SYNOPSIS

The Hindu doctrine of Karma is directly linked to the doctrines of reincarnation and rebirth in Hindu thought and, in its various appropriations, has universal appeal both in and out of its original context. The Sanskrit roots of the word karma literally mean “to do,” “what is done,” and “a deed,” but its universal meaning in writings of the East centers on the law of cause and effect, governing the sphere of human action and all of natural existence. The Western popularization of the various dimensions of karmic theory and practice, some argue, has subordinated its eternal value to a lesser world of momentary irony and paradox. Critics of this arcane evolution from the authentic karma to karma-lite, its Westernized version, attempt to offer a fresh contextualization to a doctrine that almost everyone in India—from cradle to grave, pauper to prince—swears by. Their attempts also create a space for a renewed scrutiny of defects inherent in the doctrine of karma in respect to the cross and person of Christ. If the word of the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, it can appear to be both a stumbling block and foolishness to Hindus. According to the law of Karma, if Jesus were to suffer to the point of death on a cross, it must have been because of His own bad karma and such suffering could not possibly be associated with the very Son of God, whom, Christians hail as the Savior of the world.

Present day Hindus are in general convinced that all religions are good in as far as they lead men to perfection. They would be inclined to accept and even join in with it, if Christianity would consent to give up its exclusiveness and its consequent claim to be the definitive religion.

—R. Panikkar¹

In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

—Apostle Paul (2 Cor. 5:19)²

Earl, the hero of the NBC television series My Name Is Earl, is a former petty criminal who wins the lottery and sets out to right wrongs committed over a lifetime, generating laughs along the way. For example, in Episode 12, “O Karma, Where Art Thou?” Earl and brother Randy take money from a stolen wallet and discover that the theft results in a missed honeymoon for two newlyweds. To right his wrongs Earl takes over for the groom at a fast food restaurant run by a bona fide jerk. How this man with such a charmed life (a big house and a beautiful wife) could remain ignorant to the idea of karma, the one thing that radically rearranged his own perspective, eludes Earl throughout the episode.

The problem with Earl’s comedic quest for karmic redemption, according to writer and American Hindu Shoba Narayan, is that he bandies about the Hindu term karma without any idea of its true meaning: “For starters, karma doesn’t happen. It is what you do. karma in its most basic sense means action or duty. This series uses the term to mean cosmic retribution….Take, for instance, the lyrics of Alicia Keys’ popular song, ‘Karma.’ Keys sings, ‘It’s called karma baby. And it goes around. What goes around comes around. What goes up must come down.’ That isn’t karma. That is Newton’s Law of Physics.”³

Narayan’s exploration of popular culture’s marketing of the mystic East⁴ includes a search for “karma” at Amazon.com (there are at least 900 entries), an exploration of psychic MaryT.Browne’s references to karma in her book The Power of Karma⁵ (“Karma is a powerful ancient law of cosmic cause and effect….Simply put: what goes around comes around”⁶), and The New York Times’ “spectacularly wrong usage of the term,”⁷ when it describes Browne’s book as “a practical handbook for the karmically deprived.”⁸

Devout Hindus don’t use the term as frequently as American popular culture does, writes Narayan. “Granted, Earl is consumed by the concept, but much of his dialogue appears disingenuous given that he has only just heard the word and barely knows its meaning. Just like the Americanization of yoga, ‘My Name is Earl’ could further dilute the religious weight of the Hindu concept of karma and wedge it deeper into the American vernacular,”⁹ or (here Narayan salvages one reason for Hindus to be thrilled about the series) “it will help securely lodge what is essentially a Hindu concept into the collective unconscious of America [and] might on occasion create lively debates about the meaning of the word karma.”¹⁰

It is probably no surprise that the Westernization of the concept of karma, like that of yoga currently, results in an understanding antithetical to its origin. Narayan finds nothing necessarily wrong with that, other than the process of uprooting yoga and karma and converting them into something they are not, simply because “there will be enough Americans…who know the difference between ‘true’ yoga [and karma] and [their] more fashionable shape.”¹¹

UNDERNEATH THE SATELLITE SKY

Both the word and the concept of karma are familiar to all Hindus. It is derived from the Sanskrit root kri (“to do”), and signifies literally “what is done”—a deed. It is the ceremonial deed par excellence. It declares that any action in the present arises necessarily out of actions in the past, and that it, in its turn, will have its influence in determining what action shall arise in the future. As Hindu missionary EdgarW.Thompson wrote in his classic work of historical inquiry, The Word of the Cross to Hindus, “The law of Karma cannot be limited to the sphere of human conduct. By Karma the sun, moon and planets keep their appointed courses; by Karma the tides rise and fall—the winds blow, turn about and sink to rest; by Karma the sap rises in herb and tree, the seasons succeed one to another, and all animate creatures pass through all the stages of their life from birth to death.”¹²

The law of karma is complex because it is inextricably intertwined with the world of samsara (reincarnation), a world of constant change in which souls are continually dying and being reborn. One Hindu parable describes this world as worse than “a vale of tears,”¹³ a frightening jungle full of hungry beasts and deadly snakes:

Imagine finding yourself in such a terrible jungle. You decide you would rather meet your ruin on the run than standing petrified in fear, and a frantic flight for freedom ensues. The trail grows thick, impenetrable. You struggle to push through. Frustration grows to the point of giving in…an awkward step…stumble…slip…and suddenly you’re falling headlong into a deep pit. Just before you hit bottom, vines at the mouth of the pit wrap around your ankles and you are left suspended head downward. At the bottom of the pit, mere feet away in the fading light, you make out an enormous cobra poised and waiting. You look up again and there stands a huge elephant at the mouth of the pit ready to trample you if you are able to crawl back out. You also notice an overhanging branch to which is attached a bee hive simultaneously attracting a rare species of deadly killer bee and dripping honey down into the pit. If you twist yourself just so, you can catch a drop or two. In the next moment the tree to which that branch is attached is uprooted, falls over the edge, and carries you crashing downward to the floor of the pit, where the cobra waits.¹⁴

Hindus hold this world to be a place of terror and pain. Pleasure is short-lived and illusory, masking for a moment the stern reality of pain accompanying this mortal life. The main preoccupation becomes the search for a way of escape from this world and beyond the passage of time.

Contrast such unsettling pessimism with a Western love affair with human potential and with our cultural enslavement to the “tyranny of the urgent.”¹⁵ We loathe suffering for its metaphysical conceit. Indoctrinated in “the denial of death,”¹⁶ we are quick to bury the dead¹⁷ before the mourning even begins. We no longer imagine life without the Palm Pilot or Blackberry. Reader’s Digest at bedside, there is barely enough sand left in the hourglass to read a quip from “Laughter, the Best Medicine,”¹⁸ or to channel-surf late night televised serial slapstick to help us digest the jagged forgetfulness pill.

IMAGINE THERE’S NO HEAVEN, NO HELL BELOW US

Hindus, irrespective of their views of God, accept the teaching of karma as an inevitable factor in life. They believe, rather strongly, that one cannot change one’s karma. Your meeting with the deadly cobra was bound to happen, and Earl, even if the series were renewed ad infinitum, just won’t get it right. The world is evil and full of suffering and sorrow and the Hindu would rather be “free” of this wicked world because it is, indeed, a snare and a trap where cobras and bona fide jerks dwell. One is caught by these traps and struggles to be free but remains in bondage in the long run; to face this reality is to embrace a feeling of hopelessness, which under the circumstances is inevitable and fills this life…and the next.

Suffering is not caused by sin in the universe of karma; it occurs because of one’s ignorance of spiritual principles. Good actions always produce good karma; bad actions result in bad karma. Almost all Hindus believe that all suffering is due to a person’s karma. One is responsible for one’s own suffering and, therefore, capable of taking care of one’s own problems. A clear understanding of this principle is the right place to begin the spiritual pilgrimage.

The world is a manifestation of the Supreme Being and of Atman (the Self), and one reaches complete comprehension of reality when one undertakes rigid discipline such as yoga and comes to realize Atman within his or her own being. There is no guarantee, karma-wise, however, that such a state ever can be achieved. Hindus strongly believe that they will have to return again and again until all karmic debt is settled.

Hindus believe that heaven is not real and that hell is not a physical place. One must strive to balance out one’s karmic equation completely, and thus one must prepare for total identification or oneness with the Supreme Being before one can reach, or hope to reach, spiritual perfection. The real goal of life is not to reach heaven or escape hell but to be delivered from the karmic cycle of life and death that all life forms undergo, which alone can lead to this oneness with the Supreme Being. The world inflicts suffering. To be born into the world is to ask for suffering. The wise person therefore seeks release from the world by seeking an understanding or oneness with the Self.

Some Hindu scholars suggest that moving in the direction of inner search in itself cancels out bad karma and produces good karma. Other Hindus disagree. They contend that when a person begins to move in the direction of searching inward, his karmic debt already has been balanced.

FOREIGNERS AND FEMALES NOT WELCOME

Having established the ultimate goal of life, Hindus also contend that one cannot comprehend, or even raise, the ultimate questions about reality in one lifetime. One needs to be born into this world as many times as necessary to begin to understand the journey.

Hindus also suggest that this journey is not always directed upward. A person can move up or down the scale according to his karmic indebtedness or position. Some Hindu texts suggest that even gods undergo several life forms according to their karma. In other words, no one is free, spiritually speaking, to act on his own without having to bear the consequences of his past actions, or earn the consequences of his present actions in future lives.

Again, all Hindus subscribe to this concept or teaching of reincarnation (which applies to all life forms, not just to people). The basic concept with regard to people is used to explain or understand differences in social status, in spiritual awareness, in health, in intelligence, and in wealth. Hindus believe that the conditions of a person’s birth are determined according to his own personal accumulated karma. Good karma is always associated with the so-called good things of life, such as material riches.

Hindus contradict themselves, however, when they allow materially poor but spiritually rich people, Hindu seers, to have authority in religious matters. Hindu priests, wise gurus, and holy men are considered people with good karma. They are looked on with reverence by almost all Hindus as seekers and interpreters of the ultimate truth. Some of these holy men even claim to know the truth.

Some Hindus believe that when one is born as a Hindu male, in an upper caste, however, one is naturally reaping the rewards of his accumulated good karma. When one is born a female or a foreigner, one is not reaping the rewards of good karma, and is not considered upwardly mobile, spiritually speaking.

NO ALTERNATIVE TO FUTILITY

Bad actions do lead to bad karma in Hinduism, but bad actions are not considered sins, per se. Bad actions lead to undesirable life experiences and circumstances. Since humanity is free to choose its own form of worship, it, in a sense, is also free to develop its own moral and ethical code of conduct. Humanity, according to Hinduism, is not judged according to a divine code; it is judged according to the religious code of ethical and moral conduct that it selects and exercises for itself.

If there is no understanding of sin, if there is no need of an external God, and if all life forms are different manifestations of the same Supreme Being, one can see how these definitive statements eliminate the concept of evil and ultimately condense all life forms to divine forms. One creates one’s own problems, in a sense, and one must therefore seek one’s own solutions. Some Hindu texts, however, do define the two opposing concepts of good and evil and detail elaborate sacrifices, which can be offered to one’s chosen deity to ward off evil.

There is no judgment day in Hinduism. Hindus would insist that humanity is being judged by its own actions almost on a daily basis, and that it is receiving due and just rewards arising from those actions. Humanity is the policy maker, policy keeper, and policy enforcer—all on its own. Why should Hindus have to wait to receive judgment from God when they continue to judge themselves? Why should Hindus seek a Christian God when they each have been performing the functions of a god? Why do they need salvation in Jesus when they believe they can obtain salvation for themselves?

The Christian message appears to be judgmental. Hindus react, rather strongly, to someone judging them. In their view, no one has the right to develop a moral code for others, and no one has the authority to enforce such a moral code. As noted earlier, each person acts as his or her own judge and monitors his or her own conduct according to his or her own frame of reference.

Religion is cosmic and eternal, transcending human history, which is cyclical. The Hindu concept of religion extends far beyond the human domain. Most Hindus do not restrict or limit the definition of religion. They do not believe that religion is the acceptance of academic abstractions or the celebration of ceremonies. Most Hindus describe religion as a kind of life or experience.

Everyone is on the road to eternal rebirth (moksha), although there are up and down movements in the cycles of reincarnations. The final destiny and desire of each and every soul is the same and Hindus are convinced that they definitely are going to make it. They are on a glorious path to the ultimate blissful and peaceful destination: becoming one with the One! The possibility that they may be pursuing uncertainties does not occur to them.

KARMA IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS

For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom.5:19–21)

On January30,1948, Mahatma Gandhi, en route to a prayer meeting in Delhi, India, was shot twice in the chest at close range and died moments later. Gandhi’s assassination shocked the world, and national leaders in India as well as Hindu newspapers boldly proclaimed his death an opportunity for the Hindu to understand the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ in a manner that a century of Christian missionary preaching could not realize.¹⁹ Hindu Missionary E.M.Thompson, in his classic work of historical inquiry, The Word of the Cross to Hindus, wrote: “Here was one who had himself resorted to pleading for mercy and justice to the lowliest and for toleration and amity between Hindus and Muslims, and the wickedness of his own country-men had conspired against and killed him at Delhi, even as the hands of wicked men had crucified Jesus at Jerusalem.”²⁰

Admittedly, there are similarities between the death of Christ on a cross and the murder of Gandhi at the hands of a Hindu extremist, but the fundamental differences between the two events and the two men are profound. Gandhi was more than willing to lay down his life for the dissolution of the Hindu caste system and the evils he believed inherent therein, and his radical philosophy had placed him in harm’s way in a volatile climate many times before, but no one would suggest that Gandhi, like Christ on His way to Jerusalem, was aware that it was his time to die for the explicit purpose of the salvation of the human race.

Jesus was only 33 years old and the fruit of His ministry was only three years ripe on the vine, when the cross was there before Him. He both foresaw and foretold His death in this brief span of time, and considered the reality of such an event necessary to accomplish a goal far beyond the reaches of even the most enlightened guru.

The revelation that He is Christ comes surprisingly to one of His disciples, at which point Jesus confesses without hesitation that He must go up to Jerusalem, “suffer many things,” and, in the end, “be killed” (see Matt.16:17–23, especially v.21). There was no need for a show of force to prevent His going there, for He had set His face for such a time as this. During the night that gave way to that horrifying day He went to a familiar garden to prepare His spirit for ultimate surrender, like a lamb readying itself for the ritual slaughter.

If in the incarnation of Christ, God Himself comes into our world, lives as a man “tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb.4:15), and is obedient to His own laws to the point of death on the cross, what of the law of karma?

Good theology should teach us that God by His very nature is both righteousness and love. A person must see the holiness of God’s laws and at the same time be assured of the greatness of God’s love, which forgives those who have rebelled against those laws. In the death of the God-man who was without sin, Jesus accepts the suffering wrought in the crucible of obedience because He cannot be other than His very nature—righteous and good.

To the Hindu, we try to reach perfection, as we understand it, by following a rigid regimen of prescribed disciplines of diet, exercise, yoga, meditation, asceticism, and avoidance of the temptations around the next corner. Picture, if you will, the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ. On one hand Christ offers free and complete emancipation from the exercises in futility that turn the wheels of karmic indebtedness and, on the other hand, reconciliation with God, the Father, by the exercise of one’s simple trust and faith in Him. Hindu modes of perfection do not make any promises in this life or the next, whereas this hanged Christ offers total forgiveness and acceptance to those who put their faith in Him.

Alfred George Hogg (1875–1954), the great Scottish educational missionary to India, whose encounter with the Hindu doctrines of karma and transmigration resulted in an understanding of both that few in history have approached, wrote:

It follows that, if God is freely and fully to express Himself, the universal order must have at least two inviolable laws or principles. It must have the Karmic law, the law that, if sin enters the phenomenal system, penalty must enter too. It must also have the law of Salvation, the law that, if sin enters the phenomenal system, God shall be compelled—with reverence by it spoken!—by all the moral forces of His nature to throw the whole infinitude of His being into the phenomenal system, that is, to incarnate Himself in order to abolish sinfulness….The story of Christ is not the story of a divine expedient: it is the revelation of the inmost necessities of the being of God.²¹

Narayan believes that an understanding of karma will increase as the yogis and purists have more of an opportunity to educate those who have misunderstood it. She holds out hope that “every once in a while—perhaps after watching [My Name Is Earl, some] college student might be drawn to it because it finally puts a name on a concept that has resonated in him for a long time. And he might start reading about karma, and therefore Hinduism.”²²

It is a sincere hope of this writer that that same student, or anyone so inclined to explore the concept of karma in its various guises,²³ might also be drawn to the foot of the cross of a crucified Christ, where “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”(Rom.1:18), and where the question, “Am I under karma or the shadow of the cross?” confronts the face of grace and truth, and the haunting words of Pilate in John19:5 linger today: “Ecco Homo” (“Behold the Man”).²⁴

notes

1. Raimundo Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism: Towards an Ecumenical Christophany (New York: Orbis Books, 1981),151.

2. All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version.

3. Shoba Narayan, “Pop-Karma: NBC’s ‘My Name Is Earl’ Bandies about a Key Hindu Term without any Idea of Its Real Meaning—but That’s Not Such a Bad Thing,” Belief Net, http://www.beliefnet.com/story/174/story_17471_1.html.

4. Beginning in the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Westerners descended on India, disciples of a cultural revolution that proclaimed that the magic and mystery missing from their lives was to be found in the East. Indian Gita Mehta’s book Karma Cola became an instant classic for describing what happens when the traditions of an ancient society are turned into commodities.

5. Mary T. Browne, The Power of Karma (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). In The Power of Karma, psychic Mary T. Browne debunks assumptions about Karma, noting that it is an active process over which we can seize control simply by positive action; basically, it is the idea that you get out of life what you put into it.

6. Mary T. Browne, The Power of Karma, back cover, quoted in Shoba Narayan, “Pop-Karma.”

7. Shoba Narayan, “Pop-Karma.”

8. New York Times, “Sunday Styles,” quoted in Mary T. Browne, The Power of Karma, back cover, quoted in Shoba Narayan, “Pop-Karma.”

9. Shoba Narayan, “Pop-Karma.”

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Edgar W. Thompson, The Word of the Cross to Hindus (Madras, India: The Christian Literature Society, 1956),102.

13. This parable is roughly paraphrased from R. C. Zahhner’s Hinduism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962),87–88.

14. Ibid.

15. See Charles Hummel, Tyranny of the Urgent (1967; repr., Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994) and Charles Hummel, Freedom from Tyranny of the Urgent (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), in which the author introduced and amplified the distinction between the important and the urgent, and offered a biblical understanding of how God’s will should take precedence in determining what has value in life.

16. See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). Becker focuses in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book on how we as Westerners develop strategies to forget our mortality and vulnerability and convince ourselves that we are immortal.

17. See Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), in which the author writes about this phenomenon from the perspective of an undertaker in small-town America.

18. Sample from that column: “What did the ginger-bread man put on his bed? Cookie sheets.” Reader’s Digest, December2006,140.

19. Edgar W. Thompson, 117.

20. Ibid., 117–18.

21. Alfred George Hogg, Karma and Redemption: An Essay Toward the Interpretation of Hinduism and the Re-Statement of Christianity (Madras, India: The Christian Literature Society, 1970),114-15.

22. Shoba Narayan, “Pop-Karma,” http://www.beliefnet.com/story/174/story_17471_2.html.

23. What follows is a short list of books that address either the doctrine of Karma or the person of Christ in both secular and sacred venues. Ram Gidoomal and Michael Fearon, Karma ‘n’ Chips: The New Age of Asian Spirituality (London: Wimbledon Publishing Company, 1994); Alfred George Hogg, Karma and Redemption (Madras, India: The Christian Literature Society, 1970); Gajanan Wasudeo Kaveeshwar, The Law of Karma (Gurudeva R. D. Ranade Memorial Lectures, University of Puna, 1974); Yuvraj Krishan, The Doctrine of Karma: Its Origin and Development in Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jaina Traditions (Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1997); S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life (New Delhi, India: HarperCollins, 1998); Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: SUNY Press, 2006); Bruce R. Reichenbach, The Law of Karma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990); Rudolf Steiner, The Manifestation of Karma (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968); Edgar W. Thompson, The Word of the Cross to Hindus (Madras, India: The Christian Literature Society,1956).

24. “So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Behold the man!’” (John19:5).

Most Christian parents in America think of Intelligent Design or sexual education controversies when they hear of curriculum battles. Fighting to keep Heather Has Two Mommies off the required reading list of first-graders, however, may be the least concern for parents hoping to protect their children from indoctrination.

American Hindus with ties to extremists in India have launched a nationwide campaign to rewrite history to reflect a Hindu worldview and hide Hinduism’s darker tenets to make it more attractive to school children. They have already had surprising success in rewriting world religion courses in Virginia, have sued to force the changes in California, and are setting their sights on Texas textbooks.

The American Hindus fighting for the changes have direct ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an extreme Hindu Nationalist group that spawned the controversial Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Hindu nationalists believe that “invading forces,” such as Christians, historically have oppressed Hindus in their own land. Derided by opponents as xenophobic, racist, and fascist, Hindu nationalists support religious movements indigenous to India, including Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. The movement was launched in the 1920s in response to British rule in India, the political victories that Muslims were having in certain regions, and the success of Christian evangelism that in turn subverted the oppressive Hindu caste, or social class system.

The subsequent religious tension in India has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Christians and Muslims, landing the RSS on the radar of human rights organizations around the world. In regions where Hindu nationalist political parties have power they pass laws against evangelism, fail to prosecute attacks against Christians, and set up insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles for Christians, such as forbidding them from receiving visas or foreign money.

When the BJP came to power in 1998 they appointed Hindu nationalists to the national curriculum development and review committee to “saffronize” textbooks by omitting references that made Hindu nationalists look bad, including such facts as that a Hindu nationalist assassinated Mahatma Ghandi. The U.S. State Department, in its 2002, 2003, and 2004 reports on religious freedom, specifically cited these attempts to Hinduize education as an affront to religious freedom. After the BJP lost power in 2004, the textbooks in India were corrected.

Red, White, and Saffron. Despite the BJP’s failure to rewrite history in India, other Hindu ideologists are attempting this same “saffronization” strategy in the United States. It began in 2004 in Fairfax County, Virginia, a populous and wealthy county just outside of Washington. A Hindu parent, Dr. Rakesh Bahadur, contested aspects of the fifth-grade textbook his daughter was using. That prompted the school district to suggest textbook changes for the fifth, ninth, and tenth grades. The school district asked for community input on the changes. Bahadur responded with a lengthy critique and a petition signed by 118 people. “We read them, and we really couldn’t fairly respond,” Fairfax County’s assistant superintendent for instructional services Ann Monday said at the time. “Quite frankly, none of us had a depth of knowledge in the field.”

This small group of petitioners, with little effort, was able to completely change the curriculum of one of the top-ranked school districts in the country. The school district forced five publishers to change their texts, purchased eight additional textbooks, and supplemented the curriculum with materials that explain Hindu doctrine.

American Hindus with nationalist ties immediately noticed how easily the changes were achieved. At an October 2004 meeting of the Vedic Friends Association at an ashram (i.e., Hindu temple) in Pennsylvania, the association’s academia group hatched plans to take the “program” to other school boards and state curriculum committees, using the RSS’s sister organization in America: the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS).

According to the notes from the Vedic Friends meeting, “A sub committee was formed, which will coordinate the project on the national level.” Less than a year later California was hit with a coordinated campaign to change sixth-grade textbooks. Two groups with ties to Hindu nationalists ended up proposing 500 changes.

One proposed change reflected the desire of Hindu nationalists to hide the horrors of the caste system. The cultural structure of India places citizens into four castes, or classes, of descending honor. Beneath the four main castes are the Dalit, formerly called the “untouchables.” This system was developed some 3,000 years ago and classifies people based on nothing more than the fortune or misfortune of their birth. The nationalists, however, proposed that the phrase “The Aryans created a caste system…” be replaced with “During Vedic times, people were divided into different social groups (varnas) based on their capacity to undertake a particular profession.”

In reality, however, the system is not merit based. According to the International Dalit Solidarity Network, Bread for the World, and more than a dozen other national and international human rights groups, Dalits have very few religious or economic rights. They are forced to work in the worst conditions and are not allowed to touch members of the higher castes or even let their shadow fall upon them. They have limited access to food, health care, and housing, because of how poor they are. Hindu nationalists do not want to permit Dalits to leave the Hindu caste system, yet they are not permitted to enter temples or read scriptures. These oppressed poor have been receptive to Christianity.

Nancy Dicks, executive director of the Dalit Freedom Network, a Christian non-profit that works with organizations in India to meet the physical and spiritual needs of Dalits, told the Journal, “Hindu nationalists are trying to cover up the caste system and say it doesn’t exist. But for the large percentage of the population in the lower castes, it does exist and is very unpopular.”

Resistance to Revision. Days before the curriculum commission was to meet to consider these and other changes, Harvard University’s only tenured Sanskrit professor Michael Witzel received word of the changes about to be made and quickly drafted a letter to the Virginia State Board of Education. He argued, “The proposed revisions are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature, and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their area of expertise.” The letter was endorsed by 47 other Asian-studies scholars, including Sanskrit professor Robert Goldman and renowned Indian historians Romila Thapar and D. N. Jha.

The Hindutva won the first round, with the commission accepting almost all of their recommendations. The scholars quickly rebounded, however. At the next meeting, they brought Dalits who explained how the proposed changes hid the violent truth of caste-based discrimination.

Having Dalits protest the changes was such a successful political move that the Hindu nationalists launched fake websites purportedly authored by Dalits and designed to give the impression that Dalits favored the textbook changes. These maneuvers by the Hindu nationalists failed. In March 2006 the school board rejected most of the proposed changes. Within a week, however, the Hindu American Foundation sued to force the changes, and by April the group had hired its first full-time executive director to coordinate further educational activism.

Dalit activists and Asian-studies scholars expect that the next textbook battle will be in Texas. Large states such as Texas and California are attractive targets, since they are large buyers of textbooks. Curriculum changes made to appease school boards in those states end up spreading to other states, Ben Marsh, the Washington coordinator of the Dalit Freedom Network, told the Journal.

Marsh added, “As parents get involved, they should use this as an opportunity to reach out to the Hindu community in the United States. We don’t want to isolate Hindus. What we’re worried about is people coming from India with an agenda.”

—

“And to think this is the man we used to think was God,” said a former follower of Hindu guru Sai Baba in the wake of renewed charges and evidence that his miracles are staged magician’s sleight-of-hand tricks and that over several decades he has sexually abused many young men among his followers.

Sai Baba is the 76-year-old founder of the Sathya Sai Baba Society. His followers are estimated at between 20 and 50 million people internationally, and some consider him to be the dominant guru in India. He presides over the largest ashram (spiritual retreat) in the world in the otherwise destitute Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. In 1990, Sai Baba founded the ashram Prasanthi Nilayam, “Abode of Peace,” in his home village. An entire community dependent on the ashram has grown up around it, including hotels, two hospitals, primary and secondary schools, a college, a university, luxury apartment buildings, and a civic arts complex. One of the newest assets is an airport, which welcomes followers from around the world. The ashram itself boasts 10,000 beds for weary followers.

Sai Baba holds darshan, or “a visit with God,” twice a day at the ashram. Devoted followers wait for hours, sitting lotus-style on the floor, until a change in the music heralds the appearance of the diminutive man with an outrageous halo of frizzed black hair. For 10 to 15 minutes he passes through the room, which is strictly segregated by gender — men on one side, women on the other. Most don’t receive so much as a glance. The specially blessed ones receive a glance, a smile, perhaps a word or two, or maybe a quick “materialization” of a trinket or toy they can take for a souvenir. He also may materialize vibhuti, or “holy ash.” This “god” favors an exceptional few who receive an invitation to a private audience with him. It is during these private audiences that the sexual abuse is said to take place.

The Hindu holy man says “all faiths are facets of the same truth.” For nearly 50 years he has been known as an avatar, an incar­nation of God. He declares himself to be the Second Coming of Christ. His faithful call him “The Protector,” “The Infinite,” and “The Creator.” He is said to be “an instrument of the divine” and omniscient: capable of perfectly knowing the past, present, and future of any individual. He is also said, like Christ, to have created food to feed crowds, healed the sick, raised the dead, and “appeared” to disciples in special need at any time in any place. According to his official biography, a four-volume collection written by his late secretary, disciple Professor N. Kasturi, Sai Baba was born in 1926 and at age 13 declared himself the re­incar­nation of the South Indian saint Shirdi Sai Baba, who had died in 1918. Kasturi recounted that when Baba was challenged to prove his claim, the child threw a fistful of jasmine flowers on the floor, and they landed miraculously arranged to spell “Sai Baba” in the local dialect.

Sai Baba is known worldwide for the “miracles” he performs before his public audiences, such as pouring copious quantities of ash from an empty urn and materializing trinkets and small valuables from thin air to give to his disciples. There are nearly 7,000 Sai Baba temples worldwide, and 500 centers are in the United States alone. Large contingents of his followers are found in North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, South America, and especially India. Prominent followers include Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prince Andrew’s former wife Sarah Ferguson, and entrepreneur Isaac Tigrett, founder of the international Hard Rock Cafés and the House of Blues restaurant chain. Another follower is a former Vatican priest, Don Mario Mazzoleni, author of A Catholic Priest Meets Sai Baba, in which he declares that Sai Baba and Christ are both the manifestation of God on earth. (Mazzoleni was excommunicated for his beliefs in 1992.)

Part of Sai Baba’s attraction to well-educated Westerners is his blend of Eastern thought with Western vocabulary. His teachings attempt to synthesize the “truth” from all of the great faiths, with a special emphasis on Christian charity. His most famous saying is, “Love All, Serve All.”

A plethora of disaffected members has spurred the current media attention. Some of them call him a fraud, a sexual abuser, and a pedophile. Prominent among the detractors is the English former follower David Bailey, a concert pianist, who began to follow Sai Baba in 1994 at the age of 40. Bailey’s investigative document, The Findings, has been widely circulated on the Internet and has raised media attention worldwide. Bailey claims that he conducted more than 100 interviews with Sai Baba. As Bailey drew closer to Baba’s inner circle, including marrying a devotee picked by the holy man, he began to have doubts. He finally concluded, “The miracles were B-grade conjuring tricks, the healings a myth,” and the guru’s alleged ability to see into people’s minds and give them special messages “merely a clever use of information gleaned from others.”

