Discussion Wise Fellows

Those Who Need Advice Are Not All Likely to Take It

"False, lying, wrong, mistaken, misleading, incorrect, inaccurate, sham, dishonest, deceptive, spurious, erroneous, fallacious, untruthful information" can mirror a problem.

"Rebuke me a million times - do scold med now!" says the guru Yogananda somewhere [Pa 432]. In another place he says, "Our best friends are those who criticise us the most . . . who never condone our faults".

How often is the saying true for critique as for counsel, that it is "seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least." [Lord Chesterfield]. Many proverbs evolve that basic idea: "Advice is something the wise don't need and the fools won't take [Ap 9]." A variant: "Fools need advice most, but wise men only are the better for it [Ap 10]." Apropos, "He asks advice in vain who will not follow it [Ap 10]."

If you have something of value to be implemented for the benefit of people in largely submissive groups and authoritarian clicques, consider that "frozen" cliques may neither like nor want you, that pertinent critique or criticism the wise seldom need and fools would rather not take.

Overlooked Problem Source?

Paramahansa Yogananda, former founder-guru of Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) is an overlooked source of contemporary problems in SRF. it is headed and run by a special breed of monastics today. What can be wrong with that? It really springs to the eye as soon as you add two plus two: They claim in their public aims and ideal to stand for "Original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ". But there was no monasticism in Christianity then. A hoax has been exposed. [◦More]

To the degree that an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man, as Emerson says and Yogananda's SRF have repeated in their magazine, the institution's problems can in part be shadowy and unclear ones. As I see it, Yogananda set wheels rolling, in part by inconsistent teachings and practices, dubious propaganda, and his hailing of dictatorship. Other delicate problems and suggestions for how to deal with them, if once caught in the guru's net, are exposed elsewhere. [Link]

By and by Paramahansa Yogananda's teachings turned into exhorting "God-lore" rather than "Selfhood serving". You may say he luffed to serve the sort of audience he attracted by the demagoguery. His kriya teachings were simplified and changed, and the kriya hype vastly expanded. He set up his own church in 1935, with its own monastic order too, and monastics are not known for managing even needed change.

Yogananda's early messages are at times yoga-psychologically oriented, focusing on Self and universality. But after fifteen years he had his own registered church and monastic order, and the focus of his output became "God!" and exhortations to meditate. SRF has gone on to serve the guru without discerning between the changed profile of their guru from the eary and later years in their mixture-based SRF Lessons, a blend of guru sayings and poems, and, in my experienced, too little practical value. After all, a good part are based on his orator output - lectures, sermons, and talks. What is considered best, is to spend time in suitable quality meditation, and such meditation should be its best advocate, delightful and helpful.

Discussing Ex Monastics with Deep Problems and Unresolved Issues

It seems unrealistic to hope that an online discussion board that is made up by disgruntled ex-members of SRF, is full of praise of SRF. And such a board of mostly anonymous participants may not be a wholly fair and unbiased source of information.

Some parts of the SRF Walrus is ◦ Back links from 17 January, 2004] online still (December 2010). In the years after one third of the SRF monastics left the SRF premises, it was different, though. Some of them contributed vast amounts of sentiments and faith decrees and facts about SRF and kriya gurus on the board (The current board address is at bottom).

There are many largely unrecognised dangers of becoming monks and nuns in a rather cultish setting. An SRF monk once told me, "It's not easy being a monk." I figure former SRF monastics can say something similar, for example, "It's not easy being a former monk of SRF." And why? The SRF Walrus board shows sides to it. Some of the posts are much biased, and a slightly paranoic vein ran through it in former days, but that is not all there was to it. First, it offers looks into an otherwise close environment, a monastic enclave. Second, lack of reliability springs to the eye too. Third, I had fun reading into it and participating somewhat too. We are not all alike.

To elaborate a little: In 2001-02 about one third of the SRF monastics left the SRF premises, disgruntled and "fattened" on Yogananda verbiage that usually is marked by little good proof, and at times goes against other Yogananda decrees and scriptures he based his teachings on too. You cannot bake good cakes if the ingredients are at fault like that.

