This is an important, yet poorly understood premise: The guru has both personal style and universal consciousness.
Perhaps more than their spiritual ideologies, it is the constituencies of feminist goddess spirituality and of the path of female gurus that overlap in the United States, for in both cases a large number of educated, affluent Euro-American women are devotees. Siddha Yoga is prowomen in its encouragement of women to explore a progressive spiritual path as well as healthy life choices, and in its placement of women devotees in leadership positions, including swamis, scholars, seva (service) leaders, and public relations spokespeople. This affirmation must be understood, however, in the context of the decenter-ing of gender in the philosophical teachings of the path. In Siddha Yoga, the “conscious immersion in a reality that precedes earth and ego” is, in terms of the guru’s yearly message for 2004 and 2005, “Experience the POWER within: Kundalini Shakti.”25 Kualin akti is a yogic interpretation of akti as a subtle power located within the subtle body, analogous to the physical body at the base of one’s spine. This yearly message of the guru can be gendered, as when devotees are encouraged to experience the divine “in all her infinitely diverse forms,” or when a devotee refers to kuaalin akti as a “goddess” or even my.26 But the message can also be ungendered, as with a devotee’s discussion of Kualin akti as a “divine power.”27The common thread among these perspectives, and between feminist goddess spirituality and the path of the female guru, is the validation of personal experience insofar as it relates to, or can be made to relate to, the teachings.
PRACTICE AND GATHERING:
TRANSCENDING GENDER AND AFFIRMING GENDER
In his famous study of Eastern religions in the United States in the 1970s, Harvey Cox (1997: 9) highlighted the participatory mode:
The influence of Oriental spirituality in the West is hardly something new . . . But there is something new about the present situation. In previous decades, interest in Oriental philosophy was confined mostly to intellectuals and was centered largely on ideas, not on devotional practices. There is no evidence that Emerson ever sat in a full lotus. Today, on the other hand, not only are large numbers of people . . . involved, but they appear more interested in actual religious practices than in doctrinal ideas. The recent wave of interest in Oriental forms of spirituality seems both broader and deeper than the ones that preceded it.
The emphasis Cox places on the relative novelty of “devotional practices” in the West is evidenced, in general, by devotional gatherings of devotees in ma ny H i ndu-based groups, and in pa r t icu lar, by t he sophisticated methods employed by Siddha Yoga to bring devotees together. Through satellite technology, it is possible for Gurumayi to hold global satsangs (gatherings of enlightened people) of devotees on important occasions, such as the unveiling of the yearly message on January 1. In this way, people across the globe can participate in the event simultaneously in real time. While Gurumayi’s guru, Swami Muktananda, maintained that the devotee did not have to be in the presence of the guru to experience aktipat, he did in practice make personal contact, at the South Fallsburg ashram, with each devotee during the summertime Intensive sessions centered around the transmission of akti, as did Gurumayi during the first decade or so of her leadership. After a brief period of absence during the late 1990s, recently Gurumayi has applied satellite technology to the Intensive, so that one can be in the “presence” of the guru even when one is on a different continent. It is through such technology that Siddha Yoga stands out among present-day guru organizations. The significance of the ashrams as places of residential learning is not diminished, however, since the guru broadcasts from an ashram context, and devotees are encouraged to assemble at a Siddha Yoga center to hear the message; in addition, devotees are encouraged to participate in programs held at the ashrams.
