The Guru Question: The Perils and Rewards of Choosing a Spiritual Teacher
Caplan believes that most people eventually find themselves on a spiritual path, whether they seek it out or not. Once that journey begins, the issue of working with a spiritual teacher---a guru---arises. In Western culture, the relationship between spiritual teacher and student is complex and there are few resources available to help people decipher that relationship. Caplan has been working to fill that void. This book, originally her doctoral dissertation, brings the rewards and pitfalls of what she calls conscious discipleship into the light in order to distill them into a set of basic guidelines. It is an in-depth study, tackling issues such as psychological sanity, assessing spiritual authority, false complaint syndrome (valuable for customers who teach), sex in exchange for teaching, and defining true power. She has reprinted some of the interviews with spiritual teachers that she did as part of her original research in 2000.Whether your customers are looking for a long-term relationship with a teacher, or seeking to understand how to separate the wheat from the chafe in short-term study, this book provides the information they are looking for. --Anna Jedrziewski - New Age Retailer SpiritConnectionNewYork.org