Thread: Kumare!!

I'm down. I'm already pretending to be a wizard.

I've already watched the doc twice, it's so fucking good. It completely encapsulates my own philosophy on spirituality.

Yeah that's how all the 'real' gurus got started too. They attain some real power that way, but they're so lost in pretending that they don't know how to be real, or even that there's a difference. They can no longer distinguish between thinking that is helping or hurting themselves or other people.

Do you believe there is a difference?

Originally Posted by Original Poster

Do you believe there is a difference?

Is this a real question?

I know that there is a difference. And you must know by now that I believe that I know there is a difference. I'm guessing you must know there is a difference too, though it requires being willing to honestly feel who you are.

I'm not suggesting that who you are is not created, I'm saying there is a tremendously important difference between creating it honestly and creating it dishonestly. You can't turn every assertion into truth by imagining it to be true, or every con into expert knowledge by conflating the two.

Do you want me to elaborate on this? If your question is even half sincere I'll take as much time as you want. Or are you like a cat playing with a mouse when the outcome is already assured? Your ego has to be willing to feel its un-awesomeness along with its awesomeness, or its all pointless. If there's nothing that I understand that you are interested in understanding better, I don't want to waste my time. I don't say that as if I'm better than you or know more than you, it goes both ways.

I'm going to pretend you didn't write the last four sentences of that post.

I am a practitioner of magic and divination, as well as a skeptic. The only reason I am able to remain skeptical while also practicing arts that a skeptic would most likely ignore is because I've come to study consciousness enough to understand that much of the world actually does enable you to turn assertions into truth by imagining them to be true. If you change your beliefs, you can change the reality you experience. It's not so far fetched, after all everything we experience as reality is solely being experienced within our consciousness, so if we can alter our consciousness we can alter the reality. There is therefore nothing special about an "enlightened" guru sending his blessing and a pretend guru sending his. They both imagine something, and through their imaginations, make something happen. It has also been well repeated by people I would consider enlightened that the only difference between an enlightened person and a regular person is the belief the regular person has that they are only regular. Great Masters may have told one student to walk the earth and count every grain of sand, or to meditate for a number of years, or go live in a cave. But these are not necessary farther than as to allow the student to realize they are already enlightened.

That being said, I do believe there is some relative difference, but the difference is not whether a guru grew up in New Jersey or India. The difference is time spent in authentic and humble discovery and wonder of the universe. This is a state during meditation which we encounter for brief periods of time that slowly grow to longer periods of time and begin to spill outside of meditation into every single activity we engage in. You can call it surrender, you can call it wisdom, there are many ways to describe it and many ways to engage to forcefully and fail at it. Gurus also readily fail at it because they assume the role of teacher and too easily lose touch with the awe of life in the process. Remembering for oneself that one is still just a simple person is necessary to the path and yet far too easily lost in the new-age haze.

Kumare makes one very, very necessary point to anyone wishing to engage in spiritual practices and find enlightenment. The guru is primarily within, and its manifestations without do not need to come from an enlightened person. Viktrum Gandhi decided to act as a mirror to reflect their inner guru. He allowed his followers to fall deeply in love with their true selves, using him as a totem. That is all an enlightened master can hope to accomplish.

Original Poster,

It seems we're speaking past each other.

I don't at all have a thought that what other gurus are doing is somehow more legitimate than what this particular guru is doing because they have some kind of training or authority or tradition or presumed enlightened state.

I also think that if you find my last few statements objectionable and insulting, then we're not understanding each other. I think you should not ignore them. I mean what I say, and I'm just responding in as straightforward a manner as I can to what I am able to understand from you.

I'll try to explain my point about gurus better using a basketball analogy....Confidence is important for shooting. There are players that believe that every shot they take is going in, because having that confidence improves their chances. A problem with this is that they keep jacking up contested, off-balance mid-range jumpers even when they're 3 of 15 for the night, because it always seems to them that they'll make the next one. Then there are other players who have great confidence in their abilities, but they temper that confidence with a realistic appreciation of what's really going on. They bring their imagination into focus with reality, they don't try to just ride rough-shod over reality, expecting reality to fall in line no matter what they are imagining.

As a closer example, someone on another thread says that the speed of astral projection from the mind is c-squared, and its c-cubed from the heart. It doesn't matter who he is or how much he believes that, he can not make it reality by believing it, because it doesn't make any sense. (If you square a speed its not a speed any more, just like how when you square a distance it becomes an area. Squaring just the value and not the units has no meaning, because the value has no meaning apart from the units. So for instance if you square c in Natural units the value stays the same at 1.) My view is that if you're styling yourself as a guru at all, you're already doing something that doesn't entirely make sense, because there are contradictions built into the very concept of a guru. You get results, but you also get unwanted results that follow from the presence of those contradictions.

As I understand it, the question you asked me amounts to whether believe there is a meaningful distinction to be made between honesty and dishonesty. Pretending is a form of imagination that is at least in part dishonest. If it were entirely honest it wouldn't be pretending, it would be someone attempting to be or do something that they guess to be within their power and succeeding in doing it. The thing that makes it 'pretend' is the disconnect between their story of what's doing on and what is actually going on. That's what that word means. If we pretend to be pirates, we're 'pretending' because we're not really pirates. But if we go hijack some ships and take hostages, then we're not pretending to be pirates, we are pirates, even though we may still pretend to ourselves about what that implies. My view is that almost all if not all gurus are to some degree pretend, though not entirely, and I think that I can defend that view.

You ask "do you believe there is a difference?" Of course I do. How is it unreasonable for me to wonder if you're serious when you, as a self described bullshitter, ask such a question? Particularly in light of our previous long discussion with Sageous about positive thinking? Did you really not know that I believe there is a difference between pretending and being real? Isn't it reasonable for me to want to understand what you're asking before I spend hours trying to answer it?

In regards to awesomeness or lack of awesomeness....A person can not feel the truth of who they are if they can not feel both without shrinking away. And if you can't feel the truth of yourself, then you can't understand what I'm trying to communicate about gurus. Not in a very real way, even if you understand some of the logic of it intellectually while holding it at a distance between your fingertips. This is the nature of the topic we're talking about, it is about identity, about self. So yes, if you're not comfortable with your own un-awesomeness, then I'm pretty sure its a waste of time to converse on such subjects. I'm not making a personal attack here, I am quite un-awesome myself, among other things. I am making personal statements that may be uncomfortable, but again it is the topic that we're discussing that is personal. This reminds me of drone warfare colleagues being all offended by my implication that we might be a bunch of killers. Well if its so offensive to even consider the possibility, maybe we shouldn't be doing what we're doing.

I don't mean to suggest that Kumare doesn't make any valid points, or that you shouldn't be inspired by how well he makes them. With hindsight I should have added such disclaimers up front in a longer post. So I apologize for that. The point I was trying to make remains one that I care very deeply about though.

Mark

(I'd use my real name instead of the pretentious sounding ''shadowofwind' handle, but my first name isn't sufficiently unique, and I'm trying to keep my last name off the board to avoid misrepresentations by half-assed background check companies.)

Do you believe it's possible to offer "energy gifts" or healing blessings or other similar things?

I don't consider imagining or pretending the same as dishonesty - I consider it role-playing. I think you might learn something about yourself. And besides, I really do think theres power in the imagination.

Kumare's imaginary healing techniques is literally no different than any other energy based healing technique. In both, you literally imagine the results.

Originally Posted by juroara

I don't consider imagining or pretending the same as dishonesty

I don't consider those three things to be the same either:

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Pretending is a form of imagination that is at least in part dishonest.

To use my earlier example again, pretending that we're pirates isn't particularly dishonest if we're clear that we're not really pirates. But if we're pretending to be a pirate in a way that we regard to be is essentially the same as being a pirate, that's a somewhat different sort of thing, and is more like what is being discussed here. Even in that case its not dishonest if a person can do it realistically, if a person becomes what they are imagining themselves to be. My contention is that this isn't the whole truth for any guru, that there is always an element of pretense. But that's because of partial fallacies in the thought of what it means to be a guru, not because imagination has no power.

Originally Posted by juroara

And besides, I really do think theres power in the imagination.

I think I was quite clear that I believe there is power in imagination also.

And yet, it is also possible to imagine falsely, to imagine a half-truth which because of a subject's own internal logic can not be a whole-truth. If you don't believe that this distinction is real, or you don't care, then much of your imagination is unavoidably dishonest.

I tried to explain using the basketball analogy, but I guess neither of you saw a useful way to connect that to the subject of gurus.

Originally Posted by juroara

Kumare's imaginary healing techniques is literally no different than any other energy based healing technique.

I haven't said anything to suggest that I think otherwise. In fact, my original comment was to extend that equivalence.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

Do you believe it's possible to offer "energy gifts" or healing blessings or other similar things?

I believe these thoughts do something which isn't entirely different from what people imagine them to do. I don't believe that these thoughts entirely amount to what many people imagine them to be.

As I see it, a lot of this sort of thing should happen naturally as a normal part of human interaction. Once it becomes an activity for teachers or gurus, its already distorted, even if everyone is pretending to be one. Is it a step in the right direction for somebody? No doubt. But that depends on where they started, and what kind of steps they're encouraging or discouraging in others.

Mary Baker Eddy is a classic example of the pitfalls of healing. Was her teaching entirely false? Of course not. Was it right for her to teach that seeking medical treatment is a sin, and then enrich herself receiving payments for 'treatment' of sick, frightened, and often dying followers who turned to her for healing? I call this wrong. Trying to maintain the credibility of her racket by hiding her own illness was wrong too.

I'm not suggesting that Kumare is equivalent to Mary Baker Eddy. I was trying to highlight the way in which this sort of thing goes wrong, and I think that the weakness is present in pretty much all teachings of the power of imagination, even though some are much better than others.

I agree that my way of introducing a thought and explaining it often isn't very clear or helpful.

I am not familiar with Mary Baker Eddy. I do agree that blessing happen, to some extent, through human interaction, but I also believe that both gnosis and roleplay empower such blessings. It is psychologically proven that what you pretend to be, you slowly become. I am not sure what people imagine blessing to be, in your perception, but I do believe that the subtle is transactional, with systems of information constantly influencing each other. I also believe you can use your imagination to change the type of information you encode in others, and their belief about you and seriousness regarding your ability is also conducive for this action.

Now for another question, do you believe that everyone is already enlightened, at present?

Originally Posted by Original Poster

It is psychologically proven that what you pretend to be, you slowly become.

There must be some limits to that though, right? If I pretend that I am someone who has a moral right to reap the rewards of other people's labor, that doesn't make it true, right? If I pretend to be the deserving object of your slavish reverence, that won't slowly happen, will it? So there must be honest limits on what a person pretends. That's all I'm saying.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

Now for another question, do you believe that everyone is already enlightened, at present?

I still don't understand the nature of your questions, whether you really want to know what I think, or if you're trying to slowly become Socrates, or something else, but I'll try to answer....

I doubt the whole premise behind the idea of enlightenment. Certainly remarkable transcendent experiences are possible. But I don't believe any of the dogmatic interpretations of these experiences that I've heard, that they are of the Void, or the True Self, or Purusha, or that they're not really experiences because they transcend what can be experienced, or whatever people say about them. And though these experiences are similar for different people, I don't think they're similar enough that they can be neatly categorized as higher or lower, or True or illusory. I also think the ego death concept is ridiculous, as I have discussed previously. But let's consider the best of such realizations or insights, and call them enlightenment. I don't think we can say that every person is or is not enlightened, because they're not quite a temporal thing like that. The awareness is there all the time, sort of, even when it doesn't seem to be there. Trying to decide whether it is already there or not becomes a tangle of definitions. So I'd say that everyone is enlightened, and that nobody is enlightened, and that some people are enlightened. I don't like the third statement, that some people are enlightened, because its misleading, though certainly some people are at times aware of things that other people at times are not.

