Is Sadhguru a Charlatan?

[Carl-Richard]

6 minutes ago, Sugarcoat said:

I see, but I perceive differences in how much is belief vs connects to experience, also what kind of experiences. One is making claims about inner states, some phenomena (woo woo experience for example), meanwhile the other (religious) is making claims of having personal relationship to the absolute highest being of reality (God).

Mysticism vs theism (they're not mutually exclusive but still distinctions).

 

7 minutes ago, Sugarcoat said:

Also difference in how it's emphasized, religious people emphasize the importance of belief, even more so than experience, meanwhile New Age at least focuses more on experiences, living it, even if many can still end up quite dogmatic about it.

Definitely in Christianity. Faith, hope, etc. (and submission in Islam). It's a product of the Axial revolution (the evolution from a circular to a linear/transcendent worldview). You see it less in Hinduism. And nature religions that predate Christianity (e.g. Norse paganism). But it's all religion.

 

18 minutes ago, Sugarcoat said:

Doubt may be common amongst religious people, but it doesn't seem embraced as much as in New Age, as in "questioning" is not seen as valuable, that's a stark difference in cognitive development for me (at large, ofc much ego everywhere, yes even in the most simple non duality sphere). 

Yes, there is a difference in cognitive development (or at least the cultural code associated with it), hence Blue vs Green. Conformism is stronger at Blue than Green. But there is still conformism, community, belief in Green and any cultural code. It's not a hard line. A category like "religion" vs not religion, you would want a hard line somewhere, a definition. A new-ager has faith and hope in awakening being real and possible, even if they're not currently awake or is yet to experience it, even despite hardship.

[eos_nyxia]

These type of conversations have always tended to confuse me, assuming that it's even intended to be a productive endeavor of sense-making. 

Can you not just look at person, look at their words and body language, and see what they're about? Like SEE, as in, feel it with your intuition? Do you not feel it in your gut/ body? Can you not see it in people's eyes what they're feeling, what they're projecting, and where they're coming from? Even what they might likely be hiding (or not hiding)?

Can you not also see if your own motives in reading another person are impure? Suspect?

Why the need for back and forth debating about their surface presentations and making that the central point of deciding validity, like a game of ping pong in your head against yourself? Y'all can see it's not going to lead to anything worthwhile and conclusive other than whatever your mind is already currently leaning toward, and that it just leads to more of not knowing and the same type of thinking process?

Likewise, if I tell you this person is legit and then give you a bunch of reasons why, is this actually what you're looking for, is it actually helpful? 

 

Also, can you see a person beyond being a genre of person raised in a certain way, with a certain tradition, with a certain accumulated manner of thinking of speaking?

[eos_nyxia]

If you're connected to Source and can see yourself clearly, there's nothing stopping you from witnessing the truth of another being's connection to Source in equal clarity and the truth of how they manifest in form, even if it's just the outline of them, or like... a summary version of them. All that is left behind and which is not accounted for is what people hide, whether it's unintentionally or it's because they didn't want it to be seen (and they actually did manage to hide it). 

Theoretically, this is true. None of this information is off limits. Literally nothing and no one can stop you, except for in whatever ways you yourself are limited. For whatever ways you believe yourself to be limited.

So literally just go do that, if you are capable.

What's the point of being skeptical (which so often involves believing that you have the means to acertain truth for yourself) but also believing in God and potentially supernatural means (assuming that if you're here you're willing to give traditional yoga the benefit of the doubt instead of throwing out all but the most sterile, practical, easy-to-justify stuff), but then either not believing or knowing truly for yourself if it is possible or not bothering to try to learn if there is an alternative?

Only using the habitual aspects of conscious observation leads to the kind of limited, insular worldview and experience set mostly everyone else has. 

Narrow lens, narrow worldview.

 

Edited 17 hours ago by eos_nyxia

[Breakingthewall]

9 hours ago, Sugarcoat said:

could make more specific points, but I am a bit baffled ngl that you seem to consider average New Age person almost equivalent to average religious person; mostly thinking christianity and islam as that's what we encounter here in west. And I have barely even met any "New Age" people. 

The difference is total since religious people is closed minded, absolutely closed to any new ifea. and new age are open minded, open to new ideas. The problem is that human mind needs certainty, knowing exactly how things are, then the mind always create a frame, and in that frame everything has a cause, a reason .

Human mind collapse without cause, and the absolute that new age people are looking for is causeless, there is no reason for reality, reality exists, and thats it, so if they want to open themselves to what reality is they should open themselves to the absolute absence of structure (because they want direct experience of the reality), but for that purpose they create structures, and that makes them appearing as crazy, disfunctional.

Religious people need a jail and they have one, new age people need freedom and they haven't it

Edited 16 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

The difference is total since religious people is closed minded, absolutely closed to any new ifea. and new age are open minded, open to new ideas.

New Age are (typically) closed to many elements of traditional religiosity, like the institutional and more tightly communal aspects. Hence New Age is the religion of cults. Propose to a New Ager the idea that religion in the institutional and widespread sense might be good, even for achieving their own goals, and they'll not take you seriously. The individualistic dogma is strong.

Edited 14 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Breakingthewall]

3 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

New Age are (typically) closed to many elements of traditional religiosity, like the institutional and more tightly communal aspects. Hence New Age is the religion of cults. Propose to a New Ager the idea that religion in the institutional and widespread sense might be good, even for achieving their own goals, and they'll not take you seriously.

Well they could accept the Sufis or Christian mysticism that are part of the religions

[Carl-Richard]

6 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Well they could accept the Sufis or Christian mysticism that are part of the religions

But not the priests or rulebooks for disseminating the teachings and to whom. They want to be in charge and open-source everything, even if it leads them to losing an eye (even a third eye).

Edited 14 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

On 9.11.2026 at 7:00 PM, Carl-Richard said:

Had he called himself religious (which he doesn't), he would be like a Rupert Sheldrake. He has a soft-spot for Christianity, he calls himself a Christian, he calls himself religious, but he has New Age roots and cognition. There is like a "dumb" kind of New Ager (the one who thinks New Age is not a religion) and the ones who think it is a religion. The dumbness just makes it obvious that they are New Age, but if your background is obviously postmodern, post-rational, atheist, individualist, even hippie, you'll also be New Age.

Actually, I'm creating a new category for this: post-New-Ager. It's when you're New Age compatible but you realize 1. you're religious, 2. current religious institutions are stale but religious institutions in and of themselves are necessary, and 3. the problem with current institutions isn't as much "it's religion" as it is dogmatism.

Call it a "transcend-and-include" of New Age and traditional religion, a step from Green to Yellow if you wish. The Green New Agers exclude traditional religion, that's what makes them "Tier 1".

Examples of post-New-Agers: Rupert Sheldrake, John Vervaeke, myself, Bernardo Kastrup also I seem to recall.

Edited 11 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Hence New Age is the religion of cults.

Religions are literally cults.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Religions are literally cults.

If it's mainstream and society-compatible, it ain't a cult. It's culture.

The reason why scholars don't like the term "New Age" as describing a unified thing or movement ("the New Age movement") is because it's a collection of cults. They're so heterogeneous, lacking in a central orienting doctrine.

New Age cults happen when a charismatic leader is like "we don't need those religions, we just need ourselves and our own insights into what is true" and then people ironically gather around that leader and listen to their thoughts because they of course need religion, they just don't want the current ones.

Edited 11 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[hyruga]

Sadhguru is not just good with words. He's also an active leader who builds meditation centre and organize many events like 'Save Soil', 'Rally for Rivers'.

