We think that the classic Enlightenment of the Buddha is far beyond our reach. What if it wasn’t?

As more and more people have found meditation and mindfulness to be beneficial, there has been little information on the underlying process, which Dr. Frederick Lenz (1950-1998), known to his students as Rama, called “self-discovery.” Self-discovery is the pathway to enlightenment, in which you realize that your ego is like an island in the middle of an ocean. Each meditation is taking a swim in that ocean. Self-discovery is becoming the ocean. Enlightenment means the dissolution of the finite self into the infinite mind, but how is that actually done?

Rama taught over a thousand people he accepted as direct students an unusual blend of spiritual practices for 20 years, all directed towards the classic Buddhist definition of complete enlightenment. He explained to us that the process has many interdependencies and stages. It was a combination of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Hindu Vedanta and Yoga, and Native American mysticism, implemented through a unique approach to living in the modern world, built upon a foundation of meditation and mindfulness.

Over a dozen years, Rama recorded 120 talks for his students covering all aspects of this process. Rama Speaks consolidates these talks into a single book, presenting the essential concepts in a sequence that lets the reader understand his model of the mind. It includes the meditation methods and other techniques he taught us, as well as several photos of him. In these talks he taught how to become fully enlightened, carefully breaking down the steps and how to do them in today's world. While many of the things he taught can be found in spiritual books, many cannot, and none all in the same place. The book has nearly 200 extended quotes from these tapes--5+ hours in the audiobook spliced in from Rama's original recordings. As the title of the book says, the idea is to let Rama speak, directly to you.