CRIMES OF THE SOUL
by Jill Neimark

 
    It isn’t often you invite the mother of God to drop by for a visit, but that’s exactly what I did one wet morning last December, when the rain snapped on the pavement like popped guitar strings.  She arrived at my home in a parka, leggings and sneakers, shaking out her umbrella, an endearingly messy halo of bleached blonde hair around her face.  After plunking a few playful notes on my piano, she sat down to tell her story—a peculiarly American story of the search for transcendence and how it had gone awry, morphing into a gothic horror flick of abuse and betrayal.  America, home of Deepak Chopra and O.J. Simpson, the X-Files and Touched by an Angel, the endless search for grace and the endless fall from it.  And home of Luna Tarlo.
Luna wryly calls herself the mother of God (and has written a book by that name) because her son, Andrew Cohen, is an American guru with an international following, and for three and a half years she became his disciple.  Today they are estranged and she believes they will never speak again.  “I’ve been burned,” she says. “I don’t believe in the premise anymore that anybody can save you.  And my son has become a monster to me.”
    Cohen himself is a boyishly attractive 43-year-old with thick, dark hair and a mustache, and a pensive softness in his eyes.  He travels around the world offering teachings and retreats, and his foundations—Moksha and Friends of Andrew Cohen Everywhere (FACE)—are headquartered on an estate in Lenox, Massachusetts.  He produces tapes, books and a magazine called What is Enlightenment?, in which he himself has addressed the question of purity and abuse in spiritual life.
    In 1986, however, he was just another spiritual seeker who had broken up with his girlfriend when he met an Indian teacher named Poonja.  Later that month he claimed that a “spiritual realization [had] transformed his life beyond  recognition.”  He immediately began to attract followers, and brought his mother to India, where, she says, he told her that the son she knew was dead, that he felt like God, and that in his presence she was now enlightened.  “At first, I felt I’d won some kind of cosmic lottery,” recalls Tarlo, who was astonished by her son’s new charisma and “silver tongue”, and who was longing to be catapulted out of her own pain (she’d lost her husband, father and mother in the previous four years, and had just left a second marriage). “Andrew said he felt he was on fire, that his body was like an electric generator.  Poonja told me he’d been waiting for Andrew all his life.”  Andrew and Poonja wrote each other ardent letters: From Poonja, November 2, 1986:  “You’ve occupied my whole mind day and night.”  From Andrew, April 13, 1988:  “Master I love you so!…My each breath is only you and you and you!”
    By 1989, Luna was sending similar adoring letters to her son:  “Beloved: Just as a leaf turns toward the sun, am I turned towards you.” Surrendering to a spiritual teacher is, she says, as mysterious and shattering an act as falling in love.  “People fall in love with Andrew, men and women, in this mad, hysterical way, as if he’s their savior. I did, too. I believed he had reached this exalted state.”
But the enlightened teacher, she warns, was not all love and compassion.  She recalls him lashing out at his disciples—supposedly in an attempt to strip away the ego.  Tarlo says he told her to give way to him or their relationship would end; once ordered a regimen where she would cook one meal a day, meditate for two hours, and remain in silence except for talking to him; and said that  “since I was so full of opinions and nothing but opinions, I was absolutely forbidden to express an opinion on anything.”  Her son, formerly the “sweetest, sensitive kid, had changed into an unrecognizable tyrant.”
    Tarlo found her moods veering dangerously from ecstasy to self-loathing.  “He thinks if you disintegrate the     personality you’ll find your true self.  I think it’s an extremely cruel act.  I don’t think I would have remained if Andrew were not my son, but I knew if I seriously objected to anything I’d be kicked out and never see him again.”  Finally, she returned to New York and burned all her work as a gift to her guru:  “I watched [myself], a remote alien being, move to and fro, to and fro, from filing cabinet to incinerator, from filing cabinet to incinerator.”  When she called to tell him of this spiritual act of renunciation his response, she says, was: “Show me how much you love me.  Show me.”  When she returned to sit at his teachings, “I hardly dared look at him.  He sat, backed by tiers of gorgeous flowers, looking like the king of paradise.”
