There is something very subtle about the role of a teacher on the path. It is easy to misunderstand, especially in the beginning. A teacher is not there to run your life, make your decisions, probe into anything you are doing, or tell you how you should live. At least that has never been my way of teaching. Students have their own lives. They make their own choices, have their own careers and relationships, make mistakes, discover things, get lost in things, come out of things. But there is another kind of guidance that takes place, something much harder to describe. It has to do with learning to see that our views as humans have been limited by our conditioning. It’s being willing to open up to see other views, other options, to be free of the biases and constraints that we unconsciously live in. It has to do with learning to see what is actually happening in yourself while you are living your life.
A teacher can see from somewhere outside that closed loop. Not perfectly, not magically, and not because the student gives up their own intelligence or discrimination. Quite the opposite. The purpose is to develop that discrimination until the student can see more and more clearly for themselves. In the beginning, it’s not clear what is ego and what is truth. The path is all about gaining that wisdom, that ability to decipher between what is real - existence itself, and what is unreal - the thought forms, entanglements, skewed, solidified, illusory, man-made definitions of life on the planet that becomes our own individual idea of life. Our ego is based on reactions and habitual patterns of behavior that we become addicted to but have nothing much to do with the true nature of existence. So there are times when another awareness, particularly one that has been through the wringer of their own journey beyond ego, that knows you well and can see the place where you have become caught long before you can. Only because they’ve been there themselves.
It isn’t therapy, and it isn’t someone giving you instructions about how to conduct your life. Often there isn’t anything to fix. The important thing is seeing. It can be extraordinarily difficult to know what is ego and what isn’t when you are inside your own mind. Ego can be wily, clever. It can absorb spiritual ideas just as easily as anything else. It can meditate. It can talk about enlightenment. It can decide it understands nonattachment. It can even decide that it has progressed far enough that it doesn’t particularly need anyone reflecting it back, exposing it anymore.
That is one of the great values of these meetings. You are living your life. You’re going here and going there, working, studying, falling in love, getting your heart broken, succeeding at something, screwing something up, worrying about money, thinking about the future. Life has tremendous momentum. Then for an hour you stop. You sit with someone whose purpose in that encounter is your awakening, and you look at your life from a whole other perspective.
I have been meeting individually with students for years now. I didn’t always teach this way. Over time, though, I began to see how powerful those meetings are. This is the fast path meaning, the meditations are powerful and the transformations are dynamic. A week is a long time in the mind. Ego can go very fast and very far. Something happens, a fear gets activated, an attachment takes hold, a story begins forming, and before long you are living inside of it. You may even think you are being tremendously insightful about the whole thing. Then you sit down with your teacher and there is an hour where everything stops. Wait a minute. What actually happened this week? What happened in me? What am I feeling? What am I believing? Where did my attention go? What is real here?
One of my longtime students and I were recently talking about this. We started meeting many years ago, almost every week for about five years, and more sporadically after his life became increasingly busy his career. I asked him what those meetings had actually meant to him. His answer surprised me in its honesty because he admitted that, in the beginning, he didn’t understand what was happening at all.
He had already been exploring meditation and spirituality before we met. He had arrived at some of the conclusions people often arrive at when they begin looking into these things: nothing is really real, we’re all one, there is something beyond ordinary consciousness. When he first came around, he liked the meditation and the people. It was interesting and fun. He understood that I was the teacher, but in his mind the teacher was somewhat like the person coordinating everything. We meditate, we’re a sangha, everybody is nice, Sunyata is leading this thing. Cool.
It took him a bit of time to understand that something else was going on.
“I didn’t recognize the importance of the teacher in the spiritual process. It was almost like, yeah, I can get to that, and if I find a community of people who are doing it, cool, we can all do it together. The teacher coordinates us and helps us and organizes us. But I didn’t recognize on an individual level the incredible importance of the role of the teacher.”
That understanding came gradually, through the experience itself. Week after week, he showed up. Sometimes he was excited to meet. Sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he had been flying all week and sometimes he thought he had been in terrible consciousness and learned absolutely nothing. There were times when he would approach a meeting almost embarrassed. What am I going to talk about? I didn’t learn anything this week. I have nothing to bring.
But then we would meet.
He described it as being snapped back into something. Someone was bringing attention, energy and love to him, and that called something forward in him too. He couldn’t just sit there and remain inside whatever state of mind had carried him through the week. He had to look. And invariably, there was something to look at. There was always consciousness operating somewhere, something being revealed, something he hadn’t seen because he was inside of it.
When this student first came to me, he was in tremendous pain over the end of a relationship. It wasn’t ordinary sadness. He was deeply caught in it. The loss had become an obsession, and the obsession was creating a depression that he was skewered inside of. He couldn’t understand what had happened or how something that had seemed one way could take such an immediate turn. He hadn’t seen it coming. There was shock mixed with the grief, and he desperately wanted to change what had happened.
But he couldn’t change it. He couldn’t make another person turn around. So eventually there was only one direction left to go: into himself.
What was wonderful in that moment was that he wanted to see. He didn’t have much perspective at first because he was so deeply inside the pain, but he wanted perspective. He meditated. He looked. We talked about what was happening, and then he looked again. Instead of continually trying to escape the experience, he gradually learned how to go directly into it. Within a few months something began to break open. The external situation hadn’t changed. What changed was his relationship to the enormous amount of energy that had been trapped inside his obsession with it.
Years later, talking about that period, he described it very simply: “That terrible obsessive pain is what I needed to dig and dig and dig until I got to the point where it wasn’t obsessive pain anymore. It was just energy.”
That’s exactly what happened.
The pain hadn’t been meaningless. There was tremendous raw energy underneath it. But when all that energy was caught in the story, it could only express itself as obsession, loss and suffering. By going into the experience instead of continually recoiling from it, he eventually reached the energy itself. More importantly, he learned something about how to do that. The next difficult experience would not find quite the same person waiting for it.
Having a teacher is all about learning self reliance and independence from someone who has learned to live that way. The point is not to make a student increasingly dependent upon the teacher. If that were happening, I would consider the teaching unsuccessful. The point is to make someone increasingly capable of seeing, encountering and moving through their own life. You learn how your mind works. You learn what fear feels like before it becomes a whole world. You begin recognizing attachment while it is forming. You discover that an overwhelming emotion is also energy and that you can enter it rather than being ruled by it. You become more capable, not less.
But becoming more capable does not mean there is no longer value in having someone who can see where you can’t. In fact, one of the tricks of ego is that greater capability can become another identity. I know how to do this now. I’ve got it. I’ll get myself back into the light. I’ll find my own way. Sometimes that is exactly what someone needs to do. Sometimes it is simply another place where ego has quietly taken possession of the process.
There is also something about consistency that is easy to underestimate. My student said that whether he wanted to meet or didn’t want to meet, whether he was having a wonderful week or a terrible one, the meeting itself required him to bring something. There was a kind of accountability, but not accountability in the ordinary sense of somebody checking whether you’ve been good. It was accountability to awareness. Bring your life. Bring what happened. Bring the part you’re happy with and the part you’d rather not look at. Let’s see.
He also admitted something that made me laugh because I remember it very clearly. He said that for quite a while, he simply did not understand the preciousness of what was being offered. He would meet with me and then basically say, all right, thanks, bye, and go back to his life. There was no disrespect in it. He said he was oblivious. The whole thing was simply there and available to him, and because it was so available, he didn’t know what it was.
Then at some point, he did.
I remember hearing the change in him. There was a sincerity in his gratitude that hadn’t been there before. Something had registered. He understood that another human being was consistently giving time, attention, energy and life force to his awakening. He began to understand that this wasn’t simply a meditation group he happened to have found, with somebody at the front organizing things. There was a transmission occurring through the whole thing, through meditation and teachings, certainly, but also through conversation, attention, laughter, difficulty, silence, course correction, and the very ordinary act of meeting again next week.
From my side, there is an odd paradox to this because it is a big deal and it is no big deal. This is my life. I love doing it. It is my dharma. I don’t experience myself as performing some extraordinary sacrifice every time I sit down with a student. At the same time, I am giving my life to it. I am giving my energy, attention and life force to it. That is what my teacher did in his way. It is what I learned. On this path, that kind of giving is simply what you do. In whatever way you so choose. I choose teaching.
Perhaps that is one reason the role of a teacher can be difficult to understand from the outside, and even from the inside at first. It doesn’t necessarily look dramatic. Someone meets with you. You talk. You meditate. You go home. A week passes and you do it again. Nothing about that description conveys what can accumulate over five or ten or twenty years of practice. Once a student has learned somewhat to discriminate between the real and the unreal (that’s called Jnana Yoga - the Yoga of Wisdom), once they have come to a beautiful, strong, direct connection to life, where their ego and wild elephant mind are no longer ruling their lives, the meetings become more sparse and more on an as needed basis.
My student put it more directly than I ever could. If he had simply been introduced to Rama and then been “left in the wild,” as he called it, he has no idea where he would have ended up. He might have loved the teachings. He might have meditated. He might have had wonderful experiences and developed all kinds of ideas about what those experiences meant. What the relationship with a teacher gave him was something different. It kept bringing the ancient teachings and truths back into the actual substance of his life.
That may be the simplest way I know to describe it. A teacher doesn’t live your life for you. A teacher doesn’t remove the experiences that will break your heart, frighten you, confuse you or expose you. Those experiences are part of your path. Sometimes they are exactly what you need. The teacher keeps pointing you back toward the place where you can meet them consciously. Back to yourself.
Eventually you begin to recognize that place within your being and how to access it as a portal to the all pervading awareness of existence. You recognize when you’ve left it. You recognize the feeling of being caught and the feeling of being free. You learn how to take something that once would have drowned you and follow it all the way down until the story falls away and there is simply energy.
And then another week begins.