Obsolescence

My friends and I are watching a war movie on TV. One of us says something like, "That actor looks familiar. Who is he? What else has he starred in?" or "The general he's portraying... is he historical or fictional? If he's real, what happened to him after the war?" Then we'll perhaps pause the DVR, quick draw our smart phones, and get the answer.

Now consider people who are great trivia experts (think Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, etc). Up until now, they've been able to capitalize on their skills by winning bar bets, and entertaining folks at parties with their breadth of knowledge. But now that everyone can know anything at any time, the unique value of their talent must be collapsing. I imagine there are lots of trivia wizards who now feel like Ron Jeremy after the introduction of Viagra.

Breaking Bad Prediction

Todd's neo-nazi ex-con Uncle Jack will surely share some of the $70 million with him. So why is Todd bothering with cooking meth (and keeping Jesse alive to make it 99% pure)? It must be part of Todd's plan to woo Lydia. And what's Lydia's tragic flaw? Her addiction to Stevia.

Walt will poison Lydia by disguising ricin in a packet of Stevia. It will be part of a plot (a la Brock) to flush out Todd as a pre-requisite for saving Jesse, and redeeming Walt's soul.

And somehow Walt will kill Uncle Jack, get his money back, and use it for benefit of Jesse and/or the surviving White family. The scheme will have something to do with poisoning Jack with fumes, since he doesn't wear a mask in the meth lab.

After the last episode, please use the comments section of this post to marvel at my psychic abilities.

Regarding the Abdication

In the actual resignation letter, which wasn't made public, the Pontiff revealed that he had woken up in a cold sweat at 3am, realizing that he really didn't know the meaning and purpose of life. The poor old guy just didn't have the energy to keep pretending.

BuckyBall Pyramid

On Thanksgiving, my brother introduced me to BuckyBalls, and I've become a bit obsessed. They work better than prayer beads at pacifying my mind.



Last month, BuckyBalls were taken off the market, due to government harassment. (While this is upsetting, at least marijuana is still legal, I think.) I got mine just under the wire. I'm pretty sure you can still get knock-offs from China.

Poker: unpardonably neglected

In the NY Times article No More Bluffing, James McManus writes about poker's connection to the risk-taking elements in the American DNA. "Nearly all of us are descended from immigrants, a self-selecting group that is disproportionally inclined to take chances."

Individuals have an inner thermostat, which makes us uncomfortable whenever there's too much or too little risk in our lives. People will speed on the highways... but only until the danger of this behavior hits their thermostat's set point. When laws are passed requiring drivers to wear seat belts, some drivers will find that the speed they'd been driving no longer feels right; it's not quite risky enough. So they'll drive a little faster till they again reach the set point.

Europeans who came to America in centuries past tended to be those with higher risk-appetites. Once in the New World, the people who moved further and further West were those with the highest need for and tolerance of risk. It's no coincidence that poker is considered a game quintessentially suited to America, and particularly to the American West.

Casino gambling in general is a way to satisfy risk-appetite in a meticulous way. On-line poker rooms offer games where the betting starts at one cent, and other games with bets of $1000 or more. Compare that to ordinary-life behaviors that involve risk (mainlining heroin, having children, etc), which are often all-or-nothing choices. Gambling is a way to calibrate more precisely the level of risk that fills our inner need.

When people tell me that they don't gamble, I sometimes reply that getting out of bed in the morning is a gamble. As is staying in bed. We don't have the option of avoiding risk, but we can manage the type of risks we do take. 

The McManus article ends by quoting Mark Twain. "There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush.’ It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species."

Consistency

Just once, I'd like to see one of those gymnasts fall off the balance beam, and tell the interviewer, "I place all the blame on God." It's only fair, right?

Upcoming film "Kumare"

In this documentary, filmmaker Vikram Gandhi becomes a fake guru, and attracts real followers.

Transformation

The Skeptic's Dictionary has a great page about Landmark Forum. Landmark is the successor to Werner Erhart's est from the 70s. Swami Muktananda was explicitly influenced by est in creating the intensive weekends in the Siddha Yoga (SYDA) organization, The influence of est can be seen in the many other currently-active LGATs (Large Group Awareness Trainings), and this Skeptic's Dictionary page sheds some clear-thinking light on all of them.

One simple concept that I found intriguing is this. People naturally go through high and low psychological phases during their lives. Among those who are drawn to an LGAT, people in a down-phase are over-represented, as they have the most motivation for seeking quick transformation. The tendency of people at low psychological points is to eventually regress to the mean. That is, they move from the extraordinarily low psychological point to a more typical one (i.e., they feel better with time). If the LGAT can convince people of its transformational power, then when a better state occurs (for whatever reason), they'll likely attribute it to the LGAT, and become true believers.

Of course there are some people who get extraordinary bliss-states etc, not just relief from a low-point. Surely, the mere fact that attendance of these workshops and seminars gives people an opportunity to ponder their lives, seek new perspectives, question old assumptions, etc, can have amazingly powerful effects. But among the masses who become LGAT devotees, I'd think regression to mean is a significant dynamic.

In a broader sense, many psychologists say that our happiness tends to follow a U-shape. We're happy as children, then struggle as young adults as we adapt to challenging jobs and relationships and life complications. Somewhere in mid-adulthood, most people tend to gain greater mastery of their lives (and/or our lives actually become easier, as we advance beyond shitty jobs, as kids grow up and no longer demand constant attention, as relationships become more solid, etc). The point is that when we experience a natural life up-turn, we tend to project a reason on it, even if it's just correlation and not causation. If we happen to be Christians, we say Jesus is making us happier. If we're into meditation, we credit that. If we value money most, we think that wealth is the cause of this increased happiness, etc.

Our experience is one thing, and the way we interpret it (assigning a cause to our good or bad feelings) is something different.

Free Thinking

Long ago, when our species was less evolved, it improved our chances of survival if we stuck in tight-knit tribes. As individuals, we'd quickly starve or get eaten by wild animals etc. It makes sense that DNA would wire us to blindly follow a leader, so we'd all stick together in the tribe, and we'd have a fighting chance to keep nature at bay, long enough to procreate and all.

Evolution is brilliant that way, but it moves very very slowly. After all, natural selection has no tools except trial-and-error. We generate a bunch of offspring, and the ones best designed for survival last long enough to pass on DNA codes to future beings. Amazingly effective adaptions arise, but only over the course of many many generations.

Then we got these incredible new tools. Rational thinking allows us to run "what-if" scenarios, and conclude what's best for our survival so much more quickly than the brute force of trial and error. The development of language and the printed word allow us to accumulate knowledge across populations, and pass it on to the future. What to speak of the internet.

Rationality, technology, scientific method bring us to our current condition, in which individuality and independent thinking are a far more effective survival mechanism than they were in our caveman days. When I need food, I pop something into the microwave. Satisfying my needs apart from any tribal allegiance has become a lot easier, compared to when I'd have to live off of dinosaur meat (joking, joking).

The new tools of rationality etc allow at least part of the population to live as free-thinkers. But for many generations to come, this advancement towards personal freedom and independent thinking will be bumping up against the hard-wired drive to adhere to a tribal authority, that drive being a hold-over of a strategy that was more appropriate millions of years ago.

Ron Paul Speech after NH Primary

The 99%

Say you wanted to build a Movement by appealing directly to the Cult Mind, that part of the brain that most desires to be part of a herd. You'd need a slogan to imply that following a crowd leads to Truth. Such a maxim would suggest that being in the majority, or having membership in the biggest tribe, somehow confers moral superiority. You'd want the slogan to be well-suited to sheep, while scrupulously avoiding any speck of human critical thinking.

I submit that "We are the 99%" fits these criteria perfectly.

For the benefit of readers who have been living in caves: "We are the 99%," or slight variations thereof, is a battle cry appearing on countless posters and placards in Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests around the world, and used by its supporters in the media and blogsphere.

"We are the 99%!" is found alongside signs like "Eat the Rich," suggesting anger directed at the top 1% measured by finances. Demonizing the wealthy is hardly a new phenomenon.

It's also common in our history to aim derision at those at the very top of the intelligence/education pyramid. Think of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or of George Wallace referring sneeringly to "pointy-headed intellectuals," those with too much book-learnin'. Anti-intellectual movements gain traction precisely because they're aimed at a minority.

Protesters with a lesser slice of the IQ pie could occupy universities. People with PhDs make up less than 1% of the American adult population; imagine mobs trying to disrupt doctorate programs while proudly shouting "We are the MORE THAN 99%!" How is that any less coherent than the Occupy Wall Street motto?

What's so special about the OWS number anyway? If it's OK to demonize 1%, why not 2%? There's ample precedence for slurring the Jews. Why begrudge anti-Semitic demonstrators the mathematically-accurate claim "We are the 98.3%!"

Where to draw the line? At what magic number is there a moral distinction? Aren't rallies against African-Americans entitled to the motto "We are the 87.7%!" And other than the need for larger signs, where's the problem with anti-gay mobs using slogans like "It depends on which study you believe, but we're confident that we're somewhere between the 87% and the 98%!"

Maybe there are some people carrying "99%" signs with the intention of attacking a relatively small number of people who have cheated larger numbers of people. If that's the case, if they're rallying against wrongdoing like lying or stealing, why not direct energy and anger against those specific behaviors? Aren't we rational enough to argue that a deception or theft causes harm, and condemn it whether the criminal is rich or poor, whether there's one culprit or ten thousand?

It's hypocritical to direct condemnation only at those we consider to be outside of the herd. There's little moral authority in "We're protesting against those who commit violent assaults... but only if they're a lot more attractive (or smarter, or stronger, or richer) than we are!"

Personally, I'd find the 99%ers a whole lot less creepy if they based the protest on a principle... rather than appealing to the lowest common denominator, using a mindless bandwagon slogan that relies on a dubious, self-proclaimed head count.

The Best Zen Talks Never Mention "Zen"

"Of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jobs said: 'I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.'"

Ya Don't Gotta Believe!

The recent CNN.com article Religious belief is human nature huge new study claims begins, "Religion comes naturally, even instinctively, to human beings, a massive new study of cultures all around the world suggests."

This is no surprise if we consider our distant ancestors. Cavemen who failed to see tigers in the bushes often died too early to pass on their genes. Those who saw tigers even when they weren't there may have been stressed-out, but they survived and procreated just fine.

Evolution must therefore favor those who perceive patterns, whether they really exist or not. (If you have any doubts of this, look up at the clouds and see the duckies.) Perceiving patterns leads to perceiving meaning and purpose, where they exist and where they don't. Hence, the natural and instinctive "religion" that CNN reports.

Buddhists -- not to mention Existentialists -- would say that originally there's no meaning or purpose. If we want them, then we make them ourselves. This view can be learned and practiced, but it doesn't come instinctively to us from the get-go.

There's evidence all around that religious belief is inherent. Consider the May 21 doomsday scare. Ordinary-appearing people devoted their lives to a belief in end-times prophesy, based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Or watch Sister Wives on the TLC cable channel. Perfectly functional people, risking arrest by following a polygamous belief-system. God bless 'em, it's horrific that the government harasses them... but how can these otherwise intelligent people follow a religion that defies simple arithmetic? (If men have multiple wives, but no women have multiple husbands, it simply doesn't add up.)

The majority of us follow religions that are obviously silly; this is solid evidence that we're hard-wired to believe. Yet it's possible to live and learn. As I go through life, I find less and less interest in holding beliefs, and more and more in questioning, watching, wondering.

Often I've encountered people proclaiming beliefs unsupported by logic or evidence. Many seem to embrace a belief purely because it's old, or popular, or written in a dusty book, or asserted by charismatic people in fancy costumes. I ask the faithful why they choose to hold their beliefs, and have repeatedly heard responses like, "You've got to believe in something. You can't live without belief."

A while back, in the ayahuasca-soaked web zine Reality Sandwich, Charles Eisenstein wrote:

Last time I wrote about this, a commentator suggested that we not “believe” anything. I find this position disingenuous, akin to certain misunderstood Eastern teachings about non-attachment. We are born into the world of flesh and dust, and are not meant to be aloof from it. We are meant to experience the joys and sorrows of attachment. If you want to build a bridge, or a relationship, you have to believe something and act accordingly. You believe the steel will hold. You believe someone will do as she has said. Life in the world is built of beliefs. The world is built of stories. We enact them and live in the world that they create.

I suspect that the commentator he's referring to is me. Whatever. To the above assertion, I replied thusly:

The point isn't believing vs not-believing. It's whether or not you recognize belief for what it is. When you embrace a belief, do you recognize it as your own creation? As a choice that you can examine and question? Or do you assume that your chosen beliefs represent substantial truth (as "religious" people do)?

The use of the passive-voice "meant to be" belies our own power to examine and question beliefs. Who or what is it that "means" for us to do this or that? Are we assuming there's some God or Force that decides that we're "meant to" feel this or that? Or do we take responsibility for how we choose and create our own meaning?

You could say, e.g., "I choose to see myself as living in a world of flesh and dust, and I want to be attached to the joys and sorrows of this world." Wouldn't that be clearer than speculating about what's "meant to be"?

To question your chosen beliefs is hardly being "aloof" from the world. Indeed, taking refuge in a belief-system is a common strategy to avoid engaging with the living experience of each moment. When these joys and sorrows appear... how much are you present for the experience itself? How much are these experiences filtered through a belief-system?

Eschatology

I've been seeing the occasional billboard, and bold advertisements on the side of RVs, heralding the end of the world on May 21, 2011. See Huffington Post, Believers Warn Neighbors of Impending Doom. Apparently, the prediction comes from "Biblical scholar" Harold Camping.

Judgment Day is coming May 21, 2011 -- not sometime this decade, not sometime this year, but precisely on May 21.

Jeez. It's almost three years since I first blogged about a rise in apocalyptic warnings. Back then, it was penciled in for December 21, 2012 (Mayan calendar/I Ching stuff). At the time, it made me ponder how believing in the end of the world could be a zig-zag way of considering our own mortality.

As a youngest child, I sometimes felt left-out of the activities of my older siblings. In those pre-DVR days, I'd have to go to bed at 9pm, and endure the sounds of the rest of the family watching Hawaii 5-0 episodes that I'd never see. As a result, my fear of death is entangled with bitterness that other people may be enjoying a futuristic earth while I'm stuck in the ground (or in some Whatever realm). Thinking about the End of Time can thus be easier than facing the possibility that Time will go on without me.

In any case: I wish the doomsday folks would come to some sort of agreement re what the date will be. This is the type of thing that requires some advanced planning. Perhaps some enhanced risk-taking behavior is in order, maybe even hedonism.

In one of the articles I've read about the May 21 Doomsday people, a follower mentioned that he was on a diet, and of course the journalist asked Why?? I'm not sure what I'd do if I really believed that the end was so near, but I sure as hell wouldn't be counting carbs.

Update... The Christian end-times warnings now have resulted in a competing billboard going up in Oakland:


Breaking news: the world failed to end on May 21. There was, though, a little 3.6 earthquake in the Bay Area around 6pm, which made me nervous for a few seconds. Camping has rescheduled The End for October 12.

Buffoons and Bimbos

Last night I watched the finale of season 3 of Jersey Shore. Season 4 will be filmed in Italy.

Italian-American interest group UNICO opined: It will not only hurt Italians but all Americans … their outrageous, reprehensible behavior will make us look like buffoons and bimbos.

Read about it here. And more on Snookie here.

Artificial Intelligence is Gaining on Us (Jeopardy! part 2)

I watched the first 2 episodes of the Jeopary! challenge between former champions and an IBM super-computer. Humanity isn't fairing well.

We may live long enough to watch the debate in Congress over whether computers should get the vote (once they become indistinguishable from humans). Kurzweil points out that when we build a machine as intelligent as we are, it'll be the last machine we have to build, since the machine itself can create all future machines. This means that if we allow robots to vote, they'll simply overwhelm us by replicating, and then exploiting the power of "one 'man' one vote." Wouldn't this make universal suffrage for all beings (whether bio or techno) impossible in practice, even if philosophically or morally imperative?

(We could e.g. legislate that all beings that are exactly the same get just one vote collectively... but that'd piss off a whole bunch of identical twins!)

Even now, human groups with high birth-rates eventually gain more power at the ballot box. This doesn't create immediate crisis, since humans are so slow and inaccurate in our efforts to reproduce ourselves. When computers can do so without friction -- making their replicas quickly and flawlessly -- it'll be a different matter.

Kurzweil on Computers on Jeopardy

This coming Monday, 2/14/2011, a computer will compete against two human champions on the TV show Jeopardy. If the computer is able to understand the quiz show questions (which often use puns, metaphors, and other word-play), some artificial intelligence experts will consider it a great leap forward. After all, understanding complex language is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. And if the machine can understand the question, it will surely win, as it's got a monstrous advantage over any biological brain when it comes to searching for answers through massive amounts of data.

Here's artificial intelligence wizard and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicting that the computer will triumph.



