Great exchanges, Psyborgue. It does sound like you were talking to her students/defenders/yes people. This is her personal FB page, which she uses to post directly: [www.facebook.com]

This should be obvious, but you shouldn't post there (at least without a throw-away facebook account) if you don't care about being identified.

This is rather ironic, but in listening to the first satsang by Swami G posted here [http://www.guruswamig.com/index.php/satsang/early-satsangs-1-9], which contains generally helpful material on centering and ego and meditation, I could not help but think that it would benefit Swami G herself to follow its teachings. About calm. About being the eye of the hurricane. About centering. About equanimity. About letting go of ego. And about embracing the reality of impermanence. She should return to those original teachings. She should live them herself. Internalize them again. Return to her core, if that was ever her core to begin with.

The person teaching this satsang is not the person expressing the extreme negativity, vengeance, bitterness and ego-centered arrogance in more recent times. The person teaching this satsang would not, I don't think, have gone after departed followers with such a zeal to humiliate and even destroy them by publishing, far and wide, their most private and personal information shared in confidence with her and even within the confines of a counseling relationship, solely because the followers left with less than venerating things to say.

Swami G has caused suffering that has been very well-documented here. She is at great risk for causing significant suffering in the future (especially if the allegations about her running an unlicensed mental health/medical treatment operation are true). But she herself is suffering. I hope that she finds peace, returns to center, and follows her own good advice from the past. Perhaps that will prevent her from doing more harm to unsuspecting and vulnerable students to come. I hope that her current students, some of whom strike me as being well aware of their teacher's current instability and suffering, will take this advice to heart and help coax their guru back to her original anodyne and positive teachings. Otherwise, they not only will be complicit in the harm already done to the dissenters, but they will be exacerbating the harm that Swami G continues to do to herself. They themselves will be participating, perhaps unwittingly, in her continued demise.

Despite Swami G's demands for unquestioning devotion and adulation, what she needs now are not Yes Men and Yes Women. She needs help. True help. Teachers, even experienced ones, can lose their way and can benefit from redirection even from (especially from) devoted students. Let's see if the handful of remaining students are up to the task. The forthcoming Guru Purnima should be just as much an intervention as a celebration of the guru.

Icarus:

Thanks for clarifying that you are not and were not a student of Sharon.
Please take it from long-time students who have been in close contact with this woman.
Don't be fooled by any of the videos.
Sharon has remade herself several times over the decades.
Before advaita/kundalini Guru she was new age Guru.
And before that something else.
What you read here from Holly, myself, and others, is what she has always been like.
The closer you get, the more you come to know, the more obvious it becomes.
And then it falls apart.
And she moves and rebuilds again in a new guise.
It is easy to talk the talk.
But she has never walked the walk, and that's where it really counts.
Sad thing is, she's reading all this wondering what the hell we're all going on about.
Everything's fine in her little world.
Everyone else must be crazy.

Well. Guru G appears to have deleted her second facebook page (the one with open comments). A screenshot of the thread I was posting in up until the time I went to bed is here. Not surprisingly, the Guru never answered my first question. On her closed facebook page, she's talking about all the "pain" and "deep abiding sadness" all of this has caused. The ultimately irony here is the last thing discussed by Guru G's defenders was "censorship" here (specifically, dabcult's banning), and how excessive it was for Rick Ross to delete all his posts. I wonder if they'd hold Guru G to the same standard after she nuked an entire facebook page. Indeed, one of her followers quipped "Let Rick Ross tolerate this kind of debate". If anybody else has screenshots after I went to bed, please let me know and i'll stitch them on to the one I made.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/10/2013 04:26PM by psyborgue.

Quote
Icarus
But I do feel badly for her insofar as she appears to be suffering and, as she's done in the past, is complaining about how thankless her gurudom is. I just wish that she would realize that her suffering is rooted in her own enormous ego and hunger to be venerated without question or criticism -- qualities that strike me as quite contradicting of her claim of egoless enlightenment.

