SYDA's Phantom Abuses
Narada 1
It strikes me as odd how people here keep bringing up all the abuses they say
occur at SYDA, yet can only point to some back room rumors about things that
might be going on. One cannot help but come to the conclusion that the true
abusers are the anti-SYDA hate group here that keeps saying abuses are
continually taking place but cannot put their finger on them. I cannot help
but notice how allusive the facts to these abuses are.
Well, the Hare Krishna movement (ISKCON's) are full of abuses, and they can
back up what they say. When you compare the feeble attempts to demonstrate
abuses here with the heinous abuses there, it makes what they are saying here
so feeble and weak that one can't help but laugh. I mean, to put it into
perspective, when people here say stuff like SYDA is bad because it makes
people get addicted to all the good feelings there which then makes them spend
to much money, and you compare that 'abuse' with this link, about real Child
Molesters Gurus at ISKCON and other heinous crimes that people there have no
trouble seeing for themselves, well, it does make Dan and his groupies look
more then a little bit pathetic.
If you check out this link about ISKCON abuses, it will make you sick.
Warning!! don't read it with a full stomach.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/3933/molester_gurus.htm#Chapter
One - Gurus or Pedophiles?
Have a nice day,
Narada
Tekgal1811
but like it's a religion for a lot of people. i guess it's like a choice,
different strokes. i think its' a joke now. sy assholes near the guru had no
humor, full of preachy bs....JUST LIKE THE ONELIST! onelist is like the shitty
part of sy.
S235108
There are few things sadder than a good guru gone bad. The cynics among us may
object that a "good guru" is a contradiction in terms and certainly the
spectacle of corrupt and authoritarian cults in recent years has cast a pall
over the role of spiritual teachers. Nevertheless I'm willing to maintain that
a significant amount of wisdom and compassionate works have proceeded from
various gurus and their followers, and I resist the impulse to write off the
whole bunch as charlatans and power-trippers.
From all indication Swami Muktananda helped thousands of people in his day -
a fact that even disillusioned ex-devotees don't dispute. However, the last few
years of his life saw a proliferation of abuses which are only now coming to
light. William Rodarmor; a former lawyer, park ranger, wilderness trip leader
and presently a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley
journalism school has spent months interviewing former and current followers of
Muktananda for this investigative article. CQ independently contacted his major
sources and confirmed the authenticity of their quotes and allegations. -Jay
Kinney
The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda by William Rodarmor
Illustrated by Matthew Wuerker
"There is no deity superior to the Guru, no gain better than the Guru's grace
... no state higher than meditation on the Guru." -Muktananda
On the American consciousness circuit, Baba Muktananda was known as the
"guru’s guru," one of the most respected meditation masters ever to come out of
India. Respected, that is, until now. When Baba Ram Dass introduced him to the
U.S. in 1970. Muktananda was still largely unknown. Thanks to Muktananda's
spiritual power, his Siddha meditation movement quickly took root in the
fertile soil of the American growth movement. By the time he died of heart
failure in October 1982, Muktananda's followers had built him 31 ashrams, or
meditation centers, around the world. When crowds saw Muktananda step from a
black limousine to a waiting Lear jet, it was clear that the diminutive,
orange-robed Indian was an American-style success. At various times, Jerry
Brown, Werner Erhard, John Denver, Marsha Mason; James Taylor, Carry Simon,
astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Meg Christian have all been interested in
Muktananda's movement. The media coordinator at the large Oakland, California,
ashram is former Black Panther leader Erika Huggins.
Baba Muktananda said he was a Siddha, the representative of a centuries-old
Hindu lineage. According to his official biography, he wandered across India as
a young man, going from teacher to teacher, living the chaste, austere life of
a monk. In Ganeshpuri, near Bombay, he became the disciple of Nityananda, a
Siddha guru of awesome yogic powers. After years of meditation, Muktananda
experienced enlightenment. When Nityananda died in 1960, Muktananda said the
guru passed the Siddha mantle to him on his deathbed, though some of
Nityananda's followers in India dispute the claim. When Muktananda himself
died, a sympathetic press still saw him as a spiritual Mr. Clean, and his two
successors, a brother-sister team of swamis, continue to draw thousands of
people searching for higher consciousness.
To most of his followers, Muktananda was a great master. But to others, he was
a man unable to live up to the high principles of his own teachings. "When we
first approach a Guru," Muktananda wrote, "we should carefully examine his
qualities and his actions. He should have conquered desire and anger and
banished infatuation from his heart." For many, that was a warning that was
understood too late. Some of Muktananda's most important former followers now
charge that the guru repeatedly violated his vow of chastity, made millions of
dollars from his followers' labors: and allowed guns and violence in his
ashrams. The accusations have been denied by the swamis who took over his
movement after the master died. In the course of preparing this story, I
talked with 25 present and former devotees; most of the interviews are on tape.
Some people would only talk to me if promised anonymity, and some are bitter at
what they feel was Muktananda's betrayal of their trust. All agree that
Muktananda was a man of unusual power. They differ over the ways he used it.
"I don't have sex for the same reason you do: because it feels so good."
-Muktananda
IN HIS teachings Muktananda put a lot of emphasis on sex - most of it
negative. Curbing the sex drive released the kundalini energy that led to
enlightenment, he said. The swami himself claimed to be completely celibate.
Members of the guru's inner circle, however, say Muktananda regularly had sex
with his female devotees.
Michael Dinga, an Oakland contractor who was head of construction for the
ashram and a trustee of the foundation, said the guru's sexual exploits were
common knowledge in the ashram. "It was supposed to be Muktananda's big
secret," said Dinga, "but since many of the girls were in their early to middle
teens, it was hard to keep it secret." A young woman I am calling "Mary" said
the guru seduced her at the main American ashram at South Fallsburg, New York,
in 1981. Mary was in her early twenties at the time. Muktananda was 73. At
South Fallsburg, Muktananda used to stand behind a curtain in the evening,
watching the girls coming back to the dormitory. He asked Mary to come to his
bedroom several times, and gave her gifts of money and jewelry. Finally, she
did. When he then told her to undress, she was shocked, but she obeyed. "He
had a special area which I assume he used for his sexual affairs. It was
similar to a gynecologist's table, but without the stirrups." (To his later
chagrin, Michael Dinga realized he had built the table himself.) "He didn't
have an erection," Mary said, "but he inserted about as much as he could. He
was standing up, and his eyes were rolled up to the ceiling. He looked as if he
was in some sort of ecstasy." When the session was over, Muktananda ordered the
girl to come back the next day, and added, "Don't wear underwear." On the
first night, Muktananda had tried to convince Mary she was being initiated into
tantric yoga - the yoga of sex. The next night, he didn't bother. "It was like
‘Okay, you're here, take off your clothes. get on the table and let's do it.'
Just very straight, hard, cold sex."
Mary told two people about what had happened to her. Neither was exactly
surprised. Michael's wife Chandra was disturbed. Chandra was probably the most
important American in the movement. As head of food services, she saw
Muktananda daily, and knew what was going on. "Whoever was in his kitchen was
in some way molested," she said. A girl I’ll call "Nina" used to work for
Chandra. One day, the guru remarked to her in Hindi, "Sex with Nina is very
good." Nina's mother was later made a swami. Chandra said she had rationalized
the guru's having sex in the past, but was dismayed to learn it had happened Lo
her young friend Mary. Aware of Muktananda's power over people who were devoted
to him, she saw it as a form of rape. The other person Mary confided in was
Malti, Muktananda's longtime translator. Mary said Malti wasn't surprised when
she told her about being seduced by the aged guru. "She told me people had been
coming to her with this for years and years," Mary said. "She was caught in the
middle."
Malti and her brother, who have taken the names Chidvilasananda and
Nityananda, are the movement's new leaders. Another of Muktananda's victims
was a woman I'll call "Jennifer." She says Muktananda raped her at the main
Indian ashram at Ganeshpuri in the spring of 1978. He ordered Jennifer to come
to his bedroom late one night, and told her to take her clothes off. "I was in
shock," she said, "but over the years, I had learned you never say no to
anything that he asked you to do...." Muktananda had intercourse with Jennifer
for an hour, she said, and was quite proud of the fact. "He kept saying, ‘Sixty
minutes,’" she said. "He claimed he was using the real Indian positions, not
the westernized ones used in America." While he had sex, the guru felt like
conversing, but Jennifer found she couldn't say a word. "The main thing he
wanted to know was how old I was when I first got my period. I answered
something, and he said, ‘That’s good, you're a pure girl.’" Devastated by the
event, Jennifer made plans to leave the ashram as soon as possible, but
Muktananda continued to be interested in her. "He used to watch me getting
undressed through the keyhole," she said. She would open the door and see the
guru outside "I became rather scared of him, because he kept coming to my room
at night." Both women said the Ganeshpuri ashram was arranged to suit
Muktananda's convenience. "He had a secret passageway from his house to the
young girls' dormitory," Mary said. "Whoever he was carrying on with, he had
switched to that dorm." The guru often visited the girls' dormitory while they
were undressing. "He would come up anytime he wanted to" Jennifer said, "and we
would just giggle. In the early days, I never thought of him as having sexual
desires. He was the guru..." Mary knew otherwise: she talked with at least
eight other young girls who had sex with Muktananda. "I knew that he had girls
marching in and out of his bedroom all night long," she said.
While his followers were renovating a Miami hotel in 1979, Muktananda slept on
the women's floor, and ordered that the youngest be put in the rooms closest to
his, and the older ones down the hall. "You always knew who he was carrying on
with," said Chandra. "They came down the next day with a new gold bracelet or a
new pair of earrings." Around the ashram, said Mary, people knew that "anyone
who had jewelry was going to his room a lot."
For a time, Muktananda's followers found ways to rationalize his behavior. He
wasn't really penetrating his victims, they said. Or he wasn't ejaculating - an
important distinction to some, since retaining the semen was supposed to be a
way of conserving the kundalini energy. Ultimately, Chandra felt it didn't
make any difference. "If you're going to be celibate, and you're going to
preach celibacy, you don't put it in halfway, and then pull it out. You live
what you preach..." After years of repressing their growing doubts about
Muktananda, Michael and Chandra finally drew the line when they learned he was
molesting a 13-year-old girl. She had been entrusted to the ashram by her
parents, and was being cared for by Muktananda's laundress and chauffeur. The
laundress "told me Baba was doing things to her," said Chandra. "I think he was
probing around in her." The laundress suggested it was only "Baba's way of
loving her," but Chandra was appalled. Charges of sex against Muktananda
continued. In 1981, one of Muktananda's swamis, Stan Trout, wrote an open
letter accusing his guru of molesting Little girls on the pretext of checking
their virginity. The letter caused a stir, but word didn't go beyond the
ashram. In a "Memo from Baba," Muktananda merely answered that "devotees should
know the truth by their own experience, not by the letters that they receive...
You should be happy that I'm still alive and healthy and that they haven't
tried to hang me."
"Wretched is he who cannot observe discipline and restraint even in an
ashram." -Muktananda
I N THE first of his eight years with Muktananda, Yale dropout Richard
Grimes said he was "in a funny kind of grace period, where you're so involved
with the beginning of inner Life that you don't really notice what is going
on." But then he started seeing things that didn't jibe with his idea of a
meditation retreat. "Muktananda had a ferocious temper," said Grimes, "and
would scream or yell at someone for no seeming reason." He saw the guru beating
people on many occasions. "In India, if peasants were caught stealing a coconut
from his ashram, Muktananda would often beat them," Grimes said. The people in
the ashram thought it was a great honor to be beaten by the guru. No one asked
the peasants' opinion. Muktananda's ubiquitous valet, Noni Patel, was a
regular target of his master's wrath. While oh tour in Denver, Noni came down
to the kitchen to be treated for a strange wound in his side. "At first, he
wouldn't say how he had gotten it," Grimes' wife Lotte recalled. "Later it came
out that Baba had stabbed him with a fork." When ex-devotees talked about
strong-arm tactics against devotees, the names of two people close to
Muktananda kept coming up. One was David Lynn, known as Sripati, an ex-Marine
Vietnam vet. The other was Joe Don Looney, an ex-football player with a
reputation for troublemaking on the five NFL teams he played for, and a
criminal record. They were known as the "enforcers"; Muktananda used them to
keep people in line. On the guru's orders, Sripati once picked a public fight
with then-swami Stan Trout at the South Fallsburg ashram. He came down from
Boston, where Muktananda was staying, and punched Trout to the ground without
provocation. Long-time devotee Abed Simli saw the attack, but figured Sripati
had just flipped out.
Michael Dinga knew otherwise. Muktananda had phoned him the morning before the
beating, and told him Trout’s ego was getting too big, and that he was sending
Sripati to set him straight. Dinga, a big man, was instructed not to interfere.
In India, Dinga and a man called Peter Polivka witnessed Muktananda’s valet
Noni Patel give a particularly brutal beating to a young follower: A German boy
in his twenties, whom Dinga described as "obviously in a disturbed state" had
started flailing around during a meditation intensive. The German was hauled
outside, put under a cold shower, stripped naked, and laid out on a concrete
slab behind the ashram. Dinga said the German just sat in a full lotus
position, and tried to steel himself against what happened next. Noni Patel
took a rubber hose, a foot-and-a-half long, and beat and questioned the boy for
thirty minutes while a large black man called Hanuman held him. "They were
full-strength blows," said Dinga, "and they raised horrible welts on the boy's
body." There exists a long tradition in the East of masters beating their
students. Tibetan and Zen Buddhist stories am full of sharp blows that stop the
students rational minds long enough for them to become enlightened. Couldn't
that have been what Muktananda was doing? "It could be seen that way," said
Richard Grimes. "For years we thought that every discrepancy was because he
lived outside the laws of morality He could do anything he wanted. That in
itself is the biggest danger of having a perfect master lead any kind of group
- there's no safeguard." Chandra Dinga said that as Muktananda's power grew,
he ignored normal standards of behavior. "He felt he was above and beyond the
law," she said. "It went from roughing people up who didn't do what he wanted,
to eventually, at the end, having firearms."
Though the ashrams were meditation centers, a surprising number of people In
them had guns. Chandra saw Noni's gun, Muktananda's successor Subash's gun, and
the shotgun Muktananda kept in his bedroom. Others saw guns in the hands of
"enforcer" Sripati and ashram manager Yogi Ram. The manager of the Indian
ashram showed Richard Grimes a pistol that had been smuggled into India for his
use One devotee opened a paper bag in an ashram vehicle in Santa Monica, and
found ammunition in it. A woman who ran the ashram bakery for many years said
she knew some people had guns, but that it never bothered her. The Santa Monica
ashram, for example, was in a very rough neighborhood, she said, and the guns
were strictly for protection.
"In an ashram, one should not fritter one's precious time in a precious place
on eating and drinking, sleeping, gossiping and talking idly." -Muktananda
BY ALL accounts, devotees in the ashrams worked hard under trying conditions.
In India, they were isolated from their culture. Even in the American ashrams,
close friendships were frowned on, and Muktananda strongly discouraged devotees
from visiting their families. A woman I'm calling "Sally" used to get up for
work at 3:30 a.m. She said her day was spent in work, chanting, meditation, and
silence. "Some days, you couldn't talk to anyone all day long. I would get very
lonely." Recorded chants were often played over loudspeakers. Even a woman who
is still close to the movement admitted that "the long hours were a drag."
Though he was Muktananda's right-hand man for construction, Michael Dinga
worked "under incredible schedules with ridiculous budgets," putting in the
same hours as his crew. In the six-and-a-half years he was with the ashram, he
said he had a total of two weeks off. As time went on, Dinga came to be
bothered by what he saw as exploitation: "I saw the way people were
manipulated, how they would work in all sincerity and all devotion [with] no
idea that they were being laughed at and taken advantage of."
"Even a penny coming as a gift should be regarded as belonging to God and
religion." -Muktananda
MUKTANANDA'S movement was both a spiritual and a financial success. Once
Siddha meditation caught on, said Chandra Dinga, "money poured into the
ashram." Particularly lucrative were the two-day "meditation intensives" given
by Muktananda, and now by his successors. Today, an intensive led by the two
new gurus costs $200. (Money orders or cashier's checks only, please. No credit
cards or personal checks.) An intensive given in Oakland in May 1983 drew 1200
participants, and people had to be turned away. At $200 a head, Chidvilasananda
and Nityananda’s labors earned the ashram nearly a quarter of a million dollars
in a single weekend.
There was always a lot of secrecy around ashram affairs, Lotte Grimes
remarked. During Muktananda's lifetime, that secrecy applied to money matters
with a vengeance. The number of people who came to intensives, for example,
was a secret even from the devotees. Simple multiplication would tell anyone
how much money was coming in. And when Richard Grimes set up a restaurant at
the Oakland ashram, he said Muktananda "had a fit" when he found out that
Grimes had been keeping his own records of the take. Food services head
Chandra Dinga said the restaurants in the various ashrams were always big
money-makers, where devotees worked long hours for free. On tour during the
summer, she said, they would feed over a thousand people, and bring in three
thousand dollars in cash a day. Sally said that a breakfast that sold for two
dollars actually cost the ashram about three cents. Donations further fattened
the coffers. if somebody important was coming to the ashram, Chandra’s job was
to try and get them to give a feast and to make a large donation. $1500 to
$3000 was considered appropriate "There was just a constant flow of money into
his pockets," said Chandra, "it let him get whatever he wanted to get, and let
him buy people."
Muktananda himself was said to have been very attached to money. "For years,
he catered only to those who were wealthy," said Richard Grimes. "He spent all
the time outside of his public performances seeing privately anyone who had a
lot of money." A parade of Mercedes-Benzes used to drive up to the Ganeshpuri
ashram with rich visitors, said Grimes. In Oakland, Lotte Grimes saw Malti
order a list drawn up of everybody in the ashram who had money, to arrange
private interviews with Muktananda, by his orders. Devotees, on the other
hand, had to get by on small stipends, if they got anything. Chandra Dinga,
despite her status as head of food services, never got more than $100 a month.
Devotees with less prestige were completely dependent on the guru's generosity.
Sally once cried for two days when she broke her glasses, knowing she would
have to beg Muktananda for another pair. How much money did Muktananda amass
from his efforts? Even the officers of the foundation that ostensibly ran
Muktananda's affairs never knew for sure.
Michael Dinga was a foundation trustee, and used to cosign for deposits to the
ashram’s Swiss bank accounts, but the amounts on the papers were always left
blank. In 1977, however, he got a hint. Ron Friedland, the president of the
foundation, told Dinga that Muktananda had 1.3 million dollars in Switzerland.
Three years later, Muktananda told Chandra it was more like five million. "And
then he laughed, and said, ‘There’s more than that.’" A woman called Amma, who
was Muktananda's companion for more than twenty years, told the Dingas that all
the accounts were in the names of Muktananda’s eventual successors,
Chidvilasananda and Nityananda.
Michael and Chandra Dinga finally quit the ashram in December 1980. They had
served Muktananda for a combined total of sixteen-and-a-half years, and had
risen to positions of real importance. Both knew exactly how the ashram
operated. Together, they went to Muktananda to tell him why they wanted to
leave. The guru wasn't pleased. To get the Dingas to stay, Muktananda called on
everything he thought would stir them. He offered them a car, a house, and
money. When that failed, he started to weep. "You're my blood, my family," he
said. Then Muktananda abruptly changed tack. "You've come on an inauspicious
day," he said. "I can't give you my blessing." Next morning, he called Chandra
on the public intercom and said she could leave immediately.
After they left, the Dingas say they were denounced by the guru, and their
lives threatened. "Muktananda claimed he had thrown us out because Chandra was
a whore" said Dinga, "that she was having sex with the young boys who worked in
the restaurant. Later he said I had a harem. In other words, he was accusing us
of all the things he was doing himself." Muktananda also claimed that none of
the buildings Michael had built were any good. When one of Michael's crew stood
up for him, he was threatened physically. Leaving all their friends behind in
the ashram, the Dingas moved to the San Francisco area, but Muktananda's enmity
followed them. Their doorbell and telephone started ringing at odd hours, and
Michael saw the "enforcers" running away from their door one night. A cruel
hoax was played on Chandra. Someone followed her when she took her cat to the
vet, then phoned the vet's office with a message that her husband had been in a
bad accident. Chandra waited frantically at Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital for
three quarters of an hour, only to learn that Michael was at work, unhurt.
Death threats started to reach the Dingas toward the end of April 1981, six
months after they had left the ashram. On May 7, Sripati and Joe Don Looney
visited Lotte Grimes at her job in Emeryville with a frightening piece of
information: "Tell Chandra this is a message from Baba: Chandra only has two
months to live." Another ex-follower said he got a similar message: If the
Dingas didn't keep quiet, acid would be thrown in Chandra's face; Michael would
be castrated. The Grimeses and the Dingas reported the threats to the police.
The Dingas hired a lawyer. The threats stopped soon after Berkeley police
officer Clarick Brown called on the Oakland ashram, but Chandra was badly
frightened. Some ex-followers still are.
Michael and Chandra's departure sparked a small exodus from the ashram. Some
of the ex-followers began to meet and compare notes on their experiences in the
ashram. "We were amazed and rejuvenated," said Richard Grimes. "We got more
energy from learning he was a con man than we ever did thinking he was a real
person." Just the same, the devotees who left the ashram are still dealing
with the damage done to their lives. Michael and Chandra's marriage broke up,
as did Sally's. Michael is only now coming out of a period of depression and
emptiness. Richard and Lotte Grimes are bitter at having wasted years of their
lives in the ashram. Stan Trout still considers Muktananda a great yogi, but a
tragically flawed man. Chandra Dinga has taken years to come to terms with her
experience with Muktananda; "Your whole frame of reference becomes askew," she
said. "What you would normally think to be right or wrong no longer has any
place. The underlying premise is that everything the guru does is for your own
good. The guru does no wrong. When I finally realized that everything he did
was not for our own good, I had to leave."
Muktananda’s two successors were at the Oakland ashram in May. I asked Swami
Chidvilasananda about the accusations against her guru. To her knowledge, did
Muktananda have sex with women in the ashram? "Not as far as I saw," she said
carefully. What about the charge that Muktananda had sex with young girls?
"Those girls never came to us," Chidvilasananda said. "And we never saw it, we
only heard it when Chandra talked to everybody else." Chidvilasananda also
denied that there was a bank account in Switzerland. When asked about the
ashram's finances, she said that all income was put back into facilities. "We
are a break-even proposition," the new leader said. As for the alleged
beatings, she said that Americans had their own ways of doing things. She said,
"You can't blame the guru, because the guru doesn't teach that." Why then, I
asked, do the other ex-devotees I talked with support the Dingas in their
charges? Chidvilasananda replied, "I'm very glad they gave you a very nice
story to cover themselves up and I want to tell you I don't want to get into
this story because I know their story, too, and I do not want to say anything
about it." When I said, "You have a chance to tell us whether or not you think
these are accurate charges, falsehoods, or delusions," Malti's answer was: "I’m
not going to probe into people's minds and try to find out what the truth is."
Two swamis and a number of present followers also said the charges were not
true. Others say they simply don't believe them. On the subject of money,
foundation chief Ed Oliver conceded in an October 1, l983, interview with the
Los Angeles Times that there is a Swiss account with 1.5 million dollars in it.
And when I repeated Swami Chidvilasananda's denials about women complaining to
her, Mary, the woman who says the guru seduced her in South Fallsburg, said,
"Well, that's an out-and-out lie."
"The sins committed at any other place are destroyed at a holy centre, but
those committed at a holy centre stick tenaciously - it is difficult to wash
them away." -Muktananda
THIS IS a story of serious accusations made against a spiritual leader who is
still prayed to and revered by thousands. Even his detractors say Muktananda
gave them a great deal in the beginning. "He put out a force field around him,"
said Michael Dinga. "You could palpably feel the force coming off him. It gave
me the feeling I had latched onto something that would answer my questions."
Former devotees say Muktananda's eyes had a kind of light; when they first met
the guru, he radiated love and benevolence. He also had a way of making his
devotees feel special. "I think he liked me so much because I wasn't taken by
all the visions and the sounds," said Chandra, "that I understood that having
an experience of God was something much more substantial and more ordinary."
Chandra still feels that spirituality is the most important thing in her life.
She says the gradual unfolding of the dark side of her guru's personality
chipped away at her love and respect. "When you have a loved one you never
dream that he might hurt you. At the end, I was devastated." Yet despite the
unsavory conclusion to her ten years with the swami, Chandra still notes, "if I
had it to do over again, I still wouldn't trade the experience for anything in
the world."
In a way, the sex, the violence, and the corruption aren't the real point.
Muktananda's personal shortcomings were bad enough, explained Michael Dinga,
but "the worst of it was that he wasn't who he said he was." A person can make
spiritual progress under a corrupt master, just as placebos can actually make
you feel better. But how far can a person really grow spiritually under a
master who doesn't himself live the truth? There was a tremendous split between
what Muktananda preached and what he did, and his hypocrisy only made it worse.
His successors are now in a dilemma: If they admit their guru's sins,
Chidvilasananda and Nityananda lose their god-figure. and weaken their claim to
a lineage of perfect masters. But if they don't, people who come to them
looking for truth are courting disappointment.
Stan Trout, formerly Swami Abhayananda, served Muktananda for ten years as a
teacher and ashram director. He left in 1981. "My summary withdrawal from
Muktananda’s organization was also a withdrawal from what I had considered my
fraternal family, my friends, and able all, my life’s work," he wrote us. He
sent this open letter after reading a draft of "The Secret Life of Swami
Muktananda," in which he is quoted. - Art Kleiner
Letter From a Former Swami by Stan Trout
I’d like to add this letter, if possible, as an appendix to the article on
Muktananda by William Rodarmor. It is a statement of my thoughts and opinions
of Muktananda after two years of deep deliberation following my discovery of
his ‘secret life’. When I left Muktananda’s service, I did so because I had
just learned of the threatening action he had taken against some of his
long-time devotees who had recently left his service. He had sent two of his
body-guards to deliver threats to two young married women who had been speaking
to other women who had been speaking to others of Muktananda’s sexual liaisons
with a number of young girls in his ashram. It was immediately clear to me that
I could not represent a guru who was not only taking sexual advantage of his
female devotees but was threatening with bodily harm those who revealed the
truth about him. However, after I had left Muktananda and had make the reasons
for my departure known to others still in his service, another issue came to
light for me, teaching me something not only about Muktananda’s, but about the
nature of the organization and all other such organizations in which the leader
is regarded as infallible by his followers, and is therefore obeyed implicitly.
When Chandra and Michael Dinga and later myself realized the truth about
Muktananda and his secret sex life, there was absolutely no means available to
present the evidence for a fair hearing or judgment. There was no recourse but
to leave, for the guru was the sole appeal, and he was as accustomed to lying
as he was to breathing. Yet his word was regarded by followers as so absolutely
final that when each of us left and were branded "demons" by him, not a single
soul among those who had been our brother and sister devotees for ten years
questioned or objected, but unamimouly rejected us outright as the demented
infidels he said we were. One has only to observe the way each of us who
discovered the guru’s secret life were treated by our former comrades to
understand the power for evil inherent in any relationship based on the
infallibility of the leader and the unquestioned obedience of the subjects.
It is clear to me that not only had the girls with whom Muktananda practiced
his sexual diversions committed acts to which they had given no moral or
rational consent, but so had the men who were ordered to threaten them with
violence, and so had I myself when I had followed Muktananda’s orders to
express to others opinions which I did not sincerely hold. It is a sad but
perennial phenomenon: Out of a love for truth and for those who teach it and
appear to embody it, we unwittingly set ourselves up for exploitation and
betrayal. Our mistake is to deify another being and attribute perfection to
him. From that point on everything is admissible. I think the lesson to be
learned is that we simply cannot afford to relinquish our individual
sovereignty - whether it be in a socio-political setting or in a religious
congregation. Those who willingly put aside their own autonomy, their own moral
judgment, to obey even a Christ, a Buddha, or a Krishna, do so at risk of
losing a great deal more than they can hope to gain.
About Muktananda himself I have thought a great deal. There is no doubt in my
mind that he was an extraordinarily enlightened, learned, and articulate man
who possessed a singular power, a dynamic personal radiance and charisma that
drew people to him and inspired them to lay their lives at his feet. Surely
such a power is divine; yet there is no way to justify the way in which he used
this power. If God himself were to behave in this way, we would have to find
him guilty of flagrant disregard for the law of love. Some may say, ‘He did no
worse than any of us have done, or would do if we could.’ And I would answer,
‘No; he did worse than any of use have done or would have done in his place.
For, though he was only human like the rest of us, he staged a deliberate
campaign of deceit to convince gentle souls that he had transcended the
limitations of mankind, that through realizing the eternal Self, he had
attained holy "perfection." He planted and nourished false, impossible dreams
in the hearts of innocent, faithful souls and sacrificed them to his sport.
With malicious glee, he cunningly stole from hundreds of trusting souls their
hearts and wills, their self-trust, their very sanity, their very lives. No
ordinary, good person could do this, no matter how he tried; his heart and
conscience would not allow it.
