stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

140 STRIPPING THE GURUS
taken such exaggerations seriously enough to experience Adi Da’s
community discipline first-hand.
How unsettling, then, to discover a 1987 interview with Yoga
Journal, only a few short years after the Dawn Horse ejaculations,
where Wilber stated his opinion that Adi Da’s “entire situation has
become very problematic.” Nearly a decade later (1996a), he explained:
“‘Problematic’ was the euphemism that sociologists at that
time were using for Jonestown.”
For my own part, not being a sociologist, I would never have
caught on to the meaning of that “unsafe word” without having it
explained to me ... albeit years after the fact, here. I suspect that I
am not alone in that regard.
No matter: Three years later, in 1990, Wilber was back to contributing
endorsements for Da’s teachings, this time to the humbly
titled The Divine Emergence of the World-Teacher:
The event of Heart-Master Da is an occasion for rejoicing,
for, without any doubt whatsoever, he is the first Western
Avatar to appear in the history of the world.... His Teaching
contains the most concentrated wealth of transcendent wisdom
found anywhere, I believe, in the spiritual literature of
the world, modern or ancient, Eastern or Western (in Bonder,
1990; italics added).
Note that, in the above quote, Wilber is evidently considering
himself fit not merely to pronounce on the degree of enlightenment
of others, but even to confirm their avatar status, “without any
doubt whatsoever.”
Of the above author Bonder (2003) himself—who has since independently
adopted the status of teacher, without Adi Da’s blessing—Wilber
has more recently declared:
Saniel Bonder is one in whom the Conscious Principle is
awakened.
Again, note the oracular nature of the statement, as no mere
expression of opinion, but rather as a without-doubt, categorical
evaluation of another person’s spiritual enlightenment—as if Wilber
himself were able to see into others’ minds, or clairvoyantly
discern their degree of conscious evolution.
Others, however, have reasonably questioned the possibility,
even in principle, of anyone executing such over-the-top insight: