Idea for a porn flick:

Mission: Impregnable.

Salma Hayek ... or a chess piece from Through the Looking Glass? Her head is way too big for her body. And there is too much pepper in this soup.

"A model wears an outfit made of chocolate during the seventh annual 'Chocolate Show New York' fashion show in New York, November 10, 2004." They've come a long way from edible panties, n’est ce pas? "Melts in your mouth, not in your hands."

The New Age movement has really come a long way since there was originally a cult of seven hippies who derived their entire theology from Celestial Seasonings teabag boxes.

—Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

Well, here's something you don't see every day. In Beijing, China, no less. From www.eveandersson.com.

Idea for a book:

Everything I Needed to Know About Kindergarten, I Learned in Teacher's College.

From www.mackie.com: Three members of Beyoncé's red hot touring band have been packing 1402's in their racks. Um, by "racks," they probably mean ... uh, 'cause I don't see how they'd manage to stuff a 1402 mixer unit down their, um.... Boy, is that Beyoncé built, or what?....

TOKYO (AFP) - Giving a new meaning to the term grassroots music, Pioneer Corp. said it had developed a next-generation disc made of corn to let the eco-conscious consumer dispose of data in the soil. The Japanese electronics maker said the Blu-ray optical disc, which can be written once and stores 25 gigabytes of data, is 87 percent natural polymer derived from corn and biodegrades. While the disc can theoretically be eaten, it is coated by a 0.1-millimeter (0.004-inch) thick layer of resin and is too hard for even the strongest teeth.

You could have a DVD that automatically makes its own popcorn when you put it in the player!

Of course, you could only play it once....

The [Maharishi's] ashram seemed a cheery place now, in the spirit of the flower-child sixties. The Beatles were everywhere and so was their music. They even brought their guitars to meals and improvised songs. I heard no complaints from the meditators: our eclectic group had bonded, Beatles and all. Then a self-important, middle-aged American woman arrived, moving a mountain of luggage into the brand-new private bungalow next to Maharishi's along with her son, a bland young man named Bill. People fled this newcomer, and no one was sorry when she left the ashram after a short time to go tiger hunting, unaware that their presence had inspired a new Beatles' song—"Bungalow Bill."

—Mia Farrow, What Falls Away

Coming to movie theatres this Christmas season (seriously):

"Bride and Prejudice," from director Gurinder Chadha ("Bend It Like Beckham"), retelling Jane Austen's nuptial tale as a Bollywood musical.

Also, "The Merchant of Venice," with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons in an update of Shakespeare's tale of romance and vengeance.

"Art I out of order?
Thou art out of order!
This whole courtoom
Verily, 'tis out of order!"

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the actors."

In 1646 another Puritan, John Boggis of Great Yarmouth, asked, "Where is your God, in Heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or where doth he sit with his arse?"

—Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy

Indeed, "where doth he sit"?

With his arse.

Received the following semi-incoherent piece of nonsense in my inbox this morning, in response to my online postings about my (1998-99) experiences at SRF's (Paramahansa Yogananda) Hidden Valley, from which I have still not recovered:

Geoff-don't join the Canadian military, you won't like it.From the gist of you very long whatever it was9 sour grapes?) I'd say you don't like to be told what to do from AYONE.I can't imagine being a person like that,why they would een consider joining a place live Hidden Valley.I sincerely believe it is probably something that in this lifetime you may never fully understand.I have been to hidden Vally several times, and no I did not live there, and I donot know what" supposedly really goes on, that's true.BUT I have no doubt whtsoever that I could live there a lifetime and be happy doing it.I think therin lies the part you just don't get"it varies from one person to the next and where they are on ther general spiritaul path--whether they can find happiness in an Ashram or not.appratently you could not.You knew, or should have known before you went in that it was not a place to "speak up', a place to "try to bring the outside world inside".It is just not that w!
ay,never will be.IT is a place to go and do what your told to do and learn to be happy doing it.Since you could not do that you made the right decsion to leave for your sake and everyone else's.This is the end but I can't help but express that "you just don't get it", even now probably.I am sorry for that.Harry.

