GURUS AND MENTORS! HOT AIR! OH MY!

I thought we were done with gurus once the sixties ended. Guess not. They've just put on business suits. For those too young to remember regular gurus, they were long-haired bearded guys from India who wore robes and went barefoot. They made their livelihood telling gullible people obvious truths. It wasn't quite as simple as all that, but that was their game in a nutshell. They had followings and disciples and the like and a lot of people made fools of themselves paying these guys to learn that it was better to love your neighbor than to hate him. Well, yeah , guess so, but was it necessary to travel to India and chant some dumb slogan to find that out?

Anyway, the Beatles made this guy Maharashi Mahesh Yogi famous by checking out his teachings. Even though they realized he was a phony jerkoff and dropped him pretty quick, the damage was done and he was all of a sudden some famous wise man with all the answers to life's mysteries. On the plus side, while they were in India they got influenced by some pretty cool music they incorporated into some of their albums. As for the rest of that stuff, only George Harrison converted to an Eastern religion, but one having nothing to do with the Yogi guy. But before you could say Sergeant Pepper a whole bunch of these guys turned up in the Western World preaching transcendental meditation and other Eastern philosophies, seemingly all of them involving people rejecting anything that interfered with the cash flow to the various gurus.

Seemed like a lot of mumbo jumbo and chanting and dressing up funny and eating what he told you to eat only for the purpose of pointing out common knowledge. A lot of people thought it was pretty amusing and harmless enough so what the heck, let these people sit in the lotus position and spend their hard-eaned on lessons they already learned when they were children. No skin off anybody else's nose. Me, I figured if the wit and wisdom of India was so damned profound the place wouldn't be a country where some people cripple their children in order to make them more effective beggars while their government invests in nuclear weapons. Today's India, even with the influx of high tech jobs and a rapidly growing economy, remains a place where half of their billion-plus people scramble for limited food, housing, sanitation and even the most rudimentary education. Whatever else may be their shortcomings, Western nations solved these problems a century ago. So maybe their abundance of wise gurus weren't all they were cracked up to be. There's a lot of great things about India and its culture, but in my humble opinion these guys don't rank up there with the Taj Mahal or the great Mahatma Ghandi, a guy in robes with real ideas and accomplishments to his credit.

Well, fads being fads, thankfully these answer men eventually went away, the only remnants of their influence being the lunatic Hare Krishna chanters with the shaved heads and the orange robes you see begging in airports and city streets, and even they are pretty rare these days, what with most of them having come to their senses and all. But the word guru and the concept behind it has stuck, the idea that one man can supply all of life's answers if you follow his simple program. And pay his fees, of course. Gurus have to eat too, and American gurus seem to like to drive around in Jaguars and live in fancy homes as well. They also dress pretty sharp too, expensive suits and leather shoes and whatnot. And just like the various gurus from the east, most of them are basically full of shit.

We've got financial gurus, internet gurus, fitness gurus, business gurus, stock market gurus, something called wellness gurus, weight loss gurus, marketing, engineering, administrative and graphic design gurus as well as a lot of left-over spiritual and religious gurus still trawling for the dollars of the spiritually insecure. They go by different names sometimes; mentors, life coaches, advisors, guides, anything but what they really are, scammers and charlatans preying on the gullible. Well, I hate to let all the earnest seekers of truth down, but there isn't anybody out there with all the answers. There's God, maybe, but he's not talking. So as far as our earthly pursuits are concerned, maybe it's best to learn all we can about what we want to know and draw our own conclusions.

There's always been certified experts in every field and gifted teachers too. There are books and magazine articles about every topic under the sun and now we all have the internet on which to learn things, the greatest reference library ever assembled, right here at our fingertips. So I'm not saying don't seek out teachers and books and experts, it would be foolish not to in one's quest for knowledge of any sort. Just don't let anybody tell you he's got the foolproof answers to all of life's riddles and has all the answers you'll ever need to know to live your life. And just maybe you've got something to add to the general body of knowledge, some new insight that has escaped the gurus.

But if you were a dedicated disciple of one of these gurus and came up with an original idea that would make you a heretic and your important idea would get ridiculed and squashed. At least until you were out of the room. At that point the guru would announce your idea as his own and sell to the rest of his disciples. For a hefty fee, of course. At that point you might realize that you've got a decent brain yourself if you only give yourself permission to use it. Or you might seek a new guru if you're a real insecure jerk. Why? Have some faith in yourself, dammit.

There's lots of people with great ideas and a lot of people from whom we can learn a great deal, and you just might be one of them sooner or later. There isn't a single one of them who has all the answers for your situation, just like you'll never have all the answers for everyone else. Besides, having answers implies questions, and self-proclaimed gurus frown on questions, preferring instead to provide pat answers to questions and problems that they pose, not you. Gurus have no interest in the opinions of others. They've worked out a scam and expect their marks to follow it to the letter. Uncomfortable questions and ideas only serve to interrupt a good scam.

Legitimate experts and teachers, on the other hand, welcome new ideas and unusual questions, and encourage students to think for themselves. People who possess a lot of knowledge know enough to realize they don't know everything. Sometimes a student asks a question or offers an opinion that opens the floodgates to new avenues of inquiry or alternate solutions to accepted practice. A legitimate teacher rejoices at such occurrences while a guru recoils when it does not fit into his carefully constructed scheme. Where would Galileo be if he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the sun revolves around the earth? His teachers certainly thought that was the case.

Fortunately, the man had enough faith in his own mind and the plain evidence in front of his eyes to explain our solar system in a different way than the gurus of his day. And he paid dearly for thinking for himself, since the gurus of his day were the officers of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church, who banned and burned his books, threw him into prison and forced him to deny his work. But he had the last laugh. His work is considered groundbreaking to this day and the Church of Rome has long been exposed as a bloodthirsty and repressive tyranny that hampered human progress for centuries. His name is far more famous than the pope who censured him or any of the barbaric inquisitors who hounded a genius for telling the truth and laying the foundations for modern science.

History is full of gurus who were complete assholes and misled millions of gullible fools. There were also a lot of anti-gurus, people who learned things, drew their own conclusions and spoke their minds, thus changing the world in the process. Gandhi comes to mind, so does Martin Luther King, who was a student of Gandhi's work and ideas. JFK was also a radical thinker who changed a lot of minds in the face of a lot of opposition. All three of those guys were killed for their troubles, but their work lives on for the benefit of untold millions. How about Einstein, Newton and Copernicus? They were scientists whose ideas defied all the scholars of their day and they all turned out to be right.

What about Bill Gates? Any business guru would have told him he was a fool to drop out of college and start a computer software company out of his garage with a nutty name like Microsoft. No expert could talk Elvis Presley out of recording "race music" and changing popular music and culture forever. What if Woodward and Bernstein hadn't asked a lot of uncomfortable questions about the Nixon Administration? None of the people mentioned here followed the formulas of any guru or guidance organization. They learned their trades and followed the truth instead, mostly working on their own, no gurus, no committees, no bowing to accepted wisdom. Many met with a lot of opposition and disapproval. Well, boo-hoo, disapproval. Get over it. Bob Dylan did, and produced some of his best work. A lot of people opposed the Emancipation proclamation, thinking Lincoln had gone too far. He didn't give a crap, he knew he was right and "a lot of people" had their heads up their asses. Judging by history, the greater the disapproval, the closer to the truth one must be.

So take all your Doctor Phils, your Scientologies, your success seminars, your narrow-minded TV preachers, your paid programming get-rich-quick scammers and your bona-fide experts on everything under the sun and stick them all where the sun don't shine. If it was that easy everybody would have all the answers and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Find your own way, ask all the uncomfortable questions you can think of and solve your own life situation. If you need help, and we all do from time to time, by all means get it. Follow any sound advice you might receive and ignore any advice that doesn't ring true. Trust yourself on that one, you're not an idiot so don't act like one.

After all is said and done, though, it's up to you to make your own decisions. There's plenty of people willing to decide for you, so if you don't mind living someone else's life go find yourself a guru. For a fee you can get out of taking responsibility for your own life, deciding how to raise our own children and deciding what's what in this world. It's easier that way, it really is. So if easy's what you're looking for, I can recommend a good how-to-live-and-think seminar run by a bona fide answer man guru who will welcome the control over yourself that you hand him along with a good chunk of your dough. Good luck sleeping at night,though, wondering what might have been if you used the balls and the brains you were born with.