The Findings’ major claims, based on interviews with devotees worldwide, include allegations of sham miracles, financial irregularities, and sexual predation on young, impressionable male members. These findings have been substantiated by skeptic societies and secular news media. In Bailey’s opinion, “Sai Baba is a simple sex maniac who’s on an ego trip, after money, after power. He is a sheer con-man.”

Neither class of accusations (fraudulent “miracles” and sexual abuse of male followers) is new. Although Sai Baba has never been criminally charged, for decades various ex-members, skeptics, and critics have publicly challenged the claims and practices of the guru. The Indian Science and Rationalists’ Association and various international documentaries have exposed his “miracles” as magicians’ tricks and used slow motion photography to expose his materialization tricks. The U.S. Department of Justice and government officials in France and Germany are quietly conducting their investigations into Baba’s activities. Other media exposés have come from the Australian publication NEXUS and the Canadian Daily Telegraph newspaper.

It is alleged that Baba sexually molests young men during his private audiences at his huge ashram in India, which is visited weekly by thousands. One of the most convincing stories comes from Dr. D. Bhatia, former head of the blood bank at Sai Baba’s hospital, who said that he had sexual relations with the guru for “15 or 16 years” and that he was also aware of sexual relations between the guru and “many, many” students and devotees. Bhatia never questioned Sai Baba’s actions, however. He explained, “Devotion doesn’t need any justification. In my philosophy of life, everything good and everything bad belongs to God. That is my belief and that is why whatever he does, does not affect me in that way.” He still believes that Sai Baba is God manifest on earth.

One young devotee, whose parents raised him to believe Sai Baba was God, claims Baba sexually abused him. He said in a written public statement, “Sai Baba was my God — who dares to refuse God? He was free to do whatever he wanted to do with me; he had my trust, my faith, my love and my friendship; he had me in totality.” According to several critics, at least one young man had numerous sexual encounters with Sai Baba and in return received watches, jewelry, and cash, valued at around $10,000. Another former devotee, Swedish film star Conny Larson, claims he was molested as well. Some current followers acknowledge they are aware of his intimacies, but they say such activities are “sexual healing” or “genital oiling” exercises.

In addition to media and government investigators, mental health professionals have checked into the stories as well. One therapist, Elena A. Hartgering, who was once a follower of Sai Baba, lost her reverence for the guru when she investigated the charges and discovered they were valid. She said, “I recognized immediately the consistent theme in the stories told by young men from around the world who have come forward to describe their victimization by this man masquerading as God.” This therapist sacrificed her stellar professional reputation among devotees when she publicly released the charges.

Hartgering was especially concerned that neither Sai Baba nor his administration would even acknowledge the charges. She expressed her concern in a 2001 Internet posting:

It is troubling that neither Sai Baba himself nor the officials who head up the organization are willing to confront the accusations. If he and the organization have nothing to hide, then the accusations should be confronted directly, rather than with rehashed accounts of Sai’s miracles and divinity, and being told to rely only on one’s own experience…saying Sai predicted this in advance — “soon many devotees will fall away” — is irrelevant. This prediction resulted from his realization that the information on the Internet would be disseminated widely. It appears to be a lame attempt to save face….The problem is Sai Baba’s behavior. No one is denying he touches male genitals. Knowledge about this is so widespread that it cannot be denied without the organization losing total credibility. People delude themselves with comments like, “He is God, he has no sexual intent,” or “boys need to be tamed in that regard,” or “it is a therapeutic touch, like a doctor.” How can a rational human being believe this? Obviously the boys who have come forward with their tragic stories aren’t accepting these explanations. How can we?

In his refusal to respond to the charges, Sai Baba says that he wants people to realize that God lives within them and that he remains silent so that followers don’t become too attached to him. One of his favorite aphorisms encourages followers to avoid any criticism: “When doubt walks in the front door, faith walks out the back door. Keep your doors closed.” His principal English translator, Anil Kumar, affirmed that every great religious teacher faced criticism during his lifetime, as with Sai Baba, but “with every criticism he becomes more and more triumphant….[This] is all part of his divine plan. It’s a paddy field with husks around the rice. Eventually all the unwanted parts will go to leave the true substance behind.”

One die-hard follower commented, “I feel that what we should do is this: Realize the God within us. If swami is a fraud, we must do this. If he is who he says he is, then we must do this.” Other loyal followers blame the charges on a mysterious, untraceable international oil, lumber, pharmaceutical, and mining cartel. Credulity persists, and those followers who fall away are quickly replaced. Said one stubborn follower, “Sai Baba is faultless. He just opened the largest hospital in India. He’s done incredible service to the world. His accusers are wrong. And we’re no gullible believers.” One supportive Internet posting declared that because “Sai Baba is a divine incarnation, one cannot attribute human sexual motives to him, nor interpret him in the light of human sexual experience.”

Some followers try to straddle the divide between the charlatan and the god. Hard Rock Café chain co-founder Isaac Tigrett was such a strong supporter of Sai Baba that he donated $20 million to build the Sathya Sai Super Specialty Hospital in the community around the ashram in India. He first encountered Sai Baba in 1974. Prompted by a premonition, he attended darshan at the ashram, and Sai Baba “blessed” him with a materialization of holy ash. For the next 15 years, although he had no personal contact with Sai Baba, he attributed many experiences to the miraculous power of Baba. Unlike many devotees, however, Tigrett doesn’t believe Sai Baba is God, but he explained, “Whatever it was I experienced, it changed my life….And I will never be able to deny that experience; nothing he could do could change that.” So how does Tigrett explain the accusations? He doesn’t. He concludes, “For me the only meaningful relationship with him is the personal one, and everyone has to make a personal decision based on that….I know that he materializes things, because I’ve seen him do that. And I know he fakes materializations, because I’ve seen him do that too. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just a game….[He is] a total and complete enigma.”

The father of a young man allegedly molested by Sai Baba echoed Tigrett’s observations, but with less credulity. After his final break with the movement over his son’s experiences, he says he was finally able to realize he had been denying what he saw for some time: “I knew the materializations were fake. I’d sit there and watch him pulling things from under a pillow. It was totally obvious. And he’d see that we saw and he’d kind of laugh. But I just thought, he’s testing me to see if I’m focused on the love or on the external. Because Baba says, love my uncertainty [sic]. You’ll never be able to understand the avatar.”

After his son’s disclosure and his family’s disassociation with Sai Baba, he was able to express how such discordance could exist in the mind of a devotee:

I realized, I’d really known this for a long time but didn’t really know it. It goes so far into your mind. You ask yourself, how could millions of people be wrong? How could millions of people be tricked? I think a lot of people deny these things are happening because they’re afraid of being embarrassed. I felt that myself. We’d spent 23 years raising our family to believe in him, going upstream against a river. You think, how could I have been so wrong?

Despite the die-hard devotees who continue to sing his praises, this round of accusations seems to have hurt the movement more than any other. There have been defections from among the top leadership as well as among the rank-and-file. Hundreds of former followers have bravely made public statements, many available on the Internet, about their personal experiences. The central group in Sweden has completely shut down, and some events and businesses in the community around the ashram have been cancelled and shut down.

NEO-VEDANTA: THE FORCE STRIKES BACK

Neo-Vedanta arose partly as a countermissionary movement to Christianity in nineteenth-century India. Having lost a significant minority of Indians (especially among the outcast “Untouchables”) to Christianity under British rule, certain adherents of the ancient Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism retooled their religion to better compete with Christianity for the souls not only of Easterners, but of Westerners as well.¹

Historically, Advaita Vedanta, which was formulated by the Hindu philosopher Shankara (ca. A.D. 788–820), is the strictest monist (“All is One”) philosophy in India. It holds that God is an impersonal and formless Consciousness or Force, the world is an illusion (maya), and the path of devotion (Bhakti Yoga) to a personal god (Krishna, Shiva, Kali, etc.), though valid, is inferior to the more direct and abstract approach of seeking oneness with the impersonal Absolute (Brahman).

Following the lead of Ramakrishna, who embraced the devotional elements not only of Hinduism but of Christianity and other religions as well, a new movement of Vedantists added a warm devotional emphasis to their cold monistic tradition and extolled Christ as one of the greatest avatars. They also opened up the previously restrictive practice of Vedanta “to all regardless of caste, colour, or race”² and stressed the importance of balancing their contemplative life of worldly withdrawal with active social service.³

Adopting such distinctively Christian missionary practices as providing education and health care to the poor, they set up successful missionary organizations in India (e.g., Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Order with its Ramakrishna Mission; Yogananda’s Yogoda Satsanga Society, established in 1917) that were complemented by strong sister organizations in Europe and the United States. Thus the Vedanta Societies and the Self-Realization Fellowship were the first — but far from the last — Hindu missionary works planted in the West.

The rationale offered for such efforts was that the West — though technologically advanced — was spiritually impoverished, while India — though technologically backward — was spiritually advanced. Just as the West had brought technology to India, India was now imparting its spiritual riches to the West. Furthermore, they maintained, since Vedanta is a naturalistic philosophy, and since its adherents pursue union with the Absolute through empirical, time-tested, and rigorously systematized disciplines (yoga), it is a scientific philosophy/religion that can bridge the growing gap between science and religion in the West.

YOGANANDA’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

Born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in northeastern India in 1893, Yogananda was a devout, college-educated, personable man. He was acquainted with many dignitaries in his native India (he even initiated Mahatma Ghandi into his Kriya Yoga). After being initiated into the Swami Order, an ancient order of Advaita Vedanta monks, Yogananda was sent to the West by his guru, Sri Yukteswar, to preach the gospel of Kriya Yoga (see below) and to work for the spiritual unification of East and West.

Through public lectures, yoga classes, and published writings, Yogananda attracted a sizable following, which included famed horticulturist Luther Burbank. His best-selling Autobiography of a Yogi is a New Age classic and, perhaps, the most readable and fascinating introduction to Hindu spirituality in the English language.

Yogananda’s autobiography is replete with accounts of the mystical and miraculous, including his own ecstatic visions as well as his encounters with legendary Hindu “saints.” The latter allegedly displayed such powers as levitation, materialization of a second body, and the ability to live without such physical necessities as food and sleep. Most fantastic of all is his description of Babaji, the “yogi Christ of India,” who — like the “Immortals” in the 1990s Highlander movies and television series — is believed to have retained the same 25-year-old appearance for hundreds or even thousands of years. Babaji allegedly initiated Sri Yukteswar’s master, Lahiri Mahasaya, and thus got the SRF ball rolling. In the SRF visitor center, a drawing of Babaji, which had been sketched under Yogananda’s supervision, accompanies photographs of Mahasaya and Yukteswar. Not surprisingly, although Yogananda supposedly met Babaji and his Autobiography is filled with pictures of the people (including Indian gurus and “saints”) described in its pages, no known photograph of the “yogi Christ” exists.

Selling Yoga as Science. This emphasis on the extraordinary is accompanied by the repeated claim that yoga is a science, and that such “miraculous” feats as these Hindu supermen perform are, in fact, the natural results of a yogi’s mastering the more subtle laws of the universe and the self. Indeed, Yogananda argued that yoga could prove to be the perfect counterbalance to the unique perils of our scientific age: “The Western day is nearing when the inner science of self-control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of Nature….An indirect benefit of mankind’s concern over atomic bombs may be an increased practical interest in the science of yoga, a ‘bombproof shelter’ truly.”⁴ In Autobiography Yogananda cites an observation made by Swiss psychiatrist (and New Age forefather) Carl Jüng that the guru obviously took quite seriously: “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation.”⁵

Kriya Yoga, the distinctive system of yoga taught by Yogananda, is “an advanced Raja Yoga⁶ technique that reinforces and revitalizes subtle currents of life energy in the body, enabling the normal activities of heart and lungs to slow down naturally. As a result, the consciousness is drawn to higher levels of perception, gradually bringing about an inner awakening more blissful and more deeply satisfying than any of the experiences that the mind or the senses or the ordinary human emotions can give.”⁷ Among other disciplines, the Kriya yogi manipulates this life energy (prana) through breath control and by mentally directing it around his or her spinal cord.

“Death Had No Power”? Yogananda’s mission to the West can be viewed only as a success. SRF claims that Yogananda personally initiated 100,000 students into yoga. His Autobiography has undoubtedly influenced a much greater number toward embracing Eastern mysticism. Like Vivekananda, Yogananda won a good measure of acceptance and admiration from the cultural establishment. In 1927 he even received an audience with an enthusiastic President Calvin Coolidge. His 32-year mission in the United States helped pave the way for an unending cavalcade of Eastern gurus who have since found a ripe mission field on American soil.

Yogananda died of heart failure in Los Angeles on 7 March 1952. SRF cites a notarized letter from the director of the Los Angeles Forest Lawn Memorial Park that affirms that Yogananda’s body exhibited “a phenomenal state of immutability.” At the time of his burial 20 days after his death, “there was no reason to say that his body had suffered any visible physical disintegration at all.”⁸ Thus SRF concludes that “death had no power of disintegration over this incomparable devotee of God.”⁹

SRF AFTER YOGANANDA

After Yogananda’s passing, “self-made business magnate” J. L. Lynn (renamed Rajas Jana Kananda by Yogananda) assumed the presidency of SRF. Less than three years later Lynn also died, and SRF’s leadership passed to “the Reverend Mother Sri Daya Mata.” It was in 1931 that Daya Mata — then a 17-year old Mormon girl named Faye Wright — met Yogananda in Salt Lake City. She says after he cured her of a blood disease that had forced her to leave high school, she became a nun in the SRF Order. She has continued as president of SRF to this day.

Although three books bear her name and she regularly contributes to Self-Realization magazine, Daya Mata has maintained a low profile, faithfully promoting Yogananda’s teachings and executing his wishes. Under her leadership, SRF has expanded and charted a steady course. SRF lacks the visibility of some of the newer Eastern movements whose colorful and controversial leaders are still living or only recently deceased (e.g., Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation and the cult of the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). Nonetheless, SRF has demonstrated a staying power that most of the Eastern sects that have appeared on the Western scene since the mid-1960s can only envy (e.g., Guru Maharaj Ji’s Divine Light Mission, P. R. Sarkar’s Ananda Marga Yoga Society, and Swami Muktananda’s Sidha meditation movement).

Religious Life. Devotion is a central component of SRF religious life. The birth and, in some cases, death (mahasamadhi) anniversaries of the SRF gurus (not only Yogananda but also Jesus, Krishna, Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Yukteswar) are adoringly observed each year (“Offerings of flowers and a donation should be brought”¹⁰). Yogananda is devotedly referred to as “Master,” his spiritual presence is believed in and sought in a manner comparable to that of Jesus for the Christian, and virtually everything on which he left his mark at SRF’s Mount Washington Mother Center has been turned into a shrine. All of this is standard within the Hindu tradition of the guru-disciple relationship.¹¹

Regular meetings are held at SRF temples, ashram centers, fellowship centers, and meditation groups in various locations around the world (with a preponderance of ashram centers and temples in Southern California). Local SRF ministers give the same lecture around the world on Sunday mornings, and Thursday evening services consist of chanting, meditation, and a talk by the minister, with the exception of the third Thursday each month, when a “satsanga” is held in which previously submitted written questions are answered.

Much of SRF’s program, however, is conducted through the mail. The Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons indoctrinate the seeker in Yogananda’s eclectic teachings and prescribe a regimen of “energization exercises” (e.g., breathing exercises, physical tension and relaxation exercises, and mental exercises to develop powers of will and concentration), meditation techniques (withdrawing from sensory awareness so that one can hear the Divine Cosmic Motor of the Universe — om), abstinence from meat and intoxicants, and so on.

Regardless of religious affiliation, all persons who sincerely seek spiritual advancement are welcome to study the Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons. These sacred teachings constitute the formal religion of students who make Self-Realization Fellowship their Church. Initiation in the highest technique of meditation, Kriya Yoga, is the spiritual baptism of this Church, and is given when students establish church-membership affiliation with Self-Realization Fellowship.

Application for Kriya Yoga may be made after completing Steps I and II of the Lessons, a period of approximately one year if the Lessons are received weekly, as is the case with the majority of students. Initiation in Kriya Yoga signifies acceptance of the holy guru-disciple relationship between the student and Paramahansa Yogananda. Kriya Yogis pledge their spiritual loyalty to the Gurus and to Self-Realization Fellowship.¹²

For men and women who are free of family obligations, the invitation is extended to join the SRF Order, a monastic community. Renouncing worldly pleasures and entanglements for a life wholly devoted to God and Yogananda’s teachings, these monks and nuns abide by “vows of simplicity, obedience, chastity, and loyalty, persevering in meditation and humbly trying to improve.”¹³ Yogananda told his devotees that after he left his physical body they would be his body: his hands, feet, and speech.¹⁴ It is their goal to “quietly [radiate] a peace and divine love”¹⁵ that will make them “living examples of Guruji’s teachings and his spirit.”¹⁶ Indeed, the monks and nuns whom one encounters at the Mother Center and other SRF monasteries and retreats generally do seem peaceful, perhaps a little too much so (“blissed-out” or “spaced-out”), after spending years in monastic seclusion and hours every day “persevering in meditation.”

Bad Blood on the Mountain. Nonetheless, as New Times Los Angeles reports, a controversy over SRF’s plans to bring Yogananda’s corpse home to the Mother Center has lately hampered their endeavors to do credit publicly to their master.

In some ways it is as unlikely a squabble as can be imagined, involving a religious retreat known for its solitude, whose 100 or so monks and nuns, ever the quiet neighbors, devote many of their waking hours to prayer and meditation. Yet in attempting to get what it wants, the SRF has acted more like a heavy-handed real estate developer than the monastery next door. Besides trying to silence opponents by getting its slate of candidates elected to the neighborhood association, the church has turned to some of the most powerful influence peddlers in L.A. to spread its message at City Hall. With lobbying as well as with letter-writing and phone-call campaigns, the SRF tried to avoid producing an environmental impact report while naively seeking a quick rubber stamp of its preliminary plans. The tactic incensed many residents and galvanized the opposition. After long pretending not to have decided whether to even try to move the guru’s body into the shrine the church hopes to build, SRF officials — to no one’s surprise — announced last January their intent to do so. The public relations gaffe was soon compounded, however, when church representatives acknowledged that transferring the body had long been a part of its plans, as the organization’s literature for the last 40 years has implied. Since then, the SRF has struggled to convince critics that placing the body of a holy man, whose acolytes around the world conservatively number in the hundreds of thousands, atop crowded Mount Washington will have only a minimal effect on traffic. This, even though thousands of pilgrims flock to Forest Lawn to visit his crypt each year, with little promotion by the church and nothing comparable to the visitor center and 20,000-square-foot museum the SRF plans as part of its expansion.¹⁷

As to the exact size of Yogananda’s following, SRF does not disclose its membership number, but my guide on a recent tour of the Mother Center did affirm that growth in recent years has been “exponential.” This has necessitated the construction of a new administration building in addition to the 50-room former hotel building that has long served as SRF’s administrative center. SRF has members in 54 countries.

Yogananda has many followers outside of SRF as well. About 5,000 are members of a sect called Ananda, whose controversial leader, Donald J. Walters, a.k.a. Kriyananda, was a direct disciple of Yogananda. A long-standing feud between SRF and Ananda over copyright to Autobiography of a Yogi, a sexual scandal involving Walters and several female disciples, a resulting lawsuit brought by one of those disciples against Ananda and allegedly financed by SRF, and the complications all of this creates for SRF’s goal of moving Yogananda’s body to the Mother Center — along with scandals involving high-ranking SRF officials as well — are all detailed in the 1 July 1999 New Times Los Angeles article.

THE TEACHINGS OF SRF

As with all systems of yoga, experience is the essential ingredient in Yogananda’s religion. He orchestrated the regimen of exercises and techniques discussed above to produce particular experiences that he believed would result in self-realization. Nonetheless, Yogananda set forth a highly detailed and fairly consistent body of teachings that are preserved in numerous books and adhered to faithfully by SRF today.

God and the World. As we’ve seen, SRF’s most basic supposition is pantheism. They believe that ultimately nothing is real but God; all things are a part of God, in whom they find their true identity: “The Eternal Father, God…is the only Real Substance…and is all in all in the universe.”¹⁸

In keeping with neo-Vedanta tradition, Yogananda emphasized that God is both impersonal and personal. The impersonal is primary but the personal is also important: “Everything in essence is the ever-living Absolute who has become personal and visible to us for a time through this cosmos.”¹⁹

If God is the only real Substance, then it follows that the world as we know it is illusion. What then is the purpose of the world? Yogananda does not hesitate to offer an elaborate answer:

This world is God’s lila, or divine play. The Lord, it seems, like a little child, loves to play, and His lila is the endless variety of ever-changing creation.

I used to reason in this way: God was infinite omniscient Bliss; but, being alone, there was no one but Him to enjoy that Bliss. So He said, “Let Me create a universe and divide Myself into many souls that they may play with Me in my unfolding drama.” By His magical measuring power of maya He became dual: Spirit and Nature, man and woman, positive and negative….

….Look upon life as a movie, and then you will know why God created it. Our problem is that we forget to see it as God’s entertainment.

….Then this cosmic movie, with its horrors of disease and poverty and atomic bombs, will appear to us only as real as the anomalies we experience in a movie house. When we have finished seeing the motion picture, we know that nobody was killed; nobody was suffering.²⁰

Man. If God alone is real, it also follows that man (humanity) is an illusion. Man’s illusory existence is based on God’s own self-imposed ignorance:

Ignorance, which produces the idea of separate existence of self…is the source of Ego, the son of man.²¹

When the developments of ignorance are stopped, man gradually comprehends the true character of this creation of Darkness, Maya, as a mere play of ideas of the Supreme Nature on His own Self, the only Real Substance.²²

Furthermore, if God is the underlying essence of all creation, then man’s true essence must also be divine: “Just as there appear many images of the one sun, when reflected in a number of vessels full of water, so is mankind apparently divided into many souls, occupying these bodily and mental vehicles, and thus outwardly separated from the one universal Spirit. In reality, God and man are one, and the separation is only apparent.”²³

Christ. It is easy for SRF to confess that Jesus Christ is God, since they believe there is nothing that is not God. By the same token, however, it is impossible for them to grant that He is the unique incarnation of God, the only begotten Son of God. Rather, He is lauded as one of many yogis who achieved “Christ Consciousness” through a process of self-mastery:

We are unique channels, for it lies within our power to make ourselves narrower or wider….Some choke the channel of their lives with the mud of accumulated ignorance….There are others who keep on digging, widening, deepening the channels of their lives by self-discipline and culture, thus inviting an ever larger volume of God-wisdom to pass through. Jesus the Christ was one of the greatest channels through which the cosmic wisdom flowed. We must remember that each channel is finite and has its limitations. I daresay there shall never be born a prophet who can contain or exhaust the whole ocean of truth in his short span of life. Other prophets shall always come to express truth anew. Though infinite truth must thus suffer measurement even at the hands of prophets, these great souls nevertheless serve to widen the channels of smaller lives….Jesus the son of man lifted himself to the state of being a son of God. That is, he rose above ordinary human consciousness and entered the cosmic Christ Consciousness, the pure reflection of God present in all creation. When St. John said that “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God,” he meant that anyone who could receive that Christ Consciousness, who could increase the capacity of his consciousness to hold that infinite ocean of truth, would become, as did Jesus, a son of God — one with the Father.²⁴

Salvation. Man is thus saved when he sheds his ignorance of his divine Identity and attains Christ Consciousness. Salvation equals self-realization:

When all the developments of Ignorance are withdrawn…man becomes Sannyasi, free, or Christ the Savior.²⁵

Self-realization is the knowing on all levels of our being — body, mind, and soul — that we are now in possession of Divinity and therefore need not pray that it come to us; that we are not merely near God at all times but that His omnipresence is our omnipresence; and that He is just as much our essential life now as He ever will be. All we have to do is improve our knowing.²⁶

As do virtually all Hindus, SRF believes that man’s progress toward salvation is determined by karma (the moral law of cause and effect) and reincarnation.²⁷

The Relationship of Hinduism to Christianity. One of the “Aims and Ideals of Self-Realization Fellowship — as set forth by Paramahansa Yogananda” is “to reveal the complete harmony and basic oneness of original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ and original Yoga as taught by Bhagavan Krishna; and to show that these principles of truth are the common scientific foundation of all true religions.”²⁸ Although SRF stresses the unity of all religions, in its own words it “gives emphasis primarily to Christianity and to the Yoga teachings of India. The life of Jesus Christ receives special attention and devotion in Self-Realization Fellowship teachings. Many persons who have been skeptical of the divinity of Christ have had their doubts dispelled forever through SRF teachings.”²⁹

In the SRF visitor center, a red-letter King James Version of the Bible is on sale along with SRF and Hindu literature. In the Mother Center’s administrative building lobby, Hindu idols and religious imagery share decorative space with the Christian cross and images of Jesus and Mary. In keeping with its mission to bring yoga to the “Christian” West, SRF is — in outward appearance — a unique Hindu-Christian hybrid.

SRF IN LIGHT OF THE BIBLE

Although SRF’s attempts to promote unity between Hinduism and Christianity may appear commendable on the surface, such a goal can be achieved only by subtly glossing over critical, irreconcilable differences between the two. In the end, we find Hinduism unscathed by the transaction, while Christianity becomes stripped of its defining and distinguishing characteristics.

Yogananda and Yukteswar presuppose pantheistic esotericism in the Bible and then find it there, showing no respect whatsoever for historical context or the author’s intended meaning. They presume that their tradition of Advaita Vedanta mysticism is surely the esoteric core of all true religion and therefore do not allow the biblical tradition to prove to them otherwise.

This is certainly no less dogmatic and exclusive than orthodox Christianity. Unlike orthodoxy, however, it is untruthful and manipulative. By claiming an agreement that does not in fact exist, it simply redefines the biblical tradition out of existence, retaining the characters and terminology of Christianity while filling them with Hindu content.

Beware the “Other Jesus.” The most significant example of this is Jesus Himself. SRF claims affinity with Jesus, but this does not of itself prove that Jesus has affinity with them. It is crucial to note that the apostle Paul condemned those who preach “another Jesus whom we have not preached,” labeling them “false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:4, 13–14). Clearly, not all who speak reverently of Jesus are to be trusted, for there are counterfeit Jesuses manufactured by diabolical forces for the purpose of promoting spiritually lethal deception.

How then can we know the real Jesus from the counterfeit? Yogananda claimed to know “original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ.” But the only historically reliable source of information on Jesus is in the New Testament documents. The portrayal of Jesus we find there is based on credible eyewitness accounts and not on legends that developed in subsequent centuries, such as we find in the Gnostic gospels or modern occult literature. The New Testament Jesus claims total continuity with the God of the Jewish people (e.g., John 4:22; 8:54), not just on some esoteric level as we find in SRF materials, but in a plain and straightforward (exoteric) manner, according to a faithful and literal (as context warrants) interpretation of the Old Testament text (e.g., Matt. 5:17–19; John 10:35).

While Jesus totally identified Himself with the God of Israel, the God of Israel completely dissociated Himself from the objects of worship in nonbiblical religions (e.g., Deut. 32:16–17, 21; 13:6–10; Ps. 96:5; 2 Kings 5:15; 19:15). Hinduism, with its pantheon of idols, most assuredly fits into that category.

Pantheism by definition is the identification of the creation with the Creator. This is the essence of idolatry and is an abomination in the sight of the biblical God (Exod. 20:2–5; Rom. 1:18–25), who created the world out of nothing, not out of Himself, by the irresistible power of His Word (Gen. 1:1; Ps. 33:6–9; 148:1–6; Heb. 11:3; Rom. 4:17). The world as God created it is therefore “good” (Gen. 1:31), not “darkness,” and what goes on in it is profoundly meaningful and significant. It is not a “play” (lila) that a pitiful solitary deity engages in his own mind to keep himself amused, as if it would be “enlightened” to view the Holocaust as “entertainment” in which ultimately “nobody was killed, nobody was suffering.”

Understood in their historical context, the teachings of Jesus bear no resemblance to Eastern mysticism. His claims were as exclusive as were those of the God revealed in the Old Testament (e.g., John 10:7–10; 14:6). Yogananda and Yukteswar’s attempts to handle these passages by separating the man Jesus from the “Christ Consciousness within creation” have no basis within the biblical text itself. From its first usage, the term the Christ (i.e., the Messiah) always referred to a specific prophesied Deliverer and King of Israel (e.g., Dan. 9:25–26; cf. Luke 2:11). In the first century A.D., the proto-Gnostics — drawing on the rich smorgasbord of pagan (including Indian) ideas available in the Roman Empire — sought in a similar esoteric manner and for similar mystical purposes to distinguish between Jesus and the “Christ.” The apostle John, who was Jesus’ “beloved disciple” (John 13:23; 21:7, 20–24) and who was commissioned by Jesus along with the other apostles to uphold the purity of His teachings (Matt. 28:18–20), labeled such teachers “antichrist” for so doing (1 John 2:22–23).

Let No One Take You Captive. Unlike any other world religion, Christianity is all about its founder. For the believer, the historic personage known as Jesus of Nazareth is not just a way-shower but the Way (John 14:6); not just a teacher of truth, salvation, and sanctification (the way to righteousness) but Truth, Salvation, and Sanctification themselves (John 14:6; Heb. 5:9; 1 Cor. 1:30); not just one who points the way to eternal life but Eternal Life itself (1 John 1:2). Indeed, to the Christian, Jesus Christ is nothing less than the Beginning and the End — the source, meaning, and goal of life (Rev. 22:12–13; Phil. 1:21). To have direct experience of God can only mean experiencing a vital relationship with this Person, and through Him with the unseen Father, through the agency of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7–15; 17:25–26). Oneness with God must be understood as a oneness of will and not of essence, since God is not only ontologically separate from His creation but also — unlike Brahman — personal and moral in His unmanifest as well as His manifest nature (Exod. 3:14; 34:6; Lev. 19:2; Ps. 86:5).

This overwhelming biblical evidence is supported both by reason (which must presuppose dualities and not Oneness even to operate) and by intuition (in that man cannot escape a personal and moral apprehension of reality — even Brahman is inconsistently spoken of in personal and moral terms). We must therefore conclude that the common mystical occurrence of supposed oneness with a Universal Consciousness in differing religions and cultures is not evidence of a divine spark within man and a common core to all religions. It rather speaks of fallen man’s profound capacity for spiritual delusion, which takes specific universal forms that were determined by its universal, primeval origin (Gen. 3:4–5). As the apostle Paul warned, “See to it that no-one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the Head over every power and authority” (Col. 2:8–10, NIV; emphases added).

Although Yogananda thought it impossible for Jesus or any other finite being to contain the fulness of God, he did not recognize the infinite Person with whom he was dealing. Since all the fulness of deity dwells in Christ, the believer finds everything he or she needs (“you have been made complete” — v. 10, NASB) in a relationship with Him. There is no need or reason to look anywhere else. It is no more possible to go “beyond Jesus” than it is possible to go “beyond God,” and thus Yogananda’s statement that other prophets would come to add to the truths that Jesus taught is biblically false (Heb. 1:1–3).

Whether or not Yogananda’s body showed signs of decay at the time of his burial, he is still in his crypt. The tomb of Jesus, on the other hand, is empty. Sin (moral guilt), not ignorance, is the cause of our separation from God (Isa. 59:1–2), and the resurrection of Jesus demonstrates that His sacrificial death on our behalf was efficacious for removing that guilt and thus restoring our relationship with God (Rom. 4:25; 1 Cor. 15:17). It further demonstrates that He is the One on whom God has set His seal of approval (Acts 4:10–12; 17:31; cf. John 6:27). By conquering man’s ultimate enemy, death, He has shown He is capable of effectively dealing with all of our most basic and fundamental problems (1 Cor. 15:54–57; Rom. 8:31–39). As Simon Peter replied when Jesus asked the disciples if they too would forsake Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). No one else can make that promise good, including Yogananda.

1 An interesting account of how conditions in nineteenth-century India gave rise to neo-Vedanta can be found in R. C. Zaehner, Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), ch. 7.

2 “Neo-Vedanta,” International Forum for Neo-Vedantists (http://members.xoom.com/drcsshah/neovedanta/aboutsite.html).

3 For an informative, albeit highly technical, discussion of Vedanta and neo-Vedanta distinctives, see “Dasanami Sampradaya — The Monastic Tradition,” on The Advaita Vedanta Home Page — Advaita and Advaitins Today (www.advaita-vedanta.org/avhp/ad-today.html).

4 Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1972), 265.

5 Ibid., 264. For a critique of the claim that Eastern meditative practices are scientific see my book, A Crash Course on the New Age Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), ch. 2.

6 Raja (“royal”) Yoga was “formally systematized in the second century B.C. by the Indian sage Patanjali.” (Undreamed of Possibilities: An Introduction to Self-Realization Fellowship [Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1982], 8.) Raja Yoga incorporates disciplines of body, will, and mind and thus is considered a comprehensive path to union with the Absolute. Many yogis teach Raja Yoga, whereas Kriya Yoga is specifically associated with Lahiri Mahasaya.

7 Ibid., 9.

8 Yogananda, 575.

9 Ibid., 571.

10 “Self-Realization Fellowship Church of All Religions Calendar of Services: January — February — March 1978” (flyer).

11 Yogananda expounds on this in his The Divine Romance (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1986), 377.

12 “Introduction to Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons,” Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons,

vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1956), 2.

13 Mrinalini Mata, “A Life of Consecration,” Self-Realization, Fall 1999, 64.

14 Ibid., 63.

15 “The Monastic Journey,” Self-Realization, Fall 1999, 63.

16 Mrinalini Mata, 64.

17 Ron Russell, “Return of the Swami,” New Times Los Angeles Online, 1 July 1999 (newtimesla.com).

18 Swami Sri Yukteswar, The Holy Science (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1984), 21.

19 Yogananda, Divine Romance, 375.

20 Paramahansa Yogananda, Journey into Self-Realization: Discovering the Gifts of the Soul (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1997), 31–33.

21 Yukteswar, 94.

22 Ibid., 41.

23 Paramahansa Yogananda, The Science of Religion (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1982), 20–21.

24 Yogananda, Divine Romance, 335–36.

25 Yukteswar, 42.

26 Paramahansa Yogananda, quoted in Why a “Church of All Religions”? (SRF pamphlet, n.d.), 6.

27 See, e.g., Yogananda, Divine Romance, 372; Yogananda, Autobiography, 199.

28 Ibid., 573.

29 Why a “Church of All Religions”? 4.

Rajneesh came to the U.S. in 1981 and, the following year, established a commune and would-be city known as Rajneeshpurum near rural Antelope, Oregon. The com­mune grew rapidly and became home to about 4,000 of his followers. It was there that many scandalous stories emerged about the sect and its practices. To many, Rajneesh is best remembered for his collection of 93 personal Rolls Royces he kept at the commune.

After pleading guilty to two Counts of immigration fraud, Rajneesh was deported and became an international pariah. He was rejected from settling in Asia, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. He resettled in Poona, India in 1986 with a smaller number of his disciples. New bizarre stories soon sur­faced. In 1988 he changed his name to Gautama the Buddha, and in late 1989 again to Osho, or “enlightened one.”

Rajneesh, bald, bearded and photogenic, first attained major media exposure in the U.S. in early 1978 when Time magazine featured an article on the guru entitled “‘God Sir’ at Esalen East.” Time reported that the charismatic guru had come into vogue among cer­tain celebrities and prominent apostles of the “human potential move­ment,” who were joining thousands of other spiritual seekers in mak­ing the pilgrimage to Rajneesh’s ashram (religious commu­nity/monastery) in Poona, India. Rajneesh’s appeal stemmed partly from his use of “tantric yoga” (involving nudity and free sex) in his ashram, and partly from his incorporation of a wide variety of popu­lar “psychospiritual” therapies and techniques.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s Rajneesh’s acclaim continued to spread within the “new age movement” in America, Great Britain, Germany, and virtually every free-world, industrialized nation. With as many as 6,000 westerners flooding Poona at a time, the ashram population rose to 10,000 while 500 Rajneesh centers were estab­lished in 32 nations by orange garbed san­nyasins* returning from Poona to their home­lands. Rajneesh now has 250,000 followers, whose average age has been estimated to be as high as 35. Among those who have made the trek to Poona include the Prince and Princess of Hanover, the Marquis of Bath, actor Terence Stamp, singer Diana Ross, and Ruth Carter Stapleton.

Rajneesh’s discourses, which were delivered daily in Poona, have been transcribed into 300 books and diaries which average between $15 and $20 in cost. Video cassettes of each dis­course range in price between $50 and $170. Ashram income during the last year in Poona is believed to have been between $5 and $7 million. As a follower stated in the film Ashram, a documentary on the Rajneesh cult, “The organization understood long ago what powerful energy money is.” Rajneesh, who owns two Rolls Royces and two airplanes, be­lieves that “spirituality is the luxury and privi­lege of the rich.”¹

Rajneesh is a self-proclaimed spiritual rebel who thrives in the controversy that he has cre­ated, particularly in India, by his “trainings” (such as the “tantra” group, and the often violent “encounter” group) and his denuncia­tions of respected religious and political leaders. Tal Brooke, a former devotee of the popular Indian guru Sai Baba, after visiting Poona effectively summed up the scene there:

An object of media fascination and horror, Rajneesh is known for his bi­zarre revelations on sex. He has con­structed a vision of the New Man that repudiates all prior norms and tradi­tions. Man, by Rajneesh’s thinking, is the hedonist-god, fully autonomous (barring the inner voice of Rajneesh), and free to carve out the cosmos in his own image. He is the sovereign pleasure seeker, self-transcender, who owes nobody anything. The family is anathema, children extra trash. And so long as the Neo-sannyasin has the money the fun ride continues. After­ward, however, he or she is usually a non-functional casualty. Homicides, rapes, mysterious disappearances, threats, fires, explosions, abandoned ashram children now begging in Poona’s streets, drug busts — all done by those amazing hybrids in red who believe they are pioneering new and daring redefinitions of the word “love.”

Christians working in a Poona asylum confirm such accounts, adding the breakdown rate is so high the ashram has wielded political power to suppress reports.²

Bhagwan’s practice of readily initiating every westerner who came to him into the order of Sannyas infuriated many Hindu traditionalists, who uphold the ancient belief that the title of “swami” can only be conferred upon one who has spent years in preparative study and meditation. Rajneesh’s reply was that “Westerners want things quickly, so we give it to them right away.”³ Rajneesh further offend­ed the more ascetic Hindus by his advocacy of self-indulgence and sensuality. “He urges his disciples not to deny their thoughts, feelings, and urges, but instead to experience them ful­ly, as stepping stones on the spiritual path.”⁴

Bhagwan has often been open concerning his hostility toward established religions. “This is a revolution.…I am burning scriptures here, uprooting traditions.…unless I am shot I’ll not be proved right.”⁵

By early 1981 threats on Bhagwan’s life were indeed being made. The ashram was now heavily guarded, and no one was allowed to enter without first being searched for weapons. Then an ashram warehouse was set on fire, and an explosion was set off near the cult’s health center. When an actual attempt on Raj­neesh’s life was made in February, ashram of­ficials hastened a process (which had already been initiated) of looking for a new head­quarters.

Concurrent with these events, on May 1 of last year Rajneesh entered into what was term­ed a new and ultimate stage of his work — silence. Since 1977 Rajneesh had been an­nouncing that he would one day stop talking, on the grounds that only through silence could his real message be communicated.

Then during the same month the U.S. Con­sulate in Bombay issued Bhagwan a tourist visa, which opened the door for him to stay in America for at least a year. On June 1 he secretly flew to New York with 17 of his closest disciples. His followers in Poona were cast into a state of great disorientation upon hearing the news of their master’s departure, and many suicide reports were made. The Poona ashram was closed down, and a small meditation cen­ter was left in its place to accommodate Indian disciples.

Since Rajneesh left Poona his followers have spread throughout the west. “In Europe the present strategy is to establish ‘Sacred Cities.’ The European Newsletter, issue 8, 1981 says: ‘A Sannyasin city is to be set up in each major European country.. Bhagwan has suggested that the cities should be self-supporting, alter­native societies, which will be models of san­nyas.’ So far four cities have been planned: in England, Holland, Germany, and Italy.”⁶

In America, plans were undertaken to cre­ate the ultimate sacred city, one fit for the “master” himself. On July 10 the Chidvilas Raj­neesh Meditation Center of Montclair, New Jersey purchased the Big Muddy Ranch (where the John Wayne movie Big Muddy was filmed) for $6 million ($1.5 million of it in cash) from an investment company in Amar­illo, Texas. The land, near Antelope, Oregon, covers more than 100 square miles. The Cen­ter also managed to lease 14,889 acres in the same area from the Bureau of Land Management.

Three hundred sannyasins from western countries soon flocked to the Big Muddy, and in September they jubilantly welcomed their master to his new home. “There is no doubt it is already the world’s largest ashram, geograph­ically speaking,” the Los Angeles Times said. Expenses are reportedly running at $1 million a month.

Not long after the Big Muddy Ranch was purchased, plans were announced to build “America’s first enlightened city,” to be called Rajneeshpuram (expression or city of Rajneesh). The Rajneesh Foundation International (headed by “Ma” Sheela Silverman, a 32-year-old Indian disciple) projected that the city would encompass roughly three square miles, support a population of 1,500 to 2,000, and be self-sufficient within three years.

On November 4 the Wasco County Com­mission voted two-to-one to allow an election to be held May 18 to determine if the Big Muddy property should be incorporated as a city. Since the only ones allowed to vote in such an election are those who live on the site (in this case the Rajneesh cult), the outcome was certain to be in favor of incorporation. The One Thousand Friends of Oregon, an en­vironmentalist group, sought to have the County Commission’s approval overruled by Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), but LUBA decided it lacked juris­diction to take such an action. Then on May 18 no one was surprised when the disputed election resulted in 154 votes in favor of the in­corporation of Rajneeshpuram, and none op­posed. The One Thousand Friends are now petitioning the state Board of Appeals to re­verse Wasco County’s action and thus block the actual development of the city.

In the meantime, under the leadership of the pugnacious Sheela Silverman, the sann­yasins have responded to this opposition to their plans with a bold attempt to take over the city of Antelope and turn its municipal powers to their use (such as providing authorization to operate a printing plant and other services needed by the growing population of sann­yasins). The “Orange People” (as Rajneesh’s disciples are sometimes called) now own and operate the town’s only gas station, and the “Antelope Store and Cafe,” whose name they’ve changed to “Zorba the Buddha” (the store’s menu is now strictly vegetarian).

Fearing that once the sannyasins gained control of the city council they would raise taxes to facilitate the cult’s operations, longtime Antelope residents called or a spec al election April 15 to decide whether to disin­corporate the town. However, Oregon law al­lows anyone who has resided in the state or 20 days or more to vote in a city’s election the same day he or she takes up residence in the town. On April 15 the established citizenry managed to muster 42 votes for disincorpora­tion (Antelope’s official population is listed as 40), but the votes of 55 very new residents thwarted their efforts. A court challenge of the outcome is likely.

Ashram life in Oregon is different than it was in Poona. Now that Rajneesh has gone in­to “silence,” he no longer conducts the twice-daily meetings with his disciples that were the focal point of life in Poona. Rajneesh does speak to Sheela Silverman and his personal nurse, however, and in this manner a chain of command has been constructed which affords the sannyasins little or no direct contact with their master. He may be seen, however, taking joyrides around the property with his nurse. Life reports that “he has already crashed into a cement truck,”⁷ and New Age magazine in­forms us that at an Antelope City Council meeting “Francis Dixon, a city counselor, chimed in that Bhagwan himself is a menace, driving around on their roads in his Rolls Royce at over 70 miles per hour; already, noted Dixon, he has ended up in a ditch three times.”⁸

In northeastern Oregon, as it was in Poona, the Rajneesh cult has provoked a crescendo of responses ranging from curiosity, to concern, to alarm. The unusual orange clothing worn by the sannyasins, their advocacy of a radically unrestrained (im)morality, and the numerous unconventional (and, to many people, repuls­ing) facets of their beliefs and lifestyle will hardly allow them to meld unobtrusively into the cultural milieu of their rural, provincial surroundings. It seems likely that the tension and hostility between those inside and those outside the ashram will continue to grow in the Antelope area, just as it did in Poona. Accompanying this may be a radical internalization in which the cult severs itself from almost all contact with the outside world, and focuses in­tently upon realizing its own spiritual and community aspirations.

What are these aspirations? Even the brief­est exposure to Rajneesh’s teachings makes it explicitly clear that the spirituality he advocates is in every respect hostile to the Chris­tian faith. Consider the following samplings from his discourses.

You can be a Christ: Why be a Christian?⁹

Let me be your death and resurrection.¹⁰

Nobody is a sinner. Even while you are in the darkest hole of your life, you are still divine: you cannot lose your divinity. I tell you, there is no need for salvation, it is within you.¹¹

….disobedience is not a sin, but a part of growth.¹²

God is neither a he nor a she….if you say he is a she, I will say he is a he and if you say he is a he, I will say he is a she….whatever your belief is, I’m going to destroy it….¹³ (emphasis ours)

The spirituality into which Rajneesh is lead­ing his disciples is the self-deification of eastern mysticism, and at the same time it is a spiritu­ality that cannot be defined, experienced, or maintained apart from the guru. As an uni­dentified former sannyasin describes the Poona experience: “The ashram is a convent, a temple, a therapy — the whole ashram-life is a therapy, not only the groups: every moment you are pulled and pushed, towards something you don’t know, towards the unknown, the di­vine — and towards Bhagwan. Each day you come nearer and nearer to him — and each day you become more and more dependent on him.”¹⁴

Because his many “therapies” have been highly acclaimed by some in the human poten­tial movement, the majority of those who come to Rajneesh have many personal problems they hope he can resolve. Rajneesh tells them that the cause of all of their problems is their egos, and the solution to these conflicts is to surrender their egos to him. On a sign at the entrance to the meditation center in Poona read the words: “Shoes and minds are to be left here at the gate.” Rajneesh maintains that “Only those are accepted who surrender, only those are accepted who are utterly committed, who have fallen in love with me, who can trust and whose trust is unconditional, and absolute — they are accepted.”¹⁵ (emphasis ours)

The entire ashram program is designed to progressively weaken the participants’ egos un­til they surrender to Rajneesh. For example, one of the “therapies,” called centering, requires one to speak of himself in the third person for seven days, with the result that one begins to feel distant and separate from himself. Another training, intensive enlightenment, forces participants to do nothing for three days and nights but answer the question “Who am I?” The process leads one to see himself as miserable and unimportant. Soon his ego or sense of who he is begins to crumble and is re­placed by a feeling of oneness with everything, and dependence upon Bhagwan.

Life reports that Iha Vander Schulenberg, a young German who had been initiated by Raj­neesh in Poona, took part in “….a 10-day ordeal during which participants were hypno­tized and led back to childish, even infantile states of consciousness. In this condition of ex­treme vulnerability, potential disciples were urged to consider devoting their lives to the Bhagwan.”¹⁶

As each ashram session further breaks down the independent ego of the sannyasin, he final­ly becomes the mental slave of Rajneesh. When a follower reaches this point, he views any difficult thing Rajneesh asks him to do as a test of his commitment and fidelity to the guru. An Indian movie star who is a sannyasin said: “It’s a test or surrender, and surrendering yourself to the guru means doing anything and everything he asks you to. You understand that? You stop thinking for yourself. The guru does the thinking for you.”¹⁷

Through such absolute dependence on a human being, and surrender of the right to evaluate him critically, Rajneesh’s devotees forfeit qualities that are vital to personal growth and healthy adulthood. When two young English women were caught smuggling drugs in order to afford rooms — in the ashram (this means of producing income, along with prostitution, was not uncommon among san­nyasins in Poona), a psychologist called into the case told the court that “….those who left the sect were found to have regressed to the mental age of l2.”¹⁸

The atmosphere of brotherhood and play­fulness that prevails at the ashram, when com­bined with the “blissful” states of consciousness often achieved through the meditations and therapies, can lead the sannyasins to believe that their problems have been “transcended,” and that they have attained the psychological and spiritual “wholeness” Rajneesh promises. However, Tal Brooke speaks for many who have visited Poona and other Rajneesh centers when he says: “I strongly sense a terrible ob­scene gaping wound underneath this facade — a collective lacerated psyche.”¹⁹

When a group of people’s psyches remain fragmented and wounded, but they believe they’ve been healed; when they are still very much sinners and yet they are convinced they’ve become pure, some disturbing, fright­ening possibilities emerge. This is especially the case if the people involved disavow use of their rational minds as “unspiritual” and collec­tively connect themselves to one “supermind,” who is inevitably no more healthy nor perfec­ted than they. Speaking of the Rajneesh cult and cult patterns in general, Joshua Baran, a former Zen Buddhist monk, observes:

In this process devotees lose their natural alarm systems which tell them when things aren’t right. This is usu­ally a gradual process. This is how it is possible for Jonestown or the many other examples we’ve seen — how peo­ple end up doing blind, insensitive things to one another.”²⁰

With such references to Jonestown already being made, an eerie sense of irony was added to the unfolding Rajneesh story when it became known last year that Shannon Jo Ryan, daughter of the late congressman Leo Ryan, had become an active disciple of Rajneesh. In November, 1978, Leo Ryan was murdered in Jonestown, Guyana by followers of Jim Jones as he was completing an investigation of the Peoples Temple there. Life reports that Shan­non traveled to India to offer Rajneesh money collected from her father’s life insurance policy.²¹ She is now living in Oregon at Raj­neeshpuram, a fact which some of the neigh­bors in the Antelope area find foreboding. When the subject of parallels between Raj­neesh and Jim Jones was brought up, Shannon candidly acknowledged: “I’ve heard other peo­ple say if Bhagwan asked them to kill them­selves, they would do it. If Bhagwan asked them to kill someone else, they would do it. I don’t know if my trust in him is that total. I would like it to be and I don’t believe he would ever do that.”²² (emphasis ours)

Miss Ryan’s words are frequently echoed by other sannyasins. They acknowledge that the psychological structure of the cult is such that if Rajneesh were to order them to kill them­selves or others they would be obligated to do so. However, they are fully assured that Raj­neesh is essentially different than Jim Jones, and would never ask them to kill. Unfortu­nately, one cannot find a basis for this assur­ance in the ethical system that Rajneesh pre­scribes. In The Book of the Secrets, Volume One, Rajneesh tells his followers:

So remember this: whatsoever you are doing consciously, with alertness, fully aware, becomes meditation. Even if you kill someone consciously, while fully conscious, it is meditative. This is what Krishna was saying to Arjuna: “Do not be afraid. Do NOT be afraid! Kill, murder, fully conscious, knowing fully that no one is murdered and no one is killed….you are only destroying forms, not that which is behind the forms. So destroy the forms.” If Arjuna can be so meditatively aware, then there is no violence, No one is killed, no sin is committee.²³ (emphasis ours)

Rajneesh is clearly teaching here that since God is everything, and human beings are merely illusory forms of God, then if one, through meditation, can maintain awareness of this “truth” he may do what he wills to the “forms.” To a person in that state of mind no one is really being killed, and thus no sin is committed.

In the final analysis, the only reason the san­nyasins are so confident that Rajneesh will not lead them into disaster is that they have a subjective conviction that he is pure love” and therefore incapable of doing so. No doubt most of them have had little prior exposure to wiles of the many big-time and small-time cult leaders who can project an aura of love and spirituality while they mercilessly exploit their followers. Jim Jones was perceived by his fol­lowers as a loving father figure. Certainly Bhagwan is different from Jones, but it could be a fatal error to conclude that he therefore presents no danger. There is more than one way to be deceived; evil comes in many forms.

By the anti-christ, anti-human, anti-social message Rajneesh promotes, it is ominously evident that the spirit that so visibly drives him is capable of any evil thing. Needless to say, the discerning Christian fails to see the inher­ent goodness in Bhagwan to which his follow­ers naively entrust their souls. And, if we con­sider such firsthand observations of Rajneesh’s mental instability as those offered by Eckart Flother (see “Inside the Ashram,” this issue), the outlook for Rajneeshpuram becomes still more precarious.

If in Rajneeshpuram we do not have another major cult-related tragedy in the making, it will not be because it was prevented by any­thing in the group’s theological, ethical, or psy­chological structure (not to mention their phy­sical situation — located 20 winding miles from the nearest public road in the middle of the sparsely-populated Oregon desert). It might, however, be because Christians were praying, and alerting as many sannyasins and potential sannyasins as they could to the critical differ­ences between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the “gospel” of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Elliot Miller

1. “Guru Brings His Ashram to Oregon,” Russell Chandler and Tyler Marshall, Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1981, part 1, p. 14.

2. “Pied Piper of Poona,” Eternity, September, 1981, p. 14.

3. “God Sir’ at Esalen East,” Time, January 16, 1978, p. 59.

4. “Om, Om on the Range: Rajneesh in America,” Mark Roseland, New Age, January, 1982, p. 35.

5. This is a Revolution, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Videocassette, 18C236, December 28, 1980.

6. “The Master Will Not Speak Again,” Jens Johansen, New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. 5, Issue 3/4, December, 1981, p. 81.

7. “Shortcut to Nirvana,” Life, October, 1981, p. 78.

8. op. cit., p. 37.

9. The quote cited is the title of Videotape 18C144, September 2, 1980.

10. Discourses on the Sufi Way, quoted in the Victor Valley Daily Press, September 18, 1981, p. B3.

11. Sannyas, April, 1978, p. 18.

12. Jesus, Buddha: Their Days are Finished, Videocassette 18C321 and 18C322, March 7, 1981.

13. He or She? On Beliefs — The Book of the Books VI, Videocassette 18S133, April 22, 1980.

14. “No Ego, No I,” New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. IV, Issue 1/2, May, 1980, p. 15.

15. Rajneesh Foundation Newsletter, April, 1979, quoted in “No Ego. No I,” ibid.

16. “Shortcut to Nirvana,” op. cit., p. 80.

17. “Shoes and Minds Are to be Left at the Gate,” New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. III, Issue 1/2, July, 1979, p. 60.

18. “News — Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Sannyasins.” New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. IV, Issue 1/2, May, i980, p. 20.

19. “Pied Piper of Poona,” op. cit., p. 14.

20. “Guru Brings His Ashram to Oregon,” op. cit., p. 3.

21. op. cit., p. 76.

22. “Daughter of Rep. Ryan Is Follower of Indian Guru,” William Endicott, Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1981, part 1, p. 1.

23. p. 399.

Inside the Ashram: An Interview With Eckart Flother

In San Diego last November most of our Research staff par­ticipated in the 1981 Cult Summit Conference, which was a predominantly Christian gathering of “cult watchers” to share information and get to know one another. There we met Eckart Flother, a former follower of Bhagwan Shree Raj­neesh, who gave an interesting presentation on the Indian guru. Eckart, a German citizen, is currently a student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. In the following discussion with Forward Editor Elliot Miller, Eckart shares some valuable Insight into the Rajneesh cult that he has gained through personal involvement and subse­quent research.

FORWARD: Eckart, when did you join the Rajneesh commu­nity in Poona, and how long were you involved?

FLOTHER: I joined the ashram in Poona in March 1979, and was there during that month, and then from June to October of the same year.

What was it that drew you to Rajneesh?

Well, there are various reasons. First of all, after having been a very successful journalist in Germany, I felt that something was miss­ing in my life. So I took kind of a sabbatical in order to search for some other meaning in life than just making money, or writing stories about success and failure.

I traveled to India and was referred to Raj­neesh by various people who I knew from Europe, whose opinions I respected. I went to the ashram in Poona in order to find out what was going on there.

I found the master a very fascinating, char­ismatic man who gave answers to all of the questions of our lives. This was the first thing that attracted me.

Second, I found it interesting to meet spiri­tually-minded people who, on the average, were not dropouts, but were well-educated. These were people between the ages of 25 and 45, who created an environment of understanding, love, and charity on a pretty high level. It was a community which lived and worked together without competition. This, for me, was something totally new, an environment created by people who were trying to express a new kind of life.

Were you initiated?

Yes, I was.

What led you away from Rajneesh and to Jesus?

In July, right as I was getting more deeply involved with the ashram, I had a very extra­ordinary experience. On one of those hot, humid Indian nights filled with mosquitos, I was sitting in my hotel room and reading Rabi Maharaj’s book, Death of a Guru. Suddenly I saw a brilliantly shining being standing in the hotel room, and He said to me with a mighty voice, I want you to become my disciple.” I immediately understood that Jesus had called me, yet I really didn’t know what to do with it.

I went to Rajneesh and told him what had happened to me. As I was talking to him about this experience, I could feel a kind of very warm energy or light radiating from me and I saw that Rajneesh was very irritated, and even startled as he looked at me. He was unable to speak. At that moment I could see that he was not a master like Jesus Christ, as he claims. It was at this time that I decided to become a disciple of Jesus.

How is it that you came across Rabi Maharaj’s book?

My brother-in-law in Germany is a pastor, and he knows Rabi Maharaj. He said, “Since you are going to India you should know something about this man. Read this book when you have the time.” So I took the book with me in my bag and eventually read it in India.

I recall you mentioning in San Diego that there were 30 followers of Rajneesh who left the ashram with you. Could you describe what happened there?

First of all, I did not immediately stop wearing the special clothing worn by the sannyasins. After I realized that Rajneesh was deceiving people by claiming to be the Jesus of our day, or God incarnate, I decided that I had to find out what he is really doing and do a lot of research before I would leave. This would enable me to write a book about my experience. So I talked to the people from a new perspective.

About six weeks later, after I’d completed my research, I came in jeans and t-shirt again. Because by this time I’d become pretty well-known in the ashram, a lot of people began to talk to me on a very personal, intimate level. Suddenly I was drawn into the role of a counselor as they asked what happened to me. So I told them of my encounter with Jesus and explained to them what I had learned in the four or five weeks that followed the encounter. This caused them to start thinking and realizing what they were into. Christians in Poona provided them with places to stay, away from the ashram, and provided some with money and help so that they could go home. So, altogether there were around 30 people that left the ashram.

Could you give us a feeling for what your experience in Poona as a sannyasin was like?

I was very amazed at the time to find that being a disciple and belonging to an alterna­tive community felt very good. It seemed as though life in the ashram had no tension. There was no competition. We were all sur­rounded by fellow believers and our philosophy was that life should be playful. So the whole ashram was more or less a playful en­vironment for people who voluntarily abandoned the world.

And from my point of view today, I realize that the reality that was created in the ashram was a false reality, because it did not cope with the reality outside. It did not question why things in the world are going as they are, and it did not want to accept the fact that to live in reality means to struggle with the issue of being human — which means, I think, to deal with joy and despair. What we did was, in a way, to live a “blissed-out” life in a non-reality. I would now say that this was a deception.

Such systems are fabricated, synthe­tic realities which do not address the real causes of our problems in the first place and therefore, in the long run, can’t succeed in drawing a solution.

Yes, I would call it a mind-created reality which is similar to a reality experienced by people who are on drugs.

What areas of ministry does the Lord seem to be leading you into, and to what extent will this involve outreach to the followers of Rajneesh?

My experience has taught me that it is very difficult for an outsider to discern between what it means to follow the Lord in a Christian lifestyle, and to follow someone like Rajneesh, who claims to be the representative of God today. So my ministry, which I am preparing for right now, will certainly lead me to help people to understand the distinction between these “new age” religions and Christianity; to dis­cern what it means to develop a relationship with God; and how this is different from a relationship with a master, who is only human himself.

Could you give us a brief synopsis of Rajneesh’s personal history?

Rajneesh Chandra Mohan was born on the 11th of December, 1931, in a village in central India, the eldest in a family of five sisters and seven brothers. His childhood was overshadowed by the fact that his father, an unsuccessful businessman, was often on the road. The “father figure” in Rajneesh’s life was instead occupied by his grandfather, to whom he became very attached. His grandfather died when he was seven years old. This was a very traumatic experience for young Rajneesh. From then on he felt strangely attracted to the subject of death. In his 1979 diary (which is made public), it is reported that he followed after funerals as other children would follow circuses.

Rajneesh pursued his education and in 1957 obtained a Master of Arts in Philosophy. He proceeded to teach philosophy in two universities between 1957 and 1966.

In 1966, Rajneesh resigned from his ser­vice as a teacher in order to, as he puts it, concentrate on the wish of God. He felt called to work for the spiritual regeneration of humanity, which he feels is necessary in order to survive the holocaust which he is predicting and fearing.

Rajneesh then became a “master” and called himself “Acharya”* Rajneesh, and he walked and rode a donkey around India in various states in order to teach people that they have to change their lives and turn around in order to survive.

His mission wasn’t very successful, and in 1970 he was a tired and poor man who never­theless recognized that he possessed charisma and power. In Bombay he decided to gather people around him to whom he could teach his message. As more and more disciples flocked around him, the apartment where he lived was unable to accommodate them. Thus, in 1974 he moved to Poona, 120 miles south of Bombay, rented several houses, and founded his ashram. There he changed his name from Acharya to Bhagwan (which means God), designed orange robes and a wooden bead necklace for his disciples, and started the movement we are dealing with today.

About when did European and Ameri­can seekers begin coming to Rajneesh?

There were two stages. Those who weren’t Indians — Americans and Europeans — heard of him in the beginning of the ‘70s, so in Bombay he started with a handful of disciples. By the time he moved to Poona there were about 300 people around him. Then others who lived in Europe and America at that time heard about him, either by reading books or newspaper articles. Thus, the main flow from Europe and America to India took place in the mid-‘70s until the end of the ‘70s.

What are the most important concepts in Bhagwan’s philosophy?

Rajneesh is a monist, which means that he understands that the world, persons, and God are all one. There is no ultimate distinction.

Since to Rajneesh God is a process and not a personal being, he claims that we can experience God only by being, and not by thinking or believing. So basically he would say that we have all necessary knowledge in ourselves. What we have to seek is the place where that knowledge is buried. Reality, as we understand it, is only a pointer to this knowledge and truth.

So he teaches that we have to forget all of our concepts and belief systems about reality, because the most important thing is to find the nucleus within this reality which is true. It is a monistic belief system with gnostic* elements.

Rajneesh would describe the men and women of our age as unenlightened and ig­norant because they try to understand every­thing by their minds. The mind is extremely important in his philosophy. He claims it is leading us away from truth, and from God.

Like Gurdjieff,** he considers the unen­lightened man to be like a machine who is at war with himself, a person who is living in a world of duality. By “duality” he means the common assumption that God is someone other than oneself.

Now, he says whenever we overcome this duality, happiness and bliss will appear. This is based on the Indian doctrine of void, which suggests that we have to empty ourselves of all our preconceived ideas, thoughts, and pat­terns in order to be filled with the real truth, which is the truth of the Self. This doctrine of void is, as we know, foundational in Zen Buddhism, which also claims that we can be enlightened only when we first are emptied.

Third, Rajneesh believes that we can reach this enlightenment, which Hindus call samadhi, through sex. He teaches that sex is one of the moments in a person’s life in which he is totally insulated from the outside world and able to descend to the inner-most depth of his being.

To summarize, Rajneesh teaches his dis­ciples to leave the world, forget about their thoughts, and seek deep down for the hidden seed, which will then unfold the truth for them. He tells his disciples that they are all buddhas, or gods, and that they are only intellectually separated from this idea. They are not separated from the reality of it — they are only separated from the idea of it, because their minds are telling them that they are not gods. Rajneesh claims that he, as the master, is the gate and the mid-wife through which a person can abandon all points of reference in his mind and merge with the truth, “as a drop in the ocean.”

Now, these teachings are typical for an Indian guru. However, Rajneesh has his own special areas of emphasis. What he demands from his people includes the following: first, one must give up his past and future. He says that past and future are irrelevant because living occurs only in the here and now.

In order to do this (and this is his second command) one must become mindless. Raj­neesh believes that the way our world is organized, we will not be able to survive. This is because it is founded, as he would say, on competition, hatred, envy, and materialism. He feels that in the long run this will lead to a nuclear holocaust, and only if mankind is changing in terms of the “old man” changing into a “new man,” will the race survive. The “new man” has to be a mindless man, because only the mindless man will be able to cope with the “new age.” Thus, he says that since the ego needs to be nourished by activity, and since only passivi­ty can empty a person, a person has to aban­don his ego totally.

Fourth, all purpose must be denied. He says that no purpose can be fulfilled in life because existence is nonpurposive; it is just a play.

Fifth, the family must be forsaken. Raj­neesh believes that marriage is a bondage and a chain, and that the idea of the family is rotten — it has accomplished its purpose, and can consequently be abandoned. This also means that if there are children, they belong to the community.

Sixth, he says that to worship God or to believe in a God is stupidity, because there is no God as such. There is no God who exists as a person. He also says that God has never left his address. If you seek God, he says, you cannot find him. Since the guru is a gate to God, and you know his address, you just have to come to the guru. Consequently, this point would mean that we need to replace God with the guru.

The final point, which is the culmination of his philosophy, is that one must be God him­self, because he has a divine spark within that he must discover. Whenever one would be bothered by guilt or sin, Rajneesh would say that he needs to realize that nobody is a sinner because, being God, we have salvation in us. We have the divine potential, and should therefore not bother ourselves about sin, but become gods ourselves.

Shankara, who developed the philoso­phy that Rajneesh is promoting, gave a place in his system for devotion to a personal God on the road to ultimate union. But it sounds as though Raj­neesh is attacking devotion to a per­sonal God on any level, yet it sounds as though he is encouraging devotion to himself at the same time. Is that cor­rect? Does he encourage devotion and worship of himself?

He wouldn’t necessarily say, “Worship me,” yet the whole ashram movement is cer­tainly a devotion to him. He accomplishes things in a very subtle manner. His way of getting people to attend to him is by guiding their minds into a state of total disorientation, where after some time they feel they need him so desperately that they would rather worship him than try to cope with life without him. So he would not ask for personal devo­tion, but in effect what he is doing secures ex­actly that.

Do you feel that he has a psychologi­cal need f or this kind of attention and devotion?

Yes, definitely. He speaks very often of people who suffered from psychological deficiencies like his. He suffered from feelings of inferiority throughout his life, and talks very often about people like Adolf Hitler, Alexander the Great, and Joseph Stalin, who had similar problems. They coped with this complex as he does by an attitude of superiority.

Does he recognize that he himself has these kinds of characteristics?

Most probably not. When he talks about these people, he makes fun of them because he feels that they were not very successful in their missions. He feels that he has included a spiritual dimension that they did not attain, that his approach is the ultimate approach, and that therefore all of the power trips they were into can therefore be abandoned. Basically, what he is doing is the same thing on a different level, which makes it more dif­ficult for people to see.

Do you believe that he has consciously designed his program in such a way as to evoke psychological dependency upon him from his followers?

Yes, I would say so. For example, he uses an old Zen saying, “If you meet Buddha on the way, kill him.” I understand this to mean that a disciple chooses a master for a period of time in order to grow, and when he becomes mature he should part from him. If this former disciple should meet the master later on, it would be better to kill him before the master could speak. Rajneesh always says, “Before you would start talking to me, I would have killed you already.” So he is set­ting up a situation where there is no way to make it spiritually without him.

And a basic factor which needs to be understood about Rajneesh is that, unlike other masters, he has not yet settled upon a final way to help people find enlightenment. It has yet to be discovered. He has not yet mapped out how people can be guided to enlightenment, so he needs his followers for purposes of experimentation. He has to make his people dependent on him because he needs them, not just to satisfy his egoistic needs, but to experiment, to develop what he calls “the Psychology of the Buddha”; a way which helps people to become enlightened like a manual helps them to repair a car.

Does he feel that he is the singularly most important guru on the earth? Does he have a sense of mission to bring enlightenment to this age?

Yes. He feels that there have been many attempts in history to discover how the pro­cess of enlightenment can be readily effected. He very often quotes Gurdjieff and Ouspen­sky. He feels that these two were on the edge of figuring out how this can be performed. Now, they had a falling out, and didn’t finish their work. He feels that he is Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in one. He believes that he is the Buddha of our time — the only living master who will be able to guide people to enlightenment — and that this enlightenment will be the only way humanity can survive the holocaust.

Does he consider himself an avatar, an incarnation of God?

Yes, he considers himself an incarnation of God in the role of Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mahavira* and others.

What is his attitude toward other popular swamis or gurus such as and Muktananda and Sai Baba?

He considers them to be unsuccessful imi­tations true master. They try to do their job, but he certainly thinks that he is the only one who has the real, true mission. He makes fun of both of them.

What is his view of Jesus and the Bible?

He claims to respect and love Jesus, be­cause he feels that Jesus had a very important mission on earth which, unfortunately, nobody understood. He draws parallels between his life and that of Jesus because he feels that besides his 250,000 followers, the world is not really appreciating and under­standing him.

His view of the Bible is very different. He selects certain parables and sayings of Jesus and of the Bible to quote in his teachings. But he is using them to support a gnostic, or Hin­duistic, eastern world view. When quoting Jesus, he most frequently quotes the pseudo-gospel of Thomas, which has gnostic over­tones.

You have mentioned that Bhagwan disowns his own teachings and says, “Don’t hold me to what I said yesterday because I might contradict myself today.”

Yes, he believes that words as well as thoughts cannot describe reality or truth, and thus we should not stick to words. So he tells his disciples not to cling to his words, but rather to use them as a device for growth. His followers, as you can imagine, are sometimes very irritated by hearing a particular version of a story one day, and the next day a contra­diction of it.

But basically, he feels that to be a growing person one must not cling to any words, for the state of a growing human being necessitates not knowing where one is at or who one is. One of the basic illustrations he uses is that one has to be like a cloud in the sky, being thrown back and forth by the wind. Then one has a chance to grow. As long as one would cling to any theory, system, thoughts, or words, he would stop growing, and would hinder himself from discovering life.

The problem with that is that all along they are clinging to the assump­tion that the monistic world view is the correct belief, and they are applying their entire lives to pursuing the im­plications of that belief.

Yes. This is what he thinks and believes and he is, therefore, very limited.

Bhagwan constantly talks about love. Can you give us an idea of what this word means to him, and what love turns out to mean experientially among the sannyasins?

I would almost say that love is the second most frequently used word in the ashram. His teachings, his newsletters, everything starts and ends with the word “love.” Yet, it’s just an empty word. It is used in order to pretend something is there which is not. There is an element of caring within the ashram; people care for each other because they fulfill the need of community for each other. But one of the points of my criticism is that I never really found that people cared in a deep sense. It’s very superficial. So “love” is used as a label to cover up a superficiality which shows that the whole system is profane rather than loving.

Everybody is really very hedonistic in that they are seeking their own fulfillment, and part of that fulfillment is to be in a caring atmosphere. But as far as having a commitment to each other to a point of self-sacrifice, that is probably quite lacking there.

Right. Rajneesh would even instruct his followers when they would have a choice be­tween a situation where they could help each other, or a situation in which they could do something for themselves, that they should choose themselves.

An example of this would be when women became pregnant (which, of course, happens very often in the ashram). They are advised to either abort, or if they are among Ra­jneesh’s closer disciples, to get sterilized. The rationale he offers for this is that all the energy you have is needed for your personal growth, so you should not share your energy with even a child or your partner. It should all be used for yourself.

Have you seen any examples of san­nyasins being “blissed-out” to the ex­tent of being completely incapable of showing a proper concern when some­one else is suffering or being In any way injured or abused?

Yes. I had various experiences myself and, I have to admit, was in a state of being ‘bussed-out,” too. Let me give you a few cases as examples.

The ashram was guarded very heavily by strong Germans, and very often I saw that beggars or Indian people came to the ashram in order to get help, food, or alms. They were always kicked out in a very rough manner. Nobody would feel bad about it. On the con­trary, most people felt it was justified because they were not “selected” or “elected.” Bhag­wan even states that only rich people can be enlightened.

Second, I once observed one of the group leaders take a Canadian woman who was mourning over the death of her parents and force her to have sexual intercourse with him in front of the group. Nobody reacted as though this was something unusual. On the contrary, especially after the group leader told her all she needed was sex, people were very satisfied with it.

But more serious are cases of violence and rape which occurred very often in the ashram. I was a witness of an event where a girl was raped, and I tried to intervene with two Swiss people. We were rejected by the group leader because he said it was not our business, and in any case, she needed it.

In general, the blissed-out state is the common state in the ashram. It seems as if these people are always floating two feet above the ground.

So you would view the attainment of this bliss as being a sort of dehumanizing, desensitizing process?

Definitely. I would say it is dehumanizing in two ways.

First of all, a person fails to properly experience what is going on in his environment and is not sensitive to react as a human being should.

Additionally, it is dehumanizing in the sense of how it affects a person’s life. He is somewhat like a puppet, almost an apathetic creature who is just trying to satisfy his basic needs while the rest of his energy is being used to glorify the master.

It seems like the end result of Bhagwan’s instruction to “leave your minds at the gate” is that he ends up becoming the effective mind of the entire ashram. It is he who is doing the thinking. He is taking that function — that necessary capacity of humanness — away from the sannyasins.

Yes. He is the super-mind, the one who knows. He always stated this very clearly when he used to lecture every morning for 1½ hours. He would say to his disciples, “Whatever you do is wrong.” This leads people to the point where they want to give up thinking, because it is too much to always be wrong. But on the other hand, he tells them, “Whenever you let me enter your lives, I will do the work which is needed.” So he asks these people to give up, to surrender totally to his mind, that the work of enlightenment can be done.

So despite the intellectual attractive­ness of what he has put together, and the fact that many thinkers are drawn to him, we are apparently dealing with a cult situation with grave potential for devastation because people are handing their minds over to someone who, as you have described, has definite schizophrenic tendencies.

I know psychiatrists who have diagnosed in Rajneesh a paranoid, schizophrenic psychological condition which can be traced back to his childhood and his behavior ever since.

An interesting point concerning these intellectuals that are drawn to him is that I think most of them have also had some traumatic experiences, and thus cannot bridge the gap between their vocational and emotional lives. They may have schizoid tendencies themselves.

Rajneesh, by his therapies, is helping them to make contact with themselves in ways that would be too painful on their own. Also, Rajneesh’s entertaining way of teaching and lecturing appeals to many intellectuals.

The big potential for a disastrous develop­ment lies firmly in the fact that he needs to have more and more followers in order to feed his ego.

Second, he has promised his disciples to fulfill his mission, so he feels committed. And since he is ailing and becoming more and more sick, he feels pressured to go on and accomplish his mission.

Third, I would think that as the pressure from the outside is increasing, he will create a “closed shop” situation in Oregon where he will try to perform what he has promised. I fear that this will end in disaster.

Could you describe what his physical problems are?

The Rajneesh Meditation Center in Montclair, New Jersey, published a state­ment that “he is suffering from severe allergic and digestive disorders, which include asthma and diabetes complicated with the dislocation of two lumbar discs.”

Is it true that since January of 1979, Rajneesh has forbidden all violence in the therapies?

I have a copy of the press release that says that violence is forbidden. This was a reaction to complaints from the outside by parents and others.

Yet, violence did not cease within the groups. On the contrary, the only thing that really was changed was that in the well-known encounter group, people did not fight without protective covering. They now were to have boxing gloves, cushion-covered sticks, and so forth. The idea was to diminish the effects of fighting, but the fighting itself didn’t stop at all.

So to your knowledge, is the fighting continuing to this day?

I don’t know what is happening today I only have reports from people who are attending courses in America. There is not as much violence going on in terms of beating each other, but the general tendency in the group is to act out suppressed emotions and feelings which can sometimes only be expressed by becoming violent, or by using violent sexual means. This is going on, and I would say that only some patterns have changed, but not the basic philosophy which is behind it.

Why are people attracted to Rajneesh?

Well, besides his teachings that are attract­ing some people who have not found answers to their questions in our society and conven­tional belief systems, I think the major attraction is for people who are suffering from various emotional disturbances. After spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on various therapies without being cured, they find that the therapy techniques combined with eastern meditation techniques that Rajneesh is using are very effective.

Besides this, most of his group leaders are psychic. Even if somebody does not intend to join Rajneesh at first, things can quickly change if he is told in workshops what his basic problems are so that within one or two days, he is seemingly resolving problems he has suffered from for years. This is very convincing for the person, and also for the onlookers.

Now, what these people do not realize is that this instant opening of a person leads to an injury which has two effects.

First of all, it is true that the problem that the person is suffering from is being hit or reached, but it is not being worked through. As a result, the person is opened and is now extremely vulnerable to the influence of Rajneesh. They are open for surrender to him.

Second, by this opening process, a lot of people regress to a childhood state where they stay and cannot come back anymore. This may lead to a blissful state of being, but not to the cure of a neurotic psychological structure or an emotional problem. As this blissful state of being is one of the goals of the movement, the process is considered a success.

I would say that the attraction is that people who have tried to change a certain pattern of their lives for years are totally changed, sometimes within a weekend work­shop, and they feel that this cannot happen in normal society. What they assume is that some magic or spiritual power has done this job and, of course, Rajneesh claims the credit for it.

So the eclectic techniques, the charisma of Rajneesh, the philosophy, and no doubt the sexual activity and the nudity, all contribute to the popularity of Rajneesh. Would there be any other things that come to your mind?

We didn’t talk very much about the sexual activity. Rajneesh is in favor of liberated sex.

Rajneesh teaches that enlightenment can be reached when the channel between the sex center and the crown chakra,* which is on top of the head, is opened. Then the energy called kundalini can flow freely through and enlighten the person. Now, whatever helps to free this channel from any emotional or mental blocks is being used. So liberated sex is one of the tools being used to open this channel.

Another tool is hyperventilation, in order to create an energy push up the channel, and a third tool is the deprivation tank. As a fourth tool, there were plans to have people dive down into the ocean. The idea was to make them dive 30 or 40 feet without any oxygen and provide the oxygen to them down on the bottom of the ocean. By so doing, they would have had to go through a fearful near-death situation in order to become enlightened.

Basically, he believes that enlightenment can be accomplished by this kind of physical change, by opening this channel from the sex center to the crown chakra.

The kind of free sex promoted by Rajneesh is invariably going to result in a lot of psychological damage. Did you see evidence of this in Poona — people who were psychologically injured as a result?

Well, I found that people who came from the normal structure of family life felt very strange. I found especially that vulnerable, sensitive women very often seemed lost. The feeling I got talking to them after they had attended certain workshops was that they had lost a certain innocence, the innocence of the soul, and they seemed to look like injured creatures who had lost a part of their essence.

This was the general pattern, I found, of people who were not emotionally strong enough to cope with the events of the ashram. They fell into an apathetic state of’ sadness, a state of not really knowing where they were anymore. The psychological impact of living this kind of life made people look and act as if they had lost part of’ their identities.

Does Bhagwan encourage the devel­opment of “siddhis” or psychic powers? Does he manifest them himself?

He has courses in hypnotherapy and para­psychology. He offers a lot of courses in different meditation techniques which should help people develop these powers because he considers the psychic realm to be the ultimate realm which we can reach as human beings. He certainly has psychic powers himself, because when he initiated people he was amazingly clear. He knew very much about their characters, their shortcomings, and their personality patterns. When he initiated them and explained their new Indian names to them, he would normally “read” the person and tell him how his new name would help him to overcome his shortcomings. He normally had not seen the person before, so he has psychic powers.

In your San Diego lecture you stated that Rajneesh is a drug. Could you describe for our readers what you mean by this?

I think Rajneesh is serving the same purpose as a drug. A drug helps a person to escape from the reality he is living in, and Rajneesh is doing exactly this. He helps them to leave the life situations where they have to confront their own realities, struggle with them, make up their minds, and so on. He helps them to “snap out,” to leave their reality, and he creates exactly the same blissed-out and non-real state a drug would normally create. This is the reason why I consider him a drug.

His meditation techniques and the other techniques I described are producing energy rushes which have effects that are similar to those of drugs. They are taking energy away from the nervous system, giving the people a certain high, and this creates (without taking drugs) a blissful state similar to being on a “trip.” And this happens without going through the “down” felt afterwards by people who take drugs. The only down they feel is that they get more tired, and they need extra sleep, but they don’t have any withdrawals.

Also, with respect to comparing ashram life to the drug experience, there’s the element of psychological dependency in order to cope with and face life.

This is very noticeable. People who have been initiated by him feel that by the initia­tion he has opened the “third eye” in them, and that his energy, which is considered to be the cosmic, psychic energy, has rushed through them. However, after six months or so, they need a new energy rush from the master. So it’s a dependency not only in terms of his being the teacher and master who is needed in order to grow, but his energy is also needed to survive. So in terms of what people feel, he is a drug.

In the film Ashram, they had a scene of an “energy darshan” where he would apply his thumb and forefingers to the initiates’ foreheads, and they would be “zapped” with the “energy” and go into all kinds of ecstasy. Apparently, he is the channel through which this energy is transmitted. So if they need a revitalization of this energy, they are dependent on him for it, or at least on someone who he has empowered to act as his representa­tive.

That is correct.

In line with this thought, Wolfgang Dobrowolny, who produced Ashram, has said: “It’s very easy to get into a movement, and it’s very difficult to get out.” Would you comment on how this is true with the Rajneesh cult?

There are two factors, one of which is psychological. Psychologically, it is very difficult for somebody who has been inside the ashram to go back into reality, because reality is hard to face afterwards. People have lost their sense for reality and they have lost their defense mechanisms.

But second, somebody who wanted to leave voluntarily would have to have the insight to leave, Rajneesh would normally try to keep him, not necessarily by physical force, but by seducing him, either through girls, or offering him all kinds of positions within the ashram. Yet, when somebody really wants to leave, he or she can go. The problem is that the person normally runs into difficulties because he would have to learn to cope with reality again.

In seeking to communicate with sannyasins from the Christian stand­point, there is the obvious difficulty of their not wanting to use their minds, not wanting to think objectively about what they are experiencing. The more they have progressed within the move­ment, the more difficult this becomes. Are there any means of approaching them in which one can get them to think critically about what they are experiencing, and to look objectively at what Rajneesh is doing to them and to others?

I found by working with people who wanted to get out that any logical or rational argument does not help at first.

The approach that I have found useful is to create an emotional situation, such as helping them to recall a childhood situation in the family, or a situation where they felt they needed privacy (which they don’t have in the ashram), or a situation where they helped others. I have advised parents and friends to recreate a situation where they showed charity to others. Reliving this normally creates an emotional outburst, a flashback of a previous experience, which is called “snapping back.”

After this I have found that I can talk to them on a rational level again, and most of them shake their heads as if to say, “I must have been in a long, long dream.”

So one has to first create a situation where they can feel something very deeply that they felt before joining the movement, in order to help them to go back and become whole again. Then let them ask questions, because normally they say, “Where am I? What was happening?” and they have many questions. Then one can come with a message.

The best approach is not to criticize at first what Rajneesh was doing, but to go through the differences between his teaching and that of Jesus Christ point-by-point and show the ways in which the teachings of both cope with reality. In this way one can help people make up their minds by themselves, and not impose a certain belief system on them.

So you find criticizing Rajneesh or coming against his philosophy in a direct manner is not effective?

Not in the first attempt, because one has to realize that Rajneesh was, in effect, the foundation of their lives, and his belief system was their structure of reference. So if one starts stripping his foundation off of them, it could be considered dangerous, and no sannyasin would be likely to go for it.

To criticize Rajneesh and his system can be left to the man or woman who comes out, because he or she will find out sooner or later what has happened. If this critical attitude is not appearing two or three weeks after the person has left the movement, it will be important to initiate criticism, but not at first.

What are the needs of an individual coming out of involvement with this cult?

It is very important that the family and friends create a very strong and loving support system. It is important that some­body who has been with Rajneesh not only feels supported, loved, and wanted by family and friends, but needed as well. They need to feel that they have not only been missing something, but that they’ve been missed.

A second important point I’ve found is that one of the reasons why people leave their families and join Rajneesh is because their parents and friends very often pre­tended that everything was all right, and nobody had a problem. So parents, family members, and friends must share their problems in dealing with life, and their struggles in coping with reality, to show that they are human too. It is important that somebody who comes out realizes that to be human means to be imperfect. It means to have problems and not always know how to resolve them.

Above all, not only the sannyasins but also their families and friends must realize that our problems can only be ultimately resolved through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He has the answers that we so often lack.

Dead Swamis Society

There was a mere trickle of gurus emigrating to the West through much of the twentieth century, but after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the trickle became a flood. This was just in time for gurus to capitalize on an awakening interest in Eastern spirituality especially among baby boomers. Many of the most important gurus are no longer on the scene, but the movements they established live on.

The person most responsible for introducing yoga to the West was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), a personal disciple of the revered Hindu saint, Sri Ramakrishna. In 1893 Vivekananda won over many liberal religionists who had gathered at the Chicago World’s Fair for the first World’s Parliament of Religions, and he subsequently expanded that following by lecturing on raja yoga (the classical form of yoga) across the country. Many of his followers began to practice yoga, and out of that the Vedanta Societies, the first Hindu fellowships to be established in the West, were born.

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) was the second major emissary of Hinduism and yoga to the West. Yogananda followed in the trail blazed by Vivekananda: first dazzling attendees and attracting disciples at the 1920 International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, then building on that following by lecturing from city to city, and finally establishing a base of operation for his own Hindu tradition on American soil: the Self-Realization Fellowship, headquartered in Los Angeles.² Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi has served as a primer on yoga and Eastern philosophy for millions of Westerners. Yogananda taught kriya yoga, an esoteric form of raja yoga known as the “yoga of ritual action.” It is said to accelerate spiritual growth and to produce ecstatic experiences because of its manipulation of prana (vital force), which it accomplishes chiefly through pranayama (breath control-see part one) and the use of the mind to direct prana around the spinal cord.

Swami Muktananda (1908-1982) initiated the siddha yoga movement, which teaches kundalini yoga. He was famous for the shaktipat, or touch of power, in which the kundalini energy is believed to be transmitted from guru to disciple through physical contact, with overwhelming spiritual, psychological, and physical effects. Muktananda’s teaching is summed up as “Honor your Self, Worship your Self, Meditate on your Self, God dwells within you as you.”³ He was immersed in major scandals toward the end of his life because of alleged sexual exploitation of his female disciples.⁴

Swami Satchidananda (1914-2002), founder of the Integral Yoga Institute and the Yogaville ashram in central Virginia, first gained renown for his opening address at the 1969 Woodstock rock festival. His integral yoga approach calls for the integration of yoga philosophy into every area of life and culture. He was a promoter of the unity of all faiths and was highly revered and influential in the yoga and New Age worlds, but he too was entangled in scandal because of allegations of sexually exploiting some of his female disciples.⁵

B. K. S. Iyengar/Iyengar Yoga

Arguably the most respected and influential teacher of hatha yoga, B. K. S. Iyengar (b. 1918) continues to astonish people with his supple demonstrations of difficult yoga poses. Iyengar has systematized over two hundred classic asanas (postures-see part one) and fourteen types of pranayama and has developed props to make the postures accessible even to people who lack the strength or agility to achieve them on their own. The intention is for such students to develop such strength eventually, as Iyengar did when he overcame his childhood afflictions of malaria, typhoid, and tuberculosis through yoga practice. Iyengar yoga emphasizes both proper alignment and length of time in holding a pose. There are 180 Iyengar Institutes around the world administered by certified trainers who first must complete anywhere from two to more than ten years of rigorous training.

Superstar yoga instructor Rodney Yee of Oakland, California (known for his numerous instructional videos, headliner status at yoga conferences, and strong promotion by Oprah Winfrey⁶) started as an Iyengar yoga teacher. He now combines the Iyengar style with one of his own creation.

Sri K. Pattabhi Jois/Ashtanga or Power Yoga

Like Iyengar, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (b. 1915) was a disciple of S. T. Krishnamacharya in Mysore, India. He continues to teach yoga at his Ashtanga Yoga Research Center in Mysore. A quarter of a century ago Jois brought ashtanga yoga to America and it has become extremely popular and influential. Ashtanga yoga has been promoted heavily by such celebrities as Gwyneth Paltrow, Sting, and Madonna.

Ashtanga (which literally refers to Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga and is used both as a general term for raja yoga and as a term for this particular style) is a systematic and regimented style of yoga that employs vinyasa (a synchronization of movement and breathing) in such a way as to create a flowing pattern from one asana to the next; during this process, blood temperature rises and the body’s perspiration releases impurities.

Ashtanga yoga is sometimes called power yoga, although the term power yoga is also associated with a distinct derivative of ashtanga:

Power yoga is a general term used in the West to describe a vigorous, fitness-based approach to vinyasa-style yoga. Most power yoga is closely modeled on the Ashtanga style of practice. The term “power yoga” came into common usage in the mid 1990s, when several yoga teachers were looking for a way to make Ashtanga yoga more accessible to western students. Unlike Ashtanga, power yoga does not follow a set series of poses. Therefore, any power yoga class can vary widely from the next. What they have in common is an emphasis on strength and flexibility. The advent of power yoga heralded yoga’s current popularity, as people began to see yoga as a way to work out. Power yoga brought yoga into the gyms of America.⁷

The most famous teacher of power yoga is Baron Baptiste, whose yoga studios in Massachusetts are the largest in the country. Baptiste is well known through his books, instructional videos, and numerous television appearances, including the Transform Your Life with Baron Baptiste program that public television stations air during pledge drives.

Bikram Choudhury/Bikram or Hot Yoga

Based in Los Angeles, former weightlifter Bikram Choudhury (b. 1946) calls himself the “Guru of the Stars.”⁸ (Shirley MacLaine, Raquel Welsh, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and John McEnroe have been among his students.) Choudhury, who originally was sent to America to teach yoga by his guru, Bishnu Ghosh (the brother of Paramahansa Yogananda), opened his first studio in Beverly Hills in 1973. Today there are well over four hundred independently owned and operated Bikram Yoga studios worldwide and three thousand teachers, who were certified by Bikram’s Yoga College of India, which is based in Los Angeles.

Bikram yoga is also known as hot yoga because of its ninety-minute workouts involving twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises performed in a room that’s heated to 105 degrees or more. He calls it a “torture chamber,” and perhaps because it is so physically punishing it is more attractive to men than any other yoga style (about forty percent of hot yoga practitioners are male). Just as with power yoga, there are yoga teachers advertising “hot yoga” who are not affiliated with Choudhury and not teaching his specific pose sequence, but are teaching yoga under sweltering conditions.

Choudhury has been a lightning rod for controversy for numerous reasons, including the following: (1)his hot yoga has been criticized as unsafe for people in poor physical condition;⁹ (2)he has franchised his yoga schools and copyrighted his yoga posture sequence and other “brand” distinctives and threatened legal action against those who use them without certification;¹⁰ (3)he lives in Beverly Hills, wears Rolex watches, owns dozens of classic cars, including Rolls Royces, and in other respects does not fit the ascetic profile of an Indian yogi; (4)he is an outrageous braggadocio (e.g., “I’m beyond Superman”¹¹); and (5)he’s been involved in sexual scandals with some of his female pupils. “‘What happens when they say they will commit suicide unless you sleep with them?’ he says. ‘What am I supposed to do? Sometimes having an affair is the only way to save someone’s life.’”¹²