My beginning, our beginning

I met Sri Sri Ravishankar in the early 90s. I did not think much about him then. He seemed an ordinary small size Indian man dressed in white, with simple answers which often mocked the questions made by the public, giggled more than lectured - nothing really outstanding. I remember being more captivated by the eccentricity of his followers. Some seemed to float around, as if they were high on some peace and love pill, throwing flowers in the corridors, singing, dancing as they greeted us, brain dead, brainless, handing brochures, speaking to us about the wonders of this man they were following since God knows how long. The whole event was lame, small, uneventful, boring. I left suspicious, dull, cheated. How did I, a year later, got sucked into the organization, I still wonder. I had received very high education, considered myself intelligent and skeptical. But I do know that when he, Ravishankar, wants to lure a newcomer with potential (either because of the capacities the person presents or his/her contacts or he/she has money), he is the perfection of Don Casanova.

I went from disliking everything about him to being passionately in love with him. I found every stupid word he uttered, wise, deep, even funny. To my surprise, I can watch the very same talks today and find them shallow and repetitive. Actually, he never says anything new nor mind-blowing. I’d name it, “Variations on a Theme of Ravishankar” (without any doubt Rachmaninoff had a lot more creativity, depth, genius, confirmed by his numerous master pieces).

There was something about the way he spoke – slow, well paced -, the way he gazed – hypnotic … I cannot decide yet if his talks hypnotized us or made us stupid. Like I cannot decide either whether his famous Sudarshan Kriya, and other techniques, relaxed us or killed our brain cells. Somehow, as the years went by, I remember perceiving myself more stupid.

There are many things I have not yet found answers. However, there is one thing I am certain of: the art of living happens without the Art of Living. Leaving the Art of Living becomes an art itself.

Looking back, I see my years of involvement with the organization as a pause in my life. Everything that happened revolved around the ambitions of Ravishankar and his family. And there was only one clear ambition: fame, power, wealth, numbers. He wants to be the biggest, the greatest, the best … We all worked for free for him, in the name of “seva”, in the name of “spiritual growth”, in the name of “becoming stronger”, in the name of “burning karmas.”

I stopped being myself, I stopped living life, I stopped being happy by faking joy and teaching the means to reach it, I became stressed teaching how to be stress-free. Of course, you may think it is all my responsibility, or that I was unfit for the organization or the role as a volunteer teacher. I definitely am responsible, but for having bought a fraud and stayed for so long. I am responsible for being gullible, innocent, idealistic, insecure. I am responsible for not loving myself and not knowing how and when to draw the line. Unfortunately, it was not just me who suffered of the same stress, unhappiness, psychological dissonance, illnesses.

I have met many senior teachers who are unstable psychologically, psychotic, etc. I have met hystrionics, narcissists, border-lines, psychotics, sociopaths, obsessive compulsive, hypochondriacs, paranoids, immature people claiming to have the absolute truth and the key to salvation and enlightenment.

Being in a so-called spiritual path has given me a lot of pain, robbed my innocence, living my life, being myself. It has taught me invaluable lessons, woke me up to the fact there is a lot of evil in the world and that, regardless, it is beautiful as it is. At the end of the day, Ravishankar did not teach me absolutely anything. The lessons were provided by life itself only because I decided to turn every experience into a lesson.

Today, if someone asked me what I learned in the spiritual path, I’d reply, “I learned everything one must never do in life, and I learned what kind of a human being I never want to be.”