File under: Amma All-Over-The-Planet and Ammachi's Goongate
posted by guruphiliac @ 10:51 PM
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Look Ma! We've made Boing Boing! Again! And again! Once again! Yet again! And once again!
.... I try to poop *in* the toilet, not *on* it.While we understand that gurus are held sacred by many, they are also public figures deserving of scrutiny. Our primary aim is to inject a little humor into what can be an excessively self-righteous enterprise, and to illustrate the primary truth that no matter how divine their devotees believe them to be, gurus poop on the same pot we do.
© 2005 - 2010
25 Comments:
If you are equating the dirty work of RSS with Amma you are mistaken. Please don't confuse people with your shoddy pictures.
Maybe you should brush up on your CS 3. *giggle*
Please don't confuse people with your shoddy pictures.
These pictures were sent to me by one of the Green Avenue residents. They have not been retouched by me in any way other than the addition of the black bars.
Maybe you should put down that Kool-Aid. *giggle*
Dear Jodie,
I am sorry to hear all this about Amma and her henchmen. Amazing how easy it is to go wrong and how far wrong you can go when you start with the idea that you are superior to other people. In this case the belief is that Amma is a superior form of the Almighty, which makes her devotees superior to other people in their own minds, which they seem more and more to keep in the same place they keep their hemorrhoids. The more "Indian" these groups are, the sillier and uglier they seem to be. Indian culture now appears to be as low and bizarre as any I have seen in the deep south of the USofA.
Chuck wrote that the Indian groups tend to be sillier.
IMO, the more any group talks about love, the greater the risk that there is a dark side that is the groups unspoken shadow.
In India, the traditional understanding of power was that you possessed power (as a guru or as a secular ruler) because you'd done well enough in past lives to earn a fortunate rebirth as a powerful person.
IF a ruler was sufficently powerful, he was considered an avatar. Whether or not he abused power was irrelevant. Agehananda Bharati was shocked to meet Hindus, many monks and quite gentle learned people who earnestly insisted that Hitler was an avatar. Bharati grew up in Vienna during the Nazi occupation and tried to tell them otherwise--they refused to listen. (Ochre Robe and Light at the Center)
Therefore possession of power and riches proved you had good karma.
This is just a version of the tiny child's attitude of 'Mommy and Daddy know best, just because they are Mommy and Daddy.'
In this primative framework, there is no way to imagine that power can obtained through fraud or force, or that power can utilized abusively.
Power is itself good.
And nondual philosophy can be perverted to state there is no way power can be abused, that there is no such thing as good and bad.
People will go so far as to claim that the bruised bodies of the Green Street residence are all mere illusion or that its all just divine play and that anyone who objects is failing in gratitude to the ALmighthy.
Bwwt...th!
Again, those of us who are paying our taxes are indirectly subsidizing tax exempt spiritual outfits that ship their money abroad to support corrupt and sleazy political agendas abroad.
All too often in India, powerful gurus end up functioning as feudal chieftains. They have enough devotees to swing votes in elections,and enough money to get things done by baksheesh--especially in cultures where the police and politicans cannot be bought--but can be rented.
Again, if these folks exploit American tax laws to register as tax exempt spiritual projects, their nasty political projects get indirectly subsized not only by their trustful Western devotees, but by the rest of us who are not spiritual at all, but who as lowly, unevolved beings, do pay our taxes.
That is why even non devotees are entitled to speak up here. Thanks to American tex law, we are indirectly subsidizing Amma and her goondas.
If she has the authority she's venerated for having, she should call off the thugs and go to the Green Street neighborhood and apologize and best of all pay people for any work they missed by being injuried.
Stuff like this is going to cause devotees to feel as though someone is stealing thier teddy bear from them but...this is not a nice teddy bear.
It has claws and hurts people. Jody posted the photos.
Well, the machine cannot be stopped. You can post all you want, it's not going to make a difference. The ashram has billions of dollars to keep up their end of the publicity and keep all of it's dark secrets buried from the eyes of the general public. Odds are that they have gotten away with murder many times, certainly they can get away with a beating or two. Nothing is going to stop the sweet, sparkling image of "the hugging saint".
By posting, we can refuse to be part of the silent, complicit majority.
In social justice, its rare to get quick results. That's why an activist community is needed, so that no one person overworks and gets burned out.
And if just a few persons read this material and get out of a bad organization sooner, that makes all the effort worth it.
Its all about the inherant dignity of the ordinary human person, and providing tools in the form of validating information so that persons with misgivings can decide for themselves, at thier own pace, on thier own time, whether and when to leave an exploitative set up before they get too seriously depleted.
And this is an important matter. The social and economic safety net in the US has become badly frayed. Its harder to recoup one's losses if one sacrifices years, money and emotional energy to an organization that presents as a hugging teddy bear in the West and (metaphorically speaking)grows claws and fangs and wields a very big stick against its foes when in India.
"Well, the machine cannot be stopped. You can post all you want, it's not going to make a difference. The ashram has billions of dollars to keep up their end of the publicity and keep all of it's dark secrets buried from the eyes of the general public. Odds are that they have gotten away with murder many times, certainly they can get away with a beating or two. Nothing is going to stop the sweet, sparkling image of "the hugging saint"."
Do not let posts like this discourage anybody reading this. The poster may just be down about something, but the web is a powerful tool and gurus/cults are not invincible. Look at the reputations of Scientology, Mormonism, or the Maharishi. While they have the ability to stop SOME of the questions about them, overall people feel queasy about them. Of course, some people are just untouchable, like the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa (both frauds- side note: Jody, can't wait till you figure out the Dalai Lama thing!), but Amma does not have the POSITIVE image built up yet that they did. So it is very worth the effort.
Jody, can't wait till you figure out the Dalai Lama thing!
Spill the beans and give me something to link to and we'll got hog wild on the guy!
Interesting discussion. Someone should leak these types of stories to the media in the US. The same media that drools all over the hugging saint propaganda. Would they care? Would they report on it? My guess would be no, but that sucks. It sucks for all the people that have been and will be taken for a ride by this wolf in sheep's clothing. Why has no one called for disclosure of the financial records of all of these charities? Sure, they have the Indian government in their back pocket, but not the United States (or maybe they do?) Seems that it's just taken for granted that the money is going where it should.
The nice part about being in the United States is that we can speak up about all of this. They cannot censor the voices of critics like they do in India, and if they try to (threats, harassment etc.) then they will be in even more hot water. So, more people should speak up and spread the word that all is not as it seems.
You bet it is worth the effort.
Forty years ago, when people were, in huge numbers, turning East for spiritual sustenance, there was virtually no information available, no road maps, and no way to readily fact check whether a guru was legitimate or not.
The people who hit the hippie trail blazed a path in the forest for the rest of us, and went into unmarked territory, not knowing about the hazards of subtle energy surges, nor anyawareness of how trance and social engineering could be used to triger bliss experiences.
And when people in this early group were wounded, there were few or no support communities available. You staggered away, heart and finances plundered, often shunned by other devotees, and with no easy way to find other former members to connect with. Mary Garden has a painful biography entitled Serpent Rising. She was made pregnant by her guru in India who then turned into a vicious child when she informed him of this. She was brutally sent away to have an abortion and when she finally left India, she left alone and with her health wrecked. It took decades before she was able to figure all this out and write a book.
But today...we can use the Internet to create communities of support. We can locate discussion groups in India and ask them about Guru So and So, and have a chacne to be told beforehand whether the person is OK or turns dangerous when away from the scrutiny of Western media.
Some who have been burned because they lacked today's resources may be very happy and cheer when they see that today's generation of seekers are better equipped for the journey.
But...and, new students, be warned--a few wounded members of the pioneer cohort have not come fully to terms with the way they were betrayed. They may jeer and insist that a real seeker is supposed to accept the possiblity of abuse. They may sneer that offering advice and travel advisory to new seekers is 'coddling them.'
They say this because they cant stand to face how, in thier vulnerable youth, their own hearts and souls were exploited and how they were left to fend for themselves without the care and support available today.
Dont let them shame you into avoiding use of the wonderful resources available today.
Every human person has inherant dignity--and that means we are not in this life to be a guru's toy, or an income unit for an ashram.
You dont have to be enlightened or have a guru to have inherant human dignity.
These days, its a challenge to just live as an ordinary human being. Its not worth becoming enlightened or 'evolved' if we end up making excuses for a guru who is abusive or harbors a goon squad.
You're a sick, sick man Jody. Posting these pictures is really sicko. Linking Ammachi with this is just pushing it too far there buddy. You have lost all sense of reality and have been sipping way too much Kool-aid. Ammachi has nothing to do with this, end of story, done, finito, over. Are you goons hearing this? She is a Saint and Master and only knows love and compassion. She would never promote hurting any living being. Okay? Got it? No more Ammachi bashing please.
Linking Ammachi with this is just pushing it too far there buddy.
I didn't link these pictures with Amma, the Indian version of Vanity Fair did. Read the article, and then read the original newspaper article. Both link Amma ashram residents with these beatings. They were defending an illegal sign, one them ripped her clothes and threatened to cry rape–falsely, and they called in the RSS goon squad to do the head bashing.
Amma, as the head of her org, is the final responsible party, despite her org's every effort and intention to keep these truths from the public eye.
Someone who stayed at Mums ashram just posted an account at the ex-amma Yahoo group of seeing a dead body floating in the water and the cover up that ensued.
Methinks this Mamma business is much more convoluted and twisted than anyone can imagine.
I have heard that a type of Indian mafia often steps in to take over a guru's operation when they become big. If this is the case with Ammachi, she may have lost control and be a dupe of goons in the background! If this is so, it would be more honorable for her to make a public statement about it, even if she has to be killed for that, than to sacrifice the truth for the sake of her own life or the lives of a few of her followers! I think that's what the article said Gandhi should have done!
Too bad there can't be a True Believer planet for all these kinds of people. Ammachi's group could have S America, Sly Baba's could have all of Asia, She She Ravi Shrunknards could have Canada and they could all sit around jackin each other off with bullshit beliefs. When they got tired of that they could take their crow bars and beat up rival groups of Kool-Aid drinkers. This is the kind of love that makes the world go round, Jody. Thanks for openin my eyes up so I could see that what I thought was an angel comin down from above is really a hunk of dried horse hockey thrown by my Pentecostal neighbor!
dead body floating in the water
In India? I thought that sort of thing only happened in the West.
