Superiors?

Quote:

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How they ever got put in charge of telling us how to expand our consciousness I'll never guess.

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"I've been seriously itched by your gossipy statements about Hidden Valley I've spend more than 3 years there and it's been the best time of my life so far!You're an ungrateful piece of @#%$, highly unethical and disturbed.And for your info I've been in SRF 2 times as long as you."

"If you want to be able to keep using your email adress,remove the worthless crap about SRF and Hidden Valley(all of it) from your excuse for a website"

1. Before being officially accepted to live at Hidden Valley (HV) as a resident volunteer, one is required to sign a pledge affirming that he will regard his supervisors at the ashram as vehicles of God and Guru, and obey their instructions accordingly. That boils down to being an interesting way for the monks in supervisory positions there to allow themselves to feel that their actions are divinely inspired, and that anyone who disputes that is being a "bad disciple," whose insubordination they will undoubtedly publicly quietly tolerate, but privately discuss and disdain. One is also required to disclose his sexual orientation, and whether or not he has ever had any homosexual experiences.



2. Yogananda claimed to be the reincarnation of William the Conqueror—reputed to be able to heal scrofula with a mere "king's touch"—and of William Shakespeare.
   

   "In this one incarnation I can sleep and dream that I am born in England as a powerful king. Then I die and dream I am born a devout man. And then I die again and am born as a successful lawyer. Again I die and am reborn as Yogananda."
   —Paramahansa Yogananda, The Divine Romance



3. The late Dr. M. W. Lewis—Yogananda's first American disciple—is believed to have been the reincarnation of Sir Francis Bacon. (These questions regarding previous incarnations are not openly touted by SRF, but they are well known behind the scenes, and never directly denied by SRF ministers.)



4. The late Tara Mata (editor of Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi) is alleged to have been the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci. (Source: Brahmachari Lee Dickens, the "head monk" at Hidden Valley.) Her own published writings, however—printed in old SRF magazines, and sometimes available in photocopy to lucky devotees "behind the scenes"—show none of da Vinci's genius, instead bristling with biting and petty condemnations of anyone who failed to agree with her yogic point of view. In particular, of H. G. Wells and others who endorsed the standard view of evolution and the overall arc of human cultural development being monotonically-increasing phenomena. The "logical force" of her arguments comes down to nothing more than a repetitive mongering of the fact that such a view is opposed to the Hindu idea of a cyclic view of spiritual development on the planet, and is therefore "wrong." Somewhat oddly, since she was reputed to have been able to remember her own previous incarnations in those very same previous "world cycles" aeons ago, and thus should have been in a unique position to bolster her arguments via that direct remembered experience.



5. In one satsanga (weekly "fellowship with truth" question-and-answer sessions), Brother Dharmananda—the Hidden Valley Ashram Administrator—"guaranteed" that an unspecified number of the members of SRF's Board of Directors will have been rulers/pharoahs in ancient Egypt.



6. When Hidden Valley wanted to buy a fax machine, it took them three years of asking permission for that from the Mother Center, before Uma Mata on the Board of Directors acquiesced. Brahmachari Lee's unsolicited analysis, given to me, of that dynamic, was that it arose simply from those aging women being uncomfortable with technology in general.



7. Already back in 1999, according to Dharmananda in a satsanga, SRF had hired an "image consultant." The relayed recommendation of that consultant was that SRF work toward becoming known as "the spiritual organization which lives up to its ideals more than any other." In light of SRF's behavior in the attempted Mount Washington expansion (see the CANDER website), the irony there cannot be missed.



8. In a Voluntary League (financial) Appeal newsletter to their members around 1990, SRF disclosed that the city of Los Angeles had been considering a public transit plan which would have disrupted their Hollywood Temple, but had been persuaded to not proceed with it in part because of SRF's protests that the site was considered a holy place of pilgrimage by their devotees around the world. Amazingly, however, in 1966 SRF had filed a plan with the city calling for tearing down their Mount Washington Hotel headquarters—a building considered by devotees to be more holy than the Hollywood Temple, as Yogananda lived for an extended time in the former historic building. Evidently, then, the holiness of a place depends upon who exactly is planning on tearing it down.

