For quite a while now I've been puzzling on why so many spiritual teachers appear on close examination to be con artists. This would make sense if the atheist skeptics are right and spiritual stuff is all BS. But its not all BS, a person can discover that. So what's going on?

A theory I've played around with is that it has to do with motive, that there's something a little bit unnatural about attaining exceptional supernatural knowledge or psychic power, so that people who have done that are people who are willing to override their sense of natural development, or maybe they lack that somehow. This would be analogous to why billionaires are rarely very conscientious people: there's usually no way to acquire that kind of wealth except by extracting it from a lot of other people somewhat against their will.

But now you guys have provided me with a much more direct explanation. Gurus all become gurus by pretending to be gurus. So they all acquire direct knowledge of something of the power of imagination, and of being. But its not fully in focus with the temporal reality of who they are, so to speak. And they don't want it to be in focus. That willingness to trump one reality with another imagined one is central to their approach. So they deprive themselves of much of their ability to tell reality from fantasy. Hence the fact-defying obsession with emotionally compelling phenomena and conspiracies. Over-riding the perception of facts with other, preferred imaginative facts was key to their attainment.

To free themselves from this trap, they'd have to be willing to give up the whole idea of their attainment, their whole identity as gurus or sages, and start over again from the shattered remains that are left over, without pretense. And if they've rebranded their imagined reality as being beyond imagination itself, then that strut has to go also.

I've been caught in this too, in a somewhat different or complimentary kind of way, and it has been a major problem in my life. So thanks for helping me out.

As a very minor side note, which may also be a minor key to all this (E minor I believe), this also helps explain another UFO phenomena, the ridiculous posturing of rock stars:

U.F.O. - Rock Bottom (1975) - YouTube

They became what they are by pretending to be that. As the 70's turned into the 80's and 90's, many stars tried to overcome the pretentiousness by becoming all punk or ironic or minimalist. (Offspring and Curt Cobain are two among many possible examples.) But its just another kind of pretense, they can't escape. Others, unable to escape being parodies of themselves, just went all-in with parody. (Steel Panther and Jack Black are examples.) But they still don't escape the tragedy of being living jokes when in their heart of hearts they wanted to be serious musicians. Is this coming in the realm of spiritual growth? Gurus who hold their actions and teachings beyond criticism by marketing themselves as ironic gurus? It must be close if its not already here.