Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 03, 2011 11:36 am

http://www.american-buddha.com/we.be.tr ... THE%20MONK

WE BE TRIPPIN' WITH UMA'S DAD, AKA BOB THURMAN, "THE MONK"

by Charles and Tara Carreon


"The CIA started Tibet House, using the Dalai Lama and his first ordained Western monk, [Robert] Thurman, now president of Tibet House in NYC, to do the job. Leila Luce is on the board of trustees of Tibet House, she is the wife of Henry Luce lll, whose father founded Time and was an early supporter of the CIA, using Time magazine journalists as operatives. Mrs. Luce is also on the board of Tricycle. 'In 1992, she joined the board of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, for which she is also a consulting editor.' She has just been sued by her daughter and granddaughter for committing sexual abuses on her daughter and granddaughter." -- Am Learning, aka Elsa Cloud (Leila Luce's daughter)

"Robert Thurman [is] the 'academic godfather of the Tibetan cause.'” (Time Magazine), quoted in "An Interview with Victor and Victoria Trimondi," by James C. Stephens]


Image



Did you ever notice how nobody ever heard of Bob Thurman, even though he was the first monk ordained by the Dalai Lama, until a short time after Uma showed her tits to the world in Dangerous Liaisons? You remember that scene, where John Malkovich, long before "Being John Malkovich," writes Glenn Close a nasty letter using Uma's perfect spine, as in naked, for a handy writing surface, complete with quill and nasty remarks. We had to wait until Geoffrey Rush chased Kate Winslett through an insane assylum for a scene of similar power. But I'm getting distracted from the main point -- Uma's tits. These are the spheres from which Bob really launched his assault on reason and sanity, and well empowered for the task they were. Just one look and we all knew that monk-shit was bull-shit. This man has great taste in ass.

Okay, Charles composed the foregoing, but now the torch passes to me, and I want to burn this little pig right in his house of sticks. Yes, this is the big bad wolf of liberation here to call Bob Thurman out. No, I don't need to, which is what this post is all about. Over a year ago I posted my expose of the truly empty nature of Bob's book "Inner Revolution," the "Brother Where Art Thou?" feel-good hit that everybody bought, nobody read, and for which we were none the worse.

Frankly, I was disappointed when all the spit-ballers on the Trike board did nothing to defend Bob. I thought they'd feel like I was torching their huts, but they displayed little or no concern about my revelation of the vacuity of Bob's life work. Comments like "Who cares what Thurman thinks anyway?" rained down hard and fast, drenching my parade. I had to move on to other issues that had more incendiary qualities.

But I dare say, like a stray marijuana seed that will poke its little serrated leaves up in the dirt outside the teacher's lounge, my irreverent critique of Uma's dad seems to have taken root. I mean, it's not every day a major cult monthly that retails in the food coop for $8.95 devotes eight precious full-color pages that could be devoted to Elizabeth Clare Prophet's global campaign for cash concentration to a cartoon that seems to lampoon the hell out of "The Fantastic Buddhaverse of Robert Thurman."

I loved it so much, I've transcribed it here for you from the Fall/Winter Issue of Andrew Cohen's "What is Enlightenment" magazine. Check it out, but before you walk through the grocery line. It will take a few minutes to read, or rather to "experience" what the author calls "another dimension, an alternate reality in which contemporary notions of spiritual transformation...mix and mingle with the mythic, the miraculous, and the other-worldly." Which is just what Charles says about Uma's tits.


Go to "Fantastic Buddhaverse of Robert Thurman"



Illustrated by Nadir Balan

WHEN YOU BECOME A BUDDHA, YOU'RE NO LONGER JUST A BEING INSIDE THIS SKIN...

SO FOR EXAMPLE, I'M A TEACHER, AND I HAVE TO GO TO SOME CRAPPY COLUMBIA CLASSROOM...

...AND I GOTTA TALK IN A MICROPHONE, AND YOU STUDENTS SIT IN SOME CRAPPY CHAIRS,

BUT IF I WAS A BUDDHA, THE CHAIRS WOULD TEACH YOU, THE ROOM. THE SHOES, THE CLOTHES, EVERYTHING!

I WOULD SURROUND YOU WITH PEDAGOGICAL DEVICES. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I'M SAYING?!

BECAUSE I WOULDN'T JUST BE STUCK STANDING UP OVER HERE ON THE STAGE GIVING A TALK; I WOULD BE A WHOLE CLOUD OF THINGS!

THE MOMENT IN A BEING'S EVOLUTIONARY CONTINUUM WHEN THEY DECIDE THAT THE UNIVERSE HAD BETTER HAVE A HAPPY ENDING, AND THEY'RE GOING TO SEE TO IT...

...AND THAT HAPPY ENDING IS FOR THEM AND EVERYONE ELSE TO BECOME A COMPLETE BUDDHA, THEN THEY TAKE THE BODHISATTVA VOW. "I'M GOING TO BECOME A BUDDHA AND I'M GOING TO SAVE BEINGS." I'M GOING TO DO IT!" IT'S NOT JUST A LITTLE SELFLESS THING. "I'M GOING TO DO IT!"

AND IT'S KIND OF AN EGOTISTICAL ALMOST MEGALOMANIAC THING THAT A BODHISATTVA DOES. THEY GET SO PASSIONATE THEY CAN'T STAND TO WAIT FOR A LONG PERIOD OF EVOLUTION TO SAVE OTHER BEINGS...

...SO TO SPEED UP THE PROCESS, THEY SHIFT INTO THIS VERY DANGEROUS, SWIRLING VIRTUAL REALITY, IN ORDER TO CHANGE FAST.

THIS IS TANTRIC HIGH-TECH METHODOLOGY!!

IN THAT REALM, YOU HAVE TO ACTUALLY GO THROUGH THE SELF-TRANSFORMATION OF GIVING YOUR LIFE TO OTHER BEINGS.

LIKE A THOUSAND TIMES IN A NIGHT.

A GUY LIKE THE TIBETAN YOGI, MILAREPA, HE'S IN A CAVE THERE, BUT ACTUALLY HE'S IN A VIRTUAL PLANE AND IT'S LIKE HE'S DOING ONE OF THOSE TRAINING PROGRAMS FROM THE MATRIX.

AND IT'S INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS. YOU'RE DOWN THERE SWIMMING IN YOUR UNCONSCIOUS AND YOU'RE BRINGING UP THESE DEEP ENERGIES AND YOU'RE SORT OF REDESIGNING YOUR GENES...

...AND YOU COMPRESS YOUR EVOLUTION IN THIS INCREDIBLY HIGH-TECH WAY.

YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH A DEATH-REBIRTH, WHICH MEANS TO DEVELOP THE FORM BODY OF BUDDHAHOOD, AND INSTEAD OF THREE INCALCULABLE EONS OF EVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE AND SELF-TRANSCENDENCE...

YOU CAN DO IT IN ONE LIFETIME--IF YOU'RE A SUPER-DUPER PERSON!

BUT IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE FOUNDATION FOR TANTRA, WHICH IS KNOWLEDGE OF SELFLESSNESS, THE ABILITY TO LET ANY STRUCTURE OF SELF DISSOLVE--EVEN THE MOST POWERFUL, THE MOST MAGNIFICENT, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL STRUCTURE OF SELF--

--YOU'LL BE REBORN AS A TITAN OR A DEVIL OR SOMETHING.

THE BODHISATTVA COMPLETELY MASTERS THE WHOLE ART OF MANIFESTATION THROUGH THE MAGIC BODY...

...WHICH IS LIKE A DIGITAL RESIDUAL SELF-IMAGE IN A VIRTUAL, SAMADHIC REALM WITHIN A MANDALA, WHICH IS A PROTECTIVE FORCE FIELD IN WHICH TO VOYAGE TO INNER UNIVERSES. AND THIS IS ALL A REHEARSAL FOR DEALING WITH THE OUTER UNIVERSE.

SO, SAY YOU WANT TO GO AND REHEARSE SAVING SOME BEINGS FROM HELL. THEN YOU MIGHT WANT TO MEDITATE ON SOME FIERCE DEITY WITH MANY ARMS AND WEAPONS AND DIFFERENT HEADS LOOKING IN ALL DIRECTIONS...

...AND THEN, IN YOUR IMAGINED BODY, LIKE A PEACE WALKER WEARING THE MISSILE MAN SUIT...

YOU GO INTO HELL,

AND GET THOSE DEMONS OFF THE BACKS OF PEOPLE

...AND COOL THINGS DOWN--BRING A FIRE HOSE, WHATEVER IT TAKES!

OR YOU COULD BE A BEING THAT IMAGINES ITSELF AS FOOD,

AND WHERE THERE ARE HUNGRY AND THIRSTY PEOPLE, YOU'D STREAM CARROT JUICE AT THEM FROM YOUR FINGERTIPS, OR POTATOES, AND WOULD COMPLETELY FEED THEM. BY DOING THAT YOU FEED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND YOU GAIN THE MERIT OF FEEDING ALL THOSE BEINGS.

SO YOU'RE ACCELERATING THE ACCUMULATION OF MERIT THAT WOULD OTHERWISE TAKE LIFETIMES TO ACCUMULATE AND YOU'RE DOING THIS IN THE NIGHT IN YOUR DIGITAL MAGIC BODY.

WHEN YOU GET THAT KIND OF MERIT...

...YOU DEVELOP THE STABILITY OF MIND AND HAVE THAT LEVEL OF ART AND CREATIVITY TO BE ENGAGED WITH THE WHOLE WORLD SYSTEM.

THEN YOU BECOME A BUDDHA!!

A BUDDHA CAN MANIFEST ALL KINDS OF INCARNATE FORMS AND SEEMINGLY INDIVIDUATED FORMS, TO BECOME A DISCREET MANIFESTATION THAT OTHER BEINGS CAN PERCEIVE. THEY EMANATE AN INDIVIDUATED FORM THAT ANOTHER PERSON CAN THEN RELATE TO IN ORDER TO GET THAT PERSON TO REALIZE THEIR OWN TRUE NATURE.

BUDDHA WILL BE A PARROT IF THAT'S WHAT IS NEEDED.

IF SOMEONE IS SO FRIGHTENED OF THE WORLD THAT ALL THEY CAN DO IS PET A DOG, THEN THE BUDDHA WILL BE A DOG, AND JUST GO AND GET PETTED. THEY WON'T EVEN SAY THE DHARMA OR ANYTHING.

AND TO BE A REAL GURU YOU HAVE TO BE CLAIRVOYANT, BUT NOT FOR YOUR OWN SAKE.

LET'S SAY THE GURU WAS TEACHING SOMEONE AND AT THE SAME TIME THEY WERE AWARE OF EVERY WAY THAT PERSON WAS PERCEIVING THEM...

...A REAL GURU WOULD BE AWARE OF EVERY THOUGHT IN THAT PERSON'S MIND....

...AND OF HOW THAT PERSON WAS INTERPRETING EVERYTHING THEY WERE SAYING...

IF YOU WANT TO BE A TRUE TEACHER YOU HAVE TO DEVELOP THOSE ABILITIES.

SO ENLIGHTENMENT IS WHERE YOU CONSCIOUSLY INHABIT WHATEVER LEVEL OF BEING YOU WANT BECAUSE YOU'RE NO LONGER A PRISONER OF ANY PARTICULAR BODY.

YOU CAN FORM BODIES OUT OF AIR, OUT OF MOLECULES, OUT OF COSMIC RAYS, AND YOU'RE TOTALLY INTERFUSED WITH EVERY BEING---

--TO AN INFINITE EXTENT! YOUR BODY IS LIKE A BACKGROUND RADIATION, NOT PERCEIVABLE BY OTHER BEINGS, YET IT'S INTERFUSED IN THE CELLS AND BEING OF OTHER BEINGS.

I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT ETERNITY OR IMMORTAL LIFE IN SOME NICE SENSE, LIKE UP ON GO'D SHELF, DANCING IN THE CHOIR WITH BEATRICE, LIVING IN THE BRAHMA REALM JUST LOUNGING AROUND IN ENERGY FIELDS, I MEAN BEING EMBEDDED FOREVER IN THE NITTY-GRITTY OF LIFE WITH EVERY OTHER BEING.

ACTUALLY, IF THE LUNATICS HAD ALL-OUT NUCLEAR WAR TODAY...

...BUDDHA COULD PRODUCE ANOTHER PLANET IMMEDIATELY IN A NEIGHBORING GALAXY AND FUNNEL EVERY SOUL THAT WAS DESTROYED!

SO THE WHOLE WORLD BECOMES AN EXPRESSION OF THE BUDDHA'S WISH TO TEACH BEINGS, AND THERE ARE ENDLESS BEINGS, SO THE BUDDHA WOULD BE A WHOLE CLOUD OF THINGS...A BUDDHAVERSE!!

AND THE BUDDHA WOULD BE ACTUALLY UN-LOCATABLE. TOTALLY UN-LOCATABLE, AND TOTALLY PRESENT AT ALL TIMES WITH ALL OF US COMPLETELY RIGHT HERE AND NOW, FOREVER ENGAGED.

THIS IS WHAT THEY SAY. IT'S A LOT OF FUN TO THINK ABOUT ACTUALLY. BUT I KNOW IT'S A LITTLE INCREDIBLE. IT'S SUPER SCI-FI!


Go to "Fantastic Buddhaverse of Robert Thurman"
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 03, 2011 6:00 pm

EARTHDANCE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA GLOBAL FESTIVAL FOR WORLD PEACE

Hosted by Wavy Gravy and The Hog Farm

Image

_______________

* American-Buddha Librarian's Comment: Wavy Gravy and The Hog Farm are hosting the 2005 Earthdance Northern California Global Festival for World Peace at their ranch in Laytonville, California on September 16-18, hosting such bands as One World Orchestra, Kali's Angels, Lost Children of Babylon, Shaman's Dream, Goddess of Funk, Choir of Peace, The Kingdom Travelers Gospel Choir, Swami Beyondananda, Osiris, Ganga Girl, the Temple of Electronica, and the Goazadians (Gozer the Gozarian?) to "UNITE over 150 cities in more than 50 countries." And don't forget the Harvest Moon Faery Masquerade Special Friday Night Event (masks, wings, robes, horns, crowns and costumes encouraged!) We were handed this flyer while eating at our favorite Ashland restaurant by a Hog Farm devotee who everyone in our party agreed was high on methamphetamine, the cause of his extremely aggressive attitude. He got mad at me when I asked if the event was funded by the CIA! (See CIA Connections to the Mind Control Cults in "The False Memory Hoax" by Alex Constantine http://www.american-buddha.com/falsememoryhoax.htm ). Now why would somebody get mad when you tell them they could be part of a CIA-run cult? You'd think they would be interested. (See "A Clown For Our Time," http://www.american-buddha.com/aclownfortime.htm ):

A guy obsessed with eyeballs, clowns, dead fish, saints misbehaving, a church of fun, hogs, labyrinths, paganism, Jewish cowboys, Santa Claus, antlers, a band named "The Grateful Dead," nihilism, buddhas, tetrahedrons, sufis, the magic "E," the KKK, flashlights and light switches, Babylon and the god Pan, who lives in a town called "Sunland" and thinks women are pigs -- can anybody say "Illuminati"?

Regarding the quick sketch of Wavy's thumbnail, there are five years missing in a list that spans 37 years (1957 to 1994), one of them being 1965, where according to a guy named Hammond, Wavy fails to mention that he worked for Art Kunkin at the L.A. Free Press, which published all of Charles Manson's ravings. (See Norman Spinrad Autobiography http://www.american-buddha.com/spinrad.bio.htm ). Now why would he want to hide the fact that he worked for the L.A. Free Press? Is it because his Manson connection is already established through the testimony of Dianne Lake, and this adds yet another connection between him and Manson? And with whom did Dianne Lake participate in group sex while she was a member of the Hog Farm and only 13 years old? (See Dianne Lake aka Snake at http://www.american-buddha.com/dianalakeakasnake.htm ). Is Wavy Gravy a pedophile as well as a coke addict and acquaintance, if not friend, of a mass murderer? If so, what is he doing hosting summer camp for children? And just what was/is his relationship with MK-Ultra and the CIA? (See Farewell to the Chief -- Ken Kesey's Long Strange Trip http://www.american-buddha.com/farewellchiefkesey.htm ). It is rather unbelievable to think that all of his media connections, business success, and vast accumulation of property was due to his own merit. I mean, what is he but a clown who spouts complete nonsense? "In ancient times, I was a teenage beatnik, and I used to brush my teeth with Snickers bars and gargle with Hoffman's Black Cherry Soda and, after a while, I began to get these cavities and my teeth would rot out ..." Is that something people pay for?

Here's the proof that he worked for Art Kunkin at the L.A. Free Press:

And speaking of that LA Time frame [1965-66] - You might have still been at the Free Press when I used to sleep under Hugh R's (now Wavy) desk on occasion - he called me "The Desk Boy." -- Hammond, writenow@spiritone.com http://www.diggers.org/guestbook_03_nov.htm
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:37 pm

American-Buddha Librarian wrote:
A guy obsessed with eyeballs, clowns, dead fish, saints misbehaving, a church of fun, hogs, labyrinths, paganism, Jewish cowboys, Santa Claus, antlers, a band named "The Grateful Dead," nihilism, buddhas, tetrahedrons, sufis, the magic "E," the KKK, flashlights and light switches, Babylon and the god Pan, who lives in a town called "Sunland" and thinks women are pigs -- can anybody say "Illuminati"?


Here's one from the old archive:

A Grateful Dead/Phish Government Connection?

http://www.Stardog2012.net
_____________________________________________

The FASCINATING connection here involves one of the Dead's inner circle pals, Alan Trist. Check out the GD bio "Sweet Chaos" by Carol Brightman, chapter 4 - "How the Balloon Was Launched" and you'll read about Trist's friendship with Jerry & Robert Hunter and the other Palo Alto bohos in the early 60s. Trist would go on to head the Dead's publishing arm, Ice 9.... Key excerpts:

"What we were interested in was art," recalls Alan Trist, who was 19 when he and his father, Eric Trist, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford who founded the Tavistock Institute in London, arrived in Palo Alto in 1960. It was the business of being an artist that totally captured Jerry and Hunter," Alan states, that it was "art in the sense in which art is free of the political frame of reference."

"Alan," according to Robert Hunter, "was a heavy prime mover in getting us together to recognize ourselves as a group".


We cannot underestimate the weight of this last statement in light of the following information... Now break out your copy of author Jim Keith's "Mind Control World Control", a primary selection from the Stardog Library... Chapter 5 -"Tavistock"... The Tavistock Institute was a major mind control experimentation center in the 20th century, going as far back as the 1920s. (If you are unfamiliar with the concept of secret government mind-control projects, please visit Stardog2012.net's Conspiracy page.) By the early 60s, the chairman of Tavistock's board was the aforementioned ERIC TRIST, Alan's father! Feast your mind on these excerpts:

"Tavistock, born from the collaboration of the international monied elite, military intelligence, and the materialistic psychiatric community, refers to its self-admitted military orientation as Operation Phoenix - again, a Freemasonic symbol that it shares with the infamous Vietnam War assassination program. One is reminded of the Freemasonic legend 'Ordo Ab Chao', Order Out of Chaos... Throughout the Tavistock literature... they reiterate their 'global vision' and make it clear that the institute is intended to work it's long-term 'societry' on the world regardless of the wishes of individuals who inhabit it...

"Eric Trist, the chairman of Tavistock's governors, in 1963 described his and Tavistock's work on mass brainwashing, delineating in detail his theory of 'social turbulence'... Trist postulated that the administering of a series of traumatizing shocks upon a society would destabilize it, lowering the overall character of the society's reasoning. Trist suggested that by late 1963 the world had moved into a condition of 'permanent social turbulence' that would serve to usher in a new condition of society, a new paradigm, and a new possibility for remaking the face of the planet."


Later in the chapter:

"The final and most disrupted state of society is termed disassociation, in which the individual becomes the entirety of society for himself, and is isolated from other members of the group. The dominant culture of the society becomes fantasy and superstition.

According to Trist, the current 'wired society' where the main interaction of the individual is with electronic media is only a metaphor for disassociation. Cyberpunks, New Agers, and couch potatoes take note. It is interesting to note that the same progression can be seen in microcosm with the induction of the multiple personality, an oft-asserted goal of intelligence agency brain-banging...

...the primary impetus towards the evolution to the post-technological society are the repeated shocks and chaos taking place, including such events as the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, and the assault on traditional institutions and thinking by the psychedelic counterculture"

Now, I know I just beamed a lot of info at you dear reader, so let me summarize:

The connection with Alan Trist and the Dead is very difficult to view as a coincidence. There is something going on there. Don't get me wrong - anyone who knows me knows that I champion the benevolent spiritual power of the GD and Phish as much as anyone. But this evidence seems to indicate that there is more going on than meets the eye. Robert Hunter stated that Alan Trist was a "heavy prime mover" in getting him and Jerry to recognize themselves as a group. And Alan Trist's father was head of the Tavistock Institute - that is what I call a Siriusly interesting connection. It suggests that Tavistockian elements helped create the psychedelic counterculture.

.
Last edited by American Dream on Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:46 pm


...Dark Star Palace gave a copy of Revolver on cassette to His Holiness the 17th Karmapa in Tibet in 1998 when he was 12 years old, as well as his first Grateful Dead mix tape...a mix tape with some wonderous '75 and '69 sprinkles... because Revolver was the first bit of pop music released that had bits of Tibetan Buddhist texts (albeit via Lennon's recollection of Tim Leary's interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead on Tomorrow Never Knows...so it's a bit flimsy) in it, and because my thinking at the time was along the lines that His Holiness will be getting a lot of western students in the years to come and many of them will likely come to the Dharma through rock music...especially the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. Weird gets weirder because H.H. Karmapa is the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage and Jerry Garcia was married to Mountain Girl by a Kagyu lama, Bob Weir had his kids named by a Kagyu lama and supports the local Kagyu center near Haight Ashbury,Wavy Gravy is a follower of H.H. Karmapa and likes to wear hats that have Karmapa's "dream flag" on it, Mickey Hart puts out records of Buddhist chants...including the track "Mahakala" which is the protector of H.H. Karmapa, and wait, isn't Peter Rowan tied into the Kagyu Buddhists too and blah de blah blah...there is a lot going on here in the Grateful Dead / Kagyu universe (Editor: full disclosure here, DSP financially supports Kagyu yogis living in Himalayan caves). Maybe a post is needed on this in the future? Ok, enough! Back to the Fillmore...hey there...wait, on walking into the Fillmore's bathroom, who is staring at me but Milarepa, the Kagyu lineage's most famous Yogi. Something is definitely up here!




ww.darkstarpalace.com/2010_12_01_archive.html



.
Last edited by American Dream on Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:55 pm

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/tib-m22.shtml

The tawdry politics of Tibetan Buddhism

The flight of the Karmapa Lama from Tibet

By Peter Symonds
22 March 2000



For two months, ever since his arrival in India on January 5, the 14-year-old Tibetan monk Ugyen Trinley Dorje has been in and out of the international media. His brief public appearances and even briefer utterances have been the occasion for rather fawning reports which for the most part are marked by an uncritical acceptance of statements and comments emanating from the self-styled Tibetan government-in-exile headed by the Dalai Lama. Trinley Dorje's flight from Tibet has been turned into a “Boys Own” adventure story and the arcane religious rites surrounding his selection as the 17th Karmapa Lama have been the subject of close interest and reportage.

Among a few of the writers, one detects a willingness to lend a certain credence to the myth of reincarnation and the claim that the 14-year-old boy has inherited the mental and spiritual capacities of the 16th Karmapa Lama who died in a Chicago hospital in 1981. In a gushing article in early February, a correspondent for the Boston Globe wrote that the young monk “already displayed the same star quality, combining flashes of brilliance with humility and composure with impish humour, an infectious mix that has helped his mentor [the Dalai Lama] win international sympathy for the Tibetan cause”. After praising his attributes, she concluded that “such breadth of character seems incredible for a 14-year-old boy” and quoted a Canadian student as saying “something illuminated from him”.

Needless to say such royal treatment is extended to few other 14-year-olds around the world, particularly from backward and impoverished countries. Nor is much time spent discussing, for instance, the cultural practices of Papua New Guinean tribes or the demise of the beliefs of the Peruvian Indians. International media interest in the intricacies of Tibetan Buddhism and the doings of its high lamas are bound up with broader issues both on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere.

According to press reports, Trinley Dorje fled the Tsurphu monastery near the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on December 28 after announcing a few days before that he was entering a religious retreat. He jumped out of his window into a waiting car and with two experienced drivers, his sister and several other passengers sped off to the border with Nepal. Details of the journey into Nepal then onto New Delhi vary widely—many include a romantic ride on horseback, some the more prosaic use of public transport and others the possibility that he and his party simply caught commercial airline flights from the Nepalese city of Pokhara.

How the car managed to evade Chinese security within Tibet, how he and his group were able to cross two international borders without passports or papers; and where he obtained a car and the necessary money in the first place—all of this is left somewhat hazy. All reports appear to agree on one thing: on the night of January 4 he hired a cab in New Delhi and drove hundreds of kilometres to Dharmsala in the foothills of the Himalayas in northwest India—the Dalai Lama's headquarters.

Why he left is even murkier than the route he took. By all accounts, the 14-year-old led a rather pampered existence in Tibet complete with toys, chauffeured limousines and trips through China. Trinley Dorje was particularly valuable to the Chinese bureaucracy, as he was the only high lama recognised by both the Dalai Lama and Beijing. As the 17th Karmapa Lama, he heads the powerful Karma Kagyu sect and ranks third in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.

For the most part the boy has been cosseted away since his arrival in Dharmsala. His brief public comments referring to the lack of freedom in Tibet have been tailored to the political requirements of the Dalai Lama and his government-in exile. Trinley Dorje fled Tibet, it is said, because he felt “like he was living in a gilded cage”. The official story appears to be that he is a headstrong lad who just decided to jump in his car and arrive unannounced in India taking the Dalai Lama, Beijing and New Delhi completely by surprise.

Unlikely as it is, even if Trinley Dorje did depart unprompted and unassisted from his “gilded cage”, then he has leapt from the frying pan into the fire. If he felt he was being used by Chinese authorities in Tibet then in Dharmsala he will quickly find himself—if he is not already—a pawn in the political intrigues within the Tibetan exile community and in the broader strategic equation of regional power politics.

Factional Tibetan politics

To understand why it is necessary to start by delving, briefly at least, into the bitter factional rivalries of Tibetan lamadom and its rather bizarre politics of reincarnation. Trinley Dorje is not the sole claimant to be the reincarnation of the Karmapa Lama—there are at least two other youngsters, each backed by rival lamas and their respective organisations who also insist that they are the new physical embodiment of the spirit of the dead monk.

At stake in the dispute are not spiritual matters or fine doctrinal points but an earthly lust for power and considerable sums of money. While most of the 130,000 Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan eke out a precarious existence on small plots of land or in handicraft production and small businesses, the religious hierarchy has been able to amass significant fortunes through business investments and donations, particularly by exploiting interest in the West in Tibetan Buddhism.

The Karma Kagyu sect, headed by the Karmapa Lama, has a lavish monastery in Rumtek in Sikkim in northern India, which houses the symbol of his leadership—a black crown said to have been woven from the hair of 100,000 dakinis, or fairies, and to possess miraculous properties. The sect also has a centre in the United States, where the 16th Karmapa Lama chose to spend much of his time, and a large business empire. Estimates of the worth of the Karmapa Charitable Trust start at around $US1 billion and escalate from there.

Following the death of the previous Karmapa Lama in 1981, four regents were charged with the task of finding his reincarnation. The senior regent, Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche, also known as the Sharmapa, subsequently fell out with the others and with the Dalai Lama. The selection of Trinley Dorje was based on clues purportedly left behind by the 16th Karmapa Lama, which were miraculously discovered in 1992 inside a talisman worn by another regent Tai Situ Rinpoche.

Shamar challenged the selection and the feud came to blows on more than one occasion. According to an article in the New York Times, “On August 2, 1993, a second brawl broke out, far worse than the first. Versions of what occurred are as different as inner peace and outer space. What is certain is that the split within the monastery's walls had become irreparable. Dozens of monks slept in the woods that night—or in a hospital or in jail.” Monks loyal to the Dalai Lama continue to control the valuable monastery.

