stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

472 STRIPPING THE GURUS
When I first started to speak out about [alleged] cults
approximately ten years ago [i.e., around 1982], I
was one of an extremely small group of lawyers who
were willing to address [so-called] cultic groups’
broad range of challenges to individual freedom and
personal liberty. The podium had in fact been largely
forfeited to a strident, well-organized clique of “civil
libertarian” experts who discoursed at length upon
the inviolability of the First Amendment and the
rights, vulnerabilities, and vitality of so-called new
religious movements (Herbert Rosedale, in [Langone,
1995])
• Amy Wallace (2003), Sorcerer’s Apprentice—Carlos Castaneda,
another “world’s savior,” who was every bit the tragically
equal fool in cruelly disciplining his followers as any of
the other “Rude Boys” we have seen herein have been. The
details Wallace gives of an insane community founded on a
“skillful means” of reported lies and unspoken, rigid rules
are nearly enough to cause one to lose one’s faith in our
sad, conforming, manipulative, power-hungry species. Nor
did Castaneda’s own famous writings featuring the purported
Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan fare any better in the light
of truth:
As sociologist Marcello Truzzi was the first to say,
Castaneda’s books were the greatest hoax since the
Piltdown Man (Gardner, 1999)
Anyone who has ever lived in an ashram/monastery environment,
and recovered enough from that to see how much less “evil”
the “real world” is, will find numerous significant points of contact
in all of the above first-hand accounts—including Underwood’s
days with the Moonies, and Layton’s gripping story of her narrow
escape from Jonestown. For, as we have seen, the techniques used
to keep residents in line and loyally “living in fear” of what will
happen to their bodies or souls should they leave are constant
across all paths. That is so, regardless of the specific beliefs involved
in each case.
Butterfield went into his experiences under Trungpa with the
most skeptical attitude of the above thirteen. He thus seems to
have suffered the least in the inevitable realization that a lot of