and enjoy the music. It seems that you don’t really care. But I do. A lot. Would you please leave the club for me?”
Shaken and on the verge of tears, I left the club and drove back to Foxhollow. I didn’t know what to do. I went to the meditation hall, sat down in the middle of the large, empty space, and meditated through the night. In those hours of meditation, I rediscovered immovable stability, which was not dependent in any way upon me.
In the morning, when we met with Andrew, it was clear to everyone—without exchanging a word—that something had settled down and completely relaxed in me. I shared with everyone what happened.
“Andrew, I don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve been meditating for thirty years, but nothing like this has ever happened to me; I’ve never had such a meditation. What happened?”
“It’s very simple,” Andrew replied. “You’re a narcissist, so even your meditation is for yourself. Last night you meditated for me. That’s what made all the difference.”
DECEMBER 26, 2008
FOXHOLLOW, MASSACHUSETTS
“We’ve been putting so much energy, time and money into the Israeli center, but it’s never taken off,” Andrew said. “So, as disappointing as it is for me and for everybody, we’ve decided to close it down. I want you to move back to Foxhollow and be part of the core group here.”
I sank into my chair, feeling as if all the energy were draining out of my body. The room suddenly turned darker. A horrible feeling of total and final failure came over me. But the failure wasn’t just of our Israeli center and of me as its co-leader. At that moment I sensed that, for me, the failure really lay in my relationship with Andrew and the promise it had carried.
In a way, that moment was the culmination of a half-year process, during which my mistrust in Andrew’s motivation had grown. I mistrusted his willingness to support me in the independence, strength, creativity and responsibility I was discovering. The stronger and more independent I became, both as a leader and as a cultural activist, the more tension I felt growing between us. Being sent back to Foxhollow also meant that I would be again in Andrew’s sphere of tight control, which would be a major setback to my growing autonomy.
From the bottom of my sinkhole, I heard myself mumbling, “I cannot do that. I cannot leave Israel and all the projects I’m involved in. That would be completely wrong.”
“Why don’t you think about it, and let’s talk again tomorrow,” Andrew said. “I think it would be good for you to be here, with your brothers and close to me. You’ve become a leader, and here you’d be part of the worldwide revolution, rather than wasting your time in Israel.”
“I cannot leave Israel,” I repeated, now with a little more determination. “That would be a total letdown of my friends and colleagues there, and of my own integrity. I’m not going to do that.”
As I stepped out of Andrew’s office into the freezing wind and began walking back to the house where I was staying during my visit, I already knew that this conversation marked the end of my relationship with Andrew as my Teacher. It was the first time in nearly twenty-two years that I had told him directly that he was wrong and that I wasn’t going to obey his instructions. That meant that I trusted myself more than I trusted him. That meant the termination of our teacher-student “contract.” But at that moment, for me it also meant failure, disappointment and heartache.
The breakdown of my relationship with Andrew left me with one big, wide open question: “What was it all about?” Five years later, when Andrew’s worldwide organization of EnlightenNext collapsed, I decided to engage even more fully with that question, and take its exploration as far as I could—at least for myself, at this point in my spiritual process. I didn’t know where this would lead or what discoveries I would make in the process, but just the idea of diving into the mystery of the teacher-student relationship made my nerves tingle with excitement.
I started off by reading every book and article on the subject that I could find, and taking my first steps in interviewing teachers and students in Israel. My very first interview was with Peter (Hakim) Young, a British Sufi teacher who was visiting Israel with his Israeli-born wife. On a sunny morning in Tel Aviv, we met in a café on Sheinkin Street, and I vividly remember our first exchange. I asked Hakim to tell me about his relationship with his teacher, Bulent Rauf, and he replied that the man had never regarded himself as a teacher but rather as “a fellow student.”
“Gosh,” I thought, “this project is going to be trickier than I thought.”
My second interviewee was with Aikido teacher Miles Kessler, in another café in Tel Aviv. At the end of the interview, I asked him if he was willing to refer me to a couple of his students to interview, and his response seriously impressed me: “Since you heard from me only good things about myself,” he said, “I think you should get a more balanced picture, so I’ll introduce you to two former students of mine with whom the relationship did not end well. If they agree to be interviewed, I think you’ll get quite a different perspective from them.” Indeed, the picture I got from those former students was much more complex and dilemmatic than I got from him.
Israel is a mecca for spiritual teachers, and I went on to interview about a dozen visiting teachers, from Zen masters to Jewish rabbis, as well as a few of their students, including British Vipassanā teacher Christopher Titmuss, American teacher Gabriel Cousens and two Tibetan Rinpoches. During that initial process, I built a list of ten questions, which I used as the basis of each interview and from which I happily diverted into whatever interesting subject came up during the talk. I soon discovered that teachers were generally clearer and had more to say than students about what it meant to be a student, based on their previous experience with their own teachers, so I devoted a good part of many of the interviews to the teachers’ experiences as students.
After completing that first round of interviews in Israel, and with the generous help of Buddha at the Gas Pump interviewer Rick Archer, interfaith dialogue advocate Kurt Johnson and some of my friends in Europe and the United States, I began contacting teachers from other parts of the world and asking them for interviews about their relationships with their own teachers as well as with their students.
I was surprised by the high ratio of positive responses I received. Within a few months I had conducted about thirty more interviews, most of them via Skype and a few in face-to-face meetings during trips I made to the U.K. and the U.S. About half of the interviews were with teachers; the other half were follow-up conversations with their students. Reading through the interviews and considering the excerpts, I found that the most potent parts of each interview were those during which I sensed a paradox or an unresolved question or dilemma—all of which were suggested by an interviewee’s hesitation, inconsistency, vagueness or confusion. One night over dinner, I excitedly told my wife that I came upon what would be the heart of my book: the paradoxes and dilemmas in the spiritual teacher-student relationship.
I became most interested in the types of relationships in which paradoxes and dilemmas were most prominent, including spiritual mentorships and root guru-disciple relationships, which are described in the next chapter. These relationships are characterized by a high level of commitment, involvement on many levels and a certain intensity of intimacy or love between teacher and student.
After conducting nearly one-hundred interviews, of which about one-third were with teachers and two-thirds were with students, and forming a list of about a dozen types of paradoxes and dilemmas, I decided to dedicate each chapter in this book to a specific problem and demonstrate it through one or two interviews in which it is most clearly evident. This meant that most of the interviews I conducted were not included in this book, but excerpts from many of them—as well as additional paradoxes and dilemmas that were not included—are posted on my website The Freedom to Question (free2quest.com).
THE FUNCTIONS AND CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE TEACHER-STUDENT RELATIONSHIP
There are four classifications of spiritual masters:
the