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I took a look at the Cult Education forum tonight, and saw that the James Swartz discussion now has over 120,000 views - 120,167 to be precise. It's a very high number, and it must have an impact...

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"Allowance" (Jame Swartz himself? A rare supporter?)
Allowance Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Who are you, and why are you so obsessed with Jame
> s Swartz? You keep posting the same old things ov
> er and over. You're obsessed with views in this f
> orum, but it's basically just you who keeps coming
> back here. What gives? Have you noticed that it'
> s only a small handful of people that care about y
> our posts?

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Yeah, only a handful of people. Average of 170 views per post. Over 120,000 views. Over 700 posts.

Many have indeed phased out of the "debate," as they have concluded Swartz is indeed a spiritual fake, a criminal, and a pedophile. I write often enough to keep the topic near the top of Page One so new readers and people interested in JS have an easy time finding the topic.

Why let them suffer?

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You sound jealous. If you look at this whole thread (which obviously you do very often), you will notice it's only a handful of people that keep coming back, with you being one of them.

I'm just curious why you have such a large chip on your shoulder. Did you not get enlightened, while James was?

I don't believe what you say about him being a fake and pedophile. Maybe he's committed a crime or two, but who hasn't?

He doesn't want to be a popular teacher, but he is one. He's a reluctant guru.

Who are you going to have to whine about when he passes away? It's going to be quite troubling for you if you keep up with your hatred.

You might be reborn to a crack-addicted mother. Take the higher path. Instead of being so interested in such a gossippy way in James Swartz, you could actually work on your own spirituality.

I really wonder what happened to you to be so gossippy with your headline-style writing and accusations. I've read many of your posts and seen how you twist people's words and turn opinions into seeming facts.

I knew you'd just eat up my previous message to you and publicize it. Any little scrap, and you eat it up. You're dying to hear more dirt on James Swartz, real or fake.

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December 10, 2020

Carl asked for a comment about the statement below by a person named Ira Schepetin who seems to be some sort of authority on Vedanta.

“Sorry. James Swartz is definitely neo-Vedanta. He teaches (among many other wrong ideas that he got from his neo-Vedanta teachers) that after enlightenment there are still vasanas that continue and some are not a problem and others are? I don’t think so. That idea is neo Vedanta, in Traditional Shankara Vedanta after Enlightenment there are no vasanas good or bad. If you think you're Enlightened (as James does) and still have vasanas you're in big trouble and so are your students.
Ira”

The public response from James Swartz begins:
Hi Carl,
Well, it depends on Ira’s idea of “enlightenment.” He seems to think it is an event.

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Maybe Ira knows something and maybe he doesn’t. Before a person makes a judgment it’s always best to do some in depth research and contextualize the issue as I’ve tried to do above. My statements above are from Chapter 7 of Vidyaranya’s Panchadasi. You can find them translated in my book, Inquiry into Existence. I copied them in below.

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Do you remember the "Special February 2017 Shining World Newsletter that James Swartz put out? The one in which he compared himself to Jesus, Krishna, Jack the Giant Slayer, and confessed to knowing Heather when she was fourteen? Well, Swartz finally realized that "Special Newsletter" was way too revealing, actually very self-destructive, and he took it down. (I have a copy, though, and most of it was published in "Guru? The Story of Heather," anyway.)

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In that now-deleted Feb 2017 Special Message James Swartz told his followers that he suspected that "Trav is an American devotee of either Osho, Tony Parsons, or Papaji." You mentioned David Godman as writing great biographies of Ramana Maharshi and of Papaji, so now it could be that Swartz in his twisted, paranoid mind thinks that you are David Godman!

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Of course, David Godman wrote books about many other holy persons, too, including many of Ramana's greatest followers. Some Advaita people like this teacher and others that one, and all hold their teacher to be the best. (Yes, the 'not two' of Advaita does not always get applied, does it?) However, I do believe that now James Swartz is even more firmly convinced that you are a Papaji devotee, and he might well accuse one or some of them of being you.

