SECRECY AND SAFETY THE KILLERS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

So many Sanghas have been shattered by scandal:  Muktananda and the entire SYDA lineage beginning with Chidvilasananda, Guru Ma, and many other swamis, Robert Adams during my time with him, Da Free John, and countless others. 

They were smashed, yet most reborn, because of “secret” sexual teachings practiced between Guru and student, which can never, never remain secret.  Just one misstatement by a teacher can lead to hurt feelings, anger, feelings of humiliation, such that students will reveal what happened between the two, and out will pop a scandal.

You see, there is a madness in all of society around the topic of sex.  Most consider that sex should never be a part of spirituality, even though the desire for it even more than sex itself, is one of the most powerful drives in humans, and has been utilized by many teachers, including those in the Sufi and energy traditions, to awaken the whole body, the spiritual body, and the life force or Shakti in both student and teacher.

But there are some people in spirituality, including gurus, where the drive for secrecy becomes a deep pathology, where the individual is so repressive of expression that it distorts all truth and feeling in their lives.  Some gurus think everything between guru and teacher should be secret, and years of such practice lead them to total exhaustion from hiding expression.

One famous guru I know has so filtered and checked his expressions from fear of blowback, that even his deepest expressions of love are so checked and bottled that few believe them.  He told one woman, “No one has ever loved you as much as I have,” to which she responded, “That is not true; Ed loved me much more,” which bothered him no end.

You see, I used to lie and conceal but found out that over time the truth always came out, and I had to lie and conceal even more.  I learned a most important lesson:  Tell the total truth now, let everything out, and burn now, or conceal and hide the truth and burn later when the truth emerges out of suppression and a long-festering rumor-mill with ten times the strength.

This is a truth I want all the gurus in the world and their students to understand: Secrecy and Hiding actions and feelings can kill you in a hundred ways.  Robet told me, “I have to be careful what I say, or I might be stoned to death.”

That beautiful short film “The Three Gurus” with Swamis Shankarananda, Chetananaanda, Master Charles, and Cohen points this out:  When you are the guru, you walk around with a target on your back.  Every student can be deeply hurt by one sarcastic remark, a wrong glance at the wrong time, a loving expression directed towards a felt rival, failure to make deep contact for a few weeks, and then you have raging students that want to cut your heart out and do everything possible to harm you.  I have had this happen to me many times, and have learned to live with it.  My Sanghas get destroyed and I start all over again.

This also happened with Robert as a result of his “womanizing,” which I will not get into here.  But our Sangha broke up regularly, every year or so and even more often in 1994 and 1995.  Robert then used to say, I am not interested in having a lot of students.  I am looking for those who stay by me no matter what!  This is also what Yogananda asked of Robert when he said, “Will you stand by me no matter what I do?”  What gurus do, their actions, often fall outside the moralistic world of polite-speaking fake gurus who can act like moral scourges, authoritatively blasting something some other guru does as wicked, in attempt to gain more followers for themselves.

This is what I have learned too: sex is a topic that has to be brought into the open.  It has to be discussed time after time, whether it s between students, or between teacher and student.  The topic has to be normalized in all of spirituality, because sex, love, and erotic attachment are the most powerful human drives that can be used to awaken Shakti, the life force in people—vast numbers of people. Sex can be used for self-realization.  Lust and longing for another can both energize and purify both the nervous system and the Nadi, the channels for the flow of prana.

Not only should sexuality be made a constant topic, but we should also not hide our spiritual experiences as so many teachers warn about, not because the experiences will lose their power—all experiences lose their power over time—but because of the effect on listeners, arousing envy, contempt, or one-upmanship.  Hearing the experiences of other eventually will reach the ears of the right person who will benefit and be emboldened to contimue.

And we just have to tolerate the blowback.  Look how Trump has become president despite hearing him speak about what many call his sexual abuse of women.  But when sex is coupled with the desire to awaken Shakti, and occurs in someone totally devoted to another, yearning for the other’s presence, love, and is utterly and totally surrendered, it can set you on fire with Shakti leading to the realization of Shakti as an entity, as God within you, and the discovery of your own divine nature, totally transcending the mundane world, and entering a world of endless energies, bliss, divine sexual relations, where you see that your old way of seeing the world was false.  The world is not as you thought it was.  It is much, much more.

It is a world of ever-changing energies, events, and objects.  It is a world not filtered by mind so that your senses become laser-sharp and sensation become brilliantly alive, and every sex act,  real, or just imagined, becomes an ecstatic surrender to your God or Goddess.

What a world it would be if this vision were normalized!  But what it would take is courage on the part of gurus not to hide everything out of self or other-protection.  Be bold.

I want to ask the Siddha gurus, can you imagine Baba’s teacher, Nityananda to hide anything he did?  I don’t imagine he hid anything.  Why can’t you be that way?