Notes for a Critical Review of Sarah Caldwells The Heart of the Secret: A Personal and Scholarly Encounter with

kta Tantra
General Appraisal Caldwells article is rife with problems, and not difficult to critique. The main problems are the following: 1. Bias and subjectivity: its not that the article is factually incorrect (though sometimes it is, see below), but no fact is presented without being severely coloured and interpreted for reader in such a way that no other intepretation is admitted. Furthermore, Caldwell throws around colourful and highly charged adjectives and terms in an extremely unscholarly and sensationalistic way. More on this below. 2. Logically invalid conclusions: the unsoundness of her argument is primarily due to her tendency to propose some rather tenuous speculative assumptions (e.g. Muktnanda recommending Pandeys book as a hint towards his predilection for Kaula sexual ritual), and then begin to treat those assumptions as fact, drawing further conclusions on those unstable foundations, until shes constructed a house of cards easily blown over. More on this below. 3. Perhaps the most interesting problem in the article is its schizophrenia. By this I mean the two quite different and contradictory understandings of Baba simultaneously held in her mind. It is fascinating that she doesnt seem to fully see the contradiction. On the one hand, she wants to compare Baba to Abhinava, and describes him a Tantric kta secretly and a conservative aiva on the outside, a great Guru enacting a wonderful play; she appreciates the powerful experiences she had through him, etc. On the other hand, she describes him as abusive, manipulative, possibly mad, and possessed of all kinds of character flaws. These two pictures of Baba never resolve in the article, weakening her stance and opening her to questioning as to what shes really trying to say. The following are notes and references which may prove useful to one writing a critical review of Caldwells article: Factual errors and distortions, some in bad faith: 111 multimillion dollar corporationthis implies that SYDA is a profitmaking enterprise, not a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation, as in fact it is. Annual income for SYDA is approximately 20m, and annual expenditure was slightly more than that until the Directors Capital Campaign made up the difference. Of course, no more than a handful of salaries are paid by SYDA.

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No documented evidence is offered for this, nor do I believe any exists. The evidence offered in fn 4 is the hearsay of a single individual, acquired second-hand! 6 13 No evidence for this either, notwithstanding the photo offered as evidence in fn 4, whose caption added by ivnandas devotees is proves nothing. 1423 initiatedby whom? where is the evidence? 1810 supposedly had been seduced by Nitynandaan incredible statement, given that there is far more, and far more certain, evidence of Nitynanda/Subhash Shettys sexual transgressions than Babas: multiple witnesses, his own admission, etc. 11-13 18 Caldwell neglects to mention that the only woman who refused to join in the beating was Devayani (Kimberly) Cable, Subhashs primary mistress, very much in love with him and now the mother of his children. Her testimony about the event is for this reason hardly reliable. 1829 No matter how you look at this scene, it is odd and abusive in the extreme. Invalid rhetorical device. In the full context of the events, the incident described strikes me as neither odd nor particularly abusive. In order to counter this charge and reveal the full context, however, you would need a full account of the events of late 85 to 86. 1832 Gurumayi was motivated by angersomething the author cannot know, stated as fact. 196 kept apart from her family and the worldabsolutely not the case, as Malti Shetty lived at home with her parents until 18 years old. 26-27 19 All attempts at reconciliation...have met with stony silencenot the case, Shantnandas unpublished manuscript documents Gurumayis own attempts at reconciliation in 1986. 208 burnedbad faith distortion. Caldwell pretends to be unaware that burning is in fact the auspicious and honourable way to dispose of sacred artefacts in India. Burning in this context absolutely does not have the negative connotations of censure present in Western culture, as any Indological scholar should know. 2011-12 Gurumayis outrage at Nitynandas failures seemed to require total eradication of his memoryCaldwells speculations indicate lack of awareness of the normal functioning and self-perception of a Siddha parampara. The re-envisioning of the lineage in this way would have taken place even if Subhash had stepped down but not committed any transgressions. 2017 rewriting of the pastthere was no rewriting of the past in MR, only omission.

