Comment below: **
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bronte Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > TurqB wrote: > > One of the values of working with a teacher who can > blast you out of your socks with shakti is that when > he does, there is nothing left. No beliefs, no opinions, > no you to even *have* beliefs and opinions. You're > washed clean, for a short time, and then the beliefs > and the opinions and "you" creep back onto the scene. > But even when they do, you find yourself (or at least > I found myself) not nearly as *attached* to my former > beliefs and opinions as I had been before. I'd seen > them dissolved into nothingness in front of me and > within me. So what possible substance could they have? > > Bronte: > > This is one problem I have with gurus in general: their ability to "blast people clean" of their opinions, desires and other aspects of their individuality. I find that scary. Let me rephrase -- I find that counterproductive to personal evolution. I no longer believe it's a good thing to surrender our minds to a master, never asking questions. Nor that it's healthy to lose my desires, which in my experience are the very motivating power of change, progress and increasing happiness in my life. Same thing with opinions -- they are the milepost I'm at on my road to greater knowledge. To be stripped clean of them is to be stripped of my humanity. > > If I don't have an opinion, I don't know anything. If I don't have a desire, I don't create anything. Knowing nothing, or having no opinions, and holding that state as a good thing is saying there's no objective relative reality. That truth (in a relative sense) can never be known or defined. Yet objective reality does exist, along with many perspectives on it. That story of the elephant and the four blind men trying to figure out this animal in front of them. > > Stripping a person of opinions, beliefs and knowledge is tantamount to saying there isn't any elephant, instead of knowing the elephant from one's own perspective and listening to the data feedback on the creature from others coming from different perspectives. But there IS an elephant. There is objective reality. For gurus to take that away from us dehumanizes us, IMO, and it is a sinister thing to do. > > It's the same thing for desires as it is for opinions, when it comes to the effect of being stripped by a guru. Telling a person to be desireless is to take away the greatest joy in being alive: inspiration and creation. It takes away our motive to act, replacing that with surrender to some cosmic force that will impersonally "make the right thing happen." This is the problem I have with Byron Katie. > > Tolle, the Buddhists, they all take this "detachment" as a good thing. I find it a very bad thing. I think the Hindus and the Buddhists have sold us up the creek and twisted spirituality into something even more horrible than Christianity has twisted it into. At least Christians are allowed to have SOME desires. Victims of Easternism are brainwashed to give up all desire, not just the "sinful" ones. So Christians have more fun! > > I'm making a joke there, but back to being serious, the Christians are more dynamic. Because they have desires, and opinions and beliefs, they are doers in this world. Obnoxious doers sometimes (like when they're proseletyzing), but doers. Hindus and Buddhists, on the other hand, are stripped of their ability to be dynamic by the bullshit they've accepted from the great ones on high. They just "allow Nature to work through them" and crap like that, or if they have a desire or opinion, they feel those are impurities and fail to act on them much of the time. I believe a desire or opinion is the power of God within us, expressing in the world. It is a holy thing. I am outraged at religion for making us believe otherwise. > > This is not to say I don't agree with your observation that some people react to opposition to their opinions like they have their buttons not only pushed but duct-taped down in the on position, and that the serene and humorous beings who shrug off criticism are a lot nicer to deal with. The second kind of person is more pleasant. But of the two character types, which one is more likely to create and do things in this world? I say the person with passion, not the person who has been stripped. > > A passionate, opinionated person may not be pretty at times, but they're sure as heck alive. Their soul has not been stolen or zombified. They don't blather "my guru says" in response to every life question or mutter mantras all day long, delivering the little that's left of their personhood to the gods. They're capable of making decisions, taking defined positions, and moving forward into action. They do stuff. They make a difference. > > All the above is IMO, of course. Now have at it, guru fans. I'm ready for the snowballs over here. > **end** Bronte, it seems to me that you missed the point that Turq was making, and perhaps that's because the experience he relates is not your own. If it had been, I'm certain that you would have instantly understood what he was relating. And he wasn't talking about giving up your individuality or slavishly following a guru; only that some have experienced that blasting away of the individual and the realization that I/It -- *Is* -- not even One but beyond the concepts of 'One' and 'other'. And, if I follow what Turq was referring to correctly, the catalyst to that realization (whether temporary or permanent) may come from a guru, but it can just as easily come from any other source. Once is all it takes to change everything and as Turq said, after that the desires and the individualities just don't have as firm a hold as they did prior. Personal evolution is fine for Bronte Baxter (and Marek Reavis is all for it) but it has nothing to do with who you are. That, I feel, is what Turq was referring to; that's what I understood at least. It doesn't seem to me that you understand what detachment is; it is not brainwashing as you say it is. And on a personal note, for me the constant repetition of mantra is, and has been, an extraordinary boon to this life and I would highly recommend it to anyone on this list. And, too, I refer to the wisdom I've received from Maharishi when it seems appropriate in conversation and credit him accordingly. Similarly with Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharishi, Tolle, several persons who post on FFL, and anyone else who has made me see something or understand something I hadn't before. Like many here, I'm a Westerner who subscribes to many of the tenets of Hinduism and Vedanta, regularly meditates and find that it has sapped neither my energy nor my enthusiasm for life. Quite the contrary. Marek
