"From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents.

From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks.

From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality.

From fifty-five on, she needs good cash."

Sophie Tucker

Phases is a concept that allows for your wildest flights of imagination and connivery. This book for example, is a study in how to use the concept of phases. Hidden in the title of the book is the word "Becoming." I could have titled this book How To Be A Modern Guru. But early in my Guru practice I discovered the Phantastic Phantasia of Phases.

You can't just be a Modern Guru, as though it's something you merely have to Realize you are. No! Modern Guruhood, like anything Wonderful, requires that you slowly climb from being an ordinary person to Become a Guru - in slow, orderly phases.

Your Teaching Programme should be described in terms of Phases. Explain to your students that their study necessarily passes through such stages as the Occult Phase, the Intellectual Phase, the Gardening Phase, the Emotional Catharsis Phase, and the Home-Made Ice Cream Phase. This enables you to do what you would do anyway, that is, pattern your teaching after whatever mood happens to strike you that day. These abrupt changes can now be explained as Phases.

Impress on your disciples that they must not get sot in one pattern - hence the absolute necessity of Phases. Meanwhile, if you happen to be reading something that turns you on, you can put a note on the Centrum bulletin board that the study Programme is entering a Marvel Comics Phase or a Hustler Magazine Phase. Play with each phase until you get turned onto some other diversion.

Structure every part of your Teaching Programme in terms of phases. For example, you might adapt my Phase explanation of how students approach the Teaching:

Phase - 1: Hell: Having Heard of Teaching Programme and Rejected It (perhaps even sneering at it)

Phase 1: Death or Sleep: Not Having Heard of Teaching Programme

Phase 2: Hope: Hearing of Teaching Programme

Phase 3: Start: Having Heard of Teaching Programme and Paying Fee

Phase 4: Hard Times: The Fee-Paid Student Enters the First Halcyon Days

Phase 5: Slough of Despond: "As the Sinner is Awakened by His Lost Condition, There Arises in His Soul Many Fears, and Doubts, and Discouraging Apprehensions..."

Phase 6: Conversion: The Awakening of Transcendental Consciousness and Increasing Commitment to the Programme (hike in fee)

Phase 7: Purification: Cleansing the Powers of Perception, Distinguishing Between Pseudo-gurus and Real Gurus

Phase 8: Sacrum Commercium: Student Now Pays Study Fee and Matriculation Fee for School for Disciples

Phase 9: Beginning of Illumination: Greater Appreciation of the Teaching Programme and Admission to the School for Gurus

Phase 10 and Beyond: Nirvana. Satori, Salvation, and Renewed Sexual Potency (For Advanced Students Only)

You must fight the Noxious Misinterpretation in some disciples' heads that there is a phase where they actually stop needing you, their Guru. The No Longer Needing Your Guru Phase, you explain, is a delusion and a snare - a temptation by evil forces.

Your customers will inevitably come to you dependent on certain things and people. In fact, you hook them by knowing just what things they're dependent on. Today's would-be customer is addicted, for example, to Excitement, the need to Join a Moving Band-Wagon, and the need for someone to answer all his Imponderable Questions for him. Playing on these obsessions you manipulate him into your Programme.

But you'll soon discover that he's dependent on several other things as well: acceptance by his friends or family, absolute slothfulness, and a sense of self-importance. You will have to transfer his dependence from himself and his family to You. It is your approval, acceptance, and smile that he must psychically and physically Crave. If you find someone is still exercising influence over your disciples, make your disciple break off any association with that person - no matter who (even if it's her hair dresser). You must now become his Whole World. After all, whose disciple is she, anyway?

People are now completely hooked on Slothfulness - their half-thinking and confused argufying , and their sloppy, shoddy, non-work. Most of the hard work going on today is the brilliant creativeness people generate in trying to avoid work. Use this dependence on Slothfulness for your own purposes. Replace the disciple's old non-thinking and confused argufying with the New Thinking and Clear Believing Phase of your Programme. That is, keep the same mental tendencies going in the disciple, but give it a new name. The same with her old patterns of non-work; give it the new name of Super-Effort. Of course, the work they do for you around the Centrum MUST be done well, but if you've got them hooked on your Personal Approval, persistent screaming at them should do the trick.

There is one major Pitfall you must avoid in this entire operation. When making the disciple in-dependent of some old dependency, be sure not to make him independent in general - or he won't be dependent on You. The Guru-Dependency Phase, you explain on alternate Saturdays, is a never-ending Phase.

Nothing gives the customer the Sense of Belonging so well as an appropriate Title - relative to the Phase she's in. He can thus tell her friends he's an Arch Deacon or a Black Monk - some mysterious nomenclature with which she Identifies. I try to connect the student's duties with his or her Title - all in an ascending Order of Phases:

1. Mendicant - does all the sewing
2. Lay Brother - lazy novitiate
3. Servant of the Servants of the Most High - Chief Factotum
4. Friar - cook
5. Metropolitan - urban propagandist
6. Scribe - secretary and typist
7. Sexton - personal secretary (see Sister Superior)
8. Hierophant - personnel director
9. Palmer - greets guests
10. Novice - female trainee for Sister Superior
11. Sister Superior - Guru's present favorite
12. Trappist - advanced disciple, skilled in hooking customers
13. Brother Confessor - one who listens for others secretly criticizing Guru
14. Elder - anyone who stays in the Programme over six moths
15. Pundit - advanced disciples who can tell jokes similar to the Guru's