THE FACTS ON HINDUISM; John Ankerrberg & John Weldon; Harvest House Publishers; Eugene, Oregon 97402

Da Free John

In describing his own sadhana or work along the spiritual path, Free John openly confesses the insanity of his own gurus. They were indeed mad. They were also possessed by spirits. That Da Free John represents the logical culmination of their teaching and influence speaks for itself. His principal gurus were Nityananda, Muktananda, and Rudrananda ("Rudi"). In No Remedy, Da Free John told of his personal "sanctification":

Concerning meditation-induced kundalini arousal, a practice of spiritual "enlightenment" often promoted by the gurus, Shree Purohit Swami experienced near-insanity, madly ate the leaves of two entire nimba trees, devoured insipid mudra leaves, and could not sit or stand. He mentions one yogi who had the "fire" rage for six to eight months, and another who had to sit under cold tapwater eight hours a day.

Gopi Krishna, founder of one of the several Kundalini Research Centers in the world, records his own yoga induced kundalini experiences:

The popular Swami Muktananda described his own possession in some detail in his spiritual autobiography Play of Consciousness. In the chapter titled "My Confused State of Mind" and elsewhere he describes this terrible experience of madness as the "blessing and grace" of his own guru, Nityananda. Muktananda goes on to state that his disciples can expect similar experiences, and that such are merely the normal workings of kundalini arousal:

Let us ask you a question: Does what we have been describing so far sound like something divine-or demon?

Unfortunately, the gurus are not the only ones possessed; the spiritual path they offer to their disciples frequently leads their students to possession as well.

Da (Bubba) Free John

Da (Bubba) Free John (Franklyn Jones) illustrates the state of the disciple being possessed by the alleged "spiritual form" of the guru or master. His text Garbage and the Goddess describes the experiences that he and his disciples underwent at his Persimmon, New York, ashram. While Free John describes normal everyday living as being "possessed by the most insidious demonic force in the universe," one would hardly suspect it from the following descriptions of, as he calls it, "life in God."

Perhaps Free John is correct: "True wisdom is the capacity for perfect madness." Below we cite several descnptions as given by disciples.

Rudrananda

7. The development of altered states of consciousness

8. The practices of yoga and meditation

9. The practice of attaining "enlightenment"

10. The practice of occultism

Part of the disciples' required obedience to the guru is to follow the guru's sadhana or spiritual path. By definition this places a person on the path ofoccultism. In fact, psychic powers and spiritism are to be expected. For example, spirit contact frequently occurs with what are believed to be various Hindu deities, "nature" spirits, or the guru himself after death (or even while alive via his alleged "spiritual form"). Muktananda tells us his students encounter various Hindu gods and other spirits as well as the dead.

Paramahansa Yogananda's spiritual autobiography, Autobiography of a Yogi, is replete with occult experiences -- astral projection, psychometry, astrology, psychic healing, spiritistic materializations and apportations, amulets, etc. For example, Yogananda teaches, "True spiritualism [mediumism] is a wonderful science...it is possible by meditation and spiritual [occult] development to contact departed loved ones...."

In conclusion, a brief summarization indicates that to one degree or another many of the gurus in America directly or indirectly:

1. discard the mind and independent thinking;

2. demand an absolute, unquestioning obedience;

3. reject moral standards;

4. demean and cheapen human life as maya (illusion);

5. see family life as a perversion or a concession to evil;

6. reject Christianity as a spiritual hazard or abomination;

7. offer teachings leading to despair and nihilism; and

8. offer an occult path that may lead to insanity, serious physical ailments, possession, or death.
 
 

BBC News, Net version

Monday, December 28, 1998 Published at 21:30 GMT

World: South Asia

No season of goodwill for India's Christians

Right-wing Hindus protesting at what they see as forced conversions

Christmas in the Indian state of Gujarat has been marked by violent clashes between Hindu extremists and Christians.

Tensions remain high, despite police the western state making a number of arrests following a weekend of violence.

Buildings, including schools, hospitals, and churches were attacked on Christmas Day. In the village of Varki, a Pentecostal church was burned down by what the United Christian Forum for Human Rights (UCFHR) said was a mob of around 70 people from a Hindu extremist organisation.