[sic]!

And you wonder why people call SRF a cult? What Harry is trying to "teach" me is exactly in line with what that power-tripping, moron-filled organization wants him to believe. And he's too docile, too eager to blindly follow, too unable to even imagine being truly independent, to know any better but feel sorry for me for not being an equal "Stepford Disciple." (It's always the ones that don't have a fucking clue, who can't stop "teaching," isn't it? Ken Wilber—and his sometimes-nasty admirer on the SRF Walrus Discussion Board, posting as One Taste—would be proud. That latter wanna-be is gonna have a rude awakening when the 50-page chapter and 25-page appendix on Wilber in STG are made public. 'Cause there's very little left in Wilber's work or character to admire, if you look at those in proper detail. The phrase "world-class fool" rather comes to mind.)

Tara Mata (the "spiritually advanced" editor of Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and one-time vice president of SRF) would also be proud. For, her own authoritarian view on disciples such as Harry (in Walters, 2002) was exactly this:

In an organization, no one has a right even to think except the members of the Board of Directors.

I have no doubt that Harry could indeed live his entire life at Hidden Valley and be perfectly happy there, just "doing what he was told" to do, in the best tradition of Stanley Milgram's chilling experiments on unthinking obedience to authority.

How sad. And to be so proud of that, (egoically, big egoically) congratulating himself, thinking that it makes him "more spiritually advanced" than I am, and that I should "become more like him" if I hope to advance on the spiritual path (which I don't at all wish to, but that's a separate issue). Caught the same load of bullshit from the layman project manager I had to deal with at HV, who couldn't keep his brain-dead opinions to himself, to the point of telling me, unsolicited, that when I had meditated more, I wouldn't feel the need to be creative in writing books or music, and would just "serve Master's work," like the idea-less managerial drone he himself was.

And if these sheep would at least learn to write, for Christ's sake. But even without such minimal competence, bumbling over missed details at every opportunity—there are at least 37 typos in Harry's short message, omigod!—they've still got it all explained. (He actually spelled "gist" correctly, though. Surprising, but true. Could anyone so starkly inept at basic punctuation actually be even minimally competent at anything else?) So they "compassionately" enforce their half-baked understandings of Metaphysics 101 on anyone who will listen, trying desperately to extract a blind respect comparable to what they've already given to those "above" them.

Harry's gonna really like the chapter on Yogananda in my Stripping the Gurus, I'll bet....

And what do I have to look forward to when that book is published? Not merely well-meaning, respect-hungering sheep like Harry electing themselves as "teachers" to the world, but the full "cult cocktail" of harassment and death threats ... from each of the forty or so gurus I've exposed in that forthcoming book.

Anybody wanna trade lives? Mine sucks. But, in the words of Tom Petty: I won't back down.

Plus, Harry's actually got it all wrong: I didn't go to Hidden Valley to "bring the outside world in"; I went there to "serve my divine guru," as I explicitly stated, in print, to the ashram administrator, Dharmananda. When I signed the paper to enter the ashram, agreeing to view and obey the monks there as being explicit "vehicles of God," I actually believed that they were exactly that. (Stupid, stupid, stupid.) It was only via six months of intense psychological abuse, dumped on me by the short-tempered, chronically negative, neurotic weasel-freak of a supervisor I got stuck with, which curled me into such a tight little ball of stress that I still haven't recovered, that it became obvious to me that the higher-ups there consistently didn't have a fucking clue.

By the end of my stay at HV, the foot-dragging of that "superior," as a means of doing things his way (as per Br. Lee's analysis, in a rare insightful moment for him) even in the face of other time-sensitive and higher-priority projects, had caused even the none-too-bright layman project manager for the Systems Department to float the idea of removing him. So, it was him who was disobeying his own superiors, not me. All of that is fully obvious from the online postings which Harry refers to, even if being lost on that detail-deficient lemming.

And "sour grapes"? For what? For not being heard or elevated to a position of respect within a society of grandiose, power-tripping imbeciles? Please. To be accepted and respected by docile, unquestioning fools, who won't see how they're being manipulated even after it's been clearly pointed out to them, is not my goal in life.

Harry the Hat's actually almost right about me not liking "to be told what to do from A[N]YONE," though. Except that I do love to receive good advice, and have gotten (and followed) exactly that from David Lane, John Horgan and Steven Hassan in connection with Stripping the Gurus. Indeed, guidance like that, even in small doses, is good as gold—and just as rare, if not moreso.

I received equally bad advice, however, from Ramakrishna "scholar" Jeffrey Kripal, whose work has been completely discredited within and outside of the academic community, yet who requested that I not use any quotes from his might-as-well-be-fictional Kali's Child in STG, as he didn't want it to be associated with my ideas! (For some strange reason, Kripal wants Ramakrishna to have been a practicing homosexual—which the holy nutcase wasn't, being prematurely impotent. He then objects, however, to the characterization of the same "sage" as a "homoerotic pedophile," which Ramakrishna absolutely was, for suckling his young male disciples and groping the older ones.)

And more bad advice from a seemingly humorless philosopher von Amsterdam. The man needed over a decade of co-dependent residence in an extremely destructive community to figure out that the "divine guru" he was following there was and is an idiot. He had also earlier done extensive analysis of the work of the "Velikovsky of consciousness studies," Ken Wilber; so he really knows how to pick 'em. (His foolish editorial advice to his guru was that the latter should strive to have only occasional bon mots of "wisdom" in his first book. For, to have it be consistently insightful would be like baking a chocolate cake that was made out of nothing but chocolate. That has to be among the five worst pieces of advice I've ever seen given. And even as it stands, and with that none-too-bright messianic guru-figure doing his best to be profound in publishing "pure chocolate," his double-spaced books are still totally vacuous.)

Understandably, I won't be altering anything I ever write to make it more like he would do it—particularly since the people who have endorsed both STG and his book have given much more glowing reviews to STG! And how he could read the entire book—over a three-month period, no less—and still think that it lacked "theory" as to why closed, guru-led communities invariably turn toxic, completely astounds me. The precise mapping of the behaviors seen in Zimbardo's classic prison study to documented ashram behaviors, coupled with the characteristics explicated by Zimbardo himself as to how such toxic environments arise, alone provides a huge amount of theory-based understanding of cult-member behaviors. As do the insights regarding Findhorn.

And you wonder why you can't even point out Amsterdam on a map, i.e., why it's never become a world power? It's because of bad advice like that!

Anyway, as to how anyone such as dear, daft Harry could ever enjoy being told what to do by others who demonstrably don't know what they're doing, or consider that to be a good ("ego-killing") thing, I stand amazed and saddened. To be so psychologically immature and weak as to want those ideas to be valid is in no way healthy, even if "spirituality" (like the incompetently managed "emperor's new clothes" business world) too often demands it.

So be careful, Harry: While your subservient and unquestioning personality may make you a fine spiritual and secular minion, it would be a Very Bad Thing for you to end up following a fascist/totalitarian dictator, rather than a cult-leading guru—notwithstanding that there's actually very little difference between those two positions.

You're aware that Yogananda regarded Mussolini as being as "master brain," who had been sent to Earth by God to serve as a role model for humanity, right? You don't think that reflects on the guru's personality and authoritarian streak?

It does:

[Shelly Trimmer] spent about a year with [Yogananda] at the SRF headquarters in Los Angeles but then left.... Although he has retained great affection and respect for Yogananda, he also acknowledges his weaknesses. "He loved to order women about—after all he was a Hindu.... He had a violent temper and was a little bit arrogant."

—Andrew Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters