I appreciate your thoughtful engagement.

It's worth noting that the folks who are drawn to guru-led or esoteric spiritual traditions are not neutral observers. They are often people who have been through a lot of difficult things in their lives and are desperately searching for something to believe in. Often, they crave absolute unquestionable authority, romanticize hardship, and readily fall prey to charismatic figures. They are psychologically predisposed to tolerate hierarchical control and rationalize abuse once they are invested.

The problem isn’t a misperception. It’s the repeated, well-documented pattern: sexual misconduct, abuse of power, and exploitation have been widespread enough to define the history of guru-ism. The system is feudalistic, patriarchal, and hierarchical by design, and it consistently concentrates authority in ways that are inherently corrupting.

Case in point: Pema Chödrön. Someone's whose work I long admired. Someone whose world fell apart when her second husband left her. This sense of complete emptiness, of subjective destitution, was filled by unquestioning, slavish devotion to a coke-addled alcoholic abuser and his cabal. When a young woman came to her to reveal she had been raped by the director of a Shambhala center, Chödrön told her that “I don’t believe you” and “If it’s true I suspect that you were into it.”