(176) Dodgy gurus and false Jesus claimants
"I happen to believe that elevating a human being into a "higher power" who possesses spiritual insight not given to ordinary mortals is dangerous and misguided, but I can envisage circumstances in which I might succumb."
Prof. Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay
"..."I believe that we are at the end of the guru system and that its current abuses disqualify it from the business of serious spiritual transformation. The next five years will see a blizzard of financial and sexual scandals which I am certain will make this point painfully clear even to those who now believe implicitly in the guru system and are prepared to fight dirty to preserve it."
Prof. Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay
"..."I believe that we are at the end of the guru system and that its current abuses disqualify it from the business of serious spiritual transformation. The next five years will see a blizzard of financial and sexual scandals which I am certain will make this point painfully clear even to those who now believe implicitly in the guru system and are prepared to fight dirty to preserve it."
Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother 1994
r In AugustIn August of 1980, Jeff Katz of Bedfordshire on Sunday interviewed me and then a week or two later we met up again at a lecture given by a self proclaimed spiritual authority in the Bedford Corn Exchange.
"It´s interesting, isn´t it?".
"No," he replied.
"There´s no way you´re ever gonna get me to believe in a load of shit like that!
What a character!
The mendacity! The mendacity!".
"Well; audacity," I suggested.
"Mendacity!", he insisted.
Katz then wrote a withering review of it all for the same paper.
Incidentally, when we had a drink together after the lecture, Katz told me how impressed he was with Peter Seller´s most recent film, Being There.
"That is a great movie!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There
Later the same lecturer would tell me that Sellers had consulted him on spiritual matters.
In Being There the inanities of the simpleton, Chance, are misinterpreted as profound. The film ends with Chance finding himself accidentally walking on water, whilst plutocrats discuss backing him as a Presidential candidate. Being There was Sellers´penultimate film and the last to be released whilst he was still alive. He died of heart failure in 1980.
Apparently he had put enormous efforts into getting it made and had set his heart on playing the lead role ever since he had read the novel. Curiously, as the above Wikipedia entry and its links make clear, the author himself was accused of plagiarism in that the novel and screenplay (which he also wrote) bear very strong resemblances to a Polish work of the 1930s. He was also regarded by some as something of a fraud in the persona he presented to the world.
In the first week of November 2007, whilst adding some addenda to this entry, I was moved through curiosity to enter Katz´s name into a search engine.
The hits surprised me - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1101356,00.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/file_on_4/4149813.stm
... ... ...
In Autumn 1996 I asked directory inquiries for Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch’s telephone number. This was despite my having tried to obtain it in the late 1980s and being told that it was ex-directory. The operator put me through to his brother by mistake- his identical twin. The brother then put me through to Jeremy. Thus we became acquainted.
It later emerged that the day before I rang, Jeremy had written in his diary that he wanted nothing more to do with the self proclaimed spiritual authority.
... ... ...
In 2000 I spotted on the authority's website a list of points by which he claimed the reappeared Christ could be identified. All of these referred to himself! So on February 7th 2001 I found his number and rang him. I said that this was the first I had heard of his claim to be Jesus. He corrected me: "The Christ". He said that the information had been up at his website for five years, and added, "In my thousands of lectures I have always been open about my attitudes... (etc) ." I accused him of being a fantasist. He muttered something in reply.
After a brief interchange, in which I repeated my astonishment at his brazen attitude, he said "Oh what´s the point in talking to you..." and rang off.
Later that evening my wife suggested we watch a recording which I had asked her to make two days earlier of a documentary on Erich von Däniken.
I had once asked the "authority" for his opinion of von Däniken and he had said "He’s a c***. And he knows he’s a c***!"
The cassette was already in and so she asked me to just press ‘Play’. I did, and it began with a sketch which I recognised from the end of an episode of a BBC comedy programme called Goodness Gracious Me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodness_Gracious_Me_(TV_&_radio)
It had been recorded by my wife at least a year earlier, and was a musical spoof where Maharishi types had formed a pop group called The Gurus. They were singing of themselves as financially and sexually ripping off their hapless acolytes ("Free for ladies, if you touch my...") and it ended with them all being arrested. That was the only sketch of that show that she had recorded, and I think that she had done so because I had thought it hilarious and apposite.
There then followed the von Däniken recording. After about ten minutes I decided that it was not for me, and left the room.
At 9 p.m. Fiona called me back to see the opening scenes of a programme on Channel 4. It was a social history of the Karma Sutra called Position Impossible.
The presenter was Sanjeev Bhaskar, better known then as one of the cast of Goodness Gracious Me. Mr Bhaskar wrote a lot of the music for the Asian comedy show and indeed he had written the song for, and also been a member of, their band; The Gurus.
It began with a Tantric workshop in Penzance where couples were being shown how to prolong sexual matters for supposed spiritual benefit. Then it cut to Bhaskar doing a stand up routine where he was making mild fun of the workshop to his audience.
... ... ...
On May 17th 2006, just after I had been thinking of all of these wacko false claims, Bart Simpson made some remark on The Simpsons cartoon playing in the background on my TV about his being the real Jesus!
... ... ...
In 1997 I heard that our friend, Pepita de Foote, had a star named in honour of a sick friend of hers. To do this she had used the services of an agency which advertised that, for a fee, they would name a star after someone for you. Not long afterwards I saw Sir Patrick Moore on a TV programme called Serves You Right saying that this sort of business was invalid, and that only an object such as a crater could have a name conferred on it in that way.
Star names were decided by an official International Astronomical Association, and the people to whom Pepita had paid her money were con men.
... ... ...
Note also this, from Entry 18 -
" At around 5:15 on the evening of December 21st 1998 I alighted from a train that I had boarded at Welwyn Garden City as it arrived at London King’s Cross.
Dr. Jonathan Mestel shot past me at King’s Cross as he hastened to board a train departing from the adjacent platform. (Harry Potter fans, note the location!) I waved at him through the glass. I had been to Welwyn to research data further to pursuit of a dubious guru, and at the afternoon’s end I had, by chance, passed by the offices of The Welwyn and Hatfield Times newspaper. I went in and spoke to Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch’s contact there, and she gave me the phone number of a private investigator whom she recommended.
The next day Jeremy made contact with this man. "
Mestel had been someone who, years before, had reacted with horror at my advancing some racist ideas with which, as I was to subsequently realise, I had expressed a far too uncritical empathy through my having taken such ideas aboard via that self proclaimed authority.
... ... ...
On July 5th 2000 I discussed with a newspaper their publishing a piece on it all. That morning two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked at our door and spoke to my wife of the problems our society faced, e.g. declining standards of behaviour amongst the young, and how, for instance, schoolchildren today showed lack of respect towards their teachers.
Fiona responded that that did not bother her at all, and that, indeed, she herself had had little respect for those who taught her.
... ... ...
At 11:a.m. on August 4th 2000 I opened a letter from the newspaper’s editor which outlined their reasons for not running any story about it. As I did so, the same Jehovah’s witnesses called again.
Then at 11:45 a.m. Sacha turned on the TV and he and Fiona found themselves watching Whistle Down The Wind. In this film of the early 1960s a group of schoolchildren mistake an escaped criminal to be someone who has claimed to be Jesus.
... ... ...
On the morning of July 10th 2000 I visited my G.P. concerning back problems. I explained that I had incurred them through typing a book on coincidences. He responded that he had encountered a coincidence many years before when he was being shown some psychiatric patients and on the same day he had met two who claimed that they were Jesus.
I then sold Doctor C. Chinnery a copy of my book, Coincidences.
... ... ...
And in 1987, the authority had asked me to report to the Bedford police crazed threats made against him by a schizophrenic living in Bedford. When I mentioned the authority's name it galvanised an officer at the front desk. He stared wildly at me for several seconds, until a colleague turned to stare at him and he hastily muttered something and returned to attending toae member of the public.
Only years later did I think on how apposite it should have been that this occurred in a police station.
In 1992 I bumped into Pete Wood in Luton. He and I had met up some six years previously via esoteric interests. I invited him to visit me at my flat and a day or so later he was present when I received a call from The New Statesman about a reference I had made to fugitive homosexual paedophile Brian Eley ( who had, indeed, once made a move on myself) in my chess column for that publication. It was the only time the magazine ever rang me.
... ... ...
On November 10th 2003, Bruce Mitchell, whom I had met just once some 16 years or so earlier, called me from Cape Town on the pretext of obtaining Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch´s number. He informed me that he had bankrupted the "authority" and was now to receive £7,500 after someone bought the rights to his works.
Bruce said that it does not matter what sort of access one may have: what matters is whether or not one helps people.
And later that day I was to access a grateful message left on my ansafone by the mother of Charles Ingram. Mitchell also happened to mention that he had known Tommy Milligan and his wife Helen from Edinburgh chess club and had, perhaps twenty years or so before, lent Tommy 50 Pounds, which was never returned.
On June 2nd 2010 I received this e mail from Chris Jeans –
Date: 2 June, 2010, 12:56
Hi James,
On Friday I was driving north on the A1 on my way to Bedford when noticed a Kestrel hovering at the side of the road. I then looked at the lorry in front of me and the word Kestrel was written on the back of the lorry. Strange but true.
CJ
I immediately responded -
Less than 5 minutes before you sent this I had been looking at a thing on Mary Whitehouse by Joan Bakewell in The Daily Telegraph on line and she mentioned Ken Loach in the 1960s.
I of course thought of "KES" and indeed a notice once put on the school 6th form notice board in 1977 by a Mr Stafford telling us all not to miss it.
I recalled that KES is based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kes_(film)
5 mins later I see your e mail.
J.
And then I wrote to him –
...and you were on your way to Bedford, my town...
what took you there, might one inquire?
J.
He replied –
I was taking a lady to a Ceroc (jive) dance at the Bedford Corn Exchange in St.Paul's Square. She mentioned Kes when I saw the Kestrel . I have been trying to remember someone in the film called Brian something who was a PE teacher.
CJ
I replied –
Probably this guy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Glover
Bedford Corn Exchange, eh?
I said that I had been there just once, in August 1980...(although, as I would years later recall, I had actually been there another time, in late 1991 to attend a Psychics and Mystics fair.)
He asked –
What happened at the Corn Exchange then?
And I explained.
r In AugustIn August of 1980, Jeff Katz of Bedfordshire on Sunday interviewed me and then a week or two later we met up again at a lecture given by a self proclaimed spiritual authority in the Bedford Corn Exchange.
"It´s interesting, isn´t it?".
"No," he replied.
"There´s no way you´re ever gonna get me to believe in a load of shit like that!
What a character!
The mendacity! The mendacity!".
"Well; audacity," I suggested.
"Mendacity!", he insisted.
Katz then wrote a withering review of it all for the same paper.
Incidentally, when we had a drink together after the lecture, Katz told me how impressed he was with Peter Seller´s most recent film, Being There.
"That is a great movie!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There
Later the same lecturer would tell me that Sellers had consulted him on spiritual matters.
In Being There the inanities of the simpleton, Chance, are misinterpreted as profound. The film ends with Chance finding himself accidentally walking on water, whilst plutocrats discuss backing him as a Presidential candidate. Being There was Sellers´penultimate film and the last to be released whilst he was still alive. He died of heart failure in 1980.
Apparently he had put enormous efforts into getting it made and had set his heart on playing the lead role ever since he had read the novel. Curiously, as the above Wikipedia entry and its links make clear, the author himself was accused of plagiarism in that the novel and screenplay (which he also wrote) bear very strong resemblances to a Polish work of the 1930s. He was also regarded by some as something of a fraud in the persona he presented to the world.
In the first week of November 2007, whilst adding some addenda to this entry, I was moved through curiosity to enter Katz´s name into a search engine.
The hits surprised me - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1101356,00.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/file_on_4/4149813.stm
... ... ...
