Oh, that Rama. Bwahahahaha,
enlightened, yeah, right...
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 6:38 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Kaplan's
money
> > You may have missed out. I worked with a
spiritual > > teacher who took his students to Disneyland often.
> > http://ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/rtm13.html >
> Unc, how have you "come to terms (if that's the right > term)"
with your powerful experiences with Rama and > his rather bizarre death
and less than "enlightened" > behavior at times? >
-Peter
In two words, "Shit happens."
I had already left his
study a couple of years before he died, and thus wasn't as affected by it
as a lot of folks who hung in there to the end. I don't really know
anything about the "whys" of it all; it's a koan. I spent some
time pondered it in one of the stories I wrote, at: http://ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/rtm53.html
As
I suggested in a recent post, for many reasons I do not believe in the
idea that the enlightened are perfect and don't make mistakes. I
don't think they're any different than anyone else, except on the level of
subjec- tive realization. So I have no tendency to suggest
that odd or questionable behavior means that someone
wasn't enlightened. All it suggests to me is that they indulge in
odd or questionable behavior. So did many teachers whom history
regards as enlightened. Big deal.
I'm also not a person who is
terribly impressed by the ability to perform siddhis, and wasn't when I met
the Rama guy. I got to see and experience some neat stuff,
and enjoyed it, but I did not then and do not now make any link between
being able to, say, levitate and turn invisible and do fascinating things
with light and that person's state of consciousness. The main thing
that impressed me about the guy was his ability to meditate. When
you sat with him in the early days, it was just silence -- pure
samadhi. It was *impossible* to have a thought. All the other
stuff was bells and whistles, IMO.
To be honest, not all of his
students felt as I did. They definitely consider the enlightened
perfect by definition, so his suicide fucked with their heads
Big-Time. If you believe that your teacher is enlightened and that
the enlight- ened are by definition perfect, then you have to jump
through a lot of mental hoops to justify suicide. I'm not much
in touch with them, so I can't tell you how they've come to terms with
things.
For me, it was a wild and wacky Mister Toad ride that I
shall always be thankful for but don't spend a lot of time missing or
even thinking about. Right here and now is too wild and wacky and
wonderful to leave much time for
that.
Unc
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