stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

AFTER THE ORDEAL 481
of the Third World, if God can permit Sonny Bono to sit on
the House Judiciary Committee, why should we figure He’s
going to get off His Butt to stop Union Carbide from leaking
polychlorinated biphenyls into the groundwater underneath
Piscataway, New Jersey?
You think that your “divinely loving, omniscient” guru-figure
is watching over you, and “everything is always working out as it
should, for your own greatest good”? Tell that to Lisa McPherson.
Oh, you can’t: She’s dead.
* * *
We cannot take refuge in the idea that any of the individuals discussed
herein are simply “false teachers,” and that genuinely enlightened
individuals would not behave so poorly. Nor is the problem
simply with “naïve Westerners” following guru-figures who
would not be taken seriously in the “spiritual East,” as is sometimes
wrongly suggested. For, if there is such a thing as a “genuine
guru,” who would ever have doubted that Vivekananda, Trungpa,
Muktananda or Yogananda would qualify as such? These are not
the worst of gurus, they are rather among the widely recognized
best!
Ramakrishna, likewise, was ostensibly one of
the few indubitable Indian saints and sages amidst the veritable
plague of so-called swamis, gurus, “enlightened masters,”
maharishis, “bhagvans” [sic] and the like of recent
times (Oldmeadow, 2004).
After all that we have seen, then, it is easy to sympathize with
the perspective of the insightful and democratic 1984 author,
George Orwell (1980):
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved
innocent.
The bottom line with each of these figures is thus not whether
one or another of their visions may have been real or imagined.
Nor is it whether their actual degree of enlightenment is even onetenth
of what they and their loyal disciples claim it to be. (It is
not.) Nor can our concerns be allayed by the suggestion that any
reticence in approaching one or another of these figures is based