People start yoga practice for getting fit and very few for spiritual upliftment. Anybody can do yoga, it will certainly help you to progress in your spiritual progress irrespective of the religion you follow.

I am from India and here people of all religions do yoga and never feel about shedding their religious beliefs. Those who seriously become real yogis, they are above religion.

“3HO people don’t seem to be interested in heavy recruiting like other “cults” appear to be.” This seems to be a better philosophy, yoga is not for recruiting people to your way of life but to help people to live better.

The Brahma Kumaris DO NOT teach Raja Yoga. They teach their own practise. Raja Yoga has a 2,000 year tradition. The BK’s practise only goes back as far as the 1950s. The focus of their “yoga” is a channeled spirit entity or entities which speaks and acts through the sect’s mediums at its headquarters. They believe this entity to be “the god of all religions”, their religion to be the supreme one, themselves to be becoming angels … all other religions and all the and Hind dieties to be only poor or partial “memories” of their religion.

Any spiritual master worth their salt would encourage students to do their homework first and check out their would be master’s lineage. That requires people to dig a little bit deeper than the organization’s own PR and the wide eyed “intoxication” of its neophyte devotees.

The big problem with the Brahma Kumaris is … why all the secrecy? Why do they expect people to initiated into a relationships with this spirit entity BEFORE they know ‘the big picture’.

In the BKs case, the big picture included an imminent and desirable nuclear holocaust and the death of 6 billion human being to “purify” the world in order that they leadership can rule a “golden age” on earth as Emperors and Empresses for 2,500 years starting off with only 900,000 of their faithful followers. All of time fitting into one single, identically repeating 5,000 Year Cycle.

The downside with the BKs is that getting to the truth is difficult. They are steeped into their own historical revisionism. The reports of multiple suicides amongst their followers and the leaderships handling of the child sex abuse cases at their headquarters are abysmal.

In this case, starting with the critics and gauging the organization’s response to those criticism, might be the best way of learning about the reality before you surrender your life to them.

Of course I’m going to be more suspicious of the organization I’ve never heard of that has been identified as a “doomsday cult.” I had also done homework on 3HO and knew of the Yoga Bhajan controversies. My take on kundalini yoga is that it’s a useful practice and whether or not Bhajan was a sincere guru doesn’t really matter to me at this point. He did not create kundalini yoga – he just brought it with him from India. I’m not interested in getting deeper and giving up my normal clothes and make-up to become a Sikh however…but the point is, the 3HO people don’t seem to be interested in heavy recruiting like other “cults” appear to be.