Stripping the gurus. Sex, violence, abuse and enlightenment.* / Разоблачая гуру. Секс, насилие, жестокость и просветление.

Ramakrishna was a homoerotic pedophile.

His chief disciple, Vivekananda, visited brothels in India.

Krishnamurti carried on an affair for over twenty years with the wife of a close friend. Chögyam Trungpa drank himself into an early grave. One of Adi Da’s nine “wives” is a former Playboy centerfold. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh sniffed laughing gas to get high. Andrew Cohen, guru and publisher of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, by his own reported admission sometimes feels “like a god.”

These are typical of the “wizened sages” to whom otherwise – sensible people give their devotion and unquestioning obedience, surrender-ing their independence, willpower, and life’s savings in the hope of realizing for themselves the same “enlightenment” as they ascribe to the “perfect, God-realized” master.

Why?

Is it for being emotionally vulnerable and “brainwashed,” as the “anti-cultists” assert? Or for being “willingly psychologically seduced,” as the apologists unsympathetically counter, confident that they themselves are “too smart” to ever fall into the same trap? Or have devotees simply walked, with naïvely open hearts and thirsty souls, into inherent psychological dynamics of power and obedience which have showed themselves in classic psychological studies from Milgram to Zimbardo, and to which each one of us is susceptible every day of our lives?

Like the proud “Rude Boy” Cohen allegedly said, with a laugh, in re-sponse to the nervous breakdown of one of his devoted followers: “It could happen to any one of you.”

Don’t let it happen to you. Don’t get suckered in. Be prepared. Be informed. Find out what reportedly goes on behind the scenes in even the best of our world’s spiritual communities.

You can start by reading this book.

http://www.strippingthegurus.com/

* The inclusion of any particular individual in Stripping the Gurus is not meant to suggest or imply that he or she represents him- or herself as a guru, nor is it meant to suggest or imply that he or she indulged in sex, violence, the abuse of others, or any other illegal or immortal activities.