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II. Message from Cătălin Călin concerning the recent events in Italy, written for all those interested in the truth.
Now, since we’re already talking about jobs and other such, let’s clear up another matter that Gregorian Bivolaru and yogaesoteric pick on, namely the fact that I would call myself “master Virgil”. This is another cheap manipulation that they use so that the few people who are still faithful to them would think that I have some sort of desire for glory and that this would be one of the reasons why I left MISA. I will start by saying that I’m not the one who calls myself that, but SOMETIMES, some people call me that and they do it for entirely different reasons than those Gregorian Bivolaru and yogaesoteric refer to. In Italian the word “master” is used with to mean something entirely different than it does in Romanian. In Italian the word is used for all those who work in a certain domain which, generally, has to do with teaching, but not exclusively. Therefore, in Italian we will encounter such phrases as: “ski master”, “swimming master”, “maths master”, “kindergarten master”, “painting master”, “dance master”, “yoga master”, “karate master”, “master chef” (you see, chefs are masters as well, so you could say that I am twice the master – this being a joke, of course). Thus the mystery of my supposedly calling myself “master” is revealed.
In the next sentence in the article people refer to my having fans. This is entirely false. I have friends, people whom I respect and who respect me and appreciate the work I do. That is all! As far as this is concerned, we all know that it is actually mister Bivolaru who has fans, because he is adored by a number of people who become hysterical and faint even at the bare mention of his name.
In the same context, the article on yogaesoteric says that I have contacted Swami Suryananda to threaten him that, if he goes to the yoga congress in Romania, he will be arrested. This is another way of twisting the truth. It all started from the fact that, after the first yoga congress held in Bucharest a few years ago, in which Swami Suryananda participated, the latter reproached me for not telling him about the fact that he would have to hold conferences at the same table and in the same context as some porn actors, for which the people in the Federation strongly reproached him. Now, when I found out that he would participate in the so-called yoga congress this year, you can imagine that I was very surprised. That was why I called him and asked him if it was true. He said yes and I asked him if he remembered the situation that was caused by the other congress. He said yes, he remembered, but he had been called insistently a number of times by Swami Mahalayananda from Portugal, and the latter had strongly urged him to participate in the new “congress” and guaranteed repeatedly that MISA no longer had any legal problems and that they were cleared. I told him that those affirmations were false and that MISA still had legal problems – even more so, these problems had spread to many other countries, among which Italy, which was proved by the fact that there was an inquiry concerning the MISA branches in Italy and that I had already been visited by the authorities who searched my home, cars, etc. He thanked me and said he’d think about it. Now I found out from yogaesoteric that I did nothing else but than “threaten” this man. Gentlemen from yogaesoteric, do you know what a threat is?
Yesterday, after I found out about what was written in this article, I called Swami Suryananada again to ask him when I threatened him or if he had felt threatened. He denied that and he even thanked me repeatedly for my warning, considering the fact that he had now read the Italian newspapers and he was sorry even about the fact that he offered those from MISA that video conference. He said that his decision to not go to that congress in Romania was taken after a conversation he had with his collaborators from the Federation, conversation in which the latter insisted that he shouldn’t participate, saying that there was a risk that he would besmirch the name of the Federation again. He then called those from MISA to tell them that he no longer intended to participate in that “congress” and he proposed that he should return the money for the ticket and the other expenses that MISA paid for, but they refused him. Then, mister Suryananada, as he told me last night on the phone, somehow felt he owed them because of the yogi principles of fairness. At the suggestion of his collaborators, he offered those in MISA that video conference. He actually asked me last night: “How have I wronged these people, why do they want to cause me trouble? I have lived all my life honestly and now they put me in this risky situation where I could get in trouble with the authorities without having done anything wrong. Is that what I need at my age?” If you want to convince yourselves of what I said regarding this, mister Suryananda can be contacted by telephone or e-mail at the addresses that are found on the European Federation of Yoga website.
Now let us talk about other things as well, you could say more serious ones, MISA and I and about my breaking off from MISA. Despite all the lies that were told about this, I decided to cease all contact with MISA and Gregorian Bivolaru mostly due to four reasons:
1. The interminable legal problems which, in my opinion, are problems that appeared due to behavior that is contrary to the moral and ethical yogi principles.
2. The misrepresentation – in many cases, the complete misrepresentation – of the authentic yogi teachings.
3. The fact that mister Gregorian Bivolaru himself suggested that I should manipulate my students (he said: “Well, I think that in this case you should use some manipulation techniques with them”)
4. The invitations made to girls from the yoga courses to attend so-called Tantric initiations with mister Gregorian Bivolaru. These girls were invited by other girls whom Gregorian Bivolaru trusted and they were told: “Be discrete, Cătălin mustn’t know.”
