Zen Tapes talk series artwork

Zen Tapes

Psychic Development

Zen Tapes - Psychic Development

(Zazen music plays in the background.)

Psychic development. What lies on the other side of seeing? How can you know what someone thinks of you, when they're not there? How can you avoid the traps and pitfalls that others may set up for you, or see opportunities that might not present themselves to your physical mind and body? How do you develop your intuition, so that you can just know what's true and what isn't?

If you are dependent upon your ability to deduce information logically through direct observation, through the senses, you can be fooled.

What is the border between the mental and the psychic? When are psychic impressions just imagination and not accurate information? Why are some people more psychic than others?

Psychic development - with Zen Master Rama.

We live in a world filled with automobiles, highways of the mind, urban disasters, billions of people living on a tiny planet, sharing the diminishing natural resources of the earth. Pollution - air pollution, noise pollution, psychic pollution - it's getting dark out there. But it's always light in the inner worlds. In the inner-dimensional psychic planes, there is no pollution. There's endless, infinite, awareness.

Beyond mind, beyond time, beyond space, there's immortal awareness. The universe is a giant mind. Some people have the ability to tap into that mind. We call them psychic. Others don't. We call them dull. But they have potential.

The unlimited mind, the diamond mind of the Buddha, is your mind, if you can get in touch with it, if you can figure out where it is and what to do with it, and stop thinking so much and tap into that psychic part of your being.

So sit back and relax for the next 45 minutes or so, and let's talk about psychic development. How you can escalate your level of awareness with patience, practice and a good sense of humor. What to expect, what to avoid. How to know what you don't know. Psychic development.

(Zazen music ends.)

There are two ways to come by money in this world. One is to inherit money. The other is to make it, to acquire it. If you inherit money, you can squander it and lose it. You can use it, or you can make more money. You can also start with no money and acquire money and get richer and richer, or you can acquire it and lose it. Once you know how to make money, even if you lose it, it's easy to do it again.

So in the world of psychic development, some people come by their psychic development through a kind of inheritance. It has to do with reincarnation, of course. In a prior lifetime, they developed their awareness field by the practice of psychic development exercises, meditation, zazen, things like that. And that state of mind stayed with them. They are that state of mind. They were born with these psychic sensitivities.

Everyone is psychic. You are psychic. Psychic is not a particular talent; it is an ability that we all have. Everybody has a left foot. Some people may just walk with that foot, some people may drag it, some may learn to dance with it. Everyone is innately psychic. It's a part of your mind.

What does it mean to be psychic? Essentially it means to feel, rather than to think all the time. There are two general modes of perception. There are many, but there are two that we see most frequently in this world, and that's thinking and feeling. Feeling, not in the sense of the senses - hot, cold, pleasant, unpleasant, pain, pleasure - but feeling in a more intuitive sense. Feeling love from someone, feeling anger from someone, that kind of feeling - a non-sensorial feeling having to do with the emotional body and the psychic body. Thinking is analysis, perception, measurement, random association. It's a way of figuring something out. But to be honest, most decisions are not made through analysis.

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.