--- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Oh yes, in fact. As I pointed out to Barty, you > need to keep in mind that there aren't a whole lot > of such cushy jobs, and many people aren't qualified > for the ones there are. If you insist spiritual > teachers must teach for free by getting a high-paying > job that leaves them lots of free time, you're > restricting the pool of teachers to folks who are > highly educated and trained to start with, which in > effect means people from relatively well-to-do > backgrounds for the most part.
"Barty" here. I love it when Judy gets so mad she can't type. :-) Just to provide a counterpoint to what she so mistakenly says above, here's what the Rama guy (even with his many faults) did to try to help his students get careers that would allow them the money and freedom to pursue their spiritual lives. Many of his students, when he first met them, were *not* well educated. Some, like my friend in Chicago, never finished high school. Many didn't have established careers. So Rama advised them to consider computer programming as a career path, calling it a 2-3 year path to 100K a year, with the attendant financial and temporal freedom that salary level implies. His idea was that no one, should they want to pursue teaching or some other form of selfless service in their spare time, should ever feel deprived in doing so. And, interestingly, that's how it turned out for hundreds of his students -- 6 months in a computer school, paid for with student loans, followed by a couple of years of programming work to get one's chops down. The two years on the job were supplemented by classes that Rama provided at night in relational database, AI, different languages and operating systems, how to dress and act on the job and in interviews and the other things a person would have to know to go into consulting. Most did. My friend that I mentioned above was making 100K two years after entering computer school. He's now making closer to 300K, and he's *still* never finished high school. This is not a career path (or a spiritual path, for that matter) for everyone, but I firmly believe that it can be *done* by everyone. I've seen it done by hundreds. Judy's idea that this approach to teaching would restrict the pool of teachers to the well-educated is sheer educational bias on her part. T'ain't true. It ain't the "well-educated" who get the well- paying jobs, it's the people who are *motivated* who get the well-paying jobs. It's also not without historical precedence. The Cathars (sorry I keep harping on them, but they do provide an interesting alternative to many other spiritual groups) felt strongly that their perfecti (not really priests but who had devoted themselves to their path and to teaching) should be self-supporting. So they organized trade guilds that taught literacy (not common in that era) so that they could become scribes for the illiterate masses, and paper-making (since most of the world was still using parchment at that time). They were a remarkably *self-sufficient* group of seekers. And the contrast between what a lay Cathar was asked to contribute to the religion (nothing) and what the lay Catholic was forced to contribute to that religion (pretty much everything the church could squeeze out of them) was obvious. I still think that financial self-sufficiency is a good model for the spiritual teacher. It avoids so many "down sides" that appear when you never challenge the assumption that these teachers somehow "deserve" not to have to work at a regular job, because what they're doing is so much more important than what "normal" people do. *Everyone* is "normal."
