The Garden of Weeden:
The Shadow Side of Spiritual Community
By P.T. Mistlberger
All every situation in your life to teach you.
Most personal growth workshops or seminars or study groups or meditation retreats, etc., ultimately deal with understanding the nature of “projection” (investing the outer world in meaning that is really coming from our own minds), and how we create the conditions of our reality. Once the entry level workshop or seminar or meditation retreat or study course is completed, there is often the opportunity to enter into the life of the community or organization that has staged the entry level event. This may take the form of attending regular support groups, more advanced level studies and trainings, being apprenticed to mentors, and so on. While this whole process is usually very beneficial to the psychological and spiritual progress of the one participating in it, there is also often a hidden aspect -- and at times a real dark side -- to the entire process that needs to be looked at in order to grasp the deeper meaning and purpose of spiritual community. ***********
-- Osho
The basic underlying psychology of spiritual communities primarily involves “family replication”, the working out of unhealed past relationships (perhaps 90% of which involve our family of origin, i.e. our parents and siblings) using current community relationships as vehicles. Outstanding amongst these are the parental ones, and the type of relationship that the community member had with his/her parents is usually similar, in many underlying respects, to the relationship with the community leader or leaders. This dynamic is a “normal” and expected aspect of community life, and if handled therapeutically can be a powerful tool for releasing the past.
However, we are meant to go beyond this stage. Remaining stuck in the parental and sibling projections blocks our deeper inner growth. But what often happens is that in spite of all sincere efforts to wake up out of the seductive power of “family replication” — in the name of “healing the past”— most spiritual community members seem to slide into a stagnant condition, where male or female leaders simply remain “father” and “mother” respectively, and those associated with them remain pre-occupied with winning their approval and/or respect.
And it is here that that something “rotten” in the state of Denmark is not far behind. The problem, I believe, all boils down to the spiritual seeker’s true motives and intentions for being a member (or leader) of a spiritual community. My own experience — as co-founder of one community in 1993, and founder of another in 1994 — has been that the majority of people who gravitate to personal growth workshops, or even communities, are not truly in search of inner awakening. They may claim as much, but this is more often shown to be, in time, a guise covering the real search, which is for some form of consolation or well-being. This may take the form of longing for one's “soul-mate,” attempting to establish worth within the community which effectively becomes one’s surrogate “family” (and which often degenerates into simple approval-seeking), hiding out from the greater world, infatuation with the leader or leaders, and, perhaps worst of all, a place to negatively reinforce powerlessness, by becoming a “process-junkie” who is dependent on intense, melodramatic meetings in order to get simple attention.
In my years of in depth spiritual community involvement I have been continually amazed by the extraordinary power of “Shadow” qualities such as fear, blame, anger, and dependency to perpetuate their existence. Somehow, in spite of all our best intentions to wake-up spiritually to the bigger picture, we are tripped up again and again by a strange self-defeating neuro-loop that manages to sabotage our growth, interfere with our relationships, and make us question deeply the true usefulness of all so-called “work on oneself”.
The spiritual world is full of such paradoxes. A good example is the case of Andrew Cohen, an American spiritual teacher. His life story, Autobiography of an Awakening, has to be one of the strangest books around. Andrew grows up in New York City, a typical sensitive, dysfunctional kid who has a powerful mystical experience at age sixteen, becomes disillusioned with conventional life, goes on a search, finds gurus and guides, and eventually locates his main teacher (H.W.L. Poonja) in northern India. There, he experiences a deep awakening, is eventually endorsed as a teacher himself by Poonja, and happily goes off to guide others to their realizations. Many are drawn to him, and within a few years he finds himself with several hundred students.
Then, oddly enough, his relationship with his master falls apart. Andrew accuses Poonja of duplicity and dishonesty. Poonja sends disciples to “the four corners of the earth” to clean up the “corruption” caused by Andrew. Andrew declares that he has “surpassed his master.” Poonja proclaims that Andrew is “off” and has a “serious misunderstanding.” Despite all this, both continue mentoring hundreds of people, who seemingly are growing and benefiting from their association with their teachers, in spite of the fact that the teachers themselves seem to have become each other’s nemesis.
These kind of oddities are not uncommon in the whole area of spirituality. Perhaps the most outrageous cases of internal corruption occurred in the communities of two of the most creative and influential spiritual masters of this century, Osho Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. Trungpa, a Tibetan tulku (reincarnate lama), fled the 1959 takeover of Tibet by the Red Chinese, went to England where he was educated at Cambridge, and then started Tibetan Buddhist Meditation centres in Scotland, Nova Scotia, and Colorado. Within a decade his work attracted several thousand people from all over the planet, and he had many centres opened in cities throughout the world. Then, at the height of his popularity, he died at the age of only 47. It was revealed that he had cirrhosis of the liver, and that he had in fact become alcoholic in the last few years of his life. Worse, his “Dharma Heir” (successor) was revealed to have had AIDS, and to have had slept with some of Trungpa’s students and knowingly infected them.
Although Trungpa and his successor are gone, his movement still exists and many fine teachers have developed from within its ranks. Many thousands of people were helped by Trungpa’s work, and his books are some of the most intelligent interpretations of Tibetan Buddhist teaching for the Westerner ever written. Seem strange?
The Osho story may be even stranger. Beginning his teaching work around 1970, by 1985 Osho had a following of several hundred thousand initiates to his version of “sannyas”, the Way of the “ego-renunciate” (I was one of them). Then, in 1985, all hell broke loose. The main commune, the incorporated city of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, (where Osho resided) was home to some of the most bizarre happenings ever to occur in a spiritual ashram. Osho’s right-hand person, Sheela Silverman, convinced that a conspiracy to assassinate Osho was afoot, apparently lost her mind and, helped by a few henchmen, attempted to poison people, built bombs, and planned to knock off the attorney general of Oregon. No one was killed, but attempts on lives were actually made, and federal law enforcement agencies, seeing this as a golden opportunity to destroy the commune (which, as was revealed later in court testimonials, had been their priority all along) quickly moved in and jailed Osho, though he claimed to be unaware of his assistant’s descent into Judas-hood. “Enlightenment,” he declared, “means that I know myself. It does not mean that I know that my bedroom is bugged.” The Oregon commune, which had been home to thousands of people who experienced bona fide spiritual growth, within weeks became a ghost town. All this despite the fact that Osho went back to India and taught successfully for another four years before his death, left behind a devoted following of hundreds of thousands, virtually all of whom were positively influenced to varying degrees, and a legacy of over 500 books, the contents of which are unmatched in scope and understanding by any master of recorded history.
But what does the average person remember about Osho? The Oregon debacle. And what does the average person know of Trungpa? Probably not much, which is a shame because he may have been the greatest bridge ever between the Western mind and the Tibetan teachings.
But the real strangeness is perhaps not in the content of these stories, but in our interpretation of them. I have observed time and again the human mind’s extraordinary ability to locate one (perceived) thorn in a bed of a hundred roses, and to use this perception to justify personal fear-based agendas.
I have a term for this aspect of the mind: journalistic stupidity. There is a brand of ignorance that is particularly deceptive because it is masked by the appearance of intelligence, and is more properly a form of cunning.
I discovered a good example of “journalistic stupidity” recently when I happened upon a book chronicling the two decades of Werner Erhard's teaching career (1970-90) up to his departure from the U.S. to Europe. (Erhard was the father of the famous “est” trainings, which in later years was known as “The Forum”.) The book, entitled Outrageous Betrayal, and written by one Steven Pressman, a newspaper journalist, is a meticulously crafted diatribe of Erhard and practically everything he did in two decades. Pressman uses any bit of toxic gossip he can get his hands on, and relies on as his main sources a seemingly tiny percentage of disgruntled former Erhard diehards. When you consider that approximately 500,000 people directly experienced Erhard’s work over the two decades, a “tiny percentage” can still obviously amount to a loud chorus of victim-consciousness.
Pressman found his few thorns amongst the thousands of roses, and blew them up with an intensity and cynicism that spoke loudly of his personal agenda as a writer. In the end, the author lost credibility by lumping Erhard together with other “imposters” like Marianne Williamson and John Bradshaw, gleefully highlighting Williamson’s past as a former night-club singer.
This writer is mentioned here only because he represents such a typical attitude found in mainstream media in relation to personal growth and spiritual communities. Of course, anyone who knows about Williamson and Bradshaw is aware of the immense numbers of people whose lives they have impacted positively, and of the ignorance it would require to blindly attack these people. Erhard is a more complex case, and it seems probable that his ego-impurities did arise at times throughout his teaching career. But so what? He was practically single-handedly responsible for transforming the consciousness of North America, not just directly through the hundreds of thousands who did his work, but through the spawn-off organizations that clearly bore the mark of Erhard. Phrases like “give me space”, “get off of it”, “take responsibility for what you create”, “get it”, etc., which have become household expressions and have even touched the political circles of the West, were all Erhard creations.
It is in the nature of the ego-based mind to rebel against perceived authority, and certainly this is often justified. But the ego’s mastery lies in using anything for its purposes, which is ultimately to prove and maintain its separate existence. And it is here where we can trip ourselves up in the area of accepting guidance from human teachers. To focus on the perceived “flaws” of the teacher is basically to miss the point, the nature of any given teacher's limitations notwithstanding.
I recall back in 1985, in the aftermath of the Oregon farce, the degree of confusion rampant in the Osho community. In the midst of it all an older East Indian disciple remarked wryly, “This is the same old game. Truth is inside, nowhere else. I am responsible for my reality, and this is simply another opportunity to learn that. And this is all Osho has been teaching us all along.”
The paradox with all this is that in order to receive what a teacher or system or community has to offer, we must learn the art of intelligent surrender. To “surrender” does not mean to submit. We may submit ourselves to a relationship, but we do not submit to another person. We can however, surrender to another when our intuition, discernment, or plain old common sense tells us that we have nothing to lose but useless resistance, and only growth of some kind to gain. Then, it becomes foolish to not surrender, not to mention a waste of time, because the same lesson invariably repeats itself in the future with different players.
This applies, of course, to any relationship — whether teacher-student, parent-child, lovers, or friends. It is in the recognition of truth, and surrender to that, that the awakening process is actually occurring, with the key being that we must be willing to be totally wrong about everything. (And this is not nearly as bad as it may sound, given that what we have to be wrong about it usually some negative or limiting belief about ourselves). That is the higher spiritual ideal operating at the heart of any spiritual community.
The nature of the mind is similar to that of a camera. We are constantly taking thought-pictures, mental snapshots, and then fiercely holding onto them, like some cherished family photo-album. However, we are usually unaware that the source of all suffering lies in the “grasping” of these mental photos, and in the unwillingness to abandon ourselves to the revelation of truth each moment. This means being “wrong” about the “reality” of those cherished mental-photos.
In spiritual communities there is always the temptation to drift into “fascistic” thinking, which translates as “This is the Way, and if you deviate from this way, you are obviously making a mistake.” I remember once an incident that happened when I was a member of the Sterling Institute of Relationship. Justin Sterling, the founder and head of the Institute, which has many thousands of members across North America, was in town addressing a few hundred local “Sterling” men. During a question period one man stood up and expressed his objection to something about the community. Initially, he was quite powerful in his expression, and courageous for challenging Justin the way he did. But when Sterling opposed what he said, the whole room slowly but surely turned on the challenger, who within minutes withered into the powerless expression of a young boy rebelling against his dad. As I recall, he came off looking rather silly, left the community, and was simply remembered as yet another wimp who didn't “get it.”