Eventually, Tarlo broke with her guru and son.  “I’ve lost a child and I’ll never get over it.“  But, looking back, she believes she knows why she followed him and why he is still so popular:  “Everybody wants to be saved from their suffering, and the unique quality gurus have is that they seem so certain, so confident.  Confidence is its own kind of magic.”

    Only Luna Tarlo and her son can know whether her story is an accurate rendering.  But she does trace a topography of seduction and betrayal described by many American disciples of gurus.  Something happens to that venerable, ancient tradition of teacher and seeker when it hits our shores.  It mutates.  There’s simply too intoxicating a liquor of freedom and power here to keep it intact.
A while back, when I decided to write about this topic, we were a country mesmerized and deeply baffled by Heaven’s Gate.  In that tragedy we heard the eerie echoes of Waco, and of the massacre of Jim Jones’ 900 devotees who drank grape punch laced with cyanide.
    Each of these stories is a message from a bottle forged in the heart of America.  It may not be our gurus who are ultimately at fault, but the alchemy our society works on them.  Our primal themes have always been writ large:  God, freedom, power, possibility—from sea to shining sea.  We were founded by bands of the persecuted in search of religious freedom.  “Spirituality in America has always consisted of large and small groups of spiritual communities permitted to live side by side,” explains Eugene Taylor, Ph.D. “That freedom is protected by the constitution and unprecedented in the history of any other culture.”
    But freedom has its discontents, and dangers, because we also free up the devil, and paradoxically, we free up our need for boundary and authority.  “Who are we now that we’re free?” asks Mark Edmundson, professor of English at Virginia University and author of Nightmare on Main Street (Harvard University Press). “Angels perhaps, but maybe sadists, too. As a culture we’ve become nearly as obsessed by angels as by Gothic images of the serial killer.  In fact, one often creates the need for the other.”  No doubt about it, we’ve found both in our religious gurus.
    One of the deeper ironies of a life committed to a spiritual teacher is that, though you may flee ten thousand attachments, you end up surrendering your entire existence to a single man or woman.  In the most extreme cases, that surrender leads to absolute powerlessness and death.  “There isn’t any power more absolute than the power of a `spiritually enlightened’ human being over his disciples,” points out Joel Kramer, co-author with his wife, Diana Alstad, of The Guru Papers.  “That is as absolute as you can get on a psychological level.” To Kramer and Alstad, gurus preach freedom but wear the mask of authoritarian power.  “Gurus are actually a metaphor,” says Kramer, “for any human being or system that establishes itself as fundamentally unchallengeable, presuming to know what’s best for others.  And that kind of authoritarianism is everywhere in our society.”
    Yet if gurus are contradictory straw men dancing to our own epic tale of good and evil, freedom and punishment, selfishness and surrender, it’s because we are contradictory, too.  As Eugene Taylor puts it: “The power, danger and possibility of gurus lies in our projection. A simple human being can inspire you to spiritual ecstasy because of what you believe him to be.  Or you can end up totally bamboozled.” We have met the guru, and he is us.  Just who is that, anyway?

    “It’s you and me,” says New York psychotherapist Daniel Shaw, CSW.  “It’s anybody who has ever been vulnerable, lonely and searching. For me, following a guru was a way of relieving all my depression and emptiness.”
    For twelve years Shaw was an ardent disciple of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, a beautiful Indian woman who inherited the spiritual path called Siddha Yoga (SYDA) from her guru, Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa.  (Most gurus are crowned by the lineage they lay claim to.  It’s a rare one who springs full blown out of nowhere.)
    In 1981, when Shaw joined SYDA, he was a struggling New York actor.  “I was so enraged at my failure to achieve what I had wanted.  I ended up trying to annihilate all that I had been, devalue everything and everyone, take a new spiritual name and identity. My own grandiosity was stimulated,” he admits.  “The idea that I could be the pure, devoted servant of a great master was very intoxicating.”  In addition, he had a sudden fully-formed, ‘loving’ community.  As Alstad and Kramer note, “Community is very hard to get in this world, and it’s a powerful enticement to followers.”
    SYDA’s claim to spiritual fame is an ecstatic state known as “shaktipat”, a cosmic body orgasm that one experiences after connecting with the guru. Shaw remembers “a crescendo of sensation that goes from your toes to your head again and again in waves.  It provided a kind of addictive substance, a kind of heroin, that seemed to completely allay all anxiety.”  Shaktipat is not unique to SYDA—countless spiritual traditions acknowledge and honor ecstatic awakening.  Perhaps its most striking image is Michelangelo’s statue of Saint Theresa, stabbed through the heart by an angel and collapsing in his arms in agonized bliss.
    For Shaw, the experience of shaktipat “was magical proof “ of his guru’s power, and thus began a twelve-year and somewhat tortured apprenticeship.  “Now I view what I went through as a dissociative phenomenon.  In my private life I was depressed, exhausted, and quite unwell most of the time.  But when I was at SYDA I literally put on a happy face.”  He managed to overlook the scandals that have marked SYDA’s history like gunshots on window glass. First of all, Baba was widely rumored to be a pedophile, initiating young girls in sex—apparently choosing them from a six-bed dormitory called the Princess Dorm.  One woman reported that the guru inserted his penis inside her, without an erection or ejaculation, and remained that way for an hour and a half, joking and talking, while she lay in a state of ecstasy.
    But the scandals did not end with Baba’s death.  In 1982, shortly before he died, he appointed a brother and sister (whom he had raised) as his successors..  Both were children of an admirer of the swami’s.  Within three years the sister, Gurumayi, took control of the organization, and in 1985 announced that her brother, Swami Nityananda, was stepping down. Nityananda, told The New Yorker magazine that before being forced out his sister ordered him to be caned for three hours by four women followers with whom he’d had consensual sex.  Gurumayi, in later reports, said the cane was a small walking stick, and that he was only slapped with it a few times.
    Other rumors have followed in the wake of that disruption—ex-devotees point out that Gurumayi has had her cheekbones, chin and nose enhanced by plastic surgery; that although she claimed celibacy, she’d had a love affair with George Afif, an upper echelon SYDA member; and that she issued a 1990 edict to fire all gay and lesbian yoga teachers at SYDA ashrams around the country. One former follower says that when he tearfully questioned Gurumayi about her ouster of her brother, she walked away, and that evening publicly announced that she was offering a new course in “delusion” in honor of the questioner.
    If the response sounds defensive and hostile, it may well be.  According to British psychiatrist Anthony Storr, author of Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners and Madmen (Free Press), even though gurus may feel divinely inspired, “they are not as certain as they look.  They need disciples to help them believe in their own revelations. Gurus tend to be intolerant of any kind of criticism, believing that anything less than total agreement is equivalent to hostility.”  In fact, says Storr, many gurus are frankly delusional, “yet function very well as long as they have people who believe in them.”  Storr cites the intricate, many-tiered cosmologies of gurus such as Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff or Rudolf Steiner.  “Gurdjieff stated that he’d invented a way to increase the visibility of the planets and the sun.  Steiner invented his own history of the universe.”  These men, and other gurus, says Storr, were narcissistic, isolated, arrogant and even delusional, but they did not suffer from thought disorders or actual psychosis—buffered as they were by adoring disciples.  When Amrit Desai, the now dishonored “guru” of the international holistic facility called Kripalu (see boxed item), was questioned about a new policy of silence at all meals, a poster went up in the dining room: “Never wound the heart of the guru.”  Most disciples signed their names to it.
    It sounds as if these gurus are half-mad, and maybe they are. When Storr examined the lives of ten gurus, he found that each had suffered a dark night of the soul, an episode akin to a manic-depressive or psychotic illness, which ultimately seemed to resolve in revelations and religious insights.  Take David Koresh: Storr notes that at 19, a 16-year-old girlfriend got pregnant but refused to live with him.  “He began to suffer from mood swings of pathological intensity, sometimes believing himself to be uniquely evil, sometimes thinking that he was especially favored by God.” Yet gurus are not actually insane, says Storr. “They are narcissistic, isolated, and arrogant; but they do not suffer from thought disorders.”
