What is it in you that
brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the
Spirit in you, since that is already enlightened and has no need
to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.
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When it comes to spiritual
teachers, there are those who are safe, gentle, consoling,
soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors,
the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and
women who are in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until
you radically awaken to who and what you really are.
And may I suggest?: choose your
teachers carefully.
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If you want encouragement, soft smiles, ego stroking, gentle
caresses of your self-contracting ways, pats on the back and sweet words
of solace, find yourself a Nice Guy or Good Girl, and hold their hand on
the sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort. But if you want
Enlightenment, if you want to wake up, if you want to get fried in the
fire of passionate Infinity, then, I promise you: find yourself a Rude
Boy or a Nasty Girl, the ones who make you uncomfortable in their
presence, who scare you witless, who will turn on you in a second and
hold you up for ridicule, who will make you wish you were never born,
who will offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror, not saccharin
solace but scorching angst, for then, just then, you might very well be
on the path to your own Original Face.
Most of us, I suspect, prefer our spiritual teachers to be of the
Nice-Guy variety. Soft, comforting, non-threatening, a source of succor
for a worn and weary soul, a safe harbor in the samsaric storm. There is
nothing wrong with that, of course; spirituality comes in all sorts of
flavors, and I have known some awfully Nice Guys. But if the flavor
tends toward Enlightenment instead of consolation, if it drifts away
from soothing dreams toward actually waking up, if it rumbles toward a
God realization and not egoic fortification, then that demands a brutal,
shocking death: a literal death of your separate self, a painful,
frightening, horrifying dissolution—a miraculous extinction you will
actually witness as you expand into the boundless, formless, radical
Truth that will pervade your every cell and drench your being to the
core and expand what you thought was your self until it embraces the
distant galaxies. For only on the other side of death lies Spirit, only
on the other side of egoic slaughter lies the Good and the True and the
Beautiful. "You will come in due course to realize that your true
glory lies where you cease to exist," as the illustrious Sri Ramana
Maharshi constantly reminded us. Your true glory lies on the other side
of your death, and who will show you that?
Not the Nice Guys and not the Good Girls. They don't want to hurt your
feelings. They don't want to upset you. They are here to whisper sweet
nothings in your ear and place consolation prizes in the outstretched
hand of the self-contraction, balm for a war-torn weary ego, techniques
to prop it up in its constant battle with the world of otherness. In a
sense, it's very easy being a Nice-Guy teacher: no muss, no fuss, no
wrestling with egoic resistance and exhausting confrontation. Be nice to
the ego, pat it on the back, have it count its breaths, hum a few
mantras.
Rude Boys know better. They are not here to console but to shatter, not
to comfort but to demolish. They are uncompromising, brutal, laser-like.
They are in your face until you recognize your Original Face—and they
simply will not back off, they will not back down, they will not let up
until you let go—radically, fully, completely, unhesitatingly. They
live as Compassion—real compassion, not idiot compassion—and real
compassion uses a sword more often than a sweet. They deeply offend the
ego (and the greater the offense, the bigger the ego). They are alive as
Truth, they are everywhere confronted with egos, and they choose the
former uncompromisingly.
Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, used to say that nobody
comes to a therapist to get better (although they always say they do);
they really come to perfect their neurosis. Just so, nobody comes to a
spiritual teacher to get Enlightenment (although everybody claims they
do); rather, they come to a spiritual teacher to learn more subtle and
sophisticated egoic games—in this case, the game of "Look at me
being really spiritual."
After all, what is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in
the first place? It's not the Spirit in you, since that is already
enlightened and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that
brings you to a teacher: you want to see yourself in the presence of the
spiritual game, you want to meet yourself tomorrow as a realized
being—in plain language, you want your ego to continue into a
spiritual paradise.
And what's a poor teacher to do, confronted with such egoic cunning? Everybody
who comes to a spiritual teacher comes egoically motivated. And teachers
have two choices in the face of this onslaught of the separate selves,
this conference of the self-contractions: they can play to the audience,
or they can blow the entire building up.
Andrew Cohen is a Rude Boy. He is not here to offer comfort; he is here
to tear you into approximately a thousand pieces...so that Infinity can
reassemble you, Freedom can replace imprisonment, Fullness can outshine
fear. And that simply will not happen if all you want is consolation,
soothing prayers, ruffle-free platitudes, "It will all be
okay." Well, it will not be okay if you want Enlightenment. It
will, in fact, be hell, and only Rude Boys are rude enough to tell you
that, and to show you that—if you can stand the rudeness, stay in the
fire, burn clean as Infinity and radiate as the stars.
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