However, his monastics seem to think they are not allowed to find fault with the guru, and the church of Yogananda rides on his hybrid Hindu-Christian tenets, which in part consist of sham Christianity, and has gained cult dogmatism to support it, although it is not fair. When many monastics and other members left in the early 2000s, they took very much the guru verbiage with them as part of their baggage, along with their dissatisfaction, loss of hopes, and fears that might be guilt-related. They never seemed to understand that the cult they got a freer position in from leaving the monastery premises, is far from "original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ", even though they hold up such a facace in public, in the SRF Aims and Ideals. For one thing, monasticism was no part of any "Jesus Christianity"; it appeared in the 200s CE. If SRF monastics were informed or honest, they would admit they have been had and go on to refrain from spreading such crap. [◦More]

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. [Sir Winston Churchill]

The Walrus message board was set up by a former monastic, and soon dozens started to communicate with one another there, but for most part anonymously. Unresolved conflicts were quite easy to observe - some wrote of deep problems and traumas, and of resorting to psychoteraphy. One of the hot spots was unresolved conflicts around loyalty and devotion and leader submission on the one hand, and the fact that some participants on the board had left SRF, the guru's cult - and some had left Yogananda altogether.

The SRF Walrus participants of "Yogananda devotees" seldom seemed to relate their own troubles to their own reciprocal parts in their "SRF dance", for example admitting that "It takes two to tango". In the first years there were not many self-searching posts from people who tried to find out "What was it in me that made me vulnerable to this sect and its teachings in the first place?" In this respect some shared a problem with divorced couples - after a break-up there is vulnerability and a desire to talk and blame much on the other part, but maybe little self-searching so as to escape committing similar mistakes in times ahead. After some time with less pressures, some gather their wits about them, reassess some, and concede a little too.

As for the SRF Walrus board, some had not developed that far when they contributed, and were not marked by writing fondly of others, even their own past board members, but that could have changed later.

Less Friendly Goings

I got some letters from one such former Yogananda devotee who told about her troubles with the cult SRF and the message board of former cult members. After she had become Christian, she put some of her harsh experiences with the SRF cult and cultists online. There might be something to learn there too, if she has anything of it on-line yet. If not, at least parts may be retrieved through the ◦Internet Archice Wayback Machine (January 2010). Anyway, I can document almost everything I render below, even if the page references given below are no longer valid.

She Left SRF and Yogananda Altogether

"Turtle-dove" (alias) published material related to SRF a few years ago. She may have decided to remove it by now, but such material can be retrieved. Have in mind that the following is from a year or two before 2010, then.

Turtle-dove did not usually write about Self-Realization Fellowship, the church of Hindu faith that she left - for she did not wish to attract SRF followers. This was because she learnt that they put on the air of being holy and perfect while in public, and the Internet afforded some of them an opportunity to behave quite badly, for example by smearing her, she tells.

She summed up that before the Internet, those who questioned Self-Realization Fellowship were largely left to suffer their various disillusionment in silence.

Several years ago she came across the SRF Walrus discussion board where ex-SRF members with camouflaged screen names, shared the machinations of this church which many found was a cult. She had realised that members lived in great fear - some of it consciously too. Many would often come back to the board and delete entire posts, sometimes within minutes after posting, due to inner conflicts and guru fears, one may add.

For a while, people were gathering information and sharing experiences about SRF. Most of those who left SRF, did not leave the guru. They could still practice his teachings on their own, or join a spin off church, Ananda Sangha, with guru-idolisation still intact.

Now when board members found out she had become a Christian "they trolled the internet for any false, lying, wrong, mistaken, misleading, incorrect, inaccurate, sham, dishonest, deceptive, spurious, erroneous, fallacious, untruthful information about Christianity they could copy and paste to denounce [her] decision".

