http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2007/07/hugging-saint.html A modern Pagan perspective Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:46:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2007/07/hugging-saint.html#comment-1228 Erik Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:45:00 +0000 http://patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2007/07/the-hugging-saint.html#comment-1228 Items like this, and memories of folks like the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, can and should serve as a reminder as to why one needs to proceed carefully, and with as full a cultural education as possible, when embracing a religion from a culture other than one's own.Unconscious understandings and norms that allow a practice such as guru veneration to work in the Indian cultural context, simply don't exist for the most part in American and European culture. This can have the (not entirely unpredictable) result that some Westerners will misunderstand the way in which "guru represents God for the devotee", and fall into a psychologically inappropriate worship mode of identifying the guru AS God. This, in turn, can lead to devastating personal consequences when the guru is revealed to be, after all, merely human. Items like this, and memories of folks like the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, can and should serve as a reminder as to why one needs to proceed carefully, and with as full a cultural education as possible, when embracing a religion from a culture other than one’s own.Unconscious understandings and norms that allow a practice such as guru veneration to work in the Indian cultural context, simply don’t exist for the most part in American and European culture. This can have the (not entirely unpredictable) result that some Westerners will misunderstand the way in which “guru represents God for the devotee”, and fall into a psychologically inappropriate worship mode of identifying the guru AS God. This, in turn, can lead to devastating personal consequences when the guru is revealed to be, after all, merely human.

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