stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

166 STRIPPING THE GURUS
[T]hose who ... want to be free more than anything else
... are willing to whole-heartedly take responsibility for absolutely
everything that they do [italics added].
Only slightly more recently, however:
Cohen derided the notion—promulgated by New Agers and
traditional believers alike—that everything that happens to
us has been divinely ordained or at the very least happens
for a reason. “The narcissism in that kind of thinking is so
blatant, I mean, it’s almost laughable.”
Pain and suffering often occur in a random fashion,
Cohen assured me. He and his Indian-born wife, Alka, were
crossing a street in New York City a few years earlier [i.e., in
1994] when they were hit by a car and almost killed. “I was
going, ‘Why did this happen?’ And I realized that it didn’t
happen for any particular reason. It just happened” (Horgan,
2003).
As far as being “almost killed,” however, Cohen merely suffered
a broken right arm and injuries to his right calf in that accident;
his wife sustained a concussion and a fractured jaw. All in
all, those are fairly minor wounds, considering the context, i.e., one
could just as well feel lucky for having incurred no spinal or internal
organ damage. Indeed, a different person might actually manage
to turn the same incident into a proof that “God was watching
over them.” For, considering that they “could easily have been
killed,” isn’t it “a miracle” that they survived with such minor injuries?
Independent of that, the responsibilities shirked by Cohen in
his accident—i.e., in him not “taking responsibility for absolutely
everything he has done”—boil down to him simply not watching
where he was going. The taxi, after all, did not ride up onto the
sidewalk; rather, Andrew and his wife stepped straight into its
path, albeit at a red light. But did we not all learn, well before age
ten, to look both ways, even just in peripheral vision, before crossing
the street?
Contrast the abdication of responsibility in his own implicit
victim-hood, further, with Cohen’s reported attitude toward the
supposed responsibilities of others under much harsher circumstances: