The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - I Am Rama | 2. Becoming

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

This episode follows Frederick Lenz III from his early days and education through his introduction to spiritualism with his mentor, Sri Chinmoy, at the dawn of the New Age. Young Freddie  becomes “Atmananda,” a recruiter for his mentor, until it becomes time to strike out on his own, as Zen Master Rama.  If you want to know more about Rama’s early years, you can read more from the people who we interviewed for this episode. Liz Lewinson’s book is called “American Buddhist Rebel The Story of Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz.” Mark Laxer's books is called “Take Me For a Ride, Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult.”  A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Rama was different than other spiritual teachers.

He never fasted in the mountains for years. He wasn't celibate. And in the early teaching days, late 70s, early 80s, he wasn't even Rama yet. Back then, he went by the name Atmananda, a name his teacher, Sri Chinmoy, had given him. Life with Atmananda in those days was an adventure, new, weird, and profound. Friday night was movie night, and on movie night, students would play a game called Where's Atmananda? For a chance to score a few extra hours with their teacher, some of his students would drive around to movie theaters all over the west side of Los Angeles

and try to guess which theater Atmananda would show up at and what movie he would watch. Kind of like Where's Waldo, only a live-action game. And instead of the nerd with a red and white striped shirt, his students went in search of Atmananda, their lanky, perfectly dressed teacher with a round bush of curly blonde hair. It wasn't exactly a city-wide search for a needle in a haystack. Rama's students knew his favorite theaters. Still, the thrill of the chase, the feeling of discovery, it pervaded this game and defined the experience of studying with Rama,

of being devoted to him. They would eventually find him waiting in line to see Terminator, Conan the Barbarian, or whatever the latest box office buster of the moment was. Challenges, games, quirky lessons on Buddhist philosophy with a nerdy twist. These activities define the small but loyal group of early Atmananda students. So much, in fact everything, would change in the blink of an eye.

Close your eyes and the Rama you knew would disappear. In its place, a new person, a new project, a new location. He was, you could say, a spiritual chameleon, and always on the move. The people who entered into Rama's orbit were always in search of him, always yearning for just a little more. And all the way to the end, he was one step ahead. I'm Jonathan Hirsch from Neon Hum Media and Smokescreen. This is I Am Rama. Chapter Two, Becoming.

Rama said he chose his parents, that he actually opted to incarnate himself. I imagine him floating around the earth and zeroing in on a happy couple living in San Diego in 1950. Let's see, I'll take a spiritual mom and a more business-type dad. Why did he choose San Diego, you might ask? Because of all things, the balmy West Coast weather and the more tolerant religious views than his previous incarnation enjoyed in the Himalayan mountains of Tibet. That's all according to his biography and really the woman who wrote it. Most of what we know about Rama's early years,

we were unable to independently verify. My name is Liz Lewinson, and I am the author of American Buddhist Rebel, the story of Rama Dr. Frederick Lenz. Liz's book talks a lot about Rama's early years, except back then, nobody was calling him Rama yet. His parents named him Frederick P. Lenz III, but called him Freddy. And then the family moved back to Connecticut. They got divorced, the mom and dad, when he was only seven. And she went off elsewhere. As he said in his own words, he really just became very independent.

With his dad working long hours and stepmom who didn't much care for him, Freddie was kind of alone, and he had to find his own way. In the book, there's a story from around when Freddie was about 10 years old. It was a rainy day, and Freddie wandered into his father's library and stumbled on an unopened set of eight books on Buddhism. Before he knew it, he had devoured the entire set. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in Eastern spirituality, one he would say had carried over from his previous lifetimes. Freddie finished high school in Connecticut.

He went to San Francisco and right into the heart of the Haight-Ashbury. Which was kind of the place you go when you're in search of a freewheeling counterculture life. Basically, a lot of hippies. Freddie found what he was looking for, and maybe a little too much of it. Freddie ended up accidentally befriending a police informant. So he had apparently one ounce of marijuana, and he got caught. Now today in California, that's 100% legal. No one will do anything, but he was sent to a work camp for nine months. It was up in the San Diego mountains.

Yep. A weed work camp. After Freddie was released, he left for Nepal. In 1969, advertisements for traveling to Kathmandu were on the back page of every single newspaper. And I mean, it was the hippie rite of passage. And it was right in your face. That story checks out. My mom went to Kathmandu in 1972 in search of, gosh, what a lot of people were looking for in those days.

A new way to live, spirituality, distant cultures. Anyway, back to Freddie on his hippie rite of passage. And also maybe hoping to get in some snowboarding? He was having trouble getting on planes with the big board. The highlight of those travels happened when, Freddie claims, he went barreling downhill on a snowboard and accidentally crashed into a diminutive monk named Master Fwop. He was so upset, he was so apologetic

that when the monk said, hey, come back and let's talk, he was willing to do it. Freddie spent a few weeks under Master Phwop's tutelage. In a book he wrote decades later called Surfing the Himalayas, he describes in great detail how he literally stumbled into his spiritual experience and how he saw the golden light enveloping Master Phuap's body. There's that golden light thing again. It's when Freddie really began to seek enlightenment. Freddie returned to the States, enrolled in college, and did really well. Magna cum laude,

then on to grad school. For the next decade, and really for the rest of his life, this was part of his image. Excellent student-turned-professor, a learned man, a relatable genius. All the while developing his spiritual half, what he learned from his astrologer mom, the books in his dad's office, and that monk he nearly sent to the hospital. I've got to say, it's these competing versions of Freddie that make him so fascinating to me. He's the successful academic and the awkward and somewhat eccentric spiritualist. He may hold a doctorate with honors, but while in college, he was also hand-making dulcimers and playing them in coffee shops like Joni Mitchell. Freddie was taking the parts he liked best from two different worlds and building his own reality.

Turning academic Freddie into spiritual teacher Rama might seem like a sea change, but it's a little less wild when you consider the time. Back then, getting into spirituality was almost a fad. It was, after all, the dawning of the age of Aquarius. You remember that song. If you're thinking naked, long hairs, dancing in the mud to Neil Young ballads, there was a lot of that. But it wasn't just free love and lots of drugs. There's a bit of nuance that's important here. The country had been living through Vietnam, a seemingly endless and unwinnable war.

I mean, for many people who had come out of the 50s and 60s, you know, civil rights and anti-war, were experiencing a not inconsiderable amount of burnout along those lines. Matt Hedstrom is a professor of American religious history at the University of Virginia. And I study what is often called the spiritual but not religious. Spiritual but not religious. For millions of Americans in the 70s, theirs was the first generation to adopt alternative spiritual practices into the mainstream. A spirituality that wasn't tethered to a church or major world religion. Americans were tired, tired of their government, and started to doubt

all the structures they had grown up trusting. Sounds kind of familiar. They started thinking about other paths that might bring about change. And here we have the seeds of the New Age movement, an amorphous term used to describe the marketplace of art, entertainment, and ideas of people who prioritized peace, the environment, their own happiness over other, more worldly considerations. I mean, I think the term New Age really gets to this notion that by changing consciousness, you know, maybe one individual at a time, somehow you can affect a wider social change. Positive thinking. Social change. This is what young Americans wanted. And Freddie Lenz fit the profile to a T, down to the timeline. He was born in 1950 and came of age during the Vietnam War. Some of those years were

spent on college campuses or in San Francisco, great places to let your hair down, to fight the man, and find your people. And it was at the intersection of this moment in history and where he was in his own spiritual journey when Freddie's life changed forever. He met his teacher, a guru named Sri Chinmoy. Chinmoy was a guru who would eventually become somewhat mainstream, even famous, after being invited to teach meditation at the UN. He had some celebrity followers, athletes, musicians, and became known as a unique sort of guru for his feats of athleticism. Here's Helen Hunt telling David Letterman about it. He lifted people that he felt had achieved something that contributed something to the world. Physically lifted. Physically? Physically lifted them. I was thinking spiritually. No, actually lifted them.

And I mean, this is real, like Desmond Tutu, Muhammad Ali, and me, naturally. The three of us always together. Anyway, Freddie became a student of Chinmoy in 1970 before he'd really broken into the mainstream. He described it as thousands of hours of rigorous training. Training that he loved. Freddie started teaching yoga and meditation to other seekers, and eventually he also brought new students to Chinmoy. And in 1974, when Freddie was 24, Chinmoy gave him a spiritual name, Atmananda.

It means bliss of the soul in Sanskrit. It's not uncommon for spiritual teachers in certain traditions to afford their students names, and some teachers change their names quite frequently, sometimes as a way to indicate shifts in their teaching or persona. Getting a name was a big deal to Freddie. And since from this point on, everyone else in his life was calling Frederick Lenz Atmananda, we will too. The next year, in 1975, Atmananda moved to New York, started grad school, and he kept recruiting for Chinmoy. That's how a 17-year-old named Mark first found Atmananda. My name is Mark Laxer, and I'm from Little Neck, Queens, New York. Today, Mark is in his 60s, and has published a few books, including one about being in Atmananda's inner circle.

It's called Take Me for a Ride. It's a story that starts back when Mark was in high school, back when he was a little like Freddie had been at the same age, looking for something bigger than himself. I'm on a mystical quest. You know, everyone get out of my way. And then one day, his brother invited him to a lecture on spirituality in Manhattan.

