On the Road with Rama talk series artwork

On the Road with Rama

Unity

On the Road with Rama - Unity

Today is March 30th. It's around five o'clock in the afternoon. I'm on the Big Island of Hawaii, the island of Hawaii, and I'm pulled off to the side of the road at around three thousand feet.

I'm going to roll up the window here 'cause it's getting a little loud. There's a lot of traffic on this particular road, but it's a power place. Beneath me I see the island stretching out. The sun will probably be setting in about an hour. I'm facing the direction of the volcano Mauna Kea. It's obscured by a heavy cloud cover. Behind me is Mauna Loa - the twin peaks of the Big Island. And today I'd like to talk to you about making yourself available to energy, to power.

I'm sitting up here now, looking in the direction of the volcano and the power is shifting. The luminous lines of energy that surround the Hawaiian Islands are moving and shifting now.

You've decided to look for power, to look for light, to look for truth. So now you've started on your journey. But there are some things that you need to consider. The first is to be strategic. The second is to be earnest, and the third is not to give a damn. They really all go together.

What is power anyway? What is energy? What is light? What is the thing that we seek? It's awareness. Awareness is everything. Our awareness shapes the world. And if you control awareness, you control the world. Awareness is not just the sense of seeing in time. Awareness is the very fabric that existence is made up of. People have varying degrees of awareness depending upon their level of evolution - what they've done in their other lifetimes, how much of that has come forward, how much of that is still being held within. They have awareness of the world as it has been taught to them.

Everybody sees life in their own terms. Our awareness is colored, of course, by moods, mood swings, emotions, feelings - feeling good, feeling bad emotionally. The body colors our awareness, the body awareness - pleasure, pain, sickness, health, fatigue, feeling energetic. Awareness, of course, is very, very influenced by our desires. We desire to become something, we desire to have something or we desire to avoid something. Awareness is modified by all these things. But what is awareness? Aside from all these modifications, what is it that is aware in us? Who is it who is listening to this tape? Who is it who is speaking these words? Does the world exist without us? What is the "us"? It's awareness.

Awareness is really not a simple thing. It's very, very complex. As we progress through life, we move through different states of attention, different states of awareness. And we, in a sense, become those states of attention. When you were five or six or seven years old, you had a certain state of awareness or attention, and that for you was the whole world. That was your world. Everything that you experienced and felt was modified. Awareness is the screen on which the movie of life is projected. Awareness is also the viewer.

Now, here's an interesting point. Awareness becomes aware of itself. Awareness perceives itself, but not always completely. Awareness can think of itself, feel itself, speculate about itself, correctly or incorrectly. It depends on what level or gradient of awareness we're dealing with.

You're aware. You're aware that you're seeking power, you're seeking energy. And it's been my experience as one who has sought awareness and continues to do so, that in the beginning, at least, awareness is something that appears to be outside of us. We have the sense that we will be aware when we have traveled, when we have experienced something, when we've met someone, when we've interacted with something or someone. But awareness really is within. Not within the body, certainly - it's within itself. Awareness is itself. And the way into awareness, well, it's the way into anything and everything, since anything and everything is awareness.

Rama smiling with his arms crossed wearing a designer suit
Seeing is the ability to tell what really is.

The works of Rama – Dr. Frederick Lenz are reprinted or included here with permission from

The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism.