TEACHER
Who is a true spiritual teacher? His object in prayer is to see God, be God, not to alter the world of effects. An effortless effort heals our problem.
I am always expecting to meet such individuals at every corner, but it turns out they are very rare. We try to immerse in the principles as deeply as we can, and so we can truly evaluate a teacher. “The sword of the spirit” is our honed sense of discrimination.
Do they love their enemy? Do they surpass the psychic plane? Do they honor a student’s freedom? Do they teach with pure motive? Do they carry the unpeeled Presence?
When we’re finally led to bond with a teacher who’s on this level, we work on the marriage with divine help. (Yet in their role as healing practitioners, one may be essentially as effective as another, for it’s the Invisible that we’re seeking, and each is an avenue to reveal God in a situation, to function as It will. As “God is no respecter of persons,” It can never be importuned to do special favors. Like the sun, God shines into every window where the curtain is pulled back.)
“The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” A master in the distant mountains may be just that: in distant mountains. Dorothy says, I don’t have to search farther than my own backyard: I never really lost it in the first place. So we may need to roam the world over, only to find the satguru when we’re home. (For instance, I considered traveling afar to the Lakota sundance, and it immediately convened for three years outside my town.) The middle path here: When we cease depending on form, we’re led to teachers or colleagues or students, far and near, that will fit like a glove, the only ones for us, the world’s best.
A razor’s edge: A teacher is another person pulling away from conditioning and helping us to do likewise. The process between student and teacher sweeps up in its folds the karmic patterns of our lives, such as transference from childhood situations. Teachers foster a loving relationship that impersonalizes, where they immensely love earnest seekers without regard for outer traits. Then teachers must fall down too, so they in turn draw the forgiveness, compassion and help of their students. There is no free lunch teacher.
In teaching, it’s okay that students don’t entirely “get it.” Who does? And the student will eventually discover things the teacher doesn’t know yet.
Hidden in the student are links from the highest self to the lowest floor of the building. We all do spiritual things without baldly knowing it. (For instance, breaking habits, admitting our mistakes, hearing both sides, reconciliation.)
Being in agreement with the spiritual teacher about all abstruse points is irrelevant. We’ll continue to progress in our unique ways. An awakened teacher is all we need. Primarily, we learn by imbibing the teacher’s invisible realization.
That the teacher can be either a man or a woman is demonstrated in my genealogy:
Phineas Quimby taught Mary Baker Eddy; her school of Christian Science taught Joel Goldsmith; he taught Lorraine Sinkler, my dear teacher, graduated to life eternal.
Whether or not recognized by a mentor of their own, teachers receive their ordination from within, never due to desire but only when they are fully ripened and their awareness leans to the spiritual level. They depend on this alone.
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In the world of greater love, we can ask for help. Yet in any group, we expect the “higher-ups” to handle things that really only we ourselves can handle. No deity outside ourselves is going to ride up and fix things for us.
The power of darshan affects the teacher as much as the student. For we’re both carried deeper into our meditative Being, which is the grandest joy of our joining.
Every teacher was and is a student; the newest initiate has the most evolved insight; the harvester at the end earns as much as the old hand; the last remaining human volunteered for a tough assignment here.
No elder brother.
Our spiritual development flags at times during our roundabout process, so a group or its leader will fall back again into our mass psyche. Beyond what we say, the greatest subtlety rests in the inexpressible intention that moves us.
Great pressure is applied to the leader of a group; as pressure on the keystone of an arch, it can weld us and elevate us. Paradoxically, each member of the group is the center of the circle as well.
We leaders can be tempted and put a cap on the group with personal ego. When the “leader” takes care to remove self in order to serve ultimate purposes, then the group uni-verse can do so, letting God lead the group.
Leading meetings, I sometimes feel hypocritical, unworthy, because the group experience reaches so incredibly high, yet much of the week seems spent so mundanely. It’s very difficult. Then I realize that nothing comes from storming the gates of heaven; I honor the seamlessness of my human and divine levels.
One day, I lay down and Turned. (It’s all in the turning, but even that---can it be willed?) The Presence poured in, and in awhile I fell asleep, a beautiful sleep. I awoke, the Presence was still there, and again in awhile slept. This repeated some times. Showing the effortlessness. And we are reminded that we don’t need to deserve.
Unobtrusiveness. The entire group is unobtrusive, an open secret.
When we are brought into a leading role, go along with what’s happening without attachment, trustingly, like a bobbing cork. If we sink, it’s a good time for a day off. We’ll float up again.
“A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate.” (Exodus 28)
Worth repeating. The enlightened person, and the rest of us, are hidden, a dull-skinned lumpen pomegranate with rare wine stashed inside; nevertheless the truth rings out from such a righteous one.
A candle does not run over to shine around the corner. Students all come to the spiritual teacher without ever being sought.
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Every one of us has grievous faults and terrible difficulties. This includes every teacher who has ever lived. If it were necessary to become a plaster saint before reaching enlightenment, no one would ever get there; but it’s irrelevant. Beloved, if we look for flawless leaders secularly or religiously, we say to ourselves that we can never aspire to reach such exalted heights, so why bother to try? So through superiority/inferiority complexes, our ego works to preserve the human sense. Then when we find compassion for the masters, we find compassion for ourselves.
How can one of us help another, and how can we avoid idolizing the helper? We can help one another, beginning in this Operation Bootstrap, as we each enrich the only Identity, expanding our Relationship in Oneness more and more. It isn’t idolatrous when we know all effects are from the Invisible back to the Invisible, Which has all the power; that nothing we’re given is separable from the activity of Omnipotence; that nobody can be lost, and as the guru is God so everything is God. In the story, Moses our teacher dies before we can enter the promised land. The admiration with which we gaze upon Moses our teacher is our amazement at our own revealed Self, and returns to ourself.
The spiritual teacher doesn’t inculcate dependence, is essentially non-directive. If I’ve had a question, my teacher often referred me back to myself to quarry out the answer.
And it’s always up to us students to initiate the contacts. (Yet if we call during a crisis, our teacher may encourage us to call back often as we want.)
“Obedience” to the teacher is just a mistaken technique, a deflected attempt to practice obedience to the One within. For the teacher follows and depends on this Withinness, seeking no recompense outside. Yet there can be no end to the increase in our true respect and gratitude and love in action, and our recognition of our own Divine Self.
When by Grace we reach the footbridge over the ravine, we are overawed by new vistas of Consciousness beckoning, exciting yet frightening. Behind these feelings moves our unarticulated desire to become Who We Are, Really Be with You. We all can and we all do transmute. “Unto Me every knee shall bow.”