P2P Foundation

Intriguing project, because it reveals an open source approach, but on closer inspection, hides an authoritarian practice:

For the open source aspect, see the Transontology site,

which states:

“The traditional model for religious and spiritual technologies has been closed and proprietary. The most powerful technologies are kept secret, limited to an initiated priesthood or inner circle. Development of new applications is prohibited or heavily controlled.

Transontology applies the open-source distribution and development model to an ancient spiritual technology for the first time. By making the development tools and applications available freely to everyone, we open the ancient esoteric teachings to a much wider audience and increase their value to society through community participation.”

However the Cult Education Forum reports a very autocratic conception at work within the movement, and quotes the leader David Bruce Hughes, which shows an Authority Ranking principle at work based on a presumption of knowing the Truth, based on their own interpretation of the meaning of the Vedas, which is derived from the Hare Krhsna movement:

“All of your questions and much, much more are answered in Bhagavad-Gita; As It Is. But your posts reveal that even if you have read it as you claim, you have not understood it at all. Otherwise you would not say so many confused and ignorant things. Let me just highlight one example out of many: “A very important thing I want to tell, is I see myself equal to everybody, and doesn’t put myself higher or lower to another!”

You cannot be equal to everyone: there will always be superior and inferior men. Just like when you are in school, there are students in higher grades and others in lower grades. In whatever way you measure, there will always be people better than you and less than you. The only way we are equal is in our spiritual potential, but even then there are enormous differences in how well we have realized that potential.”

This spiritual practice is clearly not informed by the peer to peer principle of Equipotentiality, as formulated by Jorge Ferrer:

“An integrative and embodied spirituality would effectively undermine the current model of human relations based on comparison, which easily leads to competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy, conflict, and hatred. When individuals develop in harmony with their most genuine vital potentials, human relationships characterized by mutual exchange and enrichment would naturally emerge because people would not need to project their own needs and lacks onto others. More specifically, the turning off of the comparing mind would dismantle the prevalent hierarchical mode of social interaction—paradoxically so extended in spiritual circles—in which people automatically look upon others as being either superior or inferior, as a whole or in some privileged respect. This model—which ultimately leads to inauthentic and unfulfilling relationships, not to mention hubris and spiritual narcissism—would naturally pave the way for an I-Thou mode of encounter in which people would experience others as equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal. It also would bring a renewed sense of significance and excitement to our interactions because we would be genuinely open to the fact that not only can everybody learn something important from us, but we can learn from them as well. In sum, an integral development of the person would lead to a “horizontalization of love.” We would see others not as rivals or competitors but as unique embodiments of the Mystery, in both its immanent and transcendent dimension, who could offer us something that no one else could offer and to whom we could give something that no one else could give.”

Here is an example of the attitude dealing with spiritual ‘competition’, i.e. impersonalist conceptions of the spiritual (the laugable assumption here is that there would not be sexual exploitation in personalist spirituality):

“When Maharishi Mahesh Yogi first came to the U.S. he stayed in Los Angeles in the house of a family. (The name of this family is not of importance. This story was delivered to Babaji by a direct witness of these events.) The family had a little daughter and “Maharishi” repeatedly abused her sexually. This is the nature of impersonalists. They can not control their senses. They are demons – as mentioned above. Similar examples can be found in the biographies of “Satya Sai Baba” or Rashneesh.”