Armed with wit, insight, and truly astonishing research, Geoffrey Falk utterly demolishes the notion of the enlightened guru who can lead devotees to nirvana.
This entertaining and yet deadly serious book should be read by everyone pursuing or thinking of pursuing the path of guru devotion.
--John Horgan, author of Rational Mysticism Stripping the Gurus is superb--one of the best books of its kind I have ever read.
The research is meticulous, the writing engaging, and the overall thesis: devastatingly true.
A stellar book.
David C.
Lane, California State University Ramakrishna was a homoerotic pedophile.
His chief disciple, Vivekananda, visited brothels in India.
Krishnamurti carried on an affair for over twenty years with the wife of a good friend.
Chogyam Trungpa drank himself into an early grave.
One of Adi Da's nine wives was a former Playboy centerfold.
Bhagwan Rajneesh sniffed laughing gas to get high.
Andrew Cohen, guru and publisher of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, by his own reported admission sometimes feels like a god.
These are typical of the wizened sages to whom otherwise-sensible people give their devotion and unquestioning obedience, surrendering their independence, willpower, and life's savings in the hope of realizing for themselves the same enlightenment as they ascribe to the perfect, God-realized master.
Why? Is it for being emotionally vulnerable and brainwashed, as the anti-cultists assert? Or for being willingly psychologically seduced, as the apologists unsympathetically counter, confident that they themselves are too smart to ever fall into the same trap? Or have devotees simply walked, with naively open hearts and thirsty souls, into inherent dynamics of power and obedience which have showed themselves in classic psychological studies from Milgram to Zimbardo, and to which each one of us is susceptible every day of our lives? Like the proud Rude Boy Cohen allegedly said, with a laugh, in response to the.
| Thesis | Devastatingly true |
|---|
Million Monkeys Press Stripping the gurus, hardcover/geoffrey david falk
