are using the higher mind. When you find a new way to do something, you’ve reached up into the intuitive level, the astral and you’re creating on a higher level. So there really is no downtown in life. If you use life properly. Most people don’t do that, needless to say, they just stumble along, they want to get out of work as fast as they can. They want to make maximum output for minimum input. And that does not result in a happy life, there is no pride in your work. It does not become an active force to advance your mental awareness into higher states, it doesn’t compact you.

Let’s say you wanted to be an Olympic athlete. And you got a job that would develop your muscles the same way as an exercise program would. Naturally, you had to pay for your life, you have to make your way in life until the Olympic games came. And other people perhaps were subsidized perhaps they had a scholarship, someone funded them and they could just go train all day, but you didn’t have that available to you. If instead, you got a job that was literally like training all day, and you were getting paid at the same time, well, that would be the best of both worlds.

So that’s how a Buddhist uses career. And any career, being a doctor, being a lawyer, anything can be used to advance yourself. The key is to have to begin with, that sense, that possibility, that I’m working not just to get paid, but I’m working to advance myself. And that there is an inherent power in my career to advance myself spiritually. In other words, you shouldn’t create a break, a syntactical break in your mind between your career and your religious practice. If religious practice is just something you do for the church a couple of hours a week, that’s not a lot of practice. The rest of time is down time. So in the type of Buddhism that I teach, the career actually is the central point in practice. Since you spend 2 hrs a day meditating, or just an hour if your are new to mediation and maybe 10 or12 hours devoted to the career between the commutation, dressing, going to school, the homework, that’s a lot of time. If that time is turned into mediation, then you live in a high level of energy all the time, your mind advances rapidly, and you just dash along the path to more and more beautiful vitas. You experience deeper ecstasy from going to school. So the central point really in the teaching I do, is career. Since we spend more time doing it and more energy is expended in it than anything else, then career becomes the most important item in our agenda to turn into a meditative form of practice that makes us happy, that makes us wise, that makes us balanced. It develops your sense of humor, it develops your concentrative and meditative powers, and then enables you to go into inner dimensional realities bright and beautiful and empowering and eventually, of course, into enlightened stages of attention. Naturally you can’t practice the yoga of career, without practicing meditation by itself, sitting meditation because you won’t have the kundalini available to you . When you meditate in the morning and the evening, you release kundalini energy. That energy, with proper meditation upon the chakras, will enable you then to have the power to use your mind in your career each day. Most people are operating out of repetition. In other words, if you come to work each day with the same mindstate, you probably can’t get more out of it each day. But if you meditate in the morning and you reach mindstates that you’ve never been in before. It will stay with you through the day. And you will be able to find new ways to utilize your career and your school work and just the routines of daily life; cooking, cleaning, getting the car serviced, there are million of opportunities, of little opportunities to advance yourself. Everything in life is the pathway to enlightenment. But you have to have the personal power to see how to do it. You can know it as a theory, but that doesn’t mean that you can do it. So the personal power comes from meditating in the morning and meditating in the evening and if you have an enlightened teacher, receiving instructions and empowerments. But then if you combine that with a career like computer science or just use whatever you have as a yoga, the school you are in, you will find that your practice will not be in any shape or form be less powerful or less effective than the person who lives in a monastery. Not only can you be on a par with them, but you might even excel because practice in a monastery can get one sided. There are certain challenges to face living in the world, certain difficult situations that you deal with that you don’t have in a monastery. And sooner or later the person in the monastery is going to have to overcome these things. So we feel that it is better postpone it to solidify the realizations and then take on the more difficult things. I like to just jump into everything at once. You’ve got to learn it anyway, and why not just tackle it to start with. If we are going running, let’s do the uphill part first and then as we come back and we are a little more tired, we will have the downhill to aid us, we will go with the flow of gravity. When our power is up, when we are new to something, that’s the time to tackle the rough stuff. It’s kind of fun, it’s easier.

So I think it’s better, personally. One can advance faster outside the monastery, if you follow a tantric path, that’s to say a path in which you use the experience of daily light, daily life, to advance yourself. That’s tantra. Tantra is a form of Buddhism and yoga in which not only is the kundalini is released with chakra meditation but daily experiences are used to advance oneself. I think if you combine the experience of career and daily life with meditative practice and study with an enlightened teacher, I think that while it’s more difficult initially than going to the supportive environment of a monastery, you will progress faster. And then later in your life, once you‘ve learned to deal with the world and the more complicated balancing issues of dealing with life in the physical, all the things that can happen and jar you, once you’ve kind of gotten your rhythm for that, the second part of your incarnation will go more smoothly, that’s the downhill run. If you avoid that, which you sometimes do in the monastery, I think that you will find that while you learn certain tidings in a controlled environment, when you are out of that controlled environment and you’ve gotten used to it, it can become debilitating to a certain degree. It’s not bad living in a monastery. I have done it many times. Many lives teaching. Don’t misunderstand me, but I think that you can do a better job outside the monastery, if you have the necessary component parts and I really think that computer science is one of those component parts. I can see no better way if you don’t live in a monastery to practice. Because the mere practice of the art itself, computer science advances you, advances your mind in tandem with your meditation is a very powerful, potent way to free yourself materially and to advance yourself spiritually. So career is yoga, career is the Buddhist practice. I can think of nothing that is more so because it is what we do with our lives and if we make that a spiritual thing, it gives us energy and enlightenment, then enlightenment can’t be very far off can it. Career is one of the pathways to enlightenment. And needless to say, I recommend computer science as the ultimate form of career for the reasons we discussed.

The Enlightenment Cycle Enlightenment by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without mental modification. Enlightenment is a state of awareness we reach when our consciousness is one with infinity with the infinite consciousness of life itself. Enlightenment is not a state of mind, although all states of mind are contained within it. It is the best of all things, the brightest of all lights, it is union with immortality. Timelessness and with the temporal. Of all the mirriad worlds, planes, and things that simply can’t be put into words. Enlightenment exists within everything. There is nothing that can be separate Enlightenment. But when I talk about Enlightenment, when I discuss it with my students, I am referring to an experience, a journey, journey to light. Enlightenment in this sense is a journey into cosmic consciousness. To be completely aware of eternity. To be aware not of just this moment, or this world, but of timelessness of space, of organic life, and where lie’s beyond it. Think of Enlightenment as a journey. Today you woke up, And anything can happen.. You could live any type of life. You could be rich, you could be poor, you could be wise, you could be ignorant. It doesn’t really matter. Because no matter what happens, there is Enlightenment. All the things you see that threaten you and make you afraid, All the things you see that attract you, the things you are indifferent to, or perhaps didn’t know about. They don’t really matter. Life is like a dream. It’s transient. For one moment, we’re in the dream of life. We’re awake, we’re having experiences. Then we’re asleep. Its all washed away. At best it becomes a memory, that fades. So death is a sleep and life is an awakening. And in each lifetime we awaken to a different condition. The wakefulness, the state of wakefulness that I refer to, that Enlightened teachers refer to, is a condition of ecstasy, a condition of tremendous beauty, a permanent state of wakefulness that defies sleep. Sleep is dreams of another kind, death. The experiences in the after death plane. Between lifetimes, between incarnations. Its a different kind of dream which we forget upon waking into this life and this world. So, Enlightenment is a journey, a journey into light, a journey into self knowledge, a journey into beauty, reflection awareness, the infinitude of being, calls us to become conscious of itself. Now this might sound like a lot of euphoria, to some, it might sound like a lot of words. A rhapsody of words that don’t necessarily connect and aren’t practical. That is certainly not the case. To be conscious to be aware of what your aware of is not something you can defend or express, it simply is. Yes, there is the surface of life, there’s the day-to-day activities of human beings, plants, animals, astral beings, the endless movements of creation and then there is Nirvana.

Nirvana is absolute ecstasy, absolute stillness, a presence, to be in the center of the mind of God, to become completely conscious forever, of forever. To be in that timeless, misty realm, the nexus of all things, all universes, all intelligences, all cycles of being come from it. And they go back to it. It sustains them, totally here. That’s the world of enlightenment. The day-to-day life we lead has nothing to do with enlightenment. We’re unaware of it. It’s just around the corner and we don’t see it. It’s in front of us and we don’t see it. We are it and we don’t see it. Enlightenment is happiness. Happiness in the most profound, yet simple sense. Enlightenment is, as I said before, a journey. A journey into cosmic consciousness, and meditation is the key to enlightenment. To meditate, to make your mind still and supremely aware. To penetrate the void, the essence, the substance and go beyond both to what is referred to as the clear light of reality. Clear in the sense that it doesn’t have a definite color. Light in the sense that it is not solid, yet it is, pure energy. Reality in the sense that it is that which is most real. That which is actual, meaning it doesn’t change. It’s always here.

The pathway to enlightenment is your life. Each being is walking along that pathway. Having experiences, gaining knowledge, learning by doing. What else is there to do. And the progression beyond judgement. It just is. But then there is the study of Enlightenment. In other words, life is Enlightenment, the great process of life. Then we can say that everybody’s on the way to enlightenment or they all are Enlightenment. And from a certain perspective, that’s true. But then there’s the experience of Enlightenment, to yoke your consciousness, to join yourself to immortality, to in this very life, be very aware of what lies beyond the boundaries of cognitive perception. Beyond the boundaries of thought, reflection, and self awareness as seen through the personality. Why become enlightened? Why join the military? Why get married? Why cross the ocean? Why stay at home? Why stay single? Why avoid the army? It’s a personal choice. There’s something in a person that draws them to the light. It’s karma, ultimately. Karma is not a cop out. The word as it is frequently used, is a cop out. If you say something is your karma, that seems to free us from responsibility. If you say well, this happened to me, I was born into this life in this condition or these things just happened to me because it’s my karma, it’s as if you had nothing to do with it. Certainly, there is chance, but that isn’t really the esoteric meaning of karma. The esoteric meaning of karma is that you are who you are and you experience what you experience because of what you’ve done and what you’ve been. Your karma is who you are today. Your karma is the sum total of your awareness field. Your awareness field is comprised of all the experiences that you’ve had in this life and all other lives. In this incarnation, you were born into the world with a certain karma. That is to say, at the moment of birth, you had a certain facility, one is potential and one is immediately available. The karma of immediate availability is the wakefulness the condition of your awareness when you’re born. The karma of potentiality is what’s stored inside you from your past lives. Just as you are today the experience and the product of everything you’ve ever done and gone through in this lifetime. So at the moment of birth, you are the product of everything that has occurred to you in every lifetime that you’ve had. But like an inheritance, that you don’t come into until you’re perhaps 21. When you’re born, you don’t necessarily at your fingertips, at your control, everything that you are, everything that you’ve been in your past lives. So, in the enlightenment cycle, attention is paid to bringing back the awareness field, the total view from other lives. This does not simply mean the memories of experienced passed, that may or may not be helpful. But rather, to draw on the internal power and intelligence. The knowledge, the wisdom you’ve amassed in other lifetimes. And if you’ve amassed any siddah powers to bring them also because they can be quite useful So to do this, mediation is the key that unlocks or opens the door. Meditation will bring back the powers and awarenesses of the past and even more immediately, it will expand your consciousness today, to places you’ve never been, to experiences you’ve never had. Meditation is the pathway to Enlightenment. Meditation is to stop thought, to silence the mind, to move the ego aside and simply be still, open, clear, bright and fully conscious. Meditation is not an active movement in a sense. Not in a deeper since. There is a sense of activity in beginning of s mediation. The shuttle astronaut are going into space. So they have to blast off. And there is a great amount energy expended to get up into orbit or to get up beyond the gravitational pull of the earth. Once they have done that, they shut the engines off, there is no gravity, or they’ve achieve the orbit they desire, they simply coast. They’re in space, no motion(?). So in meditation, in the world of Enlightenment, you have to expend a certain amount of energy gain it, conserve it, expend it, to place yourself into a high state of awareness, to get beyond all gravity to get into the world of Enlightenment or samadhi. Once you’re there, you just let go, you’re absorbed into perfect radiant light. And as you go into the light, into the planes of light, which lie beyond the physical dimensions, and the astral dimensions, as you enter what we call the causal dimensions, the planes of light, you will be purified, energized, and you will become wise. Wisdom in the world of enlightenment is not something that you gain in conversation. A certain amount of instruction can gained in conversation. But wisdom in Enlightenment is something you gain by making the mind still. You can make your mind still when you’re alone through the practice of meditation. If you learn some meditation techniques you can quiet the mind, you can bring the kundalini up through the seven chakras, and enter into various states of Enlightened mind. If you meditate with a teacher, who is enlightened, you can go higher, deeper. You can ride with them into stages of mind, into the nexus of the universe that are perhaps not available to you at this time. All of us have an aura, a body of energy and that aura linked to different planes of awareness. Some of us have the ability to access more planes of awareness than others because of our accomplishments in past lives, because of our practice in this life. An Enlightened teacher is someone who has an access not only to the astral dimensions, but to the planes of light. And beyond the planes of light to Enlightenment itself, to Nirvana. Nirvana is the highest, cleanest, purest, and best of all things. And if you meditate with an Enlightened teacher, if you sit with them, and silence your mind, as they go into Nirvana as they experience the clear light, the suchness, the thatness, of perfect radiant oneness with all being, you will be according to your lucidity, according to how well you meditate, able to travel with them. The pure power of their aura will bring you on a metaphysical journey into the world of perfection. (end of side one)

A teacher is really invaluable as is personal practice. Each day you should meditate, twice a day, in the morning and evening and still your mind. A teacher will instruct you in chakra meditation and how to silence the mind and raise the kundalini. A teacher will also instruct you in how to stabilize your energy field, increase it, decrease a loss of energy in your life, how to be balanced, how to have power, and how to be wise. And how to be funny, of course. It’s a testing process, really. A testing process with yourself and a testing process with your teacher. The purpose of enlightenment is certainly not the teacher, nor is it you. It doesn’t have a purpose. Enlightenment simply exists. And if you would like to reach it, if you would like to attain it, if you would like to go beyond suffering, pain, frustration, and limited happiness that can be experienced in any form, then you need to journey to Enlightenment. So individual practice is to meditate twice a day. And when you’re not meditating to groom your mind, to eliminate hate, doubt, fear, anxiety, negative thoughts, emotions and stages of awareness that limits your consciousness that binds you to a sense of self of ego. This is the practice of mindfulness, of monitoring your mind all day and all night and it’s enjoyable to simply remove things that make you unhappy from your mind, to clarify your emotions, and to lead a happy and productive life. Then you need to see your teacher to sit in meditation with them to take journeys with them to high energy places, places of power, where it’s easier to meditate, where it’s easier to access higher dimensions. The relationship with the teacher is really not a relationship. A teacher of enlightenment is Enlightened. And they simply express enlightenment in their life by living. It’s the student responsibility and job to gain the teaching. It isn’t the teachers. The teachers job is just to be perfectly Enlightened. In this era, we’ve grown to have a sense that it is the responsibility of the teacher to cause the student to learn. We’ve placed the burden on the teacher. And certainly it’s the responsibility of the teacher to have knowledge and to teach it and communicate it intelligently and effectively. But it is not the responsibility of the enlightened teacher to bring the student to Enlightenment. That may be true in the classroom, in algebra, in trigonometry, in computer science, English, in Art, I don’t know. Each teacher has their own philosophy in school. But in the world of Enlightenment, it’s not the responsibility of the teacher. Its our responsibility. You’re the one who wants enlightenment, you have to do what’s necessary, find it, enter into it and to do that, you have to let go of everything. You have to let go of your ideas about enlightenment, your ideas about teachers and teachings, your ideas about yourself. You have to be responsible conscious, and above all earnest. Not perfect, far from perfect, but you need to have a sincere, earnest interest in becoming one with the light, becoming fully conscious. And if you have that, and you’re flexible and you’re accommodating, you’re willing to follow your teachers suggestions, then if your teachers truly enlightened, they have the power and the wisdom and the balance and the sense of humor necessary, you’ll make rapid progress into the world of Enlightenment.

Enlightenment is something that is real. And as I said, Enlightenment is a journey, it’s a journey through the 10,000 states if mind. A journey that is not accomplished in a single day or moment. Each time you meditate, you take the journey. Each time you become more conscious, you love more, you feel more, you increase your depth. Each time you gain a happier sense of what it is to live, each time you gain a little more control over your life, each time you don’t, you don’t allow that to discourage you and cause you to give up, you become a little more Enlightened. Enlightenment is accumulative, you become a little more enlightened each day as you yoga and Buddhism. But simply having a teacher and doing what you call meditation will not necessarily bring you to Enlightenment. You can sit and just space out and not meditate. A lot of people do that and they think they are doing a wonderful meditation. You can become pompous and egotistical and think you’re very important and think that is a spiritual achievement. There is no such thing as spiritual achievement. While Enlightenment, while people who are Enlightened, full enlightened in this world are rare, it’s not an achievement. It’s not a belt ranking. It’s simply an awareness that’s intrinsic to all life that they’ve managed to gain or become conscious of. It’s certainly worthy of our respect because life is worthy of our respect. But to put them on a pedestal is a mistake, to under value them is also a mistake. In other words, you have to come to the world of Enlightenment with open hands, that is to say, not clenched in fists, without an agenda. You’ll have an agenda, of course and you’ll have your fists clenched, that is to say, you will have expectations, ways you think it will work out, what you’re going to receive from the experience. You’ll have ideas about what you’ll do and what you won’t do. You can’t help but have those things. But what matters most is that you have a sincere love of truth, there’s something in you that loves light. And you’re willing to side with that part of your being more than any other side. And you’re willing to be patient and go through the training to go through the Enlightenment Cycle. You’re not vain enough to think that you’ll necessarily become fully Enlightened in this lifetime, it doesn’t really matter. There is no time factor. Yet you would like to become as fully conscious as possible in this life, before death because it makes life more enjoyable to be fully conscious. And also in your next lifetime, you get that consciousness back, it returns to you. Partially at the moment of birth and as you are drawn back to meditation, fully. So, its something that you can’t loose in this lifetime, you can loose everything. You can amass a fortune and it can be lost. You can have a healthy body and it can get sick. People you love can leave you, experience misfortune, or they can die. Everything passes here. And when you leave this world, you loose the body you’ve developed down at Gold’s. You loose the mind that you educated at the Universities. You loose everyone and everything, but you don’t loose Enlightenment or any spiritual knowledge that you’ve gained in this or any other lifetime. It’s inside you, it’s a potential. So the answer is to bring it back, to become more conscious, more aware.

Enlightenment, as I said, is a journey. Its a journey that’s made alone. Its a journey that’s made with a teacher. It’s also a journey that’s made with friends with other people who are practitioners of yoga and Buddhism. As you meditate, its good to have people around you who are doing the same thing, because you help each other not take it too seriously and yet you can cause each other to be inspired by each others journey. Enlightenment is not about being political, it’s not a social club. Ashrams often turn into that, I know. And societies of Enlightenment often just become cliques. They often just become places where there is a hierarchy and a pecking order and not much Enlightenment. But, so what. That’s what those people are drawn to. They need to go through those experiences. But that has nothing to do with Enlightenment. Enlightenment is experience of light. Its something you experience twice a day when you meditate in the morning and evening. It’s something you experience between those times because in your meditation you open your awareness field to a higher degree light and then you experience that light and increase it through the practice of mindfullness during the day.

To be completely aware, to be beautifully conscious is the journey to Enlightenment. And there is pain in it, and there’s suffering and there’s frustration. But you already have those things, so it doesn’t really matter. But there is ecstasy beyond comprehension. So my suggestion. If you’re drawn to the world of enlightenment, if you’re interested in it, most of all, learn to meditate. Not just to read a lot of books about it. Not just to talk to people about it. These things are inspiring perhaps. But the key to all Enlightenment is to have personal experiences in the world of light. And all you need to do that is to meditate twice a day, learn to practice mindfulness, to lead a simple economic life, to work happily at whatever your tasks are and to use them to help you use perfection. And if you’re able to have a teacher, to be with that teacher, to follow their instructions to the letter if not more so about how to meditate, how to lead a balanced life, how to gain power, wisdom, to have a sense humor, the things they show you. And you must be accommodating with your teacher. It is not the job of the teacher, it is not their responsibility to cause you to be enlightened. It is your responsibility to do that. And so your responsibility means that you have to have a sense of humor about your teacher and the impossible things they ask you to do. They seem impossible to you only because you haven’t done them. But the teacher will show you if you’re a good student or maybe if you’re a bad student and your impatient. How to increase your capacity to do things. How to do things that are seem impossible. At 5, it might have seemed impossible that some day you would read, write, and work, and go to the university and to all the things you might do today. But you do them now and it’s no big deal. So an Enlightened teacher is someone who has powers, who has awareness fields and access to them, who can do things that would seem impossible to the average person. They can, I guess what you would say perform miracles. Although the real miracle is the gold light of enlightenment the pure light that shines through them. And that isn’t their miracle, that’s the miracle of enlightenment that’s available to all of us. So with a teacher, its necessary to be sensitivity to their directions. Most of the time they won’t say much, they just walk around and they ‘re enlightened. And you have to b e very still and silent to understand what they are saying. That is to say, to see how to open the dimensions and to learn how to do that yourself. All the physical teachings, all the exotic teachings, the things that can discussed and explained are only designed to give you the type of life that will allow you to practice the esoteric teachings. The esoteric show us the different techniques and methods for achieving the kind of life that will allow us into higher. Planes and become Enlightened.

The esoteric or inner teachings which only an enlightened teacher can deal with are experiences in infinite consciousness. They are the journey to enlightenment. The esoteric experiences are the experience you will have with your teacher when they meditate and when through the persona power of the kundilini, they empower you and lift you into higher dimensional plateaus into fields of light. In other words, the esoteric aren’t something you can you can express, they are the experiences in the planes of light, in the causal realities. And you go to sa teacher, not just for the teachings of how to live a happy balanced life, optimize the possibilities of having a spiritual experience. But if the teacher ‘s really enlightened, simply being around them is a spiritual experience. And then your job is to go home and learn to meditate and achieve those states on your own. Go back and see them and it will take you further, deeper, make more suggestions, And we have to go back and do those things on your own. 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 and then you come back if you want to go through a higher doorway. And so on, and so on. And they show you how to refine yourself until you’re able to enter Nirvana on your own. And the no more teacher. Guess what. Only Enlightenment everywhere. At the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things. There is only perfection. And that is the perfection of enlightenment that is Nirvana that is here, right now.

