The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda (by William Rodarmor )

[Guest guest]

The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda

 

by William Rodarmor

 

Illustrated by Matthew Wuerker

 

" There is no deity superior to the Guru, no gain better than the

Guru's grace ... no state higher than meditation on the Guru. " -

Muktananda

 

ON THE American consciousness circuit, Baba Muktananda was known as

the " guru's guru, " one of the most respected meditation masters

ever to come out of India. Respected, that is, until now.

 

When Baba Ram Dass introduced him to the U.S. in 1970. Muktananda

was still largely unknown. Thanks to Muktananda's spiritual power,

his Siddha meditation movement quickly took root in the fertile soil

of the American growth movement. By the time he died of heart

failure in October 1982, Muktananda's followers had built him 31

ashrams, or meditation centers, around the world. When crowds saw

Muktananda step from a black limousine to a waiting Lear jet, it was

clear that the diminutive, orange-robed Indian was an American-style

success.

 

At various times, Jerry Brown, Werner Erhard, John Denver, Marsha

Mason; James Taylor, Carry Simon, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Meg

Christian have all been interested in Muktananda's movement. The

media coordinator at the large Oakland, California, ashram is former

Black Panther leader Erika Huggins.

 

Baba Muktananda said he was a Siddha, the representative of a

centuries-old Hindu lineage. According to his official biography, he

wandered across India as a young man, going from teacher to teacher,

living the chaste, austere life of a monk. In Ganeshpuri, near

Bombay, he became the disciple of Nityananda, a Siddha guru of

awesome yogic powers. After years of meditation, Muktananda

experienced enlightenment. When Nityananda died in 1960, Muktananda

said the guru passed the Siddha mantle to him on his deathbed,

though some of Nityananda's followers in India dispute the claim.

When Muktananda himself died, a sympathetic press still saw him as a

spiritual Mr. Clean, and his two successors, a brother-sister team

of swamis, continue to draw thousands of people searching for higher

consciousness.

 

To most of his followers, Muktananda was a great master. But to

others, he was a man unable to live up to the high principles of his

own teachings. " When we first approach a Guru, " Muktananda

wrote, " we should carefully examine his qualities and his actions.

He should have conquered desire and anger and banished infatuation

from his heart. " For many, that was a warning that was understood

too late.

 

Some of Muktananda's most important former followers now charge that

the guru repeatedly violated his vow of chastity, made millions of

dollars from his followers' labors: and allowed guns and violence in

his ashrams. The accusations have been denied by the swamis who took

over his movement after the master died.

 

In the course of preparing this story, I talked with 25 present and

former devotees; most of the interviews are on tape. Some people

would only talk to me if promised anonymity, and some are bitter at

what they feel was Muktananda's betrayal of their trust. All agree

that Muktananda was a man of unusual power. They differ over the

ways he used it.

 

" I don't have sex for the same reason you do: because it feels so

good. " -Muktananda

 

IN HIS teachings Muktananda put a lot of emphasis on sex - most of

it negative. Curbing the sex drive released the kundalini energy

that led to enlightenment, he said. The swami himself claimed to be

completely celibate.

 

Members of the guru's inner circle, however, say Muktananda

regularly had sex with his female devotees. Michael Dinga, an

Oakland contractor who was head of construction for the ashram and a

trustee of the foundation, said the guru's sexual exploits were

common knowledge in the ashram. " It was supposed to be Muktananda's

big secret, " said Dinga, " but since many of the girls were in their

early to middle teens, it was hard to keep it secret. "

 

A young woman I am calling " Mary " said the guru seduced her at the

main American ashram at South Fallsburg, New York, in 1981. Mary was

in her early twenties at the time. Muktananda was 73.

 

At South Fallsburg, Muktananda used to stand behind a curtain in the

evening, watching the girls coming back to the dormitory. He asked

Mary to come to his bedroom several times, and gave her gifts of

money and jewelry. Finally, she did. When he then told her to

undress, she was shocked, but she obeyed.

