Karma Cola/Alternative Altars
Steindl-Rast, David & Tiso, Francis V.
Tracking the mystic pilgrim KARMA COLA: MARKETING THE MYSTIC EAST Gita Mehta Simon & Schuster, $9.95, 201 pp. ALTERNATIVE ALTARS: UNCONVENTIONAL AND EASTERN SPIRITUALITY IN...
...Do not look to Karma Cola for insights into the "decline of the West" or for a diagnosis of our spiritual malaise...
...280...
...Mehta's characters went to India on the "quest for enlightenment' ' of one sort or another...
...the voyage of the Theosophists Olcott and Blavatsky to India in 1879...
...It has been the personal search for that discipline on American soil by such men and women as Mother Ann Lee, Soyen Shaku, Madame Blavatsky, Henry David Thoreau, and Gary Snyder, that has given form to one of our most enduring myths: the ideal of the wandering, alienated scholar-mystic who seems to catch the energy of the land itself, altering any foreign symbology toward a self-renewing vision of the eternal magic which is in all of us...
...There is an undeniable dynamism in these chapters which can be attributed to the weaving of the biographical strands of the story with an appreciation of the surprisingly broad social impact of excursus religion...
...rather, episodic involvements with new groups are regarded in advance as "just another opportunity to 'grow,' "even if the new groups turn out to be a hoax (ibid...
...Mehta has instead given the West a way out...
...Ellwood's approach is a useful application of social science methodology, but we might have hoped for greater balance in the chapter on "Inner Worlds: The Psychology of Excursus Religion...
...Conventional religion remains safe and sound from ritual murder, ritual sex and ritual ecstasy...
...The intent of the book is never really clear to the reader, but if it means to entertain us, then it is our worst selves that will find it funny...
...After Mehta's nightmares, we come into the relatively ordered world of Robert Ellwood's Alternative Altars, an attempt to make sense of the American propensity to generate new religious paths on which seekers since the earliest days of the republic have ventured forth...
...our bodies, too, may move as little as possible, tagging along behind our minds...
...One could give examples from Zen to Catholicism...
...Here we begin to glimpse some of the discouragement that often hovers near despair in this population of young persons...
...was a destiny-fraught sign of a rising undertow . . ., a reverse process which would not stop until independence had come again to the East and the West was awash with yoga and chanting...
...August 1980: 447...
...Ellwood breaks important ground in his recognition that the symbols and methodology of any imported religion do Commonweal: 446 not remain untouched by the experience of America...
...and the movement of Zen into the United States since the turn of the century, with emphasis on the postWorld War II phase...
...Her book fails as literature because it does violence to the humanity it describes, or rather, exploits...
...David Steindl-Rasl and Francis V. Tise GITA mehta'S Karma Cola is a collection of anecdotes portraying the sickening consequences of unholy cultural mixtures...
...Ell wood tends to neglect the darker side of the subgroup he describes, seeking his paradigms in a series of exciting biographies of the heroes and heroines of excursus religion...
...Ellwood's powers of insight might have shed more light on the breakage and psychological dislocation that is the tragic side of the spiritual quest in the West today...
...In telling us about the dark side of religiosity, our propensity to abuse and exploit everything, Karma Cola is itself an example of the perverse inclination to make that which is sacred the victim of the grossest vulgarization...
...In both Karma Cola and Alternative Altars we are on the track of this mythic pilgrim whose spell may touch many readers...
...Karma Cola has in it material from which Chaucer, Boccaccio or Dante could have woven great literature...
...Quaint as the mission .. . may sound to some, it...
...The difference between Mehta and these Western writers is in her astonishing lack of compassion...
...The "different ones" are described as living "for a long time protean in lifestyle, alienated, and involved in cults, communes, self-actualization techniques, and esoteric world views...
...It is not a book about the assimilation of Eastern religions into the American scene (in spite of the misleading and offensive jacket design...
...Ell wood does the scholar's labor of describing the psychology and social structure of "the different ones," a permanent group of Americans who comprise the shifting membership of' 'excursus religion" in North American culture...
...Our well-scrubbed children may continue to be taught a laundered gospel...
...ALTERNATIVE ALTARS: UNCONVENTIONAL AND EASTERN SPIRITUALITY IN AMERICA Robert S. Ell wood, Jr...
...One cannot help wondering if Ellwood's heroes and heroines, in spite of their besetting vices, have any relation at all to the mass of misfits and discontents who ravage and are ravaged by the "mystic East" of Karma Cola...
...The reader is swept along by the author's sense of excitement and openness to the histories he relates...
...In the words of Jose Arguelles in The Transformative Vision: "The vision of what we are to become is already within us, awaiting the proper discipline through which it might be appropriately expressed" (pg...
...It should be possible to appreciate the radical subjectivity, indeed the unfathomable mystery, of the religious seeker, without shying away from the evident maladies of non-commitment on the one hand, and exploitative enthrallment on the other...
...10) The question of deep conversion, or a "radical reorganization of identity" does not arise...
...We learn, for example, that the Theosophists' journey to India influenced both the Irish and Indian independence movements...
...The second half of the book is an application of the tools of research to the experience of three "moments" in the history of American excursus religion: Shakers and Spiritualists in the midnineteenth century...
...pg...
...Rather, it is a portrait gallery of Europeans and Americans choking in the quagmire of modern India...
...University of Chicago Press, $12.95, 192 pp...
...in her view, the quest has led all too often to moral disaster and the corruption of a nation ripe for infection...
...The very fact that the "different ones" are alienated from both secular society and normative religions should signal the depths of vulnerability and loneliness experienced by these persons...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 14
