Neville Hodgkinson

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Neville Hodgkinson is an influential English Brahma Kumari follower who has a great deal of influence on the Western BK leadership as advisor to Janki, Jayanti et al. (Just how much of his advise they took, I must leave him to tell). Intelligent, educated, very 'middle class English', Neville is a professional journalist and author for, primarily, well-established right wing publications like The Daily Mail and The Telegraph whilst his wife, and to become part-time BK follower and publicist for a while, wrote for right winged tabloids like the The Sun. She also turned out and profited from a few BK experience inspired books.

Neville, his professionalism and his accent, has been very serious assets to the Brahma Kumaris' clamber to status. He has also contributed considerable financial support, believed to be in the many £10,000s. At the start of this forum, I wrote to his sons asking if they might write a piece for us but never heard back. However, I have only just discovered that around the same time, this was published, which gives a warm, humorous but interesting insight into the changes families go through when one or more partners join the Brahma Kumaris.

Nev organised a party for all of his worldly old friends to meet all of his otherworldly new ones. The results were as disastrous as you would expect and Nev lost touch with many of his old friends from then on. As my mother has often said, she did not lose her husband to another woman, but to God.

Incredibly, Nev's life change coincided with a fundamental re-evaluation of my mother's own values. Always careerist and strong-willed, she had never been particularly maternal or domestic, but she appeared to view the arrival of the BKs as a chance to wage an all-out assault on the British nuclear family in general.

Archived here, from ...

Spiritual suburbia by Will Hodgkinson. The Guardian, Saturday 22 July 2006

It began one summer day, when Will Hodgkinson's dad asked him to meet 'some very special people'. How was a boy to cope with a newly spiritual Father and militantly celibate mother?

I remember the afternoon my parents dropped out. It was the summer of 1982, I was 12, and another dull day at my vaguely elitist and unimaginative prep school in Richmond had thankfully ended. I planned to return briefly to the semi-detached family home, with its Volvo in the drive and tasteful prints of Victorian Coca-Cola advertisements on the walls, to eat a few digestives before taking off to the nearest park on my BMX and attempting, once more, to clear the infamous "Leap of Death" as our local BMX hero "Mad" Malc Smith had done the week before. (The Leap of Death was a small stream.)

School had been particularly bad that day. All the teachers cared about was that we passed the exams in order to qualify for a prestigious public school, and it was already obvious that I wouldn't be following my much more academic elder Brother to Westminster. The bone-crunching thrill of BMX was my reason for living, in a world dominated by low academic achievement and the unpleasant prospect of ending up at a minor private school with all the other slightly dim sons of the suburban middle classes.

The BMX was out of the shed and ready to go when I heard my Father's voice - a strange event in itself given that he was generally at work at this time, but then his former reliability had gone out of the window recently. For the past few years Nev had been the medical correspondent for the Daily Mail, frequently proving to be independent-minded and ahead of the pack in his reportage on controversial issues from the cutting edge of science and medicine. But dinner table conversations had recently moved from being about test tube babies, quantum physics and, being a man with a mortgage to pay, home insurance policies to meditation and Indian philosophy. But what really worried me was his appearance. A flowing white pyjama suit had replaced his usual outfit of a tank top, beige trousers and all-weather imitation leather shoes.

"Ah Will, I am so glad I caught you," he said with a wide-eyed look that I think was meant to convey innocence. "I'd like you to meet some very special people."

My protests that I had an important date to keep with a potentially lethal jump across a muddy stream were dismissed with a wave and lightly closed eyes. "Never mind that. I have a treat in store that is far more enriching. It's time for you to experience the beauty and wonder of soul-consciousness."

In our living room were 20 people, all dressed in white. Quite a few were Indian women wearing saris. The white women, some of who had a wispy look about them as if a sudden breeze might result in their floating out of the window, were wearing saris too. They were all sitting cross-legged and facing a large, smiling Indian woman of indeterminate age who reminded me of ET. Nev (we have never called him Dad) introduced me to the room.

"Om Shanti, Brother Will," said one man, pressing his palms together. I smiled nervously at the white-clad invaders of our suburban normality and edged backwards, but my Father said: "Won't you stay for just five minutes? Everyone has been looking forward to meeting you."

So it was that I too was sitting cross-legged and experiencing, by the force of parental persuasion, my first meditation session. Somebody started up a tape recorder that played soft, ambient music and a woman's dulcet voice announcing with trance-like slowness that "my soul ... is ... eternal ... as my body ... fades ... I live ... forever". Nobody was making a sound. I planned to sneak out while Nev was busy achieving soul-conscious nirvana, but unfortunately he was meditating with his eyes open and would have spotted me. With the kind of exaggeration that came to typify his enthusiasm for his new discovery the promised five minutes turned into an hour, and with it faded all hopes of joining Mad Malc in the elite "BMX Mentalists Hall of Fame".

From that afternoon on, our bourgeois life was lost forever.

Nev had discovered the Brahma Kumaris, an Indian group whose philosophy comes from a distillation of the basic tenets of Hinduism. The Brahma Kumaris believe that the soul is an entity that cannot be created or destroyed. It passes through a series of bodies and each incarnation generally brings with it another step away from the goal of pure consciousness. The BKs teach that the physical world is secondary to the spiritual world, and that anything that takes one away from spiritual awareness, including sex, violence, alcohol, materialism, thrill-seeking, sensual pleasures and selfish behaviour, is to be avoided. The strict BK is celibate, vegetarian, peaceful, careful not to cause harm to others, and spends a good few hours of every day in monkish contemplation and meditative silence.

This was no fad that Nev was going through, as anyone who visits him at the house he currently lives in in Oxford with other BKs can tell you. My old bedroom, which had previously been taken over by a pretty impressive model racing car track, was painted white and turned into a meditation chamber. Down came the Coca-Cola prints; up went colourful paintings of smiling Indian deities. Lamb chops were off the menu, dhal and rice were on. Regular visits to the Brahma Kumari House (Richmond Chapter) took the place of Sunday lunchtime trips to the Chinese restaurant and the "bomb down to Brighton" that my dad would inevitably suggest when the spirit of spontaneity overcame him.

With astonishing naivety, Nev organised a party for all of his worldly old friends to meet all of his otherworldly new ones. The results were as disastrous as you would expect and Nev lost touch with many of his old friends from then on. As my mother has often said, she did not lose her husband to another woman, but to God.

Incredibly, Nev's life change coincided with a fundamental re-evaluation of my mother's own values. Always careerist and strong-willed, she had never been particularly maternal or domestic, but she appeared to view the arrival of the BKs as a chance to wage an all-out assault on the British nuclear family in general. She wholeheartedly embraced celibacy and vegetarianism, and although always more interested in having her nails done than reflecting on the immortality of the soul, she was open-minded about the BKs. She saw them not as a sinister cult as most of Nev's friends had, but as avatars of an enlightened philosophy and a positive approach to life.

The upshot of this was that my parents changed every aspect of their life, including their attitudes to our education. Both realised that I was unsuited to a traditional public school and sent me off to Frensham Heights, a progressive, mixed boarding school in the Surrey countryside with no uniform, an atheist headmaster, and a lot of hippy sixth formers who smoked joints and listened to Jimi Hendrix. I loved it.

Arrival at Frensham Heights coincided with my own burgeoning sexual awareness - and my parents' increasingly public announcements of their celibacy. Nev kept threatening to give a talk in front of the entire school about the Brahma Kumaris - dressed in white. My mother wrote a book called Sex Is Not Compulsory, with the result that girls I fancied would come up to me and ask: "Do your parents really not sleep together? is not that weird for you? Are you celibate as well?" ("Yes, yes and - although it certainly is not by choice and I am hoping to do something about it soon - yes.")