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From David Godman -- an appraisal and refutation of James Swartz

My attention was recently directed to a post on James Swartz’s blog or site. It was highly critical of me. Here is the post:

[www.shiningworld.com]

It begins:

Hi James,

Just learned about David Godman who claims that he got established in the Self when seeing Papa Ji.  Do you know about him?  If you do maybe you can talk about him in next week’s meeting.  He seems like an interesting person. 

I have never made any such claim, and I did not get established in the Self during my time with Papaji. I don’t know where the claim originated. It’s possible that James is simply making it up and using the invention to launch a diatribe against me. He begins his response by saying that I don’t understand Ramana Maharshi’s teachings, implying, of course, that he does. For those who don’t know me, I will mention that I have written, translated and edited about fifteen books on Ramana Maharshi, his devotees and his teachings. One of them, Be As You Are, published by Penguin, has been, outside India, the biggest selling book on Sri Ramana’s teachings for almost forty years.

After expounding for a few lines on my scholarly deficiencies, he makes the following odd claim:

Anyway, he conveniently assumed that Papaji was actually a disciple of Ramana, not just a person who “got it” during a brief conversation. 

Papaji most definitely claimed that he was a disciple of Sri Ramana. This is what he said in 1992:

Papaji: A few months ago [March, 1992], at one of the satsangs I conduct in Lucknow, someone gave me a note which concluded: ‘My humble respects and gratitude to you, especially to one who was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi.’ I couldn’t let this pass.
‘Why do you say “was”?’ I exclaimed. ‘Please correct your grammar! Please correct your grammar! I am his disciple! He is my Master. How can I throw him away into the past? There is no past and no future for the Master. There isn’t even a present because he has transcended time.’
When I left him physically in 1947, he told me, ‘I am with you wherever you are’. That was his promise and that is my experience. There is no one called Poonja left anymore. There is only an emptiness where he used to be. And in that emptiness there shines the ‘I’ , the ‘I’ that is my reality, the ‘I’ that is my Master, the ‘I’ that he promised would be with me wherever I am. Whenever I speak, it is not someone called Poonja who is speaking, it is the ‘I’ that is the Maharshi who speaks, the ‘I’ which is the Self in the Heart of all beings. (Nothing Ever Happened, volume two)

The fact that Papaji got the full experience from Sri Ramana after sitting in his presence and having a few brief conversations with him does not mean that he was not a disciple. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Swartz then went on to claim that ‘David is actually the father of the modern Neo-Advaita movement’. No, I’m not, and it’s an utterly absurd claim to make. I am a scholar, student and practitioner of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings, and actually share Swartz’s distaste for what has become the neo-advaita movement.

The bulk of the post, though, is devoted to a bizarre claim that I engaged him to make a cover for one of my books on Annamalai Swami, and then refused to pay him. I have ransacked my brain, trying to recollect encounters we had decades ago, and I have no recollection whatsoever of talking to him about anything, especially not book covers. I had friends who made my covers in those days and didn’t need outside assistance. I do remember seeing him in local restaurants in Tiruvannamalai, loudly trying to impress people at his table with his knowledge of Vedanta, but I never had a conversation with him myself.

Just for the record, this is how the covers for my Annamalai Swami books came into being. The cover for Living by the Words of Bhagavan was made by Dev Gogoi, a friend of mine who did graphic design work for Ramanasramam in the 90s. He was also a devotee of Papaji. If you look at the verso (reverse of the title page) his name is listed there as the designer of the cover. Dev did the work for nothing because he was a friend of mine and a fellow devotee of Papaji. The book came out in 1994, which was well before I learned of the existence of James Swartz.
A few years later I edited a book of Annamalai Swami’s dialogues entitled Final Talks. The cover for that one was designed by Alan Gold, a retired creative director of an advertising agency in London. I had known him since our time together with Nisargadatta Maharaj in the late 1970s. Alan did a good job, and I had no need to engage anyone else. In his post James claims that he felt a strong urge to throw me down a flight of stairs when I refused to pay him for the work I had commissioned from him. The commission never happened, and nor did the fabricated account of our meeting on a staircase that prompted his violent thoughts.