Her father was the leader of a traveling Buddhist cult. As he rose to prominence he abandoned his family. When asked about the cruelty of this by a family member, he shot back rhetorically, “How can I waste my energy loving the few when I need to love the many?”
She said he wasn’t a fan of children to begin with. His status as a spiritual leader afforded him the opportunity to desert his.
***
One common way gurus self-corrupt is by becoming societal figures acting as parental figures, while telling you not to have children. They commonly say that loving relationships are a farce because one cannot reserve love for another; one must love all equally. Or they equate enlightenment with leaving the physical “level” completely. Or they say that sex is a wastage of energy. All of these warnings against relationship and yet they want to be your daddy and mommy.
Conversely, there are some who tell you to do what you want, to hedonistically engage everything in life as you wish, you’ll eventually burn out and come back to square one. An alternate take holds that it doesn’t matter what you do because nothing matters. Life is an illusion.
Do any of these instructions imbue a healthy disposition from which to form loving bonds and/or bear and raise children? If these are their philosophies, how could they know anything about Love, except that they’re running from it while pretending to be it?
Let’s unpack this….
We have no society built on the authority of enlightened parents. This is where the guru steps in to pretend to be that enlightened authority. Enlightened parents would kinda get in the way of their sweet, sweet gig, and so they preach against family, while replacing yours. That’s a common enough conscious motive, but if we peer into the dark places of themselves they dare not look, we will find unconscious ones as well. Here’s one now: One reason why so many gurus and mystics—even those who preach ethics and morals—are abusive to their followers is that they don’t acknowledge the psychological aspect of their being as worthy of concern. They bet it all on this thing called “spirituality,” exclusive of their psychological, and often physical, dimensions.
In politics, religion, and psychology, there are those who fight for social change, or justice, at the expense of themselves, or in ignorance of their own personal problems. They often ignore their abusiveness and their addictions while struggling to change society. Leaders of the spiritual kind fall prey to the same trappings: the trappings of the self. Whereas leaders not of the spirituality-at-large ilk may consider their misunderstood ego antics modest, heroic, or selfless, the spiritual leader misunderstands transcendence—namely, that one cannot forgo the psychological for the trans-psychological. Transcend and include, not transcend and ignore. They ignore this.
When one transcends and ignores the self, one falls out of balance and ends right back at self. One ends up divided and unconscious within. One ends up two.
Prior to the enlightenment experience, such a one was unconscious of transcendence. Now, they’re unconscious that they’re out of that experience and are therefore no longer transcending. They are back to being partial people with knowledge of wholeness, no longer wholeness oneself. This, if they were not running from their own psychological issues in the first place.
It is more likely that they never had an experience of wholeness, but of something else. And that something else, rather than changing them forever, played into them and became their power trip. It became what they wanted. And what they wanted was not what they spoke, for what they wanted was to be masters of hypocrisy. In this way may they still exist and be on top of the world, while lecturing others on how to live in and with the world. Or just sit quietly with a beatific smile on the face and dollar signs in the eyes.
Ah, what a life. It pays to be the parent railing against parents.