--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > --- "BillyG." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Personally, I question whether or not he is > > enlightened especially > > when he started damning democracy and suggesting > > Bush was Hitler, that > > doesn't strike me as coming from someone who is > > enlightened! > > If you have never had any personal contact with MMY I > can easily understand why a person would say MMY is > not Realized. Especially the last decade or so he has > made many an outrageous comment. So, from a conceptual > level of evaluating MMY based on his speech and > behavior he does not meet many people's expectations > of how a Realized person speaks and behaves. The same dialectic / discussion and diversity survey questions to you that I just asked Billie on this thread. And do any expectations of how a person acts in enlightenment have validity? > However, > personal contact with MMY, in my experience, pretty > much crushes any conceptual edifice regarding > Realization. His darshan is incredibly powerful and > triggers deep spiritual experiences. And Turq, I believe, and others, have a completely different experience, indifferent,with MMY's darsan. Is your experience more valid than his? if so, in what ways? Does triggering deep spiritual experiences necessarily mean the source of that experience is enlightened? Is a murti in a temple "enlightened". It can trigger powerful spiritual experience to some. Is love enlightened? It can trigger powerful spiritual experience to some. Someone said a teacher was not so good because she did not give the viewer of her picture a strong "energy hit". If personal interpretation of darshaan experience is valid, the is energy-hit-ology also valid for judging a teacher? IMO, interpreation of darshan experience, and any spiritual "experience", altered, or beyond conventional state, is an issue. As an example regarding darshan, when I first met SSRS, I went up to the stage and had a nice chat with him at intermission, and he taught my intro course, he asked me and others questions, so there was more than a 3 second type assembly line darshan. Yet I didn't feel so much "from his darshan". But through the day I felt some very positive things, but did not attribute it to darshan. That night, the good thing was huge. Still being a skeptical of many casual causal claims, I still did not say or think SSRS caused this. When I went to a second and third course, and the same thing happened, the correlation sank in. (correlation i not causation .. but... for other reasons, I saw it a causal) The effect was huge, but I was looking in the wrong place, so to speak. I initially incorrectly "interpreted" the source of the huge effect. YMMV > As has been said > here many times, MMY is an incredible paradox. Does that make him enlightened? If so,are all sources of paradox enlightened? If not, which are and which are not? > To > dismiss MMY as unenlightened is, IMHO, ridiculous > based on my own personal experience with him. And that is your opinion, an your interpretation of your darshan experiences with him. Both are respected. But does your experience sigularly establish that he is enlightened? Can he be enlightened for you, and not for others? What is the role of expectation of the darshan experience have with the actual interpretation of the experience? IMO, its quite large. That might be a factor in explaining the large variance in experiences. Many of the former skin-boys had far far more face time with MMY than you and yet don't share your experience of his darshan. What explains that variance of experience? (an authentic, not pointed, question)