Absolutely amazing guy. Another guy is Tony Robbins. He has fed millions of people through his 'Feed America' program. Someone who walks the talk. He has fed millions and have any of us ever fed 1% of what he does? Let say feed 10000 people. Let's reduce it to 0.01%. have we fed 100 people?

[eos_nyxia]

3 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

If it's mainstream and society-compatible, it ain't a cult. It's culture.

The reason why scholars don't like the term "New Age" as describing a unified thing or movement ("the New Age movement") is because it's a collection of cults. They're so heterogeneous, lacking in a central orienting doctrine.

New Age cults happen when a charismatic leader is like "we don't need those religions, we just need ourselves and our own insights into what is true" and then people ironically gather around that leader and listen to their thoughts because they of course need religion, they just don't want the current ones.

Sometimes it is very helpful to know the origin of certain terms. Granted, you can also use the term however you want -- language is flexible enough in that way and adapts with shifting human usage (whether people want it to or not).

The pejorative use of the word "cult" is quite recent, and only started to exist within the last two hundred years or so. It's a product of Victorian thinking through and through (specifically how they thought of "the primitives"), but even then, the traditional use of the world "cult" had a more neutral usage which referred to any religious system or devotional practice. It started to take on connotations of dogmatic, untrustworthy fringe groups of a smaller size more and more into the 20th century. The current use of the word "cult" as an actively sinister group was only really popularized in the 1970s due to Jonestown, Hare Krisha, etc.  

In ancient studies, "cults" in the academic sense still refers almost exclusively to any specialized religious system. For example: the Cult of Isis, the Cult of Dionysus, etc. There is nothing really pejorative about it at all. In Catholic theology... I'm pretty sure they literally still sometimes call it the "Cult of Mary", even if no one calls it that in the vernacular/ IRL.

I tend to see it all as one cyclical process, once it's been kicked off:

1. Forming "cults" from "nothing" (or more accurately, "shamanistic" types of early religion). 
2. These early cults/ religions becoming more complex, more rigid in their structures with the claim of a central, absolute, divine authority, most often with a corresponding human proxy (the ruler), forming the start of orthodoxy  (what we would call a religion proper)
3. Having various cults splinter off from the main group. (i.e. the Cult of Isis, as mentioned above)
4. Having these cults interact with and inevitably influence each other, often by merging similarities (ancient syncretism, many of these early religions likely shared similar roots in Proto Indo European religion, so it could be looked at as a re-merging of sorts).
5. Eventually uniting into larger, monolithic orthodoxies, often conveniently involving various political motivations (e.g. the formation of the Nicene Creed, for Christianity), all because a bunch of people wanted to do things their own way, so they challenged the religious system and the rule of law (one was inevitably tied to the other in ancient times)   (e.g. Arianism and the many sects that originally got persecuted as a result of the Nicene Creed)
6. People disagreeing and killing each other (becoming inquisitors) and sometimes themselves (becoming martyrs)  over these disagreements  (>insert reference to a bunch of Christian saints that I don't care to remember because Church history is mind-numbingly boring<) 
7. re-establishing orthodoxy (the medieval Catholic church)
8. more splintering over disagreements (e.g. Luther and Protestantism), some conveniently political (Anglicism and Henry VIII making a whole-ass new church because he wanted to fuck and marry freely without the Catholic Church breathing on him about his pious Catholic first wife)

 Rinse and repeat enough times until said religious institution becomes old and decrepit and everyone who knew what made the original religion compelling and vital in the first place died a very, very long time ago. And then people want fresh blood and inspiration, not old decrepit blood and the same recycled ideas and symbols from an earlier time period in human history. (Most of those symbols arguably live on in public consciousness only because we keep recycling them.)

I mean, no matter where you are and what time period you're in, there's always something which fulfills the role of the "New Age".

