The Teacher as a Mirror and Patience vs Stagnation

SHAMBHAVI
This is about teaching method in direct realization traditions. And one of the things I'm most grateful for, and I've said this so many times, is that somehow I arrived knowing how to work with teachers.

I'm very grateful for that because this is a teacher-student-centric kind of tradition. And it's said very, very explicitly in the ancient scriptures of the tradition, the teaching text, that the teacher-student relationship is the path.

So, what does that actually look like? Well, it looks like many different things, and of course, it's different for different people. I have a unique relationship with every person in this community, near and far. But the goal of this tradition, as Kristi asked about, what's the central deal here, is that we would be divested of our sense of separation.

In other words, our reduced contact with wisdom or reduced degree of intimacy with life, that we would be divested of that and that we would be able to reconnect with wisdom, with life, with beings with everything and everyone in this profound intimacy and with this sense of celebration and playfulness.

In order to do that, it means we have to, in a very practical sense, be divested of our self constructs, the ideas we have about ourself, the ways that we've gone about relating. All kinds of things have to be dismantled in order to be able to reconnect and recognize wisdom and recognize that that wisdom is who we really are.

For this reason, because this tradition, and others like it, not just this tradition, but also Dzogchen, and also Chan Buddhism, and some forms of Daoism, the practice is entirely destructive. It's entirely destructive in that we know that you are already made of and full of that wisdom.

So nothing needs to be created. You are already that self, that enlightened self. You are that enlightened self playing these parts. And in doing this sadhana, in working together, we are playing that game. It's just a game.

But the game is destructive in that we have to take away things in order to reveal what you already are.

One of the reasons why I am so enamored of the teacher-student relationship is because it's so nuanced. It's so multilayered. The means by which any particular student can be divested of these limitations are infinite.

But there are certain ways that teachers relate to students in these traditions in particular that you need to know about. Because otherwise, you're wondering, what's going on? You know, is the teacher rejecting me? Is there something happening here that it's not happening the way that I expect it to. I'm not getting a response I think I should be getting from the teacher.

This is because when you come to the teacher, of course, to a large degree, at least at first, You're just doing what you always do. You're just being that habituated, repetitive, karma-filled self that you've been. And so you're just trying to rope the teacher into participating in your same old, same old realm visions and habit patterns.

And what does the teacher do? Well, they do many different things. They play with you. They undermine you. They pull the rug out from under you. They tolerate it for a while, and then they stop tolerating it, and you wonder what happened.

Maybe they tease you. They give you lots of sadhanas to help erode this stuff.

But one of the things they do is this. So they basically hold up, you could call it a wall or you could call it a mirror. It's a wall in that whatever you just said or just did, the teacher is not responding to, either at all or in the way you them to.

It's a mirror in that when that thing bounces back to you, you are supposed to look at it. That's how it works. It's very mechanical, almost.

You run up to the teacher and you say, 'Oh, my God, I had this most amazing dream last night.' And the teacher's like, 'Oh, okay.' You're not supposed to go, 'Is the teacher mad of me? Oh, how rude!' Or something like that.

You're supposed to go, 'Oh, what is happening now?' Why did the teacher respond to me that way? There is something for me to look at here. Maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic. Maybe I am trying to magnetize the teacher with my special spiritualness.

Maybe this is part of my fixation the way that I just approach the teacher, and that's why they're doing this. So this is part of how it functions. And if you don't get it, and you don't get it over over and over again, the teacher keeps doing this and this and this, and you might get very frustrated or not know what's going on.

So I'm telling you this is what's going on. This is what's happening. This is not the only tool, that's not the only thing that teachers are doing by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one of the things that teachers are doing.

And there's particular kinds of ways that each of the different realms insists on the teacher bowing to the realm, like, taking a knee to the person's realm fixations. [laughs]

So someone in human realm is going to want the teacher to tell them everything that's happening in categories and in advance and treat the teacher like an explainer of reality and want the teacher to plan everything out and discuss the minutiae of their practice in all kinds of human realm, categorizing and measuring ways.

And they're going to want to go on with that forever and ever and ever and ever.

Someone who's in hungry ghost relationship with the teacher or wants to be is going to continually come to the teacher with emotional problems, sadness. Everything is disappointing and sad, and they'll be constantly trying to have the teacher give them nourishment, but the nourishment is not getting in.

All those kinds of things. I mean, hell realm, the student always comes to the teacher and says how angry they are at the teacher about this, that, or the other thing.

So these are all ways that students are trying to make a connection with or competing with the teacher, right? Titan realm. Or trying to prove they're more compassionate than the teacher, god realm.

So all of these are ways that students try to connect with the teacher. And these are the ways that students try to connect with other people, too, not just with the teacher.

But the problem is that the teacher's special job is to try to get you to stop doing that and to recognize what it is you're doing so that you can have a more intimate experience with life so that you can engage with life more spontaneously. So that you can have more joy in your life and have more latitude of self-expression.

That's why this is happening. And if the teacher simply responds to you the way that you want to be responded to or the way the realms want to be responded to, then there's no teacher-student relationship at all.

Nothing can really happen because it's just perpetuating the same old, same old. So this is why this is more of a rough and tumble kind of a situation. And believe me, and I have really bent over backwards and softened my style a lot over the years in consideration of the condition that a lot of people are in these days.

But the way that I was taught was way more confrontational than the way that you're being taught.

At the same time that we can't have it be the way that you want it to be all the time, because then you just have the same old, same old world that you've always had. And that's a waste of my time. It's a waste of my life, and it's a waste of your time.

So I'm just letting you know that this is just how it works. This is how it works. And some of you already do know this, and some of you don't know this.

But next time you think you're not getting the response from me that you want, sometimes I say very little. When I want someone to look at what they're doing, I'll say very little. And that's also a clue.

You don't get as much response from me as you think you want. Someone a little while ago told me a lie, and I said very, very little. And then later they came back to me and said, 'Oh, your response to me was so weird.' [laughs]

I wanted them to look and see, what did I just do?

This is how I relate to my teachers. But I realized that not everybody's capable of that. So I'm just letting you know flat out that's how it works. If you notice I'm not responding to you in the way you expect, or maybe there seems to be a bit "hmm" of going on, that's a signal for you to look at something.

So now you know. When I don't answer the question that I've been asked, or I answer it in such a way that it doesn't quite answer what the person was hoping to hear. I'm not doing that because I don't understand the question.

I mean, sometimes I don't understand the question, and I'll just say I don't understand. But most of the time, it's because I'm trying to speak to what I think is actually needing to be spoken to. So that's like another thing.

If you ask a question, then I say something either that turns it in a direction you didn't mean for it to turn in or it doesn't seem to be an answer to the question you actually asked, that's another time to pause and think, oh, was there something else here that was more important?

Or maybe I just misunderstood, but you know, nine times out of ten, it's not a misunderstanding. It's very deliberate.

One thing that will happen from human realm perspective is that people will ask a question, but they'll tell me what the answer is that they want in the question. They'll be sort of grooming me. [laughs] Do not do that because you definitely will not get the answer you want.

STUDENT 1
Can you talk about patience and if there's ever a circumstance where patience can become an obstacle?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, everything exists on a continuum from more informed by wisdom to less informed by wisdom. So, we can think of that same teaching on the realms, where our ordinary, impacted, contracted forms of anger are connected to clarity at a more expansive portion of that spectrum.

So everything can be more or less expressive of wisdom. And what is on the other end of the spectrum from patience would be stagnation. So patience involves some sense of waiting for the correct time.

If you're having a more wisdom-informed experience of patience, it could be because you have had enough experience in life that you know things just take their own time.

And so you may feel impatient, but you're going to wait anyway because you kind of know how things work.

You recognize your own impatience as part of your habit, patterns, part of your conditioning, and you're willing to just take a deep breath and wait because you know that there's a proper time for things, and your patience is really not an expression of that.

If you have even further along the more wisdom-informed spectrum, you're actually going to be wanting to go along with the times. You're going to be having some feeling or sensation of timing.

You're going to have some feeling for a whole circumstance. It may not be something you can articulate, but when you could feel like this isn't ripe yet. I should wait. Or you've done a divination that's telling you the same thing.

So on the more contracted part of that spectrum is stagnation, where even when the right time comes, you don't do anything. And you can call that patience if you want to. But you can see that there's that stagnation.

Then there's ordinary patience that might also include some impatience, but you're willing to wait. And then there's more expansive, informed patience that doesn't even really feel like patience because you feel the time and you really have a very concrete direct understanding of when the right time is and when it's not.

And so that's just a whole huge spectrum. But basically, patience improperly applied is stagnation. Not moving when you should move.

And the Zhouyi, the Yijing, really talks about this really beautifully when you've missed an opportunity because you've waited too long for whatever reason, or when you jump the gun. Both of those opportunities are happening.

You know, housing is my Achilles heel. And Charandas and I were thinking about, well, we'll try to live in the same building, and then other people will come live in that building.

And we just kind of moved too quickly. And then the Zhouyi said, this will turn out well despite the fact that you're stumbling around and not moving at the proper pace. Take a step back, take a seat, and wait for things to become more natural. All those possibilities are there.

And I think that if we become a little more sensitive, we understand the feeling of stagnation. We can feel when we're being stagnant, and we can also feel when the anxiety is attached to impatience.

We can feel that we want to move because we're anxious about something. We just want to get it resolved. We want it to be done. We want to arrive. And there's some little chugging engine of anxiety be going on there.

That isn't a good circumstance in which to move. That's a good circumstance to take a breath.

But it really involves not thinking. When we think about when to move or when not to move on something, many of us just use our cognitive mind or intellect, and informed by a lot of anxiety and habit pattern. Instead of consulting something more expansive. Part of this is just remembering to pick up the tools that we have.

When we get anxious and our karmas are chugging along, we just forget that we have tools. So I did a divination about this housing thing a while back, but in my karmic haze about housing, I didn't read the second hexagram, which said, stumbling. [laughs] Oh, gee.