Making sense of the psychological split which some apostates appear to exhibit
As discussed previously, people often write detailed accounts of their lives while with a spiritual group. These accounts tend to reflect a thinking, feeling individual who is living out their spiritual choices, consciously reaffirming those choices day after day, year after year. But later, after exiting the spiritual group, the same individual may supply a “captivity narrative” in connection with participation in a so-called “ex-cult support group.” The captivity narrative may seem contrived, formulaic, and scripted in comparison to the same person’s prior narrative describing spiritual experiences with uniqueness, and in detail.
This phenomenon suggests a psychological split in someone who was once a spiritual seeker, but who later adopts a hard apostate stance. Comparing their written statements over a period of decades, we may find two mutually exclusive world views and contradictory sets of alleged facts, as if the accounts were written by two different people. Hence, “a tale of two psyches.” Such is the case with Bithika O’Dwyer, whose public apostatizing seems intended to provoke controversy and raise matters of public concern. I respond to those matters here and elsewhere, and with as much sympathy as I can muster (though not always as much as I should like).
Not that her case is unique. Apostates sometimes make a great show of breaking with their former faith group by posting lewd or hateful material on the Internet. Such “testimonials” are then collated and used as part of a degradation ceremony belittling spiritual groups and portraying them negatively to the general public. This technique is used by anti-cult groups to create a set of “alternative facts” about spiritual groups running counter to the facts established by bonafide scholars of religion and by spiritual practitioners themselves. The intent is to suppress, harass, limit the civil rights of, and discourage participation in minority faith groups.
In this vein, I have been critical of attorney Joe Kracht of the Lawton law firm of San Diego for conducting Internet show trials of deceased spiritual figures where he is both judge and jury, exculpatory evidence is suppressed or ignored, and no genuine defence is permitted.
Where spiritual figures or groups are prosecuted in absentia by Internet demagogues, the so-called “evidence” often consists of an emotionally charged apostate testimonial which, though fictional, is designed to push people’s hot buttons and work them into a nativist lather. The evidence being suppressed or ignored is that same person’s prior written statements extolling the spiritual figure or group in question.
To a well-grounded legal mind, the fact that the same person tells two completely different stories is first and foremost an indicator that this person is not a reliable witness. But should one find it necessary to judge which of two conflicting stories is most accurate, only an idiot would assume that the most recent story must be the most accurate. When all the evidence is considered (rather than being suppressed or ignored), the story which is told most consistently over an extended period of time, and which also comports with generally known facts, tends to be the most accurate.
So one way to debunk false accounts which raise matters of public concern or threaten to infect the popular imagination is to produce the same person’s more voluminous and persuasive accounts written over an extended period, which dramatically contradict her (more recent) apostate testimonial. See, for example, “False Salon Story: What was said at the time,” which debunks the claims of Celia Corona-Doran (a.k.a. Suchatula Cecilia Corona) by referencing her prior statements.
I started the Digital Citizens project on Scribd.com to house such accurate source material debunking false claims. You can read the Digital Citizens Mission Statement here. Some key points are:
Digital Citizens helps bring to light and make available evidence which is being suppressed elsewhere. This material is relevant and necessary to resolving public controversies which have been artificially manufactured through the circulation of material containing false depictions of spiritual figures and groups. This leads to other adverse effects in society, such as making minority spiritual groups the object of hatred and harassment, or contaminating the prospective jury pool where such groups are targeted for civil litigation. The net effect is to curtail the civil rights of minority adherents, in contravention of the U.S. Constitution as amended by the Bill of Rights.
The corrective measure of uploading exculpatory evidence is a lawful purpose and protected form of speech. Where Person A purposefully manufactures a public controversy by attacking the character and reputation of Person B through the circulation of hateful or salacious material, the public has a right to view other material authored by Person A (or concerning Person A) which speaks to his or her credibility. In such cases, the public’s right to know trumps other interests. Uploading of such material deemed necessary to resolving matters of public concern constitutes fair use of existing source material.
In keeping with these principles, I am today uploading to Digital Citizens the document “Bithika O’Dwyer Testimonials” which contains a representative cross-section of material authored by or concerning Ms. O’Dwyer during the period when she was a member in good standing of Sri Chinmoy Centre — a period comprising roughly 1979-2014.
