stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

SPIRITUAL CHOICES 425
So, assuredly, it could “happen in California.” It already has.
The heavily armed Rajneeshpuram could easily have violently
and apocalyptically “happened” too—even without mass suicides—
had it not been for its fortunate collapse following the guru’s
“brave retreat” out of the country. Plus, much of Charles Manson’s
mind-control programming of his own followers, in the late ’60s,
was effected at the machine-gun fortified Spahn Ranch, outside of
Los Angeles (Krassner, 1993).
And all of that is sadly not surprising. For, the issue in all of
these cases is the degree of isolation from outside ideas and perspectives,
specifically from being able to see how others “like you”
are behaving in the real world, to use that as a guide for your own
thoughts and actions. And one can be thus isolated and obsessed
by apocalyptic fears in the middle of a major city, or in a simulated
basement prison at the center of a bustling university campus, just
as surely as one can be so in the darkest jungle.
Note: Dick Anthony himself was present at an alternative spiritualitybased
seminar in the mid-’80s with both Zimbardo and Wilber, along
with numerous other highly placed transpersonal psychologists. The
footnoted indication of Zimbardo’s attendance at that meeting, however—plus
two inconsequential questions asked by him of an interviewee
(Werner Erhard)—is the only mention of him in Anthony, Ecker
and Wilber’s (1987) Spiritual Choices. That is, not a word is spoken
of Zimbardo’s (or Milgram’s) groundbreaking professional work, while
the other contributors to that misled volume occupy themselves with
the valiant struggle of determining how to distinguish “safe” gurufigures
and organizations (such as Trungpa’s and Muktananda’s) from
reportedly “problematic” ones. Nor, amazingly, have Zimbardo’s classic
observations even quietly made their way into the confident arguments
given there, by people whose lives have been devoted to understanding
those issues.
Sad. Very sad.