"A thing is perfect when it is
the way
it is. When it is not
the way
it is then it is flawed. Life is always
the way
it is, hence perfect. It did not work
the way
I wanted it to. It worked
the way
it worked, and only that way. I just needed to get
my fingers
out of
the machinery.".
Who are your teachers? Do you have a
guru?
Who do you learn from? Even more specifically, who have you let in that
you allow yourself to learn from? Who do you allow
yourself to be taught by? And by "be taught by" I'm not just referring
to a plethora of mundane day-to-day things like changing a tire or
unclogging the sink or baking bread, but rather profundities like
living, transforming,
making a difference.
Who do you emulate? If we emulate anyone at all, we're
thrown to emulate all those whom we
consider
to be morally, intellectually, integrally, even legally
perfect, faultless. That's the gold standard.
It's the stuff of which legends are made (which means it may not be
true,
and it may be) that very, very few
people
(for as long as there've been
people
on
this planet)
have been ethically, morally, intellectually, even legally perfect,
faultless. We're talking about a select group of legendary
people
out of the one hundred and forty billion
human beings,
past
and
present,
who've ever set foot on this
Earth.
And what did we do with them? Oh yes, that's right: we killed them.
That's what we did with them:
the people
from whom we could have learned something profound about life and
living,
those people
whose message if fulfilled, would've brought some goodness to
the world
and all of us, we killed them off. And when we did so, we justified our
reasons
for killing them off.
There's certainly a lot we could say about our propensity to do that.
Books have been written about it. But that's not what I would like to
do here this time. What I'd like to do instead is raise in
contradistinction the possibility that in order to become a great
teacher, in order for me to regard you as
a great guru,
you don't need to be as morally, intellectually, integrally, even
legally perfect and faultless as we have typically assumed you'd have
to be. Indeed, if we did eliminate everyone who wasn't morally,
intellectually, integrally, even legally perfect and faultless, there
would be no one left to teach us anything. Really.
My
gurus
don't have to be saints. Part of the problem we have with teachers, is
what we
consider
"perfect" / "faultless" to be, before we allow ourselves to be open to
and learn from them. A well-known, hugely
loved
and admired ex-episcopal priest who had become
a world
authority on
Zen,
died of alcoholism (he literally drank himself to death). Others
suffered serial toxic marriages. And others failed to uphold their vows
of celibacy, none of which
present
pretty pictures if you expect your
gurus
to be saints. And yet there's little evidence that any of their
debauched behavior detracted from the power of their word.
Regardless of what they did or didn't do, they were the kind of
human beings
around whom
it's possible to be
enlightenedjust by
listening
their speaking. And the question is not so much "How can such
imperfect
people
teach me anything?" as it's "Isn't
a person
perfect when they are
the way
they are (and aren't
the way
they aren't)?". Now I ask you: can
a person
ever not be
the way
they are (or ever be
the way
they aren't)? No, of course not. So given that allpeople
are perfect
the way
they are (and they are:
stop
lying about it!), any
person
is /
all people
are the possibility of standing before me as my gurus.
