BKs' own production of self-promotion

I’d assert that Lekhraj Kirpalani reached such a tipping point ...

I forget now although I know this has been discussed in the past ... did not the "Lucky Prince's" mother die in childhood or something?

It's funny but in Jagdish Chander's hagiographic "Brief Biography of Brahma Baba", the whole of his childhood and upbringing is skipped over.

Regarding the "cult issue", here's a quote from the BKWSU's own apologetic website ... Writing the article I always wanted to read about the Brahma Kumaris - Kathy Shea, USA. Apparently the Brahma Kumaris are not a cult, anyone who thinks it is just "struggling with their own guilt, anger, and negative emotions".

Some individuals write of their struggles with guilt, anger, and negative emotions that find expression in labeling the Brahma Kumaris a “cult.” This is how they have perceived the Brahma Kumaris at various times and in various places in the world. We cannot deny anyone’s experience. However, I find it equally important to acknowledge my own experience of the organization’s generosity, hospitality, and authenticity. For some, this path resonates; for others, it makes no sense at all. There is nothing in the Brahma Kumaris tradition that prohibits anyone from leaving at any time.

There is nothing in the Brahma Kumaris tradition that prohibits anyone from leaving at any time.

If it were true, she may be right, BKs are not a cult.

This is where she reveals her ignorance, her ”outsider only" understanding. One defining feature of most cults is that there is usually something quite negative awaiting someone who leaves the group, and even worse fate for those who leave and ”bad mouth” the group.

If you never really took the BK teachings on board and accepted their implications, you can leave anytime, with fond memories, no problems.

If you fully understand & accept the teachings, believe with all your heart that the teacher is who he claims to be, the authority is as claimed, and all that implies, then leaving the BKs is probably the most momentous choice you ever have to make. And if you do, you carry a heavy burden, at least until you find a way to get out from under the BK shadow.

It seems Kathy Shea is no BK.

There is nothing in the Brahma Kumaris tradition that prohibits anyone from leaving at any time.

If you never really took the BK teachings on board and accepted their implications, you can leave anytime, with fond memories, no problems.

If you fully understand & accept the teachings, believe with all your heart that the teacher is who he claims to be, the authority is as claimed, and all that implies, then leaving the BKs is probably the most momentous choice you ever have to make.

It's a typical line, I heard myself from leaders like Jayanti. It's almost mocking of BK adherents ... "You can leave anytime ... No one is forcing you to stay". It is as if to celebrate their total domination over the prison-adherent, the moment they open the prison cell and tell the prison they can leave anytime and the prison chooses to stay.

The prison being a mental one. Individuals imprisoned by the mental matrix that spells out a kind of eternal damnation if one does.

BK Kathy Shea: Destruction or Construction?

'For nearly 20 years I have been a student of the Brahma Kumaris. In all that time, I’ve never been seriously troubled by the notion of “destruction” as taught by the BKs. Perhaps it is because I was not acquainted with the BKs until after 1976, a date that has been mentioned as foretelling “destruction.”...

I hear another very common descriptor these people use is "powerful". How do they define and sustain that? So she entered the BKs, to whatever degree she has, in around 1996, just after the failure of the "50 to 60 years for Destruction" prediction (1996), not just 1976.

So Kathleen A. Shea has "never been seriously troubled" by the death of 7 billion human beings, nuclear war wiping out Western civilisation, a blood bath civil war wiping out the population of India, and all the continents sinking!?!

What planet is she from?

Kathleen A. Shea, Ph.D. is the President of IAM, Inc.. She does not mention her BKism on her resumé but instead uses the Brahma Kumaris' Living Values service programme instead. She holds a doctorate from the University of Miami in Higher Education Administration, a Master's in counseling from the University of Dayton and is on the Advisory Board of the Family Therapy Training Institute of Miami, so I guess she falls under BK Waddy's mantle?

I see the BKs are now promoting themselves as a spiritual humanitarian organization at one of her public programmes.

She served for five years as the USA President of Living Values: An Educational Program, Inc., a global character education program for children and youth.

The Western BKs are basically reshaping their branches’ presentation to suit the market and allowing their ’students’ to be a BK in whatever way they like to be a BK. They do not care to see how it is they who are the aberration, out of line with what the 99.9% of BKWSU (in India) is or was, says or said, or what their own ”Baba” teaches.

They rather like to think they are leading change and modernisation, they are the ones who ”get it”- equivocating about BK history and teachings, correcting their own God whose knowledge and teachings they say they accept but take issue with or explain away and make excuses for. They don't realise how they are being suckered.

The spiritual community awaits Kathy Shea's experiences of the dark night of the soul in the movie house of the BKs. Will she still maintain that any one can leave the BKs at his or her own will or when they choose? Western BKs have to be careful and ensure they are not overused or abused. At the end of the day or cycle of Kapla, each BK will have to ask: How much have I done to advance myself, physically and spiritually?

... And "how much to delude and deceive others, and sustain and protect those who have?"

Can an Age of Truth be made out of lies?

The question of what one's "own will" compromises of is an interesting one to me. My feeling is that it is at a relative conscious level of mind and that BKism basically undercuts it at a more sub-conscious level of mind. Therefore, it's a bit of a false construction to pose something like "choice" when you've been re-jigging the mechanism by which one makes choices ... all those sub-conscious calculations going on. Very deep ones when you consider it is pull on strings and tying in knots concepts of self, god, and eternal damnation.

Where, for example, do they place Stockholm Syndrome in their mind view?

I wonder how the Sindi/Hindi elite really views Western BKs?