Yogi Bhajan is the Sikh founder of 3HO, the non-profit "Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization," headquartered in Los Angeles.

Born in the Punjab, he worked as a customs agent in New Delhi before emigrating with his wife to North America in 1968, at age 39, to teach kundalini and white tantric yoga there.

White tantra is used "to purify and uplift the being," as opposed to Black, which is "for mental control of other people," or Red, which "is for sexual energy and senses," or for demonstrating miracles (S. Khalsa, 1996).

Yogi Bhajan has said that kundalini yoga will be the yoga of the Aquarian Age and will be practiced for the next 5,000 years (in Singh, 1998a).

Guru Terath Singh Khalsa, who is [Bhajan's] lawyer and spokesman, says that Bhajan is "the equivalent of the Pope" (Time, 1977).

Yogi Bhajan is unique among spiritual teachers because he is also the Mahan Tantric of this era. This means that he is the only living master of white tantric yoga in the world, since there can only be one on the planet at any given time. He is a world teachers, a very special instrument whom God has appointed and anointed to awaken the millions of sleeping souls on this planet....

[White tantra] can only be practiced under the auspices and direction of the Mahan Tantric (Master of white tantric yoga), at a time and place specified by him.

You could search the world over, climb the highest mountains of Tibet, seek out the deepest caves of India and not find anyone else properly qualified to teach you white tantric yoga, because the one and only person on the planet empowered to do so is Yogi Bhajan. He is the designated Mahan Tantric of this time....

In just a few minutes of white tantric yoga meditation you can accomplish results that would take months to achieve with any other practice (S. Khalsa, 1996).

The idea that Bhajan is actually the "Mahan Tantric of this era" via any recognized lineage, however, has been questioned by some of his detractors.

In any case, Madonna, Rosanna Arquette (former squeeze of Peter Gabriel), Melissa Etheridge, Cindy Crawford, Courtney Love and David Duchovny have all have been influenced by Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, one of Yogi Bhajan's devoted followers (Ross, 2002). As of 1980, Bhajan claimed a quarter of a million devotees worldwide, including around 2500 in his ashrams. The yogi himself has been reported to live in a mansion in Los Angeles.

Bhajan's brand of Sikhism has actually been rejected by the orthodox Sikh community, but that seems to derive more from him including elements of (Hindu) kundalini yoga in it than for any concern about the teachings or practice themselves. Splitting on such a basis of "impurity," of course, has a long history in Christianity too, and is more the product of fundamentalism than of any particular degree of insight.

K. Khalsa (1990) described life in Bhajan's community, to a visitor, in this way:

"Well," I explained "we are supposed to get up and meditate and do yoga at 3:30 a.m. but for the last six months nobody has managed to do that. In fact everyone has been really negative lately and the only time we even talk to each other is during our weekly house meeting where we have been ripping each other to shreds!"

There have been times down through the years where 3HO has seemed to me to be just like a baboon troop complete with Dominant Male #1, Male #2, #3, #4 and so on down the pecking order....

[W]e have all put 3HO first; freely letting Yogi Bhajan dictate our diets, our sex lives, our clothes, our choice of partners, our children and our livelihoods (K. Khalsa, 1990).

As to Bhajan's particular style of teaching, K. Khalsa (1990) noted:

[Y]ou never know what this person is going to do next. Are they going to praise you or blame you, empower you or humiliate you?

[Bhajan's] devotees are often singled-out and reamed for behaviors that he, his inner circle, and/or ashram directors feel are inappropriate and/or disobedient to the 3HO code of conduct. Then not unlike the process of being pardoned of one's sins by a confessor—the student is instructed as to how to act in accordance with his or her "birthright." This is reminiscent of what some Christians have called "spiritual abuse" (Kaur, 1998).

There are, of course, other hugely problematic spiritual paths which tout such behavior as being a valid way of teaching, via "crazy wisdom" methods. Bhajan, however, has made no claim to that wonky lineage.

As a Master, as a yogi, Yogi Bhajan always sees women—and men—from a cosmic viewpoint. He never forgets that we are primarily souls, paying our karma and learning our lessons in these two different forms....

"I believe that so long as those born of woman do not respect woman, there shall be no peace on Earth" [Bhajan has said] (S. Khalsa, 1996).

The particular brand of "respect" offered to women within the Bhajan community, however, seems to have stopped somewhat short of any enlightened ideal:

When I moved into the Philadelphia ashram back in the 70s, I was handed a little pink book called Fascinating Womanhood.... [I]t is a practical how-to manual on marriage from the woman's point of view, written by a Mormon. It is the philosophical opposite of feminism, completely committed to the belief that the spiritual fulfillment of women is achieved through unquestioning service and obedience to men....

In most ways 3HOers no longer play such extreme sex roles. It has been a very long time since I have seen a male head of an ashram lounging around while sweet young things ply him with foot massages (K. Khalsa, 1990).

Of course, this implies that there was a time, not so long ago, when desirable young women in the ashrams would give foot massages to the highly-placed men there.

In a series of lectures entitled "Man to Man," Yogi Bhajan explains women's nature to the males: "One day she is very bright and charming and after a couple days she is totally dumb and non-communicative. This is called the 'normal woman mood.'" And because women fluctuate so much, "a female needs constant social security and constant leadership ... when you are not the leader, she is not satisfied" (Naman, 1980).

Bhajan reportedly enlarged on the same insights, when discussing the role a "woman in the home," when her man comes home from a "hard day's work":

If there is a big bitch with an open mouth waiting for him, how many days can you expect him to come back home? (in Naman, 1980).

Of course, such "Fifteenth Century" (i.e., when the Sikh religion was founded by Guru Nanak) attitudes toward "the fairer sex" would invariably have a flip side:

Bhajan has repeatedly been accused of being a womanizer. Colleen Hoskins, who worked seven months at his New Mexico residence, reports that men are scarcely seen there. He is served, she says, by a coterie of as many as fourteen women, some of whom attend his baths, give him group massages, and take turns spending the night in his room while his wife sleeps elsewhere (Time, 1977).

When the same Ms Hoskins became disillusioned and decided to leave the 3HO group,

she says Bhajan told her she would be responsible for a nuclear holocaust and that her young daughter would go insane by the time she was fifteen (Naman, 1980).

Perhaps in anticipation of such nuclear calamities, Bhajan is reported to have suggested (in Singh, 1998):

We should have a place, which should sustain 5,000 children, 5,000 women, and 1,000 men.

Of course, if we have learned one thing from Dr. Strangelove, it is that such women would have to be chosen for their "breeding potential"....

Apparently not done with "cursing" his former followers,

[w]hen Philip Hoskins [Bhajan's former chanceller, and Colleen's husband] quit last year, he says Bhajan told him that he would suffer 84 million reincarnations and be "reborn as a worm for betraying your teacher" (Time, 1977).

And what was Bhajan's reported response to those charges?

"The critics didn't spare Jesus Christ, they didn't spare Buddha, and they don't spare me" (Naman, 1980).

The proper attitude toward the guru, within 3HO as elsewhere, was explained by Bhajan himself:

Advice should be righteous, your mind should be righteous, and your advice and activity to that advice [sic] should be righteous. If a guru says, "Get up in the morning and praise God," will you do it?

Answer: Yes.

Question: If the guru says "Get up in the morning and steal," will you do it?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Is everything the guru says righteous?

Answer: Otherwise he is not a guru.

Question: Is it righteous to steal?

Answer: Perhaps he is testing, who knows. What is a guru? A guru is an unknown infinity of you, otherwise another human being cannot be a guru to you (Bhajan, 1977).

Note that this quotation is not taken out of context: it is a full entry in the "Relationship" chapter of the noted book, as the reader is invited to confirm for him- or herself.

The alleged result of such attitudes is not altogether surprising:

The yogi makes money from businesses run by his yoga disciples, but was sued for "assault, battery, fraud and deceit." He decided to settle out of court.

One of Bhajan's top leaders and yoga enthusiasts was busted for smuggling guns and marijuana and then sentenced to prison (Ross, 2003c).

The wise Bhajan (1997) himself, of course, might well have seen those disclosures coming:

Remember that there is no such thing as a secret. The cat will always come out of the bag.

At the 1974 3HO Teachers Meeting in Santa Cruz, NM, Yogi Bhajan reportedly predicted:

In another 10 years hospitals will have iron windows and people will try to jump out. There will be tremendous sickness. There will be unhappiness and tragedy on Earth.

Your dead bodies will lie on these roads, your children will be orphans, and nobody will kick them, rather, people will eat them alive! There will be tremendous insanity. That is the time we are going to face (Singh, 1998).

And from the same sage in 1977, quoted in (Singh, 2000):

Now you say there is no life on Mars? Mars is populated ... it is over-populated. The rate of production and sensuality is so heavy, and the beings—they grow so fast that they have to go and make war on all the other planets.

There are beings on Jupiter. There is a hierarchy. Their energy and our energy interexchange [sic] in the astral body and it is highly effective.

For a long time I didn't worry much about the few odd people who left 3HO. I hadn't liked them much when they were in 3HO so it seemed reasonable to me that, after forsaking the truth, they had all become pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers, like the rumors implied (K. Khalsa, 1990).

But again, Bhajan himself saw it all coming:

[Yogi Bhajan] warned all of us who were to become teachers that, "You will be tested in three areas: money, sex, or power—possibly in all of them." It is a great responsibility and privilege to teach kundalini yoga. It is said that if a teacher betrays the sacred trust placed in him, he will be reborn as a cockroach! (S. Khalsa, 1996).

Kundalini yoga. Tantric sex yoga. Pimp yoga. Prostitute yoga. Drug-dealer yoga. Gun yoga. Nuclear holocaust yoga.

Cockroach yoga.

Kentucky-born J. Michael Shoemaker grew up in the 1950s and early '60s. Accumulating a poor academic record, he nevertheless achieved high marks in "making out":

My favorite hobby was the hereafter test—that's when you take a girl out in the country on Friday night and say: "Honey, if you're not here after what I'm here after, then you're going to be here after I'm gone" (Shoemaker, in Goldenberg, Indiana Daily Student (ids), quoted in [LNI, 2003]).

He also lettered in football and swimming, with the notable extra-curricular distinction of having soon visited every bar in the three-state area (Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky). He later bragged of his success in having won bar-room brawls.

He completed three years at Indiana University in the late 1960s, suffering a nervous breakdown during that time.

Shoemaker was active in numerous protests and antiwar activities, but was involving himself deeper and deeper in drugs, until he finally was committed to a hospital in Indianapolis. Shoemaker says he learned a lot in the hospital, where he was kept in a padded cell after he assaulted two psychiatrists (Jerry Hicks, Louisville Courier-Journal & Times, quoted in [LNI, 2003]).

A college friend introduced him to hatha yoga. Soon, he was practicing half a dozen hours a day, with frequent losses of consciousness, which he attributed to the effect of an awakening kundalini energy. It was during this time that Shoemaker experienced an epiphany that "brought him remarkable wisdom" (LNI, 2003).

Then, in 1971 at age 22, Shoemaker traveled with a couple of friends to Manhatten to meet the openly-gay (and not shy about practicing that with his students) Rudrananda. They returned after five months to start their own ashram in Bloomington, Indiana—with some of Rudi's former students claiming that Shoemaker had been told to return to Bloomington at that point simply as a ploy by Rudi to get him, as a trouble-maker, out of the way in New York (LNI, 2003).

According to newspaper articles, most of the original members of the [Bloomington] community were drug addicts and drug pushers who turned to both yoga and hard work in the recovery process (LNI, 2003).

Members soon founded several ashram businesses in and around Bloomington, including a bakery, restaurant and construction company.

In 1973, Rudrananda passed away, aboard his private plane as it crashed into the Catskill mountains.

Shoemaker claims that Rudi predicted his own death and had designated him as the successor. He claims to have a letter from Rudi to this effect, however no ex-students have ever seen the letter and it has never been publicly displayed (LNI, 2003).

In any case, whether kosher or not, Shoemaker emerged as Rudrananda's successor, thus gaining control of Rudi's existing ashrams.

In 1975, Shoemaker established the Rudi Foundation, which organized a number of cultural, educational and social service programs, including teaching meditation and hatha yoga.

Also in the same year, stories flared concerning an attempted deprogramming by a family who called the environment surrounding Shoemaker a cult, on the basis of their son's involvement with the Cincinnati ashram.

In 1978, Shoemaker took sannyasi vows of celibacy, and abstinence from meat and alcohol, from Muktananda in India, and adopted the monastic name Swami Chetananda.

Soon after, Chetananda/Shoemaker became involved with the founding of a new American magazine, ReVision, which was actually owned by the Rudi Foundation for a few years. (LNI, 2003), before its editing duties were taken over by Jack Crittenden and Ken Wilber.

Wilber later gave up his co-editorship of the magazine to support his second wife in her ultimately-lost battle against cancer.

In 1981, Chetananda founded the Nityananda Institute, moved the Bloomington ashram to Cambridge, MA, and shut down all of the other ashrams inherited from Rudrananda. As far as the reasons for that move, Chetananda put it this way:

In terms of the audience for Eastern spirituality, there is no one like me. I will automatically become the dean of eastern spiritual figures on the East Coast (in Dawson, 1981).

By the early '90s, however, having remained an insignificant figure in Boston with a steady following of around only two hundred members, Chetananda moved his group again, this time to Portland. There, approximately seventy-five residential members continue their search for enlightenment, via Chetananda's own variations on tantra yoga.

In 1997, followers added a beachfront Malibu cottage to the non-renunciant guru's possessions and, a year later, a house in Nepal, where Chetananda now spends four or five months per year.

Repo Man, starring Emilio Estevez as a street punk who began repossessing cars after his parents gave his college money to a cult, is said to be a favorite movie of his.

Already in the early '70s, allegations of sexual and other forms of misconduct on the part of Shoemaker/Chetananda began to surface:

[P]eriodically, traumatized people emerge from the gated compound of the Rudrananda Ashram, or spiritual center, saying they surrendered their hearts, minds and souls at the behest of the swami. In return, ex-members say, the swami abused them and other followers sexually, spiritually and financially, from the 1970s to the present....

Many of these former followers say Chetanananda controlled their lives and threatened people who tried to leave him, inflicting severe psychological and spiritual damage. One woman says he persuaded her to give him more than $400,000 that vanished in failed investments. Eleven ex-disciples say that despite his proclaimed vow of celibacy he had sex with them—sometimes violently. They say their awe of him as a spiritual being, father figure, teacher and counselor left them incapable of true consent....

Diane Asay, a current disciple ... says jealous former lovers are going public to hurt the swami, who is helping to lead a grand spiritual reformation that will make their complaints appear trivial a century from now (Read, 2001).

The "Threats from Swami Chetananda" section of the sidebar at www.leaving-nityananda-institute.org (not .com, not .net—those domains are owned by loyal devotees of Chetananda) also makes stunning reading.

We may leave the last word to the loyal devotees of Chetananda, via www.leaving-nityananda-institute.com:

We are aware of the existence of a website with a name similar to this one that refers to Nityananda Institute and Swami Chetanananda. The authors of that website, who do not identify themselves, are using tactics recently employed by hate groups. Hate groups have learned to make highly inflammatory statements—false allegations of horrendous acts—with the expressed intention of stigmatizing the individual, organization, or group of people or organizations they are attacking.

This is, of course, indistinguishable from how the disciples of any other "God-like" guru would react to the suggestion that the human being they have devoted their lives to is in fact radically fallible in his "crazy wisdom."

Any concern that the cruel behaviors which we have noted herein might have to do with any particular "weird cult ideas" (e.g., reincarnation, auras, renunciation, tantric sex, etc.) can easily be allayed simply by considering Werner Erhard's est—"Erhard Seminar Training," the therapy which brought us the phrase, "Thank you for sharing."

Erhard was born John Paul Rosenberg, and took his new name on a cross-country flight, as a combination of two names he read in an in-flight magazine: quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg—developer of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle—and then-economics minister of West Germany, Ludwig Erhard.

Meeting [Erhard] for the first time, many insisted they had been in the presence of no less than a holy man (Pressman, 1993).

"I have quite a few million people who listen to me," [Buckminster] Fuller told the New York Times in February, 1979. "And I say Werner Erhard is honest. He may prove untrustworthy, and if he does then I'll say so" (Pressman, 1993).

This latter endorsement came, of course, from the same now-late Bucky "Geodesic Dome" Fuller who, only a few years earlier, had whole-heartedly endorsed the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At the time, Fuller and Erhard were splitting the (six-figure) proceeds from a series of public "conversations" between the two of them.

Early graduates of Erhard's four-day seminars included John "Windy Kansas Wheat Field" Denver—who wanted to give up his singing career to become an est trainer—Diana Ross, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Yoko Ono. More recently, Ted Danson, Valerie Harper and other Hollywood luminaries have taken Erhard's (Forum/Landmark) training.

In a 1975 Psychology Today article, San Francisco freelance writer Mark Brewer "traced the substantive origins of the est course to Zen, Scientology, gestalt therapy, and Dale Carnegie" (Pressman, 1993).

What the training is more than anything else [is an] application of classic techniques in indoctrination and mental conditioning worthy of Pavlov himself (Brewer, 1975).

Yet, the relative absence of anything "Eastern" did not stop the former used car/encyclopedia salesman, Erhard, from declaring his own high position in the cosmos:

"How do I know I'm not the reincarnation of Jesus Christ?" Erhard once wondered of a friend (Pressman, 1993).

In other times, "Jonestown" Jim Jones asked himself the same question, coming to the conclusion that he was exactly that reincarnation (Layton, 1998)—as well as having more recently been Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Wanna-be rock star and alleged pedophile David Koresh, too—of Waco, Texas, i.e., Branch Davidian infamy—believed himself to be Jesus Christ (England and McCormick, 1993). (Jones and Koresh both explicitly anticipated near-future apocalyptic scenarios, as a reported means of controlling their "chosen survivor" followers, for one.)

On can always "aim higher," however. Thus, in the autumn of 1977, during a beachside meeting of est seminar leaders in Monterey, one participant got to his feet.

"The question in the room that nobody is asking," the man told Erhard solemnly, "is 'Are you the [M]essiah?'"

The room grew silent as Erhard looked out to the curious faces of some of his most devoted disciples. After a few moments he replied, "No, I am who sent him [i.e., God]" (Pressman, 1993).

Given feelings such as that among the formerly encyclopedia-selling "God" and his seminar trainers, it is hardly surprising that the mere absence of an underlying "weird, Eastern" metaphysics did not prevent trainee horror stories such as the following from surfacing:

"Most of the people I've seen at our clinic—and they come in after the training in fairly substantial numbers—have suffered reactions that range from moderately bad to dreadful," the executive director of New York City's Lincoln Institute for Psychotherapy reported in 1978. "They are confused and jarred, and the same pattern—elation, depression, feelings of omnipotence followed by feelings of helplessness—are repeated over and over again" (Pressman, 1993).

In March 1977 the [American Journal of Psychiatry] published the first of two articles by Glass and Kirsch ... that described five patients who had developed psychotic symptoms, including paranoia, uncontrollable mood swings, and delusions in the wake of taking the est training (Pressman, 1993).

The same paper was reportedly nearly not published, after a member of est's advisory board allegedly attempted to convince the journal's editor that its research could not be authenticated. Indeed, the paper had apparently already been rejected on that basis when three other medical experts argued successfully for its publication (Pressman, 1993).

Of course, similar attempts to suppress uncomplimentary papers have been reported in other cases involving respected spiritual leaders (e.g., Ken Wilber) and their protective followers.

As if to then prove that the harsh discipline of any "holy man" directed toward his disciples simply begins a "cycle of abuse" with future generations of disciples:

Those who worked closest to Erhard often witnessed his own tirades and yelling bouts, and sometimes felt free to mirror his own behavior when they were in charge (Pressman, 1993).

Erhard's home life seems to have taken tragic turns as well, as a former governess of his children alleged on a 1991 episode of television's 60 Minutes:

He beats his wife and he beats his children ... and then he goes and tells people how to have marvelous relationships (in Pressman, 1993).

He allegedly forced his wife to participate in group sex and raped one of his daughters, who refers to him as a "monster" (Rae, 1991).

According to Deborah [one of Werner's daughters], Erhard ... coerced one of his older daughters—one of Deborah's sisters, in her twenties—into having sexual intercourse with him in a hotel room they were sharing during one of his frequent out-of-town trips (Pressman, 1993).

As the reader may have by now surmised, Pressman's (1993) Outrageous Betrayal (excerpted on www.rickross.com) tells the fuller story of est, and the related Forum and Landmark trainings.

Scientology was founded in the 1950s by pulp/science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who understood little of Eastern philosophy but claimed to be the reincarnation of the Buddha, and was viewed by devoted followers as being the only one who could "save the world" (Miller, 1987).

Scientology teaches that seventy-five million years ago Earth was called Teegeeach and was part of a galactic confederation ruled by an evil titan named Xemu. To solve the problem of overpopulation in his empire, Xemu rounded up miscreants and imprisoned them in volcanoes on Earth, which he then exploded with nuclear bombs. Their spirits, called thetans, were gathered in clusters and trapped in frozen alcohol. Xemu then "implanted" them in humans, which is the cause of all our suffering; only through Scientology auditing can our thetans be cleared (Rae, 1991).

Through its practice of "auditing"—a therapy aided by a simplified lie detector called an E-meter—Scientology "promises to heal the psychic scars caused by traumas in present or past lives" (Richardson, 1993).

The claimed seven million worldwide followers of Scientology have reportedly included jazz pianist Chick Corea, jazz singer Al Jarreau, actress Jenna Elfman, pop star Beck, Priscilla Presley, and the voice of Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright. (Ironically, Bart's sister is Lisa Marie, named after Priscilla's daughter; and the real Lisa Marie is herself, along with Priscilla, active in Scientology.) Also John Travolta and wife Kelly Preston, Tom Cruise and ex-wife Mimi Rogers, Kirstie Alley, Sonny Bono (Cher's late ex-husband) and Aldous Huxley. Jerry Seinfeld, Patrick Swayze and Brad Pitt have also "drifted through" Scientology (Richardson, 1993); as have Mikhail Baryshnikov, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Emilio Estevez, Rock Hudson, Demi Moore, Candice Bergen, Sharon Stone and O. J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark.

So too has mass murderer Charles Manson—who reportedly undertook around 150 hours of auditing while in prison (Atack, 1990). Manson is, of course, famed for the brutal 1969 killing of pregnant actress and Playboy centerfold Sharon Tate (wife of director Roman Polanski), among other similar crimes.

The imprisoned Manson was actually later set on fire via gasoline by a fellow inmate, an ex-Hare Krishna—who himself had been convicted of killing his own abortion-performing father—following Manson's endless taunting of him for his in-jail chanting and prayers (Muster and Shinn, 1997).

In more recent years, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone and Goldie Hawn all signed an open letter to the chancellor of Germany, protesting discrimination against Scientologists there and hyperbolically comparing their treatment to that of the Jews during World War II (Bart, 1998).

The cravat-wearing Hubbard maintained his own set of privileged, teenaged female "messengers." These cheerleader-beautiful, blond girls, vying for the geriatric Hubbard's attention, had designed their own "messenger" uniform, consisting of hot pants, halter tops, bobbysox and platform sandals. Their envied duties reportedly included washing Hubbard's hair, giving him massages, and helping him dress and undress (Miller, 1987).

"We became," Jill Goodman admitted, "poisonous little wenches. We had power and we were untouchable." It was not in the least unusual for a fourteen-year-old messenger to march up to a senior executive on the ship and scream: "You fucking asshole, you're going to the [disciplinary unit]. That'll teach you to fuck up." It was unthinkable to answer back; it would have been like answering back to Hubbard. "A sort of "Lord of the Flies syndrome" began working with the messengers," said Rebecca Goldstein.... "They were so drunk with their own power that they became extremely e vengeful, nasty and dishonest. They were a very exclusive, dangerous little group" (Miller, 1987).

Bringing a welcomed level head to all of that, however, "Superman" Christopher Reeve described (2002) his own method of evaluating Scientology's very expensive auditing procedures:

[M]y growing skepticism about Scientology and my training as an actor took over. With my eyes closed I gradually began to remember details from a devastating past life experience that had happened in ancient Greece....

I could tell that my auditor was deeply moved by my story and trying hard to maintain her professional demeanor. I sensed that she was making a profound connection between guilt over the death of my father when I was Greek warrior in a past life and my relationship with my father in the present.

And that was the end of my training as a Scientologist. My story was actually a slightly modified account of an ancient Greek myth.... I didn't expect my auditor to be familiar with Greek mythology; I was simply relying on her ability, assisted by the E-Meter, to discern the truth. The fact that I got away with a blatant fabrication completely devalued my belief in the process.

Others have come to even less complimentary evaluations of Scientology. Indeed, years earlier, in 1965, the Australian Board of Inquiry into Scientology had produced a report concluding that "Scientology is evil; its techniques evil; its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and often mentally ill" (in (Miller, 1987). The same report criticized the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, created by Hubbard in London in 1952, as "the world's largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy" (Richardson, 1993).

If that were the worst of the reported activities of the Church, few could loudly complain. However, much more troubling actions have long been alleged:

Scientologists are known to have framed the mayor of Clearwater, Florida, in a trumped-up-hit-and-run accident [where, according to (Miller, 1987), both the mayor's driver and the pedestrian victim were Scientologists]. They also framed a journalist named Paulette Cooper [author of the book The Scandal of Scientology], alleging a bomb threat, and sued her seventeen times. Hubbard's wife, Mary, and ten other leading Scientologists were sentenced in 1982 to five-year terms in federal prison for breaking into government offices and stealing thousands of official documents about Scientology. During their trial, several Scientologists leaked damaging information to the press about the presiding judge's sex life. In a 1977 raid on Scientology's Los Angeles offices, the FBI found lock picks, pistols, ammunition, knockout drops, a blackjack, and bugging and wiretapping equipment, as well as church memos on how to launder money, tail enemies, and blackmail people (Richardson, 1993).

In a May, 1991 cover story, Time magazine described Scientology as "a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner" (Behar, 1991). Atack (1990) and Miller (1987) have given much additional detail as to the nature of "life within Scientology."

Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard's policies was that all perceived enemies are "fair game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed." Those who criticize the church—journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges—often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment (Behar, 1991).

More recently, a wrongful-death lawsuit was brought (and settled in 2004) by the estate of former member Lisa McPherson against the Church of Scientology.

It alleges that McPherson died in 1995 after being held against her will by the church for 17 days. When she died, it is claimed, her body was covered with cockroach bites and McPherson was dehydrated (Friedman, 2003).

Hubbard himself died in the early '80s, via suicide. By the end, he had become a rather unhappy man, living in a rather unhappy, paranoid, Howard Hughes-like fashion—reportedly believing, at various times, that his cooks were trying to poison him; and demanding that his dirty clothes be washed thirteen times, in thirteen different buckets of clean spring water, before he would wear them.

Good advice, however, comes from—of all places—multiply-rehabbed actor and pornography aficionado Charlie Sheen, a former boyfriend of Travolta's wife Kelly Preston. (Also, an aspiring poet. "Luckily most of it was written on smack, or it would all be religious fluffy stuff.") For, when asked about attempts by Scientologists to recruit him for their cause, Sheen—who would surely have fully appreciated the hot pants and halter tops of Hubbard's blossoming "messengers"—replied:

"I have no involvement in that form of silliness."

Ken Wilber is the "Einstein of consciousness studies," having been generously regarded as such for the past quarter of a century.

The late David Bohm was for many years arguably Wilber's "primary competitor" in consciousness studies. Indeed, in the early 1980s, Bohm became close to a guru-figure in the "physics and consciousness" aspect of the New Age movement.

Although Wilber has offered at least three separate printed critiques of Bohm's work in physics, he clearly lacks even a rudimentary understanding of Bohm's ideas. That, however, has not stopped Wilber from throwing nasty insults at the late Bohm and his admirers, unapologetically misrepresenting Bohm's brilliant, Nobel-caliber ideas and making himself look good in the process. That has done exactly that can be demonstrated very easily.

To begin, David Bohm (1980) said:

The explicate order can be regarded as a particular or distinguished case [i.e., a subset] of a more general set of implicate orders from which latter it can be derived [italics added]. What distinguishes the explicate order is that what is thus derived is a set of recurrent and relatively stable elements that are outside of each other [as opposed to spatially interpenetrating].

Ken Wilber (1982), however, twisted that idea into the following form:

Some writers use the implicate order as a metaphor ... of transcendence. That is, the implicate realm is used as a metaphor of higher-order wholeness or unity, referring, presumably, to such levels as the subtle or causal.... The difficulty is that, as originally explained by Bohm for the realm of physis, the explicate and implicate "entities" are mutually exclusive [italics added]. The "ink-drop" particle is either unfolded and manifest (explicate) or it is enfolded and unmanifest (implicate). It cannot be both at the same time.

Bohm himself, however, stated explicitly that the implicate and explicate orders are not mutually exclusive, but are rather supersets and subsets of each other. Wilber's claim that Bohm had "originally explained" anything other than that is completely false. Nevertheless, to Wilber's own mind, he has, in that blatant misunderstanding, "proved" that Bohm's ideas in that regard are "wrong"!

David Bohm (in Weber, 1986) further said:

In talking of a super-implicate order, I am not making any further assumptions beyond what is implied in physics today. Once we extend this model of de Broglie to the quantum mechanical field rather than just to the particle, that picture immediately is the super-implicate order. So this is not speculation, it is the picture which is implied by present quantum mechanics if you look at it imaginatively.

Ken Wilber (2003), however, says:

[T]he simplistic and dualistic notion that there is, for example, an implicate order (which is spiritual and quantum) and an explicate order (which is material and Newtonian) has caused enormous confusion, and is still doing so. But even David Bohm, who introduced that notion, eventually ended up tacking so many epicycles on it that it became unrecognizable....

Bohm vaguely realized this—and realized that his "implicate order," precisely because it was set apart from the explicate order, could not actually represent any sort of genuine or nondual spiritual reality. He therefore invented a third realm, the "super-implicate order," which was supposed to be the nondual spiritual realm. He then had three levels of reality: explicate, implicate, super-implicate. But because he was unfamiliar with the subtleties of Shunyata ... he was still caught in dualistic notions (because he was still trying to qualify the unqualifiable). He therefore added yet another epicycle: "beyond the superimplicate," to give him four levels of reality.... This is not the union of science and spirituality, but the union of bad physics with bad mysticism.

Again, however, if Wilber had understood Bohm's ideas even rudimentarily, he would have seen that, at no point, going back to even pre-1980, did Bohm ever regard the implicate order as being "spiritual and quantum," and the explicate order as being "material and Newtonian." Nor did Bohm ever "realize that his 'implicate order,' precisely because it was set apart from the explicate order [it is not!], could not actually represent any sort of genuine or nondual spiritual reality." It is Wilber (and numerous other transpersonal/integral psychologists) who have misread those orders as being mutually exclusive. For Bohm himself, on the other hand, the explicate order was always a subset of the implicate order. This is just as Newtonian physics is a subset of quantum theory, not mutually-exclusive with nor "set apart from" it.

Further, Wilber claims that Bohm's super-implicate order and the like are arbitrarily-added "epicycles." But anyone who has bothered to read Bohm's own publications on the subject can easily see that they are instead fully implied by the mathematics of the situation. Bohm himself indeed elucidated precisely the same in the quote above. His peers have further actually recognized and agreed with those insights (cf. Weber, 1986), while yet dismissing them as being "philosophical" rather than pragmatically useful.

Wilber has further recently (1998) asserted, in obvious wishful thinking, that

over the last decade and a half [Bohm's work] has generally fallen into widespread disrepute (and it has no support whatsoever from recent physics).

From a far less self-serving perspective, however, consider the relatively-unbiased work of Martin Gardner, one of our world's more prominent skeptics. (Gardner wrote the "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American for more than twenty-five years, and was largely responsible for bringing knowledge of fractals to the masses via that medium in 1978.) Gardner's efforts at debunking New Age ideas have actually earned him the praise of both Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky. He then had this to say about Bohm's ontological formulation of quantum theory (from which the implicate and explicate orders are derived):

[T]his theory, long ignored by physicists, is now gaining increasing support. It deserves to be better known (Gardner, 2000; italics added).

One could easily go on like this for a full thirty typeset pages (cf. Falk, 2004a). In doing so, one would conclusively demonstrate that every point in Wilber's second "simplistic analysis," above, is dead wrong. That is, his insulting "critiques" of Bohm reflect only his own lack of understanding, and say nothing whatsoever about Bohm's work itself.

Note further that, in the first two cases above and in many others, Bohm had already put his ideas into print before Wilber's original (1982) published critique. That was more than a decade before the latter's openly insulting (1998) and pointlessly nasty (2003) follow-ups. Indeed, Bohm (1980) is included in the bibliography of Wilber (1998)!

In all three of those "critiques," Wilber has radically misunderstood and wrongly presented Bohm's work, making himself "look good" (for allegedly having superior ideas) in the process.

In 1982, Wilber presented a non-polemic but wildly inaccurate "refutation" of Bohm's ideas (Falk, 2004a).

In the 1998 lashing, he insultingly referred to Bohm's brilliant ideas three times as being merely "notions."

In 2003, as we have seen, in an utterly unprovoked and borderline ad hominem attack, he further categorized Bohm's "notions" as being "simplistic." He further dismissed them as being "bad physics" allegedly containing arbitrary, after-the-fact "epicycle"-like ideas; and as being "bad metaphysics."

Bohm's overall work in physics, however, has received Nobel Prize consideration. (Wilber's background in the same discipline, by contrast, consists of an undergraduate major in the subject.) Indeed, his ontological formulation of quantum theory, far from being "bad physics," has been enthusiastically endorsed by J. S. Bell, among others. (Dr. Bell is the developer of Bell's Inequality, the experimental confirmation of which, in the early 1980s, proved that faster-than-light transfer of information exists in the physical universe.) Indeed, Bohm's formulation of quantum theory, in its most basic quantum potential nature, falls right out of Schrödinger's equation in deriving the "WKB approximation" of quantum mechanics. (See Chapter 3 in [Bohm and Hiley, 1993]. Hiley currently sits on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.) In its more advanced field formulation, as we have noted above, Bohm's quantum theory inherently includes the idea of a super-implicate order, i.e., that order is not an arbitrary addition. (For an online overview of "Bohmian Mechanics," see [Goldstein, 2002].)

Bohm began with the Schrödinger equation, which is the central mathematical formula of quantum physics. Using elegant mathematics, Bohm effectively partitioned this equation into two parts, or terms: a classical term that essentially reproduces Newtonian physics, and a nonclassical term that he calls the quantum potential. The classical term treats the electron as an ordinary particle, as in classical physics. The nonclassical quantum potential is a wave-like term that provides information to the electron, linking it to the rest of the universe. The quantum potential is responsible for the well-known wave-particle duality and all the other bizarre phenomena for which quantum theory has become famous....

[T]he theoretical impetus for the implicate order was the quantum potential, which is a mathematical version of the implicate order in the Schrödinger equation (Keepin, 1993).

The mathematical tools for effecting that solution or "partition," via the "separation of variables," are taught no later than one's junior year in physics. Wilber therefore should have seen them as a student, possibly even applying them to the exact problem which yields Bohm's normally-discarded (in the WKB approximation) quantum potential.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, like Bell, considered Bohm to have done "great" work in that same field (Peat, 1997). One may rest fully assured that neither of those, as preeminent, world-class physicists, would have admired Bohm's work had it contained epicycle-like ideas. The same is true of Geoffrey Chew, Henry Stapp, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigogine and David Finkelstein, all of whom have contributed papers in celebration of Bohm's work (Hiley and Peat, 1987). Wilber's own expressed derision toward Bohm's ideas, as with countless other small minds before him, derives only from his own lack of understanding of Bohm's ideas, never from any superior perspective on even physical-level reality on his part.

Ironically, Wilber himself has suffered much misrepresentation of his work by others:

I greatly appreciate responsible criticism and do whatever I can to fix any problems with my presentation. But this often means that somebody will give a blistering attack on, say, Wilber-2, and that attack gets repeated by others who are trying to nudge me out of the picture, with the result that ... over 80% of the published and posted criticisms of my work are based on misrepresentations of it (Wilber, 2001; italics added).

Bohm's work, too, involved the chronological development of the implicate order and super-implicate order (or Bohm-1, Bohm-2), etc. When Wilber criticizes Bohm for his own wrong perceptions in seeing tacked-on "epicycles" in the latter's work, then, he is doing exactly what he rightly will not accept in argument from his own critics.

One might conclude, then, by parity of argument, that in behaving thusly Wilber is trying to nudge Bohm "out of the picture," even without being consciously aware of that.

"What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," after all.

In defending his own published polemics, Wilber has recently offered the following misleading explanations:

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is in some ways an angry book. Anger, or perhaps anguish, it's hard to say which. After three years immersed in postmodern cultural studies, where the common tone of discourse is rancorous, mean-spirited, arrogant, and aggressive ... after all of that, in anger and anguish, I wrote SES, and the tone of the book indelibly reflects that.

In many cases it is specific: I often mimicked the tone of the critic I was criticizing, matching toxic with toxic and snide with snide. Of course, in doing so I failed to turn the other cheek. But then, there are times to turn the other cheek, and there are times not to (Wilber, 2000).

As for the dozen or so theorists that I polemically criticized [in the first edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality], every single one of them, without exception [italics added], had engaged in "condemnatory rhetoric" of equal or usually much worse dimensions. Some of the venomous writing of these people made mine look like a Girl-Scout picnic. And frankly, I decided to give them a dose of their own medicine (Wilber, 2001).

Bohm, however, although not mentioned in SES (except in that his [1980] is once again included in the bibliography), is an exception to that self-absolution. For, he never stooped to any such nasty, snide behavior toward Wilber. Thus, the above rationalizations cannot be validly applied to justifying Wilber's unduly-vexed comments about Bohm's consistently honest, humble and insightful work. The most that Bohm was ever "guilty" of was in having simply never responded to Wilber's (1982) critique, nothing more provocative.

What are the odds, then, that Wilber's polemics in other contexts can be excused as being altogether noble attempts to "spiritually awaken others"? or as having arisen only from others having "started" the mud-slinging? A betting man would not, one supposes, wager in favor of that.

Conversely, what are the odds that he is simply not being psychologically honest with himself as to the basis of his anger, cloaking it instead in high ideals?

In further defending his behaviors toward others, Wilber (1999) has written:

Even in my most polemical statements, they are always balanced, if you look at all of my writing, by an appreciation of the positive contributions of those I criticize.