OTHER ODDITIES WHICH I PERSONALLY
WITNESSED/ENDURED AT HIDDEN VALLEY

1. Midway through my stay at Hidden Valley, a fellow devotee left the ashram to join the Peace Corps. Hardly coincidentally, within a few weeks of that departure, and with Brahmachari Lee leading a satsanga, we were told that anyone who leaves the ashram to work for world peace would have been serving their guru better if he had stayed and done "Gurudeva's work" at the monastery.
   
   
In related matters, Dharmananda—who himself reads at a Junior High level, testimony to his Engineering background—once opined in a satsanga that "scientists who use their intelligence to 'get famous,' rather than for seeking God, are misusing that intelligence." Brother Achalananda similarly asserted that "Einstein's intuition failed him in his later years," in that the great scientist allegedly "wasn't able to see" that the accepted indeterministic quantum theory was right. Achalananda's certainty in that regard presumably stemmed from the purported correspondences between indeterministic quantum theory and Eastern religion/meditation, espoused only since the mid-70s by authors such as Fritjof Capra and Amit Goswami, and quoted approvingly in some of SRF's publications. (Goswami in turn once wrote a complimentary letter to SRF praising Yogananda's writings.) In reality, however, having thoroughly researched those "correspondences" for my own book on the unity of science and religion, it's clear that they are at best fortuitous, and can more reasonably be regarded as wishful-thinking nonsense. In any case, how does one best use one's intelligence "for God"? By entering the ashrams, and willingly doing what one is told to do by one's spiritual superiors, of course.


2. At a "monks only" gathering at the SRF headquarters around Christmas of 1997, one of the maternal members of the Board of Directors (Mrinalini Mata) was said to have favored those assembled with a joke: "What is an atheist? A member of a non-prophet religion." The clever riddle was proudly retold in the ashram at a satsanga, as a "Christmas gift" from those holy, wise and "spiritually advanced" mother-figures. And all gathered there dutifully laughed, not realizing that the line itself is simply a bastardization of a classic George Carlin observation, i.e., that "Atheism is a non-prophet organization."



3. One evening, Brother Mitrananda—who runs the SRF Postulant ashram in Encinitas—graced HV as a guest speaker. One of the points that he brought up, from his unique perspective as head of the Postulant ashram, was that "the people most likely to leave the ashram after taking some degree of monastic vows are those who are the most independent." While that's undoubtedly true, the clear implication was that independence and the ability to think for oneself are bad things, when in reality they are the only way of doing anything original in this world. Worse, cult-like attitudes such as that allergy to independence turn the unthinking following of other people's blind guesses and bad/incompetent advice into an "ego-killing" virtue, and paint the inability to so blindly follow, against one's own better judgment, what one knows to be wrong, as being a sin.



4. James J. Lynn, personally chosen by Yogananda to be SRF's second President, was a married man. That is, married before, during and after Yogananda gave him the monastic title of Rajasi Janakananda. As to why Mrs. Lynn does not show up in any of SRF's published pictures showing Mr. Lynn at banquets, etc., one can only assume that those have been judiciously cropped to make Mrs. Lynn "non-existent" in SRF's edited view of reality. After all, the existence of a married monk certainly could not help the image of the organization. When this anomaly was brought up by one of the HV residents in a satsanga period, the justification which Dharhamanda provided for that deceit was simply that "that's the way the Board of Directors and Daya Mata want it done." (The Board of Directors are widely regarded as being composed of "perfected beings"—siddhas, ostensibly beyond the possibility of error—by devoted members of SRF.)
   

   "The people running [SRF] are supposedly enlightened siddhas, which makes it even more confusing, because how dare lay devotees question, or worse, challenge, what they have done? But then how can we swallow what's being done (radical editing, photo alteration, and the rest of it)?"
   —an SRF devotee, posting on the Kriya Yoga Discussion Board

   
   The extent to which one is expected to "respect one’s elders" as a good and obedient devotee of SRF was underscored by the following (real) exchange, quoted during a sermon at Hidden Valley:
   
   Elder: "How are you?"
   Youthful Inferior: "I’m fine. How are you?"
   Elder (disgusted at the impudence): "Are you a doctor?"
   
   Further, the extent to which questioning is discouraged in the ashrams is demonstrated by the following example: early in my stay at Hidden Valley, just following our Thanksgiving meal centered on Tofurkey (a tofu-based turkey substitute), one resident pointed out in a written satsanga question that that food was loaded with MSG, which many people are allergic to, or develop headaches from. He also pointed out that non-MSG turkey substitutes are readily available, and requested that the ashram use those instead in the future. Dharmananda’s response to that was to relate the story of how, in the early days of SRF, the nuns used to work "all night" (in shifts) manually preparing gluten-based meat substitutes for their festive occasions. He concluded by saying that he didn’t want the kitchen at HV to have to work all night in similar preparations (not that they would have had to, but anyway), and thus the ashram would continue serving the MSG-laced products.
   
   And all assembled smiled knowingly, that anyone would so foolishly try to improve the ashram, and "resist what God and Guru had given us" there.
   
   At other times, Dharmananda (by now, a hobbled diabetic) related his own experiences of entering the ashrams (along with Achalananda) in the 1950s as a "health nut," and of the two of them being concerned with the poor food being served there. Upon bringing this up with a senior monk, the latter’s response was simply “What Master gives, you take.” Which sounds relatively fine, until one considers that over Easter (in 1996, when I first spent a month at HV), "Master/God gave us"—a group of steadfast vegetarians—a box of donuts containing lard.
   
   Amazingly, although Yogananda very explicitly taught that the consumption of white flour and white sugar was unhealthy, both of those are staples in the ashram diet—with sugar even being added to freshly-squeezed orange juice, and whole wheat flour being all but entirely absent. The explanation which Dharmananda gave regarding that discrepancy was that Yogananda's advice on diet was allegedly meant to apply only to the specific group of people he had been speaking to at each particular time. Personally, I think that's nonsense: Yogananda regularly encouraged his followers to eat only "unsulphured" fruit, for example—which today would equate to it being certified organic—and yet one will find no examples of that in the Hidden Valley cafeteria (other than the produce that they grow themselves, which is close to being organic). SRF's menu, inconsistent with Yogananda's teachings, is just the product of a cultural lowest common denominator among their kitchen staff—it ain't "what Master gives them," nor did Yogananda's dietary advice apply only to "meat and potatoes" people fifty years ago.



5. SRF's respected Brother Anandamoy will typically put up to eighty hours of rehearsal into a Convocation speech—even to the point of practicing facial expressions and hand gestures, according to the head monk at Hidden Valley, Brahmachari Lee. There is nothing wrong with such preparedness, of course; except that the majority of the audience at those events undoubtedly assumes that those lectures are given "from intuition," with little or no preparation—on the basis of the monk's fifty-plus years of meditation—as Yogananda explicitly taught and practiced; a perception which SRF's deceptive billing (in their Convocation literature and tapes) of them as "informal talks," when in reality they are highly scripted, certainly encourages.


Anandamoy also (according to Dharmananda's satsanga re-telling) praised the devotional "absorptive listening" of audiences in India, in contrast to the "intellectual weighing" and analysis which Western audiences give to the words of saints and sages. Of course, that intellectual attempt to understand and "separate the wheat from the chaff" is absolutely necessary if one is to retain any ability to think for oneself. SRF, however, presents it as an "evil," which allegedly interferes with one's spiritual progress (i.e., in introducing doubts, etc.).


6. Yogananda and his followers emphasize the nature of God as Bliss, above all other divine aspects: "To contact [the] Self in deep meditation is Bliss, and is also the source of all truth. To contact it intuitionally gives inspiration, wisdom, genius. Self-realization means all of these things"—Sri Gyanamata, God Alone. Unfortunately, not only is that relating of the Self to Bliss highly questionable—other spiritual paths place the Self at a higher level—but the equating of bliss with truth, and the associating of it with wisdom, genius and intuition, means that any blissed-out meditator can consider himself to be "guided by God" in his actions, from which it follows that anyone resisting his orders must be influenced by maya, i.e., Satan.



7. Yogananda founded separate uniformed schools for boys and girls in India; Dharmananda once publicly voiced the opinion that Yogananda would definitely have wanted the same setup implemented in America as well, had he founded schools here.



8. SRF's emphasis on the "conservation and transmutation of sexual energy" as a means toward effecting spiritual (kundalini) awakenings leads readily to a guilt-ridden attitude toward sex on the part of its devout members. For, if the choice is between sex and spiritual advancement—i.e., if sexual activity leads one away from God—how could one not feel guilty about indulging in it?
   
   Notwithstanding that, in response to a satsanga question, Dharmananda once explicitly recommended that anyone who decides against entering a monastic Order for life should get married, so that his/her ego won't be strengthened by "being able to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants." (As if the "real world" is so lenient and flexible to one's desires! and as if there were a stupider reason to "fall in love.") This leads to the obvious conclusion that, unless one is going to become part of the official monastic "in-group," he shouldn't even try to live a hermitic lifestyle, lest he be guilty of being "egoic and selfish."



9. Each one of the SRF line of leaders/Gurus—their "Popes"—from Daya Mata back to Krishna, are regarded by obedient SRF devotees as being infallible, and simply "working in mysterious ways" when it comes to any seemingly-questionable actions on their parts. I, too, once foolishly regarded them thusly.



10. In a seasonal letter bulk mailed to SRF members several years ago, Daya Mata lamented "sexual immorality" as being the foremost cause of the world's problems. Where, in the SRF view, any sexual relations outside of marriage would constitute such "immorality." Indeed, Dharmananda once asserted in a satsanga that SRF members shouldn't even "live together" before marriage, as it would "set a bad example" for other people's perceptions of persons on the spiritual path. As to how a piece of paper called a marriage license makes cohabitation more acceptable in the eyes of God, well, that was never really explained.
    
    Interestingly, some Clint Eastwood "Spaghetti Western" movies are pre-approved for HV ashram viewing by monks and residents on their monthly "movie nights"; while The Sound of Music, in contrast, is banned. The reason? In the latter, Julie Andrews’ character is contemplating life as a monastic, but then finds "the man of her dreams," and "lives happily ever after." And such an idealization of romantic love might "put ideas into the heads" of the people living there. Guns, however, are evidently relatively okay.



11. Around February or March of 1998, one of the projects at Hidden Valley involved paving the median path in their substantial greenhouse—that path being a ten-foot-wide strip, approximately the length of a football field. That ended up working well, with the cement truck utilizing a long hose to force the concrete along that length. However, a reliable resident volunteer there informed me that the original plan—before someone informed Br. Lee about a better way of doing things—had been to have devotees work in turns, transporting wheelbarrows full of cement along the length of that path. Taking that report as true, had they followed their original plan, one can only imagine how many of those workers would have dropped from sunstroke, in pushing themselves, throughout the day in that heat, "for God and Guru." Or what the headlines would have read.



12. A resident volunteer at HV once remarked within my range of hearing that "everything you do at Hidden Valley gets talked about behind your back." From my own experiences there—including being critiqued by the neurotic Computer Systems Department supervisor there on the length of my hair, the shabbiness of my clothes, and that I shouldn't "work so hard" on ashram projects—and from hearing that same supervisor criticize Dharmananda behind his back as being "long-winded," and offer endless critiques of the ashram food on our monthly trips in to the San Diego Visual Basic Users Group meetings, I know too well that that observation is valid. This, among a group of people supposedly concerned with their own self-improvement, but who in practice inadvertently make a strong case for defining a yogi as "a person intent on killing everyone's ego except his own."
    
    Indeed, Dharmananda once stated his view on positive thinking, being that "failure flattens one's ego," and is thus a good thing. Aside from the problem that Yogananda taught nothing like that, the obvious converse of that idea is that to "succeed too much" would interfere with the "killing of one's ego" that ostensibly constitutes spiritual progress. Thus, implicitly, even if one is successful, he should not feel too good about those successes. It does not take an advanced understanding of human psychology to predict that, in the face of those taboos, the easy way to make oneself feel good is by "cutting off the heads of others"—albeit behind their backs, for to do it to their faces would make one a "bad disciple."



13. Through my work in assisting with Hidden Valley's attempt to set up a software programming shop during my stay there, I was promised full-time computer programming work at $30 U.S. per hour, after having "paid my dues" at HV. That whole programming project was managed by an SRF member who had formerly lived in the SRF ashrams, and was now highly placed in QA at a major American defense contractor...and who believed that HV's software venture was destined to succeed, owing to the "blueprints" for it that the spiritually-enlightened (i.e., kundalini-raised) Dharmananda was "visualizing in the ether." Those visualizations, however, were unfortunately not enough to prevent the collapse of the company upon which the venture depended as the source of contracts for software customizations; resulting in my receiving precisely zero hours of work in the two months following my departure from Hidden Valley.
    
    That individual himself planned to learn to program computers at a professional level in several months of his spare time—having never done any programming at all before—and yet gladly informed me that I was "impatient" and possessed a "big head," simply for getting things done faster than he (and God) wanted them done! He further explicitly informed me, at the time of our "job interview," that when I had meditated more and become more spiritually advanced—i.e., as advanced as he was—I wouldn't feel the need to be creative in writing books and music. That is, that I would just "serve Master's work" by donating money/labor to it, without presuming to do anything original or truly creative in life.
    
