"The guru/student relationship on Master Path is one of tyranny"

January 12, 2005
By a former student of the Master Path

Master Path is most definitely a cult [sic]. A cult is a place where you give up thinking for yourself or questioning the authority that asks you not to think.

Gary will tell you at your very first meeting that he is "just a humble guy, serving God." Experience should tell you that anyone who has to announce how humble they are, probably isn't!

Gary asks you to "check out the path to see for yourself." Checking it out is fine, but don't ask any questions. Questioning Gary Olsen elicits an angry and sometimes verbally abusive response. This can happen very publicly in a Master Path seminar. It seems like a real guru wouldn't shame a student in front of others for having questions. On Master Path though, we call a verbally abusive response from the Master or his staff "spiritual redirection."

Most people who are attracted to cults are sincere, good people who are seeking answers in their lives. There is nothing wrong with this. It's just that most of life really is a sacred mystery and people like Gary Olsen prey upon people who are hoping that life is less about uncertainty and unpredictability and more about a concrete answer, tied up in a pretty little bow. What Olsen promises in this neat little answer is a connection with the "sound current, the great current of God."

If you are reading this right now, you may want to consider that your ability to know God through prayer, meditation or contemplation is alive and well in your own heart and you don't need Gary Olsen or any other Guru to "hook you up" to anything to have that relationship in your heart.

Gary Olsen will want to tell you where you are at in consciousness.

Interestingly no one will be as high as Gary Olsen, which means that the Master Path theology works for Gary, but probably not for you.

The way that the guru gets bigger is by making you smaller.

The guru/student relationship on Master Path is one of tyranny.

In this case it's a tyranny over how and what you think and how and what you feel, because Gary believes that he knows what's best in that regard and so he will tell you that your mind and your emotions are the enemy.

You will be taught how to hate or disdain your mind and emotions. They are after all just your "lower bodies."

But please remember that spirituality cannot sustain itself by any form of disdain or hatred of the self.

It is the guru's job to dominate the student. Abuse, whether it is financial, emotional, physical or intellectual is part of the power structure. The best way out of any group like this, is to see that you don't need it in the first place.

Gary Olsen told me that if I left the Master Path, the world would turn against me.

I can assure you that the world not turned against me and that Gary has no power in this regard.

And besides what an egotistical thing to say to someone that has questions.

If Gary's ego weren't so big he probably would have just wished me well.

Gary Olsen is just a man. He cannot deliver anything.

He cannot take your karma or turn the world against you.

He cannot make you feel love in your heart.

He can neither take you home to God, nor prevent you from finding a path to God within yourself.

He is just a man, an ordinary, arrogant man who has deluded himself and others into believing that he has some kind of power that he does not.