The ashram remains the premier setting for aktipat, even when one is viewing a satellite image, because the ashram is a powerful “body” of the guru, a special concentration of her power and presence, as Daniel Gold (1995: 230–250) has discussed. Importantly, the Siddha Yoga path is preeminently residential. Although one can be a day visitor at the ashram, one can go for an afternoon at one of the many smaller Siddha Yoga centers around the world, and even t a ke a S idd ha Yog a home cou r se, t he weig ht is on t he re sident i a l ex p e-rience, as evidenced by the weekend-long Intensive, by the placement of weeklong programs and courses prior to the Intensives, and by the recent phenomenon of very long-term service (seva) retreats at the South Fallsburg ashram. Through the residential experience, serious engagement with the teachings is encouraged through immersion in the way of life at the ashram. This immersion involves personal experience, reflection on personal experience, and articulation of the experience. This participatory mode was heightened by Siddha Yoga in 2004, as one newsletter noted: “Recently at Shree Muktananda Ashram, there has been a change in the way students approach sat-sangs. Now it isn’t just the emcee and the speakers who are invited to prepare for the program—it’s everyone. Siddha Yoga students are putting into action the teaching that the Guru is within by learning from and teaching each other!”28
Students are encouraged to articulate their personal experiences in light of the teachings, and published responses fit securely within this model. The testimonial is the genre most widely applied with respect to devotees in the organization’s publications, and it is a prominent feature at Intensives. While this model is distinctive from the scholar’s more open-ended methodology of intersubjectivity and dialexis that is advocated in this volume, which results in a publicly rendered ac cou nt t hat may (or m ay not) be at va r i a nce w it h reig n i ng d is cou r s e s , the personal experiences of the devotees are exploratory. Such experiential explorations do leave room for private reflection on both the program at Siddha Yoga as well as reflection on the relationship of one’s personal experiences of the teachings to its application in the wider world, both of which are emphasized in the Siddha Yoga ashram experience.
The experience at the South Fallsburg ashram, when it was open to shorter-term retreats prior to 2004, begins with registration, including the payment of fees and the issuing of a photo ID that must be worn at all times at the ashram. The photo ID is encoded with information on what programs one will be attending, and the number of meals one is entitled to at the cafeteria. It is a membership card, however temporary; when I initially called the ashram, I had requested permission to visit the ashram just to see it, and I was gently told that the organization required that I actually be enrolled in a program in order to have access to the ashram campus. Thus, the position of the organization is to encourage anyone who comes to the ashram to engage with the activities there.29
There is a daily structure of devotional practice at the ashram. There is early morning chanting, with a session at 3:00 a.m., and then the more popular session at 4:30 a.m., in which the Guru Gita is chanted; t hen break fast; then a morning session of seva, during which one might help clean the ashram or perform outdoor work; noontime chanting at the temple to Bhagavan Nityananda, the first guru in the Siddha Yoga lineage; then afternoon seva; and finally dinner, evening chanting, and lights out by 10:00 p.m. There is some flexibility in the schedule; for example, if one is enrolled in an Intensive or in a course, then one would not be able to do all aspects of the daily schedule. A lso, within the two main blocks of time dedicated to seva one might take some time for solitary contemplation or reading. Other aspects of daily life at the ashram are not flexible: Participants are required to wear conservative clothing, to eat vegetarian meals, and to refrain from alcohol, tobacco, and sex.
The separation of women and men is a structural component of life at the ashram, and one quite noticeable to a feminist. They are separated in housing30; in seating arrangements at chanting sessions, talks by the guru, and Intensives; and in terms of chanting the Guru Gita, with women and men chanting alternate verses throughout most of the session. Although I have not heard an explicit justification for such
proceedings, they pa ra llel such divisions in aspects of Hindu and Indian tradition.
Some feminists might applaud the separation insofar as it gives women their own space during times of devotion and self-discovery. Other feminists might question the reification of sex and gender implied by such separation, especially at a time when feminists are deconstructing the connection between sex and gender and their presumed meanings in the dominant heterosexual culture.31 In addition, even within the context of Siddha Yoga teachings there is seeming discontinuity between, on one hand, the teaching that ultimately inner divine nature has no gender and, on the other hand, the emphasis on gender separation in the practices that lead to the realization of inner divine nature.
There is a presumed difference between life at the ashram and life out in the world; the permeability of the latter to the former is the issue. The thesis of the residential experience is that it does permit one continuous, unbroken engagement with the Siddha Yoga path, which is not necessarily possible in the outside world. However, it is also a feature of the residential experience that it demonstrates that one can live day to day in accordance with the Siddha Yoga path, and indeed extending the teachings to ordinary life outside of the ashram is a hallmark of Siddha Yoga, which expresses this desire in terms of its understandings of seva; in the guru’s yearly message, which devotees are to contemplate throughout the year; in courses on the yearly message, which encourage participants to apply aspects of the message to their lives; and in terms of the Intensive, especially in workshops at the conclusion of the Intensive. This real connection between spirituality and the way one leads one’s life, which is most powerfully made through the residential experience, challenges Harvey Cox’s (1977: 101–110) view of Eastern spirituality as a form of “escapism,” and yet the separation of male and female devotees, as well as the separation of devotees from the wider world on the ashram campus remain.
In an additional contrast to feminism, activities that could be classed as social activism, which are promoted by Siddha Yoga, such as the Prison Project (bringing the teachings and practices to the U.S. prison population) and PRASAD Project (alleviating conditions of poverty, with the majority of projects in India), are not framed politically although they have significance as political and social criticism. Siddha Yoga’s resistance to or rejection of a politicized expression of its social welfare activities returns us to a major distinction between it and feminist praxis, although both movements share a commitment to remaking the world in their image.
CONCLUSION
One of the aims of this essay has been to emphasize the overlooked commonality of Siddha Yoga, feminism, and the academy on affirming personal experience as a value. For feminist scholarship and activism, the idea that “the personal is political” is a touchstone for theory and practice. Siddha Yoga’s frame of reference is its teachings, which generate but also shape and evaluate the personal experience. The academic study of religion today has a much more cautious approach toward “evaluation,” partly in response to the once dominant missionary-inflected scholarly discourse that sought to rank religions with Protestant Christianity at the apex of religious development.32 The strength of the academic methods of intersubjective construction and dialexis, suggested by this volume, is to create a valid space for personal experience within the context of critical inquiry. In the academy, creativity is valued in terms of asking questions, and accuracy is valued in terms of formulating responses, but in neither case is permission relevant to the exchange of ideas. The integrity of the exploration is in the finding of points of connection and points of disagreement, not sameness. When these intersections are identified through the methodology of intersubjective construction and dialexis, which is the work of scholarly knowing and understanding, we have a ground to stand on for taking the next step of determining what we can live with and what we cannot—and saying so.
NOTES
1. The role of empathy in the scholarly study of religion is a topic of discussion among scholars. Rita Gross (1996: 10–16) calls empathy “the most radical emotion” and provides a compelling rationale for empathy as a constitutive perspective in the study of religion. For a discussion of other methods in the study of religion, including the postmodern critique of empathy, see Olson, 2006.
2. The phrase “structure of feeling” is from British critic Raymond Williams (1977: 128–135), cited and discussed by Gayatri Spivak (2001: 120–163, 122–123, and passim), e.g., “Williams thought that the way to observe culture where it is in the making is through ‘structures of feeling.’ “ In her article, Spivak applies the phrase to a Hindu way of thinking that is formed by culture, not belief, and suggests the concept of dvaita (awareness of two-ness) as a preeminent structure.
3. “Representation” need not be explicitly political, though it carries political implications; see my discussion in Prentiss, 1999: 7–11.
4. Karen McCarthy Brown (1994) characterizes fundamentalism as a response of closure in an attempt to impose control in the face of rapid change: “the varieties of fundamentalism found throughout the world today are extreme responses to the failed promise of Enlightenment rationalism . . . Bitterly disappointed by the politics of rationalized bureaucracies, the limitations of science, and the perversions of industrialization, fundamentalists seek to reject the modern world, while nevertheless holding onto its habits of mind: clarity, certitude, and control.” Moreover, this ideology of fundamentalism targets women in particular: “Most of all [fundamentalists] seek to control the fearsome, mute power of flesh. This characteristic ensures that fundamentalism will always involve the control of women, for women generally carry the greater burden of human fleshliness” (175–201, esp. 175–176).