This makes compelling reading for anyone who was taken in by the type of hate material circulated by Joe Kracht. Obviously, the most compelling witness testifying against Bithika O’Dwyer is Bithika O’Dwyer! One half of her (apparently) split psyche is far more consistent and reliable than the other, and the accompanying photos underscore the truthfulness of her contemporaneous accounts describing a spiritual life with which she was abundantly happy. To quote Ms. O’Dwyer from “Beauty is my Light”:
As a woman, I have everything I need to progress — I believe that I live a truly modern life. I have many older sisters and a very beautiful and supportive spiritual family. I hope that I may grow into women half as beautiful as some of them. I treasure their joys and their sorrows, and the more generations that are included in our family the more special the bonds of love and friendship. I have projects to work on within my own community — a business to support myself independently (which means a lot to me), musical and artistic projects, fun projects like plays and games, and always colour, decorations, abundance. This path is a garden where you can find a representative of everything and everyone under the sun, thriving and living side-by-side with even diametrically opposed aspects in harmony. I am not given to “fluffy” gratitude — when you grow up with spiritual terms, I think you come to the point that you have to really redefine some of the terms again for yourself, or the language can become cliched; but I know that in my future births, I shall look back on this life as the turning point. Wherever I go from here, I know that I have been so deeply altered by these 26 years, that my destiny has been rewritten. I know that I now believe in the “impossible” dream — of a divine life on earth. I have as many incarnations as it will take to manifest that dream, but that belief is so priceless. I know I shall personally honour Sri Chinmoy’s sacrifices to bring this truth to me for all my days, for all eternity.
Bitihika O’Dwyer and Sarada Crowe, running in a Joy Weekend event, October 2004.
Ms. O’Dwyer wrote such positive accounts both before and after Sri Chinmoy’s passing (which occurred in 2007), and she remained an active member of Sri Chinmoy Centre until 2014.
Why does someone leave a well-organized spiritual path with no history of abuse? We cannot always know the reasons to a certitude, but we discussed many possible reasons in Part 1 and Part 2. Such reasons are augmented by They Came Only To Go: The Birthless and Deathless Chronicles of Himalayan Absurdity.
I would not publicly speculate about the motives of a private person by name; but apostasy is not a private, personal decision. The apostate makes a great public show of her newfound rejection of faith, and actively (even aggressively) seeks to persuade others to abandon their faith and attack their former faith group. Those who take an active public role by posting hate material on the Internet (thus provoking controversy) may lose some expectation of privacy in the bargain. The harms caused by circulation of such hate material are tangible harms for which one remedy is to shine the light of truth on false claims made by the apostate.
That said, I genuinely admire Bithika O’Dwyer for her spirituality, her creativity, her intellect, and for all the good she did during an extended period of her life when she defined herself primarily as a spiritual seeker. Pointing out the inaccuracy of her later claims is not a pleasant task; and in spite of feeling an ethical necessity to do so, I have put it off repeatedly.
What I would add to previous discussions is that in reading Ms. O’Dwyer’s spiritual chronicles, we can observe some unique aspects of her own nature and struggles. She is clearly a sincere spiritual aspirant, and her own way of relating to the spiritual quest is a highly dramatic one. She’s prone to ecstatic highs and despondent lows, and this creates for her a sense of the spiritual life as a series of dramatic encounters with the Guru and his teachings. This is not true of everyone. Some people have a more steady, easy-going nature, do not experience such dramatic highs and lows, and are able to progress in a more natural way, with less inner conflict and less of a sense of themselves as players in some Grand Drama.
One of the subjects we tackled in Part 1 was the many mundane or prosaic reasons why people leave a spiritual path, and why they sometimes disguise these mundane reasons with an over-the-top “atrocity story” which simply isn’t true.
In the case of Ms. O’Dwyer, my personal belief is that she left for fairly conventional reasons such as losing interest and intensity, no longer having her teacher present in the physical to inspire her, no longer wanting to fight the “inner battle” with herself, and because she still had desires and ambitions which took her back to worldly life, to career and romance. But because she’s a Dramatique by nature, she can’t accept such mundane reasons for leaving, and has to create a dramatic narrative which vindicates her rather than making her appear weak and foolish, or implying that she betrayed a high and noble goal which she had long cherished as her raison d’être.
Still, in fairness to her and others, I don’t want to minimize the difficulties of the spiritual quest. Some (by no means all) seekers experience ups and downs, highs and lows, struggles with faith and doubt and with the complexities of their own nature. These struggles can be painful.
Sushmitam Rouse is a psychologist by profession, but also a spiritual seeker. According to her, spiritual work is a lot like good therapy. Ms. Rouse writes:
Now for the issue you raise of women who claim to have experienced abuse. I’ve worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist for many years now, so have quite a bit of experience in this area. I agree wholeheartedly with your comment on the innocence and purity of Guru’s consciousness, which I think results in women feeling safe in the centre and with Guru. I know there are some women on the path who have had difficult or traumatic experiences with men when they were living in the world, who have taken refuge in the safety offered by the centre. It would be easy to conclude from this that the centre functions for such women as a way of repressing these experiences rather than working them through. This view of the spiritual life is quite commonly held by secular people, and arises from a fundamental lack of understanding about the inner work and process of transformation involved in leading a spiritual life. Whilst in the short term a person on our path can avoid dealing with difficult personal issues, in the longer term the profoundly transformative experience of meditating with Sri Chinmoy usually means that we cannot stay with our repression for too long.
In my experience, any psychological issues that need to be dealt with rear their heads once we are spiritually strong enough to deal with them. They can then be worked through under Sri Chinmoy’s loving inner guidance. Usually when this happens there is a period of struggle, which manifests outwardly, and we say to each other “Oh she’s just going through Stuff” (do the guys talk like this too?). It is actually quite similar to the process involved in good psychotherapy, but on a vastly different level. Mostly, the person eventually works the issue through and is able to move on to the next challenge. Just like in therapy and in life, some people get stuck on a certain issue for a long time, and others leave the path because it’s just too hard to deal with it, or some part of them actually likes the problem and doesn’t want to resolve it. Guru never forces us to resolve issues, he just provides us with the inner assistance, and the safe and loving environment to enable us to work them through.
By the way, for anyone interested in reading about this process at play in another spiritual path, read the book ‘Unveiled: Nuns Talking’ by Mary Loudon — a superb first person account of the lives of nuns in various Christian orders in the UK.
– Sushmitam Rouse from “Question For The Women” (discussion thread)
Her analysis is fascinating, not least because it comports with some of Bithika O’Dwyer’s own observations. In “Beauty is my Light,” Ms. O’Dwyer writes:
Because my spiritual training was primarily in silence, I was developing very naturally outwardly with every aspect of my developing mind, and meanwhile the love and kindness were seeping into my soul and I was pleasantly marinating in them, eventually to emerge as a completely transformed individual. Sri Chinmoy’s guidance was laid out as a benchmark, but I was given complete free will to discover my own truth. It was always a “given” that the pursuit of the spiritual heart was the key to divine experience — Guru did say this time and again. But his understanding of the unfoldment of a soul, the timing of illuminations and so forth were impeccable — telling us how things were was not his style — but helping us to truly discover for ourselves the truth. I think of him as a true friend — allowing the individual the joys and sorrows of existence and his/her free experience, while always being there to help at any moment. When I think of how many acts of kindness I experienced, inner and outer, tears come. I was not given to obeying my parents or even the best wishes of my Guru at times, and had many adventures while trying to discover who I was. I was always met with a loving and tender kindness. Forgiveness comes to Sri Chinmoy faster than it will ever come to any. And always oneness — a full understanding of where you as an individual are and what your needs are. He was a pure channel of divine light in my vision, but again and again I was struck by his humanity also — such impeccable nobility, endless giving to all around — of his time, money, affection, concern. My own wilfulness was no match for his quiet, silent, sweeter than the sweetest eye. Not for long, at least.
It was these honest reflections on the inner journey (along with her many other good qualities) which made Bithika O’Dwyer well-loved among her friends at Sri Chinmoy Centre.
Following up on the passage from Sushmitam Rouse: Maybe not all spiritual paths and types of therapy are equally compatible; but among those which are, perhaps the shared element is “inner truth.” In spiritual work, as in good therapy, one tries to get at the inner truth and to transform what needs to be transformed. As human beings most of us have broken places inside us which are tender to the touch, and things which seem too painful to deal with. Yet, in both spiritual work and good therapy, we are guided into those broken, painful places so that we might ultimately manage to transform them.