We're going to 33rd Street and 2nd Avenue, somewhere around there, in Manhattan, to a place called Yoga Life Perfection. It was inside this old building. And it was like this creaky, old, dark kind of, I don't know if this elevator is actually going to get us up there, kind of feel to it. Spooky, but exciting. They took their shoes off, took in the sweet smell of incense, and Mark took a look around. And then you see all these beautiful women wearing saris. This is like an Indian garb, like a very light, fluffy, wraparound fabric that's very colorful.

And my brother was explaining all this to me, and he was saying, like, don't vibe the women because it'll take away from their energy. And I'm like, uh, okay, if you say so. So they sit down and wait. And out comes this really tall guy and his arms are swinging back and forth like pendulums. And he holds his head up. He's very tall and it looks like his hair is like this aura. And he's sharp looking. He looks like someone who could be a movie star.

Part movie star, part professor. And he's got this rich voice that you trust. He knows this is a voice of confidence. But it's also a vulnerable voice, almost kind of feminine, but intentionally so. And he speaks eloquently, and he starts telling these jokes. Jokes about literature, Shakespeare, Melville.

Kind of feels like a college lecture. But he's intertwining it with discussions about the Bhagavad Gita and Zen Buddhism and mysticism in this rich voice. And then it's almost like you're kind of mesmerized. There's something cosmic about the whole thing, especially after the lecture, when the meditation starts. You close your eyes, you try to slow your thoughts down. It's all very relaxing.

And then he's saying, almost like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking to Luke, you've taken your first step into a larger world, Luke. And that's how I felt. I felt like Luke Skywalker. Mark joined up after that night. And over the years, he became closer and closer to Atmananda. He characterized our relationship as a friendship. And that's how I saw it. Not as peers. He was 10 years older than me, and he was the charismatic one. I was the kind of nerdy, kind of shy, more shy. He was smooth. Over time, something started to become clear. Atmananda was very effective at recruiting, but he was bringing people into a group he didn't necessarily fit into.

Now, the thing is, a lot of Chinmoy's disciples were kind of strict in the way that they practiced their spiritual path. And the guys did not vibe the women, and they were celibate, and they strict vegetarians, and they were not flamboyoyant and they sort of like in little boxes. But Atmananda, according to Mark, you could say vibed the women. He had a girlfriend and this girlfriend and that girlfriend. He had girlfriends all over the place. He particularly didn't get why celibacy was so important for Chinmoy. Atmananda just wanted to meditate, but afterwards he wanted to go to bars and meet women, at least according to Liz, his biographer.

Glaxer says looking back, he sees the situation as a kind of ruse. As he was flapping his wings to go off on his own and leave the nest. I think that he was practicing becoming his own guru. Meanwhile, Mark says, Chinmoy noticed. Chinmoy found out that Atmananda was playing guru. And so Atmananda was in big trouble and he was going to get kicked out. But Mark says Atmananda came up with a way to release the pressure. He asked to be sent away from Chinmoy's backyard to San Diego, where he was born, to open a meditation center in Chinmoy's

name. And Chinmoy said, sure, go ahead and do that. To be fair, not everyone thought Atmananda was on the outs with Chinmoy. From those accounts, it sounds like he just wanted to be out on his own. Whatever the truth is between exile and escape, any tension surrounding Atmananda's rule-flouting behavior was relieved for a little while. Atmananda and a handful of followers, including Mark Laxer,

moved west and started a new center, a new life. Very exciting. We're going to go to a new island and make new laws, new rules, like Lord of the Flies, you know, stuck on a new island. And the kids are in charge. And the kids, they loved it. Atmananda grew popular,

and tales of his incredible feats from those days, of people seeing him disappear out of thin air and then reconstitute himself. It's a sort of Buddhist magic, as Rama would later call it. A lot of the students I talked to for the series said something like this. Levitation, golden light, a physical manifestation of spirituality, a demonstration. Even the followers who are critical in retrospect will usually still cough to having experienced some magic from being in the same room without Linanda. And there was this idea that if you spent enough time around him,

he would transform your life, that he was transmitting a spiritual energy to you. Siddhis, this is called sometimes. It was the stuff of movies. First of all, there was kind of this innocent, dreamy stuff. Like, he'd borrow from Kermit the Frog. For all the magic, all the intensity, Atmananda also operated with a lot of levity. He was part stoic, part comedian. He'd do things like hop around the kitchen on one foot, lead the others in chanting and Kermit voice.

We're going to make millions of people happy. I mean, we really believed that stuff in those early years. And it was beautiful. And, you know, we would sing songs, we'd make up plays, and it was just a hoot. More followers started flocking to Atmananda. Further away from Chinmoy, instead of repenting, he was even more free to do his own thing. I didn't understand that he was like a fugitive on the run. According to Atmananda, he was experiencing a fundamental shift during this time. He was becoming fully enlightened, ready to be his own teacher. But he had to break up with Chinmoy first.

