Posted by read on July 18, 2002 at 05:39:33:
Posted by lifestudent on July 08, 2002 at 15:26:12:
1 At their roots, regardless of philosophical doctrine, all spiritual groups, both east and west, operate somewhere between integrity and manipulation, honesty and sham. Fortunately for humanity, spiritual groups lean more toward honesty and integrity as a general rule.
2 Groups that operate from manipulation, dishonesty, and sham I will call cults, rather than spiritual groups. There will always be a small minority of individuals who become cult leaders to deliberately manipulate and exploit people for their personal benefit, just as there will always be the dishonest and corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders at every level.
3 Sincere students and teachers of the Tao who have a strong desire for spiritual clarity need to differentiate between honest spiritual groups with integrity and manipulative cults. For thousnds of years Taoist have observed that cults do not spiritually serve their leaders or followers. Both cult leaders and students can be blithely unaware of the future repercussions of their obvious and hidden motivations and self-delusions.
4 Many corrupt spiritual leaders, especially those with smaller cults, begin with surface integrity and pure motivations, but over time turn to the dark side for a multitude of reasons. Some never truly learned the genuine inner humility or hard work of being a student. Some became teachers before completing their studies. Now, as their flock's adulation increases, they begin to be influenced by, beleive in, and succumb to their students' overt or subtle demands to be manipulated. Sooner or later they run out of genuine teaching material but find they have become attached to and crave the perks of being an adored leader. Rather than humbly admitting that they have no more to teach and saying, 'It's time to learn from someone more accomplished,' they begin to manipulate their students psychologically in order to maintain their status. Some find that the volume of psychic energy they absorb from their students destabilizes their inner being, causing them to sink into the deeper and darker sides of their nature faster than they can handle or transmute. Some simply slide down the slippery slopes of self-delusion or choose expediency and the path of least resistance over honesty and integrity.
5 How do people set themselves up for being exploited by a cult? Students need to ask this question while looking honestly and deeply at their own motivations, in order not to become subject to a cult leader's manipulation. Because the human desire to belong to a group is both powerful and natural, the true motivation of many aspiring spiritual students is to find a social group to belong to, rather than to find a teacher who can genuinely help them to belong to themselves.
6 Are secular and spiritual goals and needs different? In normal secular society, with its strong social, economic, and political agendas, people often allow external images---physical beauty, clothes, education, way of speaking, class, economic staus and so on---to become powerful motivating forces. For many the primary focus is on style over substance, the cover is more important than the books's contents. Conversely, true students of the Tao should not take any spiritual teacher's externals all that seriously. Rather, a teacher's inner essence, knowledge, and integrity should be the prime concern. A genuine spiritual seeker's focus should be on substance over style.
7 When students become trapped by externals, the danger exists that they will sooner or later divert their internal efforts away from meditation and into mimicking the teacher's image---possesions, clothes, hairstyle, language, gestures, and so on---becoming 'act as if' clones. A good cult leader can manipulate mental or emotional images much more easily than true spiritual substance. If a student's motivations are image oriented, it becomes possible for the cult leader, often using subliminal hypnotic methods, to gradually shift and mold the student's images into extremely convoluted beliefs, which can have dangerous consequences. At the extremes, an image-desiring student is set up to be exploited by unscrupulous teachers or self-deluded crazies.
8 These cult leaders use and project a multitude of external images to attract different crowds. They are equally likely to wear conventional suits and dresses, embroidered silks, ethnic costumes, or robes. They may look, speak, and act like well-groomed salesmen or professors, street hustlers, humble clerics, cryptic kung fu television characters, of Jesus Christ 'wannabes'.
9 To quote a common saying, misery loves company. The need of students with psychological weak spots or damaged emotional lives to act out dysfunctionally, be conflicted and indecisive, or have endlessly convoluted relationships with parents and family are often trasferred to the teacher and the cult community.
10 Students should note whether they personally, or the members of the spiritual group or cult they are investigating, allows, encourage, and play these these neurotic games. Some individuals misinterpret the idea of a spiritual friend to mean, 'Oh boy, now I can mitreat my new spiritual buddies like all my other friends, who mostly tell me to get lost because I act so horribly.' This attitude easily opens the door for some enterprising cult leader to brainwash, manipulate, and abuse them in sadly absurd ways. Responsible spiritual teachers will not encourage these mentally unhealthy relationship games and will maintain distance from those that do, as these spiritually corrosive games breed neurosis and easily escalate into the danger zone.
11 Good teachers encouage relaxed relationships and cooperation between spiritualy inclined individuals, not conflict. Students of the Tao endeavor to treat spiritual friends well, with respect, and with honest, open agendas. Taoist consider these hallmarks of spiritually productive teacher-student relationships. Taoist believe it is good not to confuse human relationships predicated upon compassion, balance, and integrity with those based on the need to defend self-agrandizing ego tendencies and hidden agendas about power and control that imprison the spirit. Chains, whether made of steel or gold, still bind.
Excerpted from 'Relaxing Into Your Being' by B.K.Frantzis
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