    Kramer and Alstad note that gurus are deprived of real intimacy, and thus try to fill the need for closeness with more and more followers.  “The role of guru is a gradual entrapment.  Power is seductive, and they don’t realize what they’ll be giving up—humanity, a normal life of horizontal rather than vertical relationships. When people succumb to the temptation to be a guru, they are often destroyed as human beings.”
As for the loving disciples, they reach out for certainty and transcendental meaning, but are asked to give unconditional love and selfless surrender in return.  “That kind of idealism doesn’t leave room for the needs of the self,” says Alstad.  “The guru blocks feedback.  You need a way for dealing with issues of power, control, and self-centeredness, all of which arise in long-term relationships, after the romantic phase.”  The disciple cannot surrender his human needs forever.  Neither can the guru live up to his presumed divinity.  Luna Tarlo echoes this in her own experience:  “My son must be living under terrible tension,” she says sadly.  “He has to maintain that he’s enlightened and living in paradise all the time.  I don’t know what happens when he goes to bed at night.”
    The guru-disciple relationship is by nature unhealthy, believes psychologist Rachel Brier, who has worked with over a dozen former devotees of Kripalu’s Gurudev.  “When a relationship is based on the idealization of one and the submission of another, the system invites abuse.  Disciples believe that the guru is Godlike, and the disciple is lost without the wisdom, knowledge and love of the guru.  It is an emotionally fused relationship in which each needs the other to exist.  There are no healthy boundaries, no checks and balances, no real ‘other.’”
    Yet religious teachers and their disciples are as old as recorded history.  That relationship has long been regarded as a sacred and yet pragmatic path to God.  And it can be, says Eugene Taylor.  “Let’s not attack the idea of a spiritual mentor before we understand that the definition is culture specific.  Americans interested in Tibetan Buddhism fall all over themselves to meet the Dalai Lama, while Tibetans can’t understand why we’d want to meet him at all.  They feel he’s too busy, and it’s enough to have his picture.  In Bengali tantrism, the idea of using sexuality as a vehicle for spiritual attainment is common, but that idea is almost incomprehensible to most Americans. And take the idea of kissing a guru’s feet—in India this is common, but in America it gives us a completely different impression.  What a religious scholar might see as Hindu devotionalism looks to a typical American like guru worship.”
    John Perkins, founder of Dream Change Coalition and author of Shape Shifting (Inner Traditions) agrees.  He is working to preserve the rainforest, and has befriended many Peruvian shamans. “In their native cultures, they are looked at as ordinary people who happen to heal others.  They milk cows, plant corn, and perform healings. I have the highest regard for these shamans, I’ve gone to live with them, but they’re infinitely human.  They get sick, they have personal problems, they live in a very poor part of the world.”
But when a shaman comes to America, says Perkins, he’s often idolized as a saint and guru. “To come from a culture where they are respected but not revered, and to be suddenly idolized is difficult for them.  A lot of women throw themselves at these men sexually.  And because shamans tend to consider sex as an ecstatic experience that opens the door to other realities, it’s a very confusing issue.”
    For Americans in particular, the guru is an irreducible paradox. Here in the land of religious freedom, he’s an inevitable figure.  How can we curtail his freedom, whether he’s dreaming up nightly bacchanals or unthinkable penance for his flock?  “We are the only culture that has enshrined within its legal system the expression of religious freedom in any form,” notes Taylor.  “We believe in the idea that the small sect can live and thrive next to the large sect.”  Even when that tiny sect is in Waco, Texas or Rancho Santa Fe, California, we are reluctant to intervene—often until it’s too late.
And yet, as Michael Murphy says: “This is one of the glories of America, this freedom.”

    I’ve never followed a guru.  But, like a curious and slightly bedazzled tourist, I’ve stood at the periphery of the pack.  I’ve invited shamans into my home, trekked with them up mountains, and listened with suspended disbelief as they told me about myself, the universe, and God.  But I always shook myself out of the dream and went on my way alone, under the authority of nobody.  An American in her sect of one.  Wandering through what Mark Edmundson wryly calls our “spiritual lazy Susan”, in search of transcendence, as Americans are wont to do.
