The Big Secret About Spiritual Lineages

Hello Chris,

I wonder if my quoting Gurdjief made you think of the hacker analogy.
It’s understandable that it would be misunderstood.

The truth is that it wasn’t my intention in the least to give that impression. Gurdjief means, in my humble opinion, that it is beholden on the student to make what he learns his own; the teacher can’t do it for him or her. Also, the student has to be bold enough to think that he “can do it”, otherwise he remains in a subservient, or as the zen people would say, in a “guest” position; he is not entering into the “host” position of trusting his own innate intelligence/the dao/buddha nature.

I personally have good relationships with my teachers, toward whom I certainly do not conduct myself as a “hacker”. Friendship is my guru, and friendship is the spirit I aspire to bring to teacher-student relationships.

I do not accept when a teacher claims he or she is a necessary element of anyone’s enlightenment equation; but there are some teachers who make such claims more or less whom I very much respect and from whom I know I have much to learn; I don’t write them off or condemn them. If you can’t be a good student how are you going to get anywhere in a complex endeavour?

I was not at the gathering you mentioned (and it seems like a slightly strange venue for Guenther to begin with actually, Guenther being pretty much exclusively a buddhist scholar; maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to attend, and was only there at all because the minor celebrity status of his successful books brought such a possibility into his orbit), so I don’t know if I would have experienced it the same way, but I will say that many people are good at some things and not at others. In some cases this takes on extreme, even freakish proportions. Not everyone can easily get into singing native songs around a circle, particualrly if they are not native and harldly ever sing, which I hazard to guess is the case with Guenther. I feel free to learn from a physically awkward person who may just be one of the finest scholars of the century; I will get physical yogic savvy elsewhere. Awkwardness comes across in some of his prose too, though he’s getting better and better with time, which is all one can really ask of a person.

Speaking of taking different perspectives, is Guenther a head case or a super freak? I choose to see the foibles of such special souls in the latter light, as long as they do not have negative intentions toward others, which is the same way I aspire to relate to my friends.

best wishes,
simon

yo it doesn’t say you will lose the falun if you practice tai chi
IT SAYS THE FALUN WILL BECOME DEFORMED. because you will be miixing things from other cultivation systems with falun gong.