Links for Monday
March 4, 2024
I’ve been thinking about the student-teacher relationship recently and so of course I was drawn to this article on self-help guru Jay Shetty. Compared to other gurus, he doesn’t seem all that bad. No accounts of abuse or theft, just some murkiness around his origin story, light plagiarism and some evidence of a money-making focus. I suppose if you are going to do deity yoga, any sufficiently powerful mental archetype could work. Why not some self-help person? In some ways it’s easier to have a parasocial relationship with some online guru than to encounter the real complexity of facing another person1. Seems like the latter can be high risk / high reward. It’s understandable that so many Buddhist teachers want to be more like coaches, and there’s a part of me that feels like something precious is being lost. I’m going to write more about this topic - risk taking in spiritual practice - soon.
A (hopefully unrelated) thread where Michael Taft asks people about the best shadow work programs out there. I hadn’t heard of most of these. Curious what folks’ experiences with some of these are like.
“Recovery [from trauma] can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In renewed connections with other people, the survivor recreates the psychological faculties damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience.” - Judith Herman (h/t this tweet). The more I practice, the more the locus becomes relational.
Not going to comment on AI risk, but this was a fascinating exchange between two prominent folks on different sides of the issue. There’s so much in here — bigness/smallness in pursuit of the good, the right goals of the spiritual path and more. I found myself in agreement and disagreement with both of them. I do agree that the core of these issues is spiritual in nature.
Half-joking. If you are going to do it, it’s certainly likely better to use an online guru as an Icon from afar than from nearby.