 

 

Edited 8 hours ago by eos_nyxia

[OBEler]

21 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

A good teacher must be able to.explain away that this is a dream. Not to just introduce idealism over materialism but to understand that it is not made of atoms.  Leo's quantum mechanics videos debunking materialism are absolutely priceless.  So advanced course or no I dont think he would he able to match that 

Have you ever watched a video of Sadghuru, he always says publicy life is a dream.

 

[Breakingthewall]

7 hours ago, hyruga said:

He's also an active leader who builds meditation centre and organize many events like 'Save Soil', 'Rally for Rivers'.

Absolutely amazing guy.

Sure, but maybe he doesn't to gain popularity, that is power. Then he's not so amazing, he's a politician.

[kavaris]

Yas got me thinkin bout something thats called like "the common point of realization" like ...

It started with an interesting sorta ques., for example: for those people that worship a teacher or god or anyone for that matter, suppose you are dating somebody and they too worship the same entity or person, and then suppose you were to do something, but one of yous blamed god... is that a legal move in that relationship? E.g., "something happened, i dont know how, but nevertheless, it was gods doing"?

Cause i was wondering like, can you not just blame things on the highest deity, or on the flipside, if you are the person responsible for everything, then now, anything that goes wrong is something of your own doing. Like, no matter what... you are always tryina not have it go wrong for ya... but how can someone know whats considered right if they never had things go wrong? Yous know what im tryina say?

Like "Im scared things will go wrong", for instance. But wait... If i dont know whats considered right, then i dont know whats considered wrong either, except for a few degrees around my little circle... And i might not know what anything even is in life, like at all... and anything that i do know is more like, "the common point of realization". Does that make sense?

[kavaris]

P.s. i should add, that when i say "it started w an interesting question", thats not like some alternate art group and me conversating away, thats jus me inventing a world of lies, and then simulating it and tryina pick it apart, such that it fits as like a circle of logic that makes sense... So if theres holes that you wanna poke inside of it for fun, go ahead, as like... its not a real experience, its a fantasy for philoso-fizing and for really crunching the circles so you can feel it out, to see it as being true or not ~ Which is always got degrees of,  to weigh on the scale.

[Carl-Richard]

5 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

In ancient studies, "cults" in the academic sense still refers almost exclusively to any specialized religious system. For example: the Cult of Isis, the Cult of Dionysus, etc. There is nothing really pejorative about it at all. In Catholic theology... I'm pretty sure they literally still sometimes call it the "Cult of Mary", even if no one calls it that in the vernacular/ IRL.

I don't treat is a perjorative. I use it to mean a small group with weird/divergent (usually religious) beliefs relative to the larger society. It's Leo who picked up the perjorative definition from sensationalist authors who found a niche for selling books that people think are interesting "those scary and dangerous cults that manipulate you and steal your life".

Cults in my and the academics who taught it to me 's definition don't identify with a larger mainstream religion; they don't treat themselves as a denomination or "the real take" on a certain World religion. They're more idiosyncratic and syncretic, because they're usually New Age, usually the product of a single charismatic individual and their machinations. And if they do, they're a sect.

 

5 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

Rinse and repeat enough times until said religious institution becomes old and decrepit and everyone who knew what made the original religion compelling and vital in the first place died a very, very long time ago. And then people want fresh blood and inspiration, not old decrepit blood and the same recycled ideas and symbols from an earlier time period in human history. (Most of those symbols arguably live on in public consciousness only because we keep recycling them.)

I mean, no matter where you are and what time period you're in, there's always something which fulfills the role of the "New Age".

That's an interesting historical interpretation. Where did you learn about it? I guess the "New Age proper" is a magnified version of this process because the Death of God was widespread as a cultural phenomena and the religious critique became more severe and widespread.

Edited 2 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Inliytened1]

4 hours ago, OBEler said:

Have you ever watched a video of Sadghuru, he always says publicy life is a dream.

 

Cool. 8 or 9 year olds would ask these questions? Surprising 😀 would they really understand what they are asking. I've never seen kids in America ask this. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Inliytened1