Kumare

Wednesday 08 Aug 2012

Kumare is a documentary film made by a native New York man of Indian (sub-continent) descent. The film can be purchased, downloaded or streamed from You Tube. The trailer can be seen here:

<<>>

The idea of the film started out as a somewhat cynical exercise, to see if he might be accepted as a Guru by people who may be that way inclined. He resolved to look the part and practiced to say basically nothing in a meaningful way.

He grew his hair and moved with his sister and a friend to Arizona in the west of the United States and set up an Ashram in a rented house. They planned to film the experiment, and I imagine the filming also gave the group a certain gravitas. The house looked spacious. It had a pool and areas that were conducive for gatherings. With the placement of some ads in the area around the Ashram, they soon started to gather some followers and quickly received invitations to visit other places.

At this point I should say that Kumare was not entirely bereft of spiritual experience. He was a very good Yoga practitioner. He had the confidence to invent new and what he thought initially to be ludicrous moves and poses. He also had a fascination with the peaceful and serene states his grandmother would get herself into when she practiced her Hindu rituals and ceremony. He did not understand it but recognised the goodness and peace in her transformation during these times.

Kumare's became very popular because he would listen to people's troubles and just be with them. His responses and advice were of practiced neutrality, but supportive and loving. He was respectful and never took a position on anything. He tried as best he could to have no opinions to give back to his devotees. He mirrored his followers. The film demonstrates how good he was at doing this.

Because we, as the films audience are in on the deception of the experiment and the people acting in the film were not, you do get a sense of feeling guilty in the voyeurism that we are participating in. Thoughts came to me like --- "how stupid are these people" but at the same time fascination and recognition at how vulnerable these people are as they open themselves up completely and pass all of their trust over to this Guru. The worry when you have with thoughts like this is that you know it could easily have been "me" as the butt of this kind of experiment.

As the film progresses and Kumare becomes more popular and gathers more devotees. He develops his art of saying nothing and reflecting back into a solid practice that the devotees could work with. With their eyes locked onto his, he would get them speak out there troubles and concerns and then get them to speak out on the way they could move forward to heal or better their lives. It was a very powerful therapy.

At some point I think Kumare's outlook changed. I think without realising, he had fallen in love with his devotee's (became one with them) and realised he could not complete the experiment in the way he intended by telling everyone he was a fraud. He tried to follow the plan but he could not. He had wanted to make the film to show how gullible people are and how a lot of the Guru's he had met in life were fake. The realisation came, I think, that the devotees had changed him. He really was Kumare, and he was very good at being Kumare but now he became trapped in his guilt.

He left the West Coast and went home after providing a suitable escape story but continued being Kumare to his devotee's via internet links. He let the space this created to allow him to prepare himself and his devotees for the truth which he knew must be told.

He went back to his Ashram after some months and walked into the meeting he had arranged with his hair cut, with his normal clothes and voice. Most of his devotees accepted what he had done and probably saw the bigger truth that came out of his experiment. A few people did not and got up and left apparently quite hurt.

So what is this bigger truth that came out of this experiment?

My view is that it demonstrates unequivocally how it is us that put the meaning and purpose into our lives. We are conditioned to see the world the way it is. We make the universe the way we condition it be. Some of Kumare's followers ended up seeing the truth in their own power. Kamare offered a brilliant truthful reflection for them in the naïve way he thought he might practice as a Guru. For Kumare himself, he saw the power that he had in being to be able to shape the world and get energetic responses back from his actions that resonated with what he was doing. He was connecting to the universe through his followers. A great love affair in fact.

Kumare was naïve, he did not realise the spiritual qualities present inside himself. His form of listening and being with people was really was quite extraordinary. He really did attend to people and the appropriate responses came. We can say his conditioning, his karma was very good. We can be thankful that the story did end with so much clarity, with results that did not cause too much trouble for people. It did illuminate the truth of things in a wonderful way. If someone else had practiced the same deception the results probably would have been very different. It may well have produced a scandal where "shock jock" energy might have got in to obfuscate and turn it into a black and white story instead of the beautifully nuanced film we ended up viewing.