Understanding the Guru Function and the Legacy of Sexual Abuse | Mark Whitwell

Clearly, we have drifted a long way from the indigenous, non-hierarchical wisdom cultures of Yoga in which the Guru function arose.

The word today is associated with the very worst confluence of male power structure, hierarchy, sexual abuse, and religious/spiritual cultism. Most people run a mile if they hear the word ‘Guru,’ and rightly so.

The disempowering structure of guruism across both the East and the West is clear for all to see: bands of loyal followers, self-proclaimed God-realization, political influence, special clothing, and extreme wealth accumulation.

Always, there is a trail of victims — those who have suffered sexual, physical or psychological abuse within the presumption of being second to the ‘perfect person; what U.G. Krishnamurti called “the social dynamic of disempowerment.” It has created dreadful damage to human life.

Sadly, civilization has been built upon this model: the axiom of patriarchal culture is the idea that someone of special social status or authority (“the knower”) holds knowledge that you don’t have yet. Supposedly lacking in some essential understanding about Life, innocent people become “seekers,” “cultic followers,” who visit so-called Gurus in an attempt to get that knowledge.

Arbitrary and decontextualized methods of yoga and meditation are endorsed by gurus as the method to attain shadowy future states of perfection. The gullibility and suffering of the public is exploited: mantras are commodified and sold; yoga sequences are branded; people are seduced by the hoax of enlightenment and stuck on the rollercoaster ride of highs and lows that is the life of the spiritual seeker.

My teacher Desikachar was highly critical of the spiritual business of India; of the celebrity gurus; of the touristic merchandising of Vedic wisdom; of ‘Gurus’ who use siddhis as a marketing tool to make money.

Whilst Westerners may find it easy to be critical of Indian guruism, it is equally present in the West albeit in a different form.

“In the West,” Desikachar once commented. “Whilst they don’t accept authority, they would like to be the authority.”

And so, in our modern world, the word ‘Guru’ has become toxified: a descriptor of a patriarch, a sexual abuser, a person to avoid at all costs.

But, is there an alternative history to the Guru function? Where did the word come from? And can we recover in the tradition of Guru anything worth keeping?

In the ancient world of Veda, in which Yoga was the mother’s milk of culture, the Guru was not worshipped, but regarded simply as the function of Mother Nature’s nurturing in local community.

There were no temples to Guru; they were not seen as an authority; and neither were they identified with their function in a social or personal way.

“He who says he is a Guru is not a Guru” — T. Krishnamacharya.

The whole point of the Guru function, and the wisdom culture surrounding, was for the shishya’s (student’s) liberation. When Moksha happened the Guru function dissolved. A relationship of gratitude in dear friendship was all that remained.

Moksha was not the phenomena of rarified perfect people who gathered followers within power structures: a thought-structure that implies all others are not perfect.

Moksha is in fact the birthright and intrinsic brightness of all people. Moksha is not an attainment but the natural bloom of intelligence, beauty, harmony and power that inheres to Life Itself, yours and mine.

The Guru navigates a paradox: there is, in fact, no need for a teaching. Life is looking after you perfectly. We are all already in the natural state. The ‘teaching’ is only a conversation between two friends during which the culturally implanted ideas of separation, of lack, of less than or more than, are hashed out and discarded.

“You have to be saved from the idea that you have to be saved” — said my friend U.G. Krishnamurti.

The true Guru points out the non-necessity of the search; the non-necessity of the desire to realize God; the non-necessity of trying to become enlightened; or get connected.

They help us see that there is no need to get closer to God or to Guru; the form of the Guru is your own form; and his or her embodiment is identical to your own.

The word Guru means “heavy,” — it is a heavy intervention into the life of another to interrupt the perpetuating thought-structures of patriarchal enslavement; it is a heavy intervention to help another be free; it is a heavy thing to be in relationship with one who is not obstructed in body or mind from the powers of creation.

We can sense here a rift running through the word itself — a tug of war, as it were, between two completely different understandings of Guru. On the one hand, Guru has come to mean a figure who wields spiritual authority to entrench hierarchy, support their delusions of superiority, and entrain followers in a social dynamic of dependence and financial enslavement.

On the other hand, when we take the time to excavate the traditional meaning of the word and situate it within a non-hierarchical wisdom framework, the word Guru is precisely an intervention into patriarchal culture — the Guru ends the presumption of hierarchy; the Guru empowers their student; the Guru is “no more than a friend, and no less.”

In my life I hope to purify four words: God, Yoga, Sex, and Guru; four words that have been thoroughly toxified by civilization and made useless to our lives.

Each of these words is run through with multiple meanings however, and beneath the perversions of our time there is to be found a completely positive, luminous, and sincere set of meanings.

We recently celebrated Guru Purnima, a day in which we acknowledge what our true Gurus have given to humanity.

We do our best to repair the psychological, physical and sexual abuse that has been enacted under the word, and bring forth an alternative culture of love, care and friendship in local community.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.