Like all of us, Muktananda was only human. And, like all men who worship
power, he was inevitably corrupted and destroyed by it. His power could not
save him form the weakness of the flesh, nor from the wickedness and depravity
that servitude to it brings. He ended as a feeble-minded sadistic tyrant,
luring devout little girls to his bed every night with promises of grace and
self-realization. Muktananda’s claim of "perfection" (Siddha-hood) was based
on the notion that a person who has become enlightened has thereby also become
"perfect" and absolutely free of human weakness. This is nonsense; it is a myth
perpetrated by dishonest men who wish to receive the reverence and adoration
due God alone.
There is no absolute assurance that enlightenment necessitates the moral
virtue of a person. There is no guarantee against the weakness of anger, lust,
and greed in the human soul. The enlightened are on an equal footing with the
ignorant in the struggle against their own evil - the only difference being
that the enlightened person knows the truth, and has no excuse for betraying
it. Throughout history there have been many enlightened souls who have been
thought great, who, in the pride of their perfection and freedom, have imagined
themselves to be beyond the constraints of God’s laws, and who have thus fallen
from love and lost the glory the once had. Those glorious Babas and Bhagwans,
thinking to build their kingdom here on earth upon the ruins of the young souls
devoted to them, often succeed for a time in fooling many and in gathering a
large and festive following, but their deeds also follow them and proclaim
their truth long after the paeans of praise have been sung and wafted away on
the air. "God is not mocked"; there is no freedom, no liberation, from His law
of love, nor from His inescapable justice. It is indeed often those very
persons who have thought themselves most perfect, most free and ungoverned, who
have fallen most grievously; and their piteous fall is an occasion for great
sadness, and should serve as a clear reminder of caution to us all.
******************S235108***********************
“Why would even the most realized of beings want people to become
reliant on his wisdom instead of their own?” GURU PAPERS
S235108
included is the letter written by former swami Abayananda.
S235108
S235108
S235108
(continued from last post)
Linda25311
I clearly understand people still worship his picture (and I have also been
reminded of it again, thank you). I still say that Muktananda, the man of 1981,
is not a part of a disciple's experience in 1999. That's why the articles don't
make a very big impact, something which we should expect and not be surprised
about.
Baba's picture is a puja item, not at all the same as the man. Stan Trout's
letter is from 1981, a long time ago. I ask myself whether I should feel more
about these old articles than the little I do. I remember a time when I would
have pricked up my ears towards any news of Baba. Today, I see other social
problems as more worthy of activism than spreading the word about an already
discredited guru who died twenty years ago.
I have thought about it, and have come to the conclusion that using articles
about Muktananda is like disciples using his picture. One group, the disciples,
gets proof of their beliefs from his picture. Another group, the ex-disciples,
gets a different proof from articles discrediting him. People who are not in
either camp scratch their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about.
Muktananda died before AIDS was recognized, now a worldwide health disaster,
and before the destabilization of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union,
which has led to a global crisis that continues today. Yet an obscure paper
from 1981 is supposed to shock people as if it were a smoking gun? Frankly, if
that's the best there is, it makes Siddha Yoga look good!
There is a better way to get the message across, than preserving a twenty year
old article about Muktananda, just like a disciple would preserve one of his
old wool hats. After twenty years, breaking news becomes nostalgia, like period
movies about Vietnam.
Though I disagree with Narada, I can see why he would get an impression that
there is no substance to the allegations, since the way it looks is that the
worst happened twenty years ago and was never proven. (If Baba lived another
ten years, I think the allegations would have eventually been proven.) If
getting the word out is important to us, we need to find better ways to talk
about the problems of Siddha Yoga. You have seventies preservation societies on
television selling record collections, and they seem so out of it that they
come across as camp. That's an appearance I would avoid. We want to be taken
seriously about our experience of Siddha Yoga.
Linda Saucier
Linda...@aol.com
Andy Comanda
Linda25311 <linda...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19990515180454...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
> I clearly understand people still worship his picture (and I have also
been
> reminded of it again, thank you). I still say that Muktananda, the man of
1981,
> is not a part of a disciple's experience in 1999.
> Baba's picture is a puja item, not at all the same as the man.
Were you ever in $Y? How could you have been and missed all the emphises on
Nitty Sr and Mooktys divinity? Where were you when we were told that it was
their perfect divine energy that makes the whole world of $Y go round! That
they were part of the unbroken chain of PERFECT masters (MATERBATORS may be
more appropriate) going all the way back to shiva? The whole validity of $Y
hinges on the perfection and divinity of Mookty and Nitty!!!
As far as baboo's picture not being the same as the man - where were you
when we were tought that the picture could transmit divine energy. We were
tought that his pictures imbibed HIS shakti.
Either you were never in $Y or you are purposfully trying to distort the
facts and teachings to make $Y out to be something all together different
than it really is.
By the way - WHY are you here?
S235108
> People who are not in
>either camp scratch their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about.
From Stan Trout (former Swami Abayananda):
"About Muktananda himself I have thought a great deal. There is no doubt in
my
mind that he was an extraordinarily enlightened, learned, and articulate man
who possessed a singular power, a dynamic personal radiance and charisma that
drew people to him and inspired them to lay their lives at his feet. Surely
such a power is divine; yet there is no way to justify the way in which he used
this power. If God himself were to behave in this way, we would have to find
him guilty of flagrant disregard for the law of love. Some may say, ‘He did no
worse than any of us have done, or would do if we could.’ And I would answer,
‘No; he did worse than any of use have done or would have done in his place.
For, though he was only human like the rest of us, he staged a deliberate
campaign of deceit to convince gentle souls that he had transcended the
limitations of mankind, that through realizing the eternal Self, he had
attained holy "perfection." He planted and nourished false, impossible dreams
in the hearts of innocent, faithful souls and sacrificed them to his sport.
With malicious glee, he cunningly stole from hundreds of trusting souls their
hearts and wills, their self-trust, their very sanity, their very lives. No
ordinary, good person could do this, no matter how he tried; his heart and
conscience would not allow it."
Right now as I write, SY centers and ashrams are having all night chants in
honor of Swami Muktananda. Linda doesn't think what happened twenty years ago
is important today. I strongly disagree. Gurumayi's whole show is based on her
(and Muktananda's) infalibility and 'perfection' myths. Do the Rodomor article
and Stan Trout's letter cause anyone to wonder what really IS going on in
Siddha yoga NOW? Would reprinting the "OH GURU GURU" article from the NEW
YORKER bring a similar poo pooing
from Linda? Does it matter to anyone if Gurymayi is a vain, cruel despot? That
her chief of staff FOR YEARS sexually preyed upon underaged darshan girls and
Gurumayi covered-up for him? Doesn't the APPARENT emphasis on wealth and fame
bother anyone? Are these the attributes we want in our spiritual leaders? Does
it matter that the leader we choose to guide us into spiritual lokas is
obsessed with her appearance, her pictures, her dress - to the extent that
people formally on her staff (video and art departments) report that she has
had her face surgically altered?
For years I chose to bury my "doubts and negativities" about Gurumayi and
Muktananda. I was living a lie for the sake of appearances and my personal
social harmony. I had read all the articles about these two and still kept my
mouth shut and my questions just for my most trusted friends. Somehow, two
years ago I woke up! I couldn't contain it any longer: Siddha Yoga was
repressing my spirit! How else can I describe it? The words in Stan Trout's
letter, Rodomor's article and THE NEW YORKER article ARE IMPORTANT! People will
read them and THEY WILL WAKE UP!
That's what "all the fuss" is about, Linda.
Linda25311
I am sorry if my message offended you. As I have said several times now, I know
that people are doing puja to Muktananda and you don't have to keep reminding
me. I am not trying to distort or cover up anything. We may see things
differently, but there is no reason for us to start suspecting each other's
motives. Keep in mind that I was a Baba disciple a long, long time ago, and
that my romance with Siddha ended after Baba's death in 1981. I am still
talking about my experience because Siddha Yoga was a big influence on my life.
My process of leaving Siddha Yoga forced me to dissolve my relationship with a
guru that I had become very attached to. At a certain point it became necessary
for me to focus on myself instead of on Baba. It is easy to rationalize
dwelling on Baba because we are certain about how wrong he was. Facing personal
uncertainties is not so easy, however, and I found that talking about Baba
didn't help me much. I didn't know what direction my life would take after I
lost the spiritual path that had once seemed so clear. The more I became aware
of my confusion, the less important it became for me to keep thinking in
circles about Baba and people in the ashram.
What I notice is that all this discussion is taking place between individuals
who have already left Siddha Yoga. The moderator's message asked to introduce
myself and basically to acknowledge my ex-status; the list is obviously
designed to screen out anyone who hasn't left. Of course a few disruptive
individuals are going to make it in. Still, it is essentially an ex-disciples
area. Anybody who starts arguing that Baba's actions were justified is
obviously going to be moderated, and maybe referred to the disciples lists.
I think it is fair to ask what is accomplished by intensively discussing the
Muktananda stories to people that have already left. To those who want to keep
talking about those old newspaper articles from twenty years ago, I am not
trying to stop you or interfere. I just don't understand why that has to be so
emphasized when there is so much else at stake. I found the positive side of
leaving Siddha Yoga in a fresh appreciation of life after, and the new
beginnings.
It is very late now, and I don't know what more I can say, except that I did
not mean to offend anybody.
Linda Saucier
Linda...@aol.com
JyotiK2052
Thank you for your post in which you describe your leaving sy, and your
relationship with sm. I know that it was a hard decision and fraught with many
conflicting emotions.
Those conflicting emotions are with most of the people who have left or are
contemplating leaving sy. And it takes as long as it takes to get past that.
And I agree that perhaps there are instances in which people dwell too much on
those emotions...but..I cannot judge the depth of the pain/confusion.
The List was not designed to screen out anyone who has not left sy. We have
had posters still in sy but who had doubts about it. We have had posters still
in sy but trying to get up the courage to make a break. THAT'S why the List
was formed...along with the desire to have some ability to keep the purpose of
the List un-disrupted by persons with obvious intent to disrupt the
discussions.
As to people who argue that sm's actions were justified...it's obvious that
those people are going to be challenged to provide reasoning behind that. As
long as those arguments are not couched as personal attacks against someone
else on the List, they are welcome and up for honest debate.
And, I think it is perfectly reasonable that those persons who are clearly
pro-sy et al find their own discussion group, as it is not helpful to tell
others that their decision(s) to leave sy is not valid and so on. And I do
believe that having a 'safe' place to speak about one's 'LSY' is helpful to at
least some people who sincerely want to 'get on' with life after LSY.
I believe that you did not mean to offend anybody, and I have taken no offense.
I hope you will continue to post. Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Respectfully - Jyoti
Satdesh
>Date: Sat, May 15, 1999 18:04 EDT
>Message-id: <19990515180454...@ng-ch1.aol.com>
> (If Baba lived another
>ten years, I think the allegations would have eventually been proven.)
*****************
Hark! Do we hear a chorus of angels? To the strains of dubious speculations
about what happened in the past we now have baseless speculations (Saucier's)
about what might have happened in the future!
WOW!
Satdesh
Satdesh
>From Stan Trout (former Swami Abayananda):
Quote 1:
> He planted and nourished false, impossible dreams
>in the hearts of innocent, faithful souls and sacrificed them to his sport.
Quite 2:
>With malicious glee, he cunningly stole from hundreds of trusting souls their
>hearts and wills, their self-trust, their very sanity, their very lives.
****************
I read Trout's letter in the context of a man who was sincerely and deeply
distressed over his guru's (and his organization's) being perhaps inflated with
arrogance over their great success and position in the "higher consciousness
movement". Money and power bring arrogance and unless ego has truly been
eliminated from the equation, you have a formula for spiritual disaster of some
sort.
In my mind a disaster of some sort did strike when you consider the number of
swamis who defected and the whole Nityananda affair. And there is credible
evidence that Muktananda, a swami, engaged in physical intimacy with some
women, which showed that he dishonored the spirit, if not the letter, of the
vows of a swami. If he wanted to experiment with things tantric in nature, he
should have realized that his position as a swami would only cause scandal and
damage to his movement. Perhaps the money and power caused him to overlook his
vulnerability on this point. Few were in the position of Master Charles to
learn of this activity and then to go on to understand it or overlook it,
whatever the case may be. If nothing else, it was a public relations disaster.
I can understand the psychic pain that drove Trout to write this letter.
However, I do not see this thing as a Mosaic or Pauline writing. There are
elements of truth and insight mixed in with grief driven exaggeration. For
instance, Quote 1 (above), is insightful. SM should never have made statements
that SY sadhana completes itself in 3, 6, 9, or 12 years nor should he have
stated that going to GSP mean't that it would be your final lifetime. While he
may have made these statements with the good intention of inspiring his
followers to practice sadhana and ashram dharma with enthusiasm and zest,
people ultimately became unenthused when these presumptions wore thin.
SM never functioned as a traditional Indian guru who took students into his
ashram and closely supervised their sadhanas giving them personal and practical
advice. His followers, aware of this, attributed it to SM's being so
incomparably great, that he didn't need to give such detailed instruction. It
was believed that his "shakti" would do it all. Mass initiations of people
into shaktipat-siddha yoga, people who never received any practical advice from
this guru, has proved otherwise. Even a privilged and sincere practitioner
like Master Charles, in my opinion, is suffering from some delusions because he
has no living guru to help him interpret the import of the mystical experiences
he was given. His philosophy seems like lunacy to me.
Thus, I think there is something to Quote 1. However, I myself don't have any
evidence of malice on SM's part (i.e., "sacrificed them to his sport").
Judging the "whole man" I would say it was more likely he was naive. It could
have been malice, but there is no evidence of it, IMO, when the totality of
SM's character and activities is considered.
As to Quote 2:
This is total venting (again, IMO). It is written *as if* SM's secretary was
taking notes at SM's bedside (while SM was having sexual intercourse with a
follower) 30 minutes before an intensive began and quoted SM as saying "Can you
believe those suckers are paying $200 bucks for this charade." (i.e., "with
malicious glee, he cunningly stole . . .")
"Very sanity"? (i.e., from hundreds, etc. ) There were a number of seemingly
disturbed people hanging around perhaps looking for a resolution of their
mental health problems. Siddha yoga didn't seem to solve their problems. I
didn't see otherwise normal people going bonkers, however. In addition, many
have claimed, and none of the antagonists have denied, that many were
positively helped and influenced by SM/SY.
Also, the venting nature of "some" of the Trout/Dinga "revelations" is
suggested by the fact that crimes were alleged but never reported or
investigated. This is not suggesting that they are ultimately wrong in what
they allege, but there is also no reason to believe they were right on all
points either.
Well, I'll close now and let our latter day Ezra get back to work posting some
more excerpts from other people's work.
Satdesh
S235108
>Hark! Do we hear a chorus of angels?
Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
here?
Are we in a position to be so judgmental?
Satdesh
>Date: Sun, May 16, 1999 20:58 EDT
>Message-id: <19990516205813...@ng-fi1.aol.com>
>
>>From: sat...@aol.com (Satdesh)
>>Hark! Do we hear a chorus of angels?
>
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
>Are we in a position to be so judgmental?
*****************
Well, S., I don't know if it's hypocrisy or stupidity that causes you to say
such a thing.
Are you posting your accusations "on your butt for all the world to see?"
Actually, "I am disappointed" in the orchestration, the insincerity and game
playing that goes on here, that's all. It's not conducive to honest and
sincere discussion.
Satdesh
S235108
>Well, S., I don't know if it's hypocrisy or stupidity that causes you to say
such a thing.<
Are you going to start a personl insult thread here, Satdesh? I'd sooner meet
you face to face and settle this off-line. Reply to me via e-mail and we can
arrange a meeting.
S235108
I've posted the NEW YORKER article, "Oh, guru guru" here in a few segments:
ANNALS OF RELIGION
O GURU, GURU, GURU
The spiritual movement known as SYDA boasts a glittering clientele
and a multimillion-dollar Catskills retreat. But behind all the serenity lie
some
uncomfortable, ill-kept secrets-and a less than blissful struggle about
succession.
BY LIS HARRIS
O
n a damp day last fall, some three thousand people from all over the world
gathered in a huge glass-and-marble pavilion in a rundown pocket of the
Catskill Mountains to chant, meditate, and dance in rapt circles under the
beneficent eye of their revered teacher and spiritual guide, Gurumayi
Chidvilasananda. The singsong Sanskrit chanting, the saris of the (mostly
Western) women devotees, and the thick, sweet scent of incense lent the scene a
hint of the sixties and early seventies. Gurumayi, as she is usually referred
to, is a beautiful, energetic thirty-nine-year-old Indian woman who was named
by the Honolulu-based monthly magazine Hinduism Today as one of the ten most
influential international Hindu leaders of the last decade. She is the
spiritual head of the Siddha Yoga Dham (or Home of Siddha Yoga) of America
Foundation, known by the acronym SYDA-the dominant American arm of a thriving
organization that maintains five hundred and fifty meditation centers and ten
ashrams scattered around the world. In one way or another, tens of thousands of
people, ranging from live-in devotees to occasional visitors and mediators, are
involved in SYDA's activities. Its five hundred-and-fifty-acre Catskill ashram,
near the village of South Fallsburg, New York, serves as its headquarters. At
South Fallsburg, photographs of the guru-with her thousand-watt smile, wide
eyes, and elegantly chiselled cheekbones-adorn nearly every wall, cash
register, shop counter, and shelf, as well as her devotees' private meditation
altars and many of their car dashboards. There are also plenty of photographs
of SYDA's founder and Gurumayi's predecessor, Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa.
Swami Muktananda, who died in October, 1982, at the age of seventy-four, was
one of the most prominent of the numerous Indian spiritual teachers who
flourished in the United States two decades ago. Devotees still refer to him by
the honorific nickname Baba, or Father.
South Fallsburg started out, in 1976, as a modest operation run out of the
rented rooms of an old hotel; its sprawling complex now has an estimated market
value of fifteen to seventeen million dollars. Muktananda disapproved of loans
and debt, and SYDA reportedly paid mostly in cash for three dilapidated prewar
Catskill hotels-the Brickman, Gilbert's, and the Windsor. They have now been
sleekly modernized, in country-club-glitz style, as Anugraha (Descent of
Grace), Sadhana Kutir (House of Spiritual Practices), and Atma Nidhi (Treasure
of the Self). Around the ashram's main building, the neatly landscaped grounds
are scattered with Disneyesque painted-plaster likenesses of Indian gods,
reflecting the scope of the Hindu pantheon.
Nobody knows how rich SYDA is: as a nonprofit religious organization, it is
not required to declare its income or pay property taxes. Most of the devotees
who work at the ashrams are unpaid; many pay rent to live there. During a
summer weekend, several thousand people may visit the South Fallsburg ashram,
and SYDA can raise more than a million dollars from the sale of food, books,
tapes, and memorabilia and from ìintensivesî a type of spiritual initiation
program, usually lasting two days and costing four hundred dollars. (The
intensives follow a format similar to that of many self-help programs of the
seventies and early eighties, especially the est program, a profitable
self-help movement founded by Muktananda's friend Werner Erhard.) Some years,
intensives are held all summer long. In 1989, revenue from the South Fallsburg
bookstore alone was well over four million dollars.
Over the years, SYDA has attracted a number of well-known admirers, including
Jerry Brown, John Denver, Andre Gregory, Diana Ross, Isabella Rossellini,
Phylicia Rashad, Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, and Marsha Mason. Most of
Gurumayi's followers are college-educated people, who may have been attracted
to meditation for spiritual reasons but are just as likely to have sought out
one of her ashrams for the psychological and health benefits that the
meditative process is said to confer. The pop-culture image of the ashram
visitor as dazed flower child or potential Manson groupie is outdated. Long
after the Beatles took off their kurtas, and the last string of love beads was
tossed in the trash, many serious students of Eastern meditation in this
country continued to find in the practice riches that had eluded them in the
mainstream religions of the West. Doctors, lawyers, artists, business people,
and religious-leaders of many denominations are among the five million or so
Americans who practice yoga, and many of them can be found on what is sometimes
called the New Age religion scene-a peculiar name, really, since the traditions
these groups draw from are among the oldest in the world.
The occasion for the gathering that fall morning was the last day of a yajna a
(pronounced ìyagnyaî), an ancient Vedic fire ceremony, which was presided over
by sixteen Brahman priests who had been flown from India to South Fallsburg to
help commemorate the eleventh anniversary of Swami Muktananda's death. The
yajna was held in the pavilion, which has blue neon-lighted pillars that make
it look (especially at night) like a cross between a mother spaceship and a
small sports stadium. Kathy Nash, the SYDA spokesperson, a chipper woman with
light-brown hair who used to work as an anchor for a Monterey, California, TV
station, steered me to a cushion on the women's side of pavilion. (Men and
women traditionlly sit apart in ashrams.) The sixteen orange-robed priests, who
all week had been chanting and casting offerings of spices, and flowers into a
blazing fire sunk into the pavilion floor, were being garlanded and enfolded in
long shawls as a gesture of thanks. About fifty feet from the firepit sat a
red-robed figure wearing a raffish-looking, high-crowned, unadorned red hat,
whom I took at first to be a beautiful boy, perhaps an acolyte. But when the
figureís face appeared, hugely magnified, on two closed-circuit screens
suspended from the ceiling, I could see that I had in fact been looking at the
startlingly glamorous Gurumayi.
S235108
at darshan-a ritual in which devotees and visitors receive a blessing from the
guru in the form of a tap on the head with a wand of peacock feathers. Sitting
on a throne, she beamed her powerful smile a me, tapped me with the feathers,
and gave me a frank once-over, followed by another generous blast of smile. A
nimbus of electricity seemed to surround her. She asked if I had seen the yagna
ceremony. I said Iíd caught only a bit of it at the end, because Iíd lost my
reading glasses earlier, and that had delayed my arrival. ìYou think so much,î
she said, smiling again.
I nodded, though I had no idea what she meant. Then, sensing impatience in the
long line behind me, I started to edge sidewise, away from the throne. I was
detained be a regal movement of the guruís hand as she signaled to a young
attendant on the floor beside her. The attendant quickly rose and draped a
garland of gardenias around my neck.
S
EVERAL months later, at New Yorkís John F. Kennedy International Airport, a
rather less beatific scene unfolded. On the evening of February 1, 1994, a car
pulled up to the Lufthansa section of the international terminal, and a tall,
bearded, powerfully built Indian in his early thirties got out. He was dressed
in a swamiís traditional orange robe, and he was accompanied by two women, both
Western in appearance. As the three were making their way to the terminal, five
men, waiting at the curb, approached them menacingly and began shouting ìYou're
dragging Baba's name in the mud!î
The main object of this attention, the man in the orange robe, was the younger
brother of Gurumayi. Born Subhash Shetty, in Bombay, he had, like his sister,
been given a new name-Nityananda. Like Gurumayi, Nityananda is a meditation
teacher with an ashram (though a tiny one) in the Catskills. And, like her, he
claims to be an inheritor of Swami Muktanandaís spiritual mantle. Indeed,
Muktananda had named him his sole successor in July of 1981, and about a year
later, a few months before he died, changed the decree to name him and his
sister his official co-successors. But Nityananda stepped down under mysterious
circumstances in 1985, and today his picture is conspicuously absent at SYDA
ashrams. The women accompanying him, Inge Fichelmann and Kimberly Cable, who
use the Sanskrit names Nirguna and Devayani respectively, were his principal
assistants.
The five men doing the shouting were all known to Nityananda, and all were
active devotees of Gurumayi. Among them was a member of SYDA's three-person
Executive Management Council, which oversees the day-to-day running of the
South Fallsburg ashram. According to Nirguna, another of the men, a longtime
devotee named Ganesh Irelan, put his face right up to Nityananda's and said
loudly, ìIím going to follow you till the day you die!î Devayani ran inside to
the ticket counter to call for the police, but by the time they arrived the men
had been chased away from the Lufthansa ticketing area by an airport security
guard. The guard, Joseph Mee, later told me that he'd never seen anything quite
like the scene that followed. Lufthansa stowed Nityananda and Devayani, who
were scheduled to depart for Germany on the first leg of a trip to India, in
the first-class lounge, though they weren't traveling first class. When the
flight was announced, Mee and other guards formed a human wall around them and
started walking them to the departure gate. But the five men had managed to
slip through an unguarded door to the departure area ìThey all looked the same,
to put it bluntly. They looked like clones,î Mee said. ìThey were saying that
he was a cult figure ...and meantime they're acting like complete fools.î
Nityananda and Devayani managed to board the plane but not before being
followed to the boarding gate by the five men, who, Mee added, had to be
ìpushed asideî to clear the way.
This incident, with its mixture of slapstick and menace, is only one of the
more recent in a long series of curious and sometimes disturbing events, and it
is a reminder that behind the vision of Catskill bliss lies a more complicated
tale, one that traces its roots to a bitter family schism and, before that, to
SYDA's founder.
S
WAMI MUKTANANDA PARAMAHAMSA, Gurumayiís-and Nityananda's-predecessor, began his
spiritual searchingís at the age of fifteen but didn't find his own guru until
he was thirty-nine, in 1947. According to SYDA's ecclesiastical constitution,
ìthe Siddha Yoga lineage of Gurudisciple ... goes back ... in time thousands of
years beginning with the primordial Guru, Shiva.î Historically, though,
Muktanandaís lineage goes back no further than to his guru, Bhagawan
Nityananda, an ecstatic, mostly silent renunciant who, it is said, was born a
Siddha (Sanskrit for ìperfected oneî) and claimed no physical guru of his own.
Other students of Bhagawan Nityananda also claimed to be his disciples, but
they attracted far fewer devotees. There have been Siddhas in India since time
immemorial, and numerous other Siddha lineages are represented in India today,
but none has a global following to rival SYDA's. In Siddha Yoga, a central goal
is the awakening of cosmic energy, or Shakti, which is said to be coiled at the
base of the spine, in a form called Kundalini, and which, when activated,
manifests itself as bliss. And it is through a guru that the Shakti is
awakened-by word, touch, look, or thought. As a matter of creed, this is the
role that Bhagawan Nityananda played for Muktananda, and it is the role that
Muktananda would play for thousands across the globe.
After coming to the United States in 1970, Muktananda traveled frequently
around the world, published more than thirty books, gave lectures, and founded
numerous ashrams and meditation centers. SYDA's official histories say that he
believed it was his mission to create a ìmeditation revolutionî in the West,
and the hundreds of enthusiastic devotees who filled jumbo jets-chartered by
SYDA-to join Baba in India on two of his ìworld toursî (he went on three, in
the nineteen-seventies) must have seen that as a real possibility. Most of
Muktanandaís devotees revered him as a saint, and many students of his who
shied away from that kind of vocabulary nonetheless considered him the most
impressive man they had ever known. Even diehard rationalists who met him
thought him a man of great charisma and charm.
Two apparently contradictory themes thread their way through Muktanandaís
writings. On the one hand, he urges seekers not to be too credulous or to yield
too easily to the demands of the guru. ìTo love a Guru does not mean to follow
after him saying, ëO Guru, Guru, Guru,í î he writes. On the other hand, he
maintains, the only way to escape the bonds of ego is to surrender to a
guru-not by worshipping his physical form but by following his path and
teachings. ìThe Guru is absolutely necessary for one's life as necessary as the
vital force,î he writes. A true guru, he adds, is ìnot an individual, but the
divine power of grace flowing through that individual. That power is the Shakti
that creates and supports the world.î To sustain such awesome powers, a guru
ìalways practices the teachings he imparts to others. He never breaks his own
discipline. He follows strict celibacy.î In fact, Muktananda advised his
devotees to refrain from sex, too. ìFor mediation,î he told a South Fallsburg
audience in 1972, ìwhat you need is not dollars, not eggs, not sweets, nor
chocolate or cakes. What you need is this strength, this seminal vigor.
Therefore I insist on total celibacy as long as you are staying in the ashram.î
On such bedrock principles are communities of belief grounded.
S235108
EVERAL hundred people were living at the South Fallsburg ashram at the time of
my visit, but the vast majority of Gurumayi's devotees lead conventional lives
interspersed with weekend and summertime interludes at the ashram. Even for
them, the power of SYDA's practices is undeniable. Some told me that the
practice of Siddha Yoga had been more useful to them than therapy; some that it
had helped them to reconnect with their own religions. And for other, whose
involvement is less casual, it can be completely life-transforming.
One such person is Sally Kempton, a long-term American devotee of Gurumayi's.
In 1974, she left a promising career as a journalist to join the ashram.
Kempton, the daughter of the Newsday columnist Murray Kempton, had a reputation
as an acerbic essayist for such publications as Esquire and the Village Voice.
In April, 1976, New York published a piece of hers, entitled ėHanging Out with
the Guru,î in which she described Muktananda holding court in a mansion in
Pasadena, California, in 1974, with a big crowd of people paying tribute to him
with flowers and fruit as he touched their heads with a wand of peacock
feathers. Dressed in his customary orange robe, ski cap, and sunglasses, the
sixty-six-year-old guru seemed to her to radiate a boyish insouciance, and to
be ėthe least spaced-out person in the room, a practical, solid presence.î
Kempton sat around listlessly as devotees asked questions about visionary
experiences, until one woman asked a question that seemed to apply to her own
life: ėWhat do you do about negative emotions?î His answer-ėLet them goî-and
his subsequent elaboration of this approach to difficult problems had for her
the force of a depth charge, not because of the idea, which sounded like any
number of pop philosophies, but because of the spiritual authority and power
she felt behind it:
I felt as if a huge pool had opened in my heart (Oh God, I thought, it's all
true what those creeps were saying), and the pool was full of soft air, and I
was floating in it. It was the most intensely sensual feeling I had ever had.
It felt so good that my first reaction was a sharp pang of guilt, a feeling
that I had stumbled into some forbidden region, perhaps tapped a pleasure
center in my brain, which would keep me hooked on bodyless sensuality, string
me out on bliss until I turned into a vegetable.
Soon, she wrote, she stopped enjoying cigarettes, even though she had been a
smoker since the age of thirteen and had had no particular wish to quit. She
also began needing far less sleep, and she rarely got annoyed at things that
would have bothered her a lot in the past. A couple of weeks after that first
encounter, she was formally introduced to Muktananda, and three months after
that, in Denver, she joined his tour.
The New York article on Muktananda was one of Kempton's last pieces as a
popular-magazine writer. By the time it came out, she had joined Muktananda's
entourage; she has been a full-time member of his organization ever since, and
in 1982 she became a swami and was given the spiritual name Durgananda. Her
defection was a minor cause celebre in the small world of New York journalism.
Ross Wetzsteon, a former editor of hers at the Voice, told me that he believes
that her immersion in Siddha Yoga diminished her. ėSally was a wonderfully
gifted writer, and when she got involved with that place she lost all her wit,
all her irony, and all her perceptiveness,î he said. ėIt was as if her brain
had gone completely soft. There was a vacancy. She seemed hollow. People use
the word ëbrainwashedí-I know that doesn't really apply, but it was as if her
center had disappeared,
not got stronger.î
Durgananda, who is fifty-one years old now, is a slim, fine-featured woman
with cropped dark-blond hair and large, intelligent pale-blue eyes. When I met
her, she was wearing a red robe and ski cap. Though she did not remotely
conform to the bliss-blob image the woman I sat with over a vegetarian Indian
lunch in the ashram's snack bar had a ready laugh and a quick wit she did talk
about the guru, as do many devotees, in somewhat abstract terms. For example,
she told me that a distinguishing feature of Muktananda and Gurumayi, compared
with other, run-of-the-mill gurus, ėis that they're fully enlightened. They've
reached the goal.î
ėHow do you know that?î I asked.
ėYou know it ultimately by your experience. You know it ultimately by the
state which you attain. But there are a lot of ways; that you can test or that
you can understand the state of the guru. One of them is that a master is in a
state of total equality awareness, and you see this cropping up. In other
words, without being spaced-out or out of this world, they really do see
everyone as equal. It's something that's so rare that we're not aware of how
much inequality we experience. ... Things like, you're too hot, you're too
cold, you're comfortable with this, you're not comfortable with that, you want
this, you donít want that. It's like the whole universe is made up of better
and worse and more and less. What you find with these masters is not that they
don't get cold or hot, and say, ëTurn down the heat.í It's not like that. But
you see them time and time again in different situations and you see that there
is this genuine unendingly joy and equanimity.î
When I asked Durgananda a few questions about Gurumayi's routines and habits,
her responses were guarded. All I could glean from them was that Gurumayi ate
alone, that she had a good sense of humor, and that she thrived on helping
people.
Some devotees to whom I spoke attested to life-altering visions they had had
of Gurumayi-sometimes before they had even met her-or talked of prophetic
dreams about her. Mainly, though, the powers attributed to Gurumayi are in the
realm of helping people to feel more ėcenteredî; her powers may also rest in an
ability to attract well-educated, relatively worldly followers. Gurumayi, by
all accounts, is a cool, calm, confident leader. Even so, I was firmly turned
down each time I tried to find a way past the barriers around her. Her policy,
I was told, was not to grant interviews to publications other than SYDA's own.
By contrast, Muktananda used to give interviews liberally, even appearing on
numerous TV shows (including one in Santa Monica in 1980 on which he gave the
interviewer shaktipat, as the transmission of spiritual power from guru to
disciple is called, during the commercial break), and in Gurumayi's early days
as guru she herself gave several. Moreover, I found, I could never amble around
the ashram's grounds on my own, or even sit in the lobby, without having a
smiling man with a walkie-talkie or some soft-spoken facilitator swoop down on
me. Many of my inquiries about SYDA's history seemed to be met by an air of
secrecy. And after I'd had what I thought of as a private conversation with a
devotee, the contents of that conversation were reported to the SYDA staff by
someone who had been standing nearby. Perhaps experience had made them chary
about the risks of making their affairs public.
S
YDA'S first taste of scandal came when, shortly before his death, Swami
Muktananda was accused of failing to live up to the principles of celibacy by
which he set such store. The accusations saw print in a 1983 article by William
Rodarmor, published in CoEvolution Quarterly (now the Whole Earth Review).
Rodarmor's article was based on twenty five interviews with members and former
members of SYDA, and it detailed sexual
activities Muktananda was alleged to have engaged in with female devotees, many
of them fairly young. According to the article, members of Muktanandaís inner
circle had overlooked his behavior, or tried to rationalize it, for years.
Then, in 1981, a swami named Stan Trout publicly distributed a letter in which
he accused the then seventy-three-year-old guru of betraying the trust of young
ashram women and causing their families anguish by extracting sexual favors
from them in the name of spiritual enlightenment. Though Trout's letter
troubled many in the SYDA community and sent shock waves through the Yogic
world, Muktananda chose to respond by circulating within the fold a ėMessage
from Baba,î in which he quoted from the fifteenth-century poet-saint Kabir
(ėThe elephant strides at his own gait, but the dogs do trail behind and
barkî), and by telling devotees that they ėshould know the truth by their own
experience, not by the letters that they receive.î
Ex-devotees told Rodarmor that Muktananda used a specially built table at the
South Fallsburg ashram for his sexual encounters, that in India he had a habit
of visiting the girls' dormitories at night, and that it was his custom to
bestow gifts of money and jewelry on young women whom he summoned to his room.
(If a young woman suddenly appeared wearing new jewelry, the ex-devotees said,
it was understood that she had been tapped by the guru.) Michael Dinga, an
Oakland contractor and a former SYDA Foundation trustee and devotee, who was in
charge of construction at South Fallsburg for many years but became
disillusioned and left SYDA in 1980, told Rodarmor that ėit was supposed to be
Muktananda's big secret, but since many of the girls were in their early to
middle teens, it was hard to keep it secret.î
Investigating these claims, I tracked down approximately a hundred
ex-devotees, ex-trustees, and ex-swamis, all but a handful of whom either so
feared reprisals from SYDA or were so anxious not to be entangled with the
organization that they would talk to me only if I promised not to use their
names. A great number believed that the allegations about Muktananda's behavior
were true, and found it hard to believe that Gurumayi could not be aware of it.
A few former devotees told me that many people considered it a signal honor to
have been tapped by the guru; one said those who had long-term relationships
with him were known as his ėqueens,î though some families and guardians of the
young women sexually involved with him had become very upset. Several people
pointed out to me that, whatever had happened, it was in a context of reverence
so great that devotees used to drink Muktananda's bathwater and worship the
trimmings from his haircuts, just as, soon enough, Gurumayi's attendants would
vie to sit in her dirty bathwater.
ėA Siddha master can juice up the Shakti with sex,î one longtime devotee who
left SYDA in the mid-eighties told me. In his book ėWhere Are You Going?î
Muktananda writes, ėIt is through the power of the upward-flowing sexual fluidî
that the guru ėis able to give Shaktipat.î In context, this appears to be part
of an argument for celibacy. But it
may shed light on a detail common to all accounts of sexual encounters with
Muktananda: that he did not ejaculate. Two women I talked with who were in
their twenties when Muktananda approached them said that they had considered
their experience to be ėloving,î and that it was ėnot exactly sex.î What,
exactly, was meant by ėnot exactly sexî was clarified by another ex-devotee, a
writer, who sent me an unpublished account of what she described as a sexual
encounter she had at the age of twenty-six with the then
seventy-one-year-old Muktananda. After talking to her for a while in his room
one evening about the power of Kundalini, she reports, Muktananda told her that
ėthe pleasure we gain out of having sex also has a higher counterpart.î Her
account continued:
He told me that when the Kundalini is fully realized, the body exists in a
state of permanent ecstacy. ėIt ever changes and is ever new.î
He asked me to lie down on a table. He stood close to me and placed himself
inside of me. We stayed for about one and a half hours in that position. During
that whole he never had an erection or ejaculation. He never even moved. We
talked all the time. He joked a lot, and told me stories about his childhood.
At a certain moment he said: ėWhatever happens now cannot be understood with
the mind. Don't think about it a lot. This is just happening, that is all. Just
know that this is the greatest day of your life.î
It was a very extraordinary experience. And he was right, I could never
understand with my mind what happened that evening. All I know was that I was
in a state of total ecstacy, and whatever happened had nothing to do with sex.
In a letter that the woman sent me not long ago, she urged me to view her
experience, as she has, in a context of moral relativism. ėThe beautiful
example that the (true) Siddhas give us, which always touches me so deeply, is
their quality of non-judgment and total acceptance,î she wrote, and added, ėThe
Grace of a Guru like Baba is something very mysterious.î Muktananda may well
have considered his sexual encounters in a similar
light, and his wish, however hypocritical, to conceal them from public view,
and even from the majority of his own followers, may have been a matter of
public relations. A good number of those I spoke with, though they were
troubled by his double life, found spiritual explanations for his behavior. Few
considered the time they had spent with Muktananda to have been mainly a
destructive experience, or felt that his sexual activities negated the
spiritual gifts he had given them. Some speculated that the sexual activity
might be construed as goddess worship; others pointed to precedents in Yogic
history where sainted masters flouted conventional mores because they
themselves lived on a more esoteric plane. Two people suggested that
Muktananda's alleged preference for
very young women, whom he was said to have regularly chosen from a six-bed
dormitory known as the Princess Dorm, bespoke a need to borrow ėextra energyî
from them after he had suffered three heart attacks. Finally, some devotees
have speculated that Muktananda was actually conducting Tantric spiritual
initiations. (The Tantra tradition is derived
from a number of sixth-to-twelfth-century mystical Hindu and Buddhist
scriptures that describe a range of practices-including a form of sexual
congress in which ejaculation is controlled-for attaining exalted states of
awareness and enlightenment.) But the Tantric scholars I spoke to dismissed
such explanations. ėThis kind of behavior should not be legitimized by calling
it Tantra,î Robert Thurman, the chairman of the Department of Religion at
Columbia, told me. ėThe occasional shocking incident, even in legends,
demonstrates exactly the degree to which such behavior stands against the
tradition.î
The closest Muktananda ever came to explaining his behavior, some say, was in
the oblique form of a talk given by Pratap Yande, a longtime Indian devotee,
shortly before the guru's death and published after it, in the October, 1982,
issue of Siddha Path, the sect's monthly magazine. The talk, entitled ėNever Go
Too Close to a Saint,î was about a great seventeenth century saint named
Ranganath, who lived his youth as an ascetic but at a certain point had a
vision instructing him to accept the worldly things he might be offered. By and
by, the vision came true, and he was given a beautiful horse, servants, and
elegant clothes, and proceeded to live in a luxurious way, which many people
around him found ėconfusing.î One day, the story goes, a pious king came upon
Ranganath (who was still supposed to be a renunciant) lying in bed with two
beautiful women who were massaging his feet. When the king saw Ranganath thus
disporting himself, ėa little doubt about his saintlinessî entered his mind.
Sensing this, Ranganath dismissed the women, called for a silver bucket,
ėclosed the door, and in the presence of the king he ejaculated his seminal
fluid into the bucket, filling it to the brim.î Shortly thereafter, calling
upon an esoteric Yogic practice called mahavajroli mudra, ėhe reabsorbed all of
the semen within himself and went back to sleep,î and the two women returned
and continued their foot therapy. The moral of the story: ėIt is impossible to
understand a Siddha.î As it was, there remained some devotees who could not
accept a spiritual explanation of any sort, and reluctantly concluded that,
though Muktananda's spiritual power was undeniable, their teacher was neither
as enlightened nor as infallible as they had believed; still others felt
revulsion and shock when they learned of his behavior. Scores of active
devotees eventually left SYDA after hearing about the allegations against
Muktananda; some never resumed their practices. ėMy personal opinion is that
itís not OK, regardless of whether it's a time-honored tradition,î I was told
by a female ex-devotee who had spent much of an anguished year trying to find a
satisfactory explanation of the whole business. ėIt was sex and it was abuse.î
The same woman, who had been a member of SYDA's inner circle, was informed that
she was unwelcome at the ashram after she found that she couldn't deal with
Muktananda's alleged sexual activities; she told Durgananda that she was
leaving because of issues of personal integrity. ėAnd what she said-Iíll never
forget it-was ëWell, you have the luxury of integrity. People who are committed
don't have that luxury.í It just raised the hair on the back of my neck.î
Durgananda says that she does not remember making this remark.
S
YDA has steadfastly stuck to the position that Muktananda never strayed from
celibacy, and its swamis have taken pains to teach ways of handling questions
about the issue in role-playing training sessions with its meditation teachers.
One American swami to whom I spoke-Kripananda, an ex-college professor who had
lived and traveled extensively with Muktananda-vigorously denied every
allegation. Kripananda said that at SYDA's Indian ashram, in Ganeshpuri, about
fifty miles from Bombay, her room was adjacent to the stairs between the girls'
dormitory, above, and Muktananda's room, directly below. The walls and doors
were so thin that she could hear him sneeze or cough, and she had never heard
anything suspicious. Nor did any of the girls complain to her about sexual
molestation, she said, though they constantly came to her with their problems.
Durgananda called the accusations ėlaughableî and ėridiculous.î Had they been
true, she said, Muktananda would not have been able to go on giving shaktipat
and the organization would not have continued to be as healthy as it was.
Recently, however, I spoke with two longtime SYDA meditation teachers with well
established academic and professional careers as psychotherapists, who say that
Durgananda sounded a different note with them. They told me that last winter
they had investigated some of the allegations, had sadly concluded that they
were true, and, in May of this year, confronted Durgananda and another swami,
demanding to know why the truth had been kept from them for so many years. The
confrontation occurred away from the ashram, and this time, according to the
therapists, Durgananda did not say that the allegations were false. Durgananda
told the therapists that she knew a number of the women quite well and was
convinced that whatever had happened had been beneficial to them, but that the
swamis had never talked about it, because they thought it would be more
appropriate to be ėdiscreet.î The therapists have now left SYDA. When I phoned
Durgananda and told her what they had said to me, she said, ėMy memory is that
I did deny it to them,î and she added that, whether the allegations were ėtrue
or not, it doesn't really change our understanding of Baba.î
As disturbing as the sexual allegations were, Michael Dinga, the former SYDA
Foundation trustee, and other ex-devotees gave Rodarmor equally disturbing
descriptions of strong-arm tactics used to hush up ex-devotees or punish them
for disloyalty. Over the years, the ex-devotees said, various ėenforcersî
confronted and threatened those not in SYDA's favor. Dinga and his wife,
Chandra, told Rodarmor that they were subjected to months of harassment.
