stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

A WILD AND CRAZY WISDOM GUY 107
constraints on the behavior of any “divine sage” than does its postmodern,
Western counterpart.
Trungpa may have “partied harder” in Europe and the States,
but he was already breaking plenty of rules, without censure, back
in Tibet and India. Indeed, one could probably reasonably argue
that, proportionately, he broke as many social and cultural rules,
with as little censure, in Tibet and India as he later did in America.
(For blatant examples of what insignificant discipline is visited
upon even violent rule-breakers in Tibetan Buddhist society even
today, consult Lehnert’s [1998] Rogues in Robes.) Further, Trungpa
(1977) did not begin to act as anyone’s guru until age fourteen, but
had women “since he was thirteen.” He was thus obviously breaking
that vow of celibacy with impunity both before and after assuming
“God-like” guru status, again in agrarian 1950s Tibet.
In 1970, the recently married Trungpa and his sixteen-yearold,
dressage-fancying English wife, Diana, established their permanent
residence in the United States. He was soon teaching at
the University of Colorado, and in time accumulated around 1500
disciples. Included among those was folksinger Joni Mitchell, who
visited the tulku three times, and whose song “Refuge of the
Roads” (from the 1976 album Hejira) contains an opening verse
about the guru. Contemporary transpersonal psychologist and author
John Welwood, member of the Board of Editors of The Journal
of Transpersonal Psychology, is also a long-time follower of Trungpa.
In 1974, Chögyam founded the accredited Naropa Institute in
Boulder, Colorado—the first tantric university in America. Instructors
and guests at Naropa have included psychiatrist R. D.
Laing, Gregory Bateson, Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg—after
whom the university library was later named. (Ginsberg had earlier
spent time with Muktananda [Miles, 1989].) Also, Marianne
Faithfull, avant-garde composer John Cage, and William “Naked
Lunch” Burroughs, who had earlier become enchanted (1974, 1995)
and then disenchanted with L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. Plus,
the infinitely tedious Tibetan scholar and translator Herbert V.
Guenther, whose writings, even by dry academic standards, could
function well as a natural sedative.
Bhagavan Das (1997) related his own, more lively experiences,
while teaching Indian music for three months at Naropa in the
’70s: