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. 'Men and women fall in love with Andrew
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; he 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, saying
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 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 wouldn't have remained if Andrew
were not my son, but I knew if I seriously objected to
anything, I'd be kicked out.' Finally, she returned to
New York and burned all her writing 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 teacher and seeker when it hits our
shores. It mutates. There's 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 at Guyana, when Jim Jones'
900 devotees drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
Each of these stories is a message from a bottle from 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., author of The Psychology of
Spiritual Healing. '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 -- our need
for boundary and authority. 'Who are we now that we're
free?' asks Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the
University of Virginia and author of Nightmare on Main
Street. '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.' 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 ten thousand
attachments, you end up surrendering your entire
existence to a single 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 anybody who has ever been vulnerable, lonely, and
searching,' says New York psychotherapist Daniel Shaw,
CSW. 'For me, following a guru was a way of relieving all
my depression and emptiness.'
For 12 years, Shaw was an ardent disciple of Gurumayi
Chidvilasananda, an Indian beauty who inherited the
spiritual path called Siddha Yoga (SYDA) from her guru,
Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, nicknamed Baba. (Most gurus
are crowned by the lineage they lay claim to. It's a rare
one who's born full-blown out of nowhere.)
In 1981, when Shaw joined SYDA, he was a struggling New
York actor. 'I was enraged at my failure to achieve what
I had wanted. I ended up trying to annihilate all that I
had been, devalue everyone I'd known, take a new
spiritual name and identity,' 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 -- many spiritual traditions honor ecstatic
awakening. Perhaps its most striking image is
Michelangelo's statue of Saint Teresa, 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 he began a 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.'
Like gunshots on window glass, he managed to overlook the
scandals that have marked SYDA's history.
First of all, Muktananda 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 young 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.
Shortly before Muktananda died in 1982, 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 suggest 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, 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.' And the gurus make sure to maintain that
absolute adoration. When Amrit Desai, the now dishonored
'guru' of the holistic facility called Kripalu, in Lenox,
Massachusetts, 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 itself though
revelations and religious insights. Take David Koresh:
Storr notes that at age nineteen, his sixteen-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.'
Mad or Bad or Sad?
Yet gurus are not actually insane, says Storr. They may
be frankly delusional in their beliefs about God and the
universe and their exalted role in it, 'yet they 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, and arrogant, but they did not suffer from the
thought disorders prevalent in schizophrenia or actual
psychosis -- buffered as they were by adoring
disciples.
The cost of that adoration is, oddly enough, isolation.
Kramer and Alstad note that gurus are deprived of real
relational intimacy, and thus try to fill the need for
genuine closeness with more and more followers: 'The role
of guru is a gradual entrapment. Power is seductive, and
they don't realize what they're 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's particularly hard for Americans, bred on
independence. '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, even those with a guru.' 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. 'He has
to maintain that he's enlightened 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 Desai. '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.''
Kissing Feet?
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. Some of our problems with
gurus are our own: we don't understand the nature of the
relationship we're importing, and we respond to it
inappropriately at times. '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 devotion, looks to a typical American
like guru worship.' Before we rush to condemn, cautions
Taylor, let's try to understand the roots of the guru's
own culture.
John Perkins, the founder of the Dream Change Coalition
and author of Shapeshifting agrees. 'In their native
cultures, shamans are looked at as ordinary people who
happen to heal others. They milk cows, plant corn, and
also perform healings.'
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.' Some gurus have championed what is
known as 'crazy wisdom' -- knowledge gleaned from
breaking boundaries and indulging in mind-altering drugs,
alcohol, and group sex. Yet, imported to this culture,
crazy wisdom began to look merely crazy. Consider Chogyam
Trungpa Rimpoche, who appointed a successor he knew had
AIDS and was having unprotected sex with the
disciples.
A Saffron Paradox?
For Americans in particular, the guru is an irreducible
paradox. Here in the land of religious freedom, the guru
is inevitable, often irresistible. How can we curtail his
freedom, whether he's dreaming up bacchanals or 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
Esalen Institute's Michael Murphy says: 'This is one of
the glories of America, this freedom.' Let our gurus
fall. We'll hoist up new ones in their place. Land of the
brave, home of the free.
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.
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 a single religious teacher, we rebel
against the very freedom we fought for from the
start.
Eventually, most of us wander free again. 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
bird-watching 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.'
