Scott Edelstein on Discerning the Role of a Spiritual Teacher - podcast episode cover

Scott Edelstein on Discerning the Role of a Spiritual Teacher

Sep 11, 201844 minEp. 246
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Scott Edelstein on Discerning the Role of a Spiritual Teacher

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Fear, but on the kindest bravery and love side needs to be fed a very strict, careful, limited diet. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Scott Edelstein, who has studied with several spiritual teachers, including Tony Packer, Dane and Cottagery,

Tim McCarthy, and currently Steve Hogan. As the friend of several spiritual teachers, he's also spent much time with them off duty, sometimes serving as a confidante. He's a long time practitioner of both Buddhism and Judaism, and a committed proponent of serious spirituality in all forms and traditions. Scott's work on several spiritual topics has appeared in shambalasan American Jewish World the writer. His new book is The User's Guide to Spiritual Teachers. Hi Scott, welcome to the show.

Thanks Eric. It's pleasure and bit of an honor to the year. I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called The Users Guide to Spiritual Teachers, which I think is a topic many of our listeners are going to be interested in. So we will get into it in just a second. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves

inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Sure well, first of all, the work that I do is as a writer and researcher and editor and collaborator and ghostwriter. And I would actually like to this parable because I would argue, if there's a word here that is not right, that indeed there is always a battle going on inside us, with kindness, bravery, love, and other such things on one side, and with greed,

hacred and other such things on the other. But I would argue and strongly that fear belongs on both sides, and that fear, but on the kindness, bravery and love side, needs to be fed a very strict, careful, limited diet. And the reason for that is fear is partly what keeps us alive. It's partly what keeps us safe. There are things we need to be afraid of. What happens is people then stoke and feed the fear in an an appropriate way for things that we shouldn't be afraid of.

We shouldn't be afraid of immigrants just because they're immigrants. We shouldn't be afraid of people who we see as the other just because they're the other. We probably shouldn't be other remembering the first place. Um. But we also should be paying attention to our bodies, um, to our hearts, to our minds when we do feel fear, and instead of saying, oh, that fear is bad, getting rid of it, we need to actually discern one of that fear is

telling us something useful and important. And I'm saying all this because that discernment is at the heart of the user's guide to Spiritual Teachers. One of the big problems that often happens with spiritual teachers who are Charlotte's or creditors and narcissists or liber teams or whatnot, is we assume that because they're spiritual teacher, we should never fear them. But actually there's plenty of people in that role who we should fear, and if we paid attention to that fear,

it would serve as well. Yes, an earlier book of years was Sex and the Spiritual Teacher, Why it happens, when it's a problem, and what we can all do, And certainly there are no shortage of stories of spiritual teachers who take advantage of students. So I agree with you, it's certainly something to watch out for and worry about.

I want to kind of just jump into the book because I think there's so many different things in here or that you talk about with spiritual teachers, and I want to start by a saying or something that you have pretty early in the book. You say, a spiritual teacher is a living, breathing human being with normal human emotions, impulses, and desires. So talk to me about what you're driving

at with that sentence, like why that's important? Sure, if they didn't have the normal human desires and expectations and foibles, um, then they would have nothing of value to teach us because they wouldn't be able to number one, speak from their experience, including their mistakes. Number Two, they wouldn't have the necessary empathy. So if I were to look at a cat and go, why why are you tearing that mouse to pieces? The cat would just say you don't

understand it all, do you? Because you and I would never tear a mouse to pieces. But if you're a cat, there is nothing better, more appropriate, more fun than to beat the craphole out of a mouse. So if we go into assume that our teachers are somehow, our spiritual teachers are somehow inherently different from us, then how are

we going to apply their experience to our lives? And indeed, the only people who are going to claim that they're fundamentally different from us are going to be Charlotte's or alternatively, somehow, some supposedly channeled being. But even if the being is somehow being channeled in sign of some corporeal time, share

the same rules of engagement and the same discernment would apply. Yeah, I'm always interested in It's a question I've asked some of the so called teachers we've had on the show, and it's really about people who make some claim or believed to some degree that they have achieved used the word enlightenment, awakening, use whatever word you want. And I'm always kind of curious. The thing I'm trying to get out of out of those folks sometimes is, well, how

different is having obtained that? How different is that experience of living than what say mine is, or or other people? And I find it a fascinating question, because at the heart of the show we talk a lot about this new reference in the book, this idea of you know, we're seeking something and yet at the same time that seeking often can stand in the way. But there's a

reason that we are on a spiritual journey. There is a place to go, although I get that we could say there's not, but for purposes of keeping this conversation saying, we'll assume there is a place to go, that there is some degree of improvement in our quality of life that occurs. And I just am always interested in, like, just how far does that go? It's a wonderful question, and I'm thrilled that you asked it, so thank you. Let me speak to that in a couple of ways.

The first is people, I do think um pretty consistently misunderstand enlightenment as some kind of threshold that gets crossed some combination of losing your virginity and getting bar mixivent are confirmed. First of all, that's not the case, because, as we know, everything is constantly changing, Everything is in flux and flow, and so even if a certain experience appears, that doesn't mean that that experience is stays around forever,

because nothing stays around forever. So I think it's more useful to look at enlightenment will come back to what is enlightenment a moment as something that comes and goes for some people that may never come at all for others if it does show up and then it disappears again. Uh. It isn't something where you can suddenly, oh uh, some gate has opened in my brain and now I can just rest on my laurels, or now everything's easy, or now I understand everything, or now my discernment is perfect.

We still have to be engaging, moment by moment, listening to our own hearts and minds and guts, making the room determinations. So that would be the first half. The second is that the whole question of what is enlightenment? And of course, as Lee Armstrong said, if you if you have to explain it, you're not you're not getting it. He said that, of course about jazz. So this notion that enlightenment is a thing that is somehow gotten, kind of like some bonus or some award, I think it's

also pretty misleading. That said, as human beings, there are things we can know or recognize that we didn't previously recognize or no, and there are things that we can realize we know that we have known but didn't realize we knew so um, and so I don't want to this or dismiss enlightenment because it's quotes real. Yet at the same time, it's certainly not anything that people would

typically imagine it. Did it right? Well, that's the whole thing about it is the idea of you you can't put into words something that you can't put into words. The the other thing that and I don't remember where I heard this and who I had this conversation with, but the idea has sort of stuck around with me.

You know, a lot of times we we think of enlightenment in the sense of the satory type experience, just the sudden like whack upside the head and boom, you know, an explosion goes off in our brain and we are in a different place. And somebody posited that, yes, that's the way it happens for some people, and it seems very dramatic. They take a dramatic growth step forward. But

that for a lot of people. The reason that a lot of other people might be equally Again, I'm going to use this word in quotes enlightened right, or have a same degree of realization. It's just that it happened

so slowly they barely noticed it. And I think that's a fascinating idea because I often think about if you could take me at say twenty four years old, when I was just coming off of being a heroin addict, and you could drop me in my brain today, I bet that twenty four year old would have his mind blown by what it's like to be in my head today. And I'm not saying that being in my head is

like so amazingly special. I'm just saying the difference from the mindset and the way that I operated then until now is so dramatic. It's just that I don't mostly notice it because it's been a twenty year process or twenty plus year process. Just had a couple of I think important things. One is simply about the the nature

of maturation, that as we grow, we grow. If we're paying attention, as we grow older, we grow wiser, and if we're paying attention consistently and in the right ways, that even that wisdom, the quality of the wisdom we have changes in terms of the quick versus the sudden versus the gradual. I think the best analogy I would draw there is you could win a lottery get inheritance and be a millionaire. And you can also put aside fifty dollars a week from your paycheck for fifty years

and be a millionaire. And both of those wind up at the same spot. At least financially, you have a million dollars. Yeah. Either way. That said, I would like to add one thing is that the two most in quotes profound supposedly spiritual experiences that I've had, really, I would argue, are not remotely profound. I had one under the influence of Alice d at age Oh god, I don't know, just getting five, who were your parents, no

wonder you wrote a book about spiritual teachers. And I had another one doing sun salutations at about age I don't know. Again, maybe a year later. They seemed profound because one was a whack in the head the other was a whack in the head in the body, But now at age sixty three looking back, I'd say, well, yeah they were. They were both revealed something, and the second one was a huge body experience, probably the most

in quotes profound experience my body has been through. But in terms of insight, they actually revealed something that now just seems like normal. Relevant background information. I just wasn't used to it at that young age. Yep. Makes sense to me, and I've had some things that are similar

in that regard. It's just it's sort of a fascinating idea to me because there do seem to be states that occur that are profoundly different than my ordinary consciousness um and and they are striking perhaps to the degree in which they do differ, um, but the insights underneath them, to your point, sort of over a period of time, start to seem relatively commonplace or normal if you live

with the belief long enough. And that, I would argue is one of spiritual teachers main values is you can do you your spiritual teacher with this information, and they can say things like, as they often do, oh yeah, that's pretty normal, or or yeah that's don't don't let them bother you. It's it's fine, or yeah so what oh yeah, you had some insight? Well is that it? Yeah? Anything else? Uh no? And then and then they send

you back out into your life. Right. So, one of the things that you talk about in the book often is a spiritual teacher that I kind of consider, at least right now, one of the main people who I learn a lot from his audio, Shanti, and he says something similar to he says, don't do this, And you talk about how it's a common thing that people do, which is to really hand over a large degree of

our personal autonomy. Maybe the word that he would use to a spiritual teacher, you say, many of the students try to avoid the unavoidable pain of making our own decisions, living into their consequences, and growing up. So we ask our teachers to make our personal decisions for us. Should I take this job or that job? Should I leave my husband or stay with him and try and work things out. Is it okay for me to eat meat, etcetera, etcetera. Well, first of all, I want to give a thumbs up,

but a shout out to the shanty. He's he's got a lot of wisdom, and I'm thrilled that you had him on your show, actually twice, so that's that's great the and I would certainly agree with him that one mark of a spiritual teacher worth their soul is they will not try to take from you or allow you to hand over um any responsibilities and decisions that are yours.

Probably the clearest signs of the Charlotte, or someone who shouldn't be a spiritual teacher is someone who either wants something from you, or is trying to run your life for you, or is trying to make decisions for you, or tells you basically you need to get in line

here and do what everybody else is doing. That's almost inevitably a sign that this person is potentially dangerous, because after all, ultimately our job as human beings, of course is to be decent human beings, but also to grow up, to wise up, to open up, to be more fully human. And there's no way to do that by handing over our responsibilities and our decisions to some other person. Yeah, this is an interesting concept for me because as I

was reviewing, I read your book previously. Um, we were going to do the interview and we had to reschedule it, and so I was going back through it all today in the notes, and something occurred to me that hadn't occurred to me before and thinking about this, and I started to think about the concept of sponsors in a A and it brought me back to thinking about how that role can look like a lot of different things in a depending on who's doing it, and a like

anywhere is likely to create hero figures, um or spiritual teachers or extremely wise people, and how in sponsorship it's always this. And I sponsored a lot of people and was sponsored by people. There was this line that was difficult because on one hand, you've got a person in those cases like me. Take me at twenty four, and I've been homeless and a heroin addict, I don't know very much about living, and I have a track record

of disastrous decisions. So having somebody who doesn't necessarily take all that and make all my decisions for me, but somebody who's willing to maybe take a slightly heavier role there than you might want. I wouldn't want that now in my life, but at that time there was some use in it. But I did ultimately hit a point very quickly where I went like, I don't need somebody to make all my decisions. I don't want somebody to

make all my decisions. But boy, I noticed in a there were a lot of people that stayed there for a long time that really did want that. You know. Everything was like, well, I'm gonna ask my sponsor what they think. I'm gonna ask my sponsor what they think, and I think getting feedback is always a great idea. After a while, it just sort of creeped me out a little bit. This like I'm gonna run every decision I make or everything I think by another person to

see what they think. And so I think that's endemic to this, this question of working with a spiritual teacher or a sponsor, because we are dealing with matters that guidance is important and useful, right, and it's just like how far does that guidance go and and what are the limits on it. I don't think it's as black and white as we might like it to be, but I do agree with you that most often it's easy, at least from the outside, to see the abuse of

