stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

396 STRIPPING THE GURUS
posé of the “Merwin incident” was published in their local Boulder
Monthly, apparently “scurried about town, trying to keep the magazine
off the racks by purchasing several copies at a time” (Schumacher,
1992). Books uncomplimentary toward so-called cults also
tend to vanish mysteriously from public libraries. My local city reference
library, for example—which allows no books to be taken out
—is nevertheless missing its sole copy of David Lane’s (1994) Exposing
Cults. That book itself is notably critical of Da Free John,
among numerous other “lesser lights/coronas.”
Such reported attempts at covering up questionable behaviors,
however, are fairly superfluous. For, transpersonal and integral
psychology are more than screwed up enough for their leading figures
to still explicitly encourage you to go along for the “adventure,”
even years after the reported methods of “Teaching” have
been widely publicized. And if you can’t trust the recommendations
of one of the “top thousand Zen realizers” of all time—an “Einsteinian
genius,” no less—whom can you trust?
Or, if you can’t take the “Rude Boy” discipline, whose fault/ego
is that?
Remember: “The greater the offense, the bigger the ego.”
Put another way: The expert reassurance of a highly respected
hero or “genius” that being disciplined by a God-realized “Rude
Boy” is the fastest way toward one’s own most-valued realization
(or salvation) will easily override any concerns one might have
about even a reportedly “problematic” group. It is, after all, very
easy to rationalize away the complaints of disaffected former followers
as being mere “whining” or “cowardice” on the part of people
who “couldn’t take the heat,” etc. That is so even if the group is
prone to literally “beating the crap out of” its followers, as we have
seen. In such a case, the purportedly destructive group could even
fully disclose all of its past alleged abuses and plans for future mistreatment
to potential members, and new lemmings would still
flock to join. (Recall how Zen monks will allow themselves to be
literally beaten black and blue just to get into the monastery. That
is, they go into that environment knowing full well that it is a violently
abusive one. They have further in no way been “deceptively
recruited” into that.)
In such a realistic scenario, then, seekers absolutely would not
merely find themselves involuntarily “recruited” into reportedly
destructive groups by any deceptive means. Rather, they would
explicitly go looking for those. They sought out Rajneesh’s violent