stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

340 STRIPPING THE GURUS
stitutes spiritual progress. Thus, implicitly, even if a man
is successful, he should not feel too good about those triumphs.
It does not take an advanced understanding of human
psychology to see that, in the face of those taboos, the
easy way to make oneself feel good is by “cutting off the
heads of others”—albeit behind their backs, for to do it to
their faces would make one a “bad disciple”
• Through my work in assisting with Hidden Valley’s attempt
at setting up a software programming shop during
my stay there, I was further informed that I was “impatient”
and possessed a “big head,” simply for getting things
done faster than they (and God) wanted them done. I was
also explicitly told that when I had meditated more and become
more spiritually advanced, I wouldn’t feel the need to
be creative in writing books and music. That is, I would just
“serve Master’s work” by donating money/labor to it, without
presuming to do anything original or truly creative in
life.
Yogananda (1986), of course, taught exactly the opposite:
Do some creative work every day. Writing is good for
developing creative ability and will power.... I am always
seeking to accomplish something new. Being
creative is more difficult, of course, than following a
mechanical existence, but when your will battles
with new ideas it gains more strength.
In contrast to that, but in accord with the attitudes
present within today’s SRF, Butterfield (1994) observed the
following within the context of his own discipleship under
Chögyam Trungpa:
Originality is unwelcome; it is regarded as an impulse
of the ego which must be processed out of the
mind before enlightenment can occur. “If you find
something in my talk that is not in Trungpa’s writings,”
said a program coordinator, “then it’s just my
ego.”
In any case, “big-headed” experiences such as the
above have led me to the firm conclusion that most of the