Stripping The Gurus: B. Das Gets Down

File Under: Reference Library

We've been leafing through Geoffrey Falk's Stripping The Gurus for the last week or so. It's 646 pages of gurus being all too human, and it skews hard toward their faults rather than their virtues. But then this passage caught our attention:

In happier days, the married Bhagavan Das too had, for a time, been part of the same energetic “scene” with Joya:

We were having a huge meeting and Joya said, “Bhagavan Das, stand up!” I stood up and she said, “Shivaya stand up! Shivaya, take Bhagavan Das to a whorehouse right now!” The next thing I knew I was in a whorehouse in Manhattan on Christmas Day (Das, 1997).

Now that's what we call the will of the Mother!

Bhagavan Das knows this. It makes him one of America's greatest Kali devotees. We can relate to the raw transgression of this moment:

I felt completely saved and totally free. The freedom I had felt in that tantric sexual experience with the choir girl was like being with Mary and Jesus (Das, 1997).

A perfect example of authentic tantra manifesting. Really. We're not kidding. If there's one thing we're truly serious about, it's the efficacy of having sex with God as a spiritual practice. It's not always pretty, can be quite dangerous and is always very transgressive. But if you survive—as Bhagavan Das has—you will have dipped your toe into a black hole and lived with Ma Kali's eternal love as your reward (minus the toe, of course.)

More Stripping The Gurus to come.