Stop Acting Like a Guru You Bellend
Charlatans love to suck people in with robes and deep voices.
When you first get into spirituality, it’s easy to find yourself in a vortex of optimism where you think spiritual awakening is like something you can buy in Seven-Eleven.
This won’t take me long, you think to yourself.
Twenty years later, you wake up with a hangover and realise that most spiritual teachers on this planet are fake.
You realise that the spiritual path is, in fact, the work of very slowly overturning the stones of your delusion rather than constructing new spiritual ones.
You realise that it has fuck all to do with the way you dress, the way you talk, how much you smile, how many online classes you run or whether you can do full lotus position while holding up your partner, baby and dog.
- It doesn’t happen by cracking it logically while drawing on a window like Russell Crowe.
- It’s not something to be solved like a Rubik’s cube.
- It’s not something that lights up your seventeenth Omega — 353 chakra when you hit one of those hammer things at the fairground, and it goes:
DING.
It’s what is left after you have killed all of your self-imposed lies.
Which is probably not much at all.
When the hippies first met their Indian Gurus, they began to dress like them.
They grew their beards and wore kaftans.
Those Indian outfits were standard everyday clothing in Indian culture. The correct response would have been to wear a suit or t-shirt and jeans. Or, even better, to keep dressing exactly how they did before.
The exotic outfits came to represent hippies, tree huggers and lefties while spirituality took off on a cultural tangent of its own
The way people dressed, the way people spoke, the incense they burned, the music they listened to and the people they hung out with all came to represent the culture of spirituality.
The ordinary people who needed it most became suspicious of spiritual methods while the hippies claimed ownership of spirituality for themselves.
Spirituality became an escape from the world to a place where we don’t have to get a job, and we don’t have to pay our taxes — a place where we can hang out and smoke weed all day talking meaningless philosophy with our friends, meditating on purple light and growing our beards indefinitely.
The hippies believe they did us a favour in bringing spirituality to the West, but the truth is, they fucked it up.
Now we are living with the consequences of that.
Jump on Insight Timer or any spiritual app, and you will see them lined up with their beaming smiles and their top knots.
Compare them to Tilopa, the tenth-century Indian Mahasiddha who was living as a filthy, sweaty, growling fisherman when his student Naropa found him.
Another example is Patrul Rinpoche, the Tibetan master who lived as a beggar. People were terrified of his filthy and unkempt appearance, yet he is revered as one of the greatest spiritual masters in history.
These days your guru might be an angry bastard who wears a pinstriped suit and works in the city.
Or, they might be an anxious pole vaulter from Russia called Maria who chain smokes and eats too much KFC.
These people might not be able to teach you meditation.
They might not know what the fuck a chakra is.
They might not have a healthy top knot or a decent set of abs, or a single pair of fisherman pants between them.
But they are damn good at stripping you of your lies.
When Naropa found his teacher Tilopa living on discarded fish guts under a bridge, Tilopa denied being any kind of master. He didn’t have a Youtube channel or an Insight Timer account.
And as the story goes, Tilopa didn’t teach a single word of meditation to Naropa in twelve years, yet Naropa was liberated.
The spiritual path is not what most people think. It is a painful, systematic stripping back of everything to reveal what is left when everything that can be removed has been removed.
And if you still think an authentic spiritual teacher has any quality whatsoever that you can recognise with ordinary eyes, you better start this article again from the beginning.
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