--- In [email protected], "jim_flanegin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Yeah, the only thing I could surmise from his no talent > performance was that he was demonstrating to his disciples > how perfect he was at everything (!?).
Exactly. And that's another trait that I saw in Frederic Lenz/Rama that I think he "picked up" from Sri Chinmoy. And occasionally with the same less-than-desired results. Fred wanted all his students to study the martial arts. For fitness, because he believed they taught things that were applicable to the spiritual path I happen to agree with him on this. But when a lot of his students started getting black belts, well he felt compelled to get up on stage with them wearing a karate gi himself, wearing a black belt that I'm pretty sure he never earned, showing off a few of his "moves." "Ooooo..." and "Aaaaah..." went the adoring crowds. And I'm sitting there thinking, "This guy has the worst form I have ever *seen* in someone performing a karate move. No balance, no control, no focus, nada. He makes the guy in 'The Karate Kid' look good." Or when he went on a TV interview show during the latter days of his teaching, when his focus had shifted away from traditional spiritual teaching and onto business and succeeded at it. He was describing himself as a CEO type, talking about all of the successful computer businesses he was running. And the interviewer asked him, "So name a few of your clients." And he couldn't. There *were* clients for some of these companies -- big clients -- and a few of the companies were actually making money. But the fact that the "CEO" didn't know the name of a single one of them was pretty telling in my opinion. It's a phenomenon I've seen in a lot of spiritual trips. The teachers, after a few years, find themselves surrounded by bhaktied-out students to whom they can tell pretty much *anything* and they'll believe it. And so they start believing that they can get away *with* saying anything. And so they start trying to do stuff that they really can't do, or claim that they can do it. My bet is that if you did a poll among Sri Chinmoy's students, 95% of them would tell you that he was a *tremendous* musician, very avant-garde and misunder- stood...near genius. Only about 5% of them would say, "Yeah...he couldn't play worth a damn." That 5% would be the ones you'd want to hang out with.
