Flexible followers of many gurus at once
The opposite of strict followers, who I described yesterday, are flexible followers who don’t mind having several gurus, no, who love having as many gurus as possible. They actually follow whomever they can find. They have hundred pictures of different masters on their altar and they buy every book of every guru.
Flexible followers have a clear advantage here: they can take the positive parts of every guru’s message and just forget what does not fit to them. They can pick the good lessons only and don’t need to go too deep into the dubious rests of every philosophy.
It is easy for them to mingle with all kinds of followers. It doesn’t matter whom the others are following, flexible followers have something positive to say about every guru. The other person obviously likes that and so they keep every other follower happy, too.
Sometimes people who do business in the esoteric scene are this kind of followers. It has many advantages for their business because they can sell their stuff to anybody, irrespective of whom they are following.
One disadvantage is however, that they easily get confused. Each and every of those masters uses different words, sees things in another way and tells his followers different things. If you read a hundred books about enlightenment, you can find a hundred different ways to get there and mixing them up does not always help.
While strict followers of one guru sometimes have problems of intolerance and narrow-mindedness, flexible followers have problems of too much choice, a variety of possibilities that is just too big. They find it hard to find a common factor with all those gurus and cannot really decide which way they should go. They try everything a little bit and unfortunately often get very confused in the effort to follow everyone at once.
Related posts
The Dilemma of Followers: Knowing about the Crimes of a Guru but unable to accept it – 11 Sep 13
Arranging Girls for a Guru’s Lust, following him blindly even in Crime – 10 Sep 13
The Father of Asaram’s Victim: Bribed, Threatened but still standing strong – 9 Sep 13
You never wasted Time even if you have believed in fake Gurus – 13 Oct 11
Don’t do esoteric Business in spite of lost Faith – be honest – 12 Oct 11
Being a Student is better than being a Follower – 16 Jun 11
Celebrity Followers – Free Advertisement and Popularity for their Guru – 15 Jun 11
Personal Followers – always able to approach their Guru – 14 Jun 11
Mass Followers – Following Celebrity Gurus – 13 Jun 11
If a true philosopher is investigating many different viewpoints, it is for the purpose of investigating many different perspectives, as good philosophers have always done, so as to approach and arrive at ones own independent viewpoint. It’s a necessary process for all good philosophers to study many different perspectives and viewpoints, as knowledge evolves though a process of building on previous thought, so it’s necessary to know what the previous thought is. The more I’ve investigated and studied various perspectives and viewpoints, the more my clarity has increased. My main influences are, for scripture, the Gita, Upanishads, Dhammapada, and Bible, and for thinkers, Plato, Plotinus, Swedenborg, Kant, Hegel, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Ganesh Baba.
Dear Deniz,I know how much you have studied and that you actually really consider what you are reading or hearing and openly decide whether this is right for you or not. It becomes critical when people try to think everything is right at the same time because that does not work. It is always good to know what was before so that you can develop further but nobody should stick with what was then and mix it all up 🙂
Thank you again for your comment and Much love
In a way I feel this is the best of all followers whom you have described until now. In this way they don’t really get stuck with one person and worship him as the only right one but take the best from everywhere.
I agree with Lucas (above) that this kind of following is probably the best. The important point is that this follower takes what they like and agree with from all the different teachings and then synthesizes his/her own conclusive belief system. Maybe if they tried to memorize every mythological story or analogy that each guru said, then they would get mixed up. But if they really listen for the deeper meaning in all the lectures, I think they would actually find some simple commonalities among all the teachings that would be easy to believe in and follow.