Ttoo often the leader gets addicted to that energy raised and the and dependent on his or her entourage. Social isolation and pampering corrupt the guru.
Social isolation, which usually happens when a guru is successful enough to build an ashram or compound is very dangerous.
Philip Zimbardo in his Prison Experiment demonstrated that in the absence of input from outside a group, social isolation leads to exaggerations of power imbalances, entrapment in roles and imates forget, actually forget there is anything outside the group--they forget they can leave.
Zimbardo made no attempt to impart any belief system or doctrine. His test subjects got trapped in the roles of prisoner and guard and things got so bad that Zimbardo ended the experiment early.
It is when a guru is capable of isolating his followers for long periods of time
even if just for a few days to a week or more that, too often FEAR becomes part of the guru disciple relationship.
Fear of losing the bliss
Fear of losing the guru's blessings
Fear of getting laughed at by the group
Fear of getting scorned by the guru and group
All this is enough to bring a trickle of fear into the guru disciple relationship.
When fear enters the guru disciple relationship, this is when that relationship begins to turn abusive/cultic.
Fear paralyses conscious thought. If combined with "teachings" that lead us to distrust our own minds and emotions, this is a dangerous combination. Such teachings are bad enough. Add even the slightest bit of fear to distrust of one's own mind and perceptions and this is poison, with no safe level of use.
All a guru has to do is begin hinting of dark forces, or a malevolent outside world, all a guru has to do is hint that his or her blessing is needed for protection, that one can lose the guru's blessing through doubts or negative thoughts and the guru disciple relationship becomes yet more burdened with fear.
Another fear recipe, perhaps even more effective, is for disciples to tell stories about the guru, tales of how doubts made the guru sick. Tales of how
doubters and former disciples have gone crazy, suffered misfortune.
Before the fear teachings slip into our beings, we often feel energized and vitalized by the guru disciple relationship. We may accomplish things we were never able to do before.
Horizons open. That combined with friendships formed, shared sense of purpose, shared work projects is a fantastic feeling. We may feel liberated from life long depression, anxiety. The problem is, this feeling of liberation is
not based on deep and enduring change in our character structures. It is dependant on idealization of the guru and the special idealistic social group around the guru.
When we feel so healed, we do not want to lose that feeling.
This is where the possibility of fear enters our relationship with the guru.
A genuine guru would do everything possible to get each follower tied to
sources of healing independent of the guru and ashram so that the person will
not feel dependent on the guru or ashram. A real guru does not want to
become something that people feel addicted to.
But, if a guru is enriched by having many disciples, what incentive is there to do this.
But as fear makes its way into the guru disciple relationship, we slowly lose that initial vitality, which happened only because fear was not yet a part of the relationship.
We do not want to lose that wonderful feeling of being vitalized, but because we ARE being given genuine cause for fear, nothing we can do can get that vitality back unless we deny we feel afraid of what the guru is doing, or might do.
We split off and disown our fear, and what leads us to fear the guru. We split off and disown our doubts. We split off and disown the worrisome sights and events that trigger our fear and our doubts. We split off and disown our indignation when we see someone getting laughed at in satsang, see the persons eyes fill with tears, shoulders tensing and hunching, face reddening or going pale and frozen.
We split off and disown our hurt and shock when a guru makes a joke and suddenly slips in a sharp, cruel or lewd comment. We tell ourselves it is a joke or therapeutic crazy wisdom. We split off and disown the sick feeling in our guts.
Our fear, our anger, get split off. We may be aware of each and every incident but we will not or cannot connect conscious thought with these incidents and our bodily awareness of them.
As we seek to reclaim that lost bliss of our early fear free days with the guru, we must exert vitality to suppress all our emotions all our awareness of incidents that call into question our idealized early relationship with the guru.
To get that feeling we once had of being energized by the guru, we must expend energy to preserve our ideal of the guru, because that ideal is no longer supported by evidence of our own eyes and ears.
Disowning what we know exhausts us. We are feeling drained by telling ourselves to ignore our fear, ignore what our senses are telling us.
To offset feeling drained, to try and regain feeling vitalized by the guru, we throw ourselves into service. We are driven to recruit new followers. The joy of
recruiting new followers for the guru we secretly distrust temporarily
vitalizes us, but the feeling is temporary.
First we are vitalized, eventually we become vampirized. Its the memory of being initially vitalized that keeps us longing for a return of the good old high energy days, and ignoring that we are being vampirized.
And if we urge new friends to join the group, we risk their joining the donor pool and ending up like us.
That may be why such groups are desperate to recruit. The people getting debilitated get a transient flash of vitalization by pulling new donors in---they summon memories of when the group had intially vitalized them.
As someone put it,
Social isolation, which usually happens when a guru is successful enough to build an ashram or compound is very dangerous.
