Episodes 36 & 37 cover how Guru Jagat (Katie Griggs) and her Venice Beach RAMA Institute have pivoted in the COVID era to a new area of focus: anti-lockdown, anti-“woke” rhetoric, anti-masking, and anti-vax propaganda. As the center of her own weather system in the wider Kundalini Yoga / 3HO cult, this serves Griggs in a number of ways, from driving engagement to obscuring 2020’s revelations of just how criminal her umbrella organization is.Cults will never let a good crisis go to waste. Back in the summer, Matthew noticed that Michael Roach, who led the cult he was recruited into from 1996-99, also pivoted to COVID content. He does it with a lot more credibility than Griggs does, but in some ways, this makes it even more obnoxious. In this bonus episode, Matthew analyzes his late-summer “Love in the Time of the Virus” content as a retread of what he’s put out there for more than 20 years now.Sinking into Michael’s vibe again after all these years brings up old questions for Matthew around earnestness and delusion, altruism and manipulation. It makes him wonder whether a cult’s dogged fixation on doctrine can sometimes be an artifact of the leader’s arrested development.Show NotesNina Burleigh’s profile in Rolling StoneScott Carney’s investigation of the death of Ian Thorson (originally in Playboy)My own somewhat cranky review of Carney’s work
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
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Michael Roach meditates COVID away.
Okay.
Episodes 36 and 37 here on the podcast have been focused on how Guru Jagat, or Katie Griggs, and her Venice Beach Rama Institute, which is her little corner of the wider Kundalini Yoga and 3HO cult, they've shifted in the COVID era to a new area of focus.
Anti-lockdown, anti-BLM, anti-masking, and anti-vax propaganda.
Now, I've already made a few remarks about how cults will never let a good crisis go to waste, but just to underline the point, cults are built on conspiracy theorizing.
History is filled with highly paranoid cult leaders.
And in episode 37, we'll hear Philip Deslip describe how often Yogi Bhajan went on about the FBI wanting to assassinate him.
Osho was so on edge, he aided and abetted a bio-warfare attack on his Oregonia neighbors.
And of course, Jim Jones fled to Guyana.
Anything dangerous in the outside world that can confirm a conspiratorial mindset is gold to a cult.
And if it's something that the public is talking about and feeling, the cult has instantly widened the market for what it considers to be its tried and true solution.
Yogi Bhajan made a lot of money with promises of perfect health and an Aquarian age free from atheistic biotech.
So for some kundalini yoga people like Griggs, COVID will be an ideal opportunity for these empty promises to be marketed with heightened panic and passion.
But let's also remember that COVID has crashed the brick and mortar assets of new age spirituality.
Groups have to find new pathways, applications, and means of recruitment.
They've got overhead just like everybody else.
Now, some had already started down this outside-of-brick-and-mortar space.
Economically, COVID struck at a perilous moment for New Age wellness.
Most larger yoga studios in the Global North were already overleveraged, paying through the nose for the gentrified overheads that they helped raise with their own hipness and beauty.
The year prior to COVID saw the contraction or collapse of many large businesses.
The owners with the most foresight had already been building their online ground game.
And included in this demographic were cultic groups, some of which had been working their online world for a long time.
In the case of organizations like Kundalini Yoga, or Sivananda Yoga, or Shambhala International, or Rigpa International, COVID can also change the subject away from abuse crises that have shaken them all over the past two years.
The world is in peril, after all, and who has time to reflect on dirty laundry?
We have to come together in online community and remember what's really important.
Now in the case of Guru Jagat and Rama Institute, Covid denialism meshes with abuse denialism.
It's just a flu, and Yogi Bhajan is just a persecuted saint.
It's an old story, and the world has gone mad.
And the face mask is covering our truth.
The paradox with Rama is that they might be pushing deadly COVID denialism in a last-ditch attempt to save their own skins.
But let's roll back just a little bit.
In July, Michael Roach released a three-minute promo for an online course called Love in the Time of the Virus, which ran at the end of the summer.
Now, Michael Roach was the leader of the Neo-Tibetan Buddhist cult I was a member of from 1996 to 1999.
Back then, and for about a decade after, all the hallmarks of the high-demand group were in place in Roach's sprawling network of projects.
His own charismatic leadership dominated every movement and piece of information.
Deceptions about his relationships and lineage connections were the glue that held everybody's faith together.
There were also masses of volunteer labor and increasingly suspicious connections with Russian and Hong Kong oligarchs.
All of this, it was claimed, was to further the glory of Tibetan Buddhist wisdom in the world.
Now, I don't really know what he's up to now, in terms of who's working for him and whether he's backed off on interpersonal manipulation.
I hope he has.
But what he hasn't backed down from is his content.
Love in the time of the virus is a pitch-perfect application of the same thing he's always done, but now, sized for a global crisis.
And to me, this consistency points to a number of possibilities.
Firstly, it could be that he really does believe that medieval meditation instructions from Tibet will, if done with discipline and yearning, destroy the virus in the world, which is what he says.
Secondly, perhaps it's a softer sell in that he earnestly believes that this content will provide mental health and well-being and that this will be a positive contribution to the world in a stressful time.
He was often fond of saying that in Tibetan monasteries, and now I don't know if this is true, that there was this joke that at the very least, if you were meditating, you weren't out in the world making trouble.
Now thirdly, he's just endlessly creative in his capacity to adapt this material, which he's been chewing on like a cud for more than 20 years.
Fourth, there's the possibility that he's got nothing else to do.
Fifth, that that endless retreading of content for new crises has always been a really efficient way to change the channel on criticism.
Or, of course, it could be a mixture of all of the above.
So I'm going to run the audio of the promotional video here, just to give a sense of the content and feeling of Michael's pitch.
Hi, this is Geshe Michael Roach, and I just wanted to let you know, it's kind of a list of all the cool things that are going to be part of this next Lam Rim retreat.
The retreat is called, Love in the Time of the Virus, and we're going to try very hard To learn a special kind of love that could actually destroy the virus in the world.
And let's try to do a good job on that.
So first there'll be 15 videos with myself.
We're going to go through word by word through the ancient book of the steps to the path of enlightenment.
And I love to do it in great detail and word by word.
Very, very deep and very beautiful.
We'll be doing five special meditations together.
Five different kinds of meditation that are based on Master Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.
You'll be getting five special yoga classes from the Yoga Studies Institute teachers who are amazing, and I take their classes often myself.
You'll be in your own study group.
There'll be about 25 friends, and you'll be studying with your study group, and that's a great bonding experience.
And then you'll be having question and answer.
With the senior ACI teacher.
So as we go through the great ideas, and ideas come up in your mind, questions come up in your mind, you'll be able to talk to a senior ACI teacher and get your personal questions answered.
You'll be part of a private Facebook community.
And I think this is really important because I don't know about you, but You know, it's kind of rare for me to find a person who is really interested in exactly the same spiritual things I'm interested in.
And it's such a comfort to meet people like that.
And it's so nice to hang out with people like that and make friends with people like that.
So people in your own language will be having these special Facebook groups and you will get to know Other people, which is kind of strange with the virus that we can't go out and meet other people.
So, out of the whole world, people who speak your particular language, I would say you'll be meeting people who very much have the same kind of interests that you have.
And then finally we'll be doing a final question and answer with myself at the end of the whole course.
And you'll be, you know, everybody will be asking questions about the course as we wrap the course up at the end.
So I hope you So I have so many feelings when I listen to this.
it will be very valuable.
And I really do think we could have a big effect on the virus around the world.
Okay, see you then.
So I have so many feelings when I listen to this.
I remember Michael's apparent gentleness and the impish way in which he'd talk about matters of grave existential importance and make promises from this place of utter boyishness that made it hard to resist.
It could really feel like you'd hurt the feelings of a little boy if you told him he was wrong. - Yeah.
I'm thinking about the bold declarations that my own four-year-old makes about the world, like, I have ultimate superpowers and that means I can breathe underwater for a very long time.
Now as the dad, I nod and validate and say, wow, buddy, that must be an amazing thing to experience and think about.
But then when the 8-year-old tries to disabuse the little one of the fantasy with a well-meaning reality check, I know it's not going to go well.
There will be tears and gnashing of teeth.
So, it's not just that there's an earnestness shining through, such that it's really hard to imagine that he doesn't literally believe that he holds the precious keys of existence.
It's that even to this day, there's a part of me that wants to respect and protect that fantasy on his behalf.
And the way he presents himself, I just don't want to break the news to him.
