stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

DA AVATAR, DA BOMB, DA BUM 141
[B]oth mystics and sympathetic writers about mysticism are
just wrong if they think that there is a way of telling whether
the other person has had a genuine experience or just pretends
to have had one....
A man may write excellent love poetry without ever having
been a comparable lover; it is the writer’s skill as a writer
that makes his words convincing, not his skill as a lover.
The mystic’s talk about his experience may be skillful or
clumsy, but that does not improve or weaken his actual experience
(Bharati, 1976).
Bharati himself was both a scholar and a swami of the Ramakrishna
Order.
A mere seven years before the aforementioned “problematic”
Yoga Journal piece, Wilber (in Da, 1980) had again ironically been
“protesting too much,” in print, that Adi Da was not creating a
harmful environment around himself:
[N]owhere is [Da] more critical of the “cultic” attitude than
he is towards those who surround him.... I have never heard
Da Free John criticize anyone as forcefully as he does those
who would approach him chronically from the childish stance
of trying to win the favor of the “cultic hero.”
Other fans of Da—even those who have comparably considered
him to be “the ultimate expression of the Truth residing in all religions”—however,
have claimed to find in his followers exactly
what Wilber would evidently rather not see:
The problem was they were much too friendly, much too
happy, and far too nice. More plainly put, they were all busy
breathlessly following their own bliss. Not only this, but
unless my eyes were deceiving me, they all looked like maybe
they came from the same neighborhood or the same college. It
was uncanny really. And very disquieting, as well. I mean,
they all looked and sounded almost exactly alike.
My God, they’re pod people, I thought (Thomas Alhburn,
in [Austin, 1999]; italics added).
Hassan (1990) gives a completely plausible explanation for
such phenomena:
One reason why a group of [alleged] cultists may strike even
a naïve outsider as spooky or weird is that everyone has sim-