Submitted by Wild Child on
You don’t sell love
You can’t sell spirituality because first and foremost spirit is infinite Love, pulsating with the forces of Creation. If you have spiritual insight, you must, to some degree, be a conscious participant in this infinite pulse of Creative Love. If you aren’t, you can’t point anyone towards it except by happenstance, and you are delusional or a fraud. And if you love fiercely, you do not look upon the suffering, confusion, and weariness of your beloved and say, "O beloved, let me help you - for a price."
No, what you do is you act out of Love. Your acts are not limited to sitting on a pedestal dispensing advice to others on how they should love. You serve those you love, in every reasonable way, including all the dirty work that fraudulent teachers think is well below them. You feed, you clothe, you comfort the lonely, you put Bandaids on and you take your jacket off and hand it to someone who is cold. You do whatever you can, whenever you can, wherever you can, and what you do is in no way separate from your life. You serve because it is the nature of the lover to serve the beloved.
People who make excuses as to why fraudulent gurus have to be treated as rock stars don’t see what it really means to be enlightened. They imagine that service (if they recognize the value of service at all) is merely a tool to break down ego. Service is for students, the way arithmetic worksheets are for grade schoolers. Status, power, wealth, isolation from those who suffer, even freedom to violate normal rules of ethical conduct, are privileges a guru has earned as a result of their personal spiritual accomplishments.
That’s not right. Enlightenment is a state of transparency to that passionate, creative, and unconfined Love. It is surrender to love in action, which is eternal service. It has no course with status, power, wealth, and certainly not with being set apart physically or morally. It is not the end of the need for humility — it is its utter incorporation. If you understand this, then the frauds are easy to spot.
You ought not sell what you don’t own
Love alone would be reason enough never to sell spirituality. But there’s another argument, an intellectual property argument. Who owns spiritual information? Information we call “spiritual” is either an attribute of Being, and thus not the legal (or moral) property of anyone, or it is something someone made up (i.e., it is either mistaken or fraudulent, if presented as an attribute of Being). No one owns authentic spiritual information. We live in a world which would sell the sky, if it could, and so the position that it is unethical to sell what one cannot ethically own may be an unfamiliar one. But since I can no more claim ownership of what I share than I can claim ownership of the molecules of air I last exhaled, I can sell neither.
Straw men and real women
Someone, somewhere, reading this is probably constructing a straw man argument. “Surely if my guru gave away all his books, he would go bankrupt, and then the teachings would not help anyone!” Love is not a rule for the rule bound, obligating all who love to be irredeemably stupid. Love is the creative principle. It’s not just adaptable and reasonable, it’s Adaptable and Reasonable. Surely one can charge for the paper and the binding without making a fortune and without making a purchase the only way to get the same content. If your guru’s publisher objects to making a book freely downloadable, it’s because your guru chose to sign a for-profit book deal, not because there is no other way to distribute a book in the 21st century.
The same goes for the arguments about light and heat and rent and transportation. While no one charges their beloved the price of their love, I’ve never known anyone to have ethical scruples over nudging their beloved and asking for some loose change at a highway tollbooth.
But all this is a distraction: the fabulous sums of money pulled in by alleged spiritual teachers are not being used to further their teachings. The fabulous sums of money pulled in by the guru industry goes to the guru CEOs for their private material enjoyment. And that is what the gurus of the guru industry do. They indulge their material whims, in fabulous houses and yachts and private jets and automobile collections and fine art and fine food and wine and all the other accoutrements of the wealthy who seek material pleasures to fill the vacancies in their souls.
Again, we’re not talking about straw man arguments that would have gurus dying by the droves on the side of the road of starvation because they are not permitted to accept so much as a bologna sandwich. If the sorts of gurus of which I speak were people who supported themselves modestly through donations and minimal fees, keeping their feet planted in Love and their eyes on their work, I would have nothing to say. That’s not what they are doing. They are living, not the life of those who love, but the lifestyle of those who grasp and want more.
That last point is, on more than one level, the real story behind these dealers in a product they do not have. They sell a simulated spirituality that affirms everything about greed that many millennia of spiritual traditions have rejected. They sell it to people who have lots of stuff they got by exploiting others and who want to ease their guilt. Or they sell it to people who have a little stuff, want more stuff, and who can be easily sold any snake oil labeled “The Secret of more stuff!“.
But worst of all — and it is these next people who most concern me — they sell their message to desperate people. These faux gurus sell lies to people teetering on the brink of a disaster far worse than even their own fears can imagine, who bankrupt themselves at their guru’s direction.
I know that popular gurus make it amply clear that they believe poor people are poor because they are spiritually inferior. I have seen this, more than once. The bhikku forswears even to touch money, and the West follows a homeless carpenter who died, rejected by most of his friends, at the wrong end of Death Row. But these gurus find shame in poverty, and everything to admire in wealth, power, and privilege. I know that some of these gurus advise their poor followers to put aside prudence, forswear planning, and spend their last dollars as if they had an unlimited supply of cash — preferably on a luxury item or, best of all, on something for or from the guru. Such an act of recklessness is, the gurus say, a poor person’s one real hope of demonstrating prosperity. Spend the rent money, they say, and more will come.
I also recall that the average life expectancy of a homeless woman living on the streets in America is six months. I can find no spiritual fault in such a woman. I can’t say as much for what I find in gurus who lead them to their deaths.
Hardcorespirituality.com
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