The Purloined Teaching
“Life is about growth and understanding.”
—Padre Pio
I didn’t want to,
and still don’t, but the call to write this spiritual musing is persistent and
I have to do its bidding; but I want it on record that I’m doing so under
protest. So, what is so important about this imperative that I have to explore
it in a spiritual musing?
I think I know,
but I don’t really; because once I start a spiritual musing it takes on a life
of its own, and what I want to say about a certain purloined teaching may not
be what the creative spirit of my daimonic imperative has in mind; so why don’t
I just go straight to the source and ask my Muse— “Why must you persist on this
spiritual musing?”
“To shine a light in the darkness of this New Age teaching.”
“What am I,
Diogenes?”
“In spirit, yes. To see the light, one must know the
shadow; and you have been called to shed the light of clarity onto the shadow side
of this teaching.”
“And how do you
propose I do that?”
“Tell a story, and I’ll take it from there.”
“Fair enough…”
Shy and
unassuming, he was born a Kentucky boy with a burning desire for truth, and to
help satisfy the deepest longing of his soul the gods granted him the gifts of fast
reading and a remarkable memory, and he read mountains and mountains of books
and remembered everything that he read; and he became a prolific writer with a
genius for assembling thoughts, ideas, and perceptions into a single truth that
he had to share with the world.
“How?” he asked
himself, knowing how short his life would be. “What did Jesus do? What did the
Buddha do? What did Socrates, Lao Tzu, Shams of Tabriz, Ramakrishna and all the
great spiritual teachers do?” They taught their truth and gave it to the world,
and that’s what he would do; and he racked his brains for the perfect name for
his truth.
His truth was the
truth of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu, Shams of Tabriz, Ramakrishna
and all the sacred teachings of the world that he had read and remembered and rendered
with poetic genius into a single truth that he called “The Way of the Eternal,”
and everyone who came to his teaching recognized the truth they saw, and they wanted
more; and he gave them more with the purloined truth of imagined Masters who
were the longest unbroken line of Spiritual Masters in the world, stretching
into the foggy mists of antiquity and whose wisdom was unparalleled in the
annals of spiritual literature.
I couldn’t believe
what I read in The Far Country, which
was dictated to him in private by his most completely fabricated staff-carrying
Spiritual Master whose existence has never been empirically verified, a book
that was imbued with instant credibility by the miraculous grace of serendipity
that brought it to me in my need for a new path, granting me all the truth I
needed to continue my journey of wholeness and completeness, and I devoured all
I could in one sitting and could not wait to finish reading the following day,
that’s how much his teaching satisfied my need to know; and I became a bona
fide member of “the most direct path to God” for more than thirty years and
then walked away when the archetypal shadow of this teaching could no longer
hide its Janus face from me in the behavior of my fellow chelas, which became
the premise of the closing chapter, “The Vanity of All Spiritual Paths,” of my
novel Healing with Padre Pio that I
was called to write just before walking away from this cleverly cobbled spiritual
teaching called “The Way of the Eternal.”
I knew the way before I found this teaching, having
found my true self by “working” on myself with “conscious effort” and “intentional
suffering,” Gurdjieff’s most rewarding disciplines for giving birth to one’s
soul self, and unlike the chelas of this New Age teaching I never bought into
the concept of the Outer and Inner Master who guided his chelas in all of their
decisions; I was Jungian in my belief, and all of my guidance came from
experience and the “superior insight” of what the American Gnostic Ralph Waldo
Emerson called “God within,” a concept that the clever modern-day founder of
this cobbled teaching had also appropriated before transforming his teaching into
a New Age religion to avoid taxes, and it pained me to see how my fellow chelas
slowly forfeited their individual will to their spiritual leader who aside from
being their Outer and Inner Master had also assumed the role of being their Dream
Master, closing the gate of their mental prison, all the while teaching that
the central tenet of this spiritual path was to become one’s own Master, an
oxymoronic premise that became too much to bear, and I had to walk away from this
soporific illusion.
But unlike so many
chelas who had also awakened to the archetypal Shadow Master of this alluring New
Age Religion of the Light and Sound of God and walked away from in bitter
resentment and humiliation for having been played for a credulous fool, I have
no rancor whatsoever, and I thank my lucky stars that this teaching came into
my life because I was forced to see my own false shadow self in a light that I would
never have seen had I not been seduced into believing in “the most direct path
to God,” an elitist conceit born of a misapprehension that I could no longer
suffer, and as humiliated as I was for my gullibility and self-deception, I cannot
help but marvel at the genius of this purloined teaching.
——
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