Inside Mooji's Cult

[Leo Gura]

37 minutes ago, whoareyou said:

@Leo Gura , still waiting for you to address this. This thread has been spammed, so would like for you to be able to see this.

Those are serious allegations, IF true.

But I have no idea who this woman is or if she is being accurate, or if she is somehow disgruntled.

Again, the only way to adjudicate this matter is to dig into all the details and see it for yourself. I am not in the business of doing that. All I do is make general meta points about how cults work, so people are armed with the best wisdom possible.

One of my top values with Actualized.org from day one is independence. I strongly discourage my students from worshiping anyone or being loyal to any one teacher or teaching, including myself. This should be obvious from the body of my work.

From what I can intuit, there probably ARE some cult-like activities happening in Mooji's community. How bad it is, I have no idea. But none of this changes his status of being awakened in my book. To what degree he is awake is hard to say. In the end it doesn't really matter to me because I don't hinge anything on it.

People who worship him are fools. Women who sleep with him and expect something from it other than sex, are also fools. To me this is so obvious it doesn't even require saying. But I certainly understand how young naive spiritual seekers can get suckered into it.

But also keep in mind that if a spiritual teacher is doing his job right, there will be plenty of people who hate him and spread totally fictious rumors about him.

People make shit up about me all the time. It's quite shocking to see totally false stuff written about you. I've seen it and it always baffles me. That's because the ego-mind finds very creative ways to deny truth, often attacking the messenger. It cannot be otherwise. Ignorance cannot help being ignorant.

Both of these things can be true simutaneously.

As a general rule of thumb: be very careful about joining any ashram. They are notoriously cult-like in various ways because no one there has bothered to study cult dynamics. To be awake does not mean you automatically understand cult dynamics.

[Chi_]

@Leo Gura What is your opinion on the Ashram of Sadhguru? The Isha Foundation.

Is it a real cult from a cult dynamic perspective? 

Edited June 9, 2019 by Chi_

[Leo Gura]

32 minutes ago, Chi_ said:

@Leo Gura What is your opinion on the Ashram of Sadhguru? The Isha Foundation.

Is it a real cult from a cult dynamic perspective? 

I have very little info about it.

It seems like a decent spiritual community. Keep in mind that any community will be somewhat cult-like. But I don't think Isha is too bad. Although I don't know. The trick with real cults is that they hide their activities behind fake pleasant fronts. But from what I can sense about Sadhguru he is too responsible to allow Isha to be a proper cult. I don't think he would stand for it. After Sadhguru dies, then I would expect some serious problems to hit Isha as his followers wrestle for power with no authoritative voice like Sadhguru to guide them.

The problem with building large organizations is that once the founder dies, it will easily get co-opted by devils and turned into a machine for devilry. That's one of the reasons I keep Actualized.org small.

[Chi_]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I have very little info about it.

It seems like a decent spiritual community. Keep in mind that any community will be somewhat cult-like. But I don't think there's is too bad. Although I don't know. The trick with real cults is that they hide their activities behind fake pleasant fronts. But from what I can sense about Sadhguru he is too responsible to allow Isha to be a proper cult. I don't think he would stand for it. After Sadhguru dies, then I would expect some serious problems to hit Isha as his followers wrestle for power with no authoritative voice like Sadhguru to guide them.

Yeah I've had a very hard time trying to find any cult like characteristics in Isha as well and I think most of that credit goes to Sadhguru. However even his Ashram has had major criticism back in the day(due to the mahasamadhi of his wife) and I'm not surprised Mooji also gets criticised, however the former is due to lack of spiritual understanding. 

I wanted to know as I was planning to join the Isha Ashram for a while for a volunteering program. Thank you. 

 

[Leo Gura]

19 minutes ago, Chi_ said:

I wanted to know as I was planning to join the Isha Ashram for a while for a volunteering program. Thank you. 

Before you join anywhere, visit it, stay a while, explore the grounds, and ask people questions.

[Chi_]

3 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Before you join anywhere, visit it, stay a while, explore the grounds, and ask people questions.

True, I was actually given the same advice from the Isha Ashram itself before joining. Will consider this 

[legendary]

On 08/06/2019 at 4:57 PM, kieranperez said:

@legendary an exorcism is the exorcism of the ego. The ego, character, self permeates your entire energetic, psychic, and bodily system. It manifest in your adopted and habitual holding pattern. Your habitual emoting pattern. Your habitual emotional patterns. Your habitual thinking patterns. Your habitual perceptive patterns. So on and so forth.

So when you see an exorcism happening “out there” and you writhing, rolling on the ground, speaking in tongues, etc. that’s actually the self trying to survive and resist surrender. Or you can see it as the process of breaking up the self and those are the reactions. You’re bringing up all the stuff that have been repressed, denied, etc. in your psychology but that manifest in the body becaue the body (including brain) are very much (yet not entirely of course) manifestations of one’s psychology. 