Shamar did not let the issue rest. In March 1994, he enthroned another reincarnation—Thinley Thaye Dorje—as the alternative 17th Karmapa Lama in a ceremony in New Delhi. The matter has been the subject of a lengthy and rather sordid six-year-long wrangle through the Indian courts. An article in the Indian Express entitled “Brief history of the lama wars” refers to no less than six legal cases in various courts throughout India, all but one of which have been dismissed. Shamar currently resides at a monastery donated to the 16th Karmapa by the President of India in 1979 but he himself owns a couple of well-appointed houses in India as well as land in Nepal.

But there is also a third claimant to be the reincarnation of the Karmapa Lama, Dawa Zangpo Sherpa. An article on March 5 in the Hindustan Times reported his comments warning that any attempt by the new boy from Tibet to enter the Rumtek monastery would create “a major law-and-order problem”. His group, which unsuccessfully tried to storm the Rumtek monastery in 1998 and 1999, claims that 60 percent of Kagyu sect followers in Sikkim do not recognise the Tai Situ nominee.

Tibet and geopolitical interests

These intrigues are not solely bound up with money. The factional disputes in Tibetan Buddhism intersect with regional politics. In the case of Shamar he has not only sought to have the courts decide on the thorny legal issue of which boy is the real reincarnation but accused Tai Situ and other lamas of being Chinese agents engaged in anti-Indian activities. The Indian government took the charges seriously enough to ban Tai Situ from entering India from 1994 to 1998 and still bar him from entering Sikkim or the Rumtek monastery.

Whether the accusations against Tai Situ are true or not, the flight of his protégé to Dharmsala has the potential to set off tensions between India and China who have yet to settle the border disputes that led to army skirmishes in the 1960s. Beijing has always been sensitive to the political activities of the Tibetan government-in-exile on Indian soil and anxious that it be afforded no official recognition. For its part, India has utilised Tibet as a means of putting pressure on China, which has been allied with India's bitter rival Pakistan.

Clearly Beijing would be concerned if the boy it has recognised as the Karmapa Lama were to be afforded some form of official status by the Indian government and used as a vehicle for agitating for Tibetan independence. But the Indian press, which takes a rather more hardnosed attitude than its Western counterparts to Tibetan matters and the politics of reincarnation, considered the possibility that all was not as it appeared. Beijing, it speculated, was playing its own game.

An article in the Hindustan Times in January entitled “Chinese piece in Karmapa jigsaw remains a puzzle” hypothesised that Beijing might be trying to insert the young monk as a more pliable figure in the Tibetan exile leadership. Preliminary police investigations in India, it noted, did not show that “the boy lama and his entourage slipped through the heavy Chinese security cover. On the contrary, the investigations suggest that they had a fairly smooth passage out of their Chinese-occupied homeland, indicating that Beijing may at least have acquiesced in the departure...

“If the boy-lama was sent to secure the spiritually vital Black Crown and be installed at Kagyu's Rumtek headquarters, his presence in India could aid Chinese designs both on Sikkim and the Tibetan exile community. He who controls Rumtek also controls the school's $1.2 billion worldwide wealth and commands influence over many Buddhists living in the strategically sensitive Indian Himalayan arc from Arunchal Pradesh to Ladakh. What undergirds India's concerns is the fact that China on its maps still shows Arunchal Pradesh as its territory, Sikkim as independent, and Jammu and Kashmir (other than the parts it occupies) as disputed.”

Here the story begins to read like something out of Rudyard Kipling's Kim and the boy agent who was involved in the Great Game played by the British colonial rulers on India's northern borders during the 19th century. The Hindustan Times points to the possibility that Tai Situ and the Dalai Lama are involved in a complex web of intrigue with elements of the Chinese bureaucracy. “The Dalai Lama's controversial endorsement of China's Karmapa was driven by purely political reasons,” it noted, concluding: “India has yet to figure out the Dalai Lama's game”.

For his part, Shamar is also involved in intricate machinations with connections in India, China and Taiwan. According to the Indian Express article, referred to above, “He enjoys very cordial relations with Kathog Shingchong Tulku, an office-bearer of the Chinese Communist Party who was allegedly deported from Dehradun [in India] 20 years ago for indulging in anti-Indian activities. Tulku now resides in Chengdu, located in the Szechwan province of China, and is a key anti-Dalai Lama player.”

The Dalai Lama and the CIA

Little more has been written on the political machinations behind the boy's flight as both India and China have sought to downplay the issue. India is allowing Trinley Dorje to remain as a refugee but has refused to grant him the status of political asylum. Beijing has indicated that it is satisfied with New Delhi's response. But all of this underlines the basic fact that Tibetan factional politics has always been bound up with regional politics and the geo-political interests of the major powers. The question of Tibet is connected to the longstanding border dispute between India and China, the bitter conflict between Pakistan and India particularly over Kashmir, and wider strategic issues connected to the scramble for oil and minerals in Central Asia.

For centuries the high Tibetan plateau has constituted a key strategic position within the region—long under Chinese patronage, and then after the Chinese revolution of 1911, used by the British in India as a buffer against China and Russia. Soon after Mao's peasant armies took power in Beijing in 1949, the Chinese army seized Tibet and in 1951 it was formally incorporated into China.

But the Chinese Stalinists were unable to create a stable social base for their rule. Beijing invariably approached religious and cultural questions in Tibet with the heavy hand of the state bureaucrat imbued with Chinese chauvinism. Incapable of eliminating social inequality, poverty and cultural backwardness, Chinese policy has in varying degrees combined brutal repression with pandering to Tibetan Buddhism in an effort to create its own officially sanctioned hierarchy of lamas through which to manipulate local politics.

China's brutish behaviour in Tibet created oppositional tendencies. Throughout the Cold War, the US was able to exploit as a means of putting pressure on Beijing. While not diplomatically recognising the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile, US administrations have in the past provided diplomatic, financial and even military assistance to the Tibetan priesthood. After China's takeover of Tibet in 1950, the CIA financed and trained Tibetans to engage in espionage and guerrilla activities against the Chinese authorities.

Details of the CIA's operations in Tibet have recently begun to leak out as former operatives have began to publicly reminisce about their Cold War exploits. An article in the US-based Newsweek magazine last August pointed out that the CIA's activities began as far back as 1956. While the Dalai Lama, keen to preserve his image as a man of peace, claims not to have been directly involved, his elder brother Gyalo Thondup was at the centre of the operations. According to the magazine's report: “Gyalo Thondup now says he didn't inform his exalted sibling about all of his intelligence connections at the time: ‘This was a very dirty business'.”

The Newsweek article explained: “Beginning in 1958, American operatives trained about 300 Tibetans at Camp Hale in Colorado. The trainees were schooled in spy photography and sabotage, Morse Code and minelaying. Between 1957 and 1960, the CIA dropped more than 400 tonnes of cargo to the resistance. Yet nine out 10 guerrillas who fought in Tibet were killed by the Chinese or committed suicide to evade capture, according to an article by aerospace historian William Leary in the Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine.”

These activities culminated in an abortive uprising in Tibet in 1959, which was ruthlessly suppressed by Chinese security forces. The Dalai Lama, his close associates and thousands of other Tibetans fled to Nepal and India and established a government-in-exile, which received US and CIA support throughout the 1960s. “By the mid-60s,” Newsweek explained, “the Tibet operation was costing Washington $1.7 million a year, according to intelligence documents. That included $500,000 subsidy to support 2,100 guerrillas based in Nepal and $180,000 worth of ‘subsidy to the Dalai Lama'.”

Following Washington's rapprochement with Beijing in 1972, overt support for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan guerrillas dried up. The Newsweek article quoted the rather bitter remarks of the Dalai Lama: “They [the CIA] gave the impression that once I arrived in India, great support would come from the United States. It's a sad, sad story... The US help was very, very limited.” By 1974, the Dalai Lama was forced to publicly call for an end to armed resistance in Tibet.

While the US and other Western powers have been wary about alienating Beijing by associating too closely with the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile, neither have they dropped completely what could still be a useful political tool. It was no doubt for past services rendered that the Dalai Lama was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He continues to receive “unofficial” audiences with political leaders and to bathe in the invariably reverential adulation of the international media.

Tibet along with Taiwan has always been a political hobbyhorse of the extreme right in the US, particularly in the Republican Party. The anti-China lobby wields considerable influence within both the Democrat and Republican parties and as the presidential campaign heats up it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Tibet along with US-China relations as a whole will surface as an issue.

The Free Tibet movement

Certainly the “Free Tibet” movement, which has become something of a cause celebre among middle class social circles and numbers in its ranks figures such as actor Richard Gere, has a degree of political clout in the US and elsewhere. No doubt many people are repelled, quite legitimately, by the acts of repression carried out by the Beijing bureaucracy in Tibet and the insensitivity of the Chinese bureaucracy to the language and cultural traditions of ordinary Tibetans.

Some are also drawn by a fascination for the Dalai Lama's religious teachings—a phenomenon which has far more to do with a profound crisis of perspective among broad layers of the population in the West than any inherent profundity of Tibetan Buddhism. Not a few people find themselves alienated from the political establishment and at the same time can see no way out of the immense social and political problems of the day. In a society thoroughly saturated with individualism, some try to find an individual solution to their anxieties and personal crises. Tibetan Buddhism not only offers an exotic lifestyle but one, which is centred on the spiritual salvation of the individual through his or her own efforts. Moreover, Buddhism justifies indifference and inaction as a response to suffering, poverty and social inequality with the reactionary doctrine that the world is the way it is and the woes of individuals are brought on themselves by their sins in present and past reincarnations.

The result of this rather bizarre mixture of religion and politics is the demand of the Free Tibet movement for an independent Tibet and the return of the Dalai Lama and his entourage of monks to their palatial monasteries in Lhasa. Prior to 1950 Tibet was, after all, a theocracy rooted in the backward semi-feudal practices of the past. The Dalai Lama and the top lamas were not only religious leaders but also political despots with absolute powers that could be wielded in brutal ways. The social conditions of pre-1950 Tibet are as much a matter of fierce debate as its history and politics. Suffice it to say that hard-line Free Tibet supporters are compelled to acknowledge that life was harsh for the majority of Tibetans under the rule of the Dalai Lama.

For instance, Mary Craig in her book Tears of Blood—A Cry for Tibet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, provides the following grim picture: “In this strange theocracy administered from Lhasa, all land belonged to the state. Much of this had been granted in the form of hereditary manorial estates to aristocratic families or important monasteries. The government retained a few holdings for its own use, but most of the remaining arable land was leased in strips to small-holding peasants.

“It was a mediaeval feudal society and whether he worked on government property, the monastic estates or on the lands held by the two hundred or so great aristocratic families, the Tibetan peasant was undeniably owned by his master. He had to render a certain amount of compulsory labour in exchange for his own bit of land; and give up the greater portion of his crops to his landlord, keeping the barest minimum necessity for himself and his family. The landlord not only had the right to exact whatever rents he wished, but could also impose cruel punishments for failure to conform. Capital punishment and limb amputation were quite common in some regions.”

Having painted this picture, Craig in the next breath tells us: “Life for the ordinary Tibetan was harsh, but it was not the unmitigated hell claimed by Chinese propaganda... Generally speaking, the Tibetans were not aware of being downtrodden or exploited, and their enormous zest for life was undimmed by desire for a freedom they had never known... Despite the yawning divide in terms of money and material possessions, there was so little resentment of the rich by the poor that in all Tibet's history there had seldom been a popular uprising.”

They had food, shelter and clothes—what more could they want? At any rate, they didn't rebel so they must have been content. All of this reeks of the same appalling indifference and contempt towards the plight of the oppressed as was exhibited by the high lamas themselves and could no doubt be found—with the appropriate changes—among the justifications trotted out by the apologists of, for example, the British Raj in India or Czarist Russia.

The Tibetan theocracy has, of course, had to change its tune a little over the last 50 years ago, if for no other reason than that the Dalai Lama's US patrons were fighting the Cold War under the banner of democracy. But in examining the “Guidelines for Future Tibet's polity” to be found on the official website of the Tibetan government-in-exile it is remarkable just how limited is the nature of the “democratisation” proposals.

The plan for a “democratic” Tibet abounds with contradictions, not least of which is the fact that it is written in the first person by the Dalai Lama in the manner of an absolute monarch. He eulogises the period prior to 1950 as one in which, under Tibet's Kings and Dalai Lamas, “peace and happiness prevailed”. Yet for reasons unexplained he finds it necessary “to reform the unsavoury aspects of our social system”. He has made up his mind “not to play any role in the future government of Tibet” but nevertheless will appoint the interim president to form any transitional government.

The Dalai Lama is involved in a delicate balancing act between many forces, including within the Tibetan exile community. While a handful of lamas preside over significant fortunes, the vast majority of Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan live in poverty. According to the Tibetan government-in-exile's own figures, the unemployment rate among exiles is 18.5 percent and many live in settlements which lack basic sanitation, clean water, adequate housing or proper health and education facilities. It was only in 1990 that the “democratisation” of the exile regime constituted itself as the Assembly of Tibetan People's Deputies on a “one man one vote” basis. But even then, the Dalai Lama retains the right to appoint his nominees and the major Tibetan Buddhist sects all have their representatives.

Stripped of its media hype the world of Dharmsala into which the 14-year-old monk from Tibet has entered hardly presents an edifying spectacle. What emerges is a rather seedy picture of a Tibetan lamadom steeped in backward superstitions, embroiled in sordid intrigues over money and power, and a willing instrument of great power politics in the region.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:29 am

Excerpted from: The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part II – 12. Fascist occultism and it’s close relationship to Buddhist Tantrism , by Victor & Victoria Trimondi


Julius Evola: A fascist Tantric

Image


It was not just the ideologists and theoreticians of national socialism who were closely concerned with Tibet, but also high-ranking intellectuals and scholars closely linked to Italian fascism. First of all, Giuseppe Tucci, who attempted to combine Eastern and fascist ideas with one another, must be mentioned (Benavides 1995).

A further example is the work of the Italian, Julius Evola (1898-1974), for a time Benito Mussolini’s chief ideologist (mainly in the forties). In numerous books and articles he has investigated and further developed the relationship between tantric rituals and power politics. He has followed “tantric trails” in European cultural history and come across them everywhere: among the Cathars, the troubadours, the Knights Templar, in the work of Alighieri Dante, the mysticism surrounding the holy grail, European knighthood, alchemy. Using criteria drawn from Vajrayana, he propounds a cultural history of sexuality in his most famous book, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. Evola was not just a theoretician, he also practiced sexual magic rites himself. There are unmistakable statements from him about the “tantric female sacrifice” and the transformation of sexuality into political power. Like almost no other, the Italian has openly named the events that unfold in the mysteries of the yogis and then confessed to them: “The young woman,” he writes, “who is first ‘demonized’ and then raped, ... is essentially... the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic” (Evola, 1983, p. 389). In dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini he saw the precursors of future Maha Siddhas who would one day conquer the world with their magic powers: “The magician, the ruler, the lord”, he proclaims in regard to Tantrism, “that is the type of the culture of the future!” (Evola, 1926, p. 304). He recommends Tantrism as “the way for a Western elite” (Evola, East and West, p. 29).

In the Shambhala myth he sees a confirmation of the European tradition of the savior king, especially the myth of the grail: “At a particular time decreed by one of the cyclical laws, a new manifestation of the solar principle from above will occur in the form of a sacred ruler who gains victory over the ‘dark age’: Kalki Avatara. Symbolically Kalki will be born in Shambhala — one of the terms in the Indian/Tibetan tradition for the holiest hyperborean [Nordic] center” (Evola 1955, p. 56).

We could fill many pages illustrating the influence of Vajrayana (Tibetan Tantrism) on Evola’s work. But however, we will instead concentrate on a detailed discussion of the ideas of one of his pupils, Miguel Serrano. Serrano combines Evola’s fascist philosophy of power warriors with the national socialist thoughts on race. His works are particularly interesting for us not just because he is still alive (in 1999), but also because he has been linked with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama several times.

Miguel Serrano: The Dalai Lama’s “friend” and chief ideologist of “esoteric Hitlerism”

"Miguel Serrano”, writes his interviewer, Isidro Palacios, “was the only [!] western foreigner who traveled to meet the Dalai Lama as the monk-emperor of the Tibetan Buddhists fled from the holy land of Tibet to the south because of the Chinese invasion. Our conversation partner [Serrano] traveled from India into the Himalayas where his meeting with the Dalai Lama took place, and since then a close friendship has existed between him and the now Nobel prize winner” (Palacios, 1990, p. 2). Who is this “close friend” of the Kundun then?

Miguel Serrano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1917. Between 1947 and 1948 he visited Antarctica for the first time, to which he later undertook many journeys. One of the massifs which he explored on an expedition there bears his name today. Between 1939 and 1945 he published the esoteric journal, La Nueva Edad [The New Age]. He was active as a diplomat for Chile in several countries, including India, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Austria. He also worked as an ambassador at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna and at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Largely unnoticed by the public, Serrano has been in friendly contact with numerous prominent national socialist and fascist figures since the seventies: with Léon Degrelle, Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Hanna Reitsch, Julius Evola, Herman Wirth, Savitri Devi, and the French Waffen SS man and author Saint Loup. The Chilean returned to his country of birth and lives some kilometers from Santiago (as of 1999).

He published numerous books with an occult/poetic content. Even his work best known in the West, in which he recounts his encounters with the German poet Hermann Hesse and the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, displays a great deal of occultist speculation when one reads it attentively. Serrano titled his book The Hermetic Circle: Conversations, Correspondence, and Memories of Hermann Hesse and C. G. Jung.[5] This title alone should signal that the author had formed an esoteric brotherhood with Jung and Hesse, a sort of triumvirate of magicians who had gained admittance to the archetypal storehouses of the human subconscious and are unique in the twentieth century. Jung was sympathetic towards the Chilean who had courted him. He wrote an effusive foreword to Serrano’s tale, The Visit of the Queen of Saba: “This book is unusual. It is a dream amidst other dreams, one could say, and completely different to the spontaneous creations of the unconscious with which I am familiar” (Serrano, 1980, p. 7). Serrano was also a great admirer of the American poet, Ezra Pound, who sympathized with the Italian fascists. Together with Pound’s widow (Olga Rudge) and Prince Ivanici, Serrano had a commemorative stone erected in Italy.

His occult studies took him to all parts of the world. He saw himself as a modern Percival (Parsifal) and Minnesinger, who went in search of the Grail under the protection of his diplomatic passport. “The life of an ambassador is a farce and a folly”, he said in an interview in the journal Cedade, “My post allows me to meet with people of value like the Dalai Lama, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Hanna Reitsch (Hitler’s famous female war pilot) and others” (Cedade, 1986). Switzerland, Westphalia, the mountains of Salzburg, the Pyrenées, his travels in search of the Grail led him through all these “geomantically” significant sites, but likewise to the Himalayas, Patagonia, and Antarctica.

The Chilean was rightly considered the occult eminence of modern, international fascism. Meanwhile, his phantasmagoric writings have also developed a fanatic following in the German neo-nazi scene: It is the Chilean author’s obsessive intention to convince his readers that Adolf Hitler was an avatar (a divine incarnation) or a tulku, and ever will be, since he lives on in another body in another sphere, that of the kingdom of Shambhala. According to Serrano, the Führer will reappear as the doomsday ruler and fight a terrible battle, and that in the next few years. How did this bizarre fantasy arise?

Shortly after the Second World War a mysterious “master” from the beyond is supposed to have appeared to the Chilean and said to him: “Hitler is a initiate, he can communicate with those dwelling on the astral plane. I do not know who his spiritual leaders are, but I have decided to help him. Hitler is a being with an iron, unshakable will which he inevitably put into effect. He never yielded. I was in contact with him.” (Serrano, 1987, p. 21).

After this appearance of his spiritual guru, Serrano was absolutely convinced that he had been entrusted with the mission of the century: the worldwide dissemination of Hitlerismo Esoterico (of “esoteric Hitlerism”). Whilst still performing his international duties as a Chilean Ambassador he held himself back, although he carried the idea in his heart from the nineteen fifties on. During this period he published books of a poetic/esoteric content with several respectable western publishers which, although they without exception include tantric topics (especially the “female sacrifice”), studiously avoid mentioning the name of Adolf Hitler. Only in 1978 did the Chilean first dare to go public with an open profession of belief in the German Nazi dictator, and published El Cordón Dorado — Hitlerismo Esoterico [The Golden Ribbon — Esoteric Hitlerism]. In the mid-eighties the almost 650-page, large-format book, Adolf Hitler, el Ùltimo Avatâra [Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar], followed. Serrano summarizes the results of his extensive occult research into this topic with the concise statement that, “esoteric Hitlerism is tantric” (Serrano, 1987, p. 330).

Shambhala: The center of “esoteric Hitlerism”

In the following sections, we hope to show just how much of his fascist world view Serrano owed to Tantrism. It is of especial interest in connection with this study that he recognized “esoteric Hitlerism” as a central doctrine from the kingdom of Shambhala: “In fact”, the author says, “Shambhala is indeed the center of esoteric Hitlerism. The entrance to it [the realm of Shambhala] was to be found in the vicinity of Shigatse or near Gyangtse [in southern Tibet]. Through my investigations I arrived at the conclusion that our center [i.e., that of Serrano’s occult order] had also been located there. The connection between Hitlerism and the Tibetans or Mongolians was also not immediate, but indirect, in as far as they established contact with the Hyperboreans (the Aryan gods of the north) and made free passage and the transmission of physical messages possible. Tibetans and Mongolians were their vassals who had to guard the magic entry gates to their world. ... When I visited Berchtesgaden [the Obersalzberg to which Hitler retreated time and again], my attention was constantly captivated by a tellurian force, a tangible vibration in the air, which instantaneously linked this point with the Tibetan Himalayas and trans-Himalaya: Hitler’s high-lying refuge with the Lhasa of the Dalai Lama, with Shambhala. For some particular reason, esoteric Hitlerism had chosen this point, which is full of direct connections, magnetic vibrations, and those which touch the stars, as the holy center of its order (the SS), and it had avoided letting a final physical struggle, which could have harmed this area, take place there” (Serrano, 1987, p. 32). In his book, NOS, Serrano defines the kingdom of Shambhala as “one of the hidden subterranean cities in which is performed the tantric initiation that transforms, transmutes and transfigures matter. There are people who say that it was the capital of Agarthi” (Serrano, 1984, p. 186). Before Shambhala was relocated in the Himalayas by the hyperborean (Nordic) siddhas, it was a kingdom at the North Pole.

Shambhala and Agarthi are thus the two occult regions (or cities) from which the national socialist dictator, Adolf Hitler, was sent to our planet. According to Serrano the two locations lie in a magic realm beneath the surface of the Earth. “Thus the submerged Agarthi and Shambhala are to be found there, which the Tibetans and Mongolians speak of as the seat of the king of the world, and also the symbolic orient of the [Knights] Templar and the true Rosicrucians. Thus the unknown leaders of these two orders, as well the organization of esoteric Hitlerism [the SS], betook themselves there. And from there Hitler clearly received instructions” (Serrano, 1987, p. 32). [6]

Following the Second World War the rumor (which Serrano seizes upon thankfully) arose in occult circles that Hitler had settled a brotherhood of Tibetan lamas in Berlin, who stood in direct contact with the kingdom of Shambhala. After the Russians entered the city the members of the order committed suicide ( Ravenscroft, 1988, p. 262ff.).[7]

But Hitler — Serrano says- did not suicide; rather he was able to return to his subterranean home of Shambhala. “Hitler lives. He did not die in Berlin. I have seen him under the earth. ... I kept this secret for many years; then it was dangerous to reveal it, and it was even more difficult to write about it”, the mysterious master we have already mentioned explained to his pupil, Serrano (Serrano, 1987, p. 37). The “Führer”, however, did not flee to Tibet as is assumed in other occult speculations. Serrano doubts such assumptions, since on the basis of his researches he reached the conclusion that the mythic realm of Shambhala was relocated from the Himalayas to the South Pole (Antarctica) following the war and that today the entrance to the underground imperium may be found there. Hitler is thus said to have traveled to Antarctica.

In the near future, the “Führer” with ascend to earth from the subterranean Shambhala (now at the South Pole) for a second time, with a powerful army of UFOs in fact. (At another point Serrano reports that Hitler will lead his army on a white horse, like the Rudra Chakrin, the wrathful wheel turner from Shambhala.) The “last avatar” (Hitler) will plunge the planet into a terrible apocalyptic war between the forces of light (the hyperborean Aryan race) and the powers of darkness (the Jewish race). The Jews, who currently rule the world, will be exterminated and the Nazis will found the Edidad Dorada (the “golden age”) and the “Fourth Reich”.

Serrano took his “fantasies” literally. To seek his spiritual leader (or the tulku Hitler), the Chilean diplomat (in India at the time) set off and began exploring in the Himalayas and in Antarctica. “In the book The Serpent of Paradise, I describe my search for the ashram of the Siddha in the Himalayas, which is likewise to be found beneath the earth in the Kailash mountains, in a very remote area where my master’s residence also is” (Serrano, 1987, p. 40).[8] He was convince that he would find an entrance to Shambhala or Agarthi in the Kailash. He also tried to reach Lake Yamdrok, because he suspected there was an entrance gateway to the underground Shambhala there as well. But the Chinese turned him back at the border.

EL/ELLA

But the time was not ripe, Serrano was unable to discover the entrance to Shambhala. In Kalimpong, “before the gates of Tibet” he encountered a “man” who assured the Chilean that a mysterious “order” exerts an influence over both the affairs of the distant past and the most recent events of world history. Obviously this man was the guru who — as he recounts in his key book EL/ELLA — initiated Serrano into the rites of sexual magic, and the order was a tantric secret society. Its members, the “man” said, “live in two cities in the Himalayas, Agarthi and Shambhala. To get there one has to trace this (tantric) way back to the origin of time” (Serrano, 1982, p. 10).

The pupil (Serrano) — we read in EL/ELLA — is prepared to go this way and is initiated into the tantras and the “laws of androgyny” by the master: “This knowledge has been passed on to us by the serpent [kundalini] that survived on the ocean floor as the world of the god-men was destroyed, in which the woman was not outside but rather inside and where man and woman were one. .... Until you are one with the woman ... you will be no priest king ... The stallion must become a mare, the man a woman ...” the guru continued his teaching (Serrano, 1982, pp. 11-12).[9]

This is never, the pupil learns, possible through chastity and asceticism. Rather, the man must encounter the woman in the “magic love” in order to divert her feminine energies. As we know, this requires absolute control over the sexual act and above all the retention of the seed: “If the stallion expels the seed, he becomes impoverished by this. ... For as long as the seed flows outwards like a river, the play of the deceptive appearances will continue” (Serrano, 1982, p. 13). In another text it says: “the magic love that is taught in ... Shambhala. ... In it the seed may not be issued outwardly and be lost in the woman, rather it must flow inwardly into the body of its owner in order to impregnate him with the androgyne, ... as one in the likewise symbolic language of alchemy” (Serrano, 1987, p. 289). If the man does not expel his sperm he can absorb the woman’s gynergies completely. “If the woman does not receive”, Serrano says, “she gives! Through her skin she exudes substances, a concentrated energy, which satiates you and penetrates into your blood and heart” (Serrano, 1982, p. 14).

But it can happen that the tantric experiment fails. If the sadhaka (the pupil) loses his seed during the magic sexual act then he is destroyed by the aggressive femininity: “The spider devours the male who fertilizes her, the bees murder the drones, the fearsome mother wears the organ of generation tied around her neck. Everything female devours, every mare, mother, goddess, or woman. In one way or another the man is consumed” (Serrano, 1982, p. 13).

It is thus a matter of life and death. Ultimately, according to Serrano the “killing” of the external woman (the karma mudra) is therefore necessary, so that the inner woman (the maha mudra) can be formed. The author does not shrink from discussing the “tantric female sacrifice” directly: “Only those who are able to love the woman so much [!] that they externally kill her [!] in order to make possible her inner rebirth will find the immortal city of Agarthi (or Shambhala)” (Serrano, 1982, p. 13).[10] For an uninformed reader hidden, but obvious to one who knows the logic of Tantrism, a tantric female murder is described in both of his initiatory writings, EL/ELLA [HE/SHE] and NOS [WE].