that fantastic question. I'd like to speak to several parts of it, and so full disclosure, I have written a lot of recovery materials. As twelve we're talking about twelve step material I've been in a twelve step recovery group and a ghost written for a lot of twelve steps authors. So I want to speak to both the twelve steps and other things related to it. So, for example, the twenty four year old who is caught in what twelve step people will call stating thinking and doesn't really know

how to make some some basic decisions. There, it might be necessary for the people who love him or her to do an intervention, and that would be something completely outside of what the sponsor would be at the center of. So the sponsorship role might be a piece of what's necessary at that particular place and time. That said it, yes, there's always whatever. Someone has a leadership role, or a

mentoring role, or a sponsorship role, or a spiritual teaching role. Um, they need to exercise their discernment very consistently to be able to make sure that they are never putting their desires or needs or concerns ahead of the student. They're always got to be when service at the student. And meanwhile, the student or the mentee or whomever to sponsor also

has to be exercising their own discernment. And in fact, the word discernment, which I use a lot in both of my books on spiritual teacher, I will give a big shout out here to the twelve step programs because they use that word discernment over and over and over, and that is essentially building the the ability through getting to know yourself, through paying attention through hard and sometimes not so hard experience, being able to know whom to trust,

what to trust. We're back to this whole notion of fear again, right, When do you trust fear? And when do you not? When are you when is it appropriate? Defeated and how much? And when is it not? Sense of discernment is at the heart of all this, And in both my books, just as in twelve step programs,

I encourage people to build that discernment. And that fits very well with any spiritual tradition that has what some I'm called a mystical component, where you're essentially challenged to be fully prescent and fully engage, as opposed to check out into interest state or to check out into mir metings. And here's the rest of the interview with Scott Edelstein. You write in the book at one point, all of us who have spiritual teachers are sometimes tempted to treat

them as our surrogate parents. This is especially true when we face great stress, pain, or uns certainty. And I do think it's that that ladder piece that when we face great stress, fear, or uncertainty, that we are in need of more guidance. I think Discernment is the is the key there. And part of I think what's in that word is that discernment means you have to have knowledge of the situation of the people involved in all that.

So we can't make some blanket statements because discernment really is being able to take the things into consideration in those moments. Well, I'd like to add a confession here if I may, and that is because you bring up the classic situation where we go, I can't trust myself right now, and so I need to consult with someone else. And I'm in that situation now. So I had fairly recently that Steve Hagen on uh, Steve Hagen wrote Blues and played in Simple Meditation. Now we're never a couple

of other books. He's a longtime friend. I vote his meditation center, Dharma Field. I would consider him my teacher as well as my friend. However, belonged to a synagogue where we were. You know, I know the rabbi well. So over the last year, things that are happening in our world, in this country, in the world in general, in this country in particular, have been completely involving the President, United States Congress and so on, completely outside the realm

of anything I thought was even possible. I mean right now, and I should add that today's date is July two thousand eighteen, and right now the whole country is grappling with the fact that it appears that the essentially the entire political right has been played by Russian operatives. Now that's something that would if if I wrote it in a thriller, editors would go that ridiculous, will never publish

this novel. Yet that's what's happening. So this means I have to be watching my own mind, my own situation, because part of my brain is having to deal with and every day were reality fits well beyond my imagination, and what have I decided to do. I'm actually I'm not going to Steve Hagan. Why Because for all I know, he's a wonderful human being. I love him, he's a

great guy. Um, but he's no fan of of of what's going on, and I'm actually worried And maybe maybe he wouldn't be this way, but I'm worried, um that will wind up commiserating about what a mess of countries it. So I've decided I'm going to the Rabbi and saying I'm coming here and I'm talking to you periodically for half an hour, and your your job is to help me keep my feet on the ground in my head on straight. And for that I decided that he was the better person. Might just be a friend, right to

make that decision. But that's a classic example of how to reach out in the right way, at least, I hope, the right way at the right time, to whoever the right person is. That is a great example also of you know, going to the right person for the right thing. And Audi Ashanti used as an example of it would be useful to think of your spiritual teacher in some

cases like you would a university professor. If you're in a math class with a university professor, they know math, and you go there for math, right, but you're probably not going to ask that person what car you should buy or you know, what girl you should date? Right, you go to the right person for the right thing. And and I think it's it's safe to say that not every question we have is answered by a spiritual teacher. That there are other experts in the world that we

can go to for for different things. And kind of a point you make throughout the whole book is that if we think that one person has the answer to everything, we're probably putting that person on a pedestal that is

not healthy for them or us. I will add that you brought up a really useful caveot, which is that if you're thinking is way off, If, for example, um, you're seriously down the road of a life threatening addiction and so you're just not thinking sright, then it may be useful to ask a spiritual teacher or almost anyone who, you know, what what kind of car should I buy? Should I buy this Maserati? I just got a raise from eleven dollars an hour the twelve fifty an hour,

and the maseratis are on sale. You don't you know, a spiritual teacher will probably be able to give as good an answer as anyone else as hell milk, And you might need it if you're if for some reason they believe and they can see that you're thinking is way way out of the law. Yep, I agree, And I do think that that's what makes some of this so confusing, is it's very difficult to peel apart spiritual from emotional from mental from I mean, these things are

all tied together. And so it's not as simple as like, oh well, okay, if it's case a, you ask this person and for this, yes, that person. I'm I'm certainly not insinuating that it's that simple. May I speak to your use of the word spiritual there, because I think you raised a really profound issue. This word spiritual has done as a great service and a great disservice. So first the service is it's reunited the secular and the religious, which we split decades ago, and which we were foolish

to split. Um, we should have just become more discerning about the two. So now supposedly things can be divided into the religious and the secular, which is absurd. Thou shalt not murder is not a merely religious concept, but it surely is. It's in the Ten Commandments, but it's also enshrined in secular law. It belongs in both, and so much of the human codes of conduct belong in both. So those those gots split out, I think, to our detriment,

and spirituality term manages to bring them back in. However, it does so unfortunately, and this is now I'm going to dissa a little bit. Um. It doesn't by watering it down because the terms spirituality is very vague and it's been co opted by lots of people. Some people think that means talking to angels. The other thing it means getting shivers going up your spine. Other people think

it means helping out at the local food shell. And what of course it means, I would argue, if you're going to put any meaning on it is the good wolf, kindness, bravery, love, all those things. Well, by the way, a quick cooda on fear, I neglected to say that bravery requires fear, and so there's another example of how fear belongs to both wolves. You cannot be brave if you're unafraid. When a child runs down into the street in front of a moving car because they don't know better, that is

hardly bravery. But when you run out in front of that car to push the child out of the way to save their life, that's bravery. And as you do so, you may be scared to death, but you know it's the right thing to do. Absolutely, yes, Courage require some degree of fear, otherwise it's not really courage. Near the end of the book, you say, and this just made me laugh because it's just it's so dry and and

just a single sentence, and it's so obvious. But also there's just something about you said sometimes spiritual study and practice can be surprisingly boring. It's true, indeed, it is. And what you're suggesting there is that this is a fairly subtle thing. But a lot of people to get into quote spirituality or study with a spiritual teaching because what they really want is some kind of thrill, and that can be everything from a kind of pseudo sexual

body sensation, you know, some kind of spiritual orgasm. Who I want to feel the Combelini rise, Who I want to feel this? I want to feel that? Or a desire for some kind of big head exploding insight. And so what they really want is to acquire some kind of spiritual good or they might want some spiritual toys to play with. I want the power to levitate and the power to do this, or the power to do that. And let me just say, really clearly, that's all bogus bullshit,

none of it is. I can tell you what spirituality is not, and it's none of those things. And so one of the things that happens is people go they get very excited at first and either think they have an idea of spiritual growth and they either feel like, Oh, I'm getting smarter, I'm getting better, I'm getting this, I'm

getting that. And if there's anything that might typify growing up in the quote spiritual unquote realm, it's beginning to loosen your grip on the damn getting in the realm of human connection and a human maturation and growing up. It's not about getting. It's about giving, and it's about

doing things together. That's another area that it just makes me think back to alcoholism and addiction, because you know, even in a itself, it often talks about how that alcohol is a substitute for a spiritual experience or a spiritual life, and I think it is very easy to think of spirituality as being something that can provide some experience of being alive, like alcohol and drugs do, but it does it in a very different way. The similarity

there is it's about being connected to things. I think that is what at least at the heart of addiction for me was was about being connected, and at the heart of spirituality that is also the thing that I think remains most essential and elemental to me, is to be connected to life and it's various components, but I also agree with you. More and more, I'm realizing that the path of spirituality is one of subtraction rather than addition. That's a really lovely way to put it. Subtraction rather

than addiction. If you don't mind, I would like to encourage your listeners to sit with that for a while, because Arts just said something deeply important, and it might be the only time that happens for like the next six or eight episodes, folks, so you might as well give a sh There's actually two pieces to this that I'd like to call out. The first is, yes, belonging, whether the word is connecting or belonging. It is one of our deepest, if not our very deepest human needs.

And that's why one of the reasons the twelve step programs are so effective is that you're they don't work for everybody, but they are a place to belong. Now, that's also one reason why the National Rifle Association of Ku Klux Klan continued because their place is to belong. So belonging also requires some discernment. You know, you can belong to good will organizations and you can belong to

bad will organizations. UM but that is one of the defining characteristics often of what people call the spiritual quest and of twelve Steps and recovery. But there's another one that I'd like to also highlight, and that's the giving up of all control, understanding that we are not in control. That is also a hallmark of all steps, and it's a hallmark of what goes by the name of spiritual

opening or spiritual development or whatnot. And in fact, my own favorite book on recovery in the Twelve Steps is called Recovery the Sacred Art by Rommy Shapiro. Rammy is an ecumenical rabbi. He's the only rabbi I know of who's had a piece he's written in best Buddhist writing of the year. So he travels around the world. He's

he is a spiritual teacher. It's been a long time, but he was a guest on this show, probably a hundred and fifty episodes ago, which it's amazing to me how long we've been doing this, but yes, he was. He's out there, folks, if you want to find him, and you can find him. Ramy is a recovering food addict. I have eaten with him and I've watched. He's the only person I've ever uh but watched to which the phrase food seeking behavior erupted in my mind. I mean,

you could see he's a recovery addict. It's a wonderful book, and it is not written for people who have some identifiable um addiction what or what we would normally call an addition. Uh Well, he said is we are all addicted to control, and that that is a fundamental issue, and that what we ultimately we all wind up, whether we have a substance abuse issue, a supposed behavioral addiction, or none of the above, we all wind up on our knees at some point going I have no control.

I need God or the universe or a higher powers helper, however you wanted to find that. And I would argue that that is a defining characteristic of spirituality in all traditions and outside of all traditions, and in recovery and in growing up. I agree. I always caveat that with the the idea of the Serenity prayer, which is the recognition of trying to recognize what we can I don't think the word is control. The word and the prayer is actually what we can change, what we can influence.

And so for me it's been interesting because on one hand, for most of my time and recovery and all that, the lesson I needed most was not the one to accept, but it was the one to have the courage to change, because I had and still have a tendency sometimes to just be like at effort right or just to let things go. So for a lot of time for me, it was about having the courage to to step in

and do the change. But lately, for me, what mostly I've been working with is just the limits of that of really realizing the difference between the ability to change, the ability to influence, the ability to have effect. But where that that does really stop short of the ability to control, and really realizing the limits of action and change and improvement and where that stuff just ends. I've

been I've been dealing with that a lot lately. And then this notion of the ability to change really breaks out into two uh seeming mirror images, but they're both part of the same whole. The first is the ability to UH set a goal follow it, which we Americans are very familiar with because that's that's baked into our culture. You've got you want to change, fine, determined to change, work toward it, um envision at YadA, YadA. But they're

especially in spirituality. There's a more subtle but I would argue typically more important and also typically more difficult aspect to it, which is not so much the ability to change yourself, where you grab yourself and haul yourself somewhere else, but the willingness to be changed, where you open yourself up to the complete unknown, knowing that you don't know what's going to happen, don't know what the solution is,

don't know what the future will be. Just know that where you are right now is untenable, and that you ask for help in changing. Whether that help is with what the twelve step programs call a higher power, whether it's other even beings, and whether you don't even know. But that willingness to be changed is I would argue all important. I think it's really profound and beautiful. I

focus a lot, and I think a lot. You know, the show is about the ability of us to change and and to have a positive influence in the world and on ourselves. But I think what you said there is so important is that the willingness to be changed by things other than our own will is really the critical thing. So I'd like to bring this back to spiritual teachers because this applies in a variety of ways. First of all, someone who goes to a spiritual teacher

and says, I need to change, change me. The correct answer from the spiritual teachers, you're right, you need to change. I am not changing. That is not my job. But what I can do is watch if you fall off a tree limb, or you're going too far out on a tree limb. I can tell you that if you fall off and hurt yourself, I can help you back up,

back up again. You don't have to get up. There's a lot of things that the spiritual teacher can do, but they absolutely cannot change you and will not change you. Um And if they think if they go, yeah, I'll change you, then run hell away because you're dealing with Charlotte and the predator or a narcissist or or somebody who's not the real thing. Now, the other thing that

will often happen is the spiritual teacher. The spiritual teacher will just say, if they're not good, oh follow this, follow this program, one size fits all, and then you will change in the right way. I would be also very very careful of all these one size fits all situations. On top of that, we can go people go to spiritual teachers and say they want to change, but there's a paradox built into that, which is, well, why aren't you changing already? If I want a cup of coffee,

I will go get a cup of coffee. I'm not going to to to stop telling people I want a cup of coffee. Someday that's my goal. They will they will start saying, well, go get your damn coffee. So part of what a good spiritual teacher can do is point out where the person is resisting the change that they need, and they might say something about it um or they might help the students wake up to what

they're actually doing, what they're saying versus what they're actually doing. Certainly, they might teach a particular practice like meditation that can be useful. But then that's it's not that they're doing it's to make that change. It's just something helpful and supported. And then the last thing that people can get caught up in is um. People will go to a spiritual teacher and say, am I changing? Am I better? Now?

I'm I am I, this, am I that, And often the spiritual teaches job at that point is to say, stop worrying about it. No, you're you're hoping. You're coming to me and hoping for a grade of A in spirituality. And a good teacher is not going to be handing out that kind of candy. They'll just keep paying attention, just keep watching, just keep living, just keep doing your best, and I will try to keep you. I will help you when you seem to be either going too far

straight or when you're lost. I might be able to give you a little bit of guidance. That's wonderful. We're nearing the very end of our time here. What I did want to ask you to do real quick though, and I don't remember where it is. I'll find it and put it in the show notes. But you've got an article somewhere and maybe you can remember where it is, um And we're not going to go through it all right now. But it's about things to bear in mind, or questions to ask, or how to go to a

new spiritual center. If you're like the new person going to a spiritual center, do you remember where you wrote that and where that is? Yes? Well, actually, uh, I wrote that in nineteen seventy nine or night, and I sent that around from from magazine to magazine and magazine no one would touch it, and then it took over. I took I believe almost how many years with this advantage. It took thirty six years or something like that before someone would print it. It's now up online. It's called

when You're the New Kid at the Spiritual Center. I think it's on in two or three publications. One of them, I believe is The Edge, which I think would be the Edge dot com. But it's also appears as the appendix in the User's Guide to Spiritual Teachers. And so it's a guy for someone who's showing up at a spiritual organization that they're not familiar with for the first time. You know, it's not like you're going to a new Lutheran church. It might be a tradition you're utterly unfamiliar with,

or it might even be your own tradition. And you might be a Catholic, but this is the first time you've walked into a Cistercian monastery, for example, and you don't don't know what do e'spect. So it's a brief, very practical, very simple guy about what you do and what not to do. Yeah, I thought it was really useful as somebody who's wandered into more strange situations than

I can count. By just showing up at spiritual centers, I'm pretty comfortable just walking in and seeing what happens, but a lot of people get nervous, and I just thought it was a very useful guy to kind of just to help make that experience go a little easier. Well, Scott, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed this conversation. Um, it's been great. Thank you so much. Aaron, Okay, take

care all right, Well bye yea. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to The One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

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