5. My collaborative Affiliate study with the Harvard Pluralism Project focused on New Jersey: “Historical Religions New to the American Context in Northern and Central New Jersey” (http://www.pluralism .org/affiliates/pechilis/index.php). The project on female gurus was separate since the SYDA Yoga Foundation is headquartered in New York State; it developed into an edited volume on Hindu female gurus (Pechilis, 2004). This present essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Toronto, November 24, 2002, for a panel on “Hinduism and the Feminine: Reclamations and Reconstructions,” chaired by Rita DasGupta Sherma, and it draws in part on one of my articles published in that volume, “Gurumayi, The Play of akti and Guru,” in Pechilis, 2004: 219–243.
6. Puttick’s discussion of female gurus (175-195) concludes with a gendered typology of styles of leadership: masculine or male-identified, feminine, and non-gendered (192), respectively.
7. Some very recent examples of scholarship that both use and challenge feminist issues with respect to South Asian materials include: Biernacki, 2007 (on the issue of agency and subjectivity with respect to textual analysis); Bellamy, 2008 (on the issue of agency and subjectivity with respect to ethnographic analysis); Landesman, 2008 (on male models and the development of female religious paradigms); Pintchman, 2005, esp. chapter 4 (on resonances between Hindu women’s meaning-making and feminist perspectives); Pechilis, 2008a (on patterns of interpretation) and Pechilis, 2008b (challenging the applicability of the oppression-empowerment model).
8. The issue of standards is a major one in the discussion of Western feminism and South Asian cultures. For a current review of the literature, see Anderson, 2008. See also Elizabeth Pritchard, 2000, who provides an important critique of Western feminist images of mobility that unwittingly collude with ideologies and practices of Western colonial development.
9. The strands of tradition informing the meanings of the key philosophical terms my, akti, and pakrti are lucidly discussed in Pintchman, 1994: esp. 7, 84-115, 131-137, 194-197
10. “The name of that fiction or Maya is the apparent magic of fertility— animate and inanimate. The acknowledgment of this always unitary female power . . . cannot be translated into normative social attitudes toward female human being
s. And indeed women cannot feel fertility as the uncanny in quite the same way. For reverence for fiction (Maya) as female to be unleashed, the dvaita trick must happen, and the female subject exit sociality” (Spivak, 2001: 135).
11. Carol Christ (1997: 97-98) echoes this idea: “In Jungian ‘archetypal’ psychology, in the ‘history’ of religion, and in some feminist theologies, the warrior Goddess is identified as an aspect of the ‘Dark’ Goddess. Warrior Goddesses such as the . . . Hindu Durga and Kali are invoked as images of the ‘Dark’ Goddess. It is said that these Goddesses allow women to express the full range of our anger at patriarchy, enable us to accept our own death, and may even help us to accept the death of the human species . . . the Hindu Durga exults in the slaying of demons; Kali holds a sword . . . The bloodthirsty warrior Goddesses legitimate warfare and violence, large-scale blood sacrifice, and a dualistic understanding of good and evil.” Thanks to Rita Sherma for bringing this to my attention. See McDermott and Kripal, 2003, for a recent discussion of the variety of interpreters of Klï.
12. More recently discussed in Gross, 1996: 233-235. See also the important revisiting of this question in Hiltebeitel and Erndl, 2000.
13. According to Rita Sherma, “iva is understood as Prakasha (pure light) in the Tantric ethos, especially in certain major schools of Kashmir aivism. The tantric tendency, of course, is to internalize the deities rather than focus on the mythology which is so central to bhakti (and so difficult to translate across cultures). Of course, Siddha Yoga affiliates itself implicitly with the legacy of Kashmir aivism. Thus, there is a tantric flavor to its hermeneutics. This is significant for a feminist understanding of the movement, as is the different perception of my itself in Tantra than in, say, amkarite Advaita” (personal communication, September 14, 2004).
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