stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

190 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Ritual offerings of food and water are truly effective ways of
helping beings suffering in the astral dimension, particularly
the souls of people who have recently died. When we place an
offering upon the altar, we don’t expect it to disappear because
we know that someone who has died cannot eat physical
substances. When we expand our field of vision into the
higher dimensions, however, we can actually see spirits consuming
the offerings. They are consuming the “ki” [i.e., the
chi or prana] of the food and water, the astral energy of the
objects that exists even before the object manifests into the
physical world.
One assumes that Wilber would not himself endorse these latter
claims—of spirits eating subtle energy, etc. If not, however,
why not? If Motoyama’s clairvoyant perceptions of the chakras are
taken as valid, why would his comparable perceptions, through the
same subtle senses, of ghosts and astral gods not be taken as equally
valid? Did he see the chakras validly and clearly, but hallucinate
everything else? If not, how can you justify “picking and choosing”
only what you want to believe from those perceptions?
Of course, if such phenomena as Motoyama describes really do
exist, a lot of what Wilber denigrates as being “pre-rational” or the
product of regressive magical or mythical thought would not be so.
Rather, it would instead be appealing to aspects of reality which
simply do not fit into his own theories. That point would apply specifically
to sacrifices to nature spirits or to human ghosts who
could very conceivably actually be “personally mad at you.” Indeed,
Motoyama (2000) describes exactly such appeased ghostly anger in
the very same book, along with his psychic interactions with water
and tree spirits:
Yoichi had been dead for 800 years, yet his tortured spirit
was still able to affect me when I began to build our retreat
center. We began to pray for his soul in the Shrine. After
three years of such prayers, his resentment dissolved and I
no longer experienced any negativity.
I could see that the Spirit of the tree was grieving about its
impending doom.
I saw that the Water Spirit was understandably outraged
and was retaliating by causing the family its present problems.