Why Do Spiritual Teachers Keep F@&king Up?
Without a doubt, sex is the third rail of humanity — yes, it powers the train but it can also kill you if you step on it. In spiritual circles, there has long been a rule in place that teachers should not sleep with their students. It’s one of those rules, like not cheating on one’s spouse, that seems to get ignored nearly as often as gets followed.
Yet it seems reasonable that the teachers of spirituality should know better, act more ethically, and be more transformed — be more adult — in their sexuality than the rest of us. After all, what's the point of being a so-called spiritual master if you can’t keep it in your pants?
It’s a fair question. With all the scandals in the world, some people have concluded that the offending teachers are frauds. Others, that all spirituality is a fraud. And others still have made excuses and claimed their teacher’s behavior was actually enlightened in some way.
None of those really work, though, and none of them help us to actually understand what’s going on, and how we might actually address it in a way that can create change.
This is a long piece. Watch a summary of it by clicking the image.
In Zen, in the New Age, in Christianity, in Tantra and the Vajrayana, and in many other forms of spirituality there have been scores and scores of teachers who have had major scandals around sex, but also around power, money, control, favoritism, demanding servitude, and other offenses both grave and petty.
Why? How do we explain this seeming paradox of spiritual people acting in petty and selfish ways?
The truth is simple to say and more complicated to explain: spiritual teachers may have spiritual depth and wisdom, but they also have psychological shadows and blind spots that are untouched by the depth of the spirituality.
Are advanced spiritual people really above petty things like lust and greed? Not so much.
Most Buddhists I know believe that “awakening” or Enlightenment transforms psychological shadows — my own teacher, Junpo Roshi, believed this. He said to me, many times, that to fully awaken is to fully transform all of the self, including all shadows (even though he knew he had to do a great deal of his own shadow work).
I’ve come to understand this position — that enlightenment transforms psychological shadows — is impossible, self-deceptive, and highly destructive to both teachers and their students. In order to understand why, we need to understand two things better: shadow and awakening.
One note: a small number of spiritual teachers almost certainly have personality disorders — Borderline, Narcissism, and other clinical disorders. I avoid those in this essay, however. But the conclusions at the end of this essay still apply to them and their current and former students.
Understanding Shadow
There’s an old story about a man looking for his car keys under a street light. A stranger walks by and asks if he can help.
“Sure,” says the man looking for his keys.
“Where did you last see them,” the good samaritan asks.
“Over there,” the man replies, nodding his head to a dark part of the street half a block away.
“Then why are you looking over here?”
“The light is better.”
Shadow, simply put, is the shit we can’t see in our conscious mind. We all have shadows — all of us. If you don’t think you have shadows — you are absolutely kidding yourself, and chances are your life shows it in ways that might not be obvious to you but is certainly obvious to others.
There are three kinds of shadows, according to the therapist, coach, educator, and my buddy, Kim Barta.
Introjects, or things we tell ourselves that aren’t true. Like You have no idea what you’re talking about and no one will like this essay, you stupid fool. Hypothetical, of course. You’re not loveable, you piece of shit. That would be another introject. Also completely hypothetical. What is wrong with you? Why does everyone leave you? Or, You don’t need her. You don’t need anyone. You’re better off on your own. Introjects get put into us by our parents or educators. Think of a parent saying, “Shame on you!” to a kid and then 20 years later, that now young adult shouts, “Shame on you!” to his dog, and then feels a lot of shame for saying it. “That’s a fucked up thing to say to a dog…”
The “work” with introjects is to actually get them “out” of your self-system since they came from outside of you.
Splitting, or when a part of ourselves, like our inner child, gets cut off from the rest of our ego. This often happens with trauma, where the walled-off part is isolated in the psyche in order to preserve the larger whole. Men who “hate” crying almost certainly have locked away inner kiddos who experienced that it wasn’t safe to cry as a child, for instance. How many men have said, “I never cry. I actually don’t feel that much of anything, except anger.” Chances are there’s a wounded and sad child locked off inside of their psyche.
The “work” here is to integrate the split self, like people do when they “re-parent” their own, inner child — becoming a good parent to a part of their own psyche.
Watch out for your inner Trump! Fuck that guy, man! (Wait, which guy?!)
Projection is when we are disturbed internally by something we see outside of ourselves. When we have a very strong reaction to external events, like hating the guy in the White House, trying to destroy the patriarchy, thinking religious people are idiots, or that American history is shameful, the rich are just so undeserving, or the poor get what they deserve, those all point to projections rather than more objective assessments of the truth. Anytime there’s a strong emotional reaction projected outward, it’s really pointing at an unresolved emotion that is moving inwards. Our current political divide is almost entirely made up of unowned projections on both sides.
The “work” for projections is to “own” them — to figure out what it is in you that makes that external thing so intolerable.
Shadow work involves exploring and integrating these hidden aspects of ourselves in order to achieve greater self-awareness and freedom from our unconscious conditioning.
If you’re unsure of your own shadows, just look at your life. Is there a wake, like a wake behind a boat? Do you drink every night in order to calm down? Spend hours every day looking at porn? Seem unable to be in a serious romantic relationship? Shadow. Do you have constant turmoil and problems in your life? I see lots of people who blame others for their crappy dating experiences and crappy relationships — but at some point, you have to realize the only constant in that drama is you. That doesn’t mean everything is your fault, only that a lot of folks choose badly (unconsciously) to prove their (unconscious) story — like “Men just suck and are unreliable,” or “Women just can’t be trusted and are gold diggers.”
Or if you’re always poor, it could be because you haven’t had a fair shake at things. But it could also be because you believe money is scarce and hard to come by, and that you can never make money doing what you love. The first gets handed to you and must be overcome; the second one you create with your mind and it too must be overcome.
SHADOW CREATION
Let’s do a quick drive-by of the two ways shadows get created:
Trauma is simply an experience that overwhelms an individual's ability to experience it fully. So the experience must get stored in the body-mind to be processed — or not — later. Trauma is far more likely to happen in childhood because their brains aren’t fully formed, and they need an adult to regulate their nervous system after a stressful event or they get traumatized.
Traumatic experiences can include physical or sexual abuse, “benign” neglect or overt neglect, unattuned parents, overprotective parents, being raised by a parent with a personality disorder, and of course things like war, natural disasters, and other large forms of violence or threat.
But the birthing process itself can be traumatic and that alone can leave a deep shadow on someone, even if their childhood was otherwise reasonably healthy. Just growing up can be traumatic for some. Trauma is subjective, meaning one child might live through a war and not get traumatized while another gets traumatized simply by being left in a crib for too long. Trauma isn’t so much what happens to you but what happens inside you during the event(s).
Trauma resolution matters because all unresolved trauma leads to symptoms such as anxiety, dissociation, depression, PTSD, and other mood disorders, and to impacts on health like addiction, a greater risk of disease, and being far less free than you might otherwise be.
Attachment disorders were a shock for me to discover. I presumed my lone-wolf detached style was just cool, and meant I was more mature than most people. Never mind that I was often single, tended to hold back my innermost thoughts and fears to the people I loved the most, and lived most of the time like I was half out of the metaphorical party of life.
An attachment disorder describes a range of emotional and behavioral problems for those of us who experienced disruptions in our early attachment relationships, such as with a parent or caregiver. Attachment disorders can manifest in different ways, such as difficulty forming close relationships, excessive clinginess or avoidance, emotional detachment, poor impulse control, and a lot of other frankly embarrassing things.
According to Dr. Dan Brown, there are 5 (seemingly minor) things that are needed to create healthy attachment:
Safety and protection from caregivers (without overly protecting you — see point 5).
Being attuned to — a parent notices and is curious about what you feel and think, and is accurate in what they guess.
Regulating your nervous system with the help of a calming adult when you’re upset. (Gen Xers got a lot of, “I’ll give you something to cry about…” which — duh — does not lead to secure attachment.)
Feeling parents’ joy at your mere existence, and expressed by things like seldom being too busy for you.
Allowing exploration of the world on your own by trusting your sense of curiosity and play.
Nearly everyone in the West has not had all (or maybe even some) of these things as a child. This doesn’t mean your parents were shitty parents (but it might mean just that) or you were abused, only that a lack of all five of these things will almost certainly leave a shadow in you. Or two. Maybe even a baker’s dozen.
There are 4 kinds of attachment styles: 1.) secure, 2.) preoccupied, 3.) fearful-avoidant, 4.) dismissing-avoidant.
The psychological literature suggests that more than half of us have an attachment disorder, but honestly, I don’t seem to find many securely attached people in my circles. But maybe that’s because they’re friends with me.
Secure people feel these five things in relationship to others (regulated, joy/being wanted, trusted, safe, and attuned to).
Secure attachment style is characterized by individuals who know they have self-worth and who trust others. Intimacy is great but so is independence. They find it easy to love and easy to be alone, don’t get freaked out by conflict with their partner, and tend to “come back to baseline” — or to be able to self-regulate (point #3 above) quickly. In response to relational stressors, they tend to stay emotionally available and have no need to take space or create instant closeness in order to feel safe.
Those with preoccupied attachment (or Anxious attachment) believe they aren’t worthy of love, and so seek validation and self-acceptance through their relationships with others. They tend to freak out and “rush in” if they don’t feel loved and accepted, which freaks out people in the next category (or so I’ve read.) Put another way, the Anxiously attached struggle when they feel like they aren’t being accepted (which can also be a projection), but their response is to try and force connection and resolution immediately, without attunement to the other person or what that other person might be needing in the moment.
Those with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style (or Avoidant) seem cool and collected, but underneath that seemingly calm exterior is a profound lack of trust of other people. Or as people described me in college, “Keith? He’s that aloof guy that never talks.” These types have a sense of their own self-worth but stick to themselves. Lone wolf types. Writers, often. Zen guys. Unlike preoccupied folks, when they get freaked out in a relationship they tend run for the hills by either physically leaving or by emotionally checking out. They “self-soothe” not by being in relationship to who freaked them out, but by getting as far away from it as possible. Ask one of them how they’re doing and you’re likely to hear some version of, “Fine.”
And then we have the fearful-avoidant (or Disorganized attachment) ones. These poor souls are a combination of the preoccupied and dismissive-avoidant styles, or anxious-avoidant. So they get pulled in two directions — they need reassurance from others in the same way a preoccupied person does, but they share the distrust of the dismissive-avoidant. Put simply, they deeply desire love but just as equally fear it, and tend to sabotage their relationships unconsciously if they get “too” close by pushing away those close to them, then rushing in to try and get them back.
At least half of us are saddled with one of these three shit types. And for most of us, we’ll never know we’re one of the unhealthy types unless we get curious or someone tells us (and we happen to believe them). Otherwise, we keep on keeping on and presume the problem isn’t with us but rather with anyone who isn’t just like us.
That’s an overview of shadow, so now let’s move onto spiritual awakening. This is from a nondual point of view (meaning, we’re not talking about the local pastor here or the 23-year-old chic teaching 6 am Power Yoga). Nondual means a spirituality that allows one to experience a connection to all, as all. Let’s unpack that.
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?
This is kind of a big topic, like asking what is God or what is love or why was disco so popular, but let’s see if we can simplify it.
In Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, enlightenment refers to the attainment of spiritual insight or awareness, usually through a process of meditation. In this context, enlightenment is often seen as the realization of one's true nature or the ultimate reality of the universe, leading to freedom from suffering and a state of profound inner peace.
Well, that sounds pretty cool, eh? Who doesn't want to be free from suffering or not in a state of profound inner peace? We all do, but of course awakening comes with some important caveats and one big paradox, namely you — as in your little egoic self — can’t awaken at all. Which raises a good follow-up: who, then, awakens?
If you’re a classically trained meditation student, you’ve probably heard terms like rigpa, sahaja samahi, turia, turiatita, nirvikalpa samadhi, shunyata, and so on. There have been thousands of books written on the topic, and modern teachers are as diverse as Adyshanti, Lama Tsutrim, Eckhart Tolle, Thomas Hübl, Shinzen Young, and hundreds of others.
There are just two parts of your mind you need to worry about: your consciousness and your awareness. Awareness is like a beam of light, steady and constant. Consciousness is in relationship to that light, but not the light itself. Some meditative practices have you focus your consciousness on a singular object, like your breath, and try to stabilize it there. Others ask you to make your consciousness as diffuse as possible. Either practice can eventually result in you first seeing this light arising within you. Later practices turn the consciousness of light into awareness as light.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS, THEN?
Your consciousness includes your ego, of course. But it also includes much more, such as your unconscious conditioning and drives. Consciousness is that which is aware of things, including awareness of itself.
Right now, you know you’re self-aware (unless you’re an AI scanning this doc to steal parts of it), and right now you know (or you should know) that your childhood, place of birth, education, race, sex, gender identity, intelligence, wealth, and many other things have helped to shape who you are, in ways profound and mundane. And you probably know that your consciousness is a changing and fluid thing.
One day you wake up in a terrible mood, and on the drive to work another driver suddenly cuts you off. And you scream a litany of curse words at that person, listen to the news on the radio, and wonder how the world ever got so totally fucked up. The sky seems dark and gray and you wonder whether there is any real point to life.
A few days later, you wake up in a great mood. And when someone cuts you off on your morning commute, you laugh at how rushed and inattentive he seemed. The news goes on and on, being the news, but you notice some good things happening in the world. The sun is low but bright as you drive, and you look forward to a dinner you’re planning over the weekend with some friends. Life seems pretty good.
In both scenarios, your consciousness hugely influences how you experience reality. Nothing was objectively different—reality was pretty much the same on both of those days—and yet your experience of reality was completely different. Your consciousness, then, is the lens through which you filter reality, but reality is independent of what you think or feel about it.
Put another way, you may just hate climate change — and good for you. But your feelings don’t do a damn thing to the reality of the situation. Reality goes on being real. Makes sense, right?
Consciousness is fluid and changing. It can be hugely expansive like many people report after the birth of their first child, or while sitting bedside as a loved one dies. Your consciousness is hugely influenced by your brain chemistry, your personal psychology, your culture, and your physical surroundings (a war-torn city versus a quiet suburb versus the deck of a sailboat), and of course your shadows.
You think your consciousness is steady and stable, but it’s not. Your consciousness at age two is very different from your consciousness when you’re eighteen, and the consciousness of a wise sage is very different from that of a cutthroat Wall Street hedge fund manager. And you were very different 10 years ago — much more than you think.
Consciousness is always in relationship to something — God, nature, self, others, the world, etc.
Consciousness is always in relationship to something, even if it’s just in relation to itself. That is a defining characteristic of consciousness, of ego, of self: relationship. Yours might be in relationship to God, or to your memories, or to the magic and mysteries of nature, or to the spiritual realm, or to other humans, or to writing an essay on consciousness.
Egoic consciousness can also be an identity, like when someone is a fundamentalist form of anything, like a Ku Klux Klan member, a born-again Christian, a close-minded woke activist, or a hardcore Trump supporter. Those people usually don’t have identities; they are their identity, which is part of what makes them such jerks.
If you’re more self-aware, you will know that you have constructed your identities. I’m a writer, but not when I’m driving. I’m a martial arts teacher, but not when I’m meditating. My identity is like a set of clothes worn over my body. I’m obviously not my shoes or shirt, but the man under them. And I’m just as obviously none of my identities, none of the stories I tell myself about myself.
If you’re less self-aware, you may not know that your identities are constructed, and you may act as if that construct—that temporary identity—is real, permanent, and solid. This leads to calcification of the mind, rigidity in relationships, predictable and reactive ways of being in the world, low self-awareness, and a very low chance of ever seeing your shadows.
Consciousness includes anything you’re in relationship to, from angels to God to Jesus to lunch to ancestor realms to Netflix. But it can’t know anything outside of itself.
At the highest levels, consciousness itself becomes fully self-aware. This means it knows it has an ego, which is part of the whole of the unconscious and conscious mind. And at its most self-aware, a consciousness can see that everything it knows and everything it is can only be as big as what it has experienced and what it has known, which isn’t that much in the big scale of things — and yet, big enough to know that.
At these highest levels, consciousness knows it changes, knows it’s self-aware, knows it can be an unreliable recorder of history or subject to having emotion push it to wrong or incomplete conclusions, and knows that it only knows what it knows and nothing else (and that it actually doesn’t know all that much).
Yet even at its most powerful and self-aware, consciousness is still always in relationship with something else.
HOW IS AWARENESS DIFFERENT?
Part of the confounding part of describing awareness is it seems paradoxical if you’re not resting in awareness itself, but from the place of awareness there is no paradox. So as you read this section, try and just relax a little. Don’t try and figure it out, just let it flow through you and see if it lights anything up.
Awareness is something else than consciousness and something that does not change. While consciousness can get very expansive or very contracted, awareness is just aware. It is in you right now, right here, in this very place. Awareness doesn’t get big or small, doesn’t change in relation to your thoughts of it, isn’t impacted when you first contact it, and hasn’t evolved or changed since it exists entirely outside of time (yet fully within it). Paradox.
… in relationship to nothing ...
Awareness, in contrast to consciousness, is not in relationship with anything or anyone else. It just is.
When we notice that we have an ego, and that our egos have parts and conditioned behaviors and conditioned selves, we become more self-aware. This is our consciousness noticing a part of itself. When we allow an awareness deeper than our consciousness, something that can see the whole of us and all that we can see, we’re in touch with something deeper. Some would call this awake. Or aware of being aware.
Awareness notices changes in consciousness, not the other way around. When we fall into sleep, our consciousness shifts and changes into a dream state, but after some time consciousness ceases to be, and there is only awareness (known as deep sleep). At some point, consciousness returns with dreaming, and then dreaming gives way to waking up and starting our day. But the awareness is untouched by all of this.
Awareness when we contact it with our consciousness, is always here (never “there”). Always present. It can see but not be seen. How do you shine light on a beam of light? Awareness is the ultimate subjectivity, only ever looking out at the world but unknowable to itself because there is nothing to know about it. It’s here at our birth and it’s here at our death, and it remains constant throughout our lives.
In the quiet of meditation, we can reside inside of this awareness (not our awareness, for we do not have it. If you believe you “have” awareness, this really means your ego believes you’ve captured enlightenment, something that is quite impossible.)
All egos are, by their nature, dualistic—it is how the ego operates. That simply means that an ego’s job boils down to three things:
I like it.
I don’t like it.
I don’t care about it.
So when an ego believes it is enlightened (“I like it!”), spiritual narcissism is always the result. Why? Because it believes there is a difference between a spiritual and non-spiritual life, for one (there is only a difference from your ego’s point of view). Two, you cannot keep your spiritual insight for yourself — you reside inside of it, not the other way around. Awareness watches as your consciousness and ego arise, even as that ego is trying to keep what it finds for itself (adorable little ego!).
The paradox is you can allow the dance of life to flow through you, as you, which can transform your ego — as long as you don’t try and keep what you find for yourself.
More technically and more specifically, awareness can’t be changed, can’t be moved, has never spoken, and although it’s not static, it’s not dynamic either. You can see as awareness, but you can’t see it as an object of your consciousness, which is what far too many meditators try to do.
You can allow your conscious attention to be on something like the breath, and in so doing, sometimes, the awareness that is always arising suddenly is all that you are. Then, as awareness itself, your little ego, with all your dramas, opinions, stories, contractions, traumas, identities, neuroses, and attachments, is seen as simply arising within this ever-present, ever-unchanging awareness-that-is-really-you. Your “you-ness” is no different than the passing clouds — perfect as they are, even if you are really you and the clouds all at once!
The tiny dot? Your consciousness.
(Not to scale.)
This is liberation, because “you” are no longer identified with your ego story, your thoughts, your opinions of what’s right and wrong, your beliefs about the world, or even (with very highly realized practitioners) the mental impacts of your psychological triggers.
Awareness exists in relationship to nothing because it includes everything in the manifest and unmanifest world. Awareness isn’t located in your belly or your third eye or your heart, which is why we sometimes say it is empty, because it has no locus, no central location.
Consciousness seems to exist in the head, more or less, and as we evolve we can also experience our consciousness in our body as well. But awareness doesn’t exist anywhere. We also say awareness is empty because awareness is just aware, nothing more. There are no stories here, no karmas, no identities, no morality, no good or evil, no ranking, no valuating (right or wronging), no trying to change what is, no nothing. But also something — that damn paradox again.
For those masters who have stabilized their ability to rest in awareness as awareness, I have experienced them taking their shadow material, like trauma, and letting go of the shadow material as it arises — most of the time. The problem is awareness cannot understand trauma or attachment, or consider them problematic, or think they should be better understood and resolved. That all takes place in consciousness, in the ego, and very realized masters are largely disidentified with their egos.
Shadows and awakening. When we come back to our central question, What’s really going on with sex scandals and spiritual teachers, it’s important that the nuances of each be understood. My assertion is that none of us are exempt from having shadows — no exceptions. Furthermore, spiritual practice and spiritual insight do not touch shadow material, so no matter how “awake” someone is, this has no bearing whatsoever on how much shadow still exists inside their egos.
I don’t think we’ll ever end sex scandals with spiritual teachers, but I do think we can decrease them by following a few, simple guidelines.
5 Ways to Integrate Sex, Spirituality, and Shadow
1. UNDERSTAND AND AVOID SPIRITUAL BYPASSING
My own teacher, Junpo Roshi, did a very odd thing when he first became a Zen roshi and lineage holder: he quickly went into psychotherapy. Years later, when we were writing The Heart of Zen (North Atlantic Books, 2014), I asked him why.
Because I was a fraud. There was nowhere to hide. In 1992, when recognized as a so-called Zen master, I had to face the fact that in my case Zen was just not working effectively—not for me or for many others. I had insight but I wasn’t free. I had a lot of psychological damage from my upbringing, and Zen simply hadn’t touched it.
I could transcend it, true, control it with my will, but the damage was still intact and mostly untouched. I didn’t know if that was just my problem, or if it was something that was common in the larger Buddhist community. I saw, with my six years in the monastery, a lot of psychological shadows in myself, but also in the men and women training with me, in other spiritual communities, and in Eido Shimano himself [Junpo’s teacher and the head abbot of the monastery]. But how widespread it was, and what it meant, I could only guess at.
How come, after decades of practice, real wisdom and compassion were not ruling my life, directing my behavior, and transforming lust, violent anger, jealousy, envy? How could love and compassion not hold in the face of my internal conflict?
I could remain non-reactive in the face of these things, mind you, but it was a very repressive energy that was required. And my negative emotions still flourished, and they would sometimes overpower my discipline and my insight. Why? How? I had to know.”
That is a near-perfect description of spiritual bypassing — “I had a lot of psychological damage from my upbringing, and Zen simply hadn’t touched it. I could transcend it, true, control it with my will, but the damage was still intact and mostly untouched.”
Bypassing isn’t limited to just Buddhism. I’ve known more than a few people who use Ayahuasca to try and get around what would be better faced with a therapist, or believe that their experiences of oneness are somehow actually about them rather than about something much bigger. And of course, Christianity is drowning in examples of this, but so are New Age teachers, teachers of Tantra, and teachers in just about any school of spiritual thought and practice.
We need to use the ego to work on the ego. And awareness to help us transcend our identification with that ego. But beware of the teacher, or the person, who thinks he or she are above or beyond shadow work.
2. TELL THE TRUTH/DEMAND THE TRUTH
We all make mistakes. What kind of life would we have if we didn’t? Sometimes a wise and deeply awake teacher will make a serious mistake: sleep with a student, get on a power trip and humiliate someone, mistake detachment for equanimity, or any number of things.
