A Prayer for Gaza… and for the Rest of Us

About the Progenitor of God Alone

A good Muslim friend of mine wrote to warn me about the God Alone movement, which was initiated by a man named Rashad Khalifa.  Khalifa was an Egyptian scientist who claimed to find a “Qur’an Code” based on the number 19, which he asserted as proof that the Qur’an has come down to us in uncorrupted form.  He ended up in Tucson, AZ, where he was assassinated in the early 90’s.

The above video is a straightforward presentation of the anti-Khalifa position, which is in line with traditional Islam.  I do appreciate having access to this information as I continue to self-educate around the religion of Muhammad.

Thanks, also, to my friend (you know who you are!) who was not afraid to take me to task over a very touchy subject.

God Alone

There’s a movement within Islam that seeks to establish the Qur’an as the one and only source of Truth, leaving out the Hadith and all the other “authorities” that have been established over the centuries.

One website I found that offers a platform for this movement is called Free-Minds.org:

“…O people of the Scripture, let us come to a common agreement between us and between you; that 1) we do not serve except God, and 2) do not set up anything at all with Him, and 3) that none of us takes each other as patrons besides God….” (The Message 3:64)

This website has been created for all people who have a desire to allow God into their lives and follow His path alone…

This website invites all people of various beliefs (Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Bahai, Agnostic, Humanist, and even Atheists) to come and examine for themselves the system of Submission/Islam which is based on God Alone.

Many of you may outwardly be content with your current faith or that which you inherited from your parents and community…but to some out there, there will always be a tugging at the back of their mind that ‘there is something more’, and that ‘some things don’t always make sense’…

If you are one of those people, then open your eyes, put on your thinking cap, and welcome to an open examination of the system of Submission/Islam which very few know about….

How is it that I am so attracted to “roots” groups like this?

The Buddha-inspired support group of which I am a member, the Great Western Vehicle, also rejects all the canonical texts accepted by mainstream Theravada Buddhism, except for the original discourses of the Buddha found in the Sutta Pitaka.

The idea is, as soon as the progenitor of a spiritual movement dies, there is a power struggle that begins almost immediately. Additions to the original teachings quickly creep in, and this process continues down through the years, until what people practice bears almost no resemblance to the original teachings.

There’s a lot to learn in terms of the God Alone movement, but so far I am intrigued. I’ll let you know what I find along the way.

Mooji

My wife just turned me onto this gentleman, Mooji, who apparently was a devotee Papaji.

It seems like every other person in our hometown of Boulder was a devotee of Papaji.

Over the years I’ve probably attended 20 or 25 satsangs with devotees of Papaji, of whom Gangaji is the most famous example.

This is “neo-advaita” teaching, which purports to give the “ultimate view” that resides as the final stop along every spiritual journey.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you how to get there, other than to repeatedly say what you shouldn’t do — i.e., “neti, neti.”

You’ve probably heard variations of it before:  “Consciousness is all there is.”

Gee, thanks.

What’s so enticing about neo-advaita teachings is that they are packaged as “not for just anybody.”  While the rest of us poor schmucks are out here beating our heads against the wall, enlightened neo-advaitins are “just being” in a state/non-state of absolute is-ness… or something… and it’s the simplest thing… so long as you are one of the chosen few whose capacity is deep and wide enough to “get it” in fairly short order.  Of course, there’s nothing you can do to “get it,” because it either happens or it doesn’t happen… but, then, there’s nothing actually happening, and for that matter there is no “one” for whom it happens, or doesn’t happen.

Suffice it to say, you just want to shoot yourself in the head after a few years of this stuff.

At a certain point in 1997 or so (can’t be sure, but give or take a year), I had for a close Internet friend a self-confessed Nisargadatta/U.G. Krishnamurti (both of whom I continue to respect and love, by the way) devotee named “El.”  As she was gruff and tactlessly honest in all her communication, she was universally disliked on the big neo-advaita discussion boards to which I belonged, but for some reason I was truly drawn to her.  Just when I was perfecting my neo-advaita pitch and putting it out there from an authoritative perspective (i.e., I was just sure that it had “happened” to me), El brutally knocked me off my high horse… and after three days of licking my wounds, it dawned on me what a beautiful favor she did me.  When I expressed my thanks, she said, “Okay, now you’ve got a chance to go all the way.”

I’m still working on it, but I can definitely say that I am thankful for having moved beyond neo-advaitaism.  It took three or four years after the above-mentioned event before I finally dropped it completely, at which point I stopped ignoring the “signs of absorption” that had been asserting themselves since the very early 90’s… and I found a meditation teacher who could not only explain what was happening to me, but who could help me devise a lifestyle that allows “jhana” to do its spiritually-transformative thing with me.

Still a work in process, but let me just say that, having been a “jhana yogi” for four years, I can watch Mooji’s satsang with a mixture of thanksgiving and tolerance.  My teacher would say that Mooji is “established in second jhana,” and that sounds about right to me.

More power to him.

He could very well, in fact, have it absolutely right.