Batgap

“…I was out in the garage one day working out on my Bowflex machine and the idea just popped into my head, ‘Hey, do an interview show.’…

Alex Tsakiris: I want to talk about a sensitive area for you. I want to talk about TM…the guru phenomena. I’ve been involved in enough spiritual practices over the years—not as deeply maybe as you have—but to see this happen again and again it’s funny. It’s like the old MTV band after band that makes it big, has all this money, wastes it all on drugs, and is now broke. It’s over and over again. We see this with the guru phenomena. Great spiritual insights, huge following, sexual indiscretions, money mismanagement, and deception. What’s going on with the guru thing in general? And how did you process that as it unraveled with your TM experience?

Rick Archer: Well, since you mentioned rock n’ roll, there’s a great line by the band from the song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down which is, “You take what you need and you leave the rest.” TM was invaluable for me. It transformed my life. It saved my life. I mean, the direction I was going I was starting to mess with heroin. Some of my friends ended up dying. So it turned me around like night and day. Very profound. I had all kinds of wonderful experiences over the years and great times with Maharishi in person and so on. The TM movement booted me out about a dozen years ago because I was becoming too independent in my thinking, really. That’s what it boiled down to. Organizations of every sort, political, spiritual, and so on, seem to have their own mindset and they don’t like people rocking the boat too much or thinking outside the box too much. But that was great. It was a perfect step in my progress to be booted out and to be able to step back and reassess all my assumptions and not take for granted many of the things I’d been taking for granted all these years. I still meditate although it’s actually strictly speaking not to him because I got a different mantra from a different teacher, but I do it TM style. I have nothing but appreciation for everything I derived from it and for all the wonderful people that are still involved in it and so on.

Regarding sexual scandals and all that almost every guru, including Maharishi, has been prone to them. I honestly don’t know what to make of it because I had been raised spiritually with the concept that higher consciousness correlates with higher ethics. And of course, ethics is very much a human thing sometimes. What one culture considers ethical, such as polygamy, is not ethical in another. But there’s a sort of universal agreement that teachers in a position of authority, many years older than trusting innocent students, shouldn’t mess with their students.

Alex Tsakiris: … Why does this happen again and again?

Rick Archer: I don’t have any absolute answers but… There are quite a few of them who have fallen prey to this. They’re raised in a certain culture, maybe an Eastern culture, and it may be an Ashram in an Eastern culture which is relatively cut off from the general society… there are certain aspects… psychologists would call “shadow” things that are never confronted until they suddenly find themselves transplanted to the West with hordes of devoted, beautiful, young followers. There’s tons of money… they indulge in them or fall prey to them. That’s just my theory… it doesn’t necessarily mean that morality and higher consciousness aren’t correlated…there’s definitely a tendency for morality to correlate with higher consciousness but it’s not tight… One can be highly advanced along one line and relatively immature in other lines.

Alex Tsakiris: Any practical advice you’d give someone in seeking or becoming drawn to a guru?...

Rick Archer: I always try to avoid black and white thinking and I think there’s tremendous benefit potentially to be derived from association with the guru. And there also may be a time to leave. There’s tremendous benefit to the chick to be in an incubator for a certain period of time and then there’s a time when they’ve hatched and they should probably get out of the incubator and stretch their wings. I think any guru worth his salt doesn’t want you to maintain some kind of subservient, dependent relationship with him for the rest of your life. They want you to stand on your own two feet at a certain point. Some gurus will actually kick you out of the nest at a certain point and say, “Go do it on your own.” I would encourage people not to dismiss the guru phenomenon out of hand. If you feel drawn to associating with some teacher, great. But keep your eyes open. It’s so easy to fall into a kind of cult mentality. That will mix it up for you.

Alex Tsakiris: In all seriousness, I think that’s a great service that Buddha at the Gas Pump does, is expose people to a variety of teachers that you can dip in and at a very safe Internet/YouTube level decide a lot of things. You do have that distance. Do you think that is part of what you do? Was that intentional on your part or do you see people using Buddha at the Gas Pump in that way?

Rick Archer: I don’t know if it was one of my initial intentions but I’m very aware of it and people do use it in that way. One principle that I’ve gotten more and more clear on as I’ve gone through this process is that we’re all on the journey. I found a St. Teresa quote recently in which she said, “It appears that God Himself is on the journey.” So where I used to think of enlightenment as sort of a static, superlative terminus—you get there and you’re totally done, I now see it as never-ending refinement/ enfoldment. There might be some elements of enlightenment or the fundamental element of consciousness itself which in and of itself doesn’t change but the clarity with which that is appreciated and the degree to which that is integrated into your relative life, there’s no limit to that… It’s easy to glom onto a particular teacher and say, “This guy knows it all. He’s the ultimate, perfect master,” or whatever. I would just take that with a grain of salt. You don’t want to be a dilettante necessarily and hopping from teacher to teacher. There can be a value in committing to one teacher. On the other hand, just recognize that teachers themselves are human beings and that they too can be growing and be in need of certain development of understanding or experience or compassion or various human values just as you are…”

“BatGap’s intention is to inspire and inform. We are not in a position to endorse any of our guests’ teachings, practices, healings, etc. We encourage you to discriminate carefully and make your own decisions before signing up for any retreats, sessions, or healings.

Sincerely, Rick & Irene Archer”