Leslie and lesson 51

Is Self Realization Fellowship a cult blog has gotten many recent views concerning this post on the Manson family murderess, Leslie Van Houten. I think it is because of her recent parole hearings. This blog entry is about how searching for her "true guru" may have affected her thinking. This blog entry is not about the drugs, popular culture or any other analysis of her character which undoubtedly are factors in this sad story.


Manson family

SO WHAT?
You may wonder why this is relevant to SRF since many religions have had their share of crazy members.

DOESN'T EVERY RELIGION HAVE FREAKS?
yes.

Unfortunately every legitimate major world religion has various sects and cults founded by nuts.

From suicide bombers to the practice of Sati (widow burning), the nuts are out there.

Jim Jones claimed he was Jesus Christ. David Koresh claimed he was Jesus Christ. Charles Manson claimed he was Jesus Christ.
Jesus want to be

Yogananda claimed to be the chosen perfect god-like Avatar of this age and spokesman for Jesus Christ, getting information directly from him. Yogananda also claimed to be a Christ himself. He claimed he was all knowing and could  heal colds and read minds.

Yogananda placed a picture of himself next to a picture of Jesus Christ on the altar to be worshipped by his followers. I do not know if he worshipped himself at this altar.

Seems they all want to get in on the Jesus action.

It is within this context that Leslie Van Houten went looking for her true Guru.

There is no indication that Yogananda was anything other than a  non violent man.  In fairness the manson family was heavily influenced by the Beatles, drugs and other popular culture icons.

The inquiry I am making here is not to compare a benign self aggrandizing guru to an evil one. I am just exploring how the search for a true living Guru -disciple relationship may have lead her to Manson.

So what did Yogananda teach that may have sent Leslie Van Houten looking for her "Real Guru'?

SHE WAS ONLY THERE FOR EIGHT PERFECT MONTHS


She left the order after only 8 months. What could she have learned in such a short time that would have left her confused brain open to Charles Manson? Well, ironically one of the last lessons she would have read was lesson 51: The Guru and Disciple.


SUPER SECRET BRAINWASHING


The SRF lessons are copyrighted and super super secret, so even members don't share information with each other about the contents. The SRF organization has been very forward with lawsuits in the past. For this reason I am going to have to summarize and paraphrase a bit and of course stay within the fair use laws.

The SRF lessons are arranged in an order that gives an array of Hindu philosophy, 1900's health observances and Religious quotes taken completely out of context. Periodically the spiritual aspirant is exposed to a new sensory deprivation or self hypnotic technique along with some regular mainstream yoga techniques. Interwoven in the fabric of these lessons are messages to make the reader susceptible to worshipping Yogananda and loyal to SRF. 'THE LESSONS' are considered holy and they are sent to your house every other week in sets of two. It is a gradual indoctrination over time.

This is a summary of Yogananda's
LESSON 51


Point one: ONLY through a guru-disciple relationship can your soul make it's way back to God as only the Guru "knows God" personally. 

Point two: It is ok to try a variety of teachers in the beginning but when you find a TRUE Guru you must be loyal to him for all eternity through all incarnations and become one with the Guru.

Point three:Yogananda is himself a TRUE Guru and can "be the cause of their (SRF members) salvation", even after he is dead.


Point four: All true Gurus are alive even if they no longer have a body. Yogananda then claims to be omnipresent like God.


Point five: For this "perfect union" to occur the disciple must be completely receptive to the Guru who works in invisible and visible ways to transform the disciple. The "ever-living" immortal BABAJI will provide guidance as will all the SRF gurus.

This Hindu highlander  has never been photographed so all we have is this artists depiction

Point six: In the beginning of our spiritual search we may have teachers but we have only ONE guru. If you study with a teacher you are only a student. If you study with your Guru (chosen for you by God) you are a disciple. You can not find your Guru unless God himself has brought you to him. The Guru is ordained by God and a "living embodiment of scriptural truth and an agent of salvation appointed by God".


Point seven: Once the relationship is established it can not be broken. Not even if the Guru admonishes you or for any other reason. If you do not immediately recognize that the guru is sent by God, it is because your memory of the relationship is buried in ignorance.
(side note: In SRF lay members generally take a formal vow of obedience and acceptance of the Guru about a year after starting the lessons. This involves a secret ceremony. After the vow is taken you are stuck with that Guru for all eternity no matter what. Leslie Van Houten apparently may have left just prior to taking this vow to search for her "chosen" guru.)


Point eight: SIGNS OF A GURU
The way to tell if a Guru is the real deal:
A) His eyes are still and unwinking

B) His breath is quiet

C) His mind is focused

Point nine: Ordinary people who have studied Religious texts are not to be listened to because they do not KNOW God. Only a true Guru with cosmic consciousness is equipped with super pychophysical methods that lead to self realization. 

Point ten: "OBEDIENCE TO THE GURU"

Tune your will in with the will of the Guru. Obey the Guru.

Underlined in the lessons are the words A REAL GURU IS SENT BY GOD.  If after following a guru for some time the disciple spurns him then "he actually spurns the help sent by God"

Point eleven: Yogananda then goes into a description of how he formed this bond with his Guru Yukteswar (Yukteswar is currently the Savior Christ of the planet Hiranyaloka ). Yogananda describes how he made a pact with Yukteswar and after that he understood the importance of this Guru-disciple relationship. That he was not complete until he "attuned" himself with the "unconditional loyalty and devotion" to the Guru.


So then the Cadet Yogi goes onto lesson 52, which is a summary of lessons 27 through 52. It includes a question sheet for self study. The questions are arranged by lesson with questions for lesson 51 like "What are the signs of a Guru?"




Peace and Best Wishes,
Katie

SRF Meditation techniques (Part one)

PART ONE:

Before an SRF member can receive “Kriya Yoga” and get aboard that big ol’ Concorde astral plane to the divine. They need to go through a number of lessons and levels.

The quest begins at the first level: Step 1

The student has to agree not to share the super secret contents of the SRF lessons with anyone before he can get the secret Guru decoder ring (I am making up the part about the ring). Then, within a few weeks the lessons start coming in the mail.

The newbie devotee learns basic meditation techniques, asana and is given some fundamental pep talks to get started. Most of this stuff is fairly universal in the world of Yoga. On the second page of lesson one the newbie is told that he should look to the Gurus as perfect examples to follow  (The Guru worship indoctrination comes out with a one-two punch in the first round). It also says that the student is a “Potential child of God” Good to know I have potential but I thought I was born a “Child of God” oh, well….on to the next lesson…

We are told to pick the “Best” path and stick with it and of course the “Best“ path is the one they are selling. To put this whole thing in historical perspective I came of age at a time that every pop culture Icon had a Guru. Every airport had a band of tambourine thumping, crazy dancing Hare Krishnas. Every city park had a screaming, Itinerant, drug addled preacher standing on a soapbox. 
It was a strange time. The "Best" path was highly subjective.

Then comes the art of energization

I have a few things to say on this subject so get comfy.

First of all, I am a fairly fit and athletic person but I didn’t really like doing these exercises. I thought they were boring and tedious, but I did them.

Many people skipped the exercises before meditation. In fact this may be a good place to point out that in the quarter century I was in SRF, I never met one person who did the entire SRF routine of exercises, Hong sau, Aum, Kriya and the mudra every morning and evening and actually liked doing it. No one I knew ever ran home from work everyday excited to do their 2 hour meditation routine. People would SAY how great it all was, but their actions told a different story. Typically what I saw were people who would rather be doing almost anything else. I remember one lady who did the whole routine and spent her Saturdays in 6 hour meditations. She told me “those exercises are the biggest test”. It was like the Catholic priests who wear scratchy horsehair undies as an act of penance. Kind of an Opus Dei thing.


 If you were serious about making progress though, you had to do the exercises to whip your astral body into shape.  Lots (and I mean LOTS) of SRF people cut their meditations down to the minimum. This is why talking about how great the Gurus are is so important to the faithful. Just keeping the Guru in your thoughts at all times means you are loyal. This is thought to make up for your shortcomings in the meditation arena. Members put their time into activities like music, walking, reading, movies, art, computers and service. Then they tell themselves they are doing the activities for God so they justify not doing the meditation routines. 
I am totally 100% in sync with that thinking but alas it isn’t what the Guru teaches is it?

Now you might be thinking “Sure KD, but Master said ACTIVITY plus Meditation”.  Well, I say review the lessons. He wasn’t talking about replacing his program with recreation.

Anyway, in 1916 Yogananda discovered these exercises. The way SRF makes it sound you would think God delivered them to him express mail but in reality there is more to the story.

This is something that really made me angry when I first learned about it. Remember, I had been doing these tedious exercises for 25 years.

By ‘discovered’ they mean ‘ripped off’. 


Turns out Yogananda and Dhirananda had some books by Ironmen such as JP Muller, Sandow (who visited India in 1904) and Tom Inch.

J.P. Muller

1904

Ironically after I discovered (in the actual sense of the word) this information, I found out from my mom that my grandfather had been a mail order student of one of these Sandow ironmen exercise series. The revelation had been available to me all along if I had just shared the super secret exercises with my mom.

The most telling of the Ironman books were the Tom Inch series. Tom Inch was a physical culturist from the UK. His series was available in England and by association India. Apparently, Yoganadas brothers Bishnu Ghosh (teacher of Bikram Choudhury) and S. Ghosh studied the lessons of Tom Inch and other Ironmen under the direction of their Guru. There were special books available only to Tom Inch students including Nerve Force in Relation to Physical culture and the book Pyscho-Physical culture which was available only to people signed up for the Inch lessons. Reasoning (correctly) that Americans would not be knowledgeable about these exercises Yogananda lifted the material for his lessons and ‘ How to Live’ booklets.

Weightlifters

S. Ghosh and B. Ghosh

(Photos taken in 1930)

Their Guru

Guha Thakurta

Now, I am not saying that the works of Tom Inch and Sandow were not good material. I am not saying that a person couldn't benefit from their practice. 

I am saying that Yogananda was deceptive about the origins of the material. I did these exercises in good faith thinking they were some special lessons from God sent by a God realized Avatar.  Turns out, you could get the same stuff from an Ironman book and Tom Inch didn’t expect you to grovel at his feet with fruit and flowers. Plus Yogananda selected the easiest, most boring and least effective exercises.

Just get yourself a gym membership like his brothers did.

This is actually the thing that sealed the deal with me. When I saw these books, I knew I had been hoodwinked by Yogananda and SRF.

Here Are Some Pages from just one of Tom Inch's Books (Turn of Century).

Deja vu.

http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/Competition/Inch/Will&Nerve/will-nerve.htm

http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/Competition/Inch/inch01.htm#selection

He also lifted material from other physical culturist of this time. Looking over the material on this site, I see alot of stuff from the lessons.

http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/

These for instance......

SRF

IRONMAN

1920

1902

http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/Competition/Swoboda/swoboda.htm

TEST QUESTION FOR EXTRA CREDIT:

IS THIS A QUOTE FROM THE SRF LESSONS OR AN INTRODUCTION TO AN IRONMAN BOOK?

ANSWER BELOW

Live long and prosper,

KD

(Answer: Ironman book)

Liar, Liar, Pants on fire! and other strange observations.

I just wanted to hit on this point briefly. 


We get a lot of weird information when we are in a cult. I don't have the patience to go over every nutty thing and I am sure you don't have the patience to listen to all of this stuff either. 

These are just a few that come to mind.


Loyalty and our connection to God


When I was in SRF we were told that Loyalty is the highest law and we therefore MUST be loyal to SRF. We could never leave without breaking Gods highest law.


If Loyalty to a religion was the highest law my family would all still be druids or something. I mean seriously if we could never change from one belief to another or one religion to another SRF wouldn't have any members. Everyone would still be the faith they were born into.
This is told to you to scare you into staying. They don't want you to develop any Spiritual independence and move on.


Learning a meditation technique isn't a life sentence.


Postrating yourself before Gurus

I don't know exactly what is happening in this photo but I think she is touching his feet.

Bowing before pictures of the Gurus is an integral part of the SRF experience.

Consider yourself warned.

Really weird stuff in step 6 of the lessons


Lots of people who take the SRF lessons start losing interest in reading them in great detail by the time they get to step 6. If you get that far there are some really strange techniques. One is "The Tunnel to Eternity". I can't write the whole thing out because it is copyrighted but I can give you an overview;


 You sit on a blanket that insulates your feet from the pull of Gravity or world currents. Wool is the material of choice. Imagine you are a trillion miles above our big blue planet.


1) Imagine you are a "soul-chick" and you are positioned on the Earths yolk.  You are attempting to break through the shell of the atmosphere like John Glenn in the Mercury capsule.
 Your mind can travel from America to outerspace in just 60 seconds.


2)Visualize a white shell and picture a golden tunnel with a 50 foot mouth. (Your bird pilot is aiming his imaginary flying machine toward that mouth in the golden tunnel)


3)In an instant you fly through the gold tunnel, then the blue tunnel then pass through the silver star.


4) you have just traveled a million miles in less than a minute.


Congratulations! Now imagine the frequent flyer miles you have coming!


Incredibly there is an illustration of this in the lessons and it shows the "Cosmic Vitality" tunnel and the starry bliss gateway.

Soul Chick being briefed on flight instructions

SCARY STUFF: selection from the book, Mans Eternal Quest:

"There are however a few astral beings known as "Tramp Souls". They are earthbound because of strong attachments to the world, and are desirous of entering a physical form for sense enjoyments...Tramp souls do occasionally succeed in entering and taking possession of someone's body and mind, but only when such a person is mentally unstable or has  weakened his mind by keeping it often blank or unthinking. It is like leaving a car unlocked with the key in the ignition; some vagrant may get in and drive off. Tramp souls want a free ride in someone else's physical body having lost their own that they were attached to."

Paramahansa Yoganada

Always be on high alert! Do not relax or let your mind go blank! A tramp soul may jump in and take a joyride in your body. Heaven knows what kind of hot water it will get you into!

Strange Biblical Interpetations. 

Here is just one example:

Yogananda states in the SRF lessons that the true meaning of Mathew 13:13 (when they look, they cannot see, and when they listen, they cannot hear ) is that our eyes are meant to be like x-rays that can penetrate through the astral world and see saints and "fine rays dancing" and saints moving through the ether. He says that leaves turn orange in the fall because they are returning to the infinite so we can see their color with our x-ray vision. 

Ok. Well, lets look at that whole biblical verse in Mathew shall we?

 10Jesus' disciples came to him and asked, "Why do you use nothing but stories when you speak to the people?"

    11Jesus answered:

   I have explained the secrets about the kingdom of heaven to you, but not to others. 

12Everyone who has something will be given more. But people who don't have anything will lose even what little they have. 

13I use stories when I speak to them because when they look, they cannot see, and when they listen, they cannot hear or understand. 

14So God's promise came true, just as the prophet Isaiah had said,

   "These people will listen

   and listen,

   but never understand.

   They will look and look,

   but never see.

    15All of them have

   stubborn minds!

   Their ears are stopped up,

   and their eyes are covered.

( Here, I think the esoteric meaning is that Isaiah is talking about how idiotic the Aum technique is)

   They cannot see or hear

   or understand.

   If they could,

   they would turn to me,

   and I would heal them."

Alright. So the way I read this it sounds like Jesus is answering why he preaches with stories instead of using Jewish scripture. Nothing about x ray vision. What it appears Jesus is saying is if he were to stand up and teach boring Scripture like a Puritan Minister

(Here is a Puritan minister. He could preach for 8 hours straight. If a parishioner fell asleep the usher would smack them in the head to wake them up)

The people would go brain dead and nod off. Jesus didn't get up with a powerpoint presentation and bore people to death. He went the way of Spielberg. Make it entertaining and fun.

 leaves turn orange in the fall because there is not enough green chlorophyll as the sunlight diminishes and the tree begins to rest for the winter. The leaf is actually orange (red if it has more glucose) and with the chlorophyll we see green. It is not because that are going back to the infinite (although they do seem to take an eternity to decompose if I don’t rake them).

The Yogananada tree

Deck the halls with Yogananda Fa la lalala lalalala

From SRF:

Recently, scientists have discovered a remarkable physical fact about this spiritually beloved tree: It has been scientifically recognized as a unique variety never before documented by horticulturists and officially named after Paramahansa Yogananda. The name is now listed as Litchi Cultivar Yogananda Selection.

http://www.yssofindia.org/news.php?mode=detail&id=1 

Turns out Dr.Kumar needed SRF's help to save his research gardens so he did this fluff piece for them.

The Ranchi-based Horticulture and Agro Forestry Research Programme (HARP) ” under the aegis of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) ” is set to lose all these if the Jharkhand government goes ahead with its plan to acquire land from the institute to build bungalows for over 115 MPs and MLAs. 

http://www.rtiindia.org/forum/1591-doomed-say-scientists-member-legislative-assembly-member-parliament-bulldozer-closes.html 

Now there are lots of sites that discuss this  self promoting species naming process but I thought this one was best:

Naming species after celebrities is one seriously effective way for scientists to draw attention to taxonomy. Giving species a famous name for more public interest is "shameless self-promotion," says Quentin Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for Species Exploration in Arizona (whose names populate four of our top-15 list). "When you are a taxonomist and are mentioned in Rolling Stone," Wheeler says, "you know you have arrived." 

Scientists are given free rein with naming, as long as they abide by guidelines set by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The rules for patronyms—or scientific names in honor of people—do not limit which names are used. 

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4323547.html 

There is nothing wrong with saving trees but to make it into a fake miracle for self promotion is kind of, well, crummy....

Peace and Best Wishes,
KD