Anyone that has been involved with magical or spiritual organizations for a long enough time begins to notice a sad truth: Such groups tend to be dens of neurosis, backstabbing, and behavior that is generally lower than what you would find in a typical corporate environment.
I have spent a good amount of my career navigating these waters and for this reason generally try to relate directly to teachers, not groups or orders.
Many people seem to think that this behavior exists because the members are not doing the work. I used to think this way as well.
A long time ago though, someone who was a student of Gurdjieff told me that he once said that spiritual groups are like garages for your car. Before your car goes in it probably does ok. When it comes out it will be better than ok. But while it is in there being worked on, its not a pretty sight. Its guts are all over. Its smeared with grease. It being taken apart and put back together repeatedly.
So in some cases the politics and odd behavior of people in a given magical group may be a symptom of doing genuine work rather than not. Than again in some cases people are just assholes. Discernment is a vital quality for a Sorcerer to possess.
Good points
. Meditation practices and such things do not seem to make life always very stable if one actually does them. For me, it often induces change. When things change, one does not always keep ones cool and sometimes you have to deal with a lot of one’s own sh*t that keep arising.
In my sangha (Aro gTér lineage) the typical policy is that first and foremost is the student’s direct relationship to his/her root lama. Other members of the sangha should not really tell others what to do in the terms of practice. The system seems to work well and the general atmosphere is good, but not everything is ever perfect. You also try to see the other members of the sangha through Pure Vision, but that is a quite difficult practice really.
I do not think though that this system could work some other Buddhist/magical groups, where there is usually bigger organization behind the teachers. This could not even work with more democratic kind of magical groups, because because then there is not clear student-teacher relationship.
This behavior can also be the result of individuals doing the wrong sort of work for their particular situation, with a lack of what my Buddhist teachers called “skillful means.” Continuing your garage analogy, there’s a big difference between how good and bad mechanics work, both in terms of process and results. A good mechanic looks at the car, diagnoses the problem correctly, and swaps out the correct part for a new one. It’s fast, efficient, and it works right the first time. A bad mechanic might have to take the car apart over and over again and make a real mess, either due to faulty diagnoses or poor repairs. For that matter, some bad mechanics are crooked, which is perhaps an unintended extension of the analogy that nonetheless seems quite appropiate to apply to abusive cult movements. They take your money, make a mess of your car, and don’t really fix anything.
From time to time I encounter the idea that problems, difficulties, and chaos in your life are signs of success in magical work because you’re “working through issues” or some other bit of psychoanalytic nonsense. In my experience this is rarely true. Magical practice when done correctly should almost always result in measurable improvement in your life that you can see pretty quickly, even if in the very short term a few problems may arise. It’s change, yes, but that change should be positive overall. If you start in on a practice and everything hits the fan it’s a good sign that you probably are at a point in your spiritual and magical development where you should be trying something else, and there’s nothing virtuous about persevering when you’re doing the wrong thing.
Cool article, I seriously will enjoy fresh news by you.