stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

510 STRIPPING THE GURUS
as gathered herein, which would have convinced any rational,
thinking person that the practitioners of the “guru game” are not
in any way what they present themselves as being. Indeed, without
the Internet and over five thousand hours of research, I still
wouldn’t have it.
You, however, having gotten this far, do have easy access to
that information. And you can save yourself, and those you care
for, from undergoing a great deal of suffering, simply by using it
wisely.
For, if we have learned one thing from Blaise Pascal, it is that
“those who play at being angels, end up as animals.”
There may still be more to religion and spirituality than mere
hallucination, dissociation, psychoses, transference, conformity,
massive co-dependence (cf. Warner, 2004), belongingness needs,
and hierarchical outlets for power-tripping authoritarianism and
“Rude Boy” sadism. But the sad fact is that the above principles
would fully suffice to create exactly the situation which we see in
the imprisoning guru/savior-influenced “spiritual world” around
us. Indeed, they could not help but do so.
If you have not been through the “cult” experience yourself,
living on the “inside” for years (not days), you may naïvely think
that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they are alleged to be by
the disillusioned members who have left any closed, totalitarian
organization/ashram/prison. (It took some time for the free world
to be able to believe that the Stalinist purges and Nazi Germany,
too, were “as bad as all that.” Yet they were.) Or you may believe
that you, as a real spiritual “macho man” who values Enlightenment
Über Alles, could “take the heat” for the death of your own
ego, at the hands of one or another of these bozos, or their equally
clown-like spiritual cousins.
Well, good luck to you with that, then. You’re going to need it.
* * *
Christopher Reeve (2002) then summed up his noteworthy, common-sense
conclusions regarding spirituality. (Reeve’s own genuine
spiritual interests had previously led him to investigate both
Muktananda and TM, in addition to Scientology.)
Gradually I have come to believe that spirituality is found in
the way we live our daily lives. It means spending time
thinking about others.