Most individuals, locally and abroad, have been amazed and delighted with the work. One cannot please everybody. To the minority of unhappy souls looking to blame someone else for their own misery, we offer the following reflections:
“Or are you a journalist who sells his principles in the markets of slaves and who fattens on gossip and misfortune and crime. If so, you are like a ravenous vulture preying on rotten carrion” Kahlil Gibran: The Voice of the Master.
“Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out of malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavourable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but only that they should have been said.” William Hazlitt:. 1778-1830
“The real existence of an enemy upon whom can foist off everything evil is an enormous relief to one’s conscience. You can then at least say, without hesitation, who the devil is; you are quite certain that the cause of your misfortune is outside, and not in your own attitude.” CG Jung: CW 8:518
“Those (Shamans) who survived have had exceptional qualities – a capacity for secrecy, slyness, cunning – a thoroughly realistic appraisal of the risks they run, not only from the spiritual realms that they frequent, but from the hatred of their fellows for anyone engaged in this pursuit.” R. D. Laing: Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis.
“These people were teachers, not gurus. A teacher is pointing the way, while the guru is the way. I, personally, was surrounded by gossip about this spiritual teacher or that one. We misunderstood the concept of surrender. We thought that you surrendered to someone else as a person, when what you do is surrender to the truth. What you look for in a really good teacher is that quality of rascalness… Of course, I was sitting in judgement. A Tantric teacher is not afraid to lead us through our own dark side. Thus you never know whether the Tantric is an exquisite teacher or hung up on his or her own obsessions. There is no way you can know. If you want to be free, all you can do is use these teachers as hard as you can.” Ram Dass: Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path.
“Much of the art of being a good teacher consists largely in staying just one step ahead of your pupils.. If people are one step ahead of us, we usually admire them. If they are two steps ahead of us, we usually think they are evil. That’s why Socrates and Jesus were killed; they were thought to be evil.” M. Scott Peck: The Different Drum.
“So that it may be that at last, sexual love – that tired angel who through the ages has presided over humanity, with distraught eyes, with feather-shafts broken, and white wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, his golden locks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression – till those looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, ‘He is the Evil and not the Good of Life!’ and have sought, if it were possible, to exterminate him – shall yet, at last, with eyes bathed from the mire and dust in the stream of friendship and freedom, leap upwards, his white wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant future – the essentially Good and Beautiful of human existence” Olive Schreiner: Woman and Labor.