Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 08, 2011 10:59 am

http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.4.htm

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

January 9, 2004, No. 1

Hello dear Tara,


Yes, your kind and brave efforts to express your anger here got me here.

I want to say that I think you made the right decision to come forward with the secrets of those who wrote to you privately, which has been and is protecting the abuses, many of them criminal, being perpetrated by various Tibetan lamas. In life there are situations in which discretion and honoring privacy is the right, moral, and honorable thing to do, and also circumstances where keeping the secrets is enabling the abuse to go on.

Legally, enabling a crime, such as hiding it or keeping it secret from others who could otherwise prevent themselves from being victimised, is called aiding and abetting. It has been over two decades since I removed myself from the Tibetan scene in India. In that time, I tried to expose the truth of what was going on, but all the victims I spoke to were afraid to come forward. And all those who saw the victims being abused and exploited did nothing, said nothing directly to the abusers. When I helped Jane Doe file her suit against Sogyal, it took me two years of my life to help her organise and support her case. I got $300 for all that help, not enough to remotely pay for all the telephone calls I made, speaking to Sogyals' victims.

At the same time, I understand they were shamed into not telling, or feared Vajra Hell ... ooooh. They were and are cultically paralysed into silence. Maybe this conversation can inspire others to not be afraid of telling the truth openly. I'm alright after all this time! You will be alright too!

Last night I ruminated about what had happened to me, the old memories and the news about the Tibetan Buddhist scene with Gyaltrul and Sangye.

The overriding thought was about how many sad sides to this ugly, messy betrayal there are.

There is an excellent book I'd like to recommend to anybody who has or is feeling betrayed by their involvement with Tibetan Buddhism. It's by Patrick Carnes called, "The Betrayal Bond - Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships."

When the lamas' lack of integrity started creeping into my consciousness, I made so many excuses for it. Like my old friend, Chloe, who said that lamas' and disciples' immoral and corrupt behavior was HIGHER morality. Yeah, right, the lamas' grandiosity, their feeling entitled to be above the law, and sexually abuse their students at will, their racist and sexist comments, including their contempt for Indian people and Indian culture, in spite of the Indians offering the Tibetans generous refuge, that was such excellent morality. There were routine little experiences of Tibetan ill-will via the lamas that I tolerated for so many years, excusing it, glossing it over because I WANTED to believe that I was connected with something Meaningful - a Higher Good.

For example, I lived for a while near Hardwar, a holy city for many Hindus, on the bank of the Ganges. Tibetans would arrogantly carry bloody slabs of water buffalo beef onto a bus packed with strictly vegetarian Indian pilgrims. When the blood got on a pilgrim's clothing or dripped onto the floor and a pilgrim complained, the Tibetans would be so arrogant about it. A lama hearing this also was so arrogant about it. Indians were grossly ridiculed by Tibetans as a matter of course.

One lama, a head of Mindroling Monastery, Zona Rinpoche I think his name was, said he could not take tea in his community for fear he would be poisoned. I wonder why? Smuggling gold was a routine that lamas did to get money, and they got Western students involved in this as well. I took it for granted that when lamas did criminal activities that it was skillful activity!!!

When Geshe Ngawang Dargye asked me to lift my shirt up to look at my breasts, he said it was to blow on my heart to help me feel less agitated. I trusted him as a teacher more than anyone I’d ever trusted in my life, and in many ways as if he were a parent. If he punched me hard in the face I would have felt less pain than I did by his 'trivial' betrayal. When I told another student what Geshela had asked me to do, she said I must be a dakini, special. I wanted to buy into this malarkey because I wanted to believe, to trust my refuge guru, that he had my best intentions at heart, that he was a Superior Being.

Not only did Geshela betray me, my dharma sister also betrayed me by helping me lie to myself about the truth.

And she covered for the abuser too.

She betrayed herself.

I betrayed her too by not snapping out of the cultic mindset and saying, Elizabeth, this monk who we all prostrate to and take refuge in as the example of Truth and Enlightenment, just asked to look at my breasts! That is TOTALLY unacceptable, and I want to discuss this with the proper authorities, like the Dalai Lama, who put Geshela in charge of teaching foreigners only to sexually act out on them over the years. AND so did his dufus of a side kick assistant, Khedrup, who regularly felt me up, especially if by bad luck I was doing korwa around the library, and he came up behind me to grab my ass.

The betrayal was 3-dimensional. It was a full-circle lie. We were bound to each other in our betrayal bond, a mandala of deception and betrayal.

Variations on this theme occurred over the years in all the Tibetan communities I stayed in. I feel partly responsible for the death of my old friend who committed suicide because I was part of the lies that went on at the Library for the 1-1/2 years I was there. If I had only spoken up maybe she would not have bought into such insanity and taken her life.

Oh, and the games the old timers, like Alex Berzin and Priya, used to play with their not openly giving advice about the teachings. The secrecy-power games they and other old timers played were truly crazy-making. And that shit came down from the lamas too, who also got off on secrecy power trips.

My own morality began to crumble over the years too.. There were a couple of sexaholic men there at the Library, Glenn Mullin and Brian Beresford, who died recently of a heroin overdose I believe, or complications from his drug addiction. Geshela, a monk who was extremely strict about his impeccable following of the rules and regulations when in public, KNEW these men were sexual predators, cruising the new women students who arrived doe-eyed to study with a ‘genuine’ lama at the Library. He did nothing, and numerous children were adulterously and recklessly sired by these men who thought they were sooo cool with their Tibetan rigamarole and substance/alcohol addiction.

This all may sound like just so much Peyton Place bullshit but in real life, actual kids came into the world because of these rogue creeps, and their mothers really suffered not having a father who behaved like an adult to these kids but instead had some cheating dog who was goofing on the pseudo-yogi role. God knows how the dozen or so kids are doing! I can't imagine their LIVES have been comfortable being basically fatherless ... and all this under the guise of being Buddhist? What a crock!!!

I slept with one of these dogs, Brian. When, getting off the train in Old Delhi, he asked if he could share the hotel room Jenny and I were staying in. He was married, I knew his wife, and didn’t think anything of it. He took the middle bed in the room and in the middle of the night came into my bed. I deeply regret sleeping with him. I felt badly. Jenny scolded me badly, but then went off and married a Tibetan monk herself. Although I eased my guilt by saying I wasn't the only one who’d cheated with Brian, because over the years I met a few other Western women who had slept with him. I betrayed Brian's wife, who I did apologize to 4 years ago. I betrayed myself, my own principles about not liking to commit adultery. I betrayed Brian's daughter by doing that with her father.

The lack of morality was seeping slowly into my own life and I didn't like who I was becoming as a person, using Buddhism as part of some camouflage, and not being well connected with my true self. I saw what this betrayal cover-up was doing to ALL my Western Buddhist friends. It took me six long years to break away and decide to keep a complete distance from the entire Western Buddhist scene, in India and America. By the time one of Trungpa's Kalapa Court Mafiosi came to New Delhi due to the fact that Karmapa was dying of stomach cancer, I had seen so much Tibetan corruption, lama corruption, vicious gossip, kids being born out of adultery, Western Buddhist corruption, everybody screwing everybody, lying, smuggling, the assassination of the head of Clement Town, monks molesting little boys, monks having a prostitution camp outside Rumtek, the various Kargyu heads of the various sects all in political war with each other, death threats ...

The whole, ugly mess was so rotten!!!

Then came the news about Osel Tenzin and his thinking he was above AIDS, that his penis was magic, so magic it killed people. Then news of Trungpa's death, his obesity, the drunken stripping of people in public, violating them publicly, then Kalu Rinpoche's using June for all those years with his nephew in on this insanity, all while pretending to be His Holiness monk, who looked like a male Mother Theresa, and actually being scum.

Yes, it's a whole, ugly, rotten mess, and the betrayal by the lamas was just the beginning. The lack of principles, clarity, honesty, morality trickled down. Ugh.

I remember now that Sangye also told me in 1980 that Gyaltrul saved her from an abusive marriage. It sounds like her ex, this Hawaiian DJ was/is a psychopath. It sounds like Sangye may also have a personality disorder if she is a pathological liar, cold and socially exploitative. She may be a Narcissist or an Inverted Narcissist and need some kind of celebrity or 'unusual' person to subjugate herself to? It certainly sounds like she is unhealed from the abuse she survived with the psychopath DJ. It would be logical from that alone and the fact she went into this bizarre and unhealthy servile relationship with Gyaltrul, that she had been sexually abused as a child.

Holding her arms out and making kissy faces to Gyaltrul Rinpoche would be as culturally acceptable a display of affection to a Tibetan male as if she did a striptease act. Traditional Tibetans NEVER hold hands, and public display of affection is unthinkable to them. Saliva is considered to be a greater contaminant than urine, and less attractive. Kissing is done to babies and on cheeks, dry and privately. Sex is something that takes place in about 5 seconds. I sincerely doubt that many Tibetan women have any idea of what an orgasm is or would know what it feels like, nor would a Tibetan man have any idea that a woman could have one! Sakya Trinzin, for all his education, being married, father of two children and world traveling, thought oral sex could get a woman pregnant. Almost all Tibetans I met knew almost nothing about the birds and the bees or the most basic science, and still think the world is actually flat.

I seem to remember the sexaholic, adulterous Achi, (Karmapa’s translator) saying that Tarthang Tulku had coerced a number of Tibetan people into near slavery, and had tried to do that to his American wife too, the one Achi had the affair with. I cannot imagine that dozens of Tibetans have been in this bonded labor situation without other Westerners or Tibetans knowing about it. This is an example to me of an abuse support network that happens in the presence of a malignant Narcissist. It is a strange collusion of the victims in their own abuse and of the abuse of other victims. This has happened throughout history, for example, in Germany, under Hitler. It is a crazy-making enmeshment that is common in cults. It can be common also in corporate Narcissism, like at Enron.

I am ashamed of my own bad behavior in all this mess and corruption. I regret that it took me six years to get out of the cultic enmeshment. I was deeply invested in the Tibetan Buddhist scene. I convinced myself I was part of something that was a Higher Good, while not allowing myself to be fully conscious of the bad I saw around me. I would like to publicly apologize to all those I have hurt with my own lack of morality on the occasions I did not follow my better judgment, and in not having taken clear-thinking action to stop the abuses I saw or knew about, and also because I also participated in the cover-up with my silence. Previously, I justified my passivity by saying I was a victim. Yes, I was, but I also helped in the secrecy. I said and did nothing for 6 years to speak up against what I knew in my heart was wrong. I deeply regret that.

I hope my sharing of my tale of betrayal will help others who are or have been traumatized into secrecy or into not honoring what feels right, to get out of their betrayal bondage and to share their story here.

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http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.7.htm

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

January 10, 2004

To the people who wrote me privately:

To you both,


Although you deleted your emails to me, I copied them and have them ready to post tomorrow, unless you come to this forum and speak up for yourselves, find the words to speak your mind. How much more abuse is going to go on?

When will the perfect moment be for the truth to be spoken? It has been DECADES of abuse going on!!! HOW MUCH MORE ABUSE HAS TO GO ON BEFORE YOU SPEAK UP?????

Miranda Shaw and I sat next to each other on a plane ride from Germany to America in 1990. I told her about Sogyal's abuses 3 YEARS before she took any action. Hundreds more women were abused in that time. One woman was institutionalised that I know about as a direct result of Sogyal's abuse of her. Miranda was the one who referred Jane Doe to me, so that I could comfort this poor woman who had been sexually connived and beaten by Sogyal JUST AFTER HER FATHER HAD DIED. It was a miracle Jane Doe's husband didn't divorce her for sleeping with Sogyal, that her entire life didn't shatter and fall apart in a total mental/emotional breakdown.

What kind of a man seduces women who have just lost a loved one, who are GRIEVING and lost, in need of spiritual comfort? This is some kind of emotional necrophilia to be such a predator! This is monstrous! When are you, who posted me, who know what has been going on, going to speak up????!!!!

Miranda was VERY focused on her success. She wanted to write about women and sex practices in Buddhist history. It's an exciting subject, one that the author and a publisher COULD MAKE MONEY ON. I don't think the practices she wrote about have EVER happened with Tibetan lamas, or maybe anybody. I'm not convinced that she thought that either. She did technical, scholarly research based on religious texts. People write about dragons and Loch Ness monsters, but do those things really EXIST? Religious texts can say ANYTHING, and they often do. Are cult texts to be believed? I don't think so!

Anybody can write about or publish anything. I've published a couple of books myself. One was written when I was 19, it was commissioned. I wrote the book in a single month, researching it while taking school exams. I did the best I could at the time, but I was instructed by my editor to write information to fit the images they had bought for the book. Words to match the pictures. It was a comparative history book on religion. A commissioned coffee-table book. It was intended to make money, that was all. It was published on 2 continents, and by a reputable, internationally renowned publisher. I made a considerable sum of money for a 19 year old's first effort at writing. The contents of the book were never questioned for a second. I was commissioned, I wrote, it was published as fact.

I wrote all kinds of errors in that book, some I knew about because my writing had to fit the pictures, as I was hired and paid to do, and some by accident. That book is now quoted all the time on the web, as correct, as fact. None of what I wrote was checked up on as being fact. So I KNOW that editors don't find out whether something is true before they publish something. The publishing industry is just that, an industry, they sell PRODUCTS, books, not truth.

My writing for that book was based on other books that were published with the wrong information. Just because something is published doesn't mean in any way that it is true. Just because a person has a degree does not mean that person knows what they are talking about, or that they are necessarily a person of integrity, telling the truth they know, or that they even know the truth about anything.

What I'm trying to say is that I think that the tantric sex thing is not true. I don't think that women or men get enlightened doing tantric sex, or that it gives anybody anything, except the simple sex act. I don't think it cuts through any dualistic tendencies AT ALL!!! Ever. I think that is some kind of way to jazz up the plain old sex act into being something it's not.

June Campbell was used by Kalu Rinpoche for sex. He told her she would be going to Vajra Hell if she didn't do what he wanted, and by the way she had to screw his sleazy nephew too, or else. Some enlightened being there. Not. What an ugly, cruel power game, with a nun, who devoted herself diligently to learning Tibetan, to being his translator, taking vows to live her life chastely, to helping others.

She never spoke about her feelings of anger, or the terrible betrayal she felt, because Tibetan Buddhists, all, are ASHAMED AND HORRIFIED by expression of anger, as if THAT, expressing anger, were immoral, and not the abuses committed! So she wrote her book with calm, not bringing her emotions into the picture at all, but she was reviled anyway by the Tibetan Buddhist community, not for telling the truth, but because people didn't want to be disillusioned from their fairy tale malarky!

She was betrayed, used for sexual purposes in ugly, hurtful ways. It had NOTHING to do with anybody's being enlightened! That is just some Western or Tibetan fantasy that was rigged so lamas could use women sexually and cover it up as something fancy.

The word in Tibetan for female IS INFERIOR BIRTH. For a thousand years nuns were not called nuns, they were called Auntie. Women did not get respect in Tibet, ever. It was a male theocracy. Women were not taught to read or do anything. It was polyandrous, forcing one woman to sleep with a handful of brothers, to keep the land from being legally parceled out to the different brothers. If all the brothers married one woman, they could keep their pitiful piece of land in one piece and not have to divide it up among their separate families. They respected a piece of barely arable farmland more than they respected any woman. Women did not and do not have any power or respect in Tibetan culture, period. That is a fabrication of Western women who want to believe that without ever knowing anything about Tibetan society up close, just reading books by Western authors who idealised Tibet as some kind of Shangri-La.

What kind of man, lama or not, goes around saying his wife likes bigger dicks than his, so she should quietly screw other men? Say wha !???! This was the sacred bond between Gyatrul and Sangye? Neither of them seem to be any more enlightened from their experience. And why should they be? It was always and only, just plain old sex.

Sex is for pleasure and making babies, to be done in appropriate ways with partners who have consented as peers, not as disciple or teacher, child and parent, child and trusted elder, parishioner and priest, patient and therapist, client and lawyer. If 2 peers, friends, want to have "tantric sex", I say go for it, have a folie a deux! Go for the mutual delusion. But when it is a power play, a sadistic one of spiritual betrayal, a cruel game of seduction of people who are vulnerable, very vulnerable to what they are being told, that is NOT okay. In the West is is AGAINST THE LAW. It is against the law, not for frivolous reasons, but because the VICTIMS, yes, the person who gets used this way, is seen as a victim of a crime, of abuse, are deeply DAMAGED by this abuse, this appropriation of power. It is like a child getting screwed by a parent. It is an abuse of power.

If a little child flirts with daddy, it doesn't matter how turned on daddy gets, it's a CRIME to use this vulnerable child in a sexual way for the gratification of the adult. That is how a spiritual "disciple" is seen in the eyes of the law, as a person who is very vulnerable, like a child. Psychiatrically, such a violation by a spiritual teacher is treated as if the sexual abuse were a type of incest.

In my experience with Tibetan people in general, they are not remotely romantic at all. Not in ANY way that a Westerner would consider romantic. There is no literature per se, almost no stories at all, and none that I have ever heard about involving "love". In fact, I have never heard the Tibetan word for love before in the 30 years since studying and knowing how to speak the language. There is "compassion" as in compassion, "nyingje", for all sentient beings. There is the Tibetan expression, "Goe gi do" that passes for "I love you", which is "I want you (sexually)". The colloquial word for sex in Tibetan, "layka' is "work".

Maybe the lack of romantic literature in Tibet, or literature that has anything to do with the relationship between men and women as peers, is because Tibetan men did not have romantic love with women. There was almost no literature at all in Tibetan culture. All writing and the use of the intellect was utterly taken over by the male theocracies of the monasteries. Society was almost 90% illiterate; a lot of the religious texts were just memorised, not read to be understood, basically just a form of brainwashing.

Tibetan men generally do have exceptionally small penises, and it is generally known in conversations I've had with Tibetan women over the decades that Tibetan men cannot perform sexually in any way for more than a few seconds, or that Tibetan women get little or no pleasure out of the sex act with a Tibetan man. This is something joked about frequently by Tibetan women themselves, that sex is nothing to them, a disappointment to be endured for the sake of having children. Maybe this is why all the emphasis on what passes for the expression of love in the Tibetan Buddhist texts always refers to love one would have for a mother?

Tibetan marriages are arranged. It's a business arrangement between families for the tribal purpose of creating laborers and landowners. One son, if it could be afforded to hand over a potential farmhand, was traditionally, somewhat routinely, given to the monastery when he was a tiny boy, handed over like a sacrificial lamb to a theocratic city of pseudo-monks; run by men, for men. These pseudo-monks didn't work and were totally supported by the poor laborers, the farmers outside the monastery perimeter. Inside the monastery these pseudo-monks brainwashed themselves, and the outside people were treated like inferiors who had to crawl and scrape for the "blessing" of these pseudo-monks (who were in fact, raping each other, when they weren't brainwashing each other, inside the monastery walls).

A number of educated Tibetan people understand that those chosen to be "rinpoches" were because of their relationship to politically powerful families. Or a child was chosen from an area for politically strategic reasons.

What are you, who posted me privately, waiting for? For there to be nothing to be afraid of? For your reputations to be protected? You both think you are spiritual and moral people, but what kind of integrity do you think you have when you can help put an end to the abuse, NOW, but you are not doing it??!!!

Why would you not come to this forum, where I publicly spoke out about what I suffered, and support me here? Either of you could have chosen anonymous names, unrelated to your actual identity, and offered your support, your experience, written about your thoughts and feelings in any way you like, in such a way that nobody knew who you are, but still validating what I said was true, or that you had experienced similar abuses yourselves.

Why write to me privately, wanting my sympathy, my comforting, or to confess your knowledge about abuses to me, when there are people out there, now, being abused, used, assaulted, pimped, whose inner and in some cases outer lives are being destroyed by these abuses?

WHY ARE YOU KEEPING YOUR PART IN THIS SECRET???

Is it because you know that you are still perpetuating this abuse by keeping it secret?

Please, be decent people and come forward and speak up, openly.

As for the person who said they think my intention to post what they said to me in private here is blackmail, the legal definition of blackmail is:
"obtaining or procuring something by illegal means, such as by force or coercion."

You CHOSE to write to me. I did not coerce you. I did not obtain the information you told me illegally, by force or coercion. You didn't know me. There was no trust I earned with you. I posted here publicly to support Tara and Odysseus in their truth telling, by my own truth-telling. My intention in doing that was to HELP END THE ABUSES AND TO TELL THE TRUTH.

When I read your second post to me I felt literally sick for 12 hours. How could you have helped that abuse, so directly to continue and think for a second that you are a therapist! A trained therapist???!!! OMG, I was horrified!

From what you told me you were a co-perpetrator who had been trained to know better! And you had the gall to tell me that it was Tara's ANGER that you feel is sick? Buddy, you are the sick one. Tara has every reason to be angry. That anger she is expressing is sane. NOT expressing anger about these abuses is what is wrong.

So what if she is expressing the anger in ways that are not esthetically pleasing to you? So what if she refers to male genitalia? It was male genitalia that was being used to abuse these female disciples, con them into the sex act. Do I think Tara is going to cut off any male genitalia? No.

I think she has a deep and loving relationship with Odysseus and at the moment is caring for her FATHER, who is dying of cancer. It's not men who are so bad for their having genitalia or sex with men that is bad. It's the ABUSE of power by men who set themselves up to be worshipped as reincarnate lamas, holy teachers of The Truth. It's conning women into sex acts to use them and camouflage it as something that it is not.

Hiding the truth about these ILLEGAL abuses that are going on on a MASS SCALE for DECADES is wrong. Letting it go on by not talking about it is wrong.

Have a look in your heart. Have some cojones to talk about this, openly. Here, now. That is the right thing to do.

Protect your identity if you want to but come here and speak the truth and let it help others. Let this be a place where this sexual abusing of women by Tibetan lamas starts to end.

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 08, 2011 11:17 am

http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.8.htm

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

January 12, 2004, No. 1
From: oscar
To: AmLearning
Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2004 1:40 pm
Subject: Sogyal R

Hello " AmLearning",

I have read your account of your horrible experiences with Sogyal Rinpoche and I can confirm many similar events happening during the time (mid 80's to beginning 90's) when I was in a leading position in Rigpa Org in Europe. Because of the obvious abuse of female students, I confronted SR , who called me a friend at that time, several times (he did not even try to justify his behaviour spiritually), then first I resigned from my position and later left Rigpa fellowship. I did not want to give my name anymore as a person of trust to be misused to help to recruit women to Rigpa to eventually be abused by the SR ("lama care").

I am very interested in the information about the lawsuit against SR which I guess took place recently, and which you mention in your comment on the Kazi case.

With best wishes

~oscar~

From: oscar
To: AmLearning
Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 1:32 pm
Subject: my story

Dear AmLearning
,

Thank you for keeping my privacy and answering in length to my email. I will tell you a bit of my story, and having discovered ambu-bulletin board only one day after you, I will need more time to carefully consider my next steps. I have no interest to join into something which is not yet clear to me what the motivations of some of the people are. I write to you because you appear to me clear, well thought, and responsible. This makes your contributions to me more trustworthy than many of the other posts.

Some are horrible and have very bad energy themselves. I find the papers on narcissism in the bulletins quite correct. But let me say that also: what “Odysseus” and “Ambu” say in many of their posts is very horrible and unacceptable to me. When Ambu wants to get all men fucked and wants to cut their balls, I can’t see her anymore in any moral position to criticize others. If you want to change something for the better, you must try yourself to live up to the values you want to defend or support as good as you can. I am very hesitant about putting something into the American Buddha bulletin because many of the posts there are of very low ethics and using words and expressions which do not represent my values and the way I want to change something for the better. This kind of complaining and judging and talking reminds me of adolescents who yell at their parents and blame them for everything they do without putting the same high standards on themselves. But we are adult. So I must say very clear: I will not become a member of another sect. I see this danger very clear in this forum, and this will take the power away from the justified and necessary actions to stop people like SR abusing their students and abusing religion, and the trust of many good people. Abuse is always soul murder, and sexual abuse in so called spiritual context is for me the worst. It makes me sick. But some of the posts there are as sickening and disgusting. I can see the damage which has been done to these people, and I can feel the pain behind it, but I think one has to consider one's actions very well and one's words as well, not to go on a similar level as the people criticized. In that way they are working for those they try to fight. They put themselves down with gossip, and I get the feeling they put themselves up. As a therapist, I can see the need for expression of strong feelings, and that those feelings are bitter and not very subtle, but going public it needs another stage in the dealing with the trauma. One must be very aware of one's actions, not to be surprised by what kind of response one might get. There is a great danger that you point to somebody with one finger and don’t see that three fingers are pointing towards you.

So here is a bit more of my story:

In the mid 80's, during my seven years with Rigpa and 4 years as founding director of a national Rigpa branch, I had slowly discovered that Sogyal Rinpoche had sex with very many disciples. Even though I was very close to SR, it took me some time to notice the obvious. Even though I am a professional counselor, it took me quite some time to notice it at all, and then it took me even more time to take action. First, at the same time I was shocked and kind of amused, I felt somehow mixed about it, because in the beginning I saw that some women tried to get him. First I thought, they are mature woman, they know what they are doing, and I simply am too inexperienced in the exotic ways of Tibetan Lamas to be able to judge. It was much later that I heard stories and saw things which were not based on consent, and saw that he was cheating all the time on the women. Also I noticed that he had sex with young students who just had come to Rigpa retreats for the fist time.

There was the harem, and the women seemed to be able and ok with their role in the game. At least I wanted to believe this, still trying to see SR as a holy man. On the other side, I found always obstacles to consider SR as my guru. I considered myself at that time more as a Buddhist manager and some kind of assistant of SR than as a disciple of him. I could see Dilgo Khyentse or the Dalai Lama as true masters, but SR appeared to me always more as a teacher who teaches Buddhism, or many times as a salesman who sells Buddhism. When I was in power at my national Rigpa branch, I always extinguished most of the superlatives in the flyers. I said to SR: either you are true and good and people will find out themselves, or if not they will also find out. So don’t tell them what they should think or how good they should think about you. True quality will speak for itself. With me, he accepted such words, but I heard my successors had to put on the praise line again.

Well back to the abuse subject:

I confronted first jokingly, then half-heartedly Sogyal with my concerns about his behaviour, and I said to him that as a therapist I know about transference phenomena: students see the teacher as kind of a father figure, so sex with the student is psychologically seen as incest. Also, that in the West, the relationship between teacher and student, or priest and the parishioner, must be kept pure, and does not allow intimate relationships or involvement with sex in any way. He was not amused, and tried to avoid the subject, but he first tried to justify his sexual behaviour spiritually. First he said that because he is one of the incarnations of Padmasambhava, and that Padmasambhava had had many "spiritual consorts", he would be somehow entitled to do so. Then he played the cultural card: in Tibetan culture women are seen as Dakinis, and they would happily serve the Lamas for enhancing their spiritual power and so on. I am ashamed, but first I wanted to believe all this. Raised in an over-sanctimonious, hypocritical catholic background, I was somehow trained for bending the truth, and trained to idealize and respect people of position even more than supposedly “holy” men. My spiritual and emotional hunger made be blind to my own values and my professional standards - at least where the standards of a Lama are concerned, not in my own work. For some years I was blind with my own position. I was together with other dear friends establishing a very well-working organisation to benefit many people. I was happy. I was in a very special position. I honestly tried to use my possibilities well. I felt I was chosen, and because of karmic connections with Sogyal, I was finally recognized in my full capacity. What the bitter irony is, because other students saw me as a rather independent, seemingly critical, and reasonable person, and because I am a psychotherapist, some people took me as a guarantee for trusting Sogyal. And I guess some people even envied my special access to SR. By that time I could no longer ignore what was happening. Once Sogyal wanted me to lie on the phone to a woman, who wanted to contact him after having had sex with him another day, because he was in bed with another one, but I refused. He became very angry and yelled at me, but I was not impressed. Basically, he treated me always very good. He seemingly respected me, but now I think he was clever enough to not treat me like some of his other main students. He gave me the feeling that he appreciated my views at least as long I helped him to please the audience and the students. But he never was open to criticism concerning his personal behaviour. Also, he never answered any of my personal spiritual questions. I got more and more the impression that he simply could not answer them. Also, when I attended sessions where he should answer questions by his students, he often gave very stupid answers, and showed that he had not much understanding of what people were really asking. Sometimes he ridiculed people.

One of the worst things I experienced was at a winter retreat in Germany. A long term student of his was in emotional distress and asked in obvious pain and vulnerability and confusion for his help, and he forced her to speak louder and then to come forward to the stage where he put her completely down. In my view, he was totally afraid of her, and could not deal with the situation whatsoever. But instead of putting her into safe hands, he tried to save himself in putting her down and ridiculing her, and then played the strong teacher who can deal with everything. In the same night, we had to rush her to the emergency ward of the next psychiatric hospital with a nervous breakdown and a psychotic seizure.

As a therapist and as a student, I was horrified by his behaviour and his complete lack of compassion and skill. Before I left Rigpa, an American woman told me confidentially and in great distress that she had just lost her husband and had come from US to France to SR to get help, and that SR, during a private audience, had tried to violently force her to have sex with him. Fortunately, she managed not to be raped. She left the retreat in even greater despair and completely shocked. This was the worst incident which I heard from firsthand.

SR did not respect any limits: he had sex with most of the wives of the leading students at Rigpa. I tried to keep myself and my private life out of his. I tried not to mix with his affairs. Sogyal had a classical harem, and he knew all the tricks to make the obvious invisible, or if that did not work, to change the context of the students’ values, giving the whole thing a spiritual excuse, and abuse fears and naivety, or the good belief of his students to get what he wanted. It’s 12 years ago that I quit Rigpa, so I have no more first hand information of SR’s doing now, but I must say I have little doubt that everything is the same today, because I consider him an addict. He is hooked on sex and power.

When I have more time I will write more professionally on the psychology of the guru-student relationship and of abuse. What interests me most is why people “agree” to be abused and what hinders them to see the truth. And how to help others to discover their own truth, and how to stop people like SR from going on.

Please again this is confidential, and I will take action, but I will choose my own way according to my values and my autonomy. It is a painful process for me to look after all these years more deeply into my own behaviour and acts. I need my time so that I can be really of use for others who need help. Just acting without having my personal process at a certain point could do more harm than good.

Thank you for listening, and it's very good that you study the psychological background of what happened to you. You are very courageous. I hope that you can heal and learn from it and help others. Of course it would be easy to identify me quickly -- maybe you have already -- but the story is on trusting, so I trust you.

Best regards

oscar

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http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.12.htm


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

January 14, 2004
Dear Oscar, Tiger Lily, Tara and Charles,


Wow, all I can think of is wow. What an amazing and freeing conversation this has been for me this last week! hank you all so much for sharing your true selves valiantly.

