"Well, if I called the wrong number,

Why did you answer the phone?"

James Thurber

I'm tempted not to write this chapter at all. If you've read this far and are still wondering WHY to become a Modern Guru, lord!... And if you need to be TOLD why to become a Modern Guru, forget it.

Nonetheless, I will tell you Why you should hope and yearn to have the Exalted Privilege of some-day beginning to learn how to become a Modern Guru. You Covet becoming a Modern Guru because this is an Ancient and Honorable Profession - some say the oldest. You have the Greed to become part of Something Bigger than yourself. Most important, you Lust after Fame and Wealth, right?

Now that we have your motives straight, we must ask why you would choose to be a Guru instead of, say, a therapist, an Establishment teacher, or a pole-vaulter. There are certain rewards in being a therapist or teacher: your patients or students adore and fear you, they heed your every command, and they pay you to listen to your inanities.

      These rewards are the Modern Guru's as well. And being a Guru allows you to escape some of the intrinsic difficulties of being a therapist or teacher. Granted shrinks and Establishment pedants are held in somewhat higher esteem by the brainwashed masses, but there is built into the therapy or teacher paradigms the idea that sometime the patient or student completes his cure or his course. It may be seven months or seven years, but he Ends nonetheless. This Dread Idea need never enter your Guru practice at all.

You should, in fact, make it clear to your customers from the start that Learning and Personal Development are Life-Long processes, requiring never-ending commitment. Of course pole-vaulting has the admitted disadvantage of having to fall from great heights.

The therapist or Establishment teacher also cannot ordinarily hope to establish the dependency relationship that the Guru can with his followers. Whereas therapy or teaching retain the delusion of objectivity and psychic distance, the Guru paradigm by its very nature allows - almost demands - that the follower identify and unify himself with his Guru. I recommend giving your new customers some tract or Internet link which explains the whole Guru trip as requiring absolute love and undying devotion from the disciple. Most people who watch pole-vaulting feel very little for the vaulter after the event.

Therapy and teaching are, also, necessarily limited fields. While the Guru scheme allows you to pilfer ideas and techniques from any field whatsoever. I can't imagine any reputable therapist, for example, using pole-vaulting as part of his regimen. But I can imagine an intelligent Guru including pole-vaulting in his practice - in fact I use it in my own.

Pole-vaulting teaches people such important symbolic lessons as:

1. How to get up in the world
2. How to get over difficult obstacles
3. How to fall gracefully
4. How not to touch people with a ten foot pole

The Establishment teacher is hampered by the particular ideology that happens to dominate higher education at any one time. For the past twenty years, for example, higher education has necessarily meant teaching students:

• How to ignore reality
• How to condemn everyone and everything in their culture
• How to rebel against their parents and their culture
• How to think they are Smart in condemning and rebelling against everything
• How to excel in basketball, football, scholasticism, or pole-vaulting

As important as these lessons are, the Modern Guru does not want to be limited in inculcating only those virtues. Here, for example, are a few of the limitless things I teach my students:

1. How to roller-skate in a buffalo herd
2. How to appreciate the necessary restrictions and prohibitions of one's culture as being necessary for orderly existence
3. How to be happy if you've a mind to
4. How to distinguish between scholasticism and True Learning
5. How to pole-vault in a purely symbolic way

Beyond your purely selfish motives for becoming a Guru, there are also the Cosmic Reasons. The Universe desperately needs Crafty Gurus today - perhaps more than ever before. As the Great Galactic Clock is ticking down, and the Intercosmic Alarm is about to go off, there is increased need for Clarity of Vision and Serenity of Mind.

The Modern Guru can contribute absolutely Nothing to these Crying Needs. However, he can offer something perhaps equally important: Diversion. Someone busying himself with a Guru's Teaching Programme isn't worrying needlessly about world events or international crises. He just listens to the TV, reads his newspaper, believes whatever he hears or reads (as taught in the Programme), and lets the world roll merrily on. A perfect Modern Citizen of Inter-stellar Space.

Ultimately the Modern Guru becomes a Guru because he Must. Must in any of several senses. Pseudo-gurus must because they are unfit for any useful trade or profession - capable only of the totally dissolute, scholastic, amoral Life of Guruship. Enrollees in your Programme must become Gurus because, if you are skillful, they will consider that the only True Calling and will be obsessed with your promises of Wealth and Fame. Graduates of your Programme, finally, must be Gurus because that's the only thing they are even remotely fit for.