No Gurus(?)
On personality cults and ways that Judeo-Christian practice may not be immune to them, but does mitigate them.
Last week I wrote a post discussing NXIVM and the larger idea of cults. I noted that the tendency to certain kinds of religious formation is surprisingly natural; that cult-like organizations in America are in some ways the outgrowth of a spiritual exodus away from the Church in the 19th and 20th century; that intensive religious or “human potential” organizations can do some good; and that, in the broadest applications of the term, maybe there could be such a thing as a “good cult.”
After I wrote that post, I started to feel unsettled, and I worried that I’d gotten into sketchy territory without realizing it. For one thing, I realized I’d published the post with an AI photo of a group of mostly young women which, in retrospect, might have tracked as a little creepy. (If so, that was definitely my bad.) But I re-read the post itself, and thought, “No, this is okay. Maybe people won’t like it. But if so, I’m being misunderstood.” Still, something continued to bother me.
As I continue to dig into NXIVM, I’m left with the impression that such harmful things occurred in the organization that it’s very difficult to hold the criticisms fully in mind and still say, “Yes, but good occurred, too.” (Even though, from the most comprehensive perspective, I think you have to say that good occurred — and perhaps a lot of good.) It’s a “can you separate the art from the artist” kind of thing. In NXIVM’s case, the “artist,” Keith Reniere, did, and inspired others to do, some pretty awful things (like confine a woman in her twenties to a empty room for two years, because she would not be wholly romantically and sexually devoted to Reniere, while Reniere himself kept up as many as a dozen lovers — including the girl’s two sisters, one of whom he first approached at age fifteen).
Also, Amanda Montell’s Cultish helped me to see that tragedies like the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate group, or the residents of Jim Jones’s Jonestown, linger casually in the collective historical imagination without there being a full acknowledgment how ghastly they really were. With Jonestown, in particular, I was struck by the fact that many of the so-called “suicides” were actually coerced, that the few people who survived only did so by hiding or fleeing, and that some of the survivors bitterly resent the glib use of the phrase, “drink the Kool-Aid.” There has been a range of abuses in cult-like organizations. Many people have been hurt.
As I wondered whether the idea of reclaiming the word “cult” at all was fundamentally misguided, it started to emerge that one of the main things that almost universally characterizes a “bad cult” is that a “bad cult” is organized around a manipulative narcissist. It occurs to me that many people, including myself, are totally exhausted by manipulative narcissism in the world — and there’s a nonzero tendency for certain kinds of intensive spiritual groups to actually promote it.
At the same time that I was thinking about this — synchronistically, in retrospect — a conversation about gurus cropped up in a chat room of the Metamodern Spirituality Facebook group (which group, and whose founder, Brendan Graham Dempsey, I recommend). I’m pretty resistant to the idea of gurus. In my twenties I lived for two-and-a-half years with, and nominally under the tutelage of, someone who considered themselves a guru, and I’ve been involved in a number of organizations that have had a charismatic leaders that were a little guru-y — including a private school where I taught for ten years. A number of personal experiences have etched any number of significant marks into my own being — some of which have taken a long, long time to pull into view and heal, and perhaps not all of which have yet been pulled into view and healed. But it’s left me with certain strong impressions about the guru thing.
As the topic was getting discussed in that metamodern chat, it seemed like some of the differences were essentially semantic. Some people, it seemed to me, just wanted to be able to use the word “guru” whenever they were referring to a teacher or a mentor of some significant spiritual attainment. And I can get that. It seems clear that if a teacher or the mentor is a healthy person with good boundaries, mentoring relationships can be really good things.
Also, though, some people in the chat really wanted to defend the classic guru-disciple relationship to greater extent than I think anyone should. The problems with this dynamic, I think, are obvious. The teacher is turned over and over in the devotees’ imagination. Projections magnify even the most noble of them. Personality gets fetishized. False hierarchies can emerge. And all sorts of abuses can occur.
As I formulated my argument in that metamodern chat, I noticed that I was building it around tropes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Because the way the Judeo-Christian tradition handles the idea of the guru is actually one of the major things that attracted me to it. Here are four aspects of “Judeo-Christianity” that I think are helpful when navigating the role of the teacher, and protecting against the effects of narcissism:
God is the guru
Judaism and Christianity are rooted in the idea that the ground of reality has a personal aspect that is fiercely interested in the lives of human beings. This emphasis includes the idea that God’s participation is not only redemptive, but transformative. The implicit guru-disciple relationship is between any individual and the ground of reality itself — a personal relationship. God is where ultimate truth lies. And God is personal. And God is directly involved.
So, no matter the structure of the gathering, all participants are gathered in a shared sacred space to witness something together. This is worth minding, I feel.
The king’s gonna tax
Interestingly, the Hebrew scriptures indicate that, after being led out of Egypt the people of Israel organized as a nation where God was not just the spiritual sovereign, but explicitly the political ruler as well, having handed down Torah, the Law, as a sort of holy constitution. Later, 1 Samuel opens on an Israel where that aforementioned theocratic system has become corrupt and complacent. It was a time where “people did what was right in their own eyes,” instead of surrendering to the infinite wisdom — and the formative yoke — of the cosmic will. In response, people began to dream of having a king — a strong ruler that would sort out the mess. (Sound familiar?)
God tells the prophet Samuel that it’s a bad idea:
[The king] will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots . . . He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11-18)
You can note the iteration of the word “take,” which seems clearly intended for rhetorical effect.
But the Israelites insist. And they get a king: Saul, who’s so-so, and when he ultimately falls from grace, they get another king: David. David’s celebrated quite a bit, but he falls from grace, too, and he’s succeeded by his son, Solomon. King Solomon is the one who builds the Jerusalem temple — right next to the palace and, according to scripture, through the agency of thirty thousand conscripted laborers. Soon after, the kingdom breaks in two, and the two parts are eventually conquered by bigger neighboring empires.
The bottom line, the Hebrew Bible tells us, is that the king’s gonna tax. I think this is a bedrock idea to carry around whenever considering any sovereign-like leader — be it a political leader, or an organizational leader, or a spiritual leader. It’s worth asking whether such a person is going to extract some additional, unallocated consolidation or compensation, in the form of status, or privilege or, in the case of far too many spiritual leaders, even access to the bodies of devotees.
Christ, ascendant
God is personal, and the king’s going to tax. But the idea of a personal, relational aspect of God and the idea of the saving, sovereign human really explode in the idea of Christ. There is a guru, and it’s Jesus, and he’s God. It’s certainly not a totally unique idea: other religions in the region had deified figures — like the Egyptian god Osiris, the tales of whom preceded Jesus, and the deified pagan teacher and healer Apollonius of Tyana, who came after Jesus. Vedanta has long had a system of avatars, or god-like emissaries, too, of course. (In some ways, I think Christianity can be viewed as a two-thousand-year livestream of people discovering the Vedic concept of the avatar, from scratch — though I think the idea has had some particular developments in Christianity, too.)
If you look at the first three to five centuries of the Church, you can see a couple of interesting things happening in this regard: One, from very early on, the numerous ecumenical debates had a distinct anti-guru element to them, because there was a principal complaint that worshipping a person as divinity was idolatrous.
And two, in the early Church — even in the Gospels — I think you can see Jesus becoming Christ, as Bart Ehrman puts it — i.e., the story of an apocalyptic Jewish prophet being increasingly rendered in more and more exalted terms. Again, there’s the idea that a process of projection can transform and mythologize the teacher.
Only in the case of Christianity, the teacher is not there to receive the projections, and then run riot. I’m not suggesting that Jesus would have run riot; I think you get what I mean. The only Christian guru — Jesus, who’s God — has ascended into heaven. So you can think about him, and even interact with him (I believe you can), but you’re unlikely to meet him or spend a lot of time with him until you die. Some of the problems of projection, wherein abuses can occur, are preempted.
I actually think it can’t be overstated how profound this design is. I don’t mean to imply that it was a deliberate thing. And I don’t mean to imply that abuses can’t occur with Christian leadership — quite clearly, they can. But I do think the design is surprisingly effective.
You have a rigorous contemplation of the merger of fully divine being and fully human form — which, in my opinion, is an indispensible theological concept — both for what it suggests about God and for what it suggests about people. You have a fairly well-developed pathway for realizing a developing divinity in the individual, too — and for anchoring this pursuit in the common life of a community. But also, the expectation that another person is the any sort of divine endpoint is controlled. It doesn’t make Christianity completely immune to cult-like tendencies — far from it. And some people would argue that, when Christ is exalted too much, the Christ-like potential in all of us is diminished. (I agree that this has happened in some places, but I’m not sure that it was ever the intent of those who have understood Christianity the best.) In all, I think Christ does make Christianity somewhat surprisingly effective, while remaining surprisingly narcissist-resistant.
Paul, the other apostles, and the early church
The Gospel of Luke has a sequel, the Book of Acts, which describes Jesus’ followers tearing around the Mediterranean, getting into all sorts of trouble. The book introduces us to a Pharisee named Saul, who is a persecutor of the Christians until one day, when he’s traveling to Damascus, he has a vision of Jesus, the Anointed. Upon seeing this vision, Saul repents. He is struck blind by the encounter, then regains his sight and, after a period of travel and reflection, re-emerges on the map as Paul, “an apostle of Christ,” traveling around, tending to early churches until he himself was (probably) executed by the Romans during Nero’s persecution.
Paul gives us one of the earliest, clearest of examples of what early Christians thought it meant to follow Jesus — and a keynote is self-abasement. Paul calls himself “the least of the apostles,” and he is content with persecution and weakness because, he says, “when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Jesus, of course, deserves credit for the original demonstrations of the humility that Paul is talking about. Jesus calls himself “meek and humble of heart,” and the Sermon on the Mount exalts the lowly and dethrones the exalted, and in Jesus’ parables affirm “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” And shortly before his crucifixion, as a final act of service, he demonstratively washes his disciples’ feet. (So there’s one Christian guru — who’s Jesus, who’s God — and that guru washes feet.)
But Paul concretely follows this example, demonstrating how it’s possible to have personal authority and to cede to Jesus’ higher divine authority at the same time. The emphasis on deep humility, even in conviction, traces itself through the Christian tradition. Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly on humility, by any means. But its exemplars of humility are definitely among the best, in my opinion.
No gurus?
So, what? Should we say that nobody has gone further than anyone else? Should we say no Ken Wilber? No Ramana Maharshi? No Sri Aurobindo?
No Eckhart Tolle? No Gangaji?
No Richard Rohr??
I think it’s worth considering four things:
One, that there’s an ambient truth that’s being always invoked, and it is dynamically alive, and we’re all always looking for it. And, it is always looking for us. Whoever has gone further down this road, we are all being consciously beckoned by reality itself. When people circle up, everyone in the room should be looking at the what’s in the center of circle, to some extent. So it’s good to focus not on the teacher, but the teaching.
Two, leaders can tax — and on a practical level it’s important that organizations have explicit accountability structures to mediate for this. (There’s a lot more that can be said about this, I think — in a later post.)
Three, the Christ archetype, too, is multi-faceted, alive, and profound. Holding this archetype as a guru above gurus is an excellent yoga, in my opinion, and a wonderful daily practice.
And four, humility is key — for everyone. That humility can come simply from the pursuit of the divine — because truest encounter with the divine is inherently humbling, I feel. And that suggests that the people whose examples are most worth following will are inherently, authentically humble. Humility should not preclude our stepping into the fullness of our “human potential,” but a certain hard-wired habit of deferral, receptivity, self-reduction, and self-denial is not at all a bad thing, either.
I’ve been thinking recently that there is much to be gained from interreligious dialogue, and some of the most vivifying spiritual concepts are somewhat outside the conventional domain of Christian tradition, to be sure — making it, as I’ve said, a difficult container to comfortably settle down in at this point in my spiritual journey.
But also, I think the Judeo-Christian tradition has some deep wisdom about the handling of teachers and avatars, and it’s very wise to mind it.