In 1967 Fred graduated from Rippowam High School. The following description of him appears in the yearbook: "A streak of the unusual—chasing the beautiful, hiding from the known. Cut-rate philosopher—monopoly on the side... "
At seventeen, Fred left the east coast and experienced the mushrooming of the psychedelic movement while living in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. It was during the subsequent year, which he spent in prison for selling drugs, that he was handed a promotional brochure for Indian guru Chinmoy Kumar Ghose. Chinmoy, whose path was paved with "peace, light, and bliss," had several hundred followers worldwide, including rock musicians John "Mahavishnu" McLaughlin and Carlos "Devadip" Santana.
Fascinated by Eastern philosophy and meditation techniques popularized in the late '60s, Fred returned to the east coast where he studied the art of quieting the mind with Chinmoy. He also studied English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. While still an undergraduate, he married and divorced a Chinmoy disciple named Pam, built dulcimers in a wood shop in his basement, joined the university debating team, and began hosting free public lectures on meditation.
Chinmoy, who often asked disciples to start "divine enterprises," asked this well-spoken, Phi Beta Kappa graduate to start a laundromat. When Fred chose instead to enroll in a Ph.D. program in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Chinmoy kicked him out of the Centre for roughly one year in an apparent attempt to teach him obedience and humility.
By the time I met Fred several years later, Chinmoy had dubbed him "Atmananda" or "Bliss-of-the-Soul," whereas the State University of New York at Stony Brook, after accepting his dissertation ("The Evolution of Matter and Spirit In The Poetry Of Theodore Roethke"), had bestowed upon him the title "Frederick Lenz, Ph.D."
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Fundamental to my research on Rama were my discussions with former disciples, some of whom I tracked down, and some of whom I happened to meet at movie theatres, airports, and gatherings of Amnesty International. Talking and writing about my experiences helped me to work out much of the emotional pain. Listening to what others had gone through also helped a great deal. But as I listened, I realized that my darkest fear had come true. Rama had been getting progressively worse.
In the fall of 1985, weeks after I left the Centre, Rama disbanded Lakshmi and encouraged roughly one hundred followers to move from Boston to Los Angeles. He directed these disciples to donate their time to his software company, Vishnu Systems.
In 1986, Rama moved from Boston to Seattle with about eight men and three inner circle women: Laura, Cindy, and Anne. Once they arrived in Seattle, Rama informed the three women that he had asked them along specifically to satisfy his sexual appetite. He told them that they were to be his "Geisha's." By then, he explained, he needed to sleep with two or three women at a time; an individual, he maintained, had too little "energy" to stimulate him.
He confessed to Anne that for most of his life something had been hurting him, keeping him down. He told her that during a recent trip to a family event, he saw that his aunt and uncle had been using their psychic powers all along to make him deathly ill and to try to kill him. He told her that I had been sending him a great deal of Negative Psychic Energy and that, in response, he had been sending me Entities so my life would be "miserable on a daily basis."