stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

... TO A NUNNERY 303
training and conscious or subconscious cueing can account for all of
their celebrated behaviors. Thus, independent of whether or not
reincarnation exists, there is no rational reason to believe that it
has anything to do with such “thinking.”
Note, further, how similar cues to those given unconsciously
by the questioners of Clever Hans would have to be present and
relevant in the search for tulkus. For, the latter are again children
who are asked to identify the possessions of their “previous incarnation,”
from among a set of objects ... where others in the room
with the child know what the right answer is. A suitably sensitive
or crafty child, even if only a few years old, might well be able to
pick up on such inadvertent cues, just as a relatively dumb horse
can. Voilà! an “incarnation,” who will very quickly have additional
“miraculous” events incorporated into the myth of his “recognition.”
And thereby do utterly normal rainbows, coincidental
dreams, and otherwise-irrelevant pails full of forgotten milk become
“signs.”
Of course, such searches are typically initially motivated by a
lama’s dream of a particular house, or of a family with specific
characteristics, living in a certain direction, etc. But even there,
“seek and—statistically—ye shall find.” That is so, even without
later “revisionist histories” as to the details of the original events,
to emphasize particular attributes of the dream. For, it is unavoidable
that elements of the dream which, at the time of dreaming,
were no more important than any others, will assume purported
significance when a promising family is found, which matches
some of the selectively chosen “facts” revealed in the dream, but
misses completely on others—as it invariably will. With equal certainty,
those “misses” will not be mentioned in later recountings of
the “recognition” myth.
Seen in that light, the reported poor behaviors, in sex and violence,
of contemporary and past tulkus and Dalai Lamas become
very understandable. For, those “reincarnated sages” are, after all,
very ordinary people, who were simply placed into extraordinary
circumstances from childhood onward. And even an otherwiseaverage
person could “play holy,” as they do publicly, if that was
all he had ever been taught how to do. (Cf. Krishnamurti. Yogananda,
too, was trained from earliest childhood to be a “spiritual
engine,” destined to bring others to God.)
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