stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

294 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Of course, were anyone to display such characteristics as the
above without having been titled as a “modest, humble saint” by a
great yoga master or the like, the same behaviors would be seen as
the height of ego. Indeed, a South African customer—H. E. V. Pickstone—who
visited Burbank in 1904 and spent the day with him,
had this to say:
I was disappointed with his personality ... I found him too
much of an egoist ... I do not think he can be considered a
great man from any angle (in Dreyer, 1975).
Regardless, Burbank not only suggested that he had aided the
development of his plants by sending them “thoughts of love,” but
believed himself to be psychic. Indeed, he “insisted that he possessed
the ability to heal by a laying-on of hands, citing several
cases in which he had employed it” (Dreyer, 1975). Those “healings”
were given both to humans and to ailing plants.
* * *
Regarding the discipline given by Yogananda to his disciples: Durga
Mata (1992) relates that at one point in 1948, when Yogananda
was in a very high state of samadhi, he talked aloud to what he
took to be a vision of the Divine Mother. The latter would then answer
back in Yogananda’s own voice ... laying out the petty flaws of
the disciples present and absent, against Yogananda’s entreaties
not to punish them.
Of course, if Yogananda really was conversing with the cosmic
Feminine force underlying all creation, one could hardly find fault
with any of that criticism. One cannot, after all, “second guess”
God.
If....
God Herself spending time criticizing others who weren’t even
present, and threatening punishment on the ones who were there,
for utterly minor exhibitions of selfishness, though, does seem
more than a bit odd. It is, indeed, more consistent with Yogananda’s
own personality than with what one might expect from “God”:
[Shelly Trimmer] spent about a year with [Yogananda] at
the SRF headquarters in Los Angeles but then left.... Although
he has retained great affection and respect for Yogananda,
he also acknowledges his weaknesses. “He loved to
order women about—after all he was a Hindu.... He had a