     As most of us are wont to do.  Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson long ago said that the impulse to believe in God is “the most complex and powerful force in the human mind…[and] an ineradicable part of human nature.”
     When we funnel that force down to the very narrow opening of a single religious teacher, we rebel against the very freedom we fought for from the start. But eventually, most of us wander free again.  Like the mother of God. Luna Tarlo says she has given up the possibility of enlightenment; in its place has come religion with a small “r”.  “One has these moments of religious feeling,” she says.  “Sometimes I go birdwatching and look at the variety and beauty of these wonderful creatures, and whatever created us, and a sense of awe brings tears to my eyes.  How can any of us presume to rise above it?  I don’t know where we come from.  I don’t think we ever can know.”
 

HOLY MADNESS: A TALE OF A PSYCHIATRIST AND HIS GURU
Dennis Gersten is a psychiatrist in private practice in San Diego, and author of Are You Getting Enlightened Or Losing Your Mind? (Harmony Books).  Here follows a letter he wrote me about his transformative experience with a guru named Sai Baba.  On reading this letter, I thought to myself, “Yes he’s probably lost his mind, but maybe he’s a little enlightened, too.”  Whether or not what Dr. Gersten describes is objectively true, his 20-year history with a guru has been deeply beneficial to him personally and as a psychiatrist.  Here is all the passion of the devotee and true believer, but one gets the feeling that even if he discovered Sai Baba were a fake, Dr. Gersten would go on believing in divine grace.

Dec. 9, 1997
Dear Jill,
    I’ve thought about your questions and decided to go all out, 100% truth.  Many people will think I am crazy for what I am about to say.  It’s so controversial that Harmony Books deleted it.
    I entered psychiatry residency after four grueling years of medical school, and began my residency at the La Jolla Veterans Administration Hospital at the University of California at San Diego.  Within the first month a nurse named Madeleine approached me, and gave me a photograph of an Indian holy man with a big afro and an orange robe.  "You're a spiritual person, and I think you should have this picture. His name is Sai Baba."  That was all she said.  I kept the photo, but had no interest at all in Sai Baba.
    During my second year, I contacted a San Diego psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel
Sandweiss and asked if he would supervise me. Dr. Sandweiss is a devotee of Sai Baba.  For two years we met and he told me stories of this man of miracles. The miracle stories shook my very foundation of reality.          Sometimes I thought that Dr. Sandweiss was himself out of his mind, for as a budding psychiatrist with one year of psychiatric training behind me, Dr. Sandweiss seemed to fit the description of a paranoid schizophrenic.  Except for a couple of major discrepancies.  He was and is one of the happiest and most well-adjusted people I've ever met; friendly, intelligent, sociable; stable family with a loving wife and 4 daughters
    When I finished my residency,  I traveled with Sam and a third psychiatrist to India to see Sai Baba. I simply wanted to know if Sai Baba really did all those miraculous things I had heard so much about.  Baba made my head spin. He deluged me with so many miracles that after 4 days I couldn't take any more and left on the 5th day.  During that brief visit I observed and experienced Sai Baba manifesting material objects out of thin air.  He manifests sacred ash, called "vibhuti" more than any other object, for ash is considered to be sacred, as it can not be further reduced.  I also witnessed rings, medallions, even candy being materialized with a wave of his hand.  If you think this was sleight of hand, let me say that Sai Baba even materialized a 3-foot high gold broach for his pet elephant. During the closing moments of that first trip, I was called in for a personal interview.  Sai Baba knew everything about me.  Now, I'm obviously interested in things that most doctors and psychiatrist shy away from. But Sai Baba was no psychic.  He wasn't just 90 or 95% accurate. He knew everything.  It was as if he had lived inside my head every moment of my life..
