A Long Sunday Rant or DroshDear H108:
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And this was a great shortcoming in cult life - how you were personally feeling and interacting with the world was irrelevant and actually dismissed as illusion.
Friend, the guru who persuaded you and others to follow him or her was covertly not taking that same advice. To market oneself and acquire and retain followers and generate income, one has to interact with the world and NOT dismiss it as irrelevant or as illusion...otherwise how can a guru get the word out to recruit? To market oneself the spiritual entrepreneur/euse has to be very very concerned with the world, and with public opinion....and not dismiss these as irrelevant.
The New Brahmins play a double game. They retain analytical thought and study how we tick, so they can meet our expectations.
But they teach us to ditch analytical thought so that we become unable to analyze them or the social sitaution that empowers them.
They retain methods of thought that enable them to study us and get rich, and obtain US tax deductible status, while conning us into feeling ashamed to think critically and to believe money is dirty or not to worry about it..and give some to the guru.
The New Brahmins pretend to have renounced their stories, but covertly are marketing their stories like mad, using methods of thought that they tell us to give up.
This guarantees they stay Brahmins and the rest of us get fuzzy headed, get poor and lose capacity to function as citizens in a participatory democracy--the same democracy that offers tax deductible status to spiritual projects and enables them to accumulate wealth more rapidly than us peons who still have to pay taxes--and who are gonna have to bail out AIG and Fanny and Freddie Mae.
We are told to 'love what is', even if its our rapist, instead of learning to give a well aimed kick where it counts scream our lungs out.
The New Brahmins are at the top of a power imbalance and profit from it, while conning us into believing that a man made power imbalance 'just is' and must be loved for what is...when in fact, they create these power imbalances and profit from them--and con us into never thinking clearly about power in the first place.
With your interests, you might get some validation from some books written by Barry Magid, the psychoanalyst and Zen teacher. He is the one who talked to us about what he called 'bypass'.
He also mentioned something from another psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg.
Speaking of dissociation and splitting, and how to actually remedy these, Magid said that the solution was not through bypassing the areas of our humanity or other people's humanity that scare us (and though Magid didnt say so, this would also include issues of social justice that make us feel overwhelmed)...instead of dissociating from these and splitting these off,
through rationalizing that they are mere illusion, the remedy is instead...
to increase our own capacity to consciously
hold and contain the experiences and situations that arouse our anxiety.
(I want to emphasize that splitting off and dissociating are not always done consciously. In extreme cases this can happen unconscously-- to the point where someone may involuntarily trance out/black out/zone out. When that person learns more and more how to willingly and consciously bear and contain anxiety, these episodes of blacking out will be reduced.)
What is difficult is if, without knowing it, one gets involved with a teacher or group that is part of an entire social scene in which dissociation and splitting off from scary aspects of human and social life are not not only considered a normal and desirable way to cope...but are spiritually rationalized.
'There are no victims' is a tip off that we are in a social scene, or a group within a social scene, that normalizes dissociation and splitting off from pain and unpleasantness, rather than training us to become more and more capable of bearing consciously the human anxiety and awareness of both inner and outer conflict.
Two, it is interesting to see if a group (or for that matter a potential romance or marriage partner or boss) is capable of dealing with misfortune
or can only rationalize it as evidence that someone 'made it happen'.
Once again, I think we need venues like RR.com to serve as both sanctuaries and think tanks.
Because we have a most interesting situation in the First World.
We have what I term a bunch of New Brahmins who are teaching us to use our minds in such a way as to split off and dissociate from the great and pressing issues of being human and of being citizens in participatory democracies that are under severe stress, being taught by these New Brahimins that if we discard and devalue dualistic/analytical thinking, we will have special experiences and be transformed into New Brahmins ourselves.
When what is really happening is that in a social arrangement that makes it possible for Brahmins to exist, there will always be very few slots open for Brahmins, but many, many more slots for peasants who are unable to think dualistically and analytically about the entire social arrangment that puts BK and ET on a stage, and the marketing strategies that lead so many to fill the auditorium and pay for this stuff.
BK and ET are using the very same kinds of dualistic and analytical thinking that they are training the rest of us NOT TO UTILIZE.
You cannot do long range marketing strategies as these two have done, and as gurus such as Maharishi, Rajneesh, Muktananda, Gurumayi, and Sri Sri Shankar and Amma have done and are doing, unless you use the very sorts of analytical, dualistic thought that you train your trustful and cash generating followers to stop utilizing.
