I went and got hugged by Amma, India’s world-famous hugging saint, when she was in Los Angeles last month. She shoved my head into her fluffy right boob and whispered something that sounded like “Magilla, Magilla, Magilla, Magilla,” into my ear. Or maybe it was “Medula, Medula, Medula, Medula.” It was hard to tell.

Her hot breath was kind of a turn-on. I didn’t expect that. But I have kind of a weakness for women whispering in my ear. Then she mashed a Hershey’s Kiss into my hand, after which two of her people grabbed me from behind, kind of spun me around and sent me off into the crowd.

It took me a while to get the whole “hug and kiss” pun.

I felt a little dizzy as they shoved me out of the way to make room for the next customer. Was that the shaktipat everybody was getting so excited about? Shaktipat is supposed to be a direct transference of spiritual energy from an enlightened being. It felt to me more like that druggy, disorientated sensation you have when you get off a rollercoaster or when you take a hardy toke of some very good weed.

In case you don’t know, Amma is a cute, short, chubby Indian lady who a lot of people believe is an Enlightened Being. She was born in 1953 in a tiny fishing village in South India. During her childhood, they say, she spent much of her time absorbed in a deep meditative state of Samadhi. By the time she was 21 she’d begun to attract followers. In the early '80s she consolidated this following into an ashram and began traveling the world offering darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning “encounter with a saintly person,” to spiritual seekers around the world.

There’s a lot to like about Amma. So I’m going to start by saying some of that, because I know that no matter what I do people are gonna say this article trashes poor sweet Amma. But she seems like a genuinely decent person and I’m sure her charitable work does a lot of people a lot of good. She’s not a hate monger. She doesn’t put down anyone regardless of race, creed or religion. She seems to be a very nice lady who wants to do some good in the world. Her charities run educational programs, distribute free food, run hospitals and hospices, build free homes for the poor and provide lifetime stipends for mentally and physically challenged adults. It is all wonderful stuff.

What worried me was what surrounded all of this niceness and how some of it wasn't really all that nice.

The set up has been psychologically and theatrically designed for the maximum build-up just before you get the big pay off. When you arrive at the Radisson Hotel near LAX you take a number. Or in my case, you arrive really late after taking your friend to the airport and you get a little pink card. After Amma gets through hugging all the people with numbers, if she’s still up to hugging some more, they allow the folks with the pink cards to get a number.

The second floor of the hotel has been re-imagined as a spiritual wonderland, sort of a Hindu themed fairground complete with uniformed Mousekateers to guide you through. After you get your number you stand in a long line, drawing slowly ever nearer to the saint herself. “Have your ticket visible,” I was told several times. Can’t have any line jumpers! And you’d be amazed how many of these “spiritual seekers” will elbow the next guy out of the way to get their shaktipat first.

As you get closer you see that Amma is surrounded by concentric circles of ever more devoted disciples. There are three or four guys right next to her watching her the way a dog watches its master as she speaks what I assume are beautiful spiritual messages to them, to which they dare not reply or in any way engage in conversation with someone so divine. After that are rings of worshippers swooning just to be in the Amma’s presence. When they remove Amma’s chair many of these will run up to lay prostrate and kiss the ground upon which it had sat.

As you move closer to Amma you gradually surrender more and more of your own will. First your shoes come off. Then you’re directed in a line by authoritative people who instruct you to move from chair to chair. Then you are pushed into a kneeling position such that you are crawling for the last ten feet or so. Then they remove your jewelry and glasses and wipe off your face like you’re a three year old child. Finally you are pushed powerlessly into Amma’s -- they call her “Mother” -- waiting embrace.

The stage is set up with Hollywood style lighting full of vibrant orange, pink and gold. On the wall is a ten-foot high photo of Amma with a half dozen spotlights trained upon her face to make it glow even more ethereally, just in case you forgot what she looks like. Backlit streamers and flags hang all around the Radisson Hotel’s conference room to create the image of a blissful Hindu heaven. The color scheme seems intended to generate a feeling of womblike security. The scent of incense and perfume hangs heavy in the air.

Beyond the inner circle is the marketplace. Here you can buy Amma jewelry, Amma T-shirts, Amma bumper stickers, Amma dolls, Amma coffee mugs, Amma iPods pre-filled with MP3’s of Amma singing and a whole range of other such goodies and trinkets. On the walls are advertisements for other spiritual healers personally endorsed by Amma, such as Dr. Weng’s acupuncture, Effective Vedic Astrology, Banyan Botanicals and much, much more. If that’s not enough for you, you can buy all sorts of items personally used by Amma including discarded clothing, chairs, rugs, and even Amma’s Lexus. The poster for this last item helpfully includes the car’s current Blue Book value ($8000) and its starting bid ($12,000). And don’t forget the food! Delicious vegetarian cuisine at reasonable prices. This last, I did not pass up.

Amma is a registered trademark. None of the licensed items on offer fail to put that little circled “R” next to her name, lest she lose her claim. I know how this works. I used to be in charge of this kind of stuff for a Japanese company that made a superhero show and we did exactly the same thing. She’s got a cute little logo too, just like we did. Branding is everything! I’ll bet you dollars to donuts she goes after bootleg Amma merch just like we went after bootleg Ultraman merch.

