I’m not a “guru” in the stereotypical sense of the word. I don’t jet around the world in fancy robes making appearances, and I don’t earn cash for smooth-spoken trash. I couldn’t lay claim to divinity without either giggling, or throwing up. If worshipped, I promise to run away. I have no secret teaching and no special initiation to offer or withhold.

But there’s another, not so off-kilter grandiose, meaning of the word: teacher. That I am, even if I don’t use the word. If I don’t look at that, and think hard on that, my blindness can foster a metamorphosis towards the ugly form of the word.

This is a slippery thing for me to grasp. I don’t feel that I’m all that different from those I mentor. I call them friends, because that’s what they seem to be to me.

But, that word obscures the fact that I am not just a friend to them. I see my friends as they describe themselves to me, as persons who struggle with personal and spiritual issues. They see me as someone who has seen a way beyond some of these same issues, as someone to whom their happiness — and in some ways perhaps even their survival– is bound.

The extent of this power differential is a recent revelation for me. I had understood in a general sense that it existed. I’ve held conversations, for example, about why any sort of romantic involvement was forever off-limits between myself and those I mentor. Still I hadn’t seen the depth of the issue until a few weeks ago I understood that a friend wasn’t really free to speak his mind with me.

This isn’t a problem with the disciple, as I know gurus (pejorative sense) everywhere have argued in similar situations. This “problem” isn’t even really a problem. It’s an inevitable part of the learning process. I never argued calculus or Russian grammar with my teachers, because I knew they knew far more than I did. The circumstances my friends are in (“friend”, defective as it is, is still a good word, expressive of aspiration, if not perfectly of reality) is analogous to the position of a calculus student, but much messier. As a calculus student I never looked to my professor as an authority on existence itself.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. And just as this isn’t a problem, but a fact, there isn’t a solution, but only a responsibility. I have a responsibility to strive to be aware of my friends’ circumstances, to strive to address the imbalances, to make space for independence, to recommit myself to serve my friends — understanding that, short of abuse, I am not free to walk away unless I am sent away, and that when I am sent away it’s not mine to linger a moment longer.

Perhaps the great failure of the gurus of the dharma religions is that. The student is expected to swear fealty to the teacher and to assume a duty of service to the teacher. In fact it is the teacher who ought be taking the oaths. Unless power is a burden, it is a poison.

Looking at it from another angle: Yes, I’ve known the “Great Aha!”, and it has in some sense irrevocably changed me. But extrapolating from there that I or anyone else could be an infallible enlightened being without the capacity to do wrong is bullshit of the sort that lets escapists indulge in fantasy and sociopaths indulge in excuses. I have a body. My mind can and had been fogged through illness and lack of sleep. I often lack the material knowledge to make the right decision. And try as I might to be aware of them, I’m as neurologically prone to cognitive errors as the next human equipped with a few pounds of wetware between my shoulders. I can, without a doubt, make errors, even devastating errors. The ideas expressed by the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, that one who has experienced theosis, while no longer capable of mortal sin (i.e., the rejection of God) remains capable of sins of the flesh (no, not how we use it, colloquially, to mean sex, but rather, that living creatures have physical limits and physical needs which can cause errors in judgment) are, in my opinion, much more accurate than the grandiose claims of the worst of the East.

I don’t want to be haunted by a burden of perfection that I cannot live up to. The only way to escape such a burden is to work diligently to mitigate the power imbalance between myself and those friends I mentor.

http://www.hardcorespirituality.com/2013/01/