Remembering Rama - Dr Frederick Lenz

<< Back

Working At It
by Y. Monk

One of Rama's favorite films was "The Ninth Configuration." He assigned it to us when it was in the theaters, and I went to see it twice. I thought it was very powerful and the scenes with Shakespeare and the dogs truly hilarious and the ending such a "moment", but it did not do well with the general public. Rama said the Stacy Keach character was very much like himself, given how he had started out a long, long time ago as an warrior before he came to the world of enlightenment. During his warrior phase, he was totally dedicated to learning killing arts. He said he thought nothing of spending ten lifetimes just to perfect one technique. But he made a switch when he pondered the question, what is harder than killing, and that inquiry brought him into the halls of enlightened teachers. He said, unlike us, he did everything his teachers told him, that total intensity was then brought to the study. He said he had some very funny teachers.

In this life, many years after "The Ninth Configuration," the same director did Exorcist 3. Rama was very interested in that one as it was also a very good movie in terms of some occult matters, but this one did really well with the general public. He said Blatty had figured something out. He was so intrigued by this because he himself was working at it, figuring out how to present things about enlightenment, etc. that normally get presented one way in the East but needed to be mapped differerently for the West. Blatty was actually living in Greenwich, CT at the time Exorcist 3 came out. Rama drove over to his house in the middle of the night and just stood in his driveway, looking into his mind and "seeing" how he had done it, the transition to being able to create a film the general public would accept yet that still had considerable depth. I thought that was a cool story, Rama out in the middle of the night, just standing in a director's driveway, learning things. That he would be so keen to see it up close for himself.

Rama then took from the was-I-raving speech in Exorcist 3 and re-worked it into the Techno Zen Master album, spun it right out onto the dance floor...making it funny and a great "moment" in the song.