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We Need To Talk About Abuses Of Power In The Spiritual Community
As someone who likes to think of himself as a rational person, spiritual practices like meditation are sometimes difficult for me. Meditation is by its very nature, mysterious. By which I mean it forces you to ask questions which don’t have clear-cut or scientifically verifiable answers.
As you begin to explore the nature of your mind, you bump up against questions like “Who am I?” or “How should I relate to others?”, or “What am I supposed to do?”, and you see that these questions don’t have clear-cut answers. We’ll have our own feelings about the answers of course. We might believe passionately that we know what our purpose is, or that we’ve figured out the true nature of existence, but in the end, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that these intuitions are nothing more than our best guesses.
The problem is, we’re often not honest with ourselves. Worse, the teachers and gurus that we turn to for answers are often not honest either. A quick YouTube search of the word “consciousness” for example, will surface hundreds of videos featuring men and women (usually men) speaking with absolute conviction about what happens after death or about the nature of reality or the origins of the universe. All things, in case there’s any doubt…
