stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 193
astral spine. To take their holiness and “natural abode of souls”
nature literally, however, is highly unusual.) If not, was the “greatest
sage of the century” hallucinating? If so....
Or, even if not:
All the food [in Maharshi’s ashram] was prepared by brahmins
so that it should remain uncontaminated by contact
with lower castes and foreigners....
“Bhagavan always insisted on caste observances in the
ashram here, though he was not rigidly orthodox” [said Miss
Merston, a long-time devotee of Maharshi] (Marshall, 1963).
[Maharshi] allowed himself to be worshiped like a Buddha
(Daniélou, 1987).
“Greatest sage”—for whom “the Self is love,” but lower castes
and foreigners evidently aren’t, in spite of his supposed impartial
witnessing of all things equally, and in spite of the fact that he was
not otherwise “rigidly orthodox” or bent on following religious proscriptions.
Not finished with giving unsolicited ratings of spiritual personages
he has never met, on the simple basis of their extant writings,
Wilber (2000a; italics added) recently had this to say about
Aurobindo:
When it was also understood in the East that the Great
Chain [or ontological hierarchy of Being, manifesting
through causal, astral and physical realms] did indeed unfold
or evolve over time, the great Aurobindo expounded the
notion with an unequalled genius.
In Wilber (2002)—“Sidebar A” to his Boomeritis novel—he further
has one of that book’s characters refer to Aurobindo (1872 –
1950) as “the world’s greatest philosopher-sage.” One might try to
argue that that sidebar is only a “character” speaking from a perspective
which Wilber himself does not hold. Boomeritis, however,
was originally written as a non-fiction work, which Wilber only
later decided to transform (with questionable success) into a “true
story, loosely based on fiction.” Plus, in his earlier (1980) Atman
Project, he already had Aurobindo designated as “India’s greatest
modern sage.” And, more recently, in his foreword to A. S. Dalal’s
(2000) A Greater Psychology, he has again averred that “Sri Aurobindo
Ghose was India’s greatest modern philosopher-sage.” Like-