cbrahma

I got this response from a related site This description is really frightening. In the seventies and eighties there were a number of cults that used 'loss of ego' to justify all sorts of abusive excesses. EST is one classic case. I can't imagine all the destructive practices that can be justified under the 'loss of ego' pretext. Ego is such an abstract concept, hard to pin down. The only truly ego-less people I've met were mentally ill. It's so convenient. A guru could commit all sorts of artrocities on a disciple like rape and justify it as an excercise for losing ego. How horrifying. A religion in which a loving God is nominal.

bottom line - where I stand is nobody should be alllowed have that kind of power of anybody else.

I am not organizing a propoganda. I am posting to a blog. Institutions organize propaganda. Institutions that need to increase their ranks by demanding diksa subjugation as a condition for God's love. Your physical mobility is hardly the point. Potentially a diksa guru is supposed to be able to make any demands and the disciple is supposed to jump. Say a nice young boy is a disciple of a homosexual guru. That guru can demand sexual favors and the boy will believe he has to comply. Or in another instance somebody with a lot of money will believe he has to hand it all over to the 'loving' guru. This kind of control is a cruel reality. Not proganda.

Cool. Then my hands are tied, along with my tongue. Can't duh ...uh..choose to get initiated..duh... Tell it to a black person who had slave ancestors. There is a qualitative difference between living in a democracy and a despotism. Slavery is not philosophical. It is a painfully concrete state.

I don't what religious process you're affiliated with but diksa is diksa. Love is not ownership. The absolute demand for obedience is slavery, ownership, not love and certainly not freedom.

Yes but the diksa-enslavement process is dehumanizing. It cures the disease by eliminating the patient. By which I mean trading misery and suffering for the coma anesthestized state of 'surrender' where all conscious feeling and thought is dismissed as maya and irrelevant. A literal comatose would be preferable.

I actually don't care. Salvation is salvation. Resurrection is resurrection. However I get there as long as I do.

Now you quote Paul, a human as being doctrinal. Catechism is a very early tradition. New Christians had to be taught the basic teachings of Christ. The Epistles or Letters of the Apostle helped to contribute to that teaching. I'm not going to quibble in what form the Christians survive, but they do. Sure beats millenia of transmigrations. That's not home spun. Nevertheless salvation entails a lot more than ressurection of the body.

Christians survive their bodies. Salvation is not the ressurection of the body, althought that is included. I suggest you take basic catechism.

You expected Jesus to sit down and write Scripture? He was a Jew who reverenced Scripture, included in the very Bible you are trying to discredit. Since you can't address the issues you try and make the whole thing evaporate. Christianity, the Bible is concoction. Christ never existed , Christ never said he was the Messiah.. etc... You have two thousand years of tradition and scholarship to address if you intend to just dismiss it as a fabrication.

You prove to me how it says otherwise.

Salvation through Jesus is not a waiting game. It is a 'fait accompli'. As for KC being a science, where is the empircal proof. In fact where is the empiricism at all? It's just a law book of offenses about so many little ritual behaviours. Makes me feel like a gerbil in a cage. Any system that promises punishment for speaking out the truth is hardly a science. Truth and complete discovery is the cornerstone of any scientific study.

But there isn't an implicit requirement of surrender to a human being going in like in the vaisnava sects. One doesn't even get in the door really, until one surrenders (that word gets used a lot, because it's very useful). The Christian rhetoric is more cognitive , believe, repent etc... In the uncontaminated version there is no pressure as such. Salvation is already accomplished. One is led by grace to follow and be transformed. I don't find that one bit as complicated as all the rules about offenses that get slapped on as soon as you are naive enough to buy the "Chant and be happy" slogan.

I began by expressing why I wanted to stay with my Christian faith rather than pursue the treacherous complicated path of chanting. And I am little more than vexed at the misrepresentation of chanting as being 'simple' without any hard rules. That is simply a lie. I don't like being lied to. I see nothing wrong in expressing that fact in a public forum.

I think it goes deeper than taste. There's no doubt that the Oriental invasion as left is indelible mark. But I don't read it any more as the 'thing to do'. The image of the Hindu swami, the Bhuddist priest (less so) is no longer exotic and glamorous. In fact it is tarnished by so many scandals. I see this as a good and wonderful thing that these unscrupulous pseudo-mystic snake-oil merchants have lost credibility. Christian hypocrisy, at least on the Protestant side, has depended more on trickery than the religious demand for complete submission to a human authority. That one is harder for the Christian preacher/pastor to pull off. When the price of admission is 'surrender' then exploitation is a no brainer from that point on.

