Carl-Richard

What are you talking about?

Enlighten us. In the meantime while you work out your utopian fantasy world of enlightened saints, we normal people who live in reality will create rules which are easy for people to understand and follow. It's ridiculous that when we talk about normal everday stuff, everybody is like "yeah, laws and ethics are important", but when somebody mentions spirituality, everybody goes full relativistic libertarian nihilist. It's actually a mind virus.

And that is where you lose me. This thread has done nothing but confirm my suspicion that ethical questions around spirituality is absolutely necessary. If a spiritual state was given nuclear codes, I would evacuate the planet faster than the members of Heaven's Gate.

And why is that? Is it because if you ask people prior to joining the organization "would it be ok if we were to kill someone for your awakening?", many people would be skeptical? Do you think if you ask people "would it be ok if we had sex?", many people would be skeptical as well? Because I can envision both of these things happening (killing and sex) once you trap them into some teacher's orbit and slowly erode their boundaries over months and years, certainly if they've conceded their friends, family, money or any normal sense of autonomy. Non-dual mindtricks makes all of that exceedingly likely.

So spirituality is above ethics. Is spirituality above the law? Can I literally kill for someone's awakening?

I think all of these deserve ethical questioning indeed. I'm certainly not uncritical of past spiritual teachers, or Leo, or 100 year old psychoanalysts. However, it's one thing to look in retrospect and think "all of that would've never happened, and we would've been so much poorer as a result", but it's another thing to imagine an alternate timeline where they did follow some ethical guidelines. From that perspective, I don't think they would've been too hindered in performing their work in any significant way. I don't think Carl Jung was fucking people's brains out of their childhood traumas ?

Ethical violations don't require a psychopathic mind. Their subtle nature makes normal people subject to them as well. I don't call the people I'm arguing with psychopaths ? Unethical behavior is something you can easily fall into if you're not deliberately watching out for it. It often deals with normal behavior which feels totally ok from an emotional level, but which is only seen as problematic from a more abstract level (professionalism, etc.). I think it's negligence and ignorance rather than deliberation and evil that will stand for most of the ethical violations. That doesn't mean they're not a big deal. It's just means we have to be better at watching out for them. A better predictor for violations would probably be openness (which is associated with spirituality btw) and of course low conscientiousness: "I don't like these rules; let's make some new ones!" or "fuck rules!". Besides, look at it statistically: it could save some psychopaths, certainly some people who are on the boundary of psychopathy, and certainly some normal people.

Functioning can change without molecules getting permanently stuck inside receptors or lingering in the body for long periods of time. I'm also not sure if it would matter in the long run, as the system probably has ways of downregulating that activity (e.g. just removing the receptor in question).

When the tl;dr is longer than the original text ?

Give me a practical example of where an ethics board impinges on the practice of spiritual teachers in a way that justifies eliminating the ethics board.

Tl;dr? ?

@A_v_E If you're suicidal, you're not dead. Go get some help.

This place is too pure for you ?

A.k.a non-duality.

Solipsism is when you take your limited human perceptions as fundamental. Non-duality is when you take the limitless nature of consciousness as fundamental.

I basically answered this already, but make the distinction between professional roles and private persons.

If you're a lecturer and responsible for some of their grades, it's definitely putting into question the impartiality of your practice, and the teacher could also certainly levy some of that in their favor ("if you have sex with me, I'll give you an A"). It's generally considered unethical conduct. Rock and roll and the like is not really an organization where you have roles and titles with set expectations and interactions with people in a professional setting. A groupie who goes backstage to meet their idol doesn't experience a conflict of roles. They're there as a private person, as is their idol. A student goes to school to get an education. That's the purpose of the student-teacher relationship. Once you start blurring the lines between professional roles and private persons, that is where ethical misconduct begins. If there is a power differential, sure. We can keep going through all kinds of examples, but you can't deny that there are levels to these things. A spiritual teacher is dealing with people in a very vulnerable situation. It's not just people who come with issues like in psychotherapy, but they also come to deconstruct their sense of reality. The "weighting" on the power differential and the potential for misconduct is much greater than in almost any other example I can think of.

If it's for the direct sexual pleasure of some higher-up person in the organization, and if it's also not overtly stated as a part of the organization's activities prior to people joining, then it's most likely unethical conduct and likely manipulation and power dynamics going on. If you on the other hand join a hippie commune and end up having sex with some new friends, that's not necessarily a sign of unethical conduct on the part of any powerful person in the organization.

In BDSM, you get what you signed up for. In spirituality, it's a bonus, a "pleasant surprise" which you get persuaded into doing "for your own good", through subtle manipulation and gradual erosion of boundaries, power dynamics, group pressure — you know, all that good, innocent stuff. The difference of course is that spiritual teachers are holy men of God, while Catholic priests are not...

What kind of rationalizations do you think Catholic priests use? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_the_causes_of_clerical_child_abuse Oh, was I being culturally insensitive now? I'm sorry.

@Nilsi So the answer is: fucking your students is not ethical. It's the go-to example of unethical conduct. "The absolute" doesn't justify it. If you feel like fucking your students, and you execute on it by framing it as a spiritual practice, you're a devil, regardless of whether it leads to somebody's awakening or not. It's worrying that we're even having this conversation.

Is it? You tell me. I think spiritual teachers actually need ethical guidelines the most because of their socially transgressive "holier than flesh" tendencies. "The absolute doesn't care about anything you care about. Let it go, let it go, let it go... and let me have it".

They get laid despite their lack of understanding of Chess.

Are you against ethical guidelines for psychologists or other healthcare professionals?

You think ?