Ram/Jerry/Rahasya/Is is phony or what?

[Guest guest]

At 10:31 AM 1/6/00 -0500, Ram Chandran wrote:

>Greetings Rahasya:

>

>I do not object humor as such but it is only a mean and not the end! The

focus of the Satsang should be the subject matter and not on humor and

rhetoric. I have seen some Satsang where subject matter is drowned by the

humor and rhetoric. Humor is a useful tool to get the attention of the

audience but needs to be employed without erasing the ultimate goal!

 

Ram-ji, Rahasya-ji

 

What Jerry is talking about is not the yagna-style Satsang (like the

Chinmaya Mission's), but a recent, Western hybrid. Have you ever been to a

satsang by one of the recent Western teachers who teach by answering

questions not from a text, but from their own experience of a kind of

transmission they say they got from their teacher? The teacher sits in

front of the room and looks deeply into peoples' eyes; the people deeply

into the teacher's eyes, and then ask a spiritual or psychological or

life-skills question. The teacher looks deeply into the questioner's eyes

and answers. Sometimes the mood is somber, sometimes it is wacky and

playful. Sometimes people cry, sometimes they laugh. People say they see

the Self in the teacher, and also in the person sitting next to them. They

report how this wonderful feeling was still present after the last time the

person was at satsang, but then wore off in 2 days. There are boxes of

Kleenex in the room. Sometimes people go up and just hug the teacher, and

see the teacher as God. The teacher will mention Buddha, Ramana Maharshi,

Jesus, Meister Eckhart and lots of others. This kind of thing is what

Jerry spoke about, and I have been to enough satsangs to know that he's

reporting something that is quite common.

 

Om!

 

--Greg