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oversightCaldwell libellously implies, with these quotes, that Brooks lied with that statement in the MR panel. It was an oversight. 25 21 pattern of dissimulation and deceita pattern Caldwell fails to give any solid evidence for. 20-21 22 conscious acts of dissimulationthis can hardly be the case when the authors of MR do not believe that Baba performed the acts of which he is accused; an unwarranted distortion. 256 their history is only what she has told themfactually incorrect, SYDA has an exhaustive library, archives, and Historical Research department 6 25 pillaged archivesfactual error made in bad faith; Caldwell was told at the AAR panel that the SYDA (non-public) archives are neither pillaged nor purged; they are entirely complete, including all material relating to Subhash and Babas sexual accusations; I have seen them myself. 285-7 Caldwell incorrectly associates monistic philosophy with the Ka of the Bhgavata Pura; the latter is generally dualist and devotional in orientation, making her point invalid. 21 29 He clearly understoodgiven that no evidence can be adduced to support Babas understanding of actions which he never even admitted to, Caldwells use of the word clearly would be laughable if it wasnt so outrageous! She does it again at: 25 29 clearly the sourcepure speculation. 3019 no texts to attest to itfactually incorrect; we have ample evidence of this from Krama texts, and, as Caldwell should have known, Sir John Woodroffe cites a fragment of the Rudraymala which states that women can be gurus, and in fact initiation by a woman guru is to be recommended (in his Principles of Tantra, II, 72-73) Subjective suppositions later taken as facts: pp. 2-3 Are we expected to believe that Caldwell remembers this incident with this degree of vivid clarity after 20 years, objectively and without serious personal bias? Virtually impossible. This paragraph is simply propaganda and foreshadowing of her thesis. p. 8, para 2: The girl who looks at Baba like a shy lover could equally well have been a shy devotee; no evidence supports this (sexual) assumption, which is then followed by the laughable statement: He seemed to be dropping hints at every turn (820). Here Caldwells baseless suspicions about a particular girl have become a hint dropped by Baba. p. 13, second full paragraph and following: this is baseless speculation. By 143-5, the baseless speculation has somehow become stated fact.

p. 16, bottom para-p. 17: subjective and imprecise. Ends with a supposition stated as fact: Baba had unleashed a tide and was no longer there to control it (171-2). p. 18, second para: a highly subjective and baseless paragraph, drawing strange and invalid parallels. Caldwell invites the readers sympathy by observing that Subhash was unfairly punished for his natural love (1825), neglecting to mention that he had taken a vow not to partake of natural (i.e. sexual) love, and that some of the women he slept with believed the event to have greater significance than mere sexual pleasure, and felt used when they found that was not the case. p. 18: I would argue that the entire page is implicitly driven by the authors association with, and desire to defend, Subhash Shetty, aka Nitynanda. p. 19 is simply libellous in its baseless accusations. Again, speculation is later taken as fact when Maltis formative environment is cited as highly abnormal (1911). The first paragraph closes with more groundless speculation. p. 28, top: these statements are subjective and bizarre for a scholar of Hinduism. On 284, she asserts that monistic traditions and teachers are devoid of ethics, apparently unaware of the prodigious evidence supporting the claim that most monistic sages are/were highly virtuous, not out of any desire to follow societys rules, but rather because they personally experience that virtue is in harmony with the akti/brahman/Tao. On 286, she apparently misses the point of the entire Bhagavad Gt, as well as the rasll of Ka Gopla, which she appears to take literally instead of symbolically (!). In tantrism, ordinary constraints on behaviour may have no meaning (2811) for the liberated being, but this fails to address the fact that most tantric masters freely adopted constraints on their behaviour, knowing that, from the perspective of iva, that is just as much an enactment of innate freedom as transgression of societal norms.

Inappropriately subjective, opinionated, and dramatic use of highly charged terms in a scholarly article without objective evidence, sometimes amounting to propaganda: sensuously (224); sinuous (227); secretively (228); secret (526); predatorily (627 shocking in its unsupportable subjectivity); embarassedly (1014); unleashed (171); henchmen (1710); strongarmed (1711); erased (183as opposed to the neutral omitted); secretive and private as the snow queen in her icy tower (1918as if Gurumayi was any less accessible to most than Baba had been); hypnotic (1932); history (221); distorted (2214rather than abridged); raucously joyous (2227more opinion without evidence); purposely (246); false (247); maidens (2422word depicting innocent, pure young virgins designed to elicit readers

sympathy, yet Caldwell only cited one virgin alleged to have been violated); purged (257a word eliciting associations with Stalinist Russia, grossly misplaced here and wildly inaccurate for the most part). Personal reasons Caldwells testimony cannot be accepted as unbiased or scholarly: Caldwell calls herself a compulsive ashramite (61); mentions she was shocked, hurt that she wasnt invited to the Devi chants (62); that she become obsessed with them (64). She cites the utter dependency of her life at the time (72). The sense of secrecy, mystery, evanescent inner circles of which I could never quite be a part, utterly captivated and maddened me (1024-25). She cites her own troubled sexual background (1026-27); and she has undergone intensive psychotherapy (265). And her conclusions are supposed to be unbiased and trustworthy? Other observations: 1922 Gurumayi refuses to see or meet her family taken as evidence of her secretly non-loving nature; yet Jesus does exactly the same in Mark 3.31 23 19 This account is at odds with Gurumayis own descriptions of her family 25 21 censorshipI think the concept of upya, with respect to the SY devotees, should be cited to correctly explain the reasoning behind the omissions in MR. 2425 a gesture of revelation for his devotees who could grasp it i.e. Caldwell herself, whom, we are expected to believe, alone grasped it amongst those present