The Big Picture: An Oveview of the Core Issues in Art of Living

Having spent a good part of the last few months reviewing all the material contained in these blogs, I have come to realize that the one thing we are missing is a birdseye view of all the issues that have been raised so far.

In any one post, a single issue is usually discussed, and although it makes sense to many people who have been following the blogs from the beginning, often I have seen individuals question the relevancy of certain posts. This is due to the fact that each issue raised represents one piece of a much larger puzzle, and there are many who don’t have visibility of this larger puzzle yet. The purpose of this post, then, is to give our readers a much needed holistic perspective of the core issues in Art of Living.

I originally posted these in response to a comment which Doreen made in which she attempted to summarize the issues documented in that post as boiling down to:

[…]money, claims about the practices, and AOL culture.

I wasn’t wholly satisfied with Doreen’s summary as I didn’t feel it adequately covered the core issues. So I came up with a more detailed list, which I posted here. Since then, I have spent more time thinking this through and as such have further refined the list and settled on the following:

• DISHONESTY AND DECEIT
• LACK OF INTEGRITY AND UNETHICAL PRACTICES
• ABUSE
• CULT CULTURE AND BRAINWASHING

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to revise this list at any time, especially as new data comes in which may supercede existing material and hence necessitate that this list be updated.

For each of these core issues, I plan to write a separate post detailing the evidence we have for the specific core issue in question. There are a number of good questions that have been raised over time which I will re-quote on each relevant post (Doreen posted some in response to my original comment above – no I haven’t forgotten Doreen!)

For now, I want to ask two questions which naturally arise as a result of being presented with these issues:

• Where do these core issues utlimately stem from? Do they simply arise because Art of Living is an organization, and so suffers from the same political, hierarchical problems that plague all organizations? Or, as many people including myself believe, do they stem from the core of the organization, that is, from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar himself?
• What level, if any, of the above issues are YOU willing to accept in a spiritual organization?

At the end of the day, it is a matter of personal choice whether or not you wish to have any association with Art of Living. We can argue if Art of Living are doing more harm than good in the world until the cows come home, but ultimately it is you who needs to make the choice as to whether you want to have any association with the organization or not, and if so, what level of association.

I have already made my decision to end my association with Art of Living based on a combination of my own personal experiences and a number of things I have read here which corroborate my experiences. I am not going to make any attempt to force my opinion on you, and I would encourage you to be wary of anyone who does. I simply want you to have as much information upfront to help you make as informed a decision as possible if you are considering having any future with Art of Living. Above all, my advice is to you is to question everything, not just those those things which come from Art of Living, but even the things on this blog.

It may be difficult for you to answer the above questions right now, especially if you don’t have full visibility of all the information. If this applies to you, please keep these questions in mind as you read through the posts which go into the detail of each of the core issues.