In a love scene from EL/ELLA, a young woman expires in Serrano’s arms in order to then re-emerge within him as an inner maha mudra. He bends over her, strokes her hair and kisses her bloody lips: “They tasted like bitter honey, and he swallowed a little of her blood” Then he suddenly sees the stigmata: “Strangely, it [the blood] was only on her feet and the palms of her hands as if she had been crucified. 'Here!', she said. She indicated her side, at breast level. A white line seemed to run through it, like a spear wound” (Serrano, 1982, pp. 72-73). The references to the sacrifice of Christ are obvious, indeed they seem quite blatant. “When I die,” the woman then says, “you will bear me within you; I will be you, live in you ... You have drunk my blood, and we are now two siblings. My character is already being transferred into your blood ... If god will, I shall love you even more when I am dead. ... I have to die that you may live” (Serrano, 1982, pp. 73-74). With this she fulfills the wise saying of Serrano’s master: “The decay of the one [the woman] is the purification of the other [the man]" (Serrano, 1982, p. 93). “The absolute woman”, he says at another point, “can sleep or she can die, which is the same thing” (Serrano, 1987, p. 289).

Written in a fantasy manner, the book NOS — Book of the Resurrection also depicts a tantric female sacrifice. The heroine of this “hermetic biography” is called Allouine, the main hero is admittedly Serrano. Additionally, various “tantric” masters crop up. Among them are, unmistakably, C.G. Jung, Hermann Hesse, and the American poet Ezra Pound. The contents of the book depict the voluntary self-sacrifice of Allouine, her interiorization as a maha mudra by the author (Serrano), and the latter’ achievement of immortality through the absorption of gynergy. “The woman dies. She is dead. She must die. ... She is the warrior’s [the yogi’s] companion, existing only in his mind, in his spirit” (Serrano, 1984, p. 11), Serrano instructs us once more. “She [the woman] becomes interiorized in you through her death, she inspires you”, one of his masters explains to him and in another passage continues: “The secret path of yoga along which you are traveling is only for the warrior, for the initiated hero. It is not the path for the woman; because a woman has no chakras, no kundalini to awaken. ... A woman is the Kundalini. A woman has no soul. She is the soul. A woman has no eternity. She is eternity” (Serrano, 1984, pp. 102, 147).

Serrano stages a tantric séance with Allouine, in which they both consume the five forbidden foods. Then he drinks “the liquor of orgasm ... the heavenly Soma, an spirit of secret wine ... which is now only to be found in the river of your blood” (Serrano, 1984, p. 112). We know that he is talking about the sukra, the mixture of male and female seed, of menstrual blood and sperm. This magic potion grants the Tantric immortality. In NOS too the author longs for the blood of his lover like a vampire and goes into raptures if he detects it on his lips. After he has washed the dying Allouine, he kisses her and drinks of her blood.

Yet Allouine patiently and will-lessly accepts her sacrifice: “My desire for you (i.e., for Serrano) is reaching its peak. The fire of sacrifice has already been lit in my vulva and beats there like a heart. ... My will no longer exists” (Serrano, 1984, p. 111). “The authentic, absolute woman sacrifices herself voluntarily,” we read in NOS, “immolating herself in order to give her eternity to her lover. ... The beloved is now the hidden beloved, she who has died and buried herself in your bones and your veins. The female Sophia, guru of the soul, she who courses through the blood, the female philosopher, Sophia, wisdom, the dove, gnosis” (Serrano, 1984, pp. 147-148). Dying, his “wisdom consort” says to him, “I shall but love thee better after death. I give you my eternity. … My beloved, you will be my coffin of perfumed, precious wood!” (Serrano, 1984, p. 140).

After he has internalized Allouine within himself, the Tantric Serrano can now overcome his EGO, he can now talk of NOS (WE), since his lover (maha mudra) will dwell in him for ever. Through this love, deadly for the woman, the man gains eternal life. In this context, Serrano plays upon the word AMOR, which does not just mean love, but also A-MOR, i.e., beyond death.

Eternally united with Allouine’s gynergy following her physical death, Serrano buries her corpse and places a stone at her grave into which he has chiseled a leftward hooked cross, the supreme symbol of “esoteric Hitlerism”.

Hitler as a tantric and as king of the world (Chakravartin)

From Serrano’s tantric world view it is only all too easy to assume that Hitler (as a tulku) also conducted sexual magic practices with a wisdom consort (mudra). Eva Braun, the lover of the dictator appears to have only partially performed this duty. Behind her, Serrano says, stood a greater one: “We must thus consider the relationship with Eva Braun to have been like that between Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the Christian legend, like that of an alchemist to his mystic sister. ... The presence of the woman, her telepathic, self-communicating energy, the tensions this generates are indispensable for a tantric magician, for this kind of bearer of power. The mystic consort of Hitler was, however, not Eva Braun, but rather another” (Serrano, 1987, p. 25). He refers to her as the “Valkyrie” or as Lilith too. With the name Lilith he draws a connection to Adam. Like Hitler, the biblical first father of humanity (Adam) also possessed two women, an outer Eve and an inner Lilith. Did Hitler perhaps make an decisive tantric mistake, asks the author, in marrying Eva Braun (shortly before his suicide)? “... Since the secret Eve [Braun] of transient flesh and blood was accepted, she now [took] the place of the mystic consort” (Serrano, 1987, p. 25), and Hitler lost part of his magic powers (siddhis).

A according to Serrano the “Führer” of the Third Reich was a tantra master from Shambhala, the “high priest of the occident” (Serrano, 1987, p. 269) He came to earth to fulfill a mission — the control of the world by the Nordic ("hyperborean”) race. But in him Serrano does not just see the incarnation of a warlike archetype who lowered himself into a human frame in the nineteen-thirties and forties. In the dictator he directly recognized a tulku and god sent from Shambhala. Hitler “was a highly developed being, a Bodhisattva, a tulku ... the incarnation of a deity” (Serrano, n.d., p. 119).

Just as a tulku need not only appear in the form of a single person, but can rather produce many emanations of his self, so too the various fascist national “Führers” of the first half of our century were the emanations of the mightiest central tulku and Shambhala prince, Adolf Hitler: Benito Mussolini in Italy; Oliveira Salazar in Portugal; Leon Degrelle in Belgium; José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Spain; Plinio Salgado in Brazil; Doriot in France; Jorge González von Marée in Chile; and Subhash Chandra Bose in India. All the fascist energy of the world was concentrated in the German “Führer” (Hitler): “The tulku”, says Serrano, “ — in this case it is Hitler — radiates out from a center of higher power, which like an enormous sun absorbs everything and draws it into his fire and his fate. If HE falls, then all the others fall too, then HE is of course ALL [of them]" (Serrano, 1987, p. 270).

According to Serrano Hitler must also be seen as the earthly appearance of the Chakravartin: “For the initiates of the SS Hitler was that mysterious prophet or magician who … would restore the sense of royal dignity, where the king of the world is the emperor, the priest of priests and king of kings; it is the leader, who will establish a new golden age for a thousand years and more” (Serrano, 1987, p. 354). This is clearly intended for the future, since– according to Serrano — Hitler will soon return once more to fulfill his cosmic mission. One may think what one will of such prognoses, but it is in any case amazing what a large upturn fascist movements have achieved worldwide since the end of the eighties.

The SS as a tantric warrior order from Shambhala

For Serrano the tantric initiation is the central rite of a “hyperborean” (Nordic) warrior caste. Shambhala counts as the supreme mystery site for the initiation of the “priest-warriors”. “In Shambhala”, the author says, “ the use of the force through which the mutation of the earth and the people can be carried out is taught, and the latter [the people] are introduced into the martial initiation, which makes this possible. ... Those who follow this initiatory stream have struggled to found a new/old order here on the present-day earth which has its roots in the transcendent origins, with the goal of reawakening the golden age, and they will fight on to the end...” (Serrano, 1987, p. 258). [11]

This order is the secret brotherhood of the Shambhala officers, who have for centuries been incarnated in our world — for instance as knights of the holy grail or as Rosicrucians or finally as the occult elite of the SS, Hitler’s notorious Schutz-Staffel. “Once a year”, we learn, “the inner circle of the SS people met with their supreme leaders for a few days of retreat, the solitude, and meditation. A kind of western yoga was practiced here, but nothing is known about it” (Serrano, 1987, pp. 171-172).

According to Serrano the SS were divided into two sections, an inner esoteric one and an outer one. The “exoteric SS” were selected to “be able to deal with the most difficult tasks and adventures in the external world”. “Nothing of the esoteric of the black order, its practices and teachings, its invisible connections and its occult doctrines was known” to them (Serrano, 1987, p. 264). The “inner circle” of the SS consisted of “sun people, supermen, god-men, the total human, the human magician” (Serrano, n.d., p. 96). The esoteric SS were siddhas (magicians) from the underground kingdom of Shambhala, or at least their messengers In German, SS are the initials of the “black sun” (“schwarze Sonne”), and Serrano did also call the members of the order “the men of the black sun”. We are reminded that the planet of darkness, Rahu, which darkens the sun and moon, is also referred to in the Kalachakra Tantra as the black sun.

The author is convinced, of course, that sexual magic rites were practiced in the SS (the “new aristocracy of the Aryan race”). Like Julius Evola before him, the Chilean makes constant references in his writings to how sexuality may be converted into high-quality aggressive military energy and political power through tantric practices: “Come and take me like a warrior!”, a lover (his karma mudra) says to him at one stage in his key novels, “I give you my heart for you to devour. Let us drink our blood” (Serrano, 1982, p. 54). In EL/ELLA the author recommends to heroes initiated into the tantras that “the warrior should give death the face of his lover; the fiery femininity of death will be thus evoked” (Serrano, 1982, p. 87). For Serrano, tantric practices and the cult life of a fascist/esoteric warrior caste are one.

Additionally, the sexual magic of the SS was connected with racial experiments. These aimed at a mutation of the human race, or better, a regaining of the formerly high-standing Aryan god-men who had in the dim and distant past tarnished themselves through “ordinary” sexual intercourse with human women and produced a lesser race. According to Serrano, such experiments were conducted in the Wewelsburg, the occult center of the SS. “Laboratories of leftward magic” for the re-creation of the original, pure Aryan race were to be found there (Serrano, n.d. pp. 488, 589). But these were nothing more than the above-ground branches of corresponding establishments in subterranean Shambhala. “ In Shambhala they attempted to produce a mutation of their kind which would allow them to return to that which they were before their interbreeding with the sons of man...” — when they still had a white, almost transparent body and blonde hair (Serrano, 1982, p. 54).

As Tantrics, the SS were “beyond good and evil” and for this reason their “terrible deeds” were justified by Serrano, plus that they took place at higher cosmic command (Serrano, 1987, p. 331). The “final solution to the question of the gypsies” (many gypsies perished in the concentration camps), for example, is said to have come directly “from Tibet to Hitler, certainly from Shambhala”. The gypsies used to live in Shambhala and had then been driven out of there. “The reasons for this”, says Serrano, “were known in the Tibet of the Dalai Lama” (Serrano, 1987, p. 366).

Just like the Knights Templar, the inner occult core of the SS were incarnations of the guardians of the holy grail, and “the grail of the siddhas [the magicians], of the solar and martial initiations” is to be found in Shambhala (Serrano, 1987, p. 264). The miracles which radiated from the grail were evident in the achievements of the black order in the course of the Second World War: “If one examines the achievements of the followers of Hitler in all areas of creation within a period of just six years, one cannot avoid admiring this miracle and making a comparison with the Templar order. And one comes to believe that the SS have likewise found the grail and even deciphered it” (Serrano, 1987, p. 278). Even the monumental architecture of the Third Reich is supposed to have been prepared on the building sites of Shambhala. The Hyperboreans (the gods of the north), we may read, “emigrated to two secret cities in the Himalayas, Agarthi and Shambhala. ... In Shambhala they practiced the magic of the giants which made the monumental buildings possible” (Serrano, 1982, p. 54).

In the Second World War the forces of light and the “sun race” (Hitler and the SS) stood opposed to the forces of darkness and the “moon race” (the Allies and the Jews). It was no ordinary war, but rather a global battle between the gods (the Nazis, the light Aryan race) and demons (the Jews, the dark Semitic race), between Odin, the highest god of the Germanic peoples, and Jehovah, the highest god of the Jews. The Nordic (hyperborean) heroes fought the “lord of darkness”, the “satanic demiurge”. At heart, Serrano says, the patriarchal and matriarchal powers were at war.

Admittedly Hitler outwardly lost the war, but through his sacrifice and his example he saved the ideals of the warrior caste from Shambhala. He shall return at the head of his “wild army” to finally liberate the white race from the lord of darkness (Jehovah). It will then come to a terrible final battle. “These are the dimensions of Hitler, the envoy of the hyperborean [Nordic] siddhas, the tulku, the Bodhisattva, the Chakravartin, the Führer of the Aryans, so that the demiurge Jehovah has to mobilize all his earthly and extraterrestrial legions” (Serrano, n.d., p. 50).

One may well dismiss Serrano’s visions as the product of an overactive imagination, but it cannot be denied that modern fascism has found a home and a predecessor in the Shambhala myth and in Tantrism. Its mythological conceptions and visions of power can without difficulty be brought into harmony with the practice and political ideology of the Kalachakra Tantra for all fundamental issues. The occult right wing’s move toward Tibetan Buddhism is thus in no way to be understood as the exploitation of the dharma for ignoble purposes, since there is a profound inner relatedness between these two ways of looking at the world.

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama and Serrano

Naturally, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would simply dismiss any link between the Shambhala myth and Kalachakra Tantra and the “esoteric Hitlerism” of Serrano, regardless of how closely matched even the conceptual principles of the two systems may be. Nonetheless, it is of great interest to our culturally critical study that the Kundun met with the racist Chilean several times (in at least 1959, 1984, and 1992). When His Holiness visited Chile in the year 1992, he was greeted at the airport by, among others, the leader of the National Socialist Party of Chile — Miguel Serrano by name. The principal ideologue of Esoteric Hitlerism told the reporters present that he and the hierarch from Tibet had been good “friends” since his time in India (Grunfeld, 1996, p. 302). Serrano was also a friend of the German living in India whom we have so often cited, Lama Govinda, in whose meditation tower with a view of the Himalayan mountains he was able to immerse himself.

The first encounter with the Kundun took place in 1959. In his own account, the founder of “esoteric Hitlerism” was the sole foreigner to greet the Dalai Lama as he crossed the Indian border after his flight from Tibet. “Shortly before the taking of Tibet by Mao’s troops”, he reports in his own words, “the Dalai Lama succeeded in fleeing to India. I journeyed into the Himalayas to wait for him there. I donned Tibetan clothes which the Maharaja of Sikkim had given me so as to attempt to get to Tibet from there. I made it to the Tibetan border, where — incidentally — I made the acquaintance of one of Roerich’s sons who also gave me a report of the hidden city lying in the mountains (Shambhala). The at that time still very young Dalai Lama later, when everything was over, gave me a small Tibetan dog, as a sign of his gratitude” (Palacio, 1990, p. 4).

It is at any rate interesting that the Kundun, who was introduced to western culture by a member of the SS (Heinrich Harrer), meets as the first (!) Westerner after his crossing of the Indian border the fascist Miguel Serrano, who sees a mythic command from the kingdom Shambhala at the esoteric core of the SS. Serrano says of himself: “I was employed as a tool and continue to be used” (Cedade, 1986). We may recall that upon crossing the border, the Dalai Lama gave vent to the cry of “Victory to the gods!”. The gods that Serrano represented and as whose tool he served were Wotan, Odin, and, in his own words, Adolf Hitler.

Image
Miguel Serrano and the XIV. Dalai Lama in Santiago de Chile (1992)

As far as the “enchanting” Tibetan temple bitch of “honey yellow color” which was given him by the Kundun is concerned, this creature had a most special significance for the Chilean. The lamas, the author says, referred to the petite race as the “lion of the back door of the Temple”. Serrano’s “back door lion” was called Dolma, “the name of a Tibetan goddess; in truth the shakti” (Serrano, n.d., p. 189). Dolma is the Tibetan name for the goddess Tara. As abstruse as it may sound, after some time the Chilean recognized in the Dolma given him by the Kundun the reincarnation of a woman whom he once loved as a “mystic partner” and who (in accordance with the laws of the “tantric female sacrifice”) had had to die (Serrano, n.d., p. 189). As Dolma the bitch one day passed away in his arms — Serrano had flown from Spain to Vienna just to accompany her into eternity — he recalled an event of mythological dimensions from the 16th century. As if he were in a trance he suddenly felt that it was not the Tibetan Dolma but rather the dying sister of the last Aztec emperor Montezuma, Papán by name, whom he held in his arms. Papán — Serrano claimed — originally a high priestess from the north ("Hyperborea”), had in Mexico prophesied- according to legend — the return of the white gods to America. In her final hour, Dolma (the bitch) radiated out the energy of the Aztec princess who had to suffer a ritual sacrificial death.

Thanks to this vision Serrano could once more experience the fascination which habitually flooded through him at the embrace of dying women, even if one of them had this time been incarnated in a bitch. In NOS, a dying dog (the fate of Dolma probably lies behind this) spoke to him like a tantric lover with a human voice: “You don't need me outside anymore. I will howl inside you, like my brother the wolf” (Serrano, 1984, p. 21).

Such central “hermetic” experiences naturally tied the Chilean to the Kundun and his tantric world view profoundly and so it is also not surprising that Serrano linked “esoteric Hitlerism” and the fate of Germany to the Dalai Lama directly: His “skill”, the author says of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is “closely linked to that of Hitler’s Germany ... on account of yet undiscovered connections. A few years after Germany, Tibet also fell” (Serrano, 1987, p. 366).

The Chilean did not yet know about the SS past of Heinrich Harrer, the Kundun’s “best friend” and teacher, since this first became known in 1997 in connection with the film Seven Years in Tibet. But we can be certain that this fact would have been cited by him as further evidence to justify an occult connection between Shambhala and the SS, between the Dalai Lama and Adolf Hitler, particularly as the Chilean indicates at many points in his writings that the SS sent “secret missions” to Tibet in order to search for traces of the Aryan race there.

Serrano allows himself to be celebrated as the “Führer” of the National Socialist Party of Chile. His calendar commences with the year of Adolf Hitler’s birth in 1889. He describes “esoteric Hitlerism” as the “new religion of the young heroes and future warriors and priests, the true myth of the coming century” (Cedade, 1986). In 1989, on the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s birth (the year 100 for Serrano) a commemorative celebration was staged at which the Chilean and representatives of “esoteric Hitlerism” from various countries (Chile, Spain, Italy, Germany) spoke: “On the peak of a mountain in the Andes ranges which dominates Santiago,” the Chilean newspaper, La Epoca, writes, “and to the sounds of the Ride of the Valkyrie from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), some 100 Chilean followers and foreigners commemorated Adolf Hitler in yesterday’s evening twilight and promised that in the new Hitlerist age the continuing triumph of his ideas would proceed from Chile. ... Hitler, Serrano opined, would be resurrected from in the Andes ('Andes' means 'perfected, total human) and he would do like the Caleuche [a mystic hero of Chile, whose name means 'the man who returns’) and introduce the age of Hitler” (Epoca, April 21, 1989). This event should not be underestimated on the basis of the small number of participants. For Serrano it had a ritual/symbolic significance and was reported in detail in the German neo-Nazi scene, for example.

In fascist circles worldwide, Serrano is a “hot tip” and his bizarre visions do in fact exercise a fascinating attraction on many young people. His nazi books are openly offered for sale in all South American countries. The German translation of Cordón Dorado Hitlerismo Esoterico is available as a hardback (Das goldene Band — esoterischer Hitlerismus). Highly sought after copies of the other works (about Hitlerism) in German translation and individual propaganda essays are in circulation and passed from hand to hand. “Serrano’s mystical neo-Nazism … [has] a distinct appeal to the younger generation”, writes the historian Goodrick Clark, “Here Nazism becomes a pop mythology, severed from the historic context of the Third Reich. The Gnostic Cathars, Rosicrucian mysteries, Hindu Avatars, and extraterrestrial gods add a sensational and occult appeal to powerful myths of elitism, planetary destiny, and the cosmic conspiracy of the Jews that culminate in a global racist ideology of white supremacism. … Books by Serrano … are now circulating among neo-pagans, Satanists, skinheads, and Nazi metal music fans in the United States, Scandinavia, and Western Europe” (Goodrick Clark, 1998, pp. 221-222). The Dalai Lama has never distanced himself from Serrano. Instead of decisively opposing fascism in any country, he recently called for the former Chilean State President and fascist, Augusto Pinochet, to be spared a trial.



http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Part-2-12.htm
Last edited by American Dream on Tue Sep 06, 2011 1:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 06, 2011 12:45 pm

The 1938-1939 German Expedition to Tibet was a May 1938 - August 1939 German scientific expedition led by German zoologist and SS officer Ernst Schäfer.

Image

The origins of the expedition

The Reichsführer-SS Himmler was attempting to avail himself of the reputation of Ernst Schäfer for Nazi propaganda and asked about his future plans. Ernst Schäfer responded he wanted to lead another expedition to Tibet. Ernst Schäfer wished his expedition to be under the patronage of the cultural department of the foreign affairs or of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ("German Research Foundation") as indicated by his requests.[1] Himmler was fascinated by Asian mysticism and therefore wished to send such an expedition under the auspices of the SS Ahnenerbe (SS Ancestral Heritage Society), and desired that Schäfer perform research based on Hans Hörbiger’s pseudo-scientific theory of “Glacial Cosmogony” promoted by the Ahnenerbe. Schäfer had scientific objectives, and he therefore refused to include Edmund Kiss, an adept of this theory, in his team, and requested 12 conditions to obtain scientific freedom. Wolfram Sievers from the Ahnenerbe therefore expressed criticism concerning the objectives of the expedition, so that Ahnenerbe would not sponsor it. Himmler accepted the expedition to be organised on the condition that all its members become SS. In order to succeed in his expedition, Schäfer had to compromise.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938–1939_German_expedition_to_Tibet


The expedition likely also had a political goal- as blessed by Himmler himself- of winning Tibet over from British influence and towards the Nazi geopolitical agenda...



American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Pierre d'Achoppement » Tue Sep 06, 2011 2:42 pm

Intresting read about Serrano! Reminded me of the chapter on the nazi tibet connection in 'the morning of the magicians'. Here's a summary taken from a longer article concerning 'mistaken foreign myths about Shambhala' by Alexander Berzin:
(...)

The Nazi Search for Shambhala and Agharti According to Pauwels, Bergier, and Frére

A number of scholars have questioned the accuracy of the postwar studies on Nazism and the Occult. Whether or not they accurately represent Nazi thought during the Third Reich, still they represent a further popularized distortion of the Shambhala legend. Let us examine two slightly different versions from among them.

According to the version found in Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) (1962) by the French researchers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier and in Nazisme et Sociétés Secrètes (Nazism and Secret Societies) (1974) by Jean-Claude Frére, Haushofer believed that two groups of Aryans migrated south from Hyperborea-Thule. One went to Atlantis, where they intermarried with the Lemurians who had also migrated there. Recall that Blavatsky had associated the Lemurians with Atlantis and Shambhala, and Bailey had associated both the Lemurians and Atlanteans with the Shambhala Force. The descendents of these impure Aryans turned to black magic and conquest. The other branch of Aryans migrated south, passing through North America and northern Eurasia, eventually reaching the Gobi Desert. There, they founded Agharti, the myth of which had become popular through the writings of Saint-Yves d’Alveidre.

According to Frére, the Thule Society equated Agharti with its cognate Asgaard, the home of the gods in Norse mythology. Others assert, less convincingly, that Agharti is cognate with Ariana, an Old Persian name known by the ancient Greeks for the region extending from Eastern Iran through Afghanistan to Uzbekistan – the homeland of the Aryans.

After a world cataclysm, Agharti sank beneath the earth. This accords with Ossendowski’s account. The Aryans then split into two groups. One went south and founded a secret center of learning beneath the Himalayas, also called Agharti. There, they preserved the teachings of virtue and of vril. The other Aryan group tried to return to Hyperborea-Thule, but founded instead Shambhala, a city of violence, evil, and materialism. Agharti was the holder of the right-hand path and positive vril, while Shambhala was the keeper of the degenerate left-hand path and negative energy.

The division of right-hand and left-hand paths had appeared already in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. There, she wrote that at the time of the Atlanteans, humanity branched into right- and left-hand paths of knowledge, which became the germs of white and black magic. She did not associate the two paths, however, with Agharti and Shambhala. In fact, she did not mention Agharti at all in her writings. The terms right- and left-hand paths derive from a division within Hindu tantra. Early Western writers often characterized left-hand tantra as a degenerate form and misidentified it with Tibetan Buddhism and its teachings of anuttarayoga tantra.

According to Pauwels and Bergier, the Thule Society sought to contact and make a pact with Shambhala, but only Agharti agreed to offer help. By 1926, the French authors explained, there were already colonies of Hindus and Tibetans in Munich and Berlin, called the Society of GreenMen, in astral connection with the Green Dragon Society in Japan. Membership in the latter society required ritual Japanese suicide (Jap. hara-kiri, seppuku) if one lost one’s honor. Haushofer had purportedly joined the society during his early years in Japan. The leader of the Society of Green Men was a Tibetan monk, known as “the man with green gloves,” who supposedly visited Hitler frequently and held the keys of Agharti. Expeditions to Tibet followed annually, from 1926 to 1943. When the Russians entered Berlin at the end of the war, they found nearly a thousand corpses of soldiers of the Himalayan race, dressed in Nazi uniforms but without identification papers, who had committed suicide. Haushofer himself committed hara-kiri before he could be tried at Nürenberg in 1946.

(...)

http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/ar ... bhala.html
Jeff: I'm afraid that Earth, a-all of Earth, is nothing but an intergalactic reality-TV show.
Man 2: My God. We're famous! [everyone stands and whoops it up]
- script from "Cancelled" - South Park
User avatar
Pierre d'Achoppement
 
Posts: 453
Joined: Fri Mar 21, 2008 7:26 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:42 pm

Pierre d'Achoppement wrote:Intresting read about Serrano! Reminded me of the chapter on the nazi tibet connection in 'the morning of the magicians'. Here's a summary taken from a longer article concerning 'mistaken foreign myths about Shambhala' by Alexander Berzin:
(...)

The Nazi Search for Shambhala and Agharti According to Pauwels, Bergier, and Frére

A number of scholars have questioned the accuracy of the postwar studies on Nazism and the Occult. Whether or not they accurately represent Nazi thought during the Third Reich, still they represent a further popularized distortion of the Shambhala legend.


My understanding is that some researchers of Nazi occultism have questioned the Ravenscroft material that Pauwels and Berrgier drew from in Morning of the Magicians but that much of the rest of the material on that topic has stood the test of time and been supported by more recent studies...
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Pierre d'Achoppement » Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:37 am

I thought Pauwels and Bergier preceded Ravenscroft by a good deal, morning of the magicians is from 1962, spear of destiny from 1973 no? Anyho, the morning of the magicians is an entertaining book, the nazistuff is just one chapte, they discuss lots of other things, there's a whole chapter on charles fort for example, whose work they translated into french. But it's not a sreious book, they use mainly sci-fi novels as sources, without mentioning they are in fact sci-fi novels lol. Took me a while to figura that out..
Jeff: I'm afraid that Earth, a-all of Earth, is nothing but an intergalactic reality-TV show.
Man 2: My God. We're famous! [everyone stands and whoops it up]
- script from "Cancelled" - South Park
User avatar
Pierre d'Achoppement
 
Posts: 453
Joined: Fri Mar 21, 2008 7:26 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 07, 2011 7:59 am

Pierre d'Achoppement wrote:I thought Pauwels and Bergier preceded Ravenscroft by a good deal, morning of the magicians is from 1962, spear of destiny from 1973 no? Anyho, the morning of the magicians is an entertaining book, the nazistuff is just one chapte, they discuss lots of other things, there's a whole chapter on charles fort for example, whose work they translated into french. But it's not a sreious book, they use mainly sci-fi novels as sources, without mentioning they are in fact sci-fi novels lol. Took me a while to figura that out..
You are right, Pierre- Morning of the Magicians did precede Spear of Destiny by more than a decade. It is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke who is at the center of disputing the details of Nazi occultism.

I suppose it is all a question of degree: Were occult lodges the prime moving force behind the development of National Socialism in Germany> Was Ariosophy just a side show? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between?

Anyway, yes Pauwels and Bergier are important- they certainly influenced me when I found them at an early age. And, yes it was very much of a popular paperback when I found it, with all that entails...
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby semper occultus » Wed Sep 07, 2011 8:20 am

interesting posts A.D. - Dave Emory was good on this area - references to which were included in the following thread : Behind the Dalai Lama's Cloak

this is a pretty intresting look at the Spear Mythos & the Ravenscroft conundrum:

Secret of the Spear

from which I see a fairly extensive comment by another author in that genre :

By Jerry E. Smith "Author & Lecturer" (Sparks, Nevada United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME) This review is from: Secret of the Spear (Mysteries of the Universe) (Paperback)
According to The Gospel of John (chapter 19, verses 28 through 37) in the New Testament, as Jesus Christ hung on the Cross a Roman centurion pierced His side with a spear. Variously called the Holy Lance, the Spear of Christ and the Spear of Destiny, this strange relic has been written about in novels and non-fiction books, in many languages, for nearly two thousand years. Besides being the name of a heavy metal rock band from the UK, the Spear of Destiny has also appeared in at least two comic books: "Indiana Jones and The Spear of Destiny," and "Hellblazer;" and was a principal plot device in "Constantine," the 2005 major motion picture from Warner Brothers, directed by Francis Lawrence, staring Keanu Reeves. The most important non-fiction books in English are, in chronological order:

"Spear Of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind The Spear Which Pierced The Side Of Christ," by Trevor Ravenscroft (1973);

"Hitler's Ashes -- Seeds of a New Reich," by Howard A. Buechner (1988);

"Adolf Hitler And The Secrets Of The Holy Lance," by Howard A. Buechner (1989);

"Mark Of The Beast: The Continuing Story Of The Spear Of Destiny," by Trevor Ravenscroft and Tim Wallace-Murphy (1990);

"The Secret of the Spear: The Mystery of The Spear of Longinus," by Alec MacLellan (2005);

"SECRETS OF THE HOLY LANCE: The Spear of Destiny in History & Legend," by Jerry E. Smith & George Piccard (2005).

I found Trevor Ravenscroft's "The Spear Of Destiny" a fascinating but ultimately disappointing read. If you are looking for verifiable facts about the lance that pierced Christ's side don't waste your time or money here. The vast majority of this book is conjecture and the few facts he bothers to include are often wrong. I found this out the hard way while trying to verify his "facts" for my own book on the Spear of Destiny, "Secrets of the Holy Lance," which I co-authored with Operation Paperclip/CIA expert George Piccard.

Ravenscroft claimed that his friend and mentor Dr. Walter Johannes Stein would have written "The Spear Of Destiny" if he had lived long enough to do so. Curiously, several persons who said that they too were friends and associates of Dr. Stein deny Ravenscroft's claimed friendship with Dr. Stein, saying that they met but once, and then only for an hour. Since Ravenscroft's death from cancer in 1989 there has been an international debate over how much of his book was actually written from hard facts and how much he simply made up. In retracing his steps George and I found that, when we could locate and verify the facts, Ravenscroft was often in error. Not being disposed to speak ill of the dead we only comment on this in our book in a few passages where it seemed important enough to set the record straight, as in when and how the US actually took possession of the artifact now housed in Vienna after the fall of Nuremberg in 1945.

Ravenscroft begins with telling you that World War II was a wizard's battle, one between white-magic-using occultists working for the British Crown, and black magicians who comprised the top of the Nazi hierarchy. He never detailed any of their alleged battles, though. Without going into much detail he just hints that he had first hand knowledge of white wizard's existence through his claimed intimate association with Dr. Stein, one of these white wizards. Instead, he spent nearly all his efforts on revealing who the enemy where. His primary contention was that a cabal of black magicians tried to take over Europe in the Eleventh Century (forming the basis for the Holy Grail epic and later Wagnerian opera "Parsifal"), and that they had reincarnated and regrouped to try it again in the Twentieth Century. The majority of the book is an attempt to prove whom each of the top Nazis, Hitler, Himmler, etc., were in their past lives. Fascinating, but utterly unverifiable.

Further, he asserted that the Nazi black magic was based on using the Power of this so-called Spear of Destiny or Holy Lance (in German "Heilige Lanze"). He related a story, which he claimed had been told to him by Dr. Stein, that Hitler as a youth of 18 or so years of age wandered into Vienna, Austria's, Kunsthistorisches museum and there had a life changing event. A tour group gathered around a glass case stopped Hitler in his meander through the museum. He heard the guide tell them about the object in the case, this Heilige Lanze, and that a legend had arisen about it: "Whosoever possesses this Holy Lance and understands the powers it serves, holds in his hand the destiny of the world for good or evil." After the group moved on Hitler approached the case and was transfixed. He was transported back in time and found his flophouse rags replaced with royal vestments, the Spear was in his hands and he, as a great king of Germany, was using it to rule the Holy Roman Empire. It lasted but a few moments then he found himself back in front of the case wondering what had just happened to him. Ravenscroft said Hitler then went on a personal crusade to verify if this truly was the real Holy Lance if it did indeed have any supernatural powers. In doing so Hitler was drawn into the occult, eventually becoming the greatest black magician of the age and picking up where he left off a millennium before in trying to take over the world through magical means.

Ravenscroft accepted that the artifact on display today in room 11 of the Schatzkammer (Treasure House) was the object that pierced the side of Christ. Dr. Robert Feather, a British metallurgist, who is currently preparing his own book on the Spear, has since disproved this. He was permitted in 2003 to conduct a series of tests on it, which conclusively proved that it had been forged in the 6th or 7th centuries and so could not have been used at the Crucifixion. While Ravenscroft could not have known what Dr. Feather would find thirty years after his book came out, a visit to the museum would have revealed to him that its curators had been convinced of its Carolingian origins for over a century.

He also completely ignored the half-dozen other objects scattered around the world, each of which is claimed to be the real Holy Lance. In so doing he gives us not a book about the spear that pierced the side of Christ, but a book about the Nazi's obsession with the Spear of Destiny and other matters occult. Indeed, it is primarily a book about occult initiation - Hitler's, Ravenscroft's and ultimately the readers. Interesting yes, but not terribly useful for one wanting to know more about this purported relic of the Passion of the Christ.

All major religions believe in the importance and power of relics, which are more than mere mementos of Saints and Prophets but are believed to be a contact point between the supernatural and ourselves. People visit the shrines where relics are kept in hopes that some of the supernatural power that made the deceased into a Saint will come through and positively affect them. The Holy Lance, should it actually exist, then is not merely a curious object reminding us of Christ's sacrifice on the cross but may have, through having pierced his body, become imbued with supernatural power. It is that power that Ravenscroft said Hitler tried to tap. Ravenscroft repeatedly called that Power the "Anti-Christ" and the "Spirit of the Age" (whatever that meant).

The sequel, "The Mark of the Beast" by Trevor Ravenscroft and Tim Wallace-Murphy, is even more disappointing, in part because it wasn't actually written by Ravenscroft, who at least was an engaging writer. Published in 1990, it was written after Trevor died. All of his discernable contributions to the book are quotes lifted directly from "The Spear Of Destiny," which frankly is about all "The Mark of the Beast" has to do with the Spear. Tim Wallace-Murphy is a rather pedestrian writer with, in this book, a rather curious theory to put forward. He believed that the system of cathedrals in Europe was a one-foot equals one-mile scale model of the Temple in Jerusalem! His "proof" is to be found, he wrote, in Rosslyn Chapel. If you are not keenly interested in the mysteries of Rosslyn Chapel or in cathedrals in general this book is a real snooze. And if you fail to find a connection between the Spear Of Destiny and Rosslyn Chapel you are not alone! Calling it a "stretch" is an understatement.

In 1988-89 two other remarkable books came out, purporting to tell the real story of what happened to Hitler's Holy Lance. These were by Dr. Howard A. Buechner, M.D., a professor of medicine at Tulane and later L.S.U., who wrote over 240 medical textbooks and several books on art history. His two books on the Holy Lance, now long out of print, became underground bestsellers in the `90s. In them he relates that he was contacted by a former German U-boat submariner who claimed to have helped take the Holy Lance to Antarctica in 1945 and to have helped a group of German businessmen whom he called The Hartmann Expedition recover it in 1979.

Doctor Buechner was a retired Colonel with the U.S. Army who had served as a battalion surgeon in World War II. In the mid-1980s he was presented by the pseudonymous "Capt. Wilhelm Bernhart" with what was claimed to be the log of the equally pseudonymous "Hartmann Expedition," including a hand-written letter of authenticity signed by "Hartmann," and photos of some of the objects recovered.

According to Buechner, this former Nazi sailor claimed that he could prove that the spear on display in the Schatzkammer is a fake. It is well known that prior to the war Heinrich Himmler, who would become head of the Occult Bureau of the SS, formed a circle of Knights dedicated to the Holy Lance, called The Knight's Grand Council. It has been widely reported that they used a replica of the Holy Lance in arcane black magic ceremonies in a specially appointed castle in Wewelsburg, Germany, which today welcomes tourists with a taste for the macabre. Capt. Bernhart claimed that during the war Himmler had Japan's greatest sword maker flown to Germany where he created a second and much more exact duplicate of the lance. The "perfect" copy then went on display in Nuremberg, from whence it was turned over to Austrian authorities at the war's end, while the real one remained under Himmler's control - until sent to Antarctica by order of Hitler.

In the final hours of the war, according to this sailor, Hitler personally selected a man who would later be called "Col. Maximilian Hartmann" to send several of his most prized possessions, including the Spear of Destiny, to Antarctica via submarine - the one on which Bernhart said he had served. Further, Col. Hartmann was alleged to have recovered the real Spear of Destiny, again with aid from Bernhart, in 1979. According to Buechner and Bernhart the Holy Lance is now in hiding somewhere in Europe, in the possession of the reconvened order of Himmler's knights, renamed The Knights of the Holy Lance.

After contacting most of the purported members of the 1979 Hartmann Expedition and others involved, including senior former Nazi officials and close personal associates of Adolf Hitler, like Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann, Buechner became convinced that the sailor's claims were true. Either he was the victim of an incredibly elaborate hoax, or the Spear of Destiny really did reside for a while in Antarctica and may well be in the hands of a group of individuals who believe in its power to direct the destiny of mankind - and may be conducting magic rites with it right this moment!

But if the object on display in Vienna isn't it, where is it? What of the other objects around the world that are claimed to be the spear that pierced the side of Christ - such as the one in a monastery in Etschmiadzin, Armenia, or the one said to be in the Vatican - could any of them be the real deal? Two books in recent years have tried to pull together the full story of the Spears and the bona fides of the various claims for them. Both were published in 2005 a few months apart. Alec MacLellan's "The Secret of the Spear: The Mystery of The Spear of Longinus," was published in England shortly before our book, "Secrets Of The Holy Lance: The Spear of Destiny in History & Legend," came out in the US. Alec MacLellan believed that the lance currently in Armenia is the real one. George and I leave it up to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

MacLellan `s book is very similar to ours in general subject matter in that we both tried to round up and tell the full 2,000 plus year story of the various objects claimed to be the Holy Lance. We both cover several of the major wielders of the Spear, while leaving others out, often citing the same sources. George and I focused more its Roman era wielders (Queen Boadicea, St. Maurice, Constantine the Great) while Alex focused more on its Holy Roman Empire claimants (Charlemagne and Barbarossa). Our book is 75 pages longer than MacLellan's. This gave us greater freedom to wander farther a field than he, both historically and into delving into contemporary politics (how the Third Reich has, in America, morphed into the Fourth Reich); as well as the links between science and the supernatural, quantum metaphysics if you will.

Col. Buechner's story was examined and partially corroborated by both MacLellan and George and I. Common sense, perhaps, would lead one to reject such a wild tale. Yet, over and over we discover that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Although George and I lean toward believing that Buechner was the victim of a hoax we agreed that his story was certainly worthy of inclusion in a book about legends surrounding the Holy Lance - and elements of Buechner's tale did strike awfully close to the truth, as both we and Alec MacLellan found.

In 1939 Germany and Norway each staked official territorial claims, within days of each other, to the Atlantic coastal area of Antarctica known today as Queen Maud Land. The German Antarctica Expedition of 1938-39 over-flew nearly one-fifth of the continent, taking some 11,000 photographs. The expedition's aircraft also dropped several thousand small Nazi flags, as well as special metal poles with the expedition's insignia and the swastika, claiming the territory for Germany.

They named the region Neuschwabenland after Swabia, which was one of the original duchies of the German Kingdom. Swabia was home to one of the most powerful dynasties of European monarchs, the Hohenstaufen Dynasty, which ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries. Frederick Barbarossa was the greatest of the Hohenstaufen kings, and a wielder of the Holy Lance. It has been reported that Hitler believed he was a reincarnation of Barbarossa. He dubbed the invasion of Russia "Operation Barbarossa."

The German Antarctic Expedition discovered several ice-free regions with lakes and signs of vegetation (mostly lichen and moss) in the territory's interior. The expedition's geologists said that this phenomenon was due to hot springs or other geothermal sources. This discovery may have led Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to hatch a bold plan to build a permanent base in Antarctica. For more than sixty years rumors about a base code named "Station 211" have tantalized historians and researchers. Could it be that it was actually constructed and staffed as an ongoing project throughout the war? Perhaps Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz announced its completion when, in 1943, he said: "The German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Fuhrer, in another part of the world, a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress."

Most of the rumors agree that Station 211, if it really existed, was located inside a prominent ice-free mountain in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains of Neuschwabenland. In 1946-47 Admiral Byrd, America's most recognized polar explorer may have searched for Station 211 in what was called "Operation Highjump." During it he had at his disposal the largest armada ever sent to Antarctica. It was comprised of some 13 ships and 4,700 men; including: an aircraft carrier, a submarine, two destroyers, more than two-dozen aircraft and 3,500 Marines in full battle gear. All these were sent by the United States to Antarctica on what was officially described as a "training" mission. Yet persistent rumors insist that the actual purpose of Highjump was to find the Nazi fortress. It's unclear if Byrd ever discovered the location of the Fuhrer's "Shangri-La" -- if it really was there and if he really was looking for it, that is.

Col. Buechner and Capt. Bernhart avoid mention of Station 211 though, perhaps to maintain its secrecy, which would be in keeping with the general tone of their two books. Indeed, they admit that the names given for all members of the 1979 expedition, including Bernhart and Hartmann, are fictitious and where used to protect their true identities. It is clear that Buechner did not tell us all he knew.

Instead, Buechner and Bernhart tell us that the submarine crew in 1945 placed Hitler's treasure at the foot of an unnamed glazier in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, dug in and protected with steel plates. This would have meant trekking more than 100 miles deep into the interior, loaded down with a ton or more of steel! This seemed to George and I as the least plausible piece of this whole mad jigsaw puzzle. Some parts of Antarctica receive as much as sixty feet of snow in a single year. How deeply would this treasure have been buried after more than thirty years? And why head for an ice-free region only to stash it in the ice? No, we rejected Buechner's cover story, feeling sure that if any of it were true then they must have taken the Holy Lance somewhere from which it would be easily recoverable -- to Station 211.

We chose as a literary device to begin most of our chapters with a fictionalized dramatization of the most important scene in them. Having made that decision, we than decided to do the same with the whole book. Thus, we began "Secrets of the Holy Lance" with "Chapter Ought," a dramatic blend of Buechner's revelations about The Hartmann Expedition and Urban Legends about Station 211. We chose Hartman's recovery of the Spear as the most important scene from our book because, if true, then the Spear of Destiny is not an object hidden in some church or displayed in a musty museum but is in the hands of men who mean to alter mankind's destiny with it - for good or evil?


sorry for the thread hi-jack

:backtotopic:
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:31 pm

http://www.american-buddha.com/CIA.ordo ... tencom.htm

ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS (OTO)

by rotten.com


Image


As secret societies go, the Ordo Templi Orientis scores high marks on the "society" front, but the "secret" aspect is iffy.

After the Golden Dawn and the Freemasons, the OTO is one of the worst kept secrets in modern occultism.

Although it is most famously associated with Aleister Crowley, the OTO had an illustrious history of nearly 10 years before he came along! Oops! Did I say 10 years? I meant 10,000 years.

Carl Kellner, the founder of the OTO, was an initiated Mason from Austria who had a strange encounter with three wise men while attempting to find himself in Asia.

These keepers of the Sacred Whatever supposedly initiated him into a really, really ancient tradition of magick and mysticism, which inspired him to create his own branch of their secret society, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light.

Later, Kellner hooked up with other Masons, Rosicrucians and Theosophists (whose worldview was generally Gnostic and who believed that all religions were basically the same religion). Kellner began to believe that he could unify the various esoteric traditions of Freemasonry with the mysteries of science and religion. This, of course, would empower him to create wealth, health and world domination. Not a bad gig (if he had pulled it off)!

Kellner created his own sect, an offshoot of Freemasonry called the Ordo Templi Orientis (the Oriental Order of the Templars). Unlike the Masons, the OTO would allow women as members (expanding the potential base as well as making the sex-orgy-rituals more fun, see below). Otherwise, at this stage, the organization was fairly similar to the Masons, and the inner circle of OTO leadership had advanced Masonic degrees as a job requirement.

Kellner's partner in founding OTO was Theodor Reuss, who had previously tried to create a revival of the Illuminati.

A Rosicrucian, Grand Master Mason and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason himself, Reuss was also a singer and had taken part in the first performance of Parsifal several years earlier. When Kellner died in 1905, Reuss took the OTO from fledgling concept to formal group.

Image

In addition to their membership in Masonry, Reuss and Kellner shared an interest in sex magick, which was a major tenet of OTO practice. Reuss and Kellner translated tantric sex manuals from the Orient and elsewhere and were enthused about its possibilities. They were particularly interested in the properties of sexual fluids in the context of alchemy. The theory (as understood by the uninitiated) generally went that the right combination of male and female juices could be used to create a "Philosopher's Stone" style magickal object of power, which could be used to create a homonculus, a magickal child.

Or something like that. Reuss toiled away in relative obscurity but with much intrigue and arcane doings involving groups with many weird names and numerical designations, until a certain Aleister Crowley came on the scene in 1910.

On a trip to England, Reuss and Crowley had a meeting of the minds which resulted in Crowley's accelerated initiation into some of the higher degrees of the OTO. Crowley was, if anything, even more deeply immersed in sex magick than Reuss. He was also a master at convincing people of his credibility, and Reuss bought into the Beast's mystique.

In 1912, Crowley was named Grand Master of the OTO in Britain and Ireland, tweaked slightly for Crowley's purposes. The lower degrees of the lodge were called the M:.M:.M:. (funky punctuation is a must for occult orders), and Crowley's manifesto announcing its launch managed to lay claim to possessing just about every conceivable source of occult knowledge, including (but not limited to) the Knights Templar, the Gnostics, the Illuminati, the Knights of Malta, the Holy Grail, the Rosicrucians, the Masons (all Rites), the Golden Dawn (and all Hermetic traditions). Crowley liked to think big.

It's hard to have a "secret" organization whose membership includes Crowley, so it's fortunate that the OTO had always been (relatively) public. The man liked to talk; he published the secrets of the Golden Dawn (of which he had formerly been a member) and distributed them to anyone who could read. "Low profile" was not in his vocabulary. And he had bigger plans than just staging orgies and granting himself self-important titles (although he unabashedly enjoyed those activities as well).


Image
The Inner Circle: Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard -- Late 1940s-early '50s

When Reuss died in 1921, the OTO became Crowley's playground. For the Great Beast, the society offered an opportunity to evangelize his self-made religion, Thelema, which was a mystical spiritual framework Crowley claimed to have channeled nearly 20 years earlier. OTO was also a potential source of funds, along with just about everything and everyone else in Crowley's world.

Under Crowley's somewhat laid-back leadership, OTO crept forward over the course of decades. Crowley spearheaded an expansion into the United States, where the infamous Agape Lodge of the OTO played host to the Antichrist stylings of Jack Parsons. Parsons, of course, was mentor to L. Ron Hubbard, who swiped the OTO's Thelemic teachings, rewrote them into bad science-fiction and called it Scientology.

In the wake of World War II, as Crowley aged, becoming ill and self-absorbed, the OTO languished. Some branches dropped out entirely in protest of his ascension.

Crowley's successor, Karl Germer, oversaw the slowest period in what had not exactly been a booming history thus far. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the OTO proper stopped accepting new members, while internecine warfare among various sects led to further divisions.

When Germer died without naming a successor, bloody conflicts erupted and the organization foundered leaderless for a time until Grady McMurty, a friend of Crowley's, led a revival in 1969. McMurty launched a recruitment drive and sought new members, establishing bases in Dublin and San Francisco. By this time, the damage had been done and the OTO's membership has seriously splintered into a host of offshoots, each claiming some sort of apostolic succession from Crowley, who was now the personification of OTO.

McMurty's successor was elected by what was left of the Order, as per his wishes. The leader, known as the "Caliph" prefers to be known only by his magical nom de guerre Hymenaeus Beta (his secret identity is allegedly "William Breeze," but this couldn't be independently confirmed). The organization today boasts a membership of around 3,000 (depending on who you ask). Interested hangers-on and assorted other sects would substantially increase that figure.

The OTO is more like a religion than a cult, and its major rites are closely guarded secrets that can for the most part be found by anyone who has a search engine. The organization's members, like its icon, Crowley, just can't keep a secret.

One of the most well-known OTO rituals is the Gnostic Mass, written by Crowley, which is open to the uninitiated. The Gnostic Mass is surprisingly like a Catholic Mass, except with more groping, a better sense of humor and the naked chick sitting on the altar.

Image

The really big secrets hoarded by the OTO leadership have to do with sex magic. Higher level OTO initiates apparently spend rather a lot of time obsessing about penises (as did Crowley himself). According to various exposes of the OTO, the secrets include swallowing sperm as the ultimate form of Holy Communion, although some alleged "secret" texts of the OTO specify that the substance is "analogous" to sperm without actually being sperm, whatever that's supposed to mean.

Higher level initiates also learn a lot of tantric stuff, which can hardly be considered "secret," what with the Kama Sutra and more advanced texts available in every bookstore. Top OTO officials also practice Masturbation, heterosexual intercourse and homosexual intercourse for magical effect, once again techniques that aren't exactly top-secret in occult circles.

One major text, Liber IAO, has actually managed to remain secret, or at least offline. This book, allegedly by Crowley, supposedly delves further into the whole sperm-which-is-not-sperm thing, with all sorts of no-doubt dazzling benefits and magical powers detailed at extraordinary length (as was Crowley's wont).

One wonders exactly why OTO bothers with the secrecy thing, given the widespread discussion of its secrets and the blatant disregard Crowley himself showed for vows of silence, but it seems to be very important to them, and the OTO has sued to block publication of its most sacred rites and techniques. So if you're at a dinner party with an OTO member, don't ask if he or she swallows, or you could be opening yourself up for a world of hurt.





http://www.american-buddha.com/theotoandthecia.htm

THE OTO & THE CIA -- ORDIS TEMPLIS INTELLIGENTIS

by Alex Constantine




Flying saucer mythology took hold in a big way in the 1950s, wrapped in gaudy pulp covers and flashed on movie screens. Jack Parsons, the CalTech rocket pioneer and high priest of the OTO's Agape Lodge in Pasadena - and one of the first Americans to report a UFO sighting - was addicted to science fiction. He regularly attended meetings of the L.A. Fantasy and Science Fiction Society, where in 1945 the black adept (he took "the Oath of the Anti-Christ" in 1949) met Lt. Commander L. Ron Hubbard, who made "alien" visitations an integral part of a religious doctrine he called Scientology.

The OTO was founded between 1895 and 1900 by a pair of powerful Freemasons, Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss. Politically, the order was right-wing in the extreme, proposing the creation of a pan-German world based on pagan spiritual beliefs. Kellner died in 1905, and Reuss, a former spy for the Prussian Secret Service, assumed the office of high caliph. While living in London, Reuss spied on German socialist expatriates. In 1912 he made the acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, and appointed him head of the OTO's British chapter. But The Beast's political loyalties have always been an open question.

While living in the States, he wrote pro-German diatribes for two fascist publications, The Fatherland and The Internationalist. After WW II, there were calls for his head. But Crowley offered that his pro-German stance was a ruse of MI6, the military intelligence division in the UK.

In 1912 he had informed the secret service of his correspondence with Reuss, the German spy. Throughout the '20s and '30s, Crowley gathered intelligence on European Communists, the Nazi movement and Germany's occult lodges. Crowley died in 1944, willing the copyright for his books and unpublished manuscripts to the OTO, and leadership of the order to Karl Germer, otherwise known as Frater Saturnus X., formerly Crowley's Legate in the U.S. Germer was born in Germany, served in WW I and was reportedly tossed in the prison by the Nazis for his involvement in Freemasonry. (Crowley believed Germer to be a Nazi spy, but admitted him to the OTO anyway. Typical.)

He settled after the war in Dublin, California and died on October 25, 1962 "under horrifying circumstances," according to his wife in a letter to Marcelo Motta, an OTO official in Brazil. She informed him that Germer, on his death bed, had insisted that Motta succeed him as the Outer Head of the occult order. But the mantle was not passed on to Karl Germer's chosen successor because the CIA orchestrated a coup. But not as an OTO spokesman tells it: "Recently the United States government has legalized our opinion.... [McMurty's] leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis rests on several rather clear letters of authorization from Crowley himself. They met while McMurty was a young First Lieutenant during World War II. He had been admitted to the OTO in 1941 [by] Jack Parsons."

In fact, the choice of McMurty was not entirely "clear." Motta's advocates insist the court decision was based on the perjured testimony of McMurty and attorneys with CIA paymasters. The cult's position on a successor is moot since, according to charters signed on March 22, 1946 and April 11, 1946, The Beast of the Apocalypse had left it to Germer to veto or amend his designation of a successor. As Motta saw it, no one had a legitimate claim to the title but he. Unfortunately, Herr Germer died during the period the CIA had chosen to move mind control experimentation from academic and military labs into the community. An inner circle of Heironymous scientists experimented on cult devotees, and sometimes collaborated in mass murder to silence the subjects (Jonestown, SLA, Solar Temple). It was a sweet arrangement. Occult societies are secretive and often highly irrational. They follow a leader. They exist on the edge of a society that ignores them because weird religious rhetoric is obnoxious.

A number of intelligence agents with occult interests already had their hooks into the OTO. One of them was Gerald Yorke, a veteran British intelligence agent working, an advocate of Motta argues, "with American intelligence in an attempt to absorb the OTO into the ideological warfare network of the political right." Before the horns of Thelemite succession were bestowed upon Grady McMurty, Yorke the prelate spy "misinterpreted" Germer's will and named Joseph Metzger, a ranking Thelemite (and the son of a former Swiss intelligence chief), to the office of high caliph. One order adept, Oskar Schlag, was an alleged "psychological warfare" specialist from Israel. Even McMurty (with his degree in political science) was a State Department bureaucrat the day Herr Germer died. The coup was sealed while Marcelo Motta, a writer for Brazilian television, fended off operatives of the CIA bent on destroying his sanity and leaving him financially crippled. It was a ritual that subjects of mind control conditioning would come to know well. Strangers approached his friends and filled their ears with lurid stories of debauchery. He was suddenly unable to find work. His mail was opened. Motta took a job teaching English, studied self-defense. "He had begun to doubt his sanity," the advocate says. "He constantly suspected people who approached him. He saw in himself all the clinical symptoms of paranoia."

After a few years of harassment and squabbling over the leadership of the OTO, Motta came to the realization that the McMurty junta and "the American 'intelligence' network behind them had a worry, and a pressing one; Motta's proposed 'New Manifesto' [did] not mention ... Grady at all. Since their purpose was to create an American 'intelligence' tool at the expense of a religious organization, it was necessary to either bring Motta to concede Grady further authority or to discredit Motta completely." They did what they wilt. In 1967 Germer's entire occult library and manuscripts were stolen from the home of his widow. Without the royalties these brought in, Mrs. Germer was destitute and literally starved to death. Motta was cast out of the OTO. Trouble brewed in the cult's cauldron. At least one Cotton Club killer passed through. The OTO's Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was founded by Maury McCauley, a mortician, on his own property. McCauley was married to Barbara Newman, a former model and the daughter of a retired Air Force colonel from Vandenberg. The group subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic view of the world precipitated by race wars, and the prophecy made a lasting impression on Charles Manson, who passed through the lodge. In the L.A. underworld, the OTO spin-off was known for indulgence in sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation and murder. The Riverside OTO, like the Manson Family, used drugs, sex, psycho-drama and fear to tear down the mind of the initiate and rebuild it according to the desires of the cult's inner-circle.

On the East Coast, a series of murders created an atmosphere of fear in New York City. Before the world had ever heard of Son of Sam, an obscure Vietnam vet named David Berkowitz moved into an apartment on Pine Street, a rotting gantlet of hovels in Yonkers. Like much of the bloodshed for which he is known, Berkowitz did not make the decision to live on Pine Street. Key decisions in his life were made by the leaders of a religious group based in Westchester, a hybrid of OTO members and acolytes from the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Members of the cult mingled with others in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and had contact with similar groups across the country. The leader of the Westchester "family" was a real estate attorney with a practice in White Plains. He was active in local politics. Balding, lean with years, he directed Berkowitz and his "brothers" to kill in the name of an old cause. The group's meeting place was an abandoned church, a decrepit hulk on the grounds of the abandoned Warburg-Rothschild estate. The church, partially eaten by fire, was the group's "eastern Headquarters." Most of the pews had been removed from the church long ago. On one wall was hung a large silver pentagram, festooned with silver insets in the shape of Waffen SS lightning bolts.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 07, 2011 11:02 pm

CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE.

This article/chapter is excerpted from Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey D. Falk.

CHAPTER XXIX

AFTER THE ORDEAL


http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsam ... ordeal.asp

I thought this ashram was going to show me the way. No more politics. Only philosophy and salvation. I should get so lucky. There’s more politics in one Indian ashram than in the whole of the Western Hemisphere! (in Mehta, 1979).

Ashrams are often the heaviest, most neurotic, political settings I’ve ever been in (Dass and Levine, 1977).

Dass himself, recall, was a clinical psychologist at Harvard; his categorization of others’ behaviors as “neurotic” is thus an informed, not merely a colloquial, opinion.

Ashrams, in my experience, are lunatic asylums filled with jealous and needy people.... [M]ost of the ashrams I have known and visited are not sacred environments where people progress; they’re places in which people regress—to blind adoration, spiritual vanity, sibling rivalry, mirroring and parroting of the so-called master—and in my experience, I have to say, sadly, that I have seen very little real spiritual progress made in them (Harvey, 2000).

My life was forever altered by my experience in a [so-called] religious cult. Not only did I abandon my passions in life, I spent fifteen years following someone else’s path. When I finally awakened from my enchantment, I found myself with near-zero self-esteem, a lot of regret for many wasted years, and plenty of anger at my own naïvete, as well as being furious with my former group. I felt that a gigantic chunk of my real identity had been stolen from me without my conscious consent. At the same time, I felt a euphoric sense of freedom and complete delight that I now had my life back in my own hands (Goldhammer, 1996).

ONE MAY JOIN A SPIRITUAL ORGANIZATION for reasons ranging from the childish search for a substitute parent-figure to the mature hope of achieving liberation or enlightenment in this lifetime. And having thus joined, there is a comparable range of reasons to stay. In that regard, one former ashram resident informally estimated that 85% of monks and nuns he had met were there just for power, control or codependence trips, or for fear of the world. Or, for a feeling of belonging to something larger, and for enjoying the stardust falling on their robes. That is, for adulation in their positions as ashram “rock stars,” a respect which they would not receive anywhere else in the world for any reason, much less for so little accomplishment as the color of the robe they are wearing. Or, they were there “just for laziness, for being trapped or were just too ‘short’ of brains to know any better.” (If that estimate of 85% seems excessively harsh, consider that the Dalai Lama himself proposed an even less complimentary figure of 90%. My own independent estimate had been a mere 80%.)

Fond memories of past good times, in one’s early “honeymoon” days with the guru-figure, can also play a role in keeping disciples living in the community (Strelley, 1987).

Other reasons for staying typically include financial constraints and atrophied “real world” skills. Indeed, the more that one’s life has been positively changed in the very early stages of one’s involvement with any spiritual organization, the more likely it is that one will have—big mistake—donated all of one’s worldly goods to the “God-inspired” work. That noble if naïve commitment, however, makes it much harder to leave when the “love” wears off, and you begin to realize what you have gotten yourself into. And then, how to get out of it? For, in the best possible successful outcome, your most recent job reference is still, in the eyes of the business world, from a “cult.”

Doctors who had for years worked as carpenters, cooks, and laborers began [after Rajneeshpuram collapsed] with part-time work in emergency rooms or covering for other sannyasin physicians who had never come to live on the ranch. Architects worked as draftsmen and reporters as proofreaders and copy editors. Nurses who had been in charge of whole medical wards before they came to the ranch worked private duty or part time in clinics (Gordon, 1987).

Of course, there are also positive reasons for staying in the ashram environment, including the energies and love which the residents have felt to be emanating from the guru-figure—whether those energies are real or (far more likely) simply imagined. By contrast, however, weigh the following, where there were demonstrably no “divine energies” whatsoever flowing, yet the effect was substantially the same:

The Beatles [were] such a hit that Life magazine showed a picture of people scraping up the earth and saying: “The Beatles walked here,” as if these young musicians were Jesus Christ Himself (Radha, 1978).

Indeed, when the Fab Four toured North America, there were girls in the audience not merely fainting, but literally losing bladder control. None of that, though, was from any overwhelming, radiant energies which John, Paul or George—much less Ringo—were giving off, in spite of their best attempts at wearing their fame/divinity well:

Who could think ill of boys who, smothering inner revulsion, were charming to the chain of handicapped unfortunates wheeled in by credulous minders deluded that a “laying-on of hands” by the four pop deities would bring about a cure? (Clayson, 1996).

And yet, suppose that George had been christened as “enlightened” by the Maharishi or the Hare Krishnas, or Elvis taken as an avatar by Daya Mata. (Presley actually “had messianic concepts of himself as the savior of mankind in the early 1970s” [Cloud, 2000].) One can then only imagine the profound “darshan energies” which their fans would have sworn, from their own experience, to be able to feel flowing from them. One can likewise easily picture the miraculous “coronas” and the like which The King might have manifested. (Even as it stands, Elvis believed that he could move clouds with the power of his thoughts, but that is another story. As one of his handlers noted, if you take enough drugs, you can see anything you want.)

Conversely, no small percentage of the disciples vouching for the divinity of their own guru-figures are the same group-thinking ones who can see coronas which aren’t actually there, etc. Understood in that context, their testimonies as to the greatness of any guru-figure cannot be taken seriously. Yet, history and hagiography are filled to the bursting point with exactly such individuals.

The late Swami Radha, for one, again looked askance at the reverence displayed for the “mere mortals” constituting the Beatles. One suspects, however, that had the relevant ground been trodden upon by her own guru, the “miraculous god-man” Swami Sivananda Himself, she would have been among the first to devotedly scrape it up. Indeed, were she to have given that a miss, that irreverence would certainly have placed her in the minority among devoted spiritual seekers, and would in all likelihood have called her own loyalty to the guru into question.

I watched as eager devotees grabbed at [Sai Baba’s] footprints in the sand, joyfully throwing the holy sand on their hair, heads and children; and some, even eating it (Jack Scher, in [Warner, 1990]).

When I attended my Leaving Darshan, I was given a small wooden box with something of Bhagwan [Rajneesh] in it—a hair, or nail clipping, I don’t know what because you are supposed to never open it (in Palmer and Sharma, 1993).

My mind was filled with joy to be able to eat some of Gurudev’s [i.e., Nityananda’s] leftover food. I would rub on my body particles of dust from where he had sat (Muktananda, 1978).

[C]ommon forms of homage to one’s guru include drinking the water with which his feet have been washed (Kripal, 1995).

[A] discarded toilet seat from Jetsunma’s house had been rescued and saved by her students as a relic (Sherrill, 2000).

Likewise, among the sacred objects offered in a recent auction of items which had been blessed by being touched by Adi Da was a used Q-tip “stained with Adi Da’s precious earwax.” Minimum bid: $108 (Elias, 2000). In a previous auction, a half-smoked cigarette butt reportedly sold for $800 (Elias, 2000a).

As Tarlo (1997) then finally noted:

It was embarrassing to see these supposedly serious seekers behaving [around Andrew Cohen] like a bunch of rock-star fans.
Or conversely, as a woman once said to me at a David Bowie concert, with regard to the headliner: “This man is God.” (Cf. “[Adi Da] is utterly God”
[in Da, 1974; self-published].)

The psychology of the “believer,” then, is obviously the same, whether the object touched by the “holy sage” is sand, a bowling ball or a toilet seat, and regardless of whether the sacred butt (on toilet or cigarette) in question belongs to Jetsunma, Adi Da or Ringo Starr.

For my own part, I would have more faith and trust in Sri Ringo.

* * *
Frances Vaughan (in Anthony, et al., 1987) gives the following set of questions, which potential new members of alternative religious movements are advised to consider before joining:

Does the group keep secrets about its organization and the leader? How do members of the group respond to embarrassing questions?.... Do members display stereotypic behavior that emulates the leader?.... Are members free to leave?.... Does the group’s public image misrepresent its true nature?

Reasonable questions, all. But where to get an honest answer to them? From the guru-figure? From his inner circle of disciples? From other loyal members of the group, anxious to have you join them? Surely it is obvious that any spiritual teacher or organization with things to hide would never tell the truth in response to those questions, instead giving the potential devotee the “right” answers which he/she wanted to hear in the first place. And is it not obvious that all organizations and leaders keep secrets from the public?

Does the Vatican have secrets? Yes, as every government, corporation, NGO [i.e., non-governmental organization], and other institution does (Allen, 2004).

Is it not equally obvious that all groups (even secular ones) have “pod people” members who mimic their leaders? (Even physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s graduate students used to unconsciously imitate his manner of smoking cigarettes. Oppenheimer, for his own group-thinking part, dismissed David Bohm’s work as “juvenile deviationism,” going so far as to suggest that “if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him” [Peat, 1997].) And obvious, too, that you’re always “free to leave,” even if being “pursued by disasters” to “drown in the dark sea of ignorance” afterwards ... and that the public image never properly represents the true nature of the spiritual teacher or community?

Were common sense to play a greater role, one might instead do the obvious, in evaluating any particular guru-figure: simply talk to former disciples who have split from the “master,” and ask them why they left! That latter approach, indeed, is the only way (short of published exposés) to accurately gauge the character of the guru-figure and community.

The best way to learn about a specific group is to locate a former member, or at least a former member’s written account (Hassan, 1990).

Minimal thought applied to that subject would further disclose that the amount of perceived validity and “divine love” in the sage being evaluated at the beginning of the disciple’s involvement or “testing period” has little relation to his or her real character. Indeed, such differential would be far greater than the difference in the degree of “perfection” seen in a potential romantic mate on a first date, say, versus after a decade of marriage.

You would not, unless you are a complete cad, hire a private investigator to quietly uncover dirt on a prospective mate, when falling in love with her or him. Neither could you objectively ask (or even covertly research) the intrusive questions suggested above by Vaughan of any “holy sage” and his or her organization, when you are already “falling in love” with them.

And then, where those two ideas cross:

[Paulette Cooper] had in front of her pages of detailed reports from another [alleged] cult operative.... He had, for a short while, been very close to her, and pretended to be in love with her....

The secret agent told his superiors that on the outside he was sympathetic [to her troubles] but inside he was laughing: “Wouldn’t [Cooper’s depressed talk of suicide] be a great thing for Scientology?”
(Marshall, 1980).

As to Vaughan’s suggested questions above, then: Even if you did ask them, you would truly have to be born yesterday to think that you would ever get an open and honest answer.

* * *
Jack Kornfield, years ago, penned a landmark exposé for Yoga Journal. There, he presented the results of his own research, disclosing that thirty-four of the fifty-three American yoga teachers whom he surveyed (64%) had had sex with their students. Those indulgences encompassed preferences ranging from heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, fetishist, exhibitionist and monogamist, to polygamist.

How to react to that? As both the people at Kripalu and the Dalai Lama figured out for themselves through simple common sense, the proper response to father-figure gurus and teachers who reportedly cannot keep their hands off their disciples in spiritual incest is quite simple. That is, one must criticize them openly and, if they will not change, pack one’s bags and leave.

Or, even better, wisely send the teacher packing.

Yet, just when we may be thinking that we have finally found a guru-figure, in the Dalai Lama, who can actually see things even halfway clearly ... well, we find the same man musing aloud that it may indeed be possible for great yogis such as Drukpa Kunley to sleep with other men’s wives only for their (wives’) benefit.

Smiling slightly, His Holiness explained that Drukpa Kunley could understand the long-term effects of his actions because he had attained the nondual insight known as “One Taste.” All experiences were the same to him: He could enjoy [eating] excrement and urine just like the finest food and wine (Wheeler, 1994).

Ken Wilber himself, however, has again attained to the One Taste state of which the Dalai Lama speaks so highly, thus allegedly being able to “understand the long-term effects of his actions,” e.g., in endorsing Adi Da and Andrew Cohen. (No word on Wilber’s preferences of fine wine versus urine, etc.) Those endorsements, however, plus his continuing, insult-filled misrepresentations of David Bohm’s brilliant work, absolutely prove that even such a nondual state cannot be a valid basis for one’s allegedly “always behaving appropriately in every situation.” Note also that even the Dalai Lama is thus guilty of romanticizing the spiritual accomplishments of persons whom he regards as being greater than himself. Indeed, he is probably doing that to a comparable degree as his own spiritual state is undoubtedly overestimated by his most loyal followers.

Further regarding Kunley himself:

There is little doubt that Drukpa Kunley would have broken the incest taboo if he had thought that this might serve his mother’s spiritual growth (Feuerstein, 1992).

Drukpa Kunley ... when asked by a follower, Apa Gaypo, for a prayer to strengthen his religious resolve, answered:

Drukpa Kunley’s penis head may stick,
Stick in a small vagina,
But tightness depends upon the size of the penis.
Apa Gaypo’s urge to gain Buddhahood is strong,
So strong,
But the scale of his achievement depends upon the
strength of his devotion
(French, 2003).
As prayers go, it’s certainly one of the more interesting....

Kunley’s exploits included claims of his having slept with five thousand women—but evidently no men—“for their spiritual benefit.” So here we have someone who ostensibly drew no distinctions between excrement and urine, versus “the finest food and wine.” That is, he potentially enjoyed both sets equally, for experiencing everything—including his own thoughts, sensations and emotions—as having the same “One Taste.” In other words, he “experienced” them with no division between subject and object, and no recoiling from psychological engagement in those various psychic relationships. And yet, like the strictly heterosexual Wilber, he obviously still distinguished between men and women as sexual partners, only indulging in the female of the species in that regard.

Very fishy, that—to allegedly not distinguish between one’s culinary enjoyment of filth versus appropriate foods, but to still be bound by largely learned/cultural sexual preferences.

Feuerstein gives many additional “fairy tales” of the violent “crazy wisdom” exploits of Kunley and others. None of those mythic stories could possibly be literally true. Yet, all of them have undoubtedly been used, at one time or another, to excuse the behaviors of foolish individuals masquerading as sages, both past and present.

Consider:

[Adi Da] likes to compare his work to the crazy-wise teachings of some of the great adepts of the East. In particular, he once remarked, “I am Drukpa Kunley.... This is exactly what I am in your time and place” (Feuerstein, 1996).

* * *

Traditionally, in Asia, vows and moral precepts have protected teachers and students from sexual and other forms of misconduct. In Japan, Tibet, India and Thailand, the precepts against harm by stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, or abuse of intoxicants are understood and followed by all members of the religious community....

In modern America these rules are often dispensed with, and neither TV preachers nor Eastern spiritual teachers have clear rules of behavior regarding money, power and sex
(Kornfield, 1993).

Yet as we have seen, contrary to the romantic belief that things are different in Asia: In Japan, local girls throw rocks over the monastery walls, receiving ready responses to those “calling cards.” (Such enticement, though, is hardly needed, given the documented propensity of monks there to sneak out over the walls even without solicitation.) In Tibet, while masturbation and oral sex are taboo, whores are okay as long as you pay for their services yourself. In Thailand, with a population that is 95% Buddhist, monks get their names in the papers for having been caught with pornography, sexual paraphernalia, and more than one woman at a time. And that publicity is even independent of their Rajneesh-like collections of vintage cars, some of which were obtained via the misuse of temple funds. (Ironically, Kornfield himself practiced meditation “in the remote jungles of Thailand” under the guru Ajahn Chah in the early ’70s [Schwartz, 1996]. Perhaps the jungles there are simply not “where the action is,” but in any case, the idea that precepts are in general followed there or elsewhere in the East “by all members of the religious community” in no way matches the facts, as we have repeatedly seen. For more of the same purely wishful thinking regarding “Eastern gurus,” see Andrew Harvey’s [2000] conversation with Ken Wilber.)

And things could be different in contemporary India, building upon the constraints “obeyed” by Ramakrishna and the like? Sadly, no:

That little seven year old is a real Lolita. She’s the best lay in the ashram (in Mehta, 1979).

Or, as one five-year-old boy in Rajneesh’s Poona center complained: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, all we ever do is fuck!”

At least one “older and wiser” six-year-old girl in the same community, however, saw things from a more adult perspective; for she delighted in grabbing men’s genitals through their robes. Another offered to suck the penis of every man she saw in the public showers (Franklin, 1992).

Of course, that situation did not improve upon Rajneesh’s messianic move to America, where one could easily find three-year-old girls sobbing their hearts out to their mothers:

None of the boys will fuck me!.... It’s not fair! Just because I wear diapers they won’t fuck me. They said I’m a baby! (in Franklin, 1992).

To that, the mother’s patient response was simply an encouragement to her child to stop wetting herself at night, at which point she would not have to wear diapers anymore.

With the additional penchant of early-teenage girls in Rajneesh’s America for sleeping with men twice their age, Franklin went on to note:

Scores of ranch swamis would have been considered child molesters out in the world.

Consider also the relevant problem of Tibetan lamas taking private female consorts in spite of their public vows of celibacy—reported by June Campbell on the basis of her own experience as such a consort to a universally revered lama. That rule-breaking was never lessened by tradition, hierarchy or lineage:

[W]hile a lama would, to all intents and purposes, be viewed publicly as a celibate monk, in reality he was frequently sexually active, but his activities were highly secret (Campbell, 1996; italics added).

Further, note again that Chögyam Trungpa’s teachings and behaviors, for one, were verified as authentic not merely by the (disillusioned, late) student Butterfield but by the head of his own Nyingma School. Indeed, by that verification, his behaviors were exactly in accord with that 1800-year-old tradition, dating back to Milarepa. Given that endorsement, it was obviously for working within the alleged “checks and balances” of his tradition, not for being freed of them when emigrating to the West, that Trungpa had people publicly stripped and humiliated. From the same “obedient following” of selected traditional rules—i.e., of only the ones which they felt like obeying, without meaningful censure for violating others—his successor again infected his disciples with AIDS, criminally believing that God would protect them.

Likewise, consider the reported non-effect on Trungpa when the Sixteenth Karmapa came to America in 1974:

It had been six years since His Holiness and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche had last seen each other, and the Karmapa had doubtless heard lots of stories, some true, some exaggerated, about how this former monk had immersed himself in the Western world. But now as they met His Holiness smiled broadly, and it was clear that everything was all right (Fields, 1992).

Additional research, though, discloses that the same Karmapa actually later “non-recognized” Trungpa. Further, the Dalai Lama, too, pointedly canceled a scheduled visit to Trungpa’s community from his itinerary during his first, historic tour of America in the 1970s (Clark, 1980). Part of the motivation for that cancellation no doubt arose from the suggestion, by an officer in Trungpa’s paranoid, submachine-gun toting organization, that (in all seriousness) the Dalai Lama was conspiring to assassinate the Karmapa.

Neither of those quiet lamaic signs of disapproval, of course, did anything to keep Trungpa in check from making additional “mistakes.” But it is still a little bit comforting to know that those two lamas at least had some sense left in them. For, one can easily contrast even that ridiculously mild censure with others who have touted Trungpa’s teachings and sangha as being the first foray of “authentic Tibetan Buddhism” into America (Bharati, 1974).

Acharya Reginald Ray is another of Chögyam Trungpa’s contemporary followers. He is thus undoubtedly familiar with the details of his “principal teacher’s” life. He therefore had this to say regarding the effect of traditional “checks and balances” on the behaviors of gurus and their ilk:

In Tibet, even the tulkus—these very well-trained people—were surrounded by people who were watching them all the time. Even the ordinary village people knew what was appropriate behavior and what wasn’t. If a guy went off, he’d be nailed (in Caplan, 2001).

Yet, in spite of such claimed watchfulness and the supposed punishment for “going off” vouched for by Ray, Trungpa managed to sleep with women “since he was thirteen,” actually getting one pregnant before having left Tibet, while still under a vow of celibacy. He further obviously suffered no discipline in response to that, from “ordinary village people” or otherwise, sufficient to get him to stop that blatantly “inappropriate behavior.” In short, in no way did he get “nailed” for that.

One wishes, truly, that there was a visible correlation between the documented realities of situations like that, and the distortions which are presented to the Western public as factual by respected, life-long “experts.”

While I do not know what people mean when they claim that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, I do know that no one has a right to be wrong in his facts (Askenasy, 1978).

It was, further, not merely Trungpa himself who was transplanted into the West. More importantly, the closed communities, feudal/hierarchical power structures and “infallibility of the guru” teachings of his ancient Tibetan tradition formed the basis for his own little spiritual “kingdom” in Boulder (Marin, 1995). And it is those structures, not any excessive partying per se, which create the “superintendent/guard/prisoner” environment which ruins people’s lives just as much in non-“crazy wisdom” surroundings as it does in “uncontrolled” contexts such as Chögyam’s.

It is true that Trungpa (1981), for one, gave at least lip service to encouraging “an attitude of constant questioning, rather than ignoring our intelligence.” Butterfield’s descriptions of the interview process undergone during his own admission as a student, however, show that one could not become a member of Trungpa’s community without buying into the full set of ridiculous superstitions. Consider also Merwin’s fate, when he attempted to question rather than going blindly along with the dictates of the guru and his group-thinking community. It is issues like these, not half-baked, pulled-out-of-thin-air theory, which matter in evaluating the potential for harm present in any “true sangha.”

Note further that, by Feuerstein’s own testimony, Drukpa Kunley’s sexual exploits “did fly in the face of custom and propriety.” That is, his “crazy wisdom” behaviors were not constrained by the agrarian society in which he lived.

Obviously, then, after all that, neither social nor cultural nor psychological-development variations can account for the “difference” between guru-disciple relationships as practiced in the East versus the West. Rather, when it comes to the demand for blind obedience, and to the reported abuse of sex and power, the problems and alleged abuses exist, and have always existed, just as surely “on the other side of the pond” as they do in North America. (Cf. Ramakrishna, and the history of Zen and of lama-sexing, child-torturing Tibetan Buddhism.)

Persons looking to account for a non-existent difference between East and West in all this further generally ignore the natural effect of the passage of time on the involved individuals. Someone like Trungpa was going to become increasingly self-destructive as the years went by regardless, for his childhood pains and otherwise. It was his own psychology, not “the West,” which gave him license to drink himself into an early grave.

Further, being worshiped by one’s disciples as a “god” for years on end would go to one’s head in the East just as much as in the West. It would also predictably result in an increasing feeling that one could get away with anything, regardless of whether or not the surrounding society and culture had become more liberal at the same time.

If one goes from the East to the West, then, being worshiped equally in both as time goes by, one’s increasing disregard for moral rules in that later West can in no way be reduced to a simple surrounding cultural or social matrix phenomenon. Rather, the bulk of that can be accounted for simply on the basis of the aforementioned grandiose inflation, fuelled by the willing obedience and obeisance of one’s close, devoted followers.

Put more bluntly: Although power corrupts, it also takes time to thus corrupt. If other things are changing simultaneously with that passage of time, it may be easy to mistake them for the cause of the corruption. For nearly every guru-figure one could name, however, there was a time early in his (or her) life when he could have been regarded as exhibiting “impeccable integrity”; a later time when he allegedly began breaking rules which hurt others; and a yet later time when he had hurt so many people that his alleged sins began to find him out. Some such figures lived their entire lives in the West, some came to the West from the East, and some spent their entire lives in the agrarian East. For the latter, nothing of the “unconstrained” West can be regarded as the cause of their reported misdeeds; and yet the alleged corruption in the claimed misuse of power and sexuality happened all the same.

Likewise, regarding “tradition”: Aside from Rajneesh, Sai Baba, the Caddys, Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Ananda Moyi Ma and Ammachi (whom we shall soon meet)—plus L. Ron Hubbard and Werner Erhard—every other spiritual leader we have considered herein came from within a recognized teaching lineage. (Aurobindo might even claim Vivekananda as a teacher.) Yet, that has clearly done nothing to keep them in check, or even to ensure/test that they were anywhere near as enlightened as they claimed to be.

Sex between clergymen and boys is by no means a uniquely Catholic phenomenon ... it’s been going on in Buddhist monasteries in Asia for centuries.

“Of course, this is against the Buddhist canon,” [Dr.] Leonard Zwilling [said] “but it has been common in Tibet, China, Japan and elsewhere.

“In fact, when the Jesuits arrived in China and Japan in the 16th century, they were horrified by the formalized relationships between Buddhist monks and novices who were still children”
(Siemon-Netto, 2002).
* * *
After all that, it is almost a relief to find an actual instance of Eastern rules being “followed by all members of the religious community,” as Kornfield and others claim:

The real temptation many men face when they come here [to a Thai Buddhist forest monastery] is masturbation. You are not supposed to do it. Once you have been ordained, if you break this precept you must come and confess it to the senior monk. It’s worse if you are a bhikkhu [monk]. Then a meeting of the sangha is required and penance must be handed down. The guilty monk has to sit at the end of the food line. For seven days no one can do anything for him. It’s really embarrassing. I remember one fairly senior monk had a serious problem with this. Whenever the villagers came in to bring us food in the morning, they would see him sitting at the bottom of the line and laugh (Ward, 1998).

It is one thing for monasteries to focus on humiliating their residents for such a trivial activity—which surely affects, for harm or good, no one but the individual practitioners in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and should hardly merit a meeting of the entire community to discuss it. It is quite another, however, for them (or their “big city” counterparts) to overlook or attempt to cover up embezzlement, the use of prostitutes, and the indulgence in necrophilia and karaoke, etc., on the part of their other residents. Indeed, the situation is no different, in that regard, than one finds with the horrendous betrayals of trust reported within the Catholic Church, worldwide. Such major alleged abuses are then left to be brought out by muck-raking journalists whose conscience has evidently not yet been completely dulled by blind adherence to a set of archaic precepts.

One further cannot help but note that Buddhism has surpassed even the Catholic Church, here, in terms of the need for confession (to one’s superiors) and humiliating public penance, for even ridiculously minor “sins.” And that Church is by no means an easy one to surpass, in terms of guilt and ignorance:

Even today, the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church holds masturbation to be a mortal sin [i.e., one “punishable by eternal damnation, unless one repented in confession”], though few serious theologians consider it a cause for the loss of heaven (Berry and Renner, 2004).

* * *

Interestingly, had Rajneesh and his inner circle of followers not gone over a line with their public bioterrorism activities, etc., his ashrams would still be viewed today as fine models of how spiritual communities should be run—as J. Donald Walters’ Ananda was, for example, prior to his own disgrace. That is in spite of the fact that, as early as 1979, the National Institute of Mental Health had been warned that Rajneesh’s Poona ashram might become “another Jonestown” (Gordon, 1987). (Likewise, the San Francisco Zen Center had “long [been] thought of as the very model of a modern Zen center,” prior to the “Apocalypse” following from the public airing of Richard Baker’s hitherto-private reported activities there [Fields, 1992].)

