Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Appeal to switch off your Brain and follow him: Don't think!

I am surprised but also very happy about the great response I received to my last two diary entries. On Monday I told about a very funny article on the Art of Living website in which their guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar claimed that his devotees were able to charge their mobile phones without any chargers, simply by putting them in front of his picture. After this story spread in this way online, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar decided that this story was not good advertising and they took the page down from their website. Many people have been writing to me and expressed their experiences with this guru and his organization and I thought I should write another diary entry about him, his work and his way of attracting people.

Above you can see the photo of a newspaper insert, an advertisement that was handed out to people in Ahmedabad along with their newspapers. At the bottom you can see the events, courses and retreats that they offer, the venue, which is one of the organization’s own places and the contact details. The essence of this advertisement though, which catches the reader’s eye and which would immediately deter me personally from anything that is being offered is the order which is written above in the biggest letters of the complete paper: DON’T THINK… JUST JOIN ART OF LIVING

Wow! Do you really think that this is the most subtle way to advertise a brainwashing, cult-like community program like this one? After the story with the mobile phones I am convinced that Art of Living and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar offer nothing else than exactly that – a place where you are not allowed to think and develop your own opinion. A place where you can just comfortably follow whatever you are being told and blindly believe that you will in this way reach some kind of spiritual goals like enlightenment, Samadhi or even liberation at the end of this life. Congratulations to everybody who feels attracted by such an advertisement!

Maybe however they are successful because they are so openly saying it! They don’t, like other sects, try to hide the fact that they don’t want people to think but rather believe whatever they say. That does not fit with the action of taking down their article about the mobile chargers though – as I said yesterday, normally I don’t often read that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar presents himself publicly as all knowing or omnipresent because that would cause an uproar in the media who are thankfully nowadays ready to show how fake gurus claim to have impossible superpowers!

We can perhaps conclude that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in general tries not to look like other fake gurus but that from time to time something slips through of how it looks like underneath the well maintained cover of purity. An article about mobile-charging powers, a leaflet which encourages people to switch off their brains and follow blindly or news reports accusing him of building his meditation centers on government land that was meant for the poor and needy.

There have been such events that scratched his nearly-perfect guru image and made him a little less popular, also among the Indian religious population. Last March for example he publicly said that government schools were the breeding places for terrorists, which is why all schools should be run by private organizations. After big protests from all over the country, including from ministers and members of parliament who went to government schools themselves, he tried to talk himself out of it but video records show clearly that he said exactly that.

So maybe Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has to try harder not letting the cover slip or maybe, just maybe, people could learn at some point that they don’t need a guru to find inner calm and peace as well as physical and mental well-being. Yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, all that is available for everybody and just because Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or anybody else started putting his brand on it doesn’t make his technique more valuable or better.