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Reading his discourses made me realize that Rajneesh was a sad loss. He had an extraordinary range of knowledge and a vision of how life should be lived, but he proved incapable of following his own precepts.

— Anthony Storr Feet of Clay; Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (1997)

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In 20th-century England, an individual announcing that he was the son of God and would return after death in glory would probably attract psychiatric attention; but earlier generations might have regarded such claims as unsurprising.

Feet of Clay; Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (1997)

Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God's prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity.

Feet of Clay; Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (1997)

Few subsequent gurus seem to have matched the simplicity and directness of Jesus′s message; but it must be remembered that we have very little information. If the world had possessed a detailed biographical account of Jesus, an authentic picture of what he was like as a man, it is quite possible that Christianity would not have been estabished as a world religion.

Feet of Clay; Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (1997)

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