Until Rajneesh spoke publicly, the only charges pending against him or anyone else on the ranch were related to immigration fraud. If he hadn’t exposed Sheela’s wrongdoings, the authorities would probably never have found informants to testify, let alone obtained convictions on wiretapping, poisoning, and arson. And if Rajneesh hadn’t tried to flee the country, both he and his commune would in all likelihood still have been in Oregon (Gordon, 1987).

The composition of that same ex-ashram is of significant interest:

According to the Oregon University survey, 11% of the [Rajneeshpuram] commune members had postgraduate degrees in psychology or psychiatry and another 11% had B.A.’s in the field (Fitzgerald, 1986).

Thus, nearly one-quarter of the residents at Rajneeshpuram were trained psychologists. That documented fact does nothing to increase one’s confidence in the ability of the profession to spot openly pathological behavior in contexts where its members have a vested interest. For, while most members of the Rajneesh community were not aware of the more grossly illegal activities going on there until after the fact, Sheela’s own “duchy” included suppression of any “negativity.” In her world, further, even constructive criticism qualified as that, and was punished accordingly. Of course, all that one gets out of that, other than an enforced obedience, is a superficially “happy” community of people—as in the Maharishi’s ideal society—reminding one too much of the Python sketch involving an unhappy man sentenced to hang by the neck (or meditate) “until he cheers up.”

The sociological studies of safely distant, academic “Rajneesh watchers,” etc., would fall into the same category of deep concern. Indeed, for such scholars, publishers of exposés, by Milne for example, have been deemed worthy of denigration as “schlockmeisters” (cf. Palmer and Sharma, 1993).

Nor were Bhagwan’s sannyasin psychologists merely at the bottom of the barrel in their professional abilities or standing:

The “Hollywood crew” [included] the best-known therapists in town—all of them had taken sannyas (Strelley, 1987).
Rajneesh, interestingly, was actually regarded as “the intellectual’s guru”: “[T]he educational level of the followers of Rajneesh was far greater than most of the rest of the population”
(Oakes, 1997).

An astounding number of therapists and leaders of the human potential movement are current or former disciples of Bhagwan’s, although few, if any of them, publicly acknowledge it
(Franklin, 1992).

Many of these therapists had the sense, before they came to Poona, that Rajneesh was at least a master therapist, that his work might represent the next step in the evolution of psychotherapy (Gordon, 1987).

Those, of course, are the same people who decide, through the peer review process and as a “community of competent, intersubjective interpreters,” what constitutes truth within humanistic psychology. The same peer-adjudication of truth naturally occurs within consciousness studies in general, influenced by Wilber and his colleagues, for example.

Interestingly, from the early ’70s until the collapse of his empire and IRS-inspired flight into Mexico in 1991, Werner Erhard reigned as the “guru of the human potential movement.” Indeed, even in Anthony, Ecker and Wilber’s near-worthless (1987) Spiritual Choices, the interview questions (led by John Welwood) put to Erhard centered only on whether est training granted an “enlightenment” comparable to that purportedly realized through traditional spiritual disciplines. That is, there was not even the slightest whisper of any concern expressed regarding its safety, in spite of those authors’ own later characterization of the interview as being “spirited.” (The interview itself was conducted in 1981—half a dozen years after Brewer’s [1975] exposé of the alleged negative effects reportedly experienced by various est participants.)

Wilber has, in the past, sat on the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, as have Ram Dass, Dr. Herbert V. Guenther, Ph.D., and “the best stripper in town,” Chögyam Trungpa. Current members of that board include Michael Murphy, who again genuinely believes (1992) that Ramakrishna’s spine lengthened during his Hanuman sadhana.

Murphy is “the leading integral theorist of his generation,” according to Wilber’s Integral Naked (2005) website.

Also on the JTP board is one Mr. Paul Clemens, whose Blue Dolphin publishing company catalog contains books by authors who can (they believe) literally hear God and Jesus speaking to them, and literally converse with leprechauns—the latter existing, fractal-like, in the “third-and-a-half dimension.” None of those are financially lucrative best-sellers, which could then perhaps have been excused as being published only for their dollar value.

Note further: The above book on leprechauns, by the imaginative Tanis Helliwell, was actually endorsed by Jean Houston, the former president of the Association of Humanistic Psychology. Indeed, she there credited Helliwell with being a “deep seer.”

Houston (1997) has, at other times, functioned as a non-guru to the White House:

For almost a year and a half, I had served as a kind of intellectual sparring partner for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, helping her focus ideas for the book she was writing.

A report that the First Lady and I had engaged in an imaginative exercise in which we reflected on what Eleanor Roosevelt might have said about building a better society for our children sent the media scurrying for colorful copy. “Séance!” the front pages of the newspapers shouted “Witchcraft!” And even that most dreaded of all epithets, “Guru!”

Needless to say, the distortions both embarrassed Mrs. Clinton and played havoc with my life and career. Virtually every newspaper and news magazine in the world carried the stories, the facts hugely distorted, and liberally dosed with snickering asides by reporters who never bothered to find out anything about me or my work.

As a result of this public ridicule, I found my reputation for thirty years of good work in the service of human betterment strained so badly that lectures were canceled by nervous sponsors and research grants were withdrawn. I felt that I had gone overnight from being regarded as a respected pioneer on the frontier of human capacities research to a laughable representative of the flaky fringe....

What was it that turned the evening news into an Inquisition?

I suspect that the answer lies in two great phobias—fear of the rising power of women and fear of the power of imagination and inner realities.


A “laughable representative of the flaky fringe” ... as opposed to being a “respected pioneer” in the field of humanistic psychology. There is, of course, no meaningful difference between the two categories.

Autobiographical claims on the part of Houston include supposed childhood friendships with both Albert Einstein and Teilhard de Chardin, and a status as Margaret Mead’s adopted daughter. (Mead also served as the President of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Mind Research [Houston, 1982].)

As Advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development, [Jean] has worked to implement some of their extensive educational and health programs, primarily in Myanmar [Burma] and Bangladesh (Houston, 2006).

Houston’s own (1982) teachings have included the following wisdom:

I have been known to begin seminars by asking people to tell each other three outrageous lies! The resistance that some people experience to such a suggestion may be indicative of the extremely literal mindset that results from an acculturation that worships “the fact” and logical proof.

Houston’s husband, Robert Masters, by his own “About the Author” testimony, is a “leading pioneer of modern consciousness research,” “one of the founders of the Human Potentials Movement” ... and former director of the Library of Sex Research. Much of his “Work” (always capitalized) in the non-library regard has centered around Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess possessing the head of a lioness and the body of a woman—ostensible a “Gateway to alien realms” of consciousness via the raising of the kundalini energy. The worldview within which Masters’ (1991) Egyptian metaphysics functions includes the following ideas:

The “Gods” of Chaos ordinarily “ascend” only to the realm of the KHU [the “fourth most subtle of the Five Bodies,” cf. auras], when a “black magic” is practiced. However, some of the most potent sometimes invade the SÂHU [the “highest” of the Five Bodies] so that even the holiest of men or women is not secure from them. Also, the most powerful of black magicians can work with Metaeidolons representing the Ur-Gods of Chaos at this level, thus effecting the most potent evil.

Later in the same book, Masters expounds further on his view of reality:

You can learn to extract from another body a [cf. astral] Double of that body and interact with it. In fact, this is what, at the lowest level of psychic development, a psychic does, whether for healing, for defense against psychic attack, or in an unscrupulous way to attack by psychic means.

In 1972, John Lennon blurbed for Masters and Houston’s Mind Games, saying:

I have read three important and revolutionary books in the last three years: Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream, and now Mind Games. I suggest you read and experience them.

The book itself is simply a series of exercises, done in groups, for entering altered states of consciousness. It does, however, aim for the creation of a “Group Spirit” by “a version of a method known and practiced for thousands of years in Tibet, where such entities are known as thought-forms, or tulpas.”

What caliber of thought, then, would you expect from a group of people among whom Houston is one of the level-headed, understated, thoughtful ones? What would you expect the lesser lights of the “profession” to look like? Would it surprise you to find that they seem to genuinely believe that the voices they hear, and the elfish beings they see, are real?

You may start out taking transpersonal/integral/parapsychological claims seriously, as David Lane, John Horgan, Susan Blackmore and I once did. And there is nothing so very wrong with that, up to a point. For, each one of us, at one stage or another in our lives, has committed to mistaken ideals and perspectives simply for not knowing any better, and for believing far too much of what we were told by people whom we trusted to have done at least minimally satisfactory research and vetting of their own beliefs and purported abilities. With regard to transpersonal, integral and parapsychological claims, however, if you simply keep reading and thinking widely, beyond the field itself, the transition from believer to skeptic is unavoidable.

Conversely, to exist for decades in those fields as a member in good standing is a sure sign that one is relying more on the part of one’s brain that is responsible for mere wishful thinking, than on the section which is to credit for coherent, rational analysis.

Speaking of which: Dr. Roger Walsh is another respected member of the JTP board. He is also on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Plus, he is another founding member of the Integral Institute, who has compared Wilber’s (1995) Sex, Ecology, Spirituality to Hegel’s work in its scope. Walsh has recently stated, with an absurd degree of exaggeration:

Ken Wilber is one of the greatest philosophers of this century and arguably the greatest theoretical psychologist of all time (IntegralNaked, 2004).

Ah, but is he as great a philosopher as Rudolf Steiner? Or L. Ron Hubbard? The jury is still out.

Walsh actually teaches philosophy (among sundry other subjects) at the University of California at Irvine, and might therefore claim some measure of informed expertise in voicing the above opinion. Still, such puffery surely reminds one far too much of Wilber’s own pontifications as to whom he imagines the top shabd yogis, Realizers, or “strongest dinosaurs” to be.

Frances Vaughan, incidentally, is Roger Walsh’s wife. Both are close friends of Ken Wilber—and founding members of the Integral Institute—to the point of having introduced him to his second wife. Together, Walsh and Vaughan (1988) edited a book of selections from Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles (ACIM)—attempted pithy sermons which were purportedly channeled from Lord Jesus Christ in 1965.

‘Cause evidently the leprechauns were all out.

Wilber, interestingly, had this to say (in Klimo, 1998) about the Course:

I’m not saying that there was not some transcendental insight involved and that Helen probably felt that it was certainly beyond her day-to-day self. I think that’s true [italics added]. But there’s much more of Helen in the Course than I first thought.... It’s not all pure information, there’s a lot of noise that gets in. I also found that if you look at Helen’s own poetry, you’re initially very hard pressed to find any difference between that and the Course.

Yes indeed. And, why might that “non-difference” be? The answer is obvious to anyone who isn’t desperately trying to find spirituality and paranormality in what can much more reasonably be viewed as simply one woman’s overactive imagination and inability to distinguish reality from her own fantasies.

Or do you believe that Jesus Christ spoke directly to Helen Schuchman in the mid-’60s, dictating over a thousand pages of garden-variety New Age musings to her?

Regardless, anyone who was actually impressed with ACIM to the point of compiling a “best of” from it that makes Andrew Cohen’s books look wise and insightful by comparison, should think more than twice before considering himself to be in a position to rank the world’s great philosophers. That applies, I think, even if the person in question is a peer reviewer amongst a field of comparably fine “scholars.”

The same compiled book was endorsed as “marvelous ... inspired and profound” by Willis Harman, former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In a similar vein, Walsh and Vaughan’s (1993) anthology, Paths Beyond Ego, has a foreword written by John E. Mack, M.D.—Harvard’s now-late, laughably credulous alien abduction expert (Carroll, 2004). As if to close the circle, the foreword for Walsh’s (1999) Essential Spirituality was written by the Dalai Lama, and is dedicated to Judith Skutch Whitson—president of the Foundation for Inner Peace, publisher of A Course in Miracles.

Of that same uninspiring book, Ken Wilber blurbed: “The field of spiritual books has been looking for its own Lewis Thomas or Carl Sagan, and I believe Roger Walsh may be that one.” Sagan, however, was not merely a cogent popularizer of serious science, but also one of the world’s more prominent skeptics, who would not for a moment have taken ACIM seriously. Any “Carl Sagan of spirituality” would be one who would keep asking pointed questions and demanding properly conducted research ... at which point even the most hitherto-certain claims of the transpersonal/integral field crumble rapidly into a pile of fairy dust.

As to the psychological profession in general, Storr (1996) has demonstrated that both Freud and Jung created personality cults—initially populated by many other respected psychological professionals—around themselves:

Freud’s dogmatism and intolerance of disagreement led to the departure of many colleagues, including Adler, Stekel, Jung, and eventually Rank and Ferenczi, from the psychoanalytic movement. When his associates remained faithful disciples, Freud gave them his approval; but when they disagreed, he abused them, or accused them of being mentally ill. Adler was described by Freud as paranoiac, Stekel as unbearable and a louse; Jung as brutal and sanctimonious.

What is remarkable about Freud’s leadership of the psychoanalytic movement is that although he quite clearly did not believe in any kind of supernatural creator, he adopted almost without exception the strategies of those who did. In effect he treated his own theories as if they were a personal revelation granted to him by God and demanded that others should accord to them the reverence which the sacred word usually commands
(R. Webster, 1990).

And as we have seen, leading professionals in humanistic psychology thought that Rajneesh was “at least a master therapist.” (Likewise, “Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, defended [L. Ron] Hubbard’s early work ... and briefly received Dianetic counseling” [Atack, 1990].) Comparably, transpersonal and integral psychologists today regard Ken Wilber as a rare genius and a compassionate bodhisattva.

Think about all of that before you feel obliged to take any of their other ideas or analyses seriously.

Interestingly, Richard Price had actually visited and subsequently repudiated Rajneesh’s India ashram in the ’70s. (Price was one of the co-founders of the humanistic potential Esalen community, that “hotbed of sexual experimentation” located three hours south of San Francisco.) That distancing, however, was strictly for the violence he observed in their encounter groups, not for any stated comprehension of the potential for pathological problems which exists inside every closed society.

Price actually noted a style of “manipulating group pressure to force conformity” (Fitzgerald, 1986) in those encounter groups, in his formal letter of protest sent to the ashram staff and to Rajneesh himself. One will, however, find that manipulation in every ashram setting, with or without encounter groups. In any case, Price’s objections were not directed at the ashram in general, which environment he fully enjoyed. Yet that “enjoyable” community is exactly where the real pathologies later manifested.

Price and Murphy’s Esalen, like Findhorn, is itself a relatively safe community. Or “safe,” at least, when not being haunted by future mass murderers:

Esalen was, at this time [i.e., August of 1969], just coming into vogue as a “growth center”.... Obviously [Charles] Manson felt Esalen a prime place to espouse his philosophies. It is unknown whether he had been there on prior occasions, those involved in the Institute refusing to even acknowledge his visits there....

Manson would tell Paul Watkins ... that while at Big Sur he had gone “to Esalen and played his guitar for a bunch of people who were supposed to be the top people there [Murphy? Price?], and they rejected his music” ... just three days before the Tate murders
(Bugliosi and Gentry, 1974).

Prior to that, the Beach Boys had recorded (in September of 1968) one of Manson’s songs, “Never Learn Not To Love,” for their 20/20 album. Manson and his Family had actually lived in (drummer) Dennis Wilson’s house in 1968-9. It was Dennis himself who had once taken Manson to Roman Polanski’s house, at which the murder of the latter’s wife (i.e., centerfold Sharon Tate) and others later occurred.

Between that and Mike Love’s interest in the Maharishi, that the Boys managed to sustain any “good vibrations” at all is nothing short of amazing. (The Maharishi actually toured with the Beach Boys in 1968, to the complete disinterest of their fans, causing the tour to be cancelled halfway through, already half a million dollars in debt [Kent, 2001].)

* * *

The inner circle [in Jetsunma’s ashram] was always careful to protect newcomers from the darker side of the center—and the things they would not be able to comprehend correctly (Sherrill, 2000; italics added).

The present book is, of course, exactly an attempt to provide a relatively comprehensive disclosure about what reportedly goes on behind the ashram gates. That is, it is a cataloging of the alleged actions which one would not “comprehend correctly” if one were to find out about them too soon in one’s involvement with any group. Informed decisions may then be made regarding one’s participation in our world’s nontraditional and traditional spiritual organizations.

Of course, each new approach which comes along may be the “one clean spiritual path” whose guru-figure is everything he or she claims to be, with an inner circle of disciples who care nothing for their own power or respect, and simply want to make the world a better place by first changing themselves.

And if you buy that, I’ve got an ashram in Florida I’d like to sell you ... because that’s exactly what I once thought SRF was. And yet, even the holy Tara Mata’s attitude toward other, lower members of that compassionate and “God-guided” society embraced the totalitarian ideal:

In an organization, no one has a right even to think except the members of the Board of Directors (in Walters, 2002).

Comparably, as Thomas Doyle (2002) observed, with regard to the Catholic Church:

There is a solid principle in political science that says the governing elite of an organization will eventually think it is the organization.

No surprise, then, that exactly the same principle would apply to our world’s nontraditional religious organizations, in their ashrams and otherwise. How could it not? ‘Tis simply human nature.

Interestingly, devotees who tire of SRF and Yogananda frequently end up following Sai Baba, Chinmoy, or the “hugging avatar” Mata Amritanandamayi (Ammachi).

Many people have called Amma[chi] a saint or sage and believe that she is a great master, a reincarnation of Divine Mother, Krishna, Christ, Buddha, or Ramakrishna.... When asked if she believes this about herself, she responded that she basically did not want to claim anything or that she was any particular incarnation of a god or goddess (Cornell, 2001).

And yet—

“The Mother of Immortal Bliss” [i.e., Amritanandamayi] claims to be the living manifestation of all the divine goddesses of the Hindu pantheon combined (Macdonald, 2003).

In presenting Amma with the Gandhi-King Award for Non-Violence in 2002, the Jane Goodall further reportedly characterized her as being “God’s love in a human body” (in Ammachi, 2004).

Understandably—or not—then,

Amritananda[mayi] went underground in 1983 when the police confronted about twenty-six women who claimed to be possessed by gods and goddesses (Premanand, 1994).

Sarah Macdonald’s (2003) clear-eyed experiences with Ammachi in darshan leave one further wondering:

Amid the push, shove, knee-crunch and head-yank I concentrate on my question.

“What is my purpose, what does God want from me?”

Again, the flash of the nose ring, the gentle hold of the neck and the whisper in the ear. The answer, my purpose in life is: “rootoongarootoongarootoongarootoongarootoongarootoonga.”

My shoulder nearly dislocated by the yank out of the Mother’s midst, I wait for a vision. Is the purpose of my life to root?


Dr. Goodall, interestingly, has had her own “spiritual awakening”:

From her description, her experience seemed to be a pure consciousness experience—a sensate-only experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world. Thinking about it afterwards, she felt the experience must have been a mystical experience or a spiritual revelation—simply because there was no other explanation available to her. This experience proved to be a turning point in her life—she changed from skeptic to spiritualist, from scientist to savior, from feeling lonely to being loved, from feeling hopelessness to having a “reason for hope.” She saw human evolution as the eventual triumph of Good over Evil and began to cement her place as a champion of the good in the battle against evil—a Savior, not only of Mother Earth and “her” creatures, but also of Humankind (Actualism, 2006).

* * *

One can again always find apologists for whom allegedly abusive gurus/teachers are only “a fraction of a percentage” (i.e., less than 1%) of the whole. To the same “compassionate experts,” students attract to themselves the teachers and guru-figures they deserve:

In almost all cases, the sincere student is with a corrupt teacher because he or she has areas of blindness that are either getting fed or reflected by the teacher....

When I encounter someone who argues vehemently against the student-teacher relationship, almost inevitably they are unconsciously trying to heal something still unsettled either in their present life or in some former circumstance....

It has been suggested that false prophets are decoys to deter the masses of less determined seekers so that only those who are serious enough to pay the price for true mastery will discover it
(Caplan, 2002).

But did the “true prophet” Ramakrishna’s (or Sai Baba’s) young male disciples, faced with the alleged sexual interests of those gurus, and going along with them because they believed that their “God in the flesh” wanted them to, “bring that upon themselves”? Was David Bohm’s brutal mistreatment at the hands of the “authentic sage” Krishnamurti a necessary price to pay for his own “true mastery”? (In Bohm’s case, that cruelty was the primary component inducing his suicide-considering nervous breakdown. It ultimately led to electroshock therapy, not to any greater enlightenment at the hands of the “World Teacher.”)

The Wilber-admiring Caplan does not “name names” in her evaluations of “decoys” and her spirited defense of the hierarchical guru-disciple relationship in general—though she does consider 95% (her figure) of gurus to not be worth following. However, it is quite obvious from the content of her writings and of the interviews within them that she and her interviewees specifically regard Krishnamurti, Aurobindo, Meher Baba, Trungpa, Muktananda, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati and Andrew Cohen as being “authentic sages.”

Interestingly, Ram Dass’ experiences with Bhagavati (in her “Joya” days, with “no escape clause”) did not prevent Caplan from interviewing both of them in the same (2002) book. She further did that without giving any indication that “Ma” is anything less than (in Caplan’s own words) “an internationally respected spiritual teacher, as well as a forerunner in the global fight for human rights and religious freedom.” Bhagavati has received equally positive coverage, independent of Dass’ well-known claims regarding her past, in Cohen’s (2001) What Is Enlightenment? magazine. Conversely, in Caplan’s view, it could apparently only be other, unspecified “bad apples” who are guilty of messing up their naïve followers’ lives, not any of these “compassionate sages.”

Perspectives such as that are again sadly what passes for wisdom in today’s spiritual marketplace. One then follows such advice only at one’s own peril. After all, if these “experts” are wrong, it is your life that will be at risk of being shattered, not theirs.

Interestingly, Caplan’s largely misled (2002) book has been hyperbolically endorsed by the Trungpa-following Welwood as being “the most comprehensive, lucid, well-argued, utterly straightforward and honest work on the whole guru question that there is.” Caplan herself is a devoted disciple of Lee Lozowick, the latter of whom has a “special relationship” with Adi Da, and is a friend of Andrew Cohen (Rawlinson, 1997). Lozowick himself, however, has been critiqued by at least one former disciple, as follows:

I think he is deluding himself when he claims to be fully enlightened.... During public gatherings he would constantly use four-letter words, ramble on about sex and anal fixations, and generally behave and speak in a totally asinine way (in Feuerstein, 1992).

Of his prolific, if unknown, rock band (“Liars, Gods, and Beggars”), Lozowick has predicted: “LGB will be bigger than the Beatles” (Rawlinson, 1997).

And thus, “more popular than Jesus Christ,” too.

The wise Lozowick is further of the opinion that Sai Baba is a “master [of] the physics of form,” i.e., that the latter’s purported materializations of vibhuti and the like are genuine (Caplan, 2001). It is more than ironic, then, that both of Caplan’s relevant books are concerned in significant part with how to distinguish “authentic” guru-figures from “decoys.”

* * *
After all that, are “delusions of enlightenment” alright? Some would ridiculously say so:

Better these people should think they’re enlightened, which is a wonderful aspiration, than be robbing stores or taking heroin or beating their wives or kicking their dogs. I think that one of the most wonderful things is the delusion of enlightenment, even if it is a delusion. At least it represents an aspiration that is better than an aspiration to be a murderer (Joan Halifax, in [Caplan, 2001]).

But, are the “best” of history’s “sages” really better than our world’s bank robbers, drug addicts, wife abusers or animal mistreaters? Are they not arguably worse? For, note that more than one of them has allegedly misused (i.e., effectively stolen) temple funds, or feasted while his most devoted followers starved, thus exhibiting less moral sense than the average bank robber. (Stealing from a church or from one’s friends and admirers, after all, has got to be morally worse than stealing from a faceless corporation or a bank.)

In the same vein, more than one has been accused of physically beating or otherwise brutally oppressing his or her spouse. As the Mill Valley Record (Colin, et al., 1985) reported:

On one occasion during a raucous party at the church sanctuary in Clear Lake, eyewitnesses say they saw [Adi Da] push his wife Nina down a flight of stairs. They also claim that during that party Jones pulled a sizable hunk of hair from her head.

[Rajneesh] wasn’t the Master [Deeksha had] fallen in love with. She’d witnessed him beating Vivek once, she swore
(Franklin, 1992).

Recall also Swami Rama reportedly kicking women in the buttocks. And further:

Chögyam Trungpa wrote that Marpa, the tenth-century Tibetan guru, “lost his temper and beat people.” Marpa is also considered an incarnate Buddha, the spiritual father of Tibet’s greatest yogi Milarepa. Maybe his beatings were compassion in disguise, but it is hard to understand why the same argument could not be made for the drunk who abuses his wife and children ((Butterfield, 1994; italics added).

In terms of the aforementioned (and above-denigrated, by Halifax) use of illicit and abused prescription substances: Included among the usage attributed to various “genuine sages” have been LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, nitrous oxide, and the opium derivatives Percodan and Demerol. Also amyl nitrite, a blood vessel-dilator used to cause a “high” or to improve sex; and, it goes without saying, marijuana. Not to mention Quaaludes reportedly given as a medical treatment in Rajneeshpuram. (That only Percodan, Demerol, Quaaludes and nitrous oxide among all those are recognized as being—like the opiate heroin—physically addictive, seems somewhat beside the point.) And God only knows what the police were expecting to find when they raided Trungpa’s Scottish center. (People with nothing to conceal generally do not feel the need to desperately hide themselves, as Trungpa did, in such circumstances.)

Even metaphorically, the analysis fares no better:

Fred [Stanton]’s final comment on Andrew [Cohen] was, “Andrew creates addicts. It’s like giving people heroin” (Tarlo, 1997).

On top of that, we again have “genuine masters” allegedly building secret passageways leading to the dormitories of young girls in their care. (Caplan quotes frequently and respectfully from Muktananda in her books, thus inadvertently providing a bad, bad example from him of how not to do the guru-disciple relationship properly. Both of her relevant books were written well after the 1994 New Yorker exposé of him by Lis Harris.) Plus, we have the reported pedophilia/ephebophilia of universally revered figures such as Ramakrishna, as an early precursor to the allegations against Sai Baba. Also, holy Zen masters “beating the crap out of” their disciples, even to the point of death, and being celebrated for their macho, “ego-killing” abuse by foolish persons who themselves have obviously never been thus “beneficially” beaten. And all of that is ever done, of course, “in the name of God, for the compassionate benefit of all sentient beings,” by great bodhisattvas and otherwise. And woe unto any “disloyal” disciple who should even think otherwise, and thereby risk his “one chance at enlightenment” in this life.

I myself am again in no way anti-drug, anti-dildo, anti-secret-passageway-to-the-dormitory, anti-whorehouse, anti-orgy or anti-leprechaun. It is simply obvious, by now, that any of those, when put into the hands of “god-men” who have carved islands of absolute power for themselves in the world, only make an already dangerous situation much worse.

We can surely agree with Ms. Halifax in her three decades of experience, though, that the delusion of enlightenment generally “represents an aspiration that is better than an aspiration to be a murderer.” Unless, of course, you’re Charles Manson. For, he borrowed heavily from Eastern philosophy in creating his own pre-rational view of the world, hinted at “deity status” for himself, and believed that “since all is one, nothing is wrong.”

Manson ... called himself “a.k.a. Lord Krishna, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, the Buddha” during a 1986 parole hearing (Agence, 1999).

After all that, it should be painfully clear that the delusion of enlightenment is the most dangerous, not the most wonderful, delusion. (Again, Jim Jones and David Koresh had similar messianic regards for their own enlightenment as does the still-incarcerated Manson. In all three of those “worst” cases, the delusion of enlightenment/divinity undeniably helped create the violent tragedies for which they are each known.) That most-dangerous regard is so if for no other reason than the effect that it has on the ensuing naïve followers. For, those end up throwing their lives and sanity away on persons who, even while laying claim to the highest levels of enlightenment (whether validly or psychotically), grandiosely deceive themselves, and then mislead others, all with the apparent goal of being given the proper obeisance due to themselves as “enlightened masters.”

And as far as the treatment of animals goes, the spellbinding writer Deborah Boliver Boehm (1996) relates her experiences in a Japanese Zen monastery in Kyoto, upon being presented with two stray kittens:

“Will you keep them?” Saku-san asked.

“What if I didn’t?” I asked.

“Then they would be left to die, or to be found by someone else if they were lucky.”

“But why doesn’t the sodo adopt them?”

