Role of the Teacher.......................................................................
So many people are on a purported spiritual path
of “self-discovery” without ever having spent any face
to face time with a teacher in the flesh.
This is almost exactly like having a Facebook
romance with someone you never met in the flesh. It
is all imagination and concept. You are having a
dialogue with your image of the teacher; in other
words, a dialogue with yourself.
You cannot “know” a teacher, or a teacher a
student, through emails, phone calls, or Skype. You
have to spend time together, face to face, otherwise
the idealizations that made you want a guru in the
first place, will always poison the instructions he or
she is giving.
A huge number of “spiritual virgins” form their
concept of what a guru is or should be like from
reading about Ramana Maharshi. Forty years ago the
most common guru models were either: Ramakrishna,
Yogananda and his Babaji lineage, or a Zen master such
as Yashatani.
But all of us have ideal-guru concepts which no
teacher ever fits because it is an image personalized
by us within our own minds by our felt need for a
certain type of mirroring. That is, we project onto the