An Odd White-Power/Yoga Amalgam

I recently came across a site called www.celibacy.info. At first glance, I was excited to see this site, as I am a celibate myself. I was happy to hear the audio files on the site, and gladdened to see what appeared to be good work such as this.

However, as I continued to view the content, and as I visited several more times over the course of two months, I realized that the blue eyed white power fellow that runs this site, Julian Lee, includes at the bottom of the page prominent links to "Western Voices World News" (Which used to be called The Vanguard, a newspaper specifically for neo-nazi's). Just above that link, he has some text from the Bhagavad-Gita, then a quote or two from the Dalai Lama, and links to the site of a bizarre and half-formed simple-minded man, Henry Makow, with the header text above it, "Understand Your World". This unfortunate fellow had to travel outside of this country to import a wife for himself, and then he wrote a book about it for all of his one or two hundred like minded and like bodied post-middle-age readers.

The white-power link got me curious. I did a bit of google'ing up of this guy, and you find posts by him along with a ridiculous and skill-less song (Johnny O) on Stormfront and other white-power websites. On the bottom of the song page, there is a link pointing to the greatness of the white singing voice, obviously Lee's is the exemplar.

On the one hand, I like the celibacy work of Julian Lee's. It is good to hold up chastity in this extraordinarily wrong and confused world where morality is mocked and understanding of what makes for a heroic man is nearly entirely unknown. Heroism is all but forgotten, it is hardly understood anymore the nature of the battle that a real man must take, both outside of himself, and inside of himself. For any serious spiritual practitioner, chastity is an absolute requirement, just as is diet, physical culture, meditation, and mental culture.

However, the person of Julian Lee is like many spiritual practitoners that I have met along the path. Very little experience, never had a living guru, and filled with a personally created mish-mash of ideologies that ultimate exist to suit and strengthen their ego self-identification. Spiritual materialism, as Chogyam Trungpa puts it. Ideas, formations, conceptions, are the working material of the ego. You can hear the inflated nature of Lee's ego in the sound of his voice as he speaks through his telephone into the service that provides audio for his website. The special enunciations he uses prick up the ears of this wiley long time denizen of hard-core Zen and martial arts circles. I've heard that "special" sound a hundred times. Just like the sound of a bell rung by an ego is different from that of a bell rung by an empty monk, you can hear Lee's person in his ring.

One can imagine the confounded vasanas of this odd-fellow's"Brotherhood", amalgamating pure Indian spirituality with some of the least intelligent and spiritually competent men living -- The white power folks. I am sure that a mystical vision of the origins of the aryan race backs all of this up empowering the formation of confused and half-completed vrittis of these practitioners.

Since when does the natural intention of chastity, which is to unify with God, to destroy the ego self-image (which is the true means for chastity -- until the mind is destroyed, you are filled with desires. When the mind is destroyed, the desires also cease.) come into contact with people who hate other people on the basis of their race? Since when would Swami Vivekananda - whose image is on Lee's site and many of whose followers I personally know and in whose presence I have spent goodly time - sanction such a perverse amalgam of vedanta with hatred of people based upon their race or religion.

I do believe in racial differences, differences between the culture of one family and another, differences in bloodline, etc. However, in the search for enlightenment, the sages that Julian Lee refers to on his site are unanimous in saying that anyone, even an untouchable, can become enlightened, and that there is no racial connection between this capacity.

Why? Simply because, like yin and yang, race is a thing of this ego-created world of maya. When the mind is beyond form, beyond self and other, these divisions cease to exist. But that is only an impossible idea or a fantasy to someone who hasn't "been there". That Julian Lee puts these things on his site shows that he is simply another seeker like anyone else -- nothing wrong with that, however, he is mixing messages. As Ramana Maharshi would say, he is traveling towards one village while he wants to go to the other. Bringing racist thought into the sphere of enlightenment is going towards a village in the opposite direction. You will eventually just have to turn around and come back all the distance you traveled.

If you want to promulgate racist thought outside of the domain of enlightenment, by all means, as I said, I do believe in racial differences, when speaking in terms of maya, the world of form.