In every spiritual tradition, the search for the Divine is a timeless pursuit, a journey that Saints, poets, and seekers have explored through the ages. This deep yearning, often called “holy longing,” drives us beyond the confines of ego and toward the sacred. But as we seek spiritual connection, we may project divine qualities onto human teachers, risking disillusionment when those figures reveal their fallibility. How do we navigate the delicate balance between devotion and discernment? And what happens when we reclaim the Divine that has always lived within us? – asks the question in the Hive video by Connie Zweig, Jungian Therapist and Spiritual Counselor.
Transcript of the video
So in every perennial tradition, the Saints and the poets speak about the Soul’s search for the Beloved—the seeker’s yearning for the Divine, but for the self beyond ego. This longing, which I call “holy longing,” is a secret feeling with many disguises, and it leads us to pursue it in spiritual practice. It guides us to timeless wisdom and transcendent experiences. But it can also go awry when we project the Divine onto a teacher, priest, guru, rabbi, or roshi who is all too human.
When we find a spiritual teacher who evokes our soul’s longing, our image of God leaps out of the inner world and onto an idealized human being. We’re filled with exalted feelings of devotion in the presence of our ideal. In our psyches, the teacher has realized in human form the ideal “other” that’s living within us—the image of the complete or self-realized human being.
In the inner world of the student, the teacher carries the student’s own highest authority—the parent who won’t fail them, the godlike human whose attributes they strive to emulate. For the student to recognize the teacher in this way, there must be a match between an internal image in the psyche and the outer person. We call this projection. The arrow of projection hits the target, and the seeker feels a fit—an inward “yes.”
I remember the first moment I saw Maharishi at Hanol—his long hair and beard, his white robe, his legs crossed, sitting with equanimity. I remember thinking, “This is my future; I will be a yogi.” In these moments, we’re unconsciously attributing godlike status to a teacher. Once activated, this projection holds a promise and a duty, an inspiration and a burden.
On the flip side, the teacher basks in the admiration and devotion of the student. In some cases, teachers carry the projections of thousands or even millions of people. In India, there are millions of people projecting this ideal onto a particular teacher, and the teachers come to emotionally depend on this adoration like food. As a result, they may behave in ways that exact obedience from their followers. If they lack moral development, they may act out their shadows in destructive ways.
For many people, the meeting with the teacher’s shadow—or with our own shadow within the group—may trigger a need to separate and individuate again. If we’ve sacrificed our capacity to question authority and think critically, if we’ve sacrificed our ability to feel deeply and honor our authentic feelings, if we’ve sacrificed our capacity to detect bodily cues and messages (like a woman who once told me her body kept warning her that something was dangerous with her teacher, but she dismissed it), we risk becoming passive and childlike. We won’t be able to leave an abusive discipleship, and we won’t be able to shift from victim to bystander to whistleblower.
With the collapse of these projections, your real inner work begins. We see through our projections to the humanity in the other person—his darkness and light, his fallibility and divinity. We come to see that our beloved teacher is not responsible for carrying the Divine for us. We see that what they carried for us was inside us all along.
As we begin to do spiritual shadow work and reclaim our projections, we carry our own wounds and our own greatness. We need others in a different way—not to parent us or connect us to the Divine, but to join us in the dance of love and freedom, union and autonomy. This promise may be different for different seekers. Some people will leave a teacher and community but continue a practice—I’ve had many people who’ve left the movement say to me, “I still do TM, but I left all that other stuff.” Others will stay and help to reimagine a healthier, more supportive model of community.
But the holy longing for union with the Divine fuels the evolution of consciousness in all of us, and the reality of awakening awaits.