stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

480 STRIPPING THE GURUS
the position and workspace which I had vacated there. I then attempted
to inform him as to the problems with that organization,
as reported in Russell (1999), for example.
His response?
“If anything were going really wrong, Yogananda would step
in and intervene. Until then, the Master was probably just looking
down and laughing at the foibles of his disciples. In the meantime,
we should just focus on changing ourselves, and not worry about
things like that.” Or words to that effect.
Oy vey. With “wisdom” like that, one does not need ignorance.
With “compassion” like that, one does not need callousness. For, at
what point in the slow descent into insanity of any of our world’s
guru-figures and organizations did God or the relevant line of “ascended,
omniscient” Masters ever “step in” to stop alleged pedophilia,
spiritual incest, intense psychological and physical abuse, or
worse? When, even, did Jesus ever step in to stop the sodomizing of
altar boys in the Catholic Church? And other guru-figures will
then have more interest in, or ability to stop, abuses done in their
name? And if they do not step in, “everything is going as it should,
for your own benefit,” so “bend over, here it comes”?
That I was apparently poisoned and/or deliberately overdrugged
[in Rajneesh’s ashram] was the furthest thing from
my mind....
I took everything that happened at face value. The only
ulterior motives I looked for were spiritual.... Everything was
happening the way it should. It always did (Franklin, 1992).
[T]o be a disciple [of Rajneesh] you had to believe that everything
that happened was literally or mystically the guru’s
doing. If something appeared to be wrong or unjust or foolish,
that was your myopia; it was otherwise in the guru’s encompassing
vision (Fitzgerald, 1986).
That attitude, of course, was nothing peculiar or pathological
to Rajneesh, but is rather the essence of the guru-disciple relationship,
in agrarian India and Tibet as in the postmodern West.
Yet, as the humorist Al Franken (1996), displaying far more
insight than one is used to encountering in these matters, reasonably
summarized the real-world situation:
If God can allow genocides to occur on a more or less regular
basis, if God can stand by while famine ravages large parts