These New Brahmins are quite analytical in thier stance toward us, and how to get us to disclose confidential information, how to be vulnerable onstage and submit to questioning, and how to keep paying for stuff.
But we are forbidden to be analytical in relation to the New Brahmins and thier determination to use the very habits of mind that they tell us are the cause of our suffering.
Thier life stories are used to seduce us to listen to them---but we are told our life stories are making us suffer.
And by our being trained to devalue analytical thinking, we dont ever ask
'Why do BK and ET get to tell the same story again and again, yet we are told to give up our story?'
Why does their story have market value and our stories are devalued?
'And what is the social arrangement that made this happen--the forces both within us and outside of us?'
For ET and BK are part of what Journalist John Horgan, in one of his books, termed 'the Enlightenment Industry.'
Its a branch of the entertainment world, yet because its spiritual, they can claim tax deductible status and avoid having to get licensed and legally accountable as psychotherapists must do.
The pleasures of power and none of its many responsibilities.
They get to ask what makes us tick, but we are forbidden to ask what makes them tick...except in protected think tanks such as RR.com.
To repeat:
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For the New Brahmins have been teaching a doctrine of misfortune as merely part of 'What Is'--to be passively accepted and bypassed through trance logic, rather than subjected to analysis, cause and effect questioned, and a remedy sought.
In Liberation Theology, there is a stance called hermeneutic of suspicion by which one asks whose self interest and which power structures are preserved or challenged by the assumptions implicit in a text or teaching.
This matter of loving what is, will undermine the very benefits of America covertly valued by the New Brahmins--concentrating wealth, analytical thinking in the hands of an entrepreneurial and power loving few, while turning the multitude into passive acceptors, who remove themselves from participatory democracy...whose existing laws are NOT WHAT IS, but have
been created by participation and can only be maintained by participation.
Do ET and BK vote? Has either one ever done jury duty? Do they participate by paying their taxes?
They benefit from Anglo American law which respects and safeguards property and its orderly transmission and which supports capitalist enterprise.
And gives tax exemption to spiritual enterprise...enabling such enterprises to accumulate wealth much faster than those who must pay their taxes.
All this is not what is. It is made possible by Western analytic philosophy translated into law, into revolutionary thought that created the America that has enabled ET and BK to flourish...by subverting participatory democracy and teaching citizens to renounce clear thought and regress to the sort of trance logic that could never have created the social resources or communications networks that have made ET and BK's commerical success possible.
And...Western Dualistic thought is needed to invest profit--and you can bet BK and ET either know how to do this, or are wise enough to hire people who do this for them.
All this is legal, BTW. But..it is hypocrisy to tell us to heal ourselves by loving what is, while the person teaching this is accumulating social power and influence and making vast profits by retaining the very kinds of thought patterns he or she is claiming are the root of our suffering.
If ET and BK followed their own teachings 100% they would be in a state of mind incompatible with utlizing the techniques of celebrity networking, publishing, PR and marketing that they both utilize.
My beef with the New Brahmins is they continue to use the same patterns of thought they teach are causing US suffering.
Used by the New Brahmins, analytical and dualistic thought makes possible the marketing that has made them famous and wealthy and influential.
But...they are not telling us this. They make it seem they got rich and worth listening to by abandoning belief in their own story, when it was actually a mighty belief in thier own story and a willingness to use dualistic strategic thought and use American mass marketing (and use copyright law based on analytical thought!!!) that has given them success.
They didnt become desirable and successful by taking their own advice, but by getting people to ditch theri story and have a special experience and become a New Brahmin.
Its marketing ones story that makes you a New Brahmin, and it is having access to the tools of marketing that make it possible--and these are the same tools used to market any product, whether its Chlorox bleach, new brands of body armor, new upgrades of software, and new kinds of automatic weapons.
Its access to and knowledge of marketing, the right social contacts and venture capital that really makes a person one of the New Brahmins--not whether one has had an experience of nondual realization.
If you dont have access to all this, you can have a zillion nondual experiences, but never become a player in the Enlightenment Industry.
Its not just experiences that make you a New Brahmin--its knowing how to market oneself, using forms of thought that are incompatible with nondual realization.And that, friends, is truly....The Secret.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2008 09:46PM by corboy.