The Christian community says the attacks are part of a concerted campaign against them which has worsened since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party came to power in Delhi in March.

However, the leadership of the BJP - which also holds power in the state of Gujarat - has consistently condemned the violence.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee met Christian leaders earlier this month after they

held a nationwide protest.

Wednesday, December 30, 1998 Published at 10:30 GMT

World: South Asia

Delhi investigates attacks on Christians

The Chief Secretary of Gujarat and the Director-General of police have been summoned to appear before India's National Commission for Minorities to explain why the Christian population has not been protected.

"Attacks are continuing despite the presence of police," he said.

The UCFHR says it has recorded more than 60 cases of violence against Christians, including incidents of Bible burning and rape, since January. Most of the attacks are said to have taken place in Gujarat.

The Christian community says the attacks are part of a concerted campaign against them which has worsened since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party came to power in Delhi in March. However, the leadership of the BJP - which also holds power in the state of Gujjarat - has consistently condemned the violence.

The Hindu groups Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) and Bajrang Dal have

both denied accusations that they were responsible for the attacks.

Both organisations say the violence was provoked by the forcible conversion of Hindus

to Christianity.

Christian missionaries in turn say their work is to help the poor, and not to force people to

adopt Christianity.

The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 121-145

Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee

Parama Roy

"I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work."

--Confession of the thug Bukhtawar in James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders

"Colonial accounts of thuggee, on the other hand, represent thuggee as outside a realm of political and economic rationality (since it is religiously sanctioned, grounded in caste, and linked to ex-orbitant pleasures). Nonetheless, as the obsessive invocations of the Mutiny of 1857 and of the Bengal revolutionaries of the twentieth century indicate, thuggee was simultaneously addressed (even if not acknowledged) as a peculiarly potent threat to the authority and benevolence of the empire in India. "To the colonial regime," says David Arnold, "crime and politics were almost inseparable: serious crime was an implicit defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion; political resistance was either a 'crime' or the likely occasion for it."16 Freitag [End Page 125] points to the fundamental distinctions, both in terms of the allocation of resources and of formulating legal procedures, that the Raj made between crimes committed by individuals ("ordinary crime") and those committed by collectivities ("extraordinary crime"): "

"Thus, despite the putative restoration to wholeness, Englishness, and legality of William Savage at the close of the story, the narrative nonetheless opens up a space for investigating the "double and split subject" of the colonial enun ciation, for what Bhabha calls--in the context of the nation's fissured enunciation—"dissemination": "a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations."48 As in the case of so many other Englishmen, Savage will have to turn to Indianness in order to return to or consolidate or improve his English self; in doing so, he will come back as a new and more English Englishman, but he will also, temporarily at least, be transformed into a border subject, changed by his experience of Indianness, surrendering illusions of full agency and Englishness in the crossing of bound aries. Whereas for Kipling's Kim O'Hara, identity formation follows an accretive model, in which the elements (British and Indian) are clearly hierarchized and manipulable, for Savage, identity is the locus of strain and contradiction rather than being expansive or pluralist. That is why Savage can at the end afford to take no prisoners or recruit any approvers from among his erstwhile comrades; the thugs whom he has led and who are now pursuing him must be wiped out in an act of violence that not only precludes the need for approvers but also does away with any witnesses against, and rem(a)inders of, his own thug self."

In order to assert these charges use

a. personal and anecdotal

b. Weldon's study

c. Crazy Wisdom

d. Wilber

e. Gazette

Pretending to Practice Witchcraft

365. Every one who fraudulently

a) pretends to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,

b) undertakes, for a consideration, to tell fortunes, or

c) pretends form his skill in or knowledge of an occult of crafty science to discover where or in what manner anything that is supposed to have been stolen of lost may be found,

is guilty of an offense punishable on summary conviction.

The Gazette (Montreal) -- Final

Entertainment: Show Saturday September 24, 1994

CHOM turns 25; Ghosts, longhairs gone, no more swamis

MIKE BOONE GAZETTE
 
 

When the FM rock station takes over the Spectrum on Thursday, Oct. 27, drinks will be consumed, backs will be slapped, former lovers will be either steered clear of or frantically chatted up and old war stories will be told over the din of Kim Mitchell and Slaves on Dope.

