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Well, you got the first approximately 50% of this book for free. But the rest is gonna cost ya.

How much would you expect to pay for an eBook like this?

$89.95? $99.95? $28 (seriously) for the gougingly overpriced electronic version of Bill Clinton’s My Life, with highlights of his experiences in the Oral Orifice? I mean the Oval Office?

If you act now, you can download the complete text of Stripping the Gurus (in PDF format) for under $10 Cdn. (Price is subject to change.) Details are at www.millionmonkeyspress.com.

In that full version, you will find:

• Complete chapters on Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Krishnamurti:

Ramakrishna could [be] described, in the jargon of modern medical psychology, as a “she male,” that is, a male who, despite his male genitalia, possesses a female psyche and breasts resembling those of a woman....

Once he sat after a midday siesta with his loin cloth disheveled. He then remarked that he was sitting like a woman about to suckle her baby. In fact, he used to suckle his young beloved [male] disciple Rakhal Ghosh (Sil, 1998).

[Vivekananda] reportedly confessed to Swami Subodhananda that after his father’s death [in 1884] he visited brothels and consumed alcoholic beverages in the company of his friends (Sil, 1997).

Krishna[murti] professed to believe that Rosalind [the wife of a close friend, with whom he carried on an affair for over twenty-five years] was his long-lost mother....

[Emily Lutyens] said she knew Krishna[murti] was a congenital liar but that she would nevertheless always adore him (Sloss, 2000)

• A revealing chapter on the Dalai Lama, the female American lama Jetsunma, and actor Steven Seagal:

Sexual misconduct for men and women consists of oral and anal sex.... Even with your wife, using one’s mouth or other hole is sexual misconduct (the Dalai Lama, in [P. Harvey, 2000]).

To have sexual relations with a prostitute paid by you and not by a third person does not, on the other hand, constitute improper behavior (Lama, 1996).

While Buddhists aren’t really supposed to proselytize, lamas are known to be very crafty, and they use all kinds of techniques—flattery, promises, even lies—to expose a student to the Dharma. And it is thought to be an enormous blessing if a lama [such as Jetsunma, in her reported relations with at least one of her female followers, and more than one of her male disciples] chooses to have sex with you (Sherrill, 2000).

In his audience [with the Dalai Lama], according to Dora [M.], Seagal felt that something “unique” had transpired between him and the Dalai Lama. “He claimed that His Holiness bent down and kissed his feet,” she said. “And Seagal took that to mean that the Dalai Lama was proclaiming him a deity” (Schell, 2000)

• Chapters on Kripalu (Yogi Amrit Desai), and the Scottish community of Findhorn:

In venomous poetry, powerful and afire with wrathful righteousness, [the Findhorn “community poet”] unleashed the dark feelings and destructive forces of the community. The objects of his rage were the Americans in general and myself in particular. We were portrayed in terms that would make fecal material seem sunny by comparison. His attack centered around money and power ... the dark side of any endeavor that wears the mask of great good and service [as does Findhorn]. The only thing explicitly missing was sex, except he covered that by using the words “fuck” and “fucking” with an extraordinary frequency (Joy, 1990)

• An 8500-word Appendix on “Wilber and Bohm: An Analysis of the Problems with Ken Wilber’s ‘Refutations’ of David Bohm’s Ideas.” The paper proves that on every relevant point where Wilber and Bohm disagree, Bohm was absolutely right, and the bombastic Wilber irretrievably wrong, having grossly misrepresented Bohm’s ideas in nothing more than a “straw man” attack on his primary competitor in consciousness studies

The Gurus and Prisoners chapter in the paid download further contains a detailed and precise mapping of the sadistic and controlling behaviors reported to occur in our world’s ashrams, against those seen in the classic prison study of psychologist Philip Zimbardo. It thus shows that many of the reported problems we have seen with spiritual leaders and their communities are structurally inherent in those closed authoritarian societies, and are thus nearly unavoidable, as a product of basic human psychology among the followers, regardless of how “perfect” the master in charge may (or may not) be. It also presents additional decisive proof that the guru-disciple relationship has never worked, even in the traditional, agrarian East. That is so, in spite of the indefensible claims of fanciful “experts” such as Wilber, Andrew Harvey (2000) and Ram Dass (in Caplan, 2002), that it has long functioned well there. It has not. Not even close.

The final three chapters of Stripping the Gurus, as included in that paid download, contain the following:

• A dissection of the worrisome professional activities of Dick Anthony (friend of, and co-author with, the often-wrong Wilber)
  
  
• A debunking of Anthony’s (and Who guitarist Pete Townsend’s) guru, Meher Baba—a man who was, in Paul Brunton’s words, “suffering from colossal delusions about his own greatness,” and who allegedly demanded “complete enslavement on the part of his brain-stupefied followers”
  
  
• A demythologizing of the revered/cruel/unstable female mystic Ananda Moyi Ma, contrary to the enthusiastic praise given her by Yogananda in his antiseptic Autobiography
  
  
• A discussion of the alleged abuse and violence, even to the point of death threats, which are frequently reported to be visited upon persons who dare to speak out against our world’s “holy, compassionate sages”
  
  
• And much more....

The paid eBook also includes an extensive bibliography.

To download that full, very reasonably priced version, please go now to www.millionmonkeyspress.com.

Beyond that, and more importantly, if you know of anyone who might benefit from reading these chapters, please consider emailing them a link for that, to www.strippingthegurus.com.

The HTML for all of these sample chapters is likewise available at www.strippingthegurus.com/stglite/stglitesourcecode.zip. Feel free to post it anywhere and everywhere. (The right to bind those chapters and sell them as part or all of a book, or to sell them as part or all of an eBook, however, is strictly reserved.)

Someone you know is interested in Eastern or New Age philosophy, and considering following a purportedly “safe” and “divinely loving” spiritual leader? The information here could save him from making the biggest mistake of his life—because all of the “sages” considered herein were “safe” and “divinely loving,” according to their most loyal, and most blind, admirers. Even Jim Jones was “the most compassionate, honest and courageous human being the world contains,” according to his followers.

Someone you love has already been suckered in by the false claims of a “God-realized perfect master”? With any luck, this might help them get out of that mess, if they’re willing to hear what it has to say.

You want to “fight fire with fire” against the explicit recruiting efforts of allegedly harmful religious groups, and believe that the ideas herein can help with that? Great!! There are printable posters/flyers at www.millionmonkeyspress.com under the Media Room section, suitable for photocopying and posting/distributing wherever nontraditional religions themselves tend to recruit or to post. They might well look good stapled/taped right beside the “learn to meditate” recruiting posters which litter libraries, bulletin boards, lamp posts and university campuses, etc.

With regard to the latter: In one survey (Singer, 2003) it was found that 43% of former “cult” members were students (in high school or college) at the time when they became involved with their respective organizations. Further, of those students, 38% dropped out of school after joining their groups.

University students are often vulnerable recruitment targets for potentially harmful groups (Smith, 2004).

College campuses are the chief recruiting centers of most [alleged] destructive cults, and virtually every college campus in the country has been and continues to be visited by these organizations....

At the University of California—Berkeley, for example, it is estimated that at least two hundred different religious sects on and off-campus are recruiting from the 30,000-student campus (in Rudin, 1996).

In a survey done in 1980 by Zimbardo of more than one thousand high school students in the San Francisco Bay area 54% reported a [so-called] cult had attempted to recruit them and 40% said they had experienced multiple attempts (Ross, 2002b).

Some ... observers echo Richard Delgado’s call for an intensive public education campaign about the [so-called] cults.... Dr. Lester Rosenthal ... believes ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders should be required to take courses in school on how the [so-called] cults recruit and operate (Rudin and Rudin, 1980).

Beyond the sorely needed education of young people in particular, the following reasonable suggestions have also been made:

Federal funds should be appropriated for research and treatment of [so-called] mind control victims (Hassan, 1990).

[T]he government might launch a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of [so-called] cults, just as it has done for smoking, seat belts, and drunk driving (Hassan, 2000).

Professor Richard Delgado asserts that the legal status of [alleged] religious cults should be analyzed within the context of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution—which forbids slavery—rather than within the First Amendment alone. He believes the conditions of some [so-called] cult members do in fact constitute a state of slavery (Rudin and Rudin, 1980).

U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment provides only unqualified freedom of religious belief, not unlimited freedom to practice those beliefs in ways that may violate existing laws or pose a threat to the health and safety of individuals or society (Conway and Siegelman, 1982).

Albert Einstein again observed that “the world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” So let’s do something about it. Let’s do what we can to make it a safer and better place.

Take Care & Be Well,

Geoff

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