Have you ever seen a horse wearing "blinders?" They're an odd apparatus that fits over the horse's head and uses opaque flaps to restrict his or her vision to a narrow slice seen straight ahead. You'd have to ask Ann or Buck for details, because they know more about horses than I do, but they probably have their uses. Horses who has demonstrated a past history of becoming easily distracted on their journeys to where their handlers want them to go might become more interested in the produce stand on the side of the road selling carrots or the attractive horse-of-the-opposite-sex in a passing field than they are in going where they're "supposed" to be going. Thus the blinders. Wearing blinders, the horse can only see what he or she is allowed to see.
This analogy is why I don't feel the rancor towards spiritual teachers I consider con men that some do. Yes, the con men tried their best to get their students to put on blinders that kept them On The Path and doing what the teachers wanted them to do by preventing them from seeing anything but the "path" in front of them. But the teachers themselves were *also* wearing blinders, put on them years or decades earlier by *their* spiritual teachers. They taught their students to see only a tiny slice of life around them because *their* teachers had taught them to do the same, so effectively and for so long that these teachers could no longer see anything else. They put on their blinders as instructed by *their* teachers, and wore them for so long themselves that they no longer even *desired* to have peripheral vision, and see more of life. The "slice" was all that was important to them. Thus that same "slice" of life was all that they presented to their own students, and all that they wanted them to see. Anything else, after all, was a "waste of life." They'd been taught this for so long that they actually believed it, just as the horse in the original analogy believed after a few years that there was no *value* in carrots or getting it on with another horse. So that's what the teachers passed "down the line." Ah, spiritual traditions. Keeping students focused on The Things That Matter. Or at least the ones that their teachers think matter.
