Ch. 14
Disciple Illusions/Delusions

      Now we deal with a most sensitive area: the unrealistic, deluded, presumptuous state of mind students are likely to develop during their Learning. It is of the utmost importance that you recognize these attitudes immediately to prevent their inherently destructive nature from undoing any progress you have made in getting your disciples to see things Your Way.

      Once recognized, these illusions/delusions must be stamped out mercilessly if you are to have peace. If left to fester, they will not only make your other disciples difficult to control, they will make your life a living hell, with the insistence of their unreasonable (and possibly unspeakable) demands.

      Primary among disciple illusions/delusions is that of assuming you have been waiting for him to appear so that she can be groomed to assume your Cloak of Authority, while you fade gracefully and appreciatively into oblivion.

      Even though you make it a point to impress on them your unassailable Greatness and their comparative worthlessness, their delusions of grander, being very tenacious hallucinations, will be difficult to dislodge. It's best dealt with by assuming an air of Studied Indifference.

      When she is trying to impress you and/or your disciples with his knowledge and grasp of what you are doing, you can effectively counter with remarks such as: "Oh, yeah?" spoken with an obvious note of hostile boredom. You must never, of course, actively encourage such potential usurpers by appearing to be interested in their idle prattle. On the contrary, take any opportunity of identifying such behavior as a signal to suggest she perform some onerous job, such as waxing the kitchen floor linoleum. He will eventually get the idea.

      Another very common delusion is that of thinking he is qualified to learn your innermost secrets by being told them, little understanding or appreciating the fact that such knowledge is not transmittable in ordinary language.

      This sort of delusion must be handled very carefully or you might wind up telling her more than he is qualified to know, making her a danger not only to himself, but to others as well. Point out to her that the less he knows of your motives and methods, the less chance she has of letting some potentially dangerous bit of information slip out. This will inflate him with a sense of importance and make her more tractable. Keep stressing that he must learn by experience.

      Place a permanent sign on your Centrum wall:

Understanding can be acquired only by actual participation in the reality.

     

By not responding to her undermining remarks (except during your rants while teaching) and by merely pointing to the sign, you will not have to tell him anything and thus effectively keep her in a constant state of mystification (which is what most mysticism is all about anyway).

      One of the real trouble-maker delusions is the "If only........." sort of delusion. "If only we had a corn picking machine to pick our one row of corn." The delusion here is that trying to figure out a better way of doing things is what the Guru wants. Such disguised carping gives the student an excuse to avoid his share of the dirty work by convincing herself that there is a more capital-intensive way to do everything.

      He will spend most of her time and energy worrying and making plans to get the necessary equipment to do it the easy way, while the other disciples are, meanwhile, grudgingly assuming his share of the work. By the time she has the thing all figured out, the job is done, and he is ready to start worrying about how to make picking the two rows of beans easier. She is not really doing anything, just theorizing about a better way to do mind-destroying physical labor through the use of advanced technology.

      A sure-fire way to deal with problems of this nature is to avoid becoming involved with people of this sort in the first place. If this fails (because of a faulty screening process), and you find you have one disciple doing "imaginary" work while the others are busy typing, cleaning, mopping, cooking, waxing, and all those chores which you would otherwise have to, the only solution is to shame him into working.

     You can best subvert this non-doing virus in your disciples by relating to them this original tale I use in my own practice:

The Tradition Called Running

There once was a group of men and women who knew what life was all about, from whence man came and to what he was destined. They also had the ability to teach this knowledge through the symbology and activity of running. Among other effects, running was a means of transportation and communication and it was a training in mental and physical qualities. To be meaningful running required a purpose and it produced a coordination of many human capacities. So their teaching came to be called Running.

After this group all passed away, their disciples for a time continued to teach the original principles and processes. But, inevitably, other extraneous and distorting elements soon began to creep in - because some of the disciples did not understand the essence of what the original teachers had done. Running was now accompanied by the ritual of naming all those persons with whom one had previously run. This ritual was developed to remind the latter-day students that the original disciples had, after all, actually run with the Original Teachers themselves!

     Several generations and a few Dark Ages later - after the entire original system of Running had been lost from the world's literature and understanding - "Running" came to be associated with the mere rehearsal of the names of the line of teachers and a ritualized standing with legs outstretching in a "running" position. No longer was any real running carried on, in fact almost no one had any conception of what running was. The rehearsal of names and standing in a running position now came to be taught as "Running." Its teachers claimed that it resulted in something mysterious called "muscle tone."

     For a time there was a faddish interest in "running," with new and different ways of standing and new and different lists of names which were now repeated in Aramaic! Then the fad died out except for a fossilized misinterpretation of it which became an academic discipline and a new religion named Standing.