stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

MAKE IT BETTER 503
If people were really well-informed, they would be immune to
bad gurus (Robert Thurman, in [Watanabe, 1998]).
Well, you are now “really well-informed.” And being thus wise,
knowing of the Dalai Lama’s admiration for Drukpa Kunley, and
being cognizant of Richard Baker’s reported behaviors at the SF
Zen Center ... you would not be surprised to learn that Thurman is
still a loyal admirer of the homophobic, non-masturbating, “false
Karmapa”-supporting Lama, after having been a friend of SFZC
during Baker’s apocalyptic tenure there. Nor would you be taken
aback to find that Thurman, in spite of his own “immunity to bad
gurus” and foolish pandits after a lifetime of spiritual study and
practice ... is a founding member of Wilber’s Integral Institute. Nor
would you nearly fall off your chair in learning that he has released
a recording of dialogs on Buddhism and politics between
himself ... and Deepak Chopra.
Interestingly, both Thurman and the Dalai Lama endorsed
Chopra’s (2000) book, How to Know God ... as did Ken Wilber and
Uri Geller. If we are known by the company we keep.... Anyway,
Thurman called it the “most important book about God for our
times.” Not to be outdone, the Mikhail Gorbachev “pulled a Wilber”
in elevating Chopra to the position of being “undoubtedly one of
the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our times.”
Good Lord ... compared to Norman Einstein, maybe....
And all of that, while Thurman was simultaneously being
named as one of Time magazine’s twenty-five most influential people
in 1997, and viewed as “America’s number one Buddhist” by
the New York Times. The point being that, with no particular disrespect
intended toward Dr. Thurman, even the best and mostesteemed
figures in Buddhism and elsewhere demonstrably cannot
be relied upon to do other than lead us directly to spiritual teachers
whom we would do much better to avoid, should we make the mistake
of following their “really well-informed” advice.
Even someone like the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield has
again failed to do even minimally adequate research regarding the
alleged unpunished breaking of rules in the East, before offering a
confident, “watertight” opinion. That is, he has presented a superficially
convincing, but ultimately utterly false and quite wilberesquely
half-baked theory, as if it were inarguable, researched fact.
Further, he was still maintaining that indefensible opinion nearly
two decades after his own days teaching at Trungpa’s Naropa during
its most “wild and crazy” period. Those, too, were its most