This wider exposure, in turn, prompted renewed discussion—via the Web this time, and among spiritual practitioners from across India and around the world, most of them hearing of Guruji and Devipuram for the first time—about the propriety of sharing Sri Vidya’s long-secret wisdom by electronic means, thereby reaching an audience orders of magnitude larger than earlier generations could ever have imagined. The discussion eventually reached a fever pitch, with several traditionalists attacking Guruji’s practice fiercely, some murmuring that the Goddess would extract a heavy price for his transgressions. At last, Guruji responded with an exceedingly rare online defense of his approach.
“Yes, I have published mantras on the Web,” he replied frankly, referring to his Tripod and VI1 sites. “I am trying to do everything possible to make information available to people through interactive teaching media. So you have my take on this. It is true that I am taking on the karmas of all those who misuse it. Let me suffer gladly for that. If I am connected to Goddess, she is taking on the karmas made by her own self. Let her enjoy it.”
Guruji then reiterated his oft-stated belief that the Goddess would ensure that only those who were ready to receive this wisdom would ever stumble upon it—and recognize its authenticity and value—amid the plethora of competing materials online. “My feeling is that the information should be made available,” he said. “Just because it is available, it does not imply that everyone looks at it.”
Next, Guruji cited the long historic precedent for public sharing of religious “secrets.”
“Ramanuja went to the top of the roof and shouted the mantra given to him by his guru, who had extracted a promise that he would not reveal it to anyone,” he said. Later, with the advent of books, such secrets reached an even wider audience—which is, after all, the whole point of publication. “It is in this spirit that books, for example, on the Parashurama Kalpasutra are published. Do they not contain the decoded mantras? What is the essential difference between publishing it in a book or publishing it on the Web?”
In fact, Guruji argued, the Internet had solved one of the largest, most substantial objections raised by opponents to the publication of mantras and other holy scripture in books. “The main problem with books was that the soundtracks were not there,” he said. “Interactivity was not there. Now they are there, courtesy of the Web.”
Then he restated another of his boldest assertions: that an online audio file, properly pronounced and explained in the voice of a qualified guru, could in fact serve as “a proper auditory transmission from a guru to shishya.” In other words, technology could legitimately be used to reach larger numbers of people than ever before while still preserving the essential, traditional guru-disciple connection through voice.
After all, he argued, “How many so-called gurus are actually giving the information in such detail to shishyas now? The gurus themselves are just throwing the mantras out there without knowing any of their intricacies.” Here Guruji pointed to the avalanche of blatantly inaccurate information about Tantra that was proliferating on the Internet even then.
“Just look at all the play with Tantra in the form of sexual license,” he said. “When our learned gurus don’t publicly share the real secrets, then all kinds of wrong interpretations will go ’round. Given that what we [i.e., qualified gurus properly initiated and trained in authentic Indian Tantric lineages] are saying is probably less than .01 percent of what is out there on the Web, should we not break the silence? For example, who [among uninitiated persons exploring Tantric philosophies] does not know about the use of panchamakaras? Is that really any secret now? Instead of pretending to guard such ‘secrets,’ we need to instead direct people toward the proper ways of using them—by channeling the correct information rather than hiding it. The times of puritanical rejection of disseminating information have to change in order to prevent further damage. The wise must choose to speak; otherwise, the unwise shall have their way.”
Source: "Goddess and the Guru"