My mother's incendiary book career, which in retrospect might well have been guided by a desire to annoy her mother-in-law, continued in earnest. As Nev hovered somewhere between Richmond-upon-Thames and the Soul World, Mum followed up the publication of Sex Is Not Compulsory with Unholy Matrimony: The Case Against Marriage and a proposed book called Do You Really Want Children?, which thankfully never came to light. They were still married, though: Nev had converted the basement into a flat / meditation room and Mum slept alone at the top of the house. At the age of 16 I was bringing girlfriends home, which my parents never complained about, although I do recall a tense moment when one girl crept down for a glass of water at four in the morning to find my Father meditating in the kitchen.

Going through the profound changes of adolescence just as my previously square parents rebelled against their old world far more than I ever could was hard. But my parents recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary, despite the fact that they did in fact divorce each other over 10 years ago, and that shows a profound respect for each other that I admire. They showed me that a happy, functioning family does not have to conform to other people's ideas of a traditional model, and that if we are really, bravely true to ourselves as both Nev and Mum have been, we put ourselves in a situation where we can give more to other people. I couldn't have hoped for more understanding and supportive parents. And Nev never did give that talk at my school.

Quite well written! Neville is a gentle and thoughtful person. The two seem to have been good parents to their son Will.

When I looked at the original article, I found this Google Ad:

http://www.theamericanmonk.com/ in which Burt Goldman offers a free course in meditation that just happens to consist of seven lessons, and intends to reach a million people. On his web page he positions himself in the lineage of Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yoga) and Jose Silva (Silva Mind Control.)

A very enjoyable read. I remember the house, the BMX bike, and the basement. I worked with Neville and Liz on a number of occasions, and it was really nice to read this article and be reminded of those days. I hope the family are all still doing as well.

Thanks for a nice post ex-l ... I just loved the kid writing about his girlfrnd who crept down to get a glass of water to see Nev meditating at 4.00 am ...

The BKs, including the senior ones, have a penchant for publicizing the celibacy part ... as if that is the only achievement in their BK life ... Sad state of affairs ...

I have a son who is 15 and he knows the BKs comes around the centers but focuses only on his school and his transition to an adult ... and guess we will learn to leave it to him to see what he wants to do in his life ...

I know of two incidents in which kids were affected ... One where a Sister called me and my LOKIK WIFE!!! (just couldn't resist this BKspeak) and told us she has some Bad News. We were thinking that something happened to her husband ... She said, "My daughter is getting married".

Second, a Brother who refused to attend his daughter's marriage ... and after some interference from some sane BKs he reluctantly was a part of the wedding ...

I guess we have a long way to go in growing kids whilst being a part of the BK family..

Yogi

It struck me as very reasonable and genuine whilst capturing, especially, the some of the insane but humorous absurdities of BK life that we have all experienced at one time or another. Funnies that only other BKs or ex-BK might get.

I can just imagine BK Neville sitting in the kitchen ... attempting to be absorbed in the pure loving detachment of soul consciousness and The Baba ... as a half-naked, devilish 16 year old girl, hot with his own son's sweat (at the very least), jiggled into the middle his open-eyed meditation at 4 in the morning.

Its not that it happened. I just smile at what must have gone through his mind ... a mild panic of "seeing the soul" ... "wondering what Baba would do" ... "attempting to give good wishes" ... "wonder how to serve her" ... as the human part of him ran around. I wonder how the rest of his Amrit Vela went afterwards and whose "stage" it effected the most!?! Breakfast must have been fun too but congratulations to Neville for not forcing his religion onto his privately educated kids. And, bear in mind, private education for two sons in London could cost £5 to £10,000 each per term.

Nice to see Will managed to make a buck selling his story off to the leftie Guardian newspaper, and doing some good PR for the BKs, instead of doing it for nothing over here.

