Ethics and Spiritual Teaching Panel: Code of Ethics, Power, and Accountability Transcript

Ethics and Spiritual Teaching Panel at the SAND Conference

Summary

Spiritual teachers and community leaders discuss the gap between spiritual attainment and ethical behavior, including abuse of sexual, financial, and psychological power. They explore how shared standards, teacher education, student discernment, and collective accountability could prevent harm and support healthier spiritual communities.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual communities prevent abuse of power by teachers?
• What ethical standards should spiritual teachers follow?
• How can students maintain discernment when a teacher is seen as enlightened?
• What training helps spiritual teachers work responsibly with students?
• How can communities heal after spiritual abuse has occurred?

Key takeaways

• Spiritual insight does not guarantee ethical behavior.
• Teachers need education in boundaries, power dynamics, and pastoral care.
• Students should retain their autonomy and question questionable behavior.
• Shared accountability can reduce the isolation that enables abuse.
• Preventive education is better than repairing avoidable harm.
• Ethical development belongs at the center of spiritual training.

Transcript

Rick: Having been around the spiritual scene for so many decades and having interviewed so many people and all, I started out with the assumption and understanding that there was a tight correlation between higher states of consciousness and ethical behavior. And over the years, the tightness of that correlation has gotten looser and looser in my understanding based upon observation. And it always puzzled me. I’ve seen so many examples of harm, upset, confusion, and damage, and people leaving the spiritual path due to that dissonance on that particular issue. So that’s why I wanted to give the talk. And let me just ask you: How many of you have heard of instances in which spiritual teachers have behaved inappropriately? Okay.

Jac: Most.

Rick: Some of you have been living under a rock, but—[Laughter] And how many have been personally impacted by such behavior? Okay. So all of us could say something similar to what I just said and have also been aware of this issue. As a matter of fact, other talks last year actually touched on some of the same themes. So after my talk, we all had lunch together, and we asked ourselves, you know, what could we do about it? And we kind of hatched the idea of forming an association of professional spiritual teachers—to hold up our banner. [Applause]

Creating shared ethical standards

So over the course of the year, a lot of thought has gone into this. And I just want to acknowledge Jac for having been the primary engine on that train. [Applause] She’s really worked very hard. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken codes of ethics from various spiritual organizations, the Diamond Approach and Spirit Rock and various other things, and reviewed them and digested them and tried to mold them into a code of ethics which could perhaps be universal across the entire contemporary spiritual community.

Our purpose in doing so—this has very much been a work in progress and a learning curve, and I think it always will be—is to dispel from the outset the first impression that some people have when they hear about a code of ethics or an organization with a board of people who have come up with that code. My wife initially started calling it the God Squad because there’s this sort of implication that maybe we think that we are in some way morally superior to somebody and are able to tell them what they should or should not be doing. But that has really not been our sentiment.

We approach this thing with a constant sense of humility and introspection and acknowledgment of our own flaws, foibles, and vulnerabilities, with no sense of hierarchical superiority. We have no intention whatsoever of being in a position of granting or revoking licenses or any such thing, as many professional organizations do in other professions—lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and so on.

But our hope is to enliven an understanding in our community, our larger community, of what is or may or may not be appropriate, because there have been so many cases in which a teacher has behaved in a certain way and students have abdicated their own judgment and their own discernment and have had attitudes such as, “Well, this really seems nutty, but this guy appears to be enlightened and I certainly am not, so who am I to say? There must be something to what he’s doing, some justification or whatever.”

An Ethics Seal for Spiritual Teachers

And that has, in many cases, allowed teachers and their followers to go way off the rails and to get into very messy situations. So our hope is to have some code of ethics that teachers could ascribe to and, if they did, join our organization and maybe put a little seal on their website or something, which might be like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, where there’s some acknowledgment that certain standards are being recognized.

And students, in turn, would become more cognizant of these values and suggestions and perhaps have a higher standard or higher expectations for spiritual teachers and not be—the word “hoodwinked” comes to mind for some reason—but not be led astray and taken advantage of in any way whatsoever: sexually, financially, or in any way.

None of that really belongs in the realm of spirituality. Spirituality should be a growth into greater and greater healthiness in all dimensions of our being. It shouldn’t be an opportunity for anyone to just have indiscriminate romances with followers or divest them of their life savings or any such thing. That is such a travesty of the whole intention of spirituality.

None of that really belongs in the realm of spirituality. Spirituality should be a growth into greater and greater healthiness in all dimensions of our being. It shouldn’t be an opportunity for anyone to just have indiscriminate romances with followers or divest them of their life savings or any such thing. That is such a travesty of the whole intention of spirituality.

As I said in the beginning, and I’m about to finish speaking here and turn it over to others, it has caused a great deal of harm, disillusionment, and confusion. So hopefully we can evolve out of that as, again, a broader spiritual community. And we’re making this little effort as a means of fostering that growth. Okay, so who would like to speak next? Jac.

Jac: Okay.

Rick: We divvied up some points and have little notes about what we’re going to cover, so that we cover a lot. Do you have a copy of the notes?

Jac: Yeah, no, I’ll just—we’ll just follow on from your clear introduction. We’ve been trying to keep in mind that we’re looking at traditions that are over 2,000 years old, that we know of. And if we’re being part of this wave of revisiting culture around patriarchy and power play and looking at more equality issues in the diverse nature of what it is to have a human expression, we also have to see that we’ve got over 2,000 years of the guru or teacher being beyond reproach.

The teacher was in an enclosed order, in monastic situations, in so many traditions. And now, no, we live regular lives. And so the power play that is traditionally in place, where the student will bow down to the all-knowing teacher, has to be shattered and rebuilt in some more contemporary, honest, and open way that is reflective of our contemporary culture.

We can’t do this overnight. We need everybody’s help to reform, revisit, and redesign what the future of spirituality is going to look like. We can’t do it on our own. What we can do is go on the journey ourselves as teachers and say, “What would it be in me to be challenged by a student to say, ‘Jac, that’s full of crap’? Can I invite that into my own workshops, where I can introspect, reflect, be brutally honest, expose blind spots if there are blind spots, and how can that be done in a healthy way and yet maintain the core of what we’re all doing there, which is to point toward truth?”

So it’s not an easy task, and we’re looking at, I suppose, riding the wave of what is there in so many other areas in the world about looking at human rights, because it is a violation of rights that happens so often for students, and it’s not okay.

The virtues that you have as a teacher might have to be learned at a late stage in your own teaching career, and it is a career nowadays. We have to pull it away from the mystical, mythical, unquestionable authority that has been part of what has protected the abuse for so long. [Applause]

The virtues that you have as a teacher might have to be learned at a late stage in your own teaching career, and it is a career nowadays. We have to pull it away from the mystical, mythical, unquestionable authority that has been part of what has protected the abuse for so long. [Applause]

Preventing harm through education

Craig: One of the things that I began to see, working both as a teacher and as a therapist, is just meeting with so many other teachers and students. So oftentimes, I would sit and hold the space and hear this tremendous pain that had happened, whether it was someone being a young child and being abused by a priest, being sexually assaulted by a great nondual teacher, or losing an inheritance to a guru because one may have thought that would have brought them special status or put them in the inner circle, or whatever it is.

All this suffering, it’s unnecessary. It’s radically unnecessary.

And so this is one of the things that we saw as a community: We don’t need this. We don’t need to go through this journey again and again. It’s like, one of these days, the Catholic Church is going to wake up and say, “We need to examine our issues with sex and sexuality and celibacy.” But it’s not just the Catholic Church. It happens in yoga centers and dharma centers and Buddhist centers and nondual communities. I mean, it’s happening all over the world, and this was an invitation that arose in all of us to say, “Yes, why don’t we take some steps forward? Why don’t we offer a community? Why don’t we begin to have this conversation in a way that’s healing and supportive?”

Because if we go on Google right now, we could find another new student writing another blog about this teacher doing that thing. And that’s how people are filing their grievances now. I mean, that’s how this issue is coming forward. But that’s exposure; it’s not necessarily healing.

Preventive Education Instead of Cleanup

And to me, one of the things, when we were speaking with Mariana Kaplan, was: Let’s talk about preventative psychology, preventative support. Let’s speak about education and growth as a community so we’re not busy playing cleanup.

Jac: Yeah.

Craig: Because it’s unnecessary. It’s ridiculously painful and unnecessary. For anyone to spend two decades of their life struggling with, “Oh, my guru did this to me.” “Does God exist? Does truth exist?” “Is anything for real?” “Will I ever heal from this pain and wound?” It’s a ridiculous pain that is unnecessary.

And we as a community are just wanting to begin this conversation again, like Rick was saying—not with judgment, not with condemning, not with saying, “Oh, you’re in the group,” or “You’re not in the group.” That’s silly. That’s nonsense. But how about we’re all human? We live in an evolutionary world. We can all admit that relationship tends to be where most of us struggle.

So let’s talk about how to relate to our students, to each other, how to work with projection and transference and countertransference, how to work with obedience and chastity and poverty, these great issues that we’ve struggled with in spirituality for thousands of years. It’s a necessary conversation. That’s what we’re wanting to be a part of: a conversation. It has nothing to do with judgment, but everything to do with growth. [Applause]

Caverly: When Rick invited me into this conversation, I was touched in particular that there’s some attention being brought to the collective. By that, I mean that I’ve had so many conversations with folks who’ve been the recipients or on the receiving end of an abusive power in some form. I feel intimate with that topic based on my own history in terms of spiritual practice. While mine wasn’t sexual, there’s a way in which I’ve been greatly benefited by seeing different models, specifically watching Rupert Spira teach and seeing that there’s a way in which a power dynamic and a teacher being on a pedestal are not required pieces of spiritual growth and development.

Through my own experience, I’ve recognized the abuses that can happen when there’s confusion about that. The collective piece that interests me is the way in which, as I’ve spoken to these folks who are the recipients of abuses of power, I’ve noticed that in almost all cases, there’s a teacher who’s on an island of sorts. There’s no collective interaction between other groups or spiritual communities. They’re not interrelating with colleagues in a way in which there’s shared accountability.

Just to underline what was just being said, the judgment piece around this doesn’t interest me, but watching what’s possible in our collective as we create forms of teaching that more accurately reflect truth in the greatest sense of the word interests me greatly. I think there’s a real hunger and a need for it. We don’t have to look far in other communities to see the downfall of not meeting that need.

Rick: In the spirit of wanting this to be a collaboration among the entire spiritual community, and not something that we are just espousing or formulating, I’d like to open it up to questions even now. We have 45 minutes. We can have a discussion here and go back and forth. So be sure to have a mic before you speak. Someone will be running around with a mic, and raise your hand so the mic person can give you the mic, and then we’ll talk.

So, who’s the mic person? There’s a mic. There’s a person. Here it comes. Frances.

Frances: It’s a very intriguing idea that I’ve thought a lot about myself. It reminds me a lot of the accreditation, I guess you’d say, that I received as a pastoral care person when I was a hospice chaplain. One of the aspects of that was a kind of residency that we did where we learned—we didn’t learn specific theological or spiritual practices or things like that as clergy people, but we did learn basic principles of pastoral care.

I’m wondering if you might consider a two-month CPE, which is a clinical pastoral education kind of component, that would be required for this. It wouldn’t take a lot of commitment for somebody, and they would learn basic principles of how to deal with a person pastorally that I think would actually correspond very well to the spiritual teacher-student relationship.

That’s already a kind of component that’s in place that I’ve often thought, since I’ve been doing this work, would be very helpful for a lot of spiritual teachers. It teaches them things like boundaries, how to introduce various challenges, and how to challenge people in a way that’s healthy and not kind of—what’s the word?

Rick: Preachy?

Frances: Well, or that’s an abusive-power kind of position. But anyway, I think CPE would be something that could be very much utilized by your organization. Just a thought.

Jac: That’s fantastic.

Rick: Great, thank you. Any such ideas we’ll consider very seriously and hopefully implement as the thing grows. Anybody want to respond to that before the next person asks a question?

Craig: Well, these are the types of conversations that we’ve been having. Of course, when you start a new organization, one of the things that we were doing in the beginning is just trying to raise interest and raise awareness. But the thing that Frances brought up is absolutely needed.

Training Teachers to Work with Trauma

As someone who studies to become a psychotherapist or a counselor, you have to train; you have to learn how to work with people. One of the great things that we see in this community, especially the non-dual community, is people wake up and then there’s this assumption that somehow they know how to work with trauma and with people suffering. They know how to work with every relationship experience possible. They know how to—

Jac: And give financial advice.

Craig: Give financial advice. They know what’s right and who I should be dating, and this type of thing. It’s completely outrageous to have that expectation, one, as a teacher, or two, as a community, to assume that that individual knows those things.

So this is why it’s helpful, in a sense, to be educated, to have some type of education, to learn things like what Frances is bringing up: boundaries. There are so many communities where, if they simply understood how to work with boundaries and how to work with power, there’d be no problem. But just to have that thing sit in the shadow and then come forward and turn into this tragic mess, again, is unnecessary.

So this is why it’s helpful, in a sense, to be educated, to have some type of education, to learn things like what Frances is bringing up: boundaries. There are so many communities where, if they simply understood how to work with boundaries and how to work with power, there’d be no problem. But just to have that thing sit in the shadow and then come forward and turn into this tragic mess, again, is unnecessary.

I think it’s absolutely a necessary component. It’s one of the things we’re beginning to work with Mariana Kaplan to start to develop these types of things, along with other teachers and other groups.

Jac: I think it’s important that what we can add to the community is educational. And I love that idea, Frances, because there are resources that already have a wealth of experience behind them. We can put in links and add that as a resource. I love it.

Our problem is that we have a culture of people who are teachers who don’t think they need to be educated. That’s the problem. We can provide all of this. But until students say, “Hey, what are you doing to maintain your own growth as a person?” I would love to give more power to the students, where they can feel that their own autonomy to ask for better standards of their teachers could come into play.

So, to shift the power back to students, education is revisited again by the teacher, so that they can embrace that being human means being open to educating and improving yourself as a human being.

Rick: I also just want to throw in there that, in traditions I’m aware of, some kind of ethical or moral development is considered a critical part of the path. In Patanjali, for instance, you have the yamas and niyamas: nonviolence and non-covetousness, and all sorts of things like that. I’m sure in Buddhism there’s something similar, and hopefully in Christianity. I’m not as familiar with those traditions, but Frances could tell us about that.

But I don’t know if that’s been bypassed, I think, in our contemporary spiritual culture. People just get up and start doing satsangs, and there’s never sort of any… Obviously, people can only act according to their level of consciousness, and, well, that’s enough on that point.

It’s not a new idea to have some sort of ethical training or attention on those kinds of things on the spiritual path, and we’re a little bit behind the times in not introducing it. Next question. She has the mic here. Get the mic before you ask.

Audience Member 2: Thank you very much for this work. It’s hugely important. I’d also like to say that there’s a difference between New Ageism and spirituality, and there is a significant difference. Anybody that tries to put me in a New Age category, I reject it.

The other thing I want to say is that a group that may have gotten it correct—I was just recently teaching at Kripalu, and I don’t know if anybody followed that story, but it’s kind of interesting.

Rick: I interviewed Yogi Amrit Desai, and I brought up the point and everything. Yeah, go ahead and elaborate.

Audience Member 2: There was a lawsuit after the whole thing fell apart, and there were many wrongdoings that had gone on there. But the lawsuit was essentially—and the people won—for $50 million to then do a sort of rehabilitation and therapy for people who had been wrongly hurt in that environment.

So it was an interesting sort of twist: so many things had gone wrong, but they took the money to attempt to do something right. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Craig: One of the advisors who helped create healing within the community, Mariana Copeland, is working with us. These are the types of resources we’re reaching out for and welcoming, because that is a prime example of how it went. It went really badly, and then, as a community, they healed.

Again, that’s beautiful to see: we’re admitting we’re human, we’re willing to grow, and we’re willing to do our work. That’s a beautiful thing. And then, to even take it a step back, if we do our work first, we don’t have to experience the train wreck, and the whole community doesn’t have to experience the fallout.

This is an invitation. It’s not like everything is going to be healed from 2018 going forward. It’s going to be a work in progress.

Rick: Patanjali says, “Heyam Dukham Anagatam” —avert the danger which has not yet come. Benjamin Franklin said, “A stitch in time saves nine.” It’s better to nip these things in the bud than have to spend $50 million cleaning up the mess.

Wendy: Hi there. Thank you so much for doing this and for putting this organization together. I truly appreciate it. My name is Wendy Coulter. I teach medical intuition to health care professionals, most of them licensed. So you can imagine the ethical issues that are brought up in that.

What I do, and this may be a resource for you, is I’ve partnered with a woman named Midge Murphy, who is an attorney and also an energy healer. She’s written a book for energy healers. But for teachers like myself, it is now a component in my program. People have to pass her exam, and it’s comprehensive.

So I would bring her name up to you as someone to reach out to. She’s brilliant. She’s also working with ASEP and a few other organizations on this knowledge and study.

Rick: Thank you. Mention Cedar Barstow.

Jac: Yes. Cedar Barstow has been working around the right use of power in many different areas. She has recently, as the point was made earlier—we’re late in the game addressing ethics in spirituality—in the last two or three years, started to work with Zen communities.

We are at the APST offering free webinars once a month, maybe even more frequently. We’re not quite sure. We’re just making it up as we go along to see what works. So, on the first Wednesday of December, anybody can come and participate in Cedar Barstow’s two-hour webinar through the APST site for free.

She talks about the right use of power, the power differential between teachers and students, how to honor that power differential but not abuse it, and what happens in the dynamics. So it’s a total passing on of skills. She’s very practical; that’s her area of expertise.

We need to pull in expertise because it’s not in the spiritual sector, but it’s already been developed in the other sectors.

Craig: That’s what we need to learn from rather than reinvent the wheel ourselves. One of the great shadows is that it’s assumed in the spiritual sector. That’s where so many teachers in so many lineages find ourselves in trouble: there’s this great assumption that enlightenment equals this, or that because someone’s sitting in the chair above others, it means they know some great thing about everything. And there’s just trouble there.

Rick: We have a stack of cards here, which we’ll distribute later, that have the website for this organization on them. Next question. Someone with the mic, go ahead and hand it to somebody.

Sexism, patriarchy, and collective power

Mira: Hi there. I know you’re in the earlier stages of this wonderful project, and so I know what I’m asking is kind of a tall order, but have you had any conversations about institutionalized sexism? Because I think when you have organizations where it’s all men in the positions of power, it’s inherently corrupt. And I didn’t know if you had any conversations around that. Thank you.

Rick: Well, firstly, it was intentional that we had an equal balance of genders here on the stage.

Audience Member 4: Thank you.

Jac: Yeah, we…

Craig: Yeah, Caverly actually brought that into the conversation earlier in the year.

Rick: Do you want to address your question?

Caverly: You know, the thing that’s arising for me, and it isn’t lost on me that so far we’ve had so many women ask questions. It’s nice to see some women’s voices come into this room.

One of the things that interests me so much about this conversation is, because there are so many people here deeply dedicated to a spiritual path, it’s interesting to me that there isn’t… In the tradition I was raised in, guidelines and vows were imposed as ways that your ego was revealed as you ran up against them. And I think that we’re in an era where folks are learning so much more about who they authentically are, and the guidelines might be helpful along the way as places to reference, but the same power dynamic that actually keeps an ego in place seems less useful to me.

And I know I’m not specifically speaking to sexism yet. I’m going to pass it back to you. I’m afraid I’ll be too long-winded if I continue with this.

Rick: One little thing I just want to pop in here, and then more from others, is that at BATGAP we have a very intentional policy of inviting an equal number of men and women to be interviewed. Maybe it wasn’t that way over the entire course of the project, over nine years, but these days it’s like, “Okay, December’s coming up. Two men, two women.” And if it gets imbalanced one month, we try to compensate for it the next month. Anybody else want to say anything on your question, or should we take another one?

Craig: Well, I just think it’s rampant in the community, and one of the things that we see is that the people who are intending to cause the abuse, to create the abuse, tend to be men more often than not. And it’s unfortunate, and so I think it’s really beautiful what’s coming forward in the collective consciousness. From the #MeToo movement, we can learn a lot, but again, we want to move into a place that’s beyond just the shocking exposure of, “This happened, and this happened, and this happened,” and say, “Okay, now let’s take a step back. Let’s take some accountability. Who has a willingness to look at their shadow?” And to me, that’s where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where the real conversation is. But it’s absolutely necessary, what you’re saying, to investigate all these issues.

Caverly: Yeah, it seems to me that we’re in a place where we’re trying to bring attention to the structures that are in place, because we can’t just address the individual without also addressing the societal structures at the same time.

The reason this feels like such a long-winded topic for me is because there are so many ways in which the abuses of power have been a misuse of those guidelines that I think originally were created to support us in living from the recognition of who we authentically are. Within the power dynamics of sexism, within the power dynamics of the patriarchy, the guidelines and the rules have gotten usurped by a conditioned view of power structure that isn’t in alignment with our greatest understanding and recognition of who we authentically are.

So if we don’t address the context in which these things are arising, if we’re not naming the power dynamics in the context in which they’re arising, then we can be confused into thinking that it can all just be addressed internally without seeing the linkage between our personal conditioning and our collective conditioning. Does that make more sense? I felt a little rambly about it.

But it’s a topic that’s close to my heart because I think something we all have in common is asking what the ways are that we can support moving beyond the breaches in the recognition of our shared being—not from guidelines coming out and in and constraining, feeding the mind of duality, really feeding the idea that there’s someone who’s done something wrong and now they need to be punished, but more from how to support having mirrors, for example, that allow us to just see, “This is my internal conditioning.”

Being raised in a Zen monastery, I had mirrors around me all the time, for better and worse. And collectively in our spiritual communities, I see the benefit of having such mirrors: mirroring our systems of patriarchy, mirroring the ways in which I have so many people who come to me to try to, as Craig said, unwind the trauma that they’ve experienced by being in communities where they were sexually abused by a teacher, for example.

So I’m interested in guidelines that support the remembrance of who we are and the collective support for each other of manifesting the recognition of that remembrance, having our actions be on behalf of that remembrance, rather than guidelines that feed the idea of right and wrong and good and bad.

Craig: I think the key word there is guidelines. These are guidelines, they’re things we’re working with, they’re things we should struggle with, we should deeply investigate—not that this is a rule and I broke it and therefore I’m bad. I think there’s a real difference there.

Romantic Relationships Between Teachers and Students

Rick: In fact, there are certain issues that we’ve been debating all year and still haven’t come into agreement on, and this will probably go on perpetually. But last night we spent an hour discussing the issue of relationships: When, if ever, is it appropriate for a student and teacher to enter into a romantic relationship if such a thing begins to kindle during a teaching situation?

We talked about it for about an hour, and I think we’re going to patch that video onto the end of this one, and I’ll put it up on BATGAP if you want to see it. But I’m just saying that to sort of emphasize the point that we haven’t come down off Mount Sinai with anything cut in stone, you know? I mean, this has got to be a work in progress, and we intend to remain fluid and malleable and open-minded and just keep thinking and feeling into it as we go along.

And when I say “we,” I don’t mean just “we four,” I mean “we.” Next question.

✨ Teacher preparation and self-awareness

Abu Meher: Hi. My name is Abu Meher, and I’m from Canada. I’m a psychotherapist. And we have one of the very strong things, which we call SEALS: self and effective use of self. So we have continuous supervision to understand the challenges we’re going through so that transference and countertransference are not going to take place.

I have been working with clients now for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen everything from simple anxiety to schizophrenia. And, of course, I have been very successful—more than 90 percent—with sexual abuse cases.

So today I want to bring something new, like you were saying, the mirrors. The first part is that we need to train, we need to have continuous supervision for the therapist. First, he needs to address his own challenges.

Let us say, in order to put my carton on the wall, I had to go through a whole-life therapy process, which took 207 hours of sessions over four years. I went through all the challenges that I felt, that I saw, that I lived with my mom, dad, et cetera, so that when the time came, when the client fell in love with me and said she wanted to marry me, if I rejected her, I would be rejecting the attractive sexual being, and I would be hurting her.

So very politely I moved her away and said, “Okay, let’s—thank you for this honor. Let us finish your therapy and then we can talk about it.” And she agreed, and things got settled.

But now here comes the second part, which is from the victim’s point of view, and here I want to bring something new to your attention. I don’t think it has ever been discussed before, and that’s definitely my topic for tomorrow, which is the spirituality of trauma.

So I know that sexual abuse is bad. It should not happen. But nevertheless, we can’t stop it. It’s going to happen. But now the question is, do my clients need to keep on living with that victim mask? Because that is going to affect their lives directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. It’s going to affect their relationships.

Let us say if she’s a girl, when she’s going to get married, because I have attended lots and lots of cases—more than 200 or 300—in the last five years. So what I want to bring here is this: Can we introduce a kind of therapeutic process where the person can understand their participation in bringing that thing upon them? What was that thing unconsciously inside them that attracted them to bring that situation upon themselves?

Because there have been studies now by Dr. Vernon Meinhold in Germany, and we have discovered, we have proven, that every fatal accident is an unconscious form of committing suicide. So how much are we open to working with our unconscious mind so that I can understand my participation? What was that deep desire inside me that led me to bring that predator upon me?

So I have my responsibility. The other person has his responsibility. And it’s 50/50, and it just disappears. The subconscious closes it, and now I can live my life completely, with 100 percent availability of that energy which was hiding me or stopping me before. Thank you.

Craig: I think that’s something that I’ve worked with numerous times with clients. As you look at the dual responsibility, in fact, within our own organization, Jac was very instrumental in creating the guidelines for teachers. And one of the things that I thought of was that it would be good to have guidelines for students as well, so that there is that dual responsibility.

And see, when we have dual responsibility, then everyone becomes empowered. Then we’re not playing that victim-offender, or eternal victim, or eternal offender paradigm. It’s that we’re working with both. We’re all on the path, and we’re all growing together. And we’re having this experience that this lady was bringing up, where the community grows. As a culture, we grow. And I think there’s such power in that.

One of the great things that happened with me early on, when I was teaching, is that very much of my life was still quite messy. And I had some individuals—one of them is actually seated here in the front row—who brought me aside and said, “Craig, you need to take responsibility for this.”

And that willingness for me to listen, for her to step forward, for the two of us to switch roles as student and teacher, and just to see that we’re here together, we’re growing together—it’s that kind of power where the students rise up and say, “Yes, we want this.” Like Jac was saying, “Yes, we’re demanding this.” And, “Yes, we’re going to pull you aside and say, ‘Hey, no more of the monkey business. You need to go to therapy, Mr. or Mrs. Guruji.’”

I think this is a powerful thing. And then it leaves the individual not in a state of trauma, but in a state of empowerment. And the world grows. It’s a great point you brought up.

Jac: I think another point in this particular discussion is that a lot of teachers are teaching before they’re ready. There are so many teachers. I got a shock about six months ago when I realized teachers don’t even know what transcending desire is. They haven’t even gone there. So they don’t even know that this natural pull of sexual attraction is going on. They’re not even that self-aware. They’ve seen the truth with their life and their own personal consciousness. They’ve done minimal therapy. They have no sense of being responsible for their own crap. They’ve projected it onto somebody else, and they use non-dual language in order to camouflage the whole mess and continue to abuse. They’re teaching, and they’re immature.

Rick: Premature immaculation, it’s called.

Audience Member 6: Yes, please. Yes, please. Here. The next governor of California’s wife, Jennifer Newsom, is doing some beautiful work. She explained to us that men in this culture have half of their being cut off. Hearing it from her, I felt my own pain for that. From the pain, I could hear that women have half their being cut off. When they try to manifest it, our culture and I judge them as angry. After feeling my own pain, I could hear their pain underneath their anger. So I wasn’t turned away by it. I could enter it and listen.

So Van Jones says, “Common pain is common cause.” I’ve been apologizing in some groups for my own behavior. And I’m very sorry for what I have done. And I hope that I will be healing now for seven generations back and seven generations forward. Thank you.

Rick: Thank you.

Caverly: Thank you for speaking up.

Rick: Next question. Over there, I think.

Licensing and Accountability in Spiritual Teaching

Alyssa: Hi, I’m Alyssa. I’m in an interesting situation because I come from a medical background as a medical doctor, where we had boards and licenses. And if there were perceived ethics breaches, there was a whole system in place. And now I’m sort of in the spiritual teaching world, where I’m surrounded by people who are not licensed. And I’m witnessing just blatant, basic violations of what every doctor and therapist would know is an ethics breach.

My question is, I’m in a group of 200 people who are best-selling authors and spiritual teachers, and I would say 95% of them are breaching ethics. The question becomes, if you’re in a situation like that, the sign is that when I challenge people, colleague to colleague, first of all, I get ignored. They literally act like I didn’t even say anything. And then when I refuse to be ignored and I press, there’s defensiveness. And if I continue to sort of bring Kali energy of, “No, this is not okay,” then things get extremely heated.

This blew up at one point because one of the members of one of these groups had just gotten out of jail for murder, basically—involuntary manslaughter. So the whole community was sort of up in arms over, “What do we do with this?” There was a lot of emotion because the colleagues had been calling this malignant, narcissistic part in this person out, and nothing was happening. There was no way to follow up.

For example, I could decide I’m a whistleblower, and I could write on my blog and send out to 100,000 people a list of 30 people, naming a list of grievances, just so at least people who are following these people know. But I don’t feel like that’s my role. So instead, I’m going direct and challenging these people and trying to find a way—how do we do this where there’s possibility for redemption and atonement?

I love what you said. How do we give the people who are in those situations a way to say, “Wow, I didn’t know better, and now I want to do better. What do I do? How do I make apologies and make amends and atone for this so that I can actually evolve and grow from this?” I’m watching slim examples of that, but they’re slim. And so I would love to hear what you all have to say about that.

Rick: That’s a big one.

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: We’ve talked about it a little bit, and we’ve sort of—I think we felt, at this stage anyway, that we were not yet at a place where we could be some kind of sounding board. It would have to be more than just us hearing grievances and taking some sort of action on such grievances. But it’s something that somehow has to be dealt with.

In my capacity doing my interviews, very often things will come to my attention about this, that, or the other teacher. In some cases, they’ve been extremely egregious, and usually the people who bring them to my attention say, “Please don’t name me or tell the person who I am,” or in some cases, “Don’t even tell them what I said, because they’ll know who I am.”

So I’m kind of caught in the middle and usually left with the decision of whether to just take the interview down quietly, which is usually how I do it. It just disappears. Then people immediately start asking me, “Well, why did you take it down?” And I can’t tell them because I’m not supposed to divulge my source.

So it’s a screwy thing, and I wish there could be a lot more directness and healthy confrontation. It doesn’t have to be antagonistic because that’s—well, enough said. It’s something that definitely needs to be worked on, and we haven’t worked it out.

Craig: One of the things that came up with our support system at the APST is that I was having this conversation with Suzanne, and she was saying it would be great, yes, to have a grievance board. And I said, “Well, you know, it would be great if we weren’t the grievance board, because the grievance board needs to be created by professionals, and we need to be accountable to it as well. So it’s not that we are the judges, but that the grievance board is handling that type of thing.”

That may be down the road, but in this moment, what we’re trying to create is education, again, to change the community, to make it hip to say, “Oh, yeah, I have a shadow, and I’m willing to look at it, and I fell on my face.” Not, you know, “I’m the perfected guruji who’s this level of enlightenment,” or whatever.

Rick: I mean, let me just tell you a quick anecdote. There was somebody whom I’d interviewed, and I ended up taking down his interviews because I was starting to get all this feedback. I think Craig was involved, and a few others actually engaged this person in quite a lot of email conversation, trying to just sort of work it out with him.

He would write back these 3,000-word diatribes that my eyes would glaze over in a minute. I saw them come into my inbox. But finally, in one such long thing, he actually said, “I’m perfectly pure and beyond the need for criticism, and you’re wasting my time.” So that was the end of that.

From competition to cooperation

Jac: Yeah. I think, though, there is space for an in-between support system. If there is a shift in the culture whereby we could perhaps offer something like a buddy system, where another teacher could confidentially support a teacher who’s saying, “I screwed up, and I’m not comfortable being vulnerable, but somewhere I’ve got to process this, and I don’t want to go to a therapist, and I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want.”

But if we could offer something like, “Hey, this is peer support. It’s okay. I’m doing the same thing as you’re doing, checking to see where’s my shadow.” If we can offer that for each other, and there’d be safe peer support, so many teachers say, “But I can’t go to a therapist because they don’t understand me.” It’s like, “Ah, bullshit. Go to another teacher. We understand.”

We have the same process. We’ve had the same perspective of awakening and deeper. So the place to hide because they are awake is gone. What isn’t there is the structure in order to hold a teacher who is at that point of admitting their own internal pain. I think that’s something we can do, you know?

Caverly: Yeah, and Jac, it seems to me that with that, you’re talking about moving away from a culture of competition and moving towards a culture of cooperation. Again, that’s something that I think is interesting to me about what you all have started, is I’ve projected that the heart of it is cooperation rather than competition.

The heart of it is support and shared accountability, and not accountability in terms of pointing and calling out, but a calling in as we…

Craig: And that’s a big difference.

Jac: Yeah.

Audience Member 8: That actually leads to my question beautifully. Thank you. I was very interested when you mentioned the woman in the front being a student who came to you. I’m really curious: what was it about that inquiry that she brought that supported you opening to that rather than shutting it off?

Craig: Well, I think the big thing is not only was she a student, but she was also my good friend. And that’s one of the things that I’ve had as a teacher: I’ve never been able to pull off the “I’m the guru and I know something that you don’t.” So I wasn’t ever able to sit on that platform. In fact, to me, that platform feels disgusting. I don’t like to have those types of hierarchical structures.

I think that’s one of the things that’s beginning to die within the community, even though it’s been around for thousands of years. We’re finding that even in a place like SAND, you can just walk up to any teacher and start a conversation.

To have that willingness to listen, to connect, to not see yourself as the great authority on everything—to me, it all comes down to humility. With humility, there’s a willingness to listen, there’s a willingness to hear.

I can even say she came to me a couple of times. She kept nudging me. And that’s helpful. It’s helpful for students to come forward and say, “Hey, you think there’s a little something here?” “Oh, no, no, it’s cool.” “No, it’s not really cool.” And to really push it a little. For students to be empowered in that way, to me, is crucial.

I can even say she came to me a couple of times. She kept nudging me. And that’s helpful. It’s helpful for students to come forward and say, “Hey, you think there’s a little something here?” “Oh, no, no, it’s cool.” “No, it’s not really cool.” And to really push it a little. For students to be empowered in that way, to me, is crucial.

And then, of course, the teacher has to be willing to listen. One of the great things my teacher told me is, “Craig, you must always have humility in your back pocket. You must have it there. If it’s not, you’re going to get in a lot of trouble, tremendous trouble.”

Rick: I corrected Craig on something just last night. He was snoring and keeping me awake. [laughter] Whoever has the mic, yeah.

Audience Member 9: This hasn’t been explicitly stated, but I can feel that, as a person who benefited from the teacher-student role that was a giant projection, I actually benefited from the trust that I projected onto that teacher. When Jac said, “I want to tear it down,” there was a part in myself that was like, “Oh.”

But then, as I sit here, I can also feel the parts of me that have challenged those friend-teachers and other teachers I can think of, even publicly in their retreats, very viscerally. I can feel the expansiveness of what you’re bringing and what this conversation is: an opportunity for a deeper student-teacher relationship, a deeper awakening, and a deeper human, co-collective experience.

It just feels so obvious to me that this is a paradigm shift that’s scary at first, and it can be used to—I could see potentially, like, “This teacher, this…” There are such misunderstandings in teachers saying things and then being—I could see that being overly—but the co-conversation just feels so important.

I can feel how those teachers whom I’ve unabashedly felt I could trust—saying, “Dude, you really hurt me there,” or, “That was not cool. That really felt like something”—have stood in their beloved strength, not feeling ashamed but feeling willing to meet me there.

Good God, the ability and the amazing, wondrous expansion that has come from that. Like, oh, there’s another human teacher, a trustworthy being who can have this conversation. It just feels so healthy and expansive, so I’m happy about this.

Rick: Who’s handing the mic?

Jac: Just as the mic is going over, there has to be some—in some situations, there is that power differential. Of course, when you’re surrendering, we project it onto a teacher. For some of us, it really works that way. I did that also, and it really worked because I had a clean teacher.

If the teacher identifies with the role, we’re in trouble. If the teacher doesn’t identify with the role, it’s not a problem. It’s that simple, but it’s about the teacher not being screwed up, not the methodology. You see, it’s about the abuse of power that’s inherent. The teacher either hides behind the role, or they just see that the devotion that’s coming from a student is about the student. It’s not about them.

Rick: If they do identify, there’s a snowball effect in which the ego gets more and more aggrandized as they go along.

Jac: It’s rocky.

Truth, accountability, and reconciliation

Audience Member 10: Yeah. Thank you for this conversation. I was thinking, reflecting on what Jac was saying, and the words “truth” and “reconciliation” from South Africa just keep coming back. That model in which systemic racism affected not just individuals, but the whole community.

Here we have systems of power, especially through patriarchy, where men in particular are taught that this is their birthright, their entitlement to exercise forms of power and ownership. They’re doing the right thing in terms of how they’ve been conditioned. I can understand and be compassionate when there is an awareness and an understanding like, “Oh, to metabolize thousands of years of training on so many infinite levels that teaches someone to be in that position of taking advantage of power—that’s doing it right on many levels.”

I’m hoping with things like this that someone studies the model of truth and reconciliation, as happened after apartheid, in which there was an opportunity for both parties to express and fully understand the mutual harm that came about from the kinds of ignorance that everyone was suffering under—not just those who were viscerally and directly harmed, but the harm that came in the process of harming someone else.

I can imagine, and I’m thankful for the gentleman who stood up, that there are many of us who long for an opportunity to heal those parts of ourselves in which we have perpetrated harm, and an opportunity perhaps to have a truth and reconciliation mutual understanding that protects privacy and doesn’t retraumatize, but gives an opportunity for that kind of mutual healing.

Caverly: Yeah, and it seems that that can only happen in an environment of cooperation and care and shared understanding of the deepest truth we know.

Rick: Well, this has been really gratifying. I think we’re all really thrilled by the input we’ve heard from all of you. It’s still a very fledgling effort here, and we hope to have it grow in a very wholesome way. That will necessitate the participation of anyone who feels inspired to participate.

There are little cards up here. Feel free to take a card, and that will remind you of what the website is. We’ll be putting this whole conversation up. I think probably SAND will have it up on their YouTube, and I’ll have it up on BATGAP. Also, last night’s discussion that we had will tie into it. If this whole thing has been meaningful to you, please stay tuned, stay in touch, and stay involved.

Craig: And be a part of it. Be a part of the conversation.

Rick: Yeah, be a part of it.

Craig: Because it grows through you. It grows through all of us.

Rick: You want to give them the whole stack? You can pass the cards around. Give them the stack, yeah.

Craig: And so that’s what we’re inviting: we’re inviting this to be the birth of something that’s really helpful.

Rick: Yeah, cards will be here on the stage. All right, well, thank you very much, and thank you.

Jac: Thank you.

Rick: We’ll be seeing you around.