stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

40 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Getting ready for an evening out, [Baker] rolls up his sleeves
and says plaintively, “I didn’t dance enough when I was at
Zen Center. I should have danced more” (Tworkov, 1994).
Or, as Nero himself could have put it, millennia ago, upon seeing
his own empire burn: “I should have fiddled more.”
And how would all of the discontent regarding Baker’s alleged
behaviors have been handled in the “traditional” Far East?
The treatment of individual students was the purview of the
teacher. This was the traditional model. Whatever happened,
you could say it was a teaching (Downing, 2001; italics
added).
Further, following the 1983 “explosion,”
people came from Japan and tried to tell us that if we were
unhappy with the teacher, we should leave, and the teacher
should stay (Yvonne Rand, in [Downing, 2001]).
This pressure to have the unhappy students leave and let the
holy teacher stay, too, is very relevant to the unsupportable idea
that guru-disciple relationships have “traditionally” worked. (The
untenable claim implicit there is that in the agrarian East, such
relationships had “checks and balances” in place, which purportedly
constrained the behaviors of their guru-figures in ways which
are absent in the West.) For, observations such as Rand’s, above,
clearly show that “traditional” societies have exercised far less
practical checks and balances on the behaviors of their gurus/
kings/emperors than does the modern and postmodern West.
I was taught in school [that the Japanese emperor] was the
[sic] god and I believed till I was ten years old and the war
[i.e., WWII] over....
We thought Chinese inferior and whites were devils and
only god, our god, could win the war (in Chadwick, 1994).
Feudal society, with unquestioning obedience to the guru-like,
divine emperor—the “embodiment of Supreme Truth”—actually
existed in the “divine land” of Japan until the midpoint of the
twentieth century. For the effects of that on the citizens, reflected
in past and present society and culture, consult Victoria’s (1997)