Lightmind Extract 066

03Jan08

crc 8.26.07
Jana wrote:
“If spirituality were even remotely the solution to (much less salvation from) oppressive power structures, there’d be less evidence of those same oppressive power structures in the social reality that actually constellates around nearly every spiritual leader.”

Yea, this kinda of thing made me outright dismiss modern spirituality in groups … I saw the codependency, exclusion, circle the wagons, narcissistic specialness, focus on the one teacher-Guru etc… to simply make the whole thing an ugly addictive dysfunctional mess, only essentially feeding security and power and belonging needs of the ego.

It is truly awful. This ad-nauseam-repeated phenomenon has only strengthened my conviction that a transcendence-oriented spirituality will generally not work as a way to pacify, ignore, shut-up, out-power, out-shine or shame-out-of-existence the concerns of the lower chakras, it will only aberrate them further.

And we’re damn lucky it doesn’t work. The truth is, there lurks within ’spirituality’ itself, the way it’s actually conceived and practiced by so many proponents, an inherent violence. No matter how mantled in white light nor wreathed in benevolent smiles nor cloaked in p.c.ness, it has been and still remains the least recognized vehicle for legitimized power-tripping and justified disenfranchisement – not primarily between persons, although it does of course show up there, but rather within the individual psyche itself.

Take this quote from Ken in the WIE issue, “Is God a Pacifist?”

Wilber: “This is another thing that people commonly misunderstand. People think that when you say force, it means “I have the right to force you.” But what we’re talking about is that my higher self has a right to force my lower self. That’s all we’re talking about.”

Duh. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t see the glaringly obvious political ramifications of what one sanctions internally, self to self?

Honestly, we ought first to look with a clearer eye at the tactics we each use to govern ourselves. And at the justifications for those tactics. When the power-over structures have been superannuated within, I suspect the question of what can be done regarding the outward government or social powers-that-be will look quite different.

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Lightmind Extract 065

03Jan08

crc 5.22.07
richlip wrote:
It is very clear that you have no understanding what the real process of awakening requires even though there are stories throughout the traditions that illustrate this ordeal quite well. There must be a conversion from self preservation to self sacrifice.

How many people here believe that awakening requires ‘a conversion from self preservation to self sacrifice’? If one does believe that, the fact that Franklin does not provide even a remotely passable example of self sacrifice would certainly be sufficiently compelling grounds for disenchantment. Even if Frank himself did not espouse and enjoin self sacrifice. Which of course he does, crowning his self-indulgent sundae with the cherry of hypocrisy.

But here we are, at the tail end of the piscean era and its long schizoid ricochet between problematic ego-aggrandizement and the repeatedly enjoined ’solution’ of self-sacrifice, a dissociated dichotomy wonderfully exemplified in Adi Dam. Here we are, poised upon the very moment when ‘waking up’, as it must have occurred to a growing number, may indeed entail waking up precisely from those very beliefs upon which this dynamism and thus the strategy of self-sacrifice are based. A strategy which, under its militant idealism, is quite dark with charged fear or a kind of salivating glee; with rather terrible impressions of the divine and its requirements matched by equally terrible impressions of one’s human nature. How many reaffirm this long-standing worldview; how many question it?

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Lightmind Extract 064

03Jan08

Elias 9.12.07
Quote:
As for the thinking of the realizer, I have no doubt that some process is going on in the brain that looks like thought, just as when the realizer acts, it looks like a person is acting, and yet, in consciousness there is no sense whatsoever of thinking or acting on their part. Taking your reference to language processing occurring at a level below consciousness, Nisargadatta used to say that his conversations with people, from his point of view, were as automatic as the activities of cells in our bodies, and took virtually none of his attention, any more than it takes our attention to process fluids through our liver and kidneys. However, he said that none of that was actually unconscious in him, it was indeed fully conscious, but it was just an infinitesimally small aspect of his full being and awareness.

Even a fragment of consciousness will take the nature of a person — thus in the phenomenon of “multiple personalities” split-off portions of the mind have all the characteristics of autonomous personalities. This proves rather conclusively that “person” and “ego consciousness” are not the same thing, but two different aspects of human nature.

A child before it develops an ego has the nature of a person, including willfulness, fear of heights, and “desire” constellated around the need to feed. To protect their concept of original sin, Daists have been known to say say a child is “born an ego” or a child is “born narcissus.” Stuff n’ nonsense of a bullshit religion that does whatever it can to rob life of its innocence.

Thinking thoughts: The idea that a realizer doesn’t think but has a “process that looks like thought” is based on the assumption that the ego thinks! Jung demonstrated that thoughts occur separate from the ego and rise from the unconscious only to be claimed by the ego as its own. This has also been demonstrated in the last few years by the new MRI brain science. If memory serves, a time-lapse is seen between the time a group of neurons fires and the “thought” enters awareness.

The ego doesn’t think. Imho the Self is far more capable of thought than the ego. Indeed, one of the revelations that helps crash the ego is the truth that the ego isn’t doing much of all except “clench the fist”. Everything is going on without the ego and always will. The ego owns nothing and is nothing. As you say, it’s an illusion. The “death” of the ego occurs when the ego “realizes” it has no responsibilities and no reason to exist! 

Elias

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Lightmind Extract 063

03Jan08

Elias 2.24.07
Quote:
Now I understand why Elias likes the ego, and tries to find a way to deliver the ego from out of the solipsistic circle, and let it become the child of God, or the sprout that grows into God, or something like that. I understand why you like that also. I would love it if I could see things that way, but I cannot. Why? Because the only enterprise is dependent on a core solipsism, and I don’t see any way around that. The buck stops here, in other words, and unless I know myself, the rest means nothing. So this solipsistic circle begins and ends with me. This is another way of saying that we are narcissus. The world revolves around us, but what is at the center?

OK, I get to say something here, because you have characterized my views.

First off, I don’t “like” the ego. Nor do I “dislike” it. In fact, my attitude is still open as to what it really is and why it exists at all. I’m still in the mode of studying the thing, and mostly detached from the findings, one way or another.

For another, I don’t have a need, at this point, for a belief system about reality, realization, duality, non-duality, etc. I operate without beliefs, for the most part, and just let life show itself to me, in whatever way it can.

That might seems strange, but I got tired of adhering to belief, quite awhile back. I became more of an existentialist. If reality were to reveal itself as a great enveloping horror, then let it be.

But of course when you let reality be itself (instead of trying to manipulate it with the ego or with the ego’s beliefs), it reveals itself to be wholely benign — even ecstatically so.

Get a few tastes of that and you quickly lose your concerns about the ego, as well as all this ponderous chest-beating of “solipsistic” philosophy. You fall out of the word-mind entirely, and, on occasion, even become unable to communicate what you know beyond a few stuttering remarks.

In the old days I was very high on the intellect. It was, as Jung would say, my “specialization”. But then, under the influence of the Spirit, I learned how the intellect sort of beats-up on the rest of the body-mind-being…and actually is instrumental in holding the being apart from the very delights of the Spirit that the intellect honors with its wordy considerations!

Talk about the ego — the intellect is the ego in action, par excellence. Really, it is the intellect that needs meditation and discipline…and surrender. And yet there are these “non-dual” philosophers, who darken the horizon with their ponderous speeches, draining life of the enjoyment which is inherent to being itself. These advaitins, with their weighty thoughts, are the enemy of the very thing they have enshrined in self-important abstractions!

(I don’t get that from reading Ramana, by the way. I feel light breaking through virtually everything he says. If he is an “advaitin”, he’s the best, because he is living what the philosophers only believe and hope to be true.)

Now, is the ego “the child that grows into God”? Not without self-knowledge, self-inspection, and deconstruction of the mind, that’s for sure. And this too is where I leave the realm of beliefs. Because the mind is a very real thing, experientially. It holds the raw data of our experience. It includes the psyche (conscious, unconscious, superconscious…or subconscious). It includes all the emotions that are riling the world at any given moment. It includes all the experience of all who have gone before us. And, not the least, it is something that doesn’t just go away when you wish it to, or when you recite various advaitin mantras.

The mind is “the elephant in the room”, and God, or the Self, or Buddha Nature, is the Reality that draws us into taking apart the mind.

Just that taking apart — that “involution” — is a step toward detachment. You might call it the birth of the witness consciousness. And while we might think that inspecting the mind is all about noticing and defusing the complexes that have ruled (and sometimes ruined) our lives, it is actually a way of awakening to the greater Self.

You sift these impressions, these sanskaras, these karmas…and you find their insubstantiality, their illusive nature which has been dependent on you to keep them in existence. What’s coming in then, from behind you, is the Truth. …It’s a Light that lights up your eye — clarifies your seeing.

To me, this is where you find “non-dual reality” — in the illumination from within. The already existing Truth — which is not dependent upon your intellect in any way — starts to leak through the cracks in the walls. If enough of it gets in, the walls give way entirely.

Yeah, that’s “the destruction of the ego” — if by ego we mean the intellect with its ponderous ideas, beliefs…and pride.

Elias

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Lightmind Extract 062

03Jan08

crc 3.4.07
Quote:
As you know the painbody (Tolle) loves to keep growing and occupy our bodymind like a parasite (Ruiz).

An ugly, dangerous and misleading concept. There is no painbody per se, there are only various parts in pain. And this pain points our attention to distress or damage in the physical or emotional body. Such distressed or damaged parts are not helped by being characterized as a separate entity, much less by then being further characterized as parasitical or cancerous (‘loves to keep growing”), as if they had a separate, alien, integrity-destroying agenda or intentionality. This is a false, forced separation and an outright denial of their true desire for relief, acceptance and healing – and only inflicts further distress and damage, the more so for being applied with a consciousness that considers itself objective here – or even worse, as being ‘loving’. The fact that some apparent ‘good’ may result is a measure of the desperation felt by these parts for any acceptance within any kind of love at all. Eventually, the denial and unloving assessment they had to buy into for this conditional acceptance will surface again as subtler problems. And ’subtler’ here does not mean that it’s become less of a problem; it means that it has become even more circumspect in how it makes itself known. There are some who are indeed capable of building a force field around themselves that no longer allows these messages to come through as one’s own suffering. Needless to say, I find that capacity itself heinous.

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Lightmind Extract 061

03Jan08

Broken Yogi 3.1.07

Maybe I should say a couple of words here.

First, the bliss you are talking about is clearly conditional bliss. How do I know? Because it’s a bliss that comes and goes. It’s impermanent. You’ve experienced it at times in past, but clearly not now, and not unbroken since then. So this bliss, no matter how great, is not unconditional. It required certain conditions to be met. It was, itself, a condition of some kind. Thus, it is conditional.

Second, this bliss is frustrating, because it is impermanent. We would like to experience bliss all the time, under all conditions, but we do not. Conditions are frustrating. Lack of bliss is frustrating. It induces craving, the craving for further bliss, for some kind of satisfaction, understanding, wisdom, pleasure, relief, that is lasting and sustainable. This craving is suffering in a nutshell.

Third, even this conversation is frustrating. Clearly, even I am frustrating to you. You want some kind of satisfaction from me, agreement, approbation, acknowledgment, etc., and you do not get it. So you become frustrated, and in your frustration, you lash out. Who doesn’t? This is how we live.

Fourth, there is no way out of this frustrating situation. All ways out are simply part of our craving for relief from suffering, and because we do not achieve that, they are the source of even further frustration.

Fifth, only the cessation of our craving for bliss (or whatever one thinks is the opposite of frustration) brings a genuine end to our frustration.

Sixth, one can cease to crave bliss by not craving bliss. It is an intentional and voluntary, though seemingly compulsive, behavior. We can stop doing it.

Seventh, to stop craving bliss means to stop reacting to our lack of present bliss. It means to stop “acting out” when we are frustrated and upset about the lack of present bliss, or the lack of love and relationship we are experiencing with those around us.

Eight, to stop reacting to our frustrations with life is to stop living conditionally. It means to stop craving in its tracks.

Nine, without our reaction to frustration, craving ceases, and hence frustration itself ceases.

Ten, the cessation of craving is the only true and unconditional bliss.

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Lightmind Extract 060

03Jan08

Elias 3.1.07
Quote:
BY: But yes, bliss is dualistic. Too bad. Orgasm also. Even ice cream. What a party-pooper!

Broken Yogi’s statement about bliss definitely describes a “dualistic” bliss. He compares spiritual bliss to an orgasm and even to ice cream. That is to say he appears to equate spiritual bliss with various neurological or sensational feelings of pleasure, such as the extreme pleasure of orgasm. He also, in keeping with a kind of “extreme asceticism” relative to anything short of what he imagines to be the Absolute, ends up dissing effortless states like Nirvikalpa Samadhi — opining, I gather, that such ecstacies are simply brain-orgasm or a form of yogic auto-eroticism.

I must disagree with him, based on my own experience. I think it is a terrible mistake to confuse physical pleasure with spiritual bliss. To even talk about the two things in the same breath is to show a lack of understanding about the nature of spiritual bliss.

Now BY’s unhappy concentration of the evils of dualism is well known. He seems to view spiritual life almost entirely through a nihilistic attempt at ego-murder (or ego-suicide), and doing away with the nasty obstructionism of his egoism. So it is that in describing meditation, he sees it in terms of “frustration” — i.e., disciplining the ego, “frustrating its cravings”, etc. It’s an entirely Daist approach, imho, and indeed that kind of approach to spiritual life is the very basis of the cult of the guru-as-saviour. It begins with self-loathing — naming the ego as “naricissus”, and naming the activities of the ego as sin or “missing the mark”. From there it proceeds to a kind of anorexic approach to Spirit, in which one progressively denies this ego-vampire its blood-meal, until it virtually starves to death — to be followed, of course, by Enlightenment. He hopes.

I’m more of a tantric myself. I don’t see joyous participation in all aspects of the body life as anything to worry about. I certainly don’t consider them necessarily egoic. I am also a man who knows that his ego is rather puny and helpless before Buddha Nature. To worry about the ego, to attempt to “frustrate” the ego — that’s the ego’s self-concern. And as we know, the ego uses self-concern as an excuse for not looking when God (or the Inner Guru) appears. We see a lot of that in these cults. But to stand (dualistically) before the Self (or Inner Guru) and be humbled — that’s real religion and that’s a real form of meditation.

Why even worry about the “end” of the ego or the “end” of dualism? Non-duality — or Reality — can very well take care of Itself. And believe me, Reality is working your case, in every way it can — especially once it catches hold of your attention and gets your mind off such silly worries as “I..must..frustrate..my..cravings”. LOL

A little less self-concern and a little more modesty before God. That’s the ticket. At that point it might begin to dawn that this “bliss” that is spoken of has nothing to do with craving (although it can have something to do with real heart-love). This bliss is simply the Buddha Nature itself. It is moksha, release, liberation, and falling into the very ground of existence. It is being without modification. “Bliss” is a very nice name for this unalloyed and serene awareness.

So far I can’t give much credence to the dark and gloomy philosophy which BY advocates under the name “non-dualism”. I know the theory, as he expresses it, and it still seems like a mistaken flight into idealized abstractions — an anemic dissociation from life (with life becoming the very thing that is denied). It seems more than a bit like soul-murder. (As if pride could “murder” the “jiva” and its “cravings”, and accomplish anything thereby except further isolation of the ego. Certainly not enlightenment!)

Elias

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Lightmind Extract 059

03Jan08

Bobby 4.4.07
Hey that’s interesting, I wasn’t aware of Haanel! Thanks for posting that, Jana! My own favorite New Thought teacher is Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science aka Science of Mind.

New Thought writers usually trace the origins of the movement to P. P. Quimby, a highly original thinker who started a metaphysical healing practice in New England in the mid-1800’s. He was Mary Baker Eddy’s mentor for awhile, though she later repudiated him after founding Christian Science.

What’s distinctive about New Thought is not its underlying metaphysics, which indeed is quite similar to western “occultist” thought and, in many ways, to eastern ideas. The distinctive thing about New Thought is the emphasis on the practical application of this metaphysical knowledge, for obtaining physical health, prosperity, and all good things in the here and now, in real individual’s lives. In this, it resembles the magic(k)al traditions to some extent. Truth itself is one, and it takes on many forms in human history, some purer than others.

New Thought originally arose as a modification or reinterpretation of Christianity. As time has gone on, the Christian cast of New Thought has faded significantly. New Thought has blended with New Age ideas and practice. Personally, although I love the New Age and New Agers, I think there’s a benefit to keeping the two traditions conceptually distinct, for there are areas where they disagree.

In my own personal experience, it’s been a bit humbling for me to realize that I actually do believe in the basic principles of New Thought, because I like to think of myself as a rather highbrow philosophical type, and New Thought is distinctly middlebrow! Quimby himself was uneducated, for example, and in contemporary New Thought, highly educated people are scarce even among the leadership. There’s something childlike about New Thought beliefs which is distasteful to the academically trained mind. Also, there’s no doubt that New Thought can easily be turned into a populist, sensational, get-rich-quick scheme which appeals not to the Spirit within humanity as much as to the unredeemed egotistical POV (drishti).

Still, there’s a bedrock truth there in New Thought that I’ve come to adopt and, more importantly, demonstrate to myself in my own life. The intellectual side of me can revel in, for example, the parallels between New Thought and Plotinus or Emerson.

Bobby

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Lightmind Extract 058

03Jan08

Broken Yogi 8.28.07
I plead guilty to some rhetorical flourishes here. My intention is not to paint you as an evil exploiter and enslaver of the masses, but I am trying to point out the wider world correlates to this discussion, and demonstrating that they do matter. You brought up the criticism of “experience” as being a power grab for authority, and I’m pointing out that the more serious matter in that area is the power grab for authority based on knowledge and scripture and punditry. Playing the victim here and pretending that you are being burned in effigy does not sidestop the obligation you have to grapple with these real world correlates to your argument. I’m sure if “men of experience” had anywhere as dismal a record as “men of knowledge”, you would be quicl to point it out, and right to do so.

This argument does not occur in an ivory tower vacuum. There is a history of real evil in the world of religion. In my view, that history is so revolting and disgusting and pervasive that I tend to side, in political arguments at least, with Dawkins and Hitchens and other public atheiiests who basically argue for the elimination of religion. I agree with them that as a social good, it would be best if at the very least the organized forms of religion would simply roll up and die and become mostly museum exhibits. I favor a highly personalized and experientially based religious life that is not mediated by priests and pundits, even guys like you at your modest level of achievement. In some sense, I view you as a curator at a museum of dead religions. The problem is, even here the sordid mentality of the priestly intermediary rears its head and tries to take over the living, personal, experiential religion of the human individual and subjugate it to the zombie waxworks rules of proper museum displays.

Yes, that’s a rhetorical flourish, but don’t argue with the sizzle, argue with the meat, and in the meat I am dead on, pardon the pun. As for Hindu and Vedic panditry, yes, I consider them some of the worst forms of evil perpetrated on this planet. The brahmanical rule of India was every bit as evil as slavery, serfdom, and every other form of exploitation and subjugation human beings have come up with. That religious justifications were created and perpetuated in the service of this evil only confirms the idea tha any religion, no matter what elements of it are based of higher truth, can be perverted to such ends. And who did the perverting? It was the pundit/priests. You would like to separate the two categories, but history does not. They are essentially the same class, with almost perfect overlap.

Now, your arguments about Sanskrit are very disappointing, because as a professional scholar of Indian religion you simply ought to know better. Sanskrit was NEVER a vernacular language. It arose from the various vernacular languages prevalent in India at the time, as a class-based, priestly formal “code” that allowed the Brahmans to assert their rule over all others. Sanskrit means “cultured”, meaning that it was invented as a way to distinguish the learned from the rabble. It was invented by priests. It did not simply “evolve” from a vernacular to a priestly role as Latin did. Latin was the vernacular of the Roman Empire, and only much later did it become the priestly language of the Catholic Church. Sanskrit was never a vernacular, and its whole reason for being was to reinforce the class distinctions of Brahman rule. The early Sanskrit of the Vedas was NOT the vernacular of that time, of ordinary people, but was even then the priestly language of the Brahmans. Classical Sanskrit was merely a refinement of this already priestly language of the elites. In fact it was forbidden for non-Brahmans to use Sanskrit, and access to the Sanskrit scriptures was given only to Brahmans, and taught only to Brahmans.

So the very language of the holy scriptures of India is a creation of pundits for the purpose of consolidating and extending power over others. It’s “spiritual” role is indeed secondary. That even the greatest scriptures on “liberation” are handed down to us in Sanskrit is an irony few appreciate. Whether they were originally composed in Sanskrit or not is hard to say. Because liberation as a pursuit was reserved solely for Brahmans, it simply wasn’t possible for others to create scripture of this kind, at least no officially, and those that did were not likely successful in passing on their wisdom unless it were translated into Sanskrit at some point. In so doing, such teachings, whatever their sources, would always be “interpreted” by the Brahmans in such a manner as to remain compatible with Brahman rule, and probably edited and changed so as to never challenge such things. The Buddha’s revolution and rejection of Brahmanical authority required him to break entirely with Hinduism as a whole, and with Sanskrit, and to instead side with the vernaculars of the time. But even there priestly flourishes entered into the game, and over time even Buddhist scriptures become the province of scholars and pundits rather than individuals acting as “lamps unto themselves”.

The capacity of human beings to continually subvert the experiential dimension of religion and create a coded, language-based substitute that is used primarily as a vehicle for power and subjugation by elites is simply a wonder to behold. You seem not to appreciate how that machinery works, and the extent to which you have become an unwitting part of it, not just philosophically and academically, but in your own approach to religion altogether, even as on display in this forum. I would call you naive, but you pride yourself on being above and beyond all naivete, and sniggle at the thought. Well, maybe not so much as you like to think.

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Lightmind Extract 057

03Jan08

Kela 8.27.07
Quote:
I was thinking about Kela’s argument about pandits vs. experience, and how his main practical point seems to be that claims of experience are used to justify authority and power.

This much is OK, but it is not so much my original point.

Quote:
This is true to some degree, and among some people. But is it really the danger in spiritual circles, in religion altogether? Yes, we have some fraudulent gurus claiming greater experience than they have, and debaters claiming a superior viewpoint because of their “experience” or their record of “happiness”. Such things are obnoxious, to be sure, and can be the basis for some exploitation, as in the case of guys like Da. But is this really where the dangers of authoritarianism creep in? I think not.

As I say below in the thread, I value such experience. Personally, it is for myself deeply meaningful. The problem with “experience,” where “experience” refers specifically to personal religious experiences, is that it is subjective. Even if it were some kind of grounds for “authority” — and I doubt that it is anyway — there is no way for anyone to know if someone has had these “experiences” of enlightenment, realization, satori, or whatever. This makes “experience” a dubious reason for accepting the authority of any individual.

Further, and perhaps more importantly, if we accept the authority of a teacher or guru on the grounds of his “experience,” we are not in fact accepting his authority on the grounds of his experience; we are accepting it on the ground of his verbal testimony. And this is an entirely different grounds of authority, called “shabda-pramana” in India. Ironically, shabda pramana usually means accepting the authority of the written word, which is precisely what is being challenged here by the guru-philes! The irony is that one form of verbal testimony is being substituted with another. This is, and has been, my point here for some time: that what people are doing, when they say we should take the word of Ramana, is substituting one form of dogmatism for another. My point is NOT that the pundits are better than the siddhas; my point is that, at least as far as their authority is concerned, the siddhas are no better, since their grounds of authority will be no less than that of the pundits: the word (whether it is written or spoken).

Borkin Yorgi wants me to supply something positive to the discussion, and so I will put in my own two-bits. If we are to accept the authority of a teacher, I think we should probably do so by other means — observing his teaching style, talking to other students of his, including disaffected former ones, researching whether or not he has abused his power, asking oneself whether his teachings “ring true” with one’s own experience, whether they will prove spiritually useful. etc. Whether he has had a satori experience seems to me to be pretty peripheral. And, even if it weren’t, taking his word that he has had an “enlightenment experience” seems to me to be a shitty grounds for believing, absolutely, that he has.

Quote:
Look at the history of Indian religion, of the Vedas, the Vedanta, the Upanishads, etc. Where does one find the stink of authoritarianism? Is it really among the siddhas, the yogis, the “men of experience”? Not exactly. It comes from…drum roll please…the pandits! Where does the pandit tradition come from? Well, India did indeed produce a tradition of panditry, starting with the Vedas. It created an entire priestly class, the Brahmans, who managed to translate their stranglehold on all interpretation of scripture into an authoritarian political hegemony lasting thousands of years, and bringing us that wonderful class system call caste, which oppressed millions in the name of spiritual authority. One can’t overestimate the evils of this system, or the ruthlessness with which the pandit class, the Brahmans, exploited their “knowledge” of the scriptures to crush the spirits and control the populace on a mass scale for milennia.

Well, there is absoutely no doubt that the brahmans have done what they did for the reasons BY describes. I doubt if anyone would challenge that, though the dramatic rhetorical flourish here — “evils,” “ruthlessness” — is overstated, and typical of the Neo-Vedanta/Neo-Advaita apologists since the time of Vivekananda.

Quote:
There is no comparison to siddhas or yogis or jnanis in this area. The pandits won hands down at the authoritarian sweepstakes. The reality of this debate is that there has always been a battle within Indian religion between the pandit authoritarians and the men of experience.

A quaint Romantic construct. One of my initial points was that the classical Buddhists typically did not inflect the term “pandita” with the kind of rhetorical invective that we find among the modern Neo-Vedantins and Neo-Advaitins. This idea of a “age old battle” is a kind of retrospective reading of history.

Quote:
What Kela is trying to pretend is that somehow its the men of experience who are the authoritarian evil we need to wipe out and its the pandits who we need to invest with real spiritual authority. He is of course right that there’s a real tradition for this, but he’s wrong that it’s a benign tradition.

Where the hell did I say this?! Here my words are being twisted around to suit BY’s agenda, and so he can to burn me in effigy!

Quote:
The way it works is that much of the original material, such as the Upanishads, were written by men of experience, but the latter interpretation of these scriptures were taken over by pandits, who claimed that only they could rightly interpret them.

We have no way at of knowing whether the writers of the Vedas/Upanishads were “men of experience.” And it is not their intent to say this either. Certainly the works themselves do not say this. The Vedas are considered “authorless” in Hinduism. For the more heterodox traditions like Shaivism, typically, we read that some revealed scripture (agama) is the work of some god. The Buddhist scriptures are, of course, different. However, in that case, it is not personal subjective experience that the Buddha invokes; rather, it is the idea that he has “seen” certain universal, objective truths, such as “all life is suffering.” It is also worth noting that the Buddhist shastras, such as Nagajuna’s works, did not claim authority on the basis of the “experience” of their authors. We have no mention of Nagarjuna’s “enlightenment” in those works. Rather, Madhyamika claims authority on the basis of Nagarjuna’s resonance with not only Mahayana sutras, but the early suttas as well. For the most part, the idea that Indian spiritual writers and philosophers were “men of experience” is a nineteenth century construct dreamt up by the Indian “mystical empiricists” who were having their faith challenged by Western philosophers and missionaries, and who needed a new basis for authority, one that jibed with the empiricism of the day.

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This was accomplished to a large degree by putting them into Sanskrit, which was not, contrary to Brahman propaganda, the most ancient language of India, or even the original language of spiritual instruction, but was an invented, priestly language deliberately created for the purpose of keeping all spiritual information the secret possession of the Brahman priestly class, and thus requiring others to bow to their authority.

Not exactly. The Indian vernaculars follow Sanskrit in time.

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Sanskrit was deliberately made to be almost impossible to understand without a high degree of training, and had no vernacular.

Later classical Sanskrit was indeed made difficult so as to protect the priest craft (all professions do this — think of legalese) and I curse that fact every time I attempt to read it.

The last phrase in the above contradicts what was just said previously. If there was no vernacular at the time of the Vedas, then people were speaking in Sanskrit!

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It was not a spoken language, nor does it makes any sense as a language at all, but only as a code of secrecy and magic.

Not a spoken language!? BS! Makes no sense? Ha! Like the demon from the Exorcist, BY mixes lies with the truth! The ancient Vedic language makes little sense to us, and to Indians from the classical to the modern age, because there was a discontinuity in its transmission. As a result we have no idea what the strange ritual descriptions of the early Vedas refer to. But classical Sanskrit is certainly intelligible. The idea that it was not a spoken language has no basis in fact. BY is projecting late modern Sankrit onto the earliest strata. This is like saying Latin was never a spoken language! Certainly that is the case today, but it was not so in the past.

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Contrasted with the Brahmanical priestly class of pandits, scribes, and the bureaucracy of religion was a whole other tradition of siddhas, yogis, shamans, and non-mainstream religious traditions.

This is a nice little Romantic construct. It’s history is easily traceable. It ends with the Mohenjodara seal in which a man is sitting cross-legged like a “yogi.” Initially used by scholars to describe Yoga and Samkhya as quasi-heterodoxical, the contrast is later picked up by Hindu apologists such as Feuerstein sa as to invoke authority in another way: the “timelessness” of the yoga tradition, etc.

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Kela decries Vivekananda for helping to destroy the supremacy of the Brahman class of pandits.

Helping destroy!? BAh! If that was his aim, Vivek didn’t get very far! It is only Western Neo-Vedantins who believe this little myth, since they accept the propoganda written about him. All I said was that Vivekananda was the primary rhetorician of the anti-pundit propogandists. Interestingly, we find nowhere near the invective of Vivekananda in the words of Ramakrishna and Ramana.

We need to look carefully at Vivek’s Indian writings and speeches, some of which have been translated into English, to get the complete picture. The Indian writings have an entirely different tone. In them, Vivek is careful not to offend the brahmans and pandits in his audience. Thus, he was primarly an opportunist who spoke to his audience in a manner that he saw as most suitable and effective. The anti-pundit diatribes belong to his English language writings.

Maybe Vivekananda had a personal bone to pick with the pundits. Maybe one of them beat him as a kid. More likely, he knew that Westerners would never accept the classical Indian tradition as such since it is dogmatic and xenophobic to the extreme, and because the West was dealing with the hegemony of its own priest-craft at the time and was acquiring a distaste for dogma. He then constructed another image and sold it to unsuspecting Westerners.

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Does he wish they retained their power and authority? Apparently so.

This is where Heru nails BY. I have absolutely no interest in supporting the hegemony of the pundits, or any other hegemony, including that of Nisargadatta and Ramana and the new-age Neo-Advaitins.

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So yes, Vivekananda battled with the pandit tradition, and tried to resurrect the power of the siddha-yogi tradition, and point out that this is the truly legitimate tradition of Indian spirituality, not the religion of the priestly pandits who tried to control all interpretation of scripture, and all of society, by their exclusive claim to authority.

Resurrect? That’s a stretch. There seems to be two competing visions in BY’s construct here — one, based loosely on history, in which the yogis are always an oppressed subordinate class, and another based on the myth of some sort of “golden age” when yogis ruled the earth alongside Tyranosaurus Rex. Best to find a consistent picture and not to cherry pick.

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Kela doesn’t like this, and longs to roll back the clock to restore authority to the pandits, the scholars of scripture, rather than those who actually live and breath the practices and truth they speak of.

Oh, the straw effigy of kela is in full flame now! Chorus: “Recant, kela-effigy, while there is still time and we will douse you with water!” 

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Okay, maybe Kela doesn’t really want to restore the caste system and the authoritarianism of the pandits.

Backpeddle, backpeddle!

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But he should be aware of what he is actually arguing for in the real world. As we look around the world today, do we really see siddhas and yogis and gurus doing the greatest damage, and taking on the authoritarian mantle? Of course not. In virtually every single religion active today, the authoritarian danger comes from the pandit class, those who claim authority on the basis of scripture, on their interpretation of scripture, and their fealty to the “word” of God. These people have no concern for spiritual experience, and view it with the same kind of disdain and irrelevance that Kela does. They have no need for it, they eliminate it from the discussion, and what kind of religious world does this produce? The most depraved forms of totalitarian fundamentalism, bar none. This is the result of Kela’s arguments: a class of pandits whose authority cannot be challenged in any respect by arguments of experience, common sense, real world results, or any spiritual “feelings”. All that nonsense is thrown out, and the authority of the scriptures is held supreme, and of course, the authority to the priestly interpreters of scripture is made absolute.

Chorus: “Too late, kela-effigy! You are now reduced to ashes!” 

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This is the kind of terror that the world faces now, and has lived through for milennia – the terror of the priestly classes of pandits who dismiss the value and intelligence that comes from actual experience in life, in spirit, in feeling, of those with real intelligence rather than mere book knowledge. This terror and this authoritarianism has been real and has kept much of the world under its thumb since we first began to organize the religious insights of the religious experience into a social system. It’s the pandits who have always grabbed for the power, and turned these religious experiences and insights and poetry into a system of social enslavement under an authoritarian system.

This is not confined to Hinduism, but has its counterpart in Buddhism as well, and of course in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and virtually every other religion as well. There seems to be no limit to the thirst for power of the priestly, pandit class, and no religious impulse that they cannot pervert to serve that thirst. This is not to say that there can’t be good and decent pandits doing an authentic job of preserving a religious tradition in sacred texts. But the temptation to pervert that service in the pursuit of power and authoritarian control is unrivaled by any other class or type of religious individual. To condemn the authoritarian temptations of the men of experience while praising the priestly pandits as being above such things is utterly dishonest and exactly the kind of argument the pandits have always raised to justify their ongoing authoritarian stranglehold on religion.

blah, blah blah. Now we’re scattering the ashes of the kela-effigy into the wind.

The real threat here, if there even is one, is not the pundits. It’s the BJP and the fusion of Hindu fundamentalism with politics.

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So this is where Kela and others here actually stand.

I see. I’m now an agent for al-Qaeda. Gee, I usually get lumped in with the liberal “Left.” 

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They want to be the authorities with the power to rightly interpret the texts, and thus gain all power for themselves. They want to strip anyone with “experience” of any right to argue against their texts, and their interpretation of the texts. They want to discount entirely the testimony of realizers and yogis and other men of experience if they deviate from their own scriptural interpretations.

This is not the kind of religion I have any respect for. There is indeed a place for pandits in the scheme of things, but these arguments are not coming from the right place. They are a justification for the ongoing power grab that tries to defenestrate the real sources of religion, which are religious experience itself, in whatever religion we are considering.

I’m sorry if I have offended Kela…

The only offence taken here is that BY thinks me dumb enough to take these arguments seriously! But let us continue with Lightmind’s own soapbox orator…

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…but this simply needs to be said, and the context of this argument expanded to the real world. I know that goes against the grain of the pandits, who don’t want to allow real world arguments of experience to enter into the picture, but this is simply another aspect of their dogmatic assertion of power in the face of common sense.

BY’s flair for overstatement and the dramatic is rather amusing. Gaddy must be is stitches. And of course, the chorus has been nodding their heads in unison all along.

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