Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is all knowing like God - that's why he has to steal Tea!

On Monday I told you about Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s alleged mobile-charging powers which I had read about in a story which was taken down consequently to my diary entry. Reading the webpage again on the screenshot that we had made, I noticed that I had not even referred to the second story Sri Sri Ravi Shankar tells to his disciples! It doesn’t lack in superstitious, religious ideas of the relation of guru and devotee and of course the manipulative suggestion of the guru that the devotee is much more powerful than the guru.

Here is a small summary: Approximately 10 years ago, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and some devotees were guests in someone’s house in Durban, South Africa. They were about to leave when he suddenly had a strange feeling of restlessness and went to the room of his devotees. He saw a packet of tea and when nobody could answer the question whose it was, he took it and packed it in his suitcase.

His devotees felt a bit funny about their guru so openly stealing BUT – thankfully – when they landed in Johannesburg, he met a man at the airport who asked him:

“Gurudev, did you get the packet of tea I sent for you? It is a special tea. I myself went and picked it up and I wanted to give it to you. I couldn’t come to Durban so I sent it through somebody.’

The next lines of the story are so beautifully written that I don’t want to spoil them by summarizing them in my words:

‘So it was sent through somebody and they put it in another room because they know that I don’t drink tea, and so they didn’t even tell me. This was a case.
Then I said, ‘Yes, I got that packet of tea.’

This means that when your feelings and your emotions are so intense, I become only a puppet then. So I had to get the packet of tea.

So, this is the story on how I have to steal a packet of tea, which is not really stealing. It belonged to me but at that moment it appeared as though I am stealing something that did not belong to me.’

Ah, this story may sound nice when you are in a room with hundreds of people and everybody is just in a state of pure bliss because they are able to hear the voice of their beloved guru. When you sit at home and read it, you have to shake your head in disbelief about it that someone could believe him and that he would even like to place this publicly on his website! He tells these stories as though he really wants to make people believe he is God! This story alone though brings up so many questions in itself!

The very first and most important: if you are all-knowing, which you did not deny at the beginning of the story, how come you did not know that this tea was meant for you?

If you did not know it is yours, how come you took it? Taking someone else’s property is stealing, you saw that right, and even if you afterwards get to know it was yours, you stole it in the first place – that’s wrong. Really, Sri Sri, you cannot talk yourself out of this one!

If however someone buys a special tea for you and knows that he will come to meet you in Johannesburg, why would he send the tea to Durban?

If he did actually send it to Durban – maybe because he did not know he would come to Johannesburg, why would the messenger not deliver the tea personally? Obviously the man was important enough to meet you at the airport in Johannesburg, surely his messenger would be able to reach you? Why did that tea not reach you in the first place?

The best part is however this:

‘This means that when your feelings and your emotions are so intense, I become only a puppet then. So I had to get the packet of tea.’

He enforces this with the third story of this page in which he felt physically weak and ill because he had not met his followers who were waiting for him and they were all disappointed and angry. If that was true, he would always be walking around like hypnotized, doing whatever his followers want him to do. I know for a fact that they all quite strongly feel for him – for the past three days I have been removing angry posts and comments from my webpage and facebook page!

The conclusion is that I don’t believe this story or all the nonsense around it, most of all that he is all-knowing. I rather think he either invented the story or maybe actually likes to drink tea from time to time and doesn’t want to admit it, then someone saw him packing some tea and he had to create a story around it. We can only guess but one thing is for sure: if he is all-knowing, he hides it quite well.