Noticing that no one really followed up on the Seeker-Skeptic dialogue I posted yesterday about "the origins of the myths about what happens to you when you criticize a spiritual teacher," I'll follow up myself, because it seems to me to be a classic example of a larger phenomenon -- seekers being unable to remember where the things they hold as true (or Truth) *came from*, and who taught these things to them.
Anyone who has paid their dues in the TMO has heard the admonitions about how Bad it is to doubt one's spiritual teacher, and the Bad Things that will happen to them if they dare to criticize their spiritual teacher or repeat stories about them that are...uh...less than in accord with that teacher's public image. (Anyone who hasn't heard such stories was so on the periphery of the TMO or so at the bottom of its power pyramid that no one thought they were worth telling such stories to.) Such stories abound in hyperbole. "Dissing one's spiritual teacher is the worst karma imaginable." "Do it and you will end up in the Hell Worlds forever." "Do it and you are all but guaranteeing rebirth as a cockroach." "Do it and your dick will fall off." OK, I made up the last one, but you get the picture, because you've heard these things yourself. You've probably even believed a few of them. But where did they COME FROM? Who TAUGHT these things that you've believed in the past and possibly still believe today TO you? The spiritual teachers themselves, that's who. Or the trad- itions from which they came, which have a *vested interest* in keeping their followers from ever being able to view the actions of those teachers or those traditions critically. Every day on some Internet forum I see people repeating these "words of wisdom" about how karmically terrible it is to criticize or doubt one's spiritual teacher, much less to repeat a story about them that suggests that they are either less than ethical or outright criminals. Occasionally on these forums I ask the people saying these things how they know that these things they're repeating as if they were true or Truth *are* true, and where they *came from*. None of them can remember. Or they claim not to be able to. When asked how they "know" that dissing their spiritual teacher is going to cause the critic to do hard time in the hell worlds, they claim to just "know" it, as if it were "self evident," or as if they were born believing this. When I trot out actual quotes from the *teacher himself* saying the things they've just said in a lecture, using the exact same words, they claim never to have heard that lecture. Instead, they say they "read it in a scripture," or heard it elsewhere. It's a complete mental disconnect, as if once seekers have been convinced of the need to "protect the perfect rep of the perfect teacher," they can at that point no longer remember that it was the teacher himself or other teachers in his tradition who taught them to protect him in the first place. Now look at the Catholic Church, and them now dealing with the karma of centuries of doing exactly this same thing. It was just *not permissible* to criticize fellow priests or or Bishops or Cardinals or the Pope and thus lend any credence to tales that they were diddling little boys or each other. Doing so could get you excommunicated and earn you a one-way ticket to Hell. And the result? Centuries of abuse, not only tolerated but *supported* by the systematic silence. Discoveries of one of the Pope's own head ushers running a gay prostitution ring of rent boys recruited from the ranks of choir boys *from the Vatican*. All I'm sayin' is the next time you trot out one of these Truths, it might be a good thing to try to remember who TAUGHT you that it was "Truth," and what might have been "in it for them" to convince you that it is.
