Does Satan exist?

 
I have never read anything by Deepak. He's always been around but I have never been too interested. Then I saw him in God and Buddha - a dialogue with Robert Thurman and was really impressed.
http://www.guba.com/watch/3000056049

He is pretty poignant and downright halrious in this nightline faceoff. I like the way he framed the issue in terms of ignorance and enlightenment…of course. :-)
http://abcnews.go.com/nightline/faceoff
 

Re: Does Satan exist?

Thanks e

Deepak was really big in the Transcendental Meditation movement back when I was a TM evangelist (i.e. “if only everyone would learn TM then the world would become enlightened”… yikes!)

I think he still refers to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as his teacher, and he still frames much of what he says in the same “development of consciousness” terminology - and why not!?

Back in the 80's it was all “Maharashi said this and Maharsishi said that”, all very insular and quasi-cult like. Rarely did the TM movement truly intersect with mainstream culture, and Deepak would basically just follow this lead.

So now it's great to see him increasingly showing some balls and getting out there in some heated and funny debate.

Thanks for posting this.

James

Re: Does Satan exist?

I usually find “Dr Chopra” a tad irritating, to be frank. But the nightline discussion you linked was like a gust of fresh air in the face of Amber reification. Basically, stop projecting your own “evil” out into the world, and start working on yourself, which is really the only place where it's safe for all the demons to hang out and party. Safe because it's dark and 'cause there's rarely anyone there having a good look around. Really enjoyed that, thanks.

Go Deepak!

Re: Does Satan exist?

James, yeah I remember you and Irmeli talking about Deepak and TM.

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I think the gal had an OK perspective for her experience. Like you say Dawid, she was living in the shadows. So for her to have come out of that and gotten a handle on her life…more power too her! I really liked the Preacher when he was engaging with the “other side”, when he said my heart and soul were right but my mind was wrong at the time and he got all choked up because he knew he unknowingly harmed people.

So here is an angle to consider. We all believe Satan does not exist but in a story book narrative. That is, Satan does not have any ontological reality. What about our-selves? Outside of our concocted narratives, how do our dream characters exist? :-)

Re: Does Satan exist?

Deepak renounced the Maharishi, though he was a big supporter of his for awhile. He talks about it in this interview with Andrew Cohen. It's a pretty interesting, entertaining interview.

Here is an excerpt:

“It was the middle of the night when we left the ashram. I rented a car, and
we drove to Amsterdam and then flew to Boston. As soon as we came to the house,
the phone was ringing. It was Maharishi, and he said, “You’re like my son. I
said something to upset you.” I answered, “No. You didn’t say anything to upset
me. But I needed an excuse to leave.” Then he said, “You don’t realize”—he used
this word—“we have an empire and it’s yours.” “Maharishi,” I
told him, “you don’t understand. I don’t want that empire. I want freedom. I
want to think the way I think. I want to write the way I write. I want to speak
the way I speak. I don’t find that I can do that here.” “You will be able to,”
he insisted. I replied, “No, I won’t. It’s a system, now, and it’s a system that
has created something that makes it impossible to work outside the system.” He
asked, “So what do you want to do?” And I told him, “I want to leave.” These
were his last words: “Then go. I will love you, but I will be indifferent to
you, and you’ll never hear from me again.” And I said, “Okay. God bless.” That
was the last time I spoke to him.”

He's not great theoretically, but I am grateful to him for getting me into Ayurveda, Rumi, a few other things. I saw him once; he walked right by me. He was wearing very colorful glasses.

Almaas has interesting ideas about Satan. He doesn't think it is eternal, but he thinks there is something like Satan in each person, at least until a high stage of awakening.

He writes about it in Inner Journey Home in a section titled “The Prince of Darkness”:

“The absence of adequate holding in early childhood marks the specific stage at which the soul becomes estranged from divine love… . She reacts and … this reaction is generally suffused with bitterness, disappointment, frustration, and hatred. She develops the position that there is no inherent benevolence in the world, within various degrees of distrust… . The individual feels full of black, crsytalized hatred, and wants to intensely direct it toward the universal love… . The Beast turns out to be a particular crystallization of the ego principle, the conviction about and identification with separateness. Separateness is what truly opposes divine love, and the devil's hatred is the final natural outcome of such separateness.”

Some of Almaas' discussion is dragged down by some metaphysical thinking and lack of postmodernism, at times in a very obvious way, but I think it is still an important idea. It is very much like Andrew Cohen's idea of ego as an anti-evolutionary force and like Adi Da's Pit of Snakes. It also seems similar if not the same as Almaas' idea of narcissistic rage.

At one point during the Cold War some guys in the Kremlin wanted to fill a barge with nuclear weapons to blow up the entire world if capitalism won out over socialism. They felt that the world wouldn't be worth living in if socialism lost out to capitalism. That's anti-evolutionary, that's ego, that's Satan!

The kid that shot 20 or 30 people at Virginia Tech is also a fine example.

But I think we can see the same basic thing, the same anti-evolutionary force in much more everyday ways. It's like an irrational “No!” that doesn't care about anything but itself and wants to hurt. I think the rejection games Adi Da talks about are a good example.