~ For those of you who are looking for a Teacher - think twice! ~
Difficult and scary is the moment when you realize that your Teacher, the one who guides, suddenly becomes your most dangerous opponent. It could be a temporary thing - while you are in sparring, or it could be something more serious, like when your entire life becomes a huge playground on which you become enemies, but it's not a game anymore, it's the real matter of life and death.
No matter what, it is always numbing and genuinely scary, and it always seems to take an eternity because in the life of a warrior even one minute is so saturated that it can feel like a hundred years.
The fear doesn't come from the realization that you will get hurt and suffer, that you will be destroyed psychologically or maybe even die a physical death. Fear comes from understanding that this being who means more than a whole world to you suddenly becomes an enemy, a stranger, someone to be avoided, someone who will either destroy or abandon you (which feels pretty much the same). It's like being a devoted Catholic priest who suddenly loses faith. It's like being a child who is taken away from a beloved parent. It's like dying a slow death while you are still alive.
WILL THIS MOMENT COME IN THE LIFE OF EVERY STUDENT OF A TRUE, GENUINE TEACHER?
I am afraid so. Many spiritual and esoteric traditions, warrior schools, secret societies and martial arts of the old times contain this stage of teaching and learning - the scariest moment of anyone's practice when the Master (literally a god-like figure with whom the pupil develops strong bonds and emotional attachments) leaves or turns against his disciple, and it's impossible to say whether it's the real end of everything or just another test on the long path of extreme training.
It gets even more difficult in situations where you are a woman and your Teacher is a man. There's just no way around it - we live in the reality of physical bodies, hormonal reactions, and a multitude of energetic, mental, and bio-chemical interactions... And when it comes to martial arts, willpower, spiritual development, and some other aspects of the path, men are generally tougher, harder, and stronger.
WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING? WHY CAN'T REAL MASTERS BE EASY AND "NICE"? I DO WANT TO CHALLENGE MYSELF, BUT I DON'T WANT TO BE ABUSED.
It's very simple. You see, in order to drag you from your habitual thought processes, usual actions, "normal" feelings, regular perceptions, rigid ideas about this and that, and even this standard physiological half-sleeping state of being with all the automated processes of the mind, body, brain, central nervous system, and consciousness, a real guide, a real Master will sooner or later use ANY means and methods possible - I REALLY MEAN ANY - to influence his student.
This includes manipulations of student's deepest attachments, desires, fears, principles, and convictions, and the manipulations are done with a simple purpose to eventually DESTROY the acquired social and psychological persona of the student along with everything listed above.
After this, the student will either cease to exist as a human being who could be truly born into the real world (by destroying the illusory one) or manage to survive and keep on going.
For those of you who know a bit about psychology and human behavioral patterns things that I am describing now will look like psychopathy. I may agree, but not entirely. At this point I have to say that some of the training, learning, and challenges to the human mind, body, and spirit in various warrior and spiritual "schools" out there go FAR BEYOND what we define as psychopathy today.
Let me bring you an example of the warriors of the old, assassins (the real ones, not the game ones)). In the ancient times, a man who wished to become one of those warriors, wasn't even accepted inside the great fortress for training right away. He would have to stay by the walls for more than a month, tired, thirsty, and hungry while being laughed at and abused in various ways just to receive an invitation to come inside and begin the real training.
ARE THE ACTIONS OF THE MASTER IMMORAL, NON-VIRTUOUS, INHUMANE?
I'd say they are often "immoral" in a sense of "public morals" and ethics - our cultural and traditional understandings of the right and wrong. They can be in conflict with everything we consider kind, virtuous, humane, caring. However, on the path of learning when one goes beyond all these cultural and even psychological understandings of virtue and morals, nothing is "wrong".
I'm sure some of you are familiar with the myths of the above mentioned assassins. Most of us know them from the books, games, and now some films, and I won't go digging into the history of the real Ḥashashiyan now, but I'll use the saying used in popular culture: Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.
This is exactly it. This is what real Masters do. They will not be easy, nice, and caring toward our normal states of being. On the contrary, they will break them one after another until there is nothing left. Real teaching and learning HAS TO GO BEYOND common convictions, principles, and morals. And most of the time it's painful as hell.
Some people I communicate with have asked me about mental toughness and the ability to be psychologically impenetrable. Some women, in particular, have asked me how I manage to be free from certain emotional reactions. I've been questioned on the subject of the "psychological" immunity to various stimuli, situations, conversations, actions, etc., where most of us, particularly women, would have emotional breakdowns, stronger responses, and other outbursts.
I wish I could help them in their search for inner strength, but I am no teacher or helper. I don't have the practical knowledge of simple, easy, and pleasant ways of acquiring this so-called toughness though I know some of them have to do with mindfulness and meditation. In my case, I wasn't into those; I was lucky (or unlucky?) enough to meet a Master of the kind that I have vaguely described in the post above, and my communications with him and actions under his guidance allowed me to become RAW and BARE, to completely open up and become super-vulnerable, and at the same time acquire more strength and endurance on all levels of human existence.
Saying this, I have to mention that I am not even on the true path of learning yet; I'm still waiting at the door.
As for what's been happening to this day, the so-called "learning"... Has it been fun, pleasant, mind-blowing? Yes, definitely. However, it's also been and still is absolutely destructive, scary, painful to the point of physical sensations of dying stretched in time and space in comparison to which clinical depression seems to be child's play.
Some of you have probably heard about Castaneda's teacher, Don Juan (no matter if he was real or not). Some of you are familiar with people such as George Gurdjieff (look it up if you are interested). There were and are others, and most of them don't write books or become well-known to the whole world. But if you read whatever limited information about the ones we know about, you'll see that their methods and dealings with "students" were extremely tough. Pieces of information, no matter how scattered and sometimes mutated, will tell you that most people who were in contact with these "guides" or teachers would go through totally FANTASTIC experiences, like in fantasy books and beyond, but... the fact is, most of their ordeals were nothing like a fairy-tale walk into the world of esoteric heaven; it was more like going deep into states of being which are perceived by human mind, brain, nervous system, etc. like going into Hell (literally).
IF I WANT TO GROW SPIRITUALLY OR BECOME A WARRIOR, DO I NEED A TEACHER?
I have no idea. I don't even think we decide this. They say that it's best if a person is his/her own teacher, learning from everything in life. However, many people do want to meet the "teacher" Teacher - a concrete being, like in the stories of the old times where a person would go and spend years learning from an old monk, a great warrior, a wise spiritual leader, or an unbeatable master of the martial arts.
The idea is definitely attractive. It sounds like an adventure. Many of us do want to be led by someone who knows more and can speed up our development. There is also an old idea, like in Sufism, where they say that the way to knowing God without a sheikh (spiritual leader, guide) can be tough and dangerous because "if you don't have a sheikh, you'll get Shaytan for a teacher" )))
Personally, I think that having this type of Master entity in one's life is NOT a conscious choice. It's just something that happens, like destiny. There are some people who actively search for a teacher their whole life. They go from one school to another, engage in various spiritual and religious practices, but they never find a true teacher (they find only regular "gurus" who are in fact just people who have read and practiced a bit more and who are very often full of BS).
And then there are some other people who aren't looking for anything. They don't want to know anything, they are as remote from what I am writing about as possible... but the Teacher comes and they get caught into dealing with him, and the bond forms in such ways that they can neither run from it nor hide.
I think those of us who are looking for something beyond the well-known shouldn't be bothered by any of this. The main thing is to walk your way, grow as a human being, develop yourself. If at some point on this path some Teacher appears, it will be a great miracle, but it will also become one of the greatest challenges.
Having a teacher can speed up many processes. It's like galloping fast where one would normally walk with many stops. However, there is a "but". When you get to gallop, it doesn't come free. Speedups and power-ups cost something, and we usually pay the cost by experiencing uncomfortable physical and psychological states that can be quite TRAUMATIC.
When we are sped up, what a person normally goes through in like 50 years can be squeezed into several months, and it feels like an extreme overload (in the best scenario) or a complete destruction of one's world!
A true Master always takes responsibility for putting those who learn through various ordeals. But, as I mentioned above, if we are talking about going beyond our system's limits (or even just getting close to crossing some of them), all our perceptions, morals, "good" and "bad", usual understandings of being human, etc., have to basically DIE.
That's precisely why the student usually feels like he/she is in the midst of an apocalypse where everything is mind-blowing, scary, and painful, no matter how beautiful and exciting some moments can be.
I would say it's just some food for thought, a bit of my personal experiences, and common knowledge, and it's up to every one of us how to go through life and whether or not to seek a guiding figure who would help along the way... But while writing this post I actually came to the (probably temporary) conclusion that having or not having such a figure isn't entirely up to us (which is an arguable point indeed).