Personal Power

Rama, Dr Frederick Lenz characterized power as the active force of life, of awareness. He said that it creates life and gives us the power to perceive. Power is endemic to perception. Power determines our perception. Two people can perceive the same room completely differently based upon their power. One person may be enjoying the moment and the other person may be living in memory. Buddhism is a study of perception.

Rama felt that perception is made up of bands. Power is the band that we perceive on. They are like radio frequencies. There are a range of bands for organic life. These include the human band, plant band, single celled life band, etc. There are other bands for the astral and causal dimensions. The band is life for those who exist within it.

He said that within each band there are many variations. We could say that there is a high end to the band and a low end. In the human band the low end is depression, alienation and despair. The top of the band is happiness and contentment. Buddhism is concerned with raising our perception to the top end of the human band and beyond into the enlightened band.

Rama believed that the things that each of us have done in our past lives have caused us to have a certain awareness. That is our past life karma. The skills that we learned in prior lives are stored inside of us like a book. We should work to recover the information that is stored inside of us. Past life remembrance is the ability to remember the skills that we had in prior lives. The actual memories of those lives aren't that useful. One aspect of power is the ability to bring our total awareness into this lifetime.

Power has many different forms. The general term for spiritual is kundalini. Kundalini opens up the bands of perception and allows us to see or feel other dimensions. It can be used to heal or to change events in our life. Kundalini can be used to rise above circumstances.

Buddhism and Kundalini

Rama explained that Buddhism is about changing who we are as perceivers. The ultimate goal is to reach the eternal, timeless enlightened side. To get there, Buddhism is a study of power. It takes a certain amount of power to know that we can change. More power to figure out how and even more to actually do it. One aspect of Buddhism is how to get, store and utilize power so that it creates benefit to ourselves and others.

The subtle physical body, which is a body of energy that exists in the astral dimension, contains a tube that runs along our spine. This astral nerve tube, called the shushumna, has junctions called chakras located along it. The kundalini can rise and fall along the shushumna. The level of the kundalini determines our level of awareness.

When we meditate the kundalini rises. But then it returns to a general level. For most people, the kundalini is locked up in the first chakra. Successful people learn to unlock the kundalini. Learning to consciously release the kundalini can allow us to become very successful.

In Buddhism we learn how to unlock the kundalini. It can allow us to have a successful life. But a Buddhist is looking to go beyond that.

A Buddhist seeks to use power to go into the happier states of mind and go beyond them to the enlightened states of mind. Power doesn't create happiness it just is. The proper use of power creates happiness for ourself and others. The best use of power is to do well and help others do well. There's enough room in this world for lots of people to succeed. Without spiritual balance and wisdom, power becomes very destructive. We need to develop control of our base instincts so that we don't abuse the power that we have gained.

Abuse of Power

Power is abused when its uses create unhappiness. When someone uses personal power to get ahead without regard for the welfare of others. Or when power is used to go into the lower dimensional planes. Power can be used to get ahead. When we use power to cause someone else not to succeed it slows us down which causes us to lose happiness. Rama cautioned us not to use our power to make others fail. His suggestion was to focus on our own success and on helping others.

Be aware that there are people who use power to interfere with the success of others. Don't worry about them, just avoid them. The intelligent use of power is to go around jerks. The best war is the one that is won without battle.

If we are afraid of someone then we give them an advantage over us. He said that we need to learn to not be afraid or people or to allow them to upset us.

Accessing Power

There are many different ways to access personal power. The food that we eat, the things that we do and the places we go all affect the level of our kundalini. Two ways that will be discussed here are places of power and meditation.

Places of Power

Every place has an energy associated with it. Some places are associated with wisdom, others with heart. Some places will leave you feeling tired or discouraged. Places of power can be used to gain and store kundalini. We make pilgrimages to the places of power to have experiences. There are lots of places of power in the southwestern United States.

Meditation

One of the best ways of accessing power is through meditation. By meditating on the naval chakra we can release kundalini. This is described in more detail in meditation document.