A somewhat bizarre evening with a famous guru at London’s Royal Albert Hall became an unexpected lesson in spiritual narcissism.
Spiritual grandiosity often masks fragile self-worth and a deep need for admiration. Many guru scandals reveal recurring patterns of narcissism, dependency, and reality distortion. Sometime in the autumn of 1989, I attended a free concert by a famous Indian “guru” at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Posters had been hanging all over the city: free admission, and a guru — indeed, a self-proclaimed avatar — performing live. He would play many instruments, Eastern and Western alike. A considerable audience had gathered, as audiences tend to do when admission is free. It is difficult to say this without sounding unkind.
But he played so extraordinarily badly that, here and there in the audience, one could hear scattered laughs. Not loudly, not rudely, but with that involuntary, unbelievingFrom time to time one caught the eye of a stranger a few seats away and exchanged that unmistakable look of mild alarm: Soon enough people began to leave.
Some were too polite to do so before the intermission. Others walked out during the performance, shaking their heads or trying unsuccessfully not to laugh aloud. I was eighteen, and in defiance of every healthy youthful impulse simply to get up and leave, I remained, partly out of stubbornness and partly in the naïve hope that something genuinely profound might eventually reveal itself. It did not.
After an hour or so, the hall was nearly empty. Only the disciples remained in the front rows, dressed in soft pastel colours. And me. At some point I moved into the front rows, since there seemed little point in remaining at a distance surrounded by empty seats.
I received several encouraging nods from disciples who appeared to regard my persistence as spiritually promising. We drove in a small convoy through London to the old Hyde Park Hotel near Knightsbridge and entered the lobby in solemn procession: the guru in front, followed by perhaps thirty disciples in pastel shades, and me among them. I still remember the slightly alarmed expression on the receptionist’s face as this caravan moved toward the lifts and up to the guru’s suite.
There we sat at his feet while the Master blessed disciples one by one. Then the local center leader mentioned that I had stayed for the entire concert. This produced visible surprise and a few admiring looks, perhaps also a few incredulous ones. My Father and the Guru Meet Margaret Thatcher Then, turning toward his disciples, he began speaking about a recent meeting he had had with Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street.
Now by one of those coincidences life occasionally arranges, my father — then designated Hungary’s Minister for Foreign Trade of the first democratically elected government — had also met Margaret Thatcher only a few days earlier.of his own visit to Downing Street was not the historical significance of the occasion, nor the dignity of democratic transition. It was, rather, that he had gone to the toilet there “to take a dump,” as he put it.
He apparently took the briefing papers from the Prime Minister’s Office with him and studied them while Mrs. Thatcher and the Hungarian delegation waited outside for his decision.. Whenever others risk becoming too solemn, too impressed, too spiritually uplifted, he seemed to feel a moral obligation to restore proper human proportions. The guru, by contrast, recounted his meeting with Thatcher in a tone of unmistakable self-importance. It seemed strangely mediocre.
How could an allegedly enlightened man derive so much self-worth from whom he had met? Why did proximity to power appear psychologically necessary to him at all?grandiosity. Again and again, what emerges behind the façade of carefully choreographed serenity is not an unusually mature human being, but often a psychologically fragile one. Indeed, one repeatedly encounters traits associated with narcissistic compensation structures: unstableBut once admiration becomes necessary for emotional equilibrium, followers cease to be independent persons.
They become regulators of the leader’s self-esteem. What appears outwardly asdevotion may conceal a mutually reinforcing system of emotional needs: the disciple seeks certainty, meaning, or idealization; the guru seeks reverence, and insulation from ordinary human limitation. Psychologists describe such systems as reciprocal narcissistic reinforcement. Each side stabilizes the other’s illusion.
Over time, reality-testing begins to deteriorate on both sides. Human beings are generally not psychologically well-designed to be treated as semi-divine; and the problem is not merely that gurus still are, after all, human.
It is that entire and highly addictive systems can arise whose hidden purpose is to protect them from ever having to remember this — often at considerable human cost.is a Professor of Theoretical Psychology and Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute Vienna, where he explores the mind, meaning, and dying. Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist?
Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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