Later on, after my hug, I got to witness some of Amma’s teaching. She’s not bad. In fact she and her opening act, a bearded swami whose name I’ve forgotten, are fairly accomplished stand-up comics. That was something I didn’t expect. The jokes were pretty corny, but not too worn out. There was one about a guy who walks into a bar and throws his drink at the bartender. Before the bartender can get mad, the guy starts weeping. He tells the bartender he can’t help himself, it’s a compulsion. The bartender recommends a shrink. The guy goes and then returns six months later whereupon he again throws his drink at the bartender. The bartender says that the shrink doesn’t seem to have helped. The guy says, “No. He helped a lot. I still have the compulsion but now I don’t feel guilty about it!” The crowd laughs, the spiritual significance of the joke is explained and everybody sighs deeply in unison at the beauty of the great teacher’s great teaching.

And just what is Amma’s message to the world? Here are a few quotes from the free pamphlet (chock full of advertisements) given out to all comers; “God-realization is nothing but the ability and expansiveness of the heart to love everything equally,” and “Love is what fills life constantly with newness,” “Try to cultivate a heart that never harms any being in thought, word or deed.” That sort of thing.

We are also told in the pamphlet, “To love is Mother’s (Amma’s) nature, to serve is her nature,” and assured that, “As far as Mother is concerned, everyone is her child.” “There is nothing preplanned about Amma’s mission,” the pamphlet tells us, “All her projects have been spontaneously compassionate responses to the sorrow and suffering she sees around her.”

And yet, and yet, and yet… for all the charitable work and messages of kindness and generosity there is something deeply disturbing about the whole circus that surrounds all of this admittedly admirable work.

Maybe it’s because it is such a circus. Why do we need to driven nearly to a frenzy with spiritual madness before we can be coerced into contributing to a good cause?

What’s wrong with worshipping Amma, after all? She seems nice enough. So what’s the problem?

The scariest part of the whole thing to me was the men standing around her transfixed just like dogs ready to obey their master. The expressions on their faces were just like the expressions you see on a Doberman waiting for its master to say “fetch” or “kill.” A dog is only as good as its master. If the master tells the dog to fetch the paper, it fetches the paper. If the master tells the dog to maul the black man who just moved in next door, it mauls the black man. The dog’s only criteria is pleasing its master. It has no will or moral center of its own. Blind obedience is never a good thing, even when it’s directed at a supposedly “good” person.

What happens when these folks who’ve learned only obedience get tired of Amma? They have learned only obedience. Who will they obey next?

We need personal responsibility. This is truer now than it ever has been in history. We now have access as individuals to unprecedented power. This was brought home clearly by the events of September 11, 2001. A handful of people were able to cause a level of destruction and havoc that had previously taken the efforts of an entire nation. And things have only become more dangerous since then.

It’s never a good thing to give up your personal power. You need your personal power in order to take personal responsibility.

Maybe Amma delivers pure love. That’s what her press agent says, anyway. Still, I’m not sure pure love is what we need either. I think what’s truly needed is a balance of love and hate. By “hate” I’m not talking about the kind of hate that manifests as crimes against people of other races and that kind of thing. Hate is something much deeper and more profound.

There are two sides to the Universe. Spiritual people always talk about oneness, about dissolving into the embrace of Universal love. But that’s only one side of reality. The other side is hate, separation, aloneness. Both are real. When love and hate are balanced there is compassion and wisdom. Love alone is beautiful but powerless. Hate alone is powerful, but too dangerous.

It’s as bad to deny hate is as it is to deny love. When we acknowledge our separation we can act in unity with each other. When we lose our sense of separation we lose our effectiveness as individuals.

The two sides of our being are not mutually exclusive. It’s not that we have to give up our existence as individuals to merge into the warm embrace of all-encompassing Oneness. Our essential Oneness and our essential separation are manifestations of the same thing, which is neither oneness nor separation.

There are no words for this because the function of words is to divide and categorize. But reality as it is defies all categories. Even something as obvious as saying love is better than hate is an attempt to pin down and define that which is beyond definition.

We must act with compassion if we want to create a peaceful world. That’s true. But compassion is also beyond love and hate. Compassion is a spontaneous response to what needs to be done right here and right now.

I don’t detest Amma any more than I detest Phish or The Grateful Dead or anyone else who offers an evening of escapist entertainment based upon that heady feeling of warmth and community that can be created in an environment specifically designed to amplify those feelings while pushing all the other stuff to one side. I had fun and I would go again. The food was delicious too. I am overwhelmed by my own good fortune to have friends as wonderful as Aspen, Sawa and Tenaya who accompanied me and tolerated my annoyance at much of what went on at the event. I am overjoyed to live in a world enough at-peace that something like the Amma experience is allowed to happen.

What I question is when such experiences are offered up as if they provide some kind of Ultimate Answer to the world’s woes. If we don’t acknowledge and understand our own hate we can’t effectively deal with the problems that hate creates in our world. Warm smiles and hugs don’t fix everything and, sadly, they never will.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Brad Warner's endless tour continues soon and he may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!