    Eighteen months after that debacle, I submitted the following posting based on it to the Dilbert Zone List of the Day, in response to the topic "Biggest Promises Broken By Your Boss":
    
    

    TRUE: Full-time work, six-figure [Cdn.] salary telecommuting. REALITY: No work in first 2 months, ended up $1000 away from living on the street.
    —The Artist Formerly Known As Bert

    
    It finished in the top five.
    
    
14. In connection with that programming, prior to my leaving the ashram Brahmachari Lee made a very explicit—albeit not authorized or disclosed at that time to Dharmananda—offer to me, to be allowed to continue to live at Hidden Valley indefinitely as a non-monastic, and be employed in their software shop, for the good that my presence would have had in the attempts at computer programming of the others there. Since I was not in a position to legally work in the United States at that point, however, we specifically and explicitly agreed that the pay would have to be given "under the table." All for the glory of God and Guru, right, so why not break a few rules?
    
    That same head monk—who felt the need to explain to me that "monks aren't perfect," in relating the story of how another monk at HV had taken a favorite chair from the Mother Center without permission (i.e., had stolen that office furniture) when being transferred to Hidden Valley—freely admitted to me that he was used to having his "head cut off" by his own superiors (as he said, "it always grows back on") for doing things without proper permission from the SRF Board of Directors. (The particular example he gave was in having agreed to have HV do soil analysis programming work for Kinsey Agricultural Services in Missouri without appropriate approval, to "fast-track" it and not miss out on that financial opportunity.) When I indicated that I had never assumed that "monks were perfect," he proferred that I'd "be surprised how many people come to the ashrams thinking that the monks there were perfected beings." I can well believe that that's true; at least, one of the other men doing computer programming there arrived at HV believing, on the basis of ideas in Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, that Dharmananda could read his every thought.
    
    One day, the head of the Systems Department was summoned by Br. Lee to fix a problem with the latter's computer: "My computer's not working." Turned out, Lee had simply encountered a "confirm password" prompt, and couldn't understand why it wouldn't let him continue, as he had already entered his password once! And thus had to call "Help Desk" for assistance in solving that problem. "Perfected beings," indeed. Unable to follow the simplest instructions—a problem which came up as well in terms of a documented file backup utility I had written for Br. Lee, which he ended up using completely incorrectly, in spite of having written instructions for its use—and yet "perfect."


I left Hidden Valley just after the original exposé (Return of the Swami) of SRF and Ananda (which I also briefly belonged to in the late 1980s) was published in The New Times Los Angeles, in early July of 1999. That timing was just coincidental, but it did allow me to witness the "sagely" analysis of the story given, unsolicited, by Dharmananda; that being simply via his mention in that context of several monks he had known having "fallen" due to the temptation of women, without mention of the horrible abuse of power on the part of Arjunananda, or of the despicable response to that on the part of the "compassionate, saintly, God-realized" leaders there.

The same aforementioned "sage" referred to the newsmagazine in which the above information regarding SRF was printed (i.e., The New Times) as being a "smut paper," and regarded the article in question as being simply an attempt to "dig up dirt" on SRF, as a means of thwarting their planned expansion. That is, as being, in his words, "garbage" (or "trash"), not worth sticking one's nose into, particularly when one has been warned of its nature by someone ostensibly in a position to truthfully judge.

The Environmental Impact Report required for the physical expansion of the Mount Washington headquarters was similarly and explicitly viewed by that administrator as being simply a community stalling tactic. I don't recall whether or not Dharmananda explicitly advanced the connection of that overall resistance being contradictory to God's will, and thus a product of maya/Satan—I think his words were more or less that "people will find a reason to oppose SRF," as if there were no other reason for that EIR to be done!—but that analysis would certainly be in line with SRF teachings in general. For example, with regard to one of the relatively recent SRF publications—I believe it's their version of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat—it was noted that one of the artists and SRF members working on the illustrations experienced relevant health problems as the publication date drew near, and chalked those down to Satan trying to thwart the spread of truth through SRF. Given that, it would be inconsistent for SRF not to have viewed any opposition to the Mount Washington expansion as being literally Devil-inspired.

SRF explicitly prides itself on being a spiritual organization "run according to business principles." Nevertheless, although Hidden Valley receives the vast majority of its labor freely from volunteers, and provides no extravagances in food or shelter for them, they were barely breaking even financially, during the time that I spent with them. (As I understand it, the monastic part of HV is actually financially supported by SRF, but HV is expected to make their own way financially in terms of their other activities, including those involving resident volunteers such as myself.) All the while professing "intuitive" guidance in their managerial decisions, and equating obedience to the leaders of the organization with obedience to God and Guru.

Indeed, things were so tight financially toward the end of my stay in the ashram that Brahmachari Lee and my immediate supervisor there (the head of the Systems Department) discussed, without my input, having me spend my own money to provide a second computer for myself to work on—I had already provided one (for $1,000 U.S.) prior to that—in the programming that I was doing for the ashram in attempting to set up a money-earning software shop there. Learning of that, I informed that oppressively negative, short-tempered and neurotic immediate supervisor—whose favorite expression, in the midst of Yogananda's "positive thinking" teachings, was "Life sucks, and then you die," and in whose presence of Undreamed-Of-Negativity it was not safe to voice even guarded optimism—that I wasn't in a financial position to absorb that expense. I further suggested to him that if money was that tight at the ashram, then the three of us should get together and talk about the possibility of me loaning the ashram several hundred dollars from my own meager savings, to be repaid when I left. Amazingly, the same abusive supervisor stopped me later that day, to inform me that he and Br. Lee had discussed the situation—again without me, of course!—and might just ask me to provide a computer monitor instead! (Which I would then take back to Canada when I left, according to their plans.) That, after I was already providing 60 hours a week of professional-level programming, in return for only a $30 U.S. per month allowance.

Although I regularly skipped the "mandatory" group meditations, Brahmachari Lee explicitly invited me, before I left, to come back to Hidden Valley whenever I wanted to—I did not leave "on bad terms" with the organization. It was only after decompressing for several months from the oppressive weight of that experience, and comparing in detail the nonsense I observed there with the relatively benign "evil ways of the real world," that I came to the conclusion that I had never met a complete fool in my life, outside of that setting.

Several months after leaving HV, I informed SRF (i.e., Daya Mata, Brother Mitrananda, Dharmananda and Brahmachari Lee) of my many dismal experiences with the oppressively negative head of their Systems Department, via a 19-page letter of complaint; but predictably received no response from them. Sadly for me, not a day has gone by in the past three years without my dealing with significant mental and physical pain from the after-effects of that supervisor's stressful psychological abuse. Oddly, asking each of the recipients of that letter of complaint to pray for me, and submitting my name for a Prayer Request via the SRF Internet site, hasn't repaired the severe damage they have done to my life. Go figure.

Personally, I would regard even promiscuous consensual sex or pornography as far less "evil" than either deliberately contributing to others' suffering—particularly when they have naïvely turned to one for help—or oppressing others with the cult-like idea that independence and thinking for oneself are spiritually detrimental attributes. After all, if one had to choose between living in a world filled with power-hungry, respect-craving conformist celibates, male and female, concerned more with their own bliss and exercise of authority than with easing the pain of others, versus one rife with "sexual immorality"—i.e., sex outside of a piece of paper called a marriage!—but where no one ever turned his back on another person in a time of need, it is easy to see that the latter would be by far the more preferable environment. As would "smut"—i.e., the frank discussion of sexual fetishes and creativities, which to the perverted monastic mind constitute "smut"—when compared to deliberate deceit perpetrated "in the Name of God and Guru"...utilizing "Satan's favorite tool" to further the spread of a favored version of truth. Likewise, if one had to choose between individuals drunk on alcohol, versus those drunk with power, or hungry for food versus hungry for blind respect, one would wisely choose the former.

In any case, although I went to Hidden Valley contemplating remaining there permanently as a monastic, I no longer have anything to do with SRF (other than still being on their members' mailing list, simply for not having made the effort to get the hell off of it). Yogananda may well still be everything that his followers (which I am no longer one of) believe him to be; but the people currently running SRF clearly bear no closer resemblance to his probable level of integrity than Judas, Doubting Thomas and Denying Peter did to Jesus. And whatever Yogananda's spiritual attainment may be, he clearly isn't keeping too close of a watch over the activities throughout SRF, as they drift with godspeed toward becoming "another Roman Catholic Church."