stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

282 STRIPPING THE GURUS
To keep one’s perspective in the midst of such pioneering,
“growing tip of humanity” excitement, however, is no easy task ...
as every other community which has ever harbored a similarly
grandiose mission could testify.
W. Brugh Joy, author of Joy’s Way, was then invited to give a
talk at Findhorn in 1980, about what he “sensed was ahead for the
community as a whole,” to a group of participants preparing to enter
communal life there. Not surprisingly, the urge to address
those unspoken issues proved too strong to resist:
I talked about the consequences of feeling “special” and how
doing battle against the “evils of the world” not only creates
the “enemy,” but is actually a projection of the darker aspects
of the community onto the world screen. Needless to
say, the talk was not popular and I was fast falling into the
“unwelcome guest” category....
Despite assertions by most partisans of the New Age
that they are promoting such virtues as selfless service to the
world, New Age beliefs in the specialness and innocence of
the New Age are, in my opinion, regressive ... toward the infantile,
if not the fetal. Such ideation tends to be selfcentered
(Joy, 1990).
Some days later, the “community poet”—a position surely
taken straight out of Douglas Adams’ writings—responded, onstage,
after some skits and singing, to Joy’s earlier talk.
In venomous poetry, powerful and afire with wrathful righteousness,
he unleashed the dark feelings and destructive
forces of the community. The objects of his rage were the
Americans in general and myself in particular. We were portrayed
in terms that would make fecal material seem sunny
by comparison. His attack centered around money and power
... the dark side of any endeavor that wears the mask of
great good and service. The only thing explicitly missing was
sex, except he covered that by using the words “fuck” and
“fucking” with an extraordinary frequency (Joy, 1990).
And this was scarcely odd, because....
Of course, such an isolated outburst in no way invalidates the
overall good done within and by the community. That is so particularly
since the general response to Joy’s speech and the poet’s
counter-attack, at least in public, seems to have been fairly ma-