Gregorian Bivolaru
In 2005 he was charged on counts of sexual exploitation, tax evasion, and crossing the border to escape prosecution; he sought asylum in Sweden, which he was granted in 2006.
He managed to obtain and read books by Paramahansa Yogananda, Sivananda Saraswati, and Ramakrishna, even though these were not readily available in Romania at the time.
[7] In 1977, he was arrested on the charge of distributing pornography and sentenced to one year in prison, but he did not complete it due to an amnesty granted for minor convictions by the President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu on his birthday.
Prosecutors requested he be hospitalized, which was granted two days later on 19 August 1989 by the sector 1 Tribunal of Bucharest based on a report submitted by National Institute for Legal Medicine (IML).
[5] Until 1989 he was constantly on the list of the most dangerous people for the communist regime, being permanently in the sights of the Security, but he never stopped practicing and teaching yoga.
[10] In 2005, Bivolaru was charged in Romania on eight counts, including sexual exploitation, tax evasion, and illegally crossing the border to escape prosecution.
[15][15] In 2010, Bivolaru requested damages from the Romanian state for his sentencing to mandatory psychiatric treatment during the Communist regime.
[16] On 18 January 2011, Bivolaru's trial was, for the tenth time, postponed again until 23 March 2011, marking his case as one of the longest-running in the Cluj court.
[18] On 1 July 2011, a Bucharest court issued a ruling recognizing the political nature of the sentences suffered by Bivolaru during the communist period and his internment.
[41] In 2023, he was accused of exploiting female adepts for sexual contacts and luring them into performing in pornography, including by secretly recording them for such purposes.
[46] According to Le Monde, "At the eight locations they visited, the police found 58 women – 51 of Romanian nationality, none French – 'living in difficult conditions, with severe overcrowding and no privacy'".
[47] Each woman in the villa of Bivolaru's right-hand man from France had a room of three square meters, and the hygiene conditions were poor.
Vojtíšek states that MISA makes itself available socially, while gradually introducing doctrines that it calls secret.
[6][63] The sociologist Massimo Introvigne states that the teachings derive from many religious sources, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Tantra, and Taoism, as well as Esoteric Christianity and Western esotericism.
[6][61] The yoga teacher and scholar of religion Tova Olsson states that it is illustrated with poetry, Indian proverbs, "quasi-scientific drawings", and photographs of "photos of young men and women (in their underwear) performing āsanas".
She adds that the words "authenticity" and "secret" are used repeatedly at the start, indicating that students will be initiated into "a great mystery" only available through MISA.
[6][62] The photographs portray people in the Yab-Yum posture or in "orgasmic embrace", followed by "photos of naked, white, slender women with oiled skin and large breasts", often lying down in a natural setting; Olsson states that Bivolaru's book is similarly illustrated.
[6] Olsson traces the idea that everything is vibrations, along with occult concepts such as "as above, so below" and the universality of gendered opposites to the 1908 esoteric book The Kybalion, likely written by William Walker Atkinson.
[6] In line with this, the IYC calls the chakras of the subtle body "resonators"; the right use of these supposedly enables students to gain supernatural powers.
[6][61] Knowledge of the chakras is described as secret, belied, Olsson notes, by the ready availability of materials and courses on them, perhaps leading the way towards acceptance of abusive behaviour.
[6][62] Olsson summarizes MISA's teachings as "an eclectic religious worldview, where yogic techniques and Bible passages intermingle with disciplined life-choices, nudity, a sense of exclusivity and a fair share of gender essentialism.
[72] The lengthy trial of MISA members on charges of "Trafficking in human beings and conspiracy to commit crimes", which took place in Romania, was concluded after 17 years.
[44] In France, various women were deprived of passports, of mobile phones, they were transported blindfolded so that they would not know where they were, they were rarely allowed to communicate with their parents, and then only under supervision, they were forced to sign formal statements that they had sex and viewed porn of their own free will, and they were allowed no clothes except for women's underwear.
[78] This was immediately followed by supervised transportation from Paris to Prague, with six months forced work in the "Garden of Miracles" as an erotic webcam model under harsh conditions.
[78] A Vice article reports that "as a MISA female member, it was an honour to have sex with guru Gregorian, because it meant positive karma and spiritual progress".
[104] According to Andreescu, the motivation was not political, instead it was a sensational subject which largely promoted the sales of newspapers, while the journalist Ion Cristoiu suspected that the Social Democratic Party was the evil genius behind such campaign, aiming to appease conservative voters.
[105] Bivolaru flirted with the purportedly Hindu myth[ii] of having sex with a thousand virgins, hoping to reach the heights of spiritual power.
[107] An article in Huffington Post called MISA a "dangerous personality cult", stating that Bivolaru had led "hundreds of vulnerable women" into making hard-core porn videos, leaving their husbands, or working as prostitutes and strippers.
"[108] It further reported that Bivolaru and others in the MISA hierarchy had "sex with underage girls, some in their early teens", and that young women did "karma yoga", meaning that they were sent to countries such as Japan "to work as pole dancers and strippers.
[112] Vojtíšek stated in 2018 that Bivolaru sexually initiates women in an atmosphere of secrecy and drinking urine, but concluded that the bad press which MISA had is due to an unavoidable misunderstanding.
