3. Let me tell you how meditation makes your life better

A second case of when dialogue harms is that of meditation.

Earlier on my contemplative path, before I began leading meditation or teaching Kabbalah, I confided in a friend that I thought it would be years before I'd be qualified to do either. "I've got so much left to learn," I said. "Being a teacher would be dishonest. And besides, I have to stay a student, to remember that I don't really know anything yet."

My friend looked at me as though I'd been speaking in babble. "Every teacher is still learning. The only ones who aren't are frauds." He told me that one of his teachers, a master acupuncturist in Boston, had been teaching for over forty years -- but he still learned from his own master every week. "You teach where you are, and where you're going," my friend said.

There are at least three problems, though, with this point of view. First, it's just not skillful to "teach where you are," because where you are is probably not where a beginning student is. Do you begin with the fine points of how to maintain concentration while encountering the five hindrances, four elements, and four cardinal virtues? Or do you start with the basics: notice your breath, let thoughts arise and pass. Obviously, a good teacher starts not where he is, but with what will help the student.

Second, teaching can itself undermine spiritual practice. This is what I meant when I told my friend I wanted to "stay a student:" I wanted to keep what Zen practitioners called 'Beginner's Mind,' always open, not an 'expert,' not ironically solidifying the self by a pretended mastery of techniques for erasing it. For example, one way teaching impedes spiritual work is this: sometimes, when I'll be receiving a teaching -- an ordinary dvar Torah, or a meditation instruction, or just a cool technique for community-building -- I'll relate to it as a kind of research. "Interesting... how can I use this..." Instead of: how can I be part of this now? How can I, myself, have the experience that the teaching is meant to convey? When I'm not careful, a lot of my own retreat practice and meditation basically turns into fieldwork.

The third problem, more directly related to the subject here, relates to the benefits and changes that accompany meditation practice. There's a great Buddhist saying that a good teacher gradually increases the truth of her teaching according the capacity of the student to receive it. In other words, you start out with skillful untruths -- for example, meditation will make your life better -- to the extremely subtle truths which make sense only after years of practice -- for example, meditation doesn't make your life better or worse at all, but it transforms how you relate to it.

Well, how do you convey that, skillfully, to a beginner? Ultimately, we don't meditate for various benefits and changes to take place. We meditate to see more clearly the truth of what is, to embrace each moment in a fuller and deeper way. But earlier on the path, of course we meditate for the benefits: relaxation, enlightenment, whatever. And these benefits do in fact accrue -- as long as you aren't looking for them.

Moreover, "to embrace each moment in a fuller and deeper way" doesn't really say a whole lot if you don't already know what's being spoken about. Talking about meditation is like reading a recipe -- but meditating is tasting the dish. Words like "embrace each moment" do have a definite meaning, for people who know what they mean. But otherwise, the phrase is cliche. Certainly it doesn't address suffering, which is why the Buddha started teaching his meditation practices in the first place. And so, despite ourselves, people involved with meditation trumpet the various benefits -- which do exist and which do, indeed, include more happiness, more relaxation, more lovingkindness, and the rest. We try not to promise too much, because that sets up expectations that can get in the way of progress. But we do promise a little, because otherwise no one will show up.

And thus, no one will make any progress.

One further example: one of my friends, with whom I recently led a one-day workshop, has grown in her practice away from the more conventional modes of meditation (watch your breath, notice thoughts, etc.) into a kind of fusion of teachings on nonduality. In a nutshell, the foundation of the teaching is that all you really need to do is behave like what you already are: a manifestation of "already enlightened" consciousness. Rather than have a linear progression model of contemplative practice (I made progress today because I stayed with the breath longer), these teachings advocate inquiring, right now, into who it is that is really thinking these thoughts. What one finds is that the separate self drops away, leaving... what, exactly?

Well, that would spoil the surprise. But, as with "embracing the moment," really inquiring into the mind requires some experience to recognize what's there. I don't think beginning meditators have either the conceptual infrastructure or the perceptiveness of attention to understand and notice these very subtle mindstates. It's all too easy to jump to the nondual conclusion because the ideas sound cool, or someone in authority to tells you. (In some traditions, those are enough reasons, actually.) But then you're taking something on faith, rather than really, deeply knowing it through experience, the way you know that the clear sky appears blue and water makes things wet.

These nondual teachings are telling the truth, I think. They talk about how things really are. But on a contemplative path, you have to teach in the world of illusion, because that's where people are when you meet them. If you can't handle that, don't teach. And yet, on the other hand, by continually re-immersing in this world of "stage one," how do I ensure that my own practice is moving forward? How do I remember my own edges of practice, places where work is still needed? The more I teach, the more advanced I feel -- precisely the kind of egoic thinking that obstructs progress.

Finally, all these traps of backward looking -- a kind of regression, instrumentalization of one's own practice, skillful untruth, and involvement in a world of illusion -- are amplified by the power dynamic in "spiritual" teaching. In ordinary teaching -- say, about tort law, or Shakespearean sonnets -- it's enough to remain mindful of these dynamics and remain balanced between the expectations of the situation (you are, after all, a teacher, not a peer) and the reality that, of course, you are still just a human being teaching another one something you happen to know.

In "spiritual" teaching, however, I think the challenges are different, and more profound. The power asymmetry in deep work is amplified by the depth of the work. It's not just that the teacher supposedly knows more about negligence rules; she supposedly knows more about your soul, about deep questions and hidden things. The potential for abuse is enormous, and everyone familiar with the world of religious and meditation teachers knows plenty of guru scandal-stories, some of whom are told about some of my own teachers. Sometimes these are true, and sometimes they are false. But what they point to is a much deeper truth: that there is a reality to the "energies" in play in contemplative work, and that the energies are often more powerful than those who pretend to wield them.

As a consequence, the "diminishing untruth" model of spiritual teaching can sometimes take on an air of condescension, even alienation. The good spiritual teacher's ego is not part of the process, and so she tries her best to say and do that which will help the student the most. But the less refined spiritual teacher can find himself in a position of power, amplified by the intensity of the spiritual work, and amplified further by the power dynamic associated with depicting spiritual practice in a skillfully untrue way. "I am taking you on a journey," such a teacher might say, as if the teacher is a driver and the student merely a passenger.

To some degree, such a relationship is inevitable; creating a safe container for spiritual practice requires a degree of orchestration that is, when it works, invisible to the participant. Yet the combination of artifice and power makes these various pitfalls of spiritual teaching all the more dangerous. I sometimes think that the only reliable spiritual teachers are the ones who, every so often, wonder what the hell they think they're doing.

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From previous issues:

Counterculture and Democracy
Jay Michaelson

The Failure of Anti-Despotism
Justin Weitz

Shtupping in the Shadow of the Bomb
Marissa Pareles

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