To transform our nature takes tremendous patience and dedication, and at times we may have to tough it out or slog through mud. As the popular children’s song by Michael Rosen goes:
We’re going on a bear hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We’re not scared.
Uh-oh! Mud!
Thick oozy mud.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!
Squelch squelch!
Squelch squelch!
Squelch squelch!
We’ve got to go through it! Otherwise, the only other choice is to run all the way home, lock the door, throw the covers over our heads, and declare: “We’re not going on a bear hunt again!” (That’s how the children’s song ends.)
People sometimes leave a spiritual path for the same reasons they leave therapy: because the next steps involve dealing with those broken places and painful truths. Some therapists will candidly admit that while many come for therapy, this can be just another panic button to press; yet the person pressing the “therapy button” doesn’t always want to change beyond a certain point, and may become extremely hostile when the therapist gets too close to problem areas.
In the case of spiritual work with Sri Chinmoy, he shines a very powerful inner light which the student needs to prepare himself/herself to receive. That light penetrates to the core of one’s weaknesses in order to transform them. This does not happen all at once, but rather over the course of many years and many spiritual experiences. It is a cooperative process. The challenge for the student is to remain open, willing, and receptive to that light. Sometimes the way the light operates is that it is like removing a thorn from our foot: when the light touches the darkness in our nature, we may experience pain and then a feeling of freedom and release.
There needs to be a bond of love and trust between the Guru and disciple, because this relationship in which the Guru intervenes personally to dispel darkness in the disciple’s nature is an intimate relationship, though it is not at all sexual.
Just as we need to trust a surgeon who will be removing a malignant tumor, we also need to trust the Guru to use light to dispel darkness. In some cases, when the inner light enters into the darkness of our nature, we may experience some pain. This pain, if it occurs, is associated with the process of transformation. In the process of surrendering to light, darkness cries out and sheds tears. Then, afterwards, we feel so much lighter! (Here again, parallels with good therapy.) In “My Guru Sri Chinmoy,” Bithika O’Dwyer writes:
All this smiling business coincided with my pockets of depression. It’s one of those things that I understand only in hindsight. Forces from within me were playing out some dark history or drama such that I went through pockets of depression in my spiritual quest – I hear that this is not uncommon as we unravel previous behaviour patterns built up over centuries. When I would see him and he would make these comments I see now that he was applying an equal and opposite force to counteract this on so many levels. Those little acid comments fell into my heart and gradually grew into a few different trees of strength – not first without releasing floods of tears and pain that were deeply rooted in my heart and for which I had no explanation. Every visit to New York would be accompanied by hours of tears – deeply cleansing, cathartic experiences that left me so much lighter at the end.
According to Sri Chinmoy, people may shed tears for various reasons. Sometimes it is an emotional outburst coming from the untransformed vital. At other times, it is the soul’s joy expressing itself through the physical. In her spiritual memoir Auspicious Good Fortune, Sumangali Morhall writes of the first time she met her Guru:
Disciples from Britain, and some from Europe, clustered at the arrival hall in Heathrow’s Terminal Three. Their greetings buzzed around me, brimming with anticipation of the Master’s appearance, but most of them had seen him only weeks before in New York. I had never seen him at all. Aware of this fact, a few kindly made space for me at the front without me asking. I gazed out from the barrier into the strip of empty floor, amidst the canned announcements and artificial light, waiting for my Guru to appear in the world as he had done so many times in my heart.
Somewhere inside the bustle was a bubble of quietude, where for the first time I genuinely sought aloneness. There was the same familiar feeling in the centre of my chest as I had felt before, like the press of many tiny fingers. Inside it that time, I was aware of a flat disc rotating slowly. Tiny parts unfolded from its centre, as if each had always fitted neatly into the other, waiting only for that moment. It was like the intricate workings of some fantastical safe as it unlocked, one layer inside the other inside the other, the colours of each deeper level more vivid than the last. When I was sure the scene in my heart could not be more brilliant or beautiful, the outer doors slid open, and my Guru appeared: neither in the robes of a Thai monk, nor in a satin dhoti, but in a thick down jacket, track pants and running shoes. His head was bare, and a familiar hand peeped out from the end of a padded sleeve. He walked slowly with a full smile, gazing about from one side to another, but seeming to see another realm altogether. Barely six feet away, he looked right into me with eyes made of endless galaxies. Tears swelled in mine, and more tears and more tears again: they would not stop for twelve hours.
