stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

288 STRIPPING THE GURUS
“clarify and rephrase” the text. For my own part, I do not find that
claim at all convincing. Indeed, the posthumously ham-handed
evisceration of his Whispers From Eternity poetry alone (see Dakota,
1998)—being subjected to brutal and unnecessary editing which
no poetic soul could ever countenance—would cast it in doubt.
Regardless, the kriya yoga technique itself is actually not
nearly as “top secret” as SRF presents it as being. Rather, both of
the preliminary techniques leading up to kriya proper are widely
known in India. Of those, the “Om” technique is essentially just an
internally chanted mantra, while the “Hong-Sau” technique/mantra
is given in Chapter 7 of Radha’s (1978) Kundalini Yoga for the
West. (Radha herself was a disciple of Satchidananda’s guru, Swami
Sivananda, and operated an ashram in that lineage in British
Columbia, Canada.) Much of the first stage of the kriya technique
itself further exists in Chapter 9 of the same book. Yogananda’s
preliminary “Energization Exercises,” too, are very similar to ones
given later by Brennan (1987).
Ironically, in spite of their evidently opposite attitudes toward
the “secrecy” of those techniques, Sivananda’s ashram and SRF
have long been friendly with each other.
Swami Sivananda himself (1887 – 1963), in addition to founding
the Divine Life Society, wrote over three hundred books. That
is hardly surprising, given his exalted spiritual state:
I have seen God myself. I have negated name and form, and
what remains is Existence-Knowledge-Bliss and nothing
else. I behold God everywhere. There is no veil. I am one.
There is no duality. I rest in my own self. My bliss is beyond
description. The World of dream is gone. I alone exist (Sivananda,
1958).
People consider [Sivananda] to be a Shiva avatar, incarnation
(Gyan, 1980).
Swamiji was a phenomenon. He was described as a “symbol
of holiness,” a “walking, talking God on Earth” (Ananthanarayanan,
1970).
Of course, no “walking, talking God” would grace this planet
without promulgating his own skewed set of unsubstantiated beliefs: