Rumi and Shams

One of the greatest true stories about the appearance of a Helper whose relationship with an ardent aspirant transforms not only that ‘student’ but through him, also the world, is that of Shams-y-Tabriz (one of several spellings) and the gifted poet, Rumi.

Shams Tabrizi is often claimed as a Sufi or Muslim although more accurately he could be described as a “wandering mendicant” who associated with many religious backgrounds but not only one.  Shams found in Rumi a spiritually thirsty, deeply honest Soul who was able to also put aside a single faith tradition in order to experience Spirit in a most direct manner that Shams taught him to embrace.

Shams may have been murdered by associates of Rumi who thought of Shams as heretical. After his Master’s death, Rumi’s grief and burning love of Spirit Itself as he had learned to experience IT through his Teacher, was so intense that Rumi developed the whirling dervish technique of spinning to leave his bodily consciousness . He also began composing a large body of some of the greatest spiritual poetry known to humanity, including the Song of the Reed.

Below is one of Rumi’s poems about his beloved Helper, translated from Coleman Barks.

I swear, since seeing Your face,

the whole world is fraud and fantasy

The garden is bewildered as to what is leaf

or blossom. The distracted birds

can’t distinguish the birdseed from the snare.

 

A house of love with no limits,

a presence more beautiful than venus or the moon,

a beauty whose image fills the mirror of the heart.

The Divani Shamsi Tabriz XV http://www.khamush.com/love_poems.html#Love is the Water of Life

 

The Helpers

In every Hero’s Adventure—as in your own Journey of life—“when the student is ready, the Teacher appears.” Teachers, Masters, Mentors, Guardian Angels, Guides, and Signs or signposts arrive to escort us or to prepare us for the challenging passage into the Unknown.

When we look back we can appreciate how a Helper arrived who allowed us to advance in ways we probably never would have otherwise considered. That special teacher appears who lights up a whole field of study for you at school, or that talented role model who demonstrates qualities you long to develop in yourself; by accepting such encounters we connect with our deepest aspirations and claim our life’s motivating Mission or Purpose.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is playing as I write this, so as we are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of J. K. Rowling’s gift of the wondrous world of Harry Potter, let’s focus on Dumbledore as the archetypal Mystic Helper. The qualities Dumbledore exhibits in his mentoring of Harry are those latent qualities Harry is needing to develop in himself in order to fulfill his destiny: magical abilities, teaching skills, the practice of right discernment, balancing good vs. evil impulses, and dedication based on love foremost.

Think of a Helper who appeared or is now present in your life and whose example and insights have helped you develop aspects of your own nature that have allowed you to move further along on your own purposeful journey.

How did you meet this Helper? What interests or abilities has s/he aided you to develop?

images are from pixabay.com

This month we honor and celebrate The Helpers.

I invite your Comments and Stories.

Liminal Guides with their Gifts of Magical Tools

How are you to traverse the aqueous or prickly domain of the ‘belly of the whale’ during your liminal descent as you assume the full import of the rest of your Adventure ahead? You will find, if you but care to ask, a Helper is standing by, ready to guide you through the morass. S/he will bestow upon you some device, a Tool that can help you face your internal dragons and illuminate pitfalls and opportunities along YOUR Path ahead.

Mentors, Masters, Wizards, Teachers, and Guides: all are role models who have already achieved the goals of the Quest you are set upon to realize your most noble Purpose.  They can show you the Way as they know from experience what ordeals you must face, but it is YOU who must walk the Path and learn the Lessons set out before you. It would not help you for your Guide to make your decisions for you or to simply transport you immediately to your destination. For this Journey you are on, this Glorious Quest, is your road of trials that prepares you by letting you develop your talents and your wisdom, so you can become a Master in your own right (and time); so that you may become a Guide to other acolytes seeking their own purposeful goals, down the Road.

images are from pixabay.com

Your Inner (and/or Outer) Guide will bestow upon you devices appropriate to every stage of your journey; Tools you can utilize to traverse the terrain of the specific segment of the adventure you are ready to engage.  It may be a device to illuminate the Darkness (Lumos!) or a weapon to defend against your most dangerous foes. Luke Skywalker, for example, receives a light sabre that lets him focus and direct his positive force of energy as needed; Frodo wears the ring of invisibility that protects him (while at the same time exposing him as he wears it) from the negative Eye of Sauron, Evil incarnate.

All you must do is to be open and accepting, to recognize your Teacher (as they often appear in disguise).   Remember, as the wise adage states: When the aspirant is ready, the Teacher Appears.

I welcome YOUR Comments and Story.

Celebrate Your Mentors!

What have you learned from the Mentors in your life, and from when you have mentored others? A mentor is a Teacher (of the TEACHER Archetype), yet the Mentor is a specific kind of a Teacher; one who imparts Wisdom, not just knowledge on a subject. So the Mentor is often paired archetypally as a TEACHER/MYSTIC character, such as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, or Dumbledore at Hogwarts.

This week I invite you to make a list of some of your primary Mentors.  I encourage you to contemplate and/or journal about their influences on “the person you have become.”

I will share about just one of several key mentors from my life; I will call her Dr. T, or Bonnie. Bonnie was a philosophy professor at my undergraduate college. I first met her while I was a student in a class on Creative Studies. She was a guest professor that day who was to speak with us about the philosophy of creativity. I arrived a half hour early to our class that day (held in a lounge sort of area where we students often liked to ‘hang out’ even apart from classes there).  Dr. T. was already there, too, sitting with a student who majored in art and who had brought a papier mache figure of a human being he had created in an art class that day.

“How the *x*x* did you do that!?”

These were the first words I ever heard uttered by Dr. T.

“I mean, I could never do that; how could YOU?”

She persisted. The student was stunned, as was I, at this encounter. Soon others arrived and the class began.  Bonnie proceeded to explain her profound appreciation for the creative process this student had drawn upon to envision and then manifest his vision in an artistic form. From that day on I became fascinated with Dr. T. I took several philosophy classes with her and several Independent Study classes as well. I even came to mother-sit for Bonnie’s elderly mother for two or three years before I graduated and left Buffalo for Arizona.

Of many insightful lessons I learned from my Mentor, here are two:

Dr. T. took a nap every afternoon at her old-style, stone and oak Buffalo house. She slept in a small room on a single bed like a cot. One day she told me:

“Every day, I swim in the Ocean!”

I remember her telling me this one wintry Buffalo afternoon when I had arrived to mother-sit.  I understood she was telling me that she dove into a deep contemplative state every day with her nap.

Another time she told me how when her son was young, one day while they were sitting under an oak tree in a park, she picked up an acorn and asked her son to hold it in his hand.

“There is God!,” Bonnie proclaimed.

From then on I understood why she had furnished her home completely with used oak furniture from Salvation Army. She loved the sturdy Oak Tree as a symbol of mature spiritual wisdom.

images are from pixabay.com

After I left for graduate school in Arizona, I touched base a few times with Dr. T., but sparingly.  One time she told me she had started painting with oils in her retirement.  Like Van Gogh, she told me, she painted with full tubes of paint instead of with brushes. A local gallery had held a showing of her works. To the end Bonnie expressed her passion as a spiritual Being fully and with gusto!

How the *x*x* did she do that? I have ever since emulated Dr. Bonnie’s integrity and drive to create, to thrive, to truly BE.

I invite YOUR Comments and Story!

.

…and gladly teche

 

I have been fortunate throughout my life to have encountered and learned from many excellent, inspirational Teachers, not only in school environments but in life! In my next post I will share about several of their key influences as mentors and I will invite you to celebrate your mentors too, but today I want to focus on just one of them: Mr. Oliver. It is the memory of his distinct inspiration (and a few others from early grade school on) that led me confidently in the direction of serving as a Teacher myself for now over 38 years.

Mr. Oliver was on the English Department faculty at my undergraduate college where I majored in English, in Buffalo, New York.  He did not have a doctorate as most of the faculty there did; he had started teaching in a one room schoolhouse when he was 16 or 18 years old and taught from his growing experience from then on. Mr. Oliver specialized in Chaucer’s The Canturbury Tales, and I met him as a student in a class on that subject.  Middle English rolled off Mr. Oliver’s tongue as a native language to him, and I marveled and delighted in his fluency with what remained essentially a beautiful but foreign language to me throughout the semester.

The story I am to tell (like the pilgrims of the Canturbury adventures) about Mr. Oliver relates to the time of his death. Yes, really!  When I took my Chaucer class with Mr. Oliver, he was 69 years old. At that time (1973 or so), the university required faculty to retire at 70. As he had been teaching for over 50 years, all of his students felt badly for him that he would have to retire, at all. He was the consummate teacher who was ardent about his topic and centered his life around his teaching. 

In the Spring of 1974, about two days before the end of what would have been Mr. Oliver’s final class, he died. Honestly, when we students talked about his passing we were happy for him! He did not have to leave his teaching life before retiring unto the Beyond! But this story relates to another one that he had shared with us during the Chaucer class.  Once when he was in a hospital and needed an appendicitis operation, the anesthetic drugs wore off before the operation was finished. Mr. Oliver told us that for the remainder of his time on the operating table, which was at least another hour or more, he simply recounted the entire Prologue to the Canturbury Tales, in its entirety!

So, when Mr. Oliver passed, among us students we shared a passage that we had learned from him from that Prologue. To us it signified everything he meant and imparted to us:

And gladly wolde he lerne,

and gladly teche.

images are gratefully from pixabay.com

I welcome YOUR comments and Stories!

The Alien Teacher Archetype

December is associated with the TEACHER Archetype. Last week I saw the new film  Arrival  and realized there is an Alien Teacher archetype that runs through much of science fiction literature and films.  The short story The  Day the Earth Stood Still by Harry Bates and Edmund North (screenplay) is an example in which an alien named Klaatu and  his peace enforcing robot Gnut (Gort in the film versions) arrives on Earth to warn us that we will be destroyed unless we establish peace instead of war as we emerge as a space venturing species in the atomic age.

In Arrival, a linguist serves as a consultant to the military when twelve ominous, egg-like apparent spaceships come to hover over twelve areas around the globe. I don’t want to give too much away here about the story (it is well worth seeing!), but the linguist, who aims to find a way to communicate with the aliens by learning to interpret their odd ink bursts of communication, comes to understand they have a profound message for the world, and for herself personally as well.  The global message pertains as in The Day the Earth Stood Still to our needing to find a way to live peacefully together with positive international cooperation and communication rather than rely on violence and aggression to meet our perceived threats.

The Alien Teacher represents knowledge and wisdom far beyond whatever the current consciousness of people on planet Earth have arrived at when the story is written. I guess in order to have survived as a species long enough to reach Earth from interstellar travel such aliens would have had to find a way to achieve wisdom enough not to have destroyed one another, though they might have destroyed their planet so that they need to find a new one to ravage (another common alien lesson theme).

images are from pixabay.com

The Alien Teacher, as “not Us,” represents knowledge and wisdom we aspire to or a mental capacity for awareness we sorely lack.  In a way, all spiritual Teachers and Masters are of this same archetype. We look to those who have been where we wish to go and who have already achieved our spiritual or personal goals, to follow in their footsteps or at least to gain a sense of grounding and direction for striking out upon our own adventures.  The Teacher shows a Way, a Path, but you and I have to walk that path and carve it out more clearly as we advance through the wilderness. The lessons from our Teacher are always with us, even when the Teacher is no longer immediately present.  As Learners (a correlated archetype) we store the knowledge and aim to achieve the wisdom of the Teachers who have gone before us on our Journey.

A Learning Encounter

At the end of each month I will share a personal story about our monthly Archetype theme. The month of December being associated astrologically with the Sagittarian TEACHER archetype, let me share with you a story of how teaching/learning has enhanced my Life Path.

One of my greatest Learning—and Teacher–encounters I associate with one of my greatest Mentors, Dr. Antoinette Mann Paterson (or as her closest students would lovingly call her, ‘Tone-the-Bone Paterson’). She wrote a book called The Infinite Worlds of Giordano Bruno. Toni Paterson was a professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, my undergraduate alma mater.

Toni was a beguiling, dynamic professor and a strong friend. She would stand before a large class of students and teach often with her eyes closed. Then she would pop her eyes open to stare at one student and ask a direct question, waiting for their answer before continuing. She is the person I have blogged about before who handed an acorn to her son in a park and declared, “There is God!” She also took a nap every day on a little cot at her home. She told me this was so that “Every day, I swim in the Ocean!” Mind you, this was in Buffalo, New York.

One Fall day in Buffalo on campus, I encountered Toni P. while I was walking between classes. I hadn’t seen her since over the summer.

“Can I take an Independent Study with you this semester?” I queried.

“What topic?” she asked.

On the spot and not having thought in advance of this chance encounter with my mentor, I answered what came to mind: “Silence. A         philosophy of Silence.”

“See me next Monday. 10 AM, my office.”

That Monday when I went to Toni’s office for our first session, shortly after some small talk about how I had been (I was feeling down over some emotional issues), she directed  me:

“So take out a pencil and a piece of paper.” (I did.) “Now, write down this question: ‘So … What?’ Answer that question for next week. I’ll see you then.”

All week I researched philosophical and poetic or literary topics that might pertain to this topic. “So What?” suddenly seemed to me the most vital, important question I had ever considered. “So What?” was the question of existence (Descartes) or of transcendence (as in a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay where he spoke of identity as a “transparent eyeball”).

The next Monday I arrived with many pages of notes. Toni never asked to see them. Instead she brought me to a table where she had laid out a large sheet of sketch-pad paper. With a marker she began to form a diagram. Who? What? Where? When? Why? These were words she wrote around the borders of the page.

“Where do these intersect?” she probed.

I didn’t understand.

Toni then drew lines from each of the bounding terms that intersected squarely at the center of the page. She wrote one word: “W-H-A-N”. “Whan!” she said, pleased. That is the answer to “So, what?” WHAN!!!

And she was so right! Whan certainly was the correct answer to, “So what?”  It came to mean, for me, that the answer is not materialistic. “Whan” means “It Just Is!” and that is Enough! Where all the WH-Questions combine and intersect and even cancel each other out, see? There doesn’t need to be a substantive answer. IT JUST IS! Life Just IS, and that is Enough. That is Good; Life is Good. WHAN!

We read a lot that semester, and I journalled a lot—about the nature of existence and about the nature of Silence. Whan is a principle that ever since, I associate with my own Silence. I see it everywhere, hear it whispered in all of existence. It is associated for me with a Word found in many religions, too: HU! This is an ancient, sacred name for God found in many religions and sung as a mantra or song of love for God (on the outgoing breath as H-u-u-u-u-u-u). While in college around that time I was also studying James Joyce’s ULYSSES. In the structural center of the text (however I may have figured that out back then), I found these lines:

“What’s the word?”

“HU!” A bird, sitting on a wire, chirped…

So, WHAN! And, that’s enough then.

Merry Christmas to All.

images from pixabay.com

Be a Wayshower: Positive Role Models

Role models are often our greatest Teachers without trying to be.  We see in others examples of what we are striving to achieve in our own lives; we emulate those who exhibit and live up to our high ideals and strong values. Role models illuminate the pathway we are set upon, as we follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before.

Who have been your greatest Role Models or Wayshowers?  Spiritual prophets and faith leaders demonstrate the canonical Wayshower form.  Religions have formed around the heroic spiritual values of their founders. If your role model is a spiritual Wayshower, what have you applied to your own attitudes and behaviors based on the values your role model has exhibited?

“What would XXX do now? (Where XXX might be Christ or Buddha or Mother Theresa or the Mahanta or Muhammed, or your parent or a primary role model teacher or friend.) You might ask yourself this question when you seek to arrive at a positive decision or course of action that resonates with your deepest values and beliefs.

Some of what I have gained from my Role Models (I invite you to write your own list and I welcome your sharing in Comments or stories):

• Practice, practice, practice to attain self-discipline (from my fencing coach in college when I was on what became a highly successful intercollegiate fencing team);
• Edit, edit, edit to arrive at writing that ‘sings’ (from writing books and teachers);
• Contemplate, read deeply, dream to arrive at spiritual awareness and realizations (from spiritual authors and Guides);
• Do not sell yourself short, go for your Dreams and persist to manifest your ideals to advance creatively and to be of service (from several teachers and author role models);
• Accept, forgive, love unconditionally to attain a balanced viewpoint free of negativity (from my pets and closest friends and family).

My Sophia

So also consider, in what ways are you and can you be a role model Wayshower for others? Learning from role models and applying these lessons is a reciprocal process that allows us to be of service to others as well.  So remember to be a positive role model, allowing your attitudes and actions to inspire those around you, whether in public or with your closest loved ones.

images (except My Sophia) are gratefully from pixabay.com

You never know who is watching and listening, and what their needs might be that you could help them with, even unknowingly. In fact this mode of being a role model simply by the example of your highest or most mindful attitude or behavior is the highest order of teaching for its humility bespeaks the authenticity of the role model’s overall effectiveness in practice.

Better Endings to You!

 

Lessons to Glean from your Inner Teacher

As an educator for nearly forty years, and always a student as well, I have had many opportunities to learn from my inner TEACHER Archetype Ally, also from my ‘outer’ teachers, and from both inner and outer Spiritual Guides I have discovered and welcome within my ever developing consciousness. Teaching is a way of life dedicated to serving All Life and to stimulating progressive unfoldment toward manifesting personal ideals and values, or indeed, ‘better endings.’

Some of my own lessons gleaned from the PRACTICE of Teaching include:

Flexibility: This is the greatest tool I feel that a Teacher will demonstrate often.  Whatever the lesson plan might be, you must meet the student aspirants where they are at. Every student and every class has their own character and begins at their own level based on their prior experience and goals. What worked once before with teaching a lesson or a topic might not fit the needs of the current student or class, so you must respond with a new approach, tailored to the interests and needs of the individual as well as the group. Generationally these needs change and develop over time, so as you continue to teach, you must become ever more flexible too.

Listening: Empathy is a strong Teacher trait that develops from the skill of listening closely to the questions—and attending to responses or actions—of your individual student. Why does a student choose their specific research topic; what is it they are hoping therefrom to learn or to discover? Why does a student resist a given lesson? Is their personal background experience leading them to assert a certain approach? How can you ALLOW that which the student is there to learn of their own character? You are in this sense but a willing servant the student has chosen tohelp them take their next steps in understanding, inspiration, or self-discipline. Reveal to them the tools they can use to take their own next step forward.

Goal-setting: Education is a progressive process of setting out to experience ever-new vistas and horizons. Whatever we learn fertilizes the grounds for further learning in a never-ending adventure. The Teacher helps the aspirant to establish their own aspirations and to attain realizations of their goals, of any form. Whether the Goal is one of DOing, KNOWing, or BEing, the Teacher serves as a positive example of one who shows there is always a Way to manifest worthy goals.

 Creativity: Whatever the topic of study or art, the Teacher fosters creativity, not simply sterile methods or rote repetition of facts or ideas. Ultimately the Teacher must stand back to facilitate the student’s own inner Teacher potentials. For when the class is over and the student has graduated, the student must have gained their own capacity to proceed forth to successfully encounter new challenges and opportunities on their own.  In fostering creative abilities in the student, the Teacher also shows their own willingness to learn; to encourage the student to become the Teacher, and so Life itself continues to unfold and adapt.

What have YOU learned from developing your own archetypal Teacher traits? How do you share this with others in your life? The outer Teacher—while genuinely someone who has developed the knowledge and skills you aim to comprehend and use—is also in a sense but a projection of your own inner Teacher potentials, so that learning is as standing before a Mirror to perceive and unfold your own inherent, latent qualities, especially when you seek to learn from a well advanced instructor or Guide.  

images from pixabay.com

Authentic teaching/learning is self-tailored; the Teacher becomes a transparency through which you find your own Way. While this may seem to characterize especially those spiritual forms of Teacher you might aim to emulate, every Teacher is THE Teacher, the Teacher in YOU, too.  And so the true TEACHER demonstrates detachment and humility, knowing in the end it is YOUR process you seek to advance, YOUR lessons that the Teacher is charged to help you to teach yourself in such manner as you can unfold the knowledge and  the capacity to proceed forward on your own and share with others.

******   ******

I welcome YOUR reflections and stories!

 

Allowing the Teacher Within

All of You

Here’s a simple tool you can use to identify your own primary archetypal persona influences: simply make a list of your various social roles.  Parent, friend, spouse, doctor, teacher, artist, writer, etcetera; these are social roles you occupy. List your main roles (I’ll fill in mine as an example for you):

Primary roles

• Pet parent
• Teacher
• Writer
• Spiritual practitioner
• Friend
• Family member
• Single home owner

Next then, consider the following classes of universal persona archetype forms:

ELDER LEADER   ARTIST  TEACHER

LOVER     IDEALIST    COMMUNICATOR

WARRIOR  GOLDEN CHILD   HEALER

NOURISHER   DESCENDER   MYSTIC

Can you associate each of your ROLES with one or more of these twelve archetype figures? E.G.:

Archetype role associations

Pet parent  :  NOURISHER

Teacher : TEACHER

Writer  :  COMMUNICATOR

Spiritual  :  MYSTIC/ IDEALIST

Friend   :  NOURISHER

Family  :  COMMUNICATOR/ NOURISHER

Single home owner : DESCENDER

The archetypal influences you have just identified (with regard to your own list) are what I call your Archemes in LIFE PATHS. You learn how to appropriately occupy and enact a social role by drawing upon or assimilating to character traits of these collective archetypal figures.  As you assume or behaviorally enact these archetypal role types, you embrace these identities on both conscious and unconscious levels at the same time. That means, once you have identified with one of these archetype personas, they are always part of you, even unconsciously while you are expressing other modes. And if you have experienced tension or emotional inhibitions with respect to any of your Role identities, this can create archetypal “shadow” traits that might dog your footsteps and interfere with your sense of self-confidence or competence.

Knowing that your archetypal influences are largely associated with your primary roles in life can help you recognize your own character strengths and weaknesses as well as your self-limiting qualities. Also thinking of your Archemes as an “ensemble cast of Allies” can help you bring together your various role-“guises” to forge and express a more unified Self.

So after identifying your Archemes, you can also look at what strengths you draw from these influences (and you can understand some of your challenges, too).  How can you combine some of your strengths across these archetypal forms to pursue a major goal, one that will benefit from having  “all of you” activated rather than one ‘part’ or another?

E.G. Designing life after retirement [Readers: You can consider your own Major Goal similarly]

Teacher traits:  part-time teaching if needed; continuing with life maps coaching and workshops;

Communicator traits: continue with writing/ publishing;

Nourisher traits: Move closer to family, care well for pets, maintain & expand friendships;

Descender traits: Create space for solitude, contemplation

Mystic traits:  Share ideas in new location, form groups, etc.;

Idealist traits: Go for it! (fulfill Life Dream, travel, beautify environs and home!)

COMBINED:  “service” orientation in all areas.

In sum, as Socrates reminded us all: “KNOW THYSELF!”

I invite your insights and stories!

Gandalf, Dumbledore, your Inner Teacher, and You!

Two fictional examples of the Teacher archetype aiding an ensemble cast of protagonists to alter their dreamlike lives so they might achieve better endings are Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings saga and Dumbledore from the fantasy mythic adventures of Harry Potter and his friends. Gandalf and Dumbledore have always seemed to me to be the same kind of mythic personage, though Gandalf is cast more for the young adult and Dumbledore more for a child’s conception of the Teacher or Mage  (per Jung or Campbell) energy.

Myths are projections of archetypal personae and challenges that we all face in our everyday lives as everyman and everywoman heroes; so Gandalf or Dumbledore are—as we project onto them as readers or as moviegoers—our own intrinsic Teacher-selves made manifest. These mystical Teachers allow their charges to accomplish what they otherwise might believe to be unllikely, yet they are the hero’s own Higher Energy propelling her or him forward toward the realization of their “impossible dream.”  Saving the entire wizarding and muggle worlds from a force too dangerous even to Name; returning Middle Earth to a state of balance and harmony instead of chaos: these are the tasks of an orphaned boy and of a tiny hobbit; or, you and me. But the magical Wizard Teacher is a protean shape-shifter, a transformer of pure energy into otherwise unimaginable new Forms.  All is possible if we set our hearts to following the directives of this all-knowing, all-powerful Higher Self Ally of the Teacher.

Have you noticed how Wizard Teachers like Gandalf and Dumbledore conduct their novice apprentices to the attainment of their most worthy desires?  Like Glinda for Dorothy, Gandalf and Dumbledore seem always to know exactly when their presence is of utmost value; they appear only when they are needed, otherwise they remain in the background, invisibly watching.

Now then, this week as I have been contemplating how the Teacher appears in my own heroic journey of Soul, I find that my Inner Teacher(s)—whom I recognize to be “as close as my heartbeat”—are always present yet they appear exactly when and how I require their precious aid. I will share a true example of a life and death situation in which I was quite literally saved by my own Inner Master (an ECK Master associated with the spiritual path of ECKANKAR, which is the belief system and practice to which I adhere). Your own Inner Teacher or Guide may take the form of Christ or Buddha or of Socrates, Rumi, Glinda or whatever archetypal—yet very real—personae you recognize, so long as you believe in and deeply value their protection and guidance.

I was living in a duplex apartment in Tempe, Arizona with a housemate who worked a four to midnight shift. One early morning while sleeping in the living room, I had heard voices outside so looked out the front window and witnessed a drug transaction involving the scurrilous group of tenants living on the other side of the duplex living room wall. They saw me witness the transaction and started terrorizing me for the next several months, making overt threats in loud voices from the other side of the thin wall separating our lives. One April or May afternoon, I was sitting in a living room chair after a hard morning at graduate school. Suddenly, as clearly as I could hear a person standing in the room right beside me speaking into my right ear, I heard a male voice that I immediately recognized as my spiritual Teacher. He stated very calmly but firmly, “Linda, lock the door.”

I stepped over to the door, which was slightly ajar, and as I was placing my right hand on the doorknob to close and lock the door, the ringleader of the neighbor gang was reaching to grab the doorknob from the other side, to come in! I just barely closed the door and turned the lock before he could enter. Then I looked out the picture window to my left—the same window through which I had witnessed the drug deal transpire. Huddled down just beneath the window frame was the bodyguard of the drug gang, waiting to abscond me if I were to have run out of the house to escape. I kid you not; this was one of the most dramatic events of this lifetime and I am absolutely certain that had my Teacher not intervened (I know him as Harji, the Inner form of the still current Living ECK Master, Sri Harold Klemp), I would not be on this earthly plane today to share this story. Oddly though, I was not afraid at all after this happened; a calm set over me like a cloak instead. And even more oddly when I look back to it now, I didn’t even call the police. I called a friend, asked her to come pick me up at the house, and I never slept another night in that duplex apartment. I slept for weeks in a sleeping bag on the floor of my Ph.D. advisor’s office until I could locate a new roommate and move into a safer space.

I ask you to be thinking about how the helpful presence or guidance of your own spiritual or inner archetype Teacher has appeared in your own life experience. I would love for you to share your own memories or stories about how your Teacher or Guide has been leading you to fulfill your own meaningful life lessons or Quest.

Finally, it makes sense why the Teacher appears most clearly in our lives only when most needed. It is because it is not ABOUT the Teacher or Master himself or herself; we are not here to simply follow someone who has already attained to all that which we seek. We are apprentices, aspirants or Learners who are striving to become Masters of spiritual essence and formations of life for ourselves; we may then become or appear as the Teacher for others as we gradually come to master our own lessons and unfold in our own awareness.

I invite and would love to share YOUR insights and stories about your own Inner Teacher or guidance. Tomorrow I am going to see the new Hobbit movie; maybe we might meet somewhere in the Middle Earth of our dreams!

The Learner: A Question Of Afterlife

Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
About anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.

~ Rumi ~

(picture and poem reposted from Theresa at Soulgatherings, Dec.10, 2014)

This week while focusing on the Teacher archetype, what has come forth for me is a Learner part of Self. I have been asking and asking, what can I learn from some of the more difficult life experiences I am confronted with lately?

I lost a friend whom I thought very highly of last week. He passed away suddenly after battling an illness for a long time that he never told me about. I should have known, I felt. I should have questioned him when he uncharacteristically issued a swear word in our usually very positive exchange at Words with Friends.  What would my Teacher say?

I will name my inner-self teacher Rumi, after the poet I admire whose poetry I deeply appreciate. Please, teach me, Jalal.

I envision a desert oasis. I walk around, exploring.  I hear music, the sound of a wooden flute, and I think of Rumi’s “Song of the Reed”, and here he is, sitting across a wooden table from me at a quiet tavern.  The music that fills the air seems to be coming directly from this gentle man with dark hair, otherworldly eyes and olive toned skin, wearing an off-white cotton overshirt, without a turban. A stack of of cloth papers and a quill pen sits on the table before him.

“Where do we go when we leave this pale plane?  I know we go on forever, in various forms, but do we retain the sense of a unified consciousness?”

“Do you fear your own freedom so much that you would seek to contain its expression after your bird-soul is released?”

“I know that at least in this body-state, for all of its slow progress and limitations, it is solid; this lifetime is predictable, consistent. I go to sleep at night and I awake the next morning in the same body and Mind, day by day by day, for many decades. Without this solid frame, I don’t know where I will be.”

“Where are you, Now? Who are you, really?”

“I am Soul and not this body; yet there is comfort in the familiarity of my little-self personality and identity.”

“When you dream at night where do you go? Who are you Here?”

“Much of the time I am still me; other times I am personas from within the dream, or something greater.”

“What happens in these dreams when you feel yourself ‘something greater’ than your little ego form?”

“I am just a perspective, often. Not with a body although it doesn’t feel that way. But I am still me, as a point of view.  Sometimes I can fly; sometimes I ride a Pegasus. But I am not aware of having a body in those experiences.  Yet still, you see, that is my question. These dreams are episodic, not connected to one other. I am here or in another here, but I do not live a connected lifetime. I am afraid of letting go of that thread of continuity.”

Jalal sighs, a twinkle of laughter in his patient look. He slides the paper he has been writing on across to me on the table. Then he pushes his chair back from the table and gets up. He walks to a wooden platform on the side of the tavern where a man has been playing a stringed instrument like a lyre. Rumi sits tailor fashion on a large silk pillow on the platform stage. He draws out a reed flute from his wrap. He closes his eyes and lifts the flute to his lips and he begins to play.

I look at the writing on the page in front of me, listening to the delicate music. It is a poem, one I have read before, many times:

This Disaster

Why am I part of this disaster, this mud hole for donkeys? Is this the place

where Jesus spoke? Surely not. A table has been set, but we have not been served

sweet spring water yet. Evidently we came here to be bound hand and foot. I ask

a flower, “How is it you are so wise so young?” “With the first morning wind and

the first dew, I lost my innocence.” I follow the one who showed me the way. I                 

extend one hand up, and with the other I touch the ground. A great branch leans

down from the sky. How long will I keep talking of up and down? This is not my

home: silence, annihilation, absence! I go back where everything is nothing.

–Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi

Forging an Archetype Ally

As one of twelve primordial archetype character modes, the Teacher is associated with the element of Earth, with a Dissolving energy mode, and with Sagittarius (hence, December).  A Teacher perspective usually involves practicalities or facts rooted in solid foundations, revealing in that sense an earthy nature.   Teacher also brings a dissolving or resolving energy, allowing questions to be answered and transitions forged. And Teacher may cut to the heart of a matter with constructive critique like the Sagittarian archer.

Regarding our archetypal aspects of Self as potential Allies, Teacher is a very positive ally to cultivate in its Strength mode.  If in Shadow, Teacher can be overly didactic or attached to a rigid point of view. But in its positive nature, Teacher can be a transformative Ally, showing the way to new vistas or a more flexible, new way of being.

In order to harness the positive strengths of your inner Teacher potentials, it is necessary first to get to know yourself in this dimension.  In my personal development book and Handbook, LIFE PATHS, I will be presenting a complete Archetype Dialogue process to facilitate your “alliance building” in this respect. For now, I invite you to start an “active imagination” form of conversation with your Teacher energy.

I invite you to simply seat yourself in a comfortable armchair or lie prone on a couch or bed. You might chant a favorite mantra or a prayer, or breathe deeply several times and release your breath to relax into a mindful or aware state. Focus inwardly on that spot between your eyebrows, gently expecting to encounter a part of your Self that has a Teacher aspect to him or her. Imagine this inner Teacher energy; it could be someone who has been a teacher for you or a fictional character or your inner Teacher may take her or his own unique personal form.  Allow yourself to spend some time with this inner character. Allow your experience to unfold in its own way. Meanwhile you can have a conversation with your Teacher figure. Ask whom s/he is and what s/he would like for you to know about him or her. Continue the encounter as long as it naturally unfolds.

When you return from your active imagination session with your Teacher part of Self, you may either continue the dialogue before opening your eyes, then record in your journal all that you remember; or, you might open your eyes after your main interaction and then start journaling an immediate dialogue in your journal.

When Jung returned from an active imagination experience–as described in his THE RED BOOK–,he would first journal about what he had experienced, then he would often draw a painting  or create a mandala to represent the lesson he had learned.

 What does your Teacher archetype look like? Does s/he have a name? Now that you have shared an encounter with him or her, do you feel a little differently for having included your inner Teacher energy more consciously within your Awareness?

Inwardly you can invite this figure to remain part of your consciousness from now on! You can offer to be more attentive and caring about his/her interests and concerns. You can work together to help achieve your common goals.

I welcome your insights and stories!

THE TEACHER ARCHETYPE

TEACHER is such an obviously universal Archetype. The role of Teacher exists in all cultures throughout history in relation to the sub-archetype image of the Learner (or, Student). This relationship and the roles expressed may take different forms, though.  Some Teachers instruct quietly by their very example; others may be more didactic and direct.

One of my favorite Teachers served as a role model for my own apprenticeship to teaching while in college. Antoinette Mann Paterson (now long departed from this pale plane) was a Philosophy professor at the college I first attended in Buffalo, New York.  She would teach in front of a large Introduction to Philosophy class with her eyes closed! It was like she was channeling the information to be transmitted to the young, fertile minds in the classroom. Then suddenly she would open her eyes, turn and face a specific student with a direct question.  There was something amazing to me about the passion she displayed.

 

One day Dr. Paterson had been invited to visit a class in Creative Studies which I was taking.  I arrived about twenty minutes early to the open studio area we held our class in; she was already there, sitting unidentified with a couple other students around a table. Suddenly she turned to a young man who had brought a paper mache piece of art he had created for another class. “How in *** did you DO that!”, she asked him. “I could not do that; how did you transform paper, nothing really, into that magnificent FORM?” The student was dumbfounded. I don’t remember how he might have tried to answer Toni.  But this is how she began introducing us to a “Philosophy of Creativity”.

 

Another time at the beginning of a semester I went to Toni Paterson’s office to ask if she would conduct an Independent Study for me.

“About what subject?,” she asked.

I said the first thing that came into my mind: “ Silence,” I answered; “A philosophy of Silence.”

In the course of our following discussion, Dr. P. asked me what I thought about the meaning of Life. I had been in a depressed state at that time because of something that had affected me emotionally the prior summer. So, I answered her: “Life…Really? So, what?”

“Take out a pen and a piece of paper,” Dr. Paterson directed. “Now then, I want you to write down a question with two words in it: ‘SO …WHAT?’ Bring me the answer in ten pages or more by next Thursday!”

When I came back to Dr. Paterson for my conference the next week, I had scoured a wide range of literature about the meaning of life. But Toni Paterson took this further. She sat me down at a table with a pencil and a large sheet from a sketching pad. She asked me to arrange “WH-question words” around the corners of the blank page: WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? Then as we talked she drew a diagram linking all these to a central, newly constructed word: WHAN! That was the answer to “So, What”, she suggested:

“The answer to ‘So, What?’ is “WHAN!”

She was so right! Whan, that elusive common denominator principle has from that moment on been a torch of Light in the Darkness for me.  There doesn’t need to be an answer to everything; the ESSENCE is WHAN! See? This enigmatic Lesson lifted me from my depression. Life didn’t have to have a meaning or to “add up to” anything; It IS what it IS; it JUST IS! This freed me to start thinking “outside the Box” (or as a later friend has taught me: “There is no box!”)

So, how did Dr. Paterson TEACH me such a life affirming lesson? First, she set me to task, rather than trying to answer my facetious question, “So, what?” for me. Second, she took that question of mine quite seriously, as a matter I was deeply concerned about. Third, she helped guide me to a satisfactory resolution of the anxiety I brought to my question, by encouraging me to read about what others had thought about in relation to my subject (showing me I was not alone in my angst). Then she helped me to comprehend a deeper underlying principle that gave rise to the question in the first place!

Toni Paterson was THE TEACHER incarnate! I have never forgotten HOW she approached teaching, and this has helped me to cultivate my own TEACHER strengths.

But what do I mean by calling THE TEACHER an Archetype?  What do you think? Have you ever “let out” your TEACHER part of Self? Sure, you have, right?  I still after 35 years of university teaching often feel THE TEACHER coming forth through me in a classroom. When I first began teaching, I knew I could rely on “stepping into” the ROLE of TEACHER in order to overcome my naturally introspective personality and to shine forth expressively to share about what the students were there to learn.

Maybe you have experienced your own Inner TEACHER in your role as a parent or as a scout leader; or, when you have felt a strong impulse to share a point of view that you feel instinctively someone else could benefit from hearing. We all have a bit of THE TEACHER within us, as well as the counterpart character of the LEARNER. In fact, a Teacher cannot but be the Learner first!

I am deeply indebted to and grateful for all of the wonderful MENTORS I have experienced as Teachers in my life. These were not always formal classroom Teachers; they were friends, family, even my pets who have taught me the true meaning of Life! Which is WHAN?   Yes, that’s right; it is the WHAN of unconditional or divine Love, the essence of Life Itself. For, what else ever really matters?

I welcome your Insights, Comments and Stories!