What Happens When You Follow The Teachings? (A Reflection from Acharya Kashi)
What if you could pluck the sun out of the sky like a gilded coin and carry it with you everywhere? Wherever you go—hiking in Monteverde or speaking with your manager in a cubicle or driving the PCH or tapping your foot to a tune as you cook dinner—that golden orb would be right there, a quiet splendor always radiating the warmth of assuredness. Having a teacher is like walking with the sun in the palm of your hand. If you let it, that sun will give you everything that matters: limitless sharing, limitless light, limitless healing, limitless love, limitless wisdom. The teacher brightens the path of the student who travels the road to the Kingdom.
Of course, none of this was knocking about in my head when I met my teacher. I had been seeking for a while, in church pews with a bowed head, in masjid with my forehead pressed to the prayer rug, in the scattered palm nuts of a Babalawo, and in between the pages of the Kebra Nagast. So on meeting my teacher, sunglasses of suspicion made it difficult for me to witness what was shining right in front of me. Such is the human condition. Our ignorance blinds us to the wonders of the Infinite. But Grace makes transformation and healing possible. It is because of Grace that we rendezvous with the teacher. We cry out for clarity and the Grace of God responds in the form of the teacher. It is Grace, the light of God-consciousness, that flows through the teacher. That energy helps us to see what is present, real, and unchanging. It helped me to step out of the shades of doubt.
“Having a teacher is like walking with the sun in the palm of your hand. If you let it, that sun will give you everything that matters: limitless sharing, limitless light, limitless healing, limitless love, limitless wisdom.”
The energy that mends our wounds is the same energy of healing that flows through the teacher. When we’re struck with a flash of insight, the wisdom that we gain is the same wisdom that cascades through the teacher. The energy that flows through the teacher helps to make a way forward for the student the way that a machete hacks through a tangle of jungle to clear a path. The teacher gazes on the student through the eyes of unconditional love like the parent who sees only the perfection of their child. With kindness, the light within the teacher helps to make visible our inner patterns of limitation. The light within the teacher is skilled enough to point out the bruise and to heal it.
When you jump-start a car, you connect jumper cables from the working car to the nonfunctional one. The teacher is like the working car that jump-starts the inner unfolding of the student. Like the jumper cables, there is a connection, a cord, a bond, shared between the teacher and the student. I can think of no other bond like it. Always, my teacher amplifies what is good in me. Always, my teacher helps me to overcome obstacles. Always, my teacher is a truth-telling friend. The trust I have for my teacher is total.
Living the teachings that my teacher shares, my heart has cracked open like a watermelon on the curb. It’s all pouring out. Love is pouring out. Peace is pouring out. Creativity is pouring out. Compassion is pouring out. In my teacher, I have found what I sought all those years ago when I bowed my head in church: God, Oneness, Fullness, Wholeness, Limitlessness. Right here. Right here. Right here. Right now. In me. And on the human level, my teacher has provided for me a model for how to live in the world with grace and kindness and compassion and goodwill and helpfulness. To the appreciative student, which I hope to be, the teacher is the sun cradled in cupped hands, precious, respected, and bursting with light.
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