European Yoga Porn 'Cult' Establishes a U.S. Beachhead: Where Is the Outrage?
Posted: 10/30/2012 12:00 pm
It calls itself the "Movement for Spiritual Integration in Absolute" -- or MISA -- and is reputedly the largest "yoga" movement in Europe, claiming some 40,000 members in more than a dozen countries. But it's actually a dangerous personality cult whose "supreme spiritual leader," Gregorian Bivolaru, has been accused of coercing or seducing hundreds of vulnerable women into producing hard-core porn videos, abandoning their spouses, and in some cases, becoming strippers and prostitutes -- all in the name of "liberating" the female body and bringing MISA members into intimate communion with the "Divine Goddess."
On its face, the group might sound like an obvious fraud, even a criminal one. But it has escaped prosecution to date, in part because Bivolaru, who first founded MISA in his native Romania in 1990, was persecuted under communist rule. For years many of his countrymen, including influential members of the Romanian elite, as well as human rights groups like Amnesty International, have treated Bivolaru as a "victim" worth defending. Thousands of Romanians have marched and protested on MISA's behalf, and after the communist regime fell, and the new authorities still decided to arrest him -- this time, on sex crime charges -- Bivolaru somehow escaped from prison and wound up in Sweden. There, after what most independent observers consider a sham investigation, the Swedish government granted him political asylum.
The full extent of MISA's alleged criminal activities may never be known. However, based on testimony from group defectors -- first presented on the website, exmisa.org -- MISA's development parallels that of other, more notorious yoga cults. One obvious forerunner is the movement surrounding the Indian mystic Bhagwan Rajneesh (aka "Osho") that flourished in the late 1980s, just as MISA was getting started. Bivolaru, like Rajneesh, has claimed a special channel to the Divine Source that endows him with God-like powers, including the ability to channel spiritual energy and telepathic insights to his followers viamass gatherings and virtual "hook ups" that appear intended to induce MISA followers to surrender their will and identity -- and in some cases, their life savings -- to their beloved "guru."