The Sat Yoga Ashram is a beautiful Shangri-La in the mountains of southern Costa Rica, a paradisiacal spiritual place that welcomes all those willing to pay the small entrance fees, the ability to stand on your own feet and – if you have – your whole fortune.

 

Several years ago, I visited SAT Yoga Ashram twice for a total of two months.  After my first visit, I was thrilled.  After my second visit, I became completely disillusioned and returned to Europe.  Shortly before my first stay I had a deep spiritual experience, an awakening, and that made me believe that my stay at SYA would be the continuation of this.  So, I gave a lot of credit to what awaited me there.  Fortunately, I wasn’t looking for a Guru, I just wanted to stay in a spiritual community.  This is one of several reasons why I didn’t fall into the trap.

 

Like most visitors, I was captivated by the beauty of the facility, the gardens, the warm atmosphere, the cultural program, the fine food and especially the teachings of Shunyamurti.  An ashram in which you study even Freud and Lacan – it can’t be a cult!

 

The members of the community all spoke fondly of Shunya, who kept a noble distance from the community and appeared only sporadically for his performances - his guided meditations and talks.  When a younger woman said that she was trusting of him so much that she would stop breathing if he suggested it to her, I took this an enthusiastic exaggeration and not the manifestation of a worrying psychological bank.  I was impressed by so many at the good things at first and I wanted to keep these impressions.  After a few years on a stormy sea, I wanted to go ashore in a safe, beautiful port. I am so glad that I finally did not succumb to the siren sounds of this skilled seducer and that I can continue my spiritual journey self, and not Shunya, determined. 

 

In Robert Shubow’s seduction strategies I recognize three types.  But first let me make one thing clear.  I don’t think he’s a cheater.  He is a seducer and he himself has been seduced.  He couldn’t resist the temptation of power. 

 

1. The Regressive Seduction

In my first or second private session with Shubov, he offered to adopt me, spiritually of course.  I was very irritated and declined, citing my age.  At 58, I was no longer looking for a father.  Unfortunately, this strange offer did not arouse suspicions.  On the contrary, Shubov gained more and more power over me.  In a dark corner of my soul, a little boy squatted with an infinite father hungering, a deep longing for a strong, present, caring and appreciative father.  It was this boy, and Shubow’s hypnotic abilities, who sabotaged my skepticism and allowed him to gradually rope me in. 

 

I think that especially younger people, not yet fully settled or already frustrated by life in this world, succumb to the temptation to regress to a dubious childhood by accepting Shunya as an adoptive father.  I could recognize the regressive pull of this idyllic place very clearly in the fact that members left the ashram with great reluctance and great anxiety, if only a weeklong stay in Panama in order to renew their visas.  They were there on a peaceful beach with other tourists, but upon their return to the ashram spoke of this week as if they had just escaped the hell of a city ravaged by civil war. “That terrible energy there!”  Once, a young man I got to know a little bit closer had to fly to Seattle for a sister’s wedding.  He bravely said he wasn't afraid.  Strange!  What happened to a strong, healthy young man that sees a visit to his family in a normal US city as a test of courage?  I think after a few years in this secluded paradise, hardly anyone dares to leave Daddy Shunya’s care.  One might say, they become uncapable of living their own life.

 

2. The Narcissistic Seduction

When I told him about my spiritual journey in a one-on-one session he said, this is so impressive that you should write your spiritual autobiography.  It would, he added, be made into a Hollywood movie, starring Brad Pitt?  My spiritual biography is nothing more than the story of a long-time seeker. Why couldn't I just shake off this nonsense?

 

Once I told him that I recite every day the well-known prayer of Brother Klaus, a great Swiss saint.  He looked deep into my eyes and whispered "You have much more power than Brother Klaus!”  Why didn't I burst out laughing?  He also prophesied that I would play a significant role on the side of the light forces in the coming apocalyptic woes.

 

Had I known at the time Shubow was doing this to everyone, I would have ended this haunt more quickly.  But after having received the knighthood, I staggered out of the intimidatingly imposing library, where these sessions took place, into the glinting sunlight, in a rather raptured state of mind. Somewhere in my head an alarm siren sounded, but my admission to the spiritual Olympus, where Master Eckhart, Brother Klaus, Nisargadatta and other greats received me, had obviously confused my mind. 

