In 1972 the Bee Gees drummer left to join a band dedicated to a cult leader named Maharaj-ji. A few years later George Harrison of the Beatles produced a different band dedicated to the same cult leader. Carlos Santana was given the name Devadip by his abusive guru Sri Chinmoy. Donovan traveled to India with the Beatles studying Transcendental Meditation. Soon the Doors, Mick Jagger and the Grateful Dead would all be practicing TM. The Beach Boys recorded one of Charles Manson's songs. Leonard Cohen dropped out and moved into a Zen Monastery, but his guru would be ousted for sexual abuse. Musician turned cult leader Mel Lyman was dubbed the "East Coast Charles Manson." John Travolta and Frank Stallone recorded a vinyl record made up of Scientology lyrics that went gold.
These are just some of the fascinating stories in Cult Rocked
The Skeptical Vegan is making an amazing admission - and providing a great service:
"The vegan and vegetarian communities are philosophically and religiously diverse and while secular veganism is growing in the west, still in the US and much of the world religious groups of one sort or another dominate the vegetarian and vegan culture. Most of us are familiar with Hindu-run curry houses or Buddhist tofu joints but there are also many other places run by devotees of smaller 'new religious movements' or cults*. In the following series of posts I will be taking a deeper look into some of these businesses and the groups behind them."
There are five chapters, so far, all featuring figures and cults previously covered on TMR. Click the Red links, and then check out my tags at the bottom of the post, to see who the cults are, how they're trying to exploit us, and how much ground I've covered for the whole truth on these wonderful human beings:
-- Jayanti Tamm, author of Cartwheels in a Sari: A Memoir of Growing Up Cult, as she describes how her mother traveled from San Francisco to a hovel in New York to enter the cult of "Guru" Sri Chinmoy - dooming Jayanti into becoming his child disciple - on NPR.
"Tamm's parents met in the Manhattan apartment of the guru Sri Chinmoy* (above) and quickly married each other at his insistence; when they violated his commandment not to have sex with each other, however, he regrouped by declaring that their daughter, Tamm, would become his greatest disciple. The cult leader was a skilled manipulator, and Tamm's descriptions of her internalization of his predation, constantly blaming herself for not feeling worshipful enough, are wrenching. The outward pressures were equally difficult: she was forbidden a college education and sent abroad when she was caught violating the cultwide ban on dating—and the first time she was banished from the group, she begged for readmittance. Tamm, now in her late 30s and a professor at Ocean County College in New Jersey, is unsparing in her account of the psychological damage Sri Chinmoy inflicted on her and her family, from her parent's loveless marriage to her half-brother's gleeful acceptance of the role of the guru's enforcer. She reveals the difficulties in shaking off the guru's influence—under which she had spent literally her entire life before her final expulsion—and though readers might wish to hear more about how she eventually regained her identity, the harrowing details of her story create a sense of emotional devastation that will linger."
*It sure is funny how, when The New York Times wrote this creep's obituary, they didn't mention any of this stuff. We're telling ya, that's one hell of an informative "newspaper" they've got there,...
Sri Chinmoy died the other day. Here's how the New York Times described him:
"The genial Indian-born spiritual leader who used strenuous exercise and art to spread his message of world harmony and inner peace, died Thursday at his home in Jamaica, Queens, where he ran a meditation center. He was 76."
"The genial Indian-born spiritual leader". Sweet, right? Check out this list of his followers, drawn from several articles on his passing:
Carlos Santana
Singer Sheena Easton
Olympic athlete Carl Lewis
Record producer Narada Michael Walden
Clarence Clemons of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band
There are many more names listed (Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Susan Sarandon, Yoko Ono, Richard Gere) but I want to be fair, so lets just regard them as people Chinmoy ran into, O.K.? (Sure.)
O.K., now let's look closer at this "spiritual leader" - and the New York Times - to get an idea of how credible they both are for delivering the truth to the public:
The New York Post says other papers are "gullible" for buying Chinmoy's message, and "have chugged down the Kool-Aid, then licked the bottom of the cup" about "the creepy Queens 'guru'", and that "a quick Internet search" (something I seem to be good at) reveals a "sleazier side - which includes claims from former devotees that he ran a 'cult'. The Post says Chinmoy caused 'disturbing personality changes' in members and also ordered his dreamy-eyed female followers to engage in exploitive sexcapades. How "spiritual".
In 2004, one former longtime follower of Chinmoy told The Post how Chinmoy summoned her for extended sex romps, then ordered her to have sex with another woman while he watched. Other women recounted similar tales, including one who said Chinmoy paid for her abortion after he got her pregnant."
Sweet.
A couple of papers quoted Carlos Santana as saying the man some called “Sleazy Sri” was "vindictive" and everything Santana had experienced with Chinmoy had “turned to vinegar” , adding, “This shit is not for me–I don’t care how enlightening it is.”
Rick Ross's Cult News site reported that "some tagged Chinmoy’s devotees 'spiritual slaves' and repeated allegations depicted the supposedly celibate holy man as a 'sleazy' sexual predator that preyed upon vulnerable female followers.
Benjamin Spector, once a disciple of the guru wrote, 'My one-time leader Sri Chinmoy encouraged many of us to work below the minimum wage and without benefits, at businesses owned by senior group members in New York and other locations. Many workers were illegal aliens.'
Spector explained, 'The followers of cult leaders are very frequently well educated, sophisticated and sensitive, but authoritarian leaders rob them of their ability to think independently as individuals and dominate them.'"
Now, as much as I want to delve into the subject of those "well educated, sophisticated and sensitive" followers, I'll stay on point and ask:
Why didn't the New York Times report any of this ugly stuff? They didn't even use the word "controversial" with this pervert.
Our so-called "paper of record" did two stories on this asshole's passing and there's not a word of his public wrong-doings in either of them. It's just like with Yusef Bey and Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery cult, where there's just a mention - years after the fact, and once a reporter had been killed - that Bey was, literally, using girls he adopted as a toilet, forcing them to drink his urine and semen, and all while he gleefully held letters of support from Left-wing anti-war Representative Barbara Lee and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums.
Seriously, folks, is the New York Times a newspaper anymore? Under the circumstances, I'd say it's as qualified to call itself a "newspaper" as Sri Chinmoy (or Yusef Bey) was to call himself a "spiritual leader". Both bastardize the very idea of what they claim to represent. The framing of every belief, and every story, is so slanted as to never expose anything - unless, of course, it's against the Bush Administration or one of his supporters - preferably conservative and almost never true as well.
The number of people who wholeheartedly believe what the New York Times says anymore is mind-blowing to me. (As mind-blowing as the idea that all those celebrities, listed above, could fall under the spell of a craven bald-headed old fool from India - only leading to more people, who aren't celebrities, giving their lives over to him.) People tell me it's because the New York Times is "well-written" but so what? Well-written lies are still lies.
None of us should ever forget the words my ex-slave foster mother used to say, to keep us kids on our guard around the world's charlatans and liars, because her simple words were never as true as when reading a story in the NYT - or listening to the words of a so-called "spiritual" type:
