Today we forge ahead with part 2 of Matthew’s interview with Kundalini Yoga scholar Philip Deslippe and journalist Stacie Stukin on the tragic past, chaotic present, and future relevance of the cult of Yogi Bhajan. Matthew looks at Guru Jagat’s (Katie Griggs’s) pseudo-Tibetan mystical poem dedicated to her ex-con mentor, Harijiwan (Stephen Hartzell), whose current wife, Mandev, is about 30 years his junior and makes RA MA propaganda films. Will RA MA survive lockdown with COVID-busting mantras? Will Yogi Bhajan’s crimes be washed away by the ringing of the RA MA gong?We know by now that cults never let a good crisis go to waste. We’ll also examine how, when there are no global panics for cults to monetize, it’s up to the leader to create one. With RA MA we see the cycle go intergenerational as it cultjacks Yogi Bhajan’s legacy of fantasy and paranoia.For the Ticker this week, Derek and Julian review Bill Maher’s platforming of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as they trot out vax-doubt and the Wuhan lab conspiracy. Julian will cover breaking vaccine news — especially on Phase III data! — to keep you inoculated against your alt-wellness news feed.Show NotesA Campus Argument Goes Viral. Now the College Is Under SiegeThe Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be NextDecoding Bret and Eric Weinstein via Decoding the GurusModerna vaccine complications are rareAstrazeneca Phase III looks goodPfizer and BioNtech Phase III resultsAdenoviral vectorsNYT on Astrozeneca
CDC Vaccine contrast/compare
The Pfizer recipeAP on the “lab release” theoryFauci dunks on Trump’s lab release babble
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Episode 37 – Guru Jagat Cult Jacks Kundalini Yoga Today we forge ahead with Part 2 of Matthew's interview with Kundalini Yoga scholar Philip Deaslip and journalist Stacey Stukin on the tragic past, chaotic present, and future relevance of the cult of Yogi Bhajan.
Matthew looks at Guru Jagat's, Katie Griggs's, pseudo-Tibetan mystical poem dedicated to her ex-con mentor Harijivan, Stephen Hartzell, whose current wife, Mandev, is about 30 years his junior and makes Rama propaganda films.
Will Rama survive lockdown with COVID-busting mantras?
Will Yogi Bhajan's crimes be washed away by the ringing of the Rama gong?
We know by now that cults never let a good crisis go to waste.
We'll also examine how, when there are no global panics for cults to monetize, it's up to the leader to create one.
With Rama, we see the cycle go intergenerational as it cult jacks Yogi Bhajan's legacy of fantasy and paranoia.
For the ticker this week, Derek and I will review Bill Maher's platforming of Bret Weinstein and Heather Haying as they trot out Vaxxed Out and the Wuhan Lab conspiracy.
I'll be demystifying differences between the current COVID vaccines, their efficacy and safety, based on the Phase 3 data, to keep you inoculated against your alt-wellness newsfeed.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
We're going to start today with a discussion of Bill Maher's show this past Friday on HBO.
More specifically, on the interview which featured husband and wife guests Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying.
Brought on because of their background in evolutionary biology, the couple have recently been touting the theory that the virus which causes COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan research lab on their podcast.
The problem for me is that the scary, almost sci-fi intrigue of the lab escape hypothesis discussion overlapped on both ends with the topic of COVID vaccines.
It also perpetuated the trope that politically taboo ideas get unfairly labeled as conspiracy theories, which is only really a responsible argument if you then make very good distinctions.
But let's back up a little here.
Derek, who are Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying?
Well, here's some context.
Weinstein was a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, and his wife, Haying, is an evolutionary biologist as well, and she also was previously working at Evergreen.
It's important to note that they are both biologists and not epidemiologists or virologists.
So while this gives them a long view of human evolution and qualifies them to understand how pandemics, for example, can ravage populations, it doesn't necessarily empower them with a detailed knowledge of vaccinations or of this particular coronavirus.
It wasn't evolution that brought them to the spotlight a few years ago, however.
Perhaps better put, there was a cultural evolution that they didn't quite understand.
In 2017, the campus was set to honor an annual event called the Day of Absence.
So basically, on one day every year, minority students and faculty didn't show up to campus in order to raise awareness about the contributions of people of color to society.
So this voluntary activity was part of campus solidarity.
Now, in 2017, the event organizers requested a different approach.
They asked white students and faculty to not appear on campus that day.
And as with previous years, the request was voluntary.
But if you're asking white people not to be somewhere, you can imagine what will happen.
Weinstein appeared on Fox News shortly after and he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he wrote, I had objected to a planned day of absence in which white people were asked to leave campus on April 12th.
Now, to be fair, Weinstein offered to hold workshops on the topic of race and racial justice on campus after the incident exploded.
And his initial reply was measured and not combative.
But as far as I could tell, he never mentions that it was voluntary, that the students were trying to highlight racial injustice, but not demanding that everyone stay away.
And that's really important here.
And it's also important to note that Evergreen is on par with Berkeley in terms of its progressive politics.
So, such an organizational effort should not have come as a shock.
Weinstein and Haying ended up settling with the college for $250,000 each due to threatened violence against them and what they claimed was Evergreen's refusal or inability to protect them, and they both resigned shortly after.
Brett's brother, Eric, who has also been in the public spotlight in recent years, coined the term intellectual dark web to represent thinkers like himself and his brother, as well as Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson.
Mostly men, there are a few women in it, but mostly men who do not fit neatly into left-right categories.
The Evergreen event was in large part what first gave a name to this part of the internet, that intellectual dark web, and their philosophies overall.
Now, to be clear, the excesses of cancel culture weigh heavily on all of these topics and figures and can cause a lot of unwarranted reputational damage.
These discussions require more complexity than we can really allow for in this segment, but suffice to say they are not black and white topics.
In this case, though, I'm only recounting what led to the Bill Maher appearance and how Brett ended up in the spotlight, and most likely in Bill's field of vision.
I mean, they could have been friends before, I'm not sure, but he definitely got a bump in terms of popularity after this event.
My contention is that in his initial email, Weinstein called people of color leaving campus each year a forceful call to consciousness While asking white people to leave a show of force and an act of oppression in and of itself.
And this entire thing, and as far as I could tell, he never went back to say that it was voluntary.
He might have, but I haven't come across it.
And it misses two broader points.
The first, that it was voluntary.
And second, that white people seem to continually miss the point that showing solidarity with people of color sometimes means not immediately sharing your own views and instead listening to their requests without reflexively responding.
So regardless, this placed Weinstein and Hang squarely in the Rebel Academics category, and in fact, Hang's self-claimed title is now Professor in Exile, and this whole thing is likely what landed them across from Bill Maher last Friday.
Such a twisting path.
Matthew, I know you've looked into this couple a little bit in terms of their qualifications and their history.
What did you find?
Well, I mean, very superficially, I was working so hard on the Kundalini Yoga this week, but so my answer is a little bit superficial.
I did listen to an amazing Decoding the Gurus episode on Brett appearing on his brother Eric's podcast to discuss his 20-year quest for elite recognition for what sounds like a positive but relatively minor contribution to the science on telomeres in lab rats.
I can't pretend to understand the ins and outs of it, but it sounds like both Weinstein brothers believe that Brett deserves a Nobel Peace Prize or a Nobel Prize for his discipline and that they've been overlooked.
In fact, Eric contends that there's three family members that have come up with Nobel-worthy ideas.
And so I think they have a very...
You know, very, you know, very positive view of their intellectual capacities.
It seems that Brett's affinity for believing that people are out to suppress his ideas and his brilliance is, you know, a long-term family thing.
And also, you know, it's not just that he has one core idea that he wants to bring to the foreground in his discipline.
It's also that I believe they were saying on Decoding the Gurus that he's only published two papers in his field during the length of his career.
And so it's not exactly a stellar record to bring to a global discussion on such a crucial issue as COVID, especially when it's outside of his lane.
Yeah, as far as superficial responses go, that was pretty good.
Well, just a bit.
But I can see why they might appeal to Bill Maher, who, you know, is going to be very interested in a little bit of edge of the transgressive, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the thing that I... It's interesting what you just said, because it gives me a slightly different angle on what I was about to say, which is that part of the feeling I had Of this appearance on Bill Maher is that it's almost like we're entering a conversation that's already been going on for a while.
And I felt like they sort of dropped the ball in terms of good science communication and responsible science communication.
So one of the topics that they're talking about in this interview is the lab escape theory.
And it's this idea that maybe COVID-19 came out of the lab in Wuhan.
And right from the start, Weinstein's estimation is that this theory that has long deemed to be false by scientific consensus is 90% likely to be true.
Uh, they both take pains to say, both he and Heather Haying, take pains to say that this should not be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
Uh, but then they refer to the most well-known proponent of the conspiracy theory, but they do so indirectly and anonymously as the guy who said it.
Because you, you know, if the guy who said it is not beloved by people on the left, then you're not allowed to say it anymore.
So they, they don't, Identify him, so it remains kind of mysterious and filled with intrigue and they don't differentiate what they are saying from what he claimed.
So the proponent is Steve Bannon.
You're kidding.
And the full conspiracy theory was that, and this of course has long been dismissed as lacking in evidence, was made by a political group that he founded called the Rule of Law Society that is focused on corruption and injustice in China.
So Bannon alleged back in September That not only was SARS-CoV-2 from the lab, but that it was created and released deliberately by the Chinese government.
So look, if you're going to come on and say you support the lab escape hypothesis and that it is not just a crazy conspiracy theory, great, okay, but then let's make some distinctions that you're wanting those watching to understand.
How do you do that?
Well, tell them what the conspiracy theory is and then say what you think is valid and where you diverge from it, right?
By the same token, if you think political correctness occludes important facts, okay, that's a position.
Which specific well-evidenced facts are you referring to, and why?
To do this well, with regard to the lab escape hypothesis, you also have to face head-on that the scientific consensus says that because of its structure, the virus's structure, it is highly unlikely that it originated in the lab.
They didn't tell us why they disagree.
I mean, to some extent, they had a general discussion about it.
So I think all of that, all of those comments said, they do end up coming across a little bit like defensive to your point about this, you know, this long standing sense of offense or repression.
Somewhat data free.
It's a little bit speculative.
It does sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist.
And then with Mars cooperation, They create the impression as the interview goes on that the lab escape hypothesis is now established fact.
And how many viewers are we talking about?
I'm not so familiar with Marr and his audience.
Well, estimates say that he gets about one and a half million viewers when the show airs, which is down from a few years ago.
He was getting four to five million, but I would imagine it reaches a lot more than that in terms of people watching it on demand, especially right now.
So it's a big platform.
That's incredible.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I don't know, I know from their podcast that their resurrection of this topic was inspired by actually an excellent and compelling piece from January 4th in New York Magazine called The Lab Leak Hypothesis, but they don't mention this article or cite specific reasons from the article or from anywhere else why Any new evidence backs up their argument.
So I really encourage anyone who's interested in this specific topic, look up the article by Nicholson Baker in New York Magazine.
And look, for supporters of Heather and Brett, of course what they are saying might be true, and I have no desire to censor them.
It's worthy of further research.
I just don't think they did good science communication about such consequential topics on a show with such a big platform.
You know, speaking of conspiracy theories, I'm working on a study that just came out for Big Think on the Dyatlov Pass, which was something that happened in 1959 in Russia, where a group of nine hikers mysteriously died.
And it was only just confirmed that it was due to an avalanche.
It was because of the grade of the hill that they didn't think it could have been an avalanche.
And only now do we understand more about how avalanches And the study itself is, it goes into all of the conspiracy theories that have come up over 62 years now.
One of the most popular being that aliens killed them.
Of course!
Because it's Russia and it's a conspiracy theory.
Maybe it was a Jewish space laser, that could have been it too.
It reminded me of that when you said that about good science communication, because I think it's an important point that we've already noticed on social when you previewed this segment, you know, the pushback, and I think it's really important you said, and that's how I felt watching it.
I am a fan of Bill Maher.
I don't agree with him on everything, but that doesn't mean I have to, and that's why I like him because he challenges me and sometimes, and including on which I will get to on vaccines, I completely disagree with him.
But good science communication takes time, and to not cite your sources, especially someone like Steve Bannon, you have to make that apparent because there's a track record there, right?
So you can't just say these things and then say, somebody said it.
I mean, that sounds kind of like our last president, and that's where I get turned off by segments like what we saw last week.
Yeah, I think sometimes, too, with people like this, they're so deep into the topics that they cover that when they turn and face a bigger audience, they assume everyone else is already up to speed.
So it would have been really good just to create enough context and contrast what they were saying with the crazy conspiracy theory that they referred to, but refused to name the guy who was sort of central in spreading it in the beginning.
But I just want to say my gold standard from now on, whenever there's public conversation about vaccines, is this.
Does it reduce or increase confusion about the topic?
So here's how Brett starts off the whole interview.
Well, there's a problem built into the question of vaccines, which is that there's a difference between the public health analysis and the private decisions that people have to make about their own vaccinations.
The problem is one of game theory, where the best deal, given that vaccines are very effective, but they carry some risk, is for everyone else to get vaccinated, but you not to be.
And if that happens, then you get the benefit of their immunity, and you don't suffer any of the risk.
But of course, that makes you a free rider.
And so there is a tendency to underrate the risks of vaccines in order to get everybody on board with getting them, and then people who raise questions get demonized.
So having that nuanced conversation is not an easy thing to do, especially when you know what's coming.
You're going to be called in.
But it's science.
We have to do it, right?
I understand what's going on now.
The free rider thing, I get it.
And I would say, look, we're in a bad situation.
We do need these vaccines.
But just don't gaslight me, right?
Just don't treat me as a child who can't hear the truth because it might scare me or scare other people.
Just tell me the truth.
That's all I want.
Uh-huh.
Now the amazing thing about this is that that's how the interview opens and then right from there he pivots to a question about the lab escape hypothesis and so there's no, you know, there's no addressing of this topic.
Right from the top Weinstein is saying there's a deliberate downplaying or underrating of vaccine risks and then Bill Maher blusters right in that public health messaging is a form of gaslighting that doesn't tell us the truth And then that you're not allowed to say so because it gets unfairly labeled as being an anti-vaxxer when you're just trying to have a nuanced conversation.
This doesn't have to do with public, this is not a health conversation or a data conversation at all though, is it?
No.
Even when he says underrating, I don't, again, all vaccine potential damages are listed.
We can find them on a public database.
What's the dramatization, too, around don't treat me like a child or don't gaslight me?
What has he been told that has made him so ashamed?
This is part of the problem with Bill Maher on this particular topic, is that he basically is anti-vax adjacent.
On several occasions, he's talked about how he feels like there are a lot of problems with vaccines, but they're covered up.
And he's had RFK on his show, too, to support that.
And Gilmar would also fit into the intellectual dark web.
I mean, he's not a figure because he's not a philosopher, but he very much fits in that space.
Which, again, is fine, but there is a level of suspicion around a number of topics that he often runs with.
Yeah, but in terms of him and these two having that conversation, okay, if you're going to say that you can't have a nuanced conversation or else you get demonized as an anti-vaxxer, but you're going to then say that we're downplaying the risks and that we're being gaslit, let's have some data.
Let's have some clarifying caveats.
Let's create some context around this, because that's a big, big statement.
Yeah, I think you're wanting this interview or this segment on Bill Maher to be about public health and science, when really this segment is about the culture wars, isn't it?
I think you're right about that.
I mean, no citations.
There's this emotional manipulation around, you know, you're gaslighting me.
I just need the truth!
Like, come on!
You can't handle the truth!
Right, exactly.
And also, Mar, as much as I like him in a lot of ways, as I said, and I will watch him every week and I've gone to the show live, he is not an expert interviewer.
And actually, this interview was a great example of how bad of an interviewer he can be because he kept cutting them off to make his own points.
He is not seasoned.
He's better when he's with the panel, but when he's doing one-on-ones, he jumps in constantly.
And I think, as Julian will address, there were at least three different huge topics in this one conversation, and that's why your head was kind of spinning.
You're talking about MNRA vaccines, you're talking about flu shots, and you're talking about vaccinations in general, and they don't really connect.
Yeah, yeah, and of course he has to get the laughs in, so there's also that sort of temperament where it's like, okay, how does this turn into a joke as we pivot to the next topic?
Yeah.
And just to be absolutely clear, this perspective on vaccines that the risks are downplayed, and it was interesting too, guys, because what Weinstein says at the top, it's essentially a libertarian argument, right?
He's saying we are asked for the good of the collective to take this individual risk, and I don't think we should have to.
And so the way they manipulate us into doing it is downplaying the risk of vaccines.
It's just not true based on the data.
The problem is it's a widespread perception and so they are confusing people and perpetuating this very harmful thing, especially right now when we need people to be getting vaccinated.
But let's talk about the flu vaccine comments, Derek, that Mar made that went completely uncorrected by his two expert guests.
Viruses are always mutating.
That's why flu shots are very often so ineffective.
Because you're getting the vaccine for, that's why I never wanted a flu shot, for the one that was around last year.
Sometimes they're as little as 10%.
As little as 10% effective.
I don't know why that got cut off.
So, what do you think about that, Derek?
It sounds like he always has the flu.
I'd just like to say that.
The flu vaccine, there are different ways of developing flu vaccines.
The most common way is in eggs, and there's storage and shipping that happens.
But it's a global effort, and it starts in Australia because officially the next season starts there, and then us in North America will track what's happening across the world, and that's how the development starts from there.
And it's always a guess, and they're very straight up about being a guess.
But in every flu vaccine, you have three different strains, and there are four major flu strains, but they don't think that one of them affects humans, only animals, so they don't include that one.
So, there are three flu strains that affect humans, but within each of those, there are dozens of variations.
And he is right there, it was mutating, so we're always looking out for variations.
Yeah.
So, basically, you take the best guess you have partly on what happened last year, but you're not taking last year's flu, and then you're looking at trends and you're trying to identify the early candidates for the vaccine, and that's how the vaccines are made.
And very often, during the course of the year, They do mutate and so they are ineffective, but the statement that it's last year's flu is just completely false.
Yeah, just to add some numbers to that, it's called the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System that's been up since 1952.
It involves 112 institutions in 83 countries collecting specimens and conducting science to isolate the new strains and then to analyze genetically which of those are going to be more likely To become particularly virulent in the population.
And not only are there four strains that they put into the vaccine, there's a vaccine for the Southern Hemisphere and a different one for the Northern Hemisphere, right?
So they're based on imperfect but highly technical best estimates, as you said, on which are going to be most likely to be circulating.
Of course it's imperfect.
It's amazing that that's what he thinks.
It's amazing that he's going to sit in front of at least 2 million people and make a statement like that, which shows he's never really looked into it.
The other thing he says is it's sometimes just 10% effective.
So some data on that.
Actually, he's right.
In one year, in 2004, the flu vaccine was only 10% effective, but it's a totally misleading number to quote by itself.
How good of a match the vaccines are for the viral strains that end up circulating does vary.
But for example, I found data here that says in 16 out of 19 years from 88 to 2007, it was a good match.
It was a good match for 16 out of those 19 years.
And most years the flu shot is between 40 and 60% effective.
Yeah, and it just reminds me of these sorts of arguments again and again.
It makes it seem like there's a few people in a room deciding the fate of these things.
And as you pointed out, like 80, 83 different countries collaborating.
This is one of the best examples of globalization and public health that we have.
Think about all of the discord that exists in the world.
And we have public health officials working together on stuff like this.
It also translates to the current coronavirus vaccine.
Totally.
People are like, we've never done it in a year before.
I'm like, yeah, that's progress.
That's what we've been working toward all this time, to be able to do that and identify.
And that actually plays into Hayek's concerns about it being an mRNA vaccine.
But I will say, at the very least, at the very least, I was happy to hear all three of them say that they will get vaccinated.
So, at the base level, at least that was there.
Yeah, and I just want to add here because I think it's a good PSA.
Even though we can say that the flu shot averages between 40 and 60 percent effectiveness, effectiveness means that it prevents you from getting sick.
But there are more benefits that extend beyond that.
When you get the flu shot, it reduces hospitalizations for flu within the general population.
It reduces the complications that arise from diabetes and lung disease in the general population.
It reduces the risk of a heart attack if you've been vaccinated.
It protects women before and after pregnancy and their babies during the period when they are too young to be vaccinated.
So it's not just as simple as like, did it work in terms of me not getting sick?
And even when it doesn't work in that 40 to 60% range for the rest of the people for whom it doesn't work, even if they still get sick, the sickness will usually be less severe and less likely to have serious consequences.
It's a good time to remind listeners of the process that everyone is part of our body, which is called hormesis, which is just that things that can be poisonous in large doses and small doses are very good for us.
Cruciferous vegetables is the one I always go to.
There are so many health benefits, but they are toxic to us.
You're never going to eat enough of them to get severely ill.
It's just like exercise.
It's like you tear your muscle and when it repairs, it repairs stronger and bigger.
And so when you're talking about a vaccination, you are stimulating your immune system.
So even if that particular strain isn't what is going around that year, it's still a good practice just for your entire immune system overall.
You know what I would like to know is, and this is kind of like an organizational and, I don't know, media question that is way out of my league, but who is standing in the writer's room or in the production offices at Mars Show and saying, okay, well, if we do this, are we going to try to find somebody like Dan Wilson to put on next week?
Or, if we do this, are we running the risk of influencing public health in ways that we don't want to be responsible for?
I mean, what's the oversight?
I mean, I have the similar questions about Joe Rogan and his editorial choices.
Who's actually in the room with very strong media megastars that have real impact upon the culture?
The problem is that it's the blessing and the curse, right?
I really like watching Bill Maher because of the format, because of the way things get blended together, because it's very topical and very political and covers the issues of the day, but in a humorous way and in a way where there's debate and there's back and forth and it gets intense sometimes.
But it's not journalism.
Right.
And so they're covering topics that are hugely consequential, but in this way that is like a talk show.
And the answer to your question, actually, at the moment, ironically, is the audience, because all of his staff are currently the audience, because you can't have live audiences in Los Angeles at this moment.
Right.
And he actually gets on them when they don't laugh at the jokes they wrote.
Totally!
So, let me just say this because we're going to segue into the jab and the other topic in addition to flu vaccines and the Wuhan lab escape hypothesis that they talked about, I think in a kind of confusing way, was the difference between the current vaccines.
And so, let's roll into that.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
Seeing as they were appearing on the Bill Maher Show as scientific experts, the absence of any scientific data whatsoever in the conversation with Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying was conspicuous, especially given the two main topics they covered, vaccine safety and the lab escape hypothesis.
On the positive side, these two seeming experts did report that they assess themselves as amongst the most heavily vaccinated people on the planet due to their extensive travel and Brett's past research involving bats.
So they're not anti-vaxxers.
And that's good.
But they did create a whole lot of confusion about the distinction between the AstraZeneca vaccine on the one hand and the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines on the other.
And this confusion never really got cleared up on the segment.
So let's do that now.
So, all three of these vaccines that are currently being distributed focus on the characteristic spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but they do so in two different ways.
First, we should say the spike protein itself is harmless on its own.
Think of it as being like the crowbar that the virus uses to get into our cells.
The vaccines work By getting certain cells in the body to produce this unfamiliar spike protein, which then triggers an immune response that will later be armed and ready when the real virus comes along and tries to get in using that same kind of crowbar.
So, all three vaccines have that same end goal.
The difference lies in how they achieve it.
Let's start with the AstraZeneca vaccine.
It uses a DNA snippet of that spike protein from the virus.
And again, that harmless spike protein snippet will begin the process of building immunity, as I just described.
In order to deliver that DNA snippet, This specific vaccine uses an adenovirus, and here's where it gets interesting.
The adenovirus used is one that causes something similar to a common cold in chimpanzees.
It's been modified so as not to be able to infect humans or replicate, and has then had the spike protein snippet, that little piece of DNA, inserted into it.
Now, this may sound like a science fiction horror movie premise, But the technology is specifically designed to harmlessly replicate how a viral infection occurs and activate your body's natural immune response.
So that's AstraZeneca.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines essentially do the same thing, but instead of that DNA spike protein snippet, they use something called messenger RNA.
This messenger RNA is a synthesized blueprint or code for the spike protein, which, as with the previous method, teaches the cells in your body to create the spike protein and trigger an immune response.
What's brilliant about this is that the way the body works, messenger RNA has a high turnover rate, and that means it's broken up really quickly and disposed of after it's done its job.
To deliver the messenger RNA, these types of vaccine use a coating of lipid nanoparticles that protect the mRNA from being broken down before it gets to its destination, much in the same way that certain vitamins or extended-release medications do.
These fatty nanoparticles are suspended in a type of saline solution along with some salts and sugars that manage the acid-alkaline balance in relationship to your body.
There's nothing else in them.
So now that this is clear, in the segment on his show, Heather Haying and Bill Maher go back and forth a little on whether or not to trust the mRNA vaccines, given that it is a newer technology.
They both find it a little suspect.
Confusion ensues, now mostly because Maher doesn't have enough basic knowledge on the topic, and Haying tends to come across here as trying to hedge her bets.
But here's the key point.
The use of adenoviruses for human vaccines is also a new technology, even though, as she tries to explain, the strategy of using a snippet of the actual virus's DNA has a long and successful history in vaccines.
Though they are new, scientists have been studying messenger RNA for use in vaccines since 1989.
And despite adenoviruses having been studied for a variety of applications since the 1950s, they are also being used as a delivery system for the first time in a human vaccine.
I want to make a quick note here that the Johnson & Johnson and CanSino COVID vaccines, which are both in testing and production right now, also use the adenovirus delivery method.
So, to clarify, in the messenger RNA vaccine, that's Moderna and Pfizer right now, the active ingredient that stimulates the immune response is the new tech.
In the AstraZeneca vaccine and the two others that are coming down the pipeline fairly soon, the way of delivering the active ingredient is the new tech.
What would have been incredibly useful here in comparing these vaccines is data.
What does the actual science show in terms of both efficacy and any side effects so far?
Well, let's have a look.
In both cases, the data has been nothing short of remarkable, with the two mRNA vaccines boasting 95% efficacy and AstraZeneca as high as 90%.
But the million dollar question here of course is, is there any data that supports the messenger RNA vaccines being riskier?
Well, it turns out that all three vaccines have very similar incidence of moderate side effects, all of which are consistent with the effective activation of the desired immune response.
And most people are going to get some sort of pain at the injection site.
Some will get flu-like symptoms or headaches.
Some will get fever, fatigue and perhaps muscle pain.
But what about more severe side effects?
That's what we're really afraid of.
Let's look at the phase three trials.
So, for AstraZeneca, and remember this is the adenovirus delivery system, their Phase 3 trials were done with over 23,000 participants.
The rate of serious adverse reactions was 0.7% in those who received the vaccine and, interestingly, 0.8% in the placebo group, so slightly higher in those who did not actually get the vaccine.
Pfizer, this is one of the messenger RNA vaccines, had over 43,000 participants in their phase 3 trials with a serious adverse reaction rate of 0.6% and 0.5% in the placebo group.
Moderna, which is another mRNA vaccine, had over 30,000 participants and they had serious adverse reactions in 0.6% both in those who received the vaccine and in the placebo group.
But these are just trials, you might say.
Not millions of people and certainly not long-term data.
Well, you're correct about that.
By definition, we have no long-term data on new vaccines.
That should be obvious.
But here's what we do know, and I think it's really important.
This is sort of a philosophical point.
Whenever we're considering something unknown, relating it, putting it in context with what we do know can be really helpful.
And in this case, really reassuring.
What we do know is that in the research history on vaccines, longer term side effects typically would emerge within 30 to 45 days.
This is the reason why the FDA Emergency Use Clearance, right, we've been hearing about that, only becomes possible after at least 50% of participants in the Phase 3 trials have passed the 60-day mark.
I said before that He Ying and Weinstein are not anti-vaxxers.
But their appearance on the Bill Maher Show may have inadvertently given ammunition to anti-vaccine advocates.
But even more importantly, it may have perpetuated a certain amount of confusion and fearfulness about vaccines amongst those who just don't know enough to feel comfortable taking them when they become available.
Part of this fear is based on the misperception that the vaccines may have been rushed, that certain steps may have been skipped over, and that you can't really trust the new technology.
But here's the thing.
These vaccines weren't rushed at all in terms of safety trials.
No steps were skipped.
What was sped up, rather, was the funding and the focus, the ability to really get the process going.
Vaccine scientists also were not working in a vacuum.
It wasn't a complete blank slate.
They were able to build on decades of existing science regarding gene sequencing, messenger RNA, and the use of adenovirus vectors.
All of this was already accelerating the process whereby we develop vaccines.
This is the real reason why we have quickly developed, highly effective, and by all current measures, very safe vaccines for COVID-19.
So here's part two of my interview with Philip DeSlip and Stacey Stuken-Philip.
Philip is an historian of American religion with a background in American studies and literature.
He was a member of 3HO and practiced and taught Kundalini Yoga for about 12 years before leaving.
Stacey Stukin is an arts and culture writer born and raised in Los Angeles.
She's written about travel, design, women's health, and food for publications like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Architectural Digest, Lucky Peach, and LA Magazine.
Stacey's also been covering and practicing yoga for a long time.
She was actually a contributing editor at Yoga Journal for about 12 years until 2008.
And today she practices her own hybrid type of yoga In part one, we left off with some projections about the future viability of Katie Griggs' gig at Rama, given the pandemic and the Kundalini Yoga abuse scandal.
And just as we were wrapping, Lauren Sherman dropped an article with the Business of Fashion publication that shed some really bright light on Rama pandemic finances.
But maybe we can dig into the details here a little bit.
The piece says that Guru Jagat, whose given name is Katie Day, according to reports, projected that the, this would be pre-pandemic, business would generate 5 million a year from in-person retreats and a live streaming service, but also from retail in the group's centers and e-commerce site, where it sells spiritual tchotchkes as well as multiple apparel lines, which range from upscale dresses to athleisure, described as meditative streetwear.
Many of those plans went awry, but Rahma's streaming service took off.
Its site now attracts 2 million unique visits a month, 20,000 of whom pay at least $19 a month to access a video library, not to mention additional fees for access to video of one-off sessions that took place throughout the year.
That math works out to $380,000 per month.
Does that sound accurate or plausible to you both?
I would say both yes and no.
As we mentioned last time, with the pandemic, I think we are in new territory.
Not only is the future of the business of yoga uncertain, but I think many people, not just yoga studios, but restaurants, retailers are learning as they go how to keep their businesses afloat in the pandemic.
So it's not, to me, it's not surprising to imagine that there would be 20,000 people around the world who would be accessing their library.
I would caution though about Making any assumptions that what we see as far as revenue on the surface tells us a complete story.
I think we're taking those numbers at face value, but I think for 3HO in its past, things that we saw in public were just the tip of the iceberg.
We know that there were all sorts of unannounced private donations made to Yogi Bhajan, tithing, people who gave their inheritances, coerced into giving their inheritances.
So there were a lot of things underneath the surface.
And I don't think that that figure represents teacher training, retreats, special workshops.
There's a lot else that's going on.
Right, and then there's the question of whether it's self-reported or whether Sherman was able to dig behind the data and somehow see the back end.
What's your sense of that, Stacey?
Well, it says right here that at the time that the $5 million a year was a projection by Guru Jagat.
So I suspect that this reporting of 20,000 people a month paying $19 a month is also, was reported by Katie to the reporter.
Right.
I will kind of echo what Philip said that, yes, it's possible there are 20,000 people I also know they do have a quite a big following in Russia.
Yet I also know that there is some tithing going on from my reporting.
I've heard that people give money in particular to Hari Jeevan.
Also, from my reporting, I know that particularly what went down in Colorado and in Majorca, Katie was using the funds for personal expenses.
Her credit was not Up to par, so she wasn't able to sign on leases or wouldn't sign on leases.
We're also talking about real estate here too, right?
They've got two studios that are in very expensive places.
Lower East Side of New York, Venice, California.
We also know a lot of people are working for them for free.
You know, the infamous 3HO concept of SEVA.
Many people call it SLEVA.
So, you know, people are, there's a lot of sweat equity going into these businesses as well without compensation.
Yeah, I think an important point to make is when we look at subsequent generations of a group, you know, the original leader is gone, a student of the original leader kind of passes the baton to one of their students.
It's easy to see it as kind of moving away from a charismatic leader or kind of the photocopy of a photocopy.
I think it's also important to keep in mind that you can see it like a playbook.
Subsequent generations of a group, they can build upon the models that pre-existed them.
And one of the things with 3HO and other yoga organizations, if you do the math, if you add up the number of mats in a studio on any given day, it doesn't work.
You cannot Sustain a yoga business.
You cannot have a profitable yoga business if you're just having people pay $15-$20 per class.
There's only so many bodies you can fit into that room.
You need teacher training, you need special workshops, you need retreats to really make those businesses viable and profitable.
And we've seen on a smaller scale, you know, studios want to add gift shops, they want to have cafes, they want to increase the amount of money that people are spending.
And I think that's one of the innovations with Rama is to constantly crank out special workshops.
Everything is an occasion for a special workshop.
I mean, I almost want to joke that if we're in a day that ends in the letter Y, it's a great occasion for a special workshop.
But it's kind of a joke with a lot of truth.
You know, full moon, new moon, 11th day of a new moon, Sagittarius rising, Aquarius waning, Everything is an occasion for a special workshop.
I think one of the key things that Rama does is to present teacher training as not a kind of leveling up, but as a constant process.
Teacher training is a huge money maker.
People are paying thousands of dollars to do teacher training.
From the people I've spoken with who are involved with Rama, One of their innovations is to say, this isn't a one-time thing.
You don't become a teacher and now you're out into the world spreading this wonderful technology, but it's a process that you go through again and again and again.
You're learning, you're growing, you're developing by going through this process.
So suddenly, the one-time payment of a student of $5,000 in a year can become a recurring payment.
Now, I'm wondering too whether there is an advantage to, and maybe a history within Kundalini Yoga of upselling the profitability of a business in order to prove the prosperity gospel that's actually being sold.
And if that maybe impacts the, or it might inform the self-reporting around whether or not there really is $380,000 coming in per month.
I think that's part of it.
3HO and the wellness spiritual community in general, in many ways they're caught in this paradox of if you're selling prosperity, It behooves you to give evidence of that prosperity.
Who's going to believe someone selling a prosperity technology who doesn't have money themselves?
But at the same time, they're also selling spirituality.
So there also needs to be a sense of it's not purely materialistic.
So I think there's a constant tension there of moving back and forth.
We make money, but we're not We don't care about it that much.
We're in the world, but we're not of it.
Well, there's also a huge emphasis on, for example, crystals within the Rama community.
So they go on a yatra to Arkansas.
And they buy a bunch of crystals and they bring them back and they sell them at their shop.
I mean, I don't know how much money they're making off it, but again, it's like these crystals have this energy, the obsidian, the amethyst.
you know the courts um so that that's these are things to put on their altar along with a picture of yogi bhajan a picture of guru jagat a picture of hari jivan so you know that it becomes all intertwined i i think something that's important to to keep in mind is you know as we're talking about what's above the surface and what's below the surface you know if we think of corporations corporations have things that they sell to the public openly but there are also
Cultures within corporations and I think one of the things that people don't realize if they are not looking deeply into 3HO is for decades there was a culture of treating students with means and treating students without means.
You know if you came to 3HO if you And you didn't have money or an inheritance or real estate, you were, you could do slava, you know, you could literally iron, you know, iron Yogi Bhajan's underwear.
Great privilege.
If you had money, if you had power, if you had access, it was a very different experience.
You were pulled in closer, much more quickly into the inner circle.
I've interviewed people who, you know, the moment One spouse was able to get a professional degree and make a lot more money.
Suddenly, their relationship with Yogi Bhajan became drastically different.
In speaking with 3HO members over the past decades, there's a clear pattern.
There's a clear kind of corporate culture within 3HO.
What do you do with a student who has money?
You know, there's kind of a progression.
You know, if they come to classes, you encourage them to come to more classes.
And then, you know, their destiny is to become a teacher, so you can sell them teacher training.
A very lucrative thing that's kind of under the surface are private lessons and private classes and private treatments.
You know, for $200-$300 an hour, this is a very lucrative but relatively unknown thing for teachers and healers within 3HO.
I think one of the big things, as Stacey alluded to, is beyond those selling of teacher training, selling of private lessons to students of means, is to seemingly bring them in as partners in business prospects.
And it's something that we hear about very often underneath the surface.
Eventually, you know, there's a great opportunity to invest in a studio, spread this wonderful technology, or start up a charitable organization.
Is with the private appointments that you're describing, are we talking about the kind of dual relationships forming where a prominent teacher in a location or somebody involved in running a teacher training program would also be giving
private quote-unquote therapy appointments and kind of concretizing their their individual I don't know capital with with various students and then of course those students are part of the group as well and and were any of the is there any kind of like licensed therapy going on within within KY environments or is it pretty much all unregulated?
I think there are many who are licensed chiropractors or therapists, but a lot of it also exists in this fuzzy gray area of life coaching, sound healing, yoga therapy, where you don't need credentials, but you can still collect a fee.
From my reporting, Hari Jeevan does that.
People can pay I mean a fee I was quoted was $150 to have a face reading session with him or a special private meeting with him.
So that is...
Another revenue stream there.
Back to Katie's recent choice to platform David Icke and how this entire economy might or might not be working.
If she's reading her income numbers in a really calculated way, and somebody like Ike is a big draw, it might make a lot of sense to interview him, regardless of how his content or ideology might conflict with or, I don't know, trigger her demographic. I don't know, trigger her demographic.
And I'm wondering if there are prior examples of yogi bhajan or kundalini yoga teachers prioritizing money or networking or their contacts over their religious commitments.
I think a big factor is the tall poppy syndrome.
During Yogi Bhajan's lifetime, no student of Yogi Bhajan could really be bigger than the brand or be bigger than the man.
And after his death, I think there was more freedom to do that kind of networking.
And to be more eclectic and to reach out to groups and people who had not been previously connected to Kundalini Yoga teachers.
If we look at something like Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles, which I often refer to as the New Age Super Bowl, we see that same kind of eclectic mixture because we know that there is so much overlap in the wellness world.
You know, when you talk about, you know, examples of teachers sacrificing religion for money, I think in the wellness world, there isn't a lot of research and it's It's so self-serving that it's very forgiving.
I don't really care that you platform David Icke, who is a Holocaust denier, because I want to hear about the global conspiracy.
I won't be too critical.
It's going to take a lot for me to push away from the table.
I hadn't actually thought about that kind of buffet strategy having that impact.
I mean, in a way, there is something so recombinant and smorgasbordy about, you know, both New Age spirituality, but also the way in which Bhajan put together his programs that I think it would be very natural.
You'd be trained almost to be able to say, well, I'm going to leave that to the side, or, you know, I'm going to, I'm very interested in the lizard people, but the Nazism not so much.
And I'm reminded that that must be at play when people are listening to Bajon literally praise Adolf Hitler in his talks in the 70s and 80s, that they can put things to the side, evidently.
Well, they were able to put the sexual misconduct to the side, and they were able to put the bad business practice and corruption, the taking of people's inheritances, the abusing of their children.
I mean, it's a culture that is very good at being kind of myopic and in denial.
And we've seen that in the last, I'd say six to eight months, you know, in the wake of all the revelations of abuse and misconduct, in the wake of the Olive Branch report, we've seen 3HO Get back up and start moving forward with kind of a business as usual, as much as business can be as usual during the pandemic.
But we see many of the same people who wrung their hands and expressed their solidarity and sorrow with survivors.
Only months later, start offering kundalini yoga teacher training again.
And I think it's fair to look at the reality of this is a revenue stream for them.
But it's also fair to look at those decisions that people may have suffered sexual assault and abuse and grooming.
But that might be less important than the personal value that someone gets out of their yogic practice.
Well, there's also so many teachers that didn't have a personal connection to yogi vision.
He died in 2004.
So there's a whole, you know, there's thousands of teachers out there who are making their way, trying to figure out how to negotiate, you know, The teacher versus the teaching.
And they're doing it with some success, and you know, that's their prerogative.
I do feel like they should be transparent if students ask, but it's hard to know, you know, how each individual is dealing with their community and in talking about those revelations.
I had an experience a few weeks ago being in a parking lot and seeing someone back up and ding a car.
And they paused for a moment and then they drove off.
And I think 2020 was, in some ways, to use a cute comparison, it was kind of like that for 3HO and Kundalini Yoga.
There's that moment when you hit the car and you know what you have to do.
You have to stop.
You have to go out.
You have to leave your insurance information.
You have to accept responsibility for what happened.
But if no one's watching, it's really easy to quickly say, it wasn't that bad.
It's not a big deal.
I probably didn't do any damage.
I can just leave and no one will know.
And I think with Kundalini Yoga, that moment was, dear God, the person who created my spiritual practice was a serial rapist and groomer of children and abuser of people.
And I think some people stopped and they did some deep inspection.
What does this mean?
How can I separate this?
But for a lot of people it was easier to just drive off, to not look too deeply into that, to not follow those things to their logical conclusion and just keep going.
And just to take that metaphor a little bit farther, if the person was the driver of the car that did the dinging and, you know, that's the, you know, first or second generation but mid-career kundalini yoga teacher who doesn't have anything first or second generation but mid-career kundalini yoga teacher who doesn't have anything else to do and no other car to drive in, the pressure to, you know, keep it in gear is going to
And there's something very tragic about that.
You know, I was watching the kind of limited liability remorse statements pour out over the spring and summer of 2020 from these older teachers and kind of figuring that it was going to be like the cars in the parking lot.
And I was also thinking like, What else are you guys going to do with your lives, right?
Like it would take a massive amount of courage and retraining and integrity to say, wow, I was sleepwalking for a long time there.
So I think some are.
To be fair, I think some are.
realizing they were sleepwalking and there's various degrees of taking responsibility as you know.
But now KRI's new or 3HO's new solution for it is this program of restorative justice that they're pursuing.
So they've hired yet another third party organization to come in and you know I don't know exactly what those plans are yet, but that is in the works.
They also offered people $1,200 for therapy.
It may have gone up to $5,000, I haven't confirmed that, for anybody who feels they need therapy as a result of the revelations.
But yeah, it's a hard... I agree with you, Matthew.
I feel a lot of compassion for some of these people, yeah.
And it's worth, I think, mentioning just the dramatic upheavals in logic that are necessary to keep going in 3HO and as a kundalini yoga teacher.
One of the striking things in the business of fashion piece was Katie, who had made claims to this direct connection with Yogi Bhajan, being quoted as saying, I never met him.
I didn't really know him that well.
And we see that with a lot of kundalini yoga teachers and people in 3HO.
The same ideas that were horrifying and unspeakable two years ago have now become standard official reasons to keep going.
And when my article came out in 2012, the suggestion that Yogi Bhajan cobbled together his style of yoga that the titles weren't really valid.
That was slander.
That was horrifying.
And now, those are the same reasons that are being used to justify continuing to teach Kundalini Yoga, to continue to offer teacher training.
Well, it wasn't just about him.
He was taken from different teachers.
It's not really, he's not really that important.
We can move forward.
One of the other things that came up in the Business of Fashion article was, and this made me think of your remarks, Stacey, about meeting Guru Jagat.
Did you say it was like 2008?
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, Sherman is describing being at the Rama Institute and she says that while you're there, if you're in the middle of a meditation, if you open one eye, You might recognize a face or two, a creative director of a fashion label, or a beauty entrepreneur.
And I just wanted to ask you about, again, about the demographics that are appealed to here.
You know, when she talks about the social influencers gathering, what do you think Griggs has created, specifically in terms of style, that's so compelling?
Well, I think there's a lot of things, right?
So the typical kundalini yoga teacher, particularly the first-gen variety or those emulating the first generation, you know, they're in their white, very modest Um, the turban's correct.
You know, it's very prescribed.
You know, Katie shows up to class.
Her turban's a little funky.
It might be orange.
She's not wearing white.
She's got big earrings.
She's got glasses.
She's funny.
She doesn't play.
You know, the Kulsa string band.
She doesn't even play synonym car.
She plays world music.
She plays contemporary music.
She has a sense of humor.
So there's a real appeal that it's like, hey, we can still do the hippie yoga, but we can modernize it.
So it's kind of contemporizing um a tried and true thing you know sticking to the sticking to the manual but you know not being so rigid because I think 3HO has a very rigid intensity so it was kind of it's so it's kind of nice to have like you know Um, that bit of fun and flexibility.
Um, I will say, you know, things, you know, when I, there's a couple things going on here.
Let me, let me focus one on the, um, when I took class with her in 2008.
It was much, she was much different.
There has been a transformation.
Um, she wasn't, she had a following.
Um, And she was actually very kind to me.
My mother was very sick at the time.
I was her primary caregiver.
My kundalini yoga classes were a great Respite for me.
I you know, I've done all kinds of yoga, but during that time that practice was valuable and you know, she even sent me a sweet email and I kind of followed her trajectory and I was like, okay go girl.
That's cool.
But it then evolved into something else and What she was able to do was kind of take her contemporary version of it and attract people like, for example, and I find this kind of ironic, one of the earlier wellness influencers here in Los Angeles that
um I think helped propel her was a woman named Amanda Chantal Bacon of Moon Juice and I and she in fact was one of the first people that J.P.
Sears skewered that kind of he did this really funny um you know YouTube video on her that went completely viral I mean I I would say it probably launched him and it was basically her just talking about like her you know Her day of eating and like how much it cost from her like reishi mushrooms to her you know pressed juice to her like pearl dust.
Face cream, you know, it was just this whole riff and all the women's magazines picked up on it.
And so Bacon, you know, became a pretty regular student over at Rama.
There's another woman named Shiva Rose, who's another kind of fashion beauty influencer here.
Who has since moved to Austin, by the way.
Wow.
As you do.
As Juan does.
And you know, so she's in Venice.
She's got, so this fashion, so let's talk about this demographic, right?
So they're, they're in the fashion business, but they're also in the wellness space.
So they meditate, they eat well, they go to Erewhon.
A lot of them who are mothers are anti-vaxxers before COVID, what that meant before COVID.
They hold space for you, right?
They're in this very kind of superficial business, so they're looking for a spiritual outlet, more meaning.
And they're white.
And so as COVID comes, this doesn't happen to people like me.
I meditate, I eat well, this doesn't apply to me.
But then there's also a lot of virtue signaling, right?
So it's this, you know, convoluted mess whereby She is compelling, and then she creates her own fashion line, too.
I mean, she has her own style.
On the parallel tract is the White Sun Music.
And as they gain following and traction, and then they win a Grammy.
So then it all converges in this space of, we're Grammy winning, we're fashionable, we're in vogue, we're in women's wear daily.
We're in all these magazines and so it's this incredible ascent.
Stacey, it sounds like part of what you're talking about in this change from 2008 to logging on during the pandemic and you see her coming in with or being on stage with her devices is that it feels like This charismatic hub was created in a very, just on the cusp of a digital explosion.
I mean, 2008 is really before Instagram and online virality.
And all of the sort of affect and the clothes and the aesthetics are all in place to really take off on the internet.
But then people get trapped on the internet.
Yeah, yes.
I think so.
And I think we touched on this in our first episode.
I mean, the social media is just, you know, at this frenetic pace that I find, I find impressive.
But I also know that those things take a lot of work, as we all know in the media space, producing content.
So it's this, it's this, you know, This roller, not a roller coaster, what do they call it?
You know, you're just constantly going, going, going, and it must be exhausting.
And I, and I, and I think with the added pressure of the pandemic, it can't be easy, but it's also, I don't know, going back to the David Icke thing, I think it's just, you know, pure calculated, let's get clicks, let's get...
Let's get eyeballs.
Let's get people roped in.
I think it's just really not much more than that.
And Philip, I wanted to ask you just on the fashion tip, you know, there is a clear departure that Jagat is making from, you know, the old school.
And I can't help but imagine that Yogi Bhajan himself would have some stern words to say about you know, how she dresses or how she does her turban.
What's your sense of that? - I think the aesthetics of Guru Jaga and Manyat Rama and some of the teachings, it really is a photocopier effect They are, in a sense, imitating people who were imitating people who were following someone in Yogi Bhajan who was presenting a very unusual form of Sikhi and Punjabi culture.
So, in many senses, the script is lost and not only are they much more ignorant of what they are copying and what they are taking from.
But there's, with Yogi Bhajan Long Dead severing their ties with 3HO, there are less guardrails.
And so I think when we talk about cultural appropriation, I think offenses are often much stronger and much deeper the more ignorant the people who are committing the offenses are.
And so, whereas there was maybe something just unusual with early 3HO mimicking a kind of exaggerated aesthetic of proper Sikhs, You know, so much of what we see with Katie and Rama, you know, having this disheveled schmata of a turban with hair flowing out of it, it's absurd.
It's incomprehensible.
And to start selling Jewelry to start selling kind of bejeweled versions of one of the five articles of The Sikh faith, the bracelet or kutta, it's unimaginably offensive.
The names that they're giving people are just like, it's like an AI kind of algorithm, like run amok.
You know, I mentioned before that, you know, if you did a kind of comparison, 3HO people are running around with names like, if you imagine a Punjabi convert to Christianity being, you know, Hallelujah, Holy Bible, Jesus, Smith.
It's absurd.
And I think the combination of ignorance and avarice Has kind of created this bizarre, hyper-offensive, mock version of New Age Sikhi, you know, to refer to one of the powers, one of the kind of stanzas of one of the core Sikh prayers, Japji Sahib, to refer to it as the million dollar mantra that you just like repeat this
You know, like a parrot.
You don't even know what you're saying, but if you just repeat it, the money's gonna roll in.
I mean, how ridiculous is that?
You know, treating other people's fought for lived faith as a kind of tchotchke in itself.
You know, that is, in a sense, one of the tchotchkes that they're selling.
Other people's faith, other people's tradition.
You know, it also occurs to me that the farther away the subculture gets from its real referent, and whether it came by it in earnest or not, The more ignorant it will be, as you say, but the ignorance would have to be almost compensated for by an excess of confidence, too.
Because it's not just that they're changing things, it's that, you know, changing things is a mark of liberation or development, you know?
And that I think ties back to Yogi Bhajan himself, who would both hold up aspects of the Sikh tradition but had no problems denigrating his fellow South Asian co-religionists.
You know, he was always playing both sides against each other, telling Punjabis, oh, these white idiots, they'll do anything I tell them to, but then turning around and telling his students the Punjabis are just these crazy kind of tribal animals who've lost, you know, the real sense of their tradition.
So I think that's In a sense, that's how so much of cultural appropriation works.
When it suits you, you become part of it.
You bring it to you.
When it doesn't suit you, you can do whatever you want with it.
There's no liability.
I've never really thought about this aspect before where, you know, the iconography of somebody like Yogi Bhajan is of the great translator between cultures and between time periods.
And in that way, these figures are often endowed with a kind of shamanic status, that they can straddle two different worlds and communicate one to the other.
But actually, what it sounds like he's doing is the absolute opposite of that.
He's like jamming one culture on one side and then jamming the other on the other side, standing actually as a blockage between the two in some ways.
Very much literally.
It's kind of one of the big unanswered questions that has an obvious answer.
If you have thousands of 3HO people who earnestly desire to convert to Sikhi and to become Sikhs, how come they're not hanging out with 99% of the rest of the Sikhs?
How come they have their own separate gudwaras?
How come they're not in community with other Punjabi Sikhs?
How come their boarding schools in India are set apart?
And I think the obvious answer is, you know, if they were in too much communion and conversation with the rest of the Sikh world, you know, the secret would be out.
They would kind of see that what they were doing was so far afield from the rest of Sikhs.
And I think that's, in many ways, that's why the cultural appropriation at Rama works, is you can bring in endless video montages of Tibetan Buddhist masters.
You can make reference to Sikhism.
But, you know, Stacey and I always say to each other, no one Googles.
No one knows.
You can say whatever you want to an ignorant audience.
You can speak freely inside a bubble.
You can play whatever games you want if there's no accountability and no one knows any better.
More recently, there's a kind of amazing Instagram account called Rama Wrong, and they've collected bits and pieces of Griggs' communications and social media stuff over the last little while.
And one post criticized Griggs for some, what seemed to be really racially insensitive comments in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement.
That she referred to protesters as cockroaches.
And so I'm wondering, is that part of a piece with the rest of the culture?
Is this a departure in terms of Bajan's own political sensitivities?
Is this surprising to you?
I kind of think it's more specific to this group because they have no accountability.
They're not affiliated with KRI.
There's a lot of people they've left in their wake who are upset, who were spiritually abused, financially abused.
Emotionally abused.
So they saw what happened with an Olive Branch report, with my piece, with Philip's piece, with the Facebook group, the Beyond the Cage group.
And so they wanted accountability.
They wanted somebody to hold Rama accountable.
And I think Personally, I think that's more what that is.
Almost like a cry for help us, you know, we need we need somebody to like put a check on this and there's nobody to do it.
And it's been met with if you follow Rama's reaction to it.
They say they're not paying attention to it, but often there are direct posts that respond to what went up there.
And she even started a streetwear line called Cancel Cancel Culture.
So, you know, to me that's more what it's about.
And there's also It's very emotional, right?
You know, like the work Philip and I do, and I'm not judging it, but there's like more of an emotional response as opposed to like an activist, let's do something about it response.
Right.
That's my observation about wrong my wrong.
I think this brings up the interesting question of how has the internet changed things?
What does the wellness world look like with the internet in 2020 as opposed to, say, Yogi Bhajan in 1980, pre-internet?
And I think we can look at this on two different levels.
There's the basic reality of social media.
You're able to curate images and content.
You're able to access people and bring in students and customers.
As the business of fashion peace mentions.
You're able to find 20,000 people around the world and have them give you $20 a month.
So in some ways the internet is incredibly good for people like Katie and the wellness industry.
I think the flip side of that is on a deeper level the internet prevents the keeping of secrets.
It also allows I think one of the real critical moments in the history of 3HO, I think that only really bore full fruit recently, were the online forums of ex-members that started in the late 1990s.
Before then, If you were kicked out of 3HO, if you left, that was it.
Goodbye.
You had very little contact with people.
People on the inside didn't know what happened to people who left, only the exaggerated stories that Yogi Bhajan and others would tell.
Oh, they're a prostitute in a truck stop somewhere in Wyoming doing drugs.
The first online forums allowed ex-members to compare notes, to share stories, and it also created an accessible place where a lot of current members could peer over the fence and see what was going on.
I think that was critical to building the doubts that built up to a critical mass.
So I think it goes both ways.
The internet allows institutions like Rama to thrive in a global pandemic, but it also provides the tools to unearth things that are going on and allow critics to find each other and be more vocal.
Well, certainly in all of the pieces that I've worked on that, you know, look at institutional abuse in modern yoga groups and then also the one that I did on Shambhala International, the story has been the same.
That it's really taken online forums and Facebook groups to build a kind of critical mass of confidence amongst survivors and their supporters to be able to break through and kind of pull history into a kind of vibrant present, but a history that was never quite forgotten.
It was just kind of filed away in a library somewhere.
And I think with Rama it's almost like a microcosm of The larger issue.
And I think, you know, we've talked about that, the photocopy part, but I, I do know that over the years people did report ethical abuses to KRI from Rama.
That there were, you know, I know of, of, you know, maybe five, there may be more.
And KRI did nothing.
So You know, even when people did try to point out some of the ethical breaches, there was no accountability.
So it continued on, much like the abuses in the Kundalini world continued on.
And I think that brings up the really good point of it's easier to look at Abusive individuals.
I think it's much more accurate and much more difficult to look at structures of abuse and abusive organizations.
You know, Yogi Bhajan has been dead for over a decade and a half.
Why are so many of his students continuing to abuse and exploit people this long after he's gone.
It's because, you know, there was a creation of a culture.
There was institutional support or, you know, deliberate institutional avoidance of these things that allowed them to grow and fester.
So I think that it's a much more difficult thing and it goes back to, you know, digging the car in the parking lot.
It's easy to say, we're not going to mention Yogi Bhajan's name, we're going to take this picture off and march ahead.
I think it's much more important and much more difficult to realize that you're engaging in a practice and organizations that were built on assumptions and foundations that facilitated abuse too.
Well, speaking about the digging the car and moving on again and not mentioning Yogi Bhajan, one sort of point of intrigue I wanted help clearing up is that
You mentioned it a little bit, Philip, but Hari Jiwan and Guru Jagat both claim lineage with Tibetan lamas, and I saw this come to the fore after the abuse revelations came out and really swelled to the surface, and it was almost like, oh, well, we have, you know, lots of masters who endorse and authenticate what we do, and some of them are in Tibet, and we bow before their lotus feet.
What's up with that?
Is there anything there?
There's one famous, not famous I guess, but there's a poem video that they released somewhere over the summer where it looks like they're filming themselves either in Dharamsala or in Nepal or something like that.
Dharma King!
Diamond Master!
Seller of toner.
Right, you've got it.
Yeah, so what's going on with that?
Is there anything to that?
Did Hari Jivan have a Tibetan Lama that he was in samaya with or something?
We've been wondering.
That's something we've been curious about ourselves.
Okay, so it sounds inconclusive.
As the son of a poker player, I would say if you had the hand, you would have flipped the cards over by now.
In my research on Yogi Bhajan's lineage, it's laughable.
When you go to his lectures, when you read what he was actually saying about his alleged teachers, or about the historical figures that he twisted into his lineage, it's laughable.
You know, when Yogi Bhajan claimed that, you know, one of his co-students with his supposed yoga teacher was a Tibetan Lama, Lama Lilan Po, that no one's heard of.
And all Yogi Bhajan can say is, yeah, he was a cool dude.
We used to try wrestling moves out on each other.
It's laughable.
Even when members of 3HO met the descendants of the person that Yogi Bhajan claimed was his yoga teacher, where's the proof?
Where's the photographs?
You know, surely someone must have taken a photograph of this great yoga center where the Mahan Tantric once resided.
There's nothing.
Where's the evidence?
Show it.
Yeah, whereas the rest of the charismatic leader's legacy is meticulously photographed for marketing purposes.
So, you know, it's like the main thing is missing, right?
Exactly.
It's shrouded in mystery.
And like Stacey and I like to say to each other, no one Googles.
No one Googles and the bar is really low.
The burden of proof, when you're pushing an imagined lineage on your students, the burden of proof is only, will they buy it?
It's like Carnival Sideshow burden of proof.
If you throw enough images of Tibetan Buddhists, You know, your students will probably make that conclusion.
Oh, they recognize him.
What are they going to do?
Are they going to, like, call up their friend in Dharmasala?
You know, are they going to, like, are they going to investigate it themselves?
No, they'll just take the assumption.
I just, it just struck me how much Racism is involved in all of that.
I don't know why.
I mean, I'm sure I've reflected on it before, but to, I don't know, just use the image of the Tibetan sage as kind of like a prop Prop furniture.
And, you know, you're not going to keep the name, you're not going to remember the name.
And this Rinpoche is the same as that one.
And, yeah, it's really, it's extraordinary, actually, to think on.
Prop furniture.
It's using other people's traditions as furniture to decorate your room.
Just like, you know, selling jewelry and taking donations for names is selling Sikhism as tchotchkes.
So in watching Kandahar, Katie Griggs interview David Icke.
She's gazing at him, she's nodding, she's soaking everything in and I can't get it out of my head that this is kind of how the previous generation of Kundalini Yoga teachers or students gazed at somebody like Yogi Bhajan and passively kind of took everything in.
And so there's this I don't know, recurrence of knowledge coming from a male charismatic leader, and I'm wondering if that's really central to the kind of culture or the gender dynamics of this group.
I would say that's something, yes, I would say the old 3HO is a very patriarchal, you're the Khalsa woman, but I'm not sure that that would necessarily apply to what Katie's doing.
I mean, I do, or Guru Jagat, I do know that from what I understand Hari Jeevan is, she is, he is the only one she will really defer to.
So, perhaps that dynamic is in play there, but when she does her interviews, her reality riffing, as she calls them, I feel like she's kind of in charge of that space.
But I don't know, maybe that is at play.
But from my understanding, Hari Jeevan is the only person that she really defers to.
As Stacey mentioned, I think many in the first generation, when you talk to first generation members of 3HO, they came into it in the late 60s and early 70s with this very well-formed paint by numbers image of a guru or a spiritual teacher.
You know, they read too much Autobiography of a Yogi and Carlos Castaneda, and they were looking for a mystic man from the East to show up and give them spiritual truth.
That continues.
Since the death of Yogi Bhajan, there have been I've referred to them as the Kundalini Carpetbaggers, the people who have shown up to, you know, skim cream off the top and, you know, get a good payday with workshops and retreats.
And several of them have been Punjabi Sikh men who play that role well.
They fill that void.
But I think there are different kinds of bonds that students that I've talked to have formed with yogi bhajan senior students and those teachers.
I think we do see like a kind of father figure kind of role, but we also see some kundalini yoga teachers being like the cool uncle that people never had.
And there's also matriarchal connections where people have bonded with prominent female 3HO teachers.
So I think beyond Beyond the surface, I think there's these kind of deeper things that 3HO and Kundalini Yoga and that whole system continues to perpetuate, which continue to bring people in.
This promise of an idealized you and this constant poking at you're never good enough and there's always something wrong with you.
I think those are the two big pulls.
You know, we have secrets, you can get power, you can get perfect health, but also you constantly need to be fixing yourself because you're really screwed up and you're in danger of things going wrong at any moment.
Well, I think it kind of brings me to the last thing that I want to discuss, which is that with regard to the promise of perfect health and well-being and self-actualization, I mean, this is a staple marketing premise within Kundalini Yoga.
I mean, modern yoga in general shares this, but I mean, Yogi Bhajan's promises of optimal or miraculous health are really stand out.
And I'm wondering, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about how Yogi Bhajan lived up to his own marketing, his own ideals?
Sure.
I mean, towards the end of his life, I mean, he was in a wheelchair, he had oxygen, he had had a kidney transplant, he had lost some toes, he was diabetic.
Heart surgery?
Heart surgery.
And are there lifestyle factors involved in all of that?
Like, was he not doing the practices that he was talking about?
I think Yogi Bhajan's lack of yogic practice is telling.
It's like the thing that was mentioned recently about Steve Jobs and other people in Silicon Valley.
Are they letting their kids use iPads and cell phones all the time?
No.
If you want a real testament to what people believe, See what they do.
Was Yogi Bhajan doing kundalini yoga?
You know, ask anyone who was close to him how many times they saw him doing the same things that he was teaching others.
He never was.
Of course, there's all kinds of reasons for that.
Oh, he's a master.
He was, you know, he was dealing with people's karma.
I think a point of comparison is to look at Mark Singleton's book, Yoga Body, when he is interviewing uh people who were part of the hatha yoga revival he's interviewing people who are in their 90s right in their early 100s I think the aging first generation of 3HO are all too human.
They're getting old, they're suffering from chronic disease, they're not in radiant health.
You know, it's one thing, I mean, with other heroes in the modern yoga movement, we have evidence that there's periods, initial periods, learning periods of intensive practice that for somebody like Mr. Iyengar, you know, continue throughout his entire life even though he might have wound up in chronic pain because he didn't really understand biomechanics that well.
You know, Patabi Joyce was an avid practitioner of course.
It's hard for me to believe that, like I'm wondering if Yogi Bhajan had some earlier experience of at least the somatic, I don't know, entrancement of the things that he was teaching because they were very effective in terms of getting people into altered states.
It seems like he knew what he was doing in terms of biohacking.
And so I'm wondering if he guessed on that or if he did have his own experience, whether he kept up with it or not.
Early kundalini yoga classes, 1968, 1970, as they were described to me by people who were there, it was kind of pedal to the metal joyriding.
Intense pranayama, exhaustive exercise.
And I think it's easy to look at people who had an ecstatic experience and assume that that was the intention.
Other than if you get people doing heavy breathing and exhausting themselves, they're going to have an experience.
Right.
That's just how it's going to happen.
So I think it was, if he was tinkering with it, he was tinkering with it after the fact and kind of haphazardly.
He was a customs inspector.
I think that should be nailed above the door.
He was a customs inspector.
He was very adept at reading people, seeing what people were thinking and expecting.
What was in their bags, as it were.
Exactly.
Right.
And what was in their bags was LSD, and he was going to teach them how to get high on their breath and not on drugs.
Right.
Which, I mean, brings up the obvious point of, you know, a bunch of people who smoked tons of pot and dropped a bunch of acid, hyperventilating and working out in a small room, and suddenly they're seeing lights and colors.
Like, do you really need to investigate that?
Or is it kind of clear what that is?
But the point about Yogi Bhajan's physical health, you know, beyond the hagiographic, you know, he's taking on karma and this, you know, the suffering of a saint, you know, I think we can see that.
Again, it's like the tip of the iceberg.
That's like the most harmless example of his hypocrisy, of doing the opposite of what he was claiming in public.
You know, he claimed to be, you know, a yoga master.
He claimed to be teaching yoga and a healthy lifestyle, which he wasn't following at all, which is the least egregious of his offenses.
You know, he claimed to be a champion of women while he's serially abusing, raping, battering, and grooming women.
He's claiming to be, you know, like a saintly patriarchal figure while he's Breaking up families, undermining people's well-being, taking away people's livelihoods and inheritances.
His physical end, I think, it's the least offensive, but it's also emblematic of who he was as a person in general.
Now, with all of the claims of optimal health in the history and, you know, the deception behind them all, Stacey, you were mentioning that already within the sort of landscape of The spirituality in 2008 that you encountered around Guru Jagat that, you know, there were anti-vaxxers already in the mix.
And now, of course... I actually met more when she opened her studio in Venice.
Oh, okay.
So that was later.
Yes.
Right, so the year then would have been 2013 when her studio opened.
Okay, so a little bit more recent.
So, I mean now, of course, we have a group that has this history of making health claims or having insight into You know, optimizing our bodies and immune systems and so on.
And this is sort of bled over into, you know, Guru Jagat having confidence to speak her mind on COVID.
And I'm wondering if this is, again, part of a... I think I know the answer to this.
It seems to be part of a piece.
Does that sound right?
Yes, I mean, what I know is mostly what I see on social media, but the sovereign body I meditate, create, keep going, keep up, which is very 3HO, keep up with it no matter what.
So I think yeah it's all part and parcel of the of the same of the same thing.
Look at, read a book, don't look at the mainstream media, follow your intuition, you know all these signals that we see across the board in a lot of The COVID denialism.
But then, you know, then you look at some of the other things and it says safety protocols and social distancing.
And I've seen pictures of Harij even in a mask.
So what's going on?
I wonder if there's a If there's a, I don't know, a diplomatic or there's a term in Tibetan religious culture for skillful means where a teacher will say, well, I don't really believe in what I'm doing, but I'm doing it for the benefit of, you know, my students who are, you know, don't have an accurate understanding of the world.
So I wonder if the mask might be in that category, because from all I can see, it looks like Rama just does not think that COVID is a problem.
Again, to use the awful clichéd phrase, if it makes dollars, it makes cents.
If you establish yourself in a middle ground where you're not openly defiant, But you're still open.
If you're nervous and you would come to the retreat if you see there's social distancing, yeah, great.
If you're going to come to a retreat because we're not going to let some phony pandemic stop us, then that works too.
You know, I think it's comparable to the social media messages and the retreats of someone like Guru Muk, who, you know, you don't have people openly defying it, you know.
We're not going to do a meditation where we sing in each other's faces, but it's also very knowingly thumbing its nose at the pandemic and everyone else who's being overly cautious.
It just struck me the way you phrased that, that what's actually being dismissed is just the notion of external authority, right?
That the choices that are made within the group might align with the advice of public health officials, but that's not why we're going to choose to follow them.
We're going to choose to follow them because we say that we will follow them, but we won't be told what to do.
I think that's right on the nose, especially with this particular group, yeah.
And so much of the messaging and language avoids any kind of direct accounting or comparison.
The whole language of Kundalini Yoga in the wellness world, it's about radiance and vitality and being blissful and bountiful and having an energized aura Who can measure any of those things?
Yeah, it's not like...
It's not oxygen level.
Yeah, I was just going to say that.
I was just going to say that I've got my oximeter here at home, which I kind of like obsessively check every day to see that it's at 95 or whatever.
And that really doesn't, that doesn't clock with vitality.
So you're never, you're never fully responsible for those claims because no one can measure them.
And it also syncs up with the nature of COVID.
You know, a disease that is largely asymptomatic and has a low mortality rate.
You rarely have to be confronted with the consequences of your actions if you're spreading it.
The vast majority of people who spread it They don't experience symptoms.
They themselves don't die.
So there's a real kind of really lends itself to a self-centered point of view where you don't have to worry.
You don't have to mitigate your behavior in that worldview.
As expected, a number of people who were familiar with Katie Griggs and the Rama Institute reached out after episode 36 a number of people who were familiar with Katie Griggs and the Rama Institute reached out Thank you.
The majority of them were not ready to go on record.
But I talked with him about what it felt like to do volunteer work or seva for Rama, what the general professional vibe was like, and how central fashion and the beautiful people scene of LA are to Rama's brand, but also Grieg's own history.
In fact, just last evening, a source sent me some older materials on Griggs' past in modeling and theater, including a 1998 newspaper clipping about a Steve Martin play she was in at Shepherd College back in West Virginia.
So I heard also about Hari Jeevan, Stephen Hartzell, and his alleged pervasive influence over Griggs and Rama in general, especially the partnerships in the group.
And there was some interesting stuff about Rama's obsession with technology and extremely high-end audio gear for their hypnotic, trance-inducing guided meditations.
So I'm definitely going to follow the story.
But in lieu of more hard reporting, I wanted to explore two things in this closing segment.
One is the way in which Griggs and Hartzell bizarrely use the trappings of Tibetan Buddhism for extra authentication.
And the second thing is prompted by some feedback I received from the moderator of a Facebook group called Beyond the Cage, the 3HO Yogi Bhajan Kundalini Yoga Aftermath.
So, I'm going to offer a correction to a few things that I mentioned in episode 36, but then also a reflection on the very important but complicated role that Facebook groups have played in the Me Too movement in yoga and Buddhism.
First up, Katie Griggs' Tibetan Vacay.
I'm focusing on this because it brings so many of the outward-facing threads of the yoga commodification machine into sharp view.
Actually, HD view, as we'll see from one of the videos I'll review.
And these are crucial, in my opinion, for understanding how and why this culture becomes a hotbed for conspirituality and QAnon.
I think the short story is that its basic relationship to reality is already very thin.
So, in May of 2019, Griggs took Hartzell and a whole gang of Rama Institute followers on a yatra, or pilgrimage, to Tibet.
And in the bits of media that the trip has left behind, we can see all of the core elements at play.
So, a completely decontextualized commodification of religious music, ritual, and culture as imagery and aesthetics for a personal journey.
spiritual experience and practice as a spectacle, and unwarranted confidence in one's knowledge of a complex foreign culture and also this sense that the world is simply something to consume.
So, first of all, what is a yatra?
It's a real thing.
It's a core ritual element in Indo-Tibetan religious traditions.
It's a journey, understood to be more important than the destination, that is undertaken in hardship to venerate the place in which a scripture was revealed or a saint had a transcendental experience.
You're supposed to do it barefoot, ideally begging for food on the way.
Like, it's a real thing.
It's saying, this is the place on earth where my meaning and guidance comes from and I'm going to walk on this path with utter awareness and devotion that my life is real and fragile and wondrous and I could die right here.
And that the earth itself bears witness to all of this.
Of course, this is not unique to Indo-Tibetan culture.
Catholics have been walking the 30 days of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain for centuries.
So, a yatra is not a vacation or a tourist thing.
There are no porters.
There are no hot towels on the airplane or mints on your hotel pillow.
And there is no Instagram posting.
So, why do groups like Rama go?
Griggs describes it in terms of geomancy.
Geomancy means the sacred grid of the earth and the celestial grid and how to configure ourselves in these grids in order to receive the most energy and in order to create spaces that are kind of like spaceships, basically.
And that's, you know, what we do at these places.
So this is really a vision in which the world exists as a kind of spiritual playground with various levels and rides, or a scavenger hunt in which treasures have been hidden just for you.
They're yours for the taking.
Now, in a blog post, a Rama employee or volunteer unintentionally discloses the cult function of the Rama Yatra.
So I'll read some excerpts here.
Without question, Ramayatras fulfill the definition of yatra that Yogi Bhajan gave in 1997.
A yatra is nothing more than a man going to his higher self.
I've been on a few Ramayatras at this point and each one has been an accelerant for deepening into my soul.
It's an inner excavation of sorts when we go to the most energetically rich power places on the planet and Guru Jagat Harijvan and the Rama crew know how to give you the best opportunities to get the most out of your epic adventure.
One, you get access to hidden temples and secret places of power.
In Tibet, we were able to meditate in Milarepa's cave and the few hours that we spent there alone changed my life.
The Great Yogi's Cave is not something you can simply simply do a Google search for, and it required us to drive through tiny villages in rural Tibet as our guides knocked on locals' doors to ask for directions to this secret place.
We eventually found ourselves driving up a steep, winding road and then hiking up to this magnificent PowerPoint.
2.
Speaking of itineraries, you won't get one.
Because the primary intention is always about getting you to the most sacred, energetic spaces possible, you'll often go off script and will get to flow with the poetic spontaneity of these trips.
The non-linear nature of these high-energy places often requires a different kind of fluidity as many of them don't operate on Western 9-5 hours.
In fact, as was the case of Milarepa's cave, many places aren't even open to tour groups at all and will involve an extra amount of intuitive guidance from Guru Jagat and Hari Jivan.
So be prepared to surrender to a flow that will lead you to the deepest, most sacred places along your journey.
3.
The group energy creates an incredible energy field.
Without fail, every single Ramayatra group that I've been present for has been an amazing combination of people from all over the world who have come together to reach new realms of consciousness.
You'll spend a week or more together transforming in ways seen and unseen, traveling through scenic landscapes, meditating at sacred sites, decoding ancient mysteries, and so much more.
So what I love about this description is that it very transparently lays out a series of cult activities, but they're pitched as though they were a high school trip to Europe with the jazz band or something like that.
So secret access to holy knowledge that nobody else has.
No itinerary, so you have to surrender to the intuition of Griggs and Hartzell.
Also, group energy.
Now, if this is already not peak neocolonial vacationism in which any old exotic place becomes a backdrop and the people who live there are props for your spiritual adventure, the whole vibe around Katie Griggs' Tibetan Vacay is that she's claiming authentication through a kind of pseudo-devotion to Tibetan Buddhism.
And this hits close to home because I was involved in this culture for a while.
There are hints that somehow Griggs and Hartsell have some relationships with Tibetan lamas and clerics, but how they show these relationships smells exactly like cult propaganda.
So now I have to take a side trip into the propaganda work of Hartsell's wife, Mandave, who's about 30 years his junior, and I want to say that she is like his Lenny Riefenstahl, but Lenny Riefenstahl was a talented filmmaker.
Okay, so after Pamela Dyson's memoir of institutional abuse in Kundalini Yoga was released in January of 2020, Mondave released a series of four god-awful films.
Now, you can always tell in-house high-demand group films that are directed towards engaging and investing in current members and encouraging them.
They are total garbage.
They're gibberish from the outside.
It almost feels dirty and voyeuristic watching them because they're not meant for you.
So this is what Hartzell says about the films on YouTube.
In 2020, when her kundalini yoga lineage was attacked, filmmaker Mandev responded, The Futile Flow of Fate, The Golden Chain, Reflective Energy,
and now with the winter solstice, Love of Lineage and now with the winter solstice, Love of Lineage are four films that reveal a previously unknown energetic current existing in the lineage and explicate the mystic mystery of the sacred golden chain of teachers.
The This is high-level spirituality using film to activate cosmically connected thought forms.
Deeply researched, historically eye-opening, Mondave weaves images in a mesmerizing tantric formation and opens a portal of understanding that is as new as it is unique.
Using the music of the Grammy Award winning band White Sun, the films create a dream space alive with form, begetting form, understanding, deepening understanding, knowledge becoming insight and clarity expanding, growing, becoming.
A poetic mandala for traveling the spiritual path.
Required viewing for anyone connected with the Kundalini Yoga lineage and enlightening for anyone who has ever looked into the sky and wondered why.
So I appreciate that Hari Jeevan is supportive of Mandev, but all four films are these incoherent, weirdly edited brainfarts of unrelated archival footage of Yogi Bhajan and various Kundalini teachers, and there's just this prayer that the insipid Kundalini folk music soundtrack keeps the viewer from having some kind of psychotic split.
Now, one detail I should mention is that the Golden Chain is this old Kundalini Yoga chestnut about the authentication of teachings.
Every link, reportedly, provides continuous access to some primeval source.
And here's where DSLIP's research is just so useful, because it really shows that that's not a thing when we're talking about the inventions of Yogi Bhajan.
So, the title Love of Lineage is in the same boat.
And the weirdest thing about this zone of the Rama grift is their insistence that they have links to Tibet.
Now, they don't cite where this comes from.
There's just a lot of fashion and interior design a la Tibet.
I mean, one source literally said to me, I just think they like the style.
As you heard in the second part of my interview with Philip and Stacey, I brought up this question of whether Hartzell's Tibetan street cred is legit or not, and they were very polite to confess that they were wondering about that too.
But one thing I think is safe to comment on is that as the legacy of Yogi Bhajan went down in the flames of abuse revelations in 2020, It was pretty useful to have a Tibetan Lama or two, real or imagined, in one's back pocket.
So, May 2019, the Rama crew does their deluxe yatra to Tibet, and in the fall they publish this film as a kind of memento and birthday gift to Hartzell.
Now this film is not made by Mandav because it has some skill to it.
HD rolling steadicam montages of the Rama Gang visiting Agompa in some mountainous region.
There's Griggs in Heart Cell meditating, or pretending to meditate, in the Shrine Room.
And underneath it all, Griggs shows off her poetic talent.
Mirror Dharma King, when my head rolls onto the floor in front of you, even if you're Even your radiant feet become razor-edged looking glass.
Switch back curves of obsidian to quickly luminous crystal and then at once completely disappearanced.
I blink and your eyeglassed eyes are possibly looking towards me, opened and closed simultaneously.
How do you do that?
Great.
Unshakeable Master of Odeana.
Lakeborn Lord of Odeana.
Unsurpassable secret mantras fill your unknowable lion-peddled mind and spill from the endless songs of space dakinis, their double-dharma tongues, terma from the two-hearted cloud-dancing mountain kings of Rigdon,
The Great Himal Pass of unimaginable snow ethers cover over the even more dangerous path.
Once, every parallel great compassion moon, your mirrored forehead turns in lotus light as we, with one blizzard glance, have the glimmer treasure of fortunate eons to serve the copper-colored mountain have the glimmer treasure of fortunate eons to serve the copper-colored mountain of glory by your grace Okay.
So we have some really nice unidentified Tibetan Buddhist monks chanting in their
It's all very atmospheric and beautiful and eerie and it's also as appropriative as fuck.
And Griggs hits a number of sexy notes.
Also she talks about the Therma.
These are Buddha's uh, legendarily hidden teachings in the natural world.
Like, you know, there might be a beautiful river stone that the, uh, change in temperature will crack open at some point.
And then the mystic will be able to read a new scripture inside of it.
Uh, she talks about the Rigdons who are the primordial Kings of Tibet, These are the guys that Chogyam Trungpa used to hallucinate talking to when he was drunk.
She throws in some spiritualized tantra violence as well.
And you know, it kind of makes me sad because Griggs clearly has talent as a writer.
And it's not bad, this poem.
It's a pretty reasonable rendition of Tibetan tantric literature.
It kind of reminds me of this Dutch rapper named Lange Frans, who was really popular before the pandemic, but then he got totally red-pilled and he started rapping about QAnon.
I came across him because the QAnon Anonymous podcast clipped him in episode 123.
Yeah.
Lange Frans.
Benji op de beat.
Welkom op het allerleipste festival.
Je hebt geen kaartje nodig, want je bent er al.
Dit is de fall van de kabal.
Where we go one, we go all.
I mean, I don't know anything about rap, really, but that sounds pretty crunchy.
And one of the very good points that the QAnon Anonymous staff make about all of the Q musicians is that they could have just developed that.
And I have the same question about Griggs.
She's a writer?
I mean, cool!
I'm thinking about her theater days back in college and the little bit of modeling she did.
And also about how being frustrated in the arts has led a number of charismatic folks throughout history towards very weird politics and ambitions.
But what the film also makes me think about is that up until 2010 or so, yoga business owners who did these spiritual vacations would really concentrate on buying up religious tchotchkes for resale back home.
So I remember visiting religious articles shops in Dharamsala and Kathmandu where all the white yoga people would be buying up piles of thangkas and murtis and And then have them shipped back by container packed in shredded newsprint and wrapped up in brown paper.
So the boxes would arrive several months later and, you know, the studio admin would pull them out and dust everything off and mark that stuff up by a thousand percent.
But now it seems that the main export might be the selfie films posted to social or brought back for editing and final cut.
And this doesn't feel like an accident to me, but rather an acceleration of commodification.
The profit margin on the material tchotchkes is high, but the spectacle of being in Tibet, of turning Tibet into your spiritual movie set, of being seen being spiritual in Tibet, that's priceless.
Especially when everyone is cooped up at home.
Finally, I'd like to issue a couple of corrections and then reflect on something.
And this comes from a notification I got that Suzanne Jordan, who moderates the Facebook group Beyond the Cage, the 3HO Yogi Bhajan Kundalini Yoga Aftermath, offered a couple of minor corrections and then an observation as well.
First of all, I called the old website that tracked the institutional abuse of Kundalini Yoga, the wacky world of Yogi Bhajan.
It's actually the wacko world of Yogi Bhajan.
I also said that Pamela Dyson was in 3HO for decades, but it was actually 16 years.
I said that her book came out in 2019, but I got the year wrong.
It was 2020.
And I said that Pamela is 73.
Three, when she's actually 77, so I apologize for those.
But more importantly, Jordan pointed out that I framed the relationship between survivor testimony and historical research in a troubling way, according to her.
So she quotes a passage in which I say, quote, What I can say about Deslip's essay absolutely is that without it, there would be no I don't think that Pamela Dyson's memoir would have made the incredible, resounding thunderclap that it did.
Of course, her book also was ushered into the culture through the Me Too movement, but really what happened was that once there was a strong and very visible first-person testimony, direct testimony, then Deslip's work on the actual culture of Kundalini Yoga was absolutely foundational to understanding how many, many people had been deceived.
Now, Jordan maintains that, she writes in her comment, Pamela's book took off because it was honest and real.
It sparked something in all of us who read it and we knew it was true.
It was familiar because she spoke the language we used then.
The Me Too movement had us perfectly poised to speak out.
I don't think this had anything to do with a scholarly paper about the roots of Kundalini Yoga.
Jordan also emphasized that the Facebook group was started within 10 days of Dyson's memoir being published, and it played a major role in revealing her story, but then also supporting those who were telling it, and also those who came with their own stories.
Now, Jordan brings up a lot of interesting points that give me the chance to pull back the curtain a little on my experience of the process of whistleblowing and allyship in stories like this.
And first of all, I just want to say that she's totally correct that I should have said more about the Facebook group, so I apologize for that.
The group has close to 6,000 members and it's been a hub for former and current Kundalini Yoga 3HO members and their allies.
The activity has been vital and sometimes conflictual as we can expect when any legacy is deconstructed and it's probably had really healing impacts for many.
And I also want to point out that it's part of a cluster of groups that are doing similar work.
There is a Shambhala Open Discussion group, which centered around the abuse revelations about Chogyam Trungpa and Mipham Mukpo, his son, and also Project Satya, which is a meeting place for the survivors of abuse in Sivananda Yoga.
And on Reddit, there's also a Shambhala Buddhism sub that has been very influential as well.
And these are just the ones that I'm most familiar with.
I'm sure there are dozens of others.
What I can say about what I've seen in these groups is that they have been lifelines to former members who are now scattered around the world and who have had to cope with their recovery alone.
These are people who haven't seen each other in decades and they're suddenly able to pour their hearts out about experiences they've had to suppress.
Sometimes they're reintroducing themselves to each other with their birth names because when they were in the group they only knew each other by the names that the leader had given them.
And the posting is incredibly intense.
There's disclosures, confessions, expressions of horror and outrage.
There's a lot of anger that needs to be processed, but then also conflict breaking out over how to proceed, how to view the situation, whether to abandon the whole thing or whether to reform it, which brings up this awful question of whether there is anything to reform.
And to give just one example that will predictably bring up conflict as content, if a person brings the language of cult dynamics into any discussion in a forum like this, it'll have a polarizing effect.
Some people will feel totally liberated by that framework, but others will feel intolerable shame.
Now, because of this intensity, these groups can nurture really strong bonds between people.
But those bonds can also be fragile if they are built in part on a shared agreement about how to think about the situation.
Because over time, people change what they think.
And that can be hard within an activist movement, especially a movement that is hyper-vigilant around issues of betrayal.
All of this is to say, these groups not only are central to all of these waves of the Me Too movement in yoga, Buddhism, New Age spirituality, they also take a shit ton of work to maintain and moderate, and they can cause a lot of heartbreak and unfairness, whether real or perceived, when it comes to who gets their comments deleted or who gets banned from groups.
There's also a problem of intersectional focus.
Every survivor group I have knowledge of has struggled internally on whether to encourage or even allow broader political discussions.
So the question would be, is this group the appropriate place in which to discuss white supremacy?
How can you say no, given the fact that it impacts everything?
But how can you say yes, on the other hand, without shifting the original focus of the group?
Was that original focus too narrow?
Was it wrong?
The biggest confusion of 2020 in Survivor support Facebook groups was that some folks started to use them, and I think they did this in good faith, to either normalize or to boost QAnon.
This is a really painful situation.
These are groups formed by people who may have very different worldviews, but they share the desire to expose the real conspiracy of institutional abuse in a yoga school or a Buddhist organization.
So some of them bring in what seems naturally related from their point of view.
The conspiracy theorizing of QAnons.
So I heard about and also watched this unfold, and I watched how it pitted lifelong feminist survivor advocates against each other.
Those who focused on evidence-based abuse histories versus those who distrusted all of the typical channels of reporting and who earnestly believed that the Me Too movement was a gateway to realizing the truth of QAnon.
Now for those who participate in these groups, they can constitute a major part of reality for a long time.
Folks can spend whole days in dialogue on these pages, processing, taking in new data, connecting, finding new and old friends, remembering and sharing trauma.
And for them, it feels immersive.
And so, it makes sense that Jordan would chafe against my highlighting of the work of relative outsiders to that very crucial process.
But the other thing I'll acknowledge is that Jordan's comment communicates this fact of being overlooked.
And this resonates with and can rub salt in the wound of the survival process itself.
Because with all of these organizations, we're talking about how institutional abuse was allowed to continue precisely because survivors were silenced, overlooked, or had their stories co-opted.
And reporters swing in and it looks like they might be doing the same thing and they have to really take care not to replicate that pattern.
But there's something else I'm going to suggest, too, pointing again to Matt Chrisman's analogy about online political movements being like shipbuilding in a bottle.
He says that progressive movements spend all this time and meticulous care on building a ship that they think will go somewhere, but then they realize the ship is in a bottle on Zuckerberg's desk and he's just looking at it and being entertained by it and of course making money from it.
So I'm going to suggest that part of the tension in these groups comes from something similar.
That here's a movement of like-minded people who seem to be building something new in relation to an established power structure.
But how exactly does the Beyond the Cage group relate to Kundalini Yoga and 3HO as institutions?
How does Shambhala Open Discussion relate to Shambhala?
Or Satya to Sivananda Yoga?
I mean, there are some impacts, definitely, but there's also this kind of unresolvable standoff between two orders of reality, between online activism and brick-and-mortar assets.
Two of the organizations, Shambhala International and Kundalini Yoga, have completed independent investigations in response to the online activism.
With the Satya Project, online activism actually generated its own independent investigation and funded it too, which was kind of an extraordinary thing to see.
Now, with Shambhala International and Kundalini Yoga, the results of those investigations generally only scratched the surface of the historical abuse and seemed to have done, frankly, little more than make the organizations better at brandwashing.
So they've issued new ethics policies, grievance procedures, new committees, they sponsor workshops on trauma.
They can also tokenistically hire BIPOC presenters to convey wokeness.
But there's a notable lack of material redress.
In a better world, Jordan's Facebook group would be recognized by Kundalini Yoga and 3HO formally.
Maybe main members of it would be hired as consultants.
And most importantly, reparations would be paid out.
With these cases of institutional abuse, we're talking about hundreds if not thousands of lives inalterably damaged, some permanently.
Survivors need more than Facebook groups.
And so there's this grief I often feel in these groups that we've done all of this work and what now?
Is the group now the only community worth belonging to in the aftermath of the cult's collapse?
And how stable will that be?
And what will members share once the passion of their shared disillusionment fades?
Also, I mean, when Facebook finally, and far too late, decided to delete all of those QAnon accounts, I got this shiver up my spine over how fragile these forums are, and how the people who run them, who own them rather, they couldn't care less about how much of people's lives are wrapped up in them.
These big apps have become embedded in our brains, and now when they realize they can cause real harm, they think they can fix things through just amputation?
It doesn't seem right.
So I thought about how Jordan's group could vanish from an AI misreading its content, just like how our Instagram account was taken down for two months probably because the crawler saw that we were using QAnon language and couldn't figure out that we were criticizing it.
Or one of these survivor groups could get nuked by a volunteer moderator who finally loses it because of all of the pressure.
And that would be thousands of posts and perhaps hundreds of thousands of hours of labor gone in an instant.
And if that happens, who is it for?
So, Suzanne, thank you for the fact check and for the feedback.
And thank you also to all moderators in this Me Too era in New Age spirituality, yoga, and Buddhism.
