stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

500 STRIPPING THE GURUS
good luck to you in that—you’re going to need it, should people you
care about ever become trapped in those “non-cult” environments.
* * *
The collection of “enlightened” individuals we have considered here
are again in no way the worst of our world’s spiritual teachers, but
are rather among the universally recognized best. The disregard
for the guru-disciple relationship evinced herein thus has nothing
to do with simply rejecting it, whether wisely or blindly, in favor of
an alternative emphasis on individuality and independence, without
regard for the benefits of learning from a teacher wiser than
oneself. Rather, such disdain is the simple and unavoidable outcome
of recognizing the high probability that, in any given case,
the guru-disciple relationship is very likely to do much more harm
than good.
Conversely, the relevant question is not why anyone should be
“anti-guru,” but rather: How could anyone, in the face of all of the
long-extant reported issues quoted herein, still be “pro-guru”? If
the assertion is that the good mixed in with the bad (for any given
spiritual teacher) offsets the latter, the appropriate response is
that a mixture of nectar and poison is more dangerous than is one
of poison alone. After all, animals die from drinking anti-freeze because
it tastes good. Were it not for the good, they would not simultaneously
swallow the bad.
As Dick Anthony (et al., 1987) quite unsuspectingly put it:
[A] number of group leaders who evolved into dangerous, authoritarian
tyrants seemed truly to have ... loving kindness,
generosity, selflessness. These leaders were extremely dangerous
precisely because they did combine such an unlikely
mix of extreme beneficence and extreme abusiveness within
them. The beneficence was prominent first, attracted a large,
devoted following, and then gradually gave way to a “dark
side” that came increasingly into expression over ten or
twenty years, imperceptibly turning heaven into hell for the
followers.
The point which Anthony has completely missed, of course, is
that the hitherto “peacenik” student guards in Zimbardo’s prison
study likewise combined “extreme beneficence and extreme abusiveness”
within themselves. Indeed, each one of those eventual
“Nazis” again began the study congenially, only having his “tyran-