Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz:

We want to be all things, not just to gain power over things — how infantile! The challenge of power is how to use it and not abuse it. When you abuse it, it reverses on you and it hurts you. When willpower is not guided, it’s terrible. Hitler had a lot of will. But he used it for destructive purposes because he lacked wisdom. Power, people are obsessed with it. You can take a nice person and turn them into a slob, into an insane being, craving power, destroying anything that stands in their way. People want power but not wisdom. Power without wisdom is a very dangerous thing. Better to have wisdom first. Without wisdom, power tends to destroy the one who wields it.

Without wisdom, a powerful person does not become more powerful. Their power will turn back on them and eventually destroy them. So those who are truly wise become most powerful. Whatever you want you can get, when you understand the secret of will. But wisdom is needed so that you do not use your will abusively because you’ll get hurt. Say, for example, you develop the ability to make parking meters disappear. It’s probably easier to put a quarter in it. That would be the wisdom on the subject. If you use your will all the time, then it runs out. You deplete yourself and then, when you really need it, it’s not there.

If you try to pull too much power through too soon, you will injure yourself. Some come to a teacher for power. They still have all the desires, angers and jealousies of an unevolved person. Consequently, they become destructive both to themselves and to others. The big problem with power, of course, is obsession. Once you get some of it and feel it, it dominates your whole life and it’s all you can think about. That doesn’t have to happen. We must control the tendencies within our being that are destructive, when we want to slam somebody else, hurt them, injure them, or push them out of the way.

A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred. Someone who really wants to discover themselves has to be particularly careful about the use and abuse of power. But even your average human being just passing through another life has to be careful. A person who has power doesn’t seek to challenge others, their battles are within. Only the fool wants to go into battle to beat someone for the satisfaction of beating someone. When you abuse willpower you waste it. There really is not an infinite supply of it at your disposal. There is an infinite supply of it in the universe.

The person of power uses their power to open up their mind to higher levels all the time, which creates tremendous happiness. Power is something that is abused. I suppose use and abuse are in the eye of the beholder. There is a difference between willing and forcing. Willing something simply means you are not being lazy. Forcing something means you are trying to do something inappropriate or in an inappropriate way. I would define the proper use of power as something that creates happiness for yourself and others. The abuse of power takes happiness away. It is not necessary to wrap people up. The reason you’re doing it is because you don’t have enough power. If you had enough power, you could unlock your own personal power, you wouldn’t need to control others.

It takes a lot of energy to manipulate someone and keep them on a string. We see a lot of people who decide to go out and teach meditation. They become so wrapped up in it that they stop progressing themselves and they really don’t have that much more to teach. It is a tremendous waste of energy to try to block anyone else. That same energy could be applied to furthering your own success. When we use power to cause someone else not to succeed so that we can succeed, it slows our vibratory frequency. It slows us down. When we slow down we experience unhappiness. A student of mine is an actor, he used to go into these interviews and sometimes not get the part. He was “taken out”. Someone would use power in a way that would cause him not to succeed.

We learn to avoid blocking others, interfering with others, because that will decrease our happiness, slow our vibratory rate and generally bring us down and make us miserable. You have to look at your own thought forms. Are you sitting around and thinking a lot of negative thoughts? These injure the subtle body. When you hate, when you are angry, you bring that energy through you. When you become angry at someone, your anger will actually have a power. You can hit somebody in a non-physical way and it can injure that being. You must control your anger and jealousy and possessive nature or, as you become more powerful and your will increases in strength, you will injure others.

When you think an angry thought about someone, it’s like hitting them. If you hold a negative thought, then it will become more powerful and not only will it send bad energy to the person, but it will crash your consciousness. People who have power who think negatively of others and seek to injure them are practicing a kind of voodoo, a lower sorcery. Those who practice lower sorcery hurt themselves the most because they interact with negative thoughts and apply power to them; they devastate their own consciousness and their own lives. Deluded beings think that if they get in a battle with a Zen Master or with a Don Juan, that it’s going enhance their life if they win. You can never take power from someone else any more than you can take sunlight.

If you get in a battle with someone, you don’t get their power if you win. Power is something that you have to acquire yourself, through self-inquiry and the practice of meditation. The bully on the block who beats up somebody doesn’t become more powerful. All they do is walk around inside their own mind with an inflated ego. You have been imprinted by people in this world who take power from others. Most people drain each other. Or, what is worse, they are draining you right now, psychically! Most people abuse power. They use power to dominate others. They use power to destroy others. Ultimately when you do this, you lose it.

You can take power from others; you can steal it. It is not a very high-grade power. It will give you a certain amount of access to a better life; but it corrupts the individual. The person who takes power will never be happy with those things they gain. They have lost their essential balance and innocence. And without innocence, nothing can further, as they say in the I Ching. It is silly to drain others; for when you drain others, you also pick up their vibratory force. People who want to go to power places all of the time and want to be around powerful people, they don’t last long in the study.

When you do things in a selfish way, let alone a destructive way, your state of mind will go down. You will find yourself becoming depressed, nervous, anxious and upset. If you have gained some powers by your entrance into other dimensions and you use them to attack others, then power reverses on you and pulls you apart because it is not supposed to be used that way. I don’t put much stock in powers that people have to hurt others, in sorcery and all this nonsense. There are murderers and there are dictators. That is just a part of life. The intelligent use of power in yoga can assist you avoiding that side of humanity.

Angry people, unhappy people, people that seek to injure others, these people all have something in common. They waste energy. They don’t conserve it and they don’t know how to increase it. So the intelligent use of power is to never interfere with anyone else’s success. Use the power you get to just be more successful yourself. When you manipulate others your attention level drops and you become prey, for you have dropped to the plane of manipulation. The abuse of power that seems to create the most unhappiness is when a person uses personal power to get ahead without regard for the welfare of others, or when power is used to go into lower dimensions.

If you abuse power, you will be burned and then you will learn.if you live. Jealousy, anger, fear — these are ridiculous emotions that drain your power. You need to control them by being content, trusting that life knows what is best, accepting with an even mind whatever is presented to you. How do you overcome the negative karmas and problems and misery that occur to people who abuse power? You stop abusing power. The teacher has nothing to do with people who use their mental powers to block the enlightenment of others. These people lack control. What can you teach someone who lacks control?

Some people travel to other dimensions in their astral bodies when they meditate. Astral traveling doesn’t bring a person lasting happiness. If astral traveling is not done properly, it can be quite dangerous. Meditation is not this kind of spacey stuff that makes it difficult to orient your life. If that’s your experience of meditation, you’re not meditating. You’re tapping into the lower astral planes, which is not a healthy place for human beings to tap. There is a large difference between spacing out in the lower occult astral planes, weird, junky, fuzzy energy, and meditation. Meditation is sharp, clear, precise, perfect, luminous, shiny, happy, etheric, cosmic, and dissolute. The world is wonderful. It is beautiful when you are in a correct level of attention.