Spiritual Apprenticeship

The Nine Stages of Spiritual Apprenticeship explores how a spiritual guide can aid a seeker on the Path. Greg Bogart describes choosing a teacher, receiving initiation, following a path of training and discipleship, and undergoing tests of faith and tests of character. The author describes spiritual direction and the practices of guru yoga in Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist Yoga, Sufism, and Jewish and Christian mysticism, and experiences of enlightenment and illumination that may result. The book also explores separating from a spiritual teacher, finding the teacher within, and the path of teaching others. If you are searching for a teacher, The Nine Stages of Spiritual Apprenticeship provides a map of what to expect. If you already have a teacher, this book will help you avoid the pitfalls. If you had a teacher and had a difficult experience, this book can help you heal. Of interest to practitioners of all traditions.

Cover Art by Deborah Koff-Chapin. Visit Deborah’s gallery

This book is findable on Amazon. A revised and expanded edition is now available from Inner Traditions, In The Company of Sages

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Reviews “Sooner or later every spiritual seeker needs expert guidance on the path. Those who have arrived at this critical juncture will find this book clarifying, balanced, highly readable, and above all helpful. This is the best book available on spiritual apprenticeship and the psychological issues involved.” —Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., author of Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga

An Excerpt

My Search for a Teacher

I learned about the importance of finding a teacher right from the beginning of my journey. I first became interested in yoga when I was fourteen years old. I felt a curious excitement about the topic and was especially intrigued by the concept of kundalini, the serpent power. I read everything on yoga I could find and began practicing asanas, pranayama, and meditation. I studied books by Ernest Wood, Richard Hittleman, Mircea Eliade, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Swami Satchidananda. Then, when I was sixteen, I read B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, which hit me with the force of a thunderbolt, and I began to follow the systematic courses of hatha yoga postures recommended in that book. Each night I started my yoga practice several hours after dinner and continued until past midnight. I lay there on the floor with Iyengar’s book, imitating the pictures. I especially liked the ones where he was in lotus posture, meditating. Sometimes I fell with a thud while coming down from a headstand or handstand, and downstairs neighbors complained about the disturbing noises I was making at all hours. As I felt the effects of this discipline, my previous habits were overturned. I loved the standing poses and did them for hours. I felt an intense vitality doing these practices. I moved through as many of the poses as I could manage and felt energy and heat being released inside me. I practiced the maha mudra, the great seal. I learned the uddiyana and jalandhara bandhas, contracting and pulling up the abdominal muscles, gently containing energy as it moved through the throat, learning to direct and enervate the breath.

 Several months after starting this regimen, I learned why practicing yoga without proper guidance can be dangerous. One night I overzealously practiced bhastrika pranayama, the “breath of fire.” I felt a flash of light within my body, then lost consciousness. My mother found me at two o’clock in the morning, passed out on the living-room floor. This experience frightened me. I’d succeeded in rousing a powerful internal energy, yet I had no idea how to do this safely. I wasn’t adequately prepared for such an intense practice. It was then that I realized the importance of finding a teacher.

Mysterious karmic factors lead us to choose a particular teacher. We feel a deep inner connection that can’t be forgotten or denied, and we know intuitively that we have something important to learn from this person. The first test of spiritual apprenticeship is to exercise discernment when choosing a teacher. As Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan once wrote, “Before you attach yourself to a master, make sure he is the master for you.”²¹

Swami Muktananda

 I was sixteen when I first met Swami Muktananda, a meditation teacher and siddha from India. I met him the day he arrived in New York City in the fall of 1974, at the beginning of his second world tour. I’d read about Muktananda in several books by Ram Dass, Swami Rudrananda, and Da Free John, all of whom described him as a highly evolved being, so I was excited to learn that he was staying three blocks away from my high school. It was easy to go there early in the morning to meditate before school started, and after school there was darshan, a chance to hang out in his presence and to listen to question and answers.

Muktananda was a short, potbellied yogi wearing bright orange robes and a maroon sweater. He was magnetic, moving like a restless cat, and had a strangely fascinating and powerful emanation. He didn’t look like any other human being I had ever seen, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. His face assumed innumerable expressions, darting glances all over the room, momentarily seeming irritable, then bubbling with throaty laughter, then quiet and blissful, humming to himself, appearing to move in other dimensions. Even behind dark sunglasses his mysterious eyes shone like bright suns. You can ask anyone who met him and they will agree there was something so radiant and captivating in this man’s eyes; they conveyed the ray of his Self-realization.

The first time I met Muktananda, I had the intuition that I was in the presence of an ancient being whose true nature was fire. At first I wasn’t sure I liked him. He scared me, plus he seemed grouchy and intense, not the serene holy man I’d anticipated finding. Yet he affected me in a mysterious way, and after he left New York to continue his tour I thought about him, and I yearned to meditate and began to practice diligently. Muktananda’s influence became evident through an intensification of my inner life. I soon shed the desire to drink alcohol and take drugs and became a disciplined meditator and yogi.

My Early Experiences of Meditation

For several years I spent summers with Muktananda, and then practiced meditation while studying and working. After the [August 1975] Arcata retreat I flew home to the east coast and began my freshman year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I installed myself in my dormitory room and unpacked my yoga books, a meditation blanket, and pictures of my teacher, creating a makeshift altar inside a small closet that would serve as my yogi’s cave. This was where my meditative journey was launched. I spent hours meditating in this small, consecrated space, especially in the early morning between 4 and 6 a.m., before anyone else was awake. I put my legs into the lotus position and turned deeply inward, sometimes entering a quiet, breathless samadhi. For a while I had a recurrence of an intense state of consciousness I remembered from childhood: I felt myself entering a nonphysical realm of pure geometry and magnetically charged archetypal forms, where I perceived conical, cylindrical, and pyramidal shapes that had a palpable density and energy mass. I came out of these meditations in a somewhat spacy mood, feeling as if I’d just visited another world. I reflected on the fact that I had already perceived this inner world when I was four or five years old.

At that time I was gripped by the living energy I felt in the practices of hatha yoga and meditation. I was something of a loner and always scouted out the quietest places I could find on campus—chapels, forests, cemeteries. I had one girlfriend in high school, briefly, and was not very comfortable or interested in dating or relationships. When I arrived at college I avoided partying and abstained from alcohol. While my neighbors in the dorm blasted their stereos and did their share of drugs and carousing I was trying to meditate. I just wasn’t in the mood to get loaded; I’d already done plenty of partying in high school. I’d been zonked on acid and smoked some decent weed. I went to my first Grateful Dead concert at age eleven with my sister. Michele, and heard some fantastic concerts at the Garden and the Fillmore East. I’d seen Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Frank Zappa, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and saw The Who perform their rock opera Tommy. This was the kind of environment I lived in at college. People in the dorm were drinking and partying; that’s what college students do. Yet this was a moment when I had an intense longing to know God, the universal consciousness, the all-pervasive Spirit. I was more interested in Ramakrishna and Meister Eckhart than in Bruce Springsteen and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was more interested in books on yoga philosophy than guzzling beer at keg parties. I assume that most people viewed me as a total bore. But I didn’t feel naive, prudish, or judgmental. I didn’t mind that other people wanted to do drugs and get wasted—it simply wasn’t what I wanted to do at that point. I was focused on the spiritual path. The lack of support and the difficulties I faced trying to meditate in that environment only made my commitment grow stronger.

A Spiritual Apprentice Learns

 Sometimes we have to persevere in following a spiritual teaching or way of life when no one else around us is doing so. Our faith and one-pointedness is thoroughly tested in such circumstances. Sometimes interpersonal crises cause us to feel ostracized, ridiculed, or shunned for pursuing an unconventional lifestyle. Occasionally there are irrevocable endings and changes in our social contacts as we intensify an inner quest.

 A spiritual apprentice learns the importance of keeping the right company, spending time with other seekers or staying alone, quietly keeping one’s own company in meditation. Gradually one learns to sustain a feeling of inner peace amidst any company and under all conditions. But there are stages where it’s desirable to establish a protected place of meditation. This is why some aspirants enter monasteries, ashrams, and communities where they can dedicate themselves to contemplative practice in a quiet, supportive environment.

I was filled with the urge to meditate intensely, three times a day. I woke up early and went to sleep early. I did my hatha yoga postures and breathing exercises. When I wasn’t in class I spent my time reading books on yoga, mysticism, Jung and depth psychology, anthropology, mythology, and world religions. I was absorbed in these fascinating studies and kept mostly to myself.

 With each successive session of meditation I plunged deeper within. When I locked my legs into lotus posture my breath immediately became very soft, very shallow, until it was barely flickering, and I found myself resting in a place between the in-breath and the out-breath. My mind became focused in mantra repetition. When my breathing slowed down and was barely flickering, I perceived a vast inner space. Sometimes my breathing seemed to stop altogether and in the space between breaths an intense prana was generated as my mind became absorbed in meditation. As the ripples of breath and thought subsided, my mind became completely still. At first I only sustained this briefly, but gradually, as my concentration grew stronger, I entered states of breathless awe, and my solid physical boundaries dissolved into a sea of pure consciousness. I experienced that I am that consciousness.

 I melted my mind into the sound of the mantra Guru Om, GuuuuurrrrrrrrruuuuuuOoooooooooooommmmmmmmmm. This mantra was alive with shakti. I intonated each sound so it vibrated in my body. Other thoughts dispersed as the mantra imprinted its vibrations into my awareness. The sounds merged into infinity. Several times my awareness floated up above my body, and from an elevated vantage point I looked down on myself. Every cell of my body vibrated with consciousness. I perceived strange liquid forms around me and saw mysterious shapes, lights, and images with my eyelids closed. But more important than any visions was the perception of a vast energy pulsating with intensity in all dimensions. . . .

 

Swami Muktananda began exposing my ego from the very beginning. The first time I ever spoke to Baba in 1974, when I was sixteen, I asked him a question about spiritual pride. I’d been reading Chogyam Trungpa’s book Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, which was relevant to me because at the time I was feeling slightly superior to some of my high school classmates who hadn’t discovered the wonders of yoga and the spiritual path. In response, Baba said, “There was once a young boy who was a great yogi. He was such a great yogi that he developed siddhis, powers. One of his siddhis was that he could say a mantra over a bowl of oatmeal and make it expand so much that it covered the entire surface of the earth. Do you have any such powers?” When I nodded no, he said, “Well, wait until something happens. Then you can get conceited about it.” His response deftly deflated me. I felt like a complete fool, but afterward I had a good laugh at myself.

My big ego  exposed

 My big ego was also exposed through some lessons in the area of work. For a long time I was condescending and had a negative attitude about my assigned jobs in the ashram. I used to get steamed up over being asked to clean toilets, vacuum hallways, and mop floors. I did my jobs quietly and without complaint, but inwardly I was huffy and disdainful. I often wondered why I couldn’t be assigned to work in the library or do editing work for ashram publications, or anything more interesting than these menial tasks. I particularly disliked jobs that felt as if they were made up just to keep us ashram residents occupied.

 Once I spent over a month engaged in an absurd work project. I was part of a crew charged with the task of using buckets to transport an enormous pile of rocks from a parking lot to the basement of a building, which had a very low ceiling. I kept dropping the rocks and bumping my head on the low ceiling, and the heavy buckets were throwing my spine out of alignment. I began to get really tired, and bored. Then I became intensely angry about all the time I was wasting on this task. I began to plan how I’d escape from this ashram gulag.

 The Milarepa Problem

This job often made me think about a story epitomizing the phase of testing in spiritual apprenticeship, the story of Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi whose teacher, Marpa, made him spend twelve years building numerous stone edifices, tearing each of them down and then rebuilding them. Years of backbreaking labor brought Milarepa to the brink of absolute despair, extreme physical exhaustion and pain, and the loss of all hope that he would attain enlightenment in his lifetime. Later, Milarepa came to understand why he’d been tested so severely: It turns out that prior to seeking instruction from Marpa, Milarepa had been involved in black magic. He’d learned to cast spells to seek revenge against an evil uncle who’d stolen Milarepa’s father’s property and deprived the rest of the family of its rightful inheritance. Milarepa was informed that it was because of the negative karma he’d accrued through these violent, destructive magical acts that Marpa needed to test him so ruthlessly, to purify him fully. Only then was he fit for instruction and initiation.⁹

 Reflecting on this story, I became absorbed in the fantasy that I was being tested like Milarepa and purified through my arduous labors of all my past karma. After a while, however, I began to realize that perhaps it was no great spiritual test. At that point I returned to the ordinariness of the task, the naked sensation of the weight of the rocks, their density and smoothness, the sensations of my tired, aching muscles carrying the buckets. For a while I made quite a show of how hard I was working. When people passed by, I’d let out grunts and moans so everyone would see how difficult my job was. I made a point of appearing strong and energetic and showing off how muscular I was. I was lost in the drama of it all, the sheer heroism of being out there in the sweltering heat working like a prisoner on a chain gang. Then I realized that nobody gave a damn what I was doing. I was just a skinny, long-haired teenager puffing out his scrawny chest, doing some stupid job. This realization struck a blow to my sense of specialness.

 I’d been doing this job for so long, yet the task was nowhere near complete. The pile of stones was enormous. There was no clear reason why we were being asked to move them. Yet there was nothing else to do. And so I surrendered to my assigned task. I tried to do it better. I began to grow more mindful, ducking carefully to avoid beheading myself. I began to feel invisible and merged into the activity of doing the job. I wasn’t invested in the outcome. I became the work, practicing meditation in motion. The job was doing itself; I was just the instrument. I felt a sensation of emptiness and impersonality, but also peacefulness in doing the work in this manner. Soon thereafter I was assigned another job.

I grew tremendously from this experience. I burned out a lot of egotism, a feeling of being above doing ordinary labor. I came to respect the value of every task and occupation and learned to do daily labor with love. I came to feel joy in doing simple jobs thoroughly and well. One day I was sent off to sweep a remote pathway in a corner of the ashram grounds. I did the sweeping very carefully and mindfully, and as I did so I felt that I was sweeping the leaves from my mind as well as from the footpath. I was very peaceful as I did this. As I swept leaves that afternoon I told myself that I would sweep the path so well that Baba himself would be pleased to walk on it. To my amazement, just as I was finishing my day’s work, Baba showed up and walked down the path, followed by a trail of people. He stopped and looked at me and whispered, “Bahut accha,” very good.

Unfathomable Grace

In India there’s an annual celebration called Guru Purnima, which is traditionally a day of celebration akin to our Mother’s Day except that its purpose is to honor the guru. It’s said that on Guru Purnima the guru showers blessings on all devotees. In the summer of 1976, I took a long bus ride to visit my teacher for this occasion. However, that day I had a very unpleasant reaction to the ashram and the thousand or so other people who were present. I was preoccupied with various personal problems and wanted some attention from my teacher. Instead, Muktananda was surrounded by a throng of devotees and I felt completely invisible. Discouraged, I wondered why I’d even bothered to come.

 Later that evening I returned home to Manhattan. I went to bed, sadly bemoaning that no blessings had been showered on me. I slept soundly for several hours. Then at about 3 a.m. I awoke suddenly, sensing a presence hovering above me that felt like a cloud of bliss. An intense current of energy descended into my body, electrifying every cell. For perhaps twenty seconds I was bathed in ecstasy. I lovingly received this visitation of the sacred, numinous Spirit, completely in awe. Then the energy vanished.

 Over the next few weeks I pondered this experience constantly, trying to figure out what had happened, as well as how to bring it back. Finally, I traveled to visit my teacher again. The day I arrived, he strode into a room where hundreds of students were seated. He sat down, looked straight at me, and said, “The grace of the guru is truly unfathomable!” He lifted up his sunglasses so his eyes were visible like bright suns and looked directly at me for several long moments. His statement had deep significance. I realized I could never intellectually fathom the mysterious energy that had visited and filled me that memorable night.  And I realized that the appropriate response to receiving a gift of grace is to remain in a state of active receptivity and meditative constancy. Rather than trying to explain this experience with my rational mind, I was being instructed to live in devotion—not to a person, but to the divine Shakti that I now knew dwelled within me. So the next task was to make myself and my life a vessel capable of holding more infusions of that blissful cosmic energy.

 Since the summer of 1976 when I had this experience I’ve been profoundly moved and filled with gratitude. My teacher revealed to me the mystery of the invisible Beloved. This was my personal Burning Bush episode, and it had absolutely nothing to do with my volition or will. There’s a stage of spiritual life when you feel yourself existing in relationship to a transcendent Other that’s infinite and undefinable.

Honor Thy Parents

Swami Muktananda showed me many times that he could access my innermost thoughts and emotions. When I was eighteen years old I spent several months living in his ashram in South Fallsburg, New York. One day I had an argument with my parents on the telephone. They thought I’d been brainwashed and abducted into a dangerous cult and insisted that I leave the ashram and return home. I refused adamantly. I told no one about this incident. Later that afternoon, Baba entered a room where over 800 people were seated. I was sitting a good distance from him and off to his side, well out of his immediate line of sight. He sat down and began to speak, saying, “There was once a young man who loved to meditate. His parents were scientists and skeptics and told him that he was a fool to waste his time meditating. But the young man was very intelligent and handled the situation very well, not like these young men these days, who when they get to be eighteen years old start telling their parents to shut up and go away and not bother them!” Then my fierce teacher turned in his seat and gave me a stone-faced, Shiva-like stare. He was very intense!

 Two years later (1978) I spent the summer in his ashram in Ganeshpuri, After several years of austerity and a pure lifestyle, I began to experience a resurgence of old desires. One afternoon I lay on my bed in the dormitory fantasizing about smoking pot with a woman I was attracted to back home. The following day I got on the queue to ask Baba a question about an unrelated matter. There was a man in front of me on the line who was visibly dazed and disoriented. It turned out that he was a diabetic who wasn’t taking his insulin shots, which accounted for his strange demeanor. But before this fact was discovered Baba asked him repeatedly if he’d been taking any drugs. “Did you smoke hashish or take bhang in town?” he asked the man. Then Baba looked at me and told me to look through the man’s shoulder bag. “See if there are any drugs in there,” he said. I didn’t find anything. A few minutes later, after he’d answered my other question, Baba pointed his finger at me and said, “And don’t chase drugs!” There was no place to hide from him; he could inwardly see me and know what was happening inside me.

 Swami Muktananda had reached a level of consciousness where he was one with my own mind. He was established in the jewel-like awareness of the Self, which is the root of every mind, the universal consciousness from which our individual consciousness springs. I realized that I’m always seen by the guru, who is none other than the God within me. As Ramana Maharshi used to say, “Guru, God, and Self are one.” Having my teacher demonstrate knowledge of my inner life showed me that I’m always seen in the eyes of Spirit. Moreover, realizing the oneness of the guru with my inner Self supersedes the fact that the teacher’s personality may exhibit imperfections.

 

Psychic Attunement of Teacher and Student

Spiritual apprenticeship engages us in a relationship not just with a person who instructs us, but with a presence that transforms us. The guru isn’t just a teacher, because that implies someone separate from ourselves teaching us something that we don’t know. Through deep meditation, the spiritual apprentice forges an inner link with the teacher. Boundaries between the two now become more fluid. . . .  

Once while I was on retreat at my teacher’s ashram in Ganeshpuri,  India I became very discouraged. I didn’t feel that my spiritual practice was proceeding well or bearing fruit. My health was bad and my energy was low. My meditations were barren. I was lost and didn’t know what direction my life was taking. I had doubts about finding a job and a career. At one point, a week-long chant of the mantra Om Namah Shivaya was held in the ashram. On the final morning, Muktananda was expected to arrive in the temple to celebrate the conclusion of the celebration. I stayed up all night so I’d get a good seat up front, near his throne. I sang and meditated through the dark hours of the night. At sunrise the temple filled up with devotees, until the place was packed. Right before Baba arrived, one of his assistants came over to me and told me I had to move so that some very important honcho could sit up front; he pointed me toward a seat much farther in the back of the room. I was crushed and became absorbed in feelings of disappointment. I’d waited all night so I could sit close to my teacher, and now this unjust, arbitrary pandering to ashram VIPs had snatched this opportunity away from me.

 Then I got absorbed in the chanting. I closed my eyes and dissolved into the sounds of the mantras. I spoke to my teacher inwardly, saying, “Baba, I don’t know who I am or where I’m going in life or what I’m supposed to do next. All I know is that I honor you, I trust you, and I love you.”

 I opened my eyes and Baba was looking right at me. His gaze was full of love, concern, and compassion. I looked down for a moment, but he didn’t avert his eyes. He kept looking right at me so I knew that he knew what was happening inside me. I experienced an instantaneous recognition of what physicist and mystic Victor Mansfield calls the “telepathic link” between the student and the guide.¹⁵

I felt a profound sense of relief. A few minutes earlier I’d been in a miserable state; now I was happy just seeing him. Now I remembered why I was sitting here in a crowded marble temple in monsoon-drenched India staring at a seventy-year-old Indian man in a saffron silk lungi. Now I realized my teacher’s stature and his ability to guide me from within, at any distance. It didn’t matter how physically close to him I was sitting. And even though some part of me was still skeptical about the whole idea of having a guru, I could never deny what just happened. As I joined in the rousing finale of the chant, I felt waves of gratitude and devotion to the all-pervasive consciousness connecting all of us as one.

Ganeshpuri Ashram

When I stayed at the Ganeshpuri Ashram in 1978, I followed the daily schedule of work periods, chanting, and meditation. This was a very focused environment in which to do intense sadhana. There was no other reason to be there. I was most interested in getting as near to my teacher as I could so I could study him closely. Muktananda often taught that as a student attunes to the guru’s enlightened mind, grace begins to flow effortlessly to that student. Contemplating this truth, I started to practice guru yoga, meditation on the guru’s form. I mentally visualized my teacher, feeling that I was seeing through his eyes, walking in his body, laughing with his laughter. This practice was extremely potent for me. I walked around in quiet ecstasy, in love with the inner light in everyone.

At this time, Baba was initiating people in an intense siddha meditation method, silently intoning the mantra So’ham, merging these sounds with the inbreath and outbreath. So’ham means “I am That, I am consciousness, I am pure awareness.” Sometimes Baba taught us to reverse the sounds, forming the mantra Hamsa. They’re one and the same, interchangeable. Through this method, the meditator’s in-breath and out-breath become subtle and refined, until the breath barely flickers, leading to a breathless state of awe and a deep space of meditation. Practicing this method I felt myself in an expansive state while walking, eating, working, talking, and meditating. During periods of meditation, my breathing slowed down, becoming very shallow, and my mind barely rippled; the waters became still. I was in a state that was thought-free, serene, and unwavering. This is the state of awareness becoming aware of itself, which Kashmir Shaivism calls pratyabhijna, the experience of Self-recognition. At every moment consciousness is pulsating everywhere, in everything. In Shaivism, this is called spanda, the vibrant, throbbing, expansive quality of divine consciousness. Shiva’s blissful self-reflective consciousness emanates beauty and radiance throughout all creation. And this is the state of the guru. So’ham: I am That. The experience was electrifying. I was in a protected environment where I could allow myself the freedom of letting go of the world and immersing in this adamantine Shiva state, where I was inwardly one with my teacher. I felt we were seeing through the same eyes. For several weeks I continued this practice of identification with the guru and absorption in the consciousness of the inner Self.

 One day, I sat in Baba’s courtyard, gazing at him. He wasn’t doing anything special, but his presence conveyed immense power. He sat reading the newspaper and chatting with various people. As devotees approached him, I watched him blissfully greet everyone as one and the same being, as vibrations of the divine presence. Then he sat silently in a timeless emptiness. I focused on him while recognizing him as my own Self. Suddenly, Muktananda looked me over and seemed to thoroughly examine my state of consciousness. His gaze was full of light. Our eyes met in silent recognition of our oneness. My heart expanded outward to be one with him. All of this happened in an instant. He was very loving, waggled his head several times, and said, “Bahut achha” (very good). Afterward I was quietly exuberant as I recalled this meeting of minds with my teacher.

Keep reading here and here.

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“Greg Bogart has done an excellent job of describing the experience of self-unfoldment under the guidance of a guru or spiritual guide. His book is a clear and detailed map of the process–including its difficulties, dangers, joys, and ultimate value. Highly recommended.” —John White, author of What Is Enlightenment?

“Psychotherapist and yogi Greg Bogart elucidates the path of the spiritual apprentice. Drawing on his experiences with a number of teachers, notably Swami Muktananda, Bogart explores the subtleties of this special bond. This is a clear, reasoned exposition that will help seekers of all persuasions.” —Yoga Journal, March/April 1998

“Bogart calls upon his expertise as a psychotherapist and his experience as a mature spiritual seeker to discuss issues that are crucial for Western students of inner pathways. The chapter on ‘Separating From a Spiritual Teacher’ explores the issue of the fallen guru from a particularly clear and heartfelt perspective. This is a must-read for all spiritual seekers and their teachers.” —Judith Lasater, Ph.D., author of Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times

“Greg Bogart explains how an aspirant is transformed in a teacher’s enlightening presence and expands in awareness toward absolute freedom. This insightful book will become a new classic of contemporary spiritual literature.” —Master Charles, originator, Synchronicity High-Tech Meditation

“Nine Stages of Spiritual Apprenticeship is an in-depth, well-documented and passionately written study of the guru-disciple relationship that is sensitive both to traditional views and to the unique concerns of seekers in the West today. In this time of either naive guru worship on one hand, or vengeful guru-bashing on the other, this book provides a welcome voice of balance and clarity.” —Dr. David Frawley, author of Ayurveda and the Mind

“This is a thorough, well-rounded, and clearly written book on a very delicate subject. Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist paths all include some form of devotion to a teacher or guru. Bogart shares his own experiences along this path, and offers insightful examples from the lives of well-known students and teachers. This is a wonderful examination of the nature of spiritual mentoring.” —NAPRA Review

“Greg Bogart’s Nine Stages of Spiritual Apprenticeship explores the relationship between aspiring seekers and a variety of mentors, gurus, and guides who inspire and beckon us to the heights of human evolution. Solid, admirable, and wise, this book contains valuable, even essential, words of wisdom for those who have a spiritual teacher in their past, present, or future.” —Dan Millman, author of Way of the Peaceful Warrior  

 The Nine Stages of Spiritual Apprenticeship

250 pages, paperback ISBN: 0-9639068-5-2 $17.95