 

" He had a special area which I assume he used for his sexual

affairs. It was similar to a gynecologist's table, but without the

stirrups. " (To his later chagrin, Michael Dinga realized he had

built the table himself.) " He didn't have an erection, " Mary

said, " but he inserted about as much as he could. He was standing

up, and his eyes were rolled up to the ceiling. He looked as if he

was in some sort of ecstasy. " When the session was over, Muktananda

ordered the girl to come back the next day, and added, " Don't wear

underwear. "

 

On the first night, Muktananda had tried to convince Mary she was

being initiated into tantric yoga - the yoga of sex. The next night,

he didn't bother. " It was like `Okay, you're here, take off your

clothes. get on the table and let's do it.' Just very straight,

hard, cold sex. "

 

Mary told two people about what had happened to her. Neither was

exactly surprised.

 

Michael's wife Chandra was disturbed. Chandra was probably the most

important American in the movement. As head of food services, she

saw Muktananda daily, and knew what was going on. " Whoever was in

his kitchen was in some way molested, " she said. A girl I'll

call " Nina " used to work for Chandra. One day, the guru remarked to

her in Hindi, " Sex with Nina is very good. " Nina's mother was later

made a swami.

 

Chandra said she had rationalized the guru's having sex in the past,

but was dismayed to learn it had happened to her young friend Mary.

Aware of Muktananda's power over people who were devoted to him, she

saw it as a form of rape.

 

The other person Mary confided in was Malti, Muktananda's longtime

translator.

 

Mary said Malti wasn't surprised when she told her about being

seduced by the aged guru. " She told me people had been coming to her

with this for years and years, " Mary said. " She was caught in the

middle. " Malti and her brother, who have taken the names

Chidvilasananda and Nityananda, are the movement's new leaders.

 

Another of Muktananda's victims was a woman I'll call " Jennifer. "

She says Muktananda raped her at the main Indian ashram at

Ganeshpuri in the spring of 1978. He ordered Jennifer to come to his

bedroom late one night, and told her to take her clothes off. " I was

in shock, " she said, " but over the years, I had learned you never

say no to anything that he asked you to do.... "

 

Muktananda had intercourse with Jennifer for an hour, she said, and

was quite proud of the fact. " He kept saying, `Sixty

minutes,' " she said. " He claimed he was using the real Indian

positions, not the westernized ones used in America. " While he had

sex, the guru felt like conversing, but Jennifer found she couldn't

say a word. " The main thing he wanted to know was how old I was when

I first got my period. I answered something, and he said,

`That's good, you're a pure girl.' " Devastated by the

event, Jennifer made plans to leave the ashram as soon as possible,

but Muktananda continued to be interested in her. " He used to watch

me getting undressed through the keyhole, " she said. She would open

the door and see the guru outside " I became rather scared of him,

because he kept coming to my room at night. "

 

Both women said the Ganeshpuri ashram was arranged to suit

Muktananda's convenience.

 

" He had a secret passageway from his house to the young girls'

dormitory, " Mary said. " Whoever he was carrying on with, he had

switched to that dorm. " The guru often visited the girls' dormitory

while they were undressing. " He would come up anytime he wanted to "

Jennifer said, " and we would just giggle. In the early days, I never

thought of him as having sexual desires. He was the guru... " Mary

knew otherwise: she talked with at least eight other young girls who

had sex with Muktananda. " I knew that he had girls marching in and

out of his bedroom all night long, " she said.

 

While his followers were renovating a Miami hotel in 1979,

Muktananda slept on the women's floor, and ordered that the youngest

be put in the rooms closest to his, and the older ones down the hall.

 

" You always knew who he was carrying on with, " said Chandra. " They

came down the next day with a new gold bracelet or a new pair of

earrings. " Around the ashram, said Mary, people knew that " anyone

who had jewelry was going to his room a lot. "

 

For a time, Muktananda's followers found ways to rationalize his

behavior. He wasn't really penetrating his victims, they said. Or he

wasn't ejaculating - an important distinction to some, since

retaining the semen was supposed to be a way of conserving the

kundalini energy.

 

Ultimately, Chandra felt it didn't make any difference. " If you're

going to be celibate, and you're going to preach celibacy, you don't

put it in halfway, and then pull it out. You live what you preach... "

 

After years of repressing their growing doubts about Muktananda,

Michael and Chandra finally drew the line when they learned he was

molesting a 13-year-old girl. She had been entrusted to the ashram

by her parents, and was being cared for by Muktananda's laundress

and chauffeur. The laundress " told me Baba was doing things to her, "

said Chandra. " I think he was probing around in her. " The laundress

suggested it was only " Baba's way of loving her, " but Chandra was

appalled.

 

Charges of sex against Muktananda continued. In 1981, one of

Muktananda's swamis, Stan Trout, wrote an open letter accusing his

guru of molesting Little girls on the pretext of checking their

virginity. The letter caused a stir, but word didn't go beyond the

ashram. In a " Memo from Baba, " Muktananda merely answered

that " devotees should know the truth by their own experience, not by

the letters that they receive... You should be happy that I'm still

alive and healthy and that they haven't tried to hang me. "

 

" Wretched is he who cannot observe discipline and restraint even in

an ashram. " -Muktananda

 

I N THE first of his eight years with Muktananda, Yale dropout

Richard Grimes said he was " in a funny kind of grace period, where

you're so involved with the beginning of inner Life that you don't

really notice what is going on. " But then he started seeing things

that didn't jibe with his idea of a meditation retreat.

 

" Muktananda had a ferocious temper, " said Grimes, " and would scream

or yell at someone for no seeming reason. " He saw the guru beating

people on many occasions. " In India, if peasants were caught

stealing a coconut from his ashram, Muktananda would often beat

them, " Grimes said. The people in the ashram thought it was a great

honor to be beaten by the guru. No one asked the peasants' opinion.

 

Muktananda's ubiquitous valet, Noni Patel, was a regular target of

his master's wrath. While on tour in Denver, Noni came down to the

kitchen to be treated for a strange wound in his side. " At first, he

wouldn't say how he had gotten it, " Grimes' wife Lotte

recalled. " Later it came out that Baba had stabbed him with a fork. "

 

When ex-devotees talked about strong-arm tactics against devotees,

the names of two people close to Muktananda kept coming up. One was

David Lynn, known as Sripati, an ex-Marine Vietnam vet. The other

was Joe Don Looney, an ex-football player with a reputation for

troublemaking on the five NFL teams he played for, and a criminal

record. They were known as the " enforcers " ; Muktananda used them to

keep people in line.

 

On the guru's orders, Sripati once picked a public fight with then-

swami Stan Trout at the South Fallsburg ashram. He came down from

Boston, where Muktananda was staying, and punched Trout to the

ground without provocation. Long-time devotee Abed Simli saw the

attack, but figured Sripati had just flipped out. Michael Dinga knew

otherwise. Muktananda had phoned him the morning before the beating,

and told him Trout's ego was getting too big, and that he was

sending Sripati to set him straight. Dinga, a big man, was

instructed not to interfere.

 

In India, Dinga and a man called Peter Polivka witnessed

Muktananda's valet Noni Patel give a particularly brutal beating

to a young follower: A German boy in his twenties, whom Dinga

described as " obviously in a disturbed state " had started flailing

around during a meditation intensive. The German was hauled outside,

put under a cold shower, stripped naked, and laid out on a concrete

slab behind the ashram. Dinga said the German just sat in a full

lotus position, and tried to steel himself against what happened

next.

 

Noni Patel took a rubber hose, a foot-and-a-half long, and beat and

questioned the boy for thirty minutes while a large black man called

Hanuman held him. " They were full-strength blows, " said Dinga, " and

they raised horrible welts on the boy's body. "

 

There exists a long tradition in the East of masters beating their

students. Tibetan and Zen Buddhist stories are full of sharp blows

that stop the students rational minds long enough for them to become

enlightened. Couldn't that have been what Muktananda was doing?

 

" It could be seen that way, " said Richard Grimes. " For years we

thought that every discrepancy was because he lived outside the laws

of morality He could do anything he wanted. That in itself is the

biggest danger of having a perfect master lead any kind of group -

there's no safeguard. "

 

Chandra Dinga said that as Muktananda's power grew, he ignored

normal standards of behavior. " He felt he was above and beyond the

law, " she said. " It went from roughing people up who didn't do what

he wanted, to eventually, at the end, having firearms. "

 

Though the ashrams were meditation centers, a surprising number of

people in them had guns. Chandra saw Noni's gun, Muktananda's

successor Subash's gun, and the shotgun Muktananda kept in his

bedroom. Others saw guns in the hands of " enforcer " Sripati and

ashram manager Yogi Ram. The manager of the Indian ashram showed

Richard Grimes a pistol that had been smuggled into India for his

use. One devotee opened a paper bag in an ashram vehicle in Santa

Monica, and found ammunition in it.

 

A woman who ran the ashram bakery for many years said she knew some

people had guns, but that it never bothered her. The Santa Monica

ashram, for example, was in a very rough neighborhood, she said, and

the guns were strictly for protection.

 

" In an ashram, one should not fritter one's precious time in a

precious place on eating and drinking, sleeping, gossiping and

talking idly. " -Muktananda

 

BY ALL accounts, devotees in the ashrams worked hard under trying

conditions. In India, they were isolated from their culture. Even in

the American ashrams, close friendships were frowned on, and

Muktananda strongly discouraged devotees from visiting their

families. A woman I'm calling " Sally " used to get up for work at

3:30 a.m. She said her day was spent in work, chanting, meditation,

and silence. " Some days, you couldn't talk to anyone all day long. I

would get very lonely. " Recorded chants were often played over

loudspeakers. Even a woman who is still close to the movement

admitted that " the long hours were a drag. "

 

Though he was Muktananda's right-hand man for construction, Michael

Dinga worked " under incredible schedules with ridiculous budgets, "

putting in the same hours as his crew. In the six-and-a-half years

he was with the ashram, he said he had a total of two weeks off.

 

As time went on, Dinga came to be bothered by what he saw as

exploitation: " I saw the way people were manipulated, how they would

work in all sincerity and all devotion [with] no idea that they were

being laughed at and taken advantage of. "

 

" Even a penny coming as a gift should be regarded as belonging to

God and religion. " -Muktananda

 

MUKTANANDA'S movement was both a spiritual and a financial success.

Once Siddha meditation caught on, said Chandra Dinga, " money poured

into the ashram. " Particularly lucrative were the two-

day " meditation intensives " given by Muktananda, and now by his

successors. Today, an intensive led by the two new gurus costs $200.

(Money orders or cashier's checks only, please. No credit cards or

personal checks.) An intensive given in Oakland in May 1983 drew

1200 participants, and people had to be turned away. At $200 a head,

Chidvilasananda and Nityananda's labors earned the ashram nearly

a quarter of a million dollars in a single weekend.

 

There was always a lot of secrecy around ashram affairs, Lotte

Grimes remarked. During Muktananda's lifetime, that secrecy applied

to money matters with a vengeance.

 

The number of people who came to intensives, for example, was a

secret even from the devotees. Simple multiplication would tell

anyone how much money was coming in. And when Richard Grimes set up

a restaurant at the Oakland ashram, he said Muktananda " had a fit "

when he found out that Grimes had been keeping his own records of

the take.

 

Food services head Chandra Dinga said the restaurants in the various

ashrams were always big money-makers, where devotees worked long

hours for free. On tour during the summer, she said, they would feed

over a thousand people, and bring in three thousand dollars in cash

a day. Sally said that a breakfast that sold for two dollars

actually cost the ashram about three cents.

 

Donations further fattened the coffers. if somebody important was

coming to the ashram, Chandra's job was to try and get them to

give a feast and to make a large donation. $1500 to $3000 was

considered appropriate. " There was just a constant flow of money

into his pockets, " said Chandra, " it let him get whatever he wanted

to get, and let him buy people. "

 

Muktananda himself was said to have been very attached to

money. " For years, he catered only to those who were wealthy, " said

Richard Grimes. " He spent all the time outside of his public

performances seeing privately anyone who had a lot of money. "

 

A parade of Mercedes-Benzes used to drive up to the Ganeshpuri

ashram with rich visitors, said Grimes. In Oakland, Lotte Grimes saw

Malti order a list drawn up of everybody in the ashram who had

money, to arrange private interviews with Muktananda, by his orders.

 

Devotees, on the other hand, had to get by on small stipends, if

they got anything. Chandra Dinga, despite her status as head of food

services, never got more than $100 a month. Devotees with less

prestige were completely dependent on the guru's generosity. Sally

once cried for two days when she broke her glasses, knowing she

would have to beg Muktananda for another pair.

 

How much money did Muktananda amass from his efforts? Even the

officers of the foundation that ostensibly ran Muktananda's affairs

never knew for sure.

 

Michael Dinga was a foundation trustee, and used to cosign for

deposits to the ashram's Swiss bank accounts, but the amounts on

the papers were always left blank. In 1977, however, he got a hint.

Ron Friedland, the president of the foundation, told Dinga that

Muktananda had 1.3 million dollars in Switzerland. Three years

later, Muktananda told Chandra it was more like five million. " And

then he laughed, and said, `There's more than that.' "

 

A woman called Amma, who was Muktananda's companion for more than

twenty years, told the Dingas that all the accounts were in the

names of Muktananda's eventual successors, Chidvilasananda and

Nityananda.

 

Michael and Chandra Dinga finally quit the ashram in December 1980.

They had served Muktananda for a combined total of sixteen-and-a-

half years, and had risen to positions of real importance. Both knew

exactly how the ashram operated.

 

Together, they went to Muktananda to tell him why they wanted to

leave. The guru wasn't pleased. To get the Dingas to stay,

Muktananda called on everything he thought would stir them. He

offered them a car, a house, and money. When that failed, he started

to weep. " You're my blood, my family, " he said. Then Muktananda

abruptly changed tack. " You've come on an inauspicious day, " he

said. " I can't give you my blessing. " Next morning, he called

Chandra on the public intercom and said she could leave immediately.

 

After they left, the Dingas say they were denounced by the guru, and

their lives threatened.

 

" Muktananda claimed he had thrown us out because Chandra was a

whore " said Dinga, " that she was having sex with the young boys who

worked in the restaurant. Later he said I had a harem. In other

words, he was accusing us of all the things he was doing himself. "

Muktananda also claimed that none of the buildings Michael had built

were any good. When one of Michael's crew stood up for him, he was

threatened physically.

 

Leaving all their friends behind in the ashram, the Dingas moved to

the San Francisco area, but Muktananda's enmity followed them. Their

doorbell and telephone started ringing at odd hours, and Michael saw

the " enforcers " running away from their door one night. A cruel hoax

was played on Chandra. Someone followed her when she took her cat to

the vet, then phoned the vet's office with a message that her

husband had been in a bad accident. Chandra waited frantically at

Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital for three quarters of an hour, only

to learn that Michael was at work, unhurt.

 

Death threats started to reach the Dingas toward the end of April

1981, six months after they had left the ashram. On May 7, Sripati

and Joe Don Looney visited Lotte Grimes at her job in Emeryville

with a frightening piece of information: " Tell Chandra this is a

message from Baba: Chandra only has two months to live. " Another ex-

follower said he got a similar message: If the Dingas didn't keep

quiet, acid would be thrown in Chandra's face; Michael would be

castrated.

 

The Grimeses and the Dingas reported the threats to the police. The

Dingas hired a lawyer.

 

The threats stopped soon after Berkeley police officer Clarick Brown

called on the Oakland ashram, but Chandra was badly frightened. Some

ex-followers still are.

 

Michael and Chandra's departure sparked a small exodus from the

ashram. Some of the ex-followers began to meet and compare notes on

their experiences in the ashram. " We were amazed and rejuvenated, "

said Richard Grimes. " We got more energy from learning he was a con

man than we ever did thinking he was a real person. "

 

Just the same, the devotees who left the ashram are still dealing

with the damage done to their lives. Michael and Chandra's marriage

broke up, as did Sally's. Michael is only now coming out of a period

of depression and emptiness. Richard and Lotte Grimes are bitter at

having wasted years of their lives in the ashram. Stan Trout still

considers Muktananda a great yogi, but a tragically flawed man.

 

Chandra Dinga has taken years to come to terms with her experience

with Muktananda; " Your whole frame of reference becomes askew, " she

said. " What you would normally think to be right or wrong no longer

has any place. The underlying premise is that everything the guru

does is for your own good. The guru does no wrong. When I finally

realized that everything he did was not for our own good, I had to

leave. "

 

Muktananda's two successors were at the Oakland ashram in May end

I asked Swami Chidvilasananda about the accusations against her guru.

 

To her knowledge, did Muktananda have sex with women in the

ashram? " Not as far as I saw, " she said carefully. What about the

charge that Muktananda had sex with young girls? " Those girls never

came to us, " Chidvilasananda said. " And we never saw it, we only

heard it when Chandra talked to everybody else. "

 

Chidvilasananda also denied that there was a bank account in

Switzerland. When asked about the ashram's finances, she said that

all income was put back into facilities. " We are a break-even

proposition, " the new leader said.

 

As for the alleged beatings, she said that Americans had their own

ways of doing things. She said, " You can't blame the guru, because

the guru doesn't teach that. "

 

Why then, I asked, do the other ex-devotees I talked with support

the Dingas in their charges?

 

Chidvilasananda replied, " I'm very glad they gave you a very nice

story to cover themselves up and I want to tell you I don't want to

get into this story because I know their story, too, and I do not

want to say anything about it. " When I said, " You have a chance to

tell us whether or not you think these are accurate charges,

falsehoods, or delusions, " Malti's answer was: " I'm not going to

probe into people's minds and try to find out what the truth is. "

 

Two swamis and a number of present followers also said the charges

were not true. Others say they simply don't believe them.

 

On the subject of money, foundation chief Ed Oliver conceded in an

October 1, l983, interview with the Los Angeles Times that there is

a Swiss account with 1.5 million dollars in it. And when I repeated

Swami Chidvilasananda's denials about women complaining to her,

Mary, the woman who says the guru seduced her in South Fallsburg,

said, " Well, that's an out-and-out lie. "

 

" The sins committed at any other place are destroyed at a holy

centre, but those committed at a holy centre stick tenaciously - it

is difficult to wash them away. " -Muktananda

 

THIS IS a story of serious accusations made against a spiritual

leader who is still prayed to and revered by thousands. Even his

detractors say Muktananda gave them a great deal in the

beginning. " He put out a force field around him, " said Michael

Dinga. " You could palpably feel the force coming off him. It gave me

the feeling I had latched onto something that would answer my

questions. " Former devotees say Muktananda's eyes had a kind of

light; when they first met the guru, he radiated love and

benevolence. He also had a way of making his devotees feel special.

 

" I think he liked me so much because I wasn't taken by all the

visions and the sounds, " said Chandra, " that I understood that

having an experience of God was something much more substantial and

more ordinary. " Chandra still feels that spirituality is the most

important thing in her life. She says the gradual unfolding of the

dark side of her guru's personality chipped away at her love and

respect. " When you have a loved one you never dream that he might

hurt you. At the end, I was devastated. " Yet despite the unsavory

conclusion to her ten years with the swami, Chandra still notes, " if

I had it to do over again, I still wouldn't trade the experience for

anything in the world. "

 

In a way, the sex, the violence, and the corruption aren't the real

point. Muktananda's personal shortcomings were bad enough, explained

Michael Dinga, but " the worst of it was that he wasn't who he said

he was. "

 

A person can make spiritual progress under a corrupt master, just as

placebos can actually make you feel better. But how far can a person

really grow spiritually under a master who doesn't himself live the

truth? There was a tremendous split between what Muktananda preached

and what he did, and his hypocrisy only made it worse. His

successors are now in a dilemma: If they admit their guru's sins,

Chidvilasananda and Nityananda lose their god-figure, and weaken

their claim to a lineage of perfect masters. But if they don't,

people who come to them looking for truth are courting

disappointment.

 

Stan Trout, formerly Swami Abhayananda, served Muktananda for ten

years as a teacher and ashram director. He left in 1981. " My summary

withdrawal from Muktananda's organization was also a withdrawal

from what I had considered my fraternal family, my friends, and able

all, my life's work, " he wrote us. He sent this open letter after

reading a draft of " The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda, " in which

he is quoted. - Art Kleiner

 

Letter From a Former Swami

 

by Stan Trout

 

I'd like to add this letter, if possible, as an appendix to the

article on Muktananda by William Rodarmor. It is a statement of my

thoughts and opinions of Muktananda after two years of deep

deliberation following my discovery of his `secret life'.

 

When I left Muktananda's service, I did so because I had just

learned of the threatening action he had taken against some of his

long-time devotees who had recently left his service. He had sent

two of his body-guards to deliver threats to two young married women

who had been speaking to other women who had been speaking to others

of Muktananda's sexual liaisons with a number of young girls in

his ashram. It was immediately clear to me that I could not

represent a guru who was not only taking sexual advantage of his

female devotees but was threatening with bodily harm those who

revealed the truth about him. However, after I had left Muktananda

and had make the reasons for my departure known to others still in

his service, another issue came to light for me, teaching me

something not only about Muktananda's, but about the nature of

the organization and all other such organizations in which the

leader is regarded as infallible by his followers, and is therefore

obeyed implicitly.

 

When Chandra and Michael Dinga and later myself realized the truth

about Muktananda and his secret sex life, there was absolutely no

means available to present the evidence for a fair hearing or

judgment. There was no recourse but to leave, for the guru was the

sole appeal, and he was as accustomed to lying as he was to

breathing. Yet his word was regarded by followers as so absolutely

final that when each of us left and were branded " demons " by him,

not a single soul among those who had been our brother and sister

devotees for ten years questioned or objected, but unamimouly

rejected us outright as the demented infidels he said we were. One

has only to observe the way each of us who discovered the guru's

secret life were treated by our former comrades to understand the

power for evil inherent in any relationship based on the

infallibility of the leader and the unquestioned obedience of the

subjects...

 

It is clear to me that not only had the girls with whom Muktananda

practiced his sexual diversions committed acts to which they had

given no moral or rational consent, but so had the men who were

ordered to threaten them with violence, and so had I myself when I

had followed Muktananda's orders to express to others opinions

which I did not sincerely hold. It is a sad but perennial

phenomenon: Out of a love for truth and for those who teach it and

appear to embody it, we unwittingly set ourselves up for

exploitation and betrayal. Our mistake is to deify another being and

attribute perfection to him. From that point on everything is

admissible.

 

I think the lesson to be learned is that we simply cannot afford to

relinquish our individual sovereignty - whether it be in a socio-

political setting or in a religious congregation. Those who

willingly put aside their own autonomy, their own moral judgment, to

obey even a Christ, a Buddha, or a Krishna, do so at risk of losing

a great deal more than they can hope to gain.

 

About Muktananda himself I have thought a great deal. There is no

doubt in my mind that he was an extraordinarily enlightened,

learned, and articulate man who possessed a singular power, a

dynamic personal radiance and charisma that drew people to him and

inspired them to lay their lives at his feet. Surely such a power is

divine; yet there is no way to justify the way in which he used this

power. If God himself were to behave in this way, we would have to

find him guilty of flagrant disregard for the law of love.

 

Some may say, `He did no worse than any of us have done, or would

do if we could.' And I would answer, `No; he did worse than

any of use have done or would have done in his place. For, though he

was only human like the rest of us, he staged a deliberate campaign

of deceit to convince gentle souls that he had transcended the

limitations of mankind, that through realizing the eternal Self, he

had attained holy " perfection. " He planted and nourished false,

impossible dreams in the hears of innocent, faithful souls and

sacrificed them to his sport. With malicious glee, he cunningly

stole from hundreds of trusting souls their hearts and wills, their

self-trust, their very sanity, their very lives. No ordinary, good

person could do this, no matter how he tried; his heart and

conscience would not allow it.

 

Like all of us, Muktananda was only human. And, like all men who

worship power, he was inevitably corrupted and destroyed by it. His

power could not save him form the weakness of the flesh, nor from

the wickedness and depravity that servitude to it brings. He ended

as a feeble-minded sadistic tyrant, luring devout little girls to

his bed every night with promises of grace and self-realization.

 

Muktananda's claim of " perfection " (Siddha-hood) was based on the

notion that a person who has become enlightened has thereby also

become " perfect " and absolutely free of human weakness. This is

nonsense; it is a myth perpetrated by dishonest men who wish to

receive the reverence and adoration due God alone. There is no

absolute assurance that enlightenment necessitates the moral virtue

of a person. There is no guarantee against the weakness of anger,

lust, and greed in the human soul. The enlightened are on an equal

footing with the ignorant in the struggle against their own evil -

the only difference being that the enlightened person knows the

truth, and has no excuse for betraying it.

 

Throughout history there have been many enlightened souls who have

been thought great, who, in the pride of their perfection and

freedom, have imagined themselves to be beyond the constraints of

God's laws, and who have thus fallen from love and lost the glory

the once had. Those glorious Babes and Bhagwans, thinking to build

their kingdom here on earth upon the ruins of the young souls

devoted to them, often succeed for a time in fooling many and in

gathering a large and festive following, but their deeds also follow

them and proclaim their truth long after the paeans of praise have

been sung and wafted away on the air. " God is not mocked " ; there is

no freedom, no liberation, from His law of love, nor from His

inescapable justice. It is indeed often those very persons who have

thought themselves most perfect, most free and ungoverned, who have

fallen most grievously; and their piteous fall is an occasion for

great sadness, and should serve as a clear reminder of caution to us

all.

 

 

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