--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Premanand Paul Mason" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It sounds like in the early-early days Guru Dev's teaching > was still fairly fresh in his awareness, but that the freshness > diminished as time passed, to the point where he now represents > a teaching quite alien to that of Guru Dev's. > That is the corrupting force of materialism, which he appears > not to have been a match for. > Just my opinion.
I doubt that it's just your opinion; that is, I suspect quite a few people share it. Materialism (the corrupting power of money and...uh...power) is one thing; that's certainly a factor in the long-term playing out of any spiritual teacher's "career." One of the other factors though, one that isn't talked about as much because it's more occult, is the corrupting power of *attention*. I know of a number of spiritual teachers whose *own* spiritual teachers suggested that they were not ready to become teachers, but who did so anyway. In retrospect, it occurs to me that the thing they weren't ready for was having the attention of hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of students focused on them. For the people here who have been TM teachers (or teachers in other traditions) and who have stood in front of large audiences (500 to 1000 or more), you might have some idea of what I am talking about. When I used to teach the Asilomar Christmas courses, which tended to attract 500 to 1500 participants, I quickly learned that I was going to need a week to recover from teaching the course. In my case, I always arranged to hole up in a cabin in Big Sur for the week following the course and spend some time meditating and walking in the woods to recover my sanity and my sense of balance. Otherwise, I would have taken the *imbalance* I always felt after teaching those courses back with me to the Regional Office and allowed it to express itself there. It's difficult to describe to someone who hasn't been there, done that. The best I can come up with is that when you are the *focus* for a bunch of students' attention, especially if they are round- ing or practicing long meditations, you are basic- ally being *touched* by their auras when they focus their attention on you. If their attention field is experiencing some roughness or (in TM-ese) "unstressing," it cannot help but affect you as well, because you are the object that their attention field is focused on. Now imagine being a young, naive guy from India who has either lived with his mother or in an ashram all his life, and who suddenly winds up not only being the object of focus of tens of thousands of TM students but the object of focus for the world press (as a result of ripping off the Beatles' share of mass attention). It would be a miracle if he *had* handled it gracefully. In my opinion, such a miracle did not occur. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Join modern day disciples reach the disfigured and poor with hope and healing http://us.click.yahoo.com/lMct6A/Vp3LAA/i1hLAA/UlWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
