[Antarananda]

Good intentions alone are not enough. So many teachers take ancient spiritual traditions / wisdom practices out of context, and package them and sell them to their followers with unfortunate consequences.

I recently heard a very nice talk by a Buddhist teacher, Diana Winston, where she spoke of how when Buddhism spread from India to the rest of the world, it acquired the cultural flavor of the lands where it migrated: in China it took on flavor of Confucianism, in Japan it evolved into Zen, and in America it took on the flavor of capitalism; so now we have Buddha alarm clocks, and expensive thousand dollar meditation cushions and so on.

I'm sure Ray has all participants sign carefully drafted legal waivers, and that might protect him from legal action, but that still doesn't absolve him from the Karmic responsibility of human death, as a teacher who led his students into harm's way.

Let all teachers and self-appointed Gurus know one thing: as a purported spiritual Master (you might label yourself differently: a more conscious person helping others "grow" etc etc, but it's still the same), you are responsible for the Karmic fate of your student. If you have not become fully established in enlightenment (Nirvana, Christ Consciousness, Moksha), and as a result free from the law of Karmic bondage, any deleterious effects experienced by your students as a result of your teachings, will come back to bite you in the backside, either in this lifetime, or in future lifetimes. It's playing with fire.

I could probably dedicate an entire blog post to this, there are many subtle aspects to the teacher-student relationship.