Equipped with an unglamorous wad of paper napkins from a restaurant, I took my red velvet seat at the Albert Hall that evening. Had I come for a theatrical performance, I would have been studying a printed programme, or the lighting, or the ornate mouldings. As it was, I had enough to do catching the tears that had been raining steadily all day from just one glimpse of my spiritual Master, and inwardly attempting to prepare myself for several hours in his presence.
So these appear to be tears of joy. Sri Chinmoy writes:
The smiles that arise
From tears
Are unimaginably beautiful.
http://www.srichinmoylibrary.com/st-41750
and also:
The beauty of tears
Changes human life sooner than at once.
The duty of smiles
Also changes human life sooner than at once.
The union of tears and smiles
Makes God and man embrace each other,
Fulfil each other
And satisfy each other.
http://www.srichinmoylibrary.com/tp-703
Sri Chinmoy smiling
Elaborating on a topic from Part 1, we can say that the spiritual quest entails an inner struggle between light and darkness. Some people are fortunate to develop simplicity and purity in their nature, and find it easy to remain in the spiritual heart so that the struggle does not seem so intense or extreme, and does not affect their mental balance.
Others may (in spite of their best intentions) have to struggle more with the mind, and therefore experience the spiritual life in a more dramatic and subjective fashion. All that personal drama (which they themselves bring as karmic baggage) can become wearing over time, causing them to lose freshness and enthusiasm.
The spiritual path can be a joy to the heart and a burden to the mind. If one is following Sri Chinmoy’s path of the heart, then the joy and sweetness found in the heart are needed for the journey. Due to their mental approach, some people may reach a point where it stops being fun due to too much self-created drama. For them, the spiritual life becomes something grandiose clutched by the ego, whereas it’s ideally something simple and natural, plain and unpretentious (like doing the laundry, to use a Buddhist simile courtesy Jack Kornfield).
A careful reading of Bithika O’Dwyer’s “My Guru Sri Chinmoy” suggests that she was struggling with such issues, and that she hoped to firmly commit to a heart-centered approach. She wrote:
And so a smile became my emblem for change, for growth. I saw it as my commitment to a higher consciousness – as my self-offering, as a way to express my gratitude for existence on this earth, for that capacity to value Light and hold it at the earth plane. It was unimaginably powerful when this started to finally burn through my life, illumining so many of the dark corners. Added into this was Guru’s ever present quest for his children to bring sweetness into human life – another pride-smasher for an independent feminist who wanted to find her way as a cool and powerful woman, in any way but via the stereotypically sweet, mild and bending traditional female values that I associated with centuries of neglect, abuse and servitude! I am not sure how I swallowed that one, but once the penny had started to drop with the smile issue, I realised this one had to go too. It all fell into place and I gradually learn that we cannot hold onto any preconceived ideas about who we are, or who we should or want to be. The divine Light is not any of it, but a pure electricity that we put the ridiculous shades onto, and can just as easily take them off if we have the courage.
I now see real strength as the simple qualities of the heart – a willingness to smile and offer of oneself, the sweet and childlike approach to life which is ever fresh, pure and innocent – and not as the rigid, brittle morality and integrity which so often fails to fulfil us emotionally and spiritually in the final analysis, and which is the source of so many of the detrimental conditions of this earth. I find Guru’s message one that I can build my entire existence upon: follow your heart, follow your heart, follow your heart … I hope that he can feel my tears of gratitude for the immense power he sent into my heart just by opening this small ridiculous topic.
About three years later she simply “lost it,” which is very sad for her, and also sad for those who loved her as a friend and sister. Unfortunately, her particular way of losing it was to become extremely hostile toward her former friends, teacher, and path. So as I’ve said before, it’s hard to love and forgive someone who’s throwing rocks at church windows — at least while the (metaphorical) glass is still tinkling and people are checking themselves for cuts and bruises.
In Part 1, I mentioned one of the reasons for leaving a spiritual path is that someone encounters a rough patch in their own nature. I did not elaborate, but I think we’re all susceptible to running into something recalcitrant within ourselves such that we feel we can’t go over it, can’t go under it, and can’t go through it either. So (consistent with the quote from Sushmitam Rouse), this is one reason some people leave a spiritual path.