When this happens, the only way out for them is to come clean, tell the truth, and do what is necessary to repair the situation. If you know a teacher that has struggled with integrity and has tried to keep that secret, you have an obligation to call them out, to help them to tell the truth, rest in the truth, surrender to their own humanness, and be willing to clean up their mess.
If you’re a teacher, you have an obligation to bring your humanness to your students and not hide it away from them, out of fear it might damage your precious reputation. Lead by example, not by words. If you fuck up, share that with us and teach us how to do the hard work of ownership and repair.
3. AWARENESS CAN’T AWAKEN WHAT IT CAN’T SEE
The central tenet of this paper is just that — we can’t awaken what we can’t see. A “fully awakened” teacher is only as fully awakened as the things in their egoic consciousness. If, for instance, they are fully embedded with their culture (like, say, an 18th-century Zen master) they cannot and will not transcend their cultural conditioning. You can’t awaken what you can’t see.
Awakening, enlightenment, isn’t a magic pill that means you suddenly step off the wheel of life and gain magic powers of perception. The secret of liberation is you simply see that you’re always on the wheel of life, always fully human, and that it doesn’t matter if you get off of the wheel or stay on it because liberation lies right here. Doing your shadow work, fucking up, and cleaning up the mess is no more of a problem than eating your dinner — it’s all part of this glorious unfolding of truth, otherwise known as life.
4. WATCH OUT FOR SPIRITUAL INFLATION
You don’t awaken, and your spiritual identity is directly in the way of you getting what you want. A spiritual identity (which my next blog will tackle) is the fastest way to get yourself into trouble. Your spiritual insights aren’t (actually) about you. You can’t be special and be awake. You can’t be opinionated and be liberated. You can’t hold onto your spiritual identity and rest in awakening. The cost of liberation is nothing less than all of you. If you, or your teacher, think they are spiritual people, watch out. And see the next point.
5. IT’S UP TO YOU
This is the least popular point: personal accountability. The hard truth is you, and you alone, must own your projections onto spiritual teachers. The days of “golden projection” — of believing the guru is someone fundamentally different from you, better than you, need to be set down. They may, like a professor, know more than you, or have a deeper insight than you do, but their insight is the very same as the awareness underneath your conscious mind. They are not special, because you cannot be awake and special at the same time. But you can project that they are special.
When you give up your autonomy and hand it over to a teacher and refuse to see the humanness in them, you are empowering your own disempowerment. Your community is laying the seeds of a cult, of worshipping a god-man or god-woman who seems, somehow, more than all of you. They are not.
At the end of the day, you must also take radical responsibility for your own shadows — no matter if you’re a spiritual teacher or not. Those shadows are not the fault of your parents or your culture nor do they mean you’re weak or unspiritual — they just are, created through the imperfect perfection of human existence. You, however, are responsible for addressing them as they arise inside of you. In other words, you aren’t responsible for what happened to you, nor what happened in you as a result. But you are 100% responsible for doing the work required to heal from it. After all, who else is going to do that work?
As my teacher once told a sobbing retreatant crying about the heartbreaking loss of her husband, “Even if I had the power to remove your pain and instantly awaken you, I would never rob you of the journey.” That’s awakened compassion, not idiot compassion, which would try and rescue her from herself. Nor is it Spiritual Inflation, with him pretending to have something she doesn’t possess. What he offered was to be a guide on the path to discovering the truth for herself, shoulder to shoulder.
What all of us need is to be integrated — shadows and soul, awareness and consciousness, God and man, high and low, masculine and feminine — into a whole human being. It’s the only true path to getting what you really want.
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Learn more about this topic in my book, “When the Buddha Needs Therapy”
Postscript: To be clear, I believe consenting adults, even if one is a spiritual teacher and one is a student, can have a sexual relationship. The problem is when it's hidden and lied about. If everyone is telling the truth and everything is above the board, it's a conversation that their community can all have, together.