I thought this quote may be of interest to those on this board. Even though the context is significantly different, I thought the main points the author makes were well expressed. I'll cite the reference at the end, see what you think of what is said first.
We must approach spirituality with a hard kind of intelligence. If we go to hear a teacher speak, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by his reputation and charisma. but we should properly experience each word of his lecture or each aspect of the meditation technique being taught. We must make a clear and intelligent relationship with the teachings and the man teaching. Such intelligence has nothing to do with emotionalism or romanticizing the guru. It has nothing to do with gullibly accepting impressive credentials, nor is it a matter of joining a club that we might be enriched.----
We have so many different defense mechanisms fashioned out of the knowledge we have received, the reading we have done, the experiences we have undergone, the dreams we have dreamed. But finally we begin to question what spirituality means really. Is it simply a matter of attempting to be religious, pious and good? Or is it trying to know more than other people, trying to learn more about the significance of life? What does it really mean, spirituality? The familiar theories of our family church and its doctrine are always available, but somehow these are not the answers we seek; they are a bit too ineffective, not applicable. So we fall away from the doctrines and dogmas of the religion we were born to.
We might decide that spirituality is something very exciting and colorful. It is a matter of exploring ourselves in the tradition of some exotic and different sect or religion. We adopt another kind of spirituality, behaving in a certain way, attempting to change our tone of voice and eating habits and our behavior in general. But after a while such self-conscious attempts to be spiritual begin to feel too clumsy and obvious, too familiar. We intend these patterns of behavior to become habitual, second nature, but somehow they do not completely become a part of us. Much as we would like these "enlightened" behavior patterns to become a natural part of our make-up, neurosis is still present in our minds. We begin to wonder: If I have been acting in accordance with the sacred scriptures of such and such tradition, how could this happen? This must be due to my confusion, of course. But what do I do next?" Confusion still continues in spite of our faithful adherence to the scriptures. Neuroticism and discontent go on. Nothing really clicks; we have not connected with the teachings.----
Monetary donations to a spiritual cause, contributions of physical labor, involvement with a particular guru, none of these necessarily mean that we have actually committed ourselves to openness. More likely these kinds of commitment are simply ways of proving that we have joined the side of right. The guru seems to be a wise person. He knows what he is doing and we would like to be on his side, the safe side, the good side, in order to secure our well-being and success. But once we have attached ourselves to his side, the side of sanity, the side of stability, the side of wisdom, then to our surprise we discover that we have not succeeded in securing ourselves at all, because we have only committed our facade, our face, our suit of armor. We have not totally committed ourselves.
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Q: It seems that I cannot get away from trying to secure myself. What should I do?
A: You want so much to be secure that the idea of trying not to secure yourself has become a game, a big joke, and a way of securing yourself. You are so concerned about watching Yourself and watching yourself watching, and watching your-self watching yourself watching. It goes on and on and on. It is quite a common phenomenon.
What is really needed is for you to stop caring altogether, to completely drop the whole concern. The overlapping complications, building an extremely fine lie detector and a detector for the lie detector as well, such complicated structures have to be cleared away. You try to secure yourself and, having achieved security, then you also attempt to secure that as well. Such fortifications could extend to an infinite empire. You might just own a tiny little castle, but the scope of your protection could extend to cover the entire earth. If you really want to secure yourself completely, there is literally no limit to the efforts you can make.
So it is necessary to drop altogether the idea of security and see the irony of your attempts to secure yourself, the irony of your overlapping structure of self-protection. You have to give up the watcher of the watcher of the watcher. In order to do this, one has to drop the first watcher, the intention of protection itself.
It occurs to me the thoughts expressed here may sound contradictory, in that he's saying you should scrutinize even what a respected teacher has to say and then he talks about being open and not care about your security - but on second thought it is really two different things. When you try to evaluate some idea logically, if you're just looking at it for what it is then fear doesn't enter into the picture, it's just information.
The threat that something you're looking at being another cult or crazy religion harming you doesn't enter the picture either. You may eventually come to the conclusion that it is in fact a wacky idea which can lead to that, but the analysis isn't so colored by that fear in the first place so that it's all done out of defense with the end result being that you really didn't carefully think about it. People study religions as well as cultic organizations, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are a part of these organizations or actually practice the religions they study. If we are so easily swayed by things we happen to hear or read, then I'd say that's kind of a personal problem..
This quote was taken from the book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa, he was (I believe he's dead) respected as a meditation master, scholar and artist in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and the founder and president of Vajradhatu, Naropa Institute and Shambhala Training and former abbot of the Surmang monasteries.
"It is not so much that you use your mind wrongly--you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease." -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now