But is she really suffering, is she? I get the impression her constant "poor me" is more about manipulating others into feeling sorry for her (and angry at critics, for "hurting" her) than anything else. I think she would rather the criticism go away and it has probably caused her some discomfort, but the one emotion I get from her postings is more anger than anything else. I do agree, however, that she is responsible for her own situation. Had she not engaged in the practices she did, and had she not attacked those who spoke out, fewer people would have taken notice of her at all.

Will she change for the better? I doubt it. Changes in cults and cult-like groups rarely come from within, and when they do, it's almost always to increase the effectiveness of thought reform or better defend the group from outside influence. Her recent deletion of her Facebook group with open comments seems to show she's isolating her group more, not less. That's an unavodable consequence of posting on her group. I knew she would delete the group, or the entire thread, as soon as I started posting (which is why I made the screenshot). Cults and cult-like groups can only operate in a vacuum, when members are isolated (or isolate themselves) from information critical to the group, or information that contradicts dogma. Open discussion was a loophole for her, certainly on her own "territory" and she had no option but to delete it.

So why post in the group at all if it's just going to cause the group to close and the leader to further isolate students? Because her quick changes, her censorship, her actions in response, demonstrate to her followers that she doesn't accept criticism. It causes them to ask, especially when the criticism was polite and thoughtful, why they are no longer allowed to read it. They start to ask questions. Questions lead to doubt. Doubt leads to people leaving the group. Control over communication is both the strength the critical weakness to all cults and cult-like groups.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/10/2013 06:05PM by psyborgue.

"She herself is suffering"

Perhaps not.

What follows is a hunch, a First Amendment protected guess on my part.

As long as people-users like G have access to humans to work on, whether current disciples to do their bidding and receive bad moods, the challenge of looking for new recruits and pursuit of those who have rebelled and left, all this activity means that people users are kept occupied and at the center of their own Grand Opera.

So long as they have people available to them for usage, my guess is, they dont have to feel their own suffering at a conscious level--though they may profess to do so.

Only way people users might their own suffering is under the following conditions - which right now are impossible to arrange.

* Remove access to the internet, telephone or email or snailmail so they cannot influence others or pursue current or former students with commands, requests, pleas or threats.

* Remove all persons they can influence in any way.

* Make it impossible for them to recruit or beguilt new recruits.

* Return them to ordinary life where they would have no entourage and have to do their own shopping, wait in line like everyone else, cook their own food, and clean their own bathrooms. (Outings would have to be supervised so that they could not use these to recruit new followers)

* Surround them with strong, wise persons who would not be influenced by flattery, spiritual patter, threats, temper tantrums, charm, or any sort of pathos/guilt tripping.

* Keep them in one place so they cannot change their names or move to a new locale where no one knows them and they can start over under a new name and ideology.

In other words, the equivalent of an intpatient rehab for those who use people to self soothe and boost personal esteem.

But no such in patient rehababilition facility exists at this time for those who use other people to regulate and soothe their own moods.



I

Sharon thrives on attention, including the bad kind, and technology has given her various forums to soak it up.
But then she inevitably burns herself.
I don't know if she doesn't see this, or she does but can't control herself, or what......
Scary thing is back in the day, you would have no videos, no forums, no old sites, nothing to reall know.
And as you can see, even now, with all of these things, there are those that will still be attracted to her and her
teachings.
So what is the pull even in the face of what should be an obvious red flag?
It's complicated.
The allure of the mystical.
The enlightened being who promises to guide you to the same.
The mother/father/deity/authority figure.
An excuse/opportunity/invitation/reason to leave your "old" life - with all of it's issues, and fully immerse in a totally "new" one.
The promise of special Grace/blessings/transformation/knowledge.
The crazy wisdom Guru factor - which is just an invitation (in this case anyway) - for all manner of otherwise intolerable behaviour

