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username
Registered User
(10/11/02 7:04 am)
Reply 		MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
How common is it to believe you hear voices when on the SRF path? Or you are getting messages from "others"?

I have run into several SRF members who believe they are spiritually advanced because they hear voices. What is your experience? Or the experience of others close to you? Is it something in the teachings or is it something they pick up from the monks at the temple?

I recall once hearing a monk say that when he turned on the TV, whatever was on, was Yogananda telling him something. This sounds like part of a mental disorder.

gardendiva
Registered User
(10/11/02 7:19 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
(This message was left blank)

Edited by: gardendiva at: 10/11/02 7:22:36 am
gardendiva
Registered User
(10/11/02 7:21 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
username...

Over the years I heard a lot of different stories from SRF members. They had "experiences," this and that were "Master guiding" them, you name it. I was always a little skeptical, to say the least. I suppose I did question the SRF atmosphere and how it might contribute to these kinds fo things. More than anything else, I normally chalked it up to an overactive imagination (especially if the people weren't particularly at peace or stable in their normal lives).

Now I feel that I don't want to judge this phenomenon. It's what it is. Who am I to say what is valid and what is mental disease? What's important is what I experience in my own life and (you've heard it before from me) how much I can be in moment and be my own reality.

There are eccentrics in every group, religion, whatever. The people that have these experiences while being members of SRF, I feel, would have these experiences if they were Catholic or any other persuasion (how many different "apparitions" have you heard of? you know, like the Blessed Mother appearing on a tortilla?). Anytime you have a teaching that refers to the paranormal (and many of them do), even a little bit, you'll have certain people that glom on to that aspect and make something out of it.

I don't think "experiences" in and of themselves are a sign of spiritual advancement or enlightenment. There are lots of things to consider...context is everything. That goes for whether this kind of thing is a mental disorder, as well. You have to look at the whole picture (but is it really worth the effort?).

srflongago
Registered User
(10/11/02 9:05 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
If you concentrate on the attributes of an image long enough, days, months, years, it will take life and be your companion. If you meditate long and hard about a purely imaginary character, he will walk with you and talk with you and be your companion. Behold the coconut in the recent Tom Hanks movie updating Robinson Crusso.

If you spend 12 years in a Himalayan cave meditating on Babiji, you will find he appears as your companion.


Are these to be thought of as mental disorders, or as expressing the yearnings of the human psyche for consolation and companionship and guidance?

Are they visions or are they illusions? I follow Lahiri in regarding them as illusions the mind creates out of the imagination to satisfy human desires. They may be uplifting, inspiring, consoling. But, like chocolate cookies on a diet, they are a distraction. The true path is casting off all illusions and giving up the desire for consequences of actions.

Those who have entered Kriya from religions which encourage such visions usually can not do without them. Like chocolate cookies, they are very satisfying. I would not deprive devotees of illusions any more than I would hide the chocolate cookies from a dieter. This is their choice of path. It is not mine.

Edited by: srflongago at: 10/12/02 6:16:11 am
member108
Registered User
(10/12/02 7:25 pm)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
There is a lot of fantasy in the SRF community. Huge egos and mentally unstable people claim all sorts of things. Hang out at a temple for a while and you will meet them. In reality the level of spirituality in this age is very very low. A real spiritual experience for this low age is a development of some character and integrity. The bad ladies have yet to develop this level of spirituality. These qualities are very rare in the world today and a sign of advancement.

If you know someone claiming to have heard voices, and you suspect they are not just blowing smoke up your wazoo to impress you, suggest counseling by a real professional.

Gitano no divino
Registered User
(10/14/02 8:31 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
Over the years I have been deeply inspired by the writings of Joseph Campbell, as have millions of people. One of his lesser-known but no less valuable books is Myths to Live By. The chapter entitled "Schizophrenia: The Inward Journey" is especially germane to the discussion here. Campbell succinctly distinguishes between the mystic and the schizophrenic (who share much in common) in this way:

Quote:
The difference--to put it sharply--is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. Can he be saved? If a line is thrown to him, will he grab it?


Well, that's the question that could be asked about many SRF members. In any event, the experiences of the mystic and the schizophrenic are the same, and their origins are the same (the human psyche, or as Campbell put it, "the energies of the human body"). But the response to these inner experiences, the ability to cope with and integrate them into the frame of one's life and social surroundings, is different.

My beef with mystical teachings, particularly SRF, is that they dangle the bait of supernatural experiences in front of the potential devotee to lure him/her on the "path." Once on the path, however, the devotee is instructed not to crave such experiences because they represent a distraction (bait-and-switch, the oldest con known to man). The AY has reminded some, and certainly reminds me, of a Hindu-style Harry Potter book, full of vision-seeing, levitating, dematerializing, tiger-wrestling, poison-swallowing holy men. Who wouldn't crave being able to levitate, become immersed in inner light, commune with long-ago saints, etc., etc.? But all of this is just a phantasmagorical come-on. Once you're hooked, then you must abjure all such aspirations, because “the path to god is not a circus,” or some such rationalization of the fraudulent claims and outright lies dispensed to attract parishioners. But devotees are not easily dissuaded, so they manufacture such experiences in their superheated imaginations, diving headlong into the roiling waters of the mystic psyche in which they lose their grip on reality.

I have stated elsewhere that I no longer believe in enlightenment. There is a simple reason for this: I see no real evidence that such a state actually exists, has ever existed, or, if it did exist, could be demonstrated and defined to the satisfaction of a group of dispassionate observers. Enlightenment is fool's gold, and the most dangerous individuals are the ones who claim to have it; the second most dangerous ones are those who wholeheartedly believe such claims and seek to acquire it for themselves.

The whole notion of enlightenment leads directly to elitism and slavish surrender to irrationality. Since one's enlightened state cannot be verified (assuming that people could generally agree upon what enlightenment is, which obviously they can never do), it must be accepted by others on faith, which admits of no doubts and no critical scrutiny. The devotee follows obediently in the footsteps of the enlightened sage hopeful that, one fine day, s/he too will achieve enlightenment. Until that happens, though, the devotee is ripe for exploitation, financial and sexual. Is this not the SRF way? The Sai Baba/Swami Rama/"Swami" Kriyana-da/Maharishi Mahesh Yogi/Guru Maharaji/Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh/Swami Muktananda way?

However, the Hindu scriptures do give us a key to exposing and dismissing all this chicanery: “He who knows tells it not; he who tells, knows it not.” The next time someone tells you about his advanced state of awareness or marvelous experiences in cosmic consciousness, you can safely assume he knows it not. And if you see a person looking up at the azure vault of the sky, pondering the lazy meandering of a perfectly white cloud, or someone else putting a bandage on a child's skinned knee, or serving a meal to a disabled elderly person, anyone immersed in the stream of life and trying, in some uncelebrated and unostentatious way, to embrace beauty and alleviate suffering, there--maybe--is enlightenment. How will you know? Stop wasting your time pondering such a riddle, and follow their lead! That is my religion now. I have no use for anything else.

Edited by: Gitano no divino at: 10/14/02 8:32:42 am
gardendiva
Registered User
(10/14/02 9:59 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
Gitano....

All I can say is...Amen!!!

X Insider
Registered User
(10/14/02 8:32 pm)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
Ditto, brother.

member108
Registered User
(10/16/02 6:15 am)
Reply 		Go get em
Damn right! And to the Satyas and Mitras and similar ego fogged masters of the universe I say get on the spiritual path. The road of stardom and power pleasures is not the road to God. You are also deceiving other true seekers with your pitiful example. You will need to some day account for those you have turned away from Yogananda.

Rosemarie7
Registered User
(10/26/02 11:14 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
I am someone close to Rosemariie7 and we use the same computer. I am going to apply as a registered user under the name Xfundamentalist.
I do not buy into ever using the label "phenomena" as a reasonable response to this or any other topic. It says absolutely nothing and only sidesteps any genuine understanding of the nature of the psyche/soul. I commend you on your reading of Joseph Campbell.
Hearing voices can mean almost anything if one takes only a superficial glance at the idea. We all hear "voices". Voices also include our mind talking to itself. The psyche/soul is a vast universe of which most is still uncharted by our conscious mind. Are voices we hear one part of our mind talking to another aspect of ourselves? Do psyche/souls communicate with those living or "dead"? Do masters talk to us? Does God talk to us? If so, how, and how can we be sure?

You mentioned that we cannot prove rationally the validity of our hearing voices. As greatly as I esteem reason, it is not our only faculty. C. G. Jung astutely observed that we have at least for major faculties which he called "functions"- thinking, feeling, sense and intuition. Alan Watts contributed to an understanding of this when he observed that our thingking function requires a linear, bit by bit, means of processing information. This is the priciple of the computer, which simply processes linear information but at a much faster speed. There in lies its usefulness. But our intuition apprehends the sense of an entire context all at once, something that reason and the computer are incapable of doing. Watts illustrates this by using the image of walking into a dark cave. If one has a pin-pointed kind of light, say a spotlight, then to get a sense of the cave you would have to shine that light on a single spot and carefully move it along, giving you a clear view of the cave but only in a bit by bit, linear fashion. As you proceed, you will have to rely upon your memory to retain a sense for what you saw earlier. And so, you slowly try to get a vsion of the contouurs of the cave. Now, if one uses a very broad light, like a floodlight, then one can see the cave all at once, but one will not have the pin-pointed clarity of the spotlight. This is how intuition works. It gives us a general but immediate sense of the entire context of something.

It is our faculty of intuition that gives us a competent means of dealing with areas of life where either reason cannot go, or if it can go may require more time than we have to help us now. Intuition is closely related to our subjective experience. It gives us a sense of something that cannot be immediately processed by the intellect but which we require to live our lives. "Voices" require us to use both our reason and our intuition in order to help us realize the significance, validity, and sense of what we are experiencing. And, still, the mystery and wonder of life is will not make this easy or perfectly knowable, even though life also requires that we tolerate the tension between what we seem to be reasonably sure of and what we struggle with and doubt.

One cannot quickly dismiss "voices" as "phenomena" (a cop-out cliche by unthinking robots who are afraid to engage themselves in living their own lives, thinking that they can pass the boton off to someone else to decide for them things which life requires their own participation to determine) or somthing genuine and vital. This runs to the core of our lives and is part of the deeper ground of what it means to be alive.

Ultimately, this issue of "voices" leads us to a most vital truth of living that helps us to deal with our own life experience. That is, only we can determine the validity of "voices" or anything else in our lives. And that requires trusting and using our own judgement. No one can or will ever be able to do this for us. I believe that it is important to note that a cult is intuitively designed to convince you to relinquish using your own judgement so that the organization can use you as a pawn to do its own bidding. This is a universal fact that I have experienced and have come to know, as my name Xfundamentalist indicates. Any cult organization requires money, voluntary servitude, and other resources to feed those in charge. It is a kind of vampire of the soul. But a cult cannot do this without first and foremost getting you to buy into the idea that you must not trust your own judgement. When the underpinning of your true psychological foundation, your own ability and confidence in using your own judgement in life, is knocked out from under you (and that requires a mutual pact with the cult for something you think only they can give you) then you become a robot for the cause. The ends will justify the means because only the cause is important and no amount of mental gymnastics called "rationalizations" should surprise one once this system is put in place.

I once heard one of the star bro's (the self-styled "intellectual" bro) give a talk expressing how important it is for us to think for ourselves. He concluded his talk with the question, "what should we do if Yogananda or SRF asks us to do something that does not seem to make sense to us and may even seem like a bad idea with no foundation." His answer was as bold in hubrus as if was incredibly inept. He said, "we should not (!!!!!!!!!!) think for ourselves if Yogananda/SRF asks us to do something that we would not agree with if we were to rely upon our own judgement." So Bro actually used the topic of how important it is to use our own judgement and think for ourselves as a means to convince us to do exactly the opposite!!! And, even some of the mind-numbed sheep dropped their jaws, though most couldn't reconcile what they heard and simply left with the ending contradiction as their guiding light.

Finally, it is important to understand that the energies of the psyche/soul are experienced by each of us in the images that we are familar with and that we can relate to. So, God or the energy that ultimately comes from God may seem to have a particular individual's voice or face or personality. There is always a potential problem if we requre that we must take this literally. It may be literal but I tend to think that God is ominpresent and if I can let any image ultimately be transparent to the mystery of God behind all images, then I don't need to play the game of judging the literalness of my subjective experiences and the images or masks that appear. So "voices" is not a subject that a thoughtful person can make a hasty judgement about. This occurance is deeply personal and complex and does require our own judgement, intuition, and involvment to determine the true sense of it for ourselves. One cannot truly answer this question for anyone else.

love, Xfundamentalist





Edited by: Rosemarie7 at: 11/14/02 6:51:44 pm
Rosemarie7
Registered User
(10/26/02 11:44 am)
Reply 		Re: MENTAL DISORDERS vs SRF "enlightenment"
Rosemarie7 is back at the keyboard.

