When a spiritual teacher misbehaves, people who previously regarded themselves as their students find it hard to come to terms with the shift in their own perception. Indeed for some people a teacher or mentor misbehaving can be quite traumatic. There will always be particular circumstances and contexts that make every case different. However I believe, there is an underlying similarity.
For me the explanation that helped me understand the phenomena of misbehaving spiritual teachers was a deeper understanding of adult development and the separate lines of development. However for some people this explanation is insufficient – they are still left with a deep sense of hurt and disbelief that causes them to reject most of what the spiritual teacher previously stood for. I suspect that this is because they have not examined the assumptions they made about the person when they accepted them as a spiritual teacher or mentor.
For any teacher-student relationship to work the student has to regard themselves as in some sense lacking in what the teacher is offering. The teacher is elevated to someone who knows, someone who can assist me, someone who is superior in some sense. When what the teacher is offering is supervision in gymnastics, or mentoring in mathematics or assistance in learning a foreign language the sense of superiority/inferiority involved in the relationship is clearly defined. This teacher knows more about gymnastics, or mathematics, or Arabic than I do. But when the person is offering spiritual guidance the situation is not as clear; indeed I think it is murky and coloured by historical examples and unspoken assumptions about what “spiritual” means.
One of the common assumptions is that a spiritual teacher will not have an unconscious as normal people do. And even if they do have an unconscious it will be something they are in control of. (Similar assumptions are also often made about therapists.) I obviously do not know for certain, but I think that if someone is in a human body they will have an unconscious – which means that there are aspects of their mind that they know nothing about and which are likely to influence their behaviour without their knowledge. One of the most striking things about behaviour controlled by an individual’s unconscious is that the individual will have a perfectly rational explanation for their behaviour that satisfies them. It is only when one discovers this for oneself that the significance of the rational explanation covering an unconscious motive can really be appreciated. Each and every person has stories that justify their behaviour when in fact most of it is being determined by unconscious forces and desires. That this happens to spiritual teachers (and therapists) is therefore to be expected. It is not that all spiritual teachers are setting out to deceive their students. The reason why they misbehave is because they have an unconscious and they have believed the positive projections from their students and ceased to be vigilant and use tools and processes to find out what their unconscious is up to (see also Uncover your unconscious.).
I obviously have no idea at all whether any of this applies to the historical examples that conditioned my own assumptions about spiritual teachers. Did Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tsu, Bassui, Dogen or Rumi have unconscious motives of which they were ignorant? It would not have helped the dissemination of Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Zen or Sufism to have included any deficiencies in these historical teachers. Instead they are held up as being perfect. And they may have been. But the spiritual teachers of today need not be in that elite category. They may have ready access to the Divine, or discovered a process that helps students to have realisations. They may have had powerful experiences that left them able to perceive the spiritual at work in the world. They may be inspired preachers or have the ability to channel cosmic wisdom. None of these attributes says anything about whether they have an unconscious and whether they know anything about what it is up to in their life. And when it comes to misbehaving this is the crucial question.
A Master's Path 