stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

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• One evening, the monk who runs the SRF postulant (i.e.,
“new monk”) ashram graced HV as a guest speaker. One of
the points that he brought up, from his unique perspective
as head of that monastery, was that “the people most likely
to leave the ashram after taking some degree of monastic
vows are those who are the most independent.” While that
is undoubtedly true, the clear implication was that independence
and the ability to think for oneself are bad things,
when in reality they are the only way of doing anything
original in this world. Worse, suffocating attitudes such as
that allergy to independence turn the unthinking following
of other people’s blind guesses and bad advice into an “egokilling”
virtue. They further paint the inability to so blindly
follow, against one’s own better judgment, what one knows
to be wrong, as being a sin.
• Each one of the SRF line of leaders/gurus—their “popes”—
from Daya Mata back to Krishna, are regarded by obedient
SRF devotees as being infallible, and simply “working in
mysterious ways” when it comes to any seemingly questionable
actions on their parts. I, too, once foolishly viewed
them thusly. For, such regard is simply what I had been
taught was correct, by persons who I assumed would never
deliberately mislead me, as I would never have lied to
them.
As Margery Wakefield (1993) noted of her own and
others’ involvement in Scientology:
I had made the fatal unconscious assumption that
since I was honest and had good motives, then others
must be too
• James J. Lynn, personally chosen by Yogananda to be
SRF’s second president, was a married man. That is, married
before, during and after Yogananda gave him the title
of Rajasi Janakananda. (His wife, however, was “both mentally
and physically unwell,” and was not supportive of his
connection with Self-Realization Fellowship [Mata, 1992].)
That fact, however, is conspicuously absent from the relevant
literature, e.g., from the SRF-published biography of
Lynn’s life.
That anomaly was brought up by one of the HV residents
in a satsanga period. The justification which the ash-