Guruphiliac: Our First: The Guru Named Sue



Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Our First: The Guru Named Sue

File under: Wackadoo Gurus

True confession: New Age™ looney tunes guru Elizabeth Claire Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant made this blog what it is today. Briefly: we were some kind of wayward/lapsed Christian/faux-Rastafarian, Orange County, California beach mishmash until we met Sue. She was 12-years older and a former stewardess and model. Our first night together brought a whole new way of seeing and being in relationship with the Universe, one that we knew we knew all along as we got caught up in the grandiose certainty of it all. Being the blank slate we were at that time, we gobbled up the "I AM" books that form the basis of Prophet's shtick, feeling every suggested sensation in perfect harmony with their description in the book. How could it not be real!

Being hooked on the books, the experiences they were associated with, and a really hot older woman, we attended a 4th-of-July celebration called the Freedom conference at the church's stunning Camelot campus outside Malibu, California. The property was nothing short of spectacular, and the conference was surprisingly well-attended. We wandered like a puppy-dog along with Sue as she told us what it was like to be Crazy Liz's personal secretary. Then she revealed that Camelot was under psychic attack by the CIA, even going so far as to lead us to a room of people praying in shifts at 90 miles-an-hour in an effort to create a protecting vibration from all the mind-ray machines aimed at us.

It was on that somewhat discordant note that we were ushered into an indoctrination presentation for first-time visitors. There we found a guy up on a stage, ready to pour Crazy Liz's Kool-Aid down our gullets. Folks were asking questions, for which they would receive massive doses of official CUT dogma from the guy.

Someone asked about rock music, and surprisingly to us, our indoctrinator's tune was a virtually identical copy of what you'd hear in any deep red Baptist church. "It's of the Devil, because it's from the jungle. It's animal in nature and stains our cosmic glory bodies," or something like that. We'd heard it all before on Christian radio, which we'd been listening to until we met Sue. Since we already had that groove in our brain, we were ready to swallow it all, until we asked: "What about reggae music?"

Same answer. "It's from the jungle, the rhythms pollute the soul." Only classical music afforded a benefit to its listeners, all other forms of music were inferior.  How could they not be, they were mostly ethnic, and some were downright dangerous.  

For sure, because as soon as we heard that, we knew it was all bullshit. As certain as we were in our new mystical life, we were just as certain in our old one, which was enjoying the OC waves and then sitting on the beach, listening to Jamaican music while we enjoyed some of California's finest Cannabis indica.

We tried to keep it going with Sue, but without the allure of more mystical adventures to far out spiritual planes, it just wasn't worth the close-to-3-hour drive to stay in her seemingly dangerously flea-infested home. It wasn't an easy breakup, mostly because she went a bit stalker on us. Thankfully, she was finally able to realize that we weren't worth the effort, especially since we'd already taken up with our old girlfriend, who had become remarkably more compliant since seeing us hijacked for a month or so by our first real spiritual teacher, the guru named Sue.

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8 Comments:

At 10/30/2008 9:30 AM, Blogger CHUCK said...

Exactly the kind of experience the young Chuck would have been lookin for, includin the fleas! I knew a fellow Texan who had a "break through" using those fast chants of E Clare's. Gave him psychic powers, he said! How old would this gal be now?!

 
At 10/30/2008 5:28 PM, Blogger guruphiliac said...

She'd still be the same 12 years older than me, Chuckji!

 
At 10/30/2008 7:59 PM, Blogger CHUCK said...

Exactly what I figgured, Jody, which likely makes her 12 years younger then me and my fleas!

 
At 10/30/2008 8:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

12 years still older...that one really crackin me out. But chuckji what in the hell brought that incredible transformation from a jaw droppin and mouth droolin' young chuck to this wise old triple wide chuck ridin the enlightened mules ? what happened in between in dimebox? Bare me the real story.

Someday you gotta tell me bout that fat gal who sat on you inside the foot ball stadium. Btw do you plan to vote this time ?

 
At 11/02/2008 9:05 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thats autobiographical jody! May we expect more of these to follow? Fascinating indeed to see the journey of jody through his own descriptions.

 
At 11/02/2008 1:04 PM, Blogger guruphiliac said...

May we expect more of these to follow?

It's possible.

 
At 11/04/2008 4:49 PM, Blogger CHUCK said...

Semblance, I have cast my vote at Dime Box middle school lookin like a 300 pound Jackass amidst a herd of elephants! Between leavin Dime Box and returnin to Dime Box didn't amount to a popcorn poot in the grand scheme of thangs! I look to the night sky through clouds of humidity and mosquitos and see only the emptinesss of my on solitary self! What does it all mean? The "Great Questions" as my friend Stuart calls them are as high above my flat, oblong and balding head as the moon is over the river bottom! I ain't got a clue!

 
At 11/07/2008 12:24 PM, Blogger mirele said...

Elizabeth Clare Prophet's daughter Erin has written a book called "Prophet's Daughter" which is now available. I read it last night and found it valuable just for the documentation of how a mindset develops that leads to incidents like the "shelter cycle" (where the Church Universal and Triumphant built underground bomb shelters in Montana). Erin was her mother's "messenger" and "heard" from "El Morya" on various aspects of the shelters, including what shelter plan they should use and when the bombs were going to fall. It finally ended up that ECP and her hardcore followers were in the shelter and ECP was calling for bombs to fall on the USA. Wow. Talk about whack.

Erin (and her three siblings) are all out of the Summit Lighthouse (what CUT is called now). ECP retired from leadership about 10 years ago, when it became clear that she had Alzheimer's disease. She lives now in care in Bozeman, MT.

Erin's brother Sean has a website Black Sun Journal http://www.blacksunjournal.com . He's pretty blunt about the fact that he's an atheist. Another sister, Tatiana, occasionally contributes. Jody, you'd probably be interested in perusing some of their material on ECP.

 

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