804 From: Ramon Sender <rabar@mindspring.com>
Date: Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:39pm
Subject: Rant Alert rabar94114
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The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (Berkeley, California) is a
fundamentalist Christian front organization that has its own
particular ax to grind. I would ignore it in the same way that I
would ignore any proselytizing orthodoxy, no matter from what
particular tradition. True Believers come trapped out in all
sorts of garments, but the glint in their eyes is always the same.
Meanwhile, may I suggest pondering the phrase, "Religion
is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure," a paraphrase
of the original quote about psychotherapy. Or perhaps Marx's
"Religion is the opiate of the masses" might serve here as well,
although the cure is definitely not dialectical materialism.
Give me that good old-time spirituality any day, with a direct
experiential connection to the Source.
A recent quote I ran across sums up for me the co-opting
of direct experience by the priesthood and patriarchy, both
by the world religions and, more recently, in the packaged New
Age systems. In this sense, the writer of the quoted "What Does the Bible
Say" indeed is correct when he points to the institutionalization of the
pure charismatic experience by the temple-hopping guru-shopping folks --
but these same "rules and regs" rotted organized Christianity into the
"whited sepulchres" that its founder disparaged among the self-righteous
Pharisees of his day. Thus solution is not to 'go back to the bible,' but
escape out into the forests and meadows to dance ecstatically with the
nature goddesses.
Here's the quote, but please include the world religions amongst those
mentioned -- and I will add a few comments in [square brackets].
RECOVERING THE DIONYSIAN-ENDOGENOUS YOGA
...Both indigenously over the ages, and in their translation and importation
into the West, the "innately arising" (sahaja), panentheistic, dionysian
origins of yoga and meditation have been shaped and overshaped
into apollonian, pedagogical constructs, cosmeticized or leveled for mass
appeal, sterilized for upper-class gentilities, or otherwise tamed and
overtamed to avoid real or imagined dangers...
The mysterious flow of lineage stiffened into the rigidities of caste, also
in contrast to the dionysian rejection of caste prejudice and
the "crazy wisdoms" that ridicule it.
The reverentially ecstatic "Dance of Siva, Lord of Yogis," became stylized
in public rituals, "classical" music and dance, and in the yogic asanas
themselves, or withered in the severe asceticisms of the fakir. By the
second century A.D., Patanjali's dualistic, "classical" Yoga-Sutras had
formalized an overseparation between Nature (prakriti) and Ultimate
Subjectivity (purusha), thus "rejecting the idea that the world is an
aspect of the Divine" (Feuerstein 1989, p. 412). ['Faith' arises as a
construct as direct experience of the Divine as all-pervading is lost].
Thus the shamanic or dionysian yoga and its bond with mystical phenomenology
maintained in the living moment ... arose and then fell into evermore
secularized, scriptural fundamentalisms. [holy writ then becoming the
protective bulwark against the 'heretical' and 'uncontrollable' mystic]
The sequence of dionysian yoga's "fall" from dionysian-soteriological time
and in-the-moment narrative utterances into apollonian mundane time and its
"formalized narratives and "histories of events" is as follows:
1. the spirit-in-time revealed as a superlative, private bodily experience
(ecstasy or enstasy), [I-Thou, I am That, We are all One, Dissolution into
the Ocean of Self]
2. emerged publicly as presemantic ecstatic-catalytic [cathartic]
utterances and dancing-swaying movements, (spontaneous kriyas, charisms,
speaking in tongues, trance states), then
3. languaged orally as sheer descriptions of the experience, then
4. memorized and scriptured into orthodox text or externalized
liturgical commemoration (yoga and meditation as teachings; the movements
classicalized as ritual forms),
5. its lessons fableized for charm (the ancient myths), then
6. in search of a genteel purity, its sparkling and sensual phenomenology
put into disembodied descriptions of "heaven realms" or sheer "higher states
of consciousnesses," and
7. as texts and practices exported into the West [or to 'primitive
cultures' by missionaries], formulized for mass pedagogical ease (the
contemporary yoga books and aerobics-like classes, stress-reduction courses,
and other holistic applications or new-age appropriations),
8. made abstract or "symbolic" of something else, or "primitivized" by
scholars for learned discourse (the transpersonalist's synthesizing schemas)
and, at all junctures,
9. suppressed or championed by religio-political forces; eroded by
sectarian rivalries and scandals; desiccated as the legalistic, purely
academic word, or scorned as mere superstition.
Via further translations into the modern pragmatic-scientific vernacular,
instead of an inner awe of wonder and delight, we now speak of "spiritual
practices," "visualization techniques," yogic "states of consciousness"
and quasi-Newtonian "spiritual energies" [original sin, expiation,
confession, surrender to the priesthoods, book worship]. Instead of a
well-mapped but dynamic, esoteric phenomenology of marvelous fluttering,
whorling, meditative experiences of cerebral-hormonal flowing juices or
externalized teachings; the (soma) and brilliant sunlight (savitri, a Vedic
term for kundalini illuminating the mind and for which Elizarenkova counts
more than fifteen verbs denoting its brilliance in the Rig Veda) we have the
dry brahmanic (Indian or Western) abstractions or translations depicting
only exoteric " spritual libations, transrational evolutionary schemas,
tantric visualization practices, and theonyms for sun worship [Sunday
school, mouthing of platitudes, hypocritical adoption of do-goodness
attitudes towards the disadvantaged while pigging it up in elitist
sanctuaries]. The Burning Bush, whether Western or Eastern, as aptly
describing the overwhelming, experienced glow of kundalini in the cerebrum,
is lost in its own metaphor. But sometimes not, as Allama Prabhu, the
tenth-century dionysian bhakti yogi sang:
Looking for your light [of hope],
I went out [into meditation]:
it was like a sudden dawn [of eternal ttt]
of a million million suns,
a ganglion of lightnings [the cerebral puberty]
for my wonder [soteriological awe]
O Lord of Caves [hearted flesh bodies],
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor [narrative equivalent].
(Ramanujan, 1973 p. 168)
(end quote)
This sums up the tragedy of the spiritual human condition. We lock up or
marginalize our prophets, ecstatics, visionaries, saviors, avatars, arhants
-- all those who do not or cannot fit into the traditional grooves. Or more
than not, we kill them and then beatify them once they are safely disposed
of. Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor is the classic example. If Jesus
returned, he would have to be eliminated as quickly as possible by the power
structure.
> From: Gavin Meyers <gavinemeyers@yahoo.co.in> wrote
> Subject: An article against the practice of Yoga? Any thoughts
>
>
> I am floating an article i came across the net which speaks about the bad
> effects of yoga..and what the bible says about yoga.any thoughts on it?
>
> the article follows>..
> ==============================================
> What Does the Bible Say About Yoga?
> by Michael Sharif
