For further reading:

[forum.culteducation.com]


[forum.culteducation.com]

[forum.culteducation.com]

Juguntar - As a young revolutionary leader, Aurobindo used physical education gatherings as a covert means of training boys to fight for India's Independance

For India’s revolutionaries Gyms & akharas were a cover for politics

The Jugantar movement started by Sri Aurobindo Ghosh used the guise of a fitness club to take in young teenagers and turn them into revolutionaries.
JEROME ARMSTRONG
02 February, 2020 04:36 pm IST


[theprint.in]



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/2024 12:07AM by corboy.

From The Buddha Pill, by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, and the chapter "The Dark Side", p. 152:
"I haven't stopped believing in meditation's ability to fuel change, but I am concerned that the science of meditation is promoting a skewed view: meditation wasn't developed so we could lead less stressful lives or improve our wellbeing. Its primary purpose was more radical -- to rupture your idea of who you are; to shake to the core your sense of self so that you realize there is "nothing there". But that's not how we see meditation courses promoted in the West. Here, meditation has been revamped as a natural pill that will quieten your mind and make you happier..."

Certainly not what I was told in Michael Mamas' cult! Meditation was a means of attaining "enlightenment", which was defined as an overwhelming sense of being one with everything, including that water bottle on the table; that once you experienced that sense of oneness, and adjusted to the feeling much like adjusting to having a third arm, then you lived from that state of oneness. We were told that at the bottom of meditation was a "cosmic cushion" that we would land on. Well, it was all a pack of lies.

Unsurprisingly, years into Mamas' meditation technique I found myself wondering why I felt so depressed, enervated, anxious and even sad much of the time. What I did not know was that the meditation was succeeding at what it was developed to do! Personally, I do not want to find that there is "nothing there"; that life and my existence have no meaning or purpose, or to put it another way, that at the bottom of existence is nothingness. I cannot believe that whoever designed an acorn valued nothingness over life-giving energy. And if one accepts that acorns are valuable, how much more so must be human beings in their complexity and creativity.

Needless to say, I no longer meditate. I have my quiet moments, but not meditation per se. And I have come to believe that one of the worst lies of these cults is the lie that the physical world is to be denied. But maybe that exploration is for another thread...

Thanks, Corboy, for the psypost.org link. Very good info!

The Dark Side of Dharma: Meditation, Madness and Other Maladies on the Contemplative Path

Anna Luktajdis


[www.amazon.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2025 10:46AM by corboy.

newday4U Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> And I
> have come to believe that one of the worst lies of
> these cults is the lie that the physical world is
> to be denied.

Absolutely! Pretending that nothing really exists is a completely neurotic way to respond to life's challenges. It inevitably leads to indolence and ineffectiveness.

Swissalyst wrote:

Quote

Absolutely! Pretending that nothing really exists is a completely neurotic way to respond to life's challenges. It inevitably leads to indolence and ineffectiveness.

This is also eagerly grasped and exploited by predators to assert that any distinction between right and wrong is meaningless, any distinction between perpetrator of abuse vs victim of abuse is meaningless, et cetera.