My students often tell me (I’m a spirituality teacher) that they get nervous in my presence, whether in person, on the phone or even writing me an email, and wonder where these feelings of inferiority come from. Let us first look at this phenomenon from the position of the ego.
The ego classifies everyone in terms of “status” or “pecking order.” There is the Alpha, against the Beta. This works well for animals, but as humans, there is a need to go beyond ego programming and into pure spiritual truth. The ego thinks in terms of “best”, “special” and “important”. The problem is that as soon as you make someone “important”, you automatically make others less important. As history shows, this is a very dangerous phenomenon.
The “ego” is really a limited set of opinions or viewpoints. You can only perceive a small ‘fragmentation’ of Reality; he does not “grasp” that beyond his own perception there is an actual Reality, that is, the Absolute. It doesn’t “get” that Life itself is really just a Oneness. The ego automatically divides everything into a duality of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’, ‘important’ versus ‘unimportant’, ‘fair’ versus ‘unfair’, ‘light’ versus ‘dark’, and so on. The ego sees everything in terms of opposites.
In Reality, there is no such thing as something that is the ‘opposite’ of something else. Only degrees are possible. For example, light and dark are not opposites because ‘dark’ doesn’t even exist. There is light, and then we can dim the light until it stops shining. Then the ego sees that the light is absent and says: “It is dark!” But that’s just a label, it’s a fictional word. Darkness is not real energy, you can’t make darkness shine in an alley. The duality of ‘hot’ versus ‘cold’ is another. In Truth, however, ‘cold’ does not exist. Only degrees of intensity of heat have real existence. When the heat is removed, the mind says, “It’s cold in here!” but in reality, it is not ‘cold’: the environment simply lacks warmth.
Let’s do one more example. Sometimes we say that someone is ‘evil’, but evil is just a label. This is not real. It means that someone simply lacks a significant degree of integrity and love. The less love there is, eventually you get to a point where, for linguistic convenience, the mind says, “That guy is evil!” But it’s just a word, a label. An entity is not ‘evil’, but simply lacks the awareness of Love. Again, there is the existence of Light, as well as the existence of warmth and the existence of Love. Those three things Exist in the Reality of Truth Absolute, but the darkness, the cold and the evil do not. This is how duality works in the mind of man. But in truth, there is only one side of any duality, and it is this side that shines to varying degrees. There is light, then less light, then ‘shaded’ light, then dark, and finally no light. There’s scalding coffee, then hot coffee, then lukewarm coffee, then lukewarm, then room temperature, and so on. If the heat drops to a really significant degree, the coffee will freeze and change shape, but it’s not “cold” yet, see? It just lacks heat.
The simple understanding that there are no dualistic opposites is more powerful than the naive reader realizes, as this information can be used to help heal the ego and even make it disappear. To share a simple example of something ego-based that can be easily cured, take a look at anger. People get angry because they haven’t yet understood that everything exists on a continuum of varying degrees, and not as ‘dualistic opposing forces’. Simply put, the way out of anger is to realize that you are not angry at what a person is, but at what they are not.
It’s not that someone is ‘bad’ or ‘inconsiderate’, it’s just that they lack kindness and consideration. Once you see that someone simply lacks love, it is no longer possible to maintain anger because all anger is based on the illusion of opposites. (Tip: think of someone you’re angry with, and try shouting, “God, that person really lacks love!” Your anger will then mature into compassionate understanding because now you’re aligned with Truth instead of opinion/mind/ego/ mirage.)
A spiritually evolved teacher is one who is simply aligned with a higher degree of Light, Truth and Love than the student. He is not “better” or “more special” than the student, but merely reflects a higher degree of consciousness. From the standpoint of Spiritual Reality, all are equal by virtue of the fact that all ‘come from’ Divinity or God. Since the Source of your Life is God, no matter how spiritually evolved you are, you are of equal value because your spiritual value is not a variable. (I should probably mention here that I’m not talking about “God” in the same way that most religions would. I don’t see God as a person, but as the Universe itself. I see God as All That Is. God did not “create” the earth, but it is the earth. God, the way I am defining the term, simply means Totality. Perhaps another very useful term is the word Consciousness, since it is devoid of religiousness).
From the point of view of the ego, of course, it sees that people are definitely not “the same” because we are different in almost every way. However, on an invisible level, all life is equal to everything and everyone else by virtue of the simple fact that All That Is is truly interconnected and therefore One. Not a single person, animal, plant , etc., could survive were it not for the Divine Totality of Totality.
And this brings me to my point. First I wanted to take a moment to weaken the dualistic perception of the ego. A student gets nervous, not because they feel a higher degree of Light, Love or Wisdom in this writer/speaker, but because the ego makes the mistake of labeling me as more “important” than the student. (All egoists do this, so no need to worry about it.) Everyone runs around thinking doctors are more “important” than people who scrub floors, but in reality the milkman is just as “important” as the president.
Everything depends on everything else. If the bees disappeared, we would all be dead. If the temperature of the sun rose or fell a few degrees, we would all be dead. Everything depends on everything else to survive. The student needs the teacher to progress, but at the same time, the teacher also needs the student to progress. Furthermore, without students, there would be no teaching job. And without teachers, our chances of evolving would be slim to none. If Jesus, Krishna, and Buddha had not appeared on the planet when they did, it is likely that humanity would have self-destructed long ago due to ego’s negativity and ignorance.
Everyone is both a teacher and a student. We teach the least evolved and learn from the most evolved. All life serves higher life (eg, the food chain), and higher life also serves lower life. The cow serves humanity by giving her life to feed us, but at the same time we serve the cow by bringing her into existence and giving her the opportunity to have a life on earth. (If everyone stopped eating steak, who would bother raising cattle?) From the ego’s point of view, life seems ‘unfair’ because the ego doesn’t have access to the big picture. A spiritual life is a very pleasant life because it continually widens your lens of perception; your consciousness/knowledge is constantly expanding and tends to “reframe” your whole life. Concepts like ‘justice’ are considered preschool and very pompous. (With an understanding of ‘karma’, for example, life is understood to be ‘fair’ and truly perfect).
They are all as “important” as the others. This becomes clear as your awareness increases that Life is a Oneness, which is a central focus of all true spiritual teachings. Many people avoid spirituality because they assume that it is difficult and boring and that it leads them to feel guilty for their past mistakes. Exactly the opposite is true. Life becomes a million times easier and more joyful once spirituality starts to “click”. Guilt can be made to dissolve completely by learning a few very simple tools. (I even cured an incurable disease in a matter of a few weeks. I basically told him to get cured, and he did.)
Many blessings, Stephane Hemon