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July 14, 2006 Suppose you want to find the Perfect Teacher, perhaps because you have confused the word "enlightened" with the word "perfect." Then, you are likely to be satisfied with a charming woman or man who seems to be legitimate. In the same way, responding like so many naive people do, if you are a naive young man, you will probably fall for some beautiful younger woman and expect to find perfection in her. If you are a naive young woman, you are apt to fall for some handsome man who will bed you and soon be off and gone. In spirituality as in sex, there are lots of rapists looking for an easy mark. Today many sexually experienced and otherwise successful people go searching for the "Perfect Teacher" who can help them find "enlightenment." They fall for the idea that a handsome and charming adult is smarter and more spiritual than somebody who is rather ugly like Socrates is reported to have been. You are likely to fall for some talkative handsome charismatic dude. Fools imagine that a person who is near perfect in charm is perfect in other ways as well. But how perfectly did Chopin the master pianist-composer play the flute? How good a chess player was Albert Einstein? How charming is Steven Hawking? Beware of the old cliches. If you are interested in "enlightenment," then be mindful that you might not even know what "enlightenment" is. After all, if you've never seen a piano, and you've never witnessed any person playing a piano, well, how can you really know if John Schmoe or Jane Doe is really a good pianist or not? Without a guide, a rudder, and a motor or a sail attached to an unsinkable boat, you are lost at sea. Because "enlightenment" is so poorly understood, there are cynics who dismiss the idea of "enlightenment" because they've never been with an "enlightened" person and poetically speaking they've never seen a real shining star. Poetically speaking, the cynics all live in a densely cloud-shrouded place where they don't ever see the radiant sun disk. Or, if an ignorant person is not skeptical, he or she thinks a star person is very handsome or ranks very high on some other familiar scale. Such naive seekers don't understand what makes a real God-person. So, clouded by ignorance, how can they ever recognize a true teacher if they ever actually meet one? Consider a mundane analogy: a piece of quartz. If you go searching for the "Perfect" piece of quartz, well, first you have to know what you plan to do with that piece of quartz? Do you plan to set it in a ring? Do you intend to wear it on your left ear? Do you intend to use it as a paper weight? Do you expect to use it to show your science class what quartz looks like? For each of these purposes there are different essential criteria. For example, unless you want to injure your ear you won't plan to wear a six-inch long quartz crystal as an ear-ring. So when you go out searching for the very best spiritual teacher, what criteria are you going to use, and why will you choose these criteria? If you don't know the true purpose of your life, what you intend to DO with your "enlightenmened" true self? How do you know what to search for in your true spiritual teacher? Without a clear idea of what you truly need, you are likely to just fall into a socio-political trap and become someone's pretty puddy tat or obedient watch dog or bodyguard. Without a guide, you will remain lost at sea. Self-knowledge is the essential starting point. The valid teacher helps you acquire own valid personal self-knowledge. This is not numerology, casting horoscopes, or some other impersonal dubious dark stuff. In fact you yourself are Perfect for yourself. You know more about yourself than any master. The fact is, your best master is your best student. You become a master by knowing yourself. Then you will be a good teacher. There is a page which outlines what to watch out for in a "spiritual" teacher. Check out the False Guru Test. When it comes to finding God, well, even if you argue that there is no God, there is evidence that you already have God in your own self. This evidence is introduced in the article God and the Brain. Take some time and read this article. Then find a brainy teacher-student who can help you integrate the God that is in yourself with the rest of your brain that you probably already know quite a lot about through years of normal schooling and other experiences. As close to "Perfect" as you will get is totally 100% brain-mind-body integrated in your own self. No one else's brain-mind is exactly like yours. You make a mistake in trying to think, act, or feel like some popular "guru" does. On the other hand, your teacher may be well integrated. Then you will learn more and more how to be your own eccentric self, not more and more how to be like your eccentric teacher. This lesson ought to be implanted in the mind of every school student, so that he or she will take an interest in learning about the brain and about the lives and works of known saints and other outstanding brainy eccentrics. The unusually devoted "God" person is like an unusually devoted chess master or some other clever eccentric. But understanding the brain activity of a saint has been difficult because there have been so very few true saints. Lots more young people play chess and become quite adept at chess than they do at developing the sense of sanctity. Holy smokes! Smoking a joint or wearing a holy robe or talking holy talk won't make you holy. This is new brain science, the science of self-realization. Just as mastering chess has nothing to do with how good looking you are, or how much money you make, or how clever you are in conversation, the skill in question is specific, and some people have acquired the skill. But how do you recognize the skill if no one has taught you anything about this skill in theory and by example? You are still lost at sea. This question takes us back in time to Plato's Dialogues concerning Meno and Socrates, back to a time centuries before the beginning of Christian civilization. This is the old issue of knowing yourself. You have not yet become your full brainy self, so how can you ever know your true self? Wasn't it Socrates who said, "The unexamined life isn't worth living."? How can you really know yourself...your strong talents as well as your disabilities? Well, you work at becoming a self-realized person. Self-realization includes stimulating, developing, and demonstrating your God-nature, and integrating this God-nature with the other "normal" brain faculties that you have developed in yourself. This takes a bit of time and so it's best to start at a young age. Time's a wastin', so I'll submit this article, even though it contains a number of imperfections. ------------ About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and problem-solving. John has created art, music and songs, prose and poetry, and helped people solve a difficult problem. For more information, read: John's letters of recommendation: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/recommendations about John's self-healing and integration: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/index.html about John's independent research: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jlw47/index.html about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: http://www.writers.net/writers/39295 Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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