Here's a simple litmus test for me (and perhaps for you).
I can't think of one respected spiritual teacher or friend (or "non-spiritual" family member or friend for that matter), that could/would tolerate Sharon's behaviour, tactics, mish mash of teachings, manipulation, drama, baggage, whining etc
Having said this, where I would've normally not touched this garbage with a ten foot pole, I overrided my gut and told myself it must be crazy wisdom tactics - harmless eccentricity - i asked myself, does wisdom have to look a certain way - ego is just getting in the way - well some good things have happened, therefore it must be her and the practices, so i can put aside the questions for now - and on and on
So I understand if others were drawn, are drawn, or might be drawn in the future, to her and deluded people like her.
But please, as she likes to say, don't walk, run in the opposite direction of this train wreck.
Save yourself the trouble.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/10/2013 09:39PM by mike77.

(Somber)

Be especially careful of anything recommended by someone you love and trust.

I know this is impossible, but people we love and trust can be seduced and then subourned to recruit for very dodgy and hurtful enterprises.

I was in a situation that failed to trigger my gut warning, because the recommendation came from a friend.

By the time solid warning signs and information came my way, I was emotionally involved and ignored all this.

All I can say, after my little adventure is this: Even if you seem to be benfitting tremendously from something that others tell you is a cult and that fits criterial for being a cult, GET OUT.

You may be benefitting, but you might well do better, much better with someone who isnt compromised by such affiliations.

And...over a long spell, whoever you are benefitting from may themselves get pulled deeper into the cult and lose the acuity that caused them to be so helpful to you.

Thanks for your thoughts, everyone. I am most definitely not a present or past student or follower of Swami G's so really do defer to the assessments of those of you who are/were. My involvement only has been that of an outsider viewing her videos for years. Even from my remote perspective, I can see how that which the dissenters have said has a lot of truth to it. The videos themselves show a radical shift of attitude, content and even affect to Swami G, culminating in the starkly different recent behaviors -- the lashing out at many departed followers with vengeance, the bitterness, the anger, the egotism (even perhaps megalomania), the outrageous violations of student confidences and publication of private and personal information of departed students.

I do feel for her, though, in that she does strike me as someone who is suffering, no matter her past. Yes, perhaps it's karma. Perhaps she's done it to herself. But it's still suffering. I can't help but think her lack of focus and flailing endeavors suggest that she's grasping for recognition and distinction in something and still falling short. Her "singer" Facebook page is quite revealing. It is here: [www.facebook.com] In December, she posted this message: "ON a layover in New York --- will be back in Pompano Tomorrow and then back to recording and working on ever more music." As if she were touring as the opening act for Celine Dion. I am not faulting her for being creative. To the contrary would celebrate and congratulate her for tapping her creative talents. But I find it notable that in addition to being a guru, she "markets" herself as a mental health counselor, a drug addiction treatment expert, an interior designer, a stylist, a gallery owner, an artist, a photographer, a cell-cover and light switch cover designer, a singer and recording artist, and an author. I may be forgetting something. Wasn't she going to be an antique dealer at one point? The language she uses in describing her singing endeavors suggest to me a certain grandiosity that's just not merited when all she's doing is taping herself doing Karaoke in her living room.

Again, it is great that she is dabbling in so many creative endeavors and that she has that kind of energy and time. But her frenetic creativity has made me wonder whether her guru work also is a piece of performance art, at least in some respect. In her spiritual endeavors too she has exhibited an enormous amount of wandering and perhaps even a certain dilettantism -- going from as she herself describes it an Esoteric Christian order, to a path in Bhakti, to Buddhism as an initiate, to the Karma Kagyu path, to Tantric Yoga, with various meanderings in the Hare Krishnas and Scientology, finally to what she's doing now, which she's only been doing for a decade and a half or so.

I wonder if her diffuse focus is part of the problem here.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/11/2013 01:40AM by Icarus.