stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

378 STRIPPING THE GURUS
(Interestingly, like the “ashram gossip” which one cannot
avoid in such “God-centered” environments, the conversations of
Zimbardo’s prisoners, too, centered a full 90% of the time on the
shortcomings in their prison conditions, without reference to the
outside world [Haney, et al., 1973].)
It is equally clear that the prisoners in Zimbardo’s study were
not capable of giving “adult consent” to anything requested of them
by the guards or the superintendent—even though they were perfectly
normal, college-age individuals going into the study. That
has profound relevance to the idea of sexual relations between
guru-figures and their disciples. And that is so, even in addition to
any context of “spiritual incest” deriving from the disciples viewing
their leader as a “perfect father/mother figure,” as we shall see.
Ironically, there is a Hindu story about a lion who was raised
among sheep, and grew up to believe that he himself was a sheep—
bleating when he should have roared, etc. That behavior lasted until
one day when another lion grabbed him, pointed his face into
the mirrored surface of a pond, and showed him that he was a
mighty lion, not a meek lamb.
The intended point of that story, of course, is that in our soulnatures
we are mighty lions, simply behaving as sheep in our
earthly lives. (Compare the other tale of the king who went out
among his people and forgot who he was, then living as a commoner
until awakened from that delusion.) A more poignant application,
however, would see that self-confident, relatively independent
lions and lionesses become dependent sheep when surrounded
by other guarding/guru-ing “sheep in wolves’ clothing.”
As one final eerie observation regarding the Stanford roleplaying:
Before the termination of the experiment, the rumor of an
impending breakout from the simulated prison had begun to circulate.
In response to that, rather than simply recording the transmission
of rumors and observing the escape, Zimbardo and his colleagues
began planning how to foil it. That is, Zimbardo, as he
later admitted, had begun to think and act like the prison superintendent
role he was playing, rather than as an impartial, witnessing
social psychologist.
The prisoners in that study were initially rounded up by police,
de-loused when checking into the prison, and stripped of their
prior identities by being given numbers instead of names, etc., in
order to make their prison experience as “real” as possible. Likewise,
the acute rebellion on the second day of the incarceration will