The Ananda Marga Cult and The Shadow Of The Guru
In order to progress in meditation one must have a balanced and congruent mind. A mind full of confusions created by a distorted outlook on life simply cannot meditate. Of course, meditation helps one to straighten out those crooked areas of the mind, but if one is not sincere and with moral intentions from the beginning, this contemplative process will never take root in the mind. This is especially true with tantra yoga, which is extremely intense. A fall from this path is a harder and more intense fall than softer and lighter forms of meditation. Tantric meditation connects one more intensely with the forces of nature and if one abuses this connection, then nature simply takes one down very quickly.
When Anandamurti was still alive there were so many stories about people achieving high states of meditation after being around him. This was also true of people that were near his older disciples. When I came across this circle of meditation in the early 90s Anandamurti had just died. There was still a good vibe and people were enjoying deep meditation. The community of yogis was intact, far from perfect, but at least sincere. There was a very real possibility of spiritual growth within that society Anandamurti had started. I met older disciples of Anandamurti like Chandranath and his wife Ram Parith and was in the presence of living saints. Not only was Anandamurti highly elevated but his grace made others achieve enlightenment. I was inspired and motivated to continue with my meditations and do some academic work to help shed intellectual and scholarly light on these mysterious ideas in Tantra Yoga philosophy. I was to be the first doctoral student in a newly found spiritual research center in India.
I had some professors that were very mysterious yogis with even more mysterious mind powers. It was not as fantastic as Hogwarts but was much more real and exciting in that I was able to witness truths that most people ever see or can even conceive. There were yogis with telekinetic abilities, mind-readers and psychics, but more importantly tranquil yogis established in deep meditation that understood some deep secrets of the universe. These were my teachers for a blissful few months. And then the Purulia Arms Drop occurred, I became a political prisoner, and the dream of the tantric research institute vanished and never appeared again.
I continued writing on my own. I wrote about my experiences in that yoga society in my work, Light And Dark Tantra. Anandamurti´s former yoga society fell to pieces after the Arms Drop. I believe people within that group initially liked my writings until I became critical of their scandals and crimes. It was alright to give a psychological explanation of tantric metaphysics and write about Anandamurti´s philosophy, but they did not like me talking about their little, failed coup d'état in Bengal, nor all of their dark mafia activities. I simply wrote about my experience as a political prisoner in a humorous way, because for me it was a very humorous experience. It was a great time. Perhaps I ridiculed them in a humorous way, but they really were ridiculous, and because of them I was a political prisoner. Therefore they more than deserved my criticism.
Nowadays nobody in those circles really meditates very deeply. There is no real inspiration, just stories about a dead guru that they worship as the incarnation of god. Such stories only inspire empty minds. Instead they are just another religion with dogmas and doctrine. Yet they have some very smart people who are known for being good hackers. As an international mafia and crime family they must have people with such abilities. In the beginning of the cyberattacks on my blog I was uncertain if the attacks came from people in Ananda Marga or from Big Brother himself, as the FBI labeled them terrorists. Was I interfering in some covert mission to destroy Ananda Marga by writing about them? It is true that the U.S. government helped take down Ananda Marga by labelling them terrorists. Nobody stayed around after that, except the die hard fanatics and the existentially desparate. They are no longer a threat to any government in the world as they practically no longer exist. Now I have no doubt that all of the cyber warfare brought upon me comes from some poor souls in Ananda Marga. Who else would it be? I keep to myself and avoid politics and governments and have never had any legal trouble with the U.S. government. They, on the other hand, are known as criminals to governments all around the world. Maybe they can contaminate my browser and operating system if I log into Facebook without security measures, but they have never been able to take down my blog. Only once, under legal pressure, they were able to get me to take down an old archive with the original works of Anandamurti. They started altering his original texts and so I just tried to conserve them in their original form but they had legal copyrights and so I had to take down "their" works from my blog. However, I have never had any of my own writings removed, legally or through their hacking attempts. Now I am almost ashamed enough to not even write about them any longer and prefer to not even mention their name, yet my old writings are still on my blog and will remain there.
I only say to my poor and lonely hackers: "How is your meditation these days?"
Light And Dark Tantra is a compilation of essays that I wrote about my experiences in Ananda Marga. I believe most of what I write about is positive and inspirational and speaks well of Anandamurti and his older disciples. My criticism mainly fall on the organization after Anandamurti´s death. While writing Light And Dark Tantra I still was not sure if there was any future for the organization. People within wanted me to publish A Name To The Nameless with them and make it an Ananda Marga publication. They saw my criticisms as justified and these criticisms ultimately fought for the reform of the organization. However, as the years went on I saw only degradation and my writings eventually turned toward warning people about joining Ananda Marga. Those writings never made it into Light And Dark Tantra, and that work remained fairly neutral and open-ended regarding whether or not Ananda Marga was a valid spiritual path. My most recent writing after Light And Dark Tantra specifically states Ananda Marga as a really negative cult. By using the term "cult" I entirely broke off relations with all of my old friends and readers in Ananda Marga. Who would want to read me if I said that they were cult members? I wrote that essay more for people who already knew they were in a cult and needed some clarity about whether the whole system of spiritual practices was invalid or not. The audience I wanted to target were people in the same situation as me: the practices and philosophy are just as valid as ever, yet we are alone in that other people who do the same practices act like they are in a cult in that they just follow along and never really question the immorality of the institution. By arguing that the present society is a cult but that there is some valid history in the movement, the name of Anandamurti can perhaps be saved from the decadence of his followers who have all but sullied his good name. Here is the short essay that really sparked off the recent cyber warfare:
The Shadow Of The Guru
A few years ago my wife and her colleagues were involved in a situation to resolve a case of sexual harassment within their organization. She was on a panel with some other people given the duties of reviewing and resolving cases of professional misconduct within the organization. It was a very difficult situation because the accused party was generally well liked and even a personal friend to a few of the people on the review panel. However, the proofs against him that revealed his misconduct were all too clear and they were forced to act with impartiality and follow professional protocol which required firing him from his job. It was very difficult for them but nobody really felt guilty because the situation was very clear. Not only was it considered a professional transgression but it was just felt to be a wrong situation according to people´s personal sense of correctness as well.
I had no involvement in this whatsoever, nor had any involvement with their organization. I could sit back and simply respect how really balanced they were while handling the situation and how they achieved very effective results without scandal and ugly arguments. These people worked for an NGO providing medical services to people who had very little or no access to medical services in the most rural areas of Chiapas. Most people were Mexicans but there were also people from the U.S. and Europe. As the worked in global health, they had many connections with people from all over the planet as well. Many were very well educated and could easily have been pursuing more financially rewarding medical careers instead of working in the poorest areas of Chiapas. They are sincere people with very progressive ideas that are being put into practice. Also, the non-medical staff working with them really seemed to have the same spirit for caring for others as part of their professional work. In short, I would say that they were a very good group of people. I do not say they were perfect and would not want to idealize anybody or any society but I say that they really are congruent with their ideals and really do good things. Given the current state of the planet and human institutions involved in the madness, these friends have given a very good example of human conduct and ethics at the personal and professional levels. The world would certainly be a better place with more of such examples.
The more I thought about it the more I was forced to think about how contrary this case was compared to my own past situations with Ananda Marga. My friends in Chiapas were these pure examples of spiritually disciplined vegetarian yogis who promote the narrative of sacrificing their personal lives to manifest some spiritual mission to enlighten the planet like I encountered in Ananda Marga. Ananda Marga simply had the tall talk of universal ethics and an ideal society but really did nothing to achieve such a society. In fact, they achieved exactly the opposite. My doctor friends, while not having the comprehensive all embracing spiritual ideology of the yogis, at least had a desire to help others without putting their own egos first and really have had tangible results. In Ananda Marga I encountered situations much more extreme ethical transgressions. However, there was nothing achieved in these inquiries. Anybody who even tried to talk about them was silenced and slandered. They even went so far as to try to accuse the victims. Anybody with a sense of basic human decency left what they saw was a cult. People who left were right in doing so because since those terrible scandals that society has had absolutely no progress nor evolution, just degeneration and decay. I wrote about these situations in my work, Light And Dark Tantra.
I still get some correspondence from people in Ananda Marga who came across these old writings. For me Ananda Marga is something that has already come and gone. Of course it took years to reach this state of detachment in my mind. After all I was arrested with terrorism charges against me because of the dirty arms deals of the monastics that put them on the FBI´s top ten terrorists list. I defended them on the BBC only to later realize that they were truly guilty of arms smuggling and the organization was using my ignorance and innocence to put me in front of the cameras to create a believable story for the world. This confusion in my mind; believing and saying one thing to myself and the world and then learning that I was being deceived by them, took a while to process and reach some clarity. One wants to believe what one says because it has already been said, yet the story begins to fall to pieces with too many contradictions and one has to use a lot of mental energy to be truthful with oneself and how one tells the story to others. It is hard to admit that what you once got inspiration from is actually something really harmful, and that one has been used as their instrument and as a consequence has also participated in their huge lies.
The need to be congruent in thought word and deed is paramount to insightful spiritual practice. Tantra Yoga is too intense of a practice for a mind twisted and confused with unoriginal and deceptive ideas. Tantric meditation vigorously pushes the mind into union with the Infinite. The mind flows into vast ideas and has no choice but to be consumed with the flow toward union. The mind turned toward the finite world can willfully move in so many directions and with so many desires. The mind directed toward the Infinite moves only toward the infinite and is guided by spiritual intuition. All disparate tendencies are surrendered to the witnessing consciousness, the Atman.
The mind must be purified of all false ideas in order to resonate with the conscious truth that consumes all the limitations of the finite mind. The force of the practice will cause the distorted mind to fall with exponential intensity. Instead of heightened mental energy used in the pursuit of self-realization, the very same energy is used to make the mind move towards its limited desires. In this process there is also truth, but very dark and hard truths. The mind merges into its delusions and suffers the consequences with much intensity. Hopefully, this fall awakens one with a desire to be more sincere. If not, then the mind falls even further into darkness.
During this personal process of redefinition after the Arms Drop scandal the organization was unraveling and all of the dirt hidden beneath the surface was becoming so painfully evident with all of their hidden mafia activities: drug and gun smuggling, sexual crimes, political infighting and even assassinations. My closest friends in Ananda Marga all left out of a sense of shame of being associated with such a deceptive cult. We were in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and existential confusion. How is it possible to be a sincere human being while being associated with people who propagate such lies? Instead of being in an enlightened spiritual society we felt we were in a dangerous cult.
I feel I was as honest and impartial as possible when writing about my subjective experiences with that organization some decades ago. My critiques were two-sided in that I wrote about some very positive aspects with certain people in that society yet I did not try and cover up any of their scandals.
Some people are affected by the negative information I shared. While it is true that the negativity is substantial enough to invalidate the whole movement and make people think they are in a cult, I can say at least your practices and philosophy have truth in them. In Light And Dark Tantra I did write that I believe that the corruption entered Ananda Marga even before Anandamurti had died. I never stated that he himself was corrupt, but argued that at the end of his life the organization slipped out of his control and that the fall of his disciples took its toll on his health. He was a spiritual guide and healer that took on the negative karma of his disciples. In the early years the society around him flourished. Later, he was bogged down by a larger movement, with more people and more minds to heal. And then many of the minds around him began to fall into hypocrisy. I think it was too much for him to digest and he reached his limit. In short, their waywardness crucified him.
His name has been sullied by the organization he left behind. Anybody who still has any connection to his ideas or philosophy or sees him as their personal spiritual guide eventually has to reconcile the fact that he was alive when his organization became a mafia. My take on it is that Anandamurti in the end had an energetic fall. Despite all of his ethical intentions, he simply could not keep it all under his control. He was older and his health was poor and the organization kept growing and he simply did not have the energy to keep everybody in line. By the time he died A.M. was an international mafia. Karunananda was a monastic leader who provided prostitutes to some of the more desperate monks working under him. He counterfeited dollars in Brazil with Devashish and even sold drugs in Denmark! This was all in the 70s and 80s, not after Anandamurti died. I heard Karunananda talk about the prostitution personally and the author Devashish also told me he went to federal prison because of his crimes while working with Karunananda. There are so many other immoral scandals out there as well. I mentioned these because I could personally verify them and were not mere rumors. Why did not the perfect and wholly divine guru put an end to this? I think the waywardness of the dirty monkees crucified him. We live in the shadow of the guru who could not control all of this madness.
Certainly, most people ignore these dissonant facts and prefer to remain in a safe space with a concept of an absolutely divine guru. Divine incarnations and absolute, perfect divinity are totalitarian fantasies used by priests the world wide. It is the oldest trick in the book used to keep a flock together.
A meditator is a bold truth seeker and if one truly seeks the truth then whatever incongruity in one´s mental framework will eventually cause disturbances. One gets disturbed by the idea that if he was so vigilant at guiding his disciples on the right path, then why did he not put an end to all of the mafia around him? This is why I say that in the end it all slipped out of his control. Yet I think it is safe to say that Anandamurti was a viable teacher and even his social movement had a great beginning and endured for several decades before it all imploded. At least his ideas and teachings remained congruent.
Tantra is a vast spiritual science based on the spiritual laws of the universe that cannot be negated by the downfall of any single social organization or person. The organization may collapse into dogma and religion but tantra yoga will live on. I no longer have any strong opinions on the current state of affairs. I ended my connection with them several years ago and only hear things from old friends who are still on the fringes of A.M. Every once in a while I hear rumors of good things happening, however. For example, I heard that the family acharyas, or lay teachers somewhere in Europe prohibited the monastics from their society. I have always thought that if A.M. were to ever have a chance of survival, then it would have to be with the elimination of the monastics from the movement. This would not be nearly as difficult as removing the priests from the Catholic Church. Ananda Marga does not have an influence over the ages like the Catholic Church. Although it is dominated by priests it is still a relatively new institution with a clear and rational philosophy. Actual spiritual practice instead of established dogmas is the ideological base. Also, it was founded by lay spiritual teachers. The monastics came later, as did the corruption. The good monastics have already come and gone. A monk or nun in uniform nowadays is either a hardened criminal, a weakling who lies to oneself and others, or just completely naive. There may be some younger monastics who came into the order that were attracted by the ideals and did not really understand what they were getting into. I would hope that they were respected and be allowed to mingle freely with a new and open society, although without any official status as monks or nuns.