Spiritual Transmission. Amir Freimann

and developing?

      LLEWELLYN: I will be happy to pass on some of the responsibilities of being a teacher to the one who comes after me. Being a teacher is both a grace and a burden, especially in the West, where there is so little understanding of the true nature of this relationship. And, of course, there is a central part of my journey that has nothing to do with being a teacher, just a human being, a soul drawn towards the light. Just a piece of dust at the feet of my teacher.

      AMIR: You feel this way even though you are a teacher yourself?

      LLEWELLYN: In our tradition, the real relationship with the teacher is once and forever, from lifetime to lifetime. In my own experience, I could not live without the inner connection to my sheikh. I belong to him beyond life or death. Through his grace the journey continues.

SHAYKH FADHLALLA HAERI

      My question about how the absolute-impersonal and the relative-personal can be so closely—inseparably—related in the teacher-student relationship appeared to be central for all of the Sufi masters and students I interviewed, including my exchange with Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, a Sufi master of Iraqi origin, who lives in South Africa and teaches worldwide.

      AMIR: Do you have students for whom the personal relationship with you plays an important role in their journey?

      FADHLALLA: Definitely, no doubt about it. There are some with whom I know the bond is exceptionally deep and strong, beyond any emotional relationship. It’s beyond my ability to understand that bonding, but it is there. It’s part of fate, and I take it as such. There are students who I don’t hear from for months or years but that relationship is always there as though we never parted, there is no severance of the subtle inner emotional, mental and spiritual bond. It has to do with trust. Some people’s trust in me is immovable, unshakable, unchangeable, total—which is why it has something sacred about it.

      AMIR: Does such a relationship touch in some way the absolute dimension?

      FADHLALLA: The soul, the mind and the body, each has its connectedness. There are people with whom you feel great empathy and attraction on the mind level, and the same can be felt also on the body level. When you go to the soul, it’s almost inexplicable. It’s not an attraction of definable love or other measures of attraction. It’s beyond description or even intuition. Such a connection opens the heart, that is why I say that trust is essential. It’s inexplicable because it’s not a trust in the cleverness or wisdom of the person, it is trust itself. I know it when it is there, and in most cases it remains and becomes stronger as time goes by. The existential ups and downs have no effect on it. Such a person may have outer difficulties, a situation where you would have thought that the relationship would have to break down, and yet it was not touched whatsoever. That is because the connection is in another zone of consciousness.

      AMIR: Can a relationship between two humans facilitate a relationship with that which is beyond human, with the absolute?

      FADHLALLA: For sure. But these things happen in their own way, inadvertently. I don’t think it’s something that one can desire, expect or call for—it just happens. It resonates in the inner heart level, at the spiritual level. We don’t know what beam of light hits where and how. You go into this zone which is no longer understandable by our limited and conditioned consciousness. These are the thrills of life, the mysteries of life.

SANIEL BONDER

      Saniel Bonder, a former student of Adi Da and the founder of the Waking Down in Mutuality network, suggested in our interview an original view on the personal/impersonal paradox.

      SANIEL: To me, there is a potential quality of the teacher-student connection that transcends the purveying of information, wisdom, energy and guidance that helps the student to attain realized autonomy. That quality of the connection has been strongly brought forth in the mystical dimensions of Christianity, as well as in the Vaishnavite or Krishna traditions in India, where the nature of the relationship isn’t simply transactional, and it’s also not a relationship between equals. It has to do with the dynamic tension between “the absolutely impersonal” and “the absolutely personal.”

      AMIR: Are you saying that the personal connection between teacher and student is an aspect of the absolute nature of this relationship?

      SANIEL: Yes. A good example is that, for you and I, as we both acknowledged, clearly there has been a breakdown of something between us and our primary teacher, the one who contributed the most to our awakening and transformation, to whatever degree we’re living it. Clearly something of that has ended and yet—that connection is very much alive! To me that indicates that there is an absolute dimension to the personal relationship, just as there is obviously the absolute, impersonal dimension of it.

      AMIR: What does it mean, that there is an absolute dimension to the personal relationship?

      SANIEL: It means that there is no place where the absolute stops and the personal starts. This non-difference is vitally profound for anybody who is doing anything like spiritual work in intense communion and connection with an “other,” whether that other is one’s student or one’s teacher. Embodiment is the name of the game, and where the absolute meets the personal and suffuses it, it registers as a love beyond reckoning. It’s a union. One of the ways I describe it is that it’s not just that we’re interconnected, we’re inter-identified.