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Tiruvannamalai, January 28 2019.<\/p>\n
Hello Son of Bro,<\/p>\n
This is my belated answer to your last email.<\/p>\n
I have decided to make a blog out of our dialogue, so I have anonymized you to be the Son of Bro and will give the whole lot after this my email, as background information for the happy few that are interested.<\/p>\n
Thanks for your last answer in which you give an extended ‘justification’ for the ashram rules being based on the solidity of the Scriptures.<\/p>\n
I admit that I have asked for it, allowing my questions to be coming from my sligthly feeling irritated.<\/p>\n
And it gives me a fixed (stand-)point in relation to which I will try to find expression to where I stand in this.<\/p>\n
By the way, sorry for the delayed reply.
\nAs it was already clear that I wouldn’t make it to the planned retreat in December, I gave myself in to preparing for my current trip to India.<\/p>\n
By now I am already for the sixth week in India, having arrived in Tiruvannamalai after a month in Auroville.
\nMeanwhile brewing on the wider how and why of my growing stronger knowing that I am not going to visit the ashram at all at any time. Nor any other place that without knowing me is willingly putting me and others on restrictions that are seemingly unquestionable.<\/p>\n
By now, having written what came up and reflecting on it, I might come one day, cause the restrictions you talk about are only at play for repeated visits.
\nAnd by then it might even something that could be brought up in satsang, as nowadays we call looking carefully to a subject that might be carrying unclarity with them.<\/p>\n
I teased you on your saying that it is all about ending our suffering.
\nBy asking you bluntly: are you suffering?
\nIn your answer you widen this up again: it is about the suffering of all of us.<\/p>\n
Yes, and it is about getting to the roots of this as you mentioned.<\/p>\n
I have been around ‘getting to this roots’ for about fourty years now.
\nAt this point it is fully clear to me that, apart from enlightened outbursts of extasy, in the end for basically all the people I know and have known, there is more to be cleared up, cleaned up,\u00a0 to be transformed.<\/p>\n
It is by now also clear to me that there is not one single way out.
\nDespite the fact that many followers of many roads are convinced that ‘their’ way is the way.<\/p>\n
Despite the good intentions it is unavoidable that any exclusion has side effects.
\nFor instance in the form of judgements.
\nAnd it is a small step from better no sex to sex is wrong.
\nOr from no smoking allowed to the use of nicotine is despicable.
\nOr from no drugs to any use of drugs is not okay.
\nAnd what about no sex allowed, with nothing more in the user manual then ‘just don’t do it’.<\/p>\n
We live in a world that is partly the result of some of this originally maybe well intended manuals for living.<\/p>\n
The Belgian philosopher Marc De Kesel, in his deeply interesting book Auschwitz mon amour, says this about it (my translation from Dutch):
\n“This anti sexual tendency has gained influence in the course of history. With the expansion of the anti earthly, anti sexual christianity this tendency has conquered the West and gradually the whole world.”<\/p>\n
For\u00a0 deeper insights in the side effect of exclusion read Giorgio Agamben.
\nIf I were to give a quick improvisation of what he is talking about, it would kind of go like this: exclusion is done by a culture\/society\/group and the very act of exclusion has as its very effect that the excluded is right away included as the excluded.
\nThat unforseen ‘presence’ leads to the act of suppression, to the excluded being chased down into the subconscious. (Or into the lowest cast, untouchables without rights).
\nFrom where it will, one way or the other, surface again and again.
\nEtcetera ad infinitum, or untill the excluded is consciously included again and dealt with in a proper way.<\/p>\n
Every exclusion as such and perse has this kind of side effects.
\nIt is about time to handle exclusions more carefully than it has been done in the past and up till now.<\/p>\n
As a seventy plus year old male, I feel treated like a voiceless child when you write to me that when I come to your ‘guru’ and I intend to come back later, I am supposed to ‘keep the precepts’ for ever, also during the times ‘out there’.<\/p>\n
In short that would mean in my case that I would be breaking the rules the rest of my life.<\/p>\n
Because I am investigating life through many available means.
\nMeans that are at first sigt excluded categorically in your (and many others’) outline of ‘right’ living.<\/p>\n
For instance, the last months I have been experimenting with rap\u00e9.
\nAnd that brings me benefits.
\n(I came across this nicotine product thru meeting with some Brazilian shamanic Indians: https:\/\/hansvandergugten.nl\/?p=4974).<\/p>\n
So, now it is also on the surface that I also use other drugs.
\nI had a one time experience with peyote.<\/p>\n