Friday Brunch: Being a guru must be so friggin' boring
Plus other stories from around the net
New Age spirituality is in a ferment at the moment, after it was exposed that Deepak Chopra, perhaps the most famous guru in the world, was friendly with Jeffrey Epstein and sent him some chummy emails, after Epstein was convicted for sex with a minor, saying things like ‘God is a construct, cute girls are real.’ Chopra often emailed Epstein telling him to ‘bring your girls’ to a spiritual event that Chopra was leading.
Some New Age influencers have led the pitchforks against Chopra and demanded he be de-platformed. And he has been. New Age organisations like the Shift Network, the Association for Spiritual Integrity and Mind Valley have issued statements condemning his remarks or cancelling appearances by him.
Meanwhile, spiritual teacher Lissa Rankin is naming names in a viral article denouncing all the bullshit she’s seen behind the scenes in the New Age / wellness world. One guru was rude to her, another was having an affair, a third was much less nice off-stage than on-stage, a fourth was anti-vax, and so on…
It feels great to tear down the icons of spirituality, nobody enjoys it more than me. But you have to ask: who raised them up in the first place?
Guruism (a term coined by psychiatrist and cult expert Robert J Lifton) is a two-way process, involving (1) the projection of charisma and extraordinary spiritual or healing power onto a person by some other people (2) the guru-figure taking on that projection, deciding they really are special, and becoming ego-inflated and megalomaniac, then using their followers as objects to fulfil their need for attention, power, sex, money and so on.
Without the projection and worship from the followers, there is no guru, just a narcissist wandering around festivals trying to get people to pay them attention.
Attacking the narcissist gurus without thinking about the supply-side of the equation is like attacking Latin American drug cartels without thinking about the North Americans spending trillions on illegal drugs. You can assassinate El Mencho but a new cartel leader will be along shortly.
There are millions of people out there, maybe billions, eager to hand over responsibility to someone else. They want a Big Daddy or Big Mummy to tell them what to think, how to live, to tell them they are good little babies. They’re the ones making the gurus. You can character-assassinate Deepak Chopra, but a new guru will be along shortly.
As someone who has spent 20 years in the world of wellness and spirituality and met a few guru-types in the green room, I realize it’s a curse to be seen as a guru. An isolating curse. Gurus put on a heavy golden mask, and deny themselves genuine human connection. That falseness and lack of authentic connection comes out in toxic shadow behaviour - lies, addiction, abuse, criminality and so on.
Last year, I spent some time at a budding New Age commune in the US. Many people at the commune had been drawn there because they read the articles of a New Age guru type, who wrote about how this commune could be the true community they had all been seeking their whole lives. Wide-eyed seeker-types gathered round him: maybe this could finally be the true family their wounded souls were seeking.
I noticed the guru never really relaxed and hung out with the other commune members. He couldn’t. He’d been put on a pedestal by them - when they drew near to him, it was with hushed reverence. And he put himself on a pedestal as well - the only time he felt comfortable talking to people was on stage, in a monologue. The guru and his audience had got stuck in an unequal hierarchical relationship. This must have been incredibly isolating for the guru, who was himself desperately seeking community and connection.
It must be incredibly boring up there on the pedestal. Every conversation is with someone on their knees desperately seeking a word of wisdom. Can you imagine the contempt this would foster over time?
I have been researching an underground shaman who runs a big network in the US and around the world. He is seen as this great guru figure by some of his followers, but obviously he’s not, he’s just an average person in every sense. One time, he said ‘you look like an owl’ to a follower, as a passing remark. She took this as an incredible insight into her character. She thought owls must be her spirit-animal, and actually spent a year of her life studying owls. One year later, she saw the shaman again and she told him all that she had been doing with owls since his last remark. He looked at her, astonished. ‘I just meant you looked tired.’
I interviewed one of his lead facilitators, who ran a big psychedelic community in New York. This guy’s dream was to be a guru, and he got everything he wished for, by the time he was 30. There must have been 500 people in the community, and they would come to weekly psychedelic gatherings, where this young man got to play the rabbi, his greatest fantasy. And you know what he found? After a while it was incredibly boring. He would give everyone psychedelics, and then go and sit in a back room, smoke cigarettes and scroll Instagram. He got stuck in a role. And eventually, the community turned on him for not being perfect and for sleeping with hot young followers, and he had to flee the country.
Come to our event on Ex-Mormons and Psychedelics, free and online, March 18th at 12 noon US Central time. Tickets here.
It reminds me of something Lissa Rankin wrote about interviewing Byron Katie for NPR:
only to have her say, on film, that Byron Katie the enlightened master was only one of her parts, how it was the only part most people wanted to interview, but that the other parts of Katie, the ones who aren’t so enlightened or present or good, would like to meet me too
In other words, Byron Katie, Deepak Chopra and probably most other gurus who have ever been raised up - they’re putting on an act, playing the part of ‘enlightened teacher’. And after a few years of intoxicating success, they get stuck in that part. It must be so boring, so isolating, so lonely. I think that may be why, after a few years or decades, some cult leaders say ‘hey let’s all kill ourselves’. Mass suicide is the only way they can think of to exit the stage.
If you ever treat others as a guru, you are cursing them. You are not treating them as a human being, you are treating them as an object to worship.
God forbid you ever get stuck in that role yourself, because the mask gets seared into your skin. I meet many people in New Age culture whose biggest fantasy seems to be recognition for their huge spiritual wisdom, and maybe even to become a guru, with beautiful young followers hanging on their every word. Be careful what you wish for. It is a curse. It will inflate your ego, isolate you, ruin your morals, destroy your relationships, maybe even send you mad. And then, after you’ve played the role for many years, and become incredibly bored and sad, your followers will turn on you and tear you to shreds, because it turned out Daddy wasn’t perfect.
Next time someone looks at you with googly eyes and asks what they should do with their lives, run!
After the paywall, this week’s interesting links, including: important articles on the role of therapy in psychedelic medicine; a failed big study of psilocybin for depression in Germany; a viral post on AI sends the stock market crashing; Anthropic faces off against the Pentagon; a law-suit over an accidental death at a ketamine clinic; a black magician in Tulum; Nick Land in the New Yorker; LSD spritzes in Hollywood; and other stuff.
