The Guru’s Touch: A novel by Robert G. Schneider

 The Guru’s Touch

by Robert G. Schneider

Here is an unusual novel. It is the story of a young USA man’s four year involvement with a cult headed by an Indian guru and his enablers.  
Kind of, The Other Side of The Razor’s Edge. 

It all starts out in Ithaca NY. I liked that because I’ve spent some time up there so am somewhat familiar with the gorge-ous little college city that it is. Doug, narrates his own story here so we get a chance to really get inside the head, the thoughts, of this youth fresh out of high school whose mother has just died of cancer. The character of Doug ends up being very believable and realistic. Yes, his mother has just died, dad sometime before, but he is a typical emotionally repressed teen boy. He hasn’t necessarily developed the skills to deal with his emotions in a productive way. Older sister is now kind of house mom in the family home, they don’t get along. He wants control over his own life but the money is in trusts or in control of big sister who has her own ideas about what Doug ought to be doing. Bowing to her pressure, he enrolls in Cornell, taking an inappropriate major he is not interested in. (Doug is asking for trouble with this bowing to others.) He doesn’t participate and ends up flunking out.

Doug’s older brother and sister in law are into this particular guru. He gets the book through them and falls for the whole thing. In a way this is a love story. In his naive innocence he is really touched by the book and is soon off to the ashram in the Catskils and on from there.

Since the novel is in first person it is presented with an option of really showing what is up with Doug. As he gets more info about the rotten structure of the place and the guru himself, the question eventually gets down to, “How and why can he remain?” That’s the whole point of reading a novel like this, to get some insight into overwise puzzling behavior.  
All this is well performed in the novel. He was touched, he was touched by “LOVE” and it transformed him in ways that were physically real to him. Like any other love story, that first encounter, touch, eye gaze, the feeling of being seen, acknowledged as someone who matters. That’s how the love begins here as in so many other relationships. But watch out for being blinded by the afterglow so as not to see that you are being dominated, bullied, kept in work without pay, and belittled the opposite side of mattering. 

He is forever reminding himself to have “right thinking”, basically the guru is a god and the teacher and you are too lowly to understand his ways so just go along to get your enlightenment 

This is a 700 page novel. Robert G. Schneider uses that length maybe as a tool to show us the tedious repetition of the work and devotional duties of the disciples. He generates a good deal of suspense as well. Is it an enjoyable read? Yes
I would recommend it to anyone interested in cults, . . . or love, I guess.