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SRF Walrus
Mt. Washington, Ca
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Reporter
Unregistered User
(9/28/01 6:02 am)
Reply 		Urban legend: Nuns will run things
There are many urban legends within SRF, some of which have been cultivated to keep the bad-ladies in control. Is there any truth to them? When we build a website we should address all these, so if anyone knows the answer please add a message.

Quote:
The nuns will run SRF and the monks will do the public speaking.

Dilbert
Unregistered User
(9/30/01 7:19 am)
Reply 		Cartoon
I actually believed this one for a while. What a self-serving joke. I am glad we are writing these down. There should be a yogi-dilbert cartoon. He would have a field day. Dogbert could be a nun coming up with all these weird rules. "Only the nun's dogs can be in charge of the car requests" and stuff like that. What fun.

What a great idea. Put a bunch of old power hungry and cruel women in charge, then have them make up with rules so they don't have to talk to anyone or be held accountable for anything and elect the leadership so things don't change. The humor possibilities are endless.

Thinking
Unregistered User
(9/30/01 7:55 am)
Reply 		Monks will do the speaking
One has to face the possibility that this one did come from Master. He was from a Hindu family and may have had traditional ideas about women's roles. Of course, it could also have been adapted from a Mormon notion of women's roles. Or a combination of the two. Clearly, it turned out to be a non-adaptive and embarrassing position for SRF, considering the social advances in the 20th century.

Crog
Unregistered User
(10/3/01 6:34 am)
Reply 		TO: Thinking
Master may have intended that monks do much of the speaking, but not that women would HAVE to run things. But that is now what is said. That would not be part of Master's culture.

And monks doing the speaking? That is not true either, although I have also heard that said many times. Why does Ma speak, write books? Priya speaks. Uma speaks. Most of them just want to hide and not expose their nature to the public.

Deep
Unregistered User
(10/9/01 7:12 am)
Reply 		Actually
Actually the legend goes:

The nuns will run things INTO THE GROUND.

OK, OK. I have been burned by them. I admit. He among us who has worked with them and not been burned, please step forward. (Not all the nuns, in case any of them are reading this)

Musicman
Unregistered User
(10/16/01 11:38 am)
Reply 		Master's Responsibility?
I recall reading in one of the SRF publications the following quote from Emerson: "An institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man." Now, that may or may not be true (just because Emerson said it doesn't make it true), but it's a good premise for posing a very heretical question. Can (should) we lay at Master's feet not only the fresh-cut flowers of our devotion but also some of the responsibility for the current state of affairs at Mother Center?

Reading Durga Ma's posthumously published Trilogy of Divine Love reminds one that not all was sweetness and light at MC even during Master's lifetime. There were rivalries, dissension, and no small amount of arrogance and egotism, even on the part of Rajarsi. Master himself was hardly infallible when it came to business and financial matters. We criticize an overly and unnecessarily lavish accounting system now, but Master built a gorgeous temple on an unstable bluff, only to watch them both slide slowly into the sea. How much prescience did that display? Of course, he said it was an act of God to keep him from being content with that temple only, to spur him on to establishing others elsewhere. Okay, but if a Master is by definition one with God, how can God hide such motives and intentions from Himself? Sounds more like a split personality. And he could be, as we all know, very abusive, verbally and even physically. For example, pouring water on Daya Ma's head from the upper story of MC was a cute practical joke (to get her to lighten up), but if I were to try that with one of my students today, I could easily be sued. Humiliating her in front of others, harshly and repeatedly, was also a tactic none of the rest of us would lightly adopt.

Now, I know he was not one of us. He tempered these outbursts with love, and he was only giving people what he knew they could handle, and only as part of their training, not out of personal animus. But at the end of the day, we must confront the fact that the past and current leadership was handpicked and trained by him. He claimed he could tell everything about a person just by peering into their eyes. Why didn't he see that J. Donald Walters was hopelessly afflicted with satyriasis (the male equivalent of nymphomania) and narcissism? Why didn't he see Faye Wright's potential love affair with dictatorial power and control? Why did he put such people in positions of real authority? And where is he now? Is he so powerless or out of touch that he can't intervene and do something about the steady degradation of the work he established at God's behest?

These are disturbing and troubling questions for people whose final refuge, whose last ditch in this fight, is an unshakable faith in Master and his teachings.

One other point should be made regarding SRF's notorious and inhumane litigiousness. This, too, is not entirely with precedent in the days of Master, and SRF was as feckless then as now in courts of law. We have all heard the story about the monk Master brought over from India to help with the growing work, and how this monk betrayed Master and basically cleaned out MC while Master was away on a speaking tour. This, at least, is the sanitized version of events. Here is what really happened (my source for this is a 1964 UCLA dissertation by Carl Jackson about the Ramakrishna movement in the US, which includes a discussion of Yogananda and SRF). In the 1920s, Master did indeed invite Swami Dhirananda, his chief assistant in India, to come to the US and manage the LA center while he, Master, was on tour. There was eventually a falling-out between the two men, however, exacerabated by the Depression starting in 1929. According to Jackson (p. 448, n50), "the split was very damaging. Dhirananda carried off about half the membership of the Los Angeles center to set up a counter movement, the Raja-Yoga Satsanga. He also brought a suit against Yogananda and won $8000, which caused the movement bad publicity. For news of the suit, see the Los Angeles Times, May 12, August 22 and 23, 1935. Also see Dhirananda's article, written under his true name, B.K. Bagchi, 'Adventues of Indian Philosophy in America,' Modern Review, Vol. LIX (February, 1936), pp. 165-69, which, though not explicit, suggests the causes of his split with Yogananda." True, Master did not bring this suit. But he must have done something that persuaded a presumably impartial jury to award $8000 to Dhirananda. Shades of Kriyananda and Ananda? You bet, but over a half century earlier.

Such experiences were no doubt traumatic for the young disciples with Master at that time, including a very naive and impressionable Faye Wright. Everything we read and discuss on this board--the secretiveness, paranoia, vindictiveness, and insistence on absolute, unquestioning obedience to every caprice emanating from the BOD--has a context and a history going way back before any of us was even born. It's crucial to bear that in mind when assessing the prospects for future change. And it is also crucial to look at the entire situation unmasked and without illusions. Nothing is sacrosanct, not even Master.

If all the cards aren't on the table as we consider these issues, we will continue to miss the mark. You simply cannot rectify a problem until you have correctly analyzed its cause. And that analysis will be incomplete and inaccurate as long as there is an imaginary cordon sanitaire around some areas/ideas/issues/people/topics. We would be making the same mistake the BOD makes in listening only to the messages we want to hear and tuning out all others (and killing those messengers).

I thank God for this board. For years I have hidden my apostasy from others because of the reaction it provoked. Non-SRFers are bewildered and confused and have no idea what I'm talking about, while SRFers (including my wife) cannot and will not consider these possibilities or confront them. They continue to live in a fairy-tale realm where the witches are all good, or all bad. Nothing in between. It's not reality, but it's so comforting. Like all of you, I came on this path for truth, not comfort, at least not the kind afforded by the world or by self-deception. I know that meditation works and that the spirit lives in me and everyone else. But I never cease to be amazed that at the place I work, with colleagues of every religious stripe and persuasion, there is a spirit of cooperation and friendship, of openness and organizational self-criticism, that obviously surpasses anything at MC. How in the world is that possible? If the most dedicated and "evolved" SRFers cannot work together in this way, what hope is there for a New Age, at least with Master's work in the vanguard? I remember the words of the famous art historian Kenneth Clark: "One may be hopeful about the future, but one cannot be optimistic." Say it ain't so, Joe! I'm afraid it is.

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