Pranic Healing Guru – Choa Kok Sui is no more

I came to know that master Choa kok sui, the founder of Pranic healing movement died in March of this year. He was pretty young and was about 53 years old. The last time I saw Master Choa Kok sui was a couple of years ago in the St John’s Auditorium in Bangalore, where he was conducting a public function of mass healing. He was visibly overweight and looked unhealthy. I came to know that he suffered from many ailments and last year he had a bout of pneumonia and died because of that in March 07. I sometimes wonder why a person who claimed to heal so many illnesses through his psychic powers couldn’t get himself healed. Of course his followers have a ready explanation that he took the karma or the ailments of his students and died for it. A friend of mine who is his avid follower told me that Choa Kok Sui out of compassion realised that he is better off helping more people in his disembodied state than while he was alive in his body and hence he left his body.

Master Choa Kok sui started his healing career somewhere in the late eighties and he visited bangalore in the early Nineties when he introduced Pranic healing in India. He had readily borrowed from many sources in the yoga and occult traditions to create his own patented system of healing. That’s when I came to know about him and also met him in person in Atheetha Ashram of Swami Sahajananda. Choa Kok Sui was very approachable and not quite popular during this time. He later became a cult figure. 

Swami Sahajananda was a disciple of Chinmayananda and was into naturopathy and yoga healing. He had walked all over india on foot and collected funds and did a lot of rural development activities in Atheetha Ashram in thally. Choa Kok Sui was invited to the ashram and he later became a patron of that ashram. Swami Sahajananda was influenced by many people from varied backgrounds like Gandhi, E.F.Schumacher, Albert Schweitzer, Arnold Ehret, Herbert Shelton, Osho and Chinmayanada and his teachings were a mixture of the teachings of all these people. He believed in fasting and he did fast for long durations ranging from a week to three weeks. He was also interested in yoga and ayurveda and experimented with a lot of these things. I liked Sahajanada for his social work, simplicity and humility. He was also invited to Philiphines by Master Chao kok sui in 1993. That was his first tour abroad and Sahajanada died a few months later on his return to India. He was diagnosed of cancer and he died at a very young age of 48. I was shocked to hear the news of his death because I had heard many lectures from Sahajanda about health and healing and how yoga, natural hygiene and fasting can improve ones health and prolong life.

Influenced by Sahajananda, I used to follow all the rules of food, hygiene and yoga. I even used to lecture about these things to my classmates in college. But this incident really left me thinking and also changed my views and I decided not to have firm and rigid views about anything and also not fall a prey for fads. I do believe and have found the benefits of moderation in diet and also the benefits of exercises like Yoga, walking and aerobic exercises. I am quite healthy by most standards and have never been to a doctor for years.  I feel health and longevity depends on three things genetics, lifestyle and environmental factors. Genetics do play an important role in longevity. Some people are hard wired to lead a long and healthy life in-spite of their extreme indulgence and leading an epicurean life. There are some people who are quite moderate and frugal in their habits and they die young. So it is still a mystery and no one knows the secrets of longevity including the scientists, medical men and other soothsayers who claim to have insights into these things.

During this time even the self help Guru Deepak Chopra was in Bangalore. Chopra was still selling TM and not started on his own and he was not that popular. I found an article in the national newspaper which was quite funny, Chopra claimed that as a result of his practice of TM Chopra has stopped ageing. This was a ridiculous statement and now we all know that Deepak is ageing just like all others. Just compare his old and new photographs. One thing I understood during this time was that these people in the holy and healing business will go to any lengths to sell their products. Most of their testimonials and case histories are false and they only project what was good and suppress any bad evidence. 

I know some people in Bangalore who are into pranic healing and they  worship their Guru Choa Kok Sui almost as a God. They used to call him grandmaster Choa Kok Sui. There are certain characteristics I see in some of these people. They are all quite paranoid and obsessed with what they call ‘Bad Vibrations’. They are all the time judging people and have a ‘holier than thou’ attitude. They are also very secretive about their meditation and healing techniques like the Twin heart Meditation, Arhatic Yoga, Meditation on the Soul and Kundalini Meditation. You would have to go through their courses where they teach all these techniques for a heavy price. They claim that all these techniques were developed by the Grand Master Himself including all those funny new vocabulary on colour prana and cleansing and energizing techniques. However they don’t realize that Choa Kok Sui has borrowed from many known sources like Bihar School of Yoga, Alice Bailey and Theosophical Society.  What he was teaching was not something new and it was quite old and infact very popular in the early part of the nineteenth century and popularized by such authors like the American yogi Ramachakra alias William Walker Atkinson.

Choa Kok Sui towards the end of his life had become a megalomaniac. He even claimed that his photograph has healing properties and now after his death his followers have begun to worship his photograph. He created a fictitious lineage to which he claimed that he belonged to and associated it with the Mahayana Buddhist master Padmasambhava or Mei Lung as he is called in Chinese. He even went about sending court notices to other energy  healing teachers like Mantak Chia of Thailand and an Indian Author. He claimed that these authors committed the grave sin of plagiarising him. He could not use his loving kindness meditation to forgive these people of trespasses and after all these were not some great scientific and technological discoveries that they plagiarised but some rehash of age old yogic techniques.

One of the typical qualities of groups like Pranic healing, Siddha samadhi Yoga and Ravishankar’s art of living is the claim for the unique qualities of the wares they sell. In art of living we have the sudharshan Kriya which is a rehash of energizing breathing techniques and they associate all kinds of mystical qualities to this exercise. The same with the pranic healing foundation, in their websites they have outlandish claims of miracles. There is one instance on the pranic healing website where one of the practitioner of this system has mentioned about a miracle on how his CD player did not stop playing the meditation CD by Choa Kok Suion Om even after hours of the expected duration in the CD thereby defying the laws of electronics. (http://www.pranichealing.org/testimonials/t_journey.htm#cd).

It cant get more absurd than this.