Amanda Lucas ("The Guru-Disciple Relationship and the Complications of Consent," therevealer.com, 3/2/20); Ashley Wells, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly
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| Why do Westerners seem to love Indian gurus so much they show it with sex? |
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The guru-disciple relationship and the complications of consent: Neem Karoli Baba
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| Neem Karoli aka Maharaji (prem-rawat-bio.org) |
Is a devotee who promised to serve a guru able to assert her defiance or her consent?
Yet another example of a Hindu guru sexually abusing one of his devotees:
The story was a devotee’s account of her sexual and violent interactions with Neem Karoli Baba, famed guru to the stars of the American counterculture.
But this recently circulated version omitted sections of the original narrative, critical segments that complicate a facile black-and-white story of abuse and productively introduce the idea of “gray rape.”
Gray rape acknowledges the messiness of sexual interactions, the competing discourses of normal sex (by which we establish what constitutes sexual violation), and differences in power and positionality that disallow a priori notions of consent.
Sound and photos of Baba and devotees
(Nit Ram, 7/18) What did this love-magnet, love-emanating sex guru look and sound like back then?
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| The great guru was once handsome. |
To do so, I first introduce the redacted account that recently circulated on social media and that generated outrage. Second, I add the omitted sections from this account and show how they produce a more complex narrative, dependent on the values and perspectives of the people involved.
This version leads us into the muddy waters of real human interactions, ones that are fraught and complex, contradictory and unclear.
In this particular case, the devotee recounting the story is anonymous and the guru in question is dead. What can we know of their actions and intentions, or how coercion and consent overlapped and intertwined?
This is all the more important when the narrative is located within the social context of the Hindu guru-disciple relationship, a relationship entirely dependent on unequal power relations, wherein the guru is respected as a spiritual master and it is the disciple’s duty to submit to his authority.
Here is the recently circulated version that appeared on social media and that was previously published in the exposé volume, Stripping the Gurus:
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| Ram Dass' Be Here Now's about me |
The first time he [Guru Neem Karoli Baba] took me in the room alone I sat up on the tucket [low wooden bed] with him, and he was like a seventeen-year-old jock who was a little fast! I felt as if I were fifteen and innocent.
He started making out with me, and it was so cute, so pure. I was swept into it for a few moments — then grew alarmed: “Wait! This is my guru. One doesn’t do this [have sex] with one’s guru!” So I pulled away from him.
Then Maharajji ["Great Revered King" Neem Karoli Baba] tilted his head sideways and wrinkled up his eyebrows in a tender, endearing, quizzical look. He didn’t say anything, but his whole being was saying to me, “Don’t you like me?”
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| You did what with your who!? - Wait, come back! |
I had to be carried out of the ashram [religious hermitage]. On the way, we stopped by Maharajji’s [Neem Karoli Baba’s] room so I could pranam [prostrate] to him.
I kneeled by the tucket and put my head down by his feet — and he kicked me in the head, saying, “Get her out of here!” . . .
***
That was the first time, and I was to be there for two years. During my last month there, I was alone with him every day in the room . . . Sometimes he would just touch me on the breasts and between my legs, saying, “This is mine, this is mine, this is mine. All is mine. You are mine.”
You can interpret it as you want, but near the end in these darshans, it was as though he were my child. Sometimes I felt as though I were suckling a tiny baby.
***
In many ways Neem Karoli Baba was a humble guru with simple teachings, but he became internationally renowned because of his disciples’ fame.
He cultivated a cherished devotional space in the late 1960s and 1970s at his ashram in the Himalayan foothill town of Nanital, India, which Parvati Markus chronicled in her book Love Everyone.
Neem Karoli Baba’s story often begins with the litany of Western devotees who became highly influential people after their encounters with him. Ram Dass [Harvard Dr. Richard Alpert, author of Be Here Now] and Bhagavan Das [Kermit Michael Riggs] became his disciples and, later, gurus in their own right.
Ram Dass inspired a generation with his pathbreaking publication Be Here Now.
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| Steve Jobs?! The Apple iPhone guy?! |
Jobs went to see the guru and, as recounted in his biography, said, “For me it was a serious search. I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.”
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| Zuckerberg's Facebook helps CIA, FBI, NSA... |
At a town hall with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Menlo Park, Zuckerberg explained:
“He [Jobs] told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be.”
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| Not Google, too! Who is this monster? |
Google’s founder Larry Page visited Neem Karoli Baba, as did:
- Ebay’s founder Jeffrey Skoll,
- Daniel Goleman (danielgoleman.com),
- Larry Brilliant,
- Lama Surya Das [abusive Tibetan Buddhist sex guru Jeffrey Miller],
- and the list goes on
- and on.
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| Buddhist Lama Surya Das admits sleeping with students, says it was wrong (religionnews.com) |
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| Lama Surya Dass, aka Jeffrey Miller |
Later, in a statement released by a spokesperson, he said that he had had intimate relationships with "a few" (Ibid.) of his former students before 2010 (Ibid.) These admissions came after five women, working through a lawyer, brought allegations of sexual misconduct by Lama Surya Das to Dzogchen Foundation's board of directors in 2019.
Three of them said Lama Surya Das suggested that meditating while naked in his lap would help their spiritual practice. Two others recounted sexual encounters with Lama Surya Das, including one who said that he told her sleeping with him would complete her Buddhist training (Ibid.)
Lama Surya Das has disputed some of the details of these sex abuse allegations (Ibid.)
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| Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman |
The [abused] devotee’s account that opened this discussion was not hidden from these [celebrity] celebrants of the guru.
In fact, it was published back in 1979 in Ram Dass’s widely read devotional book Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba.
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| Sex is OK if you do it with me. |
When the book was published, the passage did not spark any significant critique of Neem Karoli Baba’s [sexually exploitative] treatment of this female devotee.
It also included several key sections that add to the complexity and ambiguity of the account. The deleted sections that did not appear in the recent story on social media are as follows:
…I was unable to move for the next three days, but after that I felt perfectly well again. And I had worked through a lot of my reactions to that darshan: revulsion, confusion, and so forth…
...Even as early as the 1960s, there were rumors about Neem Karoli Baba’s sexual relationships with women.
Ram Dass (Dr. Dick Alpert) introduces the special "favor" their guru showed women by positioning Neem Karoli Baba as emblematic of [the Hindu god] Krishna [to make it all right]. More
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| A wolf in sheep's clothing -- a male "Karen" in women's prison (www.fairplayforwomen.com) |
