stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

MAKE IT BETTER 487
long-anticipated Christmas Eve in the future, all are equally childish
beliefs in something which blatantly doesn’t exist. To regard
one of those fairy tales as being “believable,” and the others as “ridiculous”
or “obviously cultish,” is more than I would personally be
prepared to do.
If and when it turns out that the fat guy in the red suit at your
local mall/ashram isn’t the “real” Santa Claus, then, you might
wisely take the hint, rather than sincerely searching throughout
other malls across the world, convinced that one of them may harbor
the genuine article.
Further, if someone keeps sneaking down your chimney in the
middle of the night and molesting your wife or daughters while
claiming to be a “Perfect Santa Claus Master,” you’d want to know
about it, right?
The real Santa Claus, though, would at least know where all
the naughty girls live. Now there’s a list worth checking twice!
* * *
The degree to which one is impressed by any purported sage’s realization
of a permanently enlightened, witnessing consciousness,
will depend on what one takes the origin of self-awareness to be.
That is, it will hinge on whether one believes that such witnessing
self-awareness is an essential characteristic of Spirit and of one’s
realization of That, or rather takes it as deriving from mere biochemical
reactions in the brain. For, in the latter case, such “realization”
would indeed not be anything to get excited about. Either
way, though, such “I am” awareness exists with our without the
presence of thoughts in one’s mental milieu.
Interestingly, then, Wilber himself claims (2000a) to be able to
voluntarily enter a “brain-dead” state with no alpha, beta, or theta,
yet “maximum delta” brainwaves, in nirvikalpa samadhi. Indeed,
he has video of that EEG posted on the Integral Naked (2004) website.
Presumably, none of that declaration has been exaggerated,
i.e., one assumes that he has managed to hook the machine up correctly,
and is not otherwise tampering with the results. If so,
though, simply demonstrating the parapsychological component (if
any) of that claim under properly controlled conditions could net
him a cool $million at Randi’s JREF. (My own impression is that
such abilities might well be comparable to past incidents of yogis
being able to put their hearts into a fast flutter, and then claiming
that they had “stopped” the heartbeat [cf. Koestler, 1960]. That is,