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The role of the teacher
- every3rdthought
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Reframing the Spiritual Life and The Certain Failure of the Guru Tradition
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Muktananda (who is marred by scandal) was known to put skeptical non-meditators into trances. He loved to give shaktipat to famous people. My mom hung around him in the 70's and saw Jazz singer Roberta Flack get brought into the front of the room in Manhattan. He immediately put her into some state - no problem.
Regardless of what it is and how powerful you think it is, the evidence for transmission (more than placebo) is there (in my opinion).
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- every3rdthought
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in the traditional teachings, there sometimes seems to be a view of shaktipat (which literally means 'descent of shakti') that is more 'ritual' oriented than we presently think of it, i.e. if we set up the right conditions and conduct the rituals appropriately, shaktipat happens, rather than it being a more 'personal' transmission of energy from a charismatic guru. Interestingly, Zen transmission these days is also often seen as a quasi-mystical recognition that the transmittee is awakened, but historically in China and Japan it was often used for the purposes of authority, lineage continuation etc.
My observational view is that, when I see people who seem very invested in shaktipat, they seem to become highly reliant on the guru in a way that leads to all the bad outcomes we associate with guru abuse - dependence, turning a blind eye to immorality, etc. There was a big scandal in Satyananda recently and the Australian ashram moved to separate itself from the Indian parent body due to abuse by the founding guru. One of my Satyananda friends said that she couldn't support this, not only because she didn't believe the accusations, but because she thought that without the guru and his chosen disciple-teachers the shakti wouldn't flow. Many of the traditions I can think of that focus on shaktipat have had pretty nasty guru scandals - Muktananda/Siddha Yoga, Satyananda, and the Shiva School of Meditation here in Australia.
On the other hand, it definitely seems to be a good experience when it encourages people to go deeper or shakes them out of an old paradigm (rather than when it's seen in itself as the be-all and end-all, to try to be repeated or made a permanent state).
Anyway that's more an answer to a question about the morality of shaktipat - in answer to your actual question, I wouldn't say it's a myth, inasmuch as I can certainly envisage that being in the presence of a teacher could arouse a strong spiritual experience, and that certain teachers do have a certain energy which might conduce to that. So I wouldn't call it a myth, although I'd imagine it's easily scripted - but then, it's a nice philosophical point to ask what the distinction is between a scripted and non-scripted 'peak experience'... But subject to all the usual cautions about peak experiences and structures/beliefs that conduce to spiritual abuse.
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- every3rdthought
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ETA: I also believe it can happen for real, but there are serious dangers when a person puts a guru in a position of such power.
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Laurel Carrington wrote: Do you think that the power to affect a disciple by one's very presence is no more than a myth?
In the Dzogchen tradition, the first step is Direct Introduction, where the master directly transmits a taste of pure awareness to the student. I have no reason to believe this is a myth. On the contrary, Dzogchen seems to be a level-headed and sensible tradition.
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"We defer to each other to learn but surrender no power."
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