Ethics of Teacher-Student Romantic Relationships Transcript

Panel Discussions on Ethics and Spiritual Teaching

Summary

The discussion examines the ethics of romantic and sexual relationships between spiritual teachers and students, weighing blanket prohibitions against rare exceptions. It emphasizes power imbalance, transparency, accountability, feedback, and the need to distinguish spiritual maturity from personal desire or unresolved shadow.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Should spiritual teachers have romantic or sexual relationships with their students?
• How can students recognize abuses of power in spiritual communities?
• What safeguards help make spiritual teaching communities safer and more accountable?
• How can a teacher distinguish genuine spiritual guidance from personal desire or projection?

Key takeaways

• Protecting students should take priority over a teacher’s desire for a relationship.
• Teacher-student romance can seriously damage trust and cause lasting harm.
• Transparency and shared accountability reduce the dangers of teacher isolation.
• Teachers need honest feedback from students, peers, and ordinary friends.
• Spiritual language must not be used to justify unresolved desire or shadow.

Transcript

We’re out in San Jose, California, in the home of some friends at the moment. But the reason the four of us are sitting here is that tomorrow we’re going to do a panel discussion at the Science in Nanda Valley conference. We wanted to generate some video content for the Association of Professional Spiritual Teachers website, and so we thought we’d record something tonight.

I may also add this to the Buddha at the Gas Pump channel as an addendum to the video of the panel discussion we’re going to do tomorrow. But since this may also be a standalone video on the APST website, I should probably briefly introduce the people sitting here.

My name is Rick Archer, and I was somewhat instrumental in the formation of APST, although not nearly as much as the woman to my left, Jac O’Keeffe, who has really been the champion of this whole thing and has put in huge amounts of time and effort to bring it together. It wouldn’t have happened without her.

Jac is a spiritual teacher. I think her bio is… all of our bios are on APST. To her left is Craig Holliday, who was one of the original three musketeers involved in getting APST together. In the panel discussion we’ll do, we’ll elaborate a little bit on how the whole thing was conceived.

To my right is Caverly Morgan, who is from the Portland area these days and has done some incredible work teaching mindfulness in schools. When the three of us thought about whom we would like to have as a fourth person for our panel, Caverly came to mind as someone who would be a perfect fit. So we’re really glad to have her here.

In our panel discussion tomorrow, we have quite a wide range of topics that we’d like to cover. I’m speaking in the future tense, but by the time you watch this, you may have actually already watched the panel discussion.

🕊️ A humble approach to spiritual ethics

We also thought that there are certain points upon which… Some people, when they first hear about our efforts with this thing, jump to the conclusion that it’s going to be some moralistic, judgmental thing where we’re going to consider ourselves qualified to pass judgment on teachers and their behavior and so on.

We’re going to emphasize from the outset, and probably continue to emphasize, that that’s not our orientation and that we have a—hopefully a very—humble attitude toward this whole project.

We all feel in our own ways that it’s something that’s very much needed in the spiritual community, that there have been far too many examples of teacher misbehavior, which has caused a lot of pain, confusion, and disillusionment among students. If we can contribute in any way to the elevation of understanding of what is or may or may not be appropriate behavior by a spiritual teacher, we feel we will have done something significant.

We all feel in our own ways that it’s something that’s very much needed in the spiritual community, that there have been far too many examples of teacher misbehavior, which has caused a lot of pain, confusion, and disillusionment among students. If we can contribute in any way to the elevation of understanding of what is or may or may not be appropriate behavior by a spiritual teacher, we feel we will have done something significant.

Everyone else’s judgment and opinion is as valuable as ours may be.

But not only are we not adamant about many of the points we’re presenting, we feel the whole thing is fluid—a work in progress—and something in which we welcome and need the input and collaboration of the whole community. Everyone else’s judgment and opinion is as valuable as ours may be. Even among ourselves, our judgments differ.

There have been certain points we’ve been bantering back and forth about all year without reaching agreement. We haven’t argued in a contentious way; it’s been very friendly. Everyone has a subjective perspective, and in trying to evaluate or formulate a code of ethics, we’re trying to achieve a balance between our subjective perspectives and whatever universal standards there might be that fit our contemporary culture and ought to be respected.

Romantic and Sexual Relationships Between Teachers and Students

One such example of something we’ve had trouble reaching agreement on is the issue of relationships—romantic relationships or sexual relationships between teachers and students.

This is probably one of the most important points to consider because it’s probably the area in which the most egregious violations have occurred. These have caused the most harm and confusion among students and have gotten teachers into all kinds of hot water.

We’ve discussed among ourselves over the previous months what would be an appropriate approach to this. How can you regulate such a thing? Should there never be any kind of romantic relationship between teachers and students, or should there be a cooling-off period in which the teacher-student relationship has ended but the romantic relationship has not started for a certain number of months or years?

Again, there’s been a range of opinions on this, and we’ve each shifted our positions and discussed it back and forth. We thought that, with you watching this video, we’d like to do a little bit of that in real time and explain some of the processes we’ve gone through. You may see even now that we’re not in complete agreement.

I think you’ll also see that none of us is rigid or adamant in our opinions. We’re trying to approach this in a thoughtful, sensitive, and introspective way—to learn as we go and search our own conscience and our own understanding, as deep as it may go, to come up with something that’s really going to be useful and helpful for people.

So, who would like to take it from there?

Craig: Okay, I’d be happy to start. As far as looking at the spectrum of teachers being able to have a full relationship with their students and teachers having zero romantic relationship with their students, I’m in that very conservative camp of no relationship.

Rick: Ever.

Craig: Did you say ever?

Rick: Ever.

Craig: Well, that’s an interesting question: ever. Of course, as a human being, there are going to be exceptions to all kinds of rules—to any rule. There are going to be cultural exceptions, and there are different organizations that have learned how to do that beautifully, like in the Jewish tradition with rabbis.

It’s very common to have the rabbi be married, and for that person to be someone from within the congregation. That’s, of course, absolutely acceptable.

Psychotherapy’s Prohibition on Romantic Client Relationships

But what I’ve done as a therapist is take the rules of traditional psychotherapists and the way you relate to clients: you don’t become romantically involved. The idea taught in graduate school is that it’s never appropriate.

If you look at the exact codes and rules, this has gone through many years of great debate. When I first became a therapist, I would have to wait two years from the last time I saw the client if I wanted to date them. That made it really simple, because it probably wouldn’t happen. Since then, it’s been raised to five years, and I’m a fan of this approach.

Rick: By the governing body that governs therapists?

Craig: Yes, by the governing body that…

Rick: Grants and revokes licenses.

Craig: Grants and revokes licenses, yes. To me, it makes it really simple. As a spiritual teacher, I’m here showing up as a servant for my students. I’m not here looking for a date. I’m not looking for someone to sleep with. I’m not mixing those two worlds.

As a spiritual teacher, I’m here showing up as a servant for my students. I’m not here looking for a date.

It keeps things radically simple as a teacher. There’s no messiness. I can even say, from a place of humility, that when I first started teaching, my life was literally a train wreck. I had all kinds of busyness going on outside of my world of teaching.

What I found was that because the relationships I was in were not fully stable, that confusion bled into the world of teaching. I would show up and be a little bit confused or stressed, or thinking about what had just happened with my partner at that time. It was a great distraction.

When one has a conservative view, it’s like you take that confusion. I think we can all agree that relationships tend to be the messiest place in most of our lives. They tend to be that evolving edge. I see there are people in the room who are smiling when I say this. It tends to be where we struggle.

Keeping Romantic Entanglements Out of the Sangha

It’s helpful if that struggle is not mixed with my teaching community, with the sangha. What are we here for? Are we here to sit in meditation? Are we here to connect in the truth? Are we here to step into these greater realms of consciousness? Or are we here looking for a date?

There can be a lot of trouble when we start to mix those worlds. I know, of course, it’s not that simple. But sometimes, as a therapist, I may meet someone and think, “This person is like my best friend. They’re coming to me. I see them fully, and they see me fully.”

There’s this connection that begins to form. There’s this dynamic. I see their beauty and divinity, and they see my beauty and divinity. As a therapist, you can say, “This makes perfect sense. The two of us should now be in an intimate relationship.”

But as soon as we start going in that direction, all this potential for growth and vulnerability, and a sense of having a clean, clear, safe place, very quickly begins to crumble when those boundaries are crossed.

To me, it’s a very simple thing to say, “I don’t cross that line,” and it keeps my teaching community fairly safe for my students. If my students know this as well, they can say, “Okay, then I’m not going to cross that line with Craig.” At least it keeps that realm intentionally safe. It keeps it safe.

To me, it’s a very simple thing to say, “I don’t cross that line,” and it keeps my teaching community fairly safe for my students. If my students know this as well, they can say, “Okay, then I’m not going to cross that line with Craig.” At least it keeps that realm intentionally safe. It keeps it safe.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to hog the mic here. I’d be happy to hear.

Rick: Thank you.

Jac: Sometimes your spiritual path commands you to break your golden rule.

Craig: Absolutely.

Jac: Because it will destroy the controller. It will make you fly in the face of what you believed to be a moral high value. There is such divine efficiency when our spiritual path just says, “Oh, you think you’re like this? Okay, let’s turn you upside down, and we’ll make you be the opposite of who you thought you were.”

Rick: So give us an example of something like that.

Jac: Oh, gosh, some of us have had that path. I certainly have had that path when I was doing my spiritual practice. Whatever I held to be a clear value of, like, “I would never do that,” it’s like, oh, my God, I have to do it, I have to do it, I have to do it.

So I remember, you know, there was this golden rule with my first husband. Absolutely, absolutely, the one thing we will always keep sacred is being loyal to each other. And I knew at some point, like, spiritually, I know I’m going to leave him. I know I will have to choose God because I’m attached to him, so I’ll have to choose God.

And at a retreat, it was like, I’m going to—this is where it’s going to happen. This is how my marriage is going to break up. I’m going to be disloyal to this person, to my husband, with this person. I don’t know how this is going to happen, but this is how it’s going to unfold to get me out of the marriage.

So every value system I had had to be destroyed in that process also. And divine efficiency unfolds like that sometimes. And so, yeah, I mean, I was just in tears, taking off my wedding ring, thinking, this is horrendous. I feel like a 35-year-old virgin. It was just so nervous, so awful, but I have to do this. I have to do this and destroy everything that I held as sacred.

Now, of course, I was on a retreat as a student, and he was another student. But I can see that same energy of divine compulsion pushing through in other people’s lives. Sometimes it happens to a teacher also, where they’re like, “I don’t know how this is going to happen. I don’t know how we’re going to get from teacher-student to being two equal adults who are consenting to be together sexually. How are we going to get from here to there?”

And that’s what I’d like the APST to do: How do we map that journey? How do we guide others through that journey? Thankfully, I had a mild aversion because I was a student and he was a student. It only broke my own marital vows.

But when there’s a teacher and a student, sometimes it works like this. And to say that consciousness will never make us break a rule like this, it’s like, you know, as soon as you think consciousness won’t work like that, consciousness will come up and say, “Huh, you think you know how I work? Try this one.” And that’s what happens.

Distinguishing Rare Exceptions from Desire

So I would like us to find a way to navigate in those rare exceptions and also for our community to know the difference between what Craig is talking about. It’s like, just know when there’s desire—and K-N-O-W when there is desire. And that’s when you take the higher ground and don’t follow desire.

Craig: And there’s a radical difference between a rare exception and desire. There’s a difference between me sleeping with 35 women in my sangha and coming to a point of, okay, it’s one relationship; we’ve moved on into a deep level of commitment.

But I think what I see more often than not as a therapist is I see train wreck after train wreck after train wreck and hear these horrific stories. And so I’m willing to put my vote or my sense of, how do we go forward? I’d rather protect students than protect teachers and the path of teachers and what a teacher thinks that they’re going through and they need to do with this one particular student.

But I think what I see more often than not as a therapist is I see train wreck after train wreck after train wreck and hear these horrific stories. And so I’m willing to put my vote or my sense of, how do we go forward? I’d rather protect students than protect teachers and the path of teachers and what a teacher thinks that they’re going through and they need to do with this one particular student.

I’d rather protect students than protect teachers.

I would much rather protect the thousand and one students than worry about the one-in-a-thousand teachers who need to feel like they need to be married to this person or sleep with this person or invite this person back to their room to look at their special spiritual books. We’re going to have tantric sex and all become enlightened.

Jac: Yes, and you’ll reach my vibration and all this kind of…

Craig: I’ll raise your vibration with my lingam or whatever silly kind of conversation we’re going to have. And I’ve heard these stories and seen the tremendous lifelong pain that an individual has experienced after being open and vulnerable with the teacher and then leaving the path for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years because of the tremendous violation of trust that has happened.

Rick: I heard of a woman who committed suicide because of a violation of trust, and it wasn’t even that overt a situation. It was more like she just got so disillusioned by the behavior. It wasn’t even overtly sexual, but it was wanting to go in that direction, and it shattered her ideal vision of this person, who is a well-known and highly respected spiritual teacher, now deceased.

But before we get to Caverly, I just want to… Your statement confused me a little bit, and it opens up a possible alibi for people doing whatever they want because they feel like there’s this karmic, cosmic thing just driving me, and I have no choice about it. I realize it goes against all the conventions, but the devil made me do it.

Jac: Yeah, I hadn’t finished it. So I think the point, the gift that we can open together and share together and grow together on the APST is: What’s the level of maturity of the teacher?

So if the teacher has their own needs, if they haven’t transcended desire, if their own loneliness, their own shadow has not been explored at all, they will project this into their sangha. And then this is when the teacher will use any bullshit concept in order to justify their behavior. That stinks. That stinks. And that’s the teacher not doing the work for themselves.

But there are times when there is a mature, objective scenario that is a rare exception, and I would like teachers to know the difference. For teachers to educate themselves: Is it my shadow? What’s going on here? Or is this actually divine will in some way? And how can I safely navigate if it’s divine will? That’s the area that’s not known.

Teachers don’t know the difference between when it’s their own shadow and when there’s absolutely a divine intervention moving them in a certain way.

Rick: That’s the tricky one.

Jac: That’s the tricky one, and that’s the immaturity that I want the APST to address through education. Let’s mature the sector so that there is more autonomy and transparency in how we work.

Even bringing the conversation into the light, I think, is greatly helpful because the reason that this has gone on for probably a couple thousand years now is that it’s hung out in the shadows. And so the willingness to have this conversation, to talk about it, to bring up the rare exceptions and to bring up when it’s inappropriate, I think is a helpful conversation.

Craig: Even bringing the conversation into the light, I think, is greatly helpful because the reason that this has gone on for probably a couple thousand years now is that it’s hung out in the shadows. And so the willingness to have this conversation, to talk about it, to bring up the rare exceptions and to bring up when it’s inappropriate, I think is a helpful conversation.

I could stand here and say, “Oh, it is never appropriate ever.” And of course, I’m not—

Jac: That’s going to make it go underground, you see? There’s no growth there. There’s no learning there.

Craig: That’s going to make— I’m not wired in that way to hold that kind of stance. But there is just a real sense of what are normal expectations.

If a student comes to a sangha and the teacher is a male teacher and he’s only answering questions from the beautiful young ladies, and afterwards he’s inviting them all to hang out with him at the secret teaching after-party, it’s like, “Come on.” And we laugh, but it happens. It happens again and again. It happens with well-known teachers, not-known teachers. It happens with Catholic priests and monks. It’s across the board. It’s unfortunate.

Rick: I want to give Caverly a chance to speak. I just want to interject one really quick thing before I give you a chance to speak, which is that one thing that’s very confusing is that a teacher can be radiating like a lighthouse and appear to have an incredibly high level of consciousness, have tremendous charisma and powerful darshan and all that other stuff, and yet still have major unexamined shadow areas and undeveloped aspects of the personality, immaturities and so on, that make them act in ways that seem so completely incongruous with their apparent enlightenment that it can be extremely confusing.

