A School For Gurus
" You're a mouse studying to be a rat."
The ribbon was scarcely cut at the Grand Opening of Yeovil Hall, 1 when I began instructing my first enrollees in the Fine Arts of Guruhood. For years the need for such an institution of Higher Learning had been crying. Finally I decided to breach the gap - hence was born the Foundation for Achieving Knowledge and Enlightenment (FAKE).
I include a description of the School not so readers can thereby learn to found their own foundation. The Mother Foundation is sufficient for the nonce and will grant its Official Sanction to affiliate foundations only when the need is made apparent by an applicant coming up with the required $6,000 sanction fee. [So far no such need has been shown.]
I describe the school so you can compare your own inevitably shoddy and delusion-breeding training with the Foundation Discipline, as the curriculum is referred to by Foundation personnel. Hopefully you will be Convicted of your need for Authorized Training. Don't suppose for a moment that any ordinary kind of study or experience can prepare you for the all-encompassing Challenges and Demands of Modern Guruship. Likely you suffer from the delusion that ten years in psychoanalysis, or reading the top eleven books on the Top Ten Best Seller List, or some other "background" as pseudo-gurus habitually use as an excuse for qualification, actually sharpened your tools.
What does the matriculee learn at the Foundation? What Esoteric Experiences prepare him to face any and every D-day, H-hour, or late-paying customer? Understandably I can only hint at what kind of training the fee-paid student receives.
On a Thursday evening about 11:00 PM you will find a dedicated group of Inchoates (as the Foundation students are called) sitting in an ellipse 2 in a course titled Inner Mettle. Each student in turn is subjected to the most soul-destroying, humiliating, scurrilous abuses, threats, and maledictions pronounceable. As with most of the Foundation training, this accomplishes two things simultaneously. The target of the abuse is learning Fortitude, Composure, and Repression of Hatred. When necessary in his guruhood, she will be able to tolerate the most extreme vilification from his disciples - or ex-customers - and give every semblance of being untouched by it. 3
At the same time, the other students are learning the techniques and language of backbiting, calumniation, and slander. This will come in handy when - at those carefully chosen moments, as taught in the Discipline - the Modern Guru lets loose against an unruly student his own controlled Execration, Anesthetization, and whatever curses he learned in the Marines or Church Camp.
One of the most popular courses is entitled How to Infuriate Someone Without Seeming to Try. Building on the classical research of S. Potter, Candide, and the Zen Masters, the course introduces the student to the modern field we call Discomposure.
As a Guru you must be able to devastate the smart-ass, presumptuous, know-it-all would-be customer into an apologetic, apoplectic, humble, reverent disciple - or at least into a raging, rabid demoniac.
You must be able to penetrate any feeling of security or ease, create an
uncontrollable agitation, and then offer your services as the only possible - or nearby - remedy.
To give you just a hint of the intricate detail which our Science of Discomposure has achieved, we are now applying for a patent on our Internal Wax Smile. Something on the order of the red wax lips which children once wore and then chewed, the Internal Smile is a candy wax mold placed inside the mouth between the skin and the teeth which fixes the musculature in a sardonic grimace. The Internal Smile has been known to destroy the composure of bank presidents, mortuary directors, and once, the cool of the Pope, who chuckled out loud.
No further details can be vouchsafed the un-matriculated. But a listing of some of the other courses will provide an illustrative tantalization:
All right, one more bit of information about the School. Mentioning some of the Special Effects at the Foundation will give you a hint as to what a Powerhouse it is - and how it produces such Astounding Successes. 4
In one wing of the Foundation Building 5 we find the Magic Chambre. Here I teach the class in Chicanery I. At each weekly session there is some new Problem for the students to divine. This Magic Chambre is always pitch black and the students must enter one by one. When their eyes become adjusted to the dark, they must then figure out the new Flim Flam presented for their edification.
Each semester this course - its content held in strictest secrecy by the alumni - begins with the eager new students, their eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, facing me as I sit in the lotus position. I appear to be meditating, but the dark is so pervasive they can't be sure. It usually takes a good hour before someone discovers they have been squinting blindly at a huge life-size poster of me - not me at all.
So begins their training in what we call NOT TRUSTING WHAT YOU THINK YOU SEE.
The first Saturday of each month is Masquerade Night. Each student must wear an assigned Costume. Which sounds easy. But he or she must wear the costume in a manner and with a bearing that makes the costume seem Authentic. Such costumes include:
As soon as the Foundation can afford to add other faculty members than myself, we plan to move to a large rural acreage on a river and begin our Expanded Program. Then will it be possible to provide those elements so essential in making a School an Institution:
1 The name may seem a bit grand, since Yeovil Hall is the living room in my home. But from such small beginnings do Great institutions fester.
2 F.A.K.E. eschews circles as old-fashioned and breeding bad vibrations.
3 At the stroke of midnight on Thursdays, there is a course in Outer Screaming.
4 We have completed dossiers on both our graduates, Simon Snively, and Louisa Mae Knott, following their illustrious careers through the first six months in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Grand Central Station, respectfully.
5 My home
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