Scott Edelstein on Discerning the Role of a Spiritual Teacher

Scott Edelstein on Discerning the Role of a Spiritual Teacher

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fear, but on the kindest bravery and love side needs
to be fed a very strict, careful, limited diet. Welcome
to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have
recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like

(00:23):
garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think
ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

(00:45):
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

(01:13):
Our guest on this episode is Scott Edelstein, who has
studied with several spiritual teachers, including Tony Packer, Dane and Cottagery,
Tim McCarthy, and currently Steve Hogan. As the friend of
several spiritual teachers, he's also spent much time with them
off duty, sometimes serving as a confidante. He's a long
time practitioner of both Buddhism and Judaism, and a committed

(01:34):
proponent of serious spirituality in all forms and traditions. Scott's
work on several spiritual topics has appeared in shambalasan American
Jewish World the writer. His new book is The User's
Guide to Spiritual Teachers. Hi Scott, welcome to the show.
Thanks Eric. It's pleasure and bit of an honor to
the year. I'm excited to have you on. Your book

(01:54):
is called The Users Guide to Spiritual Teachers, which I
think is a topic many of our listeners are going
to be interested in. So we will get into it
in just a second. But let's start like we always
do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with
his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is

(02:15):
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed.

(02:36):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Sure well, first of all,
the work that I do is as a writer and
researcher and editor and collaborator and ghostwriter. And I would
actually like to this parable because I would argue, if
there's a word here that is not right, that indeed

(02:57):
there is always a battle going on inside us, with kindness, bravery, love,
and other such things on one side, and with greed,
hacred and other such things on the other. But I
would argue and strongly that fear belongs on both sides,
and that fear, but on the kindness, bravery and love side,
needs to be fed a very strict, careful, limited diet.

(03:20):
And the reason for that is fear is partly what
keeps us alive. It's partly what keeps us safe. There
are things we need to be afraid of. What happens
is people then stoke and feed the fear in an
an appropriate way for things that we shouldn't be afraid of.
We shouldn't be afraid of immigrants just because they're immigrants.
We shouldn't be afraid of people who we see as

(03:43):
the other just because they're the other. We probably shouldn't
be other remembering the first place. Um. But we also
should be paying attention to our bodies, um, to our hearts,
to our minds when we do feel fear, and instead
of saying, oh, that fear is bad, getting rid of it,
we need to actually discern one of that fear is
telling us something useful and important. And I'm saying all

(04:06):
this because that discernment is at the heart of the
user's guide to Spiritual Teachers. One of the big problems
that often happens with spiritual teachers who are Charlotte's or
creditors and narcissists or liber teams or whatnot, is we
assume that because they're spiritual teacher, we should never fear them.
But actually there's plenty of people in that role who

(04:28):
we should fear, and if we paid attention to that fear,
it would serve as well. Yes, an earlier book of
years was Sex and the Spiritual Teacher, Why it happens,
when it's a problem, and what we can all do,
And certainly there are no shortage of stories of spiritual
teachers who take advantage of students. So I agree with you,

(04:49):
it's certainly something to watch out for and worry about.
I want to kind of just jump into the book
because I think there's so many different things in here
or that you talk about with spiritual teachers, and I
want to start by a saying or something that you
have pretty early in the book. You say, a spiritual

(05:10):
teacher is a living, breathing human being with normal human emotions, impulses,
and desires. So talk to me about what you're driving
at with that sentence, like why that's important? Sure, if
they didn't have the normal human desires and expectations and foibles, um,
then they would have nothing of value to teach us

(05:31):
because they wouldn't be able to number one, speak from
their experience, including their mistakes. Number Two, they wouldn't have
the necessary empathy. So if I were to look at
a cat and go, why why are you tearing that
mouse to pieces? The cat would just say you don't
understand it all, do you? Because you and I would
never tear a mouse to pieces. But if you're a cat,

(05:51):
there is nothing better, more appropriate, more fun than to
beat the craphole out of a mouse. So if we
go into assume that our teachers are somehow, our spiritual
teachers are somehow inherently different from us, then how are
we going to apply their experience to our lives? And indeed,

(06:12):
the only people who are going to claim that they're
fundamentally different from us are going to be Charlotte's or alternatively, somehow,
some supposedly channeled being. But even if the being is
somehow being channeled in sign of some corporeal time, share
the same rules of engagement and the same discernment would apply. Yeah,

(06:33):
I'm always interested in It's a question I've asked some
of the so called teachers we've had on the show,
and it's really about people who make some claim or
believed to some degree that they have achieved used the
word enlightenment, awakening, use whatever word you want. And I'm
always kind of curious. The thing I'm trying to get

(06:53):
out of out of those folks sometimes is, well, how
different is having obtained that? How different is that experience
of living than what say mine is, or or other people?
And I find it a fascinating question, because at the
heart of the show we talk a lot about this
new reference in the book, this idea of you know,

(07:14):
we're seeking something and yet at the same time that
seeking often can stand in the way. But there's a
reason that we are on a spiritual journey. There is
a place to go, although I get that we could
say there's not, but for purposes of keeping this conversation saying,
we'll assume there is a place to go, that there
is some degree of improvement in our quality of life

(07:36):
that occurs. And I just am always interested in, like,
just how far does that go? It's a wonderful question,
and I'm thrilled that you asked it, so thank you.
Let me speak to that in a couple of ways.
The first is people, I do think um pretty consistently
misunderstand enlightenment as some kind of threshold that gets crossed

(07:57):
some combination of losing your virginity and getting bar mixivent
are confirmed. First of all, that's not the case, because,
as we know, everything is constantly changing, Everything is in
flux and flow, and so even if a certain experience appears,
that doesn't mean that that experience is stays around forever,

(08:19):
because nothing stays around forever. So I think it's more
useful to look at enlightenment will come back to what
is enlightenment a moment as something that comes and goes
for some people that may never come at all for
others if it does show up and then it disappears again. Uh.
It isn't something where you can suddenly, oh uh, some

(08:41):
gate has opened in my brain and now I can
just rest on my laurels, or now everything's easy, or
now I understand everything, or now my discernment is perfect.
We still have to be engaging, moment by moment, listening
to our own hearts and minds and guts, making the
room determinations. So that would be the first half. The

(09:02):
second is that the whole question of what is enlightenment?
And of course, as Lee Armstrong said, if you if
you have to explain it, you're not you're not getting it.
He said that, of course about jazz. So this notion
that enlightenment is a thing that is somehow gotten, kind
of like some bonus or some award, I think it's

(09:26):
also pretty misleading. That said, as human beings, there are
things we can know or recognize that we didn't previously
recognize or no, and there are things that we can
realize we know that we have known but didn't realize
we knew so um, and so I don't want to
this or dismiss enlightenment because it's quotes real. Yet at

(09:50):
the same time, it's certainly not anything that people would
typically imagine it. Did it right? Well, that's the whole
thing about it is the idea of you you can't
put into words something that you can't put into words.
The the other thing that and I don't remember where
I heard this and who I had this conversation with,
but the idea has sort of stuck around with me.

(10:11):
You know, a lot of times we we think of
enlightenment in the sense of the satory type experience, just
the sudden like whack upside the head and boom, you know,
an explosion goes off in our brain and we are
in a different place. And somebody posited that, yes, that's
the way it happens for some people, and it seems

(10:32):
very dramatic. They take a dramatic growth step forward. But
that for a lot of people. The reason that a
lot of other people might be equally Again, I'm going
to use this word in quotes enlightened right, or have
a same degree of realization. It's just that it happened
so slowly they barely noticed it. And I think that's
a fascinating idea because I often think about if you

(10:54):
could take me at say twenty four years old, when
I was just coming off of being a heroin addict,
and you could drop me in my brain today, I
bet that twenty four year old would have his mind
blown by what it's like to be in my head today.
And I'm not saying that being in my head is
like so amazingly special. I'm just saying the difference from

(11:16):
the mindset and the way that I operated then until
now is so dramatic. It's just that I don't mostly
notice it because it's been a twenty year process or
twenty plus year process. Just had a couple of I
think important things. One is simply about the the nature
of maturation, that as we grow, we grow. If we're
paying attention, as we grow older, we grow wiser, and

(11:39):
if we're paying attention consistently and in the right ways,
that even that wisdom, the quality of the wisdom we
have changes in terms of the quick versus the sudden
versus the gradual. I think the best analogy I would
draw there is you could win a lottery get inheritance
and be a millionaire. And you can also put aside

(12:00):
fifty dollars a week from your paycheck for fifty years
and be a millionaire. And both of those wind up
at the same spot. At least financially, you have a
million dollars. Yeah. Either way. That said, I would like
to add one thing is that the two most in
quotes profound supposedly spiritual experiences that I've had, really, I

(12:23):
would argue, are not remotely profound. I had one under
the influence of Alice d at age Oh god, I
don't know, just getting five, who were your parents, no
wonder you wrote a book about spiritual teachers. And I
had another one doing sun salutations at about age I

(12:43):
don't know. Again, maybe a year later. They seemed profound
because one was a whack in the head the other
was a whack in the head in the body, But
now at age sixty three looking back, I'd say, well,
yeah they were. They were both revealed something, and the
second one was a huge body experience, probably the most

(13:05):
in quotes profound experience my body has been through. But
in terms of insight, they actually revealed something that now
just seems like normal. Relevant background information. I just wasn't
used to it at that young age. Yep. Makes sense
to me, and I've had some things that are similar
in that regard. It's just it's sort of a fascinating

(13:26):
idea to me because there do seem to be states
that occur that are profoundly different than my ordinary consciousness
um and and they are striking perhaps to the degree
in which they do differ, um, but the insights underneath them,
to your point, sort of over a period of time,

(13:47):
start to seem relatively commonplace or normal if you live
with the belief long enough. And that, I would argue
is one of spiritual teachers main values is you can
do you your spiritual teacher with this information, and they
can say things like, as they often do, oh yeah,
that's pretty normal, or or yeah that's don't don't let

(14:10):
them bother you. It's it's fine, or yeah so what
oh yeah, you had some insight? Well is that it? Yeah?
Anything else? Uh no? And then and then they send
you back out into your life. Right. So, one of
the things that you talk about in the book often

(14:31):
is a spiritual teacher that I kind of consider, at
least right now, one of the main people who I
learn a lot from his audio, Shanti, and he says
something similar to he says, don't do this, And you
talk about how it's a common thing that people do,
which is to really hand over a large degree of
our personal autonomy. Maybe the word that he would use

(14:54):
to a spiritual teacher, you say, many of the students
try to avoid the unavoidable pain of making our own decisions,
living into their consequences, and growing up. So we ask
our teachers to make our personal decisions for us. Should
I take this job or that job? Should I leave
my husband or stay with him and try and work
things out. Is it okay for me to eat meat, etcetera, etcetera. Well,

(15:18):
first of all, I want to give a thumbs up,
but a shout out to the shanty. He's he's got
a lot of wisdom, and I'm thrilled that you had
him on your show, actually twice, so that's that's great
the and I would certainly agree with him that one
mark of a spiritual teacher worth their soul is they

(15:40):
will not try to take from you or allow you
to hand over um any responsibilities and decisions that are yours.
Probably the clearest signs of the Charlotte, or someone who
shouldn't be a spiritual teacher is someone who either wants
something from you, or is trying to run your life
for you, or is trying to make decisions for you,

(16:02):
or tells you basically you need to get in line
here and do what everybody else is doing. That's almost
inevitably a sign that this person is potentially dangerous, because
after all, ultimately our job as human beings, of course
is to be decent human beings, but also to grow up,
to wise up, to open up, to be more fully human.

(16:23):
And there's no way to do that by handing over
our responsibilities and our decisions to some other person. Yeah,
this is an interesting concept for me because as I
was reviewing, I read your book previously. Um, we were
going to do the interview and we had to reschedule it,
and so I was going back through it all today
in the notes, and something occurred to me that hadn't

(16:44):
occurred to me before and thinking about this, and I
started to think about the concept of sponsors in a
A and it brought me back to thinking about how
that role can look like a lot of different things
in a depending on who's doing it, and a like
anywhere is likely to create hero figures, um or spiritual

(17:06):
teachers or extremely wise people, and how in sponsorship it's
always this. And I sponsored a lot of people and
was sponsored by people. There was this line that was
difficult because on one hand, you've got a person in
those cases like me. Take me at twenty four, and
I've been homeless and a heroin addict, I don't know

(17:26):
very much about living, and I have a track record
of disastrous decisions. So having somebody who doesn't necessarily take
all that and make all my decisions for me, but
somebody who's willing to maybe take a slightly heavier role
there than you might want. I wouldn't want that now
in my life, but at that time there was some

(17:47):
use in it. But I did ultimately hit a point
very quickly where I went like, I don't need somebody
to make all my decisions. I don't want somebody to
make all my decisions. But boy, I noticed in a
there were a lot of people that stayed there for
a long time that really did want that. You know.
Everything was like, well, I'm gonna ask my sponsor what
they think. I'm gonna ask my sponsor what they think,

(18:08):
and I think getting feedback is always a great idea.
After a while, it just sort of creeped me out
a little bit. This like I'm gonna run every decision
I make or everything I think by another person to
see what they think. And so I think that's endemic
to this, this question of working with a spiritual teacher
or a sponsor, because we are dealing with matters that

(18:29):
guidance is important and useful, right, and it's just like
how far does that guidance go and and what are
the limits on it. I don't think it's as black
and white as we might like it to be, but
I do agree with you that most often it's easy,
at least from the outside, to see the abuse of
that fantastic question. I'd like to speak to several parts
of it, and so full disclosure, I have written a

(18:52):
lot of recovery materials. As twelve we're talking about twelve
step material I've been in a twelve step recovery group
and a ghost written for a lot of twelve steps authors.
So I want to speak to both the twelve steps
and other things related to it. So, for example, the
twenty four year old who is caught in what twelve

(19:16):
step people will call stating thinking and doesn't really know
how to make some some basic decisions. There, it might
be necessary for the people who love him or her
to do an intervention, and that would be something completely
outside of what the sponsor would be at the center of.
So the sponsorship role might be a piece of what's
necessary at that particular place and time. That said it, yes,

(19:41):
there's always whatever. Someone has a leadership role, or a
mentoring role, or a sponsorship role, or a spiritual teaching role. Um,
they need to exercise their discernment very consistently to be
able to make sure that they are never putting their
desires or needs or concerns ahead of the student. They're
always got to be when service at the student. And meanwhile,

(20:02):
the student or the mentee or whomever to sponsor also
has to be exercising their own discernment. And in fact,
the word discernment, which I use a lot in both
of my books on spiritual teacher, I will give a
big shout out here to the twelve step programs because
they use that word discernment over and over and over,

(20:22):
and that is essentially building the the ability through getting
to know yourself, through paying attention through hard and sometimes
not so hard experience, being able to know whom to trust,
what to trust. We're back to this whole notion of
fear again, right, When do you trust fear? And when
do you not? When are you when is it appropriate?
Defeated and how much? And when is it not? Sense

(20:44):
of discernment is at the heart of all this, And
in both my books, just as in twelve step programs,
I encourage people to build that discernment. And that fits
very well with any spiritual tradition that has what some
I'm called a mystical component, where you're essentially challenged to
be fully prescent and fully engage, as opposed to check

(21:08):
out into interest state or to check out into mir metings.

(21:46):
And here's the rest of the interview with Scott Edelstein.
You write in the book at one point, all of
us who have spiritual teachers are sometimes tempted to treat
them as our surrogate parents. This is especially true when
we face great stress, pain, or uns certainty. And I
do think it's that that ladder piece that when we
face great stress, fear, or uncertainty, that we are in

(22:08):
need of more guidance. I think Discernment is the is
the key there. And part of I think what's in
that word is that discernment means you have to have
knowledge of the situation of the people involved in all that.
So we can't make some blanket statements because discernment really
is being able to take the things into consideration in
those moments. Well, I'd like to add a confession here

(22:29):
if I may, and that is because you bring up
the classic situation where we go, I can't trust myself
right now, and so I need to consult with someone else.
And I'm in that situation now. So I had fairly
recently that Steve Hagen on uh, Steve Hagen wrote Blues
and played in Simple Meditation. Now we're never a couple

(22:50):
of other books. He's a longtime friend. I vote his
meditation center, Dharma Field. I would consider him my teacher
as well as my friend. However, belonged to a synagogue
where we were. You know, I know the rabbi well.
So over the last year, things that are happening in
our world, in this country, in the world in general,

(23:12):
in this country in particular, have been completely involving the President,
United States Congress and so on, completely outside the realm
of anything I thought was even possible. I mean right now,
and I should add that today's date is July two
thousand eighteen, and right now the whole country is grappling

(23:34):
with the fact that it appears that the essentially the
entire political right has been played by Russian operatives. Now
that's something that would if if I wrote it in
a thriller, editors would go that ridiculous, will never publish
this novel. Yet that's what's happening. So this means I
have to be watching my own mind, my own situation,

(23:56):
because part of my brain is having to deal with
and every day were reality fits well beyond my imagination,
and what have I decided to do. I'm actually I'm
not going to Steve Hagan. Why Because for all I know,
he's a wonderful human being. I love him, he's a
great guy. Um, but he's no fan of of of

(24:16):
what's going on, and I'm actually worried And maybe maybe
he wouldn't be this way, but I'm worried, um that
will wind up commiserating about what a mess of countries it.
So I've decided I'm going to the Rabbi and saying
I'm coming here and I'm talking to you periodically for
half an hour, and your your job is to help
me keep my feet on the ground in my head

(24:36):
on straight. And for that I decided that he was
the better person. Might just be a friend, right to
make that decision. But that's a classic example of how
to reach out in the right way, at least, I hope,
the right way at the right time, to whoever the
right person is. That is a great example also of
you know, going to the right person for the right thing.

(24:57):
And Audi Ashanti used as an example of it would
be useful to think of your spiritual teacher in some
cases like you would a university professor. If you're in
a math class with a university professor, they know math,
and you go there for math, right, but you're probably
not going to ask that person what car you should
buy or you know, what girl you should date? Right,

(25:20):
you go to the right person for the right thing.
And and I think it's it's safe to say that
not every question we have is answered by a spiritual teacher.
That there are other experts in the world that we
can go to for for different things. And kind of
a point you make throughout the whole book is that
if we think that one person has the answer to everything,

(25:40):
we're probably putting that person on a pedestal that is
not healthy for them or us. I will add that
you brought up a really useful caveot, which is that
if you're thinking is way off, If, for example, um,
you're seriously down the road of a life threatening addiction
and so you're just not thinking sright, then it may

(26:02):
be useful to ask a spiritual teacher or almost anyone who,
you know, what what kind of car should I buy?
Should I buy this Maserati? I just got a raise
from eleven dollars an hour the twelve fifty an hour,
and the maseratis are on sale. You don't you know,
a spiritual teacher will probably be able to give as
good an answer as anyone else as hell milk, And

(26:24):
you might need it if you're if for some reason
they believe and they can see that you're thinking is
way way out of the law. Yep, I agree, And
I do think that that's what makes some of this
so confusing, is it's very difficult to peel apart spiritual
from emotional from mental from I mean, these things are
all tied together. And so it's not as simple as like,

(26:47):
oh well, okay, if it's case a, you ask this
person and for this, yes, that person. I'm I'm certainly
not insinuating that it's that simple. May I speak to
your use of the word spiritual there, because I think
you raised a really profound issue. This word spiritual has
done as a great service and a great disservice. So
first the service is it's reunited the secular and the religious,

(27:10):
which we split decades ago, and which we were foolish
to split. Um, we should have just become more discerning
about the two. So now supposedly things can be divided
into the religious and the secular, which is absurd. Thou
shalt not murder is not a merely religious concept, but

(27:32):
it surely is. It's in the Ten Commandments, but it's
also enshrined in secular law. It belongs in both, and
so much of the human codes of conduct belong in both.
So those those gots split out, I think, to our detriment,
and spirituality term manages to bring them back in. However,

(27:52):
it does so unfortunately, and this is now I'm going
to dissa a little bit. Um. It doesn't by watering
it down because the terms spirituality is very vague and
it's been co opted by lots of people. Some people
think that means talking to angels. The other thing it
means getting shivers going up your spine. Other people think
it means helping out at the local food shell. And

(28:15):
what of course it means, I would argue, if you're
going to put any meaning on it is the good wolf, kindness, bravery, love,
all those things. Well, by the way, a quick cooda
on fear, I neglected to say that bravery requires fear,
and so there's another example of how fear belongs to
both wolves. You cannot be brave if you're unafraid. When

(28:38):
a child runs down into the street in front of
a moving car because they don't know better, that is
hardly bravery. But when you run out in front of
that car to push the child out of the way
to save their life, that's bravery. And as you do so,
you may be scared to death, but you know it's
the right thing to do. Absolutely, yes, Courage require some

(29:01):
degree of fear, otherwise it's not really courage. Near the
end of the book, you say, and this just made
me laugh because it's just it's so dry and and
just a single sentence, and it's so obvious. But also
there's just something about you said sometimes spiritual study and
practice can be surprisingly boring. It's true, indeed, it is.

(29:21):
And what you're suggesting there is that this is a
fairly subtle thing. But a lot of people to get
into quote spirituality or study with a spiritual teaching because
what they really want is some kind of thrill, and
that can be everything from a kind of pseudo sexual
body sensation, you know, some kind of spiritual orgasm. Who

(29:43):
I want to feel the Combelini rise, Who I want
to feel this? I want to feel that? Or a
desire for some kind of big head exploding insight. And
so what they really want is to acquire some kind
of spiritual good or they might want some spiritual toys
to play with. I want the power to levitate and
the power to do this, or the power to do that.

(30:04):
And let me just say, really clearly, that's all bogus bullshit,
none of it is. I can tell you what spirituality
is not, and it's none of those things. And so
one of the things that happens is people go they
get very excited at first and either think they have
an idea of spiritual growth and they either feel like, Oh,

(30:25):
I'm getting smarter, I'm getting better, I'm getting this, I'm
getting that. And if there's anything that might typify growing
up in the quote spiritual unquote realm, it's beginning to
loosen your grip on the damn getting in the realm
of human connection and a human maturation and growing up.

(30:48):
It's not about getting. It's about giving, and it's about
doing things together. That's another area that it just makes

(31:25):
me think back to alcoholism and addiction, because you know,
even in a itself, it often talks about how that
alcohol is a substitute for a spiritual experience or a
spiritual life, and I think it is very easy to
think of spirituality as being something that can provide some

(31:49):
experience of being alive, like alcohol and drugs do, but
it does it in a very different way. The similarity
there is it's about being connected to things. I think
that is what at least at the heart of addiction
for me was was about being connected, and at the
heart of spirituality that is also the thing that I

(32:09):
think remains most essential and elemental to me, is to
be connected to life and it's various components, but I
also agree with you. More and more, I'm realizing that
the path of spirituality is one of subtraction rather than addition.
That's a really lovely way to put it. Subtraction rather

(32:29):
than addiction. If you don't mind, I would like to
encourage your listeners to sit with that for a while,
because Arts just said something deeply important, and it might
be the only time that happens for like the next
six or eight episodes, folks, so you might as well
give a sh There's actually two pieces to this that
I'd like to call out. The first is, yes, belonging,

(32:53):
whether the word is connecting or belonging. It is one
of our deepest, if not our very deepest human needs.
And that's why one of the reasons the twelve step
programs are so effective is that you're they don't work
for everybody, but they are a place to belong. Now,
that's also one reason why the National Rifle Association of

(33:14):
Ku Klux Klan continued because their place is to belong.
So belonging also requires some discernment. You know, you can
belong to good will organizations and you can belong to
bad will organizations. UM but that is one of the
defining characteristics often of what people call the spiritual quest
and of twelve Steps and recovery. But there's another one

(33:38):
that I'd like to also highlight, and that's the giving
up of all control, understanding that we are not in control.
That is also a hallmark of all steps, and it's
a hallmark of what goes by the name of spiritual
opening or spiritual development or whatnot. And in fact, my

(33:58):
own favorite book on recovery in the Twelve Steps is
called Recovery the Sacred Art by Rommy Shapiro. Rammy is
an ecumenical rabbi. He's the only rabbi I know of
who's had a piece he's written in best Buddhist writing
of the year. So he travels around the world. He's
he is a spiritual teacher. It's been a long time,

(34:18):
but he was a guest on this show, probably a
hundred and fifty episodes ago, which it's amazing to me
how long we've been doing this, but yes, he was.
He's out there, folks, if you want to find him,
and you can find him. Ramy is a recovering food addict.
I have eaten with him and I've watched. He's the
only person I've ever uh but watched to which the

(34:39):
phrase food seeking behavior erupted in my mind. I mean,
you could see he's a recovery addict. It's a wonderful book,
and it is not written for people who have some
identifiable um addiction what or what we would normally call
an addition. Uh Well, he said is we are all

(35:00):
addicted to control, and that that is a fundamental issue,
and that what we ultimately we all wind up, whether
we have a substance abuse issue, a supposed behavioral addiction,
or none of the above, we all wind up on
our knees at some point going I have no control.

(35:25):
I need God or the universe or a higher powers helper,
however you wanted to find that. And I would argue
that that is a defining characteristic of spirituality in all
traditions and outside of all traditions, and in recovery and
in growing up. I agree. I always caveat that with

(35:46):
the the idea of the Serenity prayer, which is the
recognition of trying to recognize what we can I don't
think the word is control. The word and the prayer
is actually what we can change, what we can influence.
And so for me it's been interesting because on one hand,
for most of my time and recovery and all that,

(36:08):
the lesson I needed most was not the one to accept,
but it was the one to have the courage to change,
because I had and still have a tendency sometimes to
just be like at effort right or just to let
things go. So for a lot of time for me,
it was about having the courage to to step in

(36:29):
and do the change. But lately, for me, what mostly
I've been working with is just the limits of that
of really realizing the difference between the ability to change,
the ability to influence, the ability to have effect. But
where that that does really stop short of the ability

(36:51):
to control, and really realizing the limits of action and
change and improvement and where that stuff just ends. I've
been I've been dealing with that a lot lately. And
then this notion of the ability to change really breaks
out into two uh seeming mirror images, but they're both
part of the same whole. The first is the ability

(37:14):
to UH set a goal follow it, which we Americans
are very familiar with because that's that's baked into our culture.
You've got you want to change, fine, determined to change,
work toward it, um envision at YadA, YadA. But they're
especially in spirituality. There's a more subtle but I would

(37:35):
argue typically more important and also typically more difficult aspect
to it, which is not so much the ability to
change yourself, where you grab yourself and haul yourself somewhere else,
but the willingness to be changed, where you open yourself
up to the complete unknown, knowing that you don't know
what's going to happen, don't know what the solution is,

(37:58):
don't know what the future will be. Just know that
where you are right now is untenable, and that you
ask for help in changing. Whether that help is with
what the twelve step programs call a higher power, whether
it's other even beings, and whether you don't even know.
But that willingness to be changed is I would argue

(38:19):
all important. I think it's really profound and beautiful. I
focus a lot, and I think a lot. You know,
the show is about the ability of us to change
and and to have a positive influence in the world
and on ourselves. But I think what you said there
is so important is that the willingness to be changed
by things other than our own will is really the

(38:42):
critical thing. So I'd like to bring this back to
spiritual teachers because this applies in a variety of ways.
First of all, someone who goes to a spiritual teacher
and says, I need to change, change me. The correct
answer from the spiritual teachers, you're right, you need to change.
I am not changing. That is not my job. But
what I can do is watch if you fall off

(39:03):
a tree limb, or you're going too far out on
a tree limb. I can tell you that if you
fall off and hurt yourself, I can help you back up,
back up again. You don't have to get up. There's
a lot of things that the spiritual teacher can do,
but they absolutely cannot change you and will not change you.
Um And if they think if they go, yeah, I'll
change you, then run hell away because you're dealing with

(39:24):
Charlotte and the predator or a narcissist or or somebody
who's not the real thing. Now, the other thing that
will often happen is the spiritual teacher. The spiritual teacher
will just say, if they're not good, oh follow this,
follow this program, one size fits all, and then you
will change in the right way. I would be also

(39:47):
very very careful of all these one size fits all situations.
On top of that, we can go people go to
spiritual teachers and say they want to change, but there's
a paradox built into that, which is, well, why aren't
you changing already? If I want a cup of coffee,
I will go get a cup of coffee. I'm not

(40:07):
going to to to stop telling people I want a
cup of coffee. Someday that's my goal. They will they
will start saying, well, go get your damn coffee. So
part of what a good spiritual teacher can do is
point out where the person is resisting the change that
they need, and they might say something about it um
or they might help the students wake up to what

(40:29):
they're actually doing, what they're saying versus what they're actually doing. Certainly,
they might teach a particular practice like meditation that can
be useful. But then that's it's not that they're doing
it's to make that change. It's just something helpful and supported.
And then the last thing that people can get caught
up in is um. People will go to a spiritual

(40:53):
teacher and say, am I changing? Am I better? Now?
I'm I am I, this, am I that, And often
the spiritual teaches job at that point is to say,
stop worrying about it. No, you're you're hoping. You're coming
to me and hoping for a grade of A in spirituality.
And a good teacher is not going to be handing

(41:14):
out that kind of candy. They'll just keep paying attention,
just keep watching, just keep living, just keep doing your best,
and I will try to keep you. I will help
you when you seem to be either going too far
straight or when you're lost. I might be able to
give you a little bit of guidance. That's wonderful. We're
nearing the very end of our time here. What I

(41:36):
did want to ask you to do real quick though,
and I don't remember where it is. I'll find it
and put it in the show notes. But you've got
an article somewhere and maybe you can remember where it is,
um And we're not going to go through it all
right now. But it's about things to bear in mind,
or questions to ask, or how to go to a
new spiritual center. If you're like the new person going

(41:56):
to a spiritual center, do you remember where you wrote
that and where that is? Yes? Well, actually, uh, I
wrote that in nineteen seventy nine or night, and I
sent that around from from magazine to magazine and magazine
no one would touch it, and then it took over.

(42:19):
I took I believe almost how many years with this advantage.
It took thirty six years or something like that before
someone would print it. It's now up online. It's called
when You're the New Kid at the Spiritual Center. I
think it's on in two or three publications. One of them,
I believe is The Edge, which I think would be
the Edge dot com. But it's also appears as the

(42:41):
appendix in the User's Guide to Spiritual Teachers. And so
it's a guy for someone who's showing up at a
spiritual organization that they're not familiar with for the first time.
You know, it's not like you're going to a new
Lutheran church. It might be a tradition you're utterly unfamiliar with,
or it might even be your own tradition. And you

(43:02):
might be a Catholic, but this is the first time
you've walked into a Cistercian monastery, for example, and you
don't don't know what do e'spect. So it's a brief,
very practical, very simple guy about what you do and
what not to do. Yeah, I thought it was really
useful as somebody who's wandered into more strange situations than
I can count. By just showing up at spiritual centers,

(43:23):
I'm pretty comfortable just walking in and seeing what happens,
but a lot of people get nervous, and I just
thought it was a very useful guy to kind of
just to help make that experience go a little easier. Well, Scott,
thank you so much for taking the time to come on.
I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed this conversation. Um,
it's been great. Thank you so much. Aaron, Okay, take

(43:44):
care all right, Well bye yea. If what you just
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(44:07):
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