“In the East, a guru never calls himself a guru.” —Marianne Williamson
We are bombarded these days by opportunities to transform our lives by attending on-line seminars sponsored by organizations like The Shift Network or Mind Valley Academy. They usually profess to have found the leading experts in energy healing, Super Operating Systems, chakra alignment, enneagram types, etc. The question is, how do we determine the real value and potential benefit each of these gurus may want to teach us.
Below is a simple (well, not so simple) scale to measure the effectiveness of gurus, leaders, and practitioners on different levels of effectiveness – or of ourselves for that matter.
All of us encounter a variety of stimuli that lead to a particular response. The stimulus can be as simple as a bell causing the classic salivation response in Pavlov’s dog. Or the stimulus can be as complex as a warning on global warming causing world governments to come together on a Global Climate Change Agreement. The stimulus can even reach esoteric dimensions when a deeply engrained trauma is overcome with a cosmic embrace or when the material becomes ethereal.
We know that each day will bring new stimuli and new responses. What this scale helps us to do is to understand the range of possibilities of what might occur between the stimulus and the response—from an unconscious philistine at level 1 to a super-conscious guru at level 7. It’s what happens between the stimulus and the response that makes the real difference.
Guru Gauging Scale*
7.0: Stimulus – Cosmic Processing – Response
6.0: Stimulus – Spiritual Processing – Response
5.0: Stimulus – Environmental Processing – Response
4.0: Stimulus – Organizational Processing – Response
3.0: Stimulus – Human Processing – Response
2.0: Stimulus – Discriminative Learning – Response
1.0: Stimulus – Conditioned Reacting – Response
Let me explain from the bottom up.
Response 1.0: When we react automatically or involuntarily to a particular stimulus, we are much like Pavlov’s dog. There is very little between the stimulus and the response beyond our conditioned or habitual behaviors. We are not choosing, we are not thinking, and we are not exploring our feelings. We are simply reacting. There is no consciousness at this level…and it’s where most of humanity operates.
Response 2.0: When we review the repertoire of responses we have learned over time before we respond to a given stimulus, we are engaging in discriminative learning. The stimulus occurs, we think about the choices that might be most appropriate, and we respond accordingly based on past experience. At this level, we are more conscious about lessons learned and skills acquired in the past, but we aren’t creating any new responses to changing conditions or standards. For example, when someone yells at me, I can yell back or I can take a deep breath. I decide which response would yield the best results. The move from a level 1 automaton to a level 2 learner is the first step a person, who wants to grow, must make.
Response 3.0: When we create a new response to a given stimulus, we are engaged in human processing. We let the information in, we think innovatively about it, and we tailor our response to satisfy the requirements of the situation. At this level, we are conscious about whether our ideas are fresh and new or whether we are simply hoping that old responses will solve new problems. For example, instead of choosing Yoga, meditation, or exercise as a way to handle a stressful situation, we may choose to re-frame the problem in a way that frees us to find entirely new solutions. Being able to respond at level 3.0 is a prerequisite for moving up the scale and discovering what truly makes us human.
Response 4.0: When we take into account the organizational or situational context in which a particular stimulus occurs, we are expanding our response options. We consider all elements of the problem, the purpose we are trying to achieve, the processes we might employ to get there, and the cultural norms we will need to deal with in order to be successful. This level of processing requires higher order skills. With organizational processing, we understand that the content and process for our individual responses is not enough. We must consider the context as well.
Response 5.0: When we broaden our perspective to include the network of relationships involved in any substantive and systemic response to a particular stimulus, we are seeking to create an interdependent web of constituents and looking to find grow-grow solutions. For example, any viable effort to address global warming requires the active collaboration of governments, corporations, educational institutions, and local community organizing initiatives. This level of processing requires deep knowledge and broad skills as well as the willingness to collaborate.
Response 6.0: When we factor into our responses the spiritual requirements to implement a solution to a particular stimulus, we need to read accurately how much the guru/practitioner values growth and how much endowed and embodied spiritual energy they have in their heart and soul. We need to determine if the primary values are self-aggrandizement, self-actualization, or selfless service to humanity. As Lao Tzu suggests, “when a person crowns himself as a guru, he is not.” At level 6.0, a spiritual practitioner needs to have a growth orientation, a pure purpose, and an abundant aura of healing energy. Gurus typically “bill” themselves as at least 6.0, but rarely fill the bill.
Response 7.0: Responding at this level requires deep mastery of healing skills and a perspective that goes beyond planet earth. It is the ability to tap into universal energy and transform trauma into a joyful and harmonious dance with life. At this level, we can learn to find a bounce in our step and music in our veins as we walk down the street with compassion in our heart. We may even experience the joy of dancing with others with ecstatic energy. We get a glimpse of what it feels like at this level when we are a vital part of a larger whole, whether it’s joining the women’s march or participating in Earth Day. We celebrate our wholeness as a community and our connection with all of humanity. With cosmic consciousness, we rejoice in the dance of the stars and the planets in our galaxy. We welcome a Divine Embrace and feel at One with All. Energy’s Way (www.energysway.com) is all about this dance.
So, as we evaluate gurus, leaders, and practitioners, we need to ask at what level on this scale are they really operating. Are they putting new names on old practices or are they creating something truly new, thus empowering us to create newness on our own? Are they taking into account organizational and environmental factors or are they simply teaching a slick content or a fancy process without due consideration of the context in which new skills need to be applied?
Do they truly value growth and embody energy, or do they simply inflate their egos and their bank accounts through manipulative marketing with no substance behind it?
In short, are they commercializing, innovating, or generating new models for healing and harmony? Indeed, do they offer a Conduit for the Cosmos or are they another incarnation of the Wizard of Oz?
Making accurate discriminations on level of functioning is not an easy task. Many appeals are tantalizing but empty. Many require real work but offer true possibility for growth. Choose wisely.
In summary, those of us on the path to spiritual growth are struggling to be more aware of our level 1 behaviors, to broaden our repertoire of level 2 behaviors, and to improve our level 3, 4, and 5 skills. People who claim to be “gurus” or “leading experts” present themselves at levels 6, and 7, but few have the substance to back up their claims. Using this scale, you can do a better job of tuning into their real level of radiant energy and healing power. You not only can guage the guru’s real level of functioning, but you can also measure your own spiritual growth.
For fun, you may want to consider the following questions:
- Who is your guru? Why? Where is he or she on the scale?
- How would you rate these world leaders on the scale: Barack Obama? Martin Luther King? Donald Trump? Angela Merkel? Why?
- How would you rate yourself on the scale? What is your aspirational goal on the scale? Why? What would happen if you moved up the scale?
Care to comment?
*scale adapted from Carkhuff Thinking Systems
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Also published on Medium.
Oh Rick, you ever true blood brother, side by side, going forward. Thanks for your thoughts and for including Energy’s Way. To your readers, who wish to read a bit on Energy’s Way without having to click elsewhere, here’s my latest post. I am allied with you in the idea that good teaching offers experience to try, not doctrines to swallow whole. So this is in the spirit of scientific method (not dogma), as in “don’t believe, test and see.”
Energy’s Way – A Way of Ways
What? Experience (Think, Feel, Enact, Enjoy) Cosmic Being
Why? Vastly Boost the Good You Do (Good work = energy work)
How? Revive and Refine Your Inner Einstein
– Channel the Cosmic Choreography of Crawling into All of Life
– Start with Minutes Daily of Gentle Head-to-toe Undulating as You Sit, Anywhere, Anytime
Here’s the crux: what Einstein laid out in a math formula in 1915 you were already onto intuitively when you first crawled. You weren’t aware of knowing then but you knew. And precisely this knowing can be revived and drawn on to radically enhance all other paths to higher development.
The promise? To soar your ability to cultivate wise, loving, potent joy way beyond what traditional practices alone make possible.
Now please hang in: I need more than a few sound bites to tease this out and share what has emerged from a half century of seeking.
Energy’s Way holds immense potential for furthering the great changes in our lives and world in this time.
