Holy Madness: Spirituality, Crazy-Wise Teachers, and Enlightenment by Georg Feuerstein

Author:Georg Feuerstein [Feuerstein, Georg]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781935387596
Publisher: Hohm Press
Published: 2013-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

2. Individualism and Obedience

The main target of today’s anticult sentiments, however, are not immature devotees but the figure of the spiritual guide, or guru. The popular mind does not care to distinguish between genuine spiritual teachers and fakes. All that the public eye beholds is spiritual authorities exerting what common sense judges to be a disproportionate and unwholesome influence on their “followers.” Thus, the guru is typified as a cult leader who uses his, or more rarely her, charismatic power to dupe and exploit gullible seekers. This popular prejudice, masked as a common-sense judgment, is a formidable obstacle to genuine discipleship, which our age needs as badly, if not more so, than previous ages.

Alas, common sense is frequently found to be an unreliable instrument in such matters. Common sense is widely used to communicate seemingly universal truths. But, as a rule, those truths are seldom more than opinions. As the Jesuit philosopher-theologian Bernard J. F. Lonergan, who is hailed by some as the Aquinas of the twentieth century, noted:

Common sense . . . is a specialization of intelligence in the particular and the concrete. It is common without being general, for it consists in a set of insights that remains incomplete, until there is added at least one further insight into the situation in hand; and, once that situation has passed, the added insight is no longer relevant, so that common sense at once reverts to its normal state of incompleteness.5

Where common sense replaces careful thought, acute observation, and self-inspection it is no more than the voice of the mass mind of conceited egos. Over three centuries ago, René Descartes remarked on the close proximity of conceit and common sense:

Common sense is the most widely distributed commodity in the world, because everyone deems himself so well equipped with it that those who are hardest to please in all other respects, generally do not desire to have more of it than they have.6

Real life situations are apt to be far more complex than common sense either permits or can handle. This is especially true of spiritual matters, notably of the guru and not least a guru teaching in the crazy-wisdom style. Many psychic, cultural, and historical factors converge to generate the negative image of spiritual teachers in the popular mind. To disentangle all of them would require a book in itself. Here I will mention only some of the more obvious aspects.

The first factor to be mentioned, since it is likely to be uppermost in the mind of most people, is the frequent misuse of authority, whether secular or sacred and private or institutional. We need only to recall here the infamous dictatorships of recent history—from Hitler and Mussolini to Ceausescu and Noriega—or the enforced mass suicide of 911 members of the People’s Temple at Jonestown (1978) and the horrifying ritualistic murders by the Manson “family” (1969-1971). There are also the injurious machinations of misguided gurus like Rajneesh and cult leaders with imperialistic dreams, such as the “spiritual” terrorist Shoko Asahara, who have soured public attitudes.

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