First of all I would like to clarify the absurd claims that some people in MISA make, according to which I had been sent to Italy by Gregorian Bivolaru to spread his teachings. This is completely false. I came to Italy to work, I became acquainted with many yoga schools, martial arts schools, etc., and at one point I started holding yoga courses. At the time I had no connection to MISA or Gregorian Bivolaru, but my brother attended their courses. He went to Gregorian Bivolaru and told him he had a brother in Italy, etc.,etc., and Bivolaru caught the idea and proposed: “Well, he could teach for us, why should he prepare courses himself when we have them already written down and we can offer them to him.” I don’t want to bore you with the details, I will only tell you that after four years of teaching I had only received the first 5 courses from the first year, the introductory ones which describe nearly nothing, and those were in a sorry state. On the other hand, Gregorian Bivolaru had already started asking me for my “monthly contribution” in cash and considered me and my courses to somehow be his property, which was the reason why (I think in ’94-’95) we had a very heated discussion, a discussion in which he accused me of gaining some benefits from the MISA courses (?!) and of not giving anything to “them”. He called me “an amazingly selfish person”. I explained then that he had no right to ask me for absolutely anything, because: 1. I did not hold “MISA courses”: 2. I didn’t have any profit, seeing that I myself put in $500 a month to sustain the expenses with the courses and 3. If it were that important for him, I could give him money I earned myself (as a chef), in case he needed it. He insisted on being hysterical, and then I proposed a game with “coloured pencils” through which I would try to make him understand that something was wrong with his approach. He sat at the table with a pen in his hand to calculate (that was all he was interested in) and he kept screaming that if I was honest, why didn’t I bring him accounting papers. In the end he, too, accepted that I had no reason to do that since I had received no support from MISA, not in cash, not in courses, not in any way, and he tried to change tracks and somehow repair the situation by asking: “What, you really don’t earn anything from these courses and you even have to pay money yourself? Well, if that’s the case, you’re stupid! So you go in the West and hold courses for rich Italians and you still have losses? I’ll teach you what to do, because I’ve been in jail and I know all the tricks, I can’t be tricked by anybody. Many have tried, but none have succeeded. Even recently, a boy who grew mushrooms thought he could fool me in this affair, but he couldn’t manage it. Look, you have to adopt Maharishi’s system and ask for a tax equal with 30% of their earnings.” That was when I started laughing and I told him that his view on Westerners wasn’t a very accurate one and that, in my opinion, nobody who has a head on his shoulders shows up at a course with a declaration on how much he earns, so he’d pay you a 30% tax :). The discussion continued on several subjects as he tried to correct his initial mistake. I can tell you that after I got out of the room I told my brother, who was waiting for me, that there was something strange in Gregorian Bivolaru’s behaviour and that I would rather have nothing else to do with him. My brother told me then that I was wrong, that I should think on it some more and he practically spent that summer trying to convince me. I then said ok, let’s try again. That was my mistake! Later on Gregorian Bivolaru proposed that I should be sold written courses (he said it was so that I wouldn’t have to work on writing them). The initial sum that he asked me for – we’re talking about ’94-’95 – was of $300/month, then that became $400, then $500, $600 and so on. When the euro appeared, we switched to euros. If we sum up all the “donations” I gave him, we get to almost 200.000 euros and most of the time I didn’t even get those “courses”, I always had to fight with the people at the library, as if they were doing me a favor.
Naturally, I tried to continue studying elsewhere. At the same time, every time I came to Romania I brought mister Gregorian Bivolaru many books and CDs that you couldn’t find in Romania at the time, again as donations. Many of the songs that I used for meditations came from the CDs I offered him and which most of the time MISA sold back, changing their label and naming the songs for meditations. Many of the courses “written by” Gregorian Bivolaru come from such books that I and others who lived abroad brought him. Same goes for the courses on Shivaism. And here’s the equation: I pay a lot of money for some books in the West, which I later donate to the MISA “school”, Gregorian Bivolaru copies them word by word and writes such “courses”, which he later offers me for money. We have to admit that here, when it came to schemes, he was clever. Of course I noticed it, but, like many of you, at the time I thought that maybe I didn’t get it. I have told you all this to clarify this lie about “Cătălin, sent by Gregorian Bivolaru abroad, look how ungrateful he is now, a rebel.” And to ask those who keep claiming that I have used the MISA courses: which courses, gentlemen? Do you even know what you’re talking about, or are you parroting what you’ve been told?