In Autumn 1996 I asked directory inquiries for Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch’s telephone number. This was despite my having tried to obtain it in the late 1980s and being told that it was ex-directory. The operator put me through to his brother by mistake- his identical twin. The brother then put me through to Jeremy. Thus we became acquainted.
It later emerged that the day before I rang, Jeremy had written in his diary that he wanted nothing more to do with the self proclaimed spiritual authority.
... ... ...
In 2000 I spotted on the authority's website a list of points by which he claimed the reappeared Christ could be identified. All of these referred to himself! So on February 7th 2001 I found his number and rang him. I said that this was the first I had heard of his claim to be Jesus. He corrected me: "The Christ". He said that the information had been up at his website for five years, and added, "In my thousands of lectures I have always been open about my attitudes... (etc) ." I accused him of being a fantasist. He muttered something in reply.
After a brief interchange, in which I repeated my astonishment at his brazen attitude, he said "Oh what´s the point in talking to you..." and rang off.
Later that evening my wife suggested we watch a recording which I had asked her to make two days earlier of a documentary on Erich von Däniken.
I had once asked the "authority" for his opinion of von Däniken and he had said "He’s a c***. And he knows he’s a c***!"
The cassette was already in and so she asked me to just press ‘Play’. I did, and it began with a sketch which I recognised from the end of an episode of a BBC comedy programme called Goodness Gracious Me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodness_Gracious_Me_(TV_&_radio)
It had been recorded by my wife at least a year earlier, and was a musical spoof where Maharishi types had formed a pop group called The Gurus. They were singing of themselves as financially and sexually ripping off their hapless acolytes ("Free for ladies, if you touch my...") and it ended with them all being arrested. That was the only sketch of that show that she had recorded, and I think that she had done so because I had thought it hilarious and apposite.
There then followed the von Däniken recording. After about ten minutes I decided that it was not for me, and left the room.
At 9 p.m. Fiona called me back to see the opening scenes of a programme on Channel 4. It was a social history of the Karma Sutra called Position Impossible.
The presenter was Sanjeev Bhaskar, better known then as one of the cast of Goodness Gracious Me. Mr Bhaskar wrote a lot of the music for the Asian comedy show and indeed he had written the song for, and also been a member of, their band; The Gurus.
It began with a Tantric workshop in Penzance where couples were being shown how to prolong sexual matters for supposed spiritual benefit. Then it cut to Bhaskar doing a stand up routine where he was making mild fun of the workshop to his audience.
... ... ...
On May 17th 2006, just after I had been thinking of all of these wacko false claims, Bart Simpson made some remark on The Simpsons cartoon playing in the background on my TV about his being the real Jesus!
... ... ...
In 1997 I heard that our friend, Pepita de Foote, had a star named in honour of a sick friend of hers. To do this she had used the services of an agency which advertised that, for a fee, they would name a star after someone for you. Not long afterwards I saw Sir Patrick Moore on a TV programme called Serves You Right saying that this sort of business was invalid, and that only an object such as a crater could have a name conferred on it in that way.
Star names were decided by an official International Astronomical Association, and the people to whom Pepita had paid her money were con men.
... ... ...
Note also this, from Entry 18 -
" At around 5:15 on the evening of December 21st 1998 I alighted from a train that I had boarded at Welwyn Garden City as it arrived at London King’s Cross.
Dr. Jonathan Mestel shot past me at King’s Cross as he hastened to board a train departing from the adjacent platform. (Harry Potter fans, note the location!) I waved at him through the glass. I had been to Welwyn to research data further to pursuit of a dubious guru, and at the afternoon’s end I had, by chance, passed by the offices of The Welwyn and Hatfield Times newspaper. I went in and spoke to Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch’s contact there, and she gave me the phone number of a private investigator whom she recommended.
The next day Jeremy made contact with this man. "
Mestel had been someone who, years before, had reacted with horror at my advancing some racist ideas with which, as I was to subsequently realise, I had expressed a far too uncritical empathy through my having taken such ideas aboard via that self proclaimed authority.
... ... ...
On July 5th 2000 I discussed with a newspaper their publishing a piece on it all. That morning two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked at our door and spoke to my wife of the problems our society faced, e.g. declining standards of behaviour amongst the young, and how, for instance, schoolchildren today showed lack of respect towards their teachers.
Fiona responded that that did not bother her at all, and that, indeed, she herself had had little respect for those who taught her.
... ... ...
At 11:a.m. on August 4th 2000 I opened a letter from the newspaper’s editor which outlined their reasons for not running any story about it. As I did so, the same Jehovah’s witnesses called again.
Then at 11:45 a.m. Sacha turned on the TV and he and Fiona found themselves watching Whistle Down The Wind. In this film of the early 1960s a group of schoolchildren mistake an escaped criminal to be someone who has claimed to be Jesus.
... ... ...
On the morning of July 10th 2000 I visited my G.P. concerning back problems. I explained that I had incurred them through typing a book on coincidences. He responded that he had encountered a coincidence many years before when he was being shown some psychiatric patients and on the same day he had met two who claimed that they were Jesus.
I then sold Doctor C. Chinnery a copy of my book, Coincidences.
... ... ...
And in 1987, the authority had asked me to report to the Bedford police crazed threats made against him by a schizophrenic living in Bedford. When I mentioned the authority's name it galvanised an officer at the front desk. He stared wildly at me for several seconds, until a colleague turned to stare at him and he hastily muttered something and returned to attending toae member of the public.
Only years later did I think on how apposite it should have been that this occurred in a police station.
In 1992 I bumped into Pete Wood in Luton. He and I had met up some six years previously via esoteric interests. I invited him to visit me at my flat and a day or so later he was present when I received a call from The New Statesman about a reference I had made to fugitive homosexual paedophile Brian Eley ( who had, indeed, once made a move on myself) in my chess column for that publication. It was the only time the magazine ever rang me.
... ... ...
On November 10th 2003, Bruce Mitchell, whom I had met just once some 16 years or so earlier, called me from Cape Town on the pretext of obtaining Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch´s number. He informed me that he had bankrupted the "authority" and was now to receive £7,500 after someone bought the rights to his works.
Bruce said that it does not matter what sort of access one may have: what matters is whether or not one helps people.
And later that day I was to access a grateful message left on my ansafone by the mother of Charles Ingram. Mitchell also happened to mention that he had known Tommy Milligan and his wife Helen from Edinburgh chess club and had, perhaps twenty years or so before, lent Tommy 50 Pounds, which was never returned.
On June 2nd 2010 I received this e mail from Chris Jeans –
Date: 2 June, 2010, 12:56
Hi James,
On Friday I was driving north on the A1 on my way to Bedford when noticed a Kestrel hovering at the side of the road. I then looked at the lorry in front of me and the word Kestrel was written on the back of the lorry. Strange but true.
CJ
I immediately responded -
Less than 5 minutes before you sent this I had been looking at a thing on Mary Whitehouse by Joan Bakewell in The Daily Telegraph on line and she mentioned Ken Loach in the 1960s.
I of course thought of "KES" and indeed a notice once put on the school 6th form notice board in 1977 by a Mr Stafford telling us all not to miss it.
I recalled that KES is based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kes_(film)
5 mins later I see your e mail.
J.
And then I wrote to him –
...and you were on your way to Bedford, my town...
what took you there, might one inquire?
J.
He replied –
I was taking a lady to a Ceroc (jive) dance at the Bedford Corn Exchange in St.Paul's Square. She mentioned Kes when I saw the Kestrel . I have been trying to remember someone in the film called Brian something who was a PE teacher.
CJ
I replied –
Probably this guy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Glover
Bedford Corn Exchange, eh?
I said that I had been there just once, in August 1980...(although, as I would years later recall, I had actually been there another time, in late 1991 to attend a Psychics and Mystics fair.)
He asked –
What happened at the Corn Exchange then?
And I explained.
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