 

Now I can clearly see the sophisticated manipulative strategy used by Shubow.  He narcissistically inflates his victims; in one fell swoop.  They leave behind any sense of mediocrity, inferiority and self-doubt, and discover their "true" greatness.  Resisting this offer is not easy.  Who doesn't know the spiritual fable of the eagle cub who has fallen from the nest, is picked up by a farmer and put in the chicken coop, where it spends years thinking it is a chicken until a man comes along who turns the chicken into an eagle again.  Why should your true nature, from which you were so far away, not be great, sublime?   Shubow is giving you back your eagle nature, you're an avatar, yes, really.  If you accept that, the trap has snapped.  Because soon you'll find your wingspan still more akin to that of a sparrow than an eagle.  But surely your "explorer" will teach you how to fly!  So, you'll stay in the ashram and you'll take Shubow’s expensive flying lessons, a lifetime in a cult.  It’s very difficult to get away from him.  He can play his game with you. He can turn you into a mosquito if you fall woefully short of your true greatness or if you rebel against his omnipotence.  He then lifts you up again out of this fall.  This is the Yo-Yo game others have described.  This is ultimately a narcissistic deal.  You receive your “true greatness” from Shubow and he has once again saved a soul that can now be kneaded by his hands.  How cheated you are here.  You see yourself as an eagle, but you are more of a chicken than ever before, eating Shubow’s grain and laying your eggs for him: money, adoration, admiration, obedience.  In other words, you eat meagerly and feed his voracious narcissism and you don't dare leave the hen coop any more.

 

3. The Apocalyptic Seduction

Shubow’s most potent weapon in the battle for souls is, has been for decades, the apocalypse.  Apocalypse now!  Several times I witnessed him announce to his disciples and guests the impending total collapse of ALL systems.  I looked around in the semicircle and saw wide-eyed faces frozen with fear.  On one occasion he looked directly at me.  He knew from our conversations that I came from Sufism.  He even gave me an evening to conduct a dhikr, the central meditative ritual of the Sufis.  It was a beautiful, powerful experience.  Two days before I left, he made one last attempt to restrain my slippery soul.  He wasn't just talking about total collapse, no, he was talking about the fact that everyone in this ashram would lose their spiritual power, their "shakti" at this end time.  All of them?  It goes without saying who was the exception.  He turned himself into the only lifeline.  What a nasty manipulation!  Without me you get lost!  Literally, he meant that all spiritual endeavor, all meditation, all yoga, and all dhikr could do no more.  The dhikr clearly aimed at me.  He had betrayed himself.

I was definitely done with him.  The next day, I drove to San Jose with a few local visitors.  We exchanged our experiences, which were not dissimilar.  One said he hadn’t seen much love in this self-made guru.  He said it, but I agree.  We all laughed like liberated people who have seen through a big bluff or escaped a big danger.

 

A Mass Tailored Therapy

Returning to Europe after my first stay, my spiritual high didn't last long.  My friends didn't see a profound transformation, but rather saw me as over-excited.  Soon all the near-enlightenment glory was over, a hangover followed.  I soon landed again in a deep trauma hole.  I watched many of Shubow’s teachings on YouTube in an attempt to stay connected.  But more and more I sensed in Shubow an arrogant, loveless contempt for ordinary “unspiritual” people.  Here someone had developed a thick spiritual ego, I had to admit more and more clearly.  Also, the endless ego bashing, which makes up the bulk of almost all of his teachings, began to bore me.  Shubow endlessly hacks at his favorite enemy, the ego, without showing a clear way out of ego captivity or saying anything substantive about the liberated state.  How could he?  He is truly a super-ego!  But I wasn't ready to see through the whole bluff.  Instead, I clung to the illusion that I might have found my spiritual home and wrote to the ashram about my descent into trauma.  I accepted the ashram’s offer of "tailor-made" therapy and flew back to Costa Rica for a lot of money, due to booking at the last moment.  My second stay began with a retreat that, according to the not-so-modest announcement, was supposed to "lead to a breakthrough."  As if you could reach enlightenment in a week with fasting and lots of meditation!  Shubow makes it possible!  The real-life satire reached its climax when Shunya actually announced before the last extended meditation that we were now ready to break through. 

 

That week Shubow treated me as if I didn't exist.  His wandering gaze from one end of the semicircle of his audience to the other consistently avoided me.  I was very irritated, and for a day or two I suffered, until I saw through the strategy.  Shubow wanted me to starve for his gaze, for his favor.  The shot went the back, the dismantling of the guru that had already begun at home continued.  After this ‘final’ retreat, I began my "mass-tailored therapy."  And what happened?  In the first session, Shubow responded to my account of falling into the trauma hole, as usual, with a murmuring voice and an insistent gaze.  “You have no trauma!  There is no trauma!”  My chair was too wide to fall down.  Once I had recovered my composure, I had the audacity to contradict him, shyly.  (I had of course not the courage to say, do you want to fool me?) I did so in the second session, experiencing how unkindly he can treat you if you disagree with him.  The diva was not amused!  Of course, I discontinued the "therapy” and looked forward to the end of my second stay in this spiritual paradise.

 

Epilogue

Six months later in my home country, I "accidentally" bumped into a woman, a therapist, at a coffee machine in a supermarket, who got to knew the SYA in a special way.  She had been up there in the mountains, but she had a hotel down by the sea. When I told her about the ashram she said, "Yes, I know it very well.  I had to mend some that came from up there."  I thanked heaven for this encounter that confirmed all my bad experiences, all my insights.