stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

... TO A NUNNERY 355
Of course, the brother in question, having entered the ashrams
nearly a quarter century after Yogananda’s passing, never
actually met the “avatar.” That is, he is simply parroting the party
line, speaking what he would imagine to be true. But that is par
for the course in spirituality.
Regardless, the other half of me would actually like for every
alleged indiscretion on the part of “the Bastard and the Bard” to be
true, for the whole mess to have been pure baloney from the beginning.
As a bottom line, then, SRF in its current state can take a (former)
disciple such as myself, who would never have dreamed of
being disloyal to the guru or his organization, and turn him into
someone who would like for the worst accusations against them to
be true. That is, if they could change me in this way, they could
change anyone—or, at least, change anyone who was willing to see.
Yogananda’s claim to be able to walk on fire might only make
him a fool, for genuinely believing that his purported spiritual advancement,
rather than the laws of physics, were the source of that
“yogic power.” Likewise for his many wildly wrong prophecies and
his endorsements of Therese Neumann and of his “Perfume Saint.”
His comparable “ability” to stop his pulse in one wrist, however,
unless one takes that as a real parapsychological phenomenon—
which I do not—makes him something much worse.
Personally, even with that, I still consider Yogananda to have
been among the less harmful of the spiritual leaders covered herein,
comparable to the Dalai Lama, Aurobindo or Ramana Maharshi
if the allegations about his “harem” are false, or somewhere below
them if those claims are true. Being the “sanest man in the asylum,”
however, is hardly something to crow about.
And even in that grouping, one would keep in mind that the
claims made by both Aurobindo and Maharshi leave one with very
little confidence in their respective abilities to distinguish fantasy
from reality—plus, there is the significant problem of Maharshi’s
documented caste bigotry. Further, the Dalai Lama these days is
functioning more as a mere moral guide than as a guru or “savior
of humankind.” That, however, is a good thing, as his reported behavior
in the Karmapa Lama controversy has been consistently
less than inspiring. Likewise with his reported attitude when faced
with allegations of sexual exploitation against Sogyal Rinpoche,
best-selling author of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: