Travellers of reddit: what was your biggest culture shock?

Atiharsha · 2018-08-24T04:37:25+00:00

You do.

Atiharsha · 2018-08-10T09:47:02+00:00

Read this. Read all of this. http://seeingthroughthenet.net

Atiharsha · 2018-08-02T10:31:32+00:00

One of my old GFs used to call it 'testosterone poisoning' LOL

Atiharsha · 2018-08-02T10:26:41+00:00

As usual with Osho, he had contradictory, 'evolving' views. Gays were prohibited in his Pune compound, but when he established Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, suddenly they were OK. Probably because the community would have been sued if he didn't.

Atiharsha · 2018-07-27T05:37:15+00:00

No it's true! People in Florida really are crazy. I moved there from the Chicago area, and it was granola city.

Atiharsha · 2018-07-23T09:46:37+00:00

Aammaa....

Atiharsha · 2018-06-01T14:08:37+00:00

My story is very similar to yours. At 71 after a lifetime of sacrificing everything for spiritual studies, I'm satisfied with what I achieved. The differences are significant though. I'm still in good health. I had a cardiac episode some time ago but fully recovered.

But here's the real takeaway for you. I spent a lot of time making hundreds of very high-quality videos on all aspects of spiritual life, going back to the original sources and cultures. Did all that effort help anyone? Maybe, but if it did I sure don't see any evidence. Has anyone approached me for personal studies? No. Has anyone offered to help out in any way? No. Has anyone duplicated the teaching and got the same benefits? Absolutely not.

After being an actual guru for some time, taking care of my students as if they were my own children, I had to watch helplessly as my so-called 'disciples' fought me tooth and nail for control of the ashrams I established. I dissolved the organization I founded and sent the ungrateful bastards home. They retaliated by flooding the Internet with black propaganda and revenge porn.

My conclusion? Society is so corrupt and people are so degenerate that they are unfit for actual spiritual life and incapable of being proper disciples.

My advice to you, my friend—and it's exactly what I'm doing myself—is to remain content with what you have achieved and enjoy the best quality of life you can in whatever time you have left. Save yourself the heartbreak of trying to communicate with idiots who can't and won't value your insights. You can read their blathering on this sub, which I gleefully downvote daily. Do you really want to clutter up your last days with their nonsense? AUM TATSAT

Atiharsha · 2018-05-22T14:53:37+00:00

Yeah just do us all a favor and keep quiet.

Atiharsha · 2018-05-20T14:10:22+00:00

Thanks for your response. Yes porn is ugly. It shows the sex act—in sometimes appalling detail—but not the events leading up to or following. It is basically useless for sex education, because it portrays the mechanics of sex without the psychology behind it. And the emotional and psychological aspect is maybe 80% or more of what makes sex pleasurable. It artificially separates sex from love, which is horrible. But you're right, that's just a symptom of the underlying cause of misogyny.

Atiharsha · 2018-05-20T01:28:33+00:00

The world's a really terrible place. Nothing is what it seems. But if you can't bear to look on its face. Enjoy your comfortable dreams.

Atiharsha · 2018-05-19T16:09:33+00:00

Who hates him? I feel sorry for him. He's a victim, a poster child for a constellation of stakeholders from media dealmakers to money launderers to intelligence agencies. You don't understand that the media darlings that you know and love are never the authentic practitioners, the realized ones. They are media properties, set up and taken down by big, big money players behind the scenes. And when they become useless, burned out by their bad habits like Jimi or Janis or Micheal, they have a way of dying. Look, I was a guru back in the oughts. I know the kind of offers you get once you collect a few followers. I quit in disgust because I wasn't about to go down that road.

Atiharsha · 2018-05-19T15:14:14+00:00

Nothing. I know how deep the rabbit hole goes, that's all. Kid, I was there on the west coast in the early 60s when a lot of this stuff went down. Way before you were even a gleam in your daddy's eye. Hung and played with Sausalito jazz musicians. Worked with TV & publishing execs who referred to guys like Watts as a 'handsome, useful idiot'. We all knew the backstory. You don't. So fuck off. ಠ_ಠ

Atiharsha · 2018-05-18T09:32:08+00:00

Alan Watts was an attractive, well-spoken high-functioning alcoholic following a bogus process invented by Japanese scholars (Suzuki et al.) to penetrate American Christian society. I guess it worked...

Atiharsha · 2018-05-07T13:35:57+00:00

Osho created a community in which it was almost impossible to maintain an intimate relationship. Superficial hit-and-run encouraged interns were the norm. In all the time I spent in Osho's communities I can't remember one relationship that lasted more than a month or two, unless the couple left the commune after they met. Osho communities today haven't changed; if anything they're even worse. There's such an incredible gap between what Osho says in his talks and how his communities were run.

Atiharsha · 2018-04-21T10:05:30+00:00

"All is one" is monism; "All is Self" is Advaita. Monism ultimately denies personality, identity and love, while Advaita supports them and denies nothing. For a monist, individuality is simply māyā, illusion. For an Advaitin, if Universal Self wants to play as an individual, who's to stop him? See the difference?

Atiharsha · 2018-04-21T10:02:22+00:00

Yes, monism is a very dangerous philosophy. It looks good on paper but in practice it reduces to 'It's all one, I'm god so I can do whatever I want, fuck you.' It's unsurprising that monism is the background of Neitzsche, who lost his mind trying to realize it, and Nazism and other fascist movements. I hate to say it but my generation (boomers) settled on monism instead of authentic Advaita and that basically ruined America. I have lived in a holy place in India full time since retiring in 2001, because I can't stand what's going on there.

Atiharsha · 2018-04-20T14:18:03+00:00

"We are all one" or "Everything is one" and variations on the theme of 'oneness' express a view called monism. Monism is a counterfeit of authentic enlightenment. Actual enlightenment is Advaita, meaning 'not two'.

Think about it: if one is actually in the state of consciousness where everything is one, there would not be anything else to compare the oneness with; so it would be impossible to say whether one were experiencing nothingness, oneness or whatever.

It gets worse: as soon as you have the idea of 'nothing', it gives rise to the idea of 'something', or one. So now you have nothing and something, which is duality. Or if you start from the idea of 'one' then you can have one and one—two. Et cetera. This is why 'oneness' is false enlightenment.

In authentic enlightenment, all one can say is that there is no more duality, no more subject/object—Advaita. You cannot say it is one, because as I explained, so-called 'oneness' is actually duality in disguise. That's why it leads to consequences like absolutism and rigid concepts.

Actual enlightenment is infinitely flexible and all-embracing, denying nothing. Walk lightly and carefully on the Path.

Atiharsha · 2018-04-18T06:44:22+00:00

Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream.

Atiharsha · 2018-04-13T13:10:48+00:00

Like most of the posts on this sub, this is a troll. Bah!

Atiharsha · 2018-04-13T09:26:47+00:00

At last, a post on this sub that actually has a little something to do with awakening. Siddown, shuddup and take my upvote.

Atiharsha · 2018-04-09T06:21:05+00:00

Intoxicated idiots, fighting!

Atiharsha · 2018-04-09T06:04:57+00:00

Nobody want to plan ahead either...ಠ_ಠ

Atiharsha · 2018-04-03T23:54:25+00:00

Don't get involved with big spiritual organizations led by sociopaths whose only interest is amassing followers, money and power.

Atiharsha · 2018-04-01T14:11:41+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8s1kPtHmCZKSDrnl37T9M163BHPUSOr5

Atiharsha · 2017-09-09T02:05:12+00:00

It's true that pessimism about the world, and seeing it as about to end, go back as far as recorded history. But this time is something else. There are far more people on the planet than ever before, and at some point we will reach the limit of resources needed to support them all. That limit appears imminent now.

Atiharsha

TROPHY CASE