stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

... TO A NUNNERY 289
Swami Sivananda has said that every woman whom a man
lures into his bed must in some lifetime become his lawful
wife (Radha, 1992).
The late Swami Sivananda of [Rishikesh], to my mind the
most grotesque product of the Hindu Renaissance, advised
people to write their “spiritual diaries”; and in oral instructions,
he told Indian and Western disciples to write down
how often they masturbated.... [O]r, as one male disciple told
me, “make a list of number of times when you use hand for
pleasure, and check it like double book keeping against
number of times when you renounced use of hand” (Bharati,
1976).
And they say accountants don’t know how to have fun!
Elsewhere in the same book, Swami Bharati—the highly opinionated
monk of the Ramakrishna Order whom we have met earlier
in some of his kinder moments—categorized Sivananda as a
“pseudo-mystic ... fat and smiling.” (Of the Maharishi, by contrast,
Bharati stated: “I have no reason to doubt that he is a genuine
mystic.... Were it not for the additional claims that Mahesh Yogi
and his disciples make for their brand of mini-yoga [regarding
‘world peace,’ etc.], their product would be just as good as any other
yoga discipline well done.” So, you see, no one really knows what [if
any] is valid and what isn’t, even though they all pretend to know.)
Further venting his own instructive anger and anguish solely
for the compassionate benefit of others, Bharati (1976) offered a
comparable opinion of Vivekananda:
The “four kinds of yoga” notion goes back, entirely, and without
any mitigating circumstances, to Swami Vivekananda’s
four dangerous little booklets entitled Raja-yoga, Karmayoga,
Jnana-yoga, and Bhakti-yoga. [Those titles and terms
refer to “royal,” “service,” “wisdom” and “devotional” yoga,
respectively.] These are incredibly naïve, incredibly short excerpts
from Indian literature in translations, rehashed in his
talks in America and elsewhere....
I am certain that Vivekananda has done more harm
than good to the seekers of mystical knowledge.... Vivekananda’s
concept of raja yoga ... is dysfunctional.
Bharati’s own contributions to the understanding of mysticism,
however, themselves tended toward the insignificant side.