Dharma Talks by Rama ~ Dr. Frederick Lenz

Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without any mental modifications. It is perfect light, light that has always existed, exists now and will always exist. It's the light that exists beyond darkness. It's the core and the center of all things, and it's in all things and beyond all things.

Enlightenment is a state of consciousness, I suppose. It's a way of talking about it. It's something that we attain -- if we attain things.

There's a mountain. I'd like to climb to the top of it. There's something very beautiful, very wonderful on top of it -- so I hope. So I climb up the mountain and when I reach the top, I have a view. If there's something wonderful there, I've found it -- if that's what attainment is. The mountain of enlightenment, of course, is inside of us. It's inside of our mind. And we're climbing that mountain every day. Our life is that mountain.

The mountain is complicated. It has a lot of sides, a lot of paths. We can traverse them. We can go up the mountain, down the mountain, around the mountain forever and never reach the top. The top is enlightenment -- the complete awareness of life without any mental modifications, the highest viewpoint--not the best, but the highest unobstructed view. And if that's your interest, if you seek enlightenment, then the practice of meditation is the pathway to enlightenment, along with the practice of mindfulness. These are the two things that we do in Buddhism to become enlightened.

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Meditation is concentration in the beginning. It's a focus. Then, in the intermediate stage, it's an opening, a deepening of one's awareness but with a focus towards the planes of light. In intermediate meditation, you're touching light more deeply than in introductory meditation. In advanced meditation, you become light. You transcend self, ego, time, space, dimensionality. You merge with the clear light of reality or return to samadhi, and you go beyond this world.

Your ideas, your feelings, your needs, your wants, your loves, your hates, your ups, your downs-you go beyond it all and you become God. You become nirvana. You become enlightenment, for a while, for a timeless time. You merge with the ecstasy of the clear light of reality. And it changes you. It remakes you. It reforms you. It shifts you, and then you're that.

Your awareness returns to the world brighter, different, less solidified. And repeating this process endlessly or in many years and many lifetimes eventually will culminate in the experience of enlightenment where you will always be in a state of light, in a condition of limitless awareness. It goes on forever. As Bilbo tells us in his story in The Hobbit, in his little song he sings, the road leads on forever. That's the good news. There's no end to enlightenment. There's no end to incarnation. There's no end to infinity.

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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 siddha 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.

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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.

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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. Plain 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.

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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 myriad 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.

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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.

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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 schools 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.

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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.

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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.

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