Ch. 16
The Guru and Religion

Tiptoe daintily as you run roughshod over the Religious Field looking for nuggets to pilfer for your Teaching Programme. Pluck out a ruby of thought from the forehead of the eight-armed Astarte, plagiarize an esoteric passage from Mary Baker Eddy, purloin an ancient meditation exercise from the Tibetan Lamas, and presto - you'll be a full-fledged Grand Plenipotentiary.

The nice thing about standard religion - as now practiced - is that few, if any, know what it's supposed to mean. But every denomination, sect, cult, and heresy preaches its brand of Soul-Saving as THE Final Answer. Don't be left out. That's just where Modern Guruhood shines - in the field of dogmatic, absolutistic, arbitrary, dictatorial bigotry such as ordinary religion, psychology, philosophy, economics, and bowling.

Again, you may get some static from your ecclesiastic competitors - no matter how discreet your knavery. Any Established Body - religionists, academicians, politicos, etc. - conditions themselves to the pleasant illusion that they are Right because they are Established.

Anyone in an "established" profession (racket) is going to think that your guru practice is Weird and Unnatural - never having taken the time to reflect as to whether his society-sanctioned charlatanry might be just as questionable as yours. So get used to strange looks, perhaps even condemnation. ¹

You'll have to think out carefully your relationship to Established Religion. By and large, ministers, lamas, fakirs, priests, sheikhs, rabbis, TV evangelists, and cult masters are a solid lot, just concerned with keeping what little congregation they have and raking in the small but steady collection each weekend. As long as you don't bother them, they probably won't bedevil you much. By all means avoid the pitfall of getting into arguments with fundamentalists of any persuasion. No matter how many Bible or Koran or Book of the Dead or Bhavagad Gita or Seth Speaks passages you quote, they can quote more, longer, and with greater sense of Absolute Rightness. You'll wind up shaking your Gospel of Thomas at them, a most improper image for the Modern Guru.

If you're not going to argue with the Holy Joes or Archbishops or High Presbyters, what then? Your only purpose in having anything to do with them is to Learn. These traditional religions have been operating for a long time. You can't do better than study the Secrets of their success. What is it that makes Methodists hanker after Method, why do Anglo-Catholics like their incense swinging, and why don't Buddhists believe in a soul?

You study traditional religions, then, to add to your own Repertoire. To find out how people get hooked by various rituals, theological dogmas, and architectural monstrosities.

It was a warm, soggy evening in Kansas. ²   I was visiting my family during a dry spell in my guru practice. My mother and father were attending a church Ice Cream Social. I was more than a bit shocked and suspicious because my father seldom attended anything faintly smelling of Religion - he was a rabid disciple of Ingersoll the Atheist.

I listened to the easy, friendly banter of my parents' fighting as we sat on the Presbyterian Church lawn waiting for our bowls of homemade ice cream to be brought to us by one of the church ladies. My father had just said to one of the men at the next table: "So, Sam, you hypocrite; sell your over-priced funerals and stove-bolts all day and dally in the Temple at night, aye?" He had said it in his usual crude manner, half between swearing and sneering. Sam owned a hardware store and had a home mortuary business on the side (of his house).

My mother was playing her usual role of beleaguered wife, when she said something which sent my whole world reeling - and awakened me to the Secret of Kansas Presbyterianism.

As usual, my mother spoke in a high, whining voice, just loud enough to be overheard. "You wouldn't want people to know that you're an actual member of this church, would you dear?" She looked at my father, her face filled with wifely loathing borne of years of humiliation and abuse. She knew that Sam, at the next table, had overheard and the news would be all up and down Main Street - from Farmer's Co-op to Harry's Grill - the next morning.

My parents' affectionate interchange is not the point. The point was that my father had actually, much earlier, been brow-beaten into joining the church by a hard-nosed preacher who said he couldn't attend the church suppers and ice cream socials if he didn't sign up. The Secret of Kansas Presbyterianism, I suddenly realized, is Food. ³

That may sound like a small discovery to you. But in our business, readers, nothing is too small or insignificant to extort. That is why, now, in my guru practice I include regularly scheduled Public Feeds.

But don't just let people come, eat, and run. That slovenly practice has nearly decimated Kansas Presbyterianism. Always make sure the attendee gets a good healthy dose of your Teaching along with the inevitable baked beans, over-fried chicken, jellow-carrot salad, and undermoist Devil's food cake.

I discovered General Secret of Religion, Number One, Other-Think, when I was in high school. The fellows on the football squad were having their informal chat in the locker room after practice, amid the usual showering and maiming of one another. Claude, a two hundred and fifty pound gargoyle who had just missed being named an all-state tackle (because he clipped a half-back four times in succession in a conference game), was spouting his standard theory about cocksmanship (as he quaintly called it). "Religious gals is the easiest to get into their pants," he drawled, snapping apart a pair of brand-new shoulder-pads.

I had ignored this bit of dialectic before - because I knew Claude was going steady with a Pentecostal - but it now hit me that he might have something. I was floating at the moment - in my usual routine of girl-conquering - so I thought I would give this witless brute's hypothesis a test. There was a Catholic gal two grades ahead of me who had given me the come-on once or twice. A good target for my purely experimental researches.

She proved easy enough to date, but rebuffed my sexual advances in a way to which I was unaccustomed. In those halcyon days I prided myself on being irresistible - and had sixteen notches on the underside of my Nash steering wheel to prove it. None of my usually sure-fire Techniques washed with Mary Ruth. Kisses aplenty, but any heavy petting - as she coyly put it - was out until she was Married. At first I thought this was the ordinary female deviousness - wanting to feel chased before succumbing to my fatal charms. When persistence was met with obstinacy I stopped to take stock. I had used up all my seduction ploys - from what I called the "It's not fair to get me hot if you're not going to put out" gambit to the extreme of the True Love subterfuge. With Mary Ruth, nothing.

So, in desperation, I began talking to her. It turned out to be a priceless part of my Education. Mary Ruth - like others of other faiths, I discovered - had actually stopped thinking about certain things at the age of seven. Her Catholic upbringing had so effectively stamped into her brain that she was not to have coital sex until marriage that the sharpest sexual prestidigitation around (mine) wouldn't budge her.

I'm sure the reader will forgive this rummaging around in my past when he realizes what priceless discoveries I was making. I learned from Mary Ruth, as I was later to learn many times, that most people do not want to think for themselves. And any religionist - or Guru - who can relieve them of that burden is going to be successful.

Traditional religion feeds on this innate human weakness of wanting someone to tell you what to think and do. Having to decide the Great Issues of life is understandably too much for most people. In the past, this is where religion came in. Now, this is where the Modern Guru sneaks in. For religion is losing its popularity with lots of people today. They're more impressed with psychological mumbo-jumbo and economic-political clap-trap than religious cant. But it's the same Great Game of Doing Others' Thinking For Them.

For years I sneered at Religion, calling it all the usual names - narrow-minded, out-dated, hypocritical, repressive, etc. - until one day one of my more unruly patients screamed at me as I was mounting a tirade, "You no good bastard, you'll never have one millionth the victims the Mormon church has." Knowing her to be an ex-Mormon, I dismissed her remark as infantile projection. But something of the catch in her hysterical voice caught my attention. Yes, I said to myself, these religions are successful after all. Perhaps I could learn a trick or two from them.

It was then I came upon the General Secret of Religion Number Two: People Need Routine. In search of the dynamic underlying religion, I attended services of Seventh Day Adventists on Saturday, New Light Spiritualists on Sunday afternoon, Reform Jews on Friday night, Dervish exercises on Thursday evening, and Microsoft sales pep rallies on Monday morning. Midst all the jumble and confusion of doctrines, I felt there must be some unifying factor. A remark by a friend proved to be the Spark. Said she: "Been spending all your time going to these freaky churches, haven't you?"

That was it! People need religion because they don't know how to Spend Their Time. Religions provide a neat, orderly way to pattern one's week, one's whole life.

Since that time I have seen my Mission as a Modern Guru in providing, among many others, these two Services to Mankind:

• Helping people Not to Think

• Providing people Ruts into which to put the routine of their lives.

¹ See Chapter 49 - Paranoia: The Guru's Nemesis

² One of my monographs which has caused a great stir is Kansas As The Birthplace Of Famous Gurus. (Yes I was born in Kansas.)

³ I suspect this may also be the secret of Nebraska Presbyterianism.