Through a message left on another ex-devotee's answering machine, Rodarmor
wrote, the Dingas were warned that if they didn't keep quiet ėacid would be
thrown in Chandra's face and Michael would be castrated.î In the early
eighties, ex-devotees were especially fearful of David Lynn, a Vietnam veteran.
(Joe Don
Looney, a famously colorful N.F.L. running back known in the sixties for his
eagerness to infuriate coaches, became briefly involved in these activities as
well.) Rodarmor also reported that Muktananda phoned Michael Dinga while he was
still living at the ashram to complain about the swami Stan Trout; he told
Dinga that ėTrout's ego is getting too big,î explaining that he was sending
Lynn to set him straight, and that Dinga was not to interfere. (This incident
preceded and was unrelated to Trout's open letter.) Dinga told
Rodarmor that Lynn went to South Fallsburg, got into a fight with Trout, and
punched him. (Lynn confirms that he punched him, but says that he went on his
own initiative.) According to Rodarmor, Lynn and Looney visited another
ex-devotee and told
her that Muktananda had said that Chandra Dinga had only two months to live.
The harassment, Rodarmor wrote, stopped only after the Dingas hired a lawyer
and the local police paid a visit to the Oakland ashram.
It is this element in Rodarmor's account-the intimidation of those who leave
SYDA and who appear to threaten it-that has carried over to Gurumayi's SYDA and
has continued to shadow the organization, especially in connection with
allegations about the
treatment of Gurumayi's brother and co-successor, Nityananda.
S235108
L
ONG before Gurumayi and Nityananda were born, their father, a Bombay
restaurateur named Sheena Shetty, was an admirer of Muktanandaís. They first
met in 1944, and for a while Shetty, a deeply religious man, provided
Muktananda with living space above his restaurant. Eventually, Shetty and his
wife, Devaki, sent two of their four children to live and study with
Muktananda. Malti-the future Gurumayi-arrived in 1973, when she was eighteen;
Subhash, the third child and Malti's junior by seven years, followed in 1978.
Subhash Shetty, who was known as a sweet-natured, somewhat shy boy, received
the name Swami Nityananda Saraswati when he took vows of monkhood in October,
1980. The name was a significant honor, since Muktananda's own guru had also
been called Nityananda. At the end of a huge public program in South Fallsburg
on July 17, 1981,
Muktananda, then seventy-three and in failing health, announced that
Nityananda, who was eighteen, would be his successor. Nearly everyone was
surprised by the news-including, it is said, Nityananda himself. While many
welcomed the announcement, others worried that he was far too callow to take
the guru's place. One person who seemed to be unprepared for the news was
Malti, whom some people considered a far better candidate, because of her
greater maturity, discipline, and experience.
Then, sometime the following winter, Muktananda began referring to his
successors-plural-without clearly explaining himself. Finally, on February 25,
1982, several swamis interviewed him for Siddha Path, and he said that, since
there were two sexes in the world, it seemed right to make a man and a woman
his successors. On April 26th, in Ganeshpuri, Malti was renamed
Chidvilasananda, was shorn of her radiant black hair, and took vows of
monkhood. (Gurumayi, or ėOne who is absorbed in the guru,î is an honorific.)
Two weeks later, sister and brother, both of whom, ex-devotees say, had been in
equal measure spoiled and kept on a tight leash by Muktananda, were installed
as co-successors. In a video of the ceremony; both of them look awed and
vulnerable. Gurumayi was then a couple of months shy of twenty-seven,
Nityananda just nineteen.
From the start, their styles differed. By most accounts, Nityananda was
informal,
accessible, chummy with the devotees, somewhat self-mocking, and preferred
chanting, meditating, and drumming to giving talks, while Gurumayi enjoyed
ceremony and took the task of guarding SYDA's public image-and her own-more
seriously. Usually, when there were two darshan lines, hers was longer.
Nityananda, for his part, seemed content to let his sister play a more dominant
role in the running of the ashram.
Muktanandaís death, five months after he installed the two as cosuccessors,
deprived SYDA of its principal drawing card. It also left something of an
organizational vacuum. In naming his successors, Muktananda apparently never
said that either was ėenlightened" or gave them specific instructions about
running the organization. To make things worse, in the years that followed,
many of the senior swamis, and about half the swamis altogether, left, because
without him they felt less of a tie to the organization, or because of what
they felt to be an increasingly authoritarian atmosphere.
Some devotees who in later years became disaffected left SYDA to follow
another well-known female Indian spiritual leader, Mata Amritanandamayi, and a
number of those who visited her while they were still part of the SYDA world
were shocked to discover that their names were being written down as they
arrived at her programs. SYDA denies that it has ever assigned the task of
writing down the names of known followers or ex-devotees who attend programs of
other spiritual leaders, but an ex-swami I talked to told me with considerable
embarrassment that she herself had participated in one such sortie. Over the
years, a large number of people have been told that they are no longer welcome
at the ashram because they disagree with its policies. Although I spoke to at
least a dozen such people, SYDA says that the only people not permitted to
visit the ashram are those who have ėa history of disruption of the peace and
quiet of the ashram.î
The task of attracting new devotees, clearly, was taking on a greater urgency.
Though there had been tutoring of public speakers and a certain amount of
institutional streamlining under Muktananda, he had allowed his swamis a fair
amount of freedom. After his death, though, managers gradually took over many
more of the swamis' functions, and almost every facet of the presentation of
the ashram's religious and outreach programs fell under the control of the
Programming Department, which came to rely on rehearsed talks, and even
rehearsed audience responses, to smooth out SYDA's public programs. In time,
swamis were occasionally even asked to wear little earphones when they gave
talks, so that Gurumayi or George Afif, a Lebanese-born devotee and close aide,
could make suggestions to them as they spoke.
E
VEN true believers were sorely tested by a series of bizarre events that took
place in Ganeshpuri at the end of 1985, when it was suddenly announced that
Muktananda had named Nityananda as co-guru for only a three-year period, that
the time was up, and that Nityananda was therefore stepping down both as
co-successor and as a swami. To
many in SYDA's ashrams back in the United States-especially those who had had
powerful spiritual experiences through him-the announcement was baffling.
Devotees were told to turn in photographs and videos that included Nityananda
and to excise all pictures of him and information about him from their books;
one former center leader remembers being given notice that pictures of
Nityananda should be burned, because they would bring bad luck. Then, five
months later, SYDA modified its previous announcement: now the reason
Nityananda had left was that he had broken his vow of celibacy. Nityananda,
once Muktananda's honored successor, had become not just a non-guru but a
non-person.
Some people say that the seeds of conflict had been there from the beginning.
Shortly after Muktananda's funeral, Gurumayi and Nityananda gave speeches about
their new roles. In a video of the event that I watched recently (it had been
saved by a resistant devotee during the great purge), Nityananda, his eyes
filling with tears and his voice choking with emotion, clasped his sister's
hand, held it up in the air, and said, ėPeople have already started creating a
split between us: she is better and he is bad; he is better and she is bad. I
want you to know one thing. Many of you all know that we were both born to the
same family, and we have been united since childhood. No matter what you may
do, no matter what you may think of us, we won't split.î
But three years later, in the fall of 1985, after the two gurus arrived,
separately, in Ganeshpuri for ceremonies commemorating the third anniversary of
Muktanandaís
death, this unity was already severely strained. Given the tensions, in fact,
Nityananda told friends that he thought it might be a good idea for him to take
time out and embark on a tour of the holy sites of India. That trip never took
place. Instead, Nityananda ended up embarking on an odyssey that would
ultimately take him to exile at his own small ashram, a place called Shanti
Mandir (Temple of Peace), situated in the Catskills not far from the SYDA
complex. Nityananda was initially reluctant to talk to me, but eventually he
agreed to meet me at Shanti Mandir on a snowy day last winter. His ashram
turned out to be a modest brick-and-wood house on a back road. Nityananda had a
large round face, a dark beard, and a gentle, unassuming manner and was wearing
the orange robes of a swami.
He readily admitted to me that, as SYDA charged, he had broken his vows, and
that between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, before his departure from
SYDA, he had had sexual encounters with six women; he said he has admitted this
to anyone who has asked him about it. He added that one of his lovers had been
Devayani (now his principal aide). He said that he regretted his past lapses,
but that he believes the essential gift he was given by Muktananda is eternal
and that he is and will always be a successor. Nine years
ago, however, Gurumayi made her disagreement on this score abundantly clear.
H
ERE is Nityanandaís version of his downfall:
At about 10:30 P.M. on October 23, 1985, while thousands of people were
chanting elsewhere in the Ganeshpuri ashram as part of the commemorative
ceremonies, there was a knock at the door of Nityanandaís apartment. When his
attendant opened the door, seven or eight people pushed their way in and began
shouting at Nityananda, ėYouíve lost all your power! You're no longer a guru!î
When he protested, his visitors told him
that they were speaking on behalf of Gurumayi, and continued berating him.
Nityananda says he tried to speak to his sister-he called her over the ashram's
intercom-but she was unresponsive, saying only that they would talk in the
morning. If that's how things were, he told her, he'd have to leave. About an
hour later, however, he was told by his driver that three men on his sister's
staff had slashed the tires of all the ashram cars.
The next morning, he met his sister in the vestibule of Muktananda's
apartment, where she had been joined by George Afif. His sister asked him,
ėWell, what do you want to do?î And he replied, ėWell, you don't want me here.
I'd better leave, but since all the people have come for this ceremony I should
probably stay until the end of it.î When Gurumayi asked her brother to come to
her room ėto talk further,î he found him-
self surrounded by the same group that had come to his room the night before.
ėThese people are here to help you get out from within you what it is you want
to say,î his sister told him.
Afterward, he was led to Muktananda's study, where for the next eighteen days
his only visitors were those Gurumayi permitted him to see-mainly, the same
people who had come to his room and who now each day subjected him to lengthy
harangues. He was taken out for two visits to the cafeteria and two public
announcements, both of which he says he was forced to make: first, that he was
taking a vow of silence, and then, five days
later, that he was no longer a guru. The Mahamandaleshwar, the same
ecclesiastical official who had overseen Nityananda's taking of monastic vows
as well as many of SYDA's sacred ceremonies, was persuaded to give his blessing
to ceremonies that stripped Nityananda of his monkhood, his spiritual name (he
was officially renamed Venkateshwar Rao), and his guru status. On November
10th, Gurumayi was installed as sole successor.
Nityananda was then allowed to return to his rooms, and over the next week, he
says he signed papers relinquishing his power as co-ecclesiastical head of the
SYDA Foundation, several blank sheets, and a document ceding access to a bank
account. ėBaba had put a million dollars for Gurumayi and myself in an account
in Switzerland,î Nityananda told me. ėThe ashram had its own accounts, and then
there was a private account that Baba had his name on and that he transferred
to us. He'd told me that if ever anything was to happen to the ashram-if people
decided not to come, or any other misfortune happened-he had left enough for
the two of us to live comfortably in the ashram.î
On November 24th, a few days after Nityananda signed the papers, Gurumayi and
Afif arrived in his room and summoned Devayani (the person in the ashram he was
closest to) and eleven others, including six additional women Gurumayi accused
him of having ėabused.î (Nityananda says he had had consensual sexual contact
with four of the six, and none with the two others.) When they were all
assembled, Gurumayi struck him and Devayani with a bamboo cane and then gave
the cane to the six women and urged each in him to continue striking him. The
caning went on for three hours, Nityananda says, and throughout, he claims,
Gurumayi kept urging his assailants to hit him more vigorously. Nityananda
says, ėAt one point she said, ëMaybe I should beat him on his penis. That's the
cause of all this.í î He also claims that after the attack had gone on for
quite a long time, Gurumayi turned to an aide and said, ėHe's not going to
break down, is he?î Then she turned toward the devotee Ganesh Irelan-who had
once been a close associate of Nityananda and, a decade later, would turn up at
the Lufthansa terminal at J.F.K-and asked him if he wanted to do or say
anything. Ganesh responded by punching Nityananda in the face. Before Gurumayi
left, Nityananda says, she asked him, ėYou're not going to report this to the
police, are you?î
W
HEN abbreviated accounts of these events appeared in January and March of 1986
as cover stories in the Illustrated Weekly of India, a large circulation news
magazine, SYDA responded with a packet of statements from SYDAís trustees, from
a group of unnamed swamis, and from Gurumayi herself. These statements, coupled
with SYDAís written answers to queries I have posed in recent months, produce a
different version of the Ganeshpuri events, which confirms a number of
Nityanandaís contentions and disputes others. SYDA has been at pains throughout
to prove that Nityananda is an inveterate liar; at one point they even showed
me a videotape in which he talks about learning to lie as a schoolboy.
Gurumayi stated that, because she was concerned that if Nityananda left the
ashram ėharm would befall him and others,î she ordered the ashram gates locked.
When she was told that he had keys to all the gates, she decided that ėweíll
have to do something more drastic; well have to slash the tires.î She
acknowledged his relative isolation in Muktananda's study but insisted that he
was there of his own volition-ėto contemplate what he lacked and why he had
lost what he thought he had hadî-and that he could come and go as he pleased.
Gurumayi also confirmed the caning, though she described the cane as ėa small
walking stickî adding that ėin my presence, he received a few slaps with it
from the women he had abused, in addition to a few slaps from me.î And while
SYDA insists that Gurumayi never said anything like ėHe's not going to break
down, is he?,î Ganesh Irelan has confirmed to me that his frustration built to
a point where he punched Nityananda; Gurumayi also noted that another man, a
swami, was so frustrated he had to be restrained.
The main point of contention is whether Nityananda submitted to all this of
his own free will or was subdued and coerced, and if so, to what degree. SYDA
maintains that he could freely come and go from Muktananda's quarters (if not
from the ashram itself). Several ex-devotees recently told me, however, that
they saw Nityananda escorted by an armed guard. In addition, the mother of
Gurumayi and Nityananda, Devaki Shetty, who was in Ganeshpuri at the time and
was allowed to prepare Nityananda's lunches, repeatedly approached Gurumayi to
express her concern over Nityanandaís treatment; Gurumayi, Mrs. Shetty says,
eventually told her to ėgo jump in the river.î She was so upset that she left
the ashram, and for nearly a decade neither she nor her husband has been
permitted to return there or to communicate in any way with their daughter.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Nityananda himself was an active participant in
the very ceremonies that defrocked him. His public announcements in 1985 seemed
plainly to express a desire to step down. And he later wrote out a note in
which he thanked Gurumayi for a ėmost amazing and revealing eighteen
daysî-those he spent isolated in Muktananda's study.