It’s kinda like a deep tissue massage on muscle tissue that’s so matted down, has deep knots, doesn’t have much slide and glide, no suppleness, etc. and then you go on a foam roller or have the hands of a masseuse break up those tissues. Brings in more bloodflow, separates the tissues, etc. which is all well and good but it also hurts like hell. 

In the case of an “exorcism” it quite literally feels like hell.

It does feel like hell. Thanks, @kieranperez for those insights.

On 08/06/2019 at 5:24 PM, abrakamowse said:

@kieranperez @legendary  I had one psychotic episode long time ago. I was completely acting all my thoughts. I was really what a psychiatrist would catalog as paranoid or plain crazy lol...

I said a lot of things that were really true, but I was like yelling, acting crazy and my wife told me that when I talked to her and my daughter my face looked really like the devil.

I think the problem is when you don't have any reference in the community about that ego self defense, you can not ground your experience and you are not ready for an ego backslash. IMO.

Watch this video on youtube, it helped me a lot to ground myself on reality and to incorporate spiritual experiences much better than before.

 

 

@abrakamowse very insightful. Thanks for sharing.

 

On 08/06/2019 at 4:42 PM, Preetom said:

Just Maya punishing you for trying to escape the matrix 

lol

[abrakamowse]

@legendary You are welcome!

[luismatos]

I've hugged Mooji and met him in Satsang multiple times 2 years ago. I think he's a wonderful dude. I don't believe he's enlightened. Yes, he seems to have some experience and wisdom. But if you want to get enlightened following his teachings, good luck. I don't believe he experiences Nirvana, Emptiness, Nothingness or Infinity. The core of the teaching is stay in your stillness prior to thought, but a LOT of spiritual talk is added on top. How you are the One, Inimaginable, Unfathomable. I spent lots of time reading this and thinking I was somehow advancing. More Sadhana showed me my delusions and how susceptible I was. I will read @Leo Gura books on cult-dynamics because it seems I'm young and very susceptible to getting brainwashed.

Edited June 10, 2019 by luismatos

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, luismatos said:

How you are the One, Inimaginable, Unfathomable

Well that is definitely true.

Not sure why this would make you doubt his enlightenment.

Keep in mind, people can talk about the same things in different ways.

[Joseph Maynor]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

Keep in mind, people can talk about the same things in different ways.

So true.  Two very different solutions can bring about the very same fix.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Joseph Maynor

[luismatos]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Well that is definitely true.

Not sure why this would make you doubt his enlightenment.

Keep in mind, people can talk about the same things in different ways.

I doubt his enlightenment because of the lack of embodiment. If bliss is not pouring out of his face, what good is this enlightenment thing anyways?

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, luismatos said:

I doubt his enlightenment because of the lack of embodiment. If bliss is not pouring out of his face, what good is this enlightenment thing anyways?

Full bliss? Lol

You expect an enlightened master to always be bubbly for you? You will be disappointed.

Enlightenment is not limited to any one emotional state. Most enlightened masters look so ordinary and normal that you would never know they were enlightened, like a cat sitting on a windowsill. It does not need to satisfy any of your expectations. It's just sitting and being.

[luismatos]

3 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Full bliss? Lol

You expect an enlightened master to always be bubbly for you? You will disappointed.

Enlightenment is not limited to any one emotional state.

Sadhguru is always bubbly  But seriously now, how do you know then? My thumb of rule is always to look at their aura, and whether my intuition pulls me in our out.

Edited June 10, 2019 by luismatos

[Leo Gura]

Just now, luismatos said:

Sadhguru is always bubbly  

No he isn't.

[luismatos]

@Leo Gura But you can clearly see that Sadhguru has a much deeper enlightenment than Mooji.

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, luismatos said:

@Leo Gura But you can clearly see that Sadhguru has a much deeper enlightenment than Mooji.

That may very well be true. But that does not negate Mooji's enlightenment.

[SriBhagwanYogi]

@luismatos Yoga is more advanced in purging whole body mybe because of that

[Preetom]

@Leo Gura

What do you consider as the most basic, entry level enlightenment, without which you wouldn't consider someone as enlightened to begin with?

 

[Leo Gura]

8 minutes ago, Preetom said:

@Leo Gura

What do you consider as the most basic, entry level enlightenment, without which you wouldn't consider someone as enlightened to begin with?

Some degree of realization of no-self.

The attachment with being exclusively identified with the body must be broken.

This is usually called stream-entry in Buddhism or kensho in Zen.

There are much much deeper levels.

Total omniscience is possible. I recently peaked into total omnisicence. It's so fucking radical.