stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

304 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Yogananda (in Kriyananda, 1974) offered numerous predictions for
the future, prior to his passing in the early 1950s. Included among
those were an anticipated “revolution” in America against governmental
interference; the end of England as a world power; and the
prophecy that China would “end up absorbing Japan.” The yogi
further foresaw a Third World War, around the 1970s, to spread
communism throughout “much of the free world.” Following that
would be a fourth such war, “toward the last decade” of the twentieth
century. That conflict was fated to devastate Europe, annihilate
(communist) Russia, and leave America victorious, ushering in
a new age of peace for hundreds of years.
In addition:
A terrible [economic] depression is coming, far worse than the
last one!....
In the next century Boston will have a tropical climate,
and the people there will be brown skinned (in Kriyananda,
1974).
We shall have to see, of course, what becomes of the Bostonian
climate in the future, what with global warming and all.
In any case, the booklet in which all of the above wildly wrong
predictions were preserved by Yogananda’s schismatic direct disciple
Kriyananda is by now, understandably, long out of print. (The
above are not merely the most-wrong of Paramahansa’s predictions
in that book, but are rather a concise summary of his prognostications.
Were there any non-obvious and correct prophecies therein, I
would happily have included them here. There are not.)
* * *
Yogananda himself claimed to have lived at Stonehenge around
1500 BC in a previous incarnation, and asserted that Winston
Churchill was the reincarnation of Napoleon. (Churchill’s [1874 –
1965] life, however, overlapped with Aurobindo’s, with the latter,
too, again claiming to be the reincarnation of Monsieur Bonaparte.)
Also according to Yogananda, Hitler was Alexander the
Great. In the same vein, Kriyananda (1977) relates Paramahansa’s
declaration that Benito Mussolini was Marc Anthony; Kaiser Wilhelm
was Julius Caesar; Stalin was Genghis Khan; Charles Lindbergh
was Abraham Lincoln; and Therese Neumann was Mary
Magdalene. (Neumann died in 1962; Rajneesh’s Vivek, claiming
the same reincarnation, was born before then; etc.)