The Guru Cord

A Guru Cord has two insidious effects on its subject -- one spiritual, and one psychological.

On the spiritual level, you ought to be willing to acknowledge that in essence we are energy. Physics proves this: at the core, matter is only energy; our bodies are literally made up of states of energy at the most fundamental level.

Part of this energy holds us together as physical things. It bonds our atoms into molecules, organizes the molecules into elaborate structures, and through these structures flows other molecules that we use for physical energy.

Another part of this energy organizes us into sentient beings. The nature of this part has not been described by science yet. But we commonly refer to it as the soul or the spirit. It is the part with which we identify as individuals, and which makes each of us unique.

While there are many ways to observe this energy, the most useful is to conceptualize it as a set of chakras or energy centers. They are self-evident, and are easy to feel if you look for them. Discovering your chakras is just like discovering how to flex a muscle you never worked out before. There are many of them, with the seven main ones beginning near the base of your spine and ending just above the top of your head. This last one, the crown chakra, is actually not inside of you, but is just beyond your physical body.

A guru can help you align your seven chakras so they are working in optimal harmony. This is the ultimate aim of any spiritual practice: to clarify and open your energy body so that energy flows through you with complete ease. It is a state of Zen concentration, or a state of Christian grace.

When an aspirant turns to a guru, the guru overtly tells him that this is what he will help him do. What he doesn't tell he aspirant is that he will do it by aligning the aspirant's energy not only within himself, but also with his own energy. When the aspirant is perfectly aligned with himself, he is also perfectly aligned with the guru.

The resonance or attachment between the guru's energy and the aspirant's energy forms the guru cord. It attaches at the crown chakra.

The aspirant gives up something of himself to become part of this guru cord. And this alignment can last more than one lifetime -- it can last millennium. The guru becomes his master in the energy realm. The guru can help him maintain his alignment from afar. He can even help the aspirant maintain alignment from beyond the grave.

The guru can also try to force the aspirant to remain aligned with him. He can sort of "whip" the cord to snap him back into alignment should he stray -- or should he attempt to disconnect.

When you see people begging their guru for grace, this is what is happening on the energy level. The aspirant wants the guru to strengthen and maintain the cord forever, and the guru happily complies. The aspirant will feel this affinity as love, or enlightenment, or grace, or any number of positive things. Often, the aspirant believes he needs the guru to feel any sort of grace or love or peace at all.

Which brings us to the psychological part. An insidious and evil aspect of most any religion is that it can make the aspirant into a beggar. Since the aspirant is convinced that he needs the guru to attain a state of grace, he begs for it. He begs for help on this energy level, and he becomes dependent on the guru's beneficence.

A psychological state of dependence and begging is not natural and it is certainly not optimal. But most of us have been there.

As soon as we find an outside source that can have this seemingly positive influence upon us, we grab onto it and feed hungrily, like an infant at its mother's breast.  That image has been used since the beginning of time to symbolize the guru cord relationship.

As a dependent beggar, the aspirant becomes a servant. He needs his master, and so he will serve his  master. Why is it that so many of the gurus end up owning everything their aspirants once owned? Why will people work for them for nothing? It is because he has placed them in a state of servitude.

Within a short span of time, this may seem innocuous. The aspirant does, after all, have a sense of clarity and energy alignment while he is attached to the guru cord. So what if the guru gains power over him? So what if the aspirant must use the guru to overcome his own shortcomings or fears?

On a longer time scale, what becomes apparent is that the aspirant's vision of the cosmos places the guru at the center. The aspirant is no longer free to see the big picture as it actually is. He sees it only through the support and assistance of the guru.

Should the aspirant realize this and decide to decouple from the guru, the guru cord can be used to punish him. Whatever drove him into the guru's presence in the first place -- an addiction, repeated failures, a desperate need for love, a feeling of isolation from the divine -- whatever it was, it comes back. And when it comes back, it is much worse than it was before.

Now that the aspirant has been attached to the guru cord, the guru can use it to disrupt his attempts to go it on his own. The guru can prevent him from aligning his energy. Even when the aspirant thinks he has escaped, he can be wrong, and the guru will enter his life forcefully when he least expects it.

I've been through this. For some reason, when I was a teenager I decided to break the guru cord between myself and the Catholic Church -- a guru cord that I suspect I was born with.

It has taken my whole life. All of it. Enormous amounts of time and energy and suffering. But it has been a worth while task.

Only those who are free of the guru cord can complete their true, most profound spiritual awakening. One can not become fully aware when that awareness is tempered by a guru.

Each of us is perfectly capable of pure spiritual awareness. By its very nature, our energy body enables each of us to experience that state of awareness.

But it can be experienced only when an individual connects with the cosmos directly.  An intermediary guru is not needed. In fact, any guru who attempts to insert himself between you and the cosmos ultimately hs his own interests at hart -- not yours.

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies By Jared Diamond

Biography:

Jared Diamond is a a professor of geography at UCLA, although he began is academic career with a PhD in membrane biophysics from Cambridge University in 1961. He has been a professor of physiology, environmental history, and environmental health, eventually landing in geography, we suspect, because in his work he tends to survey the entire globe and all of history. His life's passion is birding in New Guenia, where he has lead numerous scientific expeditions studying the ecology and the evolution of the island's feathered natives.

In a 1987 Discover magazine article, he substantiated the oft-made claim that the development of agrigculture and hsubandry was humnkind's "greatest mistake", since it seaprated us from the relatively easy life of hunter-gatherers, completely altered the planet's ecology, and exposed millions to the devestation of famines.

We think his greatest merit as a scholar is his complete lack of racial or cultural bias, allowing him to make wide ranging comparisons without any particular agenda.

Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is the twenty-five-year, 500-page answer to a question once posed to Diamond by a native of New Guinea. Here's Diamond's story:

After a while, Yali turned the conversation and began to quiz me. He had never been outside New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable. First, he wanted to know about my work on New Guinea birds (including how much I got paid for it)...He then asked how the ancestors of his own people had reached New Guinea over the last tens of thousands of years, and how white Europeans had colonized New Guinea within the last 200 years.

The conversation remained friendly, even though the tension between the two societies that Yali and I represented was familiar to both of us. Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still "living in the Stone Age." That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousands of years ago, and they dwelt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority. Whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as "cargo."

Many of the white colonialists openly despised New Guineans as "primitive." Even the least able of New Guinea's white "masters," as they were still called in 1972, enjoyed a far higher standard of living than New Guineans, higher even than charismatic politicians like Yali. Yet Yali had quizzed lots of whites as he was then quizzing me, and I had quizzed lots of New Guineans. He and I both knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans. All those things must have been on Yali's mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

Diamond didn't have an answer for Yali then, but he does now.

We've never read a summation of history like Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies -- for one thing, we've never seen a book that so thoroughly incorporates Pacific and American pre-history into its arguments, which in and of itself was fascinating. Diamond's great strength is his ability to consider all peoples in the same light, providing lucid and compelling explanations for why groups of equally intelligent people lived in such remarkably different societies at the dawn of the age of colonialism.

This perspective alone is enormously refreshing -- throughout, Diamond criticizes the notion of "primitive Stone Age people" because not all societies began at the same time and not all societies had the same environmental conditions. Diamond rejects outright the idea that differences among people had anything to do with the relative sophistication of cultures in the 1500s; instead, he demonstrates how differences in geography and in endemic plants and animals shaped diverse societies. The age of colonialism, of course, put an end to the further native development of every society that was militarily weaker than the European powers.

Introduction:

We think that one of the main reasons Diamond's book won the Pulitzer is that it presents an enormously constructive and positive historical perspective on all the peoples of the world. Traditionally, white colonialists used Darwinian concepts of evolution to conclude that white people were superior to those they colonized or enslaved. Their technological superiority, they felt, was a material reflection of their genetic superiority. Diamond relishes his self-assigned task of blowing holes through this argument at every turn. As usual, he has access to a huge number of unique of anecdotes to support his thesis and to undermine the bigotry that runs rampant even today:

Passage:

But all such claims are based on pure speculation. There has never been a study of many societies under similar socioeconomic conditions on each of two continents, demonstrating systematic ideological differences between the two continents' peoples. The usual reasoning is instead circular: because technological differences exist, the existence of corresponding ideological differences is inferred.

In reality, I regularly observe in New Guinea that native societies there differ greatly from each other in their prevalent outlooks. Just like industrialized Europe and America, traditional New Guinea has conservative societies that resist new ways, living side by side with innovative societies that selectively adopt new ways. The result, with the arrival of Western technology, is that the more entrepreneurial societies are now exploiting Western technology to overwhelm their conservative neighbors.

For example, when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930s, they "discovered" dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop. In 1964 I met a 50-year-old Chimbu man, unable to read, wearing a traditional grass skirt, and born into a society still using stone tools, who had become rich by growing coffee, used his profits to buy a sawmill for $100,000 cash, and bought a fleet of trucks to transport his coffee and timber to market. In contrast, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, the Daribi, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they briefly looked at it and just went back to what they had been doing; the Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them.

On every other continent as well, certain native societies have proved very receptive, adopted foreign ways and technology selectively, and integrated them successfully into their own society. In Nigeria the Ibo people became the local entrepreneurial equivalent of New Guinea's Chimbus. Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings.

Among the supposedly conservative Aboriginal Australians as well, there are receptive societies along with conservative ones. At the one extreme, the Tasmanians continued to use stone tools superseded tens of thousands of years earlier in Europe and replaced in most of mainland Australia too. At the opposite extreme, some aboriginal fishing groups of southeastern Australia devised elaborate technologies for managing fish populations, including the construction of canals, weirs, and standing traps.