Sadly, that claim, too, is untrue. For, in no way did Wilber provide any such balance himself in his own (1998 and 2003) attempted demolitions of Bohm, or anywhere else throughout his life's work. Even going back to (1982), the best that he had to say about Bohm's ideas (as they relate to metaphysics) was this:

Most of the people who either introduced the physics/mysticism thing or at least used it for effect have increasingly refined and sophisticated their views. David Bohm has clearly moved toward a more articulated and hierarchical view, even if he objects to the word hierarchy.

That, however, particularly in light of his later nastiness, sounds much more like Wilber simply admitting, none too generously, that the Nobel-calibre Bohm wasn't "totally wrong about everything," than giving any "balanced presentation" of the latter's views. (Recall that he has since dismissed Bohm's fully-developed ontological formulation as being "bad physics," albeit against the inestimably better-informed opinions of Bell, Feynman and Gardner, etc.)

Wilber has met David Bohm's brilliant ideas with little but unprovoked derision. Yet, Bohm's ideas do not mesh with Wilber's own genuinely "simplistic notions" and truly "bad metaphysics" in large part simply for Wilber's insistence on mistaking supersets and subsets for mutually-exclusive dualistic opposites. He again does exactly that with the implicate and explicate orders, in spite of Bohm's explicit statements to the contrary.

Wilber has stated more than once (e.g., 1999), in promoting his "orienting generalizations" perspective, that "Nobody is capable of producing 100% error—nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time." He himself, however, comes dangerously close to that figure in his misunderstandings of Bohm's ideas (and in his stunningly-foolish and dangerous ideas regarding the guru-disciple relationship). That is, for (as a very conservative estimate) over 90% of the points on which Wilber and Bohm disagree, it is Bohm who is right, and Wilber who is demonstrably wrong (see Falk, 2004a).

Wilber (2001) then poses the rhetorical question as to his own motivations for lashing out at others:

Did they do anything to possibly bring it on themselves, or was this just a unilateral case of me being rotten to the core?

In the case of Wilber's dissing of Bohm, however, it absolutely was demonstrably a "unilateral case of [Wilber] being rotten to the core." For, Bohm never provoked Wilber in any way, except by being right (and silent, even while alive; and moreso since then) where Wilber has been embarrassingly, confidently and verbosely wrong.

Ken jokes that "being called the foremost theorist in transpersonal psychology is like being called the tallest building in Kansas City" (in Wilber, 1991).

The above could be simply an unconvincing attempt at self-deprecation, or a posing at humility, meant to impress a beautiful woman. (The drool-inducing one to whom it was told actually ended up becoming Wilber's second wife.) Or, it could be a not-too-veiled shot at the unimpressive work of his "shorter building" peers in transpersonal/integral psychology and, more recently, the broader field of consciousness studies. Or, perhaps a looking-down on Kansas City—whether Missouri or Kansas state is not clear—from Wilber's various residences in the lofty cultural and intellectual heights of (Lincoln) Nebraska, (Incline Village) Nevada or (Boulder) Colorado. Probably some of each. Regardless, Wilber need not have published the above observation, taken from his now-late wife's diaries, if he were uncomfortable with how it could be understood by others. And the above interpretations of subtext are all completely predictable and reasonable.

Horgan (2003a) then offered an observation regarding Wilber's overall attempts at being liked, with which one cannot easily argue:

His self-deprecating asides [in One Taste] seemed aimed only at making us admire his modesty.

More recently, and with far less of an attempt at false humility, Wilber has stated his own attitude toward at least one of his critics as follows:

I'm sure if [Hans-Willi] Weis would read my work in this area [of authoritarian control, etc., in New Age movements, on which points Wilber is consistently and wildly wrong, as we have seen and will sadly see much more of] that he could find something to hate about it, too, and we are all eagerly looking forward to his next round of criticism, although I'm sure that I will be forgiven if I don't respond, since I might have more important things to do, like feed my goldfish (Wilber, 2003a).

One might take this condescending remark as an implicit admission by Wilber that, in other cases too, when he has disagreed with but not responded to other authors' ideas, it is simply because he has had "more important things to do." That is, that they did not merit a response from him.

How, then, would such a person be likely to react if he were to suddenly find himself on the receiving end of the same behavior, in being apparently "ignored until he went away"? Would he perhaps unconsciously take that behavior as being driven by the same motivations as he himself has openly admitted to possessing? That is, would he take it as his colleagues evidently feeling that they had "more important things to do" than to waste time explaining things to him? Would he then perhaps feel sufficiently insulted by that as to periodically lash out at the people who have not "given him his due," in the form of a response—any response? (Without receiving an answer, after all, one feels as though one "does not exist" in the other person's world. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "I am seen: therefore I am.")

Would such a long-term lack of response further perhaps even leave him feeling confident that he could lash out in unprovoked nastiness, without having to worry about the targets of his insults "hitting back"?

Would that not account for his continuing, and wholly unprovoked, mistreatment of the late David Bohm?

Conversely, it is interesting to speculate how Wilber might have treated his own wives, had any of them been so brilliant as to conceive of ideas akin to Bohm's Nobel-caliber work. Would he have been able to be "the proudest man in the world" for that, without feeling threatened by their hypothetical brilliance? Or would he have misrepresented their work as unapologetically and insultingly as he has done of Bohm's, thereby "nudging them out of the picture" and preserving his own "Einsteinian" status? And what friends would then have stood by his side to claim, even years after the fact, that he had committed no such misrepresentation, even when the incontrovertible facts say exactly the opposite?

Still, Ken Wilber is every bit as much of a genius as Mother Teresa was a saint. That much is absolutely certain.

After all of the disappointment, incompetence and deceit which one cannot help finding in the spiritual marketplace, one turns with hope and relief to the one true, unimpeachable saint of modern times: the Nobel Peace Prize-winning "holiest person of our time," Mother Teresa.

The relief, however, is short-lived:

[Mother Teresa] is accused of being amoral and unscrupulous in her quest for funds; dictatorial; a publicity monger. But these can be justified with the line that the end justifies the means. The more serious criticism is of her spiritual ethic. She has been quoted as saying that suffering is a means of attaining Christ; to suffer along with the suffering helps one come closer to god. In other words the poor and dying are to her only a means of attaining salvation for herself. Their suffering, which is a replay of the suffering of Christ, gives her spiritual succour. Hence the tremendous funds at her disposal have never been used to set up a state of the art hospital where much of the suffering could be alleviated or pre-empted; to establish schools which would rescue generations from poverty; to renew the slums of Calcutta and eliminate disease and crime. For, she has a vested interest in the perpetuation of poverty and sickness and death....

One day in the courtyard of Mother House [in Calcultta] a man in an old army sweater who claimed to have waited five hours to see Mother Teresa reverently scraped the feet of every Sister who passed by. Mother came out and swept him gently toward the door. "Please listen to the Sister when she tells you not to come," she said. "I cannot see everybody." "But I don't want money," the man said. "You haven't given me anything"....

Mother's special relationship with Charles Keating, one of history's biggest [Savings and Loan scandal] swindlers, and the biggest thief in the history of the United States, is well known. It is not known how much Mother really got from Keating—although she did not deny that she received at least $1,250,000 [which she did not give back to the people it had been stolen from after his conviction, even after having been explicitly prompted to do so in writing by the Deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles County]....

Mother Teresa has categorically made the outrageous claim that she teaches "thousands of children"—I defy her order to show me where. More surprisingly, she said it way back in 1970-71 when her operations in Calcutta were on an even smaller scale than it is now.... This is an astonishing claim, given that even now, the sum total of the places she has for children in different sites in Calcutta will not come to more than 200....

[Mary Loudon] appeared in our Hell's Angel documentary where she recounted harrowing accounts of neglect in Mother Teresa's homes, and said that the home for the dying reminded her of scenes from Nazi concentration camps....

[Loudon:] Once I asked a nun who was washing used needles under a cold water tap why she wasn't sterilising them—she said there's no point...My boyfriend worked in the men's room and he was looking after a young boy who had some kind of problem—I forget exactly what—which an American doctor volunteer told me was entirely treatable. I asked the nuns why they were not taking him to the hospital, why they weren't doing something as simple as calling a cab and taking him to the hospital, but they said that was not how they worked—"If we do it for one we have to do it for everybody."

[Sam Westmacott:] Another building on the campus [at Shishu Bhavan, Teresa's home for children] houses about 200 handicapped children. Again, although the children were clean, well nourished and happy [thanks only to the volunteers], the permanent staff were ignorant of their disabilities and resisted attempts to introduce corrective therapies. Microcephalic children and those with cerebral palsy lay flat on their backs in their cots or on the floor with their legs scissored and their arms contracted. When a British therapist began propping them up, working their limbs and feeding them in an upright position, (which is essential if they are to improve their condition), she met angry opposition from the staff. She was told to lie the children and drop the food into their mouths.... But I knew of the many who had offered to teach them [the nuns], who had shown them how to feed properly, who had tried to change the bad habits and had been ignored.... I was learning that Mother Teresa believes, and has told her nuns, that nothing equals the therapeutic power of love. If God wanted things another way, they [i.e., the patients] would change.

[A slum-dwelling woman said:] "The Sisters [at Teresa's Prem Daan house] are only there to feather their own nests. They are absolutely awful. Poor people are always shoed away from their doors. They regularly pinch stuff that is meant for the poor. Every borodin [Christmas] there are a lot of clothes that come from abroad; this is also the time that the Sisters get their yearly visits from their family members. Some of the clothes are distributed in the slum, but most of the clothes and goodies are sent away with the nuns' relatives—sometimes they take away so much stuff that they would have to hire taxis. And, a lot of the food ration that is meant for the poor is also sold—the rice, the wheat, the maize—all sold to the local shops"....

She said that they would be given gifts of new clothes or food in front of visiting groups of white people. She also made the extra-ordinary allegation that these clothes would sometimes be taken away once the delegation had left....

I was initially genuinely surprised at the allegation of pilferage by nuns but later on realised it was common practice and never raised any eyebrows amongst the people who lived in the vicinity of Teresa homes. It was accepted as standard practice....

[W]hen it comes to social issues, even the present pope is much more liberal than Mother Teresa....

Mother was confronted on the issue of paedophile priests by the Irish journalist Kathy Ward. She replied, "Pray, pray and make sacrifices for those who are going through such terrible temptations." It is not that she was against custodial sentencing per se: a few times she said that she wanted to open a special jail for doctors who performed abortions....

She inflated her operations and activities manifold in her speeches to journalists and supporters. Often her statements would have no connection with reality whatsoever. Many times she had been captured on television while telling very tall tales about her work. She prevaricated even in her Nobel prize acceptance speech....

To the charges of neglect of residents, indifference to suffering, massaging of figures, manipulation of the media and knowingly handling millions of dollars of stolen cash, Mother Teresa never protested (Chatterjee, 2003).

Crazy Catholics—if they're not sodomizing altar boys or objecting simultaneously to contraception and abortion, they're laundering money, passing around dirty needles and "makin' things up for God."

The same above-mentioned book by Chatterjee goes into fascinating detail regarding the anti-Semitism, malice and paranoia of Malcolm Muggeridge—who essentially "discovered" Mother Teresa—and the political and religious biases and corruption underlying the awarding of Nobel Peace Prizes.

Years earlier, in 1995, Christopher Hitchens had written The Missionary Position. While hardly in the same league as Chatterjee's stunning, excruciatingly-researched work, it is still more than enough to show anyone who wishes to see, that Mother Teresa was in no way the humble and compassionate saint which the world has made her out to be:

[W]ithin [Mother Teresa's] order, total obedience to the dictates of a single woman is enforced at every level. Questioning of authority is not an option....

[Mother Teresa:] Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace.

[Emily Lewis:] [Teresa] also touched on AIDS, saying she did not want to label it a scourge of God but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper [e.g., homosexual or promiscuous] sexual conduct.

[Susan Shields:] In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a "ticket to heaven." An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person's forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa's sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.

[Teresa] once told an interviewer that, if faced with a choice between Galileo and the authority of the Inquisition, she would have sided with the Church authorities.

And what was Ken Wilber's (2000a) attitude toward Mother Teresa, even half a decade after Hitchens' exposé?

Mother Teresa was much closer to that divine ray [than was Princess Diana], and practiced it more diligently, and without the glamour. She was less a person than an opening of Kosmic compassion—unrelenting, fiercely devoted, frighteningly dedicated.

I, anyway, appreciated them both very much, for quite different reasons.

"Happiness is a warm nun."

That, of course, is exactly par for the course with Wilber, in his consistent vouching for other people's high degrees of enlightenment ("opening of Kosmic compassion," etc.), and offering-up of uninformed yet oracular opinions which, like so many of Teresa's documented public claims, have "no connection with reality whatsoever."

Amazingly, no matter how jaded and cynical one becomes about the spiritual marketplace, things still invariable turn out to be far worse than you could have imagined.

So what's left?

"God is dead, let's have a drink."