Having a Teacher and Finding Independence

            It took many years and a lot of love, compassion, pressure and help for me to be willing to live in reality and express what I have recognized to be ultimately true and important. Now I don't want to go back to sleep, the momentum to do so is there, for sure, but I don't want to and more importantly, I feel I have no choice. If I was on my own, if my actions would have no effect on others, if where I stand would not help create a field, for better or for worse, between us all, than, sure, I would have a choice. But since that is all not true, since I am not just me but we, I feel I have an obligation to you who is reading this, to be happy and sane.

            A real teacher does not only show us reality, they embody it; a relationship with a real teacher or guru, enables us to have a relationship with reality that is beyond our perception and comprehension. We recognize that the teacher is in touch with a dimension that we want to know or have known once or twice in the past, and through our relationship with him or her we can relate to that deepest part of ourselves that otherwise eludes us.

            The surrender to that relationship, I found, is what makes everything possible. By giving ourselves unconditionally to the relationship with a teacher of liberation, we loose the burden of choice, the torture of doubting reality and wondering if we should follow our True Heart. If we surrender in such a way, the heart wins and the mind becomes a tool of the heart.

            The gratitude that my teacher, Andrew Cohen, feels for his teacher, I feel for him, because he was always there, like a mountain rising up out of an often rough sea, wanting nothing from me, but offering a relationship in time and space that enabled me to become a vehicle for infinity myself. In one way it is a very simple human connection, yet at the same time it is a door to God from which there is no way back into the darkness of ignorance and selfishness that I always wanted to see beyond.

            And finally, it seems to me that this kind of surrender and heartfelt gratitude is what makes a human being truly independent. Suddenly, I found, you stop relying on knowledge and other external sources and a river of wisdom, that is always available to all of us when we dare to let go of the ego's compulsive, illusory grasp on life, starts flowing though us. I discovered that it is only then, and not before, that we find the guru inside of us...

Andrew Cohen will be teaching in Amsterdam Monday night April 16 at 19.00. You are warmly invited to come.