Someone posted back to her that "You had a nice day because you thought you were too good for a bad one." (!) And every once in a while someone would leave her a message and outright offend her, threaten her, and accuse her, she informed. From one such comment:

You're a fool, and you will endure incarnations of suffering for leaving your guru for Christ. . . . Only an idiot would leave the guru, what kind of fool would go to Christianity after having (guru)? You're going to be in the astral world one day wondering why you were so *&^$ stupid as to believe in Christ! . . . What a joke. Get a life! . . . I'm not going to listen to you, your an *(& hole and anyone like you would ***&^. Your father *&%*$ you when you were little, and that's why you left the guru, and you were *^$#*^ repeatedly in high school.

She corrected this politely: her father did not molest her. And she found the attacks of nasty cult members scary - and so should anyone who takes into account that the guru Yogananda teaches love and decent conduct.
[www.turtle-dove.com/search/label/SRF]

Evaluations of SRF people close to and in the SRF headquarters

"Turtle-dove" studied, mediated and followed the famous guru Yogananda during most of her life. She served at fellowship gatherings and tells she "knew hundreds of yogis for up to 30 years, but not one of them had ever attained much". Most of them had little financial success, and not happiness either. And "There were drugs, alcohol, affairs, divorces, physical abuses . . . They seemed a bunch of shame driven antisocial beings." She had never seen anyone enter into Samadhi, and found that "None of these struggling yogi's were better off, if anything, all of them suffered mental and emotional problems."
[www.turtle-dove.com/search/label/Gurus]

❖ "It takes one to know one," is good standard counsel.

She sobbed

One night one of the SRF leaders told her on the phone that her "mother deserved to die a horrible cancer death, and that she really didn't mind dying in this way, that her soul understood."

She lived in shock for a good long time after that, for her mother's last word to her was "shit", and then she lapsed into her final coma.

In talk therapy that followed outside SRF, she learned she had formed a religious addiction.

There was unwanted, up to neurotic perfectionism running in SRF, she noticed by and by. "Silly things like using a ruler to measure the exact location a plastic spoon and fork should be set on a table. Such awkward "perfectionism" was used to humiliate and wound "lesser" devotees and to pump the egos of the reinforcers of the neurotic-looking SRF culture, which was defended and upheld by typical top-down attitudes demanding foolish submission from beginners as the cover-up.

"They brought me feelings of distrust, worthlessness, inferiority," writes Turtle-dove. Many devotees passed on non-democratic patterns "to others through control, perfectionism, contempt, criticism, blame, envy, judgment, power and rage," and when she began to seriously question the flaws of the teachings, she was abandoned. Before it happened to her, it happened to others too: "We lost many monks to mystery. The really good ones never stayed," she found.
[www.turtle-dove.com/search/label/Guru]

❖ Who is the origin of demanding guru teachings and monastics in this case?

Guru of deceptions

When she left Yogananda, it had nothing to do with his deceptions, since she learned about them many years later. She found that SRF members guarded themselves against what had been dug up, for example that Yogananda talked for dictatorship, praised Mussolini, and things like that. SRF does not try to publish Yogananda material that does not look acceptable to Americans today, then. But the fact remains that he set up a submission-based society, SRF, and that its authoritarianism is not much to go for.

She had loved Yogananda dearly. En passant, many women fall in love with prison inmates too - real killers. She needed space from the monks and nuns who ran SRF like a gulag, and was unaware that she had been slowly brainwashed a long time, she informed.
[www.turtle-dove.com/search/label/Guru]

Geoffrey Falk, Canadian Author of "Stripping the Gurus"

Geoffrey Falk related online about SRF experiences he calls abuse and suppression in an ashram deep in California, and was likewise sweared at for it, he says.
[srfwalrus.yuku.com/topic/932/t/HV-Horrors-Science-of-the-Soul.html]

Falk has written on his experiences with SRF in a book too, Stripping the Gurus. Its chapter 26 deals with SRF.
www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/yogananda.asp]

Back to the SRF Walrus

One of the lessons above is there may be a difference between a godly facade and what actually goes on and how bad it is.

I was not so much impressed with SRF at the start as this woman seems to have been. But I did appreciate some of the monks, though, and was willing to bear up with a lot. Later it showed up that it was too much to put up with anyway.

As for the SRF Walrus Message Board, not all of its 28 500 posts (2010) are abusive and deranged railings. Surely not! However, there is an ample amount of fixed New Age-related beliefs and ranting that goes against sound evidence and may be strenuous to go into. Yogananda talks against blind believing. "No more blind believing," he says [ Ak 456]. It sounds good, but what happens when a "loyal, devoted crew" then goes on to believe him blindly? Yogananda followers take his word on this and that subject as the main authority, above direct words of Jesus too, and try not to say anything of how foolish it may be.

The SRF Walrus stated it was

intended to help those who have been involved closely with Self Realization Fellowship . . . For most it is shocking when they get a close look at the reality of what the organization is like and it brings their loyalty to SRF and Yogananda into question . . . Should we stay involved or just develop a personal relationship with Yogananda [he died in 1952] that does not involve SRF? . . . Come help us. [Wal]

However, that appeal is soundly disregarded:

It's not really worth wallowing in the mud going in that room. - Ellyn,
[www.yoganandaji.org/board/showthread.php?t=4324&page=3]

Still, the above is what the Walrus moderator wrote herself/himself, and attached a little red devil icon to. Allround reliability appeared to be out of reach for most of them as they reiterate fractions of an unquestioned New Age faith of former lives and other subjects that may be awfully hard to verify. Some who posted on the SRF Walrus stood up and claimed they had gone insane by the SRF methods and teachings. If so, and things are taken to courts, the SRF teachings and methods may become public as court evidence.

But what has happened? If anything, it is hardly visible today. SRF typically does not ask for help, other than money and donations and inheritance . . . And may I add, "Not all who ask for help, really want it if it is given." Sometimes the cure requires a bitter pill, such as awakening from stupid, very cultish, fetish idealisation of Yogananda. And still bear in mind "Advice, when most needed, is least heeded. [Ap 9]".

Among the ardent Yogananda devotees, we find some who thrash the SRF Walrus - it might be expected. Quote from another discussion board:

"I would stay away from that site . . . They do not listen to reason and the only reason it exists is to detract the teachings, be dismissive of disciples who stayed and negatively impact SRF and Masters [Yogananda's] teachings . . . Flies like to gather around filth." The moderator of that second board agreed with the content, but added, "To disparage a board that disparages others makes one board just like the other."

Another points out: "A board made up by disgruntled ex-members cannot possibly say nice things about SRF, and is hardly what I would call an unbiased source of information." [◦Source]

Speaking of court cases, SRF lost the right to much Yogananda material in a 12-year long legal feud with a spin-off church, Church of Ananda. SRF filed a massive lawsuit for trademark, publicity rights, and copyright infringement. The judge and jury decided mostly in Ananda's favour. [◦Details]

"Birds in their little nest agree; and 'tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight." [Isaac Watts]

The truth is that birds in their nest do not always agree, and some nestlings are kicked out too. Still it is a pity when it happens, and happens among seemingly evolved guru followers too.

Now, anyway, for the benefit of the blessed few who may take pieces of advice, more or less:

Posting after posting on the early Walrus tried to solve some hard problems of SRF nuns and monks for them, but at a distance, and never talking to the SRF leaders in person, and many with fear in their hearts, for reasons that outsiders do not know the full reasons for. Moreover, the Walrus posting ones did not seem to take into into account the wisdom of proverbs like:

• He who gives advice for nothing could be a bigger fool than he who takes it [cf. Ap 10].
• Take your own advice, you'll be too busy to bore others with it [Ap 10].
• Advising is easier than helping [Ap 11].

