Frederick P. Lenz, Ph.D. in English, businessman (Advanced Systems, Inc.), who goes by the name of Zen Master Rama. Thousands of people shell out as much as $5,000 per seminar to be enlightened by this self-proclaimed guru, psychic and miracle worker. The miracle is that there are so many people standing in line waiting to give him their money to take classes in computer programming and meditation. Here is what one of his followers says he learned from his master: "Spiritually advanced people work with computers because it makes a lot of money. The more money you make, the better you meditate."[note]
Rama uses a variety of mind-control techniques to seduce his disciples. He has his subjects stare at him for long hours (he calls it `meditation'). After a while, they start to hallucinate; they see him change shapes or glow. To hook them deep, he tells his followers that only psychics can see these miraculous events. The desire to have a supernatural experience is very deep in many people and undoubtedly accounts for the ease with which otherwise normal and reasonable people are suckered by such blatant charlatans. The Ramas, Jim Jones and Charles Manson's of the world take advantage of their charm and prey upon vulnerable men and women, seducing them sexually as well as financially and spiritually. Rama uses the technique of telling women that he only has sex with women who have some sort of rare karma. He also tells women that having sex with him will elevate them to a higher plane of consciousness. It is hard for a skeptic to believe that such a line would work with any woman, but apparently it does. Jim Jones was notorious for having sex with many of the women in his religious community. He used a similar appeal to Rama's, attempting to make a woman feel that he was doing her a spiritual favor by screwing her.
On the one hand, religious freedom requires that people be unrestrained in their pursuit of the supernatural, even if it means that cults proliferate the planet. On the other hand, how free can such people be if they are willing to give up the freedom to think critically in order to follow their guru? It does no good for self-righteous ministers of mainstream religions to proclaim that the cults are the work of satan, that only in a Catholic, Mormon, Baptist, etc. church can true spirituality be found. The mainstream religions practice the same mind-control over their members as cult leaders do.
Rama has taken religous freedom to new heights in his latest book, Surfing the Himalaya's: A Spiritual Adventure. There he tells us of his adventures "snowboarding through Tantric myetiolem" and offers such bits of wisdom as
Ultimately, thinking is a very inefficient method of processing data...And,
The relational way of doing things is to move your mind to a fourth condition, a condition of heightened awareness. In a condition of heightened awareness, you elevate your conscious mind above the stream of extraneous data -- out of dimensional time and space, so to speak -- and you meld your mind instead with the pure intelligent consciousness of the universe.Bravo. Rama's ad for his book in PC World [1/96] claims he is not only a consultant to major software firms but a world-class snowboarder and a black belt in the martial arts, as well as a musician and record producer. There seems to be little this man does not do. Maybe he's a consultant to Novell, for Bob Frankenberg, Chariman and CEO of Novell, claims the book "entertains and enlightens" and calls it "a wonderful contrast of Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism."
Somehow, Rama even got Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls to provide this blurb for the book: "Brings levity and humor to a subject often relegated to a mundane, boring prospect." Indeed. Rama, aka Frederick Lenz, must be giggling all the way to the bank.
See related entries on mind-control and channeling.
further reading
"Do You Believe in Magic? - New Light on the New Age," by Nancy Clark and Nick Gallo, Family Circle, February 23, 1993, p. 102.