stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

442 STRIPPING THE GURUS
increase one’s confidence in the ability of the profession to spot
openly pathological behavior in contexts where its members have a
vested interest. For, while most members of the Rajneesh community
were not aware of the more grossly illegal activities going on
there until after the fact, Sheela’s own “duchy” included suppression
of any “negativity.” In her world, further, even constructive
criticism qualified as that, and was punished accordingly. Of
course, all that one gets out of that, other than an enforced obedience,
is a superficially “happy” community of people—as in the
Maharishi’s ideal society—reminding one too much of the Python
sketch involving an unhappy man sentenced to hang by the neck
(or meditate) “until he cheers up.”
The sociological studies of safely distant, academic “Rajneesh
watchers,” etc., would fall into the same category of deep concern.
Indeed, for such scholars, publishers of exposés, by Milne for example,
have been deemed worthy of denigration as “schlockmeisters”
(cf. Palmer and Sharma, 1993).
“Idiot sociology.”
Nor were Bhagwan’s sannyasin psychologists merely at the
“bottom of the barrel” in their professional abilities or standing:
The “Hollywood crew” [included] the best-known therapists
in town—all of them had taken sannyas (Strelley, 1987).
Rajneesh, interestingly, was actually regarded as “the intellectual’s
guru”: “[T]he educational level of the followers of Rajneesh
was far greater than most of the rest of the population” (Oakes,
1997).
An astounding number of therapists and leaders of the human
potential movement are current or former disciples of
Bhagwan’s, although few, if any of them, publicly acknowledge
it (Franklin, 1992).
Many of these therapists had the sense, before they came to
Poona, that Rajneesh was at least a master therapist, that
his work might represent the next step in the evolution of
psychotherapy (Gordon, 1987).
Those, of course, are the same people who decide, through the
peer review process and as a “community of competent, intersubjective
interpreters,” what constitutes truth within humanistic
psychology. The same peer-adjudication of truth naturally occurs