To Sevaki

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"ANYONE can find God WHEREVER HE/SHE HAPPENS TO BE in this world, wherever God happens to have put him/her, and that NO ONE NEEDS TO RUN AWAY TO AN ASHRAM TO FIND GOD."

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"The times I've been over to the monastery for confession or to talk with the priests for various things it's always been the same thing. Discipline, discipline, discipline. No ifs, ands, or buts about anything. It's stricter than the military. It should have a sign outside that reads "No Egos allowed", for if you have one, it will surely be crushed! No excuses or justifications allowed."

"I'm sure there's room for improvement in SRF's ashrams, just like everywhere else in the organization as a whole. But monasticism has always been about anihilating the ego, and one should harbor no illusions about it. Those seeking recognition or comfort would probably be better off out in the world, where opportunities abound to make a comfortable living and get plenty of praise, fame, name, etc. Just MHO. "


"Those who want the things of this world, the ENTITLEMENTS that the psychobble authors have managed to convince us are our birthright, and all the perks of secular life like "empowerments" and recognition and others making them feel good are better off in the secular world, where there are tons of opportunities to cater to the ego. I just think that monasticism has of necessity to run under a whole different set of rules than those of the secular world. Otherwise what's the point of renouncing the world and going to the ashram if you expect the same rights and entitlements and comforts as in the material world?"

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To Sevaki

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DEVOTEES never give themselves a break

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To sackcloth

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"As a result, they tend to blow things way out of proportion. Overcompensation? Hmmm, I'm not the psychobabblist here, that's Beg's job."

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"But if you look at the ashrams in India, indeed if you look at the monastic orders of ANY religion, they are not democracies. They are not country clubs, or spas or resorts, they are autocracies, dictatorships."

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First off, you are committing the fallacy of appeal to tradition. Just because ALL those religions have done it in the past doesn't make it valid for now. ALL of those religious orders you refer to flowered in the swamps of the Kali Yuga. The human heart in the Kali Yuga, according to Sri Yukteswar, was always in a state of misconception and darkness -- "In this state man is called Sudra, or belonging to the servant class, because his natural duty then is to serve the higher class people in order to secure their company and thereby prepare his heart to attain a higher stage." (The Holy Science 57-58 )

We can deduce from SY's comment that, in the Kali Yuga, autocracies and dictatorships would have the perfect environment to flourish whether in a monastic community or in the political / social sphere because people looked up to authority figures for guidance -- often rather indiscriminately. Thus the cult of obedience was born -- the slave / master ethos.

But then Sri Yukteswar continues that, in the current Dwapa Yuga, man reaches the state of Sandhisthala ("the place between the higher and the lower" . Bathed in this new vibration, men "need help from one another; hence mutual love, the principal necessity for gaining salvation , appears in his heart." Such a man "affectionately keeps company with those who destroy troubles, clear doubts, and afford peace to him, and hence avoids whatever produces the contrary result..."

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With regards to all the stuff posted here and elsewhere on the board from that book about the Guardians and the personality types etc., IMHO you're falling into a delusion trap (I thought the whole point of PY's teachings was to get away from delusion, not get more and more into it). You're mixing 20th century American psychobabble junk with PY's thousands-year old teachings on Yoga and Vedanta.

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"Read Shakespeare and other classics, and suitable portions from practical books on such subjects as chemistry, physics, physiology, history of Oriental and Western philosophy, comparative religion, ethics, and psychology."

"We should study human and animal personalities of various types, and people of different nations, in order to compare their various traits and then adopt in our own lives what is valuable, good, and lovable, and discard what is harmful, evil, and unlovable."

"If one studies the personality characteristics of the different animals, he will find their various traits reproduced in different human beings."

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David Keirsey's landmark book was published in 1978 under the title"Please Understand Me." The second edition "Please Understand Me II" -- which I liberally quote from -- was published in 1998. Just five years out of graduate school, Keirsey first encountered the work of Isabel Myers when he took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in 1956. The portrait he received -- that he was an INTP "Rational" -- was a profound revelation to him. For the next 45 years, Kiersey has devoted his life to the study of personality and temperament.

About the MBTI I've lifted the following description from another website (www.bloomfield.edu/orr/mbti.html).....

"The MBTI was developed by Isabel Myers and Catherine Briggs. Their work was based on Carl Jung's theory of Psychological Types.  Having been influenced by World War II, they hoped to develop an inventory that would lead to greater understanding among people -- an effort to lead to a world harmony. "

Isabel Myers was not a fly-by-night 20th century psychobabblist. She was a profound thinker with a pragmatic aim. Her genius was making Jung's cumbersome Theory of Psychological Types practical and available to the scientist and layman alike.

Other predecessors of Myers were Adickes, Kretschmer, Spranger, and Fromm. Quoting Kiersey, these early pioneers of psychology "saw the usefulness of ancient belief that came primarily from the early Greeks and Romans. It was the Roman physician Galen who, developing the ideas of Hippocrates, proposed (around 190 A.D.) that it is neither the stars nor the gods that determine what we want and what we do; rather, it is the balance of our bodily fluids, the four 'humors,' as they were called ....We might smile at this early view of human psychology, but at the same time we must acknowledge it to be a major departure from what had gone before. Our predispositions , said Galen, come in four styles, and from within and not from without."

Kiersey then traces the history of temperament and types further back to Plato, an "Idealist" who predates the Catholic church by more than 4 centuries: "Nearly six hundred years before Galen, Plato had written in 'The Republic' of four kinds of character which clearly corresponded with the four temperaments attributed to Hippocrates. Plato was more interested in the individual's contribution to the social order then in underlying temperament, and so he named the Sanguine temperament the 'iconic' (artisan) character, endowed with artistic sense, and playing an art-making role in society. He named the Melancholic temperament the 'pistic' (guardian) character, endowed with common sense, and playing a caretaking role in society. He named the Choleric temperament the 'noetic' (idealist) character, endowed with intuitive sensibility, and playing a moral role in society. And he named the Phlegmatic temperament the 'dianoetic' (rational0 character, endowd with reasoning sensibility, and playing the role of logical investigator in society."

"A generation later, Aristotle [a "Rational"] defined character in terms of happiness, and not, as his mentor Plato had done, in terms of virture. Aristotle argued that there are four sources of happiness: 'The mass of men,' he said, 'find happiness either in 'sensual pleasure' ("hedone" or in 'acquiring assets' ("propraietari" , while some few find happiness either in exercising their 'moral virtue' ("ethikos" or in a life of 'logical investigation' ("dialogike" ."

Western Civilization owes a significant debt to Vedic lore on the subject of personality types. Starting with Laws of Manu and and the Vedas and culminating with the Upanishads in India. and running a parallel course through the annals of ancient Chinese philosophy, is a schema of a world based on 4 (and sometimes 5) elemental types. The introduction of Vedic concepts to Greek culture is generally credited to a contemporary of Plato named Empedocles of Acragas whose memorable claim was that there are four elements in the universe which account for all its variety.

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So why do we have a monastic guru leading a progressive country of basically householders? Where's the logic in that? How does that provide us with a role model we can relate to?

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