stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

62 STRIPPING THE GURUS
grams of LSD—many times the “safe” dosage—with no apparent
effect.
Some said they’d seen [Neem Karoli Baba’s] body grow really
huge, and others claimed they’d seen him shrink down very
small. And then there were those who swore they’d seen him
[as an incarnation of the monkey god Hanuman] with a tail
(Das, 1997).
[Neem Karoli Baba] is God; he knows everything (in Mukerjee,
1996).
Of course, such high reviews of Maharajji naturally came from
very hero-worshiping angles. By contrast, Andrew Cohen’s former
guru, H. W. L. Poonja, offered a perspective on the same sagely
individual which is either more balanced, or more unbalanced, as
may be left for the reader to judge:
When I had asked [Poonja] what his opinion was of the now
famous deceased guru Neem Karoli Baba, he went on to describe
in detail about how he had met him and that he knew
that he was completely insane and “mad,” but that many
people mistook his insanity for Enlightenment.... Several
years later [following Cohen’s and Poonja’s bitter separation]
when devotees of Neem Karoli would go to [Poonja] he would
praise him as the highest (Cohen, 1992).
The following story, from a female disciple of Baba, does nothing
to settle the question as to insanity versus enlightenment:
The first time he took me in the room alone I sat up on the
tucket [a low wooden bed] with him, and he was like a seventeen-year-old
jock who was a little fast! I felt as if I were fifteen
and innocent. He started making out with me, and it
was so cute, so pure. I was swept into it for a few moments—
then grew alarmed: “Wait! This is my guru. One doesn’t do
this with one’s guru!” So I pulled away from him. Then Maharajji
tilted his head sideways and wrinkled up his eyebrows
in a tender, endearing, quizzical look. He didn’t say
anything, but his whole being was saying to me, “Don’t you
like me?”
But as soon as I walked out of that particular darshan
[the blessing which is said to flow from even the mere sight
of a saint], I started getting so sick that by the end of the day