I've been intrigued by Kurzweil since I read his book The Singularity is Near (and even understood some of it). And I was impressed by his accessibility when I emailed him about the Buddhist perspective of consciousness.

Why Thoreau Would Love Snookie

...this year there are some 320 reality shows on the air worldwide, compared with four in 2000.

Season 3 of "Jersey Shore" is underway, and God forgive me, I never miss an episode.

For the pop-culture challenged... "Jersey Shore" is a reality show on MTV, in which 8 East Coast Italian-Americans (self-described "Guidos" and "Guidettes") live together in a beach house. It's been wildly successful domestically and abroad. See Newsweek's article America's New Icons, source of the photo and all italicized quotes.

Jersey Shore debuted last year... party-hearty youngsters move into a lavish house and wait for the drama to ensue... Snooki and her castmates ... out-outraged the reality stars who came before them with more self-absorption, public drunkenness, bar brawls, and ill-advised hookups than your average guilty pleasure. Three Italian-American groups demanded that MTV pull Jersey Shore. ...the crude cast of the show gives viewers license to indulge in a little class pornography.

[Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson says,] “People... watch so they can look down on those people who make these unfortunate choices... I call it ‘Masterpiece Stupidity.’” [Executive Producer SallyAnn] Salsano bristles at this view. “These are just good kids with good hearts who want to come to the shore and have fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

It's true that the housemates engage in plenty of objectionable behavior. The public drunkenness, lying, fighting, and irresponsibility. The way they disrespect and objectify members of the opposite sex, in their quest for daily hook-ups. And yet I don't feel I'm indulging in class pornography, or looking down on these people. In spite of what my brain tells me, there's something I find likable about the characters. What's that about?

I think the answer lies in the housemates' simplicity . (Illustrated, for example, by how the guys abbreviate their daily obligations as GTL: gym, tan, laundry.) It's satisfying to look into this complex, chaotic world, and find something simple enough to understand.

Why does almost everyone love animals? Because if you're nice to a puppy -- feed and pet it every day etc -- it will be nice back at you. The pattern, symmetry, cause/effect is clear and pleasing. Even when the puppy is yapping, we don't get angry with it. We figure it's just responding to something frightening, and that if we offer the puppy some affection, it will respond to that stimulus also.

Likewise with babies. People don't get mad at babies when they cry, because it's easy enough to see that their moods and actions are just reflecting what's around them. Rather than consider the baby's behavior evil, we accept it as a response to their situation.

Even as adults, whatever we do is ultimately the natural functioning of cause and effect. But when our minds become sufficiently complex, it's no longer possible to perceive the connection between our [mis]behavior and our environment. We no longer understand the whole chain of effects, so we assign inherent evil to the individual.

It's not that Snookie and the gang act in ways that are "good" by any moral standard. It's that their lives and motivations are so wonderfully simple. This allows us to view their antics as we would those of children, rather than of demons.

Stephen Hawking vs God

Of course I'm a fan of Stephen Hawking. How could you not love a man who not only solved the great mysteries of the universe, but was a guest voice on the Simpsons?

Hawking has gone through two marriages. By the time he hooked up with his nurse in the mid 90s, neuro-muscular dystrophy had left him able to move only his cheek and one finger. Amazing how he pulled off that seduction. Genius indeed.

And the divorces. When he gave each wife the "Honey... it's... over... between... us..." speech, it must have been particularly bizarre, delivered over several minutes by that computer-generated voice.

Hawking's latest book was published yesterday. An excerpt from The Grand Design appears in the Wall Street Journal article Why God Did Not Create the Universe:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

"Create itself from nothing" sounds a lot like Buddhist teaching. All things appear out of emptiness; exist for a limited time; then return to emptiness. Zero becomes One, then One becomes Zero, over and over. That's all.

Emptiness and zero are names, just words. In Buddhist teaching, what do these words mean? They point to the source of all phenomena as being before words, ideas, and thinking. "Everything arises from emptiness" means that we don't know where it all came from, or why.

Imagine meeting someone on the street, and asking him, "Where were you before you came to town?" He answers "Don't know." You ask him where he'll go afterwards, why he came, and who he is. Each time, he says, "Don't know." That'd be odd... yet it's precisely the situation we find ourselves in, when we get born into this world.

Our very survival depends on knowing stuff, so we've evolved this tendency to seek solid explanations. Yet when it comes to the really big questions, we don't have a clue. The heart of Zen practice is to sit unflinchingly with the simple experience of not knowing.

Religious people may say, "God made everything," but what's "God"? If it's a name for the mystery, another way of saying "I don't know who or what made everything," then OK. But to claim anything about what this "God" is... is to pretend to know what we really don't.

Is it so different to say it all comes from nothing? That's an OK name -- no worse than Emptiness or God -- but is it just another way of saying we don't know?

What is this nothing anyway? Whatever we think when we hear the word "nothing," it's an idea, which is something. Hawking's "nothing" can't be anything like the common sense of the word. If I have a wallet filled with nothing, it never spontaneously creates cash. Let alone Existence.

And Stephen, Mr Genius, can "spontaneous creation" really be called a reason? Does that phrase explain anything?

Example: someone asks why high-tech companies have thrived in San Francisco. You say, "Because the educational and cultural institutions in the area attract the type of workers who make the companies succeed." That's at least a coherent reason. It may have practical meaning; you could test if the explanation holds true in other cities. But if your answer was, "it happened spontaneously," have you communicated anything beyond "I don't know why"?

Is it possible that scientific ideas, like religious ideas, can be used to avoid the discomfort of not knowing? Could we discard these ideas and face the concrete reality, the great don't know, right in front of us, just now?

Eat, Pray, WTF?

The ultra-chick movie Eat, Pray, Love was released this week. Star Julia Roberts insured its success; I believe it's the second biggest film out there, after the ultra-guy movie The Expendables. EPL is based on the eponymous novel by Elizabeth Gilbert. The novel in turn is based on Gilbert's real-life year-long trip around the world, during which she experienced food in Italy, meditation in India, and a love affair in Bali.

Neither the novel or the movie names the female guru whom Gilbert encountered in India, and with whom she had the requisite earth-shaking experiences. But it's clear from all the evidence that it's Gurumayi Chidvilasananda (successor to famed guru Swami Muktananda).

I myself was part of that scene in my youth. I traveled with Muktananda in the US on his 3rd World Tour in the late 70s-early 80s. I then went to his ashram in Ganeshpuri India, staying there through his death in late 1982, plus over a year with his dual successors, Gurumayi and her brother Nityananda. The photo attached to this blog post is from those days in India; I'm third from the right. My sartorial choices were not uncommon for that locale, and made sense at the time.

As you might expect when dealing with such holy and spiritual people, the scandals (power, sex, money, lies) that emerged over time were jaw-dropping. Muktananda had diddled underaged girls (while claiming and promoting celibacy), and had sent goons to intimidate anyone who tried to reveal his secret. Gurumayi, at a minimum, helped keep this covered-up. She grabbed sole control of the org from her brother, and when he started to run independent programs, she sent her own goons to intimidate his followers. The usual stuff.

(Did Gurumayi consciously try to deceive her followers into believing that she was a divine being, bestowing magical invisible spiritual energy? Was it all for the sake of fame, fortune, and adoration? Or did she believe her own hype about her God-like status? Considering the human talent for self-deception, I'd guess it's the latter. But I can only guess. Damn, I do wish she'd come clean about her motives, purely to satisfy my curiosity. Her and Bernie Madoff.)

I was pretty clueless of all this dark underside while I was with the group. It was all slowly revealed in the press in the years after Muktananda's death, and on the net in the decades since I returned to ordinary life in the US from the ashram in India. See these links for more info on the whole sordid scene.

Gurumayi disappeared from public view a few years back, perhaps because she got tired of hiding the scandal, or perhaps just exhausted from pretending to be a superior being. Gilbert's visit immortalized by Eat, Pray, Love occurred after the scandals were well-known, but while Gurumayi was still actively playing guru.

None of this has great philosophical import: even if Muktananda and Gurumayi were absolutely pure and innocent, I don't find them very interesting or important teachers any more. Whatever valuable insights they did offer (under the mountain of nonsense) are available from countless other groups. But hell, I can't completely ignore a good sex-and-religion scandal.

It'll be interesting to see how the buzz around the movie develops, whether it leads to serious mainstream discussion of meditation practice, and/or of the ugly secrets and power struggles in Gurumayi's history. A couple of major news sources have already reported on the kerfuffle. See the New York Post article Eat Pray Zilch, and Salon's The "Eat, Pray, Love" Guru's Troubling Past.