The Knee of Listening – The Life and Understanding – Week 12

Baba had all but told me to abandon my work with Rudi. For my own part, that whole motivation had already passed. I felt no need to condemn Rudi, and the Ashram gossip that opposed him seemed only a manifestation of particular Indian predilections for certain ways of life. I needed very much to be free of Rudi but I was certain that his way was appropriate for him and anyone else who felt a genuine urge in the direction he could lead them.

Even so, the path of life had simply emerged as a totally different matter. I was convinced that the way of effort was simply a further manifestation of life lived as a problem, a motivated search. Yet, the mind and the whole habitual pattern of life appeared to me to be a source of difficulty, which in fact prevented the continuous assumption of life on a radically free basis.

Baba’s way was peculiarly tied to Indian notions and methods. *Although he suggested these to me, he did not seek to enforce any kind of method in my case. It all seemed a suggestive communication that should lead me to my own truth. He even told me that I would eventually teach the ways of spiritual life, in perhaps a year or more. But he did not tell me what to teach. I took his teaching and my experience on the broadest level, to be freely and meaningfully adapted to my own case.

Thus, when the old problems began to arise, and I saw no immediate way to use the specific methods Baba described or even to enforce the vision of my particular experience, I felt moved to find a solution to the dilemma by any means available to me. The history of my own development led me to be open to any form of solution, whether or not it involved the specific means or mentality of yoga.

While I was established in this mood, Julio Delatorre, an old friend from my days at Stanford, came to dinner. He was animatedly involved in an organization called Scientology, which was headed and exclusively developed by a man named L. Ron Hubbard.

After I had worn out the conversation about my years of yoga and my experiences in India, my friend became more enthusiastically involved in describing his experiences in Scientology. I began instead to listen to him.

Scientology made use of a peculiar technique called “auditing.” A trained person sat with you and, by careful use of a pattern of direct questioning, sought to remove the force which certain key experiences in your past had on your daily life. My friend had experienced great benefits from this method, and he had even been led to re?experience his birth, the violence of which he felt had determined a kind of nervous and aloof quality in him all his life. Now he felt peculiarly “cleared” of the force of that experience and all kinds of other reactions that he had retained as unconscious controls on his behavior.

Scientology sought by these means to relieve a person from the machinery of memory and unconscious reactivity so that he could eventually attain a state called “clear.” In the state of “clear” the reactive or unconscious mind was supposed to be entirely eliminated as a force.

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