If our institutional faith is shaken while our personal faith is strong, how can we progress?

Podcast:

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

Summary

Finding out about severe moral failings or abuse within a spiritual institution can deeply shake your faith. Here is a thoughtful framework to help process personal spiritual commitment when institutional trust is compromised.

• Separate the Medicine from the Hospital: Focus on your personal experience and the potency of the spiritual practice in elevating your life, likening it to a medicine that heals even if a hospital staff member commits malpractice.

• Acknowledge Human Vulnerability: Understand that spiritual advancement does not make anyone immune to inner temptations and moral failings; spiritual warriors face internal enemies constantly.

• Deconstruct the Issue at Three Levels: Evaluate the crisis through a clear lens categorized by morality (inner vulnerabilities and consequences), pathology (individual failures versus the core process), and responsibility (the need for communal accountability).

• Avoid Outsourcing Complete Faith: Guard against placing leaders on an uncritical pedestal, realizing that over-reverential attitudes can create environments where misconduct goes unchecked.

• Embrace Mutual Accountability: Transition toward shared responsibility and distributed authority within a movement to ensure proper scrutiny, open questioning, and collective safety.

• Recognize Faith as an Intelligent Choice: Realize that faith is ultimately a deliberate choice of what evidence you focus on—balancing the sobering realities of human flaws with the transformative power of the spiritual path.

Full Transcription

So, if someone wants to take initiation and become committed spiritually but their faith in the institution gets shaken when they hear about questionable activities and child abuse or something by the leaders of the institution.
So, the individual attraction or commitment is there but the institutional faith is shaken. What do we do at that time? Yeah, it’s a difficult situation. My understanding is that this has to be seen at three levels or at least this is how I would see it is.
First is at a level of morality. Second is at the level of pathology and third is at the level of responsibility. So, let me explain what I mean by that.
At the level of morality means that on the spiritual journey everyone is vulnerable at all times and just because one is spiritually advanced does not necessarily mean that they are immune to temptations. So, it’s like a warrior who has won many wars that does not necessarily guarantee that they are going to win the next war. There is danger all the times and now of course when we talk about a war we understand that there is somebody out there attacking and that person is weakened.
But when we talk about immoral behavior, you know what happens is that we don’t see the person being attacked, we see the person as doing the attacking. That is where our philosophical vision has to be there that ultimately there are enemies not just outside us but inside us and anybody who lowers their guard, their inner enemies can take over at any time. So, from a moral perspective, when especially somebody does actions which are not just morally questionable but harmful to others, then there have to be serious consequences for that action because we all have inner enemies and we all have boundaries within which we would give expression to those enemies.
So, when this happens we need to see that is it that the institution is causing it to happen, is it the institution letting it happen or is the institution covering it up when it happens or is the institution giving the appropriate consequences when it happens. It could be all over the spectrum. Now, does the institution cause it to happen? Let’s say unlikely.
We will talk about it later when we come to responsibility. But in general, if you look at rather than looking at what happens in which part of the world in the global institution, we need to focus more on the environment in which we are living. And if we find individually that by the practice of this process, I am being elevated.
It’s like if I am at the pathological point that if I am in a hospital and I find that I have been cured by a particular medicine, then that is the basis of my faith in the medicine. If I hear that same, say that hospital is like a franchisee in some other hospital in some other part of the world, somebody became infected by coming to the hospital or some doctor engaged in malpractice. Now, the doctors engaging in malpractice is bad.
But the doctors engaging in malpractice does not mean that the medicine is false. So, ultimately, our experience of the potency of the process is to be the basis of our faith. And sometimes we outsource our faith to others based on what we perceive as their spiritual caliber or their spiritual glory.
And that is fine to some extent. But if we see from medical perspective, even a doctor, a doctor may have cured a thousand patients. But that does not mean the doctor cannot become infected.
That does not mean the doctor cannot become the carrier of infection sometimes to others. So, that brings me to the third part of responsibility that sometimes when we have as an institution too reverential an attitude toward any particular leader, then we all need to protect each other. And it’s a responsibility of everyone that nobody should be seen as completely above criticism or above scrutiny.
When that happens in the name of spiritual growth, that is where the real danger comes in. So, if we as individuals in a movement, we start taking more responsibility for our own practice and protection and elevation and start taking more responsibility to see how the process is being practiced around us. Then, if there are some objectionable, questionable practices, then we raise questions, we try to get answers and maybe we can prevent some things like this from happening in the future.
But otherwise, if now the tension within the movement which is to be resolved is one part of the process is itself respecting those who are senior practitioners. And the other part of the process is that it’s important that there is scrutiny to make sure that the process is being followed by everyone including the senior practitioners. So, how do we as a movement maintain respect and scrutiny both? That is a challenge.
And slowly as our movement is moving from having one central authority to many distributed authorities, there is both a greater scope for mutual accountability. And as compared to what has happened across human history. So, is this something which has happened only in this movement? No.
Regrettably, child abuse happens everywhere in the world. So, like if somebody is in a pandemic, anybody can get infected, even doctor can get infected. So, what we need is that it’s not just a patient follow the doctor’s guidelines to protect themselves from infection.
But the patient has to make sure the doctors also follow the guidelines. Now, can the patient do that? Do other doctors do that? But the point is, while this has happened, which is horrible in many ways, the fact that accountability was maintained, was established, consequences were delivered, is something which can give us hope. Ultimately, our faith is a matter of choice.
It is for each one of us to choose what evidence we focus on. You can focus on the evidence of the potency of the process working in our lives and the lives of those around us. Or we can look for the evidence of the flaws, of the moral failings, of even the scandalous or abusive behaviors.
And each focus will have its corresponding effect on our faith. So, that’s ultimately a choice. But it’s not just a blind choice, it’s an intelligent choice.
And overall, there are sobering instances and we pray that such things don’t happen again. Or if they happen, they are detected quickly and rectified. And we all can have more inspiring examples of… We have more stable basis for our faith which is not just centered on individuals, but it’s centered