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Meditating, I asked, from that recliner,
That fifteen dollar holy of holies, “Who
Shall be my Teacher?”
You gave Her to my mind.
I, finally, called Her.
She is.
I sit before Her words
And hear your questions.
What shall I say? Thank you, God.
A drop of wine
jumped out of the glass
and touched my lips with Grace.
Don't blame me for not making sense
My Teacher does not, either,
for we drink from the same Glass. Presence!
I don't know how we ever got in Here
"Neither do I--
but it's so much fun!"
-Brian K. Wilcox, February 28, 2006
In the East, sat-sanga refers to a student's association with the virtuous or real (Georg Feuerstein, The Deeper Dimension of Yoga). The student experiences the Teacher as the embodiment of the Real. The student has to get up tight, so to speak, with the Teacher.
The blunt, uncompromising, and compassionate Realness of the Teacher, even the Realness of his apparent oddities, calls the student to awaken from the lie of consensual reality. The Teacher knows consensual reality is a delusional mass hypnosis that separates us from Reality. Indeed, the Teacher will use strategic moves to help shake the student into wakefulness. This is why the Teacher attracts few and distracts many. The Teacher’s love for the True is priority over his love for the student; or, rather, his love for the student is held within his love for God.
The Teacher seeks most of all to be the Spirit, or conduit of the Spirit, for another, while in the West the teacher is seen--as most of us preachers and educators--to impart information. The life of the Teacher is his main Message. Everything he does in the student's presence is a Word. He dares to say, by his life, "Look at me, see what is within me, what I show you, and you will see, truly see. You will see another Reality, and it is so Real you have been looking at it all along."
The Teacher can appear on the surface to be very ordinary; indeed, he is. That is the paradox of Presence.
Few persons can tolerate the unusual, stark Realness that a Teacher embodies. In the West we want comfort from religion and its preachers and teachers. Teachers are Spirit persons in a world that presses the masses into conventionality. But, the Spirit is wild and eccentric, certainly not customary, certainly not always comforting. The Spirit loves to play with us, to get us to lighten up, to laugh with us—and to get over the egocentricity that leads us to take even our religion too seriously. One of the most holy acts is Laughter.
The idea of devotion to the Teacher in Buddhism is noted in the reference "beautiful friend." This Friend seeks one's ultimate joy and fulfillment. The Teacher deeply loves the student and offers her a look into Reality, a look at herself. The Teacher may not be perfectly well adjusted--God forbid he be--, and he might not be very nice, but he is deeply caring. He cares so much, he can appear mean and uncaring at times.
In the West we largely lack this perspective of incarnation of Spirit in Teachers or ourselves. We are very suspicious of those called Master, Teacher, Sri, Lama, Rishi, and of getting guruitis.
While we are afraid of guruitis, we have so focused on Jesus as a one-for-all-time incarnation that we have tended to over-stress Jesus' uniqueness. We speak of Jesus as "from heaven" and seem to forget "of Nazareth." This emphasis on a high Christology, devoid of the nondual paradox of orthodox Christology, has created an icon-like veneration of Jesus--could this be a form of Western guruitis?--that distances us from how he taught the potential in us to be persons embodying the Spirit.
Indeed, the distance between the belief of the churches and their level of spirituality is related, in my opinion, to a theology that sees Jesus as being and doing for us what, then, allows us to excuse ourselves from being and doing. The Spiritual Teacher is one example of a theology of participation, rather than a theology of veneration. The Teacher reminds us that we cannot hide behind Jesus, or anyone, and avoid what the One calls us to be and do.
However, we each are incarnations of the same Spirit. We each can, like Jesus--and all great Spiritual Masters--, accept the calling to be a means of sat-sanga for others. We might not be able to be a beautiful friend to everyone, but we can be that for someone. However, to do this we need someone who is that conduit of Spirit for us, and someone who is such a beautiful friend that she will upset us when she sees us losing touch with the Real and playing games, hiding from the One.
Look into your life and asks some questions. Who is a beautiful friend to me? Who is someone that seeks my highest good and well being? Who embodies to me good and virtue? Whom do I feel Realness from? Whom am I called to be a beautiful friend to? Whom is God calling me to offer an unprejudiced presence that seeks the highest good of that other, even if at what appears my expense? How might I open more to Realness, the Real?
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