To Gitano No Divino and his other troubled guests on this dark earth.


"The Holy Longing"

Tell a wise person, or else be silent,
Because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire of higher love-making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on this dark earth.


GOETHE
translated by, Robert Bly

Gitano no divino
Registered User
(10/31/02 12:57 pm)
Reply 		Troubled guest
Thank you for sharing the lovely poem by Goethe. I canīt argue with that. I embrace the value of intuition and, believe or not, rely on it quite a bit, or as best I can. My only problem with someone elseīs intuition comes when they think it is the voice of god speaking to them. At that point, I believe a person crosses over into dangerous territory, where they become disassociated from their own thought processes and acquire a fatal sense of their own infallibility. I donīt mean to put my thumb in anyoneīs eye, really, but I sincerely believe this is what happened to Yogananda and what happens to many another "master," including Kriyananda and Daya Mata: they become persuaded of their own fantasies, and in the process persuade others to do likewise.

I donīt--canīt--really know what anyone else means by the word god. It canīt be defined or explained, so it remains a mystery. But if it is something fundamentally beyond and outside of you, with which you put yourself in touch through some kind of strenuous self-effort, I canīt accept that anymore. If I have an intuitive sense about something and ascribe that to the astute workings of my sub-conscious mind, that is not to deny the involvement of a god. It is simply to affirm that, by any conceivable definition, there is no place that a real god cannot be, and that includes my sub-conscious mind. To claim my thoughts and intuitions as my own, then, is not (as SRF would teach) a form of egoism. It is an acknowledgement that to affirm any essential difference between myself and the "creator" makes no sense. In short, I AM THE DOER. I take responsibility for my own thoughts and actions. I donīt ascribe them to any entity (master or god) outside myself, because if there is a god, I am an active expression of it and there can be no separation. Just to speak of "god" implies some separation, and as Martin Buber said, it is painful to speak of god in the third person. I would say that it is not only painful but highly illogical (apologies to Spock).

I consider that healthy, though for good reason many on this board may consider me rather sick. C'est la guerre spirituelle.

chuckle chela
Registered User
(10/31/02 10:25 pm)
Reply 		Yes! yes! we have a "Troubled guest!"
Oh, my Goodness, Gitano no divino! How can you say such things!!! [the sounds you hear are chuckle chela's renting of the tunic <rip, rip> ]

The next thing we know, you'll be saying things like . . . like . . . [shudder] "I and my father are one."


Then, my Gitano, we will have no choice but to crucify you.



In all seriousness, you are always a welcome guest in my home, and I think your posts are wonderful. I think that what you wrote here was right on, not to mention beautifully written. Good of you to mention Buber; may I?


Quote:
Man cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach Him through becoming human. To become human is what he, this individual man, has been created for. This, so it seems to me, is the eternal core of Hasidic life and of Hasidic teaching.

Mixing with all and untouched by all, devoted to the multitude and collected in his uniqueness, fulfilling on the rocky summits of solitude the bond with the infinite and in the valley of life the bond with the earthly, . . . he knows that all is in God and greets His messengers as trusted friends


(I don't think that word "trusted" appears by accident. Are you listening, SRF monitor?)

Rosemarie7
Registered User
(11/1/02 1:02 pm)
Reply 		Re: Troubled guest
Dear Gitano,

Nobody considers you sick. We are all friends sharing our thoughts.