    But we've just scratched the surface.  There is no miracle known to humankind that Sai Baba has not performed.  I personally know two people who had a loved one resurrected from the dead.  The most astounding was a woman whose husband died while at the ashram.  She refused to let anyone take the body for cremation.  She told people, "Baba said he would come help him."  For five days, her friends argued with her, thinking she’d lost her mind.  Five days after the man's death, Sai Baba came to the room where husband and wife had been staying.  The room wreaked with the odor of the decaying body.  Half an hour later Sai Baba walked out of the room with the resurrected man . . . arm in arm, cheerfully greeting the wife.
    Isaac Tigrett, founder of The Hard Rock Cafe and The House of Blues is a
devotee of Sai Baba.  In Isaac's younger days, he says, he was sailing around the curves of the Malibu hills in his sports car when it flew over the cliff.  Immediately, Sai Baba appeared in the car, held his arms around Isaac and protected him completely.  The car lay demolished at the bottom of the cliff with the waves pouring over it.  Isaac was unharmed.
    These stories are jarring to the average American, but more so to the average psychiatrist.  "Magical thinking" they call this stuff.  Yet, if one dares to explore what I have said, and what 100 million others have personally experienced, then we are faced with more than a challenge for the theories of modern psychiatry.  Psychiatry is a speck of dust compared to the infinite mystery of God.
    I don’t not care if you believe it or not, for I have no interest in convincing anyone of anything.  Sai Baba says, "I am God and you are God.  The only difference is that I know it and you don't.” And so, yes, this psychiatrist is saying that, after his puny, Western, medical, psychiatric ego had been sufficiently deflated, that he, that I, know that God is actually on earth, walking, talking. Is Sai Baba my guru?  We, in the West, have a very hard time with the idea of a real guru.  We’re tough-minded, rugged individualists, and nobody’s going to mess with our individuality.  Surrendering to Sai Baba has been a tough lesson.
    How has this transformed my practice? Because I have witnessed and directly heard about so many miracles, I now expect miracles.  I know that my patients can have a miracle, and it is my job to create the atmosphere in which a miracle can occur.  The mere belief in miracles is like a fertilized garden, ready to sprout with new flowers.  I now know that deep change need not take 8 to 15 years of psychoanalysis, four times a week.  Deep change can be instantaneous, and that is a miracle.  But there are "real" miracles that I have been part of in my clinical work.  Frankly, when I am part of the miraculous, I stand in awe. Carmen, an acquaintance, came to me for help after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
    I gave Carmen the works:  meditation, mental imagery techniques to assist in healing, a variety of nutritional supplements that boost the immune system and fight cancer, and some lingham water.  A lingham is an egg-shaped stone.  Sai Baba has materialized countless numbers of these. He materialized one for a friend of mine and told her, "This is for healing purposes.  I will send you patients." Sharon returned to America and made bottles of water prepared with the lingham.
    Carmen's entire right lung was filled with cancer.  She was preparing for surgery.  I didn't hear from her for several weeks.  Then came the call. "Dennis, you just won't believe this.  Then again, you probably will.  I had the surgery.  They opened my chest and discovered that the cancer had spread into the left lung and was wrapped around the big blood vessels.  They closed me up and sent me home to die. Well, I was meditating one morning, and suddenly Sai Baba appeared in front of me.  My eyes were closed, but I saw him, and he was reaching inside my body, pulling cancer out.  All day long I felt this hand reaching inside me pulling the cancer out.  They gave me one radiation treatment.  And you know what.  The cancer has shrunk by 75%." Six months later Carmen walked into my office and said,  "Dennis, I am 100% cancer free.”
    Before each session with a patient, I now say a silent prayer for guidance in working with the next person.  I imagine my guru, Sathya Sai Baba, in the office with me.  When I am stuck, I will silently ask Baba for advice.  Part of my spiritual practice is to look for the spark of God in every person, including the craziest of my patients.  Sometimes this can be quite a challenge, but I’ve learned to find wisdom in the midst of insanity, divinity amidst the darkest depressions or psychotic episodes.
    This is the psychiatry of the future, a psychiatry of love, hope, faith, and miracles; a psychiatry that heals and uplifts, that sees the pain as part of the spiritual journey, that knows that spiritual ecstasy is real, and that God exists.  A psychiatry that dares to bring God into the office, that dares to offer miracles, that considers Prozac the last choice and not the first.