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STRIPPING THE GURUSSex, Violence, Abuse and EnlightenmentRamakrishna was a homoerotic pedophile.His chief disciple, Vivekananda, visited brothels in India.Krishnamurti carried on an affair for over twenty years with thewife of a close friend. Chogyam Trungpa drank himself into an earlygrave. One of Adi Da’s nine “wives” is a former Playboy centerfold.Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh sniffed laughing gas to get high. AndrewCohen, guru and publisher of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, byhis own reported admission sometimes feels “like a god.”These are typical of the “wizened sages” to whom otherwise-sensiblepeople give their devotion and unquestioning obedience, surrender-ing their independence, willpower, and life’s savings in the hope ofrealizing for themselves the same “enlightenment” as they ascribe tothe “perfect, God-realized” master.Why?Is it for being emotionally vulnerable and “brainwashed,” as the“anti-cultists” assert? Or for being “willingly psychologically se-duced,” as the apologists unsympathetically counter, confident thatthey themselves are “too smart” to ever fall into the same trap? Orhave devotees simply walked, with naively open hearts and thirstysouls, into inherent psychological dynamics of power and obediencewhich have showed themselves in classic psychological studies fromMilgram to Zimbardo, and to which each one of us is susceptibleevery day of our lives?Like the proud “Rude Boy” Cohen allegedly said, with a laugh, in re-sponse to the nervous breakdown of one of his devoted followers: “Itcould happen to any one of you.”Don’t let it happen to you. Don’t get suckered in. Be prepared. Be in-formed. Find out what reportedly goes on behind the scenes in eventhe best of our world’s spiritual communities.You can start by reading this book.=======================IntroductionThe alert reader will further note that, aside from my ownrelatively non-scandalous (but still highly traumatic) personal ex-periences at Hidden Valley, all of the allegations made herein—none of which, to my knowledge, except where explicitly noted,have been proved in any court of law—have already been put intoprint elsewhere in books and magazine articles. In all of thosecases, I am relying in good faith on the validity of the extant, pub-lished research of the relevant journalists and ex-disciples. I havemade every effort to present that existing reported data withoutputting any additional “spin” on it, via juxtapositions or otherwise.After all, the in-print (alleged) realities, in every case, are jaw-dropping enough that no innuendo or taking-out-of-context wouldhave ever been required in order to make our world’s “god-men”look foolish.June, 2005  Geoffrey D. FalkToronto, Ontario