On Oct 30, 2009, at 5:29 AM, Premanand wrote:
Giving a little more thought to the authorisation issue. I am pretty certain Maharishi never claimed Guru Dev authorised him to teach meditation, it was Maharishi's uncle, Raj Varma, who claimed that. Yet Maharishi and his movement assume the right to decide who and who cannot teach this meditation. Based I suppose on the idea that it was Maharishi who 'rediscovered' this method of meditation. But just because someone has rediscovered something does not mean they own or have the rights over that thing, thus we have a law covering the act of 'stealing by finding'. There seem to be those who accept that it is quite possible that Maharishi wasn't 'authorised', that he was a maverick spirit, whilst denying the rights of others to be maverick teachers of meditation. Double standards?
There seem to be plenty of references to MMY "receiving", or some similar word, TM, from "Guru Dev". Are these all "off the record" and never direct quotes from Mahesh?
I don't know that he would be "unauthorized" to give mantras since he was a brahmachari within the Shankaracharya order--and tantric mantras are NOT caste-exclusive. Where issues would arise is he was including a more Brahminic Shank. Order lineage invocation in the mantra-diksha and this could be seen as a more Brahmin caste thingy. Since Swami Brahmananda had explicitly told him to go and meditate in the mountains and the only thing he would ever be good at was "making money", it's probably safe to say he was unauthorized by his guru. He certainly did not have a letter of authorization, nor are there any witnesses that I am aware of that attest to any such authorization.
Shank. order people that I know insist M's main problem is that he was "selling the Vedas". It's believed sellers of the vedas go to patala-loka, hell.
