Kumare
Offline Last night I watched the 2011 documentary called Kumare and was very impressed with the entire movie. At first the maker of the documentary wanted to show various gurus and their followers. This quickly turned in to a question of who are these people? Selling books, DVD's, etc. They all seem to be bullshit. They all seem to be just regular people running a business. He saw how these many masters worked against each other, had crazy conflicting philosophies, had loving but crazy followers and seemingly took advantage of their power over people.
So the maker of this documentary decided that he could be a guru and started a fake yogi, got two girls to work with him and then the film crew. They went in to Arizona, setup a fake Ashram, a fake philosophy and let things take their own course. Quickly people started to flock to him. They made up in their minds that he was "full of energy" and "he connected to me right away".
Soon he had a dozen or more followers who started to tell him their most intimate person problems. I mean, really deep shit. He started to realize how powerful this position was and how he didn't want to give advice to strangers about this personal stuff, so many times he deflected their questions. One woman wanted to leave her husband and become a devoted follower. This made him realize how cults are formed. He could see how quickly leaders could be corrupted by the power which their followers give them.
I'll skip over much of the rest of the story, but I will mention that as soon as this project got rolling I asked myself "How will this all end?" Would it be a complete let down for his followers. I started to wonder if these people would want to kill him or slap him. How would he not come off like being a complete douche?
Kumare is on Netflicks now. Definitely take a look.
- Login to post comments
this sounds really interesting, i think i'll check it out. there is a bigger industry for fake indian gurus than fake christian faith healers, and sathya sai baba in his heyday would have made jim and tammy faye look positively raggedy.
sathya sai baba
while a great deal of "gurus" in india are suspect, as far as i'm concerned, pretty much all gurus who leave india for the west are suspect. at least in india they're part of a known tradition--maybe not always well known to the general public, but still known to enough sadhus that someone could test them and call them out (and they do: contrary to popular belief, many hindu ascetics can be quite aggressive).
in the west, however, they can peddle all kinds of crap and people will eat it up: the more fantastic the better. two of the most convincing modern "gurus" i've ever heard of in terms of actually having had profound mystical experiences (note i said mystical, not spiritual or supernatural) were successful businessmen in mumbai. on any given day, you would never have known they were mystics by looking at them. they wore casual, modern clothes, had families, and didn't hang out any shingles. they usually held "satsang" (meetings) in their apartments. in america, however, every half-baked guru dresses in ochre or saffron robes, often adding turbans into the mix, and found ashrams full of krishna and ganesha statues, decked out with carpets of marigolds, and the whole place positively reeks of sandalwood. and why not? otherwise, no celebrities would come to sit at their feet. would the beatles or mia farrow or david lynch have fawned all over maharishi mahesh yogi had he been cleanshaven in a polo shirt? i somehow doubt it.
the maharishi
the biggest motherfucker of them all, however, had to have been sri chinmoy:
once that asshole carved out his freakshow in new york, he pretty much never returned to india. no order would have ever taken him seriously there, and all of his blabbering about being an avatar would have eventually earned him an asskicking by a pissed off naga baba.
here's a naga baba, btw:
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
BTW - Never understood the Naga for what they do to their bodies, ecspecially there penises.
But it was Siddhartha Buddha who rejected their lifestyle after he realized the middle path.