A childhood friend of mine, who studied for years in India with Sai Baba (yes, that Sai Baba), became very disillusioned when the guru didn’t live up to the highest expectations. My friend couldn’t separate what was useful and good about Sai Baba’s teachings from certain moral criticisms of his guru and the unspoken assumption that a valid spiritual teacher had to lead a pure unimpeachable personal life.
So my friend returned to the west sad and disappointed. All those years seemed like they’d led him down a false road behind a charlatan. Sai Baba was definitely a horny bastard and a faker (almost in the sense of the traditional fakir), but he also built hospitals, schools, and libraries. He taught practices of love and forgiveness, meditation, and introspection. And he fed the hungry. He was not a simple character. He was also not evil incarnate; though, he often seemed a bit bumbling and absurd. And by our standards today, he might have been considered a sexual predator.
A few months after my friend (then 36 years old) returned to California, he looked me up and we went to dinner. He knew I was into the occult and he wanted to ask me, as a spiritually minded person who was nevertheless very different, what I thought about Sai Baba and the accusations made against him by former students.
I said I didn’t know much about living in an ashram in India, but I wanted to ask one question: what did my friend learn while he was there? He answered that for almost a decade, he’d practiced advanced meditation, yoga, learned to cook, learned Sanskrit and Hindi, carpentry, fell in love, fell out of love, learned Ayurvedic medicine, learned how to heal through touch, studied the Vedas with scholars and spiritual masters, and taught children. Relating those things to me brought tears to his eyes.
I just nodded because my friend had made the point for me. Nothing the guru did or might have done could erase or negate those experiences. We ate the rest of the dinner in silence. Not long after that, he started his own meditation and yoga center in the Los Angeles area, took on students of his own, and passed on the good things he’d learned at the ashram to a new generation.
In my opinion, things turned out pretty well, whether or not Sai Baba had been seducing his students and falsely (ridiculously) claimed to be able to materialize sacred ash and gold watches out of thin air. My friend had a life-enhancing, spiritual experience living in India. He just needed to focus on what he’d gained instead of believing in messiah figures and godlike beings. Every guru farts. Until you can accept this, you are not ready for the training . . .
Of course, in the post-Christian atheist-materialist west, we are conditioned to apply the most stringent requirements when we evaluate a spiritual teacher. We love Aleister Crowley but we think he might have been a fake because he did heroin and held bisexual orgies. We think Osho was brilliant but we strongly disapprove of his limousine collection and think his teachings about sexual freedom were just so he could take advantage of his followers. And we have the negative examples of many whackadoo cults and insane religions that really were designed for exploitative, criminal purposes or became that way.
Growing up either in a religious evangelical-influenced or materialist-influenced context, we sometimes feel very nervous about engaging in spiritual pursuits. We want a pure messiah to save us from ourselves, someone to allay our doubts and fears that it's all a bunch of nonsense. If we perceive anything less than a messiah speaking to us, we feel gullible and start looking for the grift.
If a young person came to me and asked whether he should become a Hare Krishna or join the Illuminates Of Thanateros or shave his head and live in a Buddhist monastery for a year (or a decade) or join the Church of Satan or go to Varanasi and study with a priest of Shiva, I’d shrug and say, “Yes. Just don’t bullshit yourself."
Spiritual paths are also human paths. And humans are not gods, no matter how powerful and wise they may become. Repeat after me: every guru farts. Look at the Catholic Church. It’s been around for over 2000 years. In that span of time, they’ve had popes who were warlords, popes who were grimoire magicians, popes who had mistresses, popes who lived saintly lives and made the world a better place, popes who were insane, good popes, bad popes, indifferent popes—popes coming out of everywhere—because they were human beings first and Catholic priests second. (Don't believe the Vatican "papal infallibility" hype machine, either. No one who wears pants is infallible, kid. Trust me. I'm wearing pants right now. So I know.)
So it goes with any organization that has ever existed. The trick, if you want to walk a particular path, is to accept that its metaphysics and aesthetics interest you; accept that its leadership will have strengths and weaknesses, good points and bad; accept that only you can do the work and make it mean something; and accept that, if you are being honest with yourself, you may stay in that particular group or belief system or paradigm for a little bit or for the rest of your life. That's a lot of "accepting." It is.
You have no way of predicting how it will go until you get into it. In fact, I believe that we “make the path by walking it.” But this isn’t really about what I believe. It’s about what any particular spiritual seeker chooses to believe at any given time: a choice, made by an individual, to respond to a mysterious impulse to probe the unseen around him or her and the depths within, a choice that makes the chooser fully responsible for its outcome.
No one knows why certain people feel called to investigate spiritual things. Spirituality, religion, mysticism, and the occult are all very much like love. We know it when we encounter it. We know we’re being drawn to certain people and practices, but we can’t necessarily predict what that will be, when it will be, how long we’ll stay with it, who will be involved, what it will mean, or how it will be shaped from the material of our lives. All we know is that we’re now on a path, we're responsible for walking it, and the only way out is through.