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I have heard some
people say they find what Maharaji says inspiring.
Actually, even as a premie, I can say that is
something that was never, ever true for me,
although I might have said it sometimes.
When I listened to M, I just tried to turn my
brain off and 'be open,' because if I thought about
what he was saying, it was ridiculous. Amazingly
simplistic and dumb. Because those thoughts
constituted 'doubts' and because Maharaji commanded
me NOT to doubt, I did my best to just let what he
said waft over me with no analysis whatsoever. In
today's premie jargon, I was trying to listen to M
with my 'heart' instead of my 'mind.'
But what he says is really stupid, perhaps mixed
in with some things that are maybe kind of
reasonable. For example, the following is from M
speaking in Rome in June, of this year:
The future does not know about you, and
the past has forgotten you. Precariously, on a thin
rope, you walk. There is not much elbow
room.
Is he trying to say we might die at any time? I
guesso, but I'm not sure. Okay, let's assume that.
What 'elbow room' is he talking about? Then, he
says:
There is no room for error. Your existence
isn't a compensatory body that tries to compensate
for all your mistakes. Life is not a shock
absorber. Life is not a rubber sole on your shoe.
Life is not an elastic band on your pajamas. Life
is none of these things.
What mistakes? What error? What is the
difference between 'existence' and 'life?' What the
fuck is he talking about? So what if life isn't an
elastic band in your pajamas? He makes no sense,
and yet this is what they chose to print in the
Elan Vital online newsletter, supposedly because it
was the most profound statement in his satsang.
Again, I assume he is trying to say you might die
at anytime. Okay, let's assume that. True
statement, but hardly inspiring.
Next, he just drops that discussion and starts
talking about breathing:
You need to begin first by recognizing
this breath. In theory, it should be incredibly
simple for the living to understand the value of
the breath because without that, there would be
nothing. Without that, you would merely turn blue.
Without that, your brain would not function, your
eyes would not function, your ears would not
function, your hands would not function, your heart
would not function, your kidneys would not
function: nothing would function. You would think
that there would be a recognition of its
importance, but there isn’t. Everything else
comes in between - all the concepts, all the ideas,
all the preferences.
Okay, so you need to breathe and it's important.
True, maybe your heart would stop beating if you
weren't breathing, but you would also stop
breathing if your heart stopped beating. That's
just as true.
You also have to have blood flow, a nervous
system, a functioning liver, and a bunch of other
elements of the body or you couldn't breathe
either, at least not for very long, and just like
not being able to breathe, losing your nervous
system, the thing that tells your body to breathe,
would also make it impossible for anything else to
function. So why doesn't M say that first you have
to understand the value of your nervous system, or
brain? Why breathing?
And even if you could breathe, if you didn't
have oxygen, it wouldn't do any good anyway, or if
you had breath but no lungs, or lungs but no
circulatory system so the oxygen could do your body
any good, you wouldn't have life either. Why not
just pick one of those things for what you "need to
understand" the value of?
The point is, why does he pick BREATHING as this
thing YOU NEED TO RECOGNIZE as having profound
importance for 'life' above all else when other
things are equally, and perhaps MORE important?
[I mean, I was taught in first aid in Boy
Scouts that if someone was both not breathing, and
bleeding from an artery, it was MORE important to
stop the bleeding first, because the person would
die sooner from loss of blood than lack of
air.]
Does M do this because he is trying to tie
breath into 'life force' and that to the 'word'
meditation technique (now technique number three)?
If you think about it, it makes no other sense.
And if so, why do you need light, music and
nectar techniques? What are they for if it's the
breath that's important?
I am CONVINCED that the only way people say that
they find M inspiring is because they DON'T
actually listen to what he says. That's why if you
ask a premie to tell you what, in content, Maharaji
said, they are usually unable to tell you, except
maybe for the 'joke' M told, or the general gist of
being reminded of the value of 'life.'
The first time I realized this phenomenon was
when I brought a person whom I respected to see M
for the first time, in about 1981 or so. She was
polite, but after nearly falling asleep while M
rambled on, she told me later that there wasn't any
content in what M said, that it was disjointed, and
made no sense.
I remember thinking at the time that was because
she was listening to the 'words' with her mind
instead of her 'heart' or some such nonsense. Then
I thought about that thought, and I had a major
DRIP.
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