Gurus

Gurus

I am reluctant to recommend any human spiritual teacher. It is a bit like recommending a builder - fraught with complications. Or worse.
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.

"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)

"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."

"I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

(Morpheus, from 1999 movie The Matrix)

Also see:-

How Evolved Am I?