We can share but I can’t teach. This is a point I’ve written about, talked about, and still some expect to learn something from me beyond a description of my personal experiences, universal experiences, and, you know, understandings that listeners aren’t experiencing because they’re too busy asking me how to have them. The unfortunate problem is that this is how we were trained to ask questions; how we were trained to listen. And the types of people who give embellished answers of no value trumped up as the ultimate value is who we were taught to ask.
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Why do we take an authentic insight into how things are working for us now and imagine, hypothesize, or extrapolate beyond our experience, and then teach that verbal art project as if we’ve experienced it? Why don’t we wait and sit with our experiences a bit? Let them unfold? Why must we rush in to seize control and make illusions, make folly out of the real?
These are not rhetorical questions. There is an answer. The answer is, Because that’s who the you is. The you is a doer and so you need to graft the real onto you to sustain yourself and grow, lest you be undone by the real.
Gurus and other spiritual teachers hoard dead truths to appear to be the center of insights. If you want to grow as a person, you’ve got to go through them first. It becomes a symbiotic building of self. The difference often is that the student isn’t quite as narcissistic as the master because the student is rolling along, growing the self, while the master is strengthening the definition of self where he has parked the car: Teacher. The student is growing and gaining qualities. The teacher is gaining power through labelling and reputation. You may think the “spiritual master” does this to make money or hold the attention of a cult, and these can be the reasons. But more times than not these are results. What he wants—and wants desperately—is to recapture a moment when he was self-identifying as Truth.
In a sense, what a cult leader who has had legitimate spiritual experiences is doing by forming a cult is producing a play “based on a true story.” It’s like really warped performance art where each individual is unconsciously acting out the role of the guru at all stages of his own development, stagnation, and resulting mental unwellness, with him as writer and director. (Usually his followers produce the play by giving him their income.)
Where guru and spiritual teacher types often go off the rails is in believing that their insights mean they are enlightened. These personality types are produced by opening up, waking up, just a bit, and then stalling to define themselves. The impulse to teach (with or without embellishment) happens to most of us because the self wants to remain head honcho at all times, it’s just that those who claim mastery are alpha insecure.
In order to fully awaken, we must not park at a beautiful overlook to teach. Is this too much car metaphor?—We must understand that insights are how the rational mind, the brain-self, gets healthy in its thought process as one’s awareness melts into heart. Whether we have psychic awakenings or psyche awakenings, they are like muscles being exercised, which we are so not used to working that they don’t feel as though they are already a part of us. They feel as if someone else is activating them or giving us knowledge. Awakenings feel like parents are holding our hands above our heads teaching us how to walk. But those awakening things are already in us, lying dormant, as is the energy that activates them. The insights are not lessons to be taught. They are Truth becoming truths as Truth is free to express through the vessel of time that is you.
Crudely put, Truth is you eating nourishing food. Truths are poop. There’s no point in using poop to teach people how to eat.
Not only is there nothing to teach, the becoming a teacher is the reasserting of self over the waking process, like how sugar addiction comes on strong when dieting. Sugar always tries to pull you back to junk food. The brain always tries to pull you back to itself. Time always tries to capture the timeless. This is simply what is.
Vroom!