The Enlightenment Cycle Happiness by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Happiness is the most elusive thing, it seems, for human beings to find. Happiness is something that everybody wants, or professes to want, so it must be a very difficult thing since so few people, relatively few people, seem to ever experience it. And if they do experience it, they sure don’t seem to experience it for long. I’m the happiest person I’ve ever met. Plane and simple. The reason I’m happy is because I have a very good relationship with life. My happiness is not dependent upon what happens to me, today or tomorrow or what happened yesterday. My happiness is dependent upon light. And since light is endless, since light is infinite, since light, the inner light, of course, of self discovery, of enlightenment, is happiness in itself, then if I can make myself available to light, which I certainly do, then I’m bound to be happy, always.

Life is a game that we play. It’s a game in which happiness is the goal. Now, most people think happiness comes from experiences in the world, possessions, they believe, bring them happiness. Money, fame, fortune, personal relationships, achievements, and accomplishments. And certainly all of these things can bring a measure of happiness to a person’s life. For a while, the fulfillment of desire causes a type of happiness. But as soon as the experience passes, the happiness passes. Human beings are on a desire/aversion operating system. And if you understand the fallibility of this system, and you understand also that there is another system which is far superior, its really not that hard to be happy. The desire/aversion operating system works in the following way. When you want something, you have a desire for something, a desire for food, a desire for sex, a desire for achievement, a desire for a new car, a new life. Or when you have an aversion, you want to get away from something, you’re afraid of something, it makes you uncomfortable, you simply just don’t like it, you are immediately in a problematic siruation.. Because your happiness, your state of mind in orther words, the way you feel, is based upon, something extremely physical. And your happiness is now a victim to fortune. And fortune is capricious, that’s for sure. So, I you want a new car. And if you get it, you will be happy, until the car isn’t so new. And if you can’t get it, you will be unhappy. Or if you get it and somebody smashes into it, you are unhappy. Or if it isn’t what you thought it might be, your unhappy. And sometimes, there are things that make you unhappy, what you call aversions. Things you don’t want in your life. That you don’t like about yourself, that at this time , you cannor get away from. Try though you will. And if your happiness is dependent up on always getting everything what you desire and always avoiding everything you want to avoid, chances are you won’t be happy, or certainly not very often. This is the human system. Desire and aversion. Even the fulfillment of desire doesnt make you happy. Because, there is a satioun factor. you can really love apple pie, and get some apple pie and eat it. And you feel god for a minute. Then you can say, “well, heck, I felt good eating that apple pie, why not eat 10. It this what makes me happy, let me keep doing it”. But after a while, if we do the same thing, in the same way, over and over, repeatedly, we get a sense of saseatins, it just feel as good any more., it doesn’t taste as good. We are not happy. So, even desire taken to an extreme doesn’t necessarily make us happy. It tends to make us actually rather cynical. What makes us happy and what increases is contact with light. The experience of light in a very pure form, if not the purest form, always creates happiness. And the experience of desire and aversion, tends to create unhappiness. In the world of light, that is to say, as you have experiences, with the inner light, which are gained through the practice of meditation and Buddhism. As you experience light, it immediately delights you. Within the universe, there is pure light. It’s the light that is beyond all darkness and it does not give way to anything. It is the light of existence. It is the clear light of reality, the dharma kayah. The very nature of the light is happiness. When you experience the light, wa-la, you are happy. You don’t have to do anything, be anybody special, have a serious of accomplishments behind you. If you can get there, you are happy. If you can experience the light. The more often you experience the light, the deeper your emersion in the light, the happier you become. In other words, its an object orientation, mind set to a certain extent. That is to say, there is the light, there is the experience of the light, the light by its very nature is endless, it has no beginning, it has no end. Therefore you can never say that you’ve had the ultimate experience in light, so there is no ultimate level of happiness, it goes on forever. The light is not quantifiable, it just is. And your experience it in meditation, when thought stops. When you go beyond the senses, when you go beyond the limitations of the ego, the light is waiting for you.

Your experiences in the light, become stronger, they become happier. And you experience it more frequently as you progress along the pathway to enlightenment. The pathway to enlightenment is happiness. And it really doesn’t matter what’s going on in your physical life. If you’re successful, if you are in prison, if you’re dying, if you’re being born, if you are somewhere in the middle, it really doesn’t matter. If you have contact with light. Physical circumstance will not cause happiness. Or if it does, it immediately places you in jeopardy, Because once you’ve gained happiness from something that occurred to you, something you‘ve gotten, something you’ve attained, there is the fear of loss. The loss of that thing. The object of desire which makes you happy, now you are a slave to it. You become bound to it. Let’s say that your wife or husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, makes you happy. Or your dog or your cat. If your happiness, just comes from being in cotact with them, if they leave you, you ar bound to be unhappy. You will be depressed, you’ll be miserable. So now you’re their slave. You’re a slave of the thing that makes you happy. You have to do whsatever it takes to keep it around all the trime. You’re a junkie. And human relationships can be expensive habits. Career achievement can be an expensive habit. Anything can be an expensive habit. And you’re always afraid of loosing it. Once you’ve attained something, there is the fear of loss. If that’s what causes your happiness. The enlightened alternative is to be happy because you experience light. And then you can be married or not, have children or not, be successful or not, you can play in the world, and if you gain happiness from something, great. If you don’t, it won’t bother you. Because your happiness is so large, it’s so great, its so immeasurable, that you simply won’t be bothered by what goes on in the physical world.

I recommend to my students to make a lot of money. It seems that human beings, have problems with money. Most of human life seems to revolve around the getting of money or that which money brings. And when people have problems with money, they cut back. They say to themselves, we don’t have as much as we used to, so we will have to cut back on the things that we enjoy. I don’t think that that is the answer. I don’t think economizing is the answer. For example, the United States has an incredible national debt. Now, it’s good to economize in the sense that waste is waste. That’s obviously not the way to live. And you have you have to eliminate waste in your life. As the united states has to eliminate waste in its sending. So it is in a deficit government. But the answer for the United States or the answer for an individual is to make more money. If the country is bringing in more money, than it’s sending out, or even ifit’s ar an even point. Then there is balance. So, if you’re having with money, the answer isn’t cutting back. I mean, you have to have things you have to have. Anything else is an extra, It’s an add on. And maybe you need it and maybe you don’t. Sometimes we get out of proportion and we think we need more than we need. Cause we think it will make us happy, and that’s not true. But you do need whatever it is that you need. To work, to live, to function. At whatever ever level that is appropriate for you. But the answer is to make more money. So I suggest to my students that they go into computer science, unless they have a better field, because it is the most lucrad of all fields. And to make absolutely a ton of money. And then money simply isn’t a problem. They don’t have to spend life, always worying about whether ththey have enough to cover expenses. So many people do that. And they experience so much unhappiness. The obvious answer to money, is to have tons of it. And if you know that that’s the answer, to dealing with the physical world. Then you simply figure out how to make more money than you really need. And go do it. It’s really not that impossible. In other words, sometimes we just have to get a clear site of something. And if it’s so important, why don’t we just figure out what we need to do and go do it. We have to step back from the problem and evaluate. So it seems to me in life, all you really need, are a healthy body, a healthy mind and a healthy spirit and a bunch of money. That is to say, money equals the ability to be mobile in this world. To travel, to live in a place that’s suitable, to not be brought down or drained, not to be a victim. So I equate the inner light with that also, I mean its the same operating system. Rather than economize or figuring how to get by on a budget, why not just have tons of money. Why not have tons of happiness. Why not become so happy that no matter what happens in life as you journey doing the things that is appropriate for you, that if it all falls apart, it doesn’t matter because you are happy. That’s, I think, the happiness equation is just to be so happy. To figure out how one becomes happy and go do it that fortune is not a problem. You can always just fall back on your inner happiness. And if you had a day where it went your way, great. But you hardly noticed, because you’re so happy because you meditate. And if you have a day where it all falls apart, then it really is insignificant, because you are so happy. And when death comes, along it isn’t a fearful thing, because you’re so happy and knowledgeable from the pursuit of meditation, that you simply not afraid, you can see what lies beyond it. You know that life is good, what makes us is good and we are what makes us and there is nothing to fear. And even sickness becomes an experience that we pass through in happiness because our happiness does not depend upon how our body feels , but how our spirit feels.

So yoga, that is to say Buddhism is the study about how to be immeasurably happy. And along time ago individuals through inner study and by examining life, realized that the way to happiness is through meditation. Introspection. That happiness already exists somewhere in the universe. They looked at life and saw that most people aren’t happy or their experiences of happiness come and goes as do their desires and aversions and the fate that meets them. And they saw that this was obviously an inefficient system, so they combed the universe and found that there is immeasurable happiness inside of us. Not inside of our physical persons, but inside of our spirits. We’re immortal spirits. We live forever. And within the spirit, within that which is eternal in us, there’s a place where there’s infinite happiness. And you can get to it just like you can go to the refrigerator for food. And it’s always abundant and its always there. Now, I’m not being optimistic or euphemistic, unreal in any since. (end of side 1)

Most people are just completely oblivious to eternity. They look at the sky and the stars at night and think that’s eternity. That’s just the senses having contact with the sense world. Outside of the physical dimension, there are other dimensions. There are astral dimensions and there are causal dimensions. The causal dimensions are the dimensions of light, the planes of light. Happiness is in the physical dimensions in a limited way, in the astral dimensions in a limited way, but in the causal dimensions in an unlimited way. The causal dimensions, which I refer to as the planes of light, are happiness. They’re all different. And they’re endless. And they, of course, border the shores of Nirvana, which is beyond discussion, which goes beyond happiness itself to something else, a condition of such perfection that it cannot be expressed. Meditation is the journey to happiness. As you meditation, and as you enter into the planes of light, you’ll become happy. Immediately happy. And that happiness will enable you to compact your life, transform yourself, and open yourself to those planes. Not just when you’re meditating, but eventually all the time, so that you’re in a perpetual state of meditation. That is to say, you can be in this world, physically and have all the mired experiences life has to offer and at the same time yoke your awareness field, join your varied consciousness, to the planes of light. And eventually to Nirvana itself. You can create a conscious opening and go back and forth between these places. So while you’re at work, typing at the keyboard, doing whatever it is you do, or at school, or playing, or doing some sports, athletics, when you’re in a difficult situation, where everybody is bounding on you, cause they’re not too happy, or you’re just doing something bright and beautiful. At those times while you’re physically engaged in your activities, you mind can be wandering through the planes of light forever. Having constantly new and greater experiences that cause you happiness. So the trick to being happy is to get beyond the body, not just to the astral realms. The astral realms don’t necessarily make you happy. There are people who have access to the astral realms. But in the astral realms, they are still who they are here. And that doesn’t create happiness. Going to the astral worlds is like going to another country. You are, who you are here. And when you go to another country, you are the same person there. But when you go into the causal realms, into the realms of light, at that time, you become someone else. The nature of the causal realms is pure light. The light vibrates very quickly and to be in the causal realms, to be into the realms of light, to experience them, it washes away the parts of yourself that cause unhappiness and pain. Or perhaps it might be more correct to say that it provides us with a better understanding of who we are. And you will come to see that you are not necessarily the body, or the person who has the experiences, nor are you the personality, the ego that reacts with pride or anger or with hope. You’re not necessarily the body of desires, the thoughts, the memories. You see that you are a field of light, an endless field of light, an concurrence of light. And that light, for a while has taken shape and form in the body that you occupy and the universe that appears to your senses. And it experiences the play of life, the emotions, the dramas, the soap opera of existence. So real happiness, comes from the experience of meditation. And from getting to a point where you like life, you can enjoy it. But you don’t center your happiness and what happens here.

Meditation is a direct and vivid encounter with immortality. It’s not a ritual, it’s not based upon wishful thinking. It’s something you go and do. It’s like swimming. When you jump in the water and there you are, you’re swimming. Its an actual, very visceral experience. But the experience of meditation, the experience of the planes of light, which I would define as the experience of meditation, changes you. That is to say, it causes all the blockages, the meanness, the unhappiness, the self destructive tendencies to pass. When you take a shower, all the dirt is washed off. When you go into the planes of light, all the incorrect ideas, the incorrect ways of seeing and understanding life, that you pick up along the way on the journey, are washed away. So if you go into the planes of light in the morning and in the evening in your meditation, then you washing very thing away that you picked up. You also gain ground in a sense. Because, as you go into the plains of light, more light comes back with you each time when you meditate, you get better at meditation. And each morning when you meditate, you can experience a deeper ecstasy. Each evening when you meditate, you can experience a more profound reality. You can have a better understanding of life. In other words, the planes of light certainly give you power, the power to rise above circumstance. The power to rise above your desires and aversions to happiness. Your experiences in the plains of light will create a balance, a happiness in your life, just in simple things. But it gives you the wisdom, it gets you out of the trap of self. The trap of self is the trap that causes unhappiness. It’s that thing we get stuck in. We define ourselves too much. We’re very sure of who we are and what we’re doing. And we’re so sure that we’re not very happy. Where the infinite intelligence of the universe, which is what we truly are, the pure light, the pure radiant spirit, is not so definable. It can take every form or no form. It can be all of this and something else that we don’t know. So when you meditate and you still your mind. When you relax a little bit and chill out and let go of the desires and aversions for a while and enter into the light. If you do it with your full being, full body and mind and spirit, you will be purified, you will be energized. But you will also become wise. You will gain the wisdom, the knowing of things, in this world in and other worlds and beyond worlds. It just comes to you. The way to gain wisdom in meditation is not by having someone explain something to us. All the teacher does, is explain how we get to the plains of light, how to go deeper into them, how to avoid the things that keep you out of them. And of course, an enlightened teacher, a fully empowered teacher can lift you into the planes directly. So you can become more familiar with them. And get to them sooner and more frequently. They speed up the educational process. But that’s all an enlightened teacher does. They teach you to laugh, to be balanced, but they don’t give you wisdom. You might gain some wisdom by observing how they act and react, wisdom of a certain kind. But real wisdom is gained personally in meditation. Its something you will gain in the planes of light. No one quite knows how it works. Meaning it can’t be explained in words. But when you meditate, if you can stop thought, or even distance yourself from thought and go into the planes of light, have the planes of light enter you, you will come out of the meditation knowing things. Things that are perhaps inexpressible. You might learn how to move through the dimensions, you might learn how to dissolve the self, you might learn how to use the siddah powers to heal, to do all kind of things. That’s one kind of knowledge. You might learn just to be bright and clear and aware. To be more conscious, to be funny. Or you might gain the wisdom of immortality, the knowledge that life has, which is inexpressible. So meditation is the short path to happiness. It is the way to become completely happy. It streamlines the process. It takes you beyond the desire aversion operating system Which offers very limited happiness and a great deal of frustration. Meditation, as you practice meditation, its no good just to talk about it, you need to do it. If you can bring a earnestness to your meditation. If you can really try in other words. You will find that happiness is something that will run through your life constantly. At first when you begin the practice of meditation, of course, your happiness swill be limited because you can’t get that deeply into the planes of light. But though the practice, you will gain a little bit of happiness and that will inspire you to meditate more. And with consistent practice, you will gain access to the planes of light. Particularly if you have a teacher who is enlightened, who will guide you and make sure that you are getting into the planes of light and not into the astral. Then each day, as you progress along the pathway, you will be happier. And then you can go live your life, have your career, enjoy your sports. Do whatever is necessary, but you will find that happiness will not be elusive, it will be who you are. When you sit down to meditate in the morning, you will be filled with happiness and that happiness will last you all day. Then in the evening you will mediate again, and you will wash away any of the debris you picked up during the day. Wrong views, that sort of ting. That could lead to unhappiness. And you will be filled inside with a different kind of happiness: the happiness of the evening and then you will be happy all night. Meditate in the morning and you will wash away anything that you picked in the dream state. It’s a cycle, the Enlightenment Cycle. Based upon meditation. The role of the teacher is to make sure the practice is pure. That is to say, the methods are taught properly, and by getting proper empowerment. And by guiding the students, you make sure that they really are going into the planes of light. And they are not fooling themselves. Because the astral and the astral dimensions are not places of great happiness, necessarily. As I said, they are just journeying to another country. So the teacher has to make sure that the student is truly meditating, and that that the student is progressing in meditation. And provide the empowerments and instruction necessary to do that. That’s all. That’s what true teaching is. To make sure the student is on the path and that the path is leading to deeper and greater light. Then the rest is up to the light. As you go into the light, it will cause you to become happier and happier. And each day, you’ll gain a deeper happiness, 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 is. 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. It’s like making money. Make too much of it and money is certainly not a problem, less of a problem. If you’re just too happy, if you have an abundance of happiness, then life is bright, we see it more correctly. Unhappiness is really an incorrect seeing. When we are unhappy, we don’t see life as it really is. That means we are not in a condition of light, we are in a condition of veiled light. Of shadows. We don’t see very well. And what we think is isn’t. In the dark, you can’t see. You bump into things and mistake them for something else. You stumble across a rope and you think it’s a snake. And you get scared to death. Or maybe it’s a snake and you think it’s a rope and you think you’re safe. In light we can see what is and what is not. We know what is right and what’s inappropriate. Right in the sense that it is truly the essence of all things. The suchness, the dharma. The ultimate good. And if we immerse ourselves in the ultimate good, it will free us from all limitations. From all sorrows. From all ignorance and we will have this silly smile on our face or perhaps just inside our hearts. And that’s what illumination is. Illumination, at least in the outer world is to be happy, no matter what’s going on. Whether you’re successful or you’re a failure, whether you’re up or down, you’re in or you’re out. That’s truly illumination in the outer world. In the inner world, it’s different, it’s more profound. It’s more ineffable. It’s harder to express. So be happy, always be positive. Because that means you’re seeing things correctly. And if you’re negative, if you’re depressed, you’re unhappy, that simply means that you’re not seeing life in its perfection. Rather than being frustrated about it, sit down and meditate. Clear your mind. Be patient. Follow the instructions of an enlightened teacher in your meditation practice and then you’ll come to know all things and be free from all limitations and be happy. It’s really that simple.

The Enlightenment Cycle Meditation by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Meditation is a process of expanding your awareness. When you meditate you get in touch with the deepest part of yourself. You know from your own point of view, what’s right, what’s wrong, what you should do and shouldn’t, in any situation. Meditation makes you tough, makes you strong, conscious, happy, and eventually Enlightened. Meditation is a process of silencing your thoughts. 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. The world you see around you is largely physical. It’s perceived through seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, and feeling. It’s also analyzed through thought, it’s felt through emotion, it’s remembered through memory, anticipated through projection, and experienced as now. But there are different modes and levels of perception which most people are not familiar with. And there are different universes — astral universes and above the astral universes, the planes of light, beyond the plains of light, Nirvana itself, perfect Enlightenment -- the essence, the nexus of all things. Meditation is about becoming conscious of who you are, becoming happy, relaxing, slowing down, chilling out, and learning to smile. It’s also about the profound things that are hard to express in words: about beauty, just about being most excellent at everything, finding the perfect part of yourself, overcoming your self-destructive tendencies, overcoming depression, anxiety, nervousness, fears of all types and descriptions. It’s about being happy, being conscious, being free, and most of all about being who you really are, which is something that most people don’t have any consistent consciousness of.

Meditation is eternal awareness. The height of meditation is normally symbolized by the Buddha, a person who yokes their mind, through the practice of yoga, meditation, Buddhism, with the highest light in the universe. They experience it in a state called Samadhi. Samadhi is a complete cosmic consciousness experience. Like climbing to the top of the Himalayas to see the ranges, the mountains up there, an experience that really is unparalleled, it just can’t be expressed in words. Meditation is a journey, a journey to the other side. The other side cannot be explained, the mystical worlds, the timeless, miraculous worlds of light. But they can be certainly, most certainly, be experienced by you. So this tape is about how to meditate.

Meditation is essentially a wonderfully easy process, unless you live in this age, in which case it’s hard. Well, maybe it’s hard. Meditation is about making your mind calm and quiet and if the earth was not so over populated and toxic, this is a very easy thing to do. The mind is not naturally so active. But there are two factors that you have to take into consideration. A crowded planet and the fact that we’re all psychic. Each human being has an aura. An aura is the energy body that surrounds your physical body. And your body of energy gives off impressions just like radio waves, short wave, long wave. And you feel those impressions, you feel those thoughts, the feelings of others, particularly people, of course, you’re in close contact with either physically or emotionally -- you are very open to them.. But you also feel the vibrations of the people in your neighborhood, at your school, where you work, where you drive your car, your town, your state, your country, and your planet. But most particularly you feel the vibrations in a radius of about 100 miles from where your physical body is. Everyone is psychic. People just don’t know that. They think so much, they worry so much, so caught in unhappy emotions they’re not still enough, they are not wise and silent enough, to see that 90 percent of what they think and feel is alien to them. 90 percent of what they think and feel, 90 percent of what YOU think and feel are not your own thoughts, emotions. They are somebody else’s, a lot of other peoples’. I always remember an adventure of Star Trek, where Spock is explaining to Captain Kirk that people come to Vulcan from other planets, not so much to learn to be psychic. But people who come with psychic abilities learn to block out psychic impressions, that’s what the advanced psychics teach them at Vulcan. They teach them how to keep other peoples thoughts out of their minds. And Kirk thought that they went there to learn to be psychic. That’s not the problem, everyone’s psychic. The difficulty is just having your own thoughts and feelings. ‘Cause if you don’t, you can’t possibly know who you are, what you care about. You end up doing things, thinking things, wanting things, fearing things that have nothing to do with you. They are somebody else’s — ideas, thoughts and feelings. It’s absurd. But everybody does it. So meditation is a process of not doing that. It’s a process of not doing. It’s about being still, being centered, being clear. Being happy, being organically in touch with the universal light. Developing parts of yourself that are unknown to most people, very powerful parts, very beautiful parts, very strong parts. So the billions of people on this overcrowded planet put out so much energy and so much of it is unhappy that it makes everybody’s mind active. Everybody is thinking all the time, stressed out, can’t slow down, can’t feel what lies beyond this dimension. Normally it’s very easy to do that. If you don’t believe me, take a walk in the woods. Find a nice wooded path that not too many people have been on, or there are a lot of impressions there. Take a walk, take a hike! And you will notice that your mind, if you monitor it, is very quiet, you don’t think much. Now let’s leave there and go out and walk on a city street. Drive on a highway, walk through a building. If you begin to examine your thoughts, you will observe that they change, from where you are to the next locale. In other words, you’re influenced . Go into a room filled with unhappy people and you will be depressed, pulled down by their energy. Go into a place with happy people and you will find you are brought up.

So, if we lived in a planet, on a planet which everyone was happy and progressive and it wasn’t so over-crowded and getting more so every day, it would be easy to meditate. Very easy to feel Infinity … be in tune with our spiritual self. But that’s not the case. And when you meditate, in particular, and you slow your thoughts down, you actually become more sensitive. You become more psychic because you are clearing yourself of thoughts and impressions of this world so you can feel the other worlds, feel the perfect worlds of light that exist beyond this plane.

So it’s kind of tricky to meditate in this age, in short. And I’ve figured out a way to do it, to make it easy for you. It’s to meditate to music. I have created a number of albums, two in particular, which are designed to meditate to -- there is one for morning meditation and one for evening meditation. There are 15 songs on each album. They are about 4 minutes each. And each album is designed to provide a morning or evening meditation. The Enlightenment Tape is for morning meditation. Canyons of Light is for evening meditation. To meditate, all you need to do is sit down, either in a cross-legged position on a rug or outside on the grass, someplace that feels good to you. Or sit in a chair. Your back needs to be straight though. Don’t lie down. When you lie down, it’s almost impossible to meditate as your body relaxes too much and you just kind of get sleepy. It’s best to be very alert when you meditate. It’s a nice idea to wash your hands and face. Or if it’s a morning meditation, maybe to get up and take a shower, have a cup of tea or coffee, whatever wakes you up. Sit down, relax, and if it’s a morning meditation, put on the Enlightenment tape. Each of the 15 songs has been composed around a dimension, and they are in an ascending order. The morning tape offers you an experience of 15 higher dimensions of light that provide the energy, insight, and power to go out and have a wonderful day. The evening meditation tape, Canyons of Light, references 15 other dimensions that are easier to get into at night and you will go very high in them. It’s easier to meditate at night because in the evening people shut down, they get kind of quiet, they go home, fall asleep. And the dimensions that are available, some are easier to get to at night, some in the morning. So the Enlightenment tape is an hour long. If you are new to meditation, you might want to meditate half that time, until you get your pace and your stamina built up and then you do the hour. The hour is great. So you might sit down in the morning, put on the tape, and listen. Zazen, which is the name of our music group, composed of myself and three others, students of mine. Zazen is a Japanese word. It means to sit in silence, to listen, to be aware of everything and nothing. And what’s beyond both. So zazen is also sitting meditation in Zen Buddhism So if you sit, if you make the mind quiet, if you are still and you listen to music, the music will do two things.

One, it will provide a kind of auric blanket. The energy is very high, I’ve gone to very high planes of consciousness and Samadhi to bring a certain power into the music as a whole. And when you put on a tape, the energy is so high in it that it will simply block out the thoughts and impressions of the people in this world, so you will just be safe. It’s as if you are sitting in a pristine environment, in a beautiful power spot, with no impressions. It’s very easy to touch the other worlds.

But secondly, all of the songs are in groups of 5. In other words, there are 3 groups of 5 on the first and 3 groups of 5 on the second album. And the songs reference the particular chakras. A word about chakras, energy centers, and the subtle body. And the doorways to infinity. There are three primary meridians in the body. There is a body of light, also known as the subtle body or the astral body, that surrounds your physical body. It is composed of a network of filaments of fibers of light. And those fibers join at places called chakras. There are seven primary chakras. And they run from the base of the spine to the top of the head They are connected by three astral nerve tubes, the largest of which is the shushumna, then there is the ida and pingala. The base chakra, the root chakra is where the Kundalini energy is at rest at the base of the spine. Around the area of the sex organs is a second chakra, the third chakra is around the navel area and a little below. About an inch below the navel. Chakras are not in the physical body, but they correspond to these spots, they are in your energy body. The three lower chakras are the power chakras. And when you start to meditate, you should meditate first on the navel center. By meditating on your navel center, you will bring up the Ki, the Kundalini, from the lower centers -- it will come up from the lower two centers and it’s very easy to enter the navel center and to bring the power up to that spot. So for the first 5 songs on the morning or evening tape meditate on your navel center. Simply hold your attention, feel the area around your navel, about an inch below. If you’ve never done this before, if you are new to this process, simply place your finger tips of the right or left hand about an inch below your navel and press very gently. Now close your eyes and feel the spot. The few times you meditate, like this, you can keep your fingers there, if it helps you. It’s not really necessary to visualize anything, you don’t have to hold a picture in your mind. Simply feel the spot.

As you become adept at meditation, you will have no trouble feeling the spot, because there will be beautiful surges of energy, Kundalini energy around that chakra. But in the beginning, sometimes it’s helpful put the fingers there, very gently. Hold your attention on the navel area and listen to the 5 songs. Each of the songs is very different. The first 5. And they are designed in an ascending order. They reference planes of light. And you move from one to another, you climb up the ladder of light, just by listening to them. Then when those 5 songs have ended, move your attention to the center of the chest. The next chakra up is called the heart chakra. It’s in the center of the chest. If you will hold your attention there, same thing, if you want to, you can put your fingers there and apply a little pressure. Hold your attention on the center of the chest, gently press very lightly and listen to the next 5 songs. The chest center, the heart chakra and the chakra above it, the throat center at the base of the throat, are the centers of balance, of happiness. The best chakra, the easiest to activate is the heart center and it will also pick up the throat center for you. If you hold your attention there for 5 songs, you will feel tremendous happiness, brightness, might see vivid colors, you might feel sensations of lightness, But if you just listen deeply you will stop thought. Same thing will happen with the navel center and with the third eye.

After you’ve listened to the 5 songs, now you’ve gone up through 10 and you’ve moved up to a much higher plane of energy, climbing up the laticework of light of dimensions. Hold your attention up on the third eye. Your third eye, which is between your eyebrows and slightly above, the Agni chakra, is a center of knowledge. The third eye and the crown center at the very top of the head are the knowledge centers. The three meridians are power, balance which is happiness, and knowledge or wisdom. When you bring all three together, you are complete. There are 5 songs, the last 5, that reference the higher chakras. Simply listen to them, keep your attention on the third eye. When thought comes in and out of your mind, simply ignore it. Simply listen to the music. Don’t get frustrated if your mind is restless. There is a lot of energy in the world and it takes patience to learn how to meditate. What’s happening as you listen to each song, the first 5 songs for the navel center, the second 5 songs for the heart center and the third 5 songs for the third eye is you are bringing the Kundalini up through concentration. The chakras are doorways to different dimensions, the different planes of Enlightenment. As you hold your attention on them, the Kundalini energy at the base of the spine will gradually rise first to the navel center, then the heart center, then to the third eye.

The crown center is a little different. It’s not connected to the other centers. When you open it, you go into Samadhi and very advanced states of attention. It takes many, many years of practice to be able to activate the crown center. So I wouldn’t be too concerned about it at this time. Just bringing the Kundalini eventually to the third eye will release a tremendous of energy, brightness, beauty into your life. Your mind will become clear, your life will become centered, you will be able to use higher aspects of mind, have inner dimensional experiences and learn to be a little bit silly, and smile about even very difficult things. You will gain knowledge and power, all kinds of wonder things will happen just from meditating on these three chakras to the music. As I said, there is an album for morning meditation and for evening meditation. Optimally you will do an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Not necessarily at the beginning. In the beginning, you might just try with a tape in the evening for a half of an hour once in a while or every day or in the morning. But if you have progressively better and better experiences with meditation, you will find that it’s good to meditate to music in the morning. When you meditate in the morning, after you first get up, you energize your body, you wash out all the energies you picked up when you were very sensitive and your defenses were down, during sleep. You clarify your mind, you gain mental power, control and you release a lot of energy through the chakras, have interdimensional experiences, and you gain tremendous happiness. Then during the day, you might say your auric immune system will be very powerful, you will find it easier to keep thoughts and impressions that are negative out of your mind, your mind will be clear and sharp, you will do well at school and sports, at work or just in having fun. You will become more creative, balanced instead of the person who just goes through the day without all that energy and all that clarity and just kind of makes it. You can be on top of things. In charge and happily so. Then during the day after your morning meditation, you should practice mindfulness. It’s a fun game you can play all day long. All day after you meditated in the morning as thoughts come in your mind, emotions, feelings, realize that most of them are not your own and just bounce out anything that is negative. Anything negative, unhappy, angry, jealous, suspicious, anything that would make you unhappy and destroy your calm, your inner equilibrium that you’ve gained from your morning meditation. Just blow it out, push it away. You gain an inner Ki or power to do this from your morning meditation. If you keep doing this, eventually you will find that you will just be happy all the time. After a while, your mind will just automatically filter out these thoughts and negative impressions that we picked up from others without having to think about it very much.

So we charge up our auric battery each morning with a good meditation. And in the evening, around sunset or whenever you get home from the day, meditate again. Take a shower, maybe go for a run, or whatever works for you. And meditate. Put on the Canyons of Light tape, it’s a beautiful tape. Each of the songs references a power place in the southwestern United States, an interdimensional vortex of power. And during the day, of course, you will use up a lot of the energy of your morning meditation, picked up impressions. So sit down meditate, relax. Chill out. Be calm, be centered, be beautiful. Eternity is around you and lives in you, don’t be afraid. There is only happiness beyond this world. The happiness, the endless happiness of Nirvana and of the spirit. Relax. Trust life a little bit. What we see here is just a blink of the eye, this life. It comes and goes very quickly, there is much more to all of this and it’s much better. Listen to the Canyons of Light tape. Allow it to guide you and take you through the 15 higher dimensions that it references. Start with the navel center, 5 songs there, 5 for the heart center, the next 5 for the third eye. Remember, the key to success in meditation is to enjoy it. Not to fight thought, but to listen to the music.

You would normally learn to meditate, if things were ideal, with an Enlightened teacher such as myself. You would sit, come and see your teacher once a day and sit with them in the morning and evening. In the morning you would meditate together and when an Enlightened teacher meditates, it’s very powerful. Their aura gets very charged up and the pure power of their mind as they move from one chakra to another, from one dimension upwards into the planes of light and into Samadhi and Enlightenment and Nirvana. As they do that, if your mind is at all subtle, if you practice meditation a little bit, the power of their aura will lift you along with them, from one plane of mind to another. That’s how you really learn to meditate. I mean, you just can’t know where these planes are, how to get to them just by trying yourself. So, Enlightened teachers are there so that you can meditate with them and they move your mind from one plane to another. Then you can practice on your own and learn how to get back to those states of attention, those wonderful worlds of light. So, normally you would meditate with your teacher in the morning and later in the evening. They would lift you into these higher planes and by doing that repeatedly, day after day, month after month, you would learn just as repeated motions in martial arts teach you the motions and movements of martial arts. You would learn how to meditate.

So what I have done is created two albums, there are others, but these two in particularl -- the Enlightenment tape and Canyons of Light tape and on CD -- that are like having a private Enlightened teacher. I have infused each of the albums with the light of Enlightenment and with a tremendous amount Kundalini. The composition of the work actually came out of 30 different dimensions. And each song is actually … I can’t explain how it’s done. But let’s just say it’s hooked up to a certain dimensional access point, so when you listen to the song, the level is actually there. For a particular universe, high plane and it will lift you up if you listen to it into these higher dimensions, the same way it would if you were meditating with me or with another Enlightened teacher. So, when you put on the tape or the disk, essentially you are sitting down with an Enlightened teacher meditating with them. They’re holding a plane for 4 minutes and you experience it as you focus on a chakra and you shift to another and another. Gradually the Kundalini rises from the base of the spine to the third eye open up the chakras. In the morning and of course in the evening.

After you meditate, after you finish the session, always bow. If you’re sitting in a cross legged position, if you can, touch your head to the floor, if not, better loose some weight and do some exercises and limber up. If you are sitting in a chair, just bow slightly. We just like to offer our meditation to the universe and sit still for a couple of minutes, relax. Never judge or analyze a meditation. Just do it. Focus as hard as you can on the chakras while you meditate. Handy tips: avoid eating much before you meditate, you body will feel heavy. It’s like eating a lot before you exercise. Yuk! Relax, you’re not going learn how to do it in a day, but everything and simply listen to the music, you will go very high. You will have a very beautiful experience. When thoughts come in and out of your mind, ignore them. If you have experiences, see light, colors, sensations of lightness, that sort of thing, a cabbage grows out of your ear, or something like that, just ignore it. Experiences come and go in meditation and let them go, let them come. What matters is that you focus on the chakra undistractedly. Another hint: Disconnect the phone before you meditate. Everyone always sees to call when you start to meditate. Put on the music and listen. Zazen means to sit, to listen, you’re listening to Enlightenment, to the universes, to the planes, you are sitting with an Enlightened teacher, more specifically, let that Enlightenment flow through you, purify you, clarify you. With practice you will find that you will get a lot better. In the beginning, the music may even distract you a little bit. The music is very pure though. Not only is it played by some of my students, and produced and composed by all of us, but in addition, I, after the music is done, I take my aura and go through it, and take out any human impressions. So it’s absolutely clean, it’s perfect music in terms of its consciousness -- it’s not bad overall. We work hard on it, we really do, to make it for people so they can have a beautiful experience.

So, listen to the music. Meditate, relax, and just let it take you into the world of light. Past other peoples thoughts, other peoples ideas, and even your own. There is Nirvana, there is Enlightenment. Beyond this world and beyond all worlds is something perfect and real. The comedies, the tragedies we see played out before us don’t last. But we are eternal spirits, we do these events will come and go, but the planes of light and Nirvana will always be there. If you would like to learn more about meditation and Enlightenment, then you should find a teacher who you feel is balanced, powerful, knowledgeable, Enlightened and funny. If they are not funny, they’re not Enlightened.

Trust life. Trust that it will always guide you to the right thing, be kind, be compassionate. Take time to help others and help yourselves, be patient … if you meditate. What Rama always says, “If you meditate each day and you run each day, you can do anything.” If you run a few miles and meditate every day, you’re ok. That’s my opinion. But even if you miss the running, just get a little exercise any way you want to. Meditate each day and your life will get better. You will be happy. Free, successful, and eventually you will grow into pure and perfect light into the world of Enlightenment and there is something better than that. So please enjoy the music, we made it for you, enjoy the tapes. And grow, develop. And always be optimistic. Always be positive and ignore those who aren’t because they’re obviously confused and out of touch with light.
~
The Enlightenment Cycle Miracles by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Miracles. I like miracles. They inspire me. Miracles cause you to believe. Have faith in the unseen. To look further into things, deeper into things. I like miracles. Miracles are the fun of Enlightenment. When a teacher does a miracle, an Enlightened teacher, and everyone sees it, they’re astonished. And suddenly they have faith in what the teacher has to say about self discovery and spirituality and Enlightenment. If you see a martial arts teacher, dressed in their outfit, in their Ghi, wearing their black belt. But if you watch them break a brick or several cement blocks with their hands and kick boards and things, it’s very impressive. If you’re looking for a martial teacher, you take them seriously, cause that’s not an easy thing to do. Now breaking bricks and boards is not necessarily the purpose of martial arts and it doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with fighting. But it makes a point, both in training, in martial arts and, of course, for the student. The student sees the teacher do this and says, “Wow, this is incredible! This is a powerful person. This is a unique person who can do this.” So miracles have a purpose. Miracles help people believe in Enlightenment. Enlightenment is something that in the beginning and sometimes in the intermediate phases of self discovery you’re not aware of, you don’t see it. It’s not something that your very conscious of. Enlightenment initially appears to be subtle, it’s just out of your field of vision. If you’re meditating, if you’re practicing every day, you don’t necessarily see the changes that are taking place in your life because you’re so close to them. You don’t remember how limited your awareness field was 6 months ago or a year ago, let alone yesterday, before this mornings meditation. The real miracle, obviously, is the transformation of consciousness from limitation and pain to Enlightenment and ecstasy. But in order to get to a appreciation, a belief, in order to inspire practice, teachers sometimes do miracles, or sometimes they just enjoy doing them. A miracle, a siddah power is part and parcel of infinity and I suppose you can use them to be egotistical and show off, but somebody Enlightened wouldn’t do that. They just have fun with it, an innocent play. An Enlightened person lacks self consciousness, in the sense that there’s no ego valuation for what they do. They just do things because it’s fun, because it’s beautiful, or because that’s how life flows through them. So it’s inspiring when you see a miracle. Miracles cause you to believe. When a teacher does a miracle, then you say, “Well, if they can do that, they must be unusually powerful and there might be something to what they’re saying about all this self discovery and meditation stuff. It might be worth practicing.

Some people don’t need miracles. They just believe. Or their life is painful and they want to change and they’re willing to try something, to try meditation, to try introspection. After trying many other things. Some people are just drawn without a particular reason. Maybe it’s just past lives. And that inspires them and their karma compels them to follow the path to Enlightenment. But for many people miracles are important, an important part of self discovery. And some Enlightenment teachers do miracles to inspire people. I always do them simply because it’s part of the job. Now, I should point out, from the Enlightened teachers point of view, there aren’t really any miracles. Other than the miracle of life itself. The use of the powers, of the siddah powers, is actually a very scientific application of occult energy through the occult body to do something specific. If you went to a very rudimentary tribe that had never seen modern technology. And if you whipped out a little butane lighter and lit it, they would be astonished perhaps. They’d think you had done a miracle. Somehow, just by moving your finger, you’d caused flame to sprout out of that little device. You know it’s not a miracle, its just a lighter. You know how it works. There’s gas, there’s a spark, gas ignites and burns. Gas is stored in a little canister. That’s what the siddah powers are like. There just an intelligent application of energy. Like using a lighter, it’s like doing anything technological. It’s not a big deal. It’s only a big deal to someone who doesn’t understand what it is. Some of the more common siddah powers are, of course, physical healing, obviously empowerments and transformations of consciousness. But physical healing to heal somebody of a disease they might have, or an ailment. To bring them back from the brink of death to life just with pure energy, pure power. There are siddahs, of course, that you’ve heard about, levitation, that kind of thing. There’s the siddah, the tumo, to be able to create a lot of heat so that you’re not cold, even in a very cold environment. Very useful in caves in Tibet, by the way. There are a lot of different siddahs, you can read about them in mystical books. I think personally, though, the most convincing miracle is the miracle of light, that you see when you’re with someone who’s Enlightened. When you visit an Enlightened teacher, if you have the opportunity meditate with them, if they sit in meditation, for a period of time, you should close your eyes and meditate. But you should also once in a while open your eyes and observe them. Look at the energy field around their body. You will see if they’re Enlightened, if you’re not complete blocked up psychically, you will see a number of emanations, a number of different lighting effects that are beautiful to watch. You may see golden lights all around them, diffuse light all around them. You may see them go into a photo negative where it looks like everything reverses. You may see them dissolve in light, the light may grow so thick that you can’t see them, you can’t make out their body. You can see through them sometimes. Sometimes you can actually see right through them and see what’s behind them. Depends upon the state of attention that they are in. But as you watch an Enlightened teacher, You will see this light after a while. Some times people come to an Enlightened teacher and they don’t see the light at all. They’re just blocked up. Their mind is so caught up in the world of the senses and thought, that they simply can’t let go and allow their occult eyes to see. So they need to practice meditation for a while. But most people can see the light. Even the first time. Sometimes it’s funny, they don’t even know what they are seeing. Its so natural that it doesn’t seem like its unusual. Well, I’ll tell you a story.

When I meditate, people see manifestations of light when I go into samadhi and through the samadhis. And sometimes when I meditate, if I’m doing a public meditation, the energy of Enlightenment is very clear, it’s very high, its very beautiful. And it’s so clear that people don’t realize that their attention has been elevated. When you’re dealing with someone who is fully Enlightened, the energy is so perfect, in a way of speaking, it’s so shiny, that you really don’t know its there. I once had a judo teacher and he explained, he was telling stories about great black belts and stuff, and he said there would be an opportunity, he had a 5th degree black belt, to work with a 6th degree black belt and get thrown by him. Now immediately, I was filled with terror. I was quite young at the time and I said, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be better to be thrown by a first degree black belt and not a 6th degree black belt. I assumed that the 6th degree black belt would just sort of mop you up all over the floor. And the first degree black belt would be easier to deal with. And he said, “No, no, no. It’s much better to be thrown, if your new, by a 6th degree black belt, not by a first degree black belt. A first degree black belt is still new to the world of martial arts and when they throw you, they might injure you. They can’t see that you’re a beginner, they don’t have complete control yet. They might know you’re a beginner, but they just don’t have the control to get you to land correctly, to compensate for your lack of knowledge. A 6th degree black belt on the other hand, is so good at what they do, that they will place you on the ground just perfectly, without injuring you. They will be able to compensate for your lack of knowledge. So the same is true with teachers and with miracles. There are some teachers who just perform miracles, they can manifest things from the other world into this world. They’re not necessarily Enlightened, they have siddah powers. And they may even be spiritual. But the energy field around them, if you’re a consour of energy fields, is a little bit rough. There is an intensity to it, that is not completely pure. If you’re with someone who’s truly Enlightened, a fully Enlightened being, jivanmukta, liberated sole, the light, the quality of the light, is so clear, it’s so perfect, you don’t really know that it’s there, until later. In other words, their energy field, when you’re with them, lifts you up and you don’t really recognize that you’ve been lifted up into altered states of attention, higher states of consciousness, until you come down later. It’s so clean, it’s so pure, it’s so natural, that there is no sense, they’re so good at it, they through you so perfectly, into higher states of consciousness, that you don’t get injured. You don’t even realize that you’re in higher states of consciousness. It’s so subtle until later when you come down from that state of attention and then suddenly you realize how high you were. So as I was saying, once I gave a talk at UCLA, and I was sitting meditating, it was many years ago. And there was a large crowd there who had come to meditate with Rama. And I’m noted for colors and white lights, special effects. And there is just a tremendous amount of visible light around me when I meditate. So I got a kick out of it cause I was mingling with the crowd afterward. I did the meditation, I gave a talk on Enlightenment and Buddhism and then afterwards everyone was walking out. And sometimes I like to walk with the crowd, I just like to just be part of it, not necessarily be stand offish and go hide behind the curtain or anything. Sometimes I like to be stand offish. But, on that particular day, I felt like walking with the crowd and just walking around. So I ended up walking behind two women. And they were having a conversation. And it was interesting. Because they were talking what they had seen. And one of the women said to the other, “Oh, did you notice when he was surrounded by red light.” And she said, “I saw the red light, I saw the red light.” Then the other one said, “Oh, yes, then there was the gold light and then he just disappeared for a while. I couldn’t see anything, the room went gold.” She said, “Oh, Yea, I saw that. Did you see when everything went into reverse, everything kind of solarized.” And she said, “ Oh, Yea, I saw that.” And they chatted back and forth about what they had seen. And after they had this conversation, said, “Well, what are we going to do tomorrow night? Tomorrow night, let’s go to the opera.” And I was listened them converse and it was interesting because they were so high, they had no idea what they were saying. The things they were describing you would class as miracles to see someone manifest all the astral lights, to be surrounded by light and have so much light emanating from their body pulsing waves of gold light that you couldn’t even see anything else in the room. We would consider that a miracle. Again it’s the miracle of Enlightenment. And these gals were up so high, that they were talking about was an ordinary every day experience. They didn’t even realize what they were saying. Because the energy of Enlightenment had elevated their attention field so far, that they were in a world where that was a normalcy. Miracles were the norm. And that’s the world AI live in. I live in a world where there is nothing but the miraculous. There is nothing but continuous light. There’s nothing but continuous perfection. That’s the world of Enlightenment. Everything is subtle, everything has a million sides, everything is a manisfessation of God. Everything is light. All beings are infinite. All thing are perfect in their own way. That’s the greatest miracle. To see things in the light of eternity. (end of side 1)

The greatest miracle is silence. When everything is silent, when your mind becomes silent in meditation, by yourself or with a teacher, the world stops, time stops, life stops, as we know it. And something happens. We feel a feeling. We feel a longing. It kind of overtakes the spirit. We feel an eternality. Suddenly the world of busyness and times and places and spaces that occupies us or the world of people. And what we’re doing tomorrow and what we’re doing today and what we did yesterday. Our plans, dreams, and schemes fade away. And we feel our eternality or we feel eternality. We feel deep infinitude of being. And there’s a longing. It’s familiar. Suddenly this world which has taken on such a significance, doesn’t really matter. Suddenly it’s just a memory. It’s forgotten. And the spirit pines or longs for the world of light from which it came. It wants to return. There’s a beautiful longing. And that longing is fulfilled then with a suffusion of light. That longing causes something to happen. It causes being to grow into light.

The greatest miracle is the metaphysical process, in other words. Yes, there’s siddha powers. Yes, you can heal people, transform attention, there’s lots of different things you can do. But they’re just to inspire. You can flood the sky with light at night so you can’t even see the stars. There’s a lot of things you can do with the siddahs. Open up the dimensional planes, manifest forces, beings, all kind of things. But the greatest miracle is the light. The fact that the light comes to you when you have this longing. The spirit moves into light. It is light. It comes here for a while. I’m reminded by that Merville poem, On a Drop of Dew, where he compares the spirit to just a little drop of dew, when the light of the sun falls upon it, it just, it quivers, and then it evaporates, it goes back into the air and to the either. So our spirit makes a journey, it wanders. And the miraculous is the world of enlightenment. Most people don’t live in that world. The world appears to be solid to them, it’s physical, it’s just filled with their pain, their desires, their private ecstasies, their expectations. It’s filled with them. They are the world, they are the universe. And nothing glows in that world. Everything’s solid. Dissatisfactions are primarily physical, kind of basic. Nothing glows. But when your consciousness expands, when you enter into the world of Enlightenment, you’re in a world, literally of light. You don’t have to be Enlightened to have this experience. You just have to start the inner journey. You live in a world light, where nothing is solid. You travel about the doing what you need to do each day. Going through the doings of daily life. But your awareness field is luminous. And it glows from dimension to dimension. Back and forth from immortality to mortality. That’s the miracle of Enlightenment. Of Enlightened mind. Otherwise you’re caught in a empty house, in a box, in a place that’s not happy. You’re trapped inside YOU! And wherever you go, there you are. That’s the rule. Wherever you travel to, you’ll just find yourself in one form or another. And if you’re jealous in one environment, you’ll be jealous in another. If you’re unhappy here, you’ll probably be unhappy there. You take your internal baggage with you wherever you travel. The miracle of Enlightenment is that you let go of the baggage. Let go of the self. You take the self and let it dissolve in the white light of eternity. And then you live in that light. As you lessen the ego, as you dissolve the self a little more each day, you live in a greater condition of light. And the luminous of that light is reality. Reality is not this world, it is not the world as you perceive it. It’s this world, but, it’s reality as perceived through the world of Enlightenment. It’s the same world, but it’s not the same world. When you’re in a condition of light, everything is ecstatic, everything is joyous, everything is beautiful. Your attention field is subtle. And you’re not assuming too much importance, if any at all. The ego is quite, the mind is still, your heart is happy, And you go above all that, to the fields of light.

In this world, in the world of solidity, there are experiences. I mean, let’s face it, life for most people is a bad dream. Maybe you have a nice life, but most people on this earth don’t. They live in pain, grabbing at what they can for pleasure. And as they grow old, they despair. The body that gave them pleasure, now gives them pain. The life that gave them pleasure, turns sour. Things don’t work out the way you planned. For most people. But if you meditate, then the real miracle is the transformation of your awareness field, beyond the body. Beyond the body, there is light, infinite light, and Enlightenment. Oceans of light, continents of light, universes of light. And you can experience those, reality’s a perfect light. And they free you from the limitations of this world, from the ugliness, from the unhappiness of limited perception. That’s the greatest miracle.

I used to teach English as a second language at one time. And I was teaching at a college in new York, one summer, teaching summer classes. And I was teaching kids basically how to read who were in college, but English was not their first language, Spanish was. And it was amazing to watch, to see what it was like, when suddenly they could successfully read in English, which meant that they could go fill out a job application which meant they could transact and get around without being embarrassed in this Foreign culture. Suddenly, it wasn’t so foreign. At the beginning of the summer they couldn’t read real well or write real well in english and at the end, they could. And to watch that transformation process, was very exciting. To be able to participate in it, was very exciting. And it’s the same sense of the miraculous. In other words, I think the most miraculous thing is learning. That’s why I’m a teacher. That’s why I was an English teacher. That’s why I’m a teacher of Enlightenment. That’s why I’m a teacher of martial arts and computer science and a few other things. Because when I teach, if I’m a good teacher, I get out of the way and let the student learn. You just guide them to what they need to know. And then you get to watch this amazing, amazing thing happen. You get to watch a life change. You get to watch the growth of an awareness field. The fact that we don’t that we don’t have to stay as we are, we can improve our condition, incredibly, even just in the physical world, in terms of knowledge. To watch a puppy grow into a dog or a child into an adult is an amazing thing. To watch someone go from the limitations of the physical plane where their awareness is bound up in the senses and thoughts and a very solidified sense of self and identity. And to watch them meditate and grow and develop and become not so physical, to watch light move into their life, to see a heaviness of the face change to lightness over a period of time, to see the person smiling, to see the radiant glow of inner light in the eyes. To watch them gain that silent knowledge that comes with inner study. That’s the greatest miracle their is from my point of view. That’s why I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher because teaching allows me to observe the universe at work. I like that change, that moment when wakefulness suddenly occurs. When something impossible becomes possible. When the universe is revealed to someone who thought they knew life. And they thought they knew what there was and suddenly they realize they’re only at the beginning; that the worlds of light, the planes of light go on forever; that the experiences, the universes of ecstasy, of intelligence are perpetual.

I like the miraculous. It inspires me. And I choose teaching because it puts me more in touch with it. Like everyone else, I like a good miracle, in other words. It keeps me going. And the miracles that I see are the growth and development of my students. Or the students of other teachers. I enjoy that. It refreshes and renews me and keeps my faith in the unseen.

Very strong. The greatest miracle is the miracle of wakefulness. To awaken from the dream of life. And to see infinity everywhere, even in the finite. Even in this world. In the simple doings of life, to be a able to drive a car or mow the lawn, do the laundry, go for a run, go shopping, to take a shower. But in those activities, to be in a field of light while you’re performing them. And to see them as templates of all universes, of all realities. To be in thousands of states of mind, simultaneously as you perform simple physical tasks. Gives you a reverence for life. You realize that there is nothing that is not perfect. There is nothing that is not miraculous. The simplest thing is a miracle, if you see it truly. Because each of each of these outer manifestations of life, is God, is the ultimate truth. Buddhism leads you to this understanding. Buddhism leads you to the awareness, that all things are holy, not just those who meditate and those who become enlightened. That would only be a partial understanding. The real miracle of life is that everything is holy. Even the people who do the opposite of what you consider to be spiritual are as miraculous. The dark has its own light in other words. In the beginning, we define what is spiritual and what is not. What is practice, what is practice, and what is not. But as you go on, you see that everybody and everything is an instrument of infinity. You see the miraculous in all things, that’s the greatest miracle, of course is that everything, not just the categories you set up. But all things are holy. All things are divine. And yet we pick and choose among them, what’s appropriate for us. So there are miracles and they’re inspiring. There’re miracles of light, there are miracles of power, the ability to change things, to affect things, to see and know things without being physically present. There all kinds of siddahs, you can read about them in a book. But the greatest miracle is your journey into light. And if you’re fortunate enough, you will gain the consciousness in this lifetime to see all things glow. To see that all things are really made up of light. The solidity is not true. The apparent solidity is the delusion of the senses and of the self. Everything is made up of infinite intelligent light. And if you look into anything, you can follow that light back to it’s source which is everywhere and nowhere, which is nirvana, which is Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment Cycle Power by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Power. Power is the active force in life. It is the force of life that makes awareness. Power is seen in the wind, in fire, in movement, physical movement, emotional movement, mental movement. Power is awareness. Power in Buddhism is defined, very precisely, in many different ways. There is no singular word that can encompass all the different aspects of power. The general term for power, spiritual power, the power of awareness, is Kundalini. Kundalini is the energy of life that creates life. Life is awareness. It’s movement, it’s sentient. Life is the power to perceive. Without perception, there is no life. Types of perception certainly vary. Plants have one kind of perception, amoebas another, birds another, human beings another, astral beings another. The universe itself is a giant perceptual matrix. It perceives itself in essence and through its substance. Buddhism, Yoga, is the study of perception and what is most endemic to perception is power. The power to exist, to perceive, and the power to change perception.

Perception defines everything. I may be sitting in a room and looking around and I’ll perceive the room in one way. Another person may be sitting in the same room and they will perceive the room in an entirely different way. They may have had a bad day, they’re depressed, anxious, restless and they don’t enjoy being in the room at all. I may be sitting in a room, very happy, maybe something great just happened, maybe I’m just feeling good. And the room is gorgeous. Its colors seem bright, the texture of the room is vivid. The other person may not even notice these things. Their perception may be muddy. Perhaps they’re living right now in something that occurred earlier in the day that was unpleasant. Maybe a confrontation with someone they knew well, so it was unpleasant.

So, perception really varies, in other words, it’s internal. Perception is emotive, it’s mental, it has to do with thoughts. But it is in its essence what we are. That is to say, in a certain way, we are what we perceive. Or you might say, what we perceive certainly defines what we are. We have to think of life in reverse. If we are perceiving other than what we are, perception is the awareness of other. Certainly, perhaps, to a sense, perception can be the awareness of oneself. But primarily, the way we view the universe is that the universe is other than what we are. Perception is a mirror. In other words, we are everything that we don’t perceive. All perception is a background, it’s a screen through which we can see ourselves. Perception is the ability to become conscious of self and that which is other than self. And other than self is normally what we perceive, what you call the external universe. And who we are, well, we are the being that perceived. And certainly without thinking about it, a distinction is made between who we are and what we perceive. We perceive that which is other and that which is self.

Power is the band that we perceive things on. In radio, we have AM stations, FM stations, short wave stations, and others. Their frequencies, their megahertz, kilohertz, they vibrate, frequencies vibrate at specific rates and within those frequencies we transmit information and receive information. Perception is made up of bands, it’s a way of talking about it and the bands of perception vary greatly. There is the human band of perception, the mammalian band of perception that would include all mammals, there’s the plant, invertebrate, and so on. There are lots of different bands of perception. And simply because we’re in one band of perception and aware of it doesn’t mean that the others are not there. We may be listening to FM stations, that may be all we listen to, but thousands of AM stations are on a dial just a few vibrations away. Experiences are being had, people are transmitting information, listening to music, gathering information.

So, it’s just good to remember that the human field of perception is not in any way the only field of perception, the only band of perception. Nor is it necessarily the best. There is no such thing in infinity. Everything is the best, I suppose you might say. Infinity doesn’t label. Its creations are not labeled. They just are. Human beings like to label things and we like to say this is better than that, this is more pleasing, this is less pleasing according to our sensorial system or our mental or our emotional system, or our philosophical, sociological or political systems, or religious systems. So power, to begin with, is the thing that holds a band of perception together. And a band of perception is life for those who perceive on that band. If that band were to go away, they would not exist. And there are a great many bands of perception in the universe. There are both organic and inorganic bands of perception. And today we are confining ourselves to the organic band of perception, specifically to the human band of perception. But I just wanted you to know that it is possible to modify your awareness field so you can perceive what plants perceive, what birds perceive, what beings in the astral perceive, what beings in the causal perceive. There are many universes, many dimensions, they are endless. And it is possible to gain entry to those perceptual fields. Most of them are not particularly relevant for us. They won’t help us, they won’t make us happy or we won’t gain knowledge or information or power that we can use to improve the quality of our lives. They simply don’t reference it. There have been people who have classified and categorized these bands in different yogic systems. They enjoy, just as a botanist would classifying plants, it gives them some pleasure to create names and orders and to make catalogs. Human beings like that. One function of the intellect is to catalog. But cataloging doesn’t change anything. If we call it a rose or by any other name it smells as sweet. The name doesn’t really matter. It’s something that’s convenient for us to communicate with each other verbally or in written form what something is in a pictorial representation or in sound. But it really doesn’t matter. In other words, if human beings didn’t exist with all their categories and classifications, life goes right along, along down the street. Life is not dependent upon our classifications, our categories, our science. But we are. We find it interesting and helpful.

So, power are the bands of perception themselves. Power is what holds the band of perception in place. The ability to perceive what we call life, the ability to live is one aspect of power. Without the power to exist, to perceive, there is no life as we know life to be. Then more specifically, within the human band of attention, say on the FM frequencies, there is lots of variation. We can go from the bottom of the dial to the top of the dial or we can change bands completely and go to AM or short wave or even longer wave. So, within the human frequencies, well, what you see is what you get. There are the different conditions, mental conditions, awareness conditions that you see people on or existing in. They’re relatively representative. I would classify the bottom of the band as severe unhappiness, depression, alienation, things that we would consider very unpleasant. The top of the band, which would vibrate a little faster, would be happiness, contentment, peace of mind, the feeling of balance and overall wealth of spirit. And ecstasy. So Buddhism, Yoga, is concerned primarily with moving our awareness field from the beginning of the band of perception up to the top, and eventually, of course, in going from the human band to an Enlightened band or bands of perception, just leaving this band of perception completely. But before you do that, you have to move through the human band from wherever you happen to be, to the top. You can’t go beyond until you get to the top.

So, you were born with a specific awareness field. And that’s your karma. Karma means who you are. That is to say, where your awareness field is on the band of perception. And in past lives, whatever you did or did not do, whatever you experienced or did not experience has caused you to be at a certain wavelength, to have a certain awareness field. When you’re born, that awareness field is not completely at your disposal. When you have a book that someone wrote, it may be in our hands and it may have all kinds of information in it, but until we read it, we don’t have the information. We can’t reference it, or utilize it, or enjoy it. So within us is all the information from all the lives we’ve led. And simply being alive doesn’t mean we’ve read the book. So one aspect of Buddhism, or inner study, is the reawakening of past life knowledge. And it takes a certain type of power to do that. Past life knowledge is not necessarily a remembrance. It’s not the wedding album, photo scrapbook of existence. You can remember what you did last week and it doesn’t necessarily change anything, the physical events. Past life remembrance in Buddhism means the ability to bring a greater awareness, a greater knowledge that we had in other lives into this life. The actual memories of where we were in time and space and with whom are not usually relevant. If you were a great architect or a great musician in a past life, if you could bring that knowledge, that overall sensitivity, let’s say, that you developed to architectural design and music into this lifetime, you’d be way ahead of the game if you wanted to pursue those things in this life. But when you are born or you grow up, until you have a certain power, a certain type of Kundalini, you cannot reference, you cannot get access, you can’t dial in to those things. So one aspect of power is the power to bring our total awareness into this lifetime.

A second aspect of power, of course, is to go beyond that awareness of the things that we’ve known in other lives, into new fields of awareness that we’ve never experienced. And the very transmutive energy or power that does that is called the Kundalini. The Kundalini is the energy that opens up the bands of perception. It’s also the energy or power that enables us to travel mentally from one level to another, one plane or dimension to another. From one experience to another.

It’s also the energy that enables us to have what I call a weird power. To do things or make things happen that would not have happened otherwise. To apply a pressure, an occult pressure. In other words, to use energy backstage. To be able to use energy that is invisible, to most people, to create affects, perhaps thousands of miles away from where your body is located or in other dimensions. To heal, for example. If you have power you might be to heal a person who has a disease with having to resort to antibiotics or surgery, or what might be necessary. You can actually get inside their cell structure and create a change. You might be able to mold and shape events in your life or the lives of others. Power is something that is not really visible, the kind of power that I’m speaking about. It exists, certainly. We can see it in human lives. Some people have the power to rise above circumstances. They went to the same high school with everyone they knew, they grew up in the same kind of environment, were exposed to the same materials. But for some reason, they got to the top of the class. They succeeded in a way that most people didn’t. Just even externally, perhaps in a material sense, perhaps in a spiritual sense, a political sense, a philosophical sense. Certainly the sociological factors and DNA are not all that determine success. It’s power. Past life power or current life power that we gain through the practice of meditation, by leading a relatively conservative but extremely exciting and happy life. Conservative in terms of the usage of energy. Buddhism, one aspect of it, deals exclusively with power, how to get power, store power, utilize it intelligently so that it creates benefit to oneself and to others.

The primary energy that’s active in all the things that I’ve been discussing is Kundalini. Kundalini energy is the energy of awareness. And it can be used to modify awareness. An example might be an intelligent atom, perhaps that’s a way of looking at it. If an atomic structure -- protons, neutrons, valence of electrons -- became aware of itself, and it had the knowledge, it could change itself. It could add some different electrons, some of the valences, change the atomic number changing the protons and neutrons. If it had the ability to do that, it could become something other than it was. Human beings do that, in a way, all the time. We‘re born with a physical defect but we’ve gained the knowledge to change our body. We can perform surgery, apply radiation treatments, we’ve learned to use certain medicinal drugs to heal ourselves. To change our condition, we can go to school and gain knowledge and better our lives, have a different career. So in a sense, we do that all the time, we are intelligent atoms, I suppose. We’re intelligent organic structures. We can change who we are. Now even, of course, as you know, with genetic engineering, there are beginning to look at the possibilities of changing the actual physiological structure of the body. First, perhaps in small ways with synthetic drugs that they are creating or manufacturing, but eventually, perhaps, in larger ways.

So Buddhism, Yoga, is the study of changing who we are, modifying or totally restructuring ourselves as perceivers. Now in a way, you can’t really change who you are. Whoever you are is who you are and that always will be. There is something in us that is eternal and that’s beyond change. And the ultimate goal is to reach that. From this side, to become conscious of that side. This side is the mortal side, the limited side, the human side. Then there is the eternal side, the timeless, divine side. And we seek to, in Yoga, yoke or unify our awareness field with the divine or Enlightened side, the timeless side. Because when we do that, there is no pain, no anxiety, there is no unhappiness. The eternal part of our being is perfect, free, always changing, always new and completely conscious of all things. Complete aliveness, complete awareness. However, in the meantime, and on the way there, Buddhism is the study of power, initially. It takes a certain amount of power to even know your potential, to have a sense that you can change the way you perceive, what you perceive, and that it will be very beneficial to you. It takes additional power to find out how to do that and more power to actually do it. And of course when you make structural changes in perception it gives you power -- very curious the way it all works, it’s not very logical. It just is how it is. Things aren’t necessarily logical. Logic is a way of looking at something. It’s a flow chart, mental flow chart. Everything is not logical. Things just are. And logic is a secondary source referencing the way we look at something. And we say, “Oh, well this is this way because …” No, it is what is and we’ve decided that we want to apply rational to it. It makes us feel better.

So the power that is most interesting is the personal power that changes or shapes consciousness. And that’s Kundalini. Kundalini exists everywhere. It’s called shakti, another name for it. That is to say, a latent energy field, an invisible energy that is present in all life, everywhere, in this dimension and other dimensions. Then more specifically, Kundalini exists within us, it exists in greater amounts in certain places. Some people have more of it, some dimensions have more of it and initially a student of Buddhism has to be come aware that there are variations or differences in power. Some people have more than others, some places have more than others, some activities create and give more power, some are draining, some take power away. Since power is necessary to go into happier states of mind, and sustain them, to stay in them, and to go beyond them, to the Enlightened states of mind, which of course is the most desirable thing. Since power is necessary to be healthy, to heal one’s body, to assist others, it’s the primary concern, it’s the first space on the totem pole in self discovery.

Kundalini, in a human being, rests, in potential, at the base of the spine. We have a physical body and we have a subtle body and a causal body, and then of course, there is the eternal part of ourselves, there is a touch of Nirvana in all of us. Something that is nonphysical, non-dimensional, non-astral, non-causal, the real in us. But it’s obscured, it’s hard to get to because of the physical body, the emotions, thoughts, the mind and in general, because we don’t have enough power to perceive properly. So, Kundalini is at the base of the spine. The subtle body surrounds the physical body. It’s a body of energy. It’s also known sometimes as the astral body. And it’s composed of chakras, energy fibers, astral tubes that are similar to veins. Basically the part of the subtle body that concerns the practitioner of Buddhism and Yoga is the shushumna. The shushumna is a tube, an astral tube, kind of like a reed, that runs from the base of the spine to between the eyebrows and a little above. And there are six chakras or energy vortexes that lie along the tube. The first is at the base of the spine, the second is around the area of the spleen or sex organ, the third is about an inch below the navel center, the forth is in the center of the chest, the fifth is in the throat, the base of the throat, the sixth and topmost chakra or energy center on the shushumna is between the eyebrows and about an inch above. There is a seventh chakra which is located several inches above the top of the head, but it’s not connected to the others directly. There are many other chakras or nadis as they’re also called. There are chakras in the hands, fingertips, feet, in a number of other areas. They’re not really in the physical body. If you lost an arm, it wouldn’t affect the subtle body or the chakras. They are non-physical, they’re astral, but they are in approximately that same area, it’s a way of trying to talk about them.

The release of power, the power that enables us to transform our awareness to be successful and happy in life is the release of the Kundalini. All Yoga, either directly or indirectly, all Buddhism, relates to the release of the Kundalini energy. The Kundalini energy is in the first chakra, at the base of the spine, it’s called the root chakra and through meditation, through going to certain places around certain types of people, participating or not participating in certain types of mental or physical or emotional activities, it’s possible to take that energy and allow it to move, to unleash it from the base of the spine up to the third eye and eventually to the crown center. This energy, as it moves is often compared to a snake. It’s coiled up and it seems kind of small. But because it’s coiled, it can spring very quickly, it can jump and extend itself very fast. So the Kundalini is seen as a serpent, a coil of energy at the base of the spine but it can shoot right up through the shushumna, pass through the chakras, opening them all and bringing you into different states of awareness and finally bridge the gap into the crown center, also known as the thousand petal lotus of light which references the dimensions or planes of light, of Enlightenment.

Each of the seven chakras references different dimensional planes, that is to say, it’s a doorway, a turnstile that leads us into different dimensions and as the Kundalini rises, either in an individual meditation session or just the general level in your life, those dimension will be open to you and the knowledge and powers of those dimensions will begin to come to you. There is an immediate rise and a general level. The general level is where the Kundalini abides most of the time. So in most people, the Kundalini is in the first chakra, maybe in the second. That is to say, if we were to measure their Kundalini, if we could look at it, we would see that it’s in the first or somewhere between the first and second chakra for most people on earth. Usually the first. It’s pretty locked up. And for average people, who don’t practice Buddhism and Yoga, the Kundalini only becomes active maybe a few times in their life. At times of extreme intensity the Kundalini can become active. Very unusual circumstances, a car accident, emotional trauma, sometimes in warfare in a battle situation. Something can cause the Kundalini to suddenly come out and when it does, it gives the person incredible power. Suddenly they can overcome all fear and attack the enemy because one of their friends was wounded. Be very successful -- suddenly a 70 year old lady who can’t lift a bag of prunes will suddenly lift up an automobile several inches because her grandchild got stuck under it. The Kundalini can do physical things, but it can do mental things, it can make you understand something that we wouldn’t understand. Someone we love dies and normally the experience might be horrifying or create misery for the rest of your life, but the Kundalini can be released and it brings us to a higher level of knowledge and understanding and we see that there is no death, the person is just gone, like we all must, on a journey. We will be following them soon, we’ve all been on it before, we will all be on it again. So it can provide mental awareness, a scientific discovery, a musical creation, all kinds of things. People who tap the Kundalini and are able to release it are more successful in their fields of endeavor, great painters, musicians, architects, scientists, engineers, philosophers, martial artists, whatever it may be, athletes. Anyone who is really on top has some access to the Kundalini. They may not practice what they would call meditation every day and sit down formally and meditate and focus on the chakras, but they have learned somewhere along the line, in this life or other lives, ways of releasing power and then they can use that power in a variety of ways, depending upon how wise they are and how balanced they are.

Whenever you see someone who’s reached the apogee of their profession, if you’re dealing with someone who is a corporate head of a good, very substantial corporation, if you see someone who’s a very fine musician, a great writer, what we would call someone eminently successful with one or more fields is someone who has what I call a weird power. That is to say, they have learned how to unlock the Kundalini. There are things that they do, there are foods they eat and don’t eat, places they go or don’t go, thoughts they think or don’t think, emotions they experience or don’t experience, just the way they hold their mind in other words. They’ve learned, although they wouldn’t call it meditation or Yoga, how to meditate. And they consciously release the Kundalini, or unconsciously. Obviously, if you learn to consciously release the Kundalini, you can be more successful than those people are. Because they’ve come across something that they know works. They can’t tell you how in most cases. They know there’s just something they do that keeps them on the top of their profession, makes them happier, makes them more successful. But they wouldn’t, they don’t know where they can go from there, you might say. They’ve taken it as far as they can and they just keep doing it over and over. But in Yoga, in Buddhism, you study how to release and unlock the Kundalini and take it up to the levels that would certainly afford career success, personal happiness, physical health, and mental balance. But we move further into planes of knowledge and wisdom that enable the practitioner to do just about anything. In other words, there are ranges of experience and ecstasy, just plain fun, that people don’t even know are there to get to, so consequently they don’t. Or if they did, of course, they wouldn’t know how to do it or be able to do it unless you practice Yoga, Buddhism, or something similar in which there’s an actual study of the structures of awareness, how to transmute them properly and intelligently with wisdom and balance. That’s the study of power.

Power is something that is abused, something that is used. I suppose use and abuse are in the eye of the beholder. But I would say, essentially my template for viewing use and abuse is happiness. Happiness is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is an immediate experience, very transient in nature, that’s enjoyable. And if we experience a great deal of it, there is a sense of satiation. After you have too much pleasure, you actually don’t feel good. On the other hand, happiness is something the more you have of it, the better off you are. There is no such thing as too much happiness, it doesn’t satiate. So, I would define the proper use of power as something that creates happiness, for yourself and for others. And the abuse of power takes happiness away, it’s the enemy of happiness. So everything that I teach, as a Buddhist teacher, as an Enlightened Buddhist teacher, is toward directing an individual to happiness. Not just a pleasurable experience or the avoidance of a painful experience, but towards happiness, a balanced wisdom and knowledge that sometimes is just bubbly and euphoric or just very deep, very quiet, very still, very profound. The less we define it, the better.

Power, however, doesn’t create happiness or unhappiness, it just is. It depends how you use it. Wisdom is the guiding force that directs happiness. Balance is happiness, it’s the ability to not need to go further today. To be satisfied and just to be bright. Not to avoid, not to over do, but just to enjoy. Power is abused when it’s used or when its use creates unhappiness. And in particular, the abuse of power that seems to create the most unhappiness is when a person uses personal power to get ahead without regards to the welfare of others. Or when power is used to go into the lower dimensional planes. These are the primary abuses of power and if you learn them and avoid them, then you will have a very happy life in your practice of Buddhism.

Power can be used to get ahead. You can use power to get things other people can’t get, once you unlock the Kundalini. You could go into an interview situation for a job and you could cause someone else not to get the job. You could focus on them and they just wouldn’t perform well that day. People do this a great deal. A student of mine is an actor and he goes to auditions for films, for film parts, and very often before the audition he is sitting in a waiting room with a number of other actors and actresses who are trying to get the part. And he observed after he had become more aware of power and how it’s used, that some people there would use their energy field simply to throw somebody else off-line so they wouldn’t do well in the interview. They might talk to them for a while, pretend to be their friend or whatever, and at the end of the conversation, the person’s completely exhausted, drained. They would go in and do a terrible audition. People have power and it’s very important to respect that.

The way I look at it is everybody has had thousands of lifetimes, if not more. And who knows what anyone has learned in a lifetime. Respect is not fear. Respect is an intelligent apprehension. And I think it’s a good idea to have respect for all beings because who knows what one knows or can do. So, my student used to go into these interviews as I said and sometimes not get a film part because he would be taken out. Someone would use power in a way that would cause him not to succeed. Now, needless to say, while the person might have gotten the part, they would be unhappy in their own personal life. Because when we use power -- this is the hardest thing to explain or teach in life -- when we use power to cause someone else not to succeed so that we can succeed, it lowers our vibratory frequency, it slows us down. We vibrate at a certain rate, each one of us. And when the rate speeds up, we experience happiness, we go higher on the band. When it slows down, we experience unhappiness and we go further down on the band. Now the point of life, what makes life worth living, is happiness. Success does not necessarily create happiness. I could take you on a tour of west Los Angeles or any other very wealthy area. We could go into homes and meet people who are very successful in their careers and the amount of money they make and you’d be surprised that happiness does not blossom in Beverly Hills any more than it does in most places. Happiness has to do with how quickly you vibrate. How intelligent you are, how subtle your awareness field is, how deep you are, how aware of your eternal part you are. That’s what creates happiness. Pleasure just comes from a temporary working out of things in a way you like. But it doesn’t last, as soon as circumstance changes, you’re unhappy if it doesn’t change in a way that you consider favorable. Happiness is endemic, it’s part of us. And Buddhism is a process of getting to that part of us that is eternally happy, bringing that happiness into our physical and mental and emotional life and experiencing it, enjoying it, and knowing it.

So, meditation is a process of speeding up the vibration. When you meditate, you increase your own energy level. With that increased energy level, through the stoppage of thought and a variety of other things, you can succeed, or you can cause someone else not to succeed. I personally don’t feel that the answer is to cause others not to succeed, in order that you can succeed. It’s better to take the increased energy of mediation and just put into your own success and not try and use it to cause others to fail. Because if you put it into your own success, you will be happy whether you succeed or not. Chances are you will succeed. And this is what I suggested to this actor, movie star student of mine, that he simply not be concerned about this, know what’s going on, it’s good to know the street, and that he utilize his full energy from his practice of Buddhism and Yoga to simply do the best that he could, be at the highest energy level, the best level of performance that he could. But needless to say, to be conscious that there are people who do what we call, I don’t know, black magic, lower sorcery. There are people who use power to interfere with the success of others, not to be concerned about them, they’re not happy people. And they can’t necessarily be any problem to you as long as you’re aware of what they’re doing. You just step around them. So when he was waiting to go on and be successful and to get the film part, I would suggest to him that simply he avoid those people. Just look around the room, and if you see that this is what people are doing, using most of their time and energy causing each other not to succeed. Rather than do that, take a book with him. To sit and read something that would raise his energy level, to ignore everybody, keep his energy gained from his life and his hard work and his meditation and the practice of his craft in his body and then simply to go in there and do a great audition. To get involved with some ridiculous battle of power with someone else will use up his energy and then he would go in and not have much energy to succeed. In other words, the trick is simply to avoid jerks, in my opinion, in life. There’s lots of them out there, most people are unhappy intrinsically, it seems, and there are people who go their own way and then there people who just want to trouble you. And so, intelligent martial arts is not getting in battles and winning them. Intelligent martial is avoiding battles because battles use up energy and you can get hurt, no matter how good you are. And that wasn’t what you had on your agenda today. Simply because you were going some place today, you’re going to have a great picnic and you didn’t intend to get into a battle with somebody. If you get in a battle and even win, you never get to have your nice picnic. That was someone’s else’s idea. So the intelligent use of power is to apprehend those that would trip you up, to slide around them, and do what you want to do. Naturally if there is no way out and confrontation and battle is inevitable, one can use power and strategy, balance, and wisdom and Enlightenment to win, of course. But the best battle is the battle that’s never fought, the best war is the one that is won without battle. But it is important to know that power can be used to interfere with things. Being afraid of that, however, is absurd. In other words, I’ve seen people who practice Yoga and Buddhism who were scared to death of the sorcery power of others and this is absurd. If you are afraid of someone, you immediately give them an advantage over you, and you give them an entrée to your awareness field. People can’t do much to one another with power in my opinion, by and large. Most people don’t, they’re not far enough along, they don’t have enough of it or how to use it properly. I wouldn’t be very concerned about this. It’s paranoia. What you can do though is allow someone to upset you. And if you become afraid of someone, they do gain a power over your life. I think a lot of people profess to have power and it’s very minor astral power. And they get people very upset and then they do get power over you. Not because they had any intrinsic power, but just because your fear immobilizes you and makes you do a bad job. People can drain your energy a little, or maybe they can make you feel a little uncomfortable, by and large, that’s about it. That’s what you’re going to find around here, particularly here in the West. And you know, the most you’re going to get is a headache. But if you become afraid, well then anyone can overwhelm you and totally dominate your life.

So the intelligent use of power is never to interfere with anyone else’s success, but to use the greater power you get to be more successful yourself. Use power intelligently around people who might mean harm to you and use that power to not be afraid, to simply step around them. And that’s the end of the discussion.

Use power to vibrate more quickly. There is enough room in this world for lots of people to succeed. Your success does not depend upon the failure of others. The way to win the race is not to trip somebody else in the race, but its to train hard, to feel great about yourself. And to simply have more energy than other people because you practice better at Yoga and Buddhism. That’s my opinion. Because you will not only have a greater chance of winning, but whether you win or loose, you’re happy. Where, what is the great joy in winning some victory if it makes you miserable. It’s no victory, it’s a failure. So I don’t put much stock in powers people have to hurt others, in sorcery and all this nonsense. I think a lot of unhappy people trying to make other people unhappy and sure, people have oppressive natures, and sure, there are people who are horrible and who kill and hurt people physically. There are murderers, and there are dictators, people are out of control. Their desires are obsessive, or they’re just lost in illusion. That’s just part of life. But the intelligent use of power and Yoga can assist you in avoiding that side of life and that side of humanity. And if you have come into a battle, you can win it. But what Yoga does, is it makes you free. It makes you happy, and it gets you out of all the traps of human nature that create misery. So, power is best used then, the correct usage of power is, for one’s own personal success, and if you enjoy it, it’s not necessary, to make others succeed. You might find that makes you even happier. It adds to your power, it makes you vibrate faster. But the key line, the benchmark, is happiness. And in practice, that is to say to practice in meditation, Buddhism and Yoga, what is necessary or required is to simply extend your happiness to higher and deeper levels today than it’s been in any other day of your life. I would say if you are doing this, you‘re getting A’s in Buddhism. And if you’re not doing that, if you’re at the same level, you’re getting C’s. And if you’re not as happy as you use to be at any point of your life, then you’re definitely failing the course, which means you’re not practicing properly. There is a bug in the program. We have to read the code, look back and see what it is, it’s not by accident, there is no such thing. You are not doing something. And chances are, you’re not meditating properly, deeply, and fully. You may be trying to skip steps, and circumvent the process. You’re using power incorrectly. Your motives are not pure.

You don’t vibrate quickly, so it’s simply a question of doing a systems analysis of your energy flow, spotting where the problem is and changing it without a sense of ego. Without a sense of right, wrong. I was good, I was bad. Guilt or remorse. These things are unnecessary. This is simply structural. Everything in Buddhism is structural. Emotions are there to enjoy life. But they’re not used in self reflection because they inhibit a proper reflection. They gunk us up. Feeling sorry for yourself is a total waste of time as is feeling sorry for others. Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. There are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges whereas feeling sorry for yourself, feeling guilty, accomplishes little or nothing in terms of a true change, an improvement of our state as perceiving beings.

So the unlocking of the Kundalini, which occurs by meditating on the first, second and third chakras, is the entrance into the planes of power. As you focus on the first, second, and third chakras, you will gain access to the planes of power and with the planes of power, of course, come more power, but experience in those dimensional planes. By and large, the first two planes are somewhat tricky for the beginner in meditation. Meditating on the first chakra and the second chakra is not necessarily recommended. If you don’t have enough power, the planes won’t access or open anyway and you won’t get anything from the experience. And if they do, there can be very powerful releases of energy that can kind of catch you off-guard until you have a better sense of what you are doing. If you’re a new swimmer and you’re swimming in the ocean in big waves, you might have an unpleasant experience or drown. If you learn to swim and gain self confidence in a pool or a place where there aren’t huge waves, then later on you can learn how to deal with the waves and they’re actually kind of fun. So I would recommend initially, if you’re trying to increase your personal power level, to devote a third of your meditation practice to meditating on the navel center, not the lower two. The navel center will activate the other two centers, but the particular planes it references are relatively easy to deal with and they bring the full power of all of the three lower centers into your being. You gain the power without the problems. Later on in the Enlightenment cycle, it is necessary to learn how to surf some bigger waves and it’s fun. But initially why look for a difficult experience. Seek a pleasant experience. You won’t gain more power from focusing on the first two chakras than you will from the third. The third picks up all three. When you focus on the third chakra it has to pull the Kundalini from the root center through the second up to the third chakra.

There are places of power, places where there is more power, just as there is more power in the chakras, there is more power in certain areas. They call them places of power. In the southwest United Sates, in certain mountains, deserts, sometimes by the sea, sometimes where they build a city or even a shopping mall, there are places of power. In the United States, we are fortunate, we have a lot of places of power, particularly in the Southwest. Naturally, in the Himalayas, there are lots of places of power. In India, in Japan there are a number of power, strong places, Mount Fuji, of course, is a very strong place of power, so on and so forth. There are lots of places of power around the earth. And if you spend time in these places it increases your vibratory power. If you meditate in them, you can have very deep and profound experiences and store a lot of power. So pilgrimages are journeys to places of power. Places of power have very often been frequented in the past by practitioners. For Example, if you were to go to the Himalayas, people make pilgrimages sometimes to the caves where Milarepa and other great yogis meditated. Not simply to pick up the energy or the vibration of the people who meditated there, because the place was and is intrinsically powerful and that’s why Milarepa and others meditated there. The Indians in the southwestern United States went to many places of power and in those places of power they were able to have profound dreams experiences where they could see the future or know what to do, make proper decisions, where they could just be more, feel more, or know more. Power places in the United States are not limited to the Southwest. There are a number of them in the East and in the South and in the Midwest. But the majority of them are in the Southwest. The power planes … you might say in a way of speaking, that these places reference the first three chakras. There are physical places that reference the fourth and fifth chakras, the chakras of balance and there are places that reference the sixth and seventh chakra, places of wisdom. That’s what you have out there. There are negative places also that can drain our energy. They just vibrate slowly. They’re weird and when you’re in them, they just pull you down.

So we’re talking about keeping ourselves in a pure flow of light, being happy, learning to access and utilize power to clarify our minds, strengthen our bodies, renew our spirits, and generally have an experience of ecstasy, exaltation, and wisdom in the world of Enlightenment. It’s power that makes all this possible, without power none of it happens. There is no life without power.

The last consideration in our short journey through the world of power is the teacher of Buddhism. There two types of teachers in Buddhism: exoteric and esoteric. Again, I’m using the terms Buddhism and Yoga interchangeably. The exoteric teacher of Buddhism is someone who doesn’t have power really. They have a certain level of knowledge as a person who has meditated for some years and practiced Buddhism. They can show you basic techniques of meditation, they can show you things that they have learned from their teacher, or they have doped out themselves or learned from books about how to save energy, how increase it to an extent. They’ve reached a higher belt ranking in the inner world, perhaps than the new student has, the new student, but they don’t have true power. They may be able to make a person feel a certain amount of energy or shift their awareness slightly, but they don’t have the knowledge and the balance necessary to be an esoteric teacher, and the pure power.

An esoteric or Enlightened teacher of Yoga and Buddhism is someone who has obviously obtained Enlightenment and has the ability to transfer -- just as you’d give somebody money if you had a lot, if you made a lot -- the ability to transfer power to another individual, to someone they might meet or usually to one of their students. These are called, needless to say, empowerments. A real empowerment is not just a ceremony. In order to do an empowerment, a person obviously has to be highly empowered, have the power, and also have the structural knowledge of how to transfer it to someone else. There are lots of ways to do it, it’s a very complicated thing.

The reason that you study with a teacher as opposed to just pursuing Yoga and Buddhism on your own is primarily for the empowerments. For someone who is Enlightened and powerful, to transfer power to you on a regular basis because with transferred power you can go faster into the world of Enlightenment. If you have a scholarship, and you’re going to college, graduate school, you can devote more of your time to studying and progress faster and do a better job with your scholastic endeavors. If you have to go out and work 30 hours a week at a food place, you might lean some interesting things and eat a lot of burgers, or whatever, fries, but you’re not going to be spending time you could be spending on your school work. When teachers transfer power to their students, so that a student is able to progress faster, they can meditate better, maybe more successful on their career, so they can spend a little less time on it and more time to meditate and do other things. They might heal them in some way, help them with their physical body. There are millions of applications for power. But what’s most important is that the student use that power intelligently and wisely.

So the primary reason for studying with an Enlightened teacher is that they give you power and with that power, the Kundalini becomes active. It moves through the chakras much more rapidly and you’re able to see and operate on levels that you would not maintain on a regular basis. As I said earlier, there is a normal Kundalini that most people have which is either in the first chakra or somewhere between the first and second. An Enlightened teacher has all seven centers open all the time. Their Kundalini is always at the top. In an individual meditation session, we raise the Kundalini to a degree, for a short time, even if our normal level is first or second chakra. We may bring it up to the forth or fifth or sixth level. But it will only stay there for a few minutes and then it will recede. Gradually doing that again and again, gradually over many days and months the level changes on a regular basis and we exist in a higher Kundalini level all the time. When you study with an Enlightened teacher, they do individual empowerments when you see them. But if you’re an accepted student of theirs, they are always transferring a certain degree of power from their aura to you. So instead of living between the first and second chakras, you might live in the third or forth chakra all the time or perhaps even higher depends upon how adept and adroit you are with the usage of the power transfer.

Transferring power does a lot of different things. It enables the person to be successful, to be personally happy, to be materially successful, to be spiritual successful, but it’s not all we go to a teacher for. We also go to learn balance and wisdom. Without balance and wisdom, power becomes very destructive. It creates unhappiness and not happiness. And to simply see a teacher to gain power is a mistake. You‘ll gain the power, but with the current mindset you have, you’ll probably create more unhappiness for yourself than happiness with it. So, we see an Enlightened teacher to gain a sense of humor, to learn balance and proportion, and of course to learn wisdom, to learn to intelligently cultivate the higher mind and to only use that power that the teacher transfers to us and also teaches us to develop for ourselves through meditation and certain practices. To use that power to succeed and create happiness and not to block the success of others. To gain emotional control, mental control, physical control, and spiritual control, so that we can hurdle ourselves into the most beautiful states of mind, into ecstasy, into Enlightened states of mind. Or we can become one with the eternal part of ourselves and to avoid blocking others, interfering with others because that will decrease our happiness, slow our vibrate rate, and generally bring us down and makes us miserable. A teacher teaches you, an Enlightened teacher how to use power, how to gain power, they give you power, but they teach you how to shape it so that it becomes an instrument of beauty and not an instrument of unhappiness. An instrument of fulfillment and higher experience. And not an instrument of self frustration, or the frustration of others. So use power very carefully, don’t be afraid to have it, you have to have it to succeed. But learn balance and wisdom in addition to simply the unlocking of the Kundalini if you wish to have a happy and Enlightened life.

The Enlightenment Cycle Reincarnation by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Reincarnation is a dance. Its a movement of life to the rhythm of the universe. The idea is simple. There is spirit and there is matter. And they join together; one as one dancing partner and one as the other. The two together make a partner. They’re together for a time while they’re on the dance floor and then they separate and go their individual ways for a while and then they come together once again. And it goes on forever. Spirit, the eternal part of our being is indescribable and limitless. We are eternal spirits. As spirits, we have always existed and in a generalized form, since we are all part of the universe, the spirit of the universe. As individual spirits, we have existed for a timeless time. And in that time, we have participated in the dance of reincarnation. Reincarnation means simply that we have lived before, we live now, we’ll live again. That there is no end to life. That death is only a brief pause in our journey. It’s a rest.