Edited by: Rosemarie7 at: 11/1/02 1:57:37 pm
Rosemarie7
Registered User
(11/1/02 7:09 pm)
Reply 		Re: Troubled guest
I am Xfundamentalist on Rosemarie7's computer again.
Your last post was really quite remarkable. Isn't the core of the "self-realization" idea (it's not just an SRF idea) that which was first pronounced by the Indian sage Aruna to his son Shvetaketu as the sacred mystic formula:"tat twam asi" or "thou art that"? God is our life expressing itself as each indidivual and our true identity is that One mystery from which we could not possibly be separate. It then follows that the points below must be true:
1) We do not have to desparately seek God, we are never separate.
2) We do not have to jump through hoops by begging, cajoling, techniquing, and hoping that "just once" God might someday come to us since we are not separate and could not possibly be so.
3) No one has the one magic path to God, which is our one true identity.
4) "Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak": whatever God is, is a mystery that transcends human thought and cannot be put into words.
Etc.

Too much techniquing and struggle might best prove to be a sort of living Zen koan, a paradoxical contradiction that implodes upon itself when practiced long enough. Then we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and realize what the Buddha did; that when we finally stop struggling, we discover that we are already there (which is also here).




Edited by: Rosemarie7 at: 11/1/02 7:20:30 pm
Rosemarie7
Registered User
(11/1/02 7:24 pm)
Reply 		Re: Troubled guest
Can anybody tell that XFundamentalist is Rosemarie's, lover, husband and best friend?

soulcircle
Registered User
(11/2/02 11:18 pm)
Reply 		Me me me
Dancing on my chair

Me me me

Gitano no divino
Registered User
(11/4/02 12:21 pm)
Reply 		Buber, like, totally tubular
Chuckle Chela, that Buber quote is ELOQUENT. Thank you for a bit of inspiration. It did occur to me that I came dangerously close to proclaiming my own divinity. Fortunately, I qualified it by establishing one condition: IF there is a god. I would never have guessed that agnosticism could save me from crucifixion. SRF certainly had me believing otherwise.

Oh, and thanks to Rosemarie7 for the reassurance. One never knows about these things.

Edited by: Gitano no divino at: 11/5/02 4:40:11 am
Notice the Noticer
Registered User
(6/29/03 12:55 pm)
Reply 		Re: I don't believe in enlightenment
Gitano,

First, your explanation of the bait-and-switch technique is so well stated and, in my opinion, true.

The teachers I sit with who are reputedly enlightened ALL claim that enlightenment is a myth. Their explanation has something to do with the fact that we all think enlightenment happens to a person whereas in fact enlightenment is the realization that that person isn't even real, there's no "one" for it to happen to. They say it's not a "state" to be "achieved." This is next to impossible to understand, or maybe completely impossible. At that level, it seems the closest way to approach truth-telling is to use paradox that halts the mind.

I know this isn't what you were saying but, since I applaud your myth-busting tendencies, thought you might find it interesting.

Oh, and I think the vedic quote about "he who knows doesn't tell" doesn't necessarily mean they say nothing. It's that there's nothing about Truth that can be conceptually understood, there's nothing to be described, so they don't try to. They might use poetry or metaphor as a means of praise or whatever, but they are not under the delusion that Truth can be conceptually proven or convincingly presented to anyone else. I know well-meaning (but unawakened) teachers who get fascinated by the concept of "nothingness" and try to come up with good ways to explain it to their students. This is a telling sign.

stermejo
Registered User
(6/29/03 5:25 pm)
Reply 		Re: I don't believe in enlightenment
What a great thread you've come to NtN! I like the comparison of AY to HP.

Well at the risk of sounding pedantic:

GnD stated:

`However, the Hindu scriptures do give us a key to exposing and dismissing all this chicanery: “He who knows tells it not; he who tells, knows it not.” '

Just t'ain't the Hindu scriptures. The quote comes from Lao Tzu in the Tao Teh Ching.

Can't let the Hindus claim they discovered everything!

Also, regarding SRF only claiming PY as an avatar since the 1980s. Nope, 1960s versions of AY (I read one in '68) make the Avatar claim at least in the footnotes; when listing the avatar titles of all the other Gurus (given by PY) the note is that Rajasi said PY was a Premavatar.

One more, was Krishna on the altar back in '67? Yes. But then I didn't attend in California. Still the picture [of a statue] is the same; "he looks like a lady." Apologies to Arrowsmith.

Now, I have one [might have put this somewhere else], Did SRF change briefly ['98 or '99] to a colorized and more lifelike, sans helmet, picture of Krishna (not the Ananda painting, either)? I'm sure I saw one in the Phx Temple.

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