Recognizing this does not trivialize the very real pain some people go through doing spiritual work, and does not trivialize the pain of leaving a spiritual path if one finds one can no longer continue on. But it’s important not to blame such suffering — which is part and parcel of the human condition — on the path and teacher, since they’re not the root causes of such suffering (just as it’s not the therapist’s fault that the client has to confront stubborn problems). Buddhist author Jack Kornfield writes:
For almost everyone who practices, cycles of awakening and openness are followed by periods of fear and contraction. Times of profound peace and newfound love are often overtaken by periods of loss, by closing up, fear, or the discovery of betrayal, only to be followed again by equanimity or joy. In mysterious ways the heart reveals itself to be like a flower that opens and closes. This is our nature.
– Jack Kornfield, from After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path
Whether or not this is true of “almost everyone,” the point is that we need to maintain some constancy in our relationships with others despite these positive and negative cycles. During a negative cycle, we don’t try and burn down the church or temple where we once experienced ecstasy. On days when the sky is filled with clouds, we don’t curse the sun or claim that the sun never existed. Whether we’re feeling cheerful or depressed, we still try to be guided by ethics and common sense, and remain loyal to those who befriended and nurtured us.
As I discuss in “Making Sense of the Spiritual Life,” some people have genuine spiritual needs. If they end their spiritual practice during a negative cycle, they may even become physically ill because they’re no longer meeting those needs — no longer getting the benefits of spiritual practice, which include subtle health benefits not noticed until they are absent.
For reasons spiritual, ethical, and karmic, it is not advisable to adopt a slash-and-burn mentality when leaving a spiritual path. For more on this, see “Doubt, Faith, and the Ethics of Apostasy.”
Bithika O’Dwyer’s own writings bring to light similar reasons. In “My Guru Sri Chinmoy,” she writes:
I had unfortunate friends who were hungry and demanded experience beyond their capacity because they felt it would boost their social position and just out of general ignorance – they couldn’t deal with the result at all and before long they had denounced there ever having been Truth and given up spiritual pursuit on principle. Their hunger was mixed with a personal greed and I watched their journey with pain, as they were close friends, and with a sense that it could so easily be me. The goal is oneness with a vast universal consciousness beyond the personal ego, and on the way their personal greed was blown open and they did not have the strength to overcome it and jump to the wider consciousness. It is a very real danger when the timing of growth is not respected – the cake is pulled out of the oven yet to be fully cooked because of the impatience to eat it, and it flops and gives you a stomach pain. I said goodbye to those friends as their reality shrunk to the painful stump of their personal anger being brandished at the infinite – Guru often got the brunt of their anger, and I understood in one way because his messages for us were often infuriating and painful, but there was a choice and they chose to remain with a smaller part of their being for a while longer. He was not afraid to draw that response either, as growth always came first, and this was a territorial risk he made himself vulnerable to.
…
Every length of the road has tests that you need to pass in order to have the capacity to take the next curve. You have to respect the order of this or there is danger. The Guru helps you to get the best possible opportunities. He bargains for you and prepares the way for you and tells you of the dangers and helps you through the challenges. But most of all he believes in you and challenges you to grow where others would tell you to stop dreaming. When you are ready, he will not let you shirk the challenge. He has been there. He is master of Time and Space and knows the methods that will work. I saw him caution my friends in so many ways and for so many years before they bit off more than they could chew, but I also saw him finally allow them the choice to make their own destiny. And I know he will be with them through their suffering, be the source of renewed hope at some stage, and in due course lift them back up to continue on with increased wisdom. The road is very long. It began for me before my mind existed to try to make sense of things, and it will continue on long after my mental capacities dissolve away – only my soul will live to tell the tale. And my soul will always be guided by my beloved Guru Sri Chinmoy, for he lit the flames in my heart, has watched over them like a mother for so many years, and is inextricably linked to my existence.
The above passage, written by Ms. O’Dwyer in 2011 (four years after Sri Chinmoy’s passing), contains much wisdom (and also showcases her flair for the dramatic). That she ultimately seemed to make the same mistakes as friends she spoke of is a tragedy. In my view, she then compounded that tragedy by taking a slash-and-burn approach to her departure. This makes it harder to repair the damage, to allow her teacher to “be with her through her suffering, be the source of renewed hope at some stage, and in due course lift her back up to continue on with increased wisdom.”
