jodyr's Blog

I hope you enjoy your ethnocentric western racist psychobabble alternative.

I hope one day you truly understand Vedanta from the inside rather than as a collection of entrenched and superstitious beliefs.

So much hostility to traditional advaitic theology.

My criticism is toward those who hijack advaita to present themselves as somehow more God than anyone else. Where in advaita is this presupposition raised?

when it is traditional, historical, and respected Vedantic philosophy.

It is traditional and historical superstition that has been grafted onto Vedanta.

According to advaita, everything is God.

Precisely. Divinity does not pool in concentration. It is dispersed, no more present in those who claim realization than any bug on the ground.

The only difference between a God-Realized Soul and the rest of us?

They have been blessed with a recognition of an ever-present, equally-shining truth in all.

Because no one can attain enlightenment without a Satguru.

Old-fashioned Hindu guru marketing ploy, a la a snake oil salesman, noted.

we can all shine a brighter light and get closer to that authentic holiness the world calls "love."

Love and Brahman have as much to do with one another as Brahman and my dog's ass.

I am a professional and respected in my field of expertise and have experienced her divinity first hand.

Your profession and the respect you believe it garners obviously have little impact on your ability to project your idea of divinity onto the character that Amma is presenting to the world. That's not surprising, seeing as that character is designed to foster just those kinds of projection. The entire Amma business-model runs on these superstitious notions you've so easily been duped into, despite your self-assessed modernity and that of other the "professionals" caught in her snare of delusion.

Hey Waldo.

Sometimes my perpetual disgust with these ignorance-broadcasting flimflammers gets the best of me. Thanks for the kind words.

The blog is back up with a bit of softening. For whatever reason, I was suddenly able to see how shrill I can sound. As much as I find these "gurus" to be utter losers as spiritual teachers, my excessively accusatory tone isn't really what's called for.

Yesterday, May 13, I read my blog with different eyes. I found it to be excessively shrill, rather than bitingly sarcastic. As a result, I took it offline and I'm trying to decide what to do with it. This had nothing to do with any guru, guru's devotee or lawyer, nor did I suddenly "see the light" about gurus and realize I was mistaken. The fact is I didn't like the tone of my writing upon last night's review, so until further notice, I'm going to try to generate a new approach that is just as critical without sounding quite as harsh.

I've never heard of him until now. He's got a decent website, but he sure seems to enjoy the "sitting on a chair looking over his throng" position. He's making a big deal of himself, which is my book means he's probably more huckster than actual teacher of nondual truth.

Sarlo brought the subject of gurus to a point of scrutiny. Before Gururatings, there was just the anti-cult folk. Gurudom was not examined by those who subscribed to that culture of spirituality. Once Gururatings came online, there was a place and impetus to take a good look at what folks believe about gurus, and how gurus behave in general. It was a substantial development in American Vedic-based spiritual culture, imo.

It's the fact that his whole deal seems like a racket that bothers me. It's a grab bag of New Age™/Hindu hybrid, whatever is selling, much of it requiring one to accept absurd notions about reality based on his own internal fantasies, another very unattractive feature of his "teachings."

I'm left the conclude he's found a way to make a living and he's working it. In truth, it may be just what some folks need, but that will have everything to do with the devotee's place of heart and little if anything to do with another Godconman who's paying his bills by feeding us bullshit.

> All he talks about is the "Truth" and giving up everything for the "Truth".

And conveniently for his dupes, he IS the "Truth."

Seems a bit of a grandiose wackadoo to me based on his webpage.

Ugh. Bankrupt is too kind a term. Wildly delusional is more on target.

de Ruiter is about as bad as gurudom gets, imo. It's nothing more than mass hysteria by simple suggestion. It's the oldest con in gurudom. God help those who feel they have to move near the guy.

Those guys stay off my radar because they aren't really claiming to be God, although they're making money like Him. If you've got anything to share about them, please do, O guru of the gurubusters.

I have a friend who spent some time working for Gangaji. She feels she is authentic as a teacher. Gangaji gets dissed as neo-advaita, but generally and despite her husband's little imbroglio, she seems better than a lot of the other choices out there.

> I think it is an indicator of the guru business going mass market

Is it even possible to be a mass-market guru? You can certainly go mass market, but are you really functioning as a guru?

Amma's miracle-mongering is very troublesome. It has probably been a more effective marketing tool in India, but doubtless many Westerners have fallen for it too.

But if I were to choose the big-time guru who seemed the most sincere, Amma is the one. In this world of Krackis and Sri Sris, that counts for something. There may be stories about Amma's behavior and attitude in private that I haven't heard yet, but until then, she's the best of the worst of those gurus who market their divinity.

Good to have you here, Yo.

> I guess I answered my own question.

You did, and it's a good answer.

> precisely BECAUSE she is good at "appearing" a certain way and acting another.

Unfortunately, I don't have any access to stories where she's acting outside of her normal behavior spectrum. Please provide some examples for us if you know of any.

Thanks for joining the board.

There is always going to be great difficulty in bringing nondual truth to a mass audience. No matter how clear they make the language, folks are going to create their own interpretations, and that's going to muck it all up.

That said, I don't think you ever have to use the "e" word to put across nondual truth. It's a mistake right from the start. Tolle should excise the term ego from his teaching. It would go a long way toward preventing the kind of confusion that is occurring in mass quantities now.

Hey SMPH.

Lefora is still in beta, so the moderator tools aren't complete yet, preventing me from transferring your post to its own thread. If you want, just create the new thread with the content from your post and I'll delete the old post here.

Thanks for joining. Hopefully we'll get some more folks involved and make this a rocking discussion board.

--jody.

> I pray that you reach where you had set out for

And I pray that you realize that what you reach for already exists within, entirely outside the machinations of fame-whoring gurus who are collecting your money for the enrichment of themselves and their family.

This category exists for those gurus who are either on the way up, down or dead. Gurumayi would go here, seeing as she's dropped out of the sight of her devotees. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has been one the biggest, but he's dead now, so here he will go too. If you believe your subject warrants its own category, go to the "Suggestions for Targets" category and let us know.

I should make it clear from the start that this forum isn't only about trashing gurus. If anyone knows a small town hero guru who warrants mention, please do so here.

It may strike some as unusual for me to say this, but despite her org's tendencies to miracle-monger, Ammachi is about the best you can do for a big-time guru. You can attend her events without ever having to hear a pitch. I didn't in any of my three visits. She's never appeared to be anything other than a humble yet action-oriented gal, albeit one surrounded by a thong of infantilized Americans. She put up big for the tsunami relief effort, but she's also got some histrionic employees who incited violence in the Green Avenue sign case of last year. My main beef with her now is her support for the Hinduvta, pretty much the equivalent of the white-identity movement in the States. This gets explained away as going with the local cultural flow, but like Sri Sri's failure to censure Modi, it's a stark hypocrisy that her American devotees have no idea about.

Simply put, Kalki Bhagavan is the slickest con man of the big-time gurus. His "enlightenment"-mill at Oneness University churns out nothing more than monstrous ignorance. He is no more a world savior than my dog's ass, and I bet that ass smells sweeter than the breath of this scamming fauxvatar.

The Babaster is one of the biggest. BBC News produced an excellent documentary exposé, yet he still has millions of sadly deluded devotees. He also has a cadre of internet attack specialists, a number of whom have gone to substantial lengths to discredit yours truly.

Miracle-faking and twink-diddling, along with rumors of massive government corruption and a few murders, are only a few of this man's sins. But all that said, I'm still entirely convinced that the man functions as a perfectly adequate image upon which to project the idea of God, making him more a stand in than incarnation, something that is true of every guru who has millions of followers.

I wanted to like Nithyananda when I met one of his closer devotees, a very astute physician who was a challenging and well-informed debating opponent. This person has since left Nithyananda's org, along with a number of other close devotees, all around the same time. The reason my friend gave was that Nithyananda was pushing for the big-time at the expense of spiritual and organizational truth. The miracle-mongering and marketing became more important than the message. In fact, they've become the message in toto, imo.

Based on comments on the blog, there appears to be a growing anti-Nithyananda presence online. If anyone has anything pro or con to say about him, please feel welcome to doing so in this category.

Tolle has been getting a lot of national media play due to Oprah's endorsement of his ideas. Again, I've only gone skin deep with him, and what I take from my survey is that he's demonizing the ego. He may backpedal in his talks a bit and attempt to present a more balanced view, but when you count all the change in the end, he's still setting folks up for an internal schism of personality features, setting sub-personalities against one another in a fruitless attempt at identity purification. There is a very longstanding precedent for this in Vedic-based spiritual culture, but that doesn't mean it actually works.

It's probably clear to some folks that my knowledge of the various gurus I comment on doesn't go very deep. This is absolutely true, but it's a feature of my critique's focus as much as it is my laziness. I am most concerned with the image a guru presents to the world by way of their marketing materials. A deep survey of their literature is not required. It's all about what the guru is saying to the world about themselves, either directly or by way of the institutional mythology of their organization.

That said, Byron Katie seems like a nice enough gal. I didn't think much of her org either way until I caught wind of the content of her "School," a weeklong retreat that seems a bit strange to a more conventionally-thinking person. When I retreated from some on my criticism of her programs, I got jumped on by some folks from the Rick Ross message board who are convinced that Katie is running a destructive cult. I maintained my position that it's not, although there does appear to be some of the same personality elevation issues that can scotch a guru's efficacy at helping to foster nondual understanding.

I'll leave it to whomever is interested to continue the discussion here. I will say there are some features of her movement that are somewhat culty, although I'm not convinced she meets all eight of Lipson's criteria.

Hey Mark.

Thanks for joining the forum.

I haven't encountered Burton until now, and he definitely seems like a candidate for discussion here. They definitely appear to be a mind-controlling cult a la Lipson's 8 criteria. I'd put him in either the "Not So Big-Time" or "Kinda Big-Time" categories. If you have a story or stories you'd like to relate, please feel free to do so, posting to whichever of those two categories you feel he fits in.