This is a long overdue essay. Don’t trust that spiritual teacher. You don’t know where he’s been. Yeah, that’s funny but true. Only spiritual energy knows its own and it has no name or form. There are a few true pipelines and a lot of holey ones that have been leaking out the truth in dribs and drabs. It’s up to us to know the difference.

Online teaching is suspect by its very nature. Parroting is easy and the jungle is a good place to hide. You can throw a stone in any direction and hit a spiritual parrot.

Here is a poem.

I walked into a jungle bar
to get a taste of “who I are.”
The parrots sat upon a roost
and I was ripe to get a boost.

Sure enough, they captured me
and said they could enrapture me.
Instead they fell off of their perch
and I was soon left in the lurch.

This parrot’s dead, I said, I said.
I picked him up and stroked his head.
But he just lay there, all being said.

His books still stand upon the shelf
but I’ve quit going there myself.
Instead I walk in open air
where there are no parrots anywhere.

I call into the canyon now to hear
my echo low.
“There is no one there and no one here
and there is no place at all to go.”

The jungle bar’s a step in time
and it fits neatly in this rhyme.
Please take it with a twist of lime….

Vicki Woodyard