Part four of my essay “The Goddess as Active Listener” is now up in Scene4. Excerpt:

 Is the ego the knower of the self, or is the self the knower of the ego? Perhaps the soul is itself a mask, soon to morph into a different form with the astronomical rotation of the fashion industry. Although, as a matter of convenience, I use it here, I do not like the word “ego.” Over the past six years or so, I have tended to use it less and less. I have just as little use for or patience with the all too popular term “seeker.” I far prefer Picasso’s formulation. He states—somewhat arrogantly, perhaps—“I do not seek; I find.” The term “teacher” I like more, but this term, if casually used, has problems of its own. Too many students of famous gurus, for example, can’t seem to wait to give away all of their own intuitive authority to the teacher. It can be difficult for the teacher to be idolized, either spiritually or intellectually, and many are tempted to want to turn their students into small, submissive versions of themselves. This can be as true in a PhD program in archeology as in an ashram.

 Clearly, good teachers are needed to transmit information, to help students to discover themselves, and to model certain skills. We cannot do without them. Even the most abstract of knowledge is not abstract; at least in the first stages, it must come attached to a living body. In this essay, however, it is the more primal concept of “teacher”—the teacher as spiritual catalyst—that I am attempting to explore. If such teachers are, in a different way, essential, they may sometimes tend to hold themselves to a lower standard than their students: They may stamp the void with their brand; they may speak highly of their total unimportance; in an energetic contest with Joe Average, they may judge themselves the victor; they may take themselves as seriously as their most obedient followers; they may believe that the light has more to teach them than the darkness; they may take as much as they give; they may have the power to catalytically intervene but be unwilling to let go.

It is not that such teachers lack the knowledge that they claim; they may very well possess it, but they do not give it freely. They do not prefer to overflow. Rather, they choose to portion this knowledge out, and, in the process, they can come to believe their own P.R. How easy it is for the once enlightened teacher—accidentally on purpose—to be sucked into the vortex of his own charisma! Power intoxicates, and the gods do like to drink. The student may then become sadomasochistically attached to his own childhood, to the deadness of his feet and the blockage in his spine. He will not make of his heart a meeting place or expect that his head will click open like an aperture. He will see his mind as an electrochemical databank, as an empty space to be filled up with the teacher’s big ideas. He will not learn how to leap from a great height, to move into and beyond death, or to hatch the universe from an egg. He will not dare to trust that his energy is a kind of self-existent vehicle.

 Continue reading at Scene4: International Magazine of Arts and Culture:

https://www.scene4.com/0124/briangeorge0124.html

 My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available at Untimely Books and Amazon:

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Image: Victor Brauner, There, 1949