Dear Ramji,
please comment on this article.
Dear Steve,
I read the
‘Diksha and Enlightenment’ letter from
For some reason
people need to feel that the world is going to be ‘saved.’ The advaita view is that the world is
already saved. It is perfect as it
is. So any attempts to make it
better are the result of a false understanding about the nature of
reality. It is OK for people to get
shaktipat…in fact it happens every day all over the world to millions of
people…but to think that shaktipat is going to change one’s
thinking patterns (switch the physical hemispheres of the brain from the front
to the back!) in some permanent or profound way is completely ridiculous. No experience will eradicate vasanas
born in ignorance and reinforced with many years of negative behavior. This whole idea is a fine example of
spiritual materialism. One
wonders why the brain, which was made by God and installed in the skull, should
function better if it is physically turned around. Did God get it wrong? It is such a relief to know that some
fellow in
The real problem
is not the position of the brain but the type of thoughts the mind thinks. Negative thinking is the product of
ignorance, not the function of the physical brain.
Secondly,
enlightenment is not something that can be transferred from one person to
another in the form of some experience.
It is recognition of a simple fact.
This whole
‘shaktipat save-the-world movement’ is a fantasy that has arisen
out of the conjunction of the needs of clever people to feel important and the
needs of foolish people with little or no self esteem to be ‘saved’
without doing any serious work on themselves. These world saviors also seem to have a
very keen eye for filthy lucre. Five thousand dollars to sit alone
in a room doing nothing and have your brain reversed without a proper operation
in a hospital room? What a lovely
scam. I wish I had the chutzpah to
come up with such a scheme!
When you
don’t know who you are, you want to be somebody, to get recognition and
make a mark on the world. There is
perhaps no ego game more appealing than the ‘savior’ ego. If you read the messianic literature it
is all based on the idea that some wonderful event is going to occur or some
incredible being is going to ‘come down’ and save our existential
bacon. But the reality is that life
is wonderful as it is. Nothing
needs to happen to make life ‘better.’
If anything needs
to be done people need to look into why they are dissatisfied with themselves
and the world before they sign up for some silly enlightenment intensive. If they do they will find that they lack
a clear understanding of themselves and they will realize that it is their lack
of clarity that needs to be transformed, not the position of their physical
brains.
If you take
‘the world’ to be real then you need to see that there is as much
right with it as there is wrong.
And if you have a clear understanding of the nature of the world you
will see that the ‘wrong’ serves as important a purpose as the
‘right.’ Both serve one
reality alone. So if there is a
transformation that will ultimately serve people it is the transformation of one’s understanding of reality.
Save the world
movements are religious, not spiritual, movements. This is not particularly bad unless they
take to killing those who don’t agree with them, but it is not enough
because they do not address the ‘why.’ They simply expect you to believe that
your discomfort with the world and yourself will be removed when some
miraculous event happens in the future.
But this never happens. Time
passes and all the predicted dates of the world’s salvation or
destruction pass and the world goes on as it has always gone on…and will
continue to go on forever.
There is nothing wrong with dreaming but it should be seen for what it
is, not tied to some concrete change in the karmic order of things.
People want to
feel good and this is another feel good sadhana. Aside from the obvious spiritual
and intellectual bankruptcy of the idea such ‘movements’ do
enlightenment a disservice because they associate it with some kind of
experiential event. Such promises
create a real problem because all transformations take place in time and are
subject to reversal. Eventually,
when someone who has been through this sadhana returns to the world his or her
‘brain’ reverses again and the same kind of problems that he or she
was running away from come back.
Actually, one wonders if anyone silly enough to sign on to such a
program has a brain in the first place.
You cannot escape
your karma by joining a movement or having a spiritual experience. You escape karma by realizing that karma
only belongs to the body and mind and not to you. You escape by understanding that there
is only one Self and that you are it.
When you know that, you know that you are fine as you are and that you
could not be transformed even if you wanted to. You see that whatever can be transformed
is not real in the first place. So what use is this approach to spirituality?
Ramji
(this
letter was sent to Steve by one of his friends who is traveling in
Dear Steve,
There is a new thing is happening on
the spiritual horizon in
During the diksha course one spends
one’s time in solitude living in a private room meditating and
relaxing. You are assigned a
personal guide
called a “dassa.” He or she
answers your questions and gives diksha four times during the course. The transmission occurs while the dassa’s hands rest on the seeker’s head. The seeker cannot talk directly to
Bhagavan, the top gun, but meets him during darshan
and discourse each Saturday. In the ashram a great deal of chanting and bhajan
singing is entertained every day. The participants take part in the same. But
one has to keep in mind that people are not explicitly declared
enlightened at the end of the course.
The diksha people claim that the
brain actually undergoes a physically-felt shift. They hold that a part of back
portion of the brain in the back of the skull is moved to the front of the
skull and vice versa. After this
shift the brain is enabled to work in new way. However one woman had a CAT scan done to
see if her brain had reversed and it hadn’t.
Bhagavan is prophesying that the
Earth will be going through a huge transformation in the year 2011. Many people
will die. But the Kalki (Bhagavan’s) movement
can “save,” his own people). In fact,
after the holocaust survivors will become enlightened, independent of having
done sadhana or not. This is because the Kalki movement will have
"produced" more than 64000 enlightened people by 2011. At that time,
the accumulated spiritual power and energy will be powerful enough to transform
the entire world. The golden, enlightened, area will begin. The Kalki
movement is already working overtime saving the world. It is building a
huge meditation hall cum town, called the
Love,