stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

458 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance
and conscientious stupidity.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
And Lord, have we seen enough of that.
* * *
Most of the “great sages” whose behavior we have touched upon
within these pages have been men. Notable exceptions, however,
have included Ramakrishna’s wife, Aurobindo’s “Mother,” Muktananda’s
Gurumayi, and Yogananda’s Daya Mata and Tara Mata.
Also, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, Ammachi, Jetsunma, and Andrew
Harvey’s Mother Meera. The latter’s original hope, at age fourteen
in the 1970s, had actually been to replace Aurobindo’s Mother in
the Auroville ashram in Pondicherry, following that Mother’s passing
(Minor, 1999):
She had ... received visions of both Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother in which they told her that she was entrusted with
the work of completing the transformation of the world they
had begun. The language of Aurobindo and the Mother are
regularly a part of her descriptions of these visions, but often,
she said, Aurobindo and the Mother actually appeared
to her and in their conversations commissioned her to continue
the work.
The entirely non-mystical, twentieth-century, late Russian-
American philosopher Ayn Rand (d. 1982), too, apparently managed
to create a personality cult around herself. Loyalty there was
evidenced to the point where one of her sincere followers reportedly
floated (in the late ’60s) the idea of murder as a means of
dealing with an unfaithful (and otherwise married) former lover of
the homely, yet eminently rational, Ms. Rand (Shermer, 1997).
The endangered ex-lover in question was the dashing Nathaniel
Branden—Rand’s “intellectual heir,” to whom Atlas Shrugged
was dedicated. (The book itself was the “greatest human achievement
in the history of the world,” according to Rand and Branden.)
Together, they encouraged followers of Rand to consider them as
being “the two greatest intellects on the planet.”
Branden himself was later to host a delightful dinner, in the
mid-’80s, for his good friend ... the “intellectually powerful” ... Ken