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Originally Posted by Amilius777
No I completely understand what AC is saying.
A lot of things caused me to hunt down and research Yogananda. At first I blindingly accepted everything he said as fact because of how colorful and wonderful he said things. A psychic I went to told me not to bother with Yogananda or any guru and sensed Yogananda was corrupted, egotistical, and stole other people's work.
I shrugged this off thinking this was just some sort of competition between clairvoyance and Guru-hood. But then I started noticing some strange claims by Yogananda. A lot of them sex, health, and diet concerns. I can find more demonizing of sexuality and sexual activity in all of Yogananda's books than I can in the Catholic Church. I also find made up diet plans and false ideas about health. I began researching and discovered a few legal documents online against Yogananda and his SRF Ashram which included strange activity with women. That was odd. It was not until I found another biography written by Yogananda's contemporary from India that spilled the beans. If you read the book it contains Yogananda's self-proclamation as a "Paramahansa", his blackmailing of other Swamis, and even betraying his own master Yukteswar. This was devastating to me. It just got worse as I read more things on how Yogananda claimed to be the Avatar of the New Age and supposedly died in mahasamadhi. This is all false. Yogananda dropped dead on stage during a lecture because of a heart attack caused by obesity. His followers faked an entire miracle of incorruptibility in which his body did not waste away for 20 days. According to the mortician this is not a miracle but a natural occurrence seen in a lot of people and the SRF made up the entire scenario. Medical doctors say that Yogananda died because of obesity and many other health problems he was suffering from and lying to his disciples.
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I left the religion of christianity much the same way Amilius777.
I had no spiritual experiences or upbringing, and then became a born again christian in my early 20's.
It was all new and exiting, oooh, eternity, an all loving god, god and the devil fighting over us explained the mess the world was in etc etc etc.
But i began seeing things that didn't add up, but dismissed all of them as i continued to blindly believe.
But s the years went by, those niggly little glitches in the chritian matrix kept coming into my mind,
so after 10 years, i began deeply exploring instead of remaining a surface dwelling pew sitting automaton.
Like you i used my "god given" ability to think for myself, to reason, to check, to question,
and stop dismissing what i saw as flagrant errors in the coding.
I began to trust my own discerment instead of allowing others to tell me what to believe in,
especially the ones who spoke "colorfully and wonderfully" as you put it.
The thing i notice a lot with religions and cults and any form of group such as these,
is the seduction is generally at the emotional level.
God loves you, you will live forever, enlightenement means no more pain, you will be ascended like the gods or higher life forms, ascended masters.
Basically the promise of pleasure/bliss and the reduction/removal of pain.
But as soon as you employ reasoning/analytical thought/deductive and inductive reasoning/etc,
that's when you break free from the seductive hold, that's when you begin to see the glitches in the matrix of their belief system.
That's why they constantly go on about how norty thinking is, because thinking will expose the illusion.
And there's nothing more disheartening than to see your perfect blissful world destroyed and to be exposed as an illusion no less.
The real world is harsh and painful sometimes, no wonder many choose to reciol from it into a illusory world of happy happy joy joy,
where, from the eastern sector( not all of the philosophies though), the emphasis is on
- you don't exist...aka no more suffering.
- you are not the mind body, you are pure love.
- this world, your individual self that thinks and feels is all illusion
- surrender and accept who you really are, god that is love, anything alse and you are decieiving yourself, you are in an illusion.
Which i find the funniest because they do not realize they are the one's in an illusory world.
That when they say this existance is an illusion, and that the self that thinks and feels is all illusion,
but then they try to seduce at the emotional level proclaiming bliss awaits.
Bliss - a rather extreme version of happiness.. an emotion.
And as you may have seen here in SF, these people who are in self trapped
in these belief systems always use as their last line of defence,
"Oh the mind/mind body/intellect cannot fathom this glorious truth"
or...
"You are still down there stuck in your ego, you cannot comprehend this glorious truth."
I for one, thankyou for your OP and discussion, and bow in recognition of your ability and usage of independent rational an critical thought.
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