The Doors are open

One of the most ridiculous things to comment about the Art of Living Foundation and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar would be to say that they are really great in marketing their product. The volunteers seem hardly trained and quite a few times they blabber nonsense in their excitement to share whatever they have to say. Sometimes even simple questions/objections are not handled properly. The media is not properly used at all. There is hardly any planning or strategy. Everything happens in a haphazard and a chaotic way. Art of Living desperately needs good lessons in marketing. If at all the claims that it is a super rich organisation and the founder is hungry for fame/power are true, I would say they are doing a very sad job with their marketing department.

The wonder is, with such poor skills of organising how is it that the Art of Living foundation manages to organise such huge events?? And thousands of courses get organised in so many thousand cities all over the world.

How does this happen? To me the only logical answer seems that the people involved are really inspired to share and are genuinely been benefited by the techniques learnt in these courses. The power of experience, the power of the intention to share and contribute towards society is the only reason I feel, makes such great things happen in society. People who fail to understand this phenomenon generally say that the only reason AOL is successful is because of its extraordinary marketing skills. I beg to differ.

Such a huge volunteer based organisation obviously will consist of a few idiots here and there, some of them not just good enough to represent spirituality. One of the teachers say that the biggest drawback of working in a spiritual organization is that devotees cannot be hired or fired! But at the same time there are no illegal activities happening, people are getting benefited in some way or the other. Isolated examples, stories cooked up by a few disgruntled morons do not define the values of an organization that is involved in so much good work all over the world.

Lastly if anyone does not like it, DO NOT GET IN. If you are already in GET OUT. The doors are open. Nobody is going to stop you. Nobody is forcing you to stay. If you are allowing someone to force/fool you, you anyway deserve to suffer. But still the doors will always remain open. At least now you know that this does not work for you or you failed to make this work for you. In any case you have grown wiser. Move on.

“j”