Coming back to Barry's post: "'I've seen a number of people have strong experiences of "being enlightenment," and then afterwards "back off" and run away from any sadhana (spiritual practice, such as meditation) that would make "being enlightenment" "come back." :
Doesn't that apply to your Rama? I'd never hear of Rama till I encountered FFL but the fact that he was heavily into tranquillisers suggests he was suffering from acute anxiety. Why so? Because he was unable to integrate his own spiritual experiences. (I also see that Rama told his female followers that having sex with him would elevate them to a higher plane of consciousness. Are there really women that fall for that lame chat-up line?) This broadens out into a wider debate on "Egomaniac Godmen who had experienced selflessness". Why were so many of them such irritating self-centred arseholes? I don't doubt that some of them - Muktanada and Osho, for example - had genuine experiences of loss of ego identity. But I've had such experiences (only short-lived) and although I had no way of piecing together my lost identity my character habits (my karma?) were still functioning. It did strike me then that genuine spiritual transformation would have to uproot those character habits - perhaps by spending two years cleaning the latrines in a leper colony. I suspect that people like Osho, Chögyam Trungpa, Muktanada and Rama had that ego-loss thing and falsely assumed it was the full enlightenment blow-out and so never realised what self-centred sods they remained. I mean, take Osho's collection of Rolls-Royces: he wanted to have the largest collection in the world. How childish is that? Imagine that an authentic first-century manuscript was uncovered in the Vatican archives that proved Jesus of Nazareth had ten gold-plated chariots and was hoping to add to that collection to out-number the total of the Roman Emperor? Christianity would be finished as a world religion the very next day. Osho's acolytyes came up with some baloney about his mania being a subversive attack on materialism - does anyone still believe that self-serving crap? There's something horribly self-centred about the whole new-age trip that gives it that superficial, delusional character. The trouble is Christianity's emphasis on obedience and humility seems to go too far in the opposite direction so we're still looking for a genuine route out of the dominant materialist paradigm.
