Hi Barry, Thanks for posting this. Dare I say, very interesting (-:
In the unhealed parts of myself, I recognize the tendency to project onto others. Childhood issues, etc. And as one teacher said, to the extent we project our negative stuff onto others, to that extent we'll project our positive aspects also. I think a good teacher is aware of this and has skills for dealing with it in a healthy way. In fact, this is a great skill for anyone to have especially if they are in an intimate partnership (perfect opportunity for projection), or in a close friendship. Or even if they're all alone. There's a fun story about a sanyasi in a cave with only a loin cloth and begging bowl in his possession. After a few months, his bowl starts to look less and less wonderful. Until one day he throws it against the wall saying, "You just don't understand me!" The point is again, we're always projecting our inner world out onto the outer world even if our outer world is sparse. It's comes with the territory of being human. If we've got unhealed childhood stuff, it's gonna keep coming up for healing. It could be that as a species we've moved beyond the teacher disciple relationship. Or maybe it's a cultural difference. In any case, I've heard that Francis Lucille also uses the word friend to describe himself. Anyway, I'm happy for you that you met such a wonderful group of people. Any chance any of them would join us here? That would be very cool. One question about them: how are conflicts handled? I've noticed in my own relationships that it's all hunky dory until it's not. The acid test for any relationship IMHO is how do they get along when they're notgetting along? Share ________________________________ From: turquoiseb <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, July 1, 2012 3:46 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Relationships: "master-disciple" or "guru-groupie?" The odd story passed along recently by Nabby about Brahmananda Saraswati "passing his jiva along to Maharishi" got me thinking. It wasn't the ludicrousness of the story itself that left me thinking "WTF could this German guy be thinking?" Instead, it seemed very *clear* what the German guy was thinking. He was thinking, "My guru's status has been questioned. Can't have that. Because if he is seen as less than 'special,' then *I* will be seen as less than 'special.'" In other words, he was thinking like a groupie. Springboarding off of this in this canal-side cafe, I've been thinking back to any number of teacher-student relationships I've seen over the years in the spiritual smorgasbord, and *how many* of them seem to be more accurately defined by the "guru-groupie" dynamic than by anything else. First, there is the issue of access to the teacher. If the students only see the teacher rarely, and then only to formally (and meekly...oh so meekly) give him a flower or bow to him in passing, how close is their relationship to him, really? Isn't it really more of a groupie relationship than anything else? Second, there is the question of whether the student has any strong sense of identity *on his or her own*. In the vast majority of teacher-student relationships I was able to remember, the answer to this is almost always No. The student's self worth is measured by how "special" the teacher can be made to appear. Again, it's a rock star-groupie dynamic. The groupie's status or value is measured by how big a crowd the teacher draws, or by stories told about his prowess at teaching or his ability to perform miracles. It's this second issue that leaves me thinking that the traditional "master-disciple" relationship as passed to us from the East, and which even appears in Western traditions, is ALL WRONG, and detrimental to both student and teacher. I watched one teacher start out right, refusing to allow his students to treat him like most other spiritual teachers, and instead call him their "friend" rather than their teacher or guru. But over time he began to give in to their demands for a teacher-groupie relationship, and he became more and more of a traditional authoritarian, gotta-run-all-aspects-of-my-students'-lives guru. His life ended badly, and when he died the majority of his students who were still studying with him (I wasn't) were left still without any identity of their own, because everything in their lives had been about gaining groupie status within an organization devoted to the "special" teacher. The funny thing is that even Maharishi knew of the perils of the guru-groupie relationship. Or did at one time. Literally the first time I ever saw him, at the Greek Theater in L.A. in 1967, he said something wise. Someone in the audience asked him for personal advice, and he refused to give it, saying, "If I tell you what to do in this situation, what will you do when the next situation comes up? You'll ask me what to do again. If I tell you what to do, I will in effect have made you *weaker*, not stronger." Good answer. Maharishi should have walked his own talk, instead of becoming pretty much the model for the guru-groupie dynamic, trying to run every aspect of his students' lives. Look at what's left of the students who got "groupie close" to him while he was alive. Do they appear *strong* to you, with strong spiritual identities of their own? Or do they still "feed off of" stories of their time with Maharishi, and how they once almost got close enough to touch the hem of his dhoti, and how "special" he was because <fill in the blanks here>? I think the problem is not with the individual teachers but with the teaching model itself. I think that the ideal of the "master-disciple" relationship is fatally flawed, and always has been. It may serve a purpose, for young, naive students who feel the need to be "led" by someone more "special" than themselves, but I see it as a dynamic that rarely, if ever, inspires students to become special themselves. Instead, they tend to remain groupies for the rest of their lives. I don't think it needs to be like this. I think there are better models for teacher-student relationships. I got to see one recently. A good friend of mine in England studies Buddhism with an interesting teacher. He's a traditional Tibetan Buddhist, but at the same time *very* non-traditional. He refuses to wear Tibetan robes. He refuses to allow his students to treat him as "special" in any way, and tells them if they have to have a name for what he is to them, it should be "friend," not "teacher." His organization is small, and he plans to keep it that way. The organization itself doesn't even have a name, because he doesn't want people to develop a sense of elitism around being "Name-ists." Mainly they hang out together and perform works of charity and selfless giving and discuss ideas. When they do the latter, everyone is expected to produce their *own* ideas, in their *own* words. Parroting what he said in the past is a good way to get ignored, not stroked. When they meditate, they meditate *on their own*, not in a group, and certainly not with any notion of receiving "darshan" or any kind of "empowerment" from the teacher. And the result? They are twenty or so of the nicest people I've met in a great long while. All of them are strong individuals with well-formed and realistic self images, and all of them can talk comfortably about any subject, whether it be Buddhism or movies or who is going to win the Euro 2012 football matches. If you met one of these people on the street, they would never in a million years introduce themselves as a "student of so-and-so," and proceed to talk your ear off about how "special" so-and-so is, let alone how much "more special" he is than any other teacher. I think that the guru-groupie model is old and outdated and needs to be allowed to die a much-deserved death. The friend-friend model seems to work better, and to produce better results. If for no other reason, when a friend dies, no one feels the need to make an ass of themselves by making up stories about how "special" the friend was, in an attempt to make *themselves* feel more "special" for having known him.
