Home | Natural Family Living | Big Life Issues | Animal- Human- Angel |
Culture of Love | Solar Culture | Spirituality | Emotion |
Contact Bruce About PWP Links Photo Credits:- Buddha (mariocom20, Morguefile) |
Gurus![]() I have personally witnessed financial and relationship/sexual abuse by various spiritual teachers - all in the name of Higher Things. Goodness and wisdom can often be mixed with increasingly apparent controlling and abusive behaviour. I especially question crazy wisdom teachers - and those who support them. I don't think it particularly serves humans to spiritually idolise other humans. There is so much room for abuse. Never give your life away to any guru! To understand this, read Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey Falk - downloadable for free. After reviewing the lives of 40 widely-acknowledged spiritual giants, he concluded: "One
is then left with very little indeed to cling
to in all of this. For, if even the widely recognized
“best” Realizers
apparently cannot distinguish between hallucination and their own
ostensibly
valid realizations, are lesser Realizers to be regarded as
being more reliable?
Seen from that perspective, the most that any spiritual teacher can be
is a
decent, honest, unpretentious, even-tempered and caring human being,
never
“divinity in the flesh.” Yet, if even one-tenth of
the allegations made against
those figures are valid, the overwhelming majority of them would fail
miserably
at even that minimal, level-headed decency. Thus, the bulk of what they
would
wish to teach us by their own behaviors,
no
sensible person would want to learn. So even let each of them be every
bit as
enlightened as they have claimed to be, then. (Again, if these top
forty
spiritual leaders are not so divine, who is?) It
makes no
difference; for, with the endemic reported character flaws which they
bring to
the table, who of them could ever do more good than harm in the world?
What use,
then, is their vaunted “enlightenment”? And, if
anything like karma and
reincarnation exist, who could suffer more for their alleged actions,
in future
lives, than such respected holy fools, from the
“Christ-like” Ramakrishna on
down? The good news, though, is that none of these grandiose
god-figures,
playing unconvincingly at being holy, compassionate and wise, have any
power
whatsoever over anyone else other than what you, or I, would give to
them.
Without our obedient submission and credulous swallowing of their
untenable
claims and widespread exaggerations, they will dry up and blow away as
if they
had never existed. Put another way: They need us much
more than
we need them." (Geoffrey
D Falk, accessed 12 March 2014) Remember that life can give you many teachers (even those who oppose you). Whoever they were/are, they need to free you. It is all preparing you for Father Sky and Mother Earth. Or as O.M. Aïvanhov said, for the divine parents of your soul and spirit, that is the Universal Soul and Cosmic Spirit. So, I do recommend Nature. There is the Sun - a brilliant role model and simple symbol for God - around which you can build your life. Animals can help us. There is a quote about a spiritual teacher explaining how he learned to meditate by observing a cat. A dog can display amazing qualities of unconditional love and loyalty - always there with a wagging tail. Attunement to Angels can help a lot. Also self-love, self-acceptance is important. Also, once humanity starts applying Natural Family Living, with the likes of Attachment Parenting, human beings will naturally spiritually blossom in their life course. There is a nice quote from the book The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff about this, and her observation of it in the South American indigenous tribe the Yeqana [quote forthcoming]. It is natural and normal for us to be spiritually connected. It is our culture - like interventions in birth, unnatural education, and patriarchy - that disrupts this instinctive mysticism and drive to serve the world. There is no need for a human hierophant or intermediary. The path to intimacy is through shared power, not through unequal guru-disciple power games. We all play our part, with the emphasis very much on "we". It is a team effort to save the world and become enlightened. We have to become far more ecological, sensitive to the web of life. The quest for personal enlightenment can easily distort into selfish, competitive rivalries. Gaia Charis explains it excellently (posted March 2010, accessed 12 March 2014): "As
a sociologist I
would make the assertion that the recorded history of the construction
of
spiritual ‘knowledge’ shows it to be founded on
masculine
principles which are
themselves products of male-dominated cultures. The resulting
characteristics
of this process are the pre-eminencing of hierarchy and status and the
valorisation of intellectual complexity (traditionally deemed to be
masculine)
coupled with the denigration of emotion and simplicity (traditionally
defined
as feminine.). This template is writ large through all major religions
and all
academic disciplines from the time of Ancient Greek thinking onwards,
an era on
which our contemporary thought structures are founded. The history of
spirituality is the history of a masculine concept of spirituality. Not
only
has female experience of spirituality remained largely unheard for the
whole of
that time but it has often been actively eliminated, as witnessed in
the early
demotion of women within the burgeoning Christian church and the
horrors of the
burning times. The female experience, however, has always, like my own
and like
the African grandmothers [looking after their many AIDS-orphaned
grandchildren], been deeply grounded in both simplicity and in the
actualities and necessities of ‘Be-ing’. This
is in
direct contrast to
century upon century of masculine abstraction, of complex theorisation
and of
the creation of a status-ridden hierarchy of expertness presented as
the only
medium by which the uninitiated may access the Divine... It is no
wonder that
female spiritual experience has so often been viewed as so subversive
and
threatening that it has to be subdued and eliminated...it exposes
elitism as a
lie, it busts the gates of Divinity wide open and lets everyone in for
free." Resources
|
Also see:- __________Be on the lookout for the ways your special skills can serve what the world needs. Because we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (The Story of Stuff email 9 September 2017) |
Top of Page | Contact Bruce |