The Googru

File under: The Siddhi of PR

Sick of all the self-deludedly divine gurus who flimflam their equally self-deluded devotees? Meet Larry Brilliant, former hippie psychedelinaut and resident philanthropy guru at Google's save-the-world effort, google.org:

One day, while waiting in line at the American Express office in New Delhi, Wavy met Ram Dass, a.k.a. Richard Alpert, who, along with fellow professor Timothy Leary, had been kicked out of Harvard for experimenting with LSD. [Larry's wife] persuaded Brilliant to follow Ram Dass into the mountains to meet his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, one of the holiest men in India. It was a seventeen-hour journey, by train and trail, to the ashram, where Brilliant slept on a mat, meditated, chanted, immersed himself in the Ramayana and practiced nishkam karma yoga, which Brilliant has described as "the work of being reunited with God, through actions in the world, without attachments to results." Over the next thirty years, this simple discipline would become, for Brilliant, "the propellent force in my life."

Karma yoga as it was meant to be, the complete opposite of what Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is trying to shove down our throats.

Damn, we just can't seem to escape the shadow that the fauxvatars cast over the world, despite the Brilliants who shine on despite them all.