Guru Comparison Can Cause Indigestion/Malabsortion

[Guest guest]

Dear Ammachi Children:

 

Phil Servedio is a spiritual seeker who may be categorized as a Spiritual

Teacher to some.

I chose to view him in the "seeker" camp like myself. I condider mayself a

"beginner" in Spiritual Life. When I was in College I imbibed various exotic

foods (ie. not my Mothers boring foods) and often had gastrointestinal

repercussions..

 

Mr. Servedio wrote an essay in 1996 on the dangers of going from guru to guru.

Here is a cut and paste of Servedio's comments: Servedio wrote:

 

Malabsorption and Indigestion

"I see a downside to this abundance of possibilities. This bouncing around from

Gangaji to Andrew Cohen to Lama So-and-So to Leslie Temple-Thurston to Arjuna to

Swami Watchamacallit to Saniel Bonder to Mother Meera to Barry Long to Jean

Klein to Jack Kornfield to Poonjaji to Lawrence and Ardeliza to Thich Nhat Hanh

to Deepak Chopra to U.G. Krishnamurti to Sylvia Boorstein to Suzanne Segal to

Zen Master blah-de-blah to Ammachi to God knows who else can turn the spiritual

search into a serious case of indigestion. What is meant by indigestion is that

the reception of a particular transmission, instead of leading to a more

profound sense of freedom and clarity, can lead to its opposite, a greater level

of confusion, imbalance, emotional turmoil and ungroundedness.

We seem to know very clearly, usually from bad experiences, that excessive food

combining can lead to gastric distress, but somehow this never carries over into

other areas of life, particularly the spiritual. The tossing about of disparate

energies from various transmissions can be just another form of bad

"guru-combining". Of course, the more mature the individual is spiritually, the

more capacity that person has to work with and test out various transmissions

and teachers, but from what I've seen, the individuals who do the most bouncing

around are the ones who could really use the freedom of real commitment to one

teacher and one teaching only, for a period of time. (Conversely, those who are

a bit too rigid, cultic and narrow-minded in their one-pointed commitment could

use a bit of loosening up by visiting and experimenting with other teachings.)

One thing that I've learned is that our worst nightmare of " choicelessness" is

actually the doorway to really seeing our true nature. The truth is, that due to

the nature of the moment to moment arising of objects, we apparently don't have

a great deal of choice in a lot of what appears in our "inner" and "outer"

lives. Science is continuing to find more genetic evidence to the hard-coding of

personality structures, despite our attempts to change ourselves. The point of

really seeing that we are just stuck as we are, that we've hit a wall, that the

search for freedom is utterly fruitless, to the point of exhaustion (for

ordinary individuals like myself who have to learn the hard way) represents in

some traditions a significant rite of passage known as "hearing". Something

drops in that moment, and in that dropping, our seeking comes to rest and the

possibility of really seeing our nature becomes greatly enhanced.

Another side-effect of excessive food combining is malabsorption. In other

words, we are taking in a lot, but not getting much benefit, or not as much as

could be. We understand that it takes several years of really studying and

sweating and committing oneself to one major in college just to get a Bachelor's

degree, never mind a post-graduate degree. But this kind of understanding

doesn't seem to be applied to the spiritual realm. The movie-theater approach of

sitting in front of the big screen, where some teacher comes on and does his or

her show is a far cry from truly absorbing oneself in one teaching or tradition.

Again, for someone who is ripe, all it may take is one word from the right

teacher at the right time, but this cannot be applied to everyone at all times.

What happens is simply malabsorption, the teaching does not sink in deep enough

to effect the changes necessary at the root level of being. It only penetrates

through to several epidermal layers, perhaps to some outer

organs, but not to the bone marrow. When one takes something on, for real, for

a distinct period of time, in good moods and in bad moods, sickness and in

health, etc., one really learns and absorbs the teaching into the body, not just

the mind or emotions. One becomes a living, breathing, walking expression of a

transmission. And then one can fully examine its effect in one's life. From my

experience, I've gone through two traditions where I literally went all the way

through to the back of them, seeing both the magic and the failures and

limitations of each tradition, and made life choices accordingly"

 

MAY AMMA PROVIDE THE COSMIC ALKA-SELTZER.

 

Namah Shivaya,

 

GeorgeSon