And..on Facebook

[www.facebook.com]

[www.facebook.com]

Pass the sick bag.

bump

1. Any person who lets others call him or her "His Holiness" or "Her Holiness" is deluded.

2. Any person who lets others form conclusion that he or she is "illumined", a "blesser of a generation", a "modern Western mystic" is deluded.

3. Any person who calls others "His Holiness or "Her Holiness" is deluded.

4. Any person who concludes that someone is "illumined", a "blesser of a generation", a "modern Western mystic", etc., is deluded.

5. Gurus (Chidananda and Cohen) are supposed to be dispellers of darkness, not creators of darkness, yet creating fixed simplistic images of oneself or others - in oneself or in others - is creating darkness.

6. Isn't it obvious that the gurus and the disciples in this case are infatuated with mentally created images? Isn't it obvious that those images are not naked Reality?

'Isn't it obvious that the gurus and the disciples in this case are infatuated with mentally created images?'

Thats like the 'which came first, chicken or egg' dilemma.

When you are in a state of infatuation it is impossible to 'see' this and its not at all obvious. It only becomes so glaringly obvious when you break out of the egg as a chicken, or get past the infatuation.

Cohen, of couse, works very hard at creating and maintaining the infatuation in his followers, he's probably infatuated with the mental image of himself as the godlike 'illumination' and blessing of his generation, but that doesn't negate the cold calculation he employs to bind his followers to him.

Shared delusions are interesting phenomena (provided one is not currently labouring under the delusion, of course)

[en.wikipedia.org]

and every half-way plausible theory of mind that anyone has ever come up with shows a pattern of endless increasing complexity, not a static, fixed simplicity. Once you are a chicken and no longer an egg, you have no other realistic option but to grow up into a adult chicken in the most rational and reasonable way you can.

There is nothing more pointlessly redundant than an adult chicken who insists to himself that he is still an egg.

Quote
Stoic
Cohen, of couse, works very hard at creating and maintaining the infatuation in his followers, he's probably infatuated with the mental image of himself as the godlike 'illumination' and blessing of his generation, but that doesn't negate the cold calculation he employs to bind his followers to him.

Yes. It's ironic that he and his followers claim to be on a deep inquiry for "What is Enlightenment?" (that's the old title of their magazine). Of course, it was never a real inquiry. I only ever saw one article that fundamentally opposed Cohen's worldview. That was the one about Ramesh Balsekar. Then Cohen flatly said he disagreed with Balsekar and called that worldview "Planet Advaita" as if it was irrelevant for this planet. So much for inquiry.

And Cohen praises "The Great J. Krishnamurti" without acknowledging that JK would have been appalled at Cohen's organisation. Cohen and his organisation is the antithesis of JK's philosophy.

'Of course, it was never a real inquiry.'

No, its bait and switch-----the real goal is to serve the ever-increasing, grandiose ego needs of Cohen.

He's a megalomaniac.

Read this excerpt by Stephen Batchelor

[americanguru.net]

Though written years later, Batchelor's description matches very closely with Luna Tarlo's description of this very same time period in Cohen's career.

Many of them had just spent time around
Andrew in Rishikesh. They were convinced that something extraordinary
was happening. Then Alka, Andrew’s girlfriend, arrived
in Devon and joined the staff at Gaia House, a nearby retreat
centre, where I was starting to teach. I listened to her recount the
same story again and again

Note this..'recount the same story again and again.'

Sounds like the Eckie Tolle park bench story

The Byron Katie cockroach story

Telling and retelling such stories would probably be identified as pre frame technique.

Batchelor continues

What was going on here clearly had little if anything to do
with what Andrew was saying.

The “teaching” and “dialogue”
were merely devices for building and sustaining an emotional
bond between Andrew and the students. While the students experienced
some sort of ecstasy by collectively projecting their spiritual
longings and ideals onto Andrew, Andrew seemed to need
the adulation of others to endorse the sense of being the enlightened
guru he and his students wanted him to be.

The more this interchange of mutually reinforcing desires went on, the greater
became the certainty that Andrew really was the savior of our age
and the students his first blessed circle of disciples. As long as this
bubble of shared conviction remained intact, everyone got what
they wanted.

For additional possible frameworks by which to understand this process as observed by Batchelor,
there is a discussion of projective identification at group level

(quote)"One way of distinguishing benign from virulent projective identification is whether or not it allows experience to be thought about - for its complexity to be borne, for it to feed depressive functioning (perhaps by making it possible for a person to hold and contain sadness and acknowledge and mourn a loss with depth and relatedness?-Corboy) Young

In the kinds of abusive groups and relationships that concern us here, persons are not allowed to think or feel or acknowledge complexity and develop what some famous songs have termed, 'Tombstone Eyes'.

quotes from a paper to be referred to below.

Projective identification may occur at group level. This citation is for a long and very technical paper that is one clincians attempt to find ways to apply psychoanalytic data concerning projective identification to larger group processes(unquote)

For more read here

[forum.culteducation.com]