Teachers, gurus, coaches, mentors: Help or Hindrance?
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The pathless path of present moment awakening is very simple. The most important teacher is presence-awareness, and that is our very nature, always present. My friend and teacher (although she didn’t want to be called a teacher) Toni Packer described the pathless path, or what she called “the work of this moment,” this way:
“The essence [of this work] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves. The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.” --Toni Packer, from her book The Light of Discovery
In my experience, it can be helpful to have a teacher or a friend like Toni, but she never presented herself as all-knowing or superior. In my forward to that same book of Toni’s, I wrote:
“One of the most striking aspects of Toni Packer’s talks and writings is the listening presence out of which they emerge. Toni has the courage to put aside all the books, all the authorities, and be with the moment at hand, simply, openly, not knowing what it is or where it’s going. She’s looking anew right now, on the spot. A talk is listening, open space, silence, birdsong, airplane hum, chainsaw buzz, wind, cough, heartbeat, and words. But most importantly it is listening…
“What is said here in this book is not presented with the ‘closure of authority,’ as Toni put it recently, but is rather ‘something to be considered, questioned, wondered about, taken further.’” – from my foreword to The Light of Discovery
While a teacher like Toni can be immensely helpful in calling attention to certain things, asking provocative questions, calling us on our delusions, lighting the way, and above all, embodying an open listening presence, no one can do the work for us. We each have to look and listen and see for ourselves from moment to moment. And at times, it can feel like a long, hard slog with many challenges. But it is also a source of great joy and freedom. And hopefully, it becomes ever more playful in spirit.
As we awaken to the open spacious quality of aware presence or simple bare being, it can feel both delicious and scary, relaxing and unsettling. The scary and unsettling part is always thought-generated. The mind doesn’t want to hang out there in simple bare being. The mind wants to think. It wants drama. It identifies boundless impersonal aware presence with the thought-sense of the limited, separate, encapsulated “me,” the character in the story of my life. It wants to spin stories about “me” and “the world” and get lost in the emotional whirlwind. It wants to figure everything out, grasp the nature of reality conceptually, pin it down, package it up. It wants certainty, and yet it churns up endless doubts.
There are endless stories of not being good enough, not being awake yet, or not fully awake, or not as awake as someone else, or maybe stories of “me” being a lost cause, a hopeless case. There are moments of opening and relaxing and dissolving into spacious unbound presence, and then the mind and the thought-sense of being “me” comes back and we seem to shrink back down to capsule-size. And then that movement (from contraction to expansion, from personal to impersonal, from one dimension of reality to another), which is actually a natural movement of life, gets taken personally and turned into the story of “me” alternately “getting it” and “losing it.” And then there is the desire for “me” to stabilize permanently as spacious thought-free presence and never again feel like the little separate “me.” And of course, no experience is ever permanent, so no experience of spaciousness lasts forever, leading to endless frustration, disappointment and stories of failure. Stories upon stories, and meta stories about the stories, and at the center of them all, the mirage-like “me.”
The path is simply to see how we seemingly get lost and confused, as it arises, again and again, always now. Not to resist it, not to judge it, not to take it personally, but simply to see it. And to relax, again and again, into simply being here as this present experiencing, this aware presence, just as it is. And to notice, again and again, the ways the mind creates the illusion of separation and encapsulation, the way it creates confusion by trying to figure everything out, the way the mirage of the little “me” springs up and seems real, that seemingly deficient self in search of something that seems to be missing.
Different teachers will point out or emphasize different aspects of present experiencing. They will language all of this in different ways. They will suggest different forms of exploration, or different ways to work with the imaginary problems, or different ways to open more fully to bare presence. But it all boils down to something very simple: waking up here and now from the illusions of separation, encapsulation and limited identity, and waking up to the wonder of the present moment and presence itself, just as it is, which is always changing without ever departing from right here, right now.
And eventually, we see that EVERYTHING is included, that even the mirage of “me” and the stories of deficiency, and the loops of thinking, and the contracted sensations are ALL simply momentary shapes that this indivisible, seamless presence is taking—and that NONE of it is personal. We can’t ever get it wrong! We recognize that no words or descriptions can capture the living actuality, including words like consciousness, awareness and presence. There is simply what is, as it is—an indivisible whole in which everything belongs and cannot be pulled apart. And in that realization, there is growing peace with being exactly as we are in each moment, and compassion for everyone else and the world being exactly as they are in each moment, knowing that in this moment, it cannot be otherwise. And instead of seeking some final result, we find ourselves more and more simply enjoying presence in all its myriad dimensions and flavors.
Once we get all this, we don’t need a teacher—we have to live out our own utterly unique path. We can’t follow anyone else. We can still listen to others, talk with them and learn from them, but ultimately we each have a unique path. And sometimes, being true to that brings up fear. Clinging to teachers (or non-teachers) at that stage can be a way of keeping ourselves small and limited and dependent, reinforcing the deficiency story of being “just little old me” who is never quite good enough, instead of simply seeing through that story each time it pops up. Painful as it is, that story provides a certain safety, a certain familiarity that gives it sticking power. By seeing through it again and again, NOW, whenever it appears, it gradually loses its believability and its hypnotic power. And no teacher can do that seeing for us.
Of course, even that story or running to yet another teacher is all simply life doing what it does, another shape that this presence is momentarily taking, another dance the universe is dancing, so it’s never really a problem and it’s never personal. We can begin to appreciate our humanness in all its flaws and absurdities, without taking it all so seriously or so personally. We know that something much vaster than the thinking mind (or the “little me”) is running the whole show, and that actually we’re not doing this awakening journey; it is doing us.
However it moves, the pathless path to where we are is always exactly what’s happening, right now, and it is a never-ending journey of discovery. We are both alone on our unique path and at the same time inseparable from the whole.
Stillness Speaks is featuring a series of excerpts from the newly published 2023 edition of my book Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Non-Duality, originally published in 2010. You can read the first excerpt:
Do You Need the Substack App?
I’m still finding my way around Substack, and I’m not very technologically hip, but I’ve been asked if you need to get the app. You definitely don’t need the app to read any of my posts, but you may prefer it. When you get an email from me at Substack, at the very top you can choose to “Open in app” or “Open in browser,” or you can just read it in the email. Is there any advantage to the app? By googling this question, I found an article online by Matt Binder at Mashable from a year ago, and he writes that, “the app acts as a curated collection for all the Substack newsletters subscriptions, kind of like an RSS reader specifically for Substack writers. Users can view a feed of the latest newsletters they subscribe to instead of sifting through all the other spam and work emails in their inbox. The app provides a reader view for these posts too. In addition, the app brings in all the post comments that one would find on the web version of these newsletters. Readers will be able to easily access all of the content they subscribe to, including podcast and video content. Plus the app's discovery page will help subscribers find new writers they might be interested in as well.” I don’t know exactly what all that means, but maybe it will be helpful to some of you.
Thank you. You have such a command of language and its expression. You stated just what was necessary for me at the moment. Back on track. Thanks.
Clear and beautiful. Thank you Joan