stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

428 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Other reasons for staying typically include financial constraints
and atrophied “real world” skills. Indeed, the more that
one’s life has been positively changed in the very early stages of
one’s involvement with any spiritual organization, the more likely
it is that one will have—big mistake—donated all of one’s worldly
goods to the “God-inspired” work. That noble if naïve commitment,
however, makes it much harder to leave when the “love” wears off,
and you begin to realize what you have gotten yourself into. And
then, how to get out of it? For, in the best possible successful outcome,
your most recent job reference is still, in the eyes of the business
world, from a “cult.”
Doctors who had for years worked as carpenters, cooks, and
laborers began [after Rajneeshpuram collapsed] with parttime
work in emergency rooms or covering for other sannyasin
physicians who had never come to live on the ranch.
Architects worked as draftsmen and reporters as proofreaders
and copy editors. Nurses who had been in charge of whole
medical wards before they came to the ranch worked private
duty or part time in clinics (Gordon, 1987).
Of course, there are also positive reasons for staying in the
ashram environment, including the energies and love which the
residents have felt to be emanating from the guru-figure—whether
those energies are real or (far more likely) simply imagined. By
contrast, however, weigh the following, where there were demonstrably
no “divine energies” whatsoever flowing, yet the effect was
substantially the same:
The Beatles [were] such a hit that Life magazine showed a
picture of people scraping up the earth and saying: “The
Beatles walked here,” as if these young musicians were Jesus
Christ Himself” (Radha, 1978).
Indeed, when the Fab Four toured North America, there were
girls in the audience not merely fainting, but literally losing bladder
control. None of that, though, was from any overwhelming, radiant
energies which John, Paul or George—much less Ringo—
were giving off, in spite of their best attempts at wearing their
fame/divinity well:
Who could think ill of boys who, smothering inner revulsion,
were charming to the chain of handicapped unfortunates