stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

130 STRIPPING THE GURUS
turning to his old ashram in Poona, thereby leaving Americans either
waiting longer for their Messiah ... or being glad that he had
left.
The Oregon ashram closed down soon after Bhagwan’s departure.
(Various followers were later convicted on assault, attempted
murder, wiretapping and food poisoning charges [Larabee, 2000].)
Today, it serves as a summer Bible camp for teenagers safely devoted
to following their own, more conservatively acceptable (but
still long-haired, robe-wearing, “only one Enlightened Master”)
Messiah.
* * *
The use of consciousness-altering drugs was never officially approved-of
in either the Poona or the Oregon ashrams. In spite of
that, by 1982 Rajneesh was allegedly sniffing nitrous oxide (i.e.,
laughing gas) to get high on a daily basis. On one occasion, six
months into that, reportedly reclining in his own $12,000 dentist
chair and babbling,
Bhagwan went on: “I am so relieved that I do not have to
pretend to be enlightened any more. Poor Krishnamurti ... he
still has to pretend” (Milne, 1986).
Krishnamurti—who actually considered Rajneesh to be a
“criminal” for his abuse of the guru-disciple relationship—was the
only “sage” whom Rajneesh had ever acknowledged as an equal.
(Bhagwan himself denied being a guru, but those denials are no
more convincing than were Krishnamurti’s own.) Indeed, by contrast
to their man-made, imported white-sand Krishnamurti Lake
in Oregon, in an open show of contempt for another of his “main
competitors” in the enlightenment industry, Rajneesh named a
sewage lagoon there after Swami Muktananda. The latter’s own
guru, the shit-eating Nityananda, would surely have approved ...
and perhaps even gone for a dip.
At any rate, having returned to India, Bhagwan’s “enlightenment”
soon improved to the extent where he could announce that
Gautama the Buddha had entered his body, and that this
had been verified by the seeress of one of the most ancient
Shinto shrines in Japan (Hamilton, 1998).