It would be silly of me not to have noticed the somewhat...uh...angry reactions that come up on this board from time to time when I talk about the weird things (siddhis) I and others exper- ienced around Rama (Frederick Lenz). Here is a speculation as to where they might be coming from.
I think a lot of it has to do with Rama's "rep." He was vilified in the press as a cult leader, as someone who slept with his female students, and many other things. I can say without reser- vation that many of these things were true, and could add a great number of other stories from my own experience that indicate that the dude was occasionally a real slimeball, with a drug dependency towards the end of his life and an ego on him the size of Texas. HOWEVER, at other times he could meditate so powerfully that if you were in the same room with him, it was almost *impossible* to have a thought; clear, thoughtless samadhi was your *only* option. ALSO, he was able to perform siddhis like levitating, disappearing, flying through the air, opening dimensions to other planes of reality, etc. so powerfully that up to hundreds of people at a time saw and exper- ienced them. He was able to do this not only with students who wanted to believe in these things, but in public talks where half the audience were skeptics. The skeptics saw these things, too. So go figure, eh? I honestly think that what offends a lot of people about the Rama guy and stories of the siddhis that people saw him perform is that they have this idea in their heads that either 1) the ability to perform siddhis is linked to enlightenment, or 2) the those who can perform siddhis are 'supposed to be' "more evolved" or "beyond" stuff like sleeping with their students, or 3) both. What bothers them is that there is a strong like- lihood that Rama was a bit of a charlatan and a bit of a rogue and *none* of the things that they visualize when they think of an enlightened teacher, AND YET HE COULD DO THIS STUFF ANYWAY. Welcome to the conundrum. That, as far as I can tell, is the truth about the dude. I was around him for many years, and there is no question in my mind that he was at times a charlatan, at times a slimeball, and at other times able to manifest some of the coolest siddhis in the spiritual canon. Go figure. What does this "mean?" Well, to me it means that all the stuff about siddhis being of necessity linked to enlightenment are an enormous pile of steaming crap. That's simply not true. Siddhis are siddhis and enlightenment is enlightenment, and there is no one-to-one link between them. Histor- ically, some teachers regarded as enlightened manifested siddhis, and others did not. Equally historically, many of those who can manifest the siddhis are open and honest about the fact that they are *not* enlightened; they just know how to do these siddhis. I've had some limited exper- ience with manifesting minor siddhis myself, and I'm *certainly* not enlightened on any kind of permanent basis. The other thing that drives some people up the wall when I talk about the Rama dude is that he offends them morally. They have major problems with what he represents, and thus they have major problems with believing that he could *also* do something like manifest real siddhis. They'd prefer to believe in something far more unlikely, that he had the ability to somehow hypnotize hundreds of people at once, some of them members of the press. What I'm trying to suggest is that there seems to have been NO PROBLEM with the guy being a slime- ball AND being able to manifest siddhis. It's NOT as simplistic as the idealistic books about these things say it is. It's not an EITHER/OR rela- tionship; its a BOTH/AND relationship. As far as I can tell, the guy could coerce some sweet young female student into sleeping with him one minute and the next minute levitate like gang- busters. For all I know, he could have been able to boink the young student WHILE levitating, although I never saw or heard evidence of this. :-) The bottom line is that from my perspective, siddhis aren't what you idealize them as. They are just *abilities*, abilities that *anyone* can master, whatever their state of consciousness. They have *nothing to do* with state of conscious- ness, or with the morality or immorality of the person who is able to perform them. I understand that this fucks with many people's idealized notions of what the siddhis are and what they "mean" about the person performing them, but I'm trying to be honest with you here. I don't think that your idealized notions are correct, based on my experience. Being able to perform siddhis doesn't make a person good, and being bad doesn't prevent a person from being able to do them. Used as some kind of "measure" of a person's enlightenment, the siddhis are just as big a failure as any other "measurement" you might imagine.
