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more dirt on ramakrishna

To: alt.yoga, alt.magick.tantra
From: yohanan@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Re: Ramakrishna's Tantrika Guru (was: Re: Indian Men, American Women)
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 15:25:53 GMT

The Bhairavi clearly tried to employ sexual intercourse as one of her
means
to teach Ramakrishna Tantric truths.  Consider, for example, the
following
scene.  Night has fallen.  The Bhairavi calls into the darkness and a
beautiful young woman appears.  The Bhairavi sits her down on the "seat
of
the goddess," strips her naked, and instructs Ramakrishna to worship her
as
the goddess: "Father, repeat your mantra as you sit in her lap with your
thoughts filled with the knowledge that she is the Mother of the
Universe
herself!"  Ramakrishna weeps and cries to his divine Mother, but the
Bhairavi
does not relent.  Ramakrishna begins to repeat his mantra, sits in the
woman's lap, and immediately falls into samadhi.  He has to be brought
back
to consciousness by the Bhairavi.

Here one can see a Tantric ritual designed around profoundly oedipal
themes:
Ramakrishna is instructed to sit in a naked woman's lap "with the
knowledge
that she is the Mother of the Universe herself."  But Ramakrishna cannot
perform the incestuous act.  He cannot relate to woman as Lover, even in
the
secret confines of a Tantric ritual.  Unlike the Tantric Hero, who
delights
in his own sexual partner as he meditates on Kali delighting in waves of
passion on top of Siva, all poor Ramakrishna can do is cry to his Mother
and
retreat into a state that looks as much like a defensive trance as a
mystical
state.  For Ramakrishna, the goddess is a consoling Mother who protects
Her
child from the adult dangers of sexuality and not, as for the Hero, a
Lover
who grants the striving aspirant the bliss of union.

In article ,
  sandymac@sandymac.demon.co.uk (Alexander Maclennan) wrote:
> yohanan@my-dejanews.com wrote:
>
> >> In the life of Ramakrishna paramahamsa, it is mentioned that he learnt
> >> the tantra art  from a yogini. i remember reading it in swami
> >> nikhilananda's book 'life of swami vivekananda' but never thought it
> >> could provoke discussion. i would like to know who this yogini might
> >> be. thanks Vasudevan S Atreya
>
> > A few months after the Rani (Ramakrishna's original patroness) died in
> > 1861, a strange woman appeared at the temple river landing.  An
> > attractive--one text describes her as "extraordinarily
> > sexy"--middle-aged brahmin woman (or "brahmani"), she was dressed in the
> > red robes of a Bhairavi and carried a bundle of books in her hand.  Her
> > hair was dishevelled, like that of Kali.  She claimed that she had found
> > two out of the three great souls that had been revealed to her by the
> > goddess.  She was now seeking the third.
>
> Much snipped
>
> In this context it an enlightening study is Kali`s Child, Jeffrey J.
> Kripal,Univ of Chicago Press 1995. In this he examines Ramakrishna`s
> somewhat tormented sexuality and by going back to the Bengali
> originals, circumvents the falsifications of the Ramakrishna Mission
> in the English texts and shows that the `secret teachings` were
> tantric.
>
> Before the arrival of Bhairavi, he had been influenced by a wandering
> sadhu called Kena Ram and it was after this he started to eat garbage
> food and faeces.   This is an Aghori praxis and Kena Ram is the name
> of an Aghori guru who set up a math at Benares in the eighteenth
> century which is still active and this name is adopted by the
> subsequent mahants there.   The book is a great read.
>
> --
>
> Alexander MacLennan  sandymac@sandymac.demon.co.uk

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