Sunday, May 27, 2012

ST. JEROME

St. Jerome’s maxim above, continues to be true today as it was in the third and fourth centuries. The Second Vatican Council included it in its Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum paragraph 25) and the Catechism of the Catholic Church includes it in its section on Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church (paragraph 133).

The central issue is the Old Testament Canon or books. The Catholic canon is taken from the Septuagint (Greek version) which contained the full canon as attested to by a number of ancient documents and Councils. The Protestants use the version that was translated and compiled at the Jewish Council of Jamnia sometime between 90-100 A.D. The Council was convened due to the Christians using the Septuagint to proselytize the Jews. Additional, they adopted a “canonical authenticity” rule that said that only books written in Israel and in Hebrew could be admitted. Oddly enough, the Hebrew liturgical language at the time was Greek. A little know fact is that the Council was composed of Pharisees and Sadducees – though the Sadducees had the majority vote. In addition to the text not being deemed “canonical” due to language and location, all the text omitted contain text that address the resurrection of the body. As you know, the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the body. Modern findings seem to indicate this was more of the reason for Jamnia excluding the texts. Just a post script, the King James version of Scripture contained a full canon until 1863.

CRITERIA OF A GURU

DISCOURSES ON TANTRA
Shrii Shrii Anandamurtii
 
Perhaps you know that the word guru is a very old Vedic word. It means "one who dispels darkness". Now, this expression "one who dispels darkness" is often used without deeper understanding. This darkness actually belongs not only to the psychic stratum or the spiritual stratum, but to all strata of human existence. That is, darkness prevails in all the three strata -- in the crude physical sphere, in the psychic sphere, and in the spiritual sphere. So a guru will necessarily have to be able to remove darkness from all three strata. If he teaches the alphabet or some academic matter to students, he will be called a teacher -- teacher in the academic sense. That will not do. If, again, he removes darkness from the psychic world, he imparts intellectual knowledge to his followers, that will not be enough either. And if, finally, he dispels darkness only from the spiritual stratum of his disciples, that will not do either. The fact is that a guru — if one is to be accepted as a real guru — shall have to remove darkness from all the strata of the physical world, all the strata of the psychic world, and also all the strata of the spiritual world.

Now let us look at the spiritual world. In the spiritual world, he alone can be a guru who can lift downtrodden humanity to a high spiritual level, who can illumine humanity with spiritual effulgence. That is, only a Maha'kaola has the requisite qualification to be a guru, others cannot be gurus.

In order to be an ideal guru in the spiritual sphere, one must be throughly conversant with the minutest details of sa'dhana', every aspect of sa'dhana', important or unimportant. The guru must not only learn those things, but must also possess the capacity to teach those practices to others. Otherwise he should not be treated as a guru. The Maha'kaola alone has this capacity, no one else. Kaolas are those who by dint of sa'dhana' have successfully elevated their microcosmic stance and established it in the Macrocosmic one; but a Maha'kaola is one who is a kaola, certainly, but at the same time possesses the capacity to help others as well to get to that exalted kaola position. In the past Lord Shiva was one such Maha'kaola. Lord Krs'n'a was another. To be a guru one must be a Maha'kaola.

One must possess knowledge regarding sa'dhana', not only thorough knowledge of the sha'stras [scriptures]. And in order to gain thorough scriptural knowledge, one must know as many important languages as are necessary for the purpose. That is to say, it is not enough that a guru acquire the necessary qualifications to be able to teach sa'dhana' (that is, impart lessons on the practical cult); he must possess adequate knowledge of theory also. That is, in order to know the inner secret of sa'dhana', he must possess thorough and authentic scriptural knowledge; then only should he be accepted as a perfect guru in the spiritual sphere. One who has a fairly good knowledge of sa'dhana' and can also help others in that realm, but is completely devoid of intellect, or knowledge of languages and scriptures, cannot be a perfectly competent guru in the spiritual sphere; for, being a guru, he will have to explain the theoretical side also. If, suppose, I say to someone, "Do this," I should also explain why he or she should do that, and at the same time I should be able to support it in the light of the sha'stras.

You may raise the question, "What is a sha'stra?" You might point to a voluminous book and call it a sha'stra, but that would be misleading. Sha'stra in the true sense means, Sha'sana't ta'rayet yastu sah sha'strah parikiirtitah -- that is, "Sha'stra is that which disciplines and liberates humans." So a guru must be well versed in sha'stra, otherwise he cannot show the right path to humankind. The term guru would be a misleading misnomer -- which is never desirable. Sha'stra does not necessarily mean the Vedas; it means the way to emancipation through inculcation of rigorous discipline; it is something that prevents one from taking license in the name of liberty. It means clear instructions that guide everyone along the path, that lead to attainment of prosperity and welfare.

Sha'sana't. What is this sha'sana? Does it mean torture? No. Does it mean punishment? No. Does it mean atonement?  No. Not at all. Here sha'stra means anusha'sana. What is anusha'sana? Hita'rthe sha'sanam anusha'sanam -- that is, "Anusha'sanam means that degree of rectificatory punishment which will be conducive to one's well-being."

A spiritual guru must be well-acquainted with all the processes of sa'dhana', must have the capacity to convince others, must possess complete knowledge of the scriptures, must know many languages, and must have comprehensive knowledge and intellect, plus some extra qualifications. What are those qualifications? Nigraha'nugrahe shakto gururityabhidhiiyate -- "the guru must possess the capacity both to punish, and to love, or bless, his disciples." Punishment alone, without love, is not good. Love and punishment should go together, and the degree of punishment should never exceed the degree of love. Then  only  can  one be called a real spiritual guru.

I have already said that a guru must be an authority on all subjects in all the three strata:

As a spiritual guru, he must be thoroughly versed in spiritual science -- both the theory and the practice. He must know how Parama Purus'a associates Himself with jiivas [unit beings]; and he must know how jiivas associate themselves with Parama Purus'a (they associate themselves just as the Ganges merges into the Bay of Bengal). Otherwise, how can he teach this science to others?

And who knows this science? Only Parama Purus'a knows it, because He Himself has created everything. He has created our sense organs, and He has created the tanma'tras* that our sense organs detect. He can create anything He likes. But remember, He does not do anything. His "doing" means His thinking. Things will take shape as He thinks. No one but Parama Purus'a knows how He does it. So how can people know Parama Purus'a if He does not teach to others the science of knowing Him? Only Parama Purus'a knows the science and the method to realize Him, to know Him; because He has created both human beings and the path that they must move along. So people can know the method by His grace only. Hence it has been said in A'nanda Su'tram,** Brahmaeva Gururekah na'parah -- that is, "Brahma alone is the Guru." Through His physical structure, He teaches the actual science to the spiritual aspirants. People should clearly understand this.

There are many people who are prone to think that in the spiritual realm there is no need to acquire intellectual knowledge for God-realization; and in support of their thesis they mention the names of some great men. Now it is true that for God-realization, academic qualification may not be necessary at all: there is no differentiation between a learned person and a foolish one. But in order to be a guru, one must be a learned person. God-realization is not enough for a guru, he must possess other qualifications as well. So a person who is devoid of learning and scriptural knowledge and the capacity to teach others, and the twin capacities to punish and reward his disciples, should never be accepted as a spiritual guru. A guru does not mean only a spiritual guru, he must be a guru for the intellectual and physical worlds also.

After the spiritual sphere comes the psychic sphere, which is cruder than the former. That is, the guru must be aware of the nature of the human mind -- what it is made of, how it should be elevated step by step from crude to subtle, how all the unit minds can march together in unison towards the goal -- in a word, he must know both the theoretical and the applied sides of psychology. He must know a thousand times more than is written in books. He must assimilate everything through his own refined intellect. And then only can he teach others perfectly. That shows that he must be not only a spiritual guru, but also a guru in the psychic world. There is a sense of want in the human mind. One who can remove the sense of want is a guru. In order to qualify as a guru, one must have the power to remove psychic wants.

As in the spiritual sphere, so also in the psychic sphere, a guru must be learned. He should be well-versed in the humanities; in fact, in all branches of human knowledge. In order to be a spiritual guru, it will be sufficient that he have mastery over scriptural treatises; but to be a guru in the psychic sphere, he must be well-versed in all branches of human knowledge. A limited knowledge of a few scriptures will not do. And simultaneously, he must be conversant with the style in which the human mind functions, as also in the method to control and guide it properly.

Next comes the physical world. The followers, the disciples, of the guru, are men and women of flesh and blood having physical structures. They have their sorrows and miseries, their tears and smiles. This is their life. They have their problem of food and clothing; they have their pleasures and pains, their tears of pain and tears of joy; they become elated in happy circumstances and depressed when things go wrong. It is the duty of a guru to provide his followers with the wherewithal for their progress. This is what an ideal guru is to do in the physical sphere. As a guru in the physical world, he will have to teach mankind such techniques as will solve their wordly problems -- problems of food, clothing, education and medical treatment. A guru must see to it that their mundane problems are solved.

So in order to be a guru, one must come onto this earth with the highest qualifications in the spiritual field, and with the greatest capacity to face the mountainous obstacles in the physical world. To shoulder the responsibility of a guru is not child's play.



15 March 1981 DMS, Ramrajatala
A'nanda Vacana'mrtam
(Blissful Discussion)

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LOST AND REJECTED SCRIPTURES


APOCALIPSIS 13:18 (666)

Mula sa: ANG BAGONG TIPAN ng ating Mananakop at Panginoong Jesucristo, Isinalin sa Wikang Pambansa mula sa Vulgata Latina (Latin Vulgate) ni P. Juan T. Trinidad, S.J., S.T.L., S.S.D. Doktor sa Banal na Kasulatan --- CATHOLIC TRADE SCHOOL, Manila 1966 --- TUNGKOL SA 666
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KARMA

A doctrine common to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Theosophy, although not wholly adopted by Theosophists as taught in the other two religions. The word karma itself means ‘‘action,’’ but implies both action and reaction. All actions have consequences, some immediate, some delayed, others in future incarnations, according to Eastern beliefs. Thus individuals bear responsibility for all their actions and cannot escape the consequences, although bad actions can be expiated by good ones.

Action is not homogeneous, but on the contrary contains three elements: the thought, which conceives the action; the will, which finds the means of accomplishment; and the union of thought and will, which brings the action to fruition. It is plain, therefore, that thought has potential for good or evil, for as the thought is, so will the action be. The miser, thinking of avarice, is avaricious; the libertine, thinking of vice, is vicious; and, conversely, one thinking of virtuous thoughts shows virtue in his or her actions.

There is also a viewpoint which believes that karma comes not from the action itself, but the beliefs and feelings which motivate or allow the action. ‘‘The law of karma is not a justice and retribution system, so anyone who has had much suffering in this life is not a victim of ‘bad karma,’ but simply finds themselves in predicaments that are simply the result of their own beliefs about themselves.’’

Arising from such teaching is the attention devoted to thought power. Using the analogy of the physical body, which can be developed by regimen and training based on natural scientific laws, Theosophists teach that character, in a similar way, can be scientifically built up by exercising the mind.

Every vice is considered evidence of lack of a corresponding virtue—avarice, for instance, shows the absence of generosity. Instead of accepting that an individual is naturally avaricious, Theosophists teach that constant thought focused on generosity will in time change the individual’s nature in that respect. The length of time necessary for change depends on at least two factors: the strength of thought and the strength of the vice; the vice may be the sum of the indulgence of many ages and therefore difficult to eradicate.

The doctrine of karma, therefore, must be considered not in relation to one life only, but with an understanding of reincarnation. In traditional Hinduism individuals were seen as immersed in a world of illusion, called maya. In this world, distracted from the real world of spirit, one performs acts, and those actions create karma—consequences. In traditional teaching the goal of life was to escape karma. There was little difference between good and bad karma. Karma kept one trapped in the world of illusion.

During the nineteenth century, Western notions of evolution of life and the moral order were influenced by Indian teachings. Some began to place significance upon good karma as a means of overcoming bad karma. The goal gradually became the gaining of good karma, rather than escape. Such an approach to reincarnation and karma became popular in Theosophy and Spiritism, a form of Spiritualism.

Western scholars have often mistakenly viewed karma and fate as the same concept. Fate, however, is the belief that the path of one’s life is established by agencies outside oneself. Karma is the opposite, implying the ability to alter one’s path of life—in a future life if not the present—by altering one’s feelings and beliefs, and by engaging in positive practices. ‘‘It is the coward and the fool who says this is fate,’’ goes the Sanskrit proverb. ‘‘But it is the strong man who stands up and says, ‘‘I will make my fate.’’

According to this view, reincarnation is carried on under the laws of karma and evolution. The newborn baby bears within it the seeds of former lives. His or her character is the same as it was in past existences, and so it will continue unless the individual changes it, which he or she has the power to do. Each succeeding existence finds that character stronger in one direction or another. If it is evil the effort to change it becomes increasingly difficult; indeed a complete change may not be possible until many lifetimes of effort have passed. In cases such as these, temptation may be too strong to resist, yet the individual who has knowledge of the workings of karma will yield to evil only after a desperate struggle; thus, instead of increasing the power of the evil, he helps to destroy its potency. Only in the most rare cases can an individual free himself with a single effort.

The karmic goal in reincarnation, however, is said not necessarily to raise the soul to a higher plain of existence, but entreat enlightenment to reign at whichever level of existence the soul happens to find itself. ‘‘Many. . .see the process of enlightenment as ‘‘ascension’’; it is in fact more true to say that it is a process of descension, that is bringing the light down to all levels.’’


Sources:
Abhedananda, Swami. Doctrine of Karma: A Study in the Philosophy
and Practice of Work. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math,1965.

Carus, Paul. Karma: A Study of Buddhist Ethics. La Salle, Ill.:
Open Court, 1894.

Feuerstein, George. The Shambala Guide to Yoga. Boston and
London: Shambala, 1996.

Glasenapp, Helmuth von. The Doctrine of Kerman in Jain Philosophy.
Bombay: Bai Vojibai Jivanial Panalal Charity Fund, 1942.

Hanson, Virginia, ed. Karma: The Universal Law of Harmony.
Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975.

Jast, L. Stanley. Reincarnation and Karma. Secaucus, N.J.:
Castle Books, 1955.

‘‘Karma: Meaning and Definition.’’ Hinduism Today June 19,
1994, http://www.spiritweb.org/.

Payne, John. ‘‘Reincarnation & Karma.’’ January 1, 1995
http://www.spiritweb.org/ .

Reichenbach, Bruce R. The Law of Karma: A Philosophical
Study. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Sharma, I. C. Cayce, Karma and Reincarnation. Wheaton, Ill.:
Theosophical Publishing House, 1975.

Silananda, U. An Introduction to the Law of Karma. Berkeley,
Calif.: Dharmachakka Meditation Center, 1990.

Torwesten, Hans. Vedanta: Heart of Hinduism. New York:
Grove Weidenfeld, 1985.

Woodward, Mary Ann. Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma. New
York: Coward-McCann, 1971.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

MISBAHA (Tasbih)

 A misbaha (Arabic: مسبحة), sibha (Arabic:سبحة), Tasbeeh (Urdu), or tespih (Albanian, Turkish and Bosnian) is a string of prayer beads which is traditionally used by Muslims to keep track of counting in tasbih. The Misbaha is also known as Tasbih (تسبيح) -not to be confused with Tasbih a type of dhikr-in non-Arab Muslim regions or Sibha in some Arabic dialects e.g. Libyan Arabic. In Turkey, the beads are known as Tespih.

A misbaha is a tool used to perform dhikr, including the 99 Names of Allah, and the glorification of God after regular prayer.

It is often made of wooden beads, but also of olive seeds, ivory, amber, pearls or plastic. A misbaha usually consists of 99 beads (corresponding to the 99 Names of Allah), or sometimes 33 beads (in which case one cycles through them 3 times to equal 99).

