One facet of working with a spiritual teacher "live" vs. only "meeting" them in books or on videotape that hasn't been discussed a lot on this forum is the issue of the psychic relationship that can develop between teacher and student.
I am open to the theory that this psychic relationship can exist between a student and a teacher they have never met, but in practice I have seen this happen only rarely. In my experience, it requires having spent some time in close proximity to teachers who are capable of transmission to develop the ability to receive those transmissions. By "transmission" I am talking about the ability of a teacher to psychically "broadcast" to his students either a state of consciousness (so powerfully that the students can "put it on and wear it"), or actual data (teachings and techniques that the student remembers and benefits from later, even though not a word was ever spoken). This is one of those "You have to have been there" thangs. You've either had the experience of sitting in a room with a teacher capable of transmission or you haven't. I have, both with Rama and with a few Tibetan teachers. You may consider my subjective view of these experiences delusion or hallucination or folly or other names, and rest assured that I have applied all those epithets to myself over the years, attempting to "rationalize away" some of these experiences. But I can't. They happened, at the very least subjectively, to me. They also happened to dozens or hundreds of other students sitting in the same rooms or sitting on the sand of the same desert canyon. When comparing notes afterwards, we more often than not attended the same "pyschic lecture," and received the same teachings or techniques. All without a word ever being spoken. Go figure. I know I'm still trying to figure it out. :-) I'm curious as to how the book larnin' set on this forum, who have never met the teacher they feel they have a relationship with, will react to the suggestion that if they *had* met him they might have been able to develop a direct mind-to-mind relationship with him.
