Phenomenal Damage Done By False Teachers/Gurus in the West
Swan - the symbol of the Hamsa (discretion)
I had an email from a dear friend in which he said, “This morning I had breakfast with an executive who ….. We engaged in dialogue about it. So many paths.”
I replied that I too used to believe in “so many paths”, after all, why not? There must be many road that lead to the same destination, the logic of it would seem to be unarguable. And, of course, if you are in New York and you wish to get to LA, there are many possible ways one could travel to get there. The problem is that spiritual enlightenment doesn’t bear comparison with traveling in a physical realm. And in this regard, there is, as it happens, only one path.
A few years ago, I was listening to NPR in my car, a phone-in program where people were discussing what is meant by the verse 6 of John 14, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me.” There was tremendous confusion and disagreement as to what this meant, and I won’t go into the permutations and combinations of meaning that were offered – I recall the conversations were somewhat heated, more emotion than insight.
Many years of spiritual experience tells me that this statement is true and that it disproves the ‘so many paths’ view that is currently so popular and prevalent. Jesus, through his ressurrection, opened the sixth principle spiritual energy center within human beings, a center known in some traditions as ‘the third eye’ in others as the Agnya Chakra, and in doing so, opened the path to the Kingdom of God, the narrow gate that our own innate energy must pass through in order to take us to the Kingdom of God, the domain of God the Father.
This led me to reflect on the phenomenal damage that’s been done to the human psyche, primarily here in the USA but throughout the entire West, by the false teachers who came here in droves, to seek fame and fortune, but more importantly, to prevent human beings from achieving their true potential.
This is explained beautifully, in detail, in a novel I read a while back, The Legend of Dagad Trikon by Grégoire de Kalbermatten, in which one of the characters says, “”The challenge of the Devil to God is to deny man the chance of evolving to his highest potential.”
The example that I am focussing on here is that the ability to discriminate between good and bad, right and wrong, has been badly damaged here, so much so, that in New York street parlance, ‘bad’ has come to mean ‘good’ etc. Confusion reigns and discretion, as a quality is lost.
How many times do you hear the response, “Why not?”
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When the Count Basie orchestra came from Kansas City to New York in the 1930s they were eventually recognized as having world class musicians in each seat of the orchestra, for example, tenor sax players like Lester Young and Herschel Evans, Harry (Sweets) Edison on trumpet, etc. However, when they gave their first concert and the famous Roseland ballroom on West 52nd street in Manhattan, what did the critics have to say about them? They didn’t like them much, some even said the band played out of tune.
What does this and countless similar examples say about the knowledge of experts? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig is in the Guinness Book of Records, having been turned down by 121 book publishers before being taken on and fast becoming a million seller.
Back in 1962, an old guy in a suit, head of one of the largest record companies in England turned down The Beatles, pronouncing back that the days of the guitar bands were over! Harry Potter was rejected by 12 different publishers before being accepted by Bloomsbury Publishing, at the time a second or third division children’s publisher in the United Kingdom. In the USA, the explosion in popularity of Rock ‘n Roll and black R ‘n B was something that the people who run the major record companies completely failed to see.
You might think that these and other example from every sphere of human artistic endeavor would persuade those in power, at the helm of affairs, who think they know, to think again. But not a bit of it, they continue to pontificate, to present their opinions to those who are stupid enough to listen, as fact. What they think is mostly based on what has happened, hence they will forever miss out on whatever will prove to be ‘the new thing’. Meanwhile, like lemmings head for the same cliff top, certain of what they know.
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