“Because then we would become a dumping ground for every unwanted cat in town, and they would tear up the tatami [straw meditation mats]. Besides, some monks have allergies.”

“But what about the vow you take every day, to save all sentient beings?”

“It’s a nice idea, but not very practical,” said Saku-san with a wide-shouldered shrug.

[B]eneath the smiles Tibetans obviously are not perfect. It’s not all loving-kindness here; I see a monk beat a dog, another one smokes and while Buddhist texts forbid meat, the fleshy bodies of sheep hang in roadside butcher boxes attracting swarms of flies and shoppers galore....

I know the Dalai Lama has tried to turn vegetarian but so long as he and other Tibetan Buddhists continue to eat meat, the tinge of hypocrisy will remain
(Macdonald, 2003; italics added).
* * *
Having said all of that, one can still sadly strike a much more negative note, when it comes to the effects of messianic delusions of enlightenment/divinity on both leaders and their followers:

Adolf Hitler had a mystical awakening at Pasewalk Hospital in 1918, following the defeat of Germany; it led to his decision to enter politics (Oakes, 1997).

Hitler by now was possessed by delusions of grandeur.... Convinced that he was Germany’s political messiah, his supporters unashamedly referred to Hitler as a prophet.... After reading Mein Kampf, Joseph Goebbels, later the Party’s propaganda chief, wrote “Who is this man? half plebian, half God! Truly Christ, or only St. John?” For the growing number of “disciples” gathering around Hitler at this time—referred to as the “charismatic community”—Hitler was more than just a politician offering political and economic solutions, he was a messianic leader embodying the salvation of Germany (D. Welch, 2001).

As if to further close the circle, then, we find this, in Goodrick-Clarke’s (1994) Occult Roots of Nazism:

The Ariosophists, initially active in Vienna before the First World War, borrowed from the theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in order to prophesy and vindicate a coming era of German world rule....

At least two Ariosophists were closely involved with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in the 1930s, contributing to his ... visionary plans for the Greater Germanic Reich in the third millennium....

Ravenscroft adapted the materials of Rudolf Steiner ... to the mythology of occult Nazism.


Nor was that the only relevance of Eastern metaphysics to the Nazi cause:

Savitri Devi, the French-born Nazi-Hindu prophetess, described Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu and likened Nazism to the cult of Shiva with its emphasis on destruction and new creation....

[She] was sure that Hitler had realized he was an avatar while still a youth
(Goodrick-Clarke, 2003).

Overall, truly believing that you are “enlightened and can do no wrong”—as every “messiah” and nearly every “meditation master” has role-played himself into believing—gives you unlimited license to mistreat others “for their own good.” Indeed, it actually places your conscience farther out of reach than if you were knowingly manipulating them purely for your own selfish benefit, as a simple con man (or woman).

As Professor J. H. von Dullinger insightfully observed over a century and a quarter ago:

All absolute power demoralizes its possessor. To that all history bears witness. And if it be a spiritual power which rules men’s consciences, the danger is only so much greater, for the possession of such a power exercises a specially treacherous fascination, while it is peculiarly conducive to self-deceit, because the lust of dominion, when it has become a passion, is only too easily in this case excused under the plea of zeal for the salvation of others.

For that primary reason, among many secondary others, the “guru game,” even when enacted by “genuine masters” (such as the swooning Ramakrishna, the Force-ful Aurobindo, the caste-conscious Ramana Maharshi, the non-healer Meher Baba, and the firewalking Yogananda) is more dangerous than is any secular power-play or con game.

Even when performed with integrity and sincerity? Yes. In fact, doubly so:

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

And Lord, have we seen enough of that.

* * *
Most of the “great sages” whose behavior we have touched upon within these pages have been men. Notable exceptions, however, have included Ramakrishna’s wife, Aurobindo’s “Mother,” Muktananda’s Gurumayi, and Yogananda’s Daya Mata and Tara Mata. Also, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, Ammachi, Jetsunma, and Andrew Harvey’s Mother Meera. The latter’s original hope, at age fourteen in the 1970s, had actually been to replace Aurobindo’s Mother in the Auroville ashram in Pondicherry, following that Mother’s passing (Minor, 1999):

She had ... received visions of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in which they told her that she was entrusted with the work of completing the transformation of the world they had begun. The language of Aurobindo and the Mother are regularly a part of her descriptions of these visions, but often, she said, Aurobindo and the Mother actually appeared to her and in their conversations commissioned her to continue the work.

The entirely non-mystical, twentieth-century, late Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand (d. 1982), too, apparently managed to create a personality cult around herself. Loyalty there was evidenced to the point where one of her sincere followers reportedly floated (in the late ’60s) the idea of murder as a means of dealing with an unfaithful (and otherwise married) former lover of the homely, yet eminently rational, Ms. Rand (Shermer, 1997).

The endangered ex-lover in question was the dashing Nathaniel Branden—Rand’s “intellectual heir,” to whom Atlas Shrugged was dedicated. (The book itself was the “greatest human achievement in the history of the world,” according to Rand and Branden.) Together, they encouraged followers of Rand to consider them as being “the two greatest intellects on the planet.”

Branden himself was later to host a delightful dinner, in the mid-’80s, for his good friend, Ken Wilber (1991). Branden is, further, another one of the founding members of Wilber’s Integral Institute.

From the former’s own website (http://www.nathanielbranden.net):

The name Nathaniel Branden has become synonymous with “the psychology of self-esteem,” a field he began pioneering over thirty years ago. He has done more, perhaps, than any other theorist to awaken America’s consciousness to the importance of self-esteem to human well-being.
One would expect no less, though, from one of the two “greatest intellects on the planet.”


So, it is a small, small spiritual world, after all. And even smaller when one considers what happens when other scholars “go bad”:

[Frithjof] Schuon, blessed by God and the Virgin Mary, [believes that he] radiates grace from his body—at all times but most potently when he is naked; and that this is itself a salvific act....

[His given initiations] consist of Schuon in a state of semi-nakedness at the center of a circle of semi-naked female disciples
(Rawlinson, 1997).

Even when fully clothed, Schuon was evidently no ordinary man:

He himself says that “I was from the beginning a person different from the others, I was made from different material.” An unpublished paper, The Veneration of the Shaykh [written by his Da-like fourth “wife”], says that Schuon is “an eminent manifestation of the eternal sadguru ... an ‘avataric’ phenomenon ... a ‘prophetic’ figure ... and a great bodhisattva”; that he demonstrates the qualities of Shiva and Krishna; and has affinities with Abraham, David, Christ, and Muhammad....

One disciple who questioned Schuon’s authority was branded as mad; another was called “a natural swine”; and many others (including these two) were excommunicated
(Rawlinson, 1997).

Dr. Schuon, as a recognized expert in the perennial philosophy or transcendent unity of religions, was of course referred to respectfully, in far less interesting ways, in Wilber’s early (e.g., 1982, 1983) writings.

Should the aforementioned male/female numerical discrepancy in guru-dom still irk, however, consider the revered Bengali mystic Ananda Moyi Ma, who herself claimed to be an avatar, or direct incarnation of the Divine Mother. Indeed, after meeting her in 1936, Yogananda (1946) expressed his evaluation of her degree of spiritual advancement thusly:

I had found many men of God-realization in India, but never before had I met such an exalted woman saint.

Arthur Koestler (1960), however, added the following information regarding Ananda’s character:

[F]rom the age of twenty-eight onward, for an undefined number of years, she was unable to feed herself. “Whenever she tried to carry food to Her mouth, Her grasp slackened and a large part of the food slipped through Her fingers”....

There were ... occasions when, at the sight of an Untouchable eating rice, or a dog devouring garbage, she would begin to cry plaintively, “I want to eat, I want to eat.” On yet other occasions, she had fits of ravenous overeating....

She was prone to weeping, and to laughing fits which often lasted over an hour. She liked to tease her devotees and to display a kittenish behavior, though sometimes her playfulness could more appropriately be called cruelty. When [one of her closest followers] was ill, she did not visit him for several months, and on certain occasions during his convalescence she expressly forbade that food be sent to him.


Ma herself was nevertheless credited with having profound healing abilities, as Yogananda’s (1946) niece relates:

At the entreaty of a disciple, Ananda Moyi Ma went to the home of a dying man. She stood by his bedside; as her hand touched his forehead, his death-rattle ceased. The disease vanished at once; to the man’s glad astonishment, he was well.

All such claimed abilities and exalted realization aside, however, the following incident stands out and rankles:

An old woman came forward, prostrated herself, and begged Ananda to intercede for her son, a soldier reported missing after a clash in the border area. Ananda kept chewing pan, ignoring her. The woman began to shout and sob in near-hysterics. Ananda said harshly, “Go away,” brushing her aside with a single gesture, and the old woman, still crying, was led from the room (Koestler, 1960).

If there is compassion in such behavior, only one not yet suitably shaken from the pleasant fantasy that such actions might be a manifestation of God “working in mysterious ways” could find it.

Consider further that it has been reported that the vast majority of the individuals currently sitting on the SRF Board of Directors are nuns. And those have given no indication whatsoever of any wish on their part to give up the rigidly hierarchical structure of that organization, or their choice positions in it.

To Daya Mata, we and everyone who disagrees with her are—to quote a favorite expression of hers—“pipsqueaks”....

Daya Mata actually said once to Brother Anandamoy and me, “Let’s face it, women are more spiritual than men”
(Walters, 2002).

The revered Mata herself has been prominently featured in various magazines, in celebration of her role as one of the world’s first female spiritual leaders, and thus as “part of the solution” to the world’s problems.

Of course, the women in Rajneesh’s ashrams were part of the same “solution”:

True to Rajneesh’s vision of women as “the pillars of my temple,” women dominated the leadership of the movement (except for Bhagwan “Himself”). Braun notes that women controlled over 80% of executive positions in Rajneeshpuram (Palmer and Sharma, 1993).

And Rajneeshpuram, as we know, was the Oregon ashram infamous for its salmonella, electronic bugging and alleged murder plots.

Undeterred, Ma Bhagavati has informed us:

If people don’t accept women teachers, that’s the end of everything, because the men have made a real mess of things (in Caplan, 2002).

Bhagavati, recall, was the reportedly self-professed “incarnation of the Divine Mother” whom Ram Dass, on the basis of his own experiences, totally repudiated in the mid-’70s, in his “Das and Dasser” period, and her days as the gold-bangled “Joya.”

“The end of everything,” indeed.

Mother Teresa, sadly, fares no better in the harsh light of day, as Aroup Chatterjee’s (2003) Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict has demonstrated:

[Mother Teresa] has been quoted as saying that suffering is a means of attaining Christ; to suffer along with the suffering helps one come closer to God. In other words the poor and dying are to her only a means of attaining salvation for herself. Their suffering, which is a replay of the suffering of Christ, gives her spiritual succor. Hence the tremendous funds at her disposal have never been used to set up a state of the art hospital where much of the suffering could be alleviated or pre-empted; to establish schools which would rescue generations from poverty; to renew the slums of Calcutta and eliminate disease and crime. For, she has a vested interest in the perpetuation of poverty and sickness and death.

Nor were those religious issues by any means the only problems with Teresa’s work and character:

She inflated her operations and activities manifold in her speeches to journalists and supporters. Often her statements would have no connection with reality whatsoever. Many times she had been captured on television while telling very tall tales about her work. She prevaricated even in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech....

[W]hen it comes to social issues, even the present pope is much more liberal than Mother Teresa....

Mother was confronted on the issue of pedophile priests by the Irish journalist Kathy Ward. She replied, “Pray, pray and make sacrifices for those who are going through such terrible temptations.” It is not that she was against custodial sentencing per se: a few times she said that she wanted to open a special jail for doctors who performed abortions.


Christopher Hitchens (1995) had earlier written his own less-detailed exposé of Teresa:

[S]he once told an interviewer that, if faced with a choice between Galileo and the authority of the Inquisition, she would have sided with the Church authorities....

“She also touched on AIDS, saying she did not want to label it a scourge of God but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper [e.g., homosexual or promiscuous] sexual conduct.”


And how did Ken Wilber (2000a) jump the gun, in voicing his positive attitude toward Mother Teresa upon receiving (media) news of her death, nearly half a decade after Hitchens’ exposé?

Mother Teresa was much closer to that divine ray [than was Princess Diana, who died in the same week], and practiced it more diligently, and without the glamour. She was less a person than an opening of Kosmic compassion—unrelenting, fiercely devoted, frighteningly dedicated.

I, anyway, appreciated them both very much, for quite different reasons.


Such opinions, sadly, are again exactly par for the course with Wilber, in his consistent vouching for other people’s high degrees of enlightenment. For here too he obviously, if utterly wrongly, considers himself to be in a position to intuitively and intelligently separate the reality from the PR, even without having minimally familiarized himself with the long-extant, relevant research materials.

Likewise for his friend, Dr. Roger Walsh (1999):

The few hours I spent with Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama continue to inspire me years later, while films of them have inspired people around the world. Such is the power of those who devote their lives to awakening and service.

Or, rather, “such is the power” of those with good public relations machines and the ability to bury their indiscretions and prejudices. For, they shall be taken as saints and gods, even in the midst of cruel homophobia, bizarre sexual hang-ups, association with known criminals and the receiving of stolen goods. (Mother Teresa accepted over a million dollars in donations from Savings-and-Loan fraudster Charles Keating, and wrote a naïve letter in his defense during his trial. Following his conviction and imprisonment, the deputy district attorney of Los Angeles County contacted Teresa, encouraging her to return those “stolen” funds. He received no reply from the “great saint” [Chatterjee, 2003].)

Anyway, one might even begin to sympathize with such perspectives as Bhagavati’s, above, in the face of nonsense such as Brooke’s (1999) position. For there, he repeatedly expressed the desire to “out” (his word) the “wrangling bitch” and “vain effete peacock” (his phrases) Sai Baba. He also evinced a predictably “Christian” attitude toward female gurus in general:

I had never met [Hilda Charlton] ... and had my own personal barriers and suspicions about women gurus. It just wasn’t my style.

Gender-based “suspicions,” however, cannot be reduced to mere matters of “style,” even in the case of complete flakes such as Charlton. Nor can such dismal attitudes—whether coming from male born-again Christians or in reverse from celebrated contemporary female yogis—be viewed as a valid antidote to the problems which pervade the spiritual marketplace, or even the saner world in general.

We should not, therefore, attempt to split the power/sexual/psychological issues underlying these poor reported behaviors along male/female or patriarchal/matriarchal lines, as is often done. Indeed, should one even be tempted to do so, one should instead consider Janja Lalich’s experiences in a “soul-crushing” political “cult” founded by thirteen feminist Marxist-Leninists. Eleven of those founders “self-identified as radical lesbians.” And yet, even under their “nurturing, tolerant, egalitarian” rule:

A well-respected doctor and party theoretician in his fifties said he was so tired he prayed daily for a heart attack to give him some release. A number of others said they secretly wished they would get killed in a car accident because they couldn’t think of any other way of getting out (in Langone, 1995).

You’re thinking of dabbling in something like paganism to slake your spiritual thirst, on the wishful supposition that it might be any less founded on lies, sexism, and unapologetic misrepresentations than is any other religion or form of spirituality? Please first read Charlotte Allen’s delightful (2001) article, “The Scholars and the Goddess”:

In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story [of its own origins] is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed.

Indeed, as Allen further notes, the idea—central to Wiccan belief—that any ancient civilization, anywhere, ever worshiped a single, archetypal goddess, is wholly rejected by contemporary scholars, on the basis of both written records and archeology. (Cf. Cynthia Eller’s [2003] refreshingly insightful and devastating The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.)

Likewise for the purported superiorities of past Native American societies, or the like, to “fragmented, patriarchal, European” ones:

The Mayas, whose cities were completely unfortified, were long thought to be “an unusually gentle, peaceful people living in a relatively benign theocracy.” But as the Mayan writing system began to be deciphered and as new excavations were undertaken, a different picture emerged. Archaeologists found depictions of severed heads and bound captives under public buildings. As archaeologist Arthur Demarest concludes on the basis of this new evidence, “the Maya were one of the most violent state-level societies in the New World” (Eller, 2003).

All of which only goes to reinforce the wise observation that “a saint [or a fanciful mythology, or a ‘Golden Age’ culture] is what remains after a person’s sins have been forgotten.” Or, if not duly forgotten, at least prematurely buried by close disciples, as by the sage himself/herself—all of them having no small interest in presenting the best possible public face, for their own welfare in power and glory.

* * *

We have earlier touched on the idea of spiritual incest, in terms of sexual relations usually (but not always) initiated by the guru-figure with his (or her) trusting disciples. The respected theoreticians in the higher branches of psychology and consciousness studies may still be grappling with how to explain away such life-destroying “mistakes” on the part of their “enlightened” heroes. By contrast, others with far less commitment to the field, but far more insight, had already discerned the relevant dynamics and appropriate restrictions over a decade and a half ago:

The power of the pastor over the congregant is tremendously enhanced by his authority, if he wishes to exercise it, to describe to a woman her status with God. A sexually abusive clergyman can easily exploit this authority by telling a woman that her sexual involvement is part of a divinely ordained plan. Even sophisticated women can have difficulty resisting this argument if they are devoted to the religious vision that the clergyman represents.

[So-called religious] cults in which the guru or spiritual leader has sexual relationships with many of his female congregants are more blatant examples of this phenomenon
(Rutter, 1989).

Rutter continues:

The [related] issue of sexual relationships between professors and students draws attention because of their frequency, which [high frequency] can be partially [italics added] attributed to a traditional absence of a clearly demarcated forbidden zone [where sexual activities are not allowed] on the college campus. People who argue against such prohibitions usually claim that the women involved are consenting adults and that there is no duty to protect them....

All of these arguments ignore important social and psychological realities. The social dynamic still places the power in the hands of the teacher or professor. The psychological dynamic is based on the underlying reality of continuing dependency issues, which must be taken into account in assessing the ethics of sexual relationships between female college and graduate students and their professors. Recently, some universities have begun articulating clear policies against faculty-student intimacies that do take the unequal power dynamics into consideration.


Chapter 7 of Singer and Lalich’s (1996) Crazy Therapies covers similar topics to the above:

Sex with a therapist or counselor [or guru] is not okay and is not going to benefit the client [or disciple]. If anything ... it will cause new problems and exacerbate previous ones.

Gurus, like fathers, are in a context that gives them enormous power because of their disciples’ needs, trust, and dependency. One reason incest is a betrayal of trust is what a daughter needs from her father is a sense of self-worth not specifically linked to her sexuality. Sex with the guru is similarly incestuous because a guru ostensibly functions as a spiritual father to whom one’s growth is entrusted. Having sex with a parental figure reinforces using sex for power. This is not what young women (or men) need for their development. When the guru drops them, which eventually he does, feelings of shame and betrayal usually result that leave deep scars (Kramer and Alstad, 1993).

Note that none of the above ideas are puritanical, shadow-projecting or prudish. (In the words of the One Taste-realized Drukpa Kunley, hero to the Dalai Lama: “You like religion and I like cunt. May both of us be happy!”) They are, rather, simply a minimal application of real compassion for the well-being of others, being directed in the spiritual world against individuals who make themselves out to be gods.

When people do not have a clear idea of harm—and it is very hard to talk about sex and get it right—they accuse others of being Puritans. This is going on all over Buddhism today (Lew Richmond, in [Downing, 2001]).

As if to prove Richmond’s point, the tantric initiate John Blofeld (1970) gave a fallacious defense which could have been applied to the vast majority of our world’s guru-figures:

[A]dvanced adepts are permitted to do what seems good to them, regardless of the normal [e.g., social] rules of conduct. To consider abiding by the rules as necessarily good or transgressing them as necessarily evil would be to tie themselves down with the dualism they have set out to transcend....

Sordid people judge others by their own standards, reading crude motives into every sort of action. Hypocrites will be likely to see their own vice in every unconventional act of a man sincerely seeking spiritual advancement. It is hard to convince them that others may act from lofty motives. A true adept, however, will not be put out by misguided criticism.


But, to what extent, if any, have our world’s guru-figures ever really acted from “lofty motives”? And might not any associated hypocrisy perhaps apply more to the teachers themselves than to their “puritanical” critics?

Further consider the twenty-five virgin girls who surely had their lives messed up by one deluded old man, Upasani Baba, regardless of what component of their marriage may have been only symbolic or spiritual. (For the young girls sleeping with Mahatma Gandhi, too, it was merely a “spiritual” arrangement. Yet, had his lust ever risen to the fore, the likely outcome would have been rape. How well would you sleep, with that lurking over your shoulder?)

That same Baba was again convinced that he could distinguish the “Avatar for this age” from the mass of spiritual seekers, which avatar just happened, against all odds, to be one of his own disciples. That is indeed “sordid,” but not in any way which the apologetic Blofeld would ever have imagined. If one wishes to see the effects of “traditional agrarian” society on allegedly constraining what guru-figures are allowed to get away with, one need look no further than celebrated “spiritual discipline” like that.

To state the obvious, again: Any set of “rigid constraints” which grants a greater degree of latitude in allowable behavior to its god-figures than does Western society’s own healthy permissiveness (among consenting adults, here) would, in practice, create an even more unconstrained society for those so fortunate as to be the “kings” of it. Indeed, in the same West where a “lack of social constraint” is regularly blamed for the excesses of its “crazy wisdom” practitioners:

[Few] crazy-wisdom masters today are afforded the privilege of making use of their full bag of tricks. They are well aware that a single lawsuit brought against them ... could result in their losing the opportunity to continue their teaching function (Caplan, 2002).

Since those lawsuits arise predominantly from alleged sexual abuses (cf. Swami Rama), one cannot have it both ways. That is, one is welcome to state, with Ram Dass (in Caplan, 2002), that previously “impeccable” gurus fall from their lofty ideals because of the greater freedoms and promiscuity (in alcohol, drugs and sex) in the West. One would be hopelessly wrong—cf. Dass’ own “seventeen-year-old jock,” Neem Karoli Baba—but one is free to close one’s eyes and propose that. Having stated it, however, one cannot then turn around and assert that “crazy wisdom” is practiced with more freedom in the East, where “the guru-principle is understood,” and lawsuits need not be so feared should “Da Shit hit Da Fan”!

Note further that while even educational institutions have acknowledged the existence of relevant psychological dynamics between teachers and students, from which the students need to be protected, things are much worse for guru-figures and disciples. For, a student receiving unwanted attention from a professor or graduate supervisor might, at least in theory (i.e., notwithstanding “old boys’ networks” and the like), transfer to another class/supervisor, or go over the prof’s head to the dean, etc. There are no such courts of appeal, however, for wronged disciples. Rather, there is merely the fear that in saying “No” to anything that the guru-figure asks of you, you are being disobedient and egoic, and thus retarding your own spiritual growth. Further, to break with the guru at any stage of that may, one believes, cast one into “Vajra hell,” or result in one “wandering the Earth for incarnations” before being given another chance at enlightenment, should you “waste” this one.

More obviously, no mere professor, graduate supervisor or employer could believably suggest that sleeping with him (or her) is part of a “divinely ordained plan.” Guru-figures, on the other hand, can and do routinely advance exactly that idea. Thus, whatever constraints may be placed on secular classes should apply even more to guru-figures. For, in between the “voice of God” speaking through them, the constraints to obey, and the lack of any court of appeal, the power imbalance is far greater in the spiritual world than in the academic.

Sex between the father-figure guru and his (or her) disciples is again widely recognized as being of a comparable psychological status to incest or child abuse. One need not be stuck in any “puritanical” worldview, then, in order to feel the need to object to such activities, whether they are occurring in spiritual or in secular contexts. Nor can proponents of “idiot tolerance” for the same (alleged, spiritual) abuse safely hide behind the idea that such objections arise merely from followers wanting their sages to be “dead from the neck down.”

Encouragingly, the California Yoga Teachers Association Code of Conduct (Lasater, 1995) admirably spelled out the minimal relevant constraints on the behavior of its members a decade ago, even though concerning itself only with imperfect teachers and their students, not “divine, infallible” gurus and their disciples. There, they recognized that “all forms of sexual behavior or harassment with students are unethical, even when a student invites or consents to such behavior or involvement.” They further instructed:

We do not make public ... statement[s] implying unusual, unique or one-of-a-kind abilities, including misrepresentation through sensationalism, exaggeration or superficiality.

One wishes that the frequently “one-of-a-kind” and “best,” “enlightened avatars” in the world could see things as clearly—i.e., with such elementary, common-sense psychology and integrity—as its “unenlightened, mere mortal” teachers have. There would be far less garbage (“and the goddess”) littering the long and winding spiritual road.

* * *

Leaving a [so-called] cult is like experiencing a death of a loved one. There is a grieving process which will take time. Time to process the feelings of confusion, loss, guilt, disillusionment, anger, and lack of trust engendered (Bailey and Bailey, 2003).

For first-hand accounts as to the difficulties involved in disentangling oneself from spiritual and emotional commitments to enlightenment at the feet of any “great sage,” plus personal descriptions of the power games and manipulation which are alleged to occur within the ashram environment, I have found the following books to be excellent:

Michael Downing (2001), Shoes Outside the Door—San Francisco Zen Center, Richard Baker (this book is worth reading for the keen wit alone)

Stephen Butterfield (1994), The Double Mirror—Chögyam Trungpa

Peter Marin (1995), “Spiritual Obedience,” in Freedom & Its Discontents—Chögyam Trungpa

Satya Bharti Franklin (1992), The Promise of Paradise—Rajneesh

Hugh Milne (1986), Bhagwan: The God That Failed—Rajneesh

Kate Strelley (1987), The Ultimate Game—Rajneesh

Andre van der Braak (2003), Enlightenment Blues—Andrew Cohen

Luna Tarlo (1997), The Mother of God—Andrew Cohen

Martha Sherrill (2000), The Buddha from Brooklyn—Jetsunma

Barbara and Betty Underwood (1979), Hostage to Heaven—the Moonies

Deborah Layton (1998), Seductive Poison—Jim Jones

John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson (1990), Monkey on a Stick—the Hare Krishnas, exposed as the reportedly murderous, drug-running, wife-beating, child-molesting apocalyptic “cult” we were always reflexively warned to avoid. Yet, we chose instead to liberally tolerate and defend them as an “alternative religion,” which should not be discriminated against simply for being “different.”


“Live and let live,” right?

Compare:

When I first started to speak out about [alleged] cults approximately ten years ago [i.e., around 1982], I was one of an extremely small group of lawyers who were willing to address [so-called] cultic groups’ broad range of challenges to individual freedom and personal liberty. The podium had in fact been largely forfeited to a strident, well-organized clique of “civil libertarian” experts who discoursed at length upon the inviolability of the First Amendment and the rights, vulnerabilities, and vitality of so-called new religious movements (Herbert Rosedale, in [Langone, 1995])

Amy Wallace (2003), Sorcerer’s Apprentice—Carlos Castaneda, another “world’s savior,” who was every bit the tragically equal fool in cruelly disciplining his followers as any of the other “Rude Boys” we have seen herein have been. The details Wallace gives of an insane community founded on a “skillful means” of reported lies and unspoken, rigid rules are nearly enough to cause one to lose one’s faith in our sad species. Nor did Castaneda’s own famous writings featuring the purported Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan fare any better in the light of truth:

As sociologist Marcello Truzzi was the first to say, Castaneda’s books were the greatest hoax since the Piltdown Man (Gardner, 1999)

Anyone who has ever lived in an ashram/monastery environment, and recovered enough from that to see how much less “evil” the real world is, will find numerous significant points of contact in all of the above first-hand accounts—including Underwood’s days with the Moonies, and Layton’s gripping story of her narrow escape from Jonestown. For, as we have seen, the techniques used to keep residents in line and loyally “living in fear” of what will happen to their bodies or souls should they leave are constant across all paths. That is so, regardless of the specific beliefs involved in each case.

The total insanity underlying the use of “skillful means” of teaching, and the easy descent of followers into a chilling mob mentality, further come across frighteningly in Sherrill’s book. Selected chapters from that text are available online, at Sherrill (2000a). The “Great Blessing” chapter there is an especially enlightening/sickening documentation of the madness too often allegedly perpetrated in the name of “purifying compassion.” (For the difference between reality and hagiography, compare that exposé against the chapter on Jetsunma in Mackenzie’s [1995] Reborn in the West. And then apply the same demythologizing proportionately to each of the other tulkus covered by Mackenzie.) That “purifying compassion” came, again, from a tulku whose spiritual greatness was formally recognized in the mid-’80s by Wilber’s own Penor Rinpoche.

Also coming across clearly there are the jaw-dropping rationalizations created by disciples, in absurdly viewing such alleged violent abuses as being for their own benefit. That occurred within the context of ridiculously skewed ideas about merit and karma—including tulkus reincarnating as houses, wooden bridges, and equally wooden actors. Also, one cannot help but note the laughably superstitious interpretations of natural phenomena, and an equally hideous, Catholic-like insistence on the confession of any broken vows to one’s superiors. For, the consequence of not confessing is that such breaks remain allegedly forever unmendable. That is, they supposedly create obstacles and produce more suffering “for countless sentient beings” by one’s having failed to come forth quickly and voluntarily to admit them.

In any case, a primary idea to glean from all of the above-listed book-length testimonials is that, if you’ve once decided to leave a spiritual community, follow through on it, and don’t ever go back, even if the community begs you to stay or to return. (Corollary: leaving in the middle of the night, without saying “goodbye,” gives them less chance to talk you out of that.) Things won’t get better by staying longer, and the nonsense which caused you to decide to leave in the first place will only get worse. None of those problems, further, are ever simply “tests sent by your guru” to see how loyal you are, regardless of what the guru himself or his committed disciples may try to tell you.

Leaving such a community after any meaningful length of stay of course means being ostracized by the remaining members, and being regarded as having left for not being able to take the discipline in that relationship. Or, being the subject of far worse allegations and/or reported violence. That, however, is a small price to pay for one’s freedom and (literally) one’s sanity.

Indeed, as to the treatment which one may expect upon leaving the average “divine guru”: Andrew Harvey (2000) and his partner broke with and publicly repudiated Mother Meera shortly after having declared her to be “the avatar who would save the world” (Blacker, 1996). They then claim to have encountered the following set of horrors:

A vicious, callous, and sophisticated system was set up by a group of ex-“close friends,” that included anonymous letters, death threats for nearly a year, horrible telephone harassment, visits to New York publishers to discredit Eryk’s and my work, attempts to have me thrown out of my job in San Francisco, relentless public and private calumny—the complete cocktail, in fact, of [so-called] cult violence, demonization, and attempted destruction....

I know of many cases of terrible abuse where ex-disciples of this or that “master” are too terrified to speak out.

Former members of Rajneesh’s (Milne [1986]; Franklin [1992]) and Muktananda’s (Harris, 1994) ashrams, to name but two more, have claimed to fear for their safety in comparable situations.

Interestingly, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati (Joya) apparently regards Andrew Harvey’s claims of harassment and homophobia against mother Meera as being “baloney.” She also, however, has reportedly recently defended Trungpa and Rajneesh, and spoken highly of Muktananda (Bostock, 1998). Simultaneously, she has evidently “forgiven” Ram Dass—the “fighting puppy” at her regal, parading “elephant feet”—for speaking out against her in the ’70s. Again, the http://www.kashiashram.com website offers a valuable corrective to her public face and to any claims that she is doing “selfless, compassionate” work.

Comparably disturbing details as to the alleged treatment of ex-members by Adi Da’s community are available online at Jewel (1999). A good summary of his reported behaviors in general can be found online at ThisTruth (2001).

See also the preface to Wakefield (1991) for her claimed frightening experiences, including alleged death threats, after having left Scientology. Plus, Chapter 9 of Wakefield (1996), and the epilogue of Malko (1970), for comparable allegations.

And yet, even after all that, the Muktananda-quoting Caplan, as recently as 2001, could still write:

There is the occasional Jim Jones, Charles Manson, or Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate) who comes into the spiritual scene and presents a physical danger to the very lives of the students whom they claim to be saving. But these instances are negligible in comparison to the majority of spiritual schools and teachers, who present no danger of physical harm to their students.

The hard data, however, available for over twenty years by now, argues exactly the opposite. For, as Conway and Siegelman reported in 1982, based on a survey of over four hundred former “cult” members from forty-eight different groups:

Incidences of physical punishment, reported by approximately one in five respondents, included beatings, starvation, physical bondage, cold showers and dousings and long hours of humiliating and degrading labor.

Nor were those the only alleged negative effects to be disclosed by Conway and Siegelman’s study. Rather, nearly 20% of their respondents battled long-term health problems, while two in every three faced lasting emotional difficulties. Further, 14% claimed to have suffered from psychiatric delusions (e.g., hallucinations) for up to eight years after breaking away from their respective organizations. Also, more than one out of every five former members in the survey had suicidal or other self-destructive feelings during the rehabilitation period after leaving—a time which averaged more than sixteen months.

Interestingly, beyond the first three to six months, the impact of “cult ritual” and indoctrination did not correlate with the difficulties faced by the member after leaving the group. That is, “most of the damage appears to be done in the first few months” of (esp. residential) membership.

* * *
The “fury of a savior scorned” is generally not limited to former members of his world-saving group, but extends even to those third parties who dare to speak in too much unpleasant detail about our world’s spiritual organizations. The aforementioned late “cult psychology” expert Margaret Singer (2003) apparently found that out for herself the hard way:

Since the first edition of [Cults in Our Midst] came out, various [so-called] cults have sent people to ring the doorbell of my home at all hours of the night, often leaving menacing notes in my mailbox, then scampering away in the dark like mischievous kids on a Halloween night....

In addition to this childish level of harassment, a lawsuit was brought against me and the book ... which I am sure was designed only to intimidate and to attempt to silence me and my work. The litigation was also, I believe, an attempt to dissuade my academic and clinical colleagues from publishing similar research and analysis of [alleged] cults in the United States and from testifying against [so-called] cults, as I do, in the many current criminal and civil court cases under way between [alleged] cults and their former victims.


Steven Hassan (2000) reported his own comparable experiences:

When Combatting Cult Mind Control was first published in 1988, I became one of the most visible targets of [so-called] cult disinformation campaigns. There are [alleged] cult leaders who lecture their members on the evils of speaking with me and even reading the book. Scientology has a “Dead Agent Pack” about me. This folder contains material designed to assassinate my character—to “neutralize” me in members’ minds as a respected person. Countless times, I’ve been threatened with lawsuits and have even received death threats from [alleged] cult members. Several groups, such as the Moonies, tell their members that I am Satan’s agent.

For the past twenty years, [David] Lane’s books and articles exposing the [alleged] plagiarisms, lies, inconsistencies and scandals of a number of new religious movements have raised a fury among true believers. Members of various [alleged] cults have [reportedly] made death threats, written him letters with skeletons on them, broken into his apartment, threatened lawsuits, and generally harassed him...

.
“They sent letters about me claiming I was the negative force, that I was predicted from the beginning of mankind” [says Lane] (Bellamy, 1995).

It was easy for Theosophists to conclude that anyone who disagreed with them, however well intentioned, was working in the service of the Dark Forces(Washington, 1995).

As has been noted previously, it would be inconsistent for SRF to not view the present author as being, like the above “Dark Forces,” quite literally a deluded tool of Maya—the satanic cosmic delusive force, or devil.

Singer herself unfortunately downplayed the real and legitimate search for Truth in her list of reasons why people join and remain in spiritual communities. Instead, she focused on those joiners simply being vulnerable to proselytizing in “looking for meaning” after a personal loss, depression, loneliness or insecurity, etc. For my own part, however, I have lived that “seeker myth,” with no proselytizing whatsoever on the part of any of Yogananda’s followers. I therefore cannot take Singer’s broad debunking of that principle seriously. Nor does one encounter anything in the first-person accounts of Butterfield, van der Braak, Milne, Franklin or Strelley which would match Singer’s assertion of “active, sophisticated and unrelenting proselytizing” on the part of the relevant organizations (re: Trungpa, Cohen and Rajneesh). The Gurdjieff Society and his eponymous Institute likewise “never advertise and never recruit” (Washington, 1995).

The same is true even of Adi Da’s group, at least with regard to non-celebrities: “[S]o far as I know, the community has never gone in for active recruiting, preferring to let people be drawn by Da Free John’s writings” (Lowe, 1996). Layton’s experiences in being pulled into the People’s Temple, however, did include flattering attention/pressure from Jones himself. Underwood’s (1979) and Hassan’s (1990) reported experiences in becoming involved with the Moonies likewise fit much more closely with Singer’s assertions.

In any case, for those nontraditional organizations which do actively recruit, university campuses remain the primary area of focus:

University students are often vulnerable recruitment targets for potentially harmful groups (Smith, 2004).

College campuses are the chief recruiting centers of most [alleged] destructive cults, and virtually every college campus in the country has been and continues to be visited by these organizations....

At the University of California—Berkeley, for example, it is estimated that at least two hundred different religious sects on and off-campus are recruiting from the 30,000-student campus
(in Rudin, 1996).

In a survey done in 1980 by Zimbardo of more than one thousand high school students in the San Francisco Bay area 54% reported a [so-called] cult had attempted to recruit them and 40% said they had experienced multiple attempts (Ross, 2002b).

Indeed, in one survey (Singer, 2003) it was found that 43% of former “cult” members were students (in high school or college) at the time when they became involved with their respective organizations. Further, of those students, 38% dropped out of school after joining their groups.

Some ... observers echo Richard Delgado’s call for an intensive public education campaign about the [so-called] cults.... Dr. Lester Rosenthal ... believes ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders should be required to take courses in school on how the [so-called] cults recruit and operate (Rudin and Rudin, 1980).

Beyond the sorely needed education of young people in particular, the following reasonable suggestions have also been made:

Federal funds should be appropriated for research and treatment of [so-called] mind control victims (Hassan, 1990).

[T]he government might launch a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of [so-called] cults, just as it has done for smoking, seat belts, and drunk driving (Hassan, 2000).

Professor Richard Delgado asserts that the legal status of [alleged] religious cults should be analyzed within the context of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution—which forbids slavery—rather than within the First Amendment alone. He believes the conditions of some [so-called] cult members do in fact constitute a state of slavery (Rudin and Rudin, 1980).

U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment provides only unqualified freedom of religious belief, not unlimited freedom to practice those beliefs in ways that may violate existing laws or pose a threat to the health and safety of individuals or society (Conway and Siegelman, 1982).

The means of getting into the organization may differ between non-proselytizing “true sanghas” and recruiting-based nontraditional organizations. Still, once one is inside, working long hours for minimal wages, in a “state of slavery” to a master whose orders you cannot disobey, leaving is just as difficult. That is true whether departing from the oppressive environment means “falling into Satan’s power,” being “pursued by disasters,” or simply risking showing oneself to be a “bad disciple”—a weakling who “can’t take the heat.”

* * *
In my own case, after leaving Hidden Valley, I happened to get in touch with the monk (from a different order) who had taken over the position and workspace which I had vacated there. I then attempted to inform him as to the problems with that organization, as reported in Russell (1999), for example.

His response?

“If anything were going really wrong, Yogananda would step in and intervene. Until then, the Master was probably just looking down and laughing at the foibles of his disciples. In the meantime, we should just focus on changing ourselves, and not worry about things like that.” Or words to that effect.

Oy vey. With “wisdom” like that, one does not need ignorance. With “compassion” like that, one does not need callousness. For, at what point in the slow descent into insanity of any of our world’s guru-figures and organizations did God or the relevant line of “ascended, omniscient” Masters ever “step in” to stop alleged pedophilia, spiritual incest, intense psychological and physical abuse, or worse? When, even, did Jesus ever step in to stop the sodomizing of altar boys in the Catholic Church? And other guru-figures will then have more interest in, or ability to stop, abuses done in their name? And if they do not step in, “everything is going as it should, for your own benefit,” so “bend over, here it comes”?

That I was apparently poisoned and/or deliberately overdrugged [in Rajneesh’s ashram] was the furthest thing from my mind....

I took everything that happened at face value. The only ulterior motives I looked for were spiritual.... Everything was happening the way it should. It always did
(Franklin, 1992).

[T]o be a disciple [of Rajneesh] you had to believe that everything that happened was literally or mystically the guru’s doing. If something appeared to be wrong or unjust or foolish, that was your myopia; it was otherwise in the guru’s encompassing vision (Fitzgerald, 1986).

That attitude, of course, was nothing peculiar or pathological to Rajneesh, but is rather the essence of the guru-disciple relationship, in agrarian India and Tibet as in the postmodern West.

You think that your “divinely loving, omniscient” guru-figure is watching over you, and everything is always working out as it should, for your own greatest good? Tell that to Lisa McPherson.

Oh, you can’t: She’s dead.

* * *

We cannot take refuge in the idea that any of the individuals discussed herein are simply “false teachers,” and that genuinely enlightened individuals would not behave so poorly. Nor is the problem simply with “naïve Westerners” following guru-figures who would not be taken seriously in the “spiritual East,” as is sometimes wrongly suggested. For, if there is such a thing as a “genuine guru,” who would ever have doubted that Vivekananda, Trungpa, Muktananda or Yogananda would qualify as such? These are not the worst of gurus, they are rather among the widely recognized best!

Ramakrishna, likewise, was ostensibly one of

the few indubitable Indian saints and sages amidst the veritable plague of so-called swamis, gurus, “enlightened masters,” maharishis, “bhagvans” [sic] and the like of recent times (Oldmeadow, 2004).

After all that we have seen, then, it is easy to sympathize with the perspective of the insightful and democratic 1984 author, George Orwell (1980):

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

The bottom line with each of these figures is thus not whether one or another of their visions may have been real or imagined. Nor is it whether their actual degree of enlightenment is even one-tenth of what they and their loyal disciples claim it to be. (It is not.) Nor can our concerns be allayed by the suggestion that any reticence in approaching one or another of these figures is based merely in “fear of ego-annihilation” or in a “misunderstanding of the nature of obedience” to the guru. Nor is the problem with “projection/transference onto the perfect father/mother figure,” or “intolerance for human imperfections” in evaluating the teacher’s character and behavior. (Again, none of those issues were present in Zimbardo’s prison study. Yet, he still could not avoid creating a toxic environment which exactly parallels ashramic society.)

Nor need we even worry about which of these organizations should be designated as a (prepersonal or transpersonal) “cult,” or whether the alarming/alarmist term “brainwashing” should be used to describe any of their means of control. (Anyone who wishes to intelligently compare the tactics reportedly utilized by our world’s ostensibly “safe” guru-figures and spiritual communities, against those in recognized “problematic” environments, however, will find many significant points of correspondence. For that, Denise Winn’s [2000] The Manipulated Mind and Len Oakes’ [1997] Prophetic Charisma are excellent.)

Rather, the root question to ask with regard to even these “best” figures is simply:

Would you trust your mental and physical health to any of them?

* * *
“Your spiritual teacher’s an Enlightened Master? Join the club, buddy.”

Maharshi. Trungpa. Muktananda. Swami Rama. Gurumayi. Chinmoy. Jetsunma. Andrew Cohen. Werner Erhard.

“Your spiritual teacher’s an avatar? Impressive.”

Vivekananda. Sivananda. Aurobindo. The Dalai Lama. Babaji. Lahiri Mahasaya. Sri Yukteswar. Yogananda. Ramakrishna’s wife. Aurobindo’s Mother. Ananda Moyi Ma. Mother Meera. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. L. Ron Hubbard.

“Your spiritual teacher’s the Avatar (Messiah, Teacher, etc.)? Hey, so’s mine!”

Ramakrishna. Jiddu Krishnamurti. Meher Baba. Yogi Bhajan. Satya Sai Baba. Da Avatar. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Carlos Castaneda. Sun Myung Moon. David Koresh. Jim Jones. Charles Manson.

Jesus Christ.

“Guru, schmuru.”


.
Last edited by American Dream on Thu Sep 08, 2011 9:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 08, 2011 12:53 am

http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.1a.htm

RANDY SOGYAL, BEST-SELLING LECHER -- THE WRITINGS OF AMLEARNING

January 3, 2004
Dear Ambu and others,
Hello
.

I was the person who helped file the lawsuit against Sogyal in 1993/4. Mary Finnigan interviewed me for the BBC in which I spoke up about Sogyal's sexual exploitation of me.

I never really got to fully speak my mind about how rotten a person I thought Sogyal was at the time I got to know him, how grossly narcissistic, deceitful, slothful, sadistic, immoral and basically stupid I think he really was. I'd like to say that now.

A number of women contacted me around the time of the lawsuit by phone and letter, who had also been abused by Sogyal but who were afraid or ashamed to speak out openly, including a woman who had been a head of his organisation, saying how staggeringly corrupt his sick relationship with his devotees truly is, with them basically creating some kind of pimping service for him, called Lama Care. He was conning people and really hurting them! Not just some little dalliances but really USING and ABUSING women, some violently, especially those who had just lost a loved one, for example whose father had just died. He used people who were bereft and grieving for his sexual gratification! How SICK is that!!!

And he did NOT write his book on death and dying, Andrew Harvey did. I learned that Sogyal couldn't even answer the questions about his book on radio interviews and Andrew had to script them for him.

When I was 21, I went to India for about half a year, returned to America for 6 months in 1976, and then went back to India that year and stayed there for a decade, studying Buddhism with various lamas for 6 of those years.

It was during my 6 months back in America that I had the misfortune to meet Sogyal. After sexually assaulting me, which I convinced myself was, as other lamas had told me, some kind of "blessing", he conned me into using my mother's telephone credit card, which I said he could use in case of an emergency because he plead poverty, and he raked up a huge bill, basically stealing. He asked me to stay at Marilee and Joel Shefflin's house in Berkeley. I assumed I would be in a separate bedroom but he insisted I stay in his bedroom, telling me later that he had a girlfriend in London.

When I went for 3 days to visit my father, who was dying of cancer, I came back to the Shefflins hearing that Sogyal had slept with 2 other women. Between feeling disgusted by my having been duped by this bastard con artist, I was also sickened by his focus on getting weight loss drugs, speed for himself and Shenphen Dawa.

He told me that he wanted the sex, like a rock star, that Trungpa had out in Boulder, with girls lining up outside the hallway. When he saw Trungpa's set up, he was determined to be just like that and he told me that, called me from Boulder to New York City, bragging about the girls he was going to get.

In Berkeley at the gathering for Dudjom Rinpoche's teaching there in the summer 1976, the big joke at the dining room table was that in Tibet monks wore robes on the outside, were compassionate inside, but secretly practiced tantra. In the West, the lamas said, people were sexually wild on the outside, compassionate inside, but secretly wanted to be monks and nuns. However witty that seemed at the time, I felt it was a denigration of any Westerner wanting to practice morality or discipline of any kind.

In 1984, an old dharma friend of mine had committed suicide in a meditation retreat, making herself into a living butter lamp. This was shortly after it was exposed that the Geshe at the Tibetan Library, our refuge guru, had been having sexual relations with a south American woman he had ordained as a nun.

By then I had heard, seen and experienced so many sexual abuses of Western women by Tibetan lamas, my heart was basically broken and my faith was shattered.

And it was NOT to be discussed openly. It was 'shameful' and to be kept secret, hushed up, and this was the cover-up that kept it all going for decades.

Just as one example of how this exploitation didn't just damage a person's faith but had long-lasting repercussions, one very dear friend, who I had just advised to remove her intrauterine contraceptive device, because they caused infertility, went to visit Khamtrul Rinpoche in Tashijong. En route, she stopped to visit one of the renowned Tibetan ngakpas there, whose wife she also knew. The Ngakpa requested my friend for yab yum with him and promised he would retain his tigle. When my friend got pregnant, he made her promise not to tell his wife or anybody in his circle.

Unlike the ngakpa, my friend kept HER promise to keep the breach of trust secret, and she went back to her family in Australia where she was reviled for having a bastard half-breed, whose father she wouldn't publicly reveal. The son grew up with this shame on his head in the merciless Tibetan gossip-community in India, and he's now a heroin addict after a childhood spent growing up in a monastery.

Another old dharma friend was the Danish wife of Lama Topgyal, who had not only no compunctions about cheating on his wife with every woman who could be conned into his bed under the delusion that he was giving "jinlab" (blessing), but he convinced his Danish wife that it was part of her damstig (sacred spiritual bond with him as her teacher) to work as a prostitute in Old Delhi, to make enough money to buy him arak, hard alcohol. When I last saw her in 1984, she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, destitute, sick and emotionally crushed.

I was asked by Lama Topgyal to help be the midwife to his Danish wife's first child, even though I had no knowledge about this. I was staying with them for a few weeks before she gave birth to their son, and for a few days when their son was several months old. Not only did lama Togyal hit and yell at his infant child, he bullied his wife into letting the cold, wet child scream itself to sleep, because to nurture the baby was, according to lama Topgyal, to spoil him.

When I met his wife years later, after she had worked as a prostitute, she said she had to send their child away as early as possible because lama Topgyal beat the child so badly and wouldn't buy food but only wanted liquor for himself.

For about half a year in 1980, I went to live in Rajpur, across the street from Sakya Trinzin. I asked him for teachings on my meditation practice and he convinced me he had a vision of him and me yab yum and that it was important for him to act on it with me. Not only was it the most pathetic sex act of my entire life, it was such a total farce. It was about as enlightening as a mosquito bite, less even, if that's possible. And when it seemed impossible that he could get beyond his Ganesh sized belly to have sex, I offered him oral gratification. He was worried that would get me pregnant.

From that time on, Sakya Trinzin had no interest in teaching me anything, and any conversation I tried to have with him was focused on his adolescent-style lasciviousness, jokes, and obsessing about doing it next, and how wherever I went in the world I had to let him know where I was so he could have sexual access to me.

He also knew that his main Western student was cheating with a married woman and did nothing to stop this breach of ethics, which went on openly for many years.

I wrote the Dalai Lama directly, gave my name and address, said in no uncertain terms did I think that Tibetan lamas were abusing Western women sexually and doing them harm by tricking them into thinking it was part of some tantric or spiritual practice when it wasn't at all.

By then I'd told a number of lamas about Sogyal's exploiting women, and they thought it was just a joke. They ALL knew that Sogyal used his disciples for sex and did nothing. They all knew what lamas were exploiting what women and laughed about it.

Thinley Norbu was infamous for mocking any sense of female virtue, and I sat in a room where he bullied a Tibetan nun into saying the Tibetan words for penis and vulva because, according to him, it would cure her of her attachment to any virtue.

In 1999, when I first learned how to log onto the Internet, my computer was too old to be able to access the forum in which Mary Finnigan was talking about the sexual abuses of Western women by Tibetan lamas. So she posted my posts for me, and Evelyn Ruut, with whom I spoke over the phone a number of times, supported me in my speaking out about these abuses.

The responses I received were a number of emailed death threats, to which I responded that I would contact the FBI if they continued. That is also a warning to anybody else who reads this and thinks they can either harass me or send a death threat. I will take legal action. I am not afraid of any lawsuit, because what I am saying here is the truth.

On the Buddhist discussion board I was ridiculed and slammed for telling the truth, and it hurt not to be able to respond to all the mudslinging, but I realised that with many of the viciously misogynistic fanatics there it would have been exhausting, and it was painful enough to talk about how my deepest faith, most profound trust, had been so callously defiled by the very Tibetan lamas I had been told by other lamas were reincarnate, very holy, living Buddhas, teachers of the truth and compassion.

I didn't feel psychologically strong enough before to talk about this subject openly. I do now and I'm angry at the cowardice of the other people who have been abused and not come forward. I know there are THOUSANDS out there. I've personally met dozens and heard about many more.

When the Karmapa was in Delhi, dying of cancer, he had a married translator, Achi, who had a conveyor belt of sex partners and all the other lamas knew it and did nothing. Women would arrive in a state of abject reverence and were simply easy pickings for this translator, who was notorious for having had an affair with Thartang Tulku's wife.

The depth of sordidness in the Tibetan lama scene was pretty revolting.

Once, when I went to meet Dodrubchen Rinpoche, and held up my mala to show him that he and I had similar beads, he took my hand, with the mala in it, and rubbed it in his crotch to masturbate. I mean YUCK!!!!

It hurts very deeply to be spiritually defiled, to have one's truth path trashed by a so-called teacher of the truth. To have been used, manipulated, scorned. The very word for female in Tibetan is "inferior birth" - kyi-min.

I don't even know where to go with my first-hand experience of how the Tibetan people think Westerners are just to be milked as sponsors. Even Tibetans who are rich want "jindaks" for their kids, as a status symbol.

Having spoken at length with June Campbell, I was disappointed that she no longer thinks of herself as a Buddhist, but I can fully understand why. I do still deeply appreciate many aspects of the Buddhist path, and want to tell my experience about how Tibetan lamas are using some grotesque and cultic version to exploit and parasite off of gullible Westerners. And worse, this exploitation is really hurting a lot of people!

Go to Next Page



http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.5.htm

RANDY SOGYAL, BEST-SELLING LECHER -- THE WRITINGS OF AMLEARNING

January 9, 2004, No. 2

Dear Tara,


I just wanted to thank you for your concise and, in my opinion, brilliant summation:

"As I get older, I appreciate more and more how what happens to us as children affects our whole lives. Just like girls who don't have daddies look for daddy for ever after to worship, boys who don't have mommies look for mommy ever after to torture. Everyone acts according to their power, women submissively, and men aggressively."

This has been practically true in my assessment of myself and others in abusive relationships.

When enough serious damage is done to a child during the formative first 6 years, that child may develop a rigid, all-pervasive personality disorder. These disorders, which are briefly (and rather badly in my opinion) described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM IV for short) (an insurance, legal and medical reference guide to diagnosing mental and emotional illness) can range from the relatively benign, like Dependent Personality Disorder to the truly evil, like Anti-Social Personality Disorder, often called Psychopathic Personality Disorder.

These disorders afflict either gender. More often than not, pathological Narcissism (NPD) is diagnosed in men. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is usually diagnosed in women.

I'd say for example that I think Thinley Norbu, Sogyal and Trungpa could be diagnosed as NPD and Jetsunma as BPD.

The heavier duty personality disorders, the dangerous ones, are called Axis II (personality disorders), Cluster B (pathology). They are: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic personality disorders.

These all become worse with the co-morbidity of alcohol consumption, which is fashionable among the lamas who put themselves on the ngakpa or 'crazy-wisdom' pedestal, and encourage their male disciples to keep them company in this addiction.

It has been estimated that 18% of the population has Axis II disorders:
http://www.healthrising.com/stories/biaxis.html

The people who were not loved well enough by parents who were healthily emotionally available (most of society), but had just enough love to be able to have an integrated but weak true self, are often codependent, which means emotionally shut down, enable abusers, and fit a typical family ecological niche of:

Hero (compulsive caretaker),
Scapegoat (Rebel-Addict),
Lost Child (Invisible Space Cadet), and
Mascot (Performer-Keep 'Em Laughing)

have all tendencies to attach themselves to emotionally abusive people, either male or female, or both, in either love, friendship, career or spiritual relationships.

In the case of spiritual seekers, who attach themselves to a Narcissist guru/lama as their devotee, I'd call that Narcissist-Codependent, or NCo, for short.

Narcissist Codependents, I'd speculate, are the children of narcissistic parents, adult children of alcoholics, or parents who were abusive in one way or another, either engulfingly controlling, or using their child to get their own wounded needs met. Often the adult children were their mother's confidante, caretaker, a surrogate spouse emotionally, and their mother's 'friend', instead of having a genuinely parental mother. Or else they are commonly the blamed, devalued child. Their father might be a beeraholic, workaholic, rageaholic, or just not there. Or an Army whip-cracker. Or an incest perpetrator. Emotional and physical abuse can take many different forms.

Alice Miller's excellent (although written in somewhat antiquated English) book called, "The Drama Of The Gifted Child," can be really helpful in seeing these issues more clearly.

There are a lot of typical dysfunctional family scenarios that leave deep scars on the children who grow up in these environments. Adult children of dysfunctional families are more likely to become cult devotees, with girls who don't have daddies looking a for daddy for ever after to worship and boys who don't have mommies looking for mommy ever after to torture. As you said so poignantly, "Everyone acting according to their power, women submissively, and men aggressively."

Although I have to say that in Tibetan Buddhist cult environments, I've seen the passivity in male devotees as well as in women; the devotees often expressing their unresolved issues in passive aggression.



Go to Next Page
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to Data & Research Compilations

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests