On awful behavior from awakened people

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Sometimes spiritual teachers engage in really awful behavior. This can be everything from petty internecine warfare to full-on sexual assault. Often, the teachers who do so are teachers who talk about being awakened, or enlightened. That causes many reasonable people to think, “Well, this awakening you’re talking about must be pretty shitty if you can’t even keep your hands off your students—maybe it’s not even real.”

I think this is a real shame. Serious meditation has transformed my life to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible. Everything is better, richer, smoother, more interesting, and there are few downsides. You know that little God-shaped hole, the sense of being perpetually alone and unworthy? That can be largely dispensed with, even as you remain a functional person with a job and relationships.

It’s not that serious meditation doesn’t have extreme benefits. It’s that it doesn’t make you perfect, and being a spiritual teacher is a potentially perilous situation. Sports metaphor: Imagine seeing competitive athletes suffering debilitating injuries and thinking, “wow, having excellent physical fitness must be terrible for you.” Obviously, no. Competitive athletes have honed their fitness to the point where they can deliberately enter insane situations, and this creates the risk of damage. It’s similar for spiritual teachers.

Where the analogy breaks down is that it’s too generous—unlike with athletes, the damage from spiritual teachers isn’t self-directed, and sometimes, it’s inflicted on purpose.

Awakening does not necessarily mean that you are morally perfect

There are a million debates about what awakening means. For some traditions, it’s primarily a perceptual shift, wherein you gain greater transparency into how your identity is constructed moment-to-moment, which tends to loosen identity, and thus reduce suffering. For some traditions, that transparency is merely part of a program for creating a state of moral/behavioral perfection, wherein you no longer experience anger, ill will, or lust.

Both camps agree on one thing—that becoming completely behaviorally perfected is quite rare. I’ve spoken to one meditation teacher who feels that only one person he’s encountered met the criteria, that she “meditated until everything in her but love and eccentricity dissolved.” I’ve spoken to another who feels that maybe a half-dozen people he’s met seem to plausibly live up to a perfect standard, and many are close but not quite there.

Regardless, everyone agrees that you can have dramatic perceptual shifts before having dramatic behavioral shifts. In Ken Wilber language, you can “wake up” a bunch, and then have a big lag in the “cleaning up” department.

The transparency thing—waking up to your true nature, as they say—does make your psychology more visible. The ways in which you are a crazy, insecure asshole become crystal clear. In the last few months, for example, I’ve been really noticing my status-seeking behavior, and really hating it, and this appears to be helpful in making that behavior less compulsive.

But this awareness, itself, does not entail that you necessarily will, or even can, reach a state of perfection in your behavior. You can only correct what’s visible to you, and it is often convenient to ignore the consequences of your behavior. Recently a teacher put it to me like this: “You start by pulling up the big weeds, then you move onto the medium weeds, and then the really tiny weeds. And if you think you’ve got all the tiny weeds, it’s probably because there’s a big weed that grew behind you, and you don’t see it yet.”

Which brings us to the next point.

Spiritual bypassing appears to be a continual peril

You may have heard of the term “spiritual bypassing,” wherein people use spirituality as a way to dismiss real dilemmas or emotions. Oh look, I forgot to pay the water bill and now my kids can’t flush the toilet—this is just karma working itself out. Every time I talk to my partner I am filled with guilt and shame—cool, just more appearances in the empty space of being!

When you’re an advanced meditator, your mind becomes quite plastic. Maybe you know energetic breathing techniques that can fill your body with delicious, pulsating warmth. Maybe you can close your eyes and focus away your body sensations, until it seems like you’re simply a cloud of infinite space. Or maybe you can watch as any painful bits of self-narrative disappear almost as they arise, like snowflakes stumbling into the mouth of a subway tunnel.

And perhaps, because you teach in a tradition that emphasizes perfection, it’s considered a qualification to radiate calm serenity in all places and all times, and always have a smile on your face. So it would be unsuitable for you to appear stressed out. 

This would incentivize you to subtly ignore the negative elements of your psychology. Thus, you would be less likely to confront yourself in ways that are healthful but painful.

What, seriously, do you think will happen in this situation

Anyway, meet Bob. He is a lonely person whose psychology is a self-stabbing instrument that is somehow both extremely sharp and extremely soft. Bob is functionally unable to do anything but suffer, and so, he seeks the end to suffering. He becomes a suffering wonk, whose whole life is about examining his psychology and re-training it. He eventually joins a Zen monastery, where he shovels manure, gets hit with a stick, and wears funny robes for ten years. He emerges utterly transformed, with 98% less suffering than most people, and many lucid descriptions to share about how he got there. He also has a certain stillness and serenity that makes him a beautiful mirror for everyone to project their fantasies of enlightenment on.

Then, Bob begins teaching. Bob has never had social status in his life before, outside a monastery. Suddenly, he is a rockstar. He is surrounded by people who believe him to be essentially perfect. This is a wonderful and terrible drug—it energizes his system, sharpening his concentration, making him seem even more charismatic. 

Some of Bob’s pupils, by the way, are attractive members of his desired sex, and they try to spend as much private time as possible with Bob. A few of them wouldn’t mind if Bob decided that he was no longer bound by his former monastic laws, and are transparently flirtatious. Others would be horrified if Bob did anything untoward, and view Bob as an asexual parent figure, saying adoring things to him in a strictly platonic way. Whether or not Bob intends to break his vows, he might have trouble reading whose intentions are what—he is, after all, just a grown-up suffering wonk.

Even if Bob is well-intentioned, which is not a given, where do you expect this situation to go? We’re rolling some crooked dice here—let’s roll them for twenty years. Do you think Bob is never going to act inappropriately, even if he’s unusually psychologically aware? Perhaps he’s always ethically pure—great, let’s check up on the other 200 spiritual teachers in Berkeley.

One under-appreciated fact is that if you are spiritually powerful, it’s not just that you have to decide not to be a cult leader. It’s that people are constantly trying to make you into a cult leader, and you have to actively resist it at every turn. Watch this video if you want to see an extreme example of how this can look in real time.

Often, high-profile teachers are the ones who commit the worst sins, and this entirely makes sense to me—they get the most rockstar treatment and are most able to remove themselves from accountability. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that high-profile teachers who behave impeccably are often embedded in a community of teachers they consider equals, or have a permanent teacher of their own. This way, it’s not just their own conscience they’re accountable to—someone else can always poke their head in and say, “Hey, from one awakened being to another, your sangha is really fucked up. What the fuck is going on?”

There appears to be no cure for narcissism

As mentioned above, sometimes Bob is not well-intentioned. Maybe he didn’t assault or abuse his student because he innocently misread a social signal—maybe he doesn’t care about his student’s pain, or, worse, enjoys that kind of thing.

Sometimes, it turns out that really gifted spiritual teachers are narcissists. Not necessarily the murder-y kind of narcissist, just your garden variety narcissist who doesn’t receive emotions-level feedback about the fact that other people matter. Apparently, you can have a crystal-clear insight into your psychology, but still fail to notice what’s not there, EG, empathy.

Anyway, narcissists are narcissists—they like prominence, perhaps a little bit more than the rest of us do. This directly implies that spiritual teachers who draw a lot of attention to their own flawlessness, attainments, et cetera, are perhaps more likely to be the ones without a tremendous degree of moral development. And thus, they are the ones whose falls-from-grace cast the most doubt on the idea of awakening.

Some people want to say that real awakening must make you moral, so they come up with alternate narcissism-specific versions of awakening to solve this dilemma. One entertaining example is teacher Bill Hamilton’s “paranoid samadhi,” described in this book, the idea that spiritual narcissists gain a heightened awareness derived from constant vigilance about whether someone’s going to fuck them over. I personally have no dog in this fight. Maybe there’s Narciwakening and Normalwakening. Or maybe it’s just the same thing but it’s not a cure-all. I don’t know.

I do like the latter opinion, however, because it dissolves the dilemma instantly. If awakening can’t cure narcissism, it’s no longer troubling that a guru could have tremendous insights into the clear light nature of your consciousness, while still being wrapped up in scandals. It also directly implies that when evaluating a teacher, it’s not sufficient to just evaluate their statements about spirituality. If you’re interested in substantially emulating them or trusting them with your emotional health, you should ask around about how they are personally. Cool, they taught you some excellent spiritual tools—do they pay their employees on time? Lie to the donors who fund their non-profit organization? Leave personal drama and feuds in their wake all the time? How are they to the waiter?

More generally, perfect is dangerous

Our minds are ingenious PR departments, always able to conjure reasons for why what we’re doing is justifiable. Speaking from experience, this can happen even if meditation has quieted your inner monologue to a large extent—you can make excuses for yourself pre-verbally, or just assume that there must be a good reason for what you’re doing, even if that reason never presents as narrative content. It’s quite amazing.

Regarding oneself as perfect, or the last in an enlightened lineage, or the defender of the true teachings, et cetera, seems dangerous. It seems even more dangerous to have your reputation staked on others believing this. Then, if you fuck up, you have two options. The first is to say: I’m not actually what you think I am, that’s all just projection—your teacher is flawed, just as you will be, no matter how long you stare at walls and chant mantras. But you could also double down on the behavior, and say: if only you were me, you would understand why everything I’m doing is perfectly good.

I know some teachers who, knowing about this dynamic, attempt to broadcast their imperfections as much as they can, drawing attention to their own foibles and craziness. This works pretty well. But it’s still not a faultless approach, because people will still try and make you into a perfectly imperfect guru. “Ah, my spiritual teacher, he’s so flawed and relatable and yet perfectly wise”—this is a sentence I’ve heard uttered almost verbatim, many times. 

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.