stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

204 STRIPPING THE GURUS
the part, and coached ahead of time on what to say.... If a
visit went off successfully and the outsider went away impressed,
Jones would switch to a new role. He would stand
before the congregation and mock the visitor, imitating his or
her voice, repeating questions asked and laughing at how the
women visitors had brushed against him suggestively (Singer,
2003).
Well-meaning individuals thus duped even prior to Jones’
flight to Guyana included Jerry Brown, activist Angela Davis, future
San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, and President Carter’s
wife, Rosalyn. On the basis of similar “dog and pony” shows, Oregon
journalist Kirk Braun (1984) wrote “a highly favorable book on
ranch life” in Rajneeshpuram (Gordon, 1987). And astonishingly,
one of the daughters of Congressman Leo Ryan—whose coldblooded
murder by Jones’ men in Guyana precipitated the infamous
cyanide poisonings—later became an ardent follower of Rajneesh,
living in the Oregon ashram.
Contrast all that we have seen so far, then, with Wilber’s
(1983; italics added) ridiculous presentation of his own limited,
short-term experiences:
I have been a participant-observer in almost a dozen nonproblematic
new religious movements, Buddhist, Hindu,
Taoist. In none of those groups was I ever subjected to any
harsh degree of authoritarian pressure (discipline, yes, pressure,
no). In fact, the authoritarian pressure in these groups
never even equalled that which I experienced in graduate
school in biochemistry. The masters in these groups were
looked upon as great teachers, not big daddies, and their authority
was always that of a concerned physician, not totem
boss.
Rajneesh, it seems, would have agreed:
The people who believe in God are really the people who
cannot trust in themselves. They need a father figure, a Big
Daddy (in Gordon, 1987).
Bhagwan, of course, was no such “Big Daddy” himself, as he
emphasized (Gordon, 1987) even years after the Oregon debacle.
“Concerned physicians,” though, do not typically tell you that,
if you leave their care to see a different doctor, you will “suffer un-