Imagining the blue light

Lessons from Sri Kumaré

"This is the story of the greatest lie I ever told and of the greatest truth I ever discovered." With these words, Vikram Gandhi announces his documentary film Kumaré.

The lie is obvious. As a second-generation American of Indian descent, he does not understand why so many Americans want to devote themselves to yoga, meditation and all those things he is trying to break away from. He totally cannot understand why they follow all kinds of gurus uncritically.

In an attempt to prove that all gurus are fake and that anyone can be a guru, he decides to become a guru himself. He grows his hair and beard, puts on an orange robe and tries to mimic his grandmother's Indian accent. He renames his middle name, Kumar, to Kumaré. Together with a yoga teacher and another actress, he sets out into the wide world as Sri Kumaré, staff in hand, in search of disciples.

He invents teachings on the fly. He fantasizes the "Kumaré Sutra" with spiritual-sounding nonsense: "The seeker who finds the teacher feeds on the milk of wisdom." He invents "the blue light" on the spot, a blue light of pure love that he carries within himself and can radiate to others. To his surprise everyone experiences this purely fictional blue light.

The movie starts hilariously. As more and more people confide in him their innermost feelings, things get serious. Towards the end, as the moment approaches when he has to unveil his own lie, things get tenuous.

So much for the lie. But what is the truth he discovers?

First of all, he realizes that the encounters he has with people as Kumaré are much more intense, much more "real" than any encounter he had as Vikram Gandhi.

And then he discovers that he himself is experiencing the blue light ...

There have been people who have written down proofs of the existence of God and there have been people who felt they had to prove that God does not exist. But there is no discussion about the blue light. This is fiction, this is imagination. Then how is it possible that he experiences it himself?

Vikram Gandhi here resembles a sorcerer's apprentice who, like a young Harry Potter, playfully waves a magic wand and suddenly sees all kinds of inexplicable phenomena happening around him. Or like a boy who tries to seduce a girl for a bet, not because he loves her, but just to prove that he can. And then discovers that he lies awake all night because all he can think about is her.

While playing a game, he touches on a human reality that is far more real than he ever realized. In doing so, he touches that reality in others and, to his own surprise, he himself is touched in ... Yes, in what? We don't have good words for it. When we start with words like religion, spirituality, the sacred we end up in an endless discussion about what means what.

And yet all over the world you find shrines, temples, churches, practices, priests, teachers ... Each time we recognize it as religion, but when we try to define religion we get anywhere. The great world religions have never been able to arrive at a common definition of religion.

Perhaps we can make a virtue of necessity. If no one can say what religion is, then we can also use the word in all its vagueness and indefinability to refer to .... to something for which we simply have no better words. Let's look at religion as a ubiquitous human activity.

It is an activity that can touch people deeply. That’s hard to ignore. Religion can evoke the fiercest of human emotions. It can lead to love and hate. Religion can motivate war and selfless humanitarian action. So it is not something to be treated carelessly.

In the movie it becomes very clear, also in this movie, how vulnerable people are in these matters. Fortunately, Vikram Gandhi is an "honest trickster”. His intention is to make it clear that no one needs a guru. One critic sharply remarked, “he is quite different from all the other gurus I have known because he does not charge money, does not tell his students what to do, does not abuse his power and does not have sex with his students.” Vikram Gandhi said about this in an interview: “for fake gurus the rules are much stricter than for real gurus.”

We don't have to look far to see the damage done by real gurus. Many people live with a huge spiritual craving, which makes them feel very lonely. Traditional religions have apparently become totally alienated from people. Instead of touching people in what they crave so much, they wallow in self-pity. "People have turned away from God," it sounds. Thus they pave the road for Kumaré and all the others.

Deeply touched and without adequate framework or language, people appear willing to do anything. This human reality is so strong that people are even willing to give up their individual autonomy and allow themselves to be abused mentally, physically and sexually. The comparison with falling in love we made at the beginning, may not be so farfetched.

But what Vikram Gandhi shows is that we all have it in ourselves, that we don't need relationships of power. As the movie progresses, it becomes an increasingly strong plea for emancipation.

It has become self-evident in our time that there is no place for power in sexual relationships. That hasn't always been the way. 50 years ago, people thought very differently. The notion of "rape within marriage” is relatively new and definitely does not exists everywhere in the world. Marital duties are no longer duties to which the obedient wife must submit. The very idea sounds inappropriate to us.

Shouldn't the same be true of the relationship between power and religion? The basic metaphor in the West is that of the shepherd and his flock. Kumaré shows how ridiculously simple it is to stage it. Isn't it high time we realized how inappropriate this is, people being led like a flock of sheep by someone waving a staff? If we only blame the gurus, we will continue to behave like wailing sheep. A teacher can never have more power than the students are willing to give him.

Recently I met someone who was upset after an intensive Zen retreat because the teacher had criticized him for having a problem with authority. But if all those Zen students had had a little more trouble with authority, we wouldn't have had to witness all those scandals in Zen.

That is not to say that there is no place for teachers. I myself have deep respect for many people from whom I have had the privilege to learn. But why should I give that person power? Perhaps we should make a distinction here between natural authority and power, in the sense of "authority deserves respect, power demands it”.

This is also a truth that Kumaré makes visible: a teacher earns respect through the respect he gives to the  student and through the tact with which he deals with the vulnerability of the student. 

April 2013