Hi Rick,
As a follow-up to my previous post, a few days ago i put all the relevant stuff i wrote in 2001 about sathya sai baba up onto my website (www.enlightened-spirituality.org), linked at the "nondual spirituality" section, toward the bottom of the page. Your friends' mention of the ssb connection is what finally got me to do this part of the work on the website, so "thank you" to you and your friends. All the best to you, dear Rick! Happy New Year and Happy NOW... Timothy ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Archer <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: 'Timothy Conway' <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 10:53 AM Subject: RE: [FairfieldLife] Re: Enlightened Spirituality, Welcome to Spiritual Awakening Thanks, Tim. I just found this in my FFL folder. Things tend to get buried in there. I'll post it to the group. Have a great New Year. I hope your wife's fibromyalgia is not troubling her too much. Rick. ---- Rick Archer SearchSummit 1108 South B Street Fairfield, IA 52556 Phone: (641) 472-9336 Fax: (914) 470-9336 http://searchsummit.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <HRsize=2 width="100%" align=center tabindex=-1> From: Timothy Conway [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2006 6:49 PM To: Rick Archer Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Enlightened Spirituality, Welcome to Spiritual Awakening Greetings, dear Rick Thank you for passing along news of the new comprehensive website to your list. It's interesting that the only feedback thus far received was about my connections with MMY and Sathya Sai. You can pass along to your readership the following: For the record, I've never had any connection with the TM movement, never even signed up for the basic med. course. I did read a couple of books about Gurudev and the various expose' articles that former- and current TMers have put up on the web. And of course i've had a number of friends who've come through various levels of the TM movement and told me about their wonderful and not-so-wonderful times with TM. As for Sathya Sai Baba (SSB), i did participate for many years in some local SSB centers (first L.A. in 1979, then S.Francisco in 1980-7 [it was during that period that i served as a local officer of the SSB movement] and Santa Barbara from 1988-2000) because i loved the emphasis on bhajan-singing and charitable service projects to the wider community. (SSB was NOT and never was my primary spiritual connection--that honor belongs to the God-Self pure and simple, along with a very early connection to Sri Ramana Maharshi from 1972 onward and also, from 1986 on to Amma Amritanandamayi.) For many years i felt that the SSB movement was, comparatively speaking, one of the "cleaner" groups around--all meetings were free, no pressure to raise funds, no pressure to gain "recruits," no structured "levels of initiation," no emphasis on pushing untried or dubious techniques, a lovely blend of nondual wisdom and nondual devotion teachings, tolerance of religious participation in other groups by members, and a wonderful group of people with whom to associate. The shadow side of SSB and the higher (more hierarchical) levels of the organization were never exposed for view until around 1999-2000. There had been one early clue about SSB's homosexual orientation in an old book by Tal Brooke, but Tal was such an obviously biased messenger by the time he wrote his book (fundamentalist evangelical Christian, adamantly anti-Hindu), and so megalomaniacal in his own descriptions of his time with SSB (and in the third-person accounts by a few friends who knew Tal back then), that Tal's message about SSB's shadow side, while noteworthy as an interesting "footnote" for all those years in the latter 1980s and 1990s, could not be reliably trusted. It was only when material emerged on Prof. David Christopher Lane's website in the late 1990s and then Britisher David Bailey stood up with his 2000 revelations in "The Findings" (posted online), that many of us began to realize that something was seriously wrong, and we immediately responded by standing up for truth and justice and, not getting any mature response from the leadership of the SSB org, most of us who took this stand promptly departed the SSB movement altogether. Anyway, at my www.enlightened-spirituality.org website, there is a long page in the Healthy / Unhealthy Spirituality section that lists "warning signs" on dysfunctional cults that your readers may be interested to peruse, along with dozens of other essays. And yes, when i get the time, i've been meaning to put up some of the open letters i wrote about SSB in early 2001. Just today i posted the link (at the Nondual Spirituality section of the site) to a couple of open letters i wrote about my old friend Ramesh Balsekar that have been up at the www.inner-quest.org French website on advaita for a couple of years. I'll try to put up the stuff on SSB sometime in the next week. All the best to anyone who reads this! Love to each and every being, emanations of the One Self Timothy ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Archer <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Timothy Conway Ph. D. <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2006 12:11 PM Subject: FW: [FairfieldLife] Re: Enlightened Spirituality, Welcome to Spiritual Awakening Some discussion about your site on FairfieldLife. <HRsize=2 width="100%" align=center tabindex=-1> From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Patrick Gillam Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2006 1:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Enlightened Spirituality, Welcome to Spiritual Awakening --- In FairfieldLife@ <mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.com> yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@ <mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.com> yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <sparaig@> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@ <mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.com> yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Gillam" <jpgillam@> > wrote: > > > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@ <mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.com> yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <rick@> wrote: > > > > > > > > http://www.enlighte <http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/> ned-spirituality.org/ > > > > > > I see this site is an enterprise of Timothy Conway, > > > who I thought had been a skin boy for Maharishi, > > > but I see no reference to MMY in Tim's vita. Was I > > > mistaken to believe he had been involved in the > > > TMO for a while? > > > > Claiming relationship to MMY leads to loss of credibility > > in most people's eyes. > > I think that's it. As I just posted, he doesn't choose > to mention his time with Sai Baba either, probably for > similar reasons. Well, he says the site is growing. Maybe he'll add a page called "Perverse Spirituality" (or something) to give seekers some markers to avoid in choosing gurus. It seems that such tips would be worth as much as the "here's what you do" advice. Not that I imagine he regrets his time with MMY or Sai Baba. I finally got around to listening to Hesse's _Siddhartha_, and liked two sections: the one where the hero leaves the shramanas, and the one where he takes a pass on following Gotama Buddha, saying he didn't see the point of following the teachings of someone who did not attain awakening by means of those same teachings. In short, I seemed to resonate most with the rejections of teachings, rather than the discussions of timeless wisdom. That, and kissing Kamala. Good stuff, that.