The CHOM old-timers will talk about Geoff Stirling and Swami Shyam. They'll talk about the CHOM Ghost, and the exorcism that cleansed the station of the malevolent spirit alleged to have cracked mirrors and spooked deejays.

Pringle was a Sir George Williams university student who had an exotic CV (son of a British diplomat, he was born in Calcutta and christened in the Ganges) and a passion for progressive music.

Stirling was a flamboyant eccentric: former alligator-hunter, politically savvy anti-Confederation crusader in his native Newfoundland, goal-hoarding media tycoon. Stirling was open to new ideas - like turning a 6-year-old FM Muzak station over to Pringle and his merry band of flower children.

JoAnne Rudy remembers the invasion. The den mother of 1310 Greene Ave., Rudy, who is in her early 50s, has worked off-air for the AM and FM stations since 1966; she knows not only where all the bodies are buried but also the probable causes of death.

"Instead of seeing all these freaky-looking people on the street, we saw them in our offices," Rudy chuckles, remembering the first wave of Pringle People bringing 1960s counter-culture to the previously straight(ish) world of commercial radio.

"And the RCMP had offices in this building," Rudy says. "I lived in daily fear of what the Mounties would find if they got off the elevator on the wrong floor.

"We had people living at the radio station. Draft dodgers - waves of them came through. This was a commune.

"We had plenty of babies conceived at the station - plenty," Rudy adds. You didn't know what you'd find when you opened an office door."

"This was my introduction to the boss," Feist remembers. "He was coming up the stairs with a large group of people, carrying big jugs of water and baskets of bread."

The entourage included Swami Shyam, an Indian mystic, and a video camera crew that recorded the scene as Stirling, armed with a Magic Marker, began to write cryptic graffiti all over the walls of his own radio station.

"Then they all came to sit in the tiny studio," Feist says. "Geoff said: 'This is the Swami Shyam. I want you to interview him on the air.' "

Feist had studied comparative religion at CEGEP. He was able to toss the swami a few general questions about spirituality. Stirling sat on the floor, holding the swami's big toe - a sign of respect, it was explained, for the holy man.

"Then Geoff said we should take calls from listeners," Feist says. "We had no delay lines, so my fingers were crossed. And we actually got some calls asking the swami serious questions."

While the swami spoke, Feist picked up a call that was waiting.

"The guy said, 'Would you get that f--ing towel head off the air!, This, thank God, was not going out live."

The interview lasted for six hours - interrupted occasionally by a Moody Blues album that Stirling insisted be played uninterrupted in its entirety -before the owner, the swami and the acolytees finally decamped, leaving the disc jockey to stagger out of the studio at dawn contemplating the wonderful -world of rock radio.

Feist missed out on the great CHOM exorcism. In 1978, six years after Stirling had moved his FM station across the street to its own three-floor headquarters at 1355 Greene Ave., Rudy - by then a convert to the CHOM way of looking at the world - hired a psychic and organized a seance to rid the place of a ghost said to inhabit the building since the suicide of a former resident.

There's no para-normal communication at CHOM these days - although some critics charge that the "Classic Rock" playlist channels too much music from rock'n'roll heaven - to the exclusion of what's happening on earth.
 
 

THE FACTS ON HINDUISM

John Ankerrberg & John Weldon

Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon 97402

One of the authors of this book, Dr. Weldon, is a former practitioner of Eastern meditation and coauthor of a critique of one of the most popular forms of Hindu meditation in America, Transcendental Meditation. Dr. Weldon's Ph.D. was received in the field of comparative religion, with an emphasis on Easten? religion. His dissertation involved a 2500-page analysis of over 20 of the leading Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufl gurus operating in America.

Part of the disciples' required obedience to the guru is to follow the guru's sadhana or spiritual path. By definition this places a person on the path of occultism. In fact, psychic powers and spiritism are to be expected. For example, spirit contact frequently occurs with what are believed to be various Hindu deities, "nature" spirits, or the guru himself after death (or even while alive via his alleged "spiritual form"). Muktananda tells us his students encounter various Hindu gods and other spirits as well as the dead.

Sri Chinmoy