Thou shall not speak ill of.....any Guru who managed to get a following og twenty thousand.

[Guest guest]

Dear Harsha,

if I wore a hat I would take it off to you.

You make the point

and you make it very well,

that there is no point in allowing yesterday's cloud

to cover today's sunshine.

You know, if Sam is the man I think he is,

I once shared a flat with him,

I have great respect for him,

in fact, he is a very worthy and refined and measured fellow,

not a particularly huggy sort of bloke,

but very worthy and dignified.

I have nothing personal against Sam at all.

And if Rajneesh were alive I would not be making any effort to deprive

him of his groupies or his Rolls Royces, or his Mercedes Benzes

or whatever toys he possessed.

But Harsha, you must know that in all the years I was a member of the Rajneesh fold

I never met anyone,who had the slightest idea of who we really are.

And to see who you are, even if it is only a glimpse,

is the very ABC.

If after fifteen years, no-one had a clue about who they really are---

I have to say it - the man was a fraud.

But it was Lynne who asked me the real question

and when Lynne replies to my question to her I will give a (not particularly lengthy)answer.

Harsha, would you like to post a list of those who cannot be spoken ill of in this chatroom?

It would simplify things;

it would be a piece of Stalinist censorship but it would simplify things.

What would be the criteria?

No-one who had a following of more than twenty thousand disciples can be criticised?

That would put Rajneesh safely behind the wall that forbids free discussion and evaluation.

Is it forbidden to speak ill of Billy Graham?

What about Aristotle?

Socrates?

Plato?

And would you also like all discussion of science to be frozen at a particular point?

Would you allow for a spherical Earth?

Would you permit atomic theory?

How about quantum theory?

Harsha, we have to get rid, eventually, of all our investments.

All our beliefs in ourselves as physical entities

separate entities,

controlling entities.

Why do you erect,

as the sine qua non of spiritual enquiry,

total belief in the authenticity

of one dead guru whose reputation is already in tatters,

and whose crazy-stupid-destructive behaviour is already on the public record?

Much love

Warwick

PS I have no desire to be unfriendly to Sam or to any other member of this chatroom.

But Harsha, this chatroom is devoted to the Advaitic way of inner exploration.

The Advaitic way is not the same way as ancestor worship, for example.

The moment you say that here we are exploring the Advaitic way, or ways,

you have also said that there are other ways that we are not exploring.

-

Harsha

Sunday, April 25, 2004 3:39 AM

RE: Warwick/Adiji/ Re: Rabi'a Basri - the Mystic - a sufi saint !

Dear Warwick:

Thanks for sharing.

In Jainism, there is a notion of Anekantavada (By the way, Rajneesh

was originally a Jain. My teacher knew him well and as I recall gave

him one of the first platforms in Bombay to speak to a large crowd).

Anekantavada implies multiple perspectives on Reality, each valid

depending on the location of the observer in the "Psychological

Space".

Your trips and path that took you through Rajneesh, Bazza, Andrew

Cohen was fruitful because now you know the knower as the

self-knowing.

It doesn't matter now if one or two or all three gurus you had

are/were full of crap and charlatans, does it?

Maybe it does, I don't know. But what should we do here in the Sangha

about the problems of gurus and disciples?

If they want to screw each other, that's their business, is it not?

Maybe not. Maybe its all our business. Maybe we should be writing

letters to someone.

Now get rid of the judgments baby! :-). Oh, sorry, I have no right to ask you that.

Bring on more juicy stories then!

Here is the real question. In this sangha we have former students of

Rajneesh, Saibaba, this swami and that swami and this living divine

mother and that living divine father and this living divine uncle,

etc. So conversations will happen and there will be disagreements.

I guess the bottom line is are you Warwick willing (and able) to hug

SamP and makeup. If not, what use is all this.

At the end of the day, I don't care how enlightened you are. I want

to see you all hug each other.

This is my sangha and I make the rules.

Love to all

Harsha

Warwick Wakefield [formandsubstance (AT) tpg (DOT) com.au] Sent:

Saturday, April 24, 2004 3:01 AMTo:

Subject: Re:

Warwick/Adiji/ Re: Rabi'a Basri - the Mystic - a sufi saint !

Hi Lynne,

Yes, I met both of these guys.

I met Rajneesh somewhere around 1971 or 72. It was just after he left

Bombay and moved to Poona, up in the hills.

I spent maybe two years in Poona, as a disciple, and I spent maybe

twelve or thirteen years altogether as a disciple.

When I left the fold it was with no hard feelings and I still

considered that he was probably the Satguru that he claimed to be;

(What did I know? I was no spiritual adept-- That was the way that

we Sannyasins used to think and talk.) It was only later that the

pennies dropped and it became clear what a fraud he was.

I met Barry Long at his first series of meetings in Sydney. Somewhere

around the late eighties.He advertised them with half-page

advertisements in the local broadsheet and a few hundred people

attended. He was a smooth talker. I expect he had had some kind of

awakening experience, and he made a nice little earner out of it.

And I met him again in the mid-nineties, this time when I was a member

of the Cohen cult, and when I met him this time, the second time, it

was after Cohen had endorsed him as the genuine article.

Now Lynne, I could tell you hundreds of stories about Rajneesh. But

what would be a really relevant story?

The way I see it, a really relevant story would be either

1) A story that illustrated his authentic understanding of what is our

real essence, and his ability to teach that to others. (And I know;

there are no "others", but the statement that there are no "others"

only has relevance in a certain context, a context of much deeper

understanding than we are operating in at the moment.)

2) A story that illustrated that he really lacked this understanding,

and behaved in such a way that it was obvious that he didn't at all

know who he was.

The way I see it, stories of "going into rapture" in his presence are

not relevant. That happens at pop concerts. It was very common at

Hitler's rallies. There can be dozens of causes, ranging from having

one's pre-conceived ideas confirmed in an especially vigorous way to

having one's emotional susceptibilities manipulated.

It can happen in the presence of a Master also, but I think that the

most interesting story I've ever heard in relation to rapture in the

presence of a Master was the account of one seeker who visited

Ramana. He used to fall into bliss during satsang, but something

about it made him uneasy. After much reflection, he understood that

while the bliss was wonderful, after the bliss had passed he was in

much the same condition of ignorance as before. So, at the next

Satsang, when he felt the onset of bliss, instead of just giving

himself over to it he struggled to maintain his awareness of "who he

was" and what was the relevance of the presence (or Presence) of the

Master in relation to that question of all questions, "Who am I?"

I forget all the details now, but I remember that he did receive an

answer to that question, and that answer stayed with him after the

satsang was finished. In other words, his ignorance was, at least to

some extent, destroyed.

Now Lynne, I am going to put my cards on the table. There are great

revelations, there are intuitions and inklings, there are

intellectual understandings and there are understandings that affect

not only the intellect but have a transformative effect on the fibres

of the body, the structure of the emotions and one's moment to moment

experience.

During my adolescence and young manhood I had many inklings of a

spiritual presence. Inklings and intuitions that were relevant and

good, but left me in as much ignorance as ever.

When I was about twenty one I began reading a book about Buddhism. The

book gave an historical and cultural outline; it mentioned Buddhism's

arising, its rapid spread, the societies that grew up around it and

the magnificent artworks, temples, statuary, paintings, song and

suchlike that were rooted in, and expressions of, Buddhism.

Then it dropped the bombshell -- it said that the Buddhists themselves

regarded all of this magnificence, at the level of society, at the

level of the world, at the level of culture and art, as unreal, as no

more than a dream, an illusion.

I threw the book away. No point reading junk like that.

But five or six years later I had an experience which had no relation

to anything I could understand, and it occurred to me, with total

certainty, "My God, those crazy Buddhists were right; the whole world

was a dream, Warwick was a dream, the only reality is....whatever this

non-thing is."

But the person of Warwick came back, and the world came back, and I began the spiritual search.

I was a Rajneeshee, an encounter grouper, and a member of the Cohen Cult. All to no effect.

But over the last three or four years I have been given glimpses of my

true nature.....which is also your true nature.

I have seen, with great clarity, who, or what, I really am --- what is my essence.

It has not been accompanied by the tremendous bliss that accompanied

my realization, when I was a young man, that the world and the

persons in it, and he whom I had believed myself to be, were dream.

But it is much more valuable. It is what various Advaitists call

knowing, not the knowing of an object but a knowing that is totally

subjective, the knowing of the knower. And this knowing is available

more or less whenever I look for it.

And the implication of this knowing is that we are not flesh and blood

bodies, and we are not thinking and feeling beings, we are spiritual

being. Not beings --- being.

And we do not live in a material world, the world is also spiritual

-- forms within consciousness.

Consciousness is, in fact, that within which every happening occurs.

And the happenings are not what is important --- what is important

is that within which the happenings take place, consciousness, the

Self.

Now Lynne, before I tell you about Rajneesh, the relevant things about

Rajneesh, and before I tell you about Long, I want you to tell me

about you.

What type of spiritual search, or practice, are you involved in?

What has been your real experience?

How significant is it all, not theoretically but in terms of actual experience?

I have no intention of making any judgment, but I want to talk to you, not some vague entity.

Much love

Warwick

-

/join

"Love itself

is the actual form of God."Sri RamanaIn "Letters from Sri

Ramanasramam" by Suri Nagamma

[Guest guest]

Dear Warwick:

We have made you feel welcome here, have we not.

Sam is your old friend. Sam is my new friend.

So we have Sam in common.

There is no censorship here.

You are just expected to hug everyone at the end of the day on this list.

You have to act lovey dovey and stuff.

Hope that's not too much too ask.

Anyway, you have our company.

We have each other's company.

Was there something else you were looking for?

Love to all

Harsha

Warwick Wakefield [formandsubstance (AT) tpg (DOT) com.au] Sent:

Saturday, April 24, 2004 7:41 PMTo:

Subject: Re: Thou

shall not speak ill of.....any Guru who managed to get a following og

twenty thousand.

Dear Harsha,

if I wore a hat I would take it off to you.