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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.
Will Hodgkinson wrote: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 ...
Will Hodgkinson at The Guardian wrote: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.