Saturday, December 15, 2001


From the New Yorker, November 14, 1994:

"'An Indian will listen to his guru, nod his head, and go home and, even if he's a deeply religious person, ignore fifty per cent of what the guru has told him, because his own sense of the world tells him to do that,' an Indian man who is well versed in Yogic culture said to me recently. But Westerners who jump heart first into a cloistered Indian subculture do not always find it easy to distinguish what is spiritual from what is Indian-or merely the whim of the guru."

The article is mainly about the SYDA foundation's sordid history, and it's jam-packed with intrigue and drama. This article really shook up the organization and caused many followers to leave. It's actually very hard to find actual physical copies of the issue anymore because when this issue was printed the ashram bought as many copies of it as they could find and had them burned, and many public libraries around the US have had their copies of this issue destroyed as well.

You can read the entire article here.