Nityananda now says that he felt that he had lost his power to resist. His
second oldest sister, Rani, whom I spoke with recently by phone, told me that
when she and her husband were allowed to see him, on October 30th, he seemed
unable to respond to them. ėHe wasn't acting like a fully conscious person.î
Even the Mahamandaleshwar, the cleric who gave his approval to Nityananda's
ceremonial expulsion, is now of the opinion that Nityananda was forced to
participate against his will. And although SYDA plays down the intensity of the
caning, two people who caught a glimpse of Nityananda over the next two days
recall that he had bruises on his arms. Several weeks later, when he spent time
with leaders of a SYDA center in Germany, they saw scars on his arms, chest,
and back.
Still, in an interview Nityananda gave several weeks after the event, he
denied that he had been mistreated. Shortly after the interview, Nityananda
says, he slipped away from Gurumayi's entourage in Hawaii and got on a plane to
California. As he was leaving, he wrote Gurumayi another note, in which he
thanked her for her ėpatience and compassionî and for taking ėgreat careî of
him, and asked for her blessing. Nityananda now says that he was grateful that
Gurumayi and her followers no longer seemed interested in berating or abusing
him; moreover, he says, he hoped that the note would keep them from pursuing
him any further.
I have seen similar notes from other people who left SYDA in states of
considerable distress. The overriding wish of the authors was to acknowledge
gratitude for what they'd found in Siddha Yoga but also to stave off further
trouble. An ex-swami named Paul Constantino, whom SYDA assigned to participate
in a series of panels denigrating Nityananda, and who is now a teacher in
Nityananda's programs and serves as an officer of the Shanti Mandir
Corporation, told me recently that he, too, had written an appeasing note when
he left. ėI left because of the growing stultifying atmosphere of fear, of
informers, of public confessions and Big Brotherness,î he said. ėBut when I
left, in 1987, I wrote Gurumayi a letter in which I asked for her blessing. I
did it to keep her and George Afif off my back-absolutely.î
S235108
so far posted about half. Interesting reading, IMO.
It might not surprise many of you to read that devotees whom I know have said
that they "don't want to know" what's in this article. This is a peculiar
stance, especially from center leaders who have said this to me.
S235108
FIF seemed to play a central role in the SYDA experience of many of the
ex-devotees I spoke with. A thin, wiry man with an Omar Sharif mustache, he
became a devotee of Muktananda in 1974, and was a regular at SYDA's ashram in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. ėHe was a charming man in many ways, with a strong
devotional bent, and he had some talent as an artist,î one of the people who
knew him in his Ann Arbor days said. ėHe did a nice sketch of Baba, and went on
to do quite a bit of decorating for SYDA later on. But there was always a
mysterious quality about him, a sense of something dangerous, even duplicitous.
He was always talking about loyalty; it was a sacred word to him.î Afif hung
out with University of Michigan students, although the school's records do not
show that he was ever registered there.
Almost all the ex-devotees I spoke with consider Afif a man to be feared, and
the most powerful person at the ashram after Gurumayi. Last winter, I attended
an ėexit counselingî session of an ex-SYDA devotee in which Afifís name came up
repeatedly in a context of intimidation and sexual coercion. When the
counselor, Steve Hassan, asked the young woman if Afif had been considered a
kind of No. 2 in the organization, she responded, ėIt's more like a point
five.î When I asked Kathy Nash, the SYDA spokesperson, about Afif, she told me
that for several years he had the ėhighly visibleî job of helping people during
darshan with Gurumayi, but that his only official role in the organization had
been supervising some construction projects. She added, ėMr. Afifís perceived
position was more the result of his personal charisma and high visibility than
of actual authority invested in him.î In 1983, Afif, who was married to a woman
who also lived at the ashram, was charged with statutory rape and burglary in
Santa Clara County, California. He pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge
of statutory rape, and was sentenced to a suspended six-month jail term and
three years' probation. Under California law, the conviction was expunged after
he served his probation satisfactorily. The teen-age girl involved was the
daughter of prominent SYDA followers, who afterward left the organization in
disgust. A friend of the girl's family, William Carter, a well-known
photojournalist and fine-arts photographer, also left telling Gurumayi in a
letter that he had been appalled by the organization's treatment of the family
and its tendency to resort to ėdis-informationî in times of crisis, and that he
was cutting SYDA out of his will.
Over the years, others have raised questions about Afif's sexual behavior. A
couple who in 1982 closed the SYDA center they were running later discovered
that Afif had been having a sexual relationship with their teen-age daughter.
An Australian ex-devotee I talked with alleges that Afif had sex with her in
Ganeshpuri, in the spring of 1982, when she was thirteen years old and
theoretically under the supervision of an ashram guardian. Her experience had
been similar to that of the woman whose exit counseling I witnessed: Afif, the
Australian woman said, had got her alone under false pretenses and intimidated
her into silence.
SYDA says, regarding the California case, that it did not ėcondone Afifís
behaviorî and notes that he moved out of the ashram during the court
proceedings. Others recall that during the months prior to his court
appearances he was kept out of sight at the homes of various SYDA devotees.
Nityananda says that he argued with his sister at the time that SYDA should
dissociate itself from Afif he believes that Afif been his enemy ever since.
Certainly Afif played a prominent role in the events surrounding Nityanandaís
removal as co-guru. He was present during the caning and, Nityananda says,
warned him
afterward that if anyone interfered with what was happening there would be dire
consequences. During this period, various witnesses saw Afif carrying a gun.
In light of the drastic reaction to Nityananda's broken vows of celibacy,
Gurumayi's relationship with Afif invites scrutiny. Not long ago, I located an
ex-devotee named Andrea Skeen, a psychiatric nurse, who in 1981 and 1982 served
as Gurumayi's personal secretary and confidante. Skeen alleges that Gurumayi
and Afif spent a night together just before Gurumayi took her vows and again
after she had taken them. On the first occasion, in Ganeshpuri, Skeen says, she
was asked to wait all night outside a one-room bungalow in which the two were
staying. On the second occasion, according to Skeen, she and Gurumayi were
sharing a room during an intensive at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay. Gurumayi,
she says, left after Skeen fell asleep, went to Afif's room, and didn't return
until the next morning, when she confided to Skeen where she had been. Skeen,
who had previously had several conversations with Gurumayi about her
relationship with Afif, was aware of private letters that Afif and Gurumayi had
sent to each other, and says she was eventually asked to collect all of
Gurumayi's letters to Afif and destroy them.
Whether the relationship was sexual or not only they can say, but it was close
enough so that during late 1982 and early 1983 SYDA devotees began talking
about it. Patti Kuboske, a family therapist who was a SYDA devotee for eighteen
years and a swami for eight, and worked closely with Gurumayi and was deeply
devoted to her,
told me that she decided to inform Gurumayi about what was being said. Kuboske
recalls that when she did bring the matter up Gurumayi stared at her in silence
for a moment and then said, ėYou should know that nothing I could do would
affect what I've been given.î When I asked Kathy Nash if the relationship
between Gurumayi and Afif was personal,
she replied, ėIf by ëpersonalí you mean ëromanticíor ësexualí...the allegation
is wholly false; it does not contain even a grain of truth.î
Last spring, Kathy Nash told me that Afif was working on an ashram
construction project. Several months ago, however, when I expressed interest in
interviewing him, I was informed through a SYDA lawyer that he had ėno present
relationship at all with the foundationî; when I asked for his telephone
number, I was told that ėwhen we last heard from George Afif he advised us he
was going to be traveling in the Far East, and we have no other information.î
Efforts to locate Afif independently have proved unavailing.
In late March of 1986, five months after the Ganeshpuri events, a series of
Nityananda-bashing panel presentations, presided over by swamis and
inner-circle
devotees, took place at a number of ashrams, including South Fallsburg. One
former longtime devotee dates his decision to leave SYDA on the day he and his
wife attended the first of the South Fallsburg panels. After each panel,
devotees went back to their rooms to discuss what they had heard, and when he
expressed doubt about what had happened-he had been especially dismayed by a
swami's lurid description of Nityananda's sex life and by a video in which
self-deprecating or foolish remarks made by Nityananda were edited together to
make him look bad-he found himself ėturned inî for having ėnegative feelings.î
He says it was fairly routine for those who expressed uncertainty about the
whole Nityananda affair to be told solicitously, ėWe hear you're having
problems.î
ėIt was always put in terms of you having the problem,î this man said. ė
ëWrong understandingí was the phrase they always used. There couldn't be
anything wrong with what was happening. It was always, ëYou have some sort of
mental misfunction.' " Another ex-devotee, an artist who lives in
Massachusetts, never returned to SYDA after attending a panel. When she got
home, she wrote Gurumayi a letter objecting to what she
had seen and heard. Gurumayi never answered her, but not long afterward the
artist learned that George Afif was telling people that she was a cocaine
dealer.
E
VENTUALLY, Nityananda decided that it was his vocation to be a spiritual
teacher after all. He began giving programs both in India and abroad, financing
his travels and expenses through donations from a few well-to-do followers and
through the fees that he charged for his programs. In 1989, he renewed his vows
of swamihood under the supervision of the Mahamandaleshwar, who gave him his
blessing to continue his work. He says he also resumed a life of celibacy.
In the spring of 1988, he moved to a small house in Livingston, New Jersey,
which became his first residential center, two years later, he moved to the
house in the Catskills. The house is rented to him for a dollar a year by one
of his devotees. Its proximity to South Fallsburg may seem surprising, but
after refusing the offer of the house for that reason for several years
Nityananda became convinced that SYDA would be unlikely to bother him in its
own back yard. (In fact, he has been bothered there only once: the day he gave
his first program, about twenty picketers stood outside, carrying signs, taking
photographs, and writing down the names of attendees.) Nowadays, Nityananda has
a mailing list of two thousand friends and devotees, many of whom regularly
take part in his programs. Those who attend the programs understand that to do
so invites permanent banishment from SYDA. SYDA believes that Nityananda has
never publicly accepted the consequences of his lapses from celibacy. Devotees
who have continued to feel strong ties to both Gurumayi and Nityananda and have
tried to visit them both have been ejected, often in a quite intimidating way,
from SYDA's ashrams.
Ever since Nityananda resumed his teaching, he has faced well-organized,
aggressive picketing-similar to what greeted him at J.F.K.-throughout the
United States, in Europe, and in India. Local press accounts and police files
registering complaints against over enthusiastic picketers mark the trail of
his travels. I have talked to dozens of witnesses who have attested to the
harassment; it has included disruptions of his meetings by groups of people
shouting obscenities, a physical assault on one of his followers, stalking of
his devotees, reports of his supposedly bad behavior to the immigration
authorities of two countries and the police of a third, and, on one occasion
outside Boston, a murder threat.
One of the nastier of these episodes took place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on
August 3 and 4, 1989. That Sunday's Ann Arbor News described it as ėa protest
against a religious leader that started Thursday nightî and ėerupted into
violence Friday night.î While Nityananda was teaching, the story went on to
say, one of his followers was pushed down and kicked outside the house by four
demonstrators. The four of them then kicked in a door to enter the residence,
assaulted the swami and another follower, and threw bottles of skunk scent
against the walls." A day earlier, according to witnesses, about fifty
picketers had demonstrated across the street from the house where the programs
were being held. The picketers had brought along large signs: ėWE LOVE ANN
ARBOR, KEEP YOUR FILTH OUT OF HERE,î ėFROM MONK TO SKUNK,î and ėRAPE AND LYING
IS YOUR GAME, NITYANANDA AIN'T YOUR NAME.î That evening, three men interrupted
a program and shouted, ėHey, fatso, hey, fake guru!î and ėThere's the son of a
bitch!î and then left, pouring skunk oil over the heads of two people standing
by the door. The next night, sentries were posted; even so, two of the men from
the night before, one of them wearing a wig, broke down the door. They kicked
Nityananda's driver in the chest as he tried to shield his boss; once inside,
they threw skunk oil on the guru and several others, and knocked down a
disabled man with a cane who was trying to stop them. Earlier, devotees from
SYDA's Ann Arbor ashram distributed leaflets that read ėWarning!!! The man you
are about to see is a fraud. We know-he deceived us and ruined our lives.î
SYDA has steadfastly maintained that those who demonstrate against Nityananda
do so on their own initiative-out of a sense of betrayal-and at their own
expense. It is certainly true that many devotees felt and continue to feel
betrayed by Nityananda. But a former devotee who participated in the Ann Arbor
picketing told me that he did so at George Afif's request. He was told that he
should use his own car and money, and assumed that he'd be paid back for some
expenses, though he never was; he added that when he returned to South
Fallsburg afterward, Gurumayi smiled at him and said, ėSkunk oil, ah!î Another
ex-devotee said that while she was at the South Fallsburg ashram she was
summoned to a meeting with a swami, an ashram official, and some eleven other
devotees, and was pressured to participate in the Ann Arbor event.
Since July of 1986, Gurumayi and Nityananda have neither seen nor spoken to
one another. A few months ago, when I asked Nityananda why he thought his
sister had turned against him, he took a while to answer. Finally, he said, ėI
just think she wanted the whole thing for herself, and she tried to come up
with a way to do it-to have the whole organization, the devotees, the money,
the power as a guru, solely, without having to share or have anything to do
with me. If somehow we could have talked to each other, we could have worked it
out-she could have had it. But I think that the fear that she had and still
has-and so do her people-is that by Baba giving me the name he did, no matter
what they say or do, somehow people will never forget me. And they haven't,
because he gave me the name of his own guru.î
Nityananda claims to hope that some sort of familial reconciliation might
still be possible. After the Ann Arbor encounter, he wrote his sister an
impassioned letter, begging her to talk with him and help put an end to the
violence. The letter said, in part, ėDifferent disciples of the same Master
have become Gurus [and have] remained friends and live in harmony. Why can't we
do the same? ... I hope that you will read this personally and acknowledge that
you have indeed received it. I pray so we can communicate with each other
soon.î Nityananda signed his letter ėWith all my love.î Gurumayi didn't write
back Instead, Nityananda received a letter from SYDA's general counsel, Mark
Cohen, a lawyer based in Austin, Texas, protesting Nityananda's ėirresponsible
and characteristically inappropriateî accounts of harassment by people
associated with SYDA.
ėA
n Indian will listen to his guru, nod his head, and go home and, even if he's a
deeply religious person, ignore fifty per cent of what the guru has told him,
because his own sense of the world tells him to do that,î an Indian man who is
well versed in Yogic culture said to me recently. But Westerners who jump heart
first into a cloistered Indian subculture do not always find it easy to
distinguish what is spiritual from what is Indian-or merely the whim of the
guru.
