stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

452 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Interestingly, Caplan’s largely misled (2002) book has been
hyperbolically endorsed by the Trungpa-following Welwood as being
“the most comprehensive, lucid, well-argued, utterly straightforward
and honest work on the whole guru question that there is.”
Caplan herself is a devoted disciple of Lee Lozowick, the latter of
whom has a “special relationship” with Adi Da, and is a friend of
Andrew Cohen (Rawlinson, 1997). Lozowick himself, however, has
been critiqued by at least one former disciple, as follows:
I think he is deluding himself when he claims to be fully
enlightened.... During public gatherings he would constantly
use four-letter words, ramble on about sex and anal fixations,
and generally behave and speak in a totally asinine
way (in Feuerstein, 1992).
Of his prolific, if unknown, rock band (“Liars, Gods, and Beggars”),
Lozowick has predicted: “LGB will be bigger than the Beatles”
(Rawlinson, 1997).
And thus, “more popular than Jesus Christ,” too.
The wise Lozowick is further of the opinion that Sai Baba is a
“master [of] the physics of form,” i.e., that the latter’s purported
materializations of vibhuti and the like are genuine (Caplan,
2001). It is more than ironic, then, that both of Caplan’s relevant
books are concerned in significant part with how to distinguish
“authentic” guru-figures from “decoys.”
* * *
After all that, are “delusions of enlightenment” alright? Some
would ridiculously say so:
Better these people should think they’re enlightened, which
is a wonderful aspiration, than be robbing stores or taking
heroin or beating their wives or kicking their dogs. I think
that one of the most wonderful things is the delusion of
enlightenment, even if it is a delusion. At least it represents
an aspiration that is better than an aspiration to be a murderer
(Joan Halifax, in [Caplan, 2001]).
Yeeeiikes!!!
Are the “best” of history’s “sages” really better than our
world’s bank robbers, drug addicts, wife abusers or animal mistreaters?
Are they not arguably worse? For, note that more than