When we reach the end of a lifetime, we rest. The dancers take a break. And off we go again. With a new partner, with a new body. With a new life. Reincarnation is a cyclic process. The idea is that there is endless levels of creation different universes, you might say or dimensions and in each one something similar is taking place: evolution. The evolution of spirit through matter. Now to say that matter and spirit are different is a way of talking. Its a way of trying to discuss something they are not necessarily different that they both come from the eternal light. And the samsara, the world of experience, temporal experience and nirvana, the world of Enlightenment are really one. That’s an apprehension that you’ll have some day in the world of Enlightened experience. But for discussion purposes it’s certainly a lot easier to separate them.

So, reincarnation is a process that’s going on in endless dimensions. But, let’s just look at our own, because while the forms differ, the process is the same. If we understand how one city works, while it won’t tell us about all cities, it will give us a central understanding that will be implacable in most situations. In this universe, meaning the world with the earth that we live on, people are at different levels of evolution. They may all have human bodies, but the souls are different. Some souls are more advanced, some souls are less advanced. Advanced in the sense that they are more aware of their possibilities. Advanced souls seek Enlightenment. Souls that are not so advanced seek happiness and pleasure and sensorial experience. In other words, the advanced soul has learned that happiness, fulfillment doesn’t really come from simply leading a physical life. It can be enjoyable, it can be painful, it can be a combination of both. But real happiness comes from absorption in the world of spirit, in the world of light ?? Enlightenment. So, the advanced soul is really the discussion point in our journey of reincarnation. Your interest in the subject suggests that you are more advanced than most individuals, because most individuals are not drawn to the higher light at this time. But that doesn’t in any way make you or anyone who is interested in such things superior to anyone else. If you’re in the eighth grade, you’re not better than someone in the forth grade. You were in forth grade, now you’re in eighth. People in forth will one day be in eighth. It’s a progression. But what’s interesting about reincarnation from the point of view of the more advanced soul is how the process works. That is where am I, what are my possibilities, is there someway that I can know the system better so that I can gain more out of it. That’s the perspective of the more advanced soul. And our concerns are really two fold. One is the experience of this life and the other is the experience between lifetimes. The experience of the next life is too far away to be concerned with. And it will be an outgrowth of this incarnation and what happens between birth and death. There is not much we can do about past lives, they’re done. There’s not much we can do about our future lives that haven’t occurred yet. But our knowledge and our experience, our wisdom can assist us in gaining more from this life which will correctly set up our next life. And, of course, it can also assist us during the intermediate state bardo plane, between lives, between death and rebirth, in between all things. So if in this life that you have lived before. Its a feeling, it’s an understanding. A knowing, a silent knowing. This is a very helpful thing. Because it enables you to deal happily with our day to day lives. With your day to day life. If you know that you’ve lived before, that you’ve had many, many lives, countless lives, then what happens in this life is not quite traumatic. If this is the only life that you lead, then everything assumes a great importance. Birth’s to great an importance. We have to get everything out of life and perhaps we over do it. If today you’re alive and you suspect you will be alive tomorrow, you enjoy today, but you know there will be a tomorrow. And we don’t have to fit everything into today. We don’t have to have every experience, today. We don’t have to know or have every piece of knowledge today. Because there is tomorrow. So when you know there are future lives, its not necessary for you to cram everything into this lifetime. You can enjoy this lifetime, follow your interests, go with the flow of your life, and know that it will lead you to a better life in the next incarnation. Reincarnation is the journey of hope. Because in each lifetime we move forward to a place that’s better our last lifetime. A place inside of ourselves, awareness. Think of Reincarnation as a school. When you go to school, you’re in first grade, then there’s the summer vacation and there’s second grade and summer vacation. You don’t go back to the previous grade, of course, unless you failed the course. And if you do, you take the courses again and then move on. And summer vacation is a rest, but it’s a chance to relax, to have fun, to do something different. Because you can’t keep learning all the time. You don’t learn much. After a while, you burn out. So reincarnation works something like that. In this lifetime, you are at the level of your current awareness. That’s your subject. The subject you’re studying today is your life. And what can you do with the fabric of the life you have. To become happier, to become more knowledgeable, to become more balanced. To become more free. How can you use that texture, that fiber. How can you change it. How can you interact with it to get to a better place. A place you enjoy more inside your mind. If you do well with this life, then that knowledge, that awareness will be held within you, within the causal structure of our being that lives from one lifetime to another. And will be available to you in your next life and in future lives. Not necessarily at the moment of birth, but if you meditate it will come back to you. But if in this lifetime, you don’t meet the challenge, you don’t learn anything new. You just kind of ver out in this incarnation then you’ll be right back in the same place in your next life. And you can take another shot at it. knowing about reincarnation helps us relax, in other words. It helps us enjoy what we enjoy. And it assist’s us with an understanding of deal and dying. When we see someone we love dying, its not an ending. It’s just another step. Or maybe a new beginning. And while we’re sad to see our firends go away for a summer vacation, there is a sense that we are going to be with them again if that’s something we would like to do. And certainly there’s no sense of loss at death. Death is not an ending. Death is not the end. Quite the contrary. Knowing this makes the journey through life, dealing with own death and the death’s of those we love much easier. We can be alive and overcome this fear of death that seems to haunt so many people, particularly older people. Also, there is sometingh we can do. Gain more knowledge and more power in this lifetime and even if sometimes in an incarnation you get the feeling of frustration, it not turning out just the way you wanted it to, wanted to on a physical level. If you pull your power together, if you meditate impeccably if you learn from life. if you study it. Then no mater happens to you physically, if your situation is good or bad, you will gain from this life. No lifetime is a loss. You always learn something. That learning stays with you. And if you find your self in very difficult circumstances, painful circumstances, if you can look on the bright side. And if you can learn from these things. Then there is no sense3 of loss. There is no such thing as a wasted life if you’ve learned. Reincarnation is the evolution of spirit through matter. For thousands, millions of lifetimes, the sole evolves. Into light. The growth is slow, the progression is steady. All souls, however do not reach Enlightenment. Enlightenment exists within all souls and all thing. But some souls reach sa plateau. A certain peak. And then they stay there. Some souls actually decline and go into different cycles. In other words, people have the idea that reincarnation means… The theory of Reincarnation is that the soul stsrtd in s dtstr of ignorsance and eventually progress to Enlightenment. And that all souls eventually reach Enlightenment, certain beings, living beings. That’s not true. that’ s a simplistic way of looking at it. Life doesnot necessarily have a fixed purpose. It just is. Its an expression that is unknowable. And for us to superimpose human points of view and try and shape it is interesting, but not necessarily accurate. Nor does that imply that knowledge id sn uncomfortable to have. It’s neither. So some souls in their progression through incarnations reach a plateau and that’s a fine place to be. They stay there, you might say. The reach after many, many lifetimes a certain level of knowingness. And they just continue through lifetimes at this level. Life after life is about the same. But they like it that way. Some beings do go down. That is to say they forget. The soul falls into a downward eclipse of itself and there is a downward progression for a time. Some souls attain Enlightenment. They actually continue to go up into the highest gradients of light. no one knows why. You could say it’s an individual inclination, I’m not convinced that’s the case. It’s just how the universe works. But if we get above the individualized view of life. You will see that we are all one. We’re all one light. Were all one essentiality. We’re one beautiful, perfect essence. And in that sense we are all enlightened. We are all one.

We are all perfect oerfectuib, And yet in the outer of manifestation of life, we take on different roles, casts. Souls have different journeys. So the best thing to know is not what everybody else does, but what you do. Self discovery is about finding your own Dharma, your own Dharma, rhythm. Knowing that and pursuing it. And if you seek Enlightenment then what you need to know is there is a definite way to progress. There is definitely a way to store and amass power. To reawaken past life power To continua your journey. And there is also a way to use the moment of death, and the after death plane to advance. (end of side 1)

I’m not big, you might say, on the after death experience. If you’ve done a very good job in your current lifetime. If you’ve put your time in, then your next lifetime will be set up for you. Think of it like school. At the university, if you study all semester and you do a good job, finals, if there an accumulative exam is not a big deal. You just have to lightly review, because you’ve studied along. And when everyone else is stressing out, studying countless hours, and getting mediocre grades, you will get an a with a light view. Because you’ve been progressive on the case. That’s the best way to be. It is possible to cram for a final exam, certainly if you just have not gotten around studying. You just might pull off a slightly better grade by doing a lot of work at the last minute. And that’s essentially what the after death experience is. That is to say, the yoga of the bardo plane, the yoga of the after death experience is a way to try and slightly improve your grade. Because you haven’t done everything that you should have done. So, the best thing to do is to do the job in the first place. If you meditate, if you lead a clean life, if in spite of the egotism and vanity, jealousy and all the weird thoughts, that pass through the mind and the personalities. In spite of these things, you continue to have fun with yoga and Buddhism. If you continue to be bright and positive and hopeful. And to continually, no matter how many times you wander away from it, follow the pathway to Enlightenment. Then you will learn a great deal, you will amass more knowledge, and you will move to a higher incarnation. That is to say, in your next lifetime, you will be much wiser than you were in this one. Much happier and you won’t have to go through as much suffering. Or if you do go through suffering, you will be able to use it to advance yourself even further. On the other hand, its possible, as I said, at the last moment you have not done perhaps all that you could have with your life. If you haven’t really been on the case as much as you could be. It is possible at the last moment to make a tremendous transition to go much higher, to experience eternity more directly and more completely by joining yourself in the bardo plane with the higher fields of Enlightenment.

There is a book called the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And that book is really an instruction guide , trip tick for the after death experience. To a certain extent, it’s very hard to understand. In that it’s written mainly in symbols and if you have advanced quite far in the practice of yoga, you might be able to under stand those symbols. But essentially it’s an instruction guide to recognize the path through, through a series of mediation practices at the time of death and after death the bardo plane. So that your next incarnation will be a higher incarnation. Its difficult, its a difficult yoga to practice, to be honest with you. It’s something that someone fairly adept at yoga practice to begin with can really pull off. So, it’s an interesting book to read and I think actually al lot of knowledge in the book of the dead is useful for the living because the experience is not something you’re limited to at the time of death. Life is the bardo. The experiences of death is the experience of life to a certain sense. The planes of consciousness that are available at the time of death are also available to the living. And transmutations that can occur at the time of death can also occur while you’re alive. So its useful in that sense both for the living and the dead. But as I said before, the best thing to do is to do a good life with this life. If you have a sense of the timeliness of life. If you feel that yes I will be in another incarnation and yes it does matter what I do in this incarnation, I think that that is the best attitude. If you feel that your under some tremendous pressure, to do everything perfectly in this lifetime, so you won’t have a horrible in your next life, I think that’s a bit much personally. I think that life is not that finicky. And I think that type of fear is unnecessary. Some people don’t enjoy their life because they feel they are working hard, and viscously and reaping lots of good karma for their next lifetime. And I don’t think that’s an accurate understanding of the reincarnation process. It seems to me that happiness is something that you don’t postpone. And if you’re postponing happiness Its probably something you never experience much of. Happiness is something that comes from creating good karma. And the monk or the individual who fields that I am working hard and they have a sense that its unpleasant, is not really creating any good karma. And will not really have a better lifetime than their current lifetime. A better lifetime comes from not some Karmic scale, but comes from inner knowledge. And inner knowledge makes you happy. So, its not as if anyone is checking. There is the thought among many yogis and some practitioners. That there’s some giant scale balance scale or record where someone is keeping track. Like Santa Clause is suppose to for Christmas and will determine the allotment of your presents according to how good or bad you are. And that’s absurd. It’s a very exotic understanding of reincarnation. The esoteric understanding is that what you will be in your next life is the sum total of the realizations you’ve had in this lifetime. And the realizations you have in this lifetime are cumulative, in that they increase as you grow older if you keep practicing yoga. And if you’re happier every day, that means you’re practicing yoga, your yoga or Buddhism is successful. And if you’re not happier every day, if you don’t feel better, if you don’t see a progression in development day to day, month to month, and year to year in your life, well you’re certainly not practicing yoga or Buddhism. And therefore, you can’t amassing any positive karma. Positive karma is a better mental state. Self honesty is absolutely necessary in the practice of Buddhism. And the main point of self honesty you need is to ask your self am I really practicing Buddhism or Am I really practicing yoga? Am I really happier? Do I feel better about my life, do I feel more relaxed. Even the circumstances of life are sometimes pressured and chaotic. Aside from that do I personally feel better. Have I reached a mental state this year that’s vastly superior to the mental state I had last year. If the answer is no, You’ve got to start your yoga and Buddhism over. You’re not doing it right. And it certainly will not lend to a better incarnation or whatever you want to call it. In other words, I think all incarnations are this incarnation. And the primary purpose of reincarnation, the knowledge of it, is that it assures us life is worth living. That all of this is not vain and futile and that spiritual practice we do in a given life is not a waste of time. Life is not a one shot deal, it is forever and things do count. But to be so simplistic as to think that you can go out and help a lot of people and somehow get a better life. I don’t think, that’s not reincarnation as I know it. That’s fantasy. A better life comes from being happy and from inner realizations. Now if helping others adds to that, well then its great. But postponing happiness, suffering in other words, intentional suffering and the postponement of happiness is not yoga or Buddhism. And it will not lead to a better incarnation. If you would like to have a better incarnation, then have one now. And if that’s your attitude and you just let go and meditate and try to be as wise and compassionate and understanding as you can. Learn patience. And the higher virtues if you enjoy them if you have fun with it, that’s yoga, that’s Buddhism as I know it. And the process gets more and more exciting and the ecstasy gets deeper and that’s what will go into your next life. That’s who you will be born as the person who is happy. And all of the other babies are in the cribs of the delivery room crying, you will be smiling I guess. Well, I don’t know about that, something like that. Have a sense of humor. So Reincarnation is not what a lot of people think. Yes, we are eternal, no everyone does not attain Enlightenment, it’s not necessary. Life is smarter than we are. What ever is suppose to happen, happens. We’re dealing with the cosmos and it has its own ways. To observe those ways and be in touch with them, that’s wisdom. To try to make it fit into a neat mental package, that’s very unwise. Because you’ll be very surprised when you discover that it doesn’t work out that way. That wasn’t true, your illusions will be painful for you. The best use of reincarnation the best knowledge of it is the knowledge that gives you a better life today, now. A sense that death is not the end, so we are not afraid of it. A sense that it does make sense to do a good job with our life because we have a happier life now and will be happier in the next life. To be afraid our next life because we don’t feel we’ve done a good job with this one is not wise. It creates unhappiness now. Your next life is another opportunity to learn what you didn’t learn in this one. In other words, the knowledge of reincarnation should relax you a little bit. At the same time it should tell you it is worth pursuing inner knowledge, because that inner knowledge will make your next life more pleasant than this one was certainly. But the knowledge is not a fearful thing. It’s something that inspire you today and also, of course, shows you the practice of meditation and entering the planes of light, you can pull all the past life realizations you had into this life to make you strong and to give you insight to go even further to higher bliss, to higher ecstasy, greater laughter. That’s the essence of reincarnation. The essence of all reincarnation is to have the best life now that you’ve ever had no matter what’s going on wherever you happen to be. And to not worry about your future lives. Simply have a wonderful life now, as happy as possible. Happiness, of course, will come through the practice of yoga and Buddhism. By stilling the mind in meditation and by allowing the spirit to unfold. That happiness is not something you will lose at the end of this lifetime. It will stay with you and in your next lifetime, you’ll be that much further ahead. It will be easier to get back to that place than it was this time. And you’ll go further ahead. Reincarnation is a hopeful understanding of life, an accurate understanding of life. In each lifetime, we grow, develop, and evolve. And as long as you continue to practice meditation and yoga, you will eventually reach the world of Enlightened mind and be totally free, perfectly happy, and knowledgeable. So reincarnation is the happy news. Good news. Life is eternal, worth living, and what we do in this life is not futile. Death is not the end and our practice in this life will assist us in our next life. And If we don’t come to a perfect understanding in this lifetime, its not a problem. That’s what the next life is for. Yes, you can cram for exams. You can read The Tibetan Book Of The Dead and if you skipped it in this lifetime, you can try to pick it up at the end. But that’s not our discussion point today.

Other Talks Unpublished Buddhism by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Buddhism is the study of light and the study of life. The central theme in Buddhism is that for most people life is very painful. Life is a very painful experience and it need not be that way. Pain is caused by desire, attachments, fears and illusions that we have about ourselves and the things, events, people and places in our existence. There’s something else, there’s something better, brighter, more perfect and more beautiful and that’s enlightenment. Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without mental modifications.

Buddhism is yoga. There really isn’t a difference. Buddhism is a brand name as is Taoism, branches of Buddhism, Zen, Vadryana, Hinayana, Mahayana, these are different brand names. Raja Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, they’re all brand names for the religious experience, the experience of life in its completeness. Certainly everything is a religious experience. Everything is holy. Cause all of life if God, all of life is made up of light. Our mind gradates experience and gives us a sense of preference that one thing is better than another, one thing more meaningful than another, that something is good, something is bad, something is holy, something is unholy. But really everything is holy, in that it is all light. It is all part of the infinite perfection of existence.

For most people life, however, is not perfection, its pain. Some satisfaction, sometimes great happiness. But more often than not its pain, frustration, sometimes agony. There’s physical pain, mental pain, emotional pain and the worst, of course, is spiritual pain. Pain is really caused by absence of self knowledge. Absence of intelligent awareness of life. Pain is a frequency, or perhaps its just the absence of the frequencies of happiness, of ecstasy and beauty and of brightness.

Buddhism is an unfoldment of the spirit. And as I said before, Buddhism is yoga. You read the Bhagavad Gita, that’s Buddhism. If you read the Upanishads, the Vedas, that’s Buddhism. If you read Lao Tsu, Boddhidharma, it’s all Buddhism. Different names for the same thing. The experience of God. The experience of eternity. The experience of ecstasy. Buddhism means enlightenment. It’s not about a person or a historic personage who lived at any given time. It’s not really about any of us. It’s not a philosophy. It has become a religion although it isn’t really limited to being a religious practice. It’s a way of being, a way of perceiving. It’s a system more than anything, to articulately experience life completely.

The basic premise of Buddhism is that there is a light, a knowledge, a perfection that is beyond all things and yet within them and part of them. We call that light nirvana, or enlightenment. We’re all part of it, it’s part of us. But most people don’t experience that light, they don’t experience nirvana. They don’t experience enlightenment. Instead they experience a very limited part of the cosmos and themselves. A not very pleasant part – pain. The mere absence or the great absence of enlightenment is pain. A piano has a lot of notes. A lot of keys. Makes a lot of sounds. If we just play one note over and over continuously, it’s not very beautiful. Music is created by lots of different notes and different sequences, rhythms, harmonies and so on. So the complete awareness of life creates beauty, is beauty. Most people only hear one note, and it’s a discordant note. It’s only when we can reference, feel and experience the parts of life that are not only physical but nonphysical, that we have a full picture, a full composition, a symphony that is perfect.

I’m a teacher of Buddhism, of enlightenment. That simply means that I’m an individual who’s a Buddhist, a practitioner, someone who has journeyed into different states of mind and beyond states of mind to that shoreless shore we call nirvana. I’ve experienced the light, merged with it and become it. And I simply instruct others on how to do that. It’s a very quiet, beautiful perfect process. Everyone is a Buddha, everyone is enlightenment. But we don’t really see or know that. We only hear one note. We’re unaware of our greater self.

Buddhism can be divided into, really, three practices. The practice of meditation, the practice of mindfulness and the practice or the awareness of laughter. Meditation is stopping thought. As long as thought is in the mind, it’s a smokescreen, it’s clouds that block the light of the sun. Our thoughts, desires, emotions which come together to create the sense of self are a solid cloudbank. A smokescreen. They prevent us from seeing and feeling the radiance of enlightenment that’s within us. The practice of meditation is the stopping of thought. It’s learning to make your mind still, tranquil and calm so that the radiant light and the experiences of infinity become part of your daily existence. Meditation is something that you practice every day once or twice a day. You open a window to eternity. You experience eternity and it transmutes you, it fills you with light, energy, and the experience of light that you have in each meditation session gradually transforms your nature, it eliminates the hate, unhappiness, frustration, the illusions and the attachments vanish. The light is all powerful. So meditation is certainly the cornerstone of practice of Buddhism and yoga. Each day you have an experience, you have an adventure once or twice a day when you meditate. And you go into the mind of eternity, into the mind of god.

Mindfulness is meditation in action. If you get up in the morning, and you take a shower or purify yourself with water, and then you meditate. Meditate for half an hour, an hour and experience the light. At the end of that time you’re filled with energy, brightness, you’ve experienced different states of mind, you’re in harmony with the universe and with your deeper self. Now you’re going to journey off into the world and all day long have adventures and experiences at work, school or at play, and at the end of the day perhaps you’ll meditate again at sunset or before you go to bed and again recharge yourself with energy, go deeper into infinity, into the planes of light and become happy. Because the very nature of the experience of meditation and the planes of light is happiness. But when you’re not meditating, the rest of the time, the second practice is mindfulness. Mindfulness simply means minding your mind. It’s like playing tennis. All day long thoughts and impressions are coming in and out of your mind and the trick is to eliminate negative thoughts, unhappy feelings, unhappy emotions and to foster and cultivate positive thoughts, feelings and emotions. So, for example, if you’re at work or at school and suddenly you get angry, you push anger out of your mind and you focus on something positive. If you start to doubt yourself or you suddenly become afraid, if you experience anxiety, depression or just nasty thoughts about somebody or yourself, these thoughts make you unhappy. Thoughts vibrate at a particular level and unhappy thoughts vibrate very slowly, happy thoughts vibrate faster. And if you allow thoughts to accumulate, negative thoughts, unhappy thoughts and emotions in your mind, it slows you down, it slows down your vibration and it makes you very unhappy. It puts you out of touch with the higher octave light. So in the morning when you meditate you clear yourself of negativity and you go into a very high vibratory state. Your mind is pulsing with light. Then throughout the day, when thoughts of a negative nature come into the mind you just push them away with your will power. You return to the brightness of the meditation. You do this all day long. It’s a game that you play and it keeps you in a very high state of attention.

It’s possible to play the game because you meditate in the morning. Your morning meditation brings you into the world of light directly. In other words in a more controlled environment when you’re sitting, meditating, you are able to experience the stillness, the ecstasy of enlightenment, depending upon how developed you are in your meditation. It’s a more difficult and challenging thing to do, needless to say, during the day, when you are not just in a ideal situation or environment sitting in stillness. People are talking to you, they’re angry, the world is emotion, experiences are happening, sometimes violent experiences, you’re picking up energy from the world around you, from the people around you who are happy or unhappy today, frustrated, sad, or pleased.

So mindfulness is meditation in motion. It’s something that you do all day long.. It’s fun. And as you gradually weed the garden of your mind and eliminate the negative thoughts and just focus on something positive, something bright, something fun instead, you build up higher energy and you gain the sense of what that higher energy is, of course, by meditating in the morning, you experience light and that’s what you’re seeking to return to all day. In the evening, when you’ve just absorbed a lot of vibrations of all kinds from the day, and it’s slowed your attention field down, its just sort of like going outside all day and you get dirty, you take a shower. And that’s meditation. You meditate in the evening. Either when the day is done or before you go to bed. You re-energize yourself, you touch deeper stratas of being, deeper planes of awareness.

So mindfulness and meditation are really the same thing, in a way. But meditation is the deeper, full-focused entrance into infinity and then mindfulness is a simplified meditation. All day long you can be going into higher states of consciousness and experiencing beauty. You can be sitting at your computer terminal, driving your car, doing martial arts, going to the movies with a friend, working on your homework, and you can be in a happy state or you can be in a depressed state. You can be in a clear state, or a cloudy state. You can have the full use of your mind and be at peace with yourself, or you can be just all messed up. The choice is yours.

Meditation in the morning clarifies you and puts you in the right place. Mindfulness keeps you there. But even with mindfulness, by the end of the day you get a little dragged down. So we meditate again, and that brings us to an even higher place and as time goes on, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year you become enlightened. You live in a state, eventually, of constant light. With time and practice you’ll notice that negative thoughts don’t even crop up that much. Your energy level becomes so high, you start to vibrate so fast, that you just don’t feel those things anymore. You just live in a state of happiness. You’re not a spaced out, nebulous, nebbishy state, but a completely aware, articulate state of mind that has the depths of the universe behind it.

The third practice in Buddhism is humor. As you meditate, as you practice mindfulness, as you have a great time with your life, in other words, and become very happy, life becomes pretty funny. There are wonderful moments of humor. Now, I should define humor for you just a little bit because it’s my experience that what most people consider funny is misfortune. Most humor is based around something bad happening to somebody. You see somebody fall down and you laugh. Most jokes are not really happy, it’s kind of a deviant sense of humor. And that kind of humor, while it releases tension for a few minutes, drags you into low vibratory states and you feel lousy.

There’s another kind of humor, it’s very bright and full and celestial and absurd and it’s the sense of humor that you have if you are a Buddhist, if you practice yoga. Life itself is funny, and it’s fun and bright. And even the most ridiculously – on the surface unfortunate situations – have possibilities, great possibilities of humor. Humor and being funny is the ability to transcend fate, and that’s the essence of all Buddhist teaching.

The essence of all practice is that nothing is the way it seems. If you’re unhappy, if you’re miserable, you’re not seeing things clearly. You’ve become too caught up in the drama, the surface of life. And if you’re only in 2% of life, that which is the surface, and that’s where your vested interests are, if that surface doesn’t go well, then of course you’ll be miserable. But most of life occurs in the other 98%. If I look at the water, I look at the ocean or the bay, I see the surface. The surface is 2%. There may be 100 fathoms of water, but I’m unaware of it, and what’s going on down there, I just look at the surface. So most people only see the surface of life. We experience the surface of life through the senses. The surface is what we see, feel, taste touch and smell. And if things don’t work out well on the surface, we’re miserable. If they work out well, well, maybe we’re happy. Humor means to see the other 98% in addition to the other 2%. Because not only is it another 98%, but seeing that 98%, knowing it, even changes the way we perceive the 2%.

Humor is the ability to see endless light, endless beauty and endless radiance in a world like this, or in any world, in any plane, any dimension, any time, any place. And if you have enough energy, if you have enough brightness, then there’s always something funny. And we need the humor – we need humor the most when times are the most difficult. So the essence of all Buddhism and yoga is to be happy. To be free. Not just in an idyllic situation when things are going your way, but to be able to be happy and free when everything is horrible. When everything is falling apart. When you are in crises. To be able to pull your attention into the other 98% of infinity, into the planes of light, and the dimensions of celestial radiance and wonder, and to see that whatever is happening now is only momentary. It doesn’t last. It’s transient. It passes in an instant.

If you are happy because the other 98% of life is happy, its light, awareness, dimensions of mind that you experience each day and live in and grow into over a period of time, then you can live with the 2%. And if you’re sick, you can be happy. If you’re healthy, you can be happy. If you’re poor, if you’re wealthy, whatever your karma is, you can be happy. Happiness also gives us the positive strength and power that allows us to go lead a good life. To be successful at whatever it is we feel we should be successful at. It gives us patience so that if success doesn’t come right away we can keep striving, and the most important thing is we can just perceive what life is -- Its eternity, its depths, its brightness.

So the practice of meditation, the practice of mindfulness and the sense of humor, of happiness, of brightness that we gain from all this keeps the practice, keeps Buddhism and yoga light. If you just meditate, you’ll have profound experiences. If you meditate correctly, if you study with an enlightened or partially enlightened teacher, they will show you the steps and you will learn to go from one mind state to another, to the planes of light, beyond the physical and the astral dimensions. But if you don’t practice mindfulness during the day, perhaps for an hour or two hours a day you’ll be happy and then the rest of the time who knows. Mindfulness combined with the practice of meditation keeps us balanced, makes us wise and gives us power all day long.

But even if you practice meditation and mindfulness you can become one-sided and heavy, in my opinion. Buddhism is not supposed to be too solemn. It becomes that way sometimes in religious forms, there are lots of rituals and temples and monasteries because no one is enlightened. They’re doing their best in that temple or monastery to follow the precepts of enlightened teachers who throughout the ages have said, “This is the way to enlightenment.” But without the humor, without the silliness, without the radiant happiness, Buddhist practice, like any practice becomes heavy and one-sided. Profundity is not enough. Happiness is essential. And if we have too many rituals, and too many robes, and too much incense and too many ceremonies, we can get caught up in that and we think that solemnity is the religious experience. It’s an aspect of it, at times. But you are the religious experience. Your life, your moments.

The religious experience, the spiritual metaphysical experience of existence which is Buddhism incarnate is something that is perceived in a new way at every moment by every sentient creature. Life is light. And whether it’s a sparrow, whether it’s a virus, whether it’s a celestial being, whether it’s the person next door or yourself, we’re all experiencing enlightenment. The only issue is how much of it are we experiencing. In other words, everything is enlightenment. Most beings are only experiencing 2% When you meditate you may experience another 20 or 30%. Or sometimes for short periods of time 100% of the radiance, the infinite light of the cosmos. But without mindfulness, it’s transient, its short. In other words, mindfulness, the practice, keeps us in the light all the time. But the thing that I find absent, the true sign and hallmark of enlightenment in addition to power, balance, wisdom is laughter. Silliness. A sense of innocence. Not being stuck in the practice itself. Not taking everything too seriously. Doing what has to be don, winning what has to be won. Learning how to both win and lose, with grace and dignity, working hard at everything, harder all the time, but being happy. Seeing a brightness to life. Watching the glow of existence. Taking difficult and trying circumstances and making them into challenges that make you happy. Laughter.

These three things combined are Buddhism. There are many different kinds of Buddhism. They’re really all the same. One type of Buddhism will emphasize meditation. Another type of Buddhism will emphasize mindfulness. Another type of Buddhism may emphasize the laughter. That’s the hardest one to find. They vary sometimes by the type of practice. For example, I teach American Buddhism. It’s a new form of Buddhism. Its evolved in a new land as the practice of yoga does in every land, it takes on new outer garments although its essence is always the same – meditation, mindfulness and laughter. But the type of meditation that I teach is most closely related, I suppose, the type of Buddhism that I practice to what we call Vadryana Buddhism which is a Tibetan form, very similar to Zen Buddhism.

In Buddhism there are essentially two forms over all forms of Buddhism. The short path and the long path. The short path is the complete merging of the mind with nirvana. It is the entrance into the clear light of reality, what we call the dharma kaya, the highest light of nirvana. That entrance is gained through activating the kundalini energy which is an energy within us that’s at rest, normally, and through concentration and meditation exercises, through empowerments from your teacher, by going to places of power and by practicing certain types of positive karmic actions, the kundalini is aroused, its awakened and its brought up from the base of the spine to the crown center at the top of the head. That’s the schematic. That’s what’s happening on one level, on the subtle-physical level. This energy goes up. But what really is taking place is the merging of the mind with infinity. The mind is an aggregate, it’s a collection of things. We are complicated beings. We’ve existed for thousands and thousands of lifetimes. We will always exist in one form or another. We’re born into a lifetime with a certain karma. Our karma is who we are. That’s what karma is. Karma is your current state. So when you were born in this life you were in a certain state of mind, you vibrated at a certain rate. That’s your karma.

Karma doesn’t mean certain things are going to happen to you or not happen to you based upon the past. Its already happened. Karma is, in reality, the esoteric understanding of karma, as opposed to the exoteric, is that you are your karma. You are, for example, right now, as you’re listening to this tape, you are your karma. All the things you’ve done in all of your past lives and this life have led you to be the person you are at this moment. Now, you may not know all of that person. There may be parts of yourself that you’ve developed in other lives that you haven’t explored yet. But by and large your current mental state is your karma.

So, the short path and long path address the same issue, but they do it in a very different way. Short path Buddhism, which is esoteric Buddhism, teaches the individual to gain control of the mind, to purify the thoughts, to have happy emotions and to release the kundalini. The kundalini energy is very powerful and it will bring you into ecstatic states of meditative awareness. You will realize infinity, eternity, immortality and, as I said, learn to laugh. But its fast and its strong. It takes a relatively short period of time to have enlightening experiences on the short path. But the short path is demanding. In other words, on the short path you meditate for several hours a day. You practice mindfulness. Your entire life becomes a vehicle, a diamond vehicle of transformation. You use your work, your school work, your play, your relationships, everything is used to advance your own awareness. Nothing is wasted. And the central point of it is meditating on the chakras and learning to release the kundalini energy, to guide it very carefully with the aid of a teacher who is enlightened or partially enlightened and to have the kundalini bring you into very pure, high states, to transform yourself to eliminate all negative aspects of your being. Negative means limited – things that keep you in the 2% and to experience the totality of life.

Long path Buddhism is, I suppose, more of a religion in the sense that it involves more recitation of prayers, reading the sutras, it’s more mental. It’s not so much a meditative practice as a philosophy, a way of looking at things. In short path Buddhism, which is esoteric Buddhism naturally you are conversant with all the aspects of exoteric or long path Buddhism, but you’re more of an adventurer. On the long path we get National Geographic magazine and we read about explorers who have gone to Africa and the Arctic and the Himalayas. And we share their adventures, and we to an extent have those adventures with them because we identify with them we can feel them as we look at the pictures and read the words. Our mind takes us there, we’re mental travelers. And we have little adventures. Maybe we read National Geographic and it inspires us to go hiking in the local woods. So that’s long path Buddhism. There’s some meditation, there are some journeys into the inner world. But you’re not working directly with an enlightened teacher. You’re mainly reading, and listening to and talking about the experiences of others and sort of vicariously experiencing them.

Esoteric Buddhism, or short path is going and traveling. Taking the photos, having the journeys. You are the National Geographic explorer exploring different dimensions and universes of mind and maybe you send back reports for others, maybe you just go and explore. It’s the mystical path, the hidden path, the short path.

On long path Buddhism you’re not necessarily meditating on the chakras. Your meditation is just the stilling of the mind. But it does not involve the volatile release of the kundalini yoga. Long path Buddhism is made up more of moral precepts. Things to do, things not to do. It guides your life, it gives it a brightness and a clarity. A moral order, a sense of duty and obligation as part of the universe. Keep the environment clean inwardly and outwardly. Avoid injustice. Say the right thing, always do the right thing. But you’re gaining those insights from others. In other words, someone says this is right, this is not right. Some who’s been enlightened – who can see that which is true and that which is not. That which is real and that which is an illusion. So you’re accepting their opinion which is written down in the Buddhist sutras or in commentaries by enlightened teachers and you’re taking their word for it. And if you practice what they say you’ll notice you’ll have a happy life.

But the essence of practice on the short path is to experience directly what is and what is not. That is to say, you know, sometimes people say it’s a revalidation of the experiences of past Buddhas. Buddhism, the essence of yoga, is that there’s not just one person who has achieved enlightenment, and that’s all there will ever be. But people from time to time become fully enlightened. And what they do is they revalidate, they experience what previous Buddhas or enlightened beings have experienced and they recodify the dharma, they see what’s true and write it down in the current language of the times and present it to those who will gain benefit from it. But in my opinion, its not really just a revalidation because while you will obviously go through the successions, the different states of mind that someone else did on their way to enlightenment, enlightenment is unique at the same time, for each of us, and it actually changes.

The universe is not static. Nirvana is not a final state at all. When we get beyond the mind, when we get beyond dimensionality, nothing can possibly be final. So to try and impose limitations on nirvana and say that its always the same, that it was the same for the first Buddha as it is for you when you attain to Buddhahood, when you become enlightened, that’s not necessarily true. Its beyond quantification. Real enlightenment has nothing to do with any of this. It has nothing to do with this plane, this world, these words or anything. What an enlightened teacher can do is point a direction. They can say, ‘Well, try down there. Go down the block and turn left and keep going and you’ll probably run into nirvana. On the way you’ll have lots of experiences, and here’s some guidelines. Things that will save you time, that will save you pain. When you encounter this, try this move. If that doesn’t work, try this.’

That’s what really, all teaching is. Teaching is simply the avoidance of drudgery and pain. We learn something, we codified it, and so that a person doesn’t have to go through the initial discovery of those things, but can just learn those things more quickly and move on to another stage of knowledge, we teach them.

Buddhism is the experience of enlightenment. It’s the experience of eternality and infinity. It’s the experience of infinite consciousness and awareness. Its learned with a teacher. On the exoteric path its learned from a book, on the long path. The way a teacher teaches Buddhism is not simply by example. If you have an enlightened teacher, if you act like they do, dress like they do, walk like they do, talk like they do, that doesn’t mean that you’ll become enlightened. Its their mind that is light. After many incarnations and practice they’ve merged their mind with the clear light of reality. Its something I really can’t explain in words. When they meditate they glow. If your subtle-physical vision has developed at all and you’ve watched someone who is enlightened meditate you’ll notice that they’re suffused – they’re surrounded by a golden glow. People who are partially enlightened may give off different auric emanations, you might see red, or blue or green, or magenta, or different lights. When a person who is fully enlightened meditates you will observe perhaps those colors, but you will see a bright shiny gold, it’s a very diffuse gradient of light. This is the light of the crown charka. Enlightenment means that a person has established, as a benchmark, their awareness field in the crown center, the top center, the thousand petaled lotus of light which is at the top of the head – in a way of speaking. It means that they have penetrated the highest dimensions, or have gone beyond dimensionality. You can actually see the dimensions. You can rank someone by the kind of light that they emanate.

So, for example, in martial arts – it depends on the system – but we might have white belt, yellow belt, brown belt, black belt and their degrees of black belt. And then sometimes they even have something above black belt – red or something – it depends on the system. But those belts, those colors, are the auras of martial arts that tells us that a person has arrived at a certain level of knowledge. The auras of a teacher, an explorer, someone who is enlightened are their belt rankings. You might not be able to see them if you’re new to meditation. But when you sit with an enlightened teacher, and you watch them with your eyes open you can actually see the light around them and its colorations. So you will notice this beautiful diffuse gold glow of light around an enlightened teacher and that’s the hallmark of enlightenment.

An enlightened teacher teaches meditation by providing you with direct experiences, what we call empowerments. The teacher can actually transfer energy and kundalini from themselves to you. The teacher is in Samadhi, a state of enlightenment. And they’re very charged up with energy. They can direct that energy which they have received through their personal meditation to a student, to an apprentice, and lift that apprentice up, just as someone who has a lot of money can give someone else money and then they have it and they can spend it. An enlightened teacher can transfer power. That power will then lift a person up into states of awareness that they might not be able to reach on their own. In those states of awareness, if the person is mindful, they can advance their lives much more rapidly. They can learn to meditate better, they can succeed at their careers, at their schoolwork, they can just see the beauty of life. Or they can use that power, if they do not listen to their teacher in very negative ways, and make mistakes. It’s inevitable that that will happen to a certain extent since none of us are perfect or we wouldn’t need to become enlightened.

All learning involves error, otherwise its really not learning. So it’s a hope naturally that a person will minimize the errors and a teacher explains what is necessary to avoid error. But in order to have any serious learning experience we have to eventually go out on our own and try things. There comes a day when you solo in the plane – if you’ve been studying for your pilots license and you’ve had a good instructor and you’ve learned well and the winds are kind that day, you’ll probably do well. If you are going to learn to swim there comes a point when you’re not on the shallow end of the pool and you go in over your head and you swim. But we start in the shallow end. We learn step by step so that we can as best as possible insure that our experiences will be – we’ll survive – they’ll be positive.

So, enlightenment, the short path, there are certain risks involved. The risk of ecstasy, the risk of knowledge, the risk of enlightenment. These are the major risks. But when you do work with a teacher, an empowerment is provided, you can certainly make mistakes. You can use that power in ways that are not correct, meaning it will put you into very low mind states and you’ll be unhappy. Your teacher will explain very carefully what not to do and what to do. But if you don’t listen, if you think you’re smarter, you will simply create a series of painful experiences and slow down the learning process for yourself. Now, to an extent, this is inevitable. You’re going to have up days and down days in the world of Buddhism. But there are many more up than down. But the most important thing, if you are on the short path, is to listen very carefully to your teacher and not think that you’re so smart.

First ascertain that the teacher is enlightened, and if they’re really transferring power to you, which will shorten your journey to enlightenment incredibly, its most important to try and listen to the subtlety of what they say and try and practice it. Because otherwise you can experience a great deal of anguish and pain in empowered states of mind. They can take you down as fast as they can take you up. But if you listen, it goes very well. The ecstasy is incredible.

Buddhism has a lot to do with the teacher/student relationship at a certain point, when you’re on the esoteric path. But it really has a lot to do with just everything. You’re with your teacher, who knows how much – a few days a month maybe. The rest of the time you are out there in the world, in the universe, and life is the great teacher, and you’re learning from it at every moment. It means having an open mind. Being consciousness. And being very careful how you treat others. Its necessary to develop a respect for life. To respect everyone. To be very conscious. To be kind when possible. It’s not necessary to allow people to walk over you, that’s not being a Buddhist, that’s not practicing yoga. Allowing somebody to trash you is not yogic principle. But whenever possible, its just a courtesy, in the Buddhist etiquette, pantheon of etiquette, to help people when you can. Without a sense of selfimportance, of thinking that you know a lot more than someone else does, and mostly to learn. Constantly to be a student. To never feel you know to much.

A person who is attaining enlightenment is always learning and experiencing more. Its kind of like getting a Ph.D. You’ve reached a certain level of knowledge. You’ve passed some exams, you’ve written a dissertation, and you have a sense of the field certainly. But the main thing a Ph.D. is supposed to have done is taught you how to learn. To approach a subject and pursue it. It has given you the tools.

So for example, I have a Ph.D. in English. And that means that I took comprehensive examinations and I am conversant with every period of British and American literature. But that doesn’t mean I know every book that’s been written or every poet who has written or every nuance or aspect of it. If my professors did a good job years ago, they transferred to me not only a love of learning but the principles of learning so that I can explore any area on my own and know how to assimilate, be critical when necessary, use resources, secondary source material and so on. So a person who is enlightened has not achieved a final state. There is no final state, there is no final ending. To infinity. They have reached, definitely, the crown center. They have activated the crown center, they do go into Samadhi every day, many times a day. They do emanate the gold light. And they have overcome the basic human problems. They’re not unhappy, they don’t experience depression, they don’t experience the frustrations, all the lower emotions have been eliminated. They’ve purified themselves many times through emergence into the light. But what they’ve gained is a sense of how to explore. They have their resources for exploration into infinity.

In other words, an enlightened teacher is not someone who just teaches. If they’re really enlightened they’re continually expanding their own range of enlightenment. They’re experiencing more of infinity. They have fresh material to share with others because they themselves are out there for National Geographic exploring further than they ever have before. None of us can know it all and see it all, because it goes on forever.

Enlightenment is something that you don’t think about something too much when you’re on the path. If you’re a Buddhist, we say you’re on the path. Its something that’s not really common in this world. We don’t see many enlightened teachers. Not because its fantastically hard, its just that in this particular world there aren’t a lot of evolved beings. The basic rate of evolution is fairly simple.

Its nice to know that its there, its not necessary to become enlightened to be happy and to have profound enlightening experiences. Its best not to think about it too much. Its like a Ph.D. If you’re going to get a Ph.D. or an M.D. or a Masters in Computer Science – you don’t think about the day its going to happen. You just live each day, you study each day, you learn and enjoy the day. So on the path we don’t think about becoming enlightened too much. When its supposed to happen, it will happen. Sort of have that attitude.

What matters is not some concept of enlightenment, but what matters is living fully today. Being aware, more aware than we’ve ever been. Gaining control of our mind and our life, practicing mindfulness, having a deeper meditation experience than we’ve ever had each morning and each evening. During the day controlling our mind and staying in positive thought patterns more effectively than we ever had on any other day. There’s only today.

And developing that sense of humor. Finding deeper, brighter and more innocent forms of playful humor in our experience. Gaining control of the powers when they come, the siddhas, the ability to transmute energy on different levels. To be innocent is the essence of all practice. Not to be stupid. Innocence does not necessarily mean a lack of knowledge, it means a lack of self-consciousness. It’s the consciousness of self that inhibits us from freely experiencing life. Buddhism deals with that by teaching us not to focus or think of the past. We eliminate the past from our mind. Part of the practice of mindfulness is to constantly bring your mind into the moment.

If during the day you start to think about the past, or dwell on a past experience, take your mind into the present. We’ve already been there. We’ve driven down that road, we’ve seen what there is to see. Sometimes we reference the past – for an example: we need to know something, we’re measuring something. So if you run three miles a day, and you run the same route basically every day, and you run today, and if you remember that, well, last week the run was a lot easier, that would give you a benchmark, a way of telling that your body is under some unusual strain, there are energies that are affecting you in a negative way because you’re not running the way that you normally would. That way its good to reference the past. And then we would realize that, figure out what that was, and get a correction and get our run to a better level.