Maybe my main trouble with the thought "everyone is already enlightened", is the meaning of the word "everyone" already fails for me in the context of my deeper insights. Identity doesn't seem to me to be static and clear-cut like that, and to me the fluidity and holographic nature of it doesn't make it 'false' or 'illusory'. The word "already" also doesn't quite work for me. There is a context where those words do mostly work, but that's really not the same context where the insight is known, and I don't know the right way to reconcile that if there is one.

An obvious problem with my statements about this, is that I can't possibly know what other people are aware of, and whether my statements make sense for what they are aware of. But I have a fair amount of confidence that my statements are applicable to what many if not most people mean by enlightenment.

Life is a role playing game.

MIND = BLOWN

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

There must be some limits to that though, right? If I pretend that I am someone who has a moral right to reap the rewards of other people's labor, that doesn't make it true, right? If I pretend to be the deserving object of your slavish reverence, that won't slowly happen, will it? So there must be honest limits on what a person pretends. That's all I'm saying.

Right but my whole point is that all a guru is, is someone that serves to reflect the master that already exists within the student. The real guru is within, any guru that claims to do more than point out the guru within is a fake.

I still don't understand the nature of your questions, whether you really want to know what I think, or if you're trying to slowly become Socrates, or something else, but I'll try to answer....

There's no point in having a discussion if first we cannot get on the same page.

I doubt the whole premise behind the idea of enlightenment. Certainly remarkable transcendent experiences are possible. But I don't believe any of the dogmatic interpretations of these experiences that I've heard, that they are of the Void, or the True Self, or Purusha, or that they're not really experiences because they transcend what can be experienced, or whatever people say about them. And though these experiences are similar for different people, I don't think they're similar enough that they can be neatly categorized as higher or lower, or True or illusory. I also think the ego death concept is ridiculous, as I have discussed previously. But let's consider the best of such realizations or insights, and call them enlightenment. I don't think we can say that every person is or is not enlightened, because they're not quite a temporal thing like that. The awareness is there all the time, sort of, even when it doesn't seem to be there. Trying to decide whether it is already there or not becomes a tangle of definitions. So I'd say that everyone is enlightened, and that nobody is enlightened, and that some people are enlightened. I don't like the third statement, that some people are enlightened, because its misleading, though certainly some people are at times aware of things that other people at times are not.

Fair enough, I would more or less agree with this. While ego death does exist to some degree the term is extremely misleading. I would prefer using a term like Clarity.

Maybe my main trouble with the thought "everyone is already enlightened", is the meaning of the word "everyone" already fails for me in the context of my deeper insights. Identity doesn't seem to me to be static and clear-cut like that, and to me the fluidity and holographic nature of it doesn't make it 'false' or 'illusory'. The word "already" also doesn't quite work for me. There is a context where those words do mostly work, but that's really not the same context where the insight is known, and I don't know the right way to reconcile that if there is one.

It's just a statement to reveal my point, which is that teachers can come from surprising places. Perhaps you don't fall into this category, but Kumare is about the people that attempt to gain enlightenment by seeking out the specific people who are enlightened and giving them reverence or following their lineage, and his attempts to help people see past this. Often times, teachers with the reputation of being spiritually ascended or rumored to be Bodhisattva will confide their fears that people will discover they're just normal people doing their best with what they've got, or they'll attempt to cling harder to their egos and their spiritual wisdom, in which case they'll lose touch with True Self. It is the concept of lineage, ordained knowledge, the concept that there's some sort of metaphysical certificate which separates an enlightened master from a normal guy, which Kumare attempts to dissolve.