The Incredible Shrinking God
Freud, Jung, and their Followers
Not all gurus wear robes. 'If someone were to do today
what some of the early psychoanalysts did, you would say
that person was a megalomaniac,' says psychiatrist Peter
Kramer, M.D., of Listening to Prozac fame -- and a bit of
a reluctant guru himself. If psychology has often been
called a secular religion, do two of its most memorable
pioneers qualify as saints or as sinners?
'In Freud's presence, people felt there was this
penetrating power,' claims Frederick Crews, professor
emeritus of English at University of California at
Berkeley and author of The Memory Wars, a book compiled
from one of the most controversial sets of essays the New
York Review of Books ever published. In those essays,
Crews took pleasure in brilliantly dismantling the 'cult
of Freud' and its stepchild, the recovered-memory
movement. Though Freud presented himself as a scientist,
Crews argues that he operated more like a guru,
convincing people of the superb rightness of his ideas
through the sheer force of his personality rather than
through their objective validity.
Who's Afraid of Sigmund Wolf?
Crews thinks there was a dark side to Freud's charisma.
'People were afraid of Freud, arid would do anything to
avoid his disapproval. They became abject in his
presence, and this abjectness was itself indoctrinating.
If you give up your intellectual independence in
somebody's presence, that person becomes all-consuming.
The message Freud gave his followers was that he
personified psychoanalysis.
He was psychoanalysis.'
Yet, says Crews, Freud understood from the very beginning
that his patient were not getting cured. 'As late as
1906, he writes to Jung that he has not successfully
completed a single psychoanalysis.' Freud's scientific
contemporaries criticized him for this, but much like the
gurus described by British psychiatrist Anthony Storr (p.
76), Freud resisted any criticism. He called these
attacks manifestations of unconscious resistance, and
claimed that critics needed to be analyzed to understand
psychoanalysis properly. 'What Freud is saying to the
world is, `If you disagree with me it's because you're
not an initiate,'' Crews says. 'You have not had the
experience that creates true belief.' The whole history
of religion is a history of placing faith ahead of
knowledge. If you can acquire the faith, you will get the
knowledge. If you can be a member, you will understand
why we make the assertions that we do.' For Frederick
Crews, Freud was a guru with a dark pedigree.
Once psychoanalysis had been evangelized by Freud, he
attracted priests for his new religion.' [In
1912] Ernest Jones and Salvador Ferenczi, two of
Freud's most loyal disciples, came to him with the idea
that they should have a secret central committee of
psychoanalysis,' Crews says. 'They would monopolize the
psychoanalytic channels, and plant negative stories about
defectors. Freud was so thrilled with this idea that he
went out and had rings made for the members of the
committee; he then held a private ceremony in which
members acquired their rings and swore loyalty.' Crews
sees this as a cult-like experience of having the master
metaphorically lay hands on his disciples through
personal psychoanalysis.
If Crews sees Freud as a shameless guru in scientist's
clothing, Peter Kramer differs: 'Given the high regard
Freud was held in, he could have been far worse.' Kramer
points out that Freud's ideas were novel and threatening
in a way that late 20th century Westerners cannot even
imagine, and that his secrecy and defensiveness in the
face of criticism might have been a protective mechanism.
Freud 'was trying to create a scientific movement in an
area where he felt there was going to be natural
resistance to the viewpoint. My sense of the guru is that
it corresponds more to what Carl Jung did.'
The Jung and the Yang
Kramer recounts a famous instance in Jung diagnosed
Sabina Spielrein, his first patient, as schizophrenic,
then seduced her and asked his wife to take Spielrein
into their house; he then allowed her to idolize him.
In fact, Jung seemed to be very comfortable in the role
of idol, even in the role of a secular religious leader,
Kramer says. 'Jung was much more invested in his own
omniscience than Freud.' While Freud discussed his
dreams, Jung wrote about numerous waking visions,
including one in 1913 where he saw a great red flood over
the Alps, which he later interpreted as a premonition of
the first World War. He also unabashedly expressed his
belief that God himself implanted dreams in his head, and
that he had a special connection to a higher power. He
promoted neo-religious ideas such as that of a collective
unconscious which exists outside individual human life,
and synchronicity, a kind of coincidence. Some think Jung
saw himself as an Aryan Christ, and though these claims
are not widely held, Jung's followers did virtually
enslave themselves to him, Kramer says. 'While Freud's
ambition may have caused him to cut corners
scientifically, Jung aspired to the guru's mantle.'
Freud's guru-like greatness, in the end, did transcend
the foibles of the psychoanalytic movement. Part of this
can be attributed to the times in which he lived, Kramer
thinks. Before the world wars, 'There was a willingness
to accord great mental powers to certain people, which
was part of a more general belief that human beings were
on a progressive course and that leaders were sort of the
advance guard. It was a time of genuine, widespread hero
worship.'
Love or Libido
This cult of the hero not only warped the guru but it
warped the teachings as well. Freud's image in America as
the source of sexual liberation is a striking
example.
'America embraced Freudianism in a spirit that Freud
himself found ridiculous,' Crews says. While Freud
himself had mixed feelings about sexual freedom, America
has always been about overthrowing the past. In the 20th
century, when we discarded the mores of our sexually
puritanical past, we needed somebody to personify that,
someone who could give a scientific and medical blessing
to the idea that unqualified sexual freedom is a good
thing.
'What Freud wanted was more civilization,' says Crews.
'But people didn't care. They cared about finding someone
to validate the tendency that they were already inclined
to follow.' And this is, after all, one of the main
reasons that people seek out gurus in the first
place.
Holy Madness In Healing
Psychiatrist as Disciple
Dennis Gersten, M.D., 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 twenty-year history with a guru has been deeply
beneficial to him personally and as a psychiatrist. Here
is all the passion of the devotee arid true believer, but
one gets the feeling that even if he discovered that Sai
Baba were a fake, Dr. Gersten would go on believing in
divine grace.
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 my
publisher deleted this material from the book.
I began my psychiatry 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.
In my second year, I was supervised by a San Diego
psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Sandweiss, who 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, except he was
friendly, intelligent, and sociable, with a loving wife
and four daughters.
When I finished my residency, I traveled with Sam to
India to see Sai Baba. Baba deluged me with so many
miracles that after four days I couldn't take any more
and left on the fifth day. During that brief visit I
observed and experienced Sai Baba manifesting material
objects out of thin air. He manifests sacred ash, called
'vibhuti,' rings, medallions, even candy, with a wave of
his hand. If you think this was sleight of hand, let me
say that Sai Baba even materialized a three-foot-high
gold brooch 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 psychiatrists shy away from. But it was as if he'd
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.' Five days
after the man's death, Sai Baba came to the room, which
reeked 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, 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. 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, 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.
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, medical
ego had been sufficiently deflated, that he, that I, know
that God is 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 individuals, and
surrendering to Sai Baba has been a tough lesson. What is
a guru, anyway? The word means 'he or she who removes the
darkness.' These people are like human magnets, their
power of attraction is so great. Although gurus
throughout the ages have developed immense powers, these
are not what attract. It is the boundless love one feels
in such a presence, a love so great that one can be
permanently changed.
How has this transformed my practice? Because I have
witnessed miracles, I now expect miracles. It's my job to
create the atmosphere in which a miracle can occur. The
mere belief in miracles is like a fertilized garden. I
now know that deep change need not take eight to fifteen
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, and I stand in awe before them. Take
Carmen, an acquaintance who came to me for help after
being diagnosed with lung cancer.
I gave Carmen the works: meditation, mental imagery
techniques, nutritional supplements, and some lingham
water. A lingham is an egg-shaped stone. Sai Baba
materialized one for a friend of mine and said, 'This is
for healing purposes. I will send you patients.' She
returned to America and made bottles of water prepared
with the lingham.
Carmen's entire right lung was filled with cancer. 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. He was reaching inside my body,
pulling 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.'
The question arises, when going beyond traditional
medical and psychiatric boundaries, what to do with
spiritual experience, how to 'treat' it. 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. A few
months ago, I was working with a woman named Sarah, who
suffered from a full-blown manic psychosis. Mania is
interesting. These people have an ability to zero in on
your personal weaknesses in an instant. When this woman
and I met, she was loud angry, and threatening. I managed
to simply listen, remaining centered. Toward the end of
that first meeting, she asked about my family. I told her
I have a 22-year-old daughter. 'Do you tell her you love
her?' she asked. 'Yes,' I said, 'I do.' 'But do you tell
her everyday?' she insisted. 'Yes,' I said, 'every single
day.' And then the kicker: 'But do you really tell her
from deep in your heart? I want you to tell her tonight
from the bottom of your heart how much you lover her.' I
agreed. I knew that the divine part of Sarah had spoken,
and that I had better pay attention. I went home that
night and told my daughter how much I love her, from the
bottom of my heart. Spiritual psychiatry is about
bringing my patients to a point of serenity they may
never have experienced, but it is also about finding the
divine in another person and connecting with that,
soul-to-soul.
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, and that
considers Prozac the last choice and not the first.
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