Linda's repost/Gurus and all

[Guest guest]

LC [jyotish (AT) warwick (DOT) net]Sent:

Wednesday, February 14, 2001 8:57 AMTo:

Subject: Re: Re: Yogi

Bhajan

Hello Jerry:

Your post brings up some core issues regarding the spiritual journey.

It would be understandable for a person to come to the conclusion that

teachers of spirituality do not live up to the teachings and

therefore, "throw out the baby with the bathwater". That is probably

not the best solution as for many of us there is a long distance

between hearing that one is a perfect soul/self and getting to the

point where one is the perfect self. Without some type of guidance

along the way one can run into difficulty ranging from simple

loneliness to alienation to errant kundalini activity. A competent

teacher is definitely a blessing.

Of course, finding a competent teacher can be a challenge, especially

when one moves into the realm of working with those teachers who have

achieved a level of being able to work with shakti energy. If those

teachers have not cleaned up their own act, have not faced their own

issues/samskaras the danger of their egos being huge is very much

present. Personally, I believe that an active kundalini combined with

many unresolved psychological problems can leave the teacher/guru

actually unable to see how irrational they have become. This speaks

of the core issue itself - teacher/guru found some techniques and,

without the proper guidance, unleashed "energy voltage" and proceeds

to pump him/herself up by presenting teachings.

One can look at the end result of this and see the amount of money and

power that the "guru" has gathered and believe the teachings

themselves are false and that the "guru" always intended to use and

abuse students. However, I believe that many of these teachers

started out with a sincere desire to help others but due to the lack

of proper guidance in the beginning things moved in a negative

direction and probably the "guru" is as trapped in illusion as the

"student". Perhaps things fall apart here in the West because we

believe in instant results....write the check, swipe the credit card

and enlightenment in ours. Bottom line is that the majority of us

have latent tendencies that have to be worked on and that work takes

time and effort.

A good teacher can inspire us to start and perhaps even give us some

help with energy healing but if he/she promises us that surrender to

their form will get us there we should recognize there is a problem.

A good teacher should be able to give us some tools to work with but

should let us know that we have to walk the talk and use the tools on

our own. If surrender is spoken of it should be in terms of

surrendering to our own hearts with the understanding that we are as

perfect as the teacher and if a teacher is speaking of busting your

ego his/her own ego should not be obvious, in other words we should

recognize humility coming from the teacher before humility is

demanded of the student.

I agree with you completely, we can not hide our heads in the sand.

The ultimate destiny of each person is to shed the shackles of

body/mind identification and at this time on the planet it is as if

the greatest of secrets has been revealed as more of us begin to

discover the purity of the true self. Rather then simply uncovering

the problems within the spiritual world we need to be conscious in

our choice of teachers, if the demand for instant enlightenment

and/or for a persona to takes us there disappears, so will the market

for those who market to that need. Years ago in order to get herbs I

had to write to a company somewhere in the midwest and stuff the

awful tasting ones into little caplets because that is all that was

available. Now because the public demanded it we can get high quality

herbs at a variety of places. There is truth in the teachings of yoga,

meditation, etc., we need to demand that teachers be as truthful as

the teachings.

Linda