Teachers I love
These are a few of my main authors and spiritual teachers that I have met while out for this spiritual walk that is my life. They are part of me and whenever find myself a little off course I return to them and they guide me back. The closer I get to them, the closer I am to myself, as if we are walking together and I am there as they speak and write. When time and separation disappears, we find ourselves in the space where the master is as he is speaking, then his thought and words are your thoughts and words happening at the same time, which is no time, and happening in the same space, which is no space.
Alan Watts: Mr. Watts was a famous teacher/talker who came of age in the 60s. He called himself a spiritual entertainer and an audio of his talks is both enlightening and entertaining. He was one of the first to pierce the mystery surrounding eastern wisdom for the western rational mind. An expert in using the western rational mind to deconstruct itself, Watts wrote a number of short but very clear books.
Thich Nhat Hanh; a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Han, who now lives in France has become the most prolific exponent of Buddhism in the west because of his gentle blend of social consciousness with the principles of Buddhism, a path that is known for its separation from the worries of the world. I like him because of his simplicity and focus on the breath as the wings of salvation. He really gets into the practice of conscious breathing.
Thomas Merton: Ah, here’s the man who opened the door to the path that would eventually lead me through the labyrinth of my own mind. As an intellectual academic, Merton’s rejection of the modern world for a life of silence in a Trappist monastery apparently fascinated me because it was so irrational, and yet he was very rational in his decision to go against his own reason. He wanted to go beyond reason, and this seemed very reasonable. So there must have been a higher logic at work and both of us wanted to discover what it was. When I first started reading his work, he was also just beginning his back door excursion in eastern mysticism and he, as well as I, would discover that here was the source of the higher reason, and this source was also in Christianity, only hidden behind layers and layers of western rationalism. So Merton made the choice to work with the religion he had, Catholicism, in order to dig his way out of grave of religion.
Ken Wilbur: Now here is a renaissance man of the modern age. He is a synthesizer, one who takes everything that has been written and puts all the opposites and layer of concepts and systems together in one blueprint. His system is integral and ultimately non-dual.
Joseph Campbell: When I began practicing yoga in Cleveland in 1970, Campbell was the bible everyone had to read. His first work that put him center stage in the world of myth and its purpose was Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this book he traced out the common path of awakening we all find ourselves on, either consciously or unconsciously, as it is told in all the myths and stories of the world. There is a formula or ground map of awakening from the dream of mind, but the mind can only understand it through stories. History has been a process of deconstructing myth since the Enlightenment, and though a necessary process it has left the modern mind with no windows to the eternal, so we have become trapped in a cell of our own making. Campbell’s conclusion is that modern man, you and me, must now discover our own myths, our own personal metaphors. We are responsible for our own journey, as nobody can do the journey or create our myths for us.
J. Krishnamurti: Here is a world teacher (he died in the 80s) that pierced the veil of the western mind like a laser, and spent his live in dialogues with students, going into their labyrinth and taking their hand and leading them out. K. is like the Buddha. One sits with him and walks with his thought, practicing the art of listening without thinking. It was his teaching that jolted me out of the bed of my mind, so suddenly that my whole waking personality fell on the floor and I was suddenly and radically free of the inertia of the mind. But that freedom was only a taste, and after a few weeks in the Garden I went back to sleep to being my journey in earnest.
Jack Kornfield: Another Buddhist teacher, but a westerner who went to Thailand in the 60s, I think, to live for five years in a forest monastery. He is now one of the foremost teachers of meditation in the west and I think you have his audio. His books are from the heart and just sweep up the mind, letting all its defensives fall away like clothes left on the beach as one runs to the ocean for a plunge into the infinite ocean of one’s one bliss.
Chogyam Trungpa: A recent discovery, Chogyam was (he died in the 80s I think) was a Tibetan Buddhist monk who escaped during the Chinese invasion, went to England and renounced his vows so he could teach in the west as one of the west. I love his writings, which are mostly his talks, because of their profound insights into the mind, but in everyday language and metaphors. The sign of a great master is clarity and simplicity.
Swami Satchidananda; Gurudev as his devotees call him, was the founder of Integral Yoga and the builder of Yogaville, the lotus at eh center of Virginia, and perhaps the world. While I met him in 1986, the year I choose to stop wandering and sit in Blackstone and give up searching for God over the horizon, I apparently was not ready for close and prolonged contact with anymore gurus.
Yet he seemed to know what was in store. Tilly, my wife, and I had made a large stained glass mantra OM Namah Shivaya as a birthday gift one of his devotees asked us to maker for her. We went to his birthday party as her guests. So that was it….until 2005 when I returned to Yogaville with my daughter, who was lost and needing a gyrocompass instead of the compass of her mind that was swinging back and forth. While there, my heart awakened and something stirred like a fetus first kicking in the womb. My path and practice came back. I went into their meditation hall (Gurudev had left his body in 2004 i think), and there was the stained glass piece hanging in the light and beneath it was a plaque: Made by Ed and Tilly Conley, of Blackstone. So he knew who I was and he prepared this welcome for me.
Eckhart Tolle: When I was in the book store at Yogaville in 2005, someone there said I should read this book and held up the Power of Now, and when I read it I fell in love with his teaching. Here was my beloved J. Krishnamurti reincarnated in a kinder less frustrated body. While he spoke from the same place Krishnamurti sat, his language was more inclusive of all the wisdom teachings. He held no razor that cut you away from all authority, yet he invited you into his space where you discovered the authority of stillness. My wife and I listened to his CDs and watched his DVD retreats every morning for about two years, and each time we listened we dove deeper into his teaching, as his wisdom lay between the words in the gaps of the known.
Deva Premal: I discovered Deva Premal listening to Eckhart Tolle’s retreat DVDs, and like a sirene she called me to an awakening through her music. Most of her music is Miten’s (her husband) rendition of ancient mantras so the meaning of the words is secondary to the power of sound in itself. Mantras are like carrier waves that take our superficial noise of the thinking mind into the depts of our being and then lose them there in the silence. We can ride these deeper sounds into silence, and when we come back to the surface of the day, we are at peace. I have her music permnently in my car stereo so her music is alway with me.
Kirtana: I also discovered Kirtana on Eckhart Tolle’s DVD retreat when he played on of her songs and actually cried while listening to it. I had to have that! Kirtana is Tolle’s teaching in song. She is a poet with vocal chords. A philosopher with a heart. “I would open each day like a present, tender toward whatever came my way—every texture—joy or pain—searing sun or healing rain, for I have seen the masks of my Beloved.” Cover from Falling Awake
Richard Miller: I’m not sure how I discovered Richard Miller, but I was teaching yoga classes and when I found that his practice of Yoga Nidra (yoga sleep) was what I was doing, only better, I knew I had a spiritual teacher. Yoga Nidra is a deep exploratory relaxation usually done at the end of a yoga session. Miller is taking that ancient practice to new depths by using it specifically with different populations, like prisoners and war vets where positive results are being recorded. But as a master teacher, Miller is right in the stream of non-dualism that runs from Buddha through India and into the dualistic flatlands of the modern world. Non-dualism is the teaching of awakening to your essential self, the I-consciousneess that is not divided into me vs. the world. The closest we in the modern world have come to non-dualism is the Transcendentalism of Thoreu, Emerson, and Whitman. Remember how they were treated in American Literature classes? Just another category to learn for the test.
Paramahansa Yogananda: Yogananda should be at the top of my list along with Thomas Merton. This master came to me in the 60s through a friend that was passing through my town with hashish in one hand and The Autobiography of a Yogi in the other. The next time I saw him he only had Yogananda in his hand. And he had a yoga teacher in Cleveland, Alice Christensen, and I knew she was going to be the portal into my unknown self. As I read about the paths of other master teachers that began their journey back in the 60s and 70s, so many of them used Yogananda as the key to their door of awakening. Even today, Yogananda is a great place to start your journey.