stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

BEEN HERE, DONE THAT, WHAT NOW? 61
consciousness at Harvard, utilizing large amounts of LSD under
relatively uncontrolled circumstances. Those same activities got
him fired from that faculty in 1963.
Four years later, Alpert journeyed to India, meeting two relevant
people there: Bhagavan Das, and the man who soon became
his guru—Neem Karoli Baba or “Maharajji” (“Great King”).
Bhagavan Das had grown up in Laguna Beach, California,
coming to India on his own in 1964 at age eighteen, and later becoming
one of Ram Dass’ teachers. As Ram himself described their
first encounter:
I met this guy and there was no doubt in my mind [that he
“knew”]. It was just like meeting a rock. It was just solid, all
the way through. Everywhere I pressed, there he was! (Dass,
1971).
Of course, Dass also considered the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia
to be a “bodhisattva” (Meier, 1992), so “consider the source” in
that regard. And indeed, as if to warn us of the gulf which more
often than not exists between the real state of any guru or teacher,
compared with the pedestal upon which he has been put by his followers,
Das himself, years later (1997), gave his own honest evaluation
of his earlier spiritual state:
Ram Dass would describe me [in Be Here Now] as if I were
some kind of enlightened, mythical being. But I was just a
lost child, trying to find my way home to Mother....
Unfortunately, because of my work with Ram Dass and
because I was Maharajji’s sadhu [i.e., ascetic], many of the
[East] Indians were starting to overestimate my powers.
At other times, the boons of such “powers” included Das’ waking
up to a seventeen-year-old blond girl (Swedish) on one side of
his Nepalese cowshed bed, and a silent, young Frenchwoman with
long, black hair on the other side.
In any case, Bhagavan Das soon left that sylvan paradise behind
to drop acid with Alpert in Kathmandu, and then reluctantly
road-tripped with him back to India. He soon introduced that new
uptight, bisexual (and “too interested in him”) friend to Karoli
Baba—partly in the hope of getting rid of him (Das, 1997). To
Karoli, Das gave Alpert’s friend’s Land Rover vehicle, while Alpert
himself claims to have once fed the guru twelve hundred micro-