HISTORY
It is thought that in the early Muslim era loose pebbles were used or that people counted on their fingers. According to the 17th century allamah Muhammad Baqir Majlisi, after the Battle of Uhud, Fatimah would visit the Martyrs' Graveyard every two or three days and then made a misbaha of Hamza's tomb soil. After that, people started making and using Misbhas. 
Followers of Wahhabism disapprove of the misbaha, arguing that Muhammad only used the fingers of his right hand and this is how all Muslims should pray. It is said that the 33-bead misbaha represents, to Christians, the 33 years of Christ's earthly existence, while those of 99 beads represent the 33 years multiplied by the three manifestations of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost.


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misbaha 


MALA & ROSARY

The rosary is an ancient spiritual tool. Throughout the Far East, rosaries are called malas and consist of 108 beads. For spiritual disciplines, rosaries are used the same way regardless of the religious tradition: primarily to count the number of repetitions (japa) of the mantra or prayer. While 108 beads had been used in Vedic malas for thousands of years before the birth of Jesus, the Catholic Church adopted fifty-four beads, one-half mala, plus a pendant consisting of five beads. (While this five-decade version is the most familiar, the “full” rosary consists of fifteen decades of beads plus the pendant.) One might say, for example, that one has performed twenty rosaries or ten malas of a specific prayer or mantra. As any practicing Roman Catholic can tell you, saying the rosary is a powerful experience”.

HEALING MANTRAS, by Thomas Ashley Farrand

Monday, March 26, 2012

SWAMI SATCHIDANANDA --- Stripping the Gurus

SWAMI SATCHIDANANDA WAS THE FOUNDER of the Yogaville ashram in Buckingham County, Virginia—begun in 1979—and its satellite Integral Yoga institutes in New York, San Francisco and else-where.

He was born in southern India in 1914 and married young but, after his wife’s death, left his children and embarked at age twenty-eight on a full-time spiritual quest.

In 1949 he was initiated as a swami by his own spiritual master, the renowned Swami Sivananda, having searched the mountains and forests of India to find that sage in Rishikesh. His monastic name, Satchidananda, means “Existence-Knowledge-Bliss.”

He came to New York in 1966 as a guest of the psychedelic artist Peter Max.

Word soon spread that Satchidananda had cured the kidney ailment of a disciple by blessing a glass of water.

He spoke at Woodstock in 1969, having been flown in via helicopter to bless the historic music festival:

I am very happy to see that we are all gathered to create some “making” sounds, to find that peace and joy through the celestial music. I am honored for having been given the opportunity of opening this great, great music festival (Sat-chidananda, in [Wiener, 1972]).

Even prior to Woodstock, Satchidananda had sold out Carnegie Hall, being viewed as one of the “class acts” in the spiritual marketplace.

His views on nutrition were solicited by the Pillsbury Corporation.

By the beginning of the 1970s, thousands of Integral Yoga devotees studied at fifteen centers around the United States. By the late ’70s, Satchidananda’s (1977) followers numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Included in that group have been the health and diet expert Dr. Dean Ornish, model Lauren Hutton, Jeff “The Fly” Goldblum, and Carol “You’ve Got a Friend” King, who donated Connecticut land to the yogi’s organization.

Having acquired other, warmer property for Yogaville in Vir-ginia, Sivananda Hall was built there, complete with a wooden throne for the guru, set atop a large stage at one end of the hall. Life for the poorer “subjects” within that 600-acre spiritual king-dom, however, was apparently less than regal:

The ritual abnegations of the sannyasin [monks] included a pledge to “dedicate my entire life and renounce all the things which I call mine at the feet of Sri Gurudev [i.e., Satchida-nanda]. This includes my body, mind, emotions, intellect, and all the material goods in my possession.” Though they weren’t expected to pay for basics like food and lodging, they were relegated to rickety trailers sometimes infested with mice or lice (Katz, 1992).

In the midst of his followers’ reported poverty, Satchidananda himself nevertheless acquired an antique Cadillac and a cherry red Rolls-Royce.

Further, and somewhat oddly given Satchidananda’s Wood-stock background, in the ashram itself dozens of onetime children of rock ‘n’ roll sat down to make lists of “offensive” songs and television shows to be banned within Yogaville’s borders. Soon after, dating between ashram children was banned through the end of high school. Then all children attending the ashram school were asked to sign a document pledging that they would not date, have sexual contact, listen to restricted music, or watch restricted television shows.

Satchidananda never came forth to comment formally on the new restrictions, but residents understood that the rules carried his implied imprimatur (Katz, 1992).

With those restrictions in place, an ashram member was soon reported for listening to a Bruce Springsteen album.

Increasingly oddly, given all that: Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of the power-pop band Weezer, spent much of his first ten years in Yogaville.

* * *

Some people take advantage of the language in the tantric scriptures, “I’m going to teach you tantric yoga,” they say. “Come sleep with me.” With a heavy heart I tell you that some so-called gurus do this, and to them I say, “If you want to have sex, be open about it. Say, ‘I love you, child, I love you, my devotee’”....

Yoga monks automatically become celibate when they have a thirst to know the Absolute God, and feel that in order to do so they must rise above the physical body and the senses (Satchidananda, in [Mandelkorn, 1978]).

[T]he distinguishing mark of a Guru is, as Sri Swamiji [i.e., Satchidananda] says, “complete mastery over his or her body and mind, purity of heart, and total freedom from the bond-age of the senses” (in Satchidananda, 1977).

The taking of the monastic vows in which the title of “Swami” is conferred again inherently includes a vow of celibacy. That serious promise, however, may not have stopped the “Woodstock Swami” from, as they say, “rocking out,” via Springsteen’s The Rising or otherwise:In 1991 numerous female followers stated that he had used his role as their spiritual mentor to exploit them sexually. After the allegations became public many devotees abandoned Satchidananda and hundreds of students left IYI schools, but the Swami never admitted to any wrongdoing.

As a result, the Integral Yoga organization diminished by more than 1/3. An organization called the Healing Through the Truth Network was formed and at least eight other women came forward with claims of sexual abuse (S. Cohen, 2002a).

[Susan Cohen claims that] Satchidananda took advantage of her when she was a student from 1969 [when she was eighteen] to 1977 (Associated Press, 1991).

Another follower, nineteen-year-old Sylvia Shapiro, accompanied the swami on a worldwide trip.“In Manila, he turned [his twice-daily massages from me] into oral sex,” Ms. Shapiro said (Associated Press, 1991).

Until December [of 1990], Joy Zuckerman was living at Yogaville, where she was known as Swami Krupaananda. She left after a friend confided in her that Satchidananda had made sexual advances toward her last summer, Ms. Zuckerman said (McGehee, 1991).

* * *

A Guru is the one who has steady wisdom ... one who has realized the Self. Having that realization, you become so steady; you are never nervous. You will always be tranquil, nothing can shake you (Satchidananda, 1977).

Satchidananda’s own driver, however, recognized characteristics other than such holy ones, in the swami:
After hours of sitting in traffic jams observing his spiritual master in the rearview mirror, Harry had decided that Sri Swami Satchidananda was not only far from serene, he was a bilious and unforgivingly cranky old man. Not once had Harry felt his spiritual bond with Satchidananda enhanced by all the carping, however edifyingly paternal it was meant to be (Katz, 1992).As they say, “No man is great in the eyes of his own valet.”

In describing how a “steady” man would see the world, Satchidananda (1977) further quoted Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita:

Men of Self-knowledge look with equal vision on a brahmana [i.e., a spiritual person] imbued with learning and humility, a cow, an elephant, a dog and an outcaste.

There is, however, always the contrast between theory and practice:

Lorraine was standing beside one of [Satchidananda’s] Cadillacs ... when the beautiful model [Lauren Hutton] and the guru came out and climbed inside. Satchidananda did not acknowledge Lorraine’s presence except to glare at her and bark in his irritated father voice, “Don’t slam the door” (Katz, 1992).

* * *

Satchidananda passed away in August of 2002. Before he died, he had this to say regarding the allegations of sexual misconduct made against him:

“They know it is all false,” [Satchidananda] had said about eight years ago [i.e., in 1991]. “I don’t know why they are saying these things. My life is an open book. There is nothing for me to hide” (S. Chopra, 1999).

