Desert Trips

Rama/Dr. Frederick Lenz will sometimes take his students to power spots out in nature to meditate, especially at times of the year like solstices and equinoxes. We live in a world with a large and increasing human population, and it can be difficult to approach life with a clear mind in the workaday world in the city. At power spots, though, it is possible to reach a very clear state of mind which can help empower life for a period of many months after travelling to the power spot. When you visit the power spot with an enlightened being at a solstice, the experience is even more amplified.

I have had the privilege of attending several desert trips with Rama, and the experience has been remarkable each time. The sheer beauty of entering the Anza Borrego Desert is something which is in itself hard to describe. The desert, while only about eighty miles away from the major cities of Southern California, feels almost like another planet. There is a strong otherworldly feel to it. Rama will normally meet his students in one of the many gorges to be found in this desert. The best way to describe the feeling in the gorge is that there is an incredibly ancient energy to the place. One feels as though some of the most ancient power in the planet is stored up in this place, and that one is connected to that power and can tap into it.

Rama has performed many miracles in the desert, and I wouldn't be able to describe all of them. But perhaps one such experience will help capture the flavor of the experience. I was about to move to New York, and was feeling a bit apprehensive about the upcoming move. I wanted some kind of miracle, something to restore my faith, to take place on this desert trip. When we arrived in the desert the skies were overcast, and I was a bit disappointed because I had been hoping for a starry night. I asked Rama inwardly to perform a miracle and remove the clouds from the sky to restore my faith in the magic.

Now ordinarily Rama will not respond to such overt requests for miracles whether they are requested verbally or inwardly. But for some reason--perhaps because of the power of the occasion, I'm not sure--this time he did. When we were out meditating in the gorge, the sky was still very overcast. He then had us close our eyes for awhile, and then when I opened my eyes a little later on, I had to blink. The sky was now completely clear. And, to remove any doubt that this was a coincidence, when we took a break a little later, Rama passed me, smiled, and said "you'll notice there are no clouds in the sky anymore".

But such miracles, as fun as they are at the time, are not in and of themselves the highest achievement of an enlightened being. The deeper value of the desert experience is the clearing of the mind, and the ability to reach higher states of mind after returning from the trip. It was, for example, just after my first desert trip that I made the most progress in my Ph.D. program. I had been working on the same problem for years, making only tortoise like progress. Suddenly after this desert trip, everything seemed much clearer, and it was so much easier to make breakthroughs. Within a matter of weeks, I had probably gotten as much done as in the previous few years, and within another month or so my thesis supervisor was talking seriously about me graduating, something which would have been unthinkable only a few months earlier. By the end of the year I had the elusive degree in hand. I don't know exactly how meditating with Rama in the desert can produce such results; I only know that it happened and these experiences are real.