Let’s return to recent times. After the events in 2004, Gregorian Bivolaru started revealing his true nature more openly and also started acting increasingly strange. During the meetings that I’ve had with him (always in Paris, not in Sweden as he claims), I tried to understand what was going on and to convince him to change his behaviour concerning the “yoga school” in Romania: girls dancing in night bars (and don’t tell me that they don’t exist, because it was suggested both to me and some of my students that we should open such night bars which would also have erotic massage parlours, but we refused), the dictatorship and absurdity imposed during camps and courses (let me remind you of a few examples: the way in which those who decided to quit MISA were publicly accused and the way they were insulted with words that aren’t at all worthy of a spiritual school, waiting in the tent at Costinești in horrible conditions even for two days in a row in insanitary conditions, etc., or even the absurd situation in which during some courses you were obligated to listen to colleagues describing their own experience for hours in a row, or more absurdly, the very strange demand that instructors should read, during courses, those horrible letters in which some of the top representatives of MISA threw mud at each other) etc.
During all these meetings with Gregorian Bivolaru, when I mentioned these situations he told me that he actually has nothing to do with them, but he guarantees that he’ll fix them. For many years that was the way it went and he had reached the point where he lied continuously and even more than that, he wanted to lie to me about situations that I myself had attended and about which I knew the truth. There was even a case when I told him: “Grieg, remember that back then I was there as well and things aren’t like you say they are.” It all came to an end when a girl who had just returned from him came and told all of us, nearly 40 instructors (we were at a meeting with the instructors in Italy), about the inhumane treatment she had been subjected to by Gregorian Bivolaru. She said that when she saw Gregorian Bivolaru in the flesh for the so-called initiation, he first offered her 2 rather large glasses of liquor that was very strong, after which, she said: “I no longer knew what I was doing and I didn’t understand anything.” During the actual initiation, at one point the girl felt sick and she asked him to stop, but he didn’t care and went on. He later asked the girl to pee on him, but she couldn’t do it. The girl said that when that happened Gregorian Bivolaru started screaming at her, telling her she was stupid (“you are a very stupid person”), and that she was full of demons that made her cringe and fail. After that he took her hand, took her to the bathroom, he sat in the tub and asked the girl to pee on him. What the girl told us was this: “Believe me when I say that I’ve never seen anything more pathetic.” In the end the girl told him that she wanted to go back home, but he started screaming and told her that she had to stay for another week, so they could meet again. She replied that she didn’t want to and that she would have problems in Italy if she were late, because she had no way to justify her absence. Gregorian Bivolaru asked her what sort of problems she would have and she said she’d get in trouble with her boyfriend, but also with me (Cătălin), because I didn’t agree with her going to him. (Regarding that, I want to say that when this girl was invited to meet Gregorian Bivolaru we had a huge fight because I insisted she didn’t go because something was wrong, and she told me that wasn’t true, because many girls told her that this might be a great occasion to evolve). Hearing this, Gregorian Bivolaru got very angry and started screaming at her, saying the following: “How dare Cătălin do such a thing? He should be proud when you come to visit me and he should even help you do it, doesn’t he realize that he is what he is because of me? Because back when I met him he was a lowly dishwasher!” This is when I said: enough! It was the last drop because before this happened there had already been all sorts of issues. That was when I decided that from that moment on I wanted nothing to do with Gregorian Bivolaru and MISA and I ended our “relationship” by sending him a letter. That was also when two other girls got up and told us about their unpleasant experiences with Gregorian Bivolaru, and at the end of that meeting with the instructors, after I decided along with the other instructors that we should break off all ties with MISA, I found out something else: the cherry on top of the cake, as they say, that told me that we couldn’t have done otherwise anyway. An instructor came to me and whispered in my ear that he also had something to say to somehow confirm our decision, seeing that we had broken off with MISA anyhow. He told me then that many months previous, at the end of a training for future instructors in Denmark, he was pulled aside by Mihai Stoian, who told him that Gregorian Bivolaru intended to replace Cătălin Călin from the leadership of the Italian school and that, in this respect, he had already thought of a few people who could replace him, people among whom was this instructor. Gregorian Bivolaru told these people to choose a date when they could go to him to establish who would replace Cătălin. Then, this instructor asked Mihai Stoian: “But does Cătălin know about this, have you told him?” Stoian’s answer was as follows: “No, he hasn’t been informed and he mustn’t know yet. First you’ll have to meet with Gregorian Bivolaru and decide who will replace him.” (The pattern is the same as the one used to replace Raphael Mitica Achirei in England, Narcis Tarcău in India, Dinu Roman in Denmark, etc.) I want to make it clear that my decision to break off from MISA was taken before I found out about the plan to replace me.
Virgil Călin