Hello,
I have some good friends who are followers of Swami Rami (now deceased) and his Himalayan Institute in Pennsylvania.
The sense I get from followers is they lament that the Himalayan Institute/Swami Rami is not larger, it seems to me, it is the first place people who love general Yoga Asana/Aerobics classes go if they become interested in meditation. With the enormous explosion of popularity of Yoga in recent years I think it's important to unpack it.
Here is a farily damning article:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/swami_rama/swami_rama2.htmlIt goes into some poor sexual behavior. But I think the paragraph I most enjoyed was:
But Swami Rama's disciples do not hold him to these standards. In order to believe in his perfection, they must rationalize behavior that others would judge to be tyrannical, cruel, or self-indulgent. According to ex-members, Swami Rama often acts in ways his disciples find humiliating, but they tell each other he is humbling their stubborn egos to help them reach enlightenment faster. He reportedly smokes cigarettes, watches television for hours every day, and gossips, but his disciples rationalize this non-abstinent behavior: "Oh, Swamiji just smokes to bring himself down to the earth plane," or, "The TV is on incessantly just to give the student one more distraction to challenge his ability to maintain yogic balance," or, "all the stories Swamiji tells about other people are just to give the disciple the opportunity to develop objectivity and not get caught up in the meaningless gossip."
I have read many of the books they publish, some of the books on Kundilini were somewhat helpful and interesting, but mainly I sense a lot of obfuscation and over-complication--which seems to be common with the Yoga schools (respectfully.) There also seems to be the same problems I have with Vajrayana Buddhism. I.e. devotion to a guru, progress is made by being initiated into another secret tantric practice instead of having the religious experience, secret mantras being repeated do specific magical things to the consciousness ect.
I am going to go visit some sort of satellite retreat for a weekend in March with the folks I know who are into this stuff.
Anyway, any further insight, stories or just plain gossip are greatly appreciated.
--Luke
P.S. Some other extracts:
Megan recalls that in one of her first encounters with Swami Rama, she watched as he humiliated a quiet, withdrawn woman resident. The Swami, she says, bragged to a crowd of disciples that the woman would do whatever he told her, then put his dog's collar and leash around her neck and walked her back and forth, while the others laughed. Megan says she squelched an urge to speak out, instead deciding, like most of the Institute's residents, to suspend judgment so she could "understand and learn" from this "great master." But during the next three weeks, she says, she saw the Swami mistreating his disciples, especially the women, on a daily basis-yelling at them, ridiculing them, ordering them around, and occasionally kicking a woman in the buttocks when she was on her hands and knees weeding.
Fortified by their mutual discovery, Karen says, the two couples undertook to inform their fellow students back home in Minneapolis. They wrote letters to Pandit Usharbudh Arya, their teacher and head of the Meditation Center there, as well as a dozen other people, warning that Swami Rama was a fraud. Shortly after they returned to the U.S., Karen and George say that they and all their correspondents received a bizarre, defamatory letter containing an implicit death threat.
Meanwhile, the couple says, they discovered more evidence of illicit activity. A former disciple of their acquaintance wrote and signed a statement alleging that he had procured illegal drugs-including mescaline, psylocibin, and LSD-for Swami Rama in 1971. The two couples referred to this statement in a petition to the FBI: they asked the FBI to investigate the threat letter and argued that Swami Rama could be deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service as an undesirable alien on four grounds: possession of narcotics, sexual immorality, fraudulent financial dealings, and "affliction with [a] psychopathic personality." Friends of the two couples set up a "truth booth" outside the entrance of the Institute's first annual congress in 1976.