1
It is common enough to find among seekers the
illusion of perfectionism. It shows itself in the belief that somewhere there
exists a Master who is perfect in every respect: in his spiritual consciousness,
his feelings, his intellect, his physical health, his appearance, and his
behaviour. It shows itself also in their hopes of finding an ideal environment
where they can live a fully spiritual existence, particularly in some ashram
where everyone practises brotherly love and meditation all the time. Let them
give up such vain dreams, for nowhere on earth will they find the one or the
other.
2
The childish worship of every illumined man as if he
were the World-Mind itself and the blind reception of his every utterance as if
it were sacrosanct - these are defects to be regretted. And they occur not only
among the Orientals, where it is to be expected, but also among the increasing
number of those Occidentals who accept the doctrine of the Orientals and imitate
their attitudes. They point to excessive attachment to the limited personality
of their spiritual leader, so that it is disproportionate to the pure impersonal
Spirit of which he is but the channel. They reveal the devotee to be on the
religio-mystical level, to have advanced beyond popular religion but not to have
travelled sufficiently far into mysticism proper to feel comfortable there. He
has escaped from the crowd which is so taken in by the mere outward forms of
religious observance, but he cannot yet escape from the olden habit or need of
depending on some outward thing or person. So, he transfers to his master's body
the devotion he formerly gave to popular pieties.
3
The religio-mystical mind easily falls into cults or
personality idealization and worship. The philosophic mind rises to a higher
level and emphasizes the importance of Principles. For persons are ephemeral
whereas principles are enduring. The cultists attribute to the worshipped one
all sorts of godlike qualities, especially omniscience and omnipotence.
4
As soon as a cult is formed around a seer or
prophet, fixed dogma and unalterable creed go with it. His revelation is turned
into a final declaration, his inspiration into a fixed and finished tenet of
faith.
5
Not only is no one perfect but also there is no one
- be he husband, master, saint, or neighbour - about whom you may expect to find
everything to your liking. When therefore we hear of a "Perfect Master" in Meher
Baba, about whom everything was sadly imperfect, and find thousands of followers
accepting him as such, including Western followers, we may understand why
philosophy, not less than science, warns against credulity and gullibility.
6
It is hard to find an upright spiritual guide, easy
to find his insincere imitator, easier still to find a crooked one. So long as
they adoringly surround him with a halo of perpetual infallibility, so long will
his disciples fail to think rationally or observe realistically.
7
If only they would give to the infinite being of God
the faith they give to the finite and faulty being of some charlatan, how
quickly they would progress!
8
Legends like this grow around the person of an
Oriental recluse or ascetic faster than he himself knows. He could only slow the
pace of this growth and not stop it even if he wanted to. And this while he is
yet alive - how wildly will it progress after he is no longer alive to check it.
How baseless the tales of miracles that will pass from mouth to mouth.
9
The cult of saint-worship is popular in the East
both in religious and in mystical spheres. Its very foundation being a
blasphemous misapprehension of the true relation between man and God no one need
be surprised at learning that it teems with superstitions, abuses, and
exploitations.
10
They fall into a new sectarianism when they make
success solely dependent on a guru, and when they make their own guru the chosen
and perfect one decreed for contemporary humanity.
11
The folly of refusing to recognize that his guru
is certainly not as all-knowing as God, is a defect in this type of disciple.
Nor can the guru himself stand exempt from censure if he allows the error to
remain.
12
When all men are holy in the divine sight, why
proclaim a few only and set them apart from others?
13
To become a disciple is to become an enthusiast,
one who exaggerates, distorts, or overlooks the real facts. He will grossly
misrepresent the true state of affairs because his guide is no longer reason but
emotion.
14
Experience teaches us to be a little wary of those
disciples who indiscriminately laud their teachers to the skies. A robust common
sense is not usually accredited to mystics.
15
Just as they shamefully caricature the true
Infinite Being by their personified and symbolized idea of It, so they
shamefully falsify the true characteristics of a Master by their exaggerated and
sentimentalized idea of him.
16
We must remember that a leader's name has acquired
special meaning for his followers, that it is charged by their own minds,
through the effect of suggestion, with a certain stimulus and exceptional
symbolism. Hence they react to it favourably in a way in which non-followers do
not.
17
They see and make no difference between the human
instrument and God himself. Such exaggerated worship may be harmful both to the
worshippers and to the man worshipped. It makes them too dependent on some one
person, too ignorant or neglectful of the real source of his power. It may fill
his head with grandiose notions and far-stretching ambitions. Simply because he
feels that he is communing with God is not enough basis for him to claim,
or for others to accept, that he is really doing so. The remedy for all this is
to teach them the truth concerning such dependence as well as to show them how
to establish their own direct contact with the source.
18
Idolizing followers are not concerned to know what
is factual and what is imaginary: they need to have their bias satisfied.
19
It is idol worship, only they substitute a living
idol for a stone figure.
20
Even the qualified teacher is no perfect man; he
is fallible and mortal; indeed, he even makes mistakes. The attitude found in
simple Occidentals or superstitious Orientals of regarding him as above all
possible criticism, the attitude which elevates him to the status of a divine
being, is ill-informed and ill-judged.
21
To set up these good and great men as being even
better and greater than they are, and especially to deprive them of their
humanity and replace it by some supernatural status, is to render a disservice
to them as well as to truth.
22
All these gurus possess inevitable human
limitations and some human deficiencies. To see any one of them under an
appearance of perfection and make him into a demigod is a superstitious error
which will not bring us nearer the world of truth and reality. He who is
over-awed by the claims of these teachers suspends his reasoning faculty,
dismisses his critical judgement, lets his intellectual integrity collapse, and
falls victim at their feet.
23
To demand impossible perfection in any human being
- spiritual master or wifely mate - is as silly as to make impossible
idealizations.
24
The ideal master can be found only in the
imagination of seekers who are either over-fanciful and unrealistic or else
hypercritical and unable to understand that to be at all human is to be
imperfect.
25
This guru is not a nonhuman or superhuman being.
Take away the prestige, the ashram, the theatrical settings, and he is left a
person, perhaps on a superior level but not infallible, still liable to make
mistakes.
26
With a few exceptions, most Orientals consider the
connection with an instructor rigidly necessary. But when it is made, he is
turned into a deity and worshipped. Both learning and teaching may then get
submerged in an emotional bath.
27
There are gurus who literally enjoy the atmosphere
of devotion, exaggeration, and exploitation which surrounds them, as well as
disciples who enjoy helping to make and sustain this atmosphere.
28
Just as the Renaissance brought forward brilliant
minds and talents in scattered places, so we see today spiritual geniuses rising
here and there. The followers of some lose their balance, get swollen with
pride, and talk proudly that the avatar is here, each claiming his own leader as
the avatar. Let us not be taken in by such sectarianism.
29
There is something blasphemous in placing human
figures on a pedestal of the highest worship. Such worship should be reserved
for the Infinite Intelligence alone. Nevertheless, as institutions of organized
religion go, one may be much better conducted and far more to be recommended
than most others. Undoubtedly, some conversation and companionship with a friend
who attends such a superior type of place may be helpful to the seeker - if he
can recognize and ignore the superstitious admixtures to be found in all
religions and cults.
30
It is wiser to keep attention upon the teaching
and not upon the teacher's personality.
31
The psychic structure of a person contains a light
and a shadow side. It is naïve to see in him only one side, for that usually
leads to an exaggerated view of it. A fantasy is then built around the person by
those who fall into this error and they no longer meet, think of, or speak with
a realistic person. There is also the other case where people build up fantasies
about themselves even more than about others.
32
They make the mistake of affirming the divinity of
man without taking the trouble to notice that this is still only in a potential
state.
33
One common fault is to greet the latest master
with adoring emotion, then to follow him with a strongly personal clinging
attitude and to talk of him only in superlatives. In such an atmosphere the ego
thrives unsuspected where it is supposed to be most absent!
34
The myth of superhumanity, even of divinity,
created around the gurus will remain undeflated for their followers despite all
the historical facts and psychological principles involved.
35
Though the transcendental power may be using him
as a channel, he himself is still a very human human being. Only youthful,
inexperienced, untravelled, or fanatical naïveté can so deceive itself as to
think otherwise. The commonest error made by the guru-seekers or guru-greeters
is to believe him to be perfect. The haze which surrounds their eyes prevents
them from noting the flaws.
36
Most aspirants possess extremely hazy notions of
the powers of a mystical adept. Many even possess quite fantastic or quite
exaggerated notions about him, while few seem to realize that he has any
limitations at all. This is not altogether their fault. It is largely the fault
of irresponsible loose-thinking muddleheaded enthusiasts for mysticism, or
incompetent half-baked exponents of it, or incorrect teaching about its goal.
When an adept is supposed to have attained complete union with God Almighty,
when there is supposed to be no difference between his mind or power and God's
mind or power, where is the miracle we may not legitimately expect him to
perform?
37
The merits are magnified out of all proportion,
the drawbacks minified almost to nothing. Such is the way of enthusiastic
believers with any system they adopt or any master they follow.
38
The prophet may be personally discredited, his
prophecies may fail to be fulfilled, yet the blind faith of his adherents may
still continue unshaken.
39
An ageing master, surrounded by a court of
reverent admirers, an echoing group of disciples who behave as if they were in
physical proximity to the Deity - this is the inevitable end.
40
After making all allowance for the awe and
affection which, quite properly, well up in the guru's presence, it is still a
fact that Oriental devotees are unduly laudatory of him.
41
None of these biographies written by overzealous
disciples ever shows up the master's faults or even suggests that he had a
single one.
42
The illusion that some human being has somewhere
achieved perfection gives the naïve a curious kind of satisfaction.
43
The intense, unbalanced, and anti-human attitude
which is so often favoured by the over-devout followers of these cults and which
renders them ridiculous to the sight of sceptical outsiders, is one which will
never be found among philosophers. This foolish attitude makes men morally
indignant with their contemporaries, impatient, and highly charged with
propagandist aggressiveness. Their wild assertions and exaggerated claims show
what a startling lack of proportion exists in this attitude.
44
A famous case of the unfortunate results of
excessive guru-worship was, of course, that of the Rasputin-Empress Alexandria
relationship. It led in the end to loss of the throne and defeat in war.
45
These disciples assume so much, such as that the
guru knows everything about them, what they should do in their particular and
private situations - everything about everything.
46
They glamourize their guru, provide him with
qualities and powers he does not possess and perhaps does not even claim.
47
The glamourous myth of infallibility surrounds
such a person. Neither he nor his followers dare confess a blunder. Once having
declared such a thing impossible, they have to cover any slur on the myth with
supernatural whitewash.
48
Many people make the mistake of thinking that
because someone has gone farther than they, he has gone to the end of the Way.
Superstition, imagination, and self-deception
49
Worse than failing to comprehend the truth is
thinking that you comprehend it. It is harder to climb out of the pit of error
than out of the pit of illusion.
50
Philosophy does not accept the literal inspiration
of every page of scripture. It knows that human fallibility and human
preferences may be present. Another important factor which broadens or narrows
the nature of an individual's revelation is the breadth or narrowness of his
general cultural experience.
51
A mystical interpretation may be shaped to fit
almost any scriptural text. Twenty different interpretations may be shaped to
fit one and the same text. For the same heightened imaginative faculty which
operates
during the dream state operates during certain mystical ones. That in the latter case it is conjoined with genuine revelatory insight does not alter the doubtful character of its own contribution.
52
It is pleasant to hear that so many mystics have
communed with God, but if the word "God" means the ultimate principle of the
universe then their words must usually represent wishful thinking rather than
true statements of fact.
53
They accept such beliefs as are their own
wish-fulfilments.
54
Mere chance happenings are made to hold deep
esoteric significance.
55
Their pleasant belief that all cults teach
substantially the same thing relates to the world of their private thoughts and
wishes, not to our world. How can the results of totally different spiritual
positions be other than different themselves?
56
One and the same psychical experience can be
interpreted to support ten different religious tenets.
57
The occultist who sees esoteric mysteries wherever
he looks, the mystic who reads allegorical meanings into every text - such a man
is merely projecting his own mentality.
58
He has a peculiar capacity for self-deception,
bringing himself to a point where he sincerely believes in the truth of false
reasonings and egotistic promptings.
59
We must beware of those who are obsessed by
fanatical delusions which walk endlessly round and round within the brain like a
tiger in a cage.
60
Ignorant persons turn coincidence into miracle
because they are unable and unfit to distinguish between reason and imagination.
61
It is easy for the superstitious to assign a
supernatural origin to a perfectly prosaic event and see the work of a magician
in a perfectly material circumstance.
62
There is a moronic credulity which too often
passes for mystical faith.
63
The habit of seeing more in his words than what he
says is likely to become delusional.
64
They become willing partners to their own
self-deception because it flatters their vanity and panders to their conceit.
65
People throughout history have been able to think
themselves into any belief or conclusion; have been able to deceive themselves
into acceptance of whatever is offered them; have been susceptible to the most
opposite, contradictory, and varied suggestions which the human mind can
formulate.
66
Too many times he assumes that what he desires for
himself must be the same as what God desires for him.
67
Charlatanic occultists and half-insane mystics
take the great sayings as sanction for their misdeeds in the one case, and for
their misleadings in the other.
68
It is right and necessary to seek inward guidance
for each important step in life, but it is wrong and foolish to accept any and
every inward impression as being divine guidance. What is taken to be the voice
of the Lord can very easily be the voice of the ego.
69
They easily mistake their ego's doings for God's
doings, their human ego's healing for divine healing, and their own ideas for
imperishable truths. This happens, and can only happen, because they are so
attached to themselves and so unable or unwilling to forsake themselves.
70
These texts and symbols, these memorials and
characters, pyramids and bibles, can be construed to mean nearly anything or
everything that pleases anyone's temperament or taste or to support any of the
fanatical beliefs which thrive on human credulity. All such interpretations
which are prejudged from the beginning are either of little worth or teach
nothing at all. Whether ingenious or foolish they diminish the sum of human
knowledge - the very opposite of their claim to enlarge it!
71
It is impossible for the fanatic to receive or
give truth, for even in his most inspired moments he holds up a cracked mirror
to truth's face.
72
Imagination can find support in any fact for what
it wants to support. Faith can discover relations and connections between
things, persons, events which are simply not there at all. Superstition can
misinterpret statements and twist texts to mean what speaker and writer did not
dream of.
73
Belief in the protective power of the Overself is
valid only if it is really the Overself with which you establish a connection.
Otherwise you fall into mere superstition or, worse, into the hands of lying
evil spirits making false promises. In one or the other of these classes were
the following instances, the first two occurring in our own century and the last
two in the previous one. The Tibetan army believed that it had been made
invulnerable against the howitzers of General Younghusband's British forces.
Their spiritual guides, the lamas, were responsible for this pathetic error. The
Moplah rebels in southwest India were told that the bullets of their Indian army
would be averted by magic power. Chembrasseri Thangal, their leader, made this
promise. The Boers, in South Africa, following Van Hansburg, were convinced by
him that they were under special divine protection. Lastly, those Maoris of New
Zealand who adopted the new religion of Hauhavism were fully persuaded by their
prophet, Te Va, that the English troops would be defeated and that the Angel
Gabriel would cause the English guns to have no effect.
74
They want these occult experiences so much that
the smallest ones are greatly magnified, the most trivial happenings are greatly
exaggerated. The results - wrong interpretations, mistaken deductions, and
premature claims - are then inevitable.
75
Every piece of gibberish is not to be accepted as
momentous revelation merely because it is the product of so-called mystical
processes.
76
They are consoled by their imaginings, which,
being completely divorced from realities, are shaped to please their egos.
77
Those who believe themselves to be in mystical
communion with God do not usually admit that they may be mistaken.
78
Some of these facts of occult research and
experience have no existence anywhere, no reality at all, outside of the
occultist's own mind.
79
Too many have only an imaginary understanding of
the truth, arising mostly from books they have read or lectures they have heard.
80
In the end almost all teaching, doctrine, and
revelation is someone's interpretation, opinion, or imagination.
81
Men who delude themselves with false ideas may go
on from there to impossible ideals.
82
There are three well-defined stages in the
master-disciple relationship. In the first one the master is enthusiastically
loved and exaggeratedly appreciated. In the second there is revulsion of feeling
against him; he is depreciated, criticized, and finally rejected. In the last
stage the disciple either attaches himself to another master and repeats the
entire situation or decides to walk alone without any master at all and take
care of his own further development.
83
When they find that their paths do not lead to the
expected results, dissatisfaction is sure to arise. This in turn will lead to
some painful thinking, questioning and revision of views. They will eventually
recognize their mistakes. In the effort to rectify them, they will start
learning anew.
84
So long as fools allow themselves to be duped, so
long is it spiritually necessary for them to be duped.
85
In brief, those who look for light where it is
not, lose their labour.
86
Those who carry their faith too far and place it
too foolishly must pay the penalty of their mistakes.
87
There will one day be a stupefying awakening from
these superstitious dreams and these misplaced loyalties.
88
The enthusiasm, the zeal, and the fervour with
which they give themselves to these cults are in many cases displaced in the end
by disappointment, disillusion, and even cynicism.
89
Those who expect him to play God may get the
foolishness and tyranny they deserve.
90
Those who revered him as the embodiment of
spiritual sincerity may later shun him as the embodiment of spiritual quackery.
91
To idealize them and later, if one has judgement,
discernment, and balance, to suffer disappointment, upsets rather than advances
one's spiritual progress.
92
The failure of his predictions ought to open their
eyes to the fallacy of his doctrines. But so weak-minded are many mystical
believers that it fails to do so. What they will not learn from experience, what
they could more easily have learned from reason, they will later have to learn
from suffering.
93
Those who, in their green innocence or
intellectual folly, accept such doctrines and follow their expounders will
necessarily have to accept the tart fruits of their decisions.
94
The spell of black magic which such a sinister man
casts over his pupils has to come to an inevitable end. Their awakening brings
them to reactive mental depression and merited emotional misery.
95
Their romantic enthusiasms for false teachings and
knavish masters can rarely be cooled down by forewarnings: they are usually
brought to an end only by having to experience the bitter consequences of such
misplaced faith.
96
They hanker after divine illumination but these
lampless guides bring their feet upon the path of stony man-made enigmas.
97
I have seen criticism vaporize into discipleship
as the years passed, and I have also seen other cases where discipleship has
evaporated into criticism.
98
Those who attach themselves to an incompetent
teacher usually pay the penalty in a double form, for they merely inflate his
ego at their own expense.
99
They expect the master to support and even save
them in many senses, and not only in a spiritual one. When they find that he
cannot do so, they turn on him with a resentment as great as their former
adulation.
100
It is a pathetic scene. They squat, sit, recline
for minutes or years, serenely futile, living in their private world.
101
They are unwilling to surrender their occult
dreams as their leaders are unwilling to surrender their pretensions. Both,
then, must fall into the ditch.
102
Those foolish aspirants who are mulcted of their
financial means by so-called masters deserve exactly what they get. In no other
way can their stupidity be shown up to the outside world as a warning to others
who would imitate them. For quite often they persist in stubbornly continuing
their misplaced adherence despite their own bad experience and despite the good
teaching of genuine master's books.
103
Those who succumb to the wiles of the
cult-leaders sometimes get what they ask for, but sometimes deserve our
commiseration.
104
By following such a false teacher he may become
mentally disabled for years.
105
It is well known that some persons struggle for
years along a quest that brings them in no way nearer to God but only nearer to
mental chaos or emotional fanaticism. They are mostly to be found as members of
organizations whose leaders are themselves imperfectly and incompletely
developed.
106
The harm these gurus do is proportionate to the
faith they arouse.
107
Experience shows that many seekers take up the
position that they have been led by God to meet their "master" or "teaching" and
that it is useless to reason or even expostulate with them. They know,
and all one's longer years of wider experience count as nothing against their
dangerous emotionality or conceited ignorance or misplaced stubbornness or open
egotism. The dementia of the so-called master and the falsity of the supposedly
inspired teaching will be able to reveal themselves only by the melancholy
consequences of following them.
108
A sham mystic may deceive himself for a time and
dupe his followers for a further time, but he will one day be found out and then
turned out.
109
The mental world they have built up will prove a
tower of Babel. They will come close to inner collapse.
110
The danger of this personal deification is that
the person is expected to exhibit his perfections and when he exhibits his
imperfections there is an emotional fall.
111
Those who fall for the bait of a quick and easy
spiritual path get only what they have paid for - no more. I refer to the
advertising methods some use. That which is bought cheaply is usually of
according worth.
112
The frenetic evangelist, worked up to a state of
unbalanced excitement, may incite his audience either to melodramatic holiness
or to religious hysteria. They are so overwhelmed by their emotions - which in
turn are prompted by hypnotic suggestion - that when the wave subsides later,
they may repudiate what is now accepted.
113
Everything is seen, on the contrary, through the
spectacles of narrow intellectual preconception and biased emotional belief.
They suffer from mental sleeping sickness, a dangerous lethargy from which they
rarely awake; but when they do, it is only because the pain of repeated bitter
disappointments and the ache of constant ugly disillusionments have become
completely intolerable. A persistent capacity for throwing a romantic veil over
ugly facts merely reveals an equivalent incapacity to review instructive events.
In short, they lack the intelligence to recognize their errors and the courage
to learn from them even when recognized.
114
It is not helping anyone's spiritual progress to
let them go on living in a fantastic realm of supposed attainment. It is better
to arouse them from their hallucinations, however painful to both teacher and
student such an act may be.
115
He is seldom disillusioned, but merely shifts
from one hallucination to another. If it be true that experience is the best
teacher, he remains stubbornly untaught.
116
They dream of a perfect state or a perfect
being. This is their start but not their end, which must needs be arrived at
through progressive frustration and disappointment to finish in disillusionment.
117
The naïveté of many occult seekers is so
evident, that only time, experience, and mental growth can supply what is
lacking.
118
Both these conclusions are unpalatable to the
purblind enthusiasts among such seekers and, therefore, when they subconsciously
recognize the dilemma, they prefer to quell the revolt of reason and look the
other way. They have neither the courage to be starkly realistic and descend
from their clouds nor the capacity to be impartially reasonable and perceive
aright what is happening beneath their noses.
119
Untaught by the disappointing consequences of
many previous self-deceptions, they greet each new hope as though it were the
absolutely certain one.
120
The self-deceived mystic may continue to nourish
himself on delusions but, with time, the impact of facts becomes
uncontradictable and inescapable.
121
Those who let themselves be taken from the true
path by grand words or great promises or colossal claims show by that a certain
mental incapacity, a lack of discrimination. This will have to be adjusted by
their own efforts. But they will neither become aware of this need nor be
willing to put forth such efforts until forced to do so by disappointment or by
being awakened by calamity. Meanwhile they will live as dreamers, without
respect for actualities and without being able to look at everyday happenings
just as they are.
122
They take a long way to reach, in the end, a
recognition which they ought to have reached in the first encounter.
123
If he were to put aside all this fancy and
jargon, all this suggestion which others have put into his head, he would come
back to sobering sanity with a bump. Alas, it is unlikely that this will happen
while he is thoroughly mesmerized both from outside and from inside.