On another occasion, I myself was the “bull’s eye” of community leadership wrath. In July of '84 I was in Oregon visiting the Osho commune for the first time. Due to generally rebellious behaviour, and an angry encounter with an “important” administrator, I made it on the community “bad boy” list. At one point, I was actually tracked by a commune helicopter! (One year after this the Sheela Silverman fiasco erupted, and the woman I battled with was revealed to have been one of her chief lieutenants. But it didn't change the fact that my spiritual lesson was to accept that everything that happened reflected some condition that existed in my own mind).
These sort of things are typical in larger spiritual organizations, and there are two things we can learn from here. One concerns the power of group-psychology, of the “lemming phenomenon” (the animals that drown themselves willingly en masse for no apparent reason other than that they are following each other). The other concerns the right relationship with the teacher or leaders. “Right relationship” is, admittedly, not something learned overnight. There is a neutral zone between idol worship and rebellion without a cause, and that neutral zone is the area we must locate and maintain ourselves in if we are to maximize the learning from our relationship with a teacher. The hallmark of this zone is intelligent surrender, which includes an attitude of profound respect, as well as a desire to absorb everything useful the teacher has to offer.
I recall one of my fellow disciples once declaring to Osho, in a question submitted for discourse, that he wanted to “steal Osho’s Enlightenment”. Osho responded to this with “Good, you have understood. This is exactly how it is. It is up to the student to steal the teacher's Enlightenment”. Not that the teacher will lose anything, but the seeker has to come very close, on a heart level, to the teacher, in order to absorb what is being offered. This does not mean that the seeker becomes lost in a personality cult, like a moth orbiting endlessly about a flame. It is more like being warmed by the rays of a sun, and then once sufficiently energized, moving on, if the desire to move on arises.
The point of such journeying, however, is to become a “sun” oneself, but the awareness as to when one has reached that place must be developed while with the teacher. Hence the paradox: We need guidance for growth, but that growth must be about our own inner awakening, not about assessing the merits, or lack thereof, of the teacher, teaching, or community. Inevitably, most of us fall into this judgmental trap at one time or another, but in the final analysis it is not relevant to the purposes for which we originally came.
The essence of “political” is that it externalizes everything; the essence of “spiritual” thinking is that it internalizes. This means that believing in the power of that which is outside of us (externalization) leads to the controller/victim dichotomy, which is sustained primarily by manipulation (done covertly by the victim, overtly by the controller). Ego thrives on all this, which is the heart of projection. The more we project, and the more we are unwilling to be wrong about what we project, the more political we are. (For a good example of this, one need go no further then the average campaign speech of a political candidate. Typically, it consists primarily of attacks on the competitors, which is pure externalization).
“Spiritual” thinking looks within without denying the world. Like the lotus flower, it is in the water but not of it; or, in the world but not of it. This leads to true freedom, the ability to traverse different planes of consciousness within, and to travel into anyone else's dreamworld without making them wrong for it, and without losing your centre in it either. As such, it is the essence of maturity. And, in the end, a mature seeker of enlightenment cannot truly meet misfortune in the umbrage of the “Shadow side” of a spiritual community, for the simple reason that such a person takes responsibility for their creations. If they find themselves in what appears to be such a shadow, they note it mindfully, get the lesson, and then move on, if need be. Or, they look deeply in the mirror, and seize it as a golden opportunity to reclaim yet another useless projection.
In the end, I would suggest that life itself is the true teacher. Any “protection” from the imperfections of life, be they out there, from the community or environment we dwell in, or in here — from our own minds — is essentially “non-protection”. It is the practice of getting that there is nothing to defend against, because the journey begins with us, and ends with us.
Copyright 1996 by P.T. Mistlberger, All Right Reserved
Over to:
Home