stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 233
two extremes, then, it is quite likely that kw, in his worst moments,
is the most overrated person on the face of the Earth. Seriously.)
Wilber clearly considers himself to be an expert on all things
spiritual—not to mention (2000a) on music, movies, fashion, interior
decorating, art, media, politics, ecology, etc., etc., etc. Much
worse, he is, in my opinion, dangerously ignorant about even the
most obvious dynamics of the guru-disciple relationship, and of its
close cousin, the emperor-subject relationship. If he winds up creating
a full-blown personality “cult” around himself, he will surely
be the last one to know. That is, if he manages to establish a relatively
closed environment, rife with deferential students clearly
feeling “how great I must be to be among the integral chosen people”
of a great and proud “incarnation” of one or another Buddhist
god ... in a community with no tolerance for real skepticism or demand
for proof of the woolly claims being made there by the “spiritually
advanced” leaders ... and alleged attempts at suppressing
information which is uncomplimentary to the higher-ups ... um,
where to be able to “take the heat” in getting the crap beaten out of
you (verbally) is viewed as a measure of your spiritual worth ...
and, um, and an inner circle champing at the bit to discredit even
mild critics of the leaders there as being “cowards” or worse....
Shit—they started out with such good intentions, didn’t they?
Where did it all go wrong? (By the end of the “Gurus and Prisoners”
chapter here, mapping psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s classic
prison study to the reported behaviors in ashrams and other relatively
closed thought-environments, we will have a fairly thorough
answer to that question.)