Violence against women and alleged dildo injury to Adi Da "wife's" genitals

Posted by hatley on Feb-21-05 2:04am

I am glad to have discovered this forum. I was a devotee in the early nineties but left when I kept hearing stories of violence toward women. Whenever I heard these stories I expressed horror and amazement...but what shocked me almost more than the stories themselves was the bland acceptance everyone seemed to have about the violence. It was rarely denied.

Instead, it seemed as if it was really no big deal and the finger was pointed at me instead -- there had to be something wrong with me that I minded so much and found it so hard to understand why, for example, a female student novice in my class could be rejected from becoming a devotee because she was overweight (and she was made to bring a scale to each class!) yet it was considered okay for men to beat women and molest children and continue on as devotees.

I myself was at one point urged to "step back" from devotee level and return to student novice level because I refused to sign a vow of total lifelong obedience to every request of the guru. When this request for obedience was made one Sunday morning, I thought about it and realized that to vow total obedience would HAVE to be a lie. For one thing, it was perfectly obvious that it was physically impossible to do everything the guru asked. Not one single person had ever managed it, so how was it going to be possible for a whole room full of devotees to be able to do this? And also, I had no idea WHAT might be asked and whether my conscience would allow me to agree to it before I'd even heard the request.

I knew, for example, that I simply could NEVER impose the "cold food discipline" on a child because I considered it a profound violation of a child's boundaries. Anyway, I just kept saying something along the lines of, "If I take this vow, it will be a clear LIE, and while I may not be able to do everything the guru asks, at least I am capable of telling him the truth and I intend to keep it that way." This was EXTREMELY unpopular talk.

In Fiji, my talk along these lines was equally unpopular. When questioned about why I didn’t seem to be taking quite the right attitude toward community life, I kept saying I just was not comfortable with the community's attitude toward violence toward women and child molesting, and that long "considerations" with rooms full of doleful, anxious women wasn't going to change that. I kept insisting: "We just don’t see violence the same way, and it feels cult-like to me that you are trying to MAKE me see it your way. Why do we all have to feel the very same way about such a complex subject?"

At some point they "threatened" to have me live in total isolation, I guess just emerging, from some hut or other that was set away from the other little huts, in order to do my work. I put "threatened" in quotes because they meant it as a threat but I LOVED the idea of living alone and only coming out to do my job! I think my meals were going to be delivered on a tray. It was meant to sound like jail time but actually sounded quite heavenly to me. I loved a lot about my time in Fiji -- just not being badgered and harassed to feel things and say things and write down things that I did not feel.

To my own credit, I can honestly say they never once got me to lie, despite some pretty heavy pressure. At the time I remember wondering why it was that they were able to break down so many people and make them appear to feel the most outrageous and preposterous things (like that our lack of response to the guru was causing the war in the middle east!!!). When I felt trapped in little rooms with crazy talk like that, I would chant silently in my head: "This is nonsense, pay no attention" over and over until everyone flew off into the night to write desperate heart felt letters of apology to the guru for wrongdoings that I could NEVER, EVER fathom. When I pressed for answers on what exactly all these thin, haunted, DESPERATE to please devotees who rarely slept were actually doing wrong, I never got a straight answer. Not once.

Anyway, it was one certain tale of horror that made me realize I could not be a devotee. I never knew if the thing was true -- no one would confirm it, yet it truly haunted me. Someone told me that there was a female chiropractor whose job it was to sew back up the genital area of one of the guru's wives after he had sex with her. On more levels than I can say, this story undid me. The brutality of it! The "secrecy" of it -- imagine allowing the most sensitive part of your body to be stitched up, time and again, by someone who wasn't even a doctor!! Presumably that was because no one was going to take the wife to emergency?

And then I tried to imagine how sex could tear a woman like that and I drew a total blank...lots of women GIVE BIRTH to 7 or 8 pound babies without even tearing, so what on earth was going on? I was told the chiropractor had subsequently left the community and been paid $90,000 to never tell the story. I tried to phone the person, so bothered was I by all this, but I learned nothing. Does anyone know if this story was even true? If it is all completely made up, I am still glad I left. There were too many other stories which sickened me.

In one other case, when I was still a student novice, the teacher of the class told me after class about the guru raping a young girl (aged 16 I think) and leaving her crying on the floor. Another man was involved -- watching or taking part, I forget which. Anyway, this story DEEPLY disturbed me and I began asking, and asking, and asking about it. The teacher of the class was promptly relocated to Hawaii, and I was told that I needed to go to therapy (very, very expensive therapy!) with a devotee therapist in order to get this matter straightened out. The therapy ( I only went once or twice, recognizing it immediately as absurd) consisted of trying to get me to deny my real response to what I'd heard and trying to muddy what had seemed like pretty clear waters to me (a rape is a rape, and talk won't make that go away!).   (more from Hatley on this incident with 16 yr. old girl)

What is the 'cold food discipline?

Posted by hatley on Feb-21-05 2:35am

The cold food discipline -- and I pray they don't do it anymore -- involves making up a plate of the foods a child most loathes and serving that plate of food, cold from the fridge, for every meal until it has been completely consumed. If it gets a gag response and a no at breakfast, it is saved for lunch, and so on. This is if the child is not doing something "right". Given the expectations of children, I think if I had been a little boy in the community, my entire childhood would have been spent eating cold servings of Cheese Whiz and baloney (those were the two things I hated as a child, though maybe they couldn’t serve non-straight disgusting things. The thing I don’t think I could have endured, above all else, if I'd been a little boy devotee, is the removal of boys from the care of their mothers. Back to the cold food thing -- I think it is a very sick practice to try to force a small and powerless person to consume things that their body is saying no to. I can hardly think of a better way to create eating disorders and profound inner rage.