Jasleen ji (findingmyway), you make good points. Here is where I continue to get stuck though...
I am reading
Dr. Trilochan Singh's expose on his interaction with YB and 3HO and I guess what I find most disturbing is that there was little or nothing about Yogi Bhajan or his teachings that was remotely rooted in Sikhi other than his being born into a Sikh family and he told some people that what he was practicing and teaching them was part and parcel of Sikh practice.
Not only does
the testimony of Premka Kaur Khalsa (Pamela Dyson) indicate that his teachings barely touched on matters of Sikh faith or the wisdom of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, but this conversation between YB and Dr. Singh would indicate that YB freely
admitted it was never about the Sikh faith for him so much as it was about perpetuating the "brand" of White Tantric yoga he had created.
Dr. Singh ji wrote:
We met in what is known as Ahimsa Ashram of the 3HO. I was offered a chair while Yogi Bhajan sat on the mattress, looking sick and ailing. I have recorded the details of this talk in my U.S.A. Memoirs. The closed door talks which lasted for about three hours can be summed up thus: (1) Yogi Bhajan was absolutely frank in what he said and I believe every word of it. I asked him Is Sikhism the core of his teachings of Tantric Yoga? Which of these two contradictory disciplines is his basic philosophy? To this question he perhaps honestly replied that Tantra (White as he calls it) is his basic faith while Sikhism is only an off-shoot of his Tantric system. The reason he gave was that he believed Sikhism has no meditation techniques. I told him that Sikhism has more specific, fruitful, and spiritually exalting techniques of meditation, but his misfortune is that he has never studied Siri Guru Granth Sahib, and never cared to live according to Sikh Discipline. He frankly and sadly confessed that when he went to India in 1970 with 84 Americans, 80 left him because Nirlep Kaur lowered his prestige by insulting him everywhere. All except four Americans (which include his Secretaries Premka, Krishna, etc.) left him.
(snip)
It is a standing shame to the whole Sikh community that all this Tantric nonsense is being poured down the throat of innocent American seekers of Truth in the name of Sikhism, and this is being done by him after assuming the titles of Siri Singh Sahib and unacknowledged authority over the Sikhs in the Western Hemisphere.
That just made me shudder... :scared:
If I was born to ranchers on a farm in Texas, but I never really herded cattle or rode the range mending barbed wire fences, or lassoed a steer...though I could probably talk about these things based on things I've seen and heard back home...
And then I go off to India and put on chaps and a cowboy hat and start telling people in India who don't really know much (if anything) about cowboys that I'm going to teach them how to be good ranchers and cowboys, and part of that is that they have to put on white cowboy hats and wear white cowboy boots and white jeans, and sit around a campfire and sing cowboy songs while looking at a picture of me. And then beyond that I tell them that all good ranchers and cowboys are good jazz dancers*, and that in order to be true ranchers and cowboys, they must become so good at jazz dance that they can *teach* it to others in the name of having *them* become good cowboys... and I set up a whole jazz dance studio business called Cowpokes Unto Perpetuity (where we also sell Curried Cowpoke Baked Beans). Oh, and as it suits me, I occasionally grope and sexually accost my staff and get them to submit to it by telling them it will improve their dance skills and make them better cowboys...
*For anyone unfamiliar w/ jazz dance and/or American Cowboy culture, the joke there being that cowboys DO dance, but they do a
Texas Two Step or a
Cotton-eyed Joe, but they don't generally get into jazz dance steps...
Does that make me a genuine cowboy? :a37:
Does it make me anything that even remotely resembles a cowboy?
Or does it make me the equivalent of a sort of morally corrupt John Wayne, because I'm dressed up like a cowboy, and I play one in front of other people for money, but unlike John Wayne, I do this in a way that is ego-centered, exploitative, and harmful to others?
I'd be willing to give him at least *some* credit if there was any evidence whatsoever that he truly believed himself to be a Sikh and *wanted* to be a good Sikh, and that he was studying the words of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji with sincere good intent, and was truly able to teach people about the beauty of what it has to say. But based on everything he has said and everything I have read, he not only wasn't really teaching it, he wasn't even *familiar* with its words -- he'd just randomly find a passage to use and then make stuff up about what it meant, often saying things that were a complete distortion of what it was actually intended to communicate.
So... jeeminy... to me that would indicate he was no more a Sikh than he was a cowboy (and I'm generally the last person to be picking on anyone for "not being spiritually up-to-snuff," but even *I* have to draw the line somewhere...) I guess I'm surprised that anyone could read what Dr. Singh ji wrote and not be unnerved and disturbed by it sufficiently to call YB what he really was -- a charlatan and a criminal.
Mind you, there are a lot of Christian televangelists out there who live in fancy houses and ride around in $500,000 automobiles and wear expensive jewelry. I find it a little creepy and not really in keeping what Jesus taught, but so long as they're not hurting or exploiting anyone, breaking any laws, or completely distorting what the Bible says for their own purposes, I have no problem with their doing what they do. The same cannot be said of YB when he was alive. I know he's been gone several years now, but his organization still perpetuates a lot of the same non-Sikh tantric/kundalini nonsense that he preached without ever being intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, or factually honest with themselves or anyone else about what this man was really, ultimately about: his own ego.
As we say Down South, you can put lipstick and perfume on a hog, but at the end of the day, it's still a hog... :a36:
