A Dark Guru

 Previously in this series about my life in India during the 1980s I've written about Europeans we knew but not much about Indians except in passing. But, of course, we knew many and were friends with several. There was Krishnamurti the tailor who always wore a crisp white shirt and sharply pressed khaki trousers. Then there was Ali who ran the Yercaud Club and who looked (I thought) like a benevolent crocodile. Dilip and Ashok were two brothers who, with their father, had a geranium plantation that produced an essential oil used for perfume and skincare. Subramaniam was one of many coffee planters in the area and Ramalingam lived in the bungalow next to ours. He fell on financial hard times so leased the front of his house to the Bank of India and moved to the back. It seemed to work for him.

But our main friends, apart from the Matthews whom I have previously mentioned, were Mr and Mrs Neelakantan. He was a Brahmin and had been well off, but he was persuaded to invest his money in a film studio which went bust and lost the lot as a result of which he had come to Yercaud where his wife Prema found work at one of the private schools in the town, enabling their sons, Kumar and Prakash, and daughter, Sudha, to get decent educations. They were all very bright and took full advantage of the opportunities offered. Neelakantan was probably in his mid to late 40s but retired or, at any rate, no longer working, considering himself to be in the Vanaprastha stage of life which, according to Hindu teaching, is the third stage when one starts to withdraw from the world and focus one’s energies more on Moksha or liberation. He sought us out because he heard we were interested in spiritual matters, and we had many conversations, even debates, about Indian philosophy. He was a disciple of Swami Muktananda who was a prominent guru of the day teaching something called Siddha Yoga which claimed to be able to awaken the kundalini in its practitioners. Traditionally, this was a secret path only open to a dedicated few after years of spiritual discipline, but Muktananda offered the awakening to anyone, and Neelakantan said he had experienced it. It did not seem to have changed him in any significant way for the better though, and he admitted as much which was more than many others who have undergone this experience are willing to do.  

Neelakantan gave me Muktananda’s autobiography to read, and I could see that the man did have power of some sort, but it was also obvious that it was not true spiritual power. Like many Indian sannyasis he had tapped into a form of occult energy through his guru, but this energy appeared more demonic than divine. And rather like Sai Baba, you only had to look at a photo of Muktananda to see a darkness in his soul. When the stories of his sexual misdemeanours came out, as almost inevitably they did, I was not surprised.

 

There was a misconception of spirituality common at the time which many of the gurus flooding the West took advantage of as they preyed on the naive. They may even have been victims of it themselves. It saw the spiritual in terms of consciousness, experience and power, and believed that the self could be transformed before it had been fully purified, and that what was required to do this was technique regardless of motivation. They would have spoken of proper motivation as one must to be taken seriously, but it was not put front and centre as it should be and was often confused with aspiration. It was the old spiritual problem of the desire for heaven, even the greed for it, taking precedence over the love of God.

 

It could not be denied that Muktananda had been through some extraordinary psychic experiences under his guru, but these cannot be regarded as spiritual in the proper sense because in cases of genuine spiritual transcendence the self is not splintered and shattered as happened to him. It is more a case of the ego falling away as it is outgrown, or melting in the light of the spiritual sun. There may be an initial pain and sense of loss, but there is not the violence and terror described by Muktananda which indicate that something other than divine forces is in play. Many Indian gurus mistake the occult for the spiritual, and Muktananda certainly did. 

 

Neelakantan admitted he had not been changed by his experiences, but others were not so lucky. A commenter on this blog a few years ago wrote that he had followed an Indian guru (unspecified but obviously Muktananda) who gave shaktipat which is a supposed infusion of grace that opens the kundalini and sends the energy upward through the chakras. He said he had had many amazing experiences but even now long after he could not sit to meditate without being taken over by spontaneous pranayama and mudras, as well as the occurrence of strange mantras. He had left the guru’s organization years before when the stories of scandal and abuse surfaced, but the psychic experiences persisted. He thought they could be the result of astral forces and wondered what to do. My opinion was that they were undoubtedly caused by the premature opening of psychic centres in the body which, it cannot be emphasised enough, is an occult procedure not a spiritual one. The remedy is prayer and focus on Christ. This is the best way to cleanse the soul of the unhealthy psychic residues it picks up through these techniques. 

 

The moral of this story is that one should not be deceived by the spurious glamours, antinomian delusions and false promises of the lefthand path. The road to God is through purity and love, not magic in any form.

 

I would not have suggested focus on Christ to Neelakantan who was a proud Brahmin and not going to abandon his heritage for a Western religion, but fortunately he had not gone too deep so not suffered adverse consequences. He reverted to his traditional path and turned for inspiration to the Jagadguru of Kanchipuram, a genuine holy man who lived for nearly 100 years (1894-1994), spending his life travelling round India teaching the sanatana dharma or ancient religion of the Vedas. The Kanchi Sankaracharya was a traditional guru who was the 68^th in line from the famous advaita philosopher Sankara, and exemplified the best of his religion in contradistinction to most 20^th century gurus, obvious exceptions like Ramana Maharishi aside, who seemed to be promoting themselves. He made no grandiose promises but simply taught love of the divine for its own sake.

 

An amusing postscript to this story comes in the form of two young evangelical Christian missionaries who stayed at our guesthouse. They were sincere and enthusiastic but didn’t fully appreciate the richness and depth of the Indian spiritual tradition. On one occasion they were with us when Neelakantan came round for morning coffee as he sometimes did, and we introduced them before they left to visit a local church. A couple of days later we heard they had gone round to his house to try to convert him and his family, no doubt with the best of intentions, but you don’t convert a Brahmin to Christianity. Neelakantan, normally a very courteous man, had lost his temper and thrown them out. I tried to explain to them that it was very bad form to tell a Brahmin that he worships demons, especially when you are a guest in his house, but they were fired by missionary zeal and didn’t understand that Christ may be universal but Christianity, especially the desacralised 18th century form they promoted, is probably not which is why it will never catch on in India except in a limited form. It is too foreign.