---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote:
emptybill, this is a seriously skewed version of Robin's story.
Just for one thing, you write, "Rather he just wanted to espouse his chosen
narrative about how he was deluded by 'cosmic entities' but was now free of
them. More of the old - 'I didn’t fail … I was fooled' as you also pointed out."
As Michael pointed out wrongly, and now you've pointed out wrongly. As I
said--and you'll find it throughout Robin's posts--he acknowledged his failure
and took responsibility for it. As far as he was concerned, the negative
entities took advantage of his character flaws--what he called his "secret
infirmities." He was vulnerable to being fooled because he was badly screwed
up, in other words. And he's been tougher on himself than anybody else has
concerning his behavior back then.
Robin is by far the most complicated personality I've ever encountered. It
really doesn't make sense to brush him off with simplistic conclusions, nor is
it fair to him. I have no idea what the real story was metaphysically speaking,
but he's always been clear about how he understood it. Certainly none of us is
in a position to interpret his experience.
It's one thing if you disbelieve in the existence of negative entities who are
capable of messing with vulnerable people. That's perfectly reasonable. What's
not right is to assign motivations to the person who has had the experience of
having been messed with, or to claim they're lying about their experience.
Experience is experience; it may or may not conform to reality, especially
whatever the hell the metaphysical reality of enlightenment is.
Here is how I see it, in a nutshell. Empty can only interpret what Robin's
experience was or wasn't based on his book learning or his own interpretation
of book learning and teachers who 'told him so'. Robin had an experience and he
has analyzed what that actually was, based on his time within the experience
and his struggles and chronology getting 'free' of it. He alone truly knows
what he has discovered in his long path toward separating himself from the
influence of evil entities. Robin also knows himself to the degree to which he
understands he is possessed of "infirmities" that would have allowed him to be
vulnerable to that which is viewed as "enlightenment" by some. Robin was a
victim of outside influences but his victimization was the result of inherent
weaknesses within himself. Therefore, you can accuse Robin of conscious
manipulation of others or being the author of dastardly deeds to the same
degree that you can accuse a one-legged man of being too clumsy to dance the
tango.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <emptybill@...> wrote:
Michael sez:
"Robin's experience was that his actions were, as it were, dictated by cosmic
forces, rather than that he could just do whatever he felt like. His experience
was that he could not do other than what he did, even though at times there was
some aspect of himself that didn't want to do what he was doing."
So bottom line I don't buy Robin's assertion that he in essence was forced to
behave in this way by these "forces." That excuse goes back as long as we have
had the idea of a Devil.
Emptybill replies:
Robin never was interested in a classical Vedantic assessment of his so-called
“enlightenment”. All of this, in spite of the fact that Shankara’s Vedanta was
the proffered basis of Maharishi’s tradition. Such an assessment would have
presented an opposite view about this whole “enlightenment meme”. I pointed
this out to Robin a number of times but he wasn’t interested in hearing about
it. Rather he just wanted to espouse his chosen narrative about how he was
deluded by “cosmic entities” but was now free of them. More of the old - “I
didn’t fail … I was fooled” as you also pointed out.
This is what happens when experience itself becomes the object of sadhana
(practice) rather than conformity with Reality. It is the same old theme and
“gurus” just fool people when they cheat them out of the self-evaluations
necessary for real sadhana.