The stories about how it all went down vary. Some say he went to see Chinmoy in Eugene, Oregon, to try to make a clean break. In October 1980, a few months later, he returned to visit Chinmoy in New York to say goodbye. Some of his students remember Atmananda sending Chinmoy a letter and some money asking the guru for his blessing to go off on his own a few days later. Mark remembers it happening over time. At one point, he declared the guru had fallen and that he was stepping up. And people just walked out. Like there was, of the hundred people, we ended up with 50. And I wanted to leave. I wanted to run away. He was scared. It felt freaky because as a young kid, I knew what was happening. Because, you know, I'm from New York City, and I'm a little naive, a little bit goofy,

a little bit innocent. But I'm not stupid. And I knew it was happening. Mark wasn't sure he wanted to be involved in this anymore. And this is my dream is to create a community and to, you know, make millions of people happy and all that good, fun, gentle stuff I believed in. But I didn't realize that this guy was making a play for power. It's a coup. Mark was kind of stuck. That's the house I lived in. Everyone else could go home and think about it. I was at home and bam, it's two in the morning, there's Atmananda in my room, my bedroom. He says Atmananda was trying to see how Mark felt about all these changes.

Because people were looking to me to make their own decisions. Like they thought, all right, well, if Mark is here, it must be okay. So a lot of people didn't trust him. I was the innocent. He called me the kid. Looking back, he says what happened that night wasn't a declaration of cosmic identity. I don't see any spiritual stuff there. I see human greed, a sense of wanting power. And that's what he got.

As Aminanda ended his association with Sri Chinmoy, he also had to shed his old name the guru had given him. It happened on a trip to the desert near San Diego, 1982, way off the grid, on a hike. It was something Atmananda did a lot with his students. Mark says he'd been fasting for 14 days. And there was a hundred people there. Atmananda stopped and asked his group.

He'd say, like, who am I? He was testing them to see if anyone else figured out his new identity. And someone said, are you Rama? Yes, I'm Rama, the last incarnation of Vishnu. So I think that, I mean, things happen out in the desert. And just like that, Atmananda was no more. He was now Rama. It doesn't seem like much, but just like when Freddie became Atmananda,

this name change was also a declaration. Only this time, Atmananda, Rama, was the one making the call. A few years later, Mark would leave the group. He points to one particular experience that gave him some clarity. Watching him on LSD is actually what helped me to leave the group. As Mark tells it, Rama didn't drop acid often, but on one occasion, when he did, he had a bad trip, lost himself for

a while. Mark helped Rama through it, talking to him, calming him down, that sort of thing. And somewhere in there, Rama became his old self for a few minutes. All those narcissistic levels of ego and power tripping, it was just stripped away by the acid. And he said, would you like to be my friend again? And I said, yes, Rama,

I would. It made Mark cry. According to Mark, Rama fell back asleep. And when he woke up, and the acid wore off, Mark's old friend, Freddy, Atmananda, he was gone. Rama was back. And we were never friends again. Mark says this moment gave him what he needed to eventually leave. The emotional distance to see that things had changed. And so, in 1985, after some failed attempts, he calls them baby steps, he finally left Rama for good. This was a full decade after Mark had first stepped into that old building in Manhattan, first laid eyes on his teacher.

But what had been for Mark a good version of Lord of the Flies? Well, you know how the book ended, with a lot of danger. And in this case, at least from Mark's perspective, it was all emanating from his teacher, from someone he used to consider a friend. But Mark's opinion wasn't shared by all of Rama's students. What seemed like a trap to him felt like freedom to so many others. Like those nights, riding around Los Angeles looking for Atmananda. Students seemed to seek him out in the time and place that suited them, and their vision of the world. Rama took on an almost prismatic quality.

Depending on the moment, on the perspective, he could appear to be so many things. A visionary spiritual teacher who can turn a room gold, or vanish in thin air, or a budding leader gathering power and influence. Or, as Mark noted, a man under duress. A troubled man with a lot of influence. But whatever the answer,

Rama would soon be filling auditoriums and gaining national attention. And students like Marg didn't want to stick around for the next bend in the road. Others couldn't wait to find out what was next. And it's like, whatever that guy has, I want to know. I want to know what that is. I want to be able to do that. That's next time on I Am Rama. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Jonathan I. Hirsch. I'll be sharing tons of source material, photos, and other stuff related to our work on the series, so be sure to check it out. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville.

Justin Klosko is our fact checker. Our production manager is Sammy Allison. The theme song for this series is Dolphin Dance by Tangerine Dream. Other tracks you heard in this episode are from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. If you want to know more about Rama's early years, you can read more from the people who we interviewed for this episode. Liz Lewinson's book is called American Buddhist Rebel, The Story of Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz. You can also check out Take Me for a Ride, Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult by Mark Laxer. Subscribe to this show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen,

and you can find more about this series and all the podcasts we produce at Neon Hum by visiting our website, neonhum.com. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Thanks for listening. you