I had a similar but far more intense experience.

Strictly following the "Shrimat" given to me by London's finest Senior Sisters, who I was assured were 100% connect to God and whose word was equal to his, I left a shared BK house to live outside. This was in order to deceive and con my family that I was living an independent life and was not caught up with a crazy cult. I did not want to face it ... but I was.

At that time the senior Indian Brahma Kumaris would hand out advice to young Western followers on how to break up and away from your family or loved one. I discovered 25 years later that they, and their middle management, are still giving advice on to, e.g., wives on how to "subtly" split up from their husbands.

So anyway ... there I was "under Baba's canopy of protection" by following SS Shirmat. I rented a small room with "lokiks", i.e. worldly people, from one of the students going through the 7 Days Course which made it even more "Babified", surely? Unfortunately, the room was only separated from the next room by a shared door which the bed blocked off. It must have been an old changing room but such is cheap, shared accommodation. What I did not know was that so was the room next door. That is to say, the neighbour's bed was also pushed up against their side of the door to block it.

Come 4.15 am, which they both did, my meditation is disturbed by the noise and vibrations ... by which I mean the door rattling and bed springs creaking not spiritual ones ... of the two neighbours humping madly together. I was an aural witness to their love making separated only by the thickness of a old door. And top marks for the Brother because he obviously gave the Sister full marks of satisifaction as they both orgasmed together.

What was I supposed to do? "Be stable in Drama"? I scoured my mind for hints from the Murlis on what to do in such situations but could find no grace. I practise detachment and checked nothing but my stage was rising.

Another Brother, far more sincere than I but from the same center, had a similar but worse experience on the way to Madhuban taking a new, keen and impressionable younger BK Brother with him. Having fought off the attentions of the two Indian men who shared their overnight train compartment and wanted to play poker with them using "dirty", pornographic playing cards, the BKs made their bunks and an agreement to get up at Amrit Vela to meditate together.

There they were going actually going to meet "God", the Baba, at Madhuban. My friend woke first and made to prepare himself to get up, fold the bunks and start to meditate. He looked down only to discover that the two men were ******* themselves on the floor below. Sweet Brother number two, entirely in the dark as to what was going on, whispered down to sincere Brother number one, asking if he ought get up now to have Yoga together. "No, no ... don't worry about it", Brother number one replied, "let's just have Yoga in our bunks this morning". Trying his best to hide what was going on.

It was an eye opener to me as regards Indian male sexuality but not surprising in a nation hidebound by superstitions, arrangement marriages and dowry slavery where many poor men will never expect to find themselves a wife.

I recollect all this underline the ridiculousness of what we got into and how the cult members selectively filter out failures which prove the ridiculousness of tenants of the faith such as "Baba's protection". Failures which the Hindi are all to quick to spin on their heels and pronounces as "tests" arranged my Baba ... straight out of Hindu Bhakti.

Neville has in my opinion, perhaps more than any Western BK, helped polish this turd, and keep adding layers of news varnish in order to resell it to the West. We saw his wisdom in action in the disclosure of internal emails during the "official correspondence" events. Perhaps he and Jayanti should just bail out and set up a NGO PR consultancy service? As a confidant, he knows what goes on and what it is all like and yet he is dutiful and faithful to his Dadi.

I do not know what he really thinks or why he sticks it out. The English have a love and acceptance for underdogs, square pegs and eccentrics, one could suspect his Brahma Kumarism fits finely into that. Equally, one could suggest, if one believed in all that, that perhaps he was just like an genteel Englishman in India who, during the British Raj, who went "a little native" and found comfort for his sensitive soul amongst the local Hindoo. It might all just be part of a cross-cultural, right-wing coalition and the attraction of the Brahma Kumaris as a medium of power and influence. Or you can believe that it really is God and in 'The Knowledge' as it is spoken. Your guess is as good as mine.

I was told, but cannot confirm, that he spent £10,000s renovating the London Brother's bhavan (shared house) but has now been promoted to a property at the BKs' Cotswolds Country Mansion. I do not know if he even gave up his pension, or how much of his own wealth he kept, his Richmond home must have been worth a million by now, but it would seem his retirement amongst the BKs is assured.

Interesting ... Neville event managed to engage his other son into doing a PR slot for the BKWSU too. Note Neville's meditation is unnamed and the Brahma Kumaris are listed as Global Retreat Centre instead.

Its nice to see the comfortable middle classes always pulling together. I suppose "Destruction", the "5,000 year Cycles" and all the cultic abuse are all one big joke for 'The Idler' editor and journalist Tom?

Sarah Cavanagh, although not mentioned, is, of course, the Brahma Kumari coordinator for the BKWSU's Brighton center at '20 Nevill Road' of 15 years involvement. Perhaps there is some connection with the trips down to Brighton mentioned above?

The Art of Doing Nothing with Tom Hodgkinson & Neville Hodgkinson. Wed 03 Dec at Oxford Town Hall.

A conversation about merriment, and the mind. Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler magazine, and author of the best-selling How To Be Idle and How To Be Free. He has recently taken up the ukulele and lives in Devon with his family. Neville Hodgkinson is a meditator, which according to Tom (his son) is an artful way of doing nothing.

http://www.globalretreatcentre.org.uk

The Art of Doing Nothing at Oxford Town Hall

Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson is giving a talk with his meditating Dad, Neville Hodgkinson, on the meaning of doing nothing, the work ethic, and the mystical path. The discussion will be chaired by teacher Sarah Cavanagh.

Tom Hodgkinson, who owns a seaside farm in Devon, England, wrote the book "How To Be Idle" (published in 20 countries, best-seller in the UK, Italy and Germany). His Idler website currently has no forum as Tom "finds that the forum medium itself encourages whingeing, procrastination and rudeness of an unacceptable order". I am not sure what "divine virtue" being idle is, but The Idle Foundation promotes striving not to work ridiculous hours for some corporate wankster, eating nice stuff that doesn't go ping at the end, procreating to make idle babies, drinking real ales, amusing oneself in public and private amongst other things. Noble aims but not "Brahmin". In his book, he tries to persuade readers that the exaggerated sensitivity to light and sounds that hangovers inflict on us ''may be the model for Hinduism's 'third eye' of enlightenment.''

I flag this up but I am wondering what exactly the Brahma Kumaris are promoting here?

Tom is obviously not a BK so what, by BK standards, are his vibrations like? In the old days, it was all about keep the vibrations pure and BK. Now it would appear to be about witty aphorisms and nepotism followed by vague psycho-babble ... then wheeling on a BK Sister in white to do a meditation and dhristi at the end. I wonder if the Hogdkinsons got to sell their books at the end of the gig?

What spiritual values are being exhibited? I ask this because Neville is both a face and a very high level advisor to the Kirpalani Klan. We remember his email during the Legal dispute showing him advising Jayanti Kirpalani on how to handle our request for a formal meeting with an agenda. Can we honestly say that Neville's state of consciousness is the product of the BKWSU rather than a middle class upbringing, a fine British education, professional success and significant wealth?

Is Tom Hodgkinson's state of being, and professional success, the product of his spiritual sacrifices and endeavors, or his parents' wealth, social status and professional connections? What degree of the effect of events at the Brahma Kumaris Global Retreat Centre, including the impression made upon newcomers and VIPS, is the product of the unearned money and free labour required to purchase and maintain a "Palladian Mansion" with extensive gardens by Capability Brown renovated at a great expense by a cigarette company (Rothmans)?

I am asking these question because I am asking ... what are the Brahma Kumaris really all about? What are the "values" that their religion exhibits? Tom suggests, "once a month you should take your wife away to a hotel and treat her like a prostitute".

In my opinion, these values would seem to have become highly bourgeois, a posh way of saying, "artfully hypocritical". The bourgeoisie were members of the upper or merchant class, whose status or power comes from employment, education, and wealth. What binds, in my mind, the Hodgkinsons to the Kripalanis are not what I would recognise as spirituality, let alone Gandhian or Murli inspired spirituality, but more a shared sense of upwardly mobile middle class values. That the BK do not clearly express this, i.e. their social upward mobility, and help others to do so, is a little bit of a crime from a spiritual point of view. We have gone from Yuppies to Yussies (... young upwardly mobile spiritualists).

Forget the pithy words, what do the actions say? Its helps if there is family money, get an education and give your kids a private education, get ahead in your career and use religious opportunity for the sake of personal benefit (do not just sit there ... publish a best selling book on it before someone else does), get in with the in crowd and so on. Of course, it take virtues of one sort ... social airs and graces ... polish ... but what are the core values that they are using and the Brahma Kumaris supporting? Are working class BKs being help upwards or just used as serfs to the new lords?

For those who think 'surrendering to a religion' is such a great thing, I would suggest on the contrary. Done well, it is really just a good way to magnify one's wealth, welfare, social standing and experiences many times fold from what it otherwise would have been. The landowners, military officers and bishops or priest were a "class above". Its nothing new at Nuneham House either ... it went from the hands of soldier, to lawyer, to a Bishop. The lands it stands on were stolen from its previous murdered or violently subjugated owners by the Normans in the first place.

A "Conquest family" the BKs call them. Norman military conquerors history calls those who turned England upside down; turmoil, collusion, treachery and rebellion were rife. Nothing new there either then.

Good thoughts, Simon. The olive branch extended in the request for a personal meeting has been interpreted as weakness and trumpeted as such on the website. Perhaps JB could respond quite toughly along the lines of:

"I offered a personal meeting in the belief that it would help to improve relationships. Beyond this, I do not have an agenda of issues I wish to raise.

Your website contains a variety of viewpoints, all deeply felt, and some of them constructive, but others a modern equivalent of poisoned pen letters. In these circumstances I do not wish to enter into correspondence on the site.

Our organization is constantly changing in response to changing needs and times. I would be happy to meet you, or a group, to explain more about our perspectives and current approaches, and in the hope of improving mutual understanding." - Neville

See below, an example of one of the front covers of Tom Hodgkinson's Idler Magazine ... the "Carnal Knowledge" edition. What strange bed fellows the Brahma Kumaris keep, that distinctly looks like sperm ... or mock sperm ... on the ample breast.

What does this say about the trend of Brahma Kumari service events promoting such people?

Dadi Janki and BK supporter Tom Hodgkinson's Magazine

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For me, it is like one animal putting on the smell of another animal in order to attract or deceive other species. Perhaps one could say a 'predator' putting on the smell of its prey, like dogs rubbing themselves in dung. There is a definite trend within the BKWSU to present or promoting other people; IPs, VIPs, mics, call them what you like, before themselves and then using the event, using the non-BKs drawing power, to promote their own thing which might be entirely to contrary.

Does this suggest that they recognise that on their own they do not have the same pulling power and so they must use other people? Having corresponded with some of such individuals, I am positively aware that such individuals are not informed of the real agenda.

What ever happened to pure vibrations? I wonder why Sister Jayanti would not wish to enter into correspondence on this site accusing it of being "poisoned pen letters" but on the other hand, she would chose to promote the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University charity using someone who publishes pictures of sperm splattered breasts and frollicking nudes for boys?

Its a funny old world we live in.

Oh. I see Tom is a columnist for the same newspaper as his Father was (The Telegraph) so perhaps it is all starting to fall into place now.

It seems like his karma was better than many of the children of BK followers that are screwed up or disinherited whilst the money and property goes to the Beakies ... like Narayan Kripalani perhaps!?!