Dr. Frederick Lenz, also known as “Rama”, was an influential teacher of Buddhist meditation.
Born in San Diego in 1950, Lenz began experiencing samadhi, a meditative state, at age three.
He pursued studies in English and Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, eventually earning his Ph.D. in English Literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In his early career, he was guided by Hindu/Vedanta teacher, Sri Chinmoy.
By 29, Lenz had taught meditation globally at renowned institutions such as Harvard and U.C.L.A. In the 1980s, he established an American Buddhism school and emphasized meditation, women’s enlightenment and the cultivation of an independent mindset.
He authored books like “Surfing the Himalayas” and produced meditative music with Zazen.
Apart from spiritual pursuits, Lenz was a software designer, accomplished athlete and philanthropist, supporting organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.
Lenz passed away in 1998, leaving his estate to promote Buddhism in America.
I have listed the top quotes by Frederik Lenz.
Best Frederick Lenz Quotes
People who are humble don’t talk too much; they listen. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The quieter you can make your mind, the more you’ve invoked your will. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Buddhism is the process of getting to that part of us that is always eternally happy. ~ Frederick Lenz.
No one cares about you. No one cares. You will die and be forgotten. ~ Frederick Lenz.
As long as you’re too busy trying to become something that you’re not, you can’t see your own immortality. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster. ~ Frederick Lenz.
You must learn to meditate and stop your thoughts. You must overcome all egotism and selfishness by serving others. You must cleanse your mind so that enlightenment will find a happy place to reside there. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Taoism is the gentle way. The path of least resistance. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Yoga means we go a step further back. In yoga we go to the cause. The cause of pain is not the world. The cause of pain is us. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Selfless giving is the art of living. ~ Frederick Lenz.
As a sensitive person around other people, you feel their desires, you feel their angers, and you feel their frustrations. You begin to believe that these desires, angers, and frustrations are yours. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Inspirational Frederick Lenz Quotes
The main reason people fail is they become attached to others who hold them back. Letting go of others and going forward may seem like a lonely and impossible task, but I assure you it is not. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Your whole life is inside your mind. Your mind is the prism that refracts the entire universe. Everything around you and within you comes from your mind. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Think of your mind as a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it will become. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The relationship between the student and teacher is ultimately important. In higher spirituality we don’t study a subject as much as a person. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Zen is discipline – the discipline of living life, the discipline of taking a breath, the discipline of not knowing and not trying to know. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Our past affects us, our present affects us, and even our future can affect us. We live in the relative world of time and space. ~ Frederick Lenz.
You must have tremendous power of focus to direct your life and not allow all these variant forces, different vibrations, to enter you. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Famous Frederick Lenz Quotes
I design genetic algorithms, neural network and artificial intelligence systems. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Life is a game in which happiness is the goal. ~ Frederick Lenz.
In Zen the emphasis is on meditation and developing your body, mind and spirit to find inner peace, strength, clarity and enlightenment. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Very few individuals have the tenacity and the love to propel them beyond everything they know and can trust to face the unknown, let alone be absorbed in it. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Stop worrying about tomorrow. Stop thinking about yesterday. Mindfulness is to be here now, in the moment. Focus on this moment. ~ Frederick Lenz.
In the chakras, it’s the heart chakra, anahata, the central chakra, three above and three below, which symbolizes happiness and love, psychic oneness, spiritual understanding. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Beyond mind, beyond time, beyond space there is immortal awareness. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Sometimes it is hard to see in life. If the fog rolls in we can’t see anything. Most people get caught up in life that they forget the purpose of life is to be happy. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Popular Frederick Lenz Quotes
A person who has power has an open mind. Their mind is open and they can see on other levels. Seeing is a quality that comes to a person who has personal power. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Artificial Intelligence is creating a mind, hopefully as pure a mind as possible, for a computer. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Death is not the end of who we are. It is only a brief pause in the endless cycle of our lives. Each of us is a spirit that cannot die. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Life is invisible. The illusion is that what we perceive is in some way not a reflection of self. Life reflects the field of attention that we’re in. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Chaos theory simply suggests that what appears to most people as chaos is not really chaotic, but a series of different types of orders with which the human mind has not yet become familiar. ~ Frederick Lenz.
You’re a refraction of the one light. You’re a waveform of light. You’re a fractal, a pattern that continuously changes. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Love is the strongest force in the universe. ~ Frederick Lenz.
People use ideas of non-duality as an escape from reality. It is very easy to say there is no winning and losing and justify the fact that you didn’t do a very good job. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Top Frederick Lenz Quotes
Good karma leads to rebirth also. The desire for higher states of mind is a desire. When you are fixated on higher states of mind, you don’t become enlightened. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The Winter Solstice is the time of ending and beginning, a powerful time – a time to contemplate your immortality. A time to forgive, to be forgiven, and to make a fresh start. A time to awaken. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Buddhism doesn’t come from anybody. It exists by itself. ~ Frederick Lenz.
After enlightenment your body changes tremendously; its very molecular structure changes just because the kundalini is always streaming through you. ~ Frederick Lenz.
In Tantric Buddhism, we believe that Samsara is Nirvana. That is to say that everything in the universe is part of us. And we also are part of everything in the universe. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Taoism is the way of water. The most frequent element or symbol referred to in Lao Tzu’s writings is the symbol of water. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Balance is to choose happiness, to feel that the purpose of life is to love, not necessarily to be loved, to be happy, to be conscious, to be aware, to be fulfilled. ~ Frederick Lenz.
There is no future and there is no past, there never has been, there never will be. You just think there is. It’s not life that moves; it’s awareness. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The body comes and goes. This life, my friend, will come and go. It is a fleeting moment, an impulse in an eternal reality. ~ Frederick Lenz.
What we focus on we become. If you are just focusing on unhappy things, you will become unhappy. If you focus on happy states of mind, then it will grow in you. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The best battle is the battle that is never fought. The best war is the war that is won without a battle. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Computer science is fascinating. As you study computer science, you will find that you develop your mind. It is literally like doing Buddhist exercises all day long. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Spiritual Frederick Lenz Quotes
If your awareness was strong enough, you could change the fate of a whole world without ever leaving your room. ~ Frederick Lenz.
There is nothing that you shouldn’t do. Everything can be used as a tool for liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Nothing lasts forever – except forever. That’s the good news. It’s a good thing that nothing lasts forever because things would get terribly boring. ~ Frederick Lenz.
If you’re a sniveler, a whiner, a complainer, you will never be happy. We all have that side. Get a little stoical and just take the pain. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Love can be the only answer. But snowboarding also works for me. Because I love snowboarding! ~ Frederick Lenz.
None of this is real. All of this is an illusion and your acceptance of that fact is the beginning of the pathway to self-knowledge. ~ Frederick Lenz.
When you change your state of mind, your whole life changes, nothing remains the same. Nothing looks the same, because you have changed. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Happiness comes from self-knowledge. Self-knowledge means that you have understood your mind. Your mind is the whole universe. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The mind is like a lake. It reflects eternity when it’s very still. If ripples appear, lost of them, then the reflection is not clear. We lose clarity of the perfect reflection. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Reincarnation is a dance. It is a movement of life to the rhythm of the universe. Spirit and matter join together as one dancing partner. They dance and it goes on forever. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Everything is a state of mind. Astral travel is the ability to wander through different states of mind and develop psychic perceptions. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The essence of Taoism is really expressed by these few words. Taoism is the way of the child, the way of the fool, the way of someone who doesn’t need to be noticed. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Forgiveness is the best revenge. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Everything you do in meditation is amplified. If you meditate for five minutes with your complete mind focused on happiness, that is like focusing on happiness for several hours as you are walking around. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The scriptures recommend love and service to the enlightened to develop purity. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The pathway to enlightenment leads to states of ecstasy, knowledge, and a pretty ironic sense of humor. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Self-realization is the last game on earth worth playing. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Kundalini is seen as a serpent that can shoot up the shushumna, past the chakras, opening them all and bringing you into different states of awareness. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Nirvana is a word that means enlightenment, being beyond the illusion of birth and death, the illusion of pain, the illusion of love, the illusion of time and life. ~ Frederick Lenz.
It is possible with pure willpower to force the kundalini up the shushumna, through the chakras. You will develop visions of other worlds that will not necessarily stop when you want them to. This is a condition we call insanity. ~ Frederick Lenz.
The pathway to enlightenment is happiness. It doesn’t really matter if you’re successful, if you’re in prison, if you’re dying – if you have contact with light. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Most people abuse power. They use power to dominate others. They use power to destroy others. Ultimately when you do this, you lose it. ~ Frederick Lenz.
Prana is an element of energy. Energy is a manifestation of a certain principle which in Indian cosmology they call shakti, or spiritual power. Don’t worry about the words too much. ~ Frederick Lenz.
To have the detached eye of the occultist, to look outward, to not be so self-reflective and to learn to step through the various viewpoints of consciousness – that we call occultism – leads to freedom. ~ Frederick Lenz.
So these were the 70 quotes from Frederick Lenz.
If these quotes and sayings connect with you, check out our other posts on Richard Bandler quotes and Thomas Merton quotes.
