Advice to Spiritual Teachers & Aspirants

These past few weeks, we've been reflecting a lot on where we've been as a lineage, on our roots and origins. We discussed all of this in talks like Where Did Kālī Come From? | A Brief Herstory, What's Our Lineage? and Our Tantrik Lineage. And of course, while it is important to discuss where we're going (which we'll cover in the next talk), it is equally important to ask where we are now!

As such, I want to reflect a little bit on our ideals and values as a spiritual community. 

To do this, I thought it would be good to read from Swami Vivekananda's reflections on his guru, Sri Ramakrishna (which appear in Volume IV of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda under the title "My Master") since our lineage (and necessarily also our community) is founded upon the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and because we aspire to live up to the ideals we saw embodied in his example! 

In reading this reflection, we can come to understand a lot about the perils of spiritual communities not just in the new age context but throughout time. These perils mainly revolve around sex, money and power and in this talk, we explain why that should be so.

This talk was first given on Monday night but since the internet gave out towards the end, I wasn't able to complete the last bit of the reading I wanted to share or to make some concluding remarks. So I picked up the thread from where we left off at our Friday evening satsangh and then just tagged that unto the back of the first recording. The result is a rather long video! Forgive me! And thank you for your patience while I develop some of these ideas throughout the talk! 

May we always inspire one another to live up to the highest ideals of spiritual life always. 

Jai Swamiji! Jai Thakur! Jai Ma!