Snowboarding to Nirvana

Snowboarding to Nirvana by Rama Dr Frederick Lenz

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Rama Meditation Society

‘I put it all in the books and music. All the energy. If someone had just the books and the music, and they were really serious, they could go all the way through to enlightenment just with those.’
-- Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz


     


Rama's Promise

A Rama student was teaching an introductory meditation class, and a young film-maker spoke up, "You said all the techniques you teach in this class are written down. Where is that?"

The Rama student answered the woman, "They’re in the sequel novel Rama wrote. He wrote two novels, Surfing the Himalayas and Snowboarding to Nirvana. The Snowboarding to Nirvana book has a section that is sort of a book within a book. The main character of the book is a young American snowboarder. In the first novel, he meets his teacher by literally snowboarding into a Buddhist monk. In the sequel novel, he continues his training, and at one point he is given a book by an Oracle who’s kind of a wild, yet wise character. The book is called The Handbook for Enlightenment, and there are moments when the snowboarder reads from it.

During one of those readings, he comes across detailed instructions for several meditation techniques. So, these techniques I’m teaching in class are all written down; they’re not a secret. Look at pages 85-98. It’s just easier for some people to get started learning to meditate having a group environment for support and a teacher to ask questions of.

Now Rama said something very interesting to us several times before he died. I know some of you get disappointed that you didn’t have the chance to meet him during his lifetime. However, he told us more than once, usually in a rather casual way, which is often how he would say something really important, ‘I put it all in the books and music. All the energy. If someone had just the books and the music, and they were really serious, they could go all the way through to enlightenment just with those.’

Now Rama never lied to us about enlightenment. He would kid around a lot and tease us about many things, but enlightenment was his passion. He always gave us the straight scoop there.

He very, very seldom put a guarantee on something. Once when some of us were hesitating to go to computer school because we were so timid, one night he finally announced, ‘OK, here’s the deal. I GUARANTEE if you graduate from Computer Learning Center you WILL get a job.’ This was a school he was recommending for some of us at that time. And everyone I knew who graduated from CLC back then did in fact get a job. He kept his promise to those people. He backed them up with energy until they cracked open that first job.

So my experience is he kept his promises. And even though he said it in the most casual of ways, this statement about the books and music was a Rama guarantee. Anyone who is truly serious about enlightenment, if all they had was Rama’s novels and the Zazen music that is commercially available, meaning Enlightenment, Mandala of Light, Samadhi, Samurai, Retrograde Planet, Mystery School and Tantra, and they used that music with the techniques in the books...they could go all the way to enlightenment in this very lifetime.

You have to do the meditations, of course, and really ponder and go back to the material in the books. But he left an open pathway for anyone really interested.

You have no idea where you could be in five years doing these techniques, let alone ten.

Let’s meditate."

 

 

 

   
           


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