And sometimes they act out those shadow things in secret behind closed doors while publicly portraying an aura of saintliness and perfection. Caverly.

Accountability and Transparency in Spiritual Communities

Caverly: You know, one thing that’s—yes, I have witnessed that that is the case. But something that’s interested me about the conversation you all have been having is the building of accountability and transparency.

So I think a lot of what we’re witnessing these days is scandal that’s happening when there’s a teacher, often male, at the top of a pyramid and is untouchable based on not having models of shared accountability within larger communities. So there’s sort of an island effect that can happen.

And I saw recently one case, and I’m sure there’s more than one, but I’m just present to this one, where even after a sexual scandal comes to light, this person still—they’ve become an island unto themselves and can continue to teach even though the board of directors has left them, their own community has fallen apart.

And so I think it seems to me, from the little bit I’ve gotten to learn about how this has formed, that what’s powerful about it is that if one’s signing on to be part of this shared-accountability, learning-together process, it’s no longer possible to live in that kind of isolation.

Rick: Yeah. And isolation can be very dangerous for the teacher and for the students. I know one case of a very popular teacher who just shut down constructive criticism. If anybody offered any, they were sent packing. And he just kind of got more and more off into bizarro land of strange thinking with no critical feedback whatsoever.

Caverly: No mirror.

Rick: Yeah.

Craig: One of the beautiful things that happened with me early on is when my life was very much what I call in train-wreck land, because I was young and many of my students were also my friends, they sat me down and said, “Craig, we really love when you’re up there teaching, and we have a wonderful time in your class, but these things are incongruent,” is basically what they said.

I can remember they kind of harassed—I call it harassment—they harassed me a little bit, and I defended myself a little bit. But I realized, you know what, you guys are right. And it was really helpful that my students came forward and said this to me. They looked me directly in the eye and said, “You’ve got to clean your life up, Craig.”

You’ve got to clean your life up, Craig.

It really touched me, and it was radically helpful for them to come forward and speak to me. And it was funny because I was talking with one of them today, and there was this third person who came up and said, “Well, Craig, how’s your life going?” Because the last time I talked to this person was maybe eight years ago, and it was when my life was pretty messy.

And the good friend of mine said, “Oh, his life’s actually really wonderful, and it’s really clear and simple, and things have calmed down, and there’s peace there and there’s freedom there. And it’s supportive of the teaching, it’s supportive of the community, and it’s a wonderful thing not to be involved in this train wreck.”

And it’s a wonderful thing to have students who will come forward and speak to you and say, “Hey, maybe you need to look at this.” And I think this is a really valuable thing: as a teacher, to be radically open to feedback, to criticism, to just constructive feedback is really helpful.

And if we’re looking at, “Well, what does it mean to be free and human?” Okay, so I’m open, I’m willing to hear, I’m willing to listen, I’m willing to grow. There’s humility there. These are things that make a very supportive community.

But if we play this other game, like Caverly was describing, where it’s a person and they’re on their own island, they’re untouchable, you can’t give feedback to the teacher, there’s this inner circle of students defending the guru and not letting you speak with him or her, that can lead to a very neurotic community.

And oftentimes we see that. Those tend to be the communities that have the most struggle and the greatest shadow. But it’s hard to have a big shadow if there is that open feedback within the community, with the students able to come up and say, “Hey, I think you’re a little off here. What you said, I don’t know if that’s really spot-on.”

Jac: Another source for that kind of feedback that might seem really simplistic, but I think it’s something that every teacher or every spiritual leader should think about: What circle of friends do you have? Are they all your students, or are you just a regular Joe Soap? Are you just a regular Jane to a group of people who can call you out, who can get annoyed with you, and where there is no power play at all?

And I think if you’re a teacher or a spiritual leader who doesn’t have regular, normal friends, then you have to ask why. You have to ask why. Because there is an absence of accountability, there is an absence of connection with the regular value system of transparency and openness.

And are you able to have regular relationships? Because if you’re not able to have regular relationships, that dysfunction, if you’re living in a Western world and outside of an ashram, is going to come up and out, and some pain is going to happen as a result because you’re not taking care of your own humanity, your own need for community and for peers.

You’re always on a pedestal, and that’s not sustainable because you have to have some form of—we all have to have some form of a mirror of how to function in a regular world, in regular life.

Craig: Well, that’s one of the things we’re trying to do with the APST: create this sense of community and a willingness to talk with each other. So we’re not just all these individual teachers hanging out in our own little communities, in our own worlds, where everyone’s telling us we’re right all the time and there’s this perfected state of consciousness that so-and-so lives in.

But there’s this willingness to come together, to see each other’s humanness, to see each other’s divinity, to support each other in our highest, and also to provide support: “Hey, I’m really struggling in this way or that way or in all these ways, and I need some friends here.” And I think it can be a beautiful thing.

Jac: And we’re coming from a couple of thousand years of “the guru is beyond reproach.” So look at the change in the culture we’re trying to bring about. Of course there’s going to be backlash. But of course there is, because what we’re seeing is taboo.

Rick: And when you say we’re trying to bring about this change in the culture, the culture is changing.

Caverly: It is.

Rick: And we’re not doing it.

Jac: No, we’re responding to the change.

Rick: We form little characters.

Jac: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: And people are universally feeling the need for something of this nature. And we’re just trying to ride a wave that’s cresting anyway, and trying to articulate it, give a form to it, some words to it, so that it can be helpful for people.

But we have to keep reminding ourselves, using our terminology carefully to make it perfectly clear, that we are not some kind of governing body and have no aspirations to be. We have neither the wisdom nor the authority to pass judgment on anybody.

We’re just trying to enliven, in the sort of spiritual community of which we’re a part, an appreciation of this stuff and an articulation of what is and is not appropriate that hopefully we can more or less agree upon, all of us.

Caverly: It seems to me that it’s the creation of another type of sangha. It’s another sangha that honors the collective, that honors what’s larger than maybe your individual sangha or what you call your individual sangha.

Rick: Yeah, there must be some universal values. Maybe some sanghas are going to be a little bit more off on this end of the spectrum and others off on that, and others won’t want to have anything to do with it because they really like orgies or something.

If that’s what you want to belong to, then…

Jac: Sure.

Rick: If that’s what you want to belong to, then…

Jac: Yeah, there’s space for all of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it has to be evolving because we’ve got learner plates on, you know. That’s an Irish thing. Your first two years of driving, you have to…

Rick: On the car, yeah.

Jac: Yeah, you have to have a symbol on the car to say that you’re still learning. So we have to be learning all the time. If we’re not willing to grow, well, then that’s shadow. That’s shadow. There it is.

And if there are more blind spots that you see or don’t see in yourself, it doesn’t matter. It’s about having the availability and the transparency to say, “Yeah, of course there can be hidden shadows within me. Of course the work can still continue.”

And if we can create that in ourselves and spread that a little bit so that there’s that openness, that transparency, that willingness to make a genuine effort to walk our talk—and if we can continue to do that and understand how others talk and walk is very different from us—where can we meet, and where can we support each other so that we don’t get locked into being one type of a supportive body, but can be flexible and organic enough to be inclusive?

That would be great. I don’t know what that would look like, but it would be great to try to do that.

Rick: If this thing survives and thrives, it’s probably going to look very different in five years than it does now. So this is just a real fledgling little attempt.

And we really hope that as it grows, there will be this sort of collaboration and ebb and flow of opinions and information and input and so on among anyone who cares to be involved, and that that sort of mutual collaboration will really enable it to evolve. We hope it never becomes ossified.

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Jac: Yeah.

Rick: And so it’s apparent to me that we’re not going to resolve in this conversation whether there should be a two-year moratorium on relations.

Jac: I mean, we’ve had so many conversations about this. So many.

Rick: Any such thing. And that’s fine. I mean, this is the direction this conversation is taking. We’re just sort of painting with broad strokes here.

Jac: And giving a sample, I suppose, of the kind of dialogues that we have. No resolution comes, but we keep coming back to the drawing board and talking about it again.

⛰️ Studying ethics before a crisis

Craig: Well, the important thing is to study, to study ethics, to grapple with them, to see what’s true, what makes sense.

One of the beautiful things about studying ethics before you step into really messy ethical situations is that you can form an idea of how you will respond when something comes forward.

One of the things that I see the organization being really helpful for is young students—I’m sorry, young teachers or new teachers—who are coming forward and maybe have never studied ethics before, who don’t know about them. What is a dual relationship, and why would that be messy? Or how could I get in trouble with being friends with my students or becoming romantically involved?

It would be much better to study that, to understand it, to sit with these questions for hours and hours before you find yourself as the head of some community, and then the community falls under some incredible, messy nightmare where tremendous pain has been caused because one didn’t take the time to first study this, to examine how would I respond, how should I respond, what makes sense, and how do I professionally navigate these things.

And I think it’s something that, as we know, is radically lacking. Rick has brought this up a lot: We would assume that most spiritual teachers have really strong ethics and a strong moral high ground for the place they live and teach from. But if you look at history, if you look at recent history—even this last summer—our email boxes have filled up with scandal after scandal after scandal, and it’s like, oh boy.

These were teachers who had high levels of realization, and it didn’t… It ended in a really messy way. But the sense is that if we educate ourselves, if we sit with these questions and deeply inquire, then we can, in a greater sense, serve our communities better.

Jac: And boundaries are learned. How to work with power is learned. We need to learn these things. There are skills that we need. And to acknowledge our humanity, and that these skills don’t just come down the track. It’s very rare that that happens, that the perfection of humanity is directly in line with the movement of consciousness. Very rare, very, very, very, very rare, can I say?

Craig: Yeah, a lot of myths teach it that way, but in reality, it’s rarely…

Rick: And the word enlightenment has been associated with saintliness—all these enlightened people—and so the implication is that there’s a tight correlation between a high level of consciousness and moral behavior. But from what I’ve seen, it’s a very stretchy rubber band. There may be some correlation; eventually it gets pulled along, but boy, it can really stretch far.

The word enlightenment has been associated with saintliness… But from what I’ve seen, it’s a very stretchy rubber band.

Jac: Yeah, exactly.

Caverly Morgan: Well, that doesn’t take into account how much practice is involved in being able to have your actions continually refined such that they’re reflections of your deepest and greatest understanding. It doesn’t acknowledge that refinement process, to assume that it’s just like, “Oh, the lights came on, so we’re good to go.”

Craig Holliday: Yeah, and it’s much nicer to do that refinement work within a supportive community, before the nightmares begin to unfold or the shadows start to become unpacked. To be able to do that in a supportive community, to me, that’s a tremendous gift. And that’s what we’re trying to bring forward: this sense of support and community, and a willingness to together examine these questions.

And again, like what Rick was saying, we’re not some judging authority. That is the furthest thing from my nature, from our nature, to judge. But rather, to explore these questions and to see this as just a part of the spiritual practice, as a part of the path, to me is a beautiful thing.

Rick: So this will be an ongoing conversation. And we could probably make a video a week and explore different aspects of it.

Jac O’Keeffe: Still not come to an agreement.

Rick: Yeah, so I guess we should really conclude and say, “Stay tuned.” I mean, it’s getting late here; it’s quarter of eleven, and some of us are on East Coast time or Midwest time, and we have our panel discussion tomorrow and everything, so we want to be fresh for that.

But we just wanted to make something and get it out there and put something on the website and stimulate some thought and discussion. So we hope we’ve done that, and appreciate you watching this. If we had the energy and perhaps some more refreshments, we could probably go on for another few hours.

Caverly Morgan: Don’t give him anything to drink.

Rick: But anyway, thanks for this, and thanks for watching. Please stay tuned and get involved in whatever way you like in the Association of Professional Spiritual Teachers. Go to the website, www.professionalspiritualteachers.org, and just explore around. It will be a work in progress, and we hope you’ll find it very useful over the coming years.

Caverly Morgan: May the next Buddha be Sangha. (Applause)