MISHY MASHY MADNESS

Maybe we should blame it on The Beatles. It was all their fault when they went to India and got involved with the Maharishi mishy mashy –or whatever the swami’s name was. Around that time I had a close friend (ex-wife actually) who got swept up by a self-improvement group called EST. It stood for Erhard Training  Seminars. And you spent hours and long weekends locked in a room while a trainer called you turkeys and you showed your commitment by not going to the toilet for eight hours at a stretch.

The main guru, an American named Werner Erhard, lost a bit of his lustre when I discovered he was really a former  New Jersey car salesman named Jim somebody who called himself Werner Erhard after Werner Von Braun  and a former West German Chancellor.

Gurus and white witches and faith healers and aboriginal bogeymen are in the news for various reasons right now. Some tragic. In Sydney there’s been a coronial inquest into the death of Rebekah Lawrence who jumped naked to her death from a 12th floor window after attending a seminar by the Turning Point group. It certainly was a fatal turning point for her.

Yesterday in The Australian newspaper a man told the storey of his 18-year-old son who jumped to his death from a window during a course by a personal improvement group called  Breakthrough.

Darren Hughes was 24 when he killed himself. Breakthrough was run by a man named Walter Bellin –who also set up Turning Point.

Then you have the ‘white witch’ Caroline Shahbaz who was paid a fortune by the Port Philip Council for her guru-style advice. And it now turns out the Reserve Bank also paid her half a million dollars for a disastrous overhaul of its bank-note printing company. It was certainly a licence to print money for the white witch.

And also Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun detailed bizarre stories about Aboriginal magic men, the ngangkari, pulling invisible rocks and blood clots from people’s bodies.  Shades of the Filipino faith healers and their chicken livers.

What makes this worse is that staff at the Adelaide Native Title Offices have all been getting treatment. Presumably at taxpayers expense.

When will all this nonsense stop? Are people that desperate and that
 gullible?

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009