stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

... TO A NUNNERY 329
• In a Voluntary League (financial) Appeal newsletter sent to
their members in the spring of 1989, SRF disclosed that the
city of Los Angeles had been considering a public transit
plan which would have disrupted their Hollywood Temple.
City council, however, had thankfully been persuaded not
to proceed with that in part because of SRF’s protests that
the site was considered a holy place of pilgrimage by their
devotees around the world. (“Shrine” was the actual word
they used in the VL Appeal letter.) Amazingly, however, in
1966 SRF had reportedly filed a plan with the city calling
for tearing down their Mount Washington Hotel headquarters
(Dakota, 1998). That building is considered by devotees
to be much more holy than the Hollywood Temple, as Yogananda
lived for an extended time in the former historic
building. Evidently, then, the holiness of a place depends
upon who exactly is planning on tearing it down. (“There’s
still no room at the inn, Sir, but if we razed it and put up a
high-rise instead”...)
• Already back in 1999, according to the HV ashram administrator
in a satsanga, SRF had hired an image consultant.
The relayed recommendation of that expert was that SRF
should work toward becoming known as “the spiritual organization
which lives up to its ideals more than any
other.” In light of SRF’s reported poor behavior (CANDER,
2001) in their attempted Mount Washington expansion,
however, the irony there cannot be missed.
Indeed, the unhappiness generated in the surrounding
community through that undertaking included allegations
of stacked neighborhood meetings. Those were occurring for
an attempted expansion which was compared to the development
of “four and a half Home Depot stores” in that ecologically
sensitive residential area. In return, “[F]ellowship
supporters have compared church opponents to Nazis”
(Russell, 1999)
• Midway through my stay at Hidden Valley, a fellow devotee
left the ashram to join the Peace Corps. Within a few weeks
of that departure, the head monk led a satsanga. There, we
were told that anyone who leaves the ashram to work for
world peace would have been doing more good if he had
stayed and done “Gurudeva’s work” at the monastery