There is a going of consciousness, an attainment of mental state regardless of religious affiliation. If you think that you are already there, then realize it by your actions and trascendant consciousness. Without those symptom there certainly is a going. By the way the SB says the material manifestation is 'located' in the spiritual sky. It speaks of journeys and travelling beyond the 'covering' of false ego. Sounds like geography to me. Even the yogic process tries to raise the life airs of the body up the thousand petal cakra and release the soul at death. Lots of comings and goings.

We stir up our own dung. We should be fixed in happiness-distress. If our peace is that fragile, then we need to revisit our spritual center. Of course, there are people who get their kicks by disturbing others but the poster you questioned has a lot more to offer than that.

Oh I can think of worse things than upsetting vapuvadis. I think it's their natural state anyway.

I don't see the logic. Affirming the vibration , the vani, over physical presence, vapu shouldn't flip anybody out if they are listening to a bona fide authority, living or otherwise.

<CENTER>John Chapter 4</CENTER><DT>25 <DD><SUP>10</SUP> The woman said to him, "I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Anointed; when he comes, he will tell us everything." <DT>26 <DD>Jesus said to her, "I am he, <SUP>11</SUP> the one who is speaking with you." There are many other verses but I'm not inclined to pursue such a pointless excercise. Your bald and laughable assertion about the facts proves nothing. As for the prophecy about the crucifixion. Zechariah 12:10 (NIV) "And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son. Psalms 22:16 (NIV) Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. Matthew 27:35 (NIV) When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. Luke 24:39 (NIV) Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." John 19:18 (NIV) Here they crucified him, and with him two others--one on each side and Jesus in the middle. Your obviously Jewish conviction that Jesus could not possibly be the Messiah flies in the face of over two thousand years of testimony to the contrary. When is the actual Messiah to come then? </DD>

None of the voluminous references proves Jesus was not the Messiah. Actually He Himself claimed to be. His riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was exactly to fulfill the messianic phrophecy. He questioned Peter as to his true identity. When Peter responded in language that identified Him as the Messiah, Jesus told him it was not eyes of flesh that revealed this to him (Peter), but His father in heaven. It was after this that Jesus announced Peter would be the rock of His church. So I guess Jesus was either was a nutcake or an evil man. Nice try.

Let's not forget slavery was a commonplace at the time Paul wrote the slave passage. So the analogy is just that - an analogy. Oh there are all kinds of 'hard' teachings that Christ gave that religious totalitarians and despots cling to and build on, totally out of context of his main message of course. They do this in the same way the Pharisees condemned Jesus on many occasions for breaking the Sabbath etc... Jesus IS the Law incarnate. He IS the fulfillment of the law. He spoke these words after the Beatitudes. They are not in condemnation, but a promise. Legalism, subjugation to human self-appointed religionists, is the stuff of religious violence of the kind that inspire suicide bombers and arbortion clinic bombing. Fanatics love power hierarchies and lots and lots of laws. Because their impulse is to control and condemn, not to serve. Christ discipleship is not slavish. It is an act of grace not works, faith not legal purity. Most importantly Christ ought to be worshipped and followed - because he is God incarnate.

So many atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. Violence is being inflicted in Iraq at the moment under that rubric. Even Bush sees himself mandated by God. India's history is red with blood shed. The crusades ravaged the land with pillaging, rape and destruction in their wake. Innocent people were tortured and killed in the Inquisition 'for the good of their souls' etc... More recently the brutalities and murders in ISKCON. All of it can be accounted for by one principle - Absolute subjugation to a group or an individual. God is Love. Freedom is the essential condition of love. Even Jesus did not expect total prostration, in fact forbade it. Totalitarian enslavement of mind and soul is not of God. It is darkness, evil.

You have high hopes don't you. My understanding is that you don't get there unless you're devoted and devotees don't worry about their rasa, they just serve.

I have a Bhagavad Gita. There is no need to copy-paste entire purports. Besides I've read it in its entirety. I still refuse to subjugate my soul and mind entirely to another human being. It is incompatible with Judao-Christian teaching and more importantly my own conscience , the still small voice within. It is easily the origin of all the corruption I have known in Eastern religions, especially the ones transplanted here. Luckily Eastern gurus are no longer fashionable like they were in the sixties and seventies. By now most of them have been exposed as charlatans. In the case of Bhaktivedant swami, his organization has been exposed time and time again as corrupt. Do not proselityze me with this kind of Hinduism. Except possibly with Buddhism I think we've come to a period of Western history when Orientalism is an idea whose time has come and gone. </CENTER>