Disciple of Kumare and Dental Torture Part II

socko · Mar 22, 2013

I'm goign to check out Kumare.... It sounds like it may have some things in common with my childhood. Both of my parents were into dopey New Age religious cults. Even my grandmother was. I can't remember her position, but she worked in some sort of capacity at a "Lodge" or local (Boca Raton or near there, I think) headquarters for AMORC, a Rosicrucian group.

AMORC is a fly-by-night New Age outfit that at that time was headed by an old man who looks like Marlin Perkins. AMORC blends together tiny, badly misinterpreted and out-of-context "mystical" fragments of Christianity with Hellenistic folk magic and mysticism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Kabalah, with "secret teachings" from fragments of manuscripts that were rescued from the long lost Rosicrician Archives in the "Great Library" on Atlantis by Atlantean survivors. Or was it Lemuria ... Their story goes on to claim that survivors settled in ancient Egypt and formed a secret society headed by a Pharaoh at one point whose mission was to preserve and pass down the core manuscripts and teachings. At some point, they went underground to escape persecution and planned to re-emerge when society was ready for them. They survived underground, sometimes dormant, sometimes active, but in relatively unbroken succession over the millenea until they resurfaced/reincarnated around the turn of the last century, according to their own publications, in their present form, Rosicrucian Order. Anyway, I think that's a fairly common claim for 19th and 20th century New Age groups just as it is for trashy fiction books today . I'm still trying to get that BS out of my system.

On the CEP yoga thread, I had asked s.thing, but I guess it got lost:

Without having read the yoga article (like anybody on here actually reads the articles before posting in a thread) , I take it that a parents group is trying to put a stop to a yoga class being taught at a public school. The grounds for this is that Yoga is a religious practice and that teaching it is a violation of the separation between church and state.

I don't practice yoga, but I do practice some of the stretches combined with the breathing which is necessary to perform certain stretches correctly. I do this for health purposes. I don't do the formal poses or asanas.

Also, it's hard to see a religious significance in many of the formal poses, especially those in the ubiquitous physical style known as Hatha yoga, for example. Hatha yoga is often taught as a sequence of poses with breathing. Depending on the instructor, it may be taught here to Americans with no prayer, visualization, mantras, etc. On the other extreme, one can enroll in a Kundalini Yoga course at the Golden Temple and have a completely different yoga experience. There, Guru Khalsa would teach you a form of yoga that heavily emphasizes the mystical and religious aspect.

My questions are for you (probably the only person on there) who opposes it being taught at school:
1) Where does one draw the line for yoga being a violation of the separation between church and state?
2) For example, are the formal poses OK by themselves (without Sanskrit terminology, without mantras, without visualization, prayers, etc.)?
3) What about when combined with the visualization exercises? I understand that visualization helps relaxation.
4) meditation techniques, if they are not combined with any eastern religious elements or New Age stuff?
5) Would the only acceptable way be to whittle it down to the stretches and breathing, even to the point of eliminating most or all of the formal asanas?

Yoga is very popular, and some people will always want to teach it in public schools. This will keep coming up.

Sorry if this has already been covered, but there are nearly 100 posts to dig through and I might have missed it.

Interested in other research studies? Find more drug studies.

rachamim · Mar 29, 2013

Man that must be rough having your family into some wacky cult but at least you were able to see through it and distance yourself. How were you able to do that?

I think that it is a part of the human condition to want to belong to a select group who has the edge on everyone around them. There is a feeling of smugness when you believe you and your little group have esoteric knowledge. It is an ego trip. The funny thing to me is how people trip out over Ancient Egypt.

Egyptians had a unique perspective, highly evolved rituals, gorgeous architecture but they were nothing at all as most imagine them. It was common for young men to rape dead bodies of women, common enough so that the well to do let their womenfolk rot sufficiently before embalming/mummification. Even the aristocracy walked outside barefoot and in that part of the world that means their feet would be filthy. If you lived to age 40 you were elderly and on and on and on. Yet everyone is fascinated by Egypt.

On your questions regarding Yoga...In most- almost all- religions a full understanding of ritual is far less important than the ritual itself. For example, in Islam Qur'an Recitation is taught to Muslims all over the world, so that they learn to read Arabic but have absolutely no understanding of it. The idea is that the words, even if never understood by the person reciting them, please Allah and serve as an act of worship. With Tibetan Buddhists the idea of Prayer Flags and Prayer Wheels are the same thing. Put a prayer on a wooden wheel and place it in a stream and each cycle of the will betters your karma even if you never think of that wheel again. So, with Yoga you have physical poses and breathing techniques that are perceived by Hindus to be a form of worship in and of themselves.

With the school in California, its Yoga Programme was created AND implemented by a New Age Hindu group whose chief stated aim is to propagate certain Hindu teachings. The counter-argument in the thread was that IF the Yoga Instructor removes religious context, such as instructing children in Breathing Techniques WITHOUT explaining to those children how those Breathing Techniques serve a religious idea it is acceptable. My view, aside from not trusting a religious organisation which teaches rituals but promises not to explain them, is that I would not want a Capuchin Monk teaching my child how to make the sign of the cross or move Roasry Beads EVEN IF he omitted the theological discussion behind it. Physical Ritual equals Worship.

The Seperation of Church and State comes into play because it is a public school (in the American sense since "public school" has the opposite definition in Britain for example). If I want my children to have religious educations I can send them to religious schools. IF I send them to public school I want to deal with religion on my own terms- my view being that religion has absolutely no place in public life. It belongs only in the home or houses of worship.

In Question #2 you ask if there are poses that are OK, that do not constitute physical acts of worship. Technically speaking, yes. There are Westerners who have developed their own Poses and Techniques but whether or not it is truly divorced from religious ideology, only the person developing knows the answer and I would not entrust my child to an unknown quotient. There are other ways to stretch your body and maximise your breathing. Yoga doesn't serve as the only avenue and with the lines often being hazy I personally feel its better to eschew as much as possible...or, develop your own Poses and Techniques.

Question #3, Visualisation, it is used in many modes of behavior and isn't at all unique to Yoga so it is fine.

Question #4, Meditation, it s always rooted in religion (Jews use it to). In the IDF they taught us a great way in which to achieve similar results in a combination of physical and mental exercises totally devoid of any spiritual baggage. Starting with your toes, tighten each muscle group and hold, adding groups as you sequentially move up the body, by the time you reach your neck you hold for 10 seconds then release only the neck, move sequentially (back) down the body releasing just 1 group at a time until you end up back with your toes. That alone will make your body feel like it is floating. If you combine Visualisation and Controlled Breathing you can gain comprable results to Meditation. We used to do it as we rode out on raids, to avoid feeding off of each others' fear and adrenaline. Works great.

Question #5, regarding elimination of Asanas, yes for sure they constitute an act of worship.

socko · Apr 2, 2013

I'm not sure what did me more harm: that my parents were into dopey cultish crap -- it alternated between New Age stuff and weird forms of Fundamentalist Christianity; or the fact that they were already fscked up people and their devotion to anything New Age was just the tip of their iceberg of Crazy. Anyway, they were unqualified to care for children for many reasons and shouldn't have been allowed to have custody. At the same time, that creepy sense of isolating superiority you mentioned that comes from being a part of something elite and on the cutting edge was always there and made the situation even more isolating. My childhood makes the Jerry Springer Show (an afternoon TV talk show about freakish families) look like "Leave it to Beaver." But that's a long story.

Either way, it sucked, and I'm not sure I have yet to fully see through it and even begin to undo the damage.

When I was a kid, when I was old enough to think about it, my parents lost credibility with me. A sanity check was something along the lines of "if this stuff really works, why do we still live in a filthy hovel below the poverty line even though my parents were regularly performing expensive New Age "prosperity rituals" guaranteed to work and spending another large chunk of their monthly government "disability" check on lottery tickets (when they should have been buying nutritious food)? Or how come everybody isn't doing this stuff? Or how come people who do this stuff don't rule the world? Or if this stuff is real, why don't they open up their Secret Archives and show it to the world?" But that was never enough to properly see through it. That was only seeing that 1 or 2 things were wrong but always missing the big picture.

As you can imagine they had a grocery list of ready answers. My parents would have claimed the Illuminati did indeed rule. Or it was being covered up. Or more recently, my mother discovered David Icke or whatever his name is. You mentioned him earlier. She believes Reptilians from the constellation Draco have aligned themselves with the Illuminati and something she calls the "Bilderbergers" (I have no idea) and are controlling the world's governments. Last time I spoke to her, she was spending $1000s on mail order "magic potions," "magic candles," and "spell books" among other things.

Getting an education helped. I also met up with an atheist student group while I was in college. Several other students there had similar backgrounds and were recovering from being raised in cultish Fundamentalist Christian churches and other things.

In college, I was still trying to see if there was anything to ESP. New Age groups claim they can teach their devoted followers to develop psychic skills. So I took a college class in parapsychology. Some major universities in the US had labs devoted to studying it not long ago. Occasionally somebody would report an interesting finding, but over the decades nothing convincing came out of those studies. After carefully analyzing their data and eliminating studies that had flawed methodology, nobody has gotten reproducible and statistically significant positive results on ESP research.

But I'm still interested in meditation/visualization/breathing techniques for relaxation, concentration, and health purposes.

Also distance helped. My father chain-smoked and drank himself to death so he is out of the picture, and I have cut off contact with my mother.

Your viewpoint on the yoga questions is reasonable, and I agree with you on the separation of Church and State.

On Egyptian aristocracy going barefoot, that's one thing I dig. Going barefoot feels good. I got into the habit when I was a child because I didn't have comfortable shoes. So to this day, I go barefoot as much as I can. My feet get so filthy that not even a pumice stone gets the black off. The dirt has to wear off i nthe winter when I am forced to wear shoes all the time. I can't last more than a few minutes barefoot in the snow.

rachamim · Apr 3, 2013

I always have been interested in cults, both because of the power linked to charismatic alpha-type personalities as well as how sane, intelligent adults fall into such traps. It really sucks that your parents dragged you through that crap. Many have noted that while one needs to get a liscence to drive an automobile anyone can bring children into this world without the slightesr training or oversight. On the other hand, in America, anyone can have their child taken away just by anonymously reporting a spanking or Heaven forbid sexual misconduct.

I ended up having 3 kids in the US but I would not do so today. I think it is one of the worst possible place to raise kids. Values are screwy, contradictory, just too many pitfalls for kids and for parents.

I also find myself interested in children who despite having terrible parents still manage to not only overcome such adversity but even manage to triumph. Look at you. You have managed to overcome so much and have ended up I believe, fairly well. There was a couple in the Bronx, that I knew years ago. Irish, junkies and alcoholics, who kept popping out kid after kid. The eldest a girl, not only never even smoked cannabis, she was a straight-A student who ended up I believe at Harvard (might have been Yale) on full academic scholarship. Some cable channel made a semi-fictionalised movie about her, though I never got to see it.

On ESP, well the brain is amazing. Idiot Savants? True Photographic Memoury? Synathesia? Noone can possibly guess what the brain is capable of. I never bought into ESP. Uri Geller is Israeli and up until I was 18 or 19 Israel had a single channel that was only on for like 8 hours a day (I often wish it would revert to that system) and Geller was often a guest though noone that I knew took it seriously, bending forks and what not.

On being barefoot, the bottom of me feet are like rocks, hard like stones from marching, the joys of infantry life. However, I'm not big on barefeet, always afraid of burrowing parasites in tropical areas. One great thing about the Philippines is that everyone wears "flip flops" everywhere so that is about as exposed as my feet get.

I can't believe your mum takes stock in David Icke. He is truly a loon. You ever read his shit or watch his videos? That clown is as Anti Semitic as it gets though he does make an effort to seperate Jews into "bad" (Zionist) and "good" categories (mostly a ruse). Most of that "shadow world" bullshit is about Jews controlling the media, entertainment, banks and political systems. If that were at all true there would be no way David Icke and others like him could ever get their "message" out. Such a weird world.

socko · Apr 13, 2013

My brother is the one who is doing really well. He's a particle physicist at CERN and has a bright future before him. I, on the other hand, am struggling. I had a full scholarship only for my last three years of college (undergraduate). My first year was paid for by need-based financial aid (which I am grateful for). And now I struggle as a temporary Junior faculty member (actually glorified postdoc - the limbo between postdoc and independent assistant prof or whatever the title is for full faculty) bouncing around the fields of Cognitive Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Biophysics, Molecular Biology and more projects and can't think of at the moment. I feel as though I've been playing "catch-up" all this time.

But I'm doing as well as one might reasonably expect given the funding situation for my field of study, but sadly my contract is nearly finished. Thanks to the current economic climate and inept/nepotistic administration at the NIH among other things that depress me when I think about them, and finally the "sequester," there is no hope of finding the money to continue here.

In academia, unless you are already tenured, your future is bleak (unless you're like my brother and have a 212 (jk) IQ). Labs all around me are losing their funding or having it severely reduced. I doubt that I will ever find work again in this country in my field. Not that I am dead set against working overseas, but science funding in the rest of the world isn't so good either.

Spoon Bender -- My parents loved him. They bought the whole act.

DAvid Icke -- I heard him on the radio once and I might have read a wikipedia page about him. I don't know anything else besides that.. It sounds like the kind of racism that seems common for that generation (Baby Boomers) -- dividing an ethnic group into the "bad" and "good" categories. "There are good [ethnics] and bad [ethnics]. Those are the ones that do [stereotype behavior], and they're what you call them [racial slur]s." I would guess that my mother just ignored the racist part because she was so used to racism. Her mother hated Jews. Her mother hated my father whose mother (the Rosicrucian) was Jewish. But my Jewish grandmother, having been adopted at a young age and raised by Christians, didn't know anything about her background. But having rambled on about all of that (I've spent the past several hours working on a stock market simulator project and I'm getting loopy), I don't know.