End Note:

In his chapter The Future of Human History as a Science Diamond turns this argument one more rotation, showing how bigotry is the conservative argument that binds us to a destructive and unhappy past, and that the progress of history as a discipline and as a socially formative force must embrace a more accurate and respectful portrayal of all human societies.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Biography:

Many people have the impression that Nietzche has something to do with the rise of Nazi fascism and that his concept of the "Superman" has something to do with the Nazi ideal of a perfect Aryan race. These impressions are completely false. The reason people have these beliefs is because of Nietzche's sister, Elizabeth, who was married to an influential anti-Semite named Bernhard Forster. Forster committed suicide in 1899; Nietzche died in 1900. Elizabeth jealously controlled Nietzche's writings, publishing them in such a way that Nietzche would appear more like Forster. She published notes that Nietzche had discarded, and she published forgeries, and she published only parts of works. By the 1920s she was a Nazi sympathizer, and she continued to control Nietzche's image to make it seem like his philosophy supported Nazism. This, of course, boosted sales of his "books" in Nazi Germany, enriching her.

Legions of scholars were mislead by Elizabeth's diabolical maneuverings, but by the 1940s the full text of everything Nietzche wrote became available, and Nietzche's attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected the subsequent generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights.

In truth, Nietzche powerfully denounced things like nationalism, anti-Semitism and the exact sort of power politics that led to the rise of Nazism.

Nietzche's engagement with philosophy and ideas went deep - his life was about these ideas more than anything else. His grandfather and father were Lutheran ministers, and Nietzche had been a pious young boy. But in his teens he lost his faith, and, as R. J. Hollingdale puts it in his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Penguin Classics), he set out to

...break down all the concepts and qualities in which mankind takes pride and pleasure into a few simple qualities in which no one takes pride or pleasure, and to see in the latter the origin of the former; likewise to undermine morality by exposing its non-moral basis and rationality by exposing its irrational basis; likewise to abolish the "higher" world, the metaphysical, by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of the human, phenomenal, and even animal world; in brief the controlling tendency of his his thought is nihilist.

Nietzche was largely unknown in his own day. He was a professor at Basle University for over a decade, and his books received the polite attention accorded to a professor. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the full force of his genius entered the Western mind.

Published: 1885

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Penguin Classics)is Nietzsche's masterpiece - extravagantly odd, the book needs to be read in full to really experience its intense intellectual energy. "Zarathustra" is another name for Zoroaster, the Iranian who created Zoroastrianism in the sixth century BCE. Zoroastrianism originated the idea that the cosmos was a battleground between Good and Evil. That idea, along with many of his others, became core concepts in Judaism and, in turn, Christianity.

Zarathustra addresses us directly in Nietzsche's book, but not as a holy prophet - in fact, one of the first things he tells us is that God is dead. He delivers a series of sermons to the people of a town called The Pied Cow, vehemently condemning religion and any sort of morality or world view that depends on an afterlife to make sense. He wants everyone to affirm life here and now, and to live life to the fullest. He then goes on to develop two key concepts which were to become Nietzsche's main contributions to twentieth century thought.

The first is the idea of the Superman. God is dead - mankind killed him, in fact - and so now there is no authority left in the cosmos except man himself. And what ought man do with this awesome opportunity to replace God with himself? He ought to rise to the occasion, he ought to find God's source of power and use it. Is there danger that he will misuse it? Of course there is.

However, this is counter-acted by Nietzsche's second major concept, the "will to power". The will to power is each person's innate desire to fully become what he or she truly is. Doing so is enormously difficult -- but the chance that some will succeed gives meaning to the lives and endeavors of everyone. In his introduction, R. J. Hollingdale explains:

[T]o master oneself is the hardest of all tasks, that which requires the greatest amount of power: he who can do it has experienced the greatest increase in power, and if...happiness...is the feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome, then the Superman will be the happiest man and, as such, the meaning and justification of existence.

Nietzsche's achievement with these ideas was to create a way for there to be happiness, meaning, ethics, and truth even within a world view that does not have any "beliefs".

Introduction:

Nietzche loves to provoke his reader by condemning things that seem, on the surface, to be the sorts of things that ought to be esteemed. He then points out how those things are really fetters on the human soul:

Passage:

Behold, I teach you the Superman.The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone!
Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these blasphemers died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offense, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth.
Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body: and then this contempt was the supreme good ? the soul wanted the body lean, monstrous, famished. So the soul thought to escape from the body and from the earth.
Oh, this soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished: and cruelty was the delight of this soul!
But tell me, my brothers: What does your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and dirt and a miserable ease?
In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled.
Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under.
What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also.
The hour when you say: 'What good is my happiness? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease. But my happiness should justify existence itself!'
The hour when you say: 'What good is my reason? Does it long for knowledge as the lion for its food? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!'
The hour when you say: 'What good is my virtue? It has not yet driven me mad! How tired I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!'
The hour when you say: ' What good is my justice? I do not see that I am fire and hot coals. But the just man is fire and hot coals!'
The hour when you say: ' What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross upon which he who loves man is nailed? But my pity is no crucifixion!'
Have you ever spoken thus? Have you ever cried thus? Ah, that I had heard you crying thus!
It is not your sin, but your moderation that cries to heaven, your very meanness in sinning cries to heaven!
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness, with which you should be cleansed?
Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!

End Note:

A call for radical freedom! This is why this book has been so influential - it calls absolutely everything into question, it cries out for a perfect freedom, and yet it also offers a way for complete freedom to be an expression of love rather than an invitation to chaos. A world of Supermen and Superwomen would be a utopia!