Do You Need a Guru?:
Understanding the Student-Teacher
Relationship in an Era of False Prophets

Foreword by Claudio Naranjo

Caplan's compelling narrative of her own outrageous encounters with Central American shamans, Hindu gurus, and every kind of witch, healer and magician in between, serves as a guiding thread to illuminate the challenging principles involved in creating a working model of the student-teacher relationship in Western culture. Each chapter includes previously unpublished interviews on the subject with leading scholars, teachers and long-term practitioner including: Ram Dass, Jai Uttal, Georg Feuerstein, Vimala Thakar, John Welwood, Krishna Das, Arnaud Desjardins, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, George Leonard, and more. . .

Read about:
• Do you need a spiritual teacher?
• The nature of spiritual scandals
• Guru games, money, sex, and power
• Imperfections in the teacher
• Conscious discipleship



“Mariana Caplan’s Do You Need a Guru? answers this question better than any book I’ve read. If you are curious about the subtle gifts and traps of the student-teacher relationship, or if you are interested in authenticating mature heart-devotion rather than following your unresolved childhood hope for love down the wrong spiritual road, then read this book.”
~ David Deida, author of The Way of the Superior Man

“Mariana Caplan’s book is the most comprehensive, lucid, well-argued, utterly straightforward and honest work on the whole guru question that there is. She unapologetically tackles the most difficult, controversial, nitty-gritty issues without hedging, flinching, or smoothing over any of the rough edges. This book is must-reading for any serious spiritual seeker, as well as for anyone who wants to understand what the relation to a spiritual master is all about.”
~ John Welwood,
   author of  Toward a Psychology of Awakening