Suppose you find yourself in a dark room. There is always hope that someone will come with a light and illumine it. But if you also lock the door from the inside and announce your intention to harm anyone who tries to help you, and are arrogantly proud of the darkness you have chosen, then the situation becomes less workable. Sri Chinmoy writes:
Light will illumine all our bad qualities. Our ‘bad qualities’ means our darkness. Darkness can only be conquered by light. A room may be full of darkness for years. Then an electrician comes and in a few minutes he brings light into the room. Similarly, we have to bring light into all our imperfections. When we get illumination, all our insecurity, jealousy, impurity, impatience — everything — will be illumined. Light is the answer. The sooner we bring light into our system from Above or bring light to the fore from within the better for us. Otherwise, at any moment we can make mistakes. Light does not make any mistake. It is because we do not have light in boundless measure that we make mistakes. Each mistake is nothing short of darkness. When darkness expresses itself, it becomes a mistake.
Light is the answer. Why should we compel God to use His iron rod? When He was using His Compassion-Eye, what was wrong with us? Why did we not change our nature? If we love God, then we have to feel that God’s Tears are infinitely more powerful than God’s Smiles. If we are weak, then when God smiles at us, either we feel that we did not make any mistake or that God has forgiven us. This is how we deceive ourselves. But God’s Tears offer us another way. If we see tears flowing in God’s Eyes because of our mistake, how can we bear to see His Heart bleeding? If we see that somebody’s heart is bleeding, will we not give our life to make that person happy? And do we not love God infinitely more than we love any human being? So God’s Tears are infinitely more powerful than God’s Smiles. If we want to transform our nature, God’s Tears will be of real help to us.
True, God’s Smiles encourage us, but at the same time, we may misinterpret God’s Smiles. We may go on and on making the same mistakes and still God may give us a Smile. Inside His Smile, God may be suffering, but we take it as encouragement. In one sense, God also takes it as encouragement because He hopes that if He gives us a broad Smile, we will not make the same mistake again. But unfortunately, it does not work.
If you really love God and if you see that He is shedding bitter tears, He is lamenting, He is suffering, then you will immediately transform your life.
…
If you are good people, then when you do something wrong, you will not hide from God. You will come and stand before Him and say, “I have done something wrong. Now please forgive me. Please illumine me.”
– Sri Chinmoy, from Sri Chinmoy Answers, Part 27, Agni Press, 2000
Conclusions
Reality has a certain fabric to it. It is woven together in one particular way and not some other way. (Cats don’t play the tuba, and flowers grow up not down.) The authors quoted here present a consistent picture of reality. If someone wants to create their own reality, this self-created reality will not be consistent with reality proper, so why should we accept it? The problem with apostate testimonials is that they often fail to jibe with the fabric of reality.
These are my opinions on matters of public concern which I did not raise, but rather were raised by Bithika O’Dwyer in the course of her activities opposing her former faith group. I genuinely wish her every happiness. Where I’ve weighed in on personal issues, this has been done as a defensive measure or bulwark against hate. Once someone brings their case before the public, they are then at the mercy of the public. This is something lawyers like Joe Kracht don’t always adequately explain to clients or protégés before taking them public.
The issues raised are nevertheless not unique to Ms. O’Dwyer, but apply broadly to the apostate phenomenon. The word “phenomenon” is helpful here, because one definition of a phenomenon is something which you can’t necessarily explain, but which you simply learn to live with or work around.
For some wholly mysterious reason, your installation of Microsoft Windows always crashes on rainy Thursdays. You try and troubleshoot the problem, but can make no ultimate sense of it. So either you don’t turn on your computer on rainy Thursdays, or maybe you switch to Mac or Linux.
A famous entry in the collection of haiku error messages goes:
yesterday it worked
today it is not working
Windows is like that
We cannot know all the inner or outer reasons why someone who was yesterday a devoted seeker is today throwing rocks at church windows, nor do we have time to study the problem endlessly. Since our own spiritual quest is of paramount importance, we simply learn to work around the problems created by others, helping where we can, but accepting that some phenomena are beyond our ken. And hey, people are like that.
Michael Howard
The views expressed are my own, and do not represent any other person or organization. See my About page for further disclaimers.
Book Cover Project
Here are the book covers for this post, mostly courtesy Sri Chinmoy Libary:
Of Further Interest
Doubt, Faith, and the Ethics of Apostasy
Making Sense of the Spiritual Life
A Question of Forgiveness
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