Because of Stephen Fry, I ended up on Gizoogle.net. It appears to be a search engine that takes Google results and turns them into their gangster-speak versions. It’s an online translator of sorts, but with magnificently hilarious results.

Stephen Fry results on Gizoogle were really funny.

Gregorian Bivolaru results made me laugh my arse off. I wonder if the official Yogaesoteric website will issue an outraged cry against Gizoogle XD

Here’s the main page of the gregorianbivolaru.com website:

Da Romanian Yoga mackdaddy Home page – Introduction

This joint raps bout tha case of Gregorian Bivolaru, tha mentor of a big-ass spiritual movement up in Romania. Da organization he dropped is called MISA, tha Movement fo’ Spiritual Integration up in Absolute, n’ its main focus is on tha practice of yoga n’ meditation.

My note: The following article was published on the Yogaesoteric.net website on the 8th of March 2013. It’s a response to a conference in which I talked about MISA, a Romanian yoga group which is spreading in various other countries, and its leader, Gregorian Bivolaru. The conference was held at the meeting of the anti-cult organization FECRIS in Perpignan, France, in October 2012. You can find the written conference on this very blog.

As a side note, I spoke freely during the conference, which means that any recorded audio/video version is going to differ slightly from the written one. However, the basics are the same.

Unfortunately, the author writing this article for the MISA official website, Yogaesoteric.net, only read my impressions of the trip to Perpignan and not my actual conference, which means he missed the opportunity to offer a reply to the issues that I really raised. The author still pretends he read it, though, which I find to be delightfully ironic in some corners.

Author’s Note: This is another one of my infamously stuck-in-first-draft stories. One day I’ll actually edit it.

*

The first time I saw her – really, really saw her, not just glanced at her as we tried our best to catch the back seats in the small university classrooms – she was at a piano. Maybe I’d never have really been able to notice her had it not been for that one, strange evening when destiny gently pushed me out of my awkward life and into hers.

If only children can be prodigies, then I wasn’t one any longer. I’d lived through my glory years at school, where I’d gone off and won prizes for art and English, maths and physics, running circles around classmates and less talented professors. Eventually, when push came to shove and I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I hid behind some more studying, delaying that dreadful moment when I’d have to prove that not only was I smart, but that I was also able to do something. I chose English and physics as majors, convinced I could do both easily enough. I wasn’t right. I wasn’t very wrong, either. There wasn’t much of a personal life left between the two, but I took my exams with flying colors and dreamed of the day I’d win a Nobel prize. I don’t think it will ever actually happen, but even fools can dream.

„Sucker Love is Heaven Sent” – A Romanian Yoga Cult Under Investigation

In Romania, MISA has a dark and worrying public image: an orgiastic, pee-drinking yoga movement, full of strange, incomprehensible practices, spiral meditations, brainwashing and master-worship. The Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute, founded in 1990, has often been featured in the media after it came into public attention in 2004 when the police broke into and searched a number of MISA homes in Bucharest.

The legal prosecution against MISA and its guru, Gregorian Bivolaru, includes accusations such as sex with a minor girl, tax evasion and illegal crossing of the border. Bivolaru escaped to Sweden, where he managed to convince the Swedish court that the violence of the media against him, as well as the context of a post-communist country and the unexpected and rough treatment MISA received in 2004 at the hands of the police involved in the searches were proof enough of his being persecuted in his home country. Due to this, he received political asylum and he supposedly lives in Malmo, Sweden – although former members point out that his actual location may be Paris, France.

Have a link to it.

It starts:

This blog will mostly be in Romanian, but since my conference in Perpignan was in English and it’ll take awhile before I get around to translating it, I figured I might post the text as-is.

Two things:

1. You may use the text of this conference as you wish – as long as you don’t modify it and you attribute it to me (and it would be nice if you also specified the context). Re-post it, criticize it, publish it – be my guests. If you’re doing something with it online, a link back would be very nice. If you’re doing something interesting with it, I enjoy being told. But if I’m unavailable for comment or whatever, just assume you have my permission.

For further info (or for criticism or whatever), I am available here, or at roxmchirila (at) yahoo (dot) com.