stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

502 STRIPPING THE GURUS
deluded as to confuse his or her fantasies with reality. (After all, I
have never mistaken the products of my own imagination for what
is real, so no one else would, right?) Nor had I in any measure appreciated
the degree to which fertile human imagination can create
—as Hubbard proved, and Hoskins/Rampa showed to a lesser extent—a
religion of pure fiction, and have that taken as divinely
revealed fact by credulous, and then defensive, followers.
Worse, when I entered Hidden Valley and signed the agreement
stating that I would regard my superiors there as being vehicles
of God and guru, and obey them accordingly, I genuinely believed
that they were exactly such wise and specific “channels.”
(They said they were, right?) Yet, far from being executed under
duress, that was again simply what I had been taught to believe,
from a “safe distance” away in a far too trusting approach to life,
by “holy” people who I naïvely assumed would never mislead me. I
would even have been most willing to literally jump off a cliff—as
the Babaji fairy tale goes—to prove my loyalty to the guru, had he
appeared and requested that.
Oy....
Nor had I imagined that anyone could be so scared of particulars
which did not fit into his or her spiritual view of things as to
“kill the messenger.” That is, I would never have guessed that the
transpersonal community, for one, would prefer to defend a set of
pleasant fantasies having little more value than the childhood belief
in Santa Claus, rather than simply facing up to reality.
“To be that young again.”
And interestingly, it is not the skeptics who have convinced
me that 98% (or more) of spirituality is utter garbage. Rather, as
the research herein would easily disclose, I have become convinced
of that high percentage of idiocy simply by looking in detail at the
inept and inconsistent claims of the most highly respected believers,
theoreticians and experimentalists in the spiritual marketplace.
As the wag said, “The easiest way to prove a man [or woman]
a fool is to let him [or her] speak his [or her] mind.” And that applies
doubly, it seems, to our world’s “god-men” (and -women). For,
the more they speak, the more they prove, to anyone not already
under their authoritarian spells, that they are not even close to
being what they claim to be.
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