The Enlightenment Experience, Three Antichrist Gurus of recent times and the rescue of two from their clutches by Christ

Finally read Riders of the Cosmic Circuit which comprises Tal Brooke's studies of three of the most famous Hindu gurus of recent times, also known as "god-men" --Sai Baba (1926-2011) who was Tal's own guru for two years in India up to 1971, and for whom he was the premier Western spokesman during that time, Swami Muktananda (1908-1982) who was very big in California in the 70s, and Rajneesh (1931-1990), the notorious guru of sex, murder and mayhem who was finally kicked out of America after four years of terrorizing an Oregon town and went back to India where he died five years later.

The main subject of the book is the experience of "Enlightenment" which is what makes a guru a guru. Brooke claims that this experience is the same across all the different religions which promote such a state, in spite of different methods and different terminology. In fact the work of the student or initiate in these religions is all geared to coming ultimately to that final realization. It is generally described in terms of loss of ego, loss of self, the "no-self" experience, merging with the Self which is God, and the like. Its attainment is accompanied by supernatural power, and the approach to it can hold a variety of supernatural experiences both beautiful and terrifying.

The book is convincing at least for these three gurus that Enlightenment is probably a state of Perfect Possession, that is, a state in which the personality or soul of the original person has been completely abdicated while the body becomes inhabited by some sort of "entity" that takes its place. All three were described by others as dramatically changed after their respective enlightenment experiences, and all three were described by some family members as seeming "possessed." And the work of all three in their respective ashrams among their respective followers became marked by evil practices, both of sex and violence, Rajneesh apparently reaching some sort of pinnacle of perfection of evil.

It's interesting that the personality must be PERSUADED to abandon the body, and that's what much of the teaching of all these disciplines seems to promote. The wonderful understanding that will occur when you completely surrender your ego or self is the enticement, and there are plenty of bliss experiences on the way to keep the student motivated.

As Tal Brooke notes, such gurus are antichrists and this must be the formula for the final Antichrist to come, in which a personality is to be completely replaced by Satan himself. All such possessions that occur before the end period are more or less trial runs for the final one.

Tal himself stopped just short of the experience of Enlightenment, having repeatedly "smelled" evil in the endeavor, puzzled why this should be so. Aren't gurus supposed to be "holy men," the equivalent of Jesus Christ? During this period of his growing awareness of the evil behind his chosen teacher, he was driven to desperation in his inability to understand it.

I had discovered an absolutely Satanic thing operating behind Sai Baba's veneer. Now I was desperate. I crouched on a massive boulder on a hillside overlooking Baba's main ashram in Puttaparthi. My love affair with Vedanta was ending. I was dissolving inside, dying inside ...In my perplexity I was willing to look anywhere for an answer. There was one source of revelation I had avoided.

In my desperation, I laid a Bible on a hillside rock -- a book I had long ago 'transcended.' Now in an act of faith, I threw open the pages. You could call it a kind of miracle at the time. What I read answered a need so deep I cannot explain it. For by then I was in a blackened state of mind best described as occult desolation. In trying to figure out this creature in the red robe, claiming to be God out here on the Indian desert, I was totally lost for an answer, bewildered.

Imagine what I felt when the Bible fell open to Matthew 24:23-24 (NIV ). It was Christ himself talking about a future age in our world. And suddenly a new perspective took shape for me.

At that time if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ,' or, 'There he is!" do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect, if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time.

I looked down at Baba's green prayer hall below and thought,

"That's it, that's what Sai Baba is, a miracle-working antichrist." [p.161]

Soon afterward, partly through a missionary couple in India, he gave himself to Christ and has spent the rest of his life educating people about the false teachings of the various Hindu gurus and the growth of the occult as we approach the very last days.

In the book he also recounts the experience of Eckart Flother, a German disciple of Rajneesh who had a similar escape through a miracle or revelation of Christ some years later.

We were in a Los Angeles outdoor cafe, sitting at an open shaded table, away from onlookers. It was a warm January day in 1983. Eckart, who had been with Rajneesh for many months in Poona but who then suddenly fled, was now meeting Sai Baba's one-time top Western disciple, namely me, who had also fled his guru. And John Weldon, an author and friend, was with us at the table as a witness. I had heard about the incredible incident that happened to Eckart in Poona but now I wanted to hear it from him. One thing that had inspired him, after what he had just gone through, was reading about a sijmilar event in Lord of the Air, the abridged European version of my book Avatar of Night. Our meeting was intense, charged with energy and feeling. Eckart was recalling a powerful supernatural incident of the highest order of magnitude -- an incident that changed him forever...

It was one of those typically warm, humid Poona nights. I was alone in my hotel room. As you would say, sober as a judge, feeling alert. It was Auguswt 1979. It was one of those nights when everything is covered with mosquitoes and nobody can sleep. At any rate I was sitting in my hotel room reading and writing. Perfectly normal...

All of a sudden in the left-hand corner of my hotel room I saw a bigger than man-sized brilliant light. The sheer power, sheer presence was awesome. Rajneesh could not hold a candle to this. I felt instinctively that it was Jesus Christ ...

"Had anyone been seeing you who was a Christian?" I asked Eckart. "Or handing you material on the subject, or anything like that?"

Absolutely not. At any rate all of a sudden I heard a mighty voice saying to me 'I want you to become my disciple.' I was absolutely shaken to bits. I knew right away that this was Jesus calling me...[p. 173-4]

When he makes an appointment to tell Rajneesh about it he has an impression of evil emanating from his guru, and Rajneesh seems to shrink back in fear from the very mention of Christ. But he released Eckart with the words "Enjoy it" and that was the end of his following of Rajneesh.

There is more to this conversation in which Eckart details some of the cruel and criminal acts done under Rajneesh and he and Tal agree that their gurus are indeed Antichrists.

Eckart seems to have written a booklet about Rajneesh that is mentioned on a few websites but I can't find a description of it or a way to acquire it. Amazon doesn't have it. His name is variously written with an umlaut over the o, or as Floether. He is a business management consultant.

What Tal Brooke says on pp 160-61 pretty much sums up his observations throughout the book:

Curiously, when the heavy-hitting gurus, the Riders, emerged from the Explosion [another term he uses for Enlightenment], close assoicates and family usually used the term "possession" in describing the change that they saw. Rajneesh prepares his highest adepts by readying them emotionally to do the same thing -- sink into the infinite abyss, and drop away and keep dropping away. His words are a juggling act. Along with this comes the admonition, 'Don't worry about what fills you or enters you. Let it happen. Surrender. Lose your identity forever.'

The only scripture on earth that deals with this phenomenon is the Holy Bible. Period. It talks about massive evil intelligences operating behind the scenes of our world. It talks about possession. It has live historical instances of demonic possession and exorcism.

But there is also a super-class in this group whose possession is different -- it is a Perfect POssession and the consciousness within the possessed is many levels beyond the standard possessor demons. This was all a revelation to me in INdia ten years ago as I searched desperately for a category in which to put this phenomenon. Suddenly I noticed that this category of creatures repeatedly appears in the Bible's pages. The Bible even predicts, in its prophecy, that one day the world would be full of these creatures. What are they? Antichrists, claiming to be God. Their appearance and reign on the earth was prophesied to precede the Return of CHrist. Why had I not seen it before?