The Tempted Guru

By Don Crawford

The emotionally-challenged old man walked wearily to his small rooms at the Esalen Institute south of Carmel. The Institute was an old motel which had been converted into a center for conferences and workshops by New Age professionals, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area. The old man knew most of the teachings were contrived artifices. True Siddhi powers came only to those achieving the Third Spiritual Initiation.

Some of the presenters at the Institute included Fritz Perls, offering daily workshops in Gestalt Therapy; Eric Berne, who came on weekends to provide training in Transactional Analysis; and many others.

One instructor taught Astral Projection, where, in a self-induced trance, the consciousness leaves the physical body and travels through time and space. "The experience is similar to the 'near-death experience'," he told his students.

An ambitious young woman claimed to teach Levitation, explaining that was how Jesus walked on water. "Everything in the universe is energy and nothing but energy. With great effort and long practice, a student can learn to upgrade the energy vibrations of his body. The higher the level of vibrations, the less solid the human form becomes. Once it attains a vibratory rate in the realm of gas, the body ascends, like a helium balloon."

The old man felt worn-out after a two-hour session of imparting his Buddha teachings. It wasn't the teachings themselves that taxed all his resources but the attitude of some of the young women who attended his workshop. The people who enrolled were supposedly interested in learning the Buddha's "eight-fold path" and the "four noble truths" to overcome passion and desire and reach nirvana while here on earth.

After drinking his green tea, he closed his eyes, rested his head on a hard pillow and concentrated on life in the heavenly Deveshan. Too often these meditations were rudely disrupted by the intrusion of involuntary mental images of the shapely, tanned legs and short dresses of his young students, who he believed purposely tried to bedevil him in order to convince themselves of his authenticity. Every day some young women would expose their panties while crossing their legs or trying to sit in a lotus position in attire totally inappropriate for the occasion.

His mind struggled to fight off these intrusions while attempting to compose and still his thoughts. He had to continuously call forth strong images of Mahatma Gandhi, whose habit was having two young beautiful women at his side at all times in order to overcome all earthly desires. The old man often wondered how successful Gandhi was in fending off such obvious temptations. He tried to put himself in that position and wondered if he could resist such temptation.