Gifted
Gurus
At the outset I need to say that my categorizing is arbitrary. Who am I to determine the gurus of the New Age? And what's a guru, anyway? Nearly anyone can be one these days. Frances Lear, ex-wife of Hollywood producer Norman Lear, launched a new magazine for the mature, upscale woman. What does TIME call her? "A Guru for Women over 40."1
Not many years ago, quipped Westmont College sociologist Ronald Enroth, Americans were likely to think a guru "was an exotic animal. Today . . . it is practically a household word."2
In religion, gurus are spiritual masters who teach and help the uninitiated and demand that their disciples totally surrender to their authority. Gurus are "said to be greater than God because they lead to God."3
For our purposes, we will go with a bit looser definition. Some New Age "top guns" could be classified as gurus, channelers, or simply celebrity leaders. Or a combination. Shirley MacLaine, J.Z. Knight, and Marilyn Ferguson are headliners because of their public prominence.
Gurus often start groups or communes. Some of these — like est, Scientology, and Hare Krishna — have moved beyond the immediate leadership or control of their founders. We'll consider some of these in the next chapter on New Age-related groups.
Remember, this is not a comprehensive list of contemporary
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New Age gurus. And some may not choose to identify themselves with the New Age movement. But they are representative.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
In the summer of 1981, India's most controversial guru packed up his large commune in Poona and reassembled it on an immense, isolated cattle ranch in central Oregon known as "the Big Muddy." Within two years, the religion of Rajneesh and his $60 million empire had settled in: Crops covered more than 3000 of the 64,000-acre spread, watered from a huge reservoir. Some 250,000 square feet of permanent buildings dotted the brushlands, crowned by a five-wing "university" where orange-clad disciples absorbed a heady mix of Rajneesh-style Eastern mysticism and West Coast sensory therapy.
For years, Rajneesh had wanted "a new site, isolated from the outside world — a community to provoke God." This new commune, he wrote in 1979, would be "an experiment in spiritual communism . . . a space where we can create human beings who are not obsessed with comparison, who are not obsessed with the ego, who are not obsessed with the personality."4
But by late 1985 the commune was disbanded; Rajneesh had been deported; and many of his top aides, including tart-tongued Ma Anand Sheela, were doing time for crimes ranging from wiretapping to attempted murder (including mass poisoning of seven hundred people) to arson to arranging sham marriages in order to circumvent immigration laws.
The assessment of psychiatrist James S. Gordon is particularly enlightening because, as an expert in new religions for the National Institute of Mental Health, he had thoroughly investigated Rajneesh both in India and Oregon.
In an interview and in his book Golden Guru, Gordon sought to answer the perplexing question: Why had so many highly educated, successful people chosen to abandon their careers and families to devote their talents and lives to Rajneesh?
"Rajneesh was a catalyst, a teacher, if not a Master for me,"
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Gordon said, conceding there had been "a moment" when he almost became a sanyassin, or initiated disciple. He was mesmerized by the dream of utopia, the creation of new human beings in new communities. But there was a "love of power there, a control that was potentially ugly and potentially dangerous." He admitted his disappointment:
"If this remarkably intuitive and intelligent man could not help people change," and if these "talented, smart, energetic, and cheerful sanyassins . . . could not make it . . . then it does not bode well for me or for others who might want to create and be part of loving and productive communities . . . Rajneesh . . . failed to live what he knew and taught."5
Yet the Rajneesh mystique lived on, despite his being booted out of twenty-one countries during a world tour after his U.S. deportation. Until his death in early 1990, about five thousand people — most of them Westerners — were attending the fifty-six year-old guru's twice-daily discourses in the reconstituted Poona ashram.6
"I still see him as the wisest person I ever met," mused Sunshine, a former spokeswoman at the Rajneeshpuram compound in Oregon. She and Philip Toelkes, a lawyer who once served as Rajneeshpuram's mayor, expressed "gratitude" to Rajneesh, and Toelkes called him "the most innocent and the least innocent person I know."7
Elizabeth Clare Prophet
The Rajneeshnee exodus may have dismantled the portable housing at Rajneeshpuram, but the units were "reincarnated" 550 miles to the east at the New Age community of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, affectionately called "Guru Ma" by her disciples.
After pulling up stakes in Southern California (selling the $15.5 million headquarters estate to an American Buddhist group), the commune of 400 — which temporarily swelled to 3000 during a 1987 celebration on the Fourth of July weekend — set up shop on the 33,000-acre Royal Teton Ranch near Yellowstone National Park.8
Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant, with an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 members, stems from her teachings
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about the "ascended masters" and "light bearers" of the Great White Brotherhood. The church, active in 100 U.S. cities, embraces one of the most complex and syncretistic mixings of metaphysical beliefs in modern times.9 Prophet and her late husband, Mark Prophet, who had founded the Summit Lighthouse in 1958 (its name was changed to the Church Universal and Triumphant in 1976) stitched Eastern and Western traditions together creatively. They relied heavily on recycled teachings from the "Might I AM" movement popularized by Guy and Edna Ballard during the 1930s, a group that swelled into the millions in the 1940s, then declined drastically.
Guru Ma, a strong-willed, middle-aged woman, has a penchant for expensive jewelry and a "very profound calling in Jesus."10 As the "'Vicar of Christ," she claims to be God's chosen earthly messenger for direct dictations (channeled messages) from a host of ascended masters including Buddha, Jesus, Saint Germaine, Pope John XXIII, Merlin the Magician, Christopher Columbus, and K-17, the "head of the Cosmic Secret Service."
Some rural Montana townsfolk, alarmed over a possible repeat of the Rajneesh fiasco in Oregon, have sought to have Guru Ma's growing, self-sufficient community expelled from their pastoral valley.
Baba Ram Dass
In the 1960s, a nascent guru was expelled from Harvard University for tripping out on LSD. Gaining notoriety, Bostonian psychologist Richard Alpert trekked to India where he studied with the late guru Neem Karoli Baba and donned sandals and beads. Reappearing with the name Guru Ram Dass, which means Servant of God, Alpert hit the American scene as the New Age was dawning. His newfound Eastern faith, superimposed upon a prestigious academic background, "made him the perfect symbol of the New Age," according to American religions expert J. Gordon Melton.11 His popular books soon became a kind of bellwether of the movement's era of "tuning in, turning on and dropping out."
Now, Ram Dass's hair was silvered; his flowing beard has
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been shorn, and he sports a neat mustache. He still practices Buddhist meditation but also sits in on trance channeling sessions. A few years back he was wooed by female medium Joya Santanya who claimed to be the conduit for his old Indian guru. In 1987, at age 56, Dass was training volunteers to help AIDS patients and lecturing for a world-wide service group that runs an eye clinic in Nepal and a Native American health clinic in South Dakota.
"In the '60s," he told Los Angeles Times writer Carol McGraw, "I learned how to be, but not how to do." His focus now, he said, is on the Hindu practice of karma yoga — "using service to others as a path to transformation." He added with a laugh: "I had never thought of my humanity as a practice. I was too busy trying to become divine."12
Swami Muktananda
When Swami Muktananda Paramanansa died in 1982, one of the world's largest Eastern-oriented yoga movements, his SYDA Foundation, spiraled into administrative disarray and moral decay. But Muktananda remained one of the seminal New Age influences of the 1980s. His legacy lives on because he touched the lives of such notables as Werner Erhard, former California Governor Jerry Brown, singers Diana Ross and John Denver, musician Paul Horn, Puerto Rico-born actor Raul Julia, and actresses Marsha Mason and Olivia Hussey. Perhaps more than any other guru except Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of TM fame, Muktananda made yoga meditation accessible and fun to Westerners — particularly the Hollywood set.
To a casual observer, Muktananda was an old, brown-skinned man with a scraggly beard and tinted glasses perched on his wide nose. He habitually dressed in an orange pajama-like costume and a yellow knit cap. But to several hundred thousand devotees around the world who called him "Baba" (Hindi for daddy), he was the divine essence of the pure self — the manifestation of the God that he taught was in all of us. "God dwells within you as you; worship your Self," he said again and again as he crisscrossed the country with a
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message of self-renewal and established ashrams in twenty U.S. cities.
After Muktananda died, thirty devotees accused the guru of past sexual misconduct and left the movement in disgust. (Two told me firsthand details of sordid episodes in 1983.) Then Muktananda's appointed co-successors — a young Indian and his sister — had a falling out, and a struggle ensued for control of the SYDA empire. But the sister, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, remained in charge through the South Fallsburg, New York, headquarters.
"Muktananda is still my teacher," averred a follower who would speak to me only on condition that I wouldn't reveal his name. He added: "Divinity is not the same as perfection. The whole is a perfection; the parts have defects."
Guru Maharaj Ji
In 1973, when he was fifteen years old, Indian guru Maharaj Ji claimed a following of six million, including thousands of flower-throwing young people and disenchanted counterculture dropouts. Prominent among them was antiwar protester Rennie Davis of the Chicago Seven. Devotees, called premies, clambered over each other to fall at Maharaj Ji's feet as he dispensed "the knowledge," or "getting it" — the "divine light" of inner peace.
His Divine Light Mission experienced meteoric growth in the early 1970s (284 U.S. centers), but donations fell off, devotees fell away, and the teenaged guru had a falling out with his mother. She objected to his marriage at sixteen to his twenty-four-year-old secretary and his ostentatious and worldly lifestyle. "In the eyes of the unregenerate," scoffed religious movements tracker Carl Raschke, "there was nothing particularly charismatic about the boy, who spoke halting English larded with cliches from the argot of hippiedom, wore natty and expensive clothes . . . rode Rolls Royces and motorcycles, and gorged himself on Baskin-Robbins ice cream."13
By the late 1970s the Mission in the United States had become nearly invisible and growth had all but stopped. In 1979 the Denver headquarters quietly moved to Miami Beach,
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and Maharaj Ji and his wife and two children withdrew to a secluded hilltop estate in Malibu overlooking the Pacific. Now in his thirties, the Perfect Master occasionally circles the globe speaking to premies.14
Zen Master Rama
A more recent entrant into the guru supermarket was Frederick "Rama" Lenz, a curly haired, self-styled Zen Buddhist master who holds a doctorate in English. The laid-back Yuppie guru from Malibu mounted a massive ($850,000) advertising campaign during 1987 in major U.S. cities, announcing free public meditations, complete with free music, in rented concert halls and hotel ballrooms across the country. The ads showed a "smiling, bright-eyed Lenz, 37, dressed in a sports coat and a paisley tie, looking more like a young computer salesman than an ancient sage," recounted Katy Butler in the San Francisco Chronicle.15
But Rama Lenz abruptly canceled appearances after four former students publicly accused him "of pressuring women students into sex, giving LSD to one, and convincing others that they were possessed by demons and occult forces," the newspaper reported.
After studying under Indian mystic weight lifter Sri Chinmoy, Lenz began his career as a guru in the early 1980s in San Diego. He initially taught a Hindu meditation called "Atmananda" and the "last reincarnation of Vishnu." Later he moved to Malibu and thousands flocked to his "intensive Zen" series — which were not endorsed by any traditional Zen Buddhist teachers. (Lenz committed suicide in 1998)
Benjamin Creme
Out of the metaphysical past of Alice Bailey's Arcane School and the Ballard's "I AM" activity, self-proclaimed way-shower Benjamin Creme appeared on the scene to announce the fulfillment of all the Messianic expectations of the world's great religions with the "reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom." The white-haired British exotericist, author, and artist made his biggest splash in April
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of 1982 when his Tara Center organization took out full-page spreads in major papers worldwide declaring that "The Christ Is Here Now."
A month later, I attended a packed press conference in Los Angeles at which Creme claimed he had been singled out by "Lord Maitreya, the Christ," to inform the media that Maitreya was living in a Pakistani section of London, awaiting discovery by journalists. By early summer of 1982, Creme promised, the Christ's true identity would be revealed to everybody through a global radio-television broadcast. Then war and hunger would be forever ended and all religions unified. The Los Angeles Times was uninterested in dispatching me to London to find Maitreya.
Creme is still lecturing — to diminished audiences.
Swami Beyondananda
At least one guru is out to lighten up enlightenment. Swami Beyondananda, "the yogi from Muskogee," does live gigs featuring the "magical dance of Trudy Lite." The comic also specializes in tantrum yoga, speed suffering, and healing cars through autosuggestion. These spiritual practices are all discussed at "Yogi" Steve Bhaerman's one-nighters in spots like the Religious Science Creative Living Center in Orangevale, California.
Beyonananda, said to be a cross between Ram Dass and Haagen-Dazs, also has an advice column, published, among other places, in Sacramento's Guide, "A Calendar for the Whole Person," where I found the following typical exchanges.
Dear Swami:
What are your thoughts on reincarnation?
Ken-Adi Ring
Madison, Wisconsin
Dear Ken-Adi:
I am a firm believer in reincarnation. After all, if we're supposed to recycle, why shouldn't God? You might say I'm a born again, born again, born again Krishna and I subscribe to the born again Krishna credo, "You only go around 60 million times — so grab the gusto . . . "
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Dear Swami:
How do astral projection and quantum mechanics relate?
Waylon Wall
Jerusalem, IsraelDear Waylon:
It's simple. When you burn out a bulb on your astral projector, you find a quantum mechanic to fix it.16
Chapter 8 || Table of Contents
1. Laurence Zuckerman, "A Guru for Women Over 40," TIME 29 February 1988, 67.
2. Ronald Enroth, Lure of the Cults & New Religions (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1987), 42.
3. Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, Understanding Cults and New Religions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 82-83.
4. Russell Chandler and Tyler Marshall, "Guru Brings His Ashram to Oregon," Los Angeles Times, 30 August 1981, pt. 1, 1.
5. James S. Gordon, Golden Guru: The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Lexington, Mass.: Stephen Greene Press, 1987), 191, 244; idem, interview with author, Los Angeles, Calif., 22 September 1987.
6. Rajneesh press release, Rajneeshdam, Poona, February 1988.
7. "Marin's Bhagwan Connection," Marin Independent Journal, 22 March 1987.
8. Marjorie Lee Chandler, "Churches Wary of 'New Age' Neighbors," Moody Monthly Magazine (September 1987): 95–97.
9. Russell Chandler and Norman B. Chandler, "Guru Ma — Leader of Multimillion-Dollar Church," Los Angeles Times, 11 February 1980, pt. 2, 1.
10. Peter H. King, "Montana's Wary of Church's Plans for Promised Land," Los Angeles Times, 25 January 1987, pt 1, 3.
11. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 2d ed. (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987), 111.
12. Carol McGraw, "Seekers of Self Now Herald the New Age," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1987, pt. 1, 3.
13. Carl A. Raschke, Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism in the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980), 232.
14. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), 141–44; Enroth, Lure of the Cults & New Religions, 23.
15. Katy Butler, "New Age Flock of 'Zen Master' May Be Moving," San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January 1988.
16. "Swami Beyondananda, 'the Yogi from Muskogee,' " Guide: A Calendar for the Whole Person 1 (November 1987): 4, 8, 21.