Let’s start by noting that official reality trivializes our earliest accomplishments. Standard explanations reduce crawling by attributing it to piecemeal causes–brain firings and bio-mechanics, selected through random mutation for survival value in the “happy accident” of an exclusively “bottom-up” view of evolution.
But observe carefully and you may enter into a deeper, richer, and far more encompassing understanding–one that includes the beautiful and good along with the true.
Crawling unfolds as nothing less than a dance. We begin with learning to roll over, sit, rise on all fours, and then undulate forward. We enter into an elaborate, precise, and elegant coordination of trillions of cells, two to three hundred muscles and 13 major joints (2 each of ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists and then head on neck). See the picture below.
This dance harmonizes with patterns now known to arise in all energy fields from the tiny to the huge. And the pattern is what Einstein “saw into” with General Relativity–the universe is curved, like a “fat bagel,” and research since has confirmed that energy passes through all such fields in figure-8 paths. Now notice the diagram (ignore the writing).
Figure-8-ing with hips going one way, shoulders another, make for the moves of crawling. People studying kinesthetics have known about these “contra-lateral” dynamics for a long time. Again, the standard explanations reduce it to a matter of brain hemisphere contrasts.
But what has yet to be widely seen let alone appreciated is the intimate link with cosmic energy fields. Or with the way these “moves” also arise in life and culture in “transposed” versions like a musical tune in different keys.
Here are a few examples:
Psychological insights invariably carry such Figure-8 or reflexive logic–as we discover that what’s ‘out there’ or upsetting us about someone else is invariably shaped and colored by what we’re projecting.
Technical disciplines like laser light photography have turned up such logic as “each part includes the whole that infuses itself into each part” of holograms. The same applies to the new mathematics called fractals or patterns that recur in an endless series of different scales and also to the “recursive structure” common in computer programming.
Succinct statements of higher truth often are stated in such turning-back-on-themselves articulations: “as above so below” and “whatever goes around comes around” and “giving is receiving.”
And we can peel open the spiritual structure of prayer to find the same loop-de-loop logic. All prayerful blessings in any and all traditions at once . . .
(1) draw on the ultimate Source of blessing,
(2) extend thanks from receiver to Source, and
(3) renew “one-from-the-other-and-back” ultimate relating as core dialogue of a devout life.
All of this begs for a fundamental revision in the ways we understand who we are. Try this alternative:
We come into life and find ourselves like aspiring musicians in front of a piano, picking out a tune, later putting together chords, and eventually able to play them together.
We “hear” by “drawing in” the music psychically, including songs we compose originally, or simply improvise. And we “can tell” when they “sound right.”
Every performing art is in some sense dance. This is self-evident if you let a performance by a fine musician or actor wash over you. And art imitates life most basically in that life itself is also performance art.
So let us recognize each other as born artists of life, gifted with abilities to creatively attune to and improvise in the midst of cosmic musical dance, from early in our lives.
And once we consider that cosmic energy is the ultimate musical dancing then ancient universal wisdom as to our cosmic stature makes sense.
We are conceived as self-performing instruments for “playing” utterly unique but endlessly related renditions from cosmic resources into our lives on this plane.
So we intuit in some way from early on what Einstein managed to lay out mathematically. His work is simply an instance of someone with extraordinary talents being able to lift out and express a genius native to us all.
The discovery of a lifetime I’m passing on is the wonder of purposefully, awaredly cultivating in mature adulthood the physical-mental-spiritual dynamics originally conceived into us.
Adding our understanding and appreciating moment to moment what we’re engaging in boosts the energetic benefits all the more.
Now, “don’t believe, test and see.” All I offer is in the spirit of the best art, spiritual discipline and scientific method: check out by exploring this experience–for you to think, feel, enact and enjoy–and see what you discover for yourself.
Free basic instructions at energysway.com or watch this space. I’ll share more as we go.
Thanks Artie for your on-going support and your “beyond wise” words. The reason I placed Energy’s Way at the top of the scale for Gauging Gurus is because you combine the best of art, spiritual discipline, and scientific method. I hope my readers will benefit from your discoveries and theirs.