(from an audio lecture by Elena Kshanti)
Let’s talk about a spiritual mentor today. Right now, this topic is very important. Because in Russia for a long time there was no culture of attitude towards a spiritual mentor, the concept of a spiritual mentor, teacher, guide. And I had to travel around India for a long time in search of a teacher. To be charmed and disappointed. To leave and come back again. Even living in the teacher’s house and leaving that house. But it took a very long time before I finally began to realize what I needed from a spiritual mentor. And that a spiritual mentor is far from the image that we idealize in our dreams. In different traditions, there are different attitudes towards the teacher. And the clearest, toughest thing is, most likely, Tibetan Buddhism. Some even say that this is Judaism. And to some extent, I was already inclined to think so. Well, the most important thing is to realize that giving, giving everything to a spiritual mentor, is like giving away your selfishness, and destroying selfishness is liberation. Therefore, these are complementary concepts, and not from that,
that the spiritual mentor himself demands that you build him into a monument made with hands. The fact is that when I came to India to live with my teacher Bogdan, I often began to come into conflict with my teacher, because I thought differently inside myself.,
I thought what a teacher should be like. I thought that he should sort of coddle me, that is, completely overcome, force me to overcome some of my inclinations, and so on. Well, the Teacher often laughed, it was all done easily, no matter how stressful, that is, I had to come to such a decision that I sat down on retreats myself and began to practice on my own, no longer expecting any help from anyone.
There were no rules, no setups, but on the other hand, it was a big plus.,
because when you start organizing yourself, it means that you will be able to organize other people who will come to you for help.
This gives education to the will. It builds resilience, cleanses karma.
It gives strength of spirit. And this gives you some kind of opportunity for realization,
rather than when someone will be with you all the time and sort of coddle you.
But this is also a big disadvantage. People who don’t have the ability to overpower themselves, overpower
The trends of the current modernity, the abundance of information, worldly information, information, pleasures, pleasures, information that is very far from the spiritual path is not inclined at all, it is very difficult to pull yourself together and sit down and start practicing. Therefore, there is a very, very big problem in this situation. Such people, who may have had a spiritual attitude
from the beginning, lose it very easily. Since, for example, people often, like,
how people write poetry in their youth and, starting to gain a position in society and so on, completely lose this opportunity. That is, it’s all kind of inspiration, when we have hormonal maturation and so on, it kind of gets simplified into creativity and so on, and then very few people stay in this creativity. Similarly, in the spiritual path, people, even if they want to achieve something, eventually settle down,
become big, fat, start families, and their whole need is often for a stomach and to gain material wealth.
Alas, this example is ubiquitous and so frequent that sometimes I just want to cry when I look at people whom I used to see from a completely different perspective.
So, what is a spiritual mentor?
We must immediately understand that a spiritual mentor is the same person. First of all, we must understand that a teacher is the same person and it is absurd to demand something unusual from him.
Yes, there are very high teachers, with a high spiritual level.
Possessing Sidhe and not possessing them.
There are teachers who have been elevated to teachers.
And in general, it is believed that a teacher appears
when his students appear. Well, in fact, it mostly depends on our attitude towards the teacher. That is, it’s the same thing.,
like the parable of the dog’s fang. That is, there was such a story in Tibet.
One woman asked her son, who traveled to India,
to bring a tooth of the Buddha. Well, he went many times and kept forgetting to do it.
And in the end, he decided to just pull out a dead dog’s fang on the way back and, as it were, say that this was the tooth of the Buddha to bring to his mother. After a while, this fang or tooth began to glow because the woman treated it with faith. I prayed to him every time.Etc. It’s the same if you relate to and see the divine in a person you’ve identified as a spiritual mentor.,
then one way or another you will receive from him the blessing of his divine essence, no matter what his behavior is or what mistakes he makes. Because anyone can make mistakes,
anyone is imperfect.
And spiritual mentors can’t know everything completely either, and they also have their own personalities and inclinations.
They may not have organizational skills,
and sometimes they can’t even organize their own space.
…Or their students, but at the same time they may have other very important characteristics
that can help people walk the spiritual path.
And it is important, of course, when a spiritual mentor has comprehended emptiness, it is clear that for him everything already has the same taste, and he is in a different state of mind. And by being with such a person, you gain the same blessing of your mind. It doesn’t matter what he does, how he does it. Because when a person goes beyond…
these certainties, actions, karma, and so on,
he has a completely different vision.
Sometimes, sometimes we cannot understand all his actions.,
we cannot understand what he sees and how he thinks, because we are still locked into certain tendencies, inclinations of our own, as if karmic…the circle.
Here.
Let’s say if we are constantly worried about lust and we will constantly see lust if the teacher touches, say, some girl,
blessing her. It’s the same as if we have something
that because we just can’t figure it out.
For example, I often give an example of how Indian men cannot understand how it is possible, for example, to be friends with a woman.
That is, they are not supposed to do this, so they immediately look for some negative aspects.
The next moment.
When I tried to idealize my teacher
Because in Tibetan Buddhism, it is constantly said at every step
that a spiritual mentor is a deity, the most important, above the Buddha, above all. That is, it means that even, well, the Buddha is far away, but the spiritual mentor is nearby, and that he literally reveals everything in himself.
I was very surprised, and I thought, “How come?
As he eats, the crumbs fall to the floor…
I thought I’d seen some of his moments, and I thought he was probably afraid of something. Well, I didn’t know that maybe he was afraid for me, not for himself, right?
But these are all wrong distorted perceptions, they overlap, and you can’t get away from them. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is such a strong, clear and rigid obedience to a spiritual mentor
that any thoughts, even negative ones, when I had such,
I was starting to completely eat myself up. I was in such a terrible state of stress, tension, and depression that I couldn’t fully accept my mentor. It got to such an extent that it just became unbearable for me to even live with this, with these thoughts, with this constant guilt.
It was just unbearable. And one time I just ran away to another mentor, it was Pilot Baba. I went to Utarkashi ashram.
There is a road to Gangotri, many people know these places. When I moved in with Pilot Baba, I knew about him a long time ago, before, and I sent many of my friends there. But for a long time I did not visit him, because I tried to be faithful to the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism to the end, because in Tibetan Buddhism it is not welcome to change any areas of practice. But still, out of sheer desperation, I rushed there.
And for the first time, when I heard from Paloto Boba that the teacher is inside you.
I started crying. It was a relief, such a strong relief of tension for many years.
And I lived in those many, many years. When another person, an authoritative person, a person who has achieved realization, tells me that the teacher is inside you, and I begin to understand that indeed the strongest commitment should be to the teacher
who is inside us.
And all the other teachers are like a manifestation of our inner teacher. And at that moment, I have a revolution in my mind.
I arrive, I return to Daramsala, and I feel like I come to Rimpok, I see his eyes.
He says, “Where have you been?” I say: “I was sitting on the Ganges River and wondering what to do next.”
I saw his eyes, and when I came out, I was crying so hard and couldn’t hold back the tears. It was a transition to another state of mind, to another state of consciousness.
I have not given up practicing Tibetan Buddhism, on the contrary, I have now begun to do them consciously, understanding more deeply who Idam is, who is a teacher, a spiritual mentor, who is Rinpoche for me, who is Pilot Baba. And everything seemed to be slowly coming into place. The tension began to drop. Yes, I mixed two traditions, but at the same time I found exactly some kind of foundation, and in the end, when Rinpoche left our world, I was on a retreat at that time.
It just so happened that I had a very powerful experience, an experience that just put a big, big, big exclamation mark in our relationship with him.
And because at that time, when he was at the Bardo, I think he gave me a very powerful experience, even though I was asked not to talk about it, but I won’t talk about this experience in full detail, but I will say only one thing: I realized that Rinpoche — He is a very powerful teacher, from whom I have been trying to achieve something for years, from whom I have been running away, whom I have blamed for everything.…
