Then Jackson found out who Frederick Lenz was. “You wouldn’t believe the volumes of information I’ve received,” he said last week, “the pleas asking me not to lend credibility to this guy. This whole or-deal leaves me dumbfounded.” Three weeks ago he asked St. Martin’s Press to pull his name from all materials. “The message is fine,” he says. “The messenger, is a guy who’s done some things I don’t agree with.”
Lenz, 45, is by his own account a novelist, electronic musician, software developer, Ph.D, Phi Beta Kappa, karate black belt, meditation teacher, snow-boarder, scuba diver and one of the dozen or so enlightened beings on the planet. Endowed with soap-opera good looks and buttery patter, Lenz seems to delight in few things so much as reciting his resume. “I am an American. I like cars, I like gals, I like success,” he said last week from the Netherlands Antilles, where he was scuba diving. Others, though, are less charitable. “He’s one of the better-organized cults and has created a monstrous conspiracy in the minds of his followers that their parents are evil,” says Joseph Szimhart, a Pennsylvania “exit counselor” who says he has helped dozens of followers leave Lenz.
Cult o’ Rama: In the ’80s, under the name Rama, or Zen Master Rama, Lenz built a following and a fortune offering college students and Yuppies a “fast path” to enlightenment. Recently, he’s held high-priced computer seminars. Since 1988, a handful of defectors have painted Lenz as a cult leader who used them sexually and financially. Ex-follower Trina Walker tells a common story: “I learned that he was sleeping with all my friends,” says Walker, who never had sex with Lenz. “He claimed it was a really special honor to sleep with him, and that we didn’t have the right karma. He was supposed to be god and he really took advantage of these girls.” Lenz and several female supporters deny any sexual impropriety. “If dated a few of the gals,” he admits. “And naturally when you break up with someone they’re not pleased about it.”
“Surfing the Himalayas” itself is a bland but harmless Zen primer. For all the bluster of its ads–“A Runaway Best Seller!”–the book’s sale have been modest. “It’s a ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ of the ’90s,” Lenz trumpets. “There’s a reason 250,000 people like the book. “In truth, last week the book fell to No. 144 on USA Today’s best-seller list, with just over 110,000 copies in print. That isn’t bad. But as with many of Len’z promises, it isn’t Nirvana, either.
