stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

322 STRIPPING THE GURUS
for many years,” [J. Donald Walters] wrote in a recent open
letter to the Ananda community. “It is also vitally important
at Ananda that other energies not be allowed to intrude
themselves, as if to bypass Kriyananda and go straight to
our gurus for guidance and inspiration” (Goa, 1999).
Or, as the self-published Ananda Cooperative Village Membership
Guidelines of 1976 (in Nordquist, 1978) put it:
Each prospective member should understand that joining
Ananda ... means, too, following the leadership and personal
guidance of Ananda’s founder, Swami Kriyananda, as the instrument
for Yoganandaji’s direction.
* * *
In early versions of his Autobiography (1946), Yogananda had given
the following information regarding one of his disciples:
The Washington leader is Swami Premananda, educated at
the Ranchi school and Calcutta University. I had summoned
him in 1928 to assume leadership of the Washington Self-
Realization Fellowship center.
“Premananda,” I told him during a visit to his new temple,
“this Eastern headquarters is a memorial in stone to
your tireless devotion. Here in the nation’s capital you have
held aloft the light of Lahiri Mahasaya’s ideals.”
The same Premananda soon became Paul Twitchell’s first
spiritual teacher—initiating him into kriya yoga—around 1950,
before the latter’s leaving to follow Kirpal Singh. Twitchell went on
to found the Eckankar movement, with “tens of thousands of followers
through the Western world” (Rawlinson, 1997). His authorized
biography was later penned by the prolific New Age author
Brad Steiger.
For the startling, near word-for-word similarities between
numerous paragraphs in Twitchell’s writings and earlier-published
texts, see David Lane’s www.neuralsurfer.com website, and his
(1983) The Making of a Spiritual Movement. The inconsistencies
between the various biographies of Twitchell are laid bare in the
same latter book.
Twitchell passed away of a heart attack in 1971, “only months
after predicting that he would live at least another five years.”