Helping yourself is helping the world to the degree you are part of the world - as the centre of your own world perception. - The Catholic Church holds a similar view on charity. And proverb illustrates what is meant: "Charity begins at home but does not have to end there [Ap 92]."

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person will not be found: You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection. [Buddha]

Yogananda teaches the world is pretence. If the world is illusory, as he says, he too would be illusory, his teachings, his fear-allied kriya oath - and he would not count. So why serve the guru in illusion? Isn't it pretence? Maybe it because "Illusion is itself illusory", as Ramana Maharsi says, but not Yogananda?

From a Walrus Thread

The Walrus board moderator once got a letter, saying,

I am living in Southern India. I saw your website. Are you the devotee of Yogananda? Why did you keep websites of scandals about the master. We could not believe. It is shocking. We worry that the scandal should not spoil the reputation of the Great Master.

The Walrus moderator's response on the SRF Walrus Forum:

I replied to this person:

"To answer your questions...

1) Most here are long term devotees of Yogananda's.
2) We are not keeping a website of scandals about our Master. The scandals are about the organization he started which is seriously off track. Because of our love of Master we are attempting to prevent SRF from harming more of his loving devotees. Most who come in contact with the core of SRF leave Master. We think that is a crime.

Since you are so far away, I am sure this all looks terrible. I am sincerely sorry for any offense. I can assure you that most of what I read here is true. The stupid scandal about Master fathering a child is an unfortunate addition most of us think is wrong. That scandal, however, is hardly the brunt of what this website is about. (Still, people are free to discuss on the website what ever they want to)

I suggest you not read the website. You are protected from his organization, being so far away, and therefore also can't be part of any solution. Your prayers for his organization can and will help."

Do any of you care to answer this person also? If so include a message in this thread.

At least (s)he got this helping hand from me. Here it is:

"A reply can have many strains. I came to think of these:

1. "Why did you keep websites of scandals about the master."

   It finds favour with the godhead, that is the simplest answer I see fit. It is far, far better in the long run to try for that than just be assuming things are right and next brand a bit on top of that again. I refer to "a blind-eyed way of writing or behaving" here.

2. "We could not believe. It is shocking. We worry that the scandal should not spoil the reputation of the Great Master."

   To this: Very human reactions are told of. But they are hardly good enough. It is human to "guard one's face" to save the reputation, but what may be sacrificed thereby is candour, real sincerity from inside and out. And if nasty truths can be told, perhaps they should, so as to "nourish" badly treated and infirm people. It has to be considered.

Further, Nagarjuna says according to one source, "An astronomer . . . doth not divine that in his own household his own womenfolk, being at variance, are misbehaving" [suggested: he should know it] - From Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wenz - Tiy 62.

That note goes along with the Walrus words, "We are attempting to prevent SRF from harming more of his loving devotees. Most who come in contact with the core of SRF leave Master."

One should know what is going on, at least when what is going in is highly important. And maybe "Companionship with the wise and truthful must be preferred to companionship with those who are sovereignty-stuck" and "thus loaded" as well. [Edited at: 18 June 2002].

This Information

The former SRF monastic and follower of Yogananda who started the Walrus discussion board, has also made it clear that critique of Yogananda would not be welcome on the board, but would be deleted. The Walrus Forum moderator has deleted many pertinent messages for that reason, but not consistently. For example, a string about Yogananda praising dictatorship and Fascism was found there. I have made use of it.

Since the board actually is a cult aftermath, one should perhaps not expect that the cultural level of the large society is attained: Putting lids or limits on the freedom of speech and such things, the ex cult member Walrus has hindered valuable information about Yogananda.

It hardly matters to know the exact details of the anonymous postings as time goes by, but for qualitative research purposes such ground data make a big difference. So I took the trouble to save and keep about ten thousand older Walrus postings in case these data too could be helpful or needed. I have also noted that some of these postings have been deleted since then. What is more, in spring 2011 almost everything on the board was missing.

You may try the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to retrieve a few of the strings though, so long as it lasts.
[www.archive.org/web/web.php]