The Yuppie Guru

Frederick Lenz, a self-styled spiritual leader, urged his followers to go into computer programing. Today, he is a millionaire, with a mansion in Old Field and seven cars. But ex-disciples say the price for Lenz' 'enlightenment' was a life of fear and exploitation

By William B. Falk
Staff Writer
(July 30, 1991)

IN HIS PAST lifetimes, Frederick P. Lenz says, he taught occult secrets in ancient Egypt and meditation in Atlantis. "I've had hundreds of lifetimes as a spiritual teacher," Lenz has told his disciples.

In this lifetime, his disciples say, Lenz -- also known as "Zen Master Rama" -- has taught them everything a spiritual-minded American needs to know in the computer age:

How to empty the mind through meditation. How to dress for success. How to live in the Westchester and Fairfield County suburbs, drive a Mercedes Benz and earn upward of $100,000 a year as independent computer programers working on contract to such corporations as IBM, NYNEX and Salomon Brothers.

"He has experience and wisdom beyond my own experiences, and beyond anyone I've ever met," says David Laxer, a Great Neck High School graduate and a disciple of Lenz' since 1978. Thanks to Rama, Laxer says, he's now earning $1,000 a day -- more than $150,000 a year -- designing computer programs for Wall Street firms.

Lenz, too, is thriving. He lives as a bachelor in a million-dollar home on Conscience Bay in the North Shore village of Old Field, not far from the State University at Stony Brook, where he obtained his doctorate in English literature in 1978. Lenz tools around Long Island in the seven cars he keeps in New York: three Mercedes Benzes, two Porsches and two Range Rovers.

For a few days each month, Lenz gathers his 200 to 225 disciples for meetings of a group he calls Advanced Systems Inc. Lenz says that in his ASI seminars he teaches "a very intense course on how to make money" in computer programing. Each of his students, Lenz says, pays him $2,500 a month -- about $30,000 a year. If Lenz' figures are true, that gives him a gross annual income of at least $6 million.

"I make people a lot of money -- a lot of money," Lenz explains.

But former followers say it's not just the lure of worldly wealth that inspires his flock to pay Lenz millions of dollars each year. And it's not just his business savvy that has drawn them to follow Lenz in moves to a half-dozen cities, most recently, to the New York area in 1988.

Advanced Systems Inc., say former followers, is a front for a secretive, white-collar cult of suburban commuters who believe that the 41-year-old Lenz is "a fully enlightened being" and the last, earthly incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu.

"The yuppie guru," they say, has convinced his disciples that they're his best students from past lifetimes, with a chance in this one to escape the world's ignorance and suffering and enter into Enlightenment.

"He told us he was a fully enlightened, divine incarnation, like Jesus or the Buddha," says "Tracy," a student of Lenz' for six years. Fearing retaliation, she asked that her real name not be used. "He told us, 'You people are not like the other people in the world.' "

The price of admission to the next world, former students say, is complete obedience to the master in this one --including meeting ever-escalating demands for cash. Some of his most financially successful students are now paying him more than $70,000 a year, former students say.

"I thought he was enlightened, and I did everything he asked of me," says Mark Lurtsema, an ex-U.S. Marine who was a student of Lenz' from 1984 to 1990. "I gave up my kids. I went into computers. I moved wherever he asked me to move."

In recent weeks, Newsday interviewed eight of Lenz' former disciples. Collectively, the former disciples have studied with Lenz from 1978, when Lenz was pursuing his doctorate at Stony Brook and recruiting a small group of students; into the mid-1980s, when as "Zen Master Rama" Lenz was a highly publicized star on California's bustling New Age scene, lecturing to crowds of more than 1,000 people; and up to several months ago, after Lenz returned to Long Island, established the for-profit corporations National Personal and Professional Development Seminars and Advanced Systems Inc. and dropped out of the public eye.

The former disciples say that the upper-middle-class trappings of Lenz' disciples are a facade for a life of paranoia, deprivation and exploitation. Lenz, says former disciple Steve Putnam, is a man "on a power trip who loves to control people's lives."

Some female students say that Lenz initiated sexual relationships with them, telling them the experience would accelerate their spiritual advancement. Lisa Mercedes Hughes says that Lenz pressed her into a relationship with him in 1987, telling her that through sex he would impart his "high-vibratory energy" to her. Tracy says Lenz gave her the same rationale in 1990 when he invited her to his home and, she says, pressured her into having sex with him.

Parents of Lenz' followers say that Lenz persuades disciples to cut all ties to family, friends and everyone outside the group.

"People should know about this man," says Sue Egan. Her 18-year-old daughter, Kimberly, has been a disciple of Lenz' since she was 13 years old, when she began filling her bedroom with candles and pictures of Rama. Kimberly left Egan's San Diego home when she was 16 to move to New York to study with Lenz. She has cut off all contact with her mother, telling her that she had "negative energy."

"He's done something to her mind," Egan says. "He's an evil man."

The Cult Awareness Network, a Chicago-based organization that campaigns against so-called cult groups, calls Lenz' group "a New Age cult." CAN president Cynthia Kisser says Lenz uses belief-shaping techniques similar to those used by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Baghwan Shree Rajneesh and the Rev. Jim Jones.

Reached by telephone at his home, Lenz declined requests for a face-to-face interview, as well as repeated requests to allow a reporter to attend one of his seminars. In the two-hour phone conversation, Lenz said he was a victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by "disaffected members who are not very straight in their thinking," by spurned lovers, and by the Cult Awareness Network. CAN, he says "is to small religious groups what the KKK is to black people."

Lenz also provided four current students to be interviewed. Like other members of the group, they all work as independent programing consultants and live alone or with several other disciples in rented apartments in Westchester and Connecticut. They describe him as a kind, funny man of eclectic brilliance.

"What he teaches," says current disciple Brian Roe, "is how to be a Buddhist in America and succeed. And that really covers a lot of different areas."

For Roe, a black-belt martial-arts student who serves on Lenz' security team, success means earning more than $95-an-hour as a programer working on contract to such companies as IBM and the New York Commodities Exchange and driving a Mercedes Benz 300 SEL.

But former disciples and parents of current disciples say Lenz actually teaches neither true Buddhism nor computer science. What Lenz actually teaches, they say, is a cleverly woven web of beliefs that entrap his students into complete dependence.

They say Lenz has convinced his disciples he is responsible for any success they experience. He's also convinced them that, as his spiritually evolved students, they are stalked by demons and entities "from the lower occult" attracted to their special energy. These entities can haunt the dark corners of their homes and invade their dreams.

"He said, 'I'm the only way out,' " Lurtsema says. "He said, 'If you die, you'll go to the level of hell where these entities live.' " Ex-disciples say Lenz also told them he has the power to read minds and to give rebellious students cancer. Though exhausted, they say, they often shunned sleep to avoid being preyed upon by entities.

"There were entities in your house. There were entities in your dreams," says Tracy. "It was terrifying."

Terrified, former students say, they gave most of what they earned to Lenz in the form of tuition, gifts and special fees of as much as $10,000. "Stan," a former student who reached the highest spiritual level of Lenz' group, called ASI I, says his lifestyle was typical.

In his last year in the group, Stan -- who asked that his name be withheld because he fears both a professional stigma and possible retaliation -- earned about $160,000 on contract to such firms as Exxon, Merrill Lynch and Aetna. He drove a Mazda Miata and owned two $1,000 suits, as part of Lenz' strategy to present group members as successful.

But to keep up with Lenz' demands for cash, he spent virtually nothing on himself, sleeping on the floor in a barren room of a rented Greenwich, Conn., home that he shared with two other followers. He survived on candy, junk food and Jolt cola, the "high-energy" diet purportedly recommended by Lenz for productivity and fighting off entities. He slept only three or four hours a night.

He didn't file a tax return for three years.

"I thought it was more important to pay him than the IRS," Stan says. "I thought he was God."

Even as his disciples work frenetically in pursuit of cash, former disciples say, Lenz lives like an oil sheik. Lisa Mercedes Hughes, who lived with Lenz at a home he owned in Stony Brook in the summer of 1987, says she accompanied Lenz on a shopping spree in which he bought $17,000 worth of clothes in a single afternoon.

Last Christmas, Lenz' disciples gave him a black Bentley worth about $100,000. "That was real nice of them," Lenz said in the telephone interview. "This might sound li ke a lot if you work at McDonald's. In the world of upper-level computer science, this is nothing."

To reach the upper level of that lucrative world, former disciples say, Lenz encouraged his students to exaggerate their credentials, use each other as references and trick "head-hunter" companies into revealing their clients and going to them directly. "It was just total cutthroat," Lurtsema says. "It was all about making enough money to get to the next meeting."

In recent months, New York City firms that find computer consultants for major corporations have sounded an alarm over a mysterious group of programers that, the firms say, engage in a host of deceptive practices. The firms are faxing to each other a list of people they sarcastically call "the California raisins" because many have worked or lived in that state.

The list, obtained by this newspaper, includes the names of dozens of members of Lenz' group.

A computer-programing industry newsletter, "Job Express," recently said the "raisins" were "inserting themselves, virus-like, on accounts in the tri-state area, where they proceeded to wreak havoc." Firms say that while some of the "raisins" are highly competent programers, many others failed to demonstrate skills they claimed they had.

'THEY'RE JUST driving all of us crazy," says Gloria Harden of Alliance Systems, a firm that finds programing consultants for major corporations.

Lenz denies ever encouraging students to use deception to get jobs. Through his Los Angeles-based attorney, Warren Ettinger, and his public-relations representative, Lisa Lewinson, Lenz provided more than two dozen statements from current members attacking the credibility, morality and sanity of people who've left his group. The ex-disciples are accused of fathering children outside of marriage, failing to hold programing jobs, behaving irrationally and claiming they could see demons and entities.

In the telephone interview, Lenz acknowledged that he, too, believes in evil entities. "There are malefic forces in the universe, and they are sometimes attracted to people who are meditating," he says. But he says that some students have wrongly turned his teaching about entities into an obsession.

Lenz also acknowledges that he has slept with several former members, including Lisa Mercedes Hughes, Anny Eastwood and other female students

"I've dated lots of gals over the forty-one years I've lived and enjoyed it," Lenz says. "In some cases after dating them for a while I have terminated the association. In some cases, people are not happy about that."

"No one," Lenz says, "was pushed into a room and coerced."

Claims that he charges as much as $72,000 a year in tuition are "fantasyland," Lenz says. If some disciples' homes lack furniture, he says, it's not because of financial need: "I have no doubt that some of the people, being Buddhists, have a simple decor."

If all the allegations of ex-disciples were true, Lenz says, "this person would be a monster." But Lenz says he's no monster: He's a scholar, a self-taught computer hacker and a meditator "who has certainly experienced Enlightenment."

"I like cars. I like girls," Lenz says. "I'm just a fun, New Age guy."

* * *

His professors at Stony Brook knew him as "Goofy Fred," a graduate student in English literature who, from 1973 to 1978, spoke with equal fervor of mysticism and money and wrote books on psychic phenomena that he plugged on the Joe Franklin TV show.

"He was always coming to me with these book ideas and asking me, 'Do you think it will sell?' " says Professor Gerald Nelson, a member of the university's English faculty and the supervisor for Lenz' doctoral work. "My honest opinion was that he was a hustler. But I thought he was goofy and harmless."

The gangly Lenz, whose thin-featured, androgynous face was framed by a halo of curly hair, confined himself in class to the course work and to poet Theodore Roethke, the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Out of class, Lenz was the English department's resident mystic, telling friends about their past lives.

"I got a sense of someone who would read an audience carefully and give it what it wanted," Professor Paul Dolan says. Born in San Diego on Feb. 9, 1950, Lenz had come to Stony Brook from an upper-middle-class background in Connecticut. His father, Frederick P. Lenz Jr., was the mayor of Stamford, Conn., from 1973 to 1975. His parents divorced when Lenz was young.

Even in high school, Lenz displayed an interest in the esoteric. The 1967 yearbook of Rippowam High School described the graduating Lenz as "a streak of the unusual -- chasing the beautiful, hiding from the known. Cut-rate philosopher -- monopoly on the side."

In the late 1960s, Lenz made a pilgrimage to the bustling counter-culture scene in California, where, he said in a taped lecture, he used psychedelics and "power plants . . . based on the Tibetan book of the Dead, to experience Enlightenment."

In the recent interview, Lenz said that "the taking of psychedelics is not something I've engaged in."

At the same time he studied English at Stony Brook, Lenz studied Eastern philosophy and meditation under an Indian-born guru named Sri Chinmoy. Chinmoy, based at a Jamaica, Queens, ashram, teaches a Westernized form o

Hinduism, promotes physical fitness and claims almost-supernatural abilities. At Stony Brook, Lenz formed a group of about 20 Chinmoy disciples.

"He was enormously charismatic and extraordinarily funny," says Mark Laxer, who was among that early group of disciples and has recently completed a manuscript about his experiences in Lenz' group. "He understood people very well."

Laxer, at the time, was a straight-A student at Great Neck South High School and the editor of the school's newspaper. Introduced to Lenz by his older brother, David, a Stony Brook student, Mark attended Stony Brook so he could study with Lenz.

"He told me I was one of two people who could attain Enlightenment in this lifetime," Mark Laxer says.

The Laxers' parents, disturbed by their sons' fascination with Lenz, took them to talk to their rabbi. But Mark and David continued to view Lenz as the ultimate spiritual teacher.

In fact, David soon told his parents he would no longer communicate with them. He hasn't, for 10 years. Among Lenz' disciples, this is not uncommon; in lectures, Lenz has encouraged disciples to "put as much distance between you and your family as possible, unless, of course, you have an exceptionally enlightened family."

Shortly after Lenz completed his doctorate in 1978, he moved to San Diego, ostensibly to open a new ashram for Chinmoy. But he soon staged a "spiritual coup," unseating Chinmoy as the guru, and in 1983 Lenz announced that he was "Zen Master Rama" -- a reincarnated spiritual teacher.

In "The Last Incarnation," a book Lenz published that year, his disciples describe seeing the newly christened "Rama" levitate and make the moon and the stars disappear. He is quoted as telling the students, "You think I am a person, but I am not . . . This is my last incarnation."

RAMA'S TEACHINGS were a smorgasbord of Hinduism, Buddhism, "occult" notions about evil entities and ideas borrowed from best-selling author Carlos Casteneda's books about a Californian who becomes an apprentice of a Mexican Indian sorcerer. Rama, in one six-month period in 1987, spent an estimated $500,000 on advertising for a national tour, taking out double-page ads in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair.

Lenz' lectures, sometimes stretching from three to four hours, were delivered in a soft, slow, soothing monotone. Lenz told his audiences, dominated by idealistic college students, there was an alternative to living a life of doubt and suffering: attaining Enlightenment. "Enlightenment," Rama said in one taped lecture, "just means you've reached pure awareness, which is the mind of God."

He told students they could pursue Enlightenment by living through hundreds of lifetimes. Or they could reach it in a single lifetime, by becoming a disciple of an already enlightened being.

Lenz suggested that the hundreds of people in his audiences meditate along with him and watch him carefully.

"The whole room dissolved into a golden light," remembers Tracy, who was an 18-year-old college freshman when she attended her first Rama lecture in Los Angeles in 1984. "I saw his face change into an Indian warrior, a Buddhist monk . . . I was totally high. I couldn't wait to see him again."

Lurtsema, who had a similar experience, now believes that Lenz lulled him and other suggestible people into a hypnotic trance; he "saw" what Lenz suggested he'd see. Steve Hassan, a professional "exit counselor" for people who leave cult groups, agrees.

"Rama is a very good hypnotist," says Hassan, a former member of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and the author of a book, "Combating Mind Control." Hassan has listened to tapes of Lenz' lectures. "By timing your voice and your linguistic patterns to people's breathing, you can alter their consciousness and give them suggestions."

Over time, former disciples say, group pressure, isolation and Lenz' alternately charismatic and frightening presence combined to reshape their view of the world. They say Lenz dictated every aspect of their lives, including what they read and watched (newspapers and TV were forbidden).

But former students say they were not passive, brainwashed victims. "Part of it is a need to believe," says "Elizabeth," a disciple for five years. "He gives you a rule book with all the answers."

The steady following of the "yuppie Guru," as some called Lenz, eventually grew to about 900 people, scattered in Boston, Palo Alto and Los Angeles. And as his following and stature grew, ex-disciples say, Lenz' demeanor and treatment of his students began to change. Lenz had talked about computer programing as a desirable profession since the early 1980s, saying it was both lucrative and conducive to the Zen mind. But in the mid-1980s, he made it clear that "advanced" students should be actively studying computer languages.

As students began taking jobs in the field, Lenz' tuition costs climbed, from $125 to $400 to $600 for the series of meetings typically held once a month. Those who could not make payments, former disciples say, were banished or berated.

"Things got very heavy and oppressive," says Steve Putnam, another student of Lenz' at the time. "He was haranguing the group, saying, 'You're all going to live in hell!' "

Mark Laxer, who shared a house with Lenz, says he saw Lenz take LSD and it began to affect his behavior.

Hughes, who spent the summer of 1987 living with Lenzin a house in Stony Brook, says Lenz took LSD several times in her presence. Lenz denies ever taking LSD.

Once, Hughes says, Lenz dressed himself in yellow rain gear and Indian jewelry and went down to the basement "to combat the entities." She found him whirling wildly in an empty room, delivering karate chops to the air and knocking over furniture. "He was talking to them. He was saying, 'I got you!' "

Rumors periodically spread within the group that Lenz was having sex with some of the female disciples. In one lecture, Lenz chided disciples for gossiping "that I was making love to millions of women."

In that lecture, which was taped, Lenz said there was a great tradition among Eastern spiritual masters for prolific sexuality. He said in the lecture that he himself had outgrown monogamous relationships. "The relationships got better and better. And they meant less."

As the group's climate changed, some students left and began speaking of their experiences publicly. Their accusations led to a series of newspaper and magazine articles in 1987 and 1988.

Lenz, mounting a public-relations counter-offensive, appeared on "A Current Affair" and "The Larry King Show" to say the accusations were lies concocted by money-seeking deprogramers from the Cult Awareness Network.

Lenz' denials notwithstanding, the flurry of publicity caused an upheaval in the group. Some disciples left, and Lenz kicked out droves himself. For six months, he stopped lecturing and recruiting. "I think he wanted to filter out those who weren't totally dedicated," says Tracy.

When Lenz resumed teaching in 1988, he directed followers to move to Washington, D.C., and then, to the New York metropolitan area. About 250 to 275 people were left in the group, former disciples say. At Lenz' direction, they began fanning out into the booming computer-programing world, many of them armed with just six months' education as programers.

"It's the most amazing career that I know of," Lenz marvelled in an interview. "You can start in the mid-30s, and in a year or two you can make $100,000 to $150,000 a year."

* * *

During this time, Lenz returned to familiar territory, buying a relatively modest house on Christian Avenue in Stony Brook in 1987 for $247,500 in cash. He sold it in a year and bought another, more lavish home in nearby Old Field for $949,600 with a down payment of $300,000.

Lenz completely rebuilt the house, installing a pagodalike roof and floor-to-ceiling windows that provide sweeping views of Conscience Bay. The house is hidden from Old Field Road by trees and landscaping and is surrounded by a security system with in-ground sensors and a closed-circuit TV camera.

Neighbors and local police say Lenz lives quietly, occasionally coming and going in stretch limousines. He has been seen jogging, walking his Scottish terrier, Vayu, and meditating in a lotus position on his back lawn, which rolls down to the bay.

Lurtsema, who moved to New York in 1988, said Lenz told disciples they could not live on Long Island. "He said he didn't want us to lower the vibe." The high-vibed Lenz claims to be so sensitive to people's "auras" and vibrations that the proximity of normal people can cause him psychic distress.

At Lenz' urging, disciples rented apartments and houses in northern Westchester, close to IBM's headquarters and within easy commuting distance of Manhattan. More recently, many of them have moved to Fairfield County, Conn.

Lenz closed his seminars to the public and changed his recruiting tactics: The only new students allowed at seminars were those brought by current members.

Former disciples say they used elaborate schemes to fool potential employers in Manhattan's computer-programing industry. "We set up a fake answering service, and we'd lie for each other," Tracy says. "People would call up and I'd say, Oh yes, she worked for me. She a great programer. And they would get hired."

Though Lenz did not actually teach programing, former disciples say, he claimed to be making the students' success possible by channeling his special energy to them.

Some of Lenz' disciples flourished in the field, developing highly marketable skills through a combination of natural aptitude and 16-hour work days. Current disciple David Laxer, for example, says he's written software enabling Wall Street firms to manage hundreds of stocks.

"I'm not, like, living in delusions here," says Laxer, who says he often works from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. "They pay me a lot of money to write complicated software."

But former disciples, while acknowledging that David Laxer, Brian Roe and some other students are highly accomplished programers, say they are not the norm in the group. Most of the students, they say, struggled to find steady work.

One company that hired more than a dozen Lenz disciples, Image Business Systems of Manhattan, fired them after the collapse of a 1988 project to develop an imaging system for Avis Rent-A-Car.

John Rapuano, an IBS supervisor, said the programers affiliated with Lenz' group behaved erratically, insisting on working nights instead of days and drinking huge quantities of Jolt cola and double-caffeine coffee. "Nobody here understood what was going on until it was too late," says IBS president Jay Goldberg. "The quality of work performed by these people was very poor."

Lenz' current disciples say IBS wrongly blames the consulting programers, when it was mismanagement, unrealistic time pressure and "the purely profit-driven orientation of IBS upper management" that caused the failure of the project.

Despite setbacks, students continued to pursue contracts aggressively, making up with persistence what they lacked in skills. "He had us thinking we'd go to hell if we didn't do well, and to heaven if we did," Stan says. "So you didn't want to do anything but work."

Students who did not achieve even moderate success found Lenz to be neither patient nor sympathetic, former disciples say.

One student, Brenda Kerber, took out a $6,000 loan to take a programing course after she moved from California to Westchester, giving up custody of her son to study with Lenz, according to her father, James Barratt. Upon graduation, Kerber found a programing job with Orion Films in New York City. But she lost the job after two months.

Kerber disappeared from her White Plains apartment on Oct. 9, 1989. She left behind her car, her clothes and other belongings and a diary.

"It's a losing battle, I know," she wrote on May 7, 1989, "but I am concerned about my immediate future. By that, I mean, getting a job soon and having enough money to pay my seminar fees." When she approached Rama about a month later, she noted, he "was very stern and impersonal with me."

An investigation by the White Plains police failed to find any indication of Kerber's whereabouts. Her parents have had no sign of her for a year and a half. Lenz says she's no longer involved in his group.

Two months ago, a former member of the group committed suicide after telling her mother that she had failed Rama and had been abandoned by him.

The woman's mother, a Los Angeles attorney, said her daughter spoke incessantly of Rama and of making enough money to get back into the group.

"She believed he was a miraculous being," her mother said, speaking on the condition that her daughter's name not be published. "She believed that he was the only person who could help her. No amount of intensive treatment could free her of him."

LENZ SAYS many of the students who failed to do well were simply unrealistic or lazy. "People turn you into a savior or a sexual fantasy partner," he says. "But as time goes on, the thing I teach people to do is work.

"Are you doing your meditation every day? Are you reaching a new level? Are you getting a new job?"

But former disciples say that no matter how much money they made, it was never enough. Lenz, they say, raised monthly tuition for top students from $1,500 to $2,500 and then to $5,000. He recently raised it again, to $6,000, they say. Last year, they say, Lenz demanded that each of his best students give him a one-time gift of $250,000 by March 21, 1991. Lenz purportedly dropped the demand when no one could come up with that much cash.

In the past two years, about two dozen people have left the group, largely because of the relentless financial pressure and increasingly vitriolic rhetoric from Lenz, ex-disciples say. They say he frequently speaks angrily of a host of enemies and accuses students of failing him. "He's saying, 'You don't understand who I am! You can get in big trouble by being sloppy fools,' " says Stan.

Some former disciples worry that Lenz' two- decades-long evolution from pop philosopher to all-powerful guru might have a disastrous ending.

In Hindu mythology, Rama's last incarnation ushers in the end of the world.

"He's made comments like, 'Who knows, someday we'll all go out to the desert and never come back,' " Tracy says. "He said, 'The highest way to die is to die in the presence of an enlightened being.' "

Lenz says his plans for the future are quite benign. He's instructing his students how to go into the growing field of artificial intelligence and how to form small programing corporations of their own so they can increase their incomes to $250,000 a year. "I'm a very serious capitalist," Lenz says. "I hope to make a vast fortune in computer science."

Why, he asks, must failed students and ex-girlfriends and the Cult Awareness Network continue to persecute him? All he wants is to teach, travel, meditate and, when he has the time, date women who share his interests.

"I have a great life," Lenz says. "I'm one of the happier people I know."

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