New Age Spiritual Movement Frustrations

[kilaya]

Nice thread! So many interesting points that are certainly complex but important to wade through. My own thoughts on the issue go back to the teachings of the Buddha and Socrates: any degree of greed, lust, or anger in a "teacher," no matter how well-meaning he or she is, creates a difficulty in that person's ability to think through what they're doing and whether it's truly effective for the betterment of themselves or others. There are way too many examples of very elevated "teachers" in recent and distant history whose hidden inner anger, lust or greed led them to act in unbeneficial, unloving ways, which they were the last to acknowledge as so. In all cases they all harmed themselves most, in choosing to save others publicly before they had full control of their more negative thoughts and tendencies.

This is very very difficult to assess in a spiritual teacher without spending a lot of time closely observing them. Mostly because they're usually quite charming and totally convinced of their selfless, purely positive motives to help others. When I was searching for genuine teachers I would get turned off quickly by being sold things or charged more than modest and practical fees for teachings/seminars, etc. Ironically, Socrates criticized the most famous spiritual teachers of his day for charging for their service. In Plato's Protagoras, the famous teacher Protagoras gives a lengthy explanation of why he is justified charging large sums of money to become his student. This was in 500BC Greece! Socrates wasn't having any of it. He said that if Protagoras was actually capable of making people into better people in the way he claimed he wouldn't need to charge any money because his students would voluntarily give him money after becoming better people because of him. This makes a lot of sense to me.