Wow-
I guess I should have read the invitation at the top of this cynical and myopic site and seen just what would be in store for me: "please send hate mail".
A shining example of the worst that internet "journalism" has to offer.
Jeez, if only you guys had been around to expose St. Francis we wouldn't have to put up with all those religious zealots espousing forgiveness and kindness.
Can't wait for the next installment on the Dalai Lama... uhh well maybe I can.
A shining example of the worst that internet "journalism" has to offer.
Hey! More head-in-the-sand denial from another Ammabot. What a surprise!
blaming Amma for the behavior of her devotees is the same as blaming Christ for Christianity. try investigating that unhealed place in the heart that would seek to throw dirt on a saint.
try investigating that unhealed place in the heart
Try using your head instead of allowing it to atrophy in the name of ill-advised devotion.
It wasn't just Amma devotees, it was the head of her New Delhi ashram. And there has been no apology or compensation for the violence that was done to the innocent victims of Green Ave.
Amma is a right-wing monster in India who supports genocidal politicians. Wake up, dunderhead!
Quote of Ammachi from page 145 Indian publication of her biography. Refering to the death of her cusin who is said to have tried to kill her:
"Just as human beings have intence love for Mother, numerous subtle beings love her as well. if somebody attemts to harm Mother, Mother does not react. Mother faces such a person without any excitment and does not even think any harmful thought regarding him who acts out of ignorance, But these subtle beings get angry and take revenge. Do you understand how this is? Suppose someone's mother is attacked by a man. Do the children sit back indiferent? Even if there mother tries to stop them, they find that man and take revenge"
She is the Mother. She has her children in Deli. sounds to me like they got the message.
This is interesting... to see another side of the Amma story.
I have travelled with Amma, have served at her feet for 10 years now. I have been a part of cults before (Hare Krsna and Southern Baptist Christianity), and can tell you quite honestly, this is not a cult.
I have never been indoctrinated into any sort of belief system, never pressured to give money - ever, never pressured to attend events. I have never witnessed any force, intimidation, manipulation, or coersion of myself or anyone else in my 10 years of being with Ma. I actually believe and practice differently than most of my god-sisters and brothers in that organization... I am a Buddhist... and have never felt one ounce of separation or tension because of this.
Is it not obvious that these "goons" are separate individuals from Amma? Seprarate individuals full of their own will, volition, and... (what do you know!) their own egos and delusions! It is sad what these men did, and if Amma's ashram hasn't responded, perhaps there is an actual valid reason for it.
Readers: this is but one side to a whole story. It might be totally accurate, but it might be completely fictitious.
One thing is certain, this is not work of Amma, but of some deeply misguided and sad individuals.
It might be totally accurate, but it might be completely fictitious.
These events were reported to me by the people who were attacked. The reports were also carried by several publications in India.
I doubt that Amma herself had anything to do with this. But conversely, and more importantly, she did nothing about this after it had occurred. There was no apology for the actions of her people. Nothing, save for the calculated public relations move of keeping her mouth shut.
Well, welcome to India and Indian mentality. That's why they need gurus...
I was once yelled at by staff at the royal rose gardens in England just cos I was peeing on some stupid flowers. So, obviously now I hate the queen and try to tell everyone of how bad she is.
Come on....
Yes, Amma have probably met some aggressive people over her life, not least by trying to help them getting over their anger, but she and her teachings are very friendly and very much against all forms of violence.
I am not a devotee nor have I ever lived at the ashram, but I just felt I had to say something cos' this is sand box level slander.
To stay at the ashram all you need to do is to pay 150 rupees for a room and food just as for any hotel, retreat or ashram. Many thousands of people do this, should she be responsible for all the doings of all these people? She tries to teach people to be kind, friendly, help your fellow man and that sort of thing, and therefor meet a lot of people who need to hear this for one reason or another, but cannot be held responsible for all that she have met. I am quite sure that the people who did this, if they dared to return to the ashram to face Amma, got a starring down and a yelling that they will hardly forget the next few years. The only thing that seems to get her angry is when people willingly hurt other beings.
I was out drinking and fooling around with a lovely Finnish girl from the ashram day before yesterday. I think we should blame Amma for all that she/we did, don't you? Would be very convenient for both of us.
Hugs to you all, light headed spaced out happy hippies as well as overly square angry materialists. :)
/Lucas from Sweden
Don’t give too much importance to others words without properly using your own spiritual discrimination. ” — Amma
"Spirituality forms the path that helps transform anger into compassion, hatred into love, lustful thoughts into divine thoughts, and jealousy into sympathy"-amma
Obviously whoever did this has a ways to go on their journey...Can you blame the teacher for the student not following by example? And u obviously have not even begun yours, if you are so ready to defame someone without looking deeper for the truth firsst for if u did you would find Amma's Love showering only blessings on you and all beings within and without.
Aum from Amma's Home
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