stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 207
candidate, and I had to pass a second interview (Butterfield,
1994).
If you resisted Free John, it meant you were failing to live up
to his teaching (Jaclyn Estes, in [Neary, 1985a]).
Estes was formerly one of Da’s “inner circle of wives,” living in
the community from 1974 to 1976.
Likewise, consider Andrew Cohen’s reported infantile response
to the journalist who dared to note the irony between his
hairstyle versus the shaved heads of his followers. Where, exactly,
is the room for “critical appraisal” of the teachings in such a constricted
environment?
The committed, long-term residential relationship—evidently
missing from Wilber’s experience—under any such guru-figure, is
exactly where the real problems with “Rude Boy” behavior, and the
associated isolation and authoritarian control, would start to show.
Such a lack of long-term residence further avoids daily discipline to
exactly the same extent as would one’s following of an “Ascended
Master,” no longer present on the earthly plane, as is common in
New Age circles. The positive aspect of each of those, however, is
that you are then just bowing before an “imaginary guru.” Far
worse to surrender your better judgment to someone of flesh and
blood who has a great deal to gain from your unthinking obedience.
After being burned once with Adi Da, however, Wilber has inexcusably
gone back for more with Andrew Cohen. That is, he has
gone back there via safely endorsing Cohen from a distance, as he
did with Adi Da, without actually living under their respective disciplines.
(Cohen proudly put his own grandiosity into print—offering
glaring warning signs, for anyone who wished to see them—as
early as 1992. Has Wilber still not read those early books, even
while endorsing the more recent ones? Or, if he has read them,
how could he imagine that Cohen’s near-messianic view of himself
would not find its way into his reported treatment of his disciples?
To be the “foremost theoretician in transpersonal and integral psychology,”
and not have been able to see that, strains credibility.
Anyone passing Psych 101 should have been able to do better.
To make that same gross mistake twice is, quite frankly, an
indication that one doesn’t learn very quickly. Or, perhaps, that
the same, celebrated “rude” behavior is too latently present within
one’s own psychology, and is simply looking for a vicarious outlet.