Over the last couple of years, life has offered up ample opportunities for me to contemplate two interesting questions: the first, 'What is the difference between a deluded, self aggrandising spiritual crackpot, and a genuine truth revealing teacher?' And the second: 'How, and with what powers of discernment, can we tell who's the madman and who's the messiah?' In short, who's the real thing, and who's a spiritual fraud, and how can we tell?

I can't be the only one to have bumped into this dilemma; I feel fairly certain that at least some of you reading this will have come into the orbit of someone professing to be a great teacher, but who sets your alarm bells ringing, or makes your tummy queasy.
Without setting out to be a "guru buster" (because I have no doubt whatsoever that some rare and humble beings might be genuinely worthy of the title), I'd like to offer here some observations and insights I've gleaned as I've walked a sometimes perilous path as a "seeker" in a world full of spiritual teachers with their claims and counter-claims.

I'm under no illusion that what I'm going to offer in this article is the definitive guide to anything whatsoever. It's simply the perspective of one person who's taken the long way round to find out something really worth finding out, namely that in navigating a way through the dizzying spiritual "marketplace" there is an inner knowing, an inner compass within our own heart and spirit, which can be absolutely relied upon.
Another way to put this might be that I've learnt deeply, to my marrow, that there is some innate wisdom, some instinct for truth that we all carry within us. I've learnt - the hard way - that this inner compass can help us steer a steady path to wholeness if only we trust it and listen to it, and if only we back it all the way, no matter what.

You are my sunshine...

I first knew I was in the presence of a spiritual teacher with a vastly inflated sense of himself when we were at the beach one morning. The "enlightened master" and a few of us from his retreat had popped down to the beach for an early morning swim. I sat on the sand to warm up in the mild sunshine, but the master stood exactly between me and the sun, blocking its warmth from reaching me, and putting me squarely in the shade. Politely, I asked him to move because he was blocking my sun. "I'm not blocking your sun," he replied. "I am your sun."
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and renowned for giving us 20-20 vision. With the benefit of hindsight, I now fully recognise that if a bloke in all seriousness tells you he is the sun, it's not a bad idea to laugh a little, then get up and walk away, quickly. Instead, I just offered some mildly sarcastic reply and he moved, clearly not happy at my implicit doubt that he was the centre of my solar system.

Thus began the lesson. When someone claiming to be a spiritual master spends a fair bit of time big noting him or herself (as "the ultimate", "the best", " the brightest", "the truest", " the only", "the one sent to save humankind" and such like ) I've learned you can be reasonably sure they're on a bit of a trip. It may be woefully naive of me to imagine this, but if a person is "Self realised", and their being has shifted beyond duality and illusion into a state of cosmic unity, I have this idea that they won't be tripping out on their own greatness, preening in front of the cosmic mirror. "Look at me" - style claims of greatness and exclusivity sound a bit incongruous coming out of the mouth of someone professing to be beyond the pitfalls of personal identity and agenda.

If someone is living as an enlightened being, it seems pretty fair to expect that they won't be using their cosmic allure to dubious ends, garnering followers, adorers, lovers and supporters through what might be a kind of spiritual manipulation or hypnotism.

Spiritual Seduction People who have "attained" some degree of mastery over their shakti power can (and do) turn it on like a powerful light and catch followers like rabbits in their high beams. The 19th century bad-boy and mystic Gurdjieff was ashamed of such behaviour, though this didn't stop him from indulging in it copiously. He vowed many times during his life to end this spiritually seductive practice, which was what one modern-day writer has called "a combination of ordinary male lust backed up by the potent advantage of oceanic supermental powers". Ladies, look out!

In our own era, long after Gurdjieff's heyday, I have seen a self styled master shamelessly use this spiritual charisma to seduce nearly half the women on his retreat. And I don't just mean metaphorically seduce, I mean literally, sexually.

In a grim kind of way, it's been fascinating trying to understand how this could happen, and why. A room full of trusting and rather vulnerable people allow a skilful master to dismantle their defences - that is, after all, what they came here for. To lose one's sense of encapsulation as a finite being is what most of us seek - either through spiritual practices, meditation, retreats, love, adventure, natural highs, or addictions. It requires the utmost integrity on the part of a teacher to take his students into that opened, defenceless state while still respecting the students' integrity, so that no abuse takes place.

Firsthand, I have seen the easy-pickings that can be had by unscrupulous teachers as they convert their students' tender, open, spiritual yearning into a sexual bonanza for the teacher. More dubious still, I have seen these same teachers persuade the women whom they're seducing that the only purpose of this seduction is the women's liberation. Misuse of power as spiritual liberation - now there's a novel idea!

I imagine, if you've had some kind of cosmic realisation and you can feel the power of universal consciousness coursing through you, it might be just a little tempting to harness that monumental force for personal ends. Plenty have done exactly this, catching a phenomenal ride on the wave of Atman - divine, impersonal consciousness - as it pours through them.

It's an old party trick that pseudo-gurus have been getting away with since the year dot - using cosmic consciousness to overwhelm and seduce followers. It's a symbiotic relationship: the seductive guru gives his followers the things they're looking for (answers to life's possibly unanswerable questions, a sense of belonging, and a spiritual high), and they, in turn, give him what he craves - attention and power.

Flying solo, or part of a lineage?

Some people have said to me, as I've privately pondered this question of how to tell a spiritual fraud from a bona fide teacher, that you must always look for the spiritual lineage of the teacher. The theory is that if the teacher has inherited a teaching from another teacher there will be some ethical safeguards in place, and the teacher won't just be some small-time tyrant with crackpot ideas and dodgy practices. Perhaps so. But plenty of humanity's bravest, truest and wisest beings have been flying solo, with no lineage and no doctrine propping them up. (I'm thinking, of course, of the Buddha, Ramana Maharshi and Christ, among others.) Lineage alone does not seem to determine whether someone speaks from a place of selfless truth, though it certainly might help guard against some of the extremes of spiritual delusion and inflation.

The Blessing Field

I recently heard a Buddhist teacher visiting Australia from Germany describe the beautiful effect of a true teacher on a disciple or student. He spoke of "the blessing field" that the teacher creates, and in which the student places him or herself. This simple phrase - "the blessing field" - seemed to finally clarify the whole false-guru/true-guru dilemma for me.

A true teacher will register in your heart and psyche and subtle system as a blessing and a quiet clarity and peace will flow from this. A not-so-true teacher will reverberate within you as a niggling worry or doubt, as confusion - in short, as a disturbance rather than a blessing. This is not to say that a true teacher will roll out a red carpet for you to smoothly glide along unchallenged; a true teacher beckoning you onto a path of empowerment and liberation is calling for you to die to your habits of limitation and self absorption, and to give everything in the process. Everything, that is, except one thing - your discernment.

A teacher whose actions are congruent with their words and whose words are pointing towards truth creates this beautiful spiritual slipstream into which we can trustingly place ourselves - a blessing field.

A teacher whose words and actions are not congruent, so that what they say can be far removed from how they live and behave, will set waves of disturbance rippling through you. I have learnt that these waves are not to be dismissed as simply "egoic resistance" to the "truth" the teacher speaks. They are the spirit's reliable lie detector, letting you know that something's rotten in the back of the fridge and you really shouldn't even think about eating it!

I have seen many people, in the presence of spiritual teachers, air their doubts and sense of disturbance around what the teacher is saying, only to have it turned back upon them as proof that they are still stuck in "ego" and not ready to "surrender". (Yawn).

The mark of a true teacher, I have come to feel, is someone who can graciously deal with queries and even dissent. Time and again, I have seen some very defensive manoeuvres from teachers who take any critique of their teaching very badly, and in some cases feel required to mock and belittle the student the query.

Humiliation of students, hypocritical behaviour ("Do as I say, not as I do"), and other such demonstrations of spiritual ego being expressed by a pseudo-guru are easy to spot, if only we learn to trust our own discernment. If it feels to you like a teacher or guru is on a bit of a trip, I'll bet you Newcastle to a coal that they are. Trust yourself! Trust your deepest knowing, even if no one else around the teacher agrees. It's okay to be a heretic; it's essential to heed your subtlest wisdom even if it means going against the tide.

Sustained Epiphany Consider this: an awakened one, a guru, might simply be someone who lives in sustained epiphany. What does that mean? If an epiphany is a moment when the eternal shines through the everyday, when the infinite is seen and known as the ultimate ground of our being, then perhaps this much sought-after state of enlightenment is simply what happens when a person roots themselves in the eternally unchanging truth, while living in the relatively shifting world.

I like the tradition of the santa sangre, the hidden saint, that holds that many, many people quietly and without fanfare live in this holy state of enduring epiphany. They may not ever speak of it, they may not ever hold workshops or satsangs talking about it, and - dare I say it - you'll possibly never see their ad in a spiritual magazine!

They may be sitting next to you on the train as you read this, or across the room from you at work, or they may even be your mother or sister or father or friend. It's quite possible that some of the truest "gurus" on the planet will never proclaim themselves as such, nor even identify themselves in those terms in the privacy of their own thoughts. Nonetheless, their blessing field is out there, and if we're blessed and discerning enough we might, on a crowded train one morning, find ourselves in it, and know it for what it is.

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