But other than referencing the past as a way of perceiving the present, as a benchmark, you really don’t want to deal with it. Because when you think of the past, subconsciously you recall who you were. The limitations you had, the unhappiness you had, the state of mind you were in. And what’s most important, is to get to a new state of mind, a new beginning, a higher level of abandoned ecstasy and control.

So, its very important to live in the moment. Don’t worry about the future too much. There’s nothing you can do about it really. It’s not necessarily fated. Life is a game that we play. And in Buddhism we just learn some things that most people don’t know; to play the game advantageously.

Buddhism also has to do with what we say, what we focus on, what we read, what we eat, who we sleep with – it has to do with all the things that take place in our world. We’re made up of energy. We are a living field of energy, as are all places and all beings, and all things. And as our energy field touches other energy fields, they modify us and we modify them.
So we learn in Buddhism not to be prudish but to be intelligent.
We focus more on what to do than what not do, always emphasizing the positive. Always be positive –[he laughs] It’s a sign that you’re in a good state of mind. And if you’re not, be positive, and you’ll be in one. This is my short path formula.

First success in the world of enlightenment – always be positive – It’s a sign that you’re in a good state of mind, and if not, be positive, then you’ll be in one. This is my short path formula. First success in the world of enlightenment – always be positive.

It’s important to speak well of people. Its important to speak well of yourself. There’s a great power to what we say. Its important to be modest, to be controlled, and to not manipulate others for your own gain in a way that’s unjust or unfair to them. Because it lowers your mind state.

Try and be happy and treat everyone well. And treat yourself well. Create an evenness. In the higher esoteric forms, we teach a person to neither be attracted nor repulsed by anything but to be even. That evenness doesn’t come from just philosophically understanding the lack of attraction or repulsion, but from the positive experience of meditation. In other words, real transformation and Buddhism is not a set of precepts. And while it is important to monitor your mind and your thoughts and its important to deal well with the world and with others, career is certainly important and you can use it as a tool for self-transformation or school, sports, play, responsibilities – everything can be used to advance yourself. But the essence of all practice – what really makes it possible to do things well is the fact that you meditate deeply.

Because in meditation you gain the power, the balance and the knowledge to then take your life, and not just wishfully think it into shape but to actually put it into shape. Not a shape that the ego designs – not our egoistic view of life how life should be according to us, but the ability to be still, to be empty. And see that there are designs in the universe, there are templates – archetypes – that pass through us and around us all the time. Everything has a suchness and essence. And when we’re empty, when the mind is still, we can perceive the other side of things, the occult side, occult meaning non-physical – we can come to know what should be in a place.

Think of your life as building a house. Now, you could pick a piece a ground that suits your standards and build the house that you think will make you happy. That’s the nonbuddhist way to do things. The Buddhist way is to meditate, to allow a particular place to attract you. Not just to pick it because you want it. Based upon standards that you may have or have been given to you by your parents, society or whatever, but to be empty. To make your mind still first, and then that emptiness will cause you to be drawn to the right place. To not build a house that will please you , but to build a house that will please the place. To feel, by emptying yourself, by being fully conscious in otherwords, through meditation, and through Buddhist practice, mindfulness and humor – to be able to feel what should be there. That there’s a formation, an aggregate, something that should come to be in that place. There’s only one thing that will fit it perfectly. To find that thing and allow yourself to be the instrument of its creation.

The Buddhist approach, you might say, is backwards. Or maybe its forwards, I don’t know, I get confused on odd and even days. But – it’s a sense of not just imposing over live the egoistic view of how things should be – that doesn’t create happiness. Just look at our planet, look at the people and how they live. That’s how they built their houses, their lives. They don’t bother to reference infinity and say, ‘What is right, what should be here?’

Everybody has their Attila the Hun – Conquering view and they set it out and go into battle with everybody else’s Attila the Hun Conquering view. The right way, the deeper way, is to reference and inquire within oneself, within the infinite mind of the universe, what is right. To take the time to meditate, to learn to still your thoughts, to be happy. And then you will find that infinity will operate through you – the light will show you what should be in the house that you’re building, that is your life. And you’ll find then that your house will always be a happy and bright place. That throughout the course of your life, and even at the moment of death, as you move into your next lifetime and the Bardo planes between, there will only be brightness for you.

Be still. Meditate. And feel the aliveness of life. Become consciousness that there’s so much more than you know now. That’s the good news. Is that it goes on forever. Read books about meditation, about enlightenment, about anything that inspires you. Never limit yourself. There’s always something new to learn and we never know who’s going to teach it to us. Sometimes we learn things in likely places, sometimes in unlikely places.

Be aware, be consciousness. This is Buddhism in action, Buddhism in practice and Buddhism in essence. The purpose of life is to be conscious of life. To be life. Buddhism is a way of doing that – it’s a series of techniques and methods with which we gradually open our awareness field to the brighter aspects of life and we close ourselves off to aspects of existence where the perception of existence in incorrect ways – ways that would create unhappiness or distortion. Eventually we move beyond even that to the experience of paranirvana. To the experience of enlightenment – the pure radiant wisdom of infinity. If you practice meditation, if you practice Buddhism, yoga, one day you will become enlightened. You will be enlightenment. And then you will truly understand why life is funny, why life is beautiful, you’ll go beyond understanding and become the perfect radiant light. That is what the path is for. Not to just always walk on it, but to even go beyond its limitations.

The path never ends. The road, as Bilbo says, “winds on forever.” And so we just walk on it forever. Not so much with a sense of directing ourselves, as being directed by life and by enlightenment, by the bodhi or Buddhist principle of perfection.

The Enlightenment Cycle Wisdom by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to do two things at once. To be in the world and of it and enjoy it, participate in it fully and successfully, and at the same time to not be here at all. To be in realms of light. To be in the superconscious state, to be in samadhi, beyond all this, that true wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to take care of your life properly, to know what’s right for you. To have assessed what is the right path and follow it with heart, with your full spirit and your full mind and your full body. To not have reservations. When you do something halfheartedly, you don’t get much of a result. When you do it fully, you get a great result. So wisdom is the ability to let go. Children are wise in a funny kind of a way. Perhaps their interests aren’t as vested. They haven’t developed so many vested interests of self. So they just kind of let go. They go from one neighborhood to another, one school to another, fairly easily. As they get older it becomes more difficult. There’s a wisdom, a lack of self consciousness, that is innocence. I think innocence is the greatest wisdom.

To be wise doesn’t always mean to have a wrinkled face and sparkly eyes, usually it does. To be wise means to be still inside. To see the motions of eternity in day to day life and beyond this. True wisdom is freedom. True wisdom is Enlightenment. At the same time, wisdom has a practical side. The ability to make good choices. The best choice anyone can make is to educate them selves. You can’t be too educated. Like in Beverly Hills they say, “You can’t be too thin or too rich.” In the world of wisdom, you can’t be too wise. Wisdom is something that seeks itself. The wiser you become, the more you realize that you’d like to know, what there is to know

So there is worldly wisdom, the wisdom of success. The wisdom of achievement. How do deal with things. Politics, the political sense about. To be sharp, to be clear. To be Focused. Not showing all your cards. Not letting anyone really know who you are or what you’re like. There is a wisdom to this. Why should anyone know, it’s personal. It’s private, who you are. And also, if you define yourself, then you’re defined. People have a fixed impression of you, they hold you in their minds a certain way and that actually makes it difficult to change. So it’s very wise to be inaccessible. Not to hide. But simply not to be too personal. To keep the deepest feelings of your heart to yourself. They tend to stay more pure, if you do. There’s a wisdom to that. Wisdom is knowing that if you bend, you don’t have to break. Some times it’s necessary to go with the flow of life, to let life dictate the experience and not necessarily allow ourselves dictate it. In other words, let’s say you wanted to build a house. And you went to a place and you had your idea of what a house should be like there and you built that house. That’s not wisdom. That’s your idea of a house. Wisdom would suggest that we go to the place and feel the place, feel its presence and feel its absence. Determine if a house should be built there at all by the feelings there. What is it the place wants. And then allow the formation of the house, the kind of house, to come through us, to allow it to be drawn out of us by the place. And that’s wisdom.

In other words, in the West, the wise are usually thought of as leaders. In the far East, the wise are very often thought of as followers. It’s a different sensibility. Wisdom here means that “You’re the boss. You’re the top gun. You’re the hotshot.” And that’s a type of wisdom, certainly. But there’s another wisdom. And that’s the wisdom of following. The wisdom of not taking the lead with your ego. But allowing yourself to be still, to reflect, to meditate, to be conscious and seeing that there are templates in life that will guide you. There are templates in the universe that you can follow. Most people can’t see them. There sort of like pointers. They’re there and they will show you what to do and what not to do. But in order to see them, you have to make your mind very quiet, very still. You have to be somewhat satiated and balanced. Happy with your life, with who you are. And how you’re doing. Cause if your spirit is in a state confusion, if you’re restless emotionally, if you’re unhappy, if you just can’t settle down, then you cannot really see very much other than your restlessness. If the lake is all stirred up and there are a lot of waves, you can’t see below the waves. It’s agitated, it’s muddy. If you allow the lake to become calm, if you wait until it becomes still. The mud settles, the waves stop, and we can see all the way into its depths. And know what’s going on down there.

Love is a kind of wisdom. There is a wisdom to loving. Love is sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic. But there’s a wisdom, there’s a knowing that comes from loving. I think its a mistake not to love. I think some people think that spiritual practice means to divorce themselves from love and all other emotions, I don’t think so. I think one must love more deeply and without the sense of that which you love being your personal possession. Love makes you makes you wise. Pain doesn’t necessarily make you wise, it just makes you weary. But love means to communicate, to commune, to be a part of something. Love unites, pain divides. Hate divides even more. Hate separates and beings us down to a very physical plane. Love elevates us to the plane of spirit. So I think, if your truly wise, you love life very deeply. You love your life, the things in your life, Transient that they may be, you love them. The moments, the feelings of being alive, the feeling of the morning, the afternoon, the evening, nighttime. The wind and the way it feels. The color of the rocks, the earth, the sounds of the city. The sounds and feelings of the peoples. There’s something to this fabric of life that’s beautiful. And I think if you find the world simply unpleasant, I don’t think that’s a sign of wisdom. I think its a sign of a lack of wisdom. Certainly there are places you don’t want to be, because it doesn’t work for you. That you find draining or not elevating. But to not see the beauty, the romance in the universe. In other words, just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean that it’s not wonderful for someone else. Wisdom is the ability, I think, to realize that everyone has their own dharma. That everyone goes their own way. And your way and what works for you is not the ultimate good. It might be the ultimate good for you today. To be flexible and know that other people have different ways and may you have different ways that you haven’t discovered. But tomorrow you can let go of how you have to do things and who you are and how you have to be. To me, that’s wisdom. To be flexible, to be lucid. Wisdom has to do with how you live, how you conduct yourself, commerce. How you deal with people and things, certainly. And in the orient, there’s a wisdom that suggests that it’s good not to always to be too demonstrative. In other words, in Buddhism, there is a great deal of etiquette. Etiquette is an intelligent way to live. Etiquette are simply ways of living that have been practiced, that conserve energy, that create a more pleasant life. Etiquette is not seen as something false or unnecessary. It allows people to live together in harmony. It allows people to live in harmony with their environment. When we lack etiquette, we trash things, we trash each other, we trash our environment, we lose site of the value of things. And then, of course, we suffer. We suffer the alienation that has to follow when our spirit is disconnected from our physical awareness. So etiquette is an intelligent way to live. In other words, in Buddhism, in spiritual practice, Taoism, different forms of mystical philosophy, be they east or west, there are certain principles and practices, ways of living, that you will learn from reading, and from being around advanced students and mostly just from your teacher. These are methods that have been handed down for thousands of years, that are tried and true, tested and occasionally changed as civilization or society changes. And that’s the outer form of Buddhism. The outer form of Buddhism or practice is etiquette, a series of ways to live intelligently that keep you alive awake and happy, wakeful. The wisdom of samadhi is quite different. That’s the undifferentiated experience of reality. In other words, wisdom, if it’s really a higher level of wisdom can’t be written down, it can’t be spoken, I can’t tell you what it is. True wisdom is the knowledge of the universe, that is beyond any physical expression. Music, perhaps expresses it better than words. It can put us more in touch with it. Some types of music, art. But real wisdom is samadhi. To sit in meditation, to stop thought, to go beyond all things into the clear light of reality in which there is no time, no space, no dimensionality, that’s Samadhi. Perfect absorption to the point where there is no sense of being absorbed. Full consciousness, but not the consciousness of the body, not the consciousness of the world. Not the consciousness of daily life. Not the consciousness of knowing that you’re having an experience If you’re meditating and you sense that you were in ecstasy, that’s not really samadhi. If you sense ecstasy, that’s not really samadhi. Samadhi is beyond those things. Samadhi means you have become the light for a time. And there’s no sense of an experiencer. There’s no sense that well, I’m sitting here even though I’m not thinking, I’m having an experience. I’m experiencing ecstasy, I’m experiencing wisdom, knowledge or something profound. Real samadhi is off the game board friends. It’s not something that you’re even aware of. And you might say, “Well, how do you even know that you were in samadhi.” You know. Things don’t have to be logical, you know. You know when your awareness field returns to the plane of self, an ideation, that you’ve been beyond it. There’s a knowing. And that’s enough. So real wisdom, the deep spiritual wisdom does not occur here. It can’t. Here being in this body, in this mind, in this physical universe. Real wisdom is something that you have to move into the planes of highest light to experience. And you can’t bring your self with you. You have to go to the other side. The other side is what is beyond the minds knowing. There’s the world of the physical, there’s the astral, the dimensions, dimensional planes that you can traverse in your astral body. There are the planes of light which are refereed to as the causal and you experience in your causal body. Those are the metaphysical planes and dimensions. The planes of light. But, that’s still something you can reference. Even the planes of light, while the experience in the higher planes are certainly a kind of samadhi, salvakopa samadhi, Nirvakopa samadhi is to go to the other side. To experience the other side. (end of side 1)

As I said before, the other side is beyond knowing. You cannot know what you experience on the other side, here. It cannot be known. The chip size here is too limited. You can’t grasp your own experience. That’s the true wisdom. True wisdom is on the other side of this life. Not in death. But beyond the grasp of the conscious mind. That’s where real wisdom lies. Someone who’s truly wise makes that journey many times a day. They go back and forth from this world to the other side and when you come back, you don’t remember the journey. But yet you are the journey. Perhaps it’s more apparent to someone else even than it is to you, because the you that was here before you went to the other side is the never the same when you come back. Going to the other side of consciousness into, in other words, Nirvana, Nirvana is the other side, is the source of all things, where all the aggregates come from, where the templates of infinity are. To go to the other side or where they come from, is wisdom. Wisdom is getting there. Wisdom is Nirvana. And it’s something that can’t be known here. I know it seems incongruous, but it’s only incongruous from this perspective, from the perspective of the dialectical consciousness, of division, of time and space. So in your meditation, you’re seeking not simply to experience ecstasy or the planes of light, that’s a type of wisdom. You’re not only gaining power, and clarity of mind to lead a better physical life, to be healthy, happy, to be spiritual, to be successful, to be compassionate, those are types of wisdom. But the real wisdom, the higher wisdom is to go to the other side. To go to Nirvana. To be that. That’s the ultimate wisdom. Not that it’s ultimate in the sense that it’s a final stage, there is no final stage in Nirvana. Nirvana is beyond definition, it’s not quantifiable. So one goes to the other side and returns. You climb to the top of the mountain. Say you go to the Himalayas and you’re drawn to tops of mountains. You climb way up through the ice and snow and you get to the top of K2 or Mt. Everest or Mountains that perhaps are not as well known. You get up there, you stand there see the ranges, the mountains, the Himalayas spread out at your feet. And it’s different there. There’s a different feeling there, there’s a different awareness there. It vibrates very fast. The mountains themselves and the dimensions that are associated with those mountains vibrate very quickly. So you’re up there in the realm of the eternal snows and then you come back down. And when you’re down here you sort of forget about what happened up there, what those experiences and feelings were like. You’re back to life and your house and your job and what you do. But it changes you. It clarifies your purpose. It makes life more abundant to have had that experience. It’s not transient. It’s eternal. You touch eternality, the top of the Himalayas.

Well, samadhi is the top of the Himalayas in spiritual practice. Nirvakopa samadhi is the highest samadhi. That’s all the way up. You get up above the cloud line to the land of the eternal snows and it’s ecstasy, beyond ecstasy. Then you come back. Some people say, “why do you come back?” You don’t exactly. I mean, the journey changes you so much that it’s not exactly the same you. Life reorders you when you go into the clear light. Even the causal structures liquefy in the clear light of reality, the dharma kaya, in the highest purest formation that is existence. It changes us into beings of light. We come back and were kind of ordinary. You’re still walking around and you’re have to eat, live, and exist. But it changes your experiences of those things. You’re less here. And a part of you is still on the other side. The more you journey there, well after a while, you’re always on the other side and always here and that’s what we call sahaja samadhi. It’s not a journey like nirvakopa. Nirvakopa samadhi means you’re sitting in meditation and you go beyond just the planes of light to nirvana. Total absorption in nirvana and complete perfection. And there is no sense, of course, that it’s on the other side. Then, of course, you’re sitting in meditation. Then you come back, your eyes open and gradually you go back through the planes of light. And here you are, back in the saddle again. Sahaja samadhi, you’ve just gone back and forth so many times, that there’s no back and forth for you. All you see is enlightenment. And this world and the other side, well, there is no other side any more. You’re in a condition of perpetual wakefulness. Which doesn’t mean that you know everything. It means that you’re wakeful. It doesn’t mean you have all physical knowledge. Some people think that enlightenment means you know everything, it means you can speak all languages, that you can fix cars if you need to, all kinds of stuff. Things you haven’t studied come to you. Not necessarily at all. That’s a story book, Hollywoodized version of Enlightenment experience. Enlightenment has nothing to do with physical knowledge. It’s a knowledge, a higher knowledge. Maybe that’s not the right word. It’s the experience of existence. Existence is infinite. There are countless universes and creations taking place simultaneously in all times present and past. The far flung universes exist forever and all manner of beings and creations are there. Everything that can be and everything that can’t be exists somewhere. It’s beyond the mind’s ability to grasp and certainly Nirvana means seeing and knowing that vastness. But beyond the far flung infinities, there is something else. Beyond the planes of light, there’s something else. That isn’t a broad based knowing in the sense of a person perceiving what knowledge is. That’s nirvana. It’s a word that’s used to describe the other side. Somewhere there’s an essence. It’s not a physical somewhere. There’s an essence for all of this. There, there is nothing but light. But not even in a temporal, spatial sense. It just is And there, there is no time, no space, no self. Existence just is perfect There is no sense of this world. Of time and space. That’s nirvana. It’s the center of things. Then there are the outer bandings of attention. In other words, the universe is a mind. And at the center of its mind, is nirvana. Center not so much in a spatial sense. That’s nirvana. Nirvanas is the pure and perfect suchness or thatness of being.

Then outside of nirvana, the planes begin. The subtlest planes, that vibrate the fastest, all the way on down to the physical and so on. Life is perception. And we perceive through different parts of the body of the universe. But nirvana has nothing to do with any of this. You are what you are. Your pain, your pleasure. Your life, your death. This world, all these myriad beings we see before us, they’re not in nirvana. Nor can you say that it’s light. And you can’t journey there and have experiences. You can’t know what’s there cause you cannot be there. There is no ‘you’ there. The journey to the other side, means the loss of the self at least because it weighs too much to go there. Too much baggage. Nirvana is that perpetual knowingness of the universe. And its perfection. And there’s all this. This abstraction. This life we lead. This play: war and peace and pain, birth, growth, maturation, decay and death. The thing we call life. And all beings call life. That’s so different from nirvana. Yet it comes from there, how strange. Wisdom is to see the difference between nirvana and this. This world, this self reflection the mind creates. To do that, obviously you have to know nirvana. To get to the other side. But wisdom is to see there’s no difference between nirvana and here. Between samsara and nirvana. There’s only one seamless perfect reality. Wisdom isn’t to know these words. Wisdom isn’t to have ideas and philosophies. Those are just thoughts. Wisdom is to be that. To be that perfect consciousness. That’s the greatest wisdom there is. And then it’s good to know that go on green, slow down on yellow and stop on red. The wisdom of Enlightenment does not preclude practicality. Some people seem to think that wisdom does. If you’re Enlightened, somehow you’re not in touch with the pulse of the physical. Al contraire. The more enlightened you are, the more basic you are. The higher you go, the deeper you become. And the more conscious of the physical and the sensorial. The pure and perfect light that you experience in the planes of light and the experience of going to the other side to nirvana clarifies and simplifies your view of all things. And you see the world with greater clarity because it’s not obscured by personal desires, vanity, egotism, and thought. By illusions. Human beings have illusions. The Enlightened don’t have illusions. They just see things as they are. And in that seeing, they see ecstasy and joy in the play of life. Knowledge is as I said many things. The ability to love. The ability to feel. The ability to probe the depths and the heights of life. It’s the experience of the experiencer and at times beyond that. So many types of knowledge to explore, so much Enlightenment, so much time. So on your journey, try to remember that there is no end, that’s true knowledge. There is no final knowledge, final Enlightenment. That’s a very finite human way of looking at things. A categorization implies a hierarchical way of seeing things. Life is really relational not hierarchical. Hierarchical is a human way of looking at things. Relational is much the way things are. Things are relational, they depend upon each other. They influence each other. Everything is connected. Hierarchies are mental schemes. They usually involve good and bad, good and evil, better and worse, before and after , here and there and everywhere and those are convenient ways of talking about things to negotiate the physical world and sometimes the astral world through the day. Bur life is really relational. True wisdom is to see and understand your relationship with the universe. With God, with infinity, and with all things. Both finite and infinite. When you gain that knowledge, then you’re wise. Then you’re more careful. Then you’re more kind. Because you see that there is no reason not to be. There is no reason not to love, there is no reason not to be joyous. There is no reason not to celebrate. Because all this means nothing. Absolutely nothing. And why not be happy, why not be free. Why not endeavor. It’s a happier way to be. If you’re truly wise, then you reflect the universe and you’re relational in your approach to things. You’re a mirror of infinity. That’s wisdom.