stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

A WILD AND CRAZY WISDOM GUY 117
In response to close questioning by students, he first swore
us to secrecy (family secrets again), and then said that
Trungpa had requested him to be tested for HIV in the early
1980s and told him to keep quiet about the positive result.
Tendzin had asked Trungpa what he should do if students
wanted to have sex with him, and Trungpa’s reply was that
as long as he did his Vajrayana purification practices, it did
not matter, because they would not get the disease. Tendzin’s
answer, in short, was that he had obeyed the instructions
of his guru. He said we must not get trapped in the dualism
of good and evil, there has never been any stain, our
anger is the compassion of the guru, and we must purify all
obstacles that prevent us from seeing the world as a sacred
mandala of buddhas and bodhisattvas.
Yet, in spite of that, and well after all of those serious problems
in behavior had become widely known, we still have this untenable
belief being voiced, by none other than Ken Wilber (1996):
“Crazy wisdom” occurs in a very strict ethical atmosphere.
If all of the above was occurring within a “very strict ethical
atmosphere,” however, one shudders to think of what horrors an
unethical atmosphere might unleash. Indeed, speaking of one of
the unduly admired individuals whom we shall meet later, an
anonymous poster with much more sense rightly made the following
self-evident point:
One problem with the whole idea of the “crazy-wise” teacher
is that [Adi] Da can claim to embody anyone or anything, engage
in any sort of ethical gyration at all, and, regardless of
disciples’ reactions, Da can simply claim his action was motivated
as “another teaching.” He thus places himself in a position
where he is utterly immune from any ethical judgment
(in Bob, 2000; italics added).
More plainly, there can obviously be no such thing as a “strict
ethical atmosphere” in any “crazy wisdom” environment.
But perhaps Trungpa and Tendzin—a former close disciple of
Satchidananda, who was actually in charge of the latter’s Integral
Yoga Institute in the early ’70s (Fields, 1992)—had simply corrupted
that traditional “atmosphere” for their own uses? Sadly, no: