--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have no further comments, except to point out that > you found a way to ignore all of the situations you > didn't like, when the point of the exercise was to > comment on what *you* would have done if *your* > spiritual teacher, the person with whom *you* have > developed "an emotional alignment with someone you > trust," had asked you to do something like kill an > infidel or poison your kids or smuggle money. Well,I do the exercises I like to do, and not the one's you design for me, especially not if the contain a heavy load of insinuations. > > You've got an "emotional alignment" with this teacher. > You trust them completely. You have that "bhakti > sentiment" going for them in spades. And now they > ask you to do these things. What ya gonna do, eh? > > You won't answer, except to claim that a "real" > teacher like yours would never ask such a thing. Exactly. How did you know? > But they do. Far too often. > > And the commonly-taught dogma about bhakti, as > exemplified by the Amma quote below, tells seekers > that *when* the teacher asks them to do something > like this, they should consider it an order. But I am not a follower of Amma. And trusting here means, trusting that they wouldn't ask things like this. That they are not in the category you mix them in. Life can be simple if you see things clearly, but you like to see things complicated, with all kinds of hypothetical problems and conflicts. If conflicts come, at each stage, you have to resolve them with a good dose of common sense. I have done that often. In that sense you get a good idea about your teacher. My sense of Bhakti is well summed up by this quote of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: http://www.goldensufi.org/A-InterviewMCaplan.html "LVL: They know somewhere within. It depends how strong the longing is in the human being, and how much pushes them from within. It is said that even until the last initiation, the teacher does not know what choice the disciple will make. The disciple can say yes, or the disciple can say no. It has to be like that. Q: What is the function of the teacher? LVL: People make the mistake of thinking that spiritual power is about telling somebody what to do. Spiritual power is about being able to take a human soul and turn it back to God, to be given the authority to work with the soul of a human being, to work in the secret places of the heart that belong only to God. That is real authority. And that requires tremendous humanity. In the West, individuality is so important and we project that into this relationship with the teacher and make a mess of it. We stir it up and get confused, and fight imaginary demons, but the teacher wants nothing from the disciple, because the teacher is free. How can the teacher want anything from a disciple? If they do, they're not a teacher because they're not free. But the disciple projects into this empty space of the teacher all of their psychological dramas. They find something that the teacher said that they disagree with, and then they fight about it and go off and say, "The teacher said this and this and this." Maybe the teacher did and maybe the teacher didn't. It really doesn't matter. The disciple is given the opportunity to play out all of their dramas, all of their psychological problems, and some people get stuck in the psychology of it all. And I've seen that happen. They walk away angry and resentful. And that's fine too, because human beings are free. Those who don't walk away who begin to see that there is something else underneath start to find what is there. They get a little bit closer to themselves, to their own true nature. They walk another few steps on the path and the teacher just watches." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Join modern day disciples reach the disfigured and poor with hope and healing http://us.click.yahoo.com/lMct6A/Vp3LAA/i1hLAA/UlWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
