The Beginner's Guide to Hindoooo-ism sees jobbing thesp Paul Nicholls arrive in Tiru with the intention of "Getting God"!!!
Unfortunately he fucks up from the get go, linking up with local celebrity bad boy, Hapi, as his guide to all things spiritual (17 mins 24 secs onwards). Urrr Paul ... Hapi is really good at deflowering posh upper class English girls and getting wasted, but that's about the limit of his repertoire! The video goes on to show rare footage of the forgotten Tiru of yesteryear and it's a must see if you've never been there. But then dim but nice Paul takes some very bad advice and ends up at Radha Ma's psycho-satsang. The highlight of this exchange comes when an openly irritated Paul tells satsang wannabe and touchy feely Life Coach, Mark Hans, "you just seem quite egotistical, you seem like you need to know more than everyone else - and that to me seems the exact opposite of what this is supposed to be about." Radha gleefully cackles to herself while Paul comments that he doesn't feel comfortable around these "spiritual travellers." We say: out of the mouth of babes and sucklings come pearls of wisdom! Paul may be clueless, but he's got their number. Of course what Mr Nicholls doesn't know is that a few years later the supposedly "enlightened" Radha will commit suicide in spectacular fashion by burning herself alive ... deliberately planning her own death and choreographing all the roles her husband and devotees will play in the ensuing events ... including leaving a note blaming 4 of her ex-devotees ... who will then be tried for manslaughter and a jumped up charge of sexual molestation ... face 10 years' imprisonment up to life if they are convicted ... spend 2 years being dragged through the nightmare of the Indian judicial system ... and be largely abandoned by so-called Advaitic 'friends' who don't want to get involved with their "negativity" and "bad karma" ...
Ironically, at the end of the video when Radha takes Paul on retreat, she encapsulates spirituality as "just being honest with yourself." - Never a truer word spoken, but we'd love to know exactly what brand of honesty she was talking about! The essence of the spiritual search in Tiru involves people who are lying to themselves and others. It attracts seekers who take no responsibility for their actions and who through the clever intellectualism of Advaita claim an instant state of perfection without ever having to look at themselves or acknowledge their abusive behaviour. In this town devoted to Shiva, it is people and their lives which are destroyed - not the self - because they destroy each other through acts of egotistical elitism, arrogance and emotional withdrawal. Substituting authority figures and abstract theories of reality for genuine self-reflection, they are incapable of nurturing real human bonds. Meanwhile Radha herself was a "classic psychopathic power monger guru" (to coin a phrase of Jody Radzik's). Despite her heaving breast and flirty giggles Radha was playing off her devotees, one against the other, in a vicious game of cat and mouse. She defrauded them all in dodgy land deals and that's how she earned her nickname, Real Estate Radha. This was to be the cause of the internecine dissension that eventually brought her down. Add in her dabbling in tantric practices and other occult weirdness and we have the highly volatile mix that led to her horrific self-immolation. Paul Nicholls also visits a Kali temple where a goat is ritually beheaded. If he had stayed with Radha a little longer, he may have found that he was the goat having his head sheared from his body ...
Paul, you may have thought all of this was deeply spiritual, but unfortunately you ended up with Satan's sister in a re-run of the Dennis Wheatley novel, The Devil Rides Out ...
