Many of you noticed that this site was down
for a while. Many of you are aware that I have always been concerned that Nicole
Adams, Robert’s wife, would force me to take this site down by legal means
as she has with so many others.
Well, she did it. She had a lawyer contact
my web host and threatened to sue everyone under the sun if my site were kept
up—Oh, actually, she allowed me, via her lawyer, to keep up a few pages that do
not even mention Robert or have a photo of him.
So far, Nicole has threatened at least ten
people with lawsuits if they even mention Robert’s name, or state they were his
students, or put up any of his photos, or put up any of his transcripts. Of course
she has consistently stated that any transcripts on any Internet site other than
Infinity was not authentic, and that anyone who claimed to be Robert’s student was
never a student, except for those she stated that Robert passed on the authority
to teach, such as her and her daughter. Surprise, surprise. Nicole is quite confused here because she says not only were the
transcripts (on this and any other site) not authentic, but posting any of these
inauthentic transcripts was in violation of copyright
laws. I do not understand how a transcript is not authentic, but it
is also copyrighted. Go figure.
She has also tried to and successfully
stopped the publication of any photograph of Robert, including in my case, those
I took of him. You cannot copyright someone else's photograph, especially one of
a public figure, such as was Robert. She threatened to sue Yoga Journal if the
picture I sent of Robert were published. The editor nearly yanked the entire article,
but it was published, without Robert's photo. She also demanded I take down the
article written for Ten Directions and also for the Mountain Path.
I find it VERY curious that the Infinity
site does not have any picture of Robert or Nicole at all. Not one! Robert had a
very intense appearance and one can see the depth in his eyes. One would expect
Infinity be highly motivated to post photos of Robert during his last decade of life, but they
haven't. Why no pictures of Robert with Nicole or Blake Warner?
Nicole states that Robert
named certain people to be his successors. She calls them Robert’s thirty year
students, specifically authorized by Robert to teach his words. One of these
supposed thirty year students is Blake Warner, who apparently now owns the
copyright to “Silence of the Heart.”
Robert never named a successor. He stated
Ramana never named a successor. He said Laksman said Ramana named him a
successor, but that was untrue. He said he was with Ramana at the time this was
supposed to have happened and he knew nothing about it. No one treated Laksman
any differently than anyone else.
Nicole et al, claims that in contradiction
to Ramana’s way, that Robert named her and his “thirty year students” to be his
authorized successors. This is untrue. Had he done so, he would have told me.
Besides, the "thirty year students" do not exist. Show me proof Nicole, that
Blake is a thirty year student. Blake may have known Robert 30 years ago, but he was not around
until well after Robert died.
I have offered to discuss or debate either Warner or
Nicole on Robert's teachings and Advaita. They never responded except through a
lawyer telling my host to take this site down.
On the Infinity site, you find nothing but
the most sugary words written about Robert and Nicole, written by Nicole in her
own style of writing. However, if you
look at that site, you can see that neither Blake nor Nicole
understand Robert’s teachings. Read their site and see if you can find the Robert
I know and talk about anywhere on that site. He is not to be found anywhere.
Blake Warner claims copyright for
all of Silence of the Heart. However, he was not there. Several long time
students beside me put together the first edition of Silence of the Heart. I
have a photocopy of that on the “Authenticity” page of this site.
Notice that neither Blake Warner nor Nicole are mentioned at all.
http://itisnotreal.com/Authenticity.html
This authenticity page also has a sub-page
of a answering machine recording of Nicole stating I should write about
my understanding of Robert. She mentions five
times that she has never heard anyone who captured Robert as well as I did in
some article I wrote. She advised me that I ought to publish what I wrote about Robert.
Isn't that authorization from Nicole and Infinity?
Three years ago, I woke up from chopping wood and
carrying water to feel a burning drive to
present Robert’s teachings as directly transcribed. I encountered the Infinity
site and Blake Warner later on. I suggested we could work cooperatively to
spread Robert’s teachings. They never responded except with a "communiqué"
that I should take a flying leap. It is posted on a Letter page.
Below is the email sent to me by my former
host. There were about 30 pages and subpages that the host ordered me to take down. Many of those
pages contained photographs of Robert. She wanted all photographs of Robert off
the Internet. She even ordered the host to take down photographs of Robert I
took myself, such as the one with Robert and my wife. Of course, she could not
possibly claim copyright to a photo I took.
In the past, I figured if she left me alone,
I'd leave Infinity alone.
But, Infinity came after me legally and I
want to set the record straight. This site has the true teachings of Robert and
the only truly authentic transcripts of Robert I know about. What is here is real Robert, not
the Robert Infinity portrays. I do not even know whether the transcripts they sell
are really of Robert or are a perversion of Robert--I have never seen one of
them; they are too expensive. They say the transcripts are free to those who
can't afford them. Why don't they just post Robert's talks for free on their
site?
Now inevitably, I will get an email with an
opinion that I am not showing love or peace or whatever.
I am not Robert. Whatever he was, he was.
The body/mind mechanism, as Balsekar calls it, keeps spinning in its own time
and way, even after the
recognition that it, and the whole vehicle, are not real.
Robert never advocated being so passive as
to be a doormat. He just appeared to be a doormat.
He was not. He was always working in the background to make things happen even
in an unreal world; for example, cooking his students. That was an apparent
doing and he was the center.
Check these links out. They wanted me
to delete half the site where Robert is even mentioned. How can anyone who
PRETENDS to have any understanding of Robert, or who talks about humility and
love so much as Nicole does, possibly act like this? Infinity has no honor. Notice Infinity ordered me to take down even the photos I took of
Robert, as well as the questions and answers on the online Satsang where Robert
is only mentioned, as well as my article written for Yoga Journal.
This is infringement of my own, prior copyright and free speech privileges,
not the other way around.
In any event, when I first happened upon the Infinity site two
years ago, it was small and little was offered in terms of teaching materials.
But as this site has grown, Robert's teachings have become part of mainstream
Advaita teaching and thousands of people now know of him that would not
otherwise. The Infinity site is now much larger and they are showing a lot of
activity and life that was absent before. This site has helped them grow. One
might say Robert planned this. But things are really much more complicated than
this.
Since this process started to unfold, I did a google on other dead
teachers: Yogananda, Muktananda, Krishnamurti, Rajneesh, and Robert's first
teacher, Joel. Everyone of them had intense legal battles regarding
copyrights, trademarks, etc. following the teacher's death.
SRF tried to trademark "self realization" and
extend the copyrights of Autobiography of a Yogi, which was denied by the courts
after a 12 year legal battle. They even tried, as Nicole is trying, to gain
copyright over every image ever made of Yogananda. Seems there is always the
ownership established center run by a relative, and an outside group made up of
some of the guru's central students who wanted to [rocaim the teacher as their
mentor.
If you want to see the "communiqué" that Nicole wrote me a
couple of years ago before she decided to try to sue me and my former web host,
please click on:
