|
The other Katie just
e-mailed me and referred me to this brilliant post
on Life is Great by someone called 'the GoodyGoody
Girl.' It's quite mind-blowing and very long. I
highly recommend printing it out and learning it by
heart;–)
Here it is:
What Happened Maharaji???
From my experience of old timers, even older
than myself and I have had K for 22 years, I can
see how those guys were really screwed up by the
way the organisation was then, in the way that it
treated people who were really, really
inspired.
We have been through years of unlimited
servitude and servility through years of being
pushed around and destroyed on many levels.
To have believed that something was so pure and
holy and good all these years and then suddenly
find that its all pooh, not pure is a great shock
to the system. Even now when I know that I am on
the other side of devotion, when I see pictures of
Maharaji my heart still wants to believe. Yet with
M all my personal nightmares were starting to come
true. It is almost as if M switched our whole
consciousness around and we went into reverse
psychology. Believe the psychologists then, what M
did was to make our own humanness toxic to
ourselves.
“Toxic” at this point is an
appropriate description of what has happened to all
those ex’s who are really angry and screaming
and shouting on the “toxic” web-sites,
for in fact, this is what M has created, through
his mind manipulation of the masses. They have
nowhere else to go.
My own feeling therefore is that I could be
angry, my life too had spun out of my control, but
far more constructive is my feeling to try and
understand the damage.
We have to be clear and really zipped out and do
some healing for ourselves. Without some positive
movement we may well continue in stalemate. If what
M has is power, and if that power has been in some
way extended to the whole world, through us as
channels. How responsible then are we for what we
have in a society that is based on blame and
lawlessness without contention. This is the way in
which M has behaved in his belief that he is above
and beyond reproach in this life.
Leading us into confusion by his revisionist
structure. That is, he kept moving the goalposts so
that we never knew where we really were. We were
never good enough, we’d never get it, etc etc
etc. My understanding so far leads me to believe
that by denying our own feelings, in the light that
we were supposed to be experiencing something else,
“holy name, this experience” we in
reality suppressed our emotional body. The
consequences as we well know were the break up of
so many marriages and relationships, time and time
again. Not just because M encouraged us to believe
that relationships were of no value, and that it
was his treasure that we should be experiencing,
but because on another level we were actually not
allowed to experience our own true feelings about
any given situation.
What does seem to be true is that we are here as
human beings with a soul to reconnect with and
recognise that soul. To deal with the issues that
our soul has to deal with in this lifetime, and to
follow our soul’s destiny. We did believe, to
some greater or lesser extent, when M came along
our soul recognised that its destiny was being
shown to us through the K that M was giving us.
Some deep part of ourselves knew that, wanted
that.
Perhaps M's souls' issue is integrity.
Has M has manipulated this understanding for his
own purposes? Followers were not told that the
ashrams were closed because Mata Ji did take M to
court, she won, and the ashram ordered to be
closed, whereupon M created Elan Vital. Any
information that is withheld from its followers in
order to serve its own hierarchical purpose is
deemed as a cult. We have to understand how
misinformed we were. That deception has taken place
time and time again.
So far not only was our emotional body being
suppressed and channelled into M’s world, but
our intellectual faculties were being derided
constantly as well. In our misunderstanding we
began to blame the world, M encouraged us to leave
the world behind perhaps the knock on effect in the
world has been truly enormous. Intellectually too,
we were led to trivialise and adopt an approach
that the world was another thing not to be trusted,
we became insiders to some secret society of
enlightened beings. What in fact we became were
outsiders to society, in the same vein that ethnic
minorities do not feel as if they fit in, or that
drug addicts feel that they do not belong to the
world. A state of being which in psychological
terms is not producing integrated human behaviour.
But even worse, we became outsiders in our own
lives. Many P’s are still not integrated into
the world, and having problems of dysfunction.
In a society that already runs high on blame, M
encouraged us to blame. First and foremost
ourselves for “never getting it right”,
and then the world for “always getting it
wrong.” So we did, we blamed our partners,
parents, children and colleagues for not having
this K, for not understanding that they needed a
Master. We channelled a lot of very strong negative
concepts back into the “world” on behalf
of M, of course, and love and light and peace.
Meanwhile we were never really there for the world,
just for M.
Blame culture is destroying our society. The
counterbalance to blame is credit, and that is
precisely what M never gave us, credit. Always
trivialization and denouncement of human values and
achievements; ethical behaviour and codes of
conduct were relinquished and the “anything
goes” attitude became prevalent within the
movement. We ceased to believe that Mankind’s
history, and the culture of mankind had anything to
do with the future; that we might be creating our
own destiny that we were responsible human beings,
responsible to each other and society as a whole.
Coupled with the Thatcher/Reagan era of “there
is no such thing as society” we were led all
the way to destruction of moral and ethical
behaviour within our communities and society as a
whole.
In terms of our own personal relationships, what
we are left with is not a community that is
self-sufficient but a lot of distraught single
people who have no way left of being able to
interact with the opposite sex without in some way
being seen to be “needy.” M created that
neediness in us. By continuously suppressing our
emotions, our emotional bodies craved emotional
contact, when that occurred we were like starved
beings who were suddenly let loose at a
banquet.
Blame culture enables beings to empower the
dysfunction of male/female relationships. People
wanting love are deemed to be “needy” and
everyone now is supposed to be self-sufficient and
not needing to be coupled in the misconception that
to be alone is the right way. How much of this
resounds of M’s discourses about the way to
true enlightenment.
The point that is missing is that men have
always needed women to make concrete their ideas,
men are creatures of ideas and women are creatures
of nurturing. Therefore life has always worked by
man being nurtured by women, allowing him to make
concrete those ideas, whilst woman has been taken
care of by and protected by man for being able to
concretise those ideas through her nurture. Nothing
new or strange there. A fair and fundamental
exchange.
That quick aggressive response so normal in
today’s society, is parallel to the quick
aggressive response we so often felt and heard at
the “lotus feet.” Directed at us was a
huge amount of anger sometimes passive, but in
order to cope we became more and more and more out
of sync with our emotional bodies. Any normal human
reaction would have been to get angry back at
someone being angry with us, yet what we learnt was
to be “nice” really nice, really, really
nice. To all sorts of inappropriate situations, in
my life I should have reacted differently, but
instead had learnt to be “nice” because
hey, surely this would lead people to think that we
were in peace and love. By being nice my emotional
body became completely unbalanced.
If we already had dysfunction to begin with,
then the teachings of M amplified that, and what
started as a minor groove, became a trench from
which we could not see out of, from which we were
fighting the world and ourselves. What we had lost
at that point was a sense of ourselves.
We do have to function in this world, there is
no question of it, as the ashrams were closed there
was nowhere to retreat. We wanted to feel
comfortable at the time with this dysfunction. As
so many people had come out of the love and peace
era and were still taking drugs it all seemed to
fit together.
At some point I believe that M should have
allowed us and K (which remember originally was
called self-K) to become integrated in a more
holistic and positive way, creating functional
people, as in the beginning - the medical house,
education house, etc. He had the gift of love and
devotion from thousands of people that could have
changed the world and yet he chose to conduct his
teachings in a way that led to self-glorification
and one would imagine self-gratification. He
changed from Guru, to Master. We were no longer
premies but students. We had been given no choice
in his revisions of the movement.
For me the debate is not even about whether M is
God or not, it is about the socio-cultural
implications that his teachings have had on the
lives of his followers, and the extent to which his
teachings have been interpreted and misinterpreted
and channelled out into society.
What we are experiencing now in socio-cultural
terms is the alienation and outlawing of anything
that appears to be a cult. This is what is happened
in the French incident. Generally because cults
have been seen to be destructive, (from Manson, to
the cult in Switzerland and their belief in Haley
Bopp.) The governments of the world, but in Europe
at the moment in particular will not be allowing
cults to exist.
In terms of free speech and non-destructive
movements with benign intentions, this again poses
the question of civil liberties being eroded once
more in terms of further stringent control on any
form of organisation. One gets this sense from
looking at the web, its appears that there are many
cult escapees, not just exes, but Jehovahs, Hare
krisna’s etc etc etc. All complaining about
mind control. Government would appear to promote
the corporate identity of normality, hence
globalisation, and what appears to be individuality
is now an area of questionable debate.
As I recall the very essence of M’s
teachings were originally about the individual.
What happened. We now see the organisation running
around with their clipboards, albeit metaphorical
ones, trying to tell the rest of us how it is or
should be. At what point did we lose all sense of
our own interpretation to our lives, insofar as I
now need someone to tell me how it is.
We always fail in the eyes of M, and therefore
we have been diminished, sadly many P’s to a
point of nothingness, I personally have known 3
P’s who suicided themselves over the years
because they thought they couldn’t “get
it.” Diminished, for in essence, what was a
drip of K.
Even practising made our lives a distant thing.
For many that disengagement and denial carries on,
therefore making it easier to dismiss everything
because hey, “it doesn’t matter it’s
only the world.” Yes only the world but this
made it even more difficult for us to live in it.
Therefore the manipulation was twofold. First we
suppressed our emotions by giving everything to M
and K, thereby not identifying with what we really
did feel and think about our actual reality or the
situation that was going on at that point, in
favour of making connections, with, to, or by M.
Therefore it was a self-fulfilling prophecy our
lives did turn upside down, nothing did work
because we had not paid our lives any proper
attention in the first place. It is what we created
ourselves by not responding appropriately in the
first place.
Steiner, the well known educationalist wrote as
far back as the 20’s that if one were to
distract one’s mind from the actual reality of
a situation, then a solution would be able to
manifest through the Universe. No original thinking
there on the wonders of meditation. Jung wrote
about synchronicity.
So instead of making healthy connections with
situations in our lives, M deliberately disallowed
any functional connections to be made, in fact
setting out to make sure that nothing of any value
lasted from one discourse to the next, therefore
always disrupting the process of life itself.
It is an absolute necessity to make connections,
personal, within connections of our own sense of
ourselves, right through to connections with
family, friends, community. Without family we
cannot learn how moral behaviour works. Without
love we are desperate human beings. It is still
what the majority want, is love and be loved. Yet
with misinterpretation in the modern world this has
become sex. Without codes of behaviour learnt from
within the family and that experience of love, then
extended outwards, we have the model for society
breaking down through lack of purpose, function,
humanity.
Without connections we would live in an isolated
world of sorrow and malaise, eventually leading to
disease – dis-ease. At that point of un-ease
we were told it was our fault yet again, M reminded
us how incapable we were of getting it right. Yet
again told to go inside more, yet again more
isolation. Yet again pay our dues to our Master,
then our un-ease would be filled with bliss. We
never dealt with our un-ease. Neither did M.
M disempowered us time and time again, without
his authority we were nothing. Perhaps through his
own Indian ignorance, perhaps by not realising the
complexity of the Western mind. The level of
sophistication that the Western mind had already
reached was not so easily dismissable.
M’s ultimate and most powerful weapon was
in dismissing our mind and concepts. It is not
possible to carry on living without judgement. You
have to know how to cross the road, tie your
bootlaces, find out how much the shopping costs.
Man’s mind has been his greatest asset. Given
a moral code of behaviour and ethics, Mankind has
made enormous progress from the days of swinging a
club and landing a bison. For sure, we understand
that man’s mind can be used for evil
intentions, but usually through lack. Lack of
money, sense, understanding or dysfunction of some
more serious kind.
What happened to honour, nobility, hope,
courage, perseverance - the vital ingredients of
crossing Antarctica, climbing Mount Everest,
discovering penicillin, and what indeed is wrong
with those aesthetic qualities in mankind. We now
have dismissed so many positive human values in
favour of greed, opportunity, triumph.
So the Grand Slam. Nothing we ever think is
right, its only a concept and nothing we ever feel
is true or valid or justifiable in the face of the
great experience of K, or more recently should I
say the Master. By now subjugated to his every word
for guidance, how many of us acted and performed
our lives through the mesh of M. His dictum being
the only right dictum.
And now the nail that really hammered us into
the coffin, the one about K being the Most
Important Thing, for those of us old enough to
remember that. So we grew up and nothing was more
important. Not our minds, concepts, families,
emotions, jobs, nothing. This is how he kept people
hooked into his world. Ultimately, this is abuse,
on a conscious or subconscious level that we
plugged into for many years because we believed it
was the most important thing. Catch 22.
Inevitably at times of death, ill health and
poverty we never were given any straws to grasp
that were tangible. Wishy-washy sayings stolen from
the Gita that “even in your darkest hour I
will always be there.” How far from the truth
is that. M could have seen people individually, had
smaller events, praised people more, validated
their experience, really shared that love if that
is what he had. Not much solace in a world by now
full of tragic consequences. What happened to
benevolence? M never expanded on the spirituality
of our souls and allowed us to live in the world as
fully integrated beings. Instead by pooh, poohing
and trivialising this life, the world as we know
it, untold damage to millions of life has been done
through his small-minded and greedy way. By using
his army of devotees to channel attitudes of
lawlessness and unimportance to life in other
forms, that were not to do with him and our breath.
Attitudes were put out that are just not concurrent
with normal human behaviour.
We have over-ridden queues, negated our family
life, invalidated everything as mind, put out the
wrong code of ethics on mass, to a globe absolutely
ripe for a larger dose of darkness, but more
cynical, it was all done under the guise of
“love and light.”
What began with pushing down the boundaries of
the Old Age in the 60’s, ended up with M
destroying all the boundaries within ourselves and
our lives to a point where many of us have been
left without even being able to make a right
decision. Slaves to a Master.
Empty, soulless shells that needed their Master
to tell them what and how to do it. Hence the
organisation. Is this really enlightenment? Did M
himself become misguided. For most of us we have
woken up and smelt the coffee. Looked at our lives
and realised that indeed knowledge never gave us
anything to do with our lives in the material
world, but for some their material world was
already in place, and yet for many their spiritual
lives are no richer either. Because they are not
experiencing love.
Many have been left unfulfilled, unhappy because
of loneliness, debt, ill health. In fact, looking
around and seeing that we are normal human beings
like everybody else, that what makes us happy is
the same as everybody else. LOVE. Solvency, health.
The feeling of being loved and giving love and that
is what is missing in M’s world now. That
two-way exchange of love and energy does make us
bigger in our lives. We grow then.
Given that I have a power as a human being to
make changes through my own personal choices and
understanding. It is vitally important to get it
right in my life for me, and for the world as a
whole. We are creating our lives, we are creating
our future, creating our children’s future. To
be exacting, getting the details right without
harming myself, to get it right for the common
good, to put my family first, to live my life with
a set of values and moral ethics in place is right
for me.
What I can do now is reintegrate my life. The
world is in regression. Economically yes, perhaps
socio-culturally as well. Regression is far more
sinister than recession
To put my family first, to aid their survival;
to stop blaming mother and thereafter all women for
all the wrongs in my life. In essence to stop blame
culture. M always taught us to blame the world for
everything that was wrong, as if we weren’t a
part of it.
To really stop and see that we have got the
power of healing and good energies flowing through
our lives. To stop accepting abuse, to stop and
really intend to get the best for our lives, in a
proper way, and by proxy that extending out into
the planet.
|