Just to get back "on topic" to the BKWSU gravy train ... sorry "funding" ...
I found this interesting little note on the blog of
Judy Rodgers note in another topic. How BK is she? I read her doing Yoga in Mount Abu and I see her, along with Cooperrider, presenting herself as a member of the
Visions of a Better World Foundation [VBWF] at an
Images of Hope and Voices of Hope event for a "specially selected group of media professionals gathered in South Florida at the waterfront home of Dwina and Robin Gibb". VBWF says it was "an outgrowth of a United Nations Project entitled the Global Cooperation Project" which is a complete lie because the Global Cooperation Project was a BKWSU project not a UN project. Usual overstatement of UN relationship ...
OK, before this becomes as confusing as the character list and plot of Tolstoi's 'War and Peace', let's hop on to the sponduliks and what it is being spent on ... from;
jrodgers.netFriday, February 24, 2006
The reason that I have moved to 2/3 time at Case [Western Reserve University, USA] is so that I can focus in earnest
on a very interesting research and writing project I am doing with the Brahma Kumaris that is being underwritten by a wonderful leader from Unilever Foods in SE Asia. It is called "Something Beyond Greatness" and is a search to understand that rare breed of person who at some point in their life decides to devote their life to serving the world. We conceptualized it as a tribute to Dadi Janki who is turning 90 this year. She was unwilling to have a book about her but willing to have a book about what it is she has dedicated her life to.
Its a good, well written, if short blog full of little and honest insights about BKs in Madhuban. She gets a single room and invited on stage with Janki. But, back in the real world, Unilever have been criticized in India for toxic dumping of mercury, use of child labour and promote GM crops but if we look here,
WIE, we find,
Dadi Janki, Co-Administrative Head, Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. A spiritual guide to Brian Bacon, Tex Gunning, Joseph Jaworski, Charles Handy, Peter Senge, David Cooperrider, Rita Cleary, and others.
“Her leadership is not based on any formal position that she holds,” says Tex Gunning, president of Unilever Bestfoods Asia. “Her power comes purely from her spiritual credibility. As a leader, the more I've searched for role models, the more I've come to realize that this is the most profound power. If my boss asks me to make a meeting, I look at my agenda first. But if Dadi Janki, with whom I have no formal relationship, tells me to be in London, I just get on the plane!”
Prof Cooperrider
So, is this the same Tex Gunning that is sponsoring BK related work now?
It is also interesting that
Human Greatness has since become the theme for the latest US BKWSO service front and a strange strutting Yankee pride; "America's part in world history reflects the ongoing human struggle of good over evil, order over chaos.", says President Mohini. That is funny, I rather remember the picture of the
two cats fighting over the butter and the references to "science proud Yadavas" that were going to detroy the world with Nuclear bombs.
So ... let us wait and see what pro-BK academic paper comes out of this funding and these connections. Now you know what goes at all that
natty VIP and IP service diners and events the followers' donations are spent on, the air fares and so on, and what a cosy little circle they all are. Would it be too catty to suggest that a certain class of individual is also personally benefiting from all these associations? Rodgers writes, "The Brahma Kumaris teach that, as each individual translates ... new awareness into her life, or his life, the old world evolves" in "Call of the Time" ... but kind of misses out Destruction.
Who decides who is in and who is not of the right class and on what basis ... Yoga power, darna, Gyan or what?
Were not those Gibb's mansions the same mansions that just a few weeks ago we were reading in the Mail on Sunday of prime ministers and druids, leather clad lesbians, orgies and drug taking!?!
Judy Rodgers, above, is executive director of the Center of Business as Agent of World Benefit and has assisted prominent business writers such as Tom Peters, Peter Senge, Walter Cronkite and Ken Blanchard.