Hi Rupert,
This was in your response to Chuckee:
‘As I mentioned to Claudia yesterday, it is naïve to expect happiness to remain ever-present after such an awakening. The mind and the body often come back with a vengeance. It is at this time that a qualified teacher can help, both in interpreting the often perplexing reappearance of old patterns of feeling and, more importantly in helping to slowly realign the mind and the body with our new awakening. In the absence of such a teacher the old habits will, in most cases, prevail.’
When you say help from a teacher, do you mean going and being with a teacher in person? Does this mean if we can’t be with a teacher we are all out of luck?
Thank you,
Claudia
Dear Claudia,
Yes, in relation to the specific situation Chuckee described, personal contact with one who has some experience and understanding of what he experienced would have provided the right interpretation of the situation and could have helped to adapt the experience to the events in his subsequent life. In other words, contact with a teacher in this case could have helped to reconcile and stabilise this awakening with the normal appearance and functioning of the mind, body and world.
In the absence of such guidance, such a moment of awakening is often (although by no means always) misinterpreted and the person’s subsequent life can be spent, sometimes for many decades, in a state of nostalgia and longing.
You are not out of luck. On the contrary, the luckiest thing that can ever happen to someone has already happened to you. That is, a deep interest in the nature of reality has been kindled in your heart. You may not wish or be able to be with a teacher, but you can always be with your self. Your own presence is always with you. How could it ever be apart from you? What would you be without it?
If I have any recommendation at all, it would be to follow your love for and interest in truth, wherever it takes you and with whatever intensity you feel. If you are mildly interested, give it a little attention and energy. If it is all you are deeply interested in, then give it everything. Do whatever seems the easiest and most enjoyable thing, to remind yourself of and to explore the reality of your experience.
If, at some point, your interest and understanding prompt you to spend some time with one in whom this understanding is truly alive, then follow it.
It is my experience that when a deep love of truth takes hold of one, then the universe turns round, as it were, and cooperates with this love. Nothing stands in the way. All those things that seemed previously to stand in the way now help instead. Doors open. In such a case the universe will appear to one in exactly the way that is most conducive to his or her love of truth, including sometimes to manifest as a meeting and a friendship with a teacher.
Ultimately everything is equally an expression of presence. Once that is obvious, the question of having a teacher does not arise. However, if it is not yet obvious, then the teacher is perhaps the most potent and efficient form in which this presence can appear in our lives.
The true teacher is never a person. However, many of us need a friend to enable us to know this for ourselves.
With love,
Rupert
