classic move is for characters of this kind to create lineages for themselves. And if someone claims time in India, we are apt to believe it--plus its hard to fact check what someone has done or where they've been while in India.
She may or may not have been involved with the Maharishi. But if she was, Maharishi was one of the earliest and most successful of the export gurus. He targeted Westerners, not Indians, because Westerners didnt know how to check a guru's lineage claims. Indians would've known how to fact check the guy--which is why Maharishi did NOT minister to emigre Hindus during his time in London.
Some gurus are so easygoing that they'll allow you to put their names on your 'spiritual resume', even if all you've done is sit in an audience at their ashrams. Ditto for many Tibetan lamas.
You can have all kinds of amazing experiences and 'awakenings' and still remain needy and greedy. A german spiritual teacher named Karlfried Durckheim put it in old fashioned language, but still quite accurately when he said, 'The Holy Ghost cannot always eradicate a father-complex.' Someone can be enlightened or know how to give folks bliss experiences and still be greedy and dishonest.
One very common trick these people do is as soon as you try to pin them down about real world specifics, they'll derail the discussion using 'spiritual' language--like someone on a losing baseball team suddenly saying 'we are not losing, we are winning because this is really a football game and you're too dense to have known that.'
In case your former leader played this kind of mindgame, you can read about it here.
[
forum.culteducation.com]
As for the DL, he probably has his hands full coping with all the nutcases who claim to be his special friend.
Genuine, celebrated spiritual teachers are like newly rich widows--all kinds of hustlers constantly try to hang out with them. And, with rare exceptions, not all these spiritual teachers are worldly wise enough to protect themselves from these crooks.
This long but good article deals with another guru named Da Free John (DFJ) but the author brilliantly describes a process of 'mythologization' in which a person gradually learns to see the leader and his/her behavior from a myth-making standpoint. This may help you understand what you've been through and how you were indoctrinated in such a manner that the cult alarm bells did not warn you earlier.
[
lightmind.com]
'You mentioned that you didn't understand how all the things I said about the group and DFJ could be true if intelligent people like your cousin and myself were involved.
'What happens is that you develop *a blind spot* when dealing with anything relating to DFJ, and to some extent in ancillary areas. With respect to most aspects of your life, you continue to be a largely "normal" and rational person.
'So it's not like you have to be a glassy-eyed automaton to be trapped in a cult. That's the popular picture of cult members, but I doubt it's true of very many people in ANY cult. There's a few people like this in DFJ's group, but most people are relatively ordinary, albeit with a blind spot that obscures their discrimination regarding DFJ.
'The community is *at root a society devoted to glorification and myth-making* in relation to DFJ (fill in your guru's name here?)
'I bought into the extraordinary claims made in DFJ's autobiography (The Knee of Listening) and appreciated his dharma (if you can really call the dharma "his") to the point where *I didn't see the obvious when I met him* - i.e. that DFJ was extremely irresponsible and was exploiting people to satisfy his whims and fantasies.
'By the time I met DFJ and saw things about him that would previously have caused me to reject him out of hand, I was already sufficiently indoctrinated to assume that anything he did was a form of teaching.'
'It can be difficult to see all of the ways in which habitual mythologization is operative and to understand the full range and scope of its influence. Waking up can take time. Many can't seem to develop much insight into their delusions and commitment to myth-making about DFJ, beyond identifying the crudest and most obviously "cultic" level of it. This is why some of the group's beliefs and assumptions are retained indefinitely by many people, even long after they leave.
The funny thing, though, is that this myth-making activity I´ve described really is an "esoteric" practice in some sense. It truly is "hidden", as it is largely unconscious and almost entirely uninspected in the community, despite DFJ's frequent criticism of cultism. He superficially criticizes some aspects of cultism, yet at the same time creates an entire culture devoted to it. It is remarkable that he is able to focus everyone´s attention on what he writes and says, rather than what he does and how he lives.
'DFJ also never gets to the core issue, which is the fact that he is an ordinary human being like everyone else and should not be afforded the unique luxury of being beyond accountability.
'If he really wanted to end the cultic game surrounding him he could easily make some very practical changes in the way he lived and the way he related to others. Of course, this is the last thing he actually wants.'
Now, I am going to be a good librarian, and give you the space to chow down on all this reading matter.
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