A couple of years ago, in an attempt to help SYDA run more efficiently and
improve morale, an Australian devotee and organizational-development expert
brought in one of several popular team-work problem-solving tools used by big
corporations in the last decade. His was named Working Together, but is mostly
remembered for the part of the program called Team Data Handling. According to
several people who were around then, the program succeeded in giving staff
members more input into the day-to-day decision-making process but did not
address SYDA's more deep-seated problems, largely because, as one ex-devotee
said, about the organization in general, ėso many people are afraid of
offending the guru and being dispossessed of their Shakti.î
It is obvious to anyone who spends much time around SYDA's devotees that the
vast majority of them are far removed from the more hidden and controversial
aspects of the organization's history. They chant, they meditate, they attend
programs, they volunteer their time at the ashrams, and they work hard, in
accordance with Siddha Yoga teachings, to push beyond their own particular
limitations toward some experience of transcendence. The film director Andre
Gregory told me that he is deeply grateful to Gurumayi and her swamis for
showing him ėa technique of prayer that is in the body..a physical way of
experiencing God." Michael Karlin, a SYDA trustee who is a senior partner in a
large, successful accounting firm in Los Angeles and recently flew to New York
to express the foundation's concerns about this article before it went to
press, was undoubtedly speaking for thousands of his fellow-devotees when he
said that "the greatest personal experiences in my life I've had through Siddha
Yoga.î Karlin, an attractive, soft-voiced man of forty, spoke with pride of the
quality and integrity of his fellow devotees and the integrity of the
organization he has been connected with for twelve years. However, when the
conversation tuned to the subject of Nityananda (whom he has never met), his
voice became charged with anger. Asked why, nearly a decade after the break,
SYDA devotees still dog Nityanandaís tracks, he said, ėThese people have been
deeply, deeply
hurt by his actions.î But even if one accepts SYDA's own version of its history
as a tale of two perfect beings whose tradition has been sullied by an
all-but-demonic transgressor-one has to wonder why so little effort appears to
have been put into the task of overcoming the rage directed toward Nityananda
and moving on. In other contexts, that is what SYDA teachers advise devotes to
do all the time.
In fact, my own experience with SYDA has in a modest way confirmed some of
the things ex-devotes complained about. I have been told repeatedly of the harm
I
would cause by writing negative things about a ėpure pathî; quiet efforts were
made to discredit me with my editors; a barrage of accusatory letters arrived
from a SYDA lawyer questioning, before he had even read the story, my integrity
as a journalist and the motives of this magazine; and, this summer, the
co-chairman and co-founder of a well-known Madison Avenue advertising agency
visited the magazine's offices to express his displeasure and to warn that
there were ėmany prominent, many powerful people who are going to be hurt by
this piece.î
The righteous rage of defenders of the faith is, of course, a familiar theme
in the history of religion, as are the endless battles over questions of
legitimacy when charismatic spiritual leaders die. If the traditions upon which
SYDA draws are ancient, so too is the sort of animosity it has spawned. Several
months ago, I asked SYDA in a letter how it was possible for so farseeing and
enlightened a leader as Muktananda to have made such a bad mistake (from their
point of view) in his choice of successor. The answer was ėWould you consider
asking a Catholic priest the question: ëIf Jesus was who he said he was, how
could he have picked Judas Iscariot as a disciple?íî SYDA insists that Gurumayi
is the sole repository of Muktananda's wisdom and power. Nityananda,
excommunicated from SYDA guruhood, nonetheless stakes his own, nonexclusive
claim to successorship, and believes that, despite his youthful transgressions,
what was given to him cannot be withdrawn or lost. Thus are schisms born.
But belief in a perfect master or an incontrovertible spiritual dogma is
always fraught with danger. Michael Karlin's assertion at our meeting that ėthe
Siddha Yoga teachings cannot be challenged: the truth is the truthî goes to the
heart of religious belief itself. If, over the centuries, the longing for a
world in which, as Blake put it, everything would be perceived as infinite once
the doors of perception were cleansed has enlarged countless lives, it has
frequently left behind as a casualty a prudent acknowledgment of ordinary human
fallibility.
From the New Yorker, November 14, 1994
Satdesh
>Date: Mon, May 17, 1999 19:50 EDT
>Message-id: <19990517195054...@ng-ch1.aol.com>
>Are you going to start a personl insult thread here, Satdesh? I'd sooner meet
>you face to face and settle this off-line. Reply to me via e-mail and we can
>arrange a meeting.
S235108 on 4/4/99 (NG): "I wonder why SM felt it necessary to dispatch people
to Oakland to harass and threaten MD and his wife? Why did he send Sripati to
punch SA in the face? . . . Why, when it comes to matters of the flesh have the
above two "perfected" ones proven themselves to be so human, so ordinary and SO
ignoble . . . Those two self-styled "great ones" turn out to be petty little
people..."
>Are you going to start a personl insult thread here, Satdesh? I'd sooner meet
>you face to face and settle this off-line. Reply to me via e-mail and we can
>arrange a meeting.
S235108 on 1/20/99 (NG): "I don't feel hateful."
>Are you going to start a personl insult thread here, Satdesh? I'd sooner meet
>you face to face and settle this off-line. Reply to me via e-mail and we can
>arrange a meeting.
S235108 on 1/20/99 (NG): "There is love in my heart."
>Are you going to start a personl insult thread here, Satdesh? I'd sooner meet
>you face to face and settle this off-line. Reply to me via e-mail and we can
>arrange a meeting.
S235108 on 5/8/99 (AOL): "I am a teacher."
******************
Based on the characteristics he exhibits, and on the claims that he makes, it
appears that S235108 may be implying that he is the new/next siddha guru!
Satdesh
P.S. "Ignoble" and "petty little person" can be added to your list of S235108
approved insults for this NG. That is, if you are properly positioned to be
"judgmental".
Satdesh
>Date: Sun, May 16, 1999 20:58 EDT
>Message-id: <19990516205813...@ng-fi1.aol.com>
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
S235108 on 6/23/98 (NG): "I just want to state unequivocably that I think you
are a hateful, sick person."
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
S235108 on 6/26/98 (NG): "I am posting this commentary on a one time basis in
order to provide a context for this fool's remarks."
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
S235108 on 11/29/98 (NG): "Lay off the Foster's . . . you've got a case of the
DT's."
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
S235108 on 1/19/99 (NG): Describes a poster as "ass-kissing" and
"self-righteous".
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
S235108 on 5/1/99 (AOL): "[Do you] just enjoy talking to yourself"?
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
S235108 on 5/1/99 (AOL): "Your attitude seems to be one of keeping your head
in the sand, so to speak, while you paste your guru quotes on your butt for all
the world to see."
>Hark! Do we hear a snide, contemptuous, sarcastic person sniping at people
>here?
******************
I called you a "Scribe" and a "latter-day Ezra". If only I had followed your
example and called you (or anyone else here for that matter) any or all of the
following: snide, contemptuous, sarcastic, a [NGIC/Dan Shaw] ass-kisser, sick,
hateful, self-righteous, fool, person who hides his head in the sand, person
who pastes his cult theories on his butt for all the world to see, person who
just enjoys hearing himself talk, I would be treading the safe ground of your
superb example! Oh yes, it's different for you, I suppose. You feel justified
in your sarcasm. Everyone always does!
*******************
>Are we in a position to be so judgmental?
********************
I'm glad you included yourself in that question. If you believe you are not
properly positioned to be judgmental, then you can change your ways if you
wish.
Satdesh
Tekgal1811
are a hateful, sick person.">>
i never said somthing this bad, why the onelist throw me out? its not fair.
satdesh where you find the old messages?
S235108
>S235108 on 6/23/98 (NG): "I just want to state unequivocably that I think
>you
>are a hateful, sick person."
I am SO flattered that someone thinks enough of my posts to read the archives,
imbibe my words and then repeat them here.
I don't remember writing, " just want to state unequivocably that I think
>you
>are a hateful, sick person."
I wish that my fan would post my entire message so that I could remember the
context of what I reputedly said. To whom was I addressing the above? Is this
your seva, collecting some of my wonderful words? Are you certain that I said
the above? Are you STILL affiliated with Siddha Yoga? Remind me, what was the
OTHER screen name that you used to use?
Again, thank you for taking such an interest in my posts. I hope that you have
learned something. Oh yes, appreciate my words but please don't address
personal insults at me.
S
S235108
of value to me and influenced my decision to leave that organization. People
read things on this newsgroup and choose to take a defensive stand regarding
their continued infatuation with Siddha Yoga. It seems to me that they then try
to drive off people like me who have something "negative" to say about Siddha
Yoga with insults and attacks. I presume that Satdesh is one of these
pro-Siddha Yoga people who is trying to increase his stature and that of his
gurus by showing my imperfections, as though I were some kind of parallel to
SY. I've never claimed to be perfect and dispassionate and I have strong
feelings about the tactics which were used here in the past. Quoting my words
out of context is a cheap trick and proves nothing. I have never claimed to be
a "perfected master" the way SY claims their gurus to be.
Narada 1
Linda25311 said,
I clearly understand people still worship his picture (and I have also been
reminded of it again, thank you). I still say that Muktananda, the man of 1981
is not a part of a disciple's experience in 1999. Baba's picture is a puja
item, not at all the same as the man.
Andy then said,
Were you ever in $Y? How could you have been and missed all the emphises on
Nitty Sr and Mooktys divinity? Where were you when we were told that it was
their perfect divine energy that makes the whole world of $Y go round! That
they were part of the unbroken chain of PERFECT masters (MATERBATORS may be
more appropriate) going all the way back to shiva? The whole validity of $Y
hinges on the perfection and divinity of Mookty and Nitty!!!
As far as baboo's picture not being the same as the man - where were you when
we were tought that the picture could transmit divine energy. We were tought
that his pictures imbibed HIS shakti.
Either you were never in $Y or you are purposfully trying to distort the facts
and teachings to make $Y out to be something all together different than it
really is.
By the way - WHY are you here?<<<<<
Shiva Sutras said,
"When the mind broods constantly over the mantra of the Highest Reality, i.e.,
over the Supreme-I consciousness, it gets identified with it. Thus the mind
itself becomes the Mantra. There is no longer any difference between the
practicer of the mantra and the mantra itself. Shaktopaya is the technique of
Jnana. By constant awareness of the jnana of the real I-consciousness, the
mind of the aspirant is transformed into that Supreme I-consciousness itself.
Thus he has full realization."
Now Narada says,
The Guru is a living Icon standing in as a meditation image for those seeking
identification of the Highest Reality. Like all religious icons, the image
represents a higher reality, and it is this higher reality that one is to focus
on when seeing any religious icon. Of course if one looks only at the physical
manifestation of that icon, one would only see wood, stone, metal, flesh and
blood and so on, and if that is all one sees, then one would never achieve the
effect the icon represents "what the mind broods over constantly, it gets
identified with."
I am amazed at how the anti SYDA people seem to have SYDA's priorities
reversed. SYDA is here for it's disciples, the disciples are not here for
SYDA. It is the SYDA Guru's job to get it's disciples to focus on perfection
so that perfection can manifest within themselves. That is the Hindu path of
Gurus. Those that see the Guru in the light of what the guru stands for, i.e.
as an icon representing the Highest Reality that did indeed create all there
is, then those would have the reward of the Grace of that Highest Reality.
Those who are envies of the SYDA Gurus out of jealousy of all the attention the
Guru is getting, and only "broods constantly" over their own negative
projection cast on the Guru, will also reap their just rewards, for it is a
given impersonal fact of the machinery of the mind, whether positively or
negatively whatever the mind broods over constantly, it gets identified with,
which for this bunch and all other Asuras, their own negativity becomes
magnified while their perfection falls into the background.
Again I can only laugh at how these people struggle at finding an abuse at SYDA
when after all these years all then can come up with is how they spend to much
money there when you compare that "abuse" with what you find at this web site:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/3933/molester_gurus.htm#Chapter
One - Gurus or Pedophiles?
They are so "DESPERATE" to find something to justify saying SYDA is so
constantly abusive that one should at once leave that all they can come up with
is pointing how an old man at SYDA, Baba, spiritually stumbled the last few
years of a very long life. A life that even those who complained about his
sickness even said was virtuous and helpful for thousands and thousands of
people up to the last few years of his life. It is very clear the motives he
founded SYDA with where honorable and personified the Hindu ideal. This is the
Muktananda respected at SYDA, even though he put SYDA on shaky ground from his
personal conduct in the last few years of his life, I feel Gurumayi should be
commended for salvaging SYDA and getting it back on the right track.
Gurumayi's brother was a threat to SYDA because he also lost his focus and
became involved with his tomfoolery's with the women at SYDA, and I think
Gurumayi should also be commended for getting his negative influence out of
SYDA too. For I remember a link posted here, Muktananda's legacy, where it was
said how Gurumayi made here brother leave over his dalliances with the females
there. The message this makes clear is, if Gurumayi will not let her own
brother fool around with the women there, she sure as hell not going to
tolerate anyone else doing it. Which brings us back to the phantom abuse at
SYDA, they are phantom abuses because they only occur in the heads of those who
have to create slanderous stories in order to have something so say? And if
someone has to create abuses by lying, when there are so many abuses we all can
see in the world, that speaks volumes of how squeaky clean Gurumayi made SYDA
since she commanded the SYDA helm. Keep up the good work GM!
Narada
Linda25311
I still have my copy of the Shiva Sutras that I bought in Siddha Yoga. When I
first began to follow Muktananda, I had the spirit of the Shiva Sutras in my
heart. After time, a conflict arose between my inner yoga and my participation
in the Siddha Yoga organization. I left Siddha Yoga but have not repudiated the
original reasons for joining. My home is filled with symbols and fond objects
that bring back memories. Those objects would not have any power if I did not
value them so much. I still have a mantra card and some pictures of Baba, but
when I look at them they do not have the force they used to. Having the
pictures is a reminder of my Siddha Yoga experience, and also of how far I have
come since moving on to other things. I don't know why ex-disciples argue about
his image. After all, it is just a picture. I really don't think the picture
has any magical energy, apart from the awesome power that our own attitude can
impart to it. Attitude is everything in life!
I believe the human heart responds to love more than to fear. We can influence
disciples by showing them a positive alternative. When the ex-disciple group
presents itself as angry and paranoid, disciples may just conclude that Siddha
Yoga is better than the alternative, even if they have misgivings about their
religious path. Talking about how far we have come from Siddha Yoga, and what
we have kept, and outgrown, puts a human face on the process of leaving.
I would not praise Gurumayi or Baba. I praise God for always revealing to me,
at the proper time and place, the path I need to tread. I recognize that there
was a moment in my life when Baba was an important milestone on that path. In
the spiritual journey, it is easy to mistake a milestone as the goal, and I
almost did that through my involvement with Siddha Yoga.
I have enough faith in God that I believe people will find what they need to if
we help each other with love. I have no desire to browbeat or scare anyone
about Siddha Yoga. Answers have a way of finding anyone who has a sincere
desire to move on.
Linda Saucier
Linda...@aol.com