Tara, I felt very similar feelings about Oscar's posts that you expressed. Really, I felt so enraged by what seemed to be his sanctimonious, finger-wagging, moralising cowardice, when he, a trained therapist, saw what he saw and did nothing, for the 7 years he was in his little official role as part of the abuse support network, then for 12 years after that. And his arrogance for not understanding your expression of anger as natural, sane, appropriate in light of the betrayal of the lamas setting themselves up to be PROSTRATED to as LIVING BUDDHAS teaching THE TRUTH ... I was almost apoplectic with anger at Oscar, physically sickened.

He seemed to be more concerned about appearing like Mr. Pompous Rational Analyzer than he is about seeing that the abuses Sogyal has been perpetrating have DEVASTATING effects on people's lives. The combination of his vanity and cowardice felt really toxic to me. I want to DO something practical to STOP the abuses.

But ... as the week went by and my own feelings came up, it has been a profound experience to remain in the dialogue here. I feel for the first time in many years a deeper peace.

Tiger Lily, thank you for sharing your vulnerability. I think you are a very brave person.

Charles, I feel very comforted by your company here.

Oscar, wow, your last post blew my mind. Congratulations for coming here, sharing your thoughts. That took cojones. If you would stop being so worried about the feeling-ful use of expressions of anger that Tara uses, I think you would see her moral intentions in being here and sharing her painful feelings. What happens when your clients use obscenities in expressing their anger? Is there a censor in your office that says anger should be only expressed in 'nice' ways?

You are right Oscar, I was angry with myself for playing a part in the abuse I survived. But I was 22 to 28 years old, not a professional therapist. Still, I can very much relate to your post today and what you said. And I imagine that Tara, Tiger Lily and Charles also can relate.

My anger is really that you would not come into the OPEN and SHARE with OTHERS here. Now that you are here and sharing your true self, I'm glad and proud of you that you did. I hope you stay and talk about this with us all, not to be part of an anti-sect sect but to genuinely talk about this and think about it and let feelings come up genuinely. I do think this subject needs healing for all of us.

When one is ALONE in feeling these feelings about spiritual betrayal, especially when others want there to be SILENCE and SECRECY, the anger comes up a lot about hiding the truth, feeling invalidated. Yes, it feels to me like being a kid and yelling and nobody believing what I'm saying. It hurts not to be believed about something true and be told to hide the truth.

The truth you told in your post needs to be out there Oscar, not hidden. Like Charles says, people are so scared of telling the truth that people are forced by the use of subpoenas to get them into court to tell the truth. I genuinely felt very badly posting your post without your permission. I apologise to you. I also believe that what you wrote to me was very powerful and WILL help others a LOT. I wanted to share the truth you wrote and I did. In time I believe you will see the good that came from that. Even so, I'm sorry I hurt you by forcing your post into the public. Please forgive me.

Now you are here and we are all here, please stay and talk. I know you will read our posts because this IS an important topic to you, to who you are. And what we have to say here will, I do believe, have a good and healthy impact on others as well as ourselves.

all the best,
AmLearning

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 08, 2011 11:30 am

One more:

http://www.american-buddha.com/am.learn.13.htm

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

January 19, 2004

Tiger Lily said:


"I'm just starting to realise how terribly painful and confusing that must have been to receive such gross sexual advances from men you were wanting to see in a pure fatherly light.

I understand your anger at coming to a forum where you felt people weren't listening or not caring about your pain. Not caring about you. I think if you give us time, we are all here for you.

How you must loathe the very word Dakini that has been so misunderstood by western practitioners and the Lamas who played around with their sex, projecting a deluded Dakini vision onto a woman and so invalidating her as a woman in her own right."


Hi dear Tiger Lily,

Hmm, it's nice to be challenged to think about things in new ways I think, when the intentions behind the challenge feel well-wishing and if genuine consideration has gone into the challenge. I appreciate what you said to me in that light and have been mulling over what you said.

Human beings live in a continuum of time. Who we were as children, what culture was our background, our language, family history ... it and our individual response to what we were born into, our reactions and actions, all go into who we become as adults and what we are attracted to, what we choose to do or feel compelled to do with our lives.

I was attracted to the 4 Noble Truths because as a 10-year-old I sensed the hypocrisy in the pill-box hatted, white-gloved, Stepford wife, Jackie-Onassis-as-a-role-model that was being dished out to females in 1963. The pill-box-hat reality did not feel sane, safe or good to me at the core. I don't know why but it didn't. Maybe it was because I grew up in a privileged environment and at the same time suffered serious abuse in that arena. Rich and white became something to hate for me but I had no ideas about any other life that could possibly be a Good Way To Live And Think.

The 4 Noble Truths leapt off the page of my history book and burned into my child's mind as a possible way out of my suffering that came with fancy trappings. I was being badly abused at home. I'm lucky to be alive, it was that bad. It was my biological mother who was the abuser. My dear father, who was a scientist, had abandoned us kids and left, after he’d tried to handle his violent, psychopathically-traited wife, who I learned about 7 years ago has Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Here was somebody, the Buddha, in this 4th grade history book, talking about suffering, and a path out of that suffering, not just trying to white-glove it away. So I went to the local museum and looked at the stone heads and statues of the Buddha, with their serene expressions, simple, dignified postures, and yearned for what seemed to me like wise composure in the face of openly knowing about suffering.

But at that time I had NO idea how to learn about Buddhism. I went to book stores and read koans, but what could I get from the idea of one hand clapping? Zip. Where was the understanding there? It made no sense at all! And I sensed in those books some sort of smug ridiculing knowing about anything or valuing the mind or life. It felt nihilistic to me. Nope, Zen was not for me.

Then Evans-Wentz' book on the bardo ... that made a different kind of NO sense to me, some anthropological fascination with views on death? What good was that to me? None that I could see.

Years later I read Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in the winter of 1974, just after I turned 21 and went to live in Rome, in a room in an apartment with an elderly woman landlady. Reading that book affected me so profoundly, I went into a sort of fevered delirium I'd never experienced in my life. Maybe I got some sort of bizarre illness that lasted 3 days with no other symptoms than a raging fever ... whatever it was, I spent 3 days in bed, with my landlady bringing me soup in the afternoon after I spent 23 out of the 24 hours in some nightmare dream state. The dream was about the realms of suffering, the earth covered with misery in a Boschian purgatory. What could be the way out of that endless suffering?! That book gave me no answers. I had no idea that Trungpa was Buddhist or that there were living teachers. I thought Buddhist teachers had all died out. I really did. I thought there was no way out of all this suffering and I just didn't want to live any more.

It cast me into suicidal depression. After packing my belongings and saying goodbye to my kind landlady, I rented a hotel room in Albergo Paradiso, fully enjoying the irony in the name of this squalid flea pit of a hotel, that looked out over the statue of Giordano Bruno, the alchemist who had been burned at the stake in that plaza, Campo Dei Fiori, in Trastevere.

I didn't die; I couldn't razor blade deeply enough. My squeamishness kept me alive, and I left Rome in a depressed daze to live on a tiny island in Greece, by myself, to work on being a writer there in the olive orchards. I realised that I knew nothing about life really, wasn't capable of being a writer, and never wrote anything but letters again. It was from there, half a year later, that I mostly hitched to India over 2 months, arriving in MCloud Ganj in October 1975, just after seeing the Taj Mahal in the Dusshera full moon, floating there in the mist, at the hour of the cow dust, in the twilight. I fell deeply in love with India.

It was while in that dreamy ecstasy that I think can be experienced by people who are attracted to India's multi-layered, kaleidoscopic chaos, that I stayed at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, managing to live in India for 5 months on 70 dollars. Here, I thought, I would be living near and around genuine Buddhist monks who would teach me something I'd wanted to know about for a decade, how to work on the cessation of suffering. I was willing, able and interested.

In my first 5 months in India, there was a Bhutanese 'monk' who attempted to rape me as I walked back to my lodgings in Bodhgaya, where I went on pilgrimage to see the Bodhi tree, and where Sakyamuni was said to have attained enlightenment. As a result, I blamed my long blonde hair as to why this 'monk' was induced to try and rape me. So, after smacking this 'monk' in the face with a resounding crack that left me feeling guilty for years, I escaped from his muscled grip and ran back to the tourist bungalow and cut off most of my hair, and later wore clothes that would be best described as tent-like. Back in the USA, it was with my cut-off hair and in my almost floor length, made in Calcutta, dark brown tent dress that I went to see Sogyal. That was when he assaulted me.

After the 4 or so months I knew Sogyal in the USA, anything that smelled like an excuse to abuse people sexually, like so-called Tantric sex and so-called using 'dakinis to get 'energy', and most of the ritual elements of TB, repelled me.

Yes, my having been sexually abused as a child and turning to lamas as loving parent figures, who took advantage of that sexually, was very traumatizing. When Geshela asked to see my breasts I tried to write it off as just curiosity, a monk who hadn't seen a white woman's breasts before. I was trying to accept that maybe what I needed was to talk with a teacher who was MARRIED and had a family, a more worldly-wise lama, which prompted me to think in 1980 that Sakya Trizin would be a man to talk with about my feelings of existential aloneness. He had lost his parents when he was a tiny child, and been brought up by an aunt who had recently died. I thought maybe he could understand my own sense of loss, not having a family.

Since he had been giving me private teachings on the Dzogchen meditation part of my yidam practice, seeing the unawakened states as the flip side of the same awakened states, I asked him about how it was that lust and compassion were related. He said like water and ice. That water and ice are the same substance in different forms.

That seemed so wise to me! Like water and ice! Compassion is the free-flowing aspect of love and lust is its arrested, 'frozen' mode. Ah, how beautiful that seemed. Back I went to the meditation cushion with delight! This added a new dimension to ‘going with the flow’.

A week later he said he had a vision of him yab-yum with me as Dorje Phurba. Immediately I felt suspicious, but at the same time somewhat shocked and also flattered that this His Holiness person included me unconsciously or consciously as part of his 'path'. But moments later, as I got up to leave our hourly lesson in meditation, he said he had this vision and wanted me 'do it' with him. I said "You must be joking". He became visibly, audibly angry with me and scowlingly said, "No, I want to come to your room tomorrow morning when I go for my walk and do this."

My blood went cold. This lama I had come to trust over the months I'd spent studying with him, thinking I could respectfully share my doubts, worries, meditation questions, needs to understand certain texts. It all seemed to be finally happening, a quiet, simple rapport with a Buddhist teacher. No rituals, no bs, just working on meditation practice.

Then, bam, it was in that instant shattered. I didn't listen to my inner voice that wanted to say no. I didn't say no. I said alright but my heart was cold and my stomach sick. What if maybe this was it, the actual transformation of a worldly activity into a yogic practice? Like the Tibetan lamas said in the books and everything! What if I were passing up this possible chance with my teacher because of my fears stemming from being sexually abused in childhood? Maybe this was a chance to transcend that, to let go of the attachment-revulsion pendulum, to alchemize the worldly into the gold of awakened activity?

So I said ok.

The next morning he came up the steps to my rented apartment across the street from the Sakya property on Rajpur Road. He quickly snuck in, closing the door behind him and came to my bedroom. He sat on the bed, mumbled something in Tibetan, and told me to think that what we were about to do was for the benefit of all sentient beings I folded my hands in prayer and prayed, and then he lifted his skirt. Below his large belly, he put on a condom which hung off his acorn like a windsock on a windless day. Wondering what was going to happen next, and if anything could actually take place, I offered him oral sex. I sincerely didn’t think he could actually function sexually. That was when he said he was afraid that oral sex would make me pregnant. He also said that he thought that was unclean. He asked me to lie down, he lay on top of me, grunted in about 5 seconds and then ran for the door, carrying the condom with him, and really I hardly felt anything at all except somewhat numb with remorse.

So maybe he wasn't endowed enough to actually have sex except maybe for himself? Maybe this was something that was supposed to be my disciple's gift to him and I should just lump it, get over it with detachment. Maybe I should just laugh at the cosmic ridiculousness and keep on doing my meditation!

So I took a deep breath and thought, I'm just not going to think about this, and whatever it is, well that's what it is. But the next time I went for my class, ALL Sakya Trizin could talk about was the sex act. That's it. He seemed highly lascivious, amused, and wanted to do it all again. So I let him do it again. Was this a test? I was attached to feeling remorse? Was this going to cure me of thinking about sex as something important, and help me see the transparent folly of being hurt by sex?

Sakya Trizin had told me at the beginning of our meditation classes some weeks prior, to see everything as sacred, that he was to be seen as the yidam, the world as pure, all sounds as mantras, so I focused on that, that this was an 'enlightened' experience.

It was my trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

Then when I went to study with him, all he could talk about was sex, wanting me to swear that I would always tell him where I was in the world, and be available to him for sex. When his dignified, beautiful wife walked into the room that day, he went into a sort of cold-shouldering me that seemed like he was worried he might have been talking too loudly, and might have gotten caught by her talking about this with me. From then on he whispered to me.

It is widely known he married for political reasons: "In order to maintain the tradition of the Khon family lineage, in 1974, H. H. Sakya Trizin married Dagmo Kusho Tashi Lhakyet, the daughter of the Minister of the King of Derge." So I thought maybe his life was compartmentalized: political marriage here, “sang-yum” there, mother over there, and maybe he needed a person with whom to 'do' his yab-yum yidam practice and I was just a handy orifice who was also a dedicated disciple. I was to be used but not somehow included in this process???? I could see I got nothing out of these 2 encounters except confusion, remorse, some shame. But I had faith that he must know what he was doing because after all, he was a Holiness, and everybody held him in high esteem. My doubts must be out of ignorance, selfishness, kleshas.

He made me promise not to talk about 'it' with anybody; it would be our secret.

When I tried to discuss meditation with him over the next 2 years after I left Rajpur and returned occasionally, he didn't have time. All he DID have time for was wanting to talk about sex. When I went out to the Sakya center once for a wang given by the Dalai Lama there, and another time hoping to continue the actual meditation classes we used to have, he cold-shouldered me. One time he stood holding his wife's hand, which is highly unusual for any Tibetan, and I felt like I was somehow a pariah, had done something wrong, simply by doubting him in the privacy of my mind, my wanting to study meditation instead of just giving into being an orifice for him. I knew over time that our meditation class relationship had vanished and would never return.

I went into a 5 month retreat. When I came out of that retreat I house-sat for my old friend when she and her husband were away for a few days. When I returned from the bazaar they had returned, and the woman, who had found my diary, read it, burned it full of holes with a stick of incense without telling me. I discovered the burned pages a day later, asked her why, and her venom was really painful to me, blaming me for endangering His Holiness Sakya Trizin's reputation by writing what I did in my diary! I had told nobody! I had written it in MY diary!!!

So now she knew. I felt ashamed, reviled by my old, dear friend, who blamed me for "smiling too much," and THAT was why the married Sakya Trizin had used me like he did; I'd broken the code of secrecy by accident, leaving my diary around for her to pry into, and so I decided to leave Rajpur.

When Sakya Trizin came to New Delhi a few months later, he asked to see me, nudge nudge, wink wink, make sure I'm alone so he can do the yab-yum thing again privately in his room. I just couldn't go again.

That was the end of my connection with TB, of any trust, any faith. I stopped my practice with fear, regret, sadness, shame, loss, grieving the loss of my sense of community.

In the next 4 years I tried to discuss what happened with both a Gelug nun and a Kargyu nun who I'd known well for years. They both told me to not discuss it but keep it all secret, and if I saw/thought something wrong it was my fault. During that time I had a large apartment in New Delhi, where many guests, old Buddhist friends of mine, stayed when they came to town. We would be having breakfast or dinner on the verandah and out would come their own stories of bad experiences with various Tibetan lamas, which they begged me to keep secret, to "protect the lamas and the dharma".

Somehow the revelations of the truth never budged from the level of gossip. There was no clarity about what was going on or any sense of what direction to take, how to sort this mess out. The code of secrecy had us all paralysed. There was no talking openly, so no clarity of purpose, intention or feeling.

Whoever I discussed this Tibetan lack of morality with would invariably say that "THEIR" lama (Kalu Rinpoche, Karmapa, Khamtrul Rinpoche) would NEVER do "such a thing". Then how come these lamas were SURROUNDED by sexual abuse and nothing was done, or it emerged that really their lama DID do such a thing!???

My polite disinterest in the Tibetan culture ended for me when I heard my old 'dharma sister' friend from the Library days had committed suicide by burning herself alive as an offering in a retreat. Then that disinterest turned into outright disgust mixed with horror.

This was after it became public knowledge that Geshela had masturbated for years between the legs (common monastic practice as a way of not breaking the FULL vow of celibacy but only committing a 'misdemeanor' by not committing the monk's vow felony of full penetration) of a South American nun he'd ordained. She had stood up in his class at the Library and told the open-jawed room full of 30+ students what Geshela had been doing to her for 2 years.

My dear Geshela did THAT!!! And his old disciple had suicided after that???!!!

It was too much pain, too sad, too wrong!!! And then Geshela went to New Zealand with that randy twerp of a zhebzhi, Khedrup Tharchin, who always used to feel me up while I did korwa around the Library if I didn't run fast enough away from him???!!! No responsibility? No punishment for this breaking of vows? WHAT hypocrisy all this was AND THE DALAI LAMA KNEW ABOUT ALL THIS AND DID NOTHING?????!!!!

My faith shattered. The sense of samaya anything snapped.

I went to Delhi and got a job in the fashion clothing business because of my facility with Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu, which are all linguistically intertwined in colloquial Hindustani.

Yes, after that, any adoration of tormas, dakni anything, yab-yum anything ... it made me feel sick. I got to know the Tibetans in New Delhi over the next 4 years, the more worldly ones, and understood their deep contempt for all the foreign 'injis' who came East to worship the lamas. The young, non-monk, non-Dalai Lama Administration Tibetans really know almost nothing about their culture, history, and philosophy. All this bowing and scraping to lamas for anything other than "blessings", or in a medical emergency, or to appear traditional, is nuts to them.

The Tibetans who were born in India, or who came over as little kids from Tibet in 1959, they grew to love India as an expression of Bollywood. Their cultural frame of reference is the amazingly kitch, bizarre, New Indian culture, with Amitabh Bachan (India's answer to Arnold) as a culture hero. These Tibetans never got to know under-the-surface India, like an Indian kid would. All the New Tibetans know about India is the thin veneer of the commercial pop drek.

It would be like somebody coming to America from Tibet and thinking that Dallas and Dynasty TV shows from the 1980's are documentaries, really ARE the REAL America and dressing like that, talking like that. So the New Tibetans have this strange culture that came out of Bollywood, which came out of Hollywood. The lamas to this new generation are about as real and meaningful as Santa Claus.

There is incredible contempt for Westerners among the Tibetans. They don't like anybody who isn't Tibetan, although with the New Tibetan kids, I did see admiration for New Taiwanese kids because there was a sense of similar features and similar materialism.

Before leaving Clement Town and going to live in Rajpur, I went sweater vending several times with my neighbors in Clement Town just for fun. Because I speak both Tibetan and Hindi I sat with them observing their business transactions. The Tibetans would say in Hindi as they held up the wool sweaters that were sent by Americans to India as part of the charity to Bangladesh, "This is the best, most pure," and in Tibetan they would say "shit" or "straw". The Indians thought the Tibetans were saying "wool" in Tibetan because almost no Indians speak any Tibetan, but almost all Tibetans living in India speak some Hindi.

The Tibetan business traders were all making fun of their Indian customers in this devious, nasty, contemptuous way. All done with a smiling face! There was this mask of friendliness and warmth and then the reality of ridicule and seething anger underneath. That was shocking to me. This was not a one off experience, this was one in a thousand such experiences with Tibetans over a ten year period.

The next 4 years, from 1981 to the end of 1985, I lived and worked in Delhi and knew many working Tibetans there from all over the subcontinent: from the South, from Darjeeling, from Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Dharamsala, Manali ... and there was this ongoing contempt for Westerners' adoration of the lamas, of Westerners period, who were denigrated as hippies if they didn't look like John Travolta and his dancing partner in Saturday Night Fever, which is what the young Tibetan kids aspired to, and if a Westerner did dress well they were spoken about as whores or somebody to try and get as a "sponsor". This contempt for Westerners and no curiosity about Western culture in any way, was echoed by many lamas I spoke with, like the administrator ‘rinpoches’ at the New Delhi Tibet Center.

At the same time, young Tibetans who lusted after polyester pants a la Travolta, were somewhat horrified when Westerners were interested in wearing yak herder boots! LOL!

So ... all this mess over a decade added up to a deep distaste for Tibetan anything, thankas, cultural symbols. How could I feel comfortable around people who have so much contempt for everybody else, while they kept their hand out for everybody else's money and real estate, and adoration? These people EXPECTED to be worshipped, pitied, pampered, cared about, paid for, idolized, when they were just greedy takers, who sneered at those who gave to them!

So, if you talk about "Dakini Day" with some sort of reverence, and think it's just because the lamas betrayed my trust due to having been sexually abused as a kid, and that's why it isn't something I like or value, no, I learned on MANY levels over 30 years not to like Tibetan culture.

To me, you had a feminist get-together in a kind of New Age ceremony. That kind of thing's not my cup of tea really. I really don't like anything spiritual in any kind of group. Something catalytically happens in a group which just doesn’t feel healthy to me as part of my sense of the 'spiritual', whatever that is.

If a bunch of women want to get together to grok the cosmic nature of the universe, or have a sort of ceremony, okay, I wish you enjoyment. But to call it "Dakini Day" isn't something I like. It makes me feel uncomfortable to talk with you about it because it is something that IS meaningful to you. That's your thing.

What pleases me is privately connecting with what I think of as a "truth path", which has been formed in part from my studies of Buddhist teachings I received in person and studied further in private, as well as 17 years studying Western psychology. That truth path also means for me enjoying conversation, art, walking, being in nature quietly, studying science, reading, occasional meditation, resting my mind in a loving awareness that is democratic, non-theistic, part American, part Buddhist, and when I can remember to do so, being in the moment, feeling deeply connected with the universe.

Phew. All this came pouring out this afternoon. I didn't expect to go on such a long ramble. It feels healing to get all the gory details out, to speak about this really and also start to think about what I think is the baby not to be thrown out with the bath water. For me the whole Dakini thing was flushed down the toilet. It’s not even in the bathwater, LOL! What is the bathwater to me is Tibetan culture.

If I've bored the daylights out of you Tiger Lily or anybody else here with my verbosity, my apologies, this has been a sort of purging, getting it out in words, healing for me.

all the best,
AmLearning

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 08, 2011 5:45 pm

http://www.swamishyam.com/globe_article.htm

The Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 3, 2001

Sex and the 'celibate' swami

Allegations of long-term sexual impropriety against an Indian guru with a largely Canadian following have rocked his tranquil ashram.


JOHN STACKHOUSE reports from Kullu, in the shadow of the Himalayas, that Swami Shyam's flock has begun to shrink

By John Stackhouse High in India's Valley of the Gods,

Image


There is only one god and today he is presiding over a crowd of Canadians, who believe they, too, can become god, if only they shed all they have known.

Most have already left comfortable homes in places such as Westmount, North Vancouver and Rosedale and taken vows of celibacy to focus their energies. Many have walked away from corporate jobs, academic careers and positions in their family firms.

Here at the International Meditation Institute, the very idea of family takes on new meaning as devotees shed their family names -- names such as Mulroney, Rosenberg and Reitman -- for a new Sanskrit identity.

It is all meant to bring one closer to the eternal state of pure-bliss-consciousness, Swami Shyam explains to the 70 people who have gathered in the open-air theatre of his ashram, or religious retreat, for the daily satsang,or teaching.

"In whose hands is your birth? In whose hands is your death?" he asks. "In whose hands does your river flow?"

The people in the crowd nod appreciatively and return the smile of their white-bearded guru as he proceeds to chisel away at their upbringing. They are prisoners of materialism and ambition, and of carnal desires. But most of all, they are prisoners of their minds. The mind creates dreams, he explains. And dreams destroy.

"Mind is the dreamer, friends," Swami Shyam says. "And if you think you will find a true friend in the world who will be truthful, you will have no friend on Earth."

Some of the devotees shift uncomfortably under their fleece blankets, for today's message is more than the swami's usual lessons of eternal bliss. Today's message hints at the more fleeting troubles of sex, money and scandal, and how they are tearing his following apart.

Over the past two years, Swami Shyam's largely Canadian following based in the mountain town of Kullu has dwindled amid accusations that the supposedly celibate guru has been engaged sexually for decades with his most attractive female devotees, and that some of his disciples in Canada used meditation centres in Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg to lure young women into a form of sexual devotion.

Swami Shyam strongly denied the accusations, but five women now living in North America and Europe have given detailed accounts of what they allege were long-running affairs with the man.

Those who have left the ashram believe that the swami has broken one of the main principles of their meditation movement -- that celibacy, in an ancient Hindu ascetic tradition, is essential to channelling bodily energy to a spiritual quest.

They also believe that the guru abused his authority over many followers and neglected others, including a group of Canadian youths who grew up at the ashram and were involved in drug abuse.

"There was a group-think, 100 per cent, and it's still going on," said a businesswoman and former devotee who says she had sex with the swami a number of times. She said she is more concerned about the ashram's devotional culture. "The problem since time immemorial is that we continually search for a deity in human form that we can look up to so that we don't have to take responsibility for ourselves. My greatest lesson from Kullu was that no one knows what is better for me than myself. In Kullu, everyone has given up that right."

At first glance, the ashram appears to be the ideal blend of East and West, with so much to comfort the body and soul that devotees have come to joke about their meditation centre as "Club Med."

It is located on a congested road that may have been bucolic 30 years ago but today carries the cacophony and diesel clouds of urban sprawl. On either side are grocers, Internet cafés and shawl merchants catering to the steady flow of Indian travellers who come to vacation in the area, called the Valley of the Gods for its proximity to the white-capped Himalayas.

Of course, the region is equally famous for its ready supply of hashish and marijuana, but those are influences the gated ashram has long tried to keep out.

On a landing built above the road and overlooking the raging Beas River, the devotees gather for their daily lesson. Afterward, a lucky few will be invited to attend a private meditation session with the swami or to join him for his afternoon tea.

The rest retire to long mountain hikes or a tennis match, and later to dinner parties in their renovated chalets, set amid orchards on the mountainside.

Some devotees have managed to bring their professions with them, using Kullu as a base for freelance writing, art design, filmmaking and, in one man's case, legal advice. A few have written books about meditation, adding to the institute's claim that it is a centre of higher learning, not just a retreat.

Blending spiritual quests with material needs has long been a tradition in India's ashrams, which are found in every corner of the country, wherever a self-styled guru can assemble some disciples. In the 1960s, the Beatles sought enlightenment at an ashram in the northern town of Rishikesh, under the guidance of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

But sex scandals have become common as well, despite an ancient Hindu custom that calls for chastity among religious students and their teachers.

In 1980, Bhagwan Rajneesh, a guru with a penchant for Rolls-Royces and beautiful young women, moved his flock from India to Oregon. He wound up being convicted of immigration fraud and deported back to India, where he died in 1990.

More recently, a politically influential god-man, Sai Baba, has been accused of sexually abusing several European followers.

But no guru has won more Canadian admirers than has Swami Shyam, himself a former follower of the Beatles' Maharishi.

The swami's curious affair with Canada dates back to the early 1970s, when the former Indian public servant -- his full name is Shyam Srivastava -- visited Vancouver as a member of the Transcendental Meditation movement.

There, he gathered his first followers, largely well-off youths who were riding the tail end of the hippie movement. One was Scott Stirling, whose father, Geoff, the Newfoundland media magnate, was so impressed with the swami that he gave him a late-night spot on his Montreal station, CHOM-FM.

Soon, the swami had enough followers to return to India and build his own ashram, where he taught the young Canadians to shed their material-driven identities for a pursuit of enlightenment, the eternal state that he claimed he achieved in childhood. He placed particular emphasis on the concept of "oneness," that all people are one with god and the universe -- in short, that we all are god.

The pitch has enabled the swami to assemble among his followers Barbara Mulroney, the sister of former prime minister Brian Mulroney; the retail-chain heiress Ellen Reitman; Ellen Rosenberg, daughter of a wealthy retired Ontario judge; and two sons of retired general and Second World War hero Sydney Radley-Walters.

Many of the swami's devotees said they did not know of the sexual allegations until recently, and still do not believe them. Yet in almost every case, the guru has gained an extraordinary influence over their lives.

"I think I was just very naive," said Ann Craig, a former devotee who asked that her maiden name be used. She said she was so impressed by the swami that she did not think to question him when, she alleges, he invited her to his bedroom while staying in her home during a trip to the West in 1981. She was 41. He was 58.

"I was flattered," Ms. Craig said of her alleged first sexual encounter with the swami. "Very stupidly, I thought maybe I was unique. I was very surprised. I remember I was pretty overwhelmed. He just asked me to lock the door. It didn't seem odd. It was happening. I just accepted it, that it was an amazing happening."

She then visited the swami at his Kullu ashram and returned every year until 1985, when the alleged sexual liaisons stopped. "Every time I went to India, it would always happen at least once," she said. "I can honestly say this is somebody I loved."

Other women said they, too, fell in love with their spiritual guide and saw his alleged sexual advances as part of their development. But like Ms. Craig, the women interviewed said they eventually discovered that they were not the only ones.

"I never understood why it needed to go that way," Ms. Craig said of the alleged sexual encounters. "I once asked him and he said something about divine will, that he was a puppet at the end of the string. That was the only explanation that he gave.

"But he insisted it be kept secret. He said he would be crucified if the others found out, that it would never be understood." Although she continued to return to the ashram until 1998, she did not reveal her alleged affair to anyone, especially not to her two teenaged children, who had gone with her to Kullu and stayed until 1999, living off a $110,000 trust fund from their father. (A third child did not go to India.)

Only last summer did Ms. Craig's daughter, now 34, tell her that she also had had an affair with the swami, starting around the same time as her own ended.

"I saw him as god, so did all the people around me," Ms. Craig's daughter, who asked not to be identified, said in a letter to other former devotees. "It was a belief stronger than any in my life. I somehow by some outrageous serendipity had stumbled upon Jesus here in 20th-century India and I would do anything for him because he was the guardian of my soul, the one being in this fragmented universe who would be for my life and evolution."

Other women who say they have had sex with the guru said it never appeared seductive, that it was most often part of a meditation session in which he would request one of the devotees massage him.

"I believed him to be greater than a human being, that he couldn't possibly be subjected to human desires," said the businesswoman, who asked not to be named.

"There was no indication that he was a typical man, a Western man. He didn't handle it like a normal Western relationship. There was no seduction or courtship or attention made in normal ways that we're used to. I was able to say, 'Oh, he's not a normal human male, he's a sort of deity. And whatever he does is always for my evolution. He's making me one with him and his consciousness and awareness.' "

A Montreal women, who similarly asked that her identity not be revealed, said sexual contact began on her second visit to Kullu, when the swami invited her to his private room at night and asked her to remove her underwear and lift her skirt.

"It was often a quickie," she said. "He told you that he was purifying you, so you thought that this was the purpose of the sexual intercourse. He constantly created in us a sense of awe toward himself. For me, it was always the impression like he was having a cup of tea, he appeared to remain emotionally uninvolved, and then he would go back to reading his book or to some other activity."

Esme Hendrick-Wong, a Toronto textile merchant now based in Singapore, said she came to believe that it went much further than private sexual encounters.

Although the swami never approached her for sex, she said, she walked into a meditation session in the late 1980s and saw him rubbing his feet on one of her friend's exposed breasts. At least 20 other women were in the room, she said.

"From my conversation with her [the friend], she thought this was great," Ms. Hendrick-Wong said. "In private, it was open knowledge that he got massages, but I believe everybody should have massages. It's therapeutic. In no way did I think the massages were sexual."

How the swami gained such mental power over his devotees -- most of them well educated, financially comfortable and free from any sort of substance abuse -- is a matter of interpretation.

Some women say they were attracted to him, to his soft eyes, gentle humour and white beard that flows like a mountain glacier across his chest. Some say he manipulated them, pampering them with favours one day and then belittling them the next, especially at the satsang,where devotees take turns on a "hot seat" on stage next to the guru, who questions their spiritual thinking in front of the others.

Many also say they found comfort in him, an escape from troubled childhoods or marriages, or a lifetime of neglect. "If you have to put one thing in common with all of us, we all came from an unhappy family life," the businesswoman said. But there was more, she continued. "I watched him. I scrutinized him for three years before I was convinced of who I thought he was. He never seemed to falter. He really seemed to have something most people did not have. I had come to an understanding that he was greater than man, that he was god on Earth."

In every part of the ashram and every chalet, the swami's portrait can be seen on walls and mantels, next to espresso makers, even on bedside tables where a loved one's picture might be more appropriate. Some followers carry his picture in lockets. One woman boasted of writing a cheque to him for $25,000 because she loved him so.

On a chilly morning, the devotees sit around kerosene heaters, some bundled in Lands' End designer wear, awaiting the swami's entrance. A video crew gets ready to record his every word, which will be meticulously catalogued in the ashram's library of his thoughts. Several followers also prepare to take notes during his teaching, to review at night.

In the front row sit his wife and five grown children, perhaps a sign of family solidarity since he has not shared a house with them in nearly 20 years. Swami Shyam originally agreed to an interview on the condition that specific questions about the sexual allegations not be asked. Then, when the date of the interview was changed, he cancelled and wrote an angry e-mail.

"I, being the lover of the universe, am supposed to love all," he wrote. "But I have my own bathroom and have not to put my pee-stick into the pee-pots of women or try to abuse a minor who has been involved in experimenting in all that which young people are taught to do by certain members of their own group, where they are experimenting and smoking hash constantly."

He wrote that he would never reveal the names of drug abusers, but felt that they were making him the target of a smear campaign. "Sex is something that nobody sees, thus anyone without seeing anything can say, just by hearing something from someone," he wrote. "You also fall in this category. You have not seen me abusing anyone who just wanted to see what this sex is. Do you not know what sex is? I have five children and know what sex is. And who are the people who have produced children by me? Only my wife."

He signed the electronic letter: "With lots of love and appreciation for your half-intelligence, Swami Shyam."

At satsang,the swami emerges on stage, hands folded politely toward the audience as he approaches a throne-like chair positioned in front of a black circle on a wall, an object that is meant to focus the mind in meditation. He smiles and bows his head to familiar faces, and greets newcomers like a teacher on the first day of school.

Then, once a devotee has placed a cup of steaming tea at his side, he begins to talk. Without notes or interruption, he will speak for more than an hour about the idea of dreams and dreamers, weaving together musings on the earthquake in Gujarat state, the big Hindu festival known as the Kumbh Mela, and Bill Clinton's departure from the White House.

While meditation may be the swami's secret to life, he also apparently watches a lot of CNN.

The crowd laps up his every word -- one moment gasping at his deep thoughts, the next laughing at his jokes. There is no sign of dissent, except for the dwindling numbers. Where 200 or more people once vied for a seat close to the stage, there are now one-third that many, and several are people who have been here since the 1970s. It is hard to imagine where else they would go.

The schism is something the swami seems only willing to discuss in parables, today in the story of his own dream. In the dream, he says, invaders bent on destroying his following are about to storm the ashram. Although they bear arms, he tells the devotees to allow them to come, to breach the gates -- and then to smash their heads with rocks. The invaders are too close to fire, he explains, comparing the ensuing carnage to Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide in the 1970s.

This sudden burst of violent metaphor from the preacher of pure-bliss-consciousness seems to startle the crowd, but there is an explanation. The real danger, the swami says, is human ego, which of course must be transcended if one is to reach bliss.

Dan Chernin, who acts as general manager for the ashram, later plays down the dream sequence, saying he did not interpret it as a metaphor for war within the following.

He prefers to attribute the dissent to "a few bad apples," most notably a group of younger Canadian devotees who grew up in Kullu and became heavily involved in the local drug scene.

"The rift may be a rift, but the environment at least has been purified, in that the drug situation is gone," Mr. Chernin said.

He believes that some of the sexual allegations were concocted by the same group.

"We don't stand for that," he said. "We're working on a level of evolution that happiness comes from oneself, that one's nature is immortal. . . . Our way is not looking for gratification through the senses."

The son of a wealthy Cape Breton developer, Mr. Chernin was among the first to latch on to Swami Shyam when after university he travelled to Vancouver with Scott Stirling, who was a friend. Mr. Chernin was also with the first group to join the swami in Chandigarh, the Punjab state capital, where the guru lived, and then in Kullu, where they built the ashram.

By the 1980s, the ashram had grown from a collection of a few dozen rich kids to a large following of middle-aged professionals who increasingly wanted to escape the West's rat race.

But some families also started to grow worried about relatives there and alerted Indian officials in the hope of getting them to leave.

Hume Wright, a prominent diplomat in the 1960s, visited the ashram to try to persuade his daughter, Sheila, to come home. The woman was raising her young daughter at the ashram, where like other children there she was home-taught by various devotees.

According to Mr. Wright's son, Blake, who lives in Nova Scotia, the retired diplomat liked Swami Shyam, but at one point shouted at him for keeping his daughter and granddaughter in Kullu, and then returned to Canada alone. The elderly man, who was terminally ill, eventually committed suicide outside Ottawa.

"Obviously, his [Swami Shyam's] power to attract people and keep them was far beyond anything we could have imagined," said Blake Wright, who filed a complaint with the Indian High Commission in London but received no reply.

Another West Coast devotee, whose son grew up in the ashram and then tried to commit suicide after the family left, said he realized only after returning to Canada the psychological control the swami has over his followers. "The man had a power to show me spaces I had never seen before, not on drugs or anything. . . . I was in love with him, like a schoolgirl."

As the guru's following grew, devotees were allowed to return to the West and open meditation centres as a way of spreading his techniques, and to bring new recruits to Kullu.

After opening one such meditation centre in Montreal, Jean Bouchart D'Orval, a former Hydro-Québec engineer, said he discovered the power he could exert over his own students, whom he was soon seducing.

"The moment you set up and start speaking you have a special connection. You have a special air," he said. "People project their own energy, their own greatness, on the one who's sitting in front of them. This energy is impersonal, but it's the easiest thing in the world to take it personally and to follow up with personal relationships. . . . I don't know how many people I would have been involved with, because with many of them I was only flirtatious."

In 1993, after two women wrote to Swami Shyam to complain about Mr. D'Orval's behaviour, the guru reprimanded him during a visit. "He said these are things animals do. He referred specifically to bulls and bears, that this is what they did. He said I should save my energy. That was one of his favourite lines he gave to men."

Mr. D'Orval was allowed to continue to teach meditation. Some of the women who stayed in Kullu said they felt they could not leave, even as they heard more rumours about what had gone on in the swami's private room.

For those who thought of returning to Canada, the Montreal woman said, "he creates the illusion that you're failing, like you're going to hell and that you've been to heaven."

Although she said she was first involved sexually with the swami in the early 1980s, she stayed off and on until 1998, feeling at times like a psychological prisoner. "At times, I hated myself. I hated life."

In 1994, she was suicidal. One night, she sealed her chalet's windows, took a handful of Tylenol and went to turn on her gas stove. But she stopped herself, not for fear of death, she said. She was afraid her suicide would malign the ashram.

"I thought and was made to believe that such actions would make me incur the worst karma that one could incur and I would carry it from incarnation to incarnation," she explained. "Like a lot of women there, I needed attention, I needed love, I needed help."

Rumours continued, but in the spring of 1998, two separate events shook the community. First was the revelation that one of the original members, acting as an investment adviser to other devotees, had lost $4-million of their money through speculative investments.

The ashram responded by charging a daily fee for satsang, in the hope of raising funds for some of the victims. But instead the levy created a new sense of division between wealthy devotees and those who came to Kullu only with enough to live on.

Then came a suggestion that devotees should not talk publicly about the bizarre drowning of a young Montreal woman in the nearby Beas River. The woman had been travelling in India and stopped to visit a family friend at the ashram.

"Someone said swami told everyone not to speak of this," Ms. Hendrick-Wong said. "That smacked of total control. Something definitely had changed there." Local authorities did not link her drowning to the ashram -- a tragic number of young Westerners die, often from drug abuse, in the area -- and the Canadian High Commission later wrote a letter of thanks to Mr. Chernin for his work in getting the woman's body to New Delhi so that it could be returned to her family in Montreal.

For all that has happened at the ashram, many of the dissidents continue to respect Swami Shyam's powers. Ms. Hendrick-Wong considers him "psychic." Warren Taffel, a retired landscape designer in London who once led the swami's British wing but is no longer a follower, said he still thinks that the man "has a line to supreme knowledge."

"I had never found myself in the presence of a man who knew answers, and to a great extent I haven't changed that view," said Mr. Taffel, who has left behind a rented house full of possessions in Kullu.

Ms. Craig disagrees, as she watches two of her children, now in their 30s, and many of their friends struggling to rebuild their lives in the West. One young woman she knows in British Columbia is on antidepressant medication. Another young woman, who has relocated to the southern United States with her parents, still struggles with North American life, complaining of nightmares from her Kullu experiences and often unable to attend classes at college.

The swami's faithful deputies believe that in each case the parents are to blame. After all, they were the ones who chose to raise their children in a small Himalayan town, to keep them out of school and to ignore the fact that cheap drugs were easily obtained, before dropping them into North American society as young adults.

Some of the parents admit that perhaps they were naive. "In a way, it was the end of a dream because I actually thought that my children would be safe, that they would follow their souls. We all did," Ms. Craig said.

Back in Kullu, the few score people who stand behind Swami Shyam see light beyond the darkness of a community that has, in a way, turned on itself. Those who remain believe that they can now return to their original pursuit of enlightenment, unencumbered by charlatans and passers-by who at the height of the ashram's popularity may have diluted its strength.

"We're still driving on the road to Nirvana," said Stephen Aitkin, 47, a technical artist from Ottawa who divides his time in Kullu between meditation and serving clients through the Internet.

As satsang floats into its second hour, the guru of pure-bliss-consciousness remains seated cross-legged in his chair, working busily through a string of prayer beads as he weaves deftly from humour to insight, from CNN to Freud, carrying his enraptured audience with him.

One gets the impression that he could talk like this for days and no one would leave, but eventually, with lunch time nearing, the guru begins to sum up his thoughts on the deceit of dreaming. He offers his own denunciation, perhaps a code for the invaders rattling his gates.

"Peace is not in wine or whisky. Peace is not in smoke," he says before softening his voice to a whisper.

"Peace is in your life, eternal, unmoved. That is god. That I am." And with that, he is gone.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 09, 2011 8:53 am

Cross-posting to the Economic Aspects of "Love" thread:
Review of:

Vijay Prashad. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.


Current perceptions regarding South Asians in the United States are dominated by a multitude of stereotypes that collide and rebound against one another. South Asians are viewed as hardworking and potentially "productive" citizens but also as essentially different and distant from "American" life and culture. Although this form of othering may sound benign, it is part of a more complex form of racism that includes a portrait of the South Asian as a possible economic threat, willing to cheat honest Americans out of their livelihood (consider the depiction of Apu in The Simpsons).

Moreover, South Asian difference, though seemingly an innocent gesture of exoticization, can be used to deny civic and economic rights.
In his groundbreaking text, The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad effectively unpacks some of these stereotypes, providing an excellent historical contextualization of the many layers that determine the complex lives of South Asians. His book, as he puts it, is about "the feeling, the consciousness of being South Asian, of being desi (those people who claim ancestry of South Asia) in the United States. It is also a set of sutras (aphorisms) of the karma (fate) of desis, who must now imagine ourselves within the U.S. racial formation and seek to mediate between the dream of America and our realities" (viii). Prashad's book, however, is not just an archival resource or a series of community vignettes; it is also a call to action, striving "to address the dilemmas of desi life in the United States." In addition, the book "suggests passages to transform [desis'] current aporias" (ix).

One of the greatest strengths of the book is Prashad's historical overview of desi life in the United States and of desis' unique, evolving place in a white supremacist society. Prashad does an excellent job of tracing the roots of some of the racist notions that persist into contemporary times. An early example of racial othering, for instance, had been constructed by American writers, such as Emerson and Thoreau, who had portrayed the East as essentially spiritual and different. These views were exacerbated by turn of the century "popular orientalism," which "paraded out both the ghastly and beautiful mysteries of India as racial specimens that represented the multiplicity of Indian society, entertained U.S. residents, and validated the U.S. way of life in opposition to that deemed to be general in the East" (30). Some examples of these specimens included idols in personal museum collections, spectacles organized by the Barnum circuses, and the Ethnological Congress, which displayed people of "different and (lower) races" (30). Such spectacles were further sanctioned by the "Godmen of the fin-de-siècle who came from India to the United States" (40).

However, Prashad notes that many of these "godmen," including the most famous one, Swami Vivekananda, were disturbed by the American "tendency to view India as solely spiritual." In their eyes, this perception "obscured the devastation wrought on the subcontinent by capitalism and colonialism" (41). Prashad is particularly effective at demonstrating the continuing pattern of these perceptions by focusing at some length on the most prominent contemporary exponent of Indian "spirituality," Deepak Chopra. Chopra, according to Prashad, is a "sly baba" who "is the complete stereotype willed upon India by U.S. orientalism, for he delivers just what is expected of a seer from the East" (48). Unlike Vivekananda, however, Chopra "fails to mention the structural poverty of his homeland, nor does he offer any of criticism of capitalism" (48).
Continues at: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i2/chowdu.htm








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

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 09, 2011 9:40 am

Cross-posting to the Economic Aspects of "Love" thread:

http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/arch ... out-asians

Jane Iwamura, on Asian Religions without Asians

Submitted by Jane Iwamura on March 25, 2011

Image


Russell Brand, unpredictable and offbeat comic and husband to pop diva Katy Perry, is celebrity’s newest convert to Transcendental Meditation: an Asian-based spiritual practice popularized by Indian yogi Maharishi Mahesh in the 1960s. The coupling of Brand and Transcendental Meditation seems oxymoronic at best. But as the New York Times reports, Brand feels “Transcendental Meditation has been incredibly valuable to me both in my recovery as a drug addict and in my personal life, my marriage, my professional life.”

The Oriental Monk who made this all possible is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Those who remember him from the 1960s and '70s remember his long flowing hair, unruly beard, bare feet, wide grin, and brown skin. The dhoti-clad guru and his infectious giggle seemed to reflect the ethos of the hippie generation particularly well (“Enjoy! Enjoy!”). Maharishi’s face graced the pages of Time and Newsweek and his image became iconic for a generation.

American engagement with Asian religions has earlier precedents -- from Hindu and Buddhist influences in the works of Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to spiritual leanings of Theosophist Annie Besant. Widespread knowledge and acceptance of Asian religious alternatives did not take root, though, until the mid-20th century and especially during the seminal decade of the 1960s.

So how did the American fascination with meditation, yoga, the Dalai Lama, or even Mr. Miyagi and Yoda come about? How does an Asian religion gain entry into the American cultural imagination? Viewing Americans’ fascination with “Eastern spirituality” from this historical vantage point, we might offer the following pointers.


1. Have an icon. A focus on a specific guru or teacher -- an “Oriental Monk” figure -- is key. His philosophy and outlook are important; but perhaps more significant are his Asian face, mannerisms, and style of dress. Such visual cues help authorize an Asian spiritual movement and practice.

2. Networking, networking, networking. The Oriental Monk has to have celebrity friends. Asian religions really gained exposure and popularity when D.T. Suzuki and Zen Buddhism were embraced by John Cage, Beat writers, and the New York art scene. Similarly, the Maharishi capitalized on his association with the Beatles, Mia Farrow, and the Beach Boys. And of course, we are all familiar with the Dalai Lama and his celebrity network.

3. Be user-friendly. The successful Oriental Monk must market his views and practice as something that requires minimal time and energy and easily conforms to one’s lifestyle. It should make little demands on the practitioner and be easily consumable. Religious commitment is not really a factor, since these Oriental Monks present their spiritual alternatives as universally inspired, scientifically-based, or solely philosophical. Asian-inspired religions in the Oriental Monk’s entrepreneurial hands and within the American imagination become no religion at all.



I am being a bit facetious here. However, historical research and current events demonstrate that my observations are not completely off the mark. The newfound spirituality of Russell Brand fits all most of these characteristics. First of all, it is easy. Transcendental Meditation “prescribes two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day of silently repeating a one-to-three syllable mantra, so that practitioners can access a state of what is known as transcendental consciousness.” No sweat.

TM has celebrity endorsements. Aside from our latest religious trendsetting celebrity there’s also Clint Eastwood, Moby, Jerry Seinfeld, Russell Simmons, Howard Stern, and of course TM’s most engaged spokesperson, David Lynch. Lynch, who began meditating in the late 1960s when TM was all the rage, founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace (DLF), to introduce TM in public schools, prisons, homeless shelters, and among Native Americans and military personnel. He continues the tradition of star-powered spirituality begun by the Maharishi himself. TM officials deny the influence of their famous followers, though. Robert Roth, Vice-President of Lynch’s foundation protests that, “No one is going to meditate twice a day because a Hollywood filmmaker is doing it.” Sure. At any rate, such celebrity networks and the media attention they draw have kept the movement alive.

But Mahesh is strangely absent from Transcendental Meditation’s most recent incarnation. His likeness appears nowhere on the David Lynch Foundation website (a brief reference to the yogi is tucked away in a FAQ). And the official TM website is not much better. Mahesh’s image appears as a small icon at the top of the homepage, indicative of his shrinking significance.

It's Asian religions without Asians.

Now you can say that Transcendental Meditation was never an Indian religion (or a religion at all, as some of its followers would argue). That the Maharishi always had global ambitions or (put more nicely) universal appeal. Or that the contemporary movement seeks to distance itself from a leader whose image is plagued by suspect motives and material concerns.

All these statements are true. However, the bigger picture remains. Western practitioners appropriate what they want and need from Asian religious traditions. While TM proponents might eschew any formal connections to an established faith (most notably Hinduism) and downplay the Vedic roots of its practice, they certainly enjoy the thin veneer of Asian-ness that coats the movement. (A large part of TM’s attraction is the “mantra” -- a term imbued with Eastern mysticism and intrigue.) Asian-ness is invoked at will.

Ultimately, the Oriental Monk or guru is seen as a remnant of a dying (or dead) civilization: the last of his kind. Those in the West (à la David Lynch or Richard Gere) see themselves as the only ones who are able to appreciate the Monk’s ancient wisdom and as the tradition’s appointed heirs. Asians and Asians American certainly are not fit to play a prominent role. Or so the fiction goes.

Asian Americans have tried to challenge this narrative, along with the decoupling of Asian religions from the rich traditions from which they emerge and the vibrant ethnic communities in which they are practiced. Most recently, the Hindu American Foundation (based in Minneapolis) launched its “Take Back Yoga” campaign aimed at reconnecting the meditative practice with its Hindu roots and context. The campaign provoked a strong and often vociferous response. While the HAF’s essentialized re-presentation of yoga may also suffer from a lack of historical nuance, the Indian American organization does rightly point out the erasure of Asians from the larger religious picture.

The truth of the matter is that Asians have carried their religious traditions to the US for well over a century and continue to maintain thriving Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim communities. But again, this presence is rarely seen or highlighted. Instead, we have to settle for a single acclaimed Oriental Monk at a time, who serves to make the movement legitimate but is eventually made obsolete and fades from the American scene. The Maharishi died in 2008, but he has been reincarnated as David Lynch -- still quirky, yet wholly assimilated for the American scene.

* * *



Prof. Jane Iwamura is the author of Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (Oxford, 2010). She also co-edited the volume Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Routledge, 2003).


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

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 09, 2011 1:12 pm

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.c ... acles.html

Mind Control: A COURSE IN MIRACLES - A CIA/UNITY CHURCH THOUGHT MANIPULATION DEVICE
http://www.hometown.aol.com

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from Tal Levesque's Research Services
June 11, 2007

‘Creating a mythos’ to control people. Program of psychological warfare (PSYOP) or ‘Mind War’. ...

A Course in Miracles (also referred to as ACIM or "the Course"), [originally published in 1975] is a book considered by its students to be their "spiritual path".

According to Dr. Helen Schucman and the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP), Dr. Helen Schucman and Dr. William Thetford "scribed" the book by means of a process coming from a divine source through a form of channeling which Schucman referred to as "inner dictation". Schucman described the divine source of her channeling as none other than the person of Jesus Christ.

Well.... Dr. William Thetford, headed the CIA's "Mind Control" MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory, while at Columbia University between 1971-1978.

Dr. Thetford’s Professional Bio, also available on the A Course in Miracles web site, makes reference to his involvement in a Personality Theory Research Project while Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University, but the information does not specifically cite this as a CIA MK- ULTRA SubProject.

ce399.typepad.com...

There is a connection between Unity Church, "A Course In Miracles", MK-ULTRA Artichoke Subproject 130 ; Scientology ; the UFO Myth and the Stanford Research Institute.

"A Course in Miracles" was a CIA manipulation device.

It was an experiment orchestrated by the CIA/US government.

Many were DAMAGED by it.

It was implemented by Bill Thetford (an agent of the CIA) at Columbia University.

Search for info on Thetford and MKUltra (the government's well-documented mind-control program) to find more.

The agenda, according to those interested in this sphere of investigation, is to inflitrate and dilute the American left with New Age ideas and inward-focussed, anti-rational religious movements.

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•••••••
The Making of 'A Course in Miracles'

Excerpt from : http://www.beliefnet.com...

William Thetford, also a Columbia professor, was a mysterious character, and "probably the most sinister person I ever met," the priest recalled. Only after he retired from teaching did Thetford's Columbia colleagues (who knew him best as a rare-books expert) discover that all during the years they worked with him, the man had been employed as an agent of the CIA--one who was, among other things, present at the first fission experiment conducted by physicists assigned to the Manhattan Project. Thetford also was "the most religious atheist I have ever known," Groeschel recalled, and conceived a great enthusiasm for A Course in Miracles, personally arranging for its publication. Schucman was embarrassed, Groeschel remembered, and confided to the priest her fear that the book would create a cult, which of course it did.

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Groeschel initially read the Course as "religious poetry," but grew steadily more negative in his assessment of it as the years passed and sales of the three volumes passed into the millions of copies. From his point of view, A Course in Miracles served to undermine authentic Christianity more effectively than just about any other work he could recall, and while he was inclined to reject the position of St. John of the Cross that "these things are diabolical unless proven otherwise," doubts had crept in over the years. Most troubling to him by far was the "black hole of rage and depression that Schucman fell into during the last two years of her life," the priest explained. She had become frightening to be with, Groeschel recalled, spewing psychotic hatred not only for A Course in Miracles but "for all things spiritual." When he sat at Schucman's bedside as she lay dying, "she cursed, in the coarsest barroom language you could imagine, `that book, that goddamn book.' She said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her. I mean, she raised the hair on the back of my neck. It was truly terrible to witness."

(END OF QUOTE)

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread286946/pg1
•••••••
William Thetford

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thetford

William N. Thetford, Ph.D. (April 23, 1923–July 4, 1988) was trained as a psychologist, and remained professionally active in this field throughout his life. Thetford worked in a collaborative venture with Dr. Helen Schucman in writing A Course In Miracles (ACIM), and also with its initial edits. [1] He died in 1988, aged 65, in Tiburon, California, after having made his involvement with the ACIM material and its study the most central focus of his life.

Early childhood

Thetford was born on April 23, 1923 in Chicago, Illinois to John R. and Mabel K. Thetford as the youngest of three children. At the time of his birth and early childhood, his parents were both regular members of the Christian Science Church. At the age of seven, the untimely death of his older sister caused his parents to disavow their affiliation with the Church of Christian Science. Afterwards, for the next few years, Thetford sampled various other Protestant denominations.

At the age of nine he contracted a severe case of scarlet fever, which led to rheumatic fever and a debilitating heart condition. These resulting health problems forced him to spend the next three years at home recuperating. During his forced recuperation period he took advantage of the many free hours, using the time to satisfy his voracious appetite for reading. Despite his absence from the classroom, he entered high school at the age of twelve.

University education

Following graduation from high school, he was awarded a four-year scholarship to DePauw University in Indiana where he graduated with majors in psychology and pre-medicine in 1944. During the course of his university studies, Thetford eventually settled on the idea of specializing in psychology, and in 1949 he received his Ph.D. in this field from the University of Chicago.

While he was a student during the early 1940s he served for a time as an administrative assistant for the Manhattan Project, the World War II atom bomb development project.[citation needed] The Metallurgical Laboratory where the first atomic reactor was assembled was located under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago during those years. In his graduate studies he was fortunate to be one of the first students of the renowned psychologist, Carl Rogers.

Career and hiring of Dr. Helen Schucman

For the next five years after his graduation in 1949, Thetford worked as a research psychologist in both Chicago, and later in Washington, DC. According to Dr Colin Ross, from 1951 to 1953 Thetford worked on Project BLUEBIRD, an early CIA mind control program [2]. He spent 1954 and 1955 as the director of clinical psychology at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. From 1955 to 1957 he was an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University's CIA-funded[3] Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology[4].

In 1958 he accepted an assistant professorship, which later developed into a full professorship, at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. During a portion of this same period he also served as the director of clinical psychology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. It was here that he would stay for the next 20 years, and it was here that he first met and hired Dr. Helen Schucman, hiring her as a research psychologist and assistant.

Thetford's "Invitation" for ACIM

The working relationship between Thetford and Schucman was apparently often somewhat strained, yet throughout these difficulties they would always maintain a certain level of professional courtesy and respect for one another. The story is often retold that it was into this environment of inter-relational strain between Thetford and Schucman that the ACIM material was in a sense first “invited” into this world. This “invitation” came in the form of an exclamation by Thetford one day, in the midst of one of their periodic difficulties, in which Thetford exclaimed, “There must be another way!” This exclamation was followed by a certain speech he made to Schucman describing how he believed that it was time for them to try to refocus their energies on constructive and helpful agendas, rather than being forever hyper critical and hyper competitive with one another. Expecting a typically condescending response from Schucman, the studied silence that followed his speech was then followed by a most surprising concurrence from Schucman, fully supporting his new proposal. This speech was given in June of 1965.[5][6]

The next four months were filled with a number of unusually vivid dream sequences and even some unusual waking experiences for Schucman.

Amongst her vivid dream sequences, she began to become familiar with a certain internal character who spoke to her as Jesus in her dreams. Little did she know that the voice of this dream character would soon come to dominate the rest of her life. Many of her unusual experiences during these four months are recorded in the biographical work, ‘Absence from Felicity’, by Kenneth Wapnick.[7] Schucman appears to have confided her experiences with Thetford, who acted as a sort of a calming, encouraging and stabilizing influence for Schucman during this period.

The years of ACIM transcription

Finally in October of that year, the transcriptions of what is now known as ACIM first began. According to both Thetford and Schucman, due to Schucman’s intensely divided feelings about the work of the transcription, Schucman would at times require a great deal of reassurance from Thetford in order to complete the process that eventually resulted in the first typewritten copy of ACIM, (which later became known as the Urtext).

According to Thetford, Schucman was sitting at home on the night of October 21st, 1965, when she heard an internal "voice" say to her, "This is a course in miracles. Please take notes." When she first heard this internal voice, she thought she recognized it as the same voice of the dream-sequence character that in her recent dream sequences had represented the person of Jesus to her. Schucman then wrote down about a page of notes before she realized that this request was going to be of much greater significance, and would require a far greater commitment in time than it had ever asked of her before. In a panic, she phoned Thetford to ask for his advice. Thetford encouraged Schucman to do what the voice asked, and to take the notes. He offered to meet with her the next morning before work, to review her notes, to discuss them further with her, and then to determine what she should do with this "Voice".[8]

On the following morning, after Thetford's review of the notes, he was so impressed with what she read to him that he encouraged Schucman to continue with the note taking. Schucman was initially taken aback by Thetford's reaction, but then apparently after giving herself enough time to recover from her initial jitters to honestly review the notes herself, she agreed. Soon they recognized that the notes, which eventually became ACIM (referred to as The Course by ACIM students), was their answer, the "other way" that they had agreed to find together four months earlier.

Classifying this transcription process as one of Schucman’s unusual waking experiences is an understatement at best. During the process Schucman claimed to have the mental equivalent of a tape recorder in her thoughts, which she described as being able to turn on and off at will, at her convenience, so that she might be able to transcribe into shorthand notes, what she was internally hearing. This voice identified itself as none other than the historical Jesus.

During the beginning of this process, one of Thetford’s gentle complaints was, “In the beginning I spent most of my time while typing these notes with one hand on the typewriter and the other on Helen’s shoulder”. After some months of experiencing an initial struggle in this process, eventually they both began to experience less subconscious resistance to the process, and the initial transcription began to move along more smoothly.

From 1965 through 1972 Thetford directly assisted Schucman with the transcription of the first three sections of the work, which was in fact the great bulk of the material. Then in 1972, somewhat to both of their reliefs (yet on some levels to their dismay) it appeared that the writing was complete, which for the most part it was.

In 1972 Thetford and Schucman were first introduced to Dr. Kenneth Wapnick whom they later invited to assist them with the voluminous amount of editing that was required to render the rough draft of the ACIM manuscript into a publishable format. Wapnick readily accepted this invitation, and was eventually instrumental in assisting them in accomplishing this task. Thetford, Wapnick and Schucman, the three principle transcriber-editors of ACIM were to remain friends for the rest of their lives, throughout the arduous process of seeing this manuscript through to first successful publication, and beyond to witness the initial spreading of its teachings.

After the completion of the bulk of the initial scribing/ transcribing process, for brief periods during 1973, 1975, and 1977 the short transcriptions of Psychotherapy,[9] of Clarification of Terms, and of the Song of Prayer,[9] which are the remainder of the standard material of ACIM, were transcribed in similar fashion.

From 1971 to 1978 Thetford, along with David Saunders, headed the CIA mind control Project MKULTRA Subproject 130: Personality Theory. [10] [11]

Move to California

In 1978 Thetford resigned from his positions at both Columbia University and at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. In 1980 he packed up his household, and at the apparent invitation of Judith Skutch Whitson, moved to Tiburon California, where Whitson was by now employed full time in the publication and distribution of ACIM.

Now at age 57, in Tiburon Thetford transitioned into a sort of semi-retirement, no longer accepting any demanding positions of heavy responsibility in either his professional life, or in his involvement with the ever growing readership of ACIM. In California Thetford took on two part time professional positions; one as a psychology consultant at Travis Air Force Base and the other as one of the directors of the ACIM related Center for Attitudinal Healing in Tiburon, as offered to him by his friend and fellow student of ACIM, Dr. Gerald Jampolsky.

Here in California, Thetford spent the final eight years of his life, regularly attending meetings of fellow ACIM students where ACIM principles would be discussed, but only rarely engaging in these discussions in any kind of an authoritative manner. Instead, during this final period of his life, he appears to have been primarily concerned with his own personal study of the ACIM material, and with enriching his own grasp of its message. Still, some of his interchanges with his associates during this period are somewhat illuminating.

Anecdotal accounts of Thetford's California life

During one such interchange with his friend Judith Skutch Whitson[12], Whitson describes calling Thetford during a moment of extremely high tension in her relationship with Jampolsky. In the phone conversation Whitson went on at length, describing what she perceived to be Jampolski’s many faults. Thetford listened intently until Whitson finally ran out of breath. He then quietly said, "Judy, the Course (ACIM) can be summed up in the question, 'Are you willing to see your brother sinless?' "
"No!" Whitson screamed.

"Well, dear," Thetford replied, "when you are, you will feel much better." And then he hung up!

On July 4th, 1988, at age 65 Thetford died of a massive heart attack. In this instance another illuminating account, related to this, is told by Whitson. According to Whitson, just prior to Thetford’s heart attack, she and Thetford had been having an interesting conversation. Thetford explained to Whitson that he was feeling particularly good on this July 4th, because for some reason he felt especially ‘independent and liberated’ on this day. He then went out for a ‘short’ walk, but never returned.

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Notes

^ The Scribing of A Course in Miracles. Foundation for Inner Peace. Retrieved on 2007-04-29.
^ Ross, Colin (2000). Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personalities by Psychiatrists. Manitou Communications.
^ Marks, John (1991). The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN-10: 0393307948; ISBN-13: 978-0393307948.Available online [1]
^ Price, David H. (June 2007). "Buying a piece of anthropology - Part 1: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA". . Anthropology Today, Vol 23 No 3, June 2007 Available online [2].
^ Wapnick, Kenneth (1991). Absence from Felicity, pp. 93 ff
^ Foundation for Inner Peace, The Scribing of A Course in Miracles
^ pp. 97-131
^ ibid., p. 199
^ a b (1996) Supplements to A Course in Miracles: 1. Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice 2. The Song of Prayer. Viking Adult. ISBN 0-670-86994-5.
^ RA: MKULTRA de-classified documents
^ Dr. Willian N, Thetford Vita
^ Jessuph, Joe Miracle_Studies


References

Wapnick, Kenneth (1999). Absence from Felicity: The Story of Helen Schucman and Her Scribing of A Course in Miracles, 2nd Ed., New York:

Foundation for A Course in Miracles. ISBN 0-933291-08-6.

Miller, D. Patrick (Aug 1997). Complete Story of the Course. Fearless Books. ISBN 0-9656809-0-8.

Skutch, Robert (1996). Journey Without Distance: The Story Behind A Course in Miracles. Mill Valley: Foundation for Inner Peace. ISBN 1-883360-02-1.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 10, 2011 10:19 am

Cross-posted to the Economic Aspects of "Love" thread:

http://eriswish.wordpress.com/2010/04/2 ... ientalism/

Shopping for Dharma- Eastern religions, consumerism and orientalism
By Dan


In his book Orientalism, Edward Said argued of a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture.
dharmic religions and cultures have long been subject to various forms of Orientalism in the West, both objectifying the East in a negative or a positive way.

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Heinrich Dumoulin who has published much work on Zen Buddhism and has served as a professor in Tokyo, argued that when Buddhism was introduced into the West during the 19th century, the rationalist thinkers of Europe thought that they have found their desired philosophy or rationality which was without God, without heaven and hell, without soul. but upon researching Buddhism, it was obvious that Buddhism also included the supernatural (and what they considered irrational) phenomena such as saints and miracles, veneration of images and relics, magic and other forms of what was considered superstition. he argued that in order to truly understand Buddhism one must understand it in the context of its native lands in Asia.

On the other hand Dr Judith Snodgrass argues in her book: Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition, confronts the widespread view that Asian societies are objectified and filtered through Western thought. in her book she claims that it was the Buddhists who have labored in transforming Buddhism into a modern philosophy.

Stephen Batchelor, an author, teacher and scholar of Buddhism who has practiced Buddhism in Dharamsala and South Korea said of the background to the emergence of Buddhology:

Throughout the course of the 18th century three interconnected factors were gestating that would help give birth to what we know as ‘Buddhism’. These were the emergence of the rationalist Enlightenment, the decline of religious authority and the consolidation of colonialism.

While the colonial and missionary factor might have given Buddhism and Hinduism a negative image in Europe initially during the 19th century, as a naive philosophy, or in the form of corrupted priesthoods and wild and outlandish beliefs, the rationalism and emerging counter thought to religion in Europe also brought another form of Orientalism. Buddhism was introduced to Europe when the continent was experiencing dramatic social, political and technological changes. relations were conceived between Buddhism and modern science. dharmic ideas such as rebirth were seen as compatible with evolution and the biological vision that Darwin introduced into Europe in the 19th century. Buddhism was used as a force that together with the new biological views could tackle Christianity in Europe.

Buddhism was accommodated to European physics. a recent recycling of this phenomenon might be seen in the popular metaphysical use of quantum mechanics and Buddhism.

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When it comes to the media, Hollywood has been presenting a Utopian Himalayan existence for decades to Western viewers, and the lamas of Tibet have been presented to the American consumer while fitting a certain image.

While Tibet was once subject to the quest of the Aryan prototype by the Third Reich and Aryan traces were sought after in India’s treasure of Sanskrit, now Tibetan religion and Tibetans themselves became an embodiment of ideals in the face of a Chinese oppressor.

The mystification and idealization of the East in Western thought has taken on a consumerism approach on many levels, the challenges and social problems of societies who practice dhamric religions seem to be detached by the image religions such as Buddhism receive in the West, social problems such as the gender discrimination by Buddhist institutions in Asia, or persecution of minorities seem to be a world apart from the harmony of Shangri-La.

In many ways, popular culture has had different phases in depicting Buddhism and the east, at first in the spirit of European orientalism as primitive, then as intellectual, and later as mystical. these forms of objectifying are in fact draining the human factor out of Buddhists or Hindus and places them in a line of Western consumerism. Eastern religions and societies are having certain aspects of them exposed and moderated into pleasent movements and philosophies in the West, while the human capacity to engage in social or political strife seem to be filtered out. this leaves societies in Asia dehumanized and places eastern religions as a product to shop for in the grand bazaar of religions. this product is robbed of its indigenous elements, and the real life challenges and social dilemmas it experiences throughout Asia.[/quote]
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 10, 2011 10:22 am


The wicked are wicked no doubt, and they go astray, and they fall, and they come by their desserts. But who can tell the mischief that the very virtuous do?

—William Makepeace Thackeray
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 10, 2011 1:27 pm

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

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


CHAPTER XVI

COCKROACH YOGA

(YOGI BHAJAN)




YOGI BHAJAN WAS THE SIKH FOUNDER of 3HO, the nonprofit “Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization,” headquartered in Los Angeles.

Born in the Punjab, he worked as a customs agent in New Delhi before emigrating with his wife to North America in 1968, at age thirty-nine, to teach kundalini and white tantric yoga there.

White tantra is used “to purify and uplift the being,” as opposed to black, which is “for mental control of other people,” or red, which is “for sexual energy and senses” or for demonstrating miracles (S. Khalsa, 1996).

Yogi Bhajan has said that kundalini yoga will be the yoga of the Aquarian Age and will be practiced for the next five thousand years (in Singh, 1998a).

Guru Terath Singh Khalsa, who is [Bhajan’s] lawyer and spokesman, says that Bhajan is “the equivalent of the pope” (Time, 1977).

Yogi Bhajan is unique among spiritual teachers because he is also the Mahan Tantric of this era. This means that he is the only living master of white tantric yoga in the world, since there can only be one on the planet at any given time. He is a world teacher, a very special instrument whom God has appointed and anointed to awaken the millions of sleeping souls on this planet (S. Khalsa, 1996).

The idea that Bhajan is actually the “Mahan Tantric of this era” via any recognized lineage, however, has been questioned by some of his detractors.

In any case, Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, Melissa Etheridge, Cindy Crawford, Courtney Love and David Duchovny have all reportedly been influenced by Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, one of Yogi Bhajan’s devoted followers (Ross, 2002). As of 1980, Bhajan claimed a quarter of a million devotees worldwide, including around 2500 in his ashrams. The yogi himself was reported to live in a mansion in Los Angeles.

The late (d. October, 2004) Bhajan’s brand of Sikhism has actually been rejected by the orthodox Sikh community, but that seems to derive more from him including elements of (Hindu) kundalini yoga in it than for any concern about the teachings or practices themselves.

* * *
As a Master, as a yogi, Yogi Bhajan always sees women—and men—from a cosmic viewpoint. He never forgets that we are primarily souls, paying our karma and learning our lessons in these two different forms...

“I believe that so long as those born of woman do not respect woman, there shall be no peace on Earth” [Bhajan has said] (S. Khalsa, 1996).

The particular brand of “respect” offered to women within Bhajan’s community, however, may have stopped somewhat short of any enlightened ideal, as one of his female devotees explained:

When I moved into the Philadelphia ashram back in the ’70s, I was handed a little pink book called Fascinating Womanhood.... [I]t is a practical how-to manual on marriage from the woman’s point of view, written by a Mormon. It is the philosophical opposite of feminism, completely committed to the belief that the spiritual fulfillment of women is achieved through unquestioning service and obedience to men....

In most ways 3HOers no longer play such extreme sex roles. It has been a very long time since I have seen a male head of an ashram lounging around while sweet young things ply him with foot massages
(K. Khalsa, 1990).

Of course, that implies that there was a time when desirable young women in the ashrams would give foot massages to the highly placed men there.

In a series of lectures entitled “Man to Man,” Yogi Bhajan explains women’s nature to the males: “One day she is very bright and charming and after a couple days she is totally dumb and non-communicative. This is called the ‘normal woman mood.’” And because women fluctuate so much, “a female needs constant social security and constant leadership ... when you are not the leader, she is not satisfied” (in Naman, 1980).

Such “fifteenth century” (i.e., when the Sikh religion was founded by Guru Nanak) attitudes toward “the fairer sex,” though, would invariably have an alleged flip side:

Bhajan has repeatedly been accused of being a womanizer. Colleen Hoskins, who worked seven months at his New Mexico residence, reports that men are scarcely seen there. He is served, she says, by a coterie of as many as fourteen women, some of whom attend his baths, give him group massages, and take turns spending the night in his room while his wife sleeps elsewhere (Time, 1977).

When the same Ms. Hoskins became disillusioned and decided to leave the 3HO group, she was allegedly told by Bhajan that “she would be responsible for a nuclear holocaust” (in Naman, 1980).

Perhaps in anticipation of such calamities, Bhajan is reported to have suggested (in Singh, 1998):

We should have a place, which should sustain five thousand children, five thousand women, and one thousand men.

Of course, if we have learned one thing from Dr. Strangelove, it is that such women would have to be chosen for their “breeding potential”....

* * *
The proper attitude toward the guru, within 3HO as elsewhere, was explained by Bhajan himself:

Advice should be righteous, your mind should be righteous, and your advice and activity to that advice should be righteous. If a guru says, “Get up in the morning and praise God,” will you do it?

Answer: Yes.

Question: If the guru says “Get up in the morning and steal,” will you do it?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Is everything the guru says righteous?

Answer: Otherwise he is not a guru.

Question: Is it righteous to steal?

Answer: Perhaps he is testing, who knows. What is a guru? A guru is an unknown infinity of you, otherwise another human being cannot be a guru to you
(Bhajan, 1977).

Note that this quotation is not taken out of context: it is a full entry in the “Relationship” chapter of the indicated book by Yogi Bhajan.

The alleged result of such attitudes is not altogether surprising:

The yogi makes money from businesses run by his yoga disciples, but was sued for “assault, battery, fraud and deceit.” He decided to settle out of court.

One of Bhajan’s top leaders and yoga enthusiasts was busted for smuggling guns and marijuana and then sentenced to prison (Ross, 2003c).

And what was Bhajan’s reported response to such downturns of fortune?

The critics didn’t spare Jesus Christ, they didn’t spare Buddha, and they don’t spare me (in Naman, 1980).

* * *

At the 1974 3HO Teachers Meeting in Santa Cruz, New Mexico, Yogi Bhajan had allegedly predicted:

In another ten years hospitals will have iron windows and people will try to jump out. There will be tremendous sickness. There will be unhappiness and tragedy on Earth.

Your dead bodies will lie on these roads, your children will be orphans, and nobody will kick them, rather, people will eat them alive! There will be tremendous insanity. That is the time we are going to face
(Singh, 1998).

And from the same sage in 1977 (reported in Singh, 2000):

Now you say there is no life on Mars? Mars is populated ... it is over-populated. The rate of production and sensuality is so heavy, and the beings—they grow so fast that they have to go and make war on all the other planets.

There are beings on Jupiter. There is a hierarchy. Their energy and our energy interexchange [sic] in the astral body and it is highly effective.

* * *

For a long time I didn’t worry much about the few odd people who left 3HO. I hadn’t liked them much when they were in 3HO so it seemed reasonable to me that, after forsaking the truth, they had all become pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers, like the rumors implied
(K. Khalsa, 1990).

But again, Bhajan himself saw it all coming:

[Yogi Bhajan] warned all of us who were to become teachers that, “You will be tested in three areas: money, sex, or power—possibly in all of them.” It is a great responsibility and privilege to teach kundalini yoga. It is said that if a teacher betrays the sacred trust placed in him, he will be reborn as a cockroach! (S. Khalsa, 1996).

Kundalini yoga. Tantric sex yoga. Pimp yoga. Prostitute yoga (“3-HOs”). Drug-dealer yoga. Gun yoga. Nuclear holocaust yoga.

Cockroach yoga.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Sep 11, 2011 5:55 pm

MAY BE TRIGGERING

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

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 12, 2011 5:59 am

The video above is surely not considering long term government MK such as trauma-based mind control. It is focused instead on garden variety thought reform techniques used by cults. Clearly there is a huge debt owed to people like Steven Hassan, who- right as he is about the basics of these public cults- would befriend the "experts" like Lifton, Singer, even Jolly West who have significant overlap with that same government system and generally deny the existence of or minimize the importance of government-linked mind control conspiracies and ritual abuse. Rick Ross the same.

The same general principle holds true for the piece I am posting here- focused more on multi-level marketing cults-,even though it is designed to be "funny" at times. Those caveats aside, I would say that both are generally true as far as they go.

A.D.


http://www.reallyweirdstuff.com/howtobe ... leader.htm

How To Be A Successful Cult Leader

By Tré Taylor

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Cult Leader Characteristics 101:


Mind Control: Manipulate subject by the use of coercive persuasion or behavior modification techniques advanced in hypnotic language patterns without subjects informed consent.

Charismatic Leadership: Claim special knowledge and or skills, demand unquestioning obedience with power and privilege, excessive discipline and expectations. Demand perfection at all times. Leadership may consist of one individual or a small group of core leaders or collection of friends and or lovers. Demonstrate integrity and charm with precision and congruency.

Deception: Learn the value of Recruiting and Fundraising with hidden objectives and without full disclosure of the use of mind controlling techniques; use "front groups, or business opportunities". Display behaviors reflecting integrity and honesty in regards to honor and commitment. Give your best speech on your philosophy. Promise money or favors, but never in writing. Change the rules when it comes time to deliver your end of the deal. Always make use of the " Hand Shake Contract". Learn the art of lying congruently at will.

Exclusivity: Secretiveness or vagueness by followers regarding activities and beliefs. Intimacy and boundary issues with followers. Call one of your followers into the office and make sure to say "You are the best one of the team and are next to be promoted". Make sure to tell everyone the same thing.

Alienation: All followers will naturally feel the need to separate from family, friends and society, a change in values and substitute the cult as the new "family" or "new criteria" evidence of subtle or abrupt personality changes occur. The best test of your success is when they leave their life behind with no understanding why or ability to explain why.

Exploitation: Can be financial, physical or psychological; pressure to give money, to spend a great deal on courses or give excessively to special projects. Expect to them to work excessive hours without pay and to engage in inappropriate sexual activities.

Totalitarian World view (we/they syndrome): Effecting dependence, promoting goals of the group over the individual and approving unethical behavior while claiming goodness.


Important Techniques Of Mind Control:

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* Group pressure: Discourages doubts and reinforces the need to belong through the use of child-like games, singing, hugging, touching or flattery. Enhance their need for recognition by telling them "You just never tried hard enough", or if they threaten to quit, "You were never truly committed enough anyway", works very well.

* Isolation/Separation: Creates inability or lack of desire to verify information provided by the group with reality. Get them to live in your philosophy with few people supporting that reality. Never let them get close enough to others to really be known intimately. Works best if they create posters of their new philosophy and post them in every open space of their environment.

* Thought Controlling and Feeling Stopping Techniques: Introduce recruit to meditating, chanting, and repetitious activities which, when used excessively, induce a perfect state of high suggestibility. Teaching time control maintenance techniques should be intertwined with cults mindset for full effective results. When they are scheduling every minute of they're life with you in mind, they are on they're way. When certain emotions come up, have subject keep those feelings locked out with the use of "state control techniques" until they are ready to explode at the appropriate time for breakdown and surrender themselves completely to you.

* Fear and Guilt: Induced by eliciting confessions to produce intimacy and to reveal fears and secrets, to create emotional vulnerability by overt and covert suggestion or threats, as well as alternation of punishment and reward. Subject should easily "Fall In Love" with 1 or more fellow cult participants to ensure commitment to the group and each other. This makes it easy to get them to leave their old lives behind and follow you. Exercises requiring facing extreme fear or death defiling "Metaphorical Breakthrough Experiences" helps in faster and easier conversions.

* Sleep Deprivation: Encourage under the guise of spiritual exercises, necessary training, or " To stretch your personal boundaries" or in urgent projects. Works best when dance music is playing really loud. When they can't stop dancing and are in complete physical exhaustion, they're yours.

* Inadequate Nutrition: Sometimes disguised as special diet to improve health or advance spirituality, or as rituals requiring fasting. Require extreme changes in eating, such as "Vegan" or as part of the group or cult regime. Control subjects feeding times at unpredictable and unexpected times throughout the day and night, if at all. Result: They will not be able to eat eventually until you tell them to, and only if it is what you tell them they can eat. The ultimate result is when you teach them how to breath, and they think of you whenever they do.

* Sensory Overload: Forces acceptance of complex new doctrine, goals and definitions to replace old values by expecting recruit to assimilate masses of information quickly with little or no opportunity for critical examination. The perfect recruit will let go of all their past beliefs overnight to follow you.

How To Know Your Successful
The truly converted will show signs of:


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* The exact same goals and values as the cult leader

* Loss of free will and control over one's life.

* Noticeably more visits to the dentist.

* Excess amounts of organic broccoli in refrigerator

* Loss of family and home.

* Development of dependency and return to child-like or teen-age behaviors.

* Inability to work or be responsible.

* Posting, and of cults philosophy all over environment.

* Noticeably ugly ties or snappy dresses.

* Loss of spontaneity.

* Compulsive audio tape listening.

* Loss of sense of humor.

* Ingestion of growth hormones and speed inducing pharmaceuticals.

* Inability to form intimate relationships or friendships.

* Physical deterioration and abuse.

* Psychological deterioration (including hallucinations, anxiety, paranoia, disorientation, and dissociation).



It Takes a Good Follower To Make A Good Cult Leader

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Have you ever noticed the boss telling you an inspiring and motivational story about the future of the company, then write you bad pay checks and some how you feel sorry for him?

Ever find your friend chanting Amway affirmations while jogging with you, and he hasn't been in Amway for years?

Ever have fellow employees avoid asking for their paychecks because it would impose on the company?

Have you ever let your boss have the use of your own personal credit cards to bail his company out of trouble?


"When you meet the friendliest people you have ever known, who introduce you to the most loving group of people you've ever encountered, and you find the leader to be the most inspired, caring, compassionate and understanding person you've ever met, and then you learn that that cause of the group is something you never dared hope could be accomplished, and all of this sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true!"


"Don't give up your education, your hopes and ambitions, to follow a rainbow."

- Jenne Mills, former member of the People's Temple and subsequent victim of assassination a year following the November 18, 1978 Jonestown suicide/murders of 911 adults and children.



Learn From The Cult Leader Experts

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Sales people have been among the first to be successful at using psychological cult leader techniques to manipulate people. ... Usually you know if someone is selling a product, so you are prepared and therefore cautious. Increasingly stupid people are being maneuvered into joining very large group gatherings where they are processed through powerful psychological techniques to sell them when they thought they were just attending an "information evening."

One cult marketing group used group hypnosis to make people fire-walk and then immediately afterwards, while they were still in a highly aroused state, got them to sign expensive business contracts to learn to become teachers of fire-walking themselves! One of the best known multi-level marketing organizations is Amway. This hugely successful company started selling soap powder and now in some countries even sells cars. In order to make the most money in Amway, or to be truly "successful," it is necessary to move "up line" by recruiting more and more distributors like yourself, who themselves recruit distributors and so on. You make money not just from the goods you sell but by getting a percentage of what the distributors, and by planning to pay or not pay your employees or down-line. You have recruited sell as well and convert well.

As with all cult sales and marketing jobs, this requires extremely hard work and high motivation and easy brain washing for the cult leader on the go. Increasingly, Amway is adopting similar techniques to many cults in order to attract recruits, then to keep them involved and committed to the cause. For instance Amway distributors are instructed not to tell you they are selling Amway up front. Usually you are asked to attend a meeting about an "exciting new business opportunity." In fact Amway's name may not be mentioned until after a good hour of sales pitch. The approach of the marketing organization is usually quite evangelical. It asks if there is something missing your life, and offers all sorts of emotional inducements:

"Reach your full potential", "Find the real you", "Gain greater meaning and more meaningful relationships in your life", "Come over to my house to a religious dinner party tonight, Elvis is going to be there, bring your mom".

In many ways Amway is more like a fundamentalist religion than a direct marketing business, with money, and freedom as the God. Joining Amway is often described, by its distributors, as like a religious or spiritual and life changing experience. Distributors and covert cult leaders are encouraged to recruit first among their family and friends, an action that can very quickly put open, trusting relationships on very shaky footing as friendship is exploited for the cults perfect financial gain.

Amway distributors become aware of where a potential recruit is emotionally most vulnerable by asking questions like "What is missing from your life?" "How did you get to be such a loser?" " How specifically?" Friendships and relationships are further abused when the target tries to say no. The skilled Amway distributor may turn this into a personal rejection of himself, and the recruit can be made to feel guilty that he or she is turning down a friend. This is an excellent strategy for conversion.

Many people have told me about relationships they valued highly that were never quite the same after they tried to recruit a friend or family member to Amway as well as other cult marketing associations. A side effect of this is that a new Amway distributor very quickly becomes dependent on other distributors "who think the same," for friendship as well as business relationships. Amway encourages more and more dependence on the Amway family and its values.

For instance, a distributor told me about Amway's recommendations to deal with problems in marriage (because of the demands Amway places on a partner's time and priorities!). He said Amway suggested it was not a good idea to consult a professional marriage counselor, who would probably not understand how Amway worked. "Instead marriage and personal problems should be dealt with in-house by going "upline" to an Amway distributor at a higher level. The fully trained and skilled cult leader can be the most successful marriage and family councilor.


This intelligently restricts a distributor's emotional resources to Amway and its particular value system--one which sees wives, only as their husband's assistants, and regards men as being the sole decision-makers in marriage, or until she has learned the power of being a cult leader herself. Books and tapes are produced targeted directly at Amway wives and the role they are expected to play. To keep distributors involved and active, followers should be required to join the tape of the week club and listen every free moment of the day.

They should also attend weekly meetings that are held where people are encouraged to talk about personal as well as business difficulties with they're personal experiences. Good cult leaders use this time wisely. The "upline" distributor--the one who has recruited others and therefore takes a percentage of their sales functions as a priest, to whom failures to fulfill Amway commitments and expectations can be confessed and absolved, and further commitments made as a way of paying penance.

Extremely large gatherings are held regularly (sometimes as often as hourly) and at these many of the techniques used by the most advanced cult leaders are employed to reinforce values and enhance commitment, for instance, confessions, crying, recording really bad public speakers, sharing possible future success stories, and singing, yodeling, playing the accordion, soap bubble contests, fondling fish, writing "I love Amway" ten times with your tongue on a dirty chalkboard, smiling and bouncing around the room, anchoring, practicing a foreign languages, and many other techniques.

Participants are expected to conform to a strict dress code jacket and very ugly ties for men, smart snappy dresses and jackets for women--no pants and no underwear allowed at evening events. Many good cult candidates hearing about the deliberately manipulative techniques used by multi-level marketing groups shrug their shoulders and say "So what?" I own some ugly ties, I like hamburger helper, what's wrong with that?

Unfortunately dropping out of Amway and similar groups may not be simple or totally harmless. In the present economic climate people who have been retrenched are turning desperately to Amway to find some kind of income and purpose in life. And also learned the importance of cleaning products and what can be done intimately with soap in the bedroom.

Because of their situation they are often extremely vulnerable emotionally and Amway uses this mercilessly. A typical recruitment pitch would include the phrases "Do you have the courage to make significant changes in your life?", Do this for your children's sake," "Our only failures are quitters," and "Doesn't your family deserve what Amway can give them [materially]? "Do you and your family like cherry or lime KOOL-AID?"

"Such highly charged language, when aimed at vulnerable people in large groups and backed up with a constant stream of audio tapes which those who are truly committed to success will use conscientiously and diligently," and as every successful cult leader knows can be extremely effective. But if you are not a whiz bang seller, or are a rookie cult leader, consider everybody you know that once was signed up for Amway long ago, it is very easy to "fail" at Amway.

Coming on top of retrenchment, the resultant self doubt and the guilt that Amway plays on can cause great distress and real depression. Even if you are an inexperienced cult leader, most shame based people are easy to win over. One ex-Amway wife told me:

"My marriage, which was struggling along on a minimal income due to Joe's [husband] retrenchment, couldn't survive a dose of Amway as well."...If you are introduced into a cult direct marketing scheme that does not demand control of your lifestyle, relationships and values, your garage space, having to eat cases of peanut butter, having to hang out at malls, having to form an intimate relationship with the UPS, FEDEX man, dubbing and redubbing old Amway tapes for motivation, and insisting on people owning kitchen tables if they are going to be your friend, then maybe it can be a satisfying job. But beware those that offer "Not just a career but a way of life, and we will give you the best orgasm you ever had." They could be even more skilled then you. Practice on your friends until you get it right!

The former university chaplain who now runs a counseling and therapy service for those affected by cults, listened carefully as the man explained:

It was two days after he had been seen on national television, helping a young man break away from an "Empowering" group he had joined a year earlier was taking over his life. There were the huge meetings at venues like the Hyatt Regency and Conference Center where he and thousands of other followers were worked into a passionate frenzy and then told to go out and find as many people they could to recruit who needed to find the inner "Personal Power" as well.

The powerful doctrine that frowned on "lower personal standards" or "negative emotional" influences; there was the strict code and the advice on how to bring up children and relate to loved ones as well as how and what to eat and breath when; there was the fear that to quit would mean giving up all hope of a happy and successful future.

However, having seen the television infomercial featuring the cult leader, the man now alleged that he was being subjected to mind control techniques and being manipulated by those "Personal Coaches" in the organization. He wanted advice on making a possible break. He asked which cult the man was in. "It's not a cult. It's not a religion. It's something called owning your personal power." Support groups headed by senior cult leaders within the personal power organization are adopting cult-style tactics to recruit and motivate those below them.

Help groups, Cult Information Centers are receiving calls from worried seminar participants and their families, concerned about the techniques being used to keep them in the organization.


.
Last edited by American Dream on Mon Sep 12, 2011 11:47 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 12, 2011 10:39 am

THANKS FROM A GRATEFUL NATION -- AWARDING THE CROSS OF SECRET ACHIEVEMENT TO THE DALAI LAMA

by Charles Carreon



The 14th Dalai Lama has been a friend to American interests for his entire adult life, since he abdicated his throne in order to save his people from the dangers of .... Well, okay, it didn't turn out very well for the Tibetans, but he did save his skin, his stash of cash, and a lot of reactionary Tibetan oligarchs who came with him. Fortunately, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America was able to provide him with employment as soon as he arrived in India. Since then, he has reliably made himself a thorn in the side of the Chinese, giving the United States the leverage it has needed to build an arms-length trading relationship that now supplies us with enough borrowed money to buy all the microchips, flat screens, cell phones and cheap clothing we could ever want. While his aspirations to someday "return to Tibet" are unlikely to be fulfilled, his mission on behalf of America has been far more successful, and with the installation of numerous "tulkus" on the boards of nonprofit organizations throughout the United States, the exchange has been more than fair. His country has infiltrated ours, and our country has used his people to the best advantage. For this, we commend him, and with heartfelt thanks award him the Cross of Secret Achievement.


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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 12, 2011 11:46 am

American Dream wrote:http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/07/mind-control-course-in-miracles.html

Mind Control: A COURSE IN MIRACLES - A CIA/UNITY CHURCH THOUGHT MANIPULATION DEVICE
http://www.hometown.aol.com

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See also:
Conspiracy in Findhorn, Urantia, A Course in Miracles...
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby Simulist » Mon Sep 12, 2011 2:43 pm

I dropped in to a Border's bookstore the other day to see what leftovers might still remain untouched, and saw Marianne Williamson's most recent permutation on A Course in Miracles, called A Course in Weight Loss. Gave me a little chuckle, for some reason. :)
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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