Hi Gary,
Full moon is coming up and I have a bee in my bonnet about this
one.......
"I know that I have my own answer to this question..."
This is a bit of a tease, don't you think?
Question: can we hear what it is?
Totally by-the-by, I inadvertently (maybe) started a 'Tweedledum-
Tweedledee' (who stole my rattle?) battle on AdvaitaZen about the
questionable wisdom of judging others.......well, that was my angle,
though doing the same, of course.
It reminds me of a pseudo-guru lady who had a few followers in
Australia. I'd been playing tabla with a Sai Baba bhajan group
visiting their place once a week when a local controversy arose about
a Rajneesh commune that happened to be on a prime piece of real estate
overlooking a lake in the forest. A large number of local christians
and their priests were creating a kind of mass-hysteria and accusing
them of child abuse and god knows what else........and this lady had
declared Rajneesh to be the devil himself. I'd written a letter to the
local newspaper questioning these people's application of "judge not,
lest ye be judged", and was promptly summoned, inquisition style, to
explain myself in her presence. Having established that I in no way
condoned child-abuse, the followers said that maybe there wasn't an
issue here. "There is! There is" the woman said, "You'll see! Tonight!
You'll see!" ......at which her followers became quite awestruck, no
doubt expecting to have a vision that very night.
Well I never heard if they did or they didn't, but within a year she'd
been isolated and even phoned me up to mow her lawn (I was a gardener
at the time) because her followers no longer would. The group housing
estate which had been set up by her husband (who later ran away) as a
potential landing site for alien flying saucers then became just a
group of privately owned homes left to spiritual seekers to follow
their individual paths.
Sorry to ramble on........maybe this should have gone on the 'Guru'
thread.
Must be the moon.
To everything there is a season.......probably that includes
AdvaitaNow. To me it constitutes a 'quality' spiritual chatroom which
is certainly not available in my daily surrounds, and I suspect not in
many others' either. It is a rare subject at the best of times, and
one which, of course, carries within it the occasional seeds of its
own negation.
Not to worry though, - perhaps the occasional withdrawal from
'others', no matter how similarly-minded, is a necessary silent
reflection that recharges the batteries, as the inactivity of sleep
does, free from the illusion of 'knowledge'.
(:)