The Assuming Souls Around

Assuming could lead to fallacies - to mistakes with repercussions for life. A fallacy is a mistaken belief, in part based on unsound arguments; misconception; delusion; false notion; mistaken impression; misapprehension; misjudgement; miscalculation; misinterpretation; misconstruction; mistake; untruth; deception; faulty reasoning; unsound argument.

Thus, assume litte, suppose little, opine blandly, for your own good. In this way many could appear unassuming and get old.

Someone: "I find it hard to believe is levitation."

Answer: "Flying is believing:" Gather the evidence, sift it pertinently and see what you come up with.

First-rate soul-assumers?

Plato and Socrates accepted the immortality of the soul. Plato believed the soul was simple, not composite, and that the intellect is the purest element in the soul. For the Platonists, the soul was an immaterial and incorporeal substance. In Christian theology, body and soul were separate, but it was not possible to conceive of a soul without its body.

To Benedict de Spinoza, body and soul formed two aspects of a single reality.

The thinker Gottfried Leibniz holds that nothing truly exists except monads; they do not extend in space, and monads are souls, spiritual beings. [EB "soul;" "metaphysics"]

Many assumptions could contain truths or elements of truth in them. And simle longing could contain something sound also; a crucial thing is what we do if we have it.

Yogananda throwing stones in a glass house:

Yogananda's glass house teaching is: "Your true Self, being made in the image of God, is immortal. (2000:14) and "The indwelling soul is immortal. (1993:212)." He also teaches and preaches that his teachings are completely in harmony with those of Jesus (in the four gospels). But the gospels teach that both soul and body can be destroyed. (Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:4-6; Matthew 5:29).

You may recognise there are two different views there and not much harmony on the surface of things.

Further, find many of Yogananda's basic teachings about the world and all in it - very inconsistent and alarming - for it goes without saying that in that case he himself (in the world, as part of the world) is unreal, his teachings, and you. And in such a case there was no devil with a tail that once attacked the guru in a hotel room in Bombay and made his heart stop until the dead Yukteswar appeared out of the blue and saved him by shooing the devil away. (Self-Realization Magazine, Summer 1976, p. 8-9). [Link].

More telling still, if the world is unreal, which the guru says many times, he was not, his sayings were not - and he might have profited from thinking twice about so many things:

One cannot debunk the universe with debunking all in it.

Ninety-nine percent of all people fail under this test. Tell a person, for his own good, to do a particular thing, and he will do exactly the opposite. - Paramahansa Yogananda (1982 321)

If you know this and talk to Americans, as Yogananda lived among for thirty years, do you want to get them going in a fit direction by telling them to do the opposite of it, for the sake of helping them? If you think as Yogananda did, and still give helpful counsel, isn't that something to stop doing because there must be better adaptations than that?