--- In [email protected], "seventhray1" <steve.sun...@...> wrote: > > Thanks for the reply. People keep referring to his pain, saying > they didn't realize how intense it was. I wonder what the pain > is they are referring to. > > Some comments on the other site also attempt to put the suicide > in the perspective that he was "needed elsewhere". I don't know > if I buy that. > > Sounds like there was depression
Can you begin to imagine the stuff that got tossed around the world of Frederick Lenz - Rama students when *he* decided to take his midnight swim? I mean, for many of the people who were still on the bus at that point, this was not just a guy who talked about his experiences at the local satsang group, but a guy who promoted himself as one of the only 12 fully enlightened beings on the planet. And what does he do? He downs a shitload of pills and booze, attempts to take one of his students *with* him, and then stumbles off the end of a pier into Long Island Sound, therein to become crab food. Not really the way you want the people you have invested decades in believing were enlightened to exit, stage left. But what a KOAN this proposes for the serious seeker: "What is the sound of one spiritual teacher doing himself in?" Puts ya through some changes to ponder this koan, lemme tell ya. Cognitive Dissonance Central. One of those "What do I really believe?" moments. Whether 'tis nobler to continue to believe in this person's enlightenment and the perfection of everything he ever did or said, or whether 'tis nobler to write the guy off as a charlatan, and a suicidal one at that? Or somewhere in between. I've landed "somewhere in between." With regard to Rama, I have learned over time to discriminate between the things he said that I still feel are Onto Something and the ones that in my opinion were just manifestations of his own samskaras. The issue nailed in the quote Buck posted is an inter- esting one to ponder in my opinion. If you've "outed" yourself as enlightened, and thus associated yourself with many of the *myths* about enlightenment I've been talking about recently, WHO DO YOU TALK TO if you start to find that those myths don't seem to be working out as advertised? Like the myth about how perfect and happy and realized you are 24/7. What happens if you start to realize that you're *not* all that perfect, and not even all that happy? Who do you TALK to about that? Go to a shrink? In Rama's case he was a nationally- known spiritual teacher or charlatan, depending on whether you believed his students or Dateline. He couldn't even do *that* without being outed. Daniel? I don't know him, but I can only imagine that having positioned himself as a somewhat big fish in the small pond of Fairfield, there were similarly not many places he felt he could go to find someone to talk to. I wrote in an earlier post this week, before this all happened, that Rama was in my opinion a victim of his own self-created myth. He took his own life because IMO he could no longer live with the discrepancy between his myth and his reality. Why can't we just drop the myths and the havoc they create and go for the reality?
