https://medium.com/belover/the-guru-of-bad-vibes-651d51c9fda7
The guru of bad vibes
“He also severely abused his own senior students, employees, and volunteers — many of whom had devoted their lives to him. This needs to be reported for many reasons; not least in order to protect people from being victimized in the future.” At learning of the end of Reggie Ray’s Dharma Ocean community of Buddhist thinking, I’m trying to sort through the mountain of discussion of its central teacher, Reginald ‘Reggie’ Ray.
I think back on my many late night, starry walks listening to Ray’s audiobooks, Awakening the Heart, Somatic Descent, etc. They are guides to learning to listen to your body as a source of wisdom.
But I don’t need him to be a saint, whatever those are. I’d like to get some information about what he ‘did’ that’s upsetting by the high standards of gurus acting terribly. I’m having trouble. He makes this point in a letter he writes in reply. “Many have noted that in all of this, there is an absence of actual, concrete examples of spiritual or emotional abuse.”
What happened? It seems to be a #MeToo story without sex, a public shaming without specifics. I wonder if an undertone is that people are seeing the guru thing just isn’t working out anymore. It was never a great idea.
I re-read the sentence: “He also severely abused his own senior students, employees, and volunteers — many of whom had devoted their lives to him.”
‘Devoted their lives to him’? Maybe that was the problem.
He’s insensitive—tricky when it’s to transgender people—and seems to bear the hallmarks of ‘narcissism’. Bad vibes, bad reading of people, bad connections. What did one expect from a guru?
The story of Reggie Ray is the story of his own teacher, the famous Chögyam Trungpa, a Buddhist monk who grew up in Tibet, and in 1959, at age 22, escaped the Chinese invasion and came to the West. Every bit of his life was fascinating. Arriving in Scotland, a young David Bowie is briefly in his orbit. (An early Bowie song, “Silly Boy Blue,” with lines like “Child of Tibet, you’re a gift from the sun,” is probably about Trungpa.)
Trungpa goes rogue from the Buddhist system, and amid stages of what reads as massive PTSD, narrowly evades suicide, and spends the rest of his life doing it by alcohol consumption. Along the way, he changes the world. He revamped Buddhism for many, and infused spiritual dimensions into Pop Culture itself. As a teenager, Steve Jobs reads Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. To track Trungpa’s influence would be hard. He’s sort of everywhere.
And—as with Steve Jobs, David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg or most anyone touched by Trungpa—there’s a lot of epic bad behavior.
But the spiritual alternative was Christian clerics. Horrors they’d been doing for years started to be a bad look. That’s what we call progress—usually achieved by competition.
I still go through Trungpa’s collected works, remembering hearing religious concepts that, having grown up in Christian churches, I had never heard before. “Emotions are sacred; they should be regarded as real and obvious things that can teach us something.”
And emotions remain terribly difficult.
“Any hidden corners in our basic makeup have to be cleansed,” Trungpa writes. I’m not sure he ever that did. But I like that he said it?
Reggie Ray makes only vague references to his master’s “dark side.” But this public take-down of Ray now seems to be a larger effort to dismiss Trungpa from Buddhism. Ray seems to be helping out—with responses so vague as to suggest he’s not to the point of owning the situation.
“All the uncertainty, instability, and chaos created a vulnerability,” he writes.
Reading between the lines, I’m thinking he has a standard domineering white guy temper and an amazing ability to dress it up as diamond-like Buddhist insight. If it was me on the receiving end, I’d give it hard pass.
He writes in defense of himself, having some self-conception that his tart tongue is some kind of summit of spirituality.
In interpersonal encounters, it is clear and clean, often cutting through confusion and neurosis with surgical precision, in order to benefit beings. Many people have reflected that this quality is actually one of the main reasons they were attracted to me and my teaching in the first place. However, as with all the wisdoms, there is a neurotic side that can come off as impatience, irritation, and irascibility. Students are understandably somewhat wary of the awakened aspect, as I was with Trungpa Rinpoche, but most are able to step over themselves to receive the benefit of such clear and direct communication
Hard pass on that, thanks though. I’d have liked him to just come out and say that his mouth got ahead of him.
But this is interesting evidence that, after a lifetime of Buddhist practice, Ray is not reading situations very well, and often makes tricky situations worse with his commentary on them. It might also be further evidence that spiritual communities organized around gurus are simply a bad idea.
It’s a helpful suggestion that Ray’s voice in his audio teachings is a performance. But I should’ve known that? We don’t yet know how to be the images we’d try to teach.
The ‘charges’ against him don’t, I decide, describe anything that wouldn’t make an Evangelical pastor sound like he’s having a good day. Maybe for a Buddhist, that’s bad.
I’d like to think it’d become so for everyone.
The reported abuse involves incidents of a transphobic, homophobic, and racial nature, as well as spiritual abuse. This last included threatening individuals with “Vajra Hell”, considered the worst of all hells in Vajrayana Buddhism and populated by Vajrayana practitioners who have betrayed their vows. Reggie Ray has also been accused of gaslighting and spreading false rumors about students. Those who criticized Reggie Ray after leaving Dharma Ocean were shunned (i.e. current members of the Vajrasangha were discouraged from communicating with former members who had reported being abused or otherwise criticized Reggie).
Well, I mean, he’s a straight white American man. What did you expect?
Could we learn to stop giving others such power over ourselves? But we need to watch ourselves doing that before we can stop, I guess, and maybe Ray did that for his accusers.
I love a line by Bodhi Avinasha: “When you realize that someone is causing you distress, be grateful to that person for he is your teacher.”
You let them get to you. Why?
The take-away for me might be hopeful: that the human race is beginning to wake up from the idea of spiritual overlords ushering us into whatever heaven or nirvana we’ll attain. Of craving their approval, their blessing.
Bless yourself instead. The guru gig is a racket.
Trungpa will remain a guide to a guru-less future. This might, indeed, have been a possibility his self-destructive habits tried to anticipate. But how can you live without gurus?
How to not be owned, controlled, managed.
When we attempt to see ourselves without reference points, we may find ourselves in a situation of not knowing what to do. We may feel completely lost, and we may think that what we are trying to do is very strange indeed: “I can’t even begin. How can I do anything?” Then we might have an inkling of beginning at the beginning. Having to relate with the bewilderment of not knowing how to deal with ourselves without using reference points is getting closer to the truth. At the same time, we have not found the root of reality, if there is one at all.
I don’t know if he got very far, or if Ray got past that.
But it was a start, and a start is important.
The documentary Crazy Wisdom is on YouTube. It’s a start on the mystery of Trungpa, one of the least crazy of the Pop Culture gurus, actually. If you want a pure hit of it, you’ll still have to go seek out Osho or the Maharishi, or heaven forbid, Yogi Bhajan.
They had to be what they were. And hopefully, we have to wave goodbye on the way to something else.
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