“Throughout history, great masters have not been persecuted despite their wisdom, but because of it. Their teaching questions the principle on which social existence is organized: the centrality of the self as the axis of meaning and vital orientation. Where the wise propose the dissolution of the ego, society reacts with hostility, aggression, and violence, for its very structure is a manifestation of the collective ego in institutional form.
The genuine master does not reinforce the fictions and fantasies of the separate “I”; he dismantles them. He does not flatter, he interrupts; he does not promise validation, he proposes renunciation. His message does not conform to the expectations of a culture sustained by self-assertion, competitiveness, corruption, ignorance, repression, and falsehood. Their function is not to legitimize the egoic identity, but to dissolve it. Hence, their presence is unacceptable to the prevailing social order. Just as the criminal does not appreciate the justice that confronts them, society does not celebrate those who expose its mechanisms of self-deception. What it demands of the wise is not truth, but confirmation; not lucidity, but comfort; not transformation, but permanence. For this reason, the fate of the teacher has often been discredit, persecution, isolation, or violence. From Socrates to Jesus, from Hypatia to Giordano Bruno, from Mani to Al-Hallāj, history shows how the wise embody a structural threat to the illusory balance that sustains the social world.
Ὁ κόσμος ὁ ἐμὸς οὐ δύναται μισεῖν ὑμᾶς, ἐμὲ δὲ μισεῖ ὅτι ἐγὼ μαρτυρῶ περὶ αὐτοῦ ὅτι τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ πονηρά ἐστιν.
“The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil” (John 7:7).
To expect a society founded on the affirmation of the ego to welcome the wise man who preaches its transcendence is as incongruous as to suppose that the corrupt will celebrate the upright judge. This is not a historical accident, but a constitutive incompatibility. The more faithful the teacher is to his vocation, the more inevitable his marginalization becomes.
Prabhuji
