Aghora: At the Left Hand of God (Aghora)

Rating:
Summary: Don't fear reality
Review: beauty. huge. waves of it pour forth from the pages of this book. "aghora" reads like the bible never did for me. from the bible i sense incompletion--great loss due to years of translation and censorship. as i read "aghora" i feel an overwhelming sense of completeness. this book is fresh and full of life. it goes everywhere and nowhere. it is a wonder and an adventure if you are up for it.

Rating:
Summary: carlos castaneda inspired
Review: If I were never to read another book, for the rest of my life, I would be content with the knowledge I gathered from this book.
No other publication has aspired me in such height and inspired in me such depth. The inherent message in this book is that all things, no matter how vulgar or offensive, are all worthy of our love and consideration. I am grateful for this Divine Mastery...
OM GURU OM

Rating:
Summary: Deeper than deep
Review: It is important for anyone on a spiritual path in life to have an open mind. It is highly recommended by myself that before reading "Aghora At the left hand of God", one should review his or her motives. For one, this book has a great deal of information on a reality not perceivable by most humans. Many will take offense and be repulsed by some of its concept's. However, to say the least the book has immense power to bring light and truth to the reader. It is all too real and true, and this may be just what entices a reader to further explore him or herself more thoroughly. When I say explore, I mean really take a step back from yourself and be willing to question all your preconceived ideas about how things are, or how you want them to be. The main character portrayed by the student (the author, Robert E. Svoboda) is the tantric adept Aghori Vimalananda, in sanskrit "Vimala" (pure) plus "Ananda" (joy, bliss), or literally, "the bliss of purity". Aghori is a practiconer of Aghora. The word Aghora can be interpreted as "deeper than deep", or as "gentle,"or "filled with light, illumined." Aghora is the apotheosis of Tantra; the Indian religion whose supreme Deity is the Mother Goddess. To do the Aghori Vimalananda (which is one of many names he has gone by) any justice my words prove insignificant. His student Svoboda does manage to portray his life message as well as words could possibly do. It seemed to me that Vimalananda himself wrote the book. This is how closely the relationship between Svoboda and his preceptor was. Vimalananda in a sense was the real author. To say the least the book is well worth reading for anyone prepared to explore a deeper nature of spiritual life. The visions and description in this book took me away from my normal waking consciousness and left me with a vast array of possible approaches on my own spiritual journey. If one has the faith to dive deep and not let the judging mind cut oneself short. Here is an open invitation to let some very divine love in your life---you can grow immensely from this book, or journey. It will grip your heart tightly and you won't be able to put it down. It is superb and divinely inspired.

Rating:
Summary: =Eat Some Brain with Telang, Vimalananda, and Rockin Ravi!
Review: It is important for anyone on a spiritual path in life to have an open mind. It is highly recommended by myself that before reading "Aghora At the left hand of God", one should review his or her motives. For one, this book has a great deal of information on a reality not perceivable by most humans. Many will take offense and be repulsed by some of its concept's. However, to say the least the book has immense power to bring light and truth to the reader. It is all too real and true, and this may be just what entices a reader to further explore him or herself more thoroughly. When I say explore, I mean really take a step back from yourself and be willing to question all your preconceived ideas about how things are, or how you want them to be. The main character portrayed by the student (the author, Robert E. Svoboda) is the tantric adept Aghori Vimalananda, in sanskrit "Vimala" (pure) plus "Ananda" (joy, bliss), or literally, "the bliss of purity". Aghori is a practiconer of Aghora. The word Aghora can be interpreted as "deeper than deep", or as "gentle,"or "filled with light, illumined." Aghora is the apotheosis of Tantra; the Indian religion whose supreme Deity is the Mother Goddess. To do the Aghori Vimalananda (which is one of many names he has gone by) any justice my words prove insignificant. His student Svoboda does manage to portray his life message as well as words could possibly do. It seemed to me that Vimalananda himself wrote the book. This is how closely the relationship between Svoboda and his preceptor was. Vimalananda in a sense was the real author. To say the least the book is well worth reading for anyone prepared to explore a deeper nature of spiritual life. The visions and description in this book took me away from my normal waking consciousness and left me with a vast array of possible approaches on my own spiritual journey. If one has the faith to dive deep and not let the judging mind cut oneself short. Here is an open invitation to let some very divine love in your life---you can grow immensely from this book, or journey. It will grip your heart tightly and you won't be able to put it down. It is superb and divinely inspired.

Rating:
Summary: exquisite for few
Review: The best book I have read in my life ! First I would like to thank Svoboda for writing it ! Second, a word of advice:If you are not a true tantric and if you do not intend to be one,or if you do not know what tantra is,best to read something else on tantra first,because there are chances you will not like it so much if you read it first ! ( by the way,Tantra has actually very little to do with sex ) ...

Rating:
Summary: The most accurate book on Tantra in English!
Review: This book cuts through all of the west's romanticized notions about what is Tantra, & what is not.
Full of humor,wit,& wisdom.
This is a rollercaoster ride through the wold of Tantra which reads like fiction, while being completely factual.

Rating:
Summary: Deserves 10 stars, not 5!!!
Review: This is one of the most profound and sensational books I've ever read. It brings to light the "dark side" or the "left hand", so to speak, and illumines us as to how the "dark side" is as valid a part of God and Creation as the "bright side" is. It describes the journeys of the Tantric adept Aghori Vimalananda through realms of existence far removed from the mundane world, and hidden from most of us. Reading this book (and the other two in this series) can cause a radical change in the concepts we've formed about the universe, God, life, death and everything.

Vimalananda is the pen-name of a great Aghori master (his real name is not revealed for very good reasons), who had the privilege (or rather the grace obtained because of his past karma) to meet some of the greatest masters of all times and achieve phenomenal spiritual growth through the grace of Smashan Tara, the Great Goddess of the burning grounds. The chapters on "Ma" and "Shakti" describe the motherhood of God so wonderfully that one cannot help but fall in love with the Divine Mother in spite of her frightening disposition. The chapter on Mentors describes the eternal Guru-disciple relationship and also brings to light some of the very devious ways adopted by Gurus to test their disciples, among many other things. The chapter on Aghora brings illumines us as to how even the "forbidden" substances such as meat, alcohol, tobacco, drugs and such can be used to accelerate spiritual progress if used in a proper way along with the guidance of a Guru. The chapter on Avishkar is all about possessions, whether it's by a low-level spirit or by a high-level deity, and after reading this chapter, you would (hopefully) no longer be misled by people claiming to be incarnations of deities, since the mechanics of possession would become clearer to you.

The chapter on spirits is absolutely sensational. The astral world consists of many realms, and different types of spirits live in different realms based on their karmic qualification and level of evolution. Many people seem to think that they can extract work from the spirits and achieve whatever they want, without realizing that it can drag them into a dangerous trap, if they do not have an adept Guru to protect them. Considerable information is given on different types of spirits along with their descriptions, in the bright as well as the dark realms. It's a very objective account that brings to light various types of spirit contact, along with their pros and cons, and also tries to show how we can cultivate friendship with even the lowest forms of spirits and take advantage of it for attaining spiritual progress.

The chapter on sex is the longest and perhaps the most illuminating, and I have no words to talk about it....you must read it for yourself....it brings to light some of the deepest mysteries of sex, relationships, marriage and such never heard of before!

A word of caution though: If you are a purist with black-and-white standards, then you may find the information presented here to be very disturbing, so it might behoove you to stay clear from this book. But if you're a truth seeker who desires to discover the reality behind this mysterious cosmos, then this book is certainly for you.

This book packs real power and can cause a permanent change in your life and your very approach towards it.

May the Cosmic Mother bless you!

Rating:
Summary: carlos castaneda inspired
Review: This is what I get for believing the gee-whiz book reviews on this site. I actually thought this book was something REAL, through which I could gain more knowledge of tantra as practiced in the real world. Wrong! This book is of the Carlos Castaneda variety.
Upon opening it the first thing I encountered was a fairly tedious "preface" in the style of "Ladies and gentlemen don't try this at home; I am, after all, a professional." I waded through that. Now, I thought, the book will start. No, next comes a tedious "introduction" also by the author. I skipped that. Then the book finally starts (almost forty pages later; I now believe the long-winded preface and intro were to build verisimilitude for reasons I'll soon explain).
The book starts finally, purporting to be a first-person narrative dictated by this tantric teacher of svobodha's. By the way, this is not really this tantric teachers real name--even though he's deceased. Now, all you svoboda fans, come on and put your thinking caps on with me and think real hard: why change the name of a person who isn't even alive? (You can't even legally libel the dead). Could it be to discourage investigating this person cause they never really existed? I'll clue you--in the first few pages he's forced to do a tantric ritual sitting on a dead corpse, the Hindu Goddess appears as a real person and transports him magically to his bedroom a hundred or so miles away. Then the goddess appears to him in the flesh every day through the magic power of a yantra.
So, at this point, we find ourselves landing squarely in FICTION LAND. I think castaneda was the one who elevated cranking out a pack of lies into a literary genre.
The real magic is how svobody gets our dollars to magically flow into his bank account. Seriously, what interests me about these types of hoaxers is this: how do they justify it in their own minds? Do they tell themselves it's allegory?
One hint about how this was put together--the very first yogic parable the old tantric narrator tells I recognized as a thread-worn story told by the famous paramahansa yogananda on one of his taped lectures sold by his "self-realization fellowship" organization, taped in the early nineteen fifties. I think this guy svobodha went to india to study ayurveda and became an encyclopedia of this kind of lore and cobbled it together in these books. I guess times are hard financially for ayurvedic doctors in the USA. The bottom line is this: if you want to really learn about tantra don't waste your money (I wish I wouldn't have!). Try paramahansa Satyananda Saraswati or Jonn Mumford, both available here at amazon.

Rating:
Summary: sex magick, karma, necromancy, the transmutation of feces...
Review: Wow! A first-person account of the life of an aghora, a hindu mystic who has made it his life's mission to rise above fear and disgust and embrace reality as a seamless, non-dualist whole, paradoxes'n'all. Included here are many amusing and entertaining discussions of sex magick, karma, necromancy, the transmutation of feces into roast chicken, and a host of other off-beat topics. This book would worth the price of purchase for this insight alone: ...