Philip Zimbardo in his Prison Experiment demonstrated that in the absence of input from outside a group, social isolation leads to exaggerations of power imbalances, entrapment in roles and imates forget, actually forget there is anything outside the group--they forget they can leave.
Zimbardo made no attempt to impart any belief system or doctrine. His test subjects got trapped in the roles of prisoner and guard and things got so bad that Zimbardo ended the experiment early.
It is when a guru is capable of isolating his followers for long periods of time
even if just for a few days to a week or more that, too often FEAR becomes part of the guru disciple relationship.
Fear of losing the bliss
Fear of losing the guru's blessings
Fear of getting laughed at by the group
Fear of getting scorned by the guru and group
All this is enough to bring a trickle of fear into the guru disciple relationship.
When fear enters the guru disciple relationship, this is when that relationship begins to turn abusive/cultic.
Fear paralyses conscious thought. If combined with "teachings" that lead us to distrust our own minds and emotions, this is a dangerous combination. Such teachings are bad enough. Add even the slightest bit of fear to distrust of one's own mind and perceptions and this is poison, with no safe level of use.
All a guru has to do is begin hinting of dark forces, or a malevolent outside world, all a guru has to do is hint that his or her blessing is needed for protection, that one can lose the guru's blessing through doubts or negative thoughts and the guru disciple relationship becomes yet more burdened with fear.
Another fear recipe, perhaps even more effective, is for disciples to tell stories about the guru, tales of how doubts made the guru sick. Tales of how
doubters and former disciples have gone crazy, suffered misfortune.
Before the fear teachings slip into our beings, we often feel energized and vitalized by the guru disciple relationship. We may accomplish things we were never able to do before.
Horizons open. That combined with friendships formed, shared sense of purpose, shared work projects is a fantastic feeling. We may feel liberated from life long depression, anxiety. The problem is, this feeling of liberation is
not based on deep and enduring change in our character structures. It is dependant on idealization of the guru and the special idealistic social group around the guru.
When we feel so healed, we do not want to lose that feeling.
This is where the possibility of fear enters our relationship with the guru.
A genuine guru would do everything possible to get each follower tied to
sources of healing independent of the guru and ashram so that the person will
not feel dependent on the guru or ashram. A real guru does not want to
become something that people feel addicted to.
But, if a guru is enriched by having many disciples, what incentive is there to do this.
But as fear makes its way into the guru disciple relationship, we slowly lose that initial vitality, which happened only because fear was not yet a part of the relationship.
We do not want to lose that wonderful feeling of being vitalized, but because we ARE being given genuine cause for fear, nothing we can do can get that vitality back unless we deny we feel afraid of what the guru is doing, or might do.
We split off and disown our fear, and what leads us to fear the guru. We split off and disown our doubts. We split off and disown the worrisome sights and events that trigger our fear and our doubts. We split off and disown our indignation when we see someone getting laughed at in satsang, see the persons eyes fill with tears, shoulders tensing and hunching, face reddening or going pale and frozen.
We split off and disown our hurt and shock when a guru makes a joke and suddenly slips in a sharp, cruel or lewd comment. We tell ourselves it is a joke or therapeutic crazy wisdom. We split off and disown the sick feeling in our guts.
Our fear, our anger, get split off. We may be aware of each and every incident but we will not or cannot connect conscious thought with these incidents and our bodily awareness of them.
As we seek to reclaim that lost bliss of our early fear free days with the guru, we must exert vitality to suppress all our emotions all our awareness of incidents that call into question our idealized early relationship with the guru.
To get that feeling we once had of being energized by the guru, we must expend energy to preserve our ideal of the guru, because that ideal is no longer supported by evidence of our own eyes and ears.
Disowning what we know exhausts us. We are feeling drained by telling ourselves to ignore our fear, ignore what our senses are telling us.
To offset feeling drained, to try and regain feeling vitalized by the guru, we throw ourselves into service. We are driven to recruit new followers. The joy of
recruiting new followers for the guru we secretly distrust temporarily
vitalizes us, but the feeling is temporary.
First we are vitalized, eventually we become vampirized. Its the memory of being initially vitalized that keeps us longing for a return of the good old high energy days, and ignoring that we are being vampirized.
And if we urge new friends to join the group, we risk their joining the donor pool and ending up like us.
That may be why such groups are desperate to recruit. The people getting debilitated get a transient flash of vitalization by pulling new donors in---they summon memories of when the group had intially vitalized them.
As someone put it,
Quote
Its the memory of being initially vitalized that keeps us longing for a return of the good old high energy days, and ignoring fears of the guru that are draining us.
And if we urge new friends to join the group, we risk their joining the donor pool and ending up like us.
That may be why such groups are desperate to recruit. The people getting debilitated get a transient flash of vitalization by pulling new donors in---they summon memories of when the group had intially vitalized them.
Pulling in a new donor helps the weakened older donors to ignore their increasingly drained state.