There are moments as a teacher when you get to see something take hold in another person, and it’s hard to express what that feels like. My teacher Rama did that for me. He showed me something about life and consciousness that completely changed the way I lived. So when I get to offer some of those understandings to somebody else, and then watch them actually do something with them, it’s pretty wonderful. I can offer what I know. I can share what I’ve experienced. Then people are going to do whatever they want with it. That’s up to them. But often, you look at somebody and realize: you’re doing something with this. You’re taking it into your life. You’re finding out something for yourself. There is tremendous joy in that.
When Gratitude Opens the World
One of my students called me recently after receiving some very good news. He was in a state of deep gratitude. I could hear it in his voice. And gratitude is such an extraordinary state of mind. It buoys you. It’s like an air balloon that lifts you up into the sky, and suddenly you can see your life from somewhere else. You get perspective. You remember what matters. You get a glimpse of who you are when you aren’t completely tangled up in the ordinary concerns of the day. Going through difficult things deepens us too, of course. We get challenged, we learn, we become stronger. But there is something wonderful about balancing that with moments when life simply lifts you into something beautiful. You feel that life is here. You feel connected to it. You start to sense that life has your back.
He was talking about how his relationship with the universe seemed to be changing, how he was beginning to notice strange little synchronicities and unexpected moments that made existence feel much more alive. He talked about animals appearing at peculiar times, things working out in ways he couldn’t have arranged, and the strange sequence of events that had brought him onto the path in the first place. What interested me wasn’t whether any particular event constituted a “sign.” It was that he was becoming available to life. That is one of the things that happens on the path. We spend so much of our lives inside our heads, inside our agendas, thinking about what we want, what we don’t want, what should happen, what shouldn’t happen, that we barely notice the life we’re actually living. As some of that begins to fall away, existence starts opening up. You see things you couldn’t see before because you were too busy looking for something else.
Jumping Into the Stream
That’s what I love about the path. It doesn’t mean every day feels great. Difficult things still happen. You have challenges, disappointments, losses, uncertainty. But slowly you stop dividing existence so rigidly into the things you want and the things you don’t want. You learn to be with life on life’s terms. And underneath all of that, you begin to discover that life is magical. It has always been magical. It’s shimmering all the time. We just miss a great deal of it because we’re caught up in our complaints, desires, fears and plans.
My student suddenly compared it to Finding Nemo, when the turtles jump into the East Australian Current and get swept into the fast moving stream. I knew exactly what he meant. We’ve actually joked about swimming joyfully like those turtles before. There’s something wonderfully accurate about it. At a certain point you jump into the stream. You still have to live your life. You still make choices, go to work, deal with problems, figure things out. But you begin living inside a different relationship with existence. Kundalini is something like that current. You enter the stream, and over time the things that used to have such so much authority over you begin to lose their power. Desires don’t necessarily disappear because you have disciplined yourself into not wanting anything. They become less compelling because you begin to see through them. The endless push and pull of I need this, I don’t want that, I have to get there, I have to avoid this doesn’t get to run your life in quite the same way.
At one point he told me that before knowing me, he imagined my day-to-day life as some kind of perpetual ecstasy, that I was probably off in other worlds somewhere and had to come down from them to talk to the students. I laughed. The funny thing is that as you go deeper, the distinction itself starts disappearing. Talking with a student isn’t any more or spiritual than walking through a redwood forest or sitting in meditation or paying bills. In fact, the higher you go, the more grounded and simple life becomes. Everything is part of everything. Sometimes life is beautiful in the ordinary human meaning of the word, sometimes its cosmic and inexplicably sublime and sometimes you’re dealing with something genuinely hard. The practice is learning to be completely there for all of it. Eventually the part of you that is constantly judging life - I like this, I don’t like that - gets less and less say. That’s freedom.
The Relationship Is Real, but It Isn’t Possession
We talked about a big upcoming decision - to move or stay. To move is an exciting adventure full of newness and surprises. The prospect is alluring - it’s a wonderful opportunity. To stay is an exciting adventure in that all things on the path are making life new and vibrant and experimental in a whole other way - transformation of consciousness into higher, clearer, stronger more wakeful living. To be around others who care as much as he does about living for truth, finding it in the wonder of the universe as well as in everyday living.
With a move, there can be so many discoveries, new places, different kinds of people, different energies, the excitement of the unknown. On the other hand, growing roots on the path is about becoming more true to yourself, learning how to be open to life, how to live fully from the heart. Those are big discoveries of new energies and a whole other way to navigate life as you become more comfortable with the unknown - with the transitory. As you start on the path, you’re a young sapling learning how to live outside of the painful value system that has been setup for us as humans. In other words, learning how to be free.
Free how - of what? As Zhuangzi - one of the founding figures of Taoism puts it “It is the baggage of conventional values that humans must first of all discard before they can be free. Human suffering - the man-made ills of war, poverty and injustice as well as the natural ills of disease and death. All of these are only ills because man recognized them as such. If man would once forsake his habit of labeling things good or bad, desirable or undesirable, then man-made ills, which are the product of man’s purposeful and value-ridden actions, would disappear, and the natural ills that remain would no longer be seen as ills but as an inevitable part of the course of life. Thus in Zhuangzi’s eyes, man is the author of his own suffering and bondage, and all his fears spring from the web of values created by himself alone.” ~ The Complete Works of Zhuangzi
How can a person be free? Free to allow life to show them directly how to live, how to be human in the deepest, most loving, most compassionate, most powerful and truest way? It is meditation that creates the connection between us and that all pervading awareness of existence. We empty ourselves of mind chatter - the inane fears and the ensuing worries and dramas, and allow life to flow through us freely. It’s not easy to do - to let go of the bounded views that make us (that make our egos) feel comfortable - only because it’s what we “know”, what we’re use to. And yet, it is the source of our suffering. But to be present with life and to let it unfold in us and reveal itself to us through the magnificent wonder of being human, that’s an exciting and amazing prospect for someone who yearns for truth.
We talked about how a sapling tree needs to develop deep roots in order to keep growing and to get strong. It’s the wind that makes a tree strong. But when the roots are young, it doesn’t take as much wind to knock the tree over. That’s simply something to be aware of. He might learn extraordinary things with a move. Staying near the sangha might also open new awarenesses and understandings, a part of the path that he hasn’t experienced yet. Neither I nor anybody else can make that decision for him. He has to find out where his Dharma is, where truth lives for him.
There is something here about the relationship between teacher and student that I think is difficult to understand through our usual human frameworks. There can be tremendous closeness. There can be love, affection, laughter and a kind of intimacy that comes from exploring consciousness together over time. But the purpose of that closeness is freedom. A teacher isn’t there to become the answer to the student’s life. If anything, the teacher keeps returning the student to their own inner understanding. I can tell someone what I see. I can tell them what I’ve learned. I can point out a danger or a possibility they may not have considered. Sometimes I can point out an exquisite scenic route that they haven’t taken before. I can say, Your roots are still young. Take that into account. But then I have to leave them with their own life. That is where their path is.
A Koan Instead of an Answer
I told him that this crossroads is his koan for the moment. Life has placed a riddle in front of you, and you can feel your way into what is right. Of course, being a bright young person, he immediately started trying to solve the koan with his brain. I told him that thinking isn’t going to help. He protested, “I’m a meditator!” which was pretty funny, because that’s exactly the point. A koan gives the thinking mind something it cannot finally solve. You think about it, turn it over, come up with answers, reject the answers, come up with better answers, and eventually you discover that the entire mechanism you were using to find the answer is inadequate. Something else has to open.
He kept trying anyway. Could he go into meditation, find the answer through awareness, and then come back with an English answer? Haha! He’s a little too clever for his own good. So, not exactly. His brain was still searching for a way to be comfortable. That’s what our minds do. We want to know. We want to nail things down. We want to know, to figure it out, or for somebody to tell us that this is the right choice and everything will work out. But sometimes the practice is to remain open long enough that awareness itself begins to change the way you see the question. A koan can become a way of life because you can’t finally bring it into your brain. Eventually he began talking about identity, fluidity, personality, the possibility of having less attachment to a fixed self. I told him he was getting closer to the spirit of koans. His awareness was beginning to move into the possibilities of how he looked at life.
Then, naturally, he announced that he had a koan for me. His koan was completely ridiculous. It was a “what goes up then down but not left or right. (Etc. etc.) I answered, “Your brain farts.” We laughed. He informed me that this was not the answer and that I needed to use my awareness. We laughed again. I told him I would do what one is supposed to do with a koan and sit on it like I was about to lay an egg. This is also the path. It isn’t all incense and solemn expressions. If enlightenment can’t survive two people laughing until a koan becomes an illusory egg, then what’s the point.
The Joy of Watching Someone Become
Near the end of the call I found myself telling him how happy I was for him. I was celebrating with him, jumping for joy on the inner planes, because something good had happened in his life and because I could feel how deeply he was receiving it. Then, within minutes, we were talking about the next day - what he was doing, where me and the students were going to eat and whether he liked sushi. That movement feels completely natural to me. Dharma, joy, life decisions, ridiculous jokes, dinner. There isn’t a line where the spiritual path ends and ordinary life begins.
Perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things about the relationship between a teacher and a student. You get to know somebody as they are becoming. You feel how you went through the same kinds of choices, challenges, victories, heartbreaks, learning about your own attachments and illusions. And now from a different vantage point, you get to watch them struggle with things. You watch them misunderstand things. You watch them discover things. You laugh with them. Sometimes you challenge them. Sometimes you simply get to celebrate with them. And slowly, if they stay with it, they begin to see something for themselves that you could never have simply explained to them.
My teacher Rama gave that to me. He opened a world and showed me that there was far more to life than the reality I had been living inside. What I did with that was ultimately mine. And now, many years later, there are moments when I realize I get to do some version of that for another person. I get to point. I get to share what I know. I get to watch somebody jump into the stream and discover that the water is real.
Then they have to swim.
And sometimes, apparently, they become turtles.
The student teacher relationship is a beautiful thing, not always easy… But beautiful