This week's Time Shift, Gurus, looks at the influence of the guru on British
society. It is followed by Christopher Hitchens' classic World About Us documentary on Bhagwan Sree Rajneesh, The God that Fled.
Indian gurus had been coming to the West since the 19th century,
but their impact was limited to intellectual circles. The age of
the modern guru really began in the 1960s when the Beatles briefly
fell under the spell of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He taught them
how to meditate, and in turn their patronage gave his movement an
enormous publicity boost. By the mid 1970s he was admitting 1/4
million disciples a year.
Gurus offered the British a personal religious experience of the
sort they couldn't find in church and some churchmen, such as Bede
Griffiths, became Christian gurus; seeing a parallel between the
ascetism of Francis of Assisi and the example of eastern gurus.
The programme contains footage, shot by Christopher Hitchens, of
a guru called Rajneesh. He was the most notorious of all eastern
gurus, because of his teachings on sex, which he claimed was a way
to enlightenment. He ran an ashram in Poona, India which had up
to 2,000 (mainly western) followers a day. He had a large following
in Britain - who were known as the Orange people because he had
told them to dress in the colours of sunrise.
Since the 1980s the term guru has come to be applied to anyone
who markets any idiosyncratic knowledge. We profile Tom Peters -
the first "management guru" and explore the influence
of the "lifestyle guru".
This programme includes an interview with the Maharishi, rarely
seen BBC footage of the Beatles in India, and footage of Bede Griffiths'
ashram.
