The Sad Veracity of the Guru Gadfly or Why Can’t Just One Cult Leader Be a Nice Guy?

A few years ago my partner Julie, a professor, asked me to watch a movie with her that she was introducing for a university film festival. It’s called The Source, named after one of the first health food stores in the United States that was owned by a man who changed his name to Father Yod and went on to lead a cult. The documentary follows the usual narrative trajectory of cult leaders: there’s a bunch of women wearing white who follow him, sleep with him, marry him, have children for him and then there are questions about sexual predation with kids and others, but this story has a slightly more ironic end in that Father Yod leads his ladies to the top of a high cliff, straps himself into a hang glider, jumps off and dies because he never took a hang gliding lesson.

My jaw dropped open when I saw real footage from the seventies of Yogi Bhajan, the (now deceased) leader of 3HO, (it stands for Happy, Healthy, Holy) teaching classes in which Father Yod was a student because for several years Yogi Bhajan was my guru.

Now, here’s where I’m going to say several sentences that are going to make you think I am in denial about having been a cult member.

1. I never met Yogi Bhajan so technically he was never REALLY my guru, even if he did ocasionally show up in my dreams hovering over the hood of a red camaro convertible yelling, “I give you a beautiful car like this and you drive it like a maniac?? Slow down!!!”
2. My white outfit consisted of bicycle shorts and a paisley bandana from Walmart because I wasn’t “in the know” enough to know where to purchase cult apparel.
3. I never converted to Sikhism or changed my name (although I respect people who did).
4. I only had positive experiences with 3HO. I did eventually stop because doing that much yoga made me borderline psychotic, but let’s be real. That’s on me. Balance was never my skill set.

So I was appalled when I saw that Yogi Bhajan was considered Father Yod’s teacher. (3HO asserts that Father Yod was in fact a very bad student and obviously never listened to a thing Yogi Bhajan had to say) so I’m trying to defend Yogi Bhajan to my partner while we are watching the movie, and our conversation goes like this: (picture me leaning forward towards the TV with both elbows on my knees, my face strained with horror, while my partner is lying back on the couch, her cell phone perched on her chest while she calmly googles every word I say)

Me: “Yes, but 3HO was never considered a cult.”

Her (googling): ” Yes it was.”

Me: “Ok, but Yogi BHajan was never accused on sexual misconduct.”

Her: (googling) “Yes, he was.”

So anyway, she is what you call a Guru Gadfly, whereas I have mostly repressed certain New Age proclivities that will never die, but I try to express them in more subtle ways like picking up a copy of Carlos Castaneda from the free library yesterday.

Julie eyes it (I didn’t try to hide it from her this time like I have done with some other texts) and says, “Isn’t he like an American dude who totally co-opted indigenous beliefs and got it all wrong and was accused of lying?”

Now, I didn’t know a thing about Carlos Castaneda except the basics that everyone knows (that he wrote a bunch of books presented as non fiction based on his experiences with a Yaqui shaman he calls Don Juan, and he learns how to perceive and interact with other realms of being. His books sold over 28 million copies in 17 languages and serve as the progenitors of the New Age movement in the US) and that I had read a passage about Don Juan leading him to try to find his “spot” on the front porch and he rolls around for like 8 hours until his perception changes and he finds it. So always wanting to believe the best in people, I say, “No!! (hear it super pouty!) He was born in Peru!” but since she tends to be right about things I prefer she wasn’t, I decided to do some research.

Randomly and interesting, the most in depth whistle blower on Carlos Castaneda was Richard DeMille, adopted son and biological nephew of the famous Golden Age of film producer and director, Cecil B DeMille (famous for The King of Kings, Samson and Delilah, and The Ten Commandments). Richard, at one time, served as personal assistant to L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and later Scientology, and assisted Hubbard in kidnapping his daughter and taking her to Cuba and kidnapping his wife in order to have her declared insane. Dick DeMille disavowed himself of Scientology in 1954. So I guess he was ready to collar some gurus.

I think the conclusions made about Castaneda (not just by DeMIlle) can best be summed up by the famous quote from Vine Deloria’s 1969 Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manfiesto,“Had the tribes been given a choice of fighting the cavalry or the anthropologists, there is little doubt as to who they would have chosen.” Castaneda did an even more bang up job than the average anthropologist in screwing over Indian communities by fabricating documentation with a teacher he claimed to be Yaqui which proved not to be true through various serious textual inconsistencies and practices that in no way resembled Yaqui shamanism. The fact that Castaneda went on to become the most famous New Age writer of all times sent white hippie kids into American and Mexican indigenous communities looking for transcendence through peyote “Mescalito” and other plants with psychoactive properties leading these plants to become criminalized thus causing indigenous people to be incarcerated for their own religious practices among other examples of cultural destruction, co-optation and violence.

So my partner is always annoyingly right. But even though Carlos Castaneda did go on to to become basically a cult leader of “Tensegrity” with five women (called witches) who lived in seclusion with him and then all went missing shortly after his death including one, Patty Partin (his sexual partner whom he also legally adopted) whose bones were found near her abandoned car in the Panamint Dunes in Death Valley, California in 2003 (the rest are all still missing), The Teachings of Don Juan is still a good read.

After finding all this out, reading it is even a little harder than trying to watch The Blair Witch Project after you know it’s just a hoax anyway….but dig deep. It is well written and as detailed in its descriptions as a 89 step recipe for psychoactive enchiladas, but I am sure the true believer in you can find value in it anyway.