When the student is ready August 20, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Coming Back , trackbackI was side-swiped this month by a talk with one of my acquaintances.
I work with this person. She and I have similar interests and insights. We’ve read the same books and have similar approaches to the importance of spirit in our life.
She loves and teaches stories, she is a writer and an editor, a seeker, committed to re
lationship building and a Libran. She also has a Catholic background and recently lost her father whom she cared for deeply.
Like me, she believes that the path of the heart is all encompassing and when all is said and done, it is love that resounds and remains at the end of life. I believe, though that she is farther along the path than me and a little clearer on what that tenet actually means in day-to-day life. She is courteous and gentle; a great listener and very thoughtful in her care of others.
When she told me yesterday that she followed a guru in her spiritual practice I had a puzzling and negative reaction. And that worries me.
Despite the fact that we shared so many other interests I didn’t want to hear that she had handed over personal power to another. I find the choice of a guru akin to deifying another and this has never sat well. As I’ve done in the past, I dismissed the path as a possible method to find meaning and enlightenment.
What worries me is that I have no realistic alternative and no real reason for rejecting the path she’s chosen other than fear and confusion. Don’t get me wrong, I want to reach enlightenment along with the next person. Her path however, is dependent on trust and love – and that scares me.
When I went to India 10 years ago I sought the spiritual home I thought I needed. I was on a quest to find meaning and resonance. I had dreamt of gurus, met practitioners, read books, prayed and received confirming indicators that indeed this place and its spiritual practices would provide a place of rich sustaining support. Alas it provided noise, dirt, stress and crowds. I couldn’t see past the smells and confusion. As for inner sight I was lucky to maintain my sanity keeping an eye out for fast moving traffic and bullocks in the middle of the road. I was deeply disappointed and decided I had no spiritual bone in my body.
Besides, I had my darling husband as an alternative ‘religion’. He was my path to the heart. He was my divine other. It was enough. It was real and trustworthy. But it ended. Now without him I am rudderless and back to square one. Still sightless and a little the worse for wear; love might be the thing that matters in life, but it gets stripped away in the surety of death.
The sustaining truth from all of this, though, is that change is the other great constant in life; change in death; change in jobs; change in friends. And that the harbingers of change in my life invariably arrive with a baton – passing on a new curriculum of learning just before its time to move. This new friend brings with her the next list of subjects I am to study. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. In this case with she comes with a lesson plan: advising me to attend to the moment, to stay awake and to remember that for a seeker, the path doesn’t end.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time, T S Eliot
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Comments»
Beautiful, thoughtful and loving.
….and heartfelt ….which after all, is all that matters…
Good on you! you are a great seeker of the truth.
Jac
Well, I imagine that the attraction to a guru is that you can sacrifice responsibility for your own personal development.
There is a lot of fear involved in being in control of your development. For starters, if you fail you have no one to blame but yourself. If you have a guru – a source of wisdom – you can blame hte guru. You might even become disenchanted with the guru, and move onto another. I imagine the easiest analogue to point to is fad diets. People jump on diets as a way to become the person they want to be, physically. However, eventually they become dienchanted because the diet doesn’t work (or something) – and move onto the _next_ diet (as opposed to taking real control).
So I share your instinctual fear of gurus; who actually occupy the same role that, say, the Church – and directly, the Pope – has in Catholicism. That may be part of why it’s attractive, if your friend grew up Catholic; she would have become accustomed to listening to authority figures when it comes to morals, ethics, etc. A guru is an authority figure outside of the church, but in the same vein.
Personally, I wouldn’t say that the fear is necessarily rooted in the requisite love and trust, but the sacrifice of responsibility – the very thing that I believe is required. I share that believe, at least, with the Existentialists.
A better approach to gurus, I imagine, would be to observe dispassionately – attempting to avoid all the pitfalls in belief – and then make your _own_ conclusions, such that you don’t sacrifice responsibility. You can then benefit from the wisdom of gurus, without falling into the associated traps – one of the more insiduous ones being the “all or nothing” trap. Taking an example from psychology: Freudian theory. Freud developed a very interesting (disturbing?) theoretical framework that had the virtue of explaining _everything_. Unfortunately, because it explained everything, _anything_ a practitioner came into contact with actually _proved_ the theory. But that proof required you to buy into the theory in the first place. And once you both in, nothing you encountered would disprove it.
Basically, Freudian psychology is a cult. A very enticing, all-encompassing cult.
A imagine a number of gurus operate in a similar manner.
And I think that the quote – “When the student is ready, the teacher appears” – refers more to the sense that when the student is ready to learn, the student _will_ learn – the teacher is irrelevant. The “teacher” is merely the “spark” the alights the student’s understanding, not the source of wisdom in themselves. Much like Franz Ferdinand’s (the Archduke, not the band) assassination was the spark of World War I – but it was _only_ the spark because Europe was ready to go to war.
Just a few thoughts :-)
Love;
Michael