Meeting the Shadow on the Path to Enlightenment

Source: Jared Rice

A spectacle of corrupt priests and teachers in authoritarian communities of all denominations has cast a pall over religion and spirituality. Centuries-old teachings that were meant to end suffering have, instead, perpetuated it. And clergy and gurus who were meant to transmit wisdom have, instead, acted out their sex, money, and power and have transmitted pain.

But when examined together, these disturbing incidents of abuse reveal patterns that, I hope, can be helpful in several ways. First, when aspirants know what to look for, they can be more discerning at an earlier stage of seeking a teacher and practice. As would be the case with any abusive relationship, if they can detect a warning sign, such as emotional coercion or physical intimidation, they can more consciously choose to stay or leave, to speak up or stay silent. This awareness can loosen the grip of the transference and make it possible to learn from a teacher without idealizing him or her. In rare cases, it can make it possible to change a personal or institutional dynamic.

If you are seeing a warning sign, please ask yourself: If I didn’t believe this teacher to be awake or enlightened, would this behavior be called abusive?

Second, this quality of awareness may allow us to lose our spiritual naivete and acknowledge that the human shadow is present even in our spiritual settings. Rather than lead us to cynicism or despair, this awareness can lead to a new stage of spiritual maturity that embraces shadow awareness along with the evolution of consciousness.

The priest-parishioner or teacher-student relationship can be the most revered of a lifetime. We invest it with the vision of our highest human potential. Yet we are reluctant to find fault and to admit violations of trust because of that very investment. If the relationship fails, it invalidates not only our own judgment but the very vision to which we have devoted our lives. For this reason, denial is epidemic.

As Satya Bharti Franklin wrote in The Promise of Paradise, a book about her life in Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s Oregon community, “Before Rajneeshpuram, I could never understand how so many Jews stayed put during Hitler’s ascent. But now I was witness to my own astonishing ability to rationalize away what I didn’t want to face.”

When survivors finally acknowledge their own experiences of abuse, their communities often refuse to validate them. The Catholic priesthood has behaved for decades like a tribal brotherhood, protecting its own from charges of abuse by the laity. Suffering students’ complaints are devalued in Hindu groups as “purification” (the elimination of toxic feelings due to practice), in Buddhist sanghas as “deluded mind,” and in Christian Science as “mortal mind” (the limited human mind). Few spiritual groups provide procedures to voice unacceptable thoughts and feelings in a nonjudgmental setting.

Other members often may blame the victim for being seductive, destabilizing the community, or endangering the higher good to humanity that the teacher offers. When a client’s closest friends in her sangha refused to hear her doubts and turned their backs, she experienced a secondary trauma, the loss of precious friendships, cultivated over many years, which she had expected to endure beyond her relationship to the teacher. When a Jehovah’s Witness client began to express doubt, he was told that non-Witnesses are “bad association,” and if he spoke with them, he would be “disfellowshipped,” or expelled.

Although a group’s teachings may be valuable and rituals or practices life-enhancing, an organization’s structures may be authoritarian, and its members’ behavior patterns compulsive and cult-like. In fact, the coping strategies that are epidemic in alcoholic homes are prevalent in abusive churches and spiritual communities:

• A priest or teacher, like a parent, exploits others for his or her own narcissistic needs. (“Thinking I had some extraordinary means of protection, I went ahead with my business as if something would take care of it for me,” Vajrayana Buddhist teacher Osel Tendzin publicly admitted after he had infected several followers with the HIV virus.)
• The teacher’s transgressions are often boundary violations, whether psychic, emotional, sexual, or financial. (A follower of Chetanananda told me she feared him because she believed that he could read her mind after staring into her eyes during meditation for years.)
• Like a child, the member chosen for abuse is made to feel special. (A client and a follower of Frederick Lenz, said to me, “I worked as his housekeeper for a year, cleaning and doing secretarial stuff for no pay. He had other girls over all the time. It made me jealous, but at the end of the day, I was the one who was in the same house.”)
• Students and staff, like children, enable the teacher’s dysfunctional behavior. (“We were all co-alcoholics,” a follower of Maezumi Roshi said. “We in subtle ways encouraged his alcoholism because when he was drunk he would become piercingly honest.”)
• Members deny their own feelings of doubt, danger, and common sense. (“That’s hearsay. It’s destructive to feed negative thoughts,” said one Zen student on hearing about Richard Baker Roshi’s affairs in Shoes Outside the Door by Michael Downing.)
• Members project their ideal onto a priest or teacher, leading to psychological dependency. They maintain that image at all costs, like a child protecting an abusive parent. (A Catholic told me, “Because [the priest] represents the church, he could not have abused her. She must have seduced him.”)
• Members rationalize destructive behavior as sanctioned by the lineage holder, or as a sacred teaching, or as “crazy wisdom,” designed to startle the mind out of its conventional trance. (A client, a serious meditator, said, “When our teacher was late or failed to meditate or behaved rudely, we called it grist for the mill.”)
• Shameful secrets hold the system together. (When Trungpa Rinpoche suffered dementia due to alcoholism, some devotees suggested that he was communicating with spiritual beings called dakinis. When he died at 48, only a few followers knew it was from the effects of alcoholism. The rest were not told or denied that his body could succumb to drink like that of an ordinary man.)
• Members are threatened with retaliation when they try to disclose secrets or wish to leave. (A client told me, "My priest told me that if I revealed our secret, I would go straight to hell.”)

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Spark of Potential: Buddhist Insights on Spiritual Teachers

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Like many adult children of alcoholics, spiritual believers learn that their feelings don’t matter because an authority figure knows them better than they know themselves. Therefore, self-knowledge originating from feelings or intuition is stigmatized, and we give up our capacity to discriminate based on our gut or our conscience. In effect, we give up self-trust.

​The transgressions by individual clergy and spiritual teachers, even those deemed “perfect masters,” reveal that they are not immune to neurotic traits or shadowy behaviors. The attainment of mystical states or psychic and subtle levels of consciousness among saints and sages clearly does not mean that they fully transcend the ego. It does not do away with the personal history, personality, or temperament of the individual. However, in some cases, it may mean that they no longer identify with the ego. They no longer try to fulfill its needs.
And, just as clearly, it does not mean that they fully transcend the shadow or become aware of all of their disowned unconscious material.

Although some teachers have suggested that a sudden moment of awakening illuminates all residue in the personal shadow, I no longer believe this possibility. Even if emotional and cultural shadow work is an intentional, ongoing part of an individual’s practice, aspects of the shadow still remain outside of conscious awareness when one attains higher stages. In the end, I believe, we continue to banish material into the personal unconscious and to form shadow content at each moment because we are by nature unable to be aware of everything at once.