Yogaville, meanwhile, is still very much alive, albeit amid a more recently alleged “mind control” scandal involving a university-age woman, Catherine Cheng (Extra, 1999).

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI --- Stripping the Gurus

The messiah, or World Teacher, was made to correspond with the traditional Hindu figure of the Avatar, a deific per-son sent to the world at certain crucial times to watch over the dawn of a new religious era (Vernon, 2001).

No one used that term [i.e., “World Teacher”] in my childhood. As I could not pronounce his name, Krishnamurti, he was known to me always, as Krinsh (Sloss, 2000).
Madame B
Down in Adyar
Liked the Masters a lot ...
But the Krinsh,
Who lived out in Ojai,
Did NOT!

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI WAS DISCOVERED as a teenage boy by Charles Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society, on a beach in Madras, India, in 1909.

The Theosophical Society itself had been founded in New York City by the east-European “seer” Madame Helena P. Blavatsky (HPB), in 1875. Its membership soon numbered over 100,000; an Asian headquarters was established in Adyar, India, in 1882.

Madame Blavatsky died in 1891. Prior to that passing, however, Leadbeater had already begun claiming to channel messages himself, from Blavatsky’s fabricated “Masters.”

The famously clairvoyant Leadbeater, further, had before (and after) been accused of indecent behavior toward a series of adoles-cent males:

One of Leadbeater’s favorite boys [accused him] of secretly teaching boys to masturbate under cover of occult training, and insinuat[ed] that masturbation was only the prelude to the gratifying of homosexual lust (Washington, 1995).

In any case, the young “Krishna on the Beach” was no typical teenager, in need of such mundane lessons, as the clairvoyant well noted. Indeed, upon examining his aura, Leadbeater found Krish-namurti to be a highly refined soul, apparently completely free of selfishness, i.e., ego.

Krishnamurti was soon thereafter declared by Leadbeater to be the current “vehicle” for Lord Maitreya, and schooled accordingly within the Theosophical ranks. (An American boy had earlier been advanced for the same position by Leadbeater, but the latter appears to have “changed his mind” in that regard. Later, Lead-beater was to propose yet another East Indian youth for the title of World Teacher. That boy, Rajagopal, went on to manage Krishnamurti’s financial affairs, while his wife handled Jiddu’s other af-fairs, as we shall see.)

The brothers [i.e., Krishnamurti and his younger sibling] no doubt found Leadbeater’s swings of temperament confusing.

The Theosophical Society ... was at first enormously successful and attracted converts of the intellectual stature of the inventor Thomas Edison and Darwin’s friend and collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace (Storr, 1996).

No less an authority than [Zen scholar] D. T. Suzuki was prepared to say that [Blavatsky’s] explication of Buddhist teachings in The Voice of Silence ... testified to an initiation into “the deeper side of Mahayana doctrine” (Oldmeadow, 2004).

Perhaps. And yet—

W. E. Coleman has shown that [Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled] comprises a sustained and frequent plagiarism of about one hundred contemporary texts, chiefly relating to ancient and exotic religions, demonology, Freemasonry and the case for spiritualism....

[The Secret Doctrine] betrayed her plagiarism again but now her sources were mainly contemporary works on Hinduism and modern science (Goodrick-Clarke, 2004).

Interestingly, when Blavatsky and her co-founder, Colonel Henry Olcott, sailed to India in 1879, the man whom they left in charge of the Theosophical Society in America was one Abner Doubleday, the inventor of baseball (Fields, 1992).

Blavatsky herself taught the existence of a hierarchy of “As-cended Masters,” included among them one Lord Maitreya, the World Teacher whose incarnations had allegedly included both Krishna and Jesus. Those same Masters, however, were modeled on real figures from public life, e.g., on individuals involved in East Indian political reform (Vernon, 2001). They were fraudulently contacted in other ways as well:

[Blavatsky’s housekeeper, Emma Cutting, demonstrated] how she and HPB had made a doll together, which they ... manipulated on a long bamboo pole in semi-darkness to provide the Master’s alleged apparitions. Emma had also dropped “precipitated” letters on to Theosophical heads from holes in the ceiling, while her husband had made sliding panels and hidden entrances into the shrine room [adjoining HPB’s bedroom] to facilitate Blavatsky’s comings and goings and make possible the substitution of all the brooches, dishes and other objects that she used in her demonstrations [i.e., as purported materializations or “apports”]....

The Russian journalist V. S. Solovieff claimed to have caught [Blavatsky] red-handed with the silver bells which produced astral music [in séances].... Blavatsky confessed to Solovieff quite bluntly that the phenomena were fraudulent, adding that one must deceive men in order to rule them (Washington, 1995).

One moment they would be adored, pampered, idolized, and the next scolded for breaching some piece of esoteric eti-quette they did not understand (Vernon, 2001).

Throughout this book, we shall see many examples of students and disciples being placed in comparable situations by their teach-ers and guru-figures. In such psychological binds, persons for whom it is vitally important to earn the approval of their “master” are rather unable to discern how to gain that reward, with often-tragic results. There are, indeed, two possible extreme reactions to such intermittent reward/punishment, where one cannot ascertain the conditions by which the reward will be earned or the punish-ment given. That is, one can either simply drop all of one’s reac-tions and live in “choiceless awareness” of the moment; or, more often, evolve that impossibility of “guessing right” into neuroses, violence or extreme depression.

Indeed, relevant experiments have been done by students of Pavlov himself (Winn, 2000), wherein dogs were first taught, via reward and punishment, to distinguish between circles and ellip-ses. Then, the circles were gradually flattened, and the ellipses made rounder, until the experimental subjects could no longer dis-tinguish between them. The dogs were thus unable to give the “correct response” to earn a corresponding prize, instead being re-warded and punished “randomly.” The effect on the animals was that initially happy and excitable dogs became violent, biting their experimenters. Other previously “laid back, carefree” animals, by contrast, became lethargic, not caring about anything.

At any rate, even prior to being discovered by Leadbeater, while still in India’s public school system, Krishnamurti’s own education had been a traumatic experience:

Never one to endear himself to schoolmasters, Krishna was punished brutally for his inadequacies and branded an imbecile (Vernon, 2001).

He was caned almost every day for being unable to learn his lessons. Half his time at school was spent in tears on the veranda (Lutyens, 1975).
Not surprisingly, then, in later years Krishnamurti evinced little regard for academic accomplishments:

[The Nobel-caliber physicist David Bohm] spoke of the hu-miliation he had experienced at the hands of Krishnamurti who, in his presence, made cutting jokes about “professors” and did not acknowledge the importance of Bohm’s work....

He suffered greatly under [Krishnamurti’s] disrespect of him, which at times was blatantly obvious (Peat, 1997).

* * *

Krishnamurti’s contemporary appearance on Earth offered hope to Theosophists for the “salvation of mankind.” After years of being groomed for his role as their World Teacher, however, Krishnamurti’s faith in the protection of Theosophy’s Masters, and Lead-beater’s guiding visions of the same, was shattered in 1925 by the unexpected death of his own younger brother. (Jiddu had previously been assured, in his own believed meetings with the Masters on the astral plane, that his brother would survive the relevant illness.) Thereafter, he viewed those visions, including his own, as being merely personal wish-fulfillments, and considered the occult hierarchy of Masters to be irrelevant (Vernon, 2001).

That, however, did not imply any rejection of mysticism in general, on Krishnamurti’s part:

By the autumn of 1926 [following an alleged kundalini awakening which began in 1922] Krishna made it clear ... that a metamorphosis had taken place. [The kundalini is a subtle energy believed to reside at the base of the spine. When “awakened” and directed up the spine into the brain, it produces ecstatic spiritual realization.] His former personality had been stripped away, leaving him in a state of constant and irreversible union with the godhead (Vernon, 2001).

Or, as Krishnamurti (1969) himself put it, in openly proclaiming his status as World Teacher:

I have become one with the Beloved. I have been made simple. I have become glorified because of Him.

[Krishnamurti] maintained that his consciousness was merged with his beloved, by which he meant all of creation (Sloss, 2000).

In August of 1929, reasoning that organizations inherently condition and restrict Truth, the thirty-four-year-old Krishnamurti branch, which he had previously headed since 1911.

Even there, however, it was more the organization and its “Ascended Master”-based philosophy, rather than his own role as World Teacher or Messiah, that was being repudiated. Krishnamurti himself explained as much after the dissolution:

When it becomes necessary for humanity to receive in a new form the ancient wisdom, someone whose duty it is to repeat these truths is incarnated (in Michel, 1992).

Or, as Vernon (2001) confirmed:

[Krishnamurti] never went as far as to deny being the World Teacher, just that it made no difference who or what he was.

In 1932, Krishnamurti and Rajagopal’s wife began an affair which would last for more than twenty-five years. The woman, Rosalind, became pregnant on several occasions, suffering miscarriages and at least two covert/illegal abortions. The oddity of that relationship is not lessened by Jiddu’s earlier regard for the same woman. For, both he and his brother believed that Rosalind was the reincarnation of their long-lost mother ... in spite of the fact that the latter had only died two years after Rosalind was born (Sloss, 2000).

In the late 1930s, Krishnamurti retired to Ojai, California, be-coming close friends with Aldous Huxley. Being thus affectionate, however, did not stop Jiddu from insultingly regarding Huxley, behind his back, as having a mind “like a wastebasket” (Sloss, 2000). Huxley in turn, after hearing Krishnamurti speak in Switzerland in 1961, wrote of that lecture: “It was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha” (in Peat, 1997). Further, when Aldous’ house and library were lost in a fire, Krishnamurti’s Commentaries on Living were the first of the books he replaced.

“Wastebasket,” indeed.

With his proximity to northern Los Angeles, Jiddu also visited with composer Igor Stravinsky, writer Thomas Mann and philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell, and picnicked with screen legends Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin.

The continuing affair with Rosalind was, not surprisingly, less than completely in line with the quasi-Messiah’s own teachings:

Krishnamurti had occasionally told young people that celibacy was significant, indicating that it encouraged the generation of great energy and intensity that could lead to psychological transformation. Krishnamurti seems to have raised the matter with [David] Bohm as well, and the physicist believed that the Indian teacher led a celibate life (Peat, 1997).

Bohm first met Krishnamurti in 1961, and went on to become easily the most famous of his followers (until their distancing from each other in 1984), co-authoring several books of dialogs on spiri-tual topics with Jiddu. Bohm further sat as a trustee on the board of a Krishnamurti-founded school in England, and was viewed by many as potentially being the Krinsh’s “successor.”

Consequently, apologetic protests that Krishnamurti’s behavior with Rosalind was “not dishonest/hypocritical,” simply for him not having spent his entire life preaching the benefits of celibacy or marriage, ring hollow. On the contrary, if we are to believe Peat’s report that Krishnamurti “had spoken to Bohm of the importance of celibacy,” there absolutely was a contradiction between Krishnamurti’s teachings and his life. That is so even though the quarter-century affair with Rosalind, hidden for whatever reasons, had ended by the time he met Bohm.

Given that, the only possible verdict regarding Krishnamurti’s behavior is that of obvious hypocrisy.

Considering Krishnamurti’s own abusive schooling, it is hardly surprising that he should have perpetuated that same cycle on his students, under the pretense of deliberately creating crises to pro-mote change and growth in them:

The gopis [early, young female disciples of Krishnamurti, by analogy with the followers of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita] would seek out private interviews with him, during which he mercilessly tore down their defenses and laid naked their faults, invariably ending with the girls crying their hearts out, but feeling it must be for the best (Vernon, 2001).

Even many years later, employing the same “skillful/cruel means” of awakening others,

Krishnamurti confronted Bohm in a way that others later described as “brutal” (Peat, 1997).

As we shall see, that is a common problem among the world’s spiritual paths for disciples who have endured their own guru-figures’ harsh discipline, and have then assumed license to treat others in the same lousy way as they themselves had been treated. The excuse there is, of course, always that such mistreatment is for the “spiritual benefit” of those others, even in contexts where that claim could not possibly be true.

Quarrels due to what Raja[gopal] remembers as Krishna’s frequent lying and undercutting of him, Krishna’s agreeing to proposals behind Raja’s back, and making promises that could not be kept, became so severe after several months in South America that once Krishna, who could only take so much criticism, slapped Raja. This was not the only time that would happen, but it was the first (Sloss, 2000).

Krishnamurti lacked ordinary human compassion and kindness; he was intolerant, even contemptuous, of those who could not rise to his own high plane (Vernon, 2001).

“Born with a heart two sizes too small,” etc.

At least one of Jiddu’s early “gopis,” however, saw through his clumsy, “cruel to be kind” attempts at spiritual discipline:

These supposedly privileged and beneficial sessions consisted of Krishna repeatedly pointing out well-known faults and picking on everything detrimental and sapping one’s confidence (Lutyens, 1972).

On at least one occasion, Krishnamurti was likewise inadver-tently overheard making unprovoked, uncomplimentary remarks about others ... in his bedroom, with the married Rosalind (Sloss, 2000).

Neither Rajagopal nor Rosalind were ever devotees of Krishnamurti. Nor was David Bohm, whose own response to Krishnamurti’s (unsolicited) harsh public discipline—in a context where they were supposed to be in a dialog, not a guru-disciple relation-ship, by Jiddu’s own explicit rejection of the latter—was beyond tragic:

[T]he physicist was thrown into despair. Unable to sleep, ob-sessed with thoughts, he constantly paced the room to the point where he thought of suicide. At one point he believed that he could feel the neurotransmitters firing in his brain.... His despair soon reached the point where he was placed on antidepressants....

He once wrote to [Fritz Wilhelm] that he thought that his chest pains were a result of K’s [i.e., Krishnamurti’s] misbehaving towards him. “This problem with K is literally crushing me” (Peat, 1997).

* * *

Krishnamurti continued to lecture and discipline until his passing in 1986. In those activities, he gradually mutated his teaching style from that of a savior pronouncing cosmic truths to that of a personal counselor, focusing the content of those lectures on the split in consciousness between subject and object:

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind (Krishnamurti, in [Lutyens, 1983]).

Through that personal realization, Krishnamurti claimed (completely untenably) to be unconditioned by his own upbringing and, indeed, to have (conveniently) “forgotten” most of his past. Nevertheless, his own teachings have much in common with those of both the Buddha and the Upanishads. Not coincidentally, Jiddu had been intensively schooled in both of those philosophies during his early years at Adyar (Sloss, 2000).

In line with his stultifying ideas on the nature of thought and knowledge, Krishnamurti further gave no instruction in structural/ content techniques of meditation. Instead, he taught and practiced the meditative exercise as “a movement without any motive, with-out words and the activity of thought.”

[R]epeating mantras and following gurus were, he said, particularly stupid ways of wasting time (Peat, 1997).

And the Krinsh, with his krinsh-feet quite warm in Ojai,
Said, “Be independent, meditate my way!
Be free without gurus!
Be free without mantras!
Be free without beliefs, intentions or tantras!”

Jiddu himself, however, was a guru in everything but name. The authoritarian pronouncements, intolerance for disagreement, and grandiosity could have come from any of the other “enlightened” individuals with whom we shall soon become too familiar. Though Krishnamurti himself was “allergic” to the guru-disciple relationship, “if it looks like a guru, talks like a guru and acts like a guru....”

After so many years surrounded by an inner circle, like a monarch attended by his courtiers who adored him and believed he could do no wrong, he had grown unused to being contradicted (Vernon, 2001).

[E]ven as he was insisting on the vital importance of individual discovery, the transcripts of his conversations with pupils [at his schools] reveal a man who mercilessly bullied his interlocutors into accepting his point of view (Washing-ton, 1995).

Krishnamurti isolated himself from criticism and feedback, “just like everybody he was criticizing,” [Joel] Kramer [co-author of The Guru Papers] said, and had to have “the last word on everything” (Horgan, 1999).

Even as he lay on his deathbed, wasting away from pancreatic cancer, Krishnamurti stated firmly that “while he was alive he was still ‘the World Teacher’” (Vernon, 2001). (That terminal illness occurred in spite of his claimed possession of laying-on-of-hands healing abilities, which proved equally ineffectual in his own prior attempts at healing Bohm of his heart ailments.) Indeed, so enamored was the Krinsh of his own teaching position in the world that he recorded the following statement a mere ten days before his passing:
I don’t think people realize what tremendous energy and intelligence went through this body.... You won’t find another body like this, or that supreme intelligence operating in a body for many hundred years. You won’t see it again (in Lutyens, 1988).

Krishnamurti is supposed to have said that he is even greater than Buddha or the Christ (in Sloss, 2000).

And what happened then...?
Well ... in Adyar they say
That the World Teacher’s head
Grew three sizes that day!

Of course, Krishnamurti’s dissolution of the Order of the Star is often naïvely taken as indicating a profound humility on his part. However, as we shall implicitly see with every one of the “sages” to follow, it is only through extensive editing, in the selective presentation of the “enlightened” man’s speech and actions, that any of them begin to look so humble and holy.

As to what Jiddu’s own legacy may be, beyond his voluminous and arid written and recorded teachings, he essentially answered that question himself:

Shortly before his death the Indian teacher had declared that no one had ever truly understood his teaching; no one besides himself had experienced transformation (Peat, 1997).

That, too, is a recurring problem with the “great guru-figures” of this world—in generally failing to create even one disciple “as great as” themselves, in spite of their “skillful” discipline. More pointedly, any lesser, non-World teacher who could openly admit that not even one of his students had ever “truly understood his teaching” might have begun to question his own abilities in that regard. This World Teacher, however, evidently was not “conditioned” by any such need for self-evaluation.

Krishnamurti exhibited a lifelong penchant for fine, tailored clothing. One can further easily see clear vestiges, in his psychology, of the Indian caste system under which he had grown up (Vernon, 2001). Indeed, that background influenced him even to the point of his insisting that used books from others be wiped be-fore his reading of them. In planning for his own death, he had further actually left instructions for the needed crematory oven to be thoroughly cleaned before his own use of it, and for that cleanliness to be verified by one of his followers. Evidently, this was to ensure that no one else’s “impure” ashes would commingle with his own holy, brahmin-caste remains.

We should all be so “unconditioned” by our own “forgotten” pasts, no?

[W]hen I interrogated Krishnamurti himself about the whole World Mother affair [i.e., the Theosophical Society’s short-lived programme for global spiritual upliftment under a chosen woman after the “World Teacher” plans for Krishna-murti had fallen through], he blurted out, “Oh, that was all cooked u—” before he caught himself in the realization that he was admitting to a recollection of events in his early life which he later came to deny he possessed (Sloss, 2000).

[Emily Lutyens] said she knew Krishna was a congenital liar but that she would nevertheless always adore him....

My mother asked him once why he lied and he replied with astonishing frankness, “Because of fear” (Sloss, 2000).

Krinsh was outraged. His voice changed completely from a formal indifference to heated anger. It became almost shrill.

“I have no ego!” he said. “Who do you think you are, to talk to me like this?” (Sloss, 2000).

One day, history will reveal everything; but the division in Krishnamurti himself will cast a very dark shadow on all he has said or written. Because the first thing the readers will say, is: “If he cannot live it, who can?” (in Sloss, 2000).

Then the Krinsh slowly took off his World Teacher hat “If my teaching,” he thought, “falls down too often flat.... Maybe teaching ... perhaps ... is not what I’m good at.”

Source:
STRIPPING THE GURU, Sex, Violence and Enlightenment

AUROBINDO --- Stripping the Gurus

When it was also understood in the East that the Great Chain [or ontological hierarchy of Being, manifesting through causal, astral and physical realms] did indeed unfold or evolve over time, the great Aurobindo expounded the notion with an unequalled genius (Wilber, 2000a; italics added).

IN “SIDEBAR A” TO HIS BOOMERITIS novel—originally written as a non-fiction work—Ken Wilber (2002), the “Einstein of conscious-ness research,” has one of that book’s characters refer to Aurobindo (1872 – 1950) as “the world’s greatest philosopher-sage.” Even in his much earlier (1980) Atman Project, he already had Aurobindo designated as “India’s greatest modern sage.” And, more recently, in his foreword to A. S. Dalal’s (2000) A Greater Psychology, he has again averred that “Sri Aurobindo Ghose was India’s greatest modern philosopher-sage.” Likewise, in his own (2000) Integral Psychology, he has Aurobindo appointed as India’s “greatest modern philosopher-sage.”

So, if there’s one thing we can safely conclude....

The yogic scholar Georg Feuerstein, among others, fully shares Wilber’s complimentary evaluation of Aurobindo. Agehananda Bharati (1976), however, offered a somewhat different perspective:

I do not agree with much of what he said; and I believe his Life Divine ... could be condensed to about one-fifth of its size without any substantial loss of content and message.... [Q]uite tedious reading for all those who have done mystical and religious reading all their lives, but fascinating and full of proselytizing vigor for those who haven’t, who want some-thing of the spirit, and who are impressionable.

Bharati himself was both a scholar and a swami of the Ramakrishna Order.

Aurobindo, in any case, whether a “great philosopher” or not, could well be viewed as having wobbled mightily about the center, if one were to consider his purported contributions to the Allied World War II effort:
Sri Aurobindo put all his [e.g., astral] Force behind the Allies and especially Churchill. One particular event in which he had a hand was the successful evacuation from Dunkirk. As some history books note, the German forces refrained “for in-explicable reasons” from a quick advance which would have been fatal for the Allies (Huchzermeyer, 1998).

Other admirers of Aurobindo (e.g., GuruNet, 2003) regard that Allied escape as being aided by a fog which the yogi explicitly helped, through his powers of consciousness, to roll in over the wa-ter, concealing the retreating forces.

Aurobindo’s spiritual partner, “the Mother,” is likewise believed to have advanced the wartime labor via metaphysical means:

Due to her occult faculties the Mother was able to look deep into Hitler’s being and she saw that he was in contact with an asura [astral demon] who is at the origin of wars and makes every possible effort to prevent the advent of world unity (Huchzermeyer, 1998).

When Hitler was gaining success after success and Mother was trying in the opposite direction, she said the shining being who was guiding Hitler used to come to the ashram from time to time to see what was happening. Things changed from bad to worse. Mother decided on a fresh strategy. She took on the appearance of that shining being, appeared be-fore Hitler and advised him to attack Russia. On her way back to the ashram, she met that being. The being was in-trigued by Mother having stolen a march over him. Hitler’s attack on Russia ensured his downfall....

Mother saw in her meditation some Chinese people had reached Calcutta and recognized the danger of that warning. Using her occult divine power, she removed the danger from the subtle realms. Much later when the Chinese army was edging closer to India’s border, a shocked India did not know which way to turn. The Chinese decided on their own to withdraw, much to the world’s surprise. Mother had prevented them from advancing against India by canceling their power in the subtle realms (MSS, 2003).

Nor were those successful attempts at saving the world from the clutches of evil even the most impressive of the Mother’s claimed subtle activities:

She had live contacts with several gods. Durga used to come to Mother’s meditations regularly. Particularly during the Durga Puja when Mother gave darshan, Durga used to come a day in advance. On one occasion, Mother explained to Durga the significance of surrender to the Supreme. Durga said because she herself was a goddess, it never struck her that she should surrender to a higher power. Mother showed Durga the progress she could make by surrendering to the Supreme. Durga was agreeable and offered her surrender to the Divine (MSS, 2003).

The Mother further believed herself to have been, in past lives, Queen Elizabeth of England—the sixteenth-century daugh-ter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Also, Catherine of Russia (wife of Peter the Great), an Egyptian Queen, the mother of Moses, and Joan of Arc. Her diary entries reveal that even during her illness she continued through her sadhana to exert an occult influence on men and events (Nirodbaran, 1990).

[The Mother] is the Divine Mother [i.e., as an incarnation or avatar] who has consented to put on her the cloak of obscu-rity and suffering and ignorance so that she can effectively lead us—human beings—to Knowledge and Bliss and Anan-da and to the Supreme Lord (in Aurobindo, 1953).

In the person of [the Mother], Aurobindo thus saw the de-scent of the Supermind. He believed she was its avatara or descent into the Earth plane. As the incarnate Supermind she was changing the consciousness on which the Earth found itself, and as such her work was infallible.... She does not merely embody the Divine, he instructed one follower, but is in reality the Divine appearing to be human (Minor, 1999; italics added).

India’s independence from British rule followed soon after the end of WWII. Aurobindo himself marked the occasion in public speech:

August 15th, 1947 is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age....

August 15th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition (in Nirodbaran, 1990).

This, then, on top of his believed Allied war efforts, was the grandiose state of mind of “the world’s greatest philosopher-sage.” Note further that this, like the Mother’s diary entries, was Auro-bindo’s own documented claim, not merely a possible exaggeration made on his behalf by his followers. For all of the private hubris and narcissism of our world’s guru-figures, it is rare for any of them to so brazenly exhibit the same publicly, as in the above inflations.

And, as always, there are ways of ensuring loyalty to the guru and his Mother, as Aurobindo (1953; italics added) himself noted:

[A student] had been progressing extremely well because he opened himself to the Mother; but if he allows stupidities like [an unspecified, uncomplimentary remark made by another devotee about the Mother] to enter his mind, it may influence him, close him to the Mother and stop his progress.
As for [the disciple who made the “imbecilic” remark], if he said and thought a thing like that (about the Mother) it explains why he has been suffering in health so much lately. If one makes oneself a mouthpiece of the hostile forces and lends oneself to their falsehoods, it is not surprising that something in him should get out of order.

To a follower who later asked, “What is the best means for the sadhakas [disciples] to avoid suffering due to the action of the hos-tile forces?” Aurobindo (1953; italics added) replied: “Faith in the Mother and complete surrender.”

[Physical nearness to the Mother, e.g., via living in the ash-ram] is indispensable for the fullness of the sadhana on the physical plane. Transformation of the physical and external being is not possible otherwise [italics added] (Aurobindo, 1953).

Such teachings, of course, provide a compelling reason to stay in the ashram. In all such cases, whatever the original motivations of the leaders in emphasizing such constraints may have been, there is an obvious effect in practice. That is, an effect of making their disciples afraid to leave their communities, or even to question the “infallibility” of the “enlightened” leaders in question.
As with other important spiritual action figures, of course, the exalted philosopher-sage known as Aurobindo did not evolve to that point without having achieved greatness in previous lives:

Sri Aurobindo was known in his ashram as the rebirth of Napoleon. Napoleon’s birthday was also August 15th.... In his previous births, it was believed he was Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Krishna and many other persons too. Someone asked Sri Aurobindo whether he had been Shakespeare as well, but could not elicit an answer (GuruNet, 2003).

Being an incarnation of Krishna would, of course, have made Aurobindo an avatar, as he himself indeed explicitly claimed (1953) to be regardless. As we will see more of later, however, there is competition among other spiritual paths for many of those same reincarnational honors.

Further, da Vinci lived from 1452 to 1519, while Michelangelo walked this Earth from 1475 to 1564. Given the chronological over-lap between those two lives, this reincarnation, if taken as true, could thus only have been “one soul incarnating/emanating in two bodies.” That is, it could not have been da Vinci himself reincarnat-ing as Michelangelo. Thus, the latter’s skills could not have been based on the “past life” work of the former.

Or perhaps no one ever bothered to simply look up the relevant dates, before making and publicizing those extravagant claims.

At any rate, the purported da Vinci connection does not end there:

[E]arly in 1940, [a disciple of Aurobindo’s] came in and showed the Mother a print of the celebrated “Mona Lisa,” and the following brief conversation ensued:

Mother: Sri Aurobindo was the artist.
Champaklal: Leonardo da Vinci?
Mother smiled sweetly and said: yes.
Champaklal: Mother, it seems this [painting] is yours?
Mother: Yes, do you not see the resemblance? (Light, 2003).

Evidently, then, not only was Aurobindo allegedly the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci, but his spiritual partner, the Mother, claimed to be the subject of the Mona Lisa portrait.

“Since the beginning of earthly history,” the Mother ex-plained, “Sri Aurobindo has always presided over the great earthly transformations, under one form or another, under one name or another” (Paine, 1998).

For my own part, however, statements such as that remind me of nothing so much as my own growing up with a hyperactive cousin who could not stop arguing about which was the “strongest dinosaur.” My own attitude to such conversations is simply: “Please, stop. Please.”

In any case, even such “great earthly transformers” as Aurobindo still evidently stand “on the shoulders of other spiritual giants”:

It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail [in 1908]in my solitary mediation and felt his presence (Aurobindo, 1953).

Aurobindo and his Mother again claimed to have single-handedly turned the tide of WWII, and asserted that the former sage has “presided over the great earthly transformations” for time immemorial. If one believes that, the impressiveness of the spirit of Vivekananda allegedly visiting him in prison would pale by comparison. The same would be true for the idea of Aurobindo being “the world’s greatest philosopher-sage.” For, the yogi made far more grandiose claims himself, and indeed could therefore have easily taken such contemporary recognition of his greatness as being little more than “damning with faint praise.”

At any rate, short of believing that Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s vital roles in WWII were exactly what they themselves claimed those to be, there are only two possible conclusions. That is, that both he and she were wildly deluded, and unable to distinguish fact from fiction or reality from their own fantasies; or that they were both outright fabricating their own life-myths.
So: Do you believe that one “world’s greatest philosopher-sage” and his “infallible” spiritual partner—who herself “had live contacts with several gods,” teaching them in the process—in southern India radically changed the course of human history in unparalleled ways, simply via their use of metaphysical Force and other occult faculties?

I, personally, do not.

There is, of course, competition for the title of “India’s greatest modern sage.” For example, in his foreword to Inner Directions’ recent (2000) reissue of Talks with Ramana Maharshi, Wilber himself had given comparably high praise to Ramana:
“Talks” is the living voice of the greatest sage [italics added] of the twentieth century.
That feting comes, predictably, in spite of Wilber’s having never sat with, or even met, Maharshi, knowing him only through his extant, edited writings.
One may well be impressed by Maharshi’s “unadorned, bot-tom-line” mysticism of simply inquiring, of himself, “Who am I?”—in the attempt to “slip into the witnessing Self.” Likewise, his claim that “Love is not different from the Self ... the Self is love” (in Walsh, 1999) is sure to make one feel warm and fuzzy inside. Nevertheless, the man was not without his eccentricities:

[T]he Indian sage Ramana Maharshi once told Paul Brunton that he had visions of cities beneath the sacred mountain of Arunachala where he resided all his adult life (Feuerstein, 1998).

Indeed, in Talk 143 from Volume 1 of the infamous Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (2000)—the very text upon which Wilber has above commented—we find:

In visions I have seen caves, cities with streets, etc., and a whole world in it.... All the siddhas [“perfected beings”] are reputed to be there.

Were such subterranean cities to be taken as existing on the physical level, however, they could not so exist now or in the past without previous, historic “Golden Ages” and their respective civi-lizations, with those civilizations being more advanced than our own. That idea, however, is generally explicitly taken as being the product only of magical/mythical thinking and the like:

[T]he romantic transcendentalists ... usually confuse aver-age-mode consciousness and growing-tip consciousness, or average lower and truly advanced, [and] use that confusion to claim that the past epochs were some sort of Golden Age which we have subsequently destroyed. They confuse magic and psychic, myth and subtle archetype (Wilber, 1983a).

The question then becomes: Do you believe that “all the siddhas” are living in (even astral) cities and caves, beneath one particular mountain in India? (Mountains are actually regarded as holy in cultures throughout the world, and as being symbols of the astral spine. To take their holiness and “natural abode of souls” nature literally, however, is highly unusual.) If not, was the “great-est sage of the century” hallucinating? If so....

Or, even if not:

All the food [in Maharshi’s ashram] was prepared by brahmins so that it should remain uncontaminated by contact with lower castes and foreigners....

“Bhagavan always insisted on caste observances in the ashram here, though he was not rigidly orthodox” [said Miss Merston, a long-time devotee of Maharshi] (Marshall, 1963).

[Maharshi] allowed himself to be worshiped like a Buddha (Daniélou, 1987).

“Greatest sage”—for whom “the Self is love,” but lower castes and foreigners evidently aren’t, in spite of his supposed impartial witnessing of all things equally, and in spite of the fact that he was not otherwise “rigidly orthodox” or bent on following religious proscriptions.

Sadly, as we shall see, that sort of brutal inconsistency should be no less than expected from the “great spiritual personages” of our world.

Source:
STRIPPING THE GURUS, Sex, Violence and Enlightenment

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA --- Stripping the Gurus

[Vivekananda] is seen not just as a patriot-prophet of resurgent India but much more—an incarnation of Shiva, Buddha and Jesus (Sil, 1997).

Perfect from his birth, [Vivekananda] did not need spiritual disciplines for his own liberation. Whatever disciplines he practiced were for the purpose of removing the veil that concealed, for the time being, his true divine nature and mission in the world. Even before his birth, the Lord had chosen him as His instrument to help Him in the spiritual redemption of humanity (Nikhilananda, 1996).

BORN IN 1863 IN CALCUTTA, Vivekananda began meditating at age seven, and claimed to have first experienced samadhi when eight years old.

He regarded himself as a brahmachari, a celibate student of the Hindu tradition, who worked hard, prized ascetic disciplines, held holy things in reverence, and enjoyed clean words, thoughts, and acts (Nikhilananda, 1996).

A handsome and muscular, albeit somewhat stout and bull-dog-jawed youth, he first met his guru, Ramakrishna, in 1881 at age eighteen. As the favorite and foremost disciple of that “Supreme Swan,” the young “Duckling,” Vivekananda, was constantly flattered and petted by his frankly enchanted homoerotic mentor [i.e., Ramakrishna], fed adoringly by him, made to sing songs on a fairly regular basis for the Master’s mystical merriment, and told by the older man that he was a ... realized individual through his meditations ... [an] eternally realized person ... free from the lure of ... woman and wealth (Sil, 1997).

Vivekanandaji took his monastic vows in 1886, shortly before his guru’s death, thereby becoming a swami. (The suffix “ji” is added to East Indian names and titles to show respect.) “Swami” itself—meaning “to be master of one’s self”—is simply the name of the monastic order established by Shankara in the thirteenth century. The adoption of that honorific entails taking formal vows of celibacy and poverty.

Interestingly, in later years, Vivekananda actually claimed to be the reincarnation of Shankara (Sil, 1997).

In any case, following a dozen years of increasing devotion to his dearly departed guru, Vivekananda came to America at age thirty. There, he represented Hinduism to American men and women at the 1893 Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago.
A total stranger to the world of extroverted, educated, and affluent women, he was charmed by their generosity, kind-ness, and frankly unqualified admiration for and obsession with a handsome, young, witty, and somewhat enchantingly naïve virgin male from a distant land (Sil, 1997).

The earlier-celebrated purity and enjoyment of “clean acts,” and “freedom from the lure of women” guaranteed to Vivekananda by Ramakrishna, would nevertheless at first glance appear to have been somewhat incomplete. For, the former once admitted that, following the death of his father in 1884,he visited brothels and consumed alcoholic beverages in the company of his friends (Sil, 1997).

Thankfully for his legacy, though, Vivekananda was not actually partaking of the various ladies’ delights in those houses. Rather, by his own testimony, he was simply dragged there once by his friends, who hoped to cheer him up after his father’s death. He, however, after a few drinks, began lecturing to them about what might become of them in their afterlives for such debauchery. He was subsequently kicked out by his friends for being that “wet blanket,” and stumbled home alone, thoroughly drunk (Sil, 2004).

So it was just a few drinks too many. In a whorehouse. Nothing unexpected from a savior “chosen by God as His instrument to help Him” in the salvation of humanity.

Either way, though, “if you keep on playing with fire” you’re going to get burned, as Vivekananda himself observed:

Once in me rose the feeling of lust. I got so disgusted with myself that I sat on a pot of burning tinders, and it took a long time for the wound to heal (in Sil, 1997).
* * *

[I]t is my ambition to conquer the world by Hindu thought—to see Hindus from the North Pole to the South Pole (Vivekananda, in [Sil, 1997]).

It was not long after that announcement that Vivekananda was proudly claiming to have “helped on the tide of Vedanta which is flooding the world.” He was likewise soon predicting that “before ten years elapse a vast majority of the English people will be Vedantic” (in Sil, 1997).

The enthusiastic young monk’s hopes of effecting global change, further, were not limited to a spiritual revolution, of “Hindus ‘round the world.” Rather, among his other vast dreams were those of a socially progressive, economically sovereign and politically stable India (Sil, 1997).

The realization of those goals, however, was to come up against certain concrete realities not anticipated by the swami, including the need to think ahead in manifesting one’s ideas. Indeed, Vivekananda was, it seems, explicitly opposed to such an approach:

Plans! Plans! That is why you Western people can never create a religion! If any of you ever did, it was only a few Catholic saints who had no plans. Religion was never, never preached by planners! (in Nikhilananda, 1996).

Not surprisingly, then, given this antipathy, before the end of 1897 Vivekananda was already down-sizing his goals:

I have roused a good many of our people, and that was all I wanted (in Nikhilananda, 1996).
Further, as Chelishev (1987) observed with regard to the social improvements advocated by the naïve monk:

Vivekananda approached the solution of the problem of social inequality from the position of Utopian Socialism, placing hopes on the good will and magnanimity of the proper-tied classes.Understandably, within a year the swami had realized the futility of that approach:

I have given up at present my plan for the education of the masses (in Sil, 1997).
It will come by degrees. What I now want is a band of fiery missionaries. We must have a College in Madras to teach comparative religions ... we must have a press, and papers printed in English and in the vernaculars (Vivekananda, 1947).

As one frustrated devotee finally put it:
Swami had good ideas—plenty—but he carried nothing out .... He only talked (in Sil, 1997).

* * *

Vivekananda claimed to have experienced, in 1898, a vision of Shiva Himself. In that ecstasy, he “had been granted the grace of Amarnath, the Lord of Immortality, not to die until he himself willed it” (Nikhilananda, 1996).
The chain-smoking, diabetic sage, apparently “going gentle into that dark night,” nevertheless passed away only a few years later, in 1902, after years of declining health. Reaching only an unripe age of thirty-nine, he “thus fulfill[ed] his own prophecy: ‘I shall not live to be forty years old’” (Nikhilananda, 1996).
Of course, there are prophecies, and then there are earlier prophecies:
Vivekananda declared solemnly: “This time I will give hundred years to my body.... This time I have to perform many difficult tasks.... In this life I shall demonstrate my powers much more than I did in my past life” (Sil, 1997).

* * *

In spite of those many reversals, Vivekananda foresaw great and lasting effects on the world for his teachings:

The spiritual ideals emanating from the Belur Math [one of Vivekananda’s monasteries/universities], he once said to Miss MacLeod, would influence the thought-currents of the world for 1100 years....

“All these visions are rising before me”—these were his very words (Nikhilananda, 1996).

The Vedanta Society which preserves Vivekananda’s brand of Hinduism has a current membership of only around 22,000 individuals, and a dozen centers worldwide. It would thus not likely qualify as any large part of the “global spiritual renaissance” grandly and grandiosely envisioned by the swami. The better part of Vivekananda’s actual legacy, then, beyond mere organizational PR, may consist simply in his having paved the way for the other Eastern teachers who followed him into America in the succeeding century.

Source:
STRIPPING THE GURU. Sex, Violence and Enlightenment

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Commentary:

God and Religion are not the responsible for man's insanity, it is his own desire's.

There are numerous guru's claiming that their are the manifestation of Shiva, Krsna, Buddha, Jesus and other holy men of history, it is man's nature to express himself as superior to others, by their creative mind they can composed so many ideas upon reading many books related to spirituality and mysticism. Some people aims to have power over others and control them, just like great magicians and illusionist they caught people's attention.

----KAILASH