What are you looking for in a teacher?

Teacher, guru, or spiritual friend, what are you looking for? The spiritual path has many challenges. There are many things we need to learn or develop. A short list would probably include motivation, skills in meditation and prayer, contemplation, etc. Like music and painting, most of us learn spiritual practice better with someone, rather, than, for instance, by reading a book. When we interact with an actual person, we have to give expression to what we have learned. It becomes alive in us in a way that book learning often does not.

In Buddhism we usually think of a teacher. In Catholicism, the comparable term might be spiritual guide. Whatever term we use, this person has a crucial role in our spiritual growth. Role? Actually, it would be more accurate to say "roles". I came up with a list of nine, probably not exhaustive or comprehensive, but perhaps a good starting point. Here are brief descriptions, in no particular order.

Teacher

A teacher is a person who imparts to you a given body of knowledge, skill or capability. In the spiritual context, this might mean the underlying philosophy, moral principles, and meditation methods. A teacher has to have experience and knowledge to impart and, as a student, your responsibility is to learn from the teacher. The teacher may touch into coach or therapist roles, but only to a limited extent. Change in you comes through your efforts to learn what the teacher is teaching and to put it into practice.

Guru

A guru is a special teacher, a person whom you see as an expression of what it means to be awake and present and who also has the ability to elicit such experiences of awakening in you (i.e., transmission). In addition, he or she may provide instruction in methods of practice and guidance in both life and practice. Such a teacher may place significant demands on you to help you work through conceptual, emotional or spiritual blocks that prevent you from deeper levels of experience. Change in you comes through your confidence (or devotion) to your guru. This allows a deep emotional relationship to form which becomes the means by which you open to deeper levels of experience.

Priest

A priest is a person who, by virtue of his or her training, symbolizes a relationship with the spiritual, or, if you wish, the divine. Interaction with a priest is frequently highly ritualized, the ritual setting and roles providing an environment in which the patterns and prejudices of daily life are set aside and the priest can function for you as a representative of what you aspire to spiritually or religiously. Change comes through your trust in the ritual forms and using them to access what is in your heart.

Therapist

While there are many different approaches to therapy, the aim in therapy is to heal. Thus, a therapist helps you to heal from emotional or psychological wounds that you may have incurred in the course of your life. The therapist provides a healing environment, a place where old hurts can be touched, without your being re-wounded. Change comes through the power of the emotional connection you experience with the therapist. He or she supports you, through presence, attention, and caring, in revisiting old hurts so they can heal.

Coach

A coach is person who helps you change the way you behave, with the aim of making the way you do things more productive, more satisfying, less problematic, etc. A coach may well overlap with a teacher (teaching specific skills) and with a therapist (addressing to some extent the emotional issues that prevent you from changing your behavior). Change comes from your being willing to experiment with the different behaviors that your coach suggests and to see what works and doesn't work for you.

Consultant

A consultant is a person who helps you solve a problem by bringing greater depth and breadth of attention, experience and/or knowledge to the problem at hand. The challenge for the consultant is to avoid being relegated to an ineffectual role (the hand-holder) or being held responsible for the problem if it can't be resolved (the scapegoat). Frequently, the consultant seeks to move to the teacher role in order to help his or her client see the problem (and hence the possible solutions) differently. Change comes from your working with a consultant as a partner, combining his or her knowledge and experience about similar problems with your knowledge of the particulars of your problem.

Mentor

A mentor is a person who has considerable experience, knowledge, and wisdom which he or she makes available to you. Where you learn specific areas of knowledge from a teacher, you learn how to implement that knowledge, how to live it, from a mentor. A mentor may also guide you in your path, in your career, for instance, but more generally, in the area of experience of the mentor. Change in you comes from your listening carefully to your mentor's experience and from the mentor creating opportunities for you to grow and develop.

Preacher

A preacher is a person who moves you emotionally, evoking such emotions as love, fear, awe, or joy through his or her words and presentation. A preacher typically works with groups, often large groups, speaking to them in such a way that they are moved emotionally, inspiring them to go beyond what they ordinarily think themselves capable of. Change comes about either through faith (opening to new possibilities) or belief (solidifying one's convictions) in the preacher or what he or she is saying.

Guide
A guide is a person who knows the territory, is able to find a path, and protects you, as much as possible, from danger on the path. A guide is a good person to be with when you are going into to territory that is unknown or unfamiliar to you. Think of a river guide, or a mountain guide. Change comes from following your guide's directions, not striking out on your own, but absorbing and learning from your guide until you know the territory and its challenges and can be guide yourself.


Now, what are you looking for in a teacher?

Experience

"I don't know who I am any more. Nothing makes sense. I don't know how to go on. What do I do?"

A couple of months ago, I was leading an informal question and answer session, and after the meditation period, a young woman posed this question. She was clearly in distress about something, a loss, perhaps, a betrayal - she didn't say. Because it was a public forum I didn't ask for any details. Instead, I talked with her about how to meet experience.
Later, she asked, "Is there a way of out of the bitterness?" "Yes," I replied, "but if you look for it, you won't find it." She sat quietly for a few minutes, and then said, "So I have to experience it." "Yes," I said, "you have to experience it and not believe it."

Whenever a powerful experience arises, whether positive or negative, it triggers associations of all kinds, including deep longings and deep fears. The power of the experience says to us, "This is how things are" and we tend to believe it. If the experience is one of transcendence or insight, we may feel that we are one with the world, that we know the ultimate truth, that everything is love, that our search is over and our longings have come to an end, etc. If the experience is one of darkness or depression, we feel disorientation or despair, that all is hopeless, that we are forever alienated from the world, and we will never know joy, happiness, or love. The experience may even trigger both kinds of reactions at the same time. It's easy to fall into belief here, believing what the stories and feelings are telling us about the experience.
Instead, open to the experience and be where you are. Be aware of your body and your surroundings. Know that what is arising is an experience, nothing more, and nothing less.
A student excitedly told his teacher that he had had a vision of the buddhas of the ten directions gathering in the sky, initiating him into the mystery of life, while countless bodhisattvas and their consorts made offerings, sang songs and filled the sky with rainbows.
"Ah," his teacher sighed, "it's been many years now since I've been fooled by that kind of stuff."
As Rangjung Dorje wrote, in Aspirations for Mahamudra,
Since perception is experience and emptiness is experience,  
Since knowing is experience and delusion is experience,  
Since arising is experience and cessation is experience,  
May all assumptions about experience be eliminated.

Faith and Belief

There are two very different ways to meet what arises in experience.

One is to interpret what arises according to our conditioning. This is a self-reinforcing dynamic and results in a closed system in which everything is explained, the mystery of life is banished, and no new ideas, perspectives, or approaches to life can enter. This I call belief.

The other  is to open to whatever arises, to allow the reactions and stories of our conditioning to arise but not be swallowed by them, to open to the possibility of not knowing, and thus making a place in our experience not only for the mystery of life, but for new ideas and approaches. The willingness to meet experience this way I call faith.

In ordinary English usage, the words "faith" and "belief" are often used interchangeably and the difference between these two ways of meeting experience is confused or lost. One of the results is the pseudo-tension between science and religion, where science is presented as the willingness to open to new information in the form of experimental evidence (i.e., faith) and religion is portrayed as relying on fixed tenets that are held no matter what evidence is offered to the contrary (i.e., belief).

Belief kills both science and religion while faith is necessary for both.

If you try to practice meditation by holding to beliefs, you will inevitably come into conflict with your experience. Beliefs are conditioned ways of interpreting experience. As your capacity in attention deepens, you will see beyond your conditioning, and the beliefs you hold will lead you to dismiss what you experience then, or lead you to shut it down.

Start developing a capacity for faith by being willing to experience whatever arises in your meditation practice. Rather than try to control your mind (i.e., your experience), open to what arises without being swallowed by it. This is a practice. You will fail at it ten thousand times. No matter. Just keep going. Use your breath as an anchor. Gradually, you will forge a different relationship with experience, where you can rest in what arises and be clear and at peace at the same time.

Being an Artist in Today's World

Peter Clothier recently wrote a little book called Persist, which consists of a collection of his reflections on being an artist "in a world gone mad with commerce". His reflections are sprinkled with his experience with meditation and how it has influenced his approach to art and writing.

What I like most here is that Peter sees his meditation practice not as way to heal, nor as a way to live life better or more efficiently, but as a way to appreciate life more deeply.

One example: One Hour/One Painting.

First, choose your picture. It should be preferably an original work of art, but it need not be a masterpiece. This is simply about learning to be available to what's there, not about the finer points of aesthetic discrimination. That can come later, if you wish. This is about allowing the eyes to function, in so far as possible, without interference from the thinking process. You can do this in a gallery, too; all you need it to request the favor of a chair or bring your own folding stool.


Begin, as always, with the breath. Close your eyes, place the feet firmly on the ground with the hands laid gently in your lap. Don't be in a rush to open your eyes: if you take a few minutes to get bodily present, adjust to the breath and empty out the mind of its prejudice and expectations, you'll be astounded by the effect when you open them up to see the painting. It can be as breathtaking as I imagine it would be to step out onto the surface of a newly discovered planet.


From now on, the process will be to simply walk around the surface of the painting. Find a focal point, if that is helpful, and work out from there. Or work from the edges, one at a time, toward the center, simply allowing the eyes to take in what's there. No questions. No commentary. From time to time, allow the eyes to close gently and to rest and refresh for as long as feels comfortable — perhaps until they get hungry again. then feed them. Better if they are greedy!


Keep reminding yourself, when the mind begins to wander, to return the attention to the breath. It's the mind that will keep wanting to ask the questions, or answer them: What in God's name am I doing here, wasting an hour when I could be really working? How is this artist using color, or form, or pattern — and what is he trying to say? And so on. Ignore it. Get back to the breath. Allow the eyes to do the work. Notice how their small muscles change direction and focus.


It's simple but not easy to do if you are not accustomed to sitting for an hour in silence. 

Simple, but not easy.

As you read these pages, it's easy to feel that Peter is in the room talking with you — with you, not to you — in a warm gentle cadence in which the conversation unfolds not as a set of polemics, but his experience and thoughts about art, poetry, and writing, about meeting the creative challenge as captured in Duane Michals' line "While I am not afraid...", working from the hurt or difficult places as in Rumi's "Keep your eye on the bandaged place", or about not being a critic but one who translates, taking a painting or a poem, and expressing it in another medium. His skill with this last is something with which I have personal experience: his review of An Arrow to the Heart shows that he understood exactly what I hoped the book would do for people.

By the end, whether you are a writer, a painter, or one who enjoys art, you feel you have been invited into a different way of appreciating and approaching art, and, possibly, life.

Second Life take 2

For those of you interested in viewing my talk in Second Life, you can watch it here on YouTube.

One of the key questions that arises for me is "How does the visual interface in Second Life affect interaction?" My initial feeling was that it adds a layer and increases the probability of confusion and that Skype, or even phone, despite the limitations, is more direct. The experience of others seems to be different. One person describes how he or she finds the visual interface better than the floating video head that one has in Skype or the disembodied voice over the phone.

This observation set me to thinking. Even though one has set up an avatar and one is meeting with another avatar, the visual interface and the action of two people meeting for a conversation has a potential for ritual that would be more difficult to create in Skype. For formal interviews, as in the Zen tradition, the Second Life setting may actually be richer.

Two other observations may be relevant.

In one session of the teacher development program I have just completed, I had the participants create masks and explore the difference between teaching (and interacting as a student) while wearing a mask and teaching and interacting while not wearing a mask. People's experience varied widely. Some simply couldn't teach if the student was wearing a mask. Others could. Some taught more naturally while wearing a mask. Others taught more naturally when they were not wearing a mask. In our discussion afterwards, I noted that in formal teaching situations in some traditions everyone is "wearing a mask". And, in some sense, we are always wearing a mask. From this perspective, the avatars are a form of mask and may enhance interaction for some just as the inhibit it for others.

Second, given how the human organism depends on visual and physical cues, many of them subliminal, the quality of communication deteriorates when those cues are not present. I certainly find this with phone conversations, and though I can tune into subtleties in voice and the general energy, I still feel that I'm missing a lot. This was confirmed by my interaction with one student. When I met with her in person, I was usually pretty accurate in my responses to her questions. But when we conversed over the phone, which was usually the case, I often found myself guessing as I was missing all the usual cues. She also noticed that my responses weren't as accurate over the phone.

Now, the physical cues supplied by an avatar bear only the most rudimentary correlation (if that) with the person's emotional state, but I'm wondering if the visual image itself facilitates a fuller interaction on levels that are hard to recognize or identify.

A final point. When two people converse, communication takes place not only at the verbal level, but also at the emotional level, as each is continually sensing and responding (or reacting) to the emotional energy in the other and in themselves. How does the Second Life interface affect the ability to sense emotional energy? Does the visual interface mislead or enhance the interaction?

Idle thoughts on Christmas Eve. Have a lovely holiday!

Second Life

What was it like, to teach the Dharma in Second Life?

That question has been posed to me quite a few times, since Adam Tebbe, founder of Kannonji Zen Retreat in Second Life invited me to teach there on Dec. 16, 2009.

A week before the date, Adam introduced me to Second Life, created an avatar for me, and taught me how to sit down, strike the gong, and other basic movements. I was struck by the tasteful design of the temple. Clearly, care and attention had gone into creating this alternative reality.

At the appointed hour, I came into the temple, more or less materializing à la Star Trek, into a throng of about 30 people (there are 1300 in this particular community). Everyone, except me, had their audio muted to avoid what would otherwise have been a cacophony of feedback. For the first few minutes, I had the same feeling I had when I did a tele-teaching with Tricycle, about three years ago: the disorientation that arises in the absolute absence of any sense of being with other people. I moved to interaction as quickly as possible, to have some sense of who was present (hmmm, interesting context in which to use that word). Responses to my questions came back through instant messages, but the messages scrolled by a little too quickly. This was a small problem, but it did inhibit my ability to respond to all the questions and comments.

During the actual teaching, it quickly became clear that, to judge from the questions and responses, some of the people "present" had a good level of experience. I did my best in my comments and approach to meet them, yet one can't read much in terms of body language or emotional energy from (or through) an avatar, and I could only guess at how to respond.

In comparing Second Life to other online teaching I've done, Second Life, for me, is a bit thin for two reasons: the setting seems to add an additional layer of separation, the appearance of speaking to a group of people sitting, and the interaction is limited to speaking and responding to comments and questions.

I've used a couple of online classrooms (wimb and dimdim). While they don't provide a visual scene as Second Life does, they do allow people to see a video of me, and, in addition to the voice and IM communication in Second Life, I have the use of a whiteboard, slideshow, screen-sharing, and web links to enrich the interaction.

Of course, Second Life provides a completely different experience and was not designed as an interface for teaching, so the comparison may seem unfair. But I was there to teach and that was what I was trying to do.

Having said all this, I was impressed and intrigued by the size of the group, the level of interest, the level of experience, and, not least, the ability to make it sustainable financially, all of which says that something is happening here (but I'm not sure what it is).

Goldilocks and the Middle Way

Not too hot, not too cold. Not too hard, not too soft. Goldilocks finds that the baby bear’s porridge and bed are “just right” for her.

A few months ago, a friend or a student (and I really can’t remember who) pointed out that most people practice the middle way in the same way. They try to find the path that is the most comfortable, or, failing that, the least uncomfortable. This is how children approach life.

The middle way is not a comfort seeking approach to life. It is a way to open to everything we experience, a way to address imbalances as they arise moment by moment. The key is found in its definition: not to fall into an extreme.

Life is full of polarities: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and obscurity, respect and disdain. Whenever we pursue the “positive” pole, we set in motion forces, internally and externally, that inevitably bring about the opposite pole.

If we look to find comfort in each moment, we end up going to sleep when we find it and then being woken up and chased by changing circumstances, just as Goldilocks was chased away by the three bears.

This illustration came from Steedman, Amy. Nursery Tales. Paul Woodroffe, illustrator. London: TC & EC Jack, n.d.

For a history of the story of Goldilocks, see this article in Wikipedia.