stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

292 STRIPPING THE GURUS
The phrase “undreamed-of possibilities” has since been adopted
by SRF as the title of an introductory booklet distributed in
their churches and elsewhere. Jung’s attitude toward Yogananda’s
writings in particular, however, was far less of a marketing department’s
dream:
Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi ... provoked
Jung’s sarcasm because its cream puff idealism contained
not a single practical “antidote to disastrous population
explosion and traffic jams and the threat of starvation,
[a book] so rich in vitamins that albumen, carbohydrates,
and such like banalities become superogatory.... Happy India!”
(Paine, 1998).
Jung, though, is an interesting study himself:
The brilliant thinker Carl Jung’s opportunistic support of the
Nazis ... is amply documented. In 1933 he became president
of the New German Society of Psychotherapy. Soon thereafter,
he wrote the following vicious nonsense (seldom mentioned
by his admirers nowadays):
The Jews have this similarity common with women:
as the physically weaker one they must aim at the
gaps in the opponent’s defenses ... the Arian [sic]
unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish
(Askenasy, 1978).
In any case, the Autobiography itself is dedicated to the
“American saint” and prodigious horticulturalist Luther Burbank
(1849 – 1926). Yogananda began visiting Burbank in 1924, and the
latter in return endorsed Paramahansa’s ideas on education. (The
Burbank potato is named after Luther; Burbank, California, however,
is not.) Interestingly, Burbank’s mother had gone to school
with the girl (Mary Sawyer) upon whose experiences the “Mary
Had a Little Lamb” poem is based.
Yogananda (1946; italics added) expressed his positive feelings
toward Luther as follows:
[Burbank’s] heart was fathomlessly deep, long acquainted
with humility, patience, sacrifice.... The modesty with which
he wore his scientific fame repeatedly reminded me of the