The gold light

I am grateful to Rama for teaching meditation publicly throughout America and abroad for so many years. I have had countless times of sitting with him watching him meditate and go into the high samadhis and turn gold. I have watched in awe as the gold light radiated out of him. This gold light was not the result of fancy stage lighting. I saw the gold light fill not just a hall or seminar room, but also many outdoor settings which had only natural lighting, such as the desert or Pound Ridge, New York, as well as settings such as the living room of a friend which had only ordinary lamps. In each case, I have seen the beautiful gold light go into all the people who were present.

This gold light coming out of Rama was the gold light of enlightenment, exactly what artists try to render in the gold halos they show around Krishna or Buddha or Jesus. I was stunned and amazed to have the experience of watching this for real.

I am deeply thankful to Rama for being willing to teach meditation to someone like myself who was certainly starting from a "beginner" level. It was very much like having a full, tenured English professor take a turn at teaching the Freshman Composition course. You know the teacher loves his subject matter passionately and knows all kinds of advanced things, yet is being patient enough to teach the very beginning steps, "Take your hand out like so and touch your heart and say, ‘ME.’" Hundreds of times I saw him teach people the very basic step of opening the heart chakra (a chakra is an energy center; the heart chakra is located in the center of the chest), and each time he did it with perfect humility and purity and was totally enthusiastic.

I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Rama for teaching women and for talking publicly about the question, "Why don’t more women attain enlightenment?" His courageous commitment to teaching his women students about the pathways to enlightenment was unshakable. He held us to the same standards as he held the men students. He gave us the same level of empowerments as he gave the men. When it became appropriate for him to give out a Buddhist ordination to students, he gave the women the same ordination as the men. He conferred on the women a teaching empowerment from the lineage of enlightenment, the same as he did for the men who had fulfilled the teaching study requirements and were interested in going out to help others.

I am grateful to him for being interested in major, radical, positive transformational change for both his women and men students and for running a program that successfully accomplished this for hundreds of people over the years.

I wish to express my thanks to Rama for his wonderful sense of humor. He was the funniest teacher I have ever had. He was always very kind to me and extremely courteous and polite during our entire association which extended over many years. I first meditated with him in 1979 at a free talk he gave in Balboa Park in San Diego. I formally applied to become a student in 1982, and I was still active in the program at the time of his death in 1998. His treatment of his women students was at all times impeccable.

I am grateful to Rama for encouraging me to work on dharmic tasks, such as yantra (visual meditation) software and other software packages that were used for educational purposes. I learned so much from working on teams, and I experienced unbelievably high states of mind as Rama inwardly opened the yantra dimensions and other topics as we worked on these packages. I had moments of great joy with all the teams I worked with. To have an enlightened teacher review our work and suggest the next improvement for it was an incredibly deep learning experience.

I am thankful to Rama for producing beautiful music suitable for meditation. Many, many nights we listened to him reviewing musical "works in progress" by some of his musician students, and I received an astonishing education into the world of music as Rama carefully noted and critiqued the musical scores and accompaniments. I listened to music being developed through many versions, each time with Rama’s suggestions causing the musicians to greatly improve the music. Meditating to "Ecologie" or "Cayman Blue" or "Surfing the Himalayas, " "Canyons of Light" or "Enlightenment" is a very direct entrance into the heart chakra. I am thankful Rama left us such exquisite music.

I am grateful to Rama for writing books. His novels "Surfing the Himalayas" and "Snowboarding to Nirvana" are a happy introduction to Buddhism and enlightenment from a Western perspective. Given that he himself was an advanced siddha master and could perform numerous miracles -- which I myself witnessed many, many times, his humility in casting himself in those stories as the young guy just learning was very sweet.

I am thankful to Rama for embracing the West and exploring it and adapting himself to Western ways. The formal dinners he hosted taught me numerous things about social etiquette and made me at ease in settings more refined than anything I had ever been exposed to before. His street smarts always spoke to me deeply; he had a range that went from the high golden planes of enlightenment to an understanding of the deepest pains anyone could bring into the meditation hall.

I once tried to explain to a young black man who was living in a very poor end of Philadelphia about the lies in the press that were published about Rama. The young man immediately interrupted me and said, "If you were to tell me that Rama didn’t have enemies, I would know he wasn’t for real." I didn’t have to say anything more. From the street view, this young man got it! When I took him to see Rama at a dinner in Philadelphia, I asked him afterward what he thought of my teacher. He said that Rama was the most obedient person he had ever seen. At first I was confused and asked him to explain this further. He said he could see that Rama was "just instant to do the light; just instant." I agreed. If that’s what he meant, that Rama was completely obedient at all times to follow the will of light instantly, then yes, Rama was the most obedient person around. I was deeply impressed with the young man’s seeing.

I loved Rama for throwing rave parties and dancing with us and having us gather in close around him as he danced and poured enlightened energy out to us. I loved him for being truly tantric in using all the energies of the West to assist us in our enlightenment process. I loved him for opening up the world of scuba diving to me. His ability to inspire me to grow beyond what I thought I could accomplish was genuine.

I offer this tribute with love, respect and gratitude to Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz.