From an302429@anon.penet.fi AN OPEN LETTER ABOUT SIDDHA YOGA This letter is from a group of people who have left Siddha Yoga and who were, at one time, very deeply involved with its activities. For most of us, it was Lis Harris' November, 1994 article in The New Yorker that helped us to acknowledge that SYDA and its leaders are quite different from what they claim to be and what they appear to be. Many of us had known the facts in Harris' article to be true for years, and had ignored or denied them. We had invested our faith and trust, our idealism, and our time, energy and money, in Siddha Yoga. We had devoted ourselves and made Siddha Yoga our life. For this reason, facing the facts about SYDA has been and continues to be a painful process. We break our silence now because we believe that Siddha Yoga is deceiving its participants and we hope, in this letter, to explain how this is so. We came to Siddha Yoga because we wished to enrich our spiritual lives. At first, some of us had extraordinary meditation experiences; others felt they had found at long last a community of understanding seekers. As we got more involved, we came to believe that Gurumayi and Muktananda had valid claims to "full enlightenment," "perfection," and "sainthood". In fact, we believed them to be living deities. With the awakening of the kundalini through shaktipat, we felt that we had reached the final stage of human evolution before divine perfection. All we had to do is love, believe in, and worship the guru, no matter what, and enlightenment would be ours. Our faith in these concepts led us to make Siddha Yoga the most important part of our lives. Yet, as we drew closer to the guru, we discovered that both Muktananda and Gurumayi had private personalities that were in sharp contrast to their public personas. We soon learned that our status as "disciples," our being "close to the Guru," depended on how well we could learn to keep the secrets we came to know, and how skillful we could be at whitewashing and damage control. At great cost to our own integrity, we learned to ignore or derail the natural flow of our thoughts and feelings -- so that we could reconcile to ourselves and others the discrepancies between the gurus' claims to perfection and their actual behavior. Time and again we were told -- whether by swamis, hand picked lay teachers, or Ram Butler's Correspondence Course -- that "surrender" was the path of a true disciple; that "gossip" would only lead us to destruction. This meant subordinating our thoughts, feelings and subjective experience in favor of a supposedly greater truth and higher purpose,represented by the guru. We know now that we were selling ourselves short. We are no longer willing to give others control of our reality. We were frightened at first when we began to question and doubt; we feared we would lose everything if we didn't keep suppressing our thoughts and feelings, if we didn't blindly obey. But we have found exactly the opposite to be true: by finally telling the truth to ourselves and to others, we are regaining the precious freedom we had lost. We are aware that most people who are inspired by the outer beauty of Siddha Yoga and its practices and teachings will find it hard to believe what we have witnessed. It is not our intention here to attempt to explain the apparent benevolence at the surface layer of Siddha Yoga. The authors of this letter have spent a great deal of time beneath the public facade, and we have seen a more complete picture of the secret Siddha Yoga and the double life of its leaders than most people ever see. We believe the corruption at SYDA should be exposed, even though a former SYDA trustee once stated in a staff meeting, in ominous tones, that critics of Siddha Yoga who make public allegations of misconduct will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Clearly, it is worth a great deal of money to SYDA to try to hide the facts. What we present here is what we know to be true. It is our hope that those who read this will be open to hearing the truth, and to making an informed choice about their participation. These are some of the secrets that we can no longer, in good conscience, keep in silence: - Through the years, there has been extensive sexual abuse and exploitation of young women, often minors, perpetrated by Muktananda, and later by George Afif. Hundreds of women were seduced, sexually harassed and abused in the ashram by these men. Many of the women involved look back on the experience as a traumatic violation. Some women sought help from swamis, staff or from Gurumayi herself. They were told that they had brought their mistreatment upon themselves and to be silent and tell no one. Thus, when ashram staff and swamis are not officially denying that such things ever happened, they switch stories and claim that Muktananda's sexual activities had a divine purpose. With Afif, they simply blame his victims. We emphatically reject this denial. And we reject the justification, on the basis of tantric scripture or on any other basis, of this grotesque abuse of power which exploits and degrades women. - Muktananda's mastery of the abuse of power is an enduring legacy. For years after his death, it was not just Gurumayi but also George Afif -- a man who in 1983 pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of statutory rape -- who ran SYDA. We even witnessed Gurumayi taking orders from him. Afif's compulsive lust for young girls and women, his taste for the world's most expensive clothes and objects, and his cruelty to those who cross him, is well known to many. What is his power over Gurumayi that his notorious behavior in the ashram was condoned and unchecked for so many years? Afif himself was recently heard to say that he expects to return to Gurumayi's side eventually. The party line at SYDA is that such a reunion is out of the question. But the history between Afif and Gurumayi is not being acknowledged openly or honestly. When that is the case, history has a way of repeating itself. - At Afif's and Gurumayi's command, staff members - or the local devotees they organize - have travelled all over the world since the late '80s to follow her brother, Nityananda, and to physically attack, harass and threaten him at every opportunity. The swamis and staff who routinely deny this are simply lying. A devotee therapist in one city was persuaded by SYDA leaders, with Gurumayi's blessings, to hire a professional thug to harass and threaten Nityananda when he came to their city for a public speaking engagement. Devotees who display their loyalty by joining in these attacks elicit praise, gratitude and special attention from Gurumayi. It is notable that these attacks have ceased, at least in the U.S., since they were exposed in the New Yorker article. - Many courses and many of the public talks given in the ashram were dictated mostly by George Afif, but also by Gurumayi, into earphones worn by the speakers. These include the Fire Courses, No Ego Courses, Month Long Courses, and numerous Intensives. Many of these courses included verbally abusive assaults on participants, which sometimes included the public disclosure of confidential information they had written in personal letters to Gurumayi. Afif had access to this information because he routinely read personal mail addressed to Gurumayi. - There are hidden video cameras in various places around the ashram. Many guest rooms and public areas are bugged, with hidden microphones picking up the conversation while Gurumayi and her assistants listen in. These areas include the Amrit, the Global Communications Office, the Meditation Hall, the Programming Office, public in-house telephone areas, and reception desks. In addition tothis surveillance by microphones and cameras, the ashram staff know they can gain favor with Gurumayi by reporting any and all gossip to her at once, whether about visitors or about each other. - Ashram policies and attitudes discriminate against homosexuals. At Gurumayi's insistence, same sex couples who are known to be lovers are not allowed to be housed together in ashram rooms, although every effort is made to conceal this policy from those it affects. While Gurumayi surrounds herself with many gay and lesbian staff members, she encourages them in various ways to conceal and disavow their orientation. Gurumayi also insisted, starting in 1991, that every gay and lesbian Hatha Yoga teacher in SYDA Ashrams and Centers be fired by the local managers and steering committees. They were instructed tomake up some excuse but by no means to reveal that the teachers were being fired because of their sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians are routinely excluded from many positions and activities in Siddha Yoga institutions, unless they happen to be wealthy and influential. (continued - see "About SYDA Yoga, Part 2")