Some Thoughts About The Anusara Debacle
The more I read about the “fall” of John Friend and the Anusara Yoga organization the more I sense that we need to focus some of our attention on the growth of Spiritual Capitalism and how that effects our understanding of what George Harrison so clearly wrote in “This is Love—[using] the power free to everyone…….”
I am not suggesting that individuals who have studied and have some expertise with these matters not be compensated, there is after all a tradition of supporting those who help others to achieve a clearer understanding of spiritual transformation, but we must make a distinction between this tradition of support and the profit motive.
One of the greatest weaknesses of Western culture is the ingrained story that someone is going to come along and make it better for us. We all pursue it one way or another and the effect of this kind of wishing is to create a condition where individuals abdicate their own destiny in favor of one object. This kind of approach is damaging all the way around particularly when it is wedded to a free market economy and the sacredness of private property whether it be a piece of land or a recreation of an ancient path into something that resonates to the present.
Let us be clear: NO ONE OWNS THE TRUTH
We all embody a bit of the divine and we all need each other to help us dig it out from within but that should not be cause to abandon our responsibility in favor of letting someone else express that divinity for us. By placing ourselves in a subordinate position to another who seems to be further along the path of realization than we are at that time, is to fall into an institutional framework that fosters inequality and misapprehension.
If we want